I guess they are trying to set a precedence for when spells grant feats.

This is weird and is not a conclusion that you can draw from the spell or general spellcasting rules.

This FAQ is more errata than anything else.

I don't expect this FAQ to stand.

Is the acid flammable? If not, count as water and the elemental will be extinguised.

Is lava flammable? If not, does it count as water? Would it extinguish a fire elemental? Could you swim through it?

Yes I did dig through your post to try to gain insight into the mind of someone who thinks GMs should ignore mechanics and kill players on a whim.

Marthkus wrote:

Try playing the game rolling 3d6 for each stat in order.

I played in a game once where the DM asked you to roll stats, in order, after you pick your class.

That has to be the dumbest thing I ever heard. Picking the class after the stats makes sense. Picking before is paste-eating levels of dumb.

Zhayne wrote:

Cardinal Chunder wrote:

I can't understand why people have a downer on PB. Do people just like rolling dice?

I'm reminded of a pic I saw online the other day. Two buttons, one labelled 'You win $1 million', the other '50% chance of winning $100 million'.

It's a gambler's thrill, essentially, and not something everybody is susceptible to.

To be fair, the second button has an average payout of $50 million. That honestly seems to be the better button to pick.

I would take the 1 million every time.

I've seen someone describe their love for "D&D" is because it is a game where agency meets chance. Liberally letting people take 10 guts that aspect of the game.

The complaint of non-heroic is why I don't like low levels. I want to be more than my d20 roll, but I don't want to do that by removing it from the game, and if I do (like with skill mastery) I want that to be a powerful mechanic that I had to work for (like suffering 10 levels of rogue).

On the upside, he brought soda.

A true team player.

A tool that you don't use doesn't affect your playstyle.

Cool, but if you don't use those tools you are a rogue-.

Common ground is: when the GM says "we are playing pathfinder" what can you safely assume the rules are?

Thread with builds if you can look past the flame

EvilPaladin wrote:

So, a vivisectionist is dissecting people and animals who died of natural causes and had donated their corpses to science so that they can have a better understanding of anatomy.

That is a dissectionist. Note that "died" part. If they are dead when he's cutting them up, he's not a Vivisectionist.

I've cut open a living brain-dead frog before. That doesn't make me evil...

Marthkus wrote:

Is this real?

Black Marketeer is real yes.

That is 1/9 half a feat

extra traits

rich parent

Which is generally considered an awful trait.

Black Marketeer

You have many contacts and a keen eye for hidden opportunities in the marketplace.

Prerequisites: Appraise 1 rank, Diplomacy 1 rank, Knowledge (Local) 1 rank.

Benefit: By utilizing your black market connections, you acquire a resource pool worth 100 gp. This can only be used on illegal or illicit items or services (note that something may be illegal or illicit in one area but perfectly acceptable in another).

Typical illegal or illicit items are drugs, poisons, evil magic items, slaves, or dead bodies, though intangibles such as secret information may also qualify (and for these items, a secret of equal value—at the GM’s discretion—must be contributed to the pool).

Is this real?

*eyetwitch*

It never ends

My rogue is level 12. Hasn't died on screen once (petrified once). Has flanked maybe 5 times. Retrained from TWF rogue to feint rogue. TWF rogue doesn't work, the theorycraft of this being better than feinting is just wrong.

My rogue has the highest kill count in the party (not that kills mean anything :P), but it is still nice. Bleed is WAY more than extra DPR, it's extra actions. No one bothers chopping off heads when the creature is bleeding to death.

EDIT: The theorycraft of me in a party with a druid, inquisitor, wizard, synthesist, predicts that my actions in the party should be limited to cutting myself.

DrDeth wrote:

Insain Dragoon wrote:

Why are you guys arguing with someone who doesn't know the rules. Ignore him and move on with the discussion.

Alternatively the mods can finally lock this derailed thread, please!

Interesting tactic. Find you're losing a debate, so resort to personal insults, hoping this will lead to thread locking. Which it often does, and in fact did so last time.

Altho the mods are very busy here, they are pretty darn smart and if they can get enough time to figure out your little game, it doesn't bode well for you.

It's also pretty intellectually dishonest as well as rude.

Don't worry fellow forum troll! I see that you too are rusing it up for lolz! Thank you for your assistance in calling a mod for a thread lock!

