Jak the Looney Alchemist's page

It's quite plain and simple. Look at just about any example of an Assassin and they are not good guys.

Their profession is cold blood murder and they don't blink an eye at killing an innocent person if that's the target.

For the people that say, "but i kill people for good reasons", that's a nice way to sugar coat the fact that you're a professional murderer.

The entire point of the prestige class is murder for profit. If you want to play a "good" Assassin then just don't take the prestige class. Just take a selection of feats and abilities that allow you to do your job.

Play a fighter, a rogue, a ninja, or even a wizard. That way you can play you're watered down "good" Assassin.

It's quite plain and simple. Look at just about any example of a thief and they are not good guys.

Their profession is stealing and they don't blink an eye at stealing from an innocent person if that's the target.

For the people that say, "but I steal from people for good reasons", that's a nice way to sugar coat the fact that you're a professional thief.

The entire point of the class is to steal for profit.... I could go on, but I think I've proven my point. Anyone can do this for their view of any given class by interpreting the fluff text that way. This is why generally the fluff text is disregarded when it comes to rules mechanics.

So you've successfully proven that optimizing cross class can be powerful?
I assure you that this is not a trait exclusive to summoners.

Every character can do more things with a ring of sustenance. It doesn't change the scale. Although every character is probably not inclined to equip a ring of sustenance.

Best of luck convincing the opposition guys. G'night.

Its not a straw man.

Everyone has a product.
The cleric who heals yuo, the bard who buffs you, the fighter and barbarian who fights for you, the rogue who knocks out locks and traps for you, the wizard who casts his spells for you.
-S

Except for that these product don't take days to make. These products do not permanently grant power that is completely out of the product makers control. These products are listed duties of said character.

Stick my vote on the 10% charge being extremely reasonable without outstanding circumstances.

Picking up a craft feat is absolutely no reason to change your character into a manufacturing plant.

Anyone that assumes otherwise that plays with me will be mocked.

Ask the people who made boon companion or JJ.

Rangers do get reduced animal companions as well.

Honestly I don't think that it's broken. Animal companions can drop from a BBEG sneeze. Spending a feat to add a little survivability to one is perfectly reasonable in my book.

According to RAW nothing happens to your character other than various symptoms you or your dm choose for you to roleplay as long as you're above zero.

I would roleplay it as being able to communicate but not necessarily willing to communicate. I would also only show the most extreme of emotions.

Edit: I would rule a low charisma as a lack of personality. I would play him as bland and empty without due cause unless absolute necessity dictated otherwise.

Just to be silly and needlessly complicated I now present to you the party buff monk. Ki mystic, monk of the lotus, sensei. Focus on wisdom using ki mystic to grant rerolls and insight bonuses to your skill checks, sensei to grant all of the fun bardy goodness as well as reducing MAD and monk of the lotus for flavor to go along with the pacifistic theme.

My alchemist has one and loves it dearly for monstrous physique. The item that is supposed to be ideal for monks is oddly enough being bought up by everyone else.

Having it be both unarmed and natural seems to me to be just simplification of concept. Of course the catch to that is that it winds up being a tax on the general monk who will never, typically, be using a natural weapon. When you factor that on top of the, as currently presented, flurry rules which are markedly worse than using the standard two weapon feats it makes it somewhat hard to want to play a monk.

Edit: I'm looking over the monk's flurry ability and I'm thinking why not play a ranger instead. In my very humble opinion if flurry is supposed to work like the two weapon fighting chain exactly then get rid of flurry and grant the feats instead. Of course adding in a corollary that states that when using them monks bab is equal to level. That way they can at least qualify as perquisites for the rest of them.

Shallowsoul Circle of protection from evil is cast as a part of casting planar binding.

"A magic circle leaves much to be desired as a trap. If the circle of powdered silver laid down in the process of spellcasting is broken, the effect immediately ends. The trapped creature can do nothing that disturbs the circle, directly or indirectly, but other creatures can."

He can do nothing to disturb the circle and you cast dimensional anchor as part of the casting.

Edit: Casting dispel magic on said circle would definitely qualify as disturbing it.

Great sword damage from soup? Thenceforth the barbarian did not wield a greatsword into battle, but instead dual wielded twin pots of hot soup enchanted to be ever filling with the most delicious stew imaginable.

