The Noctuary (D&D 3.5e, Level 20+ Adventure)

[chaincomplex]

I'll get a table of characters up Later^TM today. And set a deadline of, I think, May 9. Let me know if that's too close or far, I don't remember how speedy recruitment here goes.

It's good to have a game where someone is allowing it, but is also aware of just how ridiculous it can get if players are left to go whole hog. I feel like every time I go to build an artificer, I ask at every step of the path if a particular way of making items cheaper is fine, and the DM always says yes cuz in their head they're thinking it can't ever get as good as nigh-epic casters, and then the end product has effectively like 10 times as much money as it's supposed to and is basically invincible melee bruiser and suddenly it's a problem.

The artificer can generally tune their power to fit a campaign, plus while it's possible for an artificer to just become a better melee, skill monkey, and sometimes caster than their teammates, all at the same time even, this is just an OOC issue common to all tier 1 casters. Most such players have the sense that the best way to use tier 1s is to use their abilities in a way that benefits the party overall.

So generically I'm not too bothered with cost reduction tricks since the benefits should distribute among the party in the end, providing the player in question is being conscientious. Of course, the industrial-scale distilled joy farm is off the table, and with regard to demiplane traits re: genesis, I might cap it at something like Dal Quor's 10x. Is there a published plane with a faster time flow?

Anyways, speaking of artificer, it occurs to me the class has abilities with action points built in. Do you have a preferred way of handling this? No APs for this adventure.

If you're wondering about time, XP, or wealth:

1. Around important events, time will progress at the usual D&D adventure pace, which is slow. But otherwise I'll either be asking "what are you doing today" and have things progress on the scale of days, or break days up into 4 hour pieces, etc. This is a pointcrawl, so the passage of time should be a running theme.
2. We'll have a more PF-like XP reward system for combat and out-of-combat feats, plus I'm generally scaling XP and removing relative level cutoffs. I haven't decided yet how much I'm scaling, but I'm aware how slow PbP can go, I don't want the game to get bogged down at the 21st level XP grind. This is a pointcrawl, so encounter balance isn't as much of a concern.
3. Same with wealth. As a pointcrawl, NPCs and encounters will have treasuries befitting their role, rather than follow the monster drop table to the coin. If you kill a level 13 king and rob his treasury, you're going to get a lot more than the drop table for the appropriate CR encounter. As before, I don't want PCs to get bogged down with the PbP pace.

If DM agrees that infusions counts for PrCs requiring Arcane Caster Level, I could dip Maester for x0.5 time cost.

I don't believe they do. As I recall, infusions are explicitly neither arcane nor divine. There are other tricks to get arcane caster levels, of course.

Odd. Did ToM get an errata then? Not contesting the ruling but it was mention on page 53 under "Adaption" in the original version. Just curious.

Ah, no, actually I just wasn't looking carefully enough. It's a one-sentence thing but it's stated. The general spellcaster and psionics variants are OK with me.

On the Southern Magician trick, I am not that familiar with this. So would that mean since qualifying for the PRC, would the caster level advances apply to the base class then used to enter? Or is the caster level advances only applicable to the spell that was changed from its type (the spell used for the "Once per day per two spellcaster levels...").

The CL advances per the generous interpretation. A divine caster is not an arcane spellcasting class of course, but with Southern Magician they can absolutely cast arcane spells and are still a class, so satisfies the requirement of being an arcane spellcasting class.

This interpretation is of course subject to rebuttal, e.g. "arcane spellcasting class refers to features innate to the class and not feat-enabled abilities". But, you know, this line of reasoning is not specifically printed anywhere AFAIK, and for builds especially I want to sit on the permissive side of RAW.

Closest there is to collaborative is there's a spell that lets someone else pay the XP cost I think. Intended as a "my buddy wants an item but I'm not spending my hard earned XP on his stuff". If that was allowed to work, each one could make progress on a different items upgrade at a time. I'm the only one who could work on staves or rings but that's fine the homunculus could do that.

Needs DM approval though as it doesn't explicitly Dodge the one item worked on at a time limit.

If you can source this spell I can make a ruling.

Are we using any "Once a class skill, always a class skill" approaches? Class skills can get complicated with multiclassing otherwise.

Yes. We'll inherit PF's approach here and simplify affairs. If you have any levels in a class that considers it a class skill, it's a class skill.

...

Let me shelf this for now, see Archmage1's post about buy off levels. I'll work out your concept later on my end.

Question for the DM. What is the optimisation level for the game? I am sure a lot of what is being thrown around is probably theorycrafting, but there are some extraordinary ideas coming out.

Practical optimization is OK. Wanna build an Incantatrix, OK. Wanna get free wishes with Dweomerkeeper, not OK.

If you're building powerful, build something that can be played in a way that doesn't step on other players' toes.

Looking back again, I realized I made a potential error. One of the requirements of Soul Eater is living nonhumanoid, and the character qualified when they first entered, but wouldn’t afterward due to now being undead. Is there any chance I could continue it anyway?

By my reading you don't lose class features when you lose prerequisites unless it's explicitly stated that you do. Also it looks by a careful RAW reading this doesn't even preclude continuing in the class after losing prerequisites, unless explicitly noted.

If a character does not meet the Requirements for a prestige class before that first step, that character cannot take the first level of that prestige class.

I wasn't expecting this, but huh, I learn a new thing every day.