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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Definitely something to outline a bit with the players before you start, so they know what's coming. Personally, rather than taking it away step by step, I'd go for doing it in two or three big chunks so you can make a big deal out of it.

I'd suggest tying the loss of their abilities to Big Heroes moments, like Dragonmaster Dyne stepping into Althena's power channel and losing his power. Or it takes a sacrifice to seal a Bad Thing, or SOMEONE better run out over the swirling power vortex to save the destiny child. I'd definitely tie it into setting up the next generation too. My Hero Academia totally does this kind of arc extremely well and the first couple seasons might be a good watch for some ideas.

Fighting with weapons is as much about understanding space and being able to rapidly ascertain what the other fighter needs to do in order to hit you. You could just as easily make a case for int-based accuracy. Or wis-based if you want to make it about the reflexiveness of that mental ability. Being strong and fast certainly helps, and you need a certain baseline of strength to make a weapon do particular things, but at the same time, no one is really mentally capable of performing up to their body's peak physical potential, so it's not too hard to make a case for the mental side of fighting outweighing the physical.

But then there's a ton of different factors that drastically change what is and isn't useful from situation to situation. Dueling weapons tend to be very technical and take a lot of skill to use effectively where weapons designed for large scale combat tend to favour simplicity to the point where some soldiers in some situations may not really be making much use of their "stats" at all.

Reality runs on rules so complicated as to appear vastly inconsistent. Fighting is messy and unpleasant and doesn't have comfortably predictable outcomes most of the time. Tabletop needs to have rules that can be quickly understood so the players can rely on them at least somewhat. So ultimately, which stat you use for hitting is a mechanical choice because stats are made up things that are only loosely connected with reality in the first place.

I'm fond of my setting's prime villain, a single class blaster wizard named Freeden Thrayza. He's got a bunch of backstory, of course, but my guiding principle for him has always been that instead of having some singular evil plan, the thing that makes him a bad guy is that he lives and behaves with the perspective of a PC; that is, that he sees the world and all its people as existing as a backdrop for his good times. He's kind of pointedly a villain-sue in that regard. He's also one of the most important heroes in the setting's history; saved the universe and all that. So when a PC snapped at him for causing the deaths of her parents, he looked her in the eye and told her that every second she'd ever had with her parents was a gift from him in the first place. I try to run with the idea that in his mind, everything he does is justified because there's no way for his life to have been a net-negative when considered on the cosmic scale.

Manipulative in the extreme and highly narcissistic, he likes to find the loose threads in someone's personality and tug on them until they unravel completely. It's a visceral thrill for him. Makes him feel smart.

Originally he was two different characters. The first was someone I'd alluded to in the setting's history who was really bad news. The second was just me wanting to make a really good explosion wizard. In the end, I decided they were the same person. The party had a climatic fight with him in the last campaign I ran, and I think it remains one of the best encounters I've ever run. It was high level and extremely nuclear from both sides.

He suffered defeat there, but he's still around. I'm planning to have my current campaign finish with his final death.

Things blatantly work differently at the chemical and cellular level, since you can't just heal away fatigue or the internal damage caused by poisons, or the various types of ability damage caused by purely physical effects with simple healing spells.

I suppose one could argue that healing a specific structure in a cell would require treating that cell as a separate creature from the person wearing the ring, but then there's a bunch of other conflicts and things that don't make sense. I'd say that a given spell can only heal something its caster is aware of. The person who crafted that ring of regeneration knows what skin and bones and blood are, at least to some extent, but not what telomeres are. So if you really want to have a scientific explanation, it's possible that a ring of regeneration works the way it does because the person who crafted it doesn't have a microscope and doesn't know the exact process by which the skin is being regenerated. You could even make an argument for it reducing the overall integrity of the existing creature if it works like a skin graft or something.

Or, you know, magic runs on storybook rules. Or magic runs by laying alternate possibilities over top of existing reality and so only does exactly what you tell it to, or any of a million different things.