Shadow wasn't summoned. It was created. Its legal afaik. Although I am saddened greatly at the discovery that the army of shadow chickens cannot be.

That is some of the most sexist nonsense I've read this morning.

You know killing a god could just you know be plot as opposed to the "ultimate bad ass fantasy".

Edit to clarify the sexist nonsense statement: The drive to attain power and mastery over ones surroundings is a trait inherent to the human race not just men. Writing the drive for power off in such a fashion is to disregard the entirety of human evolution as adolescent male fantasy.

I'm not saying that the gods being concepts or even impossible to kill is wrong, quite the contrary I agree in a typical campaign, but there are many good reasons to have PCs kill a god that have nothing to do with adolescent male fantasies or the drive to control the variables that influence our survival.

Dude in all fairness consider your topic title. I don't think that Gorbacz was trying to offend you.

Finn is it possible that you're jumping on a intent that isn't there because of your history as a soldier?

Edit: You seem to be looking at how the soldiers determine the lawfulness of their actions as opposed to the populace.

I don't think Ashiel is trying to rag on soldiers here.

The question of whether or not murder is killing is solely bound up in whether or not the killing is lawful. Therefore as logic attests might in this case makes right or rather law.

As far as the question of whether or not soldiers who do actions that are commonly considered atrocities for no reason other than they were told to do so can live with themselves one has to consider the nazi soldier, or the aztec warrior, or insert various soldier throughout history who did fantastically vicious actions for no reason other than his patron nation thought it was right. Heck see the crusades they were on a war from god and sacked everything they could get their hands on.

I wonder occasionally why we don't have rules for half hobgoblins. I find it much more likely that you'd find one, according to the way I read the fluff, than a half orc.

In my view a hobgoblin is a comparatively speaking better evolved version of a goblin. An orc is its own strain of what I don't know, but it isn't a goblinoid, at least anymore, so I don't know if one could really compare them as beings of similar function other than miscellaneous evil critters for PCs to kill.

I'm going to play a bard necromancer assassin that's lawful good.

Use perform pantomime for bardic performance so you don't blow your stealth.

Yes the mime killer who creates skeletons from the goblins' corpses to build the children a new orphanage and then makes the children laugh with his imaginary wall shtick.

An Assassin, in D&D / PF, kills for profit. Pure and simple. That he does so using sneaky and dishonorable means just puts the capital E on the "Evil" descriptor. I've never understood how people can justify stabbing people in the back or poison use as "not evil". It may be necessary, the ends may not be "evil", but the act certainly is.

Attaching evil or good qualities to an action in a vacuum is silly at best fanaticism at worst.

I would then go on to wager since you cannot understand that good can lack honor and that evil can be noble that you do not understand the alignment system as written.

As I said the guy did have a very good reason; however, on the other hand he did just traumatize one very sad donkey.

Apple the happy donkey lives a life of simple work. The day is hard, but she always gets her treat. Then one fell evening she blinked and her familiar stall was gone. She felt bound to obey this little man twenty feet below. She was falling. She screamed. A flash of bitter intense pain and the next night she reformed in her stall.

Apple is no longer a happy donkey.

I don't care. I'm not trying for an official answer. Any dm worth his salt will make a ruling and move on since it really is a very small factor. I was pointing out that the answer was not so clear cut and really needs elaboration, hence I stated that I was not trying to convince anyone. For some reason I feel compelled to challenge bold declarative statements that lack logical rational even if it is functionally meaningless to me.

Yes I do need a hobby. I know. I'll buy skyrim soon I promise.

Kelsey my dear I love you. What by the foul and wicked ravens that screech outside my door do you bake? By chance is it fudge? I am always on the lookout for another good fudge recipe.

I did, Ashiel, offer an opposing viewpoint using nothing but the core rule book and the dictionary in my rather long winded response on varying perspective. I do not deny the veracity of your perspective. I just find it an unreasonable conclusion without additional supporting evidence since the source material has such vague wording. The only supporting evidence that I have is that paizo encourages people to play in different ways and desires money. Beyond that I can drag out my huge ominous book that I use on literary analysis that is probably outdated and state my perspective on how it relates from my perspective.

I have little desire to convince you that your belief is wrong. I am merely asserting that there is one with just as much merit not necessarily more. I am also postulating that the odds of paizo changing are very very low.

I have never stated that you were wrong, merely that I disagree and my tush feels fine although I do need a new office chair.

