Dravicone's page

Nice, you guys have broken it down nice now.

Thanks for the replies!!

Quote:

If your distance of run in a round is 120 and you are 90 away, you will obviously get to the person in a faster time than the round is technically over, but do you get an attack, or is the move used up so you can not attack. Substituting other numbers in the equation of X' away and what is the result. 50', 70', 110'.

No, if you chose to run/sprint that is all you can do in a round.

Quote:

And on the flip side, if you get initiative and reach that person (melee range) in your turn, does that range character on his turn still get to fire? I see you say the orc can take a 5' step back and then take a turn, but I didn't know you could take a move action and then take an action as well.

You can get more than one action on a turn but they are limited depending on the action, in general you get one move and one standard action each round. The move here however is limited to just your base move (for example, in most cases 30').

So you can move 20' (move action, considering you have a 30' standard) and attack (standard action) each round?

Pathfinder is a turn-based system. As such, you handle the movement separately from the ranged attack. So, for example, let's assume combat starts with a human 200' from an orc.

On round 1, the human chooses to Run (Full-Round Action), moving 120' on his turn. The orc fires an arrow (Standard Action) at the human and moves 30' back (Move Action). That is the end of round 1.

On round 2, the human again chooses to Run (Full-Round Action), moving 110' to be within melee range of the orc. The Orc takes a 5' step (No Action, used to avoid an AoO) and again fires an arrow (Standard Action).

On round 3, the human takes a 5' step (No Action) and attacks the orc with a sword (Standard Action). The orc drops his bow (Free Action), draws his weapon (Move Action), and attacks (Standard Action).

This is the question I was trying to figure out.

If your distance of run in a round is 120 and you are 90 away, you will obviously get to the person in a faster time than the round is technically over, but do you get an attack, or is the move used up so you can not attack. Substituting other numbers in the equation of X' away and what is the result. 50', 70', 110'.

Will the result always be: no matter the distance, short or long, you will not get an attack that round?

And on the flip side, if you get initiative and reach that person (melee range) in your turn, does that range character on his turn still get to fire? I see you say the orc can take a 5' step back and then take a turn, but I didn't know you could take a move action and then take an action as well.

This is why I posted "noob"

Remember that range rules are a bit confusing. The range listed at the weapon entry in the rulebook is not the maximum range, but the so-called range increment:

Range: Any attack at more than this distance is penalized for range. Beyond this range, the attack takes a cumulative –2 penalty for each full range increment (or fraction thereof) of distance to the target. For example, a dagger (with a range of 10 feet) thrown at a target that is 25 feet away would incur a –4 penalty. A thrown weapon has a maximum range of five range increments. A projectile weapon can shoot to 10 range increments.

Yeah, my main concern is that we are getting the logistics of movement correct along with the attack.

I don't want to screw over the ranged guy, but then again I don't want to screw over the person that is getting ranged on with no way to retaliate until he gets in melee range.

My friends and I are still in the process of figuring these rules out and the question of ranged combat came up.

It is confusing to understand how the block system works vs someone firing an arrow at you and how fast you get to them.

I saw the chart on movement which shows x4 run with certain types of armor and weight (60 ft in 1 round) which helps, but I'm confused on how that works.

If my ranged weapon is a longbow that has a distance of 100 ft, at what point do you determine the person you are firing at gets to you to take an action once he gets within 100ft.

Also, what if he spots the archer at 120ft and takes off running and the archer then shoots once he gets within the 100ft range.

Sorry if this is explained in detail somewhere and I haven't found it.

Thanks,

You're wanting a game where things are less certain, a little more unpredictable, and where both parties always roll. Easy to do.

See how when you calculate a character's AC and CMD, it's done as "10 plus modifiers"? Just replace the "10 plus" with "d20 plus" instead.
See how all save DCs are calculated as "10 plus" the caster or creature's modifiers? Again, replace the "10 plus" with d20 plus.
This should allow for the additional interactivity and unpredictability you're looking for.
Now, instead of rolling CMB of d20+8 against a CMD of 15, you're now rolling CMB of d20+8 and the opponent is rolling CMD of d20+5.
Now, instead of a fireball reflex DC 18, it's a fireball reflex DC d20+8. Maybe your wizard makes a particularly clever fire spread this time (DC 25), or maybe it spreads out lazily this time (DC 10).
If you REALLY want to make it opposed rolls, you could even roll your d20s separately for each creature in the area.
It's a simple change, and it should be balanced -- not really giving much of an advantage over the current rules, but making things more unpredictable and doubling the number of rolls made.
Let me know what you think.

