NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 4451315" data-attributes="member: 5890">He's a powergamer. He prefers playing for mechanical advantage over story. That's his roots. The fact that he's even starting to care about story is a good thing: making him go in opposition to his roots is only going to stall that transition.The good roleplayer makes a choice based on story. With the rest of the mechanics, there's some flexibility between story and mechanics: you can justify having a feat in multiple ways, you can flavour powers how you like etc. Write up the story, pick something that's good and that fits it, and you're gold. Noone's forcing you to take sehanine's reversal just because you decided your character would worship sehanine: you can ignore it as a terrible feat and choose something else.But when you directly tie backstory to mechanics, you screw over the guy who writes his story without looking at the mechanics. Especially if you tie backstory to mechanics in a a way that, as others have pointed out, makes a character more powerful the more unlikely his backstory is. Imagine if every cleric and paladin of sehanine was forced to take sehanine's reversal?At least then you could argue that the fact that the abilities could be easily powergamed was an oversight. Once the author throws down that challenge, he proves himself to be wilfully ignorant, a character trait I dislike intensely.For the fighter, whom does not have bluff or diplomacy on his skill list, who does not have any cha based powers or class abilities and who has some good reasons to increase his wisdom, you can cut this list down to:+3 to intimidate, the option to take another background. Each class/path has one score that they get no benefit from: With a simple background, the fighter has 2."making weapons and armor" has no mechanical benefit over "buying weapons and armor", with the exception that it actually takes longer to make them than to buy them. You still have to be somewhere with a forge, and somewhere that you can buy the raw materials.That, incidentally, is why the DM should not be stingy about letting PCs just create their own non-magical items in this manner regardless of any background: They gain no real benefit from doing so, except the ability to roleplay. The fact that it's now codified into a mechanic that some characters may not have is just one of the many ill-thought out rules that prevents roleplaying in an article supposedly created to support it.The ability to cast creation rituals without the feat is also an incredibly minor ability: since you cannot disenchant items, you must buy your raw materials, which cost the price of the item you are creating anyway. Additionally items that are your level and below are the weakest magical items that you own: found magical items are supposed to be useful, and come up to 4 levels above you.</blockquote>

Verification