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Poison Mushroom posted:Funny story, True Namers are the only primary casting class (afair) that actually go up a tier in Epic 6, since they cap out at "hard but not impossible with decent optimization". What was the deal with truenamers?
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Sep 29, 2015 03:49
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Anatharon posted:What was the deal with truenamers? They have to do a skill check every time they use their gimmick, and it gets harder as they level up (and their total chance of casting successfully goes down as they level, not up.)
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Sep 29, 2015 03:55
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wiegieman posted:They have to do a skill check every time they use their gimmick, and it gets harder as they level up (and their total chance of casting successfully goes down as they level, not up.) And each "spell" gets harder to use the more you use it, and only one can be active at a time. So imagine if a Wizard could only use Web or Grease on a successful Concentration check that got harder and harder (starting from an already-not-easy DC), and each time the Save DC got lower and lower (so enemies could succeed more easily).
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Sep 29, 2015 04:46
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Actual quote from the Tome of Magic posted:"Borukanthalau'quirialahn'imaush-anathir!" The short version is, a truenamer is a class who's stats don't progress as fast as the DCs to use those stats. In addition, most casters can target a weak save or defense (a level 1 sorcerer has a clean two in three chance of sleeping an ogre, a monster that would otherwise crush a level 1 party into paste) but the truenamer always rolls against a target number set by the enemy's challenge rating--meaning you can't play smart. But what does the class actually do? By speaking the true name of something, a truenamer can gain power over it. Each thing has a bunch of truenames; Round 1, you might need to say an ancient word that translates as, "That Ogre over there who has just noticed us and is hostile." The next round, it'll be, "That ogre who is charging at me waving an obsidian tipped club in the air." And then it'll be, "That Ogre who's obsidian tipped club is coated in the blood of my ally." So, every time you want to use a truename, you check again; even if you successfully used it last round. It's different now! Somehow. Also, this DC gets higher every time you use an utterance twice in a day. A truenamer can look up that specific ogre's truetruename, but that only makes it harder to say it in combat. Also it takes weeks and costs thousands of gold. So. The truenamer can use these truenames as standard actions to cast, "Utterances." These are basically spells cast at an unreasonably high target number, which goes up with utterance use. They also don't do much. At level 1, for example, you can give an ally +2 to a skill check (at a harder DC than just making an aid another check) or do 1d6 damage to a single enemy. You can do that damage again next round if you concentrate! The bonuses and penalties scale a little when you use higher level utterances. Also they can apply or remove certain conditions. If you focus on condition removal, eventually a truenamer will be able to remove almost any condition, which is useful. After a fight with a level draining undead, for example, a truenamer could give everyone their levels back--it'd just take a long time and involve a lot of flubbed checks. The damage from their utterances is so low and the DCs to inflict it are so high, if a truenamer wants to kill something, they should draw a sword and stab it. Remember that each time you spend two rounds to do 2d6 damage with your utterance, the DC for using it again goes up. So it's like a bow, that hits less often, deals less damage, and stops working after you shoot a few people. A few utterances let them interact with magic items in very limited ways , mostly an impossibly high check and a standard action to reduce the chance of critical hits against one ally by 25% for five rounds. Finally, at high levels they get the "Lexicon of the perfected map" which is basically a selection of fog and area based, level 1 and 2 wizard spells they can choose one or two of to cast. Before level 12 they get no real magical effects outside of combat buffs and debuffs, but at 12 they can turn rock into mud, which at a handful of uses is a fun way to ruin a dungeon. Except the mud turns back to rock one minute later. They fight and have the HP of thieves, without the neat thief combat features. They have a garbage skill selection. What are Truenamers good at? They have some bad healing utterances. They can scry someone at high levels, but it's a slow and expensive and awful. They can remove conditions pretty well. Also the fact you can't cast the same utterance very many times isn't much of a problem here--how often are you going to get paralyzed in one day? Remember that they can't reliably use their utterances on their allies in combat, because of the DCs. Two of the utterances stack to give a +15 to knowledge checks and let you make untrained knowledge checks as if you're trained. This lets the DM give exposition about literally anything to the party, and is probably the best way for a mid level party to answer unanswerable questions like, "Who's the illithid king this ten thousand year old statue is of, and why is it beneath this church of St. Cuthbert?" Honestly that is kind of neat, and would be a fun feature for a less bad class. Wait, it is a fun feature for a less bad class--bards do this. But truenamers do it marginally better. The buffs they get do exist, even if they're terrible single target garbage buffs. Also the buffs usually miss, because the DCs are so high and get higher. At level 20, they get a true nickname. Anyone they tell this true nickname to can summon the truenamer from anywhere in the world, and it doesn't work if the truenamer doesn't want to come. So that's fun! Aaaaaand... that's it, really. You can think of them as an awful bard variant. Should I play a truenamer- No. I wasn't done. Should I play a truenamer in a fun campaign where everyone's playing something odd and we're mostly drunk? Only if you don't mind being the worst in the party at everything. They can't be that bad. They're so bad that even though their buffs are un-typed and thus stack with literally any and all other bonuses in the game, the character optimizers never found a use for the truenamers. What role to truenamers play? The sage you pay 200 gold to in town to tell you the plot to the adventure.
