Saffron Marvelous's page

When I feel like they're playing it like a videogame where they try to exhaust every dialogue tree. I dunno if I'd call what I do nudging though, usually I just mention some options when I ask what they're all doing. Like "is anybody following up on X." Otherwise, if I feel like they've missed something or they're lost, I'll just sum a few things up as I'm asking questions. I think it's fair to remind players of things their characters should know too.

I dislike games sitting at a standstill.

I once did a dungeon for a fresh PC group that was very pointedly videogamey (an ancient king wanted a cool tomb, but he didn't have the resources or support for massive public works, so he sank what he did have into a cheapo malfunctioning demiplane that worked like a bethesda game). One stretch of it had the players cross over tiles that activated different traps. One of the "safer" types of tiles would hit them with a will save which, if failed, forced them to reveal an embarrassing secret out loud and then flipped all the tiles to something different, which caused chain reactions. It was an extremely entertaining way to get everyone talking about their backstories right out of the gate.

It's not an action economy thing, it's a specific rule that says you can't use style feats before combat begins. I'd be inclined to allow using them for the most part, but probably not for having always-on-blindsight at level 3.

Saffron Marvelous wrote:

. . .

Swift death to evil
. . .

So... Aku Soku Zan?

Yeah, that's the one

I mean between Blind Zeal and the blind fight tree, you're still gonna come off pretty much fully functional blind. Personally, I think it's more interesting to be a bit unassuming and then bust out the full sensory array and kung fu the moment combat starts. More Zatoichi than Daredevil.

Style feats can only be used in combat?

Yeah there's a specific rule on it that you can't activate them before combat begins IIRC. I mean you could probably talk your GM into it, but then always-on blindsight is pretty strong too.

Well your style feats require you to be in combat before you can activate them at all, and Greater Blind Fighting probably negates some edge cases of concealment that Blindsight doesn't, but it's not an enormous advantage at this point, no. If you *really* want to corner the effortless blind master role, it covers you if you're out of combat and want to catch flies with chopsticks or something.

I don't like alignment, so I usually pick some maxims to play a character by. Kanarith Braevin, my Eldritch Knight (via Arcanist and Swashbuckler) happens to have exactly three she goes by:

Suffering to betrayers
Mercy to the conquered
Swift death to evil

That might not be in the spirit of what's asked for though, so a more elevator pitchy three details might be: Ambitious former magistrate spent too long contemplating the Void and fell out of the world.

For my human reach fighter, Lucinda: Last scion of noble family realises her forebears were dicks, trades social Darwinism for justice. I think that counts as three?

For my ridiculous Anima Beyond Fantasy warlock: Frighteningly intelligent insecure teenager never met an energy field she wouldn't consume. Saffron was a fun character to play

My Double Cross character, Action Mask (Morpheus/Black Dog): Classic tokusatsu superhero showing a lot of zeerust makes a big comeback anyway

Can I do the opposite? I gave my players a doorknob that would make doors in things they attached it to. Eminently useful, you'd think. It's not like this group hasn't totally exploited unique items I gave them before.

They completely forgot they had it multiple times.

Which was a shame, because the doorknob was a full on One Ring tier artifact that, after some time, was going to trap them in a labyrinth of doors and do some crazy stuff I hadn't decided on yet.

I enjoy running at silly high levels quite a bit. It lets me throw really absurd circumstances at players. I've been thinking of running a level 20, MR 10 game and what I might do to give it a feedback loop in the absence of leveling up or having much need for common loot.

Otherwise, the whole range of levels is pretty good. I like starting at level 1 because it's the best way to get a good group dynamic going. Level 6-8 are nice because it's where most characters have the core elements of their basic algorithm put together such that they can start to function the way they want to function. Everything after that is just fun expanding on your playstyle.

For a high level villain, I had a lich's phylactery be an adamantine golem with the addition of a weaker lich's phylactery (who'd been a fakeout villain for this guy to come in and beat) wired into it so that he had access to their divine spellcasting (though the golem couldn't spellcast).

My rule for him was that every hour he spent active as a golem added a full day to his regeneration time because of the strain it put on him. I had the soul-containing bits of the phylactery be points of relative weakness that could be attacked with called shots to bypass half its DR.

I mostly did it to give him one last little gotcha at the players before he'd escape and show up in a later campaign, but they managed to run him down and destroy it.

A house or dungeon as a phylactery sounds like a great idea. It'd be like the derelict Reaper from Mass Effect 2 that made people go crazy with its architecture.

