@Lord_Gareth soulknife is the opposite of broken. not taking into accout my distaste for the class itself.

@Novian - I was making fun of aforementioned list

Because it was TERRIBLY written

ah I see

Dude skips over the legitimate problems in 3.5 in favor of calling out some of the weakest content in the game as 'broken'

I though it was as well

what else be on the list

Oh god, it's been awhile. Soulknife was on the list, pretty sure dragon shaman was on the list

No T1 class on Earth was, though

I am also intruiged by the idea of a creature immune to death.

T1?

Tier 1

And Frenzied Berserkers aren't immune to death in a permanent sense

They're immune to death while Frenzying

They keel over once the Frenzy ends if they shoulda died during it

Still It intruiges me that the possibility of a completely immune to death creature may exist.

Because I can loophole that.

Extract its living soul. trap it, or use it a fuel

@Novian there are numerous ways to become immune to death through a variety of loopholes

none of them involve Loyal Beyond Death or Frenzied Berserker, because while those delay death a bit, neither makes you immune to it in general

Hmm question is would the soul of an undying entity be an eternal fuel?

never even heard of the frenzied berzerker

@Novian - No. In point of fact by RAW souls are only good for 10XP

Place him in stasis using magic. Make him featherweight using magic. Get 10,000 peasants to stand in a line, each 5 feet apart. Hand the stasis deathbarian to the first peasant. In a single round have each one hand the deathbarian to the next. Deathbarian travels 50,000ft in approximately six seconds. Should gain enough velocity to escape orbit. Rules debate ensues, game collapses, dice are thrown, game is over.

@MadMAxJr lol

@Novian Complete Warrior, Barbarian prestige class. It's... good, but problematic since you must make Will saves or attack things at random, including allies

The peasant railgun can solve /many/ problems.

hmm I could iron out that problem but I probably wont need to. I dont expect ill play it.

I still want to take Windicator for a test run

Just to experience it.

@Lord_Gareth ?

@Novian - Ruby Knight Vindicator, a ToB PrC that gishes cleric and crusader

ah

In addition to getting very respectable maneuvers and spells, they can convert Turn Undead to Swift actions

Which is...

Well, that one feature is the entire reason they're called Windicators

I need to read my books again Im forgetting things

That feature alone pays for all the levels you take in the class to get it

1 swift action a turn.

Divine Impetus is a really ridiculously good class feature, yeah

particularly with how easy Turn Attempts are to come by

yeah.

@Novian - Normally, yes

and how little most clerics use them.

Windicator turns that into "As many swifts a turn as you spend TUndead uses, plus one"

I have not fought undead in a while

i just want to do it with a loadout of quickened spells

....

Go super nova all over some cultists

Hmm. I'm wrong. That is roughly 2.5km per second, earth escape velocity is 11.2km per second. Going to need more peasants.

Leave one survivor, pick him up by the throat and scream, "WILL YOU PRAISE THE RUBY LADY NOW, WRETCH?" in this face

But survivors can be turned into reccuring villans.

THERE MUST BE NONE.

Hey, Gareth, tone todown the Tone of your comments, please.

Oh god no, I didn't say I was going to let him GO

@MadMAxJr We can always use more peasants.

@Brian - ?

Peasants are useful, very useful.

We aim to be informative and factual. If you find yourself using all caps, you aren't being sufficiently calm.

the were-rat question

both of your comments can be rephrased to be far more helpful and calm.

In this context the caps are emphasis since I don't have any italics

@Lord_Gareth yes. My point exactly.

do not ever let a necromancer run afoul of a village of peasants too weak to resist.

@Lord_Gareth use asterisks

You should not need emphasis in a comment.

it means that your facts don't speak for themselves.

We need... 45,000 peasants to achieve a speed of 37,500 feet per second, translates to 11.43km/sec, thus we are now able to throw the raging barbarian out of the earthlike gravity pull.

Um...emphasis is part of speech?

The things I use math for.

ever the voice of wisdom. how goes it Sir Ballsun.

Well crap now I can't edit the italics in

yeah, @Brian, I see the problem with how it reads now with the caps, but I think with italics it wouldn't be a problem

the "NOT" might be a bit much for italics, but I think the other two are appropriate

@Novian - Bah, you can't make anything decent out of dead peasants. Why should the necromancer stop and ravage this place only to get D-list minions out of it?

@Lord_Gareth to have more cleaning/cooking staff

and more laborers

you hit the HD cap on your minions quickly like that

@Novian - Planar bind an imp to serve as a man of all work, use unseen servants for the labor.

the Necromancer should probably be encouraged to do it

I didnt say the necro was smart.

God I should hope he is. Sorcerer necromancers are /terrible/ and wizards have to be smart by definition

Where did we manage to dig up a dumb necromancer?

