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I'm personally curious as to what the social structure was around these restrictions/attitudes in real life. Being charitable, I'll acknowledge there's a sense of fairness that using ranged weapons against someone violates, but then we enter the real world and psychic indulgences like that don't last very long against harsh reality, so who benefited from these codes?

As far as D&D is concerned, there's no reason for a Paladin to artificially limit himself this way.

1)Depends on the dungeon, but if it's full of intelligent enemies who know you are coming, you should expect an ambush at the first choke-point.

Some players might like the more straightforward normal hack and slash way more, there's preference involved. But if you're going for realism or immersion then yeah, there's no reason to go easy on this. I run things this way. It has the added benefits of making stealth more attractive in a game that usually penalizes it, and it knocks a sense of humility into the players when they know they can't just waltz into every enemy compound and win. It makes it so that running away from combat is something you consider. It opens up possible storylines like trying to take down an evil organization over a longer period of time because you know you wouldn't survive it if you just tried a direct attack on their lair.

2)I do this too. They can run away from the fight if they can't deal with the tactic, basically.

Bloat is when there are more rules than I have system mastery, concision is when I have more system mastery than the rules have novelty.

Tongue firmly in cheek.

I'm in a 4e game where the DM lets me ride the disk, lets it hover over water, has it act like a featherfall if there's no ground underneath it and lets me use two ropes as a rail line to cross gaps.

It's... not that powerful. These kinds of impediments stop being meaningful pretty quickly in 3rd edition.

"taking 10 takes 10 times as long as a normal check"

I liked it in the Ultima series, so I wouldn't mind it here. After enough exposure it was easier to type these things in Ultima 6 rather than flip through the spellbook to the spell you want each time.

Definitely going to incorporate something like that in my game.

jocundthejolly wrote:

I realize this kind of thing is sensitive with the RAW crowd, but by my lights roleplaying NPC reactions (without rolling dice) is well within the limits of GM fiat. In fact, I think it is an essential part of good GMing. If you pick a character who is malodorous and shockingly ugly, or who wears pleated pants or is otherwise utterly rebarbative, the world will take notice. You aren't getting away with a 5 Charisma thinking everything will be fine if you just stand in the back and keep your mouth shut in every social situation.

Especially, since part of having a five Charisma is that you probably can't keep your big, fat mouth shut in social situations. 5 is low enough (actually 6 or 7 is probably low enough) that such a character is actively offensive to a wide variety of people. He can't just sit in the back and let the face do all the talking. No need to use DM fiat. His mere presence should be enough to cause a negative modifier. While the rules don't state that should happen, they don't state it shouldn't, either. Perfectly within DM right to make it so, and I would say it should be done. Too many folks think they can use dump stats in the roleplaying attributes and get away with it.

Just because you're socially clueless doesn't mean you're unaware of it. Keeping your mouth shut and staying in the back works in real life well enough, why go out of your way to penalize it in game?

This blog entry.

Huh. And here I thought you could use manoeuvres on AoOs normally.

I got nuttin'.

Well, there was one time not a single player showed up, or told me they couldn't show up. I'm not running that game anymore.

Do you look over your player's character sheets looking for mistakes?

I don't, but out of curiosity I decided to take a look at the character sheets I had from a game that ran a single session and failed to get off the ground. I expected to find at least one mistake per sheet and was not disappointed. I have three sheets out of the five characters that were iin the game.

First character: elven ranger. Mistakes: did not include armor check penalty in the skills total, and bought a human bane weapon without having a +1 weapon first.

Human sorcerer. Mistakes: thought the elemental bloodlines granted the movement power at level 1 rather than 15. The player probably looked at the chart and didn't read the elemental movement paragraph later on. Also didn't include his strength penalty to the damage on his throwing knives. Also had more ranks than possible in one skill (probably didn't realize you can't have level +3 anymore).

Human paladin: This one was a new player's character. Did not add str modifier to attack bonus, and didn't include armor check penalty in his skills total either.

This is, of course, just what I noticed. I didn't do anything like check feat requirements. As a bonus, I looked over a sheet of an npc I made for this game and his wealth total was a bit higher than it should be.

The system mastery required to make an errorless character is really quite high, which is why I usually don't go looking for mistakes in my players' characters. I like the complexity, but then I'm detail obsessive and I like math. I don't think most people do, and I can't help but wonder whether the game would really lose anything if it were simplified.

