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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 shitty 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 shitty 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.

Also companions with only one attack get a second one in place of multiattack at 9th level, though at a -5.

You can also share spells to your animal companion, meaning a sylvan sorcerer can beast shape their companion to a giant octopus, deathsnatcher, euryale, greenman, or whatever based on how little you want your allies to enjoy playing with you.

Favorite would have to be a Fey touched fox with canopy troll as its 1 humanoid form.

Other than templated ones, the Sin Seeker sounds like the cutest thing ever, and if it wasn't so mechanically deficient I'd want one.

Hagbound witch changes you to monstrous humanoid
Planar Oracle changes you to outsider (extraplanar)
The Mudwitch Hex changes you to an ooze when you use it. I assume she turns back when it's done.
Final Revelation of Whimsy makes you fey
The psitech Artificial Ascension makes you an artificial intelligence
Kabriri obedience makes you undead
If you take all 4 damnation feats you become a native outsider
Daivrat prestige class makes you a native outsider
Demoniac prestige class makes you "Her type changes to outsider with the chaotic, demon, evil, and native subtypes" as a temporary ability at 10th level
Sanguine Angel prestige class turns you into an outsider
Sphere singer prestige class makes you fey

That's all I got from "type changes to" as a search line. There's probably more with alternative language.

Burrowing shot is cool. the -2 to a bunch of stuff is fine, but that 25% spell failure chance is really nice.

I like a couple of the story feats.
Never Conquered Forever Feared-a one stop shop for a free action shaken aoe. It doesn't boost the fear effect, but it doesn't prevent other things from boosting it.

Super Natural Spy - being two levels higher for the purpose of calculating arcanist exploit effects can be pretty interesting as it covers several other classes' abilities.

I should have looked up the archetype name. I meant Eldritch Guardian, the fighter archetype.

If you just want a cool familiar, try getting him heavy armor proficiency via eldritch knight so you have a monkey knight. Personally, I prefer grabbing one level of Wizard:First World caller so I can have a fox that can turn into a canopy troll. But at that point, it's not really cool feats anymore I guess.

I like throat slicer for companion creatures. Do you really want your witch to walk over and slit a throat every time they put someone to sleep, or would you rather have your monkey knight do the job.

If you just want backup horses, it could be easier and safer to buy a bag of backup horses with Carry Companion cast on them at 60gp a casting.

Introduce an NPC who died while researching how to surpass the deity enforced power limit. Leave some vague experiments in their lab, and cryptic notes. Then just listen to what your players come up with and go with that.

I'd ditch daily action currencies on all martial classes, or at the very least make archetypes so you could trade them out for something else. For whatever reason, one of my players never remembers to use abilities that have limited uses per day, and another is too miserly about them to ever use them. They're typically imbalanced depending on how long your adventuring day is anyway and many once per day abilities are so unlikely to matter or succeed that they aren't worth writing down.

I'd make the same change for casters too, but that would require a major restructuring of the game. Maybe give them a pool of active spells or something to that effect. But that's way outside the scope of changing classes.

I'd add damage sharing abilities, like life a oracle's, to clerics. Damage sharing is a much more effective life saving tool than healing.

Get rid of sneak attack from rogues. Replace it with an ability which can only be used when hidden, that gives a victim a few rounds to get healing or lose consciousness. Give them full bab and the ability to use dex instead of strength for prerequisites on combat feats. Let their rogue level be the caster level of magic items activated with UMD. Let them step into an allies square, make a full attack, then move back behind that ally.

I'd let magus use a spell DC for magic weapon special abilities as a spell combat option instead of casting a spell.

Give shifter the natural armor of the forms it takes and the benefit of creature types, and con to AC up to their class level.

Maybe anyway. I'm always testing minor and major changes with each game, and what works for me is based on my groups needs not a generic player base.

