What's the most munchkin character you can build?

[Moriden]

Refinement has no musts, The restriction your thinking of is for focused practitioners or sorcerers templates.

Looking it over, this...doesn't quite work. Since you have only Channeling you can't get Refinement except for Item Slots. So, 6 Focus Item Slots total. which isn't enough for all the bonuses you list (especially when they all need to be assigned to either offense or defense).

[Deadmanwalking]

Refinement has no musts, The restriction your thinking of is for focused practitioners or sorcerers templates.

Nope, check Channeling on p. 181. No Refinements for anything but Item Slots is an explicit restriction of the power.

[Moriden]

well foo. going to change that. ill just take the extra piont of refinement out and put it into evocation. will be back in a minute with the changes numbers.

[Deadmanwalking]

Alternately (for slightly more brokenness) you could instead get Evocation and have your one Refinement be in Specialization (for a total of +2 Power, +1 Control with Fire) though you'd then only have 2 Focus Item Slots (for +2 Off. Power). That'll still all fit in the staff, and his defense will be at 5 shifts, but his offense will drop from 8 to 7.

As a suggestion. Though it'd be more broken if you had the Focus grant +2 Off. Control. That'd give you only Weapon 5, but, with Lawbreaker, a 9 on attacks.

[Moriden]

went ahead and changed channeling to evocation and dropped the second level of refinement.
leaving his focus items at +3 power, +1 control, for the 2 base F.I. slots and +2 from one level of refinement. with a base conviction of +3 that's a base of 7 shifts of power.

His discipline is 4 + 1 from the focus item and +2 from lawbreaker. =7
So he'd want to only use 5 shifts of power for his "shield" but his offensive rotes basically remain unchanged.

Alternatively we could switch all of the power bonuses to control and while it would make even less sense conteptually due to the fact that control is significantly better for offense when not useing rotes hed hit like a freight train.
which would look something like

conviction 3 stays at three.
Discipline 4  +2 lawbreaker, +4 Focus item, +1 base specialization. =11

[Falar]

Seeing as it's a Staff of Death, not of Roasting, I think it might also work better thematically as Spirit and have the rotes literally rend flesh and such like that, splitting it open right there and spilling blood. Have the I am the Fire cloak you in shadows and dull burning light in a coruscating pattern of colors.

Granted, that's not about breaking the character, just thematicality, but I think it would look a whole metric asston better and creepier.

[Moriden]

Granted, that's not about breaking the character, just thematicality, but I think it would look a whole metric asston better and creepier.

Agreed and doing it that way would justify changing the bonuses to control instead of power. making for significantly more powerful attacks and weaker defense's.

[Deadmanwalking]

Okay, away from that character and back on to the general topic:

Clearly, certain Physical Immunities are particularly unbalancing. A Physical Immunity to all non-Water based Magic would likewise be a mere -1, and powerful out of proportion to it's cost. It'd likely be best to disallow the original Catche's points being used on Physical Immunity in general, which is what I'd do.

Likewise, Lawbreaker (First) is potentially extremely dangerous if taken twice, and also extremely out-of-theme for most games.

Emotional Vampire and particularly Blood-Drinker (sans the Red Court Infected's restriction on killing) are also potentially dangerous combined with Inhuman or better Recovery (especially if taken without Feeding Dependency), since they allow a full healing period by killing a foe. A condition that could crop up quite a bit in fighting things where nobody cares if they die, and could easily heal almost all their damage once every fight. This is obviously only a problem when fighting large numbers of relatively weak foes.

[Moriden]

Clearly, certain Physical Immunities are particularly unbalancing. A Physical Immunity to all non-Water based Magic would likewise be a mere -1, and powerful out of proportion to it's cost.

Not sure how you'd accomplish that, could you walk me through the math?

[Deadmanwalking]

Not sure how you'd accomplish that, could you walk me through the math?

