Shane Walden's page

I'm running it Tuesday. I read through it release day and got super excited! Love how it's like a Pathfinder "Weekend At Bernie's II", haha.

It doesn't have the DR/5 slashing?? Must have missed that. Just assumed it did. Thanks.

** spoiler omitted **

Shane

Ran this tonight, had a great time. My table decided to play up so I have very little pity for them.

The quick strikes ability from the black dragon zombie can be brutal. It killed the cavalier and scared the hell out of everyone else. Good thing zombies lose special attacks like breath weapon. It was also a good thing that it didn't have DR 5/slashing.

I almost tricked the table into releasing the glabrezu. So close I could taste it. But they persevered and it was awesome.

Overall a great scenario I thought.

Shane

I'm not certain if there are any specific rules for this so I'm posting it in advice.

I have given one of my players a custom magical ax handle. The ax handle has the ancient spirit of a white dragon trapped in it and is able to form an icy ax blade by absorbing the moisture out of the air around it . . . . . . let me just paste my summary of the item's abilities.

Hevniskrim
A dwarven waraxe weilded by Galar Helmfast during the dwarven Quest for Sky, within the handle of Hevniskrim resides the spirit of the white dragon Icingdeath.

Summoning Hevniskrim
Hevniskrem must be summoned each day, or after each time wielder’s attention is distracted enough to interrupt his focus on controlling the dragon spirit, such as being knocked unconscious, sleeping etc. The first time Hevniskrim is summoned no check is required. Subsequent summonings require the summoner to succeed in a Charisma check against a DC of 10 + 1 per number of summonings past the first. The second summoning of the day would be against a DC of 11, the third against a 12, and so on. This check represents the wielder’s attempt to overcome the will of Icingdeath’s spirit as it struggles against its bondage.

Summoning Hevniskrim is a standard action. Typically, summoning Hevniskrim and attacking in the same round is impossible.

Breath of Icingdeath - When Hevniskrim is summoned, moisture from the surrounding air coalesces in a swirling frigid maelstrom into an icy ax blade. This leaves the surrounding air in a 20ft radius so dry that anyone in that area other than the wielder of the blade must make a Fortitude save against a DC of __. Failing this save causes the affected creature to suffer the shaken condition for one round.

Special Abilities
Frost: Immediate Action. Failing a DC __ Fortitude save causes the struck creature to be covered in a sheath of ice, stunning them for one round. This ability can be used 3/day.

Throw: As an attack you can throw Hevniskrim at a range increment of 10 feet. After this attack the icy blade shatters, dissipates, and must be re summoned.

My basic question is what do you guys think the DCs to resist these abilities should be. The character is 9th level now and has had the ax since about 3rd. The DCs increase over time as Icingdeath's long dormant spirit gains strength. There have actually been a couple very cool scenes where the spirit of the dragon has pulled the character into the ax to confront him and try to bargain with him for the dragon's freedom. These typically end in some kind of confrontation. The basic nature of the ax can't change as it is a pretty well established part of the character in our RotRL campaign. Other than that though I am open to advice about how to make it better, other abilities it might gain as Icingdeath grows stronger, or advice about it in general.

Thanks

Is there a list somewhere of what scenarios play specifically into each season's meta plot?

I have just downloaded and going to prepare The Cyphermage Dilemma this weekend. It would be great to have a list of scenarios that contribute to season 4's meta plot so that I can try to run them in order. I know they don't have to be run in order, but it would be nice.

Shane

Here in Little Rock we are getting to the point where we have enough 3rd and 4th level characters that we can start playing up and start playing tier 3-5 scenarios. This brought us to an interesting question. When you complete a tier 1-2 scenario you mark off the tier 4-5 awards. But when you complete that same scenario at tier 4-5 do you mark off the tier 1-2 awards? The PFS Guide to Organized play and a brief bit mentioned in the most recent Know Direction podcast seem to suggest that you do not. Some clarification from more experienced PFS GMs would be great.

