New feat - Embraced by the Earth

[farscapesg1]

Here is a feat idea that I've been thinking about and I want people's opinions on whether it could be considered balanced or not. It is similar to the Frostburn feat that gives summoned creatures an additional 1d6 cold damage to their attacks, but instead of adding damage it modifies the summoned creature's ability to bypass DR.

Embraced By the Earth

Prerequisites: Spell Focus (Conjuration), Augment Summoning

Benefit: When you summon a creature or creatures using any summon spell, you can opt to summon a version of the creature affected by the Plane of Earth. If you do so, the summoned creature gains the earth subtype, and its natural attacks can bypass DR as if they were silver, adamantium, or cold iron weapons (choose one type when casting the summoning spell).
Creatures with any subtype other than Earth cannot be affected by this feat.

 

[farscapesg1]

Any comments? Anyone?

 

[smootrk]

Seems OK to me, but you might limit the effect to one type of 'substance' per time the feat is chosen... much like the Energy Substitution Feat in the Complete Arcane limits the choice of Energy type to one chosen at the time the feat is taken.

I would allow the feat in my campaign with that stipulation... but even 'as-is', I do not think it too out of control based upon how the DM controls monster information that the characters may or may not be privy to. This feat can effectively always allow bypassing most types of DR in any given situation.

Another possible solution to the situation is to only allow the feat to be called upon a certain number of times per day, possibly based on level or some abilty score.

Either way, I would probably seek some limiting factor.

 

[farscapesg1]

Thanks for the input

Our group is either so new to the gaming (some of us have never played the old editions) or are pretty good at keeping player knowledge seperate from character knowledge.

This came up in one of our last sessions. We were fighting some wererats and no one had any silver weapons. We also had never encountered wererats before, so their DR 10/silver became a pretty big issue in our session. Our Stonechild fighter could get some damage in, but the rest of the group was pretty limited. After a failed Knowledge (Dungeoneering) check, since the group wasn't causing much damage my wizard thought Magic Weapon might help out our TWF Ranger, but no luck there. I ended up having to summon a Fiendish Ape just to grapple the wererat that broke through and kept coming at me. Of course, he couldn't do much damage either, which is when I thought about this feat.

I can see limiting it to only one type of damage, but that seems like a pretty small benefit for a feat. Maybe if it granted the creatures an addtional +1 or +2 to Natural Armor (skin is toughened and stonelike).

 

[smootrk]

I agree that just one choice of substance is not much of a feat by itself. The additional Natural Armor would be an acceptable balancing factor IMO, and would seem to be appropriate for Earth-touched creature.

You may also consider making a lesser & greater version (with the lesser being a requirement for the greater version). Having the lesser version be only a choice of one element (with the +2 natural armour enhancment). The greater version could allow the conjuration of a being with all three substance qualities (and possibly a Natural Armour bonus upped to +4).

This would make for a progression or feat tree. To add to that tree, you may want to create another 1 or 2 feats that associate with Elemental (earth) and/or summoning them.

Just to expand on this concept, you might want to create other elemental feat trees like a fire summoning tree, or air summoning tree, which would have the same base requirements you mentioned (augmented summoning and conjuration focus). Essentially the means to create an Elmental Summoning specialist conjurer or even druid.