Neil Carr's page

I don't know about "no system mastery" - just in the few hours I've had the book I've picked out some probably-not-intended interactions that are pretty cool.

Sorry for the confusion. I wasn’t meaning that there is no system mastery. With such a huge range of effects it inevitable that some combinations will be better than others.

What I was getting at was the aesthetic presentation of the material. WIth 3.x/PF1 you would have a list of feats in alphabetical order and the constraints would be in the prerequisites. A player would need to dig into the system a bit to figure out when various feats would be available. As above, it helped veil the system a bit more.

With PF2 the feats are laid out in a 4e fashion, with pages and pages of leveled feats. It’s all very overt and it makes the game leap out at you more, at least for me.

One could say, “Wait, so it’s bad that people can more easily digest and compare information?” For myself it is on an aesthetic level. I don’t want the game yelling off the page, nor fostering a player mentality where various power combos are the leading topic of discussion at the table.

I got my subscription today with the core book and bestiary. I’ve spent the day pouring over the core book and, what brought me to this thread, was the general impression I got from 2e.

In that broad, hazy state of a first impression I’d summarize 2e as a “fixed 4e” or “what 4e ought to have been, at least for me”.

The above is of course an impressionistic statement. I didn’t care for 4e and abandoned it after a few sessions when it came out, horrified by the overt treadmill and video game cool down feel it gave me. I enjoyed 3.x/PF’s “veil” of a treadmill, it’s weird mixing of simulation tendencies and software like keyword systemization.

2e has more of a 4e vibe in that the treadmill is much more overt. Feats are leveled, rather than being “veiled” in prerequisites. The huge number of feats you get have even been codified in the player character sheet. It’s convenient, but aesthetically I find that a bit too jarring.

Another 4eish element is that your AC, attacks, saving throws, skills, and so on are scaled to level. With 4e it was level divided buy two, with 2e it is just your level. This definitely hits the treadmill feel. The 10th level character will walk into a town and be around as competent as masters in a variety of skills activities. Sure there is a distinction between trained and untrained with what you can do with an action, but this framework rapidly removes the worldbuilding from a simulationist approach, such as the famous essay at the Alexandrian on “Calibrating Your Expectations”.

There are plenty of other 4e associations I could tease out, but how does it surpass 4e and give me hope that I won’t run screaming from 2e? Some of the veil is still there. Paizo’s strength is in teasing out a lot of flavor and integrating it with crunch. The simple act of mixing the flavor text with the rules text in the zillions of feats is helpful. 4e felt sterile with flavor text in italics, helping the user ignore it, and giving the game mechanic algorithm in bold and colonized formatting.

Another helpful area is the robust feat support for all the skill actions you can do in the game. The core simulation element to the 3.x/PF was the skill section, which defined a great deal of the out of combat experience, or the corner cases of combat. Having so much mechanical attention lavished on it really helps keep this area relevant, along with baking in this category of feats in the class progressions, helps to round out a concept so they aren’t just a killing machine.

Lastly, it was impressive seeing the wild mix of ancestry, heritage, background and class. A wonderful mix of crunch and flavor. I think 4e eventually added in backgrounds, but they had lost me by that point so I can’t compare, but 2e provides what looks like a very entertaining character creation process. Not one that is necessarily newbie friendly with a sheer amount of material to read through, but for a vet it looks like there is robust matrix of options to create a character concept that is mechanically alive in the world.

I feel torn. There is a lot that I like with 2e, but where it does show its 4e influence it gives me the feeling of being already exhausted with the core book. The system is very much designed to crank out another bookshelf sagging amount of core books. With 1e I had no problem gobbling up those books because the aesthetic veil was present. I felt I was exploring with each addition. This new format, where the treadmill is laid bare in many respects, sucks the mystery out in many ways. The idea of five billion leveled feats, with no “system mastery” satisfaction of doing my own analysis and filtering, feels exhausting.

My review of this one is actually rather old - from last year in fact, but it wasn't available on Paizo back then, thus my review was probably exposed mostly to people via endzeitgeist.com, Pathways or similar means.

Thanks for the exhaustive review. It's good to hear the approach and effort I put into it is playing out well for others. When I was breaking out the book one of the central ideas was that if I was going to write a book it would be as close to the kind of ideal RPG reference material as I could hope for, so it has that "by gamers, for gamers" usability.

One thing that time and money did not allow for were designer notes in the book. I did try and inject some design considerations into the text itself, but I couldn't go into the footnote level of detail I would have wanted so that my design reasoning was made clear. You're review covers so much that I'll try and do some followup posts to elaborate on some of the book's elements.

Does anyone have any information on how to approach artists? I and my friends have been considering DeviantArt. What would be a ballpark going rate?

One of the threads that I linked to goes into a lot of detail on artwork and should have some ballpark figures for RPG art. Specifically dealing with deviantart, I've been going there and it has been successful for me. The problem with a general going rate is that it will vary so much depending on size, complexity, B&W vs. color, volume of work, and skill and experience of individual artists.

Another nuance is that different markets pay for artwork at different rates. I got some very helpful lessons from some artists who were willing to work for me who explained that the RPG market is so small that it can't support the rates that an experienced artists can get in broader fields such as mass-market book covers or video games. I fortunately found someone who understood this and was willing to work for RPG rates, even though he could get much more within the video game market. For him it was a low pay, but stress free gig that he did in part out of the enjoyment of the work.

On the super low end you can get artwork for just a few dollars. Typically this is from a teenager or student, some of whom are very talented. The problem with this demographic is that they aren't professionals yet. The idea of contracts, copyright, communication skills and workflow can all be far off from what you need for a business venture. And of course lastly, at a certain point going so low in price is really just overly taking advantage of someone's inexperience in the field. People, regardless of their age should be getting paid a fair wage.

There are “groups” that you can subscribe to on deviantart that cover all manner of things. Some of these are focused on commissions. Every day you'll get “deviations” of people in these groups, showing examples of their work and are aimed at commission work. So that is one way to help filter through the vast amount of artists on the site. These are however dominated by young people asking for small sums of money to do sketches, original characters “OC” and small cute artwork. Still, so much activity occurs there that you'll come across someone who stands out from time to time.

What has worked well for me is to go to their job offerings forum and to just present an open call for artists. Rather than negotiating prices, just put right into the subject line and then in your post how much you're willing to pay for a piece, say in increments of $25 to $50, and then give details on what you want, the kinds of rights you want for the work, dimensions, file format and so on.

What will happen is a flood of artists will write to you over the next 24 hours and you'll be spending hours looking at people's portfolios and trying to make a decision on who to work with. A lot of the artists won't fit the style you're going after, but out of the 50 or 60 submissions you'll end up finding a handful that will really align with your vision of the artwork.

Here is an open call that I did when I helped my cousin find an artist for his book cover. Here are the detailed job specifics on the project.

Eventually we went with an artist out of Jarkarta, Indonesia. The guy was great, fast and very communicative.

One other benefit with the open call is that you now have scores of artists portfolios, contact information, and you know what they are willing to work for. So you can always reach out to an artist later to do work for you.

Also, does anyone have any tips relating to getting your product licensed as Pathfinder compatible and getting them to sell it on their website?

That's really simple. You're basically just agreeing to their terms.

In my local Pathfinder Society community I found that we were getting a healthy influx of players who were new to Pathfinder, or even new to roleplaying games in general. The knowledge gap between experienced players and new players would often be vast.

While everyone in our community has been very helpful to new players, a lot of play strategies and options would often take months for new players to become aware of them, or get them spelled out in a clear fashion.

Because of that I began writing essays to our local PFS email list to help people get jump started into the game, providing advice along with play aids that could help accelerate players into the finer nuances of PFS.

Another factor in this influx of new players is that a lot of our sessions have been low level, and so I also focused on primers that would help low level characters be able to have a broader range of tools at hand to be able to provide solutions to challenges in modules.

While I've mentioned some of these resources I created on the boards before, for some reason I never thought to just devote a thread to them with everything laid out in a single post. Since Paizocon is just about to start, perhaps some of these articles and downloads would be of help to people now and in the future.

ARTICLES

Good & Cheap Equipment, Part 1 and Part 2 – I really enjoy having characters that can provide “lateral” solutions to problems. While having a lot of gold can buy a character lots of options, even low level characters can have a broad utility box of inexpensive widgets to solve problems. Both of these essays provide packages of inexpensive and lightweight items that expand play beyond waiting for initiative to begin.

Action Economy: Time Savers – This article examines a core but rather unstated layer of the system, the action economy, and how you can help make your character more efficient in that economy.

Linear Fighters & Quadratic Wizards – For new players with dreams of replicating some fictional hero of theirs, the system can often throw at them results they were not expecting. This primer on some of the more fundamental power scales in the game can help them make more informed decisions on the kinds of characters they want to create and how they will perform in play.

Animal Companion Comparisons – The druid, ranger and other pet classes are very popular with new players. It's natural to want to have a furry buddy at your side when adventuring. While some players jumped for whatever flavor of animal they liked, others kept asking me what was the best. I'd say, “it depends...” It ends up that laying out a numerical scale at least gives better information for players to pick an animal that suits their concept and performance in play.

A look at cheap Ioun Stones – In the first handful of levels you end up crashing into the reality of how expensive magic items can be. This article highlights a slew of inexpensive Ioun Stones that anyone can get a use out of.

Don't Forget the Use Magic Device Skill – The UMD skill is one of the more complicated subsystems in the game, at least conceptually, and so getting it highlighted and demonstrating that any character can make real practical use out of the skill can broaden the options of any character in the game.

Wands for Everyone! - In light of the UMD skill being useable by anyone, it makes sense to highlight one of the most inexpensive yet potent magic items in the game, wands. In PFS it's really good sportsmanship to buy your own Wand of Cure Light Wounds to take care of your own injuries, but anyone can push beyond that and become a much more adaptable character with a few utility wands.

Point Buy Arrays – With this article I went through scores of iterations of point buy arrays, trying to figure out which distributions give the broadest value for the bonuses and penalties that one can get for your character. Rather than re-inventing the wheel each time a character is made, you can zero in on a set of arrays that provide the most economical set of bonuses depending on the amount of penalties you want for your character.

DOWNLOADS (Found Here)

Organized Play Character Build Sheet – This sheet is there to help you map out character concepts. I've been using sheets like this for years and have found it very useful to find figure out how different builds function over time, or whether something is mechanically possible. Not everyone wants or needs to map out their character in advance, but these sheets can be useful for those who either want that advanced planning, or simply like a quick way to level up when the time comes.

Mundane Mounts and Work Animals – While plenty of players want pet classes, not everyone wants to follow that specific track in character development. Nonetheless people still want a pet. I decided to just make premade sheets of mundane mounts and work animals so that if a player just wanted to purchase a horse or dog, they could and then have all of the information on the animal ready to go immediately. I know I have sold some new players on the game by having these sheets already printed out an in a folder. “I want to buy a dog!” and I would present them with the dog sheet and the player was ecstatic at “getting” their dog like that.

Good, Cheap and Essential Item Checklist – It can be a real drag having to go through all the equipment lists to buy the standard fare of items, or even the suggested ones in the articles above. To save time and make it easy to organize and reference, I just made checklists to make it easy to purchase a whole set of items at once that will prove indispensable on adventures.

Discount Adventuring Kits – Just as with the checklists in the above download, there are also the Discount Adventuring Kits from the Pathfinder Field Guide. Getting these into a simple one sheet checklist really helps to speed up acquiring them and not having to re-write all of that information down again.

