Dayr's page

I agree that to some extent there's no reason anyone would ever take banded mail if full plate is available. I'd rationalized that as "some armors are just better than others," but on reflection it might be nice to give some love to plain leather armor. Either armor proficiencies would have to be drastically overhauled (ugh) or the max dex and armor check penalty system would need to be more extreme. Dunno.

This is the point I'm trying to address. The whole "some armors are better than others" is one I don't initially agree with but I'm open to some discussion on the matter. In a perfect system I'd have all armors have strengths and weaknesses while ultimately being roughly equivalent.

In your example banded mail while less comprehensive in its coverage (lower AC) than full plate makes up for it with is drastically higher maneuverability (higher max DEX and lower ACP). But at the end of these differences rarely matter when to fully benefit from a higher max Dex bonus (easily the most heavily weighted attribute) you must spend vital resources to keep banded mail equivalent to full plate (whose full benefit only requires the actual cost of the armor itself). Not to mention the fact that most of the rules concerning the limiting of the usefulness of heavier armors (low mobility, exceedingly long "prep" time) can and will be hand-waived for the sake of expediency.

Again I'm stumped as to where to go with this solution but as always the most elegant solution is generally the simplest as well.

Regarding armor as DR, that would entail reworking all of the DR options sprinkled liberally throughout the houserules (armor training talent, barbarian class feature, most 3rd level sorcerer bloodline powers...), which is something I'd hate to have to go back and undo.

Again, as this is likely a knee jerk reaction on my part I hadn't fully thought out the consequences of adding in the DR rules. I have to wonder though if letting the armor DR stack with your other DR options you've mentioned would be truly unbalancing. If anything it's at most an extra 4 DR on top of your options and on the other hand it’s simply yet another option you have to allow your players to create the characters they envision.

Kirth,
What's your opinion on the alternate AC rules from Unearthed Arcana and the SRD? Namely the Defense Bonus (Here) and the Armor as damage Reduction (Here) alternate rules? My group has been on a rather long hiatus and I'm looking to assimilate these into your houserules when we finally get back together. After years of sitting on my hands I think I'm finally ready to get rid of the notion that only the highest armor in each category is worth taking and I'm looking for a way to reinforce this notion mechanically rather than thematically. Any advice you've got is welcome.

Have you all ever considered using D20Pro or OpenRPG to continue to play when circumstances don't allow you all to meet physically? Just a thought since I know you have at least one player on a long deployment though I don't know how much access he has to PCs and internet.

(2) It prevents me from adding in minor "extras" that really aren't worth a feat or talent, but are fun perks nonetheless (like a bonus to Stunning Fist on a sneak attack) that are specific to individual combinations.

For the flexibility you were looking for, Midnight, I'm currently assuming that just about any recurrent/improving class feature will have a "Practiced X" feat associated with it: "For purposes of blah, blah, your level is treated as 4 higher than actual, to a max effective level equal to your total HD." Or maybe instead of +4, it can be made as a fraction of total HD, but that leads to wanky wording: "Take your total HD and subtract your level in X class. Half of the remainder plus your level in X is your effective level for purposes of Y..." Hmmm... (1/2)(A+B+C-A)+A = A+(1/2)(B+C)...

While it will still be a few more days before I get enough playtime to post something even resembling a reasonable evaluation this is actually something that came up in what little testing my group has done (Character Conversion and limited combat trials).

Two players chose to use your half-stacking shared class feats (Martial Outlaw and Eldritch Knight) in their conversions. They love the flexibility such feats allow to develop playstyles that aren’t well supported in 3.5/PF but they did acknowledge the power level of their characters has gone up, but that’s kind of the point of your revisions anyways. We may actually delevel the characters somewhat so I don’t have to go back through and rebuild the main cast of adversaries just to fit their current power level. That would be more of a time saving change made rather than a complaint over the balance of your rules so please don’t take it as such. Yes the feats are gestalt in their nature but you haven't gone to the extreme of letting a player take full benefit of two classes at once. As it stands you’ve struck a good balance so I wouldn’t stray too far from what you’ve already put down.

For fighters sharing talents: it bugs me a bit that fighter talents are his main class feature, aside from incidentals, unless Leadership and armies get to be big following the creation of rules for those.

Also, since we’ve never used Leadership in our games I allowed players to take one of the following in its place: Commanding Presence, Knightly Banner or Field Marshall. I felt these were the only Fighter talents similar enough in theme to Leadership to keep with your version of the Fighter.

D&D/Pf philosophy: Non-spellcasters do not get nice things.

Our philosophy: Everyone gets nice things, but spellcasters have to work a little harder to use theirs 'cause theirs are nicer things.

This statement pretty much sold my monthly group to adopt your houserules for some limited playtesting. To give you some perspective we’ve always played in our own created world rather than those developed by publishers and thus have heavily houseruled just about every system we’ve used. We finally sat down last night to decided what to adopt and what to just pass on for now due for ease of transition. What follows is by no means a shot at the hard work you've done just an overall consensus reached by friends and I. So let's begin.