Slay Evil isn't the arrow's damage or a damage bonus on the arrow. It's a death effect attached to the arrow.

Thistle arrows don't "convert" damage to bleed, they just inflict bleed damage.

It's mostly hard to get specific records because no one cared to write down what, effectively, peasants were doing. There were certainly trained spies and saboteurs doing all sorts of things, and the term "shinobi" was in use for people who did those kinds of things. The big question is if there were these secret connected fraternities that did that stuff or what, and I don't know that there's a lot of evidence for it either way that comes from before the Edo period, but it's not unthinkable either.

Anyway, something I just remembered that I didn't think of before is fire. Pretty much anything that makes fire is a good fit for ninja. Setting fire to stuff is one of the more "realistic" things for a ninja to do, and I'm sure that's why they always have fire magic in anime and stuff.

"Real life" ninjas could refer to anything from informants to guerillas to warrior monks, so it really depends. I suppose a hat of disguise is probably useful across the board. Anything that lets you speak with plants or animals should be super useful too.

VoodistMonk wrote:

SheepishEidolon wrote:

It can be tough to convince a player that they are smart enough to be fine even when they don't take "TEH BEST" options.

It took me a while to learn this for myself.

Yeah, same here. I spent quite some time and energy on optimizing eidolons and sneak attack before I realized I could go for other goals, too.

@Saffron: I offer my players free retraining unless they try to abuse it. So switching class to a related one in the middle of a campaign is ok if discussed with me, but changing favored enemies every other session is not. Worked pretty well so far.

I am not happy with the concept of "retraining HP" - since it seldom means an interesting choice. Taking these additional HP is an obvious decision, unless downtime is limited and there are competing options of equal (or superior) value. Obvious choices shouldn't be choices at all - so I rather give them full HD or go with PFS rules for HD, with no HP retraining allowed.

Finally, if they want to develop new powers against an overwhelming challenge, they can level up elsewhere or get themselves some items. The kung fu protagonist's improvement could also be explained with a level up.

It almost never can because leveling up makes next to no sense outside of games that use it. Imagine if Rocky training to box right handed meant that he locked himself out of the training he did for Drago because he'd spent a couple levels on abilities to win one fight (which he ended up not even using). For that matter, you don't have level ups on demand. You can go retrain a feat in a handful of days, you can't just level up on demand. You would only ever hamstring yourself that way. Retraining gives players a chance to do some different things, and honestly makes more sense than leveling up anyway.

The only weirdness with retraining in that respect is that you lose something.

As for retraining HP, that's down to personal taste. I like it because it helps prevent animosity from forming between players getting good rolls and players getting bad rolls, but also because it gives them a reason to seek downtime and lets me throw bigger and badder monsters at them longterm.

As for abusive, I mean what's abusive here? If they're not retraining into builds that would be broken anyway, what's actually abusive? It's not like you can just do it in the middle of a fight. If you come up against a monster that's immune to your best move and you don't think you can win, so you flee and use the new information to practice a new trick without having to go do a bunch of arbitrary encounters to level up, that's just like, engaging with the problem on a higher level than just pass/fail. Like that's something I *want* players to do. Or research the dungeon beforehand, find out there's a monster immune to fire there and retrain your magical lineage to admonishing ray or something. I can't see how this is worse than trying to level grind.

The most egregious retraining thing I can think of on the spot is spending a month to swap out four feats for dimensional savant the instant you get access to dimension door, and I don't think that's terribly unreasonable. As far as magical lineage goes, I mean, I struggle to think of why I'd put it on anything high enough level to merit retraining as opposed to having it on something like shocking grasp or scorching ray that I can just use over and over again forever. Otherwise, the main reason I can think of to swap something like that around is like if I picked scorching ray and the GM decides to spend the next year of sessions making me fight the efreeti mafia

I don't really get the animosity toward retraining. Level progression is inflexible and retraining gives you some space to get around that. I don't want someone to have to gamble on whether a campaign is going to reach a certain level to take an ability that will otherwise be a waste.

It fits narratively too. Like how many kung fu stories are there that follow the basic arc of guy gets defeated by technique, goes away for a few days and trains a new move specifically to beat that technique, comes back and wins. It's like half of them. It makes sense for characters to be refining their moves to suit their situations as they go

Personally, I usually just let players change their builds if they want, and save retraining for maxing out HP and stuff. I mean I guess if someone came to me wanting to change their Magical Lineage constantly I'd probably shut it down (why would you even), but usually it's gonna be like, once. Otherwise it just depends what they want to do and how it will affect the game. Magical Lineage is usually doing its best work on lowish level spells anyway.

