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There's also one they mentioned at RPGNet, relating to Hideous laughter (p. 296). On the creature's next turn following being hit and failing its save, it can attempt to snap out of the spell as a full-round action, but being affected by the spell in the first place prevents all actions. The intent of the rule is clear enough, but it should be worded better to account for this.
The Horizon Walker I assume was sort-of replaced with the Pathfinder Chronicler (both are sort of wandering-adventurer types, though wildly different abilities). The Thaumaturge I can only suppose was considered too weak a concept (and too unattractive a class pick).
I'd be happy with dwarves losing some of their bonuses, too. They have a lot and it's easy to forget one of them, anyway.
Neither dromites or duergar have racial Hit Dice, do they? Theoretically, a LA+0 race with racial HD could exist, but its racial HD would have to be worse than levels in a player class. I recall WOTC boards had an argument on the issue sometime.
A very good point. Historically, the swashbuckler archetype only came into its own once armour had been made superfluous by more efficient weaponry. Outside of a purely-historical game, of course, this observation is not helpful, perhaps. After all, we typically want more freedom in our games than to adhere to real-world historical precedents. I think there's room in the game for some kind of low-armor fighting archetype, it's common enough in many campaign settings (in FR, for example, the use of heavy armor is discouraged in many places, especially urban settings). Of course, then there's places where anyone wearing heavy armor would end up looking like a boiled lobster, where native warriors would be trained more towards agility to defend themselves.
I vote to keep favored classes, and allow multiclassing only when a favored class is one of the classes. I love the carrot of +1 hp, especially if your favored class is a low hp class. I hate this idea. If I want to play an elven fighter/rogue, then the rules better have a damn good reason for not letting me do that, and "maintaining group dependency on each other" or whatever is not one.
Items that give peranent skill bonuses are pretty much universally broken, it has always seemed to me. It's fairly cheap to boost, say, Diplomacy or Intimidate into roleplaying-destroying levels, after all. A part of the problem is PC-designed magic items, of course. It's pretty darn hard to have both a system that lets you make your own items and a system that doesn't give access to combos that could potentially degenerate the game.
One of my favorite passages in LOTR is the scene where Frodo comes across a dead Easterling warrior, shortly before he's captured by Faramir's men. He wonders where the dead man came from, what his name was and whether he was truly evil at heart. I also think Sauron's use of mercenaries was internally consistent, in the sense that his first objective was to destroy the kingdom of Gondor, a goal shared by several other cultures, such as the Haradrim and the Corsairs of Umbar. There's nothing on the page to suggest that the overall character of those cultures was particularly fiendish (after all, a lot of perfectly fine cultures have engaged in offensive wars in our history, too). I wouldn't read too much into the connection of Middle Earth into an European political context, largely because the author himself strongly denies any allegorical meanings of his work in no uncertain terms. Of course, we could choose to disbelieve the author in this regard, which I'm not sure would be a worthwhile premise.
Personally, I'm partial to the Magic Item Compendium approach, that lets you combine "utilitarian" bonuses like saving throw bonuses with more interesting magic items such as a Cape of the Mountebank. That way a PC can both have their cake and eat it, with the aid of either a PC item-crafter or a suitably powerful NPC (say, a legendary blacksmith). Maybe it could work the other way around, too, with those interesting item properties from otherwise unusable items being imbued into their already-present indispensables. This still means PCs will amass magic items they won't want to use, which could perhaps be resolved with being able to use them as raw materials for crafting (maybe you can extract raw enchantment from them), which limits the "magic items in the world economy" dilemma.
Sorry about that. It didn't strike me that the spell needed a fix, until I saw the fixed version, which does make more sense. With a scaling effect, some kind of cap might be in order.
An idea that struck me with the rage point mechanic is that I wouldn't even try to keep tabs of it with pen and paper. Instead, I'd give the Barbarian player a stack of poker chips and let him dish those out. It saves wear and tear on character sheets, for one thing.
Mending only fixes ordinary rents and cracks in ordinary objects it will do absolutely NOTHING for magic items that have been sundered. That has always been the default ruling. Mending also only works on items that weigh 1 lb. or less, which means you'll still need Make Whole for a lot of repair tasks. I like the concept of at-will cantrips, because they give wizards and sorcerers a touch of permanent "zing", that makes them a bit more special in a non-combat sense, and makes them something that regular joes watch out for. Such as using Open/Close on every single mundane door in town they need to walk through. Plus Mage Hand at-will has literally hundreds of uses in home or at a dungeon.
I think it'd fit, considering that all the other Charisma-based classes get it.
I'm not keen on the idea of targeted damage like this, last seen with the Sword of Sharpness in AD&D 2E. An abstract hit points system doesn't really support it very well. |
