Monster Mash VIII: Half-adventurers half-monsters

[Inevitability]

Rankings! Looks like we got some nice even spacing. The scores felt a bit low to me, but looking at the last round I judged, they're not that much worse.

Spoiler: Aly (13.25)

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Originality (2.75)
Half-Fey was probably the best out of the templates and certainly the one that optimizers are most familiar with, but the troll drags this back up a little. 0.25/0.5

Monk 1 for overwhelming attack? Hardly novel. On the other hand, Bereft is so obscure that I confused it with Forsaker for a moment. 0.75/1

Magic in the Blood was my first thought when I tried to optimize for this competition myself; I'm unsurprised to find it here. Boost SLA is predictable along the same lines. Truenaming is rarely seen in competitions like this, and Thunderclap is something I had to look up, but Supernatural Transformation is well-known and your other skills and feats are pretty basic. Fey Spirit is obscure enough for me to say this is about even overall. 0.5/1

You don't really have a sort of concept that I'm all that impressed by. Yes, the hellboy reference is cute, but it's just there because you're a naturalized evil outsider with True Name stuff going on; you don't fight like him, you don't go through a similar arc, it's an empty nod with no substance to it. The build feels like a pile of SLAs stapled to a troll, and little more. 0.25/1

Yeah, that bit in the criteria where I went 'your backstory must be more than listing off all your power sources'? I wrote that before looking at your build: it's just such a common structure to slap into a submission. No points for what's basically an extended justification to have psionics, fey ancestry, troll regeneration, truenaming, and mulhorand descent in one build. 0/0.5

Power (3.25)
Combat happens and you start spamming boosted-DC SLAs, while being rather hard to kill and having solid saves (plus regeneration and energy resistance to cover your weakest one), and even being able to turn invisible and render foes deaf (though that strategy has so many issues that I'm not greatly factoring it into your score). I'd give you full marks here, but let's talk about the elephant in the room: your attempt at Truespeaking.

A CR20 enemy sets a DC of 55 to affect, and your final modifier seems to be... +24. Sure, let's give you that Greater Amulet of the Silver Tongue you want, let's give you a masterwork item, let's give you an item of +6 int and a tome of +4 int... and we're up to +41, which took a meaningful chunk of your WBL and leaves your checks with a 70% chance to do nothing before considering the law of resistance. Truenaming sucks, you knew it sucked, and you went and dedicated two feats and one-fourth of your levels to it anyway: there was an opportunity cost there and you know it. With only 75% of your build meaningfully contributing to combat, I think 0.75/1 is a very poetic score here.

It seems that a really big chunk of your in-combat presence involves mind-affecting abilities, which many enemies are immune to. Casting Glitterdust on those monsters, or Mass Invisibility / Haste on your allies, or deafening foes (which undead and constructs are still immune to) is cute, but not actually an acceptable amount of power at higher levels. Modest save-or-suck effects do not a capable combatant make, and even with 30 strength and overwhelming attack, you having only +7 BAB and no weapons better than a quarterstaff leaves me skeptical about your melee capabilities. 0.5/1

Out of combat you have some social SLAs, by which I mean charm and dominate effects. Your intimidate is very respectable between the ranks, charisma, and size, assuming you also boost it with Fey Spirit (more on that later). However, all of these have the issue where they turn social interaction into an all-or-nothing gamble: either the die roll goes your way and you get what you want, or it doesn't and that NPC hates you now. You become a sort of taxicab at level 20 with 3/day Psionic Teleport, but by the time they hit level 20 a lot of parties might already be inside the final dungeon, and almost certainly picked up some means of transportation earlier. 0.25/1

Your build becomes legally playable at level 14, and your central concept is up and running by then. 0.5/0.5

Those lower-end save-or-sucks I mentioned earlier seem likely to show up at the tall end of the adventuring day. Yes, you have a lot of SLAs, but there will come a point where the Psychic Crushes and Psionic Dominates have run out and you're stuck using mediocre control spells like Hold Monster or Psionic Blast. Still, you have a lot of SLAs, so half points here still. 0.25/0.5

Elegance (4.25)
No multiclass XP penalties. 1/1

Mechanically, I find very little to take issue with. That said, I don't like how you didn't even specify the skill boost obtained from Fey Spirit (I'd assume Intimidate, but you never say that!): I expect a complete build, with all choices explicitly made. (0.75/1)

