Uzziel the Angel's page

I've adopted a couple of Pathfinder rules into my epic-level 3.5 game (extra +1 hit point per level of favored class, extra feat every two levels rather than every three) and am considering adding the extra +2 to ability initial ability scores that I see the core PC races get. I'm wondering though if all the NPCs and monsters get the same extra +2 to their ability scores over what they got in 3.5, or if only PCs (or only the core PC races, whether PCs or not) get them? Thanks!

I noticed on page 35 of Dragon 347 that Ogrémoch has an ability listed after hit points called absorb cold. I don't see any explanation for absorb cold. Does anyone have any idea whether this is just an error and if not, how it works? Thanks. :-)

I noticed on page 35 of Dragon 347 that Ogrémoch has an ability listed after hit points called absorb cold. I don't see any explanation for absorb cold. Does anyone have any idea whether this is just an error and if not, how it works? Thanks. :-)

Room C17 of the Fiery Sanctum contains a secret door in its north wall that leads to an unlabeled, rectangular room. The rectangular shape appears to indicate a constructed room. The map of the room shows what appears to be a bench or table in the southwest corner and what appears to be a manufactured border to a lava pool in the northeast corner. The description for room C17 on page 279 appears to contain no reference to the secret door or the unlabeled room beyond, yet an artist went to some length to give the secret room some features that we can see on the map.

Does anyone know what's the purpose or the contents of the secret room? Did it appear in Dungeon but get left out of the Shackled City hardcover?

If you've run this part of the adventure and couldn't find anything about the secret door or the room beyond, did you just ignore the room, or perhaps not even have the secret door and room at all? Thanks.

It's not clear to me whether the type pyramid from pages 142 and 143 applies to the type of the base creature or just the type of an added template. An outsider, for instance, appears at the very top of they pyramid. If you've added an outsider template to a base creature and then add a dragon template, the pyramid causes the creature to remain an outsider. That much is clear from the language on page 143 under "Construct, Outsider, Undead:" "If some other template is applied to them, they generally retain whichever of these three types they have."

What causes confusion is the language "if some other template," which implies that the base creature became an outsider by the application of a template. To me it would make sense that it doesn't matter whether a creature started as a outsider or became an outsider from a template, that either way you can't change the outsider type with the application of a template, whether it's another template or the only template.

So if you took the half-dragon template and applied it to the scyllan, an outsider from Stormwrack, would it become a dragon (replacing its d8 hit dice with d12 hit dice and its 8 skill points per die with 6 skill points per die) because dragon is the first template applied and the pyramid applies only to creature type from templates? Or would it remain an outsider because the pyramid applies to creature type regardless of its origin?

How do you interpret it, and why? Thanks. :)

When making a grapple check to "damage your opponent," do you threaten a critical when you roll a natural 20 (or 19-20 if you have Improved Critical with your unarmed attack) as you would on a regular attack roll? The text on page 156 under Grapple Checks says that a grapple check is like a melee attack roll, which could indicate either yes or no to my question.

In the normal course of humanoids grappling each other, it probably doesn't make a big difference whether you can do 1d3 or 2d3 points of nonlethal damage, but it matters more for a monk who can do lethal damage and substantially more of it, especially as she reaches higher levels. It might matter even more for a gargantuan advanced dire shark using Improved Grab to hold onto a character and rolls a grapple check round after round to inflict damage on the grabbed creature--especially if the 54-hit-die advanced dire shark has Devastating Critical.

It seems like the dire shark should pose just as much a threat to you by holding you in its jaws and biting you and it did from biting you in the first place--perhaps even more, as your struggles to free yourself would tend to rip and tear your flesh even more than the shark does completely on its own. Allowing it to threaten a critical on its grapple check to inflict damage seems like the way to replicate that danger. What do you think? Thanks. :)

P.S. Is there any way to set my account so that I get an email when someone posts to my thread? Thanks! :)

Dear Paizo,

We the posters of this thread respectfully request that you include epic material (levels 21+) in your Pathfinder RPG revision of 3.5. Thank you very much! :)

Currently I use a character sheet called the Singin' Sheet, by KEVIN ROSE, MATTHIJS HAKFOORT, GREYKNIGHT AND MICHAEL STROPE, that automatically calculates skill points, skill bonuses, base attack bonuses, ability score bonuses, and base saving throw bonuses. It's by far the best calculating character sheet of all the ones I've seen. It even adds bonuses to skill synergies for having 5 ranks in the appropriate skills. Best of all, from my viewpoint, is the fact that they have a Mac version (actually three Mac versions) too. [Actually it uses Adobe Acrobat, so any OS that can use Acrobat can use any of the various forms of the sheet.]

I'd already considered consolidating Balance and Tumble into a skill called Acrobatics, and Listen and Spot into a skill called Perception, but haven't implemented the consolidations as house rules because I make heavy use of the Singin' Spell sheet. I run a high-level, low-epic-level campaign, and when I create NPCs they often have several types of racial or class hit dice, base attack bonuses, base save bonuses, and skill points per level. Using the Singin' Sheet reduces my preparation time so much that I'd be loathe to abandon it just to follow the changes to skills that you've proposed in the alpha pdf.

