The Sword Saint HAS to strike first in combat so you want traits that boost initiative. I'd go for Reactionary first and then maybe double up with Adopted/Warrior Born. Also I'd go with the Order of the Warrior instead of the dragon. It will massively increase your crit chances, especially if you keen your katana.
I limit my players to a single archetype in each class. I don't know if that's an official rule (I've seen a few builds on these boards that combine several archetypes from the same class)
This jumped out at me as well. I harks back to earlier editions of Shadowrun where a sniper character would have a hard time seeing anything because there was no perception skill and spot checks based straight off the Intelligence stat.
The lack of skills in D&D Next is going to cause the same thing. aging priests who spent their whole life in a temple will be inherently better at spotting ambushes than trained military scouts. Hopefully there will be a skill system added later to balance this out.
It depends on your interpretation of the word 'Lawful'. I've always maintained that paladins should be any lawful alignment because a paladin is a holy warrior who strictly follows the tenants of a their specific god. It should be theoretically possibly to play a lawful paladin of a chaotic god because you are sticking very strictly to the teachings of that (otherwise chaotic) god. Basically, lawful characters don't have to follow the laws of the land. A very religious character like a paladin should consider the rules of his god to take precedence over any temporal laws of man.
I think that this edition of D&D is just going to split the player base further apart.
The interesting question is what will happen next. fast forward a few years and do you think we'll see Piazo buy the D&D licences and release PF2 as the next D&D?
maouse wrote: ps.... the GM might consider an interpretation of this : The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication : to mean... if you eschew with nothing, you get nothing ... ahhh... sweet perfect nothing. So you could use Fabricate to create areas of total vacuum? combined with wall of force to stop the air rushing back in and you can suffocate entire rooms full of enemies instantly.
maouse wrote: ps.... the GM might consider an interpretation of this : The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication : to mean... if you eschew with nothing, you get nothing ... ahhh... sweet perfect nothing. So a wizard could use fabricate to create literally nothing, ie. a vacuum. I can think of a lot of uses for emptying a room of air.
In my game the rum ration is watered to 'Grog' which only does a single point of con damage. Anyone who wishes can ask for their ration unwatered and Heave is always played with unwatered rum. I made a point of showing Tilly always drinking her ration straight and gave her a bonus feat to boost her fort save to cover her from the ill-effects.
The only way to do damage as the summoner is to take the Synthesist archetype. Otherwise the summoner acts as a support/buff character for their Eidelon. When the Eidelon isn't around they buff the party and summon monsters to support combat. Essentially the summoner is a Conjuration specialist sorcerer with the addition of a supercharged druid animal companion.
Kybryn wrote:
The latest one didn't lose to Cause Fear, he lost to Command. The command could have been 'Surrender' or 'Yield'
This argument is why I prefer the spellcasting system from games like Dark Heresy/WFRP to D&D/Pathfinder.
Which AP to choose really depends on the play style of your group. Kingmaker is sandboxy and open but requires a lot of backup work from the GM. Rise of the Runelords is a lot more linear and self contained with some good dungeon crawls but if you want to run RotRL you might want to wait a couple of months and get the SE hardcover edition when its released.
Nicos wrote:
CHA also has good synergy with the paladin and bard for multiclassing. You can build some interesting melee based sorcerers that way. I recently played in a campaign where I was playing a Paladin/DB Sorc/Dragon Disciple who acted as the parties tank fighter.
Given that we live in a world of Holocaust denial, Young Earth Creationism and Lunar Landing Conspiricies I think that Golarion should be allowed its whack-job atheists. Let the player be a hard line atheist that insists there is no such thing as gods and make it clear to him that you will pelt him with evidence to the contrary and expect him to come up with semi-rational arguments to allow him to hold on to his atheism in the face of a physical manifestation of Serenrae commanding him to repent his wickedness.
Agreed. I'm concerned about the Boarding pike of repelling in the hands of my groups Ranger with favoured enemy: Human. Zul is powerful but I don't think its a game breaker for my group. It'll give them a scare when its used against them and then they'll probably sell it because it doesn't fit any of their fighting styles.