Arrow Packs – I enjoy playing archers and there are a few other players that also really enjoy it. As you gain levels and can afford more exotic arrows it the recordkeeping on these items becomes rather elaborate, especially when you can reclaim them 50% of the time. Once you get up to mid-levels and are outputing several shots per round it really helps to have all of this information pre-organized for you.

The Handy Haversack Pack – This is something that people with plenty of GM credit will find useful. Starting a new character at a higher level means needing to spend a lot of gold. While picking up all of those expensive items, it's worth getting a lightweight Handy Haversack filled with essentials for those just in case moments. The problem is all of that tedious calculating and writing down the same information you've written down again and again. This sheet lets you grab a pack and go without any fuss.

That's it for now, but I'll be doing further revisions to articles when needed and I'm really looking forward to the new Equipment Guide that will be out soon. I'm quite sure that will provide a wealth of really cool mundane equipment to add to the existing lists.

Enjoy!

Companions of the Firmament – A Pathfinder Roleplaying Game compatible supplement

BOMBS AWAY! It's time to test all of that work that I did with the Crowdfunding Report a couple of months ago by putting out my own Kickstarter.

Companions of the Firmament is a roleplaying game 144+ page book that is compatible with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game by Paizo Publishing. CotF is meant as a supplement for both game masters and players that focuses on creating adventures and characters that involve flying.

Kickstarter Project Page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gic/companions-of-the-firmament-pathfin der-rpg-compati

Campaign Dates: June 16th, 2012 till July 22nd, 2012 at 11:30pm EDT

Thanks and enjoy!

Umbral Reaver wrote:

I just saw it.

It is, in my mind, the worst movie that I can recall having seen. I have probably seen others that were worse, but I don't really remember because I didn't care. I cared about Prometheus. I was anticipating something brilliant.

It was utter crap through and through. It was stupid beyond belief.

Sad, but true.

Indeed.

I'm unfortunately complete crestfallen with the movie. I think a lot of my gut distaste with the movie is how it not only look gorgeous, but there is also an underlying "Ridley Scott" feel to the movie that I enjoy. However these really great qualities are smeared all over with inexplicable character actions and very pat allusions to big ideas.

I can lay a lot of blame at Lindelof's script. His narrative tricks worked well for a large chunk of LOST, but it all falls flat here. Far too many story elements were set up to create a sense of mystery. It worked well in LOST, but that show as about ordinary people being put into extraordinary situations, and so a big part of the fun was seeing how that played out. In Prometheus however we're given a premise that has already stepped past the ordinary. It's already assumed there are aliens, so it's not that part which has to be emphasized, but rather the ordinary. That's what made the original Alien work so well.

The other major structural problem to the movie was the oppressive need to pace pumped-up action sequences on a regular basis. The movie was enslaved to all of this action and didn't allow for fleshed out character behavior to occur. I had hoped that Scott was able to get beyond whatever studio demands might have been laid on him, but sadly that wasn't the case. Or he's just old and just doesn't get it anymore...

So my problem is more of an Icarus issue, rather than Prometheus. I expected this to not just be summer movie entertainment. This was supposed to be an edifying piece, and instant classic, art. It should have been Alien, Aliens, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, the Matrix, or the Return of the King. It didn't fail spectacularly, like the Matrix Sequels. It wasn't and issue of being too ambitious, instead the mistakes were sophomoric in scale. The expectations flew too high for me and the resulting fall is epic.

The toil is at an end! At least partially...

Around a month ago I began collecting the data on RPG related Kickstarter projects from from various sources on the net, including this forum. In the end I dumped onto a spreadsheet a year's worth of data totaling 150 projects. Then I began crunching numbers to see what larger patterns are at work in the RPG crowdfunding world.

I've finished part one which looks at the larger patterns, such as the average backing for RPG related material is $45, rather than the $70 for Kickstarter as a whole.

You can see the report here, beware... it's long.

Part two of the report is still under construction. That will looking more closing at the various bands of backing and goal tiers from the survey.

Hopefully this will help people as they map out their own projects.

I was crestfallen to hear that the races aren't going to be unlocked. For me it's the raison d'être to play fantasy games is to play weird and unusual races. For PFS in particular, where there is little time for roleplaying in these rushed time blocks, having a distinct and all encompassing caricature to play off of helps bring more flavor to the table.

Couldn't there simply be boons tied to specific adventures? Just create a series of adventures that are deeply tied to a specific race, it's cultural outlook, and how the race is nestled within the campaign setting. If you play it then the cert gives you a boon to play it in PFS.

That way there is a narrative passageway that everyone has to go through to play the race. No one can just say, "Tengu are weird bird dudes" but instead will have become educated in their role and general flavor. Most people can wing playing a dwarf or elf because they are so saturated in the gaming cultural backdrop, but this kind of dramatic education would help provide a road map to how to play various races.

It also puts the breaks on a huge flowering of their presence at tables. People would have to process through the module, and perhaps for some the themes raised in the module might dissuade them from wanting to play a specific race.

Yeah, this is one of those areas in the design where the meta game gets lathered over the imaginary world.

Basically the issue is that the system assumes that to defeat someone you have to either chew away their hit points, or they fail a saving throw. This goes back to the very beginning of D&D where the hit point system was invented so that there would be a cinematic pacing mechanism to make combat stretch out long enough that it would be interesting. Back in the day the inspiration pointed to would be sword fights in Erol Flynn movies. People don't get cut down in one shot usually, instead you've got several minutes of swordplay to build up the drama and then finally the bad guy gets nailed in the end.

Despite what the rulebook defines hit points to be, they were and continue to be a narrative construct. It gives the mechanics breathing room for a story to emerge in the action.

The problem with cliffs is that it's more like a save-or-die effect. It's an either/or condition and if its sufficiently high or over lava then you die. So if you can knock someone off the cliff then it can bypass the hit point system. Normally save-or-die effects are something that is well regulated on when they can be used. You have to have a spell, which can only come at a certain level, and is a resource that is used up. Thus, the system regulates when these can happen and they can't be spammed.

This is one of the inherent problems with D&D is that it gives mixed messages. At it's heart is a narrative pacing system so that fights feel more like a movie scene. However there is also a lot of stuff that dangles a sense of simulation. There are rules for all sorts of things that tie into what one could see as a physics engine. That simulation and narrative elements can clash sometimes.

What it comes down to is that the system wants to avoid having a BBEG die on the first round of combat because they got knocked off a cliff. A fight is supposed to be three to five rounds of exchanges and THEN the BBEG can go down.

There are many ways to solve this. In 4e they instituted the bloodied condition where certain things only kick into effect once someone is below 50% of their hit points. A 4e solution might be to have a power like the punishing kick feat, where you can knock someone back, but they have to land in a safe spot unless they are bloodied, at which point they can get tossed into whatever place happens to be there.

Fantasycraft is also more observant of the narrative framework of the game. They have opponents tagged as either mooks or "named" bad guys. Things affect these opponents in different ways, with the named bad guys having a lot more durability to increase the chance that the dramatic arc of a fight can be achieved. It's fine to knock Stormtroopers off of bridges all day if you like, but to take out the Emperor means dialogue and Vader picking him up and getting friend in the process. When Indy shoots the swordsman in Raiders, it's framed as a joke, because there was this expectation for a big fight, but it was the fact that it was an exceptional contrast to how the fights normally work (such as the brawl on the truck) that made that funny. If the whole movie was realistic and grim one-shotting then it wouldn't have been a high adventure film.

In terms of PF solutions. One of them is just to handwave the safe zone rule away. How often people are going to be on the edge of a cliff is mostly in the control of the GM. If they don't want a BBEG to die that easily, then don't have a fight up high or close to a lava pit.

Another solution is to use Hero Points and use them as a narrative currency to let people accelerate the narrative by spending those points. If a player wants to one-shot the BBEG before he monologues, that's fine but they have to pay for it. They are trading dramatic resolution with expediency, which later on my cost them when they don't have the Hero Points available to save the character from the grim expediency of a different BBEG.

I just have to say that it is disappointing to hear that it is technically unfeasible to pull of realistic day/night lighting in an MMO. I'd vastly prefer a more accurate simulation of lighting where torches and light spells are really meaningful, and the difference between races is clearly apparent with the different vision qualities.

Right now my wife and I are playing through Dead Island coop on the 360 and it's perpetually daytime, and that lack of cycling does detract from the immersive quality of the game. Aside from a few rain storms that darking things slightly, it's always a very bright and sunny day. In a game about zombies roaming about everywhere, you'd think having some nighttime wandering terror would add to the game.

I've enjoyed the Fallout games and they go from daylight to night time on a satisfying pace, though even there the nighttime is always a bit too bright, always seeming to feel like a full moon lit night.

Anyway, it is disappointing that trying to solve this is hard to overcome in a competitive virtual space. I'd have thought that an MMO, which has all sorts of opportunities for servers to sense patches would be the answer, but evidently the cheaters ruin things for everyone.

Yeah, I can't see a real logistical way of doing it, and on top of that it would just give ammunition for certain play styles to get played at certain tables. "Don't bother coming to my table if you're a thespian!" isn't exactly welcoming.

What would be far better is to just have a section in the campaign guide that highlights various common play styles, educate the players and GMs that these exist, and then encourage everyone that you have to make compromises when playing in PFS. I know that a lot of players aren't even aware that they gravitate towards certain styles, and when I talk to them about playstyles to some people it's almost revelatory. So if there is a section in the campaign guide that can be pointed to, that encourages a cosmopolitan awareness and tolerance, then that is a useful tool to smooth over expectations and conflicts.

If the South Park kids were to sit down and play a roleplaying game Cartman would invariably be a munchkin. When called out on it, he'd likewise complain that the accuser was in fact the munchkin.

Mok wrote:

Axe Haggart wrote:

These don't really sound like they where intended as standard actions to "turn on"

Why? What is making them sound different?

As has been described, Prehensile Hair does imply that it is used 'instantly'. As that is meaningless in game terms though, it defaults to a Standard Action... which is pretty much the opposite of 'instantly'.

It functions OK as is, IMO, it just doesn't function as described.

Yeah, I wasn't as clear in my socratic confusion.

I suppose what I meant to ask is, "what makes you think that the fluff supersedes the exception based rule structure of the game?"

To the OP, fluff is fluff and stuff is stuff. If you're looking for official decisions then you just have to follow RAW, which is the "stuff" and ignore all descriptive text which is "fluff." The rules are written to get rid of interpretation, instead being driven by exception based keywords that cascade throughout the rules. Activate one keyword and it invokes other keywords that are attached to it.

Basically, if you want to follow RAW, the best way is to look at the rules as computer software, using a bunch of "If, then" commands. If you view the rules as being written in BASIC and are attached to some 8-bit sprites on the computer screen then it all starts to make sense. If however you're looking for a supercomputer modeled simulation that takes into account the myriad ways in which descriptive text can be measured, be prepared to start banging your head on the desk.

These don't really sound like they where intended as standard actions to "turn on"

Why? What is making them sound different?

The situation leaves me with a sense of futility. I can't put anything out there that the party can't defeat...because if they attempt to attack the gold dragon who wants to help...they die and respawn right back again...and potentially try the same thing a different way. And as none of them are willing to GM...

No gaming is better than bad gaming.

Negotiate expectations and if they can't meet you halfway so everyone is having some fun then just stop the campaign. You're not their slave.

Or, if it's just a few players that are the problem, just don't game with them. Play with the people that are willing to work with you.

