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What about animate non-sentient bananas? (You know, INT 2-type stuff.)

Totally fine. Had a druid with one as an animal companion (I wish)

I ban things dealing with metamagic used to create sentient bananas. Occasionally other fruit is allowed

The day job check is not meant to interfere with the activities of the PC's but to help ground them in the setting. Even a ranger who spends 95% of her time in the wilderness gets a day job check to account for the furs/herbs/fish/guide services she trades in local cities. Even if 100% of it happens off-screen.

I suppose it could even be used as a plot hook sometimes if you needed a spare one.

"Guys, my employees at the bar I own have disappeared, I found a mysterious note, I think they were kidnapped by our rivals. I could really use your help rescuing them." Something along those lines.

Ive been really excited about the Inquisitor lately. Baning a weapon looks like fun in a fight, and I've got a character concept about a sheltered LN Inquisitor of Asmodeus who may seem too nice for an Inquisitor of that god, until you realize that she was raised in a society of slavers, and sees nothing inherently wrong with treating people as chattel. She, however, doesnt practice slavery herself, because it still makes her feel a little bad, so she focuses more on the Law side of her deity than the evil side. She basically gets the neutral from standing by and feeling really uncomfortable when the clerics she works with start doing evil rites. She tries to balance it out by Lawering on the victims behalf whenever she can, and abstaining when she cant. No active participation, but she can't be good because standing by while someone else does evil isnt exactly the moral high ground (and alignment restrictions). Give her a slightly ditzy personality, and I want to see how long it takes for the party to realize exactly where she's getting her (un)holy powers from.

So the books provide plenty of magical tools and hoozits to get whatever variety of tasks needed done, but sometimes a campaign needs something a little more custom. For story purposes my party im GMing right now has a cursed greatsword that acts as a divining rod for vorpal weapons, as vorpal weapons are quite rare in my world, with the Jabberwock having systematically sent out agents to destroy them over the past couple decades. (as a side note, the curses I rolled up for the sword were 'can't cast arcane magic... which no one cares about, as their isnt a single arcane caster in the party besides MAYBE the rogue, and Character changes gender. We all agreed it was hilarious that the grizzled ranger bandit was now a grizzled ranger bandit girl.)

One 4 session game I played in got pretty monty-haul when the GM went overboard with custom magic equipment though... not saying it wasnt fun, but giving an alchemist armor with integrated bomb-launchers that had the bombs deal a bonus 4 damage on impact at radically increased range probably isnt what the designers had in mind.

What I was wondering was if anyone else had any interesting or fun custom magic equipment they'd like to share. Or perhaps stuff that maybe shouldnt have been brought into the game because of breakage? Either works.

In my game I generally have the same problem, mostly not because the monsters or enemies wouldnt have a good reason for carrying loot... but rather because I sometimes straight up forget to mention that the players got anything, and no one in my group is loot-hungry enough to remind me of it until we all realize their level 8 with only a few minor magical items and their starting gear. So I had them fight a dragon and take the horde, a rather big horde too.

I was also thinking of sticking in Money Spiders as a zany, loot-based monster, basically modifying an appropriate CR giant spider (Oger Spider, Beblith, what have you) and turning them into a 'Money Spider.' It would have the same stats as the base spider, except I would give it a hot-coin breath weapon and when it died, you could loot it's cache of coins out of its stomach. Of course, this is more of an inside joke for us, as we're all gamers and familiar with the 'money spider' concept in video games and such, and my game is weird enough to make that work (in fact, with how much the fey have an influence in my game, it would actually fit thematically, but that's not the case for your game).

I personally like the 'orcs have items of value they may or may not know the value of' approach, though I can see merit in Mark Hoover's 'stop and assess the treasure' approach too if you want to streamline the buy/sell process of getting gear, especially if the PC's arent going to have the opportunity to go shopping every now and again. One of the big things in my game is that there's a lot of big towns and small settlements, so if the players roll up some loot that's worthless to them, they dont have to worry much about holding onto it, since they'll most likely sell it that session in town. It doesnt sound like your story has the same luxuries, so perhaps letting your players have some control over their loot would be a fun way to keep them rewarded the way they want to be.