Anyway, as far as the topic is concerned, it's been said that it works by RAW, and I agree with that.

Saffron Marvelous wrote:

I do think At Will is pretty bonkers, especially since a lot (or maybe all) of the creatures that have it ALSO have pretty good SR, making them difficult to anchor. Even at like 6/day, it'd at least be predictable. For that matter, do any GMs out there actually take full advantage of the silliness At Will GT allows? I've gone so far as to have ambushers bip in and dump a whole load of AoE junk on a sleeping party, and that's not anywhere close to what *could* be done. So it really feels like an ability that the GM has to actively hold back on abusing anyway, so I don't see any particular need to drop CR for a nerf that really just brings it more in line with how GMs actually use it anyway.

Anything that teleports at will doesn't walk anywhere at my table. *poof* *poof* *poof* everywhere.

That's more flavour than actually utilizing at-will GT to its fullest extent. You could do the visual part of that with a whole host of weaker abilities too. To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying whether you should have unlimited GT or not, just that nerfing it isn't a reason to reduce CR as was suggested, so exclusively dealing with conflict. I'm suggesting that a GM actually using at-will GT to greater tactical effectiveness than say, 3/day GT is pretty rare because the things you're doing at that point have about 50/50 odds of basically being just you narrating how the players die.

So who cares if you nerf it down to 3/day unless you were seriously planning on doing something like scry-and-frying an entire PC group individually while they're in bed, unarmed, and alone.

I do think At Will is pretty bonkers, especially since a lot (or maybe all) of the creatures that have it ALSO have pretty good SR, making them difficult to anchor. Even at like 6/day, it'd at least be predictable. For that matter, do any GMs out there actually take full advantage of the silliness At Will GT allows? I've gone so far as to have ambushers bip in and dump a whole load of AoE junk on a sleeping party, and that's not anywhere close to what *could* be done. So it really feels like an ability that the GM has to actively hold back on abusing anyway, so I don't see any particular need to drop CR for a nerf that really just brings it more in line with how GMs actually use it anyway.

If you're running something pre-written with no modification, then well that's kind of it. Any kind of module is going to have some content that players are built to trivialize, so if you don't want to change the traps, then just make peace with them being ineffective. You can say they're present and just remark that the unrogue deals with them trivially if that's the route you want to go. Sometimes I do travel sequences where I give a little description that tells the players they have some minor encounters that aren't dangerous enough to merit playing so that I can get to the actual challenges.

If it's specifically an issue with trap spotter, you could talk to the player about dropping the feat because it's not appropriate for the game.

Nothing wrong with scaling the DCs for that matter, though I'd communicate it to your players so that they know you're going to be expecting them to be more careful.

Disable device doesn't have to be a one-step trap solution. In fact if it's being used a lot, you really should expand on those situations so that they don't get boring. A more complex trap could require something specific to disable it or a particular series of actions. How do you just disable an Indiana Jones type trap where the mechanism is inaccessible and the trap activates from breaking a beam of light? Have a mechanism in mind and make them figure out how to approach it.

Or disabling a particular trap might necessarily cause some other issue. As long as they feel like their perception and disable device are getting them somewhere, you're allowed to put in a hard barrier. You can switch to using hole-in-the-ground type simple traps as something more like set dressing than actual challenges, but then have traps with complex switches like say a trap in a wizard's tower that needs an arcana roll to suss out some aspect of the design and disable completely and you'll let them try UMD but either way now you've got them onto less specialized skills that either involve more members of the group or force them to use skills they're less specialized in. Or a minor illusion conceals some crucial part of the mechanical trigger so that at the very least they need to make a will save.

You could have some cunningly set up sequence where the rogue's skills let them deduce that disabling one trap will set something else off and now they have to figure out what that thing is before they do it. There could be a trap with a manual trigger activated by someone watching from pick-a-safe-viewing-place, or a wandering monster that's figured out he can catch things to eat if he steps on a particular stone while the PC is standing in a particular spot. So the rogue sees the trap and maybe even starts disabling it and a successful roll just tells them someone could be pulling the trigger on it *right now*, giving them a chance to get out of the way, but leaving the problem intact

The 2e spell Multiplicity works.