Or for that matter how differently the balance arguments here would go if we had a magic lens that let us see every unambiguously wrong rules interpretation the other poster has been using for years (for the longest time I thought weapon special abilities could not exceed the enhancement bonus on a weapon; e.g an icy flaming sword had to be +2).

Typing on an iPad with long nails ftl.

I give my players the WBL and let them magic mart whatever they want. I don't like the magic mart system too much but every solution I have ever read for it has been worse than e disease (and mostly boil down to spend a lot of GM time and attention to ameliorate the immersion busting Aspects of it). Frankly I would rather not have any interaction with the accounting part of the game at all, and I would give my players their WBL automatically every level if I didn't think that would be even worse for immersion.

I don't hand out loot randomly in the game. I generally try to encourage whatever, money making schemes the players come up with during the game. If they're not into that then they just run across a lot of well geared hostile npcs, but I never resort to the random loot tables.

As for the low magic discussion, does anyone even use the CR system? I have never found it to be remotely useful as what any party is capable of handling changes drastically depending on class makeup, how well they rolled at chargen (no one likes point buy ;( ), optimization proficiency, etc. I've always eyeballed how many hits a character can take and how much damage the party can dish out when setting up encounters; I've never ran a campaign with restricted loot, but I can't imagine it would be any different on the GM side.

It's the new Armageddon spell basically. People on the other side of the earth can't see the rope because it's hidden by all the dirt and such in between.

The rope cannot be hidden.

"I can rope trick"
"YOU DESTROYED THE WORLD, WHY'D YOU DO THAT. Campaign over guys."

Wouldn't falling be bludgeoning damage? I always played it that way, though I guess maybe it technically isn't.

I'm always a little surprised at how much of the advice people give GMs centers on logistical stuff. I guess that's the low hanging fruit.

Stuff that has helped me:

Justin Alexander's rule of three: If the players need to know some piece of information, give them three chances to notice it. If there's only one chance to learn this information, don't subject it to the randomness of a roll, just give it to them.

Corollary: Don't ever roll a die unless you're comfortable with any outcome it will give you. There's no point in rolling a die if you're just going to overrule it anyway, and don't roll thinking that you'll never get that 100 on the percentile that will ruin your campaign, because it will come up.

One of Richard Garriot's design principles: Design a solution to a problem, not the only solution to a problem. You generally shouldn't go out of your way to make sure players only solve things through the way you envisioned it; you make one solution so that there is a solution, but otherwise things you didn't think of are fair game.

Flesh out NPC/BBEG motivations heavily. This is your insurance when your players inevitably skip or trivialize what you had planned. NPCs are the most dynamic part of your adventure, as long as they are still in play, they can react to the change in circumstances your players brought about. But you will need to know what they would do in those situations.

If you're bad at adding things quickly in your head (I know I am) and you're not using some electronic aid, reintroduce Thac0 into your game. Seriously. You know your player's armor class. You know your monster's to hit. Subtract the monster to hit from the player armor class and you get the number you need to roll on the die to hit. You do the calculation once before combat so you don't have to do the math in your head with every. single. attack. you. make.

Conditionals can make this a screwy system, but it works well enough at the lower levels before there's a billion different situational modifiers.

Fudging surreptitiously: if you find that you need to fudge combat for whatever reason, don't fudge attacks and damage. It's fairly noticeable when monsters start wiffing or hitting for half of what they were a second ago. Better ways:

Hit points are a bit more concealed. Your players might have an idea of how many hitpoints your monster has, but with new monsters they don't. You can generally lop off a quarter or so hitpoints without anyone noticing.

Bad tactical decisions are another way. Just play the monsters less efficiently than you would normally. Spreading damage around to several characters rather than focus firing, for example.

I want the typos fixed. I don't care much for actual rules changes being put into the newer stuff.

I sort of recall that that was changed for zombies at least so while they are still unthinking automatons, and can do little more than follow orders what little more they can do is wonder off when you are not looking and randomly kill stuff. If I am remembering correctly that sort of makes them rather less useful as minions since they need to be supervised all the time and that rules out having them protect stuff, guard areas, wait around in a room until time for an attack, or what have you.

