Aratex's page

My current Two Weapon Warrior build has the Step Up and Strike chain. Since TWF relies so heavily on full attacks, any sort of mobility you can get without spending an action on it is a VERY good thing.

..and as someone else said, with the crazy AoO goodness the TWW gets and the huge dex requirements for the TWF feats, there's really no reason not to grab Combat Reflexes.

The Pathfinder Beta had some good alternative 1st level rules:

1: Racial Bonus (+8 Hp for Half-Orc and Dwarf, +6 for Human, Half-Elf and Gnome, +4 for Halfling and Elf).

2: 1st Level was Constitution SCORE + Max HD (so a wizard with Con 11 would have 17 hp).

3: Double 1st HD.

I've used both the first and the second one, and my players quite liked being able to be a bit risky at first level. YMMV.

^^ This. My group universally decided on option #2 and we've used it ever since, regardless of who's DMing. It's certainly still possible to outright kill a first level character with a really lucky greatsword swing, but not terribly likely. Where in 3.5, a fighter with a greatsword would have to roll really bad damage to not at least incapacitate a wizard in one swing.

Kobold Quarterly did a spell-less Ranger in issue 11 that was very good. I'd recommend giving it a look.

Edit: The Kobold Quarterly ranger variant is Pathfinder-specific, so you wouldn't have to try to rebalance it to fit with the other PF classes.

This is to be the main weapon of a dragon cultist BBEG.

Silly question, but if that is the case, why does the price matter so much? Just weave into the story that it's a one of a kind, legendary weapon, forged long ago by a benevolent dragon or long dead dragon expert whose knowledge is now lost, blah blah. Basically, unless I'm missing something, assigning it a precise and fair price doesn't matter too terribly much imo, unless you think the whole party is going to go out and craft copies.. Which I think is just a bad idea regardless of what it would cost. :)

Also, KenderKin's idea for UMD checks sounds like a lot of fun.. I'd definitely consider having some fun with them in that way, at least for a time while they figure out how to work the thing.

For the longest time, I did: 4d6, reroll 1's, drop the lowest die. If you're unhappy with your 6 numbers, throw them out and start over. However, a couple of my friends are really lucky with dice and several aren't.. Also, some were willing to spend ages rolling and rerolling until they got the stats they felt were perfect. So I changed my method.

Now, the first night of a new campaign, we make characters together as a group. The first thing we do is roll ability scores. Each player rolls 4d6, reroll 1's, drop lowest to generate one number. Then I roll the same to generate numbers until we have 6. The players vote to keep or toss the 6 numbers, and the vote stands. However, I warn them that I will use that array they generated for every villain aside from nameless mooks. I've had them reroll because their scores were too good before, because they know that I'm the best min/maxer of the group. :)

What we have here -- is contracted labor. With reasonable pay, sick days, vacation days and a good working environment the paladin isn't doing anything wrong and neither is the prostitute.

You missed the most important part. A paladin pimp is the only one that dare sample his own merchandise to make sure his ladies aren't too worn down to keep working. Why? Paladins are immune to ALL diseases. So go ahead, pally-pimp, make sure the merchandise is still intact!

Huh. Well, I guess I'll just have to finish up my Holy Warrior class and post it, then. It's designed as a Paladin replacement who gets powers based on the domains their deity grants.

This sounds fantastic, and I would LOVE to see the work you've done on it thus far.. While I understand that there are certainly preconceptions about the term Paladin, I've always felt that any established deity in a setting would very likely have his or her own militant arm of followers. I called them all paladins for the sake of simplicity, and allowed players to make a "paladin" of any god, provided that their alignment exactly matched their god's and that they roleplayed a shining example of their tenants of faith. (I'm SO thankful for the book "Gods and Magic" in that area.. There was almost nothing about religious beliefs in the core rulebook. A rather glaring oversight imo, but I know they were pushing the page count as it was.)

