Invisible Blade from CW -- almost TPK'd my group.

[Nail]

The Hyp. strikes again!

 

[Hypersmurf]

Tell you what: you give me the opposing modifiers, and I'll calulate the chance of success! (I'll bet in this example, the chance is around 90%!)

The opposing modifiers are detailed in the very first post of the thread

-Hyp.

 

[Nail]

It should also be noted that when (the author) wrote the class, he thought "and any applicable modifiers" meant "modifiers to BAB", rather than "modifiers to Sense Motive", so he assumed that the defender got to add Str bonus, Weapon Focus, etc etc.

Is this RAW, or just "his intention"? I don't have the CW in front of me....

 

[Nail]

The opposing modifiers are detailed in the very first post of the thread

-Hyp.

...on my way.....

 

[Nail]

Ftr11 with no ranks in Sense Motive adds +11 to his opposed roll.

The Invisible Blade had a +15. She was Taking 10 on her Bluff checks, for 25.

The fighter needs a 14 or higher to beat the Bluff check, so the Invisible Blade will succeed 65% of the time.

Interestingly enough, the Invisible Blade here in Hyp's example is actually slightly better off rolling the dice rather than taking 10...her chance of success goes up by ~2%.

....Anyway.....are we saying that the poor Ftr 11 doesn't get to add his Str, magic weapon, etc......???

 

[Hypersmurf]

Is this RAW, or just "his intention"? I don't have the CW in front of me....

Well, no, in the class, it just says "feint", or "Bluff check", or whatever.

So you use the rules in the PHB, which says you add your BAB as well as any applicable modifiers to your Sense Motive check.

"any applicable modifiers" means things like Wis bonus, Skill Focus (Sense Motive), etc. Things that modify a Sense Motive roll.

But SoaP was thinking when he wrote the class that it meant "any modifiers you'd normally apply when you add BAB to something" - ie modifiers to an attack roll, which fighters generally have a lot more of.

"So the fighter will have tons of bonuses to his roll to oppose the feint," he thought, "and so a feint before every attack won't be unbalancing."

After the class was published, and this line of reasoning came up in conversation, it was pointed out to him that no, the fighter doesn't add Str, Weapon Focus, etc bonuses to his Sense Motive roll.

But he decided it didn't matter - it still wasn't unbalanced

-Hyp.

 

[Nail]

Ah.

Got it. Yup, that's .......not good.

 

[James McMurray]

And no, this is just not that deadly. I'd be much more worried about a straight rogue with blink and a ghost touch weapon, or (heaven forfend) a properly-prepared straight spellcaster.

Blink is not as good as you might think compared to bluffing as a free action. Your attack bonus is already lowish, tossing in a 20% miss chance won't help matters much, even if it does allow sneak attacks.

 

[the Jester]

Sounds like an intersting, dramatic, fun encounter.

I think you ran it right- in the epic-level game I play in rather than dming, one of the other pcs is an invisible blade. He's been immobilized, grappled, feared, and otherwise shut down tons, and has barely been able to sneak attack at all since the party's started!

I think one free bluff per attack is ok.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

From the sounds of things, it doesn't seem like a problem with the Invisible Blade. Ask yourself how the other bad guys would have fared if the can of whoop @55 that was apparently opened up on them early in the battle had been opened up on the Invisible Blade and they'd been the ones able to do the killing. It was your weaponmaster who took down the evoker right? How much damage or battlefield control did the other bad guys contribute or draw?

Since, in an ambush, that's basically an EL 16 encounter (vs. an APL 11 group), you can expect a lot of deaths. In this one, it so happened that the Invisible Blade did 2/3 of the killing. From the sounds of it, he caught all of the good dice and the other NPCs caught the bad dice. They probably caught the brunt of the PCs attacks too. Were it run again, I would imagine the Spellsword and the Fist of Hextor could give a pretty good accounts of themselves.

I also notice that two of the deaths were new characters. Were these new players to the group (who might not yet have the instinctive grasp of who's going to do what next), players trying out new characters (who might be unfamiliar with the best decisions to make in a crisis), or the kind of players who go through a character a month because they have a tendency to die? That would contribute to the situation.