| Post/Author/DateTime | Post |
|---|---|
| #1OgiwanJan 15, 2011 10:10:19 | Greetings, all. While I certainly understand how and why they changed Dragonmarks from 3e to 4e, I cannot help but feel a bit disappointed with how narrow the applications for some of the the Dragonmarks are. The Mark of Warding, for example, is only usable by defenders. The Mark of Handling is kinda meh, given the Mount rules in 4e. Oh, and has anybody determined if the Mark of Storm's ability triggers on a Lightning weapon, or Lightning-augmented weapon? So, what are alternate abilities for Dragonmarks? Given the prevalence of magic-users in Kundarak, I've thought that any effects that bind, slow, stun, or whatever and have a save grant a penalty (-1? -2?) to the save. What else have you come up with? |
| #2tallric_kruushJan 15, 2011 19:30:44 | Greetings, all. While I certainly understand how and why they changed Dragonmarks from 3e to 4e, I cannot help but feel a bit disappointed with how narrow the applications for some of the the Dragonmarks are. The Mark of Warding, for example, is only usable by defenders. The Mark of Handling is kinda meh, given the Mount rules in 4e. Oh, and has anybody determined if the Mark of Storm's ability triggers on a Lightning weapon, or Lightning-augmented weapon? I, too, find the Dragonmark feats a bit too narrow. I was pondering alternate possibilities for the Mark of Shadow just the other day, though I didn't write anything down and can't really recall any particularly great insights. In our current game, a dragonmarked heir of Deneith is using the mechanics of the Mark of Warding in lieu of the Mark of Sentinel, as MoS is far more useful to fighters than any other defender. Our defender, in this case, is an Artificer|Swordmage Hybrid. As the to Mark of Storm, yes it works in conjunction with Lightning weapons. This is really the only way to consistently gain its benefit, and is a relatively common element in the CharOp forum. I'm feeling far too lazy, at the moment, to contribute much. Maybe later. ;) |
| #3ReasonForTreasonJan 16, 2011 6:39:25 | I also have two 'marked PCs in my campaign and they've had to be persuaded to take the feat to represent the dragonmarks ruleswise. While our Ranger is able to use her Mark of Shadow from time to time in combat, primarily she's excited about her mark because of the number of rituals linked to it. I've decided to steal the idea of one of the other forum users: Dragonmarked heirs can substitue healing surges for ritual materials, know all "named" rituals in the Eberron Player's Guide from the start and can learn all the others for reduced costs. This suddenly raised the importance and usage of rituals in my campaign considerably! Having played a 1:1 with the ranger , it really felt like she was improvising and thinking about how to use the tools available to her. Our dwarven heir decided to class-switch to barbarian, which makes his marked power pretty much useless to him. Allowing him to use the sentinel-powers instead, might be a good idea, but I'm also working on different ideas with him. In general, I try to boost the RPG value of a dragonmark, by allowing the PC to call in favors, pamper him with "Lord/Lady of the House" and so forth. Still, I'd love to hear your ideas! edit: typos |
| #4Suzume_StjohnJan 16, 2011 8:05:18 | I've actually been kicking around the idea to use the minor psionic powers (psionic talents) from Dark Sun. Take the feat that gives me three of them and re-flavor them to be expanded powers. Specifically i've been working on a House Orien character, and wanting to take the one that will let him run over uneven ground with no penalty, the one that will let him always be able to find north, and the one that will let him teleport an object to someone/somewhere else. (He's specifically going to be a courier, so he'd just have to get close enough to his target and then could teleport the object into his pocket or some such ;) ) |
| #5dieffenbachjJan 16, 2011 11:35:18 | I've actually been kicking around the idea to use the minor psionic powers (psionic talents) from Dark Sun. Take the feat that gives me three of them and re-flavor them to be expanded powers. I actually like that idea. Since wild talents aren't that powerful, and in Dark Sun you can have an entire party with them.. hm... Ooh. Throw in a Magecraft one, allow the character to craft items/have enhanced crafting abilities/whatever. That'll help represent the huge magecrafting community.. I wonder if it would be too magical to come up with an Eberron-based wild talent list and allow everyone to pick one? On one hand, it would certainly bring up the feel that "the world is intensely magical, to the point that you learn at least one basic cantrip (Magecraft) in school if you want to be a serious craftsman or something". On the other, I'd hate to make the setting TOO magical... where like even a goblin thief PC in a back-alley can cast some spells. But yeah. That sounds like a pretty damn cool idea. I'll have to play around with it, I'll probably post something in this thread with some ideas in an hour or so =P |
