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In Nomine might have some flaws in gameplay, but it's a pretty awesome setting with the right GM. A Goon here ran a ridiculous game with the party as demons serving Furfur, Prince of Hardcore (sex, drugs and rock&roll). By the end of the campaign they had: - Killed 2 demon princes - Redeemed a demon prince - Caused an archangel to fall, temporarily - Accidentally created a new archangel - Redeemed a few hundred demons - Punched a nuclear missile to death - Served Lucifer shots at a bar On the balance of things they were pretty terrible at being demons, but they were hardcore enough that their prince forgave them.
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Feb 3, 2016 23:42
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The Lord of Hats posted:I demand story time. I don't think we have a thread for it, but I'd love to hear more even if it's just in PMs. I'm pretty sure it got saved online somewhere so I'll try to dig out the link from my PMs. I'd never even heard of In Nomine before but it was loving hilarious. Another highlight I remember was one of them fighting a greater fire demon who had a dragon as a vessel on earth. They weren't really intended to win, what with said dragon-demon being some ridiculously high statted combat monster, and the GM just expected them to flee. Unfortunately the djinn was being played as being far too dumb and stubborn to flee. So after getting beaten around a bit, the djinn grabs onto it's head, it responds by tossing him up... and the djinn switches vessel to his dog form, rocket-dogs down the dragon's throat, and punches his organs to death. Combat stats aren't saving you from a demon-dog using your intestines as a chew toy. So I guess the lesson is with a good GM, any system can be great fun.
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Feb 4, 2016 22:17
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e: double post
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Feb 4, 2016 22:17
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SPHERES OF MIGHT Seeing the sad state of martials in the Epic Level Handbook review inspired me to do a review of one of my favourite products.  Introduction Spheres of Might (referred to as SoM for the rest of this review) is a Pathfinder 1E supplement by Drop Dead Studious. Gradenko did a partial review of their previous product, Spheres of Power, which was an alternative magic system that did a pretty good job of solving some of the caster-martial disparity and making more interesting, focused characters rather than the toolbox batman wizard. SoM uses a similar system that gives martial characters 'Combat Talents', which lets them do things beyond 'roll skill check/full attack'. They're somewhat like feats, but rather than fiddly '+1 to attack rolls if you're underwater during a full moon' or requiring you to take a 10 feat long chain to pick your nose, you get things like the ability to swim through the earth or leap miles in a single action, impale enemies and swing them around as an improvised weapon, non-magical ways to craft powerful poisons and healing potions, and the ability to grapple and piledriver a dragon. Before we get into that, let's cover the basic mechanics. Mechanics Characters that use SoM effects are Practitioners, and each gain a progression of talents similar to how you have 4th, 6th and 9th level casters. Generally this corresponds to your BAB, but not always. You're either Proficient, Adept or Expert, which respectively gives you a talent every 1/2, 3/4 or 1 character levels. You also get a Martial Tradition at 1st level - this means you only start with basic light armor and simple weapon proficiency, but you get 4 talents immediately which typically include 1-2 Equipment talents, which give a group of proficiencies along a theme. For example the Knight tradition would give you talents that allow heavy armor, shields, a bunch of martial weapons like swords and lances, as well as a base sphere. Rather than a 'caster level' for determining power and DC of effects, everything works off your Base Attack Bonus + practitioner modifier, which is usually a mental stat. Combat talents themself are divided into a number of spheres. Spending a talent will get your access to a sphere, giving you a base ability. From there you can freely obtain more talents in that sphere. To avoid the 'stand in place and full attack' problem, SoM refers to the 'attack action' - this is specifically an attack as a standard action, so most sphere effects won't trigger from full attacks, attacks of opportunity or the like. There's also a 'special attack action', which is the same but doesn't stack with other special attack actions - a bit like a Strike from Tome of Battle. This does mean you have a slightly annoying feat tax in the form of taking the