Char 1
16/12/7
-Student of philosophy (int instead of cha for the attitude aspects of bluff and diplomacy)
Char 2
12/16/7
-Empathetic Diplomat (wis instead of cha for diplomacy)
A 7 isn't really "that" low, so I wouldn't go too far off normal to play it. The 7 is no further from average than the 14. One gives -2 and the other a +2. So, the 7 would be as much of an idiot as the 14 would be a genius.
Char 1 might be bookish. He's usually conscious enough of others to know if he is annoying them, but can't quite figure out how to reliably make people like him either.
Char 2 might be stoic. He's too busy listening and paying attention to bother talking most of the time. The average person won't pay much attention to him, but those who know him, always hold his opinions in high regard.
The problem with comparing 7 and 14 is 7 is as low as you can go, while 14 is still four points away from the highest.
Forget round 2. If you, an evil spawn of an evil outsider, try to take out an Empyreal Lord, Ragathiel is going to waste you.
As for the rest of it; what I'm seeing is one player who wants to play a very different game from the rest of the group. To the point of playing an evil character in the adventure path designed for Paladins. If there's a problem player in this scenario I don't think it's the paladin.
Eh, it sounds like the Paladin should have fallen a long time ago.
It sounds like a poopshow of a game all over. Problematic GM, Problematic players, and the like.
Oh, it's quite possible the paladin would have fallen in one of my games, although my experience with WotR suggests there's context that's being left out or misconstrued. That doesn't really matter though. If the group wants to play a certain way and one player wants to go a different way and can't fit in, that player is a problem for that group.
True, though the first one seems flat-out evil. Fleeing slaves being murdered? Maybe they're demon slaves.
Either way it sounds like this party thoroughly deserves one another.
That's actually the point that initially made me think the OP isn't being exactly straight with the context.
Spoiler:
Unless the GM is pretty heavily reflavoring things, there aren't any slave armies. There are Demon armies, Tiefling armies, and Cultist armies (there's also one ghoul army, but ghouls definitely aren't causing a Paladin to fall for killing them). The Tieflings and Cultists are willingly following the orders of an Incubus.
Forget round 2. If you, an evil spawn of an evil outsider, try to take out an Empyreal Lord, Ragathiel is going to waste you.
As for the rest of it; what I'm seeing is one player who wants to play a very different game from the rest of the group. To the point of playing an evil character in the adventure path designed for Paladins. If there's a problem player in this scenario I don't think it's the paladin.
Eh, it sounds like the Paladin should have fallen a long time ago.
It sounds like a poopshow of a game all over. Problematic GM, Problematic players, and the like.
Oh, it's quite possible the paladin would have fallen in one of my games, although my experience with WotR suggests there's context that's being left out or misconstrued. That doesn't really matter though. If the group wants to play a certain way and one player wants to go a different way and can't fit in, that player is a problem for that group.
Forget round 2. If you, an evil spawn of an evil outsider, try to take out an Empyreal Lord, Ragathiel is going to waste you.
As for the rest of it; what I'm seeing is one player who wants to play a very different game from the rest of the group. To the point of playing an evil character in the adventure path designed for Paladins. If there's a problem player in this scenario I don't think it's the paladin.
Magic is insanely complex and powerful and what civilization would ever allow its use inside its walls unchecked?
Automatic guns are insanely powerful and what civilization would ever allow them to be carried around inside its cities unchecked?
Bad analogy, they don't. Pretty much the only places you see automatic weapons on a regular basis are the Middle East and Africa and that's only by people associated with the controlling faction or actively fighting them. And that's enough of a thread divergence.
Go straight druid, that full BAB and d12 hit die may look good at first level, but when you're delaying all of your access to wildshape improvements you'll regret it.
For a wildshape focused druid, you need strength for hitting and damage, dexterity because your AC sucks unless you have barding, constitution because you will be more likely to take hits, and wisdom for spells so you'll have to spread your points out a bit more than usual for a caster. Luckily you don't need your wisdom higher than the bare minimum for casting your spells as you will spend most of them on buffs. As far as companions go, if you're looking at strictly combat it's hard to beat a big cat (although personally I think Deinonychus is cooler). Same answer for wild shape; but there are a lot of utility options there that can come in handy.
