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The Waffle Iron (Mithral) and Waffle Iron (High-Grade Mithral) in Grand Bazaar should be bulk L, not bulk 1. The rules for Dawnsilver née Mithral are clear that ordinarily bulk 1 objects made of Dawnsilver/Mithral are instead Bulk L, and the ordinary metal waffle irons are bulk 1. Literally unplayable.
My counterargument for this is that Vitality Lash targets a "creature that is undead or otherwise has void healing" (emphasis added). Obviously that second clause would be wholly redundant if void healing let creatures be targeted as undead.
I see that centaurs include lances in their weapon familiarity feat, but I don't see anything that actually lets them use lances effectively? Is there something I'm missing that lets centaurs be considered mounted for purposes of the Jousting weapon trait?
If destroying magical items does enormous amounts of damage, consider taking up archery: Magic Ammunition and Breakage: When a magic arrow, crossbow bolt, or sling bullet misses its target, there is a 50% chance it breaks or is otherwise rendered useless. A magic arrow, bolt, or bullet that successfully hits a target is automatically destroyed after it delivers its damage. Your GM should seriously reconsider this houserule.
Based on his blog, it looks like he's doing work with Magic: The Gathering over at WOTC these days. So, that's cool! I had the pleasure of meeting him at one of the early PAX conventions. He's as cool a guy in real life as you'd guess.
Archaeologist needs updated it can disarm magic traps just like the rogue.Where are you getting that? Archaeologist gets trap sense, trapfinding gives magical traps. At 2nd level, an archaeologist gains a bonus equal to half his class level on Disable Device and Perception checks. He can disable intricate and complex devices in half the normal amount of time (minimum 1 round) and open a lock as a standard action. At 6th level, an archaeologist can take 10 on Disable Device checks, even if distracted or endangered, and can disarm magical traps. Clever Explorer (at 6th level, anyways) is categorically better than Trapfinding, whose bonus to Perception is only to find traps.
I know the scorpion whip has had a muddled rules history, so you might want to check Ultimate Equipment and see if it's been reprinted without change. If memory serves, you also need exotic weapon proficiency with the scorpion whip in addition to whip proficiency to use it. Maybe. Like I said: it doesn't come from a tradition of clearly-written rules.
So I'm looking to play a Kitsune Noble Scion (with some measure of thematic inspiration from the English folktale of "Mr. Fox") in an upcoming game, and I'm trying to figure out a background, but I don't know much about kitsune in Golarion. Are they all from Tian Xia, or are there kitsune who have been living in the Inner Sea region for a long time? Are there particular nations where they hold more prominence or power? (And would you be able to tell, given their human form?) Thanks!
Gestalt is a lot of fun; it lets you make characters who would be hopelessly impractical under other circumstances. Always wanted to play a chaotic good paladin? Try a cleric/fighter! Miss the Fochluchan lyrist? Try a bard/druid! Always wished mystic theurge was better? Play a sorcerer/oracle!
Easy! You run it straight out of a published adventure, as-is.
I really wish it was this easy, but speaking from personal experience: it's absolutely an unreasonable assumption that the DM's mental model of ethics, morality, or alignment will actually be the same as, or even compatible with, yours. I once played a game with a DM who rigorously maintained that alignment, and by extension the morality of a character's actions, were purely a function of the effects of that character's actions, regardless of their intentions. (In other words, the "road to hell is paved with good intentions" alignment model. He's a bit of a nihilist.) I maintained that one's intentions and goals, not actual end effects, were the source of morality. I wasn't playing a character with alignment limitations in his game, so it wasn't an actual issue, but obviously there would have been some real issues if I was trying to play a paladin.
Paladins have such a controversial code of conduct - and the penalties for failure are so steep - that I would never consider playing one without a phylactery of faithfulness. Which is a shame, because I understand that maybe a paladin would rather be wearing a headband of alluring charisma. But not having any bonuses to charisma are better than the risk of suddenly having all your levels converted levels in an NPC class. I really like the theme and mechanics of a paladin, but so long as I can't guarantee that my DM and I will have similar interpretations of the code of conduct - and so long as you need fifth-level spells on tap to deal with those failures, unlike the reasonable handicap of a knight's code of conduct.
