A Man In Black's page

Trying to replace these contextual factors with a numerical bonus would really just make the game drabber and feel less like a story.

Yet nobody says, "Trying to replace the contextual factors of fencing with a numerical chance to hit with a melee attack would really just make the game drabber." Nobody's out here posting, "Really, it's taking the fun out of the game to reduce the whims of the ley lines to a simple spell DC."

Nobody has to play mother-may-I with the GM to have their other class abilities work. Classes have numeric abilities so you can understand how likely your character is to succeed in a given situation. If you just leave all of that to GM fiat, then why bother giving Paizo a pile of money to make rulebooks? I can do rules-free RP for free.

I don't really think the real world examples are applicable, though. In a situation where no one is on the look out for the PCs or cares about people walking by, you don't need to roll stealth. You probably don't need to roll Deception either-- you just avoid doing things that will draw attention like visibly carrying giant weapons or whatever. As you out it yourself, most people do that automatically when they walk around in public, so you don't need to make it a dice challenge anymore than tying your shoes.

Exactly. Whether your characters are noticeable or not is entirely up to GM fiat, rather than being a challenge your characters can be better or worse at. Either you are noticeable, in which case you you need a rock, hill giant's leg, or dark corner to hide in, or you're not noticeable, in which case there's no game.

You usually roll stealth in scenarios where your mere presence will lead to conflict.

Exactly! They're rules written for a dungeon crawl, and they stop working once you move outside of the dungeon.

Player: "I want to cross the courtyard unnoticed."

GM: "Well that's going to be hard, because you'd be crossing in the open and there are guards on watch."
Player2: "My wizard could distract them for a moment with a fireball. While they're looking at what the hell just happened my buddy could tiptoe past."
GM: "Well. There's no rule for that in the book, but it makes sense that it could work."

This sort of mother-may-I design doesn't apply to class abilities that aren't skills, though. There's no "Well, there's no rule for hitting someone with an axe, but it makes sense that that could work" or "There's no rule for casting a spell, but I guess I could let you do it this time." You're describing a scene where you're not allowed to sneak across, but if you ask the GM really nicely, they might make up some different rules on the spot to make up for the deficiencies of the written rules.

You still can't do the scene where Merry sneaks up on the Witch King because he's beneath the Witch King's notice. "Beneath someone's notice" isn't a state in the game; you're just visible or not visible.

I suppose I should give some examples. All of these questions are looking for an answer based on the rules-as-written.

How do you do a scene where someone creates or takes advantage of a distraction to escape? Everything from fleeing under cover of a dazzling cacophony that doesn't actually conceal you to straight up "Ninja vanish" or "Hey look over there."

How do you sneak up to someone in a crowd of people? How do you hide in a crowd of people? How does this change when you're trying to hide from someone looking for you specifically, someone searching for any suspicious character, a vigilant guard who is indifferent to you, or a disinterested and lazy guard?

How do you do a scene where you silently pick off the guards one by one?

How do you do a scene where the sneaky member of the party leads the rest of the party past a dangerous situation?

What happens when you try to sneak past someone who's lightly asleep?

How do you do a scene where you want to do something in plain sight without arousing suspicion from disinterested observers? (Snatch someone off the street into a doorway, hit someone and make it look like they fell, etc.)

Can a sneaky character sneak past someone with extraordinary senses? (eg a bloodhound) Can they sneak past someone with supernatural senses? (eg a grimlock or dragon) With or without class-specific abilities, magic spells, or magic items?

How does PF handle sneaking in the context of creatures that aren't primarily visually oriented? How about in the case of creatures so alien that they neither see nor hear?

All of these are scenes I can definitely see wanting to put a sneaky character through. How does PF2 handle them?

Has anyone said buttcoins yet

More recently, Japan decided to lock up every addict they could find for two years. So, the addicts went to jail. The distribution networks collapsed, pushers changed careers, drugs more or less disappeared for years afterward.

