Apologies

not that we have any readers yet, but d12 and I feel bad about the lack of postings. We are currently trying to work on some technical difficulties with our layout and establish a posting calendar.

DND 3.5 Math - 2Hander or Dual wield?

The Questions:

• If I am playing a high-strength melee character, will I do more damage wielding 1 large weapon with both hands or dual wield

The Answer:

• Without any doubt in this situation is best to use 1 weapon. While it is true that dual wielding seems better becuase it allows more attacks, the damage does not compare to the effect of adding 1.5Xstrength

The Math:

First we start with a baseline. A fighter of level 15, with a strength of 22. To keep it somewhat realistic, we assume that the 2-handed fighter can afford a +3 weapon, while the dual wielder can only afford 2 +2 weapons. In addition, I used similar weapons, a great sword, a long sword and a short sword. To keep damage simple, I assume every swing did average damage.

Second I assumed 3 attackers and 3 scenarios. The three attackers include a 2-hander, a 2-hander who is power attacking for 3 (to give him the same to hit as a dual wielder) and a dual wielder. In the first scenario the attackers are attacking something with 30 AC, in the next 25 AC and in the final one 25 AC with DR10.

Terms: PA 3 means power attacking for 3, att means attack, ave is average.

The following is the table I used to figure out each attack, its not going to make a lot of sense. check the next group of tables.

	Magic	Bab	strmod	feats	Weapon
2-Hander	3	15	6	1	7
	Magic	Bab	strmod	feats	wep 1	wep 2
Dual-wield	2	15	6	3	4.5	3.5
	Main 1	Main 2	Main 3
2hand att bonus	24	19	14
ave dam	19	19	19
Dam ac 30	16.15	11.4	6.65
dam ac 25	19.95	15.2	10.45
Dam ac 25 dr10	9.95	5.2	0.45
	Main 1	Main 2	Main 3
2h PA 3 att bonus	21	16	11
ave dam	25	25	25
dam ac 30	17.5	11.25	5
dam ac 25	23.75	17.5	11.25
Dam ac 25 dr10	13.75	7.5	1.25
	Main 1	Off 1	Main 2	Off 2	Main 3	Off 3
dual wield attack bonus	21	21	16	16	11	11
Ave dam	12.5	8.5	12.5	8.5	12.5	8.5
dam ac 30	8.75	5.95	5.625	3.825	2.5	1.7
dam ac 25	11.875	8.075	8.75	5.95	5.625	3.825
Dam ac 25 dr10	1.875	0	0	0	0	0

OK, that gobelty gook. Here's what it all comes down to though. During a full round where each characters gets to make a full attack.

	Damage Dealt
	2hand	2hand PA3	Dual wield
AC30	34.2	33.75	28.35
AC25	45.6	52.5	44.1
AC25 - DR10	15.6	22.5	1.875

The answer is pretty clear. A two-hander power attacking for 3 beats everything else in damage. This becomes especially true if the creature has DR.

I will also add that at this point the dual wielder needs 3 feats, the 2-hander only needs 1.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't dual wield, there are lots of other scenarios where dual wielding is better. This just means that for a high-str character, if you want to max your damage, you should two-hand and power attack.

-Dude

Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Plot: The story of Wolverine. His child hood, his years in the army. Scratch that, lots of armies and how he came to be involved in the Weapon X program and loses his memory.

Dude WTF Core Scale: .4 Wolverine bounces between cheesily fun and cheesily boring. It misses the fun mark by getting bogged down in attempting to have a plot with serious emotions. On the bright side there are lots of exposions, over the top fights with mutants and a scene where he kills a helicopter with his claws . . . while it's at least one hundred feet in the air. If you choose to go see this movie, and lets face it, if your reading this blog then your the type of person that HAS to see it, you might want to consider bringing some comics along to look through while the movie attempts to have long emotional scenes.