Alright, you knew this was coming. The interpretation that lesser planetouched can be applied to demon trolls is, save to say, extremely controversial, like so much about that variant. More to the point, lesser planetouched are inherently a variant rule, and can't be used without forcing the DM to make real changes to the game world and its NPCs, so using it warrants an elegance penalty. 0.5/1

Would this work in a party? Probably: you have thumbs, you have all the humanoid body slots, you're Large and can thus get by with minimal squeezing. 1/1

Monstrosity (3)
Do you feel monstrous? Not really; you feel like a psion, or an enchanter, or a very sad truenamer. Spending a full-round action to use Thunderclap is unlikely to be worth it, and where a normal troll can also waltz in and punch stuff I remain sceptical about your melee ability. Perhaps when someone hits you and you regenerate it off, it'll serve as a reminder that you're different from Bob the Telepath. 0.5/1.5

The type change caused by half-fey is usually bad, but in your case it improves on what would otherwise be nine awful humanoid HD. You get flight, which has okay synergy with SLA usage. You're immune to enchantments, which is a nasty school of magic to get hit by, but at the same time Will is your best save already. Half-fey low-light vision is largely eclipsed by 90 ft. darkvision, the ability scores work reasonably well with what your troll chassis provides (constitution penalties will never be fun, but at least you can take them rather well). Lastly, the SLAs are obviously core to your build concept. Overall I'm seeing heavy investment in one feature and acceptable use cases for the rest. 1/1.5

Well, aside from the half-fey type thing I mentioned, your monstrosity lets you easily hit the 30 STR requirement for Thunderclap, which would be tough otherwise, and being Large helps out with intimidation. You also qualify for Bereft with your innate three languages, which is pretty cool to see. Still, being a fey or a troll or a psionic creature is at most incidental throughout most of your build. 0.5/1

Final thoughts: I'm walking away with the feeling that you started optimizing half-fey and did so in a very competent (if obvious) way, and then just kinda... stopped.

You decided to grab half-fey so you could use the MitB combo, saw you had to be planetouched and grabbed the strongest available one (perhaps even looked through the planetouched handbook?), added in that one other SLA template that routinely shows up in optimization discussions, grabbed a few reasonably-known feats that made your main schtick better... and then you used the final six levels to go all in on Thunderclap + Bereft, instead of covering the very real flaws that were holding back your core concept, or working out a cool secondary trick that actually had synergy with your main one. So many of the lost points could've been reclaimed if you'd just put more thought in those last six levels, from originality to monstrosity to power.

Spoiler: Sand Tentacle (10.25)

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Originality (3.5)
Half-Illithid was expected, but half-farspawn was not and neither was voidmind. 0.5/0.5

Spell to Power Erudite shows up from time to time but flayerspawn psychic is rarer, and at any rate I didn't expect this level breakdown. 0.75/1

Mindsight was the obvious thing to pick for a half-illithid, extended reach shows up reasonably often, and the half-illithid + illithid heritage tentacle-spam route is a trick I'm familiar with: I made a build around it about half a year ago. I hate to say it, but I could predict most of your feats from the fact you were building with a half-illithid. Skills are par for the course for a psion. Your powers are your saving grace here: a few of them catch my eye. 0.25/1

A tentacled monstrosity swimming beneath the sand is a compelling image, and your intended tricks show creative and original thought behind them. 1/1

I'm impressed you took the bold step of putting Ambiguously Gay Illithid-Uuvuudaum Intercourse in your backstory, but also unsure why you would do it. At any rate it amounts to little more than a dutiful listing of your various power sources and thus gets zero points. 0/0.5

Power (1.75)
Assume your key trick works for a second, and you get 11-13 tentacle attacks a turn, for free. They have +8 to hit, assuming they all count as primary weapons. That's not just bad, that's dire, that's the kind of to-hit a WotC-made sample fighter would have at level four. Maybe one crits, obviously fails to confirm, hits for 1d4+3, gets to attempt a grapple, and fails, because you also have +8 to grapple. Like, if at level 20 you somehow encounter a wizard who's standing on a sandy field, unprotected, unprepared, who dumped strength, his grapple modifier is still higher than yours. You put a lot of resources into something that just... doesn't work, numbers-wise. And with the tentacles a non-factor, what else is there?

