Powers of Persuasion
And there she is folks, the fourth and final member of The Evil Party. It’s been a good long while since Thief wanted to cut a bitch back in Prince Charming, but Succubus has finally stepped up to become our first monstrous Hero!
For those of you who have never slapped ranger levels onto a unicorn, I sympathize. It’s a great big rules headache to make that mess work! Monsters and PCs tend to be built along different lines, meaning that comparing power levels is often an apples to otyughs sort of situation.
Worse, even if you do manage to come up with rules that can make the conversion work on a mechanical level, scratching that “holy shit guys we’re playing dragons!” itch can be a problem. Take my recent dragon riders game. We used some pretty cool 3rd party rules, and they did a great job keeping our dragons and our riders on the same power level. I even thought it was a nice touch that you could choose to be a fear-focused dragon, or a breath weapon specialist, or just stick to being a big mean murder wyrm. Some of my players disagreed. I believe the phrase “we’re just a bunch of overgrown kobolds” came up. If you’re a monster, you want to feel like a monster! Overbalance too much and your risk losing out on half the fun.
And all that’s to say nothing of the worldbuilding difficulties. It’s hard enough getting good service at Ye Olde Inn when you’re an antipaladin. It’s practically impossible if you have the misfortune to be a nightmare murder horse.
So how about it guys? Have you ever played in a monstrous game? What about a mixed party of monsters and base races? How did it work out? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Witch, Necromancer, Antipaladin, & Succubus huh. So basically Antipaladin is just there to buy time for the other three to raise/enchant an army.
I actually forgot what Witch was and wound up looking in the cast page for her, only to find the Evil Party isn’t there yet.
Nor is my favorite piglet, who really needs to end up being a companion or some such of one of the non-hero teams.
I have played monster characters before and they are a nightmare to make work. I can’t really say much for how those games worked out as they always died before the problems of playing monster characters could be the cause of the game’s death. shrug
Necromancer is pretty good at filling out the front line of the party. Succubus, on the other hand, is pretty good at filling out the front line of that bustier.
Don’t sell Necromancer short, she also is quite good at filling out the front line of the bustier.
On that note, might we ever see a wrestling match between Druid and Succubus?
LET’S NOT START THAT AGAIN
?
“Start that again”?
Explain.
Also, who’d want to see an elf wrestle anything? They’re twiggy and androgynous.
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2pa2b&page=1?Succubus-in-a-grapple
My gods, that thread just keeps getting worse. Despite occasional attempts to keep it on topic.
I played in a monster game as a Pixie Wizard from the fey resistance (monster types was being hunted down), I can’t recall most of what happen as the campaign was about as I join part way in, but We was being send by some big guy to steal some super magic book.
Some how made it to the book, the book was behind some magic force field with 2 adamantine golems keeping it safe (I did put out the cost for the city it would be to build and own them, GM did not say thing when I pointed that out so don’t think he was thinking about that), It was taking too long to undo the force field So i hit it with my one per day dispel magic from being a Pixie and rolled well that the ghost in the group was able to fly and teleport the book, the rest of us ran for it and go out.
Turns out that the GM never plan for us to get the book and wanted us to come back later to plan a way to get it, GM ended there, no idea why, life maybe.
But I never forgot the power of the fey resistance
It was like that in an old high school game with the deck of many things. We borked the campaign past all recognition, and the DM ended it there. When you’ve got pixies and ghosts and decks of many things flying around in your game though, that’s a “shame on you” situation for the GM. You’ve got to expect the unexpected when you’ve got that much weirdness! It can be all manner of intimidating when you wind up way off the rails, but that’s part of the challenge, you know?
Not a monstrous game as such. It’s usually just me.
Plyed a mutated giant cat in WFRP years ago (“Don’t worry, it’s tame!”). A cybernetic wolf in a cyberpunk game. A dragon in AD&D (completely broken, but the campaign wasn’t terribly serious anyway). Lately a chimera in DnD4 (completely flipped out campaign. A chimera isn’t very odd compared to things you usually find in the far realms…).
I didn’t like DnD4 when I first saw it, but after a while I realized they had a lot of really good ideas in it. Too bad they couldn’t put them together in a good package… Making new and strange PC races works great in that system, DnD5 is much worse.
Do you have a different personality for each chimera head?
As for the question of systems-support, I love the crap out of Starfinder’s solution. They assumed that players would want the Mos Eisley cantina, so half the monster manual comes with separate “if you want to play this weirdo” rules. Check out the goblin:
https://i1.wp.com/geekdad.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/08/StarfinderGoblin.jpg?resize=807%2C1024&ssl=1
It’s got monster stats at left and PC stats at top right. I thought it was a pretty elegant solution to the “where do we print all these new races?” problem.
