Swordslinger's page

Yeah, I'm all for consolodating armors, and just letting people describe them how they want.

For instance just have breastplate, chainmail and scale mail be the same, so people can use different types based on whatever they think looks better.

There should be the following categories:

Light non-metallic (leather, padded)
Light metallic (studded leather, chain shirt)
Medium non-metallic (hide)
Medium metallic (scale, chain, breastplate)
Heavy (banded, splint, halfplate, fullplate)

I'm almost even thinking that maybe full plate should have its own armor type (and separate proficiency) and should be made slightly better. The drawback would be that it requires special training to use (no class would get plate proficiency for free).

Combined Bonus Types:

Armor = Armor
Circumstance = Circumstance + Luck
Competence* = Competence + Insight
Deflection* = Deflection + Shield
Divine* = Sacred + Profane
Dodge = Dodge
Enhancement = Enhancement + Resistance + Alchemical
Inherent = Inherent
Morale = Morale
Natural Armor = Natural Armor

Unnamed = Unnamed + Racial** + Size

While 3E could use bonus consolodation, yours won't work.

First, circumstance bonuses actually stack, similar to dodge bonuses. Second, combining deflection and shield pretty much nerfs the shield fighter completely, because he can't even wear a ring of protection and get a shield bonus.

Personally I'd do something like this:

Armor = Natural Armor & Armor
Circumstance
Competence= Competence & Morale & Insight
Mystical= deflection & Luck & Sacred & Profane & alchemical & Resistance
Dodge
Inherent
Enhancement
Shield
Size
Racial

That greatly cuts down on bonus clutter. Since it would lower PC AC quite a bit, I'd also throw in some static bonus to AC based on level to pick up the slack of no longer having enhancement on armor and natural armor enhancement.

In other words, how is "buff" defined?

This is actually pretty easy. You just have a separate tag you apply to each buff spell. Similar to how spells have a [death] or [mind-affecting] tag. You just create a new [buff] tag. And you can only have X spells with the buff tag active at a certain time.

As far as casting buffs on someone who has reached their limit, you can do one of two things. Either the new buff simply fails, or the person being buffed gets to choose which buff he wants to keep and which one he wants to end. The ended buff simply ends its duration prematurely, as though it was dispelled.

Yeah. Even the 3.5 designers have said that animated shields were broken.

All they do is make every fighter into a two handed fighter. And lets face it, there's enough incentive already to fight with a greatsword.

Climb and Swim are not even remotely conceptually similar.

Sure they are. They're both physical skills that have to do with moving around.

And seriously I don't see why someone can't simply be athletic and be good at all of them. That's generally how fantasy characters work. You rarely ever see an athletic hero who can't swim, jump or climb well.

Not to mention from a game balance perspective, climb becomes useless past level 7 or so when everyone is flying. So I don't see any problem with having the skill that lets you climb also let you do other things.

The main problem with this spell is that you've got to roll individually for each item. That sucks and it takes forever if you drop a MDJ on the entire PC party.

To fix the spell, I advocate separating the spell into an area and targetted variety similar to dispel magic.

IN the area variety, every creature in the area makes a will save. If they fail the save, all their items are suppressed for say 2d10 minutes. Unattended magic objects are automatically suppressed, except for artifacts which are unaffected. As usual any active spells are automatically suppressed.

The targeted variety affects one item which must make a save or be permanently disjoined.

If a DM has problems with PCs who like to dig, there are plenty of sources that describe the historical risks and countermeasures used against such schemes.

Historically, such tactics took a very long time. In D&D, you can tunnel through walls at a very fast pace.

I don't know about you, but as a player I'm pretty fed up with situations in which my PC is killed due to failing a *single* roll (surprisingly often it's Initiative), and being told that my guy will be out for the rest of the *session*. If I've spent money (on a bus ticket and food, for example) it *DOES* feel unfair -- I've come to *play*, not to "match my wits" or luck against the DM. There *are* items that help with most of the effects, but it's a big investment for every PC to acquire them, and not all DMs let you buy them (i.e. no "magic shops" in their campaigns).

As a DM I've observed that "unfair" PC deaths (especially in 3.5 when the duration of "buffs" was dramatically shortened) often result in the other players getting frustrated, too -- sometimes even angry. I'm *not* against occasional PC deaths -- I'm against "BAM! You rolled badly, now you're DEAD!"-type of effects that are far too common in high-level play.

Yeah I'm with you man. My main complaint about high level 3rd edition is that it was just too deadly.

At the very least it'd be nice if you weren't truly dead, but just incapacitated, so you could at least back up after the battle.

