Samuel Weiss's page

Well, maybe not everyone.

Now who is going to write up stats for this stuff?

to buy a movie star?

As is.
Cash only.
All sales final.
Perpetual cuteness not guaranteed.

I started my current online campaign on 5/14/07.
This was going to be a big one. Our first online campaign, where I started as a player before the DM got stolen from us by work, was Night Below. That went something like 5 years and the conversion from 2nd ed to 3E, with the mini-conversion to 3.5. It proved how unstable high level play was, so I set my expectations to lower levels for the next two to end around 14th-15th level. With those lessons learned, this one is supposed to hit epic levels. It involves PCs with links to PCs from our previous campaigns. I still do not know how it will end, but I knew how tonight's session was supposed to go.

And, shockingly, it did.

The loyal NPC magic item maker ("My name is Fred. I took all the shop classes.") died a noble and heroic death, beaten to a pulp by a shaboath golem while using disable construct on them (harm spell against constructs), revivified by the determined archivist, then blasted to his death by the late arriving bodyguards of the aboleth.

22 months of gaming, and it actually went the way I had it planned.
The plot is advanced as plotted, the PCs are suitably outraged at the death of their devoted follower, and I do not have a clue what the next chapter in the story is.
But I got this far!
Yay me!

Now what the heck do I do with 16th level characters?

That is the International Criminal Court.
Which recently indicted Hassan al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, for war crimes relating to the ongoing "events" in Darfur.

Why should the ICC be indicted for doing such a thing?
Well, according to the Speaker of Iran's parliament, the indictment is an insult to Muslims.

Is that a crime?
Well, if the OIC (the Organization of the Islamic Conference) has it's way in the UN, it soon will be binding; currently it is only voluntary.

So should Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, having transgressed by bringing this indictment, indict himself and the ICC before the ICC, and be punished to the full extent of the law?
And should it be European law, which will only fine him and the ICC, or Sharia law, which will require his execution, and the restriction of the ICC to prevent future offense in the future?

While there are other threads asking what people want to see in the Chronicles or Companion lines, with the recent change to the Council of Thieves Player's Guide, a question that has been nagging at me has become more relevant.

Looking at the products, there seems to be some focus issues.
Companion
Player's Guides (ended, 2 products, 4 if you count the first two which are placed with their adventure paths)
Race Guides (1 released, 1 pending)
Nation Guides (1 released, 4 pending)

Chronicles
Setting Books (1 big, 1 little)
Monsters Revisited (1 released, 3 pending)
More Monsters (1 pending - Princes of Darkness)
Map Folios (3 released, 2 pending)
City Guides (2 released, 1 pending)
Regional Guides (2 released)
Nations Guides (2 pending)
Organization Guide (1 pending)
Other (1 released, 1 pending - D&M, The Great Beyond)

Obviously already released books cannot have their type changed, but there seems to be a bit of crossover with the nation and region guides, as well as some changing naming conventions.

All of that makes me wonder what line, what size, and what name I can expect to see on various products.

Several special maneuvers require you to enter an opponent's square, an action that provokes an attack of opportunity.

Acrobatics allows you to move through an opponent's square without provoking an attack of opportunity.

Could acrobatics be used to just enter the square to perform the special maneuver?

Now why someone would do this rather than just take the Improved [Special Maneuver] feat is another issue. It just occurred to me that moving through naturally requires moving into to begin with, so why not be able to just move in and use the particular maneuver?

With cantrips now usable constantly, daze is a bit overpowered at low levels. At high DCs, stopping certain creatures from taking actions is disproportionately powerful. Solo encounters can be completely negated without ever spending a spell slot. The same with neutralizing ranged combatants.
The effects will fade after a few levels as save bonuses start reducing the chance of success below 50%, but until then that is rather overwhelming for an at will ability. Compare it to something like hold person, which also effectively negates a creature's action. Sure you only cast hold person once and it works until the creature saves, but it is a 2nd or 3rd level spell with limited uses.
I have not seen this effect with any of the other spells that have direct combat effects (flare, acid splash, ray of frost, disrupt undead, touch of fatigue). Except for flare these are touch spells, and three are ranged and could piggyback with sneak attack. An arcane trickster sneak attack-acid splashing endlessly might not be that good.

