What is the best version of El? This poll is closed. |
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Elminster | 20 | 6.45% | |
Elmara | 20 | 6.45% | |
Entwine | 13 | 4.19% | |
GURPS | 99 | 31.94% | |
El Kabong | 153 | 49.35% | |
Elves | 5 | 1.61% | |
Total: | 310 votes |
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Ah, an FR advocate. Shocking.
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 22:23 |
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# ? Jun 7, 2024 18:22 |
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What, does the gunlugger have to be a Gond-worshiping gnome?
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 22:29 |
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Kai Tave posted:The various complaints about how Eberron should totally have guns aren't really any more creative though. As soon as a certain subset of nerd sees anything in a fantasy game that's even slightly more advanced than your standard Tolkienian pastiche they immediately leap straight to gunpowder and latch onto it singlemindedly. Evil Sagan posted:I picture a row of adventurers, sitting at camp. The wizard mutters under his breath as he reviews his arcane incantations. The cleric silently prays to his god, holding the holy symbol to his chest with reverence. Meanwhile, clicking can be heard from the gunlugger as he disassembles, cleans, and reloads 10 guns with expert timing and precision. It's an attack power, that you can use once a fight. A Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Aug 4, 2014 |
# ? Aug 4, 2014 22:29 |
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I haven't played Pathfinder, but the Gunslinger class didn't look too bad. The Grit powers looked pretty cool, at least. Did it fail under scrutiny?
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 22:47 |
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Spincut posted:I haven't played Pathfinder, but the Gunslinger class didn't look too bad. The Grit powers looked pretty cool, at least. Did it fail under scrutiny? From what I remember it's complete garbage. Also it shipped with a feat (Prone Shooter?) that actively made the class worse.
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 22:51 |
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I played in a Dark Heresy game a few years ago where my assassin named his rifle "Susan" and his sword "Sarah". Why? Why not: I figure it's only creepy if the character or the person running them has some weird gun fetish. I don't so who cares. Now that I've said that, there's evidence of that being someone's thing, isn't there... On a different note, there's still time to enter the August TGD contest if you have a killer idea! Winner gets a $30 DriveThruRPG gift certificate. Faux-Edit: Spincut posted:I haven't played Pathfinder, but the Gunslinger class didn't look too bad. The Grit powers looked pretty cool, at least. Did it fail under scrutiny? I played in a game where someone played a Gunslinger. He loved the hell out of it, but we also had a good DM.
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 22:53 |
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M. Night Skymall posted:Unrelated to guns, how are you liking 4e Zeitgeist? I'm getting ready to run it and I'm curious how well the encounters work as written or if I'll end up having to re-balance stuff like I did with War of the Burning Sky. I ran the first few adventures as well, so I'm going to chime in as well. My over all impression of Zeitgeist is odd. I know they write the adventures for 4e first and then port them to Pathfinder, but the structure of some of the adventures felt more 3.5 then 4th, especially in the way they seem to avoid Skill Challenges by making their own versions of them. As to the combats, I feel that the maps are generally too large. 4e seems to work on a scale of 20x20 and less at lower level, but every encounter has a map that's a struggle to fit on a table. For the 4th mod the train was something stupid like 18 feet long and there's a combat that's supposed to use the whole thing. Adjustments for more or less players are pretty poorly defined. They'll be there for one encounter, and be absent for the next 3. I'm used to LFR mods telling me to add another 2 skull crushers or whatever for a 6th player and it's sorely lacking here. My party was pretty highly optimized, so several fights ended a bit faster then solos had a chance to use their oddly 3 tiered powers, and the only time the party was close to death was when I poorly adjusted a combat a bit too high. Fake-Edit: Also to get back to guns, I just noticed that they changed the way guns work in their expanded players rules that went up in February, because reloading so quickly was "unrealistic".
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 23:08 |
S.J. posted:From what I remember it's complete garbage. Also it shipped with a feat (Prone Shooter?) that actively made the class worse. Prone Shooter just removed the penalty for shooting a crossbow while prone. ... You know, the penalty which didn't exist. So the feat literally did nothing.
