Have you had a chance to check out the Darakhul pc race from Kobold Press? I'm so totally jonesing on playing one right now, but I'm going to be running Carrion Crown for the miss, so... I'll have to be her catfolk-turned-darakhul arcanist/monk butler some other time. (I always run gestalt when there's less than 3 people playing)I surely haven't. I honestly haven't been paying much attention to races outside of the ones in my campaign and/or that my players are currently interested in. :o
Also, where do you stand on the fence that PCs should have to WORK for survival and making it to later levels, rather than having it handed to them?I view progressing into the higher tiers as a sort of learning experience. Dropping someone off into high levels easily is often more detrimental than not, as it almost ensures their demise when they encounter enemies that fight in ways they aren't prepared to handle (because they lack the experience from mastering their lower-level abilities).
For example, at high levels many staple buffs and wards have entered into the realm of trash-resources. As in, a 4th level spell like death ward is a pretty trivial thing for even a 15th level spellcaster who has spells twice that level. However, death ward will immunize you to things like energy drain, enervation spam, and lots of even worse things (any and all negative energy effects like waves of exhaustion).
I've seen players either make high-level PCs or be fast-tracked to high levels in a kind of Monte Haul sort of situation and in all cases I've seen it end with the PCs finding themselves unable to handle what awaits them. They don't fully realize the purpose and potential of their abilities or how to use them effectively and as a result can be torn apart by the dangers of high level play (where creatures can literally rip your soul out as a souvenir of your meeting).
Now not only do I feel like reaching a higher level should be earned...
Darakhul: it's pretty nifty. Basically they're "greater ghouls" a rank above Ghasts, with pretty sinister minds. They basically keep their minds instead of, say, losing them to insatiable hunger for raw meat.
PC Survival: Good response! But I wasn't clear enough on my post. While I agree with what you said, I was more referring to what some call "Player Entitlement" vs the "Old School Lethal DM Style".
To rephrase... Where do you stand on the whole "PCs should just be happy they're alive" versus "PCs are Big Damn Heroes and, like movies, shouldn't have anything too horrible happen to them" kind of thing. Perhaps 'PCs' should be replaced with 'Players', since it's very much a player state of mind.
I'm a bit more on the old-styled FATALITY side myself. Ever since the game started getting skewed towards "balance", which isn't really balanced if it's entirely within the PC's favor IMO, it's just been too... Easy. There's just no sense of accomplishment anymore. Yeah rolling dice is fun and all, but at the end of a game I'm usually sitting there with the feeling that this party of unoptimized special snowflakes just meandered through a somewhat halfway decent novel full of villains that are more like mooks than Dragons or BBEGs. With more magical gear than the entirety of any Magical Girl/Boy (Magical Boys DO exist now!) anime's universe EVER.
It just feels like it's handed to players now in a "let's go along for the ride" sort of way.
Edit: I miss stuff like the Resurrection and Polymorph shock charts. Where's the bad guys attacking the PC's mounts/companions/spellbooks/GEAR? Why is it so damn easy to remove such crippling problems as, say, DEATH!? WHY can PCs get away with resting in between every fight or two?!
I admit, I get a little upset when a character dies, but mainly only when they haven't contributed anything to the party/story. When one of my PCs dies, that's some fantastic RP potential with the new guy, and if the dead PC did enough, he'd be immortalized in and out of game.
I wonder if stuff like PFS or D&D Encounters has anything to do with stuff getting too damn easy.
Seriously.... Know what campaigns my old groups and I still reminisce about? The ones where it was a challenge, and particularly the PCs that DIED, rather than the ones that made it to the end and roflstomped the BBEG.
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...Have you had a chance to check out the Darakhul pc race from Kobold Press? I'm so totally jonesing on playing one right now, but I'm going to be running Carrion Crown for the miss, so... I'll have to be her catfolk-turned-darakhul arcanist/monk butler some other time. (I always run gestalt when there's less than 3 people playing)I surely haven't. I honestly haven't been paying much attention to races outside of the ones in my campaign and/or that my players are currently interested in. :o
Also, where do you stand on the fence that PCs should have to WORK for survival and making it to later levels, rather than having it handed to them?I view progressing into the higher tiers as a sort of learning experience. Dropping someone off into high levels easily is often more detrimental than not, as it almost ensures their demise when they encounter enemies that fight in ways they aren't prepared to handle (because they lack the experience from mastering their lower-level abilities).
For example, at high levels many staple buffs and wards have entered into the realm of trash-resources. As in, a 4th level spell like death ward is a pretty trivial thing for even a 15th level spellcaster who has spells twice that level. However, death ward will immunize you to things like energy drain, enervation spam, and lots of even worse things (any and all negative energy effects like waves of exhaustion).
I've seen players either make high-level PCs or be fast-tracked to high levels in a kind of Monte Haul sort of situation and in all cases I've seen it end with the PCs finding themselves unable to handle what awaits them. They don't fully realize the purpose and potential of their abilities or how to use them effectively and as a result can be torn apart by the dangers of high level play (where creatures can literally rip your soul out as a souvenir of your meeting).
Now not only do I feel like reaching a
I suspect that D&D (and by extension, Pathfinder) has been toned down in difficulty because of the constant complaints about 'lack of fun' aspects of the game. Especially when it comes to introducing new players to the game.
Remember, the 90's really kicked off a huge expansion of video games, especially in the RPG front, and the Millennium took it even further. The important bit about those 20 years is the incredible increase in video games as a common household item, instead of as a rather rare or 'uncommon' item. This mean that whole generations of people are being raised where video game consoles are the 'assumed norm' in the house.
With this change came a change in video game 'fun factor'. Remember when we were all kids and your character had only a few lives? You had to 'earn' more lives in the game, or carry gear to mitigate death? This is no longer a thing in video games.
No, death is just a 'continue from last save point' and save points are either ubiquitous or it can be done at, literally, any point (even during boss battles). The mentality of whole generations have changed from 'death means restarting' to 'death means continue from save'. Even the older generation have changed; as the teachers and mentors, they've continued playing games and have evolved along with the younger generations. Granted, they remember when games were 'harder' but they've also grown spoiled by the changes in gaming.
I firmly believe that in order for table top games to remain a viable option into the future, close attention must be payed to the changes in video games.
For example, no longer is 'learning the system through trials and tribulation' an aspect of games as a whole. For nearly any game, you can find guides and builds for better play experiences. Granted, this was an aspect of gaming as far back as I can recall having access to the internet ('97 or so), and even further back in the form of game guides or GameGeneie or GameShark, but it's changed in recent years. With the rise of the YouTube star, they've learned that Let's Plays and Walkthroughs and Guides are a quick and easy source of views for their channels, which directly translates into quick and easy sources of cash for their pockets if they are a partner.
This means that gamers have changed to just looking up a guide on YouTube anytime they don't know how to do something or when they want to improve their character. This means that in the table top sense, game guids, build guides and the like have drastically increased as time has gone on. Sure, it's always existed, but never to such an extent as it does now, including people maintaining websites for the express purpose of builds and guides to characters.
All-in-all, the point I'm trying to say, I guess, in this long rambled post, is that it's not necessarily the fault of the designers that the game has changed; it's because the mentality of gamers has changed with the evolution of the video game industry. Video games became easier in the 90's, and as a result, when the next edition launched, table top games became easier as well.
