Grod, Son of Grod's page

I am creating a homebrew world including custom races and I have created a humanoid insect player race.

Now, an Ettercap is similar to what I have done and it is an Aberration.

But in some 3rd party stuff where humanoid insects have been included as PCs, they make them "Humanoid (Insect)" or "Humanoid (Aberration)" so that they are not immune to some spells that only work on humanoids.

I'm more interested in if any first party stuff has ever used "Humanoid (Aberrant) or (Insect)" before?

The race I have created has 2 arms, 2 legs, one head and is humanoid in every way, but is evolved from arachnids (the arms and legs are the result of fusing 8 limbs into 4)

One of the reasons to report an item is that it is content stolen from another published work.

How strict is this though?

I have seen items that are semi-similar to the idea of the Venom symbiote from Spiderman, I've seen something akin to the every flavour jelly beans from Harry Potter.

Now, obviously human creativity is mostly a remix of a remix, everything we create is influenced by everything we've seen before, so how direct do these infringements have to be?

Should I be reporting stuff that is very obviously influenced by other work or only stuff that uses actual proper, trademarked/copyright names and content?

Is it a good idea to tie all your submissions together with a sort of theme?

If not a "good" idea, is it a bad idea or a totally inconsequential idea?

As an example:

A wondrous item that works well for "class x"
An archetype that focuses on the skill the item enhances/deals with.
A monster that directly counters this archetype's skills, or a monster with class levels using the archetype.
An encounter map using that monster
etc.

Does this come across as lazy?

Hello fellow meat sacks,

I am of the personal belief that thought games and the like have gone out of practice with each generation.

We don't really have a lot of people doing recreational mathematics these days, which I think is a shame.

Because of this, I like to introduce people to thought games.

Today I'd like to discuss a very engaging and completely worthless thought game...

Picturing a hypercube.

Okay, so a 2 dimensional square is a square. 4 lines with 4 right angles.

Add another dimension by drawing equally long lines at 90 degree angles "up" from the square.

So how do you add a 4th dimension? Well, you add more lines at 90 degree angles of equal length along the 4th dimension.

That's probably where the image breaks down in your head, as we have no actual example of a 4th dimensional object to use as a starting point.

We can see the "shadow" of a hypercube though, much like you can draw a cube on a two dimensional piece of paper using false depth.

The 3 dimensional shadow of a hypercube looks like this

Anyway, the purpose of the thought game is to picture a 4 dimensional object. You're basically trying to force your brain to imagine a completely new image, something impossible for you to visually perceive.

By now, I can "sort of" imagine it. At least pieces of it. I can't exactly wrap my mind around the whole picture, but I can kind of picture the "corner" of a tesseract.

Human creativity can often be described as "Everything is a remix", or "every post is a repost", or other such terms since the human "remake" cycle has existed since human language began.

While we used to remake myths and legends over time, causing new gods and goddesses, these days we remake our films, our books, our comics etc.

So, with that in mind, what are some things you wish would get remade? Good ideas with bad execution.

Here's my list:

Star Wars: I want someone to "Nolanize" Star Wars. I want a dark, gritty, violent Star Wars with moral relativism and the whole shebang. I'll likely have to wait for Lucas to die.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Pretend this movie didn't happen, use Pitch Black as the starting point and try again. The technology jump from Pitch Black to COR was just too huge. PB looks like it took place 100 years in the future, COR looks like it took place 1000+ years in the future.

I may add more as they come to me.

So five years ago I made the choice to sort of remove myself from consumerism as best I could. I stopped decorating my living places, I only bought new clothes to replace clothing that fell apart, I've been wearing the same pair of shoes for over three years.

I have almost completely squashed my desire to own "stuff".

When this comes up with others, I'm always surprised at people's reaction to my life style. They act as if somehow I'm the weird one.

So I'm interested in understanding the desire to own stuff, as I never felt it nearly as strongly as most, and now have nearly eliminated it.

What drives you to buy stuff?

How much of your income would you say goes toward buying stuff of no actual mechanical use?

Hello fellow meat sacks,

So I've been DMing a group of three guys for about half a year now and getting RP or character backgrounds out of them was always like pulling teeth.

So two of the three decide to just reroll characters. They were bored of the ones they were playing so I let them do a reroll at same level.