Imagine being the wizard using this or simulacrum or something with similar requirements and you have to keep going out and commissioning all these really expensive figurines of yourself if you don't have the craft skill for it and everybody just thinks you're this weird vain guy

They're not anything too special. Generally I'm just trying to let players feel like they're being whatever fantasy junk they want to be. I'll usually base how much power I'm going to put into a template on what level a game is starting at. At low levels where racial templates can make a big difference, I try to get little things in for theming that feel like bonuses but don't unbalance things too much, and I'm stingier with more experienced players. A couple years back, I started a level 1 campaign where a player wanted to play something loosely similar to Yuanti (we were mainly going for "snake person, race generally perceived as evil").

I don't have my "snake person" template written down anymore, but I think it was something like Monstrous Humanoid (shapechanger subtype) +2 str/int, 60 foot darkvision, venomous bite attack (I think I had it do con damage),+2 stealth +2 swim, ability to shapechange into a snake, access to the kitsune shapechanging feats but for snake junk instead.

So a bit more than a standard racial template, but not in such a way as to blow level 1 gameplay right out of the water for the other players. At least not aimed that way. But to do it with RP would be... quite a bit, and there's a couple bits I don't think you could get. Not that there's anything wrong with RP, I just find that it's easier for me to make something for a player than try to figure out a fair amount of RP to give them that lets them get what they want.

From memory, another I did was a harpy template. My setting has a sect of harpy monks (founded by an old matriarchal harpy who is suppressing the soul of a dracolich that tried to revive itself through her because birds are basically reptiles), so they're a little more present in civilised places. A player did make one but no one ever got around to playing one. I think I did +2 dex, +4 cha (idea being this made them really effective scaled fist monks), -2 int, +1 natural AC, fly speed 60 (good), Captivating Song same as the monster (generally I let 1/2 level count as racial HD for save DCs since no one is taking monster levels for the sake of one ability and this still lets it function), LLV, 2 claws (1d4), +2 perception, +2 fly. This would have been starting at level 8, so the captivating song would have been situationally nice, but not terribly busted.

Lets see, my personal campaign setting has a wide variety of insectoid races, including a number of thrikreen-like mantis ones. One such variety is a bunch of families of scheming vizier types who've been controlling their breeding for generations to get better psychic abilities. They're smaller and prettier; they look like orchid mantises (think Salarian in how they deal with each other, Asari in how they deal with everyone else). I won't bother with the nitty gritty stat stuff, but their biggest thing is their "Voice." In my setting, some of the insectoid races have a low level telepathy that lets them communicate in languages they understand without having the right mouth parts to use those languages. These guys take it to a higher level where use of their Voice makes all the words come out exactly right, slick as oil every time, so they get considerable bonuses to social rolls against anyone who doesn't actually speak their private language. It doesn't work on people who do, because they hear the words as they're spoken. A player wanted to play as one, so I did up a template for it and formalized the bonuses.

It's like when you get up during a movie and when you come back the credits are rolling

Completely forget to screw a PC over for taking a profane gift from a Succubus. Group was level 14ish, I believe. They'd killed a bunch of demons, so I had this succubus I named Calliope appear to the party's mysterious stranger gunslinger in a dream and be like hey wow *hairtwirl* you just killed my ex, let me give you some stat bonuses. The player took it, knowing full well that I'd be bringing it back, and because profane gifts give the succubus mental contact with you, she just kind of became his headmate and was doing various things with that.

So the idea was that at a very critical moment in the campaign's climax, Calliope was going to blackmail him (she had access to his daughter) into throwing the final battle to ingratiate herself with the villain, and if he said no, she'd pull her gift and send him into the final battle with crippling cha damage (mysterious stranger, and he had various things specced to cha, so this would be bad).

Completely slipped my mind with everything going on at the end of the campaign, so we've got a series of jokes about this now, like she got up to go to the bathroom and then the campaign was over when she got back. Or she's a succubus who took a bunch of fighter levels and is actually really bad at subtle machination.

On the subject of demons I had a planar-binding-summoned Nalfeshnee and a bunch of lesser demons being employed by a high level villain. When the players killed the Nalfeshnee, he had a contingency go off that poofed his body and left behind a box of chocolates with a little "no hard feelings" note and a little advertisement suggesting that if your enemies are siccing demons on you, maybe you should have demons on your side too, instructions to contact one of his quasit slaves to make a deal. Everybody thought that was pretty funny.

If someone wants to run a weird race or something, I'll come up with a suitable template for them (I don't mind letting them build with RP, but the way RP is organized usually means they're going to get a better template if I just make it for them) and plunk their race down somewhere in my setting. I generally just let gunslingers have revolvers because I hate having to make someone who wants to play a cowboy inexplicably use a flintlock for the first few levels, but I also have slightly different rules for guns in general. Otherwise if starting a level 1 group, I don't do a whole lot for characters before gameplay starts. Once we're in-game, I'll do all sorts of bonuses and junk as part of the game's story.

