Results 241 to 270 of 406
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2014-08-12, 11:44 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2011
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
Transfer knowledge function cast by a spell to power erudite. Mitigate the costs involved with large quantities of ambrosia if good or liquid pain if evil. We can also render PP moot with any number of famous methods. from there it's simply a matter of either having the erudite in the party, trading relevant spell or power knowledge from party members, trading large amounts of ambrosia, or good old-fashioned payed abuse of ice assassin spells to make a copy of the erudite. Any of the former are preferred for relative simplicity, but the last one mitigates the need for consent pretty hard.
Most people see a half orc and and think barbarian warrior. Me on the other hand? I think secondary trap handler and magic item tester. Also I'm not allowed to trick the next level one wizard into starting a fist fight with a house cat no matter how annoying he is.
Yes I know it's sarcasm. It's a joke. Pale green is for snarking
Thread wins: 2
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2014-08-12, 11:47 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
- Location
- Singapore
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
Putting everything else aside, though, the Factotum's ability to take extra actions is fairly unique. Even if the class is just based on "filling holes", it's actually better at that than anyone else, fitting their concept of being quick-witted and clever.
As far as their flavor goes, they're meant to be highly-skilled, quick-witted gentleman (or gentlewoman) adventurer-types, dilettantes who pick up a huge variety of talents over the course of their adventures. You might not like that kind of character archetype, but they appear all the time in fiction (Cugel the Clever, say, is probably a good example of a Factotum in fiction.) Not everyone fits squarely into traditional D&D archetypes.
And like I said, being able to "fill holes" is valuable because sometimes your party needs an extra caster, and sometimes it needs an extra skill-monkey, and sometimes it needs an extra healer, and sometimes it needs an extra fighter -- it's not as simple as "there are a set number of roles each party needs one and only one person in, forever." The Factotum can switch to whichever hole needs to be filled at the moment on the fly, sometimes filling two at once.Last edited by Aquillion; 2014-08-12 at 11:51 PM.
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2014-08-12, 11:52 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
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- GMT -5
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Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
My example Factotum is usually "Every Elder Scrolls main character EVER". Eventually, you do everything at about 75% of a focused person's capacity, and then you've got the thing you've really focused on (gear, feats), and at that thing you are 125% (action economy ftw)
I follow a general rule: better to ask and be told no than not to ask at all.
Shadeblight by KennyPyro
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2014-08-12, 11:53 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2014
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
At this point I'm also hearing "Kill the factotum first"; after all, wouldn't you kill the enemy that can do everything first?
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2014-08-12, 11:55 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2011
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
Most people see a half orc and and think barbarian warrior. Me on the other hand? I think secondary trap handler and magic item tester. Also I'm not allowed to trick the next level one wizard into starting a fist fight with a house cat no matter how annoying he is.
Yes I know it's sarcasm. It's a joke. Pale green is for snarking
Thread wins: 2
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2014-08-12, 11:55 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
- Location
- GMT -5
- Gender
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
Last edited by Vhaidara; 2014-08-12 at 11:56 PM.
I follow a general rule: better to ask and be told no than not to ask at all.
Shadeblight by KennyPyro
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2014-08-12, 11:59 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2014
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
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2014-08-13, 12:01 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2014
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
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2014-08-13, 12:04 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2014
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
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2014-08-13, 12:06 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2011
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
Most people see a half orc and and think barbarian warrior. Me on the other hand? I think secondary trap handler and magic item tester. Also I'm not allowed to trick the next level one wizard into starting a fist fight with a house cat no matter how annoying he is.
Yes I know it's sarcasm. It's a joke. Pale green is for snarking
Thread wins: 2
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2014-08-13, 12:08 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2014
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
The Sorcerer can know SOME Sorc/Wiz spells.
The Psion, on his own, can learn some Psi powers. With Psychic Chirurgery, he can theoretically learn all Psi powers. That doesn't change the fact that the Sorc/Wiz spell list is better than Psionic powers. The StP Erudite has nothing to do with the Psion class, and is thus irrelevant to the discussion.
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2014-08-13, 12:17 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2011
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- Dromund Kaas
- Gender
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
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2014-08-13, 12:25 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2011
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2014-08-13, 12:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2007
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- GMT -5
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2014-08-13, 12:26 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2011
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
On the contrary. All psionic classes became related the instant a power happened for the express purpose of teaching any manifesting character and power. Now we can argue degrees of relevance to this relation, but it's now no less there than the relation all wizards share with each other as spell knowledge repositories for money or bartered spells.
