Phlebas's page

Theres only a couple of minor things that i'd tweak (out of a lot of things i like) but if I had to pick one its the Bard + Instrument thing

I like Bards,i think they're fun, flexible characters and i have no problems with the opening up of the perform skills to allow lots of options for a bard. In 3,5 i saw a bard played as a battle commander using orate to marshall his allies. Thought it was a brilliant variation on the stereotype.

but then i saw another singing bard,

and another, and then we worked it out

If a bard uses an instrument he is severely penalised in combat by

- only being able to perform or spell cast
- not having an attack of opportunity available,
- you have to stow instrument (std action)and then draw weapon to gain ability to attack (lose a round)
- and if you drop instrument & draw weapon to attack (same round), it means that it will take a standard action to pick up instrument (- lose a round) to regain the ability to perform
- vulnerability to Sunder attempts on the instrument
- vulnerability to silence

singing/orating/dancing bards on the other hand

- can perform, spell cast OR attack any round
- have attack of opportunity available
- do not lose an action switching between perform & attack
- Dancing bards can even perform in a silence spell!

the only plus for an instrument wielding bard is when you find a magical instrument..... but its not as if a singing bard will be short of skill points if he needs to up a perform skill overnight

this was brought home to me last week when the Bard in my game(a relative newcomer to D&D and definitely not a powergamer) said she wasn't even going to bring an instrument into the tomb "as it might get damaged and i'll never use it"

I'm all for allowing the use or not of instrument to be a decision of the player purely for role-playing purposes, but this is akin to a fighter deciding to restrict himself to a single light weapon - you can do it but you'll pay a heavy price compared to the ones that don't.....

so my proposed fix is to allow bards WITH INSTRUMENTS OR ANY OTHER TWO HANDED PROP to perform and spellcast in the same round.

(if all bards get perform plus spellcasting as was discussed in the classes forum then some other kind of bonus for instrument / prop use would be required - maybe utilising the perform skill check to boost or replace standard spell save DC?)

thanks for listening - for all the playtest

looking forward to the final product

Hi

apologies if this has been gone through before but i couldn't see anything on the spells forum

now i generally like the idea of at will cantrips so this is no criticism of the concept but i'm well into my second playtest and the players are starting to get the hang of the new rules and are generating new tactics thanks to 'at will' cantrips

specific issues

detect poison - or how to avoid dangerous traps and detect nasty monsters.... druid now habitually scans for poison in any room, any dodgy path, even an unidentified monster. although not game breaking it does make traps especially much easier to find, especially combined with

detect magic - possibly most abused spell. walk into room and automatically detect magic. finds treasure, many traps, lots of illusions etc. combined with detect poison it will find most nasty surprises. although i'm aware you can block with magic aura, or lead it will be a little strange if every dungeon radiates magic, or is set in ye olde abandoned lead mine....

my suggestion is to restrict the range to touch for all 0-level detects (or 1' say) this would allow for finding stuff, but remove the scan first mentality thats developing in the party as you'd have to put yourself in harms way to detect effectively. so clearing the room and then searching would be as likely to set off traps as to find them, and also put secret compartments beyond the range of detections.

thoughts?

also

Stabilize - if its at will you can cast it on enemies as they fall and hit the deck. this tends to keep alive most enemies. obvously this is a reasonable tactic for bar room brawls where you don't want a murder charge but my group is now habitually saving the most senior person and then interrogating them for all they know before killing them

I'm not sure how to stop this - making it Touch would probably reduce the opportunity, but would also make saving party members more dangerous. another idea would be that it only stabilised for 5 rounds (or a finite number), enough time to get a potion down a neck, but not enough to keep all and sundry alive in a fight.

second half of the session was another homebrew encounter designed to play around with the skills more than the combat. this time each player played a single 2nd level PC so group was

1/2 elf monk
gnome bard
1/2 orc druid

party investigated a dwarven barge that had beached on a sandbank, investigated the boat to find the clues as to what had happened to the crew and then followed the trail back to a lagoon full of bullywugs and their temple of gluttony to rescue the dwarves pre-sacrifice....

skills worked well, the monk had maxed perception and didn't have too many issues distinguishing between visual and listen type checks.