...dunno.

I found him in a village full of zombies

Clearly he was doing something we'd rather not think about when he was hit over the head and lost several points of Int :p

Or he lost his amulet of Int +6

Yeah, but that's just going down 6 points when your /start/ was 18

@Lord_Gareth Sorcerers and Wizard necromancers are both quite good, but neither should be focusing on raising many minions; they're mostly about those incredibly nasty curses. You want a Cleric or Dread Necromancer for minions, and neither of those uses Intelligence. So there.

@Kryan - Well fine then, I'm gonna go write bad poetry and put red marks on my wrists with a sharpie!

not all people can start with 18 int

You're going to need a cabal of necromancers for a skeleton railgun.

especially in a low power point buy.

On the upside the skeleton railgun would have lower maintenance costs.

indeed.

Oh god, KRyan, a friend of mine pulled the Psion Sandwich on his players

Almost exactly as it was written, too

The party barbarian went to pick up the BBEG's "sandwich" and his (the Barb's) head explodes

ahahaha

And the sandwich rises into the air crackling with energy and booms out, "Now you will all suffer!"

that's terrible and you shouldn't do that to your players

but it is hilarious

Personally I think that's exactly the kind of weird stuff a Psion or Wizard would come up with.

"How could I possibly surprise enemies that are this careful and professional?"

"Wait. No. But yes! THEY'LL NEVER EXPECT ME TO BE HAM ON RYE WITH MUSTARD!"

Cue BBEG fight against a floating psychic sandwich

I was referring more to the summary execution of the party Barbarian

Oh, yeah, save-or-die is bad move

But it made for a great scene

mm

Hey, a Ring of Counterspells counters a spell for you automatically, right?

yeah

dispel magic or greater dispel magic are the traditional choices

disjunction if you're playing a high-level bad-mannered game

So how much would it help, skipping the "how do you track wizzaaaaaaaaahd down" problem, if you kept that thing loaded with Celerity/Greater Celerity at all times?

"I go fi-" "nope, countered, celerity, deathbolts away!"

certainly interesting

it would help

but those spells only come into play if the dude loses initiative

so you also have to win that in the first place

It's a shame that I'm pretty sure it won't work to counter Contingency since, y'know, that was cast years ago

As opposed to right now

Although, alternately

You could walk around with a contingent Teleport Cage up to keep a teleport contingency from working and just open every combat with celerity+greater dispel to surpress their crafted contingencies, can't you?

maybe

It won't stop a contingent plane shift, sadly

mm

really, I'm not this high-op

But if they're going THAT far maybe it's not worth the fight.

I don't really know how to handle suitably-paranoid wizards

Well, thing is

I'm not handling a suitably-paranoid wizard

because I just assumed that I'm in spell range of the wizard

Which is not going to happen if he's going FULL PARANOIA

But in the hypothetical situation where Azuth Alter Reality's me next to this guy and whispers "Kill," in my ear

I'm imagining how I might try it

mm

not sure if I /can/ Craft Contingent Spell a Teleport Cage. Are there any mechanical limits on what contingencies I can craft?

Or can I put in ANY spell on a trigger?

'Cause if I can put anything in then that thing is getting a Twinned Repeating Teleport Cage so I have an arena large enough to keep him from moving out with actions

I'll have to mull this over

(@KRyan, I'm starting to think that any situation that actually devolves into two wizards of level 11 or higher having a magical duel is going to leave a permanent scar on the world where space-time doesn't work the same and all the animals mutate into alien horrors)

@Lord_Gareth it is pretty dumb

I like ... Glyphstone's? version

I mean, in the first round at least one of them is trying to twist time to go first (which may be countered by the other guy doing the same, or counterspelled)

So right there you just opened the fight up by slapping causality in the face

And then the actual fight happens

Chain Disjunction.

And since all the favorite blasting spells are Conjuration you're breaking space further with each one

Hmm. Would a wand of Disjunction only work once?

And to counter or avoid spells you're using Abjuration, the spell of magic that affects magic

So by the time this is done you've taken all natural and super-natural laws of physics, beat them, boiled them, then hung them to dry while a large man whips them to death

That has GOT to leave something permanent

@MadMaxJr - wouldn't work at all, it's too high level to be in a wand

@MadMAxJr depends whether or not it got caught in the blast?

Ah, right, there is a limit.

@Lord_Gareth well, staff or scepter then

You know, I almost want to do a campaign setting

Where all the non-apprentice wizards live in demiplane bubbles, sending forth projected images to attract students

And then send the students out to adventure

And whenever a students asks why, past a certain point, theyh have to swear a vow to never fight another wizard they escort the student to some horrific wild magic zone and say, "These are everywhere, and they happen every time we battle."

