Iron Chef Optimisation Challenge in the Playground C

[Piggy Knowles]

Caerulean LaRue was mine.

[DeAnno]

The Whispering Wind was mine.

It ended up being a combination of a lot of slick little things I've noticed over the years. Find the Gap is oft ignored due to being tricky to learn and less immediately convenient compared to Wraithstrike, but a build that has both a lot of buff rounds to operate with and a hunger for its swift action already is a nice spot for it. Superior Invisibility is enabled really a lot by high speeds. Level 6 Air Heritage Raptoran is a very efficient flier. Beguilers really like to have backup melee options in a broad strategic view, but it's not always very feasible.

And lastly, Swiftblade is a class I'm pretty familiar with; I've tried to work it into Arcane DPS style builds before, and the spell slot issues really punish you in endurance for using it that way. It's a well designed class in that you really need serious gishing to get the most out of the extra actions otherwise you run out of gas and fall flat on your face.

EDIT: And wow, I was slapping myself for forgetting about Expeditious Dodge. It was a minor mistake, but it was even in a sourcebook I'd already used!

[DeTess]

Myra Dale was mine.

I don't have much to add right now, apart from lamenting the fact that I forgot about weapon finesse's BaB requirement XD

[Venger]

Updated accordingly. Don't beat yourself up about it. I know I've done it before. It's such a bad rule.

[Fuzzy McCoy]

Fëanáro Swiftfoot was me.

[Hiro Quester]

Pahika Kanikani was me.

The build combined a Maori warrior theme for a bard I've been thinking about for a while, with Swiftblade and War Weaver to make the bardic buffing even more efficient.

Obviously I tried to include too much. I started with two builds, (bardic and war weaver) and then thought I could combine them. I'm kicking myself for not remembering the 3rd level spell requirement for War Weaver.

I have been trying to fit War Weaver and Swiftblade together for ages, to make a buffer who can cast a raft of standard buffs, then use the time stop to cast several situational buffs, and then go out and beat enemies.

I started trying to combine the two builds into a Maori Warrior Bard/war weaver/Sublime Chord/ Swift blade, using the Sublime chord's new spell progression to pack in the initial level of WW and SB that don't progress casting before that, then SC1 and SB the rest of the way. The trouble was while that was possible, it meant I'd only have one 3rd level spell per day. For a class that specializes in Haste, that's a big inelegant limiation.

It also required some shenanigans with Earth [edit: sorry, Sanctum] Spell (that required two flaws) to enable early qualification for War Weaver with a heightened 2nd level spell. It was a mess.

When I saw Prestige Bard as an option for a similar build, it all changed. And I forgot to reevaluate when WW could enter the build, and continued with idea that I could enter when I had 2nd level spells. A stupid mistake.

If I rebuilt it now, I'd separate it in two. A bard/sublime chord/Swiftblade could still be awesome (adding in Snowflake Wardance), with the Maori warrior flavor. The binder dip would also fit there and be more awesome with Snowflake Wardance.

So would a Wu Jen 5/ War Weaver 2 or 3/Swiftblade 10/War Weaver +2 or 3, as hyper-buffer (without the bardic music buffs) Gish. And much of the awesomeness of Body Outside Body making the duplicates count as in your tapestry for buffs would still apply.

Either build also would not be so MAD that I couldn't afford enough wisdom to make Arcane Disciple work, too (another stupid mistake).

I can't see a way to do both together without either losing a lot of War Weaver, or not taking SB to 10 (and 10 is the point, for that build).


p.s. I swear I got it to fit in one post when I sent it to Helio. Believe it or not, I edited it down a lot to fit (as this post shows, I can't write anything briefly ) Helio's intro put it over the limit again.

Edit: I can make one post that includes it all, for more elegantly linking to the whole thing, if that would be helpful for posterity's sake..


Edit p.p.s. I'm surprised nobody else made the joke about a "quickening" in the character's first experience with Haste. I thought that was pretty low-hanging fruit.

[Efrate]

Glosar was mine. Making use of awe as pseudo quicken for buffing was the genesis of the idea and I ran with it.

[Zaq]

Mine were F. A. S. T. and Quick Man.

Quick Man actually came first in my brain. I just couldn't think of any kind of theme whatsoever, and then The Quick and the Blue came up on my playlist, and the wheels in my head started turning. Once I started laughing about the idea I couldn't stop, and then it was just a matter of trying to put the pieces together. That was pretty much a joke that was only funny to me, though if there's one other The Megas fan out there (or maybe if I've created one?), my life will be slightly more complete.

