Christopher Fannin's page

I assume that scrolls and probably wands/staves will fall prey to the spell failure chance. Does it apply to potions and wondrous items that replicate magical effects?

Marcus
Human Holy Gun 3 of Iomedae

Str 12
Dex 16
Con 14
Int 10
Wis 13
Cha 14 (16)

Marcus is a nobles younger son, given quite a bit of freedom to explore his own path as long as he kept his nose clean (think...4th or 5th son, maybe...far enough that it's unlikely he'd ever hold any real power). At a young age he gravitated to the study of Iomedea and found a calling as a paladin. While he was comfortable with the tools of the order, they never felt right to him.

In his teen years, he would find himself practicing with firearms as a pastime. In fact, he was working on restoring an battered revolver that he'd found when he felt or heard something nearby that drew him. He found some children being menaced by undead and was able to use his revolver to call on the power of Iomedae to dispatch them.

Since that time he has devoted his efforts to finding and stamping out undead and has volunteered his services to the Duchess for this investigation.

And both have a duration of at least 5 hours. Admittedly, it means that the spellcaster has to give up one of their 3rd-level spells (and spells known for a sorcerer), but this is a spell that clerics and druids especially normally have available.

Plus, supplying the caster with a pearl of power means he might not be giving up the slot anyway (not that a 3rd level PoP is inexpensive).

I like the gloves. I've always felt that the basic version should have been available a long time ago. That said, the off-slot cost penalty is probably going to be required, and seems to put the costs closer to raw weapon enhancements when used in combination with the AoMF to stack enhancements.

I think a lot of people are glossing over the time element. Crafting is not instantaneous.

All true, and I'm ignoring the time component because my sole complaint deals with item creation at character creation. Time is completely arbitrary at that point.

Yes, crafting means you get to exceed the normal WBL. That's because taking a crafting feat means you're not taking some other feat and not getting the benefit of that feat. Instead of Brew Potion, the wizard could take Spell Focus and be more dangerous in combat. Instead of taking Craft Wondrous Item, he could take Combat Casting and be less likely to get disrupted in combat.

I'd have to find a little bit of issue with this statement. The problem is that Craft (pretty much anything) is still making the person more dangerous in combat. And with the ruling given, you get to have the benefits of both. Maybe even in more than one area.

That said, I don't have a problem with how it advances in game...my issue was with use during character creation.

It varies so much! :)

Best is obviously wish or miracle, but discounting the obvious answers, I think the summon nature's ally chains offer tremendous bang for the buck. I mean, tigers are just ridiculously good.

Favorite is so mutable! It often depends on how well I was able to use a spell recently...but Aqueous Orb has a special place in my heart right now for being able to completely shock my DM into submission. I mean, really, who expects a spell that does 2d6 non-lethal damage to completely change a fight? But that large-sized orb works wonders to break line of sight and being able to hold 4 Medium creatures at a time...and we won't even talk about what he decided it does to fire elementals. :)

I don't think my DM wants me to play casters anymore. I keep breaking his mind.

We used to but since I made Falchions an exotic weapon my players usually don't. Mostly, my players try to find ways to do multiple small dice beyond just a low dice weapon.

EDIT: instead of normal crits, where you get xX of damage, we use a crit chart

For myself, I would say that's too many changes (or not enough changes) for the fun of rolling more dice. Rolling more dice is fun, of course, but I think the difference in die sizes just makes it a fairly random thing that wouldn't add much to my enjoyment of the game.

Were I to consider it, I'd likely remove multiplicative crits and standardize all weapons to some number of d6's. Weapons with really high crit multipliers and/or crit ranges could get special rules to help with that...something like...and this is off the top of my head.

Anything with a standard crit range (20/*2) gets open-ended damage on a roll of 6 on d6. 1 extra roll max (the odds of getting 2 are pretty low, so that's not MUCH of a penalty)

Anything with an expanded crit range (19-20/*2 or 20/*3) gets open ended-damage on 5-6 on d6. 1 extra roll max. (you've got a decent chance of whining over this one).

18-20/*2, 19-20/*3, or 20/*4 crit ranges get 5-6 on d6, 2 extra rolls max per die.

Anything below that just gets an extra roll, or maybe rerolls 1's ^_^

So something like a greataxe would roll 2d6 damage, boost each die on a 5 or 6, but only once. If it was keen, it'd boost again. Overall max damage is much lower (since you don't get to multiply flat damage boosts on a crit), but I think you'd see the average damage over a lot of rolls scale a little higher than it current does.