Skeletons on the other hand I can not recall if they need supervision.

Depends on how literally you want to take "can do little more than follow orders" from the bestiary. Having that said even if taken literally (as in to mean there are a few things they can do beyond just following orders) there's nothing to indicate anything that they do on their own is evil, wandering off and killing things is something we read into zombies because that's that way they usually are in other fiction, not because it's supported by the RAW.

Sure. And the evil descriptor is another tool to limit its use.

How? If you're evil you don't care about the descriptor, and if you're good... you don't care about the descriptor because you're not barred from casting it and there are no rules about how casting [evil] spells or even doing [evil] acts interact with your alignment. What difference does it being [evil] make.

It wasn't in 3.0, neither were skeletons and zombies. They were in 3.5. It's like this, take the interpretation you like and run with it, because it's not like the six million people who have worked on D&D ever had a consensus, even within the same edition.

I don't know about invisible - those elves are, on average, more agile then those humans. That's easy and visible. And halflings and gnomes are so much better company than those antisocial dwarves that it's not even funny.

Yeah and they still will be. Are people ignoring the "this is for players only" bit or is having your relative position on the bellcurve shifted something everyone feels is integral to their roleplaying experience?

Yeah, but all fighters can use long swords and longbows, not just elven ones. They can all uses hammers and axes, not just those dwarves.

And in fact, that stuff can be as limiting as the ability modifiers, maybe even more so!

"If I play a dwarf wizard, my slow and steady is useless!"
"Why play an elven archer-fighter? My longbow bonus weapon is lost that way!"
"You play a gnome fighter? Are you mad? You're small! And your bonus to illusion stuff is wasted!"

And talking about bland, this stuff does more damage than the ability score modifiers, because if you want to use a dwarf that uses, say, a bow, you won't live up to your maximum potential. Or the elven fighter who goes for an exotic weapon that is not the curveblade. Or gnome spellcasters that don't use illusion.

I'm comfortable with certain races being better for certain classes than others. The difference between not getting any use out of Slow and Steady from a dwarf and getting a -2 to your spellcasting stat is that one is a wasted opportunity cost and the other actively punishes you for playing that race, rather than coming up neutral when weighed against a theoretical statless race. It's not a meaningful distinction if you're optimizing since all choices are opportunity costs anyway, but not getting any use out of Slow and Steady hurts a hell of a lot less than getting a -2 to your spellcasting stat, so you're at best wildly overrating its affect if you think that's more punishing.

I think removing racial mods is an overall negative to the game.

I strongly dispute the idea that a single +2 to a primary stat is make or break on a viable character.

Well, no one is going to argue with you because no one is arguing that.

I disagree with the premise that races should be more alike. In fact, I think the races should be MORE different. It's my biggest beef with the Half-Orc and the Half-Elf. I want to see a very diverse racial group.

Yeah me too. Here's an idea, if we remove the net +2 stat every race gets, we can use those "points" to give them other interesting abilities without pushing the races into +1 LA territory.

Yeah Pasis has some really fantastic work. I'd actually stumbled on the same method of doing mountains before I ever joined the CG, but didn't manage to make anything decent out of it, and after I found his tutorial I learned that I'd gotten rather close to something workable right before I gave up on it. Then I outright 'stole' his texture and got to what you see.

I think I already post (posted? What the hell is the past tense of post?) this on the Velesh thread, but as far as my homebrew goes this is the current map I have. Velesh is a map I'm working on for a friend that's been loooooong overdue for me to finish it, heh.

hogarth wrote:

Congratulations! You found some math errors. (I know I made a bunch.) :-)

Hardy har har! What I'm trying to get at is the fact that no one's numbers are matching up with what I have for the equation. With excel or a graphing calculator a person wouldn't get slightly off numbers, so my assumption is that I must be doing something wrong.

I'd be pretty impressed if everyone in this thread was off on their DPR.

If you're getting the hit chance by subtracting the To hit from the AC, and then subtracting that from a 20, you need to add 1 to it. I remember someone else making that mistake somewhere.

Also my 20x2 crit attack chains are wrong, because for whatever reason I used 10% for the crit chance in my calculations rather than 5% (I plead long term temporary insanity)

Anyway so I'm doing this for my next game. Now I only have to decide whether I want to give everyone a +2 to a single stat, no stat boosts at all or +2 to two stats and -2 to one.

