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Hmmm... regarding the idea of altering a timeline by killing a dictator yeah I can see problems cropping up (although if you took care to eliminate not only say Hitler but also Bormann, Himmler, Goering, etc, basically the entire possible chain of successors then it could become more workable) but what about taking special forces type troops back in time to the death camps, gulags, whatever other similar sites and liberating the prisoners from there and then sending them forward in time to safety, repeat as many times as needed. It still accomplishes the objective of saving the lives of those who were going to be massacred and leaves the enemy to face the then contemporary forces that would still be fighting them. I don't know about that as a possible time travel idea but given earlier discussion it seems a possible alternative.
I also like alternate history and quite frankly you can extend it far beyond the typical. For instance, what would the world have been like if, say, the Scandinavians had launched their westward explorations that eventually reached North America (Newfoundland and Baffin Island) earlier and with sufficient people to set up a thriving colony that survived changes to the climate. Or what would the world look like if Genghis Khan had been routed in northern China and turned his attention westward much earlier? Or the English had during the wars with France managed to solidly unify England and France under one monarch, a single empire? Or the Olive Branch petition made it to George the 3rd and he agreed to it? Well the list of "What ifs..." can get VERY, VERY long indeed, but still fun to think about.
Here's to you, as good as you are.
-Irish toast The general rule about driving in Ireland is that if you can do something that the Gardai (police) won't see you doing, or if you don't crash into anything, it's all right. -Irish motorist giving a tip to an American visitor Three quarters of what the opposition says about us is lies and the other half is completely without foundation in truth. -Sir Boyle Roache in a speech to the Irish Parliament It is the quiet pigs that eat the meal. -Irish proverb Overheard in the White House pub and restaurant in Kinsale, as one businessman was talking to another, "Whenever I want to kill time, I call a committee meeting. It's the ideal weapon."
One of the key aspects of this is that it comes down to play style and different people find different feats more or less useful than others do. Also there is the issue of yes it may be subpar but the character has a flavour reason for taking a particular feat (this applies to PrCs as well) With regard to weapon proficiencies specifically Weapon Group Feats from UA/d20 SRD
The profligacy of the age is such that we see little children not able to either walk or talk running about the streets and cursing their maker.-Sir Boyle Roache during a debate in the Irish House of Commons Though there is no bone in the tongue, it has frequently broken a man's head.-Irish proverb We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.-Winston Churchill The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.-George Bernard Shaw, "Reason" Life is much too important a thing to ever talk seriously about it.-Oscar Wilde, Vera, Or the Nihilists The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure-Oscar Wilde, commenting on the first performance of his play, Lady Windemere's Fan The only cure for love is marriage-Irish proverb
Here
Spoiler:
DOUBLE TAKE: INVITING A MALISON A niddering act?
September 25, 2008 They are, some would argue, linguistic recrement. Their caducity should be recognized and abstergent measures should be taken to expunge them from the lexicon. It seems apodeictic. We are talking about obscure and archaic words, ones that never get used much - or at all - these days. In Britain, the publishers of the Collins English Dictionary are proposing to get rid of a bunch of them to help make room for about 2,000 new words they intend to include in their next edition. But this has caused something of a fuss in the land where the English language was born. The Times newspaper has ridden to the rescue of these ancient terms by inviting its readers to vote online to rescue their favourite word from the blue pencil of oblivion. For its part, Collins has agreed to stays of execution for words that garner at least six "good-quality citations" of usage "from natural language." The deadline is January. At this point, a cynic might point out that Collins and The Times are both owned by News Corp., and that this whole thing could just possibly be construed as a publicity stunt to sell more dictionaries. Not so, said Elaine Higgleton, editorial director of Collins English Dictionary, in a telephone interview from Glasgow yesterday. "The Times in the U.K. is very interested in language and they've run quite a lot of pieces recently," she said, particularly on spelling and language use. Meanwhile, Collins has been getting British celebrities to "adopt" some of the threatened words in an experiment to see if they can be resuscitated. Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has adopted "skirr" and actor Stephen Fry is championing the survival of "fubsy." "There's an MP here called Vince Cable who has adopted 'niddering,' which means cowardly," said Ms. Higgleton. "I would have thought Vince has got a very good chance of being able to get that used by people because it kind of fills a lexical gap. He's only got to be reported as saying that the Prime Minister's response to the financial crisis has been niddering ... and there he is using the word in a good natural-language context." But whatever the ultimate fate of these obscure terms, word lovers would doubtless vaticinate that the overall exercise will be roborant for people's vocabularies. Those to be exuviated Some of the words threatened with expulsion from the British edition of the Collins English Dictionary. Abstergent: Cleansing or scouring. Agrestic: Rural; rustic; unpolished; uncouth. Apodeictic: Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration. Caducity: Perishableness; senility. Caliginosity: Dimness; darkness. Compossible: Possible in coexistence with something else. Embrangle: To confuse or entangle. Exuviate: To shed (a skin or similar outer covering). Fatidical: Prophetic. Fubsy: Short and stout; squat. Griseous: Streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey. Malison: A curse. Mansuetude: Gentleness or mildness. Muliebrity: The condition of being a woman. Niddering: Cowardly. Nitid: Bright; glistening Olid: Foul-smelling. Oppugnant: Combative, antagonistic, or contrary. Periapt: A charm or amulet. Recrement: Waste matter; refuse. Roborant: Tending to fortify. Skirr: A whirring sound, as of the wings of birds in flight. Vaticinate: To foretell; prophesy. Vilipend: To treat or regard with contempt. Any thoughts from our British contingent
About Lucifer. His Chinese name is "You Ming", which means "have bright", and translates idiomatically as "famous" He chose his English name for classes in his second language. His parents cannot speak a word of English, and had no part in the name. He researched it himself, on the internet, and knows the meaning. I fully support him in his name choice, and think it is the best name in his class. Better even than Strawberry, or Playboy ;) A fair number of Chinese people do seem to have problems with English when it comes to names. I knew a young woman in high school whose family came to Canada from China when she was very young and her parents were not too fluent in English, so when they picked an English name for their daughter they went to the Bible. Not so bad thus far right? They evidently missed certain context because the name they chose was Jezebel of all things. To make matters worse the last name was O-just the letter O (or that might be a translation or transliteration) but whatever the case one can imagine the reaction "Jezebel ... oh". Not malicious, just not overly well planned.
I know this is a bit of a cheat but the DMG has 100 of these one liners ... somewhere, as do ELH and most usefully for this discussion Heroes of Horror (HoH also has 100 creepy atmospheric effects, which were intended to merely be a bit of window dressing but tweaked could be bizarre adventure hooks ... assuming an appropriately imaginative DM >:)) One from ELH: A mistake in a resurrection (raise, reincarnate, etc.) leaves one PC alive by day and undead by night. (Most of the ELH stuff would need to be scaled down powerwise for non-epic campaigns but the basic idea could remain intact)
Here was my improvements of the Beast Shape and Form of the Dragon chains: Expanded Spell: Beast Shape IV -add Gargantuan and Fine animals to the forms that can be assumed -Fine animal: -6 Str, +8 Dex, +1 natural armour
New Spells: Beast Shape V Level: Sor/Wiz 7 -as Beast Shape IV except that Diminutive and Huge magical beast forms can be assumed
Beast Shape VI Level: Sor/Wiz 8 -as Beast Shape V except Fine and Gargantuan magical beast forms can be assumed
Form of the Dragon IV Level: Sor/Wiz 9 -as Form of the Dragon III except that it allows you to assume the form of a Gargantuan chromatic or metallic Dragon
HTH, Sentinel
I noticed all the domains from the SRD were converted to Pathfinder except scalykind. Does Paizo hate kobold clerics?? Yes it is: see the psionics rules section Psionic Races, Classes, Skills and Spells and it is listed under the cleric heading
First off, I have to say: to everyone working on Pathfinder you are doing excellent work. Keep it up! Now on to the point of the post. While I enjoy the polymorph subschool work that has been done, it has felt like two of the progressions did not go as far as they could so I have made a couple revisions to a spell and added some new ones but they all build off exisitng spells and so just look for the lower level ones for details I did not include here. Expanded Spell: Beast Shape IV -add Gargantuan and Fine animals to the forms that can be assumed -Fine animal: -6 Str, +8 Dex, +1 natural armour
New Spells: Beast Shape V Level: Sor/Wiz 7 -as Beast Shape IV except that Diminutive and Huge magical beast forms can be assumed
Beast Shape VI Level: Sor/Wiz 8 -as Beast Shape V except Fine and Gargantuan magical beast forms can be assumed
Form of the Dragon IV Level: Sor/Wiz 9 -as Form of the Dragon III except that it allows you to assume the form of a Gargantuan chromatic or metallic Dragon
Not sure how balanced these are but they seemed to be logical progressions of already established chains. Hope people like them.
