murphybrain's page

First things first...praise is great, but criticism is useful. Keep that in mind, and take nothing here personal. :)

No problems man, I wanted people to be brutal!

I am immediately struck by the idea of them having no armor, but then the Earth Discipline is all about stout defense. That was a real "wait, what?" moment for me.

Well the class is meant to be an armorless martial arts style combat. That was an issue that came up in the reddit thread: I need to me more clear that unlike normal SLA the Kata would be affected by spell failure.

Rapier seems really weird for the shadow discipline. Just...doesn't fit my conceptual imagery. Shortsword, definitely.

I have tooled around with the selection constantly. I am not particularly married to any of them but though it best that none of the "Heavy Hitter" weapons be in there. Honestly if a player thought a weapon was a better fit and it wasnt something crazy I would allow it.

Bo9S based class senses tingling...Those are hard to judge, due to the huge amount of custom abilities.

Ha absolutely. I actually toned down some it, this started as almost a straight adaptation.

How does this interact with Feint?

I didn't think about that to begin with, but I would say that Feint doesn't really cause the target of a Feint to lose his dex bonus. It only affects a single attack from the feinting character. " If successful, the next melee attack you make against the target does not allow him to use his Dexterity bonus to AC (if any)." This would seem to me like the stance would be intact.

What's the action of the ranged touch attack? Is it just an Attack, so that once they hit 8th level, they can do two of these in one turn using a full-attack? Or is it always a standard action? What's the standard action of the melee use relate to? Is it to apply the damage to your weapon for the next attack, or is it an attack that adds the damage?

Unless modified by a Kata, any type of Elemental Strike is always a Standard action. The melee version is an attack does weapon damage along with the strike damage. There is no way to have more than one strike in a round without using a Kata.

Is the bludgeoning damage counted as magic? Does it eventually overcome DR of any sort?

Yes, and No. Its magic, but its still just bludgeoning damage.

A small plant with a range of 60 feet? Eh?

That's just flavor. The idea is that you're doing a weird plant tentacle attack thing, magically making a vine whip out and attack people.

You're missing Detect Magic as an ability in the rules. Not sure how it differs.

Fack, that was in a previous version. I must have deleted it. It's just a spell like ability identical to the zero level spell.

Wise Defense: This should be (Su). Also, you should really list at which levels they get these. What action is it to use these? A lot of these are very, very powerful abilities that are given extremely early. Not many other classes can even get these abilities before 10th level.

Wise Defense is basically a weaker version of the monk's AC ability. Since an Elanim doesnt wear armor i disagree that this is overly powerful. There is no action to use it, it's always there.

Eyes of the Eagle: This one has a lot of issues. First, to start a stance, you need to use a Swift action. You can't use a swift action until you roll initiative, which means that this won't add to your initial initiative. And then what happens if you use it during combat? Does your turn order jump up?

This one is actually lifted pretty much straight from Bo9S. Assuming or swapping stances is a swift action, but you can be running around in a stance all the time. You're essentially giving up one of the stance power to improve your initiative. Shifting out of the stance would have no effect once the initiative order is established, just like taking dex damage does not effect your init order.

Shifting Stream: Most abilities like this require you to end in a square threatened by the enemy. That way you can't just step out of the way of the attacks once a single one misses you.

This one is also straight from Bo9S. I guess i could elaborate more, but the only restriction is that you are still limited to one 5 foot step per round- just like Step-Up you wouldn't be able to make one on your following turn.

Burning Riposte: Is this only for natural attacks and unarmed strikes? Things like this usually are. Sometimes it's any melee attack, but ranged attacks are pretty rare to be affected by this. Do you shed light like a candle or torch when this is up?

The idea for this one is that it's quick retaliatory strikes (like a riposte) with fire, not like the Heat ability from a fire elemental. Again taken from Bo9S. The intent is for melee only, not ranged strikes.

Flame's Blessing: Useless after 10th level.

