L. A. DuBois's page

For almost as long as I've been running tabletop campaigns, I've had the idea of running combat against a monster so big that even Colossal is too small to properly encapsulate it (though, honestly, I feel like Colossal monsters are already big enough that you could probably run them this way). Of course, I've always had the vague notion of running it as essentially terrain or a small dungeon with its various limbs and the like basically functioning as monsters, traps, or other hazards, themselves, but I'm wondering if anyone else has actually taken a stab at this sort of thing, or perhaps even if there's been some supplement that details a strategy for it.

(Incidentally, the earliest envisioning of this idea was for an apocalyptic Eberron campaign particularly inspired by the kaorti. It would eventually culminate in the PCs traveling to the Far Realm and having to fight creatures that I described as being of unfathomable size and alien dimensions such that many could be as incomprehensible to the PCs of even be creatures as the PCs would be unnoticeable to them, swimming through a multidimensional space that would cause them to even appear to be crawling through each other. Amusingly, despite this being the mid-2000s and so before Pathfinder even got off the ground, my imagination mostly rendered these things as pretty much city-sized keketar.)

Slim Jim wrote:

A dwarven rogue with his highest stats in Con and Wis is quite playable.

That sounds like a character who'd have a hard time hitting enemies and be weak in the Dexterity skills we'd expect Rogues to be good at. Are there some build options that make this work?

Look, we're not talking min-maxing here. Even outside of combat, there's still plenty that most any character - but especially a rogue - can do to help a typical party. The character needn't be in the top 10% of characters or anything, just so long as they function. Let's say characters (not classes) who would fit low Tier 4 (capable of doing one thing well, even if suffering in other areas or being cripplingly overspecialized), if we bring in the idea of class tiers. Though even Tier 5 is great if you've got a fun story to tell.

Slim Jim wrote:

Rogue critic's flowchart:

[Query: Is somebody satisfied with their rogue?]-->[Yes.]-->[Bring this heretic before the tribunal!]

They’re just applying sense to some patent nonsense. It’s cool that your GM is giving you a customized kiddie mode to make your character seem good, I hope you appreciate him.

Please don't be a gatekeeping tryhard. Roleplaying games are about having fun with some friends. If you want to talk about what builds are or aren't most effective in some absolute sense, there are plenty of other threads for that. This is a thread for wacky and fun builds that specifically diverge from conventional wisdom and truisms for building characters. Naturally, the vast majority of these characters will be, in some way, markedly suboptimal. But, if a character was able to accomplish something fun in an actual game - or even just if the player had fun playing them, or is looking forward to an opportunity to play them - without being built around common stats, that's enough for them to be welcome in this thread, regardless of how that character might fare in a PFS game or Tomb of Horrors. (This comment was singled out, but it's kind of aimed at a few replies in this thread.)

TL;DR: Please don't insult other players, GMs, or playstyles in this thread.

P.S. I just noticed, amusingly enough, that one of the first hits in that link is a "dwarf rogue who doesn't suck" with 18 Con and a respectable Wis score... Heheh

@Wonderstell: Kudos for the poem!

It wasn't really strong (just 13 Str) but in one campaign an arcane trickster was surprised to find herself the strongest character in the party. The player never did get used to the muscle wizard jokes.

This reminds of me of a campaign I'm currently playing in where we keep getting caught off guard by the fact that our barbarian (me) has the highest Intelligence in the group, at a whopping 11. You'd be surprised how often it comes up, considering it's a fairly old school kick-in-the-door style campaign. I'm also the only character with a positive Int modifier, again, in a Curse of Strahd campaign, though at least in that one my Int is a 14, and I'm a warlock which is more thematic for a group's mastermind.

That's fair. In retrospect, I think I did end up projecting some of my own concerns onto Starfox's comments.

At this point, I think anything else I might have to say would be veering dangerously close to a complete derailing of the thread, even beyond the discussion of PCs. So I'll just leave it at that.

Let's see... I've done an Investigator (Sleuth/Mastermind) for an incredibly fun slippery Bunny Ears Lawyer-type information broker concept.

And I've made a Paladin (Empyreal Knight/Shining Knight) to make just the shiningest of knights in shining armour. She was a lot of fun, too, 'cause I was able to make her an almost over-the-top paragon of goodly goodness and still just be so adorable... No, the mechanics of those archetypes didn't contribute hugely to this, but with a class name like "Empyreal Shining Knight Paladin"... they kinda don't have to. (And yes, technically both of those archetypes "affect" Divine Bond, but one just requires that the mount version be taken and doesn't otherwise alter it, so I'd argue they're compatible.)

I have a few characters who stray a little off the beaten path: A Str Rogue, a Shifter with a decent Int, more characters with 14+ Cha than the average person.

However, my more odd characters are generally from archtypes which many would say suck. And unfortunately due to the priority shifts that those archtypes provide, most of the unusual stat choices are actually rather justified. Like a Warpriest rocking a 14 Cha because they're a Champion of the Faith and thus get Smite, or a Thunderstriker Fighter with 16 Cha since they're taking the Sanguine Angel prestige class and get a lot out of Signature Skill: Intimidate skill unlocks.

I've also got some oddities like a 14 Str, 13 Wis Witch, but as the White Haired Witch, most of that is to get feat prereqs on the grappling line.

Well certainly an honourable mention to your warpriest and fighter, at the very least. And I'd actually say the witch straight-up counts, at least potentially. Even if that's not what you actually did with the character, the concept of building a witch around grappling is certainly novel enough to count.

I will say that I'm not really seeing how PF2 moves you more to "one true ability score." Yes, classes have a key ability score now, but there a lot of stuff going the other direction.

(snipped)

Well, I did at least mean to imply that I was probably being a bit overly sensitive to things I was seeing that seemed to suggest this sort of direction, considering how strongly I feel about it. Apologies if that didn't come across, and I'm certainly heartened to hear that it doesn't seem to be doing that on closer inspection.

Honestly? Probably, for purposes of this thread. Let's assume there is an NPC monk in a Paizo adventure path whose story is inexorably intertwined with his ability to punch things. (That's the bar here, but we will take this for granted.) Provided we can model a character who is good at punching things, it doesn't actually matter if his class is "monk." He could even be trained in a monastery but not be of the monk class. You could outright remove the monk class from the game and it wouldn't really matter. What really matters is if you can make a character who is good enough at punching to complete their role in the story as previously written.

This is the only bit of the rest I'm going to respond to since, for the rest, anything left that I do disagree with you on is pretty much covered by the aforementioned difference of opinion, and to try and address any of it would be tantamount to sparking a flamewar, which I certainly don't want to do. I was hesitant enough just to make the previous post for that exact fear, but I felt it was a point that was better mentioned openly rather than leave unsaid and let fester.

Anywho...

