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I want to make the Lorax into a fun, playable character for myself. I'm picturing an orange haired, bare-chested, massively-moustached gnome harboring an excess of body hair with a spunky, in-your-face attitude and a voice like Danny DeVito's. Yes, I recently saw the Lorax. No, I wouldn't recommend it, but different strokes for different folks (a cute kids movie, at least). Regardless, the thought of a fiery, over-moustached gnome greeting people with "...and I speak for the trees" tickled some strange fancy of mine.

I want to go with a druid/monk build, figuring the Lorax would be a fairly minimalist person when it came to equipment. I also picture him trying to take on things much larger than him and smack them in the face. I can't envision him with an animal companion, but having druidic powers would compliment his nature.

The thing is, I'm not sure how to go about building him. I realize that a gnome monk/druid likely isn't going to be setting any new records in terms of optimization, but I'm just looking to have a little fun with the guy; if he can be made to effectively knock some teeth out in combat, then by all means! My DM typically uses 20 point buy and starts us at level 1. Do you guys have any suggestions regarding ability scores, feats, and all that jazz? Is this character even viable? Thanks for any help. :)

PS: Most paizo products such as the Core, UC, UM, and APG are fair game. Third party supplements are pretty much out, though on occasion we let one or two slide by.

Hey everyone, I just have a quick question that I've been wondering about. Next session, my players will be fighting in a barley field (the barley being fairly large, about 3 feet in height), and I was looking at the cover and concealment rules to see if it should or would provide either. I may not be looking thoroughly enough, but I'm not sure what to consider it, if anything. What would you rule it as?

Thanks for your help!

Alright, so I'm DMing a game that revolves around the PCs eventually breaking into the BBEG's mighty fortress and killing him. That might sound boring, but I'm intentionally watering down the plot to its extremely barest bones, so have faith that it isn't that bland at heart.

Anyways, that's intended to be some big, high level dungeon crawl thing; as a DM I need to successfully bring them to that level with scheduled reinforcement through smaller goalposts and rewards, ultimately leading up to the final climactic encounter! Or, so I hope. See, in the past I've done what many of you may already be familiar with: the fetch-quest. For those who don't know, the fetch-quest is exactly as it sounds: "You must collect X items before you can enter the castle," or something akin to that. Now, I love that sort of thing... perhaps a little too much. I've most recently (in another campaign) had them gather 5 artifacts of power before the evil enemy cult could, providing an excellent 'race-aganst-the-clock!' feel, and it was great. BUT, I'd like to sport a little more originality in my latest endeavor, and I seem to be stuck in the mindset of fetch-quests. I was wondering if any of you would be so kind as to help me branch out and learn/try some different methods.

Now, I'm not actually trying to discard the idea of going around gathering artifact easter eggs or something; in fact, I've even been trying to think of a way to involve a sort of 'fetch-quest' anyways, just disguising it well enough so as not to make it immediately apparent that it really is one. I mean, my plot at its bare bones is clearly a worn and unoriginal one, but when I sprinkle the plot back in it's something my players and I really enjoy. I think the same could be said of a fetch-quest... if I could figure out to properly orchestrate one, or maybe even just think of something entirely different altogether! So anyways, I ask if anyone has any advice or suggestions for this sort of thing.

Thanks for any help! I really appreciate it.

I'm just curious since I rarely see any talk of it. Do you make your players write down all the pounds of gear they are carrying, making sure it doesn't exceed their light, medium, or heavy load? For that matter, do you do the "50 gold = 1lb" rule?

For us, we do use the somewhat meticulous recording of equipment weight, but interestingly enough, we don't apply it to gold... we just set a hard limit on the amount you can feasibly carry.

What does everyone else do?

Or can you? After the recent release of the APG, one of my players has shown clear interest in playing a paladin. As many could guess, the issue is that my campaign world doesn't (and never has before) taken alignment into consideration. It hasn't been an issue in the many years we've been playing, and we've simply avoided spells like "Protection from ______." I personally never liked the concept of it, so I ditched it early on. Unfortunately, the Paladin seems to be totally interwoven into the concept of alignment, and I know there are other DMs out there who play alignmentless games, so I was looking for some advice.

I once before had a player who wanted to play a paladin, but since there was no alignment, I simply let him smite anything except truly neutral creatures, like animals. I soon realized that was a foolish mistake, and the class dominated most everything. Luckily for me, that campaign ended quickly, and we moved on. Now I'm back looking to see if anyone has any suggestions/experience with this kind of situation, and if they could offer any helpful advice. Also, I don't intend to start a debate about alignment, I'm just looking for alternatives is all.

