The Order of the Stick

Thog, maybe, but not nearly as much as the aforementioned half-ogre.

The ogre was a jab at minmaxers. Thog was a foil to Roy, being a barbarian who only dipped into fighter for some cheap class features because he considers fighters otherwise inferior, vs Roy, whose whole shtick is proving that fighters don't suck.

Now I'm thinking about what an Epic Bard would look like.

Pied Piper? You don't pay him, he Mass Dominate Person's all your kids into the river.

Orpheus? Morpheus?

What about an Epic Bard/Dashing Swordsman?

He rides through town. Nine months later, all of the women in the village give birth to healthy blonde-haired blue-eyed children.

He manages this despite being a green-eyed brunet.

I imagine Epic bards as something similar to Hamel and Raiel from Violinist Of Hameln, at least during the earlier parts of the story when they weren't superpowered fighters themselves.

During one of the first climaxes, they defeat one of the major villains by playing together and turning an army of useless Red Shirts into an army of high-level fighters.

edited 21st Sep '17 1:00:27 AM by Cozzer

Oh, and there's the demon from Once More With Feeling who curses an entire town to express themselves through song & dance.

Getting to that level takes a lot of work. You can't just go through the motions.

edited 21st Sep '17 10:51:09 AM by sgamer82

One step at a time.

I play a bard in my Saturday 5e game, which went off the rails a while ago and wound up with the entire party becoming demigods. Among my powers, I can:

• Sing a song that adds my Cha modifier (of +15) to every roll made by allies who can hear it, including damage rolls.
• Sing a song that instantly paralyzes or kills any non-divine creature within 30 ft that hears it.
• Add/change/remove up to 2 letters in the name of any spell cast in my vicinity.
• Cast any bard spell I know as a bonus action requiring no material components.

Our party fought a terrasque at 6th level +1 divine level. We killed it in 3 rounds without taking a scratch. Now we're 14th level, 3rd levrl divine, and in our last session we killed the goddess of fortune after solving a problem with immortal cockroaches destroying a city by overbreeding.

It's been a strange campaign.

That's a serious Munchkin campaign ya got there. Sounds fun if you like that sort of thing.

It definitely has its pros and cons. The kinds of absurdity we can get up to with a monk with vorpal fists and a thri-kreen who disseminates telepathic bugs to her followers gets pretty hilarious, and sometimes it is nice to just sit back and stomp all over what by any ordinary measure should be an insanely difficult challenge.

On the other hand, I chose to play a bard because I was looking forward to doing all the typical bard-y things. Y'know, smooth-talking the guards, making strategic combat decisions about my support utility, etc., and now I just walk into a room, open my mouth, and my +55 to Persuasion causes everyone with functional ears to take bludgeoning damage as they trip over themselves to obey me.

Hence my appellation in the General D&D Thread for help balancing content for the campaign I'm planning to run, as odds are I'll be next up to GM after we decide to move on from this one, and I'd like to bring us back down to earth. :P

Even without getting into Epic levels, my group was checking out Pathfinder a few months ago, and if I got it right level 20 bards get a daily save-or-die they can hide in a song.

Wait, what? How does that even work?

Like, someone casts Fireball, and you can change it to Firewall (producing a wall of fire instead of a ball of fire), or Fireballs (producing multiple balls of fire), or Ireball (producing a radius-based effect that makes people incredibly angry), or Iceball (a giant sphere of ice), or Firebat (summons a giant flaming demonic bat)?

That is ... bizarre and hilarious.

That does sound like an amazing superpower that would be a lot of fun to work with in a game.

^^ Yes.

I once turned "Blade Ward" into "Blade Word." For a while thereafter, every time someone in the party spoke, they shot a 1d4 dagger blade out of their mouth for every word they said. And Talking Is a Free Action.

I once drove a normal man insane by turning "Detect Thoughts" into "Defect Thoughts." By the same token, since Counterspell isn't on the bard spell list, I often employ "Defect Magic."

One time I had that ability temporarily buffed to 3 letters. I used it to add "All" to the middle of "Cure Wounds."

Some others I have in mind but haven't gotten around to employing yet include but are not limited to: "Vicious Monkery," "Mage Band," "Tasha's Hideous Slaughter," "Blunderwave," "Cloud of Naggers," "Clown of Madness," "Old Person," "Sea Invisibility," "Sibilence," "Zone of Teeth," "Dispel Tragic," "Bear," "Glyph of Swording," "Leomund's Tiny Butt," "Major Mage," "Implant Growth," "Squeak With Dead," "Dimension Floor," "Greater Divisibility," "Hallucinatory Terrapin," "Teleportation Cycle," and "True Seething."

