Wasteland Knight's page

A low AC tank is going to require damage mitigation, because the enemy will make more rolls than they don't.

Opportune Parry & Riposte.
Chop/Smash From the Air.
Deflect/Snatch Arrows.

Some sort of Damage Reduction and/or Miss Chance.

Probably the improved versions of save feats, so you can reroll failed saves... going to get hit enough that conditions WILL occur.

If you read the OP, this is exactly what the OP DOESN’T want. He wants a tank that’s easy to hit and has no misss chance or damage avoidance. Because that’s not fun for the GM! LOL

High AC? NO FUN!

Ability to parry? NO FUN!

Miss chance? NO FUN!

LOL

How do you make this class? You don’t. It’s not a mechanics problem, it’s a GM problem.

If two characters go into a combat, and one is successful because they avoid many attacks and the other is successful because they have a mountain of HP, why dies it matter? I don’t see any reason having a low AC but seriously high hp character is really a true difference.

This is a GM problem, not a mechanics problem.

There is no build that can be dominant in every encounter if the campaign includes a wide variety of diverse challenges.

If a GM is using a whiteboard approach of simply throwing generic monsters at PCs, roll for init and fight it out then the GM needs to make adjustments.

gnoams: I hear you.

High level play is such drudgery for a GM. You have to throw waves of monsters at them and pretend to smile when they come up with their amazing feat combos. Tanks or worse, monks with funky archetypes, are just impossible to hit by both weapon or spell. The only time you slow them down is with stuff that don't grant a save like Maze, Scintillating Pattern or Waves of Exhaustion, and then only momentarily for a round or two.

High level villains share the same hatred for heroes that GMs have. Therefore they try to catch the heroes with their pants down when they sleep at night. Or they hide from the Tanks and Monks and target the mages and priests and bards in the back row hoping those guys are not buffed.

It's hard to be a villain. It's worse to be a GM, as it is 'bad form' to truly take the depraved road a villain would take against hero-gods gunning for them.

In Pathfinder, the villains are like "The Boyz" taking on "Supes" that are gunning for them in premeditated organized raids.

Don't you want your players to succeed? I don't understand why a GM would be unhappy if players use their characters effectively and succeed?

The idea is to increase gm fun, so Swashbucklers are right out. Parry and riposte is even worse than having untouchable ac for gm frustration and deciding not to attack you.

I'm running Shackled City right now converted to PF and one of my players is a Swashbuckler. His character performs amazingly well as the "tank", is still just wearing a plain old Chain Shirt at 5th level.

I don't find the Swashbuckler Deeds to be "frustrating", nor do I base the decisions of various monsters or NPCs on my expectations of the character's performance.

Personally, I find the Swashbuckler more interesting on the table than a Tank who's main claim to fame is massive HP, but if one of my players wanted to play one I'd have zero issues.

Thanks!

I’m three sessions in running a PF1e game where I’m kitbashing together elements of Shackled City, Council of Thieves and Curse of the Crimson Throne.

I suppose this is the place to ask this question.

I thought at one point I read an adventure in Dungeon that starts off with the PCs falling through the floor of a tavern? If I’m remembering correctly, could someone pint me to the issue #?

Please cancel my Pathfinder Player's Companion subscription. Other subscriptions should remain unchanged. Thanks!

I'd strongly consider getting rid of Greater Spell Penetration and possibly even Spell Penetration from your feat list. Since this is a PFS character, you know from day one your level will cap at 12th. So for a few levels you'll be in the "zone" where you start seeing a lot more SR in foes, but You could consider slotting in Spell Penetration as your 11th level feat.

Are the Harrow cards sized to fit with 2.5" x 3.5" (66mm x 91mm) gaming card protectors? I'm considering using these in an introductory game for kids, where the chance of food/beverage spills is pretty high.

Absolutely not!

It was Josh Frost's preferance to not reskin, but it never made it into offical rules for good reason. There are lots of good reasons reskining is harmless in many cases and sometimes even required (read my Throaty Mermaid example).

And yes, I get and support some the need for GUIDELINES that allow GMs to disallow absurdities like reskinned lightsabers and phasor 'wands'. But pigs are reasonable.

I understand where you are coming from, as reskinning is a great tool for home games, when each GM can make the individual call.

But for a game like PFS, I don't know how well it would work, since one GM's wardog-to-pig reskin could be another's longswords-to-lightsabers. For a shared world game like PFS, once you break away from RAW and start allowing GM opinion, I think it can create more problems than it solves.