Japan turned their narcotic problem into a prescription drug abuse problem, more like. Substance abuse didn't go away in Japan, and now they're dealing with a serious amphetamine abuse problem.

And it may well be that self-medication started as a term in medical writings. That doesn't give it much validity today, considering that medicine moved on. The drug addicts love using it, however. Seriously, ask any of them and you'll hear it.

I don't know how I can make this clearer.

SELF-MEDICATION IS A VALID TERM FOR A REAL PHENOMENON. NOBODY HERE IS SAYING THAT IT IS A REASONABLE TREATMENT.

You are arguing against a position nobody here is advancing. Self-medication with addictive drugs at best trades short-term relief for long-term problems. Often as not, it just makes the problem worse immediately, as with depression and alcohol.

Addiction treatment in both physical and mental and can be seen as a medical process but that should never remove the burden of personal choice in so much of it.

What role do you feel the burden of personal choice plays? S%!@ting on people for making the wrong choices only makes things worse, almost always.

There's such a thing as involuntary commitment, especially if a person is ruled to be a threat to others or to refuse treatment that's in their own best interest. Of course that relies on a third party to neutrally arbitrate to a person what's in their own best interest.

It is carefully limited to someone who presents an immediate danger to themselves or others and still sees abuse. Nobody is proposing expanding it.

In our culture we (rightly, I think) do not regard homosexuality as a dangerous aberrant addiction that needs to be cured but the same is not true of certain other lifestyle choices and I think that's something that can be fruitfully questioned and examined. As happens in this thread ;)

The difference between homosexuality and drug addiction is that homosexuality won't kill you stone dead, through physiological causes or self-destructive behavior.

Nobody has talked about why addiction is treated as a disease, only whether addicts deserve to be treated or punished (or neglected).

Addiction is treated as a disease because it's the only practical way to improve the lives of people who are addicted and the only way to do anything about drug problems long-term. Punishing addicts doesn't work, because it simply alienates people who were already marginalized themselves and pushes drug abuse as an option for alienated people. Punishing dealers doesn't work, because there's always someone willing to take the risk, and it leads to constant police harassment of people who have nothing to lose in the first place (as well as law-abiding people who happen to look like them). Shouting at people to "be more responsible" doesn't do anything at all but make the shouter feel more pleased about themselves while looking like a smug a#@$#~+.

Poverty is to addiction what a lack of cleanliness is to infection. Yes, being more responsible helps on an individual level, but if you don't want people dying of pneumonia or sepsis, you treat the disease instead of yelling at them for not doing more to prevent getting infected.

Instead, by helping addicted people, both with addiction and with whatever cause drove them to drug abuse as an escape in the first place, you can actually reduce both drug use in general and the harm caused to people who are addicted. Unfortunately, the main reasons people turn to drug abuse in the first place is mental illness or poverty, and nobody seems to much give a s@$~ about fixing either of those!

Weren't you aware? All NPC fighters in all stories are level 1 Warriors, and since the heroes who fight them fight only level 1 Warriors they cannot be higher than 4th level. . . its a circular logic trap you can never beat-- if the enemy in the book has no name and backstory, he is automatically a 1st level warrior, and that is used as justification for underestimating the good guys levels.

It's curious that a nameless mook who is a level 1 warrior has an impact on the story which is indistinguishable from a level 15 fighter nameless mook.

Little-Known ACA Feature Allows Govt. to Seize Medicaid Recipients' Assets

Linkbait title aside, this isn't a feature of the ACA at all, and is instead an already-existing Medicaid rule from a 1993 law. It's not new, but it's the sort of thing you're unlikely to ever hear about before talking to a lawyer or accountant about your will or other end of life issues. Here's some more on it. It's a pretty terrible rule, but it doesn't have very much to do with the ACA at all.

No one is claiming Batman is high level.

