FrancisBean
2016-04-04, 03:51 PM
My most recent group plays with some weird house rules. Some are legacy due to old DMs who misunderstood the rules and then stuck with the misunderstanding because everybody was used to it. Some are so that players feel more powerful than in the usual. Some are fairly normal. My problem is that the house rules tend to impact my builds pretty severely.
Here are the biggies:
Voluntarily stepping into a threatened square provokes an AoO. This is a massive change! Among other things, it makes the ubercharger builds very risky. (After the current campaign ends, this house rule finally gets entombed in the home of bad ideas!)
Stats are by a modified die roll matrix which permits starting stats as high as 24(!) (before racial modifiers). This makes many of the Druid's beast shape advantages much less helpful, because your native form may have better stats than the beast form you'd use to get that huge strength.
There's no "flat-footed" round at the beginning of combat, which slightly nerfs sneak attack builds.
Death is at -CON, not -10. Except for the rare low-Con builds, this isn't much of an impact.
Our games very rarely involve combat with creatures in our size range, but when it does, they're usually bosses with way more class levels than we have. Run-of-the-mill encounters are jumbo-sized monsters, which tends to make trip/grapple builds useless.
All of these house rules tend to operate to make aggressive melee builds less powerful. Given those house rules, what sort of melee builds make sense?
The role-play concept I want: He's a crazed killing machine in the wilds who donates most of his earnings to local orphanages and charities when home. He plays with the children in the morning and drinks the blood of his enemies in the afternoon. He drives his party nuts trying to get them to join him in the donations. Mad Max meets Mother Theresa. In a normal game I'd probably go Warblade or Barbarian, but I'm not sure about here. Any ideas?
Here are the biggies:
Voluntarily stepping into a threatened square provokes an AoO. This is a massive change! Among other things, it makes the ubercharger builds very risky. (After the current campaign ends, this house rule finally gets entombed in the home of bad ideas!)
Stats are by a modified die roll matrix which permits starting stats as high as 24(!) (before racial modifiers). This makes many of the Druid's beast shape advantages much less helpful, because your native form may have better stats than the beast form you'd use to get that huge strength.
There's no "flat-footed" round at the beginning of combat, which slightly nerfs sneak attack builds.
Death is at -CON, not -10. Except for the rare low-Con builds, this isn't much of an impact.
Our games very rarely involve combat with creatures in our size range, but when it does, they're usually bosses with way more class levels than we have. Run-of-the-mill encounters are jumbo-sized monsters, which tends to make trip/grapple builds useless.
All of these house rules tend to operate to make aggressive melee builds less powerful. Given those house rules, what sort of melee builds make sense?
The role-play concept I want: He's a crazed killing machine in the wilds who donates most of his earnings to local orphanages and charities when home. He plays with the children in the morning and drinks the blood of his enemies in the afternoon. He drives his party nuts trying to get them to join him in the donations. Mad Max meets Mother Theresa. In a normal game I'd probably go Warblade or Barbarian, but I'm not sure about here. Any ideas?