I was actually wondering how Samsarians would work with their whole reincarnation thing, and by 'work' i mean how would they act as people on the individual level. The Advanced Race Guide kind of goes into it a little, but it still seems vague to me and I was wanting some help figuring out how to characterize a Samsarian character because one of my players just picked up a Samsarian wizard as a cohort.

I was just kind of imagining it as if the Samsarian just has their own memories and inspirations, a 'normal' life, if you will, but on occasion when something happens that is similar to a situation that one of their past-lives has gone through, they have a flash of vivid deja-vu that helps them deal with those scenarios. Am I off base, or is it just up to the GM to deal with how reincarnation memories go?

If you don't mind a slightly Egyptian theme for your Archon, you could go with an Anubis mini and paint him up in celestial colors: http://www.miniature-giant.com/anubis-guard-oop-Reaper-WarLord-WL-sku-14390 -pr-10205.html

I summon a hound archon all the time. To test magical items to see if they're cursed. ;) At this point it's become a running joke at our table on how my summoner mistreats her summons, and the poor hound archon hates seeing us when he's called.

This clearly won't have any long term consequences at all, I'm sure. ;)

We had the same 1-boss-gets-curbstomped thing happen recently when one of the players decided to GM. We had a nice discussion about how the solo boss simply does not work in Pathfinder, and that any sane person would run away if faced with the prospect of fighting a full party solo, or possibly solo at all.

Now we face lots of multi-enemy encounters, with 2-3 mini-bosses, and it's a blast!

Before: DM tosses out his uber-boss, an invisible CR15, against the party of level 10s. Blind-fight fighter hits him with limning weapon, then squishing happens.

After: DM tosses out two CR13s and 8 CR 5s. After 15 rounds of intense back-and-forth strategizing, we emerge victorious but in pain. No-one died (unless you count 3 very potent summons), but we certainly felt it and the fight was a lot more interesting.

Yeah, we had a similar discussion with our GM. Sometimes for story purposes we still face single targets, but us breezing through those is now to be expected.

The GM's problem is likely that he is using a single enemy instead of multiple. Single enemy bosses are really bad ideas. Also getting immunity to cold and electricity damage is pretty hard. Even my level 20 Wizard isn't immune to *all* elemental (Well.. if you count sonic) damage and it uses magic jar to get a good body then buffs it up with tons of spells. Sounds mighty fiat-y.

Yeah, we've discussed this with him, we now face more opponents, so things are more challenging now. Also his setting has some interesting magic items that he fiat-ed, this campaign would be thrown out the window of any serious by-the-book Pathfinders. But is still fun, and the party all enjoys it ;)

What level is the party?

Banishment can't be made into a wand, maybe it was a wand of dismissal?

What is a critfail?

The (un)holy half of flamestrike's damage has nothing to do with positive
and negative energy.

When you use wands you don't provoke AoO so you don't have to cast defensively.

Did the GM tell you what class the "assasin" was?

Maybe it was dismissal, I just remember that banishment works on Eidalons, so that's what I said. It was probably Dismissal.

I know, I mentioned the Negative energy part because I didn't want people wondering why she didnt go up and cast Inflict on him. We know that some effects (such as being undead, though this guy wasnt) cause you to heal with neg energy, and we didn't want to risk it, because it would be just like the BBEG to outfit his guy with a magic item that absorbed it.

A critfail is a natural 1 on the D20.

Huh. Didn't know that about wands. Our group just treated them like casting normal spells sans components, cause the components were used in the creation of the wand. Okay :P

And no, but from his actions I think he was a UMD Rogue. He might have been something else. Also I can't quite remember, but I think we were around level 9 or ten. It's been a while, this party is now level 14.

So a while back we were playing our weekly session, and there was going to be a boss encounter down the pipeline that our GM had dreamed up for us (no official adventure, this one is pure homebrew, though our GM has ran this setting multiple times and written up an ungodly amount of material for it, so it's pretty well fleshed out and quite fun).

Quick party rundown and backstory.