eventually the party followed the trail in a small boat and after a succession of low perception checks paddled into an ambush. two bullywugs managed to successfully entangle the monk and the druid with thrown nets, the bard being ignored. two other bully wugs then started stabbing the party while the net throwers dragged the party into the water. the druid was hit a lot and then rescued by the croc AC, the bard killed two bullywugs while the monk (who failed to roll the 14 needed for an escape artist check 8 times in a row!) was dragged slowly off. after healing the druid, the bard and druid paddled off in a low speed chase until the croc was sent ahead to intercept

net rules worked fairly well - it was scary for the PC's, but more so because the monk didn't even have a knife blade to cut his way out of the net

at the temple the gnome got swallowed whole by a dire toad guard before being rescued by the group. they then had a stand up battle with 6 bullywugs before facing the dark cleric, a sahuagin cleric 2 who used negative energy to wound the party (and incidentally kill off the few bullywug survivors) before being rushed by the group and cut down

since the group didn't have a cleric they purchased a wand of cure lights and had a few potions. each pc went unconscious at least once but in the fight agaisnt the dark cleric the monk piled in, the bard sung, and the druid used the wand to keep the monk & croc active

negative channeling is a fun mechanic at low level, but a cleric 4 could have decimated the party very quickly - i'm going to keep using this mechanic for the NPC's so we'll see how balanced it is....

next session the party sail to Freeport and we begin the freeport trilogy!

I guess this is more based on 3,5 than PF, but its not something that i believe the PF rules cover (don't think its been mentioned in the other bard threads - apologies if i missed

in all i've seen 3 bards played in 3,5. none of them have used a musical instrument, all have taken singing or oratory as their perform skill

the logic goes like this

if i sing, then i can swing a sword and attack / defend while using my perform skill

if i play an instrument i can perform and move

if i sing then i can never be disarmed

if i play an instrument the first ogre music critic i meet will reduce it to a pile of matchwood

so no-one plays instruments

so my proposal is -

a bard playing an instrument that requires both hands should be able to cast spells simultaneously with his perform ability (i'd say the somatic components are perfromed with the instrument)

a bard using only his voice cannot cast spells and perform

i'm going to trial this in my game but thoughts? comments? pitfalls?

Had a chat with the player of the monk in the playtest i ran about the tactics for dealing with BBEG Channeling negative energy

one of the things he highlighted was that the new mobility rule ("You do not provoke attacks of opportunity due to movement") means that unless a BBEG / Spellcaster is completely surrounded without even a 5' gap then they are always vulnerable to attack from anyone with mobility regardless of how many allies were surrounding him

He was talking about a 14th level monk who could move 80'/round and so could get to and distract any enemy spellcaster but we then worked out you only needed Dex 13, Dodge and Mobility to break though any situation - ie any human at first level, any fighter at first level, or by 3rd level any race / class combo with dex 13 could effectively run through enemy formations at will.

Now i've had experience of this before with tumbling rogues IMC, but the impact they can have by breaking the line is mitigated by the fact they normally have light armour (or the skill check penalty is too high) and so can't survive on their own for too long, so the sequence normally went

Rogue tumbles in and hits BBEG
Mooks pile onto Rogue
Rogue looks at HP and how close Fighter is to hacking through to support and either attacks with fingers crossed or tumbles away
BBEG tends to survive until mooks dead

with mobility the sequence changes

Fighter/Barbarian runs through crowd of mooks with mobility and stabs BBEG
Mooks hit fighter, BBEG has to withdraw losing action, provoke AoO by moving and acting, or moves 5' and gets full attacked the following round
Fighter ignores the allies attacks and continues to attack BBEG who dies or at least can't spell cast effectively due to damage taken.
Nooks mill around and get mopped up by party

now I don't have a fundamental problem with a fighter breaking through the crowd and taking the BBEG guy head on, but without the AoO's for movement the crowd of minions might as well not be there and that effectively changes a lot of combat scenarios if it becomes near impossible to protect the spell casters from frontal assault. or you end up with the situation where the spellcaster is surrounded by a solid ring of allies to just block all routes in - which may be effective but gets a little strange if every necromancer drills his zombies to fight like roman legionnaires :-)

is this serious? well look at it from the parties perspective and consider the scenario of an equivalent level NPC Barbarian who charges the party and takes down the PC spellcaster with his first or second attack. If the enemy came out of nowhere then the party might accept it, however if they'd spotted him coming, fighter had gone to intercept, spellcaster had moved to the back of the group and he still ran through them and hacked the wizard you'd be more than a little annoyed.

Anyhow, the proposed fix

Option 1 - with mobility you should be able to ignore ONE AoO caused by movement per round. Improved mobility (pre-req mobility) would allow you to ignore one additional AoO

One AoO may not sound much, and certainly wouldn't enable you to run around a single enemy let alone a crowd, but it would allow you to move away and act (eg move back 30' and fire arrow/cast spell)without worrying about the AoO)

Option 2 - ignore all AoO's from a nominated opponent caused by movement. Improved mobility would allow you to ignore AoO's from a second nominated opponent. you nominate opponents as you move for that round only.

the advantage of this option is that you can ignore a single opponent, or with the improved version run between two enemies, but this also means that you could totally ignore a tentacle type monster as you ran in to stab him which may be a little too powerful as it pretty much nerf's a complete creature type.

