I’m too tired to write anything serious (I have the plan for my next trope post about fridges, I’ll tackle it this week) so I thought I’d share my 1st D&D 4e character concept.
(Run!, Chatty wants to tell you about his character)
Okay, I made a Lawful Good Dwarven Cleric.
Str 13, Con 14, Dex 11, Int 10, Wis 18, Cha 14
Combat Gear: Chain Mail, Shield, War Hammer
Powers: Sacred Flame, Lance of Faith, Healing Strike, Cascade of Light.
Feat: See below
Skills: Arcana, Diplomacy, Heal, Religion
I was thinking of playing the Dwarven cliché to the max and make him a worshiper of the ideals of Stubborness (either the Dwarven god of Strength and Stubborness, or the actual philosophical ideal of it).
As I was working on the character concept, I had an idea for the God/philosophy specific Channel Divinity feat:
Inertia of Faith [Divinity] (Placeholder Name)
Prerequisite: Channel Divinity class feature, must worship (stubborness)
Benefit: You can invoke the power of your beliefs to use Inertia of Faith.
Channel Divinity: Inertia of Faith
Backed by your deepest convictions, you repeal your opponent’s attempts to make you budge!
Encounter, Divine,
No Action
Trigger: An enemy attempts to pull, push or slide you
Effect: You may prevent the effect of forced movement.
Special: You must take the Inertia of Faith feat to use this power.
Monster Aside: Can you suggest one or two power that a Priest of Stubborness could have if he was a Monster? Dave The Game suggested canceling a Diplomacy roll (but I’d probably work this as a Skill Challenge obstacle rather than a combat power).
I would probably make a rechargable power where anyone attempting forced movement would get an immediate vs Fort attack (2w) and be pushed 1.
Now I need to work out where he comes from, why he’s adventuring and how he can fit in a party.
He’s not a jerk and he will abide by the rules of the majority but he’ll be grumpy as hell about it if it goes against his wishes (and it always does).
For instance, how did his stubborness get him kicked out of his home-mountain city?
Any ideas or suggestions?
That should be a free action. No such thing as no action.
Actually, for that matter, it should probably be an immediate interrupt, not a free action.
Asmors last blog post..MicroDie
PHB 200: Sehainine’s reversal is a “No action”.
On page 268 of the PHB in the parenthesis at the end of the 1st paragraph: it mentions that some triggered powers aren’t actions at all… I think this one qualifies as such.
It doesn’t interrupt an attack, it’s a replacement effect (to use Magic the Gathering rules Lingo) and it’s a reactive effect … I don’t think it’s strong enough to warrant using the character’s only immediate action of a round.
But free action is good too if only to prevent rhetorical rules discussions. 🙂
Hmm…how ’bout a power that keeps his allies from bailing/dying on him…
The Stubborn Cleric refuses to let his allies rest. With a mighty roar, he sends a warning to the weary, reminding them that there’s work to be done.
Daily/Encounter Power
Immediate Reaction
Burst 5
Trigger: One ally within 5 squares drops to zero or fewer hit points.
Effect: All allies within the burst, including the fallen comrade, regain 1/4 of their maximum hit points.
That should read “All allies within the burst can use a Healing Surge”, which restores 1/4th of HP. It also imitates the cleric Daily Power Mass Cure Light Wounds, which is 10th level. Seems a bit overpowered for a Channel Divinity to me.
I’d recommend looking at the feats Melora’s Tide or Raven Queen’s Blessing for something similar.
Inexorable March
At-Will * Divine, Weapon
Standard Action Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Strength vs. Fort.
Hit: 1[W]+Strength modifier damage, and you gain a +1 power bonus to your AC until the end of your next turn. If you moved at least 2 squares before attacking, you push the target 1 square if it is your size, smaller than you, or one size category larger. You can shift into the space that the target occupied.
Yes, it’s just a mash-up of Priest’s Shield and Tide of Iron.
As for the fluffy bit, maybe your dwarf got lost trying to find his way back home, refused to admit it, and decided to take up adventuring as an excuse.
Kavondes last blog post..Getting Captured: It’s the Pits
I love that one! Consider it stolen!
Stubborn & Restless: No party members may take a short rest while in a party with someone who has this ability, as they simply will not let anyone rest until the objective is completed.
w00t return to 3.x!
Bartoneuss last blog post..4e D&D SRD is up
That’s funny!
Who needs Encounter powers anyway! They’re all lame!
🙂
Shield, eh? Going to have to spend your first feat on that if that’s part of your character concept….
