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I stole a part of our character creation process from another system, though I can't remember its name.

Basically: after character creation; each player tell about an event that was important in shaping the character, the event must be at least 3 years old, but can be older.

Then players take turns telling how their character knows the character on the left. Changing the character's defining event is not allowed, but anything that fits within the campaign outline is allowed and the player on your left must now fit it into his/her story.

Why?
It gives us a group that actually works together, as well as give the game master several clues on how to involve the characters. We've even had campaigns where this process decided the entire story and everything became about the players - which was,honestly, awesome :-)

To quote the griffon: This is where we end to agree.

I like to see how crazy a concept I can make and then I usually skip it for something more ... alive. Powergaming is not necesserily a bad thing as a mental exercise, it helps gaining insight to what a system has to offer, what to avoid and what doesn't work as the flavor describe it.

I've never run a game where powergaming was a necessity, I prefer story over system and will go easy on my players if it fits the story, rules and challenges be damned. But I will NEVER actively seek ways for useless feats, archetypes and spells to become useful. It is not my job as GM to correct the mistakes of the system, especially not when I'm paying almost 60 dollers for a single book.

About thematically cool options:
This is a battle game. A friend of mine once defined 3.5 D&D (and thus Pathfinder) as a "bag 'em and shag 'em" game. This means that you go kill something to take its loot, then go back to town to spend said loot and shag a few wenches (his words, mind), then go back out to kill more stuff. All for the purpose of becomming better at killing stuff so that you can get better loot, by killing stuff.

Following that line of thought:
If the game is designed around the concept of killing things for their loot, then options that do not add to your ability to killing said things are trap options. Trap options are unnecessary and take up page space that could be used on more relevant things, such as expanding classes to make them better or more interesting.

Thematically cool sounding options:
Thematic options are pointless. All they do is lock you into a mindset where you must have a feat, talent or spell to do something that should otherwise have been fairly simple to adjudicate as game master. Thematic feats, archetypes, spells and whatnot actually serve to limit options for roleplaying characters, not expanding them.

Besides; "...thematically cool SOUNDING..." <- this is just bad. If the options sound cool they should live up to that and many, if not most of them, simply does not. You even say it yourself that you "...tend to FIND WAYS so that players actually CAN use those options ingame." It is horrible that their choice of options are not easily used into the game but that you, the game master, has to find ways for them to be used :(

So the bloat is real. The question is more if we are ready to face what it means and deal with it accordingly. Which I was not, hence I left the game behind. And no, not for 5E, I'm done with d20 in general.

I belive in bloat and I very much dislike it.

Bloat in my world is NOT more options though. Bloat is the avalanche of horrible trap options that litter the game as a toppled trashbin.

There are tons of feats, spells and archetypes that are simply horrendous, even though most of them are written to sound thematically cool.

These are the bloat, filling up the system with useless garbage that is simply a waste of pages, put there for the one reason that a book needs a certain amount of feats, spells and archetypes because that is what the buyers expect.

I won't be paying 58 dollers (I don't live in the US, making for added costs) for a book that countains a handfull of things that I like and find useful and another handfull that I hate, but my table find useful and then 2/3 of the book being completely useless because it is trap options, unnecessary rules additions and other garbage.

I have left Pathfinder behind because it was becomming bloated with horrible, pointless "options" that cost me a ton of money for a few grams of quality. In addition; I found the quality of everything after the APG to drop drastically, making each subsequent book less and less useful and interesting.

These days when I trawl the PRD for inspiration it seems to me that everyone at Paizo, their dog and their entire extended family is allowed to write feats, spells and archetypes, its just that bad.
At the same time the editing quality is also dropping steadily, making the finished product riddled with mistakes that could easily have been avoided.

So the bloat is there, not in the form of more options, but in the illusion of more options that is really just page filler and sloppy editing.

I very much doubt that you will see a new edition within the near future, maybe not ever.

As pathfinder becomes harder and harder to figure out for new players it will probably lose many of those who hang on because they might like to introduce their friends and family to the game, but cannot due to assumed rules, wierdly functioning classes, abilities, spells, monsters, magical items and what-ever else you can imagine.

As customer numbers dwindle, and they most likely will, Paizo will find themselves in a spot where they have to re-invent Pathfinder or face the risk of dying from a lack of customers.

In that case they will most likely attempt to consolidate their remaining customers, likely by lowering their prices and increasing their product output, which will not help the problem but increase it.

What do I base this on?

