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I'm currently working on a Savage Worlds campaign that has "paladins", but not "alignment". My approach to this is to have "paladins" declare an allegiance, which they then support. I don't intend to implement the Paladin class in Savage Worlds, so I won't be converting over all their abilities. But a Paladin with an allegiance to, say, the Kingdom, might be able to smite enemies of the kingdom, but this ability doesn't work against those who are neither working to help nor hinder it.
When Norse mythology is complete, I'm planning on doing a Native American version.I would love to see what you have for that. Its kind of hard to make a pantheon for Native American beliefs. We really didn't have gods per say, except for the Great Creator i guess. We payed homage to the spirits that doweled within the animals, plants, sun, moon, elements, etc, etc. There were a few Named spirits...like Iktomi- the spider spirit of knowledge, pranks, and art (I guess you could say art, he was the leading factor of the dream catcher). I think you'd have to break the native American "mythos" up by cultural areas. There might be maybe half a dozen areas covering North America, with some overlap between areas. I've noticed that many native American tribes don't seem to have a pantheon. While I'm not a Mormon, myself, for one project I was assuming that the Book of Mormon explained this by Judeo-Christian contact with America, and thus many of the American tribes were worshiping the same god as the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but in different ways. Then I went on to tie in the Greek and Japanese and Norse mythos. I did recently listen to the _The Teachings of Don Juan_ audiobook, and have decided that the Yaqui Indians have some very interesting ideas I plan to incorporate into my next RPG project. And, of course, the Mesoamericans have a well-defined pantheon. And some of the spirits I've read about, such as Raven and Coyote, might be considered powerful enough to be gods in at least some senses.
If they can kill people, they can fit into a Norse campaign. In my work work on a 17th Century Pathfinder campaign, I learned that the Swedes had some of the best musketeers, making many significant advancements in military strategy and tactics using guns. Putting Odin in charge again probably would not change that.
Genocide being evil isn't one of our postulates here. The Torag paladin code is. You have therefore performed a successful reductio ad absurdum to prove that genocide is not evil in Pathfinder.That's a pretty fancy word there buddy. Mind to share with the class? I would say that Odin would have some disagreements with this Torag guy. However, my GM'ing says that Odin and all the other gods are not above the existential nature of Good and Evil, which are not matters of opinion, but matters of being existentially aligned with the forces of the Great Wheel Cosmos. Of course, the official Pathfinder setting probably does not use the Great Wheel Cosmos, and so the version of Torag who has paladins killing goblin babies exists in a totally other multiverse. Utgardloki can not say anything about that.
How about the paladin of Torag that has a code of conduct to wipe out the enemy of his people? Genocide is evil. Therefore a paladin can not have that as his code of conduct, any more than a paladin can have "protect the institution of slavery" as his code of conduct.
In the D&D world, of which Pathfinder is the successor, Good and Law are real forces that existed eons before the Earth was even a speck of dust. Who knows whether Good came first, and then the Law, or whether Law came first, and then the Good. It might make sense to ask, in the Evolution of the Human Race, which was discovered first. Did two small bands decide to cooperate because of love for each other, which would be good, or did they cooperate because they encoded into laws the mutual self interest, which would be lawful? Did some ancient lass meet some handsome lad from another tribe, and convince the two tribes to seek the ways of peace? Or did two wise elders meet at some watering hole and one say to the other "You know, instead of fighting each other for this valuable resource, we could share it, and defend it against any tribe who came to try to take it away from us." Maybe this first act of cooperation was even unlawful. In some places, Odin himself came down to teach people the ways to act. In those cases, it was almost certain reverent awe of the divine visitors that lifted mankind up to the next higher level of existence. But is reverent awe good? Or is it lawful? Or is it something else, something unnamed by the scholars who named the planes of existence?
I was thinking that a good character might not need to save a goblin baby from being eaten by a wild animal. However, if the animal is under the control of or called by the PC, that would be evil.