So, out of nowhere, suddenly they've got RP back stories. One is a half-orc fighter, the other a full orc barbarian, and they've decided that they're half brothers.

They're riffling off stories about their child hood, facts about their father (the common parent), the half-orc player decides that he's always looked up to his older brother, despite that his older brother is one of two town drunks while the half-orc is a skilled smith and the head of the town's militia (due to being the highest level fighter in the town).

So how can I help them a bit more? I want this to keep going, so how can I assist without interference?

I was thinking of writing up info about their father, as they left it pretty open, or should I let THEM decide what their father was like?

So, surprisingly, PF has a few throw backs to old school RPG style play by including random encounter tables.

Now, way back in 2nd edition you have random encounter tables AND the chances for encounters to happen.

Example:

You're on an un-patrolled road between two cities, neither of which is lawfully aligned. Such a road would have a decently high encounter chance, with a high chance of those encounters being hostile.

So, what do you guys think would be a good system for determining if an encounter even happens?

My random thought would be

Base Percentage: This is a factor of the terrain. Forest would be higher than say desert.

City/Wilderness: Reduce or increase encounter chance based on proximity to civilization. Increases chance of neutral or friendly encounters when close to town.

Law and Order: Adjust chance based on if the area is patrolled, the alignment/attitude of near by settlements, ect.

What other factors would you guys add?

What base percentages would you use?

Does such a table already exist in PF and I'm just blind?

Why is this the best kept secret in game preparation?

I saw it mentioned here and there in some threads, and in a DM prep guide I picked up, but these people have not done enough of a job trumpeting the awesomeness of this program.

Imagine all the functionality of a scrap/notebook, but digital.

Since I started using this last week I have become more prepared for this week's session than I have been in my entire GMing career.

Does anyone who uses the program know of any good tutorials to learn the more advanced features?

In the "urban adventures" section of the PFSRD it states that an average small city wall is:

A typical small city wall is a fortified stone wall 5 feet thick and 20 feet high. Such a wall is fairly smooth, requiring a DC 30 Climb check to scale. The walls are crenelated on one side to provide a low wall for the guards atop it, and there is just barely room for guards to walk along the top of the wall. A typical small city wall has AC 3, hardness 8, and 450 hp per 10-foot section.

Yet, using the "Damaging Objects" info, a stone object has 15 hp per inch of thickness.

15 x 12 = 180 HP per foot

5 feet x 180 HP = 900 HP.

Why is the wall listed as having half that much HP in the example given in Urban Adventures?

Did I miss a modifier?

After 17 years of GMing, I'm bored of writing extensive plots that require me, far too often, to restrict my player's choices.

I'm sick of building a themepark where players sometimes never want to get on the rides.

Hence forth, at least for the time being, I reject the path. The plot. The ride.

Instead of a park, I want to build a sandbox.

What experiences do people have with more sandbox style play?

Does anyone know any good blogs/templates/guides to creating a good sandbox?

Any warnings from those who've had problems in the past?

In my nearly 30 years on this planet, I have noticed an odd trend by people to stand in front of the "Steamroller of Progress" and try to stop it.

I am not exactly sure why they do it. It's a fruitless activity.

Let's take countries for example. Of the flags represented at the UN, 2/3rds did not exist in their current form 60 years ago. Nations are temporary configurations of borders destined to collapse and be reformed... so why are people patriotic? Why drive toward the survival of a nation that was destined to fail at the moment it formed?

Or racism. Race is a temporary configuration of genetic traits destined to evolve and change into something different. The races that exist today won't exist forever, so why try to maintain the purity of something never meant to survive?

Or religion. All religions fall, and then are replaced with new ones. So why hold onto 1000, 2000, 3000 year old belief structures destined to die?

Our sun only has 3 or 4 billion years left, the universe itself is about "half dead" by most mathematical estimations, so why do people seem to hold onto these ideas of eternal values, be they race, religion, or nation when we KNOW there is no eternal anything?

The end result of all actions is the heat death of the universe. With that in mind, a lot of stuff people do is pretty bloody silly.

Hello fellow moustachioed villains,

While I am primarily a GM, I do get to play occasionally and I almost exclusively play evil characters.

I have obviously run into GMs who ABHOR evil characters. They probably have nightmares of some player playing CE as "Psychotic Stupid" in the past.

