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Howdy!

This forum has been a quick resolution to so many of my other questions I thought I'd give this one a try:

Form of the Dragon spells. Pretty much as written, amiright? I figure the dragon bonuses you gain from casting the spell are all, um... spelled out in the description?

There are those (such as, oh, I dunno, let's say, my dumb friend who also believes "victuals" is pronounced "vih' kchoo əlz") who would argue that you also get all the other listed dragon-stat stuff when assuming the form of the dragon, as well as the things that the spells describe, simply because the first incarnation of the spell reads "You become a Medium chromatic or metallic dragon..." (emphasis mine, but really, emphasis that of my dumb friend).

They argue this while you're trying to enjoy an especially yummy batch of French toast, and also when you're trying to choose a feat for your 15th level wizard, and also when you're trying to go potty.

What the heck, dumb friend? The potty is completely off limits! You can't argue with someone when they're peeing!

Could I please cancel this order? It turns out that as I was waiting for it, a friend of mine picked this up for me for my b-day, and it sounds like it might be arriving before this gets settled here.

Thank you!

I've seen a couple of threads talking about characters with the less-crunchy attributes as their weak stats. For me, it's not too hard (and even fun sometimes) to role-play a character with social/mental quirks or weaknesses.

But now I have this wizard, and she's so much smarter than me that it's not even funny. (I like to flatter myself that I sit around a 13-14 in the INT department, even though the amount of times I mess up spelling the word "weight" pretty much proves that I'm just kidding. My wizard has a 24 INT now. I'm imagining she's not having any problem figuring out the actual range of a dragon who is 120' away and 60' up. Le sigh.)

I know there are very set bonuses already in place for higher INT, WIS, and CHR scores. But outside of the pluses to skill checks, saves and attitude adjustments, how do you role-play a character who is a mensa candidate when you still count on your fingers when adding up your cone of cold? How do you role-play a convincingly silver-tongued bard when you can't even convince your 5 year old nephew about Santa?

And perhaps more to the point, as a DM, do you do anything outside of the mechanical to help your players feel like their characters actually possess these superhuman attributes?

Just curious.

Most fun spell EVAR!

Or, it was. Until I found out I might be using it wrong.

I was wondering if Enemy Hammer had the same restrictions, weight wise, as Telekinesis , since it is telekinesis being used to do the lifting of the enemy?

I had just assumed that I could lift any enemy and throw the silly fellow around, but I can see now that I may have been very wrong, and I might owe my DM (and his Huge Red Dragon) an apology for last night.

...with an alarming frequency.

I've tried very much to avoid the whole "I don't really have a familiar until I remember I do" bit, keeping my fox in the mind of our GM, even when he forgets about the little guy ("That ice storm covers a bit of ground, right? *rolls for fox's reflex*). It's made for some fun role-playing moments, but it feels a little like my attempts at keeping my familiar in the game are starting to backfire, a bit.

Of the past few encounters it seems like an inordinate amount of the bad guys are savvy to a Witch's weaknesses and are singling out my little buddy for their attacks. He's been driven down to the negatives more than 3 times in the last fight alone. A lot of my time is spent healing the poor guy, rather than beating up on monsters and megalomaniacal jerkfaces, which is more of what I signed up for.

I've never really played a class that is so very dependant on its familiar to be a truly effective party member, so I'm not really hip to the ways of embettering a familiar. Are there any suggestions from smart people out there on how I can keep little Tag alive? (Perhaps I should've started by not naming him "Tag".)

Thanks for any help!

So, I've got this witch who can fly! Crazy, right? Try to pretend you're not totally jealous! And get this: She can fly for 6 minutes a day, and they don't even have to be consecutive minutes! Just minute increments! More exclamation points!!! !

Let's, oh, let's say my sheep has gotten caught up in the top of a tree (again), so I activate my flight Hex to fly up there and get it down. This takes less than a minute, so I still have 5 minutes of sheep rescuing flight at my disposal for the rest of the day.

Here's the question: Do I have to re-activate my flight Hex again once the first minute has passed? Let's say that darned sheep gets up into the pines an hour later. I've technically stopped flying, but I've activated my Hex once already today... Do I need to expend another of my valuable standard actions to start flying again?

Also, does anyone know how to keep sheep out of trees? This is super important.

So...

My monk died last session. I know, boo-hoo, right?

We had just beaten up a bunch of smelly ol' trogs, kung fu'd an ogre into submission and found an interesting crypt. Inside the crypt was some sort of divine lady being who bade us to lay down our weapons so that they might be blessed for our efforts. Right.

My monk had no weapons to lay down and also a WIS of 16. Something seems smelly about this, and it wasn't just the trog musk.

So, our fighter and our samurai (I know, I know) lay down their weapons while the alchemist and I start to puzzle over the situation. Suddenly the lady disappears and a huge, ugly, tentacled fiend appears and tries to eat us.