Only one personality, the alternative wouldn’t really have worked with some of the other players. I did submit a chimera with that “condition” to a Fantasy HERO PBEM years ago, but the game never got of the ground. Too bad – even had activation roll on the duplicates (extra heads) to represent them arguing with each other when they should be working. ;-D
I wasn’t aiming for monstrous races exactly, but it came up in a discussion a little while back that WotC seemed absolutely terrified of letting players play large-sized races. AFAIK there’s not a single large-sized standard race; even the Goliaths from Races of Stone are medium. Anything bigger than medium usually comes with RHD and/or level-adjustment, which sometimes works out alright for melee classes like Fighter and Barbarian, but absolutely kills any chance you have for a large-size spellcaster.
And I get that maybe an Ogre at the Wizard academy might feel a little out of place, but certainly you could have made something like a Minotaur Shaman or a Loxo Warmage without needing to have a CR or ECL in the double-digits right from the start.
I think this fear ultimately comes down to dungeon delving; they make dungeons assuming the largest size of the PC is medium, and large PCs make those 5 ft corridors and tight squeezes suddenly major obstacles or impassable for a PC without reduce, and those 5 ft ledges minor obstacles. Unfortunately, WotC seems to think the solution to this is to limit PC options in what they can play.
I would really love to hear a WotC rationalization of the choice. Is reach just that powerful for a melee dude? Is the dungeon design problem, as you suggest? Maybe we’re worried about dropping appropriately sized magical gear?
In 5E for every size below medium there’s a 100 percent boost to a medium weapon’s damage dice.
A medium maul does 2D6, a large maul does 4D6, a huge maul does 6D6.
In that system, what would an equivalent small sized weapon do for damage?
There is nothing in the PHB that says large weapons deal extra damage.
In fact, the only rule I can find on it is DMG 278, “Big monsters typically wield oversized weapons that deal extra dice of damage on a hit.” the wording of which still allows us the wiggle room of saying that this extra damage only applies to ‘big monsters’ or that their weapons have some special hidden trait other than being big.
But yeah, this is the main reason against big PCs.
The most elegant homebrew solution that someone suggested and that I would love to try was a new size category called “Big” that still fit in a 5×5 ft square but was to Medium the way Medium was to Small. That way you could incorporate some of the benefits of size without in all the problems, too.
Maybe, but not every dungeon is like that and players aren’t going into the situation blindly (unless they are brand new, maybe). Given the sheer variety of options in 3.5, it seems like an odd place to draw the line.
Back in D&D 3.5 (more than a decade ago), I DM’d for a group of high-schoolers. This particular group of people often came up with bizarre and interesting character concepts. Ofcourse, I was also the rules-lawyer and power-gamer of the group, and as such character creation was never done as a solo mini-game performed only by the player. I was always involved, and not just to verify their ability score rolls. My main role was to ensure that no matter the concept, a player’s power-level wouldn’t dramatically outshine any of the other players.
Examples of such monstrous characters were: a Grig Ninja, an Incubus Beguiler, and a Gold Dragon Paladin. To build these characters, I used a combination of Racial Bloodlines (from Unearthed Arcana), and Monster Classes (from Savage Species); and if I had to homebrew something to make it work, I would.
Strangely enough, the only monstrous character to “break” my games was the incubus beguiler (and it had little to do with it’s racial bonus to Charisma; he could’ve been a plain human commoner and still broken my campaign). The issue was, that I had never had any experience with diplomancer’s before. I knew the rules for Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate, etc (but they almost never came up). It usually resulted in players rolling a d20 + Cha vs a d20 + Wis (sometimes a character would put a single rank or two into the skill). I learned just how quickly how powerful diplomacy and bluff could be when you 1) maxed out ranks in the skills, 2) spent feats on Skill Focus (Bluff or Diplomacy), 3) spent another feat on Negotiator or Persuasive, 4) utilizing EVERY skill synergy there is with Bluff & Diplomacy, 5) spend all your wealth on magical items that boost your Bluff and Diplomacy. Needless to say the total bonus for bluff and diplomacy were so high that no creature in the massive dungeon that I had written up even had a chance. Say nothing for the plethora of spells in the beguiler’s repertoire (using Glibness would give the character a high enough bonus to instill EPIC non-magical suggestions).
Needless to say, I gained a newfound respect for diplomancer’s during that game. Although, after that game I never once had another player attempt to build a diplomancer.
Those “RPG lies,” man… They are wacky:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/charm-anything
I was actually intending to talk about PC vs. PC mind control on this comic, but realized I’d done that one back here already:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/prince-charming
How did you handle the question of beguiler vs. the rest of the party?
Actually, with that group of gamers, I never had players wanting to go PC vs PC. It came up with other groups, just not the one with the incubus beguiler. And in games where PC did face off with PC, it was in a pre-established arena, where rules of engagement were very well established and enforced.
I’ve never played as one, and I’m like 70 percent sure I’ve never played against one.
Prime candidates for monsters with class levels are Illithids, Succubi/Incubi, Cambions, Giants, and Dragons.
How would you make that work mechanically in 5e?