So what are some strategies you've used to convince GMs that not every person plays evil like an idiot?

How do you work an evil character into a heroic party? What is your strategy for maintaining both alignment consistency and party cohesion?

Who are some inspirational characters you consider "evil heroes" when building a character? Spawn? The Crow? The Punisher? Jackie Estacado (and the Darkness)?

Fellow GMs, do you absolutely ban evil characters from your table?

If so, why?

I've never liked the idea of intelligent, spell casting dragons. I prefer them to be more animalistic and feral.

So, let's say I have an Adult Black Dragon (CR 11).

It has the following spell like abilities
Spell-Like Abilities (CL 14th)
At will—darkness (60-ft. radius)

Spells Known (CL 3rd)
1st (6/day)—alarm, mage armor, obscuring mist
0 (at will)—dancing lights, detect magic, mending, message, read magic.

What kind of CR adjustment would you give if you stripped away it's spell casting?

Do you believe an equation could be created to adjust the CR of any dragon when removing its spell casting?

Being that Dragonlance was my first introduction to fantasy, I have always had this fascination with wizards being these tight conclaves of highly regulated casters with "towers of high sorcery" or other such structures that defy space and time.

So I want to make a wizard school that exists in its own pocket dimension, and I want people to throw ideas at me as to what it would be like having a school in a pocket dimension.

What would the experience be like, do you think?

What threats would the school face that are abnormal when compared to a school in "normal" space?

Hola,

Short and sweet:
I use Armor as Damage Reduction

I am also using the Torn Asunder critical hit system.
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Problem
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TA's crit system bases "Critical wounds" on how much you beat AC by with your crit (5/10/15 in severity from mild to serious)

In the Armor as DR system, your AC becomes a "Defense Class" which is MUCH LOWER than most ACs, as Armor now becomes DR.

So, basically, when anyone crits right now they easily beat the DC by 10 to 15, making every crit a moderate or serious wound.

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How You Can Help
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I need to figure out how to change the 5/10/15 to a more reasonable number spread for a system where even decently geared players have Defense Classes of only 15 or lower at 6th level.

So, fellow world builders, how do you like to use gods in your campaign?

Are you a Dragonlance/Hercules/Xena kind of person who likes the gods to be real, petty, and involved in day to day life?

Do you prefer a more Song of Ice and Fire religion where the gods' existence is a little more doubt-able/distant.

Do you prefer no gods?

Immortal creatures that act like gods?

One all powerful god?

Hello once again fellow world builders and sacks of meat,

If you couldn't guess from my name, I like gore. I like blood. Not the real stuff, but the fictional horror movie/violent game stuff. (I actually find real gore/death looks fake, which is kind of funny when you think about it. We see fake gore so much that real gore starts to look fake).

Anyway, I want to make PF combat a little more brutal. A little more gory. I want more limbs removed, more grievous wounds, etc.

So I picked up "Torn Asunder" for PF, a 3rd party book that expands the crit system to include a lot of the stuff I like.

Problem is, you have to crit the creature and beat the AC by 5 just for a minor wound, 10 for a big wound, and 15 for a critical wound.

Odds are you are rarely going against things that you can hit by 15.

I also, personally, don't like the additional damage provided by crits. It swings fights a bit too much.

So here's my idea:

Get rid of true crits. Make it so ANYTIME you hit by 5 or more (then 10, then 15, or adjust these numbers to be slightly lower) you get one of the "Critical effects" from the Torn Asunder book.

This would likely lead to a lot more broken limbs, a lot more missing fingers, a lot more scars and cool stories.

Thoughts?

How pissed would you be if your character lost a limb? Assuming, of course, you have options for magical replacement.

Hello fellow meat sacks,

I am, admittedly, a sadistic bastard to my players sometimes. So I picked up the Torn Asunder book which is basically all about chopping off your player's arms and legs and laughing at them...

Anyhow, I want to incorporate the bleeding rules but I want to ensure I understand them, as they're not explained well in the book.

I'm assuming table 1-14 is Con loss from blood loss for ALL crits?

While 1-14A is the Con loss values for severing a limb?

I'm almost 100% sure this is how it works but I wanted to be sure.

So I'm trying to finally do a proper breaking in of some guys I've been DMing with for a while. I went easy on them for too long and did soft, overland adventures... but they got bored, so I stuffed them in a dungeon.

