Tarvi's page

Will there ever be an adventure where an old noble hires a group of adventurers to bring him the horns of a horned dragon before his marriage?

Thanks for the update.
Personally I'm grateful that Paizo produces the players guides so I'm sure not going to complain about it not being ready yet

(well not outside the privacy of my own mind anyway).

I know it's just a typo but I'm fairly amused by the idea of an adventure called Hekk's Rebels...

@Gilfalas

Ok- so if it was crafted as an Arcane or Divine spell doesn't matter at all? also what about CL? the wand is CL10 but my paladin is level 11, so only CL 8? doesn't matter too?

The caster level of a spell from a wand is always the caster level of the wand

it's as simple as rolling UMD as many times as i want (Outside of combat - obviously) and if i roll pass 20 i can cast, if i cast natural 1 i failed?

If your total on the skill check is 20 or more you succeed, if it's below 20 you fail and if you roll a natural 1 and fail you can't try it again for 24 hours

How will these rules play out in Herolab?

The only thing stated by the Hero Lab people that I can find is that they will be supporting it.

Slayer isn't a bad option.
You can get ranger bonus feats, sneak attack and studied enemy.

I'm pretty sure there isn't one but is there a way for a Swashbuckler to get a reduction in Panache costs for a Deed?

I was thinking they could use Signature Deed then I checked and it requires level 11 Gunslinger.

I think not having a way of being able to parry and counter every attack is a good thing but I'm checking that I'm not missing something.

Disbelieve if you wish, but Dr. Knight is correct. Pathfinder is a GAME written by nerds, not athletes, and its combat details have as little in common with real life combat as the East does with the West. As a Classical Rapier instructor, I can assure you, brawn has exactly jack to do with the penetration of a rapier. In fact, if you are utilizing brawn (assuming your opponent is a trained rapier fighter) you are an untrained thug who's doing it wrong, your weapon is going to break and/or you are going to die. Precision and technique are the exclusively requirements to do any combat application of a...

Really real world comparisons to any D&D based system don't work.

However in this case I'd point out that str isn't entirely about bulk musculature and the ability to move quickly and with precision can be partly put down to strength rather than dex.

Alceste008 wrote:

Umm, on number one the FCB for Arcanist humans is: Add one spell from the arcanist spell list to the arcanist’s spellbook.

Exactly - he is treated as a wizard rather than a sorcerer. Adding a spell to his spellbook is a minor benefit, while gaining spells known (being able to prepare more spells at a time) is a massive advantage.

Which is an area where a sorcerer might still stay ahead of an Arcanist.

If anybody who has got it could post a summary of what's changed in the various classes between the last public playtest release and the current version that'd be great.
(I'm most interested in the Swashbuckler myself)

Aaron Scott 139 wrote:

My normal rule if we use gestalt (because it can be a fun choice for flavor) is to say: 1 class can be whatever the player wants, but the other class to combined it with has to be out of the core rule book.

Not sure that's a big limitation.

The biggest boost for hp is Barb (core)
other common defensive boosts are Paladin or Monk (Core)

Core gives you wizard, sorcerer cleric ...

I honestly haven't liked ANY of the classes offered through the playtest so far this archetype simply adds another reason to dislike them on top of all the rest.

Fair enough.

Really, all of this is just the Gestalt option from 3.5 re-done with a bit more rules thrown on top of them and we all know how well that went back then. Anyway that is irrelevant to the point here.

Um, no, and a hundred times more no.

More to the point we have no idea how any of the classes will actually be until launch and we're just guessing at this point based on the little bit we know from the drips and dribbles of info from the playtest they've confirmed.
So far I'm more wary then excited, ESPECIALLY when the Gunslinger design is thrown around. Every instance (literally EVERY instance) where it's brought into contact with another class it's pretty much broken or ruined...

What part of the gunslinger coming into contact with other classes have broken or ruined them?

a) Has anybody else read The God Engines by Scalzi?

b) I want this now...

I'd have a few possibilities
18 Paladin, 1 cleric, 1 oracle, 20 Monk, 10 Champion of Irori
For saves that might actually help you...
oracle pick the mystery that lets you add dex to AC, get the feat chain that lets you do funky stuff with the dimension door stuff.

13 Sorc, 10 Dragon Discipline, 10 Barbarian, 17 monk with max strength and the spell that lets you substitute str damage for expensive material components. (cast Wish for Free)
with the orc bloodline from the eldrich Heritage bloodline.
(I believe this works out that you have over 50 str)
would need some tinkering to figure it out.

20 sorceror (sage bloodline? the one that changes you to int casting), 20 Wizard, 10 monk for defense.
Sorceror for the common spells, wizard for the customization for the day.

20 paladin, 20 sorceror, 10 Oracle.

Half-Giant Fighter (Archer) 20, Monk (Sohei) 19, Wizard (any) 1, Arcane Archer 10

You will be using a large sized Gravity Bow enhanced bow, coupled with Enlarge Person, and will proceed to flurry of arrows every single round for 4d6 base arrow damage, preferably with some critical themed feats from your fighter levels. Suggest adding appropriate Banes and other dice stacking weapon abilities.

Note that the arrows stop being large when you fire them.

If somebody wants to cripple himself I don't see why you should have to give him anything.
Now if he'd discussed it with you before hand that might be a different situation.

My archer archtype fighter with a 26 dex, combat reflexes, imp snap shot manyshot rapid shot and greater trip
Say there are 5 targets within 15ft
First shot (manyshot) 2 arrows
Second trip + aoo 2 arrows
Repeat second shot with haste shot and last 2 iteratives (6 arrows)
On their turn I make 4 aoos as enemies stand up

Not a difficult scenario to encounter at all... 14 arrows in one round
In a combat with lots of mooks this is an optimal way to attack. At the start of round 4 I now only have 8 arrows left in my quiver.

You're assuming that all your attacks successfully trip the opposition, which is pretty unlikely on later iterative attacks and with -4 for doing it ranged.

Zhayne wrote:

I'd get something stronger than ale, like really hard whiskey, and put them in potion vials (aka 'long skinny shot glasses').

The problem with that is no matter how strong, the text of the abilities indicate "a tankard of ale or similar quantity of alcohol" (barbarian) or "a tankard of ale or strong alcohol" (monk).

So it is not potency of the spirits that matters, but quantity; a tankard full each round.

for the barbarian the wording is a similar quantity of alchol.

the question is whether the monk reference means
"(a tankard of ale) or strong alcohol" or "a tankard of (ale or strong alcohol)"

a tankard of ale is about 2 standard drinks a tankard of whiskey would be around 16 standard drinks.
So I'd say it's meant to be "a tankard of ale, or strong alcohol."

It isn't as much liking to do it - it is the fact that you're eliminating an intentional balancing factor of the class.

I don't see "uses arrows" as an intentional balancing factor for the class. What's the alternative going to be?

A low level archer without magical assistance cannot carry hundreds or thousands of arrows with them, and cannot afford as many as some go through (not and get all of the other gear they buy, that is).

100s of arrows isn't really an issue to take with you. Generally there'll be someone in the party who can carry them without noticing even if it would encumber the archer 200 arrows weighs 15 lb, the odds are pretty solid there's a pack animal, fighter or dwarf who can carry that without slowing them down. At low levels 20-40 arrows will see an archer through most combats. Take 40 yourself and resupply between combats.

Even at mid to high levels, when it is less a money issue, it becomes a time management issue, as pointed out above several times. You can turn it back into a money issue, by spending a decent chunk of your resources on magical means of extending the availability of your arrows; but by default you only have so many available at a time.

