Frozen Mustelid's page

So, it's been almost a year with no update, so I figured I'd post an update.

No, the project is not abandoned. I have just had a very, very busy year, and will probably remain busy until at least mid or late summer next year.

Where I'm at right now is that I was close to releasing 0.3 and adding SLAs/spells to monsters. I was running into a weird bug that's honestly a little hard to debug from where it is in the code, and I've only been able to make time for a few days in the last year to even try to mess with it. Usually, by the time I am able to get around to it I've had to spend most of the time allotted to figuring out exactly what problem I was having in the first place and redoing my old tests.

I may or may not add a Pathfinder 2 mode to the system. Ever. It's not high priority (because honestly from what I've seen it looks like garbage). One day I would like to see this program support most well-known TTRPGs, but right now the highest priority is getting full PF1e monster support (minus some PC stuff), a working GUI mode, the ability to give monsters core class levels, and a working Windows version (which should be more or less trivial now that I have a proper Windows install and will be either in 0.3 or 0.4). A few other features would be nice, but I expect most of the other features I'd add are either trivial to implement or directly related to those 3 things I mentioned.

If I get free time to work on this before summer, I expect to spend it working on an unrelated project. Most of my summer will probably be split between this other project and PFRPG, but with how my life has been going recently, any plans I make are tentative at their absolute best.

Alright, so! I have some news: the legacy website is now up at legacy.aonprd.com. It does not contain the search functionality. If you notice anything majorly wrong with accessing the legacy website, please go ahead and post.

I've also updated the blog text to reflect this.

Awesome! I'm happy now.

I'm a little confused by this. I think Archives of Nethys is a fine site for some PF players, but it doesn't address my needs or uses very well. The absolute biggest thing I use the PRD for is the global bestiary index, because for some bizarre reason Paizo has never printed combination environment+CR tables in any of the six Bestiaries. Paizo's site has a great set of filters for monsters, while AoN's is very primitive.

Even as a player, I rarely go to AoN. Pathfinder power creep has been absolutely insane ever since ACG was printed and for this reason most DMs I've played with have heavy restrictions on what content is allowed. AoN is a lot more comprehensive that the PRD and that counts for a lot, but almost everything it has that PRD doesn't is banned by most DMs anyways. Even when it's not, sometimes the indices don't indicate what book an ability is from.

I'm glad that Paizo made a plan to keep PF1e material easily accessible, instead of pulling a WotC and removing all links to OGC from the main site. I just wish there was also a plan to make these amazingly useful filter tools accessible.

This actually somehow doesn't look terrible. Two things that concern me:

1) CE Antipaladins was a dumb idea in 1e. They always should have been LE.

2) Strictly defining the order of tenets smacks of rules legislating RP. Yes, paladin's rules abilities have always been tied to their RP (except in D&D 4th and 5th because WotC is run by morons), but also because it can and will lead to stupid corner cases where the rules as written shouldn't apply. Paladin code of conduct traps are, nearly 100% of the time, the result of bad GMing. It's perfectly acceptable to make unpaladin-y paladins fall, but the traps everyone uses to "prove" that paladins are a flawed concept only prove that bad GMs exist. A paladin's conduct is overseen by their deity, any deity who would make an LG person their champion has enough compassion and understanding to know when a compromise to the code was necessary to do the least possible evil (from the paladin's knowledge at the time) in the given situation.

Everything I find about it online says that the Rougarou bite attack is 1D4. It falls in line with the Toothy/Tusked Half Orc bite attack. It is a secondary attack if the Rougarou is wielding a manufactured weapon.

If there's a precedent for 1d4 and no other information, I guess it's supposed to be 1d4.

The confusion arose because on B6-242, the statblock for the Rougarou Ranger example (ranger 1 and no racial HD) lists the bite attack as a 1d6+STR - At least, in the printing I have (1st). However, in the "Rougarou as Characters" sidebar, it says the bite deals 1d4 damage.

Thanks for your help.

We ... [eliminated] Pathfinder First Edition's bonus spells granted for having a high ability score.

Yet another reason I won't be buying 2e. If you want to play a gish, you shouldn't be only two or three DC points at most away from a pure caster version of your class. Removing bonus spells was one of the things I hated the most about what WotC did to the current edition of D&D. If you think it was OP as it was, then you should be pushing for fewer bonus spell slots, not their complete removal. Changing the number of bonus spells you get doesn't make casters any less SAD or MAD than they already were.

Like most of what we've seen of 2e so far, Paizo is attempting to fix problems that don't exist and/or trying to fix them in completely the wrong way.

I'm excited that this book is coming out, but I am a bit concerned about the contents. I like the idea, but with 2E around the corner I'm concerned that this might be a quick cash-in to get more funds for 2E's development.

I know I can't expect unbiased information on quality of the material from Paizo, but can we at least get an estimate of the approximate power level? Is this going to be more APG/UC level, ACG level, or Unchained/UI level?

Yes. The bonuses are granted to different stats and there is no limit on the number of ioun stones you can have up at one time.

A player wants to make a Rougarou (B6) character in a game I'm in, and the DM asked my opinion on it because I know Pathfinder better. I don't see it as OP, but I do find something confusing - The damage die on the bite seems to morph between a d6 and a d4. In the example statblock presented, the bite attack is a d6, but in the Rougarou Character section, it says that it's a d4.

At first I thought that it was because a bite is the only melee option in the example, but I couldn't find anything in the example statblock or the Light/1H/2H weapon section (CRB141) to indicate that changing the handedness of a weapon would change its damage dice. Is there some rule I'm missing, or is this yet another example of the shoddy quality of B6?

The rules are easy to use (depending on how you use them) and simple to learn, however, the book, was terribly written, used poor language, and was all around a terribly built book (so bad I'd rewrite the entire thing from scratch. Indeed, I basically am at the moment, as I am making my own system). I wouldn't trust the authors to write "The sky is blue." Such incredibly bad writing can make what is easy seem very confusing.

This is one of the most sensible opinions anyone has ever expressed about 3.x/PF, ever. Not everything is simple, but people way overestimate the d20 system's complexity just because most 3.x books (i.e., every one I've ever read) is either poorly laid out or there was some hidden gotcha that you don't notice unless you have the core rules practically memorized and/or you read the entire splatbook cover to cover. I think it's really telling how so many people hail 5e as a simple, intuitive system, when many of the core mechanics are identical and about half of the rest are very similar. It's just that WotC was aware that people needed to be able to use the PHB as a reference book to look up everything you need to know about a certain rule without having to do a cover-cover read. I don't like the system, but I do like the effort made to make the PHB usable in that way.