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Sep 29, 2015 04:58
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Another quirk of the whole truenaming system was that in theory, any character could learn the skill for speaking truenames cross-class, or they could burn a feat selection to gain the skill as a normal class skill without having to multiclass as a truenamer. Why would you bother with this? Because there were a few spells for traditional spellcasting classes that had truenames as a component of the spell, requiring a check to cast them. Most of them were stuff you could already do with magic anyway, but there was a pair of spells I thought was kind of neat - spurn/expunge the supernatural. Spurn the supernatural would let you completely suppress a single supernatural ability possessed by the target as long as you concentrated on it. The higher level variant, expunge the supernatural, just straight up stripped the ability away from the target permanently. Though in practice, you'd probably never be able to make use of them because the mechanics for truenaming really weren't thought out very well.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:23
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A Truenamer who manages to reach level 20 can cast Gate without an XP cost, which is pretty dang powerful by 3.5e standards (even with all the other crap the Truenamer has to put up with dragging it down). That's about the only good thing they get though, and the other nineteen levels of the class are so miserable that it's not worth it unless you outright start at level 20. Even then, being a real caster would be better, as would some other things. Gate without an XP cost is stupid-powerful, but you're a one-trick pony with a lot of dumb limitations.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:28
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It was a neat idea, though. Same with the other two dubious classes in that book. Actually if you cut out every other spellcaster from the game and just left Shadowcasters/Truenamers/Binders you'd probably have something actually balanced against Fighters and Rogues.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:55
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Cabbit posted:It was a neat idea, though. Same with the other two dubious classes in that book. Binder isn't dubious; it's pretty solid from beginning to end.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:56
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fool_of_sound posted:Binder isn't dubious; it's pretty solid from beginning to end. Was it? That's the one that sticks out least in my mind-- potentially because it didn't stink out loud like Shadowcaster and Truenamer.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:57
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Binders are solid from what I've heard, while not being as powerful as other primary casters (unless you take a certain online-only vestige or something), so they're fine, yeah. I'm not really sure what the deal with shadowcasters is; I haven't heard much about them and haven't read much of ToM other than to experience the Truenamer for myself, because by the time I found out about it I had already moved on from 3.5e.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:59
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I hope rich is ok
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Sep 29, 2015 06:43
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Who knew telling it like it is would be so subpar.
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Sep 29, 2015 06:46
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I actually like the Truenamers thing where people can teleport you by saying your name. Sounds fun. And Binders rule, actually. Shadowcasters work fine and have a decent enough power level, but are kind of bland. Their "spells" are called mysteries and are basically just spells. They go up to 9th level like any other full caster, and the way the mysteries are organized into groups can sometimes be inconvenient. It's not too important here. By default they're "cast as Arcane spells" and you only get 1 use of each mysteries per day. Your lower level mysteries eventually advance to being cast as SLAs (and can be cast 2/day) and the lowest levels end up cast as Supernatural abilities (3/day). Beyond that, they have two casting stats, a wonky bonus feat rule, some cantrip-like mysteries that eventually become at-will and some minor abilities, like not needing to eat. That's about it? I played one and it wasn't all that interesting. Nihilarian fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 07:51
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Holy poo poo. Start a new thread on the bull poo poo. I hope Rich is okay so you can stop whacking off on a rule set.
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Sep 29, 2015 12:22
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Your sexual metaphor is gross and sexist, like most of Rich's dialogue whenever two women are on panel.
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Sep 29, 2015 12:50
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greatn posted:Your sexual metaphor is gross and sexist, like most of Rich's dialogue whenever two women are on panel.
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Sep 29, 2015 14:34
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I too really hate talking about the ruleset that the comic is based on and makes jokes about, and also my scrollwheel is broken and I am forced to read every post.
