At what price?

[Limper]

Currently this is more in the realm of rule philosophy but will make its way into House Rules later....


How would one make a Foe of the Wand prestige class and have it be fair and balanced in 3e? I'm looking at trying to whip up the Wizardly version of the Forsaker... he could use his own magics just not any form of stuff.

The 3e system assumes a lot of magical equipment... if you weren't going to use any magic save your own.... what would you need to compensate. This is cutting out alot of assumed power... what should the pay-off be?

(Just thinking permanancy would be OK)

 

[fba827]

Hmm.

If using your own magic is good, can you use a wand that you create?

If so, you haven't really limited out magic items since a wizard or so could take item creation feats and make up for anything he would otherwise miss out on.

?

 

[Gargoyle]

If you mean that he can use his own items but no one else's, I agree with the above opinion that it's not really a good limitation. He could sell items found to pay for the creation of his own items; this is something lots of wizards already do.

Assuming you mean he can cast spells, but not use any magic items, I'd have to say that it could be done, but I would caution it as a very campaign specific class. In a campaign with lot of magic items, the challenge is to make the class so that it's not too weak. In campaigns with low magic, the challenge is to not to overcompensate for his inability to use items and make him too powerful.

You would have to scale his abilities so that he gets increasing returns. The more levels taken in the class, the higher the power gain each time he gains a level. For instance, taking one level in the class would only give you a minor increase in power, but going from level 9 to 10 would be a big increase. The reason you'd want to do this is to compensate for the loss of very powerful magic items at high levels. An 8th level character may gain some power from their magic items, but an 18th level character would gain a lot of their power from magic items, assuming you're using the baselines presented in the DMG.

I suspect that you'd have to make this class pretty powerful at higher levels to compete in a D&D campaign that has a "standard" amount of magic. It's definitely a challenging class to create, and one that wouldn't work in campaigns with a lot of magic or low magic.

 

[Brisk-sg]

Here is a thought,

To help maintain campaign balance for the class, you might want to create a character ability based on the Samurai Class in Oriental Adventures. The ability would allow the class to convert magical items of greater then a certain worth into limited abilities, while providing a cap for the power. This should work in both low magic and high magic campaigns.

Just a thought,

Josh