I'm not very familiar with Golarion. I don't use it and I've never played in a campaign that uses it. So forgive me if this sounds stupid, but how does this fundamental change to how magic items work NOT require a massive restructuring of the world? If Golarion was built using a similar methodology to Eberron, then the fact that magic is a fundamental force of the universe should have an impact on how the world works in terms of economics and political power dynamics. You can't just go from guaranteed predictable magic items to "maybe it'll work, maybe it won't" magic items without a LOT of stuff changing.

This wouldn't be a problem, except that Paizo already said that Golarion won't have some sort of cataclysm to justify this kind of change.

The only way I could see this working is if the denizens of Golarion have an OOTS-like awareness that it runs on RPG logic, and thus everybody knows what a Charisma score is. I doubt very much that this is the case, since that inevitably leads to silliness and it's unlikely that any game trying to take itself seriously would have something like that be its default world.

As an aside, I see a lot of things in the playtest refer to "1d20 + x + level." This annoys me, because PF1e rarely cares about total class level, most often preferring to tie rules to total Hit Dice. As a GM, I liked the universal HD standard, so that I could be extra mean to my players when I toss a few class levels onto some monsters.

Perhaps I'm veering off topic, but the skill examples you gave here are not really how 5e is supposed to work. Your trap-checking example, for instance, should have been resolved as 'the barbarian helps you search, which gives you advantage' - so you'd have had 2 rolls at +9 rather than a roll at +9 and a roll at -2.

The takeaway for the larger discussion, I guess, is that you can't really discuss 5e's bounded accuracy/DC system without accounting for the effects of the advantage/disadvantage system.

The barbarian can't assist the rogue because the barb doesn't have proficiency in either skill. You can't assist another person unless the assister is proficient.

If you don't think that this scenario can't be repeated with advantage/disadvantage, you're sorely mistaken. It's a fairly regular occurrence to watch somebody roll double nat 20 at disadvantage or double nat 1 at advantage. We've seen it so many times, we sometimes shout, "1 in 400!" as a way of recognizing that the theoretically rare chance that either of these things happen seems to happen about every three sessions, for each game we're in. Oh, and we rarely have scenarios come up where players have advantage - The 5e rules have very few ways of letting the players get advantage, usually just leaving it up to, "L0L gm sez wen u get it." There are lots of ways to impose disadvantage on enemies, but outside of the Enhance Ability spell, the Fighting Spirit feature of the Samurai subclass, Aid Another (which, in skills or in attacks, rarely sees actual play in any of my groups) and Barbarian Reckless Attack, I can't think of too many ways to get advantage without inflicting a status condition or being a stealthy stealthy rogue.

ulgulanoth wrote:

I would hope that the first bestiary contain at least the vast majority of the monsters from the first 3 bestiaries, otherwise the game is going to be too lean.

I'm guessing a truly credible version of that book would be at least 600 pages.

Are you willing to pay $60-70 for such a book?

I'm genuinely interested in people's answers, because to tell you the truth I am strongly considering a base monster reference that is significantly larger than Bestiary 1's 320 pages.

So... don't be shy about your opinions, please.

$60, yes. $70, well, I don't know. That is, if I buy 2e at all. Judging from the information that's been released already, I'd probably prefer to stick with 1e.

Would it be possible for Paizo to release new monsters for 1e and 2e? I felt like there was a lot of untread ground, monster-wise, in PF1e. A lot of creatures could have been made, niches could have been filled, and more 3.5 monsters could have been converted so I wouldn't have to downgrade their CR by 2 to make it work in PF.

Bounded accuracy is atrocious. Your main thing you specialize in the whole game is rendered worthless through will of the dice. Consider this scenario between a level 8 rogue with +3 Int and Dex and expertise in Search and Thief Tools and a level 8 barbarian with -2 to both Int and Dex and no proficiency in either skill.

Rogue: I search the chest for traps. (rolls nat 6) 15!
DM: You don't find any traps.
Barbarian: I want to try! (rolls nat 18) 16!
DM: The lid is sitting on a pressure plate. It will be difficult to remove the trap without setting it off.
Rogue: I try to disarm the trap. My Dexterity(Thief tools) check is 17 (nat 8).
DM: You're trying to jam the plate closed, but it doesn't want to stay.
Barbarian: Let me try that.
Rogue: Sure.
Barbarian: WOO! Nat 20! That's an 18.
DM: You manage to jam the plate. The chest is now safe to open.

This is not a hypothetical scenario, this happens ALL THE TIME in 5e. It's not always the same player, but very often the one player who took an obscure or rarely-used ability is completely upstaged by another player because of a bad roll. It feels awful. 5e is designed to make every class useful in combat, so as a player you feel like your build is useless because the only thing you can contribute is damage, which every other class can do just as well - And if you're having a bad night, you can't roll to hit, and the enemies make all of their saves because level-appropriate enemies rarely have less than a 40% chance to make their save. Heck, a CR 1/4 Zombie has a 15% change of making its CON save against a level 20 Wizard with 20 (i.e., max) INT. Because zombies have a +3 CON mod, they can make a DC21 save by rolling 18. Likewise, a CR 1/4 skeleton can take half damage from Fireball from the same wizard on 19. Since the average damage of 5e Fireball cast at its lowest level is 28, and skeletons have 13 HP, if you roll low on the damage then it's very possible for skeletons to survive being Fireballed by a max level wizard. Out of all of the terrible decisions made in 5e, bounded accuracy is the worst.

Leveling up: At first I didn't mind this, but the more I think about it the more problems it sounds like it brings up. Is every monster worth the same XP? Are DMs gonna have to do APL calculations and compare that to encounter level like this is 3.0? Is there going to be a simple (10% for each point of CR difference) progressive bonus/penalty for each point of CR that the monster CR differs from the players' character level? All in all, this is looking like the best change from PF1e. I'm cautious towards it, and if it is done well I probably would be neutral towards the change, but it doesn't seem like an absolute disaster like some of the other revelations.