What's In:
Feats
Skills
Barbarian
Bard
Cleric
Druid
Fighter
Monk - Surprisingly this is a class we've all stayed away from before, mainly due to thematic reasons not necessarily mechanical ones.
Ranger
Rogue
Sorcerer
Wizard

What's Out:
Races - We already use our own highly modified versions of races.
Favored Soul - No interest from my players.
Inquisitor - No interest from my players.
Prestige Paladin - No interest from my players.
(Just to clarify they weren't uninterested in your versions just in the classes in general. We all agreed though that with the options you present in your other classes we fully expect to be able to flesh out any character we could possibly imagine.)

Undecided:
Armor
Weapons
The only reason these are on hold right now is though we liked your overhaul of the weapons and armor we argued it might lead to the most confusion at the table and thus lead to less actual playtesting. One suggestion that came up though was instead of keeping the term Exotic Weapon Proficiency use Expert Weapon Proficiency to reinforce the hierarchy of proficiency “levels.” If you believe though that your changes here are fundamental to your system we can easily adopt them in order to get in a proper playtest.

Notes/Questions on your Houserules:
Character Creation – Our first DM refused to use point buy so we’ve been using the 4d6 drop the lowest since the beginning, I think this brought a tear to his eye.
Hero Points – We’re going to go ahead and add +CHA as you suggested earlier in the thread but unfortunately it never made it into the final version of your rules.
Iterative Attacks – Our most all-encompassing house rule in the past 2 years was the adoption of the Single Attack mechanic started in the Star Wars Saga revision of 3.5. This wasn’t a balancing factor but rather one of economy as it genuinely sped up combat and allowed us to cover much more story in our limited playtime. The only problem we foresee is that a limited number of your feats will need to be changed including, Multiattack. Also to make up for the loss of multiple attacks in a given round we thought about giving all characters access to Vital Strike for free once they’ve reached a given BAB and tweaking your Fighter version of the feat so that it gives a 150% bonus rather than the standard increases. With that being said we wondered if keeping our tradition alive would inherently reduce the effectiveness of martial characters that your revisions strove to reinforce. Again if you believe though that your changes here are fundamental to your system we can easily adopt them for a proper playtest.
Parrying – Will need to be reworked if we keep our system in place.

The Elephant in the Room:
CHA for Will Saves – Already in use.
WIS for Ranged Attacks – An elegant solution to balance out this unfortunately poorly worded ability. It’s best to remember that most of your Ranged Attack comes from BAB representing training and that the “calm hand” idea of WIS is just as easily supported thematically as the “lightning reflexes” of DEX in governing a characters BONUS. Fully accepted.

All in all we hope you’ll let us know how you feel about the mixing of our similar traditions but if you feel that our playtesting won’t accurately represent your rules I’ll refrain from posting the details as they come up.

Looking over some of the resources you draw from I finally picked up the Art of the Duel. I really wish I had seen this years ago when it came out, it would have really helped my group flesh out our swashbuckler style of play.

I know you assimilated just about everything in it into your updated rules but I still can't find your reference to Responsive Duelist. Is it still used in your game or did you combine it with another feat I may have over looked? If it's just missing from the documents did you make any changes to the mechanics since it was built off of the 3.5 version of dodge where you had to designate a target rather than getting the universal +1 to AC?

Been thinking about stats (especially in light of your post, AdAstra), and also about the biography of Wyatt Earp I read, in which he's quoted as saying reflexes are relatively unimportant in a gunfight, but rather calm and steady deliberation, ability to ignore smoke and noise, etc. are critical. That said, bonus to attacks with ranged weapons could be moved from Dex to Wisdom (which is Perception's governing stat, representing a keen eye as well, which is also important in shooting). Bonus to Will saves could then be shifted to Charisma (force of personality). Opinions?

Another way you could read that is Wyatt Earp happened to use a form of the Monk's alternate class ability: Zen Archery. I would simply make Zen Archery a general feat with minor prerequisites. Neverwinter Nights actually made this change years ago and it's been something my house group has used ever since we first saw it there. It looked something like this:

Zen Archery (General Feat)
Prerequisite: Base attack bonus +3, Wisdom 13+
Fluff Text
Benefit: You may use your Wisdom modifier instead of your Dexterity modifier on ranged attack rolls.

