This is intended to be a thread compiling the general state, shape, and intent of villaining in 3.75. I'll cover some of my standard builds in the first post, some explanations of why in the second, and some information about tactics in the third. The fourth will be a brief closing if I can get there before the thread locks.
My standard villain:
Ancient Earthen Cleric
Human, Clay Half-Golem if possible.
Taint is hilarious
Did I mention hilarious? Check it out, heroes of horror.
Adjudicate it from your own perspective, but I'm sure he gets these feats as-or-before he needs them from taint, leveling, and flaws.
Great Fortitude, Combat Casting, Divine Metamagic(Persist), Persist
Power attack, cleave, intimidating rage, destructive rage
5 Dread Necromancer
3 Ur Priest
7 Geomancer
1 Rage Mage
4 levels of frenzied Berserker
Even as a clay half-golem, he can actually still self-buff thanks to the fact that his magic\spell immunity only stops spells as per the golem of his type. In other words, personal range buffs don't have SR, and thus he can cast things like Divine Power on himself without issue.
Some key notes:
Villains need at least sixth level spells if the players are of that level or higher. Ideally, they should have command structures below them that are difficult to co-opt. This means access to spells that cover divination.
BBEGs are a bad plan:
Simply put, the D&D combat system does not lend itself well to fights against a single opponent. An explanation of why can be found in the third post, but be prepared for some gamist analysis.
Other BBEGs:
Ice-keened Blade
Level 17 Warblade
Hp 126
Sr 30
Construct Traits
Wanted Maneuvers:
Iron Heart Endurance (IH 6th)
Finishing Move (IH 7th)
Action before Thought(DM 2)
Avalanche of Blades(DM 7)
QUicksilver Motion
Strike of Perfect Clarity (IH 9th)
Lightning Recovery (IH 4th)
Considered Maneuvers:
Moment of Alacrity(DM 4th)
Insightful Strike, Greater
Wall of Blades (as written, works on ANY ranged attack, including ranged touch)
Bounding Assault- Lvl 4 DM
Stance:
Pearl of Black Doubt?
Supreme Blade Parry (IH 8th?)
flaw: Inattentive
7 of 7 spent
1,3,6,9,12,15
+1 from flaw
Weapon Focus
Improved Criticals
Sudden Recovery
Stormguard Warrior
Greater Two-Weapon Fighting
Improved Two-Weapon Fighting
Two-Weapon Fighting
Warblade Bonus Feats:
Run
Combat Reflexes
Improved Initiative
Quick Draw
Gear:
Amulet of Tears - 2k +24 hp for 10 minutes.
Belt of Battle - We all know how this works. 12k
Ring of Mercy - Allows attacks to be dealt as subdual damage 12k
Adamantine Shield Runes - 2+5 ac, shield bonus, x2 to cost for no location slot 50k
Glyph Seal, Greater - Keyed to heal, and pressed into her chest, since she is technically
non-living, and non-magical under the logic that she doesn't _die_ in an antimagic field.
6k, trigger conditions of her dropping to dangerous HP levels.
Mithral Breastplate 5+5 30k
Two Elven court-blades, major artifacts:
Verso and Recto,
Each one half of a extremely plain elven courtblade sized for a fairly normal elf,
Verso and Recto are almost dainty in the hands of Ice-Keened Blade.
These weapons are both +5 enhancement bonus, however, they earn their status as major
artifacts in two ways. First, they grant their wielder the next feat in the dual-wield
fighting tree that they do not already possess.
The progression is as follows:
Perfect Two-Weapon Fighting <- Greater Two-Weapon Fighting <- Improved Two-Weapon Fighting <- Two-Weapon Fighting.
If they would grant Perfect Two-Weapon Fighting, they also grant the ability to sacrifice any
given attack with the off-hand weapon to instead use the blades as their two-handed form,
Steel's Canticle, for one of their attacks. The wielder can also opt to exclusively use
Steel's Canticle for their entire attack chain. Due to their odd construction as two halves,
literally, of one blade, no more than a +4 strength bonus may be applied for damage, and they
cannot make power attacks.