Even if your tool is harder than the material, doesn't mean it just turns to butter around your blade, for you to scoop it out in great handfuls. You have to scrape tiny flakes, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

Objects need far more hit points. And still need some form of damage reduction, even against tools hard enough to harm them at all.

Yeah, regardless of if you're using adamantine or not, it still takes considerable strength to break through rock.

Really, the object damage rules are just ridiculously stupid. An easy illustration of this is that greatswords do a better job of breaking rock than picks do.

Berlew's system sucks in 3E. It might be something you could use in 4E where the diplomacy checks are less open ended, but in 3E, you've got to basically assume that people can find way to pump their skills to ridiculous levels, because they can and will.

Berlew's system basically allows you to go around making trades with people and if your diplomacy is high enough, you can get free stuff. One example he gives is trading a piece of string for a castle. And there's really no penalty for failing a diplomacy check.

So what this means is that your characters can wander from noble to noble, magic shop to magic shop just trying rolls. Even if the penalty is really big and they succeed only on an 18 or better, that still means they succeed 3/20 times and can get effectively anything they want for free at zero risk. To make matters worse, the penalty Berlew assigns, which is a -10 for a total ridiculous deal is much much too small. It's clear that Berlew has never played a game past low level with that house rule. And honestly I can see it being abusive even at low level.

Assuming your diplomacy is maxed. The DC to convince an equal level character with no wisdom modifier is a 15. Take the -10 penalty for a ridiculous deal and that's a 25. Now, you're spending all your ranks on diplomacy so that cancels out the enemy's level modifier. You also get a +3 for it being a class skill. And lets say you're a diplomacy build, so you've got a +4 charisma modifier. Now right there I've got a +7 and I can roll a 25 on an 18 or better. And I haven't even taken skill focus yet or used any of the other myriad ways to get my diplomacy bonus up. So already I can start trading dirt for horses with the local low level commoners. And it just gets worse from there.

Berlew's system is just crazy, and I'm not sure why anyone would support it. It's ridiculously easy to abuse.

All I can say here is no.

Skills shouldn't be solely combat focused, that's what feats are supposed to be for the most part.

You want skills to give a character a set of abilities that are useful in non-combat situations.

There are feats out there that give a bonus to fighting as part of a shield wall. I would prefer to let those feats give the "roman combat" style bonuses and leave the tower shield as it is. It does not need to get any better than it already is.

Yeah that's for sure. The tower shield is already bordering on overpowered, especially when used by clerics.

As an evil GM, you would think that I would be for this rule, but to be honest, it is not one that I use.

That said, it is a current 3.5 rule so I am hesitant to kill it without reason. Does this rule serve any valuable purpose? Are there any other reason it should go?

It's an archaic rule translated from 1st or 2nd edition, back when hit points stopped increasing at 10th level. Back then taking 50 damage was huge, and I guess the designers decided to put it in to make characters feel a bit more mortal. But that was where people had around 110 hp max at 20th level unless they cheated on hp rolls. And back then 50 hp of damage was a huge amount of damage. Nothing in 2E that I remember could deal that much damage, short of the breath of a red great wyrm, or a few other very obscure creatures.

In 3E, where hit points keep going up, the 50 hp rule makes no sense at all, since in 3E, 50 damage isn't really a huge amount. There is really no purpose for the rule in 3E, and I don't know many groups that use it.

The biggest problem with Dispel Magic in my opinion is that you need so many rolls.

In my games I've changed it to a single dispel roll, not a separate roll for each effect.

Yeah, the fly skill is:

• Not backwards compatible
  
• Just as complex as the old system
  
• Requires more rolls than the old system and is thus a bad system in play.
  

Really I don't see why it isn't thrown away entirely.

Rather than have it affect Strength directly, perhaps having it apply a penalty to melee attack and damage?

This may allow the intent of the spell to stay intact, while avoiding some of the other consequences.

Yeah, this may be the way to go. That way it can't cause people in armor to be super encumbered and unable to move, or be used in conjunction with other strength damage spells to put a character to 0 strength.

Really I've always hated ability score modification anyway in 3.5, and thought it should always just have been a modifier to melee attacks, melee damage, CMB and strength checks.

Actually, if you change the buff spells to be hour/level you CAN make major strides to avoiding the 15 minute adventure day.

This is true, however changing one minute spells to one hour spells would require a huge nerf to the spells, otherwise you just make casters even better than they already are, which is certainly something we don't want.

