Truenamer Sweet Spot

[Pope Scarface]

I'm planning a one shot game using only Tome of Magic, Tome of Battle, and Magic of Incarnum, with no magical gear as it is a modern setting (although I might use the PF cyberware stuff).

At what level for a game that stays at that level would a truenamer be most viable, compared to those options, without houserules?

Another factor is that I am considering using gestalt, to allow for more 'getting to play the weird crazy stuff we don't normally use.'

[mabriss lethe]

Aside from the capstone of getting access to Conjunctive Gate at 20, Truenamers have no sweet spot, and basically require some degree of houseruling just to make them function. Without magic items? They're nearly impossible to play. their basic utterances of the evolving mind increase the dc you have to hit at twice the rate that you can increase your skill rolls. So pound for pound, they get worse at their assigned task as they level.

[Troacctid]

You cannot reasonably play a truenamer without magic items.

[Cerefel]

Truenamer's sweet spot without magic items is around level 2 because after that the DCs start becoming impractical, and then impossible

[Ashtagon]

Truenamer RAW basically assumes you will find/build a skill bonus item to your Truenaming skill, with the bonus equal to your class level. Or that your Intelligence increases at twice the rate of your level, or some combination of the two.

Sweet spot? The only winning move is not to take any levels.

[Zaq]

No magic items? Like, at all? Eeeeeeurgh.

And ONLY ToM/ToB/MoI? So we can't dip Marshal (requires Miniatures Handbook) or use the Paragnostic Assembly (requires Complete Champion/may not be appropriate in a "modern setting") or bring in luck feats (requires Complete Scoundrel) or even bring in illumians (requires Races of Destiny)? And of course even item familiars require extra books (Unearthed Arcana), not to mention that they require having at least one single solitary magic item. (Ancestral Relic brings in as many problems as it solves under these rules, and of course, it requires Book of Exalted Deeds.) No magic items also means no easy access to stuff like Guidance of the Avatar, either.

Eeeeeeeuuurrrrrrrghhh.

There's several ways to bootstrap your Truespeak bonus into being something resembling sufficient, but your rules seem hell-bent on shutting off every avenue of optimization available to the poor 'Namer. Something's gotta give, or you're just not going to have fun with the 'Namer at basically any level, even in a one-shot. Either bring in some more sources or add some houserules or allow the 'Namer's player to use an extra handful of books. You might, might get away with it at low levels (2-4ish?) if you allow the Paragnostic Assembly to exist and maybe throw them a couple other bones (allow illumians, allow a masterwork tool, etc.). But even then it's dicey.

[Jormengand]

1, because then you can actually make your truespeak checks without magic items.

You'd probably be better, if you're the one running the game, reducing the truespeak checks. Like, by halving them or something. Then they're somewhat acceptable at most levels.

[Pope Scarface]

So even at low levels they can't hit DCs reliably, and they need a bonus of approximately their class level in order to function? Seems like if I do the PF cyberware as magic items, the truenamer at level 5 could have a +5 skillchip, and be 'viable' then?

[noce]

To me, ToM means basically binder.
So this campaign will be ToB, MoI and binder.

The nice thing is that soulmeld bonuses are often competence, and occupy item slots, so incarnum characters will not be affected as much as other characters would.
ToB classes do not rely on magic items for damage, but surely they do for things like flight and the like, although they can take shape soulmeld, or dip into a MoI class.

In such a setting a swordsage umbral disciple would be nice to play, other than that there's little synergy between those books (other than the DIP-friendliness of all the allowed classes).

[Jormengand]

So even at low levels they can't hit DCs reliably, and they need a bonus of approximately their class level in order to function? Seems like if I do the PF cyberware as magic items, the truenamer at level 5 could have a +5 skillchip, and be 'viable' then?

Well.

At first level, the DC to utter on yourself is 15. Actually, it's 19, but you get a +4 bonus for being you. The DC to utter on anyone else of the same level is 17. This means that if you want to make the check "Reliably" even once per day, you need a +16. This is actually impossible at level 1, as far as I can tell, but you can get a +15 using an INT of 18, being an illumian with the intelligence sigil, taking improved power sigils out of a flaw, getting four skill ranks, grabbing up a masterwork tool and, of course, taking skill focus. Even without the stuff from RoD, you're looking at a +13, which means you only need a 4 to utter the first time each day, though that goes up +2 a day.

The trouble is, as you go up in levels, the DC goes up by 2 each level, and you can only put one skill rank in. Ways to mitigate this usually involve magic items, the Item Familiar feat which requires a magic item, or gluing your lips firmly to the backside of the Paragnostic Assembly, which appears in Complete Champion and gives some paltry truespeak boost in return for all your money.

The Amulet of the Silver Tongue is available with WBL from level 3, and the Greater version from level 6, so your character should be able to keep up with that at least. And then, of course, you'll need some way to keep up with that at even higher levels.