I don't know how old you are, but I saw a lot more of this in younger years. Sometimes people just have to live through life long enough that they finally realize that they don't have to put up with nonsense. Your social life shouldn't be built on a foundation of passive aggression.

As the GM, you're entitled to fun also. You're not just a stand in for a computer running an MMO to allow the "roll-players" to show off how clever they are. Vote with your feet if they aren't able to acknowledge you're own enjoyment.

It doesn't have to be a big social blow up. Just fire off an email to everyone saying, "Guys, I'm just not having fun with this situation. I've decided that unless we can't find a solution to what we all can agree to how the game works, where everyone (including me) can have fun then I'm going to have to take a break from GMing."

The pace and situation of combat is important. In playing rogues and just seeing them in hundreds of games the consistent pattern is that in a typical five round fight it's going to take two rounds for a rogue to get into a flank position that can still offer some avenue of escape.

It might be something like this:

Turn 1: Move or Standard (if the rogue can perform a ranged sneak due to being higher in initiative order)
Turn 2: Move/Standard Attack w/sneak attack
Turn 3: Full Attack w/Sneak Attack
Turn 4: Assess situation on staying because the rogue might have just been hammered with a full attack from enemy. So either full attack again or full withdraw.
Turn 5: Cleanup or run away.

With a full melee character it's more like:

Turn 1: Partial Charge
Turn 2: Full Attack
Turn 3: Full Attack
Turn 4: Move/Standard Attack
Turn 5: Full Attack or run away

The difference is that the full melee character is going to be able to output a lot of damage on almost every round. The Rogue has to get into just the right position and then has a chance, if the character has two-weapon fighting, to be able to deliver a potential large spike in damage for that particular round, but that spike isn't likely sustainable. It either helps drop the target, in which case the rogue now needs to spend another move action to reposition into a flank, or they are taking a beating from the target who is full attacking them. With the lower AC and hit points it isn't sustainable to just stand there.

There is also the to-hit issue. With lower BAB and lower strength the rogue is already losing out on the to hit bonus. It's somewhat compensated by the flank bonus, but that flank bonus is likely just making the full melee character even better at doing what the Rogue is trying to do. Further, if you're trying to do full-attack sneak attack then it usually means using two-weapon fighting, which adds another -2 to each roll. Finally, the TWF approach means a light weapon and a one-handed weapon, which further reduced flat damage bonuses.

Overall, the Rogue is looking at a huge pile of penalties compared to the Fighter to just deliver a high damage spike with a full-attack.

To-hit bonuses are generally better than damage bonuses because the to-hit roll is the conditional for the damage roll. Because the rogue sneak attack has two conditionals (to hit roll plus qualifying for sneak attack) then this really curbs the Rogue's ability to output huge amounts of damage on a consistent basis.

When you line it up and compare the amount of damage output that a dedicated melee fighter type does compared to a rogue over the course of complete encounters they easily outperform the rogue, even if they get full-attack sneak attacks.

I can see how, without doing enough analysis, multiple sneak attacks in one round might seem like it is over powered. However when you look at the broader flow of the game and how the system as a whole is designed it ends up being an option that has many drawbacks, and where the underlying math adds up to a much weaker melee combatant.

In terms of older version of D&D, there was a great deal more niche protection. Fighters got more attacks per round as they went up in levels, but you needed a rogue to do a lot of non-combat related abilities. Unless you were a rogue, some things simply couldn't be done, at least in a way that minimized danger or resulted in damaged goods. So the rogue got this flavorful backstabbing ability to help out in combat, but it really was up the fighter to hold the line and grind through the combat.

With later editions everyone kept getting more and more of the abilities of the rogue, to the point with Pathfinder that you might be mildly better at a lot of these broad abilities if you were a rogue, but not enough to really stand out. Further, magic has become so pervasive and powerful that most of what a rogue is good at is far better as a spellcaster.

The rogue definitely needs a revision, I suspect the inclusion of the Ninja abilities in the Rogue class was meant as a kind of patch, though even that is inadequate.

To actually reduce sneak attack to once a round is unfortunately really harming the performance of an already weak class.

Darkholme, life's keeping me busy and I can't dive into this stuff right now, but I just have to say good work!

Gogogo!

More combats... wear them down: Pathfinder Society modules on average present six encounters across a single day of adventuring and all of those encounters average out to APL+1, rather than APL. So the CR system is already a bit off as is and Paizo acknowledges it with how they construct their PFS modules.

More missile fire: If Grog is making humanoids explode with his greatsword, have enemies in superior terrain (CR+1) who rain missile fire down on Grog.

Multiple wave combats: If the spellcaster is shutting down an encounter with a well placed sleep spell, just make sure that you're breaking up the timing and composition of the enemy. Don't have them all come out at once and cluster together, but instead have an initial wave that gets dumped on with choice spells, then send out the second wave.

Bombs: The alchemist class is a wonderful GM friendly class to put on the enemy. Those pesky bombs can coat an area and wear multiple PCs down. Crazed kobolds and hobgoblins work great as alchemists.

Spells: Enemy casters... how about a crack squad of sorcerer kobolds, all who know magic missile. It gets nasty and can make Grog start to cry as he gets lit up with multiple magic missiles from 100 feet away. Grog also likely has a lousy will save so just dump some save-or-suck spells on him. Not enough to TPK, but enough to make them have to think of tactics other than charging forward to meat grind.

Swarms: The big beater weapons are useless against swarms. Watch as everyone scrambles to pull out flasks of oil, if they were smart enough to take some along, and start tossing them all over.

As far as the spellcasters go. The key is that they have to use up their spells for the day, which means lots of combats and no 15-minute work days. Use time sensitive plots, or random encounters to ensure that the high DC spell casters can't unload their show stopping spells and then kick back and rest.

Oh man...

I'd laugh and laugh and laugh, as I walked out the door to go find something fun to do.

A munchkin can make anything contentious, so the GM just has to say, "this is a GM tool, I'm running this campaign and this is how it's going to be. Either get on, or get off."

At some point a GM needs to grow a pair (what that pair happens to be depends on gender) and needs to be able to look a whiny player dead square in the eyes and just say "No."

Is there really an outbreak of abusive reskinning happening across PFS-land?

The only reskinning I've seen comes from either:

People fairly new to RPGs in general and passionately imagine some flavorful character element. They aren't beaten down by the RAWish nature of PF yet and are just engaged in the act of imagination. They say they want some innocuous thing, someone at the table suggests they use this rule and just reskin it, and the new player gets a big smile.

And then there are the ROLEplayers who make super quirky and sub-optimal character builds. They want that weird thingamabob, someone suggests using such-and-such and then they retreat into their mindseye satisfied.

I've never seen anyone reskin and then in a cheeseball manner start pushing the boundaries "because that's how it would work" arguments. If anyone ever did that, at least three people seated at the table would robotically turn their head towards the perpetrator and sounds of "RAW" would come screeching out of their mouths.

In terms of people's aesthetics being challenged and their fun destroyed, it's just hard to imagine how such sensitive fun could have survived already with just normal munchkin antics. When you're seated at a table with several soul sucking rule lawyer, meta-game-chatty, hard core gamists who never make an effort to inject any flavor into their characters, I would think anyone who cared about flavor would welcome with tears someone who is riding a pig or wielding a glowing buzzy sword.

[eyes squinting] Speaker, I've spent about 10 minutes thinking about your last post. I think we might be talking past each other a bit. I guess I'm not communicating myself very well.

You're quite emphatic about the effects based stuff, though I'm not really persuaded. Whether the system intends to be effects based isn't really a concern to me, because in the end there is still an effect that can be measured in relation to it's potency in combat.

The raison d'etre of the system is to kill things and take their stuff. Now by "system" I'm meaning the core math behind the game. You have other dimensions that are explored in the game, but they all revolve around the very basic premise of killing things to take their stuff so that you get more powerful so that you can then go kill more powerful things and take their stuff. There is plenty of other fun in the game, but the way I've seen D&D for 30 years has always been, "you come for the slaughter and theft, you stay for the conversation!"

So if you use that as your yardstick, then you can evaluate all of the end effects of all the stuff that is available to do in the game and measure how directly it helps with that central premise.

Being able to talk to animals is fun and cool, no doubt about it, and it could even help you get information to help you go and kill something and take its stuff. Still, the stakes are highest when combat is on and so in light of that you can measure through a variety of factors how much individual spells will help with that.

If you were to give at-will speak with animals to a race, it isn't likely to derail or break a game. Instead it will result in a lot of comical conversations with Int 2 animals, and perhaps a few clues on whatever adventure you're on. The fun will get pumped up, but the underlying math of the game isn't going to get messed with. But having some combat spell... say, True Strike... as an at-will power is ridiculously overpowered.

Measuring the end effect and quantifying it can give you a much more clear listing of what spells could be useful to use as special powers that help bring out some rather interesting situations and really frame a race. It doesn't really matter that the spell is lumped into a specific spell level if you're trying to wed it to a race, all that really matters is how the actual effect of the spell will impact the combat performance of the game, or cause some disruptive effect on the flow of the game. At-will Black Tentacles would get old real fast, but at-will Nondetection... there is something interesting going on there for a race.

All I'm trying to say is "there is gold in them thar spells" that could be used in interesting ways, and one way to figure that out would be to grind through the spells, measure out their end effect, and then line that up with the core premise of the system. It just takes a lot of tedious work.

AND, I'm not even saying this as something I'd expect Paizo to do. I'm just saying as I lean on a comfy armchair, enjoying the sound of my own typing. I suppose once I see the final ARG system I could dust off my own race design system and go even deeper with it. By that point though a newborn will be in the house, so I'm not sure I'd be able to pull it off.

Melissa Litwin wrote:

I also agree with the people who don't like the racial subtype prerequisites. The whole idea of mixing and matching and building new races who are unique gets hurt a lot with those restrictions. I like the idea of making certain abilities cheaper for certain subtypes (hardy dwarves or lucky halflings), but I see no reason for not building a lucky gnome variant or a race of tiny amphibious lizardfolk (newt-type) whose culture is built around luck, gambling, and getting lucky in dangerous situations.

So I will reiterate the plea: cost things in a purely mechanical way. Look at the ability outside who currently has it, cost it appropriately based on power, then decide if it is racially linked. Perhaps add a discount if it is, perhaps not (Hardy is, after all, really good. Why should dwarves get it cheaper?).

I agree wholeheartedly with this. A race-building point-buy system should be a perfect toolbox for mixing and matching abilities that I think would work well together, without being forced to have a specific subtype in order to use a certain ability-package.

Giving races of certain subtypes discounts for some of the abilities that are mainstays for those subtypes is certainly fine, and makes perfect sense, but forcing a race to have that subtype to have the ability at all seems too restrictive.

+1

It obscures values too much by layering them, thus reducing the ability for it to be a useful toolbox.

The last thing I'd want to do with a race design system is make a bunch of variations of dwarves and elves.

What I'd want is a system that helps me make fantastical races that help frame the tone and themes of a campaign in totally new ways.

Mok wrote:

*Mok's stuff *

You make your points very well. Let me be a little bit more clear about what I mean when I say "impossible". You can do what you are saying, but you will need to assign arbitrary numbers to many things. For example, when you assign values to "magic missile" and "comprehend languages" you will need to just make a decision what their two very different effects are worth. Low resolution, that value is "1st level spell". High res, I think many players would disagree.

It's true that there are arbitrary valuations that always go into an analysis. However the word arbitrary is a tricky word because it can come off as have a meaning similar to "random." It's not that the person making the valuation just rolls a die and adds that value to the equation, instead it's built on estimation. Some people's estimates are more valuable than others, and the methodology of those estimates is also more valuable than others.