Steel's Canticle
This is a Large Elven Courtblade carved of blue ice inlaid with the words of a prayer
in elvish across the entire surface of the blade in fairly large but finely wrought lettering.
It is a +3 weapon that bestows the effect of True Strike on every swing. However,
it's icy construction takes its toll on those ill-equipped to deal with the frigid
blade, tearing off skin and sapping vitality at a prodigious rate. Each swing
chews through ten hitpoints unless the wielder takes careful and likely magical
precautions against the searing cold.
Worth approximately 220k, even given the difficulty of wielding them effectively.
It is extremely unlikely to find a buyer, however, as they are part of the
legend of Ice-Keened Blade, and while her resurrection is unlikely, the possibility
that she might come seeking her lost property is a chilling thought.
8k for House, personal effects, doo-dads, stuffs.
This is more of a one-off fight, with a serious opponent. I'm using the arcane-to-martial house rules to give her some teleportation spells. You'll notice she has a high HP, and some ways to keep upright when she should go down. This character won't hold up against a party alone though, which makes using her problematic. There's a nice contrast between her, and the ancient earthen cleric.
Haley:
Cleric 3/Walker in the Wastes 10
Using early entry via domains as an cleric of an ideal.
This is one of my favorites, though you may need to adjust it. Unless you can hunt down all five of his phylacteries, he'll just keep coming for you over and over. Which is precisely how a BBEG should work. Two of those phylacteries are tucked away in the hands of other dry liches.
The BBEG Fallacy
So... Let's talk for a moment or three about some of the structural underpinnings of D&D. Basically, in higher powered play, or just at higher levels, the only meaningful economy is economy of actions. Entire books have been written about it at my home on WotCO 339, so I'll spare you the long talk. Suffice to say that the average character can cast 2 or at most 3 spells in a round, before the application of significant optimization kung-fu.
So you have a party with two casters, and two warriors.
And a BBEG with three mooks.
So far, so good.
Except that the mooks are gonna need to close to melee, leaving them a standard action to use for combat at best. Worse, the villain is going to need to deal with the buffs and prep that the team has taken time to lay out. They may know more about him than he does about them. This means he may be busy fighting reactively, and unable to support his mooks with battlefield control or debuffs. War Weavers and other interesting classes can help fix this, but it's a core problem in the fact that D&D has uneven valuation for certain kinds of actions.
In other words, he has to fight you. You just need to kill him.
You have 6 spells to his three, and two full attacks on top of that. It's even worse if one of the melee roles is being filled by a gish build.
So you think, that's not a problem, I'll be fine with just upping his class levels. Well that may work, or more likely it will either fail or result in a TpK. After level six, each level a character has in a player class starts to matter more and more. This leads to bad places.
You need to prepare your BBEG to deal with more spells coming in than he can put out. Or you need to provide him with more caster support...
Suddenly this isn't about the BBeG anymore.
And that's fine.
In fact, that's probably for the best.
Why?
Combat in D&D is brutal, and unless you fudge dice, a really powerful villain is either going to die rapidly or cause some very serious and irreparable damage to the party. If that's okay, go back to the first post, and consider using one of those villains. Or go down to the next post and start thinking about how a tactically minded villain can mitigate these problems. Forgive my brevity.
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D_R's Black Tactica for BBEGS:
So I'm known for my dirty tricks. Not well known, but known.
Here's a quick list of some of the things I do to keep my villains interesting.
First:
Cover doesn't work, Superior Invisibility does.
Mindsight normally has only got a 100 foot range, trueseeing's only got about a 120. Draw up a larger battlefield and have him use decoys or stand-ins. Toss in invisible spell and the players may not know they failed to kill him until he shows up months later. Alternatively, with Darkstalker from lords of madness, there are very few ways to legitimately see through a stellar hide check. This is a good thing to let your villain lean on, even if it does come out of a hard to find WOTC book. It helps tremendously.
