JBSchroeds's page

Random picture of what could be a Formian queen.

Aren't those like the things in that TERRIBLE Dan Brown novel...uh...Deception Point? Basically giant sea lice.

Maugan22 wrote:

So here's the thing, I'm looking to off a 9th level PC,

A DM shouldn't have that as an agenda, with or without player collusion.

A DM is not a storyteller rather he is the neutral party that is representing his world to the players.

At least that's my personal opinion,

James

I think you'll find you're in the minority with that opinion. Even in a sandbox type game the DM has to come up with SOMETHING for the PC's to do and people to interact with. And that's telling a story. The best games I've ever played in had a strong overarching plot. Yes, the PCs did a lot of shaping what happened through their own actions (and these make for some very memorable moments) but there were excellent "triggered events" along the way that told a greater story. The couple that had a "neutral" DM petered out fairly quickly due to a lack of a universal driving force.

As for the OP: it depends a great deal on how "obvious" you want to be. Are the players to realize that you've just zapped somebody for story purposes? If yes, then high level magic in just about any form will do. If it's supposed to be more organic in the way it happens, I think you're best bet will be to have a large creature consume the character in the process of a long pitched battle. A character of mine once got eaten by Rhemoraz (sp?), and those are fairly bug-like.

My 2cp on some of the mentioned shows:

Escaflowne- TV series was fun, the movie, like most anime movies, tries to cram too much into too little time. Good animation though.

Akira- Excellent animation, but the story is convoluted and requires multiple viewings and perhaps reading the manga to fully grasp. Still, a classic work that has stood the test of time.

Evangelion- I've only seen the original series and thought it was excellent...up until the last couple episodes which are some of the worst things I've ever seen BAR NONE.

Patlabor- I have the first two movies, and both are great. The first is a great detective show, while the second is one of the most political animes ever. Both very Japanese in their directorial style.

Gurren Legan- Totally over the top and redicoulous, but somehow very moving nonetheless.

EDIT: A word of warning with anime series. A recurring trend is that they rarely have a satisfying ending. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen a good show muck it up in the last two episodes. However, one of the most moving endings I can remember is for Chrono Crusade

Oooh. I like where this is going. How about:

Whenever a character gains a level in a class they may also gain a pseudo-level in a separate class. A pseudo-level is like having a normal level in that class except it does not grant increase in BAB or Save progressions. A character may never have more pseudo-levels in a class than one-half their actual levels in that class. Gaining a level in a prestige class never grants a pseudo-level.

I think this could work well and the wording is simple.

In the real world there is a significant difference between an air-choke and a blood-choke. Almost all chokes that render somebody unconscious in a matter of seconds are blood-chokes. The most ubiquitous example would be the classic rear-naked choke, which, when properly applied, will knock you out in less than six seconds.

I would rule that, for game purposes, a choke around the neck bypasses the ability to hold your breath, because it's not the ability to breath, but rather the flow of blood to the brain, that's being affected.

I don't know how to Spoiler. Sorry :\ I'm daft in that way.

In that "BBCode tags you can use:" list below where you type, it's the second one from the bottom.

Personally, I really dislike Chloe.

2.5 hours for GURPS character generation? Surely you prevaricate!

Seriously, though, sounds like a good first experience. GURPS is still, and probably always will be, my favorite system. Glad to see people still having fun with it!

Heavy weapons can break the game, but can also be moderated. I almost always have one character with an H&H Express if the TL's high enough. 10d6 damage is a girl's best friend.

This beast was a Gauss HMG from Ultratech. 16d(3) Pi. The wielder had an 18 in Gunner(Machine Gun) and went full burst. Four hits=splattered Krogan. The Krogan had a grenade launcher that would have made them duck for cover and nullified the mounted weapon, but he never got a chance to act. The poor guy.

So I had my first GM'ing experience this weekend. I'd like to share, and hear what other people's experiences were like.

My gaming group consists of seven people (including me) but only four of us can currently meet regularly. Everybody else has run a game (3.5, 4th Ed, WoD Changeling/Mage/Hunter) except for me. I decided to play a game of GURPS set in the Mass Effect universe. I statted out all the races and equipment in addition to the story. None of us had played GURPS before, so things went real slow at the beginning. Character creation took about 2.5 hours, mainly because I had to do most of the work being the only person who was at all familiar with the system.