Your manifesting? 10th-level manifesting, at level 20; absolutely horrid. Your various mind blasts? You get the half-illithid and voidmind ones 1/day and the feat-based one thrice per day (except not, see below), and they have the best save DC out of your many abilities. And by 'best' I mean 'around 20': which should be what the wizard is currently hitting with his expendable mid-level spells. Your farspawn SLAs? Maybe, but note most are 1/day and none are all that impressive.

You can deliver a single big hit, after several turns of setting up, at which point you suggest you want your 12 HD psion to grapple the enemy, like getting literally tied down in melee is a good thing for you. Your listed 'alpha strike' strategy puts you immobilized within reach of every other enemy: this kills the caster.

I'm sorry for this extended treatise tearing into everything your build wants to do, but... you decided to use the notoriously powerful StP erudite, made it the centerpiece of your build, and then delivered... this. You gave up half your caster levels to fuel a trick that does not work; that's worth a power penalty. 0/1

Even with 26 constitution, your missing levels, psion HD, lack of good armor, and low Reflex combine to make you pretty frail. Sure, you can dive under the sand to protect yourself; you could also run out of the room, both these plans have the same issue. 0/1

Out of combat, you have a lot of knowledge skills and some SLAs. Charm Monster and Detect Thoughts aren't awful, but they don't make you a face. Your powers known are limited in scope, but you could get more, and I'd give you the points for being an utility caster if it wasn't all so terribly late relative to when you could (should) be getting it. So-so casting and so-so charming make for half a point in total. 0.5/1

Your frailty is much worse at low levels, where you eat a ton of LA at once and haven't gotten the benefits from compounded high constitution yet. Worse, most of your abilities are HD dependent, so all the things that look kinda-okay by level 20 are awful when you need them most. I don't know when this build becomes kind of playable, but it isn't before ECL 10. 0/0.5

Alright, so by level 20 you boast 123 power points a day, which is good enough to manifest a ML10 power four combats long thrice per combat, and perhaps covering additional rounds with a SLA or mind blast or something. Still, that puts such a strain on your resources that I'm going to express mild scepticism that you can really stay at your desired power level towards the end of the day. 0.25/0.5

Elegance (2.5)
No multiclass XP penalties. 1/1

You cannot enter flayerspawn psychic. Illithid Legacy requires Illithid Heritage and another illithid feat, but you only have Illithid Heritage. This means you don't have Psionic Charm without getting a powerstone somehow. Moreover, you need to be able to speak Undercommon to enter Flayerspawn Psychic, and it's not a bonus language for Asherati, so you're missing two skill points in Speak Language to qualify. You fail to qualify for a key PrC: this is a glaring mechanical error that invalidates a large part of your build. 0/1

(The real painful thing is that Expanded Knowledge would've worked to get Psionic Charm and keep the build mostly intact, but you overlooked a prerequisite and picked what seemed to be a slightly better feat)

Furthermore, Voidmind says:

Sentient Tentacle (Ex): A voidmind creature's tentacle attacks of its own accord. The creature can direct it to attack certain targets, but the psionic nature of the tentacle enables it to flex and move in combat without hindering the creature's other combat abilities.

Note the singular here: Sentient Tentacle applies to one tentacle attack, presumably the one granted by voidmind. I really don't see a way to read this differently, unless you're willfully interpreting it wrong. Even then, it meets the definition of 'ambiguous rules' by a wide margin.

We see another issue when it comes to your intended trick of Mindsight-sniping people through the sand.

Some powers have a target or targets. You manifest these powers on creatures or objects, as defined by the power itself. You must be able to see or touch the target, and you must specifically choose that target. However, you do not have to select your target until you finish manifesting the power.

[...]

A line of effect is a straight, unblocked path that indicates what a power can affect. A solid barrier cancels a line of effect, but it is not blocked by fog, darkness, and other factors that limit normal sight. You must have a clear line of effect to any target that you manifest a power on or to any space in which you wish to create an effect.

