New character, new spell

With my new Bard I chose Otto's resistable dance instead of Charm person.

I was unhappy with charm person. It's a great spell in theory but in practice it's a hastle. The charmed persons are so fragile and harmless it's easier to just whack them with my medium BAB and -1 STR mod. What's worse, in the only Korthos combat that has any use for CC (Misery's peak, against the swarm of cultists on the ice stairs) my charmed persons woke up the facinated crowds.

I'm much happier with the replacement spell Otto's resistable dance. The target keeps dancing even after getting struck. The animation is fun to watch. The range is very short though so I'll have to get used to that. I've got to break my Cleric habits of being able to cast at distant targets.

Since these spells are new to me, I'm going to eschew Charm person for Suggestion. Looks more useful since it works on more than just persons. Shorter durration but once it takes effect there's no save to snap out of it early. Should make it more predictable and longer lasting in those rare cases I get a lucky roll against a high Will target.

Twinking level one

Although I was excited to play my new Bard, I was not so excited about running the Korthos stuff again -- especialy since I just finished running it the previous bard. So I twinked.

It was really easy actualy. I logged in with Fietor (Cleric 7) bought stuff from the auction house and mailed it to Darkbad. I sent myself a +2 sword, a flame something robe and a mithral shield (no arcane failure)! As it turns out the sword and shield are level two, so in my first solo quest I was stuck fighting empty handed. It was slow going and I would have lost except for the twink robe. As it turns out, it wasn't flame resistance, it was a flame counter-attack. Whenever anyone hits me, they get counter-attacked for 1d4 fire damage. All I had to do was take out the casters and then let the melees kick against the goad. Well that and not run out of HP. Luckily, I took Cure Light Wounds as my first spell so it was easy enough to survive the Collaborator. Partway through I pulled a dagger from a treasure chest and equiped it. No noticable change in damage.

 

 

But, now that the quest is done I'll have a Monsterous humanoid bane sword to play with. I know that for the first couple of levels the mobs get cleared so quickly it doesn't make sense to use my song on them. But I'm really looking forward to putting Fascinate on those troll and bugbear armies in Redwillow's ruins.

CharGen: Darkbad

Darkbad is my first real attempt at Bard. I gave him a 20 Charisma since CHA is a Bard's only casting statistic. I gave him an Intelligence of 14 so he can have more skills and a chance at unlocking those INT runes that no one in my pickup groups can ever seem to pry open. The rest goes into Constitution so he can survive combat.

For skills (8=6+2) I'm maxing out Perform, Concentration, Diplomacy, Haggle, Use magic device, Sneak, Move silently and using the rest (1 pt per level) to grab some jump, spot, ballance and tumble.

RIP Xeroic

I deleted  my first attempt at a bard. The problem with Xeroic ( pronounced /Zero-ic/ ) is that too many players pronounced his name like there was a 't' between 'r' and 'o'.

Also, I made INT a dump stat because I forgot about Concentration. So farewell Xeroic, we barely knew ye!

Bards rock? Who knew!

So last week I was running a Cleric through Stormcleave and I was very impressed by a Bard. He zerged ahead hypnotizing and facinating everything. The highlight was when he imprisoned a Giant Boss behind a wall of facinated black skeletons. All we had to do was follow along and pick them off one by one.

Anyway, I was so impressed by bards, I decided to start one of my own!