VargrBoartusk's page

So I've been kicking this idea around for a while since there is usually a bunch of disconnect and I personally use it to try and help avoid the headaches it can cause.

Pathfinder works best to me when viewed not as one game but several and i'm going to try to touch on them as i see them. There might be more and there might be less but these are the ones that work best for me.

Pathfinder as 3.X Framework
In this type pathfinder is a bare bones mechanics set you use to provide a rules framework to the game you want to run. This is the default assumption of most of the big hardback books. In this rules set class names are skins you use to define your characters abilities and how they interact with the world you're in. Fluff and crunch are disconnected. Fey foundling is a way to get better heals, Goblins are not all comical pyromaniacs and your character can claim paladin/gunslinger/wizard/ninja/samuraihood without having a single level in the actual class. Feat and trait names try to be generic because they are meant as mechanical options and while Golarion examples are given it's largely contextual or as filler information. Fluff where it is present is also somewhat barebones and largely easy to ignore. For example my bloodrager has the dragon bloodline because I like what it give me more then because he had an actual dragon ancestor. Rulings here are simple straightforward and based off of rules interactions. Math is king here and nebulous concepts lead to exploitation. Let's use the following example of tail. Tail is not a thing covered in the rules. Kobolds from a mechanical point of view do not have a tail since having or not having a tail does literally nothing. If I take a feat that gives me the ability to make an attack with my tail it is no different from a feat that gives me a bite or a claw attack that i also do not have. the human heritage feat to gain access to the kobold tail attack is fine since 'tailed' is not a race trait that is toggled on and off like say darkvision or weapon familiarity. House rules are not really as much of an issue because your adding or subtracting stuff as you want to make your game. 3PP, The race building rules, it's all good since basically it's all house rules.

Pathfinder as Golarion
This is the middle of the road. It's also the default assumption of most of the APs and splat books. You're playing in the official game setting so fluff and crunch work together and the names of things have context in the world. You can't take traits pertaining to being from Cheliax as an andoran, wizards and sorcerers are mechanically and socially different with wizards using magic from studying books and sorcerers having magic in the blood reflected both in the rules and the knowledge of the world. As the GM since this is a home game you have final say. Maybe in your world osrion has a different king or maybe Geb is helping Clexiax take over the River Kingdoms. They designed the sandbox and you bought it so now you can tweak it but if you try to bend it to far it's not going to be the same sandbox anymore. Now let's go back to the tail. Kobolds in golarion have tails, there's still no mechanical justification for a tail but artwork and fluff back this up. Kobolds can take a feat to attack with their tails. The human heritage feat does not call out that if you take it for kobold feats you gain a tail so a human taking it to take the tail attack probably will not work unless you work it out with your GM that the heritage feat gave you a useless fluff tail like the kobolds have. It's more of a GM fiat sort of thing. The rules aren't so much different as the assumptions are and fluff relevance has mechanical fallout. House rules happen, it is after all still a home game but, but for the most part RAW and RAI matter. This type of pathfinder is where thing like 'Virtual number of hands' tend to crop up the most.

Pathfinder as A living campaign
Pathfinder Society games are set for a very specific balance level. Weather or not you agree with how it's balanced or that it is balanced don't matter much. What they shoot for is what they shoot for and your opinions don't matter. Not only do the rules have relevance but some options are different or just not allowed to better facilitate it's particular playstyle. Not many rules are seemingly designed for this but FAQs and Errata seem *strongly* influenced by this as it is the largest collection of feedback available to the company. If you never had the problems they make the changes for in your home game it doesn't matter. Because of the balance aims here some things are just flat out no. Back to the tail example. Here it doesn't work. Virtual number of hands problems sort of occur but are less of a problem because at the end of the day this is their sandbox and your just building castles in it.

Pathfinder as a guideline
You have friends, dice, snacks and the books. You don't care about making your own world, you don't obsess over exact rulings. Beer and pretzels and good stories are your goal so all the rules discussions are kinda pointless for you. You're probably on these forums for the same reason crash fans go to nascar rallies. YaY explosions. No one really care about tail attacks.

I think of 'adventurer' like i di 'football player' A quarterback, linebacker, running back, and kicker all have vastly different skillsets, purposes and training methods. When talking about the team as a whole it's way easier to have a term for them as a collective.

The last group I actually played with was an halforc brawler, a halfling cleaner investigator, A cleric who's religious preview was solving logic puzzles and bringing lost ancient wisdom to light, and a lunatic hedge wizard sorcerer who focused on conjuration and illusion magic. We called ourselves a freelance adaptable solution providers.

My first 3.0 group was a half ogre barbarian strongman, twin human rogue contortionist acrobats, a druid animal handler, A bard based entirely off of Elvira and my Elven carnival barker/ringmaster/snake oil salesman Necromancer with the leadership feat who made a side income reanimating plow animals as zombies to help farm production. That group called itself Dr. Karrodius's Wandering Artists of the Whimsical Macabre.
They all likely would have nodded if anyone asked if they'd say they were adventurers.

Treantmonk wrote:

Reverse creep isn't really possible. If every option in a splatbook is universally trumped by abilities in the existing material, then power levels have stayed exactly the same.

Soon as a single ability in a splatbook allows you to do something you could not do in the existing material, and is balanced, then you've increased character versatility, and the power level potential has increased (just a bit).

Generally speaking, a splatbook induces power creep, it's pretty much inevitable if you are providing mechanical options. The question isn't as much "if" it produces power creep, the question is "how much?"

That said, if splatbooks have interesting options that improve a player's ability to make unique characters, and make the game more fun, then a bit of power creep is a small price to pay right?

It's interesting how this philosophy has been proven incorrect over time as Paizo starts actually nerfing things or creating feats that limit stuff that was assumed to be part of a skill.

Turns out it is possible, it just has to be a lot more explicit than "this feat is a bad one".

Or just full out rewriting certain archetypes *cough*scarredwitchdoctor*cough* to make them less appealing when their new class has a core mechanic that is an arguably worse version of their shtick.

Air0r wrote:

As a DM, I generally open the floodgates and tell my players "play whatever you want, even 3PP. Just let me see what you want to do first."

Asa DM, I generally just give the players Core Rulebook and whatever supplements I have on hand. They just get confused by optional, extraneous and cross referenced rules on d20pfsrd, and forget what their character can actually do. Do you not experience this and how do you avoid it?