When you machine-gun style spray arrows down the battlefield, you WILL run out from a mundane quiver in just a few rounds. So then you have to swap quivers; interrupting your damage dealing for a round. Which can have a significant impact on the combat, sometimes.

assuming 20 arrow quivers at each hip and a quiver on the back you're right for a fair few rounds unless you're fighting an army and have improved snap shot.

Don't like that? Then spend a portion of your gold on a magic item to alleviate the problem. But now you don't deal quite as much damage, or you are slightly more vulnerable, because that gold had to go to solve the INTENTIONAL logistics issue of ammunition.

or you've dropped an interesting minor item and kept the defensive and offensive options.

Don't like either solution? Play a different style/class of character, or go play an MMO*..

actually WOW used to require tracking ammo and had quivers which increased the firing speed.

*I am not anti-MMO. I am not a WOW addict, but I invest a few hours a month playing some other MMOs, and I enjoy them in general. But they are as different from roleplaying as a boardgame is. If you don't enjoy roleplaying, stick to what you enjoy.

Somewhat over the top to suggest that if you don't want to track ammo you don't want to roleplay

Tarvi: would you feel the same about a gunslinger doing that? The cost of ammo for them is one of the main limiting factors. What about a crossbowman? Or even the various special materials used for beating DR, tracking them is really important.

At higher levels generally I don't see the cash being worth worrying about.

A gunslinger can make 1000 gp worth of ammunition in a day, at 12gp/cartridge you pay 1.2gp/cartridge and can make not too far off 100 cartridges/day or 1000 bullets/day for 100gp of raw materials.

at higher levels 100gp is a rounding error and 1000 bullets will last a while, given a week between adventures and that's enough ammo to keep you going for a long while...

Special materials become less important as a +3 weapon bypasses cold iron or silver DR, +4 bypasses admantine DR and +5 bypasses alignment DR.

It'd doable for bows and crossbows anyway, it's just expensive and cuts into what else you can do with the bow.

Just out of sheer curiosity, why are you looking to get around tracking ammo? It's a some, yet important part of the game. Ammo costs money. You might run out at a crucial moment, etc. would you be ok gunslingers and other ranged weapon folks not bothering to track the cash and amount of their ammo?

because it's annoying tracking all the ammo?

In a 4th ed D&D campaign I bought an everful quiver (or whatever it was called) even though it almost certainly cost more than I'd ever have to pay for arrows.

I'm o.k. with tracking arrows at low levels but at high levels when you're firing off 7 or 8 arrows a round (4 standard attacks, rapid shot, multi-shot, attacks of opportunity with Snap Shot) it gets annoying and you've got to be carrying hell of a lot of arrows to deal with a standard adventure.

At 1 gp for 20 arrows the cost is completely insignificant at higher levels so it's just trivia. As resource management it's just fiddly and it's not like you've got many other options as an archer, it's not a case of "Do I use the wand or cast a spell".

Heck, I'm fine with saying "pay xxx gp/level and get a bag of holding and we'll just assume it's full of arrows which will last you for the level.

I'm about to start playing an archer and I'm wondering about ways of not worrying about tracking ammunition.
There's Endless Ammunition but as a +2 modifier that's pretty expensive, is there anything else out there?

Not ideal for a Paladin archer though...

Hi,

I'm kind of new in here and by poking around a little bit I've come to agree that TWF is not a really good option.

Currently one of the players in my table (rise of the runelords anniversary edition) is playing a TWF ranger and he has, by a fair amount, the lowest DPR of the table. Problem is that they are having a really hard time with the battles.

So I've been thinking on a way to make TWF on the same league as tow handed or sword and shield.

Unless somebody has done a truly terrible job of building a 2 weapon character they should be doing more damage than a sword and shield.

What you need for a 2 weapon fighter to work is bonus damage (rogue with sneak attack makes a good option)

A 50% split in levels between rogue and ranger probably wouldn't work badly

I have a few ideas but maybe they are over power and was wandering if anybody could give a hand. Okey so far I've got:

1. Decrease in 2 the dex requirement for the whole chain of TWF feats;

Note that a Ranger can largely bypass the 2 dex requirements because his style feats let him ignore the requirements.

@ Blueluck

Being a two-handed weapon is not any sort of advantage. A one-handed weapon can be wielded in two hands for 1.5x str damage and 3-for-1 on power attack.

I'm not sure that there's absolutely no advantage for a two-handed weapon.

Yes, and oddly they NEVER pick CON as their dump stat "for roleplaying purposes", and very rarely DEX.

Not to long ago, I asked for all 14s and got it, even those the default was a 20 pt buy (or rolling).

Mainly because if you dump con or (to a lesser extent dex) you're probably going to die.

Mostly people want to create characters who have a chance of surviving.

As far as the straight 14s what's your point?
Sure, the character is 30 points on point buy but he's going to be less effective than characters who are designed with an emphasis on their character's main focus.

Rerednaw wrote:

buddahcjcc wrote:

I voluntarily retired the character after we got to the leader of the band of bad guys (the boss fight), I got within 30 feet, Sleep Hexxed him, he rolled a 1 on the Will, the rest of the party walked up and coupe-de-graced him to death

Note that Coup de Grace is a full round action so the opposition would have a chance to wake him up before the PCs killed him and if he survives the first one he's awake and not helpless.

My main complaints are that most of the base classes do not appear to be as well designed as the core classes. A lot seem to have "cool, but rather useless in practice" abilities tacked on, or are only really useful when made as antagonists for the party to fight.

Inquisitor teamwork feats are pointless, considering that they are melee focused for a class built for a ranged playstyle.

I don't see anything in the Inquisitor class that makes it a ranged class.

Witches being able to mess with crops is pointless when you are adventuring in dungeons and saving the world.

There are a few curses that are unlikely to be taken in standard campaigns, however they do give the GM options for enemy witches (or allied witches if you're interested in moral issues)

Oracle curses are cool, but blatantly unbalanced...deaf (spell failure) vs haunted (no real drawback + free spells) is pretty much a no contest.

You really might want to read the descriptions. Deafened means you're casting all of your spells as Silent without taking more time, boosting the spell level or costing a feat.

Haunted gives you problems in terms of using potions, wands, bows (loading arrows) etc. Scent and Tremorsense aren't exactly minor benefits for a character...

While there are definitely curses I'd take ahead of others there are also archetypes I'd take ahead of others, school specialisations, bloodlines etc.

Infact, no attempt seems to have been made to balance oracle curses. Summoner eidlons are clearly geared towards the "mass as many natural attacks as possible" route and it is incredibly sub optimal to try and make a eidlon that can use weapons/armor.

And of course, many of the arche types are cool ideas with bad mechanics.

The witch is probably my biggest gripe, really cool idea, just badly executed with the 30 ft range limitation, poor spell selection, patron powers being watered down sorcerer bloodlines, and a familiar cum spellbook that you pretty much can't take out of the backpack for fear of getting it killed. It's like a combination wizard/sorc, with the worst of both and some cool hexes tacked on.

Except that it has a lot of things wizards and sorcerers can't do (healing for a start)

Samurai vs fighter is another example of class full of gimmick abilities vs one that is well designed and made to work.

How do you feel about Paladins then?

I'm curious to know what ability generation approaches people have as options other than point buy or just random generation?

I'm not entirely sold on either approach, point buy has the drawback that it's easy to get into stereotyped score distributions as well as favouring single attribute classes over multi-attribute classes.

Rolling for stats has the huge drawback that you can have 2 characters in the same class where 1 of them is just completely better than the other. (Back in very early days of Earthdawn I rolled a character with 18, 18, 18, 17, 16, 12 back in 1st ed AD&D days I rolled a character who had 3 scores below 5 so didn't qualify for any class)

Do people have any other suggestions?