Note: My current PFRPG campaign features a sorcerer using daze. The rogue plans to go arcane trickster, so I may very well see the other in due course, though not likely until the final book is out.

Irony.

Warning:
Make sure you are seated and have no liquids that can damage your keyboard or monitor when reading the message.

So there I am yesterday, sitting in a chat room, kvetching with a friend about the inaguration, and Chief Justice John Roberts flubbs the oath of office. After a few jokes concerning competence, I sense an opportunity, and offer him a bet that within three months some fringe group will claim that means Obama is not really the President. With the grand tradition of conspiracy theorists we have, he declined the bet. (Whose terms were never specified anyway.)

And not ten minutes ago, sitting in the same chat room, kvetching again, the news breaks that "out of an abundance of caution" Chief Justice Roberts had visited the White House and readministered the oath.

I am not sure if I should be happy the President (and/or his staff) vindicated my paranoia and cynicism, or upset that said vindication means it is neither.

Only in America baby!

Here are a few thoughts to kick off the discussion.

- Encounter Building: Are the new rules for building encounters clear and simple to use? Do they create balanced and entertaining encounters? Do the treasure tables and experience point tables work well with the encounter building guidelines.

I have been using these for about 6 levels of a limited conversion (skills and these rules only) campaign, from levels 8-14.

So far, they have worked incredibly well, even when I push them with APL +3 and +4 encounters, and even with the extreme power-limiting restrictions of feat choice and build I placed on the PCs.
The only problem I routinely have is remembering to multiply xp needed per level to advance by 4 to account for four PCs.

- Creating NPCs - Are these rules simple and easy to use? Are there any parts that could be more clear or user friendly?

Again, these have worked particularly well, especially the general breakdown guidelines for NPC gear by type.

The biggest issue I think is the separation of the guidelines in the book. As a result, I routinely use the chapter pdfs so I can "hold open" two pages at once, or I do a full layout of the encounters by EL and the CRs I want in them first, then design my NPCs as a second stage.

The only thing I am not sure about for both are how easy they are to understand. I am too experienced with the systems at this point to notice most quirks, so I would advise trying to get less experienced people to comment on them.

With the basic desire to improve various aspects of weapon based characters, these feats should be eliminated and their effects assumed as a basic option. Let any character use Strength or Dexterity to modify melee attacks and combat maneuvers. That will avoid the inherent "penalty" to anyone who wants to build a non-Strength based fighter.

I started a CoCT game using the Pathfinder rules just before Gen Con.
The first session used the Alpha rules, the second session added tweaks from the Beta rules.
There are six players, though only four showed up to each session. I expect I will have to add something to the various encounters for the third session since we expect everyone to finally make it to a session.

I converted the various NPCs for Seven Days to the Grave to the Beta rules. I noticed a few quirks.
1. Almost all NPCs will wind up with a few more hit points because of the favored class rules. They simply do not need the skill points.
2. Almost all NPCs wound up with extra skills, the higher the level the more they got. This was quite naturally due to the combining of skills. For some NPCs it was quite significant. 3rd and high level rogues will be swimming in skills, and even spellcasters will wind up with a "free" extra skill from combining concentration and spellcraft. Almost all of them got a bonus to Perception.
3. One place skills drop a bit is the lack of any mention of synergy effects in the Beta rules.
4. The extra +2 to an ability score has some significant effects. Spellcasters almost naturally add 1 to all their spell DCs, as well as pick up a bonus spell. Fighters either get an attack and damage boost or bonus hit points. Rogue get all the benefits of the extra Dexterity; initiative, AC, Reflex saves, and possibly attack bonus if they have weapon finesse.
5. The human bonus weapon proficiency was irrelevant for all of these builds.
6. The changes in cleric domains and bonus spells had a minor but noticeable effect, removing some options.
7. The changes wizard and sorcerer schools added some significant power boosts, but also trimmed a few spells.
8. The changes in HD for several classes raised hit points for NPCs with them noticeably.
9. In general conversion is tedious but not particularly difficult.