I usually don't run into it as a problem since i ask my players what they want their characters to do then try to find a way to make it work in the rules. After that its jut a matter of a character sheet flash cards for spells or wordier abilities and the occasional hint. Rarely for X uses per day I've had chits when dealing with players who just could not keep track of resource pools

Really the big problem is 90's asskicking movie ninja and fudal japanese assassin ninja share a name but very little in the way of a common skill set. Seriously the turtles archvillain organization was way more ninja then they ever were... You just kinda have to have some background in stealth to fight a shadowy underworld organization. Add in the usual comic book problem of every different author puts his own spin on and emphasizes different traits of the characters and genre so often it's hard to pin them down after all the years and versions. Personally I actually like the recent movies of them because they were all visibly different in a way beyond their bandanas. Hell Eastman even said at one point the different weapons were more of a way to consistently differentiate the characters in a B&W comic then anything.

*stuff*

Mikey might need the dex to damage.. He's the one who's all about acrobatics and extreme sports.. Also considering how he uses his chucks <and in the later seasons of the cartoon the grappling hook because of all the anti nunchuck stuff that cropped up around the world> He's the most likely to be a finesse fighter.. Also Leo might want some refluffed sawtooth sabres instead of katana just to not tank his attack bonus.

Honestly I've never understood the whole 'I can only swing more than once if I stand still' thing. Especially in melee combat you're moving while you swing rather than taking one step left and flailing your sword around a bunch. I'm experimenting with just let everyone get their full allotment of attacks at any point along their movement as a full round action. Since charging actually gets you a double move and 1 attack there's still a reason to do it and letting vital strike and such function on charges helps it a bit.

>Is optimising characters actually suboptimal?

What kind of loaded question is that? Before anyone can decide if something is "suboptimal", you first have to define the criterion for which you are optimising, because "optimal" thing is just a thing that has a minimum(or a maximum) of that criterion. E.g. damage per round, or fun per second, or thrown bears per minute, or whatever. You can't "optimise" in general.

So, OP, what is your criterion?

Whatever it was before it is now thrown bears per minute. Full stop.

In an actual AP a human with an intelligence of 3 actually had PC class levels. That is all you...

To be fair any level of intelligence using any tactics is a house rule as I've yet to see an Int score to tactical option chart in any sort of official publication..

Thinking of monks and monk-like characters in fiction, I can think of as many drunken monks and monks who can't resist temptation as wise / high willpower monks.

The defining factor of monk-like martial-artists is usually their amazing dexterity. The defining factor of other 'monks' is their refusal to resort to physical violence.

To be fair how many of those were

Plus, being quick is also a big part of the monk legend ("snatch the pebble from my hand") and we're not talking about giving a monk a poor reflex save to encourage them to keep their Dex up above 14.

This. Though mostly for the quote.. Kwai Chang Caine is more or less what I think the Monk class was trying to emulate rather than any of the wuxia action movie guys. It's a very westernized pulp genre monk more than any sort of honest attempt at an accurate cultural depiction.

It's a better Monk.

No.. Not at all.

It is a better martial artist.
It is a better wire-fu practitioner from hong kong action hour.
It is a simpler chassis with fewer trap options.
It is better out the gate at dealing teh damages.
If these things were what you expected out of the monk class to begin with then I suppose the class was an upgrade.

The UnMonk in many people's eyes lost a lot of the iconic monk things trading away it's 'monkness' for combat viability. This is not everyone's definition of better. In fact it is many people's definition of worse.

Also for the record posting things in bigger fonts and bolded letters doesn't make you more right it just makes you look like a belligerent jerk.

A better example might be to look at Japanese culture for what is honorable.

I think you need to do a more thorough read on bushido and google the Nanking massacre before you try to use japans definition of 'honorable' as in any way better than the code of chivalry..

memorax wrote:

That's the problem. What is a evil act. Maybe acceptable depending on the situation.

Negative. Pathfinder deals in OBJECTIVE morality not SUBJECTIVE morality.

Tell you what. You show me the lines is the rulebook where Pathfinder codifies good or evil in anything but the vaguest of generalizations. For example is giving candy to a baby good ? You've made a child happy but this particular piece of candy was also enough to push him into diabetes. You a have inflicted a disease on a small child is inflicting a child with disease evil ? Show me where the books come anywhere near defining the morality of a situation like that as anything shy of dude it's a GM call.

I just want to point out that the use of both Witch and Warlock predate the founding of Wicca as a religion by several centuries. The term has been kicking around since long before all the nice neopagans were around to find it offensive.

At to the main point I'd say each class would call themselves whatever was culturally appropriate to his or her self-perceived role in society based on whatever their native language was. Class names are just shorthand to write on your character sheet so the GM doesn't get confused.

Okay.. wall of text warning

VargrBoartusk wrote:

Aaaaand because of this whole thread the world I run for my housemates kids now has an entire order of paladins without paladin class levels that are just as respected and trusted if not more so then chosen or classed paladins because they don't get fancy gewgaws for following the code.. just more hardship.

Aaaaaand because of this I did the same thing... Then made them all evil beings who abuse their power and went hidden for so long because they could. One person who was evil got in, got power, and since nobody could detect it, and there was no way to notice that anyone fell, they became an evil organization who have crushed all opposition while fooling the populace that they are good.

They are the next enemy for the PCs to crush, when a real Paladin shows up and realizes something is up with the fact that one of these "Paladins" is evil aligned.

EDIT:

To add... Also what bonuses are you giving class Paladins then? If they are suddenly deemed as "lesser" because they get divine power, then what normal class abilities do they get? Because Fighters get extra feats, and other classes get things for their class. Without Paladin abilities Paladins are really lame warriors... So if they are going to get the reputation for getting "gewgaws" then they should actually GET "gewgaws" that other classes don't...

So I recommend all class paladins in your world be given 1 feat per level and weapon/armor training to make up for the fact that their CLASS ABILITIES aren't actually any stronger than other class's abilities yet you are claiming, in universe, that they are.

Sounds to me like you just made a world where the entire planet thinks less of Paladins simply because they have divine abilities that put them on par with other classes...

Like I said... This is just some DM's dislike of Paladins OOC manifesting in game.

Universe actually.. it's a magical space faring game. Nope. No one thinks less of paladins or any of the ethical warriors in my universes because of anything.. they just don't think any more of them because of it. Paladins are preferred to antipaladins of course because no one want's a neighbor who wants to burn down your house and do unmentionable things with your misses.. But they recognize that paladins have an agenda that doesn't always mesh with theirs and treat them accordingly. They just figure someone who holds to a code without their devotion to it being so strong it gives them mystic powers might be slightly less b*$!!#@ insane and open to reason.