There's some precedent for feats that allow otherwise illegal weapons to be used by a duelist. Now, to be fair, Aldori Dueling Mastery generally isn't considered to be very good, but it's at least a benchmark. Here's what I'd suggest: Elven Dueling Mastery(Combat):
Prerequisites: Weapon Proficiency (Elven curve blade), Dodge, Weapon Finesse, Weapon Focus (Elven curve blade). Benefit: You gain a +2 bonus on Initiative checks as long as you start combat with an elven curve blade in your hand. As long as you wield an elven curve blade in both hands, you do not lose your dodge bonus to AC while flat-footed or denied your Dexterity bonus to AC. Although the dueling sword is a two-handed weapon, you treat it as a weapon being wielded in one hand when determining the effects of duelist class abilities. Is it too good? Maybe. But if your player is rolling a duelist and doesn't even intend to wear a mithril shirt - well, I wouldn't be too worried.
The duration is less of an issue than one might imagine; you only need cast it before you find a trap if you really think that a bonus to perception of 1/4 your level is going to really make a difference. Most of the time, you can find a trap with perfectly ordinary perception - the party's druid, cleric, or monk is a good candidate for this - and then cast Arnim Zey's focus so you can disarm it. The biggest thing you lose from not having a rogue on traps duty, I think, is loss of access to the phenomenal Trap Spotter rogue talent. (This is a real point in favor of the cryptbreaker alchemist, who can take it as a discovery.)
Why not? A true neutral character could create a +1 Axiomatic Anarchic Holy Unholy longsword, and wield it; it'd do an extra 2d6 or 4d6 damage (depending on enemy alignment) to any non-true-neutral opponent. Each magic enchantment requires a specific alignment - holy requires a good alignment, for example - but those can each be bypassed by increasing the creation DC by 5, as with any other creation prerequisite that you don't meet.
It's sort of a back-and-forth. I'll generally get a ballpark idea of what I want to do - sometimes as vague as "hitting people with axes", sometimes as specific as "Tetori monk" - then I'll go and figure out the broad strokes of a character I can make from that, then I'll find more specific rules (feats, stats, race) that compliment that character, etc. I've never created a whole and complete statblock without having at least an idea about the character. Once - and only once - I made a complete character before thinking about any mechanics, and he was terrible and dysfunctional and didn't mesh with the rest of the party. (Lesson learned.)
I can't for the life of me find a good image of this, but if you've ever seen Evangelion - do you recall the scene where EVA-01 pries apart an A.T. field with its bare hands? That's how this works.This Scene? Thank you! This is exactly how barbarians work.
I can't for the life of me find a good image of this, but if you've ever seen Evangelion - do you recall the scene where EVA-01 pries apart an A.T. field with its bare hands? That's how this works. A raging barbarian isn't just Really Mad. It's less about rage and more about... power. They're tapping into an arbitrarily powerful well of strength within themselves, and that's disruptive - see the "no concentration" clause - but it's also not just an expression of physical power, which is why you get abilities like "swim real good" (Beastial Swimmer) and "grow wings" (Dragon Totem Wings) and "absorb spell effects" (Eater of Magic). If this was my character and I was asked to justify this thematically (for, say, a bull's strength, I'd style it like this: I would [i]plunge my hand into their belly[i], and then withdraw it; but instead of holding their intestines, I would be holding a glowing orange mass, and I would crush it in my fist.
I guess this is the "how useful are skills" thread. If I make an investment in Perform (as a monk, not as a bard), is that going to pay off in any meaningful way? Will that even a little bit ever suffice as a substitute for Diplomacy? How much trouble will we have if our party has no Disable Device?
I agree that mystic theurges are generally terrible, but I will point out that you can have a wisdom-based sorcerer by taking the Empyreal bloodline - so you could do, say, sorcerer/druid and double down on wisdom. You've still got miserable spell progression, but at least you don't have hideous double stat dependency.
