Catharz Godfoot's page

Why not change wish to follow the appropriate genre conventions rather than its current setup? Although wishes are supposed to be for 'anything', in practice they tend to be quite limited.

One example would be "great wealth". Assuming that normal 'get rich tricks' don't break your game, giving the wisher a great big pile of money isn't going to break the game.

Another example is the classic "make me smarter/faster/stronger/wiser/whatever", which is why stat boosting wishes should stay. However, there's no reason such a wish shouldn't simply grant a small enhancement bonus. It's unlikely that a permanent +2 or +4 enhancement bonus to strength or a +1 enhancement bonus to initiative and a +5' enhancement bonus to land speed is going to be game breaking. Keep it on the scale of a minor magic item.

Other wishes like "make me the king of France" pose no problem either: sure, they bend the world's reality, but not in a game breaking way. Wow, now your character is provably the king of France. She still has to do something about the guy sitting on the throne right now with false credentials. Similarly, wishing for a castle is neat, but it isn't directly increasing the power of your character.

And, finally, it's OK to say "no can do" when asking for truly broken things. When a player says "I want to be god of magic", you have the option of saying "no" or "roll up a new character". Mimicking most other spells is just b!&&%#!%, and should probably be restricted to 3rd level or lower ("Make the viscount fall in love with me." *charm person* "Done.").

Sneak attack is balanced very nicely as it is.

From a flavor standpoint, however, changing sneak attack completely and making it a standard action would have a number of benefits. Adding mobility to the standard sneak attack seems very much in keeping with the spirit of the rogue: run out of the shadows, bury your dagger in an ogre's back while she's distracted by the warrior, and run off before the ogre turns to face you.

Such a change would require a significant ramping up of a rogue's sneak attack damage. The current rogue is attacking twice (TWFing) at 1st level for 4d6 damage (assuming hits) and 12d6 at 6th (rapid shot), with a moderate hit chance.

Then there's the flavor issue. We expect a rogue to be sneak attacking with short swords, daggers, or vials of acid. If they're doing it as a standard action, they're encouraged to use great swords or heavy crossbows (or vials of acid). A nonproficiency penalty to sneak attacks with two-handed weapons might fix that.

But ultimately, that's probably beyond the scope of Pathfinder. After all, if it ain't broke then don't fix it unless it's your pet issue with specialist wizards, cleric domains, rogue special abilities, or sorcerer class features.

If we take sneak attack as an example: some people view Allpha2 sneak attack as no problem others as it is an A Bug. Some people view the Alpha 2 version a C Bug while the 3.5 version is not. And there are people that think the 3.5 version would be an A Bug so don't even want to consider the Alpha 2 version. Did i forget to mention the minority that think sneak attack isn't powerful enough because rogues have 3/4BAB instead of full BAB?

That's a good point. I think it shows how important it is to base what you report on playtesting or running the numbers very carefully. Just eyeballing the rogue and saying 'that's no good' or 'it's fine' is no help to anyone.

It's nice to try to categorize the problems as you see it, but many thing are rather subjective. I really don't believe that a DND game can be viewed purly in a mathematical way as it is a roleplaying game. It's not like a chess federation where the rules are applied the same regardless of where you play. DND by it's very nature is customized from group to group and so what unbalances a DND game in one group may not in another because each has their own rules.

*My* hope is that when Pathfinder is released, it will not only will have all of the new improvements (skill ranks, combat feats, more class abilities for fighters and rogues, etc), but it will also be free of many of the balance and internal consistency problems of 3e. Enough at least that the rest can be taken care of with errata and not things like the polymorph fiasco.

Although many people will make changes in the rules that might throw it out of balance, at least then we can know it plays great before we mess it up. :)

I would propose a second axis to determine how widespread the 'bug' is. How likely it is that this will enter the game.

That would be nice too, although it can be hard to tell. Most things are conditional on whether they appear in a campaign. Classes, feats, spells, magic items, and monsters all have to be intentionally selected. Bugs in them will be very common in games they're in, and nonexistent without.

Bugs in things like economics, skill ranks, and basic actions available to all characters will probably be encountered in every campaign. For things like economics it can be difficult to find problems running one-shot or prewritten adventures.

Ideally one would want to fix any serious problem, regardless of how uncommon it seems to be. Normally that would be a little unrealistic, but with an open playtesting community like this it might be worth shooting for.

I thought I'd quote a guy who's gotten a bit on (negative publicity) in the last few days. I'm sure the guys at Paizo (Jason et al) have already thought of this sort of thing, but I think it's a good reference for the rest of us interested in play testing.