Oh, I usually gloss over it with some passing reference to the funny bits and maybe a roll or two so I can make something embarrassing happen to someone because we're all over 30 and sex makes us giggle. Everyone wants to f%~# half my NPCs, so I generally run a fairly sexually open setting, which everyone seems to enjoy.

Edit: Also I don't think my players have ever invaded the home of a reclusive mage without discovering their exotic forms of magical masturbation. And there was one dungeon I ran where the entire mystery the players were unraveling was that the wizard who made it died because he tried to neg a marilith. There's a well known book on courting spirits and demons and soforth in my setting. All original copies of it carry a curse that compels the readers to write new editions with lethal errors.

The nature of complaints I see popping up a lot here boil down to "This class can't do whatever I want it to do." I mean, seriously? That's kind of the entire point of a class-based system. Different classes play differently. One of my biggest complaints of PF1 was that it got to the point where I felt like my class wasn't actually doing enough to distinguish my character. They had a couple unique gimmicks, sure, but a witch I made didn't feel fundamentally distinct enough from an Enchanter or a Fey Sorcerer. When someone comes out and says "I want X class to be able to do whatever I want," I have to wonder to myself why they're even playing Pathfinder instead of a system that uses build points to create characters, or maybe an STG.

What. Like what? This speaks to such a deep level of ignorance on the mechanics of PF1, and you're the one in here calling other people "Trumpian?" Really?

Like I mean witch vs enchanter okay. I mean witch is the base class alternate to the wizard, but even then: Different spell list, completely different ability track with features like prehensile hair, all of which motivates different synergies. I mean you CAN build a witch to operate similarly to a wizard, but that's really on you, and even then, it will never be the same because you have an entire different ability track. So sure, you've got options to do similar things to some of the classes adjacent to your own, buy if you're trying to build a witch like another class, then I'd suggest that perhaps distinguishing yourself as a witch isn't what you actually want to do.

Is your complaint that there were too many options? Because it sounds less like you're concerned with having a class distinguish itself (they do that absolutely fine) and more like you want classes to run along strict lines without branches or close relatives. Like you're here saying the witch isn't distinct enough from one set of options that a class which it's built to be an alternative to has, when it's pretty blatantly as distinct from that class as it can be while still being in the same family. That's an argument less about class distinction and more about having no periphery options to the core classes.

Edit: For the record though, that being what you want, you're going to be disappointed in the end, 'cause all those adjacent classes and options will come along eventually. Unless the edition is wildly unsuccessful, but I don't think anyone is hoping for that.

If you want to capture the crazy prep junk, being a wizard is pretty much the way to go for your Batman in a pre-industrial setting where magic is the technology. Hell, BATMAN did it at least once, demonstrating that Batman believes magic is the best way to be Batman in absence of modern technology. Anytime you say X Marvel or DC Superhero wouldn't Y, there are at least a dozen miniseries' that spontaneously spring into existence where they do exactly that.

Though to be fair, I'd probably suggest something like alchemist to the player at that point.

I DID make a sort of Batman character once when my players went into a seedy, crime-infested city. I did him as an unrogue/unmonk with dimensional savant so not big on gadgets, but more on the ambush tactics with coming out of the night and being everywhere at once. He beat up the party's lich a bit before failing a save against Destruction.

Edit: TBH though, I've never found Batman's prep successes terribly believable, and they frequently rely on massive narrative contrivance to make him look smarter than he is.

Divine grace is a narrative annoyance. Good riddance to it.

Which is not to say that paladins should eat an overall nerf, just that I'd be glad to see them rebalanced to get more stuff rather than have one particularly bothersome ability make or break the class. My annoyance with PF1 Paladins is largely that they're balanced around making the GM be a jerk to them; the code tells the GM to effectively destroy their character if they step too far out of line, and Divine Grace means that the best, most effective, and easiest way to deal with a paladin is to just kill them even if you didn't really want to. As a man said about a completely different game: Death is the best status effect.