I will say that I am unreasonably proud of my image showing the interaction between QM and one Mr. Kuwanger. Like, obnoxiously so. Here, I'll post it again.

Spoiler

Show

Geddit? GEDDIT?

F. A. S. T., of course, is simply on-brand for me, but I contend that, with the exception of that absolute stretch at the end (yeah, even I thought that was kind of BS), it actually works. How crazy, right? But it totally does.

I have to feel like submitting a truenamer full of references to John McWhorter and then also an homage to a Mega Man villain as interpreted by The Megas (i.e., a build that is basically a solidified version of a VGM song) is just absolutely peak me. I wasn't even trying to hide my fingerprints this time. But hey, it's round 100. Let that freak flag fly.

[Hiro Quester]

I have to feel like submitting a truenamer full of references to John McWhorter and then also an homage to a Mega Man villain as interpreted by The Megas (i.e., a build that is basically a solidified version of a VGM song) is just absolutely peak me. I wasn't even trying to hide my fingerprints this time. But hey, it's round 100. Let that freak flag fly.

Completely, Zaq. I assumed that FAST was you (though I would have been delighted if it was someone else). I appreciated the McWhorter references, as a linguistics geek myself.

You got me looking more closely at truensmer to see how that build could work. It’s absurd in the most alluring way.

and though I’d never heard of the Megas, I did enjoy that song. Thanks!

[Hiro Quester]

Apologies for double post, but I just want to invite Venger to talk about where the ideas for Persephone came from.

That was brilliant. Both figuring out how to get a cleric ordained champion into swiftblade, and creating those characters in that world.

I have re-read that story too many times. Kudos.

[Venger]

Apologies for double post, but I just want to invite Venger to talk about where the ideas for Persephone came from.

That was brilliant. Both figuring out how to get a cleric ordained champion into swiftblade, and creating those characters in that world.

I have re-read that story too many times. Kudos.

Certainly. I would be delighted. What would you like to know? I'm glad you enjoyed Persephone so much. I had a great time writing her.

[Hiro Quester]

No specific questions. Just curiosity. I thought for a very short while about how to get a celerity cleric base for swiftblade, without losing the point of progressing arcane casting. I gave up.

But I’m most intrigued by how the world and story of Persephone came about. Which bits came first, and what was built around them?

It’s very a detailed, engrossing short story, with funny/intriguing/twisty nuggets throughout. A clean-living hextor worshipping family who matter of factly cannibalize the night’s meal with bagels, and see “H” as immoral (and Persephone as equivalent to a drug addict to them). P’s ignorance and misinformation about H. The magic school. The bard girlfriend, and bringing her home to meet the parents. The “knowledge monkey” hadozee. Gran.

Excellent foreshadowing, e.g. with the “caddy” reference.

[Piggy Knowles]

My first idea for this one was a savage bard/swiftblade with Greenbound Summoning and Green Ear. My idea was to take advantage of the party-buffing aspect of haste by summoning a bunch of greenbound critters and buffing them with haste and bardic music. It even had the advantage of a constant freedom of movement effect to dance through the walls of thorns created by the summoned critters.

I got as far as writing up most of the build, but the main sticking point I kept running into was Spring Attack. There was simply nothing interesting I could do with Spring Attack, and I felt like that was such a core component to swiftblade that I hated more or less writing it off entirely.

So, I went back to the drawing board, and decided to start again with Spring Attack as my, er, springboard. I wanted to find a way to make Spring Attack not just an annoying pre-req, but an actual vital part of the build's strategy. Finally I settled on the fact that when Spring Attacking, your target cannot make AoOs against you for that movement, and decided to use Spring Attack as a way to dart into combat, do something interesting at touch range and then dart away. After messing around with various touch attack specialists I settled on pickpocketing, using Spring Attack as a way to close in and rob someone blind without them getting a chance to counterattack. That was the core idea behind Caerulean LaRue, and I still like it, even though I think I probably could have done something more interesting with it.

Fun round, all.

[Venger]

Apologies for double post, but I just want to invite Venger to talk about where the ideas for Persephone came from.

That was brilliant. Both figuring out how to get a cleric ordained champion into swiftblade, and creating those characters in that world.

I have re-read that story too many times. Kudos.

