What is the best art in 3.x

[walfulninja]

Inspired by the worst art in 3.x thread. Let's see the best of the best!

[atemu1234]

I personally like most of the art from Pathfinder. It seems to have had more requirements in the job description than 'can hold a crayon'.

[Invader]

I'm fond of a lot of art in the Eberron books.

[The Viscount]

Some of my favorites are
Pious Templar
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/47/1f/4e/471f4e4733ca86d1c942dcd3dd3a3e12.jpg

Thayan Knight
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/1/12/Thayan_Knight_by_Wayne_Reynolds.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140608122933

and Tempest
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a263/lemuelrocksalot/classes/COAD/Tempest.png

These are among my favorites precisely for what they have in common. They are all warrior women who are reasonably armored in a way that makes you believe they would survive a fight. Even the Tempest, who is most lightly armored, has a chain shirt for ease of motion, not to show off anything.

[Snowbluff]

Matt Reynolds? HHAhHAHAHA

The answer is Rat Mage.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51088M963TL.jpg

Sorry, but there is nothing reasonable about warrior women dress reasonably. You can't cast Arcane spells in armor. Full plate is a pretty good indication of who would die first.

[Eloel]

Sorry, but there is nothing reasonable about warrior women dress reasonably. You can't cast Arcane spells in armor. Full plate is a pretty good indication of who would die first.

Most divine casters are still pretty badass in full-plate.
Also, an arcane caster would rather dominate the enemy full-plate chick than kill her - increasing her longevity.

On topic:
I like the Factotum's art. Proportional, using a circumstance-bonus knowledge item.

[Snowbluff]

Most divine casters are still pretty badass in full-plate.
Also, an arcane caster would rather dominate the enemy full-plate chick than kill her - increasing her longevity.

No, most divine casters can caster magic vestment. Dastana + Chain Shirt + Buckler are usually the best way to take advantage of that. IF they are wearing plate, it's either bone plate or Luminous Armor, based on their alignment or preferences.

As a high level enchanter, it's usually better to dominate people who could pose a threat to you. :smalltongue:

[Eloel]

No, most divine casters can caster magic vestment. Dastana + Chain Shirt + Buckler are usually the best way to take advantage of that. IF they are wearing plate, it's either bone plate or Luminous Armor, based on their alignment or preferences.

As a high level enchanter, it's usually better to dominate people who could pose a threat to you. :smalltongue:

A divine caster that can reliably have magic vestment up all day on 3 items and not care about the lost 3rd level spells is already damn high level to not care about armor :smallbiggrin:

As a high level enchanter, you'd know damn well that you focused on the wrong school and anyone who could pose a threat has mind blank up. As a low level enchanter, you don't have enough longevity to risk a high-will enemy passing your DC.

[Snowbluff]

A divine caster that can reliably have magic vestment up all day on 3 items and not care about the lost 3rd level spells is already damn high level to not care about armor :smallbiggrin: It pays for itself really quickly if you buy a 3rd level pearl of power. Not that your argument disproves my statement.



As a high level enchanter, you'd know damn well that you focused on the wrong school and anyone who could pose a threat has mind blank up. As a low level enchanter, you don't have enough longevity to risk a high-will enemy passing your DC.
The first rule of Enchanting is Dispel Magic. :smallwink:

Those kind of people wouldn't be vulnerable to full plate, anyway.

[PraxisVetli]

That pic in the Drac of the blue vs a bunch of wraiths. Sooooooo sick.

[Vhaidara]

I love most of the art on the PFSRD. Magus, in particular, has an awesome looking sword design that I totally stole for a character

[Snowbluff]

I love most of the art on the PFSRD. Magus, in particular, has an awesome looking sword design that I totally stole for a character

Yeah, the artist who does those is good. So much better than the last one. :smalltongue:

[(Un)Inspired]

Sorry, but there is nothing reasonable about warrior women dress reasonably. You can't cast Arcane spells in armor. Full plate is a pretty good indication of who would die first.

Snowbluff, your avatar is a warrior woman in full armor.

[Eloel]

Snowbluff, your avatar is a warrior woman in full armor.

I'd say Favored Soul. Not THAT bad.

[Amphetryon]

Some of my favorites are
Pious Templar
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/47/1f/4e/471f4e4733ca86d1c942dcd3dd3a3e12.jpg

Thayan Knight
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/1/12/Thayan_Knight_by_Wayne_Reynolds.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140608122933

and Tempest
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a263/lemuelrocksalot/classes/COAD/Tempest.png

These are among my favorites precisely for what they have in common. They are all warrior women who are reasonably armored in a way that makes you believe they would survive a fight. Even the Tempest, who is most lightly armored, has a chain shirt for ease of motion, not to show off anything.

