The Gaming Den

deanruel87 wrote:No there isn't. When I went through the process of making my own rather extensive home rule set I charted out the mean, median, and mode of the skills, saves, AC, and attack bonuses of PC's and monsters across all 20 levels. The end result is that no, there isn't any center line and PC's abilities can get halfway off the RNG from level one and the monsters are made of arbitrarium.

If you wanted to create house rules to put people on a line then you should do the following.
* 1/2 BAB classes given 3/4th BAB.
* Everyone gets all good saves
* Max skills become equal to level not level+3
* No bonuses to AC, Attack scores, Saves, or Abilities from any magical equipment other than the listed standard enhancement bonuses from shields, weapons, and armor.

That's a condensed list, there's a little more art to it if you'd like me to write it out in full but if you want to be able to derive level appropriate estimates of characters knowing only their levels then those are the sorts of changes you have to institute. As things stands a character is just a pile of mumbo jumbo numbers thrown into a .....gumbo.

So, d(X)/d(Level) should be...

• Primary stat: 1/3 (enhancement) + 1/4 (level) + 1/4 (inherent) = +10/12
• Relevant stat: 1/3 (enhancement) + 1/4 (inherent) = +7/12
• AC: 1/3 (armor) + 1/3 (shield) + 1/4 (deflection) + 1/4 (natural armor) + 7/24 (dexterity) (+3/24 for DEX classes) = +35/24 or +38/24 for DEX classes
• AB: +3/4 (BAB) + 1/3 (weapon) + 7/24 (stat) {+ 1/4 BAB + 3/24 for weapon classes) = +33/24 or +42/24 for weapon classes
• Saves: +1/2 (Level) + 1/3 (enhancement) + 7/24 (stat) = +27/24, or +30/24 for classes with the relevant primary attribute
• DC: +1/2 (level) + 10/24 (stat) = +22/24

EDIT: Formatting

EDIT 2: Values at level 1:

Assume a 14 on all relevant attributes, and an 18 on the primary attribute.
Save DC: 15 (rounding up)
Save bonus: +4/+6
AB: +2/+5
AC: 12 (armorless, shieldless wizard) to 20 (rogue with chain shirt , heavy shield and 18 DEX)

Koumei wrote:That's just dumb. They're immune to paralysis effects, and having a Dexterity of zero "means that the character cannot move at all. He stands motionless, rigid, and helpless."

Show me where that says they're specifically suffering from the condition of "paralysis" and not just "can't take any actions"? Note also that a Dragon can be made Helpless (through non-paralytic means), can be Petrified, can be Pinned, and indeed will stop moving when it dies. Even though it's immune to paralysis.

Player's Handbook p. 304 wrote:ability damage: [...]A character with Strength 0 falls to the ground and is helpless. A character with Dexterity 0 is paralyzed. A character with constitution 0 is dead. A Character with Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma 0 is unconscious.

Player's Handbook p. 311 wrote:paralyzed: Frozen in place and unable to move or act, such as by the hold personspell. A paralyzed character has effective Dexterity and Strength scores of 0 and is helpless, but can take purely mental actions. A winged creature flying in the air at the time that it becomes paralyzed cannot flap its wings and falls. A paralyzed swimmer can’t swim and may drown. A creature can move through a space occupied by a paralyzed creature—ally or not. Each square occupied by a paralyzed creature, however, counts as 2 squares.

Monster Manual p. 69 wrote:Immunities (Ex): All dragons have immunity to sleep and paralysis effects.

The paralyzed condition is not the same as a paralysis effect.

-Username17

That looks roughly right. In play it's not exactly a smooth progression through all levels though since things like Inherent bonuses don't show up in early levels and then show up in huge bursts in the last 8 levels. What I ended up doing for those spikes was using a 20 level chart slightly slower than what you have there but then gave out bonuses packages at levels 5, 10, and 15 to square the math. I called them the Heroic, Paragon, and Legendary benchmarks and those bonus packages went over better with players than a completely seamless 20 level transition.

FrankTrollman wrote:The paralyzed condition is not the same as a paralysis effect.

After reading it again, that's the detail I was missing. Well, that clears it up. Thanks.

So, applying some rounding, we get approximately this:

Property	Level 1	d/dL	Level 20
Ability Score	14/18	+0.5/+0.75	24/33
Attack Bonus	+2/+5	+1.5/+2	+31/+43
AC	16	+1.5	45
Saves	+4	+1	+23
DCs	14	+1	33

Why do you have 10/12 and 7/12 derived for stat increases, but every time they show up in other derivations they're different numbers (AC uses 7/24 for Dex, I thought it should be 10/12)?

