Pangur's page

August 2009 and August 2008 respectively, if I'm not mistaken.

d/p

Pangur wrote:

I disagree. The rogue can be the most smooth-faced liar on the planet, if the fighter standing behind him looks guilty as hell that *is* going to affect the rogue (Face didn't take BA along when conning someone unless he needed some brawn as leverage, if I remember the A-team correctly).

This isn't in the rules, nor am I convinced it should be. The party as a whole is being penalized, rather than you in particular. Specifically, the rogue's getting his shtick penalized. It would be like the wizard getting his spell DCs ganked because the fighter had a low Wis.

The rogue and ranger are equally 'penalized' when trying to sneak through the forest with a clanking paladin in tow. The cleric is 'penalized' by the brainless barbarian charging in all the time and sucking him dry for healing spells. The whole party is 'penalized' when the paladin's code of conduct makes a problem that much harder to solve. The druid is 'penalized' whenever the party travels terrain that his animal compagnon disagrees with, and it's the same for the paladin with his mount (even with the 3.5 solution).

I can list similar penalties all day long. It's a party game: sometimes that works in your favour, sometimes it doesn't.

Encumbrance can really be an issue if the DM bothers to enforce it, whereas there's really nothing to enforce in the case of low Charisma: sure, you could arrange the situation such that everyone gets split up and has to make diplomacy checks on their own, but that's an artifice and looks like you're gunning for the PC, whereas it's a natural consequence of low Str that you're going to have trouble carrying all those scrolls and wands and potions. There should be a similar natural consequence to low Cha that doesn't make the DM change the way the campaign is played.

I disagree. The rogue can be the most smooth-faced liar on the planet, if the fighter standing behind him looks guilty as hell that *is* going to affect the rogue (Face didn't take BA along when conning someone unless he needed some brawn as leverage, if I remember the A-team correctly). If you take the trouble to enforce encumbrance (and you should, I'm certainly not advocating ignoring that), you can enforce Cha effects just as easily. The only difference is that the latter isn't spelled out in the rules - which is a shame, I'm hoping PF will focus on circumstantial modifiers more than 3E did.

Skills should be condensed so that the +2/+2 feats are completely unnecessary.

Lord no. The condensed skills are one of the things I can stomach least about 4E (although getting rid of the skill rank system is even worse). Also, backwards compatibility pretty much goes down the drain if skills are condensed further than they already are in PF.

I honestly don't think full BAB is a critical issue for a monk (although I wouldn't really want to go below 3/4 by multiclassing, for instance), except for one thing: it factors in grappling, which monks should be good at (or at least be able to be good at). Just a couple of points difference due to lower BAB is already pretty significant.

Pangur Bàn wrote:

Unless there's a plausible explanation - clearly something I haven't been able to come up with - why non-Medium races are too inept to fashion weapons appropriate for their size I agree with OneWinged4ngel.

I've got one for you. A tiny heavy mace would essentially be a large guage ball-bearing on the top of a quarter-inch dowel. I don't care how strong a pixie you are. If you hit me with it, it's not going to do any significant damage. Blunt weapons derive their damage from the weight of the weapon combined with the force of impact it is delivered with.

I'm not sure where you're going with this... Yes, a pixie-sized mace is not going to do much, if any, damage. So what? Set a rule that beyond a certain point certain weapons become pointless and you're done.

After all, it works the other way around too: how much good is a medium-sized lance going to do in the hands of an ogre? It's meant to be clamped under one arm, which is going to be more than a little awkward. If you can't do that, it becomes just a pointy stick. Greatswords have hilts that are fashioned so a person can grip them tightly with both hands: for someone a size larger, it's going to be like gripping a fat pencil with a long metal bar attacked to it and swinging it. It's possible, but it won't be easy holding that tightly. Conversely, the grip on a shortbow is pretty much the same as the one on a longbow - it's the rest of it that makes the difference. A small character can't properly get its hand around a medium bow's grip, regardless of it being a long- or a shortbow.

I think that each race would build weapons sized to themselves. However, a human who picks up a halfling two handed sword would likely wield it as a longsword rather than be totally inept with it.

Also, while I'm on the subject, a centaur has a human sized torso. So, why does it wield large sized weapons?

It's probably somewhere in the middle. They're still weapons so they shouldn't be as bad as improvised stuff, but two-handed weapons are balanced differently than single-handed ones (and grips are either too thin or too wide to properly fit the hands of creatures in a different size category, and so on) so some sort of penalty is still in order.

As for the centaur, isn't there a rule somewhere about (long) creatures and weapon size? Or is that just a houserule I don't remember creating? If it isn't, I can only suggest something about their body mass and stability being much greater, but that's a feeble justification.

One thing I will say: 3.5 edition gives many more opportunities to roll dice than 1st edition (which had basically no skill system for non-thieves, for instance). So if you consider rolling dice to be the antithesis of role-playing, then you will probably like 3.5 edition less.

That's the thing: with no system, what are you going to do? Obviously you can solve everything by 'roleplaying' it, but I wouldn't think that's a good idea. I mean, what's to roleplay when your fighter wants to sneak up on someone but there's no mechanic in place for it?

More importantly though, even if there is a dice rolling mechanic for something that doesn't mean you should (let alone have to) skip roleplaying something. The dice are there to ensure fairness, nothing more, nothing less - just like in combat, I might add.