Feats: I still don't like the idea of class feats. Even in PF1e I felt like some feats, like Critical Mastery, were unfairly and unnecessarily locked behind a class requirement. It there were general feats every level instead of the system you proposed, I think that would go a long way towards letting characters feel better about taking weaker feats for flavor/RP purposes, but it would probably require longer feat trees or weakening the general power of the "good" feats, neither of which I would like.

Ability scores: I don't especially like or dislike the Starfinder system. It does kind of fix the "odd problem" of 3.x, but only up to 18 in a stat. If there's anything in D&D 5e at all (I mean it, I really don't like 5e) that Paizo should add to their game, it's the idea of getting two "points" per ability score increase to apply to your stats as you see fit. Still, if the Starfinder system was tweaked a bit, I think it could be a really good system, I just dislike a few of the details.

Retraining: I've never liked retraining in TTRPGs. Every time I've played in a campaign that the DM allowed it, it's always taken so long it's hard to fit it into an adventurer's schedule (usually something like 2 months) or it's been so short it's practically at will (about a week). Personally, I prefer the too long method, since it does penalize players who make bad choices or pick up a feat that they know will be of use only for a single level or two. When it's on a short time scale, it always feels really gamey. If you can completely forget a skill you learned over the last two levels and pick up a completely different one in a week, why can't you grab more feats by spending a slightly longer amount of time to just learn the new skill without forgetting the other? In fact, why do you forget the other, besides the mechanics say so? My character isn't a Pokemon! Will a message pop up and say, "GEODUDE forgot TACKLE and learned MAGNITUDE!"?

Yes, I have had a character that required retraining.

It's this type of argument that boggles my mind. Why do you need to compare the sad situation of only having a +11 to a roll to facing a target of 30+?

In any game, if your bonus is +x, and the target is x+xn so that you need to roll consistently numbers that are difficult, the game will, in the long run, not be fun. So why would any DM make that the default?

Why not find out what the players think is a good "feeling" challenge, rolling 12+ to succeed, 14+, 8+, 6+ some value that all the players agree feels "right" and apply that to both characters and foes equally, so there is some sort of fairness involved.

This argument of "It's only fun for me if I succeed on rolls of 4+, but you only succeed against my character if you roll 16+" seems strange to me

Because each choice you make eats your resources. Feat slots, level slots, gold pieces, all of these are resources that can be expended to specialize. One of the worst things about 5e is that it's so homogenized that you have a slightly better than 50% chance of success at the thing you specialize in the hardest. In a better system like PF1e, if you spend a bunch of resources to allow yourself to be a light armor tank or unarmored tank, you're not going to be nearly as good at killing things as the crit fiend barbarian. Or if you want to pump Perception to be hilariously high, you limit your choice of races and classes, have to spend a few feat slots on it, have effectively 1 fewer skill rank per level (it's already guaranteed to go to Perception), and have to spend gold on Perception-boosting items.

The reward for all of this is that the party effectively autopasses certain types of challenges. This is great because the other party members can specialize in other things, and the net effect is that the party as a whole can better prepare for the challenges they can't autopass. Pathfinder is not a competitive game, it is a cooperative one.

What really seems strange to me is why you think that rolling a number on a die is inherently challenging. It's a challenge in the sense that it is an obstacle that can be overcome, but it's not difficult, it's just random.

Seeing as how the rest of my group adores 5e, I am unfortunately very well-acquainted with its ruleset. I don't think it's the worst thing ever, but overall it is a provably weaker system to PF. That said, I do like a few things about it.

Along with some other people in this thread, I liked short rest healing and useful cantrips. I disliked that cantrips eventually became more powerful than 1st-level spells due to lack of CL scaling, but I liked that damaging cantrips deal non-negligible damage at most levels of play instead of dealing negligible damage at all levels of play.

I also liked that prepared casters don't have to double-prepare a spell to cast it twice - That's always struck me as one of the dumbest ideas of Vancian magic, and no matter how the rulebook tries to explain it in-universe it always sounds like "because a wizard did it." It's a completely arbitrary restriction, just like race-restricted classes, or different classes requiring different amounts of XP to level, or some classes capping out at lower levels than others, or some races having a lower level cap than others and like all of those mechanics it should have been left to rot with AD&D. I have never made my players double-prepare a spell.

I liked the background system. I'm not a fan of the background feature system, but I like how you can mechanically quantify your character's background. PF1e could implement this by letting you add a skill or two to your class skill list, or giving you a small bonus to your skills, but that's basically how traits work anyways and those seem less prone to abuse than the 5e background system.

I like how in 5e, moving is just something you do, no action required. I disagree with other posters that this makes 5e combat more mobile, but only because 5e lacks an equivalent of a 5-ft step and moving really doesn't do anything except let you attack something else (not usually something worth eating an AOO for).

I like how lower-level characters are less squishy, but this gets absurd past level 3 or 4.

I like that everyone is autogranted Weapon Finesse, but the DEX->Damage portion unfortunately necessitates the hard cap of 20 on stats.

I think the 5e subclass system is an improvement over 3.x prestige classes, but a downgrade from PF's archetypes.

I like the option of doing starting gear by class, but 3e had this too IIRC. I don't remember how the 3e version was, but the 5e version is hilariously exploitable. You get 2 martial weapons as a fighter? Get two hand crossbows, sell them for a total of 75 gold, then buy your actual weapon/s out of that and pocket the rest.

Honestly, I think that's about it. I could squee about a few class features, but almost every other mechanical difference from 3.x in 5e I am either neutral towards or hate with a burning passion. The proficiency system removed a lot of RP potential from focusing on one skill at the expense of others (yes, there's bard/rogue Expertise, but only bards and rogues get that). The attempt at making all 6 abilities relevant to saving throws was clumsy at best. The removal of touch AC and the related adjustment of how spellcasters make attack rolls makes high-AC characters way too effective until high levels. Concentration is an utter travesty. Blaster casters feel way too weak at mid levels - Only their highest spell slots are effective at damaging at-level monsters, and they get so few of those due to lack of bonus spell slots you feel really weak. Metamagics locked to Sorc is retarded. Getting 2 ASIs is a great fix to the "odd problem" in 3.x, but making you give them up to get a feat is dumb, as is tying them to class level instead of character level. Lack of racial penalties doesn't make you feel like there's any kind of real trade-off going on - Though I do think it was a mistake to make all races in PF +2 instead of +0. I hate the bizarre multiclass rules in 5e. And a million and two other minor gripes, like the confusion resulting from renaming "standard action" to "action", the horrible crafting rules, and how the 5e action economy effectively negates the mere possibility of houseruling in a feat like Combat Reflexes. Not to mention that, not only does the system have almost no splat to speak of 4 years in, but the system is so limited by design that it can't even support splat. All in all, the more PF2e is like 5e, the less I will probably like it.

