Ethereal Gears's page

some of the ones my group have used in the past, primarily to make life easier for non-caster classes:

* Power Attack isn't a feat, but just something everyone can do, regardless of their STR modifier. It thus doesn't exist as a prereq for any feat
* Vital Strike automatically upgrades to Improved and Greater when you meet the prereqs, eliminating a feat tax for a suboptimal combat strategy
* Weapon Finesse grants Dex to damage
* Point-Blank Shot and Rapid Shot are combined into one feat
* Quick Draw allows you to stove/sheathe items as well as draw them, though only a total number of times per round (any combination of drawing/sheathing) equal to your Dex mod. The feat also works with any handheld item (wands, potions, etc.), not just weapons
* all classes that aren't Int-based casters gain at least 4 + Int mod skill ranks per level
*Unchained Rogues are used instead of regular rogues, and furthermore gain skill unlocks starting at level 1; they gain 5-rank skill unlocks at 1 rank, 10-rank at 5 ranks, 15-rank at 10 ranks and 20-rank at 15 ranks
*resurrection is impossible except via divine-level magic. this is obviously something a lot of groups would loathe, but we like the way having death be more or less permanent adds a level of tension to adventures. we usually use Hero Points to make dying slightly less common

Nothing too 40K. It's a really silly, aesthetically displeasing setting to me, so I hope it ain't gonna inspire Starfinder in any noticeable way.

EDIT: Kinda ninja'd, but still. :P

PEWPEWPEWPEWPEWPEWPEWPEWPEW!!!!!!!!!!!

I might be crazy, but surely the fact that you can combine Rapid Shot with TWF has never in any way, shape or form been in question, right?

I mean, that whole gunslinger mess was about the ridiculous reloading shenanigans, no? Or am I missing something here?

...

Mind.

Blown.

Yeah, but it's a very weird kind of neutral good cleric who thinks that "religion is a tool to control the populace". I mean, like, that's not a neutral good worldview, right? That's like nauseatingly evil.

Well thank you Debbie Downer. :P

@The Shaman: That is not the case, regarding Spheres of Power. It's a very open-ended (and terrifically designed) alternate magic system that replaces all kinds of magic, both arcane and divine. It actually even lets players build their own spells, so it's sorta the opposite of the OP's suggestion, in a sense.

I rarely play a GM anyway. I know it's controversial, but I've always thought that class was OP.

I think this sounds flavorful and thematic in theory but, for a large number of players, it would just render the cleric class completely unplayable. Basically, even if it is the player that chooses the spells, rather than the GM, this does not mean, from a roleplaying perspective, that this has to represent the cleric character picking its spells a la carte from the spell list. It could still represent boons from his/her god. Does that make sense?

On another note, I think this belongs in the Homebrew/House Rule forum, right?

Sooo...would Cthulhu's Cleaving Claws ability deal damage to a Diminutive or Fine swarm? It's weapon damage, so I'm leaning no, but it's also an area effect. I guess they would take 50% additional damage out of a total of 0 damage.

If you gave the monkey swarm 300 Hats of Disguise, could it disguise itself as a different monkey swarm?

This one time, at swarm camp...

Monkey swarms! They're also not mindless, so you can feint against them. Or I guess maybe you need some feat or class feature or something to feint against animals? I know it's possible somehow.

Or is it the case that feinting counts as "a single-target effect"? I mean, I could see how it might, but by that logic you could almost claim that a weapon attack is also a single-target effect, and they ain't definitionally immune to those. Like, can you demoralize a non-mindless swarm with Intimidate? If a monkey swarm steals your wand, can you disarm it back from them? If you gave a monkey swarm 300 Tiny suits of chainmail, would it gain an armor bonus to AC?

I have so many questions! :O

If I'm honest, I think the immunity to weapon damage of swarms composed of creatures below Tiny size is overdone, and I hope it doesn't get exacerbated. I can see a sneak attack meaning managing to cleverly hit a few additional component creatures, thus inflicting more damage. I also don't think swarms of any component creature size should be completely immune to bludgeoning damage. I mean, an earthbreaker might not be totally effective against a swarm of cockroaches, but it will squash more than a few of them, for sure. But that's more of a house rule/homebrew issue.

@Ridiculon: That's a pretty good way to visualize it, thanks!