Second:
Dungeons. I know, cliche, but even if it's just an abandoned warehouse, terrain that's not agreeable to good charge lanes will help a lot. Also, don't forget that you can lay down things like anti-magic fields or permanent portals. What you see need not be what you get. Illusion spells are excellent for this, and can make a player group cry for mercy but still sing songs of glory the night after.
Third:
Competent minions. Give nothing away for free. No one respects a villain who uses idiot minions or infinitely strong ones. Minions turning the game into a cutscene is just as bad as minions who accidentally let slip important documents for no good reason. You only get one shot to make the villain credible and interesting.
Fourth:
Genre switch. The villain doesn't need to play the same game the PCs are playing. I recommend letting the villain work through legal channels, dropping faked evidence and hung trials on the party, forcing them to lose logistical support. In fact, often it helps to put the villain in a position of legitimate power. Alternatively, the villain can be playing Survival Horror while the heroes are convinced it's still heroic fantasy. I still remember the look on my players' faces when they realized that the reason they couldn't find the BBEG was because he was off befriending their families with charm spells.
Fifth:
Mortality.
To be a good villain, a villain must die.
And stay dead without external interference.
But only if the players make sure Joe Schmoe Cleric isn't paid ahead of time to cast a res spell next month.
Be careful, though, because it's very easy to get the sense that you'll never catch up to the villain. Again, eventually, the villain must die. And remain dead.
Items, a quick list:
Ring of spell battle
Lyre of building
Greater Glyphseals for traps
Ring of Theurgy for options way outside his class.
Anklet of translocation
Strand of Prayerbeads
Mooks with dispelling weapons
Dust of sneezing and choking as an escape mechanism.
Minions with cursed swords of -2
Some notes from one of my players
Annotated Things you've done to us:
I'll let you live, but only if you take my soon-to-be-dead niece.
("I always have the option of breaking his deal"-Jeepers).
"It's always good when one of your best bargaining chips is self-termination. And by always good, I mean we're F*****"
Ravenloft. Enough said.
Are you sure you still want Tharn?
The BBEG got to the artifact they were chasing first, and made some crucial changes involving an Eladrin's Spine. Very hard for a champion of corellon to use a weapon that now has the evil descriptor.
The Lich likes to watch.
I'm a huge fan of divination, particularly if I can get my players to carry around items made by the BBEG. They've been particularly kind about this, and continue to carry items from an early sortie into the villain's lair. As a result, until fairly recently, he had been scrying their every move.
Your Lich is in another castle.
He even leaves notes and sometimes a handy map. He's quite fond of the players, and very interested in their welfare. Which naturally is completely terrifying.
There is a bomb.
Sometimes, these notes explode.
IT is a bomb.
Early on, they picked up a bomb commissioned by an unknown party. Of artifact level. Tucked it into their packs and all but one of them forgot about it.
YOU are the bomb.
Another similar item ended up in the cleric's chest. They never bothered to take it out, after almost six months of game play, simply because they spent most of the time too harried.
The branch is destroyed.
Funny things happen when you're traveling across Yggdrissil and a branch breaks underneath you because someone sawed most of the way through it. Well, I was amused anyway.
I'll keep this short and sweet.
Mechanics in D&D do not support BBEGS well. If you must use them, I recommend doing things like flubbing their HP by increasing it by a factor of ten. Any well-kitted out party, and even most poorly made parties, can almost accidentally decimate single opponents. The best layout for villains is the one that allows them subtlety and the ability to work cleanly behind the scenes. Beyond that, their appearances should be short, and when fighting them, if you fail to keep the players under legitimate time pressure, they will likely just pull out and come back better prepared.
In short, while I love big villains with evil laughs, they may need to stay ominous silhouettes unless you're prepared to build things like my first example villain who is effectively specifically designed to be unkillable for at least six rounds under most circumstances.
