Feytala wrote:Did I say something wrong ? What breaks the game ? Outsider ? Polymorph ?
Polymorph is a legendarily broken spell, even if it's only limited to humanoids; outsiders tend to have legions of powerful SLAs and SUs given to them on the assumption that they were monsters, not player characters, and allowing an Aasimar character or the like to shapeshift into such things is likely to get degenerate fast. I'm not saying it can never happen, but it will need to be heavily scrutinized and possibly spot-nerfed with less-than-elegant rulings.
As I said, I am very much not used to actually PLAY D&D and I MAY have visited a few D&D-Forum to much in the last days.^^┬░
Yep, that sounds about right. The D&D Optimization Community takes a considerable degree of pride in discovering all manner of cheese which is unlikely to ever fly at the table (though they can always hope to find a DM who doesn't realize the danger he's in and will allow them to get away with crap that's likely to end up giving him a complex).
I am still not thinking I got the difference between a swift, free, move, standard, partial and Full action, but that will unfold, I think...
It's pretty easy to understand. A character gets a Swift, a Move and a Standard on their turn; they can use the Standard for an additional Move if they wish, or they can trade the Move and the Standard for a Full-Round. "Partial action" is actually an obsolete term from 3.0 that 3.5 doesn't seem to use, which is odd because the situation it describes still comes up, and now they explain it long-hand; it just means "a move or a standard, but not both". Free actions are, well, free, although a lot of them in older books have been revised into swifts. There are also Immediate actions; these allow you to act when it's not your turn, but you only get one immediate action in a round, and you lose your swift action for the following turn.
Charging and bullrushing seems the same but is not.
Nope, a charge is just a way to move further than is normally possible and then attack with a bonus. A bullrush does no damage normally, but can be used to shove your opponent off a cliff, into a fire, or past a line of teammattes who all take a whack at him as he goes past. You can also charge someone and then bullrush them instead of attacking for damage.
Then grappling seems to be he bane of all casters, yet I don't know why.
It's extremely difficult to cast any spells at all when grappling. The spell has to meet all of these conditions in order to even be an option:
* Casting time no longer than 1 standard action (this rules out Summon Monster for instance).
* No Somatic components (which the majority of spells have)
* No focus or material component, unless you have it in-hand; if you don't, getting it out of your pouch takes a full-round action.
* Doesn't require "precise and careful action", which may rule out a few other options (the example they give is drawing a circle for Protection from Evil, but that has Somatic components anyway so they should have found a better one to mention).
* And on top of all that, if you find a spell that meets all these conditions, you STILL have to make a Concentration check to get the spell to work.
And theres Attacks of Opportunitys. Everywhere. Whatever and whenever they are used.
They're only mildly difficult to understand. In essence, even though you make 1 attack every 6 seconds as an action, it's assumed that you're constantly shifting around in place and waving a weapon and trying to defend yourself. When someone in reach lets down their guard, you can take a free swing at them. Most characters can do this only once in a round; examples of activities which open the victim up to be AoOed include trying to run over and fight someone else, casting a spell, firing a bow, or trying to grapple you.
Nioca wrote:Hmm... can you send me more information on both? A draconic spellscale might just work excellently, but I would need to have more information if I were to have any hope of statting one up.
What made me think the spellscales were perfect was their described culture, and I can't really summarize all that; if you can't get a copy of Races of the Dragon to read, well, I'll try to do it justice in play, but the extremely short version is that they're highly experimental and experiential ultra-individualists, crave endless variety and high drama, and pretty much worship Magic. They look sort of like elves except for having colorful scales on their skin and a few forehead ridges, and their personality is a lot like that of Elves except with much less patience, and much more expression of emotion in ways that a human would recognize.
Mechanically, spellscales are -2 CON, +2 CHA, have low-light vision, and they can do a "blood-quickening meditation" every day which gives them a skill bonus or temporary use of a feat or something. Their favored class is sorcerer; canonically, they're always born as the child of one or more sorcerers (unless they breed among themselves of course), though I'm open to changing that. That's about it, really; they're not terribly exciting, I just thought the personality seemed to be about right, and they had the right balance of human-ness and non-humanness.
Draconic creature is a template which gives +2 STR, +2 CON, +2 CHA, +1 Natural Armor, claw/claw/bite attacks, and a couple of minor bonuses for LA +1. It can be upgraded to Half-Dragon using a template class, but that probably doesn't interest you. I also made a houserule that Draconics can take the first two levels of a Racial Paragon Class designed for Half-Dragons, not that I expect that you care since it's not a caster class (though it does have a d12 HD and a bonus to your natural armor). Fluff-wise, these are just people who are less than 1/2 dragon but still very measurably affected by their dragon-ness, with scales and claws and a very prolonged maturation period. Unlike with the Half-Dragon template, Draconic doesn't require you to specify what color your dragon ancestor was; you can choose to say that your scales are red and thus you're probably descended from a red dragon, but since you don't have a breath weapon or any immunity to fire, the difference might be only cosmetic, and it might turn out that you're actually Bronze-descended or something.
Let me know if you have any questions I haven't addressed.
spiderwrangler wrote:Ok... since cleric idea doesn't sound like it will work, how would you feel about playing a ranger with a monstrous spider modded out to fit as an animal companion? Converting spells to cures would still let me use my little friend to bind cuts with silk...
Rangers can't do the sponcasting thing unfortunately, otherwise this would sound like a plan.
teach me to skim... I neglected that little 'CANNOT' in the ranger casting description... 
I didn't think that was something I'd remembered existing before... should have trusted my gut. You'd be ok with fairly straightforward ranger with spider companion though? That was my original thought until the Spider domain for cleric was brought to my attention, and since you aren't a fan of that, I'd be willing/interested in reverting to this type of character, which is more the *nature revering spider-friend* type flavor I was trying to bend a cleric to.
