Inside the Kitchen: Mind of an Iron Chef

[WhamBamSam]

Inside the Kitchen: Mind of an Iron Chef

The Iron Chef Optimization Challenge is my favorite thing on this forum. Attempting to wrangle worthwhile builds out of substandard PrCs lights up the pleasure receptors in the part of my brain that enjoys problem solving and keeps 3.5 interesting all these years after its death as the designers' myriad shortcomings manifest themselves in strange new challenges that would not ordinarily occur to me to pursue. Moreover, I'm constantly impressed by the things that others come up with, which are often wildly different from my own ideas to the point of making me wonder how they came up with such a thing.

To that end, this thread is for Iron Chef competitors to discuss their thought processes when cooking up entries. This idea was proposed a while back (I think originally by Deadline), but hasn't been written up and posted until now. Hopefully we'll learn something from each other, or at least have some fun blathering on about our respective methods.

As a rough example, here's more or less how I go about approaching a new Secret Ingredient. Note that the numerical ordering probably suggests more method to the madness than there actually is. If I'm being honest, I tend to jackknife wildly between steps 1-3.

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1. Read through the class. See what sort of class features I'm dealing with and whether any of them strike me as being particularly interesting, useful, or conversely, obnoxious. Try to come up with ways to optimize various features individually. Sometimes I'll have a synergy in mind immediately. Other times I'll have only a vague idea of the sort of thing that might be synergistic and have to go in search of things that fit the bill. This search, or even double checking the validity of an idea, is made much easier by the use of some manner of searchable database (legal or otherwise), especially if it comes down to specific wording.

1b. Sometimes, one or more of these attempts to optimize a class feature will lead me down an optimization rabbit hole. I might end up with something that goes further in optimizing an idea than previously, or I might end up somewhere well afield of the problem at hand. In the latter case, hopefully I learn something and can file it away for future optimization projects, in IC or otherwise.

2. Do I see a way of tying the various ideas that I've come up with together? Ideally I want my one dish to use every part of the SI buffalo, but sometimes my ideas for optimizing two different features require wildly different builds. That doesn't necessarily mean those ideas are being scrapped, but it helps to organize build ideas.

3. Start writing build stubs. I either open a blank Word document or work on scratch paper and write up level and feat progressions to try to make the ideas from stages 2 and 3 coalesce into actual builds. I generally don't bother with skills yet beyond recognizing the minimum level necessary to qualify for something, and perhaps checking to make sure that I can actually get certain necessary skills as class skills. Generally, this stage will be where I hash out choices that aren't forced by the previous steps or the SI itself by comparing stubs that use the various options side-by-side.

4. When I've selected a finalized build stub. I go into the forum table code, and enter everything in. This is where I hash out skills and point buy to make sure that I have enough skill points and qualify for everything as well as where I choose things like spells/maneuvers/invocations/etc known beyond those that were critical to the strategies from steps 1 through 3.

5. Do the build write-up. Sometimes something will come to me during this stage that will cause something to be revised, or I might even notice a bit of synergy that already existed in the build that I hadn't before.

6. Write fluff. Fluff ideas have been fomenting throughout (out of rationalizations for or visualizations of the various crunch ideas), but writing it is usually the last stage of building.

To give an idea of how this works in practice, here's my thought process, as best as I can remember it, and probably rendered more coherent in hindsight, from my first medal entry, Sir Driscoll Conia from Iron Chef L: Corrupt Avenger.

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1. Looking at Corrupt Avenger, I assessed the abilities as follows.

Prerequisites strongly encourage full or nearly full BAB. It also involves the Taint rules. Make a note to look into those later.

Taint based self-contained spellcasting off a decent list up to 4ths and in light armor. Table this for later.

Sworn Foe is similar to Favored Enemy, but it does give bonuses to different skills, including Sense Motive. Sense Motive can be used for combat purposes by way of Baffling Defense. This would require either Swordsage or Martial Study.

Tainted Strike is basically a weak Smite, but unlike Smite Evil just says a melee attack rather than a "normal" melee attack. What constitutes an abnormal melee attack? In this case, strike maneuvers were what came to mind.

Grim Resolve adds Cha to saves. Neat. Does it stack with Divine Grace? "This benefit does not stack with other effects that allow you to add your Charisma bonus to saves (such as divine grace)." Well **** you too. Wait a minute... "other effects that allow you to add your Charisma bonus to saves (such as divine grace)." If I take Serenity, then Divine Grace doesn't add Cha to saves, so it would stack. Besides Paladin, I came up with Soldier of Light and Slayer of Dominel as things that could get me Divine Grace.

Frightful Fury is a fear ability, and Unnerving Fury is pretty similar. Fear stacking is a well-trodden field of optimization. Let's Google up a fear handbook.

Corrupt Avenger gives you some things if you come in as a Fallen Paladin. I seem to remember some other PrC or PrCs that work nicely for Fallen Paladins. Was it Bone Knight? *Looks it up* Hey, yeah. You retain or get back in another form a bunch of your Paladin abilities.

2. I had committed to using Divine Grace with Serenity to stack with Grim Resolve. I did strongly consider Soldier of Light and Slayer of Dominel, but they didn't feel right somehow, and when I got around to actually looking up the taint rules, it seemed they would run into alignment issues. Paladin initially seemed like it would have the same problem, as Divine Grace would be lost due to the fall they explicitly undergo at moderate corruption, but Bone Knight solved that problem as well as allowing me to double dip a bit on Fallen Paladin abilities.

Both the Sworn Foe and Tainted Strike ideas suggested an initiator, and in particular a Swordsage for Baffling Defense. This seemed to fit with the above as Serenity implies a bit of Wis focus, and in turn, the build will want to be wearing light armor anyway for Corrupt Avenger casting. Ruby Nightmare Blade stands out as a multiplier for the flat damage bonus from Tainted Strike as well.

For fear-op, the standard fare Imperious Command+Never Outnumbered+Fearsome Armor seemed a solid choice, and as a primarily martial character with some casting, Dreadful Wrath stood out as well. I'm not sure where I came up with Bounding Assault as a mechanism to use Imperious Command via Fearsome Armor and activate Dreadful Wrath at once (it could have been anywhere between here and step 4), but we'll say for the purpose of a clean write up that it was here, looking up charge maneuvers to synergize with Dreadful Wrath.

3. I think I wrote up a few stubs using Slayer of Dominel and Soldier of Light as well, but pertaining to the above, the issues largely boiled down to picking a race (I settled on Lesser Aasimar due to qualifying for Dreadful Wrath, giving useful stat bonuses, and having Favored Class: Paladin), deciding between Fallen Paladin 5/Bone Knight 1 and Fallen Paladin 4/Bone Knight 2 (settling on the former in hopes of better UoSI from the extra Tainted Strike), and filling in some open feat spots (including nabbing Divine Might for some added Cha synergy from the rebuke attempts that I wasn't doing anything with).

4. Finishing out skills and maneuver selections, Swordsage 4 and the existing emphasis on Ruby Nightmare Blade and Bounding Assault encouraged more emphasis on Diamond Mind, which I was cool with as it has some nice strikes to choose from.

