Sheng Gradilla's page

The Third Dawn Campaign setting from Dreamscarred Press has an adaptation of the good old ranger, with a modified animal companion and a power point progression and power list.

Creating a list of changes would be like writing the manual all over again...

From the top of my head, it wasn't just the pew pew ability, we also opened the "advanced learning" class feature to all schools. Why? Because the beguiler already has ALL the spells of the schools permitted by advanced learning as-is at the time of publishing. That class feature is some sort of "buy our future splatbooks so you can actually add a spell to your list".

Without that modification to advanced learning, there is nothing to add, plain and simple. The class becomes dull and unflexible, even useless in combat, all you can do is cast a save or suck spell and run away, letting someone else do the beating.

To my tastes, I like having the stat blocks of high level rulers, with nice equipment and stuff, as well as long background text about their lives and exploits. I use them a lot in my gaming sessions. I don't need pages and pages of stat blocks for cannon fodder, I have done those to death in the past and there are loads of character generators on the net that can do the job of creating random NPCs just fine.

Now, what about NPC rulers confronting recurrent villains the PCs can't currently beat? I mean that kind of villain you keep teasing the PCs with until they grow to a specific level.

Rulers are supposed to be rulers either by their GREAT warrior skills and experience, their GREAT magic skills and experiencie, their GREAT diplomatic skills and experience, their GREAT businessman skills and experience, or some such thing. Villains come in many flavors, and the NPC rulers became rulers for beating many of them, whether those villains were businessmen, polititians, tyrans, warlords or such, and should be prepared to endure attacks of many more to come.

One of the things I do in my game sessions as a GM is have the villains confront some important NPC every once in a while and show off the NPC's skills a bit, repelling the villain's attack and thus making that NPC admirable in the PCs' eyes, giving them an idea of why they are where they are. Several sessions later, it will be the PCs' turn against the villain, once they grow enough.

I usually make stat blocks of homebrew NPC rulers with 12-14 levels, and important authorities like a sheriff, high priest or such with 10 levels.

No, the Half-Giant can use oversized weapons unpenalized. And yes, I'm taking into account the PP cap. It's 7 PP per use of aughmented expansion, and the character is level 8, the manifester level is 8, so the 7 PP is fine.

I got 31 power points, so yes, it can be used several times per day. Anyway, players with a brain would save such combination for killing really tough monsters as soon as possible, not for the common encounter with tons of low level baddies outnumbering the party.

Hi

I have not taken the time to post before. I was wondering if there is a current discussion about psionics. I have a Psychic Warrior build that has made any GM cry. It's a Level 8 half-giant psychic warrior, and can deal 12d6+13 melee damage per hit. I can deal 24d6+26 in the first round. Has anyone else made such monstrously powerful builds with the current D&D 3.5 rules? Has any work been done to "fix" this overpower issue?

The problem has to do with Psionic Weapon, Greater Psionic Weapon and the Deep Crystal material.

I have a Large Deep Crystal Greatsword (3d6), I store psionic focus in a psicrystal, then attain psionic focus, now manifest Expansion, aughmenting it to increase my size by two cathegories. Now I am huge and my weapon is gargantuan (6d6). Then I attack using both Greater Psionic Weapon (+4d6) and channeling power through the deep crystal weapon (+2d6), got two attacks per round, and two psionic focuses ready. All subsequent rounds, I just get my psionic focus (move action thanks to Psionic Meditation feat) and attack once.

Nowhere in the rules states what type of damage is the Greater Psionic Weapon nor the power channeling, it's just an unnamed bonus, so all of them stack.