Some people believe this can lead to things getting out of hand quickly. I neither agree nor disagree to this statement, that isn't the focus of this post. I would like to see what the community at large thinks of this house rule. What are the pros and cons to using this rule and would you use it, given the opportunity. Alright, go! lol

With crits removed, it'd probably be OK, but yield to an overall increase n the amount of damage done by weapons with a smaller die size (a d4 will roll a max result more often than a d12 will....I doubt the the overall effect is equivalent over time but I'm not sure how to mathematically demonstrate it).

In short, I think it forces people to favor weapons with multiple smaller dice used in the damage. Since you didn't say anything about removing crits, I'd imagine that you see a lot more falchions in your game ;)

I'm simply asking if the conceptual intent behind crafting was to let him have more/better stuff than the non-crafter. I think everyone here can look and see that's a clear possibility....

No, I really can't. I mean, if I twist my head into a pretzel and step three steps ---> that way and stand on one foot on a bed of sweet smelling roses and pretend that I've never tried to put one over on my DM, I can, maybe, see a valid justification for the position. It puts me in that pre-matrix-like shopping mall every time I make a character, of course, but that's a really interesting place. All it needs is a little more color.

English what it is, I submit that there's no way to have written a completely unambitious statement regarding starting wealth that would have clearly and succinctly (word counts matter in a print run) addressed the situation*. I submit that in a game system where more than a passing attempt at cross-class, cross-game, and cross-player balance was attempted, it's disingenuous to pursue the question of whether the conceptual intent behind crafting was to let him have more/better stuff than the non-crafter.

*look at how much fun DM's have had over the years perverting wishes

Nothing in the rules state actions previous to character creation. That said, character creation says each character gets a certain amount of gp. Crafting provides one possible application using gold. Hence, the crafter can potentially double the value of gear he can have based on starting gold.

You appear to have a vested interest in this discussion (you did start it, I suppose.) Perhaps you would answer the question that the previous posted bailed on.

If you look at any given character progression, the grand total of wealth that has passed through your hands from 1-20 will be more than 880,000gp (assuming standard wbl). Between buying, selling, loss, usage, theft, or what-have-you, it strikes me as highly unlikely that my statement is wrong. You might (should) have about 880k worth of wealth at some point in your 20th level, but you'll have seen more than than.

Character creation doesn't care about the losses, the theft, the gains, or the SOURCE of those gains (or losses). All it describes is a way to make a character with the end result. I contend that all that matters at this point is the value of the item (and as I described, the source is irrelevant to the value). If the source is irrelevant to the value (found,created,bought), then how does any crafter justify to themselves and their group that the things they could create pre-game have a lower value than equivalent items acquired in any other fashion?

No, I read your entire post and that was my response to it. I saw what your point was in relation to someone else's post. My post was saying to read the statements from the book in their entirety so you don't feel like you're in the matrix.

Then you missed the point. Perhaps I was too wrapped up in trying to tell the story.

If you look at any given character progression, the grand total of wealth that has passed through your hands from 1-20 will be more than 880,000gp (assuming standard wbl). Between buying, selling, loss, usage, theft, or what-have-you, it strikes me as highly unlikely that my statement is wrong. You might (should) have about 880k worth of wealth at some point in your 20th level, but you'll have seen more than than.

Character creation doesn't care about the losses, the theft, the gains, or the SOURCE of those gains (or losses). All it describes is a way to make a character with the end result. I contend that all that matters at this point is the value of the item (and as I described, the source is irrelevant to the value). If the source is irrelevant to the value (found,created,bought), then how does any crafter justify to themselves and their group that the things they could create pre-game have a lower value than equivalent items acquired in any other fashion?

Anyway I'm done with this thread. People are unreasonable and openly hostile.

Interesting. Buhbye. Maybe someone else will decide to answer the question.

You gotta read the entire paragraph so you can see that the matrix doesn't have you. This is all gear you've bought, or found adventuring in the course of your career. This is the factor no one pays attention to. Time. It's effects are the same as the matrix when creating a character because you can choose whatever you want and time isn't a restriction. The only thing that has to be stuck by is that no more than 50% of your wealth should be spent on one item. The other values will vary based on character type and concept. So really, that's the one and only restriction being placed on crafters. No more than 50% of your wealth should be spent on gold. This still means the crafter will have 50% more wealth than the others that don't craft and they will exceed the WBL of the next level before the rest of the party but it keeps it roughly on par with just one level ahead.

No, I am reading the whole paragraph. I just don't think that the situation that's being described logically follows.

