Talk:Helix Blade (3.5e Equipment)

Brain Storming

I hope I made this right, not meant to be published yet so I have the "no wiki" thing in there...

| | Anyway, I am just going to dump my initial ideas for this here and sort them out later. Feel free to let me know their power level or post any ideas of your own:

Enzymes

Enzymes are powerful catalysts, driving pretty much everything. They can speed up reactions, or are sometimes required for a reaction to take place at all. For enzyme based abilities I am thinking of speeding up how often poison damage happens and/or increasing it's damage. Digestion often requires specific enzymes for certain chemicals so I could see it maybe growing an arsenal of enzymes that damage certain things more. ie. Mithriase = enzyme that breaks up mithril.

Shape Shift

Being a DNA blade I definitely want it to have a good polymorph ability/abilities. Both Baleful and Beneficial would probably be best, I am trying to think of a unique take on polymorphing too so it's not redundant if you are already adept in polymorphing. Maybe the ability to partially express DNA from those you cut?

Heartbeats

The heartbeat is a power symbol of life, not all life has a heart of course but all the fluffiest kinds do. I was thinking the blade could grant a sort of blindsense/touchsense type thing allowing you to hear and pinpoint the beating hearts of those around you. Of course undead, constructs, etc would be immune to this effect.

Camouflage

I mentioned in the flavor that it was granted some of lifes greatest weapons. Camouflage 'tech' in nature is truly amazing. Probably one of the coolest is Cephalopod camo, individual skin pigment cells each under neuron control and each capable of shifting locations and colours. This ability could grant more than Hide bonuses, making your skin flash confusing patterns could recreate daze or other things like that. Some dragonflies change colour in response to temperature, so this type of concept might be able to be spun into a resist elements type thing too.

Fast Healing/Regeneration

One of the most amazing tools life has is the capacity for self-repair. Granting fast healing and/or regeneration (last ritual maybe?). The regenerative capabilities of Axotols allow even regeneration of parts of their brain, this is because they are essentially locked in a adolescent state making it a bit easier to build/rebuild structures. But still, maybe it can grant fast healing or some benefit even a bit below -10 HP. (Not that axotols can regenerate back from the dead, but still)

Reincarnating Blow

The blade values life. I was thinking to prevent the waste of life it could have an option to reincarnate those it kills Could be just a flavor thing ie they turn into a cloud of butterflies. Or could literally reincarnate them as the spell.

Intelligence

Considering having the blade awaken some intelligence. Would have the goals of preserving biodiversity. So not exactly an ethical paragon, it would probably prefer to cut down 100 common goblins instead of 1 more endangered species.

Adaptation/Evolution

Somehow able to display a species ability to adapt and evolve over time in a short period of time.

Suggestions

Heyo! I think this is an interesting concept, and my brain mad a connection between this an another article; What if, when you kill a foe with the blade, it attunes briefly to said creature, granting you on of its extraordinary abilities that you can use three times, or for three total minutes (Broken up into one-round increments as the user sees fit) before the attunement fades, or one of its supernatural or spell-like abilities once or for one minute total. This idea is drawn from the Blue Mage class, as its "spells" are actually the abilities of enemies they have slain.

Anyway, just thought I'd leave this here :D Have a nice day. --Zhenra-Khal (talk) 13:54, 31 January 2018 (MST)

Hey! Thanks for the reply. The atunement sounds like a good idea. I had to go sooner than I thought so I didnt get all my notes out. One is an RNAi gene knockout attack, temporarily stop an oppoments natural abilities or stuff like that. So those ideas could work great. Gene knock out on your opponent leading to gene insert in yourself. RNAi knockouts fully grown organisms don't usually persist especially if exposure stops. Same with gene inserts on fully grown things hard to filly express/persist the gene. So the time limit works for those too. Thanks again for the feedback! Enigma (talk) 14:24, 31 January 2018 (MST)

Request for input

Eiji-kun Leziad Luigifan18

You guys are the top 3 contributors of homebrew stuff I use/bookmark. I really admire and respect your work, so I thought I might as well reach out and see if any of you have any thoughts for my legacy weapon. I really like where it's going so I want to try having it be really strong when it launches. Also, I'm not sure this is how tagging works so if not I guess I'm yelling into the void. Oh well! Enigma (talk) 21:32, 31 January 2018 (MST)

The Eiji Input Device

Lo, I have been summoned.

