Banjax's page

I like this thread and may come back to steal from it at a later date

Dice, oodles of pretty fresh dice, and an opulent dice rolling area/backstop done in subtle velvet.

Oil painting of dogs playing RPGs.

Second hand overstuffed armchairs.

Port and cigars.

Modern art sculptures and absenthe for coming up with ideas for dungeons/outer gods/exsurgent virus strains.

Use it to hire a burly fellow student to keep the riffraff out, also a velvet rope.

I like the way you think

So far we're seriously considering the Paizo flip mat for a battle grid (I looked at the Chessex one but dry erase will work better for us than wet erase)

We're umming and ahhing about a bestiary box, npc codex box and the combat pad, we can't afford all of them so something will have to go.

What are people's favourite tools/accessories for tabletop gaming?

The games club my RPG group is part of is giving us some money to buy stuff to improve our gaming sessions (approx £60-70) which we are allowed to spend on whatever we wish and we'd like to buy some tools for pen and paper RPGs.

We play a fair range of systems so we would like to keep things fairly generic, what sort of tools do people use in terms of maps, combat trackers, minatures etc?

A megadungeon needs a plausable reason why the inhabitants don't beseige the party in whatever room they decide to hole up for the night in.

A plausable reason why when they leave the dungeon to rest and refresh they don't come back to find the entrance barricaded and an army waiting to ambush them.

These reasons seem to be in short supply.

What where or when is First World?

There's the PRD

which is divided up into class then school/level

Are you looking for them to fight the villains of the stories (wolves, witches, giants etc)?

Or more twisted versions like groups of dwarves that capture princesses and imprison them in glass boxes and mermaids that take on human form to lure princes to their deaths by drowning?

I've got a few too many of my own projects on at the minute or I'd volunteer but once some of them are out of the way I should have some free time to help out.

I'd run the Lock Ward trick past your GM first, it's the sort of thing that can piss off a GM who was rather expecting you to have limited access to buffs.

Would it be a huge task to re-organise the Bestiary sections slightly?

Would be useful if the Monsters by type and Monsters by Terrain at least also included the CR of the monsters in their links so that when people go "I need to fill a dungeon full of undead for an APL 4 group" they can go the Undead Monsters page and pick straight from the appropriate level monsters and ignore all the ones that are far too high/low.

It sounds like your goal is to have an adventure site that is both very large and under the control of a single, organized, intelligent faction--an active fortress or similar.

If you're also approaching this as a primarily combat-oriented adventure site, then yes, you've set yourself up with an extremely difficult problem to design your way out of, and one that experienced players will readily recognize as A Bad Idea to go into. I think you have to examine your assumptions.

Can you make it an infiltration-based adventure site, such that the ultimate goal (kill a particular baddie, rescue a hostage, retrieve an artifact) can be achieved without the PCs slaughtering their way through everything? I don't know about you, but my group loves spending entire sessions planning out stealth/finesse approaches, picking supplies and spell lists, performing recon, etc. When you're on the GM side of the table, this can be really frustrating, unless you're willing to roll with it and say, "yes" to whatever questions they ask that allow them to invent solutions to this uncrackable fortress.

I'm not actively planning one, I was just looking at some of the maps people have made available online and wondered how people do run those kind of storming the castle scenarios

Otherwise, think of Kings Landing from Game of Thrones, and the various hidden tunnels and staircases that even most of the castle's inhabitants don't know about. Make your adventure site that convoluted / secretive, and arrange for your party to discover at least one such secret passageway that they can hole up in. The dungeon may then be on high alert, and it's going to be a really tense night as armed guards repeatedly pass within yards of the PCs, since they'll never know who does and who doesn't know this passage exists, but at least they can recharge. (Esp. if they can use illusions or similar to extra-hide their secret passage.)

That's another idea I hadn't considered which has some possibilities.

