Veneth Kestrel's page

Since playing Pathinder in-person lately has been difficult (for obvious reasons), I've been spending a lot of time messing around with updating old characters and such, which led me to looking at one of my favourite thematic creatures from Minions: Fearsome Foes, the Devil Doll.

That said, while thematically, the creature is fantastic (a tiny devil sent from Hell to corrupt children with a high potential for good or evil), it's statistics were somewhat off, in that familiar 3rd party way. Below are two conversions; a raw 3.0 - 3.5 - Pathfinder conversion of the monster, and a personalized version to bring it's stats and abilities to (hopefully) more in line with what is expected by CR and creature type.

I'd love to get some feedback on the revised version regarding it's CR and general balance.

• Incredibly low HP
  
• Incredibly high AC
  
• High attack bonus, but very low damage with no other real combat options
  
• Abysmal Fort save
  

• Redistributed stats to bring some values closer to average
  
• Stole Sneak Attack from the Salikotal Devil to improve combat effectiveness
  
• Added some thematically appropriate spell-like abilities, as the only devil with no spell-like abilities at all is the Lemure
  
• Reworded Air of Innocence and Enthrall to use actual Pathfinder spell effects rather than potentially vague or percentage based abilities
  

Some small, malevolent part of me hopes that Mythic Lightning Bolt functions like AD&D's lightning bolt... a geometry lesson in every casting.

Heck yes, I'd absolutely love to see a Pathfinder RPG Mythic Handbook, or something similar. Our DM loves running campaigns from around level 5 up to the mid twenties on a regular basis, so right now we're stuck with the fairly broken 3.0 Epic rules. I won't hold my breath, but I'm hoping for a proper Mythic handbook before he runs the sequel to a game that ended at about level 19.

That said, and as much as I used to be against the idea, there really does need to be a level cap at some point, or things just tend to get silly. Level 40 is about the highest we've ever reasonably managed to play in 3.X, and is probably the most logical end point. The one major point that I hope Paizo addresses if/when they do Mythic is Epic Spellcasting. It was awful in 3.0, I'm certain they can come up with something better.

The Lasher is a cool class, but it's completely broke as written in v.3.0. That's why you never saw it make into any of the Complete books in v.3.5. With some tinkering you could make it playable, but don't use it as written.

Question then from someone planning to run a Castlevania Pathfinder game soonish, what exactly is broken about it? I was thinking it would probably be the best prestige class to offer to whoever in the party plays the Belmont, and I'd like to know what I'm getting into.

Call me crazy, but gods have I been wanting to run a Castlevania campaign, set in fictional 16th century Europe, everyone plays one of the various vampire-killing bloodlines...

Anywho, I'd probably say Ranger, Paladin, or Inquisitor would be a better fit for a Belmont. Any of those would let you do the undead-hunter thing better, and give you some minor access to divine spells. Also the old 3.0 prestige class Lasher from Sword & Fist would be excellent for a whip user, and I'm sure I've seen a Pathfinder or at least 3.5 conversion for it somewhere.

Says the guy who doesn't have to spend time preparing!

About the GM who wings everything and keeps roughly two or three pages of notes for his entire 20 level campaign. A third of which is character and place names.

Wouldn't it be fun, I posit, if YOU have no idea what to expect from a troll unless you get that Knowledge check.

It is, if done occasionally. We've literally fought three monsters out of the bestiaries in 10 character levels. Everything else has either been: undead abominations that fly using their own ribcage and can't die, swarms of black particles that eat organic matter, and many many tentacle monsters. Oh, and all the custom monsters were so bizarre and obscure that the knowledge skill monkey can only occasionally figure out their weaknesses. We never did figure out how to permanently put those undead down, and spent 3 sessions beating them unconscious and then running in terror.

Second, in terms of looking for variety, I would suggest having your party use knowledge skills to learn about these things (especially if you face them more than once) -- if you know all the weak spots, it may be worth the GM's time to dig out a different monster.

Third: Remember that you're only facing 1 (albeit super) guy at a time when picking spells and take the ones that have secondary effects...

Don't get me wrong, every tentacle-horror is a slightly different tentacle-horror, so we can't exploit known weaknesses.

As for point three, this character isn't really a nuke caster. It's a bizarre divine/arcane build with a highly thematic spell selection (read: Yeah, mildly crippled already, but would be amazing against mobs). I'll have to take a look at some of that stuff, but I'm only willing to sacrifice the character theme to a point. Also the monsters are usually so powerful that minor 'you succeeded but still suck a little' debuffs have no noticeable effect.