| #6dieffenbachjJan 16, 2011 15:36:23 | www.mediafire.com/?sv3np6m10b9n1qa So I'll do a quick runthrough of what I did... For the 10 'basic' magewright cantrips, I either copied and renamed the psionic cantrips from Dark Sun, or I wrote up my own and tried to match the power levels to be balanced. My basic rule of thumb was that each cantrip was equivalent to a Wizard cantrip, with slightly better casting time and slightly worse mechanics (like the telekinesis power has no sustain, so any objects will fall at the end of movement). For the dragonmarks... well, I was writing up cantrips to go with my ALREADY house ruled dragonmarks, so I'll explain my pre-cantrip house rules and then explain my cantrip thoughts. Aberrant dragonmarks became effects that happen on any hit, but only for a short time; I did this because I believe most aberrant dragonmark users should basically pretend that their mark IS their power source. This change effects them so that they feel MUCH more like they're really tied to their mark. Other big thing was Essentials, I'm running an Essentials Eberron game and many classes don't use daily attacks... so that didn't work. I reformatted the other dragonmarks, trimming them so they'd be as little printing as possible without changing mechanics. However, one thing I did do was make it so all users of a mark (with the exception of the Mark of Scribing) automatically know any rituals associated with their mark. Basically, I did this because otherwise it implies that dragonmarked people use ritual books, whereas I prefer them storing all ritual 'knowledge' in their mark, plus it also implies you need House training to learn any ritual, but I've always been fond of characters not tied to a House who show off all of those incredible abilities and rituals without any training (like a half-orc from the Mror Holds area manifesting a mark, detecting secret doors and detecting object and looking into the past without any training, freaking the house out at the competition). Also probably a couple marks I added in non-PH/EPG rituals that really made sense, like Control Weather for the Storm. Finally, added prerequisites to the marks; basically my logic is: "Players who don't know the setting should be restricted to the norm; players who know the setting well will be interested enough in roleplaying a strangely marked character, like a Shadow Halfling, and having the campaign plot greatly involve them, whereas the reverse, where I suddenly impose a huge campaign plot on a lone character for a feat choice he didn't realize was unusual because he's new to the setting, is not fair at all." * * * * ANYWAY. Now that you know all that, I loosened the gloves a little bit when designing each house's cantrip. Some are more powerful than others, and I really only felt comfortable doing that when that particular mark was only useful to one or two roles. When I was writing up an ability, I had my 3.5 Eberron book in hand, so that I could look at what powers marked people USED to get, so I could give them a similar one now. Detection is a decently useful mark regardless of class, so it gets a baseline-level powerful cantrip. Finding is good for both defenders and strikers, so again, decent-quality cantrip. Handling was a more impressive one, based on an entire druid class feature, simply because mounts are only useful to a few people who specialize in mounts. Healing gets an interesting cantrip; the Healing normal ability is useful to anyone (since it affects the Heal skill), so I wanted to give them a cantrip that was almost utterly useless if they were the only leader in the party, but if there was a second leader (or if they weren't a leader or trained in Heal or anything) would still make taking the feat useful. Hospitality is mostly a flavor feat, as it's actually one of the more powerful marks IMHO. Making lost its access to the Make Whole ritual, and got a very similar power that's usable as a standard action. Making is already a pretty good feat if you know how to use it, and it's useful to anyone, so yeah... not a terrific cantrip. Passage... hm. Passage might require playtest, but at a glance I have no immediate issues with allowing a 3-square teleport. Oh, I should errata into the PDF to say "this distance is not affected by your +1 teleport square feat ability provided by this same feat." Mark of Scribing, similarly to Making I turned a ritual into a power ... this one more justified in that Arcane Mark isn't a feat in the PH/EPG, so unlikely to ever be taken anyway. Mark of Sentinel is only half-at-will because the power is so awesome and defender-tastic; I made it so cool because the feat benefit kind of sucks unless you're really interested in staying near someone trying to move past you. Mark of Shadow isn't a feat useful to everybody, but it's so useful to strikers that I had to give an entirely roleplaying-based cantrip. Mark of Storm, based mostly on the fact that the Mark of Storm in 3.5 gave lots of wind gusts and fog creation