Part of the problem is that no character has ever found ONLY the items that they can use over the course of a career. There is always give and take. There's always a matter of 'I'll sell my +2 blah that I bought a level ago because that demon was wielding a +3 Keen blah and I'd rather have that'. If you're given a 630000 gp credit card, you cannot emulate that narrative. You're only describing the end result (The +3 Keen blah).

That's my point, really. If all you can describe is the end result, then HOW you got an item is irrelevant to the narrative. Whether you bought it, found it, made it, or reached down and pulled it out of a stone, the only thing that matters is the end result (that you posses such and such an item). At that point, the only viable argument left is whether an item is WORTH less because it would, theoretically, cost less to acquire. That premise is flawed though. You've already agreed that the idea of a one-stop-supermarket is not valid:

This is all gear you've bought, or found adventuring in the course of your career.

So if I found that +1 holy longsword in a dragon's horde, why do I have to pay 18000 gp for it at character creation? I didn't buy it. It doesn't actually represent money that I spent on it. No, it's -value- is determined by its buy-off-the-shelf cost per the various tables and formulas. So what ground does the crafter have to stand on to say that it should have a lower -value- because he could make it for less than I could buy it off the shelf...when we've both agreed that I possibly didn't actually buy it...?

Quote:

Each character begins play with a number of gold pieces that he can spend on weapons, armor, and other equipment. As a character adventures, he accumulates more wealth that can be spent on better gear and magic items. Table: Starting Character Wealth lists the starting gold piece values by class. In addition, each character begins play with an outfit worth 10 gp or less. For characters above 1st level, see Table: Character Wealth by Level.

The arguments based on that first sentence that say it's a value representation forget that value can not be spent but gold can, or at least Pathfinder does not define such a concept. "Spending value," to me, is like drinking a potion or activating a scroll. Spending gold, however, gets you stuff.

I wonder about that first bolded line. It reads to me like someone was trying to say something fairly simple without thinking about the possible ramifications that could have resulted from imprecise use of language.

Question: Does it stretch the bounds of verisimilitude that every character created after 1st level appears in a Matrix-like scene with weapons and armor and potions as far as the eye can see with a huge bag of gold (or the game equivalent of a Dave & Buster's card)....and one guy at the end with a cash register...Just on the other side of the cash register is a fully furnished item crafter's paradise! ;)

Of course it's ridiculous, but that's exactly the situation that is described by a literal reading of 'Each character begins play with a number of gold pieces...' Each and every character shows up with a wad of cash, picks what they want, and then retires to the item crafting station to fix the rest. It might make sense for some characters to come into existence that way...but all of them?

You can't even describe a narrative of character growth using that value (I got this splint mail +1 and replaced it with full plate +2 at 6th level, blah, blah) because you'd end up with less value at the end from the buying and the selling. (Yes, I am aware that a sensible narrative of character growth could include saving platinums for crafting. It's not relevant to my point)

From the standpoint of an eternally consistent story (we are playing roles, right?), the only sensible reading of that line deals with the literal value at the end of things. But it's much easier to write 'your character starts with x gold' than something like 'when done, the total value of items on your character will not exceed the value listed on the corresponding wbl table for your level.' It's easier to read the former, too.

Granted, I'm not trying to argue RAW. But I doubt I'll ever be able to create a new character without imagining the gun racks from Matrix flashing by at unimaginable speeds thanks to this thread.

Wait,

Everyone in here has been applying this stupid essay to PF, and saying it should be followed like a religion, and now you want to only apply the logic to 3.0? Seriously? Seriously?

Ok, I concede that you are correct, and Alexandrian Philosphers are 100% correct. All of the essay is 100% correct.

As applied to 3.0.

It goes to garbage for 3.5 and PF. Please take any future references to the Alexandrian Texts to a 3.0 forum? Thanks.

I wonder if it's really worth responding to this, but I really feel like most people (you included) are missing the point on the essay in question.

The essay is 'calibrating your expectations', and that notion applies, really, to any system...every system even.. To quote from the beginning:

This essay should also be understood as something more than a defense of the game from illegitimate critique. That defense is, in fact, almost an unintentional consequence of what this essay is actually about: Providing a useful resource for those who want a deeper understanding of what the numbers really mean

The numbers he provided were, of course, pulled from the system he was discussing at the time, but if he'd been making the same argument for Shadowrun, AD&D, HERO, or Vampire, I'm sure he'd have used numbers and examples that supported his point (if it was possible).

The specific numbers and examples that he used probably don't apply to pathfinder. They started to fall apart in places with 3.5, if memory serves (IIRC, the jumping rules were changed).