Thinking about this, this is another thing gnomes can do to separate them from the halflings. Perhaps goblin babies who are abandoned can be handed to a gnome organization that returns them to be raised by goblin tribes. That way, the PC's are off the hook for raising the kid, and the goblin doesn't die of starvation. Or you could satisfy the gods by leaving the goblin baby to his fate. Normally I assume and, unless the PCs have made a point of hunting down and killing all the female goblins they can find the PCs can assume that there are goblin females who can take care of the baby and find their way to another tribe. Typically, goblin females will melt away as they sense their tribe is in danger. If PCs want a challenge, they could try raising the goblin to be good. It's not that hard -- they are not demon spawn. One of the human NPCs in my "Audor" campaign has three female goblin servants, and the PCs have even made contact with a "renegade" clan of hobgoblins who are neutral in alignment and worship the same patron deity the humans worship (the earth goddess called "Jorth").
Honestly i think it would depend on the setting. I mean HOW inherently evil are goblins in the setting?Default CE Goblins. Kill, maim, burn. You better believe that the priests of Odin and any other characters concerned about the will of the Aesir are going to stand up for the goblin when necessary. When the laws are not upheld, the entire cosmos will come crashing down in Raganarok. Even the gods are not immune to temptation, and every time those who should know better succumb to the temptation of the easier path, yet another step is taken towards the fall of Asgard.
The way I see the humanoids (goblins, humans, orcs, hobgoblins, et cetera), is that they are competing for finite resources, which led them at an early stage in development to kill each other when they were encountered, so as to secure more resources for themselves. But a better way would be to cooperate and share the finite resources to achieve a better civilization. So cooperation is better than killing. Goblins do not have to be evil, and cooperation will get you higher up on the alignment axis than killing goblin babies.
Odin says that you should not kill that baby goblin. That baby is not a warrior, and should be allowed to find his own destiny. And if his destiny is to be evil and attack a village some day, those villagers will then have their chance to show their bravery and valor. Odin has spoken. As for the GM who calls himself 'Utgardloki' on the Paizo forums, he will knock your alignment toward the evil and chaotic ends of the axis, because you have gone against the express commands of the gods in order to hurt someone who was not threatening you. At the very least, your alignment shall not be impeccably good, unless you atone. But this GM considers the entirety of the works that you do, and takes into account on his alignment chart whether your alignment is impeccable or borderline. Unless you are in danger of losing an alignment that you need for a class that you have, he won't even tell you about it unless you have an appropriate divination spell cast on yourself. Some PCs in Utgardloki's campaign might be surprised if they were to cast know alignment on themselves.
I was going through this black notebook I have, figuring out if there was anything in there worth saving before I threw the thing away. The notebook has notes on two prestige class ideas I had. So, having torn those pages out of the notebook, I have to decide what to do with them? Do I write them up for 3.5 or for Pathfinder? Or not write them up at all. Maybe I should just have idea cards for them so I can flesh them out someday if I need to. So I come here: Would anybody be interested in seeing either of my prestige classes written up for Pathfinder? Twisted Sorcerer This PrC is inspired by the depictions of Seoni, so it makes sense to write it up as a Pathfinder Prestige class. The basic concept is that they can concentrate their magic through extreme gestures, which means moving about the battlefield and makes it impossible to gain the special bonuses while constricted or trying to cast covertly. Besides Seoni, I was also thinking of the Crooked Sorcerer character from The Patchwork Girl Of Oz. The class combines dexterity abilities and spellcasting. They take a slight hit in spellcasting levels (I don't see a way around that), but the spells they cast are more powerful and more likely to get through spell resistance. Dollmaker This PrC is required for my Audor Campaign, but that campaign is currently inactive. The concept is that a culture of gnomes includes an occupation of slave traders who shrink their captives to make it easier to transport them. This kind of makes them sound more evil than they really are. Usually they do not catch slaves. Usually they purchase captives taken during the ubiquitious warring among the various races, and end up delivering the captives to tribes of their own race, where in most cases they are granted their freedom. So really, they are more like ransomers. Of course, with their specialized abilities, there are many things a Dollmaker could do, both honorable and sinister. If anybody is interested in these ideas, let me know, and I can write them up. Otherwise, I'll just file them with my other idea cards.
