Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)

Those videos are great. The delivery and ms paint drawings really sell it.

I like Dick. I mean Richard.

3.5? What the hell's a Scout? Isn't that an NPC class? How do you get 30 Dex? Dafuk?!

Isn't scout a prestige class? You get 30 Dex the same way someone managed to get insane Str, make it more insane with a potion and then use a ballista to bat away projectiles.

I see what you did there, but you can't naturally have 30 in an attribute naturally as a "normal" PC class. Gosh!

But both characters used similar min maxing tricks didn't they?

You can min-max as much as you want, but I've never seen anyone with 20+ in a stat without having Legendary/Epic level status. lel

Scotia has 29 dex. 23 is natural. +6 gloves of dexterity on top of that.

Let me take you through the process. We used point-buy for character creation so I dumped charisma and strength pretty hard, kept +2 wisdom (spot, listen, will saves) and +3 intelligence (in a party this small I have to do double duty as rogue and fighter, so skill points are essential). We started at level nine, so I was able to get 20 dexterity by buying up to 18, taking the level four and eight attribute bumps both in dex (and later the level 12 one, as we are currently level 12), and then since I'm a fire elf I get +2 dexterity. Add the +6 gloves of dex (which were +4 at the time the campaign started, they were upgraded to +6 after we walked out of the Tomb of Horrors with about 200,000 GP worth of loot and raw coin).

Scout is in Complete Adventurer. It's a fairly mediocre class, but I built him on the fly. I'll give you guys a breakdown of the party in more detail than the video goes into:

Scotia:
At this point, Scotia is level eleven Scout, level one Planar Ranger. I am the skill monkey and primary damage-dealer for the party. Scouts are a bit like rogues and a bit like fighters; they have an ability called Skirmish where if you move ten feet during your turn and attack, you get a handful of D6s to add to your weapon damage and an armor class bump. This ability Scotia has improved with a feat called Improved Skirmish which gives him extra damage and AC if he moves 20 feet.

Furthermore, the DM is an incredibly experienced 3.5 DM and we've been designing our own feats or pulling them from Pathfinder to help balance our three-person party, so we added one that allows me to add dex to damage and allow me to pull double duty as the fighter/rogue. He has been using a lot of third party materials and epic level stuff to mess with us.

The planar ranger level is because skirmish is precision damage, and a lot of enemies are immune to precision damage, but if you take a feat called Swift Hunter, you can stack Ranger/Scout levels for the purposes of favored enemies and/or skirmish. So, if you're Scout 11/Ranger 1 and you have swift hunter, you have twelve ranger levels for the purposes of determining your number of and bonuses to favored enemies. If I select enemies that are normally immune to precision damage, such as undead, oozes, plants or constructs, I can apply my skirmish damage to them in combat.

Scotia dies constantly because he's a melee build and I have reasonably low HP. At this point in the campaign, I'm in need of resurrection roughly every other game, but such is the life of the one character in the party who engages in direct combat.

Lucien:
Lucien is a wizard who is played by my friend who is the best magic users I've ever had the pleasure of playing an RPG with, with the exception of the guy who's DMing this campaign. What he and I have learned from min-maxing this character is for wizard, you want to prestige class early and often because there are a LOT of really good ones for wizard. I don't have his character sheet in front of me, but he's wizard/fate spinner/geometer at least, with his eyes on eventually getting into archmage. He's a very versatile spellcaster with +7 intelligence and knowledge ranks so high he regularly roles into the fifties on some of them. Generally he preps as a utility caster and if we run into trouble I can handle it, or we retreat, come back the next day with disintegrate prepared three times and he and I combo whatever enemies there are to death. Since his geometer level, he has his entire spellbook tattooed on his body in a series of nigh-indecipherable geometric patterns that sear your eyes or something if you attempt to read them without his permission, which is awesome.

He is a grey elf, and in our shared backstory he and I have been a traveling partnership for about a decade, spending most of our time being racist towards other pretty much everyone who isn't a full-blooded elf and raiding tombs together with me handling the trap dodging, disarming and monster subduing, and him handling the magical puzzles, information collection and banishing of the odd demon.