Now, maybe you can argue that a five foot-layer of sand does not form a 'solid barrier'. Perhaps your DM will even buy that! But it should be clear: there's enough issues of interpretation and DM dependence that I cannot give this build any points for elegance here. 0/1

Unlike some monstrous PCs, you have a humanoid form and can interact with the world normally. However, you heavily rely on the presence of sand on the battlefield, which just isn't something you can assume will be there. You can't create it until level 15, and even afterwards your PP and daily powers are so limited that using an action to set up Wall of Sand each combat hardly fixes the problem. 0.5/1

Monstrosity (2.5)
Here's the thing: over ten tentacle attacks per round should feel very monstrous... but if you're just looking at a handful of dice and saying 'oh, none of those hit this turn', they don't. Your most impactful powers are probably Mind Blast knockoffs (which, to be fair, is an iconic monster ability!) and the occasional successful Psychic Crush or Psionic Plane Shift. I like the mind blasts, but for the most part this is just a weird psion. 0.5/1.5

So on the half-illithid side you get good use out of Telepathy and the stat boosts. Mind Blast and Psionics aren't particularly optimized but should see some use, while Extract and Grapple will amost never work. From half-farspawn you get immunity to poison, DR/magic (which you barely grab the highest tier of), electricity resistance, and acid resistance that Voidmind supersedes. You also get the ability to change shape to make two more tentacle attacks, which I... don't think your build considered, given the number of attacks you say you make? There's some solid defensive stuff here, but your defenses just have so many holes on so many sides that I'm not sure this is enough to fix it. Both these templates give you SR... which scales with HD and thus does nothing for you. They also give tentacle attacks, which you obviously focus on.

See, I can't help but come back to the fact that so much of these templates is just made irrelevant by your own build choices. Your grapple didn't have to be +8, you didn't have to reduce your HD so much, you didn't have to take a better source of protection from acid. You're pretty clearly maxing out your number of tentacles, but you make poor use of them, and everything else those templates grant is kind of left by the wayside or kept around for incidental bonuses at best. In a round about optimizing those templates, that's not a good look! Yes, you (try to) use one feature heavily, you pay some attention to others, but in general I think it's really obvious that the focus of this build was never on half-farspawn, just on a single of its features. 0.5/1.5

Do we do anything with our monster aspects that aren't immediately obvious? I guess the fuse arms trick is neat. 0.5/1

Final thoughts:
I honestly like the ideas behind this build. There's an eagerness to it, a real 'look at this cool thing I can do' energy. As I said, I've built with tentacle spam myself, I admire the guts it takes to double down on that and throw in half-farspawn too. I like the style of optimization where you think out of the box and bypass the raw numbers: the attempt to become untargetable while hitting people with psionics is clearly aiming for that.

But well, the tricks don't work. You oversaw some rules, you didn't cut numbers out of the loop well enough, and it all comes back to bite you. That sucks, I've been there, and I'm sorry it happened.

Spoiler: Strigoel (12.25)

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Originality (3.5)
Half-Celestial? Owlbear? Didn't expect to see those. 0.5/0.5

Monk 3 and paladin 5 are hardly the expected breakpoints for those classes, even if the classes themselves are common dips. 1/1

A VoP build isn't exactly groundbreaking, but Ascetic Knight is basically never used and those devotion and exalted feats are not the most common ones. 0.5/1

The 'mr hugs' thing you were going for came through decently, but grappling isn't the grand mechanical innovation i was hoping for. 0.5/1

Well, at least your backstory didn't include a bit about Strigoel joining a monastry and an order of paladins... 0/0.5

Power (3.25)
You're good at what you choose to do: simple as that. 44 strength, +16 BAB, and Huge size make for a terrifying grappler, and you control a big enough chunk of the battlefield that I'm willing to say that hampers opponents. Combat Reflexes makes you a bit more relevant outside of your turn, speed-boosted flight adds to your mobility, and your saves and HP are dauntingly high. 1/1

Your build has rough matchups aplenty. Incorporeal foes, highly mobile foes, Freedom of Movement, crowds of minions, illusions, battlefield control... There's a few low-level spells like Web or Major Image that mess you up with no saving throw: that's bad! You can very easily end up irrelevant in a given battle. 0/1

When the battle is over, what do you do? You can't scout or trip traps, and Half-Celestial does not give a lot of out-of-combat spells either. You can heal, but you're hardly a substitute for wands or a dedicated healbot; a single Heal spell outperforms your entire LoH + Divine Spirit pool. 1/day you can fix a whole lot of problems by summoning a Leonal, Avoral, or Couatl... for about a hundred seconds. You want to be a face, which has its issues (see elegance), and at any rate I'm not too impressed by your social skills. Being reliably useful in one niche situation would get you half a point here; not even being that earns you a further reduction.0.25/1