Apply class features, skill, weapon, and armor proficiencies. Don’t necessarily apply save proficiencies or hit dice.
Seems straightforward.
Well yeah, but how do you monster CR to class levels? Obviously a gold dragon first level fighter is a bit different than a human first level fighter.
DMG pg. 274.
So what class levels does Succubus have?
Do HandBook-verse Succubi have the 5E power to switch freely back and forth to Incubi?
Well then. There’s a future comic waiting to happen.
I mean they can also shapeshift freely into humanoids, so there’s hijinks abound.
For me, a big part of playing a monstrous PC is playing a distinctly alien creature; the stats just help immerse you into that roll. I once played a warforged primeval ranger that I played as a juvenile trent, with spells like entangle and goodberry to really amp up the “treant” feel. It made for an interesting PC in the otherwise “normal” party.
I’m getting into the idea of themed casters here lately. “I’m a friggin’ tree” seems like a pretty solid theme, lol. How did you RP being a treant?
Couple of things. He was a bit distant from everyone else. He viewed the rest of the party the way a human might view a nice garden they are growing; certainly nice, useful, interesting, and he’s invested a lot in them and wants to protect them from pests/monsters, but he views them as biologically fundamentally different. Trecking into humanoid lands was like walking through a jungle; you may encounter some thorns, some weeds, maybe some fruit or honeysuckle, and it would certainly be a shame to see plants needlessly torn up and tragic to see a whole section of jungle burned down, but it’s not the same as seeing those things as “people.”
He was rather temperate, the archetypal “true neutral,” but found the rest of the party’s “animalistic” desires (boozing, a libido, etc) amusing rather than scornful. He may not party with the rest of the group, but he will let the drunk halfling climb up in his branches and pass out there (it reminded him of squirrels). Humanoids in generals were amusing and entertaining to him; traveling their lands was kind of like a Safari for him.
Also, he knows he’s likely going to outlast all the races with the possible exception of the elf, but felt it was rather rude to remind them of their own short life spans. The way he viewed humanoid civilization in general, and industrialization in particular, is kinda like how kudzu is viewed in America. He sees it as invasive and annoying, covering and spoiling everything, but it’s not exactly something you can burn back. You just kind of deal with it and try to keep it from encroaching on your own land (his forest).
Not a monster game, but that campaign I was attempting with mechs has had some particular balancing problems of its own… namely going from a soft and squishy person who can’t take more than a few bullets to kill, and balance it with their mech that can take multiple shots from a tank…
We have some other resources we are looking into, to find a better solution.
This wouldn’t be Rifts, would it? Mega-damage is rough!
No, it was a heavily modified variant of Ships of Skyborne, since you could build almost anything using its construction rules… But the HP scaling and movement system don’t really lend themselves to what I wanted to do with the mech theme…
There is another system that uses less HP (comparable to PCs), but has “Heavy” type weapons, which are the only weapons that can damage armored targets.
I wanted something that was heavily customizable, but that may be too difficult in the long run.
If anyone else has a favorite mech based d20 system or a Diesle-Punk system that they liked, I would like to hear about them.
I absolutely adore ‘monster’ heroes, or even just rare player-character races. One of the campaigns I ran actually was a ‘party of dragons’ game. Using the storylines and plot ideas in an AD&D module called “Council of Wyrms”, but uplifted to Pathfinder and that very same third-party book you linked to.
In mixed monster-nonmonster parties, however, I seem to prefer characters who used to be nonmonsters, like undead and lycanthropes. Though I normally DM so I’m restricted to NPC’s, the two times I got to play monster characters were some of my favorites. In a more humorous game, I got to play a Lich on ‘vacation’, leaving the dungeon he served as the ‘last boss’ of to go surfaceside in disguise. To him, “going around and killing things for treasure isn’t that different from what we do in the dungeon”. Which the party took for him being an experienced adventurer. Hilarity ensued.
Another character I’d love to try again was a result of me getting another book, “The Noble Wild”, which allows you to play… sort of awakened animals? I used the book to create an apprentice wizard who had been hit with a permanent Baleful Polymorph by his paranoid master who thought he’d eventually become a threat. So he was a grumpy black cat for the entire campaign.
I’ve always wanted to use Noble Animals to riff on this book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Night_in_the_Lonesome_October
Being the loyal companions who actually get shit done for their incompetent masters sounds like a hoot.
Could have a Homward Bound-esq game…
Homeward Bound*
Love auto-correct working as it pleases…
I guess for anyone not familiar with it…
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107131/?mode=desktop&ref_=m_ft_dsk
The Noble Wild is a pretty good option. The game I used it for, I was a Mountain Lion, and because of their reputation, he was not allowed inside the walls of towns visited. Because of this, he had to be very stealthy and secretive about his business. It was pretty fun, to be honest.
Another player that game played a Songbird Bard, and because of that, was much more welcomed in towns. Still freaked out some superstitious folk (because what’s next? The family dog talking?) but overall the bird wasn’t shunned.