I just want to clarify a bit that... I'm not too terribly bothered about what class is called what or anything like that. In fact, I'm kind of notorious among my IRL tabletop RPG community for being almost dismissive of established class fluff. Like I've once used the spirit summoner archetype to make a character whose playing of a zither is so beautiful she can enchant surrounding water (nonmagically, she's just that good a musician - because fantasy world, it doesn't have to be 100% logical) into "dancing" for her, resulting in what is, mechanically, her eidolon. A few minor tweaks - her playing of the zither counting as her somatic and verbal spell components, for example - and there she is. The edge cases where I do have to break from the concept to satisfy rules (like how her "nonmagical" effects are countered by antimagic field, for example) are generally infrequent enough that I'm content to overlook the narrative inconsistencies when they're encountered (plus it would be completely broken not to). This is pretty much because I tend to come up with a character idea first, and then look around at what class and other mechanics can be used (arguably, misused) to mechanically represent that idea. This is, in short, why I disliked the original 3e sorcerer because there were very few concepts it could fulfill that couldn't also be created with the wizard. Pathfinder's bloodlines give it enough uniqueness to stand apart. For example, another character I made who was a tinkerer. Spells were little one-use gadgets he threw together on the fly and bloodline powers were more robust, multi-use contraptions he built. Otherwise, pretty much just used the standard sorcerer class as-is.

Anyway, point being that I'm not so worried about what any particular class is capable of so much as wanting to be sure that someone is capable of filling in that niche. Which is why I backed up Starfox's concerns. The loss of a quintessential character type is concerning from that perspective. Of course, not really trying to sway any opinions here, all of this is just trying to help you understand our perspective. Like with pointing out why many respondents have mistaken the generic descriptions of the OP to mean the thread was intended to talk about the potentiality of stories to be told in each edition, not simply the officially published ones that have already been told. Not trying to persuade you to listen to these comments, simply trying to help you understand why they are being voiced in this thread.

One of the things that keeps me practically married to 3.5e/PF is the comparative freedom you have with your ability scores. Sure, clerics want to have good Wisdom, and barbarians want a healthy Con score, but just about every class can get something out of any of their ability scores.

The gold star of this is the rogue who can have builds centered around just about any of the six ability scores. Strength and Constitution rogues are your brutish thugs, bouncers, and other urban muscle who don't give one whit about propriety and civil tactics. Intelligence rogues are your skill monkeys and masterminds (at least until the investigator class came along). Wisdom rogues are sleuths, gamblers, and other shady characters who rely on their wits. And Charisma rogues are your charming rakes and suave charlatans. Now, sure, you could make a brutish thug who's a fighter or barbarian, or a charming rake who's a bard, but those would be very different characters from a rogue built around those stats. And, notably, unlike certain other versions of D&D and its spin-offs, can make use of them.

So, without further ado, have you made any characters built around unusual ability scores? Unusually high scores a class doesn't normally focus on, or unusually low scores that are normally that class's focus both count. For MAD classes, it's generally got to be a score that either isn't part of its normal MAD scores, or is built around only one of its MAD stats to the veritable exclusion of others (a monk with high Charisma as an example of the former, or a paladin with with high Wisdom but low - as in no more than say 13 - Charisma and Strength as an example of the former).

Wall of Thorns is a very respectable replacement. If anyone remembers Herogames Hero Fantasy the druid there could cast Wall of Animals which should be a fairly traumatic experience as dozens of woodland critters form an animal pyramid to stop your enemies attacks.

I'm a little surprised that there aren't any Time Travel spells in Pathfinder. I mean it is a horrible idea, introducing time travel into any game is a mistake because it basically leads to people trying to 'fix' everything. And then there is the horror of the BGs doing the same to you.

The reason I'm surprised is because its a very popular trope and well within the scope of 9th level spells (8th even), so I'd figure at some point the editors would make the mistake of letting an author introduce some sort of time travel mechanic in a limited setting and then people would insist on letting anyone in PFS and beyond use it in every setting.

Same here. Outright time travel is understandable because, yeah, players are hard enough to wrangle without giving them free access to the 4th-dimension, but there's a lot of ways to mess with the flow of time to interesting (and relatively manageable - at least as much as any other mid- to high-level spell) effect. I did one time decide to try and make a time wizard and found it difficult to grab more than one or two spells per level that fit the concept at all. I think I've noticed a few more time-related spells come out since then, so maybe I'll give it a second go, now that 1e is coming to a close.

I also feel like Time is a glaringly absent cleric Domain, when you think about it.

Sorry for double-posting, but ...frankly, there's something... unpleasant about some of your responses, that I just feel I have to point out.

First off, the title of this thread is simply "PF1 stories you can't quite tell in the playtest" which, combined with certain aspects of the OP that I'll get to in a second, reads to me as meaning more or less "stories one could tell in PF1 that significantly impacted by changes in PF2". But then a lot of your comments ask for people to cite what module or novel the things they're referring to occur in... Which, aside from a nebulous "A few APs I've read..." you never did in the OP. Or in any post since. Especially egregious when you don't seem to accept similar responses from others (i.e. The Archive's first post, which you didn't consider a "legitimate example" until they referenced a specific published adventure).

Your assertion that "The fact that you can't CLW wand spam in the playtest does not contradict canon." and the supporting statements after are perfectly reasonable for this discussion, I think, but in practice, you kind of seem to be bundling everything that is an aspect of player characters under that umbrella, and that it therefore doesn't apparently matter, but I'd argue that the players are the single most important aspect of telling stories in Pathfinder (or any tabletop game), and are therefore due at least some modicum of consideration. Sure, purely mechanical considerations like how many times an action can be performed in a round, or how much damage this or that ability does, and even things like spell levels being shuffled around don't substantively affect a given story - especially on the NPC side of things, since there's always behind-the-screen workarounds if you really need something to be done - but to use that to shut down all conversation about changes that affect the kinds of character concepts (here referring to the fluff and broad-stroke/iconic capabilities of a character) is a bit... despotic. I mean, imagine if the playtest had removed the monk's unarmed strike to instead focus them on the quarterstaff and other monk weapons. Would that not warrant discussion under the heading of "PF1 stories that you can't quite tell in the playtest"? Monks still exist, and they still get their flurry of blows, and slow fall, and other monk-y things, so it's not like the class is absent. But an aspect many would consider central to the story the monk class tells has been radically altered. If no adventure path had an unarmed martial NPC in it, would you say that discussing this change is irrelevant?

Now, you do seem to be okay with the diverging of PC and NPC/monster rules, which if that's the case, I suppose I can see a logic to your hardline rulings against any discussion of player characters. But we'd also be of fundamentally opposing opinions on how a tabletop RPG should work. Which is fine, in and of itself; it's not like I'm going to try and say that my opinion on this matter is the "objectively" right one or anything like that. But it does mean that there probably won't be any reconciliation between our viewpoints, so if that is the case, I would like to go ahead and get that matter out of the way.

P.S. Apologies for the absurd length of my previous post... ^^;

So, going ahead and saying that I haven't actually looked much into the playtest, largely due to the fact that my group is currently in the middle of a campaign, but I do think I have some to say, at least on the theory/design aspect of things, if not the specifics of the mechanics.

ryric wrote:

Everyone's great at Perception now by requirement, so you can't have oblivious guards or anyone else who is unaware of their surroundings. In PF1e if I wanted to do a stealth scenario, I made guards with a +1 Perception who take 10. Actual stealthy PCs autosucceed, and even Crag the Clunky needs about a 15 - and magical resources can be used to help the less able. In PF2e, every single PC has only about a 50/50 chance of sneaking, no matter the buffs, so for a 5 PC group it's 1 in 32 or so.