As far as rolling vs point buy goes, stat generation is like five minutes of your campaign no matter how complicated you make it, so precisely which dance you do to generate your arrays is like the least important thing ever as long as it's getting you the range of arrays you want. Somehow though, I find talking about the subject online is the quickest way to get accused of badfun and get a laundry list of carefully crafted arguments that are totally irrelevant to the question of whether the group is having fun or not. Just do what feels good and talk it out if there's a problem.

Saffron Marvelous wrote:

Did Dragonlance elves sleep? I recall the 2e elf handbook was where they introduced the reverie and that seemed to be setting-agnostic.

The Complete Book of Elves is setting-agnostic, hence overruled by setting specific. The book was a bit contentious, and much/most of it doesn't work for certain elves, e.g. Dark Sun elves. CBoE did take DL into account in some respects, but not all. For instance it gives a creation myth for all elves which is incompatible with DL, Mystara and DS.

As far as trance vs. sleeping, no mention is made of reverie/trance in the DL sources I checked, and 3.x DL have trance only by default.

I didn't realise there was setting-specific stuff saying Dragonlance elves sleep, is what I meant. It seems like such a strange thing to get explicit about.

Anyway yeah, I agree with what you're saying about setting-specific vs general.

Did Dragonlance elves sleep? I recall the 2e elf handbook was where they introduced the reverie and that seemed to be setting-agnostic.

Pathfinder elves sleep eight hours by default. I heard there was some other stuff in a supplement but that it was considered setting-specific.

Personally though, I find pretty much everyone who came from 3.5 or earlier and wants to play an elf likes the 4 hour reverie/trace stuff, so I usually just let them have it and say they still need eight hours "rest" for all the usual things because it almost never matters otherwise. Keep Watch is a first level spell anyway.

Well if you want to simulate them being closer together, you'd pack the corners in behind, which with 5 guys like in the example, still lets you block a 20 foot line. Not a flawless solution, but if you want better than that, the answer is to switch to hex and say goodbye to moving in straight lines.

Funny, I just finished making a sprite that's a legbreaker for the mob (her name is Lollipop Lane and if you get behind on your protection money, they say they're gonna send you down Lollipop Lane) and uses hellcat stealth.

Since it lets you hide while observed, it should help against things like blindsight (inexplicably) and darkvision depending on what you argue for dark vision vs concealment by low light in the first place. By rights, it should mean that basically nothing can negate your ability to go into stealth and all you ever have to argue about is if you're doing it with a penalty for hellcat or not.

Dark Vision doesn't let you see as if in light, it lets you see without light. If you're in darkness, you can use hellcat stealth to hide while observed by dark vision guy by turning on some light.

For a sprite, I just see it as using your glow like a floodlight that whites out the area and keeps you indistinct enough to hide in that space, five feet being pretty big for a diminutive creature.

Oh so it is there. Thank you. I see now that Nethys just had a wide linebreak between the two so I completely glossed over the second part.

It works the other way around, but I've never seen a rule that says that, say, a colossal dragon can walk over a squirrel without some kind of combat manoeuvre like overrun. There was a game I was in where the party had a pet imp who I nominally took control of during combat and would occasionally have him use summon minor monster to get some squirrels out that could block charge vectors (to be fair, they'd be able to do so regardless by virtue of being closer valid charge targets) or otherwise hamper movement, and I always felt like I shouldn't be able to pull this, but it seems like it's valid?

I can't seem to edit, but I wanted to add this:

I had a similar situation to OP very recently actually: I have a very new player in my current game. Last session, they encountered a powerful, intelligent undead that was bound to protect a particular door. I hadn't really counted on them trying to meaningfully engage with the skull because it was mostly going to just say some extremely nihilistic things at them that would make it obvious that all they really had to do was accept its viewpoint as correct and it would let them go through.

Well they sent the low int character out to talk to it and it wound up being a very long and confusing (amusing) conversation of her just not getting it and therefore not responding properly. This conversation also gave the players the notion that maybe this all really sucks for the big skull guy, which was another thing I hadn't really been thinking about.

So they're not saying the right things and he's not going to let them through, but they've decided that skullzy doesn't like his job, so they started chasing that thread. So I couldn't really let this work for them because he's not really got a choice about what he's doing, but I decided to go with him just being tired. So first I had him start threatening the group in a way that *very specifically* told them all of his combat abilities. The new player, possibly not really getting the scale of things, decided to try Cure Moderate on him in such a way that I could tell they expected it to do more than it was really going to do, probably because it's the most powerful healing they currently have access to.