Batman is weird. Nobody much minds Batman hanging out with Superman to fight cosmic threats and taking an occasional punch from Darkseid, along the lines of Morrison JLA or (sigh) Loeb Superman & Batman, but at the same time he's also supposed to be seriously threatened by Black Mask, whose superpower is about three dozen dudes with assault rifles.

Fiction does not map onto linear power scales very well sometimes!

Also, I've already made the sort of examples you're talking about, albeit without the adversarial "gotcha" setup you seem to be angling for, using one generic example and two examples from published adventures.

If the difference is neglible at level one, then that means tiers do not exist at level one.

Class balance is meaningless in a context where a large difference between stats is +/-3 on a 20-wide RNG. If your point is that tier lists have little to say that's useful about level 1 games, then, okay, you win that point. I'm not sure anyone but you really cares.

It's not your fault that most archetypes are page-chewing low-content filler. Freelancers write to spec.

Now, an ITEM can allow people to fly, which in a roundabout way can give a specific Fighter the ability to overcome that scenario...but that's not the Fighter. That's the item.

Does that make sense to anyone but me?

It makes sense, but it isn't satisfying to me. Characters are going to have magic items, it's just part of the game.

A better counterargument is how magic items lag far behind challenges. While a 13th-level fighter can have Boots of Flight, he's been facing flying enemies for eight or nine levels already, and still has no way of participating in a game where he has to Teleport across the world to accomplish things, or travel to the Cloud Kingdoms in the sky, or chase the villain to his lair on the Astral Plane.

Additionally, martial classes need to spend a lot more of their personal wealth just to keep from being Red Queened in combat. Not only do they need the same save cloak/stat booster/AC items that a caster will take, but they also need a whole set of gear to do their stabbing/shooting schtick. Rynjin makes this argument above (although I think he's c/ping JaronK's argument to the same effect).

Of course I do. So many of the rules-as-written don't function at all that I could hardly avoid it.

So... Any wizard that summons a meat shield only shows how weak the wizard is? Using your resources to make up for your weaknesses is the wizard's specialty and a large part of what has made it stronger in 3.x/PF than in say 1st Ed. But we are to assume that no-one else can do that?

Your point is that the strongest feat in the game does a lot to level the playing field. This is true, but taking Leadership is in no way limited to martial classes.

It highlights the weakness of martials. Casters can use their class abilities to cover their inherent weaknesses. while martial classes are forced to cover those resources from their common pools (non-bonus feats and WBL), when they can do so at all. Casters can instead use their common pool resources to do everything better, with stat boosters, more flexible and reliable consumables, etc. If Leadership is better than all of those options, then, yeah, casters take it too, but they can just choose a cohort who is more powerful than a martial while also covering their weaknesses.

Anyone can take a feat and recruit a cohort. Casters can recruit someone to take hits in melee for them without making any permanent expenditure of resources save for a spell known. (Good thing there aren't any spellcasting classes that automatically know their entire spell list!)

Funny, the way I see it is that someone who's an entitled gamist with deficiency in social communication skills shoots his/her mouth off and right away a bunch of "Paizo fails at existing as human beings because they don't write crunch the way I would" munchkins charge to his/her defense.

Your argument is that the people you're attacking, the way you see it, are jerky jerks who are jerks who do jerky things and say jerky things because they are jerks.

Yeah okay whatever man.

Also, fighters can use their own resources to gain access to reduced cost crafting through the use of the Leadership feat. Which is a character resource like any other.

Again, the fact that a weak class can recruit a strong class to deal with challenges for them only highlights the former's weaknesses.

So, MJ, are you the kind of person who was told, "Sorry, we'd love to hire you, but [the higher minimum wage makes it impossible / we had to hire a minority / taxes on our business are too high]" and actually believed it?

Well I'm Canadian, so I tend to view the US Democratic party as being uncomfortably right wing, and our right wing "Conservative" party would be seen as wacko lefty pinko communist sympathizers by the American news media.

