Goodman Games

Some of the magic sword bane abilities reference an "ego check". For the life of me, I can't find where in the rules it talks about how you do an ego check.

Anyone have a page number for me?

Thanks!

Captain Punka wrote:Some of the magic sword bane abilities reference an "ego check". For the life of me, I can't find where in the rules it talks about how you do an ego check.

Anyone have a page number for me?

Thanks!

Beats the hell out of me. Searching the pdf showed nothing.

From context, this should be a Will save.....I would make the DC 10 + sword's bonus + sword's Int + number of banes + number of powers as a base.....but you should feel free to set the sword's ego DC be whatever you desire to fit the weapon you are describing.

Nothing in the book about it... probably something that was being looked at for "conversion" from 3.5, as Intelligent items possessed an ego score their too.

Me, I would start it at 0, and then have it scale up as follows:

+1 if it has telepathy communication
+it's "plus" divided by 2 (round down)
+1 for every special purpose it possesses
+1 for every type I power
+2 for every type II power
+3 for every type III power
+the modifier for its Intelligence score (though maybe only if their is a positive modifier, I don't know that I'd let being a base intelligence being hinder the item's Ego any)

So, for example, a +4 sword with 13 Intelligence, Telepathy, with two special purposes, 2 type I powers, 1 type II power and 1 type III power would have an Ego of 13 - meaning a DC 13 Willpower save would be needed in order for the wielder to resist giving in the the desires (special purposes and/or active use of banes) of the weapon.

That may be a little low, or high, on the power-scale depending on preference - but it is where I am starting my own home-brew fine-tuning of the matter.

RC and TND both have really good suggestions, and I agree that a Will save is in order. If you are looking for something a bit more ad hoc and less globally systematic, you can work backwards from asking yourself, "What is the percentage chance that I want the target wielder to succeed the Will check?" Then just set the DC according to that.

I'll give an example that has a bit of math (sorry in advance if this is off-putting!). I will not include any type of "critical success or fumble" rules here since I don't think they are explicitly mentioned for saving throws in the rulebook. A d20-based check succeeds according to:
S% = 105+5*(SaveBonus - DC),
where "S%" is the percentage of successes. Note that for a DC of 20 with no bonus to the save, the success rate is 5%, and a DC = 21 renders the check impossible to succeed (S%=0) if there is no bonus to save. Rearranging this for DC, you get:

DC = SaveBonus + 21 - S%/5

So, let's say you have a 5th level Warrior with average personality (will save +1) and you want him to successfully save only 10% of the time. Then you'd set the DC to 20 (1+21 - 10/5). In other words, on rolls of 19 or 20 the warrior will resist the domination. Hope that helps.

Thanks all! I thought I was going crazy skipping from page to page trying to find the rules (I don't have a pdf to search ).

I can ad-hoc something.

Thanks again.
~Captain Punka

We ran into it...our conclusion was that we think they just sort of hacked that way of running magical problematic swords out of older D&D editions, so we just used the rules from our ancient DMG.

Phloog as I lost my ancient DMG ages ago care to share some nuggets of the old ego rules?

Table 8-5: Magic Sword Banes. Above the table on the page it says "Ego check = Opposed Int check against the bearer"

BanjoJohn wrote: ↑Mon Feb 28, 2022 11:07 am Table 8-5: Magic Sword Banes. Above the table on the page it says "Ego check = Opposed Int check against the bearer"

Thank you! I was like "I'm searching the pdf and ego check pops up like five times!" Then I realized you might be talking about an earlier edition, and things has been clarified in my 8th printing...

To be crystal clear - all occurrences of the search phrase "ego check" does occur on page 368, that is table 8-5.

PS. And yes, I would too ignore this rule. Opposed checks (where two d20's are rolled) are essentially random - the respective Int bonuses of the character and the sword have only a very small impact on the outcome. A Will Save vs a set DC makes much more sense, since it
a) uses Personality, which seems to make more sense that using logic and analytic ability to withstand the sword's will
b) differentiates between "difficult" and "easy" swords much better, since the difference between a DC 12 Will Save and a DC 8 Will Save is much more meaningful.

AQuebman wrote: ↑Wed Oct 17, 2012 10:01 am Phloog as I lost my ancient DMG ages ago care to share some nuggets of the old ego rules?

This link should get you pretty close to the Item Ego rules of old 3rd Edition D&D:
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/i ... atedPowers