Deblin's page

1: Wizards have been casually floating over a castle wall for a level by level 4 (Levitate)

Up and down only, hard-capped at 20 feet/round, and essentially impossible to use for tactical motion unless your DM is specifically building a "levitate-fight" map in a cave with 5x5 holes drilled in the ceiling or something. And you have to expend a magical resource to get it.

Versus tactical movement in any direction where you can simply skip past any barrier with any kind of attached obstacle ("difficult terrain") without rolling anything. If you're looking for a spell equivalent, that's essentially fly with perfect maneuverability and infinite duration.

Even if you're saying that the relatively tame limit of needing to start and end more or less on the ground accounts for the infinite duration aspect, un-counterable (i.e. silent-still) fly requires caster level 9 and the expenditure of one of the more expensive magical resources at that level.

It's reasonable enough for its out-of-combat applications, but in combat terms you're handing a level 4 character an ability with a balance in the same tier as an at-will cloudkill. It needs to start slower and scale harder in the later levels.

This isn't really a complaint as such, but you've sort of made the monk overwhelmingly powerful in combat by giving it this kind of swiss army knife of abilities. In general that's fine, I'd always rather buff players to bring them up to the level of the rest of the group than nerf them down to it.

There is one game-breaker I'm noticing, though: Feathered step. It's not at all unreasonable in its final form for a level 15/17 ability, and you're giving the most powerful parts of it to the Monk at level 4, which is going to mean they're dominating the battlefield without even trying until 10 or so.

My recommendations would be:

1. Swap the basic and improved abilities. Water-walking is significantly less powerful than casually wandering over a castle wall in a single move action, assumedly whilst whistling a jaunty tune. Remember that water is primarily a natural hazard but barriers are intentional, constructed hazards.

2. Tie the distance you can feather-step in a round to something that gradually scales. Easiest is your basic bonus move (not counting ki power), so at level 4 you can ignore water/falling for 3 squares, at 8 you can ignore water/falling/vertical motion for 5 squares, etc. So you end up in the same place at the end, but you don't own the map from absurdly low levels.

3. Make "ignore difficult terrain for a move action" part of feathered step a ki power. Again, this is absurdly powerful and needs some sort of limit. Since it's blatantly supernatural spending a magic resource is appropriate.

4. On the other end, pimp that stuff out at 15 when the casters are getting truly out of hand. Add a third level of scaling for the ability at level 15, making it apply to full instead of just bonus movement, include ki movement, and not require a wall for the slow-fall effect. Honestly, shove something else interesting on there, like being able to run five feet above the terrain to provide more options.

5. Invincibility, even as limited as "can always get away" is bad. Make it so that if someone prepares an action to hit a monk during movement (or lands an attack of opportunity) there is a chance or guarantee that they can't feather-step. Basically, a thoughtful enemy should have some recourse against anything (beyond I guess forcing the monk to carry armor or a medium load somehow) a player can do, just to differentiate intelligent enemies from animals and so on.

I've never had dinosaurs in a game where a player was an expert (e.g. had expressed any interest whatsoever in) the evolutionary biology of the setting.

What I would probably roll with is that there are multiple continents or isolated islands, where a more localized version of the big cretaceous extinction event and the dominance of mammals and smaller-scale therapods (e.g. birds) happened as in Earth, and another isolated region where the dinosaurs kept on keepin' on and continued to evolve. Then, at some point before the rise of sentience, something broke the isolation of the two biomes (land bridge, bored non-sentient pre-god, etc) and it all mixed together again and started competing, tossing evolution in even weirder directions as the niches went crazy.

I guess if you wanted to be extreme about it the biomes could be different material planes with some sort of magical barrier-jumping being the re-integration event.

This has several advantages over the "dragons" approach and the Lost World approach:

First, you get to account for all the reptilian and mammal-but-with-scales stuff with the same biological explanation: because the "magical"/divine environment is shared, sentient races got shaped from the saurian continent as well as the mammalian by the same forces, accounting for kobolds, serpent folk, and yes, Dragons, without resorting to full-on "a wizard did it".

Secondly, it helps resolve the fail-paleontology of the dinosaurs themselves. Sure, real dinosaurs had features like feathers and so on, but these "modern" dinosaurs have parallel-evolution'd back to scales for some reason that was biologically legit at the time.

