@Masakan If it would make a good addition to his answer, leave a comment asking for him to add it. Otherwise, either leave a comment asking him to chat to talk about it, or ask it as a whole new question.
@Miniman Yeah but A I honestly feel cheap doing so. and B if your DM just decides he's just gonna "CONVINIENTLY" put you in a situation full of antimagic and you become too reliant on it
frankly i hear so many story about people who just win fights with a single spell or literally break the game to the point where everyone else is just sitting on their asses doign nothing
@Masakan It's perfectly valid to decide that you don't want to be a spellcaster, of course. But asking if getting spells is a good idea, objectively the answer is yes.
A) It's simpler to increase the power of non-casters than to try and put an effective leash on an extremely versatile set of systems whose whole gimmick is getting around things. B) It's more rewarding and makes for more awesome games if you increase the lower-powered class than decrease the higher-powered ones.
@Masakan I'd rather have the guy who normally runs WIzards play a fullopt stock Truenamer on my table (and Truenamer is the single most broken class in 3.5e as it flatly does not function) instead of trying to beat up on the wizard with AMFs and breaking all the Fighter's gear in the process
C) D&D's "magic solves problems" theme is by this point so ingrained in its legacy and traditions that if you want to play a game where magic isn't the answer to everything, you might as well go find a different system which actually does that from the start.
Not "all a DM can do," but you've stumbled onto one of the flaws in D&D: most editions are so sprawling and complex that balance is nigh impossible unless the group actively works for it.
Casters can still use anything which isn't subject to spell resistance, while non-casters are deeply dependent on their magic items to get anywhere near parity.
AMF doesn't actually fix the problem, so blaming your use of AMF on the person who's making the choices is... disingenuous at best. The solution is social, not mechanical.
Again, game solutions to friendship problems don't work. Roll20 doesn't magically absolve us from creating a coherent group dynamic between participants.
RPG.SE has many answers about how to make a functional group... and many more questions which arise from people trying to use the game's rules to replace the social contract.
@Shalvenay The game where the GM and the players are competing to see who's better at optimization is fun, but I suspect it's not the game Masakan is looking to play.
In a system like D&D 3.5, system mastery means being able to choose the level of power the group is playing at and not accidentally stumbling into a forced escalation.
I'm guessing your groups may not have been aware of the dynamics they were stumbling into, and didn't even know to look for the tools to help them get out of it.
@Masakan -- I've been in a HM 3.5e game with a DM that was skilled in charopt. He was able to make the world hilariously magical, because he understood that high magic means that magic is common in the world, not just powerful from a character optimization perspective
Okay, so why did he do that? Be serious and thoughtful. Clearly he thought it was the thing he was expected to do, while you didn't. What's the difference between his view of the game and yours which led him to make that choice?
What we're getting at is that a successful group has to all be on the same page in terms of the reasons they're playing, and that doesn't just happen accidentally very often.
Even within the tiny sphere of combat effectiveness, I've had great success making PCs who shore up everyone else instead of fixing problems themselves.
whereas, I roll with sort of a "bench player" ethos, characters who can sort of flow to gaps in a party's construction and plug them -- both Cleric and Druid do quite well with this line of thought, I find.
@Masakan Fair enough - I just wondered because Eldritch Knight is kinda plain, if you see what I mean. If you're focused on air, I'd suggest looking up the Knight Phantom from Five Nations - lots of cool Phantom Steed abilities.
@Masakan in 3.5e? that's actually rather funny -- straight Druid 20, played properly, is one of the most powerful builds out there -- there is almost nothing multiclass wise that makes druids better than they already are (planar shepherd is it, but it's the kind of class that is barely one step up from the truenamer in authorship)
but back to sublime chord, i can easily see it working character concept wise...i can just say my character is a fortune telling gypsy and it would work
@Masakan that is ugh, I agree. (Paladin/Warlock in 3.5e is actually kinda underwhelming -- it's a better build in 5e, which is where my Palalock hails from system-wise)
Mmm. 3.5's complexity, and the nigh-infinite variations on interpretation and implementation based on play style and play goals, makes it easy for two people to arrive at totally opposite conclusions about the effectiveness of a mechanical feature--and both are right, from their perspective of experience.
let me see here -- I have most editions of D&D under my belt, as well as Fate Accelerated, and dabblings in Classic Traveller, Roll For Shoes, and now Dungeon World...still want to find a GURPS game, and give Burning Wheel a whirl too
@Masakan I started in D&D 3.5, moved to 4e, and then left D&D completely for systems which focus on characterisation mechanics, give equal or greater priority to non-violent problem-solving, and don't require extreme levels of system mastery to avoid trap options.
for all its quirks regarding 30 years of tech advancement, I'd rather deal with Traveller for such a game (although I'd hack it to deal with said 30 years of tech advancement)
@Masakan -- the problem is that high magic doesn't really assume invariances the way a high-tech SF world does. 3.x doesn't have a lot of tools to express technical constraints, IOW.
(Traveller would be a good start -- it was built from the ground up for space-exploration sci-fi in a Fireflyesque vein, so it has much more tooling for dealing with the issues of scale and developmental asymmetry that such a setting poses)
You might be surprised by the number of RPGs directly inspired by various anime themes, styles, and properties. But "anime" is a medium, not a genre, so it's almost meaningless on its own.
Seriously though, Big Eyes Small Mouth, Open Versatile Anime, Teenagers from Outer Space, Macross II, Mekton, Maid, Hot Guys Making Out, Anima Prime, Mecha vs Kaiju, CthulhuTech...
@Masakan RPG.SE is probably the broadest-based RPG community you'll run into -- just about everywhere else on the internet is more specialized in terms of playstyles and/or systems
come to think of it, I'd think Dungeon World would work well for him as well
or a hack thereof -- the stock DW playbooks are oriented towards Western fantasy tropes instead of Eastern, but a Far East version of DW is not beyond my imagination
@Masakan -- not all systems are setting-dependent for that matter
Fate is a great example of a system that assumes very few things about its setting
(it's a system that can handle a wyrmling wandering around an airport terminal xD)
@Masakan -- although even if you're setting dependent, it's still possible to have your own setting instead of adopting an existing one wholesale. (Anima: BF has its own stock setting/lore for instance)
@Masakan don't worry, there's plenty of room for you to pitch a tent and camp :) just like the Stack has no rule against necromancy, Stack chat has no rule against camping
@Miniman Well, I've never seen you be mean to someone around here... which, depending on where they're coming from, probably greatly improves things =|
@Masakan This, and what you just said, don't really help at all. I'm looking more for a statement like "They buff themselves with haste and then flyby attack enemies while staying out of reach" or something more like that.
ok alright so generally my character is very defensive and cautious by nature casting shield before every big fight and greater luminous armor when things get bad
due to flyby attack he wants to be as mobile as possible effectively zipping aroudn the battlefield
he also has various dispel and antimagic abilities since due to him being a gish
a head on fight with a spellcaster is just asking to die
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