Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ancalagon" data-source="post: 153913" data-attributes="member: 23">GreetingsI bought the book.  Amazing art, one of the best published by WotC.  However...The thing is though... how usefull is this book? Some chapters (like attitudes of the gods, monotheism vs duality vs animism vs polytheism) are very usefull, but they are a short part of the book.The great bulk of the book is devoted to gods and their stats. Sure, there is a short part about the church and the dogma but is woefully short. And players interact with churches 99% of the time, not gods.I'm realy questioning the value of the "god rules". I have to read a whole bunch of divine abilities and feats to make sense of them first of all.Second of all, they SUCK!!!!! Let me demonstrate. Example one: skill checks. Intermediate deities and above always take 20 on their skill checks. This leads to moronisism. For example, St-Cuthbert has a sense motive of 100 (!). This mean that someone with a bluff of 99 will ALWAYS fail against St-Cuthbert sense motive. On the other hand, Olibdemara (with a bluff of 103), will always succeed on his bluffing rolls againts St-Cuthbert... unless of course St-Cuthbert casts an empowered maximised wisdom boosting spell, raising his sense motive to 104, and always calling Olibdemara's bluff! This is pathetic.Same goes for Greater deities, who always roll a 20 on their attack roll. Either they hit 100% of the time, or they miss 100% of the time. If one changes his AC or to hit by 1 (say, a bull strenght spell), it could change the result from always missing to always hitting. Example 2: Now this is even worse. There is an ability (called annihilating strike), that allows a deity to utterly destroy something or someone with one blow (the victim deity would have to be of a divine rank lower than the attacker to be affected). They get a save.Let us take St-Cuthbert again, who has this ability (ware the cudgel). Now, the save DC is 20 + rank of deity (15 in this case) plus damage dealt... St-cuthbert's mace does 1d8 +44, so the save will be about DC 84. Few deities can make that save to begin with. Now, St cuthbert can use his divine might feat, smithe AND feat of strengh all at once. This would boost his damage by 39. If he wields his mace 2 handed (no reason not to, he doesn't use a shield apparently), that would increase the damage by a further 13. The DC is now about 136, wich not evenn Zeus could make.Now, all gods of equal or higher rank than St-Cuthbert (15) are imune to this, but all of rank 14 and bellow can be destroyed in one blow. That is an interesting cosmology!Would you allow a feat to a character that allowed him to kill any character of lower level than him automaticaly???Add to this the mistakes I'm starting to spot (abilities not being defined in some cases, stats not matching the description (st-cuthbert is describe as wearing armor, but gets no armor bonus...) and all that, I have to conclude that the rules given are, well, pretty flawed. I haven't looked at them very thourouhgly, but I'm worried.So, in point format:-the rules are bad-who is going to use those rules anyway?-bulk of the book is devoted to those rulesI think the conclusion is evident. If I wasn't so impressed with the art, I would be realy uspet at buying it.Ancalagon</blockquote>

Verification