DoomedDruid's page

I'm planning to start running Skull & Shackles soon and one of my players has mentioned wanting to play a full caster bard (probably a kitsune). Assuming they don't go completely overboard with the 20 point buy and start with 17 cha, put the level 4, 8 and 12 points into cha, take spell focus (enchantment) and greater spell focus (enchantment) and manage to get a +4 headband of alluring charisma, this will eventually make their saves for enchantment spells range between DC 21 for 1st lvl and DC 25 for 5th lvl.

While reading through the campaign I've noticed that almost every enemy, even at higher levels, has an abominably low will save. Druvalia Thrune is the notable exception with +22, but even Kerdak only has a +14. This means the bard has a 50% chance to just end the final fight with a single spell.

Are there any GMs that have experience with enchantment casters and have any advice besides me having to rebuild every encounter if I don't want the final stretch of the campaign to be a total cakewalk?

I'll follow Thebazilly's formatting of player order staying the same.

For part 1 my players had:
Human Fighter (Sword & Shield)
Dwarf Cleric (melee, Torag)
Half-Elf Rogue (Short Sword / Shortbow depending on circumstances)
Gnome Sorcerer (fey bloodline with familiar ancestry)

For part 2 my players have:
Dwarf Ranger (Crossbow & Animal Companion (Cat))
Half-Orc Barbarian (Fury Totem, Glaive, Intimidation)
Gnome Bard (Maestro)
Elf Druid (Storm Order, Savage Slice (Scimitar), no companion)

The Train Animal Skill Feat makes no sense to me. One of my players is building a ranger for the playtest and wanted to know what tricks he could teach his animal companion using Train Animal, so I took a look.

Train Animal states that you can teach tricks listed in the Command an Animal action. However, when looking at Command an Animal, the only tricks I can see are those listed in the sentence: "Most animals know the Leap, Seek, Stand, Stride and Strike basic actions". But if an animal already knows those actions, what use does teaching them those actions have? Isn't that completely redundant?

And if there are tricks that most animals don't know and could be taught, you would expect to find them in the Command an Animal section, as stated by the Train Animal feat. Since this isn't the case, to me it seems as if Train Animal is a completely useless feat.

I hope that some of you have some ideas!

In my interpretation, this feat is not nearly as big a trap as you make it out to be. I think it does work similarly to animal rage. After all, the text in the feat states that you ignore your armor's check penalty and speed reduction, if any, and states nothing about altering your AC, so you would keep your own AC. The same counts for the attacks, with you using your own attack modifier with your proficiency being trained.

Why else put the list of effects under this feat and not simply refer to the spell for all effects? Also the athletics bonus of +20 is not mentioned in the barbarian text, because who would expect a barbarian to have an athletics lower than +20 at that lvl?

The only thing that is specifically referred to from the dragon form spell is the benefits you gain for your chosen dragon's type, which is the extra benefits such as a burrow speed (Blue) and the types of attacks you have.

I do agree with you about the dragon breath DC. You would expect your dragon breath to do full damage a good bit of the time, but a Horned Devil (Trivial at lvl 16) has a 55% chance to roll a critical succes, and only a 5% chance to ever fail (a nat 1). Class DC does indeed seem a bit more appropriate.

I think the "Things to Note" text provides important clues here. Based on that text, and the text of event 6, under "normal" circumstances (a 4-player party) no banshees should be present during the encounter. If, however, the party contains more players, you should start adding banshees to keep the encounter at the appropriate difficulty level.

This is similar to event 2, where the toad demon only appears if you have 5 or 7 players. The regular event 2 description doesn't mention any toad demons appearing anywhere, just like the banshees in event 6.