But does that really negate the core premise of figuring out what those REALLY BIG (or really small) numbers actually mean, and calibrating your personal expectations of how they apply, and, as suggested in the concluding thoughts of the essay, find that sweet spot of gameplay that fits both your and your group's expectations and arrange for the game to stay there longer?

With that said, I'm sure that if someone wanted to they could figure out where the 'sweet spot' for PF lies to describe the world we live in today. But I don't play games in the world I live in today. I'm guessing you typically don't either.

Protection from Evil is a little too powerful - stops all mind control and blocks summoned creatures.

According to the SRD: Third, the spell prevents bodily contact by evil summoned creatures.

It's not all THAT powerful. There are a lot of non-evil summons.

Unarmed fighter then?

Is it expected that an unarmed fighter's str bonus will be so high that he'll never have to worry about the difference in damage dice between what he can do and what a monk can do?

Christopher Fannin wrote:

Last question, is there textual justification for the immediate action occurring before the triggering action lands, or is it a house interpretation?

It seems that some portion of the triggering action has to occur before an immediate action can happen.

He declares the attack, and you use the Immediate Action before he actually makes. Immediate Actions can literally be used any time.

Otherwise, what be the purpose of sickening the enemy, right from level 1?

So the answer to my question is 'no, I don't have a direct textual justification for my position,' (perhaps beyond the words 'at any time' in the description of immediate actions), 'but we feel it makes sense'?

The answer to your question is, imo, the same as the answer to any combat maneuver. You perform them because they are a form of control (personal or area). Sickening and/or knocking a target prone, and/or moving it to a location where the rest of your party can do it grievous harm, seems like a good use of a class ability. If you take a hit while doing it, well, them's the breaks.

Your Immediate action would go off before the enemy attacks. I assume you tripped him, so he'd be prone and sickened for all of his attacks. And no, he could not change his mind--he started the action, he has to finish it.

Bringing him into a level 9 party, so it was both prone and sickened, and the poor fool power attacked.

Last question, is there textual justification for the immediate action occurring before the triggering action lands, or is it a house interpretation?

It seems that some portion of the triggering action has to occur before an immediate action can happen. You don't Feather Fall before you start to fall, for instance. You do it after gravity has decided that your person needs to be in contact with a portion of the firmament with a lower potential energy (I think that's correct...anyway...jokes are probably a bad idea this early).

I just want something I can hand to my GM other than popular appeal.

Thanks again.

Trying out my new Flowing Monk for the first time tonight, we ran across a question of timing and interaction.

How do immediate actions interact with the actions that trigger them?

Case in question, an enemy 5' stepped up to me and proceeded to full attack. In response, I executed my Redirection attack (an immediate action to reposition/trip the opponent).

Assuming I succeed, what is the correct order of events? It was decided that I had to take the incoming strike that triggered redirection, then the opponent would have to make any followup attacks with whatever penalties the action left him with (in this case, prone and sickened for a -6 to hit), but is that correct?

Christopher Fannin wrote:

2) Rework the cure line of spells, if for no other reason than that the names bother me. 'Cure Light Wounds' will bring a commoner from near death to full health, but won't scratch the surface of even a mid level fighter's health. I would prefer to see the cure line work off the natural healing rules. Cure Light, for example, could heal as if you'd rested for one or two days + the caster's Wisdom mod. Cure Moderate...say 3 days healing, plus 2*Wis Mod, and so on.

I like the basic idea here, but would rework it to be dependent directly on CON (and still scale with the caster level of the healer). The targets with a high CON will heal faster than those with a low CON which reflects the ability of the barbarian to shrug off a hit while the wizard is still picking up the pieces of his shattered world. I would also alter the toughness feat (possibly other effects but not many) to increase the users effective CON mod for determining max HP and healing received by 1. This is more encouragement not to ignore CON and removes the random chance of healing 4+lvl dmg with your best healing spell when the tank is getting his face ripped off.

I see what I did there. I think we had a house rule that added con modifier to natural healing in 3.x. Yes, reworking it to add in CON modifier somewhere is good, but I'd also want the power of the caster to be an issue (thus the wisdom mod). I'm very leery of adding a ton of flat bonuses to it though, since that would make the spell too good at low levels (adding in both con and caster mods could take the spell to a flat +10 hp on a 1st level fighter).

Hmm. The mechanic gets more complicated, but maybe if the wording was something like 'Cure Light Wounds heals damage as if you had rested for two days (8 hours of rest each), plus 2 hp for each point of con modifier per level of the caster (Max of 5 levels)'. That would be one point of con mod added to the per day healing per level of the caster, with the same low level limit. The wording is awkward, but I think the intention is clear.

