Terraneaux's page

So I've been running this game, and I'm about halfway through adventure 3. There are 6 PCs, and while everyone has a firm grasp on the rules, nobody's particularly insanely optimized. However, fights are a cakewalk for the party to the point where it's causing us to collectively agree that something has to be done.

Usually for games with 5 or 6 players I just slap the advanced template on everything if it's written for 4, but it's not so much about the numbers - mythic powers that let the PCs go super hard in terms of action economy from the getgo just mean that enemies don't have time to respond. Has anyone had success with cranking the difficulty while leaving the current schema of mythic rules intact?

It just seems a little busted - a wizard can be a solo unit, do some damage due to his spellcaster ability, but within the confines of mass combat he can't be harmed, really, just reduced to a set percentage of HP.

I'm talking about the Mass Combat rules, as presented in Ultimate Campaign .

If you have a solo unit of just one character, what happens when it is routed/destroyed? Does the sole member just retreat with low health?

Also you'll just be worse at stuff. Organization and planning is what separates the effective from the failures.

Why would you give people freedom to do something evil? That just sounds counterproductive.

Awful means 'inspires awe.'

Get ready for that Lawful beatdown come beta launch. Shock and awe's the plan.

By 'working with' I should mention that I mean 'bring order to this lawless tract of land, with or without the approval of the vagrants and miscreants that currently inhabit it.'

28 on the outside, 13 on the inside.

I look forward to working with as many of you as possible. Fun times ahead!

Tels, it's implied in a non-core book. James Jabobs has clarified it on the forums (that's the reason Pharasma hates undeath) - which makes it Golarion canon -, but the printed implication comes from either Undead Revisited or Classic Horrors Revisited in a sidebar.

Pharasma isn't good-aligned. Just because something annoys her doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Excessive charity probably gets on her nerves.

I find it insulting in the same way I'd find an item that changes you from one ethnicity into another ethnicity being labeled as a cursed item would be insulting.

And I don't want to continue to make it seem that Paizo prefers to present the item as a cursed item, so it's not gonna be showing up in our products if I can help it.

Wait, like it's making the judgment that being female is a curse compared to being male? That's certainly one way to interpret it, but I don't think that's what makes that particular item 'cursed.'

Good cares for both good means AND good ends.

What happens when you're forced to choose between the two?

I don't know if the Operative was evil, just misguided. He thought that he wasn't a good enough person to live in the world he was creating for his superiors, when exactly the opposite was true - he was a better person than his bosses deserved to have working for them.

IIRC, he used to be LG. He dropped to LN because of the Means he kept using.

Not sure about this particular case, but why should someone who is willing to dare *more* in the cause of good be less good?

But 99% of the reason why I had her use an elixir was the fact that I think that the fact that the girdle of femininity/masculinity with its traditions of being a "Cursed Item" is pretty insulting, and I'm not a fan of them and have zero interest in letting a cursed gender changing item show up in an adventure.

It *is* a curse to most people. If Anevia put one on post-transformation, she would not be comfortable at all. Most people aren't happy with having their physical body's sex switched. I'm really confused as to why you find it 'insulting.'

The neat thing about Intimidating Prowess is that it lets you add Strength *and* Charisma for intimidate. It's like a better Skill Focus if you're set up right.

Please dun take this as a quarry or attack on the gendertransformation potion. It was much more i did think she sold an artifact for something cosmetic for her partner. (cosmetic cuz gender has no meaning in PF-Universe)

It's not really cosmetic. It's a pretty important quality-of-life thing. One could take a very grim view on things and say that Anevia should have suffered through it for the greater good, but it's not a trivial sacrifice.

I think the argument could be made that, based on the particular tenets of whichever deity a Paladin happens to follow, a paladin selling her sword (to get their lover/spouse a much-needed magical body alteration) may have been seen as a mistake. Not a serious-bizness mistake, but one in the vein of 'oh you should have sacrificed more. love and family relationships are not for you, go smite more evil.'

As cited above, though, Iomedite Paladins don't work like this, so Irabeth is off the hook.

