Firewarrior44's page

FAQ'd

When it comes to modifiers that affect weapon damage rolls, or simply “damage rolls” (such as the bonus on damage rolls from Point-Blank Shot, inspire courage, and smite evil), special abilities that deal damage on a successful attack roll, apply them on hit point damage only...

Flat out doesn't work

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I feel like meaningfully interacting with the world outside the context of combat shouldn't really require anything beyond "talking to NPCs" and "making choices about how one course of action is preferable to another."

Amen to that.

I am now wondering quite how atypical my player group is, in that so much of this argument feels like "Player A can do X and Y and Z and player B can only do W and that makes the game broken and less fun", while mine very much start from the position "We can do X and Y and Z and W, how best can we synergise this to achieve the campaign goals in a fun way." And sure, there are games that may more naturally tend to the latter direction than Pathfinder necessarily does, but there's only so much Pandemic Legacy in existence.

A point of the Disparity argument is Player 1 can do X Y Z and W while player 2 can only do W.

Basically the claim is player 2 is sort of redundant and unnecessary / adds nothing new to the parties abilities.

Question what is the action economy of a level 1 commoner?

Move Partial actions: 1 (1 base, +0 bonus)
Partial Actions In a Standard Action: 1
Immediate Actions: None

Total: 2 partial action (1 reserved for "move" actions exclusively)

or

Move Partial actions: 1 (0 base, +0 bonus)
Partial Actions In a Standard Action: 1
Immediate Actions: None

Total: 1 partial Action

Oh wow didn't know you were in the hospital. Hope you're doing well!

Except for the part where the spell explicitly denotes Scrying (including a hyperlink) as being sufficient to teleport (with a ~25% chance of error).

Familiarity: “Very familiar” is a place where you have been very often and where you feel at home. “Studied carefully” is a place you know well, either because you can currently physically see it or you’ve been there often. “Seen casually” is a place that you have seen more than once but with which you are not very familiar. “Viewed once” is a place that you have seen once, possibly using magic such as scrying.

It's not a misunderstanding. It's them trying to nerf the tactic without having to do a reprint.

I think that's still a work in progress

nighttree wrote:

It may be an uncommon opinion....but I don't see anything that needs to be fixed.

A high level caster is supposed to be more powerful than a melee character. It's a fundamental part of a fantasy setting.

I agree.

To my mind comparing casters and fighters is like comparing apples and oranges. I think it's more important to ensure that the various fighter classes are in balance with each other. And that the spellcasting classes are in balance with each other.

Then Why is a 20th level caster and a 20th level fighter the same CR? the System assumes they are the same (or near equivalent) challenge rating.

If this is not the case (which it is) then something is most definitely broken.

"They aren't overpowered because I take steps to mitigate their power"

Isn't saying they are not too strong it's conceding that they are too strong but that strength can be mitigated.

1) Caustic eruption is blocked by neither spell-bane nor anti-magic field as it is an instantaneous conjuration creation effect, it's real acid.

2) The Archon's do enough damage in 1 round to instantly kill the dragon on account of there being 120 of them.

3) Wall of suppression can suppress an anti-magic field and or spell-bane so long as their caster levels are lower or equal to that of the casters. Unless said spell-bane is key'd to wall of suppression at which point it must be first brought down with another spell-bane

This is going to be a fun thread.

The short of it is their utility and adaptability is unmatched and they can theoretically have an answer to literally any problem you present them with.

Also there are several spells which are so powerful that an adventures needs to plan around their existence them or be ruined

You could just shoot her full of shiver coated arrows. But that's probably Cheating? 50% chance per hit to fall asleep, no save.

This is flatly and objectively untrue. You get experience for overcoming challenges. Period. Nothing about killing or violence at all. It is indisputably possible to achieve 20th level entirely by social interaction and persuasion.

That's not very likely for PCs, but that's an artifact of the players and GMs wanting to use the game's well developed combat system not...

The game explicitly outlines that you are expected to be mainly participating in combat as per the CRB. Yes you CAN do it through other means but the game does not expect that or set that expectation with it's rules and systems but it's very explicit that the game is a combat centric monster blender.

