Wow, Emily. Way to piss Cory off.

Tell a story about totally getting showed up by a way more powerful character, preferably of the same class as you.

Not sure if this counts, but once in Pathfinder, my very non-optimized hobgoblin alchemist character tracked down his tribe's killer (in a subplot we like to run within larger campaigns) to a large mill the villain was using for his base of operations. My teammates followed, because you never split the party, and also because the villain was almost two times our level. In the party was a human rogue, ridiculously combat-oriented to make him "the best assassin evah!" We were all level 5 at that point, and his attack modifier with the enchanted dagger was something like +10.

So, my alchemist got past the villain's traps and confronted him in his small lair upstairs. The villain, a cunning but frail wizard was a knight templar style monster extreminator (who, as it later turned out, was part of an organization that we ran across on a regular basis), who didn't see anything wrong with wiping an entire hobgoblin tribe off the face of the earth. Granted, my tribe hadn't been the nicest bunch of monsters you could run across in our campaign world, but dammit, they were family. With a vengeful glare in his eyes, the alchemist prepared to drink the special mutagen that enhanced his strength and granted electricity resistance in order to battle the level 9 lightning bolt spamming wizard to the death. I fully expected the fight to be tough, as even though the wizard was squishy, he was level 9 and battle-hardened. My character didn't care though. One of us would die today. Oh, sweet, sweet revenge, you mass-murdering, self-righteous piece of tasty human flesh, you!

Then my party showed up, intitiative was rolled, the darned assassin went first with his darned dagger and one-hit sneak attacked the wizard to the death. He thought that was hilarious. I was pretty pissed off.

So, I recently joined an online game of Pathfinder. While I'm not exactly new to pen and paper games, this was only my second time using PF, and I still hadn't quite gotten used to just how important magic items were.

Anyway, we started at level 5, and I rolled a Dwarf Cavalier (whose mount was a kickass, moderately intelligent griffon). He was built pretty decently, and none of the other players had rolled super-powered characters, so the first couple sessions went pretty well.

However, a new player joined at level 7, after about 24 hours had passed in game and our characters had barely earned any extra cash. They ended up building an Oracle with Magic Item/Armor/Weapon making feats, allowing them to start off with several thousand more gold than the rest of us and buy their gear at half the cost, and it certainly didn't hurt that the player really knew how to choose their feats.

Needless to say, me and the rest of the party felt a little inadequate when we took a look at their character sheet, with both Charisma and AC approaching 30. Though no one directly complained, the new player actually ended up nerfing their Oracle to avoid inciting a riot. Though being fair, they were playing the game perfectly right; it was mostly a combination of the rest of the party's inexperience and the GM not giving us money that led to the power gap.

Luckily, things calmed down after a couple sessions went by, and we quickly got used to being able to get our magic gear at half price.

I homebrewed a mecha campaign recently and our party ended up fighting these bug things that take over technology and control it for their own purposes. Our party consisted of a sniper a brawler and a ship captain. The first mook they fought managed to keep up with them and almost critically damage a part of the brawlers robot. as the fight went on it was clear they needed help. One of the defenders of the planet showed up and using his barrier blocked an entire volley of cannon fire and then ripped the engine out of the enemy's Ace Custom robot in one turn. The sniper was still giving consistent damage but the brawler kept having problems with his guns and the enemy was small and fast enough to dodge most melee strikes. That session ended early and next session someone new joined equipped with gravity bombs and ended up killing everyone with a black hole........... My friends find it hard to take the session seriously anyway

a game of Monte Cooks D20 World of darkness, I was a social specked mage going off CHA with tweaked out Diplomacy, Bluff, Sense Motive. Our Resident Munchkin was an INT monster mage With Maxed Spellcraft as well as every other relavent science skill in the books. Due to how the skill system worked he started with a 3 higher modifer to spellcraft than me that i thought wasn't a big deal at first. Then his science skills allowed him to invent an masterwork Spellcraft tool giving him an extra+2 and used this to attract a lab assistant helper for a +2 aid another bonus, then he took 20 in his lab rolls while i was off helping the police with a murder investigation and his mystery project was a self only permanent skill boost spell for spellcraft netting him a magical +20 to all spellcraft checks forever. (new spells simply took a spellcraft check and a few hours research and practice in this system)

See, bullshit like "permanent stat increases" is why I refuse to play Monte Cook's WoD. As if Mages weren't ridiculously OP enough, he had to go and give them Archmage power at level one.

wow. this is such a good explaination for what is going to follow!!!
I can't wait! ^.^

Well its less optimal than 2 handed weapons for Str/power attack builds but there are builds out there that make multi weapon fighting the superior choice. Most of those builds have 8+ bard levels which i'm pretty sure Corey would rather die than play but they do work at what they do.

