BloodBought's page

Alright, so it's been nearly 4 years at this point since I've managed to have some steady tabletop action and I'm beginning to get desperate. I live in the Olathe area (just to the Southwest of KC, Kansas). I don't really have any preference as to the system or games played as I am a fan of a wide variety of different game systems. Unfortunately, my biggest hang-up is that the only time I would be reliably free for gaming would be Friday evenings.

I'll save any additional information for if I get any hits here.

Alright, I'm getting to play a summoner for a PbP campaign and I thought I'd use this thread to note my thoughts as I go. Due to the slow nature of PbP, I doubt I'll be able to give too terribly much information, but hopefully it'll be useful to someone.

First of all, for the campaign, I'm playing a LE Human Summoner in an evil campaign where the entire party has been specially selected by Fzoul and Bane himself in the Forgotten Realms. The game starts at level 5. Thus far, I've had a great time role-playing the character and enjoyed it immensely.

No direct mechanical information to report other than some observations I made upon creating my character.

1st: Summoners really have a tough time of finding 'good' 1st level spells based on their current spell list. I personally chose Mage Armor, Daze Monster, Protection from Good, and Grease. Mage Armor is really only useful for buffing my Eidolon though since I am wearing a mithril chain shirt, and the bonus from Mage Armor doesn't help me in that regard. I took Daze and Grease for the ability to have some spells to allow me to do some status effects on enemies. Finally, Protection from Good if nothing else because it gives some protection against mental effects as well as against enemy summons. My choices were actually rather difficult in this range due to the lack of stand-out strong choices. Enlarge Person is a very good buff spell to be sure, but I picked up a wand for it rather than use a spell choice on it. Shield would have been useful except my Eidolon took a feat to be able to use shields and as such, doesn't stack in that regard. Overall, I guess I just feel like they could use some more options in their 1st level spell choices.

2nd: I'm attempting to pattern my Eidolon after a corrupted Earth Elemental of sorts. One thing that would have really allowed me to capture one of the major (imo) distinguishing marks of an elemental would have been some form of immunity or resistance to critical hits/sneak attacks. I realize that full immunity would be too powerful for early stage eidolons obviously, but perhaps some stages of resistances to crits/sneak attacks that build up to immunity as a 4-point evolution would be nice.

Any questions, please ask as I'm sure that there's more information I could give that I just didn't think of.

A friend and I were chatting about the Arcane Trickster and he commented on something that seemed a bit unclear to him and I have to agree that it does seem like it could be unclear. For ease of reference, the text of the ability from the PRD:

Surprise Spells: At 10th level, an arcane trickster can add her sneak attack damage to any spell that deals damage, if the targets are flat-footed. This additional damage only applies to spells that deal hit point damage, and the additional damage is of the same type as the spell. If the spell allows a saving throw to negate or halve the damage, it also negates or halves the sneak attack damage.

Now, the question we both had is whether this is intended to work entirely like the Sneak Attack ability (with the range limitation being the primary factor that we were wondering on) or if it actually allows for the possibility of sniping with Fireballs bolstered by Sneak Attack damage outside of the 30' normal limit for sneak attack?

Given the fact that I've never been a tremendous fan of skill consolidation (due primarily to the fact that I'm much more a fan of having the options for diversification available even if they're not always taken, I'd like to make a suggestion for changing skills in Pathfinder to utilize the Skill Groups method from the Iron Heroes sourcebook by Fiery Dragon Productions. As far as I can tell, the information is Open Content due to the Open Content statement at the beginning of the book.

Effectively what would happen is that instead of consolidating skills to try to deal with the issues that are currently in place of having enough skill points to go to the 'necessary' skills for a particular class, they keep all the skills separate and just group the skills in something they call skill groups. They are as follows:

Academia: Appraise, Concentration, Decipher Script, Heal, Knowledge, and Speak Language
Agility: Balance, Escape Artist, and Tumble
Athletics: Climb, Jump, and Swim
Mysticism: Concentration, Decipher Script, Spellcraft, and Use Magic Device
Perception: Listen, Search, Sense Motive, and Spot
Robbery: Disable Device, Forgery, Open Lock, and Sleight of Hand
Social: Bluff, Diplomacy, Gather Information, and Intimidate
Stealth: Hide and Move Silently
Theatrics: Bluff, Disguise, Perform, and Sleight of Hand
Wilderness Lore: Handle Animal, Ride, Survival, and Use Rope

There are a few skills that don't get lumped into any skill group and remain as individual skills (Craft being the notable one). Anyway, the way these work is that each character class gets a few skill groups as being allowed for their class. When spending skill points, if the character wants, they can choose to put a single point into one of their skill groups, raising the skill rank of all of the skills that are part of that skill group at the same time.

The primary benefit to this sort of system in my opinion is that it allows for a good middle ground between 3.5's problem of having too many skills that you might have a hard time getting all the 'necessary' skills for your class and Pathfinder's problem (imo) of having many skills combined and the potential confusion this can create for conversions (related to PrCs, NPCs, etc).

I'm sure I forgot to clarify some point or another so if you are confused about something let me know and I'll try to answer it as best as I can.