Kalridian's page

It's pretty simple actually.

Wishbound arcana:
If a creature wishes for something in hearing distance and an understandable language, the wishcrafter can use that wish (the uttering of the words by that creature) as a verbal component for any spell that would grant this wish. This gives the spell averbal component, even if it didn't have one.
While using this ability, the Wishcrafter gains +1 cl.
They can (like the original efreeti) not grant wishes to themselves and therefore can not use this ability to cast a targeted spell on themselves. They may however include themselves in the spell radius. (so a Symbol of mirroring would be allowed, but a communal water walk wouldn't)
This can only be used once per wishing creature and 24 hours.

Expanded wishcraft:
The wishcrafter gets an additional spell known, but can only use it in conjunction with wishbound arcana, including all of it's limitations.

Hearts desire:
force a creature to make a wish for something they truly desire, so the wishcrafter can activate wishbound arcana.

twisted wish:
[This one is kind of confusing, i must admit] The way I understand it is, that the wishcrafter may purposefully misunderstand a wish to damage rather than aid the target in the same way a GM might, if you get to greedy with a normal wish. If they succed at this, the spell is harder to resist and to dispel.
This is kind of hard to use, I'd say. Might work in conjunction with hearts desire and a really creative player.

Perfect wishcraft:
once per day, the wishcrafter may cast any spell from the wizadr spell list, as long as somebody wished for it, as described under wishbound arcana and with the same limitations and benefits.

Hope this helps and thank you for giving me an interesting Idea for an NSC.

I try to avoid Save or die and save or suck spells like dominate and word of death and the like, as long as the players didn't at least have the chance to find out what they would be facing.
Nothing less fun than losing a character to a single failed save.

I don't have many Ideas at the moment, this is more of a shameless attempt to get you guys to give me yours.

1. Encountering/having to deal with a tribe of Morlocks or other denizens of the deep, who regularly sacrifice slaves/prisoners to their Lake-God that is actually a Living Lake

2. A cave that contains the old but deadly Remorhaz plus Brown Mold - combination

3. Encounter a group of Darkfolk slavers with a broken wagon/in front of a cave in/some other form of travel impedement and be forced to decide wether to ignore them, try to free the slaves or help them for a reward (preferably information or something else that can't be taken of their dead bodies if the players decide to attack)

Steal/sunder his holy symbol in the surprise round and get rid of any spares he might have beforehand.

Sorry for the broken link earlier, even though it would not have been impossible to look at the adress bar and remove the part that obviously does not belong into the URL.

Here is the working link.

I have a houserule that every magical weapon, shield or armor has some kind of "focus" (a gem, a bone, a holy symbol) in which the actual magic resides.
Those can be separated from the weapon and attached to another one in a process that takes one hour per +1 enchantment, costs 100 gp per +1 and needs a spellcraft-check with a DC of 15+ enchantment bonus.
Every item can have only one focus attached and must be masterwork.
Foci can be merged in a process that takes 1 hour for every +1 of the end product, has a spellcraft DC of 15+1 per enchantment of the end product and needs magical materials worth the difference between the combined worth of the original foci and the end product.
While combining or transfering foci, the crafter can decide to keep the original magical effect or turn it into a flat enhancement of appropriate strengt (so a +1 flaming focus could be made a +2 focus). None of these rules can be used to exceed the usual limitations on item enchantment.
If the spellcraft check fails by 5 or more, the foci are imbalanced by the process and are inert for 24 hours.

This solves the problem of believability, lets the players keep their "ancient familiy heirloom sword TM" and even gives them the option of switching a focus between weapons if they have a lot of time to prepare for a fight and know about a certain DR or somwthing but also carries the risk that they botch the roll and are completely bereft of their magical weapon for a day.

Also it adds cool details to the weapons, because every Focus is unique and you might end up with a fighter in shiny armor who has a focus made from a human fingerbone attached to his weapon, because he took it from a goblin chieftain.

Just because he charges the illusion does not mean he rugby-tackles it. He just uses the momentum of his run for his swing.

There is neither a RAW nor a "common sense" reason for him to fall over.

The System has Craft(Basketweaving)... NOT everything in it exists for powergaming purposes. Maybe somebody wants to make an NPC Gunsmith-Expert?

If non-proficient, ACP is also added to Attack rolls. Therefore ACP does NOT always only apply to Skills.

You said they had strange runes on their arms. Maybe those don't come off and keep informing followers of Zon-Kuthon about their location and they have to find a way to get rid of them while fleeing from/ defending against more cultists.