My problem now is that all of these options seem to leave the half elf and half orc really looking bland compared to everyone else.

Funny, I almost did the exact same thing a while back when I was considering running the Hollow's Last Hope module, but ended up deciding not to run it so I never did the map. Didn't realize Christopher was on the Cartographer's Guild; I'm on there too, small world.

I love your mountains, btw. I struggle with those a lot, mine always look like someone put stickers on top of the rest of the map, but yours look like they're actually coming out of the ground.

So no more gracile elves and gruff dwarves?

Of course, you'll do away with everything else, right? Making all dwarves slow is limiting, too, since that means that dwarves suck for everything that depends on fast movement. Or if I want a civilised, non-ferocious half-orc. Or everything else.

Yes, we're going to do away with everything. Life as you know it will be nothing but a white featureless void as far as the eye can see.

I think the stat mods make up a big part of what drives the fluff of the races. If you arent interested in the standard fluff i think it matters less to you, but for me, I was even sad to see the flat half orc mods lost. It changes my perceptions of the race without them, and I no longer feel they fit their gruff barbaric image that I had of them in 3.5. Such a change would sterilize the rest of the races to me, and I wouldnt enjoy them as much. I would probably play humans exclusively from that point forward, as there would be little to no reason (in my opinion) to play anything else from a mechanical standpoint or a flavor standpoint.

Stat mods are the almost the most bland and invisible racial mods you can have. When it comes to the feel of certain races, abilities that you actively use (spell like abilities) and passives that let you do something that you couldn't do before (wield a certain weapon) count for a lot more in the experience of actual play. Stat mods are lost in the sea of numbers that determine any particular check or bonuns.

Seriously, the whole point of doing away with stat mods is so that we can actually have more interesting racial abilities. There's an opportunity cost to stat mods and they're not worth it.

Also, I specifically said this is for player characters. You have the power to determine your character to be however you like and it doesn't matter because player characters are outliers to begin with. This doesn't mean doing away with graceful elves or gruff dwarves, it just means the player shouldn't be penalized for wanting to play otherwise. And it's not like you had gruff player dwarves in the first place. The average on a 4d6 drop lowest is 12. The average player dwarf is just as likable as a human. And it's not like a -2 to charisma is enough to make you gruff in the first place. The orc isn't barbaric because he has a -2 to int and cha. In the standard population human majority layouts in the 3rd edition books, there will be more humans that are at 8 in int and cha than there are orcs in total, yet the world isn't overrun by gruff and barbaric humans.

Kolokotroni wrote:

Have you tried different dice? It is possible for dice to be slightly mishapen enough to roll 'better' or 'worse' then average. If this is a reoccuring theme, its time to look for new dice.

I have. I own at least 12 different sets, along with handfuls of single dice I've acquired over the years. I'm convinced it's something in the way I roll them. Something to do with how my hand moves, or what number is already facing up when I roll them. Either way, it's so bad it's affected the way I make characters.

Could be. I realized one time while I was rolling up a rifts character that the way I picked up the d6 and rolled it tended to make it show whatever number was facing up when I picked it up.

This was back where if you rolled 17+ you added a d6 to that stat, and if you rolled a 6 on that d6 you rolled another d6 ad infinitum. I ended up with a stat like 38 or so because of how I rolled the die, which is when it hit me that something really was off in how I was throwing the die.

And if I, as the GM, am at a table where my players are expected to cheat (and know that they are expected to cheat), should a player new to the table just start out and say "Hey guys, I can't abide cheating on dice roles when things go south"?

Look, fudging doesn't have to be done in secret. If you feel at some points players should have editorial control over what happens in the game, just grant them that power, there's no need for the subterfuge in hiding behind a modified die roll. If you feel like the subterfuge is necessary so that you can keep the illusion of fairness in the outcome you're modifying, then you need to consider whether you have the right to assume editorial control when the implicitly agreed upon framework is that you can't.

Your hypothetical has nothing to do with the initial discussion, and I'm not sure if this is the topic shifting or whether you don't actually see the difference between a table where it's understood that you can ignore the dice when it suits the story and doing so in a table when it's understood you don't. If you're in a game where it's understood that everyone has the option of ignoring the dice, then it's not even cheating, just a different set of rules that treat the dice as a suggestion. This is not the standard understanding, if for no other reason than the fact that people use dice specifically because they're neutral arbiters in the first place.

