Kolyarut

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There is an NPC in Kingmaker that has the Aquatic subtype and has ranks in Craft: Basketweaving.


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I run APs for two characters. I am having a decent time starting them as two levels higher than a party of normal characters would (level 3 at the beginning of an AP, for example).

You do have to stay away from save-or-suck spells though, as an unlucky roll incapacitates half the party instead of a quarter of it. I tend to make them multi-stage affairs; for example, with a vampire's dominate, I instead cause the first failed save to cause the character to become dazed for two rounds, and if the character fails a second save, is dominated as normal.


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It's my turn to be a player again, and I am hoping for some good advice on creating the characters.

I will be playing alone through an adventure path with two characters, which means that I need to accomplish with two characters what would normally be done with four. I am especially interested in ideas for the second character. The character creation rules follow.

Campaign & character creation rules:

Leniency: The GM is open to making small changes to the AP, but the burden will generally be on my shoulders to design good characters and play smart. When I ran this style of campaign, I minimized the use of save-or-die effects, and allowed the player to add a couple of spells to his class spell list (which were thematically appropriate); few other changes. I will probably receive the same treatment.

Level: Both characters will be two levels higher than a normal character would be. The AP will be started at level 3 for both characters, and it can be expected to end two levels higher.

Class: Core Rulebook classes are allowed. Advanced Player's Guide classes are allowed, except for Summoner.

Ability scores: I have rolled their stats, but they are not with me -- generally, both characters have high ability scores, but no natural 18s.

Hit points: Maximum hit points at first level. Every level after that, if I receive less than half of the die's greatest result, I take half instead. [If a bard rolled a 1, 2, or 3 on his hit points, he would instead take 4, then add his normal bonuses.]

Favored class: Both characters will have two favored classes.

Traits: Characters select two traits, one of which is selected from the AP player's guide.

Wealth: Treasure will be awarded as normal in the AP. Two characters will split the same treasure from the AP rather than four.

Allowed books: Core Rulebook (no Leadership feat), Advanced Player's Guide. The GM may approve certain materials that are in Ultimate Magic or which are Sorceror-specific on a case-by-case basis

I do not want any AP-specific advice (quasi-spoilers), so I am not naming the AP.

First character ideas:

For the first character, I knew that I wanted to take the opportunity to play an enchanter, which is something that usually grates on GMs in a normal game. Usually I prefer wizards, and I always prefer humans; to break the pattern, I am currently thinking of playing a Kitsune Wild-blooded Sorceror (Celestial [Empyreal] and Maestro).

Crunch advantages:
* Maestro looks like a useful bloodline for enchanters, and I like the musical flavor (I have a bad habit of playing bards : P).
* I want a character that can heal (Empyreal grants channeling), but if I can avoid it, I would like to have healing without running a full cleric or oracle.

Development ideas:
* Robes of arcane heritage so I count as a higher-level sorceror for my bloodline powers; periapt of positive channeling to have more-powerful channeling ability
* If allowed, Quicken Channeling
* Possibly Quicken Spell or rod of quicken spell
* Lots of mind-affecting spells (suggestion, dominate, etc.). Some buffing spells to empower the partially-mind controlled team, and then boring ranged damage spells to deal with enemies that are immune to mind-affecting and resistant to normal attacks

Crunch disadvantages:
* I am not crazy about the -2 Will save from wild-blooded. IMO, Will saves are the worst saves as most of them will disable a character -- which is at least half my party. I can accept that though, especially since I become a Wisdom-primary caster.
* I really want both 9th-level bloodline powers -- I have to choose between Channeling from Empyreal, and the Maestro ability that allows me to speak / understand all languages and increases the caster level on my language-dependent spells.
* Kitsune gives +2 Charisma, which is awesome for a sorceror. Unless you switch to Wisdom-casting from Empyreal |:P

Fluff-wise, I am thinking that the character is a descendant of a Vulpinal. She grew up as a Kitsune / Varisian performer, but she has been developing musical and angelic sorcerous powers due to her heritage. I could even take it a step further and say that her ancestor was originally called and bound into service by wizards of Thassilon, and her flourish of magic is due to the weakening of binding spells on her bloodline. I quite like this beginning of a backstory.

* Is there any effect that could change my ability score to Wisdom for the normally-Charisma skills? I want a party face.
* Same question, but Wisdom instead of Charisma for Use Magic Device?
* Alternatively, is there a particularly good class or archetype for a tank-martial combatant that utilizes Charisma, and could be used as the party face and Use Magic Device character?
* Channeling is good -- but it doesn't take care of restoration, heal and breath of life. What might be the best way for my two characters to get access to them without becoming an outright Cleric/Oracle?
* Hypothetically, is there another method to get access to channeling without Empyreal and without taking Cleric/Oracle levels?

For the second character, I am thinking of some kind of high-AC front-line combatant that is capable of dealing decent damage and possibly keeping enemies in one spot. I would prefer not to use a Monk, as I want to be able to use a lot of the equipment that comes my way. I am also not terribly interested in Paladin, as I intend to play these characters with a certain amount of lying and subterfuge (otherwise the AP would be especially difficult to handle).

I look forward to any advice you may have, especially if it can conform to the guidelines of the campaign.


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Long ago, the efreet corrupted the lord of the fire elementals and manipulated them into waging an offensive on the material plane. A band of destined heroes banded together to stop the tyrants once and for all; they fought off incursions in their home town, fought through the capitol, then bridged the planes and braved the inferno.

They may have succeeded, but the other elementals joined the fray in the name of preserving balance. The heroes were killed in the crossfire and the planet turned into a bloodbath.

The planet's scars cannot be seen today. It is shrouded in a thick, mustard-yellow fog. Most creatures that enter it quickly die from the poisonous fumes; those that protect against it die more slowly from wasting diseases, if the fabled lurkers in the mists do not cause them to vanish first. Even the myths that torches become alive and wicked imply that the old world is no longer accessible.

A few mountain peaks pierce through the fog, but that is not where most of civilization lives. Most of civilization lives in the sky, on great floating islands or cutting the air with great ships. What few survived the end of the world have learned to make do with the space above it.

