Krome wrote:
Eh. In the Wheel of Time books, if you've read that, I think the part where Perrin forges an awesome magical warhammer was really dramatic and cool. I donno, personally I like playing wizards that research spells, create magical items, write books, and basically try to advance the science of magic when they're not out adventuring.
Me: Jason! You're not hurting it because you're using a non-magical weapon. Pull out that magical dagger you found at the beginning of the quest!
Anguish wrote:
I really hate that kind of reasoning. It's just unfair to players who take crafting feats. Take two wizards. One wizard takes a few crafting feats, the other instead takes a few feats to make their magic more effective instead (spell perfection, metamagic feats, whatever.) Which one is better off? It's tough to say; the second wizard is better and more flexible with his own magic, but the first wizard has more wands and toys to play with. They're probably pretty balanced. Unless the DM then goes and deliberately unbalances the first wizard by giving him less gold for no reason. Then the second wizard without crafting feats is clearly better off; he just buys the stuff instead of making it with the extra gold the DM is giving him for no reason, and just ends up being more powerful. If a player wants to use his feats/skills/traits to get more gold (crafting, professions, the traits that let you start with money), then that's fine. He then has less feats and skills and traits to use during the adventure, but that's balanced with the fact that he probably has slightly better equipment to compensate. If you take that away, then that's just unfairly treating one play-style worse then a different playstyle. Hey, if you really don't want your players to be crafters, then just don't let them be crafters. Don't let them use their feats for that and then cripple them to a point where it does them no good.
As for the "putting party members at risk"; that can be true, it depends on the sitatuion. Generally, though, if the cleric heals you back up to 2 hitpoints, you don't charge into melee. It's certanly something to keep in mind. It can go the other way, too. If you're in a situation where "This fight should be fine, we're winning, but the fighter is getting a little low and there is a 5% chance that that guy gets a full damage crit next round and just kills the fighter in one shot", it can be a reasonable option to heal the fighter to get him out of megacrit range. Yeah, a 5% risk is small, but it will happen from time to time, and avoiding unnecessary risks is a good thing. "Devil's Advocate" wrote:
Oh, sure. I'm not suggesting that you heal if you can't keep up with damage. Again, I'm not saying that in-combat healing is usually the best option. Most of the time, you're better off doing something else in combat and healing later, it's better in terms of action economy. But the fact that you CAN do it when it's appropriate is a significant part of your flexibility and combat effectiveness as a cleric, and just forgetting about the option completely does make you less effective.
Bigtuna wrote:
Well, no. If by healing you give your ally another action :AND: you negate your enemy's action at the same time, then your action is now roughly TWICE as important as your allies action.
Nether wrote:
Why do people say stuff like this? Assuming that NPC's role stats with 3d6, then 17% of all NPCs have an intellegence of 7 or under. That's not a "mild retard", that's about 1 out of 5 people. You're not a genius, but you're not an idiot either, you're just a little below average. A Charisma of 5 or less is lower then that (about 5% chance), but that's still 1 in 20 people. If you work with 20 people, one of them has a 5 or lower charisma; he might be a little socially awkward, but he still gets by in society ok. All the stat inflation in pathfinder makes people forget how low "normal" stats are. I think that's part of the reason that people get so up in arms about "stat dumping".
JrK wrote:
If you are in a situation where an action spent healing on your part will keep another party member on his feet for another round, then healing is probably optimal; it costs you one action to heal the damage, it costs the enemy one action to deal it again, and it gives your ally one extra action. That situation doesn't come up all that often, but when it does, healing is probably optimal (assuming by "optimal" we mean "most likely to win the fight".) And the fact that you can do it at will without needing to prepare any specialized spells means that when it is optimal to heal, then you can always do so. Now, it's not optimal to use combat healing to keep your allies at max HP; it's probably better to let them take a few hits, hit the enemy a few times yourself, and then heal them after the combat. But if a heal spell this round will keep your ally on their feet for another round, then it's worth using.
cartmanbeck wrote:
:blinks: Leadership? Really? For a tiger? Why not with the Handle Animal skill? That actually has rules for rearing a wild animal yourself and then training it for combat, and it makes a lot more sense for a druid.