As I prepare to return home for the summer, I have proposed to my old gaming group an Illithid campaign that I’d love to run, but they seem to want an Oregon Trail/Gold Rush campaign instead. What a shame.
Two concurrent campaigns. The gold is part of a massive resurrection ritual for a dead elder brain. Can the valiant illithids hold off the greedy adventurers long enough to restore their fallen hive mind?
Run every other session as one group vs. the other. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern yourselves!
Oh man, this question is right up my alley! I almost exclusively play games in the Planescape campaign setting, which is hard to play without a bestial race.
I believe I have gone on length in the past about my Badger-Hengeyokai in 3.5, he went into a PrC called Primeval which emphasized his bestial and primal nature.
I think I’ve also mentioned my Wildren Beguiler/Swiftblade (the good guy in the evil party that was addicted to casting Haste on himself).
There’s also my Bariaur characters, which have usually been Knights, Cavaliers (in a Pathfinder translation), and Duskblades. Bariaur are like centaurs (though don’t let them hear you say that) that have the body of a goat/sheep (the art has never really been clear on that) and the upper body of a human. They are medium creatures (despite goats normally being small).
And on a forum game (and briefly in the Emerald Spire mega-dungeon) I even played a Talking Mountain Lion (in the vein of a Narnian beast, and not an Awakened one).
It’s hard to pick my favorite character though, because I think I’ve grown through those characters. In my first Bariaur game, for example, I was a Duskblade in a very mixed and monstrous party. I was a very minor character in that cast, and looking back on it, my youthfulness showed in that game. It was nice to see a master-roleplayer at work though, a Minotaur (Krynnotaur) Cleric(zilla) of Heironeous. He challenged Hades for the souls of his family, and plane-shifted a Balor off a layer of the abyss.
For the most part, my bestial characters have fit in with their groups, and I don’t think I’ve really had a character whose bestial nature was front and center, so I haven’t really had to challenge it. The games have never really focused on the monstrosities of a character, partially due to the setting they are played in. Perhaps one day I’ll get to play one of the character’s on my backburner, which would make his monstrosity hard to ignore. I dunno though, that’s a long way away.
The more I hear about it, the more Plandscape sounds like the gonzo kind of game I want to play. Throw everything in a melting pot and see what comes out the other side. I’ve got to wonder if WotC is ever thinking about bringing that setting back?
Planescape can be very lenient, but in its purest form it is strict and very alignment heavy. It certainly does have its intricacies but is still “gonzo” as you said.
Many adventures might happen in the Inner Planes (The Para/Quasi/Elemental Planes and the Positive/Negative Energy Planes), but just as many will take place in the Outer Planes.
Due to the specific alignment aspect of each of the planes, there are various penalties that will occur if someone of an opposing alignment exists in certain planes. There are also a lot of environmental issues, like the Wasting Sickness of The Gray Waste (and the opposite for Elysium) which forces the character to change mental status if they fail certain saves. Magical effects differ from plane to plane. For example, on the Beastlands, nonmagical flight doesn’t work: only flight through physical means such as biological wings. Wings produced through magic fail. And alignment plays a big role just because you are traversing the planes on which Gods dwell.
But the biggest aspect, and probably the most lenient and useful for players is The Outlands, the plane that represents True Neutral and has gatetowns to every Outer Plane. And at the center of the Great Wheel stands the Pillar. The closer you get to this infinitely tall spire, the more magic fails.
And floating at the top of the infinitely tall spire is Sigil, City of Doors. It leads to every plane that has ever existed. It’s really quite an amazing idea. You can walk into a tavern and see a Pit Fiend in a drinking contest with a Planetar. A half-dragon centaur and a troll could be negotiating a deal in the backroom. Anything and everything that is not one-of-a-kind (and many things that are) can be found in Sigil. It’s a wild city.
And naturally, any GM can choose to use as much of it and as little of the setting’s rules as they want. But in its purest form, it is a lot to take in. Given WotC’s emphasis on simplicity in 5E, I don’t think Planescape would be a good fit for the edition without severely reducing the multitude of options available.
Now see, this sense of discovery is the sort of thing I want out of ALL my TRPGs. It’s cool to have a setting specifically dedicated to providing players with that feeling.
One the one hand, as a GM I’m fond of giving characters the item they desire (in the way that 4E encouraged it (and 5E I think, I might be wrong on that one)). But on the other hand, as a player I’d be worried about an “If everyone is super, nobody will be” situation, because everyone would have a gimmicky item.
It certainly allows for all sorts of off-brand shenanigans. Perhaps a store has a catalog of unique items, stored in a magical gallery. And of course, it need not be an item that is unique, but a life-form.
Yeah, I can kinda see where there would be a sense of discovery tied to it. The challenge would be making it so that the characters don’t grow jaded when surrounded by such a setting.
