Odds and ends

[Anastasia]

Added a revised Moon Domain to house rules.

[Anastasia]

NPC projected level ups. This is your chance to have imput or make suggestions on how they develop!

Noel: Fighter 4//Rogue 4; add stat point to con, take Mobility as his fighter 4 feat.
Branna: Fighter 4//Rogue 4; add stat point to dex. take Weapon Specialization as his fighter 4 feat.
Sylvie: Factotum 3//Fighter 1/Monk 2;  not sure about her level 3 feat yet.
Simmer: Dryad 5//Half Fire-Elemental 3/Sorcerer 2; select another fiery spell.

[Anastasia]

Rules topic updated with alignment changes and a new use for spellcraft.

[Anastasia]

Okay, last adventure gave me  a chance to see how the turning variant we're using works in low levels/gestalt. I think it's obvious it needs to be tweaked down, so I'm proposing the following changes:

- Turning is now a full round action.
- Quicken Turning gets banned, Empower Turning gets nerfed.
- Spontaneous Healing for clerics can be discarded. To be honest, with turning being strong healing there's no longer any need for this ability. It's redundant.

Agree? Disagree? Have any suggestions of your own? Speak up. This goes double for Merc and possibly Cor(I forget if your build gets any turning of noteworthy ability.), who may be impacted.  Balyss was admitted optimized towards turning, though anyone who has full or near full cleric turning can show how potent this variant is.

[Corwin]

I think I'll have 1d6 or 2d6 of turning, but probably not past it.

Quicken Turning would use up your swift action, and you still can't turn twice in a round. Empower Turning is eh; probably the best turning feat that exists, but it still only goes towards turning. Only cleric-like chars would ever invest in it, since it's ridiculous to get it if you don't have a consistent turning progression, but these kinds of chars would outstrip anyone else turning-wise anyhow. Say you get 2-5 levels of turning at lvl20, while a cleric has his full 20. Compared to your 2d6-5d6, does it matter if he does 20d6 or 1.5*20d6? It's still overwhelming in comparison. In all honesty, this whole talk of nerfing sounds ridiculous to me since turning only works on undead and you're removing possible optimizations towards something this niche (and optimization here means you need to take otherwise-pointless feats in place of good ones). If turning gets nerfed, why would you remove spontaneous healing? I just don't see the point in any of it. Remember why you made turning use these rules instead of the original ones? Because it sucked and no one used it.

tl;dr This doesn't really affect me but I fail to see the point in making any changes.

[Ebiris]

To be fair, nobody used turn undead because nobody had it in any meaningful sense. Since it either works or doesn't depending on your level than a roll of the dice, it's a simple yes or no rather than a calculated risk to use. This method is better since with a saving throw even the most badass lich can roll a 1 vs the shittiest cleric ever.

That said, it is *very* good, and works in all situations as general purpose healing rather than just being a counter vs one specific creature type.

I'd suggest changing it to will negates rather than will half, so that it's more of a gamble to use rather than guaranteed damage. I'd also consider reducing or limiting the healing somehow - either healing for half, or only healing members of the faith/same alignment or somesuch.

Also! Rebuke undead is way better than Turn undead in core, whereas in this variant evil clerics get completely shafted compared to good clerics. Unless they're the sort of evil clerics who walk around with a horde of undead goons, but even then how does one acquire such a horde without using Rebuking to command them in the first place? So I'd be quite down with letting evil clerics take Rebuking as core rather than this variant.

[Corwin]

My biggest problem here, the more I think about it, is really with how needed any change is. You probably know by now that I like to leave decent things alone and I'm not excited over houseruling something just because you can.

With that in mind, I would just like to ask what the intent behind having Turning in a game is for us. If it's to provide an alternate source of healing so that clerics can actually do something else with their spells, it's one thing. If it's to have a cool thing to use against the Undead rather than the weaksauce original Turning, that's another. Maybe there are other reasons, too. So I'd like to know what our goal for Turning is?

[Anastasia]

Those two reasons are the main reasons that I'm working with. It provides potent group healing, on a better scale than the typical cure x spells. It really fills the clerical healing niche, making spontaneous healing obsolete.  It also provides strong clerical firepower against undead, allowing clerics to smite them in a much more direct manner than the previous Turn Undead method.

It's that I think it's a little too good at it's task right now. It reams the hell out of the undead for a standard action, not even counting the hilarity of quicken turning, as well as providing powerful group healing. The goal is to tone it down a little bit and to better balance the ability. To that, toning down the turning booster feats is obvious. The level of power a quickened turning is insane in the economy of actions, making group healing possible while taking a full normal round of other actions.