No I don't hate paladins.. What I hate is the idiocy that keeps perpetrating that alignment and roleplaying checks make up for design balances. The alignment system in it's current form is fairly dodgey in its actual mechanics at best. The paladin code and ability loss for it's violation are better and more hard coded then alignment so it is a better step in the wrong direction at least since really you can pull the idea out of it's alignment roots and make up your own codes for other moral and ethical focused or inspired warriors. I should also point out I have zero interest in Golarion. Pathfinder is a system for me not a setting just like 3.5 was I care about the chassis here not the fluff. Lawful good being the only ones in the divinely inspired but not directly tied to worship sandbox is in a word stupid. Giving paladins a mechanical bonus because people don;t always shower them with love and respect is equally stupid. I also don't penalise people who want to play a weird race by making torch and pitchfork happy mobs show up to burn them all the time because guess what ? That's not a balance. We have ECL for that.

So what I'm going to do is break it down into what paladins have and what other classes have that has a vaguely close design space. Because paladins being special is fluff only really.

And here is the required rubber stamp boiler plate. The following bits are my opinion and I could care less if you agree or don't. I don't care if you listen to me or don't. This is my way. Not the right way, not the best way, not the one true way. It's the one I like.

First off paladins have smite. In the hands of a player for most games this ability is great since as a hero a large portion of what your fighting will be things that are evil. This is pretty good its a powerful damage boost for important fights. Alright so what do other stabby dudes have in the role ? Barbarians have rage and rage powers for it, fighters have weapon training, rangers have favored enemies. Barbarian has the in most situations easiest to use bonus since rage hard for the GM to mess with, followed by the fighter since he just needs the right weapon group, Then we have the paladin's smite and finally the rangers favored enemy since it needs the most GM cooperation to work. Other classes have abilities that are close enough, Inquisitors have judgements and bane, bards have performance, monks get flurry and increases damage dice and so on. Swashy falls sort of flat because his damage boost just keeps them in line with the other martials unboosted for the most part. Is being the antithetical opposition to a force unique to good ? No. Should it be ? Well that's an opinion but mine is also no. Fortunately since some other things get smite without the baggage the rules agree with me. Huzzah. Paladins aren't snowflakes in the damage adders here and theirs isn't always the best so this ones a wash. Moving on.

Divine grace. Hoah boy this is the most iconic one to me. Belief in oneself and ones nature as a paragon of what one represents is positively dripping with thematic badassery. Crunch wise this ability is also just the t!$% and for the longest time this bonus to saves was more or less exclusive without fairly serious investment. This ability makes sense with the code and is one of the few reasons I can see for it's justification. This one is aesthetics and function flowing into a beautiful whole. Does anything else have this as a freebie ? Nope. Monks just get all good saves, Superstition can come close and fighters get a sort of with the WM handbook. Does unflagging devotion to an ideal nail itself firmly to lawful good? Well no. They do hold hands very nicely though but since their chaotic evil buddies get it obviously this sort of thing is more tied to a code then an alignment. Cool fairly unique defensive ability. Props.

Lay on hands and it's riders. So this one is definitely all about the good since teh healz and we'll ignore the minor flavor fail of it just being better when used selfishly as a pool of bonus hit points. No one else has this nearly as good. Barby gets rage and some rage powers and a chance to use the least used polyhedron in the game at every level. Fighter gets some middling armor use bits, monk gets some ac, there are probably a few others but paladin shines here because it makes him probably the hardest someb%$** to kill his faith pushing him on where less devoted men would fall. Oh and i guess he's good so.. he can help out bob too instead of just face murdering the bad guy... Cool i guess.

Bond thingy. So you get a wonder horse for acting in ways Roy Rogers would approve of. A'aight sure.. Functions as druid... wait So scratch the magic animal comes with good behavior since animal companions are popular and honestly not super hard to get. Good ability but not much inherant flavor. As for the Weapon bond.. Every time a bell rings another angel gets shoved into a sword to help you kill stuff.. Well it doesn't rhyme and a billion other classes have a way of the i'm awesome so is my stabby thing trope. It can be good

Spells. Every alignment has spells. These are the paladins situation buttons much like the fighter feats and the barbarian rage powers of limited use or situational bennies we all know spells are good we also know nearly everyone has them and a fair margin have better ones.

So going through all this Paladins are just a class.. a bunch of numbers that you combine with other numbers to give a flavor paint job to play whatever you want to play. The paladin ones aren't better enough for me to care at all about the hoops it has to jump through to get them especially since I don't believe any alignment is inherantly harder or more restrictive to play than any other and despite the several dozen times you've said otherwise I'm going to disagree.
Always.
Forever.
Is the paladin cool ? Hells yeah. Should it be alone as a force in the universe as an ethical enforcer ? Well That's an opinion question. I say no because there's really no sense behind it. It's arbitrary. We obviously have different games and different playstyles and both of us should go to bed probably go to bed thankful we don't play in the same circles. You think the paladin is an awesome ball of special and you don;t want anyone else to dirty it up with their dirty dirty ideas ? What evs. But seriously you've got to drop whatever it is you're doing that makes it seem like you think your way is the right way to play.

Aaaaand because of this whole thread the world I run for my housemates kids now has an entire order of paladins without paladin class levels that are just as respected and trusted if not more so then chosen or classed paladins because they don't get fancy gewgaws for following the code.. just more hardship.

This one is always hard and often has a lot to do with the setting. Sometimes orcs themselves lack enough racial consistency to assume any sort of 'common' half breed traits. I tend to think like tiefling but with orcish traits more then demonic. Some get the green or grey skin, some get the 'tusks' or lupine ears, some get the feral eyes and snouty nose or any combination there of. Because Orcs tend to vary a lot from setting to setting on size and such I don't always assume bigger but I do assume more sturdy frame, denser muscle tissues and less fatty squish along with heavy and thicker bone structure.
With how orcs look in Golarion I'd probably say that they have strong and sharp features with strong jaws, wide foreheads and hawkish noses with overgrown lower cuspids that rarely extend up past the nose and all the teeth in general being larger and more carniverous with additional canine teeth perhaps replacing the premolars. I'd also assume hair to be straight and somewhat more wiry than the norm and less facial hair since I can't recall ever seeing a bearded orc.. Perhaps a reflective tapeta lucida structure to explain the dark vision. The skin i assume would be thicker and a bit rougher but still pliable and springy.
In 3.5 the Orcs were a much more gorilla/neandertal crossbreed looking thing with protruding almost muzzle like lower jaws and an almost mane like hair pattern they had large jaws but small chins with prominent side burn like hair growth on both genders and an abundance of wart like skin growths on skin with a texture like fine leather driving gloves.
In one setting I played in orcs were more or less the pig/boar equivalent of gnolls with the males tending more towards nearly fully boarlike heads complete with snouts and true tusks and the females having more human preportioned but still piggish faces.