The great islands are held aloft by a magical gem that is totally not called Skystone*, because that would be generic and lame. One of the many strange warpings caused by the elemental war, skystone grows -- almost like a plant -- in areas of raw magic. It is naturally buoyant -- so buoyant that it is the primary force keeping the islands afloat. However, its value is esteemed even higher because it can be used to create and strengthen Air-elemental spells.

The wanderers of the skies have, for centuries now, acclimatized to their new environment, and great cities are rising and creating the beginnings of new empires. Although some cultures prefer to 'tether' their islands in one place, others actually prefer to sail them across the world by catching air currents with complex sail systems.

However, civilizing landships is neither easy nor cheap. With the bulk of the planet's veins of gems and metals inaccessible, good mining locations on the islands are hotly contested. Some enterprising pirates prefer to perform raids beneath the fogs of death for terrestrial goods, but even the most experienced eventually fail to return.

This is not to say that valuables are all too rare to be found; rather, they have changed forms. As Skystone is incredibly buoyant, very little of it can be carried without also carrying off its bearer. For this reason, extremely small and dense materials -- notably lead -- are prized as the 'new gold' for their ability to efficiently cancel Skystone's lift. The especially wealthy often decorate their homes with lead -- conveniently allowing them to retain some protection against divination that their ancestors once had with all of their plentiful rivers.

However, the dauntless grasp of Skystone is not just a worry for bravos who have to watch their pouches lest they float conspicuously high and broadcast their good fortune to nearby pirates. As the floating cities continue depleting their stores of Skystone, they begin cruising closer and closer to the ground to find their new equilibrium; to combat this, engineering teams have to remove weight (usually in the form of planned abandonment of tons of stone, although it is also an excuse to jettison unpopular residents).

Some brave leaders have experimented with intentionally controlling their mining to raise and lower the city for benefits in combat and surface raids, but as an inexact science, some of these experiments have met with failure. Islands are reported to have crash landed in the fog, mined too heavily to save in time. Similarly, a group of religious separatists once tried to shave off enough stone that they could escape into the deep sky and live in peace. Their island still rests where it first stopped, filled with the risen dead of paranoid kinslayers and the last desperate miners who discovered the effects of hypoxia too late.

The failures can be as bad as successes, however -- when the orc tribes stop fighting long enough to focus on a common goal, they turn their homes into weapons of war -- massive rams -- and sailing them directly into their enemies. There is no sound quick like that of an island cracking into pieces, the fragments spinning in place and flinging away the residents as the orcs maneuver to loot.

But as much action happens above the fogline, the world still stirs invisibly beneath the poisonous vapors. Skystone still buds deep in the caves of the planet below, and every once in a while, enough of it concentrates to tear out a new sky-island and return ancient secrets to their inheritors ... with new and unseen guardians.

---

Alright folks, that's it for now. I wanted to add in terrorist druids that oppose the destructive and, honestly, dangerous mining that the earthships use; as well as comment on the problems caused by the swiss-cheese tunnels of rampant mining, but I have run out of steam. Perhaps I'll revisit this later.

* Switch out for something better at the first opportunity.


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The way I understand it, paraphrased, is that:

Qualifying to attempt stealth:
Each of the following conditions must be met to attempt stealth.
1) You cannot stealth against creatures while being observed by them
1a) Exception: When a creature is momentarily distracted, this requirement can be ignored at a penalty [See: Bluff].
2) You cannot stealth while running or charging.
3) You require cover or concealment to attempt stealth.
3a) Exception: When you begin your turn in with cover or concealment, a successful check allows you to maintain stealth until the end of your turn (or it is otherwise broken).
3b) Exception: When a creature is not affected by your source of cover or concealment (i.e. it uses Crystal Sight against stone walls, Door Sight against doors, Gaze of Flames against smoke, Darkvision or see in darkness against darkness, Goz mask against mists and fogs), that particular element will not allow you to stealth against the creature.

Ignoring stealth:
Certain abilities may allow creatures to negate the benefit of another creature's stealth. Some common examples include creatures with Blindsight, Blind Sense, Tremorsense, Life Sight, and creatures with Scent that are adjacent to the stealthed creature.

Breaking stealth:
1) You cannot stealth while running or charging.
2) When a stealthed creature makes an attack (generally described as an effect that targets a creature or the square a creature occupies) its stealth breaks once the attack has resolved.
2a) Exception: Characters can Snipe, which allows stealth to remain unbroken.
2b) Exception: "Simultaneous" attacks break stealth after all of them are made; for example, all attacks from scorching ray and Manyshot are resolved before stealth is broken.]

There is a bunch of abilities that can alter or negate the above restrictions. Common examples include:

With Camouflage, you can attempt to Stealth without cover or concealment when you are in your favored terrain. [Note that this ability does not allow you to stealth while being observed.]

With Hide in Plain Sight, you can attempt to stealth while being observed. [Note that this ability does not allow you to stealth without cover or concealment.]

With Hellcat Stealth, you can treat bright and normal illumination as if it were concealment for the purposes of attempting to stealth.

With Silent Hunter, it is possible to stealth while running.

I look forward to your corrections and arguments! :D

Although I usually allow my players to stealth while being observed : p


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Well, XP is generally for PCs meeting their goals. In the vast majority of fights, this means killing a monster, because the staging of encounters tends to be simple ("action-oriented"). Brighter GMs and adventure designers will give you the XP for handling a situation diplomatically or forcing the enemy to surrender, but that's the extent of common goals. Really, XP could be awarded for anything else that might be a PC goal.

You could run an encounter with an incursion of demon slavers and award XP for every commoner that survives the attack.

You could have the PCs hunted down by a slow but very powerful, resilient, and persistent enemy and award them XP when they finally elude it (though PCs can be pretty hard-headed and might force a TPK by assuming they're supposed to fight it; still, it's an option).

You could have a group of rebels scatter when they're discovered by the PCs, and award XP for every rebel that's hit by a paintbomb so they can be tracked through the city.

You could have a fight with a canny spy and award XP based on how much information they get from him with detect thoughts.

For traps? Alright, traps are pretty simple. The PCs' goals are probably limited to 'survive'. But if they do survive, well -- they did it. Congratulations! Sometimes they survive the dumb way, by triggering the trap, failing the saving throw and taking full damage. But that's no different than what you might get in a fight -- you might be ambushed by a creature, struck by a critical hit, and nearly torn apart by an CR=APL encounter. You've still fulfilled your goal and had an experience to learn from.


