|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 Recent Posts
I'm 100% for this being only the core rulebook. Very, very rarely am I making an NPC witch, or cavalier, or gunslinger, or what-have-you. I'm virtually always adding rogue, fighter, wizard or cleric levels to a creature, or looking for a similar NPC. This will make the effort to add cleric levels to a giant, fighter levels to an awakened golem, or wizard levels to a daemon very simple. Bravo!
Since this is the rules forum, the RAW answer is no. Only one swift action per turn. In the advice forum the answer is "it depends on your GM." A lot of GMs will allow you to take some swift actions (especially casting a quickened spell) instead of a standard action. Why would you cast a quickened spell instead of a standard action? Why not just cast a normal spell? Note that I've never run across a GM that would let someone cast a quickened spell in place of a move action ... and rightfully so in my opinion, as it would seem to go against the intent of Quicken Spell to allow a caster to toss off three spells/round.
Ah, that makes sense. I look forward to it. Actually I can't wait to get to 2007.Also, Lisa Stevens mentioned doing another "History of Paizo" post today. I don't know what they'll do, but I thought I would mention it to mitigate expectations.Since they've been on the last Thursday of the month, I think this is actually slated for tomorrow. When you get there, do me a favor and pick up some Apple stock for me?
Its important to understand that I'm not criticizing the product line. My expectations are being met. Rather, I'm saying this book doesn't deserve the degree of criticism its receiving. Right! In fact, this specific book is in my top half dozen out of all the Paizo books I own, up there with Distant Worlds, Inner Sea Magic and the Dragon Emprires Gazetteer. The latter I note as important because it took a subject I was completely ambivalent about (at best, just look at some of my old board posts) and got me actively interested in it. Distant Worlds I note as important because it took a subject that is one of my favorite topics and somehow made it even more awesome. The others, also, are incredible and can be held up as examples of what this line should be like. Oh, and +1 about Sutter's work. Goes for the fiction too.
Well, not only are Con preparations slowing it down, but I'm sure the ever more vindictive attacks on SKR are even more of a culprit. In fact, he said as much in a post a while back, that he was tired of being personally singled out and attacked as if he personally wrote all the FAQ responses, which he doesn't, even though he (was) the only one who posted them. Don't feel like looking for the post right now; doesn't really matter all that much. So I'm thinking that until some sort of vast cultural upheaval changes the way people act on the Intarwebs, we won't be seeing anywhere near the number of FAQ responses we were for a while. (yeah, I know this is a necro, but I'm surprised nobody commented on one of the primary reasons the FAQs slowed down)
That's good, they partially covered the bases ... but the reality is that it's just flat out not true that incorporeal creatures have no Strength. How much stuff can an incorporeal horse carry? What happens when an incorporeal creature smacks you with a shost touch sword ... it adds its Dex bonus to damage? In that case, I know a lot of min/maxers who are suddenly going to be big fans of the dust form spell. What about trying to break something? After all, many spells still require a Strength check, and should someone decide to use Ectoplasmic Spell, well ... now we need Strength checks. Using Dex instead of Str is just a patch that fixes small parts of the overall problem. And it's likely to get worse - sooner or later they're going to add a spell like forced manifestation (Ghostwalk) or ghost trap (Spell Compendium) and then we have corporeal incorporeal cretures. (and right, I forgot they changed ghosts in Pathfinder.) So yeah, I know it's rarely needed ... but why not just put a Strength in instead of pretending it's irrelevant?