Vital Strike chain (a feat that makes standard attack actions deal bonus damage when not used as a full attack) to keep your damage up. Many talents count as feats for the purposes of requirements etc - for example the unarmed focused spheres all count as having Improved Unarmed Strike. This means you can avoid things like the infamous Whirlwind Attack feat chain. For the uninitiated, this is a feat that requires Dex/Int 13, Combat Expertise (a useless feat tax), Dodge, Mobility (yet more feat taxes) and Spring Attack all to qualify. In SoM you could quite easily grab this feat just by having a few useful combat talents. Another issue Pathfinder had is that almost every combat maneuver would provoke an attack of opportunity unless you took a feat. SoM adds the Battered condition, which applies a small penalty to their defense vs those abilities and prevents them from taking AoOs when you do use one. This is generally easy to apply, and so encourages doing cool stuff rather than hit man with sword. Generally there's no limit to how often you can use a combat talent, but some require expending Martial Focus. Practitioners are considered focused by default, and you regain focus by a number of combat talents, resting for 1 minute, or spending a full round action to defend yourself. A bunch of talents also gain effects for being focused, and you gain expend focus to treat a saving throw as a 13, which can guarantee passing saves in a lot of cases. Getting the talent to allow you to store 2 charges of focus is basically a requirement. The book lists the classes next, but the spheres are more interesting so we'll dive straight into those. There's an absolute ton of talents so I won't cover each individual talent, but I'll mention the interesting ones.   Pathfinder does have an alchemist class, but as with every other interesting mechanic in the game it uses vancian casting and spell lists cribbed from the wizard/cleric. The Alchemy sphere is a way of using potions, poisons and other tools without needing magic or interacting with the byzantine crafting rules. When you learn the sphere, you gain 5 free points in Craft (Alchemy), to a maximum of your level, plus 5 more for each talent after. This basically means you get free training in crafting alchemy without spending skill points. You'll see this in a lot of other spheres which is a really nice way of giving martials more skills rather than spending them all just to use their class features (shoutout to how Pathfinder fighters, despite being trained warriors, can't actually have enough skill points with a default intelligence to spot things, climb, swim and ride a horse). You also choose from either the Formulae or Poison talent. Both have the same mechanics for crafting them - you can only hold a number based on your level+number of talents known, you can generally craft your entire stockpile in an hour or so, they cost no money, you're considered to gather the ingredients over the course of the day, but they're easily recognized as being unstable and so can't be sold, and expire after 24 hours. No stockpiling a warehouse of nerve gas for you. Note that you can refill during the day, but the minimum time is 30 mins, or 15 mins with a kit, so partial refills are doable during a break but probably not the entire lot. Formulae! These are the general alchemist stuff like acid, fire, healing salves etc that exist in the base game, but improved. For example, this will be one of your go-to offensive attacks: quote:Improved Acid Flask (formulae) 1d6+1d6/2 levels is the same progression as the PF Alchemist's bombs, and the 1/2 damage next round means they're an acceptable source of damage. A Craft DC of 15 can easily be hit at 1st level, and later you can get acid bombs that cover a very wide range as you buff your DC. Aside from that, you can get similar effects with fire, ice, lightning, non damaging bombs that entangle, blind, create smoke (that can have poison added to it), foam that blocks movement or slippery grease. On the non-offensive side, you can create healing, curative and buffing potions. Overall the damage and effects of the formulae aren't outstanding - a wizard is definitely going to out-blast you and do better debuffs. Your best damage choice is probably lightning, which deals 1d8+1d8/2CL lightning damage plus 1+CL sonic damage in a short line. Compared to a level 10 wizard throwing a fireball with 0 optimization for it, you'd be doing 38 average vs their 35, but they have the option of metamagic and various +CL effects. So how do you compete? With these: quote:Cluster Toss Your alchemy items might not be individually powerful, but you can throw 3-5 of them at once, which definitely closes the gap. Being able to use them as a swift action opens it up for a lot of other characters types - a rogue-y type can make a sneak attack, drop a poisonous