This would have gone very badly for them, of course. They'd do a tiny amount of damage and start a difficult fight in a bad spot, so here's where I really gave them some leeway because I understood what the player was trying and I felt like they should get *something* for it: I had Skullzy, still running with the idea that he was being unsubtly helpful, declare that hahaha the player's healing magic was SO pitiful, that it didn't even pass his minimum threshold for response, and that gosh they could probably cast that three more times before his programming would even kick in. Player got the message that the spell isn't that great, but they still got to do something with it and have the moment of preparation that I'd meant for them to have.

So that's how I adapt situations and also play gentler with players who don't know the game so much.

OP seems less like rule of cool and more like what I consider the good practice of adapting scenarios to what players actually do. Players do not know what you're thinking, and you can't predict what they're going to try, so it pays to be flexible and let them build their own solutions. It's so easy for groups to go into a death spiral when you've got one solution to a situation in mind and aren't willing to budge on it. It doesn't even sound like the player's lack of system mastery was really playing into the situation above. They had an idea that made sense, so they tried to sell their story to the monster. If you were going to make it fail, I'd say it's at least a little bit on you to communicate that the monster might be immune or resistant to this thing.

The problem I see most often when GMs WON'T be flexible is that the players try a solution similar enough to what you intend that when it fails, they write off the correct solution as well and then what do you do?

I remember years ago in a game, the GM set up a puzzle where there was a riddle and the solution was to stick a light source into this big black beam. We had tried a few different permutations of shining a light through the source (into the beam) right away, and the GM told us it didn't work. He stuck to his guns, and we spent hours of a very unpleasant session trying to figure out the stupid riddle that we'd already figured out. It sucked.

As for genuinely bending rules, I help out a bit behind the curtain here and there. I don't turn blatant failures into successes, but if the players are doing something interesting, I usually give more leeway and opportunities for second chances. Spectacular failures at just the wrong moment can be really cool too though.

Generally with things like combat, I'm doing slight edits on occasion to make it all feel better and keep everyone involved.

With diplomacy stuff, I'm usually keeping power dynamics in mind. I think some players get the idea that diplomacy should be able to resolve any confrontation, and I don't really go with that. The enemy has to at least be motivated to hear you out and believe that you're close to equal footing or you have some kind of advantage before they'll negotiate. You might be able to bluff or intimidate your way to that point, but there's a lot of times where you're just gonna have to beat some sense into an enemy and THEN negotiate.

I'm sure it has but at least in my experience there seems to be a stronger push to "Make optimized character" over "make fun character even if you know the choice is sub-optimal" these day's. That is rather than some of the party making mary sues, munchkins, etc now there's a subtle pressure to make the most powerful choice you can or you're not pulling your weight. I blame online games and the "Look who did the most DPS" contest that goes on.

Hoo this kind of comment really gets under my skin, let me tell you. I find it deeply reductive and downright insulting to players who enjoy playing with mechanics.

If you just want to make the most optimal character and care about nothing else, there's like maybe two or three actual options in a given system. Since I rarely see an entire group of arcanists or broke nature oracles or whatever, I really don't believe this is actually happening. And frankly, if someone wants to play a tweaked arcanist or whatever, they're doing what's fun for them. You are not the arbiter of their game experience. It's on the group to sort out the actual dynamic between PCs.

For players who actually know the systems well enough for the question to matter, well I don't have genuine demographics anymore than you do, but in my experience, they start with a vision for a character they want to play, and they make that character the best they can. Sometimes that's trying to make a person who had a certain kind of life, or sometimes it's starting with a wholly mechanical goal or trying to achieve some fun little trick with action economy. I started one of my favourite characters by asking myself how big of a whirlwind attack radius I could get and how horrible could I make it to be inside that radius.

Players shouldn't have to deliberately cripple their characters to pass some kind of purity test. This isn't acting school, it's fantasy gaming with mechanics that you are allowed to take advantage of to within the constraints your group agrees upon.

We are all making Mary Sues; that's what character-focused tabletop games are. Don't try to knock people down for it. If you have toxic players, that's a separate issue.

Anyway, to answer the thread's question, isekai doesn't really work for me because I have responsibilities, but assuming that would be a nonfactor, my characters are all sweet and I would totally be one of them with a couple exceptions.

