Brodiggan Gale's page

Can you use Vital Strike with an Attack of Opportunity? That's been going around our gaming table for a while, and the group is divided on how the rules translate. What about mixing Awesome Blow with AOO, or even combat maneuvers such as disarm, trip or sunder?

• Vital Strike: Does not work with AoO's as it may only be used as part of an Attack action.
  
• Awesome Blow: Is itself a standard action so it cannot be used with AoO's, vital strike, cleave, etc.
  
• Disarm: Can replace any melee attack, so it works just fine with AoO's.
  
• Trip: Can replace any melee attack, so it works just fine with AoO's.
  
• Sunder: Does not work with AoO's as it may only be used as part of an Attack action. (This one surprised me, and I almost want to say it might be a typo)
  

Not sure I agree with all of this, some of the wording on Stealth is slightly unclear, but I'd like to point out places I would rule differently and why.

First, some of your assumptions are flawed. At level 5 Jack could have as much as an additional +10 to Stealth from feats and equipment. Admittedly, not many people take Stealthy or Skill Focus(Stealth), but by level 5 a Cloak of Elvenkind is quite likely considering the cost, which would give Jack a total of +17 to Stealth. I'm also not exactly sure why a farmer commoner would have ranks in spot, but considering the potential for coyotes, I'll go along.

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On moving through a cornfield
Jack's movement is somewhat limited, unless of course Jack has fast stealth, or takes advantage of the total concealment provided by the corn to forgo Stealth checks until he's considerably closer to his objective. I'm also not entirely convinced that an orderly field would represent difficult terrain, but I'll go with it for now. Even moving at 5 ft. per round, Jack is still covering 50 feet per minute, which should be sufficient to get in and out in less time than it would take Farmer John to prepare a decent cup of coffee.

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On Bright Light

It's outdoors with the sun shining, so Jack was in an area of bright light. In bright light, characters can't use Stealth without cover or invisibility. Since the hedges only concealed Jack, he couldn't use Stealth. Thus, the DC to spot him was 0, and Farmer John's Perception was -3 with the distraction penalty. Our master rogue was spotted by a take 10.

Where does it say that bright light negates concealment and stealth? It mentions in the PRD that certain types of concealment may be ineffective because of abilities like Darkvision and Low-Light vision, but Jack should still have Total Concealment versus the farmer due to the hedgerow, allowing him to use his stealth normally. Assuming Jack takes 10 on his Stealth check, Farmer John's DC to spot him is a 27. With the penalties from distraction (+5 DC) Farmer John cannot detect Jack, even on a natural 20.

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On Moving From Cover to Cover

Oops. You need cover or concealment to use Stealth. Once you step out of your cover/concealment, the DC to spot him is 0 again. Incidentally, if Jack ever had any murderous intentions towards the farmer, this is the point at which all surprise rounds would begin. It's nearly impossible to start a surprise round in melee range.

Incorrect again. If you are being observed you need cover or concealment to use stealth. Unless Farmer John beats Jack's Stealth check and detects him, Jack remains undetected (and therefore unobserved) and can continue using Stealth. It's perfectly possible to sneak up behind someone, even across open terrain, as long as you can cover the distance without them spotting you. Now once you're spotted, you're right, you can no longer use stealth unless you can get back to cover or find concealment.

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On Sleeping Opponents

Actually, a sleeping chicken should spot him. Take 10, -10 to Perception for being asleep, +1 base Perception mod beats DC 0 to spot someone 5' away. Perhaps this was a particularly oblivious chicken.

Except if the chicken is sleeping, Jack once again has total concealment (due to the chicken having closed her eyes), making the DC to spot him 27, not 0.

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On Foes with Scent

Scent, as well as more-powerful abilities like Tremorsense and Blindsense and Blindsight, just beat Stealth hands down. No check, no nothing. There are feats in various books to work around this, in various books, as it's a well-known failing.

Scent is troublesome, but it's not automatic. The ability does allow Woof to negate Jack's Stealth, making the DC to detect him a 0, but Woof must still make a Perception check to detect him. With the penalties from being asleep (-10) this is less than automatic, with Woof needing an 8 or better to succeed. (Also, just a side note, but considering the description of taking 10 involves slowly and carefully working to accomplish a task, I'm not convinced that it's appropriate to "always be taking 10" on skills like perception.)

If Jack has thought ahead, and worked to obscure his scent, or is approaching against the wind and keeps his distance, Woof will have to make a standard perception check against Jack's stealth. (And will almost certainly fail).

