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View Full Version : Astral Construct Adaptation



Fizban
2009-02-24, 08:31 AM
[Formerly "My Pokemans, Let Me Show You Them?"]

For those of you who don't know, the above meme is often paired with a pic of an astral construct, and that's what I'm here to talk about...kinda. Well I needed a snappy title anyway.

I love the idea of the astral construct tables, letting you create a custom monster at the drop of a hat, and they're even set up so players can use them in game with the power itself. They beat the heck out of the Animated Object, which scales in power too poorly to even consider, and barely takes the mutable abilities into account. What I'd like even more however, is of course, more options. Natural weapon substitutions, attacks, abilities, Su's and SLA's and so on. No cost swaps like changing 1 slam to 1 bie or 2 slams to 2 claws, and what about 1 bite to 2 weak claws? I'd also like an idea of how one would go about substituting other creature types for them. Undead is probably a fair swap, but for any other type you'd have to arbitrarily pick a con score.

I could probably do them myself, but since I tend to think like a player, I'd prefer it if someone came up with and checked them "on their own", which gives the that slight bit of mental wiggle room where I can say, "hey, I didn't come up with it, but these guys know what they're doing and say it's balanced!"

Urthdigger
2009-02-24, 10:20 AM
Aww... and here I thought it was going to be a thread on buffing animal companions and using them to fight for you, before cramming them into tiny balls.

Fixer
2009-02-24, 01:44 PM
Aww... and here I thought it was going to be a thread on buffing animal companions and using them to fight for you, before cramming them into tiny balls.
Hey, you leave those naked halflings out of this. :P

Fizban
2009-02-26, 02:56 AM
Allright, let's try this again. I'm changing the title and bumping the thread so maybe I'll get something more than a couple pokemon comments.

I'm not actually sure if this should be here or in homebrew, but I'd like to hear from other people about the idea of altering Astral Constructs to give players a balanced by level way of designing their own monsters.

So, what do you guys think? What changes would you make to alter the type of an Astral Construct to something else? How much constitution would you give it? What CR difference would there be, or what would you adjust to keep it the same? What natural weapons/weapon combination substitutions are appropriate? Any ideas for other menu choices? You get the idea.

I figure Undead would substitute straight across just fine (though they'd be short some hp). Con usually goes up with size and HD, so you can't really just pick the amount needed to equal the construct bonus hp, which stops me in my tracks on that part. I figure any single attack could replace a slam (bite/tail/sting/tentacle), or any pair for a pair (2 claws/2 wings/2 tentacles). With the extra attack option you could get three attacks and change them to the usual combos (bite/claw/claw, bite/wing/wing and such), but in general the MMs seem to imply that 1 bite=2 smaller claws, which is patently false since more attacks=better, but makes me want to change 2 slams into bite/claw/claw.