Prestige Class Contest Chat Thread I

[Aniikinis]

I've got a few ideas for various ones, but first some more proposals.

"Blood and Steel"

"Colour Makes the Man"

"What is the Nature of the Soul?"

"Murder, Arson, and Jaywalking"

"Morality, inverted and switched"

"Beam Me Up Scotty"

"Hell hath no fury"

"Stranger in an Antique Land"

"Not![Insert Country here]"

[PairO'Dice Lost]

"Light is not necessarily good. Darkness is not necessarily evil."
[...]
"Fate or free will"

"Brains and brawn"

"The hunter and the hunted"


"Morality, inverted and switched"

Along these lines, perhaps "A Swing of the Pendulum," for classes based around balancing and combining two opposing concepts--Good and Evil, fire and ice, urban and wilderness, mind and body, and so forth.

[Temotei]

Along these lines, perhaps "A Swing of the Pendulum," for classes based around balancing and combining two opposing concepts--Good and Evil, fire and ice, urban and wilderness, mind and body, and so forth.

This gets my vote.

[Silva Stormrage]

Yep! Fixed! Sorry about that.

Also, we should maybe start discussing what the next theme will be. Everyone is of course welcome to make proposals. Proposals from me (some of these are ones we've discussed before as possibilities).

"Light is not necessarily good. Darkness is not necessarily evil."

"Your Power is What?" - Make a prc that involves using something that sounds like a weak or unimpressive ability and make it turn out to be impressive.


These two get my vote. The second one in particular sounds like it would get some incredibly unique entries.

[Lanth Sor]

"A Swing of the Pendulum,"

"Your Power is What?" - Make a prc that involves using something that sounds like a weak or unimpressive ability and make it turn out to be impressive.

my votes

[JoshuaZ]

Previous contest is now closed. Voting results are here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?588989-Voting-Thread-for-Prestige-Class-Contest-Thread-VI-Hybrid-Power) First placegoes to PairO-Dice Lost's Akashic Savant, second place to Silva Stormrage's Pact-Bound Knight, and third place to my own Goetic Collectivist. Most Original was the Goetic Collectivist. Most Likely to see Play was The Kool's True Mystic, and Best Use of Theme is the Akashic Savant.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and thanks to everyone who gave feedback on the classes, and everyone who voted.

The Swing of the Pendulum seems like a popular option, so we'll go with that for the next contest. New contest thread is here. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?590254-Prestige-Class-Contest-Thread-VII-The-Swing-of-the-Pendulum&p=23972736#post23972736)

[Morphic tide]

Got my semi-placeholder posts down, overall idea is "sadomasochistic Elite Egotist/Prestige PsyWar". Trading physical for mental and back. The bit with getting levels of Psychic Warrior manifesting is so that they're not entirely dead levels of Manifesting and you can grab the low-level PsyWar powers key to the Natural Attack focus without actually having Psychic Warrior levels clogging up your Egotist build. Also lets it get you on a tightrope for 9th level powers without decreasing the progression of Psychic Warriors who enter it, and the extra Manifesting ability does give a bit of extra PP to make up for the loss in them, though only towards extremes. Three PP per point of Wisdom modifier isn't getting you all that far, but it does help lighten the blow.

[Gideon Falcon]

Ooh! Nice! Is this the first Elite Manifester, or has anyone made others?

[Morphic tide]

Ooh! Nice! Is this the first Elite Manifester, or has anyone made others?

I don't know of any others, but I felt like taking a hard left turn with Elite Manifesting, so piling up on Augmentations it is! Which conveniently saves me a buttload of templated busywork!

[Gideon Falcon]

Yeah, and it works as a concept, too, to streamline your manifesting list and drastically cut down on PP expenditure as you don't need to pull so many different powers to get the same effects. Heck, if I get enough inspiration and you don't mind, I might end up trying my hand for the Psychokinesis specialist one (I'm a Blaster junkie).

[Morphic tide]

Yeah, and it works as a concept, too, to streamline your manifesting list and drastically cut down on PP expenditure as you don't need to pull so many different powers to get the same effects. Heck, if I get enough inspiration and you don't mind, I might end up trying my hand for the Psychokinesis specialist one (I'm a Blaster junkie).

I'd be perfectly fine with you going ahead and doing that. Honestly, the whole reason I went with Onuxmeh being more of an Elite Psychic Warrior focused on Natural Attack than an Elite Egotist based around Empathic Transfer (to fit the contest theme) is so that multiple Elite Manifesters of a Discipline can exist, as can ones focused around some other non-Discipline theme like Stygian Powers, which are Negative Energy Psionics (and entirely Psychometabolism, oddly enough, despite their extraplanar nature).

I fully admit to totally eyeballing Elite power design. Unyielding Hide includes True Metabolism as an augment to 7th level as a Temp HP refresh crossed with Fortification pulled right out the rear, while Feral Armaments has Metaphysical Claw as its Augment-for-total-PP-spent and expands Duodimentional Claw to a crit multiplier improvement while having that be two separate Augment options. And thanks to this rule, you only get one version of each Elite power:

Same Effect with Differing Results

The same power or spell can sometimes produce varying effects if applied to the same recipient more than once. The last effect in a series trumps the others. None of the previous spells or powers are actually removed or dispelled, but their effects become irrelevant while the final spell or power in the series lasts.

So if you're looking for the best output, you might want to avoid using Feral Armaments as your source of Natural Attacks, as it eats into your Augmentation budget and you could stack that Augmentation onto your already-impressive Claws of the Beast or Bite of the Wolf to either double-down on massive damage dice or have a gargantuan threat range. Of course, the Onuxmeh can dump wildly unreasonable amounts of PP into a single power, and upon realizing the feedback loops that opens up, I removed the re-applying Extend Power clause.

