BitOBear's page

Background: So I am new to Pathfinder, and while I date back to D&D first ed, I kinda skipped over all of 3rd ed cause my group was into GURPS at the time....

So with lots of experience but "new eyes" on the Pathfinder et al, I have come to realize that the "character skills" matrix on the first page of the character sheet template (and all it's brethren) is broken for the lack of an "armor check penalty" column.

For the three months I have been playing nobody, including myself, has been properly applying their ACP. Someone says "roll your acrobatics" etc, and they roll-and-add, the end.

I think people would not forget, or "forget" if you know what I mean, to take this penalty if it were spelled out in the matrix.

In my heavily modified google docs spreadsheet I use five columns:

total = ability_mod + ranks + class_trained + misc - ACP

(misc is from traits and whatnot)

As it is, far too many people just are not applying the ACP in the heat of play.

So I am new to pathfinder and pathfinder society.

There was a rule that a pathfinder character cannot have a ability score lower than 7. This rule is also implicit in the point-buy table not going to 6.

The question is, is this _really_ a limit intended to be applied before or after Race modifiers? For instance if I buy CHA down to 7 and then go Dwarf, I have a 5.

If the limit is after-race then the table should go down to five (5) with a asterisk (*) on the 6 and 5 rows that requires the race to be one with the pluses necessary to get the score up to seven.

This would, if someone were to want to play "a really dumb Elf" with an effective INT of 7, allow them to get four ability points to spend elsewhere for the buy-down to before-race-applied 5.

The post-race limiting with the extended chart would let a human character to effectively "spread out" his plus two to any attribute, by having something bought down to 5, applying his plus 2 there, and then getting four points to splash around (if the chart were symmetric around 10 etc).

(I ask because the rules lawyer in me wants to know, and because I am "poking around" with the idea of an automated character sheet for Android devices and such limits and questions come to mind as I look at the numbers etc.)

[No, I am not personally _this_ kind of min-max weasel, since I don't like low scores and prefer a "uniformly slightly above average", as opposed to a one-feature-wonder as an interesting character basis.]