I like the design of the blade. Much flavor, very stylish. I do see a problem with the price. Xenotech alone is 50k! But this sword starts at 5k. Either that's a typo or this is a massive steal of a deal. I could see waiving the cost of the al-inverse silver and the short sword since they are pennies compared to the xenotech, and the silver doesn't have any mechanical benefit, so the total starting cost probably should be 52k.

1st Ritual: Heartsense is actually really really strong, are you sure you want this to be a 1st level benefit? Also probably should be all organic creatures as it can be said constructs, elementals, and possibly even outsiders lack DNA. It would do well to damp its power.

The Enzyme coating works though I strongly discourage +1 CL to damage (remember you may be making 4 or more strikes a round), but... why steel?

No pre-reqs, I'm assuming this is work in progress. Generally I find it is best to set it to some level gate such as BAB or a skill rank amount, and some flavor pre-req like "must eat a creature from the plant kingdom" or whatever.

2nd Ritual: Gene Knockout has a weird DC. I am uncertain how well that scales, so I'll have to mull on that. Looks like a table is work in progress, but as a word of advice as written this will occur every hit. Generally that's both annoying for the DM who has to roll saves constantly and slowing down combat, and for the player who has more rolls if it happens to succeed. Consider condensing this down to a single effect, and/or making it only one save per round regardless of the number of hits. Also consider again if this is organic only.

Generic Recombination is potentially very dangerous. In particular Pun-Pun abuse via Sarruhk come to mind, but even without that semi-obscure cheese there are a loooot of (Ex) abilities which were never designed with the question of "what if a PC had this" in mind. Maybe ditch this one entirely, or limit it to a list like "any vision mode, fast healing or regeneration, etc". Though thinking about it I would immediately hunt down a hydra if fast healing is a part of it, their regen is broken.

Enzyme coasting 2 is... odd. Wait, are these things meant to destroy weapons and not creatures? That makes more sense, but... well, for this and all further Coating abilities I would say it like this: Ignore hardness up to 8, 10, 15, 20, etc. This means A) You've covered any other material so if your game is using Bronze your adamantium-eating blade isn't stopped by this substance and B) It's easier to define this in terms of breaking defense than adding more damage, which can certainly be abused.

3rd Ritual: Mitotic Regen. That's way too much fast healing. 1/2 HD will do (and HD, since CL implies you need to be a caster to use this weapon).

Enxyme Coating, see above.

4th Ritual: Nothing here.

5th Ritual: This is a really weird... benefit? I do like the idea of causing those slain by you to have their bodies destroyed by spontaneous swarming though. Even better if you had temporary control or at lease allyship of said swarms for a short time before dispersal. Then you can convert enemies into battlefield control.

Overall, needs work but there is something here. Mostly try and get a handle on Heartsense, Gene Knockout, Recombination, and add more stuff.

Oh, and there's something funky about your pricing as it jumps from 36k to 300k, what? I recommend just stealing the progression from one of my WoL for now, and I'll explain why I have done it that way later. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 21:59, 31 January 2018 (MST)

Wow, thanks for the input!

1st Ritual: Oops yeah I 100% meant it to not include certain creature types. I'll fic that up

So just the d8 for the enzyme? Uh well steel because I was making the progression of the enzymes hit different of the basic material types. Steel as the kind of basic one

Yeah pre-reqs and flavor of the rituals is a Work in Progress for sure

2nd Ritual: Gene knockout should only be organic for sure, save DCs is something I'll have to tinker with I guess. I've actually only been playing D&D for a few months, and am level 6. So there's lots of the power-scaling stuff I need help on.

Would having the abilities for a time limit work better? Like you could steal the regen but if it only lasts for a bit you'd have to either keep hunting hydras constantly to really have it. Maybe linking it with Gene knockout would be better? You can gain the racial bonus, spell like ability, ex ability but only if you randomly get it from rolling? Maybe in addition to a smaller limit.

Yeah the enzymes are supposed to damage weapons, armor, etc. I could replace them with different enzymes if I could think of better targets, admittedly hitting metals is a bit weird, but I mean they are super charged magic enzymes so I thought it could be cool haha. I originally had it deal with hardness, but if I understand right Xenotech already ignores all hardness so I just imagine this sword cutting through metals like butter. Maybe that's not the best angle for it though.

3rd Ritual: Okay, half CL it is

4th Ritual: Yeah, I need a 4th level ability. Maybe a polymorph effect of some sort. Or buffs as it enhances your own biology?

