Cory: My name is Mare Do Well and I am an Earth Pony Swordmage. I'm also part Unicorn and part Pegasus. My special talent is search and rescue. I'm quick to adapt and can fly to different places in a flash.
DM: ... I see you haven't quite transitioned to 4e yet.
Cory: I also got rid of that arcane spell failure chance by taking vow of silence as a flaw. Oh yeah. One more thing. My... um... mark also boosts my magic to the point where I can lift multiple heavy objects at once.
DM: You mean your cutie mark?
Cory: Yeah. That.
Applejack: You wouldn't think that just a couple hours ago, we had tah drag 'em here kickin' 'n screamin'.
Power creep definitely becomes a problem as a campaign runs on. But starting out with overpowered characters right out of creation? I can't even imagine.
Don't swordmages need a proper weapon to be effective? Or can they work with throw-able / improvised weapons as well?
If that's the case, I can imagine him lobbing enchanted giant boulders from the sky, essentially carpet-bombing his enemies.
Also, how does a "search and rescue" cutie mark boost his magic so much (especially since he's only half-unicorn), excluding situations where he has to rescue someone from rubble with it?
Probably treating the unicorn's horn as a natural weapon. And boosting his magic? Well he has the flaws to counter it. Vow of silence, color blind, trouble with math, no social skill, lactose intolerant, multiple personalities, no table manners... Yea, DM is really regretting the flaw house rule now
Short Term Memory Loss (but it's countered with Photographic Memory perk, so hey, free feat points!), Pacifist, Bloodlust (to cancel out Pacifist), Dark Secret: Plays the Accordian, Dark Secret: Really a Well Adjusted and Respected Member of Society Just Pretending to Have a Dark History, Dark Secret: Not Gay...
Genius ditz, book dumb(cancels each other out)Dark secret: Once played a campaign of F.A.T.A.L., Dark secret: Sings in the shower, dwarfism, giantism, club feet...
But of course, a skilled DM can make a player regret taking too many flaws.
Player: I'll take deathly allergic to cattle for those extra skill points. There's no way we'll need to go near a farm.
DM: You are stampeded by wild cows.
I had one player that I had to say 'no' to repeatedly because he'd take too many flaws to keep track of. I think it was 1287 points worth of disadvantages in GURPS (for a 150 pt game with a 50 point disadvantage limit) including more than 30 personality flaws and at least twelve enemies.
He whined about it. A lot. "But I need all these to flesh out my character!"
And then sulked about how without those disadvantages he'd be bored... ugh... x.x
He ended up ONLY having enough for 150 million dollars worth of magical items from Wealth. That's all he put the points into. I think originally he owned the universe or something.
Naw, let him have it. And oh by the way, those flaws, he has to role play them when ever they come up. And they will be coming up. Like every fricken time there is a social skills check, maybe a few while he's crossing the street. Also the 12 enemies, there will be at least one in every social ladder of society, most of them are in a position of authority. Mayors, crime bosses, the local sheriff. I call it the moody pregnant Shih Tzu's obedience school campaign, otherwise known as the winy little B****es rehabilitation program.
I could have literally made the entire campaign about punishing him for his flaws and still would have only been dealing with about 10% of them. There were just too many.
That just makes it easier to punish him for thinking that he is entitled to more than his fellow players. Yep, you should never try to pull that if I ever become a DM, I'll screw you over worse than a Genie.
Two questions though, if he was that bad why keep him in the group? And what kind of backstory can he come up with to justify the flaws?
The only backstory that could justify that many enemies and social flaws is already taken by Wolverine. However, one of his flaws could have been a nagging feeling that he was a ripoff of someone cooler than he was.
He's usually the GM. And he's a pretty good GM. He's also an active and imaginative player once you actually start playing -- it's just character creation that's like pulling teeth. x.x
He moved away in the middle of the campaign though. v.v
Don't forget the flaws technically edible, tastes good to fire hydrants, specific hatred of computers, technophobic, Anatidaephobia(The fear that somewhere, there is a duck watching you), arch nemesis, surrounded by disaster, and fear of intimacy.
Interesting choices on that point buy. I can't figure out how it works out to 22 points. Everything I've tried comes out too high or (assuming the race has +2 in Int and one other ability) too low.
If both the unicorn and pegasi genes are recessive, and (because magic) when both are present, the result is an Earth pony (like in Shadowrun with an elf and dwarf parent, if they get both metatypes they are always human), then you could argue that the cakes each had one parent that was a pegasi and one that was a unicorn, resulting in fraternal twins that got both the recessive genes of each species respectively.