Yeah those numbers look right. The DC's are about 10 over the saves and the AC is about 10 over the average attack, which was the goal. I think your ability estimates are high though. Enhancement bonuses to abilities are a lot harder to get in these rules because things like Headbands of Intellect don't exist. No magical items can add bonuses to AC, Attack, Saves, or Abilities. The only exception to that rule, as listed, is weapons shield and armor. That doesn't affect the math though because drops or raises in abilities affect every category uniformly.

...You Lost Me wrote:Why do you have 10/12 and 7/12 derived for stat increases, but every time they show up in other derivations they're different numbers (AC uses 7/24 for Dex, I thought it should be 10/12)?

Stat bonus grows with half of stat.

d(bonus)/d(level) of 7/24 corresponds to d(stat)/d(level) of 7/12.

Dean: Why'd you choose to just give everyone high saves? Are characters just too fragile if they have weak saves, or is it purely for the convenience of keeping the saves close to each other?

I kind of envisioned a benchmark for weak saves and strong saves.

I gave everyone strong saves to keep them on the right number track yes. The goal being to make spells work about 50% of the time. The weak and strong save idea always seemed out of place for me. I understand wanting a mechanic to tell who's got fast reflexes and who's got strong will and who's tough but we have ability scores to do exactly that and no other thing. In this system high dex characters get out of the way quicker and high constitution characters ignore poisons better. It also means that since there's no multiclass save stacking the Dwarf Barbarian won't have a Fort save that's like 6 lower than an Elf Druid/Warshaper/Nature's Warrior/Heirophant.

I will admit showing weakness though and having experimented with telling players to choose one "Weak save" which got a -2 which assuaged my desire to replicate weak and strong saves. In the end I stopped doing it because it didn't make anyone happier and seemed to add nothing to the play space. Perhaps if I had phrased it as "At Character creation choose your two STRONG saves and the remaining one gets a -2" people might have liked it more. The nuances of what makes people happy and unhappy are an elusive target to aim for.

If we take stat bonuses out of the other equations, ignore bad BAB, and make saves grow at 1/2 level...

Property	base	Level factor	Focus bonus (L1 | L20)
Attribute	14	+7/12	+4 | +9
AB	+0	+13/12	+1 | +5
AC	10	+14/12	+Armor | +Armor
Save	+0	+10/12	+2 | +2
DC	10	+6/12	+0 | +0

Our values (pre-attribute) at level 1 and 20 are

Property	Level 1		Level 20
Attribute	14	18	26	35
AB	+0	+1	+22	+27
AC	10	18	34	44
Save	+0	+2	+17	+19
DC	10		20

If we want to make numbers simple, not diverge (much) with level, still be about the same, and remove item bonuses, I'd take a look at...

Property	base	Level factor	Focus Bonus
Attribute	14	+2/3	+4
AB	+0	+1	+5
AC	10	+1	+Armor
Save	+0	+1	+2
DC	+0	+1*	+0

*: This is increased to account for the Attribute divergence that isn't happening

Which generate values (pre-attribute) of:

Property	Level 1		Level 20
Attribute	14	18	27	31
AB	+1	+6	+20	+25
AC	11	19	30	40**
Save	+1	+3	+20	+22
DC	11		30

**: Full Plate is better than what you can get at 1st level, but that happens at pretty low level.

EDIT: Off by 1 error.

Does anyone know where I could find a map of an Islamic mosque that I could incorporate into the top floor of a dungeon crawl?

One of my players wants to build a "Life Leech Priest." I was never big on the whole metagame culture of WoW, so I'm assuming it's a WoW thing, and can vaguely guess what it entails. So far my advice to her "Be a Cleric of Wee Jas, rebuke undead, take Profane Lifeleech, take Spontaneous Healer if you want your spontaneous cure spells back"

It occurs to me, however, that if there were a metamagic feat along the lines of Vampiric Spell, she could just take Divine Metamagic (Vampiric Spell). The problem is, no such feat exists that I can tell, and I'm not sure how to write such a feat without it being incredibly broken.

Advice?

//

I don't play WoW, but why not steal the Steal Health ability from this: http://dsp-d20-srd.wikidot.com/worldthought-medic

You could explicitly say that temp HP from multiple Vampiric Spells don't stack, but ... Healing's probably better. Temp HP is a wonky mechanic anyway.

