Marian Ceville's page

I was just kinda perusing the boards and this thought crept up on me, now the whole idea is kind of bugging me. In the back of my head I feel like iterative attacks aren't really a crucial part of Pathfinder, they can bog down combat, pouncing has to be a thing in order to move and attack, etc. I suppose the Caster-Martial disparity would be even more extreme, but one could totally develop a way to give Martial characters some sort of "Mega-Attacks" in order to give them a little oomph without their load of attacks. Naturally certain classes (Monk, TWFers) would gain abilities to attack twice, three, even four times a round, but these would be characters built specifically to attack multiple times a round as their shtick. Any pet class would be much more powerful in this scenario, so that's something to take into account.

I don't know, man, total half baked thought, but has anyone else thought about this? I have no desire to like...re-write Pathfinder without iterative attacks, they seem like a sacred cow that we could let go of.

I could also just play an E6 game, but you know, sometimes we get drunk and post things on the forums because we're bored. <3

The amount of condescending know-it-all "I'm right, you're wrong, and you're wrong because you're stupid" personalities that we have here on the forums is starting to make me sick. It seems I can't scroll partway through a thread without seeing one party openly bashing on another party because their fantasy game theory is superior. I'm not going to cite any sources, and this isn't in response to anything in particular, but the general elitist attitude of some of our veteran posters occasionally makes me want to vomit.

I'm not saying we should be caustically nice, that's more horrible, but think about what you say before you say it. Being a smarmy a**hole might feel good, but it's also why you don't have a gaming group anymore.

Alrighty, so I'm workin' on a little archer build for PFS. It goes something like this;

Lv 1) Urban Barbarian
Lv 2) Vivisectionist Alchemist
Lv 3) Regular ol' fighter.

Can I do that? Thanks a million, you're like a fluffy bunny for helping.

I recently began running a cute little homebrew campaign for my gaming group, the party consists of a Samurai, Alchemist, Mysterious Stranger Gunslinger, and a druid, all of which are second level. For their first adventure they are exploring a mysterious island inhabited by terrible beasts who roar like thunder and are coated with thick hides of scales. After a bit of aimless wandering I decided to throw a sort of decorative encounter at them, in the form of a rutting allosaurus stumbling through the woods. What was intended to be an exciting chase scene instead became a bizarre combat encounter, as the Samurai decided he would make a self proclaimed "noble sacrifice" and draw his blade against the dinosaur, which clearly outmatched him, as opposed to running...

After a round or two I brought in a second large dinosaur to challenge the first and locked the two of them in a grapple to buy the party time. Eventually the first beast slew the second, and we ended the session as the it turned back towards the puny samurai and roared triumphantly over it's kill. But now I'm stumped as to how I should end this encounter. The rest of the party wants to flee, so I think I'm just going to let the samurai die, he's consciously making a foolish decision and is trying to justify by saying it fits into his lawful alignment...it just bothers me. A 2nd level character with Wis 14 would know better...

Any suggestions on how I should handle this? Is it callous to kill the Samurai? I don't want the player to think that being foolhardy is always going to be the answer

So it seems as though I'll be joining a new Game in the next few days, something I am excited about. The only problem is that I'm not entirely sure how to go about constructing my character for it. You see, I'm entering this campaign at 5th level, with a party composition of a Barbarian, Druid, Rogue, Wizard (Or Sorcerer, can't remember), Gunslinging Ranger, and...one other guy who's class escapes me.

Looking this over I quickly decided that I was going to run a cleric, a decision which was made all the sweeter when I found out that we all have the vampire template. Now, some of you may be clicking away from this thread at this very moment, filling the air with shouts of "CHEESE!" but please, hold on for just a short minute, it's about to get even worse.

The vampire template changes your type to undead, and a negative energy channeling cleric can heal the undead...this does mean that I can heal my blood sucking buddies with my negative channeling, yes?

If so, Cheese, how I love you.

I was also curious if anyone could recommend a few choice feats for a Negative Energy Support Cleric. I'm not trying to be a front-liner or a blaster, I just wanna be a Cleric.

(We're also being given 7th level gold, and our GM writes all the encounters as though we were 7th level characters, to accommodate our Sparkly power...)

