So we sat down and looked at the amount of money we'd need, as a rough estimate. And we went over it again, to make sure we were neither shortchanging ourselves, nor asking for unneeded funds. And we came up with figures between...

If for no other reason than to see a more Pathfinder-esque version of Darwin's World produced I'd be in on paying for a Paizo done d20 Modern resource project.

I'm seeing a pattern that's telling me that combat isn't too important in your sessions, and that's cool. But I'm also seeing that you don't like that the rogue can, with his skill point allocation, be amazing outside combat, and also amazing (by your account) inside...

Hey, nice reply. :)

The reasoning is because the rogue has a lot of spotlight moments in the game session. Not sure about other groups, but in ours the rogue is the guy up front walking down the dungeon corridor, he gets the description of the room first, his player is the one asking the questions first off about something described, he's interacting with the world more than almost anyone else through those aspects plus his contributions to the party's success with his trap detection and disarming, he's the guy who finds (or fails to find) the secret doors, he's the guy involved in appraising and evaluating each piece of treasure that isn't in a common coin form, he's quite often the best diplomacy guy we have or at least second best so he's often the character that's more loquacious and therefore positively involved in the NPC interactions. He's just got tons of opportunity to shine and be The Man during the course of an adventure.

The fighter, by contrast, rarely fits any of those roles and for some he'd never do well at all, because that's just not his schtick. His specialty is Kicking Butt In A Fight. So if I had 4 hours of "other stuff" at the game where the Rogue was pretty centrally involved in much of it and 2 hours of combat then you can see where having the Rogue slicing in at a high level of combat effectiveness would rather make the Fighter (and for that matter the Cleric and the Mage) feel rather overshadowed by their more priveleged comrade.

All in all the "nerf" we elected to do to the Rogue (allowing him Sneak Attack on the first attack of a round, not all the others) didn't make the class not worth playing to our players; he's still a fun character and as stated above gets to be The Man frequently. But in a fight the Fighter gets her turn to have the spotlight to herself in most ways.

As far as the flanking thing, how often it happens? With intelligent foes I certainly work as the GM to maneuver them so they are back to back and against walls and such to try to avoid flank situations, but it still happens a whole lot. Mainly because everyone in the party from the quarterstaff holding mage to the fighter knows that +2 (and the Rogue's sneak attack) can all too often be the difference between living and dying so they too work at it to make sure it happens as much as is possible. Admittedly, they too are often being flanked by the enemy.

I think the most positive aspect of our Rogue "nerf" is that the players themselves are generally very glad they aren't running up against Rogues who are super duper master bladesmen on a regular basis. The super duper master bladesmen in our campaign are... fighters.

Oh my lovely little thread derailed with wild discussiosn about adventure design!!! The outrage!!

Finally someone came nack to save it from a certain doom! And with a good summary of the initial problem at that.

Yeah, I've got to rescue 50 threads to make up for my threadjacking ways in the Rules forum. :)

Golden Pony, I can only say what I do in my group, so YMMV big time. My players hardly EVER resent me tossing in some ideas for the Smart Character who's played by the Not Especially Smart Player. Remember to keep that going for Wise Character too. In the past I myself have ignored the importance of wisdom to the sorts of dilemma the characters in my game face. Do we go left up into the Goblin stronghold now that we've escaped the slave cells? We're standing here in loincloths... Or do we go right, into darkness sloping down and away from the Goblin Stronghold? Into the unknown?

The GM probably knows or has a pretty good idea of which choice would be the more prudent one. If a guess has to be made then the guy with a 18 Wisdom will PROBABLY make a good one.

Lots of things like that come up in my games because we do so much city adventuring, investigative sorts of stuff. No straight linear dungeon crawls, or at least not very often. So the Strong Character has chances to show of his strength and the Wise Character has chances to show off how wise he is. Give everyone their moment in the sun, just do it in such a way to not make Not Especially Smart Player feel dumb. THAT'S the challenge. :)

Remember that it's a bell curve.
Chance of rolling 7 or below on 3d6 is only 16.2%. That's about 6 people in a line of 40.
Chance of rolling 6 or below on 3d6 is only 9.3%, so only 4 of those people are that unintelligent. Only one or two will be 5 or below.
And in a supermarket of 200 people, we'd expect to find only one 3.
That's assuming common folk don't get to roll 4d6 or arrange their stats; I'd assume that in a modern setting a lot of folks would choose Int for their best stat and give it the +2.