5-6. Not much to say about the writing process for this one. I remember doing it at the last minute after a week of studying leading up to the Math GRE, and doing it while watching a close football game. The fulff in particular was rushed, and while a Lesser Aasimar far flung from the lofty nobility of his forebears had potential as did the diamond theme of being hardened under extreme pressure, but I didn't have the time or energy for more than a few sentences.

So that's more or less how it works for me, I might eventually go through my thought process for another round as well (maybe Great Rift Skyguard, where several strange ideas culminated in two medaling entries), but mostly I want to hear from other chefs, so have at it. How do you approach the making of an Iron Chef build?



For newcomers who are here to pick up ideas on how to be successful in the competition, see also: Handy Tips for the Iron Chef in the Playground Noob

[jdizzlean]

I'm still new to the IC world, I've competed in 3 rounds as of this writing. I've also competed in 1 Villainous Comp and judged 1. I've entered 1 Junkyard Wars.

Generally speaking, most of the PRC's are things I've either never heard of, or never had any interest in. So first and foremost I read the entire entry 2-3x over. Then I try to think up ways to get there that are theme appropriate. That's the biggest most important thing to me in building is that the classes and my choices of race/stats/skills/etc are good choices for the character concept i'm building. I usually have the general gist of my fluff done before I even start building the entry out.

I've done very little "research" over the years to see how other people build out anything (like sneak attack fighers, where does that even come from lol). I tend to be more creative in the ways i play any given character anyways. There's entire swaths of D&D canon I still know zero about and therefor I don't go straight for the "standard" optimization tricks that others might do. I get dinged for that, but as I said, i'm not interested in rebuilding something someone else has done before and only putting my spin on it. If what I come up with happens to be a tried and true way of going about it, then that is just validation that I'm still a competent character builder.

To me, the ROLEPLAY is more important than the ROLLPLAY, story trumps power.

To me, the optimization of anything isn't necessarily about how many options I have, or how well ability X from Class Y meshes w/ ability 1 from class 2, but how well the overall theme of each meshes with each.

To me, I try to build w/ as few dips as possible, I'm more interested in the elegance of how something gets put together, and having 5+ classes and in most cases even 1 dip of 1-2 levels is to many for me.

To me, how I build the SI into the overall build, and how that overall build works together is more important than how I "optimize" the SI's individual components. The same goes for feats/spells and if I list any equipment options.

To me, i'm building a character from level 1 to the end. I should have a end goal in mind before I begin, and all the choices I make should be moving continuously along a line to get there. It's important to me that all the choices I'm making are making this happen, and that I'm not taking a level of something early in the build for no reason other then to pay a tax or to acquire 1 thing that isn't a major theme of the build. When I judge, I take this seriously and penalize people for not building a character the entire way.

To me, it's not how many levels of the SI i take or don't thats important, it's that how the ones I do take fit into the build. I disagree vehemently with the thought that a build that takes 10 levels of the SI should score higher then 1 that doesn't if the 1 that doesn't gains nothing from the extra levels spent. Part of optimization is having that cohesiveness with all your choices, and spending more levels than needed for the sole sake of taking as many levels as possible in the SI is silly. More so when you don't spell out how that final class ability is important to your build and how you'll use it to complement all these other things you've been doing.

To me, I disagree with standard scoring guidelines, X points for doing Y things. D&D is by far not a black and white system, so scoring shouldn't be either. When every single game is run differently due to how the DM wants to handle rule zero, you can't possibly have a iron clad system of scoring either when you're judging, or when you're being judged.

Of course all this generally puts me out of medal contention, and it's a bit frustrating for that, but any completed and submitted build is better then not trying at all. Maybe one day I'll get there, and that's fine. It's not all about "winning" a medal in a forum anyways, as I've said, it's about the journey.

[Jormengand]

For me, it's a case of reading each individual feature closely and going "How can I mess with that?" I have a near-legendary eye for seeing obnoxious rules readings, which won me the shadowsmith round handily. Often, no matter how hard I try, the answer is "I can't", and nothing gets made.

Of course, then the actual character has to be built around that. With IC, it is primarily a build competition, after all.

[Venger]

Glad to see this thread up and running.

First, I'll think of a concept fluffwise. That will guide my hand when it comes to picking side dishes for the SI.

From that point, I will look at hardcaps built into the SI. This will give me a list of taxes I must pay before I enter the SI. I'll write these down in a notepad document (the program is too dumb to indent or spoil formatting, so it's what I like to use for iron chef) and see what methods are possible for entry. This will also tell me whether or not I'm building a spellcaster.

If I am, then that restricts my methods of entry and I pick something with a synergistic primary ability modifier.

If I'm not, then I look at whether or not the SI essentially forces me into playing a full ba class and gives full ba.

If so, I'll try to maintain that, or if that's not possible, try to maintain at least 3 iteratives.

If not, then I will look at the entirety of my options.

I'll look to see if the SI is a skillful class. If so, I will think about skillfull entry and prioritize int as much as possible with point buy.

If not, then I'll freestyle.

From this point, if there are taxes in place, I'll see if I can double dip and make it pay for something else that synergizes.

After all this brainstorming is done, I'll see if a potential entry method is viable and feasible by the time the hardcap keeps me out of the SI. if so, I put it on my short list. If not, I scrap it.

Once I have several stubs, I will begin vizziniing. I'll look at how the Man wants me to enter the class. If it's something obvious, I'll consider whether there are any alternatives.

If so, I will see if being different for the sake of originality is worth the hit to elegance I'll be taking for not going the straightforward route. If so, I do that.

If it's not, I'll bite the bullet and go the obvious route.

From there, I'll map out my feats. Once I've got something I like, I'll make sure I can pay all the taxes the feats incur and write down and skill taxes as new taxes to pay.

Next I do my table and put in my saves and ba, then I do my skills and all the donkey work of writing in my class features.

From here, I'll have my table up in one window and then write playtips so I can see everything. I'll check my skills, feats, and classes and see I didn't forget to pay any taxes, then I'll do sources once everything's set. I'll let the build sit a day or tow and read it backwards to catch any transcription errors.

After this, I write a few possible outlines for my backstory. I'll start and if in the process, something changes, I go with it.

I'll find a suitable image and put it in.

Then I have the dish plated and ready to serve, and I PM it to the chair. I like to try to do it early so if I catch anything amiss I have time to fix it before the reveal.

[The Viscount]

Some people like to prepare for certain ingredients that they expect to get, but I usually don't have anything prepared for an ingredient. So the first thing is a read-through of the ingredient, and more often than not something within will spark. Occasionally the dish has a helpful fluff element with its beginning summary. Other times it's a non-entity like OotBI, where all you have is "what is truth" jokes. With luck the dish forms itself around a central theme, like sneak or ranged combatant. I look for "footholds" of significant ability or ones that stack if I can as the rock to cook my dish on. Often the secret ingredient presents a muddled mix of two or a confused mess of none, so it comes to picking what aspect I think I can build on, and run with it as if it's the focus.

An ingredient's prerequisites are the place that I start really working with. They will obviously inform what I must use to enter, but I try to impart my own aspects when I can. Full BA might have fighter in mind, but if I don't have to I'll try to substitute with an initiator. For sneak attack a level of spellthief works just about as well as rogue. For this reason savant is one of my dear favorites, it and ranger can give you quite a lot of things to get into a class.

