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
Smartass PC: Why is it that <insert logical contraditiction here>
GM: "Lord Smartron gives you a logically sound counterargument."
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.
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.
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:
1: One +3 cloak of resistance (fireball)
2: One +2 cloak of resistance (black pudding)
3: One +2 cloak of resistance (black pudding)
4: One hat of disguise (black pudding)
5: One +1 great flail (black pudding)
6: One +1 or +2 full plate (black pudding)
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.
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.
We had a bit of a situation last session regarding charm spells.
Our GM rules the following:
A character who is charmed will not be aware of the fact that the character is affected by a charm spell (or even a spell at all). This makes sense until we get to the situation of having other characters aware of this fact.
A character affected by a charm spell will be hostile to the idea of having dispel magic cast against them even if made aware of the fact that a spell is affecting them which they do not know what it does.
Common sense says that a character affected by a magic spell of any kind which they did not cast upon themselves would prefer to have that spell removed, unless they know for a fact that the spell is not harmful.
Last session we had a situation where half the party was charmed and we had to employ subterfuge to get the spells removed because the characters were hostile to having them removed.
So my question is, using this premise:
My character is under protection from evil, and the spell duration will expire in a few minutes. Previously I was affected by charm person while under the effect of protection from evil but as the protection will expire soon I will soon fall under the effect of charm person.
I want to cast dispel magic on myself such that I can guarantee that the charm spell disappears, but I can only guarantee that if I let the protection from evil spell disappear, and when it disappears I am bound by gm ruling to refuse the removal of the charm spell.
I need to find a way to prevent the charm person from stopping me from removing it and I would prefer not having to rely on the rest of the party.
After our previous Kingmaker TPK our new party has been shoehorned into the campaign and not without difficulties. We've managed to kind of partially in a way resume the campaign from where we were at level 9.
(note: I believe that RPG systems should have some kind of inbuilt safeguard against TPKs because they ruin campaign coherency)
Now. Last session had a series of EPICALLY AWFUL ROLLS. They were so bad is was spectacular. I'm trying to figure out a way to dodge the situation which might turn into another TPK unless the GM goes soft on us.
But before I elaborate on the details of last session's events I want to mention that we earlier ran into a random encounter that nearly killed all of us. I admit the GM did manage to weave that creature into the campaign quite nicely, but it's frustrating that while the creature we fought (or tried to fight) spared us, it took the weapons of our fighters (fighter and battle oracle) with it when it left.
We have managed to replace the lost weapons with weaker substitutes, however. At this point we're still quite weakened. Having lost two magical guisarmes.
However this loss is but a minor setback compared to our current situation...
We had just spent some time exploring a swamp to the west when we decided we had to check out the enormous lake nearby. We got into our boats and set out. Because our group does things too brashly (it's not really the group, it's the "let's get going already!" attitude of the group leader) I almost never get time to actually think about which spells to prepare for a particular situation. This is one such situation.
We set out and the GM rolls random encounter.
Two black dragons (size large).
Uhhhh...
Our GM tends to apply, in situations like these, a "luck roll" which is basically a d20+0 where a low result is unfavourable in some obvious way.
I roll, and I roll a 2. They notice us, and one of them dives into the water causing a large splash and waves of water. We get to roll to maintain balance of our boats. The guy rowing my boat rolls a 6. The boat tips over...
End of session.
Situation:
Archer bard and fighter (with non-magical weapon) are still in their boat.
Battle oracle (with non-magical weapon) and wizard (me) fell into the lake.
We also have an arcane archer, but she was not available for this session.
My prepared spells (as a gnome illusionist):
Lvl 1: Silent Image, Mage Armour, Expeditious Retreat
Lvl 2: Acid Arrow, Invisibility, Glitterdust, Minor Image
Lvl 3: Haste, Dispel Magic, Fly, Major Image
Lvl 4: Shadow Conjuration, Greater Invisibility, Dimension Door
Lvl 5: Hungry Pit, Overland Flight, Shadow Evocation
What's most annoying is that for some reason I decided NOT to pick teleport this day. I ALWAYS pick teleport. I have nine rounds of illusionist invisibility which I can activate as a swift action.