Your GM must be either a lot of fun or very exasperated.

I'm curious to see how some of those will work out.

I think I saw that idea in a thread somewhere once.

I'm especially looking forward to hearing how cloud of naggers goes.

Your GM must be either a lot of fun or very exasperated.

A large part of the reason we're in the position we're in now is because his philosophy when it comes to being DM is that players will always go off the tracks, so why bother laying any in the first place? He's been ad libbing the entire campaign from the start.

As fun as this talk is, it might be better suited for the general D&D topic over in the Tabletop Games section of the forums.

Fair enough. So in the interest of something fun that's a bit more on-topic, since doing a build of what Nale would look like as a 5e character a little while ago, I've been kicking around the idea of doing the rest of the cast. Obviously none of them would be as complicated as Nale, but it should still be amusing to see how everyone translates from one edition to another.

So let's start with our boy Roy. Going by the GITP Class and Level Geekery Thread, Roy is a level 14 human Fighter with a bunch of feats for different special attacks. He also bears a weapon of legacy, which gives him some limited magical ability.

So the first question is going to be which Fighter archetype he'll be. Going by the above, the Battle Master seems like the obvious choice, being the specialization that grants special attacks akin to the combat feats from 3.5, but it is somewhat tempting to say Eldritch Knight. The EK would play very well with Roy's solid Int score, and would give him the magic of his Weapon of Legacy without violating his idiom of being a single-classed fighter... but Roy seems pretty adamant about finding ways to use his Int score without resorting to straight up becoming a caster. Besides, the magic comes from the sword, not from him, where the EK is the opposite. So we'll go with the Battle Master, and keep his sword what it is in the story: a homebrewed artifact weapon.

From here on, the conversion is pretty straight forward. Being a single-classed fighter, Roy doesn't have a lot of tricks that will require getting exceptionally fancy for, so it'll mostly be a matter of translating his skill ranks and combat feats.

Roy has Cleave, Combat Expertise, Great Cleave, Improved Disarm, Improved Grapple, Improved Sunder, Improved Unarmed Strike, Power Attack, the Spellsplinter Maneuver, Weapon Focus, and Weapon Specialization.

Right off the bat we can cover Cleave/Great Cleave with the Sweeping Attack maneuver, and Improved Disarm with the Disarming Attack maneuver. Roy has 5 maneuvers as a 14th level Battle Master, so let's pick up Commander's Strike and Distracting Strike, which fit his role as the Order's leader and strategist, and Goading Attack, which helps him fulfill his role as meatshield by keeping enemies focused on him.

For the others, we'll be looking at feats. Grappler will cover Improve Grapple, and Great Weapon Master works toward both Cleave and Power Attack. It's also the closest we're going to get to Weapon Focus and Specialization, un/fortunately. Mage Slayer isn't a perfect analogue for the Spellsplinter Maneuver, but it's the closest we're going to get without homebrewing, and Tavern Brawler will give Roy that higher unarmed attack die, as well as proficiency with improvised weapons and improving his grappling ability. Roy's also likely to pick up the Heavy Armor Master feat, which reduces any non-magical weapon damage his takes in heavy armor by 3, and Charger, which is analogous to Bull's Rush. Altogether, that's 6 feats total. As a human, Roy gets one feat of his choice at creation, and as a 14th level fighter, he's had 5 ability score increases that he can trade in for feats, so that pans out assuming he hasn't needed to use any of those ability score increases to actually, y'know, increase his ability scores.

That covers combat feats, so now let's look at Roy's skill ranks. Or rather, let's look a them after I get home from work, because I'm going to be late if I don't get moving here. :P

Durkon: fluffwise I'd say he's a Life Cleric: he seems to do a lot more healbotting than lightning-blasting or fighting. But by RAW clerics of Thor have to pick between Tempest and War, and of the two Durkon seems to play more like a War cleric.
Race: Hill dwarf (Wis focus), tool proficiency in brewers' supplies.
Background: Acolyte
Feats: War Caster, Shield Master, Durable (fluff more than anything), couple of Wis boosts.

...is there anything else to say? That was a boringly straightforward one to pick. I'll do Miko next.

Oh, didn't realize that wasn't on the Cleric list. OK, Tempest it is; he doesn't play his class very well, but I suppose that's par for the course in this party

edited 22nd Sep '17 10:43:40 AM by johnnye

For him to have access to lightning-based spells like Thor's Lightning (which seems to be analogous to either Lightning Bolt or occasionally Call Lightning), though, he would need to be a Tempest cleric.