The idea was that this would stack with Attunement. I should be more specific.

Hand of Wrath: Whoa whoa whoa. Is this only once per turn TOPS? No matter how many AoOs you have, it's only one, right? This is pretty good...but make sure it's only once per turn. People will try to say that each AoO in your full suite of AoOs is a single AoO :)

YES! It's only one. My minmaxer buddy tried to show me some AoO heavy build he wanted. I will try to make it more clear.

Martial Energy: This fails the Bag O' Rats test. Hard. There's no limit on uses per day for these. I'll just attack a rat from this bag until I'm fully healed. Or rather, I'll keep on attacking the rat's corpse until I'm fully healed and it's charred to a crisp.

yet another Bo9S transplant. I never even though of that (honestly if one of my players suggested it i would slap him upside the head). not sure how to fix, perhaps making it a requirement that you much be damaging a living creature above a certain size?

Glowing Charge: What's the range of this? Does it apply to all attacks if they have Pounce? Do you actually glow?

Good question. I think originally I had in mind the seen/heard limitation of Inspire Courage. Yes on pounce, glowing i would leave up to the player but sounds cool to me.

Inspiring Spirit: What's the range of this? Does it rely on Line of Sight?

Same as above. LoS.

Shifting Shadow: Seems like a really good defensive ability...20% miss chance and the ability to use Stealth from 1st level. This would be something people dip for. Very strong, I'd recommend something else.

Shadow Blade: Eh...I'd recommend against this one too. Too easy to shutdown foes, and would ALSO be worthy of a dip. Hell, I'd just trip them. Nope! You're not getting away from me! mwhaha. I'd upgrade this to be a strong recommendation to a change.

Good points, those may be something I'll have to revisit. I mean, dipping into what is partially an arcane spellcasting class for this one ability seems over the top for me, but now that you mention it I could see how it could be exploited. "I will only learn a tiny bit of this ancient, rare mystic art to enhance my rogue" seems off the wall to me. Again this would be a player slapping moment at our table.

Shroud of Thorns: I don't know why anyone would use this. It's thematic, sure, but....I'll take something that doesn't hurt me thankyouverymuch.

Ent Skin: Hah! Clever. But no, way too weak. Way way too weak.

I agree they are probably weak compared to the others. Maybe a reduction in move speed as opposed to staggered?

Kata Erm, what does the Discipline have to do with this? I read the Kata description, and may have missed it, but I didn't see anything about restricting to certain disciplines.

It's in the discipline section, but i could repeat it int he kata section for clarity. "The two opposing Disciplines are forbidden, no Kata or stances may ever be learned from an opposing Discipline."

Greater Far Strike: Is this triple the base distance, so it's 180? Or is it triple the double, so it's... uh... 240?

It's triple the base distance. We went back and forth all morning trying to choose the best way to state it. I guess i need to be more clear.

Elemental Charge: Cool ability, but feats don't generally add +1d6/2 levels to all attacks in a charge. Scary to think of if they somehow had Pounce...

It's not all attacks, it allows to you make an Elemental Strike in place of the attack action. You still only get one.

I appreciate you taking the time to go over this, and the input you gave. I will take a look at clarifying where there was confusion, and we will discuss the tweaks you mention with regard to the stances.

Thanks Again!

So to give some background flavor, in my setting the first race was the Ancients - a race of half-elemental giants. They helped the gods of my setting create the world and battled the second race (the Dragons) before the advent of the mortal races. They were put into a sort of stasis once the work of creation was complete but left tons of evidence and artifacts from their society.

The new class was based on the idea that some had discovered more about this race and they way they used elemental magic without casting spells.

The Elanim

Looking for some helpful critique. Is it broken? Is it awkward or clumsy?

Murph, here's a thought. Since you have the Leadership feat, that means you have followers. You might see if the GM will give you a discount of some sort for turning those followers into an army.

Not only do I have Leadership, I have a Ring of the Ecclesiarch. I have 146 followers not counting my cohort! I hope that counts for something in determining army cost.