Thank you for this breath of fresh truth. :) Bell curve ftw.

RickA wrote:

\

You've brought up MMO's multiple times here - at least three and I'm not through the first page of this thread - as the rational behind rogues sneak attacking repeatedly. You do know that most popular MMO's came out AFTER 3.0, yes?

Yes. Moderately aware of that fact. As well that WoW Rogues aren't unique to WoW, but like much of that game at launch were based on EQ. Is there an issue with comparing combat-centric pen and paper gaming to the combat-centric nature of MMO's? It's not meant to be belittling, it's simply an observation.

4th Edition was a pretty inarguable example of the MMO Rule-ing of Pen and Paper RPG's. It's a trend I myself don't particularly like, but I can't say categorically that it's a Bad Thing. I just don't care for it.

Your case has been heard by the Court and you have been declared... the winner! Winning arguments on the internet<winning the Special Olympics.

I was very glad to see that the DPR Olympics thread was brought up in response to my original statements. No one bothered to link to it or cite its specifics, but at least it was mentioned so I was able to search it out and read the parameters and what it is (and isn't) attempting to answer. It was a very informational read and I learned a few things about both the Pathfinder rules and the mindset of some of the people who play it.

Turns out that on average a rogue will only be 90% as effective as a fighter in doling out the hurt! Hey, that makes my statement about them doing more than the fighter wrong!

Doesn't really invalidate my point, but it does make that one statement wrong in it's specifics. Here's a cookie, Perry Mason.

The insistence by all of the Fighter Haters that Rogues deserve to be at least 90% as good as fighters in doing damage is fascinating, but I have to assume there are real good reasons they feel that way, based on the sort of game they play. I know the more combat there is in a night's adventure then the more important it is that each class be fairly close to each other in combat contribution abilities, so that explains much of it I figure.

And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that. I've never said there is, and still don't. If the average 6 hour game session at your table is 5 hours of miniature combat, then that's a good thing if y'all are enjoying it. If the average 6 hour game session at my table is 1 hour of combat and 5 hours of other elements of pen and paper RPG, then that's fine too, and it's going to affect how I judge various elements of the game as far as including them or modifying them for my group. So... I run the Rogue a bit more like the AD&D Thief and a lot less like the WoW Rogue. No big deal, it works.

When the spiritual weapon swings you become visible. You're making an attack.

-James

Actually, my one attack per round Cleric is able to make his one attack per round... with his mace. While having a Spiritual Weapon spell active and while IT is attacking a foe.

And, yes, you are indeed having a summoned magical effect attack someone, but so is someone with a summoned monster. See: Dispel Magic re Summoned Monsters

It's not quite as clear cut as you state, unless perhaps you are aware of some rules that haven't been cited in this thread? That would be real handy if you did. :)

You listed specific skills. If we only have to have those skills within 10% it is possible. You did not say all the skills.

It's true I didn't itemize the classic thief skills. I assumed everyone would more or less be familiar with what they were.

And while it might be possible for a fighter to utterly gimp himself as a fighter by taking skill focus Stealth in order to be almost but not quite as good as a rogue at one skill among many the rogue is excellent at, it's not required of the rogue to gimp himself as a rogue in order to be almost as good as the fighter in kicking butt in a combat.

In some group's games there is enough of a focus on combat that this is important, in others there isn't. If you spend 5 hours out of a 6 hour game session running combats then it's probably a pretty big deal that the rogue have some pretty good combat abilities, after all he isn't do anything else during a fight except... fighting.

But if you spent 1 hour in combat and 5 others in investigation, NPC interaction, puzzling over the (insert plot hook here), and poking your noses around corners in damp underground dungeons, then it's quite a bit different.

How about this, RickA.

Since you're totally convinced of your opinion

Oh, my, the ultimate sin on the intertubz: having an opinion. :D

To be clear I've stated over and over again in this thread that there are so many variables at play in a game group that it's just foolish for anyone to tell other GM's "You ought to change the rule to..." just because it works in that group. The more combat-centric a GM is then the more it's important that every class of Character have a pretty solid combat role to play. The less combat-centric the GM then it's more important that every class has it's Adventure Role to play, which may or may not be being a significant factor in combat situations.

I believe the TWF Rogue in the DPR thread was addressed just above? Within 10% of the best fighter's damage output was, I'm pretty sure, the result.