In a couple sessions my druid has been summoning giant centipedes in taverns. In the first case, there were some ruffians who were stupid enough to think they could pick on the halflings and gnomes while the paladin and half-elf were out somewhere else. When we came back, my druid had to save the ruffian leader's life with a healing spell. Now, it probably wasn't necessary because, even without the paladin to throw them out of the tavern, the halflings and gnomes would have convinced them that was the wisest thing they could do at that time. But, just to make it perfectly clear that they should never bother us again, my druid summoned a giant centipede to escort the ruffians out, and wave to them as they were leaving. Note: giant centipedes are about six feet long. The second time, we're in another tavern, and there is this strange woman who talks to us. We start thinking she is very strange. To help get an idea how strange, my druid summoned a giant centipede to see how she would react. She treated it like an adorable dog, thereby confirming that this was a rather strange woman and not one to be underestimated.
This reminds me of a Silver Surfer novel I read once in which the SS goes to the Negative Dimension, where there is a sort of Anti-Galactus who, instead of draining energy from planets, feeds them with positive energy. The problem is that this overloads the planets ecosystems, which are suddenly fed with too much positive energy to handle, and become choked with life. So the Anti-Galactus is just as bad as Galactus is in our universe.
I guess if you are going to raise a dead person to go into a burning building to save orphans, that is just one of the things you are going to have to put up with. I once played a lawful good necromancer. Her backstory was that as a teenager she was captured by an evil necromancer, and got tainted by his dark magic. (this was in Iron Kingdoms where necromancy was frowned upon in polite company.) She then swore vengeance against necromancers everywhere. After failing to become a Bard, she trained as a Wizard, but never managed to master conjuration or illusion because her magic was tainted.
Ah, yes, I remember Space Ghost, and Web Woman, and those other Saturday Morning cartoons. Good times! I could do a campaign inspired by them. But getting inspiration is easy. I have some ideas for settings which are pretty well determined. Spelljammer is not on my list. But what I need is something for the heroes to do. I did once try taking a post-apocalyptic adventure and convert that, which kind of started to look like "Where in this solar system I just invented is Carmen San Diego?" Villages expand to become entire planets, and then clues have to be invented to steer the PCs to the right place at the right time to receive the next clue. Some adventures that might work include the Witchfire Trilogy by Privateer Press, with different encounters placed on different planets. Instead of going to a temple in a swamp, perhaps they go to a space station cathedral. That sort of thing could work. I figured that people here know the adventure paths better than I do, and might have an idea of which of the Pathfinder adventure paths would be good ones to use.
Thinking again about running a science fiction campaign, what usually stops me is the lack of good adventures for space based campaigns. I don't want to do "You beam down to a planet and basically go through a Dungeons and Dragons adventure." So, the question becomes, is there or are there Adventure Path adventures that might be well suitable for interstellar heroes? I am thinking of doing a science fantasy setting where there are planets with wizards, and magic and science can interact (although magic does not scale well to mass production), so magic is no bar to being considered. I am inspired by Star Wars and by the Legion of Super-Heroes, and wizards are no strangers to the latter, especially.
I've toyed with some ideas of demihumans being evolutionary offshoots of the human race. Most of these thoughts revolved around contemplating an Atlantis campaign, but some of these characters could still be around in 13th Century Europe. I also have other ideas too, some of them part of my 17th Century European setting, some of them part of an idea of considering what the world would look like if Dungeons and Dragons was real, and some of them just drifting around my brain. Dwarves I've liked the idea of dwarves and orcs being descended from neanderthals who have retreated to the subterranean realms. Occasionally you'll find dwarves who have made contact with humans and employed among them, but most of them dwell in their mountainous kingdoms. Orcs tend to live deeper underground and rarely come up where they might see the sun. Elves and goblins are the original inhabitants of Atlantis. (The goblins got there first, but most elves won't tell you that.) After the sinking of Atlantis, most of the elves retreated to other planar realms such as Vanaheim and Avalon. A few of them wander the earth, but are rarely seen in this world. Gnomes are traditionally spirits of the earth, or closely related to them -- perhaps the children of humans and earth spirits. Another option, perhaps combined with the above, is that gnomes are children who never grow up, always keeping their child-like size and temperment. Halflings have sometimes been theorized to have been inspired by short ethnicities, especially in primitive times when there might have been more variability between one tribe and another. So with a little exaggeration, you can have halflings all over the place, in their little villages. Later I'll go through the bestiary with some ideas that I've had for them.