abilities, so... it just seemed amusing and very flavorful to imagine an angry half-elf being surrounded by gusts of wind and swirling fog in addition to whatever lightning he wants to dish out. And mark of warding, I wanted to give something very alarm ish, but not that useful--mostly for chase sequences or short-term warnings of intruders when making camp. Still better to just cast Alarm which (IIRC) is a 1st-level ritual anyway, but a very flavorful cantrip. * * * * Anyway. You'll notice that a lot of these cantrips aren't badass, per say... I mostly want to give each character at least one signature move which really defines them as dragonmarked heroes. And the non-dragonmarked cantrips are great for making the world seem really teeming with magic, where even the lowliest rogue PC can cast light when he needs to. Though I did suggest the 13 Intelligence score requirement for the free-cantrip system, just so that it's easily justified 'you went briefly to wizarding school and/or you are just smart and powerful enough to pick this up during an apprenticeship or by watching people on the street.' I think Dexterity gets way too much clout anyway, Intelligence needs a little bit of flexing room =P |
| #7Suzume_StjohnJan 17, 2011 7:48:37 | I like it, great job! ;) A little sad you left out the teleporting one though. But still, great list, will keep it in mind when I put my character together. (If I can get the DM to ok it that is. ;) ) |
| #8dieffenbachjJan 17, 2011 11:17:29 | I like it, great job! ;) A little sad you left out the teleporting one though. But still, great list, will keep it in mind when I put my character together. (If I can get the DM to ok it that is. ;) ) Here, a slightly more polished edition: www.mediafire.com/?sv3np6m10b9n1qa Biggest changes are modifying the aberrant marks to have their own, darker cantrips. I added two aberrant marks, since this is a document for my game but people are free to use those (I added Seduction and Annihilation, good at charming people and burning people, respectively). Polished and errata'd other things, nothing too drastic. Teleport for House Orien is now more clearly defined and balanced (once per round only, and doesn't benefit from the Orien range boost). Oh, and added a 'random cantrip' table, a la Dark Sun for players or DMs who don't want to figure out what magical spell their character learned as a child themselves. But yeah, I added cantrips to the aberrant marks too for the same reason I added them to the standard dragonmarks: I needed them to feel more like a burning tattoo of corrupted magic, rather than... a -1 penalty to checks and rolls. One of those is flavorful and screams at the other players "Look! I'm special and unique because of this awesome mark which defines my character and makes me feel dragonmarked 24/7!", the other is not and does not. For instance, the Blight power for the Aberrant Mark of Contagion. Doesn't do much, just is a cool way to turn wood to rot, iron to rust, rope to frayed threads, etc., and provides no abilities a player couldn't just do with an at-will spell or a hammer. But even if it only sees use once every other session ("I'm going to rot these ropes off of my hand and escape the slavers!"), it is still a big slap in the face and reminder to everyone: This person carries dark, dark powers with no other purpose than to corrupt and destroy the world around them. Having a -2 penalty to saving throws or whatever just doesn't carry the same weight. |
| #9durskutJan 17, 2011 12:30:34 | There was a similar thread I bookmarked a while ago. Haven't had the opportunity to make much use of it, so just reposting for relevance. community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758...[4E]_Homebrew_alternate_dragonmark_benefits |
| #10RPGBGJan 17, 2011 13:56:51 | I like it, great job! ;) A little sad you left out the teleporting one though. But still, great list, will keep it in mind when I put my character together. (If I can get the DM to ok it that is. ;) ) While your ideas are really neat and flavorful - they are way out of balance. What is more - some of them have devastating in-combat aplication while other don't. Turning them from at-will to encounter abilities will probably fix that though, except for the aberrant ones. |
| #11dieffenbachjJan 17, 2011 13:59:05 | I like it, great job! ;) A little sad you left out the teleporting one though. But still, great list, will keep it in mind when I put my character together. (If I can get the DM to ok it that is. ;) ) Yes, well, I was intentionally making some cantrips better than others. That's because some of the feats themselves are sub-par and need a little bit of a boost. If you have any specific examples, that'd be more handy for examining. |
| #12RPGBGJan 17, 2011 16:23:54 | Aberrant Mark of Annihilation: -1 AC and Reflex on ANY attack is huge. Compare it to White Lotus Enervation which requires a) the attack to be done with at-will power b) gives -1 penalty to only one defence. Limiting the effect of the feat to encounter and daily power only will go a long way towards balancing it. |
