Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lackhand" data-source="post: 3804115" data-attributes="member: 36160">Aberrations aren't really a type, they're the random-and-wacky of what you get when there's no other type that applies. What exactly is the unifying link between a chaos beast and a beholder, especially when considering Ranger Favored Foe?Outsiders also aren't really types. Just living from/hailing from an outer plane is enough to grant the Outsider type... except when it isn't. Contrast the achaierai, the fiendish tyrannosaurus, the inevitable, and the aasimar. The Achaierai is a big, angry bird, representing the platonic ideal of, um, angry four legged birds?The fiendish T Rex is summonable by Summon Monster (I think?) and thus represents some sort of platonic ideal of angry scaled lizard. It's a magical beast, despite being 1) extraplanar, 2) called, and 3) fiendish (it's in the name! : )  )Inevitables are robots. Oops, they're outsiders.Aasimar are the long-descendants of outsiders and humans. They're, um, outsiders native to the prime. Also, half-elves are considered elves, with nary a drop of human blood. That seems wrong; the fun of being a half-breed is being stuck between worlds, surely!So, that's not really worth keeping. Definitely, things that come from Outside should be marked as such, but when one is on *their* plane, they're not really outsiders any more.Angels/Devils/Demons/Inevitable/Slaad/whatever are good tags to keep around, but they don't need to imply Outsider, necessarily: They indicate precisely what they indicate (that a given thing is Angelic/Diabolic/Whatever), with no implication as to how that needs to interact with spells that care about where the beastie in question came from. How does one create a saint? Slap the Angelic template/descriptor on the cleric.I want these tags to be at *exactly* the same level as "incorporeal", "humanoid", "fire", "good" (well, in 3.x), "reptilian", and so on.Part of my reasoning is transformative templates. If _anything_ about the race determines anything uniquely, then transformative templates lose a lot of their fun.The two can be combined: Abilities are grouped into talent trees, such as psionic, draconic (it *is* called dungeons and dragons...), angelic, and so on; some descriptors have, as their ability, granting the beastie access to that talent tree.But honestly, I'm okay with using two separate sets of rules here, and not imposing the talent tree structure on monsters. I'm just exploring how these could tie together <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification