Tacgnol9001's page

Hey all,

I'm going to be running a Hell's Vengeance game soon and I was hoping to get some advice on an issue I've seen in quite a lot of games.

Often I find characters without social skills (intimidate, bluff or diplomacy) are often reluctant to get involved in dialogue as they fear being forced into a skill check they will likely fail. The result is often one or two players hogging the majority of social/talking encounters despite other players wanting to take part but being scared to.

I was considering a few different approaches:

1. Roll intimidate, bluff and diplomacy checks in secret and give players large circumstantial bonuses if they say something that chimes especially well with the NPC. My biggest concern with this is whether it would damage player agency, it also has the ability to invalidate certain class abilities like inspiration.

2. Treat group social skills as communal, so if a diplomacy check is required the highest diplomacy check in the group would be rolled. This is often an approach you see in CRPGs, but I'm not sure it translates very well to the tabletop.

3. Give every character some extra skill points per level to spend purely on social skills, so every character has a social niche they can fill. Biggest downside here is probably giving certain characters too many skill points, but that may not be the end of the world.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Does the tatterman's fear aura ability work from the nightmare creature template rules:

All creatures within a 60-foot radius that see or hear a nightmare creature must succeed at a Will save or be shaken for as long as they are within the aura. Whether or not the save is successful, that creature cannot be affected again by the same nightmare creature’s fear aura for 24 hours. This is a mind-affecting fear affect.

Or does it work based on the universal monster rules:

Fear Aura (Su) The use of this ability is a free action. The aura can freeze an opponent (as in the case of a mummy's despair) or function like the fear spell. Other effects are possible. A fear aura is an area effect. The descriptive text gives the size and kind of the area.

The former seems more logical (and also fairer, considering the fight is already quite hard), but confirmation would be nice.

Hopefully someone can shed some light on how Lesser Restoration works in regards to sanity healing and lesser madness reduction.

On the Sanity Rules it states:

A single casting of lesser restoration reduces sanity damage by 1d2 points up to once per day;

Further down it states:

Certain spells can also aid in recovery from madnesses or cure them outright. Lesser restoration has no effect on greater madnesses, but reduces the current DC of one lesser madness afflicting the target by 2, up to once per day.

My question is, do we get both effects from a single cast? It seems unclear due to how it is written and how lesser restoration normally works. I'm assuming the intent is you get both from a single cast.