Wait so... knowing what we know about the future of One Piece that means that eventually, Corey asks...

Heheh.

To properly optimize the two weapon fighting build, never stop at two weapons. There is a feat tree (available to anyone) called multiweapon fighting. Though intended for monsters with 3 or more hands, it is relatively trivial to find weapons that don't strictly speaking require use of your hands and there's nothing stopping a player character from taking it. A favorite build of mine uses boot daggers and poison rings (which can be worn on each finger, albeit only for one point of damage before modifications) for a whopping 12 attacks per round without dancing weapons. Sure the penalty is relatively high fore a few levels, but eventually the single class rogue build of this (which is not even close to the best) can be hitting for 240 d6 + 12*(str) + (any enchantments you might have) per round relatively trivially by level 9. To make matters worse (better) if you shell out the cash to make these throwing weapons you can do this all at range making you look roughly like a swarm of locusts made out of weapons.

Could you tell me exactly what feats

Multiweapon fighting from savage species.

If you fight naked, you can wear a third poison ring. It gives you a penalty to seduction rolls, but the extra attack in combat is totally worth it! While you're at it, get yoyr nipples pierced and put poison rings in them!

A female character would have a penalty to hit for the third one, due to it being in such an awkward place. However, the nipple rings would hit normally, due to the breasts sticking out. Possibly with a bonus, knowing most teenage boys.

For maximum effectiveness, you would probably want to use a character with male organs, but breaats.

Yeah, I just explained a way to argue for combat bonuses for transsexual characters. Go ahead, I dare you.

Get creative! Your DM will love you for it!

I feel like there's a lot of things I could say in response to this. But I won't. And I think that readers will thank me for that.

I was once the douche making another party member feel bad (unintentionally). I was playing a conjurer and my friend was playing a grapple based fighter. Normally we wouldn't overlap much, but I had the clever idea of taking Evard's Black Tentacles. For those of you who don't know, this spell allows you to summon dark tentacles that grapple everything in an area of effect. Splice in a few feats that make anything you summon more powerful (increased strength modifiers go a long way when the thing you're summoning can't be killed) and suddenly you have a neigh unstoppable grapple machine with a ton of added benefits. Sure, my friend could usually wrestle a dragon to the ground, but I could do it to an army... of demons... twice per round. Suffice to say my friend felt rather inadequate, well, he would have except that at one point he rolled 3 consecutive 20's and our DM ruled that his crushing pin simply popped the Balor he was grappling.

Ah, Grapple tweaking.

I think I might have mentioned this before, but the Savage Species 3.5 book lets you make the most OP creations ever- especially with the Tauric template (like Centaur, not Minotaur).

Human Barbarian Polar Ursaur (polar bear body for legs) with maxed out strength and a couple of magical strength boosting items. Had a push/drag of a couple TONS, and had the Bear's ability to grapple.

At one point, managed to push a full grown redwood onto a fire giant. At another, managed to pin a Colossal Gold Dragon, when the Colossal Treant druid shapeshifter couldn't. Good times, good times.


Oh, did I mention that this was only with a +4 level adjustment? So I was a level 10 barbarian going toe to toe with foes the roughly level 17 party was having some trouble dealing with.


Though there was a moment in that campaign where we'd come upon a group of Hill Giants (about 5?) that were supposed to be the next major combat for us. The Archmage of the party did a prismatic spray and managed to banish them all to the plane of positive energy.

