Knight of Retribution Ethan's page

I don't get the premise of the OPs argument. You are always at the whim of your GM. If they want to increase the rarity of any spell to uncommon, they could. If they wanted to ban a class like paladin, they could. If they want to set a mindflayer on a 1st level party and kill them all, they could. The GM has ultimate power on all decisions. If your GM is the kind of person that would hamper your ability to have fun at the table, my advice is play with someone else.

If I did the summoning bullets then the Persona 3 jokes would never stop.

So I am playing in a campaign as a TWF pistolero. I have 7 revolvers ranging from not magical at all to minor artifact. I picked up the Master Craftsman and Create Magical Arms and Armor feats a few levels ago and I now have enough in-game time to put those crafting feats to use. My GM and I agree that the magical properties that you can put on firearms (except for holy, distance, banes, elemental damage, and speed) all suck. Now I know that I just named quite a few enhancements but like I said earlier I have several magical revolvers which already do these things and I am looking to get more out of my feats than just putting holy on all of my guns. That is just boring.

Now my GM has told me that I should probably stay away from putting anything crazy on the pistols themselves. Making it so that every bullet, regardless of type, loaded into the firearm does something ridiculous when fired is a bit overpowered even in our already very high power game. He is, however, letting me go a bit nuts on my ammunition. Having a limited resource of awesome magic bullets is far more balanced.

I am trying to think of some creative magical properties that could be put on bullets. These are not like magical properties that you find in the base books in the magic item sections like flaming or seeking but rather things that simulate other spells and abilities. So far I have come up with the following: blinding bullets; expanding bullets that go to canon ball size after leaving the barrel; exploding bullets; goo bullets that ensnare the hit target. I am looking for more ideas. Material cost doesn't really mean anything to my character. He is 12th level and has been maxing out both gunsmithing and craft alchemy as skills so I would like to add the alchemical aspect into the bullets. Any ideas?

Im in agreement with Adamantine Dragon on this one. Have your enemies use the terrain for their advantage. Have terrain where they have to make acrobatics checks or fall prone/loose an action. Have the enemies on higher ground that is sloped. At 20 move speed it takes forever to climb a slope.

Also throw a ton of low level monsters that have the exact same stats as they do in the bestiary except that they have way more hit points than they should. Give your monsters the GM Toughness feat (AKA as many hit points as you want).

Adding in just one sorcerer with a high init and spells that hinder but dont out right kill your party (like slow, confuse, glitterdust, color spray or any of the other good status spells) to the mix can slow things down (especially slow since they can only attack once OR move).

Or you can take the dickish route and have them fight trolls or anything else with regeneration. Since they don't have an arcane caster then it is really hard to kill something that takes cold or acid damage to kill without someone with acid splash or ray of frost in the party.

As a new GM myself I have had to tackle this issue only once in game. I have a player who likes to play what I call "Evil on a budget" aka chaotic neutral.

Since I am running a game where evil undead and evil outsiders will be a good majority of the encounters I suggested very heavily to my players to play good aligned characters. I wouldn't normally do this but since non of them wanted to play the cleric, I am NPC-ing one and I didn't want the argument to start when said cleric uses a spell like holy smite and they take damage from her spell.

During the first game this player, who is playing CG, continually picks on one of the other players and tries to kill everything and by everything I include the rabbit that was foraging for food in his backpack. Nothing evil so no switch. He then provokes one of the other party members by marking their forehead with an arcane mark and in-fighting ensues. I warned the player that they were starting down the path of a CN character. He didn't think that he had done anything wrong. The truth is he was right, he had not done anything evil or wrong but he was failing to do good.

Being good and not being evil are different. That is why there is neutral. Neutral is there for people who do not go out of their way to do good but don't do anything evil either. Now I will be the first to admit that I have pretty high expectations for good aligned characters. I like good aligned characters to be heroes. The group that I actually play with, not GM for, has always run games where the good PCs are on their way to becoming great heroes, neutral PCs are slowly brought over to good through peer pressure, and evil characters are not allowed.