The tradition is only going to continue. As time goes on, when the video game industry changes, table top will have to change as well to keep new players coming to the game. It's why Wizards launched 4.0, and it's why Pathfinder has changed so much over the years to include more and more 'video game' elements.
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Darakhul: it's pretty nifty. Basically they're "greater ghouls" a rank above Ghasts, with pretty sinister minds. They basically keep their minds instead of, say, losing them to insatiable hunger for raw meat.
Ah, I just use ghouls & ghasts for that as they're both highly intelligent and have no forced mechanics to be ravenous lunatics. In fact, one of the iconic characters in my campaign is a ghast.
PC Survival: Good response! But I wasn't clear enough on my post. While I agree with what you said, I was more referring to what some call "Player Entitlement" vs the "Old School Lethal DM Style".
To rephrase... Where do you stand on the whole "PCs should just be happy they're alive" versus "PCs are Big Damn Heroes and, like movies, shouldn't have anything too horrible happen to them" kind of thing. Perhaps 'PCs' should be replaced with 'Players', since it's very much a player state of mind.
I'm a bit more on the old-styled FATALITY side myself. Ever since the game started getting skewed towards "balance", which isn't really balanced if it's entirely within the PC's favor IMO, it's just been too... Easy. There's just no sense of accomplishment anymore. Yeah rolling dice is fun and all, but at the end of a game I'm usually sitting there with the feeling that this party of unoptimized special snowflakes just meandered through a somewhat halfway decent novel full of villains that are more like mooks than Dragons or BBEGs. With more magical gear than the entirety of any Magical Girl/Boy (Magical Boys DO exist now!) anime's universe EVER.
It just feels like it's handed to players now in a "let's go along for the ride" sort of way.
I think a lot of it comes down primarily to the GM and how they use the toolbox. I'm a proponent of game balance and player rights and I'm not particularly fond of how a lot of bad things worked in older editions (such as poison just outright killing you on a failed save if you got a save at all). However, when I describe how I run my games, I've gotten the sense that some people think they sound borderline tyrannical. This can be over things as simple as having NPCs make use of the resources that are assumed available to them (such as treasure).
Now, I grew up on Nintendo Hard. I was an avid gamer from the age of 2 years old. Dino Riki was one of my favorite games even before I ventured to Kindergarten (along with Mario Bros, Donkey Kong & Donkey Kong Jr., etc). I feel challenge is very important, though I believe in fair challenges (when I was modding Baldur's Gate, one of my favorite games, I was actually super pissed to find asshat levels of cheatery spread throughout the NPCs in the game).
But like everything, careful moderation can be important. Difficulty can set the pace and feel of a game and it can be a defining feature of a game or a crippling flaw depending on its use and scale. Let me give a quick example here of what I mean.
Why Pathfinder isn't Fair - OR - Why CR Favors PCs: One of the reasons that the game is slanted in the PC's favor in terms of building encounters is that even "fair" encounters will typically lead to a very short campaign. Now, when I say "fair", I mean more or less equal with everyone playing by the same rules. However, that's not how it works in Pathfinder.
Pathfinder defines an average encounter as a party of 4 PCs vs a CR equal to the average party level (take note). It defines an epic encounter as Average Party Level +3 with the warning that it's very likely that one or more PCs will die and it can turn into a TPK with a little bad luck. The thing is, none of that is fair. It's all slanted in the favor of the PCs. To see this, we just have to look at the party's challenge rating and it becomes clear.
A heroic classed character with PC WBL (e.g. player characters) has a CR equal to their level. So a 5th level wizard w/ PC WBL is CR 5. Two CR 5 creatures equate to a CR 7 encounter. Four of them equate to a CR 9 encounter. This means even in an "epic encounter" where the CR of the enemies is APL(5)+3, the encounter is CR 8 or still 1 CR lower than the CR of the collective PCs. That doesn't seem fair, right? :o
Well, to understand why this is, we need to understand why fair fights are bad for the game. In a fair fight, you've probably got roughly a 50% chance for it to go either way. With a 50% chance to lose the fight, unless there is some sort of mechanic in place to allow easy escapes when things turn bad, roughly every other encounter is going to require PCs to re-roll characters or even an entirely new party. It would take 5 encounters to gain 1 level in a "fair" fight but you're statistically likely to never make it past 4, and you absolutely must rest between fights.
Most of us could agree that seems like a huge hassle for both PCs and GMs and would probably become very unfun very quickly for the style of game that Pathfinder is catered towards.
Exceptionally Lethal Can Be Fun: With the above said, some games thrive because of this sort of danger. If the average encounter was a truly fair fight, it generally means one of two things. PCs will learn to avoid combat at all costs unless they can force a severe disparity between them and their enemies or they are optimized to the hilt so they are functioning much higher than typical for their CR (and I don't mean optimization solely in numbers but also through tactics that are extremely hard for most NPCs to deal with).
Some RPGs have thrived on the idea that any combat could easily be your last. Some people all but wank off to critical-hit charts that cause a random goblin to decapitate mighty dragon slayers and stuff. However this sort of thing is neither conductive to heroic fantasy and caters to a very niche style of play.
Edit: I miss stuff like the Resurrection and Polymorph shock charts. Where's the bad guys attacking the PC's mounts/companions/spellbooks/GEAR? Why is it so damn easy to remove such crippling problems as, say, DEATH!? WHY can PCs get away with resting in between every fight or two?!
As far as polymorph shock charts and such, I think a lot of that has been filtered out because it can bog down the game and most feel it didn't add a whole lot to the game. It's not entirely gone though. You have to make a Fortitude save to avoid dying when someone casts stone to flesh on you when you're petrified. The DC seems fairly low and easy (DC 15) until you realize you're doing it without the benefits of your gear (your gear is nothing but a rock right now so no nice enhancement bonuses and stuff for you) and you've always got a 5% chance to randomly die unless you've got Improved Great Fortitude or something.
As to bad guys doing things like attacking allies and breaking stuff, that's 100% a GMing thing and something I do myself. When I play I carry spare spellbooks, several components pouches, spare weapons, etc. In some cases I may even wear two sets of armor (they don't stack but if one breaks you've got an extra layor, but your carrying capacity needs to be kickass to do this with heavier armors). As a GM, I will regularly target animal companions as it is practical to do so. You may recall that in my demon-encounter writeup I've copy/pasted around the boards as an example piece the succubi in the encounter have a specific tactic of attempting to repeatedly charm monster cohorts and animal companions to turn them on the PCs (and people think Devotion is a meaningless ability :P).
Wizard-lax used Rest: Finally, the resting between every fight thing is borderline mythical. I say borderline mythical because PCs can reasonably attempt to do so with things like rope trick and eventually certainly can with things like plane shift and magnificent mansion, but there are downsides to doing so. Even with the ability to forgo rest, all casting classes count any spells cast within the last 8 hours against their available spells which means you're taking at minimum an 8 hour break every time you need to recover resources (this is true for psionicists too).
Now, if you play in a static game, this is a strong tactic. However, if you are playing in a game where you're dealing with nonstatic NPCs, you may find that during those eight hours the NPCs get wise to danger and take extra steps to fortify their positions or in some cases may actually just take their ball and go home (by ball I mean treasure and by home I mean elsewhere). You can pack up a lot of stuff in eight hours with a bunch of NPCs and just strait up leave a lair that has been impregnated by a party of narcoleptic super heroes.