Thanks!

I have a setting that I've been developing for several years now thats based off a sort of Jungian dreamscape. Its one of my prime enjoyments because I have to purposely think outside of the regular scheme of how things might work, which is surprisingly tough. One of my latest thoughts regarded the "gods" of the setting, which are essentially the physical manifestation of cultural memes. As in, they're created from humanoid kind's collective thoughts. It would take an immense amount of collective thought to give a meme a physical appearance (to prevent there from being millions of memes for every small group of like-minded thinkers), but then I wondered: why should this stop at memes?

So from there I've been contemplating the repercussions of allowing whatever is collectively believed to be, well, made true over time (like the gods). For instance, because the vast majority of sailers believe in the tales of the kraken, the kraken thus becomes a real thing.

I've been giving this some thought and I don't think I can work it all out on my own without creating some guidelines... I understand that things can get crazy real fast with this idea, but it nonetheless interests me.

So I ask, would anyone be willing to help me with this? Give some scenarios where this might be interesting, or where it might get crazy? This isn't set in stone, but I see it as a sort of creative thought exercise for myself. What do you guys and gals think?

EDIT: Also, I wasn't sure where to post this, but I apologize if its in the wrong forum.

Recently, while wrapping up a campaign that I've been at for about 4 years, I realized that as the levels got higher, so too did death become more of a threat. If one of my players beloved PCs died, they would throw a monkey wrench into the plot, so to speak. One character carried a secret with him that was pivotal he kept hidden until the right moment, and should he die early, I'd really have to scramble to get things back in order.

Granted, at higher levels death becomes more of a speed bump than a real problem with spells like resurrection and their ilk, but thats not to say that this could happen at earlier levels, when revival isn't so easy to obtain.

Perhaps this is my flaw, but I was always fond of rewarding characters with intricate backstories by weaving them into the plot as important characters. That's not to say that every time I do it's pivotal that they live throughout the campaign, but there have a been a handful of instances like this in my many years of DMing that would really break my players envelopment in the story to just have another fellow come along and take the dead PCs place.

I know I'm not perfect, but I really like to try and emphasize destiny and other heroic concepts. I'm also not the type of DM who's afraid to let them die; I don't spoon feed the adventure to them or railroad them. They're generally very fond of my adventures, and grow very attached to their characters, especially when they realize that the very world hinges on their heroics (a little bit of an exaggeration, but I think you get my point).

Anyways, I was wondering how other DMs handle this, or even what players think of this. I usually do a single BIG, multi-year long campaign with occasional small but separate campaigns along the way. My big campaigns are known for their epic and grand plots with a high emphasis on adventure and action. Do other people have this sort of problem? If so, how do you handle it? Do you think I'm doing something wrong, or perhaps being too extreme?

Again, this isn't necessarily a problem of mine, but I'm curious to see if anyone else did this like me.

Hey guys, I'm trying to figure out what a "meme" is. I've tried wikipedia and dictionaries, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around the word itself. Meme's are going to be an important thing in my upcoming campaign, but I'm not sure they're what I thought they were.

I tend to learn best through examples, so I was wondering if someone could help to point out a specific meme and help me understand why its a meme.

What I know so far is they're imitable things that pass from generation to generation. Am I right in assuming that "Leeroy Jenkins" or the expression "An eye for an eye" is an appropriate meme? Also, what constitutes something not being a meme? Would the act of gathering food be a meme, since its passed from generation to generation and is imitable? I don't think the latter is true, but I don't really have an understanding of why its not (forgive me, I'm a youngster).

I started reading as much as a could on it, but I came upon something called "The Selfish Gene" and evolutionary concepts and got in over my head. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I've been trying to figure this out for weeks now.

Thanks!

When a creature falls in combat, do you simply remove the miniature (or whatever marker you use) from the board and treat the space as empty? I've always marked it and treated the space as difficult terrain. With larger corpses, it might be able to provide cover. More recently, it's become a little tedious in fights with a large amount of creatures or fights in restricted spaces. Some creatures I have dissipate when they fall, all for flavor (like a cloud giant decomposing into a cloud), but most of the time stuff just falls and stays.

What do you guys do?

QUESTION
Does damage reduction stop bleed? Under DR, it says:

“whenever damage reduction completely negates the damage from an attack, it also negates most special effects that accompany the attack, such as injury poison, a monk’s stunning, and injury-based disease.”

