Honestly, I was mostly surprised about their poor Perception proficiency because I had assumed that the Inventor was the guy you would expect to deal with (at least non-magical) traps, thanks to their knowledge of complicated mechanisms and the like. As of right now, they can still do it by investing in Thievery but actually spotting the traps requires a lot of help from other party members. It feels a bit strange to me because I would have thought that they would be the type of character with an eye for detail.
If nothing else, I think this has demonstrated that there is a good appetite for a Warlord/Tactician class. I do like the Marshal archetype but if a full class could allow character concepts with a bigger emphasis on those kinds of abilities, I would be very interested in playing as one.
Owning another human being is an evil act, period. Slavery is a cruel and unusual punishment and will do nothing to rehabilitate the "criminal" and there is no situation where its not just an evil act, you can try and argue that its evil your inflicting on evil people, but that kind of argument leads to only more evil stuff.
The character did not decide the punishment. Should she go to great lengths to set her would-be killer free? Or just refuse the Drow matriarch (an action that would put herself in great danger, while not ensuring the freedom of the criminal)?
And yes assassination attempts is indeed a crime.
Or maybe she should just have left the soul prison behind her, lying around in the darklands, and hope for the best.
She shouldn't leave it lying around, no. I suppose the question I would ask is how durable the amulet is. Assuming that apart from being a container for a person's soul, it's otherwise just a normal amulet, I would think that destroying it and freeing the soul inside so that it could find it's own way to the Boneyard would be pretty simple. The daughter of the Drow Matriarch has already been brought to an extremely low point. She was even willing to commit suicide. As far as punishments go, I think that's a pretty good one. Intentionally keeping her soul trapped (for potentially forever if Aleil dies while the amulet exists) is just excessive spite, in my opinion.
I'm inclined to agree. Especially given that said character is probably smart enough to realise that a functioning warning doesn't require the genuine article when it comes to the amulet. After all, if said daughter is already rumoured to be trapped within the amulet, all Aleil would need is another magical amulet with a similar appearance and the same school of magic as the original. It is very unlikely that anyone would be able to scrutinize the amulet and prove otherwise while it is still in her possession. Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me that the only reason to keep the amulet is out of spite for the person inside. So that they can't "get away" without living to see their punishment.
She seems pretty Chaotic to me. As far as the Good/Evil axis goes, I would probably put her as Chaotic Evil since she seems to have a strong preference for evil acts over good. That being said, if her moral outlook is a product of her experiences being limited to the exposure of cruel societies, I would allow room for future alignment adjustments if/when her circumstances change and her edges begin to soften.
My understanding is that things that used to target Touch AC (the Chill Touch spell, for example), now require a reflex save from the opponent instead.
Definitely feeling impatient! I probably won't even get to play for quite a few months after it gets released but I am very excited to dig into the character creation in the meantime. Theorycrafting characters is half of the fun for me. :)
My god, the Companions in 4 are such useless, "where the hell were you when I was getting to meet all of those ghouls/gunners/deathclaws," schmucks.
And of course, when I WANT some distance so I can open a container or grab some loot, the morons are practically velcroed to my rear
One of the little quirks about FO4 companions is that the distance they follow you from is based on whether or not you are sneaking. When you crouch/sneak and are not in combat, they tend to stay as close to you as they can. It can certainly be annoying but one good side-effect is that crouching is a good way to get your companions to come over to you after a fight if you're not sure where they went.
It depends. In general, I assume that the GM will be running something that they're looking forward to play. If they're running a certain type of game/system because another player really wants to play in one on the other hand, then yes, I tend to be more aware of whether or not they're having fun.
That being said, I always try to help curb behavior that can be frustrating for GMs (players who interrupt/talk over the GM and the like).
The creation club updated their FAQ that I linked above. In the additional post, one thing did catch my interest:
"Seems like there will only be small things in Creation Club, is the content limited to the new ESL format?
A variety of content is currently being worked on for Creation Club. Larger pieces may be released as an ESM, like other official plug-ins. The ESL format is streamlined for content that is relatively contained, or primarily reliant on scripts."
Hopefully these larger creations aren't too far away!
We actually had that particular issue of Mind Control come up in our last campaign so while I understand why people might be disappointed about the rules differences between NPCs and PCs, I think not having your fellow PCs instantly turn you into paste is a good enough trade off!
If nothing else, the trope doesn't seem to be entirely removed as there does seem to be a market for (presumably) used necrografts. At least we can have our human chop shops on Eox! :)
It does seem like multiclass characters function a lot better in Starfinder though. I'm sure a lot of casters will appreciate their caster levels from both classes stacking. Combine that with a Mystic Theurge-esque Prestige class and you have a functional multi-class caster!