As an example, if you break out magic missile and one person says, "I think it's this!" and you ask how they came to the number and they just say, "well, it feels right" then I'd be a bit suspect. However if someone else shows up and takes the DPR value of the magic missile, along with compares the auto-hit feature to factor in something close to the value of +20 to hit, plus also considers that it's force damage and thus more valuable than other types of energy damage, then factors in range, and on and on... giving you a table that breaks all of those elements down and then provides a sum... well, I'll take their approach as being more meaningful. Methodology that is documented and open for review is key.

When I say impossible, I mean you can't break the system down and apply it to this race creation alone. The reason is that by breaking it down and assigning it values, you will be revealing a fundamental truth of this game: not all options are equal or balanced. By attempting to make these options perfect, you will be making the rest of the game look broken, even though at our "low resolution" everything works just fine (at least for my games).

Ah... you see, I want the entire system laid bare. I want harsh light to shine down on everything and reveal every last flaw in the system. That way you can more accurately and reliably fix it.

I've said it before, but basically everything I post on these forums is at least in part aimed at an eventual Pathfinder 2E. It might be a decade away, I don't care, but I want that system to be a properly "fixed 3.5" and it's products like these that give opportunities to laid down some fundamental analysis on how to approach that. I know that the race design system can get into everything, but if it at least starts to make some more accurate measurements of the system, it will make the needed overhaul of the future that much easier to accomplish.

Could we make the dwarf more points? Sure. Could we make the gnome or the halfling less points? Sure. RP are constructs toward a design goal. But how does that accomplish the main goal of the system, which is to provide GM with a useful tool to create races relatively balanced with the core races?

The main issue I have with making all the core races a 10 is that it's distorting the values and thus giving GMs inaccurate information.

If you want GMs to have a tool which they can use to eyeball race design, then it ought to be accurate in measuring the core races.

It would be better to make an accurate measuring stick and then be able to show the range of values between the races. That way GMs can see that if they have a race design that fits within that range (Dwarf high, Halfling low) then the GM will be more confident that the race will fit well within the existing system. They know that both Dwarves and Halflings are playable and so they can then tweak their race design to fit what they are looking for. If a design doesn't need to use all the race points to get the point across, they can see that if it falls within range of the halfling then that would still be ok for the campaign. They don't have to feel like they have to pack more abilities in just because.

Further, with more of a gradient between the core races, you can see how other levels of race points can perform. If you know that the Dwarf is on top, and you want to make something else that has lots of options, then you can get a better feel based off of how dwarf character's have performed.

Beyond that, trying to cram things into 10 points to fit just right ends up making inaccurate assessments that cascade out into the rest of the design system. If you have more accurate assessments, then it's easier for GMs to be able to eyeball other similar effects.

Impossible. Find me one person's (or one company's) breakdown of the whole system and I'll find you thousands that disagree. Skills don't even all "equal" each other. Spells' values certainly don't match up. Feats? Forget about it. Try comparing them to each other and you'll just end up frustrated.

It's possible. It's just the amount of work that is put behind it.

Each valuation is ideally taking into account as many factors as possible. The more factors that are weighed, the "higher the resolution" is gained.

And just because lots of people disagree with you doesn't mean that you're valuation is less accurate. People can disagree for all sorts of reasons that involve far less analysis and just from-the-hip reactions. I'm old enough to know that some people's opinion on a particular subject are better than others.

Ideally though, you open up the system to review and do get input from others that provide cogent arguments and analysis. It's all about accumulating more insights and taking into consideration as many different elements as possible.

As for Skill Points, you're right. I mispoke above and what I intended is that each skill has to be evaluated on its own and it's particular bonuses have to be isolated. Once you get all of the skill broken out in this way then you can get average values to derive a generic skill points value.

As for feats and spells, they too need to be broke out individually. EVERYTHING in the system has to broken down. Depending on the element, some averages can be gleaned and used for certain placeholders, such as feat slots and spell slots, etc.

All of this is a huge amount of work, but it's not possible.

The thing is, all of this kind of analysis is done all the time for real world concerns. The entire financial system is built on breaking things down and analyzing the bits. The current movie that just came out, Moneyball, is all about the kind of analysis that I'm talking about here. It happens all the time in the real world because huge sums of money are at stake. This is all imagination stuff that has very little cash value, and so the amount of labor involved has to come from the love of doing it rather than hoping to reap real wealth.

"Low resolution" as you label it is the best that is possible. And that's just assuming all tables are created equal, which they aren't. At some tables, a social skills based character is a god among men. At others, he's an underpowered waste of a character sheet. I just don't see how Pathfinder can truly be broken down. To paraphrase Voltaire, the perfect is the enemy of the good. If Paizo can do a good job with this, it won't bother me that they didn't break the entire game system down.

I think it would be a mistake to think that how the game is played varies so much that nothing productive can be measured. While there are tables out there diplomacy and intrigue dominate the game, I'd assume that it isn't such a high percentage that it rocks the boat of good old fashioned dungeoncrawling.

Even then, the whole point of breaking the system apart and seeing how it all adds up as accurately as possible is to establish a baseline against what the system aims for being the highest stakes. If you make the assessment that combat is the main aim of the system, and build the whole evaluation around combat, then you'll get a much more accurate resolution as to how all of these elements weigh in relation to combat. Since combat does have the highest stakes for the most part, if another table is running a game that doesn't see a lot of combat, then those valuations aren't going to have a big impact on the game, precisely because they are playing a much lower stakes game.

In terms of what Paizo can do, I concede that their business interests likely won't allow them to get to a very high resolution, but if they can go deeper, get more granularity and build up values around at least some of the core game elements then it will be better than what is currently offered.

Mok wrote:

I realized that I needed to get a clear snapshot of the races and their value compared to each other. They are decidedly skewed, and yeah... the halfling is the weakest.

I think that taking away the halfling +1 to hit with slings and thrown weapons, while either adding stuff (spell penetration to the elves, a skill focus feat to the half-elves, ferocity to the half-orcs) or keeping them the same (humans, dwarves) was perhaps a step in the wrong direction for the halflings.

Yeah, after doing the assessment of the core races and seeing how shafted the halfings were compared to other races, I and the playtesters had a conversation about ways to fix halflings. I don't have my notes handy, there are so many different ways that it could be done with a point-buy system, but I do remember one that I liked was that Halfings get +3 to all of their saves, rather than +1. That brings them in line with the top races (such as Dwarves) and fits the Tolkiensque flavor of the humble hobbits being able to surprisingly pull through despite the odds.

seekerofshadowlight wrote:

Totally agreed, the whole point cost is built upon a flawed assumption.

Yes - "flawed assumption" is a big, BIG eye-sore to me looking at this.

Honestly, anyone that's seriously considering looking into all of this will be well served by looking at BESM d20's racial construction costs. They actually valued out the systemic values (by their own system's prices mind you) of the abilities and then priced everything out accordingly.

The point being - the methodology used was *exactly* the right way to approach an undertaking like this. Take it apart and see how it works (ie: system value points), and then put it together and see how it ticks with your tocks in place (ie: assignment value of individual racial constructions).

BESM d20 has an srd, but I'm not sure if the racial construction is included, I'd imagine it is, but I can't tell off hand.

In any case, to everyone really looking this over - look at BESM d20 for guidance on how this *should* be approached.

As of right now ... no. I can't back a system with such a faulty assumption up front.

Yeah, the big reason that it's taken literally years of me poking away at my own race design system is that to do it right you really do need to break the whole system down into it's constiuent parts, lego-izing everything like it's GURPS or HERO. You also have to keep aiming to anchor all of the valuations off of core game elements, such as to-hit, damage bonuses, and hit points, and then work your way out. If you don't isolate a core measuring stick, then you're going to have to keep redoing your work... something that I've had to do over several revisions as I kept honing the measurements.

Aside from BESMd20, there is also the Challenging Challenge Ratings, which is what really inspired me on my own project. The CCR document is a good start, but even the designer was looking at it as a benchmark system over 20 levels, and so it even lacks the granularity needed to really get it right.

What really needs to happen is get a measuring system that makes an attempt at as accurately measuring:

BAB
AC bonus
Saves
Ability Scores (they aren't all equal, they need to be priced differently)
Hit Points
Skill Points
Feat Values
Spell Values

Basically, the whole system needs to be atomized, then measured, then rebuilt, and then playtested.

Paizo has publishing schedules and limited resources for any given project, so I doubt it's going to happen, but doing some of the above will be far better than just eyeballing at a low-resolution.

This was the first thing that I looked at when I downloaded the pdf.

I've actually spent a couple of years, 150+ hours, and several playtest runs with my own race-creation system. It was going to be my grand foray into OGL 3pp, but the AR book has diminished those aspirations. Anyway, it went through many stages of development, but early on I realized that I needed to get a clear snapshot of the races and their value compared to each other. They are decidedly skewed, and yeah... the halfling is the weakest.

Other race creation systems in the past have also made the mistake of going off a basis of the core races all being equal. That assumption keeps cascading through the point-buy.

If you want to have an accurate measuring tool then it ought to reveal what is actually happening in the system first before moving on and measuring everything else.

I've stripped darkvision away in some campaigns I've run. The main reason is to ensure that light sources remain important and that the dark really is a threat. In these campaigns i've also modified other light sources, such as to bump light back up to a 1st level spell and make everburning torches a rare and expensive magic item.

It does make for a tighter and more interesting game. Far too many things were set to an "easy setting" when the game shifted to 3.0.

I've never been able to understand why someone would act that way, but it happens. My experience has been that such people are not going to change. You can explain yourself, or not. They will not acknowledge that they're doing anything wrong, and will think you're being a jerk for not liking it.

I've worked with at-risk populations for a few decades and, while there are many ways of getting to this state, a common one is the early upbringing of the individual.

When you're a young child you're brain is being deeply affected by the other people around you. If you're present in an environment that has a great deal of social drama, the brain in a sense gets hard wired to bond with other people through drama. Social relationships get framed as having value in the context of cycles of drama.

So yeah, later on in life, it is incredibly hard for people to get themselves out of this pattern, because their brains are wired to reward them for drama, rather than say... nurturance. The brain literally is sending out "reward chemicals," such as dopamine, when conflict emerges. In a loose way you could say people with this situation are literally addicted to drama. It's only through a lot of self-reflection, therapy, and/or other forms of reinforcement that a person can deal with their embedded worldview.

All of this is also an issue of degrees. Someone might have a deep seated desire for this, but has developed socially to know how to keep it in check. They might be "totally cool" outside of the game, but put them into this hypothetical pretend space of RPGs and they see this as an opportunity to act out their deep seated cravings.

Just like some powerful banker or politician who secretly goes to a dominatrix to tap into some regressive childhood need for being controlled, an RPG is just another avenue of roleplaying in the clinical sense of a "safe space" and hence, "that's what my character would do" is seen as a legitimate excuse to act like a jerk.

Ahh... what a comfy armchair this is. May I?

Regardless of what WotC comes up with for 5e they have to answer to the suits at Hasbro.

Hasbro has to be looking at Blizzard, who has a system down and market dominance that is so strong that they can spend a decade fussing with Starcraft II. They just rake in cash and I can't comprehend any message coming down from Hasbro-on-high that is anything other than, "figure out how to replicate that." I don't know what the numbers are, but I'd guess that if you captured x percent of the WoW market, you'd be surpassing the entire RPG market.

And now that the legal quagmire of computerized D&D is out of the way they can finally get down to business doing that.

