Paul Migaj's page

For instance, a lesser bestial mutagen gives you a more savage aspect with greater muscle mass, granting you a +2 item bonus to Athletics checks and unarmed attack rolls and increasing the amount of damage die you roll for such attacks, but this new form is clumsy and lumbering, imparting a -1 penalty to Acrobatics, Stealth, and Thievery checks, as well as to AC and Reflex saves.

I would discourage Paizo developers from adding any abilities as modifier-complex as the above. (+2 to Athletics, +2 to unarmed attacks, +1 die size for unarmed attacks, -1 to Acrobatics, -1 to Stealth, -1 to Thievery, -1 to Armor Class, -1 to Reflex Saves)

Even in the age of digital pads and auto-calculating character sheets, keeping track of the modifiers from a couple of such spells/effects takes away from the game. Players get busy with math instead of being in the moment, and combat pauses while everyone makes sure they get it all sorted correctly. No thanks, keep it simple(r) please.

Here's my heartfelt recommendation: Trust your players and leave it to them, it eventually becomes a problem when you make it your job.

One campaign we ran to completion and level 21, I've let players have no restrictions. They had fun, but as the 3 year campaign went on, it became a ridiculous amount of work to design encounters around their power levels and all their cool tricks. Way WAY too much work to do a proper job of it, and you spend all your time doing encounter math instead of NPC motivations, story and descriptions, etc. Also, at some point, all those powers, spells and abilities remove your ability to give fights flavor or unique twists and scenarios, because the party has a way to neutralize or counter everything imaginative. They're having a blast crushing the opposition, but the DM starts not to, because the amount of work you need to sink into prepping a single encounter begins to approach a full work day, and if you're a fair DM, the party may avoid that encounter or overcome it in a way you didn't account for. Which, yay for the party, but nothing like seeing 6 hours of prep boil down to a "No thanks, we move on". LOL, DM life, right?

So, after that campaign, my "DM" lesson was: Forget adjusting to the party's power level, that will drive you mad eventually. Take an AP as written and call it a day. You'll have fun, they'll have fun and all is well.

Except you start to worry that halfway through the party will get bored of how easy everything is. By level 12, they can probably handle the last fight in the AP, and by level 18, they'll win it before the BBEG gets to act. So you figure out cool "creative" ways to limit PC power.

Hey, intricate stat system. Yay, no PFS-like shopping for gear. Hey-no full casters allowed. No invisibility and fly spells/powers before level X. All the stuff that caused you a DM headache in the last campaign.

Except that is also a mistake. Players really don't enjoy that sort of thing, to the point that one bowed out of the campaign because he just wasn;t having fun. And you know, I learned that lesson too late but I learned it. Don't impose limits on your players that are above/beyond what is in the rules/PFS.

Finally, my solution is the one I should have stumbled on in the first place. Run an AP that is NOT adjusted to the party's power levels, and tell them that is the case. That makes it easy for you to concentrate on prepping story, RP, NPCs personalities and motivations instead of the math of encounter balance. It's easy for your players to aim for the expected power level, because you've just told them what it will be. Leave the character creation up to them, and trust them to police themselves. Players in a group of friends would prefer for Timmy the Barbarian to tell the wizard that he'd rather storm the castle than invisible-gaseous form through it, than to have the DM ban the spell combo.

Hope this helps.

I take my views on the morality of conflict from Just War Theory. In Just War Theory one of the requirements for a "Just War" is that it must be declared by competent authority. If a nation has as its "competent authority" the votes of the people, then such a vote could suffice for the competent authority requirement.

I'm having trouble equating the justness of a war with the justness of conscription. A government coercing me into risking my life for a cause I don't agree with, attempting to kill other people whom I may not consider my enemies, and leaving behind my duties to my family and children on the basis that I will otherwise be jailed, shot, or lose my property isn't behaving in anything but an evil fashion.

If I agreed with the war, and thought of the other side as an enemy, the government wouldn't need to conscript me, I'd be fighting already. It's not my duty to help the "State" survive, I may even prefer a change in governance. (like an Iraqi citizen might have felt with Saddam)

I feel my first duty is to my family, the second to the people that are my neighbors and form my community. A government that bullies it's way to the front of my "duty" list through threats of reprisal against me is being evil. One that convinces me without coercion to volunteer for a just war is not.