Of course the Fighter isn't within 10% of the Rogue's various abilities, nor is the Rogue within 10% of the Wizard's ability to teleport the whole party home, and man, the Fighter doesn't heal 90% as well as the Cleric. But it's okay for the Rogue to be about 90% as good as the Fighter.

Why do you all hate Fighter's so much? ;) /snark

I noticed that the Druid ended up being the best of the bunch in the DPR Olympics, which is a pretty sad statement on the state of the game, but all those Druid players must be feeling the love.

I believe I did, AvalonXQ. The Rogue they tested had too little in equipment, pretty sure you could add another +1 to hit with the gold left over.

Making crap up and whinging about the nonexistant crap you've made up?j Wow, perhaps a chill pill will help you comrade, 'cause I'm not saying you need to change jack about your game, just saying what's worked in mine; primarily due to the playstyle of my group not being real focused on the combat elements. Just one of many elements of success in an Adventure.

If the Rogue isn't substantially better, the preferred class for the "I want to be sneaky and theifly" player, then.. what is?

Or is this just a basic continuation of the homogenization of the classes? I saw that in 4e, the first version of DnD I couldn't stand to play.

Seems like there's a fair amount of confusion over this issue due to the incorrect usage of the terms "Player" and "Character" here and there.

And the Player's intelligence and wisdom (assuming they have any) is what goes into things like making a plan, figuring out who the suspect is in this killing, and other such Adventure activities. The problem, as I understand the OP, is that in many cases the Character would have a much easier time figuring out the best course of action in a given set of circumstances than the 10 INT Player would, so how about tossing that high INT Character's Player some hints now and again to simulate the fact that his Character is really pretty smart.

Sometimes Player's resent such nudges, sometimes they don't, just depends on your group.

Really? You guys have Fighters who have Dex scores comparable to Rogues, skill points/level comparable to Rogues? Because in my Pathfinder game it seems Fighters can count on having about 2 skill points per level and Rogues 8+ per level, which pretty much blows the fighter's chance of being within about 10% of the Rogue's various classic thief abilities utterly out of the realm of possibility, doesn't it? And that "mere" +3 that the Rogue gets on all his class abilities? That's a 15% improvement right there over what the Fighter could hope to get, already putting him past the Fighter by a more significant degree than the Fighter is past the Rogue in the damage sweepstakes.

Never have seen a fighter even try to be competitive with the Rogue at sneaking, climbing walls, picking pockets, detecting traps, picking locks. There's a variety of really good reasons for that; mainly that it would be an exercise in futility.

But it's well within the scope of the vanilla rules for the Rogue to be within about 10% of the Fighter's damage output in combat. Fighting, of course, being about the only thing the Fighter is good at, his moment to shine, his chance to illustrate the value he has to the party. I mean, a 10% advantage over the Rogue is something, but is sure ain't much.

And as far as how you could probably increase the Rogue's DPR over the DPR Olympics entry? The entry that had a DPR of 56.39 was with too little GP spent on equipment and I didn't see anyone redo the build with the appropriate level of gold spent. Moving those +2 weaps to +3 for instance. Maybe I missed that entry though.

Eh, even after digging through the 850,000 pages of the DPR Olympics, I can't find evidence that the Rogue, as written, isn't completely competitive with the Fighter in doling out damage in a fight. Sneak attacking TW rogue at about DPR ~56.39 vs. TH Fighter DPR ~62-ish. And frankly the DPR on that rogue could go higher within the rules of the DPR Olympics I do believe.

Even the Barbarian can't compete with that Rogue's DPR according to the builds I've scoured over.

And that's before taking into account party wide buffs and how the Rogue benefits more from just +1 more than the Fighter will, etc.

How poor are Fighters at Picking Pockets and Detecting Traps? Are they within 10% of a Rogue's proficiency at such endevours? Because the Rogue is pretty much within 10% of the Fighter's proficiency at kicking butt in a fight.

Not to threadjack, but how often is OOC/metagame "table-talk" disallowed in games?

Zo

We used to have a serious problem with such metagame talk during combat. Inevitably the one or two players who were wargame enthusiasts dominated the rest of the group during combat, essentially giving orders to the rest of the players of what to do each round (always couched as "suggestions" that would be idiotic to ignore), or there would be 10 minute discussions about what exactly to do this round...