With the changes to cross class skills you can drop one of "skill points" or "ranks". I would expect skill points can go as prestige classes always refer to ranks, and you would have better backwards compatability that way. Just have all classes get "X skill ranks per level".

Are synergy bonuses for skills gone?

Charge is still ambiguously worded. I do like the improvement to tracing a clear path from starting square to ending square, but "toward" is way too open ended when the basic grid allows for multiple paths that are the same "distance" when counting squares.

I noticed the minor changes to NPC gear earlier but missed the rather significant bumps to character wealth by level. Did I miss any discussion of this as well?

I also see some changes to the encounter building section that effectively revises monster xp to always be static. What is the reason for this change?

When calculating CR, how do class levels affect a monster that already has a base CR and monster levels? For most I can understand just using the MM CR calculation for associated and non-associated, but this seems more than a little off when considering monsters that only have 2-4 racial HD but multiple character levels. A 2HD sahuagin with 8 levels of ranger would be CR 10, the same as a 12th level ranger.

Randy Buehler

Key point: No game table this year.

This is more of an informal review, but I understand if Paizo wants to shift it to the reviews section of the book.
I have had my 4E PHB since Wednesday, and have gone over it a few times. (My activities for Thursday being cancelled or on an off week.)
This is an overview, by chapters, with what I think of it all.

4E PHB
1. How to Play

This is a rather generic introduction to the basics of the game. You would expect it would be impossible to mess this up, but then we get to the History of D&D sidebar already mentioned, where apparently Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance were the first campaign settings. Add to that the ad for D&D Insider at the end of the chapter, and you begin to really worry. Things do not get better.

2. Making Characters

Once again a relatively simple introductory chapter. There is another ad, this time for the RPGA. The first of the big changes shows up, with alignment being gelded, apparently because the differences between Neutral Good and Chaotic and between Lawful Evil and Neutral Evil were too subtle for some people. That such a change, as well as the elimination of Neutral and the introduction of Unaligned trashes a significant amount of past flavor seems to have gone unnoticed. Kord as Unaligned seems more than a little weak. That it trashes the cosmology is irrelevant, as that is trashed utterly anyway.

3. Character Races
Yes, gnomes and half-orcs are out, dragonborn, eladrin, and tieflings are in. I suppose I could tolerate that, but what was hinted at in character creation now becomes more significant. Penalties have been thoroughly given the boot in 4E. Nobody must ever have any penalty for anything ever lest it be judged "unfun" or somesuch. (I suspect it may be related to being declared unmutual at the Village.) So racial penalties are all gone, and only stat bonuses remain.
Well, except for one area - size. Small races take a major step backwards to 1st ed with the massive boning they get for using weapons. Oh sure, they no longer have their weapons doing less damage, but they are also banned from all two-handed weapons and can only use one-handed weapons with two-hands. A hosing by any other name would be as wack.
I also to have to wonder about the balance of some of these racial powers. Dragonborn get a decently strong area effect attack encounter power, and eladrin get a hefty teleport. Half-elves and humans get an extra two bit at-will power that will fade over time. Elves got an attack reroll, halflings get to force a reroll when attacked. Dwarves and tieflings seem to lose big time.

4. Character Classes

This is where it all blows up.
Powers, powers, and more powers. Everything is a power!
And very little of it has any flavor. The differences between exploits (martial powers) and prayers (divine powers) or spells (arcane powers) is vague to non-existent. The biggest differences appear to be in who gets more area attacks, with real flavor seemingly only in the utility powers.
After that it is hard to say what is worse, the limitations or the failed goals.
Two weapon fighting and archery are only for rangers; fighters, rogues, and all others need not apply. Oh, rogues can get away with a bit of ranged sneakiness, throwing shuriken into people's eyes or plugging them with hand crossbows, but that does not compare to what rangers can manage. Paladins can get holy zaps, but no real ranged weapon action.
Then there was the concept of eliminating fighters taking extended periods of time to resolve all their iterative attacks (when they got them of course). Except the higher level martial powers seem chock full of Burst 1 (attack every square around you), or make multiple attacks, often with some moving. I guess it balances with casters now making attack rolls for everything they can hit with an area effect power, but it seems they just punted on that goal.
The one thing I really dislike is the background for warlocks. Apparently the only options to get warlock power are selling out to amoral fey, becoming a Cthulu cultist, or dealing with devils. I guess selling your soul works with roleplaying Lawful Good somehow.