Two of those suffer from the spiky shoulders problem which got at least one artist lambasted in the 'worst art' thread. Fascinating how a design decision considered horribly ill-conceived by some is lauded for being reasonable by another.

[Snowbluff]

Snowbluff, your avatar is a warrior woman in full armor.
Her story has her fight an arcane caster far beyond her power, lose, and then die to a creature of some description.

Not that it's full armor. (http://ekmars.deviantart.com/art/Mittens-again-277267301) It's mostly chainmail with some plates covering the upper torso and legs.

[The Viscount]

Matt Reynolds? HHAhHAHAHA

The answer is Rat Mage.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51088M963TL.jpg

Sorry, but there is nothing reasonable about warrior women dress reasonably. You can't cast Arcane spells in armor. Full plate is a pretty good indication of who would die first.

I never said that Wayne Reynolds was perfect, just that I liked two pieces that he happened to have done. Matt Cavotta, the man who did the Rat Mage, didn't do any of the pieces I presented, so I'm not sure why you brought it up.

As for the subject of armor, none of the Prcs the art is for are casting ones, so they weren't really going to be casting anything anyway. I wasn't debating caster supremacy when I said I liked seeing women in protective armor, I was saying I prefer women characters who are actually armored as opposed to wearing something like the Dervish's outfit of a bra and some bracers. They're all vulnerable to spells, but one of them is more vulnerable to a knife in the gut.

As for the shoulder spike problems, I'm not going to pretend like the Thayan Knight isn't in severe danger of cutting her face off. Some of the details are certainly not perfect, but I like that they aimed for making the character look formidable or powerful instead of sexually appealing.

Since I'm already catching flak for my choices, I'm going to go ahead and be controversial and admit that I like the design of the image for Master of the Unseen Hand. While the horrific image of his legs in red netting like Christmas hams will forever be burned into my memory, the guy in the background flung skyward so hard he left his boots behind is really funny, and I appreciate that they went with quirky design for a quirky class, instead of just another caster wearing robes and making hand symbols while blue things glow.
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b349/zaxter1337/Dungeons%20and%20Dragons/UnseenHand.jpg

I really love the art for Alienist. It has a great creepy vibe that fits the class well and gives you a good idea of the fundamental wrongness of Pseudonatural creatures.
http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111126081110/rpg/ru/images/c/c6/Aliensit_-_Complete_Arcana.jpg

[Snowbluff]

I wasn't debating caster supremacy when I said I liked seeing women in protective armor, I was saying I prefer women characters who are actually armored as opposed to wearing something like the Dervish's outfit of a bra and some bracers. They're all vulnerable to spells, but one of them is more vulnerable to a knife in the gut.

The problem is that we know that this is patently untrue in DnD. Armor is generally balanced around AC and Max Dex. That dervish is wearing a good amount of armor (likely bracers of armor, but the sample character has mithril breastplate. What?), considering how high her dex must be to represent a Dervish. The class suggests that she's probably using weapon finesse, as her scimitar is a light weapon. The class also focuses on mobility, so the light/no armor helps by not reducing her movements, not to mention doesn't give a penalty to tumbling.

As you can tell, context is very important when making a judgement call on armor. The dervish isn't necessarily more vulnerable to being stabbed, and is in fact less vulnerable to touch based spells.

[squiggit]

Fascinating how a design decision considered horribly ill-conceived by some is lauded for being reasonable by another.

I've always thought a lot of the complaints about horribly ill conceived design felt a bit silly. I mean there's always some valid points. The worst art thread had some good (as in good examples of bad) stuff in it. But then I see someone complaining about a guy wielding a weapon that's too big for him or having too many spikes and it just kinda makes my eyes roll because, yeah. It seems very nitpicky given the genre.

[The Viscount]

I'm not criticizing the concept of a light armored character being harder to hit due to dexterity, I'm criticizing the artist's decision to represent her light armor as a bra. Look at this. http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Dervish_372.jpg

The Blade Bravo is also based around being highly mobile and dodging around, and the sample one here gets to cover herself with some leather armor.
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/dungeonsdragons/images/f/f0/Blade_Bravo_by_Bradley_Williams.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141228072609

It's not just combat, it's practicality. What about the troll blood that's about to spray all over her skin? What if the Dervish gets cold? What if she's eating soup or a messy sandwich? Why can't she look like she's actually dressed for battle? I didn't mean to make this a soapbox thing, I'm just trying to say I like art in which the women get to wear normal armor like the men.

[Snowbluff]

Dude, my dudes dress in Gnomish Twist Cloth. At a certain point your dex is so high it just stops mattering.
http://i376.photobucket.com/albums/oo203/viorlashasui/Phobos_zpsde30b61a.png

It's not like troll blood is any better when it's soaked into your armored padding layers. At least when you're wearing nothing, you can just rinse it off. Heavier armor is also hard to swim in, and is a dutch oven in warmer climates.