Well. Paizo is making their money keeping 3.5 dungeons and dragons alive. This means that they have not really re-invented anything, merely building on what was already there.

To make a new edition of Pathfinder, they would have to re-think how they do things, how they design and implement material.

The reason that this is impropable is that they have a small, but very vocal, fanbase that demands that things should remain the same. This fanbase usually point to, often unproven, claims that Pathfinder is the best selling game out there and that the fact that you can find organized play almost everywhere is an amazing thing.

What the vocal minority tends to forget is that many play pathfinder because it is the only game available near their home, while others play it out of habbit or a lack of local game stores where to find new games.

In the end, the vocal minority has, time and again, been proved to be the ones Paizo attempts to please. The company changes rules over and over again because the vocal minority is screaming about how this or that is overpowered.

And in the end, the vocal minority will be the ones standing in the way of a new edition of Pathfinder. Not necesserily because they are right, but because they are loud. And this way, Paizo's most hardcore fans may prove to be their undoing in the end.

I am not against Paizo's buisness model, though as a buisness management student it puzzles me. The way they have been doing things up to now, Paizo will not survive in the long run. They will not perish within 5 years, most likely not even within 10, but if they do not manage to re-invent their product, they will die. This isn't a matter of opinion, it is just how things are as a buisness, re-invent or die.

I have lost my love for pathfinder.

It has become too much of a mess and I found myself writing house rule after house rule, until I realised that I was attempting to write a different game.

So I did. I've left behind the clunky, math-heavy rules of the d20 system and gone in a different direction entirely and we are playing it weekly, with great enthusiasm from my players and myself :-)

For me, it all ended when magic became ordinary. Without the feeling of magic, I can't see the reason to play a fantasy rpg and pathfinder lost that feeling long ago.

Of course, that doesn't prevent me from data mining these forums every now and then for ideas, I especially like the homebrew forum for that ;)

Here lies Karg the Impaler.
Died on a wednesday,
With not a coin to his name.

Substitute Karg for any other character name as needed :-)

Will your group be covered in the spellcasting department?

If yes, then I made my GM contemplate arbitrary character murder with a Gunslinger/Magus. The build revolve around the less-than-humble pistol and - if you plan ahead to level 16, some 11 touch attacks a round.

Start out Gunslinger, focus everything on the pistol. At level 3 or 5, depending on your personal tastes, you shift to Magus to add some melee capabilities to your character.
Take 1 level of Magus if you shifted at level 3, then go back and take the last 2 levels of Gunslinger. Otherwise take at least 5 levels of Magus.
Go Alchemist 4, take the extra arms discovery. You can now enchance one of your pistols with a +2 bonus to it's usual enhancement, two-weapon fight with pistols and cast second level spells - which should be used on utility as far as possible.
Go Magus until the end of the campaign, or no more than a total of level 8, then back to Gunslinger.

You need: Pistols <- Should have as high an enhancement bonus as possible and the distance enchantment, possibly keen. A "pouch of endless bullets" with alchemical (paper) cartridges, there's and endless ammunition spell in UC, it will cost 10.000 gp. Armor, mithral breastplate is to be prefered.

At level 20 you will have: +17 base attack, 3rd level spells, 11 touch attacks a round with weapon specialization, arcane strike, and deadly aim. If done right this build will work from level 1 and put your GM in a vengeful mood around level 10, at level 14 you should be prepared to either leave town or apologise ;)

I usually sit down and build on things that happened during the session the day before, then I abandon it mid-way because of some practical chore, forget all about it for about a week and then finish it in a paniced rush a few hours before game time. Sometimes I don't finish it at all but run everything from memmory instead.

Needless to say, I've become very good at winging it and I've added an almost encyclopedic knowledge of rules and monsters to be able to keep up the charade x)

Something like that, yes.

The Barbarian chose to rage and he has some control over himself while raging, he can decide who to attack or when to end it after all.

So since he decided to rage to kill the paladin, his rage shouldn't be an excuse at all, it might even make matters worse that he somehow got himself quite worked up at the thought of slaughtering the paladin and the guards.

On the matter of him protecting his friends, I can't really see it as an excuse since he threw the first blow, choosing violence over a possible peaceful solution.

As for the int 7 argument it doesn't hold any water, being a dumb brute doesn't make it any more right to attack anyone, even if they're armed and pointing their weapon in your general direction.

As for the overall question about killing always being evil; the ansver is obviously no, there are reasons that makes it acceptable, otherwise there would be no paladins, as people has mentioned before.