The good thing about in-combat healing is that you can do it any time it seems like a good idea without actually devoting any prepared spell slots to it since you can cast healing spells spontaneously as a cleric. It's often not the best option, but more options are always better. You do also have the option of swinging a weapon. Even if you don't have a lot of strength, you still have a halfway decent BAB, decent hitpoints, and medium armor. Again, options are good, especially early on when your spells/day are fairly limited. If you are focused on casting and don't spend resources improving your fighting, then that option will drop in usefulness as you level up, but that's fine because you'll have more spells/level then. Clerics have a lot of decent in-combat spells. Dropping a buff before combat starts or in the first round of combat can be a good move, but keep in mind the cost/reward thing; the less rounds there are left in the combat, the less good a buff is going to do. Other then that, Cleric has some decent save-or-suck spells that might work well for you if you have a high wisdom score (cause fear, hold person, blindness, ect), some good summoning spells (often a great option), and you can do some blasting. Cleric also has a lot of debuffing spells, but I'm not as big a fan of these, personally; if I'm going to be hitting an enemy with something he can save against, it might as well be a save-or-suck spell, not just a -2 to attack or something. As a cleric, you have a lot of options, and it costs you nothing to try out stuff and see how well it works for yourself, since you don't need a spellbook or anything to prepare whatever you want. Play around with different things, see what you like.
davidvs wrote:
If it's evil to endanger your life in order to do what you think is right, then every adventurer is evil. It's really a "does the end justify the means" type of question. Using dishonorable means to do good means you're a chaotic good type of character. Using evil means to do good probably makes you about true neutral on the alignment scale. Those are fine types of characters to play, but neither one is lawful good behavior.
Elamdri wrote:
Wait, what? If the pickpocket has the evil alignment, and he is level 5, then he will show up as "evil" for purposes of detect evil. That's what the spell description says.
Elamdri wrote:
Evil is as much a part of the alignment system as good and neutral are. Humans, in general, are classified as "neutral", which means that there are about as many evil humans as there are good humans. It's not just the random super-evil-wizard-of-doom; it's maybe 25% of the population. 25% evil, 25% good, 50% neutral, or something like that. Now, granted, people under level 5 don't usually ping as evil because that's one of the limitations on the detect evil spell, but that's irrelevant. If you're a level 5 thief, and you make your living by picking pockets, conning people out of their hard-earned gold, breaking-and-entering, ect, then you are probably evil, unless you do a lot of good to balance that out. A person is evil if they do more bad things then good things. In fact, that's what most evil PC's in non-evil campaigns are, "Well, ok, I like gold, and going on adventures is even more profitable then mugging people, so I might as well join this adventuring group for a while. I'm not going to betray them; that would be stupid, it'd probably get me killed, and in any case they're my meal ticket." Does them being evil mean they automatically deserve to be randomly murdered? Hardly. Most people who are evil aren't cartoonish super-villains. For the most part, evil is quite banal. "Detect evil" is not a "GM is it ok if I kill this dude" button.
Atarlost wrote:
That's what a CG character might say to a Paladin, sure. A paladin would say that the end does not justify the means. It's not ok to torture a prisoner for any reason, not even if it might save innocent lives, because once you start down that road, you risk becoming as bad as the monsters you are fighting. Honor means that you don't murder helpless prisoners of war, partly because you know that if you do that that the enemy will do the same, but mostly just because you understand that it's wrong. It's not at all about appearance; in fact, it's the opposite. "It's frustrating when you know you still have your honor but you have a poor reputation, but there are worse things. It's a far worse feeling when everyone else believes you are right, but you know deep in your heart that your honor is gone." I have had a lot of fun playing a paladin. My last character deeply and utterly believed that in a fair, honorable fight, that the gods would protect the righteous and that the outcome of the fight would result in divine justice. Was he right? Well, he rolled pretty well, so it often seemed like it. :) That doesn't mean he wouldn't use stealth and such in the right situation; only a fool would try to fight an entire army by himself, and often stealth lets you avoid unnecessary killing completely. He didn't judge his party members, since he knew that they were honestly trying to do good, but personally, he did not like to attack someone in the back, and would much rather challenge a single enemy to a direct one-on-one fight. Does that make him "lawful stupid"? Possibly. I don't care, though; he was fun to play, and effective enough that the rest of the party was fine with him occasionally going for a glorious duel with the enemy general instead of slitting his throat in his sleep. I'm enough of a roleplayer that I am willing to be less effective then would be totally optimal by acting in a way consistent with my character's belief system. So long as you aren't a pain to fellow party members and don't try to hog the spotlight all the time, they're usually just fine with letting you get on your own character's personal style of badass every now and then.
