Mudfoot's page

Homunculus. Cheap, disposable, make as many as you want, no control or alignment problems. They're barely any use in a fight but that's not the point. They're more like movie Minions in that they're small and stupid-intelligent. You can even make them look distinctive and the GM can endow them with individual personalities.

The only downside is that you're short 2 feats (Craft Construct and Craft Magic Arms & Armour).

Is there an in-universe justification (plot aside) why Karzoug et al had to create their own pocket demiplanes to hide from Earthfall rather than simply teleporting or plane shifting or gating to somewhere safe and relatively comfortable like Castrovel or the Elemental Plane of Air?

The first link "Index of articles (1E)" on this page links to that list.

Nitpick: the original name for J* in the 1e Monster Manual and 1e DMG was Juiblex, not Jubliex or Jubilex. Which is odd, because I distinctly remember people calling him Jubilex in the early 80s. Maybe it's phonetically more familiar.

Otherwise, Yahoo tells me that Jubilex is "an up and coming dubstep artist", whatever that means.

The presumption here is that Prestidigitation takes no skill in itself other than casting it. Sure, you can give the guy a haircut, but is it a good haircut? Is he clean, or have you missed a bit, or tried to remove a tattoo and scraped him raw? Is the 'dirt' that you removed from his clothes actually a wax-print Batik pattern that's supposed to be there?

And likewise, if you want to flavour food, how appropriately did you flavour it? Basil and garlic ice cream is flavoured, but I suspect it's not nice. And so it goes.

As it's just a 0th level all-purpose spell, I'd think that it's a case of Jack of all trades, master of none. It's just providing the tools to do a job, but none of the skill.

Two other ways to make a tripping paladin:

1) Dump Dex and put no skill points into Acrobatics

2) this

I (and other people) scale Aid Another by the DC you beat, so DC10 = +2, DC20 = +3, DC30 = +4, etc. Which gives something like the same effect you have, but less on/off, and also allows more people to give meaningful help.

Advantage is a very non-linear thing, and averages out to +3.35. But it's effectively +5 if you need a 10 and +1 if you need a 20.

The other way to use multiple skill rolls is to have multiple effects; the wizard in the above example could have come up with a useful fact the bard didn't get. In a Diplomacy situation the bard might persuade the duchess but the paladin impresses her general.

AD&D 1e was...odd. So I'm not defending the 1% rule any more than I'd defend the 1 minute melee round or the 1e Bard of any of a vast array of other weird brainfart that Gygax came out with...while gratefully thanking him for the hobby he created.

(after being booted from TSR, he created Lejendary Adventures. Yes, it's spelled like that. And it's...also odd. And flopped like a soggy omelette)

But the gist of it is that stock RAW PF1 NPCs, even 1st level commoners with 13 12 11 10 9 8 + racial stats are vastly more capable than the typical AD&D 1e NPC. They have skills and feats and traits and stuff. AD&D 1e NPCs had a personality (there are lots of tables) and a pitchfork.

IMHO, most NPCs are entitled to a modicum of combat ability as reflected in their levels. A 35-year-old farmer (4th level commoner) has probably had a good few pub brawls, mugged or been mugged, seen off some wolves and goblins, wrestled a cow to the ground and done a couple of campaigns of feudal service. He may have done compulsory archery practice. He's entitled to his 4d6 hp and +2 BAB. He's still no match for a well-built 2nd level PC.

It can get a bit more problematic with, say, a 4th level Expert watchmaker having +3 BAB, but he's probably dumped Str and Con for Int and Dex so that's OK.

The Alexandrian's 5th level standard is generally OK, but it comes from some dubious assumptions. He claims, for example, that Aragorn is a Ranger 1 / Fighter 1 / Paladin 3 because such a character could beat the DCs and do the individual things that Aragorn does. Nope. That R1/F1/P3 could not fight 5 Nazgul with a burning torch and a broken sword, nor face down Sauron or the Paths of the Dead or the assorted armies he does. Alexandrian is trying to impose 3e rules on a singular situation in Middle Earth rather than comparing Aragorn to everyone else around him. He need not be 20th level, but he's a lot more than 5th. And likewise for Conan or Elric and the rest.

Strictly RAW you have a few random magic items plus a 75% chance of having any other magic or special item at or under a specific value. For a large town that limit is 2,000 gp, for a small city 4,000 gp.