No, I'm pretty sure sucking up to the oil industry, slashing government funding on both social programs and scientific research, and straight up voter suppression is pretty familiar to any American.

"Voting with your wallet" doesn't have to be silently only. If you (general you) really want to change things, then send letters to the editor of the local paper. Contact local TV stations. Get together with like-minded people and form groups. Boycott any restaurant which doesn't pay a living wage and tell everyone (including the restaurants) that you're doing it and why.

While this is good advice and true to boot, it's exactly my point. Organizing, publicizing, and putting pressure on business owners and politicians is how you make change. This is voting with your vote, not your wallet.

Scott Betts wrote:

Do you not know how social convention for tipping works?

Or are you just being deliberately obtuse so that you can justify your miserly behavior?

I was not around any circle of people of my choosing that tipped regularly until well into my 20s. I can not impress upon you how much the notion of compulsory tipping grates me. Tipping when I want is fine. That's why it's a gratuity. The moment it's required it stops being a nod to something I'm genuinely thankful for and becomes a tax.

Are you going to hit us with TAXATION IS SLAVERY and MEN WITH GUNS next?

But you know who has a huge bargaining power? You, the customer.

No, not really. Voting with your wallet is a fairly crude tool. Unless a restaurant is notoriously abusive of the employees and the management knows of this reputation, or you're a regular who the management takes seriously for whatever reason, then you not eating there just sends the message that you don't like the restaurant's food, service, ambiance, etc. At best, voting with your wallet sends the message that you don't like that restaurant for an unspecified reason. At worst, they don't even know that you stopped at all.

If you want to change the plight of restaurant workers, well, Anklebiter will be along to tell you how you can do that.

I won't clog up the thread, but I don't think having a few dissenting voices is a bad thing.

Dissenting voices who have nothing to say but "Everyone who disagrees with me is a big jerk from a board full of jerks and has no understanding of how the game is balanced" are a bad thing, though.

I don't see how tipping will fix it either. Feeding an animal rarely makes it hunt in other grounds.

Wow, you are the worst slacktivist ever.

I rely on scientific papers, such as this one for my sources of energy efficiency.

You rely on papers you didn't even read past the introduction? Because that paper is talking about best practices in computer simulation modeling for automotive subsystems besides the engine. While it's an interesting topic, it's not really relevant to the question of "What sort of engine results in the production of the least carbon emissions per unit of distance traveled?"

I really do recommend carefully reading your links before linking them in the future.

There's more about the EPA, but that is not related to automobiles. But that more relates to why even some environmentalists I know are questioning if the organization is helpful, or if it is the next great stumbling block to actually helping the environment.

Hey look, it's a libertarian arguing that the best way to solve problems with a government agency is to abolish it. Tre surprise.

This is getting inane.

Yes, rogues are better than spellcasters at the specific act of using a skill to disarm a trap, even if the spellcasters have Abdul Alhazred's Focus. The point is that wizards, if pressed, can switch their ability to solve problems around to deal with a new situation. If a martial character is not a rogue, they will never, ever disarm a magic trap. If it's a spellcaster, however, they can use open-ended spells (summons, dispels, etc.) to try and solve it, or maybe trudge back to civilization and see if they can't find a cheap scroll of Ali Baba's Focus to deal with the problem. The rogue, on the other hand, is not allowed to do anything but stab people, disarm traps, and use whatever limited-by-realism things his choice of skills allows.

This also addresses Aelryinth's frequently-stated point that casters are somehow weak when ambushed. They are weakest when ambushed, because it offers them no opportunity to readjust their toolset on the fly. However, this is offset by the fact that they are being compared to classes which cannot readjust their toolsets at all, and tend not to have the open-ended powers of spellcasters.

Also, stop signing your posts, Aelryinth. Your name is right above every post, FFS.

Since wizards are supposed to be tier 1, no-one-else-can-compete, then every AP with a wizard BBEG ends in a TPK, right? Oh, wait...never mind, that usually doesn't happen. I guess all this "tier" thing is is people trying to justify why they don't like particular classes. Lame.

