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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 100913" data-attributes="member: 1879">I recently read through the Burok Torm book and was very impressed. I expected to come out of it wanting to play a dwarf, but instead I find all my sympathies lying with their enemies the Dark elves of Dier Drendal.  I'd love to play one of these guys, the reasons that they are what they are very cool, and completely not their fault. And in theory their use of tattoo magic is their edge against the dwarven mastery of rune magic. Stylistically this seems very cool, but in system it makes a good deal less sense.Here the problem is two fold. First Tattoo magics big advantage for the individual (It can't be stolen.) is an equally sized drawback for the society you come from, IE your Tattoos can't be passed on when you fall. Therefore over the long term the dwarves will tend to accumulate magic while the elves are bleeding it off person by person. Secondly, Dark elves are perhaps the least suited race in the scarred lands to use Tattoo magic. There are two important stats with Tattoo magic. First and by far the most important is Con, and the dark elves have a con penalty. According to the book almost all elves have a magic tattoo which seems off when you consider that an elf needs a rolled 14 to even be allowed a single tattoo, and that is what, the 35th percentile?  So 65 percent of all elves can't possibly have a magic tattoo. Those that can have tattoo must have fewer and weaker tattoos than members of just about any other race, especially dwarves! The second important stat for tattoos is Wis, the only mental stat the elves don't get a bonus to. So the question remains, Why do the elves specialize in a form of magic they suck at?And compounding this is the Tattooed adept prestige class. Tattoos are magic items, they can't be stolen, but they all have some kind of debilitating side effect, and must be paid for just like any magic item. Furthermore they must be bought and cannot be found or stolen.  So here we have a prestige class that specializes in using a class of magic items. They have some minor benefits from their tattoos, but they don't get them for free and they can't make them themselves. So this is essentially a like a class that specializes in using wondrous items, but has no built in way to aquire them.  In exchange for the ability to have a few more of these tattoos the Tattooed adept (Described as being a martial spellcaster) gets 1/2 spellcasting progression (Every odd level) and for some reason a BAB prgression that is worse than a wizard. And these characters are supposed to be able to go toe to toe with a Dwarven runecaster, a class with full spellcasting progression and abilities that allow them to hang spells and cast multiple hung spells in the same round as well using them for defense or burning off spells for healing. So in the story and flavor text it all sounds incredibly cool, but as soon as you look at the meat and bones of how the system works, the dark elves turn out to be a paper tiger.  It's a pet peeve of mine when game designers set up a scenario that just doesn't work within the limits of the game system. So how does everybody else feels about this, Would you rather see game companies produce cool stories that require house rules to prop them up, or would you rather see things flow from the inherent logic of the world the rules portray?-Andor</blockquote>

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