ErichAD's page

More often than not, nobody takes ownership of these items, and they end up in the inventory of the person who can carry the most stuff. Someone advocates for hanging onto it, but it's still party treasure regardless.

If the advocate wants to hang onto it, then they're free to do so. If the advocate can't carry it and can't convince someone else to, then it's sold.

We don't have rules to this effect, but this is how it goes down each time.

ErichAD wrote:

Take one level of arcanist and the school understanding exploit. Then take the story feat "Supernatural Spy", get the completion benefit for a +2 to your effective level for your an exploit.

You can pump it up a little more by being a Vanara and taking mostly arcanist levels and one wizard level instead of the other way around and taking the Vanara favored class option for arcanist.

I don't think I've found any other way to do it.

This is only going to result in an increase when the character spends a point from their arcane pool. It also means that when the character is not boosting the ability it is actually lower than normal. In addition to that it will cost the character a caster level on the wizard side. Sure, they get more 1st level spells, but at the expense of their higher-level spells. This does not look like a good idea.

Why would it only boost when they spend a point? According to the last line of the school understanding exploit, "If the arcanist already has an arcane school (or gains one later), taking this exploit instead allows her arcanist levels to stack with the levels of the class that granted the arcane school when determining the powers and abilities of her arcane school.". Am I missing something.

I agree that it's not really worth it regardless. It's a way to pick up otherwise barred abilities in level capped games, and that's about it.

Take one level of arcanist and the school understanding exploit. Then take the story feat "Supernatural Spy", get the completion benefit for a +2 to your effective level for your an exploit.

You can pump it up a little more by being a Vanara and taking mostly arcanist levels and one wizard level instead of the other way around and taking the Vanara favored class option for arcanist.

I don't think I've found any other way to do it.

I ignore them, I don't think mechanical choices should be locked behind roleplaying choices. If an ability needs an explanation for how it works without the character having the proper morals, then I'll deal with that if it ever comes up. If your barbarian has perfect emotional control and can call up fury at will and turn it into power, cool, your dirtbag has some god dumping abilities on them that can only be used for good to tempt him to be a better person, great, your lazy clod can never remember to bring a weapon or put on his armor so he learned to fight without, sounds good.

I'm already not using Golarion, so I'm pulling a bunch of lore out of the classes already. Keeping the alignment restrictions seems pretty arbitrary if I'm already ignoring regional and racial restrictions.

I can see why other people use them, but it's not for me.

I don't like to deal with the awkwardness of multiclass characters needing new items for their abilities when they pick up the second class. I also don't like doubling survivability over the first three levels. I start at third so your mage/thief has lock picks and a spell book, and so that guy who spent all his money on a light warhorse isn't the most dangerous member of the party.

I've never tried for a specific emotional effect, I want to get the game back into the players hands as much as possible so the scene setting for a real tear jerker just isn't going to happen.

I've also never seen it done terribly well, either the pacing is clipped so I'm not ready to care about the villain/monster before their tragedy, or it's done very campy, or it's been the DM doing his own little thing with the NPCs in a way that doesn't involve the players in the emotional scene.

Cal's scene sounds well paced and engaging, very well done. It's good to hear it's possible, but I doubt I could pull it off.

Concealment Mastery Feat? It's only 3 per day, but one feat is pretty cheap.

I assumed that since you were making an attack against each creature in the area they were considered targets.

An attack roll represents your attempt to strike your opponent on your turn in a round. When you make an attack roll, you roll a d20 and add your attack bonus. (Other modifiers may also apply to this roll.) If your result equals or beats the target’s Armor Class, you hit and deal damage.

but I don't honestly know if "target" is a consistently used mechanical term or a plain English one.

Either way, it seems reasonable to restrict all the (targeting) flagged feats to single target attacks.

Yeah, raw it works, but it's too silly. As ranged trip it seems reasonable, blunderbuss to the legs knocking people down isn't realistic but it follows a sort of movie logic. Ranged disarm in a cone in front of you is getting a tad silly, but everyone dropping their weapons when shot isn't complete nonsense. Ace Disarm allowing you to steal from everyone in a cone in front of you is beyond description.