Whatever 5e ends up being, it's going to involve an even tighter digitized integration. There can't possibly be any trends at the macro scale of publishing that say that cranking out tons of hard back books to a shrinking print market is going to lead to an evergreen product.

Paizo on the other hand is likely viewing things at more of a micro hobby market. They can keep expanding print runs to reach deeper into this market. Eventually the market will shift to a digital format, but I'd guess that the shrinkage at the micro scale is happening at a smaller rate than at the macro scale in publishing.

In terms of Paizo's reaction. It's hard to imagine a lot of investment in a "reaction" to 5e because they've built up a solid business model, which seems to be "write, draw and sell a lot of content, using a solid rules framework to draw people into said content." The only reaction I've seen so far is Paizo moving into what WotC seems to keep seceding (such as minis).

Ultimately, WotC is under vast corporate pressure to produce results on a scale that Hasbro finds worthwhile. Meanwhile Paizo is privately owned and so it does what the owners are pleased and content with.

That would be a really cool effect.

The more repositioning rules the better as far as I'm concerned. I want people getting tossed all over the place like it's a movie or comic book.

It would be great to toss a bomb and have it do a bull rush as it's splash, and just toss a whole crowd of people.

A typical person of european descent wearing footware will have a shoot somewhere around a foot in length. It ofcourse varies but thats the point. Its not perfectly accurate but there is an every day reference point regardless of the time period.

I have to agree that the metric system has no soul. Why is because of how the length measurement was established. The meter is derived from the kilometer, which is derived from a 10 kilometer stretch of road in France that follows a meridian between the North and South Poles.

Basically, the scale that length was established on was not on a human scale. Humans have no intuitive grasp of 10 kilometers, much less the meridian between the poles. It's outside of common experience and at a level of abstraction that it feels as if it's coming from heaven.

I understand why they based it on this level. It was the age of Enlightenment, rationality was pushed to the forefront, scientists were struggling with older institutions that were just struggling to catch up with scientific thought. Further, they wanted an international standard, and so they had to appeal to global measurements to win over a very fractional world.

Still, the English system of length has an organic quality to it that is very intuitive. One thing that stands out for me as lacking (as far as I know, being a crude American) is that there is no foot in the metric system, at least on an everyday use level. You have the centimeter, and then it leaps to the meter.

The foot is a great human scale length that is very useful going about in life. I'm not talking about taking your foot and shoving it up against stuff, but the 12 inch length. It "fits" a wide assortment of objects that we encounter on a daily basis. Likewise, two feet is around the length an adult putting their hands out in front of them. With centimeters or meters you're getting tossed into a level of granularity or percentiles that just doesn't lock into everyday experience, which is what units of length ought to be using.

The old system is goofy and it could use to be made into a standard decimal system, there is no love in me for all of the stupid fractions you have to deal with, so I'm all for a metric system, but a new one that would be based off of some averaged human body part. That wouldn't have been feasible back in the Enlightenment, but in today's world of instant face recognition technology I'm sure an international body could whip out a metric inch, foot or whatever without much fuss.

Ah yes... Fahrenheit. It wasn't based on anything relating to the human scale, however the numbers line up well in a decimally kind of way. 0 degrees is really cold, 100 degrees is really hot. And as said, there is more granularity with Fahrenheit.

The argument for Celsius always goes that it is based off of when ice forms in water. As cold as that sounds, it just isn't that cold. Walking around in 32 degree weather usually isn't that bad. It's cold, but not REALLY cold.

Once again, I vastly prefer measurements to line up with common everyday experience at the human level. It ought to be humanocentric, and not abstracted out. Thankfully we don't use Kelvin, which is way of human scale of experience.

A year or two ago there was a long thread with people arguing these issues.

From what I recall, eventually a dev arrived and said that all the stuff gets added together. You get NA from the chart, from the base and the advancement. You don't split the difference in any of this. Just keep adding stuff on from each section.

Mok wrote:

Dren Everblack wrote:

I am looking for other suggestions of ways to balance things. Trust me that no one in our group wants me to confront him about this.

"That is why you fail."

Thanks Yoda, but that is not terribly helpful. :-)

The thing is your matching passive-agressive tactics with passive-agressive tactics. If everyone is firends there then just treat it like an intervention. Rather than framing it as a violation of trust, talk about it as a problem that you guys are there to support him in this cheating addiction.

Just have a player or two document his rolls quietly and the compare them to what happened. Once you have documented proof then confront him.

I've spent the last couple of decades working with people that have all sorts of at-risk isses, be they emotional, substance abuse, or mental illness, and the only way to deal with these problems in a healthy way is to face them head on. The number one deterrent to healthy change that I have seen over these years are the people close to the person with the problem. Too often they act as enablers for the behavior. Like your situation, they want change, but without dramatic fallout. The big mistake they make is that it is an either/or situation, where you either put up with it or destroy relationships.

The times whe there is a positive breakthrough is when the friends can see the need for change as one of nurturing and helping the individual, rather than castigating them.

I am looking for other suggestions of ways to balance things. Trust me that no one in our group wants me to confront him about this.

"That is why you fail."

Well, there is this:

Quote:

Additional mounts might be

available with GM approval.

Flying mounts are not appropriate for all campaigns. While a little guidance might have been nice, by doing things this way, the GM is allowed to say, "Yes," instead of being forced to say, "No."

This is precisely why I want to see it in RAW. The social pressure needs to be on the GM to allow for flying mounts, rather than the gloomy old "mother may I" routine of pleading for genre emulation.

After decades and decades of D&D play, and a system that is well established to allow flying options from 5th level on, martial players shouldn't have to beg for a flying mount. Spellcasters have a variety of ways of flying at low-mid levels, from spells to wildshape, or even being a druid and just actually riding on their animal companion. If you're a GM and taking the ban hammer to all of that then you'd definitely look fussy and over controlling... but as usual, if your a martial character then it's perfectly fine to say, "not in my world of fantasy and magic are there going to be any armored knights flying on mounts! THAT is going to far!"

If a GM can handle small druids riding on the back of a Dire Bat or Roc at level 1, Wizards, Witches and Sorcerers flying about at 5th level with spells or hexes, Alchemists with wings at 6th level, and after that winged boots, flying brooms and carpets, but through it all are stupefied by martial flying mounts then they need to step-up with their imagination a bit more.

Callarek gave a great list. To highlight some of it...

Being an Inquisitor is going to hamper damage output. Medium BAB plus a bunch of other class features that aren't funneling directly into the archer theme are holding you up. Consistent damage requires lots of feats (like Fighter), or class abilities (like the Zen Archer Monk out of the APG).

One key concept with archer damage output is that it involves quantity, not quality. The system does really support 'sniping' a target with a single shot. Instead you have to think of the archer as a machine gunner, who blasts a target with many arrows.

If you want to max out damage as quickly as possible then you need to be human so you can grab as many feats as possible.

At a fundamental level you need these feats to boost damage and increase rate of fire:

Point Blank Shot
Precise Shot (absolutely needed for to-hit purposes)
Deadly Aim
Rapid Shot
Manyshot

An archer's turn should almost always involve using a full attack to take advantage of the Rapid Shot feat, along with any iterative attacks from higher BAB. You set up your machinegun nest and then begin to concentrate fire on a target.

If you want consistent "always on" damage output then Fighter is the way to go. The other good classes for the archer tend to spike damage Ranger uses spells, Paladin uses Smite, and Monk uses Ki. All of those are great, but they do have a daily shelf life. The Fighter has Weapon Training, which stays on all day for every shot, and the damage bonus compounds as you go through the levels.

As for the potency of the optimized Archer. It has a real effect. Our 8th level Fighter Archer is doing 80 points a round, and I'm not sure he's even maxed out. A two-handed fighter will do more damage in a full-attack, however in any given combat the Archer will likely deliver more full-attacks than a two-handed specialist. If the GM isn't just clumping the enemy into one little group then the Archer is likely to get twice the number of full-attacks in a combat.

Another leg up that the archer has is that their "golf-bag" of weapons is smaller and cheaper. The Archer can have specialized arrows that deal with most versions of DR, and because they are ammo are vastly cheaper to buy than a regular weapon. No other approach is going to get you adamantine weapons as quickly. Plus, drawing your choice DR busting option is automatically a free action due to be ammo. With a two-handed fighter they are going to spend huge sums of gold to get the diversity of weapons needed for different DR, and they'd need to pick up Quick Draw to get them in hand, with the additional factor of possibly needing to drop another weapon.

In our PFS group we've got someone playing an optimized Archer and it's drawing the ire of a lot of the players, basically because the character almost solos adventures, with the rest of the party just running interference for the character. This is especially the case with encounters with enemy spellcasters. The player who runs this character knows his stuff, so as soon as he has a whiff that there is an enemy spellcaster about he's readying actions, or just coating the target in arrows to ensure that spells don't even go off. Typically an encounter with this particular character lasts two rounds. The times when people don't mind the character being use are in those rare instances where the table has the choice of playing up a tier. Then it's "cha-ching!" because everyone's confident that the optimized archer is going to lay waste to the module and give everyone piles of gold without any fuss.

Oh, and get a cleric with the luck domain to tap an optimized Archer before the character full-attacks... rolling two d20s for every attack pretty much guarantees the whole suite of attacks will hit. That combo truly becomes a machinegun nest.

One last thing... Boots of Speed when you can afford it. Lets you haste yourself, giving you yet another attack, and in the rare situation that you really need to be mobile, you're moving at +30 speed.

I wrote up a review for my friends. It should be noted that the following was written more for the "layman" gamer who would never bother to spend time on forums. I wouldn't necessarily frame everything I wrote below for "gamer cognoscenti" digestion:

THE CLASSES

The final versions of the new classes (Gunslinger, Ninja, and Samurai) are all quite similar to what was seen in the playtests. This is good or bad depending on the particular class...

The Gunslinger

Unfortunately for the Gunslinger the changes that were being brought up over and over again in the playtest were not addressed, and so we're left with a class that doesn't really come together either thematically or mechanically. Thematically what the designer explained during the playtest was to have a class that had a dynamic manner of performing stunts. You can see this whole endeavor as trying to extend the general fantasy theme deep into 17th century territory with classic pirate archetypes being evoked. Golarion as a whole isn't really set in a medieval type of world, but something that feels more 15th to 18th century, so pushing it this far actually seems appropriate.

I did find it interesting that Paizo was going to blur the lines even further and called the class the “Gunslinger,” rather than “Musketeer” and to push deep into the late 19th century. Paizo saw that spaghetti western thematics, if you squint hard enough, really isn't that far off from any of the other fantasy tropes. If you just take dirty folk in a hard environment and give them guns, the grim nature of their business isn't really any different from swords and shields. What would be jarring would be railroads and an industrial mindset, something that both spaghetti westerns and Golarion are at great pains to mute.

So the Gunslinger class was meant to be this dynamo of interesting stunts, using the deed system. The playtest input was that the deed system as it currently stood just did not capture enough of that stunting. Far too few deeds are available, the most interesting ones being feats that you have to take with your slots, and far too many of the normal deeds are simply so situational that they won't have a frequency that would be interesting to a player. Worse, some of the deeds are redundant, such as shooting a lock, which is something anyone can do with the core rules.