My friends and inonce played a campaign in which monstrous characters were allowed. I had also due to a forgetting one email thought it was a evil campaign, so my first demonic spider sorcerer character didn’t last too long due to party conflict. My next character after that was just a regular Magus tierling cause i was just curious what being a magus was like. I might have gone a fair bit munchkiny with both. The rest of our party was a giant giant specializijg it psychically getting more giant, a sky dragon monk, a really high druid flying on a pterodactyl, and our gunslinger who owned the airship we flew on and who was allowed to take the leadership feat cause he really didnt understand how to build his character so that helped balance it. Overall, we were decently balanced, though the monk needed a few nerfs, as did my magus, and my spider likely would have too if he lasted any longer.
Well that sounds like a hoot and a half. I know I’d love to see that dragon monk build. I’ve never tried to make feral combat training work, and I’m curious to see how it plays in practice.
I dont know if feral combat training even existed back then. Regardless, he didnt use it, instead he used a human form for combat and used tiger style for it.
Ha! And here I am letting my Cavalier’s riding gecko learn dragon style. Deep rules systems make for bizarre characters.
Thats for sure:), i always like all the weird and awesome stuff you can do in pahfinder, i maybe doing just 5e for the last 2 years since thats what my group prefers, or atleast our dm, but pathfinder is still my favorite. 5e is defintely second best to me though, for fixing alot of he problems with 3.5 and pathfinder, but with the problem of considerably lower ability to customize your character’s abilities.
I think you’ve summed up my feelings on the subject pretty damn well. Seriously man, that is one of the most accurate and concise pros/cons descriptions I’ve seen for the two systems. GJ!
I played in one monster game and am currently running another. In the one I played in, the DM foolishly allowed me to play a troll. I immediayely went barbarian, got feats to stay conscious at negative HP, and invested everything I had in resistances to fire and acid. I routinely finished fights in the negatives, only alive thanks to Regeneration, and in one glorious case, at negative 100-something HP standing atop the corpse of a demon-spider the size of a house.
For some reason, no one wanted to play a troll in the monster game I’m running. We do, however, have a half-giant half-dragon hair metal skald with an actual electric guitar axe, and a talking cat. Between the two of them, the cat is more dangerous.
I feel like I want that skald painted on the side of my van.
I LOVE to play monstrous races/uncommon races, or just plain weird stuff. I enjoy the roll-play aspect of the game, but my favorite part of any tabletop game is the roleplay. I like figuring out what this monstrous humanoid’s life was like, what its personality is, why it’s being a help instead of a hindrance.
I’ve mentioned my red dragon that was cursed to be trapped in a humanoid form and who eventually realized he’d gone CG over time and ended the campaign as mayor of a town in another topic and told his whole story there, so I’ll not repeat it here to save time/sanity/boredom levels.
My highest level character I’ve ever had was a kobold in a DM’s homebrew setting. We had a kobold Gunslinger/eventual Shaman, a Gnoll Inquisitor of the thundergod, a Ratfolk Bard/Rogue, and a member of a custom race for the setting, basically ‘Sentient magical energies sealed inside a human-shaped cloth container.’ Other characters that went in and out of the game were an elf magus, and an orc fighter. We basically REFUSED to have a ‘normal’ race after the elf left the game, and I temporarily switched out the kobold to play a kitsune Titan Mauler Barbarian/Mammoth Rider PrC.
Then that same DM did a short game where everyone played an Awakened Animal. We had an armadillo oracle/paladin (This one was mine,) a squirrel alchemist, a cat swashbuckler, a hare monk, and a ferret arcanist, all in a world where all the humanoid races had died out because of the ‘shadows’ they’d ‘summoned’ that was heavily implied to be nanomachine swarms at the end.
Hmm… Then I did a game where the PCs were a human swashbuckler, a kitsune magus, an Aasimar-kobold bard, and a tiefling rogue. It was book one of Rise of the Runelords but my ability to DM was kind of shaky and eventually half the players just kind of got bored of how slowly things were progressing and the game was called on account of college responsibilities from a couple of players anyway.
My current game has a kobold knife master rogue, and a badgerfolk (The DM was kind enough to let me use the race creator to make the race from scratch,) Mendevian Priest Cleric of Gorum (That one’s mine,) taking part in the Hell’s Rebels campaign with two humans from the city it takes place in.
In every case, we’ve all had a ton of fun just trying to reason out why all these strange, uncommon, weird, inhuman creatures would be trying to be the ‘good guys’ (Or in some cases, the ‘Not quite as bad as those’ guys.) It’s just so much more fun to me to add that additional layer of ‘But why would they?’ to a character’s backstory.
OK then. I’ll bite. How did you rationalize the ‘sentient magical energies sealed inside a human-shaped cloth container’ joining the party?
They weren’t particularly special in a motivational sense, they had the same needs as every other mortal race barring food and drink. They were just this weird race that showed up soon after a doomsday event destroyed most of the planet’s land mass in the distant past.
