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That makes sense. I'm curious about the change to non-leveling spells. It seems that relative to your current level, this makes spells actually worse as you improve. I mean even in Pathfinder fireball wasn't really that good. Now if you want any use out of fireball you'll have to cast it as a higher level spell, but that scales at half the rate it has traditionally done AND you have to pay precious spell slots for that miniscule improvement in damage.
What do you mean with magical reshuffle and legendary auto-saves?
Can we have a redo of the Clockwork Golem? It doesn't work for me at all. It doesn't work because you probably forgot to wind it up properly.
Interesting comments. Thanks. The incident was that a situation developed during a campaign quite a while ago where a barbarian (int 8) found a logical flaw in some religion of Eberron. I wasn't even able to properly argue because I had no brought the discussion of the religion itself into the game myself, so it was out of my hands. Essentially a player had a character, paladin, who belonged to this church and he wanted to go visit their temple for one reason or another. Someone started a discussion with the priest of the temple and the barbarian spotted some kind of contradiction. Next time this occurs I will simply reward anti-inspiration for their next combat roll. They will have to roll twice and take the worst.
So suppose you've just introduced a new npc and a player makes a real smartass observation in character. You are dumbstruck. What do you do? I've had this happen too many times to count, so now I just handwave it like this NPC: I am Lord Smartron, Cleric of Intelligence
In short I overrule whatever smart thing they were saying by simply stating that whoever they managed to corner with their statement provides a counterargument too strong for them to argue against. It might be possible for some people to actually think up counterarguments, but I have this thing that makes me utterly incapable of coming up with smart things to say unless I'm prepared for them (i am recovering from social phobia). As a result: I railroad any attempts to be smart using the above method. How do you handle it?
This is much more interesting than I had hoped for. I'm just missing one thing. Some way to have to worry about less feats as a fighter. My ideal situation would be if you could use stamina to temporarily gain the benefit of feats you don't already have. This would give fighters greater flexibility in feat selection.
Ok that's going to go into my new version of the adventure. Previously I've run it in Eberron, in that country ruled by Queen Vol.
That's actually very interesting. Do you have any particular ideas for the necromancer? I didn't even think of having another character come along for the castle. The current setup for the adventure is that all the characters are waiting at a tavern for their transport, which turns out to be an extremely paranoid halfling and a very big half orc who both work for the baron. It has so far worked for me to run it with level 7 and 8 characters (tried different levels the two times I ran it). Many of the encounters are optional, and for the players to turn the lich encounter hostile will require amazing stupidity :P
Hahaha that's great, but a bit off :) The castle has REAL monsters, not people dressed up as ghosts :) The idea about the adventure is that the player characters are invited to help the baron figure out what happened to his wife. She's been affected by some kind of enchantment that can't be dispelled and is acting really weird. When they get there, though, he's away on business (he was actually delayed by the merchants guild in some city, so its' very legit business). None of the staff at the castle know where he is or what he's doing, or even why the player characters are invited (though they do know that visitors are there on invitation from the baron)... So they're basically let free to roam this enormous castle, with a few warnings from staff on areas to avoid. EVERY time I have run this adventure, it escalates into a massive torrent of paranoia, because the castle is NOT harmless. There are places that will just plain kill the player characters or cause them severe problems. And it will be in the nature of all players to keep exploring the castle, because they just want something to do while waiting for the baron. The players will seek trouble, and they will find it! But I try to cram in as much horror themed stuff as possible: 1: A vampire
The adventure only comes off as parodic if you play it silly, which I don't. I play it seriously and that's why it works for my groups. The first time was a total party kill, though :P
Why cant they just have a sheet of paper with raged stats or unraged stats in place before the game starts. As for rage cycling it is a class feature at higher levels.I have never, before this product was announced, heard anyone suggest the Barbarian needed reworking.I have. Mostly in the context of rage-cycling being a really weird thing. And I've certainly felt how cumbersome it can be to math everything out when I've had new players go for Barbarian or Bloodrager. Rage cycling is the most nonsensical thing in pathfinder. It makes absolutely no sense. It needs to be removed or to be replaced with something that actually makes sense. I would not permit rage cycling if I were to GM, and no GM I play with would allow it either.