So, when our Alchemist (with two daggers of wounding) was dealing 2-3 overall points of damage with his daggers after DR from a Bearded Devil, would it still cause the full bleed damage, since it doesn’t seem to negate it? At first I said no, then after reading it, I let it happen, but it felt strange to me. Could I get a clarification?

QUESTION
How does splash damage work with creatures larger than medium size? Are they treated as a single, big square in which the splash emanates from? Or does the alchemist "choose" some sort of square to hit that they occupy and have the splash emanate from there? Something else? Clarification would be helpful!

QUESTION
This next one might seem silly... Do Fireballs catch people on fire?

Thanks guys!

My players and I recently did a playtest involving an Alchemist, Witch, Cavalier and Inquisitor, all level 8. Here’s the lineup:

Kwiz the Inquisitor 8, who had the Travel domain.

Witch the Witch 8 (creative bunch, eh?), with the cackle, slumber (wasn’t used), fortune, misfortune and evil eye Hexes, and a bat familiar.

Al the Alchemist 8, with the sticky poison and shock bomb discoveries (didn’t get to take advantage of sticky poison simply because he forgot… whoops?).

Calvin the Cavalier 8, Cockatrice Order, didn’t get to challenge or use a mount.

Now, allow me to explain something: We only did one battle, against a group of 4 Bearded Devils (CR 5). The intent was to have that fight lead up to the vampire (CR 9) at the end, but due to some players arriving late, we could only get through the Bearded Devils. As such, we only really got to see them in action once. Thus, I’ll be presenting my (and my players’) opinions about them so far, but it doesn’t mean they’re set in stone; they’re just what we’ve observed in this specific instance, and I didn’t see much playtesting being posted so I figured this couldn’t hurt. Tomorrow, we’ll be definitely continuing with other combats.

Anyways, the setup was that the bearded devils (disguised under magic to appear as bearded humans), were keeping watch for their leader, a vampire who has taken the role as a political figure intending to destroy the city… or something. Whatever. Point is, it’s inside amidst a handful of corridors where the cavalier couldn’t take advantage of his big wolf mount (I gave them the option of doing this or a battle that took place in an open field, and they chose this). The corridors they fought in had a couple areas that opened up into 15 by 15 squares, but were otherwise separated by 5-foot gaps and a few short stairways.

It started out with them surprise rounding the devils, mostly consisting of them moving into positions to get a combative edge (flanking, making it so they couldn’t touch Witch or Al, etc.). The goal of the devils was to simply cut them up and use their “infernal wounds” ability to soften them for their vampire leader, who was alerted to their presence just through the noise.

Overall, Kwiz the Inquisitor was the MVP. Utilizing Solo Tactics and the Outflank and Precise Strike tactical feats as well as his Bane ability to put the hook where it hurts most alongside Calvin, our Cavalier. Calvin was runner up for MVP position, surprisingly, and performed quite well without his mount or charging. Calvin, wielding a greatsword with flaming burst (a large portion of his money was spent on barding and enchantments for his mount), managed to put the heat on the Devils, getting hit only on a few occasions and having the HP to back it up. Kwiz did more damage, but Calvin was nothing to shrug at either.

Kwiz also had a great use of his travel domain power, where he teleported behind a retreating devil and used his shield to bash it down some stairs for great cinematic effect.
Witch the Witch and Al the Alchemist were… interesting. First, Witch. Witch was a little boring, to be honest, but wasn’t bad. Fortune saved both Calvin and Kwiz several occasions, and Cackle kept it going for many rounds (thumbs up on that ability, very cool). Evil Eye also saved Al from getting hit a lot, so that was good too. So, yes, Witch was benefitting the party, but his turns were relatively uneventful, consisting largely of spending a move action to Cackle and occasionally casting a spell (perhaps the environment limited that, this is just what we observed so far). Otherwise, it seems that more playtesting will have to be enacted to truly judge what the witch is capable of.

Al was weird. Al seems to be a class that just can’t decide on what its trying to do. During the character generation process, Al had a tough time deciding what exactly he wanted to do: he wanted to try focusing on bombs, but they could only be taken so far with his limited discoveries. He wanted to try mutagens, but he would have to wait until level 12 to really get another boost, so that wasn’t too appealing. Maybe being a buffer, then… but he could only really buff himself (largely unappealing for my player). He ended up at some weird dual-dagger using guy with wounding enchantments who was supposed to use poison, but FORGOT. Sweet. But it wasn’t all bad, actually. He went toe-to-toe with a devil and, despite its damage reduction, dished out enough damage to have the Witch nuke it with a lightning bolt. All in all, Al didn’t look or feel much like an Alchemist, but he did throw a lightning bomb once to good use, and drank a couple potions in his time.

