There are a lot of options to protect miniatures when traveling.
An expensive option: plastic travel case with foam trays that isolate each mini and allow you to store tons of them. A lot of hobby/miniature places sell these.
A medium-fancy option: go to your nearest big box store and get a small fishing tackle box. Many of them have openings that are almost exactly the size of your average tabletop gaming miniature.
A cheap option: use the small plastic containers that dice come in. I wrap mine in a small bit of paper towel and they don't ever get messed up in there.
This. Simple solution us old timers use (who cut our teeth on RPGs back in ancient times prior to the internet called the '80s) is a fishing tackle box lined with foam. The more precious the miniture, the more care in creating the foam compartment. I.E. using a heat gun to melt a somewhat conforming chamber in a foam block, insert custom foam block into adequately sized compartment of the tackle box.
Plastic minis were typically the disposable sort, such as the Warhammer armies that one would have mass quantities of and so didn't get nearly the care. So most of the tackle boxes gamers used back then had lower trays that while still lined with foam, had "communal compartments". But the metal ones almost always had their own compartment (unless of course they were as valued as the plastic ones) and the size of the box was often a WIP. One guy I knew had a snap on like box that he could just keep adding layers to, his box was if I recall correctly, 11 layers deep.
All that said, with no disrespect intended towards your interest of minis, allow my story below to serve as a cautionary tale with a cherished solution at the end.
Trolls & their offspring:
Enough time has gone by that I can recount this tale with a bit of wry humor, but at the time...well...lets just say that its a good thing the show Dexter wasn't a thing back then.
By '96 I had spent a near fortune on metal figs/paint/brushes/travel cases/etc, and at the store we almost always played at, I often had metal minis on display as examples of airbrush painting. I had shifted hobbies from miniature wargaming and had a fairly good skill set at creating landscapes and textured 3d terrain and had gone "all in" into RPGs bringing my minis with me. Also, partly due to being fairly good friends with the store owner (I generated a lot of business for her) and because I freely shared my landscape accessories/tiles with others, I had storage privileges for my terrain tiles and accessories in the back game area. My minis however, were all transported by tacklebox as was the norm back then.
This store had a large back room with two rentable gaming bays I typically rented 2-3x a week and after doing this roughly 5 years I was quite well known, and the gamers of the area tended to respect each others possessions and gaming area enough to look and not touch. The store had a no food in the back policy, and since it sat right in the middle of several restaurants a 5 minute walk away, sometimes we would take a break to grab a bite to eat, leaving our minis and tiles out because we never ran into any issues with anyone messing with our stuff.
Friday, June 14th 1996 changed all that. This was a night where doing a climatic end to a 8 month long campaign and we had rented our bay for a 10 hour session. We broke for dinner at 7ish and hit the mongolian BBQ across the street. I'm sure that the clarity with which I remember all this is already making some of you cringe in dread anticipation.
I don't know how things are these days as it seems like the internet pretty much killed RPG stores, but back then such places usually had a lurking troll or two of either gender who due to A) being a troll with typical troll social skills and B) thinking the word "hygene" is a rare Witch Curse, was largely avoided but because they were adept at survival they would usually just lurk and rarely interact. Sometimes, these trolls for whatever mysterious reason, manage to have offspring, and in particular, the female variety had this strange notion that others grimacing and backing away was a form of sign language to encourage them to tell us intimate details about their caves, fungus farms, and their latest attempts at recreating renn fest fashion wear.
Our store's local troll maiden was miserable at A) having offspring and B) breaking every mirror she walked by, had as usual allowed her snot trailing crawling tumor familiar like offspring to wander into the back gaming area. At this point I have to apologize as I used to be far more acidic and colorful of my description of the troll maid and her mucus shedding offspring, but time heals all wounds no? Anyway, said tumor familiar found our gaming table, and while it couldn't reach the gaming table's height it could reach the side table that sat much lower and on which I put my 3 tackleboxes of all airbrushed minis.
We were gone roughly a hour, and upon our return I find my entire collection of 250ish "elite" grade airbrushed minis was wrecked (admittedly, half of them were plastic and thus quite fragile in the pincers of such a creature). Of course there was no reimbursement (troll mothers are notoriously low on loot), and being a mother troll she couldn't fathom why I would leave my possessions out where her offspring could wreck them since obviously, it wasn't her role in life to monitor her creation, it was everyone else's. Naturally, I had the urge to flay the skin off this troll and her child using a dull spoon dipped in salt. While most insist it was my friends restraining me that prevented such a flaying from happening, I clearly recall that I (barely) made my will save and I'm equally certain my barbarian like howls of rage was only heard by the surrounding 3 counties, not states as my friends at the time insisted was the case (they were prone to being a bit melodramatic).
After a roughly two week mourning period, I invested in cardboard minis.