We've just switched from PF beta to the final core rules. The paladin is now way over-powered for my campaign in which all the major opponents fit into its 'double smite group' (evil dragons, undead and evil outsiders).

Well, one quick thing, because it's easy to miss and might be part of the issue, Smite Evil does not do double damage against all evil outsiders (of which there are a ton), it does double damage against Outsiders with the Evil subtype (pretty much just Demons and Devils, along with a few culture specific equivalents like Rakshasa and a spattering of low level types like the Barghest).

A paladin may be an average fighter against non-evil creatures,

Well below average actually, compared to a Fighter.

but in high level campaigns the most serious challenges are generally from evil creatures, many of which (conveniently) fit into this uber-smite category.

Definitely a point to be made that there is a ton of crossover between smitable (or double smitable) creatures, and the group of monsters that tend to be bad guys. On the one hand that is a design issue on the part of the campaign, not necessarily a problem with the paladin as a whole. But on the other hand, it _does_ happen, and in most games the Paladin will have the opportunity to select specifically for the opponents on which Smite will be most effective, possibly ramping up their average damage. I'm not entirely sure how this would effect the overall total average damage a Paladin puts out, but I'll see if I can find a fair way to evaluate it.

So either smite or double-smite...AND the ability to pass this on to group members for 10 full rounds of smiting frenzy * N players?

And this I definitely need to find a way to include, if I don't take into account group buffs I'm just not fairly assessing classes like the Bard and Paladin.

People are also disregarding the fact that a paladin already has 3 important advantages over a regular fighter: spells, two good saves, rather than 1 and weapon bonding.

By the same token, the fighter has a number of advantages over the Paladin. Weapon Training, Armor Training, 10 Extra Feats, Weapon Specialization and Greater Specialization, they may not individually seem like much, but Weapon Training + G. Weapon Focus and G. Weapon Spec is a +6 to hit and +8 to damage on every attack, for example. (Roughly the equivalent of the Warrior's weapon having an extra +5 enhancement and an extra D6 damage when compared to a character with just Weapon Focus.)

It is thus unfair to simply look at damage potential when comparing a paladin to a fighter.

I definitely agree here, so far I've just been looking at the damage totals because that's the topic of debate though. (And because evaluating out of combat abilities is much more subjective, and hard to quantify.)

The ability to bypass any non-epic damage reduction against evil is the final unecessary cherry on the top, when they are already doing insane amounts of damage. Creature DR is usually an imporant part of CR estimates - which is suddenly irrelevant.

Less of an issue than you think, originally I was going to include DR in the totals, but when I started looking at some realistic examples, both characters were almost certain to be able to negate their opponents DR anyways, from the combination of weapon enhancements negating alignment/material requirements, feats like penetrating strike, and easy access to items like Oil of Bless/Align Weapon.

I might try and take a finer grain look at it when I'm working on the damage calculator tonight.

The arguments that only limited smites per day (7 at high level which is what I'm concerned about!) means this is not that useful...well, I have *never* played in a campaign where we had more than 2-3 >>>major<<< combats in any single game-world day.

Well then that might explain part of why the Paladin seems so overpowered in your campaign. I'm willing to bet that casters seem mildly overpowered as well, for some of the same reasons.

By major I mean that, not piddling secondary encounters. Now that smite is endless per opponent - and given that most major combats only have one BB(E)G + lesser minion(s), thus requiring only 1 or perhaps 2 smites for each major combat - the 'less useful' argument is just not true. You cannot really allow more serious combats per day since priests/wizards etc need to be allowed to replenish their spells - or ruin their game play experience.

At the level a Paladin is using 7 Smites a day, most casters had better be able to handle more than 2 fights. They may be annoyed at the change, or unused to using less than their most powerful spells, but we're talking about people with 9th level spells, just accounting for the 5th level spells and up, you're talking about 18-28 spell slots. With the relatively short duration of most high level fights, even casting every single round that's enough for 6-9 fights (possibly minus a bit for buffing, but if they're using all their slots buffing, then they have no room to complain about the rest of their day involving sitting back and using said buffs).

I expect that for the run-of-the-mill mostly-evil-opponents type campaign - which appear to be the dominant kind at leats for published modules - , the paladin will be out-damaging the fighter all the time.

Hardly all the time, a significant percentage of the time, perhaps, and only if they're built specifically for dealing damage (or the fighter is built for something other than damage).

Careful about scaling the paladin back too far on Smite, Smite is, after all, their central damage "trick"

It's what they do. Scale it back too far and you'll severely gimp them in comparison to classes with equally powerful, but less flashy "tricks" like rogues (Sneak attack) and Fighters (Weapon Training + Specialization)

Posted this in another thread earlier, but it's relevant to the discussion here as well.
I can't help but think that having some hard numbers on exactly how much of a boost Smite really is, over the long run, has got to be useful.