A side note on paladins. In 3.5 there was a clarification of the paladin code that specified that a paladin was required to follow just law where he travled, but should he encounter an unjust tyranny he was obliged to do everything in his power to topple the tyrant and install a fair regime in his stead. I like to play with this extra because it allows paladins to actially be Lawful GOOD, instead of just Lawful :)

Attacking and killing someone simply for having a weapon drawn is an evil action, no matter what your class and int might be. The matter of it being justified or not isn't really an issue, since the alignment system is pretty black and white.

The Barbarian is probably chaotic evil, accept it and move along. In an evil group this isn't even a problem anyway, so nothing's lost. Our characters should have the alignments we play, not the ones we'd like to see on our character sheets.

On the matter of this being railroading and bad GMing ... Well. In my group we'd think of an arrest as a possibility for for adventure and roleplaying, not a forceful attempt to curb our fun, but each to their own I guess.

I'm just glad that I have at least one ocean (or a continent and an ocean depending on you going east or west) between the op and myself x)

Bestow upon him the greatest insult one can bestow upon an enemy; to be ignored <- Gotta love Mass Effect.

Don't answer him when he's being a pointless, greedy, self-serving little git, just ignore him completely and if his character attacks yours, ignore that as well.
Then when (if?) he behaves himself well enough you, include him on the same level as everyone else.

If the GM interferes on behalf of the disruptive player you now have the basics to argue that he should stay out of it in the same way he stays out of it when the guy's a problem to the rest of the group.

If the GM insists on backing the problem player still, the issue isn't one you can solve and you should just pack up and go, hard as that will be.

I have to ask: Is the problem player a close friend of the GM? And how do the rest of you stand with the guy (GM)?

I like to start small when designing worlds, a town, kingdom or other limited area, and then work from there.

I'm currently working on a setting of my own. I started out designing a small kingdom based around the kingdom from Tangled, then expanded it into the countryside, making up the populace, politics and few good places to seek adventure.

I considered what ressources the kingdom had, farmers, miners, trade partners, allies and so on and built on that for flavor and belivability. Also, trade partners and allies gave me a good idea about the nations and countryside around the kingdom I'd built, should I need to expand my adventure outside it's borders.

All that was needed is history, but I will be building that as the player's advance and explore. I have a rough idea about the background of the kingdom, but mostly as a building point for myself, not something that's too important at the beginning of the campaign.

I've tried building worlds from the top down before, but it always ended up being a mess of half-planned ideas and it was never very good. There's too much to keep tabs on, so most of it will lie unexplored and forgotten, both by you and by your players.

Look at Golarion for instance. Most of the nations in that world could be cut out and used without any relation to any of the other nations - and in many of the adventure paths they are.

Over the years I've learned that the most important thing about good worldbuilding is making your players believe in it. Nobody cares about the grand demon war 600 years ago if they do not feel the effects of it today. And having a world run by level 15+ clerics and wizards will make people wonder why these powerful individuals doesn't just take an afternoon off to destroy the bandits bothering the countryside instead of sending a group of 2nd level adventurers.

If I should give just one piece of advice it would be this: Make them believe, everything else is just windowdressing :)

They should totally make this!

The title should be ...

ULTMATE BOOKKEEPING! ;)

The most important thing you can do for yourself when playing with "veterans" is to remember that this is a group effort and while their experience can be a help, you should never allow it to become a hindrance.

This is your game, not your farther's, and your way to rp the npcs is no more wrong than the way he would have done it, it's just different.

You did good :-)

Let me get this straight; this thread is about Monks being better than fighters at high levels, I get that.

You try to prove this by posting your own monk build, of which you are obviously rather fond.

So the first premise to prove this is that the fighter builds can only be made using the Core Rulebook, because you don't want to dig around any other books - even the Advanced Player's Guide, Ultimate Magic or - more to the point - Ultimate Combat. When called out on this you admit that your system mastery isn't good enough to allow more than the Core Rulebook.

The second premise to prove your superiority seems to be to deny certain ways to use the fighter. We're not allowed to make an archer - which seems broadly agreed to be the most efficient fighter. And using shields are highly frowned upon, since most of the posts you've read about fighters are based around two-handed builds.

When someone else offers to build a monk for you, using all of the relevant books, you decline, saying that you really like your own monk build and that it is the one that this "test" is using.

Now it's looking more and more to me like you're not really here to make an argument for the Monk, but instead to make all of us appreciate YOUR Monk and how amazing he is, because you really like him.