If I recall right, they didn’t need to eat or sleep, but they were understandably a bit fragile and were in constant need of physical and magical maintenance to keep their energies and their ‘shell’ in good condition which took the place of sleep. This one was with the group mostly because it was work – we were running a cargo fleet that carried goods around between the various civilized landmasses left, and it was good work. Plus the admiral of the fleet (the ratfolk) had promised help dealing with a personal situation of his in exchange for having a new sword on board. I don’t think we ever found out what that situation was, though.
Reminds me of this critter (not mine, but I LOVE the character concept!) named Nidl (pronounced “needle”): https://www.deviantart.com/lgliang/art/Nidl-the-Seamtient-669002486
She’s made of string (cosmic string, no less), and her job is to go around sewing up the rips and tears in reality that are constantly being caused by BBEGs/adventurers. Her twin swords click together into a giant pair of scissors.
I think you’ve discovered a new species of inevitable: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/inevitable/
Nope, not yet. Some day, though. Wistful sigh.
Wait a minute… Weren’t you a skeleton person married to another skeleton person with a skeleton baby?
I’m not certain a Solar is considered “non-monstrous”.
Well,….. If your Party Consists of an Nigh ominpotent Lich Wizard, his ancient Wardemon Butler, a nigh invincible Swarm of Sentinent Plants (Leshi) fused with their Eidolon into a Twoheaded sake, and a Humble Dwarven Druid of who worships Volcanos, and literlly throws around Meteors the Local Townguard will NOT argue with you.
Also with all that Magic Power we packed it was a fairly easy task to pass as Human/Dwarv etc.
Yeesh. What level does that kind of party even start at?
(In 5E at least) you need to have access to 9th level magic to be a Lich because you need to be able to cast Imprisonment to feed souls to your phylactery, so 17+.
In systems based off 3e, you simply need to have a caster level of 11 (usually caster levels are 1:1 for class levels, but there are ways to get ahead and some classes in 3.0 and 3.5 only got 1/2 caster level progression) and have… Craft Wondrous Item, IIRC. Never had any lich PCs in my gaming groups (although one character has briefly considered it) so I’m a little rusty on the rules, but you didn’t need 9s.
Or you could play a Dread Necromancer in 3.5, which was basically a necromancy-focused Sorcerer who slowly became a lich. The capstone IIRC actually gave you the phylactery, although I think at that point it was free or something to make up for the fact that you spent 20 levels doing what anyone else could have done by level 11 at the latest.
Free phylactery with level-up. Collect all seven in your Deady Meal to join the Voldemort Club!
Why yes we were Lvl 17. It was a very High Lvl Oneshot. We all got to let our inner Munchkins out for some play. For a Oneshot it was fun!
System was Pathfinder
So when’s the cast page getting updated?
I am going to be updating it this week! I am admittedly a little swamped with the new addition to the Patreon lineup.
I am 200% about that monster character. Back in the day, I used to pester my DM to let me play oddball monster races. These days, especially after a stint with the World of Darkness games, I’ve come to appreciate the concept of making a normal person who has a monstrous mentality.
Be it the alchemist who wants to Theseus themselves into a new state of being one stolen organ at a time, the artist who uses his wizard’s schooling to orchestrate murderous masterpieces, or the summoner who uses ‘protecting his freedom’ as an excuse to bring ravenous monsters into this world, I just love toeing the line between neutral and evil.
I’m tempted to work with something nature themed, like a Shifter or Hunter, that really embodies the unpredictable savagery of the animal kingdom. The kind of being that looks upon the inevitable encroachment of civilization in the same way a seer might look upon the vast eldritch horrors of the void: Awe and curiosity tempered by an unrelenting tenacity to preserve their way of life.
I had a reach cleric back in the day with the plant (growth) and tactics domains. He was an eco-warrior raised by treants. The dude’s mission was to plant trees at the edges of towns and farms, then use plant growth spells to make them pop up in strategically inconvenient locations. The goal was to get settlers to say, “Ain’t no use. Dern forest seems to have it in for us. We’re heading back east!” It was a silly and short-lived concept, but I enjoyed coming up with the explanation for the weird domain mix.
I imagine you could do a similar motivation with much crueler methods.
I actually really like the Pathfinder Race Builder for this sort of thing. You don’t end up super overpowered (unless your GM likes your Undead Monster so much he gives you extra levels, a Mythic tier, and a checklist of players to kill) but you can be something pretty out there! With it I’ve built;
A Large Undead with claws and a grim-reaper-ish lean
A Tiny Construct who ran around rigging things to explode
A Cybernetic Bug Monster who just wanted everyone to leave him alone so he could do his magical research and…
Artorias of the Abyss, from Dark Souls
Oh, and a TV-headed humanoid who was just me messing around to see how high I could get his AC
I’d be curious to see the bug man race. Was it very close to this guy?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/other-races/more-races/monstrous-races-21-30-rp/trox-28-rp/
Cybernetic Hiveborn
Type
Humanoid (Insectoid)
Half-Construct
Size
Medium
Speed
Normal
Ability Score
Advanced
+2 STR, +2 DEX, +2 CON, +4 INT, -2 WIS
Language
Xenophobic
Defensive Traits
Natural Armor
-Improved Natural Armor
Plagueborn
Feat and Skills
Silent Hunter
Movement
Burrow
Senses
Carrion Sense
Yo! What kind of total were you working with on the build points? Seems like a pretty beefy bug!
