I dislike if you arent doing x your doing it wrong. I just liked Abrupt jaunt because it covers the one aspect im terrible at. Remembering things that would save my life.
Hrm. I'm always curious when multiple answers pop up on a question, and get votes very quickly, but the question itself remains unvoted, unedited, and uncommented.
Depite being male I do not see myself superior to women at all. I just notice differences. Women are generally more dexterous and flexible than Men and men are stronger when it comes to endurance. these are influenced by too many factors to be absolute however.
I have some strength but no endurance when it comes to anything that involves putting the lungs under heavy stress because of asthma and my weight.
Stat jumps are really important to the game, and can easily and accidentally introduce imbalances to the system. In light of that, I suggest one of these pre-existing mechanics:
Traits (UA 86) and Flaws (UA 91)
Unearthed Arcana introduced these mechanics. Traits give a small mechanical bonus wh...
My eyesight is poor, My intelligence makes me awkward and what few mental problems I have are so minor I never could see why people used them as insults.
One of the problems with 3.5 is that given the massive number of commonly-available spells, effects, and items that have world-changing consequences, precautions will be taken by anyone with the means to take them.
Any king is going to have a Royal Reader, like the Royal Taste-Tester.
@BESW because of the exception-based way in which D&D magic works, it always escalates into "who can find the best spell". The moment the party is hit by its first save-or-die, everyone gets Death Ward effect.
If a PC wizard can spend his days in a popped Bag of Holding with a Bottle of Air and interact with the outside world through Astral Projection, a 3.5 king will have plenty of opportunity to figure out how to not get assassinated... or he wouldn't still be king.
@Novian Nothing says the extradimensional space in a bag of holding disappears when the bag is stabbed, just that the bag is no longer a portal to that space.
Any attempt to reason that something "must be so" about the 3.5 world through logical extrapolation based on real-world examples is only as effective as the audience's willingness to accept it.
In a world where your average town has at least one resident capable of not only killing everyone in the town in less than six seconds, but also capable of summoning food and water, repairing any broken item, curing your average wound, and flawlessly detecting whether or not a person regularly has bad thoughts?
Any king who has survived more than six months on the throne is surrounded by a battery of the best wards and practical non-magical prevention measures the private magical protection firm of his choice can offer, for a fee of a not-insubstantial fraction of the nation's taxes.
(Because believe you me, magical protection services are going to be a booming economy in that world.)
I remember discussing a number of years back, what a civilization can do to survive a level 20 wizard that's decided to methodically destroy it. By living under various permanent non-detection spells, and once per day casting superior invisibility, teleporting over a given city, casting a number of earthquakes and contingent-teleporting out
and the outcome of that discussion was: not a hell of a lot
I love extrapolating the absolutely crazy experience it must be to live in that kind of world, but it's not actually much fun to play in unless you either ignore the implications entirely or want to play D&D: Paranoia Edition.
This is why Middle-Earth has fewer wizards than you can count on your hands, and awesome magical swords can... glow in the dark.
I am being very careful not to use mechanics that remove player agency: in fact, the best tools in my arsenal are like Stain, in that they force the players to make hard choices.
And when that choice to postpone pain now for pain later comes back to haunt them, it was their choice, not something the GM is handing down arbitrarily.
On the other hand, taking damage also means losing Stain. So the party can focus fire to let their friend out fast, at the cost of damaging their friend.... or they can ignore the nerra and let him hammer his way out from the inside.
@Magician Amusingly, it was less brutal than I'd expected.
The healer had the DS psionic power Sensing Eye already up when he got captured...
So he had line of sight out of the nerra.
It wound up letting them coordinate their battle plan, and had he been in possession of a teleport power...
You know what I'd add to that monster? Though that'd probably push it into Elites territory in terms of complexity. Twisted Image: while it has a creature captured, it may use its at-wills.
I'd keep Captured Image if I weren't also going to be stranding people with Time Jump.
The overall effect I'm going for, obviously, is a sense of reality unraveling in the face of the Far Realm.
Unreality Bubbles do for space what Time Jumps do for time.
And Stain serves as foreshadowing of this, because it's the same effect in miniature applied to the players. And now it's escalating because too much Stain can actually convert you.
(It's actually going to make a lot of sense, due to various past events and one particular character's constant ability to power through despite all odds and logic by shouting about how awesome he was.)
That character died a while back, and his ghost will show up to give them a pep talk.
I'm having the player (who moved off island a few months ago) write the speech for me.
I...am not going to go on a Far Realms rant and instead say that this Monk thread is hilarious.
