Teh Truenamer

[woodenbandman]

No, that's intentional. By spelling "the" as "teh," I unlock the greater power of the word.

Anyway, What's so wrong with the truenamer? Mechanically it looks fine, on paper at least. But Jaronk's tier list says that the class works improperly. I'd like to know why this is. Is it because of the DCs to hit the truename of some creature don't scale appropriately with the character's ranks in the skill? Or is it something else?

Also I had a fun idea about how a Truenamer/Bard would work. It looked like Truenamer5/Prestige Bard15 (Ignore the entry requirements of spells castable), and it was fun. He channeled truespeach through his guitar playing and wreaked havoc in general.

[Blade2718]

Without getting too much into the nitty-gritty, the more you use Truespeech, the less often it works for you.; the more experienced you become with it, the harder it becomes to actually affect anything with it.

[woodenbandman]

But suppose that your DM let you buy a +30 competence bonus to your Truespeech? You could get the bonus up to +70 easily.

I guess it's just a brick wall hiding a dimensional vortex between unuseable and infinite cool effects per day.

[Stratovarius]

The problem with the Truenamer is that it is very hard to walk a fine line where you have a lot of useful abilities a day, vs no abilities a day or infinite abilities a day. An optimized Truenamer is effectively a Warlock: He can use all utterances, all day, every day, and never fail. A non-optimized Truenamer, the higher in levels, will fail consistently and be almost useless.

The basic problem is the DC formula. CR increases at 2x character level, while the skill increases at slightly above 1x character level. Optimize it, and you can get 3x or 4x a character level skill increases and more or less never fail. Unoptimized, you fail almost every try.

[awaken DM golem]

When I looked at Truenamer, back in the day, I agreed with CO that it just didn't work.

Obviously, the standard trick of:
Item of Skill Bonus +5a/+5b/+5c/+5d/+5e/+5f , different bonus types,
has sat there as an option all this time.
Wizards avoid ASF like the plague.

Auto-succede Truespeech kinda changes things.
Just like Recharge Psionics changes Psionics.

[rubberduck]

truenaming is just simply to hard...

first of all the cr doesnt scale well with your char level...

15+2*cr as a dc is just way to much.
you will not make the check against any monsters especially those who are at the end of your quest.

second each time you use your utterance the dc will incresae by 2(law of resistance)
which is just 

quickening a utterance ist even more stupid... increases the dc by 20 <- 

ok lets think about it...
you should be able to get a check of about 40 in the higher levels 23(ranks) 10(item) maybe high ability score

but the check you have to beat is: 15+2*20=55 without any modifiers
throw in spell resitance of monster bypassing that adds another 5
so were at 60
as a examle: already used the word of nutrition utterance to heal your buddies/damage the baddies couple of times?
make that 70+
its that simple you cant expect to be doing well...

if you do not throw in tons of cheese,

like a +30 item
item familiar for another +23
the marshall
and other stuff

it will not work
and even then you cant use your abilities all time because law of resistence will push the dc out of reach sooner or later

but anyways the book had only two really good features... BINDERS and DARK CREATURE template  imo

[Runestar]

It is also pitifully weak. I can let you have +120 truename check at lv20, you will still suck.

[Stratovarius]

Except for the infinite supply of Gate, many of the abilities are weak, yes. Then again, nothing at level 20 compares to a Tier 1 class anyway.