In the first round, yeah, no one should speak before their turn. The first round initiative indicates when you can react to what is going on, and they're only six second rounds, not one minute rounds like the old days.
After that, whatever.
Does this mean that whoever is unlucky enough to go last in the round has to be mute for the entire combat?
The player right before him has to hold his tongue for nerly the entire round, then blurt out whatever he wants to say before the last guy takes his turn?
Nobody can speak before their turn in the round?
Sort of. Usually after the first round I let up on it though. Basically you can't chatter if you're flat footed. Harsh? Yeah, I'm a jerk like that. My PCs don't mind though, they like the abuse.
DM_Blake wrote:
They grumble, but they realize they have nobody to blame but themselves.
Well I see two options. The first is to make him take the Leopard HD and the LA and then he just wont level up until the PCs catch up to his level in XP. The other option is to let him take the LA now, wait until the PCs catch up to him in level, then force him to take his animal HD for his next few levels after that. It would give him time to put ranks in Control Shape at least. XP debt seems inevitable.
Has he already transformed for the first time? If not you could possibly hint drop to have him more actively pursue a cure.
Alertness does exist in Pathfinder, it gives you a +2 to Perception and Search, IIRC.
.. and how they use prior game knowledge against them, even if they are starting out at 1st level.
Can you be more specific? I've always addressed problems on an as-needed basis. I usually give every PC in the group a free action to speak up to one sentence which they can take only after they've already gone in the current round. As far as table talking is concerned, I don't allow it. If they want to talk tactics, they have to do it when they're not neck deep in combat.
To help discourage metagaming, I like to mix it up. For D&D, you can always throw a template on top of a monster to give it a little push. Character levels also works well. It's a lot of extra work, but if you have the time it makes for an interesting surprise. My PCs adopted the rule of not bringing monster manuals to my games so they wouldn't be tempted to look things up, which has helped.
I also don't think docking XP is too far of a stretch. The DMG (3.5) specifies in the XP awarding section that if you run an encounter in a circumstance favorable to the PCs you can lower the XP reward for the encounter. I would treat your PCs metagaming about monster knowledge as favorable circumstances and just lower their XP a bit if they use out of character knowledge in their encounters. It's not an end-all solution, but it's a good start.
Well Paizo has their own advertising department that can probably do a better job selling this than I could, but I can tell you the main reason I chose not to go to 4.0.
In the City Of Brass (necromancer games, 3.5) saves are valued by calculating strength x charisma x HD. Casters then get a x1.5 markup.
This gives you their cost in BP (Brass pieces). I'll let you know when I find out how many gold a brass piece is worth (page 100 and still waiting) unless someone else can help.
Interesting idea, that would definitely stream line the costs. If you figure out how much a BP is worth, by all means feel free to post it so I can run some examples in time with your formula suggestion.
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I dabble a little in web design so I actually wrote up a page to randomly generate a merchant. Unfortunately I don't have it hosted right now, but it breaks down like this:
The merchant's level is determined randomly from level 10 through 20, assuming that a character under level 10 is more or less not going to be in competition (under sold by other slavers, not powerful enough to control a large amount of slaves to make their trade profitable, etc).
I then set a value for the highest CR based on the Merchant Level. A merchant will not have a creature with a CR above half his character level. I came to this value because I determined a merchant would want the ability to easily put down any possible revolts, so he would make sure to only carry monsters that he, or his cohorts, could easily put down. This formula is also for humanoids with class levels, but that was primarily to easy the formulaic burden on myself for the page. Higher level merchants, however, are willing to fill special orders if the buyers are interested.
Finally I determined that the number of unique creatures and the number of those creatures available were also a function of the merchant level. For CRs, I pretty much limited them to approximately 1d4 creatures for those above CR 1 or 2. Generally higher level CRs occur more infrequently, but this was a choice by me the GM to make monsters rare.