PCs frequently lose their element of surprise (if any) when doing so. Enemy NPCs can now set traps (not necessarily actual traps aside from simple things like deadfalls but I mean traps such as ambush points and stuff), re-equip themselves, or equip themselves (if there were NPCs in the area that weren't armed to the teeth because they weren't just chillin' in all their combat gear, they are now). NPCs might become more cautious (less likely to get a sentry to wander away from post or check out a sound or something without alerting backup first, or they might not easily be fooled into walking into a dangerous situation, etc).
Random encounters can be useful in these scenarios (but I only use them as it would make sense for the creatures in the area as I usually build challenges with finite numbers of enemies unless there is reason that more would be available). However, as far as finite enemies are concerned, it's very possible at higher levels where resting mid-raid is easier that your enemies can also do the same and that can be bad for you.
For example, say you've got some big bad diabolists. You raid their lair and then activate your daily "15 minute adventuring day" power. The badguys, now aware that you are here decide to blow their loads on getting backup, so they each vomit up as many planar ally and planar binding spells as they can muster and then rest as well. So when you encounter them, they've got additional summons and stuff at the ready and they don't even add to the XP gained from the encounters because they were conjured from the class features of your enemies in response to your actions and their resting was a tactical decision just like yours.
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About Taking the Ball
I wanted to discuss the prospect of taking the ball and leaving a bit more 'cause it's kind of an interesting bit to me and one I think that a lot of GMs never even consider but I've done a few times to the surprise of a number of players.
In my previous post I mentioned that when PCs are invading the lairs or hideouts of NPCs, an oft-mentioned tactic on the internet is to use things like rope trick and so forth to simply rest mid-adventure in a dangerous area with no major issues. However, in a game where the world continues to go on while the PCs are doing things this can lead to some really bad consequences for the PCs.
9 Hours: It takes nine whole hours to recover spells. No matter how much bling of sustenance you have, spells that have been cast in the last eight hours count towards your daily limits (same with PP with psionics) and it requires 1 hour to prep all of your spells or regain your PP or whatever which gives the locals 9 hours to prep or do other things with the knowledge there's a crazy band of narcoleptic super heroes somewhere in their base of operations.
Now one of the things I mentioned before was that villains can just take their stuff and move elsewhere. In many situations, the location of the villain's base is merely one of convenience for the enemy and GMs often have an idea that the villains may have an exit strategy to fight another day anyway. I pose the question "why wait"?
In most cases it comes down to how important the lair itself is to the masterminds' schemes. In most adventures it's a matter of convenience. It's just a place they are temporarily calling home or running their schemes from. It might just be a warehouse or an old fortress on the mountain that's nearby or it might just be some caves. The thing is, most of the time the where is not important. In the nine hours the party is resting, it's very reasonable that unless the villains are super comfortable just waiting around for the PCs to appear once more, they may just pack up all their stuff and go somewhere else. Hooray, the PCs accomplished...very little. The PCs awake from their slumber and leap out of their extradimensional space ready to throw down only to find an empty lair full of untriggered traps, no treasure, and most importantly no badguys. The badguys then return to harassing the local citizens or whatever once they've set up shop elsewhere (likely with more traps and the like).
And if the badguys are super douchebags (and they should be), they might even pull the lever next to the sign that says "Do not pull!" or push the big red button that says "Do not push!" on their way out. Nobody wants to exit their extra-dimensional space to find that the death star already exploded while they were gone. Finding yourself in a collapsed dungeon is hazardous to your health (generally speaking, being magically forced into solid objects shunts you to the nearest open space and deals a lot of damage if that's a big shunting) or may complicate things as you try to get out (the cave entrance has collapsed big time so now you need to find an alternate route out or start digging).
Anyone ever played Baldur's Gate? Remember the mine that gets flooded? Yeah, that's a thing too. Everyone totally loved those aquatic sonic the hedgehog stages so they'll really love it when they get to play in the mindflayer's warren after he decides to flood the thing. What, you didn't prepare water breathing prior to leaving your rope trick? I hope you make your Concentration check to cast underwater because your party is going to need another rope trick right now.
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Heh... fun fact about rope trick, you can't hide the rope. It looks really odd to just walk into a room and there's a room just standing there, going up into the ceiling and then just stopping. Anyone with magical knowledge can then figure out what the spell is and should be able to rationalize what's going on.
This happened to one of my parties once, when they rested in a dungeon. A Wizard NPC that they let get away came back for revenge after they interrupted his experiments.
Summoned a bunch of babau (8 or so total), and then he readied an action along with his Ratling Familiar (who can activate scrolls without a check). The babau proceeded to attempt to dispel the Rope Trick, and when they succeeded, it dropped the party on the floor. Then the wizard cast cloud kill (his readied action) while his Ratling cast wall of stone (the Ratling's readied action). This trapped the party inside the cloud, with the babau (whom are immune to poison).
So yeah... just because you've got rope trick running, doesn't mean you're safe. Any spell with a duration other than 'instantaneous' can be dispelled, unless it specifically says otherwise.
Will dragons, in your game system, have armor proficiency?
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Will dragons, in your game system, have armor proficiency?
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Hahahahahaha...
They can.
(^t^)
Which sounds better to you:
Athaloric or Amhrad?
I feel Amhrad flows better and would probably like saying it more. Athaloric sounds kind of weird to me, or like it should just be "Athalor" which would be pretty as a name. That said, I think Amhrad feels a little weird and I'd probably be more fond of Ahmrad but that'd be a different pronunciation that's just more comfortable to me.
Ahmrad being pronounced more like Ah-m-rad, and Amhrad pronounced more like Am-hrad. The "hr" feels weird but could be pretty distinguishing.
Hi Ashiel,
I just wanted to tell you that I have used your "Tome of Soul Binding" in one of my homebrew games and it was tons of fun. I would like to hear your opinion about how I ruled the object and about a complaint from one of my players.
My players decided to imprison a Efreet, because it was cool with the story and also because they saw a weak will save and no SR. They researched to get the name of the least powerful and more "friendless" efreet they could get.
They got him into the book and, at first, they tried to call the Efreet only for wish-granting purposes. He perverted all their wishes to the non-harmful limits of the text of the Tome of Soul Binding. For example, one player wished to see his charisma permanently increased as much as the Efreet could with his three wishes. He gave the player a +2 inherent bonus to charisma and with his third wish, he changed the player permanently into a gnome (for another racial +2). This leaded to a lot of funny and a bit frustrating situations (for the player).
Anyway, when they saw that it was exasperating to get what they wanted this way, they tried to bribe the Efreet with more freedom and more time out of the book. Finally, the Efreet managed to convince an NPC (a waitress that he seduced) to say the words "I wish that we were free to run with each other to the desert" when he was not depleted of wishcrafting power. So he casted the wish to liberate himself as the text of the book says, and... he passed the saving throw! After that, he plane shifted away with the waitress in front of the wrathful owner of the now useless tome.
My player tells me that acting in this way should be considered acting against the owner of the book and, thus, forbbiden.
I can see this point, because the liberation caused, if not other damages, an economic damage because now the book is useless, but it is not my interpretation of your text.
Since in this case the author of the magic item is available for commenting the RAI of the matter... I though that I could ask. Was I unfair to the player?
Supplementary question:
Which do you think pairs better with the last name "Dziergas?"