No, because the wizard is outnumbered four to one. Additionally, while every challenge for the BBEG is a combat challenge, not every single challenge for a PC is a combat challenge, and wizards and clerics have a significant advantage there. This isn't a fighting game tier list.

"Wizard" and "Fighter" can't do any of those things actually. They are exist only series of abilities on several sheets of paper. A character could do those things, based upon the arbitration of their GM and the situation that they and the entirety of the party are in. A combination of a lot of factors. To say one has an easier or harder time doing something based upon only part of those factors doesn't mean anything.

I mean, man, if you think about it, the whole damn game is imaginary! None of it is real, maaaaan. Like, what if we're actually the characters in God's D&D session, man?

Did I just blow your mind?

Okay, I lied, I still have no idea how Stealth works.

It's okay, neither does Paizo.

how hard would it be to modify paladin into a generic divine crusader class without the alignment restrictions and with 2-5 general paths?

Easy enough that basically everyone with any inclination to do so has done it.

Of course, being dead doesn't stop people from getting elected; just ask Missouri about the dead senator they elected once.

The other guy on the ballot was John Ashcroft. Trust me, Mel Carnahan's corpse was the better option.

Immortalis wrote:

Yeah not sure people want every class to be perfectly balanced or we get 4th edition

Fixed that for you.

You could not possibly have been more snide or more wrong. In addition to all of the classes getting piddly little boring powers in 4e, they are absolutely not balanced at all.

That's kind of the thing, they are LG, and yet, really, they might as well be NG, because their *mechanics* are all about good vs. evil, and don't give a rat's buttocks about law vs. chaos.

This is because law versus chaos is completely incoherent nonsense.

I'm a better parent of my children than the government. The vast majority of parents are. And where I live my children have a better chance of going to college if they attend religious schools than if they attended public paid for school.

That's because they're more likely to be rich if they went to private school.

Anyway, the topic is stupid, which isn't terribly surprising. Even if this was a thing you'd want to do in a free country (and it absolutely is not), how could you possibly do it?

Which part of this nonsense is supposed to keep me playing this game instead of something that isn't nearly so masochistic?

However, I also believe a baseline for normal beings should exist, as well as some classes that adhere to it.

As long as high-CR challenges require fantastic abilities to even participate, this is not gonna work.

That's a nonsensical distinction. The spells are part of the class's powers, even if they are printed in a different part of the book for organizational reasons. What's more, plenty of caster classes get fantastic schticks that more mundane characters aren't allowed because they are magic; bards and clerics come immediately to mind.

It's not my fault they screwed up casting in 3rd ed plus.

But you are defending maintaining that screw up, so, yeah, it is kind of your fault.

I'm not a fan of Mr. Ham or the push for Creationism/Intelligent Design/whatever-they-call-it-next in science classrooms, but calling him "wackadoo" from post #1 doesn't seem likely to encourage productive discourse.

Perhaps it would be better to focus on exposing and refuting the ignorance and misstatements--the lack of actual science--in the pro-ID positions and arguments instead of personal attacks on the individuals supporting it?

Personally, I'm okay with mockery. Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions, after all.

Guns don't fit because they undermine the historical mindset that underlies heroic fantasy.

Heroic fantasy is based on the essential belief that heroism and victory in battle are somehow based in superior ability and a greater destiny. Aragorn is victorious over a hundred orcs because he's a noble hero of men, the son of generations of noble men, wielding a sword with its own noble lineage and history, and riding a horse of noble breeding. His skills are honed by personal victory over countless foes. Once he's victorious, he's crowned and rules in the most fantastic castle ever built.