Summon Natures Ally III has a constrictor snake. Its not quite as cool as a squid but its a superior grappler and can breathe our of water.
but at this kind of level, the penalties for longer range brackets won't make a lot of difference. The fighter has something like a +25 on his to-hit rolls. If the monk wants to get far enough away to be safe from the daggers then he'll have to be outside the range where his spring attack will allow him to attack and stay safe from reprisal by the fighter next turn.
What if the kukri fight build traded his kukri's for a bandolier of a few dozen daggers and traded Power Attack for Deadly Aim? Then his overall damage might go down but his AC would stay very high and he would be able to throw daggers at the monk in return for the crossbow bolts. The damage of each dagger with Deadly Aim would still be in the high 20s with a 30% chance of a 3x crit. If the monk gets fed up of the one sided shot trading game he closes on the fighter who has a dagger in each hand and be ready with a full attack.
Personally, I find the first 5 levels of play to be the most fun but I also enjoy the sense of accomplishment I get from taking a character all the way through a campaign to 20th level. I wouldn't want Paizo to drop the early levels from the APs but I'd support expanding the paths to 8 books so they could accommodate the full run from 1-20.
Skull and Shackles is a prime candidate for an evil campaign and Kingmaker would work as well. I think you could make Council of Thieves work as an evil campaign quite easily to. All you have to do is change the aims of the Children of Westcrown from freedom fighters to a rival thieves guild or maybe ally the players with the Order of the Rack.
This seems largely a problem the OP has with his GM. In the kingmaker game I played in, our group included a paladin of Serenrae and we went out of its way to offer redemption to the bandits. We ended up with almost a dozen friendly bandits living with us at Olegs trading post and a local tribe of Kobolds happily worshiping the Dawnflower.
I've just started running Skull and Shackles and its made clear the text that just about the whole crew apart from the officers are potential friends to the PCs if they work hard enough at it and find the right buttons to push. All the APs have ample opportunity for redemtion themed PCs and parties if the GM is aware that that is the players goal and is willing to work with them.
Kingmaker and Council of Thieves are both fairly non-linear after the first session. CoT has a lot of long dungeon crawls though so that may trun you off to it. If your players really want an open world campaign you're probably better off writing your own game than trying to run a published adventure. Even the most sandboxy module will feel restrictive to a some kinds of player.
Try multiclassing with Druid instead of Monk. 4 levels of Druid and you can take Natural Spell to allow you cast without hands. Boon Companion will let you Eidalon keep up with you in terms of levels and the levels of druid will give you access to domain powers and the druid spell list (Bark Skin will be handy)
I have a gunslinger in my Skull and Shackles campaign and I'm worried about the number of possible ways for him to get his ammunition destroyed by water damage. At least half the combat encounters in the first book happen on or around large bodies of water just waiting to be fallen into rendering any firearms user useless for at least 1 full turn whilst they reload their dampened weapon.
Its perfectly possible. I've seen live demonstrations of Iaido masters cutting arrows in half in mid-air. It requires extreme skill and concentration. If I were your GM Id give you a chance and set an extremely high AC to hit an unattended object. If you hit and destroyed it in a single blow then the arrow doesn't hit you, otherwise you take damage as normal.
So...
One of my players is running a female gnome alchemist who spent her first day on the Wormwood running away from rats she was supposed to be hunting (a natural 1 on her Survival roll) and then challenged Conchobhar to a game of dice without any money.
Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the Book of Erotic Fantasy? I know that had rules for conception and pregnancy
The AP does actually detail how Mr Plugg has been toadying to Harrigan so that the captain thinks he's completely trustworthy. That's how he managed to become first mate in less than a year.
As to the possibility of dealing with Mr Plugg or Master Scourge early in the AP, I saw a bunch of possibilities for that as well. I think the biggest oversight in this publication is the lack of stats for Harrigan and the other senior officers as they might factor into some of those plans.
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