I'm new, so I may be coming at this from too simple a perspective...
But doesn't the opportunity cost of having a high enough DEX to get the max DEX bonus outweigh the penalties for heavy armor? Sure, you have an armor check penalty, and pay more for your armor, but you're also not investing so many points in your DEX in the first place. You can have the high STR you want for your two-handed fighter, or the maxed out WIS you want for your cleric.
And honestly, don't get into the realism argument. If you want more realism, get Ultimate Combat out and start implementing the rules for damage reduction from armor first. Then you'll see the balance shift, I suspect, and those daggers will have a harder time getting through full plate.
Love this thread, because I too work on titles for my divine characters.
I've got an Inquisitor of Iomedae that'll be starting in Carrion Crown next weekend. For him, I created the entirely off the cuff "Presbyter-Lieutenant of the Ordo Iusticae" - and the DM, seeing that it didn't mean anything at all power-level-wise, let me do it. :)
For Pharasma, and knowledge and healing "Master" or "Professor" might be fun, as well as "Intern" if he's young in his career...
Meet Merlash The Plain and his buddy Charlie the Condor.
** spoiler omitted **...
I've always thought that Gnomes, Golarian Gnomes, are perfect candidates for a level of this and a level of that - goes with the whole "gotta stay interested" line very well. They're an entire race with ADD.
Did this guy see play? Was the rest of the party similarly inclined, or were they blowing you away with specific power level at the expense of flexibility?
I'm a sucker for Sorcerer (of whatever Bloodline) and Rogue. They tend to wind up spell-slinging swashbucklers, but an inveterate thief with the Celestial bloodline is fun as well.
I'll ask for feedback on my character - just the mechanics and the backstory, please. The stats are pretty hard to read and very consolidated. I'll clean them up some when I get a mo.
We are looking for a fourth player to join us for a Pathfinder game, specifically the Carrion Crown AP to start with. The game will be played at a private home near 104th Avenue and Hwy 2 (East on I76 from Denver). Right now we have a DM with many years of experience with D&D of all editions, and three players, all new to PF, and some quite new to gaming in general.
You will be an involved gamer who wants to play in a fun game, focused more on telling a good story than being the statistically best character that the rules allow. Your experience is less important than your enthusiasm.
We'll be playing from 6pm to 10pm on Sundays, one or two Sundays per month. The schedule will be determined as a group, so as not to keep anyone from playing.
So unless I'm missing something from a different book, or a different part of the book (the organization can be a little byzantine), I'd have a hard time putting combat into any of those.
Okay, maybe you're a sword dancer. Or a viking who chants while he hews. Or, stretching a bit, you count your club against a goblin's noggin as "percussion instruments" after a fashion. But as written, it sure looks like you, at least as a bog standard Bard, and with allowances for Intimidation in the case of the AD, are locked into some manner of fer-real performance.
Am I missing something? Or just being a bit RAW in my relative newness to the system?
Would love to play, still fleshing out my character ideas. I've got a notion to go with a Varisian thief (lower-case 't' there, as he's technically a sorcerer). Gimme a minute to flesh him out.
Grigori The Ghost:
Human Varisian
Sorcerer 1
S 10 AC 14
D 16 HP 6
C 10 AL NG
I 14 F +1
W 10 R +4
Ch 16 W +2
Skills: Stealth +4; Bluff +7; Appraise +6; Disable Device +6; Sleight of Hand +6;
Knowledge (Local) +3
Feats: Deft Hands; Dodge; Eschew Materials
Traits: Deft Dodger; Resiliant; Unhappy Childhood (Religious) +2 concentration checks
Sorcerous Bloodline: Celestial. Summons add DR vs Evil; 6/day Heavenly Fire
heal or wound 1d4 damage
Cantrips: Daze; Light; Mage Hand; Prestidigitation
Level 1: Obscuring Mist; Vanish
As the game starts, he has the following gear:
Pickpockets Clothing (Free); Dagger w/ Wrist Sheath (3gp total);
117gp in coins, small gemstones, jewelry and other easily pawnable items
Grigori has no memory of life outside of Korvosa. He doesn't remember anything about parents, either. He's always been an orphan, so far as he can recall.
He made a life for himself stealing to survive until Gaedren Lamm took him in. He thought he'd finally found a home, but the conditions were brutal. He hoped to find a way to get free, but the opportunity never really came.
