Tiefling

Caius The Disillusioned's page

Organized Play Member. 46 posts (63 including aliases). 2 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 3 Organized Play characters. 1 alias.


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Silver Crusade

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If I recall correctly, the crowd scene at the end of "Airheads" has Lemmy Kilmister yelling "I play Dungeons and Dragons too!" Since Lemmy is pretty much the baddest sonuvab+&*~ to ever live, that cameo told me the film had nothing but love for gamer culture.

Silver Crusade

That's a tough call. As tempting a combo as it is, I would say that Scout's Charge is written with the assumption that you are using the attack action during the charge and that's what the Sneak Attack damage goes to. An attack that occurs in some other way at some point in the charge (such as Spiked Destroyer) would not be eligible.

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My Battle Oracle, after one-shotting an Ogrekin in Giant Slayer last weekend would have told you yes. But since she died several rounds later under a reign of blows from a Hill Giant, instead she will tell you no.

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Calistra. I just do not get the point of her. At all. She's all over the place. She's the goddess of sex, but also, Elves, and also bugs, and also revenge. Because reasons. Oookay.

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Looks like I should step in and give some clarification. I wasn't saying that I think kerambits are "better" than other knives IRL, or that I thought the dagger in-game shouldn't have the stats that it does. I just can't figure out why they even bothered to make the kerambit a separate weapon when it's so drastically weak for a martial weapon vs. a dagger which virtually every single class in the game can automatically use.

Silver Crusade

So as far as stats go, it seems like the kerambit is an incredibly terrible weapon. It is inferior to a dagger in every single way. The only thing the kerambit has going for it is the +2 Sleight of Hand for concealing it but daggers have that too. Is there any reason in-game to wield a kerambit instead of a dagger? It's frustrating and disappointing because I'm learning to use kerambits IRL and they're pretty amazing. Frankly, I think they are statted completely wrong. I'd give them a +2 versus Disarm, or maybe a special bonus to Performance Combat. But is there any way at all to make them worth using as they are currently written?

Silver Crusade

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When you're the CN Ranger's Favored Enemy and he really gets into character.

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Being a writer and musician and highly sentimental, I would be all about Shaelyn. I wish I could fall in with Sarenrae but I can't. Because while I love everything about her, I hate the sun.

Silver Crusade

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Wrath of the Righteous:

Well a city fell on me and now I'm a super hero. Guess I'll go punch out the naughty cricket god.

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These guys are not your friends. Friends don't treat each other this way. Leave the group. You can do better but you can't fix this.

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Has anyone tried using the stamina pool rules in Unchained and just giving it to Fighters? I haven't played with it, but it looks pretty potent.

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I'm thinking about making a crit-fishing Half-Orc character based around the Gore Fiend Feat. How should I go about it?

GORE FIEND (Advanced Race Guide p.57)

Prerequisites: Half-orc or orc, Rage class feature.
Benefit: When you are raging and you confirm a critical hit with a melee weapon or a critical hit is confirmed on you (whether by a melee weapon, spell, or ranged weapon), you regain 1 round of rage (up to your maximum for the day). You can only gain this benefit once per round.

I'm thinking of giving her the Toothy alternate racial trait to add a 1d4 bite attack, because more attacks means more chances to Crit, right? I'd also been planning to go Barbarian specifically to get another attack through Lesser Fiend Totem and then take whatever Rage powers might help with crits. But now I'm thinking I might want to do Fey Bloodrager instead in order stack Confusion on top of the critical hits and to get free Haste at 12th level.

Initially I had planned to go TWF with a short sword and a scimitar (again, more hits = more crits,) but now I think I don't want to burn the Feat on it or have to make Dex a vital stat on top of everything else. Is the TWF idea viable or would it better just to use something like a greatsword or falchion?

Anyway, that's all I've got. If using a 15 point build how would you allocate it, and then what Feats and magic items would you look for along the way?

Thanks!

