Looking through it, i gotta say just seems like too much going on to be a smooth class to play.
DM: "Ok jon, what do you do?"
Jon: " Give me a minute...<thirty minutes of reading> um i put XYZ on my weapon"
It's pretty much exactly as complex as the bard.
You want a smoother class to play? Well, I can advise you to stay a few miles away from the inquisitor! But a class based on crafting using the magic item crafting rules pretty much has to be fiddly.
In play, it's not so bad. Burning dwimmers for party buffing is less complex than traditional spell buffing, and it happens between combats. In some sense, it actually speeds things up when compared to spell buffing.
We've had very good experiences with the class so far — it definitely boosts the whole party, not just the Ardwright, but not so much that they breeze through everything. A party with great reconnaissance can benefit enormously from well selected weapon dwimmers, but this is also true of parties with a cleric or wizard... and if you think bane is scary I direct you once more to avoid the inquisitor.
Why do I keep mentioning the inquisitor? Well, because this class is about half as fiddly and 2/3 as powerful as the playtest inquisitor, which is just about where a new class should be in my humble opinion as GM (IMOAGM)
So, why the changes to the class?
I have been meaning to post again about the "recent" changes but i got sidetracked. SO yeah. Lots of stuff has changed, mostly the weapon and armor dwimmers. Just went back to poke around and I saw your post and was reminded I should mention what's been going on.
• Weapon and armor dwimmers have been condensed into one arms and armor dwimmer that scales with level.
The biggest reason for the changes was to reduce the complexity and need for one to open up a book as see what was available to craft at any given level. It now specifies what weapon and armor dwimmers you can craft as you level up. For players and GMs this makes it fairly clear what an ardwright can and cannot do.
The other problem that this hopefully solves is it evens out what becomes available. My experience in testing was there were a LOT of +1 and +2 equivalent properties, and very few higher level ones. As a result when you got to level 10 or so, you only got one or two new properties. That felt like sort of a let down.
The solution then became pooling the weapon and armor stuff together so that on levels where there are less weapon properties, more armor properties can bolster the dwimmer up. Also I had to break down the utility of all of them into more than what they are at any given bonus. Not all +1 enhancement bonus properties are equal despite them being lumped together for market cost.
What I did was ask "how much damage/utility does this ability grant". Keen, for example, comes into play on fewer hits than Flaming, and in general grants about +1-2 damage per hit in the long run (if IIRC from SKR's posts about criticals). Thus it has a less broad utility than flaming (although to be fair, crits now trigger quite a few feats). I went through all of the weapon and armor properties like this and then divvied them up into groups of similar utility and scope.
For GMs who have weapon and armor properties from additional books, you will have to make judgement calls as to what level these properties should fit into or if they are even available, whether they require spell research or feats to access.
• Guidance dwimmer and ability dwimmer were toned down a little.
This was to make sure that they were more in-line with other class abilities, such as those of a Bard's inspire features. All in all they were probably too strong.
• New Feats were added include one that allow for interesting dwimmer combos.
This helps pad the choice of what feat to take with trade secret :D Signature Dwimmer was added to allow for people to make +2 flaming, keen weapons if they want to. The trade off is that it requires a feat for each combo. This is mostly to reign in crazy combinations but also for ardwrights to have something they can call their own creation. There may be other ways to gain this feat as well, through book/manual style magic items (costing about 25,000gp)
• Charge imbuing dwimmer got a limit of 24 hours.
This was so that ardwrights didn't recharge wands to sell them at full value. It really made calculating wealth-by-level wacky. An ardwright can still do this, but he will probably get a bad reputation when the buyer find out those charges were temporary. Keen arcanists can probably tell the difference between temporary charges and real ones with the proper detect magic and appraise/spellcraft checks.
• The spell list was reorganized for some early entry spells.
It seemed wrong to me for certain crafty spells to be 2-3 levels after when a wizard would get them, especially if an ardwright was to be compared to a craft minded wizard. Thus things like minor and major creation, permanency, etc got bumped down a little to make them accessible at nearly the same levels.
Also in that vein I have a list of APG spells to add soon.
In the future I want to make a supplement that includes all sorts of other ardwright and weirbrand stuff, new feats, spells, magic items, construct rules, etc. Ardwrights might get a little more scifi in the treatment for their optional stuffs.
I just don't like the dead levels. Especially the seventh.
7 is not technically dead. It is the level that the ardwright gets 3rd level spells, as well as a new tier of Arms and Armor dwimmer effects. Level 19 is really the only "dead" level since the ardwright already has most of his spells, but it still gets another spell slot. 13 is the first level that they get 5th level spells, and 14 has more dwimmer effects.
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I have only just discovered this, and I would gladly port it into my games set in Golarion or Eberron. It's very rare that I see something online that I'm comfortable enough to do that with. Well done.
Have you considered releasing this as a PDF of some kind, or spoken to a publisher to do as such for you?
It's really very good.
I have only just discovered this, and I would gladly port it into my games set in Golarion or Eberron. It's very rare that I see something online that I'm comfortable enough to do that with. Well done.
Have you considered releasing this as a PDF of some kind, or spoken to a publisher to do as such for you?
It's really very good.
Thanks Dudemeister! :D
I am glad you like it. I am considering making a PDF for sale that will include more feats, spells, magic items, optional rules to further support the class, but i have a lot of work to do to get there. Once I get something together I'll see if there someone who wants to publish it. Thanks for your support and I will try to keep you folks posted.
