User:Mauver

From LiMaWiki

Hi. I'm a geek from Canada who came across this wiki while looking for alternative, less broken rules to play DnD by and found this to look promising; I'm currently DMing a campaign using 90% Ultimate Classes as well, and it's been running quite well so far!

Right now I'm working on a 0-9 level spell system for the ultimate classes. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to tell me. Here are some reasons why I feel this is necessary:

• Spells of level 8-9 are not offered; they are simply not options for a character. Not all of them are broken, either.
• Spells that are meant to scale with the level that you get them at don't scale properly anymore; for instance, Cloudkill, a level 5 which is meant to kill off and weaken minions who would otherwise prove a nuisance, is obtained at level 9 for the core rules. It kills anything of up to 3 HD (which is largely proportional to character level, and in the way I run campaigns, tends to be entirely proportional to character level); at level 9, one might come across a level 3 challenge only in gigantic hordes, usually accompanied by some tougher enemies leading them. This takes care of them entirely. It also has a (very good, in fact) chance of killing a monster of up to HD 6, and minions of HD 6 at level 9 aren't that rare in large groups. Meanwhile, everyone else takes a small amount of constitution damage. This is a good spell by the standards of the core rules, and is a great way of wiping out a ton of guys who might otherwise get in the way as you charge for the higher-ups. In the ultimate rules, however, you get it at level 13. No responsible DM is going to send 3HDs at you when you're level 13 (except maybe as a joke), and level 6es will only be seen in extremely extenuating circumstances.
• Similar to the last one, spells that are meant to give you a boon that's based on roughly your level no longer are as effective. The big one here is Summon Monster spells. These are meant to give you, when you give up your biggest spell slot, something that's about half your level in CR. In the ultimate system, they don't do this at all. And yet the even the ultimate system goes on to make the assumption that this is about how things should work; just look at the Druid Elementalist path. It does what summon monster would do under the core rules, in giving you something half your level in CR.
• Not as many spell slots. This is largely taken care of by invocations, but it still needs some work.
• Invocations are powerful enough, but not high enough in DC at later levels, often rendering them useless by this point.
• Certain uses of invocations are close to game-breaking, whereas others are disposable. For instance, someone multiclassing Wizard and Cleric can give everyone in their party a constant +6 to AC by having both Mage Armor and Shield of Faith constantly spammed on every member of their party when outside of battle. At this same point, a Magus is doing 2d4 damage with Burning Hands. (This is an example from a campaign I am currently DMing, actually.)
• Metamagic is broken. Spell levels don't go high enough often enough to accomodate it.
• Ultimate system spells do not scale properly with what the core mechanics expect of it. This makes classes from outside the ultimate classes largely incompatible to run in the same campaign without unbalancing things. Some would say that the ultimate classes are not meant to be run alongside other classes, but some things aren't covered by the ultimate classes, and to exclude that is limiting the choices of the player. Additionally, it doesn't scale with the abilities of monsters; this is a major problem because there's really not much way around it.

I have a few ideas already, but I'm not ready to propose them just yet.