I'm not sure how I want to do it yet, which is why I'm stirring up discussion. Making it a full round action is one possible solution, and I think the turning feats need to be adjusted in any event. Spontaneous Healing is an appendix of an ability now, serving a redundant purpose.

Re: Rebuke undead. I've been working on this behind the scenes, haven't said anything since it's a DM matter. None of you are going to get rebuke undead as of right now, so don't worry about it. It's all behind the curtain stuff.

[Anastasia]

Bonus content: The mace Balyss uses is called Lunarock, as you might know if you've read her stats. It's not a Sailor Moon reference in design, yet it ends up being one. http://www.wikimoon.org/index.php?title=Sailor_Moon_%26_the_Scouts:_Lunarock

I have no idea, but what the hell. She follows the Moon Goddess anyway.

[Corwin]

What this proposal actually achieves, however, is leave the powerful turning option on the table but fuck up anyone trying to specialize in it. I like the idea of having options even if I don't actually use them myself. Essentially, if you think it's too strong go at the core of Turning, not at the bells and whistles that make it cool or another option for specialization.

And I'm probably unclear on what a full round action is, I often mix this up. Do you mean it's like a full attack, so you can't do anything else but it takes hold at the end of your turn, or that it would take effect at the start of your next round and any damage you take in the meantime breaks your concentration? If it's the latter, then there's no point in using it in battle. Certainly not for healing, if you want to heal someone right now. If it's the former, then in effect it means you lose a move action, and I just don't see why it tones anything down. Can you help me understand this?

[Merc]

- Turning is now a full round action.
- Quicken Turning gets banned, Empower Turning gets nerfed.
- Spontaneous Healing for clerics can be discarded. To be honest, with turning being strong healing there's no longer any need for this ability. It's redundant.

I honestly don't see how this does quite so much to power it down. The main issue I think is scaling, so what you offer doesn't do much to really help.

The Cure spells will horribly lag behind simply because the turning's heal effect will generally target more characters and for more/comparable healing while also harming undead in the area to boot. This is because you have it set so turning increases by 1d6 each level, while cure spells increase by +1 each level and +d8 every -two- levels AND target only one person at a time.

If you make it so turning were d4 instead of d6, and improved every other level instead, it's a bit more of a toss-up between using turning for healing or a spell. If there are undead present, turning is obviously the better solution, otherwise it depends on the number of people injured for healing, and whether you have empowered turning. It'll actually start to be weaker option for healing after level 10 if you don't have empowered turning, remains pretty useful with it, and has the plus side of not using up spell slots, so it actually continues to be useful all throughout even if it starts lagging behind spells.

So my suggestion is basically:
1) Change from +d6/level to +d4/every other level.
2) Keep Empowered Turning as is, it's pretty much only worth it on a character who keeps up their turning progression if you make the above change.
3) Rather than get rid of quicken turning, why not make it so instead of using one turn attempt as a standard action, you can make it as a move action or burn two turn attempts to make it as a swift? It's slightly more restrictive than just making it a swift action, while still giving you a lot of options and feeling worthwhile.

[Corwin]

Given that turning is fuel for all sorts of divine/devotion feats you should also consider the point where using turning to heal/burn undead stops being as appealing as using it for any of that stuff.

[Merc]

Point. I guess I'll say go with d6 every other level instead of d4s, since I didn't consider the decision of divine feats. Turning keeps up a bit better with spells if it's d6 vs d4, making it more of a decision whether to use it for healing/undead killing, or to burn for divine feats, and makes Empowered Turning more of a decision vs divine feats. But I do think the main problem is how it scales against spells right now, just being vastly superior due to that.

[Corwin]

I agree in principle! If there is an issue here with 'too much healing', it comes from the core concept, not the addons. I do wonder if you can have too much healing, that aside, since a) if the party heals, it can adventure longer, and b) wands of CLW, every party buys them anyway, and c) innate powers are cooler than wands. I'd certainly want to have Balyss along on a normal adventure (ie not against undead) and see how it works, especially when she heals our enemies as well. Assuming she does this instead of hitting them with her mace/spells.

That aside, if the healing's too good to have, it can be capped like this, or how Eb proposed. It's really the same thing in the end. The radius can be limited too, although that would make the power less flashy. If the undead-slaying is too good, it can be dealt with as well (although then I'd probably just prefer to use a fireball so that a mook skeleton doesn't roll high and remains untouched). But, again, eliminating the means of specializing in a cool new option while leaving what makes it 'too good' intact is kinda pointless to me.

[Anastasia]

I'll sort out turning tonight, I let it lie the last week 'cause I had other things on my plate. Assuming that goes well, I'll also do quick sheet audits tonight to make sure everything adds up. After Eb's skirmish snafu I figure one couldn't hurt.