Dragon 399 - Heroes of Tome and Temple

[Obryn]

Edit: Even better, just use no-action monster knowledge checks to throw away bad results! Then end up arguing with your DM for the rest of the session if that is a "meaningful check" despite never making them before. This is basically a description of the argument on CharOp, which in response to some people objecting to this (obviously ridiculous) use is this:
Oh the joys of having rules written in pudding.

Hey, that response was to me! And yeah, it's insane.

As I said, if I'm with a group where my discretion as DM is not enough, it gets ruled as, "Attack rolls, saving throws, and skill checks made as part of a challenge."

-O

 

[mneme]

[MENTION=21807]pauljathome[/MENTION]: on the in-world explaination, I could see playing the power as providing data for the seer PC to make a prediction, rather than having players try to describe the sequence of three numbers in game-world terms generally.

"What do you see?"
"If you you direct your freezing burst at Bartholemew now, and the monsters surrounding him, it will go well for him if you cast your eyes on him first, but badly for him if the blast strikes him last" (in this case, one is coming up with an in-world reasoning for why the player rolling a burst actually gets to choose the order of rolling damage -- and why it matters at all)"

or
"If you attempt to leap the wall towards the goblin queen, you may not make it over the wall, but what you next strike will feel the true power of your blow" (weak roll, crit, leaving the third roll out of the prediction as it doesn't make sense).

I envision a seer typically suggesting a course of action and predicting it's result, rather than trying to describe things more generically.

Now, that said, the ability is still kinda broken, though it's more sane if you stick to this kind of in-world prediction.

 

[pauljathome]

[MENTION=21807]pauljathome[/MENTION]:
"If you attempt to leap the wall towards the goblin queen, you may not make it over the wall, but what you next strike will feel the true power of your blow" (weak roll, crit, leaving the third roll out of the prediction as it doesn't make sense).

I envision a seer typically suggesting a course of action and predicting it's result, rather than trying to describe things more generically.

Now, that said, the ability is still kinda broken, though it's more sane if you stick to this kind of in-world prediction.

But those only work if the Seer does this RIGHT before the action and so knows what the recipient is going to do. It takes a standard action to perform, that is going to be unusual. Much more common is the case where you throw it just before entering the door.

And it is NOT the seer suggesting a course of action. Its telling the other character how the fates will be acting and letting the character decide what to do.

Your suggestions really only work in hindsight or with complete authorial control. At the table, it is almost never going to be the case that the seer player would be able to turn a roll of 1, 10, 20 into that information.

And that is leaving aside the whole issue of being able to "fight" bad luck and take advantage of good luck by choosing the order in which you look at targets. While that is an ingenious try it really doesn't succeed

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Eh, Piffle!

There's a perfectly good way to decide what is significant and what isn't. If the player is taking an action IN ORDER TO use up a bad roll, then it isn't significant. Pure and simple. If you want some kind of in-game fluff for this the answer is "you cannot thwart fate". This still leaves the players a good bit of room to arrange things in a more advantageous way, but they really can't game the thing.

As for 'no action' type things like monster knowledge checks... again, they're still amenable to the same rule. I know my players. I can easily tell when they're doing something meta-gamey.

 

[occam]

Scholar: I was very meh on this until I read the encounter utility that can give a party a damage type. That can be really utilized well, considering it grants radiant as one of the damage types. It's a very flavor heavy theme though that is competing against some with excellent mechanics. It does let you know every language though, but unfortunately the level 10 feature steps on the toes of the level 5 quite a bit. That use vulnerability can backfire on you is pretty hilarious too. Don't really know what to think of this, it's okay?

But you don't have to use vulnerability if you don't make the hard DC. You'd only use it after missing the hard DC if +4 to all your defenses is worth more to you at the moment than half damage to that target. (At least, that's how I'd interpret the power: the second paragraph of the effect states the difference in effect if you miss the hard DC, i.e. half damage but you still get the +4 to defenses. You could read it as saying that you don't get the defense bonus if you miss the hard DC, in which case it'd be utterly pointless to use the power.)

 

[Dice4Hire]

Sounds like 2 of the 4 are pretty good.

 

[mneme]

But those only work if the Seer does this RIGHT before the action and so knows what the recipient is going to do. It takes a standard action to perform, that is going to be unusual. Much more common is the case where you throw it just before entering the door./QUOTE]

And then...what? There's no reason the seer needs to actually give a prediction when they use the power -- the power lets them gain the data they need to make an interesting and semi-accurate prediction, but as you said, there's pretty much no interesting way within the narrative to give such a prediction given the data the seer has at the time they use the ability (assuming they use it outside of combat). So why give the prediction then?

Although, a nice (ish) aspect to the power is that if you use it out of combat, you only really get two predictions. The third is the initiative roll, which is hardly that interesting.

 

[pauljathome]

And then...what? There's no reason the seer needs to actually give a prediction when they use the power -- the power lets them gain the data they need to make an interesting and semi-accurate prediction, but as you said, there's pretty much no interesting way within the narrative to give such a prediction given the data the seer has at the time they use the ability (assuming they use it outside of combat). So why give the prediction then?

Although, a nice (ish) aspect to the power is that if you use it out of combat, you only really get two predictions. The third is the initiative roll, which is hardly that interesting.

That changes the flavour from the text in the article a fair bit but it actually works. You're not telling the person their fortune, you're suddenly yelling "Hey, SmallBrain, what kind of creature is that?" .

Not that the current mechanics support the flavour in the article either.

I hadn't noticed that issue with the initiative roll.

I think that I'm now tending to put this whole power into the "too annoying to exist" category. If you do it out of combat you get to know 2 rolls. In some circumstances that is going to be golden (you're a controller who wins initiative and can throw some mega area spell knowing you'll crit one opponent and miss your defended), in most circumstances its going to be "meh" (you're about to hit on your very first attack. So use the At Will power you were planning anyway until you have a better use for the encounter).

And there is the whole annoying issue of listening to the GM and player argue for 5 minutes whether the use of a knowledge roll was acceptable THIS time.

As an aside, presumably one of the points of the power is to let the player partly sidestep bad fate by using it up on less important things. So the GM shouldn't disallow ALL uses of this.

In combat, I can't see a character wasting a standard action on this very often. There are times when one characters actions are so much more important than anothers that it might be worth while but they're pretty rare.

 

[SabreCat]

Initiative isn't an attack roll, saving throw, or skill check, so it's not part of the prediction.