Hey, guys. I'm DMing a D&D 3.5 game, and I need recommendations for supplements. I have the 3 major handbooks on hard copy, and a pdf of pic related. Anyone want to recommend me some stuff?
>>46529730
Sword Path Glory
Can you give us more specifics about the sort of game you plan on running?
>>46530069
Sure, sorry. It's pretty much plane-based. Most of the main story elements revolve around extraplaner forces, plane destruction, etc. Incarnum has a huge importance as a power source for magical machines. Cont.
The tome of battle is pretty necessary for balancing non-casters with casters.
Psionics are pretty stupid in my opinion, I would drop them if I were you but I'm not you.
I've been foreverDMing 3.5 for years, and we have a lot of fun just using the Player's Handbook, the DM guide, the monster manuals and the tome of battle. Anything else we've tried feels like bloat. We have plenty of house rules of course and if someone wants to do something like play a skeleton we just balance it out using the monster manual.
>>46529730
Book of Exalted Deeds/Vile Darkness are always fun books.
>>46529730
I really wish the incarnum stuff had been better than it was. I really liked the fluff but the mechanics were kind of trash.
>>46529730
I ran one hell of a 3.5 mini-campaign with the PHB banned.
Books I allowed:
>Magic of Incarnum
>Tome of Battle
>Expanded Psionics Handbook
>Frostburn
>Stormwrack
>Sandstorm
>Lords of Madness
>Unearthed Arcana
Houserules/Optional rules used:
>Flaws allowed
>Weapon group feats for each martial discipline (with additional weapons added from Sandstorm, Frostburn, and Stormwrack)
>Unnarmed Swordsages allowed
>Point-buy ability scores, with point budget determined by level adjustment (LA doesn't do anything else)
>Racial hit-dice ignored (Thri-Kreen aren't that broken)
>Anybody can learn use alchemy
It was a lot of fun.
>>46530104
The Material Plane has been divided into 4 basic areas: The Empire of Sonarum, a strict regimented place with way to many laws, the Lunarus Confederacy, a chaotic place with numerous small countries, each with evershifting names for everything. The only consistent thing is the geography. The Great Divide, a canyon with matter disintegration and magic absorption properties, and the West Wind Trade Company that owns most of the area straddling the Divide, and regulates transport between both sides of the Divide.
>>46530185
Dude, Incarnum is freaking awesome! My GM had to kill off my Incarnate because she was too broken. Lol.
Manual of the Planes seems like a good book for you, OP.
>>46528220
guys we need some more people. even a single post would be nice.
plox
>>46529730
replace the magic system with the psionics system. Far more balanced than the base magic rules.
>>46530163
>Psionics are dumb
>Core magic isn't
dumb coreposter
>>46531229
the psionic system is fine, but the fluff and some of the mechanics really are dumb
it's like they tried to pump punk sci-fi into a high fantasy world
>>46529730
The Totemist is the best thing in that book. The Totemic Rager or whatever it's called was a blast to play.
>>46532171
I prefer Incarnate, personally, but meldshaping in general is fucking sweet.
>>46530334
>broken = good
pleb please
>>46529730
>>46530104
Manual of the Planes and Planar Handbook.
>>46530163
>>46532140
Psionics and Tome of Battle balance fairly well against each other, but Tome of Battle still balances fairly poorly against core casters. Thus the problem with core casters: If they're available why play anything else?
Fluff can be changed to suit the game, so I'm discounting that; what about the mechanics of Psionics doesn't gel well with you?
>>46530163
>The tome of battle is pretty necessary for turning everybody into casters.
FTFY
>>46532351
The main criticism against dnd psionics stems from people who experienced ad&d psionics, which was basically two people staring at each other trying to do stat damage. Pretty dumb.
Expanded psionics works really nicely, but you have to read the interactions for psionic focus and spending power points closely or broken nonsense can happen.
Metapsionic feats usually require spending focus, so you can't just chain them together. Your pp/power are limited by your manifester level, so you can't blow your load and do something like 150d6 damage, no matter how hard you try. Basically, just give the book a careful read and see if you like it.
I prefer the system because while magic users get free spell scaling for range, strength, or duration based on their level, psions have to pay points to increase their effects.
>>46533783
Yeah, in a campaign I'm in right now, we have a psychic warrior. If he wanted to, he could become literally impossible to hit and murder everything in a few swings, but chooses not to because it's "not fair".
Bump-
>>46533332
FUCKING HELL
Bump again
>>46533783
Oh, I know about all that. I'm just interested in what this particular guy's problem with psionics is. You can, technically, chain two metapsionic feats together with a feat that lets your psicrystal hold a psionic focus that you can expend, but if that's it, compared to metamagic feats/rods? It's not bad at all.
>>46529730
Ban core, replace with Tome of Battle and Psionics (but people just call it magic and mana-points instead of power points etc...)
>>46531229
I'm not talking about balance when psionics are involved. They aren't really necessary for balancing anything. I'm talking about flavor. It tastes bad in the D&D setting.
>>46535156
Then change the flavor. What's so bad about the flavor of psionics anyway? What makes it disparate with the basic flavor of D&D? Is it the fact that it's psychic powers instead of magic? The fact that crystals are what's used to store psionic powers?