I should point out my favorite orcs or Orks as they were called are from the EarthDawn setting and have a very close look to what i see Pathfinder half-orcs as being.

This thread and like seven others over the past few days have made me sure of one thing if nothing else.. I'm super duper happy I just use this game as a rules set and wouldn't go anywhere near Golarion as a player or a GM for an oppertunity to motorboat every stripper and burlesque dancer in Vegas.

The real problem with all of this is more then anything else in the reasons why people game.

The people who like system mastery tend to make better characters mechanically then the people who value story and social interaction more. This leads to those characters outshining the characters of the 'real roleplayer'. This leads to hurt feelings because as the roleplayer sees it the optimizer is taking away from him since he believes he vested more into his character then 'Just grabbing the best numbers'.

The inverse of this is the roleplayer tends to outperform the 'min-maxer' as a player by taking the head in non-rolling sorts of situations and monopolizing or dragging out the social interactions when the numbers guy is itching to get back to winning D&D.

Now comes the hard part.. Who's having badwrongfun ? Well depending on the situation both of them and neither of them. The simple truth is some people just can't have fun with the other kind there.. Here's the best example I can think of..
I love hotdogs. Cheese inside hotdogs are something I turn to when I want to murder the next irritation that crosses my path because they make me feel better. If you put sauerkraut on my hotdog.. I.. will.. end.. you. I despise sauerkraut with the hate of a thousand angry guinea pigs. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but you only like hotdogs cooked in sauerkraut and hate the kind with cheese inside. We cannot cook hotdogs together. We just won't enjoy eating the others product. We can make out hotdogs separate and try to eat them together and sometimes this works but often seeing me enjoy my krautless cheese pocked meatstick will bother you because you think it's gross.
Now back to gaming. Here it gets even worse because gamers are opinionated stubborn mules. If one gamer tries to help the other one with either roleplaying or character optimizing they take it as an offence because you're telling them through the offer to help they're playing wrong. And this is compounded even worse by the dark sides of char-oping and roleplaying I'll call them Munchkins and Snowflakes respectively. Both of these types are people who only care about themselves or even worse have the most fun by pissing in other people's Wheaties. Munchkin by rules interpretations bordering on cheating and snowflakes by making every interaction be all about them and their unique wonderful character Moondragozelea d'Whogivzakrud. Both of these types are also prone to go on at length about how their way is the way to play, and get defensive when you suggest other styles are equally viable. Jerks exist in both groups and human beings have a far far greater tendency to judge like things by the worst example rather than the best.

Read As: Let's start ANOTHER Caster-Martial Disparity Thread.

Why don't you just play E6/E10 and even the board for everybody? It's not a sign of weakness to admit bias against casters and what they are capable of because instead of raw math they have the ability to bypass/alter narrative.

Read as I don't really have anything useful to contribute so I'm going to acridly deride your thought/potential table play exercise via the medium of obtuse misinterpretation and putting words into your mouth without actually offering anything useful to the conversation that I couldn't have just replaced with 'Harumph.. I don't care for it.'

A well built blaster can rain down flaming/freezing/sizzling/oscillating ruin upon who and whatever offends him in an awe-inspiring sort of way throwing big honking handfuls of dice of anything foolish enough to stand in his path. That being said if you have the keys to rewriting the universe at your whim do you really want to always just reality hack yourself a flame thrower ?

Name: Gar
Title: The Bastard of Best Intentions
Alignment: Chaotic Good

Domains: Chaos, Destruction, Good, Strength, Trickery

SubDomains: Fist, Inuendo, Riot, Rage, Redemption,

Symbol: Two hands middle fingers extended and crossed in an X

Portfolio: Promiscuity, dirty jokes, dirtier fighting, taking a beating, and raucous revelry.

Favored Weapon: Cestus -- 'Just Two Hits'

Herald: TongueBite advanced pipe fox.

Ethos: You're here to bring the noise. You can party harder, love longer, fight meaner, and take a beating better than anyone else in the room so never be the first to blink. Be slow to make up your mind but resolute once you've decided your course. Doing what you believe is right is better than being right. Never forget to destress and unwind, drink, wild dancing, loud music, and all else that all things that confound the senses and exhaust the conscience mind have their place if they bring you peace and you master your vices rather than letting them control you.

I don't understand that statement.

They're saying that while there is an FAQ answer on it it still hasn't made it's way into a printed rulebook and thus RAW and RAI are in conflict.

And this, children, is why semantic arguments such as this (hinging on the interpretation of 'a' and debating whether or not 'in one hand' means 'as a one-handed weapon') is sophistry and deserving of a phone book to the head. See once more Wyrm's Rule of Gaming #0, which really can be boiled down to 'If it makes you go 'how the hell would you do that???', it's probably a bad interpretation.'

So like.. So like half the Ex and every single Su and Sp ability in the game... Cool pretentiously named rule ya got there brah.

Yep, the number of uses are the same, but in my opinion, Smite provides so much more bang for the buck than judgement does. This is all just personal opinion of course, but I'm playing an Inquisitor now, and unfortunately for me, my GM doesn't allow any of the archetypes from the ACG. However, when I did a side by side comparison of the base Inquisitor vs Sacred Huntsmaster or Sanctified Slayer, it's plain to see how far behind the basic inquisitor is.

In straight up damage you are 100% correct.. The versatility of the judgement is still pretty handy if you aren't going balls tot he wall DPS though I've seen decent Tanquisitors pull bodyguard duty using the three defensive judgements <AC DR Healing> since the scout knife master was the main enemy blender in that game

The strengths of one weapon does not invalidate the strengths of another.

If that were true in any sort of applicable way warfare wouldn't put such an emphasis on getting newer and better equipment. Weapons are for killing better killing = better weapon. Versatility, cost efficiency, and durability are useful but at the end of the day an A bomb is better than a sling no matter how easy it is to put a rock in it since one dropped bomb can kill more people in one go then a man with a sling probably can in his whole life.

So the AWT stuff is for the most part amazing. It gives the fighter a bunch of scope widening it needed. The base Weapon Training groups are also phenomenal... Well.. Or rather would be if it wasn't for one thing.

Magic.