Richard:
During our first session, we spent the first three hours or so building our characters and the guy playing Richard finished pretty quickly. While I was deep into research on how to get my dexterity as absurdly high as possible, he had decided that if the other player and I were going to specialize so heavily, he should try to remain as broad as he could, able to cover any additional ground that the two of us couldn't. Therefore he made himself sort of okay at everything, including being a cleric with 16 wisdom, which now that we're about to hit level thirteen, is going to be a problem because he's going to stop meeting the prereqs for casting divine spells. He's a half-orc with a mace. He throws the mace, the mace comes back. He unkills me quite regularly and removes the strange poisons that regularly find their way into my body. It's not exactly ground-breaking stuff, but it's very much needed and he can do things like back me up in melee combat if he doesn't have any healing to do, or assist Lucien with spellcrafting, dispeling magic or anything else that overlaps in the divine/arcane worlds.

Further, we have two girls that come when they're available, one who is brand new to RPGs who plays a succubus, since we were desperately in need of anyone with charisma (I have -2, Lucien has -1, and Richard has +1, she has +13) and one who plays a Samurai. She doesn't play with us much anymore (in this game; we have five or so different RPGs going on right now and she plays in three and runs one) but was a pretty straight melee fighter whose lawful good alignment regularly ran afoul of our more... chaotic neutral plans.

Honestly, the best stuff in the video series is yet to come. We spend an inordinate amount of time outside of the Tomb of Horrors basically fucking up the world, then upon exiting have a series of amusing and bumbling adventures, including one session that had us and the group of people that came to watch laughing so hard that I threw up. I really hope we can capture the feel of the table that night, but it's going to be fucking tough.

Happy to clarify further questions, but will probably have to ask the other players if you have anything wildly specific about their characters.

What book is that undead hellspawn that looks like the silence from and do you have a good story about them?

Huh?

I assume Starling is referring to the Silence from Doctor Who.

yeah, I'm just not sure what that means in this context

Oh, you mean Bodaks? You can find them on page 28 of the 3.5e Monster Manual (the first one.) As for specific stories including them,, wouldn't have a clue.

Yes, those. See the resemblance?



I figure something that creates more of itself whenever it kills someone with its gaze would make for some interesting if very life threatening situations.

The session I mentioned where I threw up from laughing includes a story about the Bodak Eye

I just ran my first Pathfinder session and I'm feeling pretty good about it. A bunch of people who normally play in my D&D group aren't going to be around much longer so I'm trying to bring in some new people. My friend who has never played an RPG before joined tonight, and despite the self-doubt inherent in a total D&D newbie, he had a pretty intuitive grasp on the whole process.

oh and in the 3.5 game those videos are based on we're currently divine rank 2. And my dex is now 36/+13.

DMing Call of Cthulhu was alright! I'm making my way through Doors to Darkness each month before moving onto some of my own stuff hopefully. I've been really impressed with the quality of the COC 7th edition stuff so far; all really nice hardcovers with great art.

DMed 7 players for Cthulhu on Thursday. It was, um, interesting.

I don't know any of the details, but I just know already that it was hectic.

It could have gone worse, actually; luckily there were several experienced players who knew how to steer the group and make some actual decisions. It was very hard to give everyone a decent amount of attention in a three hour game though and I came away feeling like a few people barely got to do anything. Wish I'd pushed back a bit more when the other guy said he was going to fold his game and send the extra players my way but oh well, it was a good learning experience.

The game itself was Missed Dues – the ganster-themed Cthulhu adventure that comes with the Keeper screen set. People seemed to really respond to that combination quite well, which was a little bit surprising, but it helps that it's also a well designed adventure with a free-roaming structure and lots of opportunities for actual investigation work. Worth checking out if you see someone running it at a Con.

Writing a Lovecraft-influenced D&D game for the next game night. Gonna test out the 5E sanity mechanics from the DMG.