Michael Worthy's page

Players should, by default, know better than to let their personal feelings bleed through into a character. That being said, a mature DM should, by default, know better than to introduce an NPC, idea, etc that would make it overly challenging for a player to do so.

Just seems like common table top courtesy to me.

Although I do like the analogy of comparing Erastil to a Jewish mother, it was spot-on.

In the World of Warcraft RPG Monster guide, they have template designed to simulate an 'Elite' creature. These creatures, if you play WoW, are stronger than there regular counterparts, and have a metric sh!t ton of hp. The template goes something like this.

Hit Dice: No adjustment, multiply creature hit points x4.
Ability Scores: Str +4, Dex +4
Feats: Elites receive Great Fortitude, Lightning Reflexes, & Iron Will as bonus feats.
CR: 1 - 3HD +2, 4HD or higher +3

If you combine that with maxing a creatures hp, as well as giving them an extra standard action per round, you wind up with a nasty that can take a full attack from the party Fighter and still come back for seconds. This, for the most part, solves the issue with creature longevity, as increasing hp and saves, allows for a longer, more intense fight.

Food for thought. Sorry if this has nothing to do with what your looking for.

@ Firest

Thanks for your input. The reasons I left it as solely Arcane were strictly fluff-based. As there is no such thing as Divine magic in DA:O. In reality it'd be easy enough to simply waive that pre-req and adjust
the spell progression to include divine accordingly.

The only problem I can forsee with allowing a Druid to become a Blood Mage
is that they make such damn good summoners, Clerics as well to a lesser extent. With the ability to activate Blood Magic and then sacrifice HP to spontaneously convert a "free" spell into a summon, which can then be drained via Blood Sacrifice for more "free" spells, it, well, lets just say it's very stinky cheese. Furthermore Clerics and Druids have a higher base HD, and thus will probably have slightly more hp to throw around with Blood magic to begin with.

With an Arcane caster at the very least Summon Monster spells eat up memorizations that cannot be changed until the next day, or a precious Spell Known slot for a Sorcerer.

Thus while there is no "real" reason a Druid can't be a Blood Mage, caution is advised.

@ Aranai

Go for it! :)

I always though that Blood Magic had a scaling issue, which is why I designed it in the way I did, allowing a Blood Mage to utilize a full caster level despite having a lowered ACL. With the removal of Bloodwalk in my build of the PrC (and thus the restoration of the caster level loss at 10) you may or may not wish to drop Blood Magic down to giving an increase at level 5 only, though TBH sacrificing hp every time you cast and only going 1 caster level above what another, equal level caster can pull out is hardly game-breaking.

@ Aranai:

Thanks for the link, the classes we made are actually quite similar, although I believe that granting both the ability to prepare extra spells by sacrificing hp AND to spontaneously cast spells by sacrificing hp is a bit much. More so for a Wizard than a Sorc, as that class feature only applies to the former, which kind of detracts the latter from taking it, don't you think?

Besides that though I'm thinking of removing Blood Walk from my version of the class, it doesn't fit the theme of the Blood Mage within the DA:O setting. So it will now only lose 2 caster levels.

@ Captain Yesterday:

*shudder* Yeah, thats gross, ugh. Bad mental images now. It's good to see Paizo has already laid a framework for how abilities like these might work. I'm still hoping to fine-tune the Blood Magic class feature (the real monster here) into something workable for a memorable, balanced homebrew class.

A million thanks for pointing it out to me. :)

Well I just now got the file. I'll look over it when I can. Right now I'm working on making the Fell Caller, from Iron Kingdoms, into a PrC for Pathfinder.

No need to rush yourself, just throwing out my two c on the whole "DK" situation.

So.... apparently I can't edit my posts? Hrm. Maybe there is a time limit or something. I apologize in advance for the double-post.

I found the DK that I made, it looked better when I first finished it than it does now. No class features to speak of except for a scaling magic weapon, a pet, and an infinite resource pseudo magic/blade magic thingie meant to simulate their in-game skills.

Feel free to tear it apart while I go try and make it better, in it's current incarnation all I know is it isn't balanced with Pathfinder at all. You can get the .doc file from Megaupload.

Here.

I made a Death Knight base class awhile ago, never got to playtest it I'm afraid. I'll go look for it and post it up on Google Docs so you can take a look.

I'm in the process of creating a Pathinfinder campaign setting, for personal use obviously, based on the Dragon Age (copyright BioWare) series. But whats Dragon Age without Blood Mages? Not nearly as cool is what. For research I did my reading on the in-game Blood Mage specialization, as well as researched the Blood Magus PrC that first debuted back in the 3.5 splatbook Complete Arcana.

Here is the link.

I'm concerned about whether or not this prestige class is balanced or not. The Blood Magus in it's 3.5 incarnation was balanced, even if a little gimmicky in my opinion. I made some design changes to incorporate some of the old aspects of the class with ideas from the game.

It looses 3 caster levels over 10 levels, but can use the new, scaling Blood Component to mitigate that. It's Blood Magic thats the problem, an ability that powerful is REALLY dangerous and screams for abuse. I originally set the cost to spell level x5 but thought that was too much, thoughts?

The final caster level loss at level 10 seems kinda arbitrary to be honest, I'd be perfectly willing to drop Blood Walk completely and restore the lost caster level, again, input is appreciated on this one.

As a final note, once this class has all of the kinks worked out you can sub it into your game without any translation issues, despite being built for a Dragon Age setting world. Just re-fluff the Apostate class feature (or remove it entirely) and change the special entry requirements to your liking.

Thank you for reading.