From what other people have said the Dread Office Block of Evil model is more common than I thought as well, has anybody actually run/played in a storm the castle style crawl, how was that handled?

Jeraa wrote:

Gignere wrote:

Since my suggestion was missed Scroll of Rope Trick, and the PCs can rest under the BBEG's nose.

It is a level 2 spell, you buy one or you plant one as a GM that is caster level 8. You can design your effing dungeon however you effing want.

Rope Trick is not as useful in Pathfinder as it was in 3.5. You can no longer hide the rope. So the dungeon inhabitants are walking along looking for the intruders, and spot a length of rope floating in midair. If if they don't know its a Rope Trick spell, they would know something was not right here.

Yes if all your patrols have max perception and spell craft, than yes you are screwed. But most of the time patrols are looking for bodies not a rope hanging from the ceiling and if your PCs are paranoid they can just hang a rope in every room they clear out.

See if the patrols find the room with the rope trick.

Not an approach I had considered but one I will bear in mind thanks.

The proper way to deal with this dilemma is to not make such artificial meta-game assumptions. From a PC's perspective, be prepared: assume there's always going to be another hazard. Do your recon, so that you can balance the risk of one more fight before resting against the risk of leaving those guys to attack you while you rest. Take enough resources--and measure their use--in such a way that you can survive whatever the night has to throw at you. Retreat to a genuinely fortifiable area before resting.

It kind of sounds like you're asking from a GM / dungeon design perspective, though. In which case, I don't understand why there's a problem. :)

I suppose I am really. I'm GMing a couple of groups at the minute and neither are likely to face extended crawls (one group just arn't interested in that kind of game and the other is pretty new to gaming so wouldn't know how to prepare for an extended crawl) so it's mostly for my own curiosity on the off chance I get to run one at a later date.

Suppose we knock the assumption about the 4 encounters per day on the head, doesn't throwing wave after wave of monsters to be slaughtered get a little tedious? If the encounters don't challenge the characters isn't that boring for the players?

The idea of fortifying any part of the dungeon (or leaving and coming back) changes a dungeon crawl into a seige, one that the party will almost certainly be overmatched for.

The idea of putting gaps in between sections of the dungeon has some merit although IMO it changes the idea from the Dread Castle of Evil to the Dread Office Block of Evil where different armies rent out different floors rather than a cohesive whole (although I suppose you could get some milage out of the even the evil guys don't get along with each other trope).

SO possibly the question should just be, to those of you who have GMed such medium to large sized dungeons which approach did you use?

(OR How Long is a Piece of String 2: The splicing)

Ok I know there's no set answer for this but I just can't quite wrap my head around the idea of multi-day dungeon crawls.

If we make all the standard assumptions about things like 4 encounters per day then how do the party not get found and stomped while they're resting?

Small dungeons arn't a problem, with less than a dozen rooms you can fill them quite nicely with 3 warm up acts a BBEG and a handful of traps or just decorative rooms.

City sized dungeons again probably offer a myriad of nooks and crannies that a resourceful adventuring party can hole up in with minimal chance of being discovered (although if that dungeon is full entirely of soldiers rather than a large number of non-combatants to a small number of soldiers/police as you would get in an actual city things become a little trickier)

But it's that middle ground that confuses me. If an adventuring party merrily slaughters their way through the first floor of a 7 level dungeon and makes camp in a storeroom or somewhere they can barricade the door against easy entry how do they not get found or wake up to find they've either been locked into the room or a small army encamped on the threshold?

A small group of searchers can go room by room in even a fairly large building in a matter of hours (and when aided by a trail of corpses, blood spatter and a sharp demarcation between the occupied and unoccupied rooms even quicker) so how does a group even spend 1 night in a dungeon safely and sucessfully?

(We can leave the undead out for now, as they're (for the most part) mindless creatures its more understandable that they might not even notice the intrusion and if they are being directly controlled by a single entitiy that will slow down searches considerably as it will either have to split its attention or be much slower and more methodical)

WhipShire wrote:

Nice of your Friends to remind you... Lol

That sort of thing seems pretty common; my group uses "I manacle the snake" in the same way.