We wiped that out by going to an old initiative/sequence system I used probably 15 years ago where the party members declare what they are going to do this round in reverse order of intelligence, they only have about 6 seconds to tell me what they are going to do, no suggestions or talking during this phase allowed. Then we go into the action resolution in the order of initiative as would be normal.

Sure it results in some chaos when the mage was going to fireball that room and the fighter rushed into the room but chaos and confusion is what most melee's are all about, and it sure did help get rid of all that endless meta discussion and argument during combat.

Quote:

repeated references to go check out some optimized fighter builds to solve the issues instead of nerfing the Rogue

The difference between "there is no problem because these optimized fighter builds proves it" and "these optimized fighter builds would solve the problem you perceive" is essentially nill. It's certainly not enough of a difference to accuse someone of arguing against strawmen.

Of course the fighter is concerned about doing damage, it's really all he has to contribute to the success of the Adventure. He's also concerned with being able to take hits, 'cause he's going to be the one doing that if he can at all help it.

This doesn't change the fact that the primary contribution of the fighter in an adventure (not in a singular combat, done in a vacuum, but in an adventure) is his ability to kick butt and take names. As a general rule fighters are poor at being the party spokesman; lacking skill points to afford good levels of Bluff or Diplomacy or various Knowledge skills that would help them in a social situation (and a general tendency to use Cha as a dump stat). They can't heal worth a dang, they can't teleport the party home for dinner after the dungeon crawl, they can't disarm traps (except through the brute force method of just letting the trap hit them to save their lower hit point comrades), they can't sneak at all, they can barely climb a wall even with a rope unless they strip off their armor, and so on. What they CAN do is kick butt in a fight; it's all they really have.

I'm not saying a Rogue should be as poor at fighting as a Fighter is at Detecting Traps or Moving Silently or Picking Pockets. But imho increasing their "Back Stab" ability from maybe once per fight (1.0 and 2.0) to every almost single round of a fight (flanks are just that common at least in my game) then increased again to every single attack made during every round of every fight... well, when I was running 1.0 and 2.0 I never saw the horrible "Oh my, thieves are just worthless and can't be played since they don't contribute anything worthwhile" symptom that someone must have seen to justify such a dramatic increase in their combat abilities.

I understand many groups feel differently, and that's cool. What works with the playstyle of that group is what matters, certainly. Thanks to the couple of number crunchers in my group it was getting harder and harder to convince anyone that a mage or a cleric (much less a bard or a ranger or a paladin...) were worth playing at all compared to an entire party of 2H Fighters and 2W Rogues. And every combat was turning into a contest between those two sorts of builds, to see for sure which was really better at fighting. Bleh, that's a path to a boring game for anyone except the number cruchers, so we took some steps to differentiate the roles of the classes, emphasizing the unique contributions to the entire Adventure success rather than how each stack of stats and skills would run in a set piece fight.

RickA wrote:

Yes, the difference between spiritual weapon, flaming sphere, and summoned monsters seems to be nill for all intents and purposes.

So you think that a spell that makes a weapon of force that attacks with your BAB as you direct it is not an attack??

-James

Not when it doesn't use up your own Standard Action for the round and when it will continue to attack a foe without you even concentrating on it. You use a Move Action to tell it where to go, it goes there and *it* starts attacking the foe, much like a summoned creature does.

Sword of Dancing? I'd say the same thing, but the wording in the book might clarify. I don't have the book handy.

But, this thread has been added to my 1000 (and 1) reasons to remove the standard Invisibility spell from my campaign. :)

It's easy to write a background that's interesting. And nobody ever writes "Well, I worked as an iternerant farm hand without 2 coppers to my name, until I found this sword one day and became an adventurer." OK, actually, once in a while someone does write something like that.

And is an orphan. I eventually had to just flat out ban orphans in my campaign.

Int and Wis are sort of tough for players and GM's in the "soft" situations. I find Cha to be easier to deal with, I just make sure all the NPC's take the 16 Cha half elf's words in the best possible light. That whole "it's not what you said it was your tone of voice" thing, works both ways. No matter how reasonable and diplomatic the 8 Cha Cleric player is the NPC's he's interacting with tend to take what he says the wrong way or they just decide they don't like the way he looks. Well, not "no matter" since an 8 Cha isn't a 3, but you get my point.