Fun Question, here's my two cents:

Yes, conscription is an evil act, very representative of lawful evil. Arguments like "for the greater good", "out of necessity" , "because we face an existential threat" and "because the enemy cannot be allowed to continue their evil ways" generally call for something that is inherently wrong to be tolerated due to the circumstances. In other words, your little nation needs to do this evil thing to survive and win.

If people freely wanted to go to war, let them volunteer. Conscripting is using the threat of punishment to make someone fight that doesn't want to. It's an effective coercive tactic, and is evil. It being common in the real world speaks to it's efficacy, not it's morality.

The "good" option in your campaign is to use Diplomacy to inspire people to volunteer for the war effort.

Would the Paladin fall? Depends on their god and tenets. A Paladin of Gorum wouldn't fall, but one whose tenets espoused freedom, fighting oppressive rule and tyranny, or opposing slavery probably would. Thankfully, Paladins in Golarion have some moral flexibility.

Yes, ask him to GM the game, in fact, insist on it. He sounds like he wants to be running the show anyway, and it would be inconvenient to kick him out. You relax, roll up a character of your own, and let him do the hard work. He can play cool battle songs on his laptop, look up images and handouts online in the middle of a session, and generally everything that bothers you now would be fine if he was GMing. If he isn't paying attention to what the party is doing, it will make his monsters less effective too, so bonus.

Otherwise, I would not continue playing with this person. You can't be "Captain I-Will-Fix-A-Player". It's been 5 years, and you've been too polite, almost too accommodating. I understand it's a relationship, but just like any relationship, you have to end the abusive ones even if it hurts to do so.

My 2 cents, anyway.

I'll drop in my 2 cents:
Contributing isn't just battle, it's roleplaying his character's personality, its being a fun person around the table, its talking out party ideas and strategies, its talking to NPCs and solving puzzles.

He wants to play a weak fighter, some people want to play ugly bards and dumb mages. It happens.

In nearly all games there are one or two characters who can't contribute much to combat and people don't complain because their class isn't called "fighter". You've got a fighter who isn't a melee powerhouse because he clearly doesn't want to be. Combat is typically a big part of Pathfinder, but not this players main focus, or he'd care to build for it. He isn't "terrible", he isn't "low-skill". This game isn't supposed to be a spreadsheet of character combat efficiency. However, he isn't a good fit for your group. This isn't a small problem as the disparity has caused you to have a pretty clear feeling of contempt for him. This can be patched, but ultimately someone isn't going to be having fun and it will affect the whole table/game.

The question is, a. can this player have fun playing "your" way? and b. is everyone else as bothered by this character as you are.

Depending on the answer to these questions, you can figure out whether the best way forward is to re-build his character, leave him alone, remove him politely from the game, or remove yourself.

Respectfully,
Paul

Please make alignment fully optional in Starfinder. In other words, do not make classes that require a certain alignment (they can still follow a code of behavior), do not make spells that function based off of alignment (instead use friend/foe).

The alignment system is a net negative. It creates more arguments at the table than anything it offers in return. It's an unsolvable problem because, as any forum post on the topic demonstrates, we each have widely differing opinions of what good, evil, lawful and chaotic mean and where each begins and ends. Its a part of the game that doesn't need to be there.

Thank you!

A Quest for the Holy Grail style adventure path where the group are or travel with a group of Vikings on a long-ship (like 13th warrior?) and visit/explore many exotic locales such as Arcadia, Garund, Casmaron, the ruins of Azlant, Tian Xia and Sarusan.

You can organize it so that the group travels to one new continent/area per book. Consider it a world tour of Golarion taken to locate some ancient artifact, each location once a former stop for the artifact before it (and the party) move on to the next place. A grand quest, like for the holy grail, except the party doesn't split up :D

How about some optional disadvantages, such as phobias, delusions and various forms of insanity? That would be pretty cool to consider when making a character, and you can design ones that happen to really work well within the AP. If you're feeling extra generous, maybe each can grant a minor boon as well.