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Sep 29, 2015 14:41
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Poison Mushroom posted:Let's be fair. By the Girard's gate arc, he had mostly realized that and has gotten a lot better about it. Yeah I had just read origin of the PCs and book 1 the other week though.
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Sep 29, 2015 17:47
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greatn posted:Your sexual metaphor is gross and sexist, like most of Rich's dialogue whenever two women are on panel. if you take the alignment debate that turned into a paladin debate that turned into an edition war debate and turn it into a social justice debate I will internet throttle you so hard your head pops off like the plastic top on a bottle of ketchup
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Sep 30, 2015 04:26
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sebmojo posted:if you take the alignment debate that turned into a paladin debate that turned into an edition war debate and turn it into a social justice debate I will internet throttle you so hard your head pops off like the plastic top on a bottle of ketchup I'm pretty sure that's Chaotic Evil.
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Sep 30, 2015 05:36
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Trasson posted:I'm pretty sure that's Chaotic Evil. 4.0 is better because a paladin can do the exploding heads thing without losing all of his abilities, unlike 3.5, which is the objectively worse edition.
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Sep 30, 2015 06:18
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Uranium Phoenix posted:4.0 is better because a paladin can do the exploding heads thing without losing all of his abilities, unlike 3.5, which is the objectively worse edition. 
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Sep 30, 2015 06:21
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 Your worst http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1007.html
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Sep 30, 2015 11:35
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For whatever reason, I kinda doubt that an evil spirit designed by Hel for the explicit purpose of being her high priest would reject Hel's schemes. 
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Sep 30, 2015 12:13
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It's almost as if the spirit exists to deceive everyone around it.
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Sep 30, 2015 12:35
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That was kind of a boring strip with just exposition of information we already had. Although seeing it and having read origin recently, I wonder why the Thor high priest was such a jerk about it? There's no good reason even by his own dumb logic he couldn't have let Durkon say his goodbyes and gather necessary supplies. Throwing him out as callously as that seems the most likely way to get him to return in the future. greatn fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 13:14
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greatn posted:That was kind of a boring strip with just exposition of information we already had. I think that's because the most nitpicky interpretation of the prophecy is him even leaving his house and returning could fulfill it and since they are dwarfs, they obviously went with that idea. e X fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 13:19
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poo poo they could have at least given him some coin. Go team Hel.
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Sep 30, 2015 13:25
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It's kind of a weak argument. "Aha, in your lowest moment you once said 'gently caress all of those guys' and now I am indeed going to gently caress them all! Is this not what you wanted?! You're just as bad as me!"
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Sep 30, 2015 14:29
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I don't think the spirit can force Durkon to fade away, it can only persuade him to. Which is what it's trying right now. If Durkon accepts not even trying to stop killing his best friend...
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Sep 30, 2015 14:46
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Dang, Durkon's character development arc has been a long time in the making but when it rains...
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Sep 30, 2015 15:17
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greatn posted:That was kind of a boring strip with just exposition of information we already had. Considering that literally earlier in this thread people were saying strips were pointless because what Durkula was saying wasn't real, it's pretty meaningful to point out that it actually is real and this is actual resentment and feelings Durkon has.