Wha? Shields aren’t a Standard Cleric feature?
Flip, Flip… well I’ll be.
Scratch that, Stubborn is a 2 hand yielding weapon user or is the lantern bearer…
🙂
2 handed weapons are better anyway. Nothing more fearsome than a righteous dwarf bearing down on you with a big warhammer in both hands. 😀
This posts seems to bring out all the smartasses! 🙂
Go wild people! Yan will probably kill my dwarf anyway to exact his vengence of me DMing for the last 8 years.
Cleric are not the walking can of armor anymore 😉
The dwarf gives you acces to the warhammer which is a versatile weapon and as such his a good choice.
Kavonde’s inexorable march is a power and seems over the power level of the channel divinity feats… (which are really narrow in their use).
Your initial suggestion is more in tune with the power level I would expect from these feats…
That being said le met look at my notes… hum… Phil as killed me at least 5 times in his games in the last 8 years… Yep! I can assure you, you’re going down!! 😛
Help, Help! I’m being repressed!
Blast you and your “research!”
I knew I should have actually verified that before I opened my big mouth. 🙂
Asmors last blog post..… and Into the Fire
Hey being a biologist is not just walking around with an Octopus in my hands.
Of course not. Sometimes, it’s a squid.
I mean, really, we covered this!
Sigh… let’s call them Cephalopods and leave it at that…
😀
NEVER!!!!!
Oh it’s going to be like that dear Gadget Minion eh?
Well, I’ll meet you at dusk, with my army of Genetically engineered monsters Insurance Salesmen and IP laywers.
We’re going to settle this, right here, right now…
Then I’ll take care of the mathematicians.
Mwa HA HA HA!
Right here, right now?
I’d rather settle it yesterday.
Now… where’d I put that time machine…
Dude, you should really put NSFW or some other kind of X rated warning label before you start talking about walking around with your “squid” in your hands!
Heathers last blog post..On the road again…
Huh? you think? I mean a Squid is preety tame stuff…
It could be much worse and be a Penis-shaped mushroom or something.
That does remind me that I had a question – I was listening to PA’s podcast and somehow I found myself uncertain about encounter powers. They said something that made me think they meant you could only use one encounter power per encounter. Meaning, you could only choose 1 of your 3 encounter powers to use during that encounter. That doesn’t seem right but I wanted to be certain. Also, Re: Channel Divinity, there are different versions of this power. Can you only use Channel Divinity once per encounter regardless of which version of it you use, or can you use both touch undead and … I don’t know one of the others?
Heathers last blog post..On the road again…
They make pills for that Chatty (tame squids).
Heathers last blog post..On the road again…
@Heather: Is this why this blog is getting popular? Readers teasing me about my Squid? Sigh! It’s the price of fame I guess.
Would now be a bad time to say that I named the Squid “Peter”?
Anyhoo, you can use each and every of your encounter powers once per encounter. However you can use only one Channel Divinity power per encounter.
It’s Magic Item Daily powers that get a bit confusing. No matter how many items you have with dailies each, you can use only one a day, except when you get new uses of daily powers at Milestones (or something like that, I need to check again later)
@Chatty: Re: Squid – hahaha, sorry you walked into it, I merely obliged.
That’s how I understood the powers, so I’m a happy Heather now. I do not think I remembered that about the daily powers on the magic items though – good to know.
Heathers last blog post..On the road again…
I meant what I said, no need to correct…no healing surges are spent, just regaining hitpoints…
And, albeit a bit over-powered for a PC, I was going for the monstrous stubborn cleric power…I could see a villianous sort blasting the PCs from behind a swath of underlings, letting them cut their way through a line or two, only to have them rise again…
Also, I too discovered the daily-power use frequency rule for magic itens the other day…and it struck me as most lame…
In that case, Monsters have healing surges too and the monstrous power you write is great, written either way!
Stolen!
“Kavonde’s inexorable march is a power and seems over the power level of the channel divinity feats… (which are really narrow in their use).” — Yan
Oh, definitely. I was trying to make a power for a monster Priest of Stubborness, which, I figure, can be a little unbalanced.
Kavondes last blog post..Getting Captured: It’s the Pits
@Kavonde: It definitively is on par with a monster power. I’ll try to cobble up a GSL compliant Monster stat card during the weekend.