Back to the question of Abilities/Attributes though. With the change in Will saves to Charisma we did notice that Wisdom was somewhat devalued. Not quite a true dump stat but not quite the "can't be forgotten" stat it had been before. As we started discussing the use a representative stats in general we found the notion of Wisdom itself to be the hardest one to clearly define, even more so than Charisma. Even looking at the core rulebook and its definition of Wisdom, we weren't convinced the original authors were all that sure of Wisdom's definition when the game was being built to the point that ultimately we've come to believe it was the last stat added and only then to bring the total number of abilities to a nice even number (3 physical/3 mental no less). Wisdom's definition is a hodge podge of multiple connotations that don't really reflect what Wisdom is seen as among my players. Wisdom to us seemed tied directly to one's experiences and the knowledge gained from them. This is why Wisdom is almost always linked to those older than ourselves. Unfortunately this does little to fix the slump that Wisdom has gone through in our group but one that does not in the least negatively impact our game.

On the other hand, when it was mentioned that 4E allows for players to determine the Ability that governs their saves seemed like a rather elegant solution to this dilemma. It allows the players more freedom (Kirth mentioned that player choice is important to his game style) as well as allows them the ability to play characters more naturally, i.e. the savvy gunslinger whose calm outmatches the reflexes of his opponents.

TriOmegaZero wrote:

Might be best to divorce Charisma from everything mechanical and just have it be the new Comeliness.

And then EVERYONE will automatically put their lowest stat in Charisma (which is more or less what happens now except for specific classes). So you can't leave it a stat like the others; you'd have to let them roll or point-buy the 1st five stats totally separately from Charisma -- otherwise it's a "get out of bad stat free" card for everyone. At that point it would be better to simply remove it entirely and hand-wave it.

I'd rather try and recify the discrepancy than exacerbate it. I'm starting to think that Cha-based spell DCs for all classes, and Cha-based hero point effects might be the only way to salvage Charisma as a stat.

Sorry to bring up a topic from 3 days ago but my group came up with a rather simple solution to fix the disparity between Charisma and the other stats. If you consider Charisma to measure the breadth of one's "force of personality" rather than simply their physical attractiveness it makes sense to swap CHA for WIS in determining a character's Will save.

We made the change months ago and haven't looked back. This solution has effectively stopped us from defaulting the "face" role to the only character with a bonus rather than a negative in his CHA modifier. Unfortunately this is a bandaid solution for now but, until we sit down and write our rules from the ground up but it's one that's likely to stay.

Looking through your Ranger document there is a reference to a Fighter talent called "Responsive Duelist" under the Swashbuckler Combat Style section. Unfortunately, this talent isn't located anywhere in the Fighter write-up even though it is listed as a prerequisite for Epic Dodge and in the description of the Manticore Parry talent.

On a side note, does your gaming group host a public messageboard? It seems like it would be easier organize discussion with others by breaking it down into different categories (in much the same way that Paizo does here) that you and your group members could moderate themselves rather than having to constantly reference a constantly growing thread here.

If you're looking to optimize damage you shouldn't overlook the Dervish Dance feat from the Qadira: Gateway to the East sourcebook. Since you'll be pumping Dex no matter what Duelist build you go with it will significantly increase your damage at the relatively low cost of a single feat.

That's my fault for overgeneralizing in my original post. Things like Expert Archer, Crossbow Expert, Shield Fighter and all the other abilities that are obviously linked to their original counterparts wouldn't simply be given to the class to stack on top of the foundational equivalents but rather those new abilities that help further specialize the archetypes (the twin blades and overhand chop abilities trees come to mind) would be slowly given out over the course of the character's career in a manner similar to the ranger's. Another idea that has been brought up was simply to convert some of these more iconic abilities into feat chains in order to simplify the transition rather than rewriting the class as a whole.

I do agree though that a simple copy and paste of an archetype over the base fighter would be a terrible idea. I also understand the idea of trade offs is very reasonable. There are just certain abilities that vastly improved the effectiveness of the fighter in Pathfinder that if taken out again would leave him vastly outmatched much like in 3.5 edition. Simply put there are some abilities swaps that do more damage than good. I can go into further detail if you'd like in another post but I think I've cleared up some of the questions you had regarding my original post.

Having recently switched to Pathfinder from 4E, my friends and I have gained a renewed interest for one of our dearest pastimes. What drew us in about Pathfinder was not only the brilliantly upgraded 3.5 mechanics but also the character depth and customization allowed by the system. With the release of the APG and the variant Class Archetypes detailed, we recently had a discussion about allowing the Fighter class, either loved or hated for its generic qualities, to choose a Combat Style at creation similarly to the Ranger's ability. Essentially the player would get to choose to either be a Shield Fighter, Two Weapon Fighter, etc... and then as he continues to level up as a fighter he would gain access to some of the more signature abilities detailed in the APG under the related archetype's heading. This would allow the fighter to further specialize in his role without losing key abilities in the Pathfinder revision that made them so much more balanced to begin with. Ultimately though, the discussion came down to the question of power level and class balance. Simply put we're looking for well thought out and reasoned advice on the subject in a hope that we can come up with a suitable answer. So what do you all think?

*Not really sure if this belongs here or in Suggestions/House Rules/Homebrew*