Yeah, the attack at the beginning of Book 4 was supposed to be your wake-up call of "not all your neighbors are friendly, if you don't have an army you should start working on one".

I think the problem was that everything up to this point has been small groups, bandits, barbarians, what-have-you that we just took care of ourselves- i think we assumed that was the pattern for the adventure path.

At least we are allied with the centaurs and kobolds, so possibly this will help when it comes time to make an army?

Another thought: Are they using the vanilla Kingmaker rules, UCam, or Ultimate Rulership? Those all have different implications for the army.

As far as non-crunch things, has your group worked much with diplomacy? If your GM rewards such creative thinking, there's something to be said for dispatching your Grand Diplomat (or the PC ruler!) to neighboring countries with hat in hand, asking for money and/or troops.

We started out using Vanilla rules, but we just swapped to UCam. (The game has been going for a long time- we rotate campaigns week to week.)

I think diplomacy is something we might have to try, the Duke (My priest) has leadership and a Cohort that is a Court Bard with crazy diplomacy bonuses.

Our GM for this campaign is a very hands-off guy, he is perfectly willing to let us screw ourselves if thats what we decide to do. (In fact after the tournament the druid realized he could have wild shaped into a treant and probably won the log chopping competition).

We didn't actually take any downtime between book 4 and book 5 to do any kingdom building. We aren't running a deficit and if we just stood pat we would eventually build up enough build points.

we have had a habit of spending almost all of our BP making new things every time, I guess we were a bit dense and didn't realize that the game was building towards something military-wise.

One of the three campaigns our group runs is Kingmaker, and our group has finally made it to book 5, and I have to say the whole thing seems really strange and the opening left us with one of the least satisfying game nights we have had in a while.

We really only have one martial character in our group (we have a fighter, a druid, a priest and a sorcerer), so the Tournament consisted of a mind-numbing hour plus of the fighter rolling against inanimate objects and then losing to all the magically buffed opponents while the rest of us listened.

Then Fort Drelev gets sacked! Which is a cool turnaround, backstabbery makes for interesting storyline. Then the GM points out to us that we have 1 build point, and can't afford to maintain an army for even a few weeks.

At this point we kind of get baited by NPCs to just start exploring hexes like a normal Kingmaker module. In what universe would a kingdom that gets attacked openly by a neighbor ignore it and just send the ruler and his buddies out to go exploring?

Did anyone else have this type of experience or is this group just botching Book 5? Or are we stuck doing hexploration until we hoard enough build points?

Came up with this guy:
Karl, human Alchemist

Interesting, love to hear more about character guidelines.

Magus lends itself to novaing, hard. Do you plan to follow this trend? If so, do you have plans for when you're out of resources?

I'm not sure Magus can be effective outside of high burst damage, its just the way the class works out. It would actually be especially bad for this character since the archetype has limited spells per day.

I suppose the only thing you can do it attempt to be as effective a melee character as you can, although this looks like it would be difficult at lower levels.

There is a 99% chance than I will be houseruling spellstrike and/or spellcombat? Is this a dealbreaker for you? What is it about being a magus that appeals to you?

Houseruling for me is not a rulebreaker necessarily, although I suppose it would tend to depend on how the rules are changed.

To be honest it's more the archetype that appeals to me than a Magus in general. I love the idea of the dwarf craftsman infusing magic into his beloved hammer. I haven't played a magus yet either, so there is definitely a curiosity factor involved as well.

A) I am down for anything except Kingmaker.(Several books into that IRL)
B) Dwarven Magus, Soul Forger archetype, Arcane bond to his warhammer.
C) Named Felek Runehammer. Comes from a long line of magic smiths. A bit greedy with a mercenary attitude but overall not a bad person. Willing to stick his neck out for friends as long as it doesn't affect his purse too much. Would fit in any AP where standard dwarves work.
D) Zero experience with PbP, decades of tabletop gaming experience.