Not sure. Athalor (minus the ic) Dziergas or Amhrad Dziergas both sound pretty cool IMHO. If anything I really just love that name Dziergas. :P
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Hi Ashiel,
I just wanted to tell you that I have used your "Tome of Soul Binding" in one of my homebrew games and it was tons of fun. I would like to hear your opinion about how I ruled the object and about a complaint from one of my players.
I hope you've been enjoying it. :D
My players decided to imprison a Efreet, because it was cool with the story and also because they saw a weak will save and no SR. They researched to get the name of the least powerful and more "friendless" efreet they could get.
Efreeti are indeed pretty awesome minions. :P
They got him into the book and, at first, they tried to call the Efreet only for wish-granting purposes. He perverted all their wishes to the non-harmful limits of the text of the Tome of Soul Binding. For example, one player wished to see his charisma permanently increased as much as the Efreet could with his three wishes. He gave the player a +2 inherent bonus to charisma and with his third wish, he changed the player permanently into a gnome (for another racial +2). This leaded to a lot of funny and a bit frustrating situations (for the player).
That's pretty funny indeed. Admittedly I'm a bit surprised that turning them into a gnome imparted the stat buff but hey, I guess it's an easy fix that wastes a day of wishes. Funny. :P
Anyway, when they saw that it was exasperating to get what they wanted this way, they tried to bribe the Efreet with more freedom and more time out of the book. Finally, the Efreet managed to convince an NPC (a waitress that he seduced) to say the words "I wish that we were free to run with each other to the desert" when he was not depleted of wishcrafting power. So he casted the wish to liberate himself as the text of the book says, and... he passed the saving throw! After that, he plane shifted away with the waitress in front of the wrathful owner of the now useless tome.
My player tells me that acting in this way should be considered acting against the owner of the book and, thus, forbbiden.
I can see this point, because the liberation caused, if not other damages, an economic damage because now the book is useless, but it is not my interpretation of your text.
Since in this case the author of the magic item is available for commenting the RAI of the matter... I though that I could ask. Was I unfair to the player?
The inability to act against the owner of the book, even through indirect means (the example given is of summoning) basically means that the outsider cannot try to harm or otherwise impair the owner of the book, even by indirect means such as summoning a monster and having the monster hurt them, or by drowning them, and so forth. The outsider itself is essentially incapable of doing anything to hurt the owner and their immediate property.
As an example, if the party wished for a sunken treasure, the djinn would need to port the treasure to them, not them to the treasure (which would probably kill them at the bottom of the ocean). :P
I think the djinn getting someone else to wish for their freedom is a pretty clever ploy and though I can see that the argument could be made that it was acting against the owner, I think allowing the djinn to attempt it was fair since it doesn't imply harm will actually come to the owner of the book. In this case it might be a lapse in security in how much freedom the djinn was given that allowed and no prior instructions given to the djinn to disallow it (such as "You are not allowed to aid or assist anyone in freeing yourself or getting my book").
I think the ruling was fair. I might have made it a bit more difficult myself but it depends on the group and what we were hoping to get out of the game and the players.
As a general rule of thumb, I flip the scenario around a bit when deciding what I would rule in niche situations. If the PC were stuck in the book and trying to escape or be mischievous method, would I rule that they could or could not? I do this because I like to try to rule consistently between PCs and NPCs (what's good for the goose is good for the gander as it goes).
For example, in my current campaign a PC (a tiefling) is actually stuck in one such book because a nefarious dude used it on her (outsider type is not always a good thing as it makes you legal bait for binding stuff). She's done things like tell her saviors the location of her book, and in one case even used suggestion on one of the books' wielder to let her run around outside the 60 ft. limits of the book, and in one case even tricked one of the bearers of the book to give her the book and she ran off with it (temporarily, before he was like "HOLD IT!" and she failed her Charisma check vs the Paladin).
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On a side note, the medium-HD version capable of binding a djinn is less than 12,000 gp to create so worst case scenario your party could pool their cash and craft a new book and try again. 3,000 gp from each party member for another shot at a wish factory isn't a bad deal. :)
On a side note, perhaps let someone with good Diplomacy be the go-to guy for negotiating with outsiders. I've always found friends are better than slaves (even if there's not a lot of practical difference when certain spells are involved).
As an example, I once played a telepath with great social skills who charmed the heck out of lots of enemies. She used charms as kind of a super ice-breaker to tear down resistance to her will, but her will was legitimately "I wanna be your friend". In several cases she actively told her thralls that they were being mind controlled by her, apologized for it, and they eventually went on to actually become friends.
One example was a drow elf that she charmed in the middle of a fight that was going pretty rough on both sides. Later she explained to the drow that she was charmed. When charmed you always take whatever is being told to you in the best possible way, so the drow accepted that she her being charmed was an appreciably better fate than being killed. The drow also was concerned that if she wasn't charmed she might suddenly decide to kill or seek revenge on the telepath so she decided she didn't want to not be charmed by the telepath either (who, if even artificially, she now cared deeply for).
Eventually the two became friends outside of the charm and one day the telepath released the charm and even had a positive influence on the drow since the telepath was good-aligned and a lot of her positive outlooks and suggestions were well received by the charmed drow who was learning in the process.
The problem with the efreeti as I am portraying them is that they are the representation of tyranny. They have a lot of slaves and they want to rule.
To be forcefully imprisoned (after suffering enervations and curses to reduce saves) into the book and then forced to comply to orders of humanoids is very humiliating for them.
They won't collaborate if they can find a way not to. That makes diplomacy difficult.
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The problem with the efreeti as I am portraying them is that they are the representation of tyranny. They have a lot of slaves and they want to rule.
To be forcefully imprisoned (after suffering enervations and curses to reduce saves) into the book and then forced to comply to orders of humanoids is very humiliating for them.
They won't collaborate if they can find a way not to. That makes diplomacy difficult.
That's fair. Personally speaking, in my games it would make harder but not impossible. If all else fails, charm monster would pretty much solve stubborness issues. :P
That said, I wouldn't honestly expect any creature you bind in a book of binding to start out as anything other than hostile towards you so diplomacy without mind-affecting magics would be really hard.
When considering bound outsiders and their attitude, there is, of couse, always the consideration that a called outsider who either has experience with how callings work, or has the spellcraft/Knowledge Arcana to know what's being done to her, will realize that a caster powerful enough to bind her may very easily be powerful enough to end her.
This is also a consideration worth keeping when dealing with warding diagrams and magic circles, since a creature caught in such a thing is entirely at the mercy of the binder. The binder can slay the outsider right then and there, and there is nothing it can do to stop her.
I realize outsiders cannot be expected to think like humans, but if I was an unaging and powerful creature, who could potentially live through the rest of existence if I play my cards right, I would have a hard time thinking of something more terrifying than being at the mercy of a mortal creature.
What is and is not reasonable to ask of an outsider takes on a different shape if the outsider has to weigh the downside of having to obey a mortal now, or get snuffed without a chance to retaliate - the most impotent of ends.
Anyhew, didn't mean to hijack, just thought I'd share my thoughts.
-Nearyn
Ashiel! I'm preparing a solo game for my partner after she expressed some curiosity and seemed utterly perplexed by my every attempt to explain how a D&D game functions. We sat down with the rulebook and was blown away by her enthusiasm. She's settled on a halfling mounted barbarian named Rillka, raised by wolves. I asked a few leading questions about her character to determine how savage she was, where she comes from and the like but we
1st level games are notoriously swingy, but I'm pleased by her choice of a formidiable class like the Barbarian, which should even the playing field.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Of talon and tush and claw.