Inner planes have nothing to do with alignment. They can't. You can't even access the outer planes from the inner planes directly. Demiplanes don't fall strictly into the inner/outer dichotomy and are often found on transitive planes AND specifically note alignment characteristics associated with them. Energy and elemental planes don't have alignment affinities by the written text. Actually the genies alignment range always bugged me a little. Efreet LE, Marids CN, Djinn CG, Dao NE? It should move the Efreet to LN and Djinn to NG or make all genies N, but that's my view, since genies don't seem to have reasons for strong alignment ties. YMMV The city of Brass has LE traits due to the pervasiveness of the presence of LE from the Efreet, but again see genie alignment thought above. YMMV, TETO
The dragons can be of any alignment rule is one thing that I love about Eberron and actually, in any games I'd run that rule would be extended to lycanthropes as well (threadjacking, apologies) but that's my idea of it that they should be able to choose any alignment they like and start as inherently true neutral, much like most humanoids. A red dragon paladin (of honour, if someone is going to try throwing out the UA paladin variants) or werewolf paladin (of honour) are perfectly acceptable to my way of thinking. TETO, though
One point here is that for the purposes of the Pathfinder RPG, Paizo would probably (although I can't say with absolute certainty) be limited to SRD material and the additional domains in Spell Compendium, among other places, might be fair game for a homebrew but legally Paizo couldn't touch them with a standard issue 10 foot pole.
One point I was noticing with the cleric is that several of the spell-like abilities in each domain (2-6) actually duplicate the old domain spells as spell-like (or supernatural, in a few cases) abilites from both PH and non PH domains. Both styles of cleric are excellent classes (in my view anyway)(TETO) Domain spells in particular have the 1st, 4th, 6th, 7th, and 9th level spells as spell-likes, but most domains have at least four, very few are only 2 or 3, so there are some ways to sneak spells in.
This seems reasonable and I would extend the concept further. Lizardfolk and Gnolls would be reduced to LA +0 with this and the more powerful races could have their LA lowered too. Ogre and Centaur both have 4 HD and +2 LAs which powerwise could probably be lowered to +1 or even +0 without trouble.
I haven't ever played a halfling or gnome but some of the commentary here needs a response. First, by pulling Darwin into it, one point that must be made is that our ancestor species (australopithecines and early hominids) were smaller than we currently are and lived out on the open plains and not only survived but flourished. Why? Among other reasons: brain power. Our ancestors didn't have sharp teeth or claws so they invented tools to do the job of these natural weapons and learned how to find various food sources. Halfling tool use and gnome magic would represent this in a D&D context. Another important factor: teamwork. Yes an individual halfling, or gnome, or even human for that matter, can't defeat an adult lion or other beast, but by working together in a large group they can take down or stay out of the way of much more powerful foes. The second point is that the comment about Eberron gnomes being a racial stereotype of Jews is similar to a comment made about another fictitious race: the Ferengi on Star Trek: TNG and DS9. The comment was totally wrong about the Ferengi and it is totally wrong about the gnomes. Neither is anti-Semitic or intended as an insult to Jews.
Str: 13 (6 5 2)
I guess it will be mage duty then. Add elf adjustments in and it brings dex up to not totally awful and puts int through the roof (assuming Pathfinder rules) Would mean a hit to con but I have some room there I was only introduced to the game in the 3.0/3.5 era (and thus had to actually consciously determine the order rather than just automatically putting in str, dex, con, int, wis, cha) (and I have never even SEEN any 1st ed books and only one 2nd ed book (arms and equip)) but still may you be long remembered and well remembered Gary Gygax
LA is needed but with slight tweaks like the elements of commoner levels idea above but it should be noted that if the NPC classes follow the PC class rules, commoners will now have d6 HD rather than d4, and experts will have d8s and warriors d10s. On another aspect of this kobolds suck badly as do goblins and even base line orcs are suboptimal so we should probably come up with ideas to up the races power levels (kobolds having Cha +2 and Str penalty reduced to -2 maybe) (goblins get +2 to Int in addition to existing modifiers) (orcs lose -2 to Wis perhaps) and this is even without taking anything but ability modifiers into account
There are a couple others that have occurred to me First is there any limit on the number of homonculi that a single construct builder can own or control at a time? Second, with familiars some of the creatures available as familiars can live for a number of years but eventually they will grow old and die. When a creature becomes a familiar, does it retain the basic creatures lifespan? This would be quite annoying for an elf arcanist because of their VERY long lives, so I was thinking of a variant rule: Any creature you take as a familiar (or animal companion for that matter) now ages at the same rate you do and has the same lifespan as you, rather than the normal aging rate and lifespan of its kind. Does this rule seem reasonable?
I have a couple of rules questions that have not got an answer in the game so I'd like the wise advice of those on these boards First, does a creature who is the subject of a dominate spell remember what they did while under the spells effect or would it just be completely blank as if they were doing one thing one moment right before they were controlled by the spell and the next thing they know is what they are doing when the spell wears off? Second if you have an object that only partially fits into a bag of holding or a portable hole or you deliberately keep a part of the object/creature/etc out of the bag does the weight of the portion in the bag not count against as would normally be the case with something in a bag of holding? Oh and as a side note I'm really liking the Alpha releases of Pathfinder. Keep up the good work |