Simple solution in my home games: The duration of summoning spells is increased to (concentration+normal duration). The timer only starts ticking once the caster stops concentrating on sustaining the spell. That way you can have out-of-combat summons for utility and fun and don't screw the balance in combat, because what character above 2nd level will waste his/her actions on sustaining a summoning spell? This would only happen in situations where the caster can not contribute anything else to the fight and then it gives them something to do. Also, it makes summonings at low levels worthwile.

I have the houserule that while you still can't attack while concentrating, you can use your skills at a penalty, so a character can, for example, summon a creature, sustain it and at the same time use handle animal at a penalty to make it do something.

(Skills tied to mental attributes take -5, those tied to physical ones -10)

At my table this wouldn't work.
Even if it's possible to convince the Wizard in the first place, once his attitude reverts, he'll be sitting there and staring at his workbench and asking himself why the hell he has been doing this for a random stranger, no matter how nice he seemed. Then when you walk into his place the next time, he'll have huge bonuses against being sweet-talked again.

See, this is P&P, with actual thinking, learning, "living" NPCs, not a computer game where the guy you attacked will be all like "hm, I guess it was the wind" and return to business-as-usual with an arrow still sicking in his head.

@ Detect magic:
This is why I let my players roll perception from time to time even when there is nothing to find.

For the same reason I sometimes ask them for their exact marching order and spacing or roll some random dice behind the screen, ask one of the players what their bonus on acertain saving throw is and pretend to write something down or have them roll sense motive when the NPC is telling the truth.
This way you teach them to stop metagaming.

Now I want to make an NPC waterelemental who collects shiny fishes inside himself... Bonus points if he has wizard levels and one of the fishes is his familiar. ^^

Not necessarily. Full casters are more powerful if they can nova every fight and the get to rest, but if you force them to stretch their resources, the whack-stuff-with-a-pointy-stick-guy suddenly becomes the hero of the day.

Wait, they are both female?

I wonder if this changes things. I should do some more research on my Internet. I wonder if they have any instructional videos on the subject...

EDIT: Oh my goodness! There are millions! How many scientists are there?

For some unknown reason I read this post in the voice of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy. Made it even funnier :-D

Edit: Up until now I was completely unaware of the very interesting and artistically pleasing things that turn up when you simply google the anmes of the female pathfinder iconics with safe search turned off...

I was really only trying to find out which of the names belongs to which character. At first.

If my players butcher a corpse for crafting ingredients (they just did that with a nightskitter demon), I give them the cool and flavourful ingredients they want, assign a worth as crafting materials to them and substract this worth on the fly from the next possible loot. This way the fighter gets his cool magical set of full plate from the armor plates of a demon and I don't upset the WBL.

DR doesn't apply against spelldamage, so switching SR against DR would be very unfair towards the martials. On top of that, there are spells that ignore SR and immunity to magic, your casters will just have to be creative.
If you put in a second DR that works against magiacal damage, your players will simply stop using damage spells and use condition-inflicting ones. While using monsters with SR/Immunity to magic should be considered carefully so the magic players don't get annoyed, I think they are quite OK as a means to allow the martials to shine in combat other than using multiple encounters to drain the spells of the casters...

On top of that, ask the GM to take all his pretend-actions at face value, no take-backsies. I did the same thing with one of my players. He plays a blaster-sorcerer and in the beginning, every time I described some kind of critter for fluff and scenery, he said "I blast it with *insert destructive spell here*" as a joke or when the players entered a room with a mechanism of which they KNEW (due to good investigation beforehand) that it would do something bad, he immediately said "I trigger the mechanism" and then took it back.
I talked to him about how it disturbed the gaming and after it didn't stop, I warned him again that from now on I would take EVERY action he states for his character at face value. After the party got chased out of a village, because he fireballed a herd of cows for no reason and he started a really troublesome forest fire by frying a squirrel with burning hands, he has learned to contain himself.

This strategy should at least help with the in-game stress, because if he keeps doing stupid things, sooner or later the party will kick him out IT.

Concerning the OT problems, I'm with the others. Let him have the normal minis back and if he damages one again, have him repay you the price for a fully painted mini. IT as well as OT stupid behaviour has consequences. If he doesn't learn that, he's gonna have a hard time in life, so essentially ayou're doing him a favour.

