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If you want more oomph to the ki powers, there's going Spellguard (also Bred for Battle) with Battle Tradition into Mystic for more Power.
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Nov 19, 2021 21:17
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Conspiratiorist posted:what is a 'vegeta'? They eat vegetables but not cheese
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Nov 19, 2021 21:42
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Spellguard is OP and your DM will deservedly hate you for taking it.
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Nov 20, 2021 01:08
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Nanomashoes posted:Spellguard is OP and your DM will deservedly hate you for taking it. I will not deny this. Adept from Forbidden Rules is more balanced.
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Nov 20, 2021 04:56
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talked to my GM about making vegeta, he encouraged me to go as much all in to bullshit as possible and encouraged things like picking out the never take fall damage faerie mark, suggested i take spellguard over adept, suggested to not have only 10 agility, and supported making a scouter interesting item. If something turns out to be too much we'll tweak it down. any suggestions on Battle tradition spells to take and avoid, and what ancestries to look at? I went elf because i don't know what im doing and it looked pretty good? Is intelligence really even required for Battle tradition spells?
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Nov 23, 2021 18:54
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No specific need for Int since you can use your punching stat for Battle spells, but SotDL has no designated dump stat - nasty save-or-suck/die are spread pretty evenly. Any race that allows you to start off with at least Agility 12 (remember you can shift 1 point from one stat to another) would be optimal, so Elf works. Go for whatever seems nifty. The other tradition that'd be pretty excellent to pair with an armor-less magic puncher is Arcana for Arcane Armor, adding a flat +2 Defense for several hours. *However* Spellguard only starts you off with 1 Tradition, and Mystic doesn't give you any new Traditions or Spells, so the sooner you could branch off into Arcana would be Level 7 if you then took a Master or 2nd Expert path with Tradition access. Note Rank 0 Incantations are pretty cheap, so if the campaign has even a little bit of downtime you could get your hands on a scroll of Arcane Armor then from it make more copies or perhaps get a buddy to craft them for you. I also encourage this for Minor Healing as a cheaper and more readily accessible alternative to healing potion stockpiles. As for spells to look at, get Augmented Attack of course, Celerity can be pretty handy, Mighty Attack and Resounding Attack give you more spell attacks to perform with Spellguard Strike and Expertise. A Glorious Death has Cunning Parry and Awesome Strike, both pretty good grabs, and at Power 3 you really want that Battle Prowess.
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Nov 23, 2021 19:31
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After reworking a little, starting at level 3, the stat array I ended with is 12 Strength, 13 Agility, 10 Intellect, 9 Will, with one point from Intellect put into Agility, with Spellguard and Mystic. Elf seemed nifty because the faerie stuff is fun. That leaves me with a 17 defense when powered up with Qi, attacking at a 1d20+2+(1 boon), dealing 2d6 + (spell effect if using a spell) + (Qi damage if expending). I honestly don't know how this stacks up against benchmarks, am i fuckin something up or is this pretty fine
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Nov 23, 2021 20:32
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Much like D&D the optimization 101 is to never stop putting points in your primary combat stat, which for a Mystic is Agility; you can be 11 14 10 9 as a Level 3 Elf. To clarify, Unarmed Strikes are Finesse so you can use your Agility for their attack rolls, so that's both your attack and Defense tied to it. Also! Soft Leather doesn't count as Armor, so your total defense at Level 3 while Focused with 14 Agility can be 19, or 21 if you can get your hands Arcane Armor incantations. Defense 19 is equivalent to a 25 gold worth Full Plate plus a Large Shield, so that's pretty good. Offensively you're just in a solid spot, nothing crazy; your 'crits' can be pretty chunky by triggering Spellguard Strike to cast a Battle attack, and Resounding Attack is pretty strong but limited so employ it wisely.