I'm also curious about how much water you need to animate a square of water. That sounds nitpicky, but it has concrete implications when you think of the question as "at what level can one casting of Create Water create enough water to animate". Does it have to be a full 5' cube (125 cubic feet, or 1000 gallons, or caster level, uh, 500)? That seems... excessive, and would totally prohibit the use of this ability in situations not next to lakes, swimming pools, or the sea. Does the water have to be originally in the space of 5', or can be it be gathered over a larger area? (e.g. half an inch of standing water over the full 30' radius of the area) Can you extract this water from some substances - swamp, soups, very heavy fog (2.5 gallons out of a full 30' radius sphere, or 1.27 from a hemisphere if you're standing on the ground), Jell-O, or even water elementals?
You'll need, what, 50 con to be able to hold your breath for ten minutes? Good luck with that.
"There's a snake in my boots!"
Huh, that is news to me. I guess it is necessary to prevent all kinds of pounce-lance-charge BS.Some of the charge feats can be used off mounts to great effect. Vital Strike, Power Attack, etc.You (still) can't use Vital Strike on a charge. Vital Strike requires an attack action; the single attack from a charge comes from a charge action, not an attack action. I literally shuddered at the thought of vital strike applying to a pounced full suite of attacks.
You've got it right for 3.5, but the PFRPG charge rules are substantially simplified, and completely remove the "knight movement" charge paths. The important thing here is that charge paths are *actually* drawn with straight lines, and not "snap-to-grid" pseudostraight lines. You map your path in real-world-straight lines, from corner-to-corner of your square(s) to your target squares(s), and if there's anything in the squares you even partially cross with those lines, your charge lane is blocked. (Line effects, such as lightning bolt, use similar rules.) This does, in fact, represent a substantial limitation to the efficacy of the charge action (and a substantial improvement to the potential zone of targets of line effects).
Some of the charge feats can be used off mounts to great effect. Vital Strike, Power Attack, etc. You (still) can't use Vital Strike on a charge. Vital Strike requires an attack action; the single attack from a charge comes from a charge action, not an attack action.
Undines have a feat, "Aquatic Ancestry", which says "Your swim speed increases by +10 feet." Now, all undines have a swim speed, but humans do not, and the swim speed is not a prereq for this feat. Does an Undine Racial Heritage human who takes Aquatic Ancestry gain a swim speed of 10'? If they gain a swim speed via other means (say, wild shape), is that swim speed improved by 10'?
Low point buy does nothing to curb powergaming; a powergamer will still be able to make their 15 points of point buy go farther than a non-powergamer. They might even enjoy the challenge. Remember: powergaming can create imbalances in the power level of a party not because it creates characters who are unbalanced by an objective metric, but because it creates a relative imbalance within the party. Suppose everybody's highest stat is a 16. If the fighter puts the 16 in strength, the cleric puts the 16 in dex, the wizard puts the 16 in charisma, and the rogue puts the 16 in wisdom... well, the fighter is going to be a lot more combat-effective than the rest of the party, but that might not be the fighter's fault.
I started playing RPGs with the release of 3rd edition, and that was the only thing I played for a long time. Eventually, I started playing other things; groups changed, tastes changed, new games came out. I haven't played a d20-based game since before the Pathfinder beta. But, after so long, I want to find a Pathfinder group, because the d20 system did something that I haven't seen in other games. A lot of RPGs these days are designed to consistently provide good play experiences - but rarely result in really incredible play experiences, and those experiences are usually the result of player influence. The d20 chassis doesn't always result in great play - sometimes bad dice can just make things unfun - but it also provides for the opportunity for one-in-a-million chances, things that nobody could have seen coming. d20 games are the games that result in stories with phrases like "And then I rolled max damage on 15d6" and something so spectacular happens that it would never fly in a game less dictated by the dice. And that's why I came back to Pathfinder.