"I level my culverin on the crowd and steal this guys coin pouch, this guys spell component pouch, that guys holy symbol, that guys cloak, this guys hat..."

Here's the FAQ answer if you all are interested in that.

As far as I can tell it cancels invisibility on everyone and everything inside the area when the spell was cast regardless of how they've become invisible and whether or not they were invisible before or after glitterdust was cast.

Does it coat every surface down to the inside of your canteen? If I flay my enemy does his flesh glitter within? Who knows.

You're giving up too much as a kineticist. Getting combat feats isn't bad, but enhancing weapons is useless, the armor enhancement options aren't great, an AC boost keyed to charisma or intelligence isn't something you'd be building toward either. Kineticist is functionally a full BAB class as long as you keep up your elemental overflow, if that doesn't increase, then taking full bab isn't a benefit.

It's got a decent base ability set, full bab good fort and will, and combat feats every other level is nice. Maybe an Id Rager who needs bonus feats could use it. All that plus martial weapons and medium armor proficiency could make this a good 1 level dip heading toward something else.

If it added to both spell casting and blasting it could maybe help a Havocker witch, but it doesn't and wouldn't help enough to save the archetype. It could be a better way to finish out an esoteric dragon disciple after you've finished maxing dragon disciple. I doubt it, but maybe.

Spiritualist can take a feat that keeps their phantom up for 4 levels, and it has a couple combat archetypes that could use the bab and feats. Spiritualist 8/EK4 is probably the best use of the prestige class.

Fastidiousness's recurring cleanliness is the best, shame it's self only. I could see a character making large statues as command word magic items of fastidiousness to improve local health.

Spiritualist with the involutionist archetype and life spirit. My wife wouldn't be too keen on me turning into a wooden robot, so Shabti rather than wyrwood which would be my selfish choice. VMC sorcerer with the Vestige bloodline for a chunk of feats.

Tempted by summoner, and wizard, but I'm not sure how much of Pathfinder is following into the world with me.

I'm not sure damage ownership is a very useful idea. Does the cleric own all your damage if he's resurrected you? Does the guy who cast the light cantrip get half your damage in otherwise dark rooms? And ensuring turn by turn damage parity doesn't sound like an exciting thing to build a game around either. If that's what you wanted, you could make a game where everyone killed 1/4 of a monster per turn, and simplify things considerably. You could also smooth out the difference between melee and ranged by using old school final fantasy positioning. You move forward, attack with all your attacks, then move back. And your whole game could be published on an index card which is convenient.

Is it a bad thing that melee characters can build toward getting their damage in different ways? Is there no value in a melee characters ability to occupy and control more space than an archer?

An Oracle with Ocean's Echo archetype and the life mystery. You got your music, great support, maybe pickup a mount through feats so you can sit and ride through your adventures in style.

Even if the fight itself wasn't a challenge, being able to spare party resources for fights that are a challenge is still important. But there's obviously a balance needed there, a character that easily ends most combats in a single round but can do nothing on more challenging combats isn't great, but a character who has a once per day instant death attack and nothing else also isn't that great.

If you had a 4 person party of once per day instant death characters, and nothing left after killing 4 dudes, the guy who can kill a bunch of weak dudes is going to seem like a good pickup.

Certainly, people expending resources should be expending as few as possible. If your fighter with a greatsword can handle the encounter, then he should. Generally a caster is trying not to cast spells, which is why haste and create pit spells are so highly regarded. With haste you've helped all the greatsword guys get into position and attack, and create pit spells make it more likely that the enemy has to approach your greatsword guys with their own action.

The most important spells in the game are those that remove or create obstacles because those are the ones that help other characters shine.

Why optimize? To make sure your character is reliable enough at something that others can include you in their strategy. Sometimes people go overboard, but that's separate from the tactical considerations of melee exclusive characters.

The fighter didn't spend any resources on either closing more quickly, keeping a target from fleeing, reaching more targets while full attacking, ignoring terrain, or anything like that?

It's easier to think about the encounters I run rather than trying to figure out what's standard, but I'd say maybe 1 in 10 combats would offer an opportunity for frequent extended base to base combat assuming no other player was motivated to assist with positioning. But I like mixing terrain heights, using difficult terrain, high winds, variable encounter start distances, things like that. So the guy with 5ft reach with no backup weapon, who can't run and can't sneak should at least get a mount so he shows up before combat is over.