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Nov 23, 2021 21:03
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Shadow of the Demon Lord is perfectly capable of presenting threats that are equally absurd to optimized players; the bigger issue imo is a) making sure all the players are on the same page, because if one person is playing Spellguard_Infinite_Action_Economy.txt and another person is a Warrior -> Fighter -> Warlord then at least one of you is not going to have a good time and b) the provided tools for gauging appropriate encounter difficulty are really bad and inaccurate even for naively built characters, and do not hold up against charop monsters at all. It can easily overshoot in either direction, and even nominally "balanced" encounters tend to be on the lethal side, particularly in the sense that the default bestiary really has it out for melee characters. (There's a reason my first draft of Spellguard bullshit was a Gunslinger rather than something that got more attacks but at closer range.)
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Nov 23, 2021 21:24
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Conspiratiorist posted:Much like D&D the optimization 101 is to never stop putting points in your primary combat stat, which for a Mystic is Agility; you can be 11 14 10 9 as a Level 3 Elf. oh poo poo, ok that helps a lot being able to just stick stats into Agi instead of Str. Also sick I had no idea that soft leather wasn't actually armor. That's much, much beefier than 24 hours ago lol Tuxedo Catfish posted:Shadow of the Demon Lord is perfectly capable of presenting threats that are equally absurd to optimized players; the bigger issue imo is a) making sure all the players are on the same page, because if one person is playing Spellguard_Infinite_Action_Economy.txt and another person is a Warrior -> Fighter -> Warlord then at least one of you is not going to have a good time and b) the provided tools for gauging appropriate encounter difficulty are really bad and inaccurate even for naively built characters, and do not hold up against charop monsters at all. edit oh yeah definitely, if things end up unbalanced we'll adjust as necessary and I already sent the new more optimized character sheet to the gm to double check on how it looks to him. if it ends up being stupid bullshit i have zero problem swapping back to Adept. sugar free jazz fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 21:48
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I'll say that what this build has going for it is potentially fairly high defense relative to its level, which in a melee character is a useful team role. Spellguard needs multiple traditions in order to truly achieve Post-Scarcity Action Economy, so with Mystic it's not really outshining anyone beyond coming in with the clutch Dazed or clutch crit into a second attack which is something Rogue can also do. Level 5 still a very potent power spike if we combine Battle Prowess with high burn throwing out attack spells left and right, but I think if you're playing melee in SotDL you deserve the ability to occasionally just go Super Saiyan and wreck face.
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Nov 23, 2021 22:04
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Anyone played PunkApocalyptic? How's it? Curious about it being an intermediary between SotDL and SotWW.
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Dec 10, 2021 12:37
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Has Rob said anything else about a play test or release date yet? I feel like it's been quiet a long time.
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Apr 15, 2022 03:03
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Has Rob said anything else about a play test or release date yet? I feel like it's been quiet a long time.
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Apr 18, 2022 04:05
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SourceRyan posted:The play test has been running for months now, first on Facebook and now on the discord. There's a channel there to opt into it! Hot drat, thanks for the heads-up!
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Apr 18, 2022 11:01
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Heads up folks: The Shadow of the Weird Wizard kickstarter is finally live!
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Aug 8, 2023 14:13
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SourceRyan posted:Heads up folks: The Shadow of the Weird Wizard kickstarter is finally live!
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Aug 8, 2023 14:29
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They're also offering Shadow of the Demon Lord and Demon Lord Legacies bundles over at bundle of holding if anybody needs a million cheap PDFs.
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Aug 8, 2023 15:40
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dwarf74 posted:I see a lot about playtesting - but is it less.... mechanically janky?... than SotDL?