Given the volume of PDFs available to longtime subscribers, the amount of books you can have in, say, a iPad is an incredible aid to the whole table. One of our players has a Kindle, and it's been an incredible asset to the whole table; I don't miss the days of bringing a backpack with eight hardback books and fifteen issues of Dragon Magazine on the bus. And I've been doing my character sheets in Excel for years. There's never any ambiguity if I've recorded a particular bit of XP or GP use, and my sheet is never illegible. If everybody at your table has laptops, you can take this the other way - you can skip the big battlemat and boxes of minis, and just put everybody on a virtual tabletop like Gametable. You keep the table chatter, the snacks, the facial expressions, the voices (if you've got a voices DM), but you have a combat log, simplified dice rolling, unambiguous IC/OOC seperation, etc. It's pretty awesome if your group can make it happen.
So there's no effective way to play a High Shield Gun Corps? That's unfortunate.
Use a light shield. Are you suggesting that the guntank's tower shield proficiency is functionally useless?
Is this play-by-post or will you be playing in a real-time format?
Would "severe cold" be the appropriate condition to substitute for "on fire", then?
When is it okay to put aside the roleplaying in a roleplaying game for 'fun'? Always, at all times, under all circumstances. Fun trumps everything in a game of any kind, role-playing or no. Your methodology may vary; sometimes it's fun for things to be creepy and unclear, sometimes it's fun to thoroughly dominate a tactical situation, sometimes it's fun just to explore and watch as an external narrative unfolds. No matter what your methodology is, the moment somebody is Not Having Fun Anymore, you need to re-examine either how good a fit the methodology is for the players, or how you're implementing it. If you're running a horror game and everybody is creeped out and not sure what's going on and it's weird and scary and fun, fantastic. If one of the players is crying because they're scared and alone and Not Having Fun Anymore, your game is now Bad.
The Winter Witch archetype from Inner Sea Magic has a limited list of patrons, including the Vengeance patron. The Vengeance patron gives the Burning Hands and Burning Eye spells, which have the Fire descriptor. The Winter Witch's "Ice Magic" ability makes her unable to "learn or cast" spells with the Fire descriptor. How does this work? Does a Winter Witch with Vengeance learn no patron spells at 2nd and 4th levels? Does the witch learn the spells anyways, but cannot cast them, except perhaps with the Elemental Spell metamagic feat?
If it's a half-drow elf, half-"normal" elf (all terror!) character, then as I understand it, Drow Do Not Work That Way in pathfinder. If we're talking about half-drow half-human, there's not really anything that both half-elves and full-elves get that drow don't also get, so I would imagine that a half-drow would be statistically identical to a regular half-elf, except maybe with darkvision instead of low-light vision (assuming that sort of thing ever even comes up in your games).
The chaos sorcerer looks like a lot of fun. Are his mechanics more complex? Absolutely. But I think that's a responsibility that falls on the player, not the class; you shouldn't play a chaos sorcerer if you won't be able to remember which things are even and which are odd, just like how you might not want to play a warlock if you're going to forget about all the continuing effects you've put on enemies.
Warlock can be a fun class, but it's definately underpowered as a striker, and star pact is just painful. There's a reason the star pact warlock got the first Class Acts of 4e; it's the most troubled class in the PHB. Usually, 4e classes are founded on having a primary and a secondary stat for each class, with the secondary stat differing based on your build. Rogues, for example, have a primary stat of Dexterity, and a secondary stat of either Strength or Charisma. Warlock changes this around by having a fixed secondary stat of Intelligence, and a different primary stat of either Charisma (for fey pact) or Constitution (for infernal pact). This works out well enough for those pacts, although it's troubling that tieflings are better fey pact warlocks than they are infernal pact warlocks. But poor star pact gets stuck in the middle, with some charisma and some constitution powers, because the PHB lies when it says it's a good idea to focus on both charisma and constitution. Hitting is a very important element in 4e, and because there's no stat-enhancing items, your first-level stats are vital to your long-term success. It's mechanically a good idea to put at least a 16 in the primary stat for your class, but that's not viable when you have two primary stats, so star pact warlocks can either usually miss with all thier powers, or consistently miss with half their powers. The Class Acts: Star Pact Warlock helps rectify this; it gives enough new star pact powers that you can, as a star pact warlock, choose one stat to be your primary stat, and have a perfectly competitive hit chance. I recently played a star pact warlock that had nothing but charisma powers, and he was quite nice; the only real issue I ever encountered was that there was still only the constitution-based at-will, so I only ever used Eldritch Blast as my at-will power. Of course, there's a seperate issue that the warlock has a lot of status effects and not so much damage for a striker, a problem which is really highlighted by the sorcerer. This isn't inherently an issue, as long as you understand when you create your character that you're as much a single-target controller as anything else.