And of course I am always interested in hearing what people think and what they would live to see included for the ardwright :)
Edit- just reprinting the link so people don't need to scroll around for it, further up in the thread https://docs.google.com/View?docid=0ASaGlkPoJPy7ZGNrN2Joa183ZnBzNmNzZnA& ;hl=en The update to the pathfinder database is forthcoming.
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Anburaid, I truly think that your work is at professional level already. The class would surely be further improved by more support in the form of specific magic items, spells etc. But I think that your next project should be improving warforged and bringing them to PFRPG. Ironborn of Questhaven are essentially nice try to do something in that direction, but I find them not refined enough. Your work fits seamlessly into Eberron, or any other steampunk setting, and it works great with Psionics Unleashed by DSP. You should direct that talent towards filling another niche in the game that is empty right now, or half-full at best. And when you have new race, new class, perhaps some additional stuff about mechanical familiars, item familiars and stuff like that, you can publish ten or twelve-page pdf that would garner greater interest than single class.
Thanks, nightflier, that is something to consider. I think the challenge might be how to make them unique, so they are not just carbon copies, so to speak.
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Yes, that is the challenge that I have faced myself for my home-brewed world. But the thing is, they must not be too different, because the people want to play warforged, after all. In my game, they are called servitors. They come in two sizes - medium and small, akin to standard warforged and scouts - and they are powered by ioun stones (mined by the dwarfs, but that's another story). You should check out Ironborn of Questhaven. Perhaps that can give you some food for thoughts. My challenge is not so difficult, since I don't plan to publish my world or my house rules. Perhaps you should consider creating a warforged/ironborn/servitor that will be an ideal platform for ardwright? Also, there should be many types of warforged/ironborn/servitors, since they should be built for specific tasks. That is something that Ironborn of QH did right, in my opinion.
Just a quick note. I have added a new section to the bottom which details what spells and magic item properties from the APG can be used with the ardwright. In general, when choosing what spells will be available to the ardwright, I mostly restrict it to spells that effect items/objects, spellcasting/magic, and writing (but not speech so much, which is more of the bard's thing).
I also added a little suggestion about including the new magic item properties. Basically I am of the mind that they should be treated like new spells, meaning you either learn them by choosing them as one of your learned spells upon gaining a level, or you stake a table out in your local ancient library, and spend gold to pour over books and scrolls till you figure them out. All of this is, of course, is pending GM approval.
Happy hammer-strikes!
Thread Necromancy! Cheapy has a list of Artificer classes. I proudly am one of them haha.
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Egads! No starting gold?! Hmmm, bit of an oversight on my part. Ardwrights start with 4d6x10 gp (average 140gp), same as a rogue (which is to say a class that needs some light armor, a weapon or two, and a set of thieves tools).
This class is a bit challenging, as most spellcaster classes I think are. Not being a professional writer, I take all editing advise graciously :D If there is anything you think is confusing or could be better explained let me know here and I will try to adjust it accordingly.
Well Dwimmers are version of the Infusions class feature of eberron artificers, so a fair amount of 'inheritance' comes from that. When I began playing Rise of the Rune Lords with my brother, I petitioned to use a warforged eberron artificer that I had written up got that campaign world, but never ended up using. In the end we decided that the artificer class needed to be "pathfinderized", so we went about doing that.
So in the end a dwimmer became a full round casting, spell-like, class feature that provides an item with a temporary item enchantment. Different enchantments could be cast on any object in someones possession that replicate permanent enchantments. A person's belt could be made into a belt of giant strength effectively for a fight or two. A PC's weapon could be made 'flaming' or even 'vorpal' with high enough skill. That was the intent of the rules that I wrote.
In the case of the term "Drams", that is a personal indulgence of mine. I didn't want to calle them "dwimmer points" or "craft points" or any kind of "points". That, to me, felt meta-gamey. Ultimately, thought, it might have been the better choice for clarity. But in the end that's what they are, 'power points'.
Dwimmers are probably complex also because they are a lot like spells, but are a class feature. They share some spell-like features such as the chance that they could be interrupted, and that is intentional. infusions were long casting effects, that were also spell-like (though defined as NOT spells, despite spell formatting, and spell lists).
Now its entirely possible that dwimmers could be better written, but to some degree you have to write the rules without too much flourish and let people draw their own conclusions as to what those rules say are happening. That is just how one writes to be setting agnostic. I am open to any suggestions or criticism as to confusing aspects of the feature as written. Indeed, I welcome them as it helps me clarify and simplify things, elegance being the holy grail of game-rules-writing :D
I realise thread necromancy on something over 2 years dead is pushing it, but I have a fondness for "Craft all the things!" type classes. So I really wanted to get clarification on some stuff in order to use your class the way it was intended.
So I came across this while searching for Twin Agate Dragons PDF version of it. Is it the final version of the class, as there are a few differences between it and the google doc? And if so I'd be curious as to why you swapped round the levels you get skill mastery and the Extra charge ability.
My next next question is a little long. As I read it, in order to simulate a spell for crafting an item you have to 1) have that spell in your book, with its CL being Dependant on where it was learnt and 2) must make a UMD check (20 + CL the spell). You do this for each spell the item requires and if you succeed at all of them the craft DC is as if you met all the spell requirements. A failed check means you adjust the DC (or are unable proceed)as per the normal crafting rules. And according to the scribd PDF (the google doc is not clear on this bit) you need to do this even for spells learnt from the Ardwright list (though you get a +2 on UMD checks involving those spells).
Phew ok, so is all that correct?
Ah a part of my craft question I forgot about (and as I currently can't find the edit button, I will simply make a new post). So my question is actually do you need the spell AND the UMD check to meet a spell requirement for item crafting. Or do you just need one of them, in the same way the original 3.5 artificer worked.