While the 15 minute workday is a problem in D&D... excessive buffing is also a problem. There are far too many buff spells in 3.5, especially when you throw in the splatbooks and really we need to work to control that too. You just don't want casters running around with 12 buffs up all day long.

that is exactly WHY we use 3.0 magic in our games... 3.5 is dead thing that doesn't account to magic at all

The main problem I think that 3.0 and 3.5 ran into is that they tried to make spells that were both super combat buffs and utility spells. Like they could never really decide if alter self was something you used to infiltrate the bandit camp or if it was something you cast so you could gain wings or a +6 natural armor. If it's the latter, then it absolutely needs a short duration, because it's a power buff spell better than pretty much every other buff out there. If it's the former, then it needs to last long enough to make it useful.

Both 3.0 and 3.5 had way too many spells that tried to do it all. Being both utility and combat, when to make it balanced, they have to be either/or situations. Because a 10 minute/level powerbuff is just plain broke and a 1 minute/level utility spell is pretty much useless.

Climb and Use Rope seem to go hand and hand. So the skill that lets climb, which is Athletics I think, should let you use rope as part of it. Though at times I really wonder if this even needs to have DCs. Can't it just be a time frame that it takes to tie a certain knot? And maybe to tie a knot one-handed you need a minimum dexterity like 15 dex?

Having a bunch of extra DCs just seems overly complex for me. About the only time I've ever had people make use rope checks in D&D is when they were tying someone up.

Hmm, I'm kinda with you. As a player I want those 1 min/level spells to last and last, but as a DM I have first hand experience of the 15 minute day problems that level 10+ PC's can gain from 1 min/level spells.

" Duration: one Encounter " looks horribly like 4th edition language which is a little disturbing, and it pains me to say, that in some cases it would probably work very well, however I'd like to know what others think.

Well even in 4E, one encounter is generally just a short form of saying 5 minutes.

The main advantage that 4E has however is that to recover encounter powers, you need to take a short rest which is 5 minutes, meaning that if you want to keep your buffs you also don't have the powers that you burned up. Which aside from 4E's other flaws, isn't a bad system for controlling people who try to make one buff last for several combats. Since 4E lets you do that, it's just that you have to stretch out your encounter powers over two combats as well, which is fine.

But 3E doesn't have that sort of control, so you'd have to actually go through the difficult process of deciding when an encounter began and ended. You also might run into problems of players trying to game the system by using fear spells to get their foes to run through the dungeon as they chase them, trying to prolong one encounter over several rooms.

Limiting something to 1 minute duration is probably the easiest way to try to handle encounter duration in 3E, since few battles last longer than a minute, but it's hard to fit two encounters into a 1 minute period. Thus I suggest the 1 minute fixed duration as a fix there.

It still doesn't solve the buff problem of buff+ teleport, but really I think that problem needs to be addressed in the teleport spell itself.

Well, what I'm usually looking for from Leadership is not a bunch
of fodder, or a healbot cleric or buffbot bard. I'm usually in
it for the monster- at higher levels, Leadership is a relatively
easy way to get a cool monstrous companion or mount. For example,
an evil cleric of Winter I built had Leadership to get his
Winter Wolf mount. A good ranger had a blink dog as his hunting
dog. That sort of thing.

Yeah really I think that leadership should probably just be changed to "Extraordinary companion", with a list of stuff you can get.

Having the feat for a free new NPC companion has always been a bad idea IMO.

I would basically do the following:

-Make an exception that the ability penalty from RoE doesn't reduce carrying capacity. That is, you can't screw someone with encumbrance of their own armor after you cast it. The ability damage is a penalty to attack and damage rolls and that's it.

-Make it clear that the ability penalty can't stack with real ability damage to bring someone's strength to 0. That is, if you take ability damage or drain, the penalty actually reduces to compensate by the same amount so that it won't put anyone to 0 or less strength.

-I might cap the scaling of the spell some. So that it caps out at 1d6. In fact, it might be best to just not have the spell scale at all. Pick something like 1d6+2 strength penalty and stick with it.

Aside from that, the penalty to attacks and damage is fairly severe, but at that level the wizard is using a 3rd level slot for an empowered ray of enfeeblement, or a 4th level slot for a maximized ray. The penalties are pretty large but generally they're about in line with a single target spell of that level shoudl do.

Also remember when using ray spells to take account for factors like cover, firing into a melee and so on. So many DMs forget that rays have to abide by the same rules as ranged weapons, so your wizard is probably taking a -8 penalty unless he took the feats necessary to use them in melee, and in which case would probably not have the feat slots left for empower.

RoE needs a slight nerf but nothing too serious. You don't want it to go back to being a spell nobody uses.

The problem here is one of system divergence.