An idea occurred to me of defining 22 alternate worlds, one for each of the Major Arcana tarot cards. The idea came from imagining a topology of two circles each divided into two segments, intersecting at the top of bottom segments, making a total of 12 + 10 = 22. Since I've also decided to assign a tarot card to each class, that gives me a clue as to where to put things. It occurs to me that I might want to be able to a limited number of multiple worlds into one slot. If I allow three worlds per slot, that gives me a total of 66 worlds. So far I have the following associations: I. Hogwarts.
VI. Avalon. XI. Camelot. XV. Muggle.
XVIII. Midgard.
Or, since everybody in Hogwarts has a magic wand, perhaps the magic wands provide a way to amplify their magic power. To prevent misuse of these wands, perhaps they do not work as well in the muggles' world. One thing that is being clear, is that Hogwarts is like being on another plane of existence. This brings to mind other stories which also are like other planes of existence: Oz, Avalon, Hollow World, Atlantis, and possibly others. I'll have to find a way to organize these. Perhaps Oz and Hogwarts can share a plane. You never hear about Camelot at Hogwarts; perhaps they were once in the same plane, but since have separated. Camelot and Avalon could have separated as described in the Mists of Avalon, which also portrays a fairyland which apparently had split off from Avalon long before.
My thought on this question is that members of the Alchemist class are just using their intuition and flashes of inspiration to make their discoveries, and do not have a sound science on which to base their theories. So they know what they know, and perhaps others can also learn their discoveries, but they don't really have a solid body of knowledge like the historical chemists have.
I believe that I am going to end up with a variant of the Potterverse, and not a high fidelity translation. I don't intend to do a Hogwarts campaign, but, watching this movie, I think there are lots of ideas I could use. Goblins and other creatures (perhaps not all of them) could be like in the Potterverse -- more commonly encountered in the Wizard's world than in the Muggles world. One difference in my campaign is that not all spellcasters come from Hogwarts -- there are other options. It probably works to have Hogwarts being a school of wizardry in another plane, which can be accessed from our own plane at different points of access, or by a properly cast spell. PC wizards could choose to be Hogwarts alumni.
I've been thinking about a Pathfinder game set in the 17th Century for some time. Right now I am watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It occurs to me that if fantasy is real in the 17th Century, then Hogwarts could very well exist in this setting. From having read the 1st book, and seeing the first three movies, it appears to me that perhaps Pathfinder is the worst system to try to model Hogwarts. Of course, I'm not trying to run a Hogwarts campaign -- I'm just running a campaign in which Hogwarts and their students and alumni would exist. So I thought I'd come here and fish for ideas for how Hogwarts might fit in Pathfinder - 17th Century.
I've long been a critic of the archetype concept. My main two objections were 1) it adds complexity to the game, and 2) archetypes are too tied to a particular character class and too inflexible. I've come up with an idea for an alternative: customizable options. Basically it is a house rule that allows you to take an archetype ability whenever you would gain the class ability that would replace, whether or not you have the class listed for the archetype. For example, in the Advanced Player's Guide, a Breaker gains destructive in place of fast movement. With my house rule, a character about to gain his third level of Monk could take destructive instead of fast movement if he wanted to be the kind of character who could just break things with his bare hands and feet. I'm not really sure how good this idea is.