[JoshuaZ]

There aren't many entries for this one so far. Would people object if I bumped the deadline a few days?

[Morphic tide]

There aren't many entries for this one so far. Would people object if I bumped the deadline a few days?

I'd be extremely thankful for the time to get to at least a notable minimum viable product of two Elite Powers per level. Can't focus enough to even reach one per level...

[JoshuaZ]

I'd be extremely thankful for the time to get to at least a notable minimum viable product of two Elite Powers per level. Can't focus enough to even reach one per level...

Ok. Based on this. I'm going to extend the deadline to Monday the 29th.

Also, for my own entry, I'd appreciate some feedback for the Dichotomy Mage. I'll try to give some comments for the other entries which are currently up sometime in the next few days.

[JoshuaZ]

So, I'm going to do some quick comments on the mostly complete entries.

Onuxmeh: Mechanically interesting. I like it much more than the other "elite" PrCs in that it has actual class features, not just modified spells/powers. The pendulum aspect seems to be in this case giving and receiving pain if I'm reading it correctly That's an interesting take. I'm not at all clear why it is called the Onuxmeh, and maybe some explanation there would be nice.

Inspiration by Castigation seems complicated. Can you expand on exactly how it works? Maybe with an explicit example given so people can see how it works? Also, it seems more like an (Ex) or (Su) than a psilike ability.

Balancer of Black and White. Generally interesting as an idea.
"balancer of black and white gains the ability to spontaneously cast heal apells as well as harm spells."

Do you mean inflict and cure spells here? Or do you actually mean Heal and Harm? Some of the mechanical explanations are also a bit short. Also, from a balance standpoint it could probably reasonably have 8/9 spellcasting just skipping first level.

Frostflame Channeler: Josh likes this a lot! My only comment is that if you are going to have feats that connect to this, I'd suggest also having a feat that allows one to pick up another Talent and allows one to take it multiple times. Maybe have as a prerequisite having 5 Frostflame talents already. That could allow someone to extend how useful this class is after they've finished up the five levels.

[Morphic tide]

Onuxmeh: Mechanically interesting. I like it much more than the other "elite" PrCs in that it has actual class features, not just modified spells/powers. The pendulum aspect seems to be in this case giving and receiving pain if I'm reading it correctly That's an interesting take. I'm not at all clear why it is called the Onuxmeh, and maybe some explanation there would be nice.

Inspiration by Castigation seems complicated. Can you expand on exactly how it works? Maybe with an explicit example given so people can see how it works? Also, it seems more like an (Ex) or (Su) than a psilike ability.

The name is sort of an attempt at a deliberately-obscure use of the mismash of Latin and Ancient Greek common to any "sci-fi" power set, which Psionics very much keeps to. "Onux" is Ancient Greek for Claw and Nail, as in "fingernail", while "Meh" is an attempt at transliterating the genitive singular first-person personal pronoun of Latin (the case system actually does mandate all of those be specified, as every one of those qualities has separate forms). The closest English equivalent would be "of mine", if I understand the grammar correctly, for an intended translation of "Claw of Mine/from Me". Ego, meanwhile, is the nominative and vocative first-person personal prounoun in Latin.

Basically, it's a play on Egotist. A really hard to explain play on Egotist that I have no idea if I got right, since I don't know the International Phonetic Alphabet to be sure about any transliteration I do.

As for Inspiration by Castigation not looking like a Psi-Like ability, the reason it's almost all Psi-Like features is because they're mostly intended as Metapsionic functions, in terms of fluff. Though the pseudo-capstone being less little-m magical than what it builds on doesn't make sense, so I'll go ahead and downgrade it. Even though it doesn't really do anything under Anti-Psionics anyways.

Also went ahead and put in a less-breakable version of the duration extension clause on Immortal Impressions (just Extended Power without expending Psionic Focus on Psychometabolism) while spelling out that yes, the character is immortal, in the "doesn't age" sense, and also the usual long-term issues never truly stick. Sure, being a Psychometabolism specialist means they most likely are basically immune to it due to having access to all the condition removal (which I really need to get put in place...), but it's still a useful frill.

[Gideon Falcon]

Did the contest die? I was looking forward to more.

[Silva Stormrage]

For those of you unaware or not following the base class challenge thread the new 3.5 Class Challenge located here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?601879-3-5e-Class-Contest-XXXXIX-Getting-Emotional) is up and due to the lack of response on the current Prestige Class contest and lackluster recent participation in the base class challenge we thought it might be best to merge the two contests.

Thus it is now a simply 3.5 Class Contest and you can submit either a base class or a prestige class and have it be voted on. We are hoping this leads to more participation/discussion on the entries. I figured someone should make a post here informing you guys on it. The current theme is emotions. :smallbiggrin:

[JoshuaZ]

For those of you unaware or not following the base class challenge thread the new 3.5 Class Challenge located here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?601879-3-5e-Class-Contest-XXXXIX-Getting-Emotional) is up and due to the lack of response on the current Prestige Class contest and lackluster recent participation in the base class challenge we thought it might be best to merge the two contests.

Thus it is now a simply 3.5 Class Contest and you can submit either a base class or a prestige class and have it be voted on. We are hoping this leads to more participation/discussion on the entries. I figured someone should make a post here informing you guys on it. The current theme is emotions. :smallbiggrin:

That sounds like an excellent idea. The last contest dying may be partially my fault, because I got very busy with work related things. Um, I don't think anyone put up a voting thread for that one. If I have time, I'll put up a voting thread for it. In the meantime, I'll need to think about what to do for this new joint contest.