Insane characters

[der_kluge]

Something in another thread reminded me something that my roommate did several years ago (back in the 2e days).

Some friends he'd met were going to play a game, and the GM of that group gave them all 1,000,000 XP that they could use to spend on character levels and/or magic items. That is, they had to find some balance to where they spent the XPs. They could buy 20 levels of characters, and a handful of items, or they could make a low level character with a bunch of artifacts, or do something in-between.

My roommate at first created a necromancer, and it was ok. Just... ok.

But by this point I had acquired all 4 of those "Encyclopedia Magica" volumes, and thus had access to every magic item that was ever created for the game. Those books are really, really awesome.

So, my friend created an elven archer. He maximized his attributes using skills and powers rules, he took an archer kit, and applied every conceivable bonus he could to his archery skill. Then we found some bow that doubled the range, and arrows that split out into multiple arrows, and he had two quivers of Ehlohna. And magic arrows are unbelievably cheap, so he bought things like "arrows of mage slaying", "arrows of cleric slaying", etc, etc. And he bought acid arrows, flaming arrows, the whole nine yards.

On top of that, he took numerous ioun stones, and even had a ring that would resurrect him into a phoenix were he to actually die.

We had this guy so twinked out, that we calculated that he could do 20-200 points of damage in a single round with NORMAL arrows.

The idea was that everyone would bring their characters together to see who would win. Ultimately, they didn't allow his character, since because he had access to those encyclopedias, the GM decided he had an unfair advantage! I don't think they ever ended up playing that game anyway...

But I'm curious if anyone has ever done anything like this, or what other kinds of insane character builds you've ever seen?

 

[Arnwyn]

We did this once every few years or so (though we haven't with 3e yet) - and called it the "Gladatorial Competition".

Each player got 1,000,000 XP to build a character, and x amount of gold to buy equipment (using the Encyclopedia Magica books).

Then we'd set it up as a 1-on-1 round-robin tournament with some basic ground rules (arena size, for example), and then see who the tournament winner is.

It was pretty fun.

 

[demiurge1138]

A while ago, I set up an epic deathmatch. Three characters versus King Ghidorah. One of the characters was a Colossal sun giant monk. I attempted to go for the same approach this year, but it was cancelled. Among the characters was an unbodied evolved vampire lord psion/master of the unseen hand, and another was an epic level wizard with access to epic spells that gave him +200 Intelligence.

Demiurge out.

 

[Boojum]

We had plans to do this a couple years ago as a one-shot. 20th level characters with standard equipment, 1-on-1 battles, ladder format. It didn't last long, but we did play the first round. My character had an elaborate plan that I never got to try out. He was a 20th level wizard (may have had some PrC but don't remember) that took Extra Familiar (I think it was from Dragon) as many times as possible to have lots of familiars. Then I would cast Eyebite, and since this was 3.0, it was target: self, and thus let me share it with all 8 familiars to fire off a barrage of gaze attacks every round. As it happened though, the one match I actually fought, I just won initiative and used Gate to bring in a Solar and watched as it diced up the opponent.