QUESTION: Does damage reduction stop bleed? Under DR, it says:

“whenever damage reduction completely negates the damage from an attack, it also negates most special effects that accompany the attack, such as injury poison, a monk’s stunning, and injury-based disease.”

So, when Al was dealing 2-3 overall points of damage with his daggers after DR, would it still cause the full bleed damage, since it doesn’t seem to negate it? At first I said no, then after reading it, I let it happen, but it felt strange to me. Could I get a clarification?

POSITIVES AND NEGATIVES

Witch: Its really great that Hexes can be used indefinitely, and Cackle is really neat as well. We were of the opinion that more Hexes should be ranged than melee, and that maybe it should have something more to do. But it’s only been one combat, and the Witch was actually pretty sweet in retrospect.

Alchemist: We think this class needs the most work. Your potions would be sweet if you could give them to other people (without having to pick a discovery to do so), mutagens should have a better progression (as in, not so clumped around late game), and yeah. I dunno, we’ll have to see more.

Cavalier: Not much to say on this one. Seems really solid even without its schtick… even though it occurs to me that I have no idea what good ol Calvin did with his mount while he was inside fighting… The true test will be tomorrow, when they fight a giant outside.

Inquisitor: Very cool class. My player really enjoyed it, the judgements proved to be quite nice (Healing and Destruction), Bane was great, and Solo Tactics proved invaluable. He went a sort of shield-bashing spear build, and it seemed pretty awesome for him. Good times were had. We don’t think it needs really anything, but again, this was just one combat that he shone in.

OVERALL: Great job Paizo! The Alchemist is our least favorite so far, but the player didn’t have a bad time by any means. He got in his moments by guzzling potions and occasionally flailing around with his daggers. We had a lot of laughs and a great time. The Inquisitor fell in love with his class, and the Cavalier can’t wait to see what he can do out in the open. The Witch was also very pleased, but not to their extent, enjoying their bat familiar and repeatedly cackling like a madman. We hope to get way more done tomorrow and post our findings.

Hey guys! I have a question to ask of you.

So, one of my players was interested in making a Dwarf fighter who would craft arms and equipment. Unfortunately, a few searches on the topic reveals that it takes quite a large amount of time to make most armor.

I'll be honest with you though, I haven't yet fully grasped the craft rules, so I'm in no position to start pumping out rules on it. I think I understand enough to get the basic concept, though.

Now, I also know that in real time it takes a long, long time to make full plate and its ilk, but I'm not necessarily looking for realism here.

That aside, I was wondering if anyone had tried to shorten the crafting times to allow a PC to play that sort of role. Bear in mind though, my player has no intention of "ruining the economy" or anything like that with this; he just wants to be able to craft armor for himself and maybe another PC or some NPC friends. I trust him. He's been a faithful player for some time now, and as a DM I want to help him be able to fulfill his desired role rather than outright deny it. So, I'm looking to compromise.

Now, as a DM, I don't want to take those 77 or so weeks it takes to make full plate and cut them down to 3 days; I still want there to be a sense of accomplishment when he finally finishes. Maybe (lets say, through magic or something) its cut down to several weeks or so. Maybe more, I'm not quite sure.

So, I'm asking if anyone has ever tried this, and what the ramifications were of the changes? Was it possible?

ALSO: I won't be changing the rules on enchanting or making magic items, those are fine as is. It's primarily the armor I'm worried about.

One of my players decided to play a Paladin recently, and asked me about the gods of my campaign setting. I'll admit, I hadn't given much thought to them until now (for some reason, somehow, it's never been a huge issue). But I think the big problem is the fact that I'm TERRIBLY brain-dead on how to incorporate something like "the divine" into my specific setting. Let me explain:

The setting itself is fairly abstract and isn't always completely understandable, but thats been done on purpose! Thats because the setting itself is a dream. The plane has fallen asleep and dreamt up whatever it wants, including humans, elves, orcs, monsters (nightmares), etc. Spellcasters are able to manipulate the world to their bidding through the power of lucidity (which is basically the understanding that you are, in fact, dreaming, and can thus do whatever you want - if you're really interested, I suggest you look it up; it's fascinating stuff).

Gods have never fit into the equation... I never felt the need for them, and in my games they were always left on the back burner. Technically, since magic is the way it is, I never felt the need for there to be a differentiation between divine and arcane magic, but (like the gods) its always been there, just in the background and never before brought to my attention. I understand that there could just be a cleric or paladin that worships some sort of ideal or whatnot, but I would really like to substantiate something for them (and yes, I do understand that this technically contradicts what I said earlier about abstraction, but bear with me).