I played around with making Guts once. The version I felt was the most satisfying translation of the things he does in the comics to Pathfinder mechanics was a level 11 fighter. I know a lot of people would probably go barbarian with him, but he was always a very technically skilled guy with magic armour that let him berserk, so I felt Fighter fit more. Mainly focused on getting him the cleave tree, improved vital strike with cleaving smash (from weapon trick), lunge, combat reflexes, and functional with an oversized weapon (I'd probably use a statblock with reach), then set up to move on to whirlwind attack. Not 100% certain that Cleaving Smash lets you take Vital Strike into your iterative cleaves, but that's how I run it because if you invest that hard into Vital Striking AND Cleave, f!#% it, you deserve to get that bonus.

For alignment, I don't generally truck with alignment at all, but I figure he's Neutral overall. He does Good Things, but he's ultimately been a mercenary most of his life and his motivations are largely personal. I don't think he is particularly passionate about right or wrong. Before the Eclipse, he was on a path to some kind of zen swordsmanship mastery, so unconcerned with the world at large that he didn't even realise his friends were branded traitors. I think he's a good person, but I don't think he falls into a good alignment. Likewise, whether or not he follows rules is largely a matter of convenience; he's not an individualist, but he doesn't really care about the lines either.

So that's Guts - Fighter 11 (minimum, probably more like 16+ given the things he fights), Alignment True Neutral.

Matthew Downie wrote:

It's pathetic and anticlimactic when a major enemy is one-shotted. It's probably even worse when it happens to one of the main characters.

A tad overdramatic.....

It's pretty much keeping with the tone of the post it was responding to.

If they neglect to read it and get upset with the results, that is no longer on me. I'm using Paizo content, as was allowed and as is written.

That's about what I expected to hear. I hope the game runs smoothly for you. Maybe you have some experience with your GM and have established that this is acceptable, but I think that you're setting yourself up for a lot of bickering. I highly suggest that you just talk about what you want your abilities to do to your GM. 99% of the time, it leads to a more fun game

Okay let me ask this: What do you want from this thread?

Because your title says you want "cheese-filled readings," which is pretty much flat out stating that you're deliberately looking for interpretations of abilities that will let you subvert the rules. But now you're in here furiously insisting that you want a strictly RAW interpretation of everything, so which is it?

My other question is this: Will you tell your GM, before the game starts, what you expect the Warded Against Nature drawback to do for you?

Fair enough, just tell your GM what your plan is upfront then.

I mean it sounds like you're deliberately doing things to provoke interpretation arguments in your group, and I'd recommend against that. If you're planning to use an ability in a seemingly unintended way, you should be bringing that up with your GM when you take the ability, or you're just going to cause exhausting arguments down the line. There's a reasonable chance that your GM agrees with you and so you get what you want, but if they don't, that doesn't mean that not telling them is an excuse to pull the precise wording of the drawback out as a gotcha later on. They get to interpret the drawback how they like, and if they think it means that the party's mounts will move away from you or that animals won't come close enough for you to hunt, then that's a reasonable interpretation.

The best possible outcome of this is that you'll have one encounter where you pull out your drawback as a defense, and then the GM just stops using animals as encounters. Owlbears instead of bears.

Oh s~*~, you guys got me there. Well he doesn't really need Spell Perfection anyway, so that'll free up a space for something else. Thank you for pointing it out. I'll have a look at the weapon trick for one handed.

Depends on the kind of game you're running, and what kind of game the players THINK you're running. "Fair" is a bit of a loaded concept; I throw my players into unfair situations all the time. "What's fun" is what matters. I wouldn't just drop something obscure-ish that has instant death abilities on the players without at least attempting to give them a chance to be informed, but if you're running a very simulationist game and the players know that, you might want to. It might even be what THEY want. If that's not the case, well all I can tell you is that personally, I try to avoid things that take a player out of the game unless I have something else for them to do (they meet an NPC's ghost while dead) or I know they're going to be back in it quickly. I try to kill players in big climactic battles where I know they're going to have a cleanup phase right away, but that's just me.

If you're going to use monsters with a lot of instant loss or death stuff, I'd say you should try to at least foreshadow it, or give your players some indication that they should do some research. Videogames will have NPCs blurt stuff out, but we can have the guy who hires the party to clear out a vampire den be like "hey there's a whole section on vampires at the local library," or even tell them that he expects them to do some research as part of the job so the town doesn't have to deal with a reinfestation. Or whatever suits your game.