And 3.5 has a lot of divergent elements.

BaB, AC, Saves, weapon enhancement bonuses and skill ranks.

One skill boosting item that grants +10 to hide checks and basically that skill is now busted and disjoined from the rest of the game.

Really, there's only one good solution to this and that's to go with the 4E model of things where everyone gets a fixed bonus from level to stuff like skills, Base attack and saves.

once you start having formulas like Saves = X/2 for some people and X/3 for others. You're screwed. Base attack can't be X and 3X/4 and X/2. It has to all be one constant.

I'm all for just getting rid of disabled. The random "it happens exactly at 0 hp" mechanic is just one extra rule people have to memorize for a rarely occurring edge case.

We probably also don't want to worry about wound penalties or "bloodied" states like 4E.

Just drop disabled entirely. If you hit 0, you're dying.

I have to say I like this so far.

15+CMB seemed just a TAAAAAD too high.
10+CMB was a TAAAAAAD too low.

I think it should matter what action you're taking. There should be hard and easy CMB actions.

Easy (DC 10+CMB): Bullrush, trip, any action once a grapple has been initiated, escaping a grapple, Sunder.

Hard (DC 15+CMB): Start a grapple, disarm, Escape a pin.

One idea I've used before for countering is that if you successfully counter a spell, you get to immediately cast a spell of your own that has a casting time of 1 standard action or lower as part of your counter action. That way a counterspell can help you gain the advantage in a given situation.

As for the spells, I don't think a minute is a good idea. When they introduced the majority of the swift action spells they were 1 round and with pretty good reason as they were powerful. The 1 minute/level spells are exactly like the above poster mentioned, spells that last long enough to get you through 1 or 2 (or possibly 3 or 4 actually) encounters. Spending a standard action to cast a spell that will last for several minutes doesn't strike me as too much of an investment for something that has a decent return.

There are a number of problems with this. First, it's that spells that last multiple encounters are entirely up to the DM, and how much time he says that things take. How long does it take for instance to finish an encounter and search the bodies, the move their loot to your backpacks and head down a corridor to the next room. Some DMs will let you do that in a couple minutes. Some will say 5 minutes, and some may say longer. You seriously don't know.

Of course with spells like this it's absolutely essential. This isn't a video game with constant time that players can track. And even worse, the DM usually won't tell you your spell has expired until once you're in combat. It'll go something like this.

PC: "Ok, I've still got my blur spell up so he has a 20% chance to miss me."
DM: "No way, that was from the prior battle, 10 minutes have gone by. "
PC: "We only searched the bodies of the guys from the last encounter and then went to two other rooms. It's not like we took 20 searching for a trap or anything."
DM: "Yeah, well that took 10 minutes."

What's even worse is that the duration goes up incrementally as you gain caster levels. So your DM is constantly worried about exactly how many minutes have passed at any given time, but he also has significant lee way to screw you over if he wants. And it leads to arguments between PC and DM as to how much time has passed. And seriously, I don't want to get into being a stopwatch nazi where as a DM I'm worried about resolving each and every encounter in round-by-round resolution because my players want to know how much time exactly is on their buffs. It's way too much book-keeping.

Most DMs see these as spells that should last a single encounter, and I say we actually go with that paradigm, but make them castable within a single encounter.

Then again maybe your stance is that casting a buff spell shouldn't cost you an action because it is keeping you from doing something else that round and that is why you want them to be swift actions. That would cater even more to the 15 minute workday, blowing off 2 spells around at even low levels. It would also completely kill the metamagic feat quicken which seems to be on its last legs as is with all the swift spells there are out there. Limiting the buff spells to just 1 minute kinda takes away from their utility as well, Bull's Strength isn't just used for the +2 hit/damage. It can be used to help break open a door or to carry a heavier load (a knocked out PC?) or any number of other things that depend on your str score. For that reason alone I would hope that they didn't follow the OP's suggestion.

Ok you said a lot here. So let me adress these one at a time.

15 minute workday: The 15 minute workday is going to be a problem in some games and not a problem in others. Pathfinder has no real control for the 15 minute workday at all, and therefore people who want to abuse it are going to. This change isn't going to make it better or worse. In fact, it's probably going to be worse without this change, because PCs don't want to cast these spells during combat, therefore the tendency is to try to guess when combat will begin and cast them right outside the room, thereby prebuffing. But people who play by the 15 minute workday are still going to do so regardless of the change. So long as players have daily abilities at all, the 15 minute workday is going to be a problem.

