Ian Bell's page

Teleportation is not movement in the sense that cage enemy is talking about, IMO. The conjuration (teleportation) rules pretty carefully avoid ever calling it movement; instead they use 'transport'.

Consider also that you cannot take a 5 foot step if you use any kind of movement, but you can in a round where you cast teleport or dimension door (as long as you don't also do a normal move).

I think that second thing pretty definitively means teleporting is not movement. The clause in Cage Enemy is there to stop you from using, for example, the withdraw action, Acrobatics, or Spring Attack to avoid the attack.

The idea is, it's always big enough for the caster. That is where the base 1 5' square comes in. For every 2 levels, you get space for one more passenger - so you add one more 5' square. I don't understand what your player is arguing for or why, really. They want less space on their raft?

This still doesn't scream broken to me, or particularly better than just giving everyone +2 to hit and damage. It does sound useful, but I don't think 7-10 rounds of greater trip (or whatever) being handed out to what in most groups will maybe be 1 or 2 other characters who can make decent use of it is anywhere near game breaking.

The *bard* still has to meet the prerequisites, though, which limits the impact of many of those feat capstones to the late campaign, and also impacts their own build heavily. Heck, in many of the APs they'd never even be able to pick Greater Vital Strike, for example, because they end before level 16 (when the bard would first be able to buy it, and even then only with a dip to something with a bonus feat, since the bard's first feat where it meets the prereqs on a single-class build is 17.)

So many of those things you listed are for pretty niche situations or would only likely be useful to one other character in a typical party. From the whole list, maybe Shatter Defenses would be a bit tough to deal with at times? Spell Perfection isn't a combat feat in the first place.

Even something like Cleaving Finish doesn't seem all that broken, since the dwarven scholar has to actually *know* the feat being granted. If someone wants to buy the whole Cleave chain, or Stunning Fist and all its prerequisites on a bard, I don't think the party is likely ending up more powerful in the aggregate.

With something like Arcane Strike, too, it seems to me like most times you'd be better off as a vanilla bard with inspire courage. Ultimately you're trading *all* the hit bonus for being a point or two ahead on the damage bonus, and it costs a bunch of swift actions to boot, and the to-hit bonus is by far the more valuable part of inspire courage.

So I guess I'm saying I'd be plenty generous on what I allow with this ability, because it's likely not worth what they gave up to get it in the first place.

Yeah, I get it, although I think that's mostly for future proofing so they can use the stance rule to cover a lot of situations. I don't think it's any big stretch to think that the stance that gives you bonuses against being tripped would stop working if someone actually gets you down, though. I will grant you I'm making a feel/intent argument and not a RAW one.

Nothing about Mountain Stance is actually elemental-related so the idea that a wooden floor would shut it off has no basis that I can see. You don't need some kind of mystical connection to the earth. It's a wuxia/martial arts movie thing, not an Avatar thing. It's a poetic name, not a statement of connection to one of the elements.

Put me in the 'grounded stable surface' camp. So no to a rolling boat or flying carpet, yes to a non-moving ship at anchor or a wooden floor on the second story of an inn, etc. I think the 'if you have to make balance checks, it shuts off' rule of thumb is good.

I also probably wouldn't allow it while prone. "Standing" is implicit in the word "stance", for me. I'm not going to try sitting down opposite my sensei when we're about to spar, you know?

I imagine the restriction has as much to do with future-proofing against potential interactions from future abilities as it does with casting in battle form under the current rules, since that currently is not really any big deal.

Opening doors alone is enough justification to have the line about manipulate actions in the rules.

Glean Contents - As others note, this allows so much more than 'reading upside down'. Decipher Writing is a specific action used only on things that are really hard to understand, and that normally requires full access to the document in question. It's used for codebreaking, not reading a letter. Being able to do it...

FWIW, 'this feat also does all these other things!' is a non-sequitur to the initial complaint. Basically all of the 'loose papers' part of the feat (as opposed to the 'sealed message' parts) would seem to pretty easily qualify as things-you-shouldn't-need-a-feat-for, to me.

Is your friend's point that it is too hard for people to hit appropriate challenges, or is the point that because AC scales so fast, the band of appropriate challenges is too narrow?