However, as far as deity-specific special abilities, I really never put the time into it I would've liked to.. and basically just shifted the alignment restrictions on the pre-existing paladin special abilities as needed. Tying it to domains and allowing players to mix and match for their own flavor is a stroke of brilliance, and I'm jealous I didn't think of it.

Not sure how you got the idea I was requiring a move action to close your eyes, but it's not even close to what I wrote.

You're right. Replied without really thinking it through, I suppose. Apologies for being snarky unnecessarily.

James Jacobs wrote:

Yeah; Blind Fight and closing one's eyes when the attack occurs is actually a not-bad option when you're facing foes with effects like displacement or mirror image.

Since the combat round is supposed to approximate simultaneous full-round actions, I'm a stickler for allowing only a standard action with eyes closed unless the person wants to be blind until the start of their next turn. Basically, if you're spending _your_ whole round with your eyes closed (which is what taking a full action action implies), you're spending the whole round with your eyes closed :) It can still be a good choice under those rules, especially with a low-Dexterity fighter and foes who don't gain anything special against Dex-down enemeis.

The problem with that ruling, imo, is that you've essentially made opening your eyes a move action. Therefore closing your eyes would have to be a similar action (it takes the same amount of effort). So as long as everyone blinks once every 6 seconds, no one gets a turn at all!

Oh, wait, I have some examples for different ability scores, too!

See? That's the spirit! It's silly, but entertaining nonetheless.

Kratzee wrote:

The feat doesn't seem like a big deal, but I can't imagine using Constitution or Strength for skills like Stealth or Disable Device.

You're right. Imagine Charisma on Knowledge checks. It does get fishy. Perhaps the feat could be broken into more than one feat, each with a specific substitution. Same power level, but you can then control the mix. So, you could swap Wis for Int generally, and Dex for Str. Not sure about others but it could be worked out for most applications.

I'm feeling spunky today, so I thought I'd chime in here just because with a couple of these ideas that intrigue me from a purely flavor perspective. Sure, they're kind of a stretch.. but so are a lot of the rules in this game. :) Don't take me too seriously, I'm not suggesting rules changes, and I'm truly not sure if I'd allow the feat in my games or not.. Just having some fun.

Constitution for Stealth: Your character has become so good at controlling his breathing that he becomes much harder to detect, especially while sprinting from shadow to shadow.

Constitution for Disable Device: Your character's pain tolerance and general health are so high that he just springs the traps and shrugs off what comes at him.

Strength for Stealth: Your character's unusual strength allow him to carry himself and his gear in such a way that he makes much less noise. (Can't think of a strength-related visual solution.)

Strength for Disable Device: SNAP! I'm in.

Charisma for Knowledges: Your character's lifetime of interacting with people of expertise in various areas has helped him glean a lot of useful information.

Wow.. I was looking around thinking "This is pretty neat." until I saw the fullscreen button and realized I could use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. That is absolutely amazing.

Also, your game world seems pretty intriguing.. Are the gates like magical teleports, I'm guessing? Are they controlled by some organization that charges a fee for their use?

Your fights must be easy then, because if your DM thinks that the best use of an attack action is to take away a weapon that won't be used for the rest of the combat then he's obviously not very tactical.

If only this were true. He'd say the bad guy weighed enough to break it by stepping on it (or kicked it into a nearby lake/pit/lava/river as he walked by if applicable). Or it would just be gone and my character wouldn't be able to find it (I'm sure it'd go somewhere, but he wouldn't give me any clues).

Even if he did destroy it within game rules, like by using an attack to smash it while it was unattended, it's not about sound tactics for that fight. It's about making me suffer for playing a character he doesn't like. He hates archers, no idea why... and Pathfinder making archery worthwhile doesn't sit well with him either.

I love Quick Draw for any build that is good with both ranged and melee fighting. You can sit back and plug arrows in your enemies and when they close within 5' of you, you can drop your bow, pull out your weapon(s) and hack them to bits without missing a step.

