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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6159302" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 326: December 2004part 6/8Heroic feats: This column only gives us 4 feats this month, but they're longer than usual. We've had full books on the paragons of good, and evil, and the cool feats, prestige classes and spells they can purchase. Similar stuff for lawful and chaotic characters seems entirely logical. Of course with chaotic characters, you don't want the actual abilities they get to be too boring and logical, and unfortunately, that's exactly what we do get here. 2 feats which work like Practiced Spellcaster for Barbarian or Bard class features, the ability to always have certain skills as class ones, and a seriously nerfed version of the old Wild Mage ability to control magical items with random effects. Very disappointing and rather formulaic. Surely you can come up with something better than this for your champions of chaos. Gaining prestige: When taking a prestige class, you always need to ask if the abilities you gain from it are better than the ones you would get from staying in your regular class. This is particularly the case with partial spellcasting progressions like this one, which cause you to give up your 9th level spells. The Shaper of Form is a specialist in shapeshifting magic, both organic and inorganic. This does give them a sufficiently different niche from the druid that both could fit into a party. They also get permanent body changes, including the ability to easily change race or gender, which is obviously a good target for people who want to play trans characters, and don't want to revert to their birth biology every time an enemy casts dispel magic on them. Overall, I think this probably comes out slightly suboptimal, since they give up 4 levels of spellcasting, but still only have an 1/2 BAB, so they won't be able to take full advantage of their physical enhancements to compensate for that. Winning races: This column introduces another set of gradual progressions for templates, to reflect gradually picking up a connection with other worlds rather than being born with it. This time, it's the half-elemental ones. Each of those 4 CR+2 templates becomes a 3 level progression, gradually boosting the degree of elemental resistance and number of spell-like abilities you can access. Like the bloodlines in UA, these work best if you take them gradually alternating between regular levels, with the final one somewhere in your early teens, rather than all at once in a way that makes you fragile at low level. As this definitely makes it easier to take these thematic abilities while remaining balanced overall, I have to approve of this particular bit of mechanical development.</blockquote>

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