Rich K's page

I'll throw down some ideas. It's your game so do whatever you want. I suggest you have each sword in its own unique situation. That way your PCs aren't just moving to kill "another pit fiend lord" etc.

-- Garvok -- Wrath -- Greatsword

2 powerful nations are warring over some land/magic/power or whatever. One of the nations is holding this sword as their "secret" weapon. The PC's might be brought in as secret weapons themselves or they might recover the sword when/after it is used. Or there is the good ole under cover noble court backstabbing route.

-- Shin-tari -- Sloth -- Short Sword

This sword was lost long ago. It is now being dug up by some archeologists who have no idea what the sword is. The PCs will need to do some leg work and puzzle solving to connect the dots.

-- Tannaris -- Envy -- Bastard Sword

Angels/good aligned outsiders have it and are looking for a way to destroy it.

-- Chellan -- Greed -- Scimitar

An ancient mage put their sword in his demi plane laboratory before dying or turning into a lich. The location is somewhat well known by treasure hunters/adventurers etc, but no one is suicidal enough to claim the treasure for themselves.

-- Baraket -- Pride -- Rapier

In possession of a wandering duelist. He has a suitable anti hero backstory and would like nothing more than to die honorably in combat.

-- Ungarato -- Gluttony -- Falchion

A devil lord has it. Your devil commander wants you to get the sword without causing a huge ruckus. Your PCs are told not to use force to get the sword. Better that they don't know it was the PCs either.

-- Asheia -- Lust -- Longsword

Some sufficiently powerful entity has it in their horde/person. Something like a big dragon, demon lord, etc should be good.

If you want to do anything that might reward low ability scores, as a DM I would just roleplay them in interesting ways.

For example, Bob the Horrifically Deformed with his stunning 6 CHA might draw stares, gasps, and screams from people in town and they might not want to have anything to do with him. But, the main villain probably doesn't really want to scry on him either.

Or, Fred the Buffoon with a 6 INT has a hard time following directions of any sort. So when he gets a suggestion spell cast on him, unless the suggestion is worded in such a way for Fred's pathetic intellect he might not understand what he needs to do.

These really shouldn't be feats that allow a flat out bonus and they really shouldn't benefit the character in combat in anyway. They should only be used if it will make the game more interesting and enjoyable for you and your players.

That's just my 2 cents.

I said fireball, but what I really meant was kill the PC's a few times, not neccesarily fireball, and they will pick up the urgency to help their buddy out.

I think the best idea though is to just disallow open announcing of hp though.

You could also put some sort of system in place where you secretly roll fort saves or con checks based on how close to death a player is. You might give a cumulative penalty to the roll based on how long the character has been below 0 hp. A failed save means that they die immediately. You may want to extend how far in negative hp a player can go if you do this though. Otherwise, you will probably have too many PC casualties. Or you can tag this onto Fatespinner's system.

That way they your PCs aren't leaving one of their own on the floor at -1 because they know he still has plenty of time left. Now, even though he is "only at -1" he still has the potential to die every turn until healed back over 0.

I have a couple of intrinsic problems with that solution. First of all, the spell makes a creature's skin fall off. The penalty for ray of enfeeblement is 1 rd/level. Even if I made this last for 1 hr./level, you have the strangeness of a creature's skin "regrowing" over the course of a day without the assistance of magical healing. Secondly, I want this spell to be potentially fatal. A temporary CON penalty might as well just be hit point damage since reducing CON reduces maximum/current HP accordingly.

This does, however, remind me that I forgot to add this clause to the spell description:

"Any spell or effect which alleviates the Constitution damage also returns the same amount of lost natural armor to the creature. Creatures without Constitution scores can benefit from spells or abilities that would otherwise restore ability damage to recover the missing armor accordingly."

In that case you may want to have a successful save either deal no CON damage or deal 1 point of CON damage. Compare the spell with something like finger of death. Finger of death is quite capable of outright killing most enemies at equal level to the caster if they fail their saving throw, but if they pass their save they take a fairly modest amount of damage.

You'll probably kill something faster with successful saves with finger of death if excoriate did 1 point of con on a successful save, but fod a higher level spell and it deals straight out HP damage and not CON damage (con damage is much worse imo).

Thoughts? Too powerful to have CON damage on demand? Should the save negate the CON damage and halve the armor reduction instead? Should it be higher level? Is it not powerful enough?

To me, the possibility of a 15th-level caster dishing out 11 CON damage and a -11 AC penalty on a big nasty creature with one spell seems pretty potent, but it is also a 6th-level spell, so maybe that's not so bad. Perhaps I should eliminate the scaling with caster level, though, and just make it 1d8 or 1d10 instead? Makes it more of a feast or famine spell (though you could maximize it with a 9th-level slot or a rod). I'm interested to hear other opinions, particularly since this spell has a nice thematic to it for me.

I would suggest making it function similar to something like ray of enfeeblement. Ranged touch attack that cannot reduce CON below 1. Otherwise consecutive castings of this spell might just flat out kill things too easily. However, if you make those changes, you may want to reduce the spell level to maybe 4th or 5th level.