Suichimo's page

I know this isn't really the focus of the discussion, but I feel a powerful need to point out that your original plan wouldn't work; being able to use a SLA once per day does not meet the "able to cast 3rd-level arcane spells" requirement of Eldritch Knight.

Except that it does:

Spell-Like Abilities, Casting, and Prerequisites: Does a creature with a spell-like ability count as being able to cast that spell for the purpose of prerequisites or requirements?

Yes.
For example, the Dimensional Agility feat (Ultimate Combat) has "ability to use the abundant step class feature or cast dimension door" as a prerequisite; a barghest has dimension door as a spell-like ability, so the barghest meets the "able to cast dimension door prerequisite for that feat.

Edit 7/12/13: The design team is aware that the above answer means that certain races can gain access to some spellcaster prestige classes earlier than the default minimum (character level 6). Given that prestige classes are usually a sub-optimal character choice (especially for spellcasters), the design team is allowing this FAQ ruling for prestige classes. If there is in-play evidence that this ruling is creating characters that are too powerful, the design team may revisit whether or not to allow spell-like abilities to count for prestige class requirements.

master_marshmallow wrote:

It can't replace the stats and also be an adjustment on the stats. That is the point, either it is an adjustment, or it replaces the base stats.

Per the strict interpretation of RAW being heralded as correct by the "no" crowd, it would seem that the armor has it's stats replaced with the new base. Mithral's rules always adjust the base.

If that is not the interpretation, could someone please explain it to me?

It's a special material. Plain enough.

Can you put celestial upon adamantine full plate? To get :

An armour of 25 pounds, a maximum Dexterity bonus of +6, an armor check penalty of –3, and an arcane spell failure chance of 20%. It allows the wearer to use fly on command (as the spell) once per day.

With a hardness of 20 and a 1/3 more hit points and a /3 damage reduction?

Almost everyone would say no. Somehow mitral does? I don't think so. It's wrong any way you look at it.

How is it a material? It is a magic property, they even give you what you need to craft it.

And yes, Celestial Adamantine Full Plate is perfectly doable and has basically no grey area outside of modifying a specific magic item.

How the hell are you guys seeing Celestial as replacing stats? Its not a magic property, it is a specific magic item, the wording is very different. EVERYTHING in the description of Celestial Plate is based on the assumption of regular full plate as the base. You have to infer, from there, the changes that it gives if you're allowing people to mess with specific magic items.

Nothing is being "set" in Celestial Armor or Celestial Plate. The wording is different because they are specific items.

I can only hope this is some form of sarcasm or satire.

Warning, long post ahead.

I am curious- those that really want a new edition- what are you expecting? I mean if you want a new edition as you are hoping they will get rid of alignments or Vancian casting are very likely to not get what they want (not saying that for sure, mind you). Some have asked for Teleporting Fighters. Even a small change like more Skill points for the Fighter may not be in the cards.

Feat taxes may still exist, etc.

So- do you want a new edition as you are hoping for a certain change? What happens if 2nd Ed comes and that change isnt there?

For me, at the very base of things is the martial vs. caster disparity. One side eventually becomes nothing more than mere peasants compared to the other side. There are other things, but I'll talk about those in a bit.

A lot of this is on the caster side. The very philosophy behind them is that they get monstrously powerful abilities that are usable only a few times per day. I imagine a good bit of people will say that this only really gets out of hand when the DM allows the fifteen minute work day, but I don't think that is true. With specialization, high Int, and magic items(including a bonded item) you have a minimum of six ninth level spells per day. Six! So if the average day has three to four encounters during it, in two of those encounters you can drop two ninth level spells. One ninth level spell will likely end the fight by itself. On top of those, you have your eighth and lower level spells. So the entire philosophy of ULTIMATE COSMIC POWAH but itty bitty casting space is bupkiss from the start. In 5e, casters get a single ninth level spell per day, with no way of getting it back.

