Anlerran's page

Whenever I'm tempted to dump-stat charisma, I remember the perfect film example of a 7 charisma: the Stapler Guy from "Office Space". While that might be fun sometime, it's not how I view most of my heroic characters...

Precisely.

My biggest RPG hate is players who dump Chr, then insist that their character is cool or impressive or 'beautiful' (Penny Arcade, I'm looking at you...)

By all means take a substitute feat or archetype if it's in the rules, but insisting the GM handwave things like Intimidate is pure munchkinism...

I dumped Strength but I think my character should be really good at hitting and damaging things. Because he's um, tough.

Can I use my Con to get hit and damage bonuses?

I wrote a really good backstory too!

Charisma is nothing to do with looks, it's force of personality and magnetism.

Choose another stat to dump next time.

The most two common 'alignment problems' I've seen are these:

- people who think LG is some kind of 'extra-special good'. Law and chaos are just a means of doing things. LG is not 'more good' than NG or CG (arguably, it might be less good than NG!) LG is probably harder to play, because you have to pretty much always take the moral high ground, and can't use the enemy's tactics against them. Which is why it's a balance to the paladin's powers, and why non-LG paladins almost always suck.

- people who think 'neutral' is 'evil-lite', and think it's fine to steal, injure or even kill others just because they're not as depraved as the ogres in Hook Mountain. If you do bad stuff to people who've done nothing to you, you're evil. A school bully who threatens other boys for their lunch money is CE. The 'popular' girl who uses her looks, wealth and status to hurt 'lesser' girls just because she can, is LE. You don't have to be Hannibal Lecter to qualify for 'evil'. You can just be a selfish jerk.

Depends on the persons perspective of reality.

Absolutely not, not ever.

Alignment is universal.

An awful lot of evil people (especially LE) think what they are doing is right and for the best.

Good/Evil alignment is simples.

For a start, it it universal, and has nothing to do with perception. Hitler was still evil, no matter if he thought he was doing it for the best reasons.

Good: 'I put the well-being of others before my own'.

Neutral: 'I treat others as they treat me'.

Evil: 'I don't mind harming others to get what I want.'

Good people aren't always heroes, just nice guys.

Evil people aren't always rapists or murderers, just jerks.

Not everyone is a paragon of their alignment.

I don't think Lawful means 'obeying the law', because you could have a LN or LE thieves guild which adheres to its own rules.

I've always felt Lawful means organised, traditional, group-orientated.

And Chaotic means maverick, individualist, mercurial.

And Conan is pretty much Neutral/unaligned; he's no hero. He's out for himself, but he doesn't harm anyone who hasn't harmed him.

Batman is LG, even if he works outside the law (and he actually works WITH the police). He has his own codes about guns and killing, for instance, and no problem working with groups like the JLA or Outsiders.

Thanks for the new thread, Evil Abe. Appreciate it so we're not diverting the other thread.

While I like 3rd edition, I think allowing PCs to choose their own magic items is a big mistake. 4E made it worse too. Sure I was indulging in hyperbole, but it annoys me no end that these bonuses are baked into the maths and pretty much force you to have certain items at certain levels to keep up with the maths.

This means:

a) it's hard to run a low magic or no magic game
b) magic becomes mundane, and it's not special any more
c) Xmas tree effect, where the characters simply have too many items

I prefer my games to feel like fantasy novels or movies, not videogames where you get sacks of vendor trash in every session. I like Diablo, but I don't want its economy in my D&D, thanks.

I've never seen a solution that works properly. And I wonder if this kind of book shouldn't make some sort of attempt to do just that.

My worry was that the new magic item book will have loads of stuff nobody ever uses because they just want the items with the dull little bonuses that help you keep up with the math.

The new 'D&D Next' or whatever it will be called has specified it will not do this, that magic items will always give you a benefit over what is 'expected'. And that's the ONE thing that might lure me away from PF.

hellacious huni wrote:

The party, while screwing

An AP where the party advances the quests and gais experience by sexual (not violent) means ...

(i.e., Book of Erotic Fantasy as an adventure path.)

I've ran 'Isle of Dread' that way!

With all due respect, if PC's don't think they can die they get spoiled. Please don't take that to mean that I think you're DMing is "wrong" because if you're having fun and they're having fun, you're doing it "right."

And with all due respect, as a GM of 30+ years, I think I know my style by now.

I've had a handful of PCs die over the years, but it's made sense to the story.

They normally die if:

a) they do something stupid

b) they do something evil and karma gets them

c) the player goes out in a blaze of glory or something else that's appropriate.

For the last decade or so, I've been lucky enough to have a group of players that doesn't do stupid or evil things, leaving only (c) as cause of death.