Making a physical model is too hardcore for me, man! (or woman) (and I don't have a 3d printer anyway) I meant more like a drawing to show the general idea of the area. I used the word model because I immediately thought this would be better to do in actual 3d, and then draw over it.
Put more clues without NPC interaction into the castle. When thinking of the big clues that push the plot forward, I never require a roll to discover. The clue is still up to player interpretation, and if they want to know something about it or gain an advantage, they need to roll. Secondary clues must be searched for and need a successful roll.Yeah, this. You never want the game to stop because someone failed a roll. If the consequences of a bad roll are "everyone go home," that really means you shouldn't be asking for a roll at all. The adventure is written with no expectation that any actual clues will be found. If they do find them, it will help them work out what is going on, but in case they don't, they will be put in a situation where they definitely will figure it out in the end. It's mainly laid out as a mystery with a LOT of sideplots and many red herrings.
Ciaran Barnes: That's actually a great idea. I can create a model of the whole castle to illustrate roughly what is where and how the buildings are in scale to eachother.
Thanks for your replies. The Golux: Yes. A balance is necessary so that the adventure is playable. Orfamay Quest: Yeah that's something I've been thinking about a lot for this adventure. When I run it it ends up being quite NPC driven, because I can use them to roughly guide the players to explore particular places of the castle. That last part about exploration is so true. I try to avoid just plain transport areas without details. Every room that is traversed has at least a few objects of potential interest (even if they're irrelevant to the "plot"). The whole idea of the adventure really is that the PCs have been invited to meet this baron, in his castle, about a "problem" he has, but when they get there they discover the baron is away on "business". They're essentially free to roam most of the castle and talk to the staff, who are all quite suspicious. I tend to discourage searching every room of the castle, and they generally don't do that either because through the NPCs I point them to potential exploration destinations. Shameless plug: This is the bottom floor of the castle
I have an original aventure I've run twice now for two different groups. The adventure has been pretty popular, and I plan to release it here for free in summer after some modifications. The adventure takes place in and around a castle inhabited by a suspicious baron and his paranoid underlings. It's a bit of a horror parody. I'm just curious to know: Do you think it's possible for a castle to be too big? I'm thinking about if I should redesign the castle. Right now it has about a hundred different numbered locations. I want to make this a discussion on the size of homebrew locations. Is it better to be compact and to concentrate everything in a few rooms? In my adventure, all locations have complete descriptions, but many locations are not ultimately that important and the players will end up wasting their time if they decide to search through the entire castle. I use NPCs to guide the PCs if their search provides futile.
I want to make clear if there is rule support for the following situation. We have been playing Kingmaker up to book 4. Our GM rules that any non-war-trained horses will panic in the presence of battle. The horse can be controlled by a ride check to avoid this. DC is unknown. This has been causing quite a lot of trouble. Is this an official rule and if so where can I read more about it?
Can someone explain what sword & sorcery flavoured means?
Everything sounded reasonable up to the point where they went into the darkness with no sources of light.
It feels like way too good of a 1st level dip. With one level, you gain a +1 in a weapon, three deeds, and the best proficiencies in the game. That's actually a really good example of why multiclassing is a bad thing. A system that permits multiclassing prevents front-heavy classes. But a front heavy class by itself isn't a bad thing.
I've been thinking of something slightly related: It's interesting that schools have obvious themes to them, but the school often has more to do with the "descriptor" of the spell rather than the actual effect. Consider: Blindness/Deafness is necromancy, but it could just as well be transmutation. In this system a spell is not associated with any single school. Instead there are multiple schools for many spells. So schools become wider. To slightly compensate we restrict wizards such that a specialist choses one single school as his specialisation school and then ALL other schools are his opposition schools.
To be perfectly honest, the fighter is the kind of class that would benefit from having the underlying system simplified. Getting rid of feats as they currently work would be a start. Most of the things that a fighter currently needs feats to do should be available to all fighters without them having to spend feat slots on long feat chains.
