DrSpunj
Explorer
SSquirrel said:
Gwarh said:
Thankfully not much to the underlying system now that we've tinkered with Defense.
We're still pounding out a few options for the players, but that's always going to be a work in progress. One martial artist has been looking at Hong's IH Dodge & Mobility trees. He & our Dwarven Warmace using battlecaster are both now able to Infuse Weapon as well, and now that they've just reached 8th level and each have a couple iterative attacks, we created an Improved Infuse Weapon so they could get potentially get a full attack action with the infused damage before the charge dissipates.
Our Wolverine Totem Warrior is loving 8th level as both he (in wolverine shape) and his animal companion are now Large creatures! I just updated their stats this afternoon following the MM guidelines and using some info from the AE spell Lion's Form to try and get everything to come together in a balanced way. Still not sure I've succeeded but it's now available for the group to critique.
The Wind Witch and battlecaster are enjoying the new spells available in AE's Spell Treasury also. Our Forest Warden Martial Artist, now that I think about it, was kind of quiet with his 8th level stuff; I need to go check his CP Worksheet!
SSquirrel said:
I'm just starting into the Religion chapter. I'm going to mine so much out of Ptolus...forever! Lots of great stuff in there, and flipping back and forth with the sidebar info & page numbers is awesome, except I want to keep reading the new section I jump to!
Gwarh said:
Great! I'm glad it has been of some use. If your stuff is in any kind of form that you're willing to share, please post it here or start your own thread and drop the link in a post here. I always like looking to see how others have done something differently. Even if I don't agree with the differences I think the change in perspective is important.
Gwarh said:
I really think the best advice I can give is try to stick with what everyone starts with. By that I mean, my players have been (and still are) working with me with all the tweaks and rules changes, both minor and major. I've got a House Rules document typed up and available on our group's website and have a printed copy at the table each session in a 3-ring binder. We have so many rules changes from Core (and AE, and IH) since this is a complete hybrid that all of us forget just exactly which rules set we're using in certain situations at least once each session (frequently 2-3 times!). Honestly that's not substantially different than the other games I've been in where Core's rules weren't very clear, but there at least you could look it up pretty quickly. IMG we have to determine which book(s) are the most relevant, and often check the House Rules as well.
With that in mind I'm really done making any sweeping changes to the system to date, cuz I don't want to lose players over any additional major changes. Defense at 2 CPs really was too cheap, and everyone IMG realized it, so it was an okay change for us all to make. Look at Defense (if you're going to use it), how it stacks with AC (or doesn't if you too are using Armor = DR), and all the repercussions very carefully.
I think, though, for this campaign we'll stick with the system as a whole from here on out. It's working well these last few sessions without any major hiccups.
Except for the Grappling rules.
They're better in IH, IMO, but still a bit cumbersome. After doing some reading on the IH boards we did adopt Hong's modification to drop the size modifier from grapple checks completely. Larger than medium-size creatures already have significantly higher strength and generally much higher HD (which gets them better BAB) so the added size modifier was overkill in our opinion. The group just battled a large, 12 HD Shadowbourne-templated Emerald Serpent on Monday, in a cave, with it shadow-jumping around to attack various members of the party by biting with poison and using improved grab thereafter to get easy constriction damage. As soon the day's light spell came around it'd shadow jump again to a different part of the cave. Rinse and repeat. Very frustrating for them, in a good way. 
Anyway, point being, it had a grapple check of +23 which was enough to nearly always win the grapple check, but twice I did roll low and the PCs rolled high enough to win beat it. I think with the +4 size bonus for being Large they would've lost both times, so I'm glad we pulled it out of the equation.
I just paid $2.37 for Morrus' Simplified Grapple rules so we may make some changes there (but again, all of us are frustrated there, and that's a change to the basic rules, nothing to do with the classless system).
Anyway, I've included the newest files in this post. I also didn't see that I'd ever posted the pdfs of the excel sheets like I said I would, so I've uploaded those as well. Enjoy!