Once we got into play it went really well. The story I came up with was straight forward and relatively linear just so we could all ease into the new system and I wouldn't be overwhelmed running the game. Most things went as planned, except I allowed the PCs to have a couple toys that I'm going to have to take back. One of the players was an Elcor and another was a Salarian. The Salarian and Elcor split the cost of a heavy machine gun to mount on the Elcor's back. This works and is pretty close to how the Elcor actually wage war. Unfortunately, the gun is REDICULOUSLY powerful and totally unbalanced the game. In what was supposed to be the climactic shootout with a Krogan bodyguard ended with the PCs surprising the Krogan and blowing him away in a single burst before he could even draw his gun. Oops. No more HMG for them. But overall it was a fun night.

So what was your first GM'ing experience like?
Also: Take THAT thread monster! I copied my post before you ate it.

I once played a 3.0 barbarian/monk who changed alignment between classes when a magic item blew up in his face in a temple (don't remember the exact reason). It was legal; by becoming lawful he lost his rage powers and other barbarian powers associated with being chaotic, but that was the only legal fallout. He then went on to be that prestige class where you destroy magic items to get cool powers, but you are not allowed to use magic items or benefit from spells (had to attempt saves vs. healing, etc.).

Or something like that...

A Forsaker. I had a friend who played an epic level Forsaker who would carry around a backpack full of Wish Scrolls to tear up at the beginning of combat. Ridiculous character, that one.

Well I don't remember any story in which he EVER minced words, and he always confronted an enemy to his face. Remember ANYONE can steal something. He was more of a thug anyway, and anyone can take ranks in Profession (Sailor). I have no idea how being a fighter makes you more apt to lead armies into battle, and remember how he started along that path was very serendipitous. I could see the argument in 2E D&D of him being a dual class character because you couldn't get thief skills otherwise. In pathfinder however, I see no need to.

[...]

*facepalm* I just reread your post when I quoted "subtle wordplay". I must have read that a dozen times and each time I read "swordplay" and not "wordplay." Sorry 'bout that. You're right about him not being a wordsmith of any variety.

As for the fighter leading armies bit, this is the way I see it. He was a great at deploying his units and using them to the fullest. I don't see a Barbarian (class) being familiar with that sort of thing. Sure, they can lead a horde or raiding party, but it seems more realistic and in-line with class flavor that a Fighter would know military units better. Reassessing the 15 level breakdown I may be more likely to say Barb 7 Rog 2 Fighter 6. I think this'll be my last post on this matter, because I don't think either of us will change our minds.

One of our characters got sucked into a pit made by a pair of Entomber undead critters. It's now the third round with him alone getting his ass kicked and nobody has a good way of getting to him. My character gets antsy:

Me: I tie my rope around my waist, toss the other end to Ian and jump down the hole.
DM: Uhhhh, how long is your rope?
Me: Let me check...50ft
DM: ...uh, the hole's only 30 ft deep...
Me: Uh-oh.
Ian: *holding end of rope as my character plummets over the edge* There's so much rope!

There is a similar spell in the spell compendium. I can't remember the name of it though. It also brings you back without any levels being lost.

Pretty sure it's called Revivify.

I have to ask then: why rogue and fighter? Certainly he does roguish things, like sneaking about and stealing from people, but he doesn't do the things that DEFINE and have defined the rogue/thief D&D archetype-carefully disarming magical traps, subtle wordplay and trickery in an urban setting, and stabbing people in the back. As for the fighter part, the things that set the fighter apart from Barbarian are as follows: less skills, well we know Conan is a particularly skilled individual so this doesn't fit. Ability to focus in a particular weapon (weapon spec/greater spec/wpn training) doesn't really fit with someone who is equally lethal with an axe and a beef bone. Tower shields-yeah not really either.

I'm just honestly baffled why people think Conan would need to be some crazy multiclass character.

I'm terrible with names so I can't give you titles of the stories, but Conan definitely does "subtle wordplay and trickery in an urban setting, and stabbing people in the back" in some of Howard's tales. Also, what low level Rogue is going to be disarming powerful magical traps in the first place? His time as a thief and pirate seem like rogue levels to me. As for the fighter: Conan spends a good deal of his later life leading troops and armies. He's an excellent military strategist and when he leads Aquilonia into battle he does so in a magnificent set of full plate armor. Conan, while good with any weapon (high BaB) is shown on multiple occasions to be one of the best swordsmen of his day (weapon spec). While a Barbarian (the class) could do these things, the Fighter makes more sense to me.

I think people multiclass Conan because he does lots of different careers over the course of his life.

Yeah, they do that in Archery, too. I don't know why people's first instinct when using a range weapon is to destroy their depth perception.