I honestly don't think that there's anything wrong with that. Problem is that your arguments seems to be based around how you want others to build fighters the way you want them to be, so that you will prove your point to us all.

Personally, I don't think that Monks are as bad as the forums make them to be and I've seen some wonderful monks played by people who really understood how to make them shine. What bugs me about these monk love threads is how they seems to deevolve into imotional rants about how amazing monks are and how wrong everyone who doesn't like them are.

Still working on my bard build btw, it's late in my part of the world and I am tired :)

Edit: Sorry if I seem a bit condensending, it's late, I'm tired and I'm not usually known for my high diplomacy skill ;)

In the midst of all these people ranting angrily against a book they don't know anything solid about; I would like to remind the good people of Paizo of the wise words of Mark Twain:

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can be come great".

Now you can all take that anyway you want to. I, as both a player, and definately as a GM, is looking very much forward to a new book to keep my games from stagnating.

I think his name was dallarius, or danarius, or something like that. He was a nobleman of was wealth and influence, as well as being a somewhat powerful warrior. His problem was that he was hunting some artifacts to open his ancestral mausoleum and the current owners wasn't selling, so he had to be creative in his acquisition methods.

The party met him while guarding an eastern merchant, who seemed very nervous about a box he was bringing home. Of course the caravan was assaulted by bandits, which where easily defeated. Then a hill giant came lumbering in and the party had a tough fight on their hands.

During the battle, several of the players notice an odd pair watching the battle from a small hill nearby, a tall, well-dressed man and what seems to be his small, elderly assistant. The gentleman is obviously reviewing his calender.

The hill giant goes down and the group rejoice! The gentleman looks annoyed, pick up a pair dwarven waraxes and go down to attack the group. He proceeds to wipe the road with them, but he never bothers killing a character who goes down or who flees, they just don't seem important enough.

One careless, arrogant beating later and the group hates him with all their little black hearts has to offer. They still talk about him to this day, more than 10 years later :D

... choice for players to make the kind of character they wanted (with the DM recognising that that character and giving it a chance to shine).

This is where we end to agree. While I agree that people should be allowed to make the kind of character they wish to play, I also think that being expected to cater to the special snowflake character is not my job as a GM.

I'm here to tell the story about a party of brave adventures, not to make a single, sub-standard, character look good. If the party is a little raw around the edges - as it seemes in the case of the hag fight - I should plan for that, but I should never have to work harder for a single individual when I have the story, group, npc's, treasure, dungeons, etc. to think about as well.

Sorry if it seems kinda harsh, but I can't waste my time making oddball look good, that's his players job, not mine.

You sound like you're going in two different directions. Heroism and horror usually work against each other. Being a hero is mostly about saving the poor defenseless villagers, while horror is most effective when you keep the heroes confused and unable to save anyone.

How heroic are the main characters in a Lovecraft novel? They are usually curious to a fault, and often willing to go far to satisfy that curiosity, but when they encounter evil they are always more desperate than heroic. And most of them end up being insane, missing or dead as well.

I'm not speaking against horror here, I'm actually running a rather efficient horror game myself currently. But horror should be run in short adventures, not long campaigns, or it will quickly lose it's bite. Also; a good horror game should always make the players feel lost, alone and in more trouble than they can manage, which clashes loudly with feeling heroic and awesome.

If you want to run a game with heroism and horror, I recommend that you alternate between the two, with more heroism than horror. And you should really get your hands on the "rise of the runelords ap, the hill billy ogres are beautifully disturbing and horrible, while most of the ap is quite heroic, great inspiration :-)

A lot of things I can't agree with

Relax, please.

I understand the intention of the rules quite well, as, I think, do the rest.

Everything you've said thus far - as I read it at least - can be boiled down to: Mythic is meant to make characters different from the people around them. Agreed.

What those of us that disagree with you say is: Mythic is meant to make characters different from the people around them. Agreed?

Where we have a clash is in the how. You seem to think that because it's a rules set it is great and you will add the rest through narrative. That's fine, I have no problem with that. But some of us feel that a rules set that calls itself mythic should be more than just another boost in power that we then have to fit in ourselves.

If we remove how we feel about the rules from how we see them and just look at what they are, we should all be able to agree on a few things:

1. The rules add power to a character in various basic ways, ranging from bonus hit points, over bonus saves, to new abilities.

2. The feats could all have "Improved" before the name and it would be ok for everyone to have them.

3. The spells could all have "Improved" before the name and be a higher level, and it would be ok for everyone to have them.

