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I'm kind of bummed that the world as a whole has taken a turn for the higher fantasy/power level lately. I may be mistaken but I recall Golarion being billed as more Westeros and less Faerun originally, yet with each canon/lore release the general power level goes up. Some of the last APs have been especially egregious. Suddenly there's level 11 barbarians and level 13 wizards running around as mook encounters? Where are these people coming from?
I love playing with new players. For me, it has nothing to do with new players building bad characters - it's the lack of content to play with them. More replayable content or expanded replayable content would help a lot.
Dizzy from blood loss, Skaar tries to quickly survey the scene. The girls are down and bleeding, maybe dead. I'm hurt. Blood... so much blood. This bastard is too quick. I'll never be able to bring him down before he carves me up again. Strapped to Aurelia's back, Rorn's greataxe suddenly caught the big orc's eye. Skaar had sworn off weapons, they reminded too much of the past he was trying to forget, but he had to do something or he was going to fail... again. Tearing the axe free from the unconscious Aurelia, the hulking orc roars wordlessly before stepping forward and swinging the deadly weapon in a screaming arc.
Markus moves away again. Very very far away.
"You know how this life is. A pirate has to be fierce to survive but that doesn't mean he can't be fair. Those two had their chances, more than someone like Harrigan would have given them. The goblin is strange but he has honor." Bjorkus studied the woman again before resuming his duties ushering the crew in Opal's direction, lingering on those legs she seemed to be so proud of. "Now that we're not enemies, we should get to know each other - tonight below decks. I can learn about your experience and you can see what's been keeping Tilly and the Besmaran priestess coming back night after night."
I'd be a terrible woman. This was my morning (~30 minutes from waking up to leaving the house). *Wake Up* 2 minutes - Put on shoes, go outside and turn on the sprinklers to water the sod
*Leave the House* There's no time for waking up Red!
Powered by his pain, Pirknok's weapon slams into the murderous goblin, splitting him in half and splattering the adjacent wall of foliage with gore.
I'm thoroughly impressed by both of the posts thus far. They've warmed my DMing heart. =)
The beast increases the pressure on Pirknok's torso and the popping sound of ribs splintering under the bear's unyielding strength fills the air.
10 Base
Total - 26
Tanrov fumes as he pins the Mage to the ground and beats him senseless with his big fists. Ares recovers thanks to Amira's channeling and climbs to his hooves. The bull encourages the young shoanti by snorting and stamping his hooves. "That's for burning us with fire!" "That's for having your thugs stab Ares!" "That's for hiding indoors!"
I believe that text is there to clarify that you don't have to do anything to turn it on once you're raging. As opposed to say, Rolling Dodge which requires that you be raging and spend a Move Action to activate it.
Mildly hungover and half-starved but I posted. That's commitment!
"There's weapon racks over there. Maybe they did combat demonstrations on the stage."
This is not an in-character problem so in-character solutions are not a good idea. This is a communication problem with the players involved. It'll only be solved using such means. You can't RP a solution to an upset player.
I had a similar problem in my Kingmaker game. This is likely result of any scenario where one of the characters needs to be singled out for something special. Unless you have a very mature group, this is going to come up almost every time. In my group one player resented another (the one that was baron and eventually king) for the entirety of the campaign. If you want to salvage the campaign have an NPC step up as captain. If the players end up hating it, they can always mutiny... again.
I think Khazrae is telling us that there should be a switch somewhere to disable the door. How else can honest looters and Thrune agents get past? "Yeah, I heard her the first eight times but I'm busy. Maybe Orsin, John, or Grimm want to go look for it?"
"What-a-tops?" Truk says in confusion.
I may rethink Dervish Dancer to tone down the build if it doesn't work through roleplaying. I've already swapped out Arcane Strike for Combat Casting. This will still help me out a lot, but reduce the damage I do and keep from outshining other players. I will still have Weapon Finesse for a Rapier for hitting well with a high dex, it will just reduce the damage bonus that I receive by a bit. At which point I would probably replace Dervish Dancer with Dodge and work more towards being a skirmish fighter. We shall see, thanks for the replies all. :) Wow, that is the best response from a magus I've ever seen. All of your suggestions are good ones. Your group is lucky to have you.