Actually, one of the things that I've been thinking about, is that you rarely hear about the female members of a species, except for female elves and halflings and occasionally a gnome. People usually assume that the females are just like the males, only with breasts. But some thinking on what sex roles might be in another species, and perhaps playing around with some concepts could lead to interesting ideas. One idea I've already mentioned is renegade hobgoblins who are ruled by a caste of priestesses. They have a strict division of labor: the males fight and do the hard manual work, while the female rule, cast spells, and tell the males what to do. I still happen to have the non-renegade hobgoblins, where the males fight and do the hard manual work, while the females hunt for their food, and do all sorts of roguish things. Finding ideas is just a matter of asking what if. What if a plague wiped out 90% of the male dwarves? What if all gnomes were male? What would a tribe of halfling amazons be like?
I just got an idea. How about making SR like an instinctive counterspell ability. That's kind of how I was seeing it from the days of 1st Edition: that some creatures just had the ability to disrupt your spells. This would be a lot more powerful, and thus would be worth an extra CR, but would apply to any spell in an area that the creature threatened. Then "SR: No" would not exist because even if you were casting a spell to create a pit underneath the Balor, he could just say "No pit!" and you'd have to get past his spell resistance.
I'm not sure what this "old feeling" is. Then again, I started playing D&D in 1980, when all halflings were relatives of Bilbo Baggins and every one of them was a burglar. Dwarves were forbidden to practice magic. Elves were tall guys with pointy ears. (Actually, in my 1st Edition days, I had a humans-only rule, so nonhumans did not play much of a role.) When I created Audor after 3rd edition came out, I mined the old campaigns for ideas, and considered how the nonhumans might fit in. What did I want the dwarves, elves, halflings, et cetera, to do and to be like? What kind of role would they have in my new campaign?
What KaeYoss said about non-human adventurers sounds politically correct, but a fantasy setting is not necessarily politically correct. Fortunately, I put a lot of thought into the different cultures of my world and what makes them different. For example, the Kosaka have strict laws forbidding sex between humans and hobgoblins. (Of course, you know what THAT means...) The Audorians, on the other hand, are a lot more accepting, although it would be very unusual since they don't have as many opportunities for such contact. And, of course, there are four different cultures of gnomes, one of which is very important for negotiating human/hobgoblin agreements when the need arises. The Kingdom of Audor even has non-discrimination laws. Or course, you know what that means... But, seriously, the Audorans do get along well with dwarves and halflings. Relations with the elves have been strained since the War of Toranian Occupation, which was about 200 years in the past.
Have you tried Iron Kingdoms? In Iron Kingdoms, there are no gnomes or halflings. There is a race of short people called Gobbers, who are like goblins with a talent for making and breaking machinery. There are no orcs or half-orcs, but there is a race called the Ogrun, who are sort of like a half-ogre race would be, except without the crossbreeding. There are two types of elves. Winter Elves come from the far north and (after I made my character I found out that) they will almost never be seen in the southern lands. (Kind of makes my character stick out.) The other type is xenophobic and believes that human wizards are responsible for all their problems. Dwarves are actually kind of normal, compared to other settings.
Another thing you could do, and I've done, is add new races to the mix. In my homebrew of Audor, I've added a race of sapient bipedal beagles and made it available for PCs. One of the PCs was a beagle ranger. One of the NPCs they encountered was a beagle witch. (Although this was 3.5, and I wasn't using a Witch class for her; that was just what she was called.) Also, based on events, I've decided that goblins, kobolds, and hobgoblins could also be "demihuman" races. While oftentimes in conflict, the hobgoblins and humans made an alliance against a common threat. Plus, there are tribes of "renegade" hobgoblins who are governed by hobgoblin priestesses who happen to worship the same goddess that humans do. Relations with kobolds and goblins are also not automatically hostile. Another campaign I've thought about running but never did, called Islar, has 13 PC races with alliances that you might not predict based on conventional D&D worlds. Elves and halflings were the core of an alliance that included hobgoblins. Humans were sort of aligned with lizardmen and bugbears, primarily because they were basically the races that were not aligned with others.
