Mortuum's page

GP is a poor substitute because it can easily be transferred between characters.

That's the entire point. Rather than paying your experience to make the fighter a sword, the fighter pays for his own sword. It's a partial solution to the very problem you were trying to solve up in the original post.

Woah. I got distracted while typing my previous post, so there were only two posts in the thread when I started it. Looks like this is turning into a caster balance argument, when it really doesn't have to.

Redking, regardless of what casters can afford to pay or not, you've switched from presenting this rule as a way to help casters get the most out of their precious feats rather than requiring them to use them for the benefit of the party, to a caster nerf in which they become expected to give up their actual levels to serve the party. Regardless of how powerful casters are or what they need, levels are bigger and more valuable than feats. You need to go back to the drawing board and start again by figuring out what your goals are.

Maybe divine bond? It's difficult to say what's fair, because some curses are way more restrictive or have way better powers than others, and some of them affect the Paladin very differently to the Oracle.

I suspect this is missing the point in the code. Yes, it does cause a lot of problems, but nearsightedness seems like a very strange alternative to having to be the good guy. They're very different kinds of restriction and Paladins with curses and no code make very little sense to me.

I just modify the code to be less restrictive and less ambiguous:

Paladin: You can only fall by changing your alignment, repeatedly violating your code (and ignoring warnings) or intentionally committing a serious evil act. You don’t need to get atonement cast on you when you associate with evil characters if it’s to resolve an emergency or try to redeem them.

Anti-Paladin: You aren’t required to “impose tyranny” or “punish the good and just”. Instead you must punish those who oppose you. You can only fall by changing alignment, repeatedly violating your code (and ignoring warnings) or intentionally committing a selfless act of sacrifice for a good cause.

Limiting Agile Manoeuvres to finesse weapons is a bad one. If you're giving out for free, just give it out for free. Manoeuvres often don't use weapons at all and high dexterity characters will have finesse weapons anyway because of your other house rules.

Why not use Fighter weapon groups for weapon feats?

Why the dexterity 15 prerequisite on Finesse Mastery? What does it add? What would go wrong if you removed it?

Can I turn off weapon finesse if I don't want it?

Arguably, but my suggestion wasn't an attempt to address balance between classes, and people who care about adjusting that are probably playing with their own fixes already. Besides, if the vigilante talents turn out to be so effective that offering them as feats creates a massive paradigm shift of that sort, the rule will punish anybody who takes a normal feat.

Yeah, they're good and I'd have to read over them again with that rule in mind before I made them so easy to get. With the Mythic version of the rules I might instead add a mythic feat called Vigilante Talent that can be taken multiple times.

The option has to be powerful, otherwise it would be ignored because there are so many powerful or required feats to choose from.

I just realised that this idea would work very well with the Background Skills rule from Unchained. Its additional skill points should help create a more rounded character, with skills reflecting both identities.

It might be cool to offer characters characters a limited selection of free traits, requiring them to pick one from a list of social identity backgrounds and one from a list of origin stories. That would help cement the concept and ensure that people have access to important class skills like Disguise if they need them.

I like this.

It's definitely a massive freebie, but that's ok. You could use it like Gestalts: It's a buff, but it's a fair, manageable buff that NPCs sometimes get too. You probably don't need to significantly adjust encounters, but I would give it to all the PCs or none.

You pretty much can't use the Vigilante itself when this rule is in play. I recommend allowing anybody with a Dual Identity to take Vigilante Talents as feats. That way nothing is really lost and everybody has access to a goody bag of costumed adventurer abilities if they're willing to pay for them.

You'd have to decided which class features can be used without raising suspicion on a case-by-case basis. It's a pretty easy call to say that a Wizard's magic risks giving him away, but what about a Bard's versatile performance? I don't foresee it being a problem if you make sure everybody knows how you've ruled as soon as the ability is acquired, rather than letting them find out when it's first used.

Obviously this rule would be great for superhero themed games that have episodic plots or a dimension of personal drama, but it could also be excellent for evil aligned parties or heist stories.

EDIT: For a really over the top superpowers game, you could tie dual identity to mythic. Mythic characters get mundane identities, mythic abilities risk revealing them and a new social talent is awarded at each rank instead of every two levels.

I'm pretty sure this doesn't work. Power attack checks if you're holding a 2-handed weapon. It does not check your strength multiplier.