5th Ritual: Gaining control of their reincarnation would be cool. I admit this ones weird too and kind of mostly for the flavor I guess, not letting the biomass/life force go to waste. The way I understand it this technically prevents reincarnation though which...I dunno, is that good? :s

For all the price questions, honestly I copied the format from The Blade of Phys so I hadn't thought about that at all. Those are leftover from that. I'll probably keep focusing on polishing/making the abilities for now and then tackle the cost and rituals so I know the scaling a bit better.I'll definitely start the cost at the suggested 52k though it's not meant to bypass the xenotech costs at all.

Enigma (talk) 22:40, 31 January 2018 (MST)

Yeah, d8 for the enzyme probably though to be honest it won't be needed if it turned to bypass hardness. Yeah, xenotech does bypass hardness on its own but I'm actually not sure of the purpose of xenotech as it is, other than inflating the cost. Thus to drop the base cost and also to make this power of bypassing hardness useful, I'd drop xenotech. If you still wanted to keep xenotech's other cool option of hiding it away inside of yourself: hey, free 1st ritual power you don't need to create right there.

For scaling DCs, you can never go wrong with DC 10 + 1/2 HD + ability modifier. Unless you are doing something very specific, you probably never want to mess with that scaling. WotC was inconsistant early on (cough cough Assassin's Death Attack) but they seem to have standardized that for basically everything other than spells/spell-likes.

A time limit can work. Mind you it's a bit of a band aid but sometimes that is enough. As long as you rule out Sarruhk abuse you should be ok. FYI, the abuse I speak of is as follows: Sarruhk's have a BS ability to basically grant any power to a creature because they are the masters of creating species. A fine power for a DM's paw, a terrible power for a PC. Thus you grant the power to grant powers to your young kobold, then the kobold proceeds to grant all the powers unto itself and then oops Pun-pun. But yeah, time limit should work.

Half HD, not CL. Caster level implies something else, either forcing you to be a spellcaster to be effective or going off the weapons CL which is... weird and unclear.

I recommend reshuffling some abilities anyway. Heartsense deserves to be higher, you could even put it in the 4th ritual slot. Then you can make a more simple and less powerful 1st ritual in its place.

For forced reincarnation rather than swarmifying, may I recommend a variant on the spell cocoon from Spell Compendium? Mind you, this is potentially bad if you are reviving your enemies. It would be counterproductive if you finally slew your lifelong opponent, Draglore the Wrongbad only for him to pop up a week later as an half-elf, just as angry at you and just as powerful as last time. What stops that from happening? -- Eiji-kun (talk) 22:44, 31 January 2018 (MST)

I, uh, mostly like how it sounded to be honest. And the flavor of it. I did want it to be sort of biomancer type people adapting xenotechnology but if the template doesn't help that can just be backstory stuff. I'll swap the enzymes to bypass hardness and drop the damage. So each enzyme should bypass all material hardness and just scale it up through the rituals?

If I don't put a formula is "Fortitude save" assumed to be that formula then? I really want to include some varient of adding genes anyway and I thought the suggested bluemage type thing would be good. That's my specialty.

I'll add a 3 minute time limit then, if that would be enough?

Oh yeah, I thought CL was character level I think.

Reincarnating could be optional, but I also have a memory blank thing built in so Draglore would wake up as a half-elf and not want to be Wrongbad anymore. I'll check out cocoon, is it like a delayed reincarnate?

I'll also do a shuffle - Enigma (talk) 23:01, 31 January 2018 (MST)

Can't blame ya, it does sound neat. It just comes with baggage (and cost). Yeah, so the easiest way is just to be "bypass hardness of X" to cover everything. If you want to restrict it further you can specify of wood, stone, or metal which all materials to my memory fit in (or they say they are 'as metal' or 'as stone' for things like deep crystal and bone).

While sometimes you can leave it off, for example all (Su) abilities are assumed to follow the 10+1/2+thing formula, it's generally good practice not to. The shorthand for it is "The DCs of this ability as X based" where X is an ability score. Then people know it's either 10 + spell level + X for spells and spell likes, and 10 + 1/2 HD + X for everything else.

3 minutes is plenty short enough. May as well round it out to 5 minutes or 10 minutes then, just because a lot of things fall into those time categories. The minute difference between 3 and 10 isn't too much as it would be between measured in rounds vs measured in minutes. 10 minutes is also enough time to get use out of useful (Ex) abilities too post-combat.