What KaeYoss said about non-human adventurers sounds politically correct, but a fantasy setting is not necessarily politically correct. The impression I got, based on gaming in the 1980s, was that a "demihuman" was someone who was not a human and would be allowed to walk into a town without being attacked on sight. But of course elves have lots of money, so you can charge them extra for everything. And charge the dwarves triple. And everybody knows that halflings are burglars who are going to take everything that is not nailed down, so keep them out of the store. And you heard me right, I called them halflings. If they don't like it, what are they going to do? Cry into my kneecaps? And the half-orc should be happy the town guard even let her into town.
The easiest way to have a humans only campaign is probably to make it a historical campaign.
The dragons think that Oprah is a human goddess. They probably would not worship her, themselves, but they may seek to deal with her in order to influence human behavior, or emulate her methods such as by giving chariots to everybody in a town so as to secure the town's loyalty. If they don't want to deal with humans directly, but still would want to influence human behavior in an indirect way rather than having to use threats and violence, they might establish relations with a wise woman who can advise the town on what they should do, and being nice to the dragon would of course be very high on that list.
The way I figure, the worst case scenario is that everybody plays Inquisitors. As a DM, I believe that you do have the right to disallow a class for whatever reason you want. For my 17th Century campaign, I am decided to limit the number of classes to 20, and the Oracle just does not make the cut. I am also considering, depending on whether or not I like the Samurai, to cut the Summoner class in favor of allowing Samurais. (Or maybe I'll cut the Summoner and allow Oracles, after all.) But for you, I'd suggest allowing Inquisitors and see what happens.
I have a couple other rules from my Audor campaign that might also be interesting: Each starting character gets a number of "Character Points" based on level. I've been giving PCs one Character Point per level. Character Points can be used for various purposes: * One character point can be cashed in for 100 gold pieces worth of cash or equipment (this has to come from a source, of course). * Two character points can be used to buy a bonus feat. * You might pick up a class ability from another class, for a number of character points determined by how many I think that class ability is worth. * One character point can raise one of your stats by one point. So if you have a Fighter with an Int of 12, and you want to take Combat Expertise, you can use a character point to raise your Int to 13.
In planning my 17th Century game, I find some ideas from Mage: the Ascension helpful in figuring out how the Alchemist class works. The setting actually has three types of Alchemists. The first type are Wizards who specialize in Transmutation, and use alchemical preparations for their spells. Their spellbooks are alchemical texts, they prepare spells by mixing materials together while reciting their alchemical mumbo-jumbo, and cast their spells by releasing the energy that has been stored in their preparations. If a modern scientists tried to copy this, without the years of effort to understand and master the mystical forces involved, very little would happen. The second type are those who use the methods of Rene Descartes and other philosophers to carefully note and record what happens when they do experiments. They haven't come up with much, yet, but their work is repeatable, and eventually they will evolve into the modern chemists with scientific texts and industrial processes. The third type are the Alchemist class described in the Advanced Players Guide. Like the second type, they've left behind the mumbo-jumbo of the first type, but unlike the second type, the Alchemists rely on bursts of inspiration and making dramatic things happen, and don't worry too much about things like disciplined methodology and careful notes. From Mage: the Ascension, I got the idea that the first type are allies of the Celestial Chorus, but will eventually evolve into the Technomancy, while the third type will evolve into the Sons of Ether. It is part because of what the alchemists believe that powers what they do, so the alchemical preparations work because they believe that it works.
One thing you could do is playtest a party. My guess is that your characters will have plenty to do. The important thing is to give characters with lots of skills chances to use their skills, e.g. if there is a Ranger, it is good if she gets to track and find food in the wilderness and stuff like that.
If you go with my idea of transporting a whole town to a new world, you might want to go with my idea of sending a town from the 1950s. That way, there is less technology, and the inhabitants of the town won't be conditioned to think of video games and plane travelling movies. Just an idea about an idea.