I'd guess it's because a lack of experience in perceiving the images from each eye independently. I've done a good bit of shooting, and you really do get used to focusing on the image from the sight eye and having the second image be a passive rangefinder kinda deal.

I actually just read all of Howard's Conan stories within the last year. If I had to give him classes up to 15 with DnD classes it'd probably be Barbarian 2/ Rogue 4/ Fighter 9, with a lot of ranks in Profession(Sailor). He's a naturally cunning character who usually relies on a combination of his natural strength, toughness, and excellent skill. And yes, he wears armor almost all the time; not much bare-chested Ah'nuld in the stories. He hulks-out a few times when fighting extra-ordinary critters, but against humans he almost always fights with an implacably clear mind.

But it's cool...supports the PF rule, right?

Yeah, it supports the PF ruling. Unless a description says otherwise, pretty much all blasty effects will be moving with too much velocity to wrap completely around an obstacle. Intuitively this should make sense, I'm just supporting it with fluid dynamics ;)

I'm sorry, but I can't resist. I'm getting a masters degree in fluid dynamics, and this screams 'fluids problem.' So, in the real world, it will depend on the Reynolds Number flow we are dealing with. If it's low enough then the fire will flow around and hug the obstacle. If it's too high there will be a detached turbulent wake region that you won't have the fire flow into. To solve this problem we need to know three things:
1) what's the size of the obstacle?
2) how fast is the fire breath traveling?
3) can it be modeled as high temp air?

So lets have fun with math. Vortex detachment occurs around a Re=4000. Lets assume that the fire breath can be modeled as air at 1600K, so it has a kinematic viscosity of 254.5E-6 m^2/s. If the obstacle is, say 2m, that means the velocity would need to be a minimum of 0.509 m/s, or 1.14 mph (from Re=U*D/nu). This substantiates the claim that pretty much no cone will wrap around an obstacle.

I miss the character advancement in Mass Effect 1, They over simplified it in Mass Effect 2.

I mostly agree. A smaller selection of skills wasn't a terrible idea (like making Unity a base power, breaking Charm/Intimidate into your Paragon/Renegade score, and the 1-2-3-4 progression), but I was wishing my party composition would at least have had effects outside combat. For example, if having Tali around would let you autohack, or even affect the difficulty of minigames.

Another thing I think they dropped the ball on was planet exploration. Give me the ATV over that stupid scanner any day. Or at least give an upgrade that gave indications of where resources were located (or what type were on the planet) so you wouldn't have to systematically do planet after planet after planet looking for that last 100 E-zero you need for upgrade ___.

JBSchroeds wrote:

and things I really didn't (thermal clips... just... so...meh).

I kinda like the thermal clips idea, but I think that they should've allowed you to fire a weapon WITHOUT them as well and just given you a ME1-style heat bar too. This way, you still have unlimited ammo, but as long as you have thermal clips, you don't need to stop hammering out rapid-fire shots. Once you're out of clips, you have to slow down your rate of fire (or risk overheat like ME1). This way, you still won't ever run out of ammo, but it still allows the faster-paced combat that makes ME2 so cool.

When I first heard about thermal clips this is exactly what I thought they were doing. It's what they should have done. Instead we get stuck with generic ammo.

It's odd hearing about different starting levels. I ported in a level 45ish and as far as I remember I started at level 1. BTW, level 30 is REALLY easy. I hit 30 about an hour into my second play through.

I'm torn about the game. There's things I really liked (improved combat), and things I really didn't (thermal clips...just...so...meh).

Its a useless spell and an oversight by paizo. It harkens WAY back to early days when limb loss was rife and heal was different.

As is 3.5 utter, utter, utter waste in the rules. House rules might make it relevant.

I suggest either delete it (instead of making fool scenarios where it is needed that pick on a rule area long forgotten and unsupported)

OR

make it a MASS, standard action spell and it becomes balanced for the level.

Just because you won't lose a limb in combat due to the base RAW, doesn't mean you won't lose something that can't be reattached from role playing or a quick bend-o-the-rules for something. A great example:

A friend was hit with touch of Jubilex and failed his fort save. He was basically dead in a couple turns as his body was converted into a slime. Not fun. The DM said that the transformation was starting in the arm the character tried to shield himself with and spreading to the rest of the body (description given entirely for flavor). I call out, "If I chop off his arm can he get another chance at the save?" DM thinks for a second, loves the idea, and off comes the arm. Friend makes the second save. So the character is alive yet incapacitated/ineffective in combat until we could get a Regenerate (there's no arm left to reattach, it got converted to ooze, which btw got used as an offensive weapon because one of our deranged characters had bottles with him). It worked out way better than just letting the dude die.