Silver Crusade

I just built a Brawler villain for a game I'm running. I create my NPC's by rolling for them and he wound up with 20 Dex. Since he's an Elf, he gets free longbow proficiency and since he's the Exemplar archetype his focus is not on unarmed strikes.

Yep. I created a ranged Brawler without even meaning to. He leads a squad of Elf soldiers who carry javelins ala the Roman legions. He lends them the Concentrated Fire Feat (from Inner Sea races) to make their ranged volley more deadly.

I'm still shaking my head. Ranged Brawler! I didn't even plan for it, but that's the way the dice fell.

Silver Crusade

Do effects such as Feral Mutagen which provide natural attacks override existing natural attacks?

For example, say I have a Half-Orc alchemist who has the Toothy alternate racial trait (Advanced Race Guide p. 52). This provides him with a Bite attack that does 1d4 damage. He then takes the Feral Mutagen discovery which provides a Bite attack that deals 1d8 damage. Does the Feral Mutagen "override" his existing 1d4 Bite attack with a 1d8 Bite while the mutagen is in effect? Or does the mutagen provide its other effects while leaving him with the 1d4 bite attack since it was already there before the mutagen was consumed and therefore can't be replaced with a different one?

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Aranna wrote:

Thanks for the hugs guys.

I try not to get too emotional, but when it was implied I killed my friend however indirectly... It shattered every emotional control I had. The worst part is probably the people at work probably think I was crying over my argument with my boss. So my authority is probably at an all time low. This will take a long time to repair, but I think I needed to cry so...

More hugs for you. Your emotions are valid, whenever and wherever you feel them, and you did right by your friend, doing what he asked. You couldn't have known, he couldn't have known. You were a good friend to him and you still are.

Silver Crusade

Dire Elf wrote:
Aranna wrote:
Thanks guys I am so choked up on old emotions now. Emotions I thought buried. He wanted to become a geologist so rock climbing was an important skill, for me it was something new and fun to try out since I was done with cheerleading. It was perfect timing for us to meet. The girl he used to climb with had fallen and quit rock climbing so we both needed someone to climb with. He was a great instructor and we quickly became friends. BUT it's time to stop crying in the bathroom and get back to work, I hear it's bad for morale if the employees see their manager crying.

I'm sorry my silly thread idea brought up these painful emotions. :(

Well, you *did* lead with a murder, after all...

Silver Crusade

someone I love very much almost died when the guy she was dating had a seizure while driving. They are now married, the near death experience brought them closer together. He hadn't had a seizure in close to 12 years before then, and he was planning on telling her he was epileptic later on that week, as that had been dating for a while and things were going well.

In my experience, both professional and not, people with epilepsy are embarrassed greatly by it, and don't talk about it much. Noone wants to be seen as a freak or weirdo, or as a porcelain being that must be protected at all times. But this isn't something that should be kept to oneself, as people in that persons life need to he aware that they may need to make space for this person to seize at a moments notice.
It's an awful situation, but it's an even worse thing to surprise someone with.

I am reminded of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the band Joy Division. Depression over having epilepsy contributed to his suicide :/

I am glad your friend and her future husband survived, and that something that caused him so much shame became something that strengthened his relationship with the woman he would marry.

Silver Crusade

Deadmanwalking wrote:
Caius The Disillusioned wrote:


I hear ya. My first and last experience with Vampire LARP ended with being invited to a game by my ex-girlfriend. She didn't know the people who were running it, just responded to an ad. I got a character generated and that was it. Because the VERY NEXT DAY she started sleeping with the LARP's GM. This was a whole three days after meeting him, and after only one day of actually hanging out. We hadn't broken up very long before that... only a few weeks, so my feelings were still pretty raw from the breakup. To her credit, she was disappointed when she found out I wouldn't be playing. But she really should have figured I wouldn't want to go to a game and see her on the GM's arm so soon after us breaking up.
In my experience, LARPs that deal with interpersonal drama and politics (and VtM LARPs definitely fall under that category) attract people who enjoy interpersonal drama and politics. Many enjoy them purely within the context of the game (I do myself, actually)...but others are drawn to the game because they see reflected in it things they also enjoy in real life. Those people are a problem. And one quite possibly endemic to the medium...especially when it's difficult to impossible to exclude people for anything short of outright crimes or cheating (University Gaming Club, remember).

