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Honestly, with this Crane Wing Nerf what I am seeing is a severe immaturity on the GM's behalf. Why you ask? Because GMs are hating on defensive builds. Lets just take a look shall we?
The old Crane Style played most into builds that stacked hard on AC. The thing is, these buidls tend to be very defense based while forgoing offensive builds. Most of the complaints seem to be coming from GMs about how they can't hit the character. The thing is... THAT IS WHAT THE BUILD IS MEANT TO BE. Now lets look at the other side of the token.
The more common build focus is on offense. With things like Beast Totem (for barbs), Power Attack, Weapon Foc/Spec, ect. there are alot of ways to build for offence. The funny thing, you don't hear as much about people complaining about their players smacking their creatures/NPCs around with Full-attacks of fury. Heck, most of the complaints tend to come from players complaining by comparing a fighter and barb or some such.
Why is this? I feel it is immaturity of the GM/Lack of understanding/The GM suffering from Power-trippiness and believing he IS ENTITLED to hurting his party. If a person builds and dedicates his ENTIRE CHARACTER to get his AC up (giving up monk ability for barkskin, getting Combat Expertise, getting the crane feats) then HE SHOULD BE HARD TO HIT. HE SHOULD BE DAMN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO HIT. Why? Because he "trained" (built up in meta-gaming terms) to be hugely focused on defense. He would be like Ip-Man in the movie Ip-Man (they guy was very rarely EVER touched, let alone hit). With the new update, no matter how much you trained, a master fighter or a noob would have an EQUAL CHANCE of hitting you (they would ALWAYS have a 5% chance of hitting you). At that point, there is no point in playing defensive...
I still don't understand why PFS GMs cared that characters were being tanky and hard to kill with single melee attack bosses.
I'm not just going to assume it was a player vs GM mentality.
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As a GM, the moment I broke the news to my players I was suddenly the bad guy behind it all.
*shakes head*
Thanks Paizo.
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To be honest there are worse problems in the game. I have a Gunslinger in my game. I have had to post up the hp of my creatures by four or even five times. Since it's horribly easy to strike touch ac. Maybe this changes at later levels. Sure I can alter the encounters to include creatures with high touch ac. Except it becomes obvious the Gunslinger is being targeted. So that tactic has to be used carefully. Taking away his gun or breaking it. He is smart enough to have spare. With the Gunslinger imo being so problamatic why was Crane Wing in such a hurry to be nerfed.
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As a GM, the moment I broke the news to my players I was suddenly the bad guy behind it all.
*shakes head*
Thanks Paizo.
Clearly you are expected to house-rule everything even though you are trying to play pathfinder.
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To be honest there are worse problems in the game. I have a Gunslinger in my game. I have had to post up the hp of my creatures by four or even five times. Since it's horribly easy to strike touch ac. Maybe this changes at later levels. Sure I can alter the encounters to include creatures with high touch ac. Except it becomes obvious the Gunslinger is being targeted. So that tactic has to be used carefully. Taking away his gun or breaking it. He is smart enough to have spare. With the Gunslinger imo being so problamatic why was Crane Wing in such a hurry to be nerfed.
Monks were being useful. That is a great sin.
What's wrong with making grown men cry?
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As a GM, the moment I broke the news to my players I was suddenly the bad guy behind it all.
*shakes head*
Thanks Paizo.
Luckily for anything but PFS play, crane wing can work however you (the GM) want it to. I told my players I'm ignoring errata for the feat. Heck, good for Paizo's sales I'm going out to purchase a copy of UC from whatever local shop has it so that I have my own copy of pre-errata crane wing (currently in a shared-copy household, may as well have my own -just in case)
I couldn't see myself saying, "Oh, you're the only person in the party who planned his character out beyond his current level; sorry, errata negates your plan."
But for PFS play, it's not the first time the GM has had to be the "bad guy" in breaking news to players about how things work in organized play.
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I DEMAND TO SPEAK TO EVERY GM RIGHT NOW
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Honestly, with this Crane Wing Nerf what I am seeing is a severe immaturity on the GM's behalf. Why you ask? Because GMs are hating on defensive builds. Lets just take a look shall we?
So, somehow your take is that an official ruling directly from Paizo (no public play testing involved), is the fault of all GMs everywhere?
I don't even know how to respond to this rationally. Probably because it's so g*%+&#n far from rational in the first place.
The thing is,
The guys at Paizo have SAID that they look at things like how many forum complaints/complaints from PFS/ ect.