This alone will be the reason I will not buy 2nd ed. There may or may not be other reasons as well, but this is extremely restrictive. I don't think vanilla PF action economy needs more than a few minor tweaks. 1) Either completely integrate swift and immediate actions, where using one on your turn eats both until your next turn begins, or completely separate them so that you can do both in a round (in either case, action economy is guaranteed to refresh when your turn begins), 2) allow multiple attacks after moving more than 5 ft, and 3) Allow attack-move-attack without taking 5 feats for the privilege.

I like playing RPGs that give me meaningful options. If I wanted to play an RPG that takes them away, I could crack open my D&D 5e books.

Thanks for your answers, everybody!

Another illustration is the unchained barbarian Knockback rage power. It cites that a barbarian can use 'her full CMB regardless of the attack it replaces.' This means doing this is an exception -- normally, if your +8/+3 warrior uses the +3 attack for a manoeuvre, you're using the +3 and not the +8.

Finally, some rules text! It would have been better if this was printed in CRB, but it seems to be some unwritten law of the universe that every 3.x sourcebook has to have some really key information locked up and hidden somewhere you'd never think to look.

Combat Maneuvers used as an iterative attack suffer the same to-hit penalties as any other attack.

That's the thing, though - By the RAW, I was unable to find anything that says the lower attacks actually have a penalty. The sections I looked at say that you gain another attack at BAB of +6 and every 5 thereafter, but not that these lower attacks technically have a penalty applied to them.

The part that confuses me is the part that says, "add any bonuses you have on an attack rolls." Obviously you wouldn't add STR and BAB to your CMB roll again, so it really looks to me like you have two ways of calculating CMB after you get iterative attacks. There's the big, bold text on CRB198 and the smaller, more detailed text on CRB199.

So later combat maneuver attempts are made at a lower BAB than higher attacks/attempts?

When I use iterative attacks and swap out a later attack for a combat maneuver, does the CMB roll suffer the same cumulative -5 to BAB the attack would?

CRB198 gives a formula for calculating CMB, but CRB199 says CMB rolls are attack rolls. The section "Performing a Combat Maneuver" says that you add your CMB in place of your normal attack bonus, but it also says that you would add any bonuses or penalties you would normally have on an attack roll.

So if I want to trip and I have a BAB of +6 or better, is it my best option to do that for my first attack or my last?

John Napier 698 wrote:

Please, if you don't mind.

Sorry it took so long, I was having technical difficulties. I just published code to a new branch ("development") on the github page. Hopefully everything made it through okay. Also, I'm pretty sure I forgot to add a few changes to the changelog, but I can't remember what they are off the top of my head.

I just remembered to mention this: Next update after 0.3 will probably be an XML update. I haven't decided what library to use yet, but I'll make sure it's compatible with Windows too.

Please, if you don't mind.

Sorry it took so long, I was having technical difficulties. I just published code to a new branch ("development") on the github page. Hopefully everything made it through okay. Also, I'm pretty sure I forgot to add a few changes to the changelog, but I can't remember what they are off the top of my head.

Downloaded the Visual Studio 2017 build tools (the command-line tools and no IDE) and compiled my first program. Will begin working to port the Generator to Windows.

Neat! I feel bad about telling you this after 4 days, but 0.3 is looking close to ready. I have no idea when I'll have time to finish it, though. The coding for most of the new/improved features is done, but I haven't done any bug or quality testing at all. Most of the code hasn't been touched, but there are a few new files.

I may be able to find time later this month to finish 0.3, but maybe I won't. It almost certainly won't happen this week, and next is looking pretty bleak too. If you want me to post what I have in a new branch on the Github, I will. It builds, but I don't know yet if it works right. I made a change to findAndReplace(), which is pretty fragile.

You could work that into your character's backstory. For example, say your character is from a world that has been taken over by clothing-shaped alien parasites. An evil cult became the world's largest supplier of clothes, and put fragments of these clothes parasites into everything they manufacture. After thousands of years of conspiracy (and market penetration), this company decides to hit the magic button that will activate all of the clothes aliens. You somehow managed to escape all of the clothes aliens and tried resisting their rule with a bunch of nudists who had their headquarters by the beach, but met with no success. With everyone else being taken, and the clothes aliens beginning to devour your world itself for its energy, you finally gave up and hailed a passing spaceship.

Yeah people complain a lot. It is the internet. The issues get over-inflated. People that have no problem rarely on on the site to say so its the negative people that show up and complain. I wouldn't assume that the problems are as extreme as people would lead you to believe with out checking on it yourself. I'll listen to someone else but I won't trust their opinion till I can check on it myself.

I will say however that sacred geometry is a pain

Also I don't think their is a General agreement about ANYTHING on these forums.

I'll admit to not being very familiar with most of Paizo's recent Pathfinder material. The most recent player options book I own is Advanced Class Guide, which even in second printing and all of the relevant errata/nerfs, I still usually have an explicit ban on. I allowed one guy to be a Hunter (at a glance it seemed like the weakest new base class), and he's still way overperforming. He's basically better than the party druid at almost everything. Oh, and I only allowed him to be a hunter because I knew he doesn't have the system knowledge to take full advantage of the class or the patience to learn how. And he's still the second strongest person in the party.

Frozen Mustelid wrote:

flagrant balance issues

Frozen Mustelid wrote:

various ways of getting DEX->damage

I'm stumped as to flagrant balance issues ANY of the the dex to damage unless you're talking about them taking way too many feats/restrictions to get... :P [that's not an issue limited to soft covers though]

I'm not aware of any method to 3.5 to get DEX to damage for good reason - If DEX to damage is a thing, DEX becomes a god stat. It applies to initiative, so you always go first. It applies to hit, so if you min-max it you always hit. It applies to damage, so if you min-max it you deal a crapton of damage. It's a prereq for TWF, so you get more attacks/round. It applies to AC, so even if your opponent survives the first round they can't hit back. It applies to touch AC, meaning that Wizards can't hit you with their spells. It applies to Reflex saves, meaning that with 2 levels of monk or rogue (2 level dips being easy to fit into most builds) you're immune to traps and most damaging DC-based spells.

