Immortals Handbook - Ascension Discussion

[EarthSeraphEdna]

I'd be willing to do an entire revision of the Abilities chapter for free. I've got a text file of the entire chapter that I can edit with Notepad and spellcheck with Microsoft Word, so I can fix up the entire thing. I've got a good feel of how WotC writes feat descriptions, so I can make the wording of the ability descriptions much less vague. Additionally, I can include fixes and rebalancings of some of the abilities, based on input from some of you guys and myself (like the limit to the amount of AMC feats U_K suggested, or the nerf to the Astro Effect + Inner Eye combo).

However, due to some issues at work, I'm going to have to do some major overtime (and working at home as well) for the next two weeks, but I can get straight to work once those two weeks are over. I can PM the final product to you guys (U_K and Alzrius), of course.

For example:

1. ABROGATE (SU)
You can negate your opponents greatest advantage.
Prerequisites: Divine Aura.
Benefit: Any single opponent within your divine aura has its greatest ability negated. This can be an ability score or one of its other abilities (divine, cosmic etc.).
Special: A negated ability score is reduced to 10.

1. ABROGATE (SU)
You can negate your opponent's greatest advantage.
Benefit: At the start of an encounter, you may choose one opponent within your divine aura to be affected by this ability. You may choose to either reduce his highest ability score to 10 or negate one of his abilities. If you choose to negate an ability, one of your chosen opponent's abilities from the highest tier (feat, divine ability, cosmic ability, transcendental ability, or omnific ability) is randomly selected and nullified.
If you happen to know your opponent's exact ability scores or abilities (such as through the Psychometry cosmic ability), you may instead choose to negate a specific ability score or ability.
If an ability that may be selected multiple times is negated, only one iteration is negated.
eg. If Darra's Uncanny Atomic Mastery is negated, it is downgraded to Atomic Mastery.
An ability score that is reduced to 10 may still be increased by artifacts that increase ability scores.
If this negation would cause an opponent to lose the prerequisites of certain abilities, he still keeps those abilities and their benefits. However, this can effectively negate an opponent's spellcasting if his spellcasting ability score is reduced to 10, or an opponent's capability to wield an extraordinarily dense weapon if his Strength score is reduced to 10.
eg. If Darra the sorceress' Charisma score is reduced to 10, she would be unable to cast her sorcerer spells (if she did not have a Charisma-increasing artifact), but she would still keep her Inner Eye and Quixotic cosmic abilities.
Once per round as a free action, you may choose to either negate a different ability belonging to your chosen opponent, or select a different opponent.
eg. Thrin is facing Surtur and Ymir, and he is currently using Abrogate to negate Surtur's Ultimate Power Attack (though Thrin does not know the exact ability being negated, since he does not possess the Psychometry cosmic ability). As a free action, Thrin may stop negating Ultimate Power Attack and randomly negate a different transcendental ability of Surtur (which may very well be Ultimate Power Attack once again), or Thrin may switch targets and instead negate a randomly selected transcendental ability of Ymir.

Now I know that descriptions like those are rather long, but they do clear up a lot of issues. Since the book is in PDF form anyway, you won't have to worry about page count... I think.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Howdy Colin!

thanks for the link.

Permafrost looks interesting...

Valent Games. It's mostly just me. I haven't written any d20 stuff in a while; my best seller when I did was probably The Other Side, which I edited rather than wrote. My most recent book was Sufficiently Advanced, which is a far-future science fiction game.

Hey you have more products than me, that means yours is the bigger company.

By the way I found a spelling mistake on the cover of The Other Side. Paragraph 2, Line 4, there should be a space between the words calledthose.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hey paradox 42 matey!

Good spot.

A player of mine was futzing around with the rules regarding divine artifacts during last night's game, and discovered a potential loophole that other DMs should be aware of- though this one's probably less serious than the Anyfeat one a different player found last year because no DM worthy of the title would permit it to go unchallenged.

What you do is, you take advantage of the fact that an item can contain a Divine ability. You have one of your four artifacts grant you the Extra Level divine ability. This grants you an extra HD, with all attendant benefits... including a slight boost in the capacity of your divine powers that depend on HD... for example the power and value of your four divine artifacts. It is thus possible to set up a situation such that you use your divine artifact to gain enough levels to increase the value of the same artifact to the point where you have enough "leftover value" to gain another Extra Level ability, and the whole thing snowballs. The player who discovered this showed me how he could use it to grant his character something on the order of 800 more levels, and he just stopped there because he got bored (more or less).