Here are a few additional resources:
T_G's original BBEG thread. There's a new one around somewhere.
Caelic's archetypal BBEG.
Well, now I only have a few reserved posts, but I'll work with what I have. Do you know the limit on post length so I can try and figure out if I should be verbose or not?
You only have about an hour or so to revise a post, after that it becomes a permanent fixture of the thread in question.
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Well, now I only have a few reserved posts, but I'll work with what I have. Do you know the limit on post length so I can try and figure out if I should be verbose or not?
The post length can be very long (though I've never tested its limit), the Paizonians are a verbose population.
I have bad news for you, though: you can only edit posts for up to an hour. So reserving those posts won't help you very much, unfortunately. :S
Well, I guess I'll need to work fast or call a mod in then. :|
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If you're going to post a long essay, I recommend composing it in word or notepad then copying it over. And use spoilers to keep the post size down. Makes for easier reading, and you don't lose your work if the Golem eats your post.
I haven't noticed a character limit yet, so you should be ok there.
Yeah, the one-hour rule, been burned by that one b4.
DocRoc, I am assuming this is the thread you referenced in the rapidly crumbling CharOp forum thread. I will pitch a concept:
WARNING: THIS SPOILERED POST SHOULD NOT BE LOOKED AT BY PLAYERS IN MY SILVER ROSE GAME UNLESS YOU LIKE RUINING ALL THE SURPRISES!
I am thinking that she is a basic vanilla erinyes in power, but she could have a few levels in rogue for skills. I imagine her as geared towards spying and infiltration.
I haven't given her much goodies, but she does carry a whip, and her wings are pierced with golden chains with small bells affixed that jingle when she walks (I don't know if a cool magical effect could be affixed to these). Feel free to improvise! She also has a Spinagon minion named Saucy Jack who does a lot of the spying for her, I wouldn't mind a spy build on him as well.
Thank god I type fast and have ready access to resources.
I'm glad, though I fear this is the single worst handbook I'll ever hammer out. :|
A lot of this _was_ original content.
Also, it looks like every edit resets the clock?
If you're going to post a long essay, I recommend composing it in word or notepad then copying it over. And use spoilers to keep the post size down. Makes for easier reading, and you don't lose your work if the Golem eats your post.
I haven't noticed a character limit yet, so you should be ok there.
I second all these rec's. I like using OpenOffice for my elephant waxing, and spoilers work better than footnotes or parenthetical comments on long, complex discussions. Saving before copying and posting will greatly decrease your misery in life. And welcome, DocRoc.
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When I design a BBEG I sort of go outside the rules a bit. Essentially I figure out what I want him to do and how. Then either gear him, class him or crate a new class and new abilities to accomplish that goal. I also sort of script out how long I want him on the stage. Which means that I know the PCs can do 100 points damage a round, I want him on stage for 5 rounds, so I prepare him with HP, and defenses to keep him on stage for 5 rounds, DR, AC, SR, HP, etc.
Then I add in supporting mooks. These guys are usually designed to impede, annoy, and wear down the PCs before they face the BBEG so he is a bigger perceived threat.
Next I design the setting. Maybe at night so they have limited light, curving corridors that are narrow and limit maneuverability, but provide kill zones for me. Throw down caltrops, stairs, debris, anything to limit speed.
Then last I work in any traps and escape contingencies I can realistically come up with.
By the time all of these elements come together the final battle scene can be quite deadly. But of course, that is not the goal. I don't actually WANT any PCs to die, but I DO want to create a nasty threat of death. It is a fine line. If the PC death would be caused due to just bad luck but a good plan I can "fudge" the trap or mook or whatever, just a bit. If the death would be caused by poor execution, a bad plan, over confidence or just plain stupidity then the PC dies. Fine line between threat and too deadly and between blind bad luck and stupidity.
I suppose I take the Iron Heroes route to BBEG, classes don't matter, end results are what matters.
