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[EN Pub] The Fantastic Science -- 24-page teaser!
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<blockquote data-quote="Kelleris" data-source="post: 2777043" data-attributes="member: 19130"><p>That construct is simply both a <em>knife spider</em> and a <em>technologist's familiar</em>, and can be activated as either using the usual activation time and costs for each version. I just added the weight of one to the weight of the other and called them the same construct. Call it a very minor house rule if you like, but I do recommend you allow players to build devices with combined functionality like that one, so they don't have to, say, wear three pairs of goggles at once. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> As long as each device is considered a different device for activation purposes, it isn't unbalancing.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>There's a set of three overlapping reasons that led to that decision - a flavor reason, a logical reason, and a pragmatic reason. Given these considerations, I felt those four fit best, though (as you note) a case could be made for others.</p><p></p><p>The pragmatic reason is that I wanted those abilities to affect a certain broad subset of creatures in an easily rule-defined way, so I needed about three or four creature types to pick on. Those four creature types struck me as the most "magicy" of the available ones, so that's what I went with. If you don't use creature types as the determiner of what can and can't be affected, it gets messy, and if you throw in too many different creature types those abilities get to be too powerful.</p><p></p><p>The logical reason is that elementals and outsiders are both constructed of the materials of their respective planes. Given that the outer planes are essentially the physical expressions of their respective alignments (which is why they cannot be <em>raised</em> - they just *are* their soul), and that elementals are likewise made of pure planar stuff without even a token nod to plausible biology (neither creature type needs to eat or sleep, elementals don't even breathe), they seemed likely candidates for being "made of magic" to a sufficient degree that they could be blasted by antimagic.</p><p></p><p>The flavor reason is that elementals, outsiders, constructs, and undead are the creature types that mages and clerics can bind into service, summon, create, and most easily control. So they're the creature types most closely associated with fantastic science's opposing spellcasting traditions. It seemed appropriate to make them the most hated-on of the creature types for technologists, since any wizard who tried to stamp out technology is going to be employing a creature of one of those four types, most of the time.</p><p></p><p>All that said, I never split that group of "abnormalities" up into any subgroup, so you can easily redefine what counts as an abnormality in your game and those abilities will not be significantly affected - essentially, you'd just change some reminder text to apply to the new creature types instead.</p><p></p><p>And, for what it's worth, I was planning to have a feat in the book that allowed the antimagic abilities to apply to additional creature types before it got cut out for space reasons. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Kelleris, post: 2777043, member: 19130"] That construct is simply both a [I]knife spider[/I] and a [I]technologist's familiar[/I], and can be activated as either using the usual activation time and costs for each version. I just added the weight of one to the weight of the other and called them the same construct. Call it a very minor house rule if you like, but I do recommend you allow players to build devices with combined functionality like that one, so they don't have to, say, wear three pairs of goggles at once. ;) As long as each device is considered a different device for activation purposes, it isn't unbalancing. There's a set of three overlapping reasons that led to that decision - a flavor reason, a logical reason, and a pragmatic reason. Given these considerations, I felt those four fit best, though (as you note) a case could be made for others. The pragmatic reason is that I wanted those abilities to affect a certain broad subset of creatures in an easily rule-defined way, so I needed about three or four creature types to pick on. Those four creature types struck me as the most "magicy" of the available ones, so that's what I went with. If you don't use creature types as the determiner of what can and can't be affected, it gets messy, and if you throw in too many different creature types those abilities get to be too powerful. The logical reason is that elementals and outsiders are both constructed of the materials of their respective planes. Given that the outer planes are essentially the physical expressions of their respective alignments (which is why they cannot be [I]raised[/I] - they just *are* their soul), and that elementals are likewise made of pure planar stuff without even a token nod to plausible biology (neither creature type needs to eat or sleep, elementals don't even breathe), they seemed likely candidates for being "made of magic" to a sufficient degree that they could be blasted by antimagic. The flavor reason is that elementals, outsiders, constructs, and undead are the creature types that mages and clerics can bind into service, summon, create, and most easily control. So they're the creature types most closely associated with fantastic science's opposing spellcasting traditions. It seemed appropriate to make them the most hated-on of the creature types for technologists, since any wizard who tried to stamp out technology is going to be employing a creature of one of those four types, most of the time. All that said, I never split that group of "abnormalities" up into any subgroup, so you can easily redefine what counts as an abnormality in your game and those abilities will not be significantly affected - essentially, you'd just change some reminder text to apply to the new creature types instead. And, for what it's worth, I was planning to have a feat in the book that allowed the antimagic abilities to apply to additional creature types before it got cut out for space reasons. :) [/QUOTE]
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