Re: Clever Ideas
- From: Jasin Zujovic <jzujovic@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 11:55:12 +0100
In article <1133411940.616912.319940@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...
> I'm prepping a sync soulknife as an NPC opponent for my PCs. (Syncs are
> from Bastion Press' MINIONS; soulknives are from the Expanded Psionics
> Handbook.) And I've come up with what I think is an extremely clever
> little gimmick:
>
> 1. I gave him a mithril shirt of greater shadow, boosting his Hide
> skill to an obscene level.
>
> 2. Then I gave him the Cloak Dance feat from Expanded PsiHB. This feat
> allows you to take a move action in order to gain concealment or a full
> action to gain total concealment until your next turn.
>
> The latter is nice, but I'm happier with the former. After all, if you
> have concealment you can Hide. So here's my stealthy assassin: He
> attacks with his standard action, then he does a little eye-twisting
> dance and (Spot checks)... disappears! And then on the next round you
> see him come spinning out of his dance, strike with surgical precision,
> and then slide away... it's like your eyes just can't follow him.
I absolutely hate to say this, since I love the idea, but I don't think
this is possible (without Rule 0-ing).
You need more than concealment to hide. Just running off into a badly-
lit corner of the room doesn't allow you to hide from the people in the
room who are looking at you. Being under the effect of a blur spell
doesn't allow you to hide.
You could hide from them, though, if you said something like "Hey, look,
the Tarrasque!" and they looked away long enough to miss where you went
(the creating a diversion to hide application of the bluff skill).
But that is a standard action, so it takes time to set up, time you
usually don't have when you're fighting PCs... There is a feat in
Complete Adventurer that makes it a move action, but that still eats up
precious actions.
Not sure if it's possible to pull something like this off without ending
up attacking once per two rounds and using the rest of your actions to
set up your hiding, going by the rules as written...
.... but that wouldn't stop me, not with an idea this nice. :) I say go
for it. Just bear in mind that your players might grumble a bit if
they're stick-to-the-rules types.
I've been considering allowing players to bend the rules like that when
I next run a game, since I've noticed that sometimes someone has a great
idea like this, then notices it doesn't really work due to the
conservative way the rules are phrased, then drops the idea completely,
since the only possible implementation under the rules as written isn't
really worth the bother.
Say it's something like the martial arts masteries from OA, where you
get a little synergy effect if you have a bunch of abilities focused on
the same trick. So if you have Cloak Dance and hide X ranks and perform
(dance) Y ranks and bluff Z (ranks), you can make a diversion to hide as
a free action when you cloak-dance. Or something like that.
> So I'm wondering, what clever little mechanical manipulations have you
> come up with lately? Not just stuff that grants you some huge bonus to
> hit, but the clever, evocative stuff -- the *neat* stuff. The out of
> the box stuff.
Well, I like my bard/blackguard succubus who had Cha to attack, Cha to
saves and Cha to damage. It did mostly mean just huge bonuses to
everything, but I liked how it let me make a succubus melee warrior who
was deadly because she was graceful and terrifying and inspired, not
because she was fast or strong.
A trick that might be pretty obvious, but was heaps of fun for me when I
first noticed it: a 4th-level paladin need never sleep. He gets one 1st-
level spell per day, and lesser restoration (which removes fatigue) is
1st-level. Talk about eternal vigilance...
Another bending-the-rules trick I pulled on my players: I allow rangers
to take organizations as favored enemies ever since I heard of that
variant. By the end of the campaign, the PCs were powerful, world-
famous, and among the main nemeses of the archvillains. So the
archvillains sent a team of rangers with favored enemy (the PCs) +8...
--
Jasin Zujovic
jzujovic@xxxxxxx
.
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