1) Removal of stat boosting items and a corresponding automatic increase in the stat growth of characters. Technically, that's easier than assuming stats won't grow since I expect encounters with monsters are balanced around certain expectations of minimum stats, damage, hit bonuses, and saves. It just bugs me to have to set aside one or two body slots and ### gp for stat boosters when there are neat items out there in the same slots that see little or no use because they're just not as good.

2) Rework the cure line of spells, if for no other reason than that the names bother me. 'Cure Light Wounds' will bring a commoner from near death to full health, but won't scratch the surface of even a mid level fighter's health. I would prefer to see the cure line work off the natural healing rules. Cure Light, for example, could heal as if you'd rested for one or two days + the caster's Wisdom mod. Cure Moderate...say 3 days healing, plus 2*Wis Mod, and so on.

I have no idea how the coding is yet. I have some actionscripting skillz and html skillz. How similar is the language?

It's not. It's Java with some different libraries to handle the Android-fiddlybits.

How long did it take you to design/program it?

A little bit of time every day over a month or two, maybe, but it is my inaugural android app, so a great deal of that time was spent reading, learning, and making stupid mistakes.

I would love to hear more about it as well. Is it like using the gamemastery pad? Either way I would love to try it out? :)

Thanks!

Email me at zilvar .at. gmail . com and I'll send you a sample screenshot with some explanatory text. I modeled the -intent- on the gamemastery pad, so I'd like to think there are enough similarities to say 'yes'.

What initiative tracker do you use on a tablet during gaming? I was looking for one that is like the game mastery initiative tracking pad. I would really like something like that.

any ideas out there?

Just so you know I am using Android Honeycomb 3.2 :)

I appreciate any ideas anyone might have.
thanks!

I actually wrote one for just that purpose. It's gotten some positive reviews from my gaming group.

(edit) I probably shouldn't leave it hanging like that...It's not on the market, but I'd be willing to discuss providing a copy for your gaming group.

I thought the Flowing Monk looked awesome in theory, but the damage is going to really suffer, and I'm not sure the repositioning they allow for is really worth the loss of potential damage.

Maybe in a few months, I'll let you know.

:)

...

You've definitely got some good points regarding damage focused monks. How do you feel about the maneuver master or flowing monk archetypes? Neither seems to be specifically damage focused.

Someone on these forums talked about a Flowing Monk of the Sacred Mountain. I'm trying to build one of those right now and it seems like it'd be a fun (and potentially annoying to the DM) class to play.

Last question.. Boar Style? I never see it mentioned. Is the bleed damage just not worth it?

Just stopping in to say that Tales from the Rusty Dragon has been updated with the first part of Thistletop. Next week will be the goblin fortress atop the island.

Very nice.

I especially like the druid.

It really is very simple.

points of light is based upon isolation.

Communities in korvera are not isolated, atleast not in any major kingdom. They have both good physicial and infomation based contact with most other places.

Saying eberron is Points of Light based, is like saying that pulp game, where yo go globe trotting to hunt lions on the africian survana one day and his a party in paris two days later is points of light.

Whatever. Whatever our differing viewpoints on the matter are, it's not worth getting frustrated about. I think it can be, and eventually will be, more than this, but I'll leave you to your certainties.

Their are frontiers and wilderness, bloody great ones, but they are at the edge of civilisation and across the sea, not in the gaps, between frightened villages.

But this is still Fantasy Trope 101, and there almost have to be lawless areas in between the villages.

Let me say that I think my fundamental problem with your fundamental problem (as I see it anyway) is the notion that the blackness is pushing back so strongly.

Much like a light illuminates many things past the area of good vision, so do our PoL. Even in the default setting I can imagine an entire kingdom that is dominated by a capital so bright that the entire place is at least marginally safe...and I can see that double in Eberron. As you say, most of the continent was mobilized for war and everyone remembers that, so the woods a quarter mile from the village are safe. 3 or 4 or 20 miles away though, you might run into a band of disgruntled goblins, or some abomination come to life slowly spreading its corruption through the woods.

See, armies or not...wars or not, people don't generally go where they have no reason to go, and people just don't have a lot of reason to stray off the rail, or the well-patrolled roads, or far from the cultivated croplands. A lot of stuff can happen in those gray areas where the Points are a little dimmer.

