E6: The Game Inside D&D (with PDFs!)

[Kunimatyu]

Indeed.

And, Gestalt characters are the best solution that I've seen for creating "gish" characters. If I get to run E6 (probably in 4E), I'd like to try it with gestalts.

Supposedly Ryan's first E6 game involved gestalts, and worked pretty well.

I'm a huge fan of gestalt games, provided everybody's gestalt, otherwise things get messy.

 

[Grimstaff]

We're just going to have to agree to disagree here, I think -- that elf is for all intents and purposes a gestalt character, and you're touting it as balanced with a Barbarian 6.

Well, the gestalt would have a +6 BAB, 2 atk per rnd, another 15 or so hp, better saves, another 2nd and 3rd lvl spell, and 2 more bonus feats (and still barely a match for the angry barbarian ) but I get your point.

I'll agree to disagree, but imho the Advanced Magic feat is a good way to go if you don't want to fuss with a clutter of other feats or bump up the power level to gestalt octane (whilch still wont get you the 4-6th lvl spells, btw).

 

[Will]

Can you copy scrolls with Scribe Scroll, if they are spells you don't know?

If so, then it's a perfect way to introduce higher level spells:
Step 1, find a cool scroll.
Step 2, copy it so you can keep making them as needed in the future.
Step 3, cast spell from scroll and hope you don't flub it (see rules for casting higher level spells).


I'm actually debating running an E6 game with no mages at all, and doing something like allowing people to take item creation feat with Spellcraft as a prereq instead of caster level, but I'm still tinkering.

 

[Kunimatyu]

Can you copy scrolls with Scribe Scroll, if they are spells you don't know?

If so, then it's a perfect way to introduce higher level spells:
Step 1, find a cool scroll.
Step 2, copy it so you can keep making them as needed in the future.
Step 3, cast spell from scroll and hope you don't flub it (see rules for casting higher level spells).


I'm actually debating running an E6 game with no mages at all, and doing something like allowing people to take item creation feat with Spellcraft as a prereq instead of caster level, but I'm still tinkering.

By the rules as written, no. It is, however, a nifty idea -- perhaps a look at the artificer class from Eberron might provide you with some good guidelines on scroll-based casting? Just remember that 20 scrolls of Disintegrate is in many ways worse(game balance-wise) than actually having an 11th level caster who knows Disintegrate.

(I will say that the constant XP/gold cost thing will probably get old very quickly, but there could be workarounds for that, especially for "temporary" scrolls or the like)

 

[PoeticJustice]

I think it got changed to a feat that simply grants an extra spell known + spell slot, with a prereq of Level 6 in a casting class.

Personally, while it was more complicated, I like the CL/2 thing, as otherwise 1st level slots are too costly to pick up.

Personally, I like the other version too, but I'm running E6 on Eberron and have a group which would buckle under the added stress of more complicated feats.

A question for RyCanada: As I have just started running an E6 Eberron game, I'm most inerested in whether or not you plan on using the "capstone feats" in your games. They seem kind of cheesy and I wonder: did you make them because you wanted them, or because they were asked of you?

 

[Kunimatyu]

While I can't respond for Ryan, I will say that the idea of a capstone feat is to give players a reason to stick with a single class, as many of the classes have "dead levels" at 6. Typically, a capstone feat is created by grabbing one ability that the class gets between levels 7-9, and making it a level 6 feat. They are not strictly necessary for an E6 game unless you want to encourage single-classing.

 

[Ry]

I wrote / compiled the capstone feats specifically because the same issues kept coming up over and over again whenever I discussed E6, and I realized that if I wanted to focus E6 discussion on world assumptions, designing E6 games, and so forth, E6 needed to have an answer to those issues.

The feats that we've posted now are feats that I'm comfortable allowing in my campaign, but I'm not making any kind of special effort to point them out. Right now my players have a lot to think about build-wise with the wealth of WotC feats available to them, and they're definitely happy with that. Part of the reason that's working for me is that I encourage players to look for things about their characters that they can develop besides raw power, and they're very receptive to that approach. I do this especially when certain regular players start to outpace avid, but irregular players in my game - when they're 4 or 5 feats up on fellow players, my players don't mind getting (for want of a better term) "roleplaying feats" - i.e. things that aren't part of a "build" but which reflect a character's real development. An example of this would be a sorcerer taking martial weapon proficiency longsword because he's being trained by the fighter in the party to be able to "handle himself a bit better"

 

[PoeticJustice]

Thanks for your quick replies (they are useful as session 2 of the campaign commences in about 4 hours).
Also, I asked this a while back and it got lost in the shuffle of other questions, but how does everyone feel about rewiring Metamagic feats so that they become a function of Action Points?

For instance, having the Maximize Spell feat would allow you to burn 3 action points to maximize a spell rather than raise its effective level by 3.

Thoughts?

 

[joela]

Using APs to activate metamagic feats

For instance, having the Maximize Spell feat would allow you to burn 3 action points to maximize a spell rather than raise its effective level by 3.

Thoughts?

Personally, I don't see why not. There's a sorceror variant -- I think "metamagic specialist" -- which uses similar points in lieu of spell slots to activate its MM feats.

 

[udalrich]

Thanks for your quick replies (they are useful as session 2 of the campaign commences in about 4 hours).
Also, I asked this a while back and it got lost in the shuffle of other questions, but how does everyone feel about rewiring Metamagic feats so that they become a function of Action Points?

For instance, having the Maximize Spell feat would allow you to burn 3 action points to maximize a spell rather than raise its effective level by 3.

Thoughts?

While it's better than not being able to use it at all, it's still fairly weak. (I'm assuming Eberron action points. If there's a different style that I missed, my comments may be completely wrong.) At 6th level, I think you get something like 7 action points. (Don't have my books nearby at the moment.) Since it nominally takes 13 encounters to level, that's 1/2 action point per encounter. You could empower 3 spells during the entire level, or maximize 2. That's not a whole lot of use for a feat.

Metamagic seems difficult to use in E6, and I don't have any good ideas for fixing it. Maybe E6 is just a world where Still Spell and Energy Substitution (and other +0/+1 metamagics) are the cool ones that everyone uses.