aceDiamond wrote: Technically, they could cast it from a scroll with a UMD check, but a wizards don't have access to casting 7th level spells unabated until they hit level 13. It's actually only a caster level check with a difficulty of the scroll's caster level +1, so a good deal easier than the UMD roll.
I had a tetori monk build that started as a synthesist summoner so he could focus on mental ability scores. Got grab on the claw attacks and enlarge person so he could enlarge and then grab medium characters at level one (without having to initiate a grapple and provoke AoOs), plus a hefty bonus to grappling (though he usually killed the things he tried to grab before he could manage it). I think I had planned for three or so levels summoner throughout his career, but then they changed the rules and I couldn't play him anymore.
Very well, I suppose 1d4 plus grab will have to be okay. I'm fluffing it as a little girl, who throws tantrums, bites people and then latches on. This is the rebuild that I'm finally getting around to for my PFS undead lord librarian. I tend to build characters for the express purpose of amusing myself
So, I'm building a human feral gnasher (via the racial heritage feat), and I'm wondering if the bite attack damage increases automatically to 1d6, instead of 1d4 for being a different size category. It makes sense to me, but I want to be sure that the archetype doesn't supersede the die type increase for size.
I have made up my sneaky goblin. One eared Fik. He challenged leadership and had his ears bitten off, then found a gun and got revenge. He wears the ear of his former big chief as a trophy (hence the name), and moved to Absalom and found work doing odd jobs in the sewers. Also he dreams of being tall. Stealth, disable device, disguise, knowledge(local) and other general roguishness.
I'd like to join as well, though I'm also new to the whole pbp experience. I'll probably have some days where my posting will be a bit spotty (especially weekends), but weekdays I should be around, provided my class workload doesn't pick up drastically. I'll probably be bringing in a sneaky goblin gunslinger of some kind.
The funny thing is I just finished making a character almost identical to this one, except lower Wis, higher strength. He has a dinosaur animal companion who he considers to be his leader (it has a considerably higher charisma than he does). His ultimate goal is to become a dinosaur too (via wild shape), since he already basically sees himself as one.
What if you write the explosive rune on, say, presentation sized foam-core and proceed to wave it around from behind the front lines? Does it blow up whoever reads it, or just the guy holding the sign (when somebody else reads it)? What if you get together a group of your mage buddies and decide to walk the rune into a field (a la crop circles), while chanting the spell? Would somebody viewing the field in google maps explode? After all that smartassery, I don't actually have anything relevant to the discussion to say, I'm just bored at work.
Well, from a purely biological perspective (I didn't get too much of that fancy physics learning), the blood would stop at the point it breaks the plane of entrance. This would form a barrier for the blood, but would not necessarily entail clotting. Arteries constantly break off into arterioles and on down into capillaries, which go off into venule and on into veins back to the heart. You might get a little bit of weirdness close to the plane, which may lead to a tiny bit of discomfort, but biology is surprisingly resilient. I guess there might be a little fluctuation in blood pressure, but a lot of that depends on the specific extremity going into the field. On the reverse case (hand out, body in), the body would be preserved perfectly, while the hand would decay normally. Probably pretty quickly actually since there isn't really a source of oxygen, nutrients, and all of those fun things. Rapid cell death, probably. This is all best guess assumptions based on one's personal view of magic though. It could do whatever you want it to, or whatever you feel is thematically most interesting for the story. And the science stuff is based mostly around a BS in biology, which may not count for too much (one never knows).
A surprising amount of the enemies in this one were one-hit-killed by a character who was supposed to be a non-lethal grapple monster. I had to keep roaring and then apologizing, and then wiping blood off my claws. I did get to grapple an owlbear to death though, which isn't something a level one character should be able to do.