Most people see a half orc and and think barbarian warrior. Me on the other hand? I think secondary trap handler and magic item tester. Also I'm not allowed to trick the next level one wizard into starting a fist fight with a house cat no matter how annoying he is.
Yes I know it's sarcasm. It's a joke. Pale green is for snarking
Thread wins: 2
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2014-08-13, 12:36 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2014
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
There is a vast difference between the mechanic for scribing spells, a mechanic capable of being performed by a 1st level Wizard, and a 9th level psionic power with an XP cost. Even if there were not, that wouldn't change the fact that arcane spells are more powerful than psionic powers.
And this discussion is about Sorcerers and Psions. No one is denying that the StP Erudite is deservedly tier 1. To say that StP Erudites could make a Psion tier 1 is beyond the point, as a Wizard could do the exact same thing with a Sorcerer. The only thing that should be judged in a discussion on the balance of two classes is what those two classes are capable of innately doing.
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2014-08-13, 12:39 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2013
- Location
- San Diego
- Gender
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
The way I am aware of involves the Spell-to-power Erudite variant, though you'd have to ask someone else on the specifics. Instead of having total powers, the Erudite has "unique powers per day", and can simply learn a boatload of powers and Chirurgary them onto their psion friend.
EDIT: Ninja'd by a lot.Last edited by Leviting; 2014-08-13 at 11:57 PM.
My Homebrew: The Shard Knight
The Shard Seeker
Please PEACH!
Apparently, I am Lawful Evil
-19 chaos, 8 evil and 6 balance!
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2014-08-13, 12:43 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2010
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
My GM (who I love to bits), banned Incarnum and all related content back when he ran 3.5. Not because it was unbalanced, but because he took a very relativistic approach to alignment (What is Good from your perspective is not necessarily Good for someone else), and believed that Incarnum was too firmly tied into the concept.
He had some interesting opinions on alignment. In the setting, all alignments were relative. Part of his reasoning behind this was because he believed no adventuring party was ever really "good", especially in a murder hobo style campaign. This did lead to the Paladin being able to effectively smite everyone they didn't like, though.
In the interests of fairness, we switched to a superhero campaign which has been the most amazing and longest running campaign I have ever been in.Last edited by CubeB; 2014-08-13 at 12:48 AM.
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2014-08-13, 12:52 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2014
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
I know about that as well, I just didn't know smooching powers off their StP Erudite buddy was a Psion class feature. :/
And no, the fact that Psions have Psychic Chirurgary on their powers list does not mean that they automatically get a StP Erudite friend who's more than happy to give them all the spells in the world.
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2014-08-13, 12:55 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2011
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- Dromund Kaas
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Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
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2014-08-13, 01:02 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2011
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
It doesn't have to be one erudite giving all spells anymore than it has to be one spellbook to scribe all non-level up spells from. Once erudites exist there's more than one. There are multiple ways of finding them, and even a few simple methods of obviating the need for consent or even presence from the erudite parties involved so long as they exist. Hell it doesn't even have to be erudites. Literally ANY psionic character that dabbled in these pursuits is a viable lead. You can't even claim that they'd be dead over time because the people savvy enough to attempt this are likely to correlate pretty strongly with the group of people who stumbled into any of the countless immortality methods in 3.5.
Most people see a half orc and and think barbarian warrior. Me on the other hand? I think secondary trap handler and magic item tester. Also I'm not allowed to trick the next level one wizard into starting a fist fight with a house cat no matter how annoying he is.
Yes I know it's sarcasm. It's a joke. Pale green is for snarking
Thread wins: 2
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2014-08-13, 01:13 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2014
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
Meanwhile, my Sorcerer is living in the Tippy-verse, where through UMD abuse he's turned himself into an Elder Eidolon Demogorgon with access to both divine and arcane spells. Of course, this doesn't really reflect the power level of the Sorcerer's innate abilities, but by god he can do it anyways.
The idea that a Psion can use an Erudite's class abilities to prove how powerful Psions are is dumb. A Psion learning every spell in existence off an NPC Erudite is DM fiat, and doesn't have any place in a discussion about balance.