DrDeth is many things. A troll is not one of them.

Your naming calling is getting old...

WWWW wrote:

Hmm, let me see if I understand you. Your argument is that a modifier to the DC of a perception check is very much not the same thing as a bonus on a stealth check. Thus invisibility grants an effective +40/60 since the stealth rules apply +20/40 to the check and the perception rules apply a separate +20 modifier to the DC when trying to look at invisible creatures or objects. Is that about what you mean.

Yes, exactly. A perception check applies in different circumstances to a stealth check. A stealth check is an active process that precludes some forms of activity (melee combat, for example). Invisibility is a passive condition that obviously does not preclude these activities, although it comes with its own caveats. Invisibility and stealth are fundamentally different things, although they of course interact.

The tables (not very clearly) spell this out: I'll grant that the +20 in 'stealth +20' is almost certaintly meant to be the +20 to stealth checks mentioned in the spell and stealth text. However, shadowkras is conflating this with the DC 20 perception check which the 'stealth check +20' is explicitly modifying. There's absolutely no precedent for this RAW, although it's a decent houserule.

I'm sorry but isn't the stealth check and the perception DC the EXACT SAME THING.

Eventually rewrote game to keep martials relevant; most parties now have a good mix.

Does anyone ever try to correct you on the rules?

Artanthos wrote:

Zardnaar wrote:

Timothy that is fine. Just getting an idea for what spells need to go and what spells eed to be rewritten for a personal project of mine.

Blood Money and Paragon Surge

These are indeed silly.

Planar Binding is a trickier case. It's obvious that it can be ridiculously powerful. It's very intention is to break the normal power curve.

But it's also a "necessary" spell for many stories. We WANT evil wizards who summon things that they really can't quite handle.

Planar Binding is at its best when it's not entirely safe to cast, but you're tempted by the potential power.

Also, unlike Blood Money and Paragon Surge, it has a lot more subtle limits on it. The drawback of BM is purely mechanical; some Strength damage which can be cured in several ways. Paragon Surge is based on a cheesy mechanical trick.

PB however also has social/political risks: the monsters you summon don't come out of a vacuum. They were somewhere else first, and maybe worked for someone. You may be able to control that CR 9 devil you bound, but what about its CR 16 boss? And although that demon you just summoned doesn't have a boss, it did have rivals. Now that it's bound, its rivals have nobody nearby to check them, and they grow in strength.

If the GM ignores these risks associated with PB, then it's not the spell that's broken, it's just the GM giving you a free rise. PB is powerful but it's also complicated, not a risk-free ticket to ultimate power.

inb4 people call that logic house-rules.

MrSin wrote:

But that's not how it is. Colour spray at level one can wipe out a horde in a cone with the right saves, a weapon attack? Not so much.

Well, if you go for technicalities, good rolls for the mosnter in their saves means a wizard near unprotected ready to get smashed.

Yes. I've always found it odd that the wizard would stand so close to foes without allies in-between because they think the color spray will work.

I know our wizard hasn't been so ballsy.

Not sure I am seeing the argument about no TWF feat. It certainly seems something like have to be trained in order to adquire.

It's an appeal to mechanical balance rather than thematic sense.

Marthkus wrote:

EvilPaladin wrote:

Marthkus wrote:

TWF is actually hard and should require a feat.

I think level 1 mundanes should be realistic.
Level 2 is the most advance special forces
Level 3 would be the greatest heroes who ever lived
Level 4 is beyond the scope of reality.

So no TWF deserves to be a feat.

So, a level 1 character is supposed to be realistic. That's why a first level librarian should be able to blind, stun and knock people out with pretty colors, right?

If people could take levels in wizard, then yes. Librarians would be commoners though, a really good one might be an expert.

Lots of the wizards I have seen in-game were librarians when they weren't adventuring. Also I've seen quite a lot of NPC wizards who were Librarians part-time or full-time. Its a viable career for those who like reading.

non-sequitur

Actual librarians aren't wizards. Wizards being able to be librarians doesn't make all librarians wizards.

Who thinks removing chains would hurt the fighter?

That doesn't even make sense. Even if all martials got buff, and the plethora of available feats trivialized the fighter's feats as excessive, removing the chains still only helps the fighter.