The heart of any adventure is its encounters. An encounter is any event that puts a specific problem before the PCs that they must solve. Most encounters present combat with monsters or hostile NPCs, but there are many other types—a trapped corridor, a political interaction with a suspicious king, a dangerous passage over a rickety rope bridge, an awkward argument with a friendly NPC who suspects a PC has betrayed him, or anything that adds drama to the game. Brain-teasing puzzles, roleplaying challenges, and skill checks are all classic methods for resolving encounters, but the most complex encounters to build are the most common ones—combat encounters.

(Take the following as my opinion)

Ending the life of some sentient creature is never a good act. It is often an evil act, especially if done through malicious intent. The can be through means as simple as petty blood lust, convenience (as in a disregard for their life), or as an act of revenge.

Ending someone's life can be a non-evil act (as in neutral, never good) when it is done in defense of self (or others) or through carrying out a sentence (whether lawfully or not) based on the creature's past actions.

Now, to clarify. I believe that ending a life is NEVER a GOOD thing. At best, it can be neutral on that good/evil axis. Whether or not it is justified by law or chaos is heavily dependent on the circumstances leading up to the action. Ending the life of the big bad villain is not a GOOD thing, but the act of protecting all those he might further harm is a GOOD thing. Fighting the good fight is a GOOD thing. The trail of bodies that you have left in your wake, through no malicious intent of your own, is NOT a GOOD thing.

So, terminating the life of your prisoner after interrogation is not a GOOD thing. It might even have been evil if you had promised no harm to him if he did surrender (definitely evil).

Killing Demons is a Good Act on the Good/Evil Axis.

The Moral stance that killing is bad doesn't nessecarily carry over to the cosmic reality present in Pathifnder. If generally you kill a [Evil] creature it's a [Good] act (with some exceptions like torture / grotesque execution).

There's a LG god who explicitly says to take no prisoners except when it's strategically advantageous to do so.

Against my people’s enemies, I will show no mercy. I will not allow their surrender, except when strategy warrants. I will defeat them, yet even in the direst struggle, I will act in a way that brings honor to Torag.

Honorably executing a prisoner after plying them for information can be totally permissible (and a [Good]) act.

I find it easier if you decouple morality from good and Evil Axis' and assume they are objective forces / teams in the universe (because they are in pathfinder).

So you delineate between cosmic [Good] and [Evil] and moral good and evil. I.e Killing a Good creature is Evil and killing an Evil Creature is Good. The nature of the kill might be evil by moral standards but is objectively [Good] by cosmic standards. Ideally the way you kill aligns with both the cosmic and the moral but that is not always possible or feasible. But so long as you are adhering to the cosmic [Good] you don't actually suffer a mechanical penalty.

That way you almost totally avoid situations like this. And I personally think it's necessary as they game is about killing (usually evil) things so such an act shouldn't cause undue mechanical strife.

Also just because it is a cosmically [Good] act doesn't mean you wouldn't suffer legal repercussions from mortal justice systems like how Deadmanwalking described.

Ugh gearing a demon lord xD

I tend to agree Nocticula is probably the strongest after old Knobby legs, although Charon could also probably aquaire similar gear making his DC somewhere around 43-45 for you to loose your mind and then your youth in two attacks which is pretty scary.
I don't see Cthulhu gearing up however xD

What?!?!

In addition as "Chromantic Durgon <3" pointed out she also created the Demon Lord Kostchtchie.

Firewarrior44 wrote:

How in 4 pages of posts has the Zygomind not been mentioned yet? It's an entire campaign hook in itself even if you discount the fact that it's a walking existential crisis.

Erm,

Tacticslion, earlier this page wrote:

I find the zygomind similarly horrifying.

:I

EDIT: I mean, it was, like, the second post. XD

My bad. I Searched "Zygomind" but it came up with no result's. I assumed they were accurate >.>

How in 4 pages of posts has the Zygomind not been mentioned yet? It's an entire campaign hook in itself even if you discount the fact that it's a walking existential crisis.