I'd think a better rationale is that the thing sat there like Augustus Gloop, unable to stop munching on the magic items. Gut instinct told me it would be unlikely to munch its way through 9 items in 2-5 minutes plus a couple rounds, especially if it was on the lower side, but then I saw the 4d10+18 damage from its bite. Since it likes magical goodness, it's clearly only going to munch on ones that are magical, which means any given item is hit no more than once every 1d4 rounds, and magic items have hardness and lots of hit points, as I recall. So suppose it decides to get to the center of the Tootsie Roll Lollipop of Inspired Wisdom +6. *lick* It's got hardness 22 (10, but +2/point), so it takes (roll) 45-22 = 23 hp of damage. It's probably done whether or not it makes its save. Next round, the Gobstopper of Mighty Fists +3. *crunch* It's only got hardness 16. It takes (roll) 37-16 = 21 points of damage. It's probably done too. This also, regardless of save, is probably toast. Moving on, it casts its eye on the handy Fun Dip sack, and spent a round angrily discovering no magical goodness inside. Next round *chomp* it takes a mere (roll) 46 points of damage and has no hardness. No more haversack. The save is irrelevant. I think odds are pretty darn good that within a minute or so all 9 items were toast and the nightwing was sitting there glowing with 9 magic items worth of temporary hit points.
When we played this scenario, it wasn't quite clear why you would really want to talk to most townsfolk. It felt weird even trying because there was little interaction with them. I find it difficult to do much roleplaying or get chit chatty with NPCs when there is no goal in mind. Then again, I have the same issue IRL ;) I chose a couple of characters to play up, primarily Zokar, owner of the Laughing Demon. When one of the PCs got cursed, they decided that it would be safest to put him in a cell overnight just in case. Zokar caught wind of this (in a small town the bartender hears everything) and started calling him the Son of the Lopper. He even stopped by the jail and tried to talk the sheriff into letting him charge a copper a head for admission. The PC was all for it, but Sheriff Caeller nixed the idea. On the other hand when they finished up, Zokar offered the PC 50 gold to have his portrait painted holding the Lopper's handaxe. Zokar: You'll be immortalized for all to see! And I'll give you fifty gold!
heheheh No, THAT won't come up again, I'm quite sure. Zokar has the painting prominently displayed over the bar in the Laughing Demon.
I understand display packaging is useful for showing off a product on a store shelf, but I'd be happier to buy them if the packaging was mostly paper. That's huge. At my house, we put out 2-3 bins of recycling per week, and about half that in garbage. I noticed that none of the WizKids stuff had recycling indicators but threw it in anyways, hoping for the best. All the better that they're doing the Right Thing from now on. Personally, I don't care how huge the packaging is if it's all recyclable, espcially since using recycling reduces the energy expenditure over materials created from scratch. So by all means, make the packages bigger so the sell better and we get MOAR MINIS!!111!1! :-)
Personally, I'm all for incorporeal creatures having a Strength score. There are effects that can cause it to be relevant; for example, any force effect can affect an incorporeal creature, and you might, for example, try to disarm an incorporeal creature wielding a ghost touch weapon. Or, for that matter, you might be wearing ghost touch armor, which ought to let you grapple an incorporeal creature. Ghosts, in particular, are even worse, for they are corporeal in the Ethereal plane. So I'd rather see the opposite ... I'd like to see Strength scores added for incorporeal creatures rather than me having to assume their Strength is 10 when they're subject to an effect that makes their (unlisted) Strength score relevant.
First off, let me state that I think this book was outstanding. For me it struck a perfect balance between descriptive prose and mechanics that a GM can use, and I love the bestiary. I'm looking forward to seeing the locations in the Shackles expanded greatly in the future.Let me start by saying thank you for complimenting the gazeteer and bestiary of the book first. I can't tell you how demoralizing it can be when people trash a product because of the map issue or artwork without any serious comment on or critique of the actual content for which I'm responsible. Right! I know full well that you pretty much have zero input into what's done with the art in the book, and, frankly, it wasn't that big of a deal anyways. I figured out what was up with the map by the time I was reading Bag Island, and moved on. What was important to me was that there were a zillion adventure hooks in here; virtually any one of these islands could be a campaign in itself. This book, Distant Worlds, the Dragon Empires Gazetteer, and books of that high level of quality are why I never doubt my subscription for a moment. It doesn't mean I won't point out what I feel are errors, but successful people and companies try things. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. My point in bringing up the maps in what was hopefully a non-confrontational, very detailed manner was to point out to the people who do have control over such things that the model of the other books I pointed out better serves the purpose (in my opinion, of course) than the way they chose to do this one. -- Now. Back to working on Shattered Star, you, I'm looking forward to your installment :)
I picked up a bunch of decks, and while my players were very happy with them, the lack of stuff from books other than the Core Rulebook and APG was rather noticeable. So ... any chance of a second buff deck that does the same thing but includes material beyond that from the first two books? Pretty please? I promise to buy 4 decks of that, too :)
I have to say that one of the coolest things for me recently happened while I was out of town. I got my ship email, pulled out my iPhone, went to my downloads page and was able to download City of the Fallen Sky directly into iBooks. Very, very cool. I love having books in both physical and electronic versions ... while I vastly prefer reading a physical book, being able to pull up iBooks when I'm stuck somewhere unexpectedly and to pick up where I left off is an amazing ability.