[Anlashok]

I'm just trying to say I like art in which the women get to wear normal armor like the men.
The men who get to be scantily clad barbarians with no one even batting an eye?

[Eloel]

The men who get to be scantily clad barbarians with no one even batting an eye?

Scantily clad barbarian is not wearing much armor, and certainly not mithral chain underwear.

[Seharvepernfan]

Todd Lockwood's core stuff is probably my favorite. He's the reason I even got into D&D (was browsing through books at a gaming store in the mall in 2000, saw his dragons in the MM).

Kalman Andrasofszky's tome of battle stuff was very good.

[Snowbluff]

For reference:

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/70/33/0a/70330a492429c0b786f6fb771afbedda.jpg

Linking the images so people can see would be nice. :smalltongue:

[The Viscount]

Certainly you can rinse yourself off easier than some armor, but if you've got some cuts or scrapes or something other than mundane blood gets on you (especially in D&D where half the monsters have some special poison or ooze or saliva or spores) you've got trouble. And yes armor can cause problems, but you can always take it off if the situation does not call for it (i.e. not battle) but you can't put on the armor you don't have.

I have no problem with the barbarian who isn't wearing much. Bear Warrior is a great example, and so is Fist of the Forest.
https://americangallery.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/fist-of-the-forest.jpg

http://s22.photobucket.com/user/zaxter1337/media/Dungeons%20and%20Dragons/BearWarrior.jpg.html

Neither character is really wearing much, and that's fine, because neither character is really much for armor, and barbarian type character typically don't wear armor. Obviously I'm not entirely unruffled by any scantily clad male character as I mentioned for Master of the Unseen Hand above. Context does have something to do with it.

This is in contrast to something like Eye of Lolth, where the character is supposed to be wearing armor, and this is represented by....whatever this is she's wearing.
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091227201751/dungeons/images/d/d1/Eye_of_Lolth_by_Steve_Ellis.jpg I don't love the pious templar art because she's wearing weird spiky armor with extraneous points. I love the art because she's wearing armor that's clearly armor.

[Eloel]

On topic:
I like the Factotum's art. Proportional, using a circumstance-bonus knowledge item.

Imaging seems like a good idea. Here's the Factotum.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v281/SecretFinder767/Factotum.png

[BilltheCynic]

Some of my favorites are
Pious Templar
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/47/1f/4e/471f4e4733ca86d1c942dcd3dd3a3e12.jpg

Thayan Knight
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/forgottenrealms/images/1/12/Thayan_Knight_by_Wayne_Reynolds.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140608122933

and Tempest
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a263/lemuelrocksalot/classes/COAD/Tempest.png

These are among my favorites precisely for what they have in common. They are all warrior women who are reasonably armored in a way that makes you believe they would survive a fight. Even the Tempest, who is most lightly armored, has a chain shirt for ease of motion, not to show off anything.

Actually, that kind of female armor drives me crazy. Sure it's not as bad as the chainmail bikini but it's still stupid, and not just for those unnecessary shoulder spikes. No, what drives me crazy are the boob socks.

Boob socks are some of the absolute worst things that you could add to a piece of armor. Armor's primary function is to protect your squishy inner bits. If you hit a traditional 'male' breastplate with a sword, the breastplate stops the sword from penetrating AND deflect the sword to the side. The boob socks on the other hand would actively angle a sword strike into the center of your chest, the exact opposite place that you want to sword to hit.

But it's so much worse than that. Another thing that armor is supposed to do is absorb the force of a blow. If you get hit by a mace, it's supposed to spread the force of the hit out to lessen the damage. It's still going to hurt, but it is far preferable than if you did not have armor. Once again the boob socks do the exact opposite. The way the boob socks are designed designed a hit to the center of the chest would put all of the force of the hit on the place right in between the breasts, namely the sternum. The heart is right underneath the sternum. That's right, if you were to get hit in the chest while wearing the boob sock armor, the armor would take all of the energy of that blow and concentrate it directly over your heart. You wouldn't even have time to curse the idiotic smiths who made your armors before your shattered sternum pierced your heart and killed you on the spot.

It is literally safer for a woman to go into battle wearing a bikini than it would be to go in full plate with boob socks. At least the bikini wouldn't restrict your movement or kill you if you ever fell on your chest.

The worst part is that the boob socks are completely unnecessary. Armor is bulky and uncomfortable. As a result people wore a lot of padding underneath the armor. With all of the proper padding a woman could probably wear a man's suit of armor with little problem (so long as the two were of comparable size). It's like the writers were trying to make the women's armor more sensible but were either ignorant of how armor works or couldn't quite get away from the 'feminized' armor.

