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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6155941" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 325: November 2004 part 7/8Class acts: Fighters get Tools of the Trade, a bit of advice on choosing your weapon. Will you go for damage, reach, special effects, types of damage, lots of attacks? The choice is yours, and you have the feats to back it up. Yawn. Clerics get More Faith, less Fight. A bit of roleplaying advice plus a how to on building characters that statistically match their personality. This may involve taking cross-class skills. Oh well. Them's the breaks. Real people are usually suboptimally built, for optimally statted and trained all their life for a purpose people wind up like Michael Jackson, deeply weird. Wizards get Apprentice tricks, some advice on the clever uses of cantrips. One of those things we've seen before, done better and in greater depth in 2nd ed. Rogues get The Multiclassed Rogue. What classes would make a good dip to complement your array of skills? A level of barbarian is easily the best choice, as speed and extra dodging makes up for the slight sacrifice of sneak attack, and you can soon bring most of your skills back to max. Fighter and bard can be pretty good too. Interesting thoughts here. Barbarians get 7 new flaws. All but 2 revolve around their rage ability, making it more of a pain in the ass. Hulk smash indeed. Take a couple of these at 1st level and multiclass out of barbarian at 2nd for much twinkitude. Druids get Druid Meets World. How does a druid fit in when not in the wilderness? Good question. Here's some possible answers. More fluff and tactical advice. Sorcerers get Sorcerous Strategies. If you choose nothing but blasty spells, don't be surprised if you suck donkey balls and die. One blasty spell per spell level, making sure they're of different shapes and energy types, is more than sufficient to keep you competitive. The rest should be devoted to defense and utility. You want to get the greatest versatilty out of your limited selection, make sure you don't get caught with nothing useful. Pretty commonsensical, really. Rangers get Tracking and Trailing. You can learn a good deal about a creature from looking at it's prints, beyond just where it's going. Another reason a few ranks in Knowledge (nature) don't go amiss. Paladins get Dealing with friends and allies. It's important that your buds know what they can't be permitted to do without the paladin having to punish them. You want a real good guy on your side, you'd better make sure you're at least moderately righteous yourself. Another case of tackling a roleplaying issue that has been done before in much greater detail. Monks get 4 new magic items. 3 weapons, and a magical belt, each of which has a special ability particularly useful to a monk. Pretty neat stuff to put in a treasure haul. Bards get Skills and Knowledge. More advice on how to play them thematicly, and assign your skill points appropriately. Knowing what lies ahead is an invaluable asset, so use it and you could avoid an unwanted TPK. Player Tips: Metagaming is one of those topics that pops up fairly regularly around here. Generally people are against it, as it reduces the verisimilitude of the world. This article takes the opposite approach. Instead of trusting yourself to not metagame, make sure your characters take appropriate knowledge skills so you can justify using your OOC knowledge. Much like saying don't create a character who's an <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> and then say you're just playing your character when it causes problems for other players, this is a solution that will work in many games, but not all of them. It's certainly not that well suited to D&D, where skill points are at a premium, and fairly specific to particular classes. I suppose it doesn't matter who has the metagame knowledge as long as at least one of the characters has the skills to back it up. It'd take a very churlish DM indeed to ban all OOC communication at the table. So this is interestingly different, but I can already see the potential problems in this approach. Still, at least they're trying new things, which is better than just churning out some old canard about building your personality. Adventurer tricks: This column is also in a modernist mood, as it thinks about what your adventuring party can take from the organisation and tactics of real life SWAT teams. Which mainly means the joys of suppressive fire, good use of stealth and cover, and focussing on the most dangerous targets to take them down fast before they even get a chance to react. Even in 3.5e, there are substantial options which enable you to win fights without putting yourself in danger, especially if you can buff your spell DC's to the point where your save or suck effects outpace the save progressions of your enemies. Just make sure you set divinations up to prevent turnaround being fair play, because being ambushed and pincushioned while trying to sleep will let NPC's kill you despite being lower CR just as easily. Once you go paranoid, it's not easy to go back.</blockquote>

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