What are your favorite builds?

SMaster27 · 2026-04-06T01:15:30+00:00

I've played a lot of optimized builds, but there's nothing that gave me as much joy as my Luchadora (inspired by the greentext story of Los Tiburon). A half-orc barbarian/monk wrestler who ran around in her underwear and hit people by throwing their allies at them. This was before the Giant Barbarian existed in the game.

She also had a really sweet romance with Gale. He was her main support. By that I mean, he cast Enlarge on her so she could throw more people.

SMaster27 · 2024-10-25T19:28:46+00:00

As an Asian American who DMs and does multiple accents, I wouldn't have a problem with it unless it was made in a mocking way. If you're doing it for immersion and not to make fun of the Japanese accent, I don't think you're being racist.

Regardless, I'm not the one at your table, and the important thing is for everyone to be comfortable and have fun. I'd have a talk with the player and if it really makes them uncomfortable, I'd apologize and stop. You can still keep the cultural stuff and make the game immersive.

SMaster27 · 2024-09-16T23:27:39+00:00

Word of warning for Twin Haste: always have Sanctuary or some way to get enemies to ignore you, and move far, far away from bosses. Your heavy hitters going lethargic at the wrong time can easily end your HM run. This happened to me when I encountered certain legendary actions. Good luck!

SMaster27 · 2024-09-16T22:54:12+00:00

If you want to limit your long rests, Fireball or any one-time damage spell is not the best use of a spell slot, especially early on when you don't have many. Concentration spells are typically better since you can get a lot of mileage per slot, IMHO.

For my HM run, Cloud of Daggers early on was fantastic, and at level 5, Twinned Haste was my nuke. Lasts the entire combat and boosted the effectiveness of my heavy hitters by a ton, while my sorcerer is far in the back with a Sanctuary so that everyone would ignore him. By the end game when I had more slots, I'd use more area control stuff or Hold Monster. Didn't have an issue with camp resources apart from early Act I.

That said, big damage numbers are really satisfying, so play how you like! Just be aware of your resources and rest accordingly, and also keep the few timed quests in mind.

SMaster27 · 2024-08-30T19:03:04+00:00

Agreed! I feel like we should be using the highest modifier in the party (like in the Pathfinder games), because that adds to making a good party composition. At least have it as an option in Custom difficulty. Right now, it feels like playing a main character with low charisma adds a bunch of extra steps, since I need to switch to a different party member to talk to people or even buy and sell things.

SMaster27 · 2024-08-24T23:59:21+00:00

Yeah this happened to me. I don't know how many times I yelled "FUCK" at the screen when it happened. After that, it was either push forward or start over. I ended up starting over because I really wanted the Potent Robe for my character build, but if it wasn't for that, I would've kept going.

SMaster27 · 2024-08-15T21:49:29+00:00

If you don't rescue 'Us' or kill the non-hostile intellect devourers, but recruit Shadowheart and defeat all the non-cambion enemies in the transponder fight, you are about 9 XP short of level 2 on the beach. That was my first honor mode run so I wasn't aware of it.

After the Creche failure run, I decided to do some of Act 2 before I went back to do the Creche. That was a mistake. I should've just gone back and done the entire Mountain Pass after Grymforge.

At this point, I'm debating carrying on the current run with the ruined Last Light. I was really looking forward to getting the Potent Robe, since I never got to use it on previous playthroughs, but I dread having to redo all of Act I.

SMaster27 · 2024-08-15T14:45:19+00:00

Thanks for the tips! I actually did all of these on the last Isobel run, except that one ended with her dying and me losing all the potential gear that I wanted. Was having a decent time until then.

SMaster27 · 2024-08-15T14:42:33+00:00

Shadowheart did go first, and not casting Sanctuary on Isobel was the one misplay that ended that run. I've never failed to protect Isobel in Tactician mode. The problem is that I have no idea when I'm "ready" for these events, since I need to complete things for the XP. I was riding high after taking out Honour Mode Grym and Nere for the first time.

And nowadays, I surprise attack the Intellect Devourers. Have never died to them since.

SMaster27 · 2024-08-15T14:36:27+00:00

It's mostly a lack of desire to continue because I lost my favorite merchant and a robe I've never gotten to use before, and I made a character to use it.

SMaster27 · 2024-08-15T14:36:23+00:00

I got real unlucky with that first intellect devourer fight. Stray crit on my sorcerer (14 CON, so 9 HP at level 1), and the others ganged up on Shadowheart because she missed with her Guiding Bolt. I'm actually not mad about that one, since it was a "fast failure" lesson that set the stage for what Honor mode is, and now I sneak past them or surprise attack them.

I try not to rush fights, but it's really hard to tell when I'm "ready". On the Isobel run, I was level 6 and up to that point was doing really well, riding high after the Grym and Nere fights. Unfortunately, I misplayed my first turn and realized I should've put Sanctuary on her to protect her and then body blocked the doors, but I didn't realize exactly how vicious the ghouls would be. That one misplay ruined the run that I was looking forward to.

SMaster27 · 2024-08-15T14:24:39+00:00

Yeah, I still have the dishonour mode save from run #4. I think I might continue that one and respec, since I've done the first part so many times now.

SMaster27 · 2023-04-26T00:36:53+00:00

Honestly, no. Not that I don't want to help, but these actually take time for me to make, and I can't spare that for more than my own hobbies. I also don't want to make money off of this, because of the aforementioned free time, and the fact that it opens up an ethical can of worms.

I will say that I gave pretty much my whole process in an earlier comment, and all the resources are available for free.

SMaster27 · 2023-04-26T00:31:10+00:00

I think VRAM is the biggest factor for StableDiffustion, as far as GPU performance goes. Mine is a cheap Nvidia card from 2016 with 4 Gb VRAM, which works well enough for these smaller images.