Prestige class is the real chance to put my thumbprint on a dish, and the real challenge is not letting it overshadow the SI. Often a complementary ingredient will have the same or stronger abilities than the SI, so a second-string prestige class is what's in order. These often have a strong enough fluff element that they can guide the dish. If after all of this I don't have a necessary race for one of the classes or human for a bonus feat, then I'll try to imbue some flavor into the dish with my choice of race. Silverbrow Human should be a no-brainer for any dish with incarnum for access to additional melds. Changeling rogue is the best way to do rogue if you must. Racial substitution levels can really twist things to make them more useful. These two resources are my closest friends in the process of building to make things work. Tumble is extremely rare, but Ride is quite common and it improves many builds.

Cooking for power is something that's not my strongest ability. If I ever do, it's because I can find some catch in the class that lets me abuse its features, like with Waverider's poorly worded mounted archery or spellfire channeler with dragon shaman. I find that if I can make sufficient competence a build high in originality that it can make up for other aspects.

Backstory is often one of the last things that I do, and naming is typically done right before I start my backstory. I've found that it's often easier to imbue an element of humor and levity into the build when I don't have time for a longer story, and my names are almost always a play on or joke about some aspect of the build. A picture is the aspect that I'll similarly try to imbue with a joke of some sort of another. Most of my dishes aren't worth taking that seriously.

[daremetoidareyo]

Does it say bonus or modifier?
Does it list a duration?
Can I extend that supernatural or spell like ability?
Is there a planar touchstone associated with this?
Can I abuse the heck out of skills to use this?
What happens if I try to racially emulate it with a changeling?

[Darrin]

When I get more time, I may traipse back through some of my Iron Chef builds to give an idea of how I put a build together, but at the moment this is what's going through my mind, so I think I'll just try to jot this out first and see where it goes.

Taxonomy of Gallimaufric Gimmickry

Ideally, a lot of the best Iron Chef builds start with a "hook" or a "gimmick" that gets the build started or that the rest of the build is structured around, like a spinal chord. So when I do the initial read-through of the Secret Ingredient, this is what I'm looking for.

Category 1: Unknown Exploit

This is the best you can hope for: stumbling on a gimmick that no one has discovered before. This is some combo or trick that goes way outside what I think of as the "design envelope", which is the role or the intended use that the designers originally imagined that the class would fill. It may be a loophole that the designers never anticipated or an obscure turn of phrase that can be tweaked to create something unexpectedly potent. As of this writing, there are 90+ Iron Chef rounds out there, and even if you go back through all the old rounds, this type of exploit is exceedingly rare. And it doesn't always guarantee a Gold, but usually results in a very memorable build. These are rare gems, diamonds in the rough that you can't really find by actively searching so much as stumble into by accident, so it's mostly a question of luck and then thinking around obtuse corners. The best example I can think of at the moment is daremetoidareyo's Scruffy the Fuglimancer from Order of the Bow Initiate. D&D has very few "One Shot One Kill" exploits, and this is one of the nastier discoveries. OMG Ponies' Sortes from Divine Crusader might also be a good example.

Category 2: Known Exploit

Much more common, and these are something you can find on your own by studying previous ingredients, by long hours of book-diving, and by wading through CharOp boards. These gimmicks still take a build well outside the design envelope, but some of your thunder is stolen because it's probably not a trick/combo that you discovered yourself. Most likely, it was used in a previous build, either on the CharOps board somewhere or in a previous Iron Chef round. Even so, you can get a lot of mileage out of an old trick by 1) using it in an ingredient that nobody else thought it could be combined with or 2) combining it with some other tricks into a new application that nobody expected. So there is still a possibility of surprise with these types of exploits. Zaq's Benjamin Nutt from Acolyte of the Ego might be a good example: Shadowpounce is a well-known exploit, but getting it to work with truenaming is pretty darned impressive. Piggy Knowles' perfectly excellent Parsifal the Fool from the Death Delver round is mostly a Diplomancer build but done really, really well.

Category 3: Half-Baked Hodgepodge

These are often what look like Category 1 or Category 2 ideas but they fall short by not quite going that far outside the design envelope. There may be limitations or sacrifices that sabotage or work against the idea. They may be great ideas that work in very limited (or overly contrived) circumstances. Or you get nine-tenths through the build and it all just sort of fizzles out, just not quite as effective as you'd hoped. *MOST* Iron Chef builds wind up here, and if the ingredient is weak enough that it just doesn't offer enough "hooks" to do anything interesting, then sometimes all the builds wind up as Category 3 messes and the winners are whatever strikes the judges' fancy. I don't want to disparage anyone by pointing out any particular builds, but the Arboreal Guardian round was probably a good example of a Category 3 Cage-Fight, largely due to a really lackluster Secret Ingredient rather than the skills of the chefs. The Cryokineticist round also struck me as a hodgepodge trainwreck, but I may not be remembering it all that well.

Category 4: Backstory Build

These are builds where the chef builds the ingredient around a backstory, and relies largely on the flavor of the "fluff" to sell the build to the judges. Sometimes a really interesting backstory can overcome a weak ingredient or a klunky exploit. The hope here is you can get a little outside the design envelope largely through storytelling or a clever idea told in an unusual way. If the ingredient is really weak, then sometimes a really well-constructed backstory can float your build up above the Category 3's enough to get into contention or snag an honorable mention. I'm having a difficult time trying to find a good example that managed to get up into medal contention mostly on backstory. The best example I can find is Rizban's Sir Jasonica Deathbringer, which cruised into an Honorable Mention by nailing the fluff and tone of a clueless player arguing with an exasperated DM over how undeniably awesome his Astral Dancer was going to be. Hopefully someone else can suggest some other examples.

Category 5: Filling the Envelope

We sometimes get an ingredient that is so gawd-awful or difficult to work with, there's just no possible exploit that can get outside the design envelope. In that case, you can try a strategy of taking what the designers intended and optimizing that to the hilt. In this case, you're not trying to go beyond the design envelope, you're trying to fill out exactly what the designers intended the ingredient to accomplish, and you show off how well you can do that by doing it better than the other chefs. Curmudgeon's Swifty from Order of the Bow Initiate is a good example. He took the "standard action" limitation from Ranged Precision and built around this concept: "If all I get is a standard action, how do I make that the most *effective* standard action possible?"

Category 6: Character Study

This is typically an established character from pop culture or some other medium, such as a movie, television series, or comic book. The personality, look, and feel of the character are already established by some other creator, so what the Chef does is adapt it into D&D using the Secret Ingredient as something similar to a template or framework, molding or adjusting the fluff to fit more appropriately into a D&D setting. The challenge is how well you can get the "crunchy" parts of the SI mechanics to match the fluff of what the character is usually capable of doing. TheG's Vlad III Draculea from Dungeon Lord and rockdeworld's Santa build from Nightsong Infiltrator are good examples of a Character Study.

Category 7: Joker's Wild

A "Joke" build is designed to be humorous or to stretch an idea out to an absurd extreme. Many of these builds are, at best, hoping to snag an Honorable Mention, but sometimes you can get some surprisingly effective crunch out of them. The best example that comes to mind is Zaq's L'il Brudder from Order of the Bow Initiate, which still makes me giggle.