Having it as a reaction is nice. Having it at +1 every 4 levels would still amount to a pretty hefty save bonus.

PERSONALLY, to soapbox for a moment, I think the concept of a paladin falling should get dumped completely (unless it's a plot thing where they want to change to antipaladin or something). While I'm sure it must have happened somewhere some time, I have never seen holding that over a player have any sort of positive result. Plus having the paladin motivated to do good because heavenly administrators are watching them and tabulating their every action is bleeeeeh. I'd rather see something like the Unconquered Sun in Exalted, where his powers are governed by his virtues, and when he denies a virtue, the powers tied to it temporarily go away. THAT can lead to interesting sorts of dilemmas.

So we're at like, level 16-20 and high mythic tier it sounds like, yeah? Does he have evasion? Make a mythic wizard and spam mythic fireballs. He can only Absorb Blow once per round, where a mythic wizard can potentially toss off... three? Yeah, three maximized, selective, lingering, disruptive, mythic fireballs in a round (just my favourite metamagics to stick on at high level, YMMV). At tier 6, your mage can make it bypass energy resist and immunity, which will cover just about anything except the absorb blow, and even if he saves, he's taking 190 - 250 damage for the round (depending on where in that 16-20 range the mage falls).

A mythic dragon specced out with full mythic vital strike and mythic power attack on their bite and as high a fly speed as they can get is pretty horrifying too. Flyby attack for stupid damage and then be a mile away from anything the Paladin can actually hit. Do it at night and buy an extra standard action at the end of the dragon's movement to turn invisible - true seeing caps at 120 feet (at least per the spell, not sure if every true seeing ability is the same), and see invisible caps at your normal visual range, so now the dragon is a stealth bomber.

It'd be nice if the Sword Saint could vital strike their iaijutsu strike, even if it required a feat to do.

Sure, there are some things that he can do because he is a supernatural being (like his hairs being able to transform into clones of himself) but many of his powers are from his Taoist practices.

Thank you for your post. Just a minor clarification on this: The changing his hairs and duplicating himself is probably "weird taoist sorcery" that he learned. I can't recall if it is made explicit in the narrative, but I'm pretty sure it's the expected assumption. It's kind of the underlying assumption with the entire tradition, that with enough practice and overcoming trials (such as surviving the eight trigrams furnace), you can learn to do anything. Anyway, he certainly never did anything like this BEFORE his super training.

I should say that I'm not really on the side of removing wisdom as a monk thing. I think it fits in pretty well with the zen-type theming of the class, and it covers your mountain hermits who develop a sort of football playbook of different sword dances and playing mental chess to find the weaknesses in OTHER fighter's secret sword dances. But I think it should be a bit more optional, and do more for the monks that use it, like precision damage and/or hit bonuses. Maybe having the option to go further and be a bit druidic even, so you can get things like your 36 heavenly transformations or turning into a storm or whatever. Some kind of melee based spontaneous casting, even, though not precisely like the magus, because as much as magi can be strong, I find the way they work unpalatable overall.

On the other hand, there are plenty of fictional characters who could fall under the umbrella of monk who are just like, hard hitting power fighters that don't go in for the mental side so much. Live a Live, which I mentioned earlier, has a very strength/power based kung fu master set up as the villain of the "Ancient China" chapter. They're not... generally WUXIA characters (except as designated losers), but that's because wuxia is all about imaginary fights and deconstructing styles. There's still a balance of those factors that comes into play even there though.

Tholomyes wrote:

WatersLethe wrote:

By all means, I want Paizo to move firmly away from the mistake of [X Fighting Style] = [Y Class]. Just as I don't believe a gun wielder should be forced to play a Gunslinger, I don't think an unarmed striker should be forced to play a Monk.