The game is about defeating encounters not pissing contests with party members.

Color spray wreaking encounters on the otherhand is a though experiment.

He's some sort of Monk/Rogue/Ninja/Ranger/Fighter gestalt at the very least. He certainly has full BAB and a good Will save.

He rarely has to fight things his level.

Hard Minded, a good wisdom, and great gear strike me as all he needs.

Yes fighters are holding back martials.

There is an expectation that the no magic, no ki warrior is something that should be on par with ki-warriors, supernatural-rage warriors, magic-warriors, and divine-infused warriors.

Having that make sense necessitates holding everyone back. Take the manga Fairy Tale, anyone worth their crap can use magic, even the dump meat-heads. Mundanes were mooks without super gear. That is the established mentality so no one complains that mundanes should be able to do things.

The fighter prevents that mentality. Pretending that mundanes should keep up without tons of money (Batman) is what bring PF down to marvel level instead of DC level.

spamming them because martials have no other effective option is.

I disagree. Spamming the same thing over and over again doesn't make it boring.

For example, look at shooters. All you ever do is shoot and yet people spend hundreds of hours "spamming their gun" because they don't have better options.

Golf is a well enjoyed sport and that is just "spamming you golf swing over and over again".

In jRPGs people can spam the same attack over and over again.

Lot's of MMOs are just people doing the same thing over and over again to do the same thing with bigger numbers.

"Spamming full attacks!" is not enough of an observation to conclude that it is boring. The underlining reason for the disinterest is more important. And it is not something I am aware of.

These wouldn't have been valid critiques until the crane-wing nerf...

I may have gone a little overboard there (specifically with the Hulk-style leaps), but the point remains pretty close to the same. When I've, numerically, passed the capabilities of a real-world mortal 14 levels past, it's ridiculous that I'm still bound by all of these restrictions that just don't make any sense any more. See my point earlier about how incredibly difficult it is for a 20th level Fighter to jump 10 feet in the air without magical assistance (it's a DC 40).

I think people are confusing realistic and sensical.

I want fighters to make sense. They don't need to be grounded in reality though. In reality a mere man could never hope to stand on equal footing with angels and demons without a lot of GM fiat (divine intervention). High level PF characters are not realistic, but most of them make sense and follow a logical flow.

What I would like to see is that same level of logic applied to what the fighter does to show why they should be able to do some things they can't at the moment.

What I don't want to see is more barbar fixes. Like channeling the ability of a beast to attack with two claws and a bite all at once after a charge somehow gives the barbar the ability to swing his sword faster. Or the barbar having such a strong adversion to all things magic that they can remove intricate curses by smacking them. I'd rather see thing internally consistent like the barbar channeling nature of dragons to grow wings and fly. That last example is the least realistic, but it makes the most sense.

I almost feel like the Advanced Class Guide is to Pathfinder what Tome of Battle was to 3.5 D&D. It almost feels like Paizo is testing the waters with something to determine if this is the direction forward for Pathfinder Part Duex or something.

ACG just doesn't feel like it belongs with regular Pathfinder to me. My group has 2 of the 6 players playing ACG classes right now in a new campaign so maybe with more experience and usage that feeling will change but for now that's how I feel.

Well if the ACG is Paizo's ToB then that makes me quite happy.

kyrt-ryder wrote:

The Rogue is Batman

Except he's not. He's a lousy Batman at best. Maybe Robin.

A rogue with Bruce Wane money would put most wizards to shame.

Alexander Augunas wrote:

I also don't think we'll see the fighter disappear. The fighter is extremely versatile and ironically enough, he's better at doing combat things that don't involve simple attacks than any other class in the game thanks to the obscene number of feats he receives.

... Is this serious? I... I'm just not sure sometimes. I mean, we have all these classes with spellcasting and class features and stuff that feats can't even replicate, and feats don't give options 9 out of ten times, so I'm not sure where this comes from.

I love seeing people blow his mind every time they say something along the lines of finding the fighter interesting.

EDIT: Notice he said simple attacking, so attacking via lunge, great cleave, blind-fight, combat reflexes, vital strike, or a host of other feats could count in addition to all the combat maneuver feats.

Marthkus wrote:

Things making sense and things mimicking reality are two different concepts.