smoke bomb then slip away. Other general talents let you control the area affected by bombs to protect allies, shape it into a different AoE entirely, or convert them into a weapon coating which acts like poison - sticking liquid ice on a weapon to make it repeatedly stagger and blast the target with cold damage is a powerful effect. RAW you can also coat a sword in Grenade which is, uh, interesting. Overall Formulae offer quite a lot of utility and decent blasting/battlefield control potential, and I do like the flavour. Poisons! These have a long and sordid history in D&D. Gygax himself loathed them and put in countless restrictions on player use, and it's not improved much from there. PF poisons are typically incredibly expensive, 1/2 the bestiary is immune, and you need specific feats to not just gently caress up and poison yourself. Does Alchemy fix this? Kinda. Your basic poison takes a move action to apply, becomes inert after an hour or when you hit something with it, so you can pre-poison to some degree. The default effect is Fort save or fatigue, which applies a minor Str/Dex penalty and prevents run/charge - not particularly exciting. However, it's free, which is a great improvement over the default poison rules. General talents improve the ways you can use your poisons - allowing you to apply them as a swift action, making them last 24 hours/more than 1 hit, improving the duration, letting you create AoE poison bombs, and most importantly letting you tailor poisons by picking a type of enemy and ignoring their immunity - so you can poison undead, constructs, demons etc. Other poison types are a bit better. These include a minor damage boost, a poison that inflicts stacking fear each time they fail, one that confuses (which is a pretty nice debuff that gives them a 75% chance to act uselessly) or the amusingly named Three Wise Monkeys that inflicts deafen>blind>silence on each failed save. You also get access to beneficial poisons, such as one that gives a bonus to a physical stat at a penalty to a mental stat, or the  Psychotropic Hallucinogen that boosts mental skills.Overall poisons are still a bit weak, but usable. There's not much opportunity cost beyond the talents, and you'll get some free debuffs without impacting your action economy or your wallet. However, there is an exception... Legendary talents! These are a separate section in each sphere, containing the mythical, wuxia and supernatural martial abilities. The book advises GMs to decide whether to allow them or not, just in case they hate fun. For Alchemy, this lets you create an elixir of youth, or the philosophers stone. Mostly just fluff as they require insanely high skill checks, but it's neat that your Alchemist at max level is immortal, has infinite money, and can resurrect people by shoving mercury down their throat. The legendary poisons are more interesting. Hemorrhaging poison turns the damaging poison into a constant bleed which is... still pretty weak. Necrotic poison however gives a negative level on each save, and each time they fail, they have to make the same save again or gain another negative level. Negative levels in PF give -1 to just about everything, including saving throws, so someone failing this can trigger a death spiral. And if they get more negative levels than they have levels, they die and become a zombie. Kinda slow, but a nasty debuff. Petrifying poison does what it says on the tin - failed saves cause staggered>immobilized>petrified. Staggered is a decent debuff on it's own so this is a really unpleasant effect. An Alchemist using Cluster/Snap Toss could entangle a group while trapping them in an smoke cloud laced with this poison, which is a pretty good save or suck. Overall, the Alchemy sphere isn't a powerhouse of damage, but it does offer a lot of fun options. Ninja and Rogue types will like the smoke bombs, anyone can splash in to grab some healing and cures, and it doesn't take a lot of investment for a usable poison build - Alchemy(Poison), Specialized Venom, Lasting Application and Necrotic/Petrifying lets you spend a move action up to an hour before a fight to make your next hits have a good chance to save-or-suck a target. Going all-in lets you pretend to be a wizard when it comes to blasting/BFC without having to stick on a robe, which is a worthy outcome for a sphere. Next up: Athletics
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Sep 7, 2019 13:08