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Can you even cast an SLA if its CL would be below the minimum required to cast it if it were a spell?


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"And that's when I remembered I had SafeSearch off, Your Honor ..."


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Related JJ quote:

James Jacobs wrote:
Diego Rossi wrote:

A question about simulacrons.

In another thread a guys suggested making a simulacron of a adamantine golem to get a weaker adamantine golem almost fro free.
I think that allowing the creation of simulacrons of non living creatures is a bit over the top (I recognize that it is RAW).
Your opinion?

First thing to keep in mind about simulacrum: The GM gets to decide what a PC can or can't make. I know it doesn't say so in the spell itself... but it's true. Simulacrum does NOT give the player the freedom to "shop" through the bestiaries for the best subject.

In my games, I slap two additional limitations onto the spell.

1) You can't make a simulacrum of something that's not alive. Constructs, undead, and other simulacrums are off the list.

2) In order to make a simulacrum, you need a physical portion of the creature you wish to make; a finger, a lock of hair, a patch of skin, a bone, whatever. Once you use that object, it's consumed, and as long as that simulacrum exists, you can't use that specific creature's body parts to make a second simulacrum.

I'll be super-crusading to get those two qualifiers built into the spell some day... if not as errata (unlikely, since that would increase the spell's footprint in the game and cause significant layout nightmares), but as FAQ clarifications or even as inclusions in some new edition of the game we might or might not do in the future.


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Sean, if you're still monitoring this thread, I have a question. Is grease a vegan spell?


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Okay. So this is kind of sleep specific.

I don't really think it would work. Even if you full attack a creature (let's say, from stealth or invisibility), the first attack voids your hidden condition. The creature is 'aware' for the attacks after that.

With sleep, the condition causing the surprise is on the target instead of the attacker, but works the same way; after an attack, it is no longer sleeping.

The first hurdle to your problem is that a coup de grace is a full-round action. This is surmountable -- there's a feat (Deft Opportunist?) that turns a CDG into a standard action. That could be readied.

The greater problem is a basic system issue: Readied actions are generally considered to come before the actions that trigger them. Being able to disrupt a spell by making an attack of opportunity "while it is happening" is a large, but very rare exception to the normal discrete sequencing.

You can try to complete a CDG "when my ally performs a CDG", but you'll CDG, the enemy will wake up (if alive), then he will no longer be Helpless for your ally's attack.


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Chris Marsh wrote:


52. It costs five copper pieces to shoot an exploratory arrow into the darkness, and five hundred thousand copper pieces to get your Troubleshooter raised from the dead.

128. Default template for single file marching order is, in order of front to back, Troubleshooter, fighter, wizard, cleric. Always leave 5' of space between

159. If the DM takes the time to describe a new pattern of floor tiling, do not advance until the troubleshooter gives the go ahead.

I appreciate your confidence in my abilities and concern for my safety.


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1. I don't think you can craft an item at a lower caster level then the minimum necessary to cast the spell. I think you can craft them above your caster level -- but then that increases the DC to craft the item.

2. I think so, yes.


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The goal is to change your monster in ways that result in something like the changes on that table. You wouldn't simply add +25 hp to your monster. Instead, you would give it bonus hit dice (and maybe other changes) so that it arrives near that value.

It's okay to vary, too. You might conceptualize a 'glass cannon' monster whose defenses don't raise as quickly as that table would advise, but whose damage increases faster than normal. Just make sure not to deviate too much, or you'll get unpredictable results during play. A monster who gets no benefits at all except for a really high AC increase may theoretically be 'balanced', but it's not going to be much fun for the fighter (who can hardly hit) or for the rest of the group (who can't hit at all).

Suppose I have a CR 3 animal, and I want to raise its CR by 1. The table advises me to increase HP by 10, AC by 2, attack by 2, and damage by 2-3.

First I look up the type of hit dice an animal has (which are d8). I start by adding more hit dice. The average roll of a d8 is 4.5, so if I add 2 hit dice, I've already increased its hp by 9 (almost there!). I might just leave that there, since it's close enough.

The Base Attack Bonus of monsters increases with their hit dice, so my Animal already has a higher attack bonus just because I gave it bonus HD.

If I gave it enough hit dice, I might increase an ability score. That's an easy way to take care of any remaining damage increase or AC increase I need to perform. Or, any feats the creature gains might help take care of those; Improved Natural Armor, Dodge, or Improved Natural Attack might help.

I don't mean to restate the entire process, just show you how it might look. You don't add the table values straight on to the monster. Rather, you try to arrive at them by changing the statistics that affect them.


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CWheezy wrote:
The spell doesn't actually say that.

Heh, this reminds me when we played a 3.x game with 3rd party materials under a new DM. My friend played a Lich with a combo that allowed him to craft magic items for free. We quickly got kitted out with the best of everything, leveled up multiple times, and I coup de graced a dragon! The campaign ended after the first session, but hey, I'll never forget it either.

Anyway. If you don't think that special abilities include spell-like abilities, and you think that granting your players infinite free wishes is a good idea, then you have the authority to play as loose with your game's balance as you like.

But sometimes it's okay so say "No, on grounds of 'No'."


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Poor Milani. Everybody retrains when the revolution is over.


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Wait. Are you asking about enchanting a single Amulet with the benefits of two separate amulets? I thought you were talking about owning an amulet and a second item with a different set of amulet enchantments.

Nooooooo ... I'm going to guess that nobody's going to allow this.

I have to wonder though, if you're already on this thought process, why not take it to the most ridiculous limit? If you're assuming it's legal, ten take a single amulet and enchant it with ten different +1 amulet properties. The first costs 4,000, and all others cost 6,000 each.

That may serve as additional evidence for the "there's no way this is legal" camp of thought.


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The handle goes in your nose.


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Quote:


"It's Barbaricus the Mighty! I'm going to go get his autograph."

"Wait! No, stay back here. Don't attract his attention. I heard the last fan that approached him, he took and put him in a cellar then forced him to make items for three months."


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My experience is that powergaming creates its own need. When players powergame, the GM adjusts encounters to compensate. Powerful encounters require powerful characters, so players -- and then GMs -- must constantly re-tool their characters to withstand the other side. It becomes an arms race, and in my opinion too much time gets spent tweaking stats instead of having fun and being heroes.