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Aug 8, 2023 17:45
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Do you have any particular pet peeves? I have playtest access and could probably answer. It seems pretty similar to SotDL to me. My biggest pet peeves that I remember were - * by high levels way way too many conditional sources of boon/Bane to track, even for simple characters * the most boring master tier classes being the most effective * action ballooning especially for casters * spell balance being all over the place
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Aug 8, 2023 18:21
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah a few things stood out. There are "stock" expert and master paths that a player who just wants to pick fighter or mage at level 1 and not worry about it can go with. They are recommended right in the text, I think they are definitely the "most boring" and they do seem pretty strong. It's hard to tell if they are the most effective but I think it'd be kinda lovely if they weren't at least on-par with the less-simple master paths - having an accessible, simple option is a nice property for a chargen-heavy game to offer. I certainly don't want people to feel like specializing will wreck their character but a nice simple baseline for each archetype is nice to have. It's hard for me to judge high level balance type stuff. There are a bazillion master paths still (which have 3 levels each instead of the 2 in sotdl) and many of them you can't really judge balance-wise without also reading all bazillion spell schools. Spell schools also now all impart a "talent" when you discover the tradition in addition to having spells grouped into "novice, expert, and master" instead of numerical spell levels. I can't tell if there is action blowup in the same way as sotdl but there definitely are like, an escalating number of things that let you reroll attacks or conditionally change attacks and otherwise make turns take longer as you go. Overall, I suspect you will have many of the same problems with this as you did with SotDL. I don't find any of them intolerable but I always ran SotDL in a sorta OSR style where players weren't necessarily looking for fights, and I never did the suggested fast-advancement thing to see the high levels.
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Aug 8, 2023 19:25
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:There are definitely still a lot of sources of boons and banes. Fighters get one on every attack still and two other starting classes have boon sources at level 1 so the baseline is having one and and it goes up from there. I wish I could tell you they reigned in the amount of conditional boons but I don't think they did and there are definitely layered conditions like a level 2 fighter ability option that says "ignore banes on your roll to attack with a ranged weapon that are imposed by obscurement or partial cover" which is already two conditions that together remove a variable number of banes, and that's at level 2. One of my players wanted a simple bash-style character and I ended up making a whole drat flowchart for her to track her melee attack boons. Hmmm.... I really appreciate the details. I think I'm in - but not totally sure, and that might change. Unlike your group sounds - mine really appreciates high crunch and will use the mechanics presented to them to crush fights.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:02
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I liked SotDL a lot and have most of its PDFs but I feel like this KS does a really bad job of highlighting why people who loved SotDL should jump in on SotWW. It mentions the thematic change but doesn't really discuss any of the mechanical improvements at all. Feels like a rough draft of the page as they haven't even detailed anything about what the Limited Edition book includes and why it's worth $150 more. Right now I'm in for the printed books but after feeling a bit meh about Punkocalypse, I'm not 100% sure about whether SotWW is worth the double-dip. I hope the KS gets way more detailed in the updates. edit: Rob has indicated in the comments that he'll post an update on "What's New" mechanically sometime tomorrow. Memnaelar fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 8, 2023 20:57
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I'm glad Bob's makin' bank. I found the puerile sense of humor in SotDL offputting, but it was a fantastic system for running a Dark Sun campaign.
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Aug 8, 2023 22:54
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I'm intrigued by the mechanical enhancements but I really don't dig the name; I was hoping it'd change before the Kickstarter.
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Aug 9, 2023 05:18
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yeah, I get why it was changed from Shadow of the Mad Wizard but still don't love it as a name though the shorthand versions ("Weird Wizard" "WW") do work ok and are distinctive, so its probably fine and I really like the fact that there is a refined version of the system that doesn't need anime-esque disclaimers about the tone of the content really excited to see what's forthcoming, especially since I sort of stopped following the playtest after the misfire with the token-centric version (which by all accounts was fixed, and was a concept worth exploring even if it ultimately had too many issues)
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Aug 9, 2023 05:28
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I grabbed the playtest rules - looks like the movement speeds for grid movement are about half what they were in Demon Lord. That was my main complaint before (in Demon Lord you could move and run, making you go 3x your speed, so a human speed of 10 would be like 30 squares in one turn, making my battlemap completely useless), so hooray.
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Aug 9, 2023 05:52
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Wasn't the original name something like 'Shadow of the four towers' - which imo was cool and evocative.