There is an inherent problem in the "math" of Pathfinder/d20.

Imagine you have two level 3 fighters. One has a +7 to hit and the other a +13. As GM, you've got one number, Armor Class, that's going to matter how much they hit the monsters. You've got to make the AC too easy for one of them, or too hard for the other.

There is no downside to designing your melee hero to be the +13 guy, just "optimal" choices. The "math" of the game mostly reinforces the idea that the rules reward the "optimized" more than they reward the +7 guy, because good role-playing is not really stat-dependent, but the combat is.

Maybe one way to make Starfinder better is to make stats and combat scale less linearly, and more like rock-paper-scissors? What if as you scale up one value to get better, another value(s) diminish slightly. Or put another way, what if you have a "Pool" to allocate between accuracy, damage and number of attacks.

Using the example of the two fighters, maybe the +7 to hit guy has that +7 because he hits for more damage, or attacks more often, whereas the +13 guy got his very high accuracy in exchange for slower, less damaging attacks.

In Pathfinder, the +13 guy is strictly better than the +7 guy. In Starfinder, maybe they both can have a place.

Thanks for reading.

APs too long?
No, they are not. As a DM, I can see most of the APs taking between 9 months to 2 years, depending on how I pace the story and how much content I add or skip. That's a really nice range of time for a full campaign.

In our Kingmaker campaign, we just passed the two year mark, but the players got really involved in the kingdom, wanted to get to level 20 and adventure there for a while, so I used the wealth of additional information and potential stories in the AP to extend the fun for them.

It is always easier to run a good campaign when there is a lot of material to work with, and the more you have, the easier it is to pick things to skip. With more detailed content, it is easier to flesh out stories that fit extremely well within the campaign if you want to add time.

The icing on the cake is that within the time one campaign takes place, your PCs have two to three new campaigns to pick from, typically each with their own unique flavor and style. My group opted for Iron Gods next.

By the time that's done, we'll have plenty more to choose from. I think the current AP model is really as good as it gets.

I like to take a different view towards good and evil.

There are situations, as written here, where killing people in their sleep is expedient, or simply good tactics;where assassination is an effective means of ending a threat; where mutilating and defiling the bodies of the dead to hide a killing is effective in escaping punishment.

No arguments from me on why the party felt those were good tactics and necessary steps. I would likely do the same or something similar in that situation. (I don't play Paladins)

However, must we really insist that because an otherwise horrendous act is tactically sound, expedient, or smart; that those conditions make it something that is not evil? Does not every villain whom parties struggle against have similar reasons for the necessity of their own "evil" actions? When we resort to lying, cheating, stealing and killing for a "good" cause, are we not also the villains?

The Paladin accepted a mission to assassinate, participated in deception to gain access to the compound, then killed his enemies in a way that presented the least threat to him. Then the Paladin participated in mutilating the bodies of the dead to avoid punishment for the killings. Then, presumably, the Paladin participated in the actual assassination. Replace the word Paladin with "Rogue" or "the Villain" and it sounds exactly what the bad guys would do.

This was not an honest mission with chivalrous goals, it was a clandestine murder. I thought that of all classes, the Paladin is the one that is not supposed to stoop to doing things "that way". That's the purview of the Rogues, Assassins, Shadowdancers, Arcane Tricksters and the like.

A little late to the party on the original question but here are some thoughts on the original matter:

Killing someone in their sleep is dishonorable and cowardly. It is also usually efficient and smart. Just because something is a careful, smart or wise choice of action, doesn't necessarily exempt it from also being evil.

The act of killing is what's evil, and there are circumstances in which we consider it not-evil. Those circumstances are usually limited to the defense of oneself or others.

Killing a bad (evil) person is usually still considered murder (evil) unless that bad person is also attempting to kill you or in the middle of committing an atrocity. It may be legally ok to execute a criminal at any time, but that's not a matter of good/evil.