I think the deception was only necessary in that the real Barry wouldn't have even asked about Iris. Barry has been having nightmares about the event and has been wracking his brain about it for a while so I would hope that he would be a lot more cautious.
They had 14 strength and Point Blank Shot, yes. The reason it was that high is because I use different racial modifiers for them since I have a player who is playing as one:
+4 Dex -2 Str -2 Con
I believe I also gave them Energy Resistance 5 appropriate to their scale colour (green in this case).
I recently DM'd for the first time and after what happened, I think it qualifies for this thread.
The world was set to be relatively low fantasy (no resurrection, no long range teleportation, etc). Because of this, I decide to use Sphere of Power from Drop Dead Studios and the playtest of their upcoming product Spheres of Might.
The first encounter is a group of six level 1 kobolds armed with little more than leather jerkins, slings and spears. Shouldn't be too much of a problem for a party consisting of four level 3 characters right? The dice had other plans that night.
The combat started with both sides aware of each other. Most of the PCs act first and open up with some decent hits on the flatfooted spearmen. The kobolds go next and that's when things start to go bad. Normally there would be no problem but the kobold slingers are built with an ability that provides an effect similar to the Rapid Shot. Given their relatively low attack bonus (I think they needed a 13 or higher to hit most of the PCs), and pretty low damage (1d3+3), this seemed okay. Unfortunately, throughout the next couple rounds, the kobolds never roll lower than a 15, including a confirmed critical so some of the PCs decide to back off and take cover around the corner.
The remaining two PCs however, are then left to be pelted by the barrage of sling bullets. Once again, the kobold slingers continue to hit all of their shots and one of the PCs ends up with 0 hitpoints, leaving him staggered but still conscious and identifiable as a threat to the kobolds. The spearmen went next. Ordinarily I would have had all of the kobolds target others out of mercy and for the most part, I did, but this particular character was still engaged in melee with one of the spearmen and he would have had to eat an attack of opportunity to go after anyone else. Because of this, I thought that it just wouldn't be plausible for the kobold to put himself in harms way because of a metagame reason so I had him attack anyway. He had a low attack bonus and would need to roll max damage to kill him. I nervously rolled the attack roll and all of the players watched eagerly in anticipation*. As it turned out, the dice had an insatiable bloodlust so of course the kobold in question not only hit but also rolled maximum damage, killing the character.
*I'm not a fan of fudging dice. I don't knock people who do it and understand their reasons for it, it just isn't my personal preference even as a player. Also, since I rolled in the open up to then, it would have looked very suspicious if I decided to roll away from prying eyes.
Tldr; I accidentally killed a PC in the first encounter in my very first session as a DM.
Vampirism in Skyrim has a much lower maintenence cost, especially with Dawnguard installed.
Weaknesses:
1. You no longer take damage from the sun but instead take take a penalty to your max health, stamina and magicka while out in the sun. Your regeneration of these stats is reduced to 0% while in sun but magicka regen enchantments and other similar effects can still increase your regeneration so that they are only weakened while out in the sun rather than turned off completely.
2. You take a weakness to fire, the severity of which depends on your stage of vampirism.
3. You get attacked by NPCs at stage four but if you have Dawnguard installed, this weakness is disabled. There's very little reason to feed with Dawnguard installed.
Benefits:
1. Your sneaking is improved by 25%
2. Your illusion spells are 25% more powerful
3. You gain frost resistance that varies in magnitude depending on your stage of vampirism.
4. Calm a creature with a power called "Vampiric Seduction" once per day. The highest level creature you can effect depends on what stage of vampirism you are at. Interestingly, since this is considered an illusion effect, illusion perks can also effect the magnitude of this.
5. Reanimate a dead body to fight for you for 60 seconds once per day. Your stage of vampirism dictates the highest level creature you can effect.
6. At stage 4, you can turn invisible for 180 seconds once per day. Like other invisibility effects, the effect is cancelled if you interact with anything.
7. If you're a Vampire Lord from Dawnguard, you naturally reap other benefits
With Dawnguard installed, the benefits outweigh the penalties by far in my opinion.
...your vanaran friend activates his rod of wonder that uses multiple homebrew tables.
So far he has:
- Made a dragon suffocate by filling a room with marshmallows
- Created a floating wall of bards
- Given an entire bay of water sentience
- Opened two dimensional portals, one to hell, one to the abyss so that they can battle it out in the sky on the material plane
- Given our enemy colossal gold dragon the half fiend template (devil) immediately after opening the two portals mentioned above
Yeah, the armour rating caps out around the 700 mark from what I remember and is easily attainable with light armour.