She was very much that sort of person. I think I wound up dodging a bullet with that particular LARP, as it was by and for a very creepy group of people who got a little TOO into the whole vampire thing, if you know what I mean. I heard from a friend that one session disintegrated into a real-life orgy. (Said friend left earlier in the evening before that happened; they heard about it from participants after the fact.)

As for my ex, after she dumped the GM she started dating his roommate. After she dumped him, he moved to Seattle. A few months later she and another boyfriend took a vacation to Seattle and previous ex offered to let them crash at his place... Boyfriend came back alone. She dumped him to get back together with her ex after spending 12 hours in his presence and stayed there in Seattle. I wound up helping her best friend pack up her things to send to her.

Suffice to say, these days I'm not losing any sleep over the fact that we broke up.

Silver Crusade

Another one:

I played a Legend Of The Five Rings game in college. In it, I played a very friendly and lovable martial arts monk who was earnestly seeking enlightenment, but also wasn't very guileful. His closest friend in the group wound up being the courtier played by the GM's wife, and they would spend a great deal of in-game time talking, him about enlightenment and philosophy and her cluing him in on various social aspects that he had missed out on during his years in the monastery.

Now the GM gave a LOT of one-on-one time to his wife's character outside of the weekly game time. It bothered the rest of the group, but since he never seemed to show her any overt favoritism during the group session, and since she never seemed to be acting on knowledge that the rest of us did not have, we let it go.

Cut to some time later after the campaign had ended. I'm hanging out with GM and his wife and we start reminiscing about that game, and this is when they smugly reveal that her character had all along been a powerful member of an evil secret society within the game world with all kinds of connections and subplots that she had been doing behind the scenes. Basically she had been an overpowered munchkin character the whole time and covertly working against the group.

What makes this a "worst" story is that then the wife basically laughed in my face about how she'd been playing my character for a fool the whole time. As she was describing it, she kept saying things like "I can't believe you fell for such-and-such" or "I can't believe you ACTUALLY told her so-and-so." Basically her just sitting there telling me how dumb I was as a person for trusting her character when I had NEVER been given a reason during the weekly sessions to NOT trust her. If she had told me OOC during the game that she was just faking friendship with my character to further her goals, that would have been one thing and I'd have gladly played along. But she didn't make it about her character deceiving my character, she made it about *her* deceiving *me.*

There were other douchey things that those two did over the years of gaming together. Individually, they were more annoying than upsetting, but looking back on their overall pattern of behavior I realize that they really were a couple of jerks. I don't associate with them anymore and I'm better off without them.

Silver Crusade

I have nothing that compares to tales of murder and attempted murder, but I do have a few interesting memories.

I started playing as a teenager in the early 90's when the D&D Satanism scare was still very strongly in play in the Midwest. I was the only member of my group whose parents were cool with gaming, but my house also wasn't exactly ideally set up for it, so consequently we had to sneak around to the others' houses to play when their parents weren't watching. One guy in particular had ultra-conservative parents who would have hit the roof over gaming, but they also owned an industrial laundromat where they washed things like doormats, etc. for various local businesses. One weekend when his parents were away, this guy thought it would be awesome to have the group come and do the game there since he had to work there that weekend while his parents were gone.

So we're doing our thing, playing D&D for several hours. I had some loose change in my dice bag - exactly eight cents, I remember it to this day - and it had come out of the bag when I dumped my dice on the table. Well, his parents might have been gone but the guy clearly never counted on his grandmother just showing up and walking in unannounced. We could do nothing except hurriedly put our things away in silence because we knew we were busted. His grandma didn't say anything to us, but we pretty much bailed without a word because he wasn't even supposed to have us in there in the first place.