Even if nobody died I want to know the story behind THAT saying...

Banjax wrote:

wraithstrike wrote:

If fireballs were like grenades and there was some variance in explosive power I would agree, but in the game all fireballs have the exact same "kill radius".

I must admit that would be an interesting addition to the AoE rules, roll a d4x5ft spread

you'd have to fudge the maths a bit for simplicity's sake so a

5ft spread 4x dmg
10ft spread 2x dmg
15ft spread 1.5x dmg (it should be 1.3 recurring but nobody wants to sit and work that out)
20ft spread x1 dmg

You could even extend it outward so it has a chance of spreading too far but doing less dmg per creature

of course bigger AoE effects the maths becomes even more of a headache...you know what, nevermind.

Not every fireball has the same radius, it's just that every fireball radius is between 20' and 24'. That's a pretty big realistic difference, but doesn't have a mechanical difference. I don't think grenades have explosions between a few feet and several yards.

Yeah I just thought it would be an interesting idea were it not for the math involved, could still be a good wrinkle for an area of wild magic but you'd have to set constraints to keep the maths simple.

If fireballs were like grenades and there was some variance in explosive power I would agree, but in the game all fireballs have the exact same "kill radius".

I must admit that would be an interesting addition to the AoE rules, roll a d4x5ft spread

you'd have to fudge the maths a bit for simplicity's sake so a

5ft spread 4x dmg
10ft spread 2x dmg
15ft spread 1.5x dmg (it should be 1.3 recurring but nobody wants to sit and work that out)
20ft spread x1 dmg

You could even extend it outward so it has a chance of spreading too far but doing less dmg per creature

of course bigger AoE effects the maths becomes even more of a headache...you know what, nevermind.

I unfortunately don't know the answer to this but I would very much like to as I too have trouble with describing interesting journeys

Sorcerer: Harry Dresden from The Dresden Files (yes he calls himself a wizard, but his descriptions of himself - all force, heavy focus on blasting, very little ability with "subtle magic", etc - scream Sorc)

I'd disagree personally, he's just an Evocation Wizard. (Or possibly a Sorc/Wiz multiclass)

He's had to learn all of his spells none of them come naturally to him without knowing how they work, he can and does learn and develop new spells (a wizard can in character learn and develop new spells while a sorcerer just has a series of powers that unlock as he gets powerful enough to cast them).

He requires various foci to be able to actually cast anything properly in the first place (so multiple bonded objects)

I'm surprised nobody has suggested Darth Vader for Anti-Paladin yet, martial prowess and dark force powers make him the most obvious choice for me.

An item I just handwaved in to my campaign (so I'm not 100% sure on the price) was;

The Cloak of Shifting Shadows.
Rather than a single piece this cloak is made of many long strips of material that gradually darken from grey at the top to black at the bottom. This cloak allows you to change the size and shape of the shadow you cast.

In bright light this cloak provides a +5 bonus to intimidate rolls by making your shadow seem more montrous, in dim light (but not darkness) it provides a +5 bonus to stealth rolls by making your shadow smaller and harder to detect.

I'm running a homebrew campaign at the minute we're using;

1) 4d6 drop 1 (although I did allow one character to bump his scores a bit after everybody else rolled incredably high)

2) Characters level up as and when I deem fit

3) CRB, APG, UM, UC are all fine anything else is subject to GM approval as I don't have the books and have to go and look it up online

I got good use out of Black Tentacles and Wall of Fire (or Ice) conjured in a circle around the tentacles.

Had Sethizar not beaten me to it I'd have suggested the same series of books.

This thread intregues me I shall return later...

Ok Watercrafters, let me think...