I think I am that guy in my party currently. My character was always a bit stronger than the others being a well optimized archer ranger (D&D 4th ed), and some of their builds weren't terribly optimized, but I didn't overshadow them too much until we reached level 11 or so. Actually it started a bit before that time, but that is when they started to notice it. You see at level 9 I got a wish, and since I loved using ropes attatched to arrows and had had a few pieces of magical ammunition I decided to continue my streak of pretending to be Hawkeye/Green Arrow and wished for a quiver that cold grant me any magical arrow I desired. The way it was ruled was that I would have to roll to see if I could get any ammunition that wasn't in the books for if I wanted a very specific magical effect there, but I could use any arrows from the books without any chance of failure. And rangers are very good at firing lots of arrows in a round. Normally magical ammunition isin't too cheap because it costs you money (about 1/10th of a normal magic item of that level) and is one use. When you can use as many as you want, and some of them can significantly add to your damage, then you start to really overpower the party. Especially since the paragon path I took lets me fire more arrows on an action point and has generally increased my accuracy and damage (as well as mostly negating my weakness to melee that I had before).

Now, I know I should be good and drop back my character's power a bit, but if I did that then I would probably get crushed by the encounters as sometimes the party will split off, and I'll often be the only one left to fight the main bad guys of that story segment (not to mention that in the past they've threatened to gang up and kill my character for no good reason, so I'm worried about if that ever pops up again, for how my guy could defend himself)

The DM has been pretty good about balancing out loot being given to them so they are on more even footing and my guy seems more balanced with the party provided I don't alpha strike too much.

Seems like the easiest way to sort that out would be to dial back on your arrow selections. To the casual eye, it looks like your guy is nerfed because he's not hitting the ridiculous numbers of damage that he used to. But if you need to deal with the Big Bad or your party coming for you, break out your A game again. Nerfing, right up until you have a need to un-nerf yourself.

Sounds like the problem was that he got a Wish at level 9

I believe there is an arcane archer feat that allows you to summon magic automatically reloading +5 arrows, and the ability to imbue them with fire, ice, electricity, or force damage. That said, I am not sure, as I have never managed to get a ranger high enough to take the prestige class. It was, however, my chosen class in DDO, and at endgame, my damage output was rivaled only the wizard. And not only that, I was providing party buffs and minor heals, too. All that, with suboptimal gear. I didn't even have the best bow, which was double the strength mine was. 2d12 is good for a bow, right?

Rangers are waaay more dangerous than most gamers give them credit for. Especially since I could hit beholders from outside their range. You have no idea how cool it is to be the only one to keep your buffs and be able to kill the beholder before anyone else can reach it. 2d6 with +5 arrows, imbued with force damage. Fired four at a time, five times per round.

Have I mentioned how incredibly broken rangers can get? There are feats to double your effective range. Not in DDO, though, sadly.

Not really familiar with 4th edition, but my last character in 3.5 dipped Ranger.

Favored enemy human was probably the most amusing part it contributed, but the skill points, HP, and armor proficiency likely were more significant.

Rangers. Not too far from Ninjas.

In pathfinder, there's a sorcerer bloodline that let's you teleport people you don't like into space just by looking at them, where they start suffocating and freezing to death.

When I played that sorcerer, we went to the moon at one point. Because of the lower gravity, levitate can move a lot more mass. So I took the maximum amount of dirt and stone, compressed it, then set it in an orbit around the planet.
Next big monster we fought, I teleported to it and pushed, riding my meteor down to impact, cackling like a mad man all the way (my character was evil).
We won that fight.

Seriously, if you ever need a sorcerer bloodline in pathfinder, make it Starsoul with the void born variant. Immune to cold, immune to suffocation, and it specializes in teleporting. The power of the cosmos in the palm of your hand.

actually, i think its sword-and-board. at least with TWF you gan get enough bonus damage to make up for it (sneak attack, dragonfire inspiration, bardic music, etc) but SaB you only hit with 1 weapon so itll be behind AND you wont get the 2 hand bonus for str OR power attack...

Wellllllll, the thing with that is that Sword and Board can actually be more like TWF with a shield bonus if you remember to grab Shield Bashing Feats. I don't QUITE remember how it is done, but you can get your Heavy Shield in 3.5 to bash for 2d6 damage and then enhance the Shield Spikes for additional effects. It can get somewhat costly managing an addition item to enhance, but it can be quite worth it.