Humanoids/Giants/Monstrous Humanoids occur a little more often than the other monster types, so these creatures are "in stock" about four times as often as a monster will. While I limited the number of different types of these creatures a merchant would have available, I greatly increased the amount compared to how many of one type of monster a merchant could have. This assumption was arrived at the fact that most of these types of creatures will form a "city" of some sort, and a slaver would just attack the city and take the town hostage for the slave trade. The number of creatures scales with the merchant level, postulating that a higher level merchant is able to keep control of more smaller creatures easier (area of effect spells, etc).
This is a really dumbed downed version of the page itself. The page currently stores every monster by every type for every CR, 0 through 10, with MM 1-5. Anything bigger than large size is omitted, as I imagined it would be too encumbering for the merchant but rarely I will make exceptions. I have more products than that, but if I ever decide to host the page, I don't want to use too many obscure sources.
End Game for the page is it will tell me the merchant level, randomly determine the merchants stats and relevant skill bonuses, and display, by CR, the creatures available and the amount of each. The page will then randomly determine some flare for each listed CR of creature, including creatures with character levels and creatures with templates.
I'd love to hear some criticism of the above if anyone is interested. Thank you all again for your suggestions.
Take a look at Table 12-5: Treasure Values per Encounter on page 293 of the Pathfinder Beta.
IMO, the value listed as "Fast" would be perfect. A 1st level or 1 HD slave would cost 400 gp, while a 10th level/10 HD slave would cost 8,200 gp, and a 20th level/20 HD slave would cost 100,000 gp.
I actually glanced over these tables briefly. As I continued to work on the Monster Bazaar, I found that figuring the price was going to be the easy part and determining what was available was a bit trickier.
I wound up going with the NPC Treasure worth for the slave cost, adjusted for different factors (such as environment, appearance, class, etc) but I'll revisit the Treasure per Encounter table. Thank you for the suggestion.
Sorry for the vanishing act, thought my thread was dead. I'm very glad to see it isn't!
Nathan Morse wrote:
The city is a metropolis. Now to evaluate the slave population: I'll assume that because of the difficulty in taking higher level slaves that the highest level of slave available in the entire city is based on a city population three levels smaller than metropolis, which is a large town. That means that rolling for the highest level character that's a slave will have a +3 modifier (this is all on pages 138 and 139 in the DMG).
I like that you're working in the city size modifiers here, I think that's something I'll definitely pick up.
Nathan Morse wrote:
This should be a 1/day check. Let's set up a percentage roll to decide. We'll set the base chance of availability at 50% for the average CR, in this case 7. That way you're almost guaranteed to locate one within 2 days. Now we set modifiers.
CR Modifiers: +1 CR is -10%
-1 CR is +10%
Environment modifiers:
Local environment: +10% (in Calimport both warm desert and ocean)
Nearby environment: no modifier (in Calimport warm plains and warm forests)
Somewhat distant: -20% (in Calimport warm swamps and warm mountains)
Truly...
These mods are really great, I like the idea of figuring outwards from the average CR then adjusting percentages based on that. I really like what you're doing with the environmental modifiers, I think that's a great idea.
Your work is very dynamic, I really appreciate your suggestions and will most certainly work them into my campaign.
I'm dealing with two sets of scenarios right now. The first is "I'm looking for this, do they have it?" and "I walk up to a merchant and ask to see what he has." This will most certainly help me take steps forward with the first question, thank you again!
Just use a random encounter table for the environment you're in. You might replace things that don't make sense with "roll on other environment table" to add in the chance of getting something really rare.
Good thought, I don't suppose you know of an encounter table that spans all five monster manuals by chance?
yoda8myhead wrote:
I'd imagine there would be an 4:1 ratio of humanoids to monsters
Arbitrary number? Kind of curious where you got it from. I don't really know of anything published that was designed for this kind of thing. Something akin to 80% of the slaves for trade are humanoid and draw up the different races and how many of each there are and have another 20% that are non-sentient monsters. Most of the humanoids/monsters will be straight out of the manual, any ideas on how many should be different? For instance, how many of the 100 Lizardfolk for sale should have class levels? I imagine the highest character level would actually depend on the specific caravan. A 4th level merchant isn't going to have near the stock of a 16th level merchant, for example.