No specific questions. Just curiosity. I thought for a very short while about how to get a celerity cleric base for swiftblade, without losing the point of progressing arcane casting. I gave up.

But I’m most intrigued by how the world and story of Persephone came about. Which bits came first, and what was built around them?

It’s very a detailed, engrossing short story, with funny/intriguing/twisty nuggets throughout. A clean-living hextor worshipping family who matter of factly cannibalize the night’s meal with bagels, and see “H” as immoral (and Persephone as equivalent to a drug addict to them). P’s ignorance and misinformation about H. The magic school. The bard girlfriend, and bringing her home to meet the parents. The “knowledge monkey” hadozee. Gran.

Excellent foreshadowing, e.g. with the “caddy” reference.

Sure. As is usual for iron chef, I had my concept first and then thought about how to represent it mechanically:

Back in 2nd edition, when you cast haste, in addition to doubling the number of attacks you got in a round (based on weapon speed and such,) it aged you one year. So if you relied on it too much, it would eventually kill you, since PC immortality was much harder to come by back then.

I very much liked the idea of Persephone's parents having these "outdated" ideas about haste when in actuality, it was not dangerous at all, but the positive effects still remained basically the same, causing the conflation. This allowed me to do a kind of "reefer madness" type thing thematically which I selected as the basic seed of my story and built outward from that: Persephone knows about a Bad Thing, learns that thing is actually harmless, and must deal with this juicy contradiction.

Mechanically, this suggested to me entering as a class that does not normally learn haste, so the character would have no reason to know what it actually was. I figured most chefs would be entering through sorcerer, wizard, or beguiler, so I looked at domains. Hextor gave me some things I needed for ordained champion, which paid swiftblade's taxes, and his domains could be massaged with heretic of the faith to provide celerity and thus haste. This is reinforced in the story by her breaking away from her faith.

Since Hextor is Evil, I thought about the kinds of things Persephone's parents would be permissive about and what they would be reactionary about when sending her away to college. A forbiddance of haste struck me as appropriately arbitrary for a social taboo, and it meshed well with my core theme, so I rotated that in. Since Persephone was raised under Hextor's church, her lens of what's shocking is different, so it enabled me to do some gotchas like mentioning the Thayan sacrifice last because she wouldn't consider them important.

Occasionally, in iron chef, one of my characters will be involved in magic school. I generally like to set it up like an English style medieval college as structure goes where students opt into various lessons with individual instructors based on their intended course of study rather than have a broad spectrum of general-education requirements. It provides more time to showcase them as an individual and more of an emphasis on independent study, which gives them more downtime to foster interpersonal relationships with other students.

Since Persephone would need to learn about H, I saw a natural way of doing that was for her to be shepherded through it by a student who knew more about magic than she did, which I took advantage of as an opportunity for them to meet cute. Stennefra took her on an outing they could use to foster interest in a shared hobby (adventuring) and introduced her to her friends to show that she was taking Persephone seriously.

The "caddy" idea is something I'd wanted to incorporate for a while as a kind of offshoot on aristocrat xp farms. Instead of aristocrats just poking at ghost brute shriekers all day, I thought that more hardy characters would use similar principles for more exciting monsters. This would provide a somewhat safe outlet to practice combat stuff (through the use of self-resetting summon monster traps and the like presumably) but with some kind of safety mechanisms in place if things ever got too dire (dispels, rez's, etc.) That way the students wouldn't get permanently killed, and staff who was busy teaching/doing research full time could keep up with their continuing education by playing a couple of rounds on the farm every odd weekend, and it could serve as a social and bonding experience for them to complain about the job, get away from the students, etc.

A school this size would have some kind of work-study program for students and TAs to help carry golf bags full of different material weapons for DR, and they could provide insight to the people doing the fighting based on their familiarity with the monsters, the same as an experienced caddy will tell a golfer the lay of the land, advise what club to use, and so on.

Obviously, once these students have keys, they will get onto the links on their own time, same as how most clubs have a caddy's day on Mondays when members are typically not using the grounds.

This provided a natural in to work in a combat encounter for Persephone to be exposed to H under.

One thing I really like to do in my iron chef stories is when there's a group of secondary characters the main or pov character encounters all together like an adventuring party, I like to make them as different from the stock brute/sneak/holy man/magic user as possible, to make them feel more like a typical adventuring party, in this case divine bard (Stennefra), blackguard (Nyx,) athar (the elf), and archivist (hadozee.)