Maybe the only places it really gets dark are the frontiers, but even heroic tier characters need a place to level up :)

With regards to points of light: This just isn't true. Their certainly are places which conform to the ideas of the points of light model, however, even monsterous lands in Eberron have a degree of organisation, and most of the large nations, despite refugee problems and some scaring still have relatively in tact infrastructures. Also, long distance and luxury travel are reatively cheap rates is common in Eberron, thanks to airships and lightning rail.

I guess I just have a different understanding of the PoL idea, or maybe I'm just more forgiving of the idea.

Airships and the LR seem to me to encourage the idea of the lawless wilderness to a point. I'll grant that some places should be SPOTLIGHTS of light, but I don't think that PoL really ever argues against that. There have to be a few big cities where great things happen...that's just standard Fantasy Fare.

But back to my point, it's a little like the interstates now. If you stop your car and start walking into the hills, the further you get from the highway, the more alien the place seems. The larger the patch of unclaimed ground, the more likely it is that you'll be further from help. That's what PoL represents to me.

Someone said it right earlier. Rivers of light. The LR is a bright ribbon that stretches between larger lakes. The further you get from that ribbon, and the further that ribbon gets from a big city the more dangerous it becomes. The dimmer the ribbon. The less light it provides. And in places where there isn't a lot of light, lots of things can happen.

I'm not an Eberron junkie, I'll admit, but IMO that really does describe the world pretty well. heck, it describes most fantasy worlds pretty well.

So, I think players have been lucky, but the encounter went on very smoothly, and the effect was quite good. At about round 5 the party seemed to be overhelmed, but they decided to go on and turned the wave!!

Very cool!! :)

Hahah :) Well, either your players are much better than we are, or our DM's above-average rolling is even better than we thought! I'm quite sure that sort of encounter would have killed us!

Here its the price of the spray paints that are making me think twice. I can get a lot of different coloured poker ships for pretty cheap.

I only recommended spray paint because I'm chronically lazy (a little stickytack and a shoebox lid and you can paint the whole mess in nothing flat).

As posters below have suggested, you can save a bundle more by getting bottled paint from the craft section of super stores like walmart. It's good quality with lots of colors...more than you can get with spray paint.

There is a product at the local Michaels craft store called "Woodsies" (guaranteed to bring the game to a mocking stop should you let the bag be seen). These are various round, unpainted wood shapes. They cost, if I recall, under $5 for 300 or so of them.

They also sell the inexpensive craft paint mentioned above and spray sealer.

What are the thickness of these pieces? The ones I got from Hobby Lobby were maybe 1/8" thick, and I didn't think that was quite thick enough to really let the color stand out on a crowded game table.

For markers I just raided my 4 year old daughter's collection of foam shapes.

Ah. That's what the other poster meant. Sure. That's even better than what I misunderstood.

- "Foamies" sheets (flat sheets of foam in bright colors), but into 1-inch squares, with tiny labels to remind us what they mean.

Foamcore squares/circles would work easily as well as the dowel method and wouldn't be too expensive.

They'd tend to compress more over time, and would probably get beat up by use (especially squares), but it's definately a great low-cost solution.

I saw one guy with small 1/2" square laminated square pieces indicating conditions.

I was originally going to use plexiglass disks, but the wooden ones are much more economical.

Interesting. As a non-hobby shop guy, have any price comparisons handy to throw out?

Looks like Home Depot has 48"x1" dowels for under $4.

Cutting them into ~1/4" pieces with a jigsaw or hacksaw would give you between 100 and 130 disks (you lose some to waste...thinner blades are better). Toss in a couple of dollars for spray paint (or if you're already a modeller you can use your miniature paint) and you're good.

Since the Alea disks are around $90 for a case and 140 colored disks, you're not getting off badly. Granted, these aren't magnetic and don't have a nifty little emblem on top, but they're a heck of a lot more replacable :)

I do recommend between 3/8 and 1/4" in thickness. The disks I bought are 1/8" and are just too thin to stand out well under minis.

(as an aside, you can also use the dowel pieces with the token maker idea that Alea sells. Get a 1" circular hole punch and punch out pictures of whatever you want to make a token of, and voila...you have goblins, or kobolds, or whatever)

The effect of the alea tools can be duplicated by running out to a local hobby shop and buying 1-inch diameter wooden disks and spray painting them to the color of your choice. A little gloss sealer and they'll even look good.

If you don't have a local hobby shop, a 1-inch dowel cut into disks would work just as well.