Sorry, but unless your guards are the same level as the party that's kinda bullcrap. You can still have guards with low enough Perception DCs to sneak by easily, you just need them to be lower level, which guards likely are.

Alternatively, "Oblivious" sounds like an awfully good reason to throw in a circumstance penalty...

The problem with this is that sneaking often (though admittedly not always) implies you're wanting to avoid a fight. Usually because the opponent is, if not outright dangerous, at least troublesome enough to make the PCs want to avoid fighting them entirely. While LG PCs wanting to sneak into the NG king's castle in order to grab some MacGuffin for the Greater Good would certainly have reason to sneak around low-level guards, the same cannot be said for those PCs trying to stealth their way into a LE tyrant's fortress, if you're simply relying on the guards being such low a level.

Of course, I'm sure there are ways to overcome this without much difficulty, but it would be nice to not need to handwave departures from the rules.

Keeping in mind that I don't like this answer:

Doesn't the NPCs-aren't-built-like-PCs feature of the playtest negate any assertion that a nth-level x can't do something anymore? Since, presumably, if they want an NPC to do it they'll just give them the ability to do it?

Seems like the only limitations the new ruleset technically puts are on the PC side of the narrative.

Oh dear... Are they actually doing this? Are NPCs/monsters now working distinctly differently from PCs? This is actually one of the biggest reasons I've been sticking to Pathfinder over both 4e and 5e, because I absolutely love the intercompatibility. NPCs, and to an extent even monsters*, can do anything a PC can do and vice versa, with only occasional exceptions. Like sure, even I'd give NPCs unique abilities the PCs could never have RAW access to, but it was very rare, and there was always some specific justification for it, like having used some offscreen ritual to absorb a metric ton of necrotic energy, or receiving a blessing from Desna.

It just added so much to the system's verisimilitude. Treating PCs differently from NPCs/monsters has always just felt... game-y to me. Of course, I realize I'm reading a lot of assumptions into two sentences, but if this is what's happening for 2e, I'm going from mildly excited to kind of scared... The ultimate point is that you can even take like a basilisk's stat block and fill out a PC character sheet with it. The fact that there was no fundamental mechanical bar preventing anyone or anything with six ability scores (or sometimes even five) from being played like a PC made it feel so much more like the players were a part of the world, even if, in practice, this rarely actually happened.

*In my experience, I've even found that most monsters can be made into PCs by treating their CR as being their starting level minus one (that is, a human with 3 levels in a PC class is a CR 2 creature, and so a CR 2 creature is roughly equivalent to a 3rd-level character). At least, outside of the hands of munchkins... It works far better than LA ever did, at the very least.

For the Teleport issue, maybe it’s time for a bit of WarCraft III(*) inspiration: Scroll of Town Portal. Classic style fast(*) Teleport would be way up your class tech tree if you have it at all, but it would be possible to use a lower level (slow) Teleport spell during down time to produce a magic item (Scroll fits best conceptually) that lets you Teleport quickly to a limited set of locations (that you would have had to prepare beforehand, in a way that is hard to conceal after the fact, using some ritual, or maybe even as part of casting the same spell in the process of making the magic item).

(snipped)

(*)No idea whether World of WarCraft continued with the same mechanic.

So I've actually been giving my parties what are basically hearthstones from WoW for pretty much this explicit purpose. That, and letting them be used as essentially magical walkie-talkies. They require a full-round action to use that provokes attacks of opportunity, so you don't want to use them in combat unless you have to, can only be used once per day, and can take you back to whatever single "hearth" you've attuned it to (and you can attune it to different "hearths" as you travel). A "hearth" being whatever semi-arbitrary place you feel is appropriate. I usually use taverns/inns, since that also provides some explanations for both the convenience of their location, and also an explanation that what makes a place a "hearth" is a ritual that requires daily upkeep, making it impractical at best for PCs to make whatever place they want into a "hearth". There's a handful of other rules on attuning them and stuff to make sure that players only use them as they are intended (like having there be no point in carrying multiple hearthstones, since in proximity they all become attuned - and therefore functionally identical - to each other), but that's the basic idea.

Of course, for campaigns that might require it, you can remove one or both features from it, but the walkie-talkie part helps justify the sort of semi-metagaming tabletalk I find every group indulges in on some level, so unless an adventure has a tone that would be specifically benefited by separated players being unable to communicate (like horror), it's a convenient handwave.

Captain Morgan wrote:

Character concepts are not Canon paizo stories.

(snipped)

PC builds aren't relevant to this thread, frankly.

We have to agree to disagree here. To me, a complete change in how an important part of the heroes of Golarion look, fight, and feel is a major change to the canon. RPGs are about the characters.

I have to agree with Starfox, here. The first thing I do when looking at a system is consider what kinds of character concepts it can create. Not builds, note. Concepts. Essentially, the fluff of the character. In tabletop RPGs, there is a certain inextricability to how the two are linked, but ultimately, you can't make a wizard if you can't cast spells. Now, of course, it's unreasonable to expect every build in 1e to be replicable in 2e, even once it is fully released, but as far as I can tell, we're just talking about core classes, here, which I think is a pretty reasonable minimum standard to meet. Now, like I said, I haven't delved extensively into the 2e rules, but I have read through the classes (since, again, considering the types of character concepts I can make is one of my main draws to a new system), and I have to agree. The 2e paladin feels a lot more like a simple variation on the fighter than the cleric/fighter gish it's pretty much always been. A perfectly fine variation on the fighter, as has been said, but... yeah, the specific focus on heavy armour feels weird, for one. Paladins don't have faith in their armour, their faith is their armour. Aside from that, while I, personally, don't feel as strongly about Starfox concerning things like the shift from spells to powers, I can still acknowledge their concerns.

Now, my major concern for 2e's class design is... See, my golden standard for concept flexibility is the fact that Pathfinder allows for dynamic building of a rogue based around any of the six ability scores. Even just with the core book, you can make any stat your highest and still build a solid rogue concept around that stat (arguable exception to Constitution, but I'd still say there's things you can do with that). There is literally nothing stopping you from making your Pathfinder rogue's dump stat Dexterity. No, it's not going to be the most powerful rogue, but there's still things you can do that will utilize your good stat(s), whatever that happens to be. Make your 5e rogue's dump stat Dex, on the other hand, and unless you've got a high Int and are going for Arcane Trickster, you may as well be playing a commoner. Aside from saves, there is literally no benefit to giving a fighter more than 8 Intelligence. I mean, sure, that's always been the quintessential fighter dump stat, but in 3e/PF you can at least do things with that extra Int, and with some creativity and a few extra books, you can probably even make a pretty respectable build for a fighter whose Intelligence is one of their highest stats. From my browsing, while 2e doesn't appear to have hit 5e or even 4e's point... It does seem to be creeping uncomfortably close to each class having One Stat to Rule Them All. Of course, this is still playtest material, and it's only my first impressions.

