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Sorry if the rules forum isn't the best place for this. We had a situation come up in our game last week and weren't sure if the rules cover this or if we need to leave it to GM prerogative.

The Situation
A PC was surrounded by eight gargoyles. They were having trouble getting their attacks through, so they decided to team up and try to grapple the PC. Since the PC had been tough to hit, their tactic was that the first 7 of them would perform an Aid Another assist the eighth one on his grapple. Since none of the gargoyles had Improved Grapple, all eight of these actions provoked attacks of opportunity.

The PCs Response
Since the PC only got one AoO per round, his response was to opt not to take an attack of opportunity on the first 7 Aid Another actions. All 7 were successful against a CMD of 10, resulting in a +14 bonus for the eighth gargoyle.

Then the eighth gargoyle then attempted the actual grapple with his +14 bonus. When the gargoyle provoked an AoO, the PC opted to take it. The PC hit and dealt 19 points of damage. This resulted in a net -5 to the gargoyles grapple attempt, which ended up missing the PC's actual CMD of 30.

The Question
After the session ended, the DM wondered if all this was kosher. Can the PC tell which actions are Aid Another actions and which are Grapple actions? At first read, we thought so since Aid Another says you are "distracting or interfering" and that sounds different from "grappling." However, since Aid Another provokes an AoO if and only if the underlying aided action type provokes, that implies that Aid Another isn't some generic distraction but is instead like trying the actual action that is being aided.

Last post... I promise :)

@Lopold, the javaw will be replaced with a plain old call to java in the v5.3 release. Long live my *nix brothers and sisters!

Also, @Sethvi, there is already the ability to rename and save treasures. So, I'm assuming that you were asking for someting else.

I get the PDF request so that you can easily distribute treasure hoards to players who don't have the software. Of course, you could always just save the treasures in the supported XML format and ask your players to download the program. That would expand the program's reach and exposure, but is probably not what you had in mind. :)

Thanks for the feedback! I'll take a look at how to add these options without over complicating the simplicity of the UI. In the meantime, I'm sure you've probably found this, but changing the generation options to "Add to treasure..." will easily get you what you want. With that generation option, you can just click Generate twice to create a "Double Standard" hoard or you can use it to piece together some minor, medium, and major, items. Also, in the latest v5.2 release, I added a "City Mode" which will generate a city's hoard all in one click.

Anyway, keep the feedback and requests rolling in. Expect to see a new v5.3 soon that incorporates all of the Ultimate Magic spells.

Hey Paizo folks! I'm sure your feature roadmap is already overflowing, but I have another suggestion to put on the list.

It would be awesome if paizo.com contained a centralized place to list helpful gaming tools: character generators, character sheets, treasure generators, etc. Further, if the community could provide ratings of the tools, it would be easy for us to find links to the collective "best" tools.

This way, we won't have to have so many duplicate, Does anyone know of a good software tool for... threads.

If you want to get really fancy, the list could allow filtering so that users could limit to their personal preferences: free/pay, windows/max/*nix, desktop/web-based, etc

You can also check out my Item Generator v5.2 project that I first mentioned here.

It currently supports all of the items and rules from the Core Rulebook, GameMastery Guide, and the Advanced Player's Guide. It also has modes to generate based on item type, city type, or CR level.

You may have moved onto some other tool by now, but I finally got around to releasing a new version v5.2 of my Item Generator project that has the City Generation included.

@JohnJohn, I think I also fixed a bug that was letting the Mongolians get in.

I suspect you should re-roll items equal to or below since the 75% chance applies to items that are equal to or below the value. So, you would re-roll a 50gp item in a Thorp.

Ok... so, now I think my code is done and should be doing the right thing. Time to get some sleep. Of course, I thought this same thing half an hour ago.

For those that are interested, my results indicate that about 1% of all minor items have a value greater than 8k. So, I definitely wouldn't want to follow the RAW without some kind of software tool at hand....

Roll...
Dang, another potion...
Roll...
Dang, another potion...
Roll...

Damn... looks like my guess was as wrong as it could have been.

Reroll any items that fall below the community’s base value.

I guess I have some more coding to do. Still seems odd to me to generate minor items for a community with a base value of 8,000gp.

One more quick note. I finished coding up a City Mode. I'm going to play around with it for a week or so before I release a new version.

