Udinaas's page

Udinaas wrote:

If this does indeed turn into an issue how unbalancing do you think it would be if I gave him access to an amulet of mighty fists that instead affects his blast?

3pp has done similar, it's not horrible but honestly it's unlikely the player needs this unless you see a real problem with his playstyle and build. Check out N.Jollys guide to the kineticist, it'll help you and your player a lot.

He is using that to build his kineticist. I looked at it and bounced off it pretty hard, along with the actual class page. It seems really opaque and I had a hard time getting even a broad idea of what it would do and how it fits in the game. So I came here to ask about it. We have a pretty unoptimized group, and I was concerned with this class throwing our group balance out of whack. I'm still not sure how it will work out, but I guess we will just have to see and go from there.

Unless I've missed something AC is a big problem for kineticists. 3/4 BAB, no way to enchant the weapon, secondary focus on the attack stat (or losing Con to pump Str/Dex). Elemental Overflow helps but it's a patch, not a solution. At level 8 they're looking at +6 (BAB) +2 (EO) +stat (+1 EO) versus an AC of 21 (CR 8) or 24 (CR 10). Even if they start with a 20 and dump everything into it they're still rolling d20+15, a 25/40% miss chance (subtract 5-10% for a belt). More realistically we're looking at a 16 and no extra investment for d20+12 and a 40/55% miss chance. And with only one attack a round those miss chances hurt. That's not a 40% chance you miss, it's a 40% chance you waste your turn.

If this does indeed turn into an issue how unbalancing do you think it would be if I gave him access to an amulet of mighty fists that instead affects his blast?

I want to thank everyone for there responses. It actually sounds like a pretty cool class, just hard to get a sense of what it does from reading the class. And thanks for the kinetic knight tip, I think he will like that, since he complained about not being able to get whip until level nine, and not caring about ranged attacks

One of my players had a character death and is going to build a kineticist. It's a new class for all of us and he is researching how to build one. I've never seen anyone play one, and reading the class itself and looking through the guide I don't think I have a very good picture of what is going on.
He wants to be a melee tanky character with utility, and I think he wants to do earth and aether but that's not set in stone right now.
So, at level 8, what can I expect from this character in a big picture sense? Or is there too much variation between the elements to say?
I'm guessing they do less damage than a barbarian or archer or the like, but I don't even really know how to estimate what to expect.

Udinaas wrote:

I feel like monks should be super reactive, but not only do they not have anything inherent in their class that boosts initiative, but other classes, such as the inquisitor, who don't strike me as thematically fast, do.

The thing is that most heroes aren't seen as "thematically" slow. Rogues are seen as slipping in and out of combat, swashbucklers cutting ropes and swinging on chandeliers, arcane masters quickly reaction to magic, investigators seeing moves ahead of others, oracles literally seeing into the future, ect... You can make a justification for just about EVERY class to be "thematically fast".

That's true, although paizo has given some of them built in initiative bonuses and not others, so they must feel like some classes thematically are quicker to react than others. I guess they just have a different opinion than I do of the ones that merit them.

Jurassic Pratt wrote:

Good Reflex Save, High Jump, Evasion, Improved Evasion, Dodge, Combat Reflexes, and Mobility as Bonus feats, Feather Balance.

I think the core image he is working with is the kind of scene where the bandit reaches for his sword, but he is ALREADY DEAD ("NANI!?") before he can even draw the sword. Either the martial artist drew their own sword faster and cut the bandit's head off, or he punched the bandit's throat in.

Another example would be the martial artist that caught the surprise attack arrow that was shot at him (while the deflect arrow line of feats can be questionable in terms of optimization, they present a good example of Udinass' problem- they do not work if you are flatfooted).

These are fairly common tropes for martial arts movies.

Yes, that's it. I will concede that I am placing too much emphasis on initiative in my judgement of clumsiness, but just because it seems like such a huge part of what my own image is. But Jurassic Pratts bonus feats and abilities are some excellent arguments against my accusation of sluggishness. I guess I just feel like the monk should have a mechanic like the aforementioned sohei, or the kensai magus, or even the inquisitors. I feel like monks should be super reactive, but not only do they not have anything inherent in their class that boosts initiative, but other classes, such as the inquisitor, who don't strike me as thematically fast, do.

That's true, your reflex save probably won't be higher than say an alchemists, which is a book learning scientist class, but evasion and improved evasion help you thematically seem more agile.

Well, it pushes you away from investing in dex in general, and does nothing to compensate for that by boosting the things that rely on dex.

