Godwyn's page

I hate it when verisimilitude is broken. Realism is a factor I require only when necessary. The last mid level campaign I ran the characters had an airship, and the barbarian would love to jump out of it and free fall to the ground. Makes for a pretty impressive entrance, and I always gave a bonus to intimidate with it. To me, there is no break in verisimilitude because every being in the world is treated the same, if they have the HP, they can do so. Its a point in the world that varies from ours by exception. People still fall, it is dangerous, but particularly powerful beings can survive it.

The Ant Man movie that came out ran afoul of this problem horribly. I still enjoyed it, but much less so than I could have. I can accept the pseudo science that lets him wear a suit to shrink. Fine. But when the movie tells me his mass remains the same, which is why he seems super strong when small, but then completely ignores this any time it is inconvenient for them, it forces me out of my suspension of disbelief.

I have no problems with a completely mundane character being mostly useless at high levels. In a high magic world, they would be. Compared to the modern world of high technology. What is more useful on the battlefield, a soldier in modern gear, or the guy with a sharpened stick. The problem that feeds the martial/caster disparity is that WBL, and therefor access to magic through gear, is independent of the classes. If access to magic gear was instead part of a class, like the legendary weapon referenced earlier, a lot of the balance problems go away. Sure the wizard can cast fly, while the fighter gets boots of flying. This is only a problem when the wizard also has the same money to instead buy something else.

A system that does so is Silver Age Sentinels (uses the tri-stat system mostly) designed specifically for superhero games. A character is built with build points, and wealth is part of it. Players also choose how an ability works. If they take flight, it may be magic, or rocket boots, or part of a suit of armor.

Part of the problem with PF and realism, and it stems from its origins, is the extreme lack of application of physics, ever. This is often why martial characters cannot do interesting things without ridiculous feat chains.

30 strength enlarged fighter he can easily carry a ton. For some reason it is impossible for him to move a 30 lb. kobold more than 15 or 20 feet. He wields a sword the size of small car, but hitting a 3 lb rat doesn't move it at all. Unless the fighter instead does a reposition, which doesn't hurt the rat at all, even if he repositions it 20 feet into a wall, cause he could probably throw a 150+ mph baseball, but throwing a 3 lb. rat does nothing to it.

So, my response I guess boils down to PF is never realistic, which I am okay with as long as it provides good verisimilitude, which it does inconsistently, but good enough.

The more I read this ability, the more I agreed that it was problematic. The page for Perception lists hearing the sound of "battle" as a -10 check. I wouldn't call it battle until at least two people are fighting. Not alerting the guards outside is your reward for stealthing up to somebody and taking them out before they can act, not something you have to pay a tax for. (Especially not a class-specific tax further restricted to a quarter of that class.)

So much this. The game needs far less miniscule feat taxes that keep making it impossible to do basic tactics unless you have the feat. Its getting to the point that to do anything interesting you have to take multiple feats for it, at which point you can do nothing else.

A really strong issue is that wizards can carry over prepared spells into a new day, and the rod is refreshed. This would, with enough prep time, let them use a single rod an unlimited number of times in preparing their spells. I think this is one of the major reasons it is required at the time of casting.

While a simple fix for this would be to not let the rod be used again until those spells are cast, and to make the rod a material focus for any spell prepared using it, such is not currently the case.

While I agree that prepared casters get an unneeded boost from rods, and spontaneous ones are penalized for being spontaneous, that is the intent of the rules.

Lets ask the inverse though, would anyone, except in a specific campaign type that calls for the dual role, take a feat to get a slightly improved disguise self spell, that also sometimes protects against scrying, that takes 50 rounds to cast?

Which is a point to consider. It does not make you immune to scrying, it makes it so you don't show up as the other identity to be scryed. But someone hunting the vigilante form, can scry them any time they are in that form.

And for a team game, it does not work well either. It has no synergy. Anyone looking for anyone else in the party will find the party, and the vigilante no matter what identity the vigilante is in.

For a feat, though, it is great. In that sort of focused campaign, everyone spends their first level feat on it. And Voila, we have a Power Rangers team, or Batman and Robin, any number of the Sailor Scouts. As a feat, this ability works, as the focus of a class it does not.