So, specific monster recommendation: hydra. Trick it out half-dragon or half-fiend or something, toss a few more heads on that sucker and you are pretty well ready to go. It has scent, which a pretty good argument could be raised will negate the mirror image, as many attacks per round as it has heads, combat reflexes, fast healing, and if it is half-dragon it has at least a 5d6 breath weapon (for each head). Throw a couple of the suckers at them, they aren't too hard to kill, and with the sheer output of attacks, odds are you'll hit him a couple of times. One of the nastiest encounters I ever saw was five twelve-headed half-dragon hydras (not that I encourage this kind of behavior). Plus, they are kind of thematically appropriate.
I think you might be cheaping yourself out a skill point, or are possibly doing skill points the old 3.5 way. You should have 5 skill points at first level (2 for int, 2 for class, 1 for human), maximum skill rank level is your hit die (1), plus the 3 for training which is only involved when you put the skill point into a class skill.
Our ninja burned down a spice factory, in spite of the protests of the entire party (in his defense that was his faction mission). Everybody rolls some disguise checks to be less suspicious and I roll a clutch 3. Then we go into what was called "the secure markets" where the ninja decides to steal the priceless idol that I am examining. Plainclothes guards who were following me around rush in and arrest all of us (except the ninja, who dashed). I get accused of arson and murder, sentence for which is death, but in the end we get to testify in a zone of truth, which clears my name provided we agree not to come back. So technically I am "banned from Qadira" which is a more or less unenforceable sentence. I figured it wasn't too unfair, since I was just happy not to have been killed. We'll just say it was an interesting session.
Jiggy wrote:
Yeah, that was pretty bad. Then my next character gets wanted for arson, and banned from an entire country. I was basically just happy to get out of that one alive.
Ah, shoot. Should have looked into that. That is very good advice, especially since I decided to pick up a weapon. I'm glad you pointed that out, since I have been a little iffy on what to do with the character and was hoping for some advice myself. Also, the flowing monk loses fast movement in favor of additional AC (+1 per adjacent enemy up to wisdom modifier).
Well, considering this is what I'm doing, I will give you some possible ideas as to where to go. This is really just what I am doing, not the best way to do it. Human Flowing monk of the sacred mountain Str: 10
feats:
You could easily go with a better Cha at level one, instead of int, but I was wanting to be able to use skills. At this point, I have AC 17, 10 hp and a +6 to trip, +7 with my masterwork kama. Plus, I get to reposition people after a trip, which makes melee characters happy. Next level I get another 9hp (toughness), +1 natural armor, and the flat footed AOO thing for flowing monks. At level three, the plan is to take combat reflexes so I can trip fools on their turn. Level five, I'm taking vicious stomp so I can try to hit them when they go down. Level six bonus feat is weapon finesse, so I can actually hit people. In that time, I plan on grabbing an amulet of mighty fists, so I can hopefully enchant it with the agile enhancement. Other than this I haven't really got any idea as far as weapons, other than a whole mess of tanglefoot bags to deal with fliers. After level six, I'm probably going down the Janni style path, so I can full attack to hit/trip/aoo/hit/hit. That's my hope, at least. Again, I don't know if this is the best way to do it, but at this point that is the plan.
Just felt I should point out, after 24 hours, enhancement bonuses are treated as permanent. What this means is you could easily buy a strength ioun stone, or a keg of bull strength potions or any other enhancement bonus to strength items you can find and they all stack, provided you keep the item ones on for more than 24 hours. Just make sure you only have one item per item slot.
Also, you can trade a standard for a move, but not a move for a standard. I think the total amount of time each one takes up is more or less arbitrary, and is left up to GM/player discretion. The most important thing to remember is you can only do one standard each round. Same with swift actions, one per round. You can do as many as two move actions (or move-equivalent actions). Alternatively you could do a full-round action, in which case you could maybe do a couple of free actions as well. As for free actions, basically as many as you feel is reasonable, though there shouldn't be any cases where a player does more than a couple.
stringburka wrote: Nit-picking rant:** spoiler omitted ** I feel like I heard a statistic that said that chances of survival drop from ~90% for a 2 story fall to ~30% for a three story fall. Falling creates a surprising amount of force in a very short amount of time, which makes falling very dangerous.
