Hmm, I owe an apology to Akalsaris in that case - I had made the catch with the level 15 snapshot, but it was only noted in the level 20 snapshot.
In any case, all three entries were really well put-together and interesting. I still lean toward Surreal as most original build, especially in his use of Geomancer, but SonOfZeal for best use of the ingredient. Without a real consensus, we'll have to call it a tie.
I wonder if we could do a multi-round Iron Chef competition. Get participants, pair them up for head-to-head competitions, and then have them work under real time constraints (24-48 hours to build a character). That's how they do Iron DM over at DnDOG.com, which I enjoy a lot. Would people be interested in that?
Thanks Pfooti, apology accepted
And the multi-round competition sounds interesting, but considering that each time we've done the Iron Chef event here, we've had a dozen players sign up and only 3-4 submit builds within a week. So a head-to-head match might not work simply due to lack of actual builds.
That said, what I'm surprised about is that everyone but me went for some Incarnum! I can see how it fits into those particular builds, but it's still not something that would ever have come to mind with that theme. Any of you want to share what got you thinking in that direction?
Well, I originally was going to go crusader 7/suel 6/transmogrifer 7. But the 8th level ability of transmogrifer is my favorite, so I needed to qualify for suel a level earlier, which meant taking a class with spellcraft and +1 BAB. That limited me to Duskblade, Soulborn, and Hexblade. Since the limited point buy meant I would have no Int score to speak of, I didn't want to take duskblade. Hexblade is nice, but the curse has a very low DC, and I wanted the character to be lawful good based on my own concepts. So that left Soulborn, which is a pretty weak class, but a smite attack is always pretty nice and it got transmogrifer 8 in before epic level.
I can deal with a tie. ^^ And I'll freely admit that Surreal's build was more original. JPM is old-hat to most people and a pretty obvious choice, so if I did it again I might be a bit more creative in how to cap my build. Still, it's obvious because it does the job very well, and I was happy to get a chance to work with it a bit more closely.
A rapid-fire build contest could work, but I think it'd be more fun in that context (for me at least) to only be responsible for the sketch of a build, the central ideas that make it tick, rather than a fully fleshed out character sheet.
Hey, but I won on points from both judges!
But I can deal with a tie too...personally I liked sonofzeal's build as well, mostly because the RKV is quite a fun PrC and I'd love to play one at high levels sometime. I actually didn't know about the ruling with swift action spells, so I learned something new too