Turned out to be the best thing ever. The amount of artistry that one can bring to custom cardboard minis puts plastic/metal to shame IMO, and their travel is in comparison, stunningly simple. And if a snottling happens to chew on one, I just print up a replacement, slip it into the slotted base, and carry on. Though to be perfectly honest, my Circle of Protection vs Vermin has been made permanent and so I no longer encounter such aberrations.
And yes, I still wish I could flay that troll and her offspring. But since I live 3 states away now, and buy all my gaming products via the internet, I manage to avoid encountering such creatures anymore.
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Sans reading the story, short version: invest in cardboard minis good sir, trust me when I say, the convenience is unsurpassed, and just as worthy of your artistic efforts to customize.
Like i said. Some people only visualize a fighter swinging their weapon regardless of feats, skills, tactics, real game play and then compare it to the wizard who casts spells in a variety of ways, but is still only casting a spell.
Next will be the ways in which a caster shuts down a martial or does everything better. Same story different thread.
Can you explain to me where a Fighter achieves more than "swing the sword"? Because personally I'm a huge sucker for martials and would love to have a sudden revelation that yes, I can have the same amount of narrative power that a 9th level caster gets.
Maybe I'm not picking up on what you mean but the narrative power of the character has, I think, absolutely nothing to do with his class per se. It's about what you (as the player with the GM) choose to go after as a character. While how a wizard or bard goes about gaining a kingdom and castle, for example, is vastly different from how a martial character might go about it the character's goal is essentially the same and both will create a narrative in the process. Or do you mean something else by narrative power?
I've been in this boat many a ocassion and I'd have to support Arachnofiend's position. I've been gaming with the same group for a very long time now (20 some years) with 3 rotating GMs of which I'm one. I love my friends dearly, but their preference for martials often puts me in a rut where I have to make sure there is lots of weapon clashing when I run, because when I throw a caster in the mix its nothing but groans and curses. I'm the only one out of us that plays casters regularly, though I mix it up by hitting 3/4 caster classes. I've proven time and again how caster types can add exponential benefits to a group, and they will repeatedly stick with melee beat sticks or archers. Most of the time I don't optimize, because I already get complaints about dominating a game.
The other night we got into a good natured argument about melees vs casters, and while I didn't say it, what struck me about it is their position was largely machismo wish fulfillment. They like being juggernauts that tear through hordes like in a video game. The problem largely stems from the fact that the game is designed from the ground up towards being a tactical wargame, with very narrow niches and development paths for martial characters.
Casters on the other hand, while also requiring the same wargame approach to specialization, have the inherit flexibility of certain spells. There's a reason why blasting for a caster is typically a sub-optimal choice, they can do more with within the limits of a spell. I still vividly remember the night one of the gms set up a campaign for us to stop a strong king from demolishing a noble who was more popular. I sat quietly while the other guys debated how to ruin supply lines, poison wells, assassinate key generals, etc. When i was accused of not helping, I suggest i could always geas the king and duke into accepting any reasonable compromise that would benefit both them. The look on my GM's face was as if I had kicked his puppy. That's a example of altering the narrative.
I enjoy PF for what it is, a tactical wargame, most of its roleplaying elements is summed up in how someone beats a critter to death, but barely any effort at doing anything else. The rules barely touch on social conflict, there's zero tactical social combat, its all summed up with catch all rolls hitting a DC, which frequently from the 100s of games I've witnessed have less than a passing effect on play. The vast majority of GMs consider a Diplomacy roll to be good for a couple of minutes and way less effective than a Suggestion spell, let alone a Geas. Until the rules treat something besides tactical weapon flicking (or tactical level spell slinging) martials are extremely limited in what they do, beating stuff up in different ways.
Update:
I printed up this thread, called up my group and got everyone to show up a couple of hours early. We got to our gamer cave and I read this post outloud to everyone and we fired up HL and took a second look at the guides that were being used. The spreadsheet was likewise reloaded.
First after all the numbers were crunched, the group agreed with the general posts of this thread and my hunch that the 2H fighter isn't broken, he was just being played right. I also lost my turn to play tonight as we wanted to test what our revised attempts would yield (sad face).
2nd we looked at the Gunslinger. The first thing we cleared up was the reloading rules, which we also applied to other areas where questions about Free actions arose. Then we went through the computations a 2nd time. The PC is a Pistolero, but he wasn't staying close to the fray, he was shooting from further away. And he wasn't using several feats properly. (I won't go into detail, I'm sure you can guess at what they were). End result was, his damage output suddenly jumped right on par with the 2H fighter and if he used his grit, it went higher. The GS player was downright giddy.