Besides which is more fun? Fighting a wizard who casts a fireball on the rogue, or a villain who thrusts a rapier into the rogue and channels a fireball down the blade to explode inside the rogue? I vote for the villain as just being cooler! :) unfortunately, that requires some "fudging" of the rules to make a unique and really cool adversary.
Excellent. Bloody marvelous work. You just codified what has been floating around in my head as half-formed ideas and vaguely-seen apparitions for a few years now. I don't play regularly, or I would have likely already nailed down in concrete a lot of what you presented here. Thanks for helping me figure out what I've been trying to tell myself.
Besides which is more fun? Fighting a wizard who casts a fireball on the rogue, or a villain who thrusts a rapier into the rogue and channels a fireball down the blade to explode inside the rogue? I vote for the villain as just being cooler! :) unfortunately, that requires some "fudging" of the rules to make a unique and really cool adversary.
Rule of Cool is the Zeroth Law.
Well, now I only have a few reserved posts, but I'll work with what I have. Do you know the limit on post length so I can try and figure out if I should be verbose or not?
I've been known to write a long post or two. Your third post in this thread rivals a few my 2nd best, but I've got a dozen or more posts here that are significantly longer than that.
That said, I've never hit a limit yet.
However, I have typed a post and submitted it, only to have the forum eat my post and take me to the Paizo Store. I haven't timed that, but it may be fairly short - I type fast too. Maybe even something like 15 minutes of actually typing the post (from the time you click the "Add New" or "Reply" link until the moment you click "Submit").
So, if you don't compose them in Notepad (etc.), then at least get in the habit of clicking CTRL+A and CTRL+C to copy your post to the clipboard before you submit. If your post vanishes, just hit the back button, paste it in, and re-submit.
I tend to post->edit->re-read->post->edit, in fairly fast cycles. Habit from being a hacker with a nice workflow, but not so much work ethic. I like to armor-plate.
To clarify some points: I'm used to dealing with damage outputs of over 300 per turn from my players, but I do run groups of 5-6 normally. This is normally not repeatable, so I try to use smaller but more frequent encounters to blunt the propensity for novas.
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Great thread.
Some of the best encounters I've run are encounters with waves of opponents. Most fights only really last two or three rounds, as you stated earlier. It's about that time that you introduce the second wave, a little bit more time and even more come in. Depending on when your waves are timed or how many waves you plan on running, introduce your main baddy towards the end.
Better yet, have two main baddies.
In one of the games I'm DMing in the PbP section, the characters engaged what they thought was the main protagonist, just as they had him down to almost no health, a door opened in the floor allowing a wave of reinforcements to come. The party had to split resources to deal with this and the first encounter. Next round another big level baddy enters the fray, with the party split and not acting as a coherent unit.
This makes for very tense fights, which is waht we're mostly after as a climactic scene. The baddies don't have to be uber deadly, just have many of them at realtively tough levels to make it a challenge.
At higher levels this is even more important. My home game is age of worms and I can tell you that single creature BBEGs just get minced by my group at 18th level. I've taken to merging encounters in those scenarios to challenge the high level party
Best encounter to date [spoilered if you're playing age of worms]
In Kulgen Thongir, the party attracted the attention of an entire flight of dragons. The party split and so did the dragon flight. Each section of the party copped the breath weapons of nearly ten dragons. They survived because they were well prepped but two of their number were dropped to negatives. To make it worse, they had to find shelter to recover the two unconcious party members, but when they had them back to about half hit points, a Fang Dragon attacked them becasue he had been tracking them. It fled when about 1/3 hit points left but called down the dragon flight again. All this was occuring while the dragons were waging a war against the giants who lived in the place. The running fight with the dragons strafing, the fang dragon attacking without warning and dealing with the odd giant warband had the party going for nearly three game sessions. They finally killed the overlord dragon in the last session, and they all cheered, literally. Great set of encounters using wave attacks and keeping the pressure up.