The more I think about it, the more I have to agree with the others about what the rest of the group is doing. If they engage without consideration for greatsword guy's limitations, and they don't need him, he can easily get left out. But that's the same for quite a few characters, so it's not really a greatsword guy specific issue.

It's a fun idea, but not something you could slot into Pathfinder without changing tons of other things. The idea that immunity to charm spells would also make you impossibly stubborn is a fun sort of drawback to that kind of ability.

"You can't be charmed or reasoned with."

Bluff can impact emotions indirectly, but it seems to hit what a person perceives more than what they feel. If you tried to blend mundane and magic abilities like this, I'd suggest making immunity to illusion immunity to bluff as well.

You'd probably also want to make tracking and knowledge checks subject to scrying protection.

But if you're redesigning the game so that mundane effects are indistinguishable from super natural effects, you'd probably also want to give skills more super natural abilities.

What happens if the said scroll gets destroyed?

It's gone, just like if the materials had been destroyed. You can get a high level greater make whole cast on the scroll to fix it up, which is probably a bit easier than doing the same thing on piles of raw materials, but it's still a pain in the buns.

Scrolls of fabricate are great long term storage. You spend the material component when creating the scroll, and the material component is also the target material, so you're basically storing materials as magic till you need it.

So I guess I'd store most things in a scriptorium.

Unchained mostly fixed two classes where a core mechanic was a bit tedious one that was too unpredictable and one that sucked. I'll try to stick to that.

Bard/Skald, may as well make their inspire always on, 2+charisma+2*level is more than enough combat rounds a day. I don't think I've ever run out of bard song before, and I've never decided not to use it. I think they deserve a mount companion as well, just for being such good guys, but probably not as a class update.

Magus: Rewrite spell combat and spell strike so that it doesn't reference other mechanics like two weapon fighting, spell casts, normal attacks, occupied hands, and so on.

Sorcerer: break up the bloodlines into abilities with different thematic flags on them. So "Draconic bloodline" would allow breath weapon, flight, claw, elemental, tags. It would kill the repetitive elemental bolt abilities, let people ignore the claw abilities, allow for more variety in the bloodlines, get rid of wild bloodlines, and crossblooded.

Wizard: Rewrite the old schools to be more in line with the elemental schools.

Nothing directly. I do modify the setting quite a bit before character creation begins, and that does amount to making certain abilities pointless, and make others require substantial character background explanation as to how they came by that ability.

Some things, like leadership, end up in a bad spot. You could take it, and guarantee the power level and loyalty of your followers, but I'm not having NPCs teleport into existence to assist you, and you could recruit followers through roleplaying without the feat. So, is a feat worth the ability to micromanage followers? Usually the answer is no.

Other things could be region locked. Some things are too rare to have the support needed to use them regularly. Other things will be forbidden knowledge and require a background based means of having secretly acquired those things.

I try to make sure that it's not so much restrictive as it's an opportunity to meld the character better with the world, but it doesn't always work out that way.

tah dah

They can compel you to comply.

More than likely they'd wait till compelling would have the biggest impact, then drag you over the edge. I suppose they'd need an intermediary to keep an eye on you so they knew when either your resistance had weakened or you were in a position to take a powerful action in their favor.

The bounty hunter with dirty trick master and throat slicer is probably a little too potent. Worse if you have a pet or familiar with throat slicer that can run up on the pinned target when needed.

Bounty Hunter conveniently combines with Sin Slayer and Sniper as well, which are both quite nice.

Double dazing to end a target's turn is also pretty potent, and once you're flanking the target it's not hard to get that going. I think you could make many combats much less fun than they'd normally be. I'd be careful about what type of game I brought this character to.

I think of it as looking like you can't handle yourself in a fight. You can let your team in on the personality shift, but the world at large needs to be unaware of it.

Maybe you clean up nicely. Maybe you retired. Maybe you kick off your boots, tie your hair back, put on some glasses, and handle your party's administrative tasks whenever you come into town.

