>>113338Because it's so much cooler this way. I built her character based on what I wanted to play. What other chance would I get to play an epic level Planar Shepherd? a level 25 character has more levels than most gods, so a lvl 25 druid should represent the oldest and strongest druid.
She's not just a Druid; she's a holy Druid of The Blessed Fields, who worships the light at the temple islands of Thalasia, taught by the greatest heroes in all of the realm-space as she served them in their eternal bliss. She's a devoted Ascetic who in her strife attained freedom from want, and believes in only using her gifts to help others and never for personal gain.
And as for the aging thing, it's hardly significant mechanically, because it makes up for the fact that I cannot simply purchase items that grant me a +12 enhancement bonus to stats like everyone else can. I thought being a 750 year old mother-of-all-druids just felt so badass, especially if it comes with the process of casting away one's old identity in favor of being a platinum-scaled dragonborn servant of justice.
She got to lvl 15 before reaching middle age because GM ruled that Kirin age like elves, so she would've had like a hundred years to get there. Her backstory for her first life is similar to the original backstory i wrote for her: at an early age, her father deemed her to be unfit to married off (chronic anger issues), so he sent her off to a monastery to become a shrine maiden. She's been a nun since before she hit puberty.
She's spent centuries serving guardinals, olympians and archons in the upper planes, but left paradise because she was neither dead nor dying, and wanted to return to the earth to make it a better place for the remainder of her extended lifespan (which is close to it's maximum), so she can die knowing she's served her purpose in the universe.
I built it this way because it's 100% awesome, and i thought it felt appropriate for an epic adventure.
I considered dumping planar shepherd to be a druid/sorcerer arcane heirophant theurge, but managing two 9th level spell-casting classes felt like it'd be overpowered and redundant.
>dozen sourcebooksI used a few sourcebooks, but there's hardly any broken content there. I had everything on my sheet personally approved months ago. Maybe greenbound summoning is a bit too powerful at lvls 1-4, but at lvl 25 it's just a cheap way of putting up shrubberies.
Everyone here used multiple sourcebooks too; GM said in the original OP that we all could. Topaz has a dragon thrall from the MMII (the most broken monster manual). Candy is an Artificer: a base class from the eberron campaign setting.
It's not like vanilla 3.5e is a complete or balanced game anyway. Most martial classes in the PHB are tier 5 garbage; the Tome Of Battle saved martial characters. Most of the most broken and exploitable spells in 3.5e are in the PHB: Gate, Simulacrum, Planar Binding, Shapechange, Polymorph Any Object, Shades, Wish, miracle, etc. Splatbooks aren't a bad thing; they enrich the game, because the game was never finished in the first place.
I took some Unearthed Arcana ACFs, but i had each and every one of them approved by the DM weeks before the campaign started.
Her skill points are calculated Correctly. When you make a PC, you calculate their skillpoints by their current Int, not the int they supposedly "used to" have. Besides, if you apply Psychic Reformation, you'd be able to retroactively gain those skillpoints anyway. It's why every character who increases their int over the course of the game should pay an NPC Psion to Reform their skills.
Replacing Exalted feats with non-exalted feats did indeed increase her power significantly, but most exalted feats are crap, and I don't even qualify for most of them. Replacing them with Dark Chaos Feat Shuffle turned an underwhelming feature of the build into something i could actually make use of. It was approved anyway.
>free bonus feats for free epic featsIf by "free" you mean, "costs all of your worldly possessions" then then sure you could call it that. Vow Of Poverty is an under-powered feat that only works for Druids because druids are powerful enough by themselves.
Epic feats aren't even necessarily that great. The only ones that stand out are Bonus Domain, Improved spell capacity and Epic Spellcasting. The rest are 3.0 garbage that are easily replaced by non-epic feats. The ELH is not a well-written book. I did take bonus domain a couple times though; it rounded-out my spellcasting pallet.
>>113342If I've been bragging about my stats a lot, I apologize for that... It's just that I worked on this for a really long time, and I get really, really enthusiastic about metamechanics sometimes...