Ability to heal other people's injuries
Ability to remove poisons/diseases
Ability to sense emotions
Ability to control water

A cleric with the Water Domain & Ocean Subdomain from APG would enable you to do most of the physical water based things that Isana accomplishes in the books. (although I'm thinking mostly of that fight with Odiana in book 1)

There's no direct analog for the empathic powers but the community domain comes close (you could change some of the domain spells to some of the more emotion based spells for a closer fit)

The energy channelling is a bit of a headache as there's nothing comparable in Alera, the Ale/Wine version of the variant channelling rules in UM might serve as an appropriate ability (you just refluff it that isntead of energy you spray everything with a light mist of water)

That would be the closest way of turning a cleric into a watercrafter I think, there may be something you could do with a druid with the aquatic domain but I don't know the druid class very well so I'd have to go and read up on that, and quite frankly I'd have to read the books again to remind myself of exactly what powers watercrafters display

The Lock Ward trick is insanely powerful but more than a little cheesy, check with your GM before trying to use it.

Sorry, didn't mean to come over quite that negative, I just couldn't see a practical use for it, you've satisfied my curiosity on that score.

On the rounding note you can get a more even distribution by rounding to the nearest even number so 32.5ft would round down to 30ft but 37.5ft would round up to 40ft (which makes it a slightly more complicated houserule)

It's not something that's come up in any game I've played so I don't know if it is already part of the rules but different terrain types (as opposed to favourable/unfavourable terrain) would have an effect on your running speed.

It's more difficult to run on sand than hard packed dirt for example, long grass compared to short grass would also slow a runner down.

I've occasionally wondered if this would ever get turned into a game, but I think one major problem at least to be aware of if you're going to try something like this is the inherant disparity in power levels between commoners and nobility.

As the common folk can only control one or two furies but the nobility can generally control all of them and their furies are considerably stronger than those of the commoners you'd have to place some fairly heavy restrictions on nobility characters and NPCs.

You could have a lot of fun with the different races though as they would each have a set of different classes available to them as well.
The Marat have their animal totems (but no magic which I suppose makes them Fighter Archtypes rather than seperate classes), the Canim have their warriors and bloodspeakers (who would be sort of like witches with their covens), the Icemen don't really come into it much so you'd have to make something up more or less from scratch for them.

As for the fury types it would depend how you want to mix Alera with Pathfinder.
A guy with an earth fury is strong and can track people, a guy with a wood fury is a good archer, a guy with both is a Ranger.
So you would either have to work at it from the Alera side (Fury X + Fury Y = Class A) or from the pathfinder side (Class A means you're good with Fury X and Fury Y)

Picking your furies and having that decide the character would open up some interesting possibilities for classes but would be one hell of a headache for coming up with all the permutations (it would be what 2^6 so thats 64, divide that by 2 for the overlap and yous still have 32 different ways of combining 2 furies [numbers pulled out of the air so may well be wrong])

(As a side note I'd have said the metal crafters were more barbarian than anything else due to their abilities to ignore pain)

My first thought is why?

Given that most people play on the 5ft grids you'd need a combined bonus of 10, 20, 30 etc in order to fit nicely into that (how do you represent a movement of 32.5 ft?) so it would only be useful for very high levels and just more of a headache for actual combat.

examples of complete scoundrel:

LG = Batman/Indiana Jones
LN = James Bond
LE = Boba Fett / Magneto

NG = Zorro / Spiderman
N = Lara Croft
NE = Mystique from X-men

CG = Malcolm Reynolds / Robin hood
CN = Jack Sparrow / Snake Plissken
CE = Riddick (Pitch black)

I agree with those choices, and for Darth Vader, I would put him along LE, he's not the best example, but that would be my category of choice.

I'd say Indiana Jones was at best NG but more likely CG, he has no trouble making blackmarket deals for antiquities, stealing artifacts and shooting first and asking questions later.