Awesome constume!

That sword looks awful sword-like. I thought that wasn't allowed?

I think it's a NERF sword with some spray paint.

Congratulations to Paizo! It's great to see a company who demonstrates such outstanding customer interaction achieve continued success. Well done.

I really like Lirianne. Great job!

I think things are ok the way they are. I feel lucky to get the free pdf and the discount.

I agree. I may not always be part of the first wave of .pdfs, but I don't think it's ever been more than a day or two until my order was processed. Among all the problems and issues I might face, complaining that someone else received a .pdf shortly before me seems rather unreasonable.

Why ordering on-line, regardless of price, PDF/Book bundling, and free shipping - quite frankly sucks:

I have yet to have Amazon not have an issue where what I order gets lost or misplaced during shipping.

Too often, shipped items get damaged.

My experience with online orders has been the exact opposite. I've received a monthly order from Paizo since the first adventure path and several years of Dungeon and Dragon magazine prior to that. Combined with dozens of individual book/minature orders from Amazon, Ebay, and other gaming sellers, I've had only a handful of orders ever go missing or show up damaged. In every case, I had no issues with obtaining a replacement order. Paizo has been the absolute best about this, which is why I have zero concern with receiving all of my Pathfinder books directly from them through the mail.

I can understand that some people don't like to order without first being able to look at their purchase, or don't care about PDF's. Those are individual preferences. But I can't agree that ordering on-line is a poor option because of the occasional lost or damaged orders.

Personally, I'm very curious as to hear the Paizo side of the story.

From what the campaign GM has stated, here, it sounds as if what the campaign page had on it was fairly benign, and while I'm certainly not a copyright expert, seemed to me at least, reasonable as personal use. Since it seems other people use Paizo art for campaign wiki/web use, the cease and desist just doesn't mesh with the Paizo I've come to see as very pro-customer. It makes me think their might be more to the story.

Suicide Mission.

If this was a home campaign, then I'd advise discussing the situation with the player and trying to find a compromiste. However, since it's PFS, as long as the character is a legal build and the player is following the rules, then there's absolutely nothing the GM can or should do. A legal character is a legal character.

I'm not invested in the Razor Coast in any way. Personally, I really thought this was an example of 'Going too far' on April Fool's day...This joke is NOT aimed at the product. It is aimed at those individuals who gave money up front in good faith. The product was not getting their hopes up. The customers that were hoping to finally see something for their trust are the ones that were targeted.

Yes, this little stunt also came across to me as inappropriate for April Fool's day joke. I suppose in one way it did "work", since it got me to visit the LPJ website. However, since now I've decided I won't be purchasing anything from LPJ, did it really have the desired effect?

Once more we see the inherent tension in a game about goodness and heroism that is also about stabbing things to death.

That is an excellent way to sum up this often recurring issue (although I do think in this particular instance it was as much about disruptive/antagonistice player behavior as character alignment). This also is the reason why many of the campaigns I now play in simply focus on stabbing things to death.

well the problem with the whole Broken concept is it can be very subjective...

But gaming is a very subjective experience. One person's "Broken" can be the same as another's "Nerfed". Just look here on the Paizo playtest boards, you'll find plenty of examples.

If a GM starts a campaign under the flag of "RAW", but then after a while starts making all sorts of changes I'd call shennanigans. But I also think a GM has the right to establish their houserules however they desire at the outset of the campaign, regardless of homebrew or published setting. If a particular houserule seems troubling, player's should have the right to bring this up for discussion. But if in the end the GM stands firm, then I think the player has only two options: live with it or move on and find another campaign.

All I can say in response is, even as 'just' a player, I put in more preparation time than anyone in my group, DM included.

Everything he has done thus far has been off the cuff, and that really makes it easy for him to thwart my every move. Just last week, I counted 6 feats on a CR4 monster. He had 'miraculous bonus feats' that countered my character's every move.

Imagine that!

This is what I'm talking about when I say RAW. The balance just isn't there without following the vast majority of RAW.

Time to find a new group ...

From reading your posts, I think there's more going on than just GM fiat vs. RAW. It sounds as if your player/GM relationship has deteriorated to the point of becoming purely confrontational instead of collaborative. Honestly, the best course of action might be for you to take a break from this particular GM's game.