First of all, I'm pretty much certain you made a mistake on the perception rules. Did you include the higher difficulty for increased range? It's +1/10ft.
Since entangle has a range of 840ft for your dragon, you don't need to worry about that. The range limit for the first entangle attack lies in the perception of the dragon.
Since the Juvenile green has +20 perception, it can get +30 by taking ten on perception, so since the dc for detecting a visible creature (which he would need to do to target them with entangle ) is 0. This means, he can aim his entangle at them from 300ft distance. Assuming he took 10 on his stealth check, your PCs would have to beat a Perception DC of 51 to notice him before he got his entangle off.
With the sniping Rules, he can continue this tactic as long as he wants. Multiple entangle spells in the same area stack, so maybe your PCs can beat the DC13 once per round, but what about 5 times?
For added fun, you can employ the same tactic with a few charm person spells, albeit the range for that is only 50 feet, so the perception DC for your PCs will decrease to 26 that way.
Then, switch out one of the feats (I recommend greater cleave) for flyby attack. On the following rounds on his init, he can fly in from as much as 130 feet, use his breath weapon, break away in a 45° angle and get about 120 feet of distance between himself and the group. For added evilness, have him fly away so low that it breaks line of sight for the casters, so they can't directly attack him on their turn. The PCs have only limited movement compared to the dragon, especially if they want to keep the spiders with them. So he can move around and has no problem finding them, but they have to check again every time to see him approaching, if you fly at half speed to use stealth between the treetops.
On top of that, with ghost sound at will, he can have the sound of his own roar come from any point he chooses for 11 rounds with only one casting. If he is feeling mean, he spends 2 or 3 rounds, setting those noises up in different directions from the group. Since they will most probably use their turn to ready an action for attacking it once it comes in sight, they will not be able to buff up.
If the dragon naturally preys on the spiders, they should probably be afraid of that sound, so the druids turn gets spent trying to calm them down, since they are definately NOT combat trained.

Additionally, did you let the druid roll his handle animal to push the spider to web the dragon? Because once again, it is NOT combat trained and I'd say this is unnatural behaviour for it.

If all of that fails and in the situation you described:
Imagine you are an intelligent being, trying to mount a suprise attack on a big group of enemys. You fail to surprise them, they bloody your nose with a big spell. How would you NOT use your awesome fly speed of 200ft per round to escape from them and kick their butts another time? THEY are in YOUR forrest. THEY have to leave, YOU don't. THEY have to sleep, YOU do too, but they don't know WHEN you will be. Depending on how big the forest is, let the martials sleep in armor for some nights, wake them up from time to time, make them tired and anxious, THEN go for the kill.

It's extremely overpowered. Look at the price and Caster Level for the vorpal weapon enchantment (which basically does what you want to do, limited to creatures with one head and minus the morale adjustment). No way in hell can you give that ability away for a Feat and a CMB check.

Aside from that, you seem to be slightly mistaken rules-wise on two points .

1th: A coup de grace doesn't have a fixed fortitude DC of 15, but rather (10 + damage dealt), which can become REALLY enormous, especially if you have a Rogue or a powerattacking 2-hand-fighter with a high crit weapon apply the CDG, since CDG is an auto-crit.

2nd: The target of a combar maneuver doesn't "roll" CMD. CMD is a fixed DC, just like AC. Either the attacker beats the CMD with his CMB+d20 or he doesn't. No rolling on the part of the defender.

One thing I am astonished nobody has mentioned so far: The wizard player in one of my games has different prepped lists of spells. They are:
- Social/investigative
- Overland travel
- Battle (humanoids)
- Battle (monsters)
- Misc Mix
Each of them contains SOME empty slots, "Misc Mix" more than the others.

We have the deal that I always assume he has prepped the list that would be most appropriate in the eyes of his character at the beginning of the day. If it is not clear which list his character would choose, I ask him.

So far this has worked pretty well and he has good to perfect spells prepared most of the time. Then again, I run a kind of sandbox-ish style in that group, so the players often get to decide which plot hook or individual goal they want to follow and often have the option of researching the general type of threats they might encounter. This style of play obviously works extremely well with the list-option, but even if you're in a more restricted game, it should have some merit.

