Vow of Poverty

[Crothian]

I find it fine, maybe a little weak. The bonuses it gives are good but set in stone. Losing out on the versatility of magical items can really be a pain.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

druids with vop are pritty strong, as all bonuses stack with wildshape, thus your entire wealth balance is usable in wildshape. Also the holy symble is holly, and has no cost. Its pritty hard for a dm to argue that it doesent go with the spirt of the rules. In a game once that I played, I wanted to see how powerfull vop as a druid really was, and let me tell you, aside from not being able to use wands, and rods of metamagic, It wasent bad at all, in fact it was alot stronger then what a normal druid could do.

Roleplaying it though was the best part. Lots of fun.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

IMO VoP looks a tad on the weak side for most PCs. You lose a lot of tactical flexibility, DR can be a problem at higher levels, and even healing yourself can be problematic.

I think it is almost par for a Druid, Monk, or Paladin. Weak for everyone else.

 

[irdeggman]

Apart from the booty divvying, are there any other RP restrictions that spring to mind as being ignored/worked around?

Yes, the fact that they don't "role play" it at all.

It becomes merely an asset on the character sheet and not something that "defines" the PC and how he acts and conducts himself.

IMO that is the essential part of the VoP and pretty much most everything in the BoED (and BoVD for that matter).

 

[Wolfwood2]

Personally I'd strip away all the 'Exalted' nonsense so that it can be used with non-good or good-but-not-saintly characters. Naturally if you're doing this, you can also drop the poverty aspect. (Hold on, I'm getting to balance.)

Instead just use the feat as a shortcut for PCs to keep up on the power curve without having their characters defined by magical items. Say it's a special set of training techniques that allows characters to develop mystical abilties so long as they don't use magical items. Exposure to magic items disrupts their natural abilties, just as surely as a druid wearing metal armor shorts out their druidic abilties. Characters can still use non-magical weapons and armor and keep money to buy land or whatever.

There are probably still balance issues to be worked out, which I'm not going to try to do in this post, but I don't see any absolute obstacles. See, I don't believe that most people who try out the Vow of Poverty are all that interested in playing an Exalted character. I think a lot of people just want to try playing a character not defined by their gear, and being exalted is the price they have to pay.

 

[frankthedm]

An exalted character seeks good above all else. By a rules definition, an exalted character is any character that implements a feat, PrC, etc out of the Book of Exalted Deeds. If you have even one Exalted feat, you are an exalted character. In most games losing your exalted status through doing non-good acts makes you lose the exalted feats/PrCs until you atone - just like a paladin. This last bit isn't true for all games, though.

Also, if the character breaks the Vow, that is it, te feat no longer gives you a benefit and you can not replace it. Atoning does not help those who break the vow.

 

[Nonlethal Force]

See, I don't believe that most people who try out the Vow of Poverty are all that interested in playing an Exalted character. I think a lot of people just want to try playing a character not defined by their gear, and being exalted is the price they have to pay.

As my wife often says about me ... I am the exception. In RA's Kiss of Darkness PbP game here at ENWorld, I play Rhaka, a VoP druid who is NG. In a recent encounter, the group wanted to break into a warehouse. Metagaming would of course tell me that the BBEG was in there. But Rhaka would not break-and-enter. Not necessarily because it is wrong - although that is a good point - but more because sh did not want to violate other people's privacy and business sense without proper justification. So, the rest of the non-exalted party walked in and almost got TPKed. Rhaka did't go in on account of her exalted status.

The action earned her a reduced amount of XP - and I figured as much. But in my case RP is more important than going in and killing so she could earn XP. I took the Vow and the exalted status not because I wanted the perks. (Because I honestly think the perks are not enough to make up for the loss). I took it because I wanted the RP experience.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

VoP works fine for classes like Monks and Soulknives whose abilities are largely inherent, and have almost no dependence upon material goods.

If you run VoP RAW, its subpar for almost any spellcaster. RAW, it prevents wizards from having spellbooks, and keeps arcane spellcasters from having the material components to many spells on their person. There is language in the BoED that says their are other ways to obtain such components (p30), but several people interpret the VoP to be an absolute bar to ever having such components even for a moment.

RAW, Divine casters lose their divine foci and several class abilities (like Turning).

In another thread (which I can't search for, nor do I have the link anymore), I posted all the PHB spells that would be excised from a VoP caster's repetoir if VoP is run RAW. If you're a religious person, that list would look extremely counterintuitive: essentially, the VoP PC swears fealty to a higher power...who then strips the PC of the ability to affect undead or cast spells that are core to the concept of the duties religious heirarchies owe their followers (like Bless or Attonement).

If you do a slight tweek, and allow arcane casters their spellbooks, divine casters their divine foci, and allow VoP casters to hold valuable material components for short periods of time (about the casting time of the spell), then it should be fine.

Some have reported VoP PCs (mostly Monks) to be über-powerful- but I suspect it is because the VoP's benefits accrue at a set pace that the DM has no control over (if running it RAW) that may be faster than other PCs are accumulating items that would otherwise maintain the balance. IOW, don't use VoP in a campaign if you're planning on being tight with the magical gear- the VoP PC will start to dominate very quickly.

 

[Tetsubo]

The SRD describes a Divine Focus as: "The divine focus for a cleric or a paladin is a holy symbol appropriate to the character’s faith."

Could the character have a tattoo of the symbol as his divine focus?

I think a tattoo or brand would work just fine for this.

But I've seen it argued on the Wizard's boards (repeatedly...) that a Divine Focus can be a physical object made from only certain materials and nothing else. That if it isn't a physical object that can be Sundered or stolen it would be HUGELY UNBALANCING!

Not really... but some rules lawyers see it that way...

So long as you require the bearer of the tattoo or brand to have e free hand for touching the symbol, I see no reason it wouldn't work perfectly.

 

[Wolfwood2]

As my wife often says about me ... I am the exception. In RA's Kiss of Darkness PbP game here at ENWorld, I play Rhaka, a VoP druid who is NG. In a recent encounter, the group wanted to break into a warehouse. Metagaming would of course tell me that the BBEG was in there. But Rhaka would not break-and-enter. Not necessarily because it is wrong - although that is a good point - but more because sh did not want to violate other people's privacy and business sense without proper justification. So, the rest of the non-exalted party walked in and almost got TPKed. Rhaka did't go in on account of her exalted status.

The action earned her a reduced amount of XP - and I figured as much. But in my case RP is more important than going in and killing so she could earn XP. I took the Vow and the exalted status not because I wanted the perks. (Because I honestly think the perks are not enough to make up for the loss). I took it because I wanted the RP experience.

That's fine, but why not allow people who are only interested in the roleplaying experience of having a character not dependent on gear and not the roleplaying experience of having a "super-good" character to use some sort of VoP-equivalent as well?