The way I'd determine availability is with a pre-arranged list of slaves for purchase. Since no one can craft a slave to spec like they can for a magic item, I think you should decide ahead of time who or what is on the auction block in any given town on the day your PCs are there.
I hate to say it because it's more work but yeah, what you're saying makes a lot of sense and it should probably be predetermined given the nature of it all.
The environmental factors is a good thing to bring up. Let's say you had a white dragon in the desert for sale, that would probably really jack up the price all things considered, native environment is something else I'll need to keep in mind as a cost factor. Good stuff! Thanks for the great ideas.
On a side note, I got to thinking about monster availability and was thinking about maybe creating some kind of inverted percentile formula that I could roll to see if a monster was available. I could probably get away with the wealth to city size ratios that already exist, but I'd like something a little more random because I think it'd be a little more fun.
The idea would be:
PC asks if certain monster is available for purchase.
Figure percent chance creature is available based on CR.
Have PC roll percentile dice to determine if monster is available for sale.
It's probably over complicating it, but I wanted to see if anyone has any ideas.
For a PC to purchase one, they have to give up other wealth, namely magical equipment. At any given level, a PC should have x amount of gold, so take that into account as well.
Yeah I agree, thanks for the input!
I think you're on to something with character wealth though. The Beta book has a table for NPC wealth, what if that was the cost per CL of the character? A heroic 6th level NPC should be worth 5,100 gp. Does that sound like a reasonable base price? That would be a lot less work on my end because the table already exists.
I could adapt that for CRs. Since the CR is designed for 4 party members, what if I multiplied the corresponding NPC Wealth cost of an NPC with a heroic CL equal to the creature's CR by 4? So a CR 6 creature would cost 20,400 gp? (A heroic CL 6 NPC is 5,100 X 4 = 20,400)
Example:
Spoiler:
So a 5th level character should be worth 10,500 gp. Let's say he spends half of it on equipment, and half of it on slaves. That gives him a budget of 5,250 gp for slaves. He could buy one 6th level equipment-less character (5,100 gp). That's one level higher than him, but that leaves him 150 gp for food, security, medical attention, supplies, etc and living with the fear that his slave could whoop him in a fist fight. That'd probably be enough for a slave unless he was a gladiator and thereby needed weapons, armor, etc.
The same character could also buy a CR 3 creature (1,200 x 4 = 4,800) and have 450 gp for upkeep. Sound reasonable?
Not sure if that will scale right or not. A CR 1 creature would cost about 2,400 gp. Would you pay 2,400 for a Pseudodragon?
I know right? Hence why i'm having a rough time portraying this one accurately, this is darker than I usually prefer to go.
Shifty wrote:
The cost of a slave is never going to be that static and easy.
What you are missing is the 'X' factor that they may or may not possess.
Well sure, I realize that there are a lot that factors but can't the same be said for magic items? X area is in the desert so endless water bottles are in high demand, etc etc. Even still we have a set price scale for magic items which doesn't account for market variances. A mark-up or mark-down is subject to the whims of the story, albeit with a healthy amount of GM fiat backing it.
Now that being said, the examples you gave me of what could effect the price of a slave are excellent, thank you for the great ideas, but I still want to move forward with setting a base-line price.
Shifty wrote:
Similarly would you be willing to gamble having an 'enslaved' high level wizard about? what about a powerful gladiator?
Well sure, even in human history there have been incredibly talented fighters that were kept as slaves, but the owners found ways to control them. The most adept swordsman is hardly a challenge without one when faced with a few dozen armed guards with magic items, for example. Sure slave revolt is very much a possibility, but that's part of the fun!
Shifty wrote:
So there's a lot to think about.
I couldn't agree more. I agree about the clerical example you provided but I just don't see a cleric circulating in this slave market. Maybe as an extreme oddity but as you aptly put, without some means of control he really isn't going to be much good.