Following the rules of war is usually a matter of being lawful vs. chaotic, not good vs evil. If the rules of war allow an atrocity, that doesn't make it a non-evil act. Killing enemy soldiers that are actively fighting you is not evil, but most other means are at least a little evil (such as ambushes or poisoning supplies) even though they are smart tactics.

I am not against parties using efficient, cold or cruel tactics. Much like in the real world during war, it is actually very hard for otherwise good people to avoid actions that will haunt them later in life while trying to survive and/or win. Violence usually degenerates into escalating acts of greater evil. It is a great challenge to remain truly good while killing others. Most of us fail that, whether in the imagination of a game or in the line of duty. That's likely why we joke that adventurers really are murder-hobos and why soldiers don't like talking about their experiences.

The DMs problem (reading between the lines) seems to have been with the lack of "challenge" in the situation. The tactic employed by the party made their risk much smaller than the standard reward. The complaint about the act being essentially evil is correct, but I don't think it was the real issue. After all, the mission undertaken was to infiltrate (deception) an enemy camp and murder (assassinate) their leader. If the goal and method are essentially evil to begin with, why is the GM upset that the party continues that line of action with murdering people in their sleep?

Format:

Solid. Using the ability is boring; it’d be more interesting if there were more player interaction involved than ‘activate as a standard action.’ This is especially true as there’s little descriptive imagery to draw the reader into the item.

Does this add something to the game?

Definitely; this is a strong item at the level you can get it, and while it drops off in effectiveness (as things get huge fort save bonuses) the penalties remain potent all the way to 20. Better, there’s nothing like this in the game.

Would I want this in my games?
As a Player?

I favor static bonuses over variable to a significant extent; the dice REALLY hate me. That said, in terms of the ‘active which screws enemies over’ items I saw this year, this was hands down the best. I’d be tempted to get it, so I’m sure others would. Maybe if this were some kind of reactive penalty I could hit others with when they tumble past me, or cast spells in my direction.

As a GM?

It’s neat; I could see putting it on law enforcement officials. Heck, I could see this inspiring a lot of city-guard related itemizations. That said, it mostly favors the side with greater action economy since burning a standard action for a highly situational short...

Thank you for the review. I really appreciate you taking your time to give an honest appraisal, it helps me to get better at design. I'm glad the idea was solid, and I will work on making future items more interesting, both in their visualization and in the method of their use. Now I'm going to spend some time thinking about how I might do that with this item as practice.

Hello and thank you for your thoughts, advice and critique of my item:

Armor of Burden
Aura faint necromancy; CL 5th
Slot armor; Price 6750 gp; Weight 45 lbs.
Description
This +1 Splint Mail is embossed with an image of a squire carrying the equipment of his knight. Once per day, the wearer of the armor may command it to impose its burden upon a creature within 120 feet. That creature must make a DC 14 Fortitude saving throw, or suffer the -6 armor check penalty, 40% arcane spell failure chance, and any non-proficiency penalty as if they were wearing a suit of Splint Mail for 1d4 rounds. While another creature is so affected, the Armor of Burdens imposes no armor check penalty or arcane spell failure chance upon its wearer.
Construction
Requirements Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Bestow Curse, Spectral Hand; Cost 3375 gp

Filled out my inventory and coins page. Nice spreadsheet, well organized!

Thanks for the thoughts! And additional background. I had kind of read Oleg as a Caramon Majere from the beginning of "The Legend of the Twins" trilogy. Ah, high school.

You know, now that you mention it, I see the similarities. I suppose Oleg would be protective of the adventuring groups that take him along instead of a brother.

Big Oleg is a character who is in-between the damage dealing and tank roles. He is big enough to take a lot of hurt, but not fast enough to avoid much coming his way. His offense is more geared toward versatility than pure damage.

I will develop Oleg as a technologist, representing his growing familiarity with the technology the party will presumably encounter.

In terms of a party, Oleg prefers to be picked than do the picking himself :D If I had to choose I would suggest something like:
1. Oleg (Brawler)
2. Auehda (Blight Druid)
3. Bosh Firebeard (Metal Wizard)
4. Shauldrek (Inquisitor)

Happy to adventure with anyone anytime, however!