Excerpts: Draconomicon: Metallic Dragons: Draconians

[NMcCoy]

Preview is up here.

It seems that even WotC forgets their rules regarding immediate actions:

Steal Appearance (immediate reaction, when the sivak draconian kills a humanoid; at-will)
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Going to be rather tricky to steal someone's appearance when you have to kill them on a turn other than your own.

 

[Derren]

I'm more surprised that they managed to add psychic damage to the Sivaks death thores.

 

[fba827]

It seems that even WotC forgets their rules regarding immediate actions:

Oddly that was one of the first things I noticed too.
Nice concept though. Guess I'll be calling it a 'free action' until i hear otherwise

 

[UngeheuerLich]

jap, should be a free action.

Maybe it would have been a good idea to have free reactions and free interrupts too.

 

[ferratus]

I'm more surprised that they managed to add psychic damage to the Sivaks death thores.

I did the same thing when I wrote up Draconians last year on the Dragonlance.com forums. The flavour was always that it would cause mental anguish to see your own death or fallen corpse, and psychic damage is the natural way to represent that.

Plus, Sivaks being the only ones without damage when they died made them a bit weak compared to other draconians when unmasked. Given that they were supposed to be the 7 foot tall temple guard brutes of the Draconians (along with being stealthy infiltrators) the lack of death throes made them less threatening than other draconians.

 

[Derren]

I did the same thing when I wrote up Draconians last year on the Dragonlance.com forums. The flavour was always that it would cause mental anguish to see your own death or fallen corpse, and psychic damage is the natural way to represent that.

So "mental anguish" is enough to kill pretty much any normal human (minion) when he manages to kill a Sivak?

 

[Phaezen]

So "mental anguish" is enough to kill pretty much any normal human (minion) when he manages to kill a Sivak?

By the rules, yes. Well established D&D trope, fear doing damage.

 

[MrMyth]

So "mental anguish" is enough to kill pretty much any normal human (minion) when he manages to kill a Sivak?

Why are we comparing what happens when two enemies fight each other?

A minion has one hitpoint to represent how 'the common mook' in dramatic scenes that goes down to a single punch. It doesn't represent actual hitpoints for the creature interacting with the world, because the DM just gets to decide that. What happens when the DM's NPC Minions kills his NPC Sivaks? It's up to him!

The only time I can see it coming up in actual gameplay was if the PCs had magically created minions through items or powers. Which are few and far between, and as far as I know, every such power involves the minion being a magical entity - which, yes, it could well be appropriate to have them discorporate when faced with the internal concept of their own death.

 

[Dragonhelm]

I'm kind of curious to see if folks will be using draconians in their games or not since they've been tied so closely with Dragonlance. I know people have used them before in other settings, but does their inclusion in Draconomicon 2 make you more likely to use them?

 

[Shroomy]

I'm kind of curious to see if folks will be using draconians in their games or not since they've been tied so closely with Dragonlance. I know people have used them before in other settings, but does their inclusion in Draconomicon 2 make you more likely to use them?

I would, at the very least in a homebrew (and did so when I was a kid; I always thought that the death throes were the coolest abilities).