Often I'll encourage the players to look to the cleric when they are trying to decide on a course of action. He's the wise one, after all. That player in my group isn't real aggressive with his ideas and opinions, so after the dominant player personalities hash out and argue over a plan for a while I'll sort of push them to let the Cleric decide.

It's whatever works for your group, really, but I think it does pay to sometimes look past the Player and bring out the Character.

Dispel magic disagrees with you. Just like flame sphere you cast dispel magic on the summoned monsters to make them go bye bye.

Yes, the difference between spiritual weapon, flaming sphere, and summoned monsters seems to be nill for all intents and purposes.

Note that Fireball and other such direct attacking spells are not the issue at hand. Not sure how those keep getting brought up. :)

That's very nice, but quite irrelevant since no one other than you has suggested such a thing. Please stop making strawman arguments and either cede the point or actually address what's been said.

Repeated references in this thread to the fighter not knowing how to build their character, repeated references to go check out some optimized fighter builds to solve the issues instead of nerfing the Rogue (not that the fighter has the option of redoing his character from scratch in the middle of a campaign), and so forth. That's not creating a strawman, that's um... sort of directly addressing various semi-snarky suggestions that the fighter player is an incompetent boob compared to the player of the dual rapier ninja monkey rogue. Certainly didn't MEAN to go creating strawmen to argue against, there's plenty of actual points of fact to debate and consider without making up new ones. :)

GM: Your Invisiblity drops, you attacked.
PLAYER: No I didn't attack. My Fighter just moved his sword through him! Its a move action!

Pretty sure moving a sword through an opponent is officially classified as an Attack, not a Move Action. : )

Any GM trying to tell any other GM how they "ought" to run their game is on a fools errand, I completely agree with that. Each group is very different and like I pointed out above the degree to which combat dominates the game sessions is going to a very large factor in determining many issues such as the one under discussion here.

There's all of those other elements as well, such as many examples of damage and such being at 10th level whereas our campaigns rarely go higher than that, many of them run for months and months before even 5th level. All sorts of variables that can be a factor for decisions various GM's make about their games.

The "they don't know what they are talking about" is one factor, but I feel it's likely overstated. I'd well bet that in many cases the GM and players well understand the rules as written but feel they are in some cases a serious problem for their games.

4th Edition DnD doesn't work for every game play style, for instance.

I still don't feel the answer to any issue with Rogue damage output is "The fighter players aren't playing one of the premium optimization routes that have been mathematically calculated to squeeze the maximum DPS from the class". In an MMO or other computer game, sure. But in pen and paper? In our game there's supposed to be more to the weekly session than computer RPG or MMO with truly crappy graphics (that 6 sider is a troll? Really?)

Of course you are correct that Rogues may receive these buffs, and they may gain more from these buffs than a fighter because the fighter is already hitting reliably.

That is sort of the point, in our experience. Yes, they all get buffed, but the Rogue benefits more from it. They have access to the same set of buffs that the fighter does, but benefit more from them. It's been our experience that you get more bang for your buck buffing the rogue than the fighter.

I notice that the comparisons for combat functionality (I assume that's the point of the comparisons) are all like "short sword dual wielding fighter" and "2H Falchion fighter" and such. There is a great variety of gaming groups out there, I must admit. I've never seen such in my games; we do have quite a few long sword and shield fighters though.

But the dual wielding rapier focused monkey ninja rogues were going to become a real problem in our game, both on the PC side and (most importantly) on the NPC side.

In much the same way that we house ruled the tumble/acrobatics ability to remove the ability to actually tumble through an enemy occupied square. My players decided, quickly and eagerly, to forgo such in-melee-silliness themselves if I promised not to have acrobatic troupes of Fire Giants bounding over the front line to massacre the squishy targets at the back of the party.

How do rogues increase their attack bonus in your experience? Druids have Wild Shape, Bards have Inspire Courage, Heroism, Good Hope and Haste, Clerics have Divine Favor, Divine Power and Righteous Might and Monks have Flurry of Blows.

Really? What magical items and/or buffs cast by the Mage or Cleric or effects granted by a Bard will increase a Rogue's base attack bonus? Really?

The rogue isn't operating in a vacuum, dependent entirely on just his own skills and stats, at least not in my game very often. When preparing for a fight or when divying up the magical loot the Fighter doesn't always get the Gauntlets of Ogre Power, sometimes the Rogue got that bit of loot because the Fighter wanted the +4 chain mail that was also in that treasure horde. The Cats Grace buff cast on him before the fight threw another +2 onto his attack bonus going in, and so on and so on.