As a result of the code and the desire for battle, cavaliers cannot be controlled in battle situations. They will charge any enemy in sight, with this order of preference:

Powerful monsters (dragons, demons, giants) serving enemy leaders.
Enemy leaders.
Opponent cavaliers of great renown, and enemy flags and standards.
Opponent cavalry of noble or elite status.
Other opponent cavalry.
Opponent elite footmen.
Opponent camp and headquarters.
Opponent melee troops.
Levies or peasants.

Losing control of your character during combat does seems like quite the price to pay for full advancement. But, while Gygax did say he wanted the non-humans to be level limited as a fighter, that wasn't published in anything official. Just Dragon #96 page 8, so yeah I guess they could fully advance.

1st edition AD&D rules were a lot different. For one thing class abilities were pretty much exclusive. Only two classes had the ability to move silently or hid in shadows. If you were not either a thief or a monk you could not do either. No other class had those abilities including the Ranger. UMD was a high level thief ability that no other class had. Second was the fact that all that non-humans had limits as to how high of a level they could go in most classes. The only class that a non-human had unlimited advancement was thief. Multiclassing was a lot different so most if not all non-humans were multiclassed. Humans actually could not multiclass. This lead to almost all non-humans being thieves.

In 1st edition AD&D the situation was reversed for non-humans. If you were not a thief and the game got past a certain level your character did not was basically stuck and could not gain any levels. The experience system was a lot different so multiclassing usually meant you were about 1 level behind, but got all the abilities of both classes. So a magic user/thief could were leather armor and still cast spells with no chance of failure.

Not to mention that rogues had the cheapest xp chart and generous bonus xp by 2nded AD&D.

If I were to give them full BAB, I'd reduce their to-hit by 1 for every 4 levels when doing sneak attack damage. It gives them a benefit when they can't sneak attack, extra attacks a little earlier, and lets them fulfill prerequisites faster. But their sneak attack to-hit stays the same.

A minor HP change doesn't matter too much, a d10 isn't going to make them much more viable melee combatants.

If I were to do anything with rogues, I'd make it so that their class level was used as their caster level when activating magic items. They're already good with disabling some spell effects, and it would give them access to cheap flexible defenses.

It's far from ideal, but you could take a level of monk-of-the-empty-hand and the quarterstaff master feat. That puts any two handed weapon into one hand. A staff magus would get you the feat early as well.

That said, it's hardly optimal and a bunch of resources spent on something that's just a cosmetic desire. But if you need a scythe in one hand without renaming things or a DM who lets you swap the scythe into the bladed brush feat, then this does the trick.

The possessed hand feat line is fun. A bunch of great bonuses and distinct flavor.

I like breaking things, so Shrapnel Strike and Stunning Irruption are top shelf for me. Sending shards of a wall into your enemies, or everyone standing their gawking when you knock in their front door, are both nicely cinematic. Shieldslam + crushing/smashing impact are also cool for the same reason. It's a real shame that awesome blow isn't as supported or easy to use as shieldslam. I should just change that.

Weapon Shift. I like shapeshifting as a character theme already, but making your tiger claws solid fire is a good transformation.

Improved familiar has so many options, and I like having strange companions with surprising abilities. Summon Guardian Spirit is similarly interesting for a somewhat customizable summon, though the option limits make it more work than I'd like. (only fey or outsider, very reliant on monsters default HD for scaling great concept though)

Deflect arrows, missile shield, ray shield, mobile bulwark style. Blocking an arrow isn't much, but it can't fail and looks cool. Ray shield is much more impressive, and mobile bulwark gives you the classic "warrior with his shield up blocking dragon breath" scene. This is some nice pulp fantasy.

I do like things like Erastil's Blessing, Guided Hand, and Desna's Shooting Star, but there should be more varieties with more similar requirements. As long as you don't end up with charisma greatswords and such.

Combat already ends pretty quickly in PF1, adding more damage would make combat shorter and boosting hp to compensate would make the change pointless. You could resort the whole system to increase the damage weapons deal with a targeted combat length in mind, but you'd be better off starting from scratch.

There are some under and overutilized things that could be addressed with default magic item benefits.