Shane Walden

I and two friends are considering volunteering for Tier 1 or Tier 2 spots. If we are all happy staying in the same room can three room credits be applied to the same room?

Shane

So, what's the word?
Two friends and I are planning to make the drive to Indianapolis for GenCon and at least a couple of us would love to run some PFS games. I might not run a scenario in almost every slot like I did at PaizoCon a couple years ago, but maybe 1 or two every day of the Con.

How does this work? Is it too early to be asking? We also would really like to run the scenarios for each other in advance of the convention. If I remember correctly, some of the scenarios that were specifically released in time for PaizoCon 2011 were done so with only a couple days to spare. Has this process been ironed out? Will we have plenty of time to run them and prepare for them? I am the kind of DM who likes to print out and have really good aids and maps available.

Thanks for your help.

Shane Walden

Holy crap those went fast. I really hope more are made available.

Shane

The title sums it up nicely. I have pretty much already decided not to create a feat that allows one of my player's rogue character to intimidate mindless undead. There are a few reasons why I won't be doing this but I would still love to hear other views about how fair I am being and whether or not other GMs out there would have made the same decision.

1st - Allowing a rogue to intimidate mindless undead, even if the feat justifies it by describing some positive energy use, just seems to be stepping on the cleric's toes. The feat as imagined so far would basically grant unlimited uses of turn undead, by the rogue.

2nd - The implacability of mindless undead just seems too classic a trope to turn it on it's head so casually.

3rd - Given the nature of the first couple chapters of CC, this ability could be pretty unbalancing.

Now, I understand that the player wants a character they feel is effective and valuable, and I want that for them. I am more than ready to allow them restructure the character into something they feel is more effective. First of course, I want to make sure they understand that there are and will be more opportunities for social skill use.

What do you other GMs think?

Shane

I got my maps and bonus material. Everything is awesome.

I would have loved if the adventure had been for Pathfinder instead of 4E, though I readily recognize that this was probably written somewhere and I just didn't notice it. I wonder what percentage of the project backers were Pathfinder players vs. 4E.

Just idle curiosity really. I have zero real complaints about the products and will happily support another such project.

Shane

Thanks Benchak, for pointing me in the direction of this thread.

I have a Badge and Banquet Ticket that I would like to offload.

Shane

Hey Watcher I bought an extra ticket for my wife but she cannot make it. I'd be willing to give it to you. My name is Larry Wilhelm, we can meet in seattle prior to the banquet and talk details, if u want it its yours.

I can see that you already have an offer, but I am certainly willing to sell my badge and banquet if you or anyone else is looking for a set.

shanelwalden @ gmail .com

Shane

I recently learned that I won't be able to attend PaizoCon this year. Part of the program I have applied to actually starts this summer. Can I sell my Badge and Ticket?

If I can, can I also just email Paizo's customer service people and have them transfer the items to someone else?

Thanks for the help.

Shane

Thanks.

Shane

On a side note (like this thread really needs another one right), what does MAD mean when referring to the power of multiclass characters?

I only ask here because I don't think the question deserves its own thread.

Shane

As stated above, a few dozen rogue types works VERY well. Heck, send in 15 goblins, all Rogue 2, and have half of them surround the dwarf (he's the obvious threat from your description) and a couple of rounds of multiple 2d6 sneak attacks will have that 70hp wittled down nicely. Sure, he can squish one each round, but he's still in a world of hurt.

Especially if they attack at night. Don't forget that any character that doesn't want to be automatically fatigued the next day will not be sleeping in their medium or heavy armor.

Tam

I just looked at Hyrum's sticky for the first time. I will be reading the 3.0 play rules through again shortly.

The only way this varies from the rules it updates is that you no longer have to slot 0 a scenario if you want GM and player credit right?

If this is the case I like it. It seems a simple way to encourage more people to GM.