I'm not trying to say your'e in the wrong. In fact, I think you're in the right. If the GM is going to make a major houserule change in mid-game, he at least owes you the opportunity to rebuild your character. That said, it's his campaign, and if he's standing firm on his ruling then you can either accept it or move on.

Moving out of the city is not really an option. We are playing Ptolus, so the city is the campaign.

What about the Sisters of Silence then?

Definitely unlucky... for having found such a bad GM.

I agree with KayYoss' breakdown of your GM. If this guy's been GM'ing for a short while, maybe it's worthwhile to have an out of game discussion and try to politely point out these problems and suggest solutions. But if he's been running games for any length of time, then it's absolutely, positively time to cut your losses and find a new game. The chances of any signficant change to the GM's way of running a game are really slim, and from my experience, you'll just be wasting your time. Time that could be better spent looking for a new game, or starting a low level game as a GM.

PFRG support also means it's something I'll look at when it's out. I was a player in a campaign that used the first ENWorld AP War of the Burning Sky. WotBS was a decent AP. Not quite the same level of quality as Paizo APs, but still an enjoyable set of adventures.

The plot is extremely basic: stop the rise of Orcus. It's a dungeon crawl in the purest sense of stringing together a series of encounters on a map. I found it derivative and uninspiring. I wouldn't put it anywhere near the level of SCAP, AoW or any other Paizo AP as far as presentation, plot or encounters. If you consider the AP's to be "A" module material, then I'd give Rappan Athuk a "C-".

Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes. While I greatly enjoyed the First Law trilogy and absolutely loved Best Served Cold, I'm not getting the same level of enjoyment from Heroes. I think larger number and more diverse POV's aren't keeping the story quite as focussed as previous Abercrombie novels. Still, an enjoyable read, and I'm hoping with crossed fingers that Logen Ninefingers/The Bloody Nine makes a return appearance.

A list of the Borders stores to be closed under the Chapter 11 filing.

Thanks for that link I was wondering if I'd lose my local Borders, but I'm glad to see it isn't part of the closures. I guess I'll just keep using my 40% off coupons until they shut the lights off for good.

Am I the only GM who doesn't want to screw over their players?

No, you aren't. As attested to by this thread, there are plenty of GM's who don't have an adversarial Me vs Players mentality. I believe the reason the posting seems slanted towards the Screw-the-Players type GM is that people tend to post about conflict and drama much more so than compromise and having fun.

When was the last time you read a post talking about how a GM and a Player had a disagreement but discussed it and came up a compromise that had everyone at the table moving forward having a great time gaming? Once in great while perhaps. While I rarely see posts about this, I observe it all the time in the campaigns in which I'm a player, but that's because I only play with GM's who are friends, who believe in everyone having fun, who communicate and who are willing to listen.

Player/GM conflict isn't something that can (or should) be solved by long discussions on a messageboard. It needs be solved by discussing it within the particular gaming group, but too often it seems people try to find an in game solution. For me, this type of behavior is a huge red flag.

Lets think about this from a storyline perspective.

AT SOME POINT a Ninja got the job of ganking a whole party.

Now given that this is a fairly experienced and high end master assassin, this guy would have spent every last waking minute using every available resource to learn everything about the party, and would have been observing (through various means) their movements, habits etc...

So yeah, a little Meta is fine - that Ninja would have planned this thing to a brutal tee - and would be very unlikely to have any surprises.

In general, I think most posters agree that any paid "assassin", regardless of class level, would have prepared as much as possible and then attacked when the party was least prepared. However, at some point, too much Meta-planning runs the risk of overshadowing fun. I

think the bigger point being made is the fact that a 107 point buy ultra-prepared 14th level Ninja accomplished a TPK isn't really an indication of the excessive power of the Ninja. The point is, and I agree with this myself, that virtually any class with such high stats and such good preparation/equipment would have the same outcome. So the OP's example has real little bearing on the relative capability of the Ninja.

Considering by mid level most parties will have access to a Handy Haversack, Bag of Holding and/or Efficient Quiver, keeping an archer stocked with mundane arrows really isn't much of an issue. I'm sure that there could be all sorts of special circumstances where it *might* become an issue, but for most part it's not really worth counting arrows once characters are out of the low levels.

There are several historical fiction novels/series I'd recommend for inspiration:

The Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell
The Oathsworn Series by Robert Low

A "viking" flavor suits itself extremely well to gaming, because the main goal of every Norse raider who went viking was simple, to gain as much treasure (and glory) as possible.

