Prestige Class Contest Chat Thread I

**Westhart** · 2017-11-22, 11:49 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ

That seems reasonable.

Question about voting. Can we include a vote for something in more than one category? (Say giving the same thing for best use of theme and also include that as one of one's top 3). I'm still thinking about my voting and I would just like to know how restrictive the voting options are.

As Jorm said, yes you can.

Originally Posted by Jormengand

Traditionally the answer to this question is "Yes", especially since sometimes (often) there are 6 or fewer entries, so anyone who made an entry is forced to vote for the same thing in two places. In fact, 15 is a comically-large number of entries compared to how many we usually get for these.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one shocked at the 15 entries

**Lanth Sor** · 2017-11-22, 11:50 AM (ISO 8601)

What about "sandwiches"

**noob** · 2017-11-22, 01:49 PM (ISO 8601)

I guess there would be a witch made of sand that cooks sandwiches?

**JoshuaZ** · 2017-11-26, 09:31 AM (ISO 8601)

Voting seems slow, so I just want to make sure everyone is aware that the voting thread is up here.

**Westhart** · 2017-11-29, 07:59 AM (ISO 8601)

Tomorrow is the last day for voting, keep in mind if you do not vote your entry will be disqualified from the voting thread.

**Baby Gary** · 2017-11-29, 06:14 PM (ISO 8601)

I forgot about this for a while... oops.

@JoshuaZ, thanks for your critiques, but it is sadly to late for that to make much of a difference

**Morphic tide** · 2017-11-29, 10:39 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by neriractor

3rd Vote: The Hive Master- I always wanted to play this type of character, and was heavily dissapointed on the versions of this concept made in official sources. I really like this class, every ability you gain being meaningful and able to escalate with the character while encouraging thought on swarm positioning and how many of them you really need to control, the class has clearly had a lot of thought put into it and it is great, plus it has some wilder love which is something I approve of. That said, I really think the class would benefit from some improvements, such as being a bit more specific how you actually give order to the swarms? specifically for vermins and other mindless swarms as well as an actual action expenditure for taking control of swarms, even if it is a free action.

Thanks for the complements! And it's not that it has a lot of thought put into it, it's that I ran some numbers to make sure it wasn't going to be busted. The point of the Primal/Druid-type-Divine casting stacking with Animal Companion was to give some better control over hit dice allocations, as the SRD Swarms fall off in usefulness soon after you can enter the PRC in the first place.

See, one of the things I planned was to have a generalized Swarm setup to make Hive Minds and Hive Masters suffer fewer problems from the honestly horrible selection of Vermin Swarms. But that quickly grew to become rather hard to work with as a monster entry, so I started trying to rework it as a monster "class" to reduce mechanical complexity. And then I got distracted by my old Crysmal monster class that I wanted to make a proper set of three racial substitution levels for and... Yeah.

Orders... Didn't think crunch was really needed, as a lot of summon spells don’t bother specifying how orders are given. It's generally assumed to be automatic and no-particular-power-source-telepathic. As for action requirements, a cursory glance kinda brings up fundamental issues with the lack of an action requirement. Swift Action would kinda cut needs for Quickened Spell in anti-Vermin situations, and lets the caster continue working properly. It's also easy enough to get extras of that you can reliably have multiple attempts at the start of a fight.

**Morphic tide** · 2017-11-30, 05:33 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Jormengand

(13th: The Hive Master.) Probably needs spellcasting, doesn't advance it without special use of their third-level ability. Requires level 10, but at ECL 13, you can cast as a 28th-level cleric, paladin or favoured soul. Glorious. The power of this class is not so much the swarms (I would leave them at home) but the bonuses you get for having them.

The spellcasting on the 3rd level ability is intentional, because the 3rd level ability is the casting progression mechanic. It's to force losing at least one level of casting for the minimum control cap. There's also two clauses preventing whatever build you're thinking of. Your effective level for any parameter can not exceed your character level from Motes of Power, nor can you take a penalty to Will saves higher than your base Will save bonus from hit dice.

Although range limits will need added in a revision. How the heck did I miss that... And where are you getting 28th level casting from, you need four Swarm HD for each pick off the Motes of Power list. And the Will save is a -1 per HD past the lower limit, so you'd need a base Will save bonus from hit dice alone of +10 to get the upper limit of 18 Swarm HD at three levels of Hive Master. Now, at ECL 20 PRC stacking can possibly be used to acquire a +17 base bonus(not actually clear on the rules, but it's meant to be non-trivial, possibly impossible pre-Epic), but +10 at ECL 13? How do you get that from base Will save?