master arminas wrote: Such beliefs are not suited for everyone: neither Arthur himself, nor Lancelot, nor any other of his Knights of the Round Table were Paladins. Actually, I think Lancelot is really the guy that the Paladin was based on. I mean, he fell for committing an act of evil, lost all his supernatural fighting abilities because of it, and then wandered in the wilderness for years until he managed to achieve atonement.
Don't have them just stand and face wave after wave of zombies, that is boring. Have them on the run from zombies. They have to sneak/fight/run their way out of a city, as quietly as possible. The challenge isn't just killing the 5 or 6 zombies in front of you, it's getting past them before the 500 zombies behind you catches up. Have stuff happen as they try to flee. Do they try to get into the house where they hear someone screaming? Do they scavenge for supplies? Do they try to investigate the old graveyard outside of town to see where the zombies are coming from? Give them options. You can have them get to a camp of survivors, help defend it, and then have the camp be betrayed or overrun and have the adventures have to flee again. There are pretty much an endless number of things you can do in this kind of situation. If you want it to not be boring, make sure you make it a horror situation, a situation where the PC's really feel like all they can do is run, hide, and try to stay alive against overwhelming odds. Zombies actually really work well for this; you can always outrun the zombie hoards over a short distance, but you have to keep running, keep going. They never get tired, they never stop, and anything that slows you down even just for a little while is inherently more suspenseful because it means that the unstoppable hoard is probably closing in on you again.
3.5 Loyalist wrote: Ronin paladins can be cool, but they shamed themselves by leaving and missing all those opportunities to help the weak and downtrodden. Maybe. But sometimes war just makes everyone on both sides into monsters. If the Paladin's options are "Do you want to burn, murder innocents, and destroy for the nobles or burn, murder innocents, and destroy for the rebels", he's likely to say "You know, I think I can do more good somewhere else" and go and become an adventurer instead.
If a feudal order the he has been raised to believe is right (and is not inherently evil) is being overthrown by basically good-aligned rebels, then a Paladin would have a great deal of trouble deciding what side to take. Not ever Paladin has the same personality. It would probably depend more on his personality and on his personal experiences then on his alignment. Most likely, he will sit out the war if he can. He may also change sides; he may start out thinking he is trying to protect the lawful ruler from a group of peasants and rebels, but then changes sides if he sees the nobles behaving in an evil way. One thing he will not do is allow the side he's on to do any kind of injustice. If he's with the nobles, he won't allow them to burn out farms and kill innocent civilians, and if he's rebels, he won't allow them to go all French Revolution and start guillotining everyone in sight. If they ignore his advice, he's likely to either switch sides or just leave the country.
Yeah, I wouldn't get too worked up about it. Honestly, using positive energy as a way to attack undead is a major class feature for clerics, and yet it's one they don't get to use often, and even for most undead it's not really worth doing. It's good for them to be happy they have it once in a while.
Neo2151 wrote:
8-9 charisma isn't "non-sociable". That's about average. Your average person you meet on the street, who has a small group of friends, gets along well with co-workers, and generally does fine, has an 8-9 charisma. Assuming that your average, normal NPC has 3d6 charisma, then about 5% of the population has charisma that's 5 or below. So if you work with 20 people, one of them has a 5 or below charisma. (You can probably picture the guy right now, hah.) Slightly socially awkward, not great at communication, maybe looks a little funny, but gets by ok in society. That's what a 5 charisma is. You don't get into the really anti-social people until you get below that.
shallowsoul wrote:
I'm a role player, I just want to roleplay a hero going on a heroic quest. I want to be able to do cool things. If I'm a wizard, I want to be able to rain fire on my enemies. If I'm a barbarian, I want to be able to charge screaming into a group of enemies. If I'm a rouge, I want to be able to sneak up on a guard outside a camp and quietly kill him before he can make a sound. And if I'm a monk, I want to be able to do cool martial arts stuff, throw people around, to disarm a swordsman with my bare hands and then kick him in the face. Every one of those characters can do their cool thing, except for the monk. I mean, the monk should be able to, in theory, but when you run the numbers it's more like "cut himself on the enemies' sword and then trip and fall over". Every player character should be able to feel like a hero, that's the point, and it's an important part of roleplaying. The monk just can't, though, and it's frustrating.