Hope some of that was helpful
Cheers
Hey DocRoc - Welcome to the Paizo boards, and congratulations on your 50th post (in 16 hours at that).
I wanted to say you have some interesting ideas embedded in your initial posts. However I would advise you that much of the Paizo boards are of the "core-only" persuasion (or at least cautious with supplements). Villains can often escape that of course, being 'behind the scenes' builds.
You may get more interest though by either giving core examples (once the final rules are actually released of course), or labeling the non-core elements and perhaps their source.
Again, welcome to the boards.
:: Grins wanly :: Thanks for the welcome. I personally feel that as it stands, core-only is not terribly well-balanced.
3.75 is an improvement, by a wide margin, but not enough for me to start throwing away my books :: gentle hyperbole ::
Unfortunately, the posts are now edit-locked, so I can't go back and label the non-core material. For the most part, I kept it limited to the Magic Item Compendium and the Completes, though the half golem template is from... I think MM II. It was just too good and too sinister to leave out of that build, particularly with it being effectively an NPC-only template.
I actually avoided keeping it core only, because I haven't seen the final 3.75 rules, and it'd be very painful to hinge a build or example on something that's not there anymore. I opted to keep it somewhat lower on examples than I wanted, simply so that it wouldn't look dominated by crunch. I am, though, a crunch man and a GM for most of my career as a gamer.
Wave attacks is a superb trick that I meant to add, but ran out of time to do so. Time crunch + Edit lock was not a pleasant experience.
:: Grins wanly :: Thanks for the welcome. I personally feel that as it stands, core-only is not terribly well-balanced.
We'd differ there, but that's alright.
3.75 is an improvement, by a wide margin, but not enough for me to start throwing away my books :: gentle hyperbole ::
Oh by no means Doc, by no means.
I would not say that PRPG "assumes" the use of non-core, but one of the primary sub-goals of backwards compatibility was the continued use of the myriad of supplements available, or at least the majority of them. At least a couple were co-written by Paizo Staff after all :)
Investigating the interactions of those with Pathfinder prior to the Final version was difficult, and often unhelpful. Investigating them now/shortly will be an important step in judging the success of that goal.
What I was simply saying is that whereas the wotc boards generally assume broad use non-core (not exclusively from what I've seen, but generally), the Paizo boards generally assume core-only. My comments were merely for future reference, and you make an excellent point about using non-core when the core is still unknown.
While I don't wish to see a board dedicated to optimization, I am interested in it for suggestions to players, etc. I'd like to forestall the inevitable core/non-core debates in favor of more useful analysis and brainstorming.
Again, welcome, Paizo's a "Big-Tent" community after all :)
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Great thread.
Some of the best encounters I've run are encounters with waves of opponents. Most fights only really last two or three rounds, as you stated earlier. It's about that time that you introduce the second wave, a little bit more time and even more come in. Depending on when your waves are timed or how many waves you plan on running, introduce your main baddy towards the end.
Better yet, have two main baddies.
I.....hose scenarios to challenge the high level party
Best encounter to date [spoilered if you're playing age of worms]
** spoiler omitted **...
Thank you for the insight Wrath, and welcome to the boards, DocRoc. I am pretty much a core-only guy so the Heroes of Horror etc leaves me cold, but much of the rest is good news. Seems to turn GMing into a science (rather than an Art).
Majuba had it right, I would look at your audience more, I have gamed in several Pbps here and there are very few PHBII characters, let alone tainted. And the Book of Nine Swords is the first book most DMs deny access to.
Cheers
ToB is a lovely and very useful book that really helps a weak set of archetypes shine. It gives you something in the same range of rewards as higher level spells, though the parity tapers off around 7-9th. I understand it's not to a lot of people's tastes, but it really is an amazingly well-made book, probably my single favorite. I'll be running ToB alongside PF very extensively, so I'll let you know more about how they measure up as I have more information post-Final.