The party consisted of: A Human Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer, specialized in lightning magic (like 90% of his spells are lightning, though, and this is important, he does have Ray of Enfeeblement).

A Halfling Bard. She's our party healer, buffer, and resident cute. She took the archetype that lets her channel positive energy. She also like sweets.

An Elf (sea-elf) Oracle. Token evil teammate, she took the Inflict tree of spells, has the Dark Tapestry Mystery, and is quite creepy.

A Vanara Monk of the empty hand, who has an enchanted bottle that he smacks people with. It technically counts as an improvised weapon, which is why it works with the empty hand archetype, even though he carries it around and his hands most certainly aren't empty. Our GM is nice.

And my character, a Human Summoner and her Eidalon, Mr. Floofy, who takes the form of a medium-sized mangy housecat. The summoner has lots of support spells and all the summon spells, while Mr. Floofy is speced out for insane single-target damage, and he and the monk are the main damage dealers for single targets, while the other casters are adept at dealing with large groups with lightning and flamestrikes.

The situation was that we had basically accidentally opened a portal in the middle of the ocean under the waterline that lead right to the BBEG's castle (by breaking a magic item of some sort when we blew up the ship it was being shipped on with a lightning bolt to the powder storage bay). The portal closed after a few rounds of seawater pouring into BBEG's throne room.

He was not pleased.

Fast forward a few days, and we're adventuring through a temple when we encounter an assassin that has been kitted out specially to combat our group. "The Chaos Mage is displeased!" he shouts, waving a wand at Mr. Floofy. A wand of banishment. Quadruped Eidalons have an absolutely laughable will save so poof, Mr. Floofy is gone in the surprise round, and as one of our main damage dealers, that was a big thing. (I have subsequently evolved spell resistance so I have at least one layer of defense against that kind of thing)

Initiative started, I was up last. The monk, who is always first, was first. He goes in, and instead of doing his usual beat-it-in-the-face-with-as-many-ki-points-as-i-can-throw-at-it technique that the GM was probably prepared for, he did something unorthodox for us. A trip. Mr. Assassin does a faceplant, shouting that we will rue the day we flooded the Chaos Mages inner sanctum. It's at this point we notice that most of his clothes are magical, and when the Sorcerer's turn rolls around, the lightning bolt bounces harmlessly off of him. Someone remembered their rubber underwear, and he was immune to lightning, almost completely negating the sorcerer. Bard sings, swings, and misses due to critfail (it happens).

The Oracle goes, and tries out her Interstellar Void Revelation, and HEYGUESSWHAT it seems he's just straight up immune to elemental damage because immunity to cold was in his super-suit too. The oracle says she's fine with this, as nothing blocks the holy half of flamestrike. We didn't want to test to see if he somehow had a way of absorbing negative energy.

Instead of standing up and incurring AAO's from the monk and bard, the Assassin stays lying down that turn and casts defensively, passing the concentration and flinging a Hold Person from another wand at the Monk. He manages the will save though, and it goes around to my turn, with the assassin still on the ground. The GM asks what I do, since I normally buff Mr. Floofy and have him go at it, he's curious as to how I'll change my tactics. As a side note, I do not have the Summon Eidalon spell because I'm dumb.

My summoner was pissed. Her best friend had just been banished! So she does the normal thing in this situation, using the summoner ability to cast Summon Monster as a spell like ability if their Eidalon isnt up. "I summon a Succubus."

He's lying down and prone, so my newly summoned Succubus easily grapples him and starts making out. Level drain was something he was not prepared for >:D

The fight got a lot easier from there, with the Succubus draining a level every turn. What made it a cakewalk when it shouldn't have been was when the Sorcerer cast Ray of Enfeeblement and knocked 8 points of his STR. He couldn't break the grapple, and the monk was making sure he kept down even if he made a little headway. Also the Oracle had no problem flamestriking both him and the Succubus (I told her I didn't care if she damaged my summon, My character has a habit of mistreating her summons sometimes. Not Mr. Floofy though). He died due to level drain, sonic damage from the bard, and holy damage.

