A game with a strong narrative focus is not negatively impacted by a tighter mechanical rule set. There is no correlation to be made here. I also fail to see why this school marm thing keeps coming up. If someone is dead set on making a dud character, then just get them to use an npc class that suits them.
I think the subtle game interaction that one might miss is that players are engaging with the RNG far more than any individual npc, making a once a day critical negation not a terrible idea on its face.
Why skirt the point being made. A first level spell has a tiny opportunity cost. The jingasa is not nearly so trivial.
Right, why would an adventurer not go out and pay for an epic outsiders service instead of buying a friggin hat that still puts them face to face with potential death and dismemberment? It may not work forever, but purchasing way above your cr can be accomplished through spell services. Buy a hat, or send in assault angels into the bbegs lair. Which makes more sense in the context of the universe? Which is more fun to deal with as a GM?
UMD allows you to emulate class feature. So, assuming "being spellcaster" is druid class feature (and you know, "spells" is a part of "class feature" section), you rogue just need UMD DC 20 roll. You still, may be, need DC 26 to emulate ability score and 3rd check DC 21 to use scroll. Ta-da! Blah blah blah spellcaster overlords blah your own fault for not picking a caster blah. We need to make sure we maintain the status quo where only one group has access to the good game features right? After these discussions I kind of wonder why umd isn't on every non casters list. The devs are clearly saying umd or gtfo.
I sure am glad I decided to stop buying first printings. Why don't they just ban everything that isn't the big six? Seems as though they don't want player options to have an impact on the game, maybe they'll ban feats next. At least I wouldn't have expectations of agency then.
You could also do something like doubling an effect like alchemist fire requires eight times the fuel for each step above standard. A corresponding 5' to the explosive radius makes sense. That would make it an interesting, if expensive, option later. Just getting 3d6 with a fifteen foot explosive radius would require 64 alchemist fire flasks.
Maybe make a general rule about not being able to throw bundles of alchemist fire, but using multiples with a fuse is okay? I figure you should be able to do something like that for internal consistency if nothing else.
Clear! Satchel charge incoming!
It says that if you drop it with a death effect it will rise again in three days in its regeneration stat block. I would assume it would be a fair target at that point.
Can you animate the Terrasque or something? I never considered that...
I personally don't really care for Unchained. So I'm glad they took the approach they did. Developers tend to be super conservative. Can't upset the oldsters who used to RP uphill both ways. "In my day you were terrible, and liked it!"
You can type in caps all you want, but everything you've said aside from pointing that some spells have alignment descriptors is your opinion of how spells with alignment descriptors should be handled in play. I don't think your stance is objective, I just think it looks that way to you because you're standing at the center of it. If a thread could be 'won', this would be the post that does it. Cognitive bias, it's a thing.
I'm pretty sure you have to weigh the consequences of an action to determine the ethics of said action. There is a point where not using a nuke is unethical, it's just a crazy world ending circumstance that really isn't likely to happen.
theres a great many posts recently making a claim to other peoples motives that really have no place here. Ashiel and others have made very reasonable arguments as to why a thing ought to be considered good aligned or not. The fact that the book is not consistant with those views does not somehow make them amoral. Look, if I somehow gained power over the world and made oranges illegal and proclaimed that any who ate oranges would, henceforth, be considered evil, do you think eating oranges would actually be morally wrong?
Granted. (I'm still working on perfecting that one. It would be... a useful skill.) :DThats not a jab, if that didnt come across in text. I admire your ability to materialise posts that would take me forever to type out. lol, the glamour of parenthood.
Granted. (I'm still working on perfecting that one. It would be... a useful skill.) :D Thats not a jab, if that didnt come across in text. I admire your ability to materialise posts that would take me forever to type out.
That's fine! I didn't know stuff before people told me (and different sites have different code), so I try not to presume what people know and tell them. If you prefer the other way, that's fine! (I find it really fast and easy by this point, though. It's all in what you're used to/comfortable with.) To be fair, some of us can't type a million words a minute Tacticslion, so that's a thing. :)
You know, you'd think a group of people like all of us, who are interested in a game like this would be more careful about our pejoratives and general bashing that we probably got enough of in high school. Using the mechanics of the game to your advantage is not something that you ought to be singled out and called names for. It's a friggin game people.
You could do core only, but that will just end up more wonky then anything. The most powerful classes and spells are in the core book. If this person was really out to be the king mechanically, then he would be playing a wizard rather than a class without ninth level spells.
Feats ought to be judged by how well they do what they are trying to accomplish. Your going to have trouble measuring the power of weapon focus against skill focus because they involve different parts of the system. If you want to compare feats, an easier approach might involve comparing combat feats against other combat feats or skill feats against other skill feats. For whatever reason, magic feats are usually better than their competition, so most of those should be on the expensive side.
Care to explain? Especially about what you find toxic? The alternative being what, that mundane heroes stay mundane while simultaneously fighting demons capable of bench pressing a small moon? That's better and easier to grok?
Writing is on the wall man. Evil is where it's at.
So, what, boiling people alive in there skin is fine, just don't give a demons fast healing to a child or your boned? How is that not the most patently absurd outcome?