The faceless enforcer archetype is my personal favorite. You have a rep, and your armor has a rep. Ferocious hunter is simply hiding his orcish heritage, very subtle shift.

Fiction is full of ironically dual capable characters.

Someone who can avoid and disengage from the summons and engage the summoner directly. I'd expect them to use invisibility and mirror image as defenses while their summons did the work, so probably someone with blindsight or something similar.

It's cheap on prerequisites which is nice. If you had a reason for high int and knowledge skills already, it's probably worth it, but I don't think it's worth building toward.

You get about half the bestiary when you max it out, that's great, but that will only happen for a full BAB class. I think the possibility of landing in a campaign that doesn't accommodate the feat is pretty high. The possibility of most powerful adversaries being too smart is also pretty high.

I'd take the feat on a big game hunter, expecting it only to work on animals and magical beasts, or on someone who has other reasons for high knowledge skills.

Martial classes only. When magic comes back, allow partial gestalt leveling so that the magic part isn't baked into their build as much.

So if you introduced casting at 9th level, your fighter would be
a level 1 wizard/fighter-gestalt with 8 more levels of plain fighter.

More mouth? Looking on the darker left side, you see a highlighted ridge as if she has an overbite that goes down to her jaw.

I think I'd go with verdant bloodline sorcerer vmc. Making things grow, turning people into plant monsters, lounging in the sun instead of sleeping. At will plant growth is too entertaining an ability to pass up.

Cleric with Vulture domain to reincarnate people would also be a neat trick.

There's also throat slicer

ErichAD wrote:

I figure that knife to throat is sufficient to qualify for the "otherwise completely at an opponent's mercy" part of coup de grace.

I disagree, the classic villain grabbing the hostage, pulling them in front of them and holding a knife to their throat, isn't even a grapple, much less "at an opponent's mercy". But I will admit that allowing it for NPC's and a theatrical scene it might be appropriate, however, RAW, I am not on board.

All a grapple does is remove the target's ability to move away from the attacker, restrict the use of one of their arms, and make it harder to take physical actions. Grabbing someone's arm fulfills all that. Pinning someone to your chest with one arm seems more than sufficient to be a grapple. Traditionally, the victim can do nothing before freeing themselves, so possible even pinned.

Whether or not "knife to throat" is at someone's mercy I'll agree is debatable, but not even grappled is a stretch.

I figure that knife to throat is sufficient to qualify for the "otherwise completely at an opponent's mercy" part of coup de grace. For NPCs at any rate. I also figure combat would be started with the hostage being taken if not before hand, so surprise rounds wouldn't figure into it, but readying would.

Death not being the worst possible fate is always a problem in later Pathfinder. Instant death effects mean instant life effects need to be in there as well, or adventure ends about as abruptly as it does in real life. If you want the same drama at higher levels, you need to update the threat to something not as easily overcome.

They aren't just dead 1, but dead 2! We need a resurrection 2! Soul trapping, soul destruction, instant aging to death, made undead, and so on and so forth.

Maybe the kingdom has laws regarding succession and a person's first death, in order to avoid resurrection of dead nobility causing endless succession wars.

It's spelled out for mounted combat. If your mount is larger than your target, you have higher ground.

I wouldn't worry about it unless the character is completely above the other one. In situations where that's possible, the character usually has enough control over their elevation to move to higher ground explicitly.

That said, I usually see higher ground used as a way for the DM to fudge rolls.

Great, now I'm picturing a world were both mortal fragility, and access to resurrection spells, increase with the prevalence of diamonds.

I read it the same way as Senko. The material component has to be the same material and same value of the end product. Highlighting the tail end of the sentence doesn't make much sense to me.

Matthew's solution would work pretty well.

I don't think it's meant to, but the spell conserves value not volume. It requires a skill check for high craftsmanship items, but doesn't specify that there must be a way to craft the item manually, only that it be made of the same material used. The skill required to crush and wet screen clay down to a rough unprocessed diamond is negligible, so probably doesn't require much of a skill check. You should be able to make a table from a bundle of sticks even though there's no means by which to do so without magic.

It's a silly spell that needs fixing or agreements not to exploit the spell. Giving it labor hours per level is probably not a bad way to go if you don't want people merging sticks into logs, having the item revert to a prior form if someone tries to craft with it would keep it from being pumped for value.

