Dema Hussain's page

I would prefer to play but could GM if no GMs can be found. Looking for something fairly regular like weekly or once every two weeks.

Leon

Minor spoilers ahead, but this is the ROTRL thread.

I just finished Chapter 2 with my group. The initial runs in Burnt Offerings were a challenge, but the PCs seem to have found their niches, and this AP is having a hard time challenging them now. The Xanesha fight was very one-sided. The party just can't seem to fail saving throws at all.

What I have:

Aasimar Bard (Thundercaller) 7
Halfling Paladin/Oracle with damage soaking ability via link 2/5 or 3/4
Tiefling Magus (Bladebound/Kensai) 7
Human Barbarian/Rogue (demoralize optimized build with dog flanker) 7

Fights normally go like this:

Bard thundercalls forcing most enemies to take sonic damage and save to avoid being stunned.

Magus and Barb/Rogue use spell combat and sometimes massive sneak attack damage to mow down the mooks that aren't stunned.

Pally/Oracle provides support, and in the event that anyone does take damage, slowly soaks it up over the next few rounds to keep anyone from falling down.

Some fungi and undead have advantages versus the thundercall approach due to immunities to sonic damage and inability to be stunned, but the next chapter really worries me. Ogres are going to be falling all over the place. It's going to be a bloodbath.

Without doing a major overhaul of the chapter and without doing something that specifically singles out the Thundercall ability to nerf the one PC, what are my options for making this a challenge for them again? Do I need to resort to giving a whole bunch of the ogres the zombie template along with one or two doses of advanced template?

AbyssLord

Are there any guidelines for deciding the level of a spell that combines the utility of multiple other spells (if some of variables are nerfed)?

One of my players is asking me about something like this:

A spell with three potential uses:

1. Creates a blue flame that can be hurled as a ranged touch attack for one point of damage.
2. Creates a blue flame that can be used to light a light source, but halves the effective light and dim light variables of the vessel being lit, and gives off a blue light.
3. Can be used as a Light spell but with 10 foot radius blue light and 10 foot radius bluish dim light beyond that.

My argument is that no matter how much you nerf the utilities, it prevents you from having to make choices with 0-Level spells that you would otherwise have to make, which bumps the power level up to at least a 1st level spell.

AbyssLord

Tonight was the first session of our RotRL campaign.

Events:
Swallowtail Festival went just as advertised. Finished up all three goblin battles with two of the characters having halfway decent wounds before the end of it (Druid and Magus). Rogue and Dragonfire Adept were not touched the whole time, but the Rogue's trained guard dog went down in the last of the three battles before the Druid could stabilize him.

Party meandered around town for a while making sure there was no more action to be had while also accepting healing from Father Zantus.

They took Aldern Foxglove's invitation to meet him at the Rusty Dragon. At this point, Sheriff Belor Hemlock invited the new heroes to escort him to the desecrated vault. They complied.

They took down the skeletons, discovered the robes (and what the robes were), as well as finding that Father Tobyn's body was missing.

Here's where it went off the rails.

The Druid has a very high Survival check and he also has tracking. He began tracking Tsuto's steps out of the graveyard. The party had an incredible string of 26+ tracking result rolls in a row. No random encounters. It's horrendous how close Thistletop is to Sandpoint since it took very few tracking rolls to get them there.

They tracked Tsuto all the way to the doorstep of Thistletop. The Dragonfire Adept is also a modified Skinchanger (weredragon-kin (using werebat-kin as a template of sorts)) with the ability to shapechange into a tiny flying dragon form. He scouted out most of the outside of Thistletop and didn't find too much dangerous stuff there within his field of vision from his aerial recon position. Mostly a lot of goblins.

I gave them level two to start the next session. They're technically supposed to be level three pretty close to the start of Thistletop according to the advancement track.

The story is derailed. Nualia may never get the chance to sacrifice Father Tobyn to grow her demonic arm. Tsuto won't get the chance to return to Sandpoint to kidnap his sister. The player characters will likely not learn about what is below Sandpoint. Most importantly of all, I think the PCs are walking into a TPK on Thistletop.

Any ideas for fixing this? Nualia can be weakened a bit, since she hasn't received any of the blessing from Lamashtu due to the lack of sacrificing Father Tobyn. Not sure what else I can reasonably do to power it down a bit while also getting the storyline back on track so that the player characters visit the Glassworks in Sandpoint.

AbyssLord

This has come up a couple of times in my games with summoners.

The eidolon goes to negative hit points and is unconscious. It cannot heal naturally and cure spells do not heal it. The summoner is either out of spells to heal it for the day or really needs access to his other summon abilities or he/she does not want to "waste" spells to heal it and would rather have it come back half-healed the next day.

As a GM, should this be declared an evil act?

For a Chaotic Neutral character, would this be considered acceptable behavior or should it steer the player character toward an evil alignment?

AbyssLord

Each person is entitled to their tastes and opinions, and it just happens that I don't enjoy the contents of this module.

I would like to replace it whole-cloth with the 3.5 hardback re-write of Expedition to The Demonweb Pits. Thematically, it makes about as much sense for the shard to end up in the claws of an aspect of a non-Golarion deity as it does the guy on the front cover of that module.

The thing I'm primarily interested in discussing is power creep. Has anyone gone back and ran any of the later 3.5 materials as Pathfinder modules and what kind of tinkering with power level was required? Would it be very similar to my experiences with running the Legacy of Fire AP?