D12 Core Scale: 0.3 When Dude WTF and I originally saw this preview, we sat in the theater going "Meh." Until one point: at the very end of the trailer, Wolverine flies through the air at a helicopter, claws first. That made it worth it. And so, that's what made the movie worth it. Crazy action, Hugh Jackman chewing on a cigar through several wars, and a bunch of mutants. Unfortunately, Gambit is only in it for a little bit, I enjoyed his character. Otherwise, it's a bit predictable, and as mentioned, there are some drawn-out scenes. But, if you like crazy mutant battles, then it'll be worth your while.

Builds that don't suck - Radiant Servant

Class: Radiant Servant of Pelor (dnd 3.5)

Flavor – The ultimate example of a righteous, undead blasting, heal-casting sun-god loving son of a bitch

Books needed – Core + Complete Divine
Cheese meter – Medium unless your in a heavy undead game, then high– the class basically makes you slightly better at stereotypical cleric duties. You heal, turn and use light spells slightly better. It’s overbalanced, but not broken. In an undead heavy game, it edges towards the broken side.
Best Variant – None: get into the class ASAP then go back to cleric. Could easily fit under any sun-god concept
Role – Healer and undead smasher.
Pros – More powerful heals when cast from the domain slot, better light spells, improved turning
Cons – None really. Have to worship pelor.

The skinny – This class is effectively “A good aligned cleric, but better” if you are planning to do much party healing or undead bashing there’s really no reason not to take this route. While that may seem a bit cheesey, any regular cleric players can attest that 1. Normal turning is fail at high levels and 2. in hard high-level campaigns getting 9 improved healing spells a day is practically a necessity.

As a radiant servant all of your light spells are lightier, any healing spell you cast from the domain slot gets free metamagic feats attached to it and on top of all this you get bonus greater turnings a day. The increased healing kicks butt and on top of that, the healing, the turning and the light spells make you into a real undead-destroyer. Even a blaster wizard has to pull out all the stops to top your undead damage.

Concept - Pelor hates undead, hates the dark and likes to help people. His servants do the same. If you want to be the super cleric, this is the class for you.

Break down – You have to be neutral good, be a level 6 cleric and worship pelor. The other requirements, extra turning and skill ranks in heal and knowledge: religion aren’t that big of a deal and fit the concept well.

As I have said, the class is basically just a supped-up cleric. You get full casting and turning. In addition you gain cha mod + 3 greater turns a day (blow up undead instead of scaring them). As the class progresses any healing spell you cast from a domain slot becomes meporwered, then maximized and eventually empowered and maximized. Light spells have a double radius and you get an extra domain! You become immune to magic and non-magic disease and you get a +2 will save aura.

Finally you get the ability to spend 2 turns to do a 1d6 per class level undead-damaging explosion of 100 foot radius. Yeah. Boom.


Build – Cleric until level 6, then radiant servant 7 – 16, followed by cleric. It’s pretty straight forward. I also can’t stress the awesomeness of the glory domain, especially if you want to even further increase your ability to kill undead.

Variant builds – At level 16 you’re a pretty kick ass cleric. If you don’t want to go back to cleric I recommend picking a prestige class that offers full spell casting and stacks turning.
Feats – Because you gain the ability to do so many greater turnings in a day, taking feats that improve the power for you turns is still a viable option.
Divine metamagic: yeah it’s a bit cheesey, so try not to over do it. As a personal rule of thumb I try not to allow any of my clerics to do it more than 3 times per day and I never stack it with other metamagic effects like using a metamagic rod.

Check out the healing feats in the complete champion, some of them are pretty sweet.

Review: The Core

The Core (2003)

Plot: The core of the earth has stopped spinning, oh noes, and chaos ensues. The earth is heading for disaster and only a special team of scientists and military personnel can save us. Join the world’s first terranauts as they drill to the center of the earth to blow up some nukes to jump start the earth. Nukes, what can’t they do.