This is core RAW and it's a bit silly. A 75% chance of having any other magic or special item under than figure means that in a small city there will be 75% of a huge number of items. For example, there's a 75% chance of a small +1 cold iron bardiche and a 75% chance of Angelskin Parade Armour and 75% chance of a masterwork astrolabe or scroll of Miracle.

Even a typical thorp (population 15, limit 50gp) in the middle of nowhere will have a stock of some dozens of assorted potions, 75% chance for one for each 1st level spell or cantrip. And even more scrolls, piles of weapons probably including Spiresteel arrows and a Drow Razor, 75% chance of a pressurised air tank, maybe an aquatic harness, a cannonball, collapsible bathtub or pantograph.

These things are not technically for sale as such, but they're there. Probably hanging on the wall at the back of the tavern, per cliche.

Back in the day (like, 1978...) this sort of random party was normal. Some RPGs like Traveller had it built in: pretty much everything about chargen was random, including whether you started as a green youth of 22 with 2 skills and a knife, or a grizzled 48-year-old aristocratic Marine Colonel with 30 skills and a starship. Or a corpse. Chivalry & Sorcery wasn't much better, nor Stormbringer, nor a bunch of others.

There's a good reason we don't do that any more.

As I've said before, bad fumble rules are bad rules. Good fumble rules are good rules. I use good rules. YMMV.

Actually, it's not silly at all, though at first I thought it was.

Speculators collect all sorts of relics purported to be chunks of tusk that sloughed off the beast

And given that a Staff of Eldritch Sovereignty is a minor artifact, it's not just going to be made of any old elephant. Not to mention that the Oliphaunt is an elephant (at least it's "elephantine" and has tusks and a trunk) so presumably the stuff is ivory.

This is why I keep bringing up the RAW on certain skills. Making many Simple weapons, simple gear and so on can be achieved with raw materials and a DC 10-12. Heck, Craft: Armor/DC 12 makes you leather armor and most shields. If a PC in the party has an 18 Int, given enough time, they can take 10 and hit any DC 12 untrained Craft check with NO tools.

This IMHO is part of where you're going wrong. Maybe it's that you have very RAW-strict players, but that sort of ruling is just silly. I could knock up a meaningful shield in an hour or two, but I have a load of timber and a whole workbench in the garage. Doing it with scavenged bits of tree and my bare hands is just nonsensical. At best you end up with a glorified bundle of sticks.

In any game one of the first things you should buy is a heavy war horse.

Because the game abstracts away things like animal feed and care, this works. But more realistically, you'd need a squire to look after the thing and a pack mule weighed down with oats to feed it. And you'd need some actual skill to ride the thing; it's not just Dobbin the tame pony from the kid's riding school.

If you want to carry stuff outdoors, get a pack horse, or a mule.

Mind you, a warhorse is a lot more sane than riding a tiger or allosaurus or the other nonsense people come up with. But their MMV, no badwrongfun, etc.

I keep track of encumbrance, but not to a neurotic level. The 7 Str sorceress carries essentially nothing but a crossbow, a dagger and the lantern. She has cold resistance so heavy clothing isn't required. The 9 Str halfling rogue is always close to hitting Medium encumbrance, but gets someone else to carry the heavy stuff. Otherwise, things get left on the horses whenever possible.

I personally don't see why Inspire Competence couldn't improve stealth regardless of whether the opponent could hear it, providing that it's not the bard's own stealth. If Rammstein or Mötorhead were playing in the room, even a paladin in full plate would seem pretty stealthy.

TLDR, but...

I was thinking about the shield proficiency and considering whether rogues should just have buckler proficiency instead, and that gave rise to the RL Bucklers thread.

The interim conclusion of which is that I think a rogue should get buckler and light shield proficiency, but not heavy shield. A heavy shield is just too big and bulky and obstructive to be a thing that a rogue would want, but a light shield (as a RL buckler) or a buckler (a RL bracer) is probably OK. After all, a RL buckler was something you might wear around town, but a heavy shield was a piece of military equipment.

The PF "Buckler" is a "small metal shield is worn strapped to your forearm". Which is not a real buckler as historians use the term: that's a dinner-plate-sized metal shield held in the fist. The PF buckler allows the hand to be used for other things; a real buckler doesn't. A PF buckler can't bash; a real one certainly can, and the user was fully expected to do so.