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SPHERES OF MIGHT  Thanks to the lack of full-attacking, SoM frees up the move action - and the Athletics sphere lets you do things with that. This sphere doesn't have much in the way of actual offensive abilities, but covers every movement option a character needs. When you take the sphere, you choose from Climb, Fly, Leap, Run or Swim. Like how Alchemy gave you 5 x # of talents in Craft(Alchemy), this gives you 5 in the associated skill, with Run/Leap being Acrobatics. You can take a talent that gives you 2 of the other options, so for 3 talents you get full ranks in all 4 physical skills, and a +1/2 level bonus to Acrobatics with both Run/Leap chosen. You also get a minor boost to that movement type, such as Leap reducing fall damage or Swim doubling your speed in the water and letting you hold your breath longer. So nothing outstanding, but does mean you can easily become competent at all the basic movement skills. However, the remaining talents let you do a lot more with your movement. The general talents are a grab-bag of mobility related options - increased movement speed, allowing you to add both Str and Dex to movement skills, talent versions of the Mobility and Spring Attack feats (the latter of which lets you run past a target and make an attack action against them without provoking, which is pretty great for hit and run). Skillful Charge is basically Pounce for SoM, letting you use an attack action on a charge, which is always fantastic for any melee. Whirlwind Flip is a standout that lets you regain Martial Focus whenever you successfully use Acrobatics to move past them and avoid an AoO - being able to regain focus without explicitly using an action is a powerful effect, as there's a lot of talents that are 'move and do X' you can combine this with. Motion talents let you apply an effect when moving, but only a single Motion at a time unless you use the Multiple Motion talent to expend focus to use 2 at once. Moving Target gives attacks a flat miss chance when you move. Dizzying Tumble applies sickness to a target when you run past it due to you giving them motion sickness which is amusing. Each movement type also gets some associated talents, which have some interesting effects. Fly let's you use your wings (provided you have them) to kick up an obscuring dust cloud. Leap lets you deal bonus damage by jumping on stuff, and lets you jump as part of a charge to fulfil your Final Fantasy Dragoon cosplay. Run lets you run along walls and kick off them at the end to do a leaping attack, as well as letting you drop prone and roll out of the way of attacks and AoE effects which gives a surprisingly large bonus to your AC/saves. Climb lets you go all Shadow of the Colossus on stuff but has a description that runs for like half a page and boils down to 'make a move action to climb on a large enemy, while you're climbing on it you get a bonus to attacks vs it, it gets a penalty to attacks vs you, and can try to dislodge you or stop, drop and roll to forcibly get rid of you at the cost of taking an entire turn'. The bonuses/penalties are actually decent and improve based on how big the creature is, so despite the complexity it's pretty cool. You can also Indiana Jones your way around by swinging from ropes which is even more complex than climbing on enemies so it's kinda hard to figure out if it's good or not. I mean, look at this! quote:Rope Swing (climb) And finally, Swim lets you... hold your breath longer. I guess you can't all be winners  Of course, the real meat here is the legendary talents. Sparrow's Path and Eagle's Path just straight up let you fly permanently, no ifs and buts. Take that casters! Afterimage causes you to spawn mirror images in your path when moving, and anyone that knows the Mirror Image spell knows how good this is. Flash Step just lets you straight up teleport instead of moving, albeit not through walls or anything you couldn't actually run through (boooo). Air Stunt lets you double jump and run across the air. Neat but kinda irrelevant thanks to Eagle's Path. The real reason is it's a pre-requisite for Dragoon Leap, which lets you jump 100 ft x your Acrobatics skill check result horizontally, or 10 ft vertically. So a high level character can jump a good mile in a single round. The book doesn't quite spell out how this combines with the aforementioned talent that deals bonus damage for jumping on things unfortunately, so no orbital lance strikes. Shark Swim lets you hold your breath for hours on end and swim at the same speed you can run - and combos nicely with Terrain Glide which lets you swim through earth, as long as you can hold your breath. Capping it all off is Sky Spider's Touch, which lets you climb on smooth walls, then ceilings, then just straight up climb the air without even needing to use your hands which is a hilarious mental image. So all in all, this is a pretty fantastic sphere. Pretty much any martial is going to want to pick this up for flight and potentially burrowing/swimming forever. Even without the advanced talents getting free points in 4 different skills as well as pounce and better movement speed is excellent. But really, you want the advanced talents so you can go Full Anime.   