Dragon style adds a bonus to damage equal to half your strength bonus. It does not increase or multiply your strength bonus.

The benefits of the two feats stack, but as far as I can tell neither modifies the other's effects.

If there was a tick box somewhere that allowed us to mirror our avatars it would be slightly easier to tell people apart, effectively doubling the number of unique images. If we were told how many accounts used the flipped image vs the original, we could deliberately choose the less popular direction to help distinguish ourselves.

It's always mildly irritating to read a conversation between two people with the same avatar or to encounter anybody with the same avatar as me, and flipping seems like a good way to halve that problem.

As far as I can understand it, brown mold uses up heat. It doesn't have to be able to absorb an infinite amount, only enough heat per round. Perhaps it converts the energy into matter to reproduce.

I once put together some notes for a party of pre-built adventurers called Headbreaker and Associates, the idea being that once I'd made sheets I could just hand them out and run a one-shot without the prep.

The idea was to give him light armour and one of the dexterity to damage options. His boss is an Orc who's struggling to convince himself that he's still evil and is only in it for the money (obviously not true), and the party's skill character is an alchemist with a giant bug theme.

Yeah the race builder was a mistake. RP values don't reflect power, so neither do RP budgets. The restrictions on who can take what seem extremely arbitrary. I couldn't recommend using it for any reason, least of all judging the relative power of races that weren't built with it, which isn't even it's intended purpose.

There's a lots these guys, so here is a link to the document.

This is a new approach to the gods, with one deity for each of the 54 Pathfinder domains.

You can use it as a cast of pre-made gods for your homebrew world, a jumping-off point for inventing your own one-domain deities, or a toolkit for adding colour to priests, communities and encounters.

It should open up build and role playing options for Clerics, give lesser-known domains, inquisitions and weapons some time in the sun, and make deities feel more unique.

It's got a little timeline, some simple mechanics and a guideline for adapting it to your campaign.

Thanks for reading. Do let me know what you make of it.

This is cool but I see a few problems:

This introduces iterative spellcasting. That's not a good thing because spells are designed to scale much better than standard action attacks. Sure, the 20th level Wizard might only get three turns to the Fighter's four, but those three turns will each be used to cast a 9th level spell and a quickened spell, all of which will be more powerful than a standard action used to attack.

Initiative is already very important, but this rule makes stacking it more vital than ever. Dexterity is the god stat because it multiplies your damage, versatility and move speed in addition to its other benefits. Improved Initiative is a compulsory low-level feat for everyone, which will hurt feat-hungry builds.

Mounted chargers will be ridiculous.

This rule will invalidate natural attack builds if you're not allowed to full attack with them and make them flat out better if you are. That will need a creative solution.

Too much is riding on the initiative roll If I roll a 20, I might get 3 times as many turns as I'd get on a 1. That's the difference between between crushing my foes in a round and not having a chance. When you consider that the monsters get to roll too, any fight with a significant initiative imbalance is over before it starts. Anything that allows initiative results to be modified or re-rolled is also too good now.

Obviously most of this is solvable, so I recommend something like this:

Spellcasters may not cast more levels of spells in a single round than the highest spell level they can cast from their class. This limit includes effective spell-levels imposed by metamagic. Quickened spells don't count against the normal limit. Instead they count against their own quickened spells limit which is four levels lower.

Base initiative on multiple stats. Maybe it uses the lowest of Dexterity and Wisdom, for instance.

Lances grant a flat bonus to charge attacks. Spirited Charge doubles it.

Characters with natural attacks may make full attacks, but they cannot include iterative attacks in them. No natural weapon may be used more than once each round.

Don't use the roll result to determine the number of times a character gets to act. Instead, base it on their bonus +10. That, or just re-roll at the start of every round.

The generic fantasy world you mention is generic mostly because it's designed to house the same handful of vaguely tolkienian/classic D&D races in their varying homelands. You can make a very different setting pretty easily by changing the line-up.

Settings normally have big spaces for core races and fit the less common races into the gaps. You can alter things pretty dramatically by changing which races are considered core in your world. There are enough assimar and tiefling variants these days that you could make almost everybody an outsider, for example.