But, if you're both the technical and impatient types, you can always grab the source and build a preview version though.

Thanks for the compliments. I've thought about the minimum/maximum value idea for a while, but I've resisted for a couple of reasons. First, my interpretation of the rules is slightly different. I don't think that RAW intend for you to re-roll any item that is under the base value for the community. My interpretation is that you roll normally for all items and keep what you get regardless of its value. If you want to know if a community has an item, you see if it's one that was generated. If it wasn't but it's value is less than the base value, you have a second chance at the item being available (75%).

I agree that this is a little bit wonky. Why am I bothering to roll up a bunch of potions when all potions have a 75% chance? However, the alternative is even stranger. For example, the base value of a Large City is 8,000gp and it has 4d4 Minor items. If we are supposed to re-roll any minor item under 8k, we would be there all day. In fact, the only way that I know of to get a minor item that is worth more than 8k is to 1) have an Armor or Weapon that happens to have at least one special ability or 2) have an intelligent item.

The other major reason that I've avoided this functionality is because of the non-determinism that it would introduce. It would be extremetly difficult for the software to know if a min/max price you entered was impossible to achieve or just very improbable. For example, it might be possible to gererate a Minor Weapon with a minimum value of 100,000gp by getting enough "Roll Twice" entries for Special Abilities, but trying to detect when a value is impossible would be very hard.

<plug>

You can also check out my Item Generator v5.1 project that that I first mentioned here.

It doesn't currently have a built in "City Mode" but once you figure out that your city needs 4d4 minor items (or whatever), it's pretty easy to just roll the dice for the number of items you want and plug the result into the software. You can even save/reload the results for future trips to that city by your characters. Just remove the items that have been sold and add some new random ones in their place. In the next release, I plan on adding a built in city mode so, so keep any eye out for v5.2.

It currently supports all of the items and rules from the Core Rulebook, GameMastery Guide, and the Advanced Player's Guide.

</plug>

Hey everyone! Has anyone had any luck (positive or negative) with the Item Generator? I'm trying to figure out if it's useful enough that I should continue publishing public releases.

Thanks for any feedback you can give!

Summary
The Item Generator is a FREE java based treasure generator which can be used to generate random treasure, items, and loot. It incorporates all rules from the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, GameMastery Guide, and Advanced Player's Guide. The Item Generator requires that a Java v1.6+ VM be installed and in your path.

Download your free copy from the Item Generator Project Page today!

I hope you find it as valuable in your games as it has been in mine!

Details
I'm releasing this in the hope that others will find it useful. I've used it on Windows XP and Windows 7 without any issues. It should work just fine on any other OS by using the included shell script, but I haven't tested those use cases. If you have problems, you can try running it by executing the command java -jar itemgenerator.jar

For the most part, this generator follows all of the rules exactly as they are presented in the Core Rulebook, GameMastery Guide, and Advanced Player's Guide. In some cases, I also had to incorporate rules from the d20 SRD to fill in gaps in the PRPG materials. For instance, Treasure generation based on CR level was taken from the d20 SRD, as was random generation of Gems and Art Objects.

History
This started almost 15 years ago as a spare-time project to help out with my own D&D games. The original version was a Java Applet which hard coded all of the D&D v2.0 treasure generation rules. I later changed it to be a Java Swing application and ported it to D&D v3.0, D&D v3.5, and PRPG.

After the recent time spent porting the data to the PRPG system, I thought that there might be other GMs out there who would find it useful. So, I decided to open source it and release it to the wild.

If you have problems or suggestions feel free to let me know. I'm happy to help how I can. While I welcome any feature requests, please remember that this is something I do in my spare time. Between a job which actually pays the bills, family, gaming and other hobbies; there's only so much spare-coding-time to go around :-)

@Concerro, @El Baron, @Wraitstrike, @Azmahel. Thanks for your feedback, but this is sort of what I was afraid would happen with this thread. Please don't get caught up in the details of this example. Partial charges, different rogue attacks etc at all fine and dandy ways to optimize within the Suprise RAW. I'm not actually looking for ways that a character can make the best of what's allowed. The example could just as easily be a wizard moving into range and casting a spell, a fighter drawing a weapon and attacking, etc.

