Sarandosil's page

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).

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.

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?

Because it's 3am and I'm working on a dungeon map instead of sleeping (just finished a new floor style! /preen) I have to wonder whether this is worth the effort. It strikes me as disadvantage of mapping that, much like turning books into movies, whatever detail I put into the map displaces the mental image my players would come up with from description alone. Worse yet I don't think it's a strictly linear effect; a sparse map I make will probably displace the entirety of the mental image my players would have otherwise come up with even if I haven't drawn in everything in the dungeon and used description to fill what artistic skill couldn't render.

I guess my question is whether anyone prefers a very sparse map, like pen on graph paper just to represent the available room to manoeuvre versus something fleshed out like this. I have one friend who does (actually he might prefer no map at all, I think, not being a fan of miniatures), and I'm wondering how prevalent his opinion is because he's also the only person I know who has it. I'm sympathetic to it, but most everyone I know enjoys having the drawn maps at the table.

Bonus question: If you as a GM get both preferences at a table, whose do you accomodate? (lets avoid the easy answer: "the preference that doesn't involve me spending eight hours in photoshop")

Spinoff from this thread.

I see this thread as a place for comparison mostly, somewhere to see how various house-rules impact the bottom line where the changes are numerical. For comparisons, the rules are the same as the rules from MIB's thread so we can use the builds from that thread as a baseline. Deviate only in the specific changes you're making, and though it's not strictly necessary, avoid making more than one change at a time. Reason for this should be obvious enough.

Otherwise there are no rules. Go nuts. Assume any party setup you like, multiclass how you'd like, etc.

For now all I have for this space is various house-rules intended to make a shuriken monk build viable, but you're welcome to suggest any other house-rules you'd like to see calculated and maybe someone will take a stab at it. I'll probably get to posting the monk stuff tomorrow or some other day since it's not quite done and I need to get to sleep (really thought I'd have it done when I started writing this, oh well).

I'm updating from 3.0 to Pathfinder now (yeah, pretty much stopped playing around the time 3.5 came out and am picking up RPGs again. I've already heard all the jokes I'm emerging from the stone-age. Also, get off my lawn you damn kids) and I'm thinking of allowing these to stack. I've never had a problem with this in 3.0, but looking at the critical focus line of feats, a rapier build looks like it can be quite powerful, especially with the fighter capstone. I know a lot of people house-ruled this back into 3.5, so I'm wondering if anyone's allowed this for Pathfinder and got away without any trouble.

While we're at the subject, do burst effects cap out at x4 crit damage? Now that weapons like the scythe can get to x5 crit damage with the fighter capstone, I'm wondering if it's intentional or an oversight that burst weapons will still function as though the crit multiplier was x4.