With 4 levels in Rogue or 2 in Barb, you don't get flat-footed, so that weakness is gone. Save or Die spells are a lot less prevalent than 3.5, so you can't bank on keeping high-DEX build in check with Fort saves, not that that's ever been a threat when a caster can craft Proof Against Disease/Poison or perma-Deathward items. The only major threat are Dominate/Charm spells, which can be a problem but you can easily reduce your attack surface by playing a Native Outsider or any other non-Humanoid-type race. Or, just get the caster to make you an Amulet of Mind Blank or something like that.

The only things that keep high-DEX builds from utterly dominating are the fact that they either deal no damage or they have to become really MAD by pumping STR and DEX. Yes, two-handers will still get their 1.5x STR to damage, but that's the single advantage they'll have. Though if your particular DEX->damage feature lets you add 1.5x DEX to damage on Elven Curve Blades, even that won't be a deterrent. In the campaign I'm currently running, the only way I'm aware of to get DEX->damage in the explicitly allowed bookset (the stuff that doesn't require my approval) is with Pistolero Gunslinger for these very reasons.

I hope I made sense. It is quite late my time. I hope I've adequately explained why DEX to damage is a terrible idea that should never be allowed without a LOT of consideration.

I fail to see the problem. From what I can gather on these forums, there is general agreement that Paizo's recent stuff does not match the same quality of material as their older books like APG or ARG. Not just that, but all of those softcover books you mentioned don't seem to have been that well thought out. A lot of the complaints I hear of flagrant balance issues seem to come mostly from the softcover books (Sacred Geometry, various ways of getting DEX->damage). Having the Pathfinder designers be able to think a little harder about new player options will probably be for the better.

I know two that are better than freeware, they're free software. Videotrans and Bombono. They're both *nix-only, though. I haven't used either one, I just searched my APT cache and those two came up.

They're not evil, but they're rarely nice to the PCs. More important than the creature's alignment is the fact that it is a dragon: It doesn't think it's superior to you, it knows it's superior to you. At best, the PCs can only ever be an entertaining distraction from a boring day.

As a result, from the PCs' point of view, it isn't really a good entity, it is a neutral entity, in the same way an ant might view a human that is indifferent to its survival or well-being. In dragon culture, this individual may be a paragon of goodness, but to a humanoid, it's just a stuck-up jerk sleeping in a cave all day while good men fight and die to stop the strong from preying on the weak.

That...doesn't seem possible. In fact, that seems impossible and I have numbers to back it up.

Numbers!
Here is my sheets doing damage calculations against equal level monsters (According to the actual monster manual creature creation guidelines). Even a 3/4 BAB guy who put only a secondary focus into his attack stat is hitting very reliably against equal level AC. The worst it ever gets is a level 20 guy trying to attack a level 20 monster's KAC and that's a 13+ (11+ if he's hitting against EAC, generally a good idea if you are lower base accuracy).

Your spreadsheet refuses to load past a certain point, so I can't see what your numbers show, but my experience playing the game (in a Society group, no less) is that nobody can hit for s$!!. Our players mostly seem to roll close to 10, and I have no idea what the GM is rolling but he can't hit us either.

Stormtrooper aim? PCs seem to be decently accurate, especially soldiers.

A disturbingly large percentage of the time, we can go a full round where this happens:

P1: I shoot it with my laser pistol (rolls 12 on die). I miss.
P2: I use my Get 'Em and shoot it with my glock (rolls 13 on die). I miss.
GM: The enemies try to hit you with their (melee or ranged attack, whichever is appropriate). They miss.
P3: I use my combat tracking on one and shoot it (rolls 14 on die). I miss.

And so on, where every player misses with a +3 or +4 attack stat mod and either a full BAB or a 3/4 BAB. Except for a couple of us, everyone has years of RPG experience (including a lot of 3.x) and a rulebook we can flip through and so far we've been pretty unsuccessful at rectifying this problem besides putting more points into STR or DEX. If you want things to die faster, good luck, because if you full attack you have to roll nat 17-18 to hit against weaklings because Paizo, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the only things you have a chance of full attacking are things that level-appropriate weapons should kill in 1 shot. Yes, there's a feat that reduces the penalty, but it's only available to a single race right now and it still doesn't solve the problem that you can't hit even without the penalty it imposes.

The thing is, you know the high relative AC was intentional because even though enemy damage is threatening, their TH bonus is low and their AC is high. If you threw that at a lower-level group, they would get murdered by high damage and the enemy's ability to hit, while the party couldn't hit the high AC on a standard attack action without rolling a nat 18 vs energy or a nat 20 vs kinetic. If you threw it at a higher-level group, they would actually be able to hit it and chew through the creature's HP while it helplessly nibbled on the PCs' shoulderpads, trying in vain to deal at least a single point of damage - To stamina.

So unless soldiers get something special besides full BAB, I don't see how they could have any better chance at hitting than a Combat Tracking mechanic or any other trick to get full BAB on a character. As is, I'm glad I'm one of the ones who didn't buy a rulebook, because whenever I run or play in a sci-fi RPG again I'll look into another system. Honestly, I think you'd have a better sci-fi RPG if you homebrewed a few new rules and weapons into regular Pathfinder. Would it be clunky? Definitely, but Starfinder would probably still be clunkier.

Pretty much my reasons for not liking Starfinder as much as I thought. That, and the fact that everyone has Stormtrooper aim and there doesn't seem to be a lot you can do about that.

Starfinder feels like the worst aspects of Pathfinder had a baby with the worst aspects of D&D 5e. The rules are complex, but your viable options are very limited.

Unless I missed something, there are no Paladins in Starfinder. I am writing this answer assuming this is about Pathfinder.

Foolish paladins aren't a problem - Bloodthirsty ones are. You gave an obvious "thin ice" warning to the paladin, so if he keeps acting like he is then it's perfectly okay to make him fall.