The GM himself is not a fan of TPKs either, so I suspect he might have the two dragons actually avoid combat, but that will still incur a cost of some kind. Most probably paying these two dragons tribute, and we are already down somewhere north of 20k cold pieces in lost weapons to the previous encounter.
One idea is to activate invisibility and then cast overland flight on myself. Then during the next round unless the dragons kill me I cast dimension door to teleport out of range of whatever invisibility they have. From then on I have nine hours of flight.
I'm looking for ideas on how to handle this.
And do not discuss dragon stats or abilities in this thread. I don't want the GM to accuse me of cheating for looking up stats :P
We've tried to to migrate part of our Pathfinder sessions to skype. Everything works pretty well using only free resources but something we're in dire need of is some way to handle hex map exploration online.
It needs to allow us to arbitrarily number the hexes, to color them and to draw things on them.
I've read the rules but I have had no opportunity to actually try and play it.
I'm curious to know how casters play in the new system. I notice several major changes.
1: Far fewer spell slots at higher levels
2: Spells rely less on caster level
3: Most duration spells being concentration means much less buffing and controlling
This strikes me as a recipe for artillery casters where each caster buffs himself or casts some duration spell and then relies exclusively on damage spells until combat is over.
A potentially mitigating factor is the possibility that now with no items to boost base abilities, we'll see many more items geared towards providing characters with duration abilities which do not require concentration.
Frankly I know very little about magic items in 5th edition.
I haven't been keeping up with the playtests and whatever. I'm curious, though, what's actually new in 5th edition if you compare it to 3.5e and 4e?
I have a vague memory of seeing something a long while ago about how the new weapon system was supposed to make weapons much more flexible... Or something...
But what else is there? Can someone sum up the big differences?
First of all, post absolutely no Kingmaker spoilers in this thread (though I will post some myself) :D
I'm a player in a Kingmaker campaign that's been running for two years. Because of a series of really stupid (meta-gaming stupid) reasons, we got TPKd in book 3 of kingmaker against the big bad.
So...
Not to go into too much detail on the TPK itself, except the only caster with dispel magic (me) was killed just before the big bad encounter because of a stupid distraction. I subsequently created a new rule for myself: "NEVER look up rules for other players during combat. It can make you forget things like how you should not walk within striking distance of a water elemental".
Vordakai can fly.
We recently started playing again, with a new party this time.
*A priest (Yod Kauken(spelling?)) we had dealings with in the first three books has taken Andamara's throne after the four founders mysteriously disappeared near Varnhold two years ago. One almost suspects HE had a hand in their disappearance...
*The Paladin's (one of the founders) wife had a baby who's now a little boy who has free reign to run around in the castle :P
*It's kinda awkward knowing about several locations which would be amazingly useful to my character without being able to go there, because my character doesn't know about them.
*Even weirder is how none of the current characters have been involved with the previous running of the country! This makes map exploration particularily weird, though we haven't really gotten to that part again, yet.
*Now we're on a mission from king Yod to investigate the goings on in the country to the west. My personal suspicion? Their "dear leader" is under some kind of magical control.
Well that's it really. It's an interesting solution on how to resume in Kingmaker after a total party kill.
Is there an official source anywhere about how the GM should rule illusions?
I made an illusionist, and the GM rules, which I have not yet objected to because it'd be disruptive to the game at that point (i will take it up next game session instead) is that figments allow saves when you see them.
This is awful. The rules are really not clear on this issue, nor is the spell description.
You can't target individual creatures, yet guides and posters on here keep saying it's super overpowered. How do you maneuver into a situation where you can actually use it to good effect?
For example suppose there's a monster I want to possess.
If the monster's HD = party level, then I'm just as likely to possess another party member than I am to possess the monster.
If the monster's HD < party level, then I'll just target my own familiar. Unless the monster's HD < the HD of my familiar. (and in that case there's no reason to possess that monster in the first place).
So I'm thinking the only scenario when you can actually use the spell is when you know for sure the monster is of a higher HD than any member in your party... That seems extremely limited.
The spell says you can only target low or high HD... Extremely imprecise.
Because of really bad luck when rolling HP for my wizard I ended up with low rolls:
We're starting at level 9, and the rolls are (without con added)
6, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5
Only two rolls above the expected value. This adds up to 25. With my 12 in constitution that gets me 34 hit points and when I add 8 points for favoured class I have 42.
