The Gaming Den

Arijkos wrote:But I totally agree with you and with other posters here, its sad that you have to think really hard about not choosing the travel domain, even if your character would have little to no reason to do that, let alone his deity of choice.

For me, the answer to that is more domains of a similar caliber rather than balancing the existing ones.

Arijkos wrote:

Mister_Sinister wrote:Yeah, I'm with Lago on this one. I don't believe that being forced to go against fluff in order to be effective is a positive thing, and if you have boring NPC priests, their domains should not be ones available to your cool PC clerics.

The problem is, CharOp wouldn't exist if more people would agree with this view. See those weird breeds with feats and options from dozens of supplements? Who cares that your domains don't fit your background/deity if everything else is min/maxed to infinity?

But I totally agree with you and with other posters here, its sad that you have to think really hard about not choosing the travel domain, even if your character would have little to no reason to do that, let alone his deity of choice.

Yes, and I see this as an objective FLAW. The need to have to divorce mechanical effectiveness from your storyline is ten kinds of stupid, and the fact that one deity's options are arbitrarily better than another's are a really bad way to ruin conceptual decisions.

I mean, clerics of Wee Jas are awesomely cool fluff-wise, it's just that her domains suck. So now, I'm being forced to decide whether I actually wanna play something I personally find cool, or whether my responsibility to be a contributing member of the party and mechanical effectiveness generally should get priority. And this is a bad toss-up that shouldn't need to be made.

As for mean_liar's point, if you want to have boring deities/domains, then these are NPC options. If you explicitly state that, all fine and good, but if your players are led to believe that they are NOT explicitly NPC options, then you have a problem. This is my exact grievance with the system as it stands - it deludes people into thinking NPC options are perfectly good and valid choices for your career, when in practice, they're not, and the people who spend time and energy (and have the right mentality about it, too) to learn all that get advantages which everyone else (or the people who wanna play flavour builds) don't. In fact, the very NOTION of a flavour build needs to die - if it's an option, it should be effective. If it's not effective, it should not be an option. Simple as that.

I think that while designing a system one should strive for parity between PCs and non-traditional PC choices shouldn't be given equal merit. However, DnD is an existing system and so your choices are a little different. There's nothing wrong with making all domains balanced, it just seems like more work than necessary to achieve the desired result: awesome, fun PCs.

So if you want to play a cleric of Wee Jas, they should be awesome with undead. They really should. If the current setup doesn't suit, then you can either rebalance the domains and make them awesome (a worthy goal), or you can just tool the domain list to suit your concept and be done with it (same basic results, just easier).

Either of those fixes the problem at hand. A good GM can reasonably be expected aware of the problems of the poor domains and adjust the setting accordingly, and hopefully provide some direction to the PCs during char-gen. If they don't have that savviness, then either a published list of rebalanced domains (or a published list of rebalanced deity's domain availability) should accomplish the same thing.


Here's Wee Jas' compiled domain list:

Death, Domination, Law, Magic, Mind, Patience, Portal, Pride


Here's my personal death god's domain list:

Death, Deathbound, Evil, Fate, Hunger, Magic, Pact, Undeath


Crystal Keep has a compiled listing for Domains (and Deities), btw. I don't think limiting it to Core is necessary when you have a handy compilation like that; it's like the Spell Compendium on steroids.

mean_liar wrote:I think that while designing a system one should strive for parity between PCs and non-traditional PC choices shouldn't be given equal merit. However, DnD is an existing system and so your choices are a little different. There's nothing wrong with making all domains balanced, it just seems like more work than necessary to achieve the desired result: awesome, fun PCs.

So if you want to play a cleric of Wee Jas, they should be awesome with undead. They really should. If the current setup doesn't suit, then you can either rebalance the domains and make them awesome (a worthy goal), or you can just tool the domain list to suit your concept and be done with it (same basic results, just easier).

Either of those fixes the problem at hand. A good GM can reasonably be expected aware of the problems of the poor domains and adjust the setting accordingly, and hopefully provide some direction to the PCs during char-gen. If they don't have that savviness, then either a published list of rebalanced domains (or a published list of rebalanced deity's domain availability) should accomplish the same thing.


Here's Wee Jas' compiled domain list:

Death, Domination, Law, Magic, Mind, Patience, Portal, Pride


Here's my personal death god's domain list:

Death, Deathbound, Evil, Fate, Hunger, Magic, Pact, Undeath


Crystal Keep has a compiled listing for Domains (and Deities), btw. I don't think limiting it to Core is necessary when you have a handy compilation like that; it's like the Spell Compendium on steroids.

The only problem with this is that now you've transferred the onus of system knowledge from the players to the GM. And frankly, given that I regularly GM for one, and that they have enough work to do for another, I don't think this solves anything.

This is precisely why I am doing the work that I'm doing with things like the Spell Relevelling Project - I don't want dead or junky options in general. That way, no-one has to have mechanical knowledge about trap options in order for the game to work.

Again, back to the mantra. If it's an option, it should be effective. If it's not effective, it should not be an option.