Unearthed Arcana Variant Rules - Previews and Questions

[Aeolius]

Aquatic Races...Races of Water...

Bloodlines (take 2) - Ancestors available:...Water Elemental...Hag..."

This book must be mine!

 

[MeepoTheMighty]

Oh, yeah.

It occurs to me that gestalt classes would be great for a martial arts campaign --- everybody picks up a level of monk abilities along with their regular abilities. This is a terrific way to model kung fu movies, where eveybody who's anybody knows kung fu. Fighters become Wudan Warriors, sorcerers wield mysterious ki powers...heck, bend the alignment requirements and you could play a pretty cool Bardic Sage / Monk, always quoting ancient wisdom and lecturing on the virtues of his Seven Scholars Boxing Technique as he fights the bad guys.

That sounds pretty cool, right there.

 

[Tarril Wolfeye]

More Answers...


Planar Banishment - Banish Outsider instead of Turning Undead

Spelltouched Feats - Feats that a simulate a spell you were exposed to or give you some protection against that spell

Action Points - just like d20 Modern, you get APs each level and you may spend them to add 1d6 to a d20 roll, this variant includes some special actions you can get with APs and some effects you can achieve with Feats

Spontaneous Metamagic - 2 variants:
-daily uses: you may use the metamagic feat 3x/day on the fly, not using a higher level, but still limited by the level modifier of your feat
-extra spell slots: you must expend more spell slots to use metamagic feats, to be exact a number of additional slots equal to the feat's level modifier of a level not less than the spell you want to modify

Test-Based Prerequisites - instead of needing standard prerequisites for prestige classes and feats you take a test.

specialist wizard variants - 3 variants each for the 8 schools of magic

 

[Plane Sailing]

Thanks very much for your help, Tarril.

The test-based prereqs is interesting, it is a house rule that I've had for a while because I felt it had more flavour and was less artificial. I'll be interested to see exactly what they've done with that.

Cheers

 

[JPL]

That sounds pretty cool, right there.

Thanks.

It also matches the genre assumption that the guy who's the mightiest X always also has the strongest kung fu.

I think it's a much more satisfying alternative to simply having everybody multiclass. A hybrid fighter-monk will still be the last guy you want to face hand-to-hand [and all those bonus feats means plenty of customization and unique fighting styles].

Hmm. And next month's Dragon updates Oriental Adventures to 3.5...and last month's Dragon had Kara-Tur. Hmm...

 

[DonAdam]

http://www.montecook.com/arch_stuff48.html - racial paragon classes

And for the spell point system, even sorcs become worthless. They don't get enough extra spells to matter and lose their versatility advantage.

 

[Michael Tree]

Interesting.
If the XPH doesn't update the PP for the psion, the Sorcerer now has 249 PP at 20th, and the Psion only 183...

I'm sure they'll give Psions more PP in the revised version, because Bruce Cordell (the designer) has already given more PP in his Mindscapes psion variant. Interestingly, all of the above classes have less PP than the mindscapes psion, who has 265 PP at 20th level.

 

[jasamcarl]

http://www.montecook.com/arch_stuff48.html - racial paragon classes

And for the spell point system, even sorcs become worthless. They don't get enough extra spells to matter and lose their versatility advantage.

How so? From what I gather, the wizard still has to prepare their spells beforehand while the sorcerer cast spontaneously. If you are referring to the sorcerer's ability to cast low-level spells in a higher level slot, that wasn't much of an advantage to begin with, and even less so now that spells can be traded out as you go up in level. You are right when you say that the sorcerer my have lost out slightly in the quantity of spells though. On the other hand, I never really bought any of the assertions that they were underpowered to begin with.

What I'm more worried about is the ability of a high-level spellcasters to cast more 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells than they could under the slot system. Under the latter, a large number of low level spell slots had practically little utility at high-levels. If they did a straight slot to pp conversion, caster just got a huge boost because now they can funnel the equivilant of those low-level spells into more useful high-level spells. Its one of the things that lead to a lot of overstatements about how underpowered psions were originally. This is assuming of course that that they did a straight coversion, which might not be the case.

 

[Ashrem Bayle]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but from what I can see, the Sorcerer did indeed get the shaft.

From what I can tell, the Wizard is treated very similar to the Magister from AU. You have a spellbook. Each day, you can prepare a number of spells. Then you can cast any of those prepared spells however you like.

How is that any different from a Sorcerer who could change his list of known spells every day?


BTW - I'm seeing a LOT of great options for a Midnight campaign in UA.

 

[smetzger]

I've got to say this -- the OGL is listed at the end of this PDF document, but I really think that they have used it incorrectly.

(a) There is no added copyright notice for this document itself, the "Unearthed Arcana Variant Checklist". That's required by Section 6.
(b) They reference Unearthed Arcana itself, which is not currently Open Game Content. That's also a requirement of Section 6.

WOTC has been getting sloppier and sloppier with the legal treatment of the OGL since Ryan Dancey left. I strongly suspect the whole project is going to collapse if WOTC keeps contradicting their own legal language.

That's bad but not as bad as not designating what is OGC. I didn't see such a designation.

They really should not be making these mistakes.