Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6079032" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 306: April 2003part 4/9Power fantasy: Another attempt to better support a well-known topic mechanically. Swashbucking has already got a themed issue this edition, but it does have to be said that D&D still isn't the best system for high mobility cinematic action. This is made worse by feat bloat, as whenever they include a feat to enable a specific maneuver, it includes the implicit assumption that you'll suck at it or can't try it at all if you don't have that feat. Thankfully this is one of the few articles these days that doesn't have new feats, prestige classes or spells, just new uses for the skills you already have. Use Rope, for example, is really handy if you want to swing from chandeliers and use heavy counterweights to head up or down fast without hurting yourself. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> And it's amazing how much more damage you can do by dropping something heavy on people than hacking them with your sword. In real life, standing still and trading blows is one of the worst ways to fight a battle. Making that more true in D&D is probably a good way to move things. Killing cousins: Ahh, the good old gith wars. The yanks and the zerths hate each other with a fiery passion, they both look down on the pirates, and all three would just pity the earthbound primitive gith if they ever ran into them. They're definitely not a big happy family, despite being united in hatred of illithids. But this does make exceedingly good plot fodder for players, especially as Githzerai are reasonably popular as a PC race. So a whole load of new feats, magical items and monsters which are good for the job of killing githyanki is good for both players and DM's. What's even more pleasing is that these are the kind of powers that aren't ONLY good for killing githyanki, just good for the job in an organic way. The power to track planeshifters wherever they may go is useful against tons of high level creatures, and toughening up your silver cord is handy whenever you're astral. Bypasing spell resistance and locking down dimension shifting powers can shift the balance at the most unexpected times. And being able to manipulate the powers of Limbo even better is just logical, considering where they live. This is a far better set of options to take than the ones aimed specifically at fighting undead or dragons, while still being full of flavour. As with the astral city last issue, you can't beat planar stuff for getting people to design interestingly different tricks which can really liven up your game. Racial variants: Here's a second article containing ideas that they'd use again and expand upon in actual books next edition. Variant racial templates based upon terrain they live in. Not only would that make up a decent chunk of Unearthed Arcana, but they'd also do terrain books in the same vein as their class splatbooks. As with that, all of these are ECL 0, apart from the underdark one, which is +1 to reflect the tougher competition they have like Drow and Svirfneblin. While the descriptions are copypasted, this is definitely a case where they refined the mechanics the second time around, with specific variants for particular races, and greater attention to adding penalties as well as benefits. Still, this article also has a few variants they didn't update, so it's both interesting to uncover, and to compare and contrast. It's good to know they still see this as a work in progress.</blockquote>

Verification