Quicken spell: Nobody is going to quicken these spells anyway. When have you ever seen someone quicken bull's strength, blur or aid? Honestly I have never seen it. That's because these spells just aren't worth casting as a standard action, and certainly not worth paying +4 slots to cast them as a swift action. The only time you'll ever see these spells cast is as a prebuff action, where the standard action can be effectively made free. As I don't think prebuffing is a good tactic for game balance as a whole (as it favors the attacker and leads to tactics like Scry & die), it'd be best just to limit the duration of these spells, but make them something people would want to cast in a real combat by making them swift actions. It won't hurt quicken spell at all, because people have better things to quicken than bull's strength. That's a fact.

Out of Combat Uses: 1 minute/level generally isn't enough for significant out of combat use anyway. Raising your strength to give you more carrying capacity just isn't going to last long enough for you to care. On the other hand, 1 minute fixed duration is easily enough time to try to bash down a troublesome door, or get a bonus for a skill check. Really, I can't think of any use for the spells that a 1 minute/level duration can do easily that a 1 minute duration couldn't. Among the few spells that you would want to use as utility, like alter self, a 1 minute/level duration is too short anyway. And those spells fall into the category that I thought should be increased to 10 min/level and keep the standard action casting time. Alter self as a 1 min/level spell is just a joke. It's no longer a combat buff in PF, and it's more likely to be used as a disguise spell. Of course you really can't infiltrate much with a spell that's going to drop in a few minutes. And if you want a good utility spell, it needs to last at least 10 minutes/level, if not 1 hour/level. 1 minute/level utility magic is a joke.

I like your suggestion but it may be too powerful a change for Divine Favor. A cleric with the Nobility domain is going to end up with 10 swift Divine Favors per day. Might just make it a very attractive choice for a player.

Well this actually wouldn't apply to divine favor, since DF is a casting time of 1 minute fixed and not 1 min/level. This change actually just makes spells that are 1 min/level into 1 minute fixed, but speeds their casting time. The powerful buffs that are already 1 round/level or 1 minute fixed, like divine power, haste, divine favor, etc. are left unchanged. They still will take a standard to cast.

Basically this is a way to make less used buffs like bull's strength, blur and similar spells more useful to cast in combat. Since right now those spells are nothing but prebuff spells, I have never really seen anyone cast any of those spells during combat, ever. I think with this change they become a lot more useful. Bull's strength or cat's grace might not be terrible if it's a swift action to cast.

Lets face it, 1 minute/level is a bad duration. It basically amounts to "How your DM wants to screw you over." Because everytime I've played with such spells, it seems like they expire ridiculously quickly, even though you technically could be crossing many rooms within the span of 5 minutes (which is 50 rounds).

So it has DMs make odd judgment calls, and that tends to suck. I would propose that this duration be abolished. You can replace it with one of the following:

-Combat buff spells should become 1 minute fixed duration (like divine favor) with a swift action casting time instead of a standard action.

-Other spells can simply be moved to 10 minutes/level or even 1 hour/level. Really, the short duration is just a pain.

Really I realize that the fly skill is supposed to simply maneuverability categories, but I just don't see the point. Having to make random checks just to move is a bad idea, because it really slows the game down. And there are also a lot of complex rules to memorize. Most players just don't want to deal with that.

I advise just getting rid of the fly skill and going back to maneuverability categories but simplify them quite a bit. Forget about the turning radius, because quite simply, it's just too complicated to figure out in play and it makes even less sense in a game that doesn't even have facing rules.

Further just about every group I've ever played with has ignored the maneuverability class rules in the DMG, and I suspect that they'll ignore the fly skill checks as well. It's just too much work trying to figure out how fast you turn in midair and how many movement points you're spending to turn in place or what not. I don't think most groups even want to deal with that. It's clunky and it's cumbersome.

Here's what I would do. Three maneuverability categories: poor, average and good.

Poor: Your standard action becomes a move action while flying and thus you can only use it for move action related tasks. You cannot make attacks of opportunity while flying. While flying, your space (But not your size), doubles. So a 15x15 creature takes up a 30x30 space while flying. If it must squeeze to enter an area, then it crashes.

Average: You cannot make attacks of opportunity while flying. While flying, your space (But not your size) doubles. So a 15x15 creature takes up a 30x30 space while flying. If it must squeeze to enter an area, then it crashes.

Good: Your space while flying is equal to your normal space. If you enter an area where you must squeeze, then you crash.

And that's it. As far as crashing goes, you'd have basic damage assigned for hitting an object, and possibly have some feats that allow you to avert crashes (or maybe even keep the fly skill specifically for that purpose). So you might get scenes where a creature is flying in tight quarters and must make a check each round to avoid a crash if you want those sort of close quarters cinematic tense crash scenes.