Eventually the arms race escalates to the point where four system-savvy players are making effective characters to thwart the plans of a GM who has potential access to all sources, and GM must ask himself: "Am I going to continue following the rules and get out-gunned because four people are spending their time researching builds, while I'm only one person and also have to manage running the campaign on top? Or am I going to start ruling disputes against the players and building encounters just to neutralize builds to keep them in check? Or am I going to just start cheating(~) and making up new abilities and challenging them with encounters far above their APL, at which point their optimizing no longer matters?"

It would be nice if we could just make cool characters and fight monsters without having to one-up each other.


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Neither of which is the OP, who spotted it on his own. Good on him.

I don't really think we can make the standard rules any more obvious, because all the rules we'd need to make extra-easily findable would slowly begin equating to the CRB. People can search for this information across the thousand existing thread about it if they choose to. They don't choose to. You can't fix people.

Ausk - in a word, yes. The rogue is built around sneak attacks. Preferably multiple sneak attacks. She can make a sneak attack any time her opponent is denied its Dex bonus to AC, and any conditions that would otherwise prevent it (you can't normally sneak attack a creature benefiting from concealment). If a rogue can't get sneak attacks, they're like a fighter or barbarian but worse.

To stably get sneak attacks, you might try (depending on GM):
* Stealthing and sneak attacking once
* Feinting and sneak attacking once
* Using Sleight of hand to draw a hidden weapon may allow you to sneak attack once -- I can't find the text on it at the moment
* Using invisibility and sneak attacking once
* Using the Snipe action to sneak attack round after round
* Summoning or bringing additional creatures to the fight so that you can flank more easily
* Obtaining effects such as Gang Up that make it easier to flank
* Benefiting from improved invisibility and sneak attacking all day long
* Attacking an effectively-blinded opponent, such as one inside an area of total darkness
* Attacking a blinded opponent, available through a variety of spells and effects
* Attacking a stunned opponent, available through a variety of spells and effects
* Attacking a creature while it is running
* Attacking a creature while it is pinned
* Attacking a creature affected by Shatter Defenses
* Attacking an unarmed creature while wielding an improvised weapon and possessing the Catch Off-Guard feat (invest in Disarm effects?)
* Standing fully concealed behind an illusion that you've disbelieved and attacking your opponent unseen.
* Standing fully concealed in a fog and attacking your opponent unseen while using an effect that allows you to see through mists and fogs, such as wearing a goz mask or using the oracle of waves' Water Sight class feature
* Standing fully concealed in smoke and attacking your opponent unseen while using an effect that allows you to see through smoke, such as wearing a goz mask or using the oracle of fire's Gaze of Flames class feature
* Standing fully concealed in a stone wall (Wild Shape, elemental form, or oracle of stone's earth glide class feature) and attacking your opponent while benefiting from an effect that allows you to see through stone such as the oracle of stone's Crystal Sight class ability.

Also helpful:
* The Shadow Strike feat allows you to deal precision damage against targets with concealment (but not total concealment)
* Gain access to low-light vision; or better, darkvision; or better, see in darkness; or possibly the best, blindsight. Avoid having sneak attacks negated by darkness-generated concealment at all.
* Sniper's goggles allow you to deliver sneak attacks at any range rather than just 30 feet, and increase the damage within 30 feet
* The menacing enchantment grants great bonuses for flanking creatures
* Heavily-armored creatures can be hit much more easily with touch attacks, such as from scorching ray

That is a monstrous amount of options. Any rogue can take one or (or several) of those methods to sneak attack and make a build out of accomplishing it.

Because a rogue is so easily negated by losing access to its sneak attack, it's important to invest in multiple routes to sneak attack. All too often, I see rogue players invest in just one then complain when it's negated. I think proper observance of this list could prevent a lot of complaints that they're underpowered. I try to spread it around a little.


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Arbane the Terrible wrote:
Tiny Coffee Golem wrote:
Vod Canockers wrote:
You do realize that diamonds are really not all that rare.
They'd be significantly more rare if they were destroyed while spell casting.

And if mines had a tendency to become infested with horrible monsters.

Now... _synthetic_ diamonds as spell components. Discuss. :D

A synthetic diamond results in a synthetic resurrection-effect. It looks and acts just like your friend, but there's just something off about it.

And that's where doppelgangers come from.


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Just so we're clear here, if an NPC has something like see invisibility prepared, and one of his minions comes back and warns him "invisible adventurers are coming!" is the GM really not allowed to have that BBEG cast the spell unless the statblock dictates it?


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Taking 20 took 20 times as long as doing the action once did. It was basically the player saying "I'm using this skill twenty times, rolling a 1, a 2, a 3 ... all the way until I get 20."

Searching a 10x10 square used to take 1 minute of work, so Taking 20 on searching took 20 minutes.

I admit that even I'm disappointed that there's no real disadvantage to Taking 20 to pick locks. I also used to think that trying to pick a diabolically complex lock took longer -- but nope, they're all full round actions.

Granted, I'm not entirely sure the rogue should be made weaker, so I'm not sure I want to house-rule them back. That's just what the wizards want.


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randomwalker wrote:
You are what you eat.

Let's test this theory. An orouboros eats its tail. Its tail is an orouboros. Thus the orouboros is an orouboros ... which verifies as true.

This theory is unassailable.


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glitterdust is great against invisible creatures, but that's not generally available until CL 3 or 4 arcane spellcasting; not all groups take it (it's something more veteran gamers choose); and you can run into CR 4 creatures long before your party is APL 4.


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If you allow a bard to use inspire courage quietly, then you should force his allies to make Perception checks as well as the enemies. Not a bad balancing factor, really.

I've always treated Verbal components as being Sounds of Battle-level. It meshes with my fantasy tropes of haughty wizards boldly shouting "DOLAR IGNOMITO PETRODEUS", and I don't see any compelling reason to make them inherently stealthier attackers than sword-swingers even aside from that. They already have access to feats like Silent Spell, after all, but fighters never gain access to a feat like Silent Strike which allows them to strike an enemy soundlessly.

