PCs from Light Against The Dark

[seasong]

Hey Delgar! So, impressions so far...

I would say that, if anything, the fighters are more effective at dishing out damage. Athan's maximum possible damage (assuming throwing 3 spears at under 30 feet, crit on each one, maximum damage rolled on each one) is 171 hp in a single round (with non-magical spears). More commonly, he does about 15 per hit, or an average of about 35 per round. He's also good at very long ranges, and can charge to close combat pretty durn quick.

For the most part, Greppa buffs everyone, and then does support damage with his spell casting, or uses his magic to alter the field of combat in some way (daylight). As he gets more powerful and starts getting access to higher damage spells and weird stuff like teleport, he may start to become an equal to Athan's dishing ability, but will still be more vulnerable to counterattacks.

Merideth provides excellent support healing, and her inflict spells are pretty dishalicious. As she gets more comfortable with being an esper, that's going to make her an interesting non-combat utility belt.

Part of this, of course, is the matter of war. D&D magic (at least up to 3rd level spells) just isn't as useful as some people think it might be against a military. On the other hand, against the groundmouth and armorcat, magic was essential to victory.

So... I dunno . It seems to all balance out.

 

[seasong]

Originally posted by incognito
I was wondering if it was feasible for someone to generate a monk like character wusing your build system. I did not notice a way to amke wisdom increase your AC, but there were other ways to build AC.

Wondering how you might simulate some of a monk's special powers.

The monk is an unusual, oriental-style class "in monasteries dotting the landscape". Generally speaking, it's not appropriate to Theralis, until they find a place that such mystic unarmed arts are taught.

With that said, I would probably allow a feat, probably with a Prereq "WIS 13+, Dodge, and Sixth Sense", let a player add their WIS bonus to AC when unarmored and unencumbered (light encumbrance). This is slightly more powerful than buying BAC, but can only be done once, ever, and is reasonably balanced for its prereqs and restrictions (BAC works with armor).

Some of the monk's special powers I might charge more than a single feat for, but I think most of them would work reasonably well at the 5-point cost.

 

[seasong]

Updated with Bellos. You'll note that I changed the cost of HPs - I'll be applying that change to the other characters when I update them.

Sorry for a really crap weekend. My parents ended up taking up most of my time until Sunday, and Sunday I just bombed out and didn't do anything.

 

[J. Anson]

Excel? Palm!

I also assume average rolls for the healers, which neatly removes the excess damage that failed to kill.

Since you mentioned using your Palm for some things, it occurred to me that you could do the whole thing on your Palm. I wrote a small program in lisp to do the same thing as the Excel spreadsheet you described, but able to run on a Palm (with the help of LispMe, www.lispme.de, a free lisp interpreter). Since I'm not very familiar with Excel, I'm not sure how much of a pain replicating a cell 2000 times (much less 4 or 5 cells 2000 times) is, but it seems like it would be tedious. So my program just lets you specify the number of attackers. It prints out the number of dead using mostly the formula you described, with instakills, cumulative damage, and turn-by-turn healing. The exceptions are: the formula you described did not actually take into account the soldiers' damage modifier (E1), and it also handles weapons that do bonus damage that is not affected by critical hits, like frost (important later on when Theralis soldiers are battling a horde of fire demons).

Naturally, a Palm is a heck of a lot slower than a PC, so unless you have the latest and greatest you probably don't want to be doing battles with several thousand per side (it took about 25 seconds to handle 2000 attackers on mine, so it might take minutes on yours). However, it lets you determine the course of the battle during the game rather than before it, which in turn lets you deal with players doing mighty surprising things, like deciding to invade Aglaonis at the last minute.

Anyway, if anyone is actually interested in this, let me know, and I'll e-mail/post it.

 

[seasong]

I would be interested in playing with it, but I really haven't had much of a problem with needing to do this sort of thing during the battle. The PCs usually impact a small segment (the important segment ) of the war at any given time. And since I know, round by round, how well other segments are doing, I can usually improvise pretty smoothly.

For example, if the battle I run decimates the Theralese soldiers by round 25, but the PCs rally an important spearhead group in round 10, or Greppa nukes the orcs doing the decimating, I just keep the old rolls, but adjust the percentage death with some guesswork and move on.