As for you,.... why does "not knowing" the monster stats bug you, I'm curious?

It's not so much that I don't know the monster stats. I'm one of those players who goes "Gee, that's a troll, does my character know it's weak to fire or acid 'rolls knowledge' nope, oh well, guess he'll find out when it gets back up." What bugs me is that I'd like to actually fight a medusa or some hill giants, something cool and recognizable once in a while. Un-named Tentacle Horror #56 gets old after a while. Also the fact that I bought both bestiaries specifically so he could use them, and he doesn't, bugs the hell out of me.

Also, side note, we usually do only have one or two combats per session, so the prep time really shouldn't be massive.

Does he know the trick of pulling encounters out of adventure path books and normal standalone adventure to filling CR encounters without doing much extra work?

He won't touch AP's or Modules. To paraphrase, "They're stale, too straight-forward, and have lowest-common-denominator puzzle design". Yeah, he hates Modules, not likely to happen.

Also, I'll repeat, he's a pretty good GM aside from the monster thing and impossibly convoluted or subtle puzzle clues.

I would bring this up to him first, and explain it to him in detail. If you are not a good "on the spot" speaker then shoot him an email. Then stomp away if need, but I hope it does not come to that.

Yeah, already brought it up with him a few times, hasn't really helped. After I nagged him enough we got one combat with 5 of the same type of angel. It actually stomped us pretty hard, as opposed to our usual steamroller effect. Since then, three more single-monster fights...

Also, not exactly sure how to pull of a character who's invincible against single enemies but still manages to be weak to groups. Best I can think of is a super-tank who can force single monsters to aggro him exclusively, but he'd either need stupefyingly high AC or he'd need to be DR focused instead, as most monsters we fight have absurd attack bonuses.

You have a better grasp of the game, you own the books, and you're not taking cues from mmo design. Why not GM yourself?

Eh, mostly because it takes me a minimum of 3 months of planning to set up a game. I'm really bad at winging it as far as plot goes, so I have to try and at least roughly plan the entire damn campaign before I start running it. As such, I usually run a game once every couple years.

As indicated in the title, roughly 90% of all combat encounters our party faces are against a single APL +2 to +5 monster of some sort. Additionally, (and this mostly irks me because I'm the only one who owns a set of books, meaning I literally bought some books specifically for him to use) the DM mostly likes to use the Bestiary as a 'reference' to figure out roughly what stats his custom horror-terrors should have, rather than using actual published monsters. Don't get me wrong, in moderation that's fine, but this is nearly every single combat encounter. Oh, and the one encounter in this entire campaign (which has run from level 5 to 15) that was against more than one monster was 5 of the same monster. Lovely variety there.

I've already sat down and talked to him about this, and have done the same with some of the other players. One guy built a Barbarian around massive intimidate and group intimidate skills, and just doesn't ever get a chance to use them. I'm playing a utility buff/debuff Mystic Theurge and aside from Haste at the start of combat and some horribly inefficient emergency healing, I'm pretty much useless, as monsters usually have to roll a 2 or higher to pass my save-or-suck spells.

Really, I'm looking for suggestions on how to convince this DM that:
A) Actually using the bestiary is a good thing.
B) Variety and multiple-monster encounters are worth the extra planning time.
C) Action economy is IMPORTANT. Most of his big-bad's only get one to three rounds of attacks before dropping.

And to answer the obvious question, he's the only guy DM'ing something other than 4th Ed in this tiny city, and actually is pretty good aside from this.

Honestly the only thing I can think of at this point is trying to build a character who's nearly invincible against single large opponents but who could be taken down by a group, and then just stomping everything with it until he gets the hint.

When did this become the "lets argue about how lava works in D&D" thread? Anyway, one silly DM rule I had to put up with was that if you didn't have your hand on your head, everything you said was in character. His reasoning for this had something to do with the third party module he was running, but seemed to mostly be an excuse to treat us like morons every time we forgot the rule.

I've only ever played one character with a non-standard age category myself. And even then I actually technically didn't.

Back in 3.5 I played a character in an evil campaign who'd been killed by slavers when he was 8 and raised as a Curst by a necromancer, who had him trained as an assassin. Technically he was in his 40's when he joined the party, but he still looked 8, due to not physically aging as an undead creature. In that character's case we just ignored aging bonuses an penalties entirely due to the weird circumstances of his existence. He's still one of my favorite characters and an RP gold mine (devil-possessed teddy bear cohort, constantly poisoning everything, intense hatred of slavers...)

I guess the point of this is that there's always some way for a DM to make oddly aged characters work in a campaign. It just takes some creative flexibility and players willing to not ludicrously min-max.

