Darth Stabber
2012-04-27, 04:19 AM
So thanks to having a ton of encounters with low or no treasure (animals and such) the party in the game I'm running is seriously behind on WBL. I am setting up a big payoff encounter to get them closer and in the future running more encounters that will drop stuff. I am trying to figure out what to drop for them, but they play significantly differently than I would, so I am having some trouble figuring out what they might need/want. Listed below is each character, their general play style and my thoughts, what I need is help figuring if what I'm giving them is about right, or if am way off, and if so what would be better. As a note they all have the usual stat boosing items for their class at +4 (+appropriate mental stats for the casters, and +dex for the other two who are both using shadow blade and weapon finesse to remove the need for strength), and
Lee (NE human unarmed swordsage 8/shadowsun ninja1/whirling frenzy spirit lion barbarian1)
Lee was the primary damage dealer(until the assassin showed up, now they compete for it), and wierdly also the tank. Since there are now two party without tomb tainted soul (the original three all have it) he's become the primary ooc healer (touch of the shadowsun is cool if you some of each in the party). Since he started off as an unarmed swordsage he hasn't had armor, but thanks to the level in barbarian he gets the proficiency he previously lost to get unarmed damage progression.
Current thought: wight armor (MiC pg23, +1 shadow studded leather, with hide from unded +60ft darkvision 3/day) since they have had many encounters with the univing and the big bad, and several of his minions are of that type.
Apple (CE Tibbet Dread Necromancer 10)
Apple is definately focused on minionmancy, though she has gotten pretty smart lately about debuffs and BC (especially since she has a slaymate [metamagic reducing undead minion]). She's still a healer (but she can only heal the original 3), and a huge chunk of her current wealth is tied up in a bag of holding full of onyx, and equipment for her horde (1 quasit familiar, the aforementioned slaymate, 1 skeletal wolf mount, 1 human zombie (pack mule), 4 wights (no chaining), 1 zombie white dragon, 1 triceratops skeleton, and 1 kiri no oni skeleton (OA creatures of rokugan, basically a giant spider who's limbs are blades, they've hollows it out and now they ride in it like a tank))
Current thought: mace of dark children (MiC pg53, +1 adamantine heavy mace that grants +3 on rebuke attempts and treats your level as 2 higher for determining how many hitdice of undead you can rebuke), since she loves her rebuking and as mentioned before there are a higher than average number of undead in this story arc. Also given her favorite minion is her slaymate (an undead child), the name is awesome too.
Zelm (TN Elan Psion(shaper)5/uncarnate5)
While most of the party is pretty good at BC, Zelm is pretty tightly focused on it (mostly to (over)compensate for lost manifester levels due to PRC, especially with practiced manifester, overchannel and talented). The last of the orignal 3, Zelm started out as the only UMD user (due to houseruling umd and upd to the same skill, ditto with spellcraft/psicraft), and has spent big chunks of his current wealth on wands and/scrolls/ect to gain access to effects the party isn't getting from their classes. He did a very good job at filing in the holes in the party's make up via smart power choices and judicious UMD. With the assassin and sorceress in the mix, he's been freed from a lot of that demand, since the other two cover missing bases fairly well. So now he's looking at blastomancy a bit more to help with the fact that combats still routinely take 6+ rounds to resolve (victory is usually a forgone conclusion early, but they don't deal damage very fast).
Current thought: ??? No idea. He's a bit all over the place due to the concerns of early game, when he dedicated himself to covering gaps, and now I don't know what direction he's going to take, and while I understand psionics pretty well, I really don't know how to equip non-gish psions.
Jane (NE strongheart halfling rogue 5/assassin5)
Jane is using an odd dexbased melee build without TWF (just a +1keen collision rapier). He provides another UMDer (always nice), and provides trap finding (which has come in handy the last couple session, and before she arrived, they were just using astral constructs to do it). She has tried several times to use death attack in combat, to no avail. When not trying to force that square peg into that round hole, she's been working with either Lee or one of the undead minions to get SA off, and it's not really an issue (there are a ton of flanking partners available). The issue is that sneak attack dice HATE her. When she rolls her 6 dice thinking that she is going to be laying some serious smack down on something, she instead gets mostly ones and twos (I don't know what her player did to offend the dice gods, but it's truely a statistical anomaly), which leads directly into my item drop.
Current thought: Bracers of murder (DotU pg98, +2 to death attack save DCs, reroll 1s on sneak attack/sudden strike), the death attack part might only encourage her (I really hope not), but the sneak attack part will be a welcome relief. Also probably going to throw her a greater truedeath crystal pretty soon to make up for the higher than average undead content, and the newbies are even further behind on WBL.
Seraphina (CN elf sorcerer10)
Seraphina's player is very quiet, and sometimes I think not interested in playing so much as just hanging out, and getting to hear an interesting story about 4 horrible people in a fantasy setting (none of the other characters could pass for good if their lives depended on it, even the neutral psion has a very well developed sense of self interest, and would definitely fall into the deep end of the alignment pool were neutral not an option. They're stuck together out of self preservation, and they have high (but mature and not unwelcome) level of party drama, that Seraphina and her player stay out of for the most part). She's new to 3.5, and her previous experience was a small amount of 4e. Her character was created with a lot of help from the other players. I am making a lot of effort not to kibutz too much (I am both an incorrigible optimizer, and bad teacher), so I let the other players do the helping, and threw in solo's BG handbook as a reference. She's got a good mix of spells, but is very trigger happy with lightning bolt (which she now frequently empowers as opposed to using baleful polymorph(her only 5th lvl)).