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 23:08 |
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Spincut posted:I haven't played Pathfinder, but the Gunslinger class didn't look too bad. The Grit powers looked pretty cool, at least. Did it fail under scrutiny? It wasn't bad, but pretty much functioned like a basic ranged attacker. Often you spend your whole turn just shooting and reloading. I used grit about once per session, and generally to aid the whole "shooting and reloading" thing. Honestly, they were a pretty boring class with poo poo mobility and decent crits at range. The to-hit odds were pretty funky, considering it was all Touch AC, so you tended to hit, but your damage dice were all "eh". My GM also tended to make pains to stifle the gunslinger from being more powerful, for what reason I still don't know. Basically it was a few hours worth of "full attack" and "spend moves to reload."
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 23:10 |
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Zereth posted:No, the feat that's always a bad idea to use was something else. Prone Shooter got errata'd to actually do something! Prone Shooter posted:Benefit: If you have been prone since the end of your last turn, the penalty to your Armor Class against melee attacks made against you is reduced to –2. In addition, the bonus to your Armor Class against ranged attacks made against you is increased to +6. It's still garbage .
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 23:17 |
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Oh yeah, good point - the Zeitgeist maps do tend to be a bit too big. I'm a moderate-prep kind of DM, so I reduce them myself on occasion.
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 23:19 |
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Baron Snow posted:I ran the first few adventures as well, so I'm going to chime in as well. I'll be running it in Roll20 so it's not as much of a concern logistically. Sounds good overall, even with the janky encounters the parts of WotBS I ran were a lot of fun and sounds like Zeitgeist will be similar with a little less work on the encounters. My main issue with WotBS was the amount of tiny meaningless combat it threw in there, which is fine in 3.5/pathfinder where combats like that can end pretty quickly but in 4E slogging through 5 equal level soldiers or something is just tedious and doesn't even use a lot of resources. Fortunately the only guy in my party who's highly optimized is a defender so they get to see the solos do everything as they whittle it down, the solo just isn't really hurting anyone very effectively. I think they run their own version of skill challenges because a lot of people have trouble making skill challenges in 4E interesting(me included). I've tried it with the Obsidian Skill Challenge system and if I can get just the right skill challenge and player involvement it can go OK, but most of the time I end up just hand waving it after a round or just talk it out and assume they succeed on things if what they're trying to do would be useful to solve the problem. I also find it weird when adventures gate all this content behind skill challenges. Like oh you failed at this so now you'll never know the mystery of the forest, guess all this text is for my personal enjoyment.
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 23:34 |
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I've always liked Gamma World's system for guns. They're effectively an Encounter power, but you can fire them more than once in a fight at the cost of running out of ammo until you find more.
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 23:36 |
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Spincut posted:I haven't played Pathfinder, but the Gunslinger class didn't look too bad. The Grit powers looked pretty cool, at least. Did it fail under scrutiny?
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 23:38 |
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Winson_Paine posted:Good luck, I asked for this thread for like two years and no one made it. MAYBE Y'ALL WILL MAKE IT FOR THE NEW GUY. Winson, Click here to make all your dreams come true.
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# ? Aug 4, 2014 23:52 |
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Mors Rattus posted:The only Elminster I've ever seen in practice was a neat one - it was from an old 2e box on the Dales and particularly Shadowdale and the caves underneath it, so you'd think Elminster would figure in largely, right? I remember that adventure. Some of those drow traps were a bitch. Those 3 massive chimneys that turned out to be a big "rock paper scissors" reference especially.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 00:21 |
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Lord Frisk posted:My GM also tended to make pains to stifle the gunslinger from being more powerful, for what reason I still don't know. Basically it was a few hours worth of "full attack" and "spend moves to reload." You could take a bow and write "GUN" over it and people would still be convinced that it was going to take over the game, even if was just "a thing you shoot to do d6 damage." quote:I've always liked Gamma World's system for guns. They're effectively an Encounter power, but you can fire them more than once in a fight at the cost of running out of ammo until you find more. See, if I'm going to be spending a lot of resources to be The Guy Who Shoots Guns, I'd like to be able to do it more than twice a day.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 01:17 |
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Mormon Star Wars posted:See, if I'm going to be spending a lot of resources to be The Guy Who Shoots Guns, I'd like to be able to do it more than twice a day. IIRC in Gamma World, you're not The Guy Who Shoots Guns, you just have guns and can use them until you run out of ammo. But I never owned Gamma World myself so I could be wrong.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 01:22 |