There are two ways to resolve this, that I can see; the first is to simply disallow the Extra Level ability in items, though that technically still leaves other loopholes along these lines like having the item grant six feats that "just happen" to be used to take Extra Level... but there's a simpler way to short-circuit this. If an item is granting the levels, I ruled, then the levels are part of the item, not part of the wearer. Therefore, the levels do not in fact increase the wearer's "soul power" for the purpose of determining item/artifact value, and the loop breaks before its first iteration.

As with the Anyfeat loophole, the player who found this is getting a substantial XP reward, though in this case it'll technically be delayed a bit due to the way we've been playing the side effects of other characters ascending (to wit, when one character "crosses the threshold" to godhood, other beings who provided substantial help get hit with backwash energy from the ascension process and gain two levels' worth of XP out of it).

I suppose I could limit the number of extra levels that stack to your divine rank. Hows that?

 

[Upper_Krust]

Howdy Adslahnit dude!

I'd be willing to do an entire revision of the Abilities chapter for free. I've got a text file of the entire chapter that I can edit with Notepad and spellcheck with Microsoft Word, so I can fix up the entire thing. I've got a good feel of how WotC writes feat descriptions, so I can make the wording of the ability descriptions much less vague. Additionally, I can include fixes and rebalancings of some of the abilities, based on input from some of you guys and myself (like the limit to the amount of AMC feats U_K suggested, or the nerf to the Astro Effect + Inner Eye combo).

However, due to some issues at work, I'm going to have to do some major overtime (and working at home as well) for the next two weeks, but I can get straight to work once those two weeks are over. I can PM the final product to you guys (U_K and Alzrius), of course.

For example:

*SNIP*

Now I know that descriptions like those are rather long, but they do clear up a lot of issues. Since the book is in PDF form anyway, you won't have to worry about page count... I think.

I certainly appreciate the help, but I am not sure rewriting all the abilities is a good idea, especially not if rewriting them vastly expands the text when I am trying to condense things as much as possible.

...and space is a factor for the print version.

 

[EarthSeraphEdna]

Howdy Adslahnit dude!



I certainly appreciate the help, but I am not sure rewriting all the abilities is a good idea, especially not if rewriting them vastly expands the text when I am trying to condense things as much as possible.

...and space is a factor for the print version.

How are readers supposed to know how Abrogate works if they're not avid readers of this forum then? Anyway, if that's the case, then I suppose I can stick to simple spelling and grammar fixes, along with fixes if they only take up one extra sentences. Abrogate was just the ability that needed the most fixing. 75% of the abilities in the book are mostly usable, with only 25% of them being vague enough as to need fixing anyway.

I have a PDF editor that I can use to edit pages, by the way. That should help me constrain myself to the line limits for each page.

 

[Farealmer3]

U_K you missed my response.

 

[Alzrius]

How are readers supposed to know how Abrogate works if they're not avid readers of this forum then?

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think people will know how it works from the text that's currently there. Though I could be biased.

 

[EarthSeraphEdna]

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think people will know how it works from the text that's currently there. Though I could be biased.

If you weren't a regular in this forum, and you were reading the description of Abrogate, how would you know... that the ability is randomly selected if you don't have something like Psychometry? That it doesn't subsequently nullify abilities if prerequisites cannot be met? That it doesn't nullify ability score-boosting items if an ability score is negated?

 

[Anabstercorian]

If you weren't a regular in this forum, and you were reading the description of Abrogate, how would you know... that the ability is randomly selected if you don't have something like Psychometry? That it doesn't subsequently nullify abilities if prerequisites cannot be met? That it doesn't nullify ability score-boosting items if an ability score is negated?

Damn right. You tell it like it is!

 

[WarDragon]

Adslahnit, I think you've nailed Krusty's single biggest weakness as a designer, even more than his chronic lateness. U_K, you have a really bad tendency to assume that everyone follows your thought processes, and sees your writings exactly as you do. Abrogate really does need all of that stuff spelled out, along with countless other things in the book that are open to massive interpretation.