Adamantine Dragon wrote:
Based on this, and on your discription of the battle, it sounds like your party is really optimized to do a lot of damage very quickly. I'm not surprised that you win battles so quickly. A very different party I saw at one point was: Witch
Tons of battlefield control to slow down the pace of the battle. Then the tactis are something like Round 1: Buff, battlefield control, Paladin/Cleric go into defensive mode. Round 2-4: Cleric and Paladin continue to defend/buff, make it impossible for enemies to get close, and/or cleric does some debuffing to start lowering enemy saving throws. Wizard and witch do battlefield control/summoning/debuffing, lowering enemy saving throws and controlling the battlefield. Rounds 5-6: Debuffing hits serious levels, enemies saving throws are down the toilet, Witch, Wizard, and Cleric all start dropping enemies left and right with save-or-suck spells and hexes on enemies that now have crappy saves. Probably does just as well as your party in your average battle, and possibly better in an epic boss fight, but it just takes a lot longer. It's a matter of the style and preference of your party.
It could go the other way, too. Say, in a dwarf or gnome society where mining was a really big deal, I could easily see someone making a magical, masterwork shovel or a pick out of adementium and specifically enchanted to let you dig twice as fast as normal. And, incidentally, because it's so strong and so magically good at tearing through anything including the hardest rock, it also happens to make quite an excellent weapon, giving you a +2 to hit and to damage.
It really shouldn't be possible to sneak up on a dragon in his lair. At the very least, I would expect any dragon to have a permanent "alarm" spell set up, and probably much more elaborate defenses. If he knows the adventurers are coming, he should have time to cast key buffs on himself, and probably can and will ambush the adventurers.
Astral Wanderer wrote: Meh, I'm on the "Antipaladin should be LE (or else of any evil alignment)" side. I've always seen them as the tyrant overlords or tyrannical generals. Roles that fit poorly with CE. A tyrant overlord can be CE; it just means that he acts in an unpredictable way, making decisions based on his (usually evil) whims of the moment and lets his friends and subordinates basically run rampant over the population with no real limits on what they can do to the peasants, rather then the type of tyrant who creates a set of elaborate (evil) laws and strictly enforces them to their inevitable (evil) conclusion.
Aelryinth wrote:
I think he's right about this. One spell being used to dispel it's opposite is something that's a mechanical holdover from older versions of D&D (look at "reversible" spells in older editions), and it does work the way he's saying. Anyway, the wording is clear here. If you "dispel" a spell, it works the same way as the dispel magic spell. The other spell is just gone. So you're using up a casting of darkness to get rid of the light spell, or a casting of light to get rid of the darkness spell. It's not quite the same as just them negating each other; if you have a darkness coin and a light coin, the darkness and light spheres will cancel each other out, sure, but they're both still there; if the light spell runs out of duration first, or if someone targets the light spell with a dispel magic, the area becomes dark, both coins are still magical and still show up as such to detect magic, ect. On the other hand, if you actually dispel the light spell with the darkness spell, then the magic is just gone.
The one my friends still pick on me went something like this: DM: "You see a lone man wearing dark clothing come stumbling down the road. He looks very pale, he seems to be shivering despite the summer heat, he is twitching, and he is muttering to himself." Me: (the squishy level 1 wizard): "I walk up to him, and say "hello, friend, are you well"? DM: "He looks up at you, and says "Friend? Friend?? There are no friends. There are no such thing as friends!" He pulls out a black dagger, and stabs you." ...yeah. Nothing like ignoring all the obvious warnings the DM is giving you and ending up in meele combat with a crazy person as a level 1 second edition wizard with 3 hitpoints. To this day, whenever a character does something incredibly dumb and naive, they all still say "Hello, friend!" Lol.
