BlueChloroplast's page

I'm playing in a Pathfinder game right now with homebrewed Armour as DR and Active Defense (dodge/parry based on dex/str) for melee attacks. (The GM has also ecouraged us to be descriptive in what we do).

You get a number of penalty-free defense rolls per round equal to the number of attacks you can do. I think the penalty after that is a cumulative -2 (I'm not a melee fighter). The DR is equal to the AC bonus plus the magic bonus, and is DR/magic unless it is magic armor then it is DR/Adamantine. We went back to using CMB/CMD instead of attack/defense rolls for combat to let things specialize in them and it not just being str/dex.

The active rolls are a lot more work for the GM who is running the enemy combatants but he enjoys the system (he also likes the ripose the Swashbuckler does). Ranged attacks hit a "passive AC" which is 10+dex, no defense unless you have deflect arrows or some supernatural skill to react to very fast small things (this is to represent ranged weapons beinga big danger IRL).

The system is fun but I'm not playing the standard system now to compare it. It has been working pretty well but we've only gone from level 5 to level 7. As well it is a homebrew setting and the encounters are customized (but the GM says you have to do that anyways and finds encounter Challenge Rating to be unhelpful as parties vary too much). We've tweaked stuff like multiple hits being bad by giving the wizard archer Clustered Shot (only take off DR once) for free.

TLDR: It is more work and slows down combat but is more active and descriptive (the GM's goal in implementing it). It has been working for my group but the GM will need to do more work. You will probably have to tweak it and we have only used it for levels 5 to 7.

Formatting of PDFs (Scrolling issues while trying to read the PDFs)

I don't really know where to put this so I hope this gets seen and taken into account by the staff at Paizo.

While trying to take a cursory look through the rulebook PDF I kept getting more and more frustrated because if I scroll through it with the down arrow on my keyboard it goes half way down the page then jumps back to the top of the page before scrolling half way down again then jumps to the top again before quickly jumping halfway etc. For me this almost makes the PDF unusable.

Plain and simple there's 2 columns of text so it should scroll all the way down the first column before jumping back to the top of the page for the second column then go all the way to the bottom of the page and onto the next page.

I also noticed at one point that as I was scrolling through it jumped back to the previous chapter for some reason and then very quickly jumped forward again.

If the idea was to make using the arrow keys a pain in the backside then mission accomplished otherwise I would change it and replace the file in your downloads section because this makes me not really want to spend any more time looking through the book and that's really too bad cause I was looking forward to joining a playtest group on Roll20. I might try again come morning but for now I'm just going to close it for the night. It might not have been so bad if this had happened on a night when it wasn't 32 degrees C with humidity at 66% and no AC but then it is summer.

I think that is probably a problem with your PDF reader than with the source, it worked fine for me using arrow keys(using the Foxit Reader free pdf reader). But two column does work better for print than on a (small) computer screen as you don't have to scroll up to see the next column.

Also try setting your PDF reader to "continuous scroll" rather than single page scroll.