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S.J. posted:IIRC in Gamma World, you're not The Guy Who Shoots Guns, you just have guns and can use them until you run out of ammo. But I never owned Gamma World myself so I could be wrong. Yeah, 4e-based Gamma World wasn't so much about being the gun guy as the half-swarm-of-rats-hive-mind-half-robot guy.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 01:26 |
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, 4e-based Gamma World wasn't so much about being the gun guy as the half-swarm-of-rats-hive-mind-half-robot guy. This sounds amazing.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 01:26 |
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I just wrote a review of the 13th Age Bestiary to be goon-published shortly. tl/dr: the Bestiary is chock full of adventure hooks, and also classic D&D monsters. I plan on using it next time I run DW, especially since I've been planning to work in a Bullette at my first opportunity.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 01:27 |
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everythingWasBees posted:This sounds amazing. Gamma World has about 20 backgrounds (like android, rat swarm, mind breaker, hypercognative, and so on), and you pick two randomly. They determine your stats and powers. The two expansions added another 20, such as AI, vampritic, wheeled, and magnetic. So you could become a octopus with Plastic Man-style powers, or a demon who could manipulate magnetism, a gelatinous yeti, or a reanimated plant.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 01:33 |
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M. Night Skymall posted:My main issue with WotBS was the amount of tiny meaningless combat it threw in there, which is fine in 3.5/pathfinder where combats like that can end pretty quickly but in 4E slogging through 5 equal level soldiers or something is just tedious and doesn't even use a lot of resources. Fortunately the only guy in my party who's highly optimized is a defender so they get to see the solos do everything as they whittle it down, the solo just isn't really hurting anyone very effectively. Oh, and really encourage Zeitgeist themes. They help tie the characters to the adventure. I gave out an extra point to spend on stats, and everyone took me up on it.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 01:33 |
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everythingWasBees posted:This sounds amazing. It absolutely is and it flows so smoothly that you can be up and running with a new character in 5 minutes. One of the guys in my group has toyed with the idea of running a max-level Gamma World game (level 10) against the 4e conversion of the classic Tomb of Horrors (which starts at 10th level) and see how far people get. It'd be the most hilarious meat-grinder.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 01:42 |
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Pathfinder guns suffer from some of the same balance problems as wizards. Part of the "balance" of guns is that ammo (guns too, but ammo primarily) costs a lot, and ammo that reduces one of the downsides (reload time) costs more and also causes misfires/weapon breakage. But, these are all just hassles, ones that some GMs will handwave, and even if they don't they just feel like irritations, rather than any real sorts of drawbacks. Similarly, a lot of the "balance" of a wizard is stuff like "their spellbook can get wet" or "they can lose their spell component pouch" and blah blah blah. They aren't otherwise comparable, guns aren't broken in the same way, it's just another example of these weird irritations that people can easily point to as why, for them, guns/wizards/whatever totally have their own legitimate drawbacks.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 01:57 |
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Gunslingers also suffer the drawback of not being casters in a 3.X system, so everything cool that they get has to be extremely limited by class mechanics and they still boil down to a Do Damage To Dudes class. So they're a class with a built-in critical failure system that will never outperform even the other lackluster damage-dealers, and in return they get to do things like open locks! But not as well as a Knock spell. And have a Fear-spell like effect! At level 15. And a single-target confuse! For a single round. And all of these things are limited by their 'grit,' which is not based of their primary attack stat but off of Wisdom instead, and only regenerates when you get a crit or a killing blow. They're hobbled because of the perception rampant in 3.X and PF that no one martial can do anything even vaguely fantastic without being heavily penalized for it, unless it's magic.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 02:11 |
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M. Night Skymall posted:I'll be running it in Roll20 so it's not as much of a concern logistically. Sounds good overall, even with the janky encounters the parts of WotBS I ran were a lot of fun and sounds like Zeitgeist will be similar with a little less work on the encounters. My main issue with WotBS was the amount of tiny meaningless combat it threw in there, which is fine in 3.5/pathfinder where combats like that can end pretty quickly but in 4E slogging through 5 equal level soldiers or something is just tedious and doesn't even use a lot of resources. Fortunately the only guy in my party who's highly optimized is a defender so they get to see the solos do everything as they whittle it down, the solo just isn't really hurting anyone very effectively. On Roll20 it's less of a logistical concern yeah, but the maps are still too big. It's no fun when the only action you get to take on your turn is a double move run. That reminds me of the last major issue I had with combat, which is that it doesn't hold to the encounters per day philosophy at all. Most fights are the only fight of the day, so everyone gets to dump their dailies all the time. Baron Snow fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Aug 5, 2014 |