Paladins are a bigger issue than Inquisitor in that setting... I don't think that sounds like too much of a problem. Other classes have abilities that grant bonuses to hit and do damage. The Cleric can target undead. Being resistant to will/fort saves may be a great way to prevent a total party kill -- it's nice to have someone you can rely on. I'm sure there are ways about Detect Lie, but even so, Paladins and Clerics also have abilities to force people to tell the truth. Unless the Inquisitor is poorly written (and I haven't examined it), it should fit in very well. As for having little treasure and no magic shops, you might want to invent alternatives. Perhaps special, hard-to-get ingredients could substitute for gold pieces for crafting potions and magic items. You could reduce the cost to create scrolls and wands by the ratio you plan to reduce treasure. (Although perhaps finding supplies of high quality paper and wood may be introduced as a limiting factor.)
There are actually an infinite number of Golarons, in an infinite number of universes. The Golaron that is in our universe, science and chemistry and physics all work. The Golaron that is in the same universe as Oerth and Toril, maybe that's not the case.
So far I've not had any problems with the Honor System. Most people, I find, are focused on their own characters and probably don't even know what scores the other PCs have. I suppose if a player did want to get in the other players faces with "I'm so awesome, I have two 18's and a 17, that PC might find himself hampered by a lack of healing spells which, for some reason, got used up on the other PCs and NPCs and 'Oh, I'm sorry, I'm out of healing. You're just going to have to walk it off."
You can only take a 5-foot-step if your movement isn't hampered by difficult terrain or darkness. Any creature with a speed of 5 feet or less can't take a 5-foot step, since moving even 5 feet requires a move action for such a slow creature. I guess I am wrong. That's why, in my own games, I have a table rule that anybody who wants to use a rule is responsible for looking up the rule in the rulebook. To merfolk: No five foot step for you!
Can a merfolk take a 5-foot step while on land, even though their base speed is 5? I think that by the rules (unless there is a rule I am not aware of), he could. The way I picture it, the 5 foot step represents something akin to "quantum uncertainty" in physics. We as GMs and Players are not tracking the exact location of a character, but only know that the character is, at any moment, somewhere within the five foot box we've established. The character could be right at the edge of the box, or at the center. So a five foot step, as I see it, is a character who really was right at the edge of the square just moving a little bit and now is in an adjacent square. So a merfolk also could be right at the edge of a square and just has to wiggle a little bit to be in the next square, assuming that the next square is not occupied or difficult terrain, etc. But we'll see if anybody says that I am wrong.
I've found that high scores are not really a problem. And I once ran a game where, as an experiment, I had a rule saying that for every '6' a PC rolled, he could reroll and add to the total, and keep rerolling as long as that die came up '6'. The highest ability score in that game was a 28 Wisdom assigned to a Monk PC. ( Actually, that worked out very well, because with his 28 Wisdom he was able to find a clue that really helped get the PCs through a tight spot. ) I suppose great differences between ability scores might be a problem. In that same campaign I allowed a reroll if a PC did not have a score over 20. In another campaign, my first 3.0 campaign, I committed to allowing characters rolled with dice, or rolled with the computer generated that came with the original 3.0 Player's Handbook. Then I found two things: 1) one player had a tendency to make lots of characters and then decide which one he wanted to play; 2) the computer roller consistently produced higher stats than the dice did. My answer to was to implement a system of XP bonuses based on stats, so those with lower stats would get more XP. (Of course, everybody is getting a bonus, so I'm not penalizing high stats, just trying to even the playing field a bit.) The game worked pretty well, and there were no complaints. I suppose if somebody was bothered by it, they could just roll a character using the generator, or ask to lower their stats so they could get more XP. I have come up with a plan for a different campaign where one of the steps for rolling characters is to take the PC who has the lowest stats, and allow the player to roll more dice to add to the stats, until that PC no longer has the lowest stats. But in general, I say the dice are the dice, and if a player rolls all 18s, that's the way it is. Choices of class and feats and strategy and tactics more than make up for ability score spread, in my opinion, once the ones with very low stats are allowed to reroll so that everybody at least has decent stats.