Both have their supporters and their detractors here but they're kind of separate issues.

I think part of what makes this topic confusing for people is that 2E is keyworded- and action-listed and super-defined to oblivion in some places and then just goes "GM make something up, shrug?" in other places. The presentation of it is kind of divergent in terms of whether it wants to be a 4e rules pick-your-action-from-the-menu or a 5e narrative free-for-all. And I don't think either of those directions are particularly simulationist, the core conflict is more about game-y-ness I think.

A 'real' simulationist would be sitting here saying that hitting the chair with your sword is going to mess up your sword, what are the penalties for dulling the edge? ;)

Agreed. Unless the human-bear is yelling his intimidating catch-phrase instead of just roaring, it also takes the -4.

That said, I don't know that I like the penalty in the first place; being yelled at by an angry person in a language you don't understand is pretty scary, IMO, as would be a bear. I think for me the -4 would just apply if I felt like the target would have trouble understanding that there's a threat. Like, say, if a human tried to intimidate a bear, rather than the other way around.

It's not much of an escape if you're making the players uncomfortable now is it?

This isn't a shade of grey situation. Shades of grey is when someone does a mix of good and bad. Not having things be genetically evil beyond redemption so I don't have to think about killing them doesn't automatically make things be shades of grey.

"I just want to kill stuff because of how they look" is what you're asking, in which case you're the shades of grey in the game.

"I want to kill those bandits that have been attacking the village" is not a moral quandary. The GM can build from there of course with the why's but just having human bandits attacking cause they chose to be evil is perfectly legitimate.

You don't need fiends or undead or utterly alien mindsets to have irredeemable villains that you wanna put down. That animosity comes from what they do, not what they are.

In my experience, my players tend to be more uncomfortable when they have to second guess every fight they have with 'could we have avoided this / redeemed them / found a non-combat solution' etc. There absolutely should be some of that in a game, I think, but too much and the campaign can start to feel like an exercise in 'does the paladin fall' gotchas. Heck, I very frequently sand down uncomfortable elements in the published stuff - most recently I cut the Grey Maidens out of CoCT in favor of more unambiguously evil opponents, precisely because I think asking the party to repeatedly fight a bunch of brainwashed, abused women was not going to be any fun for them or me. Same for some of the Logue stuff in other early APs, etc. I am not a stranger to being accommodating.

"Sentient-being-eating shape-shifting reptile overlords" is not a demographic that I can see any of my players really getting upset about, or one that I think benefits from giving them any extra nuance. It's easy enough to not put a clutch of eggs or non-combatants in an adventure if you don't want your players to have to debate what to do with them, you know?

I feel like "irredeemably evil" should be reserved to things like mindless undead, fiends, things which become what they are via evil, and things that are fundamentally alien (like aboleth or mindflayers.) The extent to which someone can empathize with a thing, the less they should be treated as "a thing which is, by nature, evil".

There is, after all, no shortage of humans who the PCs can feel justified in killing due to the what those humans are doing rather than what they are.

Well, sure. I just think serpentfolk slot right in on the edge of that aboleth/mind flayer category perfectly. Aboleth are hard to use, because underwater adventures are, generally, hard to adjudicate and often kind of unfun, and mind flayers have the problem of being unavailable intellectual property.

And I think that maybe our escapism shouldn’t be genocidal, but again, YMMV.

I don't think that's an especially apt way to describe the way a party interacts with a monster I'd have them run into maybe a handful of as the final villains of a story, but maybe there are tables that want to play 'let's murder the serpentfolk shopkeeper', I guess. If there are serpentfolk shopkeepers innocently hanging around then you've already diverged way, way far away from how I would expect them to be used in a campaign.

I think it's important to be able to ratchet down the emotional/intellectual tension sometimes at the table for a game that's ostensibly supposed to be an escape, and IME everything being shades of grey eventually grinds players down. YMMV, obviously!