[daremetoidareyo]

smart stuff

This is like a dichotomous key for approaches, if not 1, go to 2. If not 2, go to 3.

I personally skip the fluff approach. I think that I like the mechanical puzzle pieces, at least for online optimization discussions, and I get impatient reading a drawn out backstory. So of course I don't have the patience to compose one that does more than justify the insanity.

[Darrin]

This is like a dichotomous key for approaches, if not 1, go to 2. If not 2, go to 3.

I originally put this together as a hierarchy of stages, but I scrapped that idea because it doesn't exactly go in descending order. A "lower" category can still pull off a Gold in a weak field. And some entries straddle between two categories. Sir Jasonica Deathbringer kinda falls into the Joker category about as much as the Backstory category. My Caveman Lawyer build was half-joke and half-character study. And maybe it's just me, but I can ping-pong my way through several different categories before I wind up with something I can build around.

But yeah, Category 1 is what you hope for, Category 2 is what you most likely start with, and Category 3 is where you often wind up after running into the inevitable roadblocks. If you don't get a spark or something to work with in any of those, then you probably start scraping around in the other categories.

[The Viscount]

I love the categories of IC build there, Darrin.

Category 4 is interesting, would Edmond Dufresne from back in Flux Adept be another example of one of those?

[Darrin]

Category 4 is interesting, would Edmond Dufresne from back in Flux Adept be another example of one of those?

Wow... I'm not sure, that was a pretty brutal round. Edmond barely squeaked out a gold by 0.25 points in a range between 7.5 and 12.25, and the top 5 (out of 6 builds) were within 2 points of each other. (I'd have to check the spreadsheet to find the lowest Gold score.) The backstory was probably the best part of the build, but I'm not sure how much it helped your final score.

Maybe I should try to hedge things a bit by adding a line about "It's really hard to tell how much a backstory helps or hurts you."

[Venger]

Wow... I'm not sure, that was a pretty brutal round. Edmond barely squeaked out a gold by 0.25 points in a range between 7.5 and 12.25, and the top 5 (out of 6 builds) were within 2 points of each other. (I'd have to check the spreadsheet to find the lowest Gold score.) The backstory was probably the best part of the build, but I'm not sure how much it helped your final score.

Maybe I should try to hedge things a bit by adding a line about "It's really hard to tell how much a backstory helps or hurts you."

Edmond was pretty great.

Due to the way the spreadsheet is set up, I can't see the total average score of all the golds, so I'll have to do it manually. top of my head, I can't recall a gold medalist after round 26 with a lower score.

as far as backstory goes, it functions as a bonus category in almost every round. I believe once or twice, zaq has deducted for excessive poor spelling and grammar, and Pino Chio lost points from OMG Ponies's judgings back in death delver for the poor quality of his backstory, so backstory essentially cannot hurt you.

[Darrin]

Due to the way the spreadsheet is set up, I can't see the total average score of all the golds, so I'll have to do it manually. top of my head, I can't recall a gold medalist after round 26 with a lower score.

I took a brief traipse through the spreadsheet, and I haven't really dug into the numbers/formula, but Edmond is ranked #619 out of roughly 639 builds. So yeah, that's the lowest-scoring Gold in all the rounds. By which I mean to say it's still undeniably deserved. That was a brutal round.

as far as backstory goes, it functions as a bonus category in almost every round. I believe once or twice, zaq has deducted for excessive poor spelling and grammar, and Pino Chio lost points from OMG Ponies's judgings back in death delver for the poor quality of his backstory, so backstory essentially cannot hurt you.

I don't think I've ever deducted points for a bad or missing backstory. I think some judges have threatened to deduct points for overly *LONG* backstories, but it would take a lot of work to find evidence of that. I think my advice on backstory boils down to: "It may help your score, but it won't hurt your score." If I'm judging a build and I'm trying to settle a tie-breaker or bump up a score slightly, I will try to dig into the backstory for justification.

[Venger]

I took a brief traipse through the spreadsheet, and I haven't really dug into the numbers/formula, but Edmond is ranked #619 out of roughly 639 builds. So yeah, that's the lowest-scoring Gold in all the rounds. By which I mean to say it's still undeniably deserved. That was a brutal round.

I checked it. Edmond is the lowest-scoring gold medalist.

[WhamBamSam]

I've been on vacation, and due to lack of time and internet issues haven't had a chance to do a big post in this thread. Interesting discussion all around.

stuff...

It feels like you're still trying to argue my judging from the last round. If that's not the case, I apologize if I seem confrontational, as that's not my intention. My hope is that it ends up working out to a better mutual understanding of design philosophies and the reasons why Iron Chef operates the way it does.

I've done very little "research" over the years to see how other people build out anything (like sneak attack fighers, where does that even come from lol). I tend to be more creative in the ways i play any given character anyways. There's entire swaths of D&D canon I still know zero about and therefor I don't go straight for the "standard" optimization tricks that others might do. I get dinged for that, but as I said, i'm not interested in rebuilding something someone else has done before and only putting my spin on it. If what I come up with happens to be a tried and true way of going about it, then that is just validation that I'm still a competent character builder.

At the risk of confirming your point in your mind by leaning on quotes from others, I'm going to do just that. There's a passage from a very famous book written sometime around the beginning of the Iron Age that says "there is nothing new under the sun." More optimistically, I might quote from Sir Isaac Newton who said (appropriately, for this forum) "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." There are points of contention as to Newton's originality (most notably the assertion that it is in fact Leibniz who should be credited with the invention of Calculus), but it's hard to argue that he wasn't a transformative figure or that his work was unimportant or entirely *ahem* derivative.

Taking things that people have done before and putting your own spin on them is really all we as humans ever do. Certainly that's what we do when we play D&D, which is a framework that others have constructed, that we then use to create our own characters and tell our own stories. Standing on the shoulders of giants isn't a bad thing, and even if you don't see further, but only from a slightly different perspective, that's still a valid thing. Sometimes you'll recognize that a giant has a flawed perspective or is looking in the wrong direction and need to correct for that. Still, whatever the case, you get a better view than when you're stuck at ground level.

To me, the ROLEPLAY is more important than the ROLLPLAY, story trumps power.

To me, the optimization of anything isn't necessarily about how many options I have, or how well ability X from Class Y meshes w/ ability 1 from class 2, but how well the overall theme of each meshes with each.

Story and power aren't mutually exclusive, nor should they be. There's been more than enough discussion on this point over the years, and suffice to say, you should not expect Iron Chef or its competitors to waver on the point.

Remember when I said that sometimes you stand on a giant's shoulders and see that it's looking in the wrong direction? That's true a lot of the time when the giant is under the thrall of the old wizard who lives by the coast. Many of my favorite entries, and much of the most memorable and interesting fluff in Iron Chef, has come as a result of tweaking, subtly or otherwise, the view of what a SI is or should be. I direct you to Kole Narrin from Thunder Guide, born of the observation that the fluff of the Thunder Guide class includes the exploits of Thunder Guides being written about by Kole Naerrin of the Korranburg Chronicle, rather than attempt to actually sell a character with any real commitment to Thunder Guide as being able to actually accomplish said exploits. I also might mention my own Nick Snarespan build which I would say offers a more interesting take on the time monk schtick from a story perspective by virtue of the inclusion of roguish elements, or the entire Order of the Bow Initiate round, where the fluff was so absurd and the class so bad that pretty much no one could play it straight.