You can also use the alternative racial traits to change how your races relate to others and what their homelands look like. Create a set of alternate features to be the baseline of each race in your world and you end up with all manner of odd things, like elves running a huge empire by harnessing their natural ability to speak in dreams to communicate across impassable distances.

How about this:

The gods are fighting constantly across every plane. Far away galaxies are giant battlefields where the gods and their more powerful followers duke it out, while the world of your campaign is relatively quiet.

The gods are too busy to interfere with the world because it's not important in the grand scheme of things, because it's not part of a major front and it doesn't have an abundance of resources that could swing a divine battle.

Ever wanted a Magus without the melee focus, or more options for magical gunfighting? The Spellshot archetype might be for you.
I've put it in a googledoc for better formatting and editing.

You can ignore the spontaneous charisma variant at the bottom if you like. It's by no means a vital part of the archetype.

Any and all feedback is welcome, but I'm hoping for answers to these questions in particular:

I have never seen a half elf rape baby in my games.

I have however seen more than one that came from one-night stands fuelled by curiosity or attraction to the mysterious nature of elves.

The half-elf in my Skull and Shackles game was almost certainly the son of of the party's elf and neither would ever know. The elf was evil and was the sort to seduce people and then leave on the next ship.

I really like the alliance idea.

It could happen as part of a breeding program or a series of magical experiments with an aim to creating a super race with the advantages of both.

They could do it to fulfil a prophecy.

Conception during a religious ritual sounds probable, given who the elves like to worship on Golarion. I'm sure they're careful about that kind of thing, but such a method can hardly be perfect.

Most prostitutes can't afford to be choosy, so that's another strong possibility.

If elves and humans don't mix or get on in the setting there's always the fine tradition of heroes bedding worthy opponents.

Why not give sacred weapons different damage die progressions depending on their crit range or multiplier? That way x4 and 18-20 weapons could average a die-size behind and x2 weapons could average a die size ahead.

He can only flurry when unarmed or with monk weapons.

Guys, is it me or does the brawler perform best with a staff? He can two-hand it and attack with one end. This gives him 1.5 x his Strength bonus whenever he's not flurrying and a 3rd point of power attack damage every 4 levels even when he is. Then he can enchant it.

Overall that means he deals more damage on regular attacks, keeps pace with flurry, gets his weapon enchantments at half the price and doesn't have to fill his neck slot.

As for penetrating damage reduction, why not give him an extraordinary ability that lets his unarmed attacks ignore increasing amounts of DR as he levels? That would give him a little more incentive to use them without requiring him to use them all the time and wouldn't be magical.

Seems to me like characters with their own rage abilities should be able to choose between spending their own rage rounds and benefiting from the song as a free action at the beginning of their action each round, then suffer the two fatigue durations combined once they stop raging completely.

That would clear up a lot of questions and make the song a much more attractive option for raging characters. They could rage for longer and they could switch between two sets of rage powers as needed, but it wouldn't be nearly as strong as a double rage.

It stuns me every time that people are still saying per-encounter powers are unrealistic, or that they're a part of the game but not of the narrative. They make perfect sense.

An encounter power is just a thing that's a little too awkward to spam. Rest a little while? Relax enough that combat rounds no longer need tracking? Get your power back. Games from many other publishers have been using "scenes" as a unit of duration for decades and nobody minds, but start calling scenes encounters and even World of Darkness players suddenly turn on the idea.

Want to know what's really unrealistic? Daily powers. Why on earth can the monk stun people 6/day? Because gamism. Not only is that unrealistic, daily powers affect the narrative negatively: This is where we get the 15 minute adventuring day. This is why 4e characters only use their best stuff occasionally. This is why mages only cast their spell once even though they can memorise it again during the day.

Encounter powers are a legitimate way of modelling the chaos of combat and preventing endless chains of a character's best move.
can you get the angle to stab him in the kidneys any time you can reach him? Would the same trick fool your foes twice in a row? Do you have the energy to jump that high again right this second? Answering that question with a deck of cards or a pool of points is just as legitimate as rolling for it, but if those resources last all day the answers often make no sense.
"What do you mean I can't rage any more? The cleric cast remove fatigue!"
"How is it you were able to smite those cultists three times in a row, but now that we actually need it you've got nothing? How can you be sleepy? It's 2pm!"