Throwing disposable characters into a meat grinder simply isn't my idea of D&D, especially on an adventure path. Hell, I even had the idea of Jade Regent being narrated by an older Ameiko as a tale from her youth. Some of the best stories I've told have been 'framed narratives'.

You rolled 3d6 in order (Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Constitution, Dexterity, Charisma -- different order back then).

An I the only one who still puts them in this order?

Deadman's right that it's not fair, but our group doesn't care much about that. Most groups possibly would!

I let my players use a 4d6 drop-one generator, as long as I was present. They could roll as often as they wanted, but had to use the scores organically in the order they were rolled. Not everyone chose 18's, in favour of a more rounded character. One guy wanting to play in the goblin one-shot 'rejoiced' in what I think was the lowest scores I've ever seen: Str 7, Int 5, Wis 5, Dex 15, Con 6, Chr 3 (after racial modifiers). I shudder to think what that might be in point buy. I'm tempted to say it's unplayable, but he's determined to prove me wrong...

I've always detested point buy. It's one of my least favourite things in D&D.

Always struck me as part of the 'World of Warcraft-isation' of D&D, responsible for cookie-cutter characters and blandness.

Don't think I saw a half-orc in 3rd edition that wasn't Str 20, Chr 6, and it causes me physical pain to see 7 Wisdom paladins in Pathfinder...

Sometimes when you read in an NPC's tactics for Morale "This guy fights to the death," that's the wordcount creeping in. We COULD put in more details on how they react to being captured, and we try to do that as much as we can, but doing so would force us to spend less time talking about that NPC's history and personality in the first place... which makes them less interesting to redeem. It's a catch-22.

Appreciated, James - but the odd sidebar could make us feel like we're not 'fighting the system'.

Take the latest AP module. I kinda feel that if the challenge is 'get a treasure map off the skin of a lady pirate', and the PCs only options are 'kill her and take her stuff', then that's a missed opportunity for all manner of stealth-based or diplomatic options...

We can change that if we're of a mind, but the written text tells us plainly that we can't do it. Why not present alternatives as an option?

Seems easy enough to mod. Oracle, lose medium armor and shields and gain a Domain, appropriate to the mystery. Silken ceremonial armor, quarter staff. Done.

Thank you! That's pretty much exactly what I wanted - what kind of tradeoff would be fair for losing the armour.

Much appreciated.

Just 'playing a cleric without using armour' doesn't help. If someone wants to play a fighter who's an acrobatic fencer or something, there are archetypes that allow it without substantially weakening the concept mathematically. He gets something for giving up the platemail.

It's particularly weird, because only D&D uses the healer/buffer concept as a melee beatstick. A lot of other games use a pure caster archetype.

Adding Mage Armour to the spell list seems like a good idea, thanks HK.

One of my players wants to play something like a 'White Mage' role (from Final Fantasy)- that is, a divine caster with no armour but strong spellcasting abilities, weilding wands and staves more than melee weapons.

I was interested in the Oracle after seeing the iconic character, but it turns out that class is really just a melee beatstick just like all other divine classes in 3rd and 4th edition.

Which is especially galling because she looks as if she's a pure caster with those exotic robes - shouldn't the 'Iconics' have the armour and weapons the class actually uses?

I looked through the archetypes for something that would fit, and so far nothing did. I'm thinking of letting the player play a sorcerer and just swap out the arcane spells for cleric ones.

Or if I used a cleric or oracle, but cut the armour feats, maybe offering two more appropriate feat choices in exchange for losing Light & Medium armour?

I appreciate people play the game differently, but anything more than one or two sounds like a meat grinder, and that's just not D&D for me.

I bet the player on his third character didn't bother putting much into the backstory (assuming he even did on the first one!).

Also, I feel gothic horror in D&D should be scary, and a splatterfest with a high PC body count just isn't frightening for me. There are other, and better ways to scare people.

Finally, aren't some of these Adventure Paths kind of dependent on having the PCs tied into the story? I'm thinking Jade Regent and Skull & Shackles. Doesn't it destroy credibility to have such a high turnover? I mean, even if you're killing off one PC per episode, you've replaced the entire party by #4. Fine if you play it as a boardgame or something, but that doesn't sound much like a story I'd want any part of.

Lastly, I've noticed that story-driven videogames (Dragon Age, Mass Effect etc) make death fairly rare, but when it happens, it's permanent. I like character death to mean something, and constant ressurections devalues the story as far as I'm concerned.

I'm seriously impressed that not only the other players but the game's writer comes on to offer good advice! Way to engage your player base, James! Kudos.

What a nice change from... uh, some companies I could mention...

(About to run JR as my first PF game, but I want to run the goblin one now..!)