Rich Burlew revisits his old work

[Prime32]

http://www.giantitp.com/index.html#dvQHKid4TTvKKDRGMOK
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=172910

Rich "The Giant" Burlew is reorganising his site, and moving old articles into forum threads. At the same time, he's including fixes to bring them more up to date. The champion in particular gets a few more class features and a bunch of multiclassing feats, making it a lot more viable.

Comments?



Suggested build:

The Dragon Knight
Loredrake Venerable kobold Champion 1/Sorcerer 19
Feats: Dragonblooded Avatar, Dragonwrought, Extra Hero Form

Put all your avatar's ability score boosts into Cha.

[Agita]

While I like the homebrew in general, some of Rich's notes on the stuff make me facepalm.

[X-Codes]

While I like the homebrew in general, some of Rich's notes on the stuff make me facepalm.

Yeah, I have to agree... he has funny ideas about game balance.

A Champion dip is really good for spellcasters relying on save-or-suck spells.  Let's face it, your base casting stat in Hero Form will be pushing 40, and then your various magic items will bring that up to 50+ easily.  When every spell already has a saving throw of 30 + Spell Level, adding on the other stuff like Vow of Nonviolence + Planar Wizard + Spell Focus [Good] is just silly.

[Bauglir]

Hm... Near as I can tell, it's 1 level for a +4 bonus to your key casting stat for part of the day. Nice, but not absurd. You don't stack arcane spellcaster levels for your avatar's ability scores, so you start having to lose too many CLs for things to get really absurd. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem that unbalanced.

[bkdubs123]

I love his talk of power creep. As if Core doesn't include 75% or more of the most game-breaking classes and effects.

[Prime32]

Hm... Near as I can tell, it's 1 level for a +4 bonus to your key casting stat for part of the day. Nice, but not absurd. You don't stack arcane spellcaster levels for your avatar's ability scores, so you start having to lose too many CLs for things to get really absurd. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem that unbalanced.

Your avatar form has Outsider type, d12HD, good BAB, good Fort/Ref, poor Will. On top of the +4 to your casting stat.

Also, Rich answers some questions here.

[AleksanderTheGreat]

I love his talk of power creep. As if Core doesn't include 75% or more of the most game-breaking classes and effects.

I think it's because he's one of the few people who don't go all out and are enjoying simple games and are PAI (Playing As Intended).

[bkdubs123]

I love his talk of power creep. As if Core doesn't include 75% or more of the most game-breaking classes and effects.

I think it's because he's one of the few people who don't go all out and are enjoying simple games and are PAI (Playing As Intended).

Hooray, baseless assumptions combined with blissful ignorance!

[SorO_Lost]

I like the updates to The Champion.

[AleksanderTheGreat]

I love his talk of power creep. As if Core doesn't include 75% or more of the most game-breaking classes and effects.

I think it's because he's one of the few people who don't go all out and are enjoying simple games and are PAI (Playing As Intended).

Hooray, baseless assumptions combined with blissful ignorance!

Um... You're talking about me or Rich?

[oslecamo]

Loved this set of events:
-Need to make a 20th level transmuter.
-PoA clearly isn't powerfull enough, not to mention all the super self-buffs.
-Proceed to design new batch of transmutation spells, because transmutation totally needs to be able to do even more stuff!
-Present sugested changes to the DM.
-In the Giant's own words: "Fun fact, though: The character for which these spells were designed never actually saw play. The game folded before the first adventure."

Wonder if it had anything to do with wanting to give your 20th level transmuter wizard even more power than normal.

[Bloody Initiate]

I love his talk of power creep. As if Core doesn't include 75% or more of the most game-breaking classes and effects.

One could argue that the power creep to which he is primarily referring is the creep of the really shitty classes into something mildly useful at the end of 3.5's published life. For example you can watch the maturation of gishes through different sources published at different times. It took wizards a really long time to figure out something that would do the trick. Earlier work, including homebrew, was a lot more modest. Only after trying the stuff out did a lot of people figure out that giving anyone but Tier 1s ANYTHING approaching useful was OK from a balance perspective.

