Requia's page

Caster Level already determines the spellcraft check to create a magic item. So it is already figured in. Increasing the DC by 5 for not meeting the CL requirement seems fair.

There is debate on that, and no official answer I know of. I'm with you on it though.

Still, the listed caster levels are legacies of a crafting system that as far as I can tell was *intended* to be unusable.

Requia wrote:

I could see having a ninja one. Not so much the ninjas of history as the ninjas of the legends of the time and modern fiction (who sometimes have access to magics or similar).

Multi-class Rogue/wizard or sorcerer or heck bard specializing in acrobatics!

Anything involving multiclassing with a spellcaster class is a bad solution. Either you get overoptimized game breaking power builds or something vastly underpowered.

Bards have a flavor that falls flat, even if you ditch the singing and the party boosts the spell list is still wrong.

I haven't seen it of course, but I think they're called Eagle Knights because Andoran is obsessed with raptors in general, and the eagle is supposedly one of the most noble. Not because eagles are actually involved.

I could see having a ninja one. Not so much the ninjas of history as the ninjas of the legends of the time and modern fiction (who sometimes have access to magics or similar).

Though any class that fits the rogue with slight magic point would probably work (yes theres a talent for that, but an incredibly minor one), the 3.5 assassin PrC comes to mind.

But yes, I don't see any point in a Samurai one, use a cavalier, us a fighter, use a flavor tweaked paladin, there are a lot of options.

I think I really like the idea of a wish economy (not necessarily because of wishes, other options are good too).

If gold no longer buys power a character is free to spend that gold on things other than power. A castle, giving it to charity, high roller gambling, really good booze, funding a private army, whatever it is that the character wants.

This probably works best if the third economy has some kind of currency, because you can keep handing out cash rewards (unless you want to avoid that), but if you want the kind of game where getting a high end magic item is more difficult to obtain than plane shifting to Sigil and spending bolognium, this makes it an option as well without screwing up the power levels too much (as the power levels of the campaign get higher, just raise the cap of what you can buy with gold, the basics are all there but the really good stuff for the level stays out of reach).

That is some of the prettiest cover art I've ever seen. I may actually need the print copy of this one.

I'd like to see a Psionics book from Paizo.

I like demons more on an individual level. Devils have the better complete grouping.

A demon is a powerful, manipulative enemy. But it can be beaten. Even an entire army can be beaten, maybe not by you or your army, but in theory at least it can be done.

Devils on the other hand, can't be beaten, because they don't mass armies and march against you, they mass somebody else's. Exposing the adviser to the king as a devil just means that a different devil takes his place next weak.

And once they get their ideals in place they don't even need the adviser anymore, the king will act in Hell's interest without Hell having to lift a finger, probably while thinking that he's doing the best thing for his nation.

It won't ever go away either. If tomorrow you somehow slaughtered every Devil in the multiverse, Hell will keep tempting souls, because the people who have it in them to do the things necessary to stamp out an idea are the first ones to be corrupted by Hell's ideals.

Couldn't you skeleton-ify the exoskeleton?

I would point out that even if your forum is secure, you also need to worry about the image host, since most forums don't have resources for hosting large images or other files, and Photobucket or the like are very public.

I don't necessarily see this as unreasonable in size. What you have is probably more of a mix of urban and rural, with large chunks of land devoted to ranches or farms (mostly farms now probably, since the shadow beasts would make ranching difficult). With other areas simply being undeveloped. This isn't unreasonable if you have a city thats formed from several smaller settlements that grew until they overlapped. London is a good example of this.

But I am correct about CL's being a hard rule that you have to meet to make the item.

The DC to create a magic item increases by +5 for each prerequisite the caster does not meet. The only exception to this is the requisite item creation feat, which is mandatory. In addition, you cannot create spell-trigger and spell-completion magic items without meeting their spell prerequisites.

If the caster level is needed then why wasn't this mentioned? I can't find *anything* to back up what you're saying.

Um, yes, you can make the pearl without the high level spell. As was mentioned before, not meeting the prerequisite only makes it harder, not impossible.

And the pearl only requires the level of spell that the pearl is, so one appropriate to your level is fairly achievable around level 10-12 (DC 27 spellcraft check).

Requia.

Charge as a standard action (Can only move up to base speed instead of double)

Pounce = full attack (rakes included) on a charge.

BAM: Severely wounded, if not dying Bill.

I would still interpret Pounce as requiring a full round charge to work. Its a movement power, and it would be a substantial power up from 3.5 simply because a new option (standard charge) was added, rather than an intentional upgrade to pounce.

The dire lion only gets a bite attack (and possibly a grapple) in the surprise round.