I hear talk of this strategy far too often. You must have much nicer DMs than I do. If I left a weapon unattended on the ground, it would be stolen or broken in an instant.

Aratex: Do you have any ideas then on a fair way to implement critical misses? You picked apart my alternate idea, but made no comment on the one that was an iteration of the method I've been using — a method that seems-to-me to be more forgiving to highly skilled combatants. While pointing out imbalances in various approaches is helpful in a way, the impression I get is that you don't think folks like Grifter and I should use them at all.

That's all well and good, but when people are trying to find a method of doing something that will work well for their group, simply trying to end the discussion by [in not so many words] saying, "don't do that" isn't particularly helpful. Quite simply, some of us aren't willing to kill our sacred cows, but that's not to say we don't want to breed a better one.

Fair enough, and I don't mean to be totally dismissive. It's true that I'm pretty much entirely against critical misses because, as previously and repeatedly mentioned, they hurt the classes that are already weakest in the game while barely affecting the strongest classes. While I don't have a hard and fast rule in place to balance, I can spout a couple ideas that I would use to build on if I were to develop a home brew rule on the matter.

- Once the 1 is rolled initially, players need to have some chance to avoid the crit fail all together. Ideally this would be tied to BAB, as BAB is essentially the measure of the martial prowess of your character.
- Players can't lose anything for a critical failure. Attacks, actions, etc. (Note: losing actions would cover things like falling down or dropping your weapon, where an action would have to be spent to recover.) Bad luck sucks enough. Making your character worthless for longer than just the one missed attack is silly.
- If players can crit fail, so can their opponents. I've known many DMs who delighted in watching the players fail but never ever allowed any of their villains to have similar mishaps. Now if extra dice are involved in the process, I'm alright with nameless mooks not having to roll for it because it would slow the game down... but any important villain should be susceptible.

That said, the second two rules can go right out the window in certain circumstances. Experience always, always trumps rules. If there's a reason why it would be really cool for the fighter's longsword to go flying across the room, go for it. Just remember that he's probably screwed until he gets back over to it, so it better do something at least kind of helpful to offset that "cost." If a goblin mook is doing something ridiculous and rolls a 1, give him a crazy mishap: something funny and awesome at the same time.

Pathfinder/D&D rules are overwhelmingly focused on the mechanics of combat. There are tidbits about roleplay and out of combat skill use, but the vast majority of your book is about how to kill stuff. I always strive to keep the game FUN, rather than making it an exercise in memorizing endless rules and how they apply to situations. If the air in the room is getting thick, throw a lighthearted and/or cinematic mishap in there. On either side of the screen. Even if nameless mook #7 didn't actually roll a 1 on his attack.

Now, if you want actual crunchy bits, I'll give you this little nugget before I stop rambling. I once did play with critical misses. When I first started DMing, one of my players was the DM who taught me the game and he was adamant about fumbles being an integral part of the game.. but I'd already made the connection that they hurt fighters far more than wizards, so I made a compromise. The rule was this:
- When a player rolls a 1 on an attack roll, it might be a critical miss. Roll percentile. If you roll less than or equal to BABx5 (if using a weapon in which you have Weapon Focus, count it toward your BAB), you avoid the critical miss and your turn continues normally.
The system wasn't perfect, but it served me well enough. Yes, this makes very high level martial characters immune to dropping their weapon at inopportune times, but doesn't that make sense? My only problem with it was the chance to avoid the fumble was so low at low levels it almost wasn't worth rolling. I thought about making a minimum tied to BAB progression (full BAB classes start at X% then scale normally once BAB catches up, 2/3 BAB classes start at Y%, etc.) but ended up dropping the idea of critical misses all together. If you start your games at level 5+, I wouldn't even bother with calculating minimums anyway.