Well, it tries to eat me. Its opening move was to hit us all with an Unholy Blight, which thanks to my save left me with about 13 HP. We're a 3rd level party and my monk is the only character with at least an ostensible ranged magical weapon. So I chuck my +1 spear at it and hit it for DMG! Everybody else's efforts just bounce off its DR. Our GM decides since I'm the only one that's damaged it thus far, it's going to concentrate on the monk! It hits me with a scorching ray, knocking me down to -3. In our gaming circle, the usual protocol is to go after a threat who isn't unconscious in this situation, so I was a little surprised to see the second scorching ray was aimed at me as well. It's a crit, and I am now sitting on a nice round -22 HP.

I was a little sad, as it had been fun to play my silly little monk, and I was pretty excited to see her get back to Tian Xia. Also, given our gaming culture, that second shot seemed a little blood-thirsty. But monsters aren't dumb, I suppose, and even though I wasn't a threat after I had thrown my spear, I was the only person who had hurt the thing.

Our DM clled the game then, as it was nearly 10:30.

So I think all week of a new character I could play, deciding on a caster, roll her up to 3rd and I call up my GM to run some story ideas past him. He tells me not to worry about it because he was having an NPC come in who would raise my monk and kill the baddie we were fighting. He had planned on killing someone in the crypt so he could introduce this other dude. He told me my monk wouldn't take any level loss from this, because it had all been a part of his scheme.

I can't exactly put my finger on why, but this really bugged me. I'll admit that I was a little sad when he went out of his (relative) way to kill off my monk, but for whatever reason, this revelation made me feel like sitting out the next game. I'm a petty, petulant person, I know, but... grrrr anyway!

I dunno. I guess I just needed a space to vent my spleen. I think I'm kinda dumb to be bugged about this, but I think this totally broke immersion for me. It felt less like we were telling a story together and we were all just in his story? *sigh*

TL/DR: I'm kind of a baby and I need some place to pout.

Thanks for listening.

A.) My witch is awesome, she can magically grow her hair out to 10' and use it as another limb! I know, right? You're all amazed.

So my question is this: This magical, prehensile hair that we just spoke of; cool as a means of distributing touch spells, or no? I tried pulling this on my GM last night against a few toughies, and while he eventually agreed to the usage (had to give him THREE whole bars of my Kit-Kat), he finds it a bit "cheesy" and "munchkin-y".

I dunno, it just seemed obvs to me, but he's the GM.

Thoughts?

Dear Pathfinder smarties,

I recently picked up a copy of the hardbound Shackled City adventure path, and am coming up on a day where I will soon be running it.

Unfortunately, I also happened to pick up a few Pathfinder books (Core Rulebook, Ultimate Combat, Ultimate Magic, and Advanced Player's Guide [stupid tax return and complete lack of willpower]), and I'm kind of (super) jazzed to delve into these books as well.

I was niave enough to think originally that the PF books were just a teensey bit different in mechanics and mostly differing in flavor (little different crunch, more different fluff? Do people still use those words?), but it appears that there are enough differences that it may cause some difficulties as things progress.

Has anyone here in the forums run Shackled City à la Pathfinder? It seems like it wouldn't be too big of a headache to do any of the intial conversions that I'm aware of, but is anyone hip to any problems that become messy later on in the game?

I tried to find an existing thread that covered this issue, but my meagre searches didn't turn anything up. If you know of a thread that deals with this, a nudge in that direction would be super, also.

Thanks so much for your time!

Our group has just finished up a two year campaign of Dark Heresy and we have decided to give Pathfinder a try, because 4.0 made us all cry.

The new "skillz" arrangement took me a moment to wrap my head around (I'm slow and completely used to 3.5 skill point rules), but I just thought of this question and I won't have my books back for a few days, so I figured this forum (which has been extremely helpful in the past [+3 to diplomacy!]) could help me cheese this out:

When a character spends a skill point to take an initial rank in a class skill at 1st level that character gains a +3 skill bonus, right?

Does this only happen at 1st level, or does each intitial adding of a rank into a class skill gain a +3 bonus? F'rinstance: A Rogue who decides to put off adding a skill point to get a rank in Bluff until 3rd level, since this is the first rank they take in a class skill do they get a +3 bonus then, or would that had to have taken place at character creation?

Does this question even make sense?

Should I just stick to knitting? I'm pretty good at scarves...

Made a hat once.

It wasn't pretty.

Should've taken more ranks in knitting, I guess.

My players are juuuust about finished up with City of Broken Idols (silly-heads made a bee-line to Khala, I tell you, a bee-line), They managed to defeat him after a prolonged battle and are resting the night in the long tunnel just off of 44 on the 3rd Temple level, before going back to try and clean out whatever's left in the areas they missed.

Here's where I'm forseeing difficulties. My wise-acre players decided to windwalk to Taboo Island from Farshore, and, after having cleaned out the temple, are planning to windwalk back to the town. Which will, in effect, mean that they will have been away from Farshore for about two days. This kind of strains credibility for the abduction of Lavinia and the preparations of the Jade Ravens and Harliss' dream message... and I dunno.

I've been toying with the idea of maybe declaring there's been some sort of time dilation occuring in the temple, given its proximity to a being of power such as Khala, or the thinness of the veil between planes here, but that feels kind of cheap to me.