Heck, right now I'm having a squabble with a player about him stealthing and then Concentrating to call bolts from call lightning. He wants to remain undetected the whole time he's attacking. He has a compelling argument -- he doesn't have to move or make a sound -- but it feels contrary to my sense of balance, even if I can whip out "you can't stealth while attacking for some arbitrary reason."


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Core rulebook, page 561 wrote:


Any opponent that cannot be seen has total concealment (50% miss chance) against a creature with blindsense, and the blindsensing creature still has the normal miss chance when attacking foes that have concealment. Visibility still affects the movement of a creature with blindsense. A creature with blindsense is still denied its Dexterity bonus to Armor Class against attacks from creatures it cannot see.

?


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Pffft, lucky. I think I know what ghouls you're talking about, and I was just an oracle of battle 1 or 2 when we ran into them. Almost lost the whole party from the fight, and almost lost two characters to the disease.

But no, diseases don't stack. Poisons have rules for what happens when you encounter multiple doses, but diseases do not. You can't really get more sick than sick.

Even if he was interested in house-ruling it, the beginning of S&S is just about the worst place to do it. There isn't really any hope of "if we leave now, maybe we'll make it back to town before it gets really bad."

Hell, remove disease isn't guaranteed to remove the disease anymore, and the Heal skill is just a bonus. I can't see making it worse.


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You know, that sounds like a great sport for orcs. It's a game a lot like football, but there are two additional members of each team that run around the field carrying the goal and trying to keep it away from the ball.


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Friend of the Dork wrote:
Sleep has casting time 1 round. Prepare to be a squishy target while you cast that spell, if the goblins have any clue what they are doing.

Wow. These non-Standard casting times always trip me up. Oh, break enchantment takes a minute. Oh, enlarge person takes 1 round. Oh, lesser restoration takes 3 rounds.

I find myself consistency surprised by these (besides summon spells).


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I thought this thread was about blind players, and now I am disappointed.

The waiters at that restaurant used night-vision goggles, IIRC.

Now it is your turn for disappointment.


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The books can't fix your GM. I'm sorry.


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Here's a few scenarios.

Darkvision, available to tons of characters and classes, allows you to see through the normal level of darkness.

Creatures with see in darkness, such as most devils and many tieflings, can see through even magical levels of darkness.

Creatures with Blind-Fight are less inhibited by darkness than creatures that aren't, even if both of them otherwise have normal vision.

Creatures with Scent, such as plenty of half-orcs, barbarians and druids, can automatically pinpoint the square of an adjacent creature. They can also tell the general direction of enemies with a move action.

Creatures with Tremorsense, such as deaf oracles or elementals, can pinpoint enemies touching the ground.

Creatures with Blindsense, such as clouded vision oracles or dragons, can automatically pinpoint enemies they have line of effect to.

Creatures with Blindsight, such as clouded vision oracles and many plants and oozes, can see creatures in darkness just as well as if they were sighted.

When a creature capitalizes on precision damage, such as Sneak Attack, or the Duelist's Precise Strike, then it may be worth it to cast darkness even if you have normal vision. Precision damage cannot be used against creatures with Concealment, so while a fighter with 50% miss chance is certainly hindered, he isn't as hindered as much as a rogue with 50% miss chance and no ability to use sneak attack.

When a creature capitalizes on attacks of opportunity, such as Reach weapon users, Combat Patrol users, or ranged attackers with Snap Shot, then it may be worth it to cast darkness even if you have normal vision. Creatures do not provoke attacks of opportunity from opponents they have Concealment against.

Conversely -- perhaps a much rarer case -- suppose that you have a character who is mostly useless in a battle, and you think the best way you could contribute would be to use a combat maneuver, but you aren't trained in combat maneuvers. When you aren't trained in combat maneuvers, you provoke an attack of opportunity from your target, and any resultant damage will penalize your combat maneuver check. In such a case, it may be worth it to cast darkness for the same reason stated in the above paragraph. Even a lowly first-level wizard who is untrained in combat maneuvers and almost completely out of spells can really help out in a fight if he can gain Concealment against an enemy, cast True Strike and then perform a disarm.

Edit: I accidentally a paragraph.


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If an ogre is standing in the middle of darkness, and you can see things on the other side of darkness, and there is a well-lit white wall on the other side of darkness, then I have a really hard time imagining that have nothing in the way of pinpointing the creature. Maybe it makes sense for crossbows, which I aim up or down depending on distance to the target -- after all, in this darkness I don't know if the creature is a human standing 10 feet away, or a horrible giant standing 60 feet away -- but with rays, which presumably travel as a ray, just aiming directly at the target could work.

Now that I think about this, I don't think my problem is specifically with darkness ... I think it's targeting a square with ranged attacks instead of a direction. Logically, if there is a 5' wide and 5'tall dark hallway and I know somebody is in it, all I'd have to do is fire down the middle and I'd have a chance of hitting them. But RAW, you have to choose the right square to have even the 50% chance.

Hmmm. Maybe this is part of why I like the tangible darkness spheres. But another reason is that sound doesn't pass through silence, and I do so love consistency with my magical effects.


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My trouble with this is backlighting.

If there is a sphere of darkness between two lit rooms, and you rule that the darkness is transparent (you can see things on the other side), then I actually can logically outline the creatures inside the darkness effect.

The reasoning is this: I cannot see the creatures inside the darkness, sure. If I look down at them from the ceiling, all I'll see is the textureless and colorless black of the creatures, the floor, and the rest of the room's contents, all indistinguishable from each other.

However, if I look from a lit room across the darkness effect and toward the other lit room, we have a nice backlight. Now, I still can't see the creatures -- they're still dark and colorless -- they ARE standing directly between me and, say, a well-lit white wall. Essentially, by prowling around a darkness spell and looking to see where creatures interrupt my view of another lit area, I can start crudely picking out where creatures are and targeting attacks.

In case that's unclear, let's go back to the football field example. Suppose there are big lights lighting either side of a football field, but they've left a completely dark area in the middle.

A person sitting in the benches at the side can clearly see football players clustered around each goalpost. If a player walks into the middle of the field, they completely disappear into the darkness.

However, suppose you're one of the players at a goalpost, and a player from the other side walks into the middle of the field. You'd lose all ability to distinguish his jersey, its colors, his fine dimensions -- but he's still obstruct your view if you walked across your end of the field. You could totally target a crossbow in his direction if you had one.