This is something I've been wanting for ages. I suspect the same is true of any GM who runs a lot of homebrew adventures. PC options are okay, but I don't always want to throw class levels on a monster; it's a very complex way to advance them. And why would GM materials be a hard sell? It seems like much of what Paizo sells is flavor material specifically aimed at GMs (or adventures, which are also aimed at GMs), so why not create something with monster customizations intended for GMs? The primary down side I see is that it might make existing creatures and monstrous NPCs seem quaint, seeing how they won't have any of the new options. But the same's true of old modules and adventure paths in regards to new PC options, I suppose.
The thing I find most fascinating about this thread?
2,335 posts? By 82 people? That means the *average* poster made over 28 posts in this thread. And would be willing to bet that the median is wayyyyyy higher than the average :)
heheheh The most amusing thing to me in this whole thread is that I'd never even heard of gloves of dueling until they were mentioned in this thread. Then again, I virtually never build PCs, only NPCs, and I typically "arm" all my NPCs with the results of semi-random treasure generation. I was about to give an example but then I remembered that someone I know tends to lurk about here....
First off, let me state that I think this book was outstanding. For me it struck a perfect balance between descriptive prose and mechanics that a GM can use, and I love the bestiary. I'm looking forward to seeing the locations in the Shackles expanded greatly in the future. It's funny, I kept on expecting to see a reference to Eightfingers' Tomb or the Gloomspires, even though I know that would actually be impossible. But it would have been very, very cool. To give more perspective to James' response here, my turnover maps had the Shackles region magnified into six separate sub-maps in order to show the location of each place named in the gazeteer--113 in all, certainly more detail than can be afforded on a single page map (in fact, I'd argue that the visual nature of an archipelago makes for a more cluttered feel with labels--note how the label for Dragonsthrall hides Fellhope Canyon's northern entrance). Some of those unmarked places can be inferred from the text (Fellhope Canyon and the Straits of Balthus are two examples). The others are in the hands of individual GMs who wish to develop things further, though perhaps some of the later Skull & Shackles AP volumes or future adventures featuring a part of the region may give exact locations...The deal is that we didn't want to overly clutter up the map with location tags. The map's already pretty cluttered as it stands with all the island names on there. However, (and there's always a 'however', I guess), I have to second (third? fourth?) the opinion that the map just doesn't cut it. Or, rather, that the lack of further detail doesn't cut it. In many other publications there are secondary maps. Distant Worlds has 12 additional maps, Dragon Empires has a second, "cluttered" version of the map (I'm referring to James' comment), with the vast majority of the locations depicted, Dungeons of Golarion also has 12 additional maps, and Lands of the Linnorm Kings, probably the most similar to Isles of the Shackles, has 7 additional maps providing extra detail. This book has zero. That fact is particularly irksome given that the turnover did have exactly the detail that would have made it especially useful. Furthermore, it consisted of 6 sub-maps, certainly on par with other books in the same series. Now, I'm certainly not all up in arms and "OMG Paizo has totally lost it!" about this issue, but I do think that it was an error to not include any secondary maps in a location sourcebook, and I'm hoping it's not something they'll repeat.