I'd like to reiterate before I go, however, that we're not talking about builds, here. Yes, builds aren't unrelated to this conversation, but that's simply because builds are what facilitate character concepts. I'm not talking about the builds in and of themselves. I'm specifically talking about how the ways we can build characters impact the stories we can tell with those characters. I acknowledge that things like which spells are cast at which levels or how many languages a character can speak without extra investment, and even how many dice a certain thing has you roll are all pretty unimportant because, by and large, they are quantitative things. Numbers can always be fudged in one direction or another, so long as the essence of the plot holds. What I - and I believe you - have been talking about throughout this are qualitative changes, or when the quantities involved become so large that they do qualitatively alter the underlying story.

On the teleport balance issue, what teleport needs in not a long casting time - it is a long arrival time. Star Trek and its transporter often have this issue - people are starting to flicker into existence, but it takes a while for them to stabilize. This need not be a huge amount of time, say 1 minute, and the teleportees all spend their first turn after arriving orienting themselves to the exclusion of all other action. If you add the teleportation arrival making noise and smelling ozone, this would stop scry-and fry and make teleport more useful for escape than for attack.

This is also pretty much how I feel about teleport in terms of what its problems are. The original intention behind the teleport spell, from its inception in D&D, is to be a convenient way to travel, and as an emergency escape pod. The abuse of the spell is when it's used to ambush people. 2e's fix doesn't really do much for the latter (as Captain Morgan mentioned in their first response), and definitely upsets the former. I don't even know it necessarily needs to be a full minute, just a couple rounds of "summoning sickness" would probably be enough to dissuade the tactic. Making it noisy/flashy would also help in cases where the PCs are using it as part of their stealth tactics. Bonus points for all of this being pretty in keeping with the vast majority of teleportation magic in fiction.

I'd probably limit it to only forbidding alignment domains (i.e. they can ONLY be granted by a suitable deity) since I don't think that the 'Sun' domain is necessarily any more opposed to 'Darkness' than it is to 'Water' or than 'Community' is to 'Travel.' I think it would be cleaner than to try and decide what domains are 'contradict' a portfolio.

Oh no, I wasn't thinking in terms of opposing domains, merely ruling out domains that absolutely would not fit into the religion's portfolio. Like if it's a stereotypical benevolent Holy Church of Light thing, doesn't matter what your background is, I can't see it granting the Trickery domain, for example (regardless as to whether or not there's an alternate deity who's keeping it for themselves). And I wouldn't really say my method is meaningfully "balanced". I mean, RAW, any cleric can pick any two domains they want. All they'll miss out on compared to a cleric who picks a deity to follow is a favoured weapon, which is an almost meaningless sacrifice, particularly in the face of being able to pair up any two options you want without restriction (aside from alignment domains, of course). The whole thing is more about getting the mechanics to reflect the setting itself rather than force the setting to comply to the mechanics, and to help it feel distinct from the plethora of others in any minor way it can.

Quote:

can you think of non-divine explanations/sources for domains and divine magic?

That’s kind of a tautological impossibility:)

Okay, fair. ^^;

You want it to be mechanically the same ("I hate restricting options").

You don't want it to be mechanically the same ("mechanically, that's really just making a standard pantheon").

I think you have to pick one, and how your world works and how the mechanics should reflect the fluff is totally subjective.

Yeah, that's the conclusion I was coming, too. But before giving up, I figured I'd see if anyone else had ideas. I am just one person, and no one person can think all the thoughts. I do at least feel I should clarify the "hate restricting options" by saying that what I meant was completely disallowing them. Like, if my setting's only real religion is a standard, flavourless Church of Light (a la Shining Force or Dragon Quest), it puts a bad taste in my mouth to say that half of the core domains are disallowed, let alone only four or five being available.

EDIT: Hang on! What about... maybe one of your domains has to be from the religion's portfolio (say... Community, Glory, Good, Healing, and Sun), but your second domain has more flexibility? A priest from a seaside town might have the Water or Weather domain in addition to, say, Community. One from a major trade city might have Travel, and one who was in the army as a field medic might have War. This way only a handful of domains need to be disallowed (those that directly contradict the religion's portfolio like Darkness and Evil), which makes things similar to core (since a handful of domains like Evil are effectively disallowed in many campaigns with the assumptions that the players are non-evil), but still have a distinct flavour that allows the religion and its place in the setting to feel unique.

So to reiterate, I'm specifically avoiding the archangel/saint/daedric lords/etc. option since, mechanically, that's really just making a standard pantheon in all but name. I don't really have any specific needs in mind at the moment, and asking players is kind of irrelevant at this stage since just making settings has always been my... hobby within the hobby, basically. It's just something I enjoy doing for its own sake. I went six years without an actual group at one point, and that entire time, coming up with settings was all I really did. And this sort of thing is something that I always avoided because of how different it is from the basic mechanical assumptions of core 3.5/PF. I've done animism, I've done no gods/religions, I've done single omnipotent deities... But a setting with only one or a few deities that can't comfortably be stretched to include more than a handful of domains is something I've always very deliberately avoided.

Anyway... in order to at least provide a bit substance to the conversation, I suppose my inspiration for this is primarily older RPG video games that frequently featured a "totally not Christianity" mono-faith - sometimes without actually having any real god (as far as was apparent). Shining Force, Dragon Quest, Warcraft I*, the Tales series, basically anything that had clearly defined priest-type characters, but where religion was practically ignored by the story. Even some newer games like Dragon Age might fit this mould. Now, I'm not necessarily talking about adapting any specific examples to a Pathfinder campaign setting, but rather one inspired by them, that has the same feel.

*Strictly with regards to the first Warcraft game, and ignoring all the subsequent lore. We're just talking about inspiration and feel here. Even though proper deities remain sparse later on, there's a plethora of religions/faiths that can be worked with similarly to Eberron.

I've been kicking around some worldbuilding ideas, and one idea that I've really been avoiding for a while despite really wanting to use it is setting without the usual full spectrum of deities. When you've got an animistic world or one without any concrete divine influences (but still want to have clerics), it's a simple enough matter to just let clerics pick domains ad hoc (I always go back and forth on the matter of favoured weapons, though... Although just now I realized that assigning a weapon to each domain could probably work well enough - the cleric then choosing which one will be their favoured weapon - and I'm kicking myself). And there are ways of effectively getting a standard pantheon structure out of a single all-powerful deity by either having saints/angels or aspects/avatars to divide things up between. But what about if your setting only has one deity with a fairly narrow portfolio, comparable to those of standard deities, or just two or three deities (again, with similarly limited portfolios). I hate restricting options (especially core ones) if it's at all possible to avoid, but would this just have to be one of those situations where I'll have to bite the bullet? Or can you think of non-divine explanations/sources for domains and divine magic?

It gives wizards and other casters more feats to play with since they don't have to devote them to item creation. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Sorry, missed yours earlier. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that it's an E8 campaign, and also that the wizard class doesn't exist (just arcanist and witch for arcane casters).

Biggest thing is, that since everyone can craft magic items you will be increasing their wealth. Depending on your crafting rules, this will either be a bit (crafting is hard) or a lot (crafting is about as easy as the current game, without feat requirements.)

Adjusting the treasure you give should be able to compensate.

Crafting also takes time, though, and the campaign has various ways to keep players from spending too much time away from adventuring.

