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Hidden = silent and invisible. Cunning sneak + shadow walk is definitely a legitimate combo, it's just tricky to get. Another way to get it is to be a combination of Rogue, Warlock, and Assassin. Rogue hybrid for cunning sneak, plus Warlock or Assassin hybrid, followed by multiclassing into the...

Oh, I know Eldritch Strike doesn't work with sneak attack, but I've got Sly Flourish for that. I just want an MBA between now and when I can pick up the Pact Weapon. I can't retrain into it, because all of my feats are spoken for: Hybrid Talent (Cunning Sneak), Acolyte of the Veil (multiclass...

Yeah, my Rogue|Warlock hybrid/multiclass Assassin used it quite often enable Stealth checks to get combat advantage right before spending an action point. Now he has Cunning Sneak + Shadow Walk, though, so he can make a Stealth check to hide anytime he moves 3+ squares. Next level I'm probably...

The only Essentials books I own are Heroes of Shadow, the Rules Compendium, and the Monster Vault. If I was running a game and someone wanted to play an Essentials class, I'd certainly allow it, but I'm not likely to play an Essentials character in anything other than a one-shot or short...

I find the best way to get off-class skills is to take a background that makes it a class skill. That doesn't work too well for changing skills once the game starts, but I've found it quite useful.

I originally subscribed for the Compendium. The glossary is incredibly useful, and even though I now have a physical Rules Compendium, I rarely reference it when I'm the DM. The online Compendium is even better than a searchable PDF. It also means I rarely buy player splatbooks that are mostly...

WotC hasn't updated it.

You might want to check out Nevermeet Press' Portrait of a Villain: The Desire. She's a strong heroic capstone villain focused on charm/domination effects. It's been a while since I read the stat block, but you can leave the fluff (which is actually quite good, but you don't need it) and steal...

Battleragers make pretty good secondary strikers. I've got a warforged battlerager who started with Str 18/Con 18, and took feats to let him add his Con mod to damage on his opportunity attacks and Combat Challenge attacks, in addition to taking various powers that have Str mod + Con mod in the...

This isn't incompatible with the view that character death should be rare. If your RAW play extends to things like recommended encounter balance, then characters won't die all that often, since your encounters will generally push them to the brink of death -- not over it, at least until you get...

The front page review covers that pretty well. :)

I see the logic, but I don't think it's a great solution. I think the logic is that the Knight and Slayer (for example) are unique from other Fighter builds and from one another. The pre-Essentials Fighter builds are more similar to one another than to the Essentials Fighters. Therefore there...

While that's true, the PDFs generated via this method are 5-10MB in size, whereas the PDFs generated by using a PDF printer to generate a PDF from the old Character Builder were under 1MB in size. The upshot is that emailing character sheets around is a bit of a pain with the online CB as...

While there are definitely good ideas here, I have some trouble with the notion of them as "commandments." They're thoroughly infused with your take on what "epic" means, which is most clearly visible in the frequent references to video games and anime. But as this thread has shown, not everyone...

My girlfriend ran this for our three-player party about a month ago, knowing full well that two of the three players were huge Lovecraft fans. She didn't initially realize that the story was exactly the same, but it was totally fine with us -- knowing exactly what was going on right from the...

I tried this out on the weekend and I'm totally hooked. Love the interface, love having multiple virtual "desktops" to work with, and love the automatic formatting of things like monster powers. Nice work. :)

When I first started hearing about the range of rates RPG writers get for their work, I was about as surprised as you -- I've been published a couple of times in an online gaming magazine, and they paid $0.25 a word. But it does seem to be largely due to the size of the market. Even with the...

My girlfriend ran Kingspire for our small group last year. It was a pretty interesting module, and a lot of fun. I actually wish we'd explored it a bit more thoroughly instead of plowing straight into the heart of the matter -- the way we did things, we ended up finding out about the major plot...

My Swordmage|Warden hybrid plays exactly as tiornys describes. In order to use my aegis of ensnarement effect on an enemy, I have to have specifically marked them with my aegis, not via the Warden mechanic. On the flip side, I can use Warden enforcement mechanics against anyone I mark...

3E is not an incredibly accurate reflection of reality, but it's a fairly detailed framework for simulating what life is like in a heroic fantasy world given parameters like Vancian magic. The consolidation of skills discussed a few pages back is a good example. Climb and Swim used to be...