Baba Yaga too. The 'monster' that can literally be justified in doing anything as she can craft artifacts and spells and even Demon lords on a whim.

If a blind creature can pop images then the spell effectively just grant's 50% concealment until N near misses have been achieved as any attacker can close their eyes to go from a 1 in 8 to 1 in 2 chance of hitting while also chipping away at the images.

So i'm in the no you can't break images while blind camp.

Chyrone wrote:

Antipaladin, with ghost touch weapon i presume, following up on Mysterious Stranger's post?

Or did you have another means for one to be effective?

Aura of Cowardice to impose a -4 on saves vs. fear effects and suppress fear immunity. Channel Energy, possibly with Command Undead. Cruelties for imposing status effects with Touch of Corruption. Fiendish Boon. Smite Good ("Regardless of the target, smite good attacks automatically bypass any DR the creature might possess;" even against neutral and evil opponents, this is useful). Touch of Corruption for damaging living creatures (possibly with a conductive ghost touch weapon) and self healing (undead). Unholy Resilience to add Cha bonus to all saves.

If the antipaladin targets a creature that is not good, the smite is wasted with no effect.

I don't think smite good works on no good creatures

Has anyone brought up Inflict Pain, Mass yet? Sure, it allows a save, but that's one full round of the party taking a -4 to very important rolls. Time that with all the great save or suck spells previously mentioned by others and it raises the probability of them landing by quite a bit.

Also Terrible Remorse on the low Will Save melee so they keep hitting themselves, not the enemy. Bonus points for making it Persistent (metamagic).

Make sure the pain strike is being cast by a mythic Lich as Mythic Saving throws (Ex) will make it ineffective otherwise

Problem with the medium is largely that it relies on GM permission to actually channel the spirit you want with alarming regularity. If the PCs are traveling cross country on horseback and decide to camp for the night in a clearing hundreds of miles from civilization, you're basically reliant on "there's a sacred grove near here" or "there was a battle fought here" else you can't access the majority of your class features.

Certainly the GM should cooperate, but I'm sure we've all known times where the GM was uncooperative.

True even with the FAQ

As the class says, you can channel from any appropriate location, and the favored locations are just a place to start. There might be times where you don’t have access to all six legends, but a medium, either PC or NPC, should generally be able to access a legend if they can come up with a good conceptual tie between the legend and a location he can find or even set up himself. For instance, a medium could go hunt a deer and then use that location to channel a champion spirit of a legendary hunter.

You're still at the GM's mercy if you want to channel a specific spirit especially if you are pressed for time.

I tinkered a bit this should be roughly what you need to do;

Basically you just need to get a link to thee highest level folder of the documents and all of that folders contents will have the permissions of the link.

in my example link there should be 2 files in the main folder and a sub folder containing another file. I only had to hit "Share" on the uppermost folder (named "Kirthfinder test")

Is the password to prevent people from tampering with the files?

If yes you can just set permissions in google drive to "view only". I think you might be able to batch set them by sharing the folder.

You could also just zip all of the files and then you'd only have a single file to password.

Wall of Suppression Cast at CL-1 , this works a lot better if the Enemy in question is of a higher Caster level than the party possibly using prayer beads / orange ioun stones.

This could also be achieved via VMC Witch using the coven hex to increase caster level by enough to beat the parties CL threshold

Then just cast whatever other spell combinations were proposed as they will have no magical items, spells or abilities with which to retaliate outside of artifacts.

--------

If the Liches in question are mythic then Mythic magic missile With meta magic would actually be my call. Maximized and augmented that's 90 damage per Lich that cannot be avoided in any way (810 across 90 missiles) and then you could add an additional 30 per Lich with quicken for a grand total of 1080 Damage Which can be subdivided as you wish.

obviously this number can be a lot higher but i'm lazy

I just see it as another debuff where the fix happens to be a [Good] descriptor spell. In the same way remove disease or Cure light wounds is the answer to disease or hit point damage.

Rules of the universe and all that.

Also if you want a vicious non evil spell... boneshatter. Literally it's only purpose is to splinter a creatures bones and causes enough horrible pain to exhaust you (-6 str and con).