Games like Pathfinder benefit from having some badguys that are just irredeemable obstacles for players to overcome. There are dozens and dozens of options of things PCs can encounter to wonder about taking prisoners and negotiations and the nature of evil and all that, and tons of options for playing something "weird". But all that gets tiring, eventually, and sometimes you need a more straightforward sort of conflict. There has to be something in the toolbox for GMs that can talk, has a society, can make plans, doesn't have to be from another plane, and that can just serve as a no-questions badguy. I'm glad that serpentfolk are this sort of thing, given their literary and gaming heritage. They're alien enough to get away from uncomfortable real-world parallels, but not *so* alien that you have to put them in weird environments or get very strange in your evil monologuing. They're a perfect villain in a lot of ways.

It's probably a non-sequitur in the thread by this point, but the idea that rogues should never have a low Wisdom sucks. Low-wisdom rogues are probably one of the most common tropes in the fiction, and in the DNA of the game. "Here or lower the character can only be a thief" and all that.

EldonGuyre wrote:

I often do, in situations like that, but do get grumbles.

And so you should. You have just said, "Your abilities don't matter."

That's not really true for the example case in which it's a brand-new creature that nobody's ever encountered before. In the case of a truly new discovery, I'd allow the knowledge check to identify type and subtype, and perhaps things that are evident from external physical characteristics of the creature ("it's fangs drip with venom"), but that's it. Knowledge skills still rely on having had an opportunity to learn about something *somewhere*.

It's still impossibly game-y feeling - it doesn't feel like something that grows out of the fiction at all, it's the worst kind of immersion breaking for me.

Matthew Downie wrote:

Frozen Yakman wrote:

No it doesn't because DCs are not level dependent values. Eventually everybody reaches 95% success at picking normal locks. The variance between specializing in picking locks and not caring whatsoever gets washed away by level.

We don't really know how true this is.

Hypothetical adventure 1: All locks increase in DC at a rate of 1 per level. PCs who are better at locks than others will remain better by the same amount. Levelling up may feel like a treadmill, giving only the illusion of progress.

Hypothetical adventure 2: All locks remain the same DC throughout the adventure. As PCs level up, skill bonus points become irrelevant because everyone has enough skill points from their level alone to pick all locks.

Hypothetical adventure 3: Lock DCs vary wildly. Some locks will be pickable by all PCs of the expected level. Some are borderline impossible for all PCs. Some are vaguely level appropriate (eg, 90% for specialist PC, 65% for amateur PC, or 10% for amateur, 30% for expert, or something like that).

I think this is a really good example. I think a lot of people who don't like level-based bonuses are coming from a point of view of assuming either #1 or #2 will be true, and I think Paizo is aiming for #3.

Whether they hit that mark or not remains to be seen, but those hypotheticals are a good way of demonstrating that it's possible to have a meaningful outcome other than the ones people seem afraid of.

Here's the thing; in practice, #3 is the same as #1. Pathfinder does most of their business through published adventures, whether that's APs or PFS or Modules. The DCs in those adventures for anything that actually matters are going to be set such that they're a challenge to specialized characters of the expected level, just as they always have been in prior content.

I like this in general.

However - I question the idea of having spells, and Spell Points, and then you don't use the Spell Points for casting your regular spells, but rather some other 'spells' that aren't really spells. This is 100% going to confuse people.

The critical failure on spell saves is probably the first rule I'd remove from a game I GM. Those sorts of effects always disproportionately affect PCs, and I've never seen a fumble system that increases fun for the players. Leave that sort of thing for games like Blood Bowl.

EDIT: Honestly, in general, critical failures - especially when tied to chance of success - have the effect of discouraging players from trying heroic, low odds things under duress, which is another thing I don't want. Just really not a fan of this system in general.

Kaladin_Stormblessed wrote:

That sounds cool until someone summons a lillend azata and the GM needs to stop and customize it, or (possibly even worse) have the player do so. Let alone if they summon 1d3 of them.

Summoning is already a gamestopper unless the GM enforces that characters with summoning spells have their stuff looked up ahead of time, instead of poring over the options in the monster manual. So if you want to summon chaotic outsiders, you have your little stat block already written out in your notes or you don't get to.

The GM would already have this worked out ahead of the adventure and presumably could just toss d100 a couple times to build it instantly if forced to improvise.