Next up is the first sphere that's just about killing dudes. Barrage is focused on quantity over quality with ranged attacks, and deals a ton of damage thanks to sheer number of shots, albeit at the cost of accuracy. On learning the sphere, you gain the Point Blank Shot feat for free, offering a +1 bonus to close range shots - minor, but a useful free feat that also unlocks later feats and is generally considered a feat tax for archers. You also gain the titular Barrage talent, which is probably one of the most powerful effects in SoM. This lets you make a special attack action (so a standard action that can't be used with other special attack actions, but does allow for stuff like Vital Strike, albeit only on the first shot - no Vital Stiking 5 times in a round) to fire 2 shots at once at full BAB -2. At 6/11/17 BAB, which is when you'd get your next iterative attack as a full attacker, you can expend focus to fire 1/2/3 additional shots, at -4/-6/-8 to hit respectively. This counts as the Rapid Shot feat, and basically works the same way. Compared to a regular PF archer with Rapid/Manyshot, they'd be firing 1 more shot than you as a full attack, and would be more accuracy for their first few shots - but fortunately you have the following talents to compensate. Blitz talents take effect when you hit a target multiple times in a Barrage, generally for hitting twice or more. You can only apply a single one at a time per hit, but you can apply multiple ones if you hit several times - e.g. hitting twice would apply your first Blitz talent, then the 3rd shot you could apply another Blitz. Blitz talents themself are... ok. Arrow Split makes your attacks count as one shot for the purpose of damage reduction, which is basically the much-loved Cluster Shot feat as applying DR once rather than 5 times makes a big difference. Pinning Punishment causes enemies to get stuck to the floor by your arrows, forcing them to spend actions to free themself. You also get a few Blitzes that make you intentionally miss to cause debuffs which are generally a bit weak as opposed to just murdering them with a ton of damage. I'd probably just stick with Split vs anything with DR, or Pinning vs anything without. General talents on the other hand are pretty good. You gain get a two-talent combo that lets you fire in melee without taking AoOs, make AoOs yourself against nearby enemies, and count as flanking enemies. Spinning Shot lets you fire a bonus shot at the cost of making all shots target different enemies during Barrage, giving you solid AoE. You also get a few talents to alleviate accuracy issues by reducing Barrage penalties, and probably the best way to regain martial focus in the form of Mobile Focus, which automatically refocuses you if you move between 10ft and half your total movement in a turn. This lets you easily Barrage>Move>repeat. Intercepting Shot lets you make AoOs to shoot down incoming ranged attacks which is pretty neat, especially if you get Combat Reflexes to get a bunch of AoOs. As for legendary talents, there's a few gems. Cone of Death lets you fire a, well, cone, of arrows that hits everything inside. You can take it up to 3 times, increasing the size of the cone each time - at higher levels you can have a 1000ft+ cone, letting you wipe out entire armies of mooks. Ceaseless Ammo just lets you ignore non-magical ammo. If your GM is painstakingly tracking ammo, they're probably also the sort that'll ban legendary talents for being 'unrealistic' so eh. Stair Shot lets you fire a bunch of arrows into a wall to make a staircase. Considering this is a legendary talent competing with things like 'flying' and 'travel a mile via jumping' this is not particularly great. Barrage doesn't have a ton of talents, but it's very good at what it does. You can grab all the useful stuff in your first few levels and have a powerful attack option that scales well throughout the game. It's probably the most damaging sphere in SoM as the lack of full attack means firing 4+ shots in 1 turn is a rare skill.   After 2 excellent spheres, we come to one that is... less so. Barroom is an odd sphere that focuses on a mix of using improvised weapons and buffing yourself via getting absolutely shitfaced. If you want to be Jason Bourne killing guys with a rolled up magazine, look no further. Learning the sphere gives you two effects. Brutal Breaker gives you proficiency with improvised weapons (meaning no -4 penalty like normal), lets them be treated as regular weapons for the purpose of enhancing spells in case you want a +5 Keen Holy Flaming Burst folding chair, and lets you pick up and swing an improvised weapon from around you as the same action, so no wasting 2 actions to pick up that bottle and glass someone with it. In addition, breakable objects (anything like wood, glass etc) can be damaged and broken as part of an attack for