Ulfen Raider

Duderlybob's page

100 posts (1,335 including aliases). No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 6 aliases.




Hey everyone, so I've been tinkering with ideas for a skirmisher style character, made to be able to get in and out of combat quickly, but still manage to do some frighteningly good damage. Obviously, this is a bit of a narrow concept, and about the only thing I found that was functional with it, was a cavalier, making use of the Wheeling Charge and Lunge feats. Give the mount some stacks of Fleet to boot, and you get a guy who can hit on a charge with a lance, from 15ft reach, then turn and bolt a different direction with speed. Obviously, a ranged weapon would keep me out of danger entirely a little bit better, but I wanted to tinker with going melee to see just how far I could push it.

So, if anyone cares to join me in this little thought experiment, most of what I'd be interested in would be:
1. Any builds you make or have made around the same concept.
2. A way for a fighter/cavalier type guy to increase his reach (for purposes of the build, assuming no party support for the moment, so no spells like Long Arms for now).
3. A way to increase the speed, maneuverability, or anything else that could build upon that idea of get in, hit, and get out unmolested.
4. In the spare margins of feats and whatnot, anything that can help make those strikes on the way in have more punch, like Power Attack, Weapon Specialization and the like.

Thanks to anyone who cares to join me on this little experiment.


Hey guys, got a random question.

Making an Inquisitor with a rather garish Charisma score right now. As such, I've decided that he's more or less come to terms with doing everything on his own, as Inquisitors aren't exactly everyone's favorite person anyway, and with him being surly to boot? Yeah, not many friends.

So in choosing equipment, I came across Assisting Gloves and I thought it had the potential to be a really good opportunity for something that had good roleplay and mechanical purpose. But there of course is the problem that Assisting Gloves are one use items, and unless your pockets are filled with infinite money, 180 GP for a one use item isn't really a good long term strategy.

So, I poked around a bit but to no avail to try and find something to give me a bonus similar to Assisting Gloves but more permanent, so that when he's doing various crafting checks and what not he can always have his own little magical apprentice on hand to help him out.

So, does anyone know of a blatant way of doing this/a creative way of getting similar effects?


Hey guys, just a quick question.

In my game, it looks like combat's going to be winding up with a surprise round. My character has a readied action to draw his weapon, but is within line of sight of the attackers (surprising them via bluff), and therefore doesn't have his weapon drawn yet.

My question is simple, is it possible to take the readied action, and combine it with the surprise round to get what is effectively a full-round surprise round? My GM's pretty firm on a no, and I'm not planning to argue it really, but I always thought this was a legit strategy. A regular surprise round being when your party just happens to be a bit more observant than the enemies they blunder into, while with a readied action it is more a concerted ambush.


Hey guys, just started looking at the Words of Power and wanted a second opinion on a rules phrasing:

Quote:

Undeath (Death)

School necromancy [evil]; Level cleric 2, sorcerer/wizard 3
Duration instantaneous
Saving Throw none; Spell Resistance no
Target Restrictions selected

This effect word can only target the corpses of dead creatures. These creatures rise as either skeletons or zombies, as decided by the caster. These undead follow the caster's commands to the best of their limited ability. They remain undead creatures until destroyed. The caster can create at most 2 Hit Dice worth of undead per caster level with each casting of a wordspell with this effect word. The caster can control no more than 4 HD per caster level of undead creatures. If additional undead are created, the caster chooses which undead to lose control of to get back under the limit.

Does this wording make room for special variant raises, like bloody or burning skeletons, fast zombies, etc., or is this plain ol' nothing special zombies they this raises? The 2 HD limit keeps the very best that you could do with this a 1 HD variant, given the rules on raising the dead, but just curious if there's any wiggle room in there since the wording seems somewhat ambiguous.