In this case I'm not talking about spells or wizards or caster disparity. I mean magic items. With how the gear enhancement works in this game you never use anything but the fancy stabbity bit of death#$@& that you just spent a small nation's GNP on getting. Since magic weapons like that in this game are required as you level for the system math to work rather then extras you are penalised for not using said beatstick of doom and the weapon groups sort of break down. So really what this does is it allows the fighter to trade away a class feature that's not great considering the games core assumptions, but in a low magic sort of game or a game where the GM lets you have something like an aulet of mighty fists that works with wielded weapons *are* useful, for some that are useful in a normal game. This doesn't really make the fighter any better at what it does top end but it does help shore up a few places where the fighter frankly sucks fairly hard. It also has the added bonus for us that play home games rather then society of opening up that design space so it's easier to talk the GM into making other AWTs of similar power levels since it's less out of nowhere.

Imbicatus wrote:

A trait can make UMD int-based if cha is dumped, and UMD is one of the best skills in the game anyway. This is even better if you're a lore warden/tactician/pack mule with 4 skills per level. As for the fly skill, armor enhancement bonus instead of dex bonus is a very small boost since I never make a fighter with a dex under 14 anyway.

In order to make use of a magic item via UMD your average not sub par at what he's expected to do (killing stuff) fighter would need to wait at least until level 10 while maxing UMD. Spending a trait in order to switch chat to int while suing UMD isn't exactly the best of options for fighters anyway (not when there are several traits giving you much more of an edge in combat, which is still the fighters primary and secondary role in a party). That's exactly the opposite of "trivial" in my book.

You get one combat trait at most anyways... Few of them as useful as access to a couple buff spells or healing as needed, though party comp can change that.. Honestly the skill traits tend to be some of the better ones since they're about on par with a <albeit crappy> feat so spending your other trait to get an int based UMD to use a few wands and scrolls is hardly the worst thing you can do to yourself. Fighters have a low base skill cap admittedly but if you're a human with the int min for combat expertise and satisfied with your hitpoints and CMD you're looking at 5 skill points per level which while not great is serviceable.

Except when the stat boost items ar taken for granted as described above, PCs steamroll the adventure paths.

Suggesting that casting spell reduces wonder is nonsense. Literature is full of spell casters but a belt of giant strength is still special. You get stat increases already as you level up.

Pathfinder was a game built around adventure paths, they should form the baseline of difficulty. If the AP is too easy the characters are above the baseline. If the party can't succeed then they are below the baseline.

The CR charts given above demonstrate that it is far too easy to build characters that invalidate the core CR system of the game.

...

Um...

Pathfinder was a game built around houseruling D&D 3.5 and still trying to have it be compatible with the previous edition. Wax poetic about the wonder of magic all you want but as long as 3e has been around magic items are in fact specifically to be taken for granted. The core of the CR system has always been laughable. Case in point look at the CR of an NPC wealth class leveled humanoid and look at the level of a party it's supposed to provide a 'challenge' for.

Now factor in every class is improved over its 3.5 version while monsters and their CR had little change made to them between the bestiary and the Monster Manual.

PC on classed opponent encounters have got a bit of a wider gulf than before but thanks to action economy and the greater resources of PCs but it's still ludicrously slanted towards the party.

3.x designers have either been historically bad at grasping the fundamental math the system runs on since day one or the game is designed so that sucking at making a character doesn't get your whole party wiped by making everything laughably easy as a baseline.

And you are completely capable of NOT using it in your home game.

PFS is basically the game they intended for the rules to be. It is Golarian, and if the rules aren't working as they want them too, it is actually their game to change. They just let us use them.

Way too often posters complain about changes Paizo makes, as if they are messing with their game. They aren't, they are adjusting their game, you just happen to be using their rules. If you don't like them, don't use them. If you are playing PFS, you literally signed up for it, to use someone else's rules with specific circumstances and rulings. Even above and beyond the "normal" rule set (PFS restrictions etc).

I imagine PFS drives A LOT of business. And home games are free to do what they want regardless. What is the point in complaining...

What's the point in complaining about people complaining about it? What's the point in anyone ever expressing any displeasure ever?

And unlike Pathfinder, 5e's skills actually work. Much of this is because they're less codified, so you can (for instance) roll a single Stealth check for the part when it matters, instead of rolling 2-3 times per six seconds and only needing one low roll to fail. 5e's flattened math ("bounded accuracy") also means that DCs don't reach a point where you auto-fail if you're not maxed out, and skill bonuses don't reach a point where you auto-succeed if the DC is set to include the rest of the party.

Some of us are less inclined to describe the GM determines what skills do and how they work fairly arbitrarily because we barely bothered to write a system thing or a binary proficiency level as 'working' but as always YMMV

My biggest problem with this errata is my same problem with most of Paizo's 'fixes' which is the aforementioned scorched nerf policy and their tendency to favor volume of complaining over math.. Maybe if the Devs would post a thing or two as to what they consider to be an appropriate level of DPR or Damage mitigation and whatnot rather than this throw it all at the wall to see what sticks style it would be less jarring...

Then tack on what seems to be a lot of pandering to the PFS crowd which honestly has so many changes made to it already that the games while close in form are so different in function valid comparisons are few and far between. They want more stuff in PFS make PFS only erratas and leave the rest of us out of it.

I'm fortunate that I'm usually the rules guy and math guy for my groups and when I break out the pen and paper and show the numbers my play group tends to side with me but for the people who are less fortunate this must feel like a stick to the jumblies.

Also.. I'd like to note turning a broken good option to a brokenly bad option is in zero way an improvement.. It's time and space wasted on lateral moves.

Oh good work on the shaman nudging though.. I liked that bit.. And I'm kinda ambivalent about the arcanist changes.. How much of a problem were the getting more arcane pool things causing people seriously ? I never really saw it.

VargrBoartusk wrote:

Kevin Mack wrote:

So anyone else feeling the blogs are becoming a shadow of what they once were? Of all the things they used it for the wedsday story was one of the few slots that held any real intrest for me (Dont play society, dont play the card game, dont use minatures and the less said about pathfinder online the better.)

You're not alone. I mostly agree.. Looks like I'll only be hitting things up for preview times around Gencon and playtest times... Though to be honest i even missed most of that last time around.

If there is something that you want to see in the blog, please let us know! The community team is very much interested in improving our blog offerings, but we can't read minds. Tell us what you want by emailing us at community@paizo.com.

So I'm not saying the blog is bad as it is.. I'm just not as interested in Paizo's Golarion flavored side products as I am in Pathfinder. My interest in pathfinder is also more mechanical then fluff based. The fiction section was one of the only ways I had actually to get into the world you guys have built. My difficulty getting into the setting is very much a me thing and not a you thing.. As for the sort of stuff I'd like to see on the blogs Its probably not what most of the community would want.