Yes, encounter powers are abstractions, but only as much as hit points and attack rolls. They're easier to justify, they help the mechanics by reducing narcolepsy, unstoppable novas and resource tracking, and they can only support the narrative, because the narrative dictates when they work.

Encounter powers seem to score higher than dailies in terms of gamist, simulationist and narrativist design. That doesn't mean pathfinder should be re-written to use them, but it does mean I'm thoroughly sick of the nonsense I see whenever this topic comes up. New inventions happen. They will not be the same as the old stuff. Get over it.

My advice is if you really must make a character for yourself, do not bend the rules at all. Your friendly NPC should be bound by the letter of the law at the very least. With players, it's ok to break rules so their character can work, but that's because the decision to break the rule has been made by an impartial referee.

I'd also advise creating a character built to support the others, not a powerful damage class. If your magus is even half decent, you'll be setting up bosses and then killing them.

222. My Family and Other Aberrations, or "Hungry John"

This vast old book is easily the size of a man and is kept on an iron lectern inside a cage. The key is hung next to a sign warning people not to enter the cage unarmed.
The book is an account of a ranger's adventures below the ground, including amusingly disastrous attempts to study aberrations. Along the way, he discovers his own aberrant heritage and his weird family become involved.
The book is an usually erudite mimic known as Hungry John. Fed a diet of goats and able read any of the library's countless books, John has become so content that he has no interest in attacking those who wish to read him. He even allows people to add their notes to the margins.
The text includes some valuable hints about where to find aberration populations and at least two dungeons the author never gets around to raiding.

But what about the immoral, atheist queers hoping for representation? :P

Seriously though, you can't avoid making negative associations in the minds of people who do not think. Never portraying gays as immoral or godless is a bad thing. It limits writing and it won't change any hearts. The only way forward is to be honest and fair; to portray homosexuals as people.

Personally, I don't see this as a problem. It's weird and it allows some extremely sub-optimal builds, but pathfinder has always been full of such things (as has 3.x D&D).

Yeah, it lets characters into some multiclass mage prestige classes earlier than before, but they were all dramatically sub-par, precisely because they kick in way too late. We don't need an early assassin or horizon walker.

The eldritch knight, mystic theurge and arcane trickster are a completely different concept to normal prestige classes. They have no themes or fluff of their own and they exist solely to make half-and-half multiclassing viable for spellcasters. Fixing that particular kind of prestige class is a very different thing to fixing the rest.

It's also not power creep. Power creep is a continuous increase in the power of options presented in successive products. This is a buff to existing options that have been around for as long as pathfinder itself. I'm not convinced its even enough to bring them up to par. Huge bumps are are a good thing when they're targeted and judged correctly.

I won't as I'd find new players and give those players who want to "streamline" a game of "Chutes and Ladders" as well as a Primer on basic math

I knew somebody would say that.

The essence of good design is to reach your goal by the route that's most pleasant for the players. We all like the goal (a game that plays like pathfinder) but you've failed to separate it from the route (the kind of work involved in making the game happen) so you're saying anybody who tries to find a more efficient and enjoyable way to get there should aim for an inferior goal instead. You've fallen into the trap of elitism.

It's possible to get the same depth, realism, stories, tactical decisions, drama, setting and game mechanics style with different approaches to specific sub-systems. No game can ever do what people want it to perfectly, which means all games can be improved without changing their purpose.

For example, pathfinder handles inability to see people very differently depending on why you can't see them. Almost nobody can remember the rules all at once. The only reason it's still like that is fixing it is hard. You'd have to be an idiot to claim things wouldn't be better if those separate-but-interacting stealth, illumination and invisibility systems hadn't been built to a unified standard.

To truly be against the principle of streamlining itself is either to be blindly anti-change or pro-wasted-effort. That way lies F.A.T.A.L.
Now, that doesn't mean it's wrong to oppose any specific attempt to streamline, but it does mean that if you oppose them universally you're either inconsistent or you're also opposed to progress, creativity and altering the game to suit personal taste.

I think the moral of this story is everybody's a weirdo. If you don't have some kind of deeply uncool interest you have something else. Some will pay to sit in a stadium and scream while wearing a plastic cheese on their head, some are attracted to balloons and others earnestly believe they can stop the others from being so g&! d#+ned strange.

While it's weird and different, how about this take on her?