I like mixing science and fantasy, or at least considering how the two would interplay. I get lots of ideas that way. One thing I'd like to do is make an "Atomic Steampunk" setting, which is like a steampunk setting, only with nuclear technology. I have the idea of advancing Iron Kingdoms about 400 years past what the books describe, when the various nations invent nuclear weapons, people ride around on motorcycles and stuff, the Cyressians have some really neat equipment, and the Cryxians are really nasty because they have no qualms about putting a nuclear reactor inside a giant warjack knowing that if they are damaged in combat, the reactor is liable to be exposed to air and burn, spreading radioactive ash all over the place. The trick is to try to do this in a smooth way. The way Piers Anthony handles it in his novels, especially the Incarnations of Immortality, is kind of clunky, with "magicons" and all. I try to avoid getting that specific, or applying actual science theories to magic where it probably does not work. But I like the way Fred Saberhagen handled it in Empire of the East, where science and magic interacted, sometimes in ways you wouldn't expect. Spoiler: In Empire of the East, it turned out that the demons were all nuclear explosions that were changed to demons when scientists activated a device to protect themselves from a nuclear war. When the device was deactivated, all the demons returned to being nuclear explosions, and destroyed themselves.
I'm not sure what the problem with either Paladins or Inquisitors is in Ravenloft. One thing I like about Ravenloft is that it is not entirely black. There is black and white and shades of grey. Paladins fit in great in the setting as knights trying to overcome the evil the permeates the land, doing what they can to protect the innocent and the sort of innocent, while being a beacon to guide the others to the path of righteousness. I put my own flavor on the setting by, among other things, making a campaign secret that paladins and innocents are those who, last time they died, could actually have left the plane if they had wanted to, but instead chose to be reborn so they could show other people the way out. Of course, after being reborn, they forgot all that. As for Inquisitors, I am not sure what the issue is. Looking at the picture of that green chick, it looks like she'd fit in great in Ravenloft. Unless there is a balance issue I don't know about, where an Inquisitor could be a one man army, I don't see a problem. Pathfinder characters are going to be more powerful than 3rd edition D&D characters -- that is how they are designed. But Ravenloft is not Call of Cthulhu, where PCs are besieged by forces way beyond their abilities. The Darklords should be unassailable, but there should be conflicts appropriate to their level. One of my ideas for a Ravenloft adventure was a near-epic adventure in which a town was being attacked by an awakened great whale with about 20 levels of Druid. The idea was that the PCs had to prevent the great whale from becoming a Darklord.
What kind of force is a magic missile? Gravitational? Electro-weak? Strong nuclear? :PMagic Missile is Evocation force, just like it says on the tin. Scientists on Earth just haven't discovered this force yet. Back in the 80s, I was working on a whole theory of "Tau" forces, which are the ones that 20th century scientists knew about, and "Mu" forces, which are the ones that magic-users in Dungeons and Dragons used to cast their spells. For a while I even toyed with the idea of making gravity a "Mu" force rather than a "Tau" force, which would make it harder for scientists to come up with a theory to unify the physical forces. Then in the 90s I came up with a scenario in which a chemical engineer finds scientific proof that astrology works, and how it works, thereby opening the study of "Mu" forces to 21st Century science. Then when the Macho Women with Guns setting came out, I thought of an idea that scientists in that setting knew that there was an arcane force that surrounded Earth, and a "faith" force that permeated the whole solar system.
What kind of force is a magic missile? Gravitational? Electro-weak? Strong nuclear? :P Magic Missile is Evocation force, just like it says on the tin. Scientists on Earth just haven't discovered this force yet.
One idea for a campaign that I had that you might use: The PCs come from a small town in 20th or 21st Century Earth. One morning, they wake up and find that their whole town has been transported to another world. (My idea was that it was transported to a ringworld, but whatever idea works for you.) As the people in the town explore the area, they find that there are orcs and elves and dragons among their new neighbors. I had a number of ideas about this. One idea is that the electrical equipment in the town still works, because the power lines are connected to something that is generating electric power for them. Exploration also reveals that there is a tar pit nearby where the town can get petroleum. (The ringworld I am envisioning is one that was made as a menagerie, and salted with resources by the makers for use by the inhabitants.)
The following link might be useful for you:
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