Conflating the two is just disingenuous.

Not disingenuous at all. For me once you start talking about 30 ft jumping in the air im ready to throw out reason and let abstract be abstract without worrying about the particulars.

How?

Basic physics, if someone pushed off the ground with enough force they can reach 30ft into the air.

Perhaps the kind of strength needed to eat a full-attack from a the Tarrasque and still remain standing. Or the strength needed to be able to swing your sword so hard that it can kill entities made out of pure evil like the Balor. Or the kind of strength needed to lift 3200 lbs over your head (30 strength) and walk around.

Things don't have to mimic reality to make sense, I don't understand how anyone playing PF failed to grasp that concept.

The more I read, the more I think people that want "Epic fighters" might be more happy with a superhero RPG? There are plenty of them out there, and allow "fighters" to split mountains with their bare hands and leap miles in a single bound.

I think there is a good middle point between not being able to jump 3ft and jumping miles into the air.

Or not being able to split a wall and splitting mountains.

What I find odd is that a high level fighter can solo dragons but can't leap 3 feat off the ground.

I'd like to see the fighter passively get a fitness check for things like climb, swim, and jumping as strength based checks.

I could see the mechanic used to make checks to temporarily increase their movement speed too.

I also don't think there would be anything wrong with adding rules to as to how mighty blows interact with the environment. Like a fighter who strikes the ground at high level should probably leave a creator.

Something else to expand options would be more interesting gear.

What has to be carefully done is making sure none of this actually makes the classes "stronger" just increases their options (which would make them stronger).

A full attack is a very powerful thing in PF. Equivalent to 9th level spells in terms of destructive power. Giving martials more options less than full attack wouldn't be an awful introduction.

No one plays official Pathfinder? How did you come to the conclusion? Also, why are quoting the OGL disclaimer for PF? That has nothing to do with what is core.

Go try to play official Pathfinder. You can't. Even PFS is it's own special set of rules.

Core is not all of Pathfinder. If you want to talk about the pathfinder general rules that includes all the rule books. If you want to only talk about the core general pathfinder rules that is something else entirely.

Rogues and Fighters do get epic at high levels. They just don't get as different as casters do.

Fighters can jump from space and be perfectly fine, drink gallons of poison without consequence, can wrestle rhinos to the ground single handily.

GMs just don't tend to throw low level mooks at the party so it's harder to notice. APs tend to be a little better about that.

I rather like this game.

All the classes still do things even the rogue.

Really the game works quite well in dungeon crawls. Cramped spaces do a lot to balance things.

shallowsoul wrote:

MrSin wrote:

ParagonDireRaccoon wrote:

I've never seen a PFS game without either a fighter or barbarian, or at least one player with a few levels of fighter or barbarian. I agree that casters are more powerful, but players enjoy playing martials. I consider full BAB characters martials even if they have four levels of spells.

Is it that martials are fun, or that vancian is a pain?

This has got to be one of the saddest statements I have heard in a long time.

You are actually trying to dismiss someone's fun by essentially stating they most likely play martials because they have trouble with the magic.

The more responses I hear, the more I am convinced some of you don't actually play in a group.

There are two fellow players in my group who have expressly stated that is why they don't play casters. Too complicated, too cumbersome, too annoying.

FORMAT!

First paragraph:

"The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is released under the Open Game License, meaning the core rules that drive the Pathfinder RPG system are available to anyone to use for free under the terms of the OGL. This compendium of rules, charts, and tables contains all of the open rules in the system, and is provided for the use of the community of gamers and publishers working with the system."

These are the rules for PF.

There are no official rules because no one plays official pathfinder. The part about the CRB and bestiary just says those books are user friendly. It doesn't say those are the official rules.

If it's not printed in a rule-book, you can't really assume access to it when your GM says "we're playing pathfinder"

APs aren't rule-books.

Cerberus Seven wrote:

Not in our games. SR, energy resistance, concentration checks, saves, range/positioning issues, and other factors can and do mess with both party spellcasters and enemy spellcasters.

That's usually been my take on the entire question. The tables I've seen where GM's complain about how spellcasters just steamroller over everything with no opposition either forget about those rules or never learned them.

