Talk:Saiyans (3.5e Race)

The Text, It Burns...
Honestly, this has WAY too much text for a player race in the racial traits. It made me want to stop reading less than halfway through. That might just be a condemnation of my patience, but if anyone else feels similarly you may be in trouble.

On a more mechanical note, please, please remove the part about them going under the DM's control when in Ozaroo form. That makes the race suck just because of that (and that's before I even mention that you're giving +2 Level Adjustment for a race that potentially takes control of the character away from the player and also would appear to destroy any equipment you're carrying for a power boost so extremely minor in the grand scheme of things that it acts as a complete buzzkill. Worse yet, it's a full-on full moon lycanthropy, which makes it involuntary. That sucks even more. Totally kills the race, in my opinion, almost not even worth the dearth of ability score bonuses they receive.

Lastly, Competitive Spirit has no tangible mechanical effect. I understand that you don't want him to be crazy suicidal, but in clarifying as such you have negated any possible effect it could have. The save really does nothing whether you succeed or fail. As a result, I recommend simply removing it completely and putting their competitiveness (with only fluff text, since no mechanics are required) under the personality section or wherever. It's also a start on clearing the massive wall of text that is the Racial Traits, which would also be an upgrade. - TG Cid 01:22, 6 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Huh, for a moment I thought this was mine, but nope, mine has no "s". I'll give this a full review later.  Makes me want to go back and see my own list.


 * Yeah, I didn't have much to add right now, just idle thought. -- Eiji-kun 01:30, 6 July 2011 (UTC)


 * On that note, race pages are supposed to be singular, but in this case I'm letting it slide for now since Eiji just linked his. - TG Cid 01:33, 6 July 2011 (UTC)


 * To address the singular versus plural issue, I'd prefer if things were kept consistent. An easy way to differentiate different versions is either adding ", Variant" or ", by USER_NAME" to the title. I prefer the latter. If at any point anyone feels like their race/class/foo is being considered second-rate because they had to make the variant title, we can always move the original page to have a new title that also includes the user name and make the original page a disambiguation page instead that points to all pages that would have had that title. That at least seems like the simplest way to do it if anyone ever cares. --Aarnott 20:00, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Wow so much to respond to in just the amount of time I was gone to work.. Where to start? Well, thank you Cid for allowing the plural to slide, I wasnt sure how else to not have it tell me the race was already there, so I went with the first thing I could think of, if anyone has an idea for a different naming method such s V2, or some other clever or witty way to seperate it and keep it in the singular, Im alright with them going ahead and making that change.

Eiji-kun I got several pieces of inspiration from your work with the Saiyans both before we spoke and after. What Ive tried to do here is remain more accurate to the series and shape the mechanics around the flavor and include all of the little details from the series, as where I believe that you went for the more broad and straight forward method using the mechanics to make a more balanced style, even if it meant sacraficing some of the flavor. Its that key difference that I feel makes both of these deserve to be on the wikia for whichever style someone is looking for that comes to our site.

and Cid, as to your first post, maybe its a little bit of both, I probably did go a little overboard on the descriptive text in the racial traits a bit, but thats because Im a little long winded sometimes. Also, I dont know you, so maybe you do have patience issues, I dont know. Im okay with getting rid of Competitive spirit, but I have 1 issue to address. When I made this race, I weighed my decisions with the following priority,  Accuracy to the series > Balance > Flavor > Mechanics. As such with accuracy to the series being top priority I took into account all the times that a Saiyan in the series wanted to see thier opponent reach thier full power/full potential (more often Vegeta than the others, but the others were also extremely competitive). If I were to put that as fluff, than I worry that it will be overlooked and it will somehow 'lose' some of its accuracy when someone plays it. Which is why I thought it up. -- The-Marksman 14:45, 6 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm going to jump in here. There is never a need to mix flavorful text with rules text. Being long winded has nothing to do with it. It is a matter of organization. What you can do to improve this article is move a large portion of the flavorful bits outside of the rules section. The rules sections of any D&D article is just supposed to describe the rules with perhaps a couple of flavorful bits added in to make it an interesting read. If you want to talk about actual traits of a particular race (such as in this case) you should talk about them in a description section of some kind. There are a few reasons to do this. The first is that the reader can easily reference the relevant rules bits when they are actually playing a character using these rules. The second is that it is a lot easier to check balance when the rules are clear and concise.


 * tldr; Split descriptive text away from rules text. Keep rules text clear and concise. --Aarnott 20:14, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

As to the Oozaru, I would be more than happy to change the wording, but I'll require help on how to reword it, so that the Oozaru is likely to destroy and level small towns, highly damage large cities, and slaughter any living thing around it mercilessly. The Oozaru transformation is actually quite powerful, I just havnt had a chance to upload ALL of the content I made to go with this (Oozaru template, custom feats, Saiyan Warrior base class, Legendary Super Saiyan prestige class, Saiyan paragon class, custom fusion spell, I have all written, I just need to find the time to upload it so the all of the dots can connect). So right now just a lycanthrope template doesnt sound like much, but when you clairfy that the template causes you to increase 2 size catagories, and gain a breath weapon which deals damage that scales based on your hit dice, a very nice strength bonus as well as improved grab and snatch it can be pretty deadly. The reason I went with full moon transformation is because that is what is accurate to the series.


 * Actually, I'm going to jump in here too. If you want to be accurate, it should probably be up to gargantuan or colossal sized. Also, control shape should always be available if you want to be accurate (see Dragonball GT). Just sayin'. That being said, I disagree with Cid that turning into a giant monkey as a DM plot device is going to ruin the game in some way. It's just as bad as regular lycanthropy in terms of "the player is out of control". A good DM will be able to handle this and not do something dickish like destroy all their equipment. I mean, the DM could just say "rocks fall, everyone dies", but then nobody would come back to his house. I guess my best suggestion would be to write a sidebar about good DMing (e.g. don't do stupid things with the Oozaru form and instead use it to drive the plot). --Aarnott 20:27, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

If anyone has a constructive suggestion to cut down on some of the racial area, than go ahead and let me know. Especially in reguards with allowing the player to retain control of the Oozaru form, while still keeping accurate to the series about attacking everything around. Thanks for the immediate feedback everyone, I appreciate your continued contribution to this conversation. -- The-Marksman 14:45, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Okay, I edited it to shorten it as best I could with the couple minutes I had before work, its just a rough sketch till I get home (so be kind on any grammatical errors for 24 hours please). I wanted to post what I had before I headed out so you guys could see it tonight and lemme know how Im doing with the shortening of it, I moved half of the stuff up to the flavor section like Aarnott requested, but I felt that so much of the Oozaru stuff was nessesary that I paragraphed it to make for easier reading to find what you want to know. Im going to be adding more up in phyiscal section to the Oozaru part to make it make sense when I get back, but I have to leave for work right now, any feedback tonight would be wonderful guys, ty for all the help! The-Marksman 01:11, 7 July 2011 (UTC)