None of that changes the fact that if I have two unsurprised characters, the presence (or non-presence) of a third surprised character changes their options and tactics. If the third character is in the room, the two unsurprised characters have to optimize around a single standard action. If the third character is not in the room, the two unsurprised characters get to both take a full round action.

This is the problem that I'm trying to house rule and solve. IMO, the presence of a third, surprised character should not affect what the two unsurprised characters can do.

Option 1: Any surprised character get a -20 penalty to their initiative roll. This will mean that most surprised characters will get their turns after the aware charaters. If that's true, at any point in time, the expected number of actions taken by the aware character will be 0.5 greater than that of the surprised character. This is exactly the same as what you get with the RAW.

Option 2: Any surprised character can take only a single move action or standard action (but not both) during her first turn. This results in the same expected number of actions, but it has a significant change to both the RAW and Option 1. The surprised characters are no longer flat footed unless they also happened to lose initiative.

Option 3: A combination of 1 and 2. Perhaps with a lesser initiative penalty like -10.

Since v3.0, I've always had a bit of a problem with the rules for the surprise round. I'll provide an example that seems to come up quite a bit. This happens whenever a character can do a particularly devestating action that takes 1) a full round and 2) a flat-footed opponent. There are a lot of variations of this, so please don't get hung up on the details of this example.

Let's say there are two long time enemies. Jack-Be-Nimble is a high level rogue. He has a great initiative score, a great perception score, a high BaB, and a huge sneak attack bonus. His nemesis is Igor-the-Imp. He also has a great initiative and a great perception score, but he can't hold his own in a fight. So, whenever Jack shows up, he flies away.

These two have been playing "tag" for years and the results are pretty predictable. Whenever Jack wins initiative, 1) he takes a move action to approach Igor and 2) takes a standard action to sneak attack and kill Igor. Jack loves the game, so he always resurrects Igor to play again. Whenever, Igor wins initiative, he flies away.

So far, so good. The problem happens when Jack tries to recruit some help. He brings along his fighter friend Frank-the-Tank. Frank is a power house, but he wears a full helm and he's usually caught by surprise.

With Frank in the picture, there is almost always a surprise round, but only Frank is caught unaware. Jack and Igor are the only two who get to act. However, now the results are very different since they are each restricted to a single standard action. When Igor wins the initiative, the results are basically the same. He flies away to safety. But when Jack wins, he can't finish Igor anymore. Since he only has a standard action, he can only move up to Igor. He can't get in his sneak attack.

This has always bothered me that the presence of a third party can affect the results of the combatants who aren't caught surprised. In fact, Igor could abuse the RAW and just bring along his own fighter friend to sit in the room with his eyes closed. This new character will always trigger the surprise round and allow Igore to escape.

This problem is caused because my being surprised affects what you can do on your turn. To fix this, I think being surprised needs to be changes so that my being surprised only affects what I can do on my turn.

In the next post, I'll propose a couple of ideas that I have for fixing this. I'm looking for comments on the playability of these ideas.

Hey Paizo folks. I just downloaded the PDF for the new fourth printing and I noticed that the size of the single-file PDF has jumped from 79MB to 122MB from the 3rd to the 4th printing.

A 50% increase is pretty substantial and the new errata can't possibly account for all those new bytes. Are the graphics compressed less or of a different format? Perhaps there has been a change to the personalization engine or something didn't get compressed?

There are a lot of threads out there related to the stacking rules for poison, but I have what is hopefully a much more basic set of rules questions. After re-reading the rules several times and scouring the threads, I just don't get how initial and secondary effects work for afflictions. My interpretation was that whenever you failed your first "real" save, the initial effect took place. Whenever you fail any saves after that, the secondary effect took place. I use the term "real" save to distinguish between afflictions with an onsite time versus those without. For example, here's my interpretation for a poison with no onset and a frequency of 1/rnd:

1. When hit with the poison, the character rolls a save
2. If he fails, he immediately suffers the initial effect
3. On his next turn, character makes another save. If not cured, he suffers the secondary effect
4. Repeat step 3 until cured

Similarly, for a poison with an onset of 1 rnd and a frequency of 1/rnd:

1. When hit with the poison, the character rolls a save
2. If he fails, he is afflicted, but doesn't yet suffer any effects
3. On his next turn, the character makes another save. If not cured, he suffers the initial effect
4. On his next turn, the character makes another save. If not cured, he suffers the secondary effect
5. Repeat step 4 until cured

Here's why I think I must be confused. I don't see how this interpretation can be correct given the RAW for Drow Poison or Green Prismatic Poison.