Our friend wound up grounded for the rest of the school year. Not because his grandma had caught us playing D&D, but because she she saw my eight cents laying next to a pile of dice and drawn the conclusion that we were gambling! I don't know who seeds a gambling pot with three pennies and a nickle, but maybe that was a lot of money in grandma's day.

What's sad is said friend took a nosedive into crime almost immediately after he graduated from high school and did quite a long stint in prison. I think it might have had more to do with his family's draconian parenting, however, than our shoddy attempt to turn the family laundromat into a penny-ante den of iniquity.

Silver Crusade

Deadmanwalking wrote:
I LARPed Vampire the Masquerade and other WoD games for a good 10 years (starting when I was 14) with what was officially the University RPG Club. So there's a whole boatload of interpersonal drama I could go into there, if I liked, but to be honest, it was mostly pretty petty and unimportant. And almost universally didn't involve me directly.

I hear ya. My first and last experience with Vampire LARP ended with being invited to a game by my ex-girlfriend. She didn't know the people who were running it, just responded to an ad. I got a character generated and that was it. Because the VERY NEXT DAY she started sleeping with the LARP's GM. This was a whole three days after meeting him, and after only one day of actually hanging out. We hadn't broken up very long before that... only a few weeks, so my feelings were still pretty raw from the breakup. To her credit, she was disappointed when she found out I wouldn't be playing. But she really should have figured I wouldn't want to go to a game and see her on the GM's arm so soon after us breaking up.

Silver Crusade

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Quote:

I find this perspective interesting. I'm not going to tell you what perspective to adopt, but do you consider this transaction "Buying the PDFs"?

It seems to me that the enormous disparity between twenty bucks (or whatever it is) and three hundred and fifty dollars worth of stuff does change the character of the transaction.

In my mind, Paizo have offered an inducement to donate to charity - namely a promise to gift the donator a whole truckload of PDFs. I think they have an obligation to fulfill that promise, but I don't think it's such a mercantile transaction as your thought experiment suggests.

Note your first sentence "I should contribute to this" and its evolution into "But I bought them". To me, they're not the same thing.

That's actually an incredibly brilliant way of explaining things. The PDF's were offered as an incentive, and incentivized rewards can fluctuate in delivery time as anyone who has ever backed a Kickstarter can tell you. Ideally they'd be placed immediately into your hands like in the best mercantile transaction, but it's not always the case. It's not even always the case for the best mercantile transactions.

Paizo clearly was not anticipating how popular their donation incentive would be. They are working round the clock to keep up with the band, and doing a decent job of it. I've managed to download the PDFs I wanted most and can rest easy knowing that the rest will be there. Anybody who has ever dealt with this company directly knows they offer excellent customer service and I think that will shine through in the end.

Silver Crusade

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Quote:

Not liking something and not understanding why something is used aren't even remotely the same thing. And since you clearly read what I wrote you can see that I clearly demonstrate that. If that's you not trying to antagonize, you're very bad at it.

And the minimum credit card thing can get your business's contract with the credit card company revoked. So it's not just a "those damn hippies don't understand business!" thing.

But, given that you make those conflations, I can make the assumption that you are OK with businesses doing whatever they have to do to take your money and run, so you defending them when that's the charge against them (NOT by me, but by the position I was trying to explain originally) isn't ideal.

I'm not saying those damn hippies don't understand business, I'm saying you don't. Besides, the credit card thing is so barely relevant anymore that it's practically a formality: if you're going to Applebee's then you're already intending to spend more than ten dollars anyway.

You never did answer the original question of why you hate DRM so much. In this case, yes it is annoying in the sense that it is preventing us from getting our PDF's as fast as we want, but the concept itself is just good business sense and Paizo's take on it is one of the most liberal that you'll find.

Silver Crusade

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Orcs Of Golarion stated that Orcs wore masks in battle and that there was a great deal of cultural significance attached to this. Subsequent publications have made no mention of this practice, with Scarred Witchdoctors being the only Orcs who use masks in a practical extent.