-Adding combat maneuver feats for each +1 to a weapon could make combat feats feel less like over specialization for a character and more like a combat specific change in tactics.

-Some abilities are too hard to counter for martials and could be addressed with default magic item effects. Letting certain weapons attack as an AoE when enchanted could help manage swarms, letting others instantly destroy segments of wall spells could keep martials from being corralled, others could reduce concealment by a level or let you pick more squares when trying to hit invisible targets.

Magic weapons should also be much harder to break. +2 hardness +10hp just doesn't do enough when it comes up.

I love Charda for this reason. They are morally obligated not to help each other, won't defend the eggs of another Charda, and so on. So I guess they pretend not to hear the commotion out of respect for the other Charda's honor or independence.

Generally I have groups that can hear the combat retreat to get a larger group. You'd fight the group of orcs in one room, turn the corner to find a hastily abandoned room, move on to the owlbear den, and hopefully see the two ogres hiding just inside the door rather then engaging the owlbear and getting ambushed. I'm a big fan of environmental story telling, so I enjoy the opportunity to describe a room well enough that the party can guess who or what was just in it.

I personally like using dungeons. A series of similarly shaped rooms and corridors is a good mundane anti-scrying anti-teleportation measure. I don't use them all the time, but serious minded magic literate creatures end up needing them.

You use the TK spell to pin them, and the throat slicer feat to finish the job. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to use TK as a "one-handed, light, or natural weapon", so you may need an aether elemental familiar with throat slicer for the actual coup de grace.

I don't see any reason why Desna would pull her blessing from someone who operated a toll gate. They're keeping the area secure. Limiting the traffic through an area during certain times of day can be essential to safety of the road users and the road itself. They aught to have times of day, that are typically low traffic, where the tolls aren't levied so that traffic patterns are smoothed out somewhat. They'd also want to heavily restrict travel during animal movement times like dusk and dawn, possibly requiring hiring a guide. This also means that those who can't afford to pay can chose to wait instead.

The only real issue is how to enforce payment and travel restrictions. Where does their authority to make requests for payment come from? If they provide a service other than preservation of a public road, they'd be better off focusing on monetizing that.

It depends on the solution they chose. A good church may donate to their cause, they could attract patrons, economies could improve dropping the cost of goods they need, adventurers could retire leaving their equipment to the party. It's also possible that whatever conflict the players are involved in deescalates. The peaceful solutions the players have used change the methods your big bad needs to use, so he hires fewer or cheaper warriors leaning on less traditional threats.

I'd be much more concerned that the other players are out of the spotlight too much if one player is creative solutioning their way out of encounters.

As for the ABP sidebar convo. I like it and use it, but it doesn't work well if you try and drop it into the middle of an existing game, it does require treasure reworking but only really turning big 6 items into mundane items. It also makes tons of abilities pointless, so players need to make sure their temporary boost ability isn't over written by ABP bonuses. There are tons of resistance bonus and deflection bonus abilities out there that only function for a level or two when they happen to briefly poke up above ABP.

I don't mean the social aspects of game play. It'd be fun to run a pure dungeon crawl as a one shot, but not weekly. That said, making social encounters entertaining is much more challenging than making combat entertaining, so I feel like many players get turned off by that type of encounter due to poor experiences early in their gaming life.

I'm referring to players who are there exclusively to socialize, drink, digress, and so forth. Most people seem to have the social wherewithal to balance playing the game and chatting without being rude or slowing gameplay for everyone else.

The only two people I can think of that I've expressly stopped inviting for this reason also have drinking problems, and have difficulty sharing attention with other people.

Whiners, gossips, bullies, and everyone else who prefers endurance antagonism to conversation as their primary method of coercion. This sort of thing is too time consuming. If you can't convince people with reasoned debate, and won't accept that you could be wrong, and instead drag everything down with you, then I'm happy to drink with you, or go on a walk through the park, but I'm not wasting a table full of people's time on you.