See right now to me it's starting to feel more and more like a commercial for your cool new stuff coming out. There's nothing wrong with that it's just not my area of interest. Lots of people love the previews and sneak peeks.. I love them too whenever the new books and new iconics come out.

What do *i* want to see well of the top of my head heres a list and i'll try to keep it as open to all your products as possible.

1: I want it to feel more bloggish and less marketing oriented. I'm not asking every one of you to be Allie Brosh or the Oatmeal or anything that extreme so with that in mind...

2: I like to look into the creative process.. I know you guys put out great stuff but I'd like to see more 'So here's something we couldn't make work' and then let us know how eithr it was changed or scrapped.

3: My inner system gamer wants a thing where you can have designers point out the little combo's they either threw in or found by happy accident and a little explanation of why they wanted that sort of thing in.. The best example I can think of is how cleave was changed from 3.5 then cleaving finish was added back in. Was this in response to community request or was it found that it was actually a needed sort of niche mechanic in the game and it was necessary. I really want to know the whys of things getting put in. Alternately just happy little aspects that were found and liked lie hey i put a merciful weapon on my enforcer build and it was the most fun thing evar.

4: Moar characters. I don't need the art.. I like it but I'll live without it but anything that can be done to flesh out adventure path and splatbook NPCs a little bit better.. I know game designers.. I know you wrote a few ten-page back stories for guys that only got a sentence or paragraph.. Hell don't just otlimit it to characters give it to me for cultures, spells, items, monuments, holidays whatever. Then telling me what inspired all of these things like. 'So i'm gonna be honest here... We were doing whippits and watching the Johnny Depp sleepy hollow movie when we made this witch.' <Not to say any of the Paizo employees do whippits or watch Tim Burton
movies.. Nor to endorse that they should.>

So anyone else feeling the blogs are becoming a shadow of what they once were? Of all the things they used it for the wedsday story was one of the few slots that held any real intrest for me (Dont play society, dont play the card game, dont use minatures and the less said about pathfinder online the better.)

You're not alone. I mostly agree.. Looks like I'll only be hitting things up for preview times around Gencon and playtest times... Though to be honest i even missed most of that last time around.

I'm going to start out saying I don't disagree with the ruling itself because I easily saw it able to go either way.

Yes, you can take the feat, but it does no good, unless you have a tail. If you are human (no tail) and take the feat, there are ways in which you could gain a tail (including GM fiat) get a tail, hence it is not part of the prerequisites.

This being a thing is just bad.. Having feats that you can take that dont let you do something is just terrible on several levels. I understand that these feats in particular were probably never considered to interact but anything that leads to Ivory Tower style game design should be rooted out, and in my opinion preferably set on fire.

As a matter of design principle, I'm not sympathetic to making rules always as air-tight as you suggest. While the game may not seem to act like it sometimes, the rule of Pathfinder are not a strict code. Rather it is a matrix using our natural language with some game jargon to create a narrative, relative ease of play, and enough space to deal with complicate circumstance; a narrative, adjudicated and can be played with by a GM both to tell her tale and to create fun.

But this time your still going to male a call for specificity rather then just saying the GM can interpret it as he sees fit.

Logic will eventually have to suffice. If the feat allows you to do something with your tail, and you have no tail, the assumption that it grants you a tail is stretching. At the same time any home GM can easily come in and say that you have a tail, if it fits your character concept and her story.

Okay.. No.. This part *really* keeps bothering me. You cant apply consistent logic to a game like this so stop appealing to it. One group thinks its logical that you need a tail to make a tail attack. One group thinks its logical that taking a feat gives you an effect so you get a tail attack. Another group thinks its logical game designers wont let players take feats that don't work. All are logical you just agree with one being right and not the others. Given the other anatomical wonders that Racial heritage allows humans to grow it could be argues gaining a tail attack is in fact less logical, though since the feat does not specifically call out growing a tail.. Use that as your reasoning and don't try to pass it off as obvious logic.

As some of you have pointed out, PFS has to take a harder tact on this, and I agree. But I believe they have the tools to do so. If you are a human, who takes the Racial Heritage, you can take the feat, but it does not grant you anything if you don't have a tail. Humans do not have tails, ergo, your tail is nonexistent and can't be augment. In other words it is foolish to take the feat expecting it allows you to grow a tail. Neither feat says you grow a tail.

As I said earlier. Letting people take useless feats is not a good thing.

In other words, I have no idea how rules as written say you grow a tail. That seems purely outside the rules as written. The same could be said for a magic item of feat that augments darkvision. If it said your darkvision improves by 20 feet, but you don't have darkvision that does not mean that it grants you darkvision of 20 feet, because you cannot improve what you don't have. It could be possible (due to the prerequisites or the available item slot) to take the feat or wear the item. It is even possible with some of racial trait swaps to take an item designed to augment the core traits or morphology of the race, but since you have swapped out of that option, it is possible for you to take it, but for you it does nothing. It is also possible though some strange item, encounter, or monster, or GM fiat to lose a tail if you were a kobold, but that doesn't mean the act of having this feat would allow you to regrow such a tail.

The *rules* don't say anything about kobolds having tails any more then humans do, at least not outside of feats that make use of tails. If you're saying the parts of the race breakdowns that happen outside of the race trait mechanics are part of the rules, boy oh boy, do you open up a whole can of awkward worms. Like every dwarf who ever shaved his beard being deranged.

In summary, when we write the rules, we do intend a level of reason and even common sense. We have to, because instead of making things "air-tight." Personally I believe, and have always believed, that one of the benefits of tabletop RPGs is to allow the mind and the imagination to breathe. Often we don't feel we need to codify such things in rules, because the logic is (we suppose) easily apprehended by the mind and the common sense of it is pleasing to the imagination

Common sense and fantasy are if not mutually exclusive at least bad guests to invite to the same dinner party. Instead of logic and common sense maybe you should shoot for internal consistency and erring on the side of clarity with phrases such as 'If you have a tail you may make a tail attack' rather then 'with your tail.'

It would be more accurate to say that some people cant find the sense in feat + feat equaling a ten foot tongue, Glands that can spray blinding venom, the claws of a rather terrifying predator, wings and the ability to fly and several other thing which all essentially turn something with no mechanical effect into something with a mechanical effect but tail terror stands out as being unable to do so rather arbitrarily due to the possibly or possibly not simply redundant wording 'With your tail'.