If the player has to pre-prepare the stat block, it becomes just another vector for min/maxing rather than any kind of flavorful chaotic randomness.

FaerieGodfather wrote:

Well, I do not agree with you there. Making an effective character should be the default assumption, and it should be damned near impossible to make an ineffective character accidentally.

If all choices are (mathematically) the same, why are there choices? I'm all for raising the floor and lowering the ceiling, but I don't want to live in a 4ft tall apartment.

I mean, if we're throwing out spurious analogies, presumably you also wouldn't want to play on a baseball team where everyone else on your team gets issued a baseball glove, but you have to play outfield with a pair of mittens.

A more or less level playing field should be the default for a whole host of reasons.

Malk_Content wrote:

Noir le Lotus wrote:

QuidEst wrote:

1. PF1, nobody moved. My players had to be reminded of how to do things without provoking all the time. I think allowing movement leads to tactics, and Fighter being unique in locking things down is good.

Well if only fighters have it in the party but all monsters can do it too, that won't change a lot : your party will remain unable to move ...

Some monsters will have it doesn't mean all monsters will have it.

If enough DO it would effectively stop the tactic until/unless the monster is ID'd to find out if it does. This also makes IDing humanoids CLASSES an important tactic.

Assuming that humanoid monsters *have* classes; they may be 4e/5e style things like 'hobgoblin soldier' or whatever, with enumerated special abilities that make them function *like* a class, without having to burden their stat block with tons of minor class abilities.

So you think that(presuming you are unskilled at basketball) there is actually a non zero chance that you won’t be embarrassed and humiliated?

What I think is, we accept a certain amount of uncertainty into the outcome of die rolls. That's literally why die rolls are in the game. We don't say, "well, the big bad guy is 5 levels above the party, we'll just say he wins because he's better at fighting than they are." What is it about the skill system that makes it any different from how we resolve anything else in the game?

But it still means there is a pretty significant chance of the less skilled person winning the roll off.

Why is this acceptable in combat, but unacceptable with skill checks?

Save that now at mundane tasks a legend is barely distinguishable from a barely trained individual.

Who cares? If the DC is 10, why does it matter if the legendary character beats it by a lot more or a moderate amount more?

Demon Lord of Paladins! wrote:

I am gonna agree with this. I ran PF for years, I ran pbp here on this forum, I ran games IRL and now I run 5e. Every single class in the games I have been involved with feel different. Sure the math is the same or close too it, but non of them feel the same.

And people go on and on about "Oh the wizard and the fighter have the same chance to hit" which is both true and false. The caster my have the same chance to hit ranged, but as someone playing a melee cleric, I will tell you the fighter, paladin and Barbarian all outclass me in melee. I can match them for a few rounds by burning though powers, but not all session.

In the end, this "oh they have the same chance of hitting" misses the whole point

I couldn't disagree more.

In fifth ed the Paladin, the Battle Cleric, and the Battle Bard all play virtually identical.

I had a bard and a cleric at the same time in two different games and they felt like identical characters.

There was a Paladin in the group with my cleric and a battle cleric in the group with my bard (both played by the same fellow player)- this only confirmed to both of us that all three "classes" were essentially identical.

There was also player with a one level fighter dipped Wizard- who eventually always out damaged the Paladin, the Bard, either cleric in melee-- but ALL of those were basically useless because in 5E Barbarian is overpowered and you basically shouldn't play anything that ever intends to swing a melee weapon that isn't Barbarian.

This doesn't come close to matching my experience with 5e. Not even a little. At our table the paladin significantly outperforms the barbarian in terms of dealing damage, whereas the barbarian is able to TAKE way more damage, while also giving everyone advantage. It's a flip of their expected support vs. damage roles in other editions, to be sure, but the idea that a 5e paladin is 'useless' is completely ludicrous.

The barbarian can't assist the rogue because the barb doesn't have proficiency in either skill. You can't assist another person unless the assister is proficient.

This is only true of checks that require proficiency to attempt in the first place, like, say opening a lock. In which case the example doesn't apply at all, because the barbarian could never make his own check after the rogue failed.