[...]I did see Avatar in 3D IMAX recently and enjoyed the sound system more than the screen. I really enjoyed the sound system presentation too.

I agree with this completely. The sound was extremely good in the theater. I think if it had been 2D but still on the IMAX screen it would have been absolutely incredible. But alas, it was not to be.

I enjoyed the movie immensely, but then again I'm an effects nerd, always have been (all hail the great Harryhausen!). Visually, the thing that impressed me the most was that the biologicals looked as good or better than the mechanicals. This is the first time I've ever been able to say that. Another thing I liked a lot was how they do such a good job keeping the human and Na'vi parts separate so that when they finally meet back up in the big finally you're like "oh yeah, the Na'vi are really big, I forgot about that."

As for the storyline, I agree that it was relatively basic, but it didn't stop me from enjoying it in the least. I'm looking forward to the 'extended' or 'director's' cut. As an aside, has anyone had problems with 3D movies before?

So I just got back from watching Avatar in 3D in an IMAX theater and had to walk out with an hour left. The 3D never 'worked' for me (this was also my first 3D viewing experience). Thankfully I'd already seen it in 2D, but I was really disappointed because I'd heard great things about the 3D. My problem:

The 3D never worked correctly. My eyes would try and focus on one element and the entire rest of the picture would look terrible, blurry, or out of focus. I tried unfocusing my eyes, only looking at a single element, even closing a single eye to see if that'd make it watchable. Nothing I tried worked. Whenever the scene would cut or there would be fast movement everything would go wonky and I'd have to refocus and it would never look as good as it did on a regular 2D screen. After about an hour and a half of this nonsense my eyes were so fatigued that they gave up on trying to focus and everything became a blurry and jittery mess that started making me nauseous and I had to leave.

Anyone else have this problem with 3D movies (not just Avatar)? Is there some 'trick' I'm missing? I think part of the problem is that I'm extremely right-eye dominant. My regular vision is decent but not perfect. I normally only need glasses to read a board to take notes in large lecture halls and have never needed them at the movies. I was at about the 1/3 mark off center for seating. Thoughts?

I don't have a huge pool of 3.x experience to pull from, but in the games I've played in mismatched tiers haven't been a problem. The issues we HAVE had in terms of game play balance have been caused by prestige classes. A friend was playing a druid-'master of many forms' and I had a barbarian-'frenzied berserker'-'some other PrC I forget' and the two of us destroyed the balance of combat. And we didn't even mean to. For the hell of it we did an arena battle with just the two of us at level 8ish and CRUSHED a group of four monsters each a CR 4 higher than us. I personally soloed an encounter that was supposed to be an extreme challenge for the whole party. At that point the DM kinda gave up and we moved on to trying out other systems that people had been wanting to play for a while.

I decided to go for it and start up an army to play with some friends.
1) Anybody know of places to watch/play in NH?
2) I'm going with Vampire Counts, and am thinking of doing a vampire lord general focused on crushing other characters, specifically in challenges. Anybody know if this is a viable strategy before I start to blow cash on a bunch of models?

[snipped] Among the animals left out we had to scrap the dire weasel

No dire weasels???? Now what are my kobolds supposed to charge into battle with?

One of my all time favorites would be Total Annihilation by Cavedog, robot theme. Amazing soundtrack. Huge community support with 3rd party created units. Available with 2 expansions for under $20 now. Great RTS game, though not fantasy-themed.

Cavedog attempted a fantasy version, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, but it bombed pretty bad. I didn't think Kingdoms was all that bad, but without the community support the original had it died a horrible death. They went on to create the Dungeon Siege(co-op rpg) series as 'Gas Power Games' under Microsoft Corp. (Think Diablo in 'real' 3D)

TA was AWESOME! Man I loved that game. Kingdoms was crap. Absolutely awful imo. Flying units were useless because the couldn't fire unless they were in "open airspace", so you get more than a couple of them and they do this dance where they fly strafing runs but don't actually shoot and instead get eaten alive by AA fire. Also, the defenses were too strong: a porcupine strategy was virtually unbreakable in my experience. The death dudes had these lightning towers, a couple of them on a choke point made it impassible because most units were melee.