5. Skills

Skills have been cut down from 3E, both in number and acquiring them. That part feels like a big step backwards to NWPs. The worse part is the universal benefit to all skills, so that theoretically the most untrained wizard has olympic quality athletic skill by 20th level. That just comes across as weak to me.

6. Feats

Feats are now divided by minimum level to take them. They also cover fewer of the big ticket items they did in 3E. Two exceptions I dislike are evasion and mettle both now feats. Everyone can take 0 damage from area effects! Bleah.
Multiclassing also appears as feats. With the powers being nearly identical, the power swap feats look like a total waste. The initial multiclass feat looks to have more potential, even though what 4E calls multiclassing has no relationship to what 1st ed or 3E called multiclassing.

7. Equipment

Bleah and more bleah. The horrors of too much standardization and reduction and then some. Sure, lots of weapons and armor were egregiously redundant in 3E. 4E makes more cuts than Freddy and Jason combined. Armor is light or heavy, with 3 types in each. Each type has it own proficiency feat, and has 3 subtypes for use with magic items. As for weapons, including entries for improvised and unarmed, there are 41 weapons in the PHB 4. There were 73 in the PHB 3. Adventuring gear is likewise shortened dramatically.
What is worse is the magic items, now shifted here. There is a decent selection of the 3 "mandatory" slot items - armor, neck, and weapons/implements, but there is a major dearth of items for the other slots. Well, unless you go and pick up the equipment splat book I guess.
As for the economic system, although it looks reasonably balanced by number, the flavor text is stunning. From astral diamonds to the residuum sidebar, I rather wonder why they did not just go all the way and replace gold with residuum. (Residuum is the magical energy, that looks sort of like pixie dust, that you have left over when you disenchant a magic item. It can be used to make new items, or, what the heck, used as a commodity.

8. Adventuring

A rather basic section. The one issue I have with it is why the rules are not there. The rules for everything else to run the game are in the PHB, but apparently the rules for creating an encounter are off in the DMG, while the monsters are in the MM.

9. Combat

Slightly more streamlined, I still find replacing saves with attacks against defenses to be a less than zero sum game. Players like to make their own rolls for such things. While transferring control of all attacks to the creature making them may be consistent, it does not have the same psychological effect. The various conditions and effects are massive cut down, and I do not think the game loses much there. Special actions are equally cut, and I think the game does lose a lot there. However much it may not be done regularly, players are going to want to trip and disarm NPCs. Grapple is fixed, in the sense of being thoroughly neutered. Now all you can do is hold someone in place with it. The system is simpler though.
I do wonder about one absence though. With all the powers, and even basic attacks given a standard format, why did the not do the same with other combat options? It might be a bit cluttered, but they could use power write ups.
Healing is now down with healing surges. I have seen comments about them and their effect on the duration of an adventuring day.
One unusual addition here is subduing creatures. In 4E you get to decide with your killing strike if you want to just knock the creature out so you can take it captive. No penalty to the roll or anything, you just knock it out instead of killing it.

10. Rituals

Rituals replace a whole bunch of spells, from divinations to disease curing to creating magic items. Anybody can learn to use rituals with the proper feat, which wizards and clerics get as a class feature. So yes, a fighter can make magic items or cure diseases.
Since children might be reading, I will edit the naughty words from my comments on that change:

And that's all I have to say about that.

Overall

In many ways I feel bad having to give 4E such a negative review. The people who wrote it are decent people, who despite rants do have a clue about gaming, and very much want to make a great game. And there are more than a few truly great concepts in the 4E rules. Unfortunately, somewhere between getting the ideas and putting them in this book, a whole lot of everything was lost, from flavor in the text to flavor of the game to fun being anything more than "everyone is utterly equal".
A lot of the spirit I am used to is simply nonexistent in the 4E PHB. Of course, for a game that is apparently supposed to be played on a virtual tabletop, I suppose most of it really is not needed any more. At least to someone. And that someone saw it taken out of 4E.
From this and Keep on the Shadowfell I expect 4E will be absurdly easy to write for. I just do not see how I would have any fun playing this system.