Expected value for a wizard's HP with 12 con at level 9 is
I want to create a wizard with a non-standard familiar. Imp is out because of alignment reasons. Other familiars are out because they lack style.
Voidworm has amazing amounts of style, but seems to lack everything necessary to be a good improved familiar.
I don't know if it can hold a wand. It certainly does seem like it can speak. But in order to be able to hold a wand it seems to need to transform, which means it loses the ability to speak.
Core and APG only. Some bestiary 1, 2, 3 familiar stuff is permitted with improved familiar.
Making a long story short and spoiler free (Kingmaker):
We got TPKd at the end of book 3 of Kingmaker in the most idiotic TPK I have ever experienced. The frustration... Gah... I don't want to think about it.
Anyway. Now we're making new characters. My previous character was an elf wizard (conjurer) who was pretty kickass. I decided to change my game up this time so I'm making a gnome illusionist and I want advice.
First of all, I've always had this impression that gnomes were MADE to be illusionists. I mean gnome illusionists are pretty iconic back since whenever... But when I decided to throw one together in PCGen I noticed that they don't actually get an int bonus. They get a charisma bonus, which is... Questionably useful...
Either way, I still want to play a wizard rather than a sorcerer, especially since we are bound to run into undead and I don't want to be stuck with the limited spell set of a sorcerer.
So preferably, I want to make the most out of playing a gnome illusion specialist. Any ideas?
I've previously only made a few characters so I'm not that experienced making characters, though I'm not here asking for advice to make anything OP. I'm just looking for interesting suggestions.
Reqs:
1: The character is ratfolk
2: Some kind of spellcaster
3: I would prefer some focus on touch attack spells
After having done some reading I'm currently leaning toward one of the following class options
Witch, Wizard (Necromancy) or Alchemist.
Only material permitted is from Core and APG and the bestiaries.
The character is going to be 7th-9th level or around there. The character is likely to only feature in 4-5 sessions at most so longevity is not that important.
I'll use examples from Kingmaker and they will be spoilerish. You might wish to stay away if you're currently playing it. Don't spoil anything specific beyond parts of book 3.
Spoiler:
So. In Kingmaker the adventure structure is slightly different from what it is when playing a player-made adventure (and probably other adventure paths too, to a degree). There's a lot of free roaming.
There are many situations where metagaming opportunities arise, but I am interested in two situations in particular. One applies to dungeons in general. It seems to me the ideal method to traverse a dungeon is by leaving the main badguy of the dungeon alone until you've searched all other rooms. That is, if you know the badguy is in room X, search room Y and room Z first. Of course if you're running low on resources it might be a better idea to go directly for the badguy if you fear that the other areas have monsters which will end up wasting your resources...
That's local metagaming.
Then there's "overworld" level metagaming. If you have a huge map and you know that a big bad is in some particular area, do you go there immediately? How do you explain this in game terms? How do you deal with this in game?
In Kingmaker book 3, the badguy is holed up in a tower in an area that is "opened up" to the players in that book. There are probably other groups who dealt with this differently, but because of pressure from some players our group did this by basicaly visiting the abandoned city, encounter centaurs, head to valley of death, find badguy, die.
In a dungeon scenario the result of going immediately for the badguy is probably less disastrous. After all, a few extra rooms are unlikely to lead to you gaining another level. At best, you'll find some tools that might help you against the baddie, but on a hex grid or similar, this can mean gaining one or more levels.
Do your players discuss this when playing?
Is this a valid strategy? If so, how do you explain it in game terms?
There's also the time aspect. Suppose that you know that the badguy is at some particular location, if you don't go there immediately what are the consequences? The players cannot know, so they cannot act on any knowledge, they can only guess...
Suppose the players find themselves in a large territory of the kind likely densely populated by quests, and they learn there that some place is threatened by supernatural forces. Do you immediately deal with the supernatural forces or do you, for a lack of a better word, "grind" somewhere else first?
This kind of metagaming is difficult to deal with in the game. Common sense would tell you immediately to head for the threat, but gamer logic would tell you to avoid the threat as long as possible (though this is complicated by a possible time limit of some kind the players cannot be sure exists).
We've gotten into a bit of a curious situation in a particular adventure path. Which one? Not relevant :P
The group has a wizard, played by me, a fighter, a paladin, an inquisitor and an alchemist. I'm pretty much the only caster.