Fluffy stuff for reference

Interesting. It looks like Victim actual has a specific useasge when used in conjunction with sacrifice

Definitions of 'victim" Include:

So actually it would seem that it implies it could be anything, sentient being or animal.

Firewarrior44 wrote:

Im breaking and entering into their lair it's hardly self defense. And breaking and entering into monster lairs is already OK for lawful good characters to do, in fact they are expect to.

That falls into stopping them from committing further evil acts.

Breaking into a monster lair (read dungeon) is not an evil act. Otherwise the Paladin would not be a Class.

Im breaking and entering into their lair it's hardly self defense. And breaking and entering into monster lairs is already OK for lawful good characters to do, in fact they are expect to.

So according to Lizard-folk Cannibalism (defined as consuming a sentient being) for pragmatic purposes is ok.

Cook people state's it's explicitly an evil act to use the hex.

I don't take this as something that can be generalized to "all cannibalism is inherently/automatically an evil act"

Given that precedent for it not not being so exists. And if cook people wanted it to be a generalism then it would say "knowingly Consuming sentient beings is always an evil act" or something to that effect.

Wearing the skin of sentient things / crafting trophies out of their flesh are also non-aligned actions (Dragonhide, monstercrafting).

Presumably tearing chunks out of an enemy's flesh with our teethe /claws (bite attacks) are not inherently evil acts as you can be a Good aligned druid / natural attacker.

I believe tearing out a slain foes heart and destroying it to prevent resurrection is at worse pragmatic and not an evil act.

So why is consuming the heart of an evil monstrous enemy that you will be killing regardless in order to prevent yourself from becoming an evil monstrous enemy an evil act? It's at worse pragmatic which is already established as a non-evil form of cannibalism.

At the very least spilling the blood of monsters is a legitimate and morally safe way of unlocking higher orders of power for lawful good characters. I don't know about literally powering their healing (that was hyperbole / jest )

Although bathing in the blood of sentient beings can restore negative levels as well. Also not an evil act apparently. (Dragon's blood)

Firewarrior44 wrote:

don't get it what's the evil act? The Heart ripper blade isn't an evil evil nor is using it (unless such text is missing from it's pfsrd description).

You're just killing a evil creature (presumably as the subject of the CDG is going to be a monster in the dungeon) to benefit yourself. How is that any different then killing monsters for their experience or their loot? You know the core premise of the game.

Well, depends on the interpretation. The description uses words like "baleful" and "blasphemous", which are terms you normally not use in a non-evil context. Also it grants those powers "when used in bloody sacrifice". So even when it is possible by RAW, it's obvious that it isn't intended to be used as a simple +1 weapon in combat or for animal sacrifices.

So we're not talking about hunting animals here. We're talking about hunting sentient humanoid beings with the express purpose to murder them in cold blood (you can't even kill them simply in combat, you have to make them helpless before so as to be able to do a CDG. And all that to eat their still-beating heart to save yourself (and we're not talking self-defense here).

So if you you want to tell me that a lawful good character can do all this with no consequences (because, you know, the core premise of the game), then we have very different perspectives on what the core premise of the game is (little hint: to me, it's not: "Kick in the door, kill the monsters and loot the treasure.")

A lawful good character can kill evil creatures without repercussion, yes. They can also take all their things without repercussion. At least moral repercussion.

At least one guaranteed repercussion is that you get better at killing evil creatures (and creatures in general but for this example the party is good aligned) via additional powers and abilities and loot. The majority of which designed to kill, and subdue threats with violence and force.

I reject the premise that that's not the core game-play that's Incentivized by the Pathfidner system.

Anyways back to the dagger:

I don't get it what's the evil act? The Heart ripper blade isn't an evil evil nor is using it (unless such text is missing from it's pfsrd description).

You're just killing a evil creature (presumably as the subject of the CDG is going to be a monster in the dungeon) to benefit yourself. How is that any different then killing monsters for their experience or their loot? You know the core premise of the game.

Can confirm roll20 is great, may or may not have 8,000 hours on it .... and or a problem >_>

Looking at this picture. I'd guess about 25 feet from the rightmost corner of the middle platform.

