Putting it together -- Using Arcana Unearthed and other D20 products

[William Ronald]

Originally posted by Joshua Dyal
We were in a D&D campaign when AU came out, but only about 2nd level or so, and the wizard player just flat out converted his character into a magister and used the AU system instead. It worked pretty well that way; I'd be leery of anything hybridized unless it was a pretty substantial reworking of the things to get any glitches out.

I'm also using a few of the non-magical classes in my homebrew, and I have a guy playing a rogue/unfettered, but I guess that's not really you're question, is it?

I am a bit wary of combining and reworking classes. I might confuse players and cause a few headaches. To me, the rogue/unfettered combination seems to be VERY logical and a good one for urban adventures. So, how is the rogue/unfettered working out and what do you think of how the AU magister and the magic system worked with a D&D campaign?

MD Snowman: I will try to take a look at the documents in the next day or two.

 

[Desdichado]

I am a bit wary of combining and reworking classes. I might confuse players and cause a few headaches. To me, the rogue/unfettered combination seems to be VERY logical and a good one for urban adventures. So, how is the rogue/unfettered working out and what do you think of how the AU magister and the magic system worked with a D&D campaign?

Right, that's why we just decided that the mage player would just flat out be a magister instead of a wizard, rather than trying to combine or rework anything. The rogue/unfettered isn't really as obvious as all that, to me anyway. The Unfettered is designed to work in an environment that doesn't have any rogues, so a lot of stuff is redundant.

I did, for what it's worth, make a few alterations to the Unfettered; I reworked the skills to match a 3.0 skillset, and trimmed a few that he didn't really need in a campaign that had rogues as well. And I renamed it.

I'm crawling with houserules in my campaign, though, so it's difficult to say how one thing is working out relative to a control model, or anything like that. But the few problems I've had pop up haven't been with the rogue/unfettered. If anything, he seems a bit too weak, but that's because the player has never played a rogue or anything like before, and he often forgets to do some basic things, like use sneak attack damage, etc. I think he's actually working out pretty well.

 

[MDSnowman]

Bump- Updated the files I posted on page 2.

 

[ruleslawyer]

As a shameless plug I'm attaching the two word documents for my setting, the player handout, and the file with all the races stated out. I absed this loosely on an entry I saw for the setting search.

I'd apperciate feedback.

Nice work, MDSnowman! I particularly like the player handout. Regarding the races, I have some comments:

1) Do you really want quite so many elven subspecies? You already have a proliferation of races; I don't know whether adding five flavors of elf to the mix really enhances the portrait of diversity.

2) Speaking of which: I'd say some of the elf-ish races are a bit powerful. The aelfborn makes an uber magister; especially given the bonus feat; while the Con penalty hurts a caster somewhat, it's less devastating for the magister, with his d6 hit die. Arguably, it's balanced because of the tattoo weakness, but I'd say this weakness is simply too circumstantial to balance the racial benefits.

The elven subraces are less ambiguously "balanced high." All five new species, except the ice elf, have ability modifiers that are easy to twist to serious advantage. Wood elf is a superior choice to the D&D half-orc, mountain elf is a sheer no-brainer for a magister (arguably better than the aelfborn for that choice), and the reef and jungle elves are excellent choices for any character except the akashic and magister. The reef elf especially is quite good, unless "aquatic subtype" IYG means that it has a vulnerability above water.

Troll: Overpowered. Non-humanoid type, unbalanced ability score modifiers, a bonus feat, and weapon familiarity (with a pretty good weapon too, especially combined with Ambidexterity) might be a bit much.

The other ones I think are fine as is, and you've done a great job all told! (I very much like the shade template.)

 

[MDSnowman]

Nice work, MDSnowman! I particularly like the player handout. Regarding the races, I have some comments:

1) Do you really want quite so many elven subspecies? You already have a proliferation of races; I don't know whether adding five flavors of elf to the mix really enhances the portrait of diversity.

2) Speaking of which: I'd say some of the elf-ish races are a bit powerful. The aelfborn makes an uber magister; especially given the bonus feat; while the Con penalty hurts a caster somewhat, it's less devastating for the magister, with his d6 hit die. Arguably, it's balanced because of the tattoo weakness, but I'd say this weakness is simply too circumstantial to balance the racial benefits.

The elven subraces are less ambiguously "balanced high." All five new species, except the ice elf, have ability modifiers that are easy to twist to serious advantage. Wood elf is a superior choice to the D&D half-orc, mountain elf is a sheer no-brainer for a magister (arguably better than the aelfborn for that choice), and the reef and jungle elves are excellent choices for any character except the akashic and magister. The reef elf especially is quite good, unless "aquatic subtype" IYG means that it has a vulnerability above water.

Troll: Overpowered. Non-humanoid type, unbalanced ability score modifiers, a bonus feat, and weapon familiarity (with a pretty good weapon too, especially combined with Ambidexterity) might be a bit much.

The other ones I think are fine as is, and you've done a great job all told! (I very much like the shade template.)

Yeah I struggled quite a bit in creating the races and in general I used the guidelines I found in other places, Ice Elves, Reef Elves, and Jungle Elves were almost entirely out of Unearthed Arcana under sub-species, and Wood Elves are straight from the Monster Manual. Jungle Elves may just end up getting the default Elven racial ability score adjustments so can play them more as the custodians of Elven Culture, meanwhile I could easily give Wood Elves the racial ability adjustments of Wild elves from the MM. I included so many elves simply because I know they're popular with players, but I wanted to avoid the cliches, Elves are defiently a fractured race in my campaign, if you notice most of them have intelligence penalities. I saw mountain elves as a sort of anti-social group of elitists trying to perverse Elven culture and focusing on magic. I don't really see wood elves infringing on the orcs only because Warcraft Orcs get a bonus to constituion and not strength, they also have a racial ability to rage 1/day which will give them the edge over a wood elf in any kind of conflict.

Aelfborn have always been a pet project of mine ever since I RPed one and had a great time in the process. I saw them in an issue of Dragon and you'll find that aside from heightening spells in exchange for sanity they're almost identical to the Dragon Aelfborn. As for dispeling their tattoos I like to think if an enemy magister saw an Aelfborn coming (easy because of the tattoos) dispel magic would be their first spell. The chaos it could create makes it an awefull powerful draw back.

Trolls, I'll admit, will need a bit of work, my first draft of them however was very dry. I decided to spice them up a bit by adding the bonus feat and the problem with acid and fire related spells. While you are right, I could see myself dropping the ambidexterity... it doesn't even make sense in game "Well little Bobby can't wield an axe in his left hand, must be he was born to be a witch." I'll probablly change that to a simple bonus feat and not a talent. I defend the ability score adjustments however, simply because I'm with Monte in beliving that physical ability scores aren't nescerilly better than mental scores.

Shades I am very proud of. It was posted over at DiamondThrone.com. I honestly thought there needed to be an alternative to the Runechild (or Visitor in my setting). So using that as a guideline I just tried to find some ghoulish powers to give the shade. Some judicious renaming later and it came together perfectly.

Creating all these races however showed me just how murky the waters are when it comes to creating races. During this I realized unless you were basing it largely off an established race you were bound to err quite a few times, I agonized over creating the Outcast. I came to the conclusion that creating races from the ground up is about 75% guess work.

 

[William Ronald]

I have been swamped of late, but I will check out the files soon.