My group will consist of 5 or 6 players on any given game night, so they're already ahead of the curve due to numbers alone.

The hardback book is written for 9th to 12th level 3.5 edition characters. At the end of Curse of The Lady's Light, they should be somewhere around 8th level.

Considering their numbers, and considering the slight power differences in the two modules, would I necessarily have to re-stat everything in Expedition to The Demonweb Pits for Pathfinder (except for the obvious things like Spot/Search/Perception and Tumble/Acrobatics and figuring out CMB/CMD)?

What happens if a PC dies and his Animal Companion survives past his his death?

I'm trying to figure out if all of this is RAW.

I decided to go with a Lucerne Hammer, since the double damage on the small lance is only when charging, and the Lucerne Hammer gives me both bludgeoning and piercing depending on what the situation calls for. My secondary weapon is a Dogslicer (just because it's flavorful to have a halfling that doesn't think that wolves qualify as normal dogs). The Ride check for guiding with knees is not so bad to keep me from using a two-handed reach weapon (DC 5).

I would prefer to do this.

1. Move and pull up short on edge of main party
2. Ready attack action (PC and wolf) for when an enemy comes within threatened range
3. Strike with readied action
4. Strike with Attack of Opportunity for reach.
5. Wolf uses bite attack action along with Trip.
6. If the trip is successful and the enemy tries to stand up or crawl away, AoO.

Next turn

6. Wolf uses 5-foot step back.
7. Ready attack action (PC and wolf).
8. Attack of Opportunity when opponent Stands from Prone (if they didn't do it last round)
9. Readied attack.
10. With Combat Reflexes, second Attack of Opportunity for reach
11. Wolf bite and trip

Wash, rinse, repeat.

With combat reflexes, I could do the second AoO since Standing up from Prone is a move action, which would mean that the enemy's subsequent close is not a true five-foot step (and thus doesn't give him immunity from AoO).

Instead of 2d6 on a mad charge with a lance which could put me out of the range of party aid (Channel, buffs, etc), I would generally get two (and if all goes well three) attacks at 1d10 plus Str mod (even as a small character). Since it's a two-handed weapon, 3d10+12 at first level plus wolf bite of 1d6+1.

If the enemy gets smart and slows down their tactics, I don't mind, since that means I'm pinning down enemy resources for a time advantage during the combat while my companions mop up the rest of the mob.

The PFS starting limit for gold is 150 gp. The halfling is a wolf-rider. Is there any advice out there for how I can best maximize the value of my gear purchases at first level?

I'm wondering how this would interact if the PC scored a critical on such creature. Are the Flaming Burst and Frost abilities considered magic/spells which then completely bypass DR? If not, do you total the damage up and just take the 20 points of damage off from the non-fire-based damage? Or do you count the sword's damage and each of its individual abilities as separate damage pools and the only pools of damage that are reduced is the sword's damage and the Frost damage?

I have a sixth level Inquisitor of Erastil with the Animal domain.

The only other casters in the party are a sixth level Dirge Bard and a Psychic Warrior (Dreamscarred Press version, and barely counts as a caster).

I have a fellow companion that is hauling around his prior body in a gunny sack while he is stuck in a new body.

We're stuck out in the wilderness days and days away from any kind of "purchased solution" to the companion's rotting corpse dilemma.

Is there any way at all for the Inquisitor or the Dirge Bard to gain access to Gentle Repose or any other kind of preservative magic at seventh level which we should be hitting fairly soon if all goes well?

Just had a party that ran into a room with four of these and an open pit in the center of the room. The initial discussion around the table was that these things weight 1,500 pounds, they only have a Strength of 18, and their CMD is 16.

I didn't want to punish players for ingenuity, so the fact that an 18 Strength means that the caryatid columns cannot even lift their own weight off of the ground (they can technically only just barely drag their own weight across the ground) was ruled that if they were tripped, they were prone and could only crawl 5 feet per round thereafter.

So...once they were all tripped, the players came up with the plan to all run around to the other side of the pit.

With no intelligence scores, and the fact that there were no instructions for the caryatid columns to avoid the pit written into this pre-published adventure, all four caryatid columns took a tumble down the pit after a slow crawl in a straight line toward the player characters. The fall didn't exactly destroy the columns since it was only 50 feet to the bottom with a feather fall effect in the pit (and they do have a bit of DR), but once at the bottom, the caryatid columns were no longer under any kind of magical compunction to attack the player characters, since they were no longer "attacking anyone that comes into the room" with "the room" being the one that they started out within.

My question is whether or not I should have allowed the players to get away with this according to any RAW?

We've been playing through Legacy of Fire at the rate of about one session per month for 19 months. We had an incident of in-party fighting occur.

The players don't have any issues with one another personally, so it wasn't an out-of-game issue. They're just a bit immature. I'm having a hard time deciding what I should do to resolve the issue if anything at all.

We're in the sixth and final installment of the Legacy of Fire, The Final Wish. We have five players; a female Human Cleric of Nethys, Kitsune Sorcerer (recent replacement character using ARG), Dwarf Barbarian/Fighter, Elf Fighter/Rogue, and Human Sorcerer (elemental fire bloodline). Before this session, we had only lost two PCs permanently as well as one henchman (this henchman died permanently twice).

Thinking of running a one-shot old-school randomly-generated dungeon crawl for father's day tomorrow with the children.

Anyone know of a place where I can download .pcg files for PCGen for the iconics to make this get off the ground a bit more quickly for me tomorrow?

Leon