Therefore, they get information from people complaining. The thing wiht Crane Style chain feats is that they made defensive combat actually effective, but a lot of GMs complain because they can't hit they guy (because that is what he is built to do).
Honestly, with this Crane Wing Nerf what I am seeing is a severe immaturity on the GM's behalf. Why you ask? Because GMs are hating on defensive builds. Lets just take a look shall we?So, somehow your take is that an official ruling directly from Paizo (no public play testing involved), is the fault of all GMs everywhere?
I don't even know how to respond to this rationally. Probably because it's so g!%!!$n far from rational in the first place.
Check Jason's facebook for extra laughs.
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How about you just suck it up. Me - I don't even allow use of Crane Wing to begin with.
ANY character should have a chance of being killed by a lucky blow, let alone being hit.
A 10th level PC ought to still be frightened by being surrounded by an orc horde.
Crane Wing didn't stop either of those from happening.
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Crane Wing didn't stop either of those from happening.How about you just suck it up. Me - I don't even allow use of Crane Wing to begin with.
ANY character should have a chance of being killed by a lucky blow, let alone being hit.
A 10th level PC ought to still be frightened by being surrounded by an orc horde.
Agreed and seconded. Which is why it's a nerf. It's like traps. Sure they can still hurt a high level character. At 5th level and higher they start slowly becoming useless. As players not only expect traps they can either disarm them easily or have options to avoid them.
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How about you just suck it up. Me - I don't even allow use of Crane Wing to begin with.
ANY character should have a chance of being killed by a lucky blow, let alone being hit.
A 10th level PC ought to still be frightened by being surrounded by an orc horde.
Yea! If players don't fear death from orcs and goblins well into the high levels then they will lose respect for the most important player, ME! HAHAHAHA! AM GAMEMASTER SEZ CRANEWING BAD SMASH.
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How about you just suck it up. Me - I don't even allow use of Crane Wing to begin with.
ANY character should have a chance of being killed by a lucky blow, let alone being hit.
A 10th level PC ought to still be frightened by being surrounded by an orc horde.
And thsi is exactly what I am talking about.
Have you ever seen Ip-Man? There are many scenes where he is surrounded by adversaries but he almost never gets hit. Why? Because his DEFENCE is that good. He is a purely defensive fighter, only striking when the opportunity arises (i.e. AoO).
RPG Superstar 2014 Top 32
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To my mind, you are all oversimplifying the problem.
1) A martial, front-line character should have a chance of being hit. It's unrealistic to expect enemies to miss every single time.
2) It's unrealistic to expect GMs to entirely rewrite encounters to deal with a single feat. It's also unrealistic to expect GMs to entirely ignore one type of fight - fights against humanoid fighters - until such a level as those humanoids get iterative attacks.
3) This was commonly been used as part of a Master of Many Styles build in which the monk would dance around the battlefield, intentionally provoking attacks of opportunity that would never hit so that the monk gets a ridiculous number of counterattacks. Turns with these characters tended to be much, much longer than other turns and generally were frustrating both to GMs and other players. The GMs only real defense was to stop taking attacks of opportunity; that led to butthurt from the player, who felt that the GM was trying to invalidate their build. The GM just can't win here - either he allows it, letting the monk trivialize the rest of the party and make them sit there bored while he provokes from every creature on the battlefield, or he shuts them down, causing them to be angry. Either way isn't good.
4) It's already easy to make yourself nearly unhittable. With a very high AC, the GM is presented with the problem of either designing an encounter to deal with your AC or the party's AC. Generally, they will design against the party rather than against the single character.
5) Crane Wing as it existed before was prescient. It only expended its use when a creature would actually hit. Given that these builds also had high AC, that meant that even multiple creatures with iterative attacks would often find the monk immune to every single thing they would do.
6) I find it laughable that the martial types of characters would call GMs immature for wanting to challenge the party. Most martial players that I have played with demand harder and harder encounters. Unfortunately, with certain choices that these characters make, this develops into an arms race that hurts the rest of the party. When this happens, the only way to actually challenge the party is to not allow certain choices. PFS GMs and newbie GMs, though, may not be able to disallow certain feats, or may not be aware of the need to disable Crane Style.
If I was the gm and one of my players had an unhittable AC, I'd be a bit more creative about the solution. I would have the bad guys who survive the fights live to tell the big bad guy about this dude that they could not land a scratch on. The big bad guy would then set up a bounty on the unhittable player's head. To bring him back alive, so they could interrogate him on how he became unhittable.
Would be a fun way of picking on that player's power gaming lol!
5): And that's how it should be. Tanky characters should be tanky. Monks being strong is hardly a bad thing.