So the deeds fall flat, with some of them requiring the use of feats to fully utlize. Meanwhile the class' main schtick is to use a rained weapon. Anyone familiar with ranged builds knows you need a slew of feats to get the weapon to fully function in combat. While the class does provide a handful of bonus feats as you progress through levels, they simply aren't enough to keep up with what you'd want to be able to do with guns. Bizarrely enough, even though the feat Rapid Reload is fundamentally required for the class, it isn't given automatically. Woe to the player totally new to Pathfinder, who sees the Gunslinger and doesn't take Rapid Reload. Those first few levels are going to be a long wait of very slow fire to fix things at third level.

There are many other problems with the Gunslinger, and overall my impression is that after the firestorm of criticism for guns in general, and then adding the Gunslinger to the mix, Paizo decided to allow for a substandard class to be tossed into the game. If the old-school players are worried that everyone would have firearms, now they can rest easy knowing that the power gamers won't be championing the class or the weapons.

In terms of Pathfinder Society, all of the class archetypes that are outside of the Gunslinger itself are banned from play. Why? In general they are far better at being Gunslingers than Gunslingers. They all get the basic class abilities needed to use the gun, but then the gun is blended with class just enough to do something interesting, such as smiting with gunfire, or the Spellslinger with her magic spell gun. It's all pretty interesting stuff, but the gun control advocates in the Society have spoken and so these options have been cut.

If you really do want to pursue the Gunslinger, then I highly suggest the Musket Master. It's the one archetype that already seems to be offering up some of the needed “patches” to the fancy new class. It tosses out some of the junk from the core class and adds in much needed features, such as Rapid Reload, virtually for free.

Likewise, I can see dipping into the Gunslinger for a few levels to at least be somewhat interesting. If you want to have a gun just cuz, then dipping gives a slew of features that smooth out the poor performance of the gun, and avoid paying a huge price for the weapon. One thing that is nice is that the Gunslinger gives you both Acrobatics and Perception as class skills, something that the Fighter keeps weeping was present in a build. If you want to be a mobile fighter type and just do a quick dip with Gunslinger then you might end up seeing some decent benefits.

The Ninja

Ah, the Ninja... it did get nerfed from the playtest, but it was minimal and the consent online is that it was appropriate. Basically in the playtest there was a free use of a bunch of Ninja Tricks. Those free uses were removed and folded into the normal use of Ki points.

The Ninja is a great class. It's not historical ninjas, but rather movie ninjas and as far as I'm concerned, if you're playing a fantasy game then pump up the volume. The Ninja class is kind of a super-archetype of the Rogue. You can take levels in both Rogue and Ninja, but the way that they set up how you can select Rogue talents and Ninja tricks it allows for a lot of blending. In many ways it's actually more worthwhile to just be a Rogue who happens to take Ninja tricks, because then you don't have to waste class resources on poison use, which unfortunately is just too expensive to be useful.

Just glancing at the Ninja tricks is all you need to be swayed how much fun it would be to play them. Get a +20 to acrobatics checks to do spectacular Jedi-like leaps, get a climb speed to go up vertical walls, get a shadowy effect similar to mirror image (one of the best defensive spells in the game), why... just turn invisible! Oh, and there is a trick that lets you use any of the tricks that you don't know by just spending a little extra Ki. It's an incredibly versatile class that is chock full of cool effects for a largely martial character.

Since the Ki is driven off of Charisma, not only do you get put into a position to also be a party face, with plenty of skill points to go around, but there are plenty of weird multi-class combos that you could cook up.

I highly recommend trying out the Ninja, or playing a Rogue who just go a massive dose of midichlorians pumped into the bloodstream.

The Samurai

The big controversy with the Samurai during the playtest was that the guy is mounted. People pointed out that historically this was largely the case, but to western sensibilities we're more used to samurai on foot. Seeing as the Samurai is a super-archetype for the Cavalier it's kind of moot as to whether the class is going to be mounted or not.

After that the playtest discussion was rather dry. If you like the Cavalier then you'll enjoy the Samurai, and the inverse is largely the same. The differences between the two versions of the class are fairly minimal. Where the Cavalier has a bit of an emphasis on melee combat, the Samurai has more support for ranged attacks.

The little support is an element that does pique my interest a bit. An archer build that is made to be mounted gets an extra perk in that the mount can move while the rider continues to use full-attacks. Unlike an archer on foot, who can at best do a 5-foot step, a mounted archer can move up to the speed of the mount and rapid fire away. So it is something worth considering. The real issue is that while the Samurai gets a little more support for ranged combat, it just isn't the same as being a fighter with plenty of feats to spare. The Samurai comes with all sorts of other samurai-y type stuff that isn't going to help being a mobile machine-gun nest.

I wouldn't discount playing a Samurai in PFS, but you do have to realize the limitations that you'll have with your mount. If you play a small character than these issues can be minimized, but you do have to spend a lot of time carefully planning your build and tactics to make the most use out of the whole class.

THE ARCHETYPES

Ooof! Man are there are lot of archetypes. I'm not sure where to begin. This article would go on forever if I commented on all of them. Suffice to say, there are gobs of options here and quite a few of these are fortunately not suffering from the rather conservative design philosophy that Paizo normally takes with new features.

One thing that I can say as a general statement that is interesting with Paizo's design sensibilties is that they have been quite open how they are trying to pull people away from multiclassing, and instead making it so that players stick with just one class through the whole character's career.

One thing that has emerged a bit with Ultimate Magic, and definitely with Ultimate Combat is that they are using archetypes to achieve some multi-classing effects by using archetypes to represent a kind of pre-blended set of classes. In particular Paizo seems to be eager to hand out trapfinding and disabling to a large number of classes. If you really want to be X class, but with just a bit of scoundrel in you, then there is likely an archetype to service you.

On to some random thoughts on random archetypes....

The Bard – Wow! It took them long enough. Despite the fact that two other books have come out with archetypes for the Bard, they hadn't gotten around to really going at the bard that really Rocks! Finally they do it by scrapping away the foofy stuff and plugging in some kick ass features.

In particular there is the spectacular, though crestfall inducing, Dervish Dancer. For those who remember 3.5 and the Dervish class, this is basically an emulation of that class, and it delivers a lot of great features that let you gracefully slash apart your opponents. The opening act is fantastic, but the end result is dissapointing. The problem is that the true Dervish Dance doesn't happen until 12th level, which is an absurdly long build up for the climax. In 3.5 you could do a similar (actually, more potent) maneuver at around 7th level. Having to wait to 12th level is silly and basically makes it not worth perusing for Pathfinder Society.

The Archeologist and the Daredevil are ok. If you want to play a Bard and don't want that huge suite of various ways to impress a crowd, and instead would just like ways to kill things and take their stuff, then both of these let you strip off some of the excess and leave you a more lean killing machine.

The Barbarian – The Barbarian got some well needed fixed in the APG, and this just pours more gas onto this raging fire, though most of it is for mid to high levels, so it doesn't do much to excite the early game.

However, I can't overlook mentioning the Body Bludgeon rage power. What a great and flavorful ability. Just pick up someone smaller than you and start beating others with the poor fool. You have to wait till 10th level to do this, which is unfortunate, as you'll likely not be bumping into many goblins or kobolds at that level, but you should still be able to squeeze some use of it before retiring at level 12 in Pathfinder Society.

Cavalier – Grrr! The Beastrider drives me crazy! They unlock a bunch of the interesting types of animal companions for characters to use. It's exactly what I'd been asking for, BUT... BUT... they explicitly nix being able to use flying mounts. I just don't get this. By 5th level spellcasters can start to fly and by upper mid levels there is a wide range of ways for any class to be able to fly. Heaven forbid that we actually have mounted knights flying to the sky! What a wild a strange idea? Why it doesn't fit with the genre at all! Someone at Paizo must design with a Dr. Evil finger pointed high in the air.

The Fighter – I've got a real soft spot for Fighters. They are the classic heroes of tales, but where in traditional stories the spellcasters would be the helpful figure that assists the hero in the journey, with the transition from D&D 2e to 3e Fighters are basically the dumb jock. He's the high school quarterback who rides the glory of his one-trick-pony long ball throw into obscurity as all of the geeks inherit the earth with their fancy educations and stock portfolios.

The archetypes here don't help to address any of that, but there are a few bright spots, unlike the grim trade-offs offered up in the Advanced Players Guide. The Unbreakable, shockingly, offers up Endurance and Die Hard for the first level bonus feat. Finally a good deal! At second level it even trades out Bravery for a far more useful bonus of general at-Will saves versus mind affects. After that the archetype starts to ebb, but that strong opening at least fits with the dumb jock arc well.

The Cad is kind of interesting. I think the main problem is that the class isn't obvious. You need to know the list of unstated feats that you ought to be taking with this class to get the full benefit, but if you do then you're kind like a Rogue who rather than stab them in the back, instead just messes with people with dirty tricks. You're not going to wipe out opponents with this archetype, but if you want to play a martial character that tosses debuffing conditions on opponents, rather than slaughtering everything that moves, then this might be fun to play. You'll still suck compared to optimized traitional builds, but you might enjoy your suckiness.

I do have not note my disappointment with the Tactician. I was putting a lot of hope in for this archetype. Back in 3.5 days we had a class called the Martial. Basically this guy was a drill sergeant, who would buff the other players by granting various bonuses, offering up additional move actions, and in general being the “martial controller” that the system needs. The APG and UM both had archetypes for Bards that ought to be tapped to fill this roll, but they weren't. So the UC was the last best hope for this type of class with the Tactician.

With the advent of the Cavalier and the tactician ability via teamwork feats Paizo was offering up a new way of doing the martial controller. The problem with the Cavalier is that it's got so much other junk tacked on that you can't just be Gunny screaming at his teammates, describing in lurid detail what he's going to do to their skulls if they don't kill those monsters.

The big problem with the Tactician, along with all the other variants spread out in other classes, is that the Tactician ability doesn't kick in until quickly. For the Fighter it's 5th level, Paladin is 3rd level, with the Cavalier's “Strategist” archetype it doesn't really start to hum till 4th level again. This isn't really a hard archetype to make. Just hand tactician to a 2nd level fighter, chip away at some weapon training and armor training to make the tactician stuff more dynamic, and then with the abundance of feats for the fighter, just let the character pick up plenty of teamwork feats to spam the party.

Unfortunately this didn't happen, so we're stuck with a way to do it, but not a way that's really interesting and captivating, plus it makes it hard for GMs to create hard-ass “sarge” NPCs for players to encounter.

I have to say that while I'm not convinced that the Tower Shield Specialist, as designed, is the way to go, I'm glad to finally see some rules making using the those gigantic shields at least worthwhile.

The Unarmed Fighter ain't bad. However in light of all the love given to the Monk in this book, whatever decisive design decisions with this archetype are a bit muted in context. If this had come out in the APG then it would have cause people to howl that the Monk is worthless now, but with UC this isn't a very sound argument.

The Magus – The class is still really new and is already getting a score more arcana to pick from, though a lot of them are for higher levels.

Among the archetypes what makes me lean forward a bit is the Kensai. If you want to do a one-trick-pony character then this delivers. It's all about focusing both martial and arcana abilities into one weapon, kind of like the Black Blade, but with more of a tone of skill and precision over a glowing and talking magic blade doing its thing. Pump that Intelligence up real high and you're going to do some cool things with your chosen weapon. Overall I have to say this is how an archetype ought to be designed.

The Monk – As mentioned above, the Monk is getting a lot of attention in the UC. The archetypes are one part of the love, but some of these archetypes are also driven by new types of feats that are aimed at unarmed combat, so you definitely need to sit down and plow through the whole book to see all the ways the Monk is getting buffed up with UC.

All of the archetypes, save for the Sohei (which suffers the same fate as non-companion mounted archetypes, that is a sucky mount), take a particular angle with unarmed combat and turn the dial to 11.