There's something like that in the 3.0 splatbook Tome and Blood, which probably means it's in Complete Arcane or one of the 3.5 books too. It's a metamagic feat that lets you cast a spell with another spellcaster that has the same metamagic feat/metamagic'd spell, +2 to save dcs and +1 to caster level checks to beat SR for the first additional caster, and +1 to dcs and sr checks for subsequent additional casters. Use the highest base DC among the casters.

It's basically just for combat, as the wording doesn't seem to let you up the caster level check for anything other than SR.

Not gonna repost the whole build, but if you let the fighter have a +3 dagger the DPR goes up to 52.41, which I think is playable. Some kind of homebrew gloves or something that would add weapon enhacement to thrown items would go a long way towards making this a playable build.

Of course the 16k spent on the gloves pretty much takes away most of the defensive advantage, since you also get screwed out of some money by Pathfinder's forcing of all physical stats onto a single item (you'd save 8k if you can have str and dex on different items, I really don't understand this change). It's a MAD build that has to spend more money on keeping the stats up.

Thrown weapon builds need luvin'.

Dagger Dan, Thrown weapons fighter.

Following RAW, rather than the Nekogami feat I used earlier.

Attacks: 16/16/11, 1d4+14 (17-20 x2)

DPR on a full Attack is 35.06. Like the monk Shuriken build, it's defensively stronger but weaker on the damage. Mostly it's an opportunity cost thing, where the money that would go towards a weapon goes to a shield and better resist cloak instead. Higer dex helps the reflex save too.

In 3.5, rings or cloaks or weapons or armor or whatever that provide a +6 or higher bonus are considered "epic." They're INCREDIBLY expensive (millions of gp in some cases) and aren't really intended to be used by characters who are 20th level or lower.

We haven't actually said much at all about how epic rules work in Pathfinder RPG (aside from pointing out that the 3.5 rules still work if you like them), but as far as official products and the rules themselves go, +5 is the limit for magic items like rings of protection or armor. (Yes, I'm aware that there are higher limits on some things, like bracers of armor; those are different items and their own limits are their own.)

Heh, well at least the OP got his answer, even though we derailed the thread something massive.

Rogue Build using Shuriken Nekogami's Dance of the Knife feat

Jack B. Awesometastic, Human dagger rogue

Attacks: Bab 7/2

+3 daggers 17/17/12/12, d4+9 (19-20x2) +5d6 on sneak attack

Regular DPR : 30.42, Sneak Attack DPR assuming flanking : 82.96

Yowch.

Might be an awesome feat for a thrown daggers fighter though, I'll do that later.

You can buy a +5 deflection ring and a +5 Natural armor amulet by RAW. No custom magic item crafting, just the listed items in the book. Is there anyone willing to argue that stacking those two should cost you a +10 equivalent?

This thread has veered straight into mindboggling.

"You can stack multiple abilities on a single item for a 50% increase in price."

i didn't see any such rule on calculating price.
i did see this part though.

Multiple Similar Abilities: For items with multiple similar abilities that don't take up space on a character's body, use the following formula: Calculate the price of the single most costly ability, then add 75% of the value of the next most costly ability, plus 1/2 the value of any other abilities.

i would say any "other" bonus to AC would easily fall under that rule. your adding to a ring that that is already using that body slot so the "other" bonuses are not taking up any body slots. with that rule the cost would make a lot more sense.

+1 (deflection) 2000gp
+1 (sacred) 4000
+1 (luck) 9250
+1 (insight) 14500
+1 (dodge) 25687.5

55,437.5 gold

this seems more on par and perfectly legal.

I've been trying to reverse engineer your price and frankly I have no idea how you're getting it. The rules you quoted are for items that don't take up a slot, if you're going to rule that the AC bonuses fall under that then you should be applying the discount that comes along with it, and your item should be even cheaper than mine.

Louis IX wrote:

True, but you could make a ring with a +3 Sacred bonus and another with a +3 Dodge bonus. Flame on.

So...are you talking about 2 different rings? If so, that's not helping. If not, what do you mean?

There must be rules for this, whether epic or not. Seeing as Epic Level Handbook is 3.0 tho, not sure whether that applies.