Another thing I like to do is to describe or characterize these sorts of characters like they are the main focus of some campaign that the pov is not privy to and give them some kind of implied history, weird costumes, or some kind of distracting physical tic that is begging to be explored and then not paying any attention to it at all. For example here, Stennefra and Nyx are identical twins who are two different kinds of fiend-themed knights, but they never talk about it or engage with it i n any way. I find these kinds of details provide a humorous contrast and help to make the world feel more lived in, even if these characters don't have a huge amount of page-time.

The random encounter being spellwarped donkeys is a reference to Saph's Seven Kingdoms campaign journal, where one of the random encounters his party ran into while grinding for xp included spellwarped donkeys and a half-donkey paladin riding a donkey. Again, I like throwing in something patently ridiculous and then not having any of the characters acknowledge or interact with it and instead take it completely straight to underline this.

"Knowledge monkey" is a term typically bandied at the skillful member of the party who has to invest ranks in knowledge skills. I thought it would be funny to have Nyx use it literally and her colleague calls her on it because he is a hadozee. He is using the archivist's dark knowledge ability, which is why he exposits information about donkeys. The elf is a member of the divine magic hating Athar, which is why he spurns the spell despite its beneficial nature.

I wanted Persephone's family to be permissive about everything except casting haste, so they would be supportive of her chosen fields of study and relationship with Stennefra as long as she didn't fail to evangelize. While it's not mentioned explicitly, given what is printed on Hextor's dogma, I gather marriages to other worshippers of Hextor would be strongly encouraged over other similar prospects.

Since Hextor is an Evil deity and the Scourges seem to be mostly clerics, I imagine they would have a long history interacting with fiends, who freely intermarry with mortals. Having a fiendish ancestor a few generations back seemed within the realms of possibility and I thought would add some color. Again, the only thing gran would object to would be the haste, but since she's from one generation prior to the parents, her feelings would be more extreme.

Due to the family being clerics and revering Hextor, I thought one of the traditional games they could play to celebrate the Blooding (a canonical holiday for Hextor's worshippers, though the salutation "blessed blooding" is my own invention) would be to engage in this Clouseau-like game where they leap out and attack one another without warning. While being killed is a mild annoyance in D&D, this is the kind of tradition I can see falling gradually by the wayside as generations wear on, so I thought it could be something gran did and the rest of them mainly play along to humor her. Offering blood to Hextor is another canonical way to celebrate the faith, so this is why Stennefra bleeds on the altar when she enters, to show respect for the Scourge family's religion and make a good impression. When working with short fiction, I try to incorporate small meaningful gestures more than dialogue since it lets me characterize more economically.

I must confess, I'm not sure I know what you mean with the "caddy" bit. What was foreshadowed?

As far as mechanics go, when we have a partial casting SI, I usually like to look for unique progression casting classes to advance so I can finish or mostly finish them. Nar demonbinder is a natural complement to cleric, and it can be finished with swiftblade's progression, so rather than a cleric who's losing a bunch of levels, I'm a finished nar demonbinder with a couple of cleric spells as gravy.

I hope this shed some light on my dish. Feel free to ask more stuff. I really enjoy talking about craft and process. Thanks for asking.

[Hiro Quester]

Thanks for the detail and background to the story. Again, it's fun piece of short fiction in its own right, let alone supporting a character design.

The "Caddy" bit I mentioned was just Stenfra mentioning that her sister "caddies on the farm" before we are introduced to the farm and what it is. It's an intriguing bit of information that teases the idea of other farm, and gets the reader intrigued to know more, and makes the reveal of the nature of the farm that much more satisfying. (Maybe "tease" is a better term than "foreshadowing"?)

That one mention of being a caddy invokes the whole practice of the faculty use of the farm, and of student labor, that you just explained, very economically and evocatively. That's one example of the way you seem to show, rather than say, many of the details of the world. Well done.

[Venger]

Oh, okay. That makes sense. Thanks a lot.

[Zaq]

By the way, Venger, I know I say this a lot, but I need to say it this time too: you are consistently best in show when it comes to the fiction component. And it's not even close.

[Venger]

Say it as often as you like. I never get tired of hearing it. What a great compliment. It means a lot coming from you, Zaq.

