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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fralex" data-source="post: 6458682" data-attributes="member: 6785902">I had fun building on that makeshift artificer and seeing where it went. It looks like <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/5earchetypes/showentry.php?e=71" target="_blank">this</a> so far. For me, the key thing about the artificer class is inventiveness. For a regular spellcaster, everything their magic can do has been planned in advance, in the sense that their spells are mainly focused on providing end results. Every spell is a specific magical procedure that produces a discrete effect. Artificer spells are more like tools for building new effects on your own. It's like the difference between a doctor and a medical researcher, or a soldier and a weapon engineer. But I think the most fun interpretation of the concept is to make it more like a weapon engineer who takes half-finished prototypes into battle, or a doctor who invents new surgical procedures in the middle of an operation. To me, an artificer should be a source of insane spontaneous inventions that either solve a problem in an interesting way or make it a more interesting problem. Like, OK, this is an extreme example, but a friend of mine once told me a story of how he managed to turn an entire continent into a flying dreadnought that his party used to conquer the world (the DM had just admitted he had completely lost whatever plot he had prepared). It had this crazy setup where they'd launch a portable hole at the enemy, and the archer, with the help of some bracers that greatly enhanced his accuracy, would shoot a bag of holding at the portable hole as it approached the target. Bag and hole collide, and everything around them gets banished to another plane. The party just flew to each region and said they could either join them or be obliterated. The flying continent warship and the government they established was made into a part of the setting in the following campaign.Like I said, that's a really extreme example, but an artificer should make it possible to tell that kind of story. They should have open-ended abilities that allow for unplanned possibilities. They should give the party gifts that make things fun for everybody. That's why my favorite thing from that artificer attempt of mine is probably the cantrip that just gives an item one of the minor properties and quirks magic items can have with those tables in the DMG. There's a bunch of ways you can use the properties you give to things, and every time you do you also give them some sort of random flaw. I should mention I haven't gotten a chance to test any of this yet, though, so it could turn out I'm doing it all wrong. But thinking of what I could do with the class makes me excited. A class should do that when you read about it.</blockquote>

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