To me, I try to build w/ as few dips as possible, I'm more interested in the elegance of how something gets put together, and having 5+ classes and in most cases even 1 dip of 1-2 levels is to many for me.

That's your prerogative. I strongly disagree, but you aren't alone in that sentiment and I've been dinged for what I would argue is relatively minor dipping in the past.

To me, how I build the SI into the overall build, and how that overall build works together is more important than how I "optimize" the SI's individual components. The same goes for feats/spells and if I list any equipment options.

These things aren't mutually exclusive and in fact should play into one another. A build that makes an effort to optimize every part of the SI is more likely to flow together well than one that leaves pieces unused (assuming you take all 10 levels of the SI, or at least that some of the unused features come prior to your endpoint, but more on that later), because the latter has dead levels in it, whereas the former took full account of what the SI actually could contribute to a build, and incorporated it into the overall build accordingly. Some builds are just a grab bag of tricks optimizing around different class features, but most of the time (as I alluded to in my post) those ideas coalesce into a unified idea (which in turn generally makes the optimization of individual abilities better).

To me, i'm building a character from level 1 to the end. I should have a end goal in mind before I begin, and all the choices I make should be moving continuously along a line to get there. It's important to me that all the choices I'm making are making this happen, and that I'm not taking a level of something early in the build for no reason other then to pay a tax or to acquire 1 thing that isn't a major theme of the build. When I judge, I take this seriously and penalize people for not building a character the entire way.

Not to make this more personal than it has to be, but every build you've submitted in IC has several bad feats which are taxes for one class (not even the SI in the case of your Shadowsmith entry), and doesn't really use them for anything else. Or maybe you're trying to say something different, but it's hard to tell what, if anything. Can you give an example of a choice someone made or that a hypothetical build might make that you would consider problematic in this regard or tangential to the 'goal' of the build?

To me, it's not how many levels of the SI i take or don't thats important, it's that how the ones I do take fit into the build. I disagree vehemently with the thought that a build that takes 10 levels of the SI should score higher then 1 that doesn't if the 1 that doesn't gains nothing from the extra levels spent. Part of optimization is having that cohesiveness with all your choices, and spending more levels than needed for the sole sake of taking as many levels as possible in the SI is silly. More so when you don't spell out how that final class ability is important to your build and how you'll use it to complement all these other things you've been doing.

As I attempted to point out when you argued this over PM, the logical conclusion of this would be to say that for a popular dip class like Shiba Protector or Spellsword, someone who took only one level of the SI could be judged as having UoSI just as good as someone who made the effort to make all 10 levels work for their build. You can argue that I was overly generous in rewarding the capstone ability in the Thrall of Demogorgon round, but I remain adamant that a build that uses more of the SI should get more credit for Use of SI. I'm actually less generous than some in that regard. I've seen points awarded in direct proportion to number of SI levels taken as part of their UoSI score, and in my criteria it is possible to get a 5 without using all the features if you use enough of the others well enough.


Regarding Darrin's categories, in addition to falling from an initial goal it's also possible to start out at category 5, working inside the design envelope, and end up at category 2 or 1 as some weirdness emerges, possibly due to some quirk of the SI or the exploit simply presenting itself in the way that the build takes shape, and the build ends up outside that envelope. Even if an exploit doesn't immediately reveal itself, a little time inside the envelope can give you a deeper insight into the nature of its restrictiveness, and so help you to find a way to break out of it.

On the other hand, I have, on multiple occasions where I submitted two builds, one a labor of love that I considered a Category 1 and another, simpler idea that I threw together quickly and may have only considered a Category 2 or 5, had the latter build do better. Maybe the first build was really a Category 3, not holding up to scrutiny due to a rules or qualification mistake, maybe the second build's humbler goals allow for a more elegant build, or maybe the judge thought it more novel than I did.

As to backstory, it can also help to visualize an unusual schtick or justify a cheesy build choice and so translate into points that aren't explicitly fluff-related. This will generally be a subconscious boost, but as an explicit example, in the Great Rift Skyguard round, one of my builds benefited from a swing from 1 to 5 in Elegance when I pointed out the presence of a backstory the judge had missed, and even got partial credit for the capstone, despite only taking 8 levels because the terrible ridiculousness of said capstone inspired me to use it as a running joke in the fluff. The judging in question was a bit of a deviation from the norm, but it shows just how much the backstory can do for you.

Also, because I mentioned maybe doing it in the OP, and because I think it's illustrative of some of the things I said in this post, here's a rough breakdown of my process as it applies to my builds for the Great Rift Skyguard round.

Spoiler

Show

1. Gold Dwarf. Ew. Specifying a subrace means even Stoneblessed is out and the only option other than the intended one is Racial Emulation Changeling. Toughness is also annoying, and my first thought upon seeing it is usually to consider Azure Toughness as an alternative, and hence Incarnum. There's also a BAB prereq, some skills, and Mounted Combat. Not surprising, as the intended entry appears to be Fighter.

Axes from the sky is hilarious, but moving past that, it's actually not bad. It's a double damage charge, so look for flat damage to multiply, charge optimization, and it's only a standard action, so you've got a move action free to possibly do something else with. Drogue wings are sort of a pain though. Being expended after one use until you spend an hour repacking it and frequent breaking are both problems that need to be resolved.

• Charge optimization is simple enough. We need Pounce from somewhere, generally either Spirit Lion Totem Barbarian or the Sphinx Claws hand bind. Damage boosting is generally not too difficult and can probably be figured out based on how the build takes shape.
• I've done some digging around for things to do with a free move action. Mantis Leap for two charges a turn stands out, but sticking all the way through to Monk 7 is painful. Fearsome Armor demoralization is standard fare for melee types. Perhaps something else will show up as promising as the build comes together.
• To deal with broken drogue wings, all I came up with was Make Whole (Darrin came up with Swift Ready, but I did not). Make Whole, generally speaking, appears as a 2nd level spell on divine spell lists, with the notable exceptions of being 1st level on the Balance Domain (which would only require a 1 level Cleric dip) and 2nd level as a Death Master spell (which originally piqued my interest as it opened the spell up via a 1 level dip with Precocious Apprentice due to Death Master being an Arcane class). I left the option of dipping for Make Whole on the table, but Death Master also got me onto the idea of an undead minion pit crew to change out drogue wings between charges.

Hippogriff Steed is weird. It doesn't get Share Spells, which means none of the usual tricks for a melee pet like Share Soulmeld. In fact, unlike most pet classes, Great Rift Skyguard doesn't actually give you a hippogriff. You have to get your own. But wait, since you have to get your own, you can probably go get a templated hippogriff. But this is Iron Chef, so I can't just say I went out to buy a fancy templated hippogriff. What are some self-contained ways of getting a hippogriff, templated or otherwise?