Drow poison has no onset and a frequency of 1/min for 2 min. Initial effect unconsious for 1 min; secondary effect unconscious for 2d4 hours. Cure: 1 save.

So, by my interpretation, the 2 minutes of frequency are irrelevant. When you are hit, you fall unconscious for 1 min if you fail your save. One minute later, you get another save. If you fail again, you are unconscious for 2d4 hours. So, the second minute in the frequency has no purpose since by minute 2 you are either cured or already unconscious for 2d4 hours.

Green Prismatic poison is even stranger. The initial effect is death, but it also has a secondary effect, a frequency, and a cure option. But, none of that matters since as soon as I fail my first save, I'm dead. Secondary damage to Con is of little consequence.

I must be missing something.

The Eschew Materials feat has quite a long history. From my research, it's been printed in at least eight different sources from v3.0 to v3.5 to PFRPG. In all of the v3.0 printings, it was listed as a Metamagic feat. Then in the v3.5 PHB it was changed to a General feat. PFRPG kept this v3.5 classification as a General feat.

2001 - Tome and Blood - Metamagic
2001 - Lords of Darkness - Metamagic
2001 - Magic of Faerun - Metamagic
2002 - Dieties and Demigods - Metamagic
2002 - Faiths and Pantheons - Metamagic
2002 - Epic Level Handbook - Metamagic
2003 - Player's Handbook - General
2009 - Pathfinder Core Rulebook - General

Rules-wise, it seems pretty clear that it is no longer a metamagic feat. Does anyone have any good theories as to why the change? Is it just because the level adjustment is zero instead of a positive number?

What seems strange to me is that the similar feats for easing casting components (Still Spell and Silent Spell) are still Metamagic but the corresponding feat which removed the material component requirement (Eschew Materials) is a General feat.

Of course, it's very easy to have a house rule changing it back to a Metamagic feat. I'd just like to hear theories as to why the change was made by Wotc in v3.5. It was pretty clearly a conscious decision after six separate printings as a Metamagic.

First off, thanks for the very quick update on the PDF bookmarks and hyperlinks. It makes it much more usable and certainly adds a greater sense of "polish" to the final product.

For the next time you are making updates, it would be awesome if the bookmarks for the spell descriptions could be expanded. One bookmark for each letter of the alphebet should be sufficient.

Thanks!

Thanks to everyone for the thoughts and suggestions! After playing around a little bit, I've decided to go a slightly different direction, so I thought I would share my findings with you. I decided to incorporate Stefan's suggestion to remove detection via scent from most encounters unless the sneaking person is either in proximity for a long time or if the detector has the Scent ability (like a dog). More controversially, I also decided to go with two rolls (one for sight and one for sound) like in 3.5. Here's a description of the problem we ran into with the one-roll method:

Assume you have a rogue trying to sneak by a guard. Assume that the rogue is moving in an environment where he has cover or concealment (in shadowy torch illumination, in the woods, etc). To make it simple, let's also assume that the rogue's Stealth skill and the guard's Perception skills are equal. So on any given roll, the rogue has a 50% chance of success against the guard.

With the two-roll method, the rogue has a 25% chance of success since he has to win on two separate opposed rolls (0.5 * 0.5). With the one-roll method, we pick either sight or sound since they're equivalent and the rogue has a 50% chance of success. It's a higher value, but that doesn't really matter as long as the rule is always consistent.

But, here's where the problem happens. Let's say that the rogue wants to improve his chances by employing some magic. For example, the rogue could drink a potion of Invisibility to give him +20 to his sight based check. That would make detection by sight impossible (alternatively, he could also have a cleric cast a silence spell on him).

With the two-roll method, this just improved his chances of success a lot (doubled them to be exact). Since one of the two methods is now at 100%, his total chance of success just went up from 25% to 50% (0.5 * 1.0). That's what you would expect to happen since the Stealth skill specifically mentions how Invisibility helps your checks.

