Sorcerer Varients

[pirateking]

What do you think of the combination of

Stalwart Sorcerer- Complete Mage Pg.36
-give up 1spell known of your highest lvl spell(min 1spell known)
-gain 2hp per lvl
-gain 1martial weap prof + weap focus

Battle Sorcerer- Unearth Arcana Pg. 56
-give up 1spell slot of every lvl of spell(min 0spell slots)
-give up 1spell known of every lvl known(Min 1spell known)
-give up bluff
-gain intimidate
-gain Light armor prof + ability to cast in light armor
-gain 3/4 bab
-gain d8 hd instead of d4
-gain weap prof in 1 light/one-hand martial weap


Having Battle Sorcerer pretty much eliminates the draw backs of Stalwart Sorcerer, becus you only ever know 2 spells for your highest lvl spells(and u can only reduce it to a min of 1), until lvl 20 where u wouldnt learn another 9th lvl spell, so you give up one lvl 9 spell known for 2hp per lvl and weapon focus (plus how often to do get a character to lvl 20?)

Light armor
3/4's bab
d8+2 HD (better than a fighters)
Spells!
Familiar!

(3/4's Bab) + (d8+2hd) + (Improved Familiar) + (Augment Familiar) = ownage imo

Augment Familiar = +4str, dex, con DR 5/magic +2resistance to saves (2nd Lv spell, duration- concentration +1round/Lv.)

what do you guys think?

[darkalloy]

Personally I'd say that's a bit OP, I mean if you're going the battle mage route just take the warmage class. The little variant turns you into a D8 hit dice bard minus songs but plus large amounts of damage from spells the average HP of a barb if you have a con score per level. Not to mention having access to many PrC's that often required a wizard/sorc to multiclass or wait a long time to get into.

[pirateking]

thought you'd be the one to reply to this <.<

but yeah, tons of hp(for a caster) decent BaB, and armor! who could say no?! and since a familiar is based off your own stats, (1/2 your hp, your BaB, it makes it awesome!)


also for the added boost in BaB, take 5 lv's of abjurant champion
d10 hp, full bab, full casting advancement, plus some cool abilities with abjuration spells tho ur familiar loses out a little

[Andre]

Pirateking is new to the group so I'm going to explain something I should have let him know in advance , my apologies for not doing so ... darkalloy has been with this group of players here in my dragonlance campaign the longest - he's one of the founding members so to speak .. this isn't to say that "senior members" get better treatment than "new recruits" by any means ... however as a result of darkalloy being around so long he and I have worked out a certain pattern of behavior - and again my apologies for not pointing this out earlier - and said pattern of behavior is this....

I've come to rely on darkalloy as my rules guru - as you've all noticed I'm not a rules expert by any means ... when he points out a particular game rule or something else out he's basically just trying to be helpful because this is the pattern of behavior I've established with him over the past year of gaming - basically if you're a player and the DM keeps saying " Hey darkalloy what do the rules say on X " you're going to start volunteering the info automatically after a while without being asked ... basically I think what's going on here is that darkalloy is trying to give me a heads up re: a potentially quite powerful PC who might be more than I bargained for - since I'm not as familiar with the rules as darkalloy is I probably wouldn't appreciate the full impact of the PC the way darkalloy would be able to until the PC is already in play.

Also (and this was before your time pirateking so you'd have no way of knowing this) I said "Yes" to another player who had an overpowered PC without fully realizing the ramifications - the result was a player who thought she could use hold person to paralyze someone PERMANENTLY .. this turned out not to be the case after all once the rules in question were examined more closely but the player involved (whom I would argue was overly sensitive to begin with) got pissed , made a big deal of it and said she was going to be "inactive" on the RP forums and not do anything for a while, et cetera ... I have a feeling darkalloy is probably trying to protect me from a similar situation developing - again pirateking you'd have no way of knowing this since it's stuff that happened before you joined up with us. Although on the other hand pirateking doesn't strike me as the kind of player who'll throw a tantrum and refuse to RP when the game doesn't go his way to begin with ...