It really depends on what kind of campaign you are playing in and what your threats are. If you are fighting in mass combat where you are fighting enemies by the hundreds then drop some fireballs and watch them burn to death. I played in a war campaign where we, as 15th lvl adventurers, would fight an excess of 200 lvl 4-8 fighters with about 20 or so advanced units, 10-18th level clerics/arcanists. I can tell you now that having a sorcerer that loved the spell fireball made those encounters possible. If you are fighting single or only a few then I would go with the ranged touch. I built out a pretty ballin white necromancer from Kobold magazine who employed the touch and save or suck attacks of necromancy and the icy AOE damage of evocation. A mix of both is really potent with the right feats.

Self-loading, two-barreled pistols would cost more than this. It spares you a feat (rapid reload : DB pistol), which the gunslinger is starving for, or actions during fight.

Please remember than Abundant Ammunition reloads ONE barrel, and only at the beginning of the round. Hardly useful for a DB pistol if you are already focusing on them.
Do you intend for the weapon to reload itself after each shot ? If not, is that a permanent effect or spontaneous lasting a definite time /day ?

+1 Reliable DB pistol is worth 10 050 alone.

Actually Abundant Ammunition only works on replenishing ammunition that is taken from a pouch or quiver that is enchanted by the spell. So in all reality it does NOT reload ANY barrels.

That being said you can house rule things to the way you want. The beauty of a game like PF is the flexibility.

At the onset of character building you declare which hand you want to be your primary hand. Any attacks made with that hand have the full STR bonus. Conversely your other hand will only get 1/2 STR bonus when you attack. You cannot change which hand is your primary or off hand once decided at character creation. You can however pick up the double slice feat in the core rule book to gain your full STR bonus on attacks made with your off hand.

Note that you will always only get the 1/2 STR bonus with your off hand even if that is the only hand that you attack with that round. Unless of course you have double slice.

As a person who loved playing a TWF ranger, I suggest using a light weapon in your off hand, using a one handed weapon in your primary hand and picking up double slice. This will reduce your negatives to hit to only -2 for both hands and it will give you your full STR bonus to damage with both hands.

;tldr

If you want to see how to handle good drow then I suggest that you read some of the works of R.A. Salvatore. He pretty much invented the concept of good drow in the Forgotten Realms setting.

As for my opinion. If you start having large groups of individuals that are from an evil race who are not evil themselves then you devalue them as villains. You not only devalue the evil ones but you also take away from the good ones for story purposes. Good individuals from evil races should be rare.

A CG monk with a handy haversack that had something for just about any situation, to simulate a utility belt. Maybe even a monk/rouge hybrid since he would have a ridiculous amount of skills.

In my opinion, it all depends on why they sold their soul. What did they want to gain from it.

One of my GMs ran into this problem with us. We had a Sorcerer, Alchemist, Paladin and Fighter. At the beginning of the encounter the fighter and paladin would pop either their heroism or enlarge person potions that the alchemist gave them at the beginning of the day. Then the sorcerer would cast slow or confuse on most of the enemies. Then any slowed enemies the alchemist would set on fire, since they are unable to take the full round action to put out alchemical fire.

We would tare through 10-16 hill giants per encounter with these strategies. We never really worried about healing because between potions and channeling positive energy, and the fact that we rarely took much damage anyways...except me as the alchemist, we were pretty hard to kill.

One way to combat this is opponents with class levels. A good counter to the slow tactics would be to pit them against evil monks, clerics and rangers who all have pretty decent will saves. Monks and rangers are also an arcane caster's worst nightmare between good saves, good damage and the ability to fight from range or up close. Also undead are good. Swarm tactics and ability damage plus some really nasty special effects that make them a real pain to fight if you are not at least 1oth level.

Also don't be afraid to sometimes just say that they get hit by arrows. If you have 10 archers shooting at you at once then there is just no way that you can dodge them all. Have 1 out of every 3-4 arrows just hit no questions asked. Same for melee attacks. Even the greatest of fighters can be overwhelmed by numbers. I have been in war campaigns where we as lvl 17 adventurers would still on occasion almost go down, or actually go down in the cases of our sorcerer, paladin and rouge, simply because we were fighting 15 lvl 7s each plus arrow damage and spell damage.

Hope this helps.

OP I think that using the wight was a bad example for your argument. Actually using any undead is a bad idea. An undead's CHA stat is the measure of their life force and is completely different from the CHA stat of a living creature.

I don't entirely disagree with your post. CHA doesn't decide beauty but the character's shear force of personality. That being said, those characters that are super hot and memorable have high charisma.