Another problem with casters is "I have a spell for everything". This only gets worse with each new splat books, we've already seen it in 3.5 where even books like Complete Warrior and the Tome of Battle had spells in them. This is one of the reasons I liked 4e's splats. Martial Power only had Martial abilities in it, Divine Power had Divine, Arcane Power had Arcane, and so on. Back on the starting point of this paragraph, starting from second level spells, at the latest, you have gems like Knock and Rope Trick. The first of those obsoletes one of your party Rogue's main features, the second removes the need for a night watch.

The third major problem exists in the feats meant for casters. Take a look at the vast majority of the metamagic and item creation feats, which are easily the two strongest subsets of feats in the game. I count about five Metamagic feats that have prerequisites, these being Knowledge skills, Spellcraft, and caster level, you may not already meet. The two most useful item creation feats, Craft Wondrous Item and Craft Magic Arms and Armor, have no requirements outside of caster level, and Wizards get Scribe Scroll for free. This is the exact opposite situation for the martial characters who have to deal with long feat lines just to get their character to do what they initially conceived. This is another area that I think 5e is doing very well.

For the martials, we've got nearly the opposite of the first point I had for casters. The design philosophy for martials was "I can swing my weapon/fire my bow/attack" all day long. So since they could do it for as long as they wanted, this needed to be fairly low powered. The problem here is that they actually can't do it all day long as they will eventually run out of HP, even fighting nothing but hordes of level 1 commoners as they will crit every so often. It might take them longer than the caster to run out, but they eventually will. Possibly the single biggest grievance here is the melee character's inability to move and full attack in the same round.

From there, you have the casters stepping on the toes of the martials as mentioned above. Do you have a Monk in your party built for grappling? The caster has Black Tentacles. Fighter focused on tripping his opponents? Grease. The Rogue who sneaks in to the enemy base and robs them blind/sabotages their armory? Invisibility, Knock, and numerous other spells. The Fighter? Animal companion/Eidolon/Summoning.

Finally, to expand on the martial side of the feat issue, let us take a look at a couple of feats from the recently released Advanced Class Guide:

Anticipate Dodge (Combat)

Your knowledge of mobility and your attack prowess allow you to thwart elusive opponents.
Prerequisites: Dodge, Mobility; base attack bonus +7, brawler† level 4th, or monk level 4th.
Benefit: You automatically know whether a creature you can see has a dodge bonus to its AC. You gain up to a +2 bonus on attack rolls against a target that has a dodge bonus. This bonus cannot exceed the dodge bonus of the creature you attack.

So, for the cost of three bad feats, you can ignore a single feat your opponent MIGHT have.

Coordinated Shot (Combat, Teamwork)

Your ranged attacks against an opponent take advantage of your ally’s positioning.
Prerequisite: Point-Blank Shot.
Benefit: If your ally with this feat is threatening an opponent and is not providing cover to that opponent against your ranged attacks, you gain a +1 bonus on ranged attacks against that opponent. If your ally with this feat is flanking that opponent with another ally (even if that other ally doesn’t have this feat), this bonus increases to +2.

This one's requirements aren't that bad, Point-Blank Shot is a feat pretty much every archer will have, but then you notice its Teamwork tag. So not only do you need the feat to get an extremely small benefit for the cost of two feats, you need a buddy that has it as well. Also, your buddy has to be in melee combat for you to get the effect, which is precisely where archers shouldn't be.

Pummeling Style (Combat, Style)

You collect all your power into a single vicious and debilitating punch.
Prerequisites: Improved Unarmed Strike; base attack bonus +6, brawler’s flurry† class feature, or flurry of blows class feature.
Benefit: As a full-round action, you can pool all your attack potential in one devastating punch. Make a number of rolls equal to the number of attacks you can make with a full attack or a flurry of blows (your choice) with the normal attack bonus for each attack. For each roll that is a hit, you deal the normal amount of damage, adding it to any damage the attack has already dealt from previous rolls (if any). If any of the attack rolls are critical threats, make one confirmation roll for the entire attack at your highest base attack bonus. If it succeeds, the entire attack is a confirmed critical hit.