Alas, I was just killed this session. It wouldn't be that much of a problem if it weren't for the fact that the only reason we could reach the place where we are is because of me, pretty much. Wall of Ice as a bridge has quite some utility.
We managed to just reach the hideout of the big bad himself when I got killed by a monster just outside his door. This left the other characters in a bit of a pickle. They couldn't go back, because there was no way back and so the only way was to enter the door ahead.
It's slightly frustrating having to watch the final fight without being able to do anyting. Especially since I had prepared specifically for this fight...
A well timed use of Dimension Door allowed him to escape to another room to prepare more obstacles for us and at that point we had to end the session.
"Dimensional Steps (Sp): At 8th level, you can use this ability to teleport up to 30 feet per wizard level per day as a standard action. This teleportation must be used in 5-foot increments and such movement does not provoke an attack of opportunity. You can bring other willing creatures with you, but you must expend an equal amount of distance for each additional creature brought with you."
1: This seems to read to me that you can teleport a total number of feet per day equal to level * 30, so at level 8 you can teleport 320 feet. There's no limitation on how often you can do this per day, so I assume it's ok to just spend one standard action to move the full distance.
2: The movement itself is specifically called out as not provoking an attack of opportunity. Does using the spell like ability itself provoke an attack of opportunity?
3: Because the ability specifically specifies the teleportation is done in 5 foot steps, does this mean you must always have something to stand on? Can you teleport over lava without falling into it?
So I'm playing a level 8 conjuration specialist with augment summoning. Summons should be good, but they kinda suck.
Because I have so few opportunieis to act in a battle, it boils down to chosing between first casting haste and first casting summon. Haste always wins.
On turn 2 then if the fight is over or close to over then I just wait. Otherwise if the fight is looking tough, maybe then I can consider summoning, but if I do, then I have to pass this round doing nothing (1 round casting time sucks).
Round 3, I have my summon out and can take actions with, but the fight is over.
This is systematic behavior. The few opportunities where the fight is not over, the summon fails to do anything constructive. They never hit anything. They are too slow to appear.
The last time one of my summons was effective was at level 1 when I summoned a riding dog. (which was later nerfed as apparently riding dogs are no longer summonable by summon monster 1)
In some cases the battle isn't over by round 3, but then other things call for attention. I might need to scorching ray something, or glitterdust something, or spiked pit someone.
I play an elf wizard (teleportation specialist). We've just hit level 8. I have two level 4 spells currently: Summon Monster IV and Black Tentacles.
I'm having trouble picking spells because there are, quite frankly, quite a lot of them. It will take a while until I can buy spells in game. We're out in the wilderness. :O
I'm not allowed to pick spells from anything besides the core rulebook and the APG.
The spells I'm considering at the moment: (illusion and necromancy are opposition schools)
Dimension Door
Resilient Sphere
Acid Pit
Ball Lightning
Globe of Invulnerability, Lesser
Detect Scrying (i suspect we're being scryed upon)
Enlarge Person, Mass
Enchant Monster
Confusion
This would be more fancy if I could post images here, but we'll have to do without that. I've tracked down an interesting formula, and with some manipulations it can be quite useful.
What I have is a formula to approximate the number of rolls you have to do, on average, until you will succeed in negating a poison/disease that requires two successful saves to end.
The formula looks as follows
1 / p^2 + 1 / p
Where p is the probably to succeed in a single roll.
Note that this formula does NOT correctly adjust for the possibility that failing a save would result in lowering the save bonus itself as a result. For example a poison that causes constitution damage would lower your fortitude save, thereby making your future saves even less likely to happen. This is not taken into account because it makes it even more complex to calculate than it already is :P
First: If we insert p = 1 in the formula we get 1/1^2 + 1/1 which is 2. When you're 100% likely to succeed every save, at WORST you will have to make two saves to escape a poison.
If we insert p = 0.5 we get 6. So it'd take on average something like 6 rolls until you succeed.
We can calculate p for any given save with the following formula
(20+s-d)/20
Where s is your save bonus and d is the DC. Example: A character with a constitution save of 5 rolls a save against a poison with DC 19.