I feel like my presented system is something that most groups are going to use, instead of the ignored maneuverability class rules, and I suspect the new PF flight rules, which are just too complex for most groups to care about.

I am a little concerned that this would lead to folks calling for a check to identify every spell they see being cast on the off chance that they could counter it. This could really slow down play, especially with multiple casters in the group.

Yeah, I tried running a game with a spell that worked similar to dispel magic, but just for countering that had a casting time of an immediate action, and it made things a bit slow since everytime an enemy cast a spell I had to basically wait to see if the PCs wanted to counter it or not.

I say get rid of the +5 bonus altogether. Being able to grapple people in an area with a strong bonus is good enough. Especially considering that with caster level boosting items and class features, the bonus caster level may well be bigger than the BaB of a fighter of equal level. Also I'd get rid of the prohibition on attacking the tentacles. Have it work that tentacles grabbing a creature can be attacked individually and dealing 20 damage to the tentacles grabbing any specific creature will free that creature though it doesn't remove the spell effect, and tentacles may try to grab the freed creature again as normal.

I also like the idea of bringing the grapple escape roll to 10+CMB instead of 15+. Since 15+ is basically a permanent lockdown for many people. Possibly make escaping a pin be a 15+, but a regular grapple should just be 10+.

Sleep's 1 round casting time is well enough to balance it out. Color spray is mostly balanced that you've got to be in melee to use it. And at low levels, a wizard in melee is easily dropped, so it's a risky proposition. Now if people use the optional bonus starting HP rule, then color spray absolutely should get nerfed. If a wizard is no longer a fragile glass cannon at low levels, then he shouldn't be able to drop lots of monsters with a single spell.

The main thing about color spray that I don't like is the weird status effect shuffling. It's just too complicated. Unconscious for 2d4, then blinded and stunned for 1d4, then just stunned for 1 round. Why? Seriously... can't we simply that a little.

2d4 unconscious is synonymous with dead anyway in 3E, so lets just leave it at that. As for blinded and stunned or just plain blinded, why does it even really matter? Granted some things may be immune to certain status conditions, but we're talking low level creatures here and anything that's immune to stunning will be immune to mind-affecting too. So might as well simplify it a bit.

Careful everyone. This thread is meandering a bit too much.

I do have a question though. Is this really a problem? Have any of you actually had players tunnel through a dungeon? I have not in my experience... but I have heard it discussed hypothetically many times.

Well actually, yes.

While I haven't had a group that exclusively dungeon tunnels. Anytime you're throwing down any kind of adamantine door or other well defended area, it's pretty routine that the group decides it wants to bash down a wall. This forces the enemy to either try to circle around (which takes them out of defensive positions) or to let the PCs tunnel through walls. It also makes the classic wizard's tower totally indefensible. Combine dungeon tunneling with flight, and the PCs can pretty much enter the tower from anywhere. That's happened in a game too. Locate object or locate creature + tunneling and you've got a surgical strike. Especially once you've got any kind of adamantine weapon, this sort of tactic is all too easy to pull off on any above ground structure.

ANother scheme that was used by one of my groups is a combination of locate object and dungeon tunneling, whereby they just directly tunneled the closest path to the object, and thus tried to avoid running into dungeon rooms. It took awhile in game time, like a half hour or so, but that's actually a relatively short period anyway, and while the noise drew some monsters. the advantage to dungeon tunneling is that you avoid all the traps on doors, and if the monsters attack you, they'll have to attack you on your terms, which likely means one easily defended chokepoint.

And it's not a particularly difficult problem to fix. What you want to do is raise the hardness on walls and decrease the hp a bit to compensate. That way you raise the bar as to who is powerful enough to tunnel through dungeons, but they don't actually take longer to do it. So instead of being 8 hardness and 180 hp, a stone wall might have 30 hardness and 50 hp. And by doing that you've made it very difficult for someone to chop through it.

Now it doesn't stop someone using the book of nine swords and the DR breaching maneuvers, but there's really nothing PF can do about that, aside from suggesting house rules to cap the hardness breaching to 20 like adamantine.

Bonuses are the way to go to get people to play stereotyped classes. The +1 feat at first level did *wonders* for getting parties to be predominately human.

If people want to play a stereotyped class, that should be their choice. It shouldn't be something we force on them by making elven wizards better than the other choices.

Do we really want people choosing their race solely for min/maxing purposes and not for roleplaying? Personally I'd like someone to be write down "elf" on their character sheet because they want to be an elf, not because they want some bonus hp for their wizard.