IIRC it was 21 points. I also made a version without the armor, half-construct trait, and with the swarming ability added, to represent non-cybernetic members of the species.
I’ve never had the chance to play with the race builder. That +4/+2/+2/+2/-2 stat array seem crazy good for the cost though. That’s why I was a bit taken aback.
Looks like a fun sort of insect to wreck face with!
Actually, the best part is that he was a scholar, who really just wanted to study magic. He once got out of a fight by getting into a philosophical discussion on the nature of magic with a flying brain monster.
I’ve got a pathfinder game where I’m playing a medusa pretending to be a human oracle. I’ve been telling my party that i was gifted the power to turn people into stone in exchange for the rest of my powers
Two questions:
— Are the other PCs buying it?
— Are the other players buying it?
Surprisingly, the players are buying it, and the PC’s haven’t figured it out yet either. None of them have looked under the heavy veil
Solid! You’ve got me curious though: How are you avoiding friendly fire with that gaze attack?
I wear a veil thick enough to cover the eyes until I need them, and then I only really use them at point blank range, i took grappling feats to make it easier.
Wait a minute… You’re saying you grapple people, and then turn them to stone while you’re all wrapped around one another? Methinks I detect a flaw in this strategy.
“Guys? I got the bugbear guys. Now would you please help me break out of here?”
Good news everybody, we meet the face of our oracle and now we are garden decoration.
my current ersatz character is a catfolk hunter (female) with a tiger (male) companion. If she isn’t needed in this campaign I‘ll definitely use her as my main char in the next.
I’ve wanted to do a femme fatale PC for a while and just make her the most cat-themed non-catfolk PC to ever claw the drapes. As you can tell by the last couple of bullet points in my build notes, I still haven’t quite figured her out:
MAN EATER
Femme fatale combat monster.
1. Skinchanger (were-tiger) Wild Rager 1, Blade of Mercy Trait, Unnatural Presence trait, Improved unarmed strike (Still…this is 3 attacks at 1st level, all nonlethal. That’s not awful.)
2. Wild Rager 2 Animal fury rage power (on-theme and sets up for additional sneak attacks). 2nd unarmed strike for 5 total attacks.
3. Rake 1. Bludgeoner (allows us to do nonlethal sneak attack with natural attacks)
4: Slayer 1,
5: Slayer 2, weapon focus (unarmed strike), intimidate skill unlock
6: Slayer 3,
7: Slayer 4, dazzling display, violent display (Our big intimidate trick finally turns on. We also get our third unarmed strike for a total of 6 attacks.)
8: Slayer 5,
9: Slayer 6, power attack, ninja trick [unarmed combat training], retrain the now-redundant improved unarmed strike to multiattack
10: Slayer 7,
11: Slayer 8, Sap Adept
12: Slayer 9,
13: Slayer 10, Sap Master
Notable Interactions:
–Bravado’s Blade + violent display to frighten everyone in a radius.
–Bite / Claw attacks interact with blade of mercy, bludgeoner, sap adept, and sap master
–Non-lethal damage means I will rarely go crazy from being a wild rager since enemies don’t ever go down to 0 hp.
Concerns
–Unclear if we need Bludgeoner (we might just be able to deal lethal sneak attacks with non-lethal claws and avoid killing the enemy anyway thanks to the mix of non-lethal damage.)
–Enforcer is a strong option, but may be redundant with violent display.
How much monstrous needs the party to be? One thing is the human-but
-complete-monster like the abyssal and infernal exalted, other thing is the monster-but-human-enough world of darkness “monsters” and another thing is the complete-monster-unearthed-arcana-edition like pit fiends, abolleths, most paladins, and things like the gelatinous cube. With the first you can make a game without problems, with the second you need to bend the rules. With the third, comes the problems, like someone saysup here, mnsters are created like oponents not like pc so they are overpowered and dont have a level progression like the classes. Which is the reverse of the question of the last week, “What can you do when the PC are so OP?”, well in this case why no using a fairly unorthodox solution? Break the rules, unleash chaos, make anything you want. If the monster pc is op then op the rest of the characters and have fun while screwing the rules. If the rules oppose the fun then the rules are guides, like the red lights.
That said be careful, i for one, like to play evil characters, others not, the same with monsters. As fun as it is, some people dont like to be a fire-breathing treasure hoarder dragon, a soul-devouring demon… or devil… or daemon, or a perfect cube of jelly more brainless than a zombie. Some of them are awesome but not for everybody, like evil pc, other are lame and nobody will want to play one of them, ever, like the gelatinous shape monster. Who would want to play like one of that thing? Nobody will lost his time to make rules for that kind of things, so one needs to know the player and dont make the game of just one person with his monster pc.