I've taken on the task of converting Burnt Offerings to 4th Edition for the benefit of my gaming group. We started in earnest this last Thursday and I've decided to turn my conversions into a project blog. I'll be publishing encounter details, maps, rules conversions and DMing advice as I go. I'll keep this thread in mind when I do updates, and comments or suggestions can be left on the blog itself. It's located at The Rusty Dragon. So far I have the Player's Guide and up through the second encounter of the adventure finished. I'll try to add new content within a couple of days of my game.

Very cool. The blog idea works well. Are you going to be posting your games as well, or just the conversion?

For the first encounter I chose to use three waves of goblin – the first on round one(4 Goblin Minion, 1 Goblin Warrior, 1 Goblin Blackblade), the second (1 Goblin Hexer, 2 Goblin Pyro, 6 Goblin Minion) on round 4 and the third (1 Goblin Skullcleaver, 1 Goblin Dog, 2 Goblin Warrior, 2 Goblin Minion) on round 7.
It was a really nice (and long) encounter, with PC racing all around the battlemat, trying to reach the goblin and to save Foxglove on round seven.

I'm curious to how this played out and what your party makeup was.

You've got 8 minions, 6 level 1 monsters, 2 level 3 monsters, and one level 2 monster (? the dog ?)

That's..what, 1600 xp worth of creatures in a single level 1 encounter?

Shoot, based on the feedback from the TPK thread, a lot of parties have problems with a 1250 xp encounter (Irontooth) at level 1.

I'm also curious if anyone remembers that there were only supposed to be some 30 goblins attacking Sandpoint in 3(?) groups (with one of those not actually attacking anything). This would be about half that number, all showing up in the same general area within a minute of the fight starting.

I'm a fan of breaking the combats up...at least the first two and Die, Dog, Die I feel should be separated into a pair of encounters. There's less chance of overwhelming your party (especially if you have a single leader type and he has to burn his encounter powers early) and it makes more sense to me within the boundaries of the attack.

50 sleeves for about 3 dollars (Link)

I would NOT be surprised to see offical WOTC Power Deck protectors. Special ones for GENCON and the like.

You could always do a pocketmod

I wouldn't be surprised to find an official deck of power cards at some point.

drjones wrote:

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

This is exactly what I've been looking for. Though I'm sort of scared to think what printing this out in full colour, especially on some kind of card stock, would cost.

I started with the race ones and then just the first 5 levels of each class, since Anders cards only have the colored bar that was not enough to use up a cartridge on my cheapo printer. I wanted them to be disposable in that the players could write on them/spill beer on them and it would not be a big deal to print again. The biggest problem is cutting the buggers out neatly. I wish I had one of those big straight edge choppers they had in the high school library.

But yeah, I may need to find a source of cardstock and work very late at the office one evening...

Another option (that some of the guys I play with use) is buying the plastic card sleeves that stores sell to Magic players and the like. The sleeves keep them protected and give them a bit of stiffness, even if they're just regular paper. Not sure how the costs would compare though ... if anyone knows, I'd be interested in that info as well! :)

Couldn't say. I had a bunch of those card sleeves handy from when my daughter played the Pokemon card game. I actually broke down and bought a paper cutter, 8x11 laminator, and 200 laminating pouches to go with my 95+ page full-color printouts.

It was probably more than I should have spent on just a little project like power cards, but the end result was fairly nice and I can use all of these pieces for other projects (or maybe make a little money back by offering laminate services to anyone else in my group who wants cards printed).

The cutter was about $20, the laminator was $20, one pack of laminate was about $20. Cardstock was about $7, and a light blue ink cart for my printer (the most used one other than black) was $13. 95 pages on cardstock burned that one cart pretty much completely.

Christopher Fannin wrote:

We were blatantly told that there was no escape once the fight outside the waterfall happened. Irontooth and his short little friends were faster on foot than our party and we were far enough away from the town that there was no way we'd reach safety before getting run down and killed.

I'll have to go back and check my copy, but I'm fairly certain that the adventure, as written, had a statement that the bad guys behind the waterfall wouldn't come out to pursue fleeing foes. Your DM may have decided otherwise, of course...

A quick glance...no. It says that they stay inside the waterfall, believing that the kobolds outside can handle it. On top of that, our DM gave the skirmisher a horn to warn the monsters inside (not that he wouldn't have been able to double move inside from where he was, but he didn't run).

When i think of POL, I try to use real world analogis to come up with a few realistic ideas (with realistic having a different value than real world realism).

For me Europe in the Dark Ages and the beginning middle Ages can be used as analogy.

And that's not a bad one, but I submit that you don't even have to go that far.

To anyone who has ever flown at night, or looked at a picture of the world from space at night, I submit that POL isn't as strange or unworkable as you might think.