Aaron Diaz has re-imagined her as the last remnant of the her culture, created as a stature, still a statue and so enduring far longer than her makers.
She wields the aegis, which makes it impossible for her foes to lie while their faces are reflected in its polished surface and dressed like a warrior from ancient Greece.

I'm not a Wonder-Woman-ologist, but I have to say it looks more interesting and unique. Whether you could do as much with this design, or it can still be considered the same character I don't know.

The page has a whole redesigned justice league and he's done the legion of doom, the bat family and the x-men too.

So many of these rules aren't rules at all so much as a dude throwing his weight around. "house rule horror stories" seem to be "gm horror stories" much more often than badly thought out rules.

The fumble rule you mention is terrible, being neither fair nor sensible, but the horror part is that some guy was changing the rules as he went along.

I think a looooooot of people would argue that the feel of 2e is radically different from the feel of 3.0.

What saddens me about anti-4e arguments is the terrible ignorance about 4e. I'm not saying it's a great system (I do prefer pathfinder), but the people who knock it only ever seem to understand it on the most superficial level.

For starters, once you get a feel for the game it becomes clear that per-encounter powers are anything but arbitrary. It's not a meta thing.
Pre-4e dungeons and dragons has per-day abilities, which are arbitrary and designed to fit in with a spells-per-day system that didn't ever make much logical sense (not that it really needs to).
4e has abilities that are too difficult to use for your character to just spam them every round, so they are restored when you take a breather, rather than a nap. They are "per encounter" because once you're out of initiative time, tracking the 300 rounds it takes them to refresh becomes a pointless exercise. The GM will deliberately time events before or after the characters are ready to go again.
You want powers that REALLY don't make sense? Look no further than dailies.
Everybody seems to forget that 3.5 had per-encounter powers too, and I'm not talking about the tome of battle, either.

Homogeneous classes is another one I disagree with. How are they? I mean, look at the monk, who has combat powers which come in pairs, one for movement and one for attacks. Look at the psionic classes and the slayer. Look at that infamous build for a dude who rides a giant flying sentient sword familiar.

Healing surges tend to come up a lot too. Everybody confuses them with the little-used Second Wind action, which allows you to recover a small quantity of hp once per encounter at the cost of your turn and some per-day resources (it's a lot like fighting defensively, because you recover about as much hp as you're expected to lose that round).
Healing surges are actually just Reserve Points, straight out of Unearthed Arcana, but bundled into packages. Fast non-magical healing doesn't actually heal you at all, because it costs you surges and surges are your real health.
People get confused because they named these concepts poorly, but surges are equivalent to pathfinder's hit points and 4e hp is a measure of how much damage you can take in one go, kinda like massive damage but spread over a few rounds.

People seem to think that all character abilities are combat-based, too. This is false. I've had players ask to trade their wizard's at-will attacks for the ability to detect magic, which you'll know is silly if you ever played the game. It seems like whenever 4e moved anything, people assumed it REmoved it.

Most of the worst problems of 4e go away if you look at it the way the designers did and/or use the right books.
Yes, the builds in the first player's handbook are limited in scope, but the abilities you know and love are out there in the splats. Yes, the first monster manual was boring as hell, but the monster vault is full of cinematic, challenging fights.

Obviously it's flawed (skill challenges are the work of the devil), but virtually every problem was an error in the implementation or presentation of an excellent idea. Tragically, it seems people have no interest in learning from these mistakes, even though any attempt to emulate 4e would invariably mean re-implementing its ideas and presenting them anew, thus removing the old problems and giving them a second chance.

If anybody's reading this thread and thinking "But I hate everything about 4e", please think again, not because I believe you could like it, but because most parts of it could have been so much better, and the second time around they probably will be.

Honestly, I think the answer is "don't optimize."

Shoot, instead, for a consistent power level with the other PCs so that the GM can challenge all of you with the same encounter and everyone can contribute.

I couldn't disagree more. That IS optimising, to an extent. Without any attempt to optimise at all, you will find your groups power level all over the place and people's characters will not match their concepts well.

My brother made a musketeer luring cavalier who just wasn't good at shooting people. His entire role was to shoot people. That's a terrible let-down. His second character was built much, much better and does his job frighteningly well. Everybody at the table is having more fun because his gripli ninja excels at the things he's supposed to.

