Kianti's page

Based on that then I have a few pieces of advice. I will start with saying that I do not think anything you find strong from UC and UM are that bad but I doubt my opinion matters to you on that. They have been out for so long now that it is core part of the game as with all the other core line books. People play PF for choices and more books give that. Anyways on to the advice.

Even if you did not allow MP, they would have found a way to get BS to get to the same point. It's just the nature of the spells. You should ban polymorph from the game. That would solve your problem right away. There would be no more OP characters since all their damage would drop off big time but then you are going to have to go back on a lot of the changes you have made to the monsters. This also comes with the price that the players may not be happy. If three people are doing this together then they seem to like it.

You could remove the three players that are giving you a problem. The general advice is that you remove problem players from the game but then you have to look for three new players which I doubt would be very hard since there are always new players but that comes with the unknown of what those players are like.

Then there is the third choice. If these people are your friends and you like playing with them. Change systems. Do it now. The longer you wait, the more headaches you are going to get since it seems like PF might not be what you are looking for from a game. On this front, I can offer you other games to play but I am not really sure what you want from a system so I would need that info from you before I offer anything on that front.

The key to all of this is to have fun right? From what I see here, you are not having any fun and I can't speak for your players. I would be careful in thinking you know what they want though. Depending on how well you know them, they might not be saying everything on their mind. People do not like to confront others. It's by nature and you can see it all over the internet when players and GM talk about problems in their game that could be solved with talking.

I want to help you make your game a better game but I think house-ruling is the wrong way to go about it. It causes all kinds of problems the more you add. That includes messing with the monsters.

Except that is changing the rules.

Also, the campaign is supposed to be about challenging combat so simply saying "Hey I need you to not use those abilities" feels like a cheap cop-out at best.

If something needs to be nerfed I'm happy to nerf it, but I expect the players to make powerful (but not munchkin) characters.

I understand. I do not know what to tell you then. If you do end up nerfing his character, give him a chance to make a new character since I am sure he did not know this would happen beforehand. Now that is cleared up, what do you want from us? What kind of advice are you looking for? You clearly have an interesting game going on but it's so far from what I am used to that I am not sure I can help you.

I have to agree with those above. For first time GM. Roll stats! It will save you so much work in the long run. It also helps balance the party a bit since you will not have a big difference in starting stats which helps a lot.

To answer your Q: No it's not normal, this is what happens when you let your Inq overbuff spending 3-10 rounds of pre-combat setup, ideal positioning, built to spec munchkin nonsense and also burning up all their daily uses of various abilities.

I only see a few buffs that would even stop him from full attacking. Heroism and Divine Power. If he is casting both of them then yes, there is a lot of rounds for buffing but we were also told there are two party buffers so Heroism is most likely coming from one of them plus at this level, it does last a long time. So might have gotten one round to buff which seems to be not that hard to do. Personally, I do not think this is out of line and does not even seem to be min-maxing since I doubt he does a whole lot of damage.

If it's disruptive to your game, just drop a few save or die spells on them and make them reroll something that doesn't require the perfect confluence of buffs to hit on every attack short of rolling a 1. Should this be causing the encounters to be trivialized then there is a problem that the GM has a responsibility to address, through force if necessary.

This is the wrong way to handle it. Never do this. Talk to the player out of character and tell them that you are upset with their attack bonus and ask them to not use those powers. It is easy as that. If they refuse then you have a problem player on your hand and there are many ways to deal with that. I do not really know how your game is run but this is the best way instead of changing the rules.

I revamped the monster creation based on what players have ACTUALLY been doing -- because right now a Balor is supposed to be as strong as 24 level 11 characters but the Unchained Monk could more or less solo it with one round of group buffs, at least in a straight up melee fight.

For example, the default scaling is roughly 11 + 1.26 per CR. I upped it to 11 + 2 per CR. Basically takes into account more the stuff that players can do as the level since the game apparently vastly underestimates character growth. Meaning a CR14 enemy would have a default of 39 AC...which is only 1 more than the Inquisitor's AC at level 12, so I'm wondering if I need to tweak the values again. Especially since the Inquisitor also has 38 AC...and would be at 40 with a polymorph.

I am sorry, you are doing what? No one will be able to hit these guys and every battle is going to be a slog. This game was not made to have monsters have so much AC. Let's say you give CR 14 creatures 41 or 42 ac. That is only two levels higher, this Inq will only miss on a 1 or 2 but what about the rest of the party? The paladin is currently at 29 AB, he will miss on his first attack a lot. Based on the monster creation table, it seems that they want full BAB hitting on the first attack most of the time.