CG Harry Dresden
CN
CE Nicodemus

NG Billy & the Alphas
N Thomas
NE Lara Raith

LG Murphy & Morgan
LN
LE Gentleman Johnny Marcone

couldnt think of examples for CN and LN

There's the Spell Focus feat which increases the DC of a specified school by 1 and can be taken multiple times but I don't know of anything that give you a flat out increase to everything.

I thought they would but only after flipping backwards and forwards in the CRB and APG for 30 minutes reading and re-reading sections.
If it hasn't been noted already it could do with being cleared up in future editions

A number of evolutions grant the eidolon additional natural attacks. Natural attacks listed as primary are made using the eidolon's full base attack bonus and add the eidolon's Strength modifier on damage rolls. Natural attacks listed as secondary are made using the eidolon's base attack bonus – 5 and add 1/2 the eidolon's Strength modifier on damage rolls (if positive). If the eidolon only has a single natural attack, the attack is made using its full base attack bonus and it adds 1-1/2 times its Strength modifier on damage rolls made with that attack, regardless of the attack's type.

How are people interpreting this?

Possibly it's me being pedantic but the way I read "full base attack bonus" is "base attack bonus without any penalties" rather than "base attack bonus + strength modifier + size modifier" which would be "full attack bonus".

Without either the word full or base in there it would be clear but with both it's confusing.

The Hound Archon is not really capable of being an improvised weapon...

A better solution would be to just have the cleric align the barbarian's current weapon.

Looked it up, its not a feat its the rage power Body Bludgeon

Body Bludgeon (Ex): While raging, if the barbarian pins an opponent that is smaller than her, she can then use that opponent as a two-handed improvised weapon that deals 1d8 points of bludgeoning damage, assuming the opponent is sized Small. Larger or smaller creatures used as a bludgeon deal damage based on their size using this base damage. A size Tiny creature deals 1d6 points of damage, a size Medium creature deals 1d10 points of damage, and so on. The barbarian can make a single attack using the pinned opponent as part of the action she uses to maintain the grapple, using her highest attack bonus. Whenever the barbarian hits using the pinned opponent as a weapon, she deals damage to her target normally, and the grappled opponent used as a bludgeon also takes the same damage she dealt to the target. If the pinned opponent is unable to resist being pinned for any reason, the barbarian can use that opponent as an improvised weapon without grappling or pinning the opponent, until the creature is reduced to 0 or fewer hit points, at which point the creature becomes useless as an improvised weapon. A barbarian must be at least 10th level before selecting this rage power.

Alright the Barbarian would have to be enlarged inorder to pick up the Hound Archon so assuming that would it work?

(We are never going to actualy try this I'm just curious as to whether it would work or not) so
IF the Barbarian COULD pick up the Hound Archon (OR another Good aligned monster of different size) WOULD it bypass the DR on the demon?

Came across an amusing (if somewhat hypothetical) question the other night in our session.

While fighting a demon with DR 10/Good our cleric summoned in a Hound Archon (Lawful Good). Our Barbarian, irked somewhat at the reduced damage his sword was doing asked the question; if he had the feat that lets him pick up other creatures and use them as weapons (I forget which feat it is) would picking up the Hound Archon and hitting the demon with it bypass the DR?

Thoughts?

Also you dont appear to have Boost in the meta list but as a tool it looks like it could be very useful once you've got it up and running smoothly

I can't seem to find a way of removing a word from the construction (I accidentally added a third word when trying to add a target word)
Also there appears to be no obvious way of scrapping the word and starting again

Definitely going for the wasteland rather than Megaflora/fauna, cheers for the input

Volcanic winter complete with periodic ash/dust storms lasting about 400 years ish, not cold enough to kill off all life on the planet or cause a full on ice age but definite reduction in temperatures, populations greatly reduced, humanoids reduced to small enclaves scratching out a living growing just enough to support themselves but definitely not the surplus of resources needed for expansion or even holding steady.