Now hear the call, good hunting all,
That keep the Forest Law.
Encounter One: Dusk, Rillka joins the wolfpack on the hunt, having cornered an Elk in a ravine, the pack move in to strike. (Two allied wolves, one Elk)
Encounter Two: A member of the pack falls victim to a huntsman's trap. A moderate DC STR check can pry open the jaws, but as the night rides out it is clear that the beast will need a healer.
Encounter Three: Pressing into the fairie's glade to seek the Greenspeaker (local druid to be fleshed out later), the PC encounters a mischievous Grig. The Grig will harry it with it's spell like abilities and flight, but yield if the PC manages to damage it or move to threaten.
Encounter Four: The animated cauldron encounter from Hollow's Last Hope, a source of magical loot and much-needed healing (as I've opted to avoid humanoid NPC allys for now), and the first encounter that puts her in significant danger.
Potential Other Encounters: A wyvern sighting (it's almost a dragon!), kobolds, friendly fey, a CR-appropriate number of commoners in the nearby logging village. Large numbers of low-strength enemies seem fair, despite action economy there's less chance of flooring a PC with an unexpected crit. I'd love to use a hag somewhere down the road if her enthusiasm keeps up, and run the Crown of the Kobold King if I can get a full table, and the transition into friendly contact with the villagers after initial hostility would be some meaty roleplay material.
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I feel duty bound to mention that the Miyazaki film, Princess Mononoke, requires a viewing before running this game.
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Ashiel! I'm preparing a solo game for my partner after she expressed some curiosity and seemed utterly perplexed by my every attempt to explain how a D&D game functions. We sat down with the rulebook and was blown away by her enthusiasm. She's settled on a halfling mounted barbarian named Rillka, raised by wolves. I asked a few leading questions about her character to determine how savage she was, where she comes from and the like but we
1st level games are notoriously swingy, but I'm pleased by her choice of a formidiable class like the Barbarian, which should even the playing field.
I'd trust in your knowledge of the CR system over mine. How do I calculate the APL of a single 1st level PC? What about the experience seeing as it shan't be split four ways? I mean to strike a balance of encounters with the wolfpack at her side and solo ones. Any suggestions for some low CR challenges I could throw at her? Especially ones that showcase different parts of the rules and play to her strengths.
The easiest way to handle is use the APL as normal so she's APL 1 right now. Where we will do our work is with the XP budget of the encounter. The system is designed around 4 PCs of the same level (each PC is 25% of the party) so for every additional PC add +25% to the XP budget for the encounter and for every fewer reduce it by -25%.
So when you're building your encounter and buying enemies with your XP budget, your new budget looks like this:
CR 1/4 = 25 XP
CR 1/3 = 35 XP
CR 1/2 = 50 XP
CR 1 = 100 XP
CR 2 = 150 XP
CR 3 = 200 XP
Etc.
I find this method works marvelously and allows you to quickly and easily scale encounters for larger or smaller groups. As a general rule of thumb, when dealing with more players, add more monsters rather than making existing monsters stronger. When dealing with fewer players you'll often need to reduce and nerf the monsters in question.
For example, if your were going to have an encounter with spiders, for a party with 4 players you might include a pair of CR 1/2 spiders but for a party of 1 players you might include a single CR 1/4 spider.
Any suggestions on how to even the odds? I'm considering the hero point rules, but its an extra layer of complexity that I mightn't necessarily want.
Honestly if you just reduce your XP budget by 75% it should come out pretty solid. She'll generally face encounters that would be trivial for a party of PCs but can be challenging solo.
Any experience with solo games yourself?
Yeah my brother wanted to play D&D when he was four so I ran him a solo game for a pretty long time. I've also ran solo games for some other family members and a few people I was teaching the basics of the game to.
Sounds pretty cool! If you want some more ideas for random filler, here's a few.
1. Finds a lost traveler in the wild.
2. An intelligent magical creature is wounded, sick, or in peril.
3. There is a hunter that the pack fears (think Sher Khan in the Jungle Book or the leopard in Tarzan).
4. There are curious strangers in the woods with unknown motives.
5. A young warrior comes to the forest to see with eyes unclouded by hate.
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I've been working on my RPG system as much as possible lately when not working (it's pushed my other projects off the charts at the moment. I apologize to everyone waiting for updates on things like the Warlock or Vengeance Best Served but when a full-time life it's hard to find time to work on everything and I feel like this is probably the most important thing for me to develop project-wise at the moment). In any case, I thought I'd give you guys a preview of some of the prototypes we've been working on "in the shop" as it were.
Healing and Dying
Healing has a few issues in d20. Natural healing is too fast. You can be on death's doorstep and passing into the next world on the next round and be up walking around like nothing happened in a few days.
Secondly, hit points are a little too binary. You can't have a scene where a character is dying and gives their last speech to someone or something because the moment you start dying you go unconscious without effects like Diehard or Ferocity. That's a bummer.
Without getting into the crunchy bits (I'll include some excerpts below), there are now two new conditions that work in conjunction with hit points: Critical and Dying.
The critical condition is something that occurs when you are at less than 1 hit point. It represents that you've taken serious wounds, slows your healing rate, causes additional HP loss when you take standard or full-round actions and threatens to knock you unconscious whenever you lose hit points.
The dying condition is pretty simple. It's what makes you lose hit points each round that you're dying. Using things like the Heal skill or healing hit point damage can remove the dying condition without removing the critical condition.
Picture of rule from document.
Death Threshold
Along with the aforementioned conditions, characters have a death threshold. This threshold is equal to your Constitution score plus your Level. So a 5th level character with a 15 Con has a DT of 20. Until your negative Hp reach your DT, you are still alive and kicking. This is important because characters can continue to fight heroically right down into the negatives (assuming they don't fall unconscious from their wounds).
High level characters have significantly large DTs than not because inherent modifiers from things like wish are baked into character advancement in level (wish now has a different benefit for ability scores in that it can incarnate your enhancement bonuses), so as characters are throwing around higher and higher amounts of damage, their DT likewise will rise higher and higher.
So a 1st level warrior with a 14 Con has a DT of 15. A 20th level warrior with a Con of 30 has a DT of 50.
Other game effects such as feats, class features, racial features, or even spells could modify your DT further.
This also means that combat at low levels is less swingy because dropping below 1 HP may not end the fight for that PC (especially if they have a good Con score).
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Revised Natural Healing.
Revised healing for ability scores and negative levels.
A side panel discussing healing for the reader and GM.
Negative levels also do not automatically slay characters but continue to apply. The lost current and maximum HP can put you into permanent critical condition (if your maximum HP is reduced to less than 1 HP) and can kill you if it drops your current HP below your death threshold.
For example, let's say a party of 1st level characters is fighting a wight (APL +2 encounter). The wight deals 1d4+1 damage and inflicts energy drain on those it hits. Since a negative level reduces current and maximum HP by -5, effectively the wight deals 1d4+6 damage (ouch!), but it has a lingering effect.
If the party's wizard with 8 hit points is struck for 2 negative levels, his maximum hit points are now -2. The wizard is now in critical condition until the negative levels are removed, even if he is no longer dying and at full health (after the cleric heals him). The wizard is essentially ailing and crippled until the negative levels are healed.