Ethan Queen wrote:
I would avoid the "I hit you x number of times, because I do" argument. It is sort of vexing as a player to simply take damage because the GM wants you to or thinks you should. With ten arrows coming out per character, chances are good you'll crit once every two rounds. One thing that is more or less an "I hit you" move is ranged touch attacks though. Never underestimate the power of scorching ray, and don't forget that you can crit with it (rays are treated as x2 weapons).
Dragonsong wrote:
Yeah, it's not perfect. But hey, you're invisible... ish... Also, the fact that it's pretty easy to spot a standard passenger plane at cruising altitude sort of makes the rule seem a little more off. Since the stealth penalty for a gargantuan creature is only -16, making the notice check 512. The stealth/perception rules are a little skewed towards close range, since it becomes possible to hit things with a standard ranged weapon that you can't actually see. It only really comes up when a player wants to play a sniper type character. I guess you just need to use good judgement in giving modifiers.
SmiloDan wrote:
So I suppose the best advice we can give is: don't run them as written for pre-gen. In order to truly challenge your party, you'll have to tailor the encounter to them (even if it is just a leetle). Monsters in the pre-gen adventures aren't usually optimized to murder parties, that's what the critters you customize are for.
Dragonsong wrote:
Also, the most effective way to stealth is to fly very high. There's a +1 to the perception DC for every 10 feet, which means if you are flying at one mile (~ 1/3 airplane cruising altitude) you get a +528 to your stealth check. Mull that one over for a second. Even if you aren't invisible or stealthing (DC 0 to perceive a visible creature) you are almost impossible to see.
I have been itching to play a human bard/rogue (probably eventually arcane trickster), who tends towards party face, using magic to enhance his bluff/diplomacy. In combat he mostly avoids the melee, using grease and tanglefoot bags to reduce an enemies AC and make them flat footed, then throws knives into their squishy bits (probably the knife master archetype). He'll eventually pick up a wand of blindness/deafness as well. He pretends to be a cleric, using bardic healing spells, his bluff checks, and good old fashioned chicanery to convince hapless rubes (and sometimes party members) that he can heal with a touch. He rarely impersonates a priest of the same god twice, and carries holy symbols of every major and minor deity he can get his hands on. Basically has Munchausen syndrome, and more or less can't do anything without telling somebody at least one lie. His eventual goal is to start his own church, and get rich off the profits. It's a bit mechanically difficult, and probably won't be good for much in combat except an occasional bee-sting, some off-heals, and a bit of battlefield control. Mainly the use of the character should be diplomancy.
MUKid wrote:
Throw in a couple more of the lowish level mooks into the fights. Experiment until you can estimate just the right number of enemies for your party. Additionally, remember to look over the stat blocks for the enemies very carefully, looking to see what a monster may be good at, and then try to play to that monster's strength. For instance, a goblin may not be terribly good at anything, but odds are there are at least three or four other goblins (think of them in cockroach terms). Swarming a single opponent with many enemies can make up for the overall weakness of the individual enemies.
Combat maneuvers, my friend. A couple of monks tumble through the fighters, grab the casters and start choking the crud out of them. Works until your casters pick up freedom of movement, then you need to grab that grapple specialized monk from Ultimate Combat. Or more dispels, I suppose. Or you could have have one or two guys try to trip the fighters (probably hard, since fighters have high CMD). Give a couple of guys some whips, and a few trip feats, have them start tripping from range. It takes a move action to stand up, and that provokes attacks of opportunity. Besides that, they take a -4 to attacks when prone, which more than cancels out bull's strength and haste. Maybe throw in some wolves (players hate those). Automatic trip attacks on a bite is always fun. Give them a few templates and they can be quite terrifying. |