So, I'm going to assume that Ultimate Intrigue is about the same size as Ultimate Combat. Which means that Vigilante isn't enough to fill the whole book.

I'd have to guess that the rest of the book will be filled with ways to add Intrigue to your game. Where you need to make an argument to the Emperor's guards that they should allow you in for an audience, and 'I attack them' will be answered with 'they kill you'

If this sounds like your thing, if you enjoyed reading the Goblin Emperor, or the Amber series, maybe vigilante is a great class. If you can't imagine why anyone would trade combat power for social power, well, you're probably looking for a different style of game.

And it's not right or wrong, it's just different. I'm willing to at least give the rest of the book a look. Maybe that's needed to fully understand.

I already have that in the campaigns I play in, incorporated into skills, spells, and roleplaying. That seems the intrinsic problem with this class, is that it is trying to codify roleplaying opportunities into class features, with a lot of the mechanics already covered by other things in the game.

If necessary, I support the dual identity being a feat. Or maybe an additional bonus for having disguise and bluff skill unlocks.

David knott 242 wrote:

Well -- let's take a wizard with slightly above average charisma. The bardic knowledge bonus is great for this character, and even the bardic performance feature is a decent feature. If I could stop there, the Bard VMC would be a no-brainer for this character. But then we get to Versatile Performance -- and that feature doesn't look so good.

I think it look amazing and find it to be one of the biggest features of the Bard VMC. At level 11 you get to be instant face. I imagine most wizards with those aspirations will take the skill focus (linguistics) and orator feats but this give you 3 full skills in one.

If your group dosent use social skills or generally mostly kill the guys you meet it is ofcause less amazing.

That also showcases one of the problems of the VMCs though. At level 11 you get to be an instant face. What did the group do for the other 10 levels? It is such a delayed benefit that it serves very little use the majority of the time. The most noteworthy exception being starting off at higher level.

And for fun shenanigans, convince your GM that the arrows should not instantaneously appear at their destination, but have to travel. This can take a lot of time from Deep into the Solar System.

Teleport out fire arrows. Hop skip teleporting and firing arrows in so that any number will hit target around the same time.

Don't try to mathematically prove something is OP/not OP by optimizing characters. Prove it by the math. There are already plenty of threads that have worked out the possible numbers showing that in the majority of situations, 2HF with strength does more damage. This is before ACG though, so not sure if that really does change much.

Are there niche builds that make obscene use of dexterity, certainly. In general it is not better though.

Dex magus with scimitar? Sure its good. OP burst nova? Maybe. Does the same without dex to damage. No real issue.

Slayer or rogue with dex to damage, moderate effect at best.

TWF with dex to damage? Good luck. Going to blow so many feats to get it to work at all, I hope it is powerful after that much investment.

Some weird tiny fox/songbird dex of doom monstrosity. Yeah that could be annoying.

Try showing the DM the specific character you want, to see if that specific character is not a problem. Maybe he is afraid of something like the songbird showing up, whereas you want one of the former options that are not OP by any means.

Geek the mage first. Its a saying for a reason.

Malachi Silverclaw wrote:

Nearly five hours ago several people on this thread suggested that pictures would help them adjudicate the action. I've got an Internet, so I wondered if they had any pictures of succubi/grapples....

....sorry I've been so long. What was the question again?

Go ahead and Google "Succubus grapple" and let us know what comes of it.

Or don't.

Challenge accepted!

Surprisingly, the first thing to come up was the picture of a succubus and nalfeshnee from the 3.0 MM.

Other noteworthy and unexpected images include Optimus Prime; MMA "Grapple Wood" gloves; Heroes of Newerth.

Also this. Which is hilarious and appropriate.

Okay, taking it back.

That scene is what I was thinking of in this thread as well.

I have no idea if the spell is supposed to, but I think it should. What is the worst that could happen, for a feat on exotic weapon proficiency (barring inquisitor) and use of a spell, a character manages to use a concept that is otherwise mostly unsupported by the rules and is not overpowered?

Also, it takes the same action (free action) to pull back the lever to load a bolt from the case into the xbow to fire it that it does to pull an arrow from a quiver to place in a bow. Seems reasonable, and xbow's need loving to.