Scarcity of "traditional" prey leading to predators becoming less afraid of/desperate enough to attack humanoid travelers/settlements

I wasn't particularly striving for realism just wondering whether to make my wolves regular or supersized and whether large dragons would have died out through lack of food or vice versa (small dragons being too weak to survive)

In a post apocalypic world where game has gotten scarce would people expect predators to have gotten bigger (because only the strongest/most powerful will survive and they can prey on smaller members of their own race if neccessary) or smaller (because they can get by on less food)?

Any way of reading if differently implies in my opinion, a wish for it to be differently, and not objectivity.

Or possibly a masochistic streak :p

But I shall bow to the general consensus and shut my trap about it happy in the knowledge that I can go round prestidigitating things all day

I see what you're saying, I just rather assumed that the spells per day limit wasn't just 'this is how many spells you can hold in your mind' but was also 'this is how many spells you have the magical energy to cast today' (Those interpretations are a little sloppy as if either was the case you would be able to sacrifice lower level spell slots to prepare and cast higher ones)

The section earlier on the page about spell casting states

A wizard can cast only a certain number of spells of each spell level per day. His base daily spell allotment is given on Table: Wizard

I took this to mean "The wizard can cast three level 0 spells per day at level one and that's it" which the Cantrips entry then qualified with "these spells are so minor you can cast them again but you're still limited to the number of spells per day that the table says"

I'm more than happy to be proved wrong on this matter (who wouldn't want infinite spells of whatever level) but RAW can be interpretted either way and I'm not sure which one is RAI.

There seems to be a substantial number of people indicating that you can cast cantrips/orisons an infinite number of times a day, where exactly does it say this in the CRB (or any other book for that matter?)

The PRD says

Cantrips: Wizards can prepare a number of cantrips, or 0-level spells, each day, as noted on Table: Wizard under “Spells per Day.” These spells are cast like any other spell, but they are not expended when cast and may be used again. A wizard can prepare a cantrip from a prohibited school, but it uses up two of his available slots (see below).

Personally I took this to read that the spell itself is not expended (ie wiped from his mind for the day) but the wizard is still limited by his spells per day, so if a level 1 wizard prepares Detect Magic, Prestigiditation and Acid Splash he can cast each spell once or any of them up to 3 times but after that he's out of level 0 slots.

Is there something to dispute this somewhere?

101 McGuffins

Also if you look at any of the other wizard school, or sorcerer bloodline powers that give a ranged touch attack it's always 30 feet. Why would this one be different?

Because Force Missile isnt a ranged touch attack?

I would like to see some additional words get released. I wonder, are WoP open for 3rd party to develop? Heck, how would I even find that out!

That is going to be a tricky one for the publishers I would expect, certainly I think there are some fairly glaring omissions (they have the physical stat buffs but not the mental ones for example) but they will have to be very careful about what words they release, too many words and the system becomes overpowered as it can do everything regular casting can do but with the ability to combine spells, the wrong "type" of spells and they lose the effect that they're going for with wordcasting being a more primal less developed form of magic.

Banjax wrote:

There are some spells that just cant be duplicated by words of power

I just can't see this as a con. If you wanted to cast fireball and magic missile, why pick words of power as your spellcasting?

That's not quite what I meant despite my choice of example (I play an Evoker Wizard normally so those are just the spells I'm most familiar with).But there are lots of functions that WoP just can't reproduce, utility spells like Knock, Purify Food and Drink, Create Water, all of the mental stat buffs, Make whole etc

Granted depending on your character choices you may not have chosen them anyway, a lot of them are more the wizard's bailiwick than the spontanious casters as they can learn them with a fair amount of impunity but those are options that you're giving up by choosing WoP over Vancian.

A boost selected wordspell is very powerful: one target per caster level, without a limit other than "no two of which can be more than 30 feet apart." No chance of allies being caught in an area.

Ice blast and life leech are both 4th-level effect words. A boost selected ice blast life leech would raise both effect words to 7th-level. Per Table 4-1: Effect Word Combinations, that's a 9th-level wordspell.