But that apart, the "buckler" as described sounds a perfectly plausible thing. It's really a sort of heavy bracer, and I can well imagine using it to parry while using my off-hand for something else. So are there any actual historical examples of this? Not as part of a suit of armour or a metal sleeve, but as an individual shield-like add-on.

I think it's a brilliant idea :)

You'd need something that allows them to be roguey in medium armour. Most notably, that's something to deal with the Dex skill penalties and slow movement. Naturally, that goes away when Mithril Breastplate becomes standard, but for the first few levels it'll be a problem. It could be a Talent (or two) so any rogue could take it, but your standard Str rogue would need to get it free or have something else too.

I'd do it as something like fighters' Armour Training 1 at 3rd level, and 1 less Dex penalty for medium armour to any rogue class skill per 2 levels, minimum 1.

What he said. Of course, you could make that an archetype, but in practice (unless you're planning to publish it) it's a matter of what PCs (or NPCs) you make that determines what classes you need to make.

...However, you are right about finesse training and it probably makes rogues a little too dip friendly, though I really don't like that rogues have to wait to 3rd level to do damage.

The way I handle that is that the dex-to-damage bonus is equal to your rogue level or your dex bonus, whichever is less, starting at 1st level. So you don't end up with your 7 Str 19 Dex halfling doing a useless 1d3-2 at 1st level suddenly jumping to 1d3+4 at 3rd; it's 1d3+1 at 1st, 1d3+2 at 2nd, 1d3+3 at 3rd, 1d3+4 at 4th and probably 1d3+5 at 5th.

As for exequiel's proposal...looks OK, in that there's nothing that sticks out. Forager is a Nobody Will Take This feature, but you knew that. Jack of All trades is pretty weak, even as a normal talent.

The Rogue's Edge thing is a bit clunky, in that it introduces brand new skills at expert levels out of nowhere every 5 levels. The increasing bonus is fine, and more edges is fine, but you could just provide more skill points (say, 10+int) and be done with it rather than adding brand new skills.

FWIW, I'm considering giving rogues unlocks for all skills automatically if they have enough rogue levels and enough skill points. I don't think it'll break anything.

But it ought to be possible to build a half-decent (un)rogue without ludicrous levels of system mastery, and without consigning 95% of the options to the bin. The unrogue is just about playable, but still a tier 4 class. It's nowhere near as capable (or survivable) as an investigator, slayer, inquisitor or any 9-caster. The rules out of the box don't really enable it to be the classic sneaky stabby skill-monkey thief, so it does need help.

I've not read all this proposal (tldr, so far) but I'm certainly not going to say it's unwarranted.

Alternatively, one of the PCs might have the Familial Lich as his ancestor. Which has never been a problem (as the lich evidently keeps itself to itself), except that there's apparently this crusading Pharasman zealot about. And she's got hold of a family tree.

It seems to be all halflings...

Tripp Hazzard, halfling private eye from Bellis, Andoran. He specialises in finding things for people, not asking too many questions about whether said people actually own those things. As a youth, was a message runner with an eye for working out who else might be interested in said messages. Various dubious underworld contacts and enemies.

Neutral, lowish-level unrogue. Minor & Major Magic talents, Bookish Rogue. TWF daggers, crossbow, studded leather. Only unusual magic item is a rune-encrusted iron ball that gives major protection (+4 AC, +4 saves, half damage) from fey and demons and hurts them by touch. It also closes locks (as Arcane Lock CL20).

Strength and Con are his worst stats, Dex his best.

Jinxed on Toildays. Everything really bad that has ever happened to him has happened on a Toilday. Tripp hates Toildays.

Black clothes. Tends to wear boots as it was a fashion thing when he was younger, though they slow him down (mostly because he stole them so they don't fit properly).

When at home, lives with his younger brother Joey, a lecherous and mouthy rope-maker / chandler. Parents are beekeepers from a hamlet just outside town; father disapproves of Tripp's dubious lifestyle and tells him so at great length whenever they meet, which is seldom. Mother is loving and protective.

Has a crush on Kari, a blonde priestess of Shelyn. Best friends are Harek, half-orc bouncer/bodyguard (fighter) and Culver Hale, human hunter / militia archer with a gambling habit (ranger).