4. Mythic points are required to activate mythic abilities.

So what it boils down to is that:

1. Power Boost.

2. Power Boost with a higher requirement.

3. Power Boost with a higher requirement.

4. Added book keeping for everyone.

How is this any different form how things are already?

The Magus and Gunslinger use points to activate abilities that wasn't available before they showed up. That didn't make them mythic.

The Ninja use points to activate abilities that wasn't available to non-spellcasters before he showed up. That didn't make them mythic.

The mythic paths use points to activate abilities that wasn't available befroe they showed up. That doesn't make them mythic.

The point is that the rules as they are doesn't feel like myth, the paths might as well have been prestige classes with high requirements and the feats/spells is a slightly upgraded copy-paste from the core rules.

The idea in itself is good, the result is bland, uninspired and, in all honesty, boring.

Hiya.

I've run a couple of playtests with my group this last week. We mostly found that the problems in the basic document has been addressed elsewhere, so I won't repeate them here.

What I would like to mention is that when we sat after the second playtest and started talking about it we all had kind of an empty feeling from it.

As we exprerinced it the Mythic rules as they are now adds some power to the game, but it doesn't add any flavor. Everything gets a boost and some new toys, but these are essentially a better version of the toys we already have, though with the added bookkeeping needed due to new
costs and new currencies.

The Spells are the same but with a little added power and so are the feats. There's no Myth, no real feeling of otherness and awe. It feels like a boring, uninspired expansion for an online game, just raising the power level without adding anything truely different or interesting.

The different paths seems interesting at first, but in effect they end up being just non-class-specific "classes" which adds some new powers to the game, feels like I might as well play a ghestalt game and dispense with doing a new form of bookkeeping.

Sorry to be a grouch, but as the Mythic rules look like now there's very little Myth and quite a bit of Ick to them and they are diffenately not living up to their name :(

Yesterday's session I ran down a burning roof and hurled myself into the air 70 feet above the ground against a greater cyclops. I grabbed his horn as I flew by, swirled around his head and landed with my feet squarely on his shoulders, holding my pistol to his head I fired a single shot - BOOM! The brute had a thick skull, so it took another shot before he slowly fell over. As he neared the ground I leapt from his shoulders and landed gracefully besides him as his corpse hit the ground.

And it was Glorious!

A Vampiric Dryad Sorceress and her Semi-vampiric awakened (Treant) oak. The fight takes place in an overgrown monestary full of dead trees, so that the dryad can move around a lot and the treant will pick up large stones now and then to toss at the ranged characters.
Also, the Treant has a clan (10) of tiny, flying fae-creature sorcerers (level 2, 4 or 6, depending on the level of the party), casting magic missiles and being a general nuissance.

Some of you guys have a funny way of thinking of what's epic. In posts like this it always seems to end up in stats and abilities and what monsters you're capable of fighting. What happened to the truely epic struggle being about heroes fighting overwhelming odds? It's not that hard to have EPIC struggles and MYTHIC tales at all levels, all it takes is the proper setting and the right mindset, not rules and statblocks.

I'm not much for epic rules myself, got enough of those in 3.0. But those of you who crave them are of course free to do so, just remember that epic play is not dependent on the title of a rulebook, it's the way you do it that really matters. All levels and monsters can be plain and dull, all levels and monsters can be mythic and epic ;)

When the little optimizer bites your game in the ass and demotivates you; you should stop, take a step back and think: "Would this look good in a movie?" If you threw a sound track on it and some sweet editing; would you want think: "Yeeeah! That's awesome!".

I play with optimizers and wannabe optimizers (who's not really very good at it ;) and all I got from my own optimization was boredom. At the end of our 3.5 days I made characters who could do anything, couldn't be killed and was generally so one dimensional and boring that it almost killed the hobby for me. So I decided to stop that and begin having fun again.

Now I tell my story the way I want it, which is very visually, fastpaced and cheeky. I have a Ranger/Magus who wears a big coat, a large hat and smokes cigars, just because it is so 80's actionhero that it's almost too much. And my ranged options is a light crossbow in each hand and more penalties than any sane gamer would accept. But it's awesome fun and I'm actually surprisingly effective when I finally get into melee with my bastard sword and sleeve blade.

What I'm trying to get to is that optimization isn't really needed to have fun. Sometimes you just stumble into a class combo or concept that rocks simply because it looks awesome when you do your thing. So throw all caution to the wind and make your game fun! Else it will become a dull chore and you'll be writing "goodbye" posts to the very powergamers you claim to be driving you from the system ;)