The LA Assignment Thread XII: the LA-bors of Heracles

[Morphic tide]

I considered armor for the dragon, but armoring exotic creatures is difficult and expensive. You're paying way more for any armor you try to get than the fighter is. The humanoid fighter can drop 1,500 on a set of full plate and then consider getting it enchanted with the rest of his cash. The dragon is paying double that, or quadruple if they're large. They wanna dress up in mithril? They better be willing to pay through the nose for just a mundane set.

That's going to be 16,800 GP for a breastplate for a Young Ectoplasmic Dragon. +4 in Enhancement on armor or shields is 16,000 GP. Note that if the Humanoid has a +5 Necklace of Natural Armor, the Dragon can go completely without to save 50,000 GP, spend 16,000 of that to match enhancement, and proceed to still be taking less than half the damage because they still have +8 Natural Armor over the standard Humanoid and have +5 total from Dexterity because they have 34,000 GP left to spend and have a +4 racial bonus no matter how big they get, so assigning a 12 to Dexterity (which would have a non-Dex-bonus humanoid get their +1) means they can get to 20 Dex on 16,000 GP for +4 from their "native" +16, leaving 18,000 GP to spare.

End result of this potential difference in defense spending being -3 Armor, +8 Natural Armor, and +4 Dexterity bonuses to AC, leaving the Dragon at +12 AC ahead of the Humanoid with some leftovers to put towards damage. +12 AC breaks things. It's the difference between 90% accuracy and 30%, between being missed only on 1s and 2s of the first swing and first iteratives needing a natural 20 to hit. To reliably hurt this thing on its normal AC, you have to make the standard humanoid worthless. And the humanoid's got less Touch AC so going after that only screws them harder!

It gets much worse if we compare Swordsages. Because then both are obligatorily in Light armor, reducing the Mithral cost to just 4,000 GP, and the Dragon gets to really flex having wide bonuses by being able to one-up literally everything Discipline Focus is doing with its racial modifiers and Wyrm of War. Though it's very touchy for Insightful Strike, while +12 Strength is a lot, getting 22 Wis is pretty trivial at level 15 (for that critical first Swordsage level), but then Swordsages can also focus Str or Dex for accuracy.

It is, best I can tell, literally entirely on 5th vs. 8th level Maneuvers and damage-focused gear. With all the other advantages, and the infamy of Martial hyper-dipping with ToB and Barbarian levels? Seems a decent enough tradeoff, "the DM has to fundamentally invalidate multiple normal classes of Martial to deal with me" is pretty standard high-tier fare. The reason I'm taking the Astral travel ability as a big enough deal to compare to Scry Or Die is that they can, in contradiction to the normal way it works, "flip" between Astral and Material anywhere in either.

How locations relate with this is up to the DM, because there's Big Points made that they do not perfectly correspond. But for it to be particularly worth mentioning, they have to have some awareness of what's on the other side. Otherwise there'd be a Big Point made about it being a last resort because they're taking a big gamble on what the output location will be. And even with that strange risk, they're not incapable of stealth to scout out the Astral topography as needed to figure out how to get to their destination.

It's slow, but people love to talk about the Artificer shattering everything about the game with days-long preparations for single-purpose tools, just because it's any single-purpose tool (well, more the bundle of varyingly-broad multi-tools, but the point about being ludicrously pacing dependent to remotely pull off the ridiculousness stands). To say nothing of the fifteen minute adventuring day.