I think that the Charm and Diplo rules need some clarification, but it would be easy to waste ink being explicit for the sake of people who just won't get it anyway.

I'm all for adding an explanation that "neither Charm spells not Diplomacy cause an NPC to act against their nature or common sense. A merchant will not give away goods for free, and a humanoid will use violence against it's friends and allies. That kind of manipulation generally requires more powerful magic such as a Dominate spell."

Anything more specific is probably a waste of space.

That's all I'm asking for. Just a sentence or two stating that Diplomacy won't allow completely outrageous results and the DM is free to alter the DC or just declare an automatic failure based on circumstances.

Sometimes common sense needs to come into play. Not everything needs an explicit rule. Ultimately, each GM is the final authority in their respective games, not the rule book. If your players are building a "power" diplomat to abuse the game and subvert the adventure then you have to correct that by not allowing the dice or rule wording "loopholes" to ruin play.

Besides, you can always set the DC for extremely unlikely scenarios like the one you propose in the OP as high as you see fit. The player can then roll and fail if needed.

If Charm spells and the like do not allow creatures/NPCs to act against their nature then Diplomacy checks should not be allowed to either.

And that's fine. But the rules actually need to say that.

If a shop owner, under no circumstances, would give out free goods, then it doesn't matter how "helpful" they might be. The DM has the final say on how the NPC reacts, since that's his job.

The problem is that nowhere in the skill description is that actually said. All that is stated in the text is that the DM can cap the improvement to attitude by only 2 steps if he wants. That's it.

If indeed this is the way that diplomacy is intended to be played, with a lot of DM fiat, then I think it needs that specifically written in within the skill description. A single sentence or two would be all that it would take and it'd plug up the abusive diplomacy master loophole.

Diplomacy still seems outrageously powerful. I mean, you can go into a magic shop and ask the shopkeeper to "let you borrow" his most powerful magic item, and you can reasonably expect to succeed most of the time if you build a diplomacy based character.

With the massive bonuses capable by 3.5 skill manipulation, skills like diplomacy really need to be cut back in terms of what they can do. Because you very well can have characters rolling huge diplomacy checks.

With the addition of CMB, there's an easy way to help out maneuver based fighters and prevent them from turning into one trick ponies (that is, prevent the lame "I trip every round" fighter build).

There should be one feat to give a +4 to CMB, period. However everytime you use the same maneuver in the same combat you suffer some penalty, either a -2 or a -4, depending on playtesting. This allows fighters to really mix it up, it's simple, and it prevents boring archetypes like the guy who does nothing but trip people.

The concept of CMB was a great addition because it centralizes maneuvers. We should take another step forward and truly combine them into one coherent category by combining the Improved Maneuver feats into one feat.

wow, in reading the PF beta I totally missed that favored class incentive.

What a stupid idea that is.

Why do we want to encourage people to min/max based on race? Players should pick a race because they want to be an elf or a dwarf or a halfling, not because they need to be a better fighter and they get free hp for picking dwarf.

Favored classes were a horrible idea in 3E to start with. Pathfinder should just drop them entirely, not make them more dominant.

Personally, I like it when my players use clever tactics and flashy maneuvers. I want to encourage things like that. The only caveat I would have is that I think it's a little dull when 3.5 melee fighters who robotically trip their opponents over and over and over again. But bull rushing + grappling + sundering + disarming? Hell, yes -- bring it on!!

Yeah, the guy who does nothing but trip is boring. Personally I think those options should be open to everyone with decent BaB, and be less based around one trick pony fighters who spam one maneuver over and over again. I'm thinking maybe that the base DC should be lower, but if you repeat the same maneuver in the same combat, it should take a penalty. So you can trip someone once, but once you do that they're on to you and further attempts are harder. So it encourages fighters to mix it up.

Of course to make that possible, maneuvers have to be something people can do well without being required to take the requisite improved X feats.

That's kind of why I don't want to mess too much with these rules . . . I really don't have a problem with a 20th level monk doing stuff like this.

Well, I'm not advocating that nobody should be able to do it. I'm just saying that it shouldn't be something that any old low level character can do.

There are a number of possible fixes. The first is to just increase walls hardness, but decrease the HP to compensate. This makes walls about just as resilient overall but much more resistant to weaker attacks.

The second system is to come up with some kind of weapon damage system where you'll break your morningstar if you keep hitting it up against a wall repeatedly. Once again, this limit will either be much higher or nonexistent for higher level magic weapons.

But my point is that the current rules set the bar way too low for chopping through walls.

