Topic: Elemental Companion usage

[Lord Garth]

I'm in the planning stages of my next campaign (ie: I'm about 12 months to start actually GMing it, I usually write down about 100 pages worth of notes prior to a campaign) and, for the first time, I'm leaning of actually using the Elemental Companion. In my view, it's probably the most game changing companion in terms of the absurd power it brings to the table, but I've decided to give it a spin and try to balance things out with the more exotic options other companions bring to the table and then some. And of course plenty of magic items for any non spell users.

Anyone got any experience GMing with it? I've slowly warmed to the idea, it's taken quite a few years, of allowing my players to feel like super heroes. I have numbers on my side anyhow ...

[Nders]

Well we have used for a good deal of years on the side. We left out one list - Enhance elemental potency and this worked out nicely. No one has played classes from EC for years now so I have no recent experience If you keep to the rules that bolt attacks are medium and ball/cone attacks are small it's shouldn't get that much out of hand. Oh and hold back a little on the elemental metals. Also controlling the complexity of elements you open up for is a good balancing tool. For example restricting people to choosing only compound or lower in complexity.

The thing with many of the elemental classes is that they can pretty much only dish out and are rather vulnerable when being attacked - In my experience they often end up lacking diversity.

[Skaran]

I remember in one of our games a player was an Elemental Channeler of Lightning. The house rule at the time was any healing done by this character involved being struck by lightning. He called on his deity - ruler of the plain of Electricity for healing and that is how he got it!

[Ecthelion]

We have used only part of the book, e.g. the Elementalist profession, but nothing from the e.g. the rules about elemental corruption.