Masfryn's page

Usually the power difference is evened out even for powerful characters after a certain amount of levels, depending on how high up you wanna play your character to.

I, myself have played loads of characters with various templates/powerful races and at some point you even feel that you lag behind the other players, especially when you want to play a spellcasting class. That goes especially at the high/epic levels.

Concerning the ability score generation I think they are just fine. Just adjust to the campaign you want to play and apply it. The rulebook shouldn't necessarily list all the possible ways of generating ability scores. There would simply be too many.

Personally, in my group, we always either used the 2d6+6 or the 4d6 and take worst dice out, with the exception of converting the highest rolled stat into a 18. That is of course a matter of temperament :)

Regarding the racial ability bonuses I am a fan of not assigning penalties. Some races may have certain attributes that are very different from the other (for example an elf is dexterous while a dwarf is very resilient), but that doesn't necessarily make the elf frail. He/she just doesn't possess the sturdiness of the dwarf. The racebonuses are good though imo.

The "dual" favored classes are a good idea as it add a bit of flavour to your campaign. In my gaming group, we always focused on the roleplaying part so it doesn't bother me overly much that I am not boosting my main stat (str if I am fighter etc). In fact my main character for years now has been a dark elf fighter, so that doesn't necessarily give me stat bonuses that would improve my overall fighting capabilities.

Besides, the +2 int bonus that the elf, gains will be evened out. Especially at higher levels, while human wizards with their one extra feat is something to be considered, as wizards aren't known as a class that gain a tremendous amount of feats.

Doesn't really matter though.

It still is better for all characters to focus fire on a single enemy and then move on.

In my experience that applies especially when you fight an end boss or the "mastermind", but when facing the minions (nothing to do with 4th ed, never tried it...) of the main bad guy the new cleave/great cleave sounds interesting. If it works right it should almost work to eliminate some of the gap between the melee and the casters that was some of the problem about pure 3,5.

Sadly haven't had time to try out the new feats yet.

First of all I would like to say that there are a lot of valid points that are highlighted here, whether criticism or support.

When that is said, I myself have played melee characters for most of my gaming life. As PA was, it was undeniably very useful and thus chosen by most melee classes, even though they may not have used a weapon you normally associate with the feat. Thus even bards with above average stats could make use of PA against low AC monsters such as ogres or the like. That was not originally the intention of the feat I think and thus it led to much metagaming or confusion among the players because of the calculations, as has already been pointed out.

In our own campaign I have made frequent use of PA to great effect. I can only say that even though we play in a highly magical setting (and thus even higher scaling from bonuses etc) the bonus you received from the feat at especially higher levels almost became too much. When I could dish out more damage all the time in certain kinds of encounters than the casters in our party it became a bit to OP imo. Not to forget as has also been mentioned that casters may on average do more but on higher levels, you expect the enemies to save most of the time, thus diminishing a lot of the damage, while the damage from PA is a static number.
Though, the way it has been nerfed, may be a bit too much (still need to test it properly)

As some have already suggested I think that a sort of capping should be in place. Perhaps make it capped at half your BA, not doubling it when critting, not letting it apply a double str modifier to one hand weapons such as rapiers and the like etc.

CE I never made much use of as I never was the defensive type. The change,though, seems a bit too "much" imo as most fighters consider their int their "dump stat". That would perhaps make a defensive class such as a dwarven defender even less useful with fewer options to raise their AC, as tanking is perhaps their main ability.

Either way, I think the designers should make CE more attractive a feat to take, as it already in 3,5 was way too underpowered and wasn't picked by many players.