Right now they're hiding in the extra-dimensional space above a Rope Trick spell.

The two casters (Wizard and Cleric) are really bad for remembering what their own spells do, and they always seem to forget to write down important info.

So Rope Trick lasts 1 hour per level (they're 6th). I believe he is expecting to sleep a full night in the space.

Anyway, I'm going to ask him next session "How long does Rope Trick last?". When he goes to look it up, I'm going to say "No, I'm asking if your character knows off the top of his head."

If he says "I don't know." or says a duration that is longer than 6 hours, I'm thinking of dropping the party from the space and giving them 20 feet of fall damage.

Is that a jerk move or more of a "learn your spells" move?

Everyone has had a campaign that fell apart before it ever got started. Everyone has some character they really liked the concept of but never got to play.

Here's a chance to reminisce about those characters. A chance for new life.

So if you have a character you maybe never played, or only got to play a session or two, go ahead and post about it here.

Swarms don't make attack rolls.

Most swarms appear to have no CMB either.

So what is the point of Weapon Finesse on, say, a centipede swarm?

Assuming this is a mistake, what would be a nasty replacement feat?

Hello squishy man-thing.

You has problem?

You has players who has problem?

You has DM who has problem?

Grod here to help.

You ask advice, Grod give advice.

Breeding Strategies

This is a topic that goes mostly unmentioned in monster/humanoid ecology blocks.

How many goblins in a litter?

How long is a gnoll's gestation period?

In writing up stuff for my setting, I ended up coming up with some weird ideas I felt I would share.

Hopefully this will cause your creative fire to flare up and you'll at your own.

The following descriptions apply to variations of this race that exist in my own setting.

Goblinoids: Goblins have no females or males, they are genderless. Goblinoids breed through eating. The more they eat, the larger they get. When a goblin reaches a certain mass point, it begins forming egg like sacks on its back and shoulders. After enough time has passed, new goblins slop out of these sacks and quickly grow to full size.

This feral nature appears social, not biological, as elves born into human settlements, and half-elves, seem to mature more normally. This means elves may very well have their increased intellect earlier than thought, but no social understanding of how to use it.

Does anyone know of any computer programs, or phone apps, that would allow a person to create themed playlists and then switch to those playlists with a quick button press?

Something like being able to have a "combat" button, a "sneaking" button, etc, and when this button is pressed it begins playing a song from a pre-constructed playlist.

Preferably the music change would include fading, so that it's a less abrupt change.

I do realize this could be done somewhat manually using iTunes, or any other playlist capable music player, but I was looking for something more tailored to use at the table.

I'm thinking of blowing the 10 dollars on this PDF book but a lot of "DM prep" books I've previewed have been full of stuff any DM knows already.

Anyone taken a look at this product?

Hello,

I want to develop half-dwarves for my campaign.

One racial I'd like them to have is a dwarf's ability to not be slowed by armour, but for a 30 speed race.

Now, that feature in the ARG is free to any Medium creature that is Slow speed. It's not stated as an actual trait.

Now, if you took the half dwarf, made it slow (-1 RP) then added 10 movement (1 RP), it would be 0RP. But the increase movement speed has a pre-req of Normal Speed.

So I'm thinking this trait should be an RP 1 or RP 2 trait, but I am undecided as to how powerful full speed in heavy armour actually is.

Hello,

So I had to build a character for my GF a while ago and her instructions were "I want to be a barbarian, and I want to smash stuff."

So I set myself to the task and created a pretty smashy character. I would like to expand on this build with all of your assistance.

Race: Half-Orc (with Gatecrasher racial)
Class Barbarian (Breaker Archetype)
Level 1 Feat: Power Attack
Level 2 Rage Power: Smasher
Level 3 Feat: Improved Sunder
Level 4 Rage Power: Strength Surge
Level 5 Feat: Destroyers Blessing (get back 1 rage round when successfully sundering)
Level 6 Rage Power: Ground Breaker
Level 7 Feat: Greater Sunder (Sunder damage goes through to target)
Level 9 Feat: Sundering Strike (Free sunder on crit)
Level 10+: No clue what to go with.

I call this build "the skeleton key" as it pretty much negates the need for someone to pick locks, unless you're trying to be stealthy.

You can sunder your way through stone walls pretty easy.