So recently I got thinking about how to use firearms effectively, but as close to real world as possible. Personally the ability to free action reload what are supposed to be muskets always bothered me. So I got to thinking about it, and settled on a piratey design, going for multiple pistols in braces rather than pistols I reloaded really, really fast, making my pistols a brutal opening volley to a follow up attack in melee. Long story short, went on some theory-crafting, and came up with a general design. At end game, 20th level, would be carrying five brace of double-barreled pistols that I could effectively discharge all in one round, firing 9 pistols for 18 attacks. Using the Trench Fighter Archetype, and the absurd amount of feats/weapon training, managed to get an end game round's worth of damage to be 18d8+675 damage. Can only maintain it for one round, but am throwing enough fire to take down Metterak, the Dragon Prince in one round's full-attack.

But level 20 is a bit of a mythical beast and most of my games don't really tend to breach level 10 before petering out. So, I turn to you all for advice on how to make this work at earlier levels. The main idea is stacking Quick Draw, with Two-Weapon Fighting, and Double-Barreled Pistols to begin throwing a massive number of attacks, being a little devil-may-care about accuracy given the whole targeting Touch AC bit. I was curious to see what anyone interested would/could build along this line. Any takers?


So, I just got to thinking about the firearms rules for the first time. Never really cared for gunslingers all that much, but one of our recent topics talking about special materials for guns piqued my interest enough to get me interested, and I came upon an idea, that either won't work at all, or is scary as all get out.

The idea got started with the idea of going pirate-style and carrying braces of pistols in the multiple variety and really treat them like disposable boom-sticks. Fire them, drop them, keep going till out of pistols, and finish of the stragglers with melee weaponry. This ended up stacking mentally with the idea of using Double-Barreled Pistols to boot, since they seemed rather piraty in their design. All of this kind of culminated in what at least to me seems to be a terrifying idea, and I have a few questions to try to figure out where I've hopefully misread something and this is totally not kosher by the rules.

#1: The Double-Barreled Pistol can be fired with both barrels simultaneously at a -4 penalty to each attack roll. These shots are resolved as two separate attacks, therefore meaning two attack rolls and on success, two separate damage rolls with complete Dex Bonuses to damage and such. Just need to make sure that I'm clear on this rule and not misreading it.

#2: As with using Quick Draw with a Full-Attack with thrown weapons, this could be applied to pistols. Further, this application of Quick Draw could also be applied to the TWF feat tree. Also need to make sure this is correct.

#3: Rapid-Shot can be combined with various types of ranged attacks, not necessarily coming from the exact same weapon source. It just requires a full-attack and adds 1 attack to that.

If these two things are things I'm reading correctly, does this mean that someone going off of the whole effectively disposable gun route could use 4 braces of double-barreled pistols, firing both barrels on each gun, a Full +20 BAB, Quick Draw, Rapid-Shot, and Greater TWF to resolve 16 Attacks in a round?

If I got this right, it should be
4 Attacks for BAB
3 Attacks for TWF
1 Attack for Rapid-Shot.
x2 for Double-Barreled Pistols.

Stacking all of that with bonus damage from Dex and such seems like you could end up pouring out an absolutely absurd amount of damage in a single round. Not really going to be able to keep that up over multiple rounds since at the end of the first round you've got a pile of discharged pistols at your feet, but it seems like if built right, this could turn into a "I enter the room and everything dies" kind of build.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

So, a question has come up in my group recently, a player is looking into playing a Cavalier. With this, several questions have arisen.

1. Assuming a Cavalier and his mount both have teamwork feats, they can basically be a team of themselves, correct? Would this be a viable choice to make?

2. The Cavalier is wondering about ability points for his horse. Namely, the Animal type specify that they cannot have higher than 2 intelligence. If upon level 4 he tries to up his mount's INT from 2-3, does this break the rules and therefore can't happen, or does the horse cease to be a mere animal? And if it does change, what does it change to? Furthermore, if this is a Heavy Horse, and therefore had the advanced template, does this boost now apply and give it 7 INT total?

