Squirrel_Dude's page

I think it's pretty solid and pretty complete. Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong. I still tinker with it every so often.

Anyway, I was about to pick up playing Pathfinder again and wanted to play a Psychic Warrior. I decided to look up some of the handbook and was disappointed to see that they were incredibly incomplete and old enough that they were unlikely to ever be updated. The lack of a focus on feats was particularly problematic for a martial character class. So, seeing as I was going to take the time to be reading every option of the class anyway, I decided that I would make my own.

As proof of my bonifides,I have collaborated with other posters to make a proper Psion handbook for Pathfinder. I'd love to get some criticism about my ratings and prose and really anything else. Contributions are also appreciated and will be credited.

[url]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wsCSnQJh_tg9fV9PYXd4QAEmQq_g92onanBa9fS LF9c/edit?usp=sharing]Memory Muscle, a Psychic Warrior Handbook[/url]

What's been done so far.
Class Overview (General Advice, Ability Scores, Chassis and Class Feature review)
Paths breakdown
Racial Choice
Class Skills
Traits
Feats
Powers

What's left to do
Archetypes
Prestige Classes
Gear and Equipment

I'm making reviews based off of what is printed in my copy of Ultimate Psionics. I do not have 7th Path, and haven't yet looked through it's material that's online.

Obviously there is a section of every Pathfinder and D&D core Rulebook that calls itself the "Equipment" section. It would be more approriately titled "Mundane Equipment." Basically your standard weapons, armor, tents, rope, food, etc. It's a traditional section, and the rulebook wouldn't look the same without it. It's also a dinosaur and I thinkt he game would be better off finally merging magical and mundane equipment lists into a single section.

Having a mundane equipment section is at its most useful during character creation. It's when players are likely be distracted or encumbered by having to flip past magic rings to find out how much rations cost. However, it is detrimental every other moment of the game, and that is only true for generating a character at low enough power that magical item(s) won't be an expected purchase.

I am so incredibly tired of having to flip hundreds of pages so that I can look at special materials and magic armor effects and then towards the main armor stats to try and do the math to figure out what a Mithral +1 X actually has for stats. In this edition I'll also need to flip through to class pages to make sure that I'm applying all of my character's bonuses correctly. Just dropping those hundreds of pages to 5 or 10 would be wonderful.

It's tradition that goes back to when all magical items were in the DM's handbook (for some reason). PF 1e and now this rulebook are trying to maintain that same outdated Player Handbook and GM Handbook split in its format. As a GM, I need to look at both sections so that I can plan out loot, and players are going to be looking at magic items away. Alchemists have to look at this section to actually their class. Snares are a class feature but are in this second item section.

It may already be too late in the process to make such a drastic layout change, but I think it's the kind of change I'd like to see more often.

So let's get a couple disclaimers out of the way.

• I was always going to be biased against a weapons table that has "longsword" and "bastard sword" as two separate weapons or an armor table that make biker gear the preferred armor compared to gambeson. It's not fair, but those are also annoying cliches.
  
• This is one of the first places I turned to in the book. I hate gear porn in games as a design philosophy, but it's something I generally enjoy looking at. There may be context that I am missing here.
  

The weapons table

Before I nitpick, I'd like to propose a larger change. Instead of separating weapons by Common/Simple-Martial , Uncommon/Simple-Martial-Exotic, I'd separate them first by category. Something that that looked much more like this in form but obviously not in style

That isn't an ideal solution, but that's partly because there are categories that seem to serve one weapon. Brawling is just variation of fist, hammers are just variants of the warhammer, picks are just variants of the pick. At least for myself, I find it an easier way to find the weapon I'm looking for than having to divine which proficiency a weapon is in.

That larger formatting suggestion out of the way, let's get to the petty nitpicks.

• Why are Bastard Swords only piercing damage? Are they a giant rapier? What?
  
• What is this? I'll let it slide that Katana are listed as a 1 handed weapon even though they aren't. However, Versatile P is absurd. They're a single edged sword. Oh also they're just a longsword that costs twice a much.
  
• There are too many polearms and too many knives. There are 6 different knives that deal 1d4 P damage. I understand that weapon traits make them different, but I don't care.
  
• In an edition where you want to simplify the game, having 31 weapon traits and 13 critical effects to consider for your weapon choice in addition to damage and cost and bulk maybe isn't they way to go. Many are repeats or do useful things, but it still feels overly complicated
  
• On cost: Don't have things priced 2, or 7, or 12, or 18 or 23. Just make it 1, 5, 10, 20, 25, etc. Some stuff needs to cost Copper. Fine. The math doesn't need to be this granular because weapons shouldn't be balanced by their base item silver piece cost. And this doesn't just make the initial purchasing of gear easier, it makes the bulk sales of weapons or bulk purchases that can occur after scavenging and bunch of thieves easier later on as well.
  
• Can we finally just call the Longspear a Pike?
  

I like a lot of flavorful weapons being moved out of the exotic category, though. That's nice.

The armor table
Why is it that the most expensive armors in each category are also the ones that have the negative traits? It's not for th sake of "realism" because otherwise all the heavy armor would also be noisy, and so would scale mail. Instead Chain shirts and Chainmail just have a detriment on them for some reason. I honestly don't understand how breastplate makes someone "clumsy" when chain mail and half plate don't. I'm not going to quibble over outdated the trope of armor being horribly clumsy or severely limiting, and I won't deny it should have some impact on the person's ability to swim and run or sneak around. However, that I can't seem to get rid of the trait my making the armor made of magical mithril or specifically tailored to my character's body is dumb.