Edit. Dex: Well it's relative. 12 is not clumsy for a commoner certainly, but for a martial artist I would say that it is not what I would have imagined. Like I said, maybe my image of the monk is what is out of whack.

Yes Jurassic Pratt. I'm not saying it invalidates it, I'm not even complaining about the class. It just think it is interesting that the design of the class pushes you in the direction of making a clumsy monk.

Yes, thanks for putting it into better words than i could Ismeres. Although I would argue that it goes even beyond their being MAD. Other than the fact that it takes more and more resources to push a single stat higher and higher, there is not much of a reason to put a point in dex over wisdom. Wisdom gives you a better type of a.c., it gives you more ki points, and and it boosts your will save, which is always important, especially with it not being a good save. The only real benefit to choosing dex is better acrobatics and better initiative, which leads to my sluggish monks.

And yes you could build a very agile monk, as you could build a very agile sorcerer or barbarian, I guess I just think it's weird that the design of the class seems to contradict building an agile monk. Like a barbarian that gets more out of charisma than strength.

Most wizards have at least a 12 in dex and imp initiative, and wizards are not themed around their physical prowess. +5 on a pc is not particularly high. If anything, getting 80% of your initiative from a non class related source that anyone can take (and most do, it's probably one of the top five most taken feats in the game I would imagine) shows that they are indeed inherently clumsy, in that they have nothing built into their design that makes them more agile than average, and they have a lower incentive to invest in dex unless they go for dex to damage.

True they do strike quickly, and run quickly. That is true.

But anyone can take improved initiative. My image of the monk is someone who should have magnificently fast reactions, but the mechanics of the class itself don't lead to that. I mean, inquisitors get wisdom to initiative, and my image of the inquisitor is not that they are supremely quick to react, unless they were given the ability to surprise because of the Monty python joke.

Maybe it's my preconceptions that are wrong.

I've played with two different unchained monks so far, and I have been surprised by how clumsy they are. Granted, they were both built the same, so maybe there are agile monks out there and I just haven't seen them yet. It looks like, as they are designed, you generally want strength and wisdom mostly since strength helps your attacks and wisdom helps your ac more than dex does, unless you are planning on going $$$ for an agile Aomf. So the monks in my groups have both had low dex. They both had the lowest initiatives in the group, with the one exception of a dwarf cleric in heavy armor. That seems odd to me, because i think of a monk as a nimble guy or gal with lightning reflexes, walking around in no armor, ready to leap into action at a moment's notice. Maybe they are so monkish and wise that they are constantly lost in pondering and easily suprised.

Tldr: I think umonks should have a bonus to initiative to offset their emphasis on wisdom over dex.

Thank you for your time.

The inquisitor is my favorite class. I'm making my third one for a new campaign, starting at Fourth level. I looked at the war priest as well. What are the advantages to making a war priest? Mainly heavy armor and the ability to buff yourself as a swift action?

Do they just look bad on paper? Anyone seen them in action and have an opinion?

I disliked it because it was an option that only benefited martial characters, and only detracted from martial melee characters. It was of no use to your typical Wizard, Sorcerer, With, etc. But Slumber and such things that are caster-only got largely left alone.

Yeah I hear ya. Which is another reason I think haste should be left alone. I see some people in this thread saying that paizo would never nerf haste because they supposedly love casters, but ultimately, nerfing haste is a nerf to martials. A primary caster gets a very small fraction of the benefit of haste. In fact, unless you are a bard or a magus you probably have a long list of spells you would prefer to cast instead of haste. Sure, it's a powerful spell, but A. It only affects combat, unlike some of the other extremely powerful spells that allow people to skip entire sections of the plot, and B. It actually helps the very people that everyone says need more help.

I do agree that it's kind of lame that martials are so dependent on an arcane spell, but nerfing haste doesn't help. Maybe if, like Zhayne suggested, martials got something in exchange that made haste unnecessary then haste could be retired, but until I think nerfing it is the wrong idea.

Edit: Also, what Marthkus said so much more succinctly.

When I saw the Crane Wing errata it made me kind of sad. Not because of the changes to crane wing, I've never played with anyone who uses it, but because I knew there would be people asking "what should we 'crane wing' next?" I think it set a bad precedent.

So the consensus here is that whether or not fudging is cheating is up to the players to decide?

For me, the takeaway is that players and GMs should discuss how they feel about the subject, just like they talk openly about all other aspects of the game. Some GMs might think that they know what is best and don't need to respect the wishes of their players, but I think most aren't like that.