Hey everybody. I had bought a packaged deal of games on Steam a while back, and it included the DoW games. I've enjoyed playing the Tau and the whole setting in general. I was thinking about getting into the tabletop game, or at least reading the rules. I was at the GW site ogling the units and was taken aback by the price of the core rule book. Is it really worth spending $60 on a single book? Seems kinda ridiculous to me; the WoD books are really nice books and they cost half that. Any idea why it's so incredibly expensive? (This is asked with full understanding that the entire hobby can be a money pit if you really get into it)

At the risk of getting amazingly toasted by flaming here, but I'd have to say Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings movies did far more for me than the books ever did, and I read them 4 or five times. I found his vision of them far more compelling and indeed had a more bleak outlook than Tolkiens books.

Wow, another person who thinks this. Personally, I thought the books were TERRIBLE. So bad in fact, that I never bothered to start RotK after finishing tTT. I liked the movies, just avoid watching all three extended editions in a single sitting (my friends and I were yelling at the TV, "JUST GET IN THE G-D BOAT ALREADY!!!1!" by the end of RotK).

Sorry, but people are always in control of their own actions, unless someone literally has a gun to their head, and even then, they can chose to be true to themselves and let their oppressor pull the trigger.

Ugh. I felt I had to comment on this. Have you never had/been close to someone who had a mental illness? I would venture that the answer would be "no" based on that statement alone. As a sufferer of chronic depression and anxiety you can't just tell me to "go out there and have fun because you're in control of your own actions." It doesn't work that way (if only it did). This is a narrow example, and maybe not the best one someone could come up with, but there are so many factors that go into pushing a person's behavior in one direction or another that your statement comes off as naive.

If you are looking for a huge animal, you could go dire elk. As for the Draconomicon, you'd need to find an adult dragon (or young adult for Gold/Red) to heft you about, and you can never get a dragon special mount large enough to carry you.

Opponent Attack roll1

Up to man-size 21-23
Larger than man-size 22-23
Metal or stone2 23

I must not be reading this right, because it sounds to me like a roll of an 18-20 on your d20 will be an instakill on any regular humanoid (assuming that 18-20 +bonuses hits). Seems way overpowered.

Akira is great. If you thought the move was cool but convoluted, reading the manga helps out immensly.

FYI, here's a timeline for all these books that I just ran across.

That's nice to see. Definitely helps put all these books in order, especially for someone new to them.

As an update, I just read Ender's Shadow because it turns out my uncle has a copy. Overall, I'd say it was pretty good. Card did an excellent job of weaving the new story into the pre-established framework of Ender's Game, but I didn't care for the Bean character that much. A huge thing Card seemed to miss was that there was no hint in Ender's Game that Bean was the genius that he was made into for Ender's Shadow. That fact escaping Ender seemed highly unlikely, and I didn't remember it coming up in the original book. If there was anything that really annoyed me, it was this:

Overall, it was worth reading.

Overall we're a pretty relaxed group. Main rules over the years have been:

-Drinking, ok. Drunkeness, GTFO.
-Friends who aren't playing a character can come, but they are to be seen and not heard
-If your character is disruptive to the party, the party has every right to kill you in some horrific fashion and make you roll a new character.
-Evil characters are fine as long as you and everyone else play in character (ie the Paladin WILL challenge you to a duel to the death when he sees you sacrifice that child to your demonic god, but what the Paladin doesn't know can't hurt him...)
-Non gaming banter is perfectly acceptable as long as everyone is having fun. If people want to play instead of make fun of each other then its time to get back to the game. A large percentage of our game time is made up of non-gaming BS. For us gaming is a good excuse to get together every other week.

Thanks for all the responses. I think I'll wait a while and then try a few of the Shadow series. As for the other sequals, I'm not sure if I can put up with another Dune series. The first three were excellent but then it degraded into philoreligiousophical dreck (haven't read any of the ones by Herbert's son yet).

I'll probably catch a lot of flack for this, but LoTR. I can't even stomach to finish the series. You hear from so many people how great these books are but I hated reading them so much that I've yet to open RotK. I think that Tolkien can create one mean setting, but the man couldn't write for crap. His pacing is terrible, his descriptions don't get me into it, it can be difficult to tell who's talking, and everyone seems to have the same speach mannerisms. Overall, I don't know why so many people love these books. They may have spawned our hobby, but it's beyond me how enough people could get through them in the first place.

And strangest thing: I liked The Hobbit. It had its flaws, but I enjoyed the read.

So, I finally got around to reading Ender's Game and enjoyed it greatly. I was looking on amazon and its sequals seem to have a lot of mixed reviews. For those of you who have read them, are they worth reading? Are there some that should be avoided or seem to ruin the characters? I'd like to spend more time with this character and in this setting, but I don't really feal like ruining my experience with the first book.