Awesome wrap-up to the Season 1 storyline. Now that I offically have enough free time to regularly peruse the boards I'm going to dive in to Season 2.

What exactly is the difference between a homo-erotic hug and a regular hug?

Amount of clothing and level of pre-hug body oiling.

It's a game balance thing. If elves (and dwarves, to a lesser extent) were done as they should be, then they would no longer be available as player races.

Exactly.

I once played in a homebrew campaign world where the GM took the idea of virtually immortal elves to it's logical conclusion. Elves were not allowed for PC's since due to their long life even the average elf would have at least 8 to 10 class levels. The half-elf race was reskinned to be "elf touched", where the PC had some faint elven blood in their family (so your great, great grandfather/mother might have been an elf). The elf race from the PHB was reskinned as "elf blooded", where the player would have much more elven blood in their family (grandfather/mother was an elf). It was an interesting way to treat the longevity of elves.

I'm playing a switch-hitter type Ranger in a Kingmaker campaign and it's working really well. I've been switching between a composite longbow and either a falchion or longspear. However, splitting your focus means more feats and this may prove taxing for an Inquisitor.

I can sum up a last straw moment I had in two words: Palomino Unicorn.

Here's the backstory - years ago myself and a few friends(briefly) played in a game run by a guy I'll call "Tim". His wife, I'll call her "Tammy", was a player in the game. Tim was always posting Gamers Wanted notices in the FLGS (this was the days before the interwebs), and he was having trouble keeping a group going. We chatted with him a few times at some in-store events we decided to give his game shot.

First game we meet his wife Tammy. The campaign was AD&D set in a homebrew world. Tammy's character was a homebrew race called something like "Elfling", which was basically like an elf but only better. And her character's class was also homebrew, it had a name I don't remember but it could best be described as a "Mystic Princess", which was like a figher/rogue/magic-user, but only better. New players were not allowed to run Elflings or Mystic Princesses, so we settled on the regular stuff.

Now that I am older and wiser, in the same situation red flags and sirens would be going off in my head and that would probably have been the last straw. But I was young and naive, so continued on in the campaign. Tammy liked her magic bling, and from time to time she'd drop not so subtle hints like "Tim, I would be really nice if my character had a magic staff that did X, Y, and Z.". And then later in the game we'd find as loot a magic staff that did X, Y and Z. But it wouldn't just be a regular staff, there'd be some qualifier like "only one of Elfling blood" could use it, so it obviously became Tammy's property as no one else could use it.

But the last straw came in maybe the second or third game session, when at the beginning Tammy mentioned "Tim, I'd really like a unicorn mount. But not just any unicorn...a Palomino Unicorn!". And sure enough, next encounter Tim described a forest clearing where a Palomino Unicorn appeared and signified by a touch of it's horn that it chose the Elfling Mystic Princess to be it's chosen rider. That was the last straw. We made some BS excuse, packed up early and never went back. 20 years later I'm still friends and occasionally game with some of my old friends who were also at the game or heard about it shorly after, and we still talk about the Palomino Unicorn.

Squidmasher wrote:

Or you could just cast Fireball or Lightning Bolt and not waste money on the bow...

Against a single target the bow does far more damage on average and doesn't waste your valuable spell slots for the day.

And damage from the arrows isn't subject to a Reflex save, useful in the case of targets with Evasion. It's definitely a huge investment in resources, but there have been times in campaigns where a +5 blah, blah, blah, blah bow would have been awful handy :)

The current campaign (I'm a player, not the GM) is a small party going thorugh Kingmaker with 3 PC's: Half-Orc Ranger, Elven Wizard and a Tiefling Rogue. We used to have a Bard as a fourth PC, but that player is taking a break. Since we ar few in number we tend to round out our adventuring band with NPC fighters and/or rangers. We're now at 5th level, and post battle healing is covered with wands but the lack of divine magic is starting to hurt.

Since both the ranger and rogue are very stealthy (maxed out Stealth plus a Cloak of Elvenkind for each character) we've had great success at scouting out our enemies and using hit and run tactics. When we've gotten pinned down in a toe to toe slugfest, it's been tough. Multiple NPC's have fallen and we've had one PC death and two very near brushes with the afterlife. There's some talk of expanding our company with cohorts via Leadership.

I'll answer the one I know:

Basically, it's the idea that having characters that are well-roleplayed and having characters that are mechanically sound is an either-or proposition and you can't have both at the same time.