I'm thinking that in my current campaign, I'd like to not require Item Creation feats in order to create magic items. Instead, they'd just use the Craft skill. My players won't have full access to just craft any item they want (and have the skill for), of course. Some will require going out to find rare materials and components, or learning/discovering how to make the item in question, but with that in mind... What might some of the repercussions and things I should account or watch out for be, if I decide to do this? Of course, I'm going to be quite clear and up-front about what a given Craft skill can and can't make, and there won't be a perfect 1:1 translation between skills and feats. For example, leatherworking, armorsmithing, and weaponsmithing will split up what used to be Craft Arms and Armor. On the other hand, what I think I'm just going to call "enchanting" will cover wands and rods. Oh, and since part of my reason for doing this is so non-casters can also make their own magic items, I'm not going to retain spell requirements for magic items (though I may grant a circumstance bonus or something for characters with access to a given spell).

Pretty straight-forward question. What would a level 1 commoner ghost's CR be? And do you think its effective CR might actually be a bit lower than whatever its RAW CR is?

Pretty much since I started playing D&D back when 3.5e was first released, I've been building specific and often unusual character concepts. And just now, an interesting idea came to mind: could you make an effective assassin using a full-caster class, and if so how? I mean, in theory, full-progression spellcasters are the most versatile and arguably powerful characters in the game, but to be a proper assassin requires a very specific set of skills that don't immediately spring to mind for full casters.

Now, I'm gonna go monkey around with this myself (possibly in the morning since it's 1:00am right now), but in the meantime I thought I'd pose the question here as well. So here's the rules for this challenge:
1) Create a PFS-legal 12th level character using only a single full-progression spellcasting class.
2) Ignore equipment, aside from an optional weapon. Since magic items are pretty much equally accessible to all classes, including them would just clutter things up when the goal is just to see how the class would perform on its own merits.
3) In order to be a proper assassin, one must be able to reliably kill a specific given target before they are able to react much. At the very least, without being able to alert others or get help. An assassin should also be capable of doing this with no collateral damage (including extra killings) or witnesses.

Personally, I think I'm going to try for three different flavours with this to build:
A) Boring, But Practical: This type of assassin is simply reliable. Given ideal but typical circumstances (at night while the victim sleeps alone in their room or something, not while bound and unconscious in a private demiplane), they are most guaranteed to be able to off as wide a variety of targets as possible.
B) Beyond the Impossible: This type of assassin is able to kill someone and get away with it in an incredibly difficult situation, like while the target is surrounded by guards or is on a different continent. The entire assassination need not occur entirely under those circumstances, but it must start under them, and whatever remains may exist must be returned to wherever the target had been at that start before the assassin can escape. Don't know if this one will actually be possible to do, but I want to at least give it a shot.
C) Smoke and Shadows: This kind of assassin must be impossible to catch. They may not be able to kill any target, they may not be able to kill in any situation, but they cannot be tracked or discovered. No one knows who they are or how they do what they do. For bonus points, the Nameless One feat is off limits.

What about being able to throw your object out and cast spells from it so long as you're within... 30 feet? 60 feet? 10 feet/level? Touch spells being able to be used on anyone adjacent to it? The one thing is I'd like to figure out a way to at least dissuade people from picking it up...

Hmm... Name-Keeper and True Silvered Throne seem to replace Spirit Animal with a decidedly less good/flexible ability, and make up for it with the other abilities they grant. And, of course, as you say, the Speaker for the Past comes with a lot more stuff.

I am liking the idea of a bonded object, however. I've started working up a version of it as a possible replacement that I'm calling a Spirit Totem. Basically, the shaman's spirit resides inside it and thereby grants the powers it does. I like that this also allows for things like the shaman communing to prepare spells to remain. However, as was mentioned, I'm not sure it quite makes a replacement for things like the ability to deliver touch spells, and I'm having a lot of difficulty figuring out what to do with the traits that spirits grant to the spirit animal. Some of them have pretty direct parallels that could be applied (like Battle's +2 natural armor becoming, say, 5 extra hardness), but there are others - like Lore's +2 initiate, +4 Stealth - that just have absolutely no relevance, direct or analogous, to items...

Indeed! Thanks! Don't think it works well enough for shamans to give it to them too, but at least that's got witches sorted out.

Good point. :/

I don't really think there's a need to keep the familiar-like bonuses, specifically. Just to make sure there isn't a hole created in their absence. Anyway, as for the setting... Basically, there's a rather big gulf between druidic magic and other spellcasters. In my setting, druids are the only spellcasters that even remotely get their magic from nature. Witches get it from either powerful and ancient ghost-like spirits or from demons and other outsiders, and shamans either get it from ancestral spirits or elementals (which are strictly from the Elemental Planes, here and so aren't even going on the summon nature's ally lists). So having a pet - even an explicitly magical one - kinda messes with that feel. Sure, there are a number of options that Improved Familiar grants that would fit both, but especially given that this is an E8 campaign and all of the appropriate options require 7th level... I may as well just remove the feature entirely since that's almost all of their levels where they've got nothing, and still have to spend a feat to change that.

And while presumably I could homebrew some CR 1/6 elementals and outsiders... That just seems like trivializing them, especially when it would mean that practically every shaman and witch is followed by a little imp or fire elemental. Half the point of E6/8 is to make it so that even a typical fire elemental is awe-inspiring, but that would be severely undermined if just about every tribe's got a couple baby ones hopping about.

Giving the witch the wizard's bonded item would certainly work. I suppose in a pinch I could do the same for the shaman... I'd like to just swap out the familiar (well, spirit animal, before anyone comes in to correct me), though. Largely to maximize compatibility with other archetypes, but also because it's just the animal companion that's out of place. Everything else is perfectly fine as-is.

I've got a campaign setting that I'm building, and the shaman and witch classes are both really perfect fits for the setting, but familiars aren't. Any ideas for what I could replace them with? Or perhaps, do you think the feature might be minor enough that I could just cut it entirely without disrupting things too much? If you think it matters, the campaign will be E8 with no lean.

All right, sorry for so many back-to-back posts, but bit of an important update.
The original document I'd been working in seems to have gotten too large for Google Docs to handle (as best as I can figure), and has basically crashed. I managed to recover almost all of my work on it, and have created two new documents; one for spells (since spells took up about half the page count of the old one), and one for everything else.

(New) Pathfinder Rules Index

Pathfinder Spells Index

So the index has been completed up through the Adventurer's Guide, with regards to the main Pathfinder line of products. I'm now working on what I and my friends have from the Campaign Setting and Player Companion lines. We're working from oldest stuff to newest, but skipping over anything that was still for 3.5e, for now. We'll probably come back to that after the APs, which, speaking of, we only have a few of, so that would be particularly useful. Though, again, please skip over anything from 3.5e (so the original Rise of the Runelords, for example), since I only intend to include material from those sources if it has not ever reappeared in something newer.

Bit of an update: I've finished indexing:
Advanced Player's Guide
Advanced Race Guide
Bestiaries 1-3
GameMastery Guide
Ultimate Combat
Ultimate Magic

Ultimate Equipment is next on my list.