Lightning is way cooler than fire.

Totally agreed. There was actually a 3.5 spell called Scintillating Sphere that was literally a lightning equivalent of Fireball. Pretty sure it was mechanically identical.

Bonus if the dimension is one where time moves faster.

*party blows up lich, cheers*

*lich reappears fully healed and rested.*

"What?"

*lich slaughters party* "Has it really been a month? my how time flies when you're rebuilding your corpse"

Note to self, purchase a scroll of Genesis once I get my multi-phylactery.

There was a 3pp book in 3rd edition that featured a Demilich who's phylactery was a tiny crystal he surgically embedded into the heart of a mute orphan. Being essentially just a skull, he then had this orphan carry him around on a cushion, which contained a decoy phylactery. He also pretended to be completely and utterly senile so as to not appear a threat to anyone.

Another interesting one I'd heard of was in a Neverwinter Nights module, set in Forgotten Realms. The lich in question had the brilliant idea to make the Karsus-stone his phylactery. It was massive, everyone knew where it was, and no-one could do anything about it because it was an indestructible god-artifact.

My personal choice of phylactery was a circular platinum amulet that could separate into a number of puzzle pieces. For now, it's sitting in a permanent Secret Chest (thereby somewhere in the nigh-infinite vastness of the Ethereal plane) under the effects of a permanent Mage's Private Sanctum, Invisibility, Shrink Item, and Magic Aura. Once Epic Spells are available, I'll be casting Aumvor's Fragmented Phylactry on it so that each of the individual puzzle pieces comprising the amulet are in fact individual phylacteries. Then I'll hide a half-dozen of them in Secret chests while I try to figure out what to do with the other dozen or so.

You could always skip the middle-man and play a Magitech Templar

Nice list. This should save time hunting through books for non-standard races. Random bug note, the Kobold bestiary link redirects to Ifrit by mistake.

One little tidbit to throw in here from a Dread Necro I played in 3.5 a while back. Greater Harm is a 3.0 spell, and mechanically works very poorly compared to the actual Harm spell in its current form. I would suggest replacing it with Avasculate (3.5 Spell Compendium).

Going on the assumption that you're still using some 3.x stuff with your Pathfinder, I at least have some ideas how the wizard could be more effective against such a monster.

As already mentioned, the Orb spells would work great for direct damage, as would any Conjuration (Acid) spells, as they ignore SR.

If you really want to hand this thing it's tail on a platter though, here are a couple of (really cheesy) options...

If you can get to a shop and pick up a couple scrolls...

Assay Spell Resistance (Spell Compendium or Complete Arcane, Sorc/Wiz 4) - for 1 round/level, you get +10 to beat a specific creature's SR.

Plus either:

Avasculate (Spell Compendium, Sorc/Wiz 7) - you'll have to cast this one from the scroll, but it's sure to make the dragon have second thoughts. The target's current hit points are halved. If they make a Fort save, they avoid being stunned for a round.

Or

Explosive Cascade (Magic of Faerun version, Sorc/Wiz 4) - You'll need a way to make this do cold damage instead of fire, but if you can, it's how I once killed a great wyrm white dragon with a 10th level wizard in one shot. Just bounce the iceball up and down every square the dragon inhabits for 10x10d6 cold damage. The GM will probably say hell no to this one though, as the spell has since been errata'd in Spell Compendium so you can't pull this kind of cheese with it.

Okay, who else reading this got hooked in by the title?

...

That said, the title has planted a bug in my brain that I can't get out; the cavalier is the perfect mix of arrogance, superiority, and raw machismo for making Old Spice Guy.

I just need to learn the class in order to write him up.

Hello gamers. Look at your character, now back to me, now back to your character, now back to me. Sadly, he isn't me, but if he stopped using his boring old core class and switched to APG Cavalier he could be more like me. Look down, now back up, where are you? You're charging across the field of battle as the character your character could be like. What's in your hand? Back at me. It's a +5 magical lance with an orc skewered upon it. Look again. The orc is now DIAMONDS. Anything is possible when you're a Cavalier and not a core class. I'm on a horse.

Well, it's not looking promising, but I'll give this a single bump before letting it sink into the depths of the forums.

On the off chance anyone looks at this thread who isn't in my area, any recommendations where else to look for Pathfinder / 3.5 players online?

Mauril's almost certainly correct here. I ran into a similar issue to this in 3.5 with the spell Exploding Cascade, which created a 5ft. fireball that bounced through 1 square / caster level before fizzling. It eventually received errata which specifically stated that you could only hit a specific creature once per casting, to prevent people from just bouncing it back and forth on top of a creature multiple times.