Shane

This makes me think. I kind of wish there was a pdf program out there that would convert pdfs to B&W and do nothing else other than be a super fast viewer.

Shane

Can you easily have multiple documents open on the ipad at once? Does this seriously impact the page load times? Can I load foxit reader on it?

For some reason foxit reader is always faster than adobe for me.

Shane

I could swear that Erik Mona said somewhere, this year's Paizocon Banquet maybe,that the magus from Ultimate Magic would be the last base class Paizo releases for a while. I really hope this is the case.

Can anyone confirm this?

Shane

Frankly, with some of the posters on here, I'm surprised that nobody has yet begged for rules on the digestive processes of various races take, so that we can be sure to use RAW to determine when the elven ranger needs to relieve himself.

* hopes valiantly but with cynical pessimism that this doesn't inspire some fool to make said topic *

I really hope that when you flag a post for the FAQ your name is recorded and associated with the flag. I also hope that people are mature enough not to waste a developer's time.

Apparently only one of these hopes is reasonable.

Shane

I would like to call new attention to this question. Will we ever be able to have pregens for the core classes outside the cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard that we already have? I know we have four from the APG, but it would be cool to have a pregen ranger, socrerer, druid, barbarian, bard, and monk.

On a side note, was including only the cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard for a while a way to encourage new players to create balanced parties?

Shane

Hey man, if you get a no from Paizo, and your asking for this because you are short on money, email me your address and I'll Christmas one to you. I know how much is sucks to lose a copy. My copy of #34 disappeared under similar unscrupulous circumstances.

shanelwalden @yahoo .com

Shane

Spell Combat (Ex): . . . . This functions much like two-weapon fighting but the off-hand weapon is a spell that is being cast. . . .

It seems pretty clear. Your off-hand can't do something that it couldn't do with a weapon in it while two-weapon fighting. Buckler on the arm? Yes. Pull an item from a belt pouch? No. Anything else you want to do with that hand you would have to drop the weapon/forgo spell combat for that round.

Since it is a full-round action the Magus can do nothing with that off-hand besides cast a spell with 1 standard action as it's casting time, irregardless of whether or not the spell has somatic components or not.

I would personally carry the two-weapon fighting comparison as far as possible. Gauntlet of the appropriate armor level? Yes. Locked Gauntlet? No. Brass knuckles? No. You're not allowed to wield a weapon at the same time and with that same hand that you are wearing them on. It is also clear by their description that they limit your manual dexterity in that hand.

Shane

It remains relevant. Attacks of opportunity occur outside of your round. Attacks made with those actions (like with some of the 3.5 material, and probably a spell or two from the converted stuff, and almost definitely in the foreseeable future) definitely benefit from not being restricted by spell combat.

There seems to be a little confusion. Attacks of opportunity happen outside your "turn" but within one of your rounds. Your round starts on your initiative and ends just before your next initiative. Full-round actions like casting some spells and full attacks take your entire round to perform, you just resolve them all on your turn, or just before your next turn in the case of spells. A regular series of actions in a turn, i.e. standard action, move action, free action, and immediate action could be said to take your entire round as well. For each character combat is a series of rounds without interruption. Different people's rounds simply start and end at different times in relation to each other.

Shane

It seems for many people that the game begins and ends with the rules. It wasn't always that way, and it still isn't at many tables.

Shane

Do you give that kinda grief to the low-strength wizard?

Absolutely. A Strength of 3 would carry as many story consequences as a Charisma of 3. They would just be themed differently and the signs would read like "can you help me carry my staff" or "I have trouble carrying a full bladder".

Shane

I hope that Bestiary III is a long way off. That being said, my wish for its content would be that the developers spend less time updating old material and more time coming up with new creatures. As someone who owns both of the Tomes of Horror, some of the updated creatures were not as interesting to me as they might have been for others that they were new to. I had actually already updated a few of them to PF on my own. I am also not a huge fan of seeing creatures that have been published in APs being re-published.