It's particularly good, though, for ominous villains, lending them a tremendous amount of power and flair that normal mooks can get away with not having. It makes the Sword\Lord BBEG almost viable, though you'll still want a full support system behind him or her or it. In that respect, I think it's important to consider it closely. Certainly, it's a powerful book, but nothing like old 3.5 with gate, alter self, dust of sneezing and choking, or contingency, to name a few serious offenders.
Heroes of horror, I think, was always intended as a book for GMs, and in that goal it succeeds almost without parallel, introducing interesting mechanics, cool gear, and full support for the darker range of villainy. I almost never allow players to use taint to their advantage, but the mechanical support for a fundamentally corrosive flavor of evil really helps make D&D much more scary.
While I am a proponent of understanding the theoretical underpinnings of the game, game balance can unfortunately never be a science with any degree of precision. Math and theory can help us discern the raw mechanistic power of classes or of certain kinds of enemies, but valuing things like secondary debuffs is very very difficult and can only be done with extensive playtesting.
Non-core is important to me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that all of my games are run in Planescape, which means that it starts to become very odd to see your martial traditions mirrored on every world, mechanically speaking. :)
Oh by no means Doc, by no means.
I would not say that PRPG "assumes" the use of non-core, but one of the primary sub-goals of backwards compatibility was the continued use of the myriad of supplements available, or at least the majority of them. At least a couple were co-written by Paizo Staff after all :)
Investigating the interactions of those with Pathfinder prior to the Final version was difficult, and often unhelpful. Investigating them now/shortly will be an important step in judging the success of that goal.
Agreed on all points. I was just kidding about the books and the trash. :)
I'll be around, I think, more regularly after final drops to try and work through the vast amount of non-core material for the purposes of balance and analysis.
DocRoc
This Thread Rocks im glad to have you hear at Paizo ill be using your ideas alot
Do you ever go over to MinMax?
I'm Dr_Rocktopus from 339, actually. I steer clear of BG, myself. Dunno, seems a little bit more elitist than I like.
You may have seen some of my stuff in the Dirty Fixes Handbook, though, or possibly heard about my Buildomancers.
I recommend letting the villain work through legal channels, dropping faked evidence and hung trials on the party, forcing them to lose logistical support. In fact, often it helps to put the villain in a position of legitimate power.
THIS! The scariest villain I ever sent against the PCs had no spells and no combat ability... all he had was a very high Charisma, maxed out Diplomacy, and a legitimate governorship in their home country.
Interestingly, I've independently used half-golem clerics as villains as well, in other scenarios...
One important note for a proper villain handbook is the fact that many groups abandon play after 15th level or so, when the various 3.X systems problems make it more or less unplayable. Having the bulk of the advice apply to low- or mid-level scenarios, rather than to high-level ones, can expand handbook usefulness by an order of magnitude.
I just included the ones I had handy, but other than the earthen cleric, they scale down fairly well. The links I included are outbound to some other more viable builds with varying ECL. Unfortunately, I had precisely 1 hour to write most of that handbook, so.... :|
Non-core is important to me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that all of my games are run in Planescape, which means that it starts to become very odd to see your martial traditions mirrored on every world, mechanically speaking. :)
I knew there was a reson I liked you, LOL. As for non-core, I may not be the sharpest DM when it comes to math and builds, but I tend to let the players set the tone of the game. My Planescape PbP has a lot of gonzo characters floating around Like the one I spoilered above, or one a player did for me that was a simulation of the Angel character Lorne (right after Andy Hallet passed away).
I have a feeling I'll be pitching you some oddball concepts now that I know you're a Planescape fan. :)
Man, as soon as I saw that 4E had killed the great wheel, I stopped reading as simple as that. Fortunately, I found this after learning to play, so if my friends desperately need a seat filled I can do it. But not well.
And by extension, here I am. As for your Spoilered character, you might take a look at my beloved factotum in the dungeonscape supplement. Blessed with win, that one is! :)
Here's a fun BBEG that goes from "fairly useful and hard to get to" to "Holy Cow!" as he advances. He's based on a bit of trivia: Name Earth's largest desert?
