spindlethin's page

I have a character I'm working on that is a Alchemist/Drunken Brute Barbarian. The text on the Brute's Raging Drunk power is as follows

"While raging, the drunken brute can drink a potion, or a tankard of ale or similar quantity of alcohol, as a move action that does not provoke attacks of opportunity...."

It goes on to talk about quaffing booze, but it seems that as long as you already have the extract in your hand or can otherwise not spend an action drawing it, you could drink it as a move without Aoo's.

Mind you, you lose a level and you have to be raging; high price to pay for something that can almost always be accomplished with a 5' step.

I wondered how battle might be done when there are hero's around; really, when there are such vast differences between the combat abilities of one soldier and the next (even a couple of levels would make a normal soldier a monster) traditional huge armies just aren't going to work. Tactics would adapt, especially when finding out the exact troop composition of the enemy is as simple as some divination if they aren't well protected from it.

I was thinking of something like Dynasty Warriors, where anyone who intends to go to war is going to find themselves some Hero calibre warriors first. It might actually make for a really interesting NPC if there was an extremely potent but fickle mercenary involved. Divinations combined with dispel magic or counterspelling could make things very dangerous for wizards (Floating over that horde of angry orcs when your flight spell gets cancelled and it isn't your turn? ouch.)

Battlefields would be excellent places for an artefact or two to make an appearance; something that is subtle but with a massive area of effect, so you can have a gamechanging item that isn't going to turn the PC"s into gods should they manage to take it.

For actual crunch, Don't underestimate the power of weenies with aid another. With nine people surrounding, that's a +16 to one attack roll (I think?), which will make for a few hits. If there is a really solid dose of poison or the like on that hit, even a mid level commander-type could put a large strain on resources. In the end though, better to have unique people to combat the Heroes one on one, and use the battle as an epic backdrop.