This is exactly what I'm looking for. Being new to the game and not knowing feats and other bonuses that certain classes get and certain don't, we are extremely unsure of how this would unbalance one class vs the other.

But yes, this is the method that we will try to capitalize on for sure.

Thanks for all the replies, I'm sure as we work with it, I'll post on how it is going or what flaws we see if any.

The only flaw I see as of now, is that a heavy armored person would really take advantage of this. Since his armor gives him more AC plus he gets a d20 roll, he wouldn't really need a high dex and would be just as good to parry.

I think I'll have to modify how armor's weight and constriction affects your parry. Not that an armored person is useless. As you still can attack like you want to and be very proficient, because you know which way you are wanting to swing, but when it comes to the unpredictability of a parry as you do not know where the opponent is swinging, you can only react. Therefore; armor would have to ensure some kind of penalty.

This is just one of the things we'll have to discuss with this system.

Me and my buddies had a difference of option the other night on how this game portrays 18 strength's "look" in this game.

Since str is what your attack is based off of, and one of my guys wanted to be the best at the sword he could be, he chose an 18 strength.

Some background to my house rules, is that you can roll the dice for abilities, I don't have a point system and don't feel it is hard at all to modify NPC's ability stat to co-exist with my PC's stats.

So after he puts his 18 in strength, and I asked him what he wanted to look like, he was more or less wanting to be around 6'2" and not really huge.

I told him that won't happen with a 18 strength. He is going to have to look really obvious, because an 18 is the best in the game.

So we got into discussions about why Str is the way to determine if you are the best (most plus) with attacks. I couldn't answer that, due to I myself don't agree with the system, but it is what it is.

He found he can choose weapon finesse and go off his dex, but he will be limited to a d6 weapon, and once again didn't like that.

How do you guys work out the Str aspect of your game? How would you get around having to be the biggest character in the game to be the most skilled? (taking out magical bonuses to weapons and armor)

I don't want to just say by some magical creation blah blah that he looks like a 14 but has a 18, because that would betray every NPC in the game and they would clearly know who has the best sword skil just by looking at them.

Or have I not really looked into this correctly? Does having the highest strength mean without other bonuses you are the most skilled with a weapon?

No matter what, parrying will slow things down. In a boss or solo encounter this may not be so bad, but 10 guys all parrying will be a right pain. So, take caution when considering something like this.

We only have 2 guys rolling, and to be honest, we aren't the traditional D&D type roll players. Our campaign's have always centered around fighting instead of storylines. We have never gotten into city politics or drama with a woman or things of that nature. Our campaigns focus on hack and slash with rolling on the side. (that statement is based on all the rpg'rs we have around our community we've seen or tried rolling with, not in terms of every D&D'r). Our style of play is around 70% battle and 30% storyline.

Our campaign characters in our generated games had upwards of 1500 hitpoints and the weapons did around 2d12 - 3d6 average damage. Fights would last 10 to 20 minutes and we loved it. It felt like an epic battle each time we played. Now, that is based on characters that were up around 20th lvl (characters could go to around 40).

Now that we've come to this style of play, we are finding that we will be just rolling against a number and not activity "fighting" against each other. It's not really that we want to "just" parry, we want a way for each person (the GM and the PC) to roll against each other and let the dice gods determine who will win the fight. It's going to be hard to look at a fight and say, just roll above a 5 and you get a hit.

My problem is that making parry viable vs AC (if you choose) might be to difficult. If you are forced to roll a base 10 on the d20 to break AC, why would you want to chose to parry instead? (Assuming your parry bonus and the NPC's attack bonus's are close) Makes more sense to just say, "well.. hope you can beat a 10, because realistically you only have a 50% chance to hit me". So therefore parry seems kinda worthless.