LE Human starting stats:
STR 8 DEX 10 CON 12 INT 12 WIS 18 CHA 14. Boost WIS at all points
Cleric 3/Walker in the Waste 10/Tainted Sorcerer 6/Contemplative 1
1st) Heat Endurance, Willing Deformity, Corrupt Spell Focus, Greater Corrupt Spell Focus.
FLAWS: Noncombatant, Vulnerable TRAITS: Focused, Abrasive.
SKILLS: Concentration, Knowledge Arcana, Knowledge Religion, Spellcraft 4 each. Domains: Sand, Thirst, Windstorm (Contemplative)
3rd) Violate Spell. Start investing a bit in Handle Animal, for later.
6th) Flash Frost Spell
9th) Explosive Spell
12th) Wild Cohort
15th) Piercing Cold
18th) Divine Metamagic (Flash frost)
Taint Feat C: Divine Metamagic (Explosive)
Taint Feat C: Residual Magic
Taint Feat D:Domain Spontaneity
Taint Feat D: Eldritch Corruption
Typical spell load:
0th:
1st:
2nd:
3rd:
4th:
5th:
6th:
7th:
8th:
9th:
Find a way to squeeze Born of Three Thunders in there and that first 9th level spell, coupled with Explosive Spell, does a reasonable impression of Empowered Locate City.
What is...Antarctica!
For the splatbook challenged, can we provide references for all the obscure prestige classes we're dipping?
I'm going to go out on a limb and start with ... Frostburn. But that's just me.
They actually aren't too obscure, and none of it is setting specific, interestingly enough. I don't have a list right at hand.
Frostburn, sandstorm, Unearthed Arcana, and PHB2 should be just about it.
Oh, and contemplative from complete divine, but you could comfortably drop that dip. It's for a bonus domain, and is a very common dip.
To be clear, tainted sorcerer has no class abilities after first. In other words, six levels isn't really a dip in the classical sense. :)
I have to say, learned CharOp masters, that your game-fu is most impressive! DocRoc, having mentioned a love for Planescape, have you ever done any fun things with Githzerai? I am thinking of including a few in my next story arc and I would appreciate any input ..
How about I hand you one of my player's githyanki characters? :)
I knock out the psi-like abilities and make it a +1 LA race, then allow buy off. The same makes Githzerai much better all around, and playable to boot. :)
How about I hand you one of my player's githyanki characters? :)
I knock out the psi-like abilities and make it a +1 LA race, then allow buy off. The same makes Githzerai much better all around, and playable to boot. :)
Sounds excellent to me :)
Here
doink
Ooo shiny. I haven't stumbled on this Obsidian Portal before, is there a collection of characters ensconced within? I feel a yoink comin' on!
My campaign, in fact, is up there. It's basically like mythweavers except less nice. :|
Excellent. I usually yoink from mimir.net or planewalker.com, but I'm always up for more sources ...
I rely heavily on the original 2e books. I trust myself, at this point, to update material as I need to. And my lord, the gate-towns? I've seen few if any WotC products that had as much color and verve as the gate-towns.
:: wistful ::
I rely heavily on the original 2e books. I trust myself, at this point, to update material as I need to. And my lord, the gate-towns? I've seen few if any WotC products that had as much color and verve as the gate-towns.
:: wistful ::
Sigh
+1
I have all the Planescape 2e material as well (as well as the various Manuals of the Planes released in other iterations). I even have the entire line of Ral Partha Planescape minis *shameless fanboi*.
I WAS well on the way to collecting all the Planescape PDFs, but the WotC PDF shutoff caught me out (was absent the two days they gave us to buy). Sigh at least I got the main box sets on PDF, makes things so much easier..
As for updating, I am more of a fluffy rather than crunchy kinda DM. As Blanche DuBois once said, "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers" especially when it comes to stat blocks...