Recent content by Vorpal Sword

Check the DMG, page 187. It presents a nice set of rules for generating combat NPCs. :1: NPCs get a few extra hit points, to bring their life expectancy up to regular monsters. They get far fewer healing surges, though. :2: They get noticeably fewer powers than PCs--they won't live long...

Or dwarf fighters. I retract "never", but it still makes sense to get an 18 in your primary if you possibly can--and if you can't, for racial reasons, you do really need 16/16 primary/secondary.

When you can afford 16/14/14 on the standard point buy, I can't see a good reason to ever have less than 18. (Has anyone else tried to play the KotS cleric? Case in point.) In fact, I'd go even further on the multiclassing thing... don't bother multiclassing unless you can key attack powers...

:ranged: Magic Missile (standard; at-will) Range 20; -4 vs. Reflex; 2d4-4 damage. Wizards with 3 Int will be exactly as useful, fun to play, and popular as fighters with 3 Str were in 3.x.

Extrapolating from 3.5, this might not be true. If an invisible rogue is fighting a creature with blindsense, he still gets his sneak attack damage; the monster knows what square the rogue occupies, but still can't see him or prepare in any way for his attacks, so the rogue is able to strike a...

D'oh. That'll teach me to post on three hours of sleep...

Wait a sec. Did I miss something major? The D&Di gametable is released and available?

Your position is defensible, but you're definitely not describing min/maxing. :) You're sacrificing straight-up optimization for versatility, which will hopefully work better in 4e than it did in 3.x--but make no mistake, your guy will be slightly worse at using any of his powers than the...

If it makes you and your players happy, go for it! I always avoided low-magic in 3.x, because it was pretty clear from the get-go that the game mechanics didn't support it. (The first long-term campaign I played in was a homebrew update of the original Temple of Elemental Evil, and when we...

The fighter still has an attack bonus that's better by +3 or 15%, plus all the cool stuff he can do all day long. Sure Strike makes the difference in attack bonus +5, Cleave lets the fighter do 3 points of damage to an innocent bystander (still hitting 15% more often than the wizard), Reaping...

Can I suggest the novel Dragon, by Steven Brust? In synopsis, the main character has to go to the underworld to retrieve the trapped soul of a friend's cousin. Hijinks ensue, topped off by a nice bit of ritual magic to get the characters home again. @ the OP, count me in among the people who...

This might be getting a little bit OT, but what's your thought process here? In the 4e game, the constant use of at-will powers is by definition not abusive. Healing surges are also an extremely heavy cost to pay, since the basic cleric and warlord healing powers cost the recipient a healing...

You're never out of at-will powers. You can posit a strong wizard that's practiced his sword skills until he can equal the fighter's basic melee attack... but the wizard can use magic missile instead of his sword, every round for the rest of his life. It's just a difference in emphasis...

Amazing... it's like you're at my game table! :) As for the OP, how is "go invisible once per encounter" a flavorless and mechanically useless power? Gnomes have a good racial benefit, as well as stat bonuses that will make them attractive to players. How does that make them unplayable as...