...It is after all an unprecedented attempt - it's something which could theoretically achieve the kinds of results that the distributed network of D&D fans can already achieve - breaking the system within hours of publication. Regressed repeatedly, that could make a system that was resilient enough to withstand the vast majority of campaigns - maybe even all of them...

...set up a basic set of Bug Reports based on severity and Frequency, and then you'd have an entirely separate section where you discuss the equally important (but completely distinct) accessibility questions of Complexity, Cogency, and Coolness. So basic severities might look something like this:

A - An 'A' bug stops play or destroys the game world. An example of that would be The Shadow Over the Sun. Another example would be the Kokrachon from the [u]Book of Vile Darkness[/u]. It's CR 6 and it cast's blasphemy once per day at caster level 12. It will kill your entire party with no save, which stops play and is therefore of equal severity with any infinite power loop.

B - A 'B' bug severely impacts play or the campaign world. Gross balance disparities, economic inconsistencies, incorrect CRs on monsters, and the like are all B bugs because they produce a game which is not the game that is advertised. If people can fabricate or Chain Bind to get all the gold they can imagine and they can turn that into epic magic items, that's a B bug because the game claims that people of a certain level have certain magic items. If a Monk of whatever level is categorically incapable of contributing as much as other classes, that's a B bug because the game presents all of the classes as being viable in play.

C - A 'C' bug has a modest impact on play. Minor balance issues and weird numeric effects at the edges of the random number generator are C bugs because the game can shrug its shoulders and move on even when they come up. Things which can be played through and have the game mostly behave as advertised, without resorting to Rule Zero to make this happen are C bugs. Monsters which are too weak for their level are almost always C bugs because nothing bad happens to the game if the PCs get extra treasure and XP for smacking around an easy challenge. If one weapon is clearly superior to others it is a C bug, because the game doesn't stop being playable if everyone uses a lucerne hammer rather than a glaive (or whatever).

D - a 'D' bug is simply a matter of preference. If Rogues end up being classed as crossbow snipers and you want them to be dagger fighters, that's a D bug. There is nothing inherently wrong with characters fighting with swords or fists or golden teddy bears on sticks. So if a class is otherwise balanced, but is doing things you don't like, that's a D bug. It's a D bug because it is entirely possible that someone else does like the new stuffed animal fighting classes, and it is held up to a different standard than a mathematical anomaly would be.

I could have been clearer and I have made this mistake more than once. CR isn't a constant. I misused the term in my haste. What CR is, is "currently known at only one set of inputs, masquerading as a constant". Thanks for pointing this out.

The designers attempted to separate the independent variables of monster HD and abilities into CR and attempted to put the things like party size, number of foes present, party level, and terrain (things that "vary according to all kinds of inputs") in EL. They failed. Had they really done their job, CR would have been an independent variable - like any constant must be and would have been determined using some god-awful process I would rather not think about. Instead, they made CR dependent on party level and party count. Really. They did. CR is not "a variable which can be assigned any permissible value without any restriction imposed by any other variable". It is absolutely restricted by party count, among other things. Thus it is dependent and thus it cannot be a constant.

Worse, they reused party level, party count and CR in the EL table, hopelessly mingling the two together, which works only in the special case that CR is treated like a constant. As long as you really are talking about a party of 4 characters, Table 3-1 applies. The intention was to treat CR like a constant once it was determined, which in many ways you could do, but in the special case of EL...

First -- and let's make sure this is completely clear -- you are describing how CR plays out in your experience and analysis of the rules (that is, as a hidden quantity). You are not discussing as it is explicitly defined in the rulebooks (which you believe to be in error).

So then the CR of a monster as listed in the monster manual (a known constant) only accurately reflects its true challenge when that monster is facing off against a party of four. Against a party of any other number, you find that character resources are being depleted too quickly, too slowly, or too irregularly? I'd certainly believe that; imagine a fighter and a rogue going up against a shadow. Those two are going to be royally screwed because they don't have a full party to back them up.

But I think you and Frank are talking past each other. Frank wasn't talking about the way CRs really work in an actual D&D campaign. He's talking about the way they should have worked, given how they are described in the DMG, Monster Manual, etc. So any arguments that CRs as written don't work the way you know they work will fall on deaf ears, because Frank is trying to talk about how CRs are intended to work.

Sorry if I've misconstrued either of you. I'm also not saying who I think is 'wrong' when it comes to your own experiences in your own campaigns, or even your own analysis of how encounters will actually play out.