Bounded accuracy is atrocious. Your main thing you specialize in the whole game is rendered worthless through will of the dice. Consider this scenario between a level 8 rogue with +3 Int and Dex and expertise in Search and Thief Tools and a level 8 barbarian with -2 to both Int and Dex and no proficiency in either skill.

Rogue: I search the chest for traps. (rolls nat 6) 15!
DM: You don't find any traps.
Barbarian: I want to try! (rolls nat 18) 16!
DM: The lid is sitting on a pressure plate. It will be difficult to remove the trap without setting it off.
Rogue: I try to disarm the trap. My Dexterity(Thief tools) check is 17 (nat 8).
DM: You're trying to jam the plate closed, but it doesn't want to stay.
Barbarian: Let me try that.
Rogue: Sure.
Barbarian: WOO! Nat 20! That's an 18.
DM: You manage to jam the plate. The chest is now safe to open.

This is not a hypothetical scenario, this happens ALL THE TIME in 5e. It's not always the same player, but very often the one player who took an obscure or rarely-used ability is completely upstaged by another player because of a bad roll. It feels awful. 5e is designed to make every class useful in combat, so as a player you feel like your build is useless because the only thing you can contribute is damage, which every other class can do just as well - And if you're having a bad night, you can't roll to hit, and the enemies make all of their saves because level-appropriate enemies rarely have less than a 40% chance to make their save. Heck, a CR 1/4 Zombie has a 15% change of making its CON save against a level 20 Wizard with 20 (i.e., max) INT. Because zombies have a +3 CON mod, they can make a DC21 save by rolling 18. Likewise, a CR 1/4 skeleton can take half damage from Fireball from the same wizard on 19. Since the average damage of 5e Fireball cast at its lowest level is 28, and skeletons have 13 HP, if you roll low on the damage then it's very possible for skeletons to survive being Fireballed by a max level wizard. Out of all of the...

Perhaps I'm veering off topic, but the skill examples you gave here are not really how 5e is supposed to work. Your trap-checking example, for instance, should have been resolved as 'the barbarian helps you search, which gives you advantage' - so you'd have had 2 rolls at +9 rather than a roll at +9 and a roll at -2.

The takeaway for the larger discussion, I guess, is that you can't really discuss 5e's bounded accuracy/DC system without accounting for the effects of the advantage/disadvantage system.

It seems silly to base your argument on 1e abilities we don't even know are going to be there in 2e. (I rather think that Divine Grace will not exist as-it-is-now in 2e, frankly.)

Threeshades wrote:

That's your preference. Mine is what we have right now. I like how these characters look despite practicality. And I think its alright to have some characters be a little more exposed for reasons of sex appeal as long as its done for both genders. And it's not like unarmored pants are going to help seoni against sword blows and dragon claws. Since she's a sorcerer we won't see her in armor anytime soon.

It's not so much armor against sword blows and dragon claws. It's "Completely impractical even for walking in the woods not expecting to be attacked by anything."

I mean just the ticks and burrs alone...

I'll give it a chance, but the short description makes it all seem a bit game-y and 4e-ish, which concerns me. If it ends up being more along the lines of 5e in terms of filing off the edges while remaining more of an experience than a boardgame, then I'll feel a lot better about it.

I'm padding out the content of the adventure to put it on the medium XP track instead of fast, so my plan is to have a lead from the fishery take them outside of town to a nearby village for a couple days, then they can come back to Les Miserables barricades already in progress and have it make a bit more sense.

"You ignore your Strength penalty to damage" is not ambiguous. It doesn't matter why you have a penalty to damage from Strength; you ignore it. It doesn't need clarification. I'm not sure where that Editor's Note comes from, but it introduces confusion that is not actually present in the feat.

I imagine things would get pretty tough for the ratfolk around the time that the plague hits and everyone starts blaming them. Seems like a good hook.

The battle poi should probably have its damage line expressed as "0 + 1d4 fire".

I ended up taking critical focus and quick draw on a samurai character (who gets limited forms of those baseline.) Compounding the fact that I was dual-wielding different weapons, even. Definitely not the most optimal character ever, but he was fun.