That being said, I sincerely do not mind if Monks come with unarmed proficiency built in; it should just be readily available in other classes as well, particularly the Fighter. In the same vein, other classes should have access to means of utilizing weapons with "Monk" special property.

That's probably my stance as well. I think someone who decides to be good at unarmed combat, who chooses to be a class other than Monk, should be as good at unarmed combat as a monk, but monks should be the ones to get that without choosing it as an archetype (so long as it's also possible to create monks that can use weapons, especially outside of the almost universally asian-flavored "monk" weapons. Give me my Shelyn worshiping Flurry of Glaive monk already.)

This thought process confuses me...

If one were to compare real-world unarmed combat vs a martial artist (i.e. the monk) a boxer, while fantastic at unarmed combat, would get wrecked by a martial artist. Flat out wrecked.

I don't understand what this is meant to demonstrate. Are you talking about pitting a real world boxer against a fantasy martial artist? Because like, boxing is a martial art; it's made up of many well codified systems of fighting. If it exists in a Pathfinder context, it will be every bit as supernaturally powerful as a fighter who power attacks hard enough to cleave adamantine with a silver sword. Watch the scene in Ip Man 3 where Ip Man fights Mike Tyson for a perfect demonstration of what your unarmed monk vs unarmed fighter should probably look like. Here, I'll link it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HvnRvUSHr4

If you're talking about real world boxing compared with other real world martial arts, then I find the statement even more confusing. They're all sports; they all exist in their own particular contexts with particular rules, written and unwritten, and assumptions. Comparing them against each other in a general sense is awkward at best, especially when it's one umbrella term, "boxing" vs another, "martial arts."

Any skill worth having requires disciplined practice, especially if you're talking about taking it up to the ridiculous levels of mastery that Pathfinder characters attain. If a fighter is spending feats and class abilities on ramping up their unarmed abilities, that constitutes the same determined effort. The only difference is that the monk class does it automatically.

I'd like to see a monk that has a set of traits they can apply to anything weapon-like they pick up, sort of like magus enchantments, but you know, not. Currently, I'm rather fond of unrogue/scaled fist unmonk dimensional savant for getting the fightan mountain mystic feel, as I feel debilitations fit in pretty well with most monk theming.

I think it would be interesting to see multiple development paths keyed to different stats, so that you can pick what you feel your particular discipline is based on. Sort of like the Xin Shan Quan master in Live a Live (though in his case, he had ALL the different stat-based stuff available to him, but you know, different game with different rules).

Alignment restriction needs to die, but I've said as much elsewhere. I feel it was borne out of looking at certain traditions from the outside. Every lifestyle looks restrictive if it's not what you personally want, but that's not how those philosophies or their adherents see it. The ascetic doesn't become an ascetic because she loves red meat and alcoholism and senseless murder and wants to needlessly restrict herself from those things and repetitively do a bunch of menial activities that she hates every day. She does it because she sees all those vices as restrictive and believes that through daily polishing, her spirit can achieve liberation and freedom.

Arachnofiend wrote:

To be frank, any rule that makes it impossible to build Sun Wukong as a Monk is a failed rule.

Sun Wukong is a supernatural being and his legends are based on him being a supernaturally strong and quick warrior. The fact that he used a staff and martial arts does not a monk make. Most of his supernatural abilities stem from stealing things he had no right to.

He is literally a monk. Twice over. This is the second time I've had to say this. He shaves his head and converts to Buddhism after having been an entirely different discipline/spirituality of monk. He is straight up living an ascetic lifestyle and is on the path of enlightenment. IIRC he even achieves moksha at the end of the story. If Sun Wukong isn't a monk, no one is a monk.

Furthermore, he's a supernatural being, yes, and like zero percent of his powers come from that. Every trick he is known for is a spiritual skill that he trained to learn. He's like a Pathfinder kitsune or tengu: Supernatural? Sure, but his abilities are all borne of his class levels, not racial HD.