Hmm... In the introduction, I've outlined how to handle things that appear in multiple sources. Even though the basic assumption is that the most recently published book with the material in it is treated as the "correct" version, I feel it's important to include when things appear in older books (for example, in case someone doesn't have the newer book). I'm still going back and forth on whether or not or what to include from 3.5e Pathfinder books, but I've decided - for now - to err on the side of including these things. In all of these cases, every source that something appears in (so long as it is at least recognizably the same option) will be marked, with the exception of things that appear in the Core book, which will only be marked as appearing there. Since it continues to get updated, I'm going to assume that it has the most accurate rules text on anything it contains (assuming you have the most recent printing, or at least the errata).

To be honest, I'm strongly tempted to just ignore errata and FAQs. My justification being that since errata and FAQs are organized by book, I would simply recommend checking a given book's errata and FAQ when looking up a rule in it. Personally, I've made a habit of printing out the errata and FAQs for each book I own, and slipping them in the back cover.

My biggest concern with including specific notes for when something appears in errata/FAQs is that doing this as I go through each book would drastically slow things down, as well as potentially inflating the space that the source identification takes up (this is also why I'm not including page numbers). I'd simply be content with being able to look up what book a certain rule is in, or which books to look in when considering options for a character I'm building. After that, I don't mind finding which page it's on or if there's any errata/FAQ material on it myself, since once you know the relevant book, that's all comparatively easy.

All that said, I certainly would not be against someone adding these things, themselves, so long as it's tidy and easily told apart from the source abbreviations (so a dagger (†) or something to mark FAQs, for example, rather than the letters FAQ).

At present, little, I know. In fact, without having any rules text, it's decidedly unnecessary at present. However, I'm planning to index things from every single book I own (about twenty to thirty or so, I believe), including those not currently in the PRD. And if others help out and add things from books they own, then it can get that much closer to being a totally comprehensive directory, as is the intent.

Pathfinder Wiki is more focused on lore, I do believe, with minimal mention of any mechanics.

There's also d20pfsrd.com, of course, but they seem to occasionally be missing items (particularly feats), and finding out where where various rules are in the physical books is a bit more arduous than I think it ought to be since it's usually only shown on the page for a specific rule, meaning that if you want to find out where multiple things are, you have to go to the individual page for each of them.

This is just an index, but it's also intended to be a complete index.

To my surprise, I have been unable to find a rule index for Pathfinder that collects all of the various character options and the like together and shows which books they are in. So I've finally decided to start compiling one myself. Partly because it's such a big project, and partly because I don't (yet) own every Pathfinder book, I've set it up in Google Docs so anyone can add to it. So far, I've finished the Core Rulebook, and am almost done adding in the APG.

Anyway, here it is: Pathfinder Rules Index

P.S. I hope Paizo doesn't mind this on copyright grounds or anything. The intent is for this to just be a directory of the various rules to make finding them easier, and it won't contain any meaningful rules text. While it will at times contain proper names and the like which may count as product identity, given that including these would be necessary for this to function properly as an accurate and complete index, and that, as stated, no actual rules text will be included, rendering it useless without the appropriate book, I hope this can be overlooked.

A bit yes, a bit no. They're mostly relatively new to tabletop RPGs (about a year or so), and so several have a ton of character ideas that they want to try out, so there's that. But... well, I'm referring to this as a single campaign, but in scope and structure, it'll be more like several consecutive campaigns within the same setting, history, etc. The length of time that's spanned in-universe would make a single, continuous party a bit odd (though certainly not untenable), however if they were to use the same characters all the way through, they could probably easily end up with at least 30 or 40 post-E6/8 feats apiece. At the very least, long enough to allow fully leveling up four or five E6/8 characters back-to-back.

As such, I'm also trying to come up with a system to encourage players to "retire" a character and roll up a new one (again, much like in Gloomhaven, which is a big reason that lead me to mine it for ideas*), but without making it mechanically obligatory (that is, the benefits of retiring significantly outweighing the benefits of not retiring). Hopefully, this would lead players retiring their characters individually depending solely on whether or not that player feels like it, as opposed to everyone choosing whether or not to retire as a group, and so for the party to contain both veteran and new characters at any given time. But finding such a sweet spot has proven to be frustratingly elusive.

* In spite of this, Gloomhaven is not particularly helpful in this regard. It has obligatory character retirement, pending the completion of your character's personal quest. The only way to delay this is by avoiding the quest objectives. Which can be fine for a certain amount of time, however because encounter difficulty is a function of average party level, you're strongly encouraged by the rest of the party to retire a character before they get too over-leveled. All which (mandatory retirement upon completing quest objectives, pressure to retire sooner rather than later, etc.) works perfectly well for a boardgame like Gloomhaven, but I'd rather avoid for an RPG.

A fair bit of TBD, to be honest. I've come up with good reasons to go different ways on many of these things.

I do intend for players to have options, with the available adventure options growing and branching out organically, and with it being entirely up to them where they wish to go for the next adventure. But at the same time, I'd like there to be some degree of framework to fall back on to push them into some sort of direction, and so that which adventures they choose to do means something rather than just allowing them to do all of them, given enough time. So I'm thinking that there will be a combination of "declared" quests that the players are aware of from the start (with the possibility of a couple of options to pick from), and hidden quests that they can stumble across and discover unintentionally.

I plan to make the PrCs and assign them to their respective quests ahead of time, but as for whether or not they'd know beforehand... On the one hand, it would suck for them to unlock a PrC that no one even has interest in taking (though I plan for this to be a campaign where characters are periodically cycled out, and anything unlocked previously will always be available, so there's always potential that a future character may be interested), but I also want to preserve some room for discovery. So I'm thinking that maybe I'll let them know what the class is and the general idea of what it does, but not let them look over the actual mechanics. And while I don't intend for this to happen, this approach would also let me tweak the class if I see any potentially broken combos on the horizon.

And there would almost certainly be quests both for the party as a whole, as well as for the individual characters. Things run so much more smoothly when the party has a collective goal, but I also like to allow players to have their day in the sun. PrC unlocks would generally be for the party as a whole, though, while the individual player-focused quests would probably award things like magic items or a special bonus feat for that character.

I'm still in the brainstorming phase here, of course, so this is largely spit-balling. (On that note, other suggestions for both party and character rewards are greatly appreciated.)

I'm working on a long-term E6/E8 (probably E8) campaign and long story short, I'm planning to implement some ideas from a boardgame called Gloomhaven (if you haven't heard of it, check it out, it's pretty cool). In it, when you pick a character to play, you also get a special quest to complete, and if you complete it you unlock something like a new character to play as.

The closest analogy to this that I can see working in a d20 game is gaining access to a prestige class. Except that even being E8, there's little use to prestige classes. So to facilitate this, I'm thinking of having prestige class levels being granted as sort of retroactive gestalt class levels. In an effort to keep things from getting too complicated, I kind of want to allow taking these prestige gestalt levels following the same rules as post-6th-level feats. Obviously, a prestige class level would often be better than a mere feat, but I figure this will probably be evened out to at least acceptably unbalanced levels considering the typically stricter requirements for entering prestige classes as well as the need to quest to unlock them, akin to questing for powerful magic items in a typical game. In fact, I'm considering loosening or even removing the prestige class requirements given the difficulty in unlocking them in the first place - would really suck to gain access to, say, the Horizon Walker or Shadow Dancer class after a long period of questing only to realize that no one in the party has put ranks into Knowledge (geography) or Perform (dance).