Many GMs follow the guidelines or run APs mostly as they are written. Most stay in the same ballpark. That means you can and will get yourself killed or be underwhelming if you make a weak character in most games. You'll also stay alive and kick ass if you optimise to some extent.

Having a party with very mixed levels of optimisation also leads to some outshining the others. Encouraging optimisation means it will be easier for the gm to appropriately challenge the group without telling anybody to change their character because "he's too powerful"

It can also work the other way: Imbalance between the classes has always been a controversial issue, but if you're playing a very powerful class and I'm playing a very weak one, I can just optimise more and suddenly the gap is smaller and the GM has an easier time challenging you without killing or side-lining me.

Then there's the fact that we're not all concerned with beating the encounter when we optimise. Maybe what we want is to beat bigger and better encounters? It's not so much "I survived an adventure" as "I conquered the citadel of the screaming god".

You are also confusing optimisation with power building. Optimisation is about making the rules do what you want them to. It's about finding a way to make a character concept as well as you can. Whatever your goal is, optimisation will help you achieve it, even if you're not interested in overall power.
Think of it like this: If I decide I want to make a fighter who's very smart and does some magic, optimisation skill lets me make a smarter fighter who can use more magic while still keeping his essential fighter-ish-ness. Without system mastery, he's likely to wind up really bad at magic, have an unremarkable IQ or barely qualify as a fighter, even though he might be more powerful that way.

Personally I think it would be sensible for all throw-able magic weapons to return at the end of the round for free, and for there to be an instant returning property which which returns it fast enough that you can make full attacks with it.

With the rules as they are, I would not bother with the throwing property.

TIER 1

Wizard, Druid, Spontaneous full casters with extra spells

Maybe Cleric, Witch, Master Summoner

juuuuuuust maybe nobody, or anybody with maxed UMD.

TIER 2

Summoner, Sorcerer, Oracle.

Maybe Magus, Cleric, Witch, Alchemist

TIER 3

Bard, Inquisitor

Maybe Alchemist, Magus, Paladin, Ranger, Barbarian, Witch, Cavalier

TIER 4

Ninja, Fighter

Maybe Paladin, Ranger, Barbarian, Monk, Rogue, Cavalier, Samurai

TIER 5

Maybe Monk, Rogue, Adept, Cavalier, Samurai, Warrior

TIER 6

Commoner, Aristocrat

Maybe Adept, Warrior, Monk, Rogue

There we go. I think that's a start, though I would like to hear arguments for and against some of these. This doesn't really reflect all my views, I'm just trying to record what we've all been saying so far.

Thanks for your list anon fem. Interested to see the witch and cavalier in tier 3. Care to share your reasoning?

I have to say I'm surprised to see that this thread has upset people. I was concerned the thread might fill up with arguments, but I did not expect people to see the creation of a record of community consensus with supporting arguments as a bad thing in itself. I seriously doubt this is going to become some kind of pathfinder bible or get trotted out as justification all that much.
I want to make it very clear that my goal was never to create gospel, so I'll cut you a deal. If anybody uses it as such, just tell me and I will kill them in their sleep. We good?

Wrath, you've hit the nail on the head there. That's the entire point in this thread. The GM can make it all work, but he has to know what he's dealing with. This thread is a tool to help the GM make the tiers meaningless and for players to minimise the difficulty of his task if they so choose (since it will be harder if the party's tiers are more varied).
You haven't given the answer, you've restated the question.

Kolokotroni and Sunbeam, thanks for kicking it off. I'm interested to see that your assessments are different but they differ from my own in similar ways.
I can't claim to have much detailed knowledge of the Cleric, but I expected to see him in tier 1. I'm interested that sunbeam ranks the oracle, magus and alchemist at 3 while kolokotroni ranks them at 2. Sunbeam's teir 6 siege wizard is a surprise too. I mean, the guy suck's compared to his baseline class, but he's still a wizard, right? Dropping 5 tiers is pretty impressive.
What's the reasoning behind you guys' placements?

Artanthos, that's actually an interesting perspective.

As an example of what I think:

I would put the wizard and paragon surge spontaneous casters at tier 1. They're very, very far from infallible but a god tier class doesn't have to perfect, it only has to give characters the potential to solve any solvable problem they're likely to face.