All depends on the players and what game you want to play, I guess. We've had good luck with our current campaign, I'm in no rush to end it, and I'll be very interested in starting another one once the current one finishes. Whether that will be using a Paizo above-20 rule set or my current integration of 3.5 and Paizo has yet to be seen. Not that there aren't things I wouldn't do differently next time around, and not that everything's perfect, but they've been over level 20 for just under 6 years now and I'm still happy with the game.
I just hope they do more than raise the level cap. I see no reason for a really good system to have one. Heh.
Not that it adds any sort of credibility to either side of the argument, but in virtually all of the the official D&D-endorsed PC games I've ever seen (such as the Infinity Engine games Baldur's Gate I & II, Icewind Dale I & II, Planescape: Torment; Neverwinter Nights; etc), there is definitely visual cues to people casting spells beyond bat poo and flailing arms. I mean, sure, there's flailing arms and mystical sounding words; but spells are always accompanied by various forms of energy swirling about and/or gathering for the spell. You quite definitely can see a spell being cast, even though in Neverwinter Nights you have Spellcraft (which is auto-rolled every time you see someone casting a spell, to see if you recognize the spell). I'm with Ashiel here (unusual, that :) There's nothing that says spells are somehow undetectable just because you've stilled and silenced them. A spell is still being cast, and just as it still provokes an AoO, it is still identifiable. Whether there's a penalty and how much that penalty should be is up to your GM, but there's been many reasonable suggestions here. Also consider that this is, indeed, a game, not a simulation. To a non-trivial extent, the rules exist to make the game playable more than they exist to define the physics of a nonexistant reality. Yes, of course, it's always nice if they're intuitive enough that it just makes sense, but the game has to be playable too. So I'm all for imposing a penalty on Spellcraft checks vs. Eschewed/Silenced/Stilled spells, but that's very different than a blanket "sorry, you have zero chance of even noticing a spell was cast, never mind identifying it."
That might be the best looking cover of any Paizo book I have seen yet. Why, does he paint better in there or something?
Hmmm. So it's not about the most Superstar designer in the end, it's about the module that people most want to see? There is ultimately a difference between the two ideas there. I would think the two would go hand-in-hand. I guess I could see a case where someone who perhaps hasn't demonstrated the Superstar chops that others have somehow comes up with a pitch that wins everyone over. Theoretically. But many people (like myself, for example) don't just look at the final pitch but also at the contestant's full body of work. So I'm thinking it all works out.
I voted for the Scarlet God. 1. Talk about Tom being in sync with Paizo, holey moley.
Heck, he might have done even better if he'd have used the setting of Eightfinger's Tomb, but I like that he instead did something altogether new. And I second Eric Morton's comments - the fact that we'll have no idea what's in the actual published module is also cool, and given what Tom's done so far, I have no doubts he'll come up with something as awesome as the pitch and as Eightfinger's Tomb that is not dependent on Leng. Edit: I find it interesting so few people are posting their vote here. I really doubt so few people are voting, so I think the end result is unlikely to match what we see here.
The way the game is currently designed is not conducive to the infinite progression the ELH tried to shoehorn in. I'm not sure what you mean here. What you're talking about is exactly why the ELH did away with any difference between classes after character level 20, a move that I agree with. Once a character hits character level 21 using ELH rules, they alternately get a +1 to all saves or a +1 to their epic attack bonus. Iterative attacks stay as they were at level 20. Thus the disparity between classes is never greater than it was at level 20.