I got to this number by measuring the height of one of the people in pixels (~30 px) and then measuring the distance in pixels (~144 px). Assuming the person i measured was a human female of average height I got 25 Feet 6 Inches. So It's probably somewhere in that ballpark.

I like Hero points for when i don't want PC's to die. If you hand them out liberally enough it's effectively the same thing, but if they're constantly putting themselves in danger their pool will run dry.

Kirth Gersen wrote:

As a DM, I'm able to provide a clear storyline for the players to follow, but also allow them to go off in different directions if that's what they want to do.

Same here.

Quote:

I'm aware it's strictly a matter of personal preference, but that's exactly the sort of campaign I find to be enjoyable as a player -- where I get to use my brain for strategy in the game, instead of mindlessly rolling dice. If the DM insists I "stop over-thinking things and follow the story!!!" -- that's when I find a different game.

...

And I hate metagaming: "to go somewhere else and gain more power (and HP)" as Megistone put it, is something you do in a computer game, not in a tabletop RPG. So in my games, if players try something like this they can be sure that the wizard will do the same in the meantime, will simply vanish or worse, will already have gone through with whatever threat the PCs wanted to stop. What the wizard certainly won't do is sit and wait for them to return 5 levels later.

Apart from that, the problem with doing the research is that you get your information from the GM and remember, in that example, that is the guy that isn't even aware that the wizard is too strong for the group. So what the PCs will hear is "yeah,you can beat him" only to find out that the GM "lied" to them the hard way. For some reason I don't think that the players will appreciate the GM saying: "yeah sorry, my fault, but you'd better roll new characters nonetheless.

Not fighting the Lich at level 1 and doing other things to level up is a totally reasonable course of action (an extreme example). Personally I'd hardly call wanting to get more powerful so you're better equipped to fight a powerful foe meta-gaming.

As that band /power gap closes it becomes a cost benefit analysis of maximizing your potential for victory weighed against possible drawbacks (like waiting too long and his evil plan has come to fruition). Which is part of the fun for a lot of people as that's another tactic / strategy that needs consideration.

If your research about the wizard results in "you can beat him" then that's a failure on the players end as well for not asking the right questions. "What spells does he favor?", "How many minions does he have?", "Is there a time of day / place we could potentially ambush him", "Do we know where he keeps his spellbook" etc. Obviously there's potential for error as everyone's human and sometimes it happens. At which point you talk about it and figure out if you re-roll or ret-con or whatever.

Also the game has systems for determining what that dice result means. It doesn't have systems for who the murderer is and whatnot.

Given that the assumption is that you are using the games systems (this is implicit by playing the game unless stated otherwise) some people might take offense to the integrity of those systems being ignored, altered or otherwise subverted.

If they have such a strong opinion then I'd just put the burden on them to define what is and is not fudging.

You could also just raise your own concerns had reach a mutual understanding through discourse.

In general just communicate expectations.

I feel like the stance on dice is rather implicit based on the "all rules are optional rules".

Assuming you and your groups are all of, or OK with that mindset I would wager the chances of you encountering a player who takes issue with the altering of roll extremely small. So it makes sense that it never really comes up.

I'm always fond of linking this

If you need to fudge things to tell a better story, don't let on that you're doing it. Telling the players how you went easy on them, takes away from the story, IMHO.

'you' being a general-ism and not PCScipio specifically.

If you aren't going to say when you cheat on things that's only alright in my opinion if you have also disclosed that it may occur and people are OK with that. If you don't then it's much much worse as now you're lying.

Zero GM cheating is acceptable to be found out about.

Don't cheat or don't be caught.

Or get consent and then getting caught is irrelevant

That just seems like a case of over engineering the problem. You just ban the spell / feat / option instead of adding a contrived set of mechanics to make it impossible to acquire said spell / feat / option.

And then what about magi and their Knowledge Pool ability. Magus Hivemind of infinite spell knowledge!

Also Blood money does damage which doesn't actually lower your score so it doesn't matter if your score cannot go bellow 1

I too enjoy playing within the constraints of a game I agreed to play