(20+5-19)/20 = 0.3 (30%)
If we plug in this in the initial equation we get 14.44, which is really quite bad... It'd take an average of 14 rounds to break out of this poison.
Note, of course, that we can calculate the amount of damage taken on average too. I've made a table of average damage per die below:
1d3 = 2
1d4 = 2.5
1d6 = 3.5
With another formula we can proceed to calculate how much ability damage you will take on average. It looks like this
d = e(1-p)(k-2)
Where p is the probability to successfully save against the poison, e is the average damage value from the above table, and k is the number of rolls from above.
Example: k value = 14.44, p = 0.3, and 3.5 as we use a d6.
3.5 * (1-0.3) * (14.44-2) = 30.475
MASSIVE DAMAGE
I've put together a complete formula here that you can paste into wolframalpha or any other calculator:
e = damage value from the above table
s = relevant save bonus
d = poison DC
In short: This gives you approximation of how much damage a character would take if afflicted by a poison with save DC d, expected die damage e (from the table) and save bonus s.
I will revisit this later, maybe next weekend, with a more rigorous examination of the probabilities. There might be mistakes in what I have here, but they shouldn't be that severe. If you find anything, tell me.
I have an elf-wizard character now at level 8 who I am very happy with, with one exception...
For some reason I chose to pick illusionism and necromancy as my prohibited schools.
This proved to be a bad idea. We're playing Kingmaker, and the lack of humanoid/human enemies has led to a notable lack in enchantment utility. I realized now when levelling up last session that I have not actually prepared, over my eight levels, a single enchantment spell.
So I decided to read some guides, and they all seem to agree. Enchantment is rather subpar. The only spell that might be useful seems to be confusion. Dominate monster and dominate person might be useful, but they're much higher level.
I know there's a "feat" in Ultimate Magic that allows me to cast spells from prohibited schools as if they were any normal school, but my game master is very particular that we use as little non-core as possible.
Looking through illusionism and necromancy they both have more versatile and useful spells than enchantment. I know I can still cast prohibited spells, but for twice the spell slots that's quite pricey. I am disappoint :I
While ressurection spells in general tend to have a rather big impact on issues of immersion, i find Reincarnation the most problematic of all.
We just had a near TPK. 3/4 dead. Two characters reincarnate, the third one is on-hold because he might make a new character. However the reincarnation aspect means that, well, the characters now look and become completely different characters...
This doesn't just affect the players themselves, it impacts other players and it impacts the behavior of NPCs. I mean, one character who reincarnated has already been reincarnated once before, and he's the "ruler" in this kingmaker campaign.
It creates a rather bizarre situation. All people have to form entirely new diplomatic relations with this person because, quite frankly, they have no idea who he is.
Another player in my group has just lost a character and he wants to make a multiclass fighter/wizard. He was previously playing a paladin.
Is this sensible? We're playing kingmaker and we're now at lvl 7. 15 point buy.
We have:
Inquisitor
Alchemist (bomber)
Wizard (teleportation)
Paladin (the character who died)
It feels like we'll be quite squishy with a fighter/wizard build as the paladin has saved our asses several times. the fighter/wizard multiclass build looks quite weak too. We're playing core rulebook + advanced player's guide.
Edit: And oh holy crap we got nearly completely wiped out in that encounter. It was a random encounter... Against some kind of bizarre spiked creature with poison. Only the wizard got away thanks to a critically timed Mount spell.
A while ago there was a discussion on some forum, most likely here on the official boards, about future adventure paths. Someone speculated that perhaps Numeria would be a choice location. This was immediately followed by sceptical comments whose wording I cannot remember in detail but the idea was that Numeria was too radical and polarizing to be covered by an adventure path.
My question is: Why?
I've read what little I can find about Numeria on various websites, and it seems fairly normal.
Those are statted as a CR3 monster, and Summon Swarm is a level 2 spell that summons CR2 monsters. Because of the blindness effect of Murder of Crows, perhaps it should be a level 3 spell? Any ideas?
(Yes I've just recently finished Bioshock Infinite, if you need to know)
...if it wasn't for the fact that we're playing a pnp rpg.
Four level five characters, including a wizard, alchemist, inquisitor and paladin.
So we were all raiding a particular dungeon when we got one-shotted in the most pathetic fashion I have ever experienced. It was not GM fiat or railroading or whatever. We simply got owned by a gaze attack with a ridiculous save.