Thoughts? Rules? Concerns?


Hey folks, I've delved into the no-man's land of throwing build characters, and I've found what I believe to be a possible opening to take throwing weapons into a niche that should help their power level and define them as their own. Namely, a mounted thrower. My idea mainly coming from the rules on charging whilst mounted stating that you only get one attack because "Essentially, you have to wait until the mount gets to your enemy before attacking, so you can't make a full attack."

As the mount's technically the one doing the charging, it makes sense that this explanation/caveat had to be written in. But, though a minor thing, this ruling leaves an exception for the Charging Hurler feats, as a throwing character can both benefit from a charge and be attacking with no restriction on your mount having to close distance before you can make the opening volley.

Thoughts on this? Given the number of feats necessary to build a throwing specialist and a mounted combatant together, may not be viable. But I was curious if anyone agreed that this would be an exception that the dedicated thrower could use to develop a method of dealing damage that would help them compete with others who can more easily afford their magic weapons and what-not.


So yeah, this is a rather scenario heavy question, so we'll just dive right in.

Let's say I'm a Drow with the Deeper Darkness spell-like ability, as well as that of Faerie Fire. The party is in a cave or other locale with plain ol' darkness in effect. If I use Deeper Darkness in the confines of the regular Darkness, and we move into Deeper Darkness, does the concealment bonus for those with Dark Vision go to 20% or 50%? All the rules for Deeper Darkness says is "Areas of dim light and darkness become supernaturally dark. This functions like darkness, but even creatures with darkvision cannot see within the spell's confines."

This makes it sound like it's a full 50% drop, but just trying to see if it's a matter that Dark Vision just plain' doesn't work in supernatural darkness, or if it's simply that even for Dark Vision, it's indeed still pretty dark, but still functional to a limited extent.

Also in tandem with this, if I were to then use Faerie Fire on the assumed location of the baddies, would Deeper Darkness douse the light, or does that only effect it if Deeper Darkness is cast directly on the target? Obviously, Deeper Darkness would be more than a counter to Faerie Fire in just a straight counter situation, but does this counter extend to the whole area effected, or just the source? As a magical light source, Faerie Fire seems like it would operate in magical darkness, but at the same time that feels kinda wrong.

Anyway, that is my scenario for now, thanks in advance for any coming replies.


(TL:DR at bottom for those who just want me to get to the point)

So, currently playing in a fairly high level evil campaign. Our GM has suggested that beyond this just being a game in which everyone is evil, there's a good chance that coming plot twists will lead to PvP.

So I'm ok with that, I did build my character partly with this in mind. Which brings me to the crux of the matter. I am playing one of two fighters in the party, both of us are Drow. My contemporary chose to go fairly standard with a two-weapon fighting, dual rapier fighter. Pretty standard for a Drow, but very high on the DPS.

I on the other hand decided to say screw it to standard Drow fighting technique and go for a sword/shield, heavy armor, two-weapon fighter. Knowing what our party was likely to go head to head at some point during the adventure, I went with a Living Steel shield, for it's rule of "Metal weapons that roll a natural one gain the Broken Condition." And figured that since my opposing fighter would be completely spamming dice, the chance of him rolling a natural 1 is actually fairly good given time.

Now, as I hang out with my GM outside of game time, I mentioned this strategy off hand as we discussed the game. His response was that a magic weapon (like the other fighter has) wouldn't be susceptible to this, but I can't find this in the rules at all. Obviously, GM's word is law in the end, but wanted to get people's opinion on whether or not this was actually rules based or not. I'm willing to abide by my GM's ruling. But if he simply has misunderstood the rules, and since my character's survival may hang on the answer, I'm making sure that I actually know the rules well enough to have them on my side if I have to go that route.

TL:DR

Are magic weapons either immune to, or resistant to gaining the broken condition? Particularly in the case of Living Steel Armor/Shields.