Krowbar's page

Either you have ranks or you do not. The book says the headband gives you ranks. There is no such thing as pseudo ranks.

Nobody said anything about pseudo ranks. Rather, whether those granted by the headband counted as ranks "invested" by the player.

It's logical that the bonus is more valuable when your chance to hit is minimal. When you hit with 3+, a +1 to hit doesn't have a big impact. when you hit with 20s, a +1 to hit doubles your chances

Yup. For those of us who are mathematically minded, it is quite obvious and logical. However, some people do still benefit from the graphical representation (and I thought it looked cool, to boot!) Getting the specific numbers was interesting, as well.

It depends on the campaign whether or not XP should be used.

Look at Papers & Pencils: Simple Experience Points. It is a nice way to handle it while still having people feel rewarded.

Very nice article! I got pretty much the same values he had in his encounter table in a spreadsheet I worked up a while ago. I like how he normalized that into an exp chart. I'll have to ask my group what they think of that.

One reason I still see for using player exp is for rewarding good RP'ing players. Honest question here, without exp, what should be used by the GM to reward good RP? Small circumstance bonuses to skill rolls? What else?
EDIT: And what rewards should be given for good RP that would put the player at a disadvantage?

Ok guys, big bombshell here but I want to know how people feel about player experience points and whether or not they are actually "necessary" for a successful campaign. After recently starting a Pathfinder campaign with some friends (that I'm a player in) we decided as a group to completely eschew player exp for purposes of leveling up during this campaign.
To give a little background, my group of friends and I have played several GURPS campaigns (which give points after successful sessions with which you can buy stats/abilities for your character) and a Dresden RPG (based on FATE based on FUDGE) campaign (which allows players to modify/improve their characters after story "milestones"). We all really liked the FATE model and decided to let the GM arbitrarily choose when we level up (updating us after sessions with phrases like "1/2 way to level 3"). We decided on this for several reasons:

• Big numbers scare us (except for gold count)
  
• We have a new GM who doesn't have a physical beastiary book with monster EXP
  
• We are all planning on attending all sessions
  
• It gives the GM a tighter hold on party progression
  
• Easier for GM to balance encounters when everyone is always on the same level
  
• We have a mix of combat and non-combat oriented PCs who don't want to play straight up "KILL all the things for EXP!"
  
• We're planning on a super fast leveling campaign (1 session got us to lvl 2, 2-3 sessions will get us to 3, etc).
  
• It's not like this is early D&D where EXP is directly used for making potions / crafting things.
  

What are all y'alls thoughts on this? Has anyone else done it this way? Should we be tarred and feathered for thinking such nonsense? Comments are welcome!
-KaptainKrowbar

Since my last spreadsheet posted to the forum received a decent amount of positive feedback, I decided to post another.
In our current campaign, my friend is playing a Bard (who has several +1 buffs/-1 debuffs) and I wanted to see the impact those made during combat so I made a chart to show how increasing Attack Bonus by +1 or decreasing AC by 1 affected the to-hit chance. See the following link:

Pathfinder - Attack and AC Charts

• The first table shows the benefit an attacker receives when increasing their Attack Bonus by +1 against different target ACs.
  
• The second table shows the benefit of reducing a target's AC by 1 when attacked by different Attack Bonuses.
  
• Either table can be read backward to get "Defense benefits of decreasing Attack Bonus" and "Defense benefits of increasing AC"
  
• Both tables are player/enemy agnostic, don't account for other special modifiers, and only show benefits for +1/-1 shifts.
  

Comments and suggestions are welcome! My last charts were well worded and improved greatly from suggestions people made. Thanks!
-KaptainKrowbar

Since I can't figure out how to edit my first post, I'll just note here that you can download the sheet either as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or as an Open Document Spreadsheet. No promises as to whether the formatting and calculations will be preserved correctly...
(Sorry for the double post)

Hello friends! Here's my very first post on the forums!
Since some friends and I are planning on starting a Pathfinder campaign, I thought to pull together a little spreadsheet.

The purpose of this spreadsheet is to help your GM:

• Pick the proper pacing
  
• Pick the proper CR per encounter

• How many party members you have
  
• How much time you're planning on spending on your campaign
  
• What level you're hoping to attain by the end of the campaign

The spreadsheet will tell you how many encounters of a particular difficulty it will take at any given level to attain the next level. You can divide this by what you think will be encounters/session and sessions/week in order to get a rough estimate of your pace. It already takes the CR shift into account for large parties. Of course, you can always take more or less challenging encounters to change the pace.

The spreadsheet can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgsaQxa1UIRRdDlSZy0wamYyZVFzOF dLQ20tMFl0U3c
I don't know if anyone else will find this useful, but I just thought I'd throw it out here. It's still in an incomplete form but I plan on finishing it (based on the reception it receives).
-KaptainKrowbar