Long story short, my GM's boss was... less effective then he probably could have been (the GM's plan was to banish Mr Floofy, Hold the monk, and then break out the damage spells and some activated traps in the room to incapacitate us, relying on his defenses to protect him from the rest of the party. Also it turned out negative energy did actually damage him). All because the monk tripped him, basically, because after that he couldnt move. It was amusing to all of us that even though he was immune to our usual tactics, all we had to do was change up tactics just a little for it to be a compete cakewalk, even without our major damage sources.

TL;DR We stomped a boss who was immune to most our stuff because we tripped him. Does anyone else have any stories about fights that should have been tougher but wern't because of unorthodox tactics or unusual actions? Any GM's been on the receiving end of this? (I know I have, tale for another day ;) ) How about just amusing boss fights in general?

I've experienced this problem with casters. It's good strategy to conserve spells for when they're really needed - especially with prepared casters, whose options decrease every time that cast a spell. That means in an easy battle, the best tactic is to cast no spells at all and let the martials handle it. But if the martials are well optimized and the GM is running standard CR opponents, most battles are easy battles. So the wizard or cleric has to choose between wasting their best spells on opponents who were about to die anyway, or saving them up for a crisis that probably won't occur.

See, I do the exact opposite. 'Pop it dont drop it' is my phrase of the day. (that being said, I usually play spontaneous casters). Even if the resources could probably be better spent on tougher fights, I do take into account that I'm playing a game that is meant to be fun, and I want to use my flashy powerful stuff, dang it! Opportunities for that don't come up every session, like you said. This does not stop me from casting Summon Monster VII on a horde of paper tiger goblins and convulsing in hideous laughter as the T-Rex eats every single one of them. Wasteful? Absolutely. The monk could have probably wiped out the camp all by himself by standing there and letting them swarm him, then punching all of them once. The look on my GM's face as I tell him that I drop a T-Rex in the middle of the goblin camp anyway? priceless. No kill like overkill.

Of course, that may just be a playstyle preference. ;)

It is a time honored tradition that at early levels the guy with the sharp stick will usually outperform a caster who can do a few simple parlor tricks, where late levels that same caster is re-writing reality while the guy with the sharp stick has to rely on said re-writen reality (i.e magical buffs or gear) in order to compete. That being said there are ways to get a early caster to brawl with the best of them, but it sometimes requires specialization that isn't necessarily everyone's style.

As far as your character, from what it looks like, it looks like you're a support caster, at least for now. What I would do is lead with your summon spell so you have a critter that can get in the melee and fight with your martials, and THEN cast haste. This has the added benefit of letting your critter get the benefits of haste too ;) Third round debuff if you have to, or summon more things if you dont.

And support characters make or break encounters in my opinion. There have been more than enough times our party bard has made the difference between confirming a crit or not. Don't be so hard on yourself ;) high level, you'll be slinging the big flashy stuff while their sword arms are getting tired.

Howdy! First post time, and I think I'll start off with asking people about their characters trusty companions, or when they were GMing a game where one of their players did something interesting with their pets. I like classes that get animal companions (and feats and such that allow companions on normally non-companion/familiar classes). They make for interesting RP situations. So go ahead and tell a story where your pet did something cool or funny, or where something bad or odd happened because of their antics or even a tragic story of heroic Familiars sacrificing themselves to save the party.

I got a few of em, so I'll start with something amusing. A human gunslinger in the party I'm GMing decided to pick up the Eldridge Heritage feat that gets you a lvl 1 bloodline power, and he chose the Arcane bloodline, that gets him a familiar. Basically there was no other reason to do this for him other than he wanted to mess with the Kitsune Rogue character, because he picked up a fox familiar. He now has an excuse to get them mixed up when the Kitsune goes into full fox form (and the +2 reflex aint bad either).

Basically he's always picking up the Kitsune and his familiar and putting them both on his shoulders and treating them both like they're his. His fox is highly amused by this, and is always playing tricks on the poor Kitsune. It'll be even more funny once he gets to a high enough level so that his familiar can speak with animals of its kind. In any case, share your pet stories below!