Proposal: Things to be nerfed

Lord Sessadore · Jun 15, 2009

JoeNotCharles said:
I think the assumption is that you could be irrationally attached to your own pet ideas. Which may be true, but if it's a REALLY bad idea the other judges will overrule you.

And on the flip side, it's useful to have a vote in the times when you are able to see your own proposal in a balanced way. It would suck to propose something on a whim to see from the discussion if it's a good idea or not, become convinced it was a bad idea, and then watch it pass narrowly because you can't vote against it!

Speaking of proposing something on a whim, I was just thinking about Sacrifice to Caiphon and Reaper's Touch. If a non-warlock wants to be able to sacrifice to Caiphon to get powers back, they can just multiclass into Warlock to do it. You pay an extra feat, so the warlock is still better at this, but it's possible.

However, if a non-Shadar-Kai wanted to take a Shadar-Kai only feat (yeah, yeah, as printed Reaper's Touch isn't limited, but there are lots of others that are), then they have no recourse. So I was thinking, why not add a Bloodline feat (described in Dragon 371 and Dragon 374) for each race, which qualifies you as a member of that race for the purpose of feat and paragon path qualifications? (Feats and path abilities that build on racial abilities you don't have would be useless, of course, so this wouldn't be useful in all situations.)

Note that the two published bloodline feats (for Deva and Vampire) DON'T allow you to count as that race for prerequisites. Vampiric Heritage says, "You are considered a vampire for the purpose of effects that relate to vampires." (Not that there are any feats other than Vampire Bloodline feats that have "vampire" as a prereq...) Deva Heritage just gives you access to other feats from the Ecology of the Deva article, all of which have the prereq, "Deva or Deva Bloodline". So this is definitely not the intent of the official bloodline feats, but it seems to make sense to me.

I'm tempted to say that bloodline feats can only be taken at 1st level, if we decide to allow/create them. Though I'm not sure that's necessarily a good idea ... thoughts?

JoeNotCharles · Jun 15, 2009

I thought it already worked like that, but I guess I was wrong:

Dragon 371 said:
If you do not select the Vampiric Heritage feat at
1st level, your Dungeon Master might require you
to explain how your character awakened dhampyr
powers. Likewise, your Dungeon Master can rule you
cannot retrain bloodline feats without an explanation
of how your character loses such heritage when
retraining.

The Deva Heritage feat doesn't say anything on the matter.

I guess I could see a character having "hidden Shadar-Kai blood" or "secretly being half elf" and not even realizing it themselves until the bloodline gets revealed (ie. they add the feat). I'm a little more iffy on letting a character drop a bloodline feat and add a different one. So I'd probably allow adding Bloodline feats at any point during a character's career, but once you add it you can't retrain it.

Which brings up another point - in-character, how is a human with an Elf bloodline feat different from a Half-Elf?

Atanatotatos · Jun 15, 2009

*Cough* Is no one worried with the balancement of this? (see post #140)

JoeNotCharles · Jun 15, 2009

Sorry, didn't see it because it was at the end of last page.

Being able to pull from both elf and human feats is a half-elf racial ability, so the half-elf bloodline feat wouldn't necessarily give access to that ability, it would just mean you can take feats with the specific prereq "Half-Elf".

But, yeah, Dwarven Weapon Training would get pretty ridiculous...

Anyway, I hadn't thought hard about the balance - that's why I threw it out here instead of making an actual proposal.

Lord Sessadore · Jun 15, 2009

Atanatotatos said:
*Cough* Is no one worried with the balancement of this? (see post #140)

I am. I'm not sure I like the idea at all, really, for pretty much the reasons you brought up. Races were designed as un-mixable, and I think allowing mixing of races could open up a whole can of worms that I don't want to deal with.

That, and I think it is a little cheesy. Firstly, if the races you're talking about can't cross-breed, then it's not possible to have them in your bloodline. I don't see any half-goliaths or half-deva/half-half-orcs around, so I'd venture that most races can't produce offspring with each other. And if you're talking about races that can mingle, like humans and elves, for example, then just play a half-elf. It kind of reminds me of the double-templated half-race madness from 3.x. I think it's ok to do a little of that (it's cool to be a half-dragon), but too much is too much (it's not so cool to be a half-fiend celestial vampire half-dragon). That's my opinion.

JoeNotCharles · Jun 15, 2009

Well, there's already a "Deva Heritage" feat, which is weird as deva don't procreate. (Actually it's bizarre that the two "heritage" feats we have or for deva and vampires, neither of which procreate normally!)

The proposal would give a list of new bloodline feats, not a blanket "all races have a bloodline feat", so we could easily exclude things like half-elf and half-orc, which don't make sense.

Characters are limited to 1 bloodline feat, so you couldn't be a half-fiend celestial vampire half-dragon. Half-fiend, half-celestial, half-vampire or half-dragon is all you get.

Moon_Goddess · Jun 15, 2009

JoeNotCharles said:
Well, there's already a "Deva Heritage" feat, which is weird as deva don't procreate. (Actually it's bizarre that the two "heritage" feats we have or for deva and vampires, neither of which procreate normally!)

The proposal would give a list of new bloodline feats, not a blanket "all races have a bloodline feat", so we could easily exclude things like half-elf and half-orc, which don't make sense.

Characters are limited to 1 bloodline feat, so you couldn't be a half-fiend celestial vampire half-dragon. Half-fiend, half-celestial, half-vampire or half-dragon is all you get.

I didn't think it was clear that Deva's don't procreate at all.

I kind of took it that they just don't produce more Deva's that way.

So a Deva mates with a human female and produces a human child, then the deva goes on to reincarnate the human child produces children and somewhere along the link this bloodline flares up, possibly as the coming together of 2 descendants. At least that's how I read it.