Cocoon is indeed delayed reincarnate, I would have linked it but the whitelist didn't particularly like that URL and I'm not free enough to go looking for another/changing the whitelist. Googling it should get you some results, or check your Spell Compenduim if you have it. Having them wake up with a free modify memory or dominating dogma seems like a fair way of doing it. Or having a way to choose between swarmification and reincarnation so you don't actually revive the Dread Lord but you are free to bring back that mostly innocent bear you slew. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 00:16, 1 February 2018 (MST)

My flavour needs are satisfied by just keeping the backstory and adding that one little shout-out ability from the xenotech. I think that's enough anyway. Speaking of that, I chose the inverse silver stuff because it seems like it's supposed to be beneficial to shape changers and is the focus material for a homebrew domain of polymorph type spells that I can't remember the name of currently. So in that vein I'd like if it could be a focus booster or something for physical transmogrification powers/spells but is that too specific for a WoL? Like if a random fighter happens to get it all the other powers work for him even if he doesn't understand what's going on. But that ability would need a dead level or something for a guy like that, maybe? I guess I wish the silver did something like that naturally.

I think either of those spells would be great for the cocoon/reincarnate route. I think choosing which 'recycling' method happens when you kill something could be good. Depending on your party I wonder if it'd ever be good to kill a dying party member with that attack to bring them back for free, well it'd be dramatic at least. Again I'm only level 6, haha. I'm off to bed but I'll clean it up a bit more tomorrow then start working on the costs and rituals! Thanks so much for all the help so far :D

Oh, also, I believe you about the power level of Heartsense, but why is it such a strong effect? Because people can't hide/ambush you or because you don't need to hear/see in order to be able to fight? Enigma (talk) 01:01, 1 February 2018 (MST)

Sounds like a good enough reason for alchemical inverse silver to me. And I agree on the choice of recycling methods, go with that. The friendly use did not escape me, and given that reincarnation is an iffy sort (and one that would require you make the finishing blow), those downsides seemed good enough to grant technical revives at will, what with a weak cooldown in a cocoon and all.

As far as Heartsense it is like Blindsight, which is amazing. Blindsense alone the lesser version is amazing. Hide basically always fails against you and that's usually only out to 60 ft, almost making you immune to blinding except you still have a miss chance if you can't see the target. Blindsight has no miss chance, it's as good as immunity to blindness. And blindsight which can't be stopped by silence is even stronger. And then it's out to 100 ft.

Yeah, it's super good. The other big comparisons for strength are touchsight which basically has no counter, a few telepathy-sight options which require a mind to see the target, and lifesight which only effectively gives blindsight by illuminating living beings. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 01:38, 1 February 2018 (MST)

For the Gene Knockout, would making it once a round make a chart okay? Would that be strong enough with the regular fortitude save formula? This also seems like a good time to bring up that I was considering having a bonus/buff ability each level if the wielder has bio-energy to input. The example here would be input a charge or drain a charge and you get to pick off the chart instead of rolling. I don't want it to become thought of as a xeno-only sword or overload it or anything though.

Wording is something I'm worried about now that the mechanics are getting cleaned up. Is the reincarnating blow okay? I need to cite the spell compendium book still. I also added some power to modify memory, I figured that'd be okay because if you didn't reincarnate them they'd just be dead anyway as well as because it's the final ability.

I don't think you mentioned the hyper kinase enzyme so far, it was the only one that wasn't a metal specific one originally. Is there a more efficient way to do what I want there? I wanted it bypass resistance and immunity but somehow make it harder to get past immunity. It's always been my favourite of the enzymes so I just wanted to check.

Still playing with knockout/knock in gene mechanics in general. Would it work that they could gain access to anything beneficial knocked out with the first technique? Like knock out then steal an orcs bonus to strength. I'd like this to be more or less the defining ability set so I want to make sure it works smoothly and has a good power level. ALSO is it still balanced to have the time limit be able to be toggled? Like if you slay a hydra and manage to get regeneration but that was the last foe in the battle 10 minutes later its gone, unless you can turn it on and off and just have the abilities "Active" for 10 minutes. Should I also differentiate between if you steal a passive ability like regen vs a limited use ability like a Spell-Like ability?

Worked on the rituals some, I think they are okay other than maybe the 5th one. I like that requirement on the Pseudopod WoL because it encourages an interesting plot point. Not having a kid for the sake of more power but just having a kid in general. But that might be too exclusionary for what I want, so I'm still thinking of something that matches the thematic of the last ability.

Enigma (talk) 07:36, 1 February 2018 (MST)