Next up was the Sorcerer. His big gripe was that he was using up his 3 6th level spell slots to buff his 3rd level spells and they still weren't amounting to as much as he felt they should given that the martials have infinite refresh on their attacks (the cleaving that was going on was pretty impressive). So the very first thing I did was suggest he change out his magic item buy and get a maximize rod. 3 charges of the rod applied to his level 3 spells put out the same damage without burning his 6th level spells. Next up it was discovered he didn't have Empower, which made those lower level spells more use friendly as well as a couple of the higher level ones. We did a few other tweaks here and there, nothing major, but it left him with a lot more to do than before and his damage numbers were a lot more satisfying. Part of it was also realizing he'd have a select few go-to blast spells, and then the rest was about utility, that made a nice difference too. (he figured he needed at least 3 different energy types which we cleared up as well, his spell selection improved noticeably from that as well).
Our Rogue: He dropped the 2 weapon fighting and class entirely, and went Ninja instead. We also changed his race to Catfolk and went with Cat Burglar. His damage got better and his versatility got significantly better, he always had something to do and though he wasn't a DPR monster, he was a lot happier for the shift. We tinkered briefly with recasting his Rogue as a Knife Fighter using a single blade, that too worked out way better than 2 weapon fighting, but the Catfolk Ninja really grabbed his imagination and with lessons learned from before, his damage is respectable and the comedy relief his new character inspired in him was well worth it(though I worry he's abusing the poison a little, time will tell on that).
Our Monk: He was the hardest to configure and took the longest. We redrafted himself as a Quingong Monk using Dragon Style. His damage jumped up a good bit, though he was still a good 36 pts behind the Gunslinger and Fighter, he was luke warm at best regarding the gap. After some soul searching on the matter, we decided that his normal character type is less supported in PF than it was with what we were used to. We discussed other archtypes and in the end his feeling was that it takes a heck of a lot of effort to make a Monk able to boot head, and then when all is said and done you're still trailing far behind the other guys. He acknowledges that its got great saves and mobility, but he brought up a pretty good point, that if he's away from the rest of the group with all that great mobility, its a false positive. And he detests playing ranged characters so a Zen Archer wasn't going to happen.
So we took out one of the NPCs I was going to introduce to the group as a hireling, which was a Battle Oracle. This is where we all pooled our heads to help him out with the build and spell selection, made use of the guide, and got him finalized. He's playing a naginata weilding character who got a good assortment of the 2H weapon feats and we made him a Hork which was this asian flavored half-oni wandering mystic warrior. He utterly fell in love with the character and funeral services were held for the Monk class at our table.
We decided to play late tonight, I threw some fluff combats at the players to basically give them some experience using their new builds, first one was a tad clunky, 2nd one was smoother, 3rd one everyone knew pretty much how to run their character to fairly solid effect. We also updated our spreadsheet to take into account common class practices, which did a good bit to help with the learning curve to make sure everyone was using their assets properly. I.E. we had the numbers to shoot for, if you were falling short of that something isn't being done right. By the 3rd combat though we're by no means masters of PF, but we're not as incompetent anymore.
Finally, I mentioned to the group that while I was happy to run them at this level and deal with whatever pitfalls our collective ignorance could cause, that there were a couple of posts that suggested we start at a lower level. The guy who was going to GM his game tonight who put his game on hold was also going to reboot a old campaign with higher level characters. After some discussion, I convinced them that this should be a low level game and to start off with level 3 instead of level 13. We also decided to play classes different from what's in my game though I don't think the Monk will make the cut there either. This way we get to learn the game at either end of the spectrum and will hopefully lead us to a brand new campaign after a couple of months with a much more solid understanding of the system.
I'd like to thank everyone for their input, it was extremely helpful and appreciated. Cheers =)
I spent way too many hours trying to google a solution for this after searching through the various rulebooks failed me, and as a newly minted PF GM I've run out of time to devote to this and figured I'd ask this wonderful resource here.
I got a player who wants to play a Magus but wants to run it based off of CHA like the Sorcerer. I figured from what I know that this shouldn't be too difficult since I knew Sorcerers have the option to shift their spell casting stat from CHA to INT or even WIS by selecting a certain bloodline. But I couldn't find squat on how to do this for a Int based character to go to CHA. Normally I'd just make the swap and be done with it, but we're using Hero Lab alot and ideally I want to use a more official feature than my whim. So basically my question is, am I missing something? Is there no option to flip INT to CHA for a Magus?
Also, the player said he'd prefer if he could be a "Sorcerer like Magus", meaning spontaneous casting with fewer spells, etc. I considered building a archtype to do this, but as I said in the beginning, I'm newly arrived to PF and some advice would be appreciated.
Agree with Kaishakunin, but I'm not a good person to offer up anything much past that because I'm known as being politically incorrect. I deal with reality more than theory and have always believed you are what you allow yourself to be. The human spirit is like steel, its forged in fires of adversity, not excuses.