Dude WTF Core Scale: 1.0 The plot is terrible, the dialogue is so bad its funny and the science is so bad that it makes your head hurt. Somehow though, it all comes together in the perfect way. We can only hope that this was what they were hoping for. If you haven’t seen this before, go rent it, buy it or Netflix it. I recommend watching it with friends and a few alcoholic drinks. Best bits, spoiler free: Everything that Rat says and does Unobtanium Ridiculous unnecessary “heroic” sacrifices Science metaphors and pyrotechnic demonstrations

d12 Core Scale: 1.0 1.0 you say? Well yeah! This movie is what makes people who like bad science movies go "whoa." It is what little bad science movies aspire to grow up to be ("Mommy, can I have nukes too?"). It has everything -- plot, nukes, impossible materials, impossible science, hilariously bad dialogue, and some decent acting too (Oscar-winner, anyone?) The characters are standard, the hotshot pilot, the cool captian, the crazy copilot, the mad-with-popularity scientist and his pissed-off former partner, and the Rat. Also, you can't beat Tchéky Karyo for a crazy French guy. The only thing that could have made this movie better is people melting in lava... oh wait is has that too. Final point: Watch this movie. Now.

The Core Scale: an explanation

The Core Scale is a rating system that d12 and I use to rate movies. However, it is specifically used for rating how great a terrible movie is.

"Shenigans," you cry! "WTF do you mean 'how great a terrible movie is?'"

We all know that there are movies out there that we love despite being terrible. The core is perhaps the ultimate version of that for d12 and I. It is a movie that is so rife with bad acting, terrible plot holes, cheesey dialogue and horrid horrid science that one would expect that it would be nothing but excrement, human or otherwise. Yet out of this metaphoric crap a single rose of awesomeness has bloomed.

The Core scale is a decimal scale with 0 being the lowest and 1 being the theoretical highest. A rating of 1 means that the movie is both terrible and awesome for its terribleness.

-Dude WTF

Physics in videogames

Jormungandr83 from gameFAQs has a fun list of things in physics that video games ignore. Among those:

Convection and heat. Yup, standing next to lava WOULD in fact hurt you. But then again, the lava is somehow being contained in a bath of some sort. Last time I checked, lava melted shit :-)

Inertia. Don't even get me started on this one. Some games attempt, but usually miss the mark. Although it was funny being able to cheese-bounce the flag around in Halo to get it to the other members of your team

Things that weren't on the list but should be:

Aggro radii that don't include sound ("Was that a rocket? Nah... just follow our preset path, it'll be alright")

Fences I can't jump over, even though I can jump roughly 5 billion feet into the air

Miraculous powers of landing (at least Portal addressed those)

Platforms that raise/lower without any power

Being lifted in the air by a big fan


On the other hand, what kind fun would video games be if I couldn't behead things with an arrow? :-)

-d12

Table test

HAHA NOOB

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Builds that don't suck - Arcane Trickster

One of the regular features I am planning to institute here is the “Characters that don’t suck” suggestions.

Characters that don’t suck is going to be devoted to finding those interesting 3.5 builds that might not be the most powerful, but are still a hell of a lot of fun to play.

Today’s discussion – The Arcane trickster

Flavor – An arcane caster with rogue tendencies and a talent for sneak attacking with ray and touch spells. A great concept for combining a rogue with a ray-casting caster.

Books needed – Core only (complete scoundrel for optional builds)

Cheese meter – None with core build, some with optional variants

Best Variant – Taking 5 levels of spell warp sniper from complete scoundrel fits the flavor perfectly, adds neat abilities, and with only mild cheese of stacking sudden spell strike with sneak attack allows you to only have to lose 1 caster level.

Role – This character can easily fill the skill-monkey and/or “batman” wizard and/or blaster wizard slot

Pros – Full progression sneak attack and spell casting with a few other perks

Cons – Low skill points for a skill-monkey build and the loss of 3 caster levels (only 1 with optional builds)

The skinny - The arcane trickster is widely considered underpowered because at best you must have rogue 3 / wizard 5 to enter into it. Depending on which class you covet more this either means losing 5 levels worth of skills and sneak attack or losing 3 levels of spell progression. You also only have 4+int skills while in the prestige class and don’t have access to nearly as many skills.

Concept - First let’s discuss why you should be an Arcane Trickster. The flavor is pretty neat. While it’s built more around being a caster, I love the seamless combination of the arcane and the stealthily arts. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of great rogue-type spells in the arcane casters arsenal that really make a rogue shine.