Minor nitpick, but good Defense =/= Tanky. In fact if your defense is too good, then you could easily do the opposite, as smart enemies will just ignore you and attack your squishier allies, especially if you can't give them a reason to focus on you.
Either way, Having monks be really good at being defensive isn't really a problem. It just doesn't make them tanky.
I'm starting to get the impression that people are upset with this eratta. I'm sure if we just keep making these threads saying the same thing over and over again the designers will reverse it.
Without a doubt chap, I mean look at the Rogue we got after all the complaining about it ^_^ Go Team!
Does anyone actually get to play Pathfinder anymore? Threads as of late read like all GMs are the enemy. Which makes having an actual game tricky.Sure. I haven't played as much PFS as usual lately, but the GMs are great. In fact, the "home game" I'm in is actually a PFS-legal game run by a VO who is an awesome GM. And the first words he said to me last game on this topic were "Did you see how they DESTROYED Crane Wing?!?"
Heh. I guess it's good to be reminded that PFS guys aren't on the same page about this either.
The first thing to remember, is that Pathfinder itself is a home-brew, a much improved one but still, of 3.5.
It holds no magical authority over your game. So long as a GM and a player are willing to agree to the same things, they can post a million dictates which can be happily ignored.
In my case, Pathfinder rules are simply suggestions. I make sure that when I change something, it is done after extensive play-testing, that it enhances fun, and flows more smoothly into a narrative more fitting actual combat.
As a result, I am grateful to Paizo and hand them my money because they have done great work making the majority of a system I love, saving me the work of having to do any design short of house-ruling things into what my gaming group feels to be a better game.
And because of it, my games are smooth from low to high levels, the mechanics sink smoothly both with a sense of systemic balance as well as feeling more like a real medieval combat would, excepting what happens when magic is thrown in.
What does it really matter if you convince people of your point? Just accept that a GM's version of a game is just as legitimate as any publisher's, and that everyone will have fun with the setting, narrative, and tactical elements you put before them.
My biggest point here I guess is to be willing to gleefully change anything to enhance the fun and/or immersion of your encounters, and make it a standard rule for your game.
If left to my own, I never would have figured out a vehicle system or combat maneuvers or any number of wonderful changes that make Pathfinder so much better than 3.5 D&D.
All that being said with GM styles, I think that if a GM is new or not dedicated to mastering systems, his or her best bet is to stick with the core rule book for character options. There is a reason the future books have 'advanced' and 'ultimate' as adjectives.
But yeah, if you open Pandora's Box, accept that you have a group more interested in complex, detailed, evolving combats, and act accordingly.
As a GM I have mixed feelings about Crane Wing and whether or not to allow the nerf in my future games.
On one hand Crane Wing presents an obstacle in how I challenge my players. Essentially to challenge the Crane Wing guy I have to shake up some tactics and how I model encounters which my players typically dislike because they aren't always the best players in terms of tactics.
However at level 5 or 6 this becomes a very non-issue as they are more likely to be attacked with mobs, creatures with multiple attacks, casters and things with non-melee weapon attacks so Crane Wing becomes relevant about 50% of the time.
I may well just leave it in mostly because it stops mattering about the same levels that i've started my last two campaigns.
All good and all Toascend, but if your game is PFS then you gotta follow the rules. Dems da breaks.
But that's the conceit of joining a large homogenized community. You cede some of your own personal preferences in exchange of gaining broader access. If you want the game to tailor to your preferences, your options are reduced as you have to organize the game yourself.
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I agree with K177Y C47, as long as you replace every instance of "GM" with "players".
I don't agree that the "GMs" are being immature.
The job of the GM is to challenge the players in a game, and when they do hit the "min" of a minmaxer, they get accused of targeting weaknesses, even after many encounters of "Haha, I win, 'cos my build is perfect." It's a balancing act for GMs.
It's hard to challenge a group of players equaly: the creatures that can hit a defensive build will massacre an offensive build; and the creatures that can resist the offensive builds are near immune to the attack of defensive builds.
I didn't have a problem with Crane Wing as it were, and I still don't have a problem with it. I don't play PFS, and my players may choose either version, bacause I can throw the whole world at them.
But if the sole reason for taking a specific archetype is early access to this feat and that "build" is common enough that it's disrupting the fun of others, then I agree it should be open for change. Because it's a game, and it's supposed to be a challenge, not win-feat FTW at lvl 2.
The changing of this one feat should not be able to ruin the game for anyone, at most it changes some builds of one theme. Maybe try another type of character. There must be builds that work in PFS other than those revolving around Crane Wing.