People who aren't interested in playing: anyone who's just there for the social aspect, or who's there because their romantic partner is there. I lost too many games to breakups and too many hours to disruptive party people, and now I'm too old for that nonsense.

You can support them with the environment being more threatening. Use substantial natural events to force the players into a type of environment well suited to the animals in them, and restrict visibility enough that they can't as easily be neutralized or avoided. A storm could force players out of the air, a lava flow could force them off the ground, flooding could force them underwater, that sort of thing.

That only stretches them a little bit further though, as environmental threats can be neutralized as well.

And no matter what you do, a sorcerer with an infernal bloodline familiar is completely immune to unassisted animals from level 1.

Finally, after months of subterfuge, passive aggressive brushes with authority, and quiet recruitment of allies within the community, you can finally use a shade of red on your front door that doesn't clash with the shade of your Floratam. Unfortunately the divide in your team over weekend curbside parking has grown too broad to mend and your next quest is becoming clear.

Just have one of your party have the familiar from their divination VMC take the sage/figment and swap in the +8 appraise skill bump and receive an evaluator's lens spell when you need it. Don't waste any permanent resources on a skill. That may be overkill though, it looks like we're expecting to roll 15s on our knowledge checks, so we don't need to get above +15 on appraise.

You could probably save CoA&A with the Ironbound Sword Samurai stacking trick. I don't see anything that CoA&A has that I'd want for any concept or build though. Getting the magus awkwardness of in combat casting without the tools that make it easier seems short sighted. Spending your swift action to cast at a limited spell failure reduction also seems too modest a benefit.

I feel like anything you built with CoA&A could be done better with magus, bloodrager or warrior panoply occultist.

You wouldn't need a feat to wear a mithral chain shirt without penalty anyway, aside from the asf which proficiency doesn't help with. Maybe there's some feat chain consideration at play, or maybe they don't know what they're doing.

He could easily be remembering an older version of mithral armor. Wasn't elven chainmail wearable by wizards in ad&d?

I tried once to play a character who occasionally carried a buckler with ASF chance. Remembering to roll it wasn't a problem as it was automatically added to the spell macro in roll20, but making sure I had the actions to take the dang thing off in an emergency wasn't as easy. That plan lasted a couple levels.

It's not like he was getting attacked enough for the living steel effect to matter.

There's a few spells that work a bit like this like Unseen engineers/crew and telekinetic assembly, but they are use specific. You could use the magic trick "minor levitation" for prestidigitation to leave things suspended, though I don't know if the 1lb limit is per casting or total.

You'd probably be best off casting a bunch of unseen servant spells and letting them deal with your task if it's simple, just assisting you, and non-combat. You could get a bunch of "Ushabti of the Willing Servant" if you want to get fancy.

If you want to whip a bunch of items through the air, summon as many small aether elementals as possible and they should be able to accommodate. An aether elemental familiar is a cheap way to fake TK as well.

Wishing for an identity that is specifically fake is a wasted wish. There's no quality control on the wish, so you aren't getting anything you didn't already have. Something like "I wish people remembered, and will henceforth always remember, me as an innocent bystander" could produce a more effective fake identity.

Wishing to be someone you aren't is also a bit of a waste, you killed yourself with extra steps. "I wish I were the king of Melontis." Poof, you're gone, and we've got some complicated succession issues that the player no longer has to worry about.

The Ali Ababwa wish is different, Aladdin wishes for a rank and title. If that wish is granted, then that place really exists and you've somehow become the inheritor of the title and rank. How valuable that wish is depends on how well you can leverage your new position and whether or not you can hold on to it. You could probably write the wish a bit better to ensure that your new rank and title is instantly and always useful. Something like "remember and respect me as the eternal ruler of X".

How tough should a fight be for dice to be rolled, and how tough should a fight be to grant xp, are both different questions. How tough should a fight be to keep the players entertained is also a very different question.

I think the players should have to spend some resources in order for it to be an xp granting encounter. If the PCs are optimized for fighting and wipe out a cr accurate encounter in one standard action, cool, but that tells me that similar encounters can just be narrated without granting xp from then on.