I didn't really think there was anything in particular the fighter lacked until I read your post and remembered an old idea I had for the fighter... The Unchained Fighter has a total pool of combat points equal to his constitution modifier + 2. The unchained fighter may spend as a swift action any number of combat points to get, temporarily, that many combat feats of his or her choosing for 1 minute each. There is some kind of cap on how many such temporary feats one can have active simultaneously. This entirely removes the fighter's reliance upon a restricted line of feats. He or she is now free to play around using any combat feats.
I don't know what definitions of GEEKS and NERDS you are working from, but this is relevant. Ouch! :D
The idea is to make it so that the boss has temporary advantage against some particular character until another character manages to do something noteworthy, at which point focus changes to the other character. I believe with some more work, this can make combats much more dynamic. Here's the thread in question:
How is that even possible? Did they do the sheep strategy?
Those feats all sound good, but I'm not permitted anything outside of the core rulebook and the advanced player's guide :( This is because we're playing an old adventure path, and the GM wants our characters relatively balanced in terms of capability compared to the NPCs.
My level 10 gnome illusionist is soon a level 11 gnome illusionist. He does have a few feats, but he wants more! Current feats:
Potential feats:
I'm open to alternatives or suggestions as long as they are in the core rulebook or in the advanced player's guide.
Yes. That seems to be the most reasonable solution, it just sucks for him because he never got to use his own weapon before dying. He only had it for 3 or 4 encounters.
We're all level 10 characters and I haven't actually checked against the wealth by level table but our total savings count 4000 gold pieces. Notable recent losses:
The problem is we got totally screwed by a random encounter quite early on after having made our characters (at level 9) to recover from a previous total party kill. We encountered a devil/demon which we only survived thanks to trading it one +3 and one +2 weapon (one of these belonging to our battle cleric (more about him in a sec)). Since then, he and the fighter has fought with non-magical weapons. So the battle oracle has been playing gimped ever since he was created. We did just recover these two weapons but at a cost... A few rounds before we win the battle, the oracle is hit with a disintegrate... Now we haven't had a group discussion about this because the session ended just after our victory, but the battle oracle wants to be resurrected and we have almost no money. We have potentially recovered a major treasure (likely around 20-30k gold pieces), but we don't know the exact contents. This is Kingmaker, book 4. We suffered a HORRENDOUSLY PAINFUL total party kill in book 3 which has put us in a weird situation: We are now playing as adventurers assisting a particular person in a country to the east. Our "kingdom" is now ruled by some priest. Because of this, we have no kingdom budget to borrow from. TLDR: We have almost no money. We have lost buttloads of items because of one stupid encounter (black puddings). The battle oracle wants to be resurrected but we have to pay for True Resurrection for that to be possible.
On this subject: Is a caster allowed to cancel a spell with some given duration? For example Shadow Projection? (it has a 1h per caster level duration)
But I would not throw it myself. I'd cast magic jar first. Then have someone else throw the stone.
I wasn't planning on using it as a standard tactic. The idea is we're about to head into a castle, and I believe there is merit in potentially throwing the invisible stone over the castle walls. That way I can possess someone on the inside.
A related question: If I were to cast invisibility on a 100 gp gem and toss it somewhere, would it lose invisibility from hitting the ground? My idea is to cast it on the gem, then cast magic jar and put my soul in the gem. Then have someone else toss the gem near a group of enemies.
The invisibility will be obvious for anyone on the other side, but that is beside the point. This is not about stealth.
This is not the case in a realtime scenario with pausing. In such a scenario, as the other players control your flow, you have no sense of control. Whenever any other player pauses, it will stop the gameplay for EVERYONE. And then when they unpause you need some system to indicate that the system is actually unpausing,You mean kind of like the same voice chat that turn-based requires? Possibly. But it's still "ok now I'm unpausing". Which is just weird. In a turn based system EVERYTHING is under your control. You do not have to fear losing control because some other player pauses the game.You don't lose "control" because a player pauses. You still retain the ability to assign commands to your character during pause-time. It just pauses the action, that's all. But pausing the action still makes you lose control. Another player having the ability to pause the game will by definition cause you to lose control. The game will get stuck in one state thanks to the input of one singular player. Yes you can still issue commands but that doesn't mean you don't lose control. You lose control of the flow of time. It's very possible that the impact of this is massively lessened by voice chat, though. Out of curiosity, how many of the people criticizing real-time-with-pause gameplay have actually put significant time into Infinity Engine multiplayer games? Or Neverwinter Nights on a small server with pausing allowed? It's possible it works better in practice than in theory. In theory it is absolutely idiotic.