This is also the reason that people don't say Monks are powerful, even though they can get buffs from the Wizard. At the end of the day, spells are the Wizard's ability, and the fact that the Monk became insanely good with a Shapechange up says nothing about the power of the Monk.
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2014-08-13, 01:17 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2009
- Gender
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
It's not that an StP Erudite could make a Psion tier 1. A Psion has access to all of the tools necessary to make themselves tier 1 native to the class (i.e. the tools necessary to find an StP Erudite with the SpellPowers they want, convince said StP to do the metaconcert/psychic chirurgery tango, and mitigate the various costs to doing so to essentially get it for the low low price of free + time invested). If you add in Thrallherd, it's even easier. This is an important distinction to make when comparing Sorcerers and Psions.
True, doing so automatically isn't a Psion class feature. It is, however, a Thrallherd class feature.No levelled malice
Infects one comma in the course I hold;
But flies an eagle flight, bold, and forth on,
Leaving no track behind.
Andrew Eldritch Avatar by Lord Fullbladder, Master of Goblins
Psionic Tricks Handbook (WIP!)
Brainstorming thread for a Basic FAQ (WIP!)
Oh, and you can just call me KA.
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2014-08-13, 01:28 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2011
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
Only reason we're bothing with psion is the unique powers per day nonsense. Would you prefer if we were doing it with erudite and using different methods to get that particular class ''feature'' permanently suppressed? That's also a thing we can do by the way. 3.5 is fun like that. Given enough time and desire I can literally turn anything into anything. The only reason I bother with picking specific classes is the number of steps involved.
Last edited by ryu; 2014-08-13 at 01:28 AM.
Most people see a half orc and and think barbarian warrior. Me on the other hand? I think secondary trap handler and magic item tester. Also I'm not allowed to trick the next level one wizard into starting a fist fight with a house cat no matter how annoying he is.
Yes I know it's sarcasm. It's a joke. Pale green is for snarking
Thread wins: 2
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2014-08-13, 01:29 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2014
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
And a Thrallherd Psion would probably be tier 1. But my point is this:
Sorcerers can break themselves. Gate in an Efreet. Go to town. Cast Shapechange. Go to town.
Psions can also break themselves- but doing so requires a class that is not a Psion, and that a Psion would be required to find. Finding an Erudite- outside of Leadership and Thrallerd shenanigans- depends on there being a Erudite to find, which is completely up to the DM. For these reasons I do not consider it to be an indication of the Psion's inherent power or versatility that they can maybe steal another class's abilities.
I'm not sure I understand you. Psion's manifest powers differently, but that doesn't really have a mechanical impact beyond the class being easier to play, and the occasional infinite pp abuse.
Yes, I completely agree that anyone can do anything in 3.5, given enough abuse. That's why, when attempting to determine how powerful a class is, you don't look at factors beyond what a class is inherently capable of. Without UMD. Without support from other classes. A Psion that nabs every spell in existence from a StP Erudite is powerful. A sorcerer that uses Circle Magic to boost his CL is powerful. A Commoner that uses Gather Information to locate the nearest Candle of Invocation is powerful. Should these incredibly DM dependent things that say nothing about the power of a class, and everything about the power of a few broken mechanics tell us which class is better? My answer is no.Last edited by Owl Prowler; 2014-08-13 at 01:39 AM.
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2014-08-13, 02:58 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2011
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
See the thing is I realized exactly how faulty and blurry that line was a long time ago. The only things relevant to power are the number of steps involved, the likelihood of success as derived by multiplying the success rate of every step, time investment, amount of system knowledge required, and of course the final amount of power achieved. A commoner has to do a lot more to become power than a wizard, has a drastically lower chance of success, and doesn't have his tools handed to him as easily as most classes. A commoner needs to know about chicken infested, have information gathering sufficient for the given task, AND find someone powerful enough to have crafted a candle of invocation without being smart enough to have used it already. This is assuming the opponent in question is also capable of being threatened by a commoner. Wizards, psions, clerics, druid, artificers and so on though? They have to be stopped by creatures of deific power from almost the onset of their career to not almost immediately become competitive with said gods.
Most people see a half orc and and think barbarian warrior. Me on the other hand? I think secondary trap handler and magic item tester. Also I'm not allowed to trick the next level one wizard into starting a fist fight with a house cat no matter how annoying he is.