After doing a whooooole lot of math, and some data-scraping from the SRD section on monsters, I have to revise my opinion on Smite. It's powerful, without a doubt, but when I ran the numbers against a regular Fighter, I was very surprised indeed to see just how close they came at every level. I built as close to an ideal damage output fighter and ideal damage output paladin as I could, with full feat progressions, equipment, everything that might affect their damage, and at almost every level the average damage output per round for a full attack or vital strike was within two to four percent.

Against an ideal opponent, the Paladin is doing 30-40% more damage per round, but, based on the proportions of foes in the MM, all that extra smite damage ends up averaging out. (If you're curious, one third of enemies in the MM are Evil, and roughly 1/6th are Undead, Outsiders with the evil subtype, or Evil Dragons.)

I made a quick table showing the damage output for a two weapon Fighter and a two weapon Paladin (both of which MASSIVELY outdamaged the equivalent characters using two-handed weapons). Just for fun, I threw the max DPS line on for a Paladin facing a foe for which they receive double damage on their smite (but please keep in mind the average, that max damage line might look impressive, but it's balanced out by the other 5/6ths of the time, when the Paladin isn't facing their ideal opponent).

Paladin vs. Fighter Damage by level against even CR opponents (http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/9458/paladinvsfighter.png)

For the most part what I'm posting here are house rules that I'm actively using in two games each week. If I decide to post something I just came up with off the top of my head and haven't tested, I'll mark it as such (sort of a swim at your own risk deal).

I've made a lot of tweaks to skills, combat, and a put in a good bit of work on various classes. Explanations of my reasoning on the changes are seperated as quotes from the The Man Behind the Curtain, to make them easier to find.

The majority of this is meant to fix what I see as a few major problems still sticking around in Pathfinder...

Primary Melee classes in general, and Fighters especially need some help.
Pathfinder went a long way to fixing the problems with casters being mechanically too strong, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. To be honest, I'm not entirely concerned with balancing the classes, in the sense of 1 on 1 comparisons. I feel like 4th edition went way too far in that direction, and all the classes feel very homogenous as a result.
Instead, I'm just trying to ensure that every class has at least a few roles it can fill in a party, and as much "flavor" as possible. I want there to be very good mechanical and roleplay reasons for someone to play every class.

Combat is slow, very slow at high level.
There are way too many conditions/actions that force you to spend valuable time flipping page to page to find a specific piece of information.
Combat Maneuvers were a brilliant move in the right direction, but there are still some places that Combat is suffering from sprawl. Combat modifiers were the worst, they're a huge hodgepodge of specific bonuses/penalties to AC, attack bonus, stats, stat-checks, saves, skills... pretty much everything in nearly random combinations. Some of them were really elegant examples of turning a description of something into specific game stats, but the constant work to figure out exactly what penalty/bonus someone had to their attack roll slows combat terribly.
If you want an example of just how much time it can take, figure out the bonuses/penalties to a Fatigued Fighter's attack roll after he's been Entangled and poisoned by a giant spider, and is Sickened by the fumes rising from it's castoff prey. (If you're wondering, it's -5 to attack unless he's using a ranged weapon or finesse,in which case it's -7 +1/2 of whatever the dex damage from the venom was, -3 weapon damage, -2 Fortitude and Will, -5 (+1/2 of dex damage from poison) to Reflex saves, -2 to skill and ability checks except those that work off str/dex, those you'll have to recalculate for -2 str/-6 dex.)
And all that is sort of the problem with how combat modifiers work, it took me a good 2 minutes to double check all that and write it out, and it's not exactly an impossible scenario. Trying to double check all that in combat, and keep track of it seperately for 4-6 characters and 2-4 npc's is a nightmare.

One of the few things I actually disliked in the Pathfinder changes was the removal of Concentration.
Fixing the way DCs scale in concentration would be great, but rolling it in with spellcraft forces you to remove all the non-spellcaster specific uses of the skill, and removes one more thing casters needed an off-casting stat for. Admittedly, Constitution is a decent off stat even without Concentration, but anything that reduces primary casters need for off stats should be looked at carefully, they already have too much weight on their one casting stat to the exclusion of almost everything else.
So I've made some changes to Skills to bring it back in, and fix some other minor annoyances at the same time.

I'll follow this post up with a couple brief posts giving a general overview of what I was going for with each set of changes, than I'll get into real specifics in a single long post for each section (combat, skills, and so on).