Edit: And what the hell is this about all his powers coming from stealing things? Like yeah, he has magical gear like any Pathfinder character, and he also has a list of abilities a mile long that he did super training to get. Did you even read the story? The only reason he can even LIFT the staff he "stole" (more like bullied a dragon into giving him with his already nigh on invincible powers gained through super training) is because he is incredibly ridiculously strong on his own merits. Even his immortality was a learned skill; he just beefed it way way way up with drugs after the fact.

I mean, if the character is illiterate, taking a level of wizard is basically just them calling themselves a wizard and gaining no benefit. Literacy is a given with any character in Pathfinder, so I'd imagine a character being specifically illiterate to also be low int, meaning they wouldn't be able to cast anything even if they could read.

Who is asking to suddenly make their illiterate character specifically into a wizard? Why? This example seems unrealistic to the point of being silly.

cherishing their powerbuilding...

Stop, please. Like cripes, drop the attitude. You're insulting everyone who ever cared about a theme enough to pore over the system looking for ways to achieve it, and everyone who put work in to get a particular playstyle they liked, or just anyone who ever had fun putting different ability sets together to see what they could do. There's cost/benefit to all of this and it takes a bit of scrutiny and care to work it all out, especially when PrCs tend to eat your saves.

If someone cares about nothing but being powerful (and honestly, that's fine too as long as they're not jerks), they'll just build an arcanist and call it a day.

The thieves who got caught in a trap and died will have caused just as much, if not more, wear and tear on a puzzle as anyone who made it through. It's good to let players cut the knot sometimes, but they can absolutely end up shooting their own foot in the doing. That said, a problem with puzzles and riddles is that when you make something with a single solution, it's never as simple as you think it is. If the players are trying to bypass the puzzle, it's probably at least partly because they see no obvious clues as to what you want them to do.

As far as your scenarios go:

1. This is a perception and disable device roll for the rogue, which is what it would have probably been anyway. If you want a more involved puzzle, I'd probably suggest something more than just a combination lock.

2. Pretty much the same as above. Ask yourself if you're communicating the initial clues to hook them into solving the lock effectively, and ask yourself if this is something that wouldn't just be a disable device roll for the rogue.

In general, I suggest having an obvious cut-the-knot solution available, and have an idea of what additional challenges it raises when they try to do it, so that they're just putting themselves into another problem that they need to solve.

One similar sort of puzzle I used was something like a keypad that required a disable device check to unlock and a use magic device check to activate. The players had seen a few of these, so they were fairly confident in the basic premise, so with this particular one, because they were careful about examining it, they discovered that both components were trapped, and that furthermore, disabling the trap on either component would irreparably damage the other. This gave them a problem with components and clues that they could see.

nicholas storm wrote:

I played a lot of ffxi and bard has very little in common with red mage. I think closest is occultist. Next would be oracle - probably fire mystery.

I played a lot of final fantasy 1 and bard is exactly what a red mage is

I mean just look at his hat. No one but a bard has that much style.

The technology doesn't feel like a pervasive fact of the setting. In a fantasy world, not everyone can have magical arms and armour and rings and capes because these things are individually handcrafted works, but a sci fi setting has industrialization as a given. This feels like Ross rifles are still coming off the assembly line when people can get M16s, because for some reason a single M16 costs the entire GDP of a small nation. It makes the tech level feel really janky, because having them sitting right next to each other on the gear list suggests that they somehow occupy the same sphere.