So kudo's to you for checking up with us first re: this character build pirate king .. but regarding what I think is the "mad face" you put up after the "thought you'd be the one to reply to this " comment above to darkalloy ( I think it's a mad face? I could be wrong...) .... please don't be mad at darkalloy, if you need to be angry with someone please be upset with me instead. I totally deserve it for putting darkalloy in this position and creating this situation in the first place ... all I can say is I'll hopefully become increaingly familiar with the rules as I continue to DM to the point where I'm someday as familiar with the rules as other more well versed players are right off the bat ..

Having said all that - I did mention waaayyy back when I was first recruiting characters that I don't mind powergaming as long as you have a good background story to back it up.. basically if you want to come up with a powerful build find but I would need a fairly detailed background write-up explaining why the PC in question has these powers and abilities.. also I'm going to assume what pirateking is proposing is "legal" in that it's allowed in the WOTC books - long as that's the case that's fine but what I'm trying to emphasize here is that players should be focusing on the background and personality write up just as much as creating a powerful PC..

We ALL want our PC's to be powerful so we're going to select the best possible options for them - it's no coincidence that Sehila in solardawn's campaign is a multiclassed rogue/fighter with weapon finesse and two weapon fighting , combine that with the sneak attack and she can potentially kick ass given enough time and advancement in levels .. but I have the background story to go with it too if you read up on her entry explaining why she has these abilities (her dad the rogue taught her , she's kind of anti-establishment to begin with given how badly the elves treated her during her childhood as she grew up with them - I didn't state out loud that this is the reason she's a rogue more sort of implied it .... and the fighter thing can be explained pretty easily , anyone who spends enough time fighting for their lives against various foes will tend to get better with weapons and so forth ) ...I'm not trying to say " I don't think pirateking is going to give me a background/personality write up" - it's more so a general announcement to all players that I need this kind of write up in all situations to begin with, and especially if it's going to be an extremely powerful PC (because said powerful PC will have all sorts of special abilities - those abilities need to be explained). In pirateking's case since he's new to the world of krynn he should expect a lot of back and forth between him and myself as we try to work out why his PC has all these abilities - that isn't a bad thing by any means far as I'm concerned, just be prepared to answer LOTS and lots of e-mails on my part re: the new character's abilities as we work out the rationale for all of them ..

Make sense everyone? If not let me know.

[solardawn]

I find it doesn't make sense at all to call Sehlia powerful!

As for a class combo, it does seem pretty powerful as both seem to try to do the same thing, but most of that can all be achieved through RP points as well. I find I don't really care.

Except for Abjurant Champion, that's my class!

[Andre]

Something else I should mention too as far as my DM'ing style ...

Believe it or not I HAVE read all the rulebooks even if it doesn't seem like it, don't want to make it sound like I'm a lazy DM who doesn't bother to read the books .. however there's so much info in there that I think a lot of it is stuff that you can only become familiar with to the point where it's on the tip of your tongue ready to rattle off at a moment's notice after a long time spent DM'ing and/or being a player ... I probably haven't put in as much time in "rules - crunchy" type of games as other players here might have .. so again hopefully this is a situation that will correct itself in time.. my other drawback is that I'm not the best multitasker .. and I'm guessing we've all DM'ed at one point or another so we probably all know the DM tends to have a lot of stuff going on at the same time - when this happens I can get a bit cloudy on the rules sometimes.

And we've all probably noticed I'm a huge fan of RP'ing ... basically here's my style of DM'ing as far as RP'ing vs crunchy rules ... I tend to heavily favor the RP side of things.. in practice this means I'm more likely to make a quick rules call rather than spending a lot of time mid-game session looking up the rules in order to get the game session moving again ... however given that I don't have a lot of the rules right on the tip of my tongue so to speak I've come to rely on darkalloy as my "living rule book" if you will , over the past year of gaming with him I've found he's accurate at least 90 to 95 percent of the time if not more than that every time I check the rulebooks against what he's said .. so my tendency has been to ask darkalloy for a quick rules judgment, go with what he says and get the FG game session moving again.. I can definitely see how this would upset other players though and for that I apologize.