And maybe that's okay with some people. I don't like it. I like more of a solid~, cloying darkness


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Very nice, I like the DCs in particular.

When a creature has Mobility, I like to put an M in superscript next to its AC so I don't forget that it gets a bonus.

When I'm writing up NPC statblocks, I sometimes like to have a line of Combat Options where I summarize the various tricks it's likely to do, like Power Attack, Spring Attack and whatnot. Sometimes Special Attacks makes this irrelevant, or if they're mostly in the Feats area, but if a creature has both sections or if its Feats are expansive I may still do it.

It takes up more space, but when I have variable effects like Power Attack I like to put the value in parenthesis so I don't have to do the math during play. For example, one might see Power Attack -3.


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I'm used to seeing tons of overused "even if Group/Entity-X knows Secret-Y, they're not talking" in Pathfinder, so it surprised me when the Bestiary said their origin was unknown, yet looking back at Into the Darklands revealed it. It makes me a little nervous, actually; now I'm wondering if the 3.5 campaign setting also has information that didn't make it into Inner Sea World Guide.

I haven't seen much info on them, so I think this is mostly going to be a game of reverse-engineering. You know where they come from; you know a few places where they are. I haven't seen them do much, although I know that beneath an opening to Nar-Voth in Nidal, they run an effective slave market.

I think I see them as a quiet, proud and greedy people. They are the survivors of Lost Azlant, after all; they haven't fallen from grace through inbreeding like the Morlocks, and they haven't become dancing puppets like the Gillmen. They fled the horrors of Earthfall, confronted the dangers of the Darklands and survived. Mostly on their own.

I think the Dark Folk are probably the most capable of retaining Azlanti culture and hoards than any of the other scions. Don't get me wrong -- I don't think there's fully intact historical cities down there. More likely, some Azlanti survivors were able to carry an armload of stuff as they fled into the caves, and some of that stuff might have even survived their first predations by the Darklands residents. Some of that stuff might even have survived being bargained away for their lives, and so there may be cultural relics and strange magic items hidden in the Dark Folk strongholds as they meet in the gloaming and pass on warped versions of their shared history through rare whispers.

Perhaps it's this reason that the Dark Folk are such a mystery, even to GMs. The nature of Dark Folk is an iteration of Azlanti history, and revealing the Dark Folk reveals far too much of Azlant. Those are secrets they're keeping back for now.

What I recall of Azlant was that it was raised by the strange blessings of the aboleths, who made mankind great, and when mankind became too proud they revoked their sanction. Thassilon, the successor culture, was started when Xin separated on the notion that the Azlanti should work with the other races to become even greater; even good Aroden, the last Azlanti, was a bit of a human supremacist that believed humans were destined to inherit the world. What we can take away from this is that the Azlant, and presumably the Dark Folk, were steeped in a history of slavery and raised in a culture where some creatures simply live with greater entitlements than others. The relationship between Dark Stalkers and Dark Creepers seems to exemplify this within their own race -- even the Dark Creepers wouldn't have it any other way.

Still, I have to wonder if there isn't some pact or some shadow-related magical power that has infused the Dark Folk. Why photosynthesis? Have they bent a knee to some ancient Azlant enemy, or sworn themselves to something they found in the Darklands? Have they discovered some magical shadow-secret that affects them today in more than just physiology? I'd love to see an article with some answers and even more questions sometime.

This link may add additional tidbits:
http://www.pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Dark_folk


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I find that it's most fun to try creating a magic prison with affordable limitations.

Is it possible to create a prison that's effectively impossible to break out of? Sure, just make it out of adamantine, staff it with 20th level barbarians and slather it with antimagic zones. Done!

But that's also really, ridiculously expensive. Real-life prisons don't all build themselves like unassailable fortresses with no regard to cost, and there would have to be some very, very real benefits to building a superprison that would cost that much to maintain. Could a prison spend millions of dollars on every single door so they can't be breached? Sure, but they don't. It's a strange idea to take so much money that you could use it to research several mythic magical secrets or go conquer other countries and admit, "I built a prison with my share." Perhaps I could believe it for a sect of people that are keeping a mad god imprisoned -- then it's a proportional benefit -- but not too many others.

But just take the idea, "I want to build a realistic prison capable of retaining mid-level spellcasters, and maybe even some monsters".

I would create it in an out-of-the-way location; I'm thinking on the top of perilous cliffs, surrounded by the ocean, where nobody but prison personnel have any business being around. I'd give some serious thought on how to trap the cliffs beneath the water to prevent an underwater approach -- few thoughts on it yet. It would probably be prudent to sculpt 'safe paths' into the cliff walls to funnel would-be intruders into specific areas, and layer those paths with traps -- probably alarm traps protected with lead and really high Perception DCs.

The prison itself would be made of manufactured stone reinforced with iron bars and embedded lead plates. It may not be scry-proof, but we're going for scry-resistant. The manufactured stone would include the foundation of the prison, which would be very thick. The primary method of travel would be by trained winged mounts (I could see this being a Korvosan prison, actually), which also patrol the skies, look out for ships, and keep an eye on the cliff walls. The prison halls may be interspersed with magical traps as well, obscured by disguised lead plates to protect against discovery by stray prisoners that manage to cast a detect magic.

The prison would be as self-sufficient as possible, creating its own food and water so it doesn't need as many shipments. This way, shipments are infrequent and treated with maximum suspicion.

All prison guards are carefully selected and trained. Candidates would be screened for having a Lawful alignment, and questioned; they would be made to swear an oath of loyalty and secrecy, which would be renewed at least twice a year (we'd like to do it more often, but those human resources costs add up). Ironically, the secrecy of the escort guards may be more difficult to maintain -- they must remain masked during the course of most of their duties, and may not reveal that they work for the prison to outsiders. It's too much of a security risk for the escort guards' identities to be public knowledge. Pamphlets with the tagline "No, that sound probably wasn't 'just a rat'" are frequently distributed warning against potential ploys of infiltrators and encouraging diligence.

The majority of the prisons' personnel are fairly low-level, but several higher-level characters are also necessary -- to serve on the riot teams, or to work on engineering teams repairing damage and constructing specialized rooms for new arrivals with specific holding requirements. Guard candidates with certain unique features may be sought out to work on different details or even to serve with specific creatures -- for example, half-orcs and dwarves may be prized on lower dungeon levels where a lightless environment is used, while blind or deaf guards may be particularly useful controlling prisoners notorious for using a commanding voice or gaze attacks.