"Champ, you recognize those coins? That's not cheliax."
She's also a giant scary eyeball. I don't think the normal social rules apply here.
I feel like that should be question #1 for characters looking to join this party.
Bjorn spins the smith's hammer in his hand and bellows a warcry before bringing it down for one (hopefully) final blow.
Though, I wish players would find a nice middle-ground, I am quickly finding that I much prefer unoptimized characters over optimized characters both as a player and as a DM. Stories about heroes struggling through trials and emerging victorious (or even failing) are much more interesting than a group of super-humans that walked through everything.
I handle this two ways. A) No magic item Wal-Mart. Even in the biggest most well-connected city there's only a chance you can get what you want and even then, there's a serious wait time. B) Crafting is not done at a discount. You pay full price to craft. The benefit is that you can get exactly what you want (and often taking less time to do so than the person shopping by catalog in point A).
It sounds like your DM is just matching your game of rocket tag with his own. An optimized mounted charger will one-shot most monsters. The DM is doing what he has to in order to mitigate your character.
I have yet to experience any of this 'Season 4 is hard' business that everyone is talking about. I even played Storval Stair with the author! As far as I've seen, season 4 is more of the same (for better or worse).
Honestly, at this point the character should become an NPC under your control and the player in question should roll up a new character. Having a player play the antagonist among the other players won't end well.
It was good gaming with Will and everyone else down in Anaheim. Thanks Brian.
The synthesist is a perfect example of why we can't have nice things in organized play. People will abuse them. In a home game, the DM would just see the 7/7/7 character sheet and tell the player to stop being a git and to stop abusing your eidolon's stats. In PFS, DMs don't have that luxury. Thus it's on players to moderate themselves - something that doesn't happen.
If this is the worst thing your players are doing, you're in good shape.
In most cases PCs outnumber the badguys. This means that each PC's action is worth less than the enemy's. Thus if you can do something with your action to invalidate the enemy's action, you're ahead. Example: Readying to disrupt. Worst case, the enemy caster gets wise and stops casting. This is a win even if it means your caster/archer/whatever basically does nothing the rest of the encounter. Example: Withdraw Spam. It doesn't feel terribly heroic but Withdraw can be an incredibly powerful tactic. If the enemy dragon moves up on the party cleric, rather than 5-foot back and cast a spell (and eat a full attack next turn) consider withdrawing. This means the dragon has to waste a full-round action moving into position get to get a single attack on its next turn. Example: Dispel. I know in a lot of cases dispelling seams like a weak choice due to enemy boss caster levels generally being higher than the PCs' but dispel is a lot more powerful than people give it credit. Sure you might have to cast it 2-3 three times to nail that Displacement but increasing the hit chance of your melee/archers by 50% is worth the action investment. If the enemy caster recasts that displacement on his next turn, you essentially traded your standard action for his - an excellent trade. Druids, this includes you. Example: Stay Grappled. In 90% of cases, grappling is the worst thing a monster can do. It's a bit counter-intuitive but unless the tentacle-monster/bear/ooze has something like Swallow Whole that carries a risk of killing you super quickly, letting the monster have its way with your character for a while is often the best-case-scenario for your party. You might be taking some grapple damage and/or constrict each turn but in exchange the monster is losing its full attack, its ability to take AoOs, and is taking an AC penalty. Next time an ally gets grabbed don't panic and do everything in your power to break him free. Tell your buddy to suck it while the party pours on the damage.
Meatspace just feels like the title of a B-Horror movie. In any event, thanks for running your mod for me/us. Playing a mod with the author is always an awesome experience.