When an archetype allows you to take the existing rules into a new direction then I start to get excited. The Flowing Monk does this by making you into a Judo master. As a fantastic 5th wheel class, the Flowing Monk basically allows you to step into the thick of melee and then let the enemy allow you to trip or reposition them. This is an instance where you get to play out a bit of martial controller by forcing the positioning on the battlefield. It's a chess game that some people might want to try out. However, as I noted, you're a 5th wheel. You're not there to kill things directly, but rather to position others to do the burning, stabbing and bludgeoning. This is a great class for a “peaceful” character that can handle the cognitive dissonance of where you aren't directly taking other people's lives, instead your fellow party members are the uncouth murder-hobos.

The Sensei likewise is another class that does a great job of teasing out a satisfying off-beat role. It takes the Bard and the Monk and blends them together so you can do Mr. Miyagi, tossing out “Wax on! Wax off!” to buff the party, and then delivering precision Wisdom fueled strikes at enemies.

I don't quite buy the Maneuver Master, despite the applause I give for the design effort. You're getting a whole lot of Combat Maneuver love packed into the archetype, but it still makes it fairly challenging to have a lot of different maneuver options due to the feat economy. If they had included in something like “you only provoke an attack of opportunity for performing a maneuver if the maneuver fails the CMB check” then you'd have the full form Jackie Chan freedom that the archetype ought to be aiming for. This archetype does come close though, so it's worth considering.

The Master of Many Styles archetype starts to move the system down a different path. The Styles feats are basically sets of feats that need to be activated” with a swift action. It echoes the 3.5 Book of Nine Swords, where players had “stances” that they had to shift between. The styles feats are more restrictive, and wrapped up in the confining feat economy, but you can see Paizo pushing at the boundaries of the older 3.5 system with this new approach. The benefits of the MoMS archetype look pretty good, the only real drawback I see is that they ought to have trimmed a bit more fat from the Monk. Pretty much every Monk archetype could see some trimming of slow fall and a few other class features, but the conservative design angle kicked in at Paizo and we didn't see a whole sale transformation of the class.

The Ranger – The Ranger has always been my favorite class and fantasy “idea” for a character. The inherently cool, quiet mannered loner who knows how to deal with any situation, and can put up with whatever hardships get tossed in life's path. It also speaks to my age and the growing fractioning of the geek culture in that Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings was “the Man” in the early days of RPGdom. The AD&D Ranger was basically “lets make Aragorn” as a class. That legacy can be seen with why Rangers get spells, because Aragorn could heal wounds in a kind of semi-magical manner.

However, as the system evolved into 3.0 the more classic Aragorn idea was pushed further into background and we got this animal companion dude, with lots of spells, and an odd assortment of abilities. They make sense, but the whole class is stuck on one track of advancement, with just the type of weapon you're going to specialize in being the element that a player can customize.

One unfortunate legacy of the Ranger is the Favored Enemy feature. It was present somewhat in AD&D, with the idea that the Ranger is going to be a bad-ass that knows how to go around hunting orcs and trolls for a living. It works well in Tolkien, but translating it to D&D messing with things because you tend to not have standardized opponents that you're going to encounter on a regular basis. D&D is built on surprise and variety in the kinds of opponents you face, and the Favored Enemy feature doesn't play that well with this format, unless the GM is willing to work with the player and make sure that this major class ability gets used a reasonable amount of times.

Because of that, it's been good to see variant class abilities getting offered up with the Ranger archetypes in the APG. You can pick things that give a lesser, but more consistent effect, which allows the Ranger to be more versatile in battle, rather than hoping for a jackpot of slaughter.

With the UC we get several archetypes that give a more focuses spin on the other main aspect of the Ranger, being in some particular environment and gaining an advantage from it. The Battle Scout, Wild Stalker and Warden all deliver variations on this theme. The Warden in particular feels much more like what a classic Ranger ought to be. The character knows the land well and can use it to create a real advantage, unlike the normal Ranger class which requires you to hope that you get your random bonuses at various times.

The Falconer is an interesting 5th wheel kind of class. You and your falcon aren't going to blow anyone away with your distracting little bird, but the class builds up enough mechanical components for the class to work in a flavorful manner, and offer up something useful for the bird to do during combat.

The Wild Stalker is another class blending archetype, this time taking the Ranger and Barbarian and mixing them together. If you want to be a raging Ranger then this can be interesting, though the multiclass route is still very appealing.

The Rogue – I already mentioned how much more buff the Rogue is via the Ninja. They did pour a lot of attention on the Rogue even if you cut out the Ninja, however a lot of the talents offered up are either awful (such as Hold Breath) or are features that would be interesting in a homebrew game, but can't fit well into Pathfinder Society.

However, there is a wide range of archetypes here that push the game in varied directions. Some of these archetypes seem to be designed to get plugged in to other formats, such as the Bandit or Sanctified Rogue, both of which give some nice features that don't intrude on many other archetypes or main features of the Rogue.

They came close with the Chameleon to add in a great new subsystem with “stealth points” but just as soon as it was invented it retreated into a rather dull bonus.

The Charlatan is an interesting archetype that pushes towards some intrigue type of play, something that would be great in a homebrew, but in PFS is likely to fall flat.

The one archetype that everyone is paying a lot of attention to is actually rather strait forward with the Knife Fighter. You get to roll d8s for sneak attack with daggers, rather than d6s. This is a big deal because most of the damage that a Rogue deals out as you progress through levels is from the sneak attack dice.

The Wizard – Ah the Wizard... one of the best classes in the game as you advance in levels. Why not take the Wizard and mash him with the Alchemist and come up with a crazed bomber who has heaps of spells? Well sure... and so we have the Arcane Bomber. You toss out arcane bond and get the Bomb ability from the Alchemist. You also lose cantrips and have four opposed schools, but if you like bombs then this still ain't a bad deal. The Wizard class has so much potential breadth to it that while this archetype isn't technically very optimal, the degree of drop off in versatility still keeps you well above most martial characters.

My major beef with feat chains is that they play right into the linear martial vs. quadratic caster disparity.

The feat chain system is built so that a character is forced down a path of specialization. They get better and better at one particular thing, and thus keep being left behind in their capacity at versatility.

Meanwhile the spell system is built for every expanding options, and thus they continue to grow in their ability to have a variety of solutions to problems.

In terms of how this plays out in additional content. We get more and more feats to choose from, but because feat selection locks feats in place you become more and more limited in what you can do. However when new spells are released they are just added to the class lists, all of which allows for daily adjustment.

The nature of feats and spells is also different. Feats tend to be an exception to an existing rule, whereas spells tend to be an addition to the rules. Feats tend to not scale, whereas spells do. Feats have very specific prerequisites, particularly with attributes, which if you don't have basically shuts you out of them for the whole life of the character. Meanwhile spells are far more forgiving in terms of their prerequisites. You just need the class, and have high enough in the attribute that goes with that class to get access to a huge number of options, AND that attribute yields even more spells for you. You can't get more feats by just having a high attribute.

Feats have a profound lack of granularity, and due to that what you end up picking for your feats has a huge impact on your character's performance if your a martial character. Spells however, because they can be reset each day, and you can utilize them via magic items means that you can afford to utilize very specialized and situational spells that you'd otherwise be crazy to take as a permanent slot.

The devs have been very specific over the life of 3.x that they want to avoid making magic items that basically give a feat to the character, which once again deepens the problems of feats vs. spells.

Ultimately, in a world where you're facing off against a wide range of challenges, many of which are against other intelligent creatures, it's going to be adaptability which is the most important factor in success. Being able to find the right tool for the job is where you leverage your power the best.

The way feats are designed and placed within the overall system doesn't encourage adaptability, but rather specialization, and so ultimately they fail at delivering the kind of heroic "rising to the challenge" results that one would expect from the milieu.

I pretty much play by the book, except for my steps-based level advancement system.

When I saw this awhile ago it struck me as a perfect fit for my "manifest destiny of awesomeness" philosophy to RPGing and have used it quite a bit.

I tweaked it to fit within a PFS pace of play, where you level every three sessions. The three groups are:

A - Hit Points and Skill Points
B - BAB, Saves and Attribute Bonus
C - Special and Character Feat

I broke them up this way so that each category gave a mix (or a least the potential) for both active and passive class attributes, along with (once again the potential) for character attributes that involve some choice on the player's part as to what they will do with the character.

It works well, the players enjoy always getting something no matter what happens. That translates into a lot more roleplaying and nuanced moments of play because the pressure is off to kill stuff to satisfy the metagame, or scour the countryside for gold and treasure. Even for the hard core power gamers it makes playing more of its own reward, rather than having to rush through for a meta-game goal.

For "end of chapter" type moments in the campaign I'd just have everyone level up regardless of what step they were on.

What's fantastic as a GM is that I don't ever have to think about XP. The reward system is passive, which makes things that much more easy going. I'm not dispensing rewards, the system does it automatically.

Not so much a specific rule as a principle...

PC's are the exception in the world and that extends to the rules themselves. Unless the storyline really calls for it, there is no escalation of tactics. The NPCs don't keep pulling out weirder combos that are tailor made to fight the PCs. The PCs are the ones entering into the world to shake things up, and the NPCs of the world are generally conservative, unimaginative, trapped in their conceptual boxes, and the PCs are there to school the world.

For hit points at level it's average +1. Rolling for hit points is a sin.

For crits, rather than rolling gobs of dice it just delivers maximum damage, 1.5 damage or x2 damage depending on the crit value.

I also do the AoO only on a failed Combat Maneuver, I want to see more dynamism on the battlefield.

Feats are modified all over the place, many being downgraded to traits and placed in a new category called "Perks" which does not have the limitation of a character only taking one trait for that category. Examples of feats put into this Perk category include: Fleet, Mounted Combat, Endurance, the skill feats...

Some feats are modified in other ways, such as Quick Draw applies to any item and not just weapons. Which leads me to a houserule about "Item Readiness." Basically items are either "readied" (sheathed weapons, items in bandoleers, etc), "convenient" (such as a belt pouch, satchel) or they are stored (backpacks, sacks, etc.) Normally a readied item is a swift action to draw, a convenient item is a move action, and a stored item is a full-round action. It should also be noted that putting the item AWAY is also the same action.

The Quick draw feat bumps all of these actions down a step (swift to free, move to swift, full-round to standard).

This elaboration does a few things. It acknowledges that adventurers in a fantasy world that rely on all sorts of gear for survival, ought to be sensible enough to store the items so they can grab them how they see fit, something that the published Quick Draw feat wants to deny. In particular wands and potions ought to be made ready to draw at a moments notice, and is seen constantly happening in Harry Potter.

Second, by having sheaths, bandoleers, belt pouches, etc. fall into specific readiness categories which have a mechanical impact, it means players will pay attention to this stuff and will buy gear that will have a real impact on their performance. The guy who just sticks his sword into his belt so he doesn't have to carry it is going to have more of an issue in a surprise attack than the guy who's got his sword in a sheath. By mid levels I see pretty much all the classes looking more like special forces soldiers, with belts pouches, sheaths, bandoleers, etc coating them so that they have all their emergency gear at the ready.

Mok wrote:

It's a foundational trope that we have mounted flying knights. There is just way too much fantasy literature that dwells on this imagery and it ought to be something that is locked into the rules at this point.

Bad fantasy literature, sure.

If it's such a trope for your playgroup have your GM houserule it and move on.