🙂
Sometimes being a biologist means ripping the oocytes out of a starfish to examine the protein pathways involved in its fertilization. (Don’t worry, they regenerate. And why doesn’t Firefox dictionary recognize “oocyte?”) This is what it means to be dating a marine biologist stuck in a biochem lab…
Anyway, paladins do have access to shields, so could there perhaps be a Stubborn Paladin variant? Actually, paladins might be better in general, since they *have* to match the alignment of their deity (unaligned clerics can worship anyone, and unaligned deities can have clerics of any alignment). What can be more stubborn than that?
And how about one of those “giant attack before hitting 0 HP” ideas for a monstrous one? “If I’m going to go down, so are you!”
Re: Daily Item Limits
I think they instituted daily use limits to keep people from abusing cheap items (which often have the same Daily Powers as more powerful items), and to keep people from relying on items too much in general.
I found the limits easier to wrap my head around if I treated them like Action Points:
1. Using a Daily Item power expends 1 Item Point.
2. Your Item Points total resets to 1 Item Point after each Extended Rest. (2 Item Points if you’re Paragon level, 3 Item Point if you’re Epic.)
3. You gain an additional Item Point after every milestone.
For the why you are adventuring/kicked out, my take would be that you weren’t kicked out, but disagreed with some decision by the leader, and consider yourself to be the only “true” member of your community. THEY all left you!
@Kawa: lol… Nothing like ripping out someone’s oocytes to get their attention. The Feat definitively works for a Paladin and I can envision a whole order of such Paladins of Stubborness… Ultra Conservatives to the core that make Dwarven Kings squirm on their thrones!
@Mike: That’s a good crib sheet… just add “4. You can’t re-use an item’s daily power until you spend an extended rest”
@Nicholas: I like it too… I need to work out the “Lost but won’t admit it” and the “Everyone but me is wrong” in a unified background…
Here’s an idea: He was exiled but refuses to admit it… he also is under an Amnesia Charm but won’t admit not remembering where the Dwarven city is”
Lol…glad to see theft moving the other way…gives me that “pride” feeling I’ve heard so much about…
“And how about one of those ‘giant attack before hitting 0 HP” ideas for a monstrous one? “If I’m going to go down, so are you!'”
Or maybe one of those, “I’M NOT GOING DOWN, MORADINDAMMIT!” sorts…golly, I love 3.5 knights and their Loyal Beyond Death ability…what would be really scary is to convince your players that an NPC is bloodied at 3/4 hp, and have them go absolutely diehard berserk from bloodied down to dead…
I recall now the second character I ever played was the most stubborn paladin there ever was, a human by the name of Oskarr Foehammer…black and white about alignment as expected, but when the DM gave us an encounter to show us humility, that we couldn’t save everyone in the world, Oskarr refused and walked through 5 walls of whirling blades to get to the BBEG…his allies tried to stop him, but I rolled a nat 20 on the opposed grapple check…and Oskarr not dying after the second wall encouraged them to follow…only one of the 3 who came survived the first wall…
Good times…
In 4th the thing that pretty much looks like what you are talking about Mike, is the Ferocious Reaction power of the Iron vanguard Paragon path (fighter class).
Kinda sorta…s’pose whatever it is, it’s death throws…
I wonder if there’s a different power for the making though, one that’s more cleric focused…someone else’d have to come up with it though…I think for fighters all the time…
Perhaps his clan moved for some reason (an ore vein ran out, perhaps?) and he disagreed with the move since “they have lived there for times ageless”…they ended up moving without him, and he’s secretly trying to find them again while not admitting to his mistake.
I think the simplest (and funniest) option is the way to go.
That being Kavonde’s original suggestion
Simple, hilarious, and defines the character personality perfectly.
Infuse Bullheadedness
Divine forces makes all other opponents unimportant
At Will Power
Standard Action
Ranged 5
Attack: +5 vs Will
Hit : Target cannot attack any other target than the last opponent till the end of the target’s round
Miss : Target get +1 will save till end of target’s round
@François: Salut! Bienvenue sur ce blog!
If the power you propose is a PC power, I’d lower its frequency to encounter since it is a rather powerful battlefield control effect.
As a monster effect, I’d put it at encounter + recharge 4,5,6
Very in flavor…
(j’espere qu’on puisse se rencontrer un moment donné ! )
The One Way (or The Yellow Brick Road)
Only one path appears and your boots are made for walking
Encounter Power (monster Encounter Power, recharge 6)
Immediate Interrupt Action
Ranged 5
Attack: +3 vs Will
Trigger : Target has taken a move action
Effect : Target must take another full move action as soon as a move action is possible. The Target will continue on the same path for the full move action as the last move action. Target will have a saving throw if going into dangerous terrain.
Miss : Target can take a free shift action.