Firearms, on the other hand, especially pre-industrial-revolution firearms, are the weapons of commoners. No particular nobility and very little skill or training is necessary to be part of a line of shooters filling the air with bullets. Dying to gunfire is less personal and more random-seeming than dying to the sword, with no heroic confrontation of your foe involved. Famous guns aren't noble exemplars, but rather mass produced in the thousands or tens of thousands. Cannon rendered castles obsolete as anything but architectural accomplishments.

Heroic fantasy is a story about the myths that powered feudalism, and gunpowder killed feudalism.

It's easy, really.

Ask them if your fat wife looks fat.

If they answer, and still have their powers, they're a Cleric and not a Paladin.

Ooooor, since both clerics and paladins have comparable capacity to be diplomatic, they could politely refuse to answer.

Clerics are not as militant as paladins. Paladins would be the ones who form the majority of the militant arm of a faith. Yes they both fight evil, but a paladin is more prone to do so with force. A cleric not so much.

According to what? They both have a huge pile of divine powers that are all directly applicable to fighting. What makes a paladin more likely to fight anyone than a cleric? How do you tell a peaceful ascetic paladin from a cleric of the same sect? How do you tell a militant crusader cleric from a paladin of the same sect?

This is a problem Pathfinder is running into, more and more, as they add more classes. But it was there from day 1.

This ties into paladins-of-all-alignments chat: paladins have very little to distinguish them from clerics, and always being LG is part of that. Take that away and you run smack into the problem that an any-alignment paladin is even more like the already-any-alignment cleric. Plus, you also run into the fact that lawful-chaotic is a complete f@#@ing mess of nonsensical garbage, so it makes it very difficult to get any thematic space between CG, NG, and LG paladins.

Go and ask the owner of your local stores and shops what will happen to their stores with any of the proposed minimum wage increases.

They're going to say that it'll raise prices or put them out of business, whether or not it's true.

See also: every single labor reform in history

There is a basic flaw in your position.

The game system isn't intended to have PC of "x class" fighting PC of "y class".
The classes aren't designed to be equal fights between each other.

Right, but it is designed to have a PC of level X fighting enemies of CR X, and dealing with challenges appropriate to level X characters. Unfortunately, martials are a lot worse at both of these things.

The second camp wants Launcelot, King Arthur, Aragorn, and Conan.

So where are the martial abilities to awe everyone you come in contact with, serve as the greatest leader of men of your age, or preternaturally defy sorcerous powers with pure force of will? PF Fighters are even less capable than the protagonists of stories where all of their peers are also mere mortal men.

All of these characters did more than just murder people. The problem is that martials don't get fantastic schticks other than applying sharp bits of metal directly to anyone they dislike. Fine, you don't like...actually I'm not clear on what you don't like, since you don't seem to get any more specific than "video game/anime"

Anyway, you really have a hate-on for how other genres keep characters in par with each other for affecting the plot. How do you propose martial characters affect the plot other than with axe murder?

And im guessing you have never seen an armed man protect his family.

Just as I've never seen a unicorn.

I love how the mere mention of antimagic field started an epic hurr durr over system mastery, when merely replacing "antimagic field" with "dead magic demiplane" makes everybody look silly.

"So, uh, I know you guys were wanting to fight, and I'm totally cool with it. Really, I am. But could we just go to my private dead magic demiplane first? No? You're sure? It'll be cool, I promise."

Antimagic is not a martial class feature, so it doesn't really enter into the discussion at any point.

Yeah if you're a chump! Hellcat Stealth + Shadow Well for the win!

*Vanishes with his +34 Stealth check*

Why don't all martial classes get schticks as cool as these?

Martials in the game do what martials are supposed to do. This whole idea they should be able to take on a prepared wizard in straight up combat is not something I support or ever will. If a fighter shows up on the field against an equal or close to equal level wizard thinking to take him on in an open battle, he deserves to die or become enslaved. That is what would happen if some warrior without an artifact weapon helping him decided to take on a powerful wizard face to face in a book.

I agree. Conan the Barbarian has no business facing off against Thulsa Doom or Thoth-Amon.

This is neat but a year and a half old.