Still can't be an earth pony that's one half unicorn and one half pegasis, that's an oxymoron. Course anything is possible with the mary sues and munkins alike.
Given that he was made by Cory, really it's just a case of Cory only caring about math when it comes to min-maxing. That's the only logic at play here.
Shifty eyes points to the latter. But I think it could be a solid "one parent pegasus, one parent unicorn" situation. That phenotypically that means he's half unicorn and half pegasus. Genotypically its more complicated than that, but if you were to just look at a family picture you would see a half unicorn, half pegasus earth pony.
It works better if you don't overthink it.
The screen shots definitely aren't helping, though.
I don't understand why so many people go with "Mrs. Cake cheated on her husband" when it wouldn't explain how they got both a pegasus and a unicorn. Pony genetics just work differently, a lot of things in Equestria do.
Recessive genes can linger in a family for generations before expressing. But if we assume that pony genetics work like real world genetics, both parents would have had to have both unicorn and pegasus recessive genes.
Simple. Start with an earth pony, and then add the 1/2 pegasus and 1/2 unicorn templates.
It's sort of like being a half-celestial half-dragon half-fiend half-elf. There's nothing saying you can't use more than one of those templates at once (at least not in 3.5. I don't know about 4.0).
A lot depends on what exactly each "half" template actually represent.
for instance: imagine that the three pony races are basically the same the exception being an organ channelling their magic which is unique to the subspecies, the horn and some connected parts of the brain for unicorns, wings and collected muscles for pegasus and, say special bone composition for earth ponies.
A 1/2 pegasus might then have a hybrid of the wing muscle type and the baseline muscle type and a 1/2 unicorn a hybrid of the horn skull and synapses.
A 1/2 unicorn, 1/2 half pegasus Earthpony would then be an earthpony with both traits due to some quirk of genetics.
Yea, except that in the pony universe, there are no unicorn pegasus hybrids with the exception of three, all of them royalty and at least 2 of them immortals. If the dominate traits of each race can be passed down to the children, then there should be more unicorn/pegasi hybrids in Equestria. (And I am only using that as my example because it's harder to prove the earth pony hybrid does or doesn't exist.)
Well, isn't it possible that Mr and Ms. Cake each had a parent who was half unicorn or pegasus? Sure, the gene could be recessive and could conceivably come up in the babies. Especially since each of the 3 races has their own brand of magic, and maybe which race the baby is comes down to 1/4 parts genetics and 3/4 parts magic coin flip :P.
In canon there is no such thing as a "half-Unicorn" or a "half-pegasus", you are the type of pony you are, no matter who your parents might be.
Also the Sister are Unicorn/Pegasus/Earth pony hybrids* not just Unicorn/Pegasus hybrids. (the earthpony part is most immediately visible through their size)
*and gods in Celestia's/Luna's case (don't know if the same is true for cadence)
My experience is that the worst game I've run that gets into bad power-creep is superheros in GURPS. Once characters hit something like 300 points, they all become The Tick.
...sometimes mentally too XD
My DM house rules in flaws (we use pathfinder for our system), but he limits everyone to just 1 flaw (sometimes 2, if we're playing a campaign that's meant to have powerful player characters). It seems to work pretty well.
“At least I didn’t arrive six hours late! And I’ll have you know that Alicorns are perfectly legal PCs!” Twilight snapped, slamming her hoof on the table so hard that it sent cheese puffs and dice flying. “They have a level adjustment of 3!”
Wait 19 AC on a swordmage? That's terrible by normal standards (Most swordmages start with 20-21 at first level)
By power gaming standards I'd expect something like 25 AC 20 Will 21 Reflex and 18 Fort...
Rarity: Let us never speak of this again.
TS: I agree.
AJ: Eyup.
FS: Thats for the best.
PP: I dunno, they werent that bad.
RD: You kidding? There's a line between "awesome" and just plain "sad".
Probably mentioned sometime in past posts, I think by you Umiyuri, but to serve as a reminder, an alicorn is actually what the unicorn's horn is made out of. Alicorn didn't offically become a term for a wing unicorn until the Piers Anthony novel Bearing an Hourglass, at least according to wiki. But screw it, the fans know what everyone are talking about with Alicorns. Why change it?
Power creep definitely becomes a problem as a campaign runs on. But starting out with overpowered characters right out of creation? I can't even imagine.