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Usurpator wrote:

Oh, thanks for the fast responses people, I'm truly amazed!

Can anybody point me to the reasons why Magical Knack was disallowed (I'm sure there are many good ones to do so)?

link

Hmmmm... Josh said:

"As for magical knack, I feel it skews the balance between classes too much for Pathfinder Society"

Well, that sounds like saying something is unbalanced because it is unbalanced.

Since it only applies in multi-class caster situations is it fair to say this was meant as: "it empowers multi-class caster combinations too much in comparison to their single-class brethren?"

I was under the impression that (many) caster/non-caster combinations are actually sub-optimal because while non-caster class abilities (saves, bab etc.) stack transparently and caster levels do not.

Are caster/non-caster multi-class combinations in Pathfinder considered on par with single-class caster or multi-class non-caster combinations? Do you see a lot of caster/non-caster multi-class combinations in Pathfinder in comparison to single-class or non-caster multi-class combinations.

My experience is limited to just lower level players, so I've seen only single-class characters until now.

Oh, thanks for the fast responses people, I'm truly amazed!

Can anybody point me to the reasons why Magical Knack was disallowed (I'm sure there are many good ones to do so)?

Only Josh can make a ruling with any weight behind it, but if you were playing at my table I would ask you to choose a new trait to replace Magical Knack.

I talked to Josh in person just yesterday evening after a Pathfinder game. This morning a friend of mine informed me of the ban on Magical Knack, so unfortunately just a little bit too late.

As for suggestions, I would say to go Dragon Disciple to bolster your weakened BAB (with STR bonuses) and rely on your spellcasting only for buffing. You can shore up your weak ability scores with items, but hopefully you have high STR already if you don't have much CHA.

No, I don't have a particularly high strength, just decent Str (14). Charisma is my highest ability at 16. Unfortunately for Dragon Disciple a terribly dislike its RP flavor, its not what I want to RP the character as at all.

Recently a friend informed me that the trait Magical Knack (adds a caster level for each level in a non-casting class up to +2) is not legal for Pathfinder Society play. Since I have a Paladin2/Sorcerer1 with that very trait, I found out I was playing an illegal character.

Some Background
I love to create and make viable odd combinations. Paladin/Sorcerer has some synergy, but is generally not a good choice because of the Paladin's MAD, the fact that Charisma is kind of a dump stat, Sorcerer spell level progression is already slow, multi-classing caster and non-caster classes is poorly handled by the rules and armor-reliant classes don't go well with classes with abilities are hampered by armor. My character would be a mediocre tank and damage dealer and relatively poor spellcaster until character level 8 or so. My combination Paladin/Sorcerer was tremendously aided by the trait Magical Knack, which boosted its viability by a lot. However, this turned out to be not legal.

My Choices
1. Swap the Magical Knack trait for another
2. Remake the character minimally
3. Remake the character completely
4. Ignore the fact that Magical Knack is not legal.
5. Campaign for legalization of Magical Knack
6. Dump the character entirely and create a new one

1. Just select another trait for Magical Knack and keep playing a fairly suboptimal character. Slightly illegal, since changing a character trait after creation is not allowed by the Pathfinder rules.

2. Change the trait, continue as single-class Paladin and consider the single Sorcerer level and associated feats largely wasted. Again, slightly illegal, since I am not allowed to change the trait, but I'm caught between two illegal options, since I'm not allowed to keep it too. Not my favorite option obviously.

3. Just forget about the whole multi-class Sorcerer thing, go for a single class Paladin and just retro-actively change abilities, feats, skills etc. to create a decent single-class Paladin. Illegal and this cheating according to the rules, but since there is no history of my character available, no one would ever know. My secondmost preferred option.

4. Continue playing as if nothing is wrong. Most DM's will never check legality of a character anyway, nor do many know what traits are exactly legal and what are not. Yeah, I know, its cheating, and I don't like this option at all.

5. Get Magical Knack legal for play. Obviously my favored option, since it both solves all my problems. In fact, I'm perfectly happy with the rules making Magical Knack legal only for Sorcerers, Paladins and/or the particular combination, because I suspect the trait was not made illegal for play with this particular combination in mind.

6. Certainly a possible option. Just incovenient in the sense that a lot of players where I used to play with on and off all have their characters progressed into the level 3 range by now, and I'm not to keen of going out with a new level 1 character together with a group of lvl3's

Question
What do you think I should do? What do you think the odds are of getting Magical Knack re-evaluated (even if only for specific combinations) as a legal trait?

I would certainly allow it to be used by players. I would oppose it if was used by DMs (as your example did for the Goblin)

As a DM there is no neutral referee to rule if the circumstance bonus is appropriate. You are basically turning it into a +2 bonus on something whenever I like to and counterable by the players whenever I allow it.

That sounds like fudging to me. If you want to fudge as a DM, you can do so anyway, you don't need this rule. The danger is that a DM will be using this rule to justify his fudging from a rules-legal perspective, which is, in my opinion, poor DM-ing.

Scenario's could include circumstance bonuses for NPCs just fine. A DM using a scenario should avoid introducing their own circumstance bonuses.

A couple of weeks ago I started playing in the Pathfinder Society Organized Play format. On one hand I've been pleasantly suprised by the difficulty of the scenario's, but I've also had some problems with them.

There is a clearly noticeable difference in power between:

A. Optimized characters and pregenerated (or non-optimized) characters
B. 1st level and 2nd level characters
C. A party of 4 characters and a party of 6 characters

Are scenario's for Tier 1-2 the same difficulty regardless of the composition of the group that plays the scenario?

Two of the three Tier 1-2 scenario's I've played in are (in my opinion) impossible to complete succesfully with using only four of the 1st lvl pregens while being fairly easy to complete by a party of six optimized 2nd lvl characters.

What are the experiences of other people at these tiers of play with different party sizes and different levels of optimization.