It is the square and rectangle scenario. All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. All characters with high CHA are beautiful/menacing/horrific/etc. but not all beautiful/menacing/horrific characters have high CHA.

Just to let the people talking about Han shooting first know, there was no PG-13 rating at this point. It was either PG or it jumped straight to R. The PG-13 rating was not adopted until 1984. A new hope debuted in 1977. Jumping down a rating was to go from R to PG. Not many parents would take their families to an R rated film so it makes sense that they would change the scene if it would allow them to have a significantly larger viewing audience.

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That was me banging my head against the keyboard.

No, that's not a lie. I really did it.

I'm sorry I even mentioned initiative. As I mentioned in my last post, what initiative does or doesn't mean isn't the point of the thread. The point was, you are presented with a scenario in which no hostile actions are taken against you, and you have to make a decision based only on the race of the creature. IS ATTACKING FIRST AN EVIL ACT?

I don't care if your group considers rolling initiative to be a hostile action. I don't care what your purpose for being in that particular location happens to be. I don't care if the orc has his sword drawn (the PCs normally do, and that doesn't make THEM evil). For that matter, I actually don't care if the orc really is evil, because the PCs won't know that just by glancing at the orc. I don't care if Han shot first. Actually, I do care about that (he shot first), but it's not relevant to the question. The point was, the PCs have no information other than the orc's race and their preconceived notions about what that may mean.

Forget it folks. Thanks for the input, but I'll wait a few weeks and re-post the question without distractions like game mechanics. I've got a few weeks before my next GM session, and even more time before the game starts that I was thinking about playing a (good) goblin character (If a certain well-known drow character can be good, why not goblins?)

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Alright so I admit that I didn't read the entire thread to see that the game mechanic issue is was brought up.

Even so I would say a resounding NO to the question of is attacking first an evil act. Here is why. Let's say that instead of the orc in this situation lets go with a lich. Both of which have preconceived notions of being evil. Would it be wrong for your good aligned characters to attack the lich? NO. How about a mind flayer, demon, devil, or chromatic dragon? NO. And yes I know that there is such thing as a good chromatic dragon but they are supposed to be extremely rare. Unless you are going to say that players must be attacked first to attack anything, that in their experience has been evil, then you have no argument. If you are willing to say that then it sounds to me like you want your party to die or at the very least start every battle with a handicap.

My suggestion would be to not put your party in such a situation. Instead of seeing the orc as they round the corner have them see him sitting at the bar having a drink and eating. Remove the hostility from the equation. Or if you think that is boring or cliche then have the orc aid them in some way instead of them just running across them "around the corner".

My big problem with this scenario is that you are forgetting the game mechanics. A GM only asks for initiative if the party is about to engage in combat. If that were not the case then why would having a high dex improve your init modifier. If the GM were to ask for init for every situation, even diplomatic ones, then the game rules of init would need to be different. If lets say the GM were to ask their players to roll init to see who gets to talk to someone first then I would suggest that INT or WIS would be the deciding attributes because these affect how quick thinking you are in a conversation. Being able to physically react fast doesn't really matter if you are a slow thinker in this situation.

If this situation happened to me, which it very well could because I usually play the lawful good divine type, and my GM told me that I lost paladinhood/went against the tenants of faith/changed alignment because of this action then I would leave that gaming group. I have no time to play for GM's who are trying to screw over their good aligned characters and that is exactly what doing that would be. I commend you for not punishing your players but the entire scenario seems kinda dummb.

You can have an active heaven in your game but it does need to be handled with care. The use of celestrials in the god's employ would be best. Having a god manifest themselves has always been used, in my experience, to say that s**t has hit the fan. Also you don't want the gods messing with mortal affairs too much. Gods, as a rule, can only directly interact with mortals that worship them and they can not directly attack or harm followers of another god. This keeps gods from killing off all the followers of one deity so that that deity loses their power. A god should only manifest themselves if summoned by a very high level follower, 20+, or if a god that they consider a foe has manifested themselves already so that they can stop that foe.

I think that the medium attack bonus should stay. If you get rid of it all together than you deny players the ability to play off type characters. Example, I am about to play a LG, Half Orc, Cleric that worships Iomedea. He is so far the strongest person in our party with a 19 str. He is going to be a big bruiser that uses divine enhancement magic and flanking techniques to help the rouge. There is absolutely no way I could pull this character off past 4th level with a poor attack bonus.