Okay, if I'm reading this right, I'm seeing some thematic issues with the new 'wounds and recovery' system.
If you fall below 1 hp, you enter into a Critical and Dying condition. You take 1 hp of damage each round and take another 1 hp of damage if you take a standard or full-round action (this is the Dying condition) and you are staggered (Critical condition). In addition, every time you take damage, you need to make a DC 5 Con check or fall unconscious with a penalty equal to the amount of negative hp you have on the check. Furthermore, if you do fall unconscious, you make another DC 5 Con check, also with a penalty equal to your negative hp, to 'stabilize' and it also removes the Dying condition. You do not regain consciousness until your hp is brought up to 1 hp again, and it slows your natural recovery rate to 1hp/level per week, instead of per day.
Correct so far?
Does this mean that, essentially, you have to make a Con check every round while critical to remain conscious? Do you have to make two Con checks if you also take a standard or full-round action? How do unconscious characters survive long enough, on their own, to become conscious again?
What I mean is, a 1st level character at -5 hp has to wait 6 weeks to recover enough hp to become conscious again on their own. Wouldn't they die of dehydration or starvation in this time? Even higher level characters will die of dehydration/starvation unless they use the 'slowed recovery per day instead of per week' example in the sidebar. The 7th level character used in the example could become conscious again after 1 or 2 days if his hp total is 0 hp or -1 hp, meaning he'd be able to get up and forage for his own food and water while he recovers, but if they don't use the sidebar, then he has to wait 1 week at which point he'd die from a lack of water.
This makes it really unlikely for the thematic depiction of a wounded hero regaining consciousness, bandaging his wounds and barely surviving in the wild while he heals. Or for any wounded villain to crawl away from a battlefield and recover from his wounds to challenge the party at a later day.
There needs to be a chance for those who are critical and unconscious, to become conscious again in order to tend to their own wounds and needs.
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Does this mean that, essentially, you have to make a Con check every round while critical to remain conscious? Do you have to make two Con checks if you also take a standard or full-round action? How do unconscious characters survive long enough, on their own, to become conscious again?
Yes. Unless you cease dying (dying is the condition that ticks your HP down each round). Currently you can pass out from your bleeding out or pushing yourself while critical, and yes, taking actions while dying and critical means you're more likely to knock yourself out faster.
This makes it really unlikely for the thematic depiction of a wounded hero regaining consciousness, bandaging his wounds and barely surviving in the wild while he heals. Or for any wounded villain to crawl away from a battlefield and recover from his wounds to challenge the party at a later day.
There needs to be a chance for those who are critical and unconscious, to become conscious again in order to tend to their own wounds and needs.
Noted! That would be thematically appropriate. I just got home from work so expect a revision to be posted within the next hour.
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Would this be preferable?
Revised recovery.
This version allows a critically injured character to still fall into a sort of days long coma but allows them to wake up by repeating the check every eight hours.
It occurs to me the playtest is far from beginning and already I'm making revisions based on feedback. :P
Speaking of revisions, this made me laugh.
Combat Chapter's revision #.
Mind you, this isn't the number of rules changed, it's the number of revisions made at all, which include tweaks to wording, rewriting, etc. Just basically any sort of minor revision was made and saved. :P
Would this be preferable?
Revised recovery.This version allows a critically injured character to still fall into a sort of days long coma but allows them to wake up by repeating the check every eight hours.
Yeah, that's perfect! I don't know if you've seen it, but when I was talking about the thematic issue, the scene from the Rurouni Kenshin movie at the very beginning was prominent in my mind. This revision perfectly matches that scene as the guy wakes up hours after the battle is over and stumbles away.
Speaking of revisions, this made me laugh.
Combat Chapter's revision #.Mind you, this isn't the number of rules changed, it's the number of revisions made at all, which include tweaks to wording, rewriting, etc. Just basically any sort of minor revision was made and saved. :P
I wonder what the 'final' revision count will be if/when you finally 'go live' with your system?
Yeah, that's perfect! I don't know if you've seen it, but when I was talking about the thematic issue, the scene from the Rurouni Kenshin movie at the very beginning was prominent in my mind. This revision perfectly matches that scene as the guy wakes up hours after the battle is over and stumbles away.Would this be preferable?
Revised recovery.This version allows a critically injured character to still fall into a sort of days long coma but allows them to wake up by repeating the check every eight hours.
Awesome, glad you like it. :D
I wonder what the 'final' revision count will be if/when you finally 'go live' with your system?Speaking of revisions, this made me laugh.
Combat Chapter's revision #.Mind you, this isn't the number of rules changed, it's the number of revisions made at all, which include tweaks to wording, rewriting, etc. Just basically any sort of minor revision was made and saved. :P
No clue. A lot of stuff is still in flux or being ironed out. I'm most excited about the class design scheme (which is very far off since I need to get the core revisions firstly) which I'll discuss a bit about in my next post but it's very, very far off so I don't have any screenshots at the moment. :P
Basically every even character level you get a talent. Talents are kind of like class-feats (similar to how rogue talents or rage powers work in Pathfinder now). You can select talents from any classes that you have and talents are primarily limited by your statistics and/or level, so hybrid-prestige classes are probably defunct as multiclassing is going to be super-friendly.
While I'm working on stuff in the system, is there anything anyone really feels like Pathfinder / general D20 is really missing that would make them happy? :)
I can promise anything but the curiosity is real. ^_^
Hmm... I think most of my issues with the d20 system stems from cinematic or thematic issues.
For example, a true mana system so that casters can recover some of their abilities over time instead of after 8 hours rest. Possibly the ability to 'dig deep' and extract more power than you should, even tapping into your own life force to do something.
The ability for casters to work together to accomplish feats of magic they otherwise couldn't. I believe 3E/Forgotten Realms had Circle Magic, primarily used by the Red Wizards of Thay in the Realms. It's a very common trope in fantasy of all sorts to pool abilities together to do something that is above any one person's capabilities.
Surprise or sudden stealth takedowns. The coup de grat exists in the game, but it's not exactly applicable unless you have the time to pin someone via a grapple, or knock them unconcious with a sleep poison or spell. How often has there been situations in media where a guy sneaks up on an enemy, grabs him by the mouth and cuts his throat? Or a situation where a powerful warrior at full health gets stabbed through the stomach by a sudden betrayal or something like that.
Sure, there's sneak attack to be certain, but being able to suddenly slit a throat isn't something that only a certain subset of the population can do, so it shouldn't be a class ability or feat. I'm not sure how one would do something like it, but it really bugs me that a stealthy class like the Ranger can't slit an enemies throat if they creep up on them unless they have sneak attack or something.
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For me lack of partial effects for most abilities and checks is the thing that bothers me the most about the d20 system. I want failing by a little to be better than failing by a lot.
The issue is that it would requiring rewriting most abilities in the game.
Well you'll be pleased to know that one of the design standards we're going with includes lots of things with degrees of success. Generally, succeeding by more nets a better result and failing by more nets worse results.
An example of how this works is with flesh to stone. Beat someone's Fortitude and they begin turning to stone becoming staggered and suffering penalties. Beat their Fortitude by 10 and they're a lawn ornament.
Similarly, if you're fighting a werewolf and it uses a fear-effect howl on the party, the same ability could shaken, frighten, or panic members of your party depending on how much it beats your Will saves by.
