Brin Shallowstep's page

Having played a couple of levels into Halfling Opportunist in PFS, in my experience GMs tend to two types.

Most of the time the GM response has been, "Wow, that's really cool! I'm surprised its allowed, because usually GM fiat stuff just gets banned." Then they happily go along with it and have fun with a unique situation. The trick (besides just getting lucky with a friendly GM) is likely that I try to start out before the game with an ability explanation, the above-mentioned "I promise I'm not a power gamer, I just like the flavor," cringe, and then explain that I'll likely just throw down a roll in combat and not mention it unless I manage a roll above 20 (due to the above mentioned difficulty of actually pulling off CM rolls with a halfling rogue). Then I only really have to try and explain how I'm attempting my exploit if the die lands 15-20 range (and if I get the feeling the enemy will have crazy CMD I generally only bring it up if I roll a 19-20). Once the exploit explanation is approved, I generally do the same thing over and over again, so if it goes off more than once the GM generally just allows it and there is no need for more game-dragging explanation.

On the other hand, the other GM response (luckily fairly rare) is anger and annoyance that I would dare to try such an unusual ability at his table, despite my opening remarks that I totally understand and won't be offended if he decides that I have to use Strength for all my CM rolls and thus I won't ever use the ability since it will basically be useless.

Personally, I'd be fine if I got a friendly "eh...I don't know...that sounds confusing; mind if I just don't allow any GM discretion rabbit-holes?" but unfortunately that hasn't happened yet.

True. Luckily all the GMs I regularly play with seem to be pretty amenable to rule-compatible suggestions, so I wouldn't expect any huge problems even in my PFS games. I can definitely see the possibility for issues though. Personally, having gotten weapon finesse already, I'd rather take the chance that I just have to eat the bad CMD on the off chance of getting a picky GM, but if I wasn't already going finesse rogue I'd definitely take agile maneuvers.

The biggest potential problem I see is slowing things down by doing a complicated exploit every turn whether or not you are the one actually attacked or not (based on my above comment), but seems like that could be a fun problem to have.

Was thinking about taking some levels in this too, and just wanted to run this by some people. Considering that the GM can allow another ability score than strength in CMB considering the situation, my finesse rogue shouldn't ever really have to worry much about his low strength, since he could just use dex to get a bonus to hit, or dex to get a dodge bonus to his armor class if he wanted to make sure he didn't get smacked.

Also, under the RAW, the opponent wouldn't necessarily even have to attack the halfling opportunist for exploitive maneuver to work, as long as the opportunist was within reach:

"the enemy must be able to reach the opportunist, and the opportunist must activate this ability as an immediate action and succeed at a combat maneuver check against the enemy’s CMD)"

So in theory, it seems to me that as long as the enemy was in range for a melee attack against the halfling, an opportunist could as an immediate action roll CMB if the enemy attacked someone else or otherwise performed an action the opportunist could think of a GM-approved way to exploit. Or does "reach" in this context mean any sort of action that could affect the opportunist, such as a ranged attack or spell (for example, the example given in the class description, where a halfling uses a fireball shot at him to help knock down a door)? Thoughts?

Anybody have any good advice for finding an online group to play with, preferably with skype and maptools or gametable? I've been out of the loop for a while, and don't really have any access to any local gaming groups, so was hoping to find a good online forum for game-matching. So far haven't had any luck.
If anybody knows of how to find a good group (heck, if someone knew of groups that tended to have games during the day on Fridays, or late in the evenings EST, that would be even better), I'd appreciate it.