It's gone from being about monks to being about the morality and effectiveness of blasting out an army's blood, veins, and collective nervous system and turning it into a sticky mass that ties up its still-living victims.
And just about everyone involved is perfectly okay with this.
While playing at uni, I've discovered a law: probability of non-gamers entering the room is directly proportional to the ghastliness of subjects being discussed. Discussing technicalities of necrophiliac sex with beholders is almost guaranteed to summon someone.
To my mind, the entire D&D multiverse is a tiny speck in the Far Realm, and the Far Realm feels about it the way we feel about a very small splinter in our heel.
The only thing that's really canon is that something from the Far Realms walking in is exactly as bad for them, from their perspective, as a Material creature walking out
Encapsulate: there are also aberrants with agendas of encasing the material realm and forgetting about it.
First off, this is the canon in my head. I deliberately avoid ever making it explicit in the game and feel free to twist it and defy it, because... Far Realm.
Mind flayers as time travelers is... not something I want to get into, so I leave it in the settings where it's more appropriate, and which I don't run.
Like I said, I'm getting a feel for your canon, as I'm very aware of the default canon for these things (and why Mind Flayers make more sense than it sounds like - trust me)
The Far Realms is located outside of reality. Concepts such as 'time' and 'space' are not only foreign to it, but inimical to its essence - their presence almost like unto a physical blow against its denizens. The Far Realms is populated by things that, in their native forms, are difficult enough to categorize that we can only truly speak of the greatest of their kind, the Herculean Minds that sometimes make contact - or are contacted - by the Material.
(Elans make total sense to me and I'm cool with them. They fit into my vision of the mortal multiverse as a body stuck inside the Far Realm, and each of them launches antibodies against the other.)
What is known is that the Far Realms contains and emanates a powerful and foreign influence that, while not Chaos, can only be called Chaotic because of its total incompatibility with the rules of reality. Far Realms influence is bad for the Great Wheel (hereafter referred to as the Material Realms) because wherever its blasphemous power goes, reality shreds in its wake, taking forms strange and horrid.
However, Material influence is equally bad for the Far Realms; the mere existence of Material concepts or, worse, objects in the Far Realms spreads a sort of order that is utterly foreign to the place, condensing its power to "mere" chaos.
Every now and then, there's penetration between the two realms. It's not really a great idea, and attempts on both sides to cross the barrier inevitably end hideously poorly for whomever tries it. Those Herculean Minds that have crossed have become changed, turned into Material beings that are now forever barred from their homes if not annihilated entirely.
And while no beings of similar power have crossed into the Far Realms, some few mortals that managed to cross and come back (relatively) sane have babbled about a realm where death is a foreign concept, where no matter what happens to you the pain and horror just stays and stays and stays
MM3 186. A primordial-made planet given the spark of intelligence by the gods in the days before the Dawn War. They feared him, and cast him into the Far Realm.
In any event, some beings of powerful chaos, evil, or both can be traced back directly to Far Realms taint, with Aboleths being one of them - coincidentally also the oldest of all mortal races, predating even dragons.
@BESW Ah, yes. There's a rather specific reason Herculean Minds who become tainted by the Material can't cross back over - there's a known being on the Far Realms side striving to keep them out and keep the barriers sealed. IIRC he's in the Elder Evils book, but in any event his sole mission in life is to keep the Realms and the Material separate
So there are a few beings that can actually be traced back to the Far Realms, some of whom would very much like to go back, but most of them simply insane, cancerous forces of destruction, their minds utterly broken by being forced into the rules of the Material Realm; the flow of time and the presence of space being akin to a constant sensation of free-fall in a tiny cage
And it's notable that while all mortal races spawned deliberately or accidentally by Far Realms taint are aberrations (Aboleths, Kaorti), not all Aberrations were spawned by the Far Realms. Many Aberrations are magical mutations (Atach, Elans), while others are just hideous monsters that evolved 'naturally' in areas of magical taint or radiation (beholders).
See, waaaaay off in a future that no longer exists (more on that later), Illithids ruled a vast interstellar empire on a Prime Material Plane, but they were faced down with a disaster that they struggled to avert (most commonly considered to be heat death). When they finally figured out how to stop it, it was too late - but not too late to try a desperation gamble.
They sacrificed thousands of their Elder Brains in an unprecedented psionic ritual and created a psychic storm of a magnitude that may never exist again, then harnessed it to go backwards in time. Disaster struck en route - their slaves, the Gith, took advantage of their weakness and struck with powerful magics and psionics
The resulting battle annihilated causality and fractured the time stream, sending the Mind Flayers and their slaves into multiple time lines on multiple Material Planes and into some Outer Planes.