There was also a good deal of mudslinging around what was or was not fluff including my personal favorite a very Matrix like take that there in fact is no fluff and everything is part of the rules this lead to a lot of people trying to figure out just what this could all add up to such as well tails and freckles both aren't mentioned so you cant have either, to of course humans can have freckles real people have freckles, then that lead to real people have tails which was of course countered by the cunning those tails don't count you have to make a prosthetic tail. There was also an interesting foray into you have to allow PCs to have tails or you're not being politically correct.During all of this people stating that because they viewed it one way intuitively that those who didn't view it that way were without common sense and that anyone who thought it wasn't perfectly clear that it was in fact there was was somehow impaired rather than just in disagreement. Many people on both sides of the argument either staying and stomping. Its also been sprinkles with enough slippery slope arguments to impress someone like me who grew up frequently visiting Aspen and enough cherry picking that no man will ever again want for jam.

I'm sure I missed a tirade or two in all of that and a few tangents to be sure but thats what a recall at the moment.. Good times.

Forseti wrote:

"You count as both human and that race for any effects related to race."

So you don't count as the chosen race when not considering effects related to race.

Like being the race.

Not relevant, you can say the same about any and all things. I am a human but i dont count as one when not looking at anything that affects humans. Not that i count as anything else mind you but when no one is looking i am secretly not human. Or rather, i am not human until something looks to check if i am and then i register as a human but then go back to being not right after being tested for humaness.

Negative. I am a meat popcicle.

Well, I give up arguing after this post. I've lost too many brain cells; any further posting will only cause me to turn into a munchkin just like them.

If you think two feats to gain a d4 tail attack is munchkiny.. Well.. Lets just say I'm pretty sure your safe on the metamorphosis into a denizen of Oz front.

A) This is not a case of the feat modifying a trait.. Tail is not a trait it is a no rules bearing part of descriptive fluff. It gives them a tail attack. The problem here is If Kobalds get a tail as a trait then every race with a tail needs to have it too and it opens the door to a what is descriptive fluff and what is rules. If descriptive fluff is rules then many races are lacking in multiple limbs because with the kobold as the bases here <It has a tail because it's fluff says it does> It makes there be some need of a list of what body parts each race does and does not have. The FAQ can't actually change rules so they have to work with whats there.

B)Paizo has already decided that your armored body parts are a hand and thus cannot be used for off hand attacks when wielding a two handed sword so its not a stretch for the turtle has a wand in his mouth. Plus familiars with UMD and wands was been a thing for a long time. The problem is if some familiars have 'hands' and some do not some familiars become a much much better choice.

You can cry common sense you want but common sense does not apply to a rules set and often times has no place in one either what with all the common sense every spell in the history of ever ignores... A good deal of the equipment too. Common sense is what a GM gets to determine for his campaign when the rules get stupid. Is this little RAW loophole stupid ? Probably and if you don't like it by all means disallow it.. But you cant really say for sure one way or another what the RAW is because if tail terror can't grant me a tail attack <Because as it stands by RAW a tail is not a thing that exists in the rules weather or not the feat grants one doesn't matter.> Should I be able to get the tongue lash from a gripli, the venom spitting of a Nagaji, or a tengus wings etc. etc.

I'm just going to put this up one last time and hope people look at it..

This is not a clear simple obvious cut and dry sort of thing. The very real and valid argument to it working is as follows.

A tail is not a thing.. it is fluff like elves and their solid colored eyes and long ears. A tail attack is a thing and is a rule. This feat grants you a tail attack and in the rules as written you gain a tail attack which considering how many creatures with claw attacks have not claws which grow from paw/hand digits but pincers like a crab or scythes made of bone or the like or gore attacks made with a blunt skull or even tentacle attacks made with some sort of cytoplasmic pseudopod we may assume that these attacks are in fact not exactly always what they say but are often reskinned as generalizations to fit the critter. A ruling has been made that claws go on hands and feet get talons as far as bipeds are concerned.

This is it.

There is nothing that says humans have no tails, orcs have no tails ect ect. You cannot say that because it doesn't mention them in descriptive fluff they they do not have them because frequently races are not described as having hands, feet or even heads.. You also can't use art as a basis for this for more or less the same reasons. Beyond all of that racial descriptions are not rules. I can say 'Has very good night vision' or has poor depth perception' or 'Csn heasr s broader spectrum of sounds then a human' If i do then not reflect this with a trait in the rules block this means eff all. Arguments that have their basis in non rules related parts of the game are *USELESS*. There is no *rule* basis in any way shape or form for the presence of a kobold's tail. If in this feats description it said 'Must have tail.' It would hold a bit more water but then the game would have to include or not a tail in every races list of traits like it were speed or darkvision.

The fact that you all can not see a feat growing a tail on someone has as little to do with it being an, if stupider, rules acceptable thing as something without wings flying isn't relevant. Sure it doesnt really work in the real word but if thats how you justify acceptability in this game you have either suffered a *severe* psychotic break and believe in dragons, wizards, vampire and their ilk or you play the most boring games of pathfinder ever with everyone being various commoners and experts with things like skill focus: Profession gamer.

Racial Heritage kobold could grant a tail if you want it to because once more a tail is not a thing any more then blue hair if you take it for gnome or green skin if you take it for goblin is.

It is a stupid stupid way to get a tail attack alas stupid does not make it against RAW it means RAW has messed up. Until they rule differently by making the feat require a tail, and making a tail's presence a thing that is an either yes or no rule thing by RAW it works fine. Now a GM can rule it however they want and many will say no tail no tail attack but there is absolutely no rule that supports this. If they do that it will be an odd amount of rules added to the game for almost zero reason to do so because as abuses go this has so little impact on the game compared to the work of fixing it as to be laughable. so I'm fairly certain that the ruling will be 'Ask your GM' and left at that. This statement will still lead both sides to loudly proclaim 'Ha I was right.' and the other side will keep saying 'No you're not you're a dumdum head.' It would be nice if there was a ruling that was more solid but I wouldnt reccomend holding your breath for it.

I'm not trying to sound to rude here but it would have been nice if we got some form of Dex to damage to actually playtest since we keep hearing how much more important that is then theorycrafting.. Its not like it couldn't have gotten the axe after this if it by some awe inspiring fluke proved overpowering. Maybeif we actually playtested it we'd see ourselves how exactly its overwhelming.

It might be a terrible terrible idea.. But I'ma make a warpriest shuriken flinger.