So, I was recently looking over the character sheets from my gaming groups most recent pathfinder game, as we keep them all together...more or less, and I was just now realizing how ridiculous our party really was; here's the rundown

-Goblin Knifemaster Scout Rogue;(My character) Didn't end up nearly as broken as I anticipated, but I did a pretty shoddy job with feat selection and whatnot.

-Human Guide Ranger; Effectively filled the "tank" role in our party after we decided to let the Summoner die at the bottom of the ocean.

-Kitsune Factotum; Remember that class from 3.5? Well...yeah...it was a thing.

-Halfling Abberant Sorcerer; Eventually the party's main source of damage.

-Human Cleric of Good; He was happily the party Heal-bot, until towards the end of the campaign he forsook his faith and became...bad..at...combat. (In the Gm's homebrew world his Deity was intolerant of non-humans, and his closest companions were non-human by majority...so you can see where that went. Still, he was probably the most interesting character at the table, due to how generic he was up until that point.)

-Saurian Summoner (Deceased!); Nobody liked this character other than the player, he was pompous, arrogant, and overpowered. So during an underwater mission when he went unconscious everyone just turned their heads...it was beautiful, the Cleric almost took an alignment shift.

-Half-Orc Barbarian (Deceased!); He was run by the same player as the Saurian Summoner. During the last session of the campaign he jumped into a pit and fell 100ft, enough said.

So I just thought I should show off this...madness, oh! And I should also mention that we were self proclaimed pirates that never legitimately pirated anything.

The point of this post is that I'd like to hear about the most ridiculous parties that you've ever seen, and or played in, whether it was the character's personalities mixing caustically, or...whatever caused interest, I wanna hear it! Go!

Howdy everybody, lately I've been feeling as though something was a bit off in my otherwise happy world of Pathfinding, and I believe I've pinpointed the source of the disturbance;

The defense system makes me want to cry sometimes.

Here's what I mean. All characters gain a base attack bonus, meaning as they gain experience over the course of their adventures they become better combatants more adapted to the chaos of combat, right? Ok, so, my question is then why don't characters get better at defending themselves? The idea that a 20th level fighter with no armor or Dexterity bonus could be dealt damage by a commoner wielding a pointy stick is...bizarre.

Now, one could argue against me that a character's relative ability to defend himself is one of the many things reflected in his number hit-points, and that a defense bonus is unnecessary hoo-hah; The train of thought essentially being that the more hit-points you have, the more defendy you are, and that your loss of hit-points is at least partially a reflection of your increasing fatigue and whatnot from blocking, dodging, and parrying attacks...But that's just using fluff as a cover up, basically.

So, just for giggles here are a couple ideas that have been banging around in my cranial cavity (Disclaimer; yes, I understand that if you change something as fundamental to the game as the defense system then a multitude of other things have to be adjusted to line up with those changes, but to hell with the repercussions, I wanna experiment!)

-Base defense bonus; Exactly what you think it is, a defense bonus based on level. I would think it would be equal to the class in question's base attack bonus...but..it might need it's own little column on the class block now that I'm thinking, because for fluff reasons I can't imagine a Barbarian defending as effectively as a fighter...not to say a Barbarian should defend all that much worse, but just not quite as well. Hell, maybe there could be an archetype that limits DR in exchange for a better defense bonus? You get the idea.

-No more static base defense; I've been heavily considering doing away with that static 10 you stack your defense bonuses on altogether (At least for player characters, it might take up a bit too much time if every single monster is rolling for defense), and calling for a defense roll to oppose attacks instead. Not only does this add another level of randomness to combat, and draw players attention to the enemy's turn more effectively, but it also allows the party mage and other assorted squishies a better chance to not get so squished. Marquid the Sorcerer might just roll straight 20's on defense die and stand toe to toe with a Blackguard for a round or two, who knows? I was introduced to this idea by Mutants and Masterminds second ed. and immediately fell in love.

Now I understand that this all might seem like ranting gibberish, and it is, but I've seen a few threads on this sort of topic and I know there are a few like minded, and more intellectually organized individuals than myself who could share some knowledge and opinion on this general...sort of...idea.

Sleep easy and stay warm.