• Improved Familiar or Beast Heart Adept would could get one, and Improved Familiar+Changeling Wizard could perhaps extend the Hippogriff Steed bonuses to a wider variety of creatures.
• The most common templated creatures are Half-X templates, which means mating a hippogriff with some other creature. Paying or otherwise convincing a dragon or whatever to have sex with a hippogriff isn't really any less DM dependent than just buying a Half-Dragon Hippogriff, so going that route the build itself will have to be able to sire Half-Whatever offspring. That's a little tricky when the build is committed to being a Gold Dwarf, but there really isn't a better definition of fiend or celestial than Outsider (Evil) and Outsider (Good) respectively. A type change to Outsider can be done with the Otherworldly feat (using the Celestial-Attended Birth option in Champions of Valor to allow it to apply to other races), a template, or certain classes. Alignment subtypes can be achieved via the Ritual of Alignment in Savage Species.
• Undead are the templated creatures most easily acquired, as they only require a corpse and the ability to cast Animate Dead. The Zombie and Skeleton templates have some limitations (Single Actions Only and no flight respectively), but it looks like Hippogriff Steed II might restore flight in the case of the latter. Moreover, it might make it a magical beast again, and if it does that could mean that I could make it back into a corpse, reanimate it again, and retrain it as a Hippogriff Steed to make it a magical beast once more. Upon checking with the chair to ensure this was kosher, I moved on to realizing I could cycle through Zombie as well as Skeleton, as each time Skeleton was applied it would remove Single Actions Only and happily dove down the rabbit hole for things that could be accomplished by cycling thusly.

Mounted Combat feats are unlikely to be of much use, as the Skyguard will regularly be jumping out of the saddle like a lunatic.

Flyby Attack doesn't play nicely with Axes From the Sky, but any time it is used will require similar drogue wing optimization.

Drogue Charge is worse than Axes From the Sky, but you can use it in the round following Axes From the Sky if you sort out the drogue wing issues and charge optimization helps here as well. The bit about landing behind your enemy is potentially interesting. If you move your enemy, you can then change the place where you land. You're charging, which limits the ways that you can achieve this. What we really want here is Knockback, but that requires large size, which is a problem for Gold Dwarves. Temporary size change via magic/psionics might be an option even with loss of qualification when at normal size, which would probably mean PsyWar for expansion. Size increasing templates are pretty thin on the ground without Dragon Magazine, but I did come up with Half-Gorristo (in retrospect Divine Minion of Anhur would have been a better choice, and due to Fast Wild Shape being a free action would have played more nicely with features that involve riding but I didn't think of it).

The chair ruled that Glide For Distance does not work with Axes From the Sky, but might work on a Drogue Charge if the target is tall enough. What that really means is it'll work if their head is high enough off the ground, so we're looking to move the target again, and therefore looking at Knockback as above.

Skyguard Catapult is hot garbage and there's basically never a reason to use it over Axes From the Sky. I toyed briefly with weight increases (showing Haagenti's sign, Deformity (Obese)) and ways to Mindsight enemies and phase through roofs to make a living bunker buster (since Axes From the Sky wouldn't work in that situation without line of sight), but I had largely given up on this one and decided that I'd try to make the case that 8 or 9 levels of Skyguard made for better use of the other features.

2. As you might have noted, I was giving a fair bit of thought to how the features would fit together from the beginning, and certain ideas were already bleeding into each other. Steps 1 and 2 were happening almost in parallel. Some ideas were starting to take shape. An undead hippogriff to go with a splash of Death Master casting. Azure Toughness tied in with Sphinx Claw pouncing, which in turn lead toward an unarmed combat (so either Monk or Battle Dancer), likely with Totemist for more natural attacks and a feat or two saved getting the Sphinx Claws.

Also emerging from the primordial soup of ideas was a Half-Gorristo with the Ritual of Alignment (Evil) siring a Half-Fiend Hippogriff and mucking about with Knockback.

3. I wrote a lot of stubs for what would eventually become Ivarr. I really tried to make Mantis Leap work but eventually came to the conclusion that it just didn't. Some of the undead-related things listed in step 1 I probably actually came up with here, as I vacillated between Cleric 1, Death Master 1 with Precocious Apprentice (Make Whole), Death Master 3 and similar. Once I did come up with the Animate Dead/Hippogriff Steed loop, I felt committed to pumping CL for Animate Dead. This would ordinarily require committing more to Death Master than I'd feel comfortable with on a non-casting SI, but somewhere along the line, I remembered Horned Harbinger from Piggy Knowles' Babalon, Queen of Bones back in Thrall of Orcus, and realized that it would give me more of what I wanted the build to be (a charger that could use Animate Dead often and effectively) and would feel less like a high tier full caster throwing caster levels away on skydiving lessons. As Horned Harbinger adds Cha to Animate Dead's CL, it points toward more of a Cha focused build, which (along with full BAB smoothing Skyguard entry a bit) puts Battle Dancer ahead of Monk as the source of the unarmed strike iterative portion of the natural attack full attack routine. It also has me looking at the ever-useful X stat to Y bonus list, which gives me Divine Might (also a use for the crapton of rebuke attempts the build is sitting on) and Slippers of Battledancing (also a use for the open move action and known for being obnoxious to optimize due to not working with the usual ways of moving and full attacking). These also serve as my flat bonuses for multiplication. I had to hammer out kinks with regard to Battle Dancer's AC bonus and the shield used in Skyhooking, but I think it worked out in the end. Those were the major choices. Some minor feat decisions were hashed out here as well.

On the side of what would eventually become Bolfarg, Knockback (along with the Skyguard charges creating situations where you can use the ground as a 'wall') means we're going Dungeon Crasher Fighter. In turn, this means the Power Attack, Improved Bull Rush, Shock Trooper feat chain, which means a two-handed weapon over natural attacks, which means a Pouncebarian dip rather than Sphinx Claws. Moving things that it Levitates with its SLA from Half-Gorristo, and some Zhentarim Soldier intimidate boosting fill in the move action when he uses Axes From the Sky. Bolfarg was pretty painless to hammer out.

I mulled over some stubs for my Skyguard Catapult idea, my favorite of which was a Binder-focused Tenebrous Apostate, but abandoned the pursuit pretty quickly.

4.Ivarr's skills were a little tough to wrangle, as he needed both Ride and Tumble (meaning he couldn't Skilled City-Dweller), Perform (Dance) for the Slippers of Battledancing, and Knowledge (The Planes) for Horned Harbinger, but things worked out.

Bolfarg was not nearly so complicated. His skill set up really only came down to keeping a few class skills maxed, and picking up Never Outnumbered for the standard demoralize optimization.

5-6. Ivarr had a lot to explain mechanically and I was inspired to go into corresponding gory detail with his backstory. Death Master and Horned Harbinger got Orcus and Myrkul involved, the various Battledancing suggested the old dance of death trope, and that sort of coalesced with the insane skydiving into diving willingly into death, which then branched out into what the fluff ultimately ended up being.

Bolfarg was, again, more straightforward. The strange crossbreeding, Gorristos' bull-like appearance, and Dungeon Crashing made me think of the myth of the Minotaur, so I rolled with that, justified the various build choices and called it a day. The name came from tweaking what came out of some online 'Dwarven translator' when I put in a few related words, and the name of some place or other relevant to the Greek Minotaur myth.

I'd be interested in reading any similar accounts from you guys. Anyone want to give an example of how the processes you described was applied on one of your entries?