Similarly still, in some cases getting better results in things like skills will net greater successes (kind of like how Knowledge skills give more info with higher checks now).
Virtually all save or die effects are now massive success/failure type things. So you're very likely to just slaughter hordes of mooks with your save or die effects but actually sticking a SoD to a level-appropriate enemy will generally just hurt a lot.
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Hmm... I think most of my issues with the d20 system stems from cinematic or thematic issues.
For example, a true mana system so that casters can recover some of their abilities over time instead of after 8 hours rest. Possibly the ability to 'dig deep' and extract more power than you should, even tapping into your own life force to do something.
I know psionics does this with Overchannel. I might make something kind of like that as a default option. I do have some bad news though. We've still got vancian-ish casting (because people still like it), though it's much closer to sorcerer/arcanist casting and is balanced a bit differently. We'll be including psionics too of course but both styles are still here. :o
The ability for casters to work together to accomplish feats of magic they otherwise couldn't. I believe 3E/Forgotten Realms had Circle Magic, primarily used by the Red Wizards of Thay in the Realms. It's a very common trope in fantasy of all sorts to pool abilities together to do something that is above any one person's capabilities.
I'll look into this. :)
Surprise or sudden stealth takedowns. The coup de grat exists in the game, but it's not exactly applicable unless you have the time to pin someone via a grapple, or knock them unconcious with a sleep poison or spell. How often has there been situations in media where a guy sneaks up on an enemy, grabs him by the mouth and cuts his throat? Or a situation where a powerful warrior at full health gets stabbed through the stomach by a sudden betrayal or something like that.
Sure, there's sneak attack to be certain, but being able to suddenly slit a throat isn't something that only a certain subset of the population can do, so it shouldn't be a class ability or feat. I'm not sure how one would do something like it, but it really bugs me that a stealthy class like the Ranger can't slit an enemies throat if they creep up on them unless they have sneak attack or something.
This is an interesting one and I'll try to come up with something, though it will need to be carefully orchestrated because that's a really big deal and I'd like to not introduce mechanics that would be misused by players or GMs.
I know psionics does this with Overchannel. I might make something kind of like that as a default option. I do have some bad news though. We've still got vancian-ish casting (because people still like it), though it's much closer to sorcerer/arcanist casting and is balanced a bit differently. We'll be including psionics too of course but both styles are still here. :oHmm... I think most of my issues with the d20 system stems from cinematic or thematic issues.
For example, a true mana system so that casters can recover some of their abilities over time instead of after 8 hours rest. Possibly the ability to 'dig deep' and extract more power than you should, even tapping into your own life force to do something.
Yeah I figured that'd be the case :P
It just bugs me that a caster can wake up and cast a spell, and if he does nothing else that day, he can't recover that spell until he goes to sleep and wakes up the next, essentially, 24 hours later. Where as another caster can do nothing all day, and then blow all of his spells before going to sleep, and wake up 8 hours later with his spells replenished.
I dunno, maybe some sort of time limit on how often spell slots recover instead of "8 hours rest" being the only option? Outside of Pearls of Power and stuff like that, of course.
This is an interesting one and I'll try to come up with something, though it will need to be carefully orchestrated because that's a really big deal and I'd like to not introduce mechanics that would be misused by players or GMs.Surprise or sudden stealth takedowns. The coup de grat exists in the game, but it's not exactly applicable unless you have the time to pin someone via a grapple, or knock them unconcious with a sleep poison or spell. How often has there been situations in media where a guy sneaks up on an enemy, grabs him by the mouth and cuts his throat? Or a situation where a powerful warrior at full health gets stabbed through the stomach by a sudden betrayal or something like that.
Sure, there's sneak attack to be certain, but being able to suddenly slit a throat isn't something that only a certain subset of the population can do, so it shouldn't be a class ability or feat. I'm not sure how one would do something like it, but it really bugs me that a stealthy class like the Ranger can't slit an enemies throat if they creep up on them unless they have sneak attack or something.
Yeah, that's primarily the biggest issue isn't it? It'd be fairly easy to implement it and make it realistic (You can attempt to make a coup de grat attack on a flat-footed enemy) but doing so makes stealthy classes absurdly powerful as they could just use invisibility and silence to move around and kill just about everything.
I dunno, perhaps something like a special attack letting you reduce someone to the Critical and Dying conditions? Or maybe a special attack that automatically inflicts a critical hit, and the critical hit deals double damage? (I'm aware that your system has criticals doing max damage instead of multiplied damage)
It's definitely a tough one though.
The current plan is that the standard recovery method for any "daily" resources is that a character can recover any of those resources they haven't used in the last 8 hours by resting/studying/meditating/practicing/whatevering for an hour.
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Yeah I figured that'd be the case :P
It just bugs me that a caster can wake up and cast a spell, and if he does nothing else that day, he can't recover that spell until he goes to sleep and wakes up the next, essentially, 24 hours later. Where as another caster can do nothing all day, and then blow all of his spells before going to sleep, and wake up 8 hours later with his spells replenished.
I dunno, maybe some sort of time limit on how often spell slots recover instead of "8 hours rest" being the only option? Outside of Pearls of Power and stuff like that, of course.
Well with psionics, you can spend a short period (1 hour) to meditate and recover all your PP with the caveat that you can't recover any PP used in the past 8 hours. Pathfinder casters have a similar limit on spells (any used in the last 8 hours cannot be recovered) but the rule is mostly redundant aside from complications with rest-interruptions.
I like the psionics version more because...well, let's say you're doing a travel adventure. At 8 am, your party has an encounter and you burn some PP. Later at noon, your party does some stuff. A while later you stop and take a rest and recover the PP you used at 8am in time for the encounter that evening.
I'll see what I can do overall though. I'm not super concerned about buffing casters in these sorts of ways because casters are being tweaked in other ways (including some stealth-nerfs to casters in the form of poor saves not being so poor).
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The current plan is that the standard recovery method for any "daily" resources is that a character can recover any of those resources they haven't used in the last 8 hours by resting/studying/meditating/practicing/whatevering for an hour.
Yeah, this is actually one of my favorite things because we're standardizing the way classes with daily resources recover them.
Some classes may have other resources though. One thing I'm looking into developing at the behest of my brother is a class that revs up with combat, similar to warriors from WoW. As in the class begins at 0 and each action generates more whupass power to be expended for liberal smackdowns and/or heroic action.
I look forward to working on it. :)
The d20. Need a better curve, imho.
And magic item creation. Really need better rules for that.
The RP side of it, really.
I under stand there's guidelines for how much wealth a group should have at certain levels, but the item creation rules seem to be written as "if you have the materials, make it!" no matter what level the party is (with some exceptions, of course). There's a way around most of the level requirements for some spells, ways around some of the costs involved, so if you have intelligent players that really understand the mechanics, they can come up with some great stuff earlier than you'd like, and I applaud that, it just makes my job harder.
If the character's amass more wealth than the book suggests, with the exception of being a "dick" DM, there's no RP reason for them not to make these things if they are so inclined.
I'd like mechanically there to be a rule on the gold value of things being possible to make at certain levels, so that no matter the caveats or loopholes you find, this net would catch it all.