Thanks for enlightening me! I don't think it's true, but at least now I know what it is :)

My current theory is that he and his GM are both on the same power trip, derived from some boilerplate rant that rages over at the Den.

A couple of questions from someone trying to make sense out of this trainwreck:

1. What is the the Den?

2. What is a "Stormwind Fallacy"?

I haven't been around enough to notice any mood shifting on the boards of late, but sight unseen, lemme take a guess...

"I'm on the vegetarian conservative atheist rastafarian!"

"I'm on the beef farming liberal who loves god and hates reggae!"

"Rules broken!"

"Rules fine!"

"Blah blah!"

"Blah Blah!"

"You're a troll!"

"Straw man argument! Plus a bunch of posturing four plus syllable words so you'll not think me dumb!"

"Ban the troll!"

"Free speech!"

"Lets have a beer at Paizocon."

"... Sounds good."

That about sum it up?

Spot on, except I've yet to see any conciliatory offers of a Paizocon beer summit.

As others have pointed out, there seemed to be very little of this vitriol prior to the 4e/3.5e split, when for a while the edition wars raged and then eventually calmed, but ever since the first playtest to my mind has been back on the rise. Recently, it seems as if there are a few bad apple posters who seem to be as focussed on stirring the pot as they are on debating the issue at hand.

Lately my impression has been messageboard postings are more antagonistic and vitriolic. It seems anytime someone wants to discuss "balance" or "rules", that drama quickly follows. Many of the longer threads require Ross Byers to stop in and remove some postings. Has anyone else noticed this trend, or is it just me?

Yes, I know this is an internet messageboard, and I shouldn't expect much, but for a long time I felt this board was different. You could have a discussion where posters completely disagreed, but the thread didn't descend into insults and snark.

In response to the Evil Lincoln thing.

1)I created the character because I like wizards and think I know how to play one effectively. This DM has said in the past that wizards are more powerful in his games because he thinks they're underpowered RAW. I wanted to impress the DM by playing an effective wizard (both rules-wise and roleplaying).

2)Your position seems to be how dare you expect the rules of the game to be followed or your spells to ever work? This is extremely puzzling.

3)While I will admit a certain amount of adversarialness, it's in my genetic makeup to be a perfectionist and to seek truth in all things, it has never risen to more than a gentleman's disagreement. No more with this DM than others I've had, including other members of the same group who do, btw, share my feelings about him. He is just notorious for being unable to see or be shown reason.

I thought Evil Lincoln had a good take on your situation and some excellent advice. After reading your response, I'm wondering if you were actually looking for advice on the situation or just affirmation that your DM was "wrong", and then by extension you're "right"?

As for the general discussion going on in this thread regarding GM interpretation of rules, it's not really a question of can or can't GM's make rules interpretations, but rather to what extent is everyone at the table comfortable? When I play or GM, I lean towards a RAW approach, reserving rules interpretations or houserules for exceptional circumstances.

However, I've played at tables before where the GM was constantly making modifications or interpretations to the rules. It wasn't my style and I wasn't enjoying the gaming experience, and in each case after some discussion with the GM I ended up moving on to a new game. However, just because I didn't enjoy it didn't make the GM "wrong", since in each case there were 3 to 4 other players who were enjoying themselves and had not problems with the constant GM calls on the rules.

Sorry, but I don't think it's possible to run an AP without a GM. I've used a dungeon generator and encounter charts before with some friends to create simple dungeons without a GM, but the complexity (and not to mention intrigue) in an AP really requires a GM.

Its almost as if he didn't read the Core book and just made up a character from online resources, thinking that the rules were generally the same as 3.5.

Does he even own a Pathfinder Core book? Something I've noticed in the past few years is people show up to play in a campaign without even owning (or reading) a Core rulebook. I can understand if someone's showing up because they've never played Pathfinder and want to give it a shot, but if you're showing up to be part of a 6 part Adventure Path, you should own and have read the Core Rulebook.

A Man In Black wrote:

... then APG will be the last book I buy.

That would at least save the rest of us from your diatribes. Thus, I'm in favor of this option.

+1000

A friend of mine once gathered all his D20's around a D20 that was being particularly and smashed bad the offending die with a hammer. He figured that the witnesses would learn a valuable lesson from what they'd witnessed.

I too have found the occasional public execution an excellent tool for improving dice performance. I'm sure it's a techique that's tought in Evil Overlord 101.