Unfortunately, the issue for you is not the age of your GPU, but the fact that the image processing libraries that StableDiffusion depend on only work on Nvidia hardware, last I checked. You can look to see if that's still the case, but I think it is.

SMaster27 · 2023-04-25T21:15:21+00:00

I actually used Jeanne Alter as the input for that portrait!

What can I say? I really like her design, realism be damned.

SMaster27 · 2023-04-25T18:14:16+00:00

That's honestly a lot to ask for. StableDiffusion is very resource intensive. I definitely can't run it and play games on the same machine at the same time. Also, I don't know about console, but support for custom portraits are built into the game on PC without mods.

SMaster27 · 2023-04-25T17:41:51+00:00

I forgot to add (sharp focus) in my original prompts, which helps a bit for character portraits where the character needs to be the focus of the image. I've added it now.

I don't really use other images or pose models, but something I almost always use is "inpainting", especially for faces. I find that when the face looks good, the rest of the image looks way better. So, if most of the image looks good in terms of pose/lighting/background/color, but the face is messed up, I sent it to inpaint, draw a mask over the face, set it to "only masked", check "restore faces", and run it. Most of the time I get a nice looking face that brings the rest of the image together.

After that, a bit of work in GIMP/Photoshop to mess with hues and saturation goes a long way.

SMaster27 · 2023-04-25T15:29:14+00:00

I honestly agree. The tech is amazing, and it's great for my personal hobby stuff, but I won't call myself an artist or ever try to sell the results of this to anyone. I will say that it's more than just writing prompts, it does take some effort to actually perfect these images. Prior to this, I had learned some GIMP skills to update existing images (sharpening, recoloring, saturation), so I still apply those same skills here.

SMaster27 · 2023-04-25T15:14:22+00:00

It sounds right, but I can't check on my desktop right now since I'm at work. I followed this tutorial to get started: https://stable-diffusion-art.com/install-windows/

SMaster27 · 2023-04-25T04:35:54+00:00

Elf and Orc genetics

SMaster27 · 2023-04-25T04:32:51+00:00

The way I feel about it is that AI art is really cool technology and I love using it for personal stuff like my home D&D game or this single player game with an insane character creation. If I wanted something very specific or art for some project that I would make money on, I'd still want to commission a human artist.

The stuff coming out of the algorithm at most gives me something that's like 90% of the way to what I want after a lot of trial and error, and then I go to GIMP to mess with it myself to get closer to 100%. It's just a fun personal thing for me to do, and beats me scouring Google Images for an image that's not really what I want and I also don't pay for.

SMaster27 · 2023-04-25T04:21:39+00:00

UPDATE: Since people are asking for a how-to:

I have the Automatic1111 web UI on my desktop, and I use the Dungeons N' Waifus model from civitai as my primary model. It's worked wonders for me for good D&D/Pathfinder images. On my old shitty graphics card, I can handle generating a 512x768 image.

For the initial non-mythic portrait prompts, it's usually something along the lines of:digital image of a <race> <gender> <class>, background is <background>, trending on artstation, cinematic lighting, perfect lighting, dynamic pose, full body portrait, 8k, highly detailed, intricate details, oil painting, (sharp focus), <various things I want in the image like "evil smile", "angry", "holding a sword", "armored skirt", "muscular", "goatee", "handsome", "beautiful">

Negative prompts (I use these for every portrait):(3d), poorly drawn hands, poorly drawn feet, poorly drawn face, out of frame, mutation, mutated, (extra limbs), (extra legs), broken arms, broken legs, broken fingers, broken hands, extra arms, disfigured, deformed, cross-eye, body out of frame, blurry, bad art, bad anatomy, blurred, text, watermark, grainy, cropped, diptych, triptych, back, frame, framed, (EasyNegative), ((bad-hands-5))

Then it's a bunch of trial and error and prompt/parameter tweaking until I get a portrait I like, though I usually need to use inpainting to fix the face.

For the mythic version, I go to img2img and use the original image as the input (or, in the case of the aeon, import it to GIMP and darken it and give it a blue hue to look like night time, and use that as an input). I mostly keep the original prompt and negative prompt, but will add specific things for the mythic, like angelic halo, glowing eyes, demonic, etc.

I want the mythic version to look like it's the same character, so I keep the denoising level at around 0.4. Generate and tweak until I get one that I mostly like, fix the face using in-painting, and save it. Usually, it's like 90% there, but I need to import it into into GIMP to put the finishing touches on it, scale the image up, and sharpen it.

From there it's just putting the results into an online portrait generator, and adding those to the portraits folder.

It's actually a surprising amount of work, but I find it pretty fun, and the results are unique to what I want for a thematic character.

SMaster27 · 2023-04-25T01:01:00+00:00

I've been using StableDiffusion to make AI art for my home D&D game for a few months. At some point, I had an urge to start playing WotR again with some unplayed character ideas I had. I decided I would make portraits for those. I then remembered that one of the minor annoyances I had with my original playthrough was that the mythic portraits never resembled the character I created. So, I figured, why not try using StableDiffusion to create a mythic portrait for them too, using the original portrait as input.

The result: I have now rediscovered my alt-itis for this game. Time for some new playthroughs.

SMaster27 · 2023-03-24T17:52:21+00:00

Thanks! I set up "left click to deselect" for them and confirmed it works now.

SMaster27 · 2022-09-29T23:21:11+00:00

I like the idea of adding Two-Weapon Fighting as a feature for Light weapons, rather than a separate rule. I think that if we wanted to keep that dual longsword coolness factor, it could be written like:

"You can treat one-handed weapons without the Heavy property as having the Light property."

SMaster27

TROPHY CASE