PRD link

You can stack multiple abilities on a single item for a 50% increase in price. The armor class cheese basically works by stacking +1 AC from multiple sources, since the exponential price increase for each bonus value above 1 outpaces the 50% cost of adding another +1 from a different source.

So an item with +5 deflection on it comes out to 50k. An item with +1 to AC from five different sources comes out to 17.5k, 2.5k for the first point of AC + 3750 for each further point. Same AC value, but a lot cheaper (the +5 deflection gives you 1 AC per 10k gold, while stacking five +1s gives you 1 AC point per 3.5k)

I wouldn't necessarily consider it legal though. While it does follow the custom magic item price guidelines, you are supposed to compare new magic items to existing ones for a price approximation, and pricing it like the existing AC items passes muster for me.

Edit: Ok I just got ninja'd by like, four people. I need to learn to write faster.

So I looked at the DPR thread again and calculated the damage assuming a .95 hit chance, and the falchion (not elven blade, since there wasn't an attack summary for it and it's too close to 3am to bother) fighter comes out to 78 average damage while the rogue comes out to 101. Kind of interesting, the difference between the fighter's max damage and damage he does deal out is smaller than the equivalent difference for the rogue, so I can see why the rogue might outshine the fighter if you'd dunked him in a vat of buffs.

Still think Treantmonk's point that the extra damage is attributable to the buffer stands though. And to some degree to the fighter too, if he's the one setting up the flank for the rogue in the first place.

ANY system can be gamed. It has always been thus, and thus it ever more shall be, world without end, amen. Don't believe me? I recommend you read this. Heck, even if you DO believe me, read it, it's hilarious but also suprisingly instructional. Point buy systems are probably some of the most gameable systems out there, and this is coming from an old Champions player and staunch point buyist. The answer to a system being gamed is not to change the system, it's a GM with a sharp eye, keen mind, strong will, and possibly a working knowledge of cattle prods.

But the thing is, it seems obvious that racial mods were a nod to the limitations of random roll chargen systems back when they were introduced -- they allow for a modicum of the customization and optimization. That's why I say that while eliminating them is a good idea in general, it is BEST combined with some variation of a point buy system.

Yeah I believe you, but it still doesn't answer my question, mainly why this is feature of the point buy system worth preserving, regardless of whether I'm changing this purposefully or inadvertently.

Some may consider it gaming the system, but everyone in my group has a lot of fun messing around with all of the different combinations with racial stat mods and such to get the best ones we can. Not everyone sees powergaming as bad... We actually congratulate each other for coming up with an awesome combo, rather than scold them for making a powerful character that kills things too fast. Maybe we're competitive, maybe we're insane, but this is my experience. I personally like that elves are frail but dexterous and smart, and that dwarves are wise and gruff but tough, and that halflings are weak but agile and charming (especially since they are basically children)... It appeals to both the power-gamer and role-player in me at the same time.

EDIT: But also since I see that I am the minority in here that will not change any minds, I think that I will probably step out now

I don't think powergaming is bad either, but lets be honest. Your 16 str halfling is a muscle-god compared to most people. The average on a 4d6 drop lowest (after rounding down) is 12, which means the average player halfling is just as strong as a normal human in the first place. Your player elves aren't weak and graceful, they're both stronger and more graceful than other elves and a lot more graceful and just as strong as humans.

It's not like this is a flat negative to powergamers either, I'm sure it'll open up some race/class combos that were suboptimal before.

Edit: I mean, you could just do it so that you have +2 to two stats and -2 to one stat and end up with the "best" of both worlds...

...even though I'm still not sure why being able to squeeze extra points out of the point buy system is worth preserving.

It's really something from the first editions of D&D. So yeah, why the heck not. Agile dwarves and strong halflings? I approve wholeheartedly.

What about the other racial gunk though? Were you going to do anything with that?

Probably not. I mean at this point I kind of want to go through and rework the proficiencies and the dwarf training and other things so that they'd make more sense for the setting I'm running, but I probably won't touch them just out of sheer conservatism.