Silver Crusade

I'm really excited for this Adventure Path. I don't run games in Golarion, but I really want to give this one a try.

Silver Crusade

Lamashtu doesn't have to be behind it just because it aligns with her areas of interest, but it does sound like something her followers would want to claim or help in her name. I'd add to the challenge of one of these dungeons by having a rival group of Lamashtan adventurers racing the players to the heart.

Silver Crusade

I'm not familiar with the acronym VMC. What is that?

Silver Crusade

Does anybody have any ideas on what could make an Eldritch Scrapper really good. I've been toying with a couple of build ideas centering around combat maneuvers and what I keep coming down to is that there really isn't anything an Eldritch Scrapper can do that a Magus or a Bloodrager can't do better. It seems like with the weak BAB and hit points getting access to all those Combat Feats just doesn't seem to compensate. Is there something about the class that I'm not seeing?

Silver Crusade

Claxon wrote:
Intimidate and Diplomacy. Both are bad systems that have persisted through multiple versions of D&D and into Pathfinder. The way the rules are written you can turn even your worst enemy into your best friend for a DC 40. Which sounds hard, until you have someone who focus their feats and gear into it. I coudl go on, but there are many threads on the board about Diplomacy and Intimidate and many include posts and references to why the system doesn't work.

This is why I only use Diplomacy or Intimidate checks for someone the characters have *just* met, and if they can't roleplay what they want, then they don't get to make the role. I might let someone make a Diplomacy check against someone they're very familiar with who has a deeply-ingrained opinion of them under the right circumstances, but it would require some really impressive roleplaying first.

Silver Crusade

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Otherwhere wrote:
Kaouse wrote:
Did anybody mention full attacking being a full round action rather than a scaling standard action? Because it's really silly that spell casting automatically scales as the caster levels up, but the martial effectively becomes worse at fighting as he levels up, needing to stay in the same place to attack more than once.

That has been brought up before, as has the CMB/CMD system.

The whole "move then attack, or attack then move, but not move/attack/move" leads to a clunky system, especially when you're dealing with mounted combat.

"Clunky? Hey, here's a solution! Another Feat! 'Ride by Attack'! Now you can do that thing that makes sense but couldn't because the system got in the way."

Yes - Pathfinder went the other way from old AD&D and really enhanced casters but screwed martials.

I always hated the old "can only use blunt weapons" rule of Clerics in older editions. It was based on one or two brief passages in medieval manuscripts about priests defending themselves with maces in order to "avoid spilling Christian blood." A religious edict that makes no sense in a polytheistic fantasy world where even the nice gods have no problem with violent solutions. The Pathfinder notion that Clerics know how to fight, but prefer to stick to simple easy-to-use weapons due to the amount of time their religious duties consume, makes far more sense.

Silver Crusade

Claxon wrote:
Lifat wrote:
NobodysHome wrote:

The Withdraw action.

"Eeek! I'm a wizard next to a fighter! Now I'm going to run away without provoking an attack of opportunity from him, and weave around this chair in the room to prevent him from charging to catch up with me!"

Spending one round to get out of a dire situation 'for free' seemed so cheesy I disallowed it in my first campaign. Our other GMs allowed it, so I started allowing it, and it's always been abusive and cheesy, in my opinion.

Even if I agreed with you that withdraw was overly powerful (which I don't), then I'd like to remind you that without it most parties will never ever flee from battle (untill they get other ways to escape). Personally I'd love having my players run away from a potential party wipe combat. As a GM I'm supposed to try and avoid the situation but it does happen from time to time and then it is nice that the players have a chance to escape.

I don't see how "Move away from opponent in a straight line and do nothing else on your entire turn" to avoid AoO from the first 5 foot square you leave is to powerful. Once they initiate withdraw that is it. The only choice they have left is how many feet they are going to move in a straight line.

A a GM I use it regularly for villains whom I don't want to die yet, especially if crappy roles mean they weren't the kind of challenge I wanted them to be. It's a great thing to have access to.