A multiplayer turn-based system works great if you have voice chat available, as well as the ability to look through spells and whatnot while playing. Pausing in realtime is problematic because it gives another player control over your gameplay flow. The kind of control it gives is also erratic. That is, given a realtime scenario where other people can pause it, it creates a sense of lack of control. Note that when you are done with a turn in a turn-based system you "abandon" your turn. In a user experience kind of approach you can consider it as if you are handing over the ability to act to the next player. This is not the case in a realtime scenario with pausing. In such a scenario, as the other players control your flow, you have no sense of control. Whenever any other player pauses, it will stop the gameplay for EVERYONE. And then when they unpause you need some system to indicate that the system is actually unpausing, otherwise you will be kicked back into realtime again... And this is all without you having any control over it. In a turn based system EVERYTHING is under your control. You do not have to fear losing control because some other player pauses the game.
"Turn-based" creates some real issues with multiplayer video games. Not insurmountable issues, but issues that can be easily avoided by making it real-time with pausing. The idea of "turns" in board games exists to make adjudication of the game simpler. This isn't necessary in a video game - the details are handled behind the scenes, by the game itself. There are some advantages in using it in single-player tactical games (it slows the pace of the game down and gives the player time to think), but those advantages become headaches in a multiplayer environment, where some players are made to wait while others make decisions. Actually no. Turn based works perfectly for online multiplayer games. Each player acts on their turn. Very easy to program. Very easy to design. During non-combat situations, movement could still be realtime, though. The REAL problem is when the game is realtime with pausing during combat.
I love feats, I'd hate to see them go, I just fell in love with the way that 5e does them, I've always said feats should be nice not required even wrote an article about it a long time ago for the DnD 3.5 forums in the articles that required approval before they got posted. 5ed honestly just did them so well and I think the human variant fits perfectly with Golarion because players think the feat is so awesome that humans become the most common choice for characters so game groups wind up with more humans than any other race. It's what 5e does with feats that makes them acceptable again. By removing all feats with minor effects, the ones remaining are impactful. This means that as feats are now big and important again, trivial effects are relegated to being either available to everyone, removed from the game, or given as a class ability. In addition, as feats are no longer so abundant, they are not part of monster design. This frees up much effort for game masters that was otherwise spent on learning feats. The effect that feats had on monsters was that they obscured information from the game master. The GM had to research feats in advance, as monsters were equipped with them but the statblocks did not explain the feats. Lorathorn: I disagree. I've played the game with people both experienced and inexperienced with Pathfinder. Everyone found feats VERY easy to grasp conceptually. The people I play with have most trouble with favoured class rules and grapple rules. Favoured class rules are NOT intuitive. They make absolute sense to someone who's played 3.5 and then moved to Pathfinder, but for someone who starts on Pathfinder, they are confusing as heck.
1: Increased combat mobility for everyone.
If anything, the second and third points are vital to a future version of Pathfinder in my opinion. Pathfinder suffers from having too many fiddly bits.
If Vic is still checking this thread, I have a question: This talk about the spread of Pathfinder internationally is pretty exciting. Is there any chance that the Beginner Box will see any translations?Sorry—just checking in occasionally. Yes, we encourage our translation partners to put out the Beginner Box as quickly as they can manage, especially in places that don't have a strong RPG tradition. It has been out in French, German, and Italian for a while, and more languages are on the way. Any plans for a swedish translation? For my group it's not an issue of not understanding the actual rules, but dealing with the rather odd combination of swedish and english that is spoken at our table during any of our Kingmaker sessions... Our GM does his best to localize place names, but a series of OFFICIAL translations of (the names only) 1: Spells
would be amazingly useful! English terminology is already seeping into sessions from terms like "attack of opportunity" and "charge" and such. It would be great to have official translations for names of things, though. It would mitigate the language issue slightly.