Yes I know it's sarcasm. It's a joke. Pale green is for snarking
Thread wins: 2
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2014-08-13, 05:12 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
- Location
- Singapore
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
This reminds me of the old argument about how Monks were an awesome class because they can cross-class UMD a scroll to polymorph into a dragon.
Anyway, I think it's reasonable to say that Psions trying to get powers learned via StP Erudites is several orders of magnitude more difficult than wizards just using the class features they come with out of the box. You can argue with your DM about how every other Psion in their setting should already be doing this and, therefore, try to convince them to change their setting to make it easier for you to exploit this obscure highly-specific loophole, but ultimately that's not anything remotely close to the default setting for most games.
For example, I could similarly argue that large-scale Candle of Invocation cheese makes anything I desire common in the setting; but the DM is not required to follow that logic, and the default setting clearly assumes that Candles of Invocation are never used in significant numbers. Similarly, you can argue yourself blue in the face about how there should be other psions who already know all these cool powers, but that doesn't change the default setting one iota.
(Another comparison would be trying to use real-world supply and demand to argue that specific items in the books should be available for less than their listed values. Maybe, maybe not! But it's useless for optimization-talk, because that's not really optimization so much as game-specific worldbuilding; your DM is the one who decides how their NPC Psions behave, how many they are, who they've met and what they've done, etc. Not you. If you have a plan that depends on widespread behavior that clearly isn't reflected in the books or setting materials, it's at least a somewhat dubious plan.)Last edited by Aquillion; 2014-08-13 at 05:18 AM.
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2014-08-13, 05:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2009
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Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
The difference between Commoner Candle of Invocation bootstrapping and Partially Charged Monks with Cross Class Wands of UMD is, the Psion gets this power, see. It's called Psychic Chirurgery (and Psychic Reformation, for that matter), and there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a Psion of ML17 or higher not to have payed to have it put on them. And it then allows them to get every power ever printed as a power known. But then, there's this conveniently available (so long as WotC hasn't buggered their site recently, which is something of a recurring issue, I'll admit) ACF which allows all Sorc/Wiz spells to become powers. If we're assuming a RAW, all books are open environment (which is as good a default assumption as any, and better than most), there are StP Erudites out there. Our Psion has the tools to find them; she has the tools to convince them to dance the Psychic Chirurgery/Metaconcert Tango. Yes, it may take some doing, but that's what downtime/flowing time demi-plane shenanigans are for, right? And with the Thrallherd, a PrC that's as close to core as anything else Psionic, it's even easier. So they have the tools, in class, not available to everyone and their adventuring grandmother, to get every spell and power in the game, all available all of the time.
I'll grant you, this may not work in an environment in which the DM has eliminated or otherwise limited the StP Erudite. But has no bearing on their absolute power level in the RAW/ABAO environment. Basically, in any setting where there is at least one StP Erudite, the Psion has the means to find them and get every power and spell ever printed grafted onto their powers known list. All it takes is time and resources built into the class itself.
So, while there's some superficial similarities to Bootstrap Bill, Commoner, Esq. and the Giacomonk, the parallels do not continue past the surface.No levelled malice
Infects one comma in the course I hold;
But flies an eagle flight, bold, and forth on,
Leaving no track behind.
Andrew Eldritch Avatar by Lord Fullbladder, Master of Goblins
Psionic Tricks Handbook (WIP!)
Brainstorming thread for a Basic FAQ (WIP!)
Oh, and you can just call me KA.
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2014-08-13, 05:41 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2007
- Location
- Imagination Land
- Gender
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
What the heck? That was NOT all me. That was the person who I was responding to in this post.
Then you decided to come along and argue against me for who knows what reason.
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2014-08-13, 08:52 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2010
Re: Most nonsensical ban you've played under
Well it's been a couple of years, so I don't remember the specific reason, I think he just didn't want the added complication of extra dudes. We were playing Shackled City, one of Paizo's pre-Pathfinder APs. We pretty much broke it wide open thanks to the changes in item creation between 3.5 and Pathfinder anyways, and I was able to get an Improved Familiar eventually, which ended up being a Storm Elemental from Pathfinder which also tended to break things open thanks to it's crazy bonuses versus things wearing metal.