Has had only bad experiences in the wilds beyond civilisation so doesn't like leaving Bellis, despite it becoming increasingly hot for him. Methodical, down to earth, not religious (though he goes to the church of Shelyn quite a lot). Only as brave as required. Likes a long bath; appreciates good food. Hates to get up early.

Primary enemies in town are Harris Welter, a big player in the Lumber Corporation, and the extensive Birch family (human and mostly red-headed dockers, labourers and goons).

Is that enough? :)

Depending on how you interpret the RAW ("concentrate upon the material"), you can do it in the dark. You may not even need to open the book. It might be chained up behind bars, or be in someone else's hand. Good for cheating in TV quiz shows.

Not all proselytisers are paladins, or clerics or casters of any description. Plenty of holier-than-thou loudmouths will be prepared to expound their interpretation of holy writ, whether it's through suppression of fun, liturgical form, the 'wrong' image of a god or saint, or whatever heresy they might imagine. They have no divine power to lose...which is potentially why they might feel the need to display their earnest faith to god. Nutters will nut. Especially if someone non-good is pulling the strings. There's an adventure plot there.

Historically, many RL religions have gone in for very forcible conversions while claiming to be good, so I would expect some rather overzealous 'good' proselytisers in Golarion. Of course it's a bit different with real gods and objective good & evil, as well as the monotheism vs polytheism aspect.

Gods aren't allowed to intervene directly so they'd have to send a mortal crusade to fix it. If one (group of) gods were to send a crusade that way, it might be seen by the opposition as a takeover bid and they'd want to respond. And that's an unnecessary war nobody needs, as there are enough other problems going on.

So long as Rahadoum doesn't try spreading its message too widely, they'll (by and large) be left to their own devices. I expect most religions will consider this sort of radical experiment to be obviously self-limiting, as clerics are too useful.

The Inquisitor class isn't really an inquisitor like Torquemada, rulebook fluff notwithstanding. Sure, there will be some heresy and backsliding and abuse of power, but if a 'heretic' is gaining spells from the god he claims to worship, that's demonstrably OK. But it doesn't take an 'Inquisitor' to investigate that. It's a class, not a job title.

Of course that idea hasn't stopped variants of Christianity or Islam being at each others' throats for millenia, so it won't work quite properly on Golarion either. But as a lot of religion is wrapped up with politics, the details are important. For example, if country A insists that Erastil's Holy Book says that women should be married and settle down, and country B says the opposite because the queen has other plans, there's going to be a war wrapped in a cassock. And you'll get the same thing at a local scale.

ISTR there was a minor deity who specialised in infiltrating other religions and usurping their power, but I can't find it. If it exists, there's a valid reason for an inquisitor, though said deity's methods may not be heresy or prosetylising as such.

As for the question, 'is prosetylising acceptable?', prosetylising what, and acceptable to whom?

As many gods are known to exist, it's not like a Jehovah's Witness trying to convert a Muslim. You're not (presumably) replacing one belief with another. So telling someone that they should worship Abadar because reasons is probably going to be met with a shrug. It's like being pestered by a street trader to buy this lovely shawl. Go away, I'm busy.

OTOH, telling a cleric of Gorum he should worship Abadar is...dumb. There will be a fight. And telling people not to visit the temple of Calistria will a) antagonise Calistria's clerics, b) annoy some of her worshippers and c) meet the approval of their wives.

Weird and new gods would be viewed with suspicion, and evil ones with hostility unless the advocate is selling something worthwhile. For example, IMC there are Treerazer cultists subtly promoting demon worship to lumberjacks in Andoran on the pretext of getting rid of the Fey in the Verduran.

You might consider how Romans and Greeks handled it. All the conventional gods (Jupiter, Hera, Venus, Ceres, Vulcan, Apollo, etc) would be worshipped as required by feast days and what you wanted from your prayers. Outsider religions (Mithra, Jehovah, Ahura Mazda) might be tolerated depending on whether they were seen to be causing trouble. "Evil" gods were propitiated when necessary just to keep them happy, rather than worshipped as a good thing.

So if you have a secret to hide like an affair or a gambling debt, you might pray to Norgorber for help keeping it quiet. And you might ask Asmodeus for help in a legal dispute, or both Pharasma and Urgothoa when your mother dies. Lamashtu has motherhood and childbirth as a core job.

ZK and especially Rovagug are more tricky. I imagine ZK has a shrine in Shelyn's (much bigger) temple.

