McMac's page

And Lastly, Ride. Here's the thing. I have never met, heard of, or read about someone that rode an animal in any skilled capacity that did not also know how to handle it on the ground? You can own and ride a horse, but you don't know how to feed it or lead it? I think Handle Animal should cover Leading, Training, and Riding Animals.

I personally groomed horses for polo; cared for them, fed them and lead them and NEVER did I learn to ride them. So it seems to me that Handle animal and ride should be separate skills. And now you've heard of someone ;)

"I know these arguments have already been made, but it also doesn't make sense for a Wizard to immediately know what spell a Cleric or Druid is casting, simply because they have been studying wizard spells their entire life. "

I just add +5 to the dc if it's not the same type of magic

I guess if we were going from "there never was any kind of specialization" to this option, it wouldn't seem so ... bad. However, we had a good system of specialization from 3.5, and it's been turned into this. If we can ever get a comment from Jason about it, maybe he can explain the rationale behind what is going on with this School Powers stuff. It might make sense then. I still won't agree with it, but I hope at least I'll understand what he is trying to do with it. :) However, I expect I'll have to wait and read the beta to see if it even got touched.

The old system of specialization wasn't that greaat in my opionion. You had to give up whole schools of magic in return for 1 bonus spell/level. At least in this system, you can still cast every spell in the book.

I have to agree that, flavour-wise, it doesn't work to have Special Abilities based on CHA.

Nobody replied to my post in Alpha one....

What are we to do with CMs against opponents who are flat footed? I have my own solution, but shouldn't there be something in the rules?

They don't get an attack of opportunity vs the touch attack and therefore don't have a chance of raising the dc with damage done.

I agree that Escape Artist is a problem. What about making it applicable only against static restraints eg. being tied up, entangled etc? Maybe having ranks in EA could give a just a flat +3 bonus to break a grapple?

Escape artist isn't that bad if you consider this: when you have multiple attacks you can try to escape a grapple multiple times with your BAC dropping as usual each attempt. If you use Escape artist it is a standard action, which means you only get one chance.