And then, of course, you get into the fact that a truenamer isn't worth playing without either chucking extra stuff on like mortalbane from the book of vile darkness, which adds 2d6 points of damage onto any damaging utterance you like, which doesn't sound like much until you realise that it's available from 1st level, and it can be applied to utterances with 10-round durations from 7th level (assuming you can get your truespeak check up high enough to actually USE your meta-utterance feats, which you can't with these restrictions anyway); or gaming the rules with things like the utterance that is supposed to turn someone invisible but also turns them into nothingness or the one which lets you teleport between any floor and any wall as a free action because they didn't think hard enough about the wording; or having such a high truespeak check that you can use all of your utterances practically at will.

I mean, don't get me wrong, they have some nice utterances. Universal Aptitude, for example, could easily be a first-level spell and people would take it. The Word of Nurturing utterances are almost as good as the kind of cure wounds spell you get at that level, especially when you can extend them with reckless abandon, and there's also a 3rd-level utterance that allows you to deal 10d6 sonic damage without even trying to break it. Then you realise that if you can somehow extend, empower and mortalbane it (which is incidentally possible from level 7 without even having to supplicate yourself to the Paragnostic Assembly, which I've never actually done on any of my characters) that turns into 40d6*1.5 damage. "But Jor!", I hear you cry, "What if they're immune to sonic?" Oh, well, you can do any energy damage you like. So there's that.

But you're never going to get any of that fun without a decent truespeak check, and you're not going to get THAT without more items and more sourcebooks. Truenamers are really fun and good and all, but they need sourcebook support to BE that fun and good.

[Big Fau]

So even at low levels they can't hit DCs reliably, and they need a bonus of approximately their class level in order to function? Seems like if I do the PF cyberware as magic items, the truenamer at level 5 could have a +5 skillchip, and be 'viable' then?

There are two more issues to address here:


A Truenamer has a restriction on using utterances that prevents them from having two instances of the same utterance running, including inverted utterances. Because the Truenamer has only 3 utterances known he cannot use more than 3 utterances per encounter if all three have a duration longer than instantaneous. Simply increasing the Utterances Known doesn't help much in this regard, as there are very few utterances that are actually worth using.
Truenamer utterances quickly lose out to other level-equivalent abilities. The Shadowcaster, from the same book, has more power in a 3rd level Mystery than the Truenamer has in almost every 3rd level Utterance. Which the Truenamer doesn't get access to until 6th level (keep in mind, their utterance access falls behind VERY quickly due to how the progress is modeled).


The DCs at the low levels are mostly reasonable (3rd level DCs are 21-27, and the Truenamer would have Int+7+Skill Focus+MWK tool for an average of 16; able to hit a CR6 target 50% of the time). The Law of Resistance makes it worse the longer the day goes though.

[Red Fel]

The point is that, even if you used PF cyberware-style skill items to replace the Amulet of the Silver Tongue (which you kind of have to, Truenamers need that bonus), you're still dealing with a being that can only use its powers to a finite degree. The Truenamer class is unique among classes, in that its abilities get harder to use as it levels. Providing it with a skill-boosting item is a start, but only a start. And as others mention, many of its abilities are more "Oh, that's nice," than "Oh, that's awesome," without support from other books.

Even if you were willing to throw more bonuses at a Truenamer, that's only addressing part of the problem. A major part, but only part.

[Zaq]

The point is that, even if you used PF cyberware-style skill items to replace the Amulet of the Silver Tongue (which you kind of have to, Truenamers need that bonus), you're still dealing with a being that can only use its powers to a finite degree. The Truenamer class is unique among classes, in that its abilities get harder to use as it levels. Providing it with a skill-boosting item is a start, but only a start. And as others mention, many of its abilities are more "Oh, that's nice," than "Oh, that's awesome," without support from other books.

Even if you were willing to throw more bonuses at a Truenamer, that's only addressing part of the problem. A major part, but only part.

Yeah, this. The wonky DC scaling is just the first of many problems facing the Truenamer. It's the most obvious problem, but it's usually not the end of things. Under an all-books environment with reasonable access to magic items, it's not the biggest problem facing them long-term (the biggest problem is the fact that utterances aren't really that strong in general, and several of the ones that are useful are useful primarily because of poor wording that some GMs may not like), but in the environment you described, we have to address the DC problem before we can discuss the fact that utterances aren't always enough to make a character feel like a strong contributor to the party. (Truenamers are not useless. Trust me on this one. But they are underpowered, and they are pretty frustrating to play if the GM isn't going out of their way to accommodate them. They have a handful of edge cases that let them shine, but they do struggle to stand out in fairly typical circumstances.)

Solve the DC problem first, but don't think for one minute that you're finished there.

[Pope Scarface]

So I've settled on Gestalt, and using basically magic items as cyberware/supertech (purely fluff; just buy WBL from DMG and reflavor it to be cybertech).

So with skill item + Int item as some kind of skill-soft, and getting rid of the Law of Resistance, how would that play out?

I'm leaning towards Level 12 for the one-shot.

[Troacctid]

You'll essentially have a warlock, since abolishing the Law of Resistance gives you unlimited daily uses of all your utterances. Since utterances actually aren't that far off from the power level of warlock invocations, this is actually probably fine, for the most part.

While you're at it, I recommend changing shadowcasters to make mysteries per-encounter rather than per-day. It's a simple change that makes them a lot more palatable. I've playtested it and been very happy with the results.