However, if you go with the one-roll method, casting the Invisibility or Silence don't change the rogues chances at all. Before the magic, both sight and sound had a 50% chance of detection so it didn't matter which axis we chose to use. After the spell takes affect, one of the axis will have a 50% chance of detection and the other will have a 0% chance of detection. So, we will choose the axis with the 50% chance. In the end, adding magic to the equation had no effect at all on the rogue's chances of success! Definitely not what you would expect and a change that would drastically affect typical gaming situations.

So, do with this info whatever you'd like. While moving to a single roll would certainly speed up game play, I think that the changes to the game with respect to the different circumstances makes it not worth it.

In spirit, I agree with the one roll philosophy for game speed reasons, but I still think that the new system adds some complications... regardless of which mechanism you use. DM_Blake hit the nail on the head from my original post that moving from two rolls to three can completely kill off the ability to sneak past a wary opponent. I wanted to pose the question to see which direction most people went in order to give some direction to the thread. Since everyone so far appears more in favor of one roll, let's examine that course.

The first note is the obvious corollary to my prior point. For the same reason that three rolls make it much harder to stay undetected; moving from two rolls to one makes it easier to remain undetected (and harder for the PCs to detect their foes). Since PCs find themselves in both the role of the detector and the sneaker, making sneaking easier changes the game just as much as it did in the three roll case. I'm not necessarily saying that making it easier with one roll (or harder with three rolls) is a bad thing or that it will break the game, but we should be conscious of it's change to the game mechanics.

However, I think the bigger problem is the mechanic around the new axis: scent. In order to maintain any sense of parity, I think that the Stealth ability needs to increase the DC to detection by scent. Without having an equivalent mechanic to increase the scent DC (like you have for sound and sight), that axis will quickly become the Achilles heel of any rogue. It will only take a DC 5 perception check to detect any orc, no matter how good his Stealth check. Even a human rogue will quickly be hampered by the flat DC 15 Perception check. If I'm a character or NPC on guard, I'll quickly start relying on scent more than anything else since it's the hardest of the senses to fool (by skill or spell).

With the 3.5 skill set, a player typically needed to make two different skill checks to avoid detection. He would make a Move Silently check opposed by a Listen Check. He would also make a Hide check opposed by a Spot check. The concept of smell based checks wasn't formalized so they typically only happened in the case of the Scent ability.

With PRPG, the Perception skill encompasses hearing, site, smell, and taste (I'll ignore touch for now). We also have Stealth to encompass both moving quietly and staying hidden. So the question is, how many opposed checks does it take to move by someone without being noticed? Do I need to make just one opposed check or do I make three independent checks for sight, sound, and smell?

My initial guess is that you need to make three independent opposed checks because the circumstance modifiers may be very different, depending on which of the senses you're talking about. For example, while the rules don't explicitly say this, I assume that the +20 bonus from Invisibility only applies against sight based perception checks. If there's a silence spell in effect, that shouldn't make it any harder to actually see someone or to smell an Orge in the room.

If this assumption isn't correct, how do you adjudicate the different opposed rolls when all you want to do is just detect someone's presence? The smell DCs make it seem like it's easier to detect an sneaking Ogre than a sneaking elf. An Invisibility spell shouldn't help me to sneak around against a blind opponent. Nor should a Silence spell make any difference against a deaf opponent.

However, if you my assumption of independent checks is correct, there is a potentially unintended side-effect to adding game mechanics for the sense of smell. By mechanizing a third sense, we've now made it harder for someone to remain undetected. Having multiple opposed checks to remain hidden are weighted towards the detector rather than towards the hider. This is because the hider must succeed on all checks and the detector only needs to succeed on one.

Of course, smell is likely to be the least reliable method for detecting someone, but that will be up to DM discretion. Your chances to remain undetected are basically zero when you can be seen (but not heard or smelled), their slightly better when you can only be heard (but not seen or smelled), and I would rule that they are better yet when you can only be smelled (but not seen or heard). All that said, it will definitely be tougher for to remain undetected and the new axis of detection (smell) has no improvement route in the rules as they are today. The Stealth skill doesn't say anything about hiding your smell.

Thoughts? Am I interpreting the rules correctly? Am I overreacting to the new method of detecting someone? Would you include the third opposed roll or just ignore it for simplicity and speed?