Your description of the player is something I have dealt with in the past. He was very clearly autistic and literally unable to understand why he was acting like a CE maniac instead of an LG protector. I tried to be patient and explain to him why he was acting like a maniac, but he never got it and eventually left the group because he wasn't able to accept my judgements on how people perceived his psychopath of a character.

I had a similar problem with another player (different campaign). It took him a few sessions to understand why I was having a problem with an allegedly CG character acting like the only alignment I ban (CE), but it finally clicked and he became a lot more fun to play with with.

For the sanity of your game, I would advise that if he acts like a psycho again, you make this guy fall until he repents (IC if not OOC). That said, be prepared for a lot of arguments and hostility over the next few sessions, if he doesn't just get fed up and leave.

1. I want to take a dependency on boost::program_options to perform command line processing in a cross-platform manner. This will also involve killing platform.hpp with fire; we can do platform detection in cmake and have it define tokens in config.hpp.in instead so we can avoid having #ifs in the code itself.

Sounds alright to me. I was kind of expecting platform.hpp to die when a proper build system came around.

1.5. Said tokens will be employed as a replacement for the path to the template file; cmake can do platform detection and generate a list of paths that the code can check for the template file.

Sounds good to me.

2. I want to convert a lot of uses of C-strings and raw pointers to use safe alternatives such as std::string, passing by (const) reference, or RAII techniques such as std::unique_ptr if pointers are absolutely needed. This will increase code safety against things like buffer overflows and help prevent memory leaks.

Seems largely unnecessary, but I'm not married to the current find-replace functions. Leaky memory (at least on Linux) gets freed upon program exit. A quick glance at the codebase indicates that almost nothing gets affected except the find-replace functions and the undocumented game select feature, and the only pointers those use are null-terminated character arrays. What I'm trying to say it, go for it if you think it's necessary. I don't think it's priority, but if it's better code than what I already have, it would be stupid to not include it.

Speaking of the find-replace function, someone finally told me what was wrong with it. strcmp does not return at the first difference like I thought it did, so it tries to read everything in memory until it finds something to interpret as '\0'. It can be fixed by adding a character to the memory allotted to potentialMatch, then setting the last char to '\0', or by using strncmp in line 354 and using keyLength as the new param (which is what I did.)

3. If we're only supporting C++14, I want to convert uses of cstdio to use boost::filesystem. If C++17 is allowed, it will be converted to std::filesystem instead. (My preference is to go in for C++17 unless your local build system doesn't support that)

GCC-7 doesn't properly support std::filesystem. GCC-8 apparently does, but it's so bleeding-edge it hasn't even been released yet. Also, some distros' GCC packages are infamous for being out of date. IIRC mine shipped with GCC-4.9, and it was released about a year ago.

4. I want to rename all of your enum values. SHOUTY_NAMES should be reserved for macros, as you've discovered with collisions on HUGE. Furthermore, making them enum classes (instead of plain enums) will allow us to avoid polluting their enclosing scope with extraneous symbols.

I have only just heard of enum class, and I already like it. I haven't played with it much, but just changing the declaration doesn't cause any compile errors and it lets me define NUL in both. It almost seems like a Java-style enum, which is great because Java enums are one of the few times where Java differs from C++ and I prefer the Java version. As long as there's no hidden catch, like a bunch of extra code having to be written to make the switch statements work correctly, or if it makes it hard to convert to an int (which I don't think this program even does), this looks awesome.

I'm less a fan of changing the enum names, though. I had always heard that most programmers (C/C++/Java at least, I've that some users of newer languages prefer different conventions) expect to see constants in all-caps with underscores between words, and I think it's a good practice. It indicates immediately that a value should not change, that it's either set at compile time or set once during program operation.

I agree that there should be a visual difference between preprocessor macros and all other constants, and for some reason I thought that single underscores were reserved for the user, but apparently I was wrong. Do you have any suggestions? I don't like keeping them lowercase, it looks like a normal variable. I don't like capitalizing the first letter, it looks like a programmer-defined data type. aLtErNaTiNg cAsE CaUsEs eYe bLeEdInG. Unless there's something I'm not mentioning, I'd prefer to keep the constants named as they are, though the macros can have the leading underscores removed because that was my screwup.

5. General C++ conformance and stylistic issues: do not use "using namespace std" inside of header files, do not name things with leading underscores, rename files to be more descriptive of what they're about (splitting things up into multiple translation units as needed), avoid putting definitions inside of header files (put inside its own translation unit instead so we don't run into linker issues), avoiding "central" header files so that incremental compilation isn't stymied whenever we need to change it, etc.

For the most part, I'm unsure of what you mean exactly. Changing using namespace std to using std::whatever is fine (I did using namespace std because I hate constantly going back to the top of the file to add a new function) and I'm not sure where I learned that leading underscores are okay, but I thought that I had done all of the other things.

pfMon.hpp contains all of the info needed for a PF monster, except for a few struct and enum declarations, which go in pfMeta.hpp. The actual function implementations go in pfMon.cpp, except for a few pieces of code that either are non-game-specific or will be shared when other systems are added to PFSB (both of which go in main.cpp). errors.hpp contains some #defines to make it easy to have consistent and meaningful exit codes, and maybe actual error classes if I (or a contributor) ever feels like it's important enough to warrant spending time to write them. I'm also not sure exactly what you mean by a central header file. I can see why it's generally not the best idea to bunch #defines inside of a header file, but IMO this is a case where it makes sense. Unless you're referring to linker issues I'm not aware of, the only thing I can think of are issues with double defining a macro.

Without more specifics I'm failing to see a problem with most of the things in the above paragraph. Or maybe it's just because it's 5AM my time and I need sleep. Anyways, good night, and thanks for your help.

0.2 is ready. I managed to get more done in this release than I thought I would. I fixed 1 major bugs, 1 less major bug and a few minor bugs. I also added a few features. XP now includes commas. It is now possible to add DR, SR, and weaknesses to monsters. Special Abilities can now be formatted like they should be in a proper stat block. More changes can be found in changelog.txt.

Still *nix-only for the moment, but that may change in the coming weeks, because:

I'm now accepting contributions. A couple of people mentioned trying to port the build system to cmake, which is natively compatible with Windows. Hopefully they're also good enough to remove the dependency on G++ caused by my complete ineptitude with Makefiles and Autotools. Until it does get fixed, my only recommendation is to look into MinGW, which I've heard can build Make-powered stuff natively on Windows (changes will have to be made to expected file paths), or to install Cygwin, which should build and run the code with no changes necessary as long as you make sure to install make and a GCC-6/G++-6 or better package

Whatever else happens, 0.3 will definitely feature SLA support, probably spells too.