I gave my fourth vote to Veddic, Master of the Codex just because I want to see how the hell the mechanics work for a character of unknown level.
I like it. A villain needs to oppose the PCs and hinder their pursuit of their goals; the best ones are the ones that do something that really screws you up, and then escapes to taunt you another day. It's not just a big boss fight. I also don't see "he wouldn't last a minute against an evil party" arguments. He'd last every bit as long, which is quite a long time if he's sundering all their phat lewt. He'll piss off your players, both in and out of character, he'll be maddeningly difficult to defeat; in fact, I can easily imagine an outcome where the party would have to defeat him indirectly, because you just can't kill him without a sword or a spellbook. (Unless you're a monk, druid, or something else with good unarmed strikes or natural weapons.)
What would stop Wizards from terminating the Dungeons and Dragons product line? The same thing that would stop Paizo from terminating the Pathfinder product line: a profit. If a product line is making money, there's very rarely a reason to get rid of it. If a product line is losing money, there's very rarely a reason to keep it. Not terribly complicated, I'm afraid. Buy more RPG stuff.
Combat Casting (3.5 PHB) gives a +4 when casting defensively. Skill Focus Concentration gives a +3 to concentration at all times. When you stop and consider the wide variety of reasons that you made concentration checks, it becomes clear that Skill Focus is the better feat. Yes, but Combat Casting is still a poor feat long-term. A spellcasting PC's concentration modifier will probably increase by 1 every level, whereas the DC to defensively cast a spell of the highest level available to them will increase by 1 every other level. Setting aside constitution modifiers and feats, a first-level wizard with max ranks in Concentration needs to roll a 12 to successfully defensively cast a 1st-level spell; nine levels later, that wizard now has 13 ranks in Concentration, and needs to roll a 7 to successfully defensively cast a 5th-level spell. Concentration checks he makes for other things will probably scale, but defensive casting will not, which means that every level he'll see less and less use out of Combat Casting. (Kind of like Toughness.) Of course, I'm sure there's excellent roleplaying reasons why you'd want a character who was only good at concentrating on spells, so obviously this isn't an issue with the power curve of the game, and we shouldn't discuss ways it could be stabilized in a CharOp board, because that would violate the integrity of the game with wizards taking feats at first level that they wouldn't regret at fifteenth level!
I'll start caring about WOTC ripping off other games for D&D's structure when they start ripping off games that aren't utterly brilliant.
I'm reminded of the NPC Dephina Moongem, who totally was plagarized off a character in a friend's game named Daisy Moonblossom. TOTAL plagarism.
I have a hard time qq'ing about numbered core books in 4e, since my favorite 3.5 supplement was the PHB2.
Eberron absolutely uses the Points of Light model. It has five points of light, in fact. And there's some doubt about Karrnath.
I have to say, I'm having a hard time working up much caring over the new Forgotten Realms. I never really saw the appeal of it the first time around, and despite WOTC's sweeping changes, I still don't see much that makes me sit up and say "Now that sounds interesting!" I saw a great NERD RAGE thread over on /tg/, with a quote that resonated with me: Don't worry guise. WotC has promised to retain the basic premise of Forgotten Realms, namely that its s!~+ overrun by Mary Sues.
I'm surprised at how quickly I've integrated "striker" into my vocabulary, but I'm still inclined to think of the other roles as "tank", "healer", and "crowd control". It's just a matter of time before I refer to a DPS class as a "striker" while I'm playing Warcraft. :p
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