From the get-go you're a big flying grappler with ascetism boosts. Sure, that gets points. 0.5/0.5

Your core combat routine does not rely on limited-use abilities. 0.5/0.5

Elegance (2.25) (2.75)
Multiclass XP penalties are an unfortunate reality of this build. Ascetic Knight does not change your favored classes, so the moment you take the fifth paladin level you get an XP penalty that persists for the rest of your build. You also take a penalty during your first paladin level, which you could've avoided by moving monk 3 back a little. Changing your levels to monk 4/paladin 4 would've fixed this, and so would taking a PrC. 0/1

Your skills look wonky to me. Did you not factor the templated intelligence boost in for your first five RHD? Because that's incorrect from a mechanical and flavor perspective both. Also, it didn't cost you points, but please don't factor your assorted bonuses into the skill and save modifiers on your sheet, or at least tell me which ones you are or aren't counting. Synergy bonuses get added to your diplomacy, but Vow of Peace's boost does not? 0.75/1

Is the DM going to take issue with anything here? Well, there's that bit where you are taking class levels and then resume advancing your RHD: I'm pretty sure that's not allowed, but I'm willing to remove this penalty if you can show me a rule backing it up. The RHD thing is legal under contest rules, so no. 0.5/1 1/1

Are there issues with your character likely to pop up during play? Well, yes. "VoPers cannot open doors" is a meme, but if you come across a normal human-sized door what can you do with it? No fine manipulators to open it with, no ability to squeeze through, no hypothetical magic gear to help. Worse, you tell me you want to become a backup face, but you can't actually, y'know, talk. Owlbear mouthparts do not support human speech, and once more you've locked yourself out of fixing that with magic loot. On top of that, your primary skillset really calls for combat, but Vow of Peace restricts your allies in how they approach fights: that's not great! 0/1

Monstrosity (2.75)
Focusing on Huge-sized grappling and natural attacks makes you quite monstrous in a 'hulk smash' kinda way, but grappling and natural weapons are still strats normal PCs can employ; merely having bigger numbers won't get you a full score here. 1/1.5

Half-Celestial gives you Flight, which is absolutely essential to the character. It also fixes your awful RHD skills. Smite Evil kind of benefits from Holy Subdual. As you yourself admit, Immunity to Disease is redundant (for future reference, several substitution levels in Champions of Valor as well as Pelor's Blessing from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft swap out Divine Health, using these would have improved your score). Worse, the DR and energy resistances partially overlap with VoP, making them less impactful than they'd have been on a normal PC. Overcoming DR as if your weapons are magic is useful, but again; VoP does it already. There's a sort of logic to taking two MAD classes to make use of the all-round ability boosts. At-will Daylight requires effort to make work, which I'm not seeing here.

The SLAs are a really mixed bag. Some are so small that I wonder if they're even relevant, others really need some kind of boost to do anything (Holy Word), and others again should be fine.

I feel weird about half-celestial: I guess it's doing something for you with the flight and SLAs alone, but did you really get as much out of it as you could have? I don't think so: at times you even made choices that actively take the spotlight away from it. 0.75/1.5

Is there anything neat you do with the fact that you're a half-celestial owlbear specifically? Any feats that benefit from being nonhumanoid or winged or an outsider? Not really; VoP having a lower opportunity cost is something, but that's not actually a good thing to reward. 0/1

Final thoughts:
When I look at this build I see a fun and memorable concept with real and meaningful dedication to your big idea: I like that! But you're also a VoP monk/paladin with lots of RHD, which is almost deliberate in how it eschews traditional optimization advice. Unfortunately, that optimization advice exists for good reason, and your build has real flaws that it can't really fix. Ultimately, this character feels like a cohort: big, memorable, with obvious support traits, but very simple and unable to contribute to many situations. I could see a cleric taking Leadership so she can fly around on this (perhaps without the Vow of Peace); I'm less sure about playing it as a standalone PC.

Ultimately, the main issue is just that you took the limitations of your concept for granted, rather than trying to find a way to overcome them. A theme throughout the build was that you were a big nonhumanoid itemless bruiser, with exactly the strengths and weaknesses that those words imply. I'd have liked to see a bit more of a focus on mitigating those weaknesses: it would have positively impacted a lot of your score.