Zip:
https://github.com/frozenMustelid/pfsb/archive/v00.002.zip

Tarball:
https://github.com/frozenMustelid/pfsb/archive/v00.002.tar.gz

1. Which of these races are frequently featured when you play Eberron? Which tend to be neglected, and why?

None of my players seem all that interested in the Eberron races. I had one guy run a Shifter, but he died when his player said "I charge and attack Lady Vol." Keep in mind, this was after she gave a speech to her minions basically saying "Imma get strapped in to this machine that will revive me." Yes, he attacked the necromancer BEFORE she was tied down, AFTER she explicitly said that she was about to be tied down.

Given that he was level 5 and I statted up Lady Vol as the most munchkined-out pure necro wizard I knew how to build at the time... Yeah, Finger of Death to dead. Especially since I warned my layers beforehand that I use the 3.5 version of FoD + CoD.

2. Do all of the races feel like they have a place within the setting? Which races feel best-situated, and which races feel the least at-home?

The warforged are obviously the best-situated. Their very existence can elicit a form of existential angst that Khorvaire has become all too familiar with during the Last War. Even if the player's warforged doesn't feel this way, they can inspire that feeling in others. They also serve as a reminder of the brutality that was the Last War.

The kalashtar seems the most out of place, but that's mostly because most Eberron games mostly take place on Khorvaire, for the most part. I think it's supposed to seem a little out of place.

3. Are there any races you don't know what to do with?

Some of the Pathfinder races don't fit very well. Wayangs, Strix, and the Shadar-Kai expies known as Fetchlings are among these. PF Changelings are fine, but they need a new name.

I've also explicitly banned the DSP Ultimate Psionic races (the only thing in that book I've disallowed) because they're all better than the kalshtar at being a psionic race. Basically, it steps on the toes of the setting's psionic races.

4. Do you think all of these races would play just as well outside the setting?

Changelings, yes. Shifters, yea. Kalashtar, redo the fluff. Warforged, no.

A lot of people try to use Warforged outside of their setting, and IMO it just doesn't work. The existence of such a race heavily implies a scientific approach to magic and a good working knowledge of humanoid physiology, both of which are effectively nonexistent in most settings. Maybe a few warforged could exist as major NPCs or McGuffins, but once they become common or become a player race it stops working.

Adventurers are weird. Shopkeepers know this. A golem that moves like a man, speaks like a man, thinks like a man, can carry on abstract philosophical discussions like a man, and is for all intents and purposes alive? That's not weird, that's something that shatters everything you thought you knew about life in the world and life in general.

5. Favorite race? Any you've never played that you wish you had?

Warforged and Warforged.

6. Least favorite race?

Kalashtar. Take away the Dreaming Dark fluff, which only works in Sarlona or a DD campaign, and they're just kinda dull.

7. Do any of these races primarily get used as PCs? Do any of them primarily get used as NPCs?

I sometimes include changelings as NPCs. None have been discovered. I've also used WF butlers before. I'd considered running a DD game or a LoB game, but haven't yet.

8. Is there any non-Eberron specific race (halfling, goblin, elf, etc) that you primarily play in Eberron, because you like its Eberron flavor the best?

Hobgobs and orcs have great Eberron flavor. I'd also considered making a melee-focused WF cleric of Onatar. Of course, I'd actually have to play in an Eberron campaign to do any of this.

9. Overall, what is your opinion on Eberron's handling of the playable races?

Awesome. I expecially like how they tried to make some of the typical "enemy" races, like dragons, drow, goblinoids, and harpies, something new and different to the walking XP chunks that players see them as in most campaign settings. I somehow managed to get my players to respect hobgoblins enough to not attack them on sight. If that's not a reversal of everything most TTRPG players typically know and do, I don't know what is.

I just learned about something Windows users could do to get a native binary on their system. Something called MinGW apparently has a Windows port of make. The make install command won't work, but it might at least build the program and it'll probably work right if you change the template file location (defined in platform.hpp) to something that can actually exist on Windows. It should be easy to do a manual install for PFSB

Also, I didn't mention this before, because I thought it was obvious, but in case it's not: Cygwin is basically a POSIX emulator. PFSB should run no-problem on Cygwin. Just make sure you install the right packages on Cygwin and you should be able to build+run it.

Also, 0.2 should drop either Monday or Thursday. All I need to do is finish some documentation and do a test install.

Once 0.2 drops I'd be willing to convert it to cmake and get it working on windows as a PR. Just didn't want to waste time if things are changing. Git for windows automatically converts LF to CRLF in the working copy (and back to LF when committing) by default, so don't worry about line endings.

Great!

For command line switches, I have a port of getopt() to windows, so imo just leave things as-is. I can throw in that library as a shim and all will be well (assuming you're using getopt for Linux).

Actually, I didn't use getopt. I wanted to make this as close to compatible with Windows as possible before actual Windows compatibility could be added. So instead, I just had the program do strcmp with argv[1]. I figured that it wouldn't ever get enough CLI options to make this an issue.

Fair warning, I am planning to put a contributor's agreement in the next version. It'll basically say that, if you send me changes/additions, you keep the copyright on your additions/changes unless you explicitly grant it to the project owner, but the current project owner can change the license to any license the FSF has declared a free software license. It may have another clause or two, something along the lines of, "It's your fault if your changes get me in legal trouble", but it's mostly there so I don't have to ask 15 people if I can change the license to something actually suitable to software instead of TTRPGs. Is that cool with you? Do you have any advice on what it should/shouldn't say?

Dot. For OGL, you may find the bottom FAQ on this page useful.

For Windows compatibility, it would be best if you can transition from make to cmake. Visual Studio 2017 has native support for cmake, and would mean there are no issues with maintaining two build systems (Makefile and cxproj). std::filesystem should be used to generate paths, etc in an interoperable way instead of rolling your own (although in practice it doesn’t matter; Windows accepts forward slash as a directory separator as well).

@John: VS2017 Community is free and supports almost the same feature set as Professional. You may want to pick that up if you’re interested in working on this. It can be installed side-by-side VS2012.

