Question about balance

[keen320]

My friends and I, who are fairly new to tabletop RPGs, are going to play our first high-level campaign soon, at level 17. It's worth mentioning that our DM has never run such a game before, being as new to it as we are at playing.

I was wondering about the balance of a fellow player. At first I just thought it was somewhat OP, but now that I saw stuff about the tier system, I'm not so sure and wonder if he can do this without being OP.

We're playing 3.P. My friend is playing a monk, and convinced the DM to let him enchant his warforged monk with elemental damage effects, to stack with uses of elemental fist. Then he found a spell to make a magic item from a 3.5 book (don't remember which one) that says you can increase the size category of a weapon for a time, possibly by several steps. He found out that if applied to his monk's fists, it could allow him to do 12d8 damage per punch by making them do damage as if colossal. It was also, by RAW, alarmingly cheap. He also got the Blood Crow Strike ability to let him attack at range with a full attack.

I'm basically wondering if this is balanced. He thinks it is, since the rest of the party will be one unknown, one person who will almost certainly be an arcane caster, and me, who is a psion.

He thinks my psion is more OP since he can do stuff like use True Creation, in conjunction with the Mind over Body feat, to make 30k gp per day, in addition to the other stuff psion's can do. This means that the DM is letting me have the larger stated magic item budget, 300k gp (He's generally pretty uncomfortable with us getting magic items). Optimization wise, I'm pretty sure I haven't done too much, since I just looked up the "Virtually no-nonsense guide to psions" the other day and just use it to tell me which powers and feats are better. I haven't really tried to do any of the more crazy things optimized casters can apparently do, like boost my AC to 50.


So, is this actually something that would be a problem? For either of us? Should one or both of us tone it down, try to up our power levels further, or should one of us break out the cheese?


On another note, is there any specific hints anyone could give or point us to for helping our DM with his first high-level?

[nedz]

Whilst its impossible to say whether a party is balanced just by looking at one character I doubt 12d8 (average 54) per hit is too much to worry about at level 17.
Most people on this board would be very impressed if the Monk ended up as cheesy-broken.:smalltongue:

The Psion will likely be much more OP, however
Player Ability > Build > Class

[ericgrau]

Since it's your first time I think all of you, monk included, should watch the optimization. Power levels are going to vary wildly and the DM is going to have a hard time. Monks only have it bad in very high optimization when the rocket tag requires multiple ways to smash the world and not get smashed. Rocket tag shouldn't be your standard for balance. What's actually OP is relative to your group, so you know better than what you read from others.

That said I don't think 12d8 is incredibly high at level 17, it's only about 50 damage before adding strength. He could pick up a magic monk weapon and do 27. And he'd hit more often too, and if he was another class he'd have more bonuses to hit and damage. All-in-all he's only ~5-10 damage above a core fighter. If everyone else is optimizing a little (but not going overboard) then I don't think he'll cause any trouble as-is. If no one is optimizing much then he can tone it down just slightly.

Monks benefit tremendously from buffs (and are in more pain without them). Suggest that all these casters buff-stack him up to high heaven. Besides that use control spells/powers to divide & weaken then enemy so he can pick them off more easily. Playing as a team you can worry even less about someone outshining someone else since everyone is working together, and this tends to be the most effective strategy too.