E6: The Game Inside D&D

Scurvy_Platypus said:

It's like we're talking about 2 completely different games here. What is it that I'm missing?

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I get the feeling sometimes that people talk about a hypothatical game not a real one at moments like that. I hear things like CoDzilla, Healbot, Chain triper, Nova Wizard, ect. But I never play with them, even having gone to gen con for years I am yet to see one.

There is the game of "Build the best BUILD" and a game of "Play your character" when one talks about one, well another the other...well things get lost in translation

Golden Realms III

My group has been playing a GE7 gestalt game with a lean upward approach. It actually fit right into the end of the last campaign which ended with the heroes (all 16/17 level characters) defeating an invasion from a Cuthullu-like God. This epic level fight and it's consequences caused a downgrading of magic, hence no more spells above 4th level. It also ended the Age of Mighty Heroes, thus max 7 levels. Now, powerful weapons and items are "relics" from before the "Breaking of the World" or must be created by "powers beyond the mortal realm".

Some of the important changes are;
1- Gestalt Epic 7
Gestalt (GE7) was chosen to give characters more flexibility than an E7 approach would have allowed. 6 levels was seen as too simple and restrictive. Gestalt allows for twice as much choice, without twice as much power.
7 was chosen because the group wanted access to 4th level spells.

2- You must spend a feat to be able to cast 4th level spells (including 3rd level bard spells that are 4th level spells for another class).
1 feat per spell. The only exception is a spontaneous Cure Critical Wounds for clerics.
The group wanted to have 4th level spells, but needing to spend feats to access them will slow down their impact on the game.
Classes gain the ability to cast 4th level spells as normal, but can only memorize/cast metamagic lower level spells.

3- Sor/Favored Soul (and other "delayed spell progression" full caster classes) are advanced to the "regular" spell progression.
(same rate as wiz/cleric/druid)
This was to allow the "delayed spell progression" classes to access 4th level spells. We could have gone to 8th level for 4th level spells, and it would've been simpiler to do it that way. But we decided to stop at 7th and houserule the sor/favored soul as we don't really think the delayed spell progression is necessary to balance spontaneous spell casting.

4- Any non-full spellcasting class that has a "dead" level (no special abilities) at 7th is given a special ability at 7th
(example: fighters gain the ability to ignore ability preq's on fighter feats).
Our "capstone" abilities/feats. The ability to cast 4th level spells (3rd for bard) is the "capstone" for most spellcasting classes.

5- use a homebrewed rolling method for stats that lets the players choose between several equivalent stat sets,
characters with LA subtract their LA from all starting abitilty scores.
We wanted more "organic" stats than point buy generally gives, but wanted the "fairness" of point buy.[sblock=our system]
Everyone rolled a set of stats (4d6, drop low, in order). Then raise(if below)/lower (if above) to between a 22-29 point buy equivalent range by +/- 1 to all stats at a time, until they are in range. Then, anyone could pick any set of stats.

As a side rant on point buy vs Rolling; We had 5 players roll 5 stat sets. The stats as rolled were 60, 29, 27, 18 and 14 point buy equivalents. This is why I generally abhor rolling, and I've been on both sides of this issue, "Godlike" vs "simply heroic" stats. Well, thats enough of that issue.
[/sblock]6- PRC become feat chains.
7- Incantations from UA.


The characters have just starting getting to 7th level, but as the DM I have been making GE7+feats npc's for awhile and I like it. An important aspect of GE7 is that all my (classed/humanoid) villians are at least a little vulnerable to luck/clever planning on the heroes part. Organizations/minions/allies have become a lot more important to a villian's threat level. The only problem we had was we started with a different LA system. Basically, you lost x2 LA in class levels on 1 side of the Gestalt. That didn't work. The character (a halfdragon fighter) lost flexibility, but gained much more power in her specialty (hitting things really hard). The method in 5 (above) works much better.

Nimloth said:

5- use a homebrewed rolling method for stats that lets the players choose between several equivalent stat sets,
characters with LA subtract their LA from all starting abitilty scores.

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I like this a lot. Think I'll use it in the future.

- Ron ^*^

Scurvy_Platypus said:

Are you talking about E6 "in general" or the particular version you're running?