Ideally though you'd separate the cultural traits by region and leave racial traits to be those biological/magical aspects, like the darkness spell like ability for tieflings or flight for races with wings. I'd also do away with other bonuses, like the dwarf bonus to saving throws. I guess I'm biased towards wanting racial traits to be interesting; traits you interact with are nicer overall than traits you don't, and traits that let you do something you otherwise couldn't are nicer than traits that add to a number that gets lost amidst all the other bonuses.

And I assumed we were just talking about the merits of doing away with racial mods in general, without getting into the specifics (yet) of what else would have to be adjusted to make up for that.

I'm not saying your assumption was inferior OR superior to mine. Just saying, your objection is one that can be addressed without having to scrap the OP idea.

Quite frankly I consider it a plus that it does away with that. I'm not sure why we'd consider not being able to game the system to be a negative, but I'm open to arguments from the other side.

I never really understood why we have these for players in the first place. Player character stats are already exceptional with regards to the assumed baselines for members of their species, so the +2/-2 to various stats just seems like pointless quibbling, kind of like "you can only be this exceptionally likable, Mr. Dwarf."

Mechanically it's even worse. It's not like this actually hurts you if you're just going to pick a race for the stats. Pre-Pathfinder you could find almost any stat combo you liked, probably just within the elven subraces. It could still be that easy depending on how you update those races for use with Pathfinder. Even if you're sticking to core there are certain race/class combos that are just better than others. Where this does penalize you is when you pick an unoptimal combo for flavour reasons. Have an awesome Dwarf sorcerer you want to play? Ok, but you'll be less powerful than if you picked any other race.

I'd really like to just flat out eliminate racial stat bonuses, but I'll probably just have it so everyone gets a +2 to a stat of choice.

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

Can a undead cleric of a good god channel positive energy? Maybe that is why the cleric would exclude himself.

or maybe the positive channeling cleric feels he should heal his own wounds naturally.

*shrugs* (in responce to the " why would a cleric exclude himself of healing" )

That's there so you can avoid killing yourself when you channel negative energy.

First you roll 4d6 drop lowest six times. Then I will roll another set using 7d6 drop lowest four, reroll 1's and 2's. If the set you've rolled does not contain at least two 18s, a 17 and a 15, we swap stat blocks and I roll the special percentile dice that changes things thusly:

1-23 - A Cartesian daemon is in play. On this result I roll a d8, the result which determines how many extra sets of stats I will roll. Every 2d6 of in game hours, I roll randomly roll to determine which of the 1+1d8 set of stats I have are in play for that character. The player never gets to see the extra sets of stats or know which one is in play or when they change.

24-26 - Instead of the stat block I rolled, a new statblock will be determined by the following ethical dilemma. There are two train tracks, one of them has thirteen kittens on it, and the other has 23 kittens on it. The train has no brakes and you must choose one of these tracks to direct the train to. This dilemma will be repeated five more times, once for each stat. Each stat will be determined by how many kittens the train runs over before the friction from the bodies stops the train, with the caveat that if the train runs over more than 18 kittens on the second track your stat will instead be set to a nine.

27-49 - Like previous but with babies instead.

50-63 - You keep the 7d6 blah blah stat block but must use Thac0 and demihuman level limits.

64-84 - You keep the 7d6 stat block and your character is struck by a rare incurable disease that makes it so that you can only regain hitpoints by feeding on magic items.

85-94 - You keep the 7d6 stat block and gain a kender buddy who will follow you throughout your career

95-100 - You keep the 7d6 stat block but you can only play a bard/oracle mystic theurge.

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Or you could take the point buy option.

Sign you are an addict: Have you gotten ill recently I thought to yourself "Well, I just failed my Fort save?"

Or there is this test.

Ehh. The breasts are off center, which is where your eye would naturally rest first in absence of anything particularly eye grabbing.

Which in this case is the large text, which I read before even looking at the image.

Yeah I hear ya. I game with a bunch of atheists too and you can choke on the superstition, so thick it is.

What's mindboggling is that the superstitions aren't even internally consistent. They'll abandon dice that have rolled well because the luck has been rolled out of them, and they'll abandon dice that have rolled badly because they're cursed.

Ah hah, so it's pronounced al-qadeem. I kept wondering how to pronounce that, "old" definitely makes more sense than "approaching."

Bill Dunn wrote:

If the player using it suspects that it is biased and tries to exploit that bias, then it's cheating.

Is that true even if there is no actual bias? Intent may be a necessary condition, but is it sufficient?

