@TimothyAWiseman in case you missed my comment before I deleted it, just so you know: you're exactly right with respect to my feelings about Monks. I really like the character archetype and have made many characters like that, but I do not use the Monk class to do it.
@BESW Your diseases question is brilliant. I can't wait to see what other people come up with, and this is actually making me want to use diseases. Main reason I've never considered them is because they are too trivial.
Alternately, depending on modifiers and how much your party understands probability, it might be more advantageous to just have everyone make a Heal check and hope someone rolls high.
(You don't need to be trained in Heal to try helping a guy with his disease.)
@BESW What I mean is, you just said "the only engaging 4e skill challenges are the ones that break their own rules". Would the good rules change that fact?
@BESW Yeah well you've turned diseases from being something that is either trivial or flat-out weird into something that can last at least 3 days, even if people spec for it
@Lord_Gareth You're absolutely right about the VoP charity thing, but how does that relate to the OP's question about its balance?
Isn't it actually a balancing mechanic that prevents the party from gaining an excess of effective wealth due to the VoP PC's effects-out-of-nowhere that mimic wealth?
@BESW - Resource allocation is a form of balance. VoP takes resources and removes them from the party entirely, which harms the entire group and makes the feat increasingly ill-advised.
This factor further pushes Vow of Poverty into the 'underpowered' territory, and as a result is relevant for both the sake of completeness /and/ because it eliminates legitimate shared expendiatures of wealth such as, say, giving gold to the artificer to get a wand.
The removal of the wealth also removes opportunity, and both is a direct result of the feat.
As you and KRyan have been saying, the main difference in power between 3.5 classes is in the breadth of their choices. VoP eliminates choice in the arena of item acquisition. That should be the central premise of your answer, in my opinion.
(And in purely numbers terms --which I know is narrowminded-- I'm still quite convinced that the problem with charity is one of degree rather than principle.)
(Oh in principal it's wonderful and there's a few vow of poverty fixes that @KRyan can point you at where the charity rule would be totally justified/is present)
(The trouble here, with /this/ version, is how much this version harms you)
Then don't call the charity mechanic "unforgivable." It's dramatic hyperbole that obscures your actual valid point: the VoP feat's item-equivalent mechanics are unforgivably imbalanced.
Use as objective language as possible. Hyperbole just results in downvotes, as it's not persuasive. Frame it in terms of your personal experience, frame it as good-subjective. We're not as neurotic as wikipedia, but we do have some criteria here.
Very nice. You could, if you wanted, add a single sentence which makes explicit the fact that the 'mimicked wealth' you receive is not in proportion to the amount of wealth you are expected to be giving away.
@BESW The hilarious thing, and the sad thing, is that in sheer raw numbers the benefits from VoP are worth more than wealth-by-level in terms of gold cost.
The trouble isn't the amount you get.
It's that you can't spend it to cover your weaknesses or gain utility
Items can take a weak class and help them compensate in addition to accenting or boosting their strengths
Vow of Poverty only boosts some strengths, and of the ones it chooses those strengths are the least relevant and the least desirous
I personally used VoP regularly in my PCs, but it was largely because I didn't want to make those choices and I understood the consequences of my decision.
KRyan's is more comprehensive but sometimes supplementary information is important too. Knowing WHY something is terrible helps people believe that it is.
And unfortunately I've noticed a high trend of people answering optimization questions that don't understand the realities of the system they're answering for.
@Lord_Gareth I find it's very easy, once we've gained understanding of a thing, to forget what it was like to not have that understanding --and even more, to not remember what it was like when we didn't know it was a thing at all.
I've come from communities where the low-op sections of 3.5 tend to get hostile, confrontational, and downright offensive.
And I'm already noting certain posters (@KRyan's linked me to a few threads but asked me not to comment because it already caused mod headaches) that I'm going to be knife-fighting in the answer trenches with because they're married to information that is wholly and factually wrong.
And the trouble is that in the 3.5 community "Factually correct" does not end the argument
@BrianBallsun-Stanton I've been trying to do just that, thus far. If I wasn't you would have seen me on a tear of, "AUGHGODWHYDIDYOUACCEPTTHATANSWERITSSOWRONGWHEREISTHEBRAINBLEACH" already
The purpose of SE is to provide the public with peer-reviewed information. Trying to convince one person of something, or entering into a debate, is not within the scope of the Q&A format of this site.
There are some examples of folks passing out hideously bad info in this VoP thread that I've seen giving out bad information in other threads. I'd give an example but I don't wanna name names if this is going to be permanent because it'll cause a fight if they wander into chat.
This whole 'choking back the vitriol' thing is proving difficult in an interesting way. I'm used to being able to open up and include sarcasm and "poetic" turns of phrase in my posts. This detached tone is messin' me up.