Variant - In addition to the ignore, i'd suggest you can also grant +4 to AC against AoO's that aren't ignored (as per 3,5) so it would allow you to attempt more dangerous options but without the complete invulnerability.

comments? am i over-reacting or have others seen this as an issue in their playtests?

I'm starting this in a new thread rather than derail some of the discussions on the channeling mechanic.

one of the consequences of Channeling is that it highlights the role of clerics as conduits for positive / negative energy and to my mind I think that this should extend to the gods themselves - ie they should either be gods of life, or anti-life.

now if you take this logic through to the extremes, you could end up with evil gods being able to channel positive energy, and neutral (maybe even good?) gods be able to channel negative energy. This takes some of the absolutes of good / evil and replaces them with a different kind of divide

now this does mirror some of the cosmology in my homebrew, so I realise it may not fit with other games core assumptions, but it would be a more interesting approach to gods where known evil gods were tolerated due to their healing ability (gods of tyranny, thievery, power etc would seem to fit here)whereas neutral gods of death were reviled due to the perceived harm they caused. Wether you extend this to cure / inflict spells is open to debate(personally i would, but i'd add some more touch damage spells tied to the domain as well)

now this takes some choice away from the players as they wont be able to choose a neutral god and then have the choice of positive / negative energy but it would also make negative channelers stand out, either as BBEG or as outcasts for PC's

like I said in the title, this is a purely flavour thing, and it doesn't really depend on the exact mechanism used but it does (to me) provide a wonderful basis for societies and campaigns

Hope this provokes a few ideas....

I had two more encounters planned - A Choker guarding the entrance to the temple proper (get to use CMB) and then some undead (cue channeling) in the temple itself (mixture of skeletons, zombies and a ghoul) (so another CR 2 and a CR 3 as the finale) but it was getting late so we called the game to a halt then

this was designed to be tough, and I possibly gave the monsters too much of a tactical advantage but it was very close (1 round) to a TPK only half way through! more hp for the starting characters would have made a difference, but the lack of healing, even with the channeling, was the killer. Luck / tactics did have a major part, and if this had been a proper campaign the party would have scarpered, licked their wounds, and come back again later so I don't think major changes to starting HP are required especially with the improvements made to the toughness feat....

(starting Hp's were paladin - 15, monk & cleric - 10, sorcerer 7)

what i did like was how the changes to the skills really sped up character creation at low level, though it did mean that there were a lot fewer trained skills available.

what was awkward was the rules themselves. It would have been nice to be able to hand over sheets for race, and sheet(s) for class and let each player get on with it. unfortunately the layout of the pdf didn't help and even with one laptop copy and two printed copies it was awkward to find stuff quickly. hopefuly the Beta pdf will be indexed, and hopefully laid out so that its easier to print individual sections as required rather than printing the whole thing

Players have levelled up to 4th (i'm not using xp for this quick adventure, but i will use the CR guide rules for the next set of encounters) and I'll post that after it happens....

Long Sunday afternoon so we decided to do a spur of the moment playtest

4 players (most with 20 + years of roleplaying experience, one relative novice (~ 5 years). 3 out of the 4 had DM'd 3,5 games

Started at level 6, everyone had to play a different class and race. Equipment from the NPC starting equip (DMG) and core items only

PC's
Half-Orc Barbarian
Dwarven Fighter
Gnome Sorcerer (Elemental (earth) bloodline)
Human Cleric of the sun (Fire & Healing domains)

Map was based on an old / old adventure and the monsters were rolled randomly on the DMG level 6 dungeon table rather than using the encounter rules.

Encounter 1
Started with a tough one, 3 x Gray Render Zombies (CR9) approached the party from three sides. Barbarian got sandwiched and burnt through all bar 3 of his rage points in this encounter. Cleric had taken extra turning and selective channeling so made full use of the channeling rules, though the zombies only needed 4 or more to avoid being frightened. Since the 133 hp zombies were taking 10 points of damage every burst it wasn't a major impact, but combined with the healing made you feel you were getting some value out of your turning attempts.
End of the ecnounter the party went through 10 charges of the wand of cure light....

Encounter 2
Rolled an annis - since they're deceptive the party found a locked cell with an angelic looking prisoner. key was in next room

Encounter 3
1/2 dragon F4 (CR6). just used the stats straight out of the monster manual. The party botched the door so got breath weaponed after hacking through it. Gnome laughed it off (bloodline) and by now the cleric had shield other on the barbarian. Party charged and eventually hacked it down. Dwarf by now complaining about overhand chop being useless as it gives only 1/2 strength bonus to damage compared to a normal 2H attack but makes you give up second itterative attack. Cleric used some selective channleing to mass heal which combined with the shield other kept the barbarian fighting fit.

(cont)