There's also something I like to call the 'Last Line Problem'. Most of the time when a person thinks they have a spell that just does something amazingly awesome with no problems, they've forgotten to read that last line where it says something like 'this spell is only useful at night' or 'does not affect turtles'.

Other problems: not paying attention to the type of spell (does it work on this type of target?), not paying attention to the casting time, playing as if everyone has 'quiet spell' 'still spell' or other metamagic feats running all the time, playing as if everyone has 'eschew materials', etc etc etc.

Oh man, if you removed the last line on many rogue talents and abilities they would be SO much better (some would even go from trash to being useful).

How are you rolling that, then? Are you just telling the player "well, you cast invisibility but you're going to make noise so I'm not going to give you the stealth bonus". That seems abundantly silly to me.

In 3.5 the spot check to detect an invisible creature was 20.

The plus 20 to stealth clearly stems from that mechanic.

The spell says it doesn't make you quieter. So even though you get a plus 20 to stealth that is not to stealth roles to prevent noise. The specific rule of this spell overrides the general rule of stealth bonuses making you quieter, since the spell explicitly forbids any effect from it making you quieter.

Of course this requires looking at individual senses for perception. Which I don't mind. You can say this is not RAW, but saying the invisibility spell makes you quieter CANNOT be RAW.

So whatever floats your boat. Just don't think you are running the game RAW when you ignore lines in a spell.

Artanthos wrote:

Every single class in the game has access to magic, if they so chose.

UMD is a very different beast from spellcasting, if that's what your referring to. UMD cost money and can't be changed on the day to day without access to a store, and spellcasters themselves have spellcasting +UMD.

If throwing your resources all into UMD is actually better than depending on your own resources, that might be a sign of a problem.

Rogues: "I have resources?"

Maybe AP specific sources weren't meant for the general game?

Maybe that's why the spell didn't come out in a rule book?

Crazy, I know.

OK, look guys. Stealth is two skills- Hide and Move Silently. Invis does nothing for the second skill.

So, please stop the hijack.

Dude this whole thread is hijacks.

Which is real game destructive power of casters. Their turns can easily take 30+ minutes as people debate over the rules*, the GM reads the spells, the player reads the spell, the party reads the spell, all wondering how this thing interacts with the 9000+ things it never talks about interacting with...

Or I could play a fighter and hit stuff.

*Which is why I now ascribe to the idea that the GM is the rules and that their is no such thing as a houserule in it's standard connotation.

I love how casters are broken because of non-core-rules spells like blood money, misreading simulacrum, ignoring the consequences of planar binding, and adding timeless quality to demiplanes when you can't.

Anyone going to post real reasons? Like how LoTR would have been a 5 minute movie if Gandolf used invisibility on him and Frodo and then teleported to mount doom.

How stealthy is your Rogue when he needs to take his party with him? Because a Wizard can make his friends sneaky as well. And Wizards tend to have some decent Dex too.

Invisibility is a pretty standard spell, haven't seen any Wizard who doesn't have at least one casting of it prepared every day. A 2nd level spell shouldn't be able to give characters the same bonus one gets from investing 20 skill ranks.

Sure, you could use it on the Rogue, but honestly... Better cast it on something else and convince the other player to choose a class that is not easily replaced by half a dozen others.

Not really. Invisibility just doesn't cut it for the enemies perception check. You only get +20 + 1/5ft square. The maximum roll spread is +19 before perception.

Rogues can/should have skill focus(stealth), skill mastery, and be dex based. The roll spread is then just +10. Between max ranks, skillmastery, distance penalties, and your main stat, you should be able to sneak around everyone. The invisibility on you let's you do whatever you want to even the most perceptive foes.

Worst flavor: Fleet

You are, um... Faster than most?

Never seen a monk with fleet 10 times?

Combine that with fast movement and they can jump 11 feet higher (+44 jump checks)!* By my estimate that's a jump check of +72. They jump 18 feet in the air! (I think vertical jump DCs should be halved.)

*ignore spells like flight

I think this CAN be an issue if the gm lets players walk all over them. One way to keep spell asters from roflstomping encounters is to force them to play by their own rules.

Okay, you want to cast WISH? Fine, where are your spell components? No, I know you have the money, but you need to USE that money to buy them. No, I know you didn't buy components last time you were in town.

I do find that following the rules tends to limit caster power.