I would put the commoner at tier 6. It is a shining example of a class with no merit whatsoever in an adventure. No abilities, no stats, no nothing.

I am so controversial :O

163. Zarphando Moderfelon's Handbook for the Adventurous Lover

This little purple volume is a guide to sex and romance for "unusually matched" lovers, primarily those of different size categories or types. It includes peculiar but fairly tame advice on "pleasing the dwarf in your life" as well as tips about the attitudes of exotic races and sapient monsters, half of which are about convincing them not to kill you.
The book frequently goes off on tangents, many of which recount the bizarre conquests of the author, an accomplished transmuter writing under a pseudonym.
Spending an hour studying the book grants a +2 insight bonus to attempts made to seduce one kind of creature of either a different size or type to you for the rest of the day. Each time the book is used in this way, there is a 50% chance that creatures of another random kind get the same bonus against you for a year.
Anybody who does some investigating could potentially ruin or blackmail Zarphando, who is widely known and respected under his real name.

160. I Will Shut Your Smug Face In A Gods-Damned Waffle Iron And Kick You In The Ass Again And Again And Again

This small but beautiful book has gold foil edges to every page, rich purple ink and a remarkably intricate design on both covers. All the text is the very finest calligraphy. Even the ribbon bookmark is a little work of art.
The whole thing is completely filled with a ferocious rant, apparently directed at the reader, threatening, insulting and generally expressing the writer's utter loathing. The author claims to be "Your sickening whore mother".
Anybody who reads all the way through one of the thirteen chapters must make a dc 28 will save or be shaken for an hour.
It's not clear what practical purpose this volume could possibly serve, but it's a potentially valuable work of art. The materials alone are worth hundreds of gold and the workmanship is nothing short of astonishing.

158. The Fruits of Wisdom.

This oversized book has a cover made from bark and its pages have the texture of dry leaves, though they don't crumble any more readily that conventional paper. It's a guide to living in harmony with nature and your fellow man, subsistence farming, growing your own mind-altering mushrooms and performing some simple rituals dedicated to the spirits of nature.
It counts as a masterwork tool to assist the reader with profession (farmer) and knowledge (nature).

If the book is left on bare earth with sunlight and water, it puts down roots and sprouts. The dry pages turn green and come to life and over the course of a year it grows into a fruit tree. The pages can still be turned, but the book cannot be moved without killing the tree. In the spring, it grows new copies of the book, suitable for planting or drying and storing.
Fresh green copies are nutritious, delicious and faintly intoxicating.

A character who follows all the book's advice for a year and a day, (which include pacifism, wearing no metal, eating a strict vegan diet, maintaining a neutral good alignment and regularly performing the rituals) will meet the author in a vision. He appears in the form of an ancient, moss-bearded face on a giant tree and teaches the reader to be a druid, giving them everything they need to gain their first class level over the course of a moon.

I really don't understand why people feel compelled to come in to these threads and tell everybody that monks seem fine to them.

It's not really about the distinction between experience and theory-crafting. There's a big difference between a poor monk and a powerful monk, a wide range of average power-levels across different groups and as many different definitions of "balanced" and "useless" as there are players.

The issue is not that the monk under-performs in your game. The issue is that it doesn't do what lots of other people think it should.

As for the wuxia argument, yeah that's just wrong. I have met plenty of people who think D&D martials suck. None of them are big anime fans, none of them want wuxia mixed in with their D&D.
It's because of the perception that spellcasters get a huge, powerful and varied toolbox of abilities which eventually transcends attacking in scope, while martial characters mostly only get new ways to attack.
To use the classic fighter vs wizard example, the fighter is defined by the one thing he does, fighting. He is good at fighting but he can only do it by hitting people with weapons. If you fight with spells you're a magus or a blaster sorcerer or something. The wizard, meanwhile, is defined by the method he uses to do things, magic. He can use magic for almost anything, from fighting to avoiding fights to travelling.

The monk struggles more than most because it's not as focused on fighting as the fighter, but the non-combat abilities and supernatural powers he has are very minor for their costs and levels and remain limited in scope throughout.

I just wanna say, I wish we had something like a monk thread sticky, in which people discuss the problems with the monk forever. That would be so much better.

That sounds fine to me, though I will say the personality you describe doesn't sound incompatible with lawful good. After all, slavery is evil, so it's a paladin's duty to stop it even if it's legal.

