Truenamer

The Truenamer, from the Tome of Magic, is possibly one of the worst classes ever printed: Dungeons and Dragons or otherwise. Truenamers use a casting system that's just as horrible as they are. Having to constantly spend resources just to have a reliable chance of using your utterances successfully, coupled with the utterances being usually just bad versions of other spells that you could get at a lower level, is not exactly something that makes you excited to try playing a truenamer.

They start ok, then get worse as their utterances are still stuck copying wind wall and other lower levels spell and then they get a pretty much at-will Gate at level 19 which does NOT contain the usual extra rule that gated in creatures cannot summon other creatures, meaning that with enough turns and a good cause you can end up balls-deep in Solars and pretty much kick all the ass. The utterances often include lots of spelling errors and other omissions that make them completely different from what they were intended to do. In short, their editing and playtesting were non-existent and it shows.

However this is only the tip of the iceberg. Since their casting is tied to a skill (Truenaming) and the fact, IIRC, they get unlimited usages of utterances per day (though it gets harder with each successful uttering), with enough min-maxing you can crank your Truenaming skill high enough to never fail an Utterance but this is for naught as it becomes very difficult to get your save DCs for Utterances high enough to make that matter. Most things will shrug off your saves even with Munchkinry due to how shitty the calculation for them equates (it's based on Charisma for some reason).

Ways to increase your true name skill

• Put ALL the points into it, well as much as you can, there is a maximum (duh).
• Feats, obviously:
  • Skill Focus
  • Item Familiar from Unearthed Arcana to get a bigger bonus than you would normally have from spending skill points.
• A couple levels in Exemplar.
• Maxing out your Int would help, although that would take a while.
• Items.

Most interesting thing about Truenamers

So over all Truenamers are shit as far as classes go, but Truenamers have one very interesting feature to them: It's mentioned in a side box that some people's true name gets harder and harder to say the older and more experienced they get, noting that many people who show this 'phenomenon' become leaders, heroes or villains. The Truenamers think that this is because the universe takes an interest in people as they achieve more, become more powerful and more important to the universe, their true name becomes harder to say. But the Tome of Magic says it's because the person is gaining levels and hit dice, thus their DC to speak their true name goes up as well. To the NPC's to which the world is real, with hit dice as an abstraction, they only have a, quote, "vague sense of what's going on".

Stew on that for a second: the NPC's of a game, are able to detect to some degree the influence of the 'player' and are able to sense when that 'player' gets enough 'XP' by shiving enough crabs to make a person in the world stronger by go up a 'level'. We are not sure if that's fail or awesome, you decide.