Horror stories

But I know what you're thinking: when do we get characters that can deal 60 CON damage per turn? Well, here it is. This is possibly the lowlight the system right here. It demonstrates everything wrong with the soon-to-be GM's system. He doesn't understand how attacks are supposed to scale. He doesn't understand what the CON stat does. He doesn't know what an attack of oppurtunity is. And he most certainly did not pass grammar school.

Let's do the math out. Assuming full BAB progression, you get three attacks per turn at level 11. Assuming you were competent in melee, at that level, you could deal 33+3d4 CON damage in a single turn without saves. Hell, even at level 6, that's still 12+2d4 CON damage, enough to kill nearly anything that moves. This limits actual threats to undead, constructs and pretty much nothing else. Need to kill all tension in a campaign? Play this race.

And yes, the stat block is unfinished. He thinks this race needed to be made more powerful.

Alright, enough about races. Now we need to talk about classes.

Oh wait! No we can't, because there's even more stupid shit that comes in between. Here are the miscellaneous "homebrew rules" that got stuck in the middle of the document.

>Players naturally regain their Level in Health everyday.

Already covered in RAW, genius, and the term is Hit Dice.

>Natural 20s on Skill and Save checks doubles any bonuses.

Saves should automatically succeed on a 20, but that's at least one take on critical skill checks. I'll allow it.

>Characters start with only their Race’s native languages by default.

Oh, okay. There's no Common in this setting. If the party members don't share a race or coincidentally pick the same bonus languages, the party can't communicate, and the campaign comes to a screeching halt. According to the GM, this was by design. Wonderful gutting of the Linguistics skill.

>Language Skill starts at Base: 0 and each point put into it lets you learn one of these languages.

Yes, good work. That's what the Linguistics skill does.

>Unless it’s at Level one, you still have to ACTUALLY learn the language. And get one point in the language. You have a DC of 20 to effectively communicate with that language. Once per week if you have dedicated time to learning the language or made a successful roll on it you can increase it by 1 to a max of 20.

So to reiterate, you need to spend months or years learning a language before you can speak it, and even after learning it, still need to pass a rather hard check. Or, if you'd like, you can spend a week studying to raise the DC and m a k e i t h a r d e r t o s p e a k.

I did the math. At level 1, assuming you have 18 in your casting stat (and that he meant "ability modifier" instead of "stat point") and invest in both Spellcraft and Knowledge (Arcana), you have a 23% chance to learn a spell.

Yes, 23% fucking percent. I still am not over that. Right now, flip a coin twice. Did it come up heads both times? No? Fuck you, you can't cast Magic Missle. Didn't roll a 16 on your d20? No Cure Light Wounds for you.

So clearly, you are not intended to actually know any particular spells in this campaign, but that's okay. It turns out only one race is allowed to cast arcane spells anyway, a fact the GM only told us after I made a sorcerer of a different race and had to scrap. This also lead to the GM asking a question in total honesty that I feel summarizes the whole experience for me.

>Are druids divine casters?

Okay, there's that tangent. Now onto classes.

>massacred village

This is entirely just proving that liches are the master race.

All classes got the same amount of skill points per level, 5 + INT modifier. While I can understand wanting to give fighters and paladins something to do out of combat (besides being assholes, I mean), this also pretty much destroys the purpose of playing a bard, rogue, or investigator. I asked the GM if this was what he meant, and he confirmed: he was nerfing classes he felt were overpowered.

Divine casters had to worship a specific god. In canon there is one, maybe three gods at most, and all of them are Pure Paragon Goodness mary sues. That meant neutral or evil party members (which the GM encouraged, I'll get to that) were SOL as far as picking gods, and the GM refused to tell us what other gods he was adding to the setting, because it was "a surprise." Get used to hearing that excuse,

But that's not the worst thing to happen to classes. You see, in the d20 system, a fighter is only useful because he gains feats faster than other classes. Well, the GM apparently didn't know that, since he had the brilliant idea of removing feats from the game entirely.

Oh yeah.

In place of feats, we'd have a "Quest" mechanic that would allow us to choose our powers at character creation. No limit was set on this, and it showed. By the time I joined the group, the GM had allowed a player to take a Quest that effectively made him a gunslinger with unlimited grit. It's too bad he's not going to get things like Precise Shot ensuring he can never be useful in a melee.

The GM reasoned that feats were overpowered, and that his new racial traits would be an improvement. I tried reasoning with him that all members of a race would progress the same way, and thus give the player basically no control over his character's growth, but he wouldn't have it. After all, some feats are so essential that everyone takes them anyway, so might as well remove needing to take them. You'd think, then, that he'd remove the penalty for firing into melee, or make Power Attack just another combat maneuver, but apparently he mistook "removing the option" for "removing the necessity".

I silently wrote down "gains feats as a fighter" in my Quest box and tried to move on.

Is anyone actually reading this?

I am indeed reading this, and wondering exactly how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Type onward, OP, as if all the Mary-Sues in hell sought to slice your fingertips with their underpoweredkatanas.

Some minutia about races I forgot earlier.

First of all, there's a diminutive race that gets bonuses to hit in melee. Have fun dealing 1 nonlethal damage per attack, jackass.

You'll notice there's a stat that I blacked out while posting the races. That's because it's a fandom-specific term, but even if I showed you the word it wouldn't give any context; it was the equivalent of making "American" a skill. The GM never gave an answer as to what it actually did, only that it was "a surprise", but the best we could figure it was some stat that measured racial purity. The core races got +2 to it, monster races got 0 to it, and worryingly enough, the races that in canon represent black and indigenous people get a -2 to it. I was too scared to ask.

Finally, when Kevin asked the GM his reasoning for making some races clearly more powerful than others, and limited what classes each could play, his only answer was "despairity". Somehow his typo was more apt than he intended.

Okay dude. You can list the furry races now.