I have countless other examples but that's not the point. My point was that citing the VCs as a team to look over material that may be problematic for PFS is not a good system. Some of them may be, but they're not 'rules guys'. They're leaders and organizers, not technicians.
I had a barbarian back in LG that had dipped into sorcerer and had a weasel familiar. One of his crowning moments was when I shared True Strike with my familiar and then had the familiar disarmed Rary of his Staff of the Magi. Silly archmages.
I had a PC attacked by a DM when he was down and as a result, killed. And this is a group with no healers so there'd been no 'up down yoyoing'. And I hadn't hurt the BBEG at all. And the NPC's tactics say nothing about focusing down and killing one PC above all others. And my PC hadn't really done much the whole mod (it's not like he'd shown himself to be a threat via scrying or something). And the DM in question was a Venture Captain. Needless to say, I do not play at that Venture Captain's conventions anymore and, in general, avoid playing within their region.
Monks are not weak by any stretch of the imagination. The only place they suffer is in theorycraft optimization.
I appreciate these changes but I hate retroactive nerfs. I hate having to say I-told-you-so.
AC is king in 3.5/Pathfinder and you'll find that characters optimized for AC will often out perform those that optimize for other things. That said, raising overall power level of the campaign to challenge optimized characters isn't any better of a solution. Characters with ACs 30+ may be invulnerable but do you want to see AC 30+ become the standard? My stance on this is the same as it's been for a while. If people want to min/max themselves out of a game, let them. "You want into the room and the cult's champion howls a challenge. Fortunately, due to your incredible agility and myriad magical defenses he's unable to even scratch you." Here's your Chronicle. I hope everyone had fun!
Some barbarians are truly savage, having little training in modern arms. These savage barbarians learn to avoid blows and toughen up their skin.
I've been a fan of orcs ever since Warcraft 3/WoW pushed the noble-savage archetype. If you want some inspiration I'd suggest playing through the campaign mode in Warcraft III/Frozen Throne.
So you don't actually think broader rebuild rules should be applied as of Guide 4.2, you think it's fine to start with just first-level rebuilds for the time being, and you're okay with broader rebuilds being a future consideration rather than an immediate one? More or less, this. I'm a bit confused by this. Are you meaning that if the people who post on the boards were the only customers, that more game companies would go out of business? I so, I completely agree. :P I mean that, just because a few people on a message board disagree/agree with you is not indicator that either party is the majority. If that were the case Bioware would be out of business right now.
Yes, for you, me, and others starting over is a viable option. But for some, being told to start over after investing 30-50 hours into something is a deal breaker. Another poster mentioned Mass Effect earlier. Mass Effect, a game with a much smaller time investment, allows readily available rebuilds at the small cost of some in-game currency. Almost all other modern games do. Simply, the model of "You can never change anything, ever" is outdated because it's not fun for most people. Do we want this campaign to grow or stay the scale that it is now?
It's not always about optimization. Plenty of times it's just about enabling the player to have a character that's more fun for them or more in line with their character's background.
I've never played in home game that didn't allow some degree of rebuilding. Even LG had a system for it.
Summoner/Synthesist is incredibly powerful. In my CoT game I've been actively working to limit the power of my character and I still feel like I often overwhelm the content. I purposely did not abuse the stat system (I used my point buy allotment on 18 strength, 14 dex, and 14 con), I trained out of all my natural armor evolutions, and I will never take pounce. To that end, overpowered is only as much of an issue as you let it be. I very rarely merge with my eidolon and more often than not just fight without him. In big climax battles, when I am merged, I focus on fighting mooks so that others can have fun with the more important enemies.
I will pretty much never be on board for this because I've never seen it done well. Every time I've had a judge make "changes" to the scenario to make things more fun it has ended poorly for myself or someone else at the table. It's better if judges run things as best they can as written. If the experience ends up being less than ideal, the players they should take it up with the campaign writers and admins. Judges "fixing" modules on the fly makes for a vigilante mess that, more often than not, ends no better than if the judge had left things alone.
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