Thankfully the owner of said gaze attack didn't kill us and opted instead to sell us out to some trolls. So we got dropped off at some nasty troll place (while unconscious), but managed by sheer tenacity to escape!
But, you ask, where's all your stuff?
Exactly...
The only good thing was that I chose to have a familiar rather than an arcane bond item so now I can at least cast acid-splash without having to roll concentration.
If our stuff is still in the first dungeon then we might be able to get it back, but if it's with the trolls there no way we can deal with them without magic. We know for certain that there are at least 3 of them because that's how many of them we've seen... And that's a low estimate.
So we're kinda screwed. Getting myself back to even the bare essentials is close to 1500 gp (we have a stash of 4000 at our hideout) as I need to cover Spiked Pit, Fireball, Haste, Scorching Ray, Glitterdust, Summon Monster 2 and at minimum a few level 1 spells and once that money is spent it can't be sold back... I mean scribed spells are wasted. It's not like a paladin/inquisitor who can buy stuff and sell it when it's no longer useful... >_>;
A conjuration specialist gets a duration bonus on his spells. Is this bonus multiplied when you use metamagic to extend duration or is the bonus applied after?
I've assumed that the duration is added before the multiplication, but you never know with these things...
Now for a question on casting time:
If a spell is cast with a casting time of one full round the effect kicks in before your next round. If you cast enlarge person (full round action to cast) on a character who, during his next round before casting time is over, leaves your range... What happens to the spell? Does it fail or does it take effect?
Similarily, and this occured last game, what happens in the following scenario:
1: Wizard cast enlarge person on Paladin
2: Paladin drops the weapon he's holding to draw another weapon
3: Wizard gets to act again and the spell effect kicks in
4: Paladin takes up the weapon he previously dropped from the ground
Is the weapon medium or large?
(yes I was miffed at the player for doing that, but the GM was generous and allowed him to keep the weapon large)
I have an original adventure I want to post here for everyone to use later. It will probaboy be a google docs link. I'm just curious to know how you want it to look.
This thread is mainly about room descriptions, though. When I originally ran the adventure I had reference documents with location and room details and room descriptions were all extremely brief lists detailing items in the room, like this:
Example room:
KITCHEN
It's a dusty old kitchen that looks like it hasn't seen use in years.
*Various kitchen utensils (knives)
*Several tables for preparing food
*A large oven
*A gold ring buried beneath some old rags in a corner (DC 20 perception)
The ring is a non-descript gold ring.
The pattern is basically
1: Name
2: Short description
3: List of contents
4: Particular things of note, such as traps or other details.
Does this look like a good way to handle it? I've read a lot of other modules and they tend to use some quite elaborate room descriptions. It would be a bit tedious for me to do seeing that I have... LOTS of locations to write up.
For people interested, I have some pretty huge maps going on:
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y207/KGanryuS/FloorOneMap.png
And an illustration:
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y207/KGanryuS/InsaneBrain.png
Character is now level 4 with the following feats:
1: Improved Initiative
3: Spell Focus (conjuration)
I'm thinking of going either
5: Augment Summoning
5b: Craft Wondrous Items
or
5: Breadth of Knowledge (+2 to all knowledge & prof skills)
5b: Craft Wondrous Items
The following feats are on my list of things to consider (there might be more out there)
Craft Wondrous Item
Craft Wand
Craft Staff
Augment Summoning
Breadth of Knowledge
Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat are out. Only material from Core and APG permitted.
Should I aim for some metamagic? Is Craft Staff worth it? What about Craft Wand?
There is something I'm interested in confirming. I have, a long time ago, read a lot of the planescape rulebooks. I don't have access to them any longer. I'm pretty convinced that SOMEWHERE in one of those books there was a mention of how the true neutral alignment worked differently in the outlands.
The concept was something like: Instead of striving for a balance in all things, people would act in a bipolar manner, regularily flipping between acting good/evil/chaotic/lawful.
Question 1: If I boost my raven familiar so that it is strong enough to carry my own weight, can I use it to lift me around? (not necessarily as a mount but literally fly me around as equipment).
The idea is to cast bull's strength and ant-haul on the raven, and then reduce person on myself (elf). This would make sure my own weight falls within the light load carrying capacity of the raven familiar.
