Elder-Basilisk
First Post
Darklone said:
By making a mistake. We should drop the last attack.
strongbow said:
Crazy things like flying octopuses are allowed in Living Greyhawk only if the rules unabiguously support them. If the rules don't support them unambiguously, you're going to run into DMs who will not interpret the rules to allow your flying octopus (assuming you don't play all your games in one specific group with a DM who enjoys playing with your flying octopus).
You might even run into DMs who use their rules-lawyering skills for good and not for evil and who find ways to exclude things that "most DMs would not allow" on the basis of obscure rules, FAQ entries, paragraphs in the LGCS, etc.
I take it you're basically using Living Greyhawk as a home game since you have a regular group. (Though I might question the utility of Leadership in your group since it looks like you usually have full tables anyway).
Dude, I judge Living Greyhawk a lot and medium sized creatures wear medium sized armor designed for them. A human can't take a riding dog's studded leather barding and wear it when it would be convenient. Similarly, as an animal, your druid build would need barding not armor. DMs have plenty of discretion to disallow stuff that is pushing the boundaries of the rules and are under no obligation to accept every assertion a player makes about the rules. That wouldn't fly at any Living Greyhawk table I was judging, nor would it fly at 7 out of 10 Living Greyhawk tables in the San Francisco bay area or western Canada (where I have the most experience playing and judging).
Like it or not, one of the things you need to consider when designing a Living Greyhawk character of any type is how it's going to work at different tables. Finding something that you can argue is a gray area and then exploiting the heck out of it is going to make your character more effective sometimes and result in your character getting screwed when you show up at a table where the judge doesn't (mis)interpret the rules in the same way you do.
That would be an official gray area in which the text of the Complete Warrior feat can be read in two or three different ways. That your particular interpretation generally shows up on builds that are deliberately abusing the various rules does not make me favorably inclined to it.
You call it a house rule, I call it a rules interpretation. I figure that since the attack bonus is specifically called out as an enhancement bonus, the damage bonus is also an enhancement bonus. It doesn't explicitly say so but it's a reasonable interpretation. If penumbras, precedent, and considerations of abstract principles are good enough for interpreting the Constitution, they're good enough for interpreting the wording of poorly edited spells in ill-thought-out class books.
6) With regards to ape/human hands, 'tis the breaks in LG. Sure, in a home game I could get an opposable weapon, but since it is LG I can't. Editing Note: Surely you noticed that the Gauntlets he puts on make his hands a bit more human like and able to swing a weapon?
Well, you see, the existence of opposable weapons strongly indicates that, in D&D apes and other animals can't use weapons unless they have the opposable enhancement. While that may not be ideal for you since you don't have access to opposable weapons, you might wish to rethink the strategy rather than assuming that the rules must be interpreted to allow the strategy. Using wild shape+reduce animal as a stat buff (essentially you're trying to use it to make you into a human with better stats) is pretty cheesy anyway. There's plenty that you can do with wild shaping into a brown bear without twisting the rules into pretzels.
And as to gauntlets, they don't make anyone's hands more human-like. In fact, if the hands aren't humanlike to begin with, they don't fit and therefore won't work. They in no way change the basic shape or structure of your hands--they just make you stronger.
All told, I think you could make a multiclassed barbarian/druid/warshaper animal reduction dire ape build that would pass muster. However, you'd have to be satisfied with wearing barding (not armor so your character could only wear it while in reduced dire ape form) and live with the fact that your weapon use will vary between "go ahead, no penalty," "you don't really have the hands necessary to use a greatclub properly, so you'll attack at a -2/-4 penalty," and "if your weapon isn't opposable, you can't use it while wildshaped; quit your whining and be satisfied with claw/claw/rend" depending upon who is judging your table. If you build a corner case character that depends on a half-dozen ambiguous or arguable rulings, you should expect that those rulings will only ALL come down in your favor one time out of four or so--less if your interpretations are deliberately abusive.
I used to run into this all the time with my characters. Under 3.0, it seemed like every table had a different way of interpreting Shield before the FAQ clarified it. Under 3.5, it was the same with polymorph, acceptable sizes, and equipment until the LGCS clarified it. Even now, I only experience reasonable consistency on questions like "do luck and morale bonusses apply to grapple?" "if I share a Dragon's Breath spell with my familiar, do we each get one attack every 1d4 rounds or do we share a common pool of attacks usable every 1d4 rounds?" and "Can a one-round casting time spell like Enlarge Person be quickened?" The idea that using only the core rules will produce uniform rulings is a chimera.