If, however, you were to create an automatic calculating character sheet of a quality comparable to the Singin' Sheet, I would find the conversion much easier and would be much, much more likely to convert to the Pathfinder rules. You could even, dare I say it, hire these fine fellows to develop a Pathfinder Singin' Sheet. You can find them at http://singin.sheet.googlepages.com/sheet.

In general I loved the added breadth that 3.5 brought to damage reduction. I really value DR #/alignment and DR #/special metal. The only weakness I've found came from collapsing all the remaining damage reduction into either DR #/magic or DR #/epic. These two forms of damage reduction typically offer no protection against the opponents that the creatures with such damage reduction typically face.

I think that the portion of damage reduction represented now by DR #/magic or DR #/epic should be re-expanded to require specific enhancement bonuses to overcome. Here's what I've done as a house rule in my campaign: when a creature has DR #/magic now it gets the DR #/+X it had in 3.0; when a creature has DR #/epic now it gets the greater of DR #/+6 or the DR #/+X it had in 3.0.

I've made a few other minor tweaks. For common templates with DR #/magic, like the half-celestial, I've had the DR start as #/+1 and rise over the course of 20 levels to #/+3. For dragons I've adopted the following rules: Change DR 5/magic to DR 5/+2. Change DR 10/magic to DR 10/+3. Change DR 15/magic to DR 15/+4. Change DR 20/magic to DR 20/+5.

Currently your alpha rules give a 20th-level fighter DR 10/- when using the armor he or she has mastered. While the damage reduction applies only to one specific type of armor, in practice the fighter will virtually always have that type of armor, and therefore virtually always have DR 10/-. Heretofore DR #/- has been, for player characters, the exclusive province of the barbarian.The barbarian at 20th level, however, gets only DR 5/-. At a minimum, then, a fighter should get no better than DR 5/-, and even that infringes on the uniqueness of the barbarian. I would prefer to see the fighter, like a warforged with adamantine body, get DR #/adamantine. For the 20th-level fighter I'd accept DR 10/adamantine, or perhaps even 15/adamantine.

I've downloaded it and started looking it over. Some of the changes I've seen so far, like giving a character an extra hit point per level of his or her favored class and the fighter's armor and weapons training I like. I don't like the fact that humans have to choose a single favored class at first level, and I think the armor and weapons mastery go too far. I don't at all like raising the hit dice of rangers, rogues, sorcerers, and wizards. I don't see much need to change the way the game handles first-level hit points. I'd thought about combined a couple pair of skills into single skills, although I would have combined Balance and Tumble, which both use Dexterity, but not Jump, which uses Strength, into Acrobatics. (Yup, I had the same name in mind.) I'd also considered combining Listen and Spot (both Wisdom-based) into Perception. (Again I had the same name in mind.) I use the Singin' Sheet to do many of my calculations for me, however, so I'd have to give it up and do them all by hand again if I were to make such skill combinations. In any case I wouldn't want to include Jump under Acrobatics, transforming it from a Strength-based ability to a Dexterity-based ability. Jump is one of the few skills at which fighters and barbarians can currently excel, while rogues can already excel at so many skills, so that Jump should be kept separate and Strength-based for the benefit of fighters and barbarians.

For clerics, I see no particular need for at-will orisons versus the current system of a limited number of 0-level spells, especially at the cost of losing cure minor wounds, which PCs and NPCs use all the time for such things as reviving unconscious NPCs for interrogation while keeping them disabled. While the domain powers add a nice touch of flavor, I'm not sure that it's worth reducing the flexibility of spell choice. I strongly oppose having the turn undead ability grant healing to living creatures, both friend and foe. If you want to use the power of undead turning to heal creatures (and it should be at the choice of the cleric, not all living creatures) then make a feat along the lines of those in Complete Divine.

I don't mind having a slow, a moderate and a fast advancement experience progression, but one of them (the slow one presumably) should correspond to the current advancement. Using any of your advancement progressions would slash the level of all the characters in the party I currently run. After the players have done all the work to get so far, slashing their levels is the last thing I'd do. Nor am I willing to extend their current levels through much higher experience requirements to the next levels. I have to add that I'm disappointed to see nothing in the pdf for epic levels. I'm hoping that eventually you'll add epic material, but given the way you've ratcheted up the experience progression for the higher levels, it seems more likely that you intend to deal with epic levels by making it impossible to ever get enough experience to get there.

Based on what I've seen so far--and I haven't yet read everything in the alpha pdf--it's more likely that I'd adopt an item or three out of the rules rather than adopt them wholesale, making it less likely that I'd purchase the books (beta or final) when they come out. The further the rules depart from 3.5, the less likely I'll use any of them. Items like an extra hit point per level in the favored class don't require much adjustment, but I don't really want to sit down for each and every new clerical domain I've created and have to create new domain powers, or for each item like weapon mastery's 100% chance of avoiding being disarmed have to house-rule that it simply grants a +20 or +30 bonus on checks to avoid being disarmed. I'm already doing the latter sort of thing with spells like freedom of movement, true seeing and mind blank, and if Pazio's Pathfinder requires me to do the same or even more, I might as well stick with 3.5.

I selected the option of taking store credit for the remainder of my Dragon subscription fee. I'm trying to buy something now with that store credit but I'm not seeing any way to apply the store credit to what I owe. Can anyone help me out?

Thanks! :)

Is the gargantuan blue dragon really 4" by 4" at the base? I can't tell from the photograph, but it looks longer than it is wide. Thanks! :)