[Heliomance]

And this is why I stepped down as chair, because I've got absolutely terrible at this lately :P

Very very belatedly, the reveal:

Namel	Race/Alignment	Stub	Score	Position	Chef
The Whispering Wind	TN Raptoran	Beguiler 7/Swiftblade 10/Unseen Seer 3	18.75	First	DeAnno
Ferdinand Aloysius Sebastian Thennibyne	LG Uurnaen Illumian	Monk 2 / truenamer 6 / fighter 1 / swordsage 1 / swiftblade 10	17.75	Second	Zaq
Zagzag the Lightning Lizard	CE Venerable Dragonwrought Arctic Kobold	Battle Sorcerer 8/Swiftblade 10/Dragonslayer 1/Thrall of Demogorgon 1	17.5	Third	WhamBamSam
Persephone Scourge	LE Human	cleric of hextor 4/ordained champion 5/swiftblade 1/nar demonbinder 1/swiftblade 10	17.5	Third	Venger
Caerulean LaRue, the Cloudthief	TN Azurin	Azurin, Beguiler 7/Swiftblade 10/Mindbender 1/Unseen Seer 2	17.5	Third	Piggy Knowles
Myra Dale	CN Lesser Tiefling	beguiler 5/warblade 1/jade phoenix mage 4/swiftblade 10	17.25	Sixth	DeTess
QUICK MAN	LE Warforged	Wizard 5, Warblade 1, Bloodstorm Blade 4, Swiftblade 10	16.75	Seventh	Zaq
Pahika Kanikani	CN Silverbrow Human	Wu Jen 3/ War Weaver 2/ Binder1/ War Weaver +2/ Prestige Bard 1/ War Weaver +1/ Swiftblade 10/	16.25	Eighth	Hiro Quester
Fëanáro Swiftfoot	CN Fire Elf	Wizard 6 / Swiftblade 10 / Abjurant Champion 4	16	Ninth	Fuzzy McCoy
Chad the Fur(r)y	TN Human	Fighter 1/Wu Jen 5/Swiftblade 10/Abjurant Champion 4	13	Tenth	APlatypus
Glozar Dunal	TN Human	Bard 1/Binder 2/Anima Mage 6/Swiftblade 10/Sublime Chord 1	12.75	Eleventh	Efrate
Socko	LE Unseelie Fey Phaerimm Hatchling	Sorcerer 1 / Paladin of Tyranny 3 / Sorcerer +1 / Swiftblade 10 / Arcane Duelist 2 / Warblade 1	12	Twelvth	Sleven
Caelum Swyft	CG Human	Duskblade 1/Totemist 2/Warlock 4/Wyrm Wizard 2/Swiftblade 9/Hellfire Warlock 2	12	Twelvth	RaiKirah
Rukamuk	[Unknown Alignment] Venerable Desert Loredrake Dragonwrought Kobold	Battle Sorcerer 4/Swiftblade 10/Abjurant Champion 5/ Paragnostic Apostle 1	11.5	Fourteenth	jdizzlean

Thank you very much for the table, Venger, and thank you for taking up the mantle of chair, The Viscount!

Congratulations to DeAnno, Zaq, WhamBamSam, Venger, and Piggy Knowles for your medals! Here's to another 100!

It has been an honour to be your chair. Thank you all for your enthusiasm, for keeping Iron Chef going all these years. It's been a ride.

I'm Heliomance. On behalf of Iron Chef in the Playground, I bid you good evening!

[The Viscount]

Hooray!

We love ya Heliomance. Thanks for all your time as chair for the contest. You've left some big shoes to fill. I hope I can torture the contestants half as well.

Now that we've had the reveal, please anyone feel free to ask any questions or bring up any grievances in scores we didn't hash out in disputes.

[Zaq]

Helio, we love you and we love what you've done for us. You've put so much time and effort into this community, and it shows every step of the way. I personally can't thank you enough. And hey, maybe you'll see fit to join us as a chef now and again, eh?

[Eraknephobia]

As equipment is generally ignored/assumed is vow of poverty allowed?

[Venger]

That is allowed, yes. We've moved on to the next round and you may want to edit your post so no one knows which dish is yours if you're planning on cooking there.

[WhamBamSam]

As equipment is generally ignored/assumed is vow of poverty allowed?

VoP is allowed, but most judges will assume it's going to be worse than WBL unless you convince them otherwise.

[Wolfem]

Updated ICO Spreadsheet marking the dishes with their chefs. Awesome round everyone!

[Venger]

Looks great. Thanks, Wolfem.