Or basically everything Billygoat said, minus the snacks part.

We try to stay within a certain level of effectiveness. We had a bunch of unoptimized characters, and a new player joined with an archer paladin, doing more damage than the four of the rest of us put together. Nobody ever said anything, but it was probably pretty obvious how we felt about it, because after the second session he came back with a character more in line with what everyone else had. We've been able to keep it pretty even since then, without anyone making a rule.

Keep Calm and Carrion wrote:

Pathfinder games where the GM is fudging feel pretty bland to me. Why put out your best efforts if the GM is just going to preserve your enemies until he’s satisfied the encounter has gone on long enough? How is it brave to enter combat when you know the GM will blunt any really bad luck you have?

The point is that players shouldn't know that you're fudging.

For some players that would be correct.

Bill Dunn, I think yours scrying witch example is a good one. If I was running that, I don't know what I would do. That's a tough one. I usually don't have to deal with this much because I run the more intrigue and espionage portions of our game and usually don't have to deal with things like rogues vs undead dinosaurs, but that's a situation I'll probably find myself in someday.

Yeah, I think there are lots of ways to let characters get away after failing, although it's pretty hard to improvise something like that when everything is falling apart.

Certainly nothing wrong with that. But then, the magus did set himself up for it by blindly running off the edge of the tower.

Yeah, and I think that's kind of a key difference in play styles. We very often do crazy things if we think our characters would do them, and we are fully prepared to pay the price.

Another example is that we attacked an NPC at a point several levels before we were supposed to finally confront him. Our DM stopped and flat out told us that we weren't supposed to attack him yet and didn't stand a chance. We decided that our characters would have attacked him so we attacked him. The DM didn't want to cause a TPK, so he had the bad guy throw some lower level spells at us and had the town guard come down the road, causing the bad guy to take off. He pulled his punches, and he made it obvious.

So I think that, with your example, with our group of regular players, we would have preferred the rogue getting snacked on while everyone else gets to run away. All the more reason to get revenge against the beast.

But I understand that wouldn't be right for everyone, and that it makes more work for the GM to cycle through characters. I wouldn't be against playing a game where the GM did what you did. Like I've said (despite my regretfully snarky comment about Hama in my last post) I just believe that the GM should do it in a way that let's players know it's happening. That's my issue. If I know a GM is going to fudge, then I will play a class that doesn't rely on spells and abilities that depend on the whim of the GM to be effective, and I would hope that he would make it obvious when he fudged to help a player. Otherwise, how would you know if you actually won a fight or if you just got a gold star for showing up?

And again, other people might prefer never knowing that the GM saved their life. It's just a preference.

Sure, and if the players found out that there was no danger of dying it would have taken away everything that made that unlikely event fun for us. So I guess, if you are like most regular GMs according to Hama, never let people in on how little effect the dice actually have on important events.

In our case, he let the magus roll his fall damage, and it was a great tense moment when his life was hanging on a single roll of the dice. It was fun, cause we like that kind of thing.

Do you play AP's or home brew games? It seems like AP's would be much harder to run without fudging.

I'm trying to think of a good example, but I'm having a hard time. The best I can come up with is this:

We were fighting an Orc cleric and some of his minions in the ruins of a tower. The Cleric managed to blind our magus. A couple of turns later the cleric, with his minions falling around him, retreated the only way he could: up the stairs and out of the tower. The magus, full of rage at being blinded, followed while the rest of us were still engaged with the minions. He got to the top of the tower and listened to try to figure out where the cleric was. The DM made him roll perception, and he failed. He went tearing off towards where he believed the cleric was, and ran right off the top of the tower. The fall brought him to negative hit points and he was bleeding out. We ran outside to save him, and the cleric got away.

This magus is proud of his intellect, and likes to boast that he is smart enough to be a great wizard. Now, whenever he does that the party is quick to remind him of the time he ran off the edge of a tower.

Now, he survived because he got very lucky when he rolled falling damage. But he was already wounded and the fall was very likely to kill him. The DM had a choice. Knowing that the fall would likely be deadly, he could have fudged the perception roll to try to save the magus. (We have the DM roll our perceptions to help avoid metagaming.) Nobody would have been the wiser, and things would have turned out very differently.

Which makes for a more memorable story? That one time the 'genius' magus pulled a Wiley coyote and allowed the cleric to escape, or that one time the magus attacked the cleric and had a 50% miss chance?