I made this a while back.
It's a variant alignment system which (among other things) gives paladins a lot more wiggle room, though they remain technically lawful. It also allows for non-evil anti-paladins for the more chaotic/destructively inclined.

Weapon speed seem pretty pointless to me. I just can't see what it adds. The realistic thing to do would be to introduce a ticks system in place of the entire action system. And that sounds damn scary to me.

109: A dictionary of Gnomish Fabrics

Each page of this fat binder is made from a different fabric, which is described in detail by the words embroidered on it.
Several of the fabrics are rare or have magical properties and could fetch a lot of money from the right craftsman.
It weighs almost 82 lbs.

108: Andrew

This living book shows whatever it wants to. It has a sense of touch and reads anything written on its pages. It can also write and draw of its own volition, erase anything written or drawn on it and reproduce anything that has ever been written or drawn on it with perfect accuracy.
It is lawful neutral, speaks all languages and has Intelligence 20, Charisma 12, Wisdom 7 and 8 ranks in linguistics and all knowledge skills.

Should it become angry, it snaps shut. The offending reader must make a dc 15 reflex save or lose d10 fingers. Thankfully, this is quite a patient and tolerant book.

"Andrew" can only be destroyed by writing on it something so utterly heinous it cannot bear to contain it, causing it to erupt an immense lake of ink and die.

104: d20 Modern

This is a roleplaying game with a very weird but extensively detailed campaign setting. Supplements include d20 Past and d20 Future, which expand on the various eras of its bizarre "Earth" and Urban Arcana, which puts a stop to Earth's inexplicable human focus and suppressed magic.

105: Zobar's Spellbook

A gnomish wizard's spellbook written back to front and in mirror writing.
Every spell in this book is very similar to a well known classic, but none are quite the same. Interposing Foot, Wall of Marble, Hideous Screaming, and Acidball all feature, as do others which aren't easy to identify, such as Bright Rhombus, Storm of Ice Cream and Zobar's Horrendous Seven Hundred and Twenty Degree Head Twist.

I guess we're going for 200 then, since we're on a roll?

102: The Vice of Daemons

This is a book about the properties of souls and the exquisite pleasures of eating them.
It includes plenty of details about daemons, their worshippers and their home plane, an essay on the ethics of the practice (the author concludes that it's sometimes commendable and frequently acceptable) and very detailed explanations of how it feels to consume different kinds of soul (the author has a strong preference for evil humanoids).
There are two appendices: One about ways of escaping death or escaping the clutches of the daemons should you die, and one about how to inflict as much suffering as possible upon your victims before destroying them.

This book counts as a masterwork tool for any knowledge skill checks relating to daemons, abaddon, soul eaters, or avoiding arrest for kidnapping, murder or trafficking with fiends. It also has all the information a spellcaster needs to enter the soul eater prestige class.

81: The Words in My Head

This is an autobiography written by a goblin who was taken prisoner by a wizard and subjected to experimentation, including forcing him to read and even to learn the basics of magic.
Sklebic, the author, is extraordinarily eloquent, has a vast vocabulary and is freakishly intelligent. It's a tragic tale in which his increasing understanding and self awareness lead him to outgrow the flaws of his culture, even as his master treats him like an animal.
At the time the book leaves off, Sklebic's wizardry has finally exceeded that of his teacher, who is now forced to live in his old cage.
Judging by the date inside the book, they are probably still alive today.

82: The Vernon Thrain Method

This is a mix of self help guide, fitness regimen and self-defence manual written by a cheerful and clean cut half-orc fellow.
The Vernon Thrain method is a combination of embracing a chaotic good alignment, boar style unarmed combat and building towards levels in barbarian or unarmed fighter.
The books is written for middle and upper class ladies and gentlemen who are looking to protect themselves, improve their health or get in touch with those parts of their nature they may be suppressing.
It's a no nonsense approach based on being more physically powerful than your hypothetical attackers and wanting to hurt them much, much more than they could possibly want to hurt you.
"Reach forward with your left hand and arrest the ruffian firmly by the jowl. Then as he takes hold of your left arm at the elbow and wrist, strike the eyes from his head with a blow from the base of your right palm, connecting as shown in Fig. 7a."

This signed copy smells faintly of perfume.