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Aug 9, 2023 06:19
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Bread Enthusiast posted:I grabbed the playtest rules - looks like the movement speeds for grid movement are about half what they were in Demon Lord. That was my main complaint before (in Demon Lord you could move and run, making you go 3x your speed, so a human speed of 10 would be like 30 squares in one turn, making my battlemap completely useless), so hooray.
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Aug 9, 2023 22:32
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I’m a little sad it went back to grid movement, it was zones for a lot of the playtest, but I guess getting the bag by catering to the preferences of 5e-playing normies (and 5e playing non-normies who own a lot of grid terrain/minis) is an important sub-theme of WW
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Aug 10, 2023 01:48
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LGD posted:I’m a little sad it went back to grid movement, it was zones for a lot of the playtest, but I guess getting the bag by catering to the preferences of 5e-playing normies (and 5e playing non-normies who own a lot of grid terrain/minis) is an important sub-theme of WW Rob's thinking (per the discord playtest channel) was that zone rules can be added on top of a grid system, but the reverse isn't really true. Making the grid system the default was the only way he could try to please both sides. Fortunately, the old zone rules were kept in the playtest as an optional feature and should end up in the final Sages guide as well.
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Aug 11, 2023 16:15
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Angrymog posted:Wasn't the original name something like 'Shadow of the four towers' - which imo was cool and evocative. Free Companies of the Four Towers I believe. Would've been dope!
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Aug 11, 2023 18:55
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Has anyone checked out Shadow of the Weird Wizard yet? I thought SotDL was great rules-wise but the setting was too gross-out humor for me.
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Apr 11, 2024 01:45
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Tenebrous Tourist posted:Has anyone checked out Shadow of the Weird Wizard yet? I thought SotDL was great rules-wise but the setting was too gross-out humor for me. I backed it and have the pre print pdfs of the two core books. They're going through layout revisions but are mostly text complete. Happy to answer any questions, although I haven't played it yet
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Apr 11, 2024 02:04
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I 've been going over it, slowly. The PHB-equivalent came out first; I got halfway through it before realizing there were no non-humans, monsters, or DM stuff in it, so I kinda stopped reading at that point, and haven't gotten back to it, though the DMG-equivalent did show up in the meantime. What I saw looked pretty similar, though it's been three or more years since I played SoDL so my memories of that are more about really basic mechanics and not exact details. I would definitely consider running a Weird Wizard game if I had a reliable group that would play something other than D&D, I really liked the character progression of Demon Lord, and this still has the start-as-a-basic-class, pick any expert class, pick any master class progression. Spellcasters get some free stuff for each school they know, basically cantrips but all sorts of random stuff. That was new. The setting is obviously different. It seemed pretty generic.
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Apr 11, 2024 02:06
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ditto it seems like it’s in a fairly good spot overall I think the setting in SotDL hung together quite a bit better b/c the politics and backstory made a more compelling setting for me than exploration and exploitation of a new frontier teeming with abandoned wizard shotguns/unexplored dungeons (and because that setting had Rob’s passion behind it in a way I think this one doesn’t - this feels more constructed), but it is (and a lot of other aspects of the setting are) definitely better for ‘traditional fantasy’ than almost anywhere on SotDL Urth, and the game and its presentation definitely accomplish “SotDL-like without the tonal disclaimers/adjustments”
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Apr 11, 2024 02:18
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I just ran my first session of Weird Wizard last Wednesday, and so far I have really enjoyed it We have not played enough to really put it through the paces, but the system worked perfectly for what we did, and the combat encounter lasted as long as the GM book predicted. Very excited to try more. Just so clean and easy, and making the setting less stupid is great even if you should just play in your own setting.
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Apr 12, 2024 18:56
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I genuinely think that SotD/SotWW should be everyone's first d20 system (not the same as saying they should be everyone's first RPG)
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Apr 15, 2024 15:24
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