Shane

I have been thinking about handling initiative a little differently. If you declare your attack first you get a bonus to initiative, maybe as much as +10.

Everyone else is reacting to you and is flatfooted to everyone with a higher initiative than them.

Of course if you declared that you were expecting a sneak attack from the shady watchman you would get a similar modifier and have a chance to preempt his action.

Shane

In my group the player of such a character would have to wear a sign around his neck or a hat with a piece of paper pinned to it that said "Charisma 3", "personality of a rock", "everything about me pushes people away", or "you can't stand me".

There needs to be a constant reminder to everyone, including myself. Having a Charisma that low would have a negative effect on every aspect of the character's interactions, at all times.

Shane

P.S. What other cool signs can you guys think of to describe someone whose Charisma is so low that natural selection would have put an end to everyone else's misery long ago?

Dragnmoon wrote:

I am not trying to fit to a 8x10 area, I Want to scale the whole thing to have it printed on one sheet

In other words, I will bring it down to Office max to print the whole map scaled to 1x1 inch grids and printed on one large sheet.

I did it the way you are describing once. But the cost for wide format printing was, to me, prohibitive. To scale the entire image I just did it in Gimp. At the bottom of the window change the units to inches and then just use your rulers and the scale image option under image to get it where you like. Save it to an appropriate format and carry it into Office Max.

Shane

How I do it for the PFS Scenarios that I run here and at different conventions is to extract the map images from a PDF using Some PDF. Then I just select the area I want to print using Paint or Gimp or whatever. That selection is pasted into Open Office Draw. In Draw I create a 1" by 1" square with an invisible interior. Then I just resize the image manually until, using the square I created as a guide, the map squares are also 1" square.

If it is a very large image I just get my printer to break it up into tabloid, letter, or legal size chunks. Tape these together and laminate.

Not the most elegant method, but it works and I have it down well enough that it doesn't take me very long at all.

Shane

Shane Walden wrote:

Ross Byers wrote:

I removed a post. Play nice.

I imagine you with a program that causes all new messages on the boards to pop up automatically in front of you as they are submitted. How else could you be so omnipresent?

Shane

By helpful posters using the 'Flag' option present on every post.

I hadn't considered that, but it makes sense. Superficially I have been aware of the Flag option for a while. As as 90% lurker I have never been motivated to use it.

Shane

I removed a post. Play nice.

I imagine you with a program that causes all new messages on the boards to pop up automatically in front of you as they are submitted. How else could you be so omnipresent?

Shane

I've gone to fixed arrays (players pick one of several fixed arrays and arrange the stats in it as desired) for over a year now for much this reason. I absolutely LOATHE 20s in casting stats at level 1, and I'm not a fan of stats dumped to 7 for purely mechanical reasons either. The 20 at level 1 is something of a magic number (+1 DC, 1 more 1st level spell) and enables the 36 (+5 level +5 inherent +6 headband) at level 20, which is also yet another magic number (2 bonus level 9 spells). I don't have a problem giving out 'good stats', the arrays I'm willing to give actually point out very close to 25, but they're not optimized for SAD characters. That's deliberate.

Do you mind posting these fixed arrays?

Shane

Holy s$#@ do I love you guys.

Shane

It seems just a little while ago that I was asking for organization of the My Downloads area. It was probably actually about a year or year and a half ago, and you guys did a great job. And, as it always seems to go, here I am asking for a little more.

There don't seem to be too many paizo Products that I don't end up owning a hard copy and pdf of.

Is there any way your products in the My Downloads section can be organized by type like Chronicles, Campaign Setting, RPG, Adventure Paths, Society, Modules etc? Even just another level of subheadings like you are using now for the different publishers, just within the Paizo Publishing section, would do the trick.

Thanks for the consideration.