There would be a single landing zone for new arrivals, which are brought into processing. As the primary entrance into the prison, processing is well-guarded and is the focus of a lot of the prison's defensive measures and enchantments. Each prisoner is brought to the prison blindfolded and wearing 'iron mittens', an object that blends manacles worn behind the back with gauntlets that do not allow finger movement. I'm thinking a lot of prisoners would wear iron mittens even inside the facility, but unsure -- they would be crude weapons, after all.

New arrival parties are considered hostile until proven otherwise -- even the accompanying guard and his mount are expected to follow a very rigid routine until processing is complete, with the assumption that they could be disguised infiltrators. Armed guards look on as the escort displays a signet ring, is successfully detected for Lawful alignment, briefly reveals his face to a questioner and has a brief discussion (for as much purpose as granting the questioner an opportunity to scrutinize the escort guard and determine that he's not under magical influence). Creatures that are caught with variant arcane magical writings hidden on their person will have them noted and removed -- less of a problem for the rare spellcasters that record spells with knotted cords, but a much bigger problem for spellcasters that tattoo their skin.

New arrivals are disrobed and their possessions are scrutinized for additional insight to the new arrival's intentions or abilities. Chiefly, the possessions are searched for arcane magical writings, spell components, magic items, weapons and holy symbols. New arrivals are also scanned for active magical auras (which are dispelled when possible, and identified when not), and finally, brought into the reaving room.

The reaving room could take several different forms. If you're a fan of 3.5 materials, the reaving room could contain an Arcane Ooze, which strips spellcasters of their spells known / spell slots one by one until they are empty. Or it could be a room with a Spellknife, which -- well, does the same thing but with apologetic beatings. No matter how it's performed, the point of this room is that spellcasters ideally leave spell-less.

After the reaving, new arrivals are interviewed by a questioner -- a character with lots of Sense Motive (possibly aided by detect lies or Zone of Truth, or that nifty new Compel Truth whatchamacallit spell), who runs down a laundry list of questions regarding whether the arrival has access to magical abilities; whether any magical abilities are remaining; if they have a deity; if they have any hidden paraphernalia still accessible; if they were imprisoned as part of a ploy; and so on.

After that, a shower and quarantine for 24 hours.

Whew! I've hardly gotten to the day-by-day life! And I'm out of time. Maybe more later?


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Can objects and Constructs be affected by positive and negative energy?

And:

Do positive and negative energy count as 'energy attacks' for the purposes of applying to Hardness (i.e., the damage is halved then Hardness is subtracted)?

In my upcoming game session I'll be having a negative-energy charged creature making attacks to break through walls, so the result may be important. Below is the information I've collected for each case.

1. Can objects and Constructs be affected by positive and negative energy?

Constructs and objects themselves don't seem to have any rules dictating that they are unaffected in their own descriptions. Construct traits in the Bestiary, page 307 nor do Smashing An Object in CRB, page 173 list an immunity to these effects. Golems may have Immune to Magic, but there are many other Constructs such as Animated Objects or Soulbound Dolls that have no such immunity and with which the interaction doesn't seem so clear to me.

However, a great deal of positive and negative energy effects seem to have inconsistent targeting regarding non-living creatures:

* Channeling energy causes a burst that affects all creatures of one type (either undead or living) in a 30-foot radius centered on the cleric. It doesn't seem to affect either Constructs or objects, as they are neither living nor dead.

* Seemingly in contradiction to this, the Destruction alternate channeling from Ultimate Magic seems to reinterpret Channeling:

Ultimate Magic, page 29 wrote:


Destruction: Heal—Creatures gain a channel bonus on attack and damage rolls against objects, CMB for sunder attempts, and Strength checks to break objects until the end of your next turn.
Harm—Unattended objects take full channel damage (not half ).

* Spells such as chill touch and cure light wounds have a Target of "creature touched", but have descriptions that begin with "A touch from your hand, which glows with blue energy, disrupts the life force of living creatures" and "When laying your hand upon a living creature, you channel positive energy that cures 1d8 points of damage + 1 point per caster level (maximum +5)" respectively. It seems internally inconsistent.

Enervation has a Target of ray, and works on living creatures. In this case, the paragraph further narrows the effect instead of contradicting it -- there isn't necessarily any internal inconsistency, unless paragraphs in chill touch and cure light wounds are just descriptive text that don't have game functions, in which case enervation would work against any target, not just living creatures (since the same logic would apply to all spells).

Inflict light wounds, Harm, and Heal affect creatures without regard to whether they are living or not. There are no internal inconsistencies with these, but although it seems that the cure and inflict spells are supposed to mirror each other, cure light wounds may work on living creatures only yet inflict light wounds seems to work on any creature.

2. Do positive and negative energy count as 'energy attacks' for the purposes of applying to Hardness (i.e., the damage is halved then Hardness is subtracted)?

The book says this about energy attacks:

Core Rulebook, page 173 wrote:


"Energy Attacks: Energy attacks deal half damage to most objects. Divide the damage by 2 before applying the object’s hardness. Some energy types might be particularly effective against certain objects, subject to GM discretion. For example, fire might do full damage against parchment, cloth, and other objects that burn easily. Sonic might do full damage against glass and crystal objects.

However, 'energy attacks' are not defined in the book. We can see that Fire is an energy. What else?

Resist Energy helps:

Core Rulebook, page 334 wrote:


This abjuration grants a creature limited protection from damage
of whichever one of five energy types you select: acid, cold,
electricity, fire, or sonic.

The simplest (but not necessarily correct) solution is that in the absence of an explicit list, this spell description includes the definition.

However, positive and negative energy do have 'energy' in the name, which is fairly compelling. Perhaps they weren't included in resist energy not because they aren't energy attacks, but because that would be outside the scope of the spell. Effects like death ward already replicate that effect, and are more thematically-suited to divine characters.

Further, perhaps an exhaustive list of what counts as energy types is not preferable or possible for Pathfinder. If a definite list were made in the Core Rulebook, that would tie the hands of future authors and render them less able to write up new energy types such as Hellfire.