Whole setting is Aberrations and rogue constructs for enemies

A setting where Wizards are the brute, hulking tanks and Fighters are the select, reserved, educated ones.

@SimonGill The actual question's been answered by now, but nobody's addressing the elephant in the room: how to make diseases challenging.

now I must go

@BESW up DCs, pick the odds you want and make them hard.

A disease where you can no longer use words containing the letters RSTLN or E.

@waxeagle That's part of it, but not really going to challenge a numbers-conscious party.

@BESW if you've got a player who knows the DC table well they'll know what they are facing is either unfair or plot significant when they fail on a good skill check roll. And that's what the DM is going for here

the fact is, if he wants them to fail, he shouldn't actually be using a game mechanic here...

@waxeagle There's another reason diseases are trivial, and it's quite easy to fix, though not as straightforward as upping DCs (which I do think is useful).

The track usually starts at 1.

@BESW good point, start it mid phase and that will mean 2 high DCs and at least 2 days before it's gone

Rebuild the disease track so the PC starts at 2.

also the save at the end of the encounter is problematic

but that's not necessarily a well enough known rule to make it an issue...you can probably skip it and no one will notice

@waxeagle And most of the later adventures I've seen ignore it entirely.

Now here's my problem: none of this is actually an answer to the question being asked.

That question has been answered.

@BESW not completely, I'm posting an answer to get to the real question's answer

I was thinking to do my own Q&A and link to it?

@BESW that'll work, probably better than cluttering the more specific question.

on second thought, is this question a duplicate? rpg.stackexchange.com/q/20124/4089

the answers/premise seem remarkably similar. Only difference is one is wererat and the other werewolf. Perhaps they could be merged? Although I'm not sure there's a precedent for that type of action

@LitheOhm the first seems to me to be a straight-forward "what are the rules?" while the second is "how can I make this not suck so much?"

but I might be reading into the second one a bit

also, even if that is the case, merging the two does seem like a decent enough idea

Can someone point me at a link for the most current 4e DC table?

'Sup everybody?

@Lord_Gareth Hey.

@KRyan, @BESW, I'm getting the feeling that this monk thread might be best solved by voting to close the thing. Some of the comments from the low-op side are getting...hostile.

@Lord_Gareth nah, I don't think it's necessary

closing is really extreme for a question that is perfectly appropriate and reasonable

things are closed here, generally, only if there is something wrong with them -- and the implication is that whatever's wrong can be fixed so the question can be opened again

Hrm.

and since in this case it's not the question that's wrong

@KRyan Agreed, but you really should reconsider using the comments to say what you've already said in your answer. It's antagonistic for no constructive end.

So much a some of the answers/comments

what you might be talking about is Protection (i.e. you need a certain amount of rep to comment), but I don't think it's really warranted here (and only two or three people on the site can even do that)

(And also stop using the comments for conversation.)

@BESW well, I was just confirming what Tim had guessed about my perspective on monks; the comment about the weapons was before I'd added that to my answer

it could easily go away now

I wanted to let Tim know he'd guessed correctly, and maybe (if he sees it and believes me) convince Cypher some

I suppose the former would be handled better through chat, though

If you're thinking "A mod can delete this if it gets out of hand" when you make a comment, please reconsider making it.

Yes, invite them to chat.

@BESW "out of hand" was not the concern that I had, more like "becomes obsolete"

I do not consider the situation currently out of hand

nor do I suspect the conversation will continue

and if it did, yes, I'd try to bring it to chat

I kinda wish I could just tag @Ororo to come into chat so we could give him the quick-and-dirty on why Monk has so many problems and offer more comprehensive alternate suggestions. Unfortunately, it seems as though he's believing some of the less-optimal advice given in the thread.

Which will be unfortunate when aforementioned monk hits play.

@Lord_Gareth he will get a notice on the site now

because you @'d him

it'll pop up the same way as if you'd commented

...Oh yeah, that's how it works isn't it.

Well hopefully he comes on chat and we can find him a martial-arts solution that works for him.

and anyone can read chat, you just need 20 rep to respond (which, admittedly, is a significant limitation)

I'm given the impression that you only get @ pinged if you've been in chat at least once before, but I have no citation to back that up.

@Lord_Gareth of course, that's largely academic since Ororo hasn't been seen on the site since August 2010

@BESW I know Brian has used it to contact new people who'd never previously been in the chat, but it might be a mod-only thing

@KRyan This whole thing does seem kind of like a horse / barn door scenario.

@BESW not familiar with that idiom

To "close the barn door after the horse has bolted" is an idiom meaning that the method being used would have been more effective as a preventative rather than a solution after the fact.

ah, but dinner

aaah

yeah