Vampiric Spell
Hurting people with magic makes you feel better about yourself.
Benefit:
You heal damage equal to [half] the hit point damage dealt by this spell to living creatures. You cannot gain more health from this effect than the actual HP lost by affected creatures. A vampiric spell occupies a spell slot [one/two] level higher than normal.

The only questions are 1) half vs. full damage, and 2) slot level adjustment.

To avoid creating another fighter thread, is there any precedent, homebrew or otherwise, for a generally mundane melee specialist who acts as a contact debuff and who reacts better to being buffed than a normal class?

Basically, I'm wondering if you could keep melee characters combat relevant for longer by giving a better rate of return for resources the party invests in them. For instance, if the fighter or barbarian flies faster when you give him wings, because he's strong or whatever, and if he gets next to an enemy that enemy is subjected to a couple of status conditions with no save, using a spell slot to give the fighter wings is a more competitive use of the slot.

Some precedent for contact debuffing but none for superior buffing. A superior buffing paradigm seems like a weak solution because it would be very hard to define how his magical synergy worked with the thousands of different spells we call "Buffs". Maybe just letting the Fighter store one buff in himself that he could pop out when he decided would be OK. Still it has no basis in the fiction as generally Fighting-man hero's are more resistant to magic if anything.

Yeah, I have no idea how you'd standardize the way a class would interact "better" with every buff in the game. As far as the fluff though, I wasn't envisioning it as a greater affinity for beneficial magic so much as a greater degree of body awareness that lets the DMF make better use of anything he's given. It's not that big a leap to envision bull's strength giving a flat increase in muscle mass that expresses itself as even greater overall strength in someone with good form, or to imagine a barbarian taking to life as a bear a bit more readily than a wizard.

"Buy One Get One Free!" (Ex): Whenever a spell is cast on the DMF, the person who cast the spell may choose to also gain its benefit.

That would run into 4 obvious problems: a) bull's strength is worthless if the DMF is not around, a summoned creature might replace the DMF, getting magic on the DMF means the DMF is no longer a DMF, the wizard is wasting a spell slot and time on buffing instead of winning the encounter.

You'd probably want to do stuff like polymorph (specifically polymorphing stuff that shuts down your own spell casting, so you'd want to throw it on the worthless sack of meat over there) or buffs that affect everyone (so no single target fly spell only mass fly spells)

bull's strength is worthless if the DMF is not around

Well, sure, but that's kind of the point, isn't it? If you could make casting bull's strength on a DMF a comparable choice to other tactical decisions, and clearly superior to just casting it on yourself, then maybe you'd actually want him around.

a summoned creature might replace the DMF ... the wizard is wasting a spell slot and time on buffing instead of winning the encounter.

Well, these are part of the reason the DMF should also inflict no-save status conditions. If his blinding rain of blows distracts foes so much their saves are lowered and they're slowed, a summoned creature isn't automatically comparable, and spending a spell slot that provides the mobility to let him close might actually be winning the encounter.

getting magic on the DMF means the DMF is no longer a DMF

If this is true it hardly counts as a problem, don't you think?

Redshirt wrote:

bull's strength is worthless if the DMF is not around

Well, sure, but that's kind of the point, isn't it? If you could make casting bull's strength on a DMF a comparable choice to other tactical decisions, and clearly superior to just casting it on yourself, then maybe you'd actually want him around.

Not really, no. The DMF will feel sad if I don't spent my time buffing him, yet I don't want to rely on spells that are just wasting my spell slots when the DMF is not near.

And buff spells generally don't change much, so I guess I could play smash brothers and when it is my turn MC just follows my SoP list.

I did think about making a "Thayan Knight" type class/PrC that focused on that kind of thing - being an ideal caster bodyguard. So, abilities like:
* Polymorph Mastery - Be more effective when polymorphed, maybe getting some of the creatures feats and/or su. abilities.
* Spell Selection - When under two conflicting spells, can decide which one takes precedence (mind control, for instance).
* Friendly Fire - Immune/resistant to AoE spells cast by allies, if any kind of warning or signal was given.
* Spell Storing - Like the weapon ability, but no max level, and maybe more than one.
* Magic Vacuum - When in contact, can "pull" a spell from a willing caster (maybe unwilling too, with a save); no action for caster, swift? move? action for bodyguard.

However, it's more of an NPC/Cohort class, due to specifically needing a caster to power their own class abilities. Although I guess you could have the bodyguard as the primary character and the caster as a cohort.