Having said that - this will more than likely continue to be my style of DM'ing ... I DO realize there are players out there who take the opposite view, who believe the FG game session should be put on hold while the rules governing a particular situation are completely hammered out and I do respect it as an alternate form of DM'ing - it's just not the kind of DM'ing I'm inclined to do and I don't see that changing anytime soon on my part ... I'm not saying it's a bad form of DM'ing at all , it's just not one I'm prone to use only because I tend to favor the RP side of things - which to me means letting the game session flow along as quickly as possible to help replicate the feeling of "realism" so to speak, like you're in the middle of a novel - or as much as I can replicate that anyways in an FG game setting given my personal and the FG program limitations ...

So this is something else I'd like feedback on too - does anyone have a problem with this style of DM'ing? Because , again , I do know there are lots of players out there who take the opposite view and would prefer to slow things down to focus on the rules - and if you as a player fall into this category then the next question would be can you live with me NOT DM'ing in that way?

(For what it's worth if there's player disagreement on a rule feel free to voice that - but I'll probably make a quick decision, post right there on the FG chat log " investigate rule so and so " actually type it into the text - then when I'm reviewing the text logs later on I'll look for what the rulebooks have to say on the dispute in question, post what I found complete with page numbers from the rulebooks and give my ruling - but if someone can find page numbers from a book (or a reference from the WOTC website online) that counters what I dug up they can feel free to post that and obviously I'm going to take a look at that too.. so it's more of a "figure it out later" kind of thing - which again I know can be something that doesn't appeal to all players in RPG games. )

[pirateking]

wow, alot of text

well, sorry if you got the wrong impression. I kinda use ( <.< ) as like shifty eyes or the such kinda like ( _ maybe.

In no way was I mad at Darkalloy, he just has the same kinda thing that I have for D&D theoretics. I just figured he'd be the first to look at it and state his opinion of it.

Also, I thought off-topic was a good place to post something random like this. I actually have no intention of playing it as a character in the campaign...

Sorry if I got you worried there. Had no clue it was going to be taken that way, lol.

[darkalloy]

I personally wasn't sure or not if you were mad thought there might have been a good chance, no offense intended. But my "rule book" status has ruffled some feathers before... Yup pun intended. The a fore mentioned permanent spell was a small can of worms in game kinda like a spell usage misunderstanding and ok well so it can't be used for that spell Gm ruling. I went and posted said feats here on the forum and turned that small can into the worm farm I keep for fishing, fresh giant white fuzzy ball of mold and all.

[pirateking]

nah I guessed you would post something becus i got he feeling darkalloy is the type of person to be interested in this type of thing, I dont see most other players in the campaign caring much about theoretical class combos, feats, skills and what not just for the sake of putting them together and talking about it.

mainly i posted it becus i knew darkalloy would look at it and post a reply to it didnt expect anyone else to really pay much attention to it...

[darkalloy]

As for that build though it practically eliminates the need to take more than one level in fighter for some PrC's or the need to at all in some cases, like arcane archer can now be achieved relatively easily with that build. Sadly I think that is the reason many many DM's go.... "The UA book?..... Oh Hheeellll Nooo!". A lot of the things in there seem OP some aren't some actually make sense in what you loose for what you get. In this case you loose a spell known for each level and a spell slot for each level now while that's not all that great for a caster, the bonus's you get outweigh it completely because now you don't have to worry about being up close. I mean yeah it's a variant but it's just making a warmage with a bit more HP.

Druidic Avenger, now that's one that makes sense. Loose the animal companion and ability to spon cast summons, a minus to wild empathy but gain the ability to rage and move faster. That pretty much balances out, you can't cast while raging unless you have certain feats. I think it's feats anyway.

[pirateking]

but warmage has a huge spell selection, well when it comes to dmg spells.
knocking ur spell selection down by 9 spells is pretty big. and 9 less spells per day.
plus warmage gets other stuff as well- free sudden metamagic feats, and gets to upgrade to medium armor for free, as well as having warmage edge.

[darkalloy]

Yes that is true however the warmage has two casting stats technically one for the casting itself and then warmage edge. Not to mention it's HD is D6 and it only gets to use simple weapons. Where as the variant above could use a great sword and have weapon focus for it from the get go and only has to worry about increasing Int if it wants more skill points.

[Andre]

Apologies to pirateking looks like I was worried about nothing !