Shane

As soon as I have a chance I will go back and read all the way through this thread. Here are my initial thoughts.

You might eventually have to talk to him about it. Before you do I would require each player to report both what they rolled on the die and what their total was after modifiers. Write the numbers down that he reports during a session or over the course of a few sessions. After a while you will be able to demonstrate that he is benifiting from something other than a random 1-20 distribution.

You can be like, "Hey, look at this, these numbers don't make sense to me. How are you rolling this well?"

Shane

An invisible creature cuts a rope, as a side effect characters on the rope fall. The rope is the target of his action. (spell not broken)

An invisible creature blindly pushes a statue off a ledge. If the statue falls in the right square a creature in that square has to save. The statue is the target of his action. (spell not broken)

An invisible creature picks up and drops or pushes a statue directly on a character. The character is target of his action. (spell broken)

Seems pretty cut and dry.

Shane

Ah, now I am following a little better.

Shane

The first number is the Die result and the last is the odds. What is the middle number? How did you work this out? I hope to be able to repeat your results with this and other die combinations.

Thanks for your help.

Shane

It would seem that, in the case of 1d6 & 1d12, every result above 6 would still have a flat 8.33% chance of occurring. Is this still true of results 6 and lower? That doesn't make sense to me. Surely there is a better chance of getting a higher result.

Shane

Determining odds of outcomes for standard die combinations is pretty easy. My question is about how to determine the odds if you rolled two different dice and took the higher result.

Take 1d6 & 1d12, if I rolled both and took the higher result what would be the chances of each result between 1 & 12? What about 1d12 & 1d12?

Also, how do you determine these odds?

Thanks,

Shane

Intimidate only targets a single opponent, Dazzling Display lets you target everyone within 30 ft.

That was my first assumption, but in the description of the Demoralize section of the Intimidate skill it uses the word "openents" twice and "target" once.

The above interpretation makes sense and is probably what I will go with.

Shane

Why would anyone choose Dazzling Display as a feat other than to meet the prereq for another feat? It seems that you can do the same thing with the Intimidate skill.

Tam

I just started using Hero Lab to track my player's characters. One of my players has a druid and I found a quirk I want to check here about before heading over to the HL messageboards.

This character chose a cleric domain (fire) instead of an animal companion for his Nature's Bond. In the program it is listing Fire Dart instead of Fire Bolt as his domain ability. Could they be working off of a different errata than I am? I checked both erratas for the core book available here and could not find this change.

Thanks for your assistance.

Shane

Maybe have them start as commoners or experts. They have to earn 1000 experience points to gain their first genuine level.

Shane

I've houseruled that all martial classes get it for free.

Because seriously, it should not cost you a g!+%$*n feat to be able to punch someone. When your characters avoid tavern brawls because the system won't let them participate, there's a flaw in the system.

In no way does the system prevent your characters from participating in a tavern brawl. It does do a decent job of modeling the fact that far less people die in a bare fist drunken fight than in a sword battle, and that most people recover from being bludgeoned by fists much faster than your average stabbing.

Shane

Name: Grey Jack

Race: Human
Classes/levels: Barbarian/2
Adventure: Stolen Land
Location: On the trail of that damn boar...
Catalyst: Well, I intentionally was playing a Barbarian with a weak Con, and had come across a certain part in the adventure where the cleric in the party because of RP reasons could not heal my Barbarian.
The Gory Details: The stupid boar smeared me, I was set with a long spear as the boar charged, got a good hit but not enough to effect the beast. The rest of the party could not pull the beast off me as it gored my body...LOL.

And here I was going to bump this thread so you would find it easy to locate. Fear not, Grey Jack won't be alone in the line at Pharasma's Gate long.

Oh, and don't forget Grey Jack was the bait yelling, "whoo pig" in front of Tuskgutter's lair while the rest of the party pretty much hid.

The six or so Nat 20s I rolled against Grey Jack that night are a record against a single player for me.

Shane