Silver Crusade

Shisumo wrote:

I don't see myself in danger of falling for a non-human/non-elf, and my choices would be limited to the non-lesbians among those. Lessee, that leaves...

Actually, there's really no question. Lirianne all the way. Gorgeous, strong-willed, smart enough to be a successful cop, with a sense of wonder and adventure. I'm soooooo there.

I too choose Lirianne for pretty much all the same reasons.

Silver Crusade

I know the Scarred Witchdoctor nerf has been discussed elswhere, but I'm dying to know: were Constitution-based Orc witch tanks really that big of a problem?

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Thanks very much!

Silver Crusade

I've searched but couldn't find a post about this. I've just started Wrath Of The Righteous Deck 1 with my S.O. and discovered that every scenario rewards you with more and more scales. But there's only one copy of each in the box. How do folks deal with that? Can you use proxies? Or are you just screwed out of getting rewards for scenarios once you've exhausted the four that are in the box?

I feel dumb asking but I'm genuinely perplexed.

Silver Crusade

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Lord Fyre wrote:

I'm going to risk being pummeled.

I wish her costume had a bit more "fanservice"

I think this woman looks incredibly powerful and sexy. It's a gorgeous, breathtaking illustration that makes you want to learn more about the character and/or make your own character that's every bit as great as her - something that I think the iconics should do. It makes sense for characters like Seoni and Amiri to dress the way they do. It fits with who they are and how they act and think. This character dresses in a way that makes sense for her, and it doesn't make her any less easy on the eyes.

I'll tell you another thing. I had a bad playtest experience with Occult Adventures and as a result had absolutely no interest in picking up this book or using any of its content. Thanks to Rivani here, both her text and her artwork, now I do again.

So there you go. Paizo made a purchaser out of a skeptic, and they did it all without using fanservice. Pretty good, I'd say.

Silver Crusade

I don't know in what circumstances a Halfling Swashbuckler would pick up a two-handed weapon, but should he ever, Steadfast Slayer would be a good Feat.

Silver Crusade

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I play an Aasimar Magus who came from a family of Aasimars who were all divine casters. She thought there was something wrong with her because she had no connection with the gods, so she threw herself into her military training. Then one day she discovered she could cast spells and realized the gods had simply given her a different kind of magic.

Silver Crusade

I know it's not just Bonus Feats. I worded that improperly. I was expression my frustration with getting a Familiar that runs on Feats by sacrificing two of your Feats. I suppose at high levels you could make an interesting build, but all the games I play in always start at level 1. A Fighter who can't really do anything really Fighter-ly for those first few levels seems really un-fun.

If you're going to play an Eldritch Guardian out of the box at level 1, what Feat would you take to get the most bang for your buck until level 3?

Silver Crusade

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Has anyone tried the Eldritch Guardian archetype out of the new Familiar book? What are your thoughts on it? I was excited when I heard about it. I mean, what could be more awesome than a Fighter with access to a familiar, right? But when I finally read it I was disappointed. Basically you burn your first two Bonus Feats for a Familiar that doesn't do anything... unless you have Bonus Feats. The other perks of having a Familiar seem negligible for a Fighter who's crippled out of the gate. Is there something about the Eldritch Guardian that I'm just not seeing?

Silver Crusade

Something that came up with a Brawler in my group a few weeks ago: The Improved Reposition Feat does NOT allow you to pick a foe up and drop them onto a square that would do them harm. (i.e. Off the edge of a cliff, into a trap, lava, etc.)

Silver Crusade

I played the Kineticist and found it to be a lot of fun. But the character was fun in the same way that "Space Invaders" is fun: it's great to stand there shooting things and watching them blow up, but after an hour you're ready to go do something else. I was actually excited when I finally got hit because it meant SOMETHING different was finally happening.

I haven't looked closely at what other types of Kineticist can do, but this particular build is only capable of standing in one place and shooting. If you like that style of play, then it's a great class. It does one thing and it does it exceptionally well.