And with millions of Mind Flayers suddenly everywhere, there is a giant hush over the multiverse as the Blood War pauses completely - all weapons withdrawn, all armies pulled back into their home planes - and the fiends strike at these newcomers with terrifying force, determined to keep them from becoming a threat on the multiversal scale.
The end result was the retreat of the Illithids into the Underdark, and the total loss of their knowledge of what catastrophe they were even supposed to prevent.
And no, what I'm telling you is that research and consultation has given this as the essential canon story of mind flayers as consistent with the most sources at once.
Including material found in 2e about Chronomancy, the Temporal Prime, and the nature of time in D&D
(The Mind Flayers breaking Time in half really ticked it off)
At best it's an attempt to reconcile multiple conflicting origin stories in the same fashion that Baker Street Irregulars try to make Holmesian canon make sense.
(The second problem is that they know something horrible is coming, but none of them can be sure what it is, if it's coming to that world, if they can even fix it, and even if they'll have the power to do so since the idea of working with 'lesser' races is anathema to them.)
But my problem with all the time travel versions is that they tend to make mind flayers the single race around which the entire setting turns, and that's far too much narrative power to put in the hands of any one group.
Nah, as far as I'm concerned it makes them the victims of their own hubris and evil, reduced in status to a deluded cancer slowly choking on its own bile.
And it's significant to note that since they sort of broke time
There's not certainty that a disaster like theirs will ever manifest
D&D is a game, not a story; the STORY comes from the players. The illithid saga sidelines the main characters by providing a story rather than a setting: a story in which the main characters are ultimately futile.
Nah, I'd say that the Illithid saga is more of an explanation than anything. It's a setting piece, like the Lady of Pain, whose purpose is to explain the presence of something powerfully alien. Unlike Her Serenity, however, you can get together and nail all the Illithids to a wall
Eh, Her Serenity is a prop. You literally have to go out of your way to make her angry and even then she's more likely to throw you out of Sigil than to bother Mazing you unless you, you know, ignore all the advice ever and try to worship her.
That's not what I mean. In a world where there's an entire CITY of epic people, led by something akin to a god, the adventures of the heroes not only become dribbles by comparison... there's always someone else who could have done it, and probably done it better.
Your argument that the illithids are less narratively central because "Another race could have developed the sorcery to combat the nameless catastrophe" applies just as easily to the players and their achievements.
The illithids are less narratively central because they failed. They failed, they don't get a second chance, they're going extinct and they're too arrogant to do anything about any of it.
Their destiny is to die, either choking out on their own pride or nailed to the Underdark by their horde of enemies
In any event, Sigil is full of beings much more powerful than your average Material denizen, but you need to keep in mind that Sigil isn't actually popular for beings of truly heinous power.
They're either sad and pathetic or inconceivably important. Neither of those is going to be very useful to me when I'm building stories for my characters, because neither of them is very compelling to go up against.
But secondly because Sigil is a city defined by its factional struggles, and the more powerful you get the more those factions try to recruit you. Fail to pick a side and see the rumor mill pick one for you - and then have to combat the assassins sent to ensure you're not a threat.
So your 'average' Sigilite that isn't a native Humanoid (who hover around CR 5 or so on the low end of the scale) is about CR 11 or so
The exception are powerful Factional leaders (who rarely leave their safe houses) and the Golden Lords of Sigil, who may or may not actually be powerful in their own right but have enough wealth that the point is sort of moot
Both represent additional props because actually going out and doing something would either involve A. exposure to harm or B. money they don't want to spend because they have a disturbing and psuedo-sexual relationship with their freakish treasure hordes
See, though, on Planescape "the world at large" is a place where CR 11 is a mid-ranker on the Planar totem pole and is fairly common.
Vs. the Prime Material Plane, yeah, Sigilites seem powerful.
But by the time the PCs go there from the Prime Material, assuming it's under their own power, they're powerful enough to be big fish
Yeeeah, this is where simulation and balance clash and common sense is left stunned on the floor.
The average guy on the street in Sigil could mop the floor, by himself, with the majority of the challenges a party has encountered before they meet him.
I'd argue otherwise. The Planescape setting was written specifically to counter the idea that one must be high level to adventure in the Planes and still have awesome times about it.
I had quite a fun time being a low level character in Sigil, working for a minor law enforcement agency to clear raider-gangs away from portals
Stat jumps are really important to the game, and can easily and accidentally introduce imbalances to the system. In light of that, I suggest one of these pre-existing mechanics:
Traits (UA 86) and Flaws (UA 91)
Unearthed Arcana introduced these mechanics. Traits give a small mechanical bonus wh...