# ? Aug 5, 2014 03:21 |
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Evil Mastermind posted:Gamma World has about 20 backgrounds (like android, rat swarm, mind breaker, hypercognative, and so on), and you pick two randomly. They determine your stats and powers. The two expansions added another 20, such as AI, vampritic, wheeled, and magnetic. So you could become a octopus with Plastic Man-style powers, or a demon who could manipulate magnetism, a gelatinous yeti, or a reanimated plant. I recall a game of Gamma World I ran, let's see...we had a Gravity Controlling Ape (a gorilla scientist in a lab coat), a vampiric monkey (a blood drinking spider monkey), a Photonic Yeti (also a scientist) and a pyrokinetic feline (basically the fire-cat from Adventure Time). Speaking of, Gamma World has always struck me as a good Adventure Timish setting. The game was a lot of fun, but overall wasn't terribly impressed with the 4e based system. It wasn't bad but for something that goofy and weird I'd prefer more flexibility. I've put some effort into converting it to PDQ for that reason.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 03:29 |
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Last time I played Gamma World I was a swarm of robots built to tell horoscopes. Every time I had to make a decision I rolled whatever die was nearby, then said the dumbest thing I could think of. That was a good game.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 03:33 |
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Somebody should make a "what makes traditional games fun?" thread. There are so many elements that go into it, and I've read up a lot about it, but I'm bad at making infodump OPs.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 04:24 |
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oriongates posted:Speaking of, Gamma World has always struck me as a good Adventure Timish setting. This is probably because Pendleton Ward was inspired by Gamma World (among other influences) when making Adventure Time.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 04:44 |
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Baron Snow posted:That reminds me of the last major issue I had with combat, which is that it doesn't hold to the encounters per day philosophy at all. Most fights are the only fight of the day, so everyone gets to dump their dailies all the time.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 05:17 |
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Fuego Fish posted:This is probably because Pendleton Ward was inspired by Gamma World (among other influences) when making Adventure Time. I am not shocked in the least.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 08:25 |
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah, I mentioned that upthread. You pretty much need to toss the "1 day = 1 extended rest" rule out the window, and I'm a little surprised it was never addressed in the materials. I've generally switched to a "per act" model, where they're only guaranteed an extended rest when it's narratively appropriate. (Or when they've been horribly mauled, which has happened a few times.) 13th Age rules one adventuring day as four normal-difficulty battles. After battles you get a short rest to use your recoveries (healing surges or whatever) but if you want your big poo poo back you need to press on and go be heroes instead of narcoleptic bookworms.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 08:46 |
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Lynx Winters posted:13th Age rules one adventuring day as four normal-difficulty battles. After battles you get a short rest to use your recoveries (healing surges or whatever) but if you want your big poo poo back you need to press on and go be heroes instead of narcoleptic bookworms. It is also worth noting that the end of day thing is a narrative thing for 13A, not like a set 8 hour nap or whatever. So it could be a night on the town drinking, or a reflective moment where you think about all the goblins you slaughtered, or a slow walk out of the exploding dungeon in the background.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 12:16 |
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or all of the above at once
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 13:28 |
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Comrade Gorbash posted:So your argument is that you have a detailed enough understanding of a completely made up magic process to make declarative statements about what is obviously possible with it. EDIT: Right. I forgot the technology to bind elementals is a trade secret. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Aug 5, 2014 |
# ? Aug 5, 2014 14:01 |
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Efficient gun technology wasn't and isn't purely about firepower though. For a long time after the initial advent of firearms people were still using crossbows, longbows, and polearms. Which you wanted to use depended a great deal on the situation and level of training of the people using them. Plain bombs and explosive power sure, but I'm not sure you can hop straight from harnessing lightning to efficient firearms because those are completely different feats of engineering.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 14:31 |
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This is making a good argument for super secret elemental siege weapons and WMDs, though.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 14:46 |
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# ? Jun 7, 2024 18:22 |
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Well, there comes a point when you're just summoning huge elementals. Then binding them into ballista bolts, catapult stones, briefcases, or warforged race cars is a delivery mechanism.
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# ? Aug 5, 2014 14:53 |