I put in limiting clauses that make it a colossal pain in the ass to actually come out considerably ahead in progressions.

...Seriously, did you actually bother reading it? Because you seem to have missed every limiting clause and utterly ignored the explanation for a class feature's existence. The only complaint you have that's actually valid, given the design idea of not having a normal casting progression I stated multiple times, is the range limit. Or rather the lack of one.

You appear to have massively, absurdly failed reading comprehension and not seen the conversation about it. The absolute maximum progression of casting is 1.5 per level, no matter how hard you optimize your Will save, which is behind Ur Priest. Tell me what the sweet hell you saw in it to make you believe you can get 15 more levels of casting than the literal hard limit.

**Jormengand** · 2017-11-30, 06:02 AM (ISO 8601)

I did misread it as 1 per hit die, rather than per 4, as I was trying to review 14 classes (with varying numbers of terrible class features that should never have been typed) in a reasonable time. The class "Only" allows you to be one level ahead of a standard cleric at third level and two ahead at fourth and fifth levels.

However, I'm confused by the idea that it's hard to get a +10 base will save bonus on a cleric 10/hive master 3, who has, by default... a +10 base will save bonus. Maybe you didn't get that you, and I quote, "Add the base save bonuses for each class together", and yes that includes the +2. Maybe you always play with the fractional base attack and saves alternate rule, where you don't generally count the +2 each time. Whatever the reason, it's trivial to get the +10 will save bonus, to the effect that you can do it accidentally easily enough.

**noob** · 2017-11-30, 08:03 AM (ISO 8601)

Cleric?/church inquisitor 1 or 2/a bunch of other dips in prcs/Hive Master.
Congratulation you can probably have 14 to your will save by the time you get hive master.

**JoshuaZ** · 2017-11-30, 10:13 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Jormengand

1st: The Atomos Mage. This is cool and apart from spelling I can't see anything wrong with it. You might want to check the numbers on getting atomos points a bit more because you might be able to steal too many with salvage arcana (doubling your atomos pool might be too much?) but I haven't run the numbers properly so I dunno I like to pray and hope that this one is Most Likely to See Play.

Yeah, for all the fact that my early comments on other entries included spelling and grammar issues, my own entry has an embarrassingly large number of them. After the contest I'll put up an updated one; if you see any spelling or other issues please let me know since I may not have found all of them.

As for the number of atomos points, I'm not sure. Earlier drafts had too few, but this may be too many. I'll need to think about it more. If you have more specific thoughts about that, I'll be happy to hear them.

**Morphic tide** · 2017-11-30, 12:28 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Jormengand

I did misread it as 1 per hit die, rather than per 4, as I was trying to review 14 classes (with varying numbers of terrible class features that should never have been typed) in a reasonable time. The class "Only" allows you to be one level ahead of a standard cleric at third level and two ahead at fourth and fifth levels.

However, I'm confused by the idea that it's hard to get a +10 base will save bonus on a cleric 10/hive master 3, who has, by default... a +10 base will save bonus. Maybe you didn't get that you, and I quote, "Add the base save bonuses for each class together", and yes that includes the +2. Maybe you always play with the fractional base attack and saves alternate rule, where you don't generally count the +2 each time. Whatever the reason, it's trivial to get the +10 will save bonus, to the effect that you can do it accidentally easily enough.

...No, it doesn't let you get actually ahead on casting, because there's a clause specifically preventing any parameter's effective level exceeding your character level(although this does mean LA can be compensated for fairly easily). This applies to everything on the Motes of Power list.

And if you have exactly a +10 from 10 levels of strong Will save, followed by 3 levels of Hive Master... You're burning up your entire stock of Will save and are knocked out for 1d4 hours if you take any level drain at all, whether it's permanent or not. Assuming you took a one-level dip of Druid(or of Cleric as a 9th level Druid), you have a wiggle room of one point of Will save. You can get +12 on the base save if you go for 8 levels in one and two in the other, whichever way you feel like splitting it, but that cuts a spell level from Cleric's base. If you pull a multiclass soup, PRC stacking or base mixing, it gets pretty easy to get the +17 by level 20.

**Aniikinis** · 2017-12-01, 10:28 AM (ISO 8601)