I am gratefully accepting suggestions at the moment, which will be received with cries of girlish glee, and the promise of cookies that will, saddly, most likely never be delivered.

Hi!

So, I'm obviously not terribly smart (good to get that disclaimer out of the way), but about a month ago I noticed a thread that kind of showed a possible turn by turn scenario for the Crimson Fleet's attack on Farshore. I should have saved it then, but seeing how we were still a good distance from that happening, I filed it away in the back of my brain for later reference.

Well, I'm running the pirate raid in just a bit here, and imagine my chagrin when I came back to find the thread had been skuppered. Does anyone have a way to link to the original thread, or a copy of it, or, y'know, any idea at all what I'm tlaking about? I'm a little nervous, as this'll be my first big convoluted battle as a DM, and all I can think of are the thousands of things I can forget and/or mess up...

Hooray for self confidence!

Thanks in advance for any help that can be rendered.

Um.

Avast... er, matey.

I couldn't find a better place to post this question (granted, I didn't look SO very hard...), so, here goes:

Can skellingtons created via the "Animate Dead" spell be dispelled? My PCs have killed off a goodly number of the Terror Birds (including mama bird) and the cleric in our party (a devotee of Wee Jas) has decided to skellingtonize a few of them. They've come in very handy to the party over the course of their traipsing across the Isle of Dread, saving those kids from mummy rot, poisonous giant centipedes, taking the brunt of the fierce gargoyle attacks, and generally annoying the heck out of their DM.

So, now Olangru has teleported in their midst and run off with Sir Stinky Gnome (after some very fun psychological warfare as suggested in The Black Bard's thread), and absconded away with him to his shrine-lair thingama-whatsit. I've noticed the Bar-Lgura has access to the handy dispell magic, so...

Can he dispell those pesky skellington terror birds? And if so, can wizards dispell most skellingtons and zombies, seeing how they are more than likely created by the animate dead spell as well?

I tried finding an official ruling in the books but my search has been fruitless as of yet. If the response is glaringly obvious and easy to find, I apologize in advance for my wasting of time. Meanwhile, I know the ruckus the kids'll raise if I try getting rid of their strutting boneyards of fun without good backing. Thanks for all of your help!

(P.S. I was looking up the effect resurrect had on the undead as well. The Player's Handbook description of the resurrect spell (pg. 272) indicates that undead creatures can't be resurrected, but the Monster Manual I's undead type description (pg. 317) states that "[Resurrection] spells turn undead creatures back into the living creatures they were before coming undead".

I'm probably missing something here as well. Does anyone know of any "official" ruling concerning this apparent discrepancy?)

Urm. And now, the obligatory STAP rawks my sawks!

Thank you.

I have a player who's going to start off with an affiliation to Zelkarune's Horns and he's probably going to want to take part in a few of the gladiator trials (definitely, actually). Any thoughts on the best way to handle this? I suppose I could just let them whack away at each other per normal combat rules and just have clerics waiting in the wings, but that seems like an expensive way to run a gladiator pit. Also, would folks just cry "mercy" when they notice that they're particularly low on the HP and hope nobody gets a bad case of the "dying"? (The Sasserine supplement did say that fights were "generally" not to the death when people were involved.) We could try taking the penalty for non-lethal strikes and run it that way and what have you, but that feels a little like wussing out, but the other option seems a tad barbaric for a place that feels so otherwise civilized like Sasserine.

At the moment, I'm thinking just normal combat rules, with each gladiator entering into combat with the full understanding that this is a possibly lethal undertaking and that they'd have to be responsible for their own health afterwards. Perhaps judges could watch and call a match if it looks like neither side is willing to offer quarter...

If anyone has any other ideas they'd like to share, I would greatly appreciate it.

Toodles!

So, I'm just as excited as can be to start up this whole Savage Tide adventure (so excited, in fact, I paid $15 to pick up issue #139 again when my original was stolen from my car- you can find yourself in the middle of a whole lot of interesting conversations calling up magazine shops not "in the know", asking if they carry a magazine called Dungeon. *shudder*). My friends have long bemoaned the fact that our dumb DM (me) always seems to stall out adventures some where around 16th or 17th level. My boys say they're going to see this through to the 20th even if it kills me.

A problem I've found as I've read through the first few adventures is I'm terribly unfamiliar with a lot of the organizations mentioned in the STAP. We've spent the past few years lounging around our homebrew world so I have absolutely no idea who the Sea Princes, The Crimson Fleet or the Scarlet Brotherhood are. I don't know if they're tied in to Faerûn or Greyhawk or... well, you can see I'm a little out of touch.

I considered adapting the adventure to our own world, but I don't know if I could readily modify all the important factions quickly enough to stave off my already ravenous, near-zombified players.

So, I guess my question (finally!) would be this: Where would I find more information concerning the aforementioned groups? I just know the second an NPC brings up anything tied to them my players will be awash with questions, and I'd like to say something more than just "Sorry, guys, but it wasn't covered in the manual." Besides, I figure the more I know about the game world before hand, the more realized the world will feel.

Thanks for any help y'all can offer!