[Bauglir]

Hm... Near as I can tell, it's 1 level for a +4 bonus to your key casting stat for part of the day. Nice, but not absurd. You don't stack arcane spellcaster levels for your avatar's ability scores, so you start having to lose too many CLs for things to get really absurd. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem that unbalanced.

Your avatar form has Outsider type, d12HD, good BAB, good Fort/Ref, poor Will. On top of the +4 to your casting stat.

Also, Rich answers some questions here.

Hm... I may have misinterpreted what the feat did, then. I assumed you added the modifiers from your casting class, not added that many hit dice with those attributes. With all that, it's a bit crazy, yeah.

[Benly]

I love his talk of power creep. As if Core doesn't include 75% or more of the most game-breaking classes and effects.

Core is broken, noncore is also broken. Nearly every sourcebook published had something broken-powerful, but nobody cares because core was already broken. Adding more broken stuff onto a pile of broken stuff is still power creep, it's just power creep nobody cares aout.

[AleksanderTheGreat]

If you PAI then nothing is broken (except the new materials).

[X-Codes]

I also assumed that the ability score increases scaled with level, but I guess not.  It says "Champion Class Level" instead of hit die or level like I thought it did.

In that case, it'd still make a good 18th-level feat pick: once you get your 9th-level spells, grab a level of Champion and the appropriate feat for an easy, short-duration godmode 1/day.  You can even DCFS a previous feat to Extra Hero Form and do it another 2/day.

[Prime32]

In that case, it'd still make a good 18th-level feat pick: once you get your 9th-level spells, grab a level of Champion and the appropriate feat for an easy, short-duration godmode 1/day.  You can even DCFS a previous feat to Extra Hero Form and do it another 2/day.

Rich has now edited Extra Hero Form to require 2 uses/day already.

[X-Codes]

In that case, it'd still make a good 18th-level feat pick: once you get your 9th-level spells, grab a level of Champion and the appropriate feat for an easy, short-duration godmode 1/day.  You can even DCFS a previous feat to Extra Hero Form and do it another 2/day.

Rich has now edited Extra Hero Form to require 2 uses/day already.

I was swordsage'd by RICH BURLEW!?  FML    

[bkdubs123]

Um... You're talking about me or Rich?

Talking about you.

If you PAI then nothing is broken (except the new materials).

Define "Playing as Intended." Because if it's anything like I imagine even more stuff is broken in that "mode" than whatever you are assuming we all play here.

[Akalsaris]

I'm very glad that Rich went back and added 20 new feats for the Champion - it was a class that I thought looked like fun, but the lack of an "Extra Hero Shape" feat option that wasn't homebrewed by myself really annoyed me =P

By the way, I think you guys don't give him enough credit for recognizing the flaws with 3.5 between casters and non-casters.  Take this statement, for example:

Totally different scenario; the very premise of the Green Lantern calls for it to be easily passed from one person to the next (or else Hal would never have gotten it in the first place) and for there to be 3600 of them at the same time.

Captain Marvel was chosen by a wizard. A wizard.



In order for the concept of the champion to work, the avatar has to be more powerful than not only the champion, but more powerful than an average warrior-type of the same level. That's what justifies him gaining his power in such small chunks.

For a spellcaster, there's little that I can think to do to make a spellcaster MORE powerful than a standard spellcaster that wouldn't further break them. If you kept the spellcasting half at the same power level as, say, a sorcerer, then there's little reason the player wouldn't just play a regular sorcerer all of the time. If you increased it to the power of a wizard, well, they'd play a wizard instead. And if you increased it beyond the power of a wizard, then you've sailed off into Crazyland.

So, while I could see some sort of more magical variant, I don't think true spellcasting would work. The champion is only balanced precisely because other existing warrior classes are not at the top of the power curve. At best, I think you would have to go with something more reminiscent of the warlock in avatar form (but better) rather than spells.

EDITED to add: Unless you were also nerfing the power of spellcasters in general in your campaign so that they weren't casting greater "I win" spells every day at high levels. Then, a spellcasting version of the champion could work quite well