Sigil: City of Doors

wrote: CEREMORPH

So after reading all the comments for a few days, I'm going to toss out a few ideas for consideration. Please note, I'm not actually planning any of these, I'm just spitballing at this point with some ideas for balancing. And obviously no plans would ever be made to do all of these!

1. Create new martial feats and edit existing martial feats to improve them based on combined levels of melee classes.
This is actually something that's been discussed and seems to be a popular idea. It doesn't prevent the gish or the dedicated caster build from taking them, but in the hands of someone with greater combat skill they become more dangerous.

2. Adjust UMD to be a little more selective.
Every character, even dedicated casters, seems to walk around with a bundle of wands. Which gets somewhat silly when you've got epic mages casting a gerbil-ball full of cleric and druid spells, or blackguards rocking holy sword. This would be a larger project, but it would push things more towards "play your character sheet" and less "play your inventory". This would also play into making dedicated rogues and warlocks, who actually are supposed to be superior because of their ability to get extremely high scores in UMD and the warlock feat, more useful than current.

3. More UMD locking.
You've probably run into certain items that UMD can't get around. This would allow selective item tweaking to prevent UMD access of things that a character really shouldn't have (for example, evil characters using holy sword wands). Of course it would require notation on the item description of some sort.

4. Gish-busting.
And by this, I mean the practice on many other servers requiring a certain number of levels in any class (although in our case it would be via script and not nosy DMs). This would do away with the common practices of 1 shadowdancer for HiPS, 1 cleric for free feats, 1 monk for AC and so on. Scripting it would probably be a huge pain, but this would definitely be seen as a blow against power-builders.

5. Dedication bonuses.
Kind of the reverse of #4, and even something that could go hand-in-hand with it, this would dole out notable bonuses for those who build within a theme. For example, if all of your levels are within a certain archetype (all melee, all stealth, all divine) or a specific combination (arcane/stealth).

6. Diversification bonuses.
A little wackier, this would provided bonuses to those who actually make a point to go halvsies on very diverse archetypes. A character with no wider than a 60/40 split between divine and stealth, for example. A reason to go outside the comfort zone of "I need X levels to be undispallable and X DC on my avasculate to beat the Hellfire Erinyes".

7. No, your God of Home and Hearth does not support the Travel domain.
Not suggesting that we go to the "Your god is Tits McGee so your domains must be Jiggle and Bounce" extreme, but preventing certain blatant powergrab combos would not be a terrible thing and might actually lead to some diversity of builds.

Again, just ideas and nothing actually planned, but I'd love to hear feedback.

Neethanial,Jun 3 2016 wrote: As the rules state. If it can be made, it is acceptable.

Neethanial,Jun 3 2016 wrote: Please don't get me wrong. If these are going to be altered to limit what people are allowed to play, these are fine examples of doing so. I'm not trying to discredit the idea at all. If it's going to happen, these are great ideas.
I just think altering classes to prevent something that isn't really that big of a deal, something that isn't even a legitimate problem, is silly.

Strawberry Jam,Jun 3 2016 wrote: There is nothing wrong with a level 1 dip, but doing so you accept both the benefits and drawbacks, you shouldn't complain it still has weaknesses.

Lucadia,Jun 3 2016 wrote: Two: Its limiting the capability of melee even more while theres public outcry they cant do more.

cryptc,Jun 4 2016 wrote: Trying to add build rules to try to remove some cases of powerbuilding just doesn't work, it merely changes the powerbuilds slightly, while non-powerbuilds get affected about as much, leaving the exact same situation as before, just with a whole bunch of headaches.

Vandole,Jun 4 2016 wrote: 7. No, your God of Home and Hearth does not support the Travel domain.
Not suggesting that we go to the "Your god is Tits McGee so your domains must be Jiggle and Bounce" extreme, but preventing certain blatant powergrab combos would not be a terrible thing and might actually lead to some diversity of builds.

wrote: CEREMORPH

So after reading all the comments for a few days, I'm going to toss out a few ideas for consideration. Please note, I'm not actually planning any of these, I'm just spitballing at this point with some ideas for balancing. And obviously no plans would ever be made to do all of these!

[b/]1. Create new martial feats and edit existing martial feats to improve them based on combined levels of melee classes.[/b]
This is actually something that's been discussed and seems to be a popular idea. It doesn't prevent the gish or the dedicated caster build from taking them, but in the hands of someone with greater combat skill they become more dangerous.

2. Adjust UMD to be a little more selective.
Every character, even dedicated casters, seems to walk around with a bundle of wands. Which gets somewhat silly when you've got epic mages casting a gerbil-ball full of cleric and druid spells, or blackguards rocking holy sword. This would be a larger project, but it would push things more towards "play your character sheet" and less "play your inventory". This would also play into making dedicated rogues and warlocks, who actually are supposed to be superior because of their ability to get extremely high scores in UMD and the warlock feat, more useful than current.

3. More UMD locking.
You've probably run into certain items that UMD can't get around. This would allow selective item tweaking to prevent UMD access of things that a character really shouldn't have (for example, evil characters using holy sword wands). Of course it would require notation on the item description of some sort.

4. Gish-busting.
And by this, I mean the practice on many other servers requiring a certain number of levels in any class (although in our case it would be via script and not nosy DMs). This would do away with the common practices of 1 shadowdancer for HiPS, 1 cleric for free feats, 1 monk for AC and so on. Scripting it would probably be a huge pain, but this would definitely be seen as a blow against power-builders.

5. Dedication bonuses.
Kind of the reverse of #4, and even something that could go hand-in-hand with it, this would dole out notable bonuses for those who build within a theme. For example, if all of your levels are within a certain archetype (all melee, all stealth, all divine) or a specific combination (arcane/stealth).

6. Diversification bonuses.
A little wackier, this would provided bonuses to those who actually make a point to go halvsies on very diverse archetypes. A character with no wider than a 60/40 split between divine and stealth, for example. A reason to go outside the comfort zone of "I need X levels to be undispallable and X DC on my avasculate to beat the Hellfire Erinyes".

7. No, your God of Home and Hearth does not support the Travel domain.
Not suggesting that we go to the "Your god is Tits McGee so your domains must be Jiggle and Bounce" extreme, but preventing certain blatant powergrab combos would not be a terrible thing and might actually lead to some diversity of builds.

Again, just ideas and nothing actually planned, but I'd love to hear feedback.

Sinlinara,Jun 4 2016 wrote:

wrote:7. No, your God of Home and Hearth does not support the Travel domain.
Not suggesting that we go to the "Your god is Tits McGee so your domains must be Jiggle and Bounce" extreme, but preventing certain blatant powergrab combos would not be a terrible thing and might actually lead to some diversity of builds.

In general I think this idea is good on paper but unless I've misunderstood and we actually are able to add more deities to the list of ones that we are able to be select from... This one might end up being a toss unless we're going to have DM's monitor character sheets and poke every cleric to ask them what their real deity is.

wrote:QUOTE (Lucadia @ Jun 3 2016, 06:54 PM)
Two: Its limiting the capability of melee even more while theres public outcry they cant do more.

This can be fixed in other, much better ways. Such as adding Melee-only feats.

Lucadia,Jun 4 2016 wrote: We are /already/ GAINING options with the change to races and prcs.