But that's how it works when I change it - the faster in the initiative wins.

Clint wins initiative, but since he's not metagaming he readies an action to shoot rather than just shoot, in case Lee has his action ready.

Lee is now sunk. If he shoots, Clint's readied action gets him first. If he readies his action as well, by RAW they both just stand there, but by my system Clint shoots Lee because Clint's action is now immediate and Lee can't interrupt that with his own (even immediate) readied action.

Richard

But that is not what happens.

What happens is it then becomes an important reading of the opponent. Each round the ready action has to be redone, with a new condition. This continually lets the one with a higher initiative the chance to read his opponent first.

What you state only happens on the first round.

On round 2, it returns to Clint first. At this point, His readied action EXPIRES. This is important because the lower initiative ready action, IS STILL GOING.

If Clint shoots now, he loses if Lee has readied to shoot him. However, if the readied action by Lee is as described at one point, to shoot when Clint readies, Clint loses if he readies an action, but wins if he shoots instead.

Alternatively, Clint can delay, causing Lee's readied action to expire. Lee now can shoot and win, unless he thinks Clint is readied for that, at which point Lee can ready again, with a set condition. If Clint can deduce that condition, doing anything else allows it to be circumvented.

RAW allows that fight to play out exactly.

As for why readied actions are not immediate. Legacy. The ready action rules were originally written before immediate actions existed. There is good reason not to change them, however. Making ready actions an immediate would weaken them, as you then could not take a ready action and an immediate.

I have been thinking about the subject for awhile, but finally sat down and worked out some statistics for persistent spell effectiveness. Failed horribly, and pulled up a dice roller to do the math for me :). A lot of which is still by hand, and I am feeling too lazy too transfer it to a post right now.

For applying a status effect to a target. Where the target makes a save on 3+, but a spell 2 levels higher they make on 5+ because of the increased DC, is the break even point for a higher level spell being as effective. Even there, persistent is slightly more effective by 1%.

From succeeding on 4+ onward, persistent spell is ALWAYS more effective at causing a saving throw failure, and thereby inflicting an effect. If they succeed on 2+ against a spell 2 levels higher also, persistent spell is again more effective.

What is worse is that as the required save to succeed increases, persistent spell becomes increasingly MORE effective. In the utmost extreme of saving only on a 20 going from a 1/20 chance, to a 1/400.

Forcing 2 saves for a single spell slot 2 higher is more efficient by far than using quicken spell to force 2 saves from 2 spells, 1 at 4 levels higher. (Yes I am aware you can add persistent into that combination enhancing it even further).

smallroller for the program I used for the math, its free, and pretty good.

Perhaps the most unrealisttic aspect of most, if not all, RPGames is the backpack. Yes, I am including casting reality altering spells in that.

Back when I first started playing, my GM was a stickler for managing inventories. I had to describe where everything my character owned was stored. That meant the GM assumed things were stored in the order they were written on my character sheet. To pull any item out of a backpack was not something you could even entertain in combat, to do so was tantamount to simply surrenduring.

And of course that's pretty realistic. I do a lot of hiking and camping, and I am also a fly fisherman who typically fishes with a backpack, and I can tell you that pulling an item from a backpack is no six second activity. For fly fishing I have everything I think I need tied, clipped, pinned or velcroed to my gear where I can get to it quickly. If I need something from my backpack, that means I am not fishing for at least a minute or two. While hiking it can be a five minute ordeal to find the pain killer or insect repellant which I KNEW was in the left pocket, but I eventually find buried at the bottom of the main compartment wedged between the ziplock bag of raisins and peanuts and the wadded up rain gear that hasn't been used in two months.

To contemplate getting something specific out of a backpack in three seconds while in the middle of combat is no more realistic than dropping a flaming ball on somesone's head by mouthing some arcane phrase and twiddling your fingers.

But treating equipment realistically would take a lot of fun out of the game.

+1

It sometimes bothers me how unrealistic it is to grab anything out of a pack so easily. Then I imagine myself having to actually keep track of how everything is packed and I remember the hassle it would add to the game is not worth the added realism.

I have practically no interest in post 20 content.

I could say more on the subject, but I am sure others will amply respond.