Like I said above, much depends on the style of gaming the particular group is doing; if the adventuring is 90% combat time then equalizing damage output among the classes is going to be important. One should consider making sure mages can cast their essential damage spells every round instead of 3 times a day, and so forth.

If Sneak Attack was only allowed in the more traditional situation, such as the rogue is successfully oh... say... SNEAKING, this would be a non-issue at my game table. But since they changed the rules to allow "Sneak" Attack every time a foe is flanked as well as any of dozens of situations where the target has lost its Dex bonus to AC? Well, that's a seismic shift in the balance of combat. A shift which didn't make sense in the gaming we do at my table, considering that combat is very much not the primary focus of what we do during our weekly game sessions.

Ah, so in addition to nerfing the rogue's sneak attack, I assume fireballs are limited to 3d6 and clerics simply cannot target enemies with their spells?
Or are rogues the only characters whose combat capabilities got completely eliminated?

Well, if the mage was able to cast an 11d6 lightning bolt attack 6 times a round 854,225 times a day I'd probably end up making a house rule on that too after playing with it a little while as written.

The obsession with Combat capabilities as the primary contribution of a particular class is an unfortunate side effect of the MMO-ing of pen and paper gaming, imho. The rogue has many other contributions to make to the adventure success (note: adventure success, not just combat success) than what they can dole out in the fights that occur. Obviously the style of the gaming group is a big factor. If a group runs combat after combat and that is the primary focus of what they are doing at the game table, ala MMO gaming, then DPR equalization is much more critical to ensuring each player feels they are contributing equally. This was the thinking behind 4th Edition as far as I can tell. If the group runs a lot of social interaction, investigative endevours, role-playing, and general dungeoneering as well as combat then that changes the dynamic as well.

The rogue gets to be The Man many times in a typical adventure, at least as we run our games, without being a dual wielding flying monkey ninja.

Obviously YMMV. :)

I'm curious about the parameters of that test. Since there are a great deal of variables at play there's no way I can even think of to state flat out that Rogues don't out damage fighters, or vice versa. What is the AC of the foe? If it's a high AC lower hit point sort of creature the Fighter will have an advantage over the rogue in damage output. If it's a low AC high hit point sort of foe the rogue turns into a La Machine, giving a completely different set of resulting numbers.

I have no doubt that in specific situations that a Paladin can out damage a Fighter, that a Fighter can out damage a rogue, and so forth. But in our experience fighting orcs, goblins, human thieves and bandits, Hobgoblin slavers, and other assorted nasties, the rogue stomps the fighter in damage output except in encounters such as the undead. And the answer isn't "your fighter sucks at his build"

Even under the normal rules, the rogue isn't competitive. Off all the medium BAB classes, only the rogue is unable to increase its attack bonus.

In our experience that isn't the case, but I expect it depends very much on what levels you tend to play at, what sort of foes you tend to encounter, and whether or not every fighter uses utterly optimized builds and whether or not every rogue uses utterly optimized damage builds.

As mentioned above, there is no power on on earth or in heaven or hell that's going to give a fighter of any level 6 attacks that do 11d6 damage each in a round. That fact will be mitigated by campaign specific factors such as I mentioned above, but it's certainly something to look at when wondering why the fighters are fairly constantly getting their thunder stolen in combat by the rogues.

We're run it with the "Rogue gets sneak attack on first attack of full round attack only" since 3.5 came out and I've yet to have a rogue player feel like he/she didn't contribute to the success of the party in an adventure. They don't kick butt in combat as much as the fighter, but like I said above the fighter doesn't disarm traps worth a crap either, so it works out.

RickA wrote:

There ya go then, that's pretty definitive. So, Spiritual Weapon and other Summoned effects will break standard Invis.

Summoning spells won't. The Summoner is giving the order to a creature he brought there. Technically it's the creature's action since he's a separate entity.

That's my justification anyway. Makes sense fluff wise, but rules wise it's a nightmare.

Ah, yes. My reading comprehension skills are suffering a negative this morning. :)

I am so glad I don't have the standard Invis spell in my campaigns.

RickA wrote:

We house-ruled this a long time ago to only allow the first attack the rogue makes per round get the sneak attack bonus. That still gives them some pretty good damage output, without putting the fighters, clerics, and mages to shame constantly.