Edit: All that talk and I never made any real mention of what happens on a critical miss.. To be honest, I always let the circumstances at hand dictate this, improvising stuff like this can be kind of fun. I tried to do something realistic without being too hard on the players. That said, sometimes there are situations where the only feasible mishap is hitting a nearby ally or dropping/throwing your weapon. If that's all there is, use it... but try to do those things as a last resort because, for the players, they really really aren't fun.

This also has a lot to do with how your group actually plays. I always encourage my players to roleplay in combat as well as outside it. Don't say "I hit the goblin with my longsword." How are you swinging? Why? Are you throwing yourself off balance to reach at him or setting yourself up to follow through with your second attack or trying to give him something to think about as you turn to face the more threatening creature beside him? We need flavor and cinematics! Use your imagination, and urge your players to do the same. Not only does this give you fuel to describe what happens when you critical hits and misses happen, but it gets everyone involved into the game on another level.

Of course, if you don't already play this way, it may take some coaxing to get your players into it at first.. Give a couple of their opponents fighting styles and ham it up. Or talk to them before a session and tell them you'd like to try this to bring some life to combat.. I always tease players new to the idea by offering them bonuses to hit or damage if they do something really clever.. and if they're willing to roll with me making up stuff off the cuff, I'm happy to let them try nearly any action they can think of in combat. Even with the ridiculous rolls required, I've had players over the years do things like grab an enemy and use him as a living shield when they saw an attack coming, take out a fleeing BBEG with a ridiculous penalty throw with a 2H weapon, and improvise bungee cords for diving hit-and-run tactics against a caravan passing through a forest. I cannot stress enough to reward creativity by letting your players try anything they can think of because it makes the game more interesting for everyone. If it's difficult but possible, make it difficult but possible with dice.

Wow, I got way off topic. Sorry, but I guess you get a free mini-rant on my own personal gaming theory.

Alternate Idea: Another idea is that on a natural 1, that character loses any further attacks/actions they would otherwise be able to take in that round. This would apply to all attacks, iterative or otherwise. Thus, if a high-level ranger has 3 attacks with each weapon, if they roll a "1" on their 3rd attack, they don't get to make the last three. This would give melee combatants yet another reason to favor feats like Vital Strike, Great Cleave, over rolling fistfulls of dice ad nausea.

Yet again, you're punishing more skilled warriors more than less skilled ones. At 20th level, a fighter rolls a 1 on his fist attack and loses 4 attacks. A rogue rolls a 1 on his first attack and loses 3. A wizard biding his time with ranged attacks only loses 2 attacks. (Assuming no buffs, DW, etc.) I think it's pretty obvious who's losing the most under this scenario as well.

Pushing skirmish feats like Vital Strike and Cleave on the players doesn't help. Vital Strike is still resting all your eggs on that first d20 roll, and Cleave still has you making a string of attack rolls that can be borked at any point by a 1.

Not to nitpick, but critical misses are a houserule in and of themselves, and not a good one. Neither 3.5E nor Pathfinder mention critical misses anywhere in the core book.. and given the nature of both games, they are just a bad idea. Let me elaborate.

Every time you roll an attack roll, you have a 5% chance to critical miss. Every time. Who rolls lots of attack rolls? Everyone except spell casters. Who are the most powerful characters in the game? Spell casters. So why do we perpetuate a system that punishes the already sub-par classes for doing (in many cases) the only thing they CAN do in combat?

I dropped any semblance of a critical miss mechanic when I realized how good a mid-high level wizard could be. It's just not right to further damage the other classes. Rolling a 1 means you miss with that attack regardless of modifiers, and nothing more. Which is RAW.

My group has been begging me to run them through another story.

...

I also want to provide them with the best entertainment possible

I'm not going to discount some of the fantastic advice already in this thread. By all means, listen to these people. I just want to take a different angle for a second: I'd say you have nothing to worry about. You've run a game before. They're begging you to run another. You obviously entertained them the first time around.. It sounds to me more like you lack confidence than skills.

If you and your ally are both medium creatures, and the hall is 10 feet tall floor to ceiling, you couldn't occupy the square directly above him without constantly head-butting each other.