All right, rant over and back to the topic at hand. I really like this picture, though for the life of me I can't seem to find the source for it:

http://cdn.obsidianportal.com/assets/231202/Aboleth20Prison.jpg

This picture forever changed the way I changed Aboleths from "Stupid looking three-eyed catfish monsters" to "Eldritch horrors that you do NOT want to get on the bad side of."

I'm also partial to this picture of a dragon from the Monster Manual I and the Draconomicon:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR6UeQzzP1oyqZ425xvYAbXJPYHf7Um0 AHvVNFsjJlV2bj-kxw_

Bit of history on that last picture: when I was in 3rd grade we had to do take a picture and draw it using pointillism. Incredibly tedious, but being a third grader I of course wanted to draw something really cool. I stumbled across that picture of a dragon and decided that that was what I was going to do. Took me about twice as long as everyone else, but I was so proud of it. It was years before I found out where the picture was from. If my teacher had known it was from D&D she probably wouldn't have let me use that picture. Heh.

[Seharvepernfan]

I really like this picture, though for the life of me I can't seem to find the source for it:

That is from dungeon magazine, the savage tide campaign. That's a complete version that I've never seen before. I don't know which issue, but I'm fairly sure it's from around the middle of the campaign.

[goto124]

Some people like images of women that don't sexualise said women. The breast cups are there purely to indicate she's an woman, otherwise it's nigh impossible to tell.

And I think male fantasy armor isn't much better if you go into that level of detail?

[Amphetryon]

Aside from the aforementioned issue with intentionally designing the Blade Bravo's armor to deflect blows toward her heart, it appears, from here, designed to invite an opponent to all but immediately end a fight with a slicing blow to either arm by severing an artery. Alternately, an opponent of this Character (a Character whose blade focus reads as designed around dueling) could take advantage of the comically exposed throat. As a third option, a simple Dagger or Dirk thrust upwards between the unnecessarily accentuated leather plates would appear to prove ultimately deadly, if not immediately fatal.

I am aware that none of these are concerns directly reasonable in D&D's default abstracted HP system, but then, neither are concerns about so-called stripper armor.

[Eloel]

Aside from the aforementioned issue with intentionally designing the Blade Bravo's armor to deflect blows toward her heart, it appears, from here, designed to invite an opponent to all but immediately end a fight with a slicing blow to either arm by severing an artery. Alternately, an opponent of this Character (a Character whose blade focus reads as designed around dueling) could take advantage of the comically exposed throat. As a third option, a simple Dagger or Dirk thrust upwards between the unnecessarily accentuated leather plates would appear to prove ultimately deadly, if not immediately fatal.

If you're accurate, strong and quick enough to do either of that to a Blade Bravo, you might as well stab her in the face. The point of the whole "nimble fighter" archetype is that no, you can't do that, not without being vastly better than the enemy. See the whole Oberyn vs Mountain scene from Game of Thrones, which I have heard has received very positive feedback from actual swords experts.

[Elderand]

I'm nominating anything by Michael Cormack who did the covers for Dungeonscape and Elder Evil

[Snowbluff]

I'm nominating anything by Michael Cormack who did the covers for Dungeonscape and Elder Evil

Here you go.

http://www.komarckart.com/cov_19.jpg

[Eloel]

http://www.komarckart.com/cov_19.jpg

As awesome as the picture is, that party is so screwed.

[Snowbluff]

The beholder can't hit the dude and their equipment is working. They have it.

[Eloel]

The beholder can't hit the dude and their equipment is working. They have it.

There are 3 more beholders in the background.

[Snowbluff]

There are 3 more beholders in the background.

If one beholder with AMF cone and touch attacks won't work, 3 more won't.

[sakuuya]

Speaking of screwed parties, I really like this picture from the DMG:

http://archive.wizards.com/dnd/images/dmg35_gallery/DMG35_PG69_WEB.jpg

It does a good job of making the dungeon look big (the fact that it only shows small-sized characters helps). A lot of dungeon art shows one particular monster/hazard/whatever; I like the occasional broader view. I also like to assume that, rather than scouting ahead, Lidda and Gimble are just the only ones to have survived the dungeon so far.

[Hamste]

If one beholder with AMF cone and touch attacks won't work, 3 more won't.

Look at that Beholder's eyes though. The ones not firing appear to have a cloudy look to them and it is missing every shot...I think it might be blind.

[atemu1234]

Look at that Beholder's eyes though. The ones not firing appear to have a cloudy look to them and it is missing every shot...I think it might be blind.

Obviously it's a Beholder Mage.

[Invader]

Uhh, it's called a BREAST plate, not a torso plate...

[The Viscount]

The weirdness might be to indicate the beholder isn't using its central AMF eye, since its rays wouldn't function in the AMF.