Unless you also house-ruled that monsters should all have ridiculously low ACs or rogues get +10 to hit when flanking, you just put fighters way above rogues in combat capability.

Agreed. The Rogues ARE still far better than fighters at disarming traps and sneaking and hiding in shadows. And the Mages are far better than fighters at Summoning Monsters and Teleporting. And the Cleric just blows the Fighter out of the water at healing damage too.

"Kicking Butt In Combat" is all the fighter does, that's his thing. He should be better at it than anyone else, not "competitive". The other classes have their things they are far better at than fighters are.

There ya go then, that's pretty definitive. So, Spiritual Weapon and other Summoned effects will break standard Invis.

RickA wrote:

meatrace wrote:

So all I have to do is quicken a spell to make it not qualify as an attack?

Seems like the ones that are Standard Actions to inflict on your enemies, whether AoE or not, are considered attacks. Casting a Wall of Flame which your foe then attempts to go through isn't an attack that makes you become visible either, by my reading.

Honestly, the entire subject doesn't come up in my games. I neither inflict on my players not allow them to inflict upon me the abomination known as "Invisibility". There's the high level Improved Invis and that's it, no fuzzy questions and no problems.

How would you have run it if the number of people in the radius exceeded the amount healed? Assuming a 4 character party, a level one cleric would need to roll a 4 (or a three if he's excluding himself) for any healing to happen at all. More than six people and no healing would have been possible.

The lack of such a rule paragraph under Channel Energy is why I can't say "for sure the rule means a total of 1d6 divided among the potential targets". If there was such an explanation of how to divide out the healing/damage then the question would never have arisen.

The "Sleep" spell does detail how you divide out that magical effect among the potential targets in the Burst Area of Effect, the "Fireball" spell does detail that EACH target in the Burst Area of Effect takes the full damage. The section on Channel Energy does neither.

I fully concede the "xd6 PER person in area" is the way they meant the rule to read, James Jacobs who posted up above is, I believe, an official voice of authority on the subject, plus the anecdotal statements from players here about how it is run at organized Pathfinder events is plenty good enough for me. But would it kill them to toss a single sentence into the Errata on the subject? :)

I don't see that exact wording "making an attack roll" I see "The spell ends if the subject attacks any creature." I'd personally say that intentionally moving a flaming sphere into a square occupied by an enemy with the intent of hurting said enemy would be an attack. Any spell that calls the intent of the caster into play is going to be slippery.

Except it's not an Attack, it's a Move Action by the caster. That's relevant, is it not? I know the word "attack" and the technical term "Attack" are being conflated here, but they shouldn't be.

The mage directing a flaming sphere to move into an enemy is not making an Attack, he's making a Move Action. Therefore his invis doesn't drop. At least that's how I read the OP's question. The distinction with a Move Action vs. an Attack is relevant.

Then I dont think you really read the rules that well in 3.5 because that flanking rule pre-dates that Pathfinder changes.

I was unclear; when I said the requirements for making a sneak attack were lowered to the point of laughability I did not mean to imply "lowered by Pathfinder", I meant "lowered from 1.0 or 2.0 or I believe even 3.0". Lowered to be easier than in any time in the last 25 years of pen and paper gaming. Rogue Love, feels more and more like WoW all the time. :)

Stuff like "6 attacks with 11d6 damage each" might sound like a lot, but ignores all the disadvantages a rogue has: He needs to sneak attack in order to get that sort of damage

I'd say it's grossly overpowered, since no method short of attaining some sort of godhood is going to give a Fighter the ability to dole out "6 attacks with 11d6 damage each" in a round of combat. And the requirements for making a "sneak" attack were lowered so dramatically that they are almost laughable now. I mean, just flanking? That's all? In my games flanking occurs constantly, the fighters work to get into the flanking position for bonuses to hit, everyone tries to. You can pretty much assume that the flanked condition is going to come up, it's not like it's rare.

We house-ruled this a long time ago to only allow the first attack the rogue makes per round get the sneak attack bonus. That still gives them some pretty good damage output, without putting the fighters, clerics, and mages to shame constantly.

Channel energy does not divide its healing up among its targets any more than fireballs divide up the total damage among its victims.

When you generate a number by rolling a bunch of d6s when you use Channel Energy, that number is applied as healing to everyone in the area of the effect.