@Lord_Gareth Yup. Different goals, different methods.
There's no interest in establishing cults of personality or convincing individuals, really. It's about providing good information which the community will then cause to bubble to the top.
@Lord_Gareth Being eloquent is encouraged! If you look at my posts you'll see that I make asides and pop culture references fairly frequently. Haven't been slapped for it yet.
But I keep them relephant, positive, and short.
And if a topic is sensitive (you seem to gravitate toward the more sensitive topics) I try to make sure I'm letting the facts speak for themselves. If an opinion is needed I'll be sure to differentiate it from fact.
@Lord_Gareth the best I've seen/heard of/thought of myself is "Vow of Poverty: You do not own personal possessions beyond the bare essentials. (some description similar to the actual feat regarding stuff like clothes and things) However, when you give treasure items to charity, you gain, as a Supernatural benefit, the abilities of any magic item you like, provided the total value of the items whose benefits you emulate is no more than 75% of the value of the treasure donated to charity."
I think he's got something that could be worked into a very good concept here: "My point was simple; a broken character is broken because it forces the DM to work around it, instead of the opposite."
I have had many experiences where a character exploits a mechanic to the point where I must define every fight in terms of how to make sure he does not trivialize it. This limits my ability to create interesting encounters because only certain fights will be challenging without being overpowering.
Sometimes the comments derail. If the comments are no longer helpful to the thing being commented on, it's time to stop regardless of whether the conversation has reached its conclusion.
If the comments have gone back and forth more than maybe twice and there's still useful results to be squeezed out, suggest that it move to chat.
"Alright; at this point we're talking about a specific campaign and derailing the question. Why not bounce onto chat for awhile where you, KRyan, myself and anyone ele interested can discuss our disagreement over this subject? "
I do. I've got a dull axe to grind on this subject and I at least would like to know that I explained to him my stance in a complete and informative fashion.
"Alright; at this point we're talking about a specific campaign and derailing the question. Why not bounce onto chat for awhile where you, KRyan, myself and anyone else interested can discuss it?"
As I said, it irritates me when people are wrong and then insist on spreading their misinformation - heck, I'm sure that's where the entire Someone Is Wrong On the Internet instinct comes from.
@Lord_Gareth I'd just like to make it clear that I have no desire to play referee if he comes in. I'm not a mod, just a guy with an interest in seeing this social experiment fulfill its potential.
Indeed. But I can state accurately that, say, monsters were not being played up to their intelligence scores. And I can also state (accurately) that there are better walls to buy that take less investment AND work on smart monsters.
If you look at his info, you'll find that he's been playing PF for under a year and his questions are largely either basic mechanics questions or how to enact mechanics without alienating players.
@Lord_Gareth There's a question in there you could ask and possibly answer: "How can I play monsters to reflect their intelligence?"
Ah, PF. And in this case I think part of the trouble is the PF community, which has a sharp divide right down the middle. The two sides hate each other with a passion.
And the divide in the PF community revolves around optimization. One side tends to play what I'll call 3.PF, blending the two systems to get a more varied game out of both. The other side plays PF only and tends to be strongly influenced by the anti-op stance of the PF design team (which crusades through their forums mocking those who encourage system mastery and, in some cases, banning or fighting with them)
I was a victim of their banhammer when I wrote a brief essay explaining the things they did "fix" (and the extent to which they succeeded) and the things they failed to touch or notice.
But on the other hand I really do think the entire Internet RPG subculture underestimates the number of entirely happy little BNG groups that sail under the radar with their physical books and photocopied character sheets, unaware of and unconcerned with the vagaries and vitriol of The People Who Are Wrong On The Internet.
The other thing that causes all the hurt feelings is this one - just because the problems with the system can be ignored or house ruled doesn't mean they are not problems.
Having a local solution doesn't mean you have a universal solution.
A group chooses a game because it contains an aesthetic or philosophy they want to experience.
The extreme conclusion of Rule 0 is a group which has not chosen a system, but a GM.
A more moderate application of Rule 0 is that the GM applies it when necessary to bring out the aspects of the system the group desires, while allowing the bits the group doesn't appreciate to fall away.
Unfortunately, people without system mastery stumble into different op-levels by accident, which leads to unbalanced groups. That, and high-op in D&D has always been clunky, gimmicky and borderline unplayable. The fact that the game itself offers no indication of op levels, and instead pretends its all balanced is the root of the problem.
@Magician I agree that a huge part of the problem was how various D&D designers over the years have chosen to pretend that everything is okay
Paizo more than most; Monte Cook/WotC published a couple of 'mea culpa' articles late in 3.5 confessing to imbalance.
@BESW - So you think the question of "How can I play NPCs to their Intelligence scores?" is worth whipping up a Q and tagging my own A in there as an initial starter?