That said, I'd put it at 15 feet of movement to get up there.

Thirdly, what do they weigh? An alchemist fire weighs 1 lb. Does that mean enough stuff to make a bomb weighs 1 lb?

In order to create a bomb, the alchemist must use a small vial containing an ounce of liquid catalyst

Emphasis mine. I'd say even if you wanted to be nitpicky and count the weight of the vials containing the liquid, you could probably say 10 bombs = 1 pound. Honestly, I wouldn't even bother to track weight for them at all at that rate, but my group doesn't worry too much about encumbrance unless we catch someone carrying obviously ridiculous amounts of stuff. (We had a new player a couple years ago join and start hoarding stuff like it was a video game. Before we caught on, he had like 8 extra long swords and 3 or 4 suits of medium and heavy armor that he'd grabbed just "to sell in town.")

I would say the -2 AC kicks in when the fighter actually takes his attacks and lasts until the start of the fighters next turn.

This is how I would rule it as well.. The combination of the name and the effect make me think the idea is that you reach so far that you throw yourself off balance, hence the AC penalty. Planning to reach (ie, readying the action) won't throw you off balance, so the AC penalty wouldn't kick in until the attack was actually taken. At least at my table. :p

The only change my group has made to humans is to give them weapon familiarity with the bastard sword, but that was due more to the fact that we had trouble seeing the classic knight's weapon as something that you needed to spend a feat to use. If dwarves get the waraxe and elves get the thinblade, then we figured humans could get the bastard sword.

I really like that change.. I may end up stealing it for my own games. It has always bothered me to have to burn a feat to use the bastard sword correctly. I'll run this past my group and see how it goes over.

Gods and Magic has pretty in-depth coverage of the gods of Golarion and what their religions are like. Highly recommended if you want to know more about the deities in the core book.

Infused extracts no longer have to be in the alchemist's aura, though. They effectively become potions, they can be passed around and used by anyone. Hence my confusion.

So, I'm currently writing a campaign in which an alchemist is the main bad guy, and over the course of the story a few of his apprentices will face off against the party as well. In considering this, it occurred to me: What happens to an alchemist's infused extracts when he or she dies? Do they retain their power or do they go inert? I could understand it either way, just wanted to know the official ruling.

Otherwise we'd start delving too close to "check to see what potions and extracts broke because you fell into the pit!" or "check to see what broke during the octopus grapple!" And that's not good for the game at all.

Someone needs to tell my DM this. Because you're right, it's no good at all... but he's always done it anyway. I'm just waiting for the day he decides we start taking damage from the broken glass.

I understand dipping into ranged attack feats, everyone needs a backup plan.. but why Precise Shot? If there's melee combat taking place, shouldn't you be a part of it?

I would allow the two to stack, assuming the player didn't word it poorly. This is my understanding of how it should be done to make it rules-legal.

Mage Armor- Creates a "field of force" (clearly not actual armor) that grants a +4 armor bonus to AC.

Magic Vestment- Imbues armor, shield, or regular clothing (treated as armor with AC 0) with +1 enhancement per 4 caster levels.

Typed bonuses of different types stack. Typed bonuses of the same type, you choose only the better bonus. So if you ask me, it'd work this way.

Mage Armor: +4 armor, +0 enh
Clothing with Magic Vestment: +0 armor, +X enh
==============================================
+4 armor bonus, +X enhancement bonus

I suppose the real question here is if you choose to treat an "enhancement bonus" as directly and only applying to the AC of the item it's cast on or if you treat at as a magical enhancement to the character's defenses.

In your example (which is a great one btw), you have to take into account the chances of the party actually preparing and using the counters.. See Invisible lasts 10 min/level.. Is your party really going to have that active all the time? A paladin's Detect Evil is in the same boat. Sure, it can be recast without using spell slots, but it only lasts up to 10 min/level before it has to be recast as a standard action, something most characters don't ever want to give up.