I do find it amusing that this entire discussion has little relevant meaning. The way almost everyone I know plays paladins I suspect is near identical to how you suggest playing them. The difference between our opinions is one of sentence structure and context, this is why I compare this debate to a religious argument. Without input from "god" the two sides aren't going to get very far.

I tend, in my reality, to apply chaos theory to psychology including my own. As such I find that I do not believe in an absolute reality, or that people really ever have a concrete one to begin with. I tend to go along with the structure that all reality is false and that any evidence to the contrary is a clever ploy by god to trick us. This is not witticism merely my own point of view. I seem to think I enjoy what I think I seem to feel on what I deem to be a consistent basis therefore I think I enjoy existing enough to continue existence. I think I do my best to only try to define the rules of my realty as they pertain on a relative basis to amuse myself. I believe that others exist only so far as I myself exist and I try not to limit their amusement as I think I would not appreciate them attempting to limit my own.

TriOmegaZero Alas oh well I'll keep searching for another who bakes. Eventually I'll complete my tastes of the world recipe book.

You seem to be incapable of understanding intent verses definition. You seem to refuse to allow people to interpret vague statements a different way than yours. Since your evidence consists solely of well this is what these words mean and when you string them together this is what I read and since what I read is the only way to interpret then describing you as a fundamentalist is quite accurate.

The "damned rules" are open to interpretation, much like every other form of communication other than mathematics, and until you get a dev to comment every interpretation is as valid as yours happens to be.

You cannot prove interpretation without a statement of intent. Which we don't seem to have.

If you want to cite your "interpretation of the rules" as empirical fact get some evidence other than "It means this because I think that it means this."

I'm pretty sure that if the dev's intended the paladin to leave whenever some did something that they didn't like they would have openly stated it as such.

Avoiding something does not dictate absolute action.

We disagree on what Kelsey is saying. I find that you are pigeonholing paladins into a particular role that is not intended and not generally used. By your definition paladin's are unplayable unless everyone hides everything from them. This is complete nonsense. No offense intended, but to me that is what you're saying.

If a paladin leaves the party because she caught the bard lying then she is violating the Lawful part of her alignment, assuming they've been adventuring for long enough for her to consider them team mates, by betraying her loyalty to the team. According to your absolute interpretation it is quite impossible for one to play with just about any other class without visiting a cleric periodically for an atonement.

So the problem is bad roleplaying?

If the evil character cannot work around a paladin then perhaps he should be punted out of the group.

Belkar really is the perfect example a badly played chaotic evil pc.

Anything other than hey I'm right here and I'm evil massacring this orphan and her puppy the paladin can work around, except for evil clerics and antipaladins both of which glow like solar flares under detect evil. Generally when a campaign starts the group should talk beforehand and try to figure out if there are going to be any huge conflicts from the start.

So it comes back to bad role playing. The paladin class requires the party to at least try to be decent roleplayers IF there is an evil character in party.

Sleep and coups on non hostile targets. Lawful good doesn't mean stupid, but it does mean that you can't kill indiscriminately based off of race. Such an act would be fine if he was chaotic good. I'd slap him with a warning at the least and if they truly weren't evil then I'm make him find an atonement for not bothering to check. He had the time and ability to do so, without endangering him or his party or of them having any chance to get away, and didn't even consider it.

I'm not sure I'd prefer some dev clarification. I think the line about choosing targets is set so you're not healing peeps against your will by having them take flying leaps through you.

I would have to disagree with you on how you characterize said individual Arminas. Often enough I've found many players just want the paper to match the image in their head. Before I'd assume a munchkin or an optimizer I'd ask if the player would accept the stats of a chain and reskin it as spiked.

The DM does always get final call, but at the same time stating something is too silly for a game that by function consists of sitting around a table rolling dice to supplement your imagination just seems nonsensical to me more so than dual wielding shields or a spiked chain. The shields are a viable combat method, at least bucklers are, and the spiked chain could easily be used by anyone wearing sufficient armor to deflect the spikes.

Why would you see dual wielding bucklers as anything other than a variation on cestus combat? You add a sharp metal reinforced plate and possibly a spike and the martial maneuvers are going to be near on identical except for increased stopping power and a different positioning of open handed holds. Now dual wielding heavy shields is a little silly, nothing really wrong with it, but I don't know if the extra cover is worth the drop in maneuverability and reach.