I still see two problems with the class. One its Martial maneuvers is the meat and potatos of the class and it stops improving at level 12. I actually think its number of uses is fine <If i get a more maneuvers feat at least> and its duration isn't awful.. What i would like for it to do is continue to improve its action economy as it levels up and from the get go allow it to ignore attribute minimums on the feats that it can grab that way at least for a limited amount of time i can play an idiot who can still knock a person down or get rid of their weapon.

The other is I'm pretty sure number crunching will show unarmed combat is still a trap damage wise like it is with the monk. I dont need to keep match with the two handed fighter per se but since as written I'm not a tank I'd like to get just a bit more oomph from my bare hands.

Honestly if either one of those issues is fixed the class will be fine.

Part of the problem I see here is there seem to be two types of people that want to play swashbucklers at the moment.

One group wants the charismatic quipping lightly armoured fencer with all his ties to piracy romance rapiers and cutlasses they want the Errol Flynns and Jack Sparrows and maybe Sinbad when his enemies were claymation. They want to be able to do this not as a bard or rogue but as a full BAB frontliner. This character is dexterous. This character class is also kind of limited to this exact concept and mental image space.

The other group wants a dex based melee class that they can use to emulate the umpteen billion styles of combat where finesse is more valid then brawn. The knife fighter, stick fighter the unarmored iaijutsu duelist that there really is no support for under the current ruleset. this character *IS* Dexterous <note the different enunciation>. This character class could be a swashbuckler or any one of a dozen other things.

Its fairly obvious to me at this point that Paizo for whatever reasons has decided that the second group isn't going to get their thing and if by some chance they do It will not be using the swashbuckler as a vehicle to do so. Paizo has also made this game feel more like people are their character class. Fred the Fighter and Bob the Barbarian VS Fred the Begger Knight in service of the queen from a family to poor to afford a horse to send him <Their seventh son> off on so he learned to survive on foot and Bob the street urchin who learned as a boy the only way to keep the predators who hunted the cobblestones with fangs of iron duly gleaming in the flickering torchlight was to give into his seething fury drawn from his anger of the random chance of his social class. Now the Archtype rules both support this way of viewing things and help to make up for some of the limitations <I'm not a fighter I'm a Cad.> Neither approach is really better or worse then the other they're just different. It does however mean that if a class has a trope name then that class *is* the trope.

Neither of these groups are asking for these changes 'For teh min maxing' but because they have ideas in head space that they want to be able to use that rules space does not support. <Dexterous Two handed weapon fighting ? Not dumping a stat that is thematicly relevant to me but mechanicly useless ? Pshaw never>.

A few things that have to be kept in mind when dealing with d&d and it carries over to most 'Adventuring party' games ranging from this one to Shadowrun. the first one is Generalists suck. A character that is good at his 1 thing nearly all the time is better in a party than a character who is good at two things some of the time unless the party already has its guy for each task. The Swashbuckler is meant to take the 'Fighter' role. If the class cant fill this role then a sizable portion of gamers will be frustrated with it and find it unfun to play. It doesn't have to fill it in the same way but it needs to accomplish the same task with the same success rate. MC Frontalot and Ice-T are both rappers. They both Rap. They definitely do not approach it from the same way, and since both of them have fans who give them money both of them have accomplished their goal.

The Arcanist.

This class is an arcane caster and has all the baggage that comes with it and since this was a playtest we didnt add our usual notebook of houserules. When it comes to spellbook arcane casters you get a real big YMMV on their power level that depends entirely on how easy the GM makes it to acquire scrolls and spellbooks with janky busted ass spells. If every town has a shop smart shop magic mart sort of location the arcanist will wreck you kick your puppies and make you cry. Were going to go with our review of this class playtested old school arcanist because we really dont feel that the class lost anything it didn't get back in spades between versions.

Level the first. Hey its an arcane caster at level one does anyone really think this magic missile/burning hands/maybe mage armor jockey varies much from the others ? He doesn't. Moving on. Do not burn all your blood point things.. Your life will suck.

Level the fifth: Here ? Yeah still not much to differentiate them spell-wise RulesGnomes Icanhasscrollsyes? usage of WBL out performed FlavorGnomes brilliant idea of I set aside this much scroll munnies roll them up at random. Duh. Still it feels like a wizard who stole two bites of the sorcerers wheaties.

Level the Tenth and up: As level the fifth but the gap between optimized spells and unoptimized spells is now brutally apparent. It doesn't quite feel just wizardy any more as Sometimes it steals abilities from its sorcerer bloodline and it seems that its a better generalist then anything which I know is a well duh but until you play it its hard to get it. Itsm like it traded class abilities away for spell flexibility.

Player Views
RulesGnome: The spell for every niche made him sticky until it wasn't a level 20 diviner. Some of the sorcerer grabs were nice but there was no reason not to jump to a prestige full casting class asap
FlavorGnome: It was Kinda like that Old OK soda.. It had so much everything it didn't really taste like anything. I guess it cast spells better.
Girlfriend: Ugh.. Rulesgnome takes longer with his spells every new day now then with his stupid wizards.. I stab him while he sleeps so get us another hour of time actually playing.
Dbag: Its okay.. I'd still rather be a enchanter, necromancer or summoner wizard school/sorcerer bloodline though this class doesnt have the potential to have its foolish minions ruin its plans that I like.
Me: Um 'splosions ? No its not really very combat magey is it ? Party buffing ? Yeah bad ass at that.. But i want to *do* stuff not make doing stuff work.
GM: See girlfriends response.

** Not that I think they do or anything but RulesGnome is going to explain to me why the new abilities the class gets super duper do not suck.

VargrBoartusk wrote:

This is something in general that irks me about the Paizo take on duelist/swashbuckling classes. Light and 1-handed piercing weapons ? Cestus. morning stars, picks, and even some shields are precise and agile weapons whereas the war razor, scimitar, katana, dueling swords, and cutlasses however are beyond the scope of the classes abilities. Maybe if it were light and one handed sword types instead ? Ot a list of its own ?

You mean like some kind of 'dueling weapons' class?

Yeah.. isnt that a fighter weapon group or something already ? Though in the interest of opening it up to other ideas like escrima stick and knife fighters or some stone age spear uses and the like why not just make it all weapons while used in a single hand.. that lets you open hand or dual wield as you prefer.

This is something in general that irks me about the Paizo take on duelist/swashbuckling classes. Light and 1-handed piercing weapons ? Cestus. morning stars, picks, and even some shields are precise and agile weapons whereas the war razor, scimitar, katana, dueling swords, and cutlasses however are beyond the scope of the classes abilities. Maybe if it were lighe and one handed sword types instead ? Ot a list of its own ?