The way to calculate xp for monsters, and the related way of building encounters, has changed across the editions. I want to set the methods out for comparison in case there is some "better" way of doing it for Pathfinder.

Original-BECMI-1st-2nd

Strong Points
All of these used the same basic method. Monsters had a set xp value, they were grouped in levels according to a range of xp values, and the DM was expected to modify the xp awarded per monster based on the relative level of the monster to the PCs.
Some parts of this were modified through these systems. Monster Level was not originally well defined, and xp went from a base number plus a bonus for each hit point to a static number.

Flaws:
There was no standard for determining how to modify xp by party level.
There was no standard for how many monsters to use in an encounter.
Monster levels did not equal the number of character levels, making it difficult to adjust for higher level parties.

3E-3.5

Strong Points
This edition tried to answer the two flaws of the previous system. It had a table for xp cross-referenced by monster level and player level, it had a table for creating encounters based on monster level, and it had monsters of all levels (CR) equal to PC levels and beyond.
Unfortunately it created its own problems.

Flaws:
No differentiation in monsters of a particular level/CR.
Solo fights as the standard encounter.
A severe disconnect between characters as NPCs or PCs in power level.

4E

Strong Points
Although somewhat theoretical still, the essentials of this have appeared in previews and been picked up from random comments.
Again, the focus is on fixing the flaws of the previous system. Encounters now assume group fights, NPCs are radically different from PCs in how they interact as monsters, and four "types" of monster within each level have been created to establish some difference between them, and it removed the somewhat difficult to use xp table.
Again though, as it fixed problems it created new ones.

Flaws:
In eliminating the xp table, it establishes that monsters are worth the same xp no matter what level party fights them.
From that, by keeping xp so close, it establishes that monsters of different levels may well be worth the same xp. The most extreme example of this would be in a Level 5 encounter where a 1st level standard monster is worth 100 xp just like a 9th level minion. Because of the rules for minions, those two are significantly different threats simple because a 1st level standard monster will not take one hit to kill.
It remains to be seen how the NPC rules differ. From the previews so far it looks like they will be losing a lot of their flavor by being reduced in power to "monster" level.

Pathfinder

Strong Points
So far the Beta has a system to address solo fights and NPC/PC power disparity. That leaves figuring out a way to address differences in monster power within a CR.
More critically, it means finding a way to avoid introducing any flaws into the system the way each previous iteration has managed to in its attempt to fix the obvious flaws.

Is there anything I missed?

Someone noted this on the WotC forums as one of the issues with 3.5 skills, and I thought it was worth some discussion.

According to the rules, and without taking major cross-class skill ranks, a farmer has trouble identifying what his cow is.
He is also baffled by his dog, his pigs, and horses, donkeys, or mules he has.
Depending on how you interpret the rules, he might just know what his cat and chickens are, otherwise he is out of luck.

That needs to be changed.

Also, there are issues, particularly at higher levels, with identifying advanced creatures as well as those whose HD go up faster than their CR. You could literally know what a goblin warrior 1 is, but be somewhat confused as to what the goblin rogue 3 standing next to him is, since the DC to identify the rogue 3 is technically 2 higher. Of course, you would somehow identify him as a rogue that way. You could also know just what a baby dragon is, but be completely perplexed by what the larger, lizard looking thing that is the same color and standing behind it is.

The later Monster Manuals started to address this by having the DC to identify creatures based on CR rather than HD, and letting you identify the type and name with a lower roll above CR 10.

So how about some sort of revision to using Knowledge skills to identify things? Particularly at low levels. We really do not need certain individuals taking advantage of this:
DM: The farmer agrees to sell you some fresh chicken.
DM: (secretly rolls Knowledge (nature) and Knowledge (local) for the farmer, noting that the farmer's wife is a Commoner 2)
DM: He brings it back out, nice and fresh.
PC 1: Yes! I am so sick of iron rations.
PC 2: This is the funniest looking chicken I have ever seen. I thought chickens had more bones?
PC 1: Whatever. It tastes just like chicken!