Admittedly, in a 1 on 1 fight, Bill is going to lose nearly every time , since once the lion has him grappled Bill can't really fight back, and the lion will do damage at only a slightly slower rate than if it was not grappling. (It gets the rake damage in the grapple, but loses its bite attack in favor of using Rake).

Even with surprise and winning the first initiative check, the lion will only have done around 32 damage to Bill in the surprise and first round combined. That assumes it hits with all 3 attacks, there is a 60% chance it misses at least once.

If the lion lets Bill go and goes for a full attack instead the damage will go up, but its still not a first round TPK, the rest of the party has time to deal with the Dire Lion before Bill dies.

I'll agree the CR on the lion might need to be reconsidered (especially given what happens to the poor elven wizard at the back of the party if the Dire Lion attacks him instead), but you way way overpowered the thing.

Isn't FFG doing the WFRP thing now?

Emphatically not, computer games are not allowed by the OGL. You could see a Golarion game, but not a Golarion game with the D&D ruleset.

Yes they are, it specifically states that transferring the open content to a computer language is covered under the licenses definition of Derivative Materials. This is the *only* place that computers are mentioned by the OGL at all.

Paizo however, is somewhat more restrictive than Hasbro was, and only allows non commercial entities to use its stuff. (Unless they declared pathfinder core rules to be open game content somewhere).

Edit: IANAL of course. This is not legal advice blah blah blah.

Was there ever a word of god (FAQ or Jason or something?) on Spring Attack and Vital Strike?

I really really like this idea, and had a whole rant on why but my post got eaten.

Expect something from me in homebrew if nobody beats me to it.

I would do balance as a plus or minus system, to differentiate between too powerful and too weak.

Quite frankly the only bone I had was how easy they made it to bypass pre-requisites for magic item creation including caster level by just pumping up skill points.

From teh rules "In addition, you cannot create spell-

So not quite all of them.

Adamantine Armor *never* stacked. It's not a change (though perhaps a fair compliant).

Its unique, with its own benefits and drawbacks. It won't change your clothes (like disguise self or hat of disguise), its subject to true seeing (unlike nonmagic stuff). On the other had, nobody tries to grab you by the hair to realize that you're not as tall as you appear, and the makeup doesn't come off if you get pushed into the water.

What exactly makes changeling such powerful 3.5 races? They get minor shape change, some skill boosts, and one of those crappy saving throw boosts to only certain spell subtypes. Yeah. The change at will is occasionally useful for problem solving above and beyond what minor magic items and level 1 spells do, but its hardly game breaking.

a City (even a small one) is going to go through a *lot* of water, especially if it supports agriculture from the same source. Liverpool went through about 40 million gallons a day in the early 20th century (at the time it had about 750,000 people).

That Decanter does 288 thousand gallons a day. Having some of them, and some acolytes handing out created water, will relieve the pressure and change the cities problem from 'everyone will be dead next week' to something less substantial, but it wouldn't eliminate it entirely.

One of my tactics in horror games is to give the party a good mix of PCs and NPCs, then starts killing NPCs off early.

There are a couple good psionic powers that might be worth duplicating for killing the NPCs (even if you don't usually use psionics). One traps the target in a cocoon of its own skin (also good for players who aren't there that day, gives you something to do with the PC), the other causes the target to commit suicide.

A psion will lose a good deal of power from being cuffed and blindfolded, it seems simple to modify that to not letting the manifest at all that way. Or maybe give them 'self' powers only (which might let them escape, with the right powers).

Wasn't there a second edition rule that they couldn't manifest while wearing a metal helmet? You could bring that back too.

There was a very very important question I was going to ask, but the board went down for a second and now I can't remember it.

Oh yeah, every 3 class levels, or based off the class level+CR?

I'm confused, can you elaborate on this? (Armor training doesn't effect AC anymore, yeah?)

Armor training raises the max dex of your armor.

Delete is fail.

"target takes damage equal to the bulwark's Strength modifier" should be 'strength bonus (if any)' or the like. I can't imagine somebody playing this with a low str, but its the general way those are done.

I'd take armor training off the list, between that, the pre existing fighter bonuses, insight, and the defender bonus, it would get pretty nuts.

Psionics have been as long as I have been playing odd and in most cases vastly overpowered. A good deal of the reason they have been overpowered is because they are vastly different from the other magic in the game and thus few is anyone outside of those with Psionic powers have any defense against it.

While that was certainly true in 2nd edition, 3.0 gave equivalent defenses to monsters (anything with SR had equal PR) and 3.5 made transparency standard.

Best stuff:

Skills, obviously. In a hundred little ways skills. No more rolling twice to sneak, I can build jack of all trade characters, even at level 2, multiclass skills no longer requires advanced engineering degrees.

The races and classes are now strong enough that building custom classes and races should be easier without them being too powerful.

Sorcerers are now actually interesting to play.