In fact, the "home game" I'm in is actually a PFS-legal game run by a VO who is an awesome GM. And the first words he said to me last game on this topic were "Did you see how they DESTROYED Crane Wing?!?" Come to think of it, maybe there's a connection between him being a good GM and ...
Thanks! :-D I'm glad you're having a good time!
Heh. I guess it's good to be reminded that PFS guys aren't on the same page about this either.
Actually, we haven't seen it as a problem in our local lodge. Pistolero gunslingers? Yes. Magus's that flood the table with d6 every time they roll? OOOOOOHHHH yes. I've been calling the magus/ninja character in our lodge "Captain One-Shot" for months. Crane wing was hardly noticeable in comparison. It might be because our lodge is only a year old, but then again we run 4 to 5 tables in one time slot at our flagship store. It's not like we don't see a variety of builds. In fact, I just got back from the major Con for the area, where I ran a table which included 3 monks. As far as I know, there wasn't a crane wing in sight. I've only ever seen the feat on a master of many styles monk. That player just shrugged and found an even more broken combination. (I'm serious. He showed it to me last night. I think his monk actually has a higher AC now than it did in the first place.)
The REALLY funny thing, and what Eirikrautha left out of his post, is that after discussing crane wing, we played our weekly game. The one that includes the armor master fighter and tower shield wielding, umber hulk barbarian. Every week I get a practical demonstration on how to wreck melee heavy PFS mods with high AC, solid damage characters. Heck... at this point, I'm taking notes. ;)
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I think this highlights a slew of issues that have very little to do with the feat itself.
There is so much wrong with society play it's not even funny, the game being dictated by people not even at the table? Yeah, thanks but no.
The designers really don't have a solid idea of of balancing the game. The consensus really does seem to be that the feat isn't that big of an issue until you couple it with MoMS. So we make the feat terrible and call it good? No sorry, this is bad design.
A lot of GMs really don't know what the hell they're doing. If you can't figure out how a work around for a feat that cancels one melee attack per turn, walk away from the screen. You don't deserve to run a game.
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There is so much wrong with society play it's not even funny, the game being dictated by people not even at the table? Yeah, thanks but no.
Absolutely. How dare a group of people all agree to play by the same set of rules. Bad fun.
The designers really don't have a solid idea of of balancing the game. The consensus really does seem to be that the feat isn't that big of an issue until you couple it with MoMS. So we make the feat terrible and call it good? No sorry, this is bad design.
You tell em. You should write your own system and sell it. You don't need no stinking Pathfinder.
A lot of GMs really don't know what the hell they're doing. If you can't figure out how a work around for a feat that cancels one melee attack per turn, walk away from the screen. You don't deserve to run a game.
How dare people be inexperienced or short on time. You want to run a module as is without making extensive changes? What's wrong with you. Forget your job, your marriage, and your kid's baseball games. Devote more time to your Pathfinder game.
Forget your job, your marriage, and your kid's baseball games. Devote more time to your Pathfinder game.
Other people don't?
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I think this highlights a slew of issues that have very little to do with the feat itself.
Agreed!
There is so much wrong with society play it's not even funny, the game being dictated by people not even at the table? Yeah, thanks but no.
Er... Not agreed. This is done by every AP, module, and prebuilt adventure ever. As to the rules specifically, you HAVE to have a central set of house rules or organized play isn't possible.
The designers really don't have a solid idea of of balancing the game. The consensus really does seem to be that the feat isn't that big of an issue until you couple it with MoMS. So we make the feat terrible and call it good? No sorry, this is bad design.
Yet the game itself has been selling strong long after WoTC pulled out of third edition. The designers aren't perfect - they've never claimed to be - but they've been doing a good job for years. Condemning them based on a single ruling is a mistake.
A lot of GMs really don't know what the hell they're doing. If you can't figure out how a work around for a feat that cancels one melee attack per turn, walk away from the screen. You don't deserve to run a game.
After six different responses to this failed the self-censor stage of replying, I think I'll just say that I respectfully disagree. :)
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There is so much wrong with society play it's not even funny, the game being dictated by people not even at the table? Yeah, thanks but no.Er... Not agreed. This is done by every AP, module, and prebuilt adventure ever. As to the rules specifically, you HAVE to have a central set of house rules or organized play isn't possible.
You rolled a 1 on that Sense Motive check, didn't you?
If Fraust was being ironic, I'm afraid I did.
I fail sense motive checks often. My real-life dice hate me. :)