| #13dieffenbachjJan 17, 2011 17:21:48 |
For the 'on each hit' benefits, I look at it very differently. The White Lotus feats I find to be underpowered. As Wizards' official, publicly declared philosophy is "we don't care if we put out underpowered feats or powers, so long as we're not doing power creep with overpowered feats or powers. We probably also won't expend effort errataing underpowered choices." I tend to view White Lotus feats as simply sub-par options. For instance, there are a ton of feats which provide a straight +1 bonus, like Implement Expertise. Having a universal +1 to all attack rolls is better than having a -1 penalty, sometimes, to a particular defense that (since you're the one who made the attack) likely only you will be able to take advantage of. Another way I view it... say you use one daily per encounter. Formerly, you had a 50% chance of ever seeing your on-hit effect happen... and for the next 5-10 rounds, it would have a significant effect on the battlefield (permanently draining AC/attacks/whatever). The way it is now, since you have a 50% miss chance on each attack, you still only see the on-hit effect 50% of the encounter, but spread more evenly. And it still has the exact same effect on the battlefield, it'll still be more or less a permanent presence 50% of the time, with the difference of you're able to alter who your current target is by attacking someone else. So, same math that went into the original feat (which, originally, was on the overpowered side anyway, so if my final math seems a bit overpowered, I'm only concerned if it's more powerful than the original feat or not) but just a different take on it. In terms of the madness cantrip, I'm fine leaving it a mechanicless cantrip similar to ghost sound. Let the DM come up with situational modifiers. Seduction I'm not too worried about. The ongoing damage mark does the exact same thing, but with a much more common effect type (ongoing damage > charm). One thing to keep in mind that all of these feats are meant to be used with teamwork: if someone with the Mark of Seduction is destroying one NPC's ability to resist charm effects, even if that Marked person is, say, a Fighter, the party Wizard can still cast charm effects and have them function with improved efficiency. So I'm not too worried about each feat being useful to EVERY role when the feat is instead useful to TEAMWORK. Both are valid to me. I think I'll probably change out the Mark of Healing anyway. Even the Sentinel Shield can be used out of combat if you're clever enough (might change it, too, to be more noncombat... but the Mark of Sentinel even in 3.5 was never about noncombat), but the Healing mark is all about combat benefits. I happen to think it's fine balancewise, I like the idea of reducing the range to make you have to be near your target (maybe like an 'adjacent allies gain your feat bonus' or something), but I want to see it used more out of combat, somehow. But again, hard, since the Mark of Healing was originally all about the combat. Passage, I was basing off of two things: first, I have a homebrew apocalyptic setting and one of the mutations you can get lets you teleport 3 squares. It has no restrictions, and I've never found it to be overpowered in any playtest. Second, the highly restrictive Assassin teleportation, does the same thing (but longer range if you have the Mark of Passage!) and it, too, has barely seemed more useful than simply walking or squeezing or climbing or whatever. I'm not sure what you're saying about it being out of balance, I find a 3 square movement once per round (instead of twice) perfectly fine. I think that since the Intelligence modifier doesn't scale with level, it's not THAT insane. Until you hit level 11, the party Wizard with 22 Intelligence and a sentinel shield can only grant 7 temporary hit points. It is completely incompatible with classes who get temp hp any other way (if you cast it on a battlerager... well, damn, you're not getting your power back until the encounter's over), it'll be chewing up your actions to cast it repeatedly, and most monsters can smack through 7 temp hp (and again, until level 11 that's probably the MOST you'll be able to grant) in one basic attack. I might change it, as I said, simply because it's not an ability that'll see much use out of combat, and I want players to feel like their mark. But I don't know if it's unbalanced. Storm: I kind of agree, I think lightly obscured would be better and more foglike. |
| #14dieffenbachjJan 17, 2011 21:32:56 | I updated it, here. www.mediafire.com/?sv3np6m10b9n1qa Seduce got reduced to an at-will, flavor text was tweaked on crazed whispers (formerly whispers). Healers adjacent to a halfling with the Mark of Healing gain his benefit as part of the feat itself. His power is now invigorate, which is just instantly wakes up any ally (and if they're dazed, stunned, dominated, or falling asleep, provides them a minor bonus to resist that). Sentinel's Shield is now an at-will. Similar in function to mage hand, it projects a visible projection of your dragonmark. It can carry objects weighing up to 20 pounds, but can't pick them up itself; creatures behind the shield gain cover, including enemies. Everything else was untouched. I think this is slightly more where I want it to be. I gave more thought to making the Aberrant marks not quite so powerful on each hit, but while I agree it's fairly powerful, I just don't think it's any more powerful than they were originally. |