Beyond the fact that all roads lead to PFS, it's silly after 30+ years of D&D games to have to still play mother-may-I with the GM to just get a basic wish fulfillment trope.

is curious how you managed a copy of this already when the book isn't supposed to come out before Gencon.

Yep, it's been in "My Downloads" since at least the early afternoon. I put myself on the subscription to get the pdf early so I can assume Alpha-Geekness not only on the net, but especially in my local group, who bow before my obsessive forum reading willpower.

What I'm curious about is how you could miss the 10 bazillion posts on Ultimate Combat and Cheapy spilling the beans for the last 24 hours with his subscription pdf?

This is anime art.

This is not.

Sigh... kids these days!

I suppose it has finally come to pass that anime/manga has so permeated our culture that the younger folk can't distinguish it from anything else today, because it has become a default aesthetic.

From top to bottom of the piece on the blog that is being informed by Japanese cartoon aesthetics. Hair, eyes, face, hands, legs, feet, the entire stance... that over the top bow. An eleven archer illustrated in 1980 would look radically different.

It's not that the old art is actually better, but rather anime aesthetic tropes are so pervasive and cliched that it's created a uniformity in styles that is a bit stifling. Back in the day you got a lot more variation from artist to artist.

For those interested in glimpsing backwards to a pre-anime pop-culture world you could flip through the covers of Dragon Magazine starting from issue 1. You'll see plenty of the older Boris Vallejo T&A aesthetic cliche there, but you'll also see all sorts of other approaches that can surprise you.

Not gonna ask you to spoil the module but I am gonna point out even you said you meta gamed it.

I guess my point is that meta-gaming, contrary to the popular perspective, isn't an black and white phenomena. The act of role-paying requires constant mediating of meta-knowledge. When the GM says to the table, "you open the door and see a snarling monster charging at you" the players don't erupt out of their chairs in a psychotic break, either running from the table, or swinging wildly about with their pretend weapons. Everyone gets that there is a meta-layer there.

Meta-gaming is an issue of degrees. The overt stuff like telling the table of 1st level characters the DR stats for a monster you've seen in a thousand other games is clearly in the black, but no one would argue, as mentioned above, that consenting to the plot hook at the tavern is bad meta-gaming. Roleplaying requires utilizing meta-gaming to some degree for the activity to function well.

As far as I'm concerned, if you keep your meta-gaming to yourself and don't do overt actions that doesn't foul up the table's immersion then there isn't any problem. If you use the meta-gaming to actually enhance the table's play experience then even better, particularly in PFS where not every GM has the highest "herding cats" skill and the slot has a time limit.

Heh... Brian, I'm sure it comes as a great shock that I see it from the opposite point of view. That there is far too little take 10 in the game, and that it ought to be opened up wide to include a lot of risky situations.

I'm always trying to find the sweet spot between simulationism, gamism and dramatism. The 3.0 system is a weird inchoherent mixture of simulationism and gamism, and only hints of dramatism here and there. Having a more robust set of take 10 options would allow more of that “player authorship” to be invested in the system, and that would allow for a greater chance for the system to offer more story emulation.

Almost every book, tv or movie will have characters that don't fumble. Narratives normally demand a good degree of efficiency in their pacing for practical reasons, but they also are often trying to push the heroism of the characters. Fumbling about doesn't achieve either of these things. Your traditional RPG often leans heavily towards simulation, at least in intent, and so we have a long history of bumbling adventurers who through sheer rolling and rolling hopefully emerge to be victorious. That's rather jarring for a person who's inspiration is to emulate to some degree the stories they love. In typical fantasy stories failure happens because it lends more drama to the story, not because the author is modeling some kind of physics and just lets it see how it goes.

I can only assume someone will step in a say, “but RPGs aren't stories!” and that an RPG is it's own special medium. I agree its a different medium, however it's the more traditional approach to RPGs that have a hard time seeing that story emulation is something that can't or shouldn't be done. For more than a decade the indie RPG scene has shown that story emulation is quite possible and that it can be integrated into rules a lot or a little.

One of the big tenets of this approach is to “Say yes or roll the dice.” Either say yes to the cool thing that the character wants to do (and thus up the drama) or have them roll the dice (because the risk of failure ups the drama). Taking 10 in Pathfinder is one way in which you can have a mechanical “yes” for a lot of circumstances that would achieve cool effects. If you force players to have to constantly roll dice for everything because, in a simulationist mindset, there is some remote chance of failure, all that ends up doing is washing away a players capacity to drive some cool narrative moments, all because they fumbled even when very skilled at something.

An example of this might be this situation:

A party of adventurers stands before an arrogant and nefarious king in his throne chamber. Surrounding the adventurerers is a ring of royal guards. The evil king taunts the adventurers, “You think you could touch my person? You think you could defeat ME?”

The party knows they are in a tight spot, they are all still pretty green (just 1st level) and can't take on a dozen guards.

The rogue thinks that if he can somersault past the guards and get to the king then they might have some real bargaining power.

The guards have a CMD of 12 (+1 BAB, +1 Str) and passing through the guards's square means the DC will be 17.

The rogue has a Acrobatics bonus of +10 (+3 Dex, +1 rank, +3 class skill, +3 Skill Focus). This isn't a bad chance, but the rogue can still fail, and failing means either a TPK or being thrown into prison, neither of which is as cool as pull off this stunt.

So if the Rogue rolls a 1 through 6 on the d20 the cool “movie moment” fades away. This is kind of jarring because someone with a +10 in their skill at level 1 is pretty damn awesome. In a story they'd auto succeed because that's what narrative structure demands. It would be silly to see a highly talented individual in their field stumble about when the conditions said they'd more than likely succeed. It's only when that expert meets a boss or mini-boss, or some other overwhelming circumstance that they actually fail at what they are good at.

Now, if we tweaked things a bit, and made the Skill Focus feat not give a +3 to the skill, but instead allow for a Take 10 in the skill at any time then it completely changes the tone of the scene. The other characters might be gulping, but the rogue grins when the king taunts them. The fool's arrogance to allow the party to get this close just so he can monologue is his downfall. The king doesn't know who he's dealing with. The rogue nods to the rest of the party as the king berates them. The players ready actions, waiting for the rogue to act.

The Rogue springs and with his take 10 gets a cool 20 result, allow for a bullet time moment as the rogue leaps in the air, planting his foot on the broad side of one of the guards swords and sails over him and stands before the sitting (prone... maybe, if the GM is cool then it counts as prone) in his throne with a sword at his breast.

A key part of what I like in a game is to have the mechanical leverage so that I'm confident that I can do what I want to do. One of the real problems with the d20 system is that the roll of a d20 is flat. The chance to get a 1 or 20 on any given roll is equal, and so that makes for very swingy results. You can be absolutely phenomenal at some particular skill, on a level that surpasses what humans can normally be expected to achieve, but the way the dice mechanic works is make it far too likely that this superbly talented and skill individual might still fail, even when the task is still something that is within normal human possibility to achieve. You can really do a bell curve resolution system with d20 because it kind of undermines the core concept of the whole system.

Thus, having opportunities for players to be able to have more power of choosing and focusing on being able to take 10 in various skills gives a bit of leeway in the system to fix the flat distribution of the system, gives players more narrative control so that they can shape events in cool dramatic ways, rather than just hoping things go their way. It also gets rid of a lot of fumbling “sowwy” moments that are out of character for the degree of talent and skill that they player possesses.

Should this be happening all the time? No, of course not. Like I said, for me it's about finding that middle ground between simulationism, gamism and dramatism. You bake mechanical bits of those approaches into the system and give more freedom for the different play styles to emerge at various points in play.

The Heirloom Weapon Trait is perhaps the most powerful trait in the system:

Benefit: This heirloom weapon is of masterwork quality (but you pay only the standard cost at character creation). You gain a +1 trait bonus on attack rolls with this specific weapon and are considered proficient with that specific weapon (but not other weapons of that type) even if you do not have the required proficiencies.
Source Adventurer's Armory 30

It basically gives you:

Masterwork weapon
+1 trait bonus
Proficiency (exotic, martial, or simple) with a weapon

So I'm just wondering how to make the most of the feat.

One thing is to pick up a large bastard sword. You end up getting a weapon that does 2d8 damage, but is -2 to hit due to not being the correct size. With the Heirloom Weapon trait you could say that your great-grandfather fought an Ogre and won. After dragging the sword back home he refashioned the handle and reforged the blade to make it balanced for someone of his stature. Thus the -2 penalty goes away due to the +1 masterwork bonus and the +1 trait bonus. It becomes a "balanced" medium sized weapon in essence.

Here is a bit of fluff to go along with that rationale:

MY GRAND PAPPY KILLED HIM AN OGRE!

I'm going to jump right to the big guns here. This is an heirloom weapon, and you really want to make a good story out of the weapon. It is after all something being handed down to you as a legacy of your family's exploits.

So Pappy was a big strapping fellow in his day. Unlike you, who have decided to go off and see the world, he wanted to just be left alone in his valley and be at peace. Unfortunately, life doesn't always come easy and an Ogre and his ruffians wandered into Pappy's valley and started ransacking the good folk of the vale. Pappy wouldn't have nothin' for that! He formed up his own band of smiths, farmers and woodsmen and went out to put a stop to this Ogre and his ogrish ways.

The people of the vale knew their land well and laid an ambush for the Ogre and his ruffians. The woodsmen picked off the ruffians while the farmers hemmed the Ogre in with their forest of pitch forks, leading him to Pappy and his fellow smiths. They took their hammers and freshly forged spears and charged in.

That was grim work there. The ruffians were crude folk and really didn't have a chance against organized hunters. The Ogre however was a monster! A brute with a huge sword that cut men in twain. The smiths with their hammers, the farmers with their pitchforks, and the woodsmen with their bows all met together and brought the beast down, but before the hour was up there was more folk's blood spilled on the ground than the Ogre's.

My Pappy to that Ogre's sword back to his tool shed. It was too ungainly for a man to use, but at least it was a good lump of steel to make into a whole lot of tools.

You'd think that killin' an Ogre and his band would give you peace for a generation or two. Not here, evidently the critters started scrambling out of their dark dens. They must have thought that the Ogre had some real loot on him, which from what I'm told, he did, which got divided up amongst all the families that lost someone that day.

So a winter of troubles followed the vale that year. Gobins, Orcs and the like... just awful folk, kept grubbin' in the area and molesting good people. The woodsmen stood guard in the vale now, using their hunting skills to clean up the woods good, but it still wasn't right.

The vale eventually heard of a big mob of critters coming our way. The folk of the vale knew they could match the numbers, but no one was eager for a real war. It was late winter, everyone was tired, and food was getting low. How to scare these critters off rather than fight 'em all?

Pappy and his friends stoked the furnace and began pounding away at that Ogre sword. It was too big for a normal man to wield easily, but pappy was no dolt, he could fix it. The sword was heated and beaten on, and the handle was bent just so a man could hold it upright and properly put his stroke in.

The folk of the vale went out to meet the mob at the bridge over the creek. A big, but not Ogre big, Orc came forward grunting some nonsense about eating people's flesh. Pappy stepped forward and with a yell unlike any other the people had heard, told them critters what to go do with themselves, otherwise they'd be just as dead as the Ogre who used to own this sword.

Pappy then ran over to that big Orc, raised that sword high in the air and let it come down on its head before the thing knew what was goin' on. People say that the orc split clean in half, like when the axe finds just the right spot on a spit of wood.

That was it for the mob, it scattered every which way except for the vale, and my Pappy found his peace at last.

But what other ideas do people have in terms of tinkering with the Heirloom Weapon Trait?