Aeons, perhaps, or experimentation by axiomites.

Large and reach is just asking for trouble, especially in a dungeon. He's not only going to trivialize some encounters, he's also going to get in the way of other players, etc. Perhaps he should look at options that are less crazy race point wise, like an ifrit with the enlarge person SLA or whatever.

They ignore 20 points of hardness, but can't be used to cut through anything that would be useful against, so that point is moot.

There are creatures with hardness.

I wouldn't apply it to ongoing condition effects like bleed damage, catching on fire from an alchemist's fire, etc. IMO you're not the source of the damage at that point, the condition is.

As an aside, naginatas are not swords.

I think you mean the inferred maximum would be 24; A +25 is a 45/55 chance against a DC of 35.

Aelryinth wrote:

Alan_of_Q wrote:

2: Regarding Magic Vestment + Mage Armour, they will also stack. Mage armour grants an armour bonus (ie raises your base Armour Bonus to AC from 0 to 4). Magic Vestment adds an enhancement bonus to your Armour Bonus.

This can be cast on a normal set of clothing as mentioned in the spell description: An outfit of regular clothing counts as armor that grants no AC bonus for the purpose of this spell.

This is completely wrong.

Mage Armor surrounds you in a field of force that replicates armor, giving you an armor bonus.
It does NOTHING to your clothing or yourself.

Magic Vestment CANNOT target Mage Armor, because mage armor is a force effect and spell, not a suit of armor.

If you cast it on your AC 0 clothing, you get AC+5 clothing. Congrats, it works like a chain shirt or something for a few hours.

Since it provides +5 AC and is a suit of armor, it completely suppresses all the effects of the mage armor while in force, just like it would Bracers of Armor, since it has +5 Ac vs +4 from the Mage Armor.

Your clothing being AC 5 and the Mage Armor being AC 4 are seperate sources of armor and do not stack.

==Aelryinth

Nay, 'like' bonuses do not stack. But, for example, a 'sacred' bonus to AC will stack with an 'enhancement' bonus to AC.

Mage Armour provides a +4 'armor' bonus to AC. Magic Vestment provides an 'enhancement' bonus to AC. Ergo, they stack.

You are correct that you can't target the force effect created by the Mage Armour spell, but you can target your t-shirt to gain the 'enhancement' bonus.

Magic vestment does not give an enhancement bonus to AC. It gives an enhancement bonus to the armor bonus of the thing it is cast on. It takes the bonus and increases it, THEN you apply stacking. So you have a shirt with a +5 armor bonus and mage armor with a +4 armor bonus. They don't stack. The enhancement bonus does not go directly to your AC.

Enhancement Bonuses: Enhancement bonuses apply to your armor to increase the armor bonus it provides.

Nope, regular alchemical splash weapons like acid and alchemist's fire do a defined amount of splash damage, not the minimum. Acid does 1 point of damage to the splashed creatures, the end, it isn't doing 1 because 1 is the minimum roll on 1d6. You can see this is especially clear with holy water (2d4 damage on hit, 1 damage on splash.) It's also, by my reading, not a 'damage roll' which is what Weapon Specialization explicitly refers to.

Blade snare says:

This spell creates an invisible magic field that does not stop weapons (whether manufactured or natural) from moving toward you, but impedes their motion when they are retracted. When you are hit with a melee attack, attempt a caster level check against your opponent's CMD. If your check succeeds, your opponent's attacking weapon or body part becomes caught in the field, as if magically affixed to your body. If your check fails, your opponent may retract its weapon.

It clearly says weapons and intends all weapons, as it works on any melee attack, and specifies only "manufactured or natural" as the two options.

What this tells us is that most of us have been using too many categories, as even Improvised Weapons are considered Manufactured Weapons.

There are only two categories of weapons, Manufactured or Natural. Any others are only sub categories.

I don't think we can successfully read the tea leaves on intent from a parenthetical phrase in a spell from the campaign setting line.

Mystic bolts would be 'weaponlike spells' which do indeed count as manufactured weapons.

See this FAQ and this one for clarification.

Count as weapons, yes. As manufactured weapons? Who can tell?