Stunning Fist is normally a fair option for it..

Tanglefoot bags,

Also note that if they move away they aren't getting full attacks either...

No "Bonus feats" do not, as a general rule, need prerequisites.

That varies, Ranger and Monk both state that they don't need prereqs, fighters do, wizards do etc

I'd allow a rogue to get the feat through the talent without the pre-reqs though.

Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a real-word C17th noblewoman, was believed to have made a pact with the Devil and would bathe in the blood of murdered virgins, hoping to preserve her beauty from the ravages of time.

The reality is probably just that she was a serial killer, it's also noteworthy that there was no testimony at the trial of her bathing in blood and it first appeared in print over 100 years after she died.

While wearing the Vox Mask, the sniper's Goggles and the Necklace of Adaptation, she then opens her Eversmoking Bottle. The Item is based on the Pyrotechnics, Smoke Cloud effect which states:

"All sight, even darkvision, is ineffective in or through the cloud. All within the cloud take –4 penalties to Strength and Dexterity..." ,core pg 328

The Blind condition states:

"The creature cannot see[b]. It takes a –2 penalty to Armor Class, loses its Dexterity bonus to AC (if any), and takes a [b]–4 penalty on most Strength- and Dexterity-based skill checks and on opposed Perception skill checks. All checks and activities that rely on vision (such as reading and Perception checks based on sight) automatically fail...", core pg 565

According to Raw, would this let me make ranged sneak attacks? Because it looks close enough to me.

No, firstly a magic item does exactly what it says it does, no more and no less. The fact that a particular spell is used in creating an item does not mean that the item creates exactly the same affect as the spell does. (A Robe of Arcane Heritage requires Speak With Dead for construction but does not let you communicate with corpses)

by the book a scroll of limited wish costs 3775gp.
Raise dead costs 5000gp to cast so 7275gp to buy a scroll.

I'm really not up with the idea that a wizard buy a scroll that can be used to raise dead (and a lot of other things if necessary) for around half the cost of a cleric making a scroll of raise dead.

I'd allow the scroll to be used but you'd have to provide the costly material components.

Thanks for the answers people.

Not having played one before I've got a question about how it works
Can a spontaneous caster use a higher level spell slot to cast a lower level spell.

The sorcerer description has
"She can cast any spell she knows at any time, assuming she has not yet used up her spells per day for that spell level."

Under spellcasting there's
"If you're a bard or sorcerer, you can select any spell you know, provided you are capable of casting spells of that level or higher."

but there's also
"If you're a bard or sorcerer, casting a spell counts against your daily limit for spells of that spell level, but you can cast the same spell again if you haven't reached your limit."

Is it worth pointing out that the human ability Dual Talent can let you trade the bonus feat and extra skill point for +2 to a 2nd ability scores?

So you can get the +2 to str or dex and +2 to wis which the Thiefling can get without a penalty and still have the option to learn additional spells.

Admittedly the Thiefling will still have additional racial abilities while the human won't but it still could be a fair tradeoff with the human being able to get additional spells.

Wrong answer.

The mistake still lies within the rules as written.

There is no valid reason to allow a high strength bonus for a composite bow but deny that bonus with a long bow. Seriously, even in the real world, it is possible to make a long bow with a stronger or weaker draw strength, and this would be reflected in game terms by allowing strength bonuses.

I really don't see what the problem is. A Composite Longbow is a longbow as far as all feats are concerned so there's no drawback to using one.

Technically a longbow is a classic self-bow meaning it's all formed from 1 piece of wood so you can't use mithril or adamantine in it.

A composite longbow is one where you do include additional materials in the construction to provide the additional draw and strength support.

Sure you could make longbows with more or less draw but then again you could make daggers, swords and crossbows with significantly different functionality as well, it's below the level that the game models (or you can argue that the heavier draw is part of what goes into a masterwork bow, either way...)
I'm sure that not every suit of real world chain mail would be exactly the same in functionality either...

pjackson wrote:

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:

I like moral dissonance, insanity, well intentioned bad guys, and so on, and the alignment system doesn't handle that well, so I don't use it.