Effects that divide their damage/healing evenly among all targets are INCREDIBLY rare. I can't think of any, off the top of my head, that work that way in Pathfinder. Needless to say, if an effect DOES do this, it'll be specifically spelled out in the rules, since the baseline assumption is that area effects affect everyone in the area equally—no division needed.

And that's the way we've been playing it, since the preponderance of opinion we could find was that the rule meant to say "heals each person in the area of effect xd6".

As stated above, since there is longstanding precedent for both dividing a spells effectiveness among the area of effect targets as well as doling out the effect to each target in the area of effect we couldn't just assume one way or the other.

Even the rules on Fireball specify that it does "1d6 points of fire damage per caster level (maximum 10d6) to every creature within the area", not assuming that the default burst spell rule is that every creature takes this damage individually; it spells it out to make sure there's no confusion.

Channel energy's wording is distinctly not the same as Fireball; it's also not the same as Sleep.

Eh. We run it with the Upscaled Cleric Power interpretation; like I said that's the preponderance of opinion and I know of no reason to flat out deny that interpretation, certainly. At this point I just wish the rulebook had used the word "to each" if it meant "to each".

All in all we're enjoying our Pathfinder campaign, finding it a good upgrade from DnD 3.5 though there are inevitably some quibbles with rule additions/changes that are incorporated. I'll address the "Mounting a Horse doesn't evoke an AoO" in some other thread. :D

Here this might help.

Under Channel Energy there is the following: "Channeling energy causes a burst that affects all creatures of one type (either undead or living) in a 30-foot radius centered on the cleric."

Notice the that it is a burst effect? So what does bursts do? Well under magic it is defined as follows:
[edit for brevity]

Note the line that say ta burst spell affect whatever it catches in it's area.

Rise, zombie thread! Rise and wreak havok!

Hi, Pathfinder people. I'm Russell's GM and though this discussion happened many months ago I'm really pretty proud of how Russ argued my point here cogently though he didn't agree with my point. He is, after all, one of the players in my game and would much prefer the healing do MORE healing not less.

The question remains unanswered; though I see that the prevailing opinion is that only a moron could fail to understand the rule as written. :-D

The most common defense of the interpretation "heals 1d6 to EACH living creature" instead of "heals a TOTAL of 1d6 to the living creatures" is that there is no precedent for dividing a spell's effect among the potential targets in a burst spell area of effect. "Fireball" being the prefered example to show this. Please refer to the spell "Sleep" so that we can stop that line of debate entirely. There is clear precedent for a magical effect being divided among the potential targets within a burst area of effect. I'd like to repeat that four or five times but I won't.

The wording of this passage in the rulebook is unclear, regardless of what various players see "crystal clear" when they read the passage. It does not say that the total amount healed is 1d6, it also does not say the total amount healed is 1d6 x (number of bodies in 30' radius). It can quite legitimately be read either way, unfortunately.

Adding in to the confusion is the addendum that the channeling cleric can exclude himself from the effect; why would a party cleric wish to exclude himself from this healing effect unless, of course, it was going to soak up some of that "total 1d6" healing that he's trying to dole out to his injured comrades (again, see the "Sleep" spell for specific precedent on such division of spell effect on a Burst AoE)? Now, that's not a solid confirmation that the "Total of 1d6" interpretation is the correct one, but it is a leaner in that direction.

Whereas I can find no equal leaner in the rules to push me in the direction of "1d6 per target".

When a 3rd level cleric can cast 6 or 7 area of effect healing blasts, with no AoO chance against him, no chance of spell failure due to casting on the defensive, and at far lower level than even the weak "Mass Cure Light Wounds" spell, I'm forced to examine the rule and make sure I'm seeing it right. We're talking about a significant uprate in the effectiveness and power of the Cleric class compared to 3.5 or 3.0 or 2.0 or 1.0 if it's read as "per target" but not so much if it's read as "total healed". And with any significant uprate of power for a character class it's always prudent to make real sure you're reading it right; that's what brought this up at our game table.

I'm a conservative GM, I admit that freely, and tend to prefer to follow the rules of the games we run as written unless I have extensively play-tested them and determined they are borked (and we all know of at least some rules in just about every RPG where that is the case). We haven't play-tested Pathfinder enough to have a solid feel for this particular rule in both the "stronger" and "weaker" interpretations, so we want to rely on the book rule itself, which, as I said above, isn't clearly written.