A lot of NPC's are flagged as being intimidate-immune because winning an encounter with social skills, especially one like Intimidate that is not based on ingratiating or making friends with the NPC's, is seen as 'too easy.' Nobody took hit point damage or anything. Plus, if a PC can intimidate an NPC, it makes a value judgment about that PC's protagonism and 'coolness' that most GM's are somewhat leery - the PC's are oftentimes the perennial underdogs only able to succeed when they jump through certain hoops set by the GM.

What's the point of having a class feature like Detect Evil if you want to make it not work to make 'investigative adventures more interesting.'? Either you're cool with Paladins being able to tell if someone is evil or not, this bait-and-switch is a problem.

Furthermore, if ANY paladin is going to be accepting of another despite race... it's Irabeth, who's had to go through the same prejudices in her time in Lastwall due to her orc blood.

Really? Just because someone is from discriminated minority A doesn't mean that they don't have as much, or possibly more, dislike of discriminated minority B.

Fauchard?

I still don't understand why it's listed as a "cursed" item. Crossdressing would be a heck of a lot easier if you didn't have to worry about padding.

Because it does it whether you want it to or not, and it's irreversible barring more magical intervention.

If he's a LG ninja, he just wants to see the Worldwound closed any way he can. His skillset may lend itself to the sneaky, stabby type, but an Invisible Blade ninja works pretty well against just about anything (except those with True Seeing.)

Actually, I think summoning Shadows is not an evil spell, because Shadows themselves don't have the Evil subtype.

If a character is a follower of a deity, and the deity's domains grant spells that would be uncastable by alignment, how would you resolve this? The particular example is Tsukiyo, who grants the darkness domain, which has as its 5th level spell a Summon Monster V which can only be used to summon 1d3 shadows. Summoning shadows is casting an evil spell, and thus is something that Tsukiyo shouldn't be able to grant. Do we have the cleric summon LG shadows? Do we not allow the cleric to prepare/cast the spell?

Guy in my game is playing a cleric of Tsukiyo with that trait. Should be interesting to have a LG cleric with the Darkness and Madness domains running around...

Too bad that old '130% Real Shadow effects' build doesn't exist anymore from 3.5, puts it right in the dangly parts of people who can see through illusions.

Conan + Aliens. Awesome!

Poorly thought out house rules to keep players 'balanced'? Say it ain't so!

On the other hand, one could have an adventure path where the PC's themselves play as dragons. That could be pretty intense. Like the old Council of Wyrms.

I've always thought a dragon as the overall villain of an AP would be pretty awesome, since dragons are both smart and physically powerful. So a dragon can be a plotter/schemer as well as an overwhelming physical threat, like M. Bison (Dictator) from SF. Throughout the campaign you'd be dealing with the dragon's minions and machinations, and then actually having to go up against Big Red (or whatever) once you'd foiled his plans to destabilize the geopolitical region. In this case, I imagine a dragon villain as a sort of James Bond-esque villain. You could have Mengkare decide that the only way for his perfect society to work is if all of the rest of human civilization is destroyed, since it keeps screwing up the sterility of his perfect experiment. Since he doesn't want to attract undue attention, of course he works through intermediaries to throw all of Avistan into a self-destructive cycle of rebellion and war. And it's up to the PCs to find the man behind the curtain and eventually defeat him.

Yeah, speaking of Impositions - Is there ever any explanation for why you can suddenly pull off high level magical effects? The special abilities seemed really arbitrary and weird. Having a reputation might get a ship to surrender without a fight but it's not going to turn your ship into a submarine.

I always assumed it was Besmara intervening personally. She's shown as kind of a tryhard diety as far as answering her follower's prayers and supplications.

Though in my group I always give credit to Pazuzu. He cares, after all.

That's correct. And if you decide to heal undead, you heal yourself.

It bothers me you need to correct me. I meant from the players meta perspective they shouldn't have to die 50% of the time and that should influence their decisions, and from a meta-game perspective if fights took half of your group every time your game wouldn't last very long. And Fair for whom? The NPCs aren't people and don't have nearly as high a value as the PCs. If its not fair to your players, its just not fair at all.

My point is that in 99% of all fights in DnD, the PC's enjoy a substantial advantage. If the fight was fair, they'd lose half the time.

This is DnD though. The assumption is that you won't lose 50% of your party in every fight.

As someone else said... if a fight is actually "fair," then yes they would.

