Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vurt" data-source="post: 3030794" data-attributes="member: 1547">I suspect that of those who own the Tome of Battle, few also possess Magic of Incarnum, and fewer still have tried to join the two with the gestalt rules, so I'm not totally surprised by the lack of response.  Well, other than mine.  Ahem.Another potential issue to monitor is the key stat for incarnum classes: Constitution.  Whereas a standard barbarian//sorcerer really has to think about how he spreads his ability scores around, gestalting a melee class with an incarnum class makes that choice much easier: Str and Con.  And even with a moderate point-buy system for generating stats, you can do a lot if you're only looking at two ability scores.I suspect the problem is probably worse at low levels, and eventually evens out as other characters get magic items of their own.  But things that do show up early tend to be very pronounced.  Consider a 1st level barbarrian//totemist with Str 16 and Con 16.  At first level he gets 15 hp, or 17 hp when he rages.  In the morning, he shapes the rageclaws meld, which lets him act without penalty while in negative hit points.  He throws a point of essentia into it just because, so now he dies at -13 hp instead of -10.  Our 1st level barbarian, raging, now effectively has 30 hit points!  At first level, this is huge!  But again, the extra 10-20 hp at 6th level isn't quite as bad.By all means, your best option is to talk to your group and lay all the cards on the table.  Both the martial adept and incarnum classes are very versatile and option-rich, so if you really want to try that particular gestalt combination, you certainly can pick options for the character that won't cause complaint at the table, especially if, as you suggest, you focus primarily on buffing others.  But if that's your intent, perhaps a swordsage//marshal (Mini Handbook) or a swordsage//dragon shaman (PHB2) or even a swordsage//divine mind (Comp Psionic) might make for a better fit. I personally think the Incarnum rules are very creative and interesting, and I'd certainly allow them for any game in which I DM.  But I don't think they mesh very well when gestalting with regular classes.  It becomes almost too easy to game the system.  At least with the regular gestalt rules, you have to think a little! <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=";)" />Cheers,vurt</blockquote>

Verification