"The corridor continues to fill with zombies pressing through the crumbling walls and falling in from the shattered floor above. Alan the fire kineticist continues to fill the area with fire as the party turns their attention to other things."

Also, remember that if you're placing enemies based on how the world works, keep in mind that the enemies also know generally how the world works. If the enemies know they are going to encounter something beyond their level, use hit and run tactics, memorize no save spells, probe the party with scouts and summons. Change the players strategy for the encounter by changing the failure state from kill or be killed to stopping a scout, silencing a signal horn, keeping their abilities obscured, and so on.

It sounds like you should just keep making your own way for this to happen. There's a few classes that are better at ritual casting, but that's about it. The ritualist prestige class is pointed that direction.

The closest thing I can think of would be to take a druid:devolutionist's 9th level ability to devolve humans into animals, then feed them the blood of baphomet. That turns your human into a magical beast, but with a strongly demonic nature. I think this would make a good base to work with for making what you want.

Teleport takes you through the astral plane, which would put you at normal gravity during the transition, it's subjective directional at prime material gravity strength. You can bring objects along "as long as their weight doesn't exceed your maximum load", and the duration of fulfilling that criteria would end the moment the spell was cast.

Make them well loved by the NPCs of the world despite having no apparent redeeming qualities. Maybe they're famous for something their parents did, or they leverage blackmail material so that others feel its safer to speak well of them. NPCs frequently mistake the players for this villain and are disappointed when they realize their mistake. NPCs tell tales of adventures this villain has gone on that range from fairly trivial to obviously false and occasionally plagiarize the PCs exploits.

He never sticks around in a fight, and wields collateral damage as a weapon of first resort. He tends to manipulate innocent peasants into attacking the party, sets the environment on fire, liberally uses mines and poison. He'll spend one round creating chaos, then fleeing.

If cornered, he will apologize for other people's emotions, not for his actions. Argue that he's not a great person but there's obviously bigger threats than him and the party is just being petty. Then offer to sell people out if the party lets him go.

There's an faq out there that says the druid levels only stack if the animal companion has identical restrictions.

Mount and Companion FAQ

I guess I'd start with figuring out how to make the adventure visible to the players. They need to know the limits and the stakes to move forward.

If you take each of the characters from a different potential future timeline, they'd be able to compare notes about cause and effect before making a choice. Give them a few major events that they know ended differently for each of them.

Things like
-Major ritual spell cast in different countries
-significant NPC dies in different places
-battle won by different side
This gives them time sensitive plot hooks that can be selectively addressed and even if each event doesn't actually matter, you can include more relevant clues at each event.

Tell them they are the heroes that came closest to success in each time line as your group selection hook. Maybe mystery guy just went back and killed people to see who had the biggest impact by not existing and assumed it worked the other way. That'd be sort of entertaining since each player would be meeting the group thinking all the others were already dead.

As a system for managing cause and effect, I recommend grouping npcs and factions by likelihood to fulfill a role within the story. So you'd have something like:
The [king, queen, crown prince, crown princess, general] was assassinated by the [head of government, head of military, foreign assassin] so that certain events are maintained contextually. If an event continues to happen despite intervention, the players will know that the motivating force and their objective haven't yet been influenced.

Ng
There's just something great about a god who is inscrutable even to other gods some of which are friendly to him regardless. Maybe he's a robot, maybe he's a ghost, who knows, who cares, he supports people who go and we're going.

It seems like there's an extra element to the discussion that's missing. It's certainly desirable to use a set of rules that support the narrative, and to have those rules animate the world in a way that reinforces verisimilitude. The two conflict when the rules are too ambiguous for the players to know how to interact with the story, or the rules get in the way of the story. How to resolve that problem and which direction to go is a hard problem to address and probably depends on the group you're running for, I'm not sure taking a hard stance would make sense unless you've only experienced an error in one direction.

I could see players of games that did a poor job of simulation, or had a flexible rule set, being adamant that playing to the game's strengths was necessary.