>>46535156
>I'm not talking about balance when psionics are involved. They aren't really necessary for balancing anything. I'm talking about flavor. It tastes bad in the D&D setting.
If that's how you feel, remove "magic" replace it with "psionics" for balance reasons, and everyone calls it "magic" because in a world without D&D "arcane magic" as a frame of reference, what would everyone call a psion? A fucking wizard.
Personally, I actually prefer the psionics flavor, but I like my fantasy a bit more pulpy and with more Howard than Tolkien.
>>46535095
Basically this, but add the completes. They are all pretty great.
>>46535726
Eh...
Complete Psionic is iffy.
Complete Warrior would be a good source of feats and prestige classes though.
>>46535763
Complete Psionics is where some of the actual cheese, such as being able to make a legit save point, comes from, if I'm not mistaken, so, yeah, maybe leave it out.
>>46535836
Forgot to include: It's also where the only actual healing power comes from, though, so parts of it may be worth using.
>>46533555
The important thing to remember is that D20 is a subsystem system. How players can interact with the game is through the base character mechanics, and the subsystem given by their class. The universal system is intentionally weak and generic, so that the core system can be used in a wide variety of settings. Now, for some reason, some of the base classes from PHB, and a few later classes don't have a subsystem. This means they can only interact with the game world using the core system... which is why fighters suck. ToB provides a subsystem with associated classes that allows you to make a martial character that has some way to interact with the game world that is not shared by a commoner.
TL;DR Yes it did, and if you think this is a problem, you are a fag.
>>46533855
He probably can't due to the cap of only expending pp equal to your caster level. If he can, a tier 3 caster could probably do the same thing.
Expanded Psionics Handbook with Complete Psionic for extra powers and feats (ignore what it says about superseding XPH with certain stuff like astral construct or whatever.)
Weaboo fightan magic
Don't let casters use any extra books or metamagic rods besides extend.
>>46535965
Oh, really. Huh, didn't know that. I'll have to enlighten him on this. Thank you.
>>46536006
99% of the time you hear someone bitching about how broke psionics is, it is because they didn't actually read the fucking book. Always worth pointing out that you can't spend more pp then your caster level on any one spell. Almost always makes them shut up.
Going to bed. Thanks, guys.
>ctrl+F "tome of magic"
>0 results
Get it. But only for the first third of the book dealing with Pact Magic. One of the best things to come out of late 3.5. It inspired a couple of excellent 3rd party books expanding the pact magic system beyond a single class in a way similar to the Expanded Psionics Handbook. The part about Shadow Magic is interesting but flawed and requires houseruling to work well. The last part is "Magic-that-shall-not-be-named" and is best forgotten.
If you intend to use Incarnum please not that it's quite broken. At very low levels, meldshapers are nigh-unkillable and have access to certain abilities far sooner than other characters such as spell resistance, damage resistance, and at-will damaging magic. As they go up in level they gradually fall behind due to having to choose between wearing magic items or accessing their strongest powers. The book's attempts to allow non-meldshapers to have incarnum abilities leads to feats straight up better than core feats.
Also the whole "everything is blue" theme gets old. They looked up "blue" in a thesaurus and tacked on all its similar words to everything. Though it was always amusing that if you went by the descriptions laid out in the book, your average meldshaper lights up like a fucking chrismas tree in the visible and magical spectrum. You end up looking like a high level WoW character with flames, lightning bolts, and nebulous energy arcing all over you. Great for intimidating commoners.
I did like that MoI's pseudo-human race wasn't presented as human plus but as someone burning through their soul so fast they had the lifespan of an orc. But hey, you had a slightly higher pool of power and constantly glowing eyes.
>>46536463
There is a fix out there for shadow magic. Ari Marmell, the author of the book, made a number of posts on forums about better ideas he had for the shadowcaster. It's not official errata, obviously, but it's the closest we can get to a rebalance of the class. Also the class is still decidedly average at best, but the fluff is rock solid.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?184955-Shadowcaster-fixes-by-Mouseferatu&p=3273239&viewfull=1#post3273239
>>46536463
When 2/3rds of a book are shit, it casts a lot of doubt on the other 1/3rd. Though I have never seen pacts in play, and people do seem to like them a lot.
>>46536221
Nvm, I can't sleep. Lol
>>46536566
I'm not sure if this a pro or a con for you, but binders are basically what Shamans do in Shaman King. You're binding powerful beings/spirits to you and channeling their power/skills at the cost of them influencing your decisions.
Binders aren't particularly flexible (since you get powers in discrete sets and can't change very often) but they are fluffy as hell and have a lot of neat powers.
>>46529730
I don't know if it's actually any good, but I was always interested in Tome of Magic, almost entirely for the Pact Magic section. That was somewhat similar to Incarnum -- both let you kind of change up your abilities and role in the party.
>>46536663
Yeah... I am aware. They have a lot of warlock taint about them... That is basically what they seemed like. Weird, specific sets of invocations you could switch out. Which made an amount of sense. Still makes me wish they had done the tome of magic with Pact, warlocks, and some other subsystem that fitted with the flavor of the other two.
>>46536101
Well, there's also Overchannel, but it only lets you boost your caster/manifester level by three, but three levels might make all the difference.
Better start paying respects boys.
>>46529730
No core classes allowed.
>>46537073
It also hurts you a non negligible amount without another feat