Because the GM was willing to let the magus die because of a bad roll, the narrative actually turned out better.

I know that's not a perfect example, I think most DM's would not fudge in that case, but it's an example where fudging to protect a character would have led to a less memorable outcome. And that won't always be the case. But like I said we enjoy an unpredictable game where crazy things can happen.

TLDR:
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, ignoring all the issues of trust and character invalidation and stuff that we've talked about, in my opinion fudging just makes for a less interesting, more predictable, game. But we like it dangerous and random, so YMMV.

Side A: Let's stop trying to ignore the fact The rulebook suggests to GMs to fudge rolls. It doesn't say "warn your players if you're doing this." The fact it's printed there on the page implies that unless anyone says otherwise, the GM is going to assume they're free to fudge rolls. Your own dislike of that particular guideline doesn't suddenly make it something that needs announcing first, the onus is on the individual to bring up the suggestion of removing that option if you want it removed from the game.

Side B: Get it into your heads that not everyone wants to play that way, and that "change anything you don't like in this rulebook in order to have fun" also applies to that particular guideline.

(There, now both sides can direct their hate at me :P)

I deleted a post I made. I think we are arguing over matters of personal preference, so it's kind of pointless to keep it up. I agree with this post. When I DM I don't fudge. I don't believe that the guy who trades off DMing with me fudges either, although I could be wrong. I hope he doesn't.

I think that the most memorable moments I've played are when unlikely or crazy things have happened due to funky dice. If I wanted a scripted narrative I would read a book. For me the fun of gaming is that it is unpredictable, and the bad guy could anticlimactically fail, or a lone hobgoblin could, against all odds, wipe out half of the heroes. That's the kind of thing that separates a game based on the roll of dice from a movie based on the monomyth and a formulaic "Save the Cat" beat sheet.

In general I dont believe in dm fudging. Particulary not on saves. If you have a problem with save or suck spells taking down important enemies, deal with that option at character creation. Its fine to say to a player, hey the slumber hex can make encounters really anticlimactic, and mess with the work that I do. Could you maybe go a different direction with your character? I've done that before. And not just for casters, there are other things that can be an issue. If they are address them by allowing the player to change what is causing an issue.

Yeah I feel like this is my main issue. If you are going to fudge then let people know before hand. Some classes especially the witch, are built around spells and abilities that can easily make for some anticlimactic battles. If my DM sat me down and said "it looks like you have learned suffocate. I just want to warn you that I will only allow that spell to work when I feel like it fits my concept of a good narrative, so you might want to consider something else." I'd say "good to know, I've got a buff cleric concept I'd be up for playing instead." But if the DM did that in secret, well then he's making me waste my time and resources, all the while fooling me into thinking I'm actually able to affect game events.

Marthkus wrote:

magnuskn wrote:

Yeah, I fudge rolls as a GM all the time. I have an obligation as a GM to the entire group to present a cinematic story and if your twinked out min-max horror has unbeatable save DC's and destroys any climactic encounter with that, I will do my best to preserve a sense of danger and adventure for the sake of the campaign.

I think it's better to just ban things, not stealth house-rule nerf a player's choices.

Overall, I would call what you do a dick move.

Your free to think whatever you want. My players are happy enough with the way they are destroying opponents. Their characters (which are a personality, not a collection of stats) have not been invalidated as far as I see it by me giving them a more cinematic experience than "Wizard casts Phantasmal Killer, opponent keels over dead in the first round, martials stand around picking their noses".

I think that might be part of why there is so much disagreement over fudging. I don't play with anybody who would build a min/maxed munchkin with unstoppable DCs. We don't come across a situation like you just described, at least not but once in a blue moon. We work together to make a balanced group and don't try to steamroll everything. If I played with people who played as you describe I would probably have a different opinion on the subject.

Udinaas wrote:

I would be pretty unhappy to discover a DM was fudging rolls. I would rather have a TPK than find out we only survived because the DM decided we should. After that, every victory would feel hollow.

But if a DM is going to fudge rolls, I definitely think they should be up front about it. If my high level SoS spell just isn't going to work because the DM doesn't feel like it fits the plot, then I'll know not to bother casting it and wasting that precious resource. I can just hand the DM my witch's spell list and tell him that whenever he's ready to allow my character to affect the narrative, go ahead and use one of those spells. I'll just be in the other room watching tv or something.