I'd say yes, though I could also see an argument for lesser punishment.

Yaaargh, board ninja stole me post!

Anyway, because I'm absurdly fond of crowdsourcing and train-wrecks, and because I've never run a classic dungeon delve and am looking for an excuse to work on more maps, I figured it might be interesting to have the Pathfinder Fora design a dungeon.

The idea is that it'd be a mega-dungeon, a self contained adventure spot for levels 1-10 or whatever. Caveat is that is has to have a consistent plot throughout.

Generally speaking collaborations like this get very little done before imploding, for a million and a half reasons. To get around some of the problems of having a million people say they're going to work on something and then quit because it's more work than they realized or because nothing gets done in the endless discussion, the idea is that I'd just divide the dungeon into chunks and hand each chunk to a person. The idea is to quantize the work to be done so no one commits to anything without having an idea of what's to be expected of them (also minimizes shock from people quitting), and to give each person as much editorial control as you can while maintaining coherency (which at minimum would be collaborating with people working on chunks next to yours it can connect to other chunks, and working with an elected/appointed plot enforcer).

So yeah, I just want to see if there's any interest, or any chance it'll work, before I commit to mapping the dungeon. To make it more specific, don't say "yeah sounds like a great idea" unless you're willing to commit to designing 3-5 rooms following some loose plot guidelines.

Yes/no?

I want to see a fully statted treant monk, personally.

"Modern", to me, is anyone who came into the game after AD&D went soft. Somewhere @ 1987 or so...

And before you come back with whatever, the 1e AD&D PHB is STILL the best selling RPG book. Ever. There were a LOT more players before gaming started catering to Mary Sue lovers...

Hey, is this the thread where we insult other generations? Can I play?

I'm sorry you old grognards had to scale cliffs both ways in the snow to get to your gaming stores, carefully clutching your latest purchase to your chest to protect it from the wind and stifling your squeals of joy for fear of avalanches, but we don't have to do that anymore so we don't care how tough and grizzled that made you. You see, all that wealth and luxury we've been doused in since birth has opened up a lot of free time for us to to attain higher levels of ethical enlightenment. We're sorry you fogies aren't privy to certain truths because you spent your prime philosophizing years trying to fend off the Normans, but do try to keep up with the modern world.

Don't think I've ever had any epic derailments, but the group I played with in highschool was terrible in that I couldn't expect anything at all from them. The worst time I had with them was one game that I couldn't even get off the ground because none of the characters would adventure together.

None of them had character backgrounds so there wasn't anything to tie them together beforehand. As none of the characters knew each other, I contrived to place them all in the same inn one night as it caught fire. The idea was that the Paladin in the group would naturally try help get people out and would either get the other players to help or that they'd do so on their own; either way I'd have at least an event to tie the characters together.

Sure enough fire starts and the Paladin starts trying to get people out. He asks the other players to help and they instead run out the inn and watch it burn, and afterwards they all travel their separate ways. Again I contrive to have them all pass each other on the same road while traveling (kind of like a desperate "hey, I recognize you, you were in the same inn I was when it caught fire! good times, wanna join my party?")and they all just walk by each other.

I ended the game after that. From then on I switched to a completely sandbox and improv GMing style; it's a lot easier to deal with unexpected player action when you don't expect anything.

Her left knee does seemed to be turned inward. Could be uncomfortable if held too long.

Think the problem is less the direction of the knee than the direction of the knee with the foot pointing at the camera. There's only so much you can rotate your ankle and have your knee and foot pointing in different directions; I can't do that in the mirror, though I'm guessing there are people more flexible than me who can.

Funny what people notice though, because I'd never have seen that. What I would consider off is how the fingers make the top of the blade look like it's tilted towards her, while at the right hand the hilt and flat of the blade are facing the camera. The sword would have to bend in the middle for both of those to make sense.

I'm gonna pick on Hugo for a second (though I always feel bad making art criticism, as an aspiring arteeeest myself it's hard to think back to a few months ago when I was oblivious to what really goes into making this stuff) on this piece since it's the first one to comes to mind with the flat weapon bit. Same thing with the hammer here, it's flat against the camera. To be perfectly fair, it's neither impossible nor inconceivable for him to be holding the hammer at that angle, he just wouldn't be able to swing it that way.