(At least as long as your gm is not one of those "you are woken up in the middle of the night by an orb of light floaating next to your bed and as you touch the orb - no you don't get to decide wether you want to do that or not - you are teleported to dungeon XY and a voice coming from the orb tells you to slay the evil monsters" - kind of type)

I really recommend playing an evil character once in a while. I am a very peaceful person and always try to look for the reasons behind other peoples "wrongdoings" and try to understand them. Since most people tend not to actively try to do bad things, I'm neraly never mad at anybody.
But no matter how peaceful and nice a peryon is, there is an evil part in everybody. Most people don't let it out in everyday life, since they don't want to cause any harm, but it is ALWAYS there. In my opinion there is no such thing as a completely good or bad person. Once you accept that and accept the fact that you, too have a little shard of darknes inside you, take that shard, look at it from all sides, accept it as a part of yourself and THEN make it an RPG character. I get to play my inner a/%%hole in a regular game of Black Crusade (Warhammer 40k, you play as the "bad guys" by default)and I can tell you guys, it's liberating. All the evil things that little voice in the back of your head wants you to do to that guy that nearly runs you over with his car at the end of a godawful day and then starts to swear at you, even if it was his fault? Let them out. Lay waste to towns, raze kingdoms to the ground and strike fear in the hearts of the weak. It's an RPG, no one gets hurt and you get all that darknes out of your stomach without hurting anyone.

On second thought, I should probaly go to bed. I seem to have a tendency to become a little dramatic at 6 in the morning...

Edit: The time does seem to also have a negative impact on my spelling...

No. Generally, moving out of a threatened square (save a 5 ft. follow-up or a Withdraw action) will provoke an AOO.

If you are dealing with a creature that has 15 ft. reach, if you close the gap (AKA, become adjacent to that creature), you would provoke 2 AOO, as you are moving out of a threatened square into another threatened square, and moving out of that threatened square into yet another threatened square. Since the creature has Combat Reflexes, it will get 2 AOOs to make against you.

However, should you start at their 15 ft. threat range, and close the gap, you would only provoke 1 AOO, since you make a 5 ft. step (which is free), and move another 5 ft. adjacent to the creature, which is what would provoke.

Isn't it forbidden to take a 5 foot step in combination with any other movement?

The way I see it, wouldn't it actually be a good act to take that object of evil and, against it's very core principles of existence, use it to save an innocent? He takes the pain and suffering (negaive levels) that the blade will inflict on him and still stands strong for all that is good an just. Sounds like epic song material to me, not like a reason to atone...

I don't need to get out more, I need to work on my university paper. ^^
Having stated this, it should be plainly obvious to all of you why I'm spending so much time in the forums. -.-

I apologize in advance for the long post, but please bear with me, my megalomania leads me to thinking it might actually be worth your time.

I know there are millions of different fighting styles out there, but at least in the one I wasted quite some of my spare time learning, you actually parry the attack ot the opponent, who has moved close to you to attack you, then grab his wrist, to pull him even closer and take his weapon away from him.
I am well aware that this particular style would most probably be some strange grapple/disarm combination by RAW, but whenever anyone uses disarm it is quite safe to assume that the opponent has closed in on said person to attack him/her, because he'd simply have to do so to hit him.
I know it is not stated in the RAW, since facing and things like that do not exist anymore, but to me, common sense makes it perfeclty clear that characters are not glued to the exact center of their 5ft square. They HAVE to move around in that square, these movements are simply so small that they are being ignored in the rules.
On top of that, if fighters Bob and Fred stand in adjacent squares, their weapons would most probably be at a similar height

Ignore all the x-es, apparently they are needed since the forum simply ignores multiple spaces.

|xxxBxxx|xxxFxxx|
|xxxB-Wx|xW-Fxxx| (seen from the side)
|xxxBxxx|xxxFxxx|

While a weapon lying on the ground is a lot further down at the same horizontal distance, therefore resulting in a larger overall distance.

|xxxBxxx|xxxxxxx|
|xxxB-Wx|xxxxxxx|
|xxxBxxx|xxxWxxx|

(i know this does not take different creature sizes into account, but if you take logic to those, you'll end up with a LOT more questions. Think a tiny character with a vorpal sword rolling a 20 against a large oppponent. Nobody wants to think about how the f**k he reached the neck to chop off the head)

In my eyes, the disarm-CM roll (if you win it) represents drawing your enemy in and tricking him into giving you an opening for your attempt. If you fail the roll, you fail to do so.

So at least I'd want an acrobatics or a CM roll to pick that weapon up from the next square, especially if you want to do so without provoking an AOO. I know that is not RAW, but at least that's what common sense dictates to me and the way I would houserule it.

*edit: my awesome scematics of fighters and weapons got screwed up while posting.