Multishot is actually useful.

Power attack is now useful in more fights overall, and no longer breaks the enemy wizard in half.

Crafting Magic Items is now practical.

The bad stuff:

Grapple (and other CMB/CMD stuff but especially grapple) works better, but requires a huge feat investment, and is basically unusable before level 6.

Monks, I don't know how to fix these either though, so I'll give Paizo a pass on that.

There's still a lot of stuff that just plain requires high levels to do, even if there's no good reason for it. Magic items in particular suffer from this. (Why do you need to be level 12 to craft a feather token?)

Wouldn't it have been easier to screw with experience rewards instead of the amount needed? I had the old numbers memorized, and the new ones don't have a pattern.

Those seem like incompatible statements. I really hope we get an official answer soon, because if it is like #2, I worry that is way too much power handed to a player of non-standard PC's.

Racial hit die tend to suck, badly. Counting them as a full level usually meant that anything with racial HD was unplayably bad in 3.5. Presumably the LA (or whatever they call the equivalent) will factor the HD in, just not on a 1 to 1 basis.

I hate everyone who got to see Bestiary already.

*Waits impatiently for the PDF to get released.

Yes but we aren't using the pathfinder method here, this is homebrew.

Requia wrote:

Still has the same problem, here's supposed to be a balance between a 19-20/x2 weapon and a x3 weapon. The auto-20 or autocrit gives the x3 a big advantage.

Auto hit gives the guy with 3d6 sneak attack a big edge over the guy who doesn't, or the guy with a big weapon over a two-weapon fighter. I am willing to not worry about that level of "fairness."

Sneak attack damage doesn't multiply on crits, and big weapon/small weapon are still proportionally balanced.

My concern is more with what 'good' clerics and paladins are trying to do with their spells, and the general perception of said people about undead. The undead themselves are usually neutral (and rarely, good) but at some point somebody decided negative energy=evil.

A good solution to the light sensitivity if you want to keep if for the race is to keep it in but allow an item (there were a couple in 3.5) that nixes it. The black eye makeup (ala what football players use, or ancient Egyptians) is probably my favorite for that.

Still has the same problem, here's supposed to be a balance between a 19-20/x2 weapon and a x3 weapon. The auto-20 or autocrit gives the x3 a big advantage.

I usually keep undead in the supernatural evil category, other than that, what Kevin said.

M&M 2 has an interesting way of doing point regen that could be useful for more powerful points like you describe. In addition to the get them back with each adventure (which I'm kinda lukewarm about), whenever there's a DM Fiat (such as an unavoidable trap put in for plot reasons) the affected players all get a free point.

It generally makes my players less annoyed when I drop them into a maze or gas them and take all their stuff at the beginning of an adventure, and keeps the numbers down.

'make a hit automatically crit' might be a bit strong, if you use it with a x3 or x4 multiplier weapon... Maybe make it so that autocrits are always x2 (or increase the multiplier by 1 if applied to an existing crit).

Just make it invisibility as per the spell, with a relatively small uses per day (3? 4? not sure). Since it requires a standard action to pull off it balances, its nothing the assassin PrC isn't already doing, and as a tradeoff for reduced combat effectiveness, it gives better sneak power than just one round.

Oooh, the teleport as a swift action would be *nifty* though.

Hmm, requiring an action point would balance better, fits the flavor better (you can change and then change back if you really really need to), and its hard to be game breaking if it costs you an action point. Maybe changing costs an action point, but changing back is free.

The one thing is that not all games with Changelings actually use the Action Point mechanic.

You could also have the change require 10 minutes, to keep it out of combat, that would nix most potential exploits, and reduce the overall power of the ability, in which case 1/day + action point might balance well.

I can see one reason to change the stats at least, the new pointbuy system is keyed to having a lot of stat bonuses floating around.

For Changeling, I'd do +2 to any stat, changing it seems nice for flavor, but in practice most builds are going to have the same bonus all the time. And its just begging for a player to find a way to exploit it if it can be changed, even if I can't come up with a way.

No change to the shape change ability (possible exception, being able to take a small size fits the flavor better, and is less powerful in PF, but no stat change would be associated, perhaps as a feat?).

There should also really be some way for a changeling to have or get darkvision or low light vision, just to be able to emulate elfs/dwarves etc. Its a poor infiltrator who has trouble seeing in her persona's natural environment. Again this should probably be a feat or something for balance reasons, but I'm not really sure how to judge how powerful of an ability this is actually is.

Invisibility as a swift action + sneak attack makes this a fair bit more powered than a rogue, since it can get the sneak attack in in a lot of situations where the rogue can't, and all of the situations where a rogue can.

63, but only 4 of them are of a large size. The rest are asteroids/dead gods/other random magical debris thats big enough to be seen from the ground.