This is something I've always been struggling with how to frame when translating crunch into fluff. Some creatures are only immune to critical hits, but not to precision damage. Take, for instance, a swarm. You cannot crit against a swarm, but you can totally sneak attack it (although only when it's flat-footed, because it's immune to flanking for obvious reasons). How would one conceptualize that, from a storytelling perspective?

As stated, it clearly cannot be for mechanical reasons, but has to be for conceptual/flavor ones that there is a dearth of +Str/Int races. It is demonstrably not in any way a mechanically overpowered stat bonus combo, by any metric.

I would be slightly more concerned if a +Con/Int race popped up, though, as that could possibly edge out +Dex/Int as a favorite for certain Int-based caster builds.

I really hope PF doesn't move away from Extra X feats, because actual feats are painfully bad and make my soul ache each time I have to take one, outside of a tiny handful of exceptions (hi Spell Perfection!). That being said, I don't like Extra X feats for every single type of class feature. Like I get why Extra Smite Evil or Extra Favored Enemy aren't a thing, nor should they be. I haven't read the Vigilante yet, so I am agnostic as to whether its talents fall within that range or not.

Socket bayonets are pretty neat.

It would be so awesome if PF used power points (ala psionics) instead of slot-based casting. To really work, though, such a system would need to rewrite the spells themselves, not just convert discrete slots to an amorphous point pool. DSP's psionics do it very well, with low-level powers being augmentable by pouring more PPs into them. It sucks that so many low-level PF spells fall to the wayside as you level up, because they stop scaling.

Yeah, basically. I mean, I think weapon training by itself doesn't count, because the choices are so limited and same-y, but as soon as you add advanced weapon training into the mix it totally qualifies.

Like, selecting an oracle revelation that gives you scaling fire resistance is fine, because the revelation class feature provides a bunch of other flavorful options aside from that one revelation. A hypothetical class feature which simply gives you 5 points of energy resistance every four levels, and the only choice it provides you with is that you get to pick what energy type to apply it to each time, would not qualify, if that makes sense.

Oh, yeah, with hybrid classes and archetypes and everything, very few things are "unique" to a single class anymore. The point was rather to track down which classes don't get any meaningfully selectable abilities at all outside of spells and bonus feats, whether these originated with some other class or not.

@Lemmy: I totally agree with you on clerics. And generally I feel like I tend to gravitate more towards classes with more customization options. Which makes my love of bards and druids quite incongruous, but there you go. I basically wanted to compile this list because I figured it would end up being a list of my least favorite classes, but it really is a mixed bag. In my home group, I've been preaching the gospel that customizability is almost always better design than set-in-stone abilities, but I think that's too broad a generalization. There's something about just playing an awesome swashbucklin' vanilla bard that is hard to beat, in my book.

"The minstrel boy to the war has gone/
In the ranks of death you'll find him/
His father's sword he hath girded on/
And his wild harp slung behind him"

:)

Cheers,
- Gears

I thought Fat Goblin Games' Striker did a rather admirable job of creating a scout type class.

Cheers,
- Gears

I wish quarterstaffs were finesseable...

Right, and that's my point. I'm not saying you should suffer a penalty on Diplomacy checks equal to how many fewer ranks you have invested in Sense Motive. I'm just saying that if the game were designed with multiple ability scores applying to some skills by definition, I don't think it would be unreasonable for both Diplomacy and Handle Animal to be Cha/Wis. If one then changed from such a system into one where each skill only has one ability score tied to it (as is currently the case), then making Diplomacy Cha-based and Handle Animal Wis-based makes the most sense.

Yeah, but Diplomacy isn't exactly about manipulating people. It's about actually changing someone's attitude of you. "Manipulation" is actually a combination of Diplomacy and Bluff, as per the Suggest Course of Action rules. If you think I'm a basically decent guy and I ask you to provide me with simple aid via a Diplomacy check and you assent, that's not manipulation. Manipulation would be if I somehow deceived you as part of the interaction, which would require an attendant Bluff check. At least that's how I use the word "manipulation". If one defines it as simply any social interaction involving give-and-take, I think the term becomes too broad to be definitionally useful.

I've always felt like Diplomacy is a skill that feels much more Machiavellian from the player's point of view than it actually necessarily is in-game. The fact that a social interaction is mechanized via rules makes you unconsciously think of the creature whose attitude you're changing as a "target" or "victim", which is probably not how your character thinks about the person they're talking to, unless of course your character is evil or something.