It also makes low levels feel kind of crap, because you look at the gear list and realise your pistol is basically a water gun. And then you play a bit and oh boy you've got water gun lv 2, and it just sort of feels like you're stuck at the kids table and the gear you have isn't relevant, because one tick down the list is water gun lv 3. Conversely, weapon enhancement in Pathfinder is a thing separate from the gear chart and exists in its own sphere, so when I start play with a basic scimitar, I still feel like I'm playing my dervish using a scimitar, not just some putz with a foam toy weapon. Sure, I'm gonna throw my basic scimitar away as soon as I find a +1 one, but that feels like a bonus, not like I was being needlessly held down.

gustavo iglesias wrote:

The debate here was if paladins were given "gifts" because they had a code, or were specially powerful because of said code, which would mean making the code more relaxed would made them "unbalanced" because they'd get "free stuff without a counterpart".

Nobody knows if any class is "balanced." There is no formula or equation that designers can use that tells them a class is "balanced." The term is a misnomer.

What is unequivocal is that since its inception, the class was intended to do and operate in a specific manner, to achieve certain types of outcomes. The Paladin Code is a part of that experience and the class abilities and feats given to it where in concert with the Code. Once you remove the code, then you've got class that was engineered to uphold a code that is no longer required to do so.

Paizo's Paladin comes nearly verbatim from 3.5. Whatever mindset WotC used in creating the class for 3.x was transferred to Paizo's version. Do you have quotes from WotC?

The issue isn't whether the class is balanced without the code, we can never know the answer to the question, the issue is you have a class that doesn't make sense.

There's some pretty obvious situations in which we can clearly apply the term balance, and we can make a lot of educated estimates in other areas. A number of 3.5 gish PrCs grant full BaB and full spellcasting, along with a host of other abilities. We can suggest that those are unbalanced when held up against Pathfinder PrCs like the Eldritch Knight, where you trade a spellcasting level to get that BaB (not to mention generally taking a hit in saves and not getting as many crazy powers). If I invent a class that gets +2 BaB per level, we could probably agree that's a balance issue without even looking at its other abilities.

We don't need a mathematical code to debate balance issues and develop consensus. Demanding one is absolutism taken to silly extremes. It's a card played to shut down discussion.

I mean to be fair, that's probably what it would be, just in some fancy sounding dead language, so if anyone asks your guy why he's just shouting fireball instead of something arcane sounding, you just go "yeah I never got around to learning Latin."

The worst GM I ever had was, ironically, a pretty good GM. Very devoted to his game, good at setting up interesting encounters, good at voices and sound effects; cowardly, manipulative little punk in every other aspect of his life though. Eventually, it started to infect his games. I challenged him once and he decided he didn't want me around anymore.

That was many many years ago though, and we were probably all jerks back then.

As far as players go, well it's started to be a massive red flag for me whenever someone tells me they're intending to make a character that is geared for social-fu.

The Scaled Fist monk archetype is a pretty good start.

Well fine, ninja me, whatever. Unrogues are better anyway.

My Process:

Monday: "I want to build Geese Howard in Pathfinder"
Tuesday-Thursday: "I should really figure out what I'm doing this Sunday"
Friday: "Okay I'll just get this guy built and figure out a dungeon tomorrow"
Saturday: *videogames*
Sunday (game at 3:30): 8AM: "I really need to work on a dungeon." 1PM: "I'll check Twitter one more time and then build a dungeon." 2:30PM: "Still have time." 3:15PM *cobbles together a map* "Um um um he's an evil mob boss casino owner with a weird weeaboo thing for elves and he kidnapped this elf the party knows and there's an underground fighting ring, reach fighter here, magus here, wizard here, and there's the boardroom and I can b$!+#*&* stats for security guys GO"

More seriously, I generally start adventures with a general plan, give the players a little bit of information, and develop what I'm doing based around what they do to investigate and solve problems. As long as they do something reasonable and don't completely flub all their rolls, I figure out what kind of clue or clues I can give them at that stage and some bits of foreshadowing, and base the next part of my plan on that. For initial hooks, it's usually character motivations or money, but a lot of times once they're sufficiently invested, I'll play with whatever the hook was.

To be fair, you can absolutely find rules that tell you to kill people in various Abrahamic sources, but I don't think following them is going to get you an LG character.