Before you even begin to test something, you need to insure that your testing equipment isn't broken and that results you will get aren't determined by arbitrary factors. E.g. if you are trying to measure your body weight, you buy an accurate weighting scale, go into a room and weigh yourself. You do not try to weigh yourself on a bus driving down a bumpy road, because what the scale would show won't correlate much, if at all, to what you are trying to measure. In case of the evilness of the spell, it is practically impossible to insure proper conditions for an experiment, because it is possible to mess with the experiment and then make it seem(to any observer, including the experimenter themselves) like nobody messed with the experiment. And at that point your results are useless. Are they accurate? Nobody knows. How inaccurate are they? No idea. How can you decrease the inaccuracy? You can't.The testing equipment is 100% accurate, because they are detailed by a specific fundamental force. The Cosmic Force Paizo, in creating the world, has stated "This spell will tell you the fact of alignment". Illusions and methods around that do not change that. My scale is accurate regardless of the piece of tape I put on the readout. You can interpret your results all you want, but you cannot change the fact. Okay. You're advocating for evil being a label more than a rigorously tested ethical extreme. It doesn't matter what the spell does, only that it has that label. You're basically arguing for ashiels position by pointing out how silly that labeling is.
Yeah, there's a pretty big difference. That said, being intentionally patronizing isn't helping anybody. I'm more concerned with the idea of a solid idea. How do you make something that's metaphysical physical without loosing all sense of the thing in the first place.
No, I get that the game wants objective morality, I'm just noting that morality requires subjectivity to exist at all. Something without thought cannot make judgments. So, basically, how is objective morality not like saying I'm going to go make a square circle?
I'm still confused as to how you end up with objective value judgments. Even the gods are subjective within the cosmology as far as I know. They are individuals. A value judgment is subjective by its very nature, so I think it would help if someone breaks that down for me.
shrunken lava.
+1 Thanks Tacticslion, I do enjoy reading your perspective on the issue.
Its pretty clear that if you play fast and loose with the rule set, then the rule set becomes less relevant as to whether the table is fair and enjoyable. Im not sure that its a ringing endorsement for the viability of the rules though.
Arguing in good faith simply refers to being charitable with your reading of a position you don't hold. If someone is being a jerk, then you don't need to take it because of this.
The thing that really messes me up about the anti balance crowd is that, more often than not, they play in the E8 threshold of the game. When people talk about adding features to martial characters, they tend to be talking about the 10-20 level bracket. It's actually possible for both parties to get what they want, but we still fight like cats and dogs about if it's even an issue with levels one party doesn't even like. That's weird.
Is that really contentious here? it's part of the "social agreement" that's implied when gaming, is it not? I don't think it's contentious at all. I do think that there are some non zero value of gamers who consider the rules to be as important as the theater element. These people might value consistent application of rules in addition to a system that is internally consistent. These people might find highly variable character power disturbing because all classes don't exist in every game, causing concerns about whether a given group will have the means to properly overcome challenges despite being above the supposed benchmark for the challenge. Some of those things may have an impact on said non zero value of the player base.
This definitely happens and we could all learn to be nicer about how we word things. That said, it's tough to go very far with anecdotal evidence unless it's from a truly huge group of people for manifold reasons. You just can't verify personal accounts because memory is awful.
Thankfully, a fair number of offenders will quote the text they are misrepresenting, which is helpful.
I dont know how missrepresenting an argument could get at a real motive honestly. I just dont know how that would work objectively. Your just leading a conversation astray if one party or the other too badly distorts the message. At least, if the end is to achieve something through discourse, then it serves both parties to argue in good faith. That is probably the most accurate way to say it. Maybe, I don't know. I would assume that if someone is manipulating the conversation with arguments from ethos, then the best possible light would be to take it that way because there really isn't a lot of ways to do otherwise. Edit for clarity: I think that an argument that rests on nothing substantial like reasonable premises, even when taken the best way, can be discarded. So, from my perspective, there is no issue with using good faith because good faith won't fix a non argument.
I dont know how missrepresenting an argument could get at a real motive honestly. I just dont know how that would work objectively. Your just leading a conversation astray if one party or the other too badly distorts the message. At least, if the end is to achieve something through discourse, then it serves both parties to argue in good faith. That is probably the most accurate way to say it.
@Kobold - lol
The sad thing is that most people don't realize that, if you argue in bad faith, your not actually arguing at all and essentially handing the argument to the opponent.
You can work anything out through discourse, but if you need large quantities of the rare metal handwavium, then why have rules at all?
Quite the opposite, i got there quite logically, He said non-spell DPR i took that to mean the wizard is casting no spells at all to increase or deal damage. i stated what i thought he meant clearly and voiced my thoughts on the matter, when presented with an alternative to what he said i then also voiced my thoughts on that matter. When you argue in good faith, you interpret arguments in the best possible light. You already know that a wizard can't fight in melee without using spells. If you are arguing in good faith, then you discard that interpretation and move to the actual argument being made. Just trying to keep the rhetoric on track.
The first paragraph of your last post is preposterous on its face. Literally no one on these forums would come to that conclusion because to get there, you have to know nothing about the games mechanics. You can't missenterpret on that scale by accident. Therefore, your arguing in bad faith.
Arguing from bad faith.
Huh, not sure how the rules of rhetorical debate have anything to do with gamer talk specifically, but I guess it is what it is.It's a more appropriate forum than the Pathfinder RPG General Discussion forum, which should be kept more to the game itself, rather than commentary on how to hold a discussion. I see, that makes sense. I've been coming here for a while and I never made the connection between the general discussion forum and the pathfinder game. Thanks for the information.
For those that are unaware, arguing in good faith is the first requirement of rhetorical debate. To argue in good faith mandates that you have to do everything in your power to ensure that you represent your opponent's position in the best possible light. The reason why this is the first rule is really simple; if you don't follow this rule, you aren't actually having a debate, your just writing at each other. It's the rhetorical equivalent of flinging poop. Just thought I'd send out this PSA into the aether... Enjoy. |