The thing is, I'm not looking for your standard "big guns from upstairs" approach on gods, in fact, I'm not even looking to necessarily exemplify a singular being so much as have a "religion." And now that I've thought about it, I really can't think of how to explain them. Sure, maybe you could worship the Dreamer (the plane), but that always felt more druidic to me. Should "gods" just be really renown people who aren't so much omnipotent as they are powerful? Should people just worship certain ideals?

I've thought of maybe having some really strange dreamt-up things that people could revere (a giant gear that floats in the sky), but that always gave off a sot of isolated tribal feel. I've dug deep into my wells of creativity and books on psychology to see if maybe there's some gold to be had there... but alas, I haven't stumbled upon any. Can anybody spur some imagination into me? Or am I hopelessly blabbing on about something that doesn't make sense?

So my party last night faced off against a low level lich (odd, I know) It was a CR 12 all together, and my players were all level 9 (it was intended to be a tough fight). When the Lichs fear aura kicked in, half of my players had to take off running and decided, in the midst of things, it would be best to just sit it out and watch TV upstairs.

After a few turns, it became apparent that the remaining players weren't having as much fun because they were struggling, and the players upstairs were equally sad that they couldn't be a part of it. So, with the fight still in it early stages, I decided to make the fear a 60 foot barrier that, should a feared character enter, must leave on his turn. Otherwise, they could still attack at a distance, just as long as it was outside of the 60 foot radius. This for one character, but the other one didn't have his ranged weapon on him at the time, and was still rendered useless (being a barbarian and all). So then, in an effort to bring back the fun, I had them continuously make the fear will save each round on their turn until they saved (they did fairly quick).

I don't think I want to get into the habit of doing roundly saves for fear, and I'm still not sure about the fear aura thingy (I've heard a few people use it before, but I can't remember the details of their variants). I took the decision to bring the fun back into the game despite what the rules say, but should I have two problems:

Should I have allowed a roundly save against the fear, simply because a character was unprepared? Also...

What are your opinions on fear effects? We only have one spellcaster (with a great will save) and everyone else got by on rolls primarily. In their defense, I didn't think the fear would calculate this much into the equation of things, so this is partly my fault. Has anyone here tried anything besides the traditional "run away" effect it gives?

So, before I get into things here, I understand that what is mentioned here wont affect the book (being at the printer and whatnot), I just thought this would be the best place to get playtest opinions on what I may or may not houserule about CMB.

Now then, I've been running some sessions in our latest campaign using PF RPG rules, and boy, do we love em. But, they don't seem to be completely sold on the aspect of CMBs. They enjoy the streamlined nature of it, but (like most people I've heard from) think that a 15+CMB is too high. Unlike most people, half of them seem to be in favor of returning to opposed rolls (while still using CMB), the other half doesn't mind either way. What do you guys think of this?

Also, I have a level 3 Dex Fighter (going into the Duelist prestige class), who is trying to become adept at disarming his foes. In the most recent fight, he successfully disarmed one of the four foes, and failed the three other times he tried it. Though by no means was he furious about this, he was a little frustrated that he couldn't do what he tried to, even when he had built his character towards it (Improved Disarm, using weapons that give disarm bonuses, etc). It surely wasn't due to rolling poorly either, he just couldn't match his foe's CMB.

Since I allow characters to choose upon creation whether or not they use Dex or Str for their attack (it can't be changed after chosen), he asked why he couldn't simply use Dex for his CMB instead of Str, being a Dex Fighter and all. Personally speaking, this seems reasonable to me. Has anyone else done this or have any precautions I should know of? I understand that the level of power goes up a tad, but I'm okay with that.

And finally, I informed my players of the fact that Disarm and Sunder can be done as part of an attack action in a round. I presume this to mean that a character with three attacks can choose to attack normally on the first attack, and then use his other two attacks to disarm a foe. I thought that was cool, as did my players. But, one of them pointed out that wouldn't it be smarter to, should a character have four available attacks, attack with the first one at the highest bonus, and then spend his next attacks sundering or disarming foes (since his BAB will be lower on those attacks, but his CMB will stay the same). He wondered if that was, well, overpowered is far from the word I'm looking for, but you know what I mean.

EDIT: I actually have one last request: Would it be overpowered to allow a player to use his weapons enhancement bonus on Disarm checks? Personally, my guess is yes, but I would like to see others input.

Thanks for any help!