Now, considering my last two feats, you might be asking yourself "Why is Suichimo including Pummeling Style, which is a great feat, in with two such obviously terrible feats?" To that, I'll answer, the reason I'm including this feat in with the previous feats is the uproar this one feat has caused. There have been at least two threads, that I know of, that have discussed what weapons you can use with this and just how overpowered it is. I've seen people go so far as to say you can ONLY use punches with this feat, not even head butts/kicks/elbows. Yet, in the same book we get the Divine Protection feat, a feat that literally every Charisma based spell caster that can get access to it will take it, and we've actually got people arguing that it is just fine.

Do I want to see spell casting gone? No. They can even keep vancian casting. I would like to see the power of spells reigned in drastically. I would also like to see martials get their own nifty tools, that aren't bound to reality, to play around with as well.

I know this may be a generational thing, but I'm absolutely fine with my swordmasters flinging sword beams around like Link. I'm fine with my hammer users smacking the ground and opening up chasms. I'm fine with my melees being able to reflexively jump in to a caster's Dimension Door and follow him. And I'm fine with throwing a weapon or item and using that to fly, similar to Thor or Tao Pai Pai.

TL;DR Reign casters in and let the martials have more to play with. I just don't think this can be done with the 3.5 mindset that Pathfinder follows to a "t".

Completely, absolutely, and unequivocally yes.

Pathfinder was broken before Pathfinder was even a thing. Running with the 3/3.5 engine explicitly means that. It means your spellcasters are gods and your martials are filthy peasants. It is built directly in to the system. You aren't going to escape that imbalance without escaping 3.5.

Spells aren't the only place this is noticeable either. Martials get to take long feat chains to get fairly minor effects, such as ignoring someone's dodge bonus. Spellcasters just get to take metamagics and crafting feats with very little, if any, real requirements, caster level and skill ranks in skills you're already going to take are not real requirements, and the effects are huge.

Didn't you get full BAB with it in the play test?

Undone wrote:

Was looking for for the archetype which gave WP full BAB. Was disappointed.

I keep seeing things along these lines, but honestly, I don't understand why. There are no Full BAB, 6 level casters. Think of the WP as a Divine Magus (Who uses Buff's instead of Touch Attacks).

No idea why, considering we now have three 3/4 BAB FULL 9th level casters. If all 9th level casters were 1/2 BAB, I don't think I would mind this nearly as much.

ABANDON THREAD. wish there was a button to hide this guy.

(Also if you are worried about CMD just get Defensive Combat Training plz)

Speaking of CMD, why is the Belt of Superior Maneuvers so horrid? Three times per day you get a +1-+5 to your CMD against a single maneuver... Would it have been so bad to just let the player get a +1-+5 to CMD all day long, against any maneuver? Hell, I imagine the bonus could be higher than that and it'd still be fine.

Regarding Arkansas, we're actually having a cooler than average summer so far.

This is true up here in Iowa, as well. It's the beginning of August/Middle of the Summer and it isn't 100+ before the heat index.

CWheezy wrote:

Paladins are still only tier 4, their limited spell casting puts them in tier 4, and is not comparable to the battlecasters.

"Capable of doing one thing quite well, ..." Can Pally Smite Evil quite well? Darn tootin.

"while still being useful when that one thing is inappropriate," can still tank, can still heal, still buff and can still remove conditions via Mercy. Are those things useful? Yep.

Thus, ipso facto, Paladins are T3.

Throw in their face status and UMD, and I think they should be. Probably on the lower end of 3, but still there.

This is not to say I agree with other people telling someone how to roleplay, but I understand their frustration. I would be annoyed by someone role playing their four Int as an eighteen Int, just as I would be at someone describing their gnome as a half-orc.

I say let them roleplay their 4 int as 18 int. Just as you would go about your day once you rolled your stealth check. You might think you're the smartest man in the world, but everyone sees you for the idiot you are.