How long would it take for adventurers to weaponized the failed fabricate spell? Before the end of the game session I'd wager.

As near as I can tell, fabricate doesn't emulate the process of creating something, it just does it.

Gem pricing is too weird to get my head around honestly. Your character can fabricate a crate of s+@@ty uncut diamonds into one diamond the size of your palm and the value won't change a bit. Then you can hire a gem cutter to shape your large s~$*ty diamond into a round brilliant and make tons of extra money, then fabricate it into a much much larger raw gem and have it recut.

So does our wizard look at a 25k diamond and think "wow, beautiful", or do they see the multiple fabricates and gem cuts needed to get something that fancy.

Then you have to assume somewhere out there is a planar gem exchange that maintains the value of gems for spell purposes.

It's easier to handwave it all since it doesn't make real sense. I assume wizards look at these gems and thing "If I think about this too much, it won't make sense and the spell will fail."

Yes, someone who is subject to glitterdust can't be invisible. That said, if the glitterdust effect ran out before the dust of disappearance did, then their invisibility would resume once glitterdust ended.

Glitterdust doesn't explicitly say it ends invisibility in the rules text. But this clarification makes it explicit.
Glitterdust kills invisibility and all the rules that go with it.
Glitterdust has no effect on other forms of concealment.
Glitterdust also makes it very difficult to hide and might blind you.

Rules wise, someone to talk to, rest if you have positive charisma, restoration line spells. Somehow this feels even more flaccid than getting brought back to life if you die. Apparently you can make it so only rest works, so people without charisma go crazy and everyone else gets better.

I've got to say, that's pretty messed up.

I'm of the opinion that you wouldn't gain experience without keeping the side effects of the bad experiences. You've got to carry those events with you if you want to keep going on fighting life or death struggles to save the world without getting knocked back on your heels every time. You never get better, you just come up with plans on how to deal with that horror next time.

You know, like normal.

Exactly Java Man, the spell is suppressed, nothing in the text says the spell functions in an anti-magic field and nothing in anti-magic field spell gives an exception for this type of spell, so its suppressed.

I think you're oversimplifying the rule. Undead created with magic that are thereafter self supporting can walk into anti-magic fields. For instance, you couldn't use skeleton summoner to get through an anti-magic field.

It certainly looks like a spell with a duration that would end in an antimagic field. I don't see any reason the wings would fall into the " imbued with magic during their creation process and are thereafter self-supporting" caveat, since the wings have a finite duration linked to the spell.

Cythnigot have explicitly spell like flight, I assume there's a few other examples of monster with constant fly spells.

Fly is listed as either supernatural or extraordinary as a monster ability, but most creatures don't seem to flag it one way or the other.

that polymorph is bloodragers pounce option if they didn't go for totems, without pounce it's a pretty complicated choice. You do have quite a few feats that would enjoy a longer reach. The standard girallon can probably use weapons, and it retains the 10ft reach that the Angazhani loses. That plus longarms is probably your best pounce replacement.

Honestly, if you really want to use your greatsword, casting monstrous physique from your spells to be a deathsnatcher and using the free rage polymorph for the transformation spell is probably fine. It looks like you don't currently have enhancement bonuses to strength or dex anyway.

With a DM outlawing pounce and limiting item availability, I'd expect they want fights to last a little longer so that everyone can get their chance. I bet if you tell them what you want and ask what they want, you could probably negotiate something interesting. Neither of you want a situation where you turn into a giant stinky cow because it's mathematically the best option.

It's probably not an every time thing. Catoblepas if you want to be inexplicably huge in size and reach despite being technically large, Chimera for a bunch of attacks and a good breath weapon, gorgon if you want to petrify a bunch of mooks.

There's a bunch of good options, but you aren't going to be using your sword or armor. polymorphamory

The giant white girallon is cool too.

The bardic masterpiece Symphony of Sylandurla’s Ascent grants immunity to one of these "charm effects, the dazed condition, fear effects, magical sleep, paralysis, the staggered condition, or the stunned condition"

It also grants allies a new check to avoid the condition if they already suffer from it.