4e is after all why PF exists, so I guess everyone who has ever played PF got their start in it because of 4e. So it did some good after all, and haters can stop hating now :)

That is pretty good.

According to the ISWG map, about 150 miles from SW to NE tip. About the size of Belgium or Wales or Taiwan.

Another problem you'll face is that whether a class gets a 10 in this area or that depends which archetype/bloodline/mystery/domain/school/discovery/feats/etc you use. So while one wizard build might get a 10 in blasting, a 1 in melee and 5 in battlefield control, another will get a 4 in blasting, a 4 in melee and a 10 in battlefield control.

You need new players. I don't think this is salvageable in a campaign setting. You might get some decent beer'n'pretzels hack'n'slash evenings out of them, but that's about it.

Those spell components are indeed for sale in somewhere like the right district of Absolom.

But claiming that Euryale Scale and Devil's Ichor are available in the thorp of Little Nowhere, Isger, population 24, on the pretext that unpriced components cost nothing and the village has a limit of 50gp is not going to work on me.

Cayden's not about eating. You want Urgathoa. And as a wizard, you want to be the next Runelord of Gluttony, obviously. So Thassilonian Specialist (Gluttony) is the way to go.

FWIW, I'm playing a campaign solo and writing the results as a story. It started years ago when PF first came out as a way to test the game; I'm playing it exactly as if I were GMing it in the normal way, and RPing all 5 PCs. I have their personalities well enough defined in my head that I can write the non-combat RP bits more easily than the fights.

I don't fudge the dice at all, and there have been a couple of very close calls thanks to either a cluster of bad luck or bad misjudgement of CR.

The only thing about doing it this way is that it takes forever. I'm up to 80000 words (including the play-by-play commentary footnotes) and they're still barely scratching 4th level on Slow XP.

If you're doing an AP and not writing the novel, it'll go a lot more quickly as some 70% of the work is done for you, depending on how much you go off-piste. You just need to develop a bit of selective schizophrenia. But a GM should be able to do that anyway.

tldr: SoD/SoS bad.

...Correct me if I am misunderstanding these feats, but Combat Stamina lets you spend up to 5 Stamina Points to get a Competence Bonus equal to the number of points you spent on any attack as part of the same action, whereas the Swift Action option of Bullseye Shot lets spend a Swift Action and 5 Stamina Points to get a bonus of +4 -- the latter seems strictly worse EXCEPT when you are already working under a Competence Bonus, in which case paying a 20% tax to convert your bonus to an untyped bonus (so that it will stack) seems reasonable.

This is one major problem with the Stamina rules. The default use (as noted above) is so much better than most of the alternatives that they may as well not exist. A few are OK, but in 95% of cases it's just best to take the default plusses to hit. And as fighters can hit quite well anyway, giving them Stamina for free is solving a non-problem. And the general concept of fighters getting more out of their combat feats sounds good, until you note that it's non-combat where they have issues.

[edited for clarity]

I probably read about it on usenet rec.games.frp.dnd. I'd seen 4e and didn't like it, so here we are.

Started in 1981.

One of my players used to use the lawn outside as his dice jail. If one wasn't behaving, it went out of the window. He had a lot of dice, owing to his having been a branch manager of Games Workshop.

By 20th level, many of those traits will be utterly irrelevant. I'd just design what you envisage the BBEG to be, ignoring the trait costs, as the RP value won't tell you anything useful.

Bodyguard (working link). Otherwise what he said.

Like a lot of feats mentioned recently, Strike True is quite cool but way too situational. Because you're almost certainly losing a full attack, the only time this seems really worthwhile is for ensuring that some special attack like an Arrow of Slaying hits. It might be numerically viable in a fight against an enemy with really high AC, but it's not worth a feat.

The easiest way to make a combat familiar is to be a barbarian and take Wasp Familiar. Full BAB, big Str bonus, loads of hp, flight, poison...what's not to like*? Add archetypes and other feats to taste.

* awful AC is what

This could work in 1e, when level drain meant exactly that: it was an actual level, and permanent. So your 15th level wizard could be knocked back to 1st (and all his kit stolen), so he'd have to start all over again. Except with a career-load of enemies and contacts.

Dragon78 wrote:

So what class(es) would you change... ?

None of them

I was wondering which I wouldn't change. Some much more than others of course.

I get the feeling that Mark's RAW-mad players would revolt if he changed anything.