I suppose if someone in the party made goggles out of two Gems of True Seeing and a leather band, you're pretty much hosed trying to use most trickster monsters, but otherwise it all boils down to how much you let your players metagame. I think it would take a pretty ridiculous knowledge roll for a character to have such intimate understanding of that particular creature, its abilities, and tactics.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this or missing something obvious, but.. the only reason I can see for needing to draw your weapon when it isn't your turn is to make a sudden Attack of Opportunity when you weren't prepared.. So why not change the prerequisite just a little? Here's my suggestion:

Flash Draw (Combat)
Due to intense training the quickness of your draw now comes without thought.

Prerequisite: Combat Reflexes, Quick Draw
Benefit: You can draw a weapon as a immediate action. You can take this immediate action even when you are surprised and flat footed.

I suppose that would have a bit of an effect on what sorts of characters could use it, as not everyone takes Reflexes.. but flavor-wise it seems to fit with what you're trying to do and makes sense to me. (Personally, I've always liked reflexes, but I tend to be very tactical in combat and use AoO's to my advantage wherever possible.)

Although I suppose a great deal of it hinges on whether or not there's something I'm missing as to why you'd need your weapon in your hand on a turn other than your own.

I have a few characters on card stock, by accident much the same way you describe.. It's nice in that I get a lot more life out of my sheets because erasers don't seem to harm card stock as much. (On normal paper, it's not unusual for me to have to move my character to a new sheet 4 or 5 different times just because the paper wears through or gets smudgy.)

The downside is that I tend to have 2-page sheets and keep them on a clipboard when I'm at the table, so it makes flipping pages uncomfortable. Which is why I don't do so often. Usually only with characters that I really love and expect to live a long time.

It doesn't exactly work with the way the rules are written, like a couple people have said, but it does require a 3 feat investment so I think I'd probably allow it..

I'm intrigued by this idea, so here are my thoughts.. Or more accurately, what I would do if I was going to houserule something like this in.

I would attach Iterative Movement to Flurry of Blows, probably at level 8 where FoB gets an improvement anyway.. Just tack it onto that paragraph. That eliminates the problem of scouts dipping monk because 1) it's pretty late in advancement and 2) they'd be limited to using monk weapons, most (or perhaps all, I'm rusty on scouts) would require them to take another feat for proficiency. Beyond that, I'd leave the ability as is.

Personally though, I'd probably just simplify the whole thing and give monks a modified Spring Attack that allowed for FoB around level 6. Let them move how they want between targets and have their Flurry as long as they don't exceed their total movement and only use monk weapons. Still late enough to avoid dipping, and the weapon limitation should prevent too much abuse.. and it's full of monky flavor without being difficult to explain or worrying about excessive movement speeds.

Of the years I've been playing D&D (and now Pathfinder because it's just plain better), I've had the same DM most of the time.. He plays VERY low-magic and low-wealth. Right now, we're starting a game at level 6 with 3500 gold per PC (wealth by level suggests 16,000) and a max of one magic item each, just to give you an idea.

Once you get used to playing under such strict wealth control however, it's quite a lot of fun. In fact, my group has gotten so good at making the right kind of characters and thinking tactically, that the DM still often has trouble providing a true challenge for us after level 10 or so without being openly cheesy. (I just about threw my Pathfinder book at him last time we fought a group of assassins in magic armor only to be told at the end of the battle that their armor was in ribbons and would be irreparable, due to the ferocity of the battle.. Personally, I would've just made them a race that had innate DR/- or given them barbarian levels instead of taunting is with that magic aura.)

I fought him tooth and nail for a long time about upping the power level of the game, but now that I've learned to just let it go, it's a lot of fun most of the time. I still want to throw my book sometimes, though.. and I think the Pathfinder book would be at least 2d6 as a thrown weapon. :p Of course, that's all just his style of game, and I would never run a game the way he runs them, but DMs are like snowflakes..