Tell them they're supposed to be playing heroes, not children. If they persist have NPCs start treating them like cowards.

Who knows, I had a really terrible GM once who would throw overwhelming challenges at the PC's, browbeat them for not running away because they weren't 'thinking tactically,' and then have all the NPCs treat them like s%*& for running away. Also he'd get really nasty towards players who tried to optimize.

My point is, OP, the players you're talking about have a perception that the encounters they're running into are likely to kill them. Are you new to this group? Maybe it's got a culture that you're not aware of. Talk to them, and try to change their perceptions.

Probably OP's PC's were just used to playing in an environment where they didn't always have to fight fair.

Shouldn't the paladin not be allowed to have a CE follower/henchman?

Is there any way to gain one without having levels in Rogue or Ninja?

If anybody inherited the mantle of Death from Pharasma, I'd love to see somebody like Death of the Endless (as in, her character and concept) take on the role.

Superior

Yeah, I meant what would happen if someone who seemed to care more about mortals inherited the role. Cayden Cailen with the death portfolio... suddenly wakes and funerals become much more raucous, energetic affairs. Like a New Orleans funeral.

To a certain extent, though, the Pathfinder setting has the ideas that undead=evil and trying to extend your time alive indefinitely is an inherently bad thing encoded into it. That's a big part of what makes Pharasma and the context of death in Golarion what it is, to have a different take on death it's likely those things would have to change.

Urgathoa has the right idea, except that she's a terrible person. A good-aligned Urgathoa analog would be pretty awesome.

Growing up, my two dogs would open doors. They'd rear up on their hind legs, put their front paws on either side of the door handle, and sort of shuffle them until the door came open.

I'd go with the movie version of zombies, where, while mindless, they can sometimes respond to certain stimuli with "remembered" behavior from their life.

I.E. about the intelligence of a dog or other mammal.

Long story short, mindless undead and constructs should have intelligence scores of at least 1, for the most part.

Taking in what the rules say about weapons not sized properly for their wielders, if an ogre (with greatsword proficiency) were to wield a medium-sized greatsword, he or she would use it in one hand with an additional -2 to hit, right?

Rahadoum is generally shown as a tyrannical nation, as well as one with a woeful lack of knowledge about how divine magic actually works to the point where they'll persecute the hell out of rangers who cast divine spells, who don't even worship a deity. But that doesn't really say much about atheism, except to show that there are some people who don't worship gods in the setting who are incorrectly labelled as atheists who tend to be unpleasant.

The overall structure of the cosmology, in which atheists (or possibly those who are conflated with atheists) are punished in the boneyard, and the equation of a life lived without worshiping gods as one that is wasted and unnatural, is the problem - it comes off as Greenwood-style editorializing, or else seems meant to characterize Pharasma as a horrible person (which I find to be unlikely, considering the rest of the setting material endorses her version of 'natural order' as right and good).

As a house rule, we treat corpses as objects. One of the reasons why is it invalidates the targeting of many spells/effects (living creature/humanoid/etc) and so those effects cease to function.

That's what my group's done since 3.5, and it seems to solve a lot of problems.

Since the pit is actually extra-dimensional (and gravity in the pit goes 'down' to the bottom of the pit, away from the portal), the acid in an acid pit spell wouldn't be leaking out.

Blinded: depend of what blinded you. If it is physical damage to the eyes resurrection true resurrection and reincarnate should cure it. If it was a spell you need to remove it normally.

Deafened: as blinded.

Given that these were caused by a magical disease or curse, is there any reason to suspect that magical blindness or deafness would persist? You didn't cite any rules text or ruling.

Fatigued/exhausted: tricky. I would say that the healing effects of the different spells that bring you back to life will work for physical exhaustion. If it was some form of mental exhaustion (like going without sleep even without doing intense physical work) I would require actual rest.

This seems like conjecture.

What about magical effects in general? Any given spell or effect with a duration?

What's going on in 'Yeebin's' head is kind of important, which is not something you elaborate on.

In any case, Shelynites are only supposed to use violence as a last resort, which is clearly not Yeebin's MO.

If a character is killed, then brought back to life, do they still have all of the conditions they had on them when they were alive the first time? I know permanent negative levels specifically persist through resurrection, but what about everything else?