Mostly what I had in mind for the Monster Bazaar are monsters and warrior types, which is going to lean heavily on the more combat-oriented portions of the class system.
Shifty wrote:
Also - I don't care HOW BIG the plague is, no Kobold is worth a 60% mark up :p
Hehe, if the Kobold race goes extinct and no one sees it happen, does anyone care? Poor Kobolds.
So in hopes of getting everything started, I'll put down my thoughts so far. Again, all of the below is just base-line prices without any marketing conditions factored in:
Magic items scale exponentially, so I was thinking slaves should do the same. I was considering a flat formula for a character with class levels. Lets assume a "base" race (a race with no level adjustment) and class levels. The cost of the slave would be: (class level x class level) x 100 gold pieces. So, the class level squared multiplied by 100. A 1st level character would cost 100 gp, a 10th level character would cost 10,000 gp. This would be only for non-NPC class levels, NPCs with class (Adept, etc) levels would cost significantly less, maybe half?
CR is a little bit trickier. I can't help but wonder if the above formula would hold for it as well, CR squared X 100, since technically adding CL to a CR creature just raises the CR 1 for 1 (assuming the class is relevant to the monster, and I never liked that rule in the DMG as I don't quite feel it's an accurate representation).
Anyone have any other ideas? And, thanks for the input Shifty, it's very much appreciated.
I'm in an interesting situation for a game that I'm running geared more toward an evil campaign. I normally don't write this kind of game, but I'm hoping the table-top's finest can help me out.
My new campaign begins in a city over run by high level and extremely powerful vampires. One of the quirks of the city is that there is a fluid and lucrative slave trade. My problem is how much.
The slave trade will sell anything, from high level characters to monsters to monsters with character levels. I need a system to determine how much a slave should cost based on their CR and CL. I'm looking for something formulaic that I can do on the fly, something roughly akin to:
Cost by CR (XXXX gp / CR of creature)
Cost by CL (Having X levels of Y Class Adds XXXX gp per level to base cost of creature)
Also, if anyone has any ideas for fluctuating costs I'd very much love to entertain them. Something akin to "Ah drat, the Kobold plague is back in full force so the price of Kobolds just went up 60%." I want my PCs to be able to trade slaves like any other commodity and make a profit off of unique market situations should they choose to stick around.
Perhaps the following, subtle changes are the solution to making this PrC more enticing.
+ Add 1/2 Caster Progression
+ Add a +1 to the Enhance Arrow progression line
+ Increase the DC of Arrow of Death
Yes, Maybe, Yes, but one of the best ones I've seen so far.
Instead of adding +1 to all weapons, I would let the AA pick enhancements to stack on top of already enhanced weapons. The idea is that AAs have an enhanced bow, +1 through +5, and they can stack other properties on top of it that are level dependent.
A +1 equivilant at every other level, that has to be something aside from a stock + magical bonus (like flaming, shocking, distance, speed, etc) which can be re-tuned every time the ability is gained. Can be mixed and matched (e.g. a shocking and flaming bonus for a total of +2). Caps out at +5 worth equivilant bow by the end of the prestige class. Have 1/2 caster progression in time with the added bonus to bows, alternate with the already in place special "shots" that the AA gets.
Definitely goes both ways, it just seems more fun to make it a skill. A character who is not dextrous at all can really work on having a quick reaction time (putting ranks into it) so that he can out do the guy that has the dex of +8 and eventually train himself to react faster. Class abilities that apply to skills would then be able to apply to initiative. ACP could maybe be a factor...? Improved Initiative is replaced by Skill Focus. A lot of people use initiative like a skill anyways. You and the bad guy both simultaneously decide to jump for the super awesome worth-a-lot thingy. Make an initiatve check. After which, make another to go into rounds, just to name an example.
Either way will work fine, but the debate everyone has going for which one should win out has great points on all sides.