Cartoon has more to do with length than content, other than it being animated. Dragonball is cartoon-length animation, for example (assuming you consider a 20-30 tv show length episode to be cartoon-length). And most people would consider it pretty cartoony in general too. One Piece as well.

[...]

I'd consider a cartoon to be an animation of short format (often more than one story in a half-hour block), where there is little to no continuity between episodes, and where there is a lighter (most often comedic) tone. I would consider something like Dragonball or One Piece to be a light hearted animation that take some of their comedic cues from classic cartoons but they certainly aren't cartoons.

I'd say that Justice League (which despite being in my early twenties I still greatly enjoyed) and similar shows are simply stories that can't be practically told in any format other than animation. Basically, animation is cheap in comparison to a live action show that succeeds in protraying the same tone and visual breadth.

Is this splitting hairs? Sure. Is there anything wrong with cartoons? Not at all.

I miss the good old sci-fi fridays. Farscape, SG1, and LEXX. They've had entertaining shows (Atlantis, BSG, Eureka, Dresden are/were all good shows), but has anyone else had the experience of tuning into the channel only one night a week and pretty much ignoring it at all other times?

I still can't see the words "live action" and "Dragonball-Z" together without being overcome by a fit of giggles. But then, I'm not a big fan of the show. I can only watch guys "power-up" for so long before I ask "Why doesn't anyone just shoot them before they finish?"

I loved DBZ in all of its rediculousness because it had some truly awsome moments. As for why they weren't just shot, it was tried. Many, many times. Including tanks, and missles, and whole armies. The conventional weapons didn't work.

As for the live action movie, all I have to say is: BOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! WHYYYYYYYY?????? It looks so bad, but I'll rent it on DVD just to make fun of it.

I never got to playtest it, but I made a class more along the lines of what's being thown around here called the Pact Wrought. The link was behaving a little oddly when I was testing it out, so if it doesn't jump to my post just go into the address bar and hit enter.

JBSchroeds wrote:

I did a 20th level build that could kill a balor in a single round if he won initiative and didn't roll any 1s on his attack rolls. Ah, those were the days.

Holy crap! How'd you manage that?

The character was specifically designed to take out evil critters. He founded a legacy weapon that by 20th level was like a +5 Cold Iron Holy Surge Evil-Outsider-Bane that could cast Heal on him 1/day. The PrC also focused on killing evil things. So he could use a magic item to make an attack a touch, power attack getting like 4-to-1, do an extra 10d6 against evil stuff, crit on 17-20. So in the end it was something like 2d6(weapon)+7(magic)+18(strength)+60(power attack)+10d6(Holy Surge and PrC) for a total of 97-157 (avg 127) with five attacks. Of course while doing this he'd have an AC of about 16. None of this would be possible with core rules, but it all made sense for the character and wasn't as power-gaming as it sounds.

I didn't have a chance to type this before. I've always wanted to play a whisper gnome, a hellbred and a kender. Unfortunately, I never got that chance.

I had a hellbred character. He was full of bad-assery. He was a barbarian/frenzied-berserker/devil-killing-PrC-that-I-don't-remember-the-na me-of. It was a hell of a time. I accidently one-shotted a party member when a frenzy went off from a trap. I also single handedly took down a room full of gargoyles trying to dunk me in acid. I did a 20th level build that could kill a balor in a single round if he won initiative and didn't roll any 1s on his attack rolls. Ah, those were the days.

Harryhausen's guilty? :) Man, I those movies so sucked me in when I was a kid. Thanks to him, I felt right at home with the Monster Manual later in life.

All hail the mighty Harryhausen! The man single handedly creates generation after generation of fantasy geeks.

I've always wanted something along the lines of the Thaumaturgist only with planar binding and not planar ally. The Nar Demonbinder (Unapproachable East) is close but it's a mechanically troubled PrC.

There's a lot of things I'd just houserule that are simple fixes for my style of game, so my "one thing" is a bit more complex. The one thing I asked about numerous times and never got an answer for: why oh why did the domains change so much?

My one change would be to cleric domains. With channel energy shifting the healing burden away from spells, why don't we make domains back into a spell list but instead of being a choose-one-bonus-spell we make it so that when spontaneously converting spells you choose a domain spell instead of cure/inflict (note: this is not an original idea of mine, it was posted a while ago and I don't remember who said it). Add in a scaling domain ability and a 20th level capstone of badassery and there you go.