[sarcasm]One thing I'm glad to see hasn't changed is Full Plate continuing to be overpriced garbage for the experienced adventurer. In previous versions of the game it was because the maximum dexterity bonus was so low that many character would accidentally eclipse it and gain the same overall armor rating and more valuable touch AC by switching to cheaper armor. Now we don't even have to wait to get a significant dexterity. We can just use Half plate from the word go! What wonderful efficiency[/sarcasm]

More seriously, though. Half plate has the same maximum armor value of 7, costs less, has the same TAC bonus, has a lower check penalty, weighs less, and doesn't have a negative trait like very other armor in its range. The lack of clumsy could be an editing error. In that case, just use splint mail which even cheaper and thus better than half-plate.

Can't the best stuff in each class off armor just be the best stuff in each class of armor?

I'll repeat the disclaimers again. I might be missing something here that will become apparent when I play it. I do plan to properly playtest the game with some experienced PF 1e/3.5 players once we've wrapped up our Divinity 2 Co Op campaign in a weekend or two.

It is my opinion that as currently implemented, Perception is a problem both in terms of gameplay and in the metagame. In terms of the metagame, the skills near overuse in games makes the skill a near tax that almost every character is going to want to have maximum ranks in the skill. In terms of gameplay it is a skill rolled so often, either actively by players or in reaction to stealth, sleight of hand, and surprise rounds.

With that in mind, I decided to mess around with the rules for perception a little bit. The goal of these house rules would be to speed up gameplay, and make Perception a less powerful skill, while still allowing for players to invest in making their characters effective scouts and investigators.

Investigation and Alerntess

A couple friends and I are trying to get back into Playing Pathfinder. We had to take a break after graduating, going our separate geographical ways taking time to find steady employment. We don't want to jump right into homebrewing a setting/story and are trying to find an adventure path to run.

We're looking for an AP that:

• Has solid social interaction/roleplaying opportunities
  
• Has puzzle solving, Mysteries, or some system where creativity is rewarded
  
• Will be simple/easy to run.

In general, something that will be easy to run for a bunch of people getting back into it, that will have more depth to it that just kicking down doors and charging into a room.

Any suggestions?

Simple question: What one feat, spell, class ability, etc. would you remove from Pathfinder if you could?

f you remove something from the game that a prerequisite for something else in the game (a PrC/Feat/etc.) the latter is not removed from the game. IE. If I removed the bluff skill from the game, feats requiring X ranks in the bluff skill would still exist, but they would no longer have X ranks in the bluff skill as a prerequisite.

I hope that is clear enough. Answer away.

So, some of the most common threads on any game's website are probably about the problem features or vaguely worded abilities. While there can be some value (and fun) in discussing bad game features, in that by seeing what a bad feature is, we can gleam some information about what makes a good game feature. Normally the answer is something along the lines of "not that thing."

Anyway, I decided to make the opposite of that type of thread. Let's talk about some of the more well designed feats, traits, spells, archetypes, racial traits of Pathfinder? What are the ones that you like? What makes them so good? How could the design principles in those mechanics be applied to other classes.

For sake of brevity, I'd prefer the discussion stayed from the topic of entire classes. Those have a bit too much to try and unpack. Archetypes, or single class abilities are simple enough, though.

I'll be polite and start the conversation.

I love the Quiggong Monk Archetype. I love that the archetype is not the rigid list of alternate class features that other archetypes are, and is instead a selection of class features and powers that increases as the character levels up, that the character can replace his current features. They do have the downside that every Monk should theoretically be a Quiggong Monk, but I wish more archetypes were like that. I think you can see how they could be more integrated Pathfinder through Ranger combat styles. Instead of giving a character a preselected feat (see the 3.5 Ranger for that garbage), the player is given a slowly increasing pool of options that the player chooses at an early stage.

A couple quick questions about a topic that, as someone who enjoys designing encounter spaces, has always interested me.

1. What measure of space to you prefer on your battlemats/graph paper, hexagons or squares?

2. How do you approach things when you get to 3D space. Do your hexagons become hexahedrons or hexagonal prisms?

3. What types of environments or strutures do you find most difficult to design with your preferred shape?

"DPR" is a phrase that I see thrown about in Op/advice discussions around here relatively consistently, or at least with enough consistency that I would like to inquire about it further. Often the totals are extravagantly large, and this has given me some question of whether people aren't properly calculating a Damage Per Round, or that I am really rusty and out of practice when it comes to building damage dealing characters these days.

So yeah, how do you calculate DPR?

My friends and I are currently running a quick module over PbP, and we are using the wounds and vigor alternate rules in Ultimate Combat (handily linked for you). The second combat, as written, has an ochre jelly in it.

I'm not sure how the Wounds and vigor rules are supposed to work with Ooze splitting. Without explaining wounds and vigor, here is the basic problem: If each of the new ooze halves would have only 1/2 the health of the original version, wouldn't that automatically put the two ooze halves at the wounded condition (unless the creature had the toughness feat).?