Silver Crusade

So I recently ran "Into The Haunted Forest" for my group, and to my surprise, my players refused to harm the final creature in any way! The module seems to be written with the assumption that the characters and the NPC's will pile onto the boss until it is defeated. Instead, when the NPC's turned their attention on the new threat, the PC's used the distraction to cut them down while the Inquisitor just walked up to the monster and started roleplaying, making one Diplomacy check after another. Since the creature's stat block states it attacks foes who use fire before anyone else, it was busy going after the NPC with the Burning Hands spell and paid no mind to the adjacent PC, who took this as encouragement to keep talking.

By the time all the NPC enemies were defeated, the entire party was intent on talking the monster down. Its stat block insists that it attacks relentlessly, but given that it has an Intelligence score, they were communicating with it in Sylvan, and had put their weapons away, I couldn't think of a reason why it wouldn't be responsive or why it would keep attacking like a mindless creature.

The stats also say that it pursues anyone who takes the panoply out of the building, but it wasn't summoned to protect the panoply, only to help win a fight.

In the end, it let them go and take the MacGuffins in exchange for burying the remains of the person who summoned it.

Anyone else think this call was justified? I believe in rewarding good roleplaying, plus I'd hate for the attack to leave them afraid to communicate with creatures, lest they think it will just come at them anyway.

Anyone else run this encounter and have it go in a way other than the writer had planned?

Silver Crusade

Thanks for the replies. I'm getting a lot of good perspectives here. I actually wouldn't say I'm squishy at the low levels, save for the fact that the guy who typically runs our Society games is really good at rolling and confirming crits, and at level 1 and 2 that will take down anybody. The Arcane Strike actually has been very useful as I'm dealing a lot of damage myself when I hit. But those Concentration checks are just killing me. But it sounds like if that's the case the best thing to do is just ride it out until the problem goes away, huh?

Silver Crusade

Assuming a character that only gets one Feat at 1st level, is there ever a situation/build where you wouldn't give a Magus Combat Casting as its first Feat by default? Considering how every single thing a Magus is likely to do is going to require a Concentration check it seems like something you can't live without.

I'm asking because I recently started playing my first ever Magus and... I didn't do it. I went with Arcane Strike instead. I didn't realize how Concentration-intensive the class was until it was too late and it's made for tough going. I'm going to take it as soon as I hit 3rd level, but since I'm playing the character in Pathfinder Society play (3 adventures at each level: ouch.) it's been very frustrating playing.

So I guess what I'm asking is, do you just take the Feat you want at level 1 like I did and tough it out, or is anything less than Combat Casting just too risky to be worth it?

Silver Crusade

Nathanael Love wrote:
137ben wrote:
Chaderick the Penguin wrote:

I would also posit that there is a precedent for Asmodeus transcending typical devilhood. Since the 2E "Guide to Hell" supplement, Asmodeus was a deity. I'm pretty sure he retained that status in 4E, though I'm a bit fuzzy where he fell in the 3E years. The canon was all Greyhawk (the big deifying promotion there went to Vecna), and I don't have my copy of the 3.5 "Fiendish Codex II" handy...

In the 3.5 version of Eberron (i.e., the original version), Asmodeus isn't mentioned at all, and probably doesn't exist.

In the 4e version of Eberron, he was ret-coned in, and is apparently a full deity. Keith Baker said he really didn't like the change, but yea, it's there.

Also, the supposedly setting-neutral 3.0 MotP says that no one knows whether Asmodeus is an archdevil or a true deity.

Well, if we are just listing what Asmodeus is in different books. . .

In Kaballah Asmodeus is the Cambion son of the Israelite King David and a succubus

In other ancient writing he is a king of demons, then eventually one of the lords of the nine hells in medieval times where he is identified with the 2nd layer of hell and lust.

I think the lust association comes from the Book of Tobit, which also makes him one of just a handful of demons to be mentioned by name in the canonical Bible.