That being said, I fully agree Cha is far more important than Wis for Diplomacy, which is why it makes sense as a Cha-based skill. By the same token, I think Wis is (perhaps not to the same degree) more important than Cha when handling an animal, and that's why I think it's more suitable to have Handle Animal be Wis-based.

In real life, I would say it's very hard to be great at Diplomacy while being horrible at Sense Motive. You can be very suave, but you need some basic grasp of empathy and reading people, otherwise you'll at best be able to superficially charm them, but not able to fundamentally alter their attitude towards you as the Diplomacy skill seems to suggest.

With this in mind, I would say it's fair to let Diplomacy "include" the Wis-based aspects of being diplomatic and, conversely, to let a Wis-based version of Handle Animal "include" the Cha-based things (personal magnetism, etc.) that you need in order to charm any creature, animal or otherwise. In effect, neither is a realistic simulation, since both Diplomacy and Handle Animal arguably require a bit of both Cha and Wis, but the design decision would be to focus on the most important of the two ability scores for each skill. I.e., handling animals probably is more Wis-dependent than handling people, while handling people probably is more Cha-dependent.

Also, some people have been saying that UMD is Cha-based because it's about willpower but, of course, if that were truly the case the skill would be Wis-based, just like your Will saves. I always thought UMD was just what the Fonz did when he made the jukebox start.

My group has just houseruled that all FCBs are available to members of all races (provided they don't affect some mechanic unique to that race which other races lack access to), and even with this freedom, the bonus skill point (as well as the bonus hit point) tend to remain pretty popular.

"PEW-PEW!"

...I'll show myself out.

Never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.

Well, that could be an interesting barbarian archetype, certainly. Although I will say that between draconic bloodragers, the dragon totem line of rage powers and the dragon disciple prestige class, there are quite a few neat draconic options out there for rage-users as is.

Otherwise, I think it would be a fair houserule to allow someone to combine the primeval wyrmer archetype with the werewyrm archetype (simply switching out primal powers rather than dragon arts at 4th, 8th and 14th level). That would achieve a similar result, I daresay.

What ho, esteemed Paizonians!
So, this is a base class for Pathfinder I built a while back, called the wyrmer. Although I've never played D&D 3.5 myself (only PF), I have looked through some old source books, and this class is very much indebted to the 3.5 base class called the Dragonfire Adept as well as, to a lesser extent, the Dragon Shaman base class.

This is no mere conversion, however. The idea was to create a sort of Dragon Discipline-like class, except focused on a breath weapon (with natural attacks as back-up weaponry) and some at-will powers (extraordinary, spell-like and supernatural both). I created this class before either Occult Adventures or Pathfinder Unchained had been released, but have since made a few tweaks to it. I'm not sure yet how this stacks up as an at-will blaster in comparison to the kineticist, but hopefully you guys can tell me. :)

So, without further ado, here's the Google Drive folder containing all the wyrmer stuff:

The Wyrmer Files

The folder contains the main Wyrmer document, as well as the Dragon Arts document, the latter being the class' list of selectable abilities. If changes are made to any wyrmer documents, that will be reflected in the contents of the folder available via the above link. The folder also contains a handful of archetypes, primarily based around non-chromatic/metallic types of dragons. Here's a brief description of each one:

Breathwright - An archetype focused around shaping one's breath weapon in new and exciting ways.
Draconic Scion - An archetype that lets you play an actual dragon, albeit one that hastens its growth at the cost of gaining lesser powers than a regular true dragon.
Dragon Warrior- Samurai-ish archetype focused around imperial dragons.
Primeval Wyrmer - Barbarian-ish archetype focused around primal dragons.
Starscale Adept- Alien-ish archetype focused around outer dragons.
Werewyrm- A shapechanger archetype that essentially lets you become a sort of were-dragon.
Wyrmkeeper - Gives up breath weapon and other draconic powers, but instead gains a faerie dragon or a pseudodragon as an animal companion, that gains various powers as you level up.

I'm currently planning on making an archetype based around the esoteric dragons, as well as some kind of undead-ish archetype focused around raveners and wyrmwraiths. I'm also thinking of creating a wacky jabberwock-themed archetype. So if people like the class, those things will probably be in the pipeline soon.

Anyway, hope y'all enjoy!