Expanding on this question, is Force an energy type? If an object were attacked with Force damage, would the damage be divided before Hardness is applied? Or do Force spells merely signify that it is 'untyped' damage that also works well against incorporeal creatures, and wouldn't be divided any more than a strike with a mace?

I look forward to your input.


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Yes, but I see people mess this up a lot, so expect to see variation anyway.

One instance that incensed our table was a GM that ruled that if the last damage dealt to an NPC was lethal, and that brought it down, then it would die. It didn't matter to her if we'd been taking our nonlethal penalties to slug of 90% of its hit points if our spellcaster took it off its last legs with a magic missile.

Thinking over things, I think some of my GMs had a strong desire for the players not to capture enemies alive and had an agenda for ruling that they die.

Which is almost the opposite of my style -- I like having players take captives, since it's often a great way to feed them backstory they may have missed otherwise. Although I do remember a game where I had to start running my bandits as unrepentant cartoon villains, because every fight ended with a very long dialogue about seeking redemption and it was starting to slow the game down (hahah!).

They were interested in 'saving' people so I kept feeding them the occasional wayward sellsword, but I learned to space it out more ; )


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My vote is for Survival. The checks for getting lost are consequences of failing Survival checks, and items like compasses and astrolabes give bonuses to Survival by default.

Just knowing how to pilot a ship doesn't necessarily mean you know where to bring it, and the pilot of a ship may not necessarily be the navigator. Although it could certainly benefit a pilot to learn navigation, it doesn't make 'any less sense' than a rogue with +30 Disable Device but only +1 Perception, who can deftly neutralize traps but can't effectively find them in the first place.

Edit: I contradict myself. Checking the Astrolabe, it grants "a +2 circumstance on Knowledge (geography) and Survival checks to navigate in the wilderness (and on Profession [sailor] checks to navigate at sea)."


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We've had arguments about what the PCs would 'obviously do' before, and it's led us to making some standard operating procedures. We have cards players can put on the table saying SEARCHING and DETECT MAGIC to indicate that they're performing the indicated actions.

I don't feel cheated about it, since it eats into the rounds of their limited-duration spells / they have to re-cast the spell any time they stop concentrating. It's a tactical choice that they were willing to make.

I have a two-player rogue group, and we just have an agreement that anytime they're in a dungeon, they're trying to stealth. The character without Fast Stealth moves at half speed. It just makes it easier to have this agreement always be in effect unless told otherwise, because it means we're spending less time with me opening up an ambush combat and then having the player protest that they were stealthing and the ambushers shouldn't have seen them. In a bigger group, I'd probably also have STEALTHING cards or something.

There was a thread on here recently about a GM whose players would start metagaming and repositioning their characters as soon as he announced a trap or an ambush. Some people started chiming in that's why they have a standard marching order for traveling through the wilderness or down tunnels; and a standard operating procedure for encountering a door, looking for traps, and where the party is when trying to disarm it. It sounded like some good advice for avoiding fights.


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Absolutely. You'll notice that a lot of dungeons are prefaced with an 'alarm system' -- a trap or a monster that goes off shortly after the players hit the front door, and notify the other monsters that they have visitors.

The very first encounter of a dungeon may be weak, but very important, because once you've been announced you're never getting the full element of surprise back.


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I am now imagining a game with one player fielding a summoner, and another player fielding a demon trapped by her liberal planar binding. He spends the campaign trying to convince her that he really loves her and that he's not just trying to break free.

Maybe not appropriate for this situation, but that dynamic would be really fun to watch.


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Yep, I and my significant other have GMed for each other before. We've come to terms on spirituality, family, honesty, and politics; but good lord, roll out the fine points of stealth rules or readied actions and watch the fight begin.


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A character who has not yet acted during a combat is flat-footed. If there is not a combat, you are not flat-footed.

Maybe that reasoning is twinky, but if we're trying to loophole a spell into being unable to do what it does, then I don't see anything wrong with a little turnabout to loophole it right back.


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Seems to me that armor is the odd man out here. Explicitly, I think 'armor for unusual creatures' describes the difficulty in creating armor for creatures of humanoid (or not) forms, rather than for creatures of humanoid type.

Two good reasons that armor should be keyed to shape instead of type are lycanthropes and druids. Lycanthropes and druids do not change their creature Type when they Change Shape and Wild Shape, respectively, but their forms change.

If you interpret armor to be keyed to humanoid type, then a lycanthrope or druid can remove their armor, change form, and then wear their armor -- after all, under this interpretation, their types haven't changed (they are still humanoid), and the armor is designed for humanoids, thus the logic follows (against my common sense) that a werewolf in wolf form could wear platemail designed for a human.

This would also mean that existing character classes that become other creature types as capstone abilities would suddenly be unable to wear their armor. A spellcaster that becomes a lich, a monk that becomes an outsider, an oracle of life that becomes a plant or fey, and a green star adept that becomes fully adamantine are suddenly unable to use their equipments even if their forms are exactly as they were.

That works against my common sense too much, and further, it breaks too many things just to fix one.


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Oh good heavens, goblins, yes. I normally run my monsters realistically, with aims to kill, but I have some of the most fun with goblin encounters than any other even if they aren't anywhere near as lethal.

Players were in the sewers. They noticed there were creatures sleeping behind a shield propped up as a door, so they want back to the end of the hallway, and cast a ghost sound and a dancing lights.

The goblins begin pouring out of their hidden den, and the first one gets a readied arrow in the eye. The second runs up and misses; the second goblin can't fit on the sewer walkway, so he jumps into the water -- and begins to drown. From around the far corner comes a hooting goblin, jumping and spinning in the air trying to catch a dancing light.

The group puts down two more goblins, and another ally replaces him from behind. The archer fires a shot at the jumping goblin and misses gloriously; distracted by the attempt on his life, he picks up his new arrow then runs away screaming happily, having left the combat richer than he entered it.

The players dispatch the rest of the goblins and are about to start taking inventory of their scratches and spoils when a goblin bursts out of the sewer trench, sneak attacking somebody in the back of the group -- he finally succeeded a swim check, but the slow current had been dragging him backwards. The combat against the single swimming goblin lasted as long as the combat before it, as the cover granted by the water made him far more defensible.

It was far from the most threatening fights, but it was definitely one of the most entertaining.

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