Actually, the general "optimal" build is a dervish dancing scimitar-wielding magus so that you get Dex to damage and that nice 18-20 crit range. The strength magus is good at higher levels, it just has difficulty surviving to get to that point, so if you can mitigate the AC issue (or just start with non-light armor) it can do just fine in my opinion.
It depends a bit on what you're trying to emulate. In medieval Europe, standing armies were essentially non-existant; but nobles could force their subjects to become soldiers if they needed to raise an army for their king (for pretty much whatever reason their king decided they needed to raise an army), defend their territory, take somebody else's territory, or conduct a nice traditional religious crusade.
Edit:
As for guards, towns would have guards, but they were usually volunteers from the militia, so they didn't walk around in uniforms carrying swords. And jails weren't really a thing that common criminals were put in. They were used for storing captured nobility while you waited for their families to pay the ransom.
A lot of that comes down to population density. The US is so spread out that a lot of the competition between the companies comes down to whether or not they have service where you need it and they don't have to compete on price as much. Same reason there's a lot of people wtill stuck with the option of dial=up or sattelite for internet.
Name: Zintus
Race: Dhampir
Classes/levels: Wizard (Necromancer) 4
Adventure: The Thrushmoor Terror
Location: Reading Room
Catalyst: Negative constitution modifier, poor initiative, gullability, a rogue, and a penchant for rushing ahead when books are mentioned.
The Gory Details:
Two details to set this up: First, the party had bypassed the normal route into the fortress by way of the investigator's monkey climb extract and a rope, so Zintus had not been able to control one of the juju zombies. Second, the wizard's player had unknowingly taken the esipil from ISoS as a pet and it hadn't had a chance to betray him earlier due to the wizard's player missing a few sessions where that would have worked well (the only opportunity when he was there was while the wizard was being attacked by the phantom fungus earlier in the book with the rest of the party out of support distance which seemed a bit too dangerous).
The party had previously been run off by Tilsitari and, not wanting to deal with the soulsliver, had climbed the battlements. The first room they explored was the reading room. The investigator scouted ahead, came back to the group and told them what he'd found (a stack of books and a mirror). Having previously identified soulslivers due to the random encounter table in ISoS, the group was reasonably uncertain about the mirror but Zintus was too intrigued by the pile of books that contained a few magical signatures. He went in accompanied by no one but his pet "cat", with the rest of the party staying nearby but outside the room. As he found and identified the scrolls, Tilsitari took the guise of the investigator and stepped from the mirror, walking up to Zintus and asking him what he'd found. As Zintus turned to respond, Tilsitari used the surprise round and hit Zintus with a sneak attack. Initiative was rolled and the rest of the team came in, but the esipil and Tilsitari both had higher initiatives than Zintus (in the neighborhood of a 4). The esipil revealed itself, attacked Zintus for largely inconsequential damage, and was killed by a critical hit from the party's phantom blade spiritualist. Then Tilsitari went before Zintus and rolled near maximum sneak attack damage, which was enough to kill the wizard with an 8 constitution outright.
My characters are (usually) technically straight, but functionally asexual as I'm not interested in that side of roleplaying.
For the last couple of years though, I've been the GM so it's been the Pathfinder standard of NPCs are bi unless otherwise stated. Anything blatant is still "fade to black" though.
All my group needed to break a significant portion of the second book (we didn't make it to the third due to player existence failure) was the enhance magic items archmage ability.
At lower levels, your animal companion is probably doing enough damage by itself, even without the enhancements you can give it or using shillelagh and wading into battle yourself.
If one of your players goes the archmage path, there's an ability that lets them recharge wands. If they take that, then be careful what wands you give them access to. I was running the mythic AP and my party came across a wand of dimension door. Between that and the arcanist's invisibility sphere spell, they trivialized most of the non-mythic encounters in the second book, to the point that I had to start adding mythicness to the fights that were supposed to be challenging so they'd have some fun.
To go with a non-weapon example, I view it as similar to the difference between point (dexterity) and free/knockdown sparring in something like karate. People who focus on point sparring tend to be flashier and look for openings where they can make contact, but they don't usually get in solid hits. People who focus on free, and especially knockdown, sparring tend to be more stable and conservative in their movements, but they make openings by moving their opponents' guards around, whether it's through feints, parries, or just physically bashing it out of the way.