Does this work?
Question 2: Price and cost has always been blurry to me.
If you look at the table for a wizard level 1 spell wand it says that the cost is 750 gp. But the rule text goes on to say this:
"The price of a wand is equal to the level of the spell × the creator's caster level × 750 gp"
Calculating this for a level 1 wizard spells gives a price that is 750 gp. This means that the price for a wand is equal to the cost of a wand of the same level... But as far as I understood it from the craft X feats, the cost is supposed to be half of the price...
I'm curious about this because I'm interesting in knowing how much I'm expected to pay for buying scrolls. Is the price of a scroll twice the cost of scroll as given in the table?
If I understand the rules correctly, as a wizard I can target my own familiar with spells that normally target myself. Does this mean I can use this in conjunction with alter self to turn my familiar into a humanoid (for a short while)?
The rules are also slightly unclear:
"Components V, S, M (a piece of the creature whose form you plan to assume)"
Does this mean that if I use, for example, a fingernail clipping from myself, I can have the familiar turn into a copy of me?
The text does not seem to contradict that:
"When you cast this spell, you can assume the form of any Small or Medium creature of the humanoid type. If the form you assume has any of the following abilities, you gain the listed ability: darkvision 60 feet, low-light vision, scent, and swim 30 feet."
It can be quite irritating when you know that something is going to hell and there's nothing you can do about it... :P
Some of the disaster in here might actually be the result of the GM misreading a statblock... I didn't bother confirming with a knowledge check what were actually fighting anyway.
I might use some NPC names in this post that might not match with those in the official book, this is because I play in Swedish, and our GM translates NPC names and location names to Swedish. I'll try my best and translate them back without having a clue if I'm accurate or not.
The PCs
Ricardo: Human Inquisitor
Jonjon: Gnome Witch (originally human, but was reincarnated)
Doyfur: Dwarf Cleric
Ondes: Elf Wizard
So we have some alcohol that belongs to the bandit lord, Red Deer. The plan, and our inquisitor INSISTS on it, is that we poison this alcohol and deliver it to his hideout. The plan is that Ricardo and Doyfur (the cleric) infiltrate the hideout this way, deliver the poisoned alcohol and wait for it to be consumed whereafter Ondes' raven familiar (which followed them in) flies back out to signal us. Ondes (me) and Jonjon are supposed to approach the wall and wait for a rope to be tossed over so that we can climb inside.
I objected to this plan many times on account of splitting the party not being a very good idea in most circumstances. Nevertheless, this is what we have to do so we do it.
Ricardo and Doyfur enter the castle and encounter the bandits. Some diplomacy and bluff checks later, and they're inside as missionaries. They hand over the alcohol and feign sleep after being shown a quiet corner. My familiar is sent back to me and we head for the castle walls.
On the way, we're attacked by a squad of zombies and the witch, Jonjon, not being equipped for handling it, is critted and killed. I'm quickly knocked unconscious as well by an attack of opportunity. My spells are not right for this occasion (nor are the witch's).
Nevertheless, the death cry of the witch alerts both the guards of the castle and Doyfur and Ricardo both recognize it. Some diplomacy checks later they're let out and rush to our aid. The cleric (who has VERY low charisma and thus can't use channel positive energy more than once) rushes to my aid while the inquisitor is mobbed another bunch of zombies. The inquisitor is quickly slain. Note that neither cleric nor inquisitor are wearing armour on account of them just getting out of bed.
With the inquisitor knocked down and killed only Doyfur and Ondes remain. The cleric, realizing that escape is impossible (on account of GM misreading), decides to make a last stand. The wizard decides not to and runs like crazy.
Result:
Three party members killed.
We had to spend 2000 gp on reincarnation (one player refused reincarnation and made a new character)
We lost craploads of loot that we had to just run away from.
The GM had to fudge a bit to reunite the party.
Note: Unless I'm entirely mistaken about the encounter as I don't read AP guides I'm currently a player of, we fought zombies and not some other form of undead. I just remembered while writing this that zombies cannot attack and move on the same turn so things would have gone VERY differently...
One of the players in my group who's currently playing an inquisitor wants to take a level of fighter to get some weapons proficiencies and the extra feat. Do you think it's a good idea?
We're currently about to level up to level 3 from level 2.