Was watching Fifth Element when a scene struck a thought in my head. A classic scenario involves using a robotic fly to spy on people, (as in Fifth Element) when I realized, one could theoretically use Craft Construct to make little fly constructs to spy on people. Have you ever done anything like this?
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I've read a couple of your posts about your issues with the Summoner. Have you looked at the Unchained version? If so, could you share your opinions on it? Essentially all its spells with wonky levels have been changed to be in line with the other classes, and the eidolons became much more restricted in what they could buy.
I'm running a campaign where one player has a Wild Caller Summoner, and is planning on acting fully in a caster capacity (ie, could switch her to a 1/2 BAB, d6, with no armor, and he could probably care less, aside from wishing for more spells per day). We're still low level yet, but I've suggested he switch her over to unchained to ease potential headaches on my end (as I'm still a novice GM).
He is, however, worried that he won't be able to fulfill his goal as a conjuration-based battlefield control / buffing specialist, especially since he would then have the only character who isn't a full-caster.
On my end, my main issue with the class when I was making it was that all of the cool utility abilities cost so much that making anything that didn't maximize its combat potential gave up too much. With Unchained, this is even worse, since the reduction of available evolution points encourage one to focus the few points left on combat (and the freebies given out by the subtypes are all defensive in nature), especially since cost of the utility evolutions didn't get rebalanced with the combat options.
I don't yet have experience with high level spell-casting and related shenanigans, so I don't know how much he's going to feel left out as all the other players come into their own with new spell levels while he's stuck on a stunted progression compared to what he could have been.
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The current plan is that the standard recovery method for any "daily" resources is that a character can recover any of those resources they haven't used in the last 8 hours by resting/studying/meditating/practicing/whatevering for an hour.Yeah, this is actually one of my favorite things because we're standardizing the way classes with daily resources recover them.
Some classes may have other resources though. One thing I'm looking into developing at the behest of my brother is a class that revs up with combat, similar to warriors from WoW. As in the class begins at 0 and each action generates more whupass power to be expended for liberal smackdowns and/or heroic action.
I look forward to working on it. :)
That could be difficult to balance. If you base the gain of whoopass on time spent in combat, you end up with insufficient WA points in short or less important fights (which there are typically more of). If you base it on damage taken, you end up with someone who rides the line of 'kill me so I can kill you better' and 'I'm dead/I'm a healing sponge'. If you base it on damage done, you encourage one-dimensional character advancement.
I wonder...maybe something like a swift-action ability that gives a whoopass point and increases the WA counter so that the next use gives an additional point (up to a cap of, oh, 1/4 level). Activation of most skills is a single point, but can scale up in effectiveness with more points spent.
Yeah, it's not escaped me that having less options for an alpha-strike is innately a major weakness, nor has it escaped me that a lot of people have extremely short encounters (and while I feel that ultimately this is due to poor encounter design more often than not, it's a thing that is commonplace) which would make it less than ideal.
The current theory I'm working with is a mixture of passive and active methods for generating your resource on the go, including but not limited to things like swift and immediate actions, physical attacks, and special standard actions.
For lack of a better analogy, my brother plays a protection warrior in World of Warcraft. He has a number of abilities that are active that generate his resource, then he has a number of other abilities that he can expend that resource to do cool things. I'll probably end up doing something like that, with mechanics a bit similar to the gunslinger rewrite I did where certain abilities generate resource and certain others are resource dumps.
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The current plan is that the standard recovery method for any "daily" resources is that a character can recover any of those resources they haven't used in the last 8 hours by resting/studying/meditating/practicing/whatevering for an hour.Yeah, this is actually one of my favorite things because we're standardizing the way classes with daily resources recover them.
Some classes may have other resources though. One thing I'm looking into developing at the behest of my brother is a class that revs up with combat, similar to warriors from WoW. As in the class begins at 0 and each action generates more whupass power to be expended for liberal smackdowns and/or heroic action.
I look forward to working on it. :)
That could be difficult to balance. If you base the gain of whoopass on time spent in combat, you end up with insufficient WA points in short or less important fights (which there are typically more of). If you base it on damage taken, you end up with someone who rides the line of 'kill me so I can kill you better' and 'I'm dead/I'm a healing sponge'. If you base it on damage done, you encourage one-dimensional character advancement.
I wonder...maybe something like a swift-action ability that gives a whoopass point and increases the WA counter so that the next use gives an additional point (up to a cap of, oh, 1/4 level). Activation of most skills is a single point, but can scale up in effectiveness with more points spent.
Yeah, it's not escaped me that having less options for an alpha-strike is innately a major weakness, nor has it escaped me that a lot of people have extremely short encounters (and while I feel that ultimately this is due to poor encounter design more often than not, it's a thing that is commonplace) which would make it less than ideal.
The current theory I'm working with is a mixture of passive and active methods for generating your resource on the go, including but not limited to things...
So.... this class name is "the Avalanche" right?
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What is it about magic item creation that you feel is lacking currently?The d20. Need a better curve, imho.
And magic item creation. Really need better rules for that.The RP side of it, really.
I under stand there's guidelines for how much wealth a group should have at certain levels, but the item creation rules seem to be written as "if you have the materials, make it!" no matter what level the party is (with some exceptions, of course). There's a way around most of the level requirements for some spells, ways around some of the costs involved, so if you have intelligent players that really understand the mechanics, they can come up with some great stuff earlier than you'd like, and I applaud that, it just makes my job harder.
If the character's amass more wealth than the book suggests, with the exception of being a "dick" DM, there's no RP reason for them not to make these things if they are so inclined.I'd like mechanically there to be a rule on the gold value of things being possible to make at certain levels, so that no matter the caveats or loopholes you find, this net would catch it all.
I must admit to being in the minority as I actually really like the magic item creation rules and just mostly feel that they need better explanations and clarifications on the % cost reductions*, handling spells vs standard bonuses ("No, constant mage armor is not an alternative to bracers of armor, but it might be an additive to make them work against incorporeal attacks"), and so forth.
That said, Aratrok and I have discussed including some variant magic item rules including (but not limited to) items that have statistics tied to your level (so instead of having ring of protection +X you simply have ring of protection), alternate means of handling magic items, options for removing magic items completely, options for Final Fantasy-esque games where you unseal magical abilities from an item (like how magicite works in FF6 or spells unlock from gear in FF9), and so forth.
One thing I'm really quite interested in is a variation where instead of having specific slots you instead have X number of magic items that can be active at once, regardless of slot usage, with options to increase the number of active items you could have at once.
I would personally like to keep the ability to craft items beyond what spells you can actually cast because I adore that mechanic for world building purposes. Though perhaps you could limit the tier of magic items based on some sort of prerequisite, such as requiring someone to hit a particular milestone to craft moderate, and then major magic items (which is 100% based on the cost of the item I might add). I also like that how the creation of magic items and what they are made of is muted, because it opens up room for creativity.
One of my favorite things to do when I'm a player is to craft magic items out of the stuff we find. So if we for example slay a young blue dragon, it's hide has value as a special material and then we find some amulets and a ruby circlet, so I just use all those things as the costly material components to make the barbarian a cloak of resistance made from tanned dragon hide with a ruby clasp and chains. If I can afford it, I might add electricity resistance to it for thematic effect since I get a 25% discount for dragonhide (if the GM allows it since it's not technically armor).
So.... this class name is "the Avalanche" right?
It should be. :P
Gotta go for the moment, be back ASAP to reply to the rest of the posts! :o