Current thought: probably a runestaff though I'm not sure of the spells. Probably manifest dragon heritage, wings of cover, and wings of flurry, since she doesn't have any spells outside of core, and those 3 are pretty good (and they fit a theme, which is always nice for custom magic items).
Any help, suggestion or critiques are appreciated.
Lee (NE human unarmed swordsage 8/shadowsun ninja1/whirling frenzy spirit lion barbarian1)
Lee was the primary damage dealer(until the assassin showed up, now they compete for it), and wierdly also the tank. Since there are now two party without tomb tainted soul (the original three all have it) he's become the primary ooc healer (touch of the shadowsun is cool if you some of each in the party). Since he started off as an unarmed swordsage he hasn't had armor, but thanks to the level in barbarian he gets the proficiency he previously lost to get unarmed damage progression.
Current thought: wight armor (MiC pg23, +1 shadow studded leather, with hide from unded +60ft darkvision 3/day) since they have had many encounters with the univing and the big bad, and several of his minions are of that type.
Apple (CE Tibbet Dread Necromancer 10)
Apple is definately focused on minionmancy, though she has gotten pretty smart lately about debuffs and BC (especially since she has a slaymate [metamagic reducing undead minion]). She's still a healer (but she can only heal the original 3), and a huge chunk of her current wealth is tied up in a bag of holding full of onyx, and equipment for her horde (1 quasit familiar, the aforementioned slaymate, 1 skeletal wolf mount, 1 human zombie (pack mule), 4 wights (no chaining), 1 zombie white dragon, 1 triceratops skeleton, and 1 kiri no oni skeleton (OA creatures of rokugan, basically a giant spider who's limbs are blades, they've hollows it out and now they ride in it like a tank))
Current thought: mace of dark children (MiC pg53, +1 adamantine heavy mace that grants +3 on rebuke attempts and treats your level as 2 higher for determining how many hitdice of undead you can rebuke), since she loves her rebuking and as mentioned before there are a higher than average number of undead in this story arc. Also given her favorite minion is her slaymate (an undead child), the name is awesome too.
Zelm (TN Elan Psion(shaper)5/uncarnate5)
While most of the party is pretty good at BC, Zelm is pretty tightly focused on it (mostly to (over)compensate for lost manifester levels due to PRC, especially with practiced manifester, overchannel and talented). The last of the orignal 3, Zelm started out as the only UMD user (due to houseruling umd and upd to the same skill, ditto with spellcraft/psicraft), and has spent big chunks of his current wealth on wands and/scrolls/ect to gain access to effects the party isn't getting from their classes. He did a very good job at filing in the holes in the party's make up via smart power choices and judicious UMD. With the assassin and sorceress in the mix, he's been freed from a lot of that demand, since the other two cover missing bases fairly well. So now he's looking at blastomancy a bit more to help with the fact that combats still routinely take 6+ rounds to resolve (victory is usually a forgone conclusion early, but they don't deal damage very fast).
Current thought: ??? No idea. He's a bit all over the place due to the concerns of early game, when he dedicated himself to covering gaps, and now I don't know what direction he's going to take, and while I understand psionics pretty well, I really don't know how to equip non-gish psions.
Jane (NE strongheart halfling rogue 5/assassin5)
Jane is using an odd dexbased melee build without TWF (just a +1keen collision rapier). He provides another UMDer (always nice), and provides trap finding (which has come in handy the last couple session, and before she arrived, they were just using astral constructs to do it). She has tried several times to use death attack in combat, to no avail. When not trying to force that square peg into that round hole, she's been working with either Lee or one of the undead minions to get SA off, and it's not really an issue (there are a ton of flanking partners available). The issue is that sneak attack dice HATE her. When she rolls her 6 dice thinking that she is going to be laying some serious smack down on something, she instead gets mostly ones and twos (I don't know what her player did to offend the dice gods, but it's truely a statistical anomaly), which leads directly into my item drop.
Current thought: Bracers of murder (DotU pg98, +2 to death attack save DCs, reroll 1s on sneak attack/sudden strike), the death attack part might only encourage her (I really hope not), but the sneak attack part will be a welcome relief. Also probably going to throw her a greater truedeath crystal pretty soon to make up for the higher than average undead content, and the newbies are even further behind on WBL.
Seraphina (CN elf sorcerer10)
Seraphina's player is very quiet, and sometimes I think not interested in playing so much as just hanging out, and getting to hear an interesting story about 4 horrible people in a fantasy setting (none of the other characters could pass for good if their lives depended on it, even the neutral psion has a very well developed sense of self interest, and would definitely fall into the deep end of the alignment pool were neutral not an option. They're stuck together out of self preservation, and they have high (but mature and not unwelcome) level of party drama, that Seraphina and her player stay out of for the most part). She's new to 3.5, and her previous experience was a small amount of 4e. Her character was created with a lot of help from the other players. I am making a lot of effort not to kibutz too much (I am both an incorrigible optimizer, and bad teacher), so I let the other players do the helping, and threw in solo's BG handbook as a reference. She's got a good mix of spells, but is very trigger happy with lightning bolt (which she now frequently empowers as opposed to using baleful polymorph(her only 5th lvl)).
Current thought: probably a runestaff though I'm not sure of the spells. Probably manifest dragon heritage, wings of cover, and wings of flurry, since she doesn't have any spells outside of core, and those 3 are pretty good (and they fit a theme, which is always nice for custom magic items).
Any help, suggestion or critiques are appreciated.