Knight of Retribution Ethan's page

I am having a hard time finding a source for a ruling. I am playing a character that heavily focuses on grappling (took the wrestler archetype and everything). My character's ideal strategy is to tumble through the front-line and use their high speed to make it into the back-line and grapple a caster or other high-value target. We go through an encounter and I find myself in a position to do that very thing. I get a nat 20 and critically succeed. While using the grapple maneuver, that means the target is restrained for a round. Another player reminds the GM that boss mobs (and this was the boss of this part of the Adventure Path) treat all status conditions as if they are one step lower (critical success becomes a success, success becomes failure, etc.) So instead of being restrained, they only become grabbed. They proceed to cast sleep on me and I fail the roll and am out of the combat for 5 rounds until someone wakes me up and everything is basically over.

This is the first time I have heard anything about "boss" mobs being able to shrug off status conditions. I am familiar with the **incapacitate** trait on abilities and how that interacts with higher level characters. The basic grapple action does not have this trait.

What I am trying to figure out is if this is a rule that is printed somewhere I cannot find or if it is a house rule designed to make boss encounters more threatening. The GM and other players at the table made it sound like it is an official rule, but I cannot find it anywhere. Any rules lawyers here able to provide a source?

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?