| #15Nibelung_ajrJan 18, 2011 15:28:50 | The Mark of Warding, for example, is only usable by defenders. The preservation invoker of my team disagree. The extra 1 point of all defense bonus powers really help her all day. EDIT: Also, I'm curretly DMing to a Twelve group, so almost everyone is dragonmarked, exception being the 2 defenders (goliath warden covering for a Tharashk heir, and warforged fighter covering for his old Medani's "master"). So we have a few weird combinations. Kundarak invoker, that got a bunch of friendly fire powers to spam defense bonus. The mark really help all the time. Every encounter she throw around something that save someone. Cannith artificer, that uses a improved fire shotgun (reskinned superior crossbow). I changed the benefit from the mark to allow him to shot alchemical itens at the same time of the normal attacks, and craft alchemical itens with a discount. It's weaker than I was thinking, and very fun to play around. Deneith vestigelock. This mark isn't the standard mark. He has a demonskin tatoo (resist 5 one element when use AP) that works like his mark of sentinel. 3.5 sentinel had Protection from Elements as an option for spell-like, so the theme is right. And a straight-from-the-book Thuranni assassin. I know, the Thuranni isn't part of the 12. He is a bet from the team's patron. I like the idea under dragonmarks, but never found any implementation fine for my taste. 3.5 required a LOT of feats to get the full power, and feats are rare at this edition. 4e pidgeonhole almost all marks to a specific build. sure, you can find workarounds, and the free rituals are cool. But if on 3e build a cleric from jorasco was overkill, in 4e build a non-leader from jorasco is basically dumb. |
| #16dieffenbachjJan 18, 2011 16:19:10 | Kundarak invoker, that got a bunch of friendly fire powers to spam defense bonus. The mark really help all the time. Every encounter she throw around something that save someone. I think the point was more the point that the marks cater to very, very specific builds in 4E, whereas in 3.5 they had the opposite problem of being general and feat-expensive to the point of being useless (1/day cure light wounds... wooo... Oh cool, I get arcane mark, yayyyy...)
Yes, they are. ECS, page 246: "The Committee of Twelve oversees the institute. The committee actually has more than twelve members: there are twelve dragonmarks, but the split of House Phiarlan and House Thuranni and the current troubles within House Cannith have caused membership to fluctuate." And I know I've read in places mention of it taking the Twelve time to officially recognize Thuranni as a Dragonmarked House of its own, but that they eventually did it.
That's why I like some of my house-ruled changes... they make, for instance, non-leader members of House Jorasco much more useful, able to spread their healing bonus to any actual healers. |
| #17Nibelung_ajrJan 18, 2011 16:30:16 |
Thanks for the info. I checked some fonts before the campaign started (mostly, ECS 3.5 and Dragonmarked book and web articles), and I was sure I read somewhere that Thuranni wasn't recognized. Good to know the point on the new ECS. Anyway, in my game Thuranni will keep being an off-house. Too late to change backstory. I think the point was more the point that the marks cater to very, very specific builds in 4E I was saying that, even when the marks works awesomelly powerful with certain builds, they are strong enough to work "well" into other builds. It's still limited, but not as much as CO think. |
| #18dieffenbachjJan 18, 2011 16:35:30 |
Was my dusty old 3.5 ECS I was quoting from =P But anyway... hm. You know how I would handle a retcon like that? Make it a plot point! =P The Twelve is considering legitimizing House Thuranni, House Phiarlan really, really doesn't want that, party is in the awkward position of having to deal with potential political assassins, etc. etc... And then in the next Eberron campaign, just treat it as normal. The players will assume that House Thuranni is an official house due to the ministrations of their previous characters... and not only will status quo be restored, but any players in future games who played this campaign will think it's awesome that the world evolves around them =P * * * * I think the only unrecognized house is Tarkanan. Otherwise, Thuranni and Tarkanan would probably join forces *shiver of fear at double-assassin guild*. |
| #19Nibelung_ajrJan 18, 2011 17:52:25 | Reply on PM. Dont want to spoil it to my players yet. But thanks for the very good ideas. |