There is a certain pragmatism to letting characters live. I don't have to create a new and interesting way for the new character to fit into the backstory of my Metaplot. I don't have to remove the important/unresolved elements of the previous characters story hooks from my Metaplot. I don't have to learn and evaluate the power curve of the new character to ensure challenging encounters. God help me if I wipe the party.

That's not to say that characters don't die at my table or that the players don't have a healthy fear of death, but I will generally pull a punch or two before I obliterate a character.

I understand that, and I don't want to sound like I'm against a DM occasionally pulling a party's bacon out of the fire when things are headed south. Just that it should be obvious. Have some help arrive or something. Let the players know they would have lost, and maybe give them some kind of setback to overcome. I just feel like if I can't know for sure if we really won or if the DM went easy on us, victory against tough odds will never be satisfying again. That's how I feel as a player anyway.

I would be pretty unhappy to discover a DM was fudging rolls. I would rather have a TPK than find out we only survived because the DM decided we should. After that, every victory would feel uncertain and hollow.

But if a DM is going to fudge rolls, I definitely think they should be up front about it. If my high level SoS spell just isn't going to work because the DM doesn't feel like it fits the plot, then I'll know not to bother casting it and wasting that precious resource. I can just hand the DM my witch's spell list and tell him that whenever he's ready to allow my character to affect the narrative, go ahead and use one of those spells. I'll just be in the other room watching tv or something.

I like your guide! I do want to warn that admixture wizard in your guide to change to electricity instead of frost though, as devils have frost resistance.

If its core only the trapper archetype would be out.

Like awp said, if your GM follows the wealth guidelines you should have 33k gold to spend. Not all GM's follow that exactly though.

On top of the things awp mentioned I think a Ring of Sustenance is a good thing for at least one person in the party to have for keeping watch at night. It's pretty cheap, so you could enchant it on top of another ring for a little more.

I was kind of joking before, but honestly I think Druids have a huge potential for obnoxiousness. If people took their restrictions as seriously as they take the paladin's.

I agree with tonyz about grease or sleep over saving finale. I like grease. Also, I misread Musetouched as Mustachioed, which made me do a double take..

A druid that constantly asks the barbarian if he knows how many iron elementals had to die to make that greatsword.

Summoned monsters can not teleport.

We are losing two of our players until midsummer. That leaves us with a rogue and a hedge witch. The hedge witch player hates dealing with summoning and her only damage so far is from vomit swarm. Any idea of what kind of adventure I can throw at these guys that will be a decent challenge for a rogue who will almost never be able to flank and a witch who likes to heal? I've got plenty of story ideas but I don't know how to give them some good fights. Should I just run a character, a fighter maybe? I've suggested they make new characters for the interlude, but they like the ones they have.

I think it would be nice if evokers got the full +1 per die to all targets from their school power, instead of the half level on one target. Would that really be so crazy?

Of course the ultimate single-class party for survivability, versatility, damage, healing and outright crazy battlefield control is a party of druids...

But a party of wizards can be more survivable than most players realize. At low levels it's going to be a challenge, but at low levels your wizards will be more capable with melee and ranged attacks than they will be at higher levels, you'll just have to accept some risk in having wizards in combat.

Wizards can take feats and wear armor. They just suffer penalties for doing so. But at low levels you won't be casting that many spells anyway.

I'd love to play in an all-wizard party. I have no doubt that by level 5 we'd be knocking down doors and kicking ass all over the place.

By level 9 you'd have to rewrite most encounters just to challenge us.

I'm joining a game where we will be three Druids and one Summoner. It sort of worked out that way, two people wanted to play druids and one wanted to play a wizard. when the fourth player saw we were going to have two druids he thought it would be fun to play an all druid group, but the wizard player only met us halfway and changed to summoner. We're going to try RotRL.

I think it's important to remember that there are a lot of different players who like a lot of different games. If your campaign is for general use, and not for your specific players, don't try to be all things to all people. You will most likely end up with a big mess. Look at paizo- they mix it up. Shattered Star is a good example. It's a lot of dungeon crawling. A lot of people don't like dungeon crawling. A lot of people love dungeon crawls. So Shattered Star catches some flack from people who don't like dungeon crawls, but the campaign isn't written for them. There are other campaigns for them. Paizo intentionally tries to write a variety of different campaigns to appeal to different play styles. So pick a play style you want for your campaign and stick with it. Don't try to make a campaign that has it all.
From Bill Cosby: "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

Some other people have mentioned this: don't be too afraid of railroading. Rails are just another tool in your campaign-writing toolkit. If you use them sparingly, and if they aren't too obvious (actually I think a good rule of thumb for rails is: rails are only a problem if your players can see them. As long as players FEEL like they are in control everything is fine) then they can be a good thing. Having a campaign where players are grasping at straws and without any sense of direction is bad, and a judicious use of a trolley here and there to get them where they need to go is fine.

