Talk:Deep Sea Fishman (3.5e Race)

Kassupernova: It would seem i need to create a profile. lol. If there is a mod reading this, there is a blank "Authors" box I may have messed up '<' I'm sorry. Please remove the blank one without deleting the page or the filled one. Thank you!

Looks like a copy paste error, easy fix. By the way you can sign your posts by typing four tildes (aka ~~~~). -- Eiji-kun (talk) 03:54, 14 December 2017 (MST)

Created an account lol, I'll see what I can do '3' Kassupernova (talk) 15:40, 14 December 2017 (MST)

Any opinions on Level adjustment and/or ECL? Kassupernova (talk) 15:42, 14 December 2017 (MST)

Level Adjustment.

So, his many abilities seem pretty powerful, and I've tried to make them so that they scale with his levels a little. They seem strong at lower levels and not too overpowered at later levels. The abilities are also directed to be used specifically for large creatures and smaller. Now... these abilities are, however, very situational and have considerable risk involved. Swallow Whole in particular, can give the opponent that is swallowed opportunity to due serious damage. The fact that many large creatures will have high strength checks and/or slashing or piercing natural weapons is a factor. If the enemy is immune or resistant to poison is a factor. The fact that the AC in the stomach is 10+ 1/2 the Fishman's natural armor and nothing else. I gave it 4 natural armor to give his belly 2 more AC, but I know how powerful natural armor is, so I made him unable to wear medium or heavy armor. It's Frightening Presence I balanced pretty well (it can work once per turn on one enemy, only), but it only works in the dark. I didn't want its racial abilities to be useless at higher levels so I add "+1/2 of Fishman's HD" to the DC's. And the Light Sensitivity is a HUGE factor to balance. I know that it should be a strong race, but it's SO situational that being anywhere with plenty of light, no water to swim in, and no mud, rock or sand would make him a super weak race. I've placed many limiters to balance the situationally strong abilities and can't decide on an appropriate Level Adjustment. Please Help. lol ---Kassupernova (talk) 23:06, 15 December 2017 (MST)

Sorry, I meant to get to this earlier but, well, life and all.

So LA 1 right? Let's see, +2/+2 stats, not bad. It has a decent swim, darkvision, light sensitivity (which actually isn't that big of a deal, I'll explain more on that later), oooo, +4 natural armor is pretty good.

Amphibious is fine, as is pressure resistance. These things are more or less non-issues since they are expected for anything that wants to play in the two possible major environments for it (underwater and on land).

I've run into my first big problem: Frightful Presence. The glowing eyes thing is really cool. Then there is the intimidate check, which has its own rules but then seems to replace them with a check vs fear rather than shaken, which is what intimidate does (disregarding fear stacking). It's a particular check too, but then it becomes a DC Will save vs fear. So it really has 0 mechanics in line with intimidate, and it is unclear if you even make an intimidate check or not, or if the range is still limited to melee.

While shaken is a fine early status effect, fear is "save vs lose". I'm not saying you can't do it, but this is a pretty big part of what your LA probably should be.

Then we have the Long Tongue. The mechanics are fine, but I have to ask if the range is your reach +5, or just a reach weapon (which is your reach x2). If I'm Huge, is my tongue 20 ft long or 30 ft long? The tongue comes with Improved Grab which is fairly huge especially with +4 grapple (more on that later) and +2 strength. These guys are definitely built to be grapplemancers. The strength of Improved Grab is pretty serious, but so far we're still LA 1 I think.

Swallow Whole, while definitely promoting the grapplemancer focus, is almost not an issue compared to Improved Grab. Neither is the bite a problem. No, the problem actually comes from what comes next: Poison. That's actually some pretty hardcore poison, and while one has to be swallowed in order to be affected by it when you are swallowed you are so dead dead dead. You'll wither away long before you escape as you proc ability damage every round, nevermind the secondary effects of the poison.

Oh, a side note: Bites deal bludgeoning/piercing/slashing. Is there a reason yours only does piercing/slashing?

I notice the bite is "large". Along with the +4 grapple and effective large for swallow whole, I wondered if you intended to give these things powerful build? Why not just use that?

As is, it may not actually be LA 1, it might be LA 2. These things destroy any creature they can grapple. I don't know if you want to drop things down so its LA 1, or just accept it as LA 2 and maybe give it either another +2 stat, or +4 to an existing stat, but there you go. Fix how Frightful Presence works as well, and clarify how Long Tongue's reach works.

Oh, Light Blindness. Right, so that actually isn't a huge deal. Except for sudden changes in lighting conditions, you're just dazzled which is the most useless of all status debuffs. And its resolved with like a 50gp item which are basically shades. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 18:30, 17 December 2017 (MST)

So, I intended to make them able to intimidate and grapple large creatures and have their abilities scale into higher levels. Intimidate and grapple get minuses to creatures that are a size larger than you and so on, so I included the "treated as a large creature" parts.

The Frightful Presence, that I indeed do need to alter, was intended to affect one enemy (in the dark) within the range of a bullseye lantern. I thought that limiting the number of affected targets and limiting when and where you can use it would be balanced by bumping up the fear level by 1 and making it last for 1d6 rounds.

If the player were to have their size increased to large or huge, I wouldn't think the tongue would be treated as a reach weapon. I don't think it'd be mechanically useful to have them reach three times as far to grapple and swallow a gargantuan creature. Even if they did manage to kill the thing (without getting torn open first), I don't think they'd have the time to digest it before they changed back, assuming it was a temporary effect.

But say the Long Tongue and Bite weapon sizes do increase when the creature does, would that increase their range, as well?

I made the Bite a large weapon to up the damage from 1d6 to 1d8. As for the damage type... I got that bit from a shark-fishman variant on another homebrew dndwiki site. I guess you /could/ chalk it up to the fishman's protruding jaw, giving it more forward-back movement than up and down (goblin sharks are scary). But I don't mind it being bludgeoning as well.

Maybe I should add Shaken to Light Weakness. lol

In regard to Powerful Build, I just wanted it to affect the intimidate, tongue grapple and swallow mechanics. Plus, now it's stack-able. ---Kassupernova (talk) 22:13, 19 December 2017 (MST)