Mike Kiscaden's page

...Or if you have a really difficult to hit opponent. The fact that hits and misses have a ceiling/floor effect at 20 and 1 really screws with this strategy. Your analysis works because you started assuming you needed an 11 to hit, but if you move your starting point significantly above or below that point things get weird. Think about it, if you need to roll a 20 to hit your enemy, wouldn't you rather take a -8 penalty to attack 4 times with the exact same chance to hit?

My goal was to illustrate how if you are going to give a character multiple attacks all at the same penalty, you want to have the odds of getting one hit stay about the same no matter how many attacks you do. Which is why I picked 11 as the target number to get on a d20, its right in the middle of the linear possibilities.

I think there will always be a viable middle section where you don't want to do all 4 attacks at -8 each. -8 is a pretty stiff penalty. Also when combined with feats that are only used for the first attack when doing a full attack action (i.e. Stunning Fist), not taking a huge penality on your first swing may be desirable.

I'm looking at the new Combat feats, and I feel that some of these feats don't make a lot of sense.

I like the concept of having successive uses of feats in combat get better with each step in the chain. And a couple of these chains are quite cool, others seem to need some work.

For example:

In order to use Spring Attack, you need to have used Mobility in the previous round. In order to use Mobility, you need to have used Dodge in the round before that. So in short, you only get to use Spring Attack once every three rounds, and spend the other two round setting yourself up for the spring attack.

Its quite easy for your enemy to foil your Spring attack attempt by moving adjacent to you during the intervening two rounds. Making successfully completing a spring attack a very difficult proposal.

Possible Fix: Have dodge and Moblity non-combat feats, Then Make Spring attack the bottom of the chain, and create 2 new feats, Improved Spring Attack and Greater Spring attack that depend on a successful use of Spring Attack the previous round.

Conduit Spell: You can cast a spell without suffering arcane spell failure IF you hit with Arcane Strike the previous round. Why would an Arcane Caster be wearing armor knowing that he could only cast a spell every other round, and thats assuming he hits someone with arcane strike? What would the given Arcane Caster do if he isn't in combat and would like to cast a Utility spell?

Interesting. In an effort to keep things more compatable with 3.x, I would suggest making this:

1 att. = Full BAB
2 att. = -5/-5
3 att. = -10/-10/-10
4 att. = -15/-15/-15/-15

The Reason I picked -4/-6/-8 as the progression is because of statistics:

Odds of rolling 11 or better on:
1 atk, Full Bab = 50%
2 atk -4/-4 = 51%
3 atk -6/-6/-6 = 49%
4 atk -8/-8/-8/-8 = 36%

So really, the -8 option isn't that great either, but its still useful if you have an easy to hit opponent.

Huh. That's interesting. Could you give an example in use in your campaign?

I left out 1 detail, you only get the extra attacks at the BaB where you would normally have gotten an extra attack. e.g. +6, +11, and +16.

So a fighter with a BaB of +6 could do 2 attacks as part of the full attack action at +2 for both Attacks (instead of +6/+1 as in the old system). It really starts to shine when your BaB is quite high, and hitting opponents gets a little easier than at lower levels. The number of attacks used are optional. So someone with +16 Bab can choose between doing 1,2,3,4 attacks on a Full Attack action.

I too, LOVE reserve feats. Lets see more of them. Especially higher level ones that could in theory replace commonly used lower level spells.

The problem with relying on player equipment to eliminate the 15 minute day is that it assumes all DM's give out equipment in an equal manner. In reality, some DMs keep the loot coming, while others are quite stingy.

Many DMs (Myself included) frequently throw challenges at the party based on what the party is capable of doing, throw-away encounters that are just designed to get the players to burn a few charges of their wands are not nearly as fun as when the party has to work hard to survive or surely die.

anthony Valente wrote:

So if someone could explain to me why fighters, who have the best BABs, hit points, and feat selection (and how!) are weak compared to the other classes, I'll then be more effective in figuring out how to contribute to the PRPG.

I thought the PathRPG fighter was quite powerful. The Armor and Weapon mastery feats when combined with the bonus feats are quite impressive. However, the final PathRPG released is going to need a huge feat otherwise fighters are going to run out of feats to choose from.

In some ways I think wizards actually has a point on a few issues.

The game is hard to run at high levels.
The problem of remembering a lot of little situational bonuses, like multiple simultaneous buff effects.
Spell caster getting instant wins at high levels, with scry, buff, teleport, & kill.
The 15 minute adventuring day.

I completely agree on these issues. You can house rule the scry/teleport problem pretty easily, but the others are just ugly and hard to do. I'm hoping Paizo tries to fix these things, I'm a little concerned the Alpha rules don't hit these core problems very hard.

As to Multiple attacks, I find part of the slow down is each attack has a different BaB, so you can't roll 3 or 4 dice at once. Its one at a time, and you have to think about the attack bonus for each one. We do iterative attacks as follow:
1 Attack: Full Bab
2 Attacks: -4/-4
3 Attacks: -6/-6/-6
4 attacks: -8/-8/-8/-8
It works pretty well.

We have been working with this exact problem in our group, and if the Pathfinder RPG comes up with a workable solution I'm going to skip out on 4e for good.

What we do in our group is this:
Use the spell point system from the SRD (with a couple modifications)
Casters regain a number of spell points (equal to their caster level) after 1 hour of non-strenuous activity.

The system works quite well.

Another option would be to Allow Cleric Domain and Wizards School powers to be the only per/encounter abilities. And give casters some flexibility over what their domain/school powers are for each level.

No; they're not. They're duplicates of the major encounter areas in Rise of the Runelords, reprinted at the same size they appeared in Pathfinder but in a loose-leaf format that makes it easy to shuffle them around or keep a map handy (say, clipped to the inside of a GM Screen) during play.

There are also two 4-panel poster maps in the folio as well, one of Sandpoint and one of Varisia.

Thats a shame. I'll just scan in the maps by hand and resize them to fit.

I'm confused, are the maps in this folio scaled so that 1" = 5'? If so, awesome. I'm going to pick it up in time for the start of our RotR game in march.