Just because the only places really lit up are cities, towns, and hamlets doesn't mean that everything in between is an area of absolute darkness.

If I take a trip to backwoods noplaceinparticular, chances are I'm going to be able to find some hill or valley that is off the beaten path. If I go there at dusk or dark, it'd take no imagination at all to believe in things that go bump in the night. And that's today, when I could be carrying a flashlight, GPS, and pocket hand-cannon.

We live in this world, and it is possible to think of it in those terms...I think it's not such a great stretch to believe that POL can, should, and does work.

My point is, I never thought they were just whining, because the encounters were indeed incredibly deadly. So the question remains: are the TPKs intentional? (in particular the Irontooth encounter in Keep On The Shadowfell?)

I suspect there were a few things going on that affected the difficulty of the encounter design.

First, obviously, it's in waves. Despite my feeling that this doesn't really mitigate the difficulty of the encounter as whole, I'm sure that the writer did.

Second, using the playtest party of 6 characters, I'm sure they won. It's barely outside the realm of 1st level characters (or maybe just inside) if you have a full group.

Third, I suspect that the encounter level guidelines hadn't been finalized at the time Mr Cordell had been told to write the adventure. My guess is that he had a goal (get # characters to level 2 by this point), and designed his encounters to match.

Fourth, lots of new mechanics. The Irontooth fight is really good at showcasing some of the new stuff that you and the monsters can do (up-to-and-including Action Points and Second Winds). It wouldn't surprise me that influenced the number of creatures included.

And finally, again, I think that party size has a lot to do with it. At 1250 xp, a party of 6 is roughly expected to deal with 200xp of creatures per person. That's 4 minions and a normal, or some variation. That probably didn't seem unreasonable when he layed it out.

What bothers me most about KotS isn't that the fight was difficult, it's that there's no suggestions in the text for scaling for party size. (For a party of 5, remove 1 skirmisher and 3 minions, for a party of 4, remove an additional dragonshield and 3 minions). And since KotS was released before the core books, nobody that didn't have torrented copies could possibly have known what the actual EL was.

In the adventure I am currently writing, the action takes place around a small village near the shores of a lake in the crater of a long-dormant volcano. The village is basically the dead end of what once might have been a more traveled road. There is nowhere to go past it. The area around it is wild.

Obsidian (sp?) and similar volcanic materials could make for a reasonable trade stock for a seasonal merchant group, especially if there are some gifted craftsmen living in the village. That could supplement the other stuff you were talking about. It makes more sense if the village is off the beaten path, but that beaten path does travel nearby. It wouldn't be a bad stop for a group.

Thus, some of the traded items could have been magical spears and knives ('these will help protect your hunters'), or enhanced hunting leathers, and so on. Chances seem good to me that the local witch doctor would have the Brew Potion ritual, giving the party potential access to Potions of Healing.

Tatterdemalion wrote:

Are TPKs intentional? No. They are evidence of incompetence -- either the DM's, PCs' or module designer's.

I don't think this is necessarily true at all. It isn't a given that if the PCs do everything right, they'll always win unless the DM or moule designer was incompetent. A very dangerous encounter at the end of a campaign or adventure might well go either way, with no fault on anyone's part. The PCs are going to win more often than not, but they don't have to always win absent incompetence.

And, hey, when you wipe the party 3.5 hours into a 5 hour session, you can always head downstairs to play the Wii, since there's not enough time to start over. :/

This party is a Dragonborn fighter, a Halfling warlock, an Elven ranger, a Dragonborn warlord and a Human Wizard. The minions went down fast to the breath weapons of the Dragonborn, and then the players srikers and controller jsut concentrated fire until everything was picked off in series. Granted, both the Dragonborn were down at the end of the fight and the party was OUT of resources. I also delayed the second wave for two extra rounds to give them a better chance to pull it off. TPKing my sons and all their friends would have done nothing to grow the hobby.

Now, if it they were grown ups...

Our party was the pregen Fighter and Cleric, an elf Ranger and an eladrin Wizard. The only AoE attacks on the table was my Thunderwave.

Christopher Fannin wrote:

Edwin White wrote:

I just finished converting Burnt Offerings today. I'm not on the computer I saved all my info at, but I'll list some noteworthy details.

I'd definitely be interested in seeing your final product.

Back at my computer. Here's my version of Nualia: What do you think?

Not bad. My only concern would be her attack bonuses. I don't think she'll ever miss.

My Wizard 1 had a will defense of 14. Add a level, add 1 point. She's +9 vs. Will on a lot of attacks. That's going to be a pretty tough fight.