[Seriously] What is the ECl of a Munchkin?

[Jeremy]

Now this is not to say every battle should be a knockdown drag-out brawl that goes 33 rounds (when was the last time you went more than 5?) and could go either way and the tide of the battle shifts depending on who's init it is. Those are nice, but only once in a long while.

You're nearing the home stretch, you should be movers and shakers in your world and a lot of what you come up against should be put down hard and fast. Probably about half of what you meet. But there should still be other half comprised of people that take a little effort and resources to drop (i.e. if you had to fight them 8 times during the day, you'd actually lose to the wimps the 8th time), people that are actually tough little buggers, people that require serious ingenuity or end up in knockdown drag-out fights of your lives, and people that can do to you what you do to goblins.

If you haven't met any of the last two groups in your last 5-6 games, your missing some of the fun of D&D high level gaming.

Trust me.

 

[novyet]

Now this is not to say every battle should be a knockdown drag-out brawl that goes 33 rounds (when was the last time you went more than 5?) and could go either way and the tide of the battle shifts depending on who's init it is. Those are nice, but only once in a long while.
<snip>
If you haven't met any of the last two groups in your last 5-6 games, your missing some of the fun of D&D high level gaming.

Trust me.

You know what? We just had a fight like that in our last session, our dm decided to have a little fun with us, so she decided to use a crazed berserker, with a few little epic twists. So berserker and company were wailing hard on us, forcing us to start using things like heal. Know what we learned after that? Spell Stowaway: Heal sucks!

Those crazy, long drawn out fights are part of what make high level so fun!

 

[Conaill]

Stats alone could easily give you a +1 ECL. Depending on which ECL calculator you use, +1 ECL comes out to something like 35 or 45 point-buy.

For example, if significantly more than 10% of your PC's had a starting stat of 18 before racial mods, chances are they started out with much higher stats than normal. (10% is the expected number of 18's per character with 4d6-drop-1)

 

[Jeremy]

You want to know what's really REALLY a pain? A flying, I can see invisible at all times, four-armed glabrezu barbarian frenzied berserker with nothing but his claws and twin greataxes tearing into you round taking 400 points of damage before flashing and healing all his wounds reactively and keeps coming.

Ring of 9 Lives. Magic of Faerun.

Criminy. That was one hell of a battle.

In fact, while I'm sitting around, I'll cook him up in PC Gen. Man I love PC Gen. Here's the link to the baddie demon of dwarf-like stubborness.

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18175

 

[Squire James]

I hope you guys at least know that Bull's Strength and such provide enchantment bonuses to the ability score, and so do things like Belts of Giant Strength. Which means the two don't stack! You'd have to get something like Intensified Bull's Strength to get better (hopefully you don't let someone double-Empower their spells!). I've found that, once everyone gets the +6 ability-score items they want, Haste and elemental protections are about all a non-cleric can get for buffing.

I guess I'm not going to ask how a frenzied berserker maganged to get the 12 caster levels and 24 Spellcraft ranks necessary to gain the Spell Stowaway feat. He also needs the ability to cast Heal. I guess he was a holy man in his free time...

I still hold with my contention that if the party min/maxes the DM has to as well. If it's a viscous cycle (I think it is, BTW), and the campaign suffers for it (mine hasn't), maybe that's a good time to start a new campaign and tell them it's 24 point-buy and ability-score items cost 10 times as much. It's hard to min/max much when everyone's "power stat" is around 15 before buffing.

 

[Elric]

Squire James- novyet isn't in this group. I don't even know what Spell Stowaway does (probably from ELH based on those requirements). Buff spells limited to Haste? Double-empower is legal, although no spellcaster in the group has the feat. The stat-boosting spells ensure that everyone has a Con/Str/Dex bonus if they can use it well. Elemental Protections are generally worthless unless you're against an elemental creature or you know that an enemy has a favored attack form.

We use: Brilliant Aura (MoF). Holy Aura. Magic Vestment. Greater Magic Weapon. Barkskin. Stoneskin. Improved Invisibility. Fly. Expeditous Retreat.? Rage (not sure where this is from). I know hardly anything outside the core books and the party already has +5 (+7 to damage), armor-ignoring weapons, +5 armor, +5 natural armor, +4 resistance to saves, +4 Deflection, doubled movement, flying, DR 10/+5 and is invisible. We don't use all of these spells in a given fight, but we can use a lot of them.

Jeremy- our fights are really, really short. I can't remember the last time that a fight went more than 4 rounds.

KamikazeMidget- we generally stay away from Dominate Spells. The same goes for instant-death spells. Lots of ranged attackers would have a major problem trying to hit the party (after any low number of buff spells). The problem is that Str is the attribute to boost in order to do more damage and is very high on lots of creatures. There is no good way to make archers with a high attack bonus, except for lots of magic. Thus, you would have high level archers. Fighters tear through objects. The half-cel is anything but wussy. He has a very high Con score and probably the highest AC in the group. Gnomish vampires would be interesting, however...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Don`t fear to use instant-death spells or dominations spells against your group. And don`t worry about a dead character - there is nothing a wish, miracle or true resourection spell couldn`t "repair". And a high level party will have access to this, even if they have to teleport to the largest city in the campaign world and pay thousends of gold pieces...

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[Elric]

I'm a player in this campaign, not the DM. There are no raise dead type spells. Thus, insta-death and domination type spells result in far too many PC casualties. Death being final is another reason why we cast so many prep spells- we can't take any chances.

 

[DM_Matt]

I'm a player in this campaign, not the DM. There are no raise dead type spells. Thus, insta-death and domination type spells result in far too many PC casualties. Death being final is another reason why we cast so many prep spells- we can't take any chances.

There is kind of a mutual assured destruction deterrent thing going here. If they avoid insta-death, so do I. No resurrections, regardless, tough.