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Sep 30, 2015 15:24
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I think this explains a lot about OotS vampires. The premise of OotS vampires seems to be basically this: The only way vampirism can work is if your body is piloted by some completely different spirit, because the alternative - forced alignment changes - make no sense. You can't take Roy Greenhilt, say, and say "forced alignment change" and end up with Evil Roy Greenhilt. Many or all personalities of a given alignment have no negative. To put it mathematically, -x is undefined for some values of x. Because Roy Greenhilt's personality is fundamentally built on at least his Good alignment. Forced alignment changes essentially render personality meaningless in the first place. So the idea is that instead, spirits are in some way born from, or at least develop their personality based on, the Negativity that lies within a person, no matter how infinitesimal that spark may be. It's essentially an answer to a 'what if', namely 'what if all the temptations to evil had dominated throughout your life, and none of the temptations to good had?' Thus, the extent to which the original spirit will recognise the vampire spirit depends on how significant a part their Negativity played when they were living. For Durkon, it's utterly unrecognisable. But for Malack, it may have been quite similar, being that Malack was probably evil in the first place. Thus the dissonance between Vampire Spirit Malack and Original Malack may have been less obvious, leading to Original Malack forgetting his own distinct identity long ago. We see Durkon's mind as a place, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is; that might just be due to the limitations of a webcomic as a visual medium. It may rather be that Durkon's struggle is more akin to humans fighting themselves in real life. Humans do things, knowing them to be foolish and irrational actions. Humans are not singular entities, but composite ones. For example, consider the System 1/System 2 distinction as described by Daniel Kahneman. It's quite well understood now that, at the very least, one's mind can be described in two parts: a fast 'System 1' which responds quickly to external stimuli, and a slow 'System 2' which is more contemplative, and, importantly, while it receives all sensory information, it isn't necessarily in charge of the decision-making process. It's been shown that the mind actually makes decisions before people become aware of them, and they then rationalise them. Thus, 'System 2' is not so much a decision-making faculty (at least, not in the immediate instant) as it is a post-morteming faculty. But so long as you agree with the actions taken by the fast, intuitive System 1, the illusion that System 1 and System 2 are one is preserved, as is the illusion of full free will, of autonomous decision-making capacity. It's only when System 1 takes a decision, and then System 2 cannot rationalize it, that the synthesized illusion is broken, and the disparity becomes clear; the disparity between what you know you rationally should have done, and what you did. So Malack may not have recognised such a great and obvious divide between 'Malack at the Controls' and 'Malack in the Back' because they were such similar people that the illusion of them being a singular, coherent being was never broken. It may be, in the first place, that the only reason 'Durkon' exists as a discrete element in Durkula's mind is because of the sheer magnitude of the disparity of their actions and worldview, breaking the illusion in just the same way. But that may stand only so long as Durkon maintains his distinct identity.
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Sep 30, 2015 15:27
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Asgerd posted:It's kind of a weak argument. "Aha, in your lowest moment you once said 'gently caress all of those guys' and now I am indeed going to gently caress them all! Is this not what you wanted?! You're just as bad as me!" That's not the argument at all. The argument is that you own all your actions and thoughts and can't just bury and repress to pretend you are something you are not. The vampire is the worst of Durkon but those elements are still part of Durkon
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Sep 30, 2015 15:39
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Kajeesus posted:For whatever reason, I kinda doubt that an evil spirit designed by Hel for the explicit purpose of being her high priest would reject Hel's schemes. But the only reason he was there to be so is because he was cast out and, as a result, had feelings in her support. It is the self fulfilling nature of prophecy
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Sep 30, 2015 15:42
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Fried Chicken posted:That's not the argument at all. The argument is that you own all your actions and thoughts and can't just bury and repress to pretend you are something you are not. The vampire is the worst of Durkon but those elements are still part of Durkon That's also not his argument, he's saying that Durkon's base nature is his truth, and the rest is a facade. Nokrud is just that without the facade.
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Sep 30, 2015 15:49
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The argument (and this is a fairly common argument) is that you can only define yourself by what you do at your worst possible moment. You can't really argue "I wouldn't have killed that guy in any other situation, it was just the wrong time!" You can certainly point out that you wouldn't have done that in another situation but it doesn't change the fact that when push came to shove you sure killed that guy. In essence, this shows that if you push Durkon low enough he would in fact do exactly that and DID do exactly that. He might have regretted it later, he might have forgotten about it, he might not have done it in a different situation but when the chips were down he cursed the dwarves to Hel which is a bit more meaningful for a priest in a magic setting to do.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:00
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E: Do you think that if at that moment Hel had appeared and said "Sure thing! Say the word, and I'll swipe the souls of those guys and torture them for eternity," Durkon would have been on board?Fried Chicken posted:But the only reason he was there to be so is because he was cast out and, as a result, had feelings in her support. It is the self fulfilling nature of prophecy But Yurkon is saying that the only reason he wants to kill all dwarves is because deep down Durkon wants to kill all dwarves, because of that time three dwarves betrayed his trust and consigned him to a cruel fate. Any vampire dwarf cleric would have gone along with Hel's plan, regardless of that dwarf's feelings on dwarfhood. It's a pretty cruel reversal on the fiends telling Vaarsuvius that V wasn't responsible for their actions. Zulily Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 16:04
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This is just the classic example of that literary trope where Satan explains to the heroes why they are the real bad guys. Of course it's a bollocks argument there and it's a bollocks argument here. The creature saying it is a lying liar who lies. By definition he's either going to put the worst spin on things or take them out of context. You don't try and debate such a creature, you dismiss it (possibly by casting Dismissal on it) and move on.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:04
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This remind me of a bible story. There one with that guy, losses everything, he curses everyone in his weakest moment but never god. Then he gets everything back times ten. Forget his name.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:05
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