[jdizzlean]

an excessively large post trying to negate everything i said

My post was about how I build and/or judge an IC/other competition. It has zero to do with how you judged me in a previous round. D&D is made up by a very large and diverse group of players and DM's who all look at things in a different manner. If we all build and judged things the same, there would be no point in all these optimization challenges at all, as we would obviously all have the exact same build posted..

I gave my view on the matter irregardless of how it interacts with everyone else's views on the matter. That's the point of this thread.

Clearly I disagreed with your judging and how you do it, but that's neither here nor there. Clearly you view things differently than I do, and that is also neither here nor there. That's why rather then drag it on I spoke to you via PM, as you probably should've done here...

I realize that my approach to things is not the same in general as others approach optimization, but that's okay because I'm an individual, and I don't aspire to be just like you or anyone else.

/soap box

Let's return to the point of the OP please.

[WhamBamSam]

My post was about how I build and/or judge an IC/other competition. It has zero to do with how you judged me in a previous round. D&D is made up by a very large and diverse group of players and DM's who all look at things in a different manner. If we all build and judged things the same, there would be no point in all these optimization challenges at all, as we would obviously all have the exact same build posted..

I gave my view on the matter irregardless of how it interacts with everyone else's views on the matter. That's the point of this thread.

Clearly I disagreed with your judging and how you do it, but that's neither here nor there. Clearly you view things differently than I do, and that is also neither here nor there. That's why rather then drag it on I spoke to you via PM, as you probably should've done here...

I realize that my approach to things is not the same in general as others approach optimization, but that's okay because I'm an individual, and I don't aspire to be just like you or anyone else.

/soap box

Let's return to the point of the OP please.

My apologies. Due to the similarity of the points in your original post to those made in your dispute and subsequent PM, and some language that I perceived as pejorative, I read your post as confrontational. I do think the points I made are on topic for the thread though, as they serve as further explanation of my optimization process.

[Darrin]

Going back through my builds... Dokar Jaggedfang was my first medal-winner, from Hand of the Winged Masters. That build was based mostly on the umpteen-dozen Swift Hunter builds I'd been fiddling with for over a year or so.

My "hook" into the SI was realizing that Dragonfire Strike advances three different types of precision damage: sneak attack, skirmish, and sudden strike. I had already done some optimized Swift Hunter builds that crank skirmish up to 10d6 via Dragon Devotee 4/Unseen Seer 4, but when I substituted in Hand of the Winged Masters, I realized that 8d6 skirmish/10d6 improved skirmish was actually pretty decent, and Improved Dragonfire Strike made it even better. I had already done a version that used Frostblood Half-Orc to swap Endurance for a bonus feat, so Scout 3/Ranger 3 was my entry method. After that, I tried to cram in optimization tricks I had used or discovered previously: leveraging bonus feats via Dragonborn of Bahamut and using Planar Touchstone to grab Turn Undead. So I guess you could say my build started as a Category 5 ("Fill the Swift Hunter Envelope") with some Category 2 stuff thrown in.

My first Gold was Vultag Thunderkeg for the Great Rift Skyguard round, which I tied with WhamBamSam's Bolfarg of Knoss. Vultag started with hammering away at the primary problem with the drogue wing: how do you use it more than once? I think I may have started looking at using Shapesand or the Sand Shaper PrC, but there was something tickling the back of my mind... a spell that can make armor or weapons appear instantly on your body.... couldn't quite remember where I'd seen it. That sent me book-diving. If it's not in the Spell Compendium, then I check PHBII, Complete Mage, Races of the Dragon, and Dragon Magic. After that, the environment books: Frostburn, Sandstorm, and Stormwrack. If it's not in any of those, then it's either in a very obscure source (DotU, Cityscape, etc.) or in something campaign-specific... so I start digging through Forgotten Realms/Eberron sourcebooks. Eventually I found swift ready in Forge of War, near one of my favorite spells (instant of power). Swift ready is almost exactly what I need... it's not a swift-action to cast, which is what I was hoping, but the 24-hour duration and swift action to activate is close enough.

However, now I've got a problem... it's a 2nd level spell, not a 1st level spell as I thought it would be, so I've got to figure out how to get enough caster levels into the build without sacrificing anything else. For some reason I've decided I have to have Drunken Master 2 in the build, because I'd discovered Stagger previously as a way to perpetually Pounce every round. This complicates the build quite a bit, since I've got to have Barb 1 for Pounce, Monk for Flurry of Blows, and Fighter for mounted combat feats. The drogue wing and the Skyguard abilities involve quite a bit of charging, so I've decided that Stagger is mandatory, as it gives the build something useful to do on the ground once the drogue wing has been deployed. I have to keep it in the build. Swift ready appears on a petty good selection of spell lists, but class levels are going to be tight. SI needs to be 10 to get a good score in UoSI. Getting into Skyguard is going to be at least 5 levels because of skill prereqs (Ride 8). Stagger means Drunken Master 2, so I've only got 3 class levels to spare. That rules out Bard, Hexblade, and sadly Duskblade as well. I'm left with either Artificer or Assassin. For a build that was already including Barbarian, Monk, and Cleric, Assassin felt like I was stretching too far. When I sat down to put together the backstory, I managed to come up with some plausible reasons on why a dwarf might take Barbarian, Monk, and Cleric levels. Fitting in Assassin felt really klunky. So I went with Artificer 3 instead, because it sounded a lot more dwarf-ish than Assassin. Artificers make things... dwarves like making things and runes, and infusions work kinda like runes, so... even though it was from Eberron, and my backstory was quite decidedly Forgotten Realms, I figured I could refluff it as Kitchen Sink Syndrome: Forgotten Realms is so full of random junk, you can find anything in it if you look hard enough... even non-Forgotten Realms things, like infusions.

And I may have made a mistake there, as I think my elegance score got dinged up because I was mixing campaign worlds. If I'd picked Assassin and managed to sell it somehow (Uh... revenge against red wizards = elite dwarven assassin training maybe?), I think I might have pulled up the elegance score a bit.

I've done a bunch of different Falling Object Damage builds because I adore that trick, and I knew Cobra Strike Monk 2 gives me the prereqs for Roof-Jumper, so I knew I could fit in Roof-Jumper for decent chunk of damage... not quite Ubercharger damage, but enough to lift some eyebrows. The Trickery Devotion came from trying to find a dwarven deity that fit into the backstory without completely breaking credulity. Backstory had a mercantile background, Vergadain seemed plausible as the god of coins, but he also had Trickery... and then I realized a phantom dwarf duplicate could also drop down with a drogue wing, so I could switch Trickery Domain to Trickery Devotion. Dwarf with wings makes me think of Prince Vultan from Flash Gordon, Brian Blessed played both Prince Vultan and Gimli the dwarf, so that gave me the image, and a slight consonant change gave me the first name.

Vultag is probably more of a Category 3 Hodgepodge than a Category 1 or 2. No one had used the swift ready for anything like that, but actually being able to use the drogue wing more than once isn't all that impressive, and doesn't go outside of the design envelope all that much. I think Stagger may have been used in the Drunken Master round, and we've seen Roof-Jumper/Falling Object tricks before. Putting together Vultag may be more of a "Katamari" strategy: keep throwing in weird stuff and hope it all sticks together.