Poison resistance, frost resistance and the like caps out at 85%. Interestingly, this means that as a vampire you can not be fully immune to poison despite your 100% resistance but NPCs can since the cap doesn't effect them.
I'm not sure if the armour rating cap affects NPCs.
I wonder how he was able to hire Gypsy. Wasn't she from HR's earth rather than Earth-2? I suppose it's not too far fetched that Grodd would know about her since it's implied that she regularly travels the multiverse but it did get me thinking.
I don't know, a lot of the classes don't really seem to tread on anything we already have from Paizo. The Blacksmith, Technician, Scholar and Troubadour (I suppose you could argue the Medium covered this but I personally don't think it was done very well) are all relatively unexplored territory. All in all, it'll come down to what classes they choose to cut.
I personally think the classes would be a better use of pagecount. Mostly because it'll be easy to convert monsters using the system they're giving us anyway but also because backers could simply share their own monster conversions with the community to get a similar number of prestatted monsters of varying Challenge Ratings to use on the fly.
Yes, we unlocked guidelines for converting monsters to Spheres of Might back at the $12,000 mark. The $26,000 stretchgoal simply adds an example monster for each Challenge Rating (eg, Rhinos using the Lancer sphere). Since this doesn't add anything that we couldn't convert ourselves using the guidelines they're giving us, it's understandable why many would want to get the two extra classes included in this book instead. :)
But as others have pointed out, we don't know why he's able to improve his speed that fast. For all we know it might just be that Wally is gradually regaining the speed that he had during flashpoint. As soon as he does his growth spurt might stop, presumably still leaving him slower than Barry (if the scene with the Rival from flashpoint is anything to go by).
I do wonder if there's anything that they might be missing from that scene in the future. Cisco and Barry stopped reading the headlines as soon as Savitar showed himself but there was no indication that they managed to call out all of the headlines. It's also very possible that there's more to that scene, such as what HR was doing on the roof with that rifle if it wasn't to shoot Savitar. Come to think of it, did anyone happen to notice if it was Plunder's rifle he was holding? I've also been wondering if that was really HR or Wells from season 2. So many threads to follow...
I myself am happy about alignment getting removed from the Paragon as I'm not really a fan of the system. Detect [insert alignment], Alignment Auras and the like are easy enough to deal with but it's a lot more difficult to remove things that the entire class is based around without having to rework the entire class myself!
I'm a little confused about the wording of this part of the Scoundrel sphere
Scoundrel Sphere wrote:
Dedicate: While your martial focus is dedicated to the scoundrel sphere, you can attempt a dirty trick or steal combat maneuver as an attack action.
An attack action is a standard action but both the Dirty Trick and Steal maneuvers are already standard actions. Is there some benefit to having it classified as an attack action that I'm not aware of?
There are a bunch of class features and other talents that trigger off of attack actions.
It allows you to trigger those features with those maneuvers instead.
Could you give examples? I'm struggling to find any save for the Armiger's Lightning Assault which doesn't come online until level 15.
Luthorne wrote:
I believe it means that, like disarm, sunder, and trip, you can replace one of your attacks in a full attack with a dirty trick or steal combat maneuver.
If that's what they meant they should really change it to something like this so it's more clear:
Proposed rewrite wrote:
While your martial focus is dedicated to the scoundrel sphere, you can attempt a dirty trick or steal combat maneuver in place of an attack as part of a full attack action
I'm a little confused about the wording of this part of the Scoundrel sphere
Scoundrel Sphere wrote:
Dedicate: While your martial focus is dedicated to the scoundrel sphere, you can attempt a dirty trick or steal combat maneuver as an attack action.
An attack action is a standard action but both the Dirty Trick and Steal maneuvers are already standard actions. Is there some benefit to having it classified as an attack action that I'm not aware of?
In it's current form? It's true that you can't think of it as a combat option (poison conversion shenanigans not withstanding), but I would hope that any changes to how poisons work would rectify this to some degree. I would also hope that they would put these poisons within a more reasonable price range. Heck, even a Poison Sphere that doesn't use the system of buyable poisons could be cool.
Poisons that apply short term effects that wear off by themselves (maybe a duration of around 1 minute or so?) could be quite useful in combat.
Effects of such poisons could include::
1.Clouded vision like the Oracle curse where you can only see things within 60 feet. Maybe an even shorter distance, like 30 feet, for a more virulent poison
2. Tightening and cramping of muscles in a targeted area to halve their speeds. Legs would usually be targeted for landspeeds but wings and fins could be targeted for other movement mode.
