Richard McAteer's page

Our first use of smiting in game happened the other day, and while I had done some examining of the paladin's smite (and it seems reasonable there), I was rather shocked at what happens when celestial and fiendish creatures are involved in the game.

The fact that the smite is 1/day doesn't matter much to a summoned creature or an enemy, since it'll only have time to use it once. A celestial dire tiger simply mauls whatever evil thing (or worse, undead evil thing) it manages to close with, and adding one of these templates to an enemy certainly feels like it adds more than CR +1.

In particular, I'm running Age of Worms (great campaign!), but there is a Fiendish Old Green Dragon in it. Since the CR in the adventure is ~20, I have to bump the green dragon a little to match in the HP department, and it ends up being about the equivalent of a Fiendish Wyrm Green Dragon (Cr 19 by the book). Holy smokes. +3 to hit and +25 damage on every attack versus a party member until they die? That's insane. It can tack 150 extra damage onto a round of attacks if they all hit.

I guess I'm wondering how others are using the smites - do you find that celestial/fiendish summons are out of line with the power of other summons now? Do you avoid using fiendish templates on enemies?

I searched for answers, but only found old archived material.

How does multiattack work in Pathfinder? I notice some creatures in the Bestiary (an Owlbear, for example) has 3 attacks, but suffers no penalty on any of them (+8 on both claws and bite - many other examples exist: chimera, bone devils, leopards, you name it) despite not having multiattack, while other creatures like an Otyugh (2 tentacles and a bite) have the typical -5 penalty for a secondary attack, and others like a unicorn have multiattack and have the -2 penalty.

Is there a simple rule for determining whether all a creature's attacks should have the same bonus (as a bone devil has for claws, bite, and sting, or a chimera has for bite, bite, gore, claw, claw) or for different bonuses (as a cornugon has, where bite and claws are one bonus, but the tail has a -2 penalty?)

I am converting creatures and simply unsure sometimes as to whether I should bother to use a feat on multiattack if the creature would already have full BAB attacking on all its various attack forms.

Cavalier seems overpowered. Rewrote some encounters in Age of Worms using the cavalier instead of fighter-types as the base, doesn't balance well at all. Full BAB plus precision damage plus party-type buff plus a companion is just nasty, and not the same CR. Especially if you use multiple Cavaliers. As NPCs, the small size of a party makes a challenge especially powerful as not much disadvantage, since any party with a rogue will be finding ways to make the rogue effective anyway. As PCs I would have to speculate, but my guess is that it promotes rocket tag - the ability to boost offense at the cost of defence simply adds to the tendency for initiative to decide combats, and the fact that it makes parties more effective against big bosses will simply require boosting boss power to have any tension at all. To be fair, I don't like the Paladin that way either, the ability to go nova on an enemy and dish out over double a comparable fighter's damage output against evil opponents similarly makes for less impressive ordinary combats and makes the combats that should be tense less so, thanks to punching through DR and greatly boosted damage output.