Thirdly, when your players inevitably get into time-travel shenanigans and land in the pleistocene (as they will if they're asking this question... just roll with it, it'll happen) it'll provide a nice Cthulhu-style creep factor as they gradually realize that a major chunk of the wildlife and population appear to be missing. Lots of genocide/racism themes to put ice down their back, there.

(Disclaimer: I'm the kind of bastard DM that randomly puts a werewolf in a module for an otherwise-entirely-mundane Spycraft campaign, force the players to work it out from scratch, and then never put another supernatural element anywhere just so they're always looking over their shoulders. So point three is probably a YMMV thing.)

Working link maybe.

Apparently my RPG tweaking prowess is no match for my inability to use basic internet services. Sorry 'bout that.

It's hard to tell since obviously my browser's logged in and everything. That's the link from a separate window and the file's public so hopefully less fail there.

And on further thought I am gonna have to disagree with this particular ruling on this particular bloodline. What is the big advantage for Crossblooded?
Bloodline Arcana: A crossblooded sorcerer gains the bloodline arcana of both her bloodlines.

What is the big disadvantage?
A crossblooded sorcerer has one fewer spell known at each level (including cantrips) than is presented on the sorcerer spells known table.

...

In other words, due to the wording here the advantage applies to all class levels, the disadvantage applies only to sorc class levels.

And when Jason did this ruling back in 2010, there was no Crossblooded.

-2 on will saves applies to both classes, and losing a caster level in exchange for a couple level 1 spell slots and some cantrips isn't exactly a great deal either.

You can just say that everyone has the ability to perceive things, the same way that all casters have the ability to concentrate when someone bites their kneecaps when they're trying to cast.

Searching-for-things-actively perception: character level + Int
Noticing-thing-about-to-bite-your-knees perception: level + Wis

I know the other guy suggested Dex, but don't do that. Stat's should have some importance in your game, if you're just going to give people stuff based on their best stat you might as well just hard-set all stats to 16/18 and be done with it. This has the additional bonus that the fighter that put some of his point-buy into the skill that literally says it's "awareness" because he's roleplaying is now getting an actual mechanical reward for RPing instead of being a lame min/maxer.

I was hoping to get a bit of feedback on something, in lieu of the gigantic info-dump with nested everything here's the Google Docs link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ypLZZCxqBFJDM62vgnxbGPO535lAG8FTOplSg2s n8eI/edit?usp=sharing

Essentially, I got fed up with the continuing ambiguities regarding whether profession actually does anything or not, the fact that the skill system is the bastard step-child of Pathfinder to almost the same extent as 3.0, and the fact that in many cases skill/utility characters and combat characters just basically alternate scenes where the player is boredly flipping through a magazine while another player does everything.

So I downed more coffee than is likely good for me and took a machete to the whole system, or rather built a meta-overlay that I could drop on top of the skill system that at least band-aids the problem for low-skill characters without nerfing high-skill ones particularly.

The highlights are:

--"Profession" now encompasses most knowledge, crafting, and general exploration skills (e.g. linguistics/translate script). A single profession gives you a reasonable selection of basic things your character is familiar with, and every character gets one at full ranks for free.

--Skills without direct combat applications are bundled into more general skills, e.g. Athletic training = Climb + Swim + Heal.

--Customization of characters' range of abilities is now achieved by spending a few points to modify existing skills, e.g. someone wanting to roleplay a competent civil servant (who I guess kicks orcs in the face by night?) now trains one skill- profession: civilian, and then adds the Scribe, Clerk, and Lawyer credentials to it for one point apiece instead of having to drop 15-odd points into getting all three to functional levels.

--There are no more open-ended numbers of skills of any subtype, because that was really, really silly. Seven profession skills, Six adventurin' skills, and a reasonably efficient secondary level of customization.

-- It's fairly friendly as far as just giving players that don't CARE about skills something to drop points in at max ranks and forget about it, without them ever actually being rendered useless.

-- Skill applications overlap, so generally your party's not going to turn your 'easy part' gather information check etc into an impassable wall of plot-force with a single natural 1, there will probably be someone that can cover any given thing at any given time in a party of 5.

My question here is basically "am I missing anything"? My players are a bit power-gamey but they rarely try to actually break the game. I'm curious whether I should save this one for future games with different people or if it's got some deadly weakness that's going to end with them eating tarresque flakes for breakfast every morning.