Tim Hunt 103's page

Hello!

Players in my game, obviously shouldn't be reading this.

We're wrapping up a campaign and I'm trying to get some awesome out of the last couple of sessions. Got some cool stuff planned, but the party has a killer tactic I don't really know how to step to.

They are level 8, we are playing a drastically altered version of Kingmaker (no spoilers, but the crucial detail is that 90% of the time they get to set their own pace, and the only way I can counteract that is with wasted hours of random encounters).
There is a paladin, a wizard, a bow-rogue, and a ranger.

My problem is this:
round one the wizardr casts greater invisibility on the rogue.
Round 2+ everything dies and the others are unable to contribute to anything except forming a shield wall and waiting.

This displeases me.

I seriously thought we were doing something wrong, and that maybe the sneak attack should be only once per round, not every iterative attack, but google and this forum have confirmed that thems the rules.

The rogue easily lands 60+ damage a turn, the ranger is landing something like 12. This is every round. Unless it is an evil character, the paladin is landing 12, to maaaybe 20 damage.

I do not know if the rogue and paladin characters are unoptimised, or if the rogue is severely optimised. One thing I do know is that I have no idea how to handle the use of greater invisibility.

I've tried the old "use the tactic on them, see how they fight it, then learn from that" trick, pitting them against will o wisps. The problem in that was "round one, wizard turns rogue invisible. Round two, glitter dust. Then blood"

So, short of ensuring any significant encounter has an enemy wizard, who wins initiative (otherwise, sneak attack and dead), I have no idea how the tactic could be fought.

So now I feel like every encounter needs to be APL+2 to be worthwhile, or 90% of encounters should just be narrated. (You came across 4 cyclops in your travel up the mountain. One was a mighty champion. But none were wizards. You soon bested them)

I play a whole bunch of systems, so I don't know pathfinder in as much depth as I'd like.

The main adversaries for now are... People with squid faces...
What sort of tricks can they, and large brutes, use to mitigate invisibility magic at this level?

Obviously I'm more after "how do monsters and NPCs combat this when they discover it happening" than "I want to neutralise this tactic" else I'd be giving everyone True Seeing items. But what do creatures do when they discover they are being hammered by invisible arrows?

So I am wanting to run a relatively low magic campaign. It's not that I want to abolish magic items, but that I want them to feel special. I'd rather shoot for "Sting, an enchanted blade of Elven steel" than "a +2 goblin bane short sword that you'll probably sell rather than use".

But my concern is how level progression, DCs, ACs and attack scores of monsters measures up to PCs without buckets of magic items.
Is this at all doable, or should I just try another way to get the feel I'm going for? Maybe a large discrepancy between 'enchanted' generic +x items, and True Magic items, with traits, wondrous items, etc?

My players have basically no dnd experience, and I'm building my own setting for the game, so if I can shoot for the flavour I'm after that'd be great. Otherwise I can keep it more traditional.

I'm sorry if the question has come up too much before, but my searches have so far haven't solved my problem. Most of the hits were about PC builds, or making especially dangerous villains. My problem is the undead minions feeling embaressingly weak next to a lvl5 cleric.

It seems like the difference between the level needed for an antagonist to raise low level undead, and the strength of those undead, makes a necromancer useless as a low level villain.

Animate Dead is 4th level for wizards (so fireball is an alternative), and 3rd for cleric (the negative energy damage is at 3d6). A skeleton is cr1/3. I am not seeing how a party that can handle that kind of villain is even slowed down by the +0 attacks of those skeletons, or how a party that is challenged by skeletons could survive making eye contact with that villain.

I want to put together a low level adventure based around a necromancer villain. I really don't want to use stronger undead (I'm after 'skeletons and zombies' for this, not cyclops lich), and I am vaguely dissatisfied with giving the guy a wand*.

What am I missing?

* foreshadowing that there is a bigger bbeg is nice, but not to the point that this villain is obviously a chump.

So, I have a dragon in my game that has become a wizard.

I am trying to work some things out, namely, does this in anyway stack with its CL as a dragon (aka, pseudo sorcerer)? That becoming Wizard 1 makes an adult green dragon go up a CR seems a bit odd to me, as all of its spells are ridiculously ineffectual for its current power level (though the ability score changes are considerable).

I understand that sorcerer and wizard are separate things, but I'm still puzzled here. Do any of its spellcasting abilities stack together (monster advancement in bestiary seems to imply this, but not state too clearly as it relates to different spellcasting types)? I suppose I'm confused by the fact that it isn't a 5th level sorcerer, but merely casts spells -like- a sorcerer.

Thank you.

PC died last session in my game. We're playing Kingmaker, and they don't have a cleric powerful enough for any Raise Dead spells yet (all at level 4), so they have to ride at full speed to another city.

With the weather and a caravan, it could take them around a week.

So a question has come up. For them, Gentle Repose is a 4 day spell. At the end of those 4 days, can it be cast again?

I am wanting to add a human cult dedicated to the worship of a certain entity from adventure three (with the justification that the legends passed from the centaur shamans to the kingdom of Restov) to use as antagonists throughout adventures one (a kobold sized subplot that sets up a recurring villain) and two (an insidious cult infecting the new kingdom), as well as foreshadowing adventure three a little.

I'm looking for any resources for designing a cult for an rpg. Most of my google searches have already turned up nothing but the argument that dnd is satanism. Instead I turn to the august members of the board.

Anyone know any articles or general advice for forming the details?