Due to some recent losses, our group is extremely small at the moment, and actively hunting for several new players. We're running a high-powered custom setting using Pathfinder with some 3.5 material. The party is currently 8th level, but contains only two members. The game runs on Saturdays from around 6pm to 12am, though we may be open for rescheduling if necessary.

For a bit of info on the current party and some of the ridiculous crap we've gotten up to, check my post in this thread.

If interested, please just reply here for now, and we can work out further contact information.

I'd also be interested in any suggestions as to where else online I can hunt for players.

Currently playing in a homebrew "Evolving World" campaign. Due to ... social issues a couple months back, our regular group kinda exploded, so the party is incredibly tiny at the moment.

Alicia "Indigo" Valynn - Half-Elf Sorc 4 / Oracle 4
-Plans to become a Mystic Theurge next level. Basically the party's skill monkey due to how horribly ineffective she is in combat compared to her brother right now. Took the Inattentive flaw (-4 perception) to pay for the Spell Thematics (painting) feat. This essentially means that in exchange for constantly failing perception checks, all her spells look like she's painting them (and are slightly harder to identify with spellcraft). Appropriately, her staff is a giant paintbrush. Due to her abysmal perception, she has literally slept through an earthquake while on the back of a moving wagon pulled by a panicking horse.

Niaru Valynn - Half-Elf Magus 8
-The party's combat monster. He currently loves channeling scorching rays through his scimitar on damn near every attack. Keeps falling prey to horrible rolls on will saves. Recently went insane after managing to roll a -70 or so on a knowledge check on a Rakhasha (we use a variant where if you roll 1 or 20 you just add + or - 20 and roll again... he rolled 4 1's in a row). His brand new second personality thinks it's a Samurai. Hilariously enough, we recently came across a fairly powerful magic composite longbow and some plate mail horse barding. Since the DM has ruled it to be far more awesome if he actually switches classes when his personality swaps, mounted archery samurai hilarity will likely ensue.

The party also has had a rotating crew of 1-2 NPC's as a DM mercy. Current NPC's are:

"Blinky" - Gnome Wizard ??
-Seems to be an evocation specialist. Thank the gods, cause we needed more firepower. Level unknown, but he's at least high enough to lob Fireballs. Nicknamed blinky because when we met him, he had one eye, no ears, no tongue, no legs, and one arm with three fingers. Our temporary Beholder overlords wanted someone to scribe scrolls... and not much else. Blinking was pretty much all he could do. We have since had most of his limbs regenerated, but he's still missing one eye. Our NPC cleric exploded before he could finish the job.

??? - Human Rogue ??
-Seems to be based around stealth sneak attacking with throwing knives. Exact level also unknown, though he's apparently going to be a permanent fixture until we can find more players. Thankfully his presence is taking some of the skill-monkey duties off of Alicia.

I removed a post and a reply to it. Edition-bashing is passe.

Incidentally, since one of the posts removed was the first post, the question this topic was created for no longer exists. However, part of the first post is still readable in the rollover text for the topic on the main page, and that text contains the 4th ed joke you removed the post for...

In 3.0/3.5 I've played a dragon, a centaur, and a couple of devils. If you count normal races with templates, add in Curst, Lich, Half-Celestial, Death Knight, and Psuedonatural (the non-epic version). In Pathfinder so far all I've played monster-wise is a Lich and a one-shot at CR20 as a Blue Dragon.

Incidentally, a classless CR20 Blue Dragon is FANTASTICALLY overpowered in a 20th level party, even if everyone is playing a monster. If I recall correctly, I had just over 800hp and dealt several hundred damage a round. Much as I hated the old system, some sort of ECL adjudication over and above the CR calculation really is necessary for a lot of monsters.

I think the Bestiary rules probably work alright for templates and monsters at or under CR6-ish. It might even work ok up to CR 10 or so, but it definitely breaks at high CR, especially on monsters with a "Casts as an x level spellcaster" casting progression.

Honestly, the only part of this that really strikes me as at all odd are the Ninja's stats. I mean, the players were built with an 18/16/15/14/13/12 array. Looking at the Ninja's stats, I assume he started with 14/18/15/12/13/16, bumped to 14/20/13/12/13/18 by racial, and 14/21/14/12/14/18 by leveling. I assume the other 5 DEX and 6 CHA come from either unmentioned gear or Tome usage. This is likely just an oversight in his listed equipment. Either way, his final array certainly isn't any more ridiculous than what I'd expect the party to have with that starting array at that level. Heck, the Sorceress was probably sitting at a 29 CHA with just leveling and a +CHA headband.