It wasn't until he was fourteen, and he found himself straying into the temples in town, seemingly drawn to what his coarser friends chidingly called the angels of his better nature. When Gaedren got wind of his dalliances with the good people in the shrines and churges, he arranged for Grigori's friends to beat the tar out of him. Left for dead, he was taken in by one of the shrines, a small church dedicated to Sarenrae in her aspect as the Redeemer. There he was nursed back to health, and his natural gifts and connection with the gods nurtured.
Grigori's not quite gotten past his rough youth, nor his somewhat twisted sense of morals - the only thing that kept him and his young friends alive was to steal for themselves and others who were needy - but he's determined to make a fresh start, and better choices going forward.
This otherwise well thought out and thorough discussion does miss one salient point, however.
The Magus is the kid in the black leather jacket, who rides his motorcycle to school.
The Bard is a band/theater/choir geek.
I mean, I'm no one to judge - I was a D&D geek from the time I was in third grade - but that's just how it is. It's hard to be a bad-ass when your power depends, however briefly, on performance when the other guy uses raw, arcane power.
You're going to have to define what a day is. No, I'm not trying to be a smart@ss (though that's something as natural as breathing to me). But abilities that work on a per-day basis are going to be bounded based on when a day starts and ends. You could go midnight to midnight or dawn to dawn, as they're easy enough to understand and remember. Let all the per-day abilities recharge on that basis, and then use the core rules for spell preparation.
And here's a great opportunity to let your spellcasters differentiate themselves further - maybe clerics of a goddess of night get theirs at midnight, while the sun god grants his at dawn.
I am coming at this from a player's perspective. Our GM runs a fine game, but I don't think he is going to do anything to require or encourage role play. He doesn't discourage it at all, he just runs the game as he will and it is a little tough to influence him. This is not a bad thing - just one of the parameters of my situation.
As a player, you're limited a little, but not as much as others have indicated. What you need is an accomplice.
If you think that there's someone else in the party who would also like to see some real role playing going on, recruit them. Before the next session, compare notes on your character stories, and find something that you can weave into a small story. Especially useful if it happens to dovetail nicely with the GMs story, but not entirely necessary.
Then, at the next session, you let this new story start to unfold. You do something, or he or she does something, and the other reacts to it. Not an argument - though that would work - as people who aren't role-players tend not to understand that inter-character friction doesn't mean inter-player friction.
Get into character, and make the adventuring session mean that much more to your characters. At the end of it, everyone who was left out of the exchange will have some more gold, maybe a magic item or two, and some XP. You two will have advanced your character's goals. Some of them are apt to be jealous of this, and they become ripe for the recruiting.
Was I too lenient? I try to give each player one "Hand of God" ruling per character, so this was his. And I didn't really want to end the campaign at this point.
I tend to agree with the others. A) your campaign, your ruling; B) the penalty for the failed save on the necklace is that it was utterly destroyed - I think that's consequence enough, honestly.
I want to make a summoner with a tiny sized eidolon. I didn't see any evolutions that would do that.
It has to be from a Paizo PFRPG product, so I can't home-brew it or use a third party source.
Any ideas?
Not at this point you can't, not without additional magic that you'd have to keep reusing. I looked into it, wanting a fer-real pixie as my eidolon, and the closest you can get is Small.
Divine magic is only handed down by the gods themselves, so it could be intentionally limited by those wise beings to those that are worthy of the power. Sorcery has it's bloodlines and witchcraft it's dubious pacts with otherworldly powers. Only really wizardry seems to be based on book learning, and it may require a certain magical spark to even work if you do do the study.
Add in a default lack of literacy, and you limit the pool further.
And I suspect there's a certain level of cache involved with being a wizard, and you don't just want any old schmoe to be able to do what you do. So we continue to have mundane craftsmen because the few wizards in the world focus on things other than mundane item creation.
One of the things occurring to me as I mused about the way my favorite hobby has changed over the years is that the process of "building" a character has become much more important. Frankly, back in the old days character cration was pretty simple. Now character building has become much, much more complex, with all the skills and feats to choose from.
Consider that back in the Good Old Days, you made a character with a few rolls, chose a class/race, maybe a spell, and bought some gear. And odds were you weren't going to live long at all.
That's not to say that there weren't people who tried to optimize, but it was harder to do, that's for sure.
I think that you can capture some of the same feel of the old game, while maintaining feats and skills and point buys, but only if you have the right kind of gamers in your group, who don't care about optimization and will sacrifice the "only choice" for something that's interesting instead.
I tend to fall into this camp, and do my best to avoid crunching the numbers too closely - it's why I laugh at the threads where people debate if it's possible to play a fighter with an 18 STR, or if 20 is the only possible option, and that the best course of action is to tank INT, WIS and CHA to 7's and 8's to get it.