They did this in a recent episode of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They took they main character who I would classify as having an int of, at most, 6 and they give him a pill. Throughout the episode you see him becoming more and more confident and snobby as he starts explaining how the universe works, scientific theories, philosophy, and other similar subjects. At the end of the episode, it tuns out that the people who gave him the pill were just testing the placebo effect out and all of the stuff he has been saying has just been complete verbal diarrhea.

Unfortunately I can't find a good clip of this on Youtube.

Suichimo wrote:

wraithstrike wrote:

That does not mean your suggestion is an actual rule. Drench puts out fires. That is it. I explained upthread how allowing it to do anything more is well beyond the scope of what is written. It does not drench people. It is not a crop watering tool. It puts out fires.

You can totally drench people with Drench...

Drench wrote:

Range: close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)

Target: one creature or object of size Large or smaller
Duration: 1 round
Saving Throw: Reflex negates (object); Spell Resistance yes (object)

A sudden downpour soaks the target creature or object. The rain follows the subject up to the range of the spell, soaking the target with water. If the target is on fire, the flames are automatically extinguished. Fires smaller than campfires (such as lanterns and torches) are automatically extinguished by this spell.

You can drench a creature or an object. People are creatures and I imagine plants would count as objects so you could drench them as well. I've used it for drinking water and, as far as I can tell, that seems to be the only thing that I've done that would really be outside of its realm by RAW.

I dont know if you are serious, but I was talking about a monster special ability, not the spell.. :)

This is what I get for posting at 5 in the morning. Thanks, work!

@Insain Dragoon
I think Michael Kelso could teach you a couple of things about really good burns.

I'd like the Duskblade back, just improved and given more touch spells that don't end 60% of the way through his career. And no, the Magus is not what I'm looking for.

As others have mentioned, the Tome of Battle stuff. I am aware of DSP's work and will hopefully be picking it up when I get paid this week. I'd still like to see a Pathfinder version of the Warblade though, and the ToB martial schools.

The Dragonfire Adept would be fun to have back as well.

Tome of Battle, easily. I plan on picking up Path of War when I get paid, if I have enough.

The other would be the Tome of Magic. I know Binders had some love, and I personally liked Shadowcasters despite them being a bit weirdly done. Let DSP throw their hat into this ring and I think even Truenamers could be rescued.

Low attributes are, indeed, only going to bite you in the ass, and a skilled GM knows how to create obstacles subtly but definitely to show players that they maybe shouldn't have given their character a low attribute, unless they're willing to roleplay that lowered attribute and accept penalties for it, so long as the penalties are explained beforehand ("Your lowered Intelligence will prevent you from using my rules on Advanced Fighting Styles. Are you sure?").

How do you roleplay the Wizard with 6 or 7 strength though? You've already got encumberance penalties, which are devastatingly low at those levels, and the need to spend some of your money on alternate means of transportation. You're likely not carrying much in the way of personal armament either, as you're light load is only up to 20 pounds.

If this GM doesn't want people with dump stats, which is an ambiguous term anyway, just don't allow people to lower starting stats for more points. Or, hell, just have everyone start buying up from 9 or 10, just with fewer points.

Is the bonus feat from Fighter 1 something that you're in love with?

I personally like Gunsliger(Gun Tank) 1. You get the exact same proficiencies, the same HD, more skill points and a better skill list, +2 Reflex, Light Fortification a couple of times per day, and guns(for what they're worth to you).

I'm surprised it hasn't popped its head in yet, considering it is pretty much the perfect example.

Fighters are billed as your generic, default guards. Need a night watchman? Fighter. How about some guys to babysit the prince day and night. Fighter. People to watch your wagons? Fighters.

Fighters are actually horrible at this, however, because they don't get Perception. Not too mention, they just aren't very skilled. Your typical fighter with a 10 Int, only has two skills.

I'd suggest bumping Fighters up to 4+ skills and giving them Perception, and anything else that would help them fill their stereotype.