This is a spin-off from another thread. These rules are untested and some would call them too gamist. I call them an interesting option :P The idea is to balance out the action economy for solo encounters. Idea in short: A boss can focus on any character he can see during combat. If the character disappears from sight, it loses focus. Whenever this happens, the boss can chose another character to focus on instead. Whenever the character who has focus attacks the boss there's a 50% chance per attack that it will miss (in addition to cover, AC and whatever). The boss can also reroll any saves from abilities and spells by the focused character and pick the best result. The boss can change focus at any time during his own turn. Any character who has focus will lose focus if another character attacks the boss and/or does something sufficiently cool or dramatic. That character will gain focus instead. What this does is it forces people to interact better in combat.
I've personally found that there are only three kinds of "one big boss" encounters: those that end quickly in a TPK, those that end quickly in victory, and those wherein the boss doesn't follow the same rules as the PCs. You forgot those that end slowly in TPK... (yes I've been involved in one, on the losing side)
I just had a houserule idea... This might need some tweaking to iron out any potential bugs, though. I call this Boss Focus. The boss can at any point during his own turn chose to focus on any other creature it can see. From this point on, the boss has increased AC and increased saves against anything that the focused upon character does. Might go as far as to make him impossible to hit. The focus can be changed at any point during his own turn but only then. Another catch is that if the boss is successfully struck by an attack or spell from another character than the one that currently has focus, and that attack IS SUFFICIENTLY DRAMATIC, then YOU (as the GM, not the boss), can force the boss to focus on the new attacker but only AFTER that character's turn is done. In fact we might generalize this even further: Whenever ANYONE not currently under focus does something that is extraordinarily cool or successful, that character gains focus at the end of his or her turn. While this obviously forces everyone to cooperate against the boss (which is the problem we're trying to deal with in the first place), it makes such cooperation less effective than it normally would be as at any point one character is going to be unable to do anything in the first place. In addition, when metagaming commences, which is going to happen as soon as they realize who has focus, they know that for the battle to go anywhere someone besides the heavy hitting fighter will have to try something to open up the fighter for a new attack.
Things like overprinted books, problematic developement cycles etc, those I can see how they would show up in the numbers, but how would splitting the base show up? For this example consider two product pools. We have core rulebooks which are applicable to any setting, and setting specific books. In a situation with split bases, I imagine the sales of products in the first pool will remain constant, but sales for individual products within the pool of setting specific books drop off though the amount of sales of books in the second pool remains constant. In short, the same amount of overall sales, but spread over a larger amount of books.
1: First you make the point that elements of the setting are better handled in other settings. This is true, but it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. This is like saying that, say, Alien is a bad movie, because other movies have handled horror better, and other movies have handled sci-fi better. 2: You argue that they have to be taken together. This is not true. Say you don't like the mystery elements of Eberron you can just ignore them. You write your own adventures anyway, there are no requirements placed upon own original adventures aside from reasonably fitting into the world itself.
The core problem with monsters having feats is that the game master needs to know how the feats work to use the monster. Even knowing the feats are available, that feat is not listed in the statblock under things the monster can do. So you end up having list of passive and active abilities where some of them can be used while some are precalculated into the statblock itself. Of course, even having stats results in weird and entirely artificial things such as monsters having skill focus feats. WHY? Drop the feat and add the modifier directly to the skill bonus. The feat itself is just some attempt at an in-game explanation for hy that monster has a bigger bonus in that skill than just the base ability modifier. Anything passive should be baked into the monster statblock. Anything that is active should be its own ability. 5e handles monster statblocks very well. There is no doubt as to where one would look to see what a monster is capable of. None of this scrutinising the list of feats.
The big problem with previous edition monsters is how they used feats, and you had to know all the feats involved. Getting rid of monster feats is a very good things.
Leon Boellman's Suite Gothique has a piece called Toccata. There are many different recordings available on youtube. It is very similar to Bach's Toccata and Fugue except it isn't as overdone. :D
I'll probably go for Greater Spell Focus Illusion then. What's your opinion on Spell Penetration?
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