I ran an E8 game, and I didn't have anyone doing some crazy 120 damage per round.

I guess there's people out there that like to hyper-optimize things as far as they possibly can, but... I guess I'm just not getting your point.

If the game you play/run focuses on hyper-optimizing and all that, E6/E8 isn't really going to make much of a difference in preventing it or anything like that. It boils down to "you don't level after level 6". It's not some sort of rules fixing.

I read your posts, and you seem to be talking like everybody is going to be experiencing massive balance problems or something. Earlier up thread you mentioned a fighter "with a standard build"... Maybe I missed something here the last 8 years, but I've never seen anyone in real life make that character. I'm not saying that other people _don't_, it's just you seem to be assuming a style of play that I don't see, and I don't think Ryan saw at his table either. So it's not like E6 is going to adress those issues in any way really, since it was never intended to.

It's like we're talking about 2 completely different games here. What is it that I'm missing?

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First, thanks for your response.

The standard Fighter build I was talking about was something like this:

1. F1 * * (Power Attack, Cleave)
2. F2 * (Weapon Focus: Greatsword)
3. F3 * (Iron Will)
4. F4 * (Weapon Specialization: Greatsword) [+1 Str]
5. F5
6. F6 * * (Great Cleave, Something Else)

* Martial Veteran (Greater Weapon Focus)
* Weapon Specialization Greatsword
* Martial Prowess
* Swift Strikes
* Ability Boost (+1 Str)

Assuming a Strength of 18 at start. By the end Strength is 20, add Gauntlets of Ogre Power for a Str of 22.

If we pump the bonii from WF and GWF into PA every time, and get a +2 Greatsword, each hit is going to do 2d6+9(Str)+4(Spec)+2(Magic)+4(PA) = 26 average damage.

3 Attacks per round via Martial Prowess, +1 via Swift Strikes, +1 via Haste (if we're going to nova we're going to buff) means 5 attacks per round. If they all hit that's over 120 damage.

This isn't a terribly intricate build, it's just using the feats available intelligently. There are many ways to boost it further.

So I guess much of this is dependent on my own variant. It's worth noting that I had noticed the overall advantage offered to wizards with traditional E6 (the supernova build I posted earlier pretty much works the same in traditional E6) and wanted to help nudge the melee types up a bit -- maybe this was a mistake.

- Ron ^*^

GMforPowergamers said:

I get the feeling sometimes that people talk about a hypothatical game not a real one at moments like that. I hear things like CoDzilla, Healbot, Chain triper, Nova Wizard, ect. But I never play with them, even having gone to gen con for years I am yet to see one.

There is the game of "Build the best BUILD" and a game of "Play your character" when one talks about one, well another the other...well things get lost in translation

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Hm, well my last game DID have a CoDzilla and a chaingun thrower (both of whom worked together to bring about a sort of anticlimactic end to the endgame boss, now that I think of it). Honestly I have 2 super powergamers, 1-2 "efficient builders", and 2-3 "not-so-efficient-builders" in my game. One of my challenges is to try to keep things challenging for the very efficient builders while not wiping the floor with those with less efficient builds (and sometimes tactics).

A common problem, I know.

- Ron ^*^

Scurvy_Platypus said:

So any "work" is going to be coming from someone else.

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I want to be that someone else.

I want to create an E6/E8 Bible.

Who wants to help?

der_kluge said:

Who wants to help?

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Do you want help with a 4th edition E6 or 3rd/3.5 edition?

I get the feeling sometimes that people talk about a hypothatical game not a real one at moments like that. I hear things like CoDzilla, Healbot, Chain triper, Nova Wizard, ect. But I never play with them, even having gone to gen con for years I am yet to see one.

Click to expand...

Well, in the very least, healbot and nova wizards are easily 2 of the most inefficient ways of playing your casters, so I wouldn't be surprised that they rarely ever get played.

Mokona said:

Do you want help with a 4th edition E6 or 3rd/3.5 edition?

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3.x. I can't imagine why anyone would bother trying to create an E6 variant in 4e. I'm just not sure there's a reason to do so.

der_kluge said:

I want to be that someone else.

I want to create an E6/E8 Bible.

Who wants to help?

Click to expand...

What do you mean, an "E6/E8 Bible"?