3. Dizziness to reduce a target's CMD versus tripping and bullrushing. Maybe also add a penalty for acrobatics checks to balance for completeness sake?
4. Severe headaches that makes a target lose martial focus or concentration on a spell. A saving throw or concentration check would obviously be needed as a balancing factor.
5. Just about any condition in the game that you can think of.
6. Heck, maybe even introduce poison damage as a new damage type. Enemies who are immune to poison would naturally be immune to this damage. Those with a bonus to poison on saving throws could get a number equal to twice their bonus vs poison as their Resist Poison. For example, an Alchemist with a +4 bonus to saving throws against poison would have Resist Poison 8.
Those are a few off the top of my head. I'm sure the folks working on this could think of far better effects and make allowances for longer lasting, more traditional poisons for the classic "poison the wine to knock someone unconscious" scenario.
I know I would personally like it if you guys did something with poisons somewhere down the line. Even if it meant making your own system for them. As much as it pains me for the plethora of poisons released by Paizo to go to waste, very few of them see use in actual play on the player side of things even if you base an entire character around them.
I'm really liking the Blacksmith class you've put up since it's such a woefully unexplored design space. The iconic story of a blacksmith's son who was training as an apprentice, setting out to slay a dragon is a pretty big fantasy staple. I'm glad to finally see mechanics to support that concept. :)
I'm glad to see that there are spheres that have use outside of combat. Athletics seems to be pretty good so far, I'm very curious to see what the "Scouting" sphere will be like.
I convinced a necromancer that the bathroom was haunted by an entity who is older than time itself. An entity known as "the toilet spectre". I made him give me everything he owned (including the clothes off his back) as an offering for initially doubting my power. His superiors were unpleasantly surprised to find him fleeing the scene wearing nothing but his underwear.
How I did it:
After seeing the necromancer enter the bathroom, I used my lockpicking skills to lock the door behind him and intentionally jammed the lock so that no one could come to his aid if he called for it. I then went downstairs to where the pipes of the toilets dumped their sewage and shouted up through the pipes, pretending to be this spectre. When he doubted my power as this entity, I exhaled fire up through the pipes (I was a kobold sorcerer) and burned him for his transgression and followed it up with a well rolled intimidate check. When he noted that I wasn't undead, I even managed to bluff him that I was "more of an abstract concept". With the intimidate check, I made him apologise for his offense and give me an offering of everything on his person (save for his underwear) in exchange for his life and freedom. Once he agreed, I stealthily made my way back upstairs, and since I had previously jammed the lock, "opened" the door with a Battering Blast spell to not only open the door, but give me time to hide before he came to his senses (he was right behind the door I blasted). After that, it was a simple matter of retrieving my prize!
I heard Xbox restricts mods too... just not as severely as PlayStation. If I heard correctly they ban anything that is an IP for someone. Which does ban quite a bit of themed mods.
Yeah, which is really unfortunate. I guess I'll just have to do without the mod to make Paladin Danse look like Buzz Lightyear! :)
Supposedly the developers of Farming Simulator are still going ahead with providing mods on consoles for their game. Though I've no idea what's different with Farming Simulator if Sony's concern is that allowing mods will give people tools to jailbreak their consoles.
Bummer - no mods for the PS4. Looks like I'm done with that console. Time to get an XBox One.
Was it announced that they are giving up completely?
If so that means I can skip the Skyrim re-release too.
Yep, apparently Sony "wouldn't allow user mods to work as they should" - where users can do anything they want. Given the restrictions that were put in place for mods on XboxOne (no copyright material and the like), it makes you wonder what other restrictions Sony wanted to put in place. There's a chance Sony will cave later down the line of course, if only because of the backlash that they will face. To say nothing of the sly jabs that have been directed towards them from the official Xbox twitter accounts.
For now, PS4 users will just have to go without mods and I have no doubt that this will discourage people (including myself) from buying Skyrim Remastered.
A nonmagical doctor who doesn't take infeasible amounts of time to treat their patients and can actually deal with the condition removal needs of a party.
I'm very curious about what this will have. As others have noted, this is quite a broad subject compared to the other "[Insert creature type] Slayer/Hunter books we've had in the past. Hopefully the final product description will shed some light on what goodies this book contains when it arrives down the line.
I'm liking the classes so far. Now to figure out which one I could use to make a Biologist/Physician. The concept I have is very support oriented and hopefully it's doable! :)