With our game, the dice rolls each other gave would determine who would win. We would sometimes beat characters that were +9 to attack over us, because the dice gods favored us. Those were epic campaigns that we really enjoyed. The fight was set up to lose, but by winning, the GM was in awe and would modify the campaign a little because of it. And to this day we still talk about some of those fights. But the point of all of it is, we out rolled the GM, not a base number. Each roll was unique due to the fact that you never knew if he was going to roll a 2 or a 18.

All the suggestions given are good, but I really am starting to believe this type of system is not going to work with this game, and I think we'll end up just going with the book rules until we have more knowledge about all the combat system and then come up with something.

The only other thing I was maybe leaning towards, was having some type of option for parrying that if you crit parry with a 19-20, you would disarm the opponent. This would give a reason to "want" to parry instead of forcing that other character to roll a 10 or above by using your AC. So by sticking with AC, you might have a good advantage in the fact they may not break it, but by parrying you may have an opportunity to disarm and change the course of the fight completely.

We bought the book for a reason, and that was to help with the parts of our campaign rules that were flawed, like ranged and magic. We couldn't really play those very much due to the distance and movement issues. It would always result in complaining and grumpiness. :) The also adds a lot more depth with feats. So we really want to stick to the rules without breaking the game.

It's just so frustrating though.. lol.

Of course its possible, but your effectively doubling the length of time it takes to resolve every single melee attack in the game.

And making ranged combat and spell even more powerful- no parrying there...

Well AC would stay. For those who have high str classes that like to tank up with armor but can't parry, it would not hurt them. So archers really would have no advantage.

I would like to give the player a choice of Parry or just using AC, but you can't use both. Of course you could only parry based on your fighting technique. If you fight with swords and have learned to parry, then you would obviously not be adept at parrying arrows coming at you. You could try, but would be at negatives just like the game rolls out now.

Magic would have no way to be parried.

My problem comes into play when the "balance" issue comes around. The game is centered around feats and classes being geared and balanced by having AC. Throwing in the option of Parry seems like I'm going to have all these loop holes of overbalancing someone a headache for myself.

In the end, we do not know the book back and forward and have actually never played by D&D rules at all, so we may just stick to the book until we have a solid understanding of most classes and then try modding stuff later. My only problem with that, is that I would have to make a whole new campaign possibly, because someone would want character X because of X stat and X new rule.

It's really frustrating trying to make house rules that breaks other classes rolls or functions.

Me and my buddies have always rolled our games (non D&D rules) and would use Parry as a way to fight defensively.

After getting this game and looking at the rules, it seems you just roll against a set number (AC) instead of making the rolling more interactive like rolling your hit and the other character rolling a Parry.

Is there anyone that have successively modified the game rules where Parry is a viable option and it makes the fights more of a battle of rolls instead of rolling against a number?

And maybe there is, but we just don't know it?

Basically, I would like my NPC to roll a strike and my PC roll to defend it based on him putting points into his parry (DEX).

Is this possible to do?

We are wondering will abilities ever go up by just leveling or do you have to get something like an item in the game to increase them. And how does it work per ability.

Ill say this again on my crit chart and fumbled saves; I want death to be a threat during every encounter and I think these rules do that with out being a D!CK DM pulling shanagins that are trying to kill the PCs

But I'll agree with some others in that "insta death" might be a tad harsh compared to epic damage you caused yourself from your 3 1's. You can live through it, but death is most likely still a bigger percentage due to the fact you have truly done a significant amount of damage to yourself and now the enemy has his chance to compound that.

Of course I'm looking at it from a standpoint of an epic fight like a dragon, not Joe the farmer vs one of your PC's.

And this is based on the fact you haven't modified it in here somewhere and I missed the mod.

Kalimore wrote:

Ahh. I wonder why they didn't put that in the back of the book!!! Such a long time reading and re-reading to find this info.

Thanks for all the responses. My buddies and I just started getting into this and its extremely broad.

I'm having a rough time creating a wizard for sure.

When stuck just ask the people on the board, they are eager to help

sure will. this place seems extremely helpful

thanks for all the help

Ahh. I wonder why they didn't put that in the back of the book!!! Such a long time reading and re-reading to find this info.

Thanks for all the responses. My buddies and I just started getting into this and its extremely broad.

I'm having a rough time creating a wizard for sure.

I just got the core rulebook but I tried finding how you aquire feats and can't seem to.

Where is the number of feats described on how many you get and how you aquire more or if you do at all?

Thanks