Sure, the same way you did the weapon immunity:

Physical Immunity (-8)
The Catch: Water Magic (+3)
The Catch (Stacked): Non-magical attacks (+5)-We know this for a fact, look at Ogres.

Assuming you have no other Toughness powers, this works well, actually. The Catch has to be applicable to the restricted scope of the Physical Immunity (which this one is), but it works.

[arentol]

Your PI/Toughness is still broken you know. It is NOTHING AT ALL like the example on page 187 no matter how much you insist that it is.

Here is how the example on 187 works...

Supernatural Toughness (-4)
The Catch: vulnerable to cold (+3)
Total = -1

Physical Immunity (-8)
The Catch (stacked)*: Immune only to fire (+5)
Total = -3

Total toughness powers refresh cost (-4)  from the book: "the demon gets a total of +8 toward his Toughness powers, so his total refresh cost is only –4"

Here is what you should have done:

Physical immunity (-8)
Stacked catch:  Not a Weapon +2, Easy to come by +2, Can be researched +1  [+5]
Total (-3)

Supernatural Recovery (-4)
The Catch: Vulnerable to Obsidian +2, Can be researched +1 [+3]
Total (-1)

Human Form 0
Affects Supernatural Recovery (-1 power, so this is a 0 point ability)
Involuntary Change: When attacked (+1)

Total cost of toughness powers using this method is -3 instead of the -2 you pulled out of thin air.

However, you could get it to -2 pretty easily. Just have the Human Form affect all toughness powers. Then those powers would be exactly as in my example, but Human form would have a base of +1 and total of +2. Enemies would then get one chance to attack you before your defenses kicked in.

The core mistake you seem to be making is that you are not handling each power independently, though that is also a problem made by the rule book. The book has a massive hole because of the way it handles combining of toughness powers and toughness catches.

[Deadmanwalking]

There's not technically any reason the original Catch's discount can't can't apply to Physical Immunity. It's not how the example critter does it...but it could by the rules do precisely that. I think that's idiotic, and would never allow it, but it's technically legal, barring errata.

[luminos]

I think that the correct interpretation, which would disallow your -1 immunity to everything not water magic, is that a damage source from either catch bypasses the physical immunity.  so your -1 physical immunity would be bypassed by both water magic and non-magic attacks.  That is still pretty powerful, but its a little bit more reasonable. 

[Deadmanwalking]

I think that the correct interpretation, which would disallow your -1 immunity to everything not water magic, is that a damage source from either catch bypasses the physical immunity.  so your -1 physical immunity would be bypassed by both water magic and non-magic attacks.  That is still pretty powerful, but its a little bit more reasonable. 

Oh, you're absolutely right. It's an immunity to all non-Water based magic only, I never meant to imply otherwise. Though I can see how you'd take it that way, but, well, -1 for immunity to almost all magic? That sounds too cheap to me.

[arentol]

There's not technically any reason the original Catch's discount can't can't apply to Physical Immunity. It's not how the example critter does it...but it could by the rules do precisely that. I think that's idiotic, and would never allow it, but it's technically legal, barring errata.

I do see what you are saying, and I agree. Overall the rules on toughness are actually VERY broke anyway. Example:

Inhuman Toughness -4
Inhuman Recovery -2
The Catch +3
Total cost: -4-2+3 = -3

Human Form +?
Affects Inhuman Recovery ONLY

So is Human Form 0 or +1?

It is clear in this situation though:

Inhuman Recovery -2
The Catch +3
Total cost: -1 (minimum cost)

Human Form +0
Affects Inhuman Recovery ONLY

Then there is this:
Inhuman Toughness -2
Inhuman Recovery -2
The Catch +3
Total cost: -2-2+3 = -1, but there is a -1 minimum cost per power, so it is actually a total cost of -2. However, how do we right this on a character sheet since you don't actually sum these things normally (see the many examples in OW).


All this is really the core problem that Moridens idea is exploiting, and I am dang glad he brought this up because it needs to be fixed in all these variations that people have posted here.