I personally like the idea of going in with a full-on monster squad. You just have to build the campaign around it is all. That’s probably why I was so attracted to my silly Goblinvania setting. It was an entire continent built for these shenanigans!
That was a fast answer.
I dont think that you need to build or the campaign or the setting around the pc being monsters, not complete at least. Maybe you would need some hand-wave or lampshading a little but anyways it can be a good campaign. For dragons, if you are making a dragon-slayers campaign you can make op dragons pc and stage the attack, next the so called heroes come to kill the dragons and that is kids how you meet the campaign.
I remember, not a tabletop rpg but PC rpg, that in dragon age origins there was a dlc where you can play the bad guys. Long story short, the evil guys, the dark spawn, invade the city and you play like one of their leaders and combat against the companions of the game protagonist, who died prior to the siege. That could be a mini-campaign or just a session but scratchs the itch, and if nobody have problems with that you can continue alternating between dragons and dragon-slayers to see who would win.
That Dragon Age setup is a really solid way to foreshadow the evil dudes if you don’t want to avoid the meet-fight-dead cycle of PC/villain interaction.
Interesting point. A pity that after the first game the series gets screw.
Question. Which days do you upload news comics?
Mondays and Fridays. We run previews on the Patreon on Sundays and Thursday though. 🙂
Thanks for the info. Also my evil plan now just realize and i have discovered you are in fact an automaton who only exist to respond messeges. 🙂
False! I am fully human. I’ve simply been programmed for maximum community engagement. >_>
Hahahhaha, so says the android. 🙂
I have played a young Gold Dragon in a fairly high-level campaign. It worked out fairly well for the most part though equipment was grossly expensive for the poor dragon. Most magical items worked but enhancing my attacks was challenging. However, when we got past that things started to rapidly get insane. We crossed the level 20 threshold, got ahold of epic spell casting, and it quickly became game-breaking. (On average, with his daily buffs, and no crits, he could pour out 1600 damage/rd while rocking a DnD 3.5 AC of 97. Enough, on average, to one-round kill Tiamat and be essentially untouchable.) The game ended shortly after he soloed a CR 57 boss by sundering all its stuff and proceeding to rip it apart and disintegrate it through manual combat. Also if you use game breaking tactics like “Sure, I have these feats that let me breathe and I’ll be able to do it 1/hr…but it will linger in the air for that long, and stick to everything that long, and so it will murder you eventually…”
Playing the character was fun though because it acted like a young-hyper-intelligent puppy/kitten/kid. And he had slightly different morality than the average party. We came across tax collectors, legitimately taking not an unreasonable tax, but more than the villagers liked. The tax collectors attacked because the dragon had shoved its snout into the wagon and was sniffing the tasty tasty gold. Unprovoked attack…he proceeded to wampa-stomp them all. He then claimed their loot as his own. And refused to turn it all over to the villagers because it was legitimately no longer theirs, it was the people who attacked him, and he had just eaten those guys. But he split it with his party, and one member gave back their share to the villagers.
Eventually the character morphed into an NPC of campaigns I ran. He secretly assumed the identity of a good king, with the justification that he viewed the people of his land as his “horde” and keeping it safe and ever growing and prospering scratched the draconic urge while he didn’t just grow old and fat on a big pile of stuff.
“Slightly different morality” indeed! That turned out to be a big challenge in the Dragon Riders game: balancing alignment and morality against draconic nature. Sounds like you landed on the side of the latter.
Lawful Good means being generally altruistic and abiding by a set of beliefs and codes. With a young dragon away from any parental influence or guidance it can be hard for a dragon to develop it themselves. Given their long lives, they probably take a long time to develop it fully, much as we often have to teach kids to share. Raising a dragon takes what…100 years?
Playing a bugbear Cleric in 3.5 made me realize just how much of a headache calculating “Effective Character Level” can be in that system.Dude could heal like a beast, but the number crunching was almost not worth it.
What was the build?
I play GURPS so monster heroes are super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Nice! I’ve never had a chance to compare notes with a GURPS dude.
Is the learning curve really as nasty as the rumors imply? My understanding is that “you can do anything” is both the blessing and the curse of the system.
Eh, if you read through the Basic Set in advance, you should be able to keep up, as long as your GM knows the system well enough. Fortunately, GURPS books tend to be unusually well-written, in my opinion.
If Dragon Con ever becomes a thing again, I’ll have to sit in on a one-shot. That tends to be my go-to for sampling new systems anymore.
in my longrunning pathfinder game, ive allowed players to play monstrous races. for three yeard we had a Wight Rogue who ended up being the most heroic member of the pparty despite starting out as a bumbling manservent they forced into working for them
Wait… Was that an NPC that someone took on as a PC? Because if so, that’s awesome.