I'm adding the finishing touches to what will be a recurring villain in my current campaign. He's a kitsune Eldritch Knight from Sorcerer and Swashbuckler, with Magus as a VMC. He's largely an illusionist/enchanter with a few damage dealing spells. The idea behind him is that by using Arcane Accuracy to get a solid hit bonus, he can cast non-defensively to lure an opponent into AoOing him, parry/riposte that guy, finish casting his spell and safely bounce away now that the opponent's AoO is burned. It's a bit dangerous, but Magus helps make it work with Accuracy and Arcane Pool. Accuracy and Riposte interfere with each other a little bit, but it just means he has off rounds to use his other tricks on.

Anyway, his sorcerer bloodline is Shapechanger mainly for its second power, and since he's not getting the full benefits, I decided Eldritch Scrapper might work good as an archetype for that one level of Martial Flexibility, which means he has a flex feat that I can potentially be using for a few things (sadly no Arcane Strike since he needs his swifts). So I'm looking for some combat feat suggestions that might work well for him. He's level 13 and his present featlist is:

Combat:

Dervish Dance
Pirhana Strike (Bonus from EK)
Combat Reflexes (Bonus from EK)

Non-Combat:

Improved Initiative

Metamagic:

Maximize Spell
Spell Perfection: Scorching Ray

Otherworldly kimonos are expensive but not completely prohibitively so. It's entirely possible that a group pools some resources to get one at like 8 depending on how your game is going. Hell I've had them as treasures at level 9ish before, though that's brushing on "mid" level, I guess. In fact, I think my players completely forgot they had one that was cursed to put them in a labyrinth after so many uses, much to my disappointment.

Anyway, that was just one possible benefit to timing the spell out.

Hrm, banned the item a while ago, as well as the maze spell itself. Probably the worst thing about maze (as I read it): You reappear, but you had to spend a full-round action to do so, hence you are pretty much a sitting duck.

Not if you wait out the timer. If you wait out the timer you just reappear with the added benefit that players don't really plan on you waiting out the timer, so with lower level groups a lot of them will have wasted buffs. And if it's a kimono, they may or may not even be able to track ten minutes exactly, so it's entirely possible to have the creature roll back out and get a surprise round on them if they're being particularly careless.

On the other hand, if the creature is part of a group, they probably want to get out quickly, but in that case there's a lot of other stuff going on anyway.

That's a cool creature. I always love Jabberwock inspired things.

I know this isn't the advice sub, but a way that I deal with Otherworldly Kimonos is to remember that the creature can still DO stuff inside the maze (at least to the best of my knowledge). They aren't obligated to try and escape every round. Are the players watching the design on the kimono or readying their own plans? Will they notice when the now-invisible, reduced (for stealth), and hasted creature pops back into their plane? Could even wait out the duration and have a readied action cued up.

That said, players totally ganking an encounter is good once in awhile anyway. I hope they enjoyed it.

There's an SCP series called "End of Death" that might have some ideas for you. The hub for it is here: http://www.scp-wiki.net/end-of-death-hub

This is why I'm of the opinion that if you're going to have a type of creature be inherently evil and morally okay to butcher en masse, they shouldn't HAVE babies. There's just no amount of fancy moral footwork that's going to sidestep that issue in a satisfying way. Make them a nasty thing that's born every time you tell a lie or when a child has a nightmare or something. As soon as anything able to have a moral stance at all is having babies, they have a pre-moral state and everything else is just a product of development. The very fact that they have to be kept in cages and forced to resort to brutality and cannibalism pretty much disproves any argument that their morality is inherent out of the gate. You can call it fantasy rules, but you invited biology in by giving them mundane reproduction. It just doesn't mix.

An undead I came up with that I never got around to naming, but that I liked quite a bit: A long mass of severed, elongated human(oid) arms that crawls and climbs like a centipede, with the wrinkled head of an elderly man. It's gaze inflicts the phantom pain of a hundred missing arms on you, causing paralysis. It has six slam attacks, but it can forego any two in order to grapple or maintain a grapple (i.e. it can grapple up to 3 characters at once). If it successfully grapples a humanoid for two rounds, it automatically tears off one of their arms and adds the severed limb to its mass, gaining an extra slam for every two limbs. The creature was conceived of by a necromancer dragon as a sort of warmachine.

I like Violent Display for the potential to have a high initiative character jump out, do a sneak attack, and suddenly apply whatever intimidate debuffs they have against everyone within 30 feet. It's a nice way to give yourself valid targets for ranged sneak attacking too if you're using Shatter Defenses, and it pairs nicely with the Thug archetype's Frightening ability.