So you're referring to "Larger swarms are represented by multiples of single swarms. The area occupied by a large swarm is completely shapeable, though the swarm usually remains in contiguous squares," then? That part defines what do do if you want a swarm of a given type larger than 10 feet by 10 feet. The swarm type also says A single swarm occupies a square (if it is made up of nonflying creatures) or a cube (of flying creatures) 10 feet on a side, but its reach is 0 feet, like its component creatures. In order to attack, it moves into an opponent's space, which provokes an attack of opportunity. It can occupy the same space as a creature of any size, since it crawls all over its prey. Note that it says it can occupy the same space as a creature of any size; which I'd interpret as including a swarm of a different type, which is a different creature. Note that there is one creature for which the 3.5e folks broke the definition of larger swarms actually being multiple smaller swarms, and that is with the ruin swarm - but I'm guessing that was because 3e didn't even have the swarm subtype, if you look at 3e rules, you'll see the ruin swarm was originally an ooze. The Advanced Bestiary creature swarm template will also let you create a swarm that's not a 10x10 square/cube.
There's no question the existing rules can carry beyond level 20; in fact the Core Rulebook gives some very specific suggestions for how to do so. There's also a quantum evaluation of high level play (especially 21+ level play): There's no question that high level play is broken.
So I have a hunch that until that box is opened labeled "Pathfinder Above 20 Rules, do not open until 201#" (darn it, can't quite make out that last digit), we won't know whether the cat is alive or dead. --- As an aside, it's my opinion that the existing suggestions are fine for what I view as "low values of high level," i.e. levels 21 to, say, 25 or so, but with no new abilities above level 20, a lot of sameness will start to enter the picture. Heck, I've found the same to be true of the ELH rules. I don't think we started to really notice until after 50 or so (long enough for characters to go the full 20 in two base classes), and I'm still having a bit of trouble making The Primal Order mesh well with 3.5e. I'm not sure it gains me as much as I thought it was going to over the SRD deities rules.
Technically according to swarm Rules 2 swamrs can occupy the same square but only one swarm can occupy a square with its victum. Where do you see that? I've read the swarm type several times and see nothing that seems to imply that. One thing though ... I think if I had multiple swarms of the same size on a creature, I'd roll damage for each and just use the max instead of having the damage stack - the way I see it, the swarms would interfere with each other. If they were different sizes, however, I think they'd be unlikely to interfere as much.
Never mind, a simple search provided the answer... http://paizo.com/forums/dmtz4gv2?Multiple-Magic-Missiles-and-Toppling-Spell #3 Linkified for all the lazy people out there like me.
The game says nothing about [walking and getting tired], thus it is a product of the game. Push it past 8 hours and the game makes a gesture about it, but until then, nothing. I can deal with 8 hours of walking not affecting fatigue, I suppose - it's the same thing as a character at 1hp being as effective as one at full hit points, and I really, really don't want to try to turn Pathfinder into a simulation. I'm more disturbed by the fact that there are no penalties whatsoever for never sleeping. Your character can choose to never sleep, ever, without ill effect. Yet, sleep for one night in armor and you start hitting the fatigue rules. By RAW you're better off not sleeping than sleeping in armor. I ran across this when trying to figure out how long someone could play a lyre of building before dropping from exhaustion. Turns out the RAW answer is "forever."
Here's the problem with high level D&D in any edition (well, I don't know about 4e, never got past fifth level there). The RNG becomes increasingly meaningless. Once bonuses and stuff get to a certain point, that 1-20 random number has little meaning. From my experience, you're quite wrong. My player's rolls are absolutely not irrelevent. The onus is on me, of course, to see that it works out that way (sometimes ... I have been known to say "okay, you're looking at 1 to fail" or letting them realize they need a 20 to save) but even in those cases it's only true for some of the characters ... typically. Epic gaming attracts power gamers like ants to sugar. That's the major part of the appeal for 90+ percent of the epic crowd. They're looking to blow up worlds, slaughter dieties, etc.I was looking at ways to keep the d20 relevant for all classes, without hoping the player's don't try to power game.In a thread about epic content, best of luck with that. I don't envy your chances,however. Perhaps, perhaps not. Maybe they're just looking for an epic quest (or a dozen) to complete.
My thought is that it really needs to be concurrent with player options for levels above 20, otherwise it's just the "evil GM's handbook." Not that an evil GM's handbook is such a terrible thing ... I just think that a player's option book should be released at the same time.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