Thoughts?

So my players have goaded me into making Sun Wukong as a recurring antagonist for them. However, it seems to me that it would be far more enjoyable - for everyone involved - if he isn't already SUN WUKONG when they first meet him. And if he's not already SUN WUKONG, then why not have the players be unwitting instruments in turning him into SUN WUKONG?

And so, has anyone got any ideas for how I can set up a scenario where my party unwittingly helps a mischievous monkey unwittingly become immortal?

Or perhaps choosing certain options locks out others unless you get a merit badge or something to allow multiclassing?
Perhaps, the badge would allow you to pick one or two locked out options that you otherwise qualify for and then continue from there, or something. That or a cap on how many total skills (or skill xp) you can train. A hybrid system could allow (and would probably be necessary for) archetypes.

Now remember that technically any character in Pathfinder is able to use any weapon or piece of armour, but doing so without the right training comes with hefty penalties. Rather than outright restricting equipment like most MMOs do, I'd like to see this aspect kept.

@Frosthammer: I think I may have gotten a bit lost on that first part, but... As for my experience on WoW, my guildmates and I usually try to repair our equipment fairly regularly - before and after a dungeon or raid, as soon as possible after dying, and basically any time we're at a shop. From what I understand of your system, we'd be punished for that kind of frequent upkeep.
Ideally, the system should be so that most standard items (basically, not those that would have the 'fragile' quality in PF) should have a high enough durability (that degrades at a slow enough rate) so people don't have to keep checking that often in fear of the item breaking. The system should reward people for regular upkeep, not require it. Or as your system seems to do, discourage it.
And a bit of clarification on my creation idea: I'd like to see it be fairly smooth in its quality increase and be more directly tied to the character's skill level. As your skill steadily goes up, the durability of the items you craft does as well (+10% at the first rank past the minimum to make the item, +20% at the second, and so on. Note that the numbers are just an example and wouldn't have to be exactly those in the finished game). The minigame idea reminds me of the crafting system in Allods, which is all right but not what I had in mind. I can't say whether or not I like it, but I think that if it is used then failure or... I suppose "critical success" should about equally uncommon and rely heavily on chance, while normal success should be common enough to perhaps almost be doable on accident more often than not. I really hate having to waste materials.

@Kalmyel: Mostly because there is a already precedent for that in Pathfinder: arcane spell failure. Armor gets in the way of a wizard's movements and gestures when casting spells which can cause a spell to fail. Asking us to ignore this would be asking us to ignore a very well known and core feature of the original system.
That said, there are certain classes (notably the magus), as well as feats, that can be used to get around spell failure. However, since Goblinworks is going for a more modular system to reflect classes I am concerned how they will encourage people to not always take the lessened spell failure options every time they make an arcane caster. Ultimately, time isn't that much of a cost, especially if a system allows for unlimited options.

Well, as I had said, I notice that when giving players free reign over such things, we'll end up with a disproportionate number of extremes - particularly of extremely tall characters.

Naturally, race would be taken into account - an elf would rarely (if ever) be a hulking brute, and it would be difficult to get a wispy half-orc. My goal in suggesting the system is to try to reinforce the racial norms, and ideally there would be minimal variation. Even with maxed out Str and Con, an elf would only look like a fit (real-world) actor.

But to answer your concerns, perhaps a combination would be possible. The base build is determined by stats, but have sliders that can be used to have a character appear a couple points higher or lower.

As for complications, there are many MMOs that provide options for things like height and build via slider bars. My suggestion is to merely automate them (now, only to a certain degree) which I don't think would be significantly more troublesome. If anything, it is the first part that would be more difficult. That said, I have no real experience in programming, so GW feel free to correct me. ^^'

I have thrice said that I find this debate pointless, so I will reply to the absolute minimum that my pride can handle:

Replying to one's own question before the asked can reply ("Any statement of mine at all? No, that's what I thought.") is one of the most childish and aggravating habits I encounter. Particularly with such a tone.

As for Forencith: he said little if anything in an attempt to halt or change the course of our conversation.

I long ago dropped the emphasis on comeliness, and have only been expressing my displeasure with any restricted (or extra, depending on point of view) options based on Charisma.

Lastly, with the exception of legal or scientific discussion, every single conversation any two people have involves some degree of reading into implications and making assumptions. Language evolved in such a way that words like "appearance" in the context of an individual refers more to their immutable qualities inherited through genetics than to what clothes they decided to put on that day - unless that is clearly what is at issue, in which case, again there are implications based on the context of the conversation. Our conversation referred to the overall appearance of individuals which generally refers to the more permanent characteristics (eye colour, complexion, shape of the nose and other features) than to the clothing they are attired and yet that was what you immediately assumed I meant when I said that certain individuals had a plain appearance. And before you ask me where it is that you said that:

They were plain in appearance by our standards because it was expected. But they all did the "plain" look very well. They matched the fashions of the time and very accurately expressed their personal potency through their outward appearance by what the standards of the time permitted.

As Veblen explained in his masterpiece, men's apparel of the era had to be less flamboyant because it was important for wealthy men to outwardly express through their dress and grooming that they were capable of manual work, but were so important that said fashion remained clean and well tailored because they were important enough to have others do the work for them. Women's fashion, on the other hand, was more flamboyant because its purpose was to reflect not their potency, but their husband's or father's, whichever the case may be. A women wearing practical clothing in which one could conceivably do productive labor is not expressing clearly enough that her master is so valuable that he doesn't need her to do labor: he needs to conspicuously consume vicariously through her as well as himself. She is a decoration, and he is a symbol of the masses of laborers subordinate to him - of his pecuniary and social reputability and potence.

In any case, for their times, neither Lincoln, Roosevelt, nor Churchill were plain. The subtle hints of wealth and importance and reputability expressed in their fashion was subtle, and it was supposed to be subtle. Subtlety in fashion reflected the need to spend a lot of their time not being productive but learning frivolous, conspicuously wasteful things like learning the finer points of fashion. Anyone who would have suggested in those times that any of those men appeared plain would have been setting themselves up for a torrential downpour of snobbish, aristocratic mockery.

Garish and flamboyant men's fashion from other world cultures was seen during the Victorian and slightly later eras as primitive. The kings and lords of those "lesser" cultures were flamboyant because they were clearly...

I now challenge you to find where I had mentioned clothing, fashion, attire, or anything related up to that point.

I now plan to not open this thread again because it will surely incite me into continuing this pointless, and frankly detrimental debate. Let's hope I don't roll another 1 on my save.

For me, at least, "appearance" refers primarily to physical characteristics of an individual that can't be changed by a trip to the tailor. I have attributed this meaning to the word because that is what most people seem to mean by it, as well. Additionally, since this discussion, you and I have been the only ones talking - with the momentary exception of Forencith - which hardly counts as "everyone else."

"Soft-spoken" refers to the manner in which one speaks, not to the frequency or amount. As for your remark about Lincoln's biographers, that only supported my argument and had no effect on yours. I've been saying that charisma is tied to personality.

Okay, so a human with a Charisma score of 10 can pick between brown hair and blonde hair? And people with 12 can add in black? Unless you qualify what kind of options are being limited then your restrictions are entirely arbitrary (as opposed to just mostly arbitrary).