The point is not really that people actually do it. But I have been in a situation where I had to force myself to say "Even though there's a stone door here that we could easily bash through with my half-orc's morningstar and the fighter's greatsword, and I really want to know what's on the other side, I'll just ignore what it says in the rules and pretend that it can't be done." It kind of took me "out of the moment", so to speak.

Yeah, it really kind of kills the flavor for me when anyone with power attack and a half decent strength can dig through 5 ft sections of wall in a few minutes with swords and there's no chance that you ever break your weapon (or at least dull it) by repeatedly bashing it against the dungeon walls.

And you can do that to metal walls too. A steel wall is only hardness 10. That's it. Meaning that some guy with a greataxe and 10 strength will eventually cut through a solid foot of steel, all without damaging his sword. High level characters are chopping through 10 ft thick walls of iron. And hell, a 10 ft wall of iron or steel should be damn near impenetrable. Even modern explosives aren't going to get through that.

The hardness definitely should increase. And I think the hardness of metal needs to be higher to begin with. There's just no way that some guy with 10 strength should be chopping through a metal door, with any weapon.

As far as I can tell, nothing has been done about increasing the hardness of dungeon walls, meaning that as far as I can tell you can still take your sword and hack a path through the dungeon.

Isn't it about time that PF made the simple fix of giving walls and metallic doors a bigger hardness so you can't simply chop through them in a few rounds with a big power attack?

Definitely a good idea.

If you can sneak attack a construct it needs that bonus HP.

Another major problem with buff limits is that the buffs themselves aren't balanced with a buff limit in mind.

The real solution here is to tweak the buffs themselves so that it's easier to resolve them all. If not, you'll be locked into rebalancing the buffs to make them function under a buff limit anyways, so why not just go all the way and fix the buffs themselves?

Well backwards compatibility is a big issue. Even if you fix all the PHB buffs, you've still got tons of extra splatbook material that contains more buffs, which you can't fix directly.

A buffing limit would allow you to potentially curtail things that you can't affect.

Make Fireball and all those other blasting spells ignore SR. It's not going to hurt anything. SR still blocks real magic, while saves and resistances tend to negate blasting anyways.

Yeah I'm all for that. Blasting spells should ignore SR. In fact, they started this trend in the spell compendium with the orb spells and so on, though oddly they were conjuration and not evocation, which was stupid. Though this does mean that creatures that previously relied on SR (or spell immunity) need to get resistances, like golems.

But SR needs to stay for the other stuff. Spell casters are already powerful enough without removing the one defense creatures have against high level spells.

slightly off topic:

Swordslinger, have you ever heard of DM Tools ?

theres TONS of awesome NPC's, some quite well designed for combat spec, and with a huge sample size, you can find something that will fit perfectly, or at least can fit with some shoehorning.

that's what i do when i have little time to prep and am not running a premade adventure.

It does seem pretty useful, though it still seems a bit low on high level NPCs, and given that I generally don't game with a computer nearby, it's not all that useful during the session itself.

But it definitely seems like a pretty good site, after a brief browsing, the NPCs do seem relatively min/maxed which is a good thing. Most NPC generators just left you with garbage NPCs.

Because of familiarity with the system, I can whip up just about any mid-level encounter (that I'd want to use, I'm sure that some triple-templated, class-leveled monster with spellcaster levels freak with no legitimate story use would take me longer) in 15 minutes or so, so, if it were just a game system thing, I could tell them to go get us some pizza or something.

What I *can't* do is make it interesting and include the sorts of detail that creates new plot hooks for the party and stuff. That usually requires me to sleep on it and wake up with all sorts of spiffy new ideas. While *every* scene / combat in the game doesn't have to be an action movie set-piece with hidden dangers and things to swing off of and a bubbling pool of something dangerous in the corner that PCs (or bad-guys) could get Bull Rushed into, I try to make stuff a little more interesting than 'Orc, room, pie.' It isn't always just about the critters in the room, it's about the environment, too, and connecting things to any ongoing storyline (the bad-guy sending assassins after the party, or whatever, instead of just an endless sequence of random encounters).

Weird, because I'm just the opposite. I can come up with a pretty engaging story on the fly, but what I can't do is create stat blocks for all the stuff they may encounter in short order and make it interesting. Especially when you've got a quest composed mostly of NPCs, I just can't create reasonable opposition in short order. This may be because a lot of my PCs min/max like fiends and the NPCs need to have the same level of power to compete.

So I mean something unexpected like the villain throwing assassins at the party is just not something I can do without preparation because I can't generate the stat block for an assassin team in short order. There's just too much page flipping and cross-referencing.