benefits. Disappointingly, the book explicitly says that if you pick someone up and use them as an improvised weapon, you can't treat them as a breakable object. No splitting a goblin in half over the head of another goblin. You also get the Hard Drinker talent. This lets you drink stuff as a move action without provoking - you can get a trait that does this, but it's a pretty handy ability, as by default drinking a potion takes a standard action and provokes. Alcohol also gives you the Drunk status for Constitution modifer rounds, which interacts with other talents. The book also notes that drinking too much can make you sick, and you can become an alcoholic, but is fairly vague about the exact tipping point. Better hope your GM isn't straight edge! Drunk talents all allow you to expend the Drunk status to trigger an effect of sorts. Miracle Drink is probably the most notable, giving you a +2 bonus to Str, Dex or Cha for Con mod rounds, +4 at 10 BAB. This is a really nice bonus, and is a free action provided you can get drunk easily! Reeling Steps lets you move and make combat maneuvers without provoking for 1 turn, and later boosts your skill with them. You also get a big bonus to dance! Nice and Loose lets you roll twice on a Reflex save which can be a lifesaver. Purge, well, purges all over an unfortunate target, letting you reroll a save vs poison as well as making the target tile difficult terrain that can cause people to slip over your stomach contents. Aside from that there's a handful of other small buffs. So some pretty great buffs, but so far we can only get wasted as a move action. So let's look at the general talents. High on Fumes lets you expend focus as a swift action to get drunk, making it easier to trigger the Drunk talents. Swift+focus can be quite limiting though. Double Chug lets you drink a potion and alcohol at the same time, giving you a small buff to saving throws. More importantly at 10 BAB you get 2 stacks of Drunk. This combines nicely with Focusing Buzz which causes drinking to regain focus, greatly improving your Action Drunk Economy. There's also a number of talents focused on improvised weapons and breaking them. You can smash your weapons to deal bonus damage, bleed, confirm criticals, turn improvised weapons into shields, get bonuses to hit for surprising people with your unlikely weapon choice, treat improvised weapons as larger for the purposes of damage, give them increased crit range as well as treating them as if they had a special weapon feature such as reach. The book mentions the GM can choose to 'pose reasonable limitations on which items can gain which special features (for example, a sack of flour wouldn’t have reach, while a sandwich wouldn’t have deadly)'. To which I say:  Legendary talents have some interesting features. Alchemical Dragon lets you down an alchemical weapon as if it was alcohol, then breath it in a cone. Unlike Alchemy's Chemical Coating sadly it specifies that it must be a liquid alchemical weapon, so no chugging a grenade to turn your face into a claymore mine. Blazewater lets you pour alcohol onto a weapon and set it on fire, giving it Flaming Burst. A neat trick, but probably not as good as Chemical Coating - fire is commonly resisted, and 1d6 fire + 1d10 on crit isn't as good as 1d6 + 1/2CL + stagger, entangle or the like. Eternal Buzz I'll just quote from the book - "your blood is treated as an alcoholic beverage". This lets you become perma-drunk at the cost of a swift action each time, and anything that eats you becomes sickened which is amusing but not impactful. The perma-drunk part is great but at a requirement of BAB +15 you won't see it for a long time. Magic in the Spirits makes every weapon you use while drunk be treated as a magic +1 weapon, scaling with your BAB. You basically either need this or Gloves of Improvised Might to make your improvised weapons magical, as otherwise they're kinda useless vs a lot of threats. Barroom isn't a sphere I particularly like outside of the comedy value. While the whole 'drunken master' and 'barroom brawl' are definitely known themes, it feels like a lot of this could be merged into other spheres. Things like Hard Drinker's move action drink effect, Blazewater, Alchemical Dragon and Miracle Drink could well be rethemed Alchemy talents for example, and rather than having like 5 talents that read 'break a weapon to get an effect' you could easily merge those into a smaller number and stick them into a different sphere. A fully buffed improvised weapon is certainly strong, but it's a lot of investment to overtake just having a regular weapon. And compared to the wide variety of themes most spheres have, this feels remarkably niche. Next up: Beastmastery, Berserker and Boxing
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Sep 8, 2019 16:54
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