bob_the_great's page

I was in this game one time where we were hired to take down a challenge that seemed impossible. The more we considered the situation the more we realized that proceeding was just dumb (except for one guy who was convinced we could do it), so we returned to the guy that hired us and told him that we couldn't do it. He was unexpectedly pleased, telling us that he was testing us and only wanted to hire people smart enough to know when to cut bait.

Sometimes the smart move is to just walk away. This strikes me as one of those situations. If you must stop this construct I'd look for ways to take it down other than direct damage.

i hate the "Strength doesn't do much and we can't take damage away from it" argument because for many characters the only thing Charisma affects is skill checks and the only things Intelligence affects are skill points. i can build a human fighter with 6 INT and CHA, put my one skill point per level into perception, and i'm fine.

but lord forbid we devalue STR. it's worth holding back certain classes and fighting styles from something we know isn't broken because we might devalue STR in the process. nevermind that the most powerful class in the game doesn't need it at all and no one seems to care.

i didn't want to be a Negative Nancy in the other thread but I'm glad that someone else feels the same way. in the Swashbuckler playtest thread the community hit the developers over the head with the fact that, despite their insistence otherwise, dex-to-damage is not broken. it is still inferior to a STR-based character and it is actually needed to make a DEX-based Swashbuckler better than a STR-based one.

and that's where some of this dex-to-damage obsession came from - in the playtest a Swashbuckler was more effective prioritizing strength over dex and that makes no sense whatsoever.

but in that thread they said we'd get dex-to-damage so all was well. sweet, i can play Dex-based without feeling like a chump. when i read Jason's post the first thing i thought was, "wait, there wasn't going to be a dex-to-damage feat in the book until Slashing Grace was determined too weak?" despite us showing them otherwise, despite us telling them over and over that they had created a Swashbuckler that was better built STR-based, and despite them saying we were going to get dex-to-damage, Jason just told us that they decided against dex-to-damage anyway and only threw it in last minute (and only for slashing weapons, wtf?).

and THAT makes absolutely no sense. dex-to-damage is so powerful that you insist it is mythic. it is so powerful that you spend time defending your stance on it in the Swashbuckler playtest thread, and in the time intervening you choose to not include it in the book. and then, at the last minute, you toss it in as a sweetener for another feat? it goes from being too powerful for a feat to being an add-on within another?

this whole thing makes no sense. Jason's response is either a load of bull or their process really is this disjointed and illogical. personally i think him lying to us in that response is less damning than accepting that they spent all that time deciding that dex-to-damage was too powerful and then tossing it in last-minute as a sweetener. if that's their process why should we have any faith in them whatsoever?

i just started playing a rapier-based swashbuckler and my DM has a simple rule, if it is printed i can use it. i guess i'll just have to accept that i'm a chump because i didn't create a swashbuckler with STR as a primary stat (from what we've heard nothing has been done to change this if you don't use Slashing Grace) or that uses a slashing weapon (i can't use the rapier feat until it is printed).

/rant