However... what I *should* have done is asked if I could enter Goldibricks into the competition as well, as that stretched my optimization skills way beyond anything I did with Vultag. daremetoidareyo made an offhand comment about turning a gold golem into a dwarf, and said, "Impossible to do in 20 levels." I've loved all the different kinds of golems since back in the days of BECMI, and I remembered looking at a gold golem as one of the Random Encounter articles on the Wizards website, so I googled it up to take a closer look. That's when I noticed you could reduce the golem's HD by taking gold out of it. Dropping the golem's 10 HD down to 5 HD gave some room to fit in levels of Stoneblessed. But even better, taking out 50,000 GP gave me something I'd never had before in Iron Chef: a GP budget! The Iron Chef rules discourage relying on magic items or WBL to make a build work, as you want the build to stand on its own via class abilities instead of something any PC could buy. But these GPs were *part* of the golem's body, so I could use that to buy things... like spells or templates!

So, I'm starting with a 5 HD construct. First problem was get an Int score. Awaken construct does that. Second, the golem needs the giant or humanoid type to become a Stoneblessed. And we have a spell for that as well, incarnate construct. Unfortunately, this strips out all our Special Attacks/Qualities, but ah well. Are there any other templates we could buy that could give us some interesting abilities but still keep our creature type as giant? Mineral warrior, maybe? But I remember there's a well-known exploit by repeatedly adding Incarnate Construct and Dustform templates. Only there's no spell that confers the Dustform template... I dig into Sandstorm because I know there's a spell that does something like that, but I can't remember exactly... why is there no dustform spell? Because it's called sandform for some reason. But the spell doesn't change type and the duration is crap, so that won't work.

Several hours go by as I bookdive around for various ways to switch back to the construct type. There's a midnight construct template in Magic of Incarnum, so maybe there's a spell for creating those? No. Raggomoffyn can turn anything into the construct type, but that's almost too wacky even for me to use. I keep coming back to the Dustform template and the incarnate construct spell... why isn't there a spell to do the opposite of incarnate construct? Maybe in Dragon Magazine, but that's off-limits. After banging my head against that brick wall for a few more hours, it occurs to me... can I just create a spell? I check the "Spell Research" rules, which I have never actually looked at before. Cost is determined mostly by spell level... well, I know what that is! It's just incarnate construct in reverse, and that's a 9th level spell, so if I need a 9th level spell to do the opposite, then that's a fixed cost! So I can just pay for it with GP!

Only... this gold golem doesn't really have any spellcaster levels. How exactly is he casting these spells? Xena's got me covered, though: A Wizard Did It. So now I can recursively chain together multiple incarnate construct/dustform construct spells for a bunch of Strength increases. How many, exactly...? That's when I notice the XP component on the spells... 5000 XP per casting. If I'm paying a wizard to cast the spell, at 5 GP per 1 XP, then that blows my 50,000 GP budget way out of the water. Both spells would cost over 50,000 GP on top of the cost for a 9th level spell. So I need a shortcut or something to offset the XP cost. Restoring/manipulating XP... I know there's something called a Thought Bottle that can do that, but I've never actually looked up what it does. I track it down, what does it cost... 20,000 GP? That's within my budget! Ok, so XP problem solved.

Next problem... I want to maximize the incarnate construct spell so Int and Con are both 18. I need to pay for the metamagic feat somehow... is there a magic item I can buy that maximizes a 9th level spell? Yes, metamagic rods, but I can't afford it. What else can get me a metamagic feat for one casting? Metamagic storm... can I buy that? Probably not. Maybe Dark Chaos Shuffle? That's stretching it... I go back to the Metamagic Storm entry, looking for loopholes... there must be some other planar site that offers metamagic? That eventually gets me to planar traits, and I eventually realize... I don't *need* the Maximize Spell feat if I cast the spell on a plane that already maximizes spellcasting. So all I really need is a gate spell. Spreadsheet stuff to figure out how many incarnate construct/dustform constructs I can afford... looks like 4-5 recursions.

Ok, so I've got my 5 HD giant mostly ready to go... I know what the attribute scores should be. Problem... spell says the incarnate construct only gets skill points and feats for class levels taken after the template is acquired. So I don't get anything for those 5 HD... but if it was an intelligent construct before, it should get skill points and feats, yes? So... how about psychic reformation? That might work... but my alleged wizard doesn't do psionics. Uh... what's the psionic equivalent of a scroll? Power stone? Ok, close enough, we'll use that. Uh, handwave the UPD roll... it's a wizard casting 9th level spells, he can presumably max out a UPD check. Ok, we've got two feats and some skill points, but cross-class isn't enough to get into Stoneblessed. I need Crafting 5. Fighter 1 fixes that, and gets me Mounted Combat for Great Rift Skyguard as well. 5 HD + Fighter 1 + Skyguard 10 = 19 class levels... I've got one level left over. Large size, very high Str... Hulking Hurler it is! So now I can throw my mount at people! How much does a hippogriff weigh... I know the MM gives weight for animals, but very rarely mentions weight for anything else. But I look up hippogriff and... it does have a weight listed! 1,000 pounds! That's... not nearly as much as what this thing can throw, and it's only about 5d6 as an improvised projectile. I had kinda given up the idea of a large-sized gold golem riding a hippogriff as a mount but... what if the hippogriff was huge instead? Can I permanently increase the size of a hippogriff? That's probably a job for polymorph any object, which I can buy... but I can only polymorph it into an existing creature. I guess I could just pick something huge with an established weight and use that but... I'd rather have an actual huge-sized hippogriff. So I look at the Advancement line, and they become huge at 7-9 HD. So huge-sized hippogriffs do exist in the world somewhere... I'm not sure if an "advanced" creature is a valid target for PAO, but I figure at this point no one's going to call me on it, just pay for the PAO and treat it as a done deal. If it gets dispelled, just pay for another casting. And 8,000 pounds gives me a nice big chunk of 43d6 damage as an improvised object. The rest is numbers-wrangling on the spreadsheet, can I get all that spellcasting and other expenses under 50,000 GP? Yes, but I will only be able to afford three castings of the incarnate construct/dustform construct combo. That should be plenty to toss around a huge-sized hippogriff.

Goldibricks is obviously a Category 7 Joke entry, but I think it's effective enough he could have been a medal contender.

Anyway, I have no idea if that's helpful or not, but that's a better example of what you might call a "Mountain Climbing Strategy". Set a goal of "I want to do {blarg}", {blarg} being a silly idea like "I want a large creature that picks up his mount and throws it at people", and figure out how to get there. Or you could phrase it as, "I've got to get from A to B to C, and I've got X amount of resources." To get to that goal, there are discrete obstacles to overcome as you go up that mountain. Tackle one obstacle at a time, mostly through book-diving, and find the best solution that works within the budget, whatever that may be in class levels/feat slots/GPs/etc. If you go beyond the budget, then you've got to go back through everything you've got in the build and see if you can cut anything out or trim it down and still keep that core idea intact. Too many compromises and you've probably got a Hodgepodge, but an amusing or interesting entry can still get into medal contention with a little bit of smoke and mirrors.