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I am going to be GMing a solo Reign of Winter campaign for my wife. To adjust the difficulty I am going to be running a GM-PC for her, allowing gestalt, giving max HP, six rolls of 5d6 dropping lowest two dice (she does not like pointbuy or I would give 25), and applying a weakened template to all the encounters which is basically the opposite of the advanced template so they lose 4 AC, 2 HP/HD and subtract 2 from all rolls and DCs. She is going to be playing a barbarian/oracle and the GM-PC will be a druid/ranger with an animal companion. I already rolled and got great stats for the druid/ranger who will be very optimized. Her character will probably be semi-optimized with advice from me. Instead of calculating experience which would get messed up with only two PCs and weakened encounters I am going to award levels using the suggestions in the book. Does this sound reasonable?

I am going to be playing in a Skull and Shackles campaign and am meeting this week for a character creation session. We have already thrown out some ideas via e-mail and looks like we will have a barbarian, gunslinger and either a ranger or alchemist and either a rogue or wizard in addition to myself. I want to play a class that will be the missing piece as it were and this group is lacking for casting. What would be a good class if I am the only caster?

Originally I was thinking I would play a combat focused druid but adding another melee character with an animal companion seems excessive at this point or a bard but with this party I am thinking witch would be a better fit if no one else plays a caster as they have a pretty broad spell list. I guess another option would be to play a Samsaran with mystic past life. If the player picks wizard instead of rogue then I feel I have more options and might play a caster focused druid or maybe an archer oracle of battle.

I have a back story for a character that is a good fit for either druid, witch or oracle so the roleplay aspect is not really an issue. If I went Samsaran I would have to remake my back story.

I am planning on playing a melee focused wild shaping druid in an upcoming Skull and Shackle campaign. I realized that my character is going to be effectively mute during any extended conflict situation and maybe between them if I am expecting another encounter soon. How have other people handled this? What are some simple signs that I could use to communicate with my group? I mainly plan on taking cat and dinosaur forms which should both be able to make simple marks or gestures. I do not think the aquatic forms are going to be able to communicate very well except maybe the water elemental. I have already thought that the following words should be things I should be able to express: yes, no, stop, go, heal me, and trap. I think yes and no can double for ready and not ready. It seems too complicated to come up with a sign for all the different spells that I might use. If I let my group know what spells I prepare each day then at least they will have an idea of what I might do if a given situation comes up. What other concepts do people think I should be able to communicate? Since we will be on a ship it seems like there should be some specific things I would want to say about sailing but I cannot think of any.

Does the synthesist summoner's eidolon get its ability score increases when it reaches 4, 8 and 12 HD? I would imagine yes as ability score increases are tied to HD and nothing indicates that the eidolon has somehow lost its own HD when merged. It is only called out on not getting skills or feats of its own.

The synthesist is also listed as gaining access to all the special abilities of the eidolon and ability score increases are listed under special abilities in the eidolon table. Does mean that the synthesist gets the eidolon's ability score increases in addition to their own when merged? If this were true does the eidolon also get the ability score increase for itself? Or is this just an artifact of the table format where the ability score increase for the eidolon is not really an applicable special ability and instead is just a reminder that all characters get increases in ability scores every 4 HD?

I was thinking that it is the third option and just the way the table was written but the ability score increase is listed as an extraordinary ability adding credence that it is an ability that the summoner could gain access to. I cannot imagine this was the intent of the developer to give the synthesis summoner extra ability score increases and I hope any GM in a home game would disallow such a view but maybe a FAQ is needed for formal play.

From the PRD

On a direct hit, an alchemist's bomb inflicts 1d6 points of fire damage + additional damage equal to the alchemist's Intelligence modifier. The damage of an alchemist's bomb increases by 1d6 points at every odd-numbered alchemist level (this bonus damage is not multiplied on a critical hit or by using feats such as Vital Strike).

I do not believe this is the RAI but the RAW seems to be that a first level Alchemist would do a base of 1d6 damage plus another 1d6 from first level being an odd numbered level. Similar progressions such as the rogues sneak attack are worded differently and make it clear that at first level the damage is 1d6.

A person in my Pathfinder group has proposed running a homebrew campaign that will be extremely low magic. It will be so low that we are going to be restricted to taking pure martial only classes, that is barbarian, cavalier (no samurai), fighter and rogue (no ninja). The monk and paladin and ranger variants without spellcasting are considered too mystical for the setting. In this setting non-human races compose less than one percent of the world population, there is no divine magic and arcane casters do exist but they are extraordinarily rare. We will not have easy access to any magic items including potions, wands and scrolls. Healing will be done through heal checks. Basically combat will be very deadly. We will mainly only be fighting classed humans. I do not know how he is planning on having us advance as we level.

We will start at third level. Its going to be getsalt but the other class has to be a non-adept NPC class. It mainly gives you a background and extra skill points as everyone will be an expert or aristocrat. My first thought when considering a class was survivability. With no healing magic, a high AC, DR and HP seemed essential. I was thinking of starting with a cavalier of the shield and then going into stalwart defender. The cavalier of the shield ability resolute, which converts a little bit of lethal damage to non-lethal damage, and the bonus to heal checks seemed very powerful. The defender of course has DR, d12 hit die and AC bonuses. I would have a starting AC of 25 or 26 which I think would make me extremely difficult to hit (+9 fullplate + 1 DEX + 4 tower shield + 1 dodge and maybe + 1 shield focus). I would have a +8 to hit which does not seem that bad (+3 BAB +4 STR +1 weapon focus +1 mounted +1 masterwork -2 tower shield).

He also said that he might allow one person to play a non-divine magic user. I normally only play characters that can use magic and thought about playing a sorcerer. The more I thought about it I started to think that a sorcerer would break the game. Enemies would have no magic of their own or anti-magic defenses. If everyone we are fighting are going to be barbarians, cavaliers, fighters and rogues then colorspray, glitterdust, fly and confusion are going to be unstoppable.

I have several concerns about such a setting. It seems that turtling up is the best option and combat would get stale. Saving throws seem marginalized as most saving throws are versus magic especially will and reflex. I think the focus is going to be on roleplaying so my concerns about combat may be unwarranted.

Has anyone played anything such as this? It almost seems like a different system might be better which is designed with no magic and a more detailed melee combat system.

There has been a lot of talk about what a low or high INT score represents. Particularly in regard to dumping INT to 7 many people feel that such a character would be extremely unintelligent and think that the IQ of such a character would be 70 or even lower. Is there a way to relate INT scores and IQ? To try to answer this question I took a 3D6 distribution, calculated the percentiles, looked at the IQ percentiles from the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet scales and assigned an IQ to each INT score. For example the 50th percentile for IQ is a 100 and the 50th percentile for a 3D6 distributed stat is 10 so an IQ of 100 roughly equals an INT of 10. An INT of 7 is the 16th percentile and the 16th percentile for IQ is an 85. Now an IQ of 85 is not that low and such a person would not be a drooling moron. My core assumption is that a 3D6 distribution for INT is representative of a population. I would be interested to hear other people’s ideas on how the spectrum of INT scores could be modeled.