Orc Boyz wrote:
But worst case scenerio isn't that you role a bunch of 1's; worst case scenerio is that you get into position, set up for the sneak attack, and then completely miss and accomplish nothing. Rouge isn't a full BAB class, so this happens too much anyway. With this it's even worse.
Orthos wrote:
Eh. There's a lot of reasons why people with swords are still combat relevant in D&D-type worlds despite wizards and magic, so long as it's not a super-high-fantesy setting. If you add in fancy modern guns, though, I think that changes. Edit: To be clear, when I say "modern guns", I'm talking about the fancy 19th century-style old-west-ish handguns that the gunslinger class seems built around. If you want to put in a few crude 14th century muskets, then you can still have swords, knights in heavy armor, ect.
TriOmegaZero wrote:
It would just drive me nuts. How could anyone be able to build something as complicated as a handgun, but not be able to take that same gunpowder and think "Hey, I could put this in a big iron tube, put a big iron ball at the end, light the fuse, and level that castle over there"? For that matter, if you allowed this into your game, what would you do if your players started building cannons and started just leveling dungeons instead of exploring them?
TheRonin wrote:
No, it's not. The issue is that I understand that you really can't have fancy old west handguns in a world without an entire industrial base to support them, and conversely you can't have guns that advanced in a world without them fundamentally changing the way wars are fought. Both of those points should be fairly obvious if you have any understanding of the history of warfare. I guess you could fudge your way around it with "a wizard did it" type of explanations, but not without a lot of twisting your neck. It's not that "I don't want guns in this world", it's just that I want a world to make sense, not to have giant plot holes you could drive a truck through.
TriOmegaZero wrote:
A fantasy would should have some kind of internal logic. Cannons, fireworks, and rockets are simple. Any kind of gun is a lot more complicated, and if you're getting into fancy handguns it's much worse. It makes no sense for the world to have guns without cannons.
If they're going into a dungeon where they're going to fight an incorporeal creature, you can always have them find a bunch of +1 magic arrows and a +1 dagger earlier in the dungeon, or something like that. Neither one will really unbalance the campaign as a whole, the arrows won't last long and the dagger is probably only going to be used until the fighter gets a magic sword, but they'll give the players a way to fight the monster, if they figure it out. If they're not used to the combat system, then make the first incorporeal monster weaker then normal, on the assumption they'll probably waste a few rounds swinging at the air before they remember that magic dagger they found earlier.
Honestly, you'd kind of expect that opposite; if you're walking down the street in your average medieval-style world and you're attacked by a knight in full armor and a giant sword trying to chop his head off, and a guy with no armor trying to punch him, you're probably going to worry more about the guy with the sword. In a lot of martial arts movies, it's just assumed that the enemies just don't take Jackie Chan that seriously until he beats them all up.
Pan wrote: Lethal blow is lethal too that's kind of cheesy trying to argue otherwise. Sounds a bit meta gamey to me. Sure he knows all about magical healing but does the character know about hit points and death? If he's a cleric, he probably has a pretty good understanding of how badly someone can be hurt and still be healed without any long-term injury. He doesn't think of it as "hit points", but the character's understanding is probably at a roughly similar level as the player's. I don't think it's really meta-gaming. On the other hand, he should also understand that he's taking a significant risk of killing someone. One crit with a morning star and suddenly the guy's dead. Just that fact alone makes it a pretty iffy act, alignment wise.
3.5 Loyalist wrote: Because of balance, they get far more special abilities and bonuses across different things compared to the fighter: saves, skills, that they don't have the points left, if you will, to be d10 with the best bab. Well, that would be a reasonable argument if you think that fighter and monk are currently well balanced.
redcelt32 wrote:
This isn't really about the paladin, per se, it's about the alignment system. Personally I don't think that any good character can just kill a helpless, tied up captive without violating his alignment. A good cleric doing the same thing would lose his class abilities just as fast as the paladin in this case. If it absolutely has to be done, then you can roleplay your way around it. Pray for a sign from your god, and then kill him because the first thing you saw was a black crow. Or if you really want to get fancy, offer the kobald a chance to prove his innocence with a trial by combat (IE: make sure he can't escape, hand him a short sword, and THEN kill him. ;) ) That kind of thing is totally in flavor of the class Knights of the Round Table-style holy knight that the paladin is based on. Be creative. In this case, though, it didn't really need to be done at all. |