Actually all of those can be handled very well whilst using the alignment system.

No, it can't. You have to make a moral judgment about whether or not a well intentioned villain is or is not justified in order to assign an alignment. This eliminates any confusion about whether the villain is in fact justified.

No it doesn't - or at least it doesn't for anything that isn't extreme enough to be obvious about it being justified or not.

If somebody is neutral how does that give any details of whether his plans are justified or not?

not everybody with the same alignment will agree about everything.

Is it justified to accept help from a high priest of Asmodeous in order to stop a demon?

As for moral dissonance, I used the wrong term. I wanted values dissonance. In the PF alignment system, alignments are a part of the universe and have specific definitions. Values dissonance is when different cultures have widely different views on what is and is not acceptable. An alignment system that categorizes everything handles that badly.

Characters with the same alignment can disagree with what is actually right or wrong.

For example, under alignment slavery is either evil or not evil. It can't be evil here and not evil there. This eliminates any confusion about what is right or wrong when dealing with foreign cultures.

That's not entirely true.

It's possible that slavery as practiced in Athens could be acceptable in most societies while slavery as practiced in other areas would mark a country as evil.

Of course a CG country will probably be very anti-slavery but a LG country could well have slaves.

As for insanity, I am in no way, shape, or form comfortable assigning an alignment to someone not completely responsible for their behavior. It makes me highly uncomfortable.

You might want to discuss with a few philosophers & psychology people whether anybody is completely responsible for their behavior...

It depends on the insanity. I'm pretty comfortable assigning CE to Ed Gain.
Other insanities could be argued to make people N on the same grounds as animals are and some would pretty clearly be CN.

Please remember that the entries in the Bestiary that say "...as Characters" are not intended to mean player characters. Rather, it indicates races appropriate for non-player characters. In PF jargon that means baddies who get their power from class levels instead of baseline hit dice.

This is a common misconception. Remember that the Bestiary should, in theory, be off-limits to players. This possibly excludes the summoned monsters and animal companions and familiars, if the GM is generous.

The Advanced Race Guide will have a player-race version of the Aasimar, I believe. Until then, the only races that have any design consideration for balance as player characters are the core book player races.

So no, the Aasimars are not balanced, as a verb. The balancing has not been done, because they are not a player race.

Pg 405-406 in the core rules suggests that there was some consideration of how balanced various monsters were (Notably the Alternative Races sidebar) and I'll also point out that several of the Pathfinder books have introduced new PC races.

The classic response for IP questions is always "consult an IP lawyer" as a computer programmer and engineer my opinion on IP is not particularly reliable however

My undertanding is you wouldn't be infringing copyright unless you directly copy the text.
You would probably be infringing on various trademarks if you do a port of Ravenloft or Dragonlance (which is one reason why companies and authors do trademarks)

Note that it's not uncommon for various sites to have permission from a company but that doesn't mean that other people can start it. There's also a lot of cases of companies not attempting to discover about infringements because under trademark law if they don't defend against an infringement they are aware of they can lose some protection.

It's completely wrong to say that it's not illegal if you are giving them away (whether you're charging or not doesn't change the legality - although it probably would change how you'd be approached by WOTC and it _might_ affect punishment imposed or damages awarded if it went to courts and it was determined to be an infringement)

In any case whether you are infringing on any rights or not generally companies have access to lawyers and can make more trouble for you than it's worth to stand up to them even if you aren't in the wrong legally.

Note that you're omitting one of the strongest pointers on Dexter's alignment.
If he just found serial killers (and other criminals) and killed them then he might have a case not to be evil.
However when he finds them, drugs them, ties them down and tortures them to death then he's not exactly on the side of light...