Oh yeah I see that I was just unsure whether the rest of the targetting words were supposed to follow the same template as Selected or not, you pointed out the typo where the boost text says effect word instead of target word I was wondering if that was the only typo (i.e is it just a cut and paste job that got missed in the proofreading and they should all say the same as selected?).

I assume this has been errata'd and somewhere there is an answer that says what this should be, are the errata answers stored somewhere or can you only find them by digging through the threads where people submit them?

edit: after searching for 30 minutes (seriously how hard is it to find those FAQs?) it seems that this has yet to be an FAQ candidate. So I shall defer to your interpretation and see about drafting myself a wordcaster sorcerer reserve character

You are mis-reading the burst target word description (granted, the typo of "this effect word" instead of "this target word" didn't help). Normally, a burst wordspell is close range, affects a 10 ft radius, and is minimum level 1; using boost on the burst target word, the spell is medium range, affects a 20 ft radius, and is minumum level 3; alternately, a boost burst wordspell can be long range, affect a 40 ft radius, and is minimum level 5. So both the burst fire blast and the boost burst fire blast wordspells are 3rd-level (burst minimum 1, fire blast minimum 3; boost burst minimum 3, fire blast minimum 3)....

If that's definitely the case then that's great but are you certain?

A sorcerer or wizard can boost the target word to make this spell affect multiple targets but doing so increases the spell's overall level to 9

The Selected targetting word does have a different wording to its boost effect in that it says "This boosted target word increases the level of all the effect words in the spell by 3 levels" compared to the "boosting this effect word increases its level by X" which all the others have, I just would have expected boost to affect all the targetting words in the same way.

I suppose Selected might have its own rules due to the fact that there are a significant number of effects which you just cant use with words like burst, cone or barrier so being able to extend them out to multiple targets is a huge boost to them which would come with a corresponding level increase but you could argue that doubling the radius of the burst spell ought to come at the same cost as you can use that to hit more targets.

It doesn't matter if he knows 1/4 of all available words when the total number of words themselves are so amazingly limited in the scope of their effects.

Oh I don't disagree, a WoP caster is never going to have the utility available to a regular caster amd it suits the blaster type more than others the versatility people keep talking about with regards to WoP isnt the same as the wizard' "i've got a spell for every situation" but more "I can't use a fire spell so i'll use ice instead" and being able to combine effects, you need to take an enemy out of action so you combine a fear effect with a damage effect or the barbarian is charging in to hand to hand combat against a dragon so you give him an AC boost and a Str boost in one spell

Mage Evolving wrote:

I had a similar post a while back. I was pointed to a great pod cast that discussed all of your questions. My take away was Words of power not better than normal casting just different and in many cases more versatile.

Believe the pod cast was called the gamers guide to pathfinder.

Thanks Mage Evolving!!!

The podcast we did is here: The Gamers' Guide to Words of Power

If you are interested you can find more episodes on other subjects at www.35privatesanctuary.com where we are one of several great podcasts on their gaming shelf. You could also subscribe through iTunes or if you would like I can post a direct feed.

Sean Mahoney

Some interesting points there (love the Lock Ward trick :p )

Kthulhu makes a point about the limited number of words that a spontanious caster would be able to learn, I'm not entirely convinced it's as bad as he says, in terms of the words of power system a level 20th Sorcerer will know approximately 1/4 of all available words of power up of levels 0-6 and approximately half of 7-9, which is a larger proportion of effects available to them than with regular casting (although the pool of possible effects is smaller which reduces the versatility somewhat) and if you play in a campaign where you will never reach level 20 (PFS, E6, E12 etc) then you may feel that you just don't get enough variation to actually be able to combine them well.

Anybody who has actually used this system in a live game care to chime in with how versatile it actually is in practice? Do you feel limited by the number of available words at lower levels?