You can smash the ground and create rough terrain.

You can sunder a weapon easily, and then pick that weapon up and use it like it wasn't broken.

You can brute force your way through a lot of objects with massive bonuses to break objects when using strength checks.

Sure, lots of creatures have no sunder-able gear, but you can still sunder a roof on their head, sunder a hole beneath them, bash down a tree ontop of them etc etc etc.

And, as long as you've got someone to sunder every round, you can stay in rage perpetually.

If you're anything like me, you have a lot of ideas in your head that cover a lot of aspects of a world but you have a hard time codify them.

I'd like to discuss world building from a meta stand-point. The technique of world building itself.

Now, I've tried both top down and bottom up methods. I've tried outside in and inside out, but I find I almost need some sort of hybrid of both.

Do you have any good tricks to world building?

Premise: In a world where magic is common, one would assume necromancy would be considered totally normal in some cultures. As magical and technological ability of such a culture would advance, eventually it would be likely that magic, specifically necromancy, and technology would merge.

So how do you think necro-technological equipment would function?

Would repair require both mend and negative energy?

Would the technology be susceptible to the same weaknesses as undead?

Would a magical equivalent of "robo-cop" be a construct or an undead or both?

I'm adding orcs as a core race in my setting, and I noticed that they don't have intimidating, but half orcs do. They both have ferocity, though the half-orcs have a weaker version, yet only half orcs have intimidating.

This seems off to me, so I'm throwing intimidating into the orc. But, then I was thinking it doesn't make sense for both a half orc and an full orc to be equally intimidating when an orc has a couple dozen pounds and a few inches on a half-breed.

So I'm thinking of a few things:

Allow an orc to use str over cha for intimidate checks, along with the +2.

Str intimidates without the +2.

Increase to a +4.

Some bonus specifically to intimidating enemies in combat.

Any other ideas?

Any DM worth their weight in books has struggled with the alignment system since they started DMing. On the one hand, it works with the rules really well. On the other hand, it is a very objective view of morality and does not lend itself well to "grim dark" settings.

The problem occurs less on the Law-Chaos axis, as both ends of the axis can be seen as equally beneficial. Law is order, safety, protection but also tyranny, oppression ect. Chaos is freedom, yet also anarchy (in the bad sense, not the political ideal).

Good and Evil have much less of an "equality". Good is good, evil is evil. This bugs me.

I want to "rethink" the good vs evil axis to use more "neutral" language.

Now, a selfless vs selfish axis works, but evil isn't always necessarily selfish. Many dictators were very selfless people (many more are greedy b!&&*@$@s of course) who did very terrible things, but did those things for others (at least this is how they saw it).

Reason vs Instinct can also work, but again, many "evil" people have been hyper reasoned and logical people.

So what are some words we could replace good and evil with that don't carry the same bias?

Hello,

I am currently going through a process of creating a fantasy campaign with an anachronistic tech/science level of about the 1900s, combined with magic/psionics.

I am writing up my racial entries from the perspective of a "Delver of Biology" (basically a professor) and I'm trying to make the races adhere to "Darvus Charwin's Theory of Evolution via Natural and Unnatural Selection".

Darkvision bugs me. It doesn't make physical sense. Infravision is too easy to exploit, so I don't want to go that route either.

So what I've decided to do is switch out darkvision for other "senses", but I need some opinions on balance.

In your opinions, what are some other senses that are about as powerful as darkvision?

I'm speaking of stuff like tremorsense, blindsense, blightsight, ect.

As an example, I am trying to explain dwarves by saying they evolved from a common ancestor with badgers. Hence I was considering giving them tremorsense. I could give them blindsight and be done with it, but I believe an intelligent humanoid would eventually figure out how to light stuff, and hence would either lose true echolocation or would have never evolved it to begin with. That and blindsight is like the holy grail of senses.

Any input is very appreciated. Also, if a thread already exists on this subject I apologize, I could not find it through search.

I have been working on my own pen and paper setting for years and when I came across Pathfider I decided it fit what I wanted to do best, rules wise.

I've been kind of taking the "Eberron approach" where I basically grab every recognizable element of Pathfinder and retool it for my campaign setting.

As people who play settings, do you prefer when a setting "calls a tengu a tengu" or do you prefer the races to have more lore appropriate names for the setting?