As for you, please try to see into what my words imply rather than exactly what they say. Particularly when such implications are of the fairly standard variety. You seem to want me to give a complete legal definition to every single word I use for a frivolous thread comment.

My usage of "plain" had nothing to do with their clothing. They had very plain facial features, and were largely soft-spoken individuals.

That in mind, what sorts of options do you suggest that would still remain race appropriate? Dyed hair colours? Perhaps a few eccentric hairstyles? How would these translate into races that already are naturally flamboyant like gnomes?

And as for why I'm still participating in this even though I have twice stated that I am done and will not further take part: I have poor Will saves... -_-'
But they say the third time's a charm.

Agreed, one needn't be flamboyant to have presence, but your example was not really accurate. Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill were also exemplars of charisma while being thoroughly plain in appearance and mannerisms (perhaps arguable with Roosevelt). On the other hand, Romney got where he is on looks and luck, winning polls by a statistically insignificant margin. As evidenced by the fact that nearly everyone who has endorsed him has done so very reluctantly, in a "well, at least he's Republican" kind of way.

I mentioned them because of a lack of grooming. One can't really tidy up something that is constantly rotting.

To recap my views: personality (and by extension Charisma) has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with appearance. In any way shape or form. One can be very plain and still able to charm the cream of society, and one can be ...Mitt Romney. This is supported by illusions, spells that affect body but not mind, and so on not affecting Charisma scores. Charisma is 100% a mental attribute with no physical manifestation, just like Intelligence and Wisdom.

I would likewise like to echo you're closing thoughts back in reference to your own manipulation of what was said in your first sentence.

But enough. Like I said, I've expressed my views and see no reason to continue this ultimately pointless debate.

[strike]I admit that I may an assumption that did not hold true the first time. My reply however was intended to mean that it doesn't matter what adjectives are used to describe it.

I still stand by the rest of what I said - there are no reasonable options that would be worth locking away behind a Charisma score of 12 or higher. Especially if you are going to reference something as mundane as grooming. Aside from games that allow outright monstrous races (the Horde - particularly undead - in WoW, and even they could be said to have decent Charisma scores since most are quite intimidating) grooming and basic hygiene seem to be inherent in MMO player characters.[/strike]

Eh, I gave my thoughts. I'll let GW decide what they think. It isn't really a matter that would keep me from playing the game, either way.

But it hasn't got anything to do with appearance, so why connect it at all? No matter if that connection is comelier, uglier, or simply weirder.
I'm not really much in favour of appearances that widely deviate from the norm anyway, so perhaps I'm just being a wet blanket here, but I wouldn't like to see more than a couple of subtly out-of-place appearance options (political correctness withstanding, since there would not likely be many from Garund so far north). Such small variations hardly justify being "locked" in the first place. Not to mention that several of the races of Golarion are pretty colourful, so what would be considered "unusual" for an elf or gnome? Dirty blonde hair and brown eyes?

It could be interesting. I'm simultaneously intrigued and wary of PC monsters, but the rest of this would open up options for use of the Diplomacy skill. ^^

It could even be fairly simple to implement. AoE, centered on the user. Success improves your standing with them (from hostile to neutral). Using it on evil races adds points to the evil side of the alignment axis (no change for neutral races, possibly good points for good), and if you use the opportunity to get the drop on them in combat then you gain points to chaotic (and evil if attacking neutral or good races) and a healthy plummet to your reputation with that faction, making it much more difficult (and impossible within a certain period of time) to repeat the trick on either the same or related groups of mobs.

Honestly, I don't like Charisma affecting appearance. A lot of people automatically attach it to looks, but it's more force of personality and charm (as evidenced by it's classification as a mental stat, not physical, and being the base of certain spellcasting classes).
Remember that ogre magi, harpies, and medusae (a creature that is so UGLY it turns creatures to stone) all have fairly high Charisma scores, and most demons and devils (including such sexy beasts as the nalfeshnee, glabrezu, purrodaemon, and belier devil) have Charisma scores of 20 or more.
Devourers, linnorms, neothelids... Oh and wouldn't you just love to sleep with the Cha 29 mu spore?

As for a real life human example that shows the disconnect between Charisma and looks: Mitt Romney. For his age and not being in Hollywood, he does look quite handsome. No one likes him though (even if they agree with his politics) because he has the personality of a cardboard cutout.

Quote:

So here something i though of in terms of how to handle items in PFO and avoiding most things i hated in other Games

well sorry for the format i wrote the orginal in the editor and copied it

I mostly agree with the ideas, particularly the idea of 2 seperate damages for equipment, your ideas of damage actually remind me quite a bit of my old idea. One thing I think I kind of disagree on yours, is the way core works. Namely in your situation, for the best durration of a weapon, one would be best to delay the field repairs until a weapon is at 11% to maximize the weapons life. Where in my view, the more often you maintain a weapon, the better. Least in my view repairing at 80% would probably be better for a weapon than at 10%.

That's why to me, having 2 numbers, a condition %age
and a condition HP of say 1000 or so
the lower the durability %age, the higher the chance of the weapon losing HP each swing.

I'm agreeing with Onishi, over all. In real life, people generally perform maintenance (repair) their tools as often as they can manage, and it is when one fails to maintain something for awhile that it starts taking permanent damage. Your system rewards waiting until an item nearly falls apart before fixing it when in real life if one did that, they would probably end up having to throw it away much sooner than someone who performs numerous small repairs over a period of time.

Three other thoughts I'd like to add: I really hate it when item durability is too frail. In Fallout 3 for instance, one practically needs to repair their weapon after every firefight. While this may a bit truer to life, it makes for a rather annoying game.

Secondly, an extension of the above, magic items and items made of special materials like mithril or adamantine should be significantly more durable than their mundane counterparts. Perhaps only losing durability (in the example of a weapon) when striking a foe with damage reduction or the like. Mundane use should have little to no effect on such items. For one thing, these items will represent a significantly greater investment on the part of the player than mundane ones (even the most minor of magical swords costs literally 200 times more than a regular one), and for another, superior materials and enchantments would almost by their definition make an item more resilient.

Thirdly, (and perhaps this is tangentially related, but) while playing Pirates of the Burning Sea (the only other game I've played with a virtual market) it occurred to me that one part of real world markets is not being replicated: quality. One of the big things that affects both price and what people buy is the quality of an item. In PotBS, buying a ship from one person is much like buying that ship from anyone else. This means that competitive pricing is reserved to pricing your Jamaica sloop at or slightly below what everyone else is pricing their Jamaica sloops at because one is just like another.
With the use of skills in PFO, perhaps we could replicate quality and give a reason to buy one craftsman's item over the same item made by another craftsman even if the former is more expensive. As a craftsman's skill goes up, the items they make have greater resilience and durability. A novice craftsman could make a steel longsword with 80 points of durability, while a more experienced one could make a statistically identical steel longsword with 200 points. This could also work in place of masterwork quality items by requiring a certain durability in order to enchant the item. Or perhaps, enchanting reduces the items maximum durability (offset by other bonuses and the aforementioned superior resilience of magical items) which would cause inferior quality items to break.