OGL notices shouldn't be an issue. Using the --ogl option from the CLI (currently the only interface type available) prints a notice near-identical to Paizo's and Dreamscarred Press's. The --help info tells you about the --ogl switch. --version tells you that it's OGL, and that a copy of the license should have been included with the program. A few more mentions are scattered across the documentation included with the program.

If CMake has any better learning resources than Make, I'll definitely look into using it. Makefiles (at least, hand-written ones) don't seem to be that complicated, but the learning aids are terrible. Automake's are somehow even worse.

I looked into std::filesystem, but it isn't fully implemented in GCC yet. The closest analogue is experimental/filesystem, which (from what little I read on it) doesn't implement or doesn't correctly implement a lot of the library.

Still, thanks for the input. I probably won't be able to include any suggestions in the next version, but that's only because 0.2 is almost into the bugtesting phase. If I can get a few free moments before the holidays are over, it shouldn't be long before I can drop it.

P.S.: A friend told me that Windows won't translate fslash to bslash when written into programs, it's just that cmd.exe and explorer.exe both autoconvert the paths. That said, he admits that he was in his mid-teens the last time he did any programming, so it's more than likely he just doesn't remember. I'd love it if that were the case, because that's less platform-specific code I'd have to write.

Thanks, but I'm not sure my Windows 10 subversion is adequate enough. I tried downloading and installing last week and got nowhere. I might be better off just working on the UI for the Windows port.

I know basically nothing about source control software, so please forgive me if this is a dumb question, but would subversion even work with Github? Wouldn't you need git?

I heard somewhere that you could cajole makefiles into working on Windows with either a specialized version of make or by installing Cygwin and using their version of make. Supposedly, there's some way of tricking Cygwin into using a compiler that will compile native Windows code as opposed to Cygwin-compatible code. Either way, some parts depend on certain files existing in certain places, which won't be true because the makefile says they get put in locations that only exist on Unices.

Normally, makefiles are machine-generated and not human-readable, but I wrote this one by hand so it is. Mine is essentially the most basic possible form of shell script, merely a list of commands to be stepped through for each make rule. I think all of the commands used exist on Windows, though with slightly different syntax. I know mkdir exists on Windows, and I think that rm and cp exist too.

The general structure of a makefile rule is:
(file): dependencies
<tab here>commands

Blank dependencies mean there are none. The first rule listed is run if make is run without specifying a rule, unless a default rule has been specified. If the file listed exists, make assumes the rule has already been run and exits without running the commands again. The phony rules don't even check for the file, you just type `make <rulename>` and it runs the commands. The dashes in front of certain commands tell make that it's okay to keep going if those fail. The at signs tell make to not print that command's output to the terminal. The pound signs denote comments.

Many people have written better write-ups than I can about each of the commands I used. Look through the online man pages if you're not sure what a certain flag does, and adopt it to Windows. The makefile is 26 lines long (including whitespace), hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to slog through.

Don't go too crazy on the UI. It already sort of has a cross-platform UI, it's just text-based instead of graphical. There are cross-platform UI libraries (qt and wx are the most popular), both of which I would have to play with before even thinking about writing any code for. What I'm trying to say is, if you spend several months perfecting this thing, be aware I will almost certainly rip it out at some point to toss in something that's cross-platform out of the box. The only UI changes I would make at this time would be converting the -- switches to something more idiomatic on your platform of choice (if memory serves, only single-letter options, / instead of - or --, and change --help to /?). Though, of course, you're not me and if you send me something better, I'd be glad to have it.

P.S.: I was about to hit post when it occurred to me that you may have trouble with reading some of the text files. I don't remember if I told my editor to use Windows-style line endings (carriage return + line feed) or Unix-style line endings (just the line feed). Most Windows programs will render either correctly, but notepad.exe is not one of them. Notepad++ renders both correctly. I think Firefox will render both correctly if you point the address bar to the text file's location. I think Visual Studio will also render either correctly, but IIRC like most IDEs it isn't the easiest thing in the world to make it open a file on the HDD without adding it to the project first.

Anyways, it's crazy late my time. Good night, everybody!

I just discovered that I have completely FUBARed the HP calculation. It's actually more likely to be wrong than to be right. This is scheduled to be fixed with v0.2. Until then, math it out by hand and correct the HTML output with a plain-text editor. I'm pretty sure I got the other calculations right, but I may have gotten those wrong too. Saves should be right more often than not, but AFAIK they're always calculated correctly. I try to test corner cases and edge cases, but obviously I can't test every possible value and some parts are tested better than others.

I can program for Windows. I've got Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate. I've hand written a stand-alone database program to manage large collections of anime.

Just downloaded the source. I'll go over it later when I have time. I've got a busy Saturday ahead. No rest for the weary.

Killer. Fair warning, VS2012 won't compile the code unless you have an updated MSVC++. I use a few C++14 features, which (obviously) didn't exist until 2014.

This is C++ code, with HTML and CSS for the output. Due to the large changes due for next version, I'm not accepting submissions yet. Unless that submission is something like a Windows port. Or creature type/environment/climate icons.

Before I start the thread, I didn't post this in the Community Use thread because I don't want to sign up to the program. I don't think it would actually help me, except that I could say the trademarked name that PFRPG is short for or the company that runs it. The only obstacle to me saying either now is the OGL, which I had to adopt due to how 3.x games work. Long story short, I think I can get around it, but it'll take a lot of extra engineering and I think my time could be better spent on other parts of the program.

This program (PFSB) makes statblocks for monsters based on user input. It only runs on *nixes as of now, but it shouldn't be too hard to change that. Also, the codebase is an absolute mess. v0.2 is mostly going to be me rearranging the codebase to be more maintainable.

Planned (farther in the future, mind you) is to have the output be a PDF instead of HTML. Also planned is a sort of internal DB that you can add files to for non-SRD (homebrew s#%&) creature types and classes. Oh, and probably a GUI at some point. That sounds possibly helpful.

Project is here. It should compile for Windows, but it won't output because it has *nix-specific things built into it. For example, fslash is the directory separator and the program has to read a template file from /usr/share. That second thing is defined in platform.hpp, and I don't think it's hardcoded anywhere else.

https://github.com/frozenMustelid/pfsb

Anyways, enjoy. I probably won't be able to work on it again for a week or several, so please tough out the issues until I can fix them.