Aloysius34's page

Helo,
I'm thinking about my next character: a sylph sniper/spell sage going for the arcane trickster prc. Of course, it involves the cloud gazer feat, which allow you to see through three square of obscuring mist, sneack-attacking everything from the fog.

I think about making him a spellsage, because I play in a small party (3 characters), often lacking full-casters (our current group include a paladin, an alchimist and a magus) and the healing/recovering spells you often need after combat. Plus our campaign are usually low cash and low magic, so we don't have tons of wand of cure light wounds, nor raise dead available with discount in every church. The sniper archtype gives me a 40 feet range for sneak attack, which may be usefull before I get those damned sniper goggles.

For the feats, I would like to take the whole sylph package :

lvl 1 - airy step
lvl 3 - cloud gazer
lvl 5 - ?
lvl 7 - ?
lvl 9 - wings of air
lvl 11 - inner breath

So, I don't know which feat to choose at lvl 5 and 7, nor which rogue talent to select (dampen presence seems attractive, against those foes who have blindsense and blindsight, but sniper eye could be usefull as well).

As for the traits, magical knack and wind carried voice.

Any suggestion for the feats, and spell selection or warning (maybe I'm doing something wrong ?)
I will probably aim for 18 Int and 18 Dex, str and Con 10, wis 14 and cha 8 (the shy assassin type...).

We all know that the D20 sweetspot lies around 5-9 levels. Once you reach level 12, the spellcasters classes have a strong tendency to send most campaigns into DM's nightmare territories.
Plus, the game became unwieldy, characters sheets expands into booklets and so on.

But, on the other hand, as gamer, we LIKE to level up. A lot.

So, I'm toying with this idea, to be used in a very low magic setting :

- From level 1 to level 6, PC can only be martial, without magic nor supernatural abilities. No wizards, no clerics, but no paladins nor totem barbarians either.
6 is the maximum level a mere mortal can reach, period.

- Then, after some kind of quest or trial, they are able to unlock the power of magic. Or the power of Ki. New ennemies, more powerful and more sinister appears, and their old abilities are useless against them (outsiders, undeads, incorporeal and so on : stuff that would send a 6th rogue or fighter without magic crying). From this point, the PC can/must select "magic" caster classes, but no fullcasters. Paladins, bloodragers, kineticist, magus, monks... PRC could also be used as base classes. They use the gestalt rules, starting from level 1, and gaining powers, hit points, skill points and so on accordingly. Plus feats. But this stops at level 12, which means that they won't have spell higher than level 4.

At this point, they have, for example, a rogue 6/kineticist 12 abilities, but with only 12 HD and 10 BAB at best. However, they have 8 feats rather than 5.

- And then comes the third tier : high magic (probably after another quest). Cleric, Sorcerec, druid, wizard, psychic... But once again, the PC starts at level 1, like the old dual classed characters, except that this is their third class. They probably won't gain any new hit-point nor BAB before long, but they are able to learn new spells at an increased rate.

In the end, once they reach the equivalent of level 36 (in real life time), they have 18 HD, level 9 spells and twice as many feat as a standard level 18 character.

But, before that, you have expanded the sweetspot for many, many levels : basically, between level 3 and level 26, the PCs don't have access to 5th level spells or higher, while still being more powerful at each level. You can play for years without entering the realms of campaign-breaking spells (raise dead, scry/teleport and so on), and without having to freeze completely PC growth.

The main problems I see are the following :
- the challenge rating rules won't work.
- every character will end-up with martial abilities plus growing magic abilities. For team play, it's better to have different characters. Sure, a rogue/shadowdancer/necromancer is going to play very differently than a barbarian/bloodrager/druid or a fighter/magus/witch...
- magic items should probably be nearly banned or very, very rare.

Any thought, advice, remarks ?

Being an old 3.5 player, I did not read the pathfinder heal rules with attention, until now. But with Unchained they are NOT wwhat they used to be.

Treat Deadly Wounds*

Requirement: You must expend two uses from a healer's kit to perform this task. You take a –2 penalty on your check for each use from a healer's kit that you lack.

When treating deadly wounds, you can restore hit points to a damaged creature. Treating deadly wounds restores 1 hit point per level of the creature. If you exceed the DC by 5 or more, add your Wisdom modifier (if positive) to this amount. A creature can only benefit from its deadly wounds being treated within 24 hours of being injured and never more than once per day.

and with signature skill "heal"

With sufficient ranks in Heal, you earn the following.

5 Ranks: When you treat deadly wounds, the target recovers hit points and ability damage as if it had rested for a full day.

10 Ranks: When you treat deadly wounds, the target recovers hit points as if it had rested for a full day with long-term care.

15 Ranks: When you treat deadly wounds, the creature recovers hit point and ability damage as if it had rested for 3 days.

20 Ranks: When you treat deadly wounds, the target recovers hit point and ability damage as if it had rested for 3 days with long-term care.

Now add

Benefit(s) Heal is a class skill for you, and you can use the treat deadly wounds aspect of Heal 1 additional time per creature per day.

It means that a level 20 character can heal 2(3x4+wis) level hitpoints without using any magic, and probably without even needing the medkit (DC29...).For a 24 wisdom druid/cleric/whatever healing his barbarian buddy in the antimagic plane of no escape, that's 494 hit points healed in two hours, just with mmundane skill.

What about lower levels ? A level 5 character with 18 wis [b]could[b] heal 2x(5+4) =18 hit point. Not stellar, but that's a two hour action requiring no magic expanditure, just four uses of the healer kit. If he don't rolls high enough, that would be only 10 hit points.
If you add the fact that this skill is precious against disease and poisons.

In most guides I have read, the poor "heal" skill is rarely highly rated. It seems that wands of cure light wounds and magical healers are everywhere in every campaigns. Sure, a skill tax and a trait tax may seem useless in any standard campaign with a cleric, a paladin and groceries full of magic wands. But even so, with Pathfinder Unchained and the treat deadly wounds mechanic, I think this skill could be used as your standard "out of combat healing".

Plus, I like the flavor of characters needing a few hours of actual healing after a combat rather than the standard "whizz, whizzz, whizz, whizz, one more wand charge and I'm OK".

1) Suppose an Aqueous Orb roll over dozen of goblins. What happens once 16 goblins are in the orb ? Are the other goblins immune to being engulfed ? Are some engulfed goblins ejected ?

2) What happens if a creature is somehow pushed inside an orb that is already full ?

3) If creature dies inside the orb, it cease to be a creature and become a corpse, an object. As Aqueous Orb does not pick objects, is the corpse ejected from the Orb, freeing a place for another victim ?

4) If a creature makes it save to escape the orb, but is ejected on an occupied square, is it pushed back into the orb ? Or does the orb eject creatures only in free squares ? What if there is no free square at all (because of wall, ceilling...)

5) Can a creature pass through the Orb, either by saving after entering the orb, or by entering the Orb while it is already full ?