Break down –

First to address the damage concerns. At high levels the arcane trickster actually out damages the pure mage ONLY with ray and touch spells and ONLY while sneak attacking. (however an arcane caster of level 17 should have no trouble sneak attacking)

Disintegrate (ranged touch 2d6 damage per level) as a level 20 character

As a pure wizard it would be 20 X 2d6 damage per level comes to a nice even 40d6 damage. Ouch.

However, now the arcane trickster. 17 X 2d6 damage + 7d6 sneak comes to 41d6 damage. Ouch again! It’s not quite as much damage, and the player must be sneak attacking, but its close.

Polar ray (ranged touch 1d6 per level) at level 20

Pure wizard 20 X 1d6 = 20d6 damage

Arcane trickster 17 X 1d6 + 7d6 sneak = 24d6

Again the trickster out damages.

Build –

I recommend wizard rogue. The int synergizes nicely and it is the quickest way into arcane trickster or any of the variants I will suggest. For optimization choose rogue first for the skill points and hit points.

Rouge 1, followed by any combination of rogue and wizard until you hit rogue 3 / Wizard 5.

You also might find that as a ray caster, you won’t need to jack your int up very high for saves purposes, as you have many options for damaging no-save ray spells.

Variant builds –

Spell Warp Sniper (complete scoundrel) – This great prestige class fits the concept perfectly. It allows you to turn any damaging spell into a ray spell, deal precision damage from 60 feat and more. In addition, getting your dm to allow sneak attack and sudden ray strike to stack for prestige class requirements isn’t exactly a stretch.

For this build rogue 1, followed by wiz for 5, then spell warp for 5 and then arcane trickster.

I enjoy this variant so much that I am sad you can only do spellwarp for 5 levels

Feats - You are most likely going ot be focusing on damaging ray spells with some stealth utility

• Weapon focus ray - who doesn't like +1 to hit
• Spell penetration 1 and 2 - I always advocate these for a damage-dealing spell caster
• extend spell - nice for those improved invis's
• maximize + empower - a great way to get ranged touch spells for those

Hello from Dude WTF

WTF: the eternal question.

It has driven mankind since our first ancestors poked their heads out of the water and said "WTF is up with this air shit?"

Personally, I believe it is also one of the greatest questions that we can ask ourselves. After all, did not an Albert Einstein once ask "Wtf is up with relativity." Did not a Dave Arneson once say "WTF would happen if I only let my players use one character?" Did not an Isaac Newton once say "WTF is up with this apple?" Did not a rogue once ask "WTF would happen if I put my dagger in this dude's back?"

I think you get my point.

Along with d12 I plan to discuss my opinions on all aspects of nerd life as well as give my suggestions on character builds, great movies and of course movies that are so horrible they are awesome.

- Dude WTF

Greetings from d12!

Greetings from d12!

No, it have nothing to do with Eminem's band-type thing. The d12 is one of the Platonic Solids, and one of the most underused ones when it comes to dice. It's gone so far as to get its own mention in The Order of the Stick albeit a sad one.

Since this is my welcome-to-our-blog post, I'll tell you what we're about -- everything and then some. The blog is called nerd-sauce, and it'll be expansive. Along with Dude WTF's list, we'll do some math, physics, and whatever else is interesting to this side of the 'verse [obligatory Firefly reference]. Oh, and comments are appreciated, and we'll surely respond.

And so, here's the first link. Next time you're pwning nubs, have a glass of leetsauce!

-d12

Welcome

Welcome to Nerd Sauce. Your place for all things nerdy, whether you just enjoy the occasional sci-fi movie or you can quote every episode of Star Trek, we think you might just enjoy it here.

Being a nerd can have a bad rap, but we say screw em. We like what we like and that's just the way it is.


Within this blog you will find information, news and our oh-so-mighty opinions on a variety of nerd and geek related subjects:

• Gaming - Video, Board and Roleplaying
• Books - Anything that tickles our nerd fancy
• Movies - Movies, especially cheesey sci-fi. Get prepared for The Core scale
• TV - Past, present and future
• More - Whatever else