Cheers,
- Gears

Tangentially, can I just ask, in what way is it not clear whether or not VMC Magus allows you to take Extra Arcana? Is there anything in the VMC's text to suggest you're barred from accessing that feat? There are plenty of VMCs that explicitly disbar you from taking the "Extra" feats, but magus, blessedly, is not among them. Let's never mention this fact again, I say, lest we be stricken with some horrendous errata.

I just wanted to mention that I've now added a suite of discoveries for this archetype, and the file in the BC Archetypes folder (LINK) has been updated to reflect these. I'd be more than happy to add further discoveries (as well as new alchemical evos/base forms) if anyone's got any suggestions.

Cheers,
- Gears

I think it's more the case that there are several different discussions going on at once. There are a few simple tweaks (WT at 1st level, 4 + Int skill ranks, Perception and Sense Motive as class skills) that can be done in order to "fix" the things about the fighter that are just annoying and make them less fun to play. A lot of other "fixes" I think have slowly but surely already come about via splat books and other expansions. As in, with AWT, archetypes, new feats, etc., the fighter nowadays seems more or less as fun and viable as the barbarian, ranger or slayer. Possibly it could use a few more boosts, but it's not far off the mark.

Anything beyond that, is my impression, tends to become a broader discussion about making full BAB classes as a whole more versatile and powerful, to put them more on par with classes that have greater access to magic. That's not a problem unique to the fighter, though.

@Cyrad: Oh, yes, I do, sorry. I seem to be expressing myself vaguely repeatedly, I'm afraid. Apologies. I know AWT is available via feats; I'm talking about being able to exchange the often pointless weapon training weapon group expansions for it, not having to sacrifice feat slots in order to get it. I realize I've not been laying that out clearly. Sorry for the confusion.

I definitely don't think niche protection is something that should be baked into the class design. It's fine if, like, your mate wants to play a healer, to then not optimize the s~!& out of your own character to be an even better healer than them. It's also not a problem if someone actually manages to build a fun healing class (like DPS's vitalist) that is awesome at healing and may be one of the best, or the best, healer in the game. But I don't think it should be a point of design philosophy for the game that only one class can heal, or only one class can disarm magic traps, etc..

...I suppose throwing in Making Craft Work (with some slight tweaks) would probably be a good idea, too, but that one's practically free.

I keep thinking, if all spellcasters (except for alchemists and investigators; I think "vancian" casting via alchemy actually fits them) were changed into spherecasters, and you then added in Path of War as an option alongside existing martial classes to provide a bit of power-level variety, doesn't that just basically solve everything aside from possibly rewriting the rogue a third time? I mean, you could add in cool stuff like Akashic Mysteries and obviously DPS's psionics, but those don't include anything crucial for the game to function. Spheres of Power even has the rules option of getting some vancian utility spells back via rituals to adjust a game's magic level.

The only problem with this is that, since these are all well-received and popular 3pp supplements, it seems unlikely PF would ever steer too clearly in that direction in terms of first-party publications, whether in the context of a hypothetical "2nd edition" or otherwise. Still, it means all you have to do to get a vastly less problematic and more playable game is buy two 3pp supplements and you're kind of good to go.

Cheers,
- Gears

Spheres of Power! Spheres of Power! Spheres of Power!

*has read the book now that Malwing gifted me; pauses for breath*

Spheres of Power! Spheres of Power! Spheres of Power!

Roy Greenhilt dosnt just fite low lvl n00bs how dare u

wat

Technotrooper. This guy gets it. Awesome suggestions. Favorited! :)

My group does half of these things already, or implement other changes very similar to them in terms of results. Definitely not a panacea, but a darn good start.

Cheers,
- Gears

I am aware of Oden's origins within Germanic mythology. I was talking primarily about the role he had in viking society. That dude was a tricksy powergaming munchkin sonofab$%+~ if ever I clapped eyes on one. Which is obviously suitable, because that's what you'd expect out of an iron age king. I'm not familiar with these God of War games whereof you speak (aside from recognizing that they exist), but I'll have a look.

EDIT: Oh, wait, I should've clarified, my bad, apologies. I've only done a course on, like, you know, Ancient Egypt before the rise of Greek civilization.

Wasn't Jack 1 in Tekken 1 and then in Tekken 2 they just changed his/her/its name to Jack 2?

...this one time, at martial camp...