With all that said, as to your question of what makes a truly bad adventure, I think one theme that is really showing itself throughout this thread is that your players need to feel a sense of agency. They need to feel like they are responsible for and in control of their characters choices, feelings and destinies. Any time you take that away, either by having NPCs win their battles, or by making their characters decisions for them, or by telling them how their character feels about something, as examples that others have mentioned, you are damaging the bond between the player and their character. In rare cases you can get away with this (for example the occasional curse or dominate used on a character, or the occasional (hopefully invisible) railroad) but do it too often and you have a bad campaign on your hands.

In addition to what son of the veterinarian said, don't assume players won't connect two things that actually are unrelated. I was running a group who came to a small village to figure some stuff out. In order to add some flavor and detail to the town I mentioned the hanging tree at the edge of town. I used one too many of the kind of words that make players assume the GM is trying to drop hints, like "forlorn" and "haunted." So for the rest of the time in the village every time the players hit a wall they would go back to the tree and look around. Or they would be interviewing someone and they say "don't forget to ask him about the tree," "oh yeah, I ask him about the tree." I let it keep going because it was really funny for me, but in retrospect it was probably really frustrating for the players who believed they were following general campaign plot conventions.

So I guess what I'm saying is find the perfect balance between running the campaign on rails and crafting a fully-realized, intricately-defined sandbox world.

blackbloodtroll wrote:

Is this Golarion(default Pathfinder campaign setting)?

Is this some sort of custom campaign setting?

This is a custom setting. Though feel free to use the idea in your campaigns!! I wanted to have a different flavor of adventure that was truly different.

It isn't a reservation - just a retirement community :-)

I do like the idea of the desire to "feel young again".

I don't know what the ogres and trolls in your setting would have done in their youth, but maybe stage a fake battle for them to be part of, or a fake raid on a village. Or you could take the oldsters on a field trip. Have you seen The Dream Team with Michael Keaton? Inmates of a mental institution go on a field trip and get separated from their doctor. I don't know if it would be the right tone for your campaign, but trying to herd some senile ogres and trolls through an eventful day in the big city could be an interesting challenge.

It sounds like ogres and trolls live in a kind of controlled, reservation setting? If so, maybe the witch would need to get them something they are restricted from having on their reservation. Procure and smuggle in contraband, maybe something society thinks (maybe rightly so) is too dangerous for ogres and trolls to have access to. The witch could later have to deal with the legal backlash if it is discovered that she was responsible for any negative outcome.

Or maybe they want what a lot of retired people of any type wants: a chance to feel young again. To recapture some of the joy and glory of their youth.

I know a witch who uses flight to stay away from melee and fog cutting lenses and fog effects to get cover from ranged attacks. It works pretty well except obviously against flying melee.

Yeah I think it's pretty clear you cannot use fast bombs with explosive missile. So that alone cuts your alchemst's damage in half, or at least forces him to get closer and drop the extra weapon damage and just fast chuck the things.

I don't mean to sound like I'm against fun or anything. It is a really cool idea. It's just that the witch is already more powerful than any of the other characters and I'm already having trouble trying to make fights that challenge everyone.

In my opinion, double damage from area effects kinda balances the immunities.

Of course, to me, a swarm of intelligent roaches is still creepy.

I was thinking that would balance it, but with improved evasion that wouldn't really be a weakness. I decided against it. It is really cool, but I thought it would unbalance touch spells too much. The roaches couldn't be hurt by weapons, couldn't be grabbed, automatically succeed on attacks in their square, etc. Nine out of ten enemies would be completely defenseless against touch attack spells and that would be a huge buff to the witch.

I'm new to GMing and the people I'm playing with are new to playing. So I'm hesitant to make changes to the rules since I don't feel comfortable with my ability to see the repercussions. With that said one of my players would like to do something that does not seem unreasonable to me, but I thought I would put it up here and see what you folks think. Our witch is planning on getting improved familiar and would like to take a swarm of roaches. That's about the same CR as other improved familiars, and in some ways would be a much weaker choice. What do you guys think?

Yeah it sounds like making a summoner would do your group a lot of good. It can actually melee, and all the casters can baby it with their buff spells. It could be your school mascot.