Making it a skill could also bring some versatility to it... opposed checks in a duel, whoever is highest acts first in the "surprise round" where both people take a standard action. If you're jumped, you could maybe make an initiatve check to let you act in the surprise round based on a certian DC...? Make an initiative check to determine where in the round you stop being flat-footed... etc, etc. My point is simply that if it is made into a skill, you could find a lot of uses for it and I wouldn't mind seeing multiple uses for initiative.
I'd love to see some more versatility with animal companions and such. I'd like to have feats that just dealt with CRs or ECLs so that you could completely customize/select the familiar that you want. For example...
Class feature gives you any familiar your little heart desire as long as it's CR 1/2 or below that gives you a +3 bonus to one skill of your choice.
1st Feat in the chain gives you a CR 1 familiar. This can be a new familiar or your base familiar with like a template.
2nd Feat in the chain gives you a familiar with a CR of 1/2 your class levels that count towards your familiar. Might be a little overkill, but looking at leadership...
As far as increasing size, I think feats should be taken to allow you to wield bigger weapons and other feats should negate the penalties therein. When balanced against spellcasters, I wouldn't think it would be that serious of overkill.
Feat Chain 1:
Feat user can wield weapons +1 size larger and incurs -4 penalty.
Feat user can wiled weapons +2 size larger and incurs -8 penalty.
Feat user can wiled weapons +3 size larger and incurs -12 penalty.
Feat Chain 2:
Lower the penalty from size category by 2
Lower the penalty from size category by one incriment if user is wielding a weapon 2+ sizes.
Obviously linear, but you guys get the idea. Just thinking out loud really.
Starting with a positive, Pathfinder RPG is a cut above the rest. The system is great, the attention to detail is fantastic, the backwards compatibility is wonderful, and Paizo is righteous for letting this beta test out into the internet so that gamers everywhere could contribute their thoughts.
On to business:
talmerian wrote:
My gripes:
1) Craft: Although craft is obviously useful, the matter of weeks it takes to create something has remained an elusive goal in many campaigns. I have largely stopped taking craft as a skill because it is unrealistic in most modules to say "My Character is going to take 4 weeks to craft a sword." It does offer monetary rewards. That is nice, but not enough.
Yeah I'm going to have to second this. I would love to see craft gain some versatility. Hate being a part of the problem without being part of the solution, so here's some ideas:
Maybe have repairing a weapon be related to how much damage it has taken, with a set cost of 1/5 of the item in the event it is destroyed. I know that makes it more complicated, but pulling off a simple way to do it would bring damaging weapons and armor back into a more gritty face which some players/GMs may enjoy.
Broaden the sub-skills, please? Craft Metalworking, Craft Woodworking, Craft Alchemical etc.
Make crafting faster. Instead of copper and silver, use silver and gold. C'mon, you know you want to. :) Just kidding, it's good the way it is. Good show on stating that an item is completed faster if the monetary amount crafted blows away the base price of the item.
Overshooting the DC and increasing the DC by 10 are not the same mechanics. Options are good, but I just want to put this on the board.
For example.. DC 20 with a +20 for a 100 silver piece item.
Rolling a 10 for a total of 30 gives you 30 x 20 = 600 silver pieces, which completes it in a sixth of the time. DC 30, rolling a 10 for a total of 30 gives you 30 x 30 = 900 silver pieces completing it in a ninth of the time.
If that's what you want, spiffy, but I just thought it deserved to be pointed out. My vote is to cut the adding 10 to the DC and have the overkill just be the law and letter for creating items quicker.
As far as spellcraft...
Rename the skill. Have a skill that involves all of the "spell aspects" of spellcasters. Just give it a new face so people let go their previous conceptions about it. I love that it's all in one skill, but the ability modifier for the skill should be the primary ability for your spellcasting type. Yes, a Sorc/Wiz would be using a modifier dependent upon what spell they're casting... charisma if it's a spontaneous spell, intelligence if it's a prepared one. Everyone's happy. Just my 2 cp, thanks for letting me give it.