Other than that bit of weirdness, the assassin had a tactical advantage versus a home-field advantage. It's explicitly stated the party even had mooks guarding the base. I assume hired Warriors, but what level? This and the other defenses on the home base that the ninja had to handle probably need to be quantified here.

Also, he could have started things off with a coup-de-grace on at least one character while they were still asleep, but chose to set off an alarm next to their bedroom and let them get up first instead, which was actually surprisingly honorable.

So was the fight cheap? Perhaps, though not nearly as much so as some people seem to indicate, or as it could have been. With a +39 stealth, the DM could have probably outright destroyed the party while they slept with that Ninja without even waking them up.

Share??!?? :D (that's awesome!)

Very well, let this abomination of magic, or science, or perhaps even magi-science, be known to all.

Hmmm... the Plain Text output of this generator seems a little wacky, particularly how it lists the effects of every spell this thing has.

Typical tactics for this thing would be to hover 30-40 feet in the air and fire off Protection from Arrows, then lob ray attacks at anything that can still manage to attack it. If forced into melee, or given more prep time, it drops Mage Armor and Shield, substantially boosting it's AC. If it runs out of rays, the Bee can use it's extra reach from the aberrant bloodline to sting characters while hovering out of their reach.

Thanks to this, I have the stats for an Advanced Giant Bee Sorcerer. It is literally a Giant Bee That Shoots Frikken' Lasers. Dear gods, what have I done?

Ok, I hate to double-post, but I may have just had a ridiculous breakthrough. Monster exp rewards by CR follow a completely linear formula, increasing by 1.5x/1.333x/1.5x/1.333x etc. all the way up the chart. Except at CR22, where they round up to the nearest 1000, and 24, where they just plain round to the nearest 1000. If you round down to the nearest 10000 at CR26, a CR26 monster gives 2,400,000 exp. From this point, up to CR41 every CR monster gives exp exactly 1000 times that of a monster at it's CR-20, at which point you can repeat the rounding.

Similarly, if I can figure out the math from level 21 to level 26 to make level 26 occur at 15,000,000 exp, then the exp required to level follows the exact same formula and multipliers, times 1000, as the formula from level 6 to level 20.

I'll see if I can't finish figuring this thing out tomorrow. I've been tinkering with this thing on-and-off for hours, and frankly, it's getting a bit too late in the evening for me to be dealing with higher math.

Ok, so... kind of an odd place for my first post on these forums, but as I'm highly interested in expanding Pathfinder into Epic Levels as seamlessly as possible, I figured I'd give this a go.

I'll warn right now though that this may be rather long and rambling...

Sorcerer's formulas are quite good, but as noted, the exp is slightly off for a few levels, and there didn't seem to be a discernible pattern for the levels at which the rounding multiplier increased.

I... think I've ironed most of the bugs out of it, by approaching it from a slightly different angle. Nobbs mentioned that with the Fast progression a character is intended to level every 3.25 encounters. This got me thinking, with all this effort being put into extending the leveling chart past 20, what about extending the exp given by monsters past CR 25? Thankfully, exp based on CR is a much simpler calculation. In Open Office Calc, assuming B1 is the exp for a CR1 monster (400) the exp is calculated as B2=B1*(3/2), B3=B2*(4/3), repeating.

You then calculate the exp to level based on monster exp*(3.25) + (EXP required for previous level) rounded up to the current rounding multiple.
For example: C2=ROUNDUP((C1+B1*(13/4))/100;0)*100
Where the /100 *100 business is the amount to which the equation is rounded.

The rounding modifier and type change as well, as noted in Sorcerer's method, though thankfully there is actually a pattern now.

At level 7, and every six levels thereafter, you round to the nearest multiple, rather than rounding upwards. (ROUND instead of ROUNDUP in the OOC equation)

At Lvl 2+ round up to the nearest 100.
At Lvl 4+ round up to then nearest 500.
At Lvl 6+ round up to the nearest 1000.
At Lvl 11+ round up to the nearest 5000.
At Lvl 16+ round up to the nearest 50000.
At Lvl 21+ round up to the nearest 100000.
(I think I could continue to extrapolate this using the "Method of Finite Differences" but I really don't feel like trying to bludgeon my way through polynomial equations at the moment...)

Using this formula, the ONLY level where the calculated exp differs from the actual exp table is level 15 (420,000 instead of 425,000) so it's possible that an additional modifier of some sort may have to be applied every 15 levels to keep the formula exactly perfect, but since we don't have an official chart up to level 30, I have no idea what that might be.