Nobody Important's page

I can say that my weak willed frightened caster who would be otherwise pointless, is beloved by my party because of these two spells used together with a quicken rod.

BARBARIAN STAY OUT OF PALADIN ALIGNMENT DEBATES. AM GOOD PART OF CHAOTIC NEUTRAL. BARBARIAN ABLE TO SMASH WHATEVER NEED SMASHING WITHOUT HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT SILLY THING LIKE ETHICS OR LEGALITY.

People talk about the GM "knowing the rules" and "being familiar with counters" and I'm sorry, but I'm going to call foul.

It's not just individual spells that are at issue, but their synergy (it's why it's called "scry and fry" afterall).

I am not convinced that the GMs on this thread have contemplated every synergy between the various spells in the Ultimate Magic, plus Core, plus whatever 3PP or campaign-specific stuff that's being used. That's too many spells, too many class abilities, etc to keep track of how they all might interact. And problem is, the 30 INT, five-thousand year-old Red Dragon the party is up against: he does know all those synergies and counters, at least in-game. Problem is, I'm his GM, I only have so much time to prep an encounter, not to mention his lair/backstory and other non-combat elements of the session. While at the same time, I have a handful of PCs pooling all their prep-time browsing through d20pfsrd looking for broken combos. I can't compete with that. And telling me that I should is just rediculous.

And then after they past him in one beautifically executed round, they ask "why didn't Mr Ancient Supergenious Dragon think of that, it could have been totally undone by X, Y and Z spells? They've been around since the founding of Thassalon." and then I throw the book at them, which was printed last month (considerably more recently than Thassalon's founding) and we're back to playing E6.

We should make a 2000 NPCs thread around here, and then a database (maybe on d20pfsrd ?) collecting the contributions and organizing them per class, CR, creature type/subtype/kind, environment, combat role, social role/organization, and (importantly) expected survivability for the party and the NPC.
Each could be made on the model of the NPC gallery of the gamemastery guide, with a short description description of its background, tactics and observed effect in combat.
It could include organizations, displayed as clouds of codified relations between major NPCs and stereotyped mooks.

That could save a lot of time, as models for more campaign-specific NPCs or as directly usable ones. The published NPC gallery and NPC guide lack high-level characters.

This may be my favorite quote of all time:

"yes I cheat, but only when it's fair"