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I've been trying to find a comprehensive list of ways to pull off a sneak attack (particularly for a ranged rogue, who struggles to flank). I haven't found one, so I figured I'd post the list I have so far. Links to any list others have posted would be very helpful (sorry if this is duplicate information!). I'm trying to keep this list limited to core Paizo (no 3rd party), as that's my limit when playing.

You won't sneak attack all the time, but it helps to know your options.

Sneak Attack Limits
-Target must have some effect that denies his dexterity bonus to AC (see below)
-Ranged sneak-attack only works within 30'
-You must be able to see target well enough to pick out vitals. Enemy cannot be benefiting from concealment, for example.
-Enemies immune to precision damage are immune to sneak attacks. These include Elemental, Incorporeal (except vs Ghost Touch), Ooze and sometimes Protean (actually, 50% chance to ignore).

Target Is Denied Dexterity Bonus
-Hasn't acted yet in combat (surprise round, you have a higher initiative, etc)
-Flanked (typically melee only, rare exceptions e.g. Unwitting Ally).
--Creatures immune to flanking include Ooze, Elemental and Swarm.
-Attacked by hidden/invisible sneak-attacker
--NOTE: Once you're spotted or no longer invisible, no more sneak-attacking. This means a full attack only gets 1 sneak attack in if the invisibility spell wears off after the attack or you fail the stealth check to stay hidden.
-Certain status effects, including: Stunned, Blinded, Cowering, Pinned
-Otherwise Helpless/Unconscious (sleeping, tied up, etc)
-Running (without Run feat)
-Squeezing through a space half its size
-Targeted by a successful Feint (typically melee only)
-Balancing (Grease spell, awkward catwalk or platform, etc)

That's not getting into any specific strategies for creating these opportunities (a list which is long indeed, and generally involves your party), but it hopefully covers the general bases. Am I missing any critical scenarios?

Thanks. I would GM a Pathfinder game, except I'm already running a Mayhem RPG campaign and the cleric is running a game of Numenera. Last time I tried running a D&D campaign it was 4th edition, and this same GM did everything in his power as a player to munchkin the hell out of the system... so I don't know where he gets off making us out to be the bad guys. :(

And yea, 3.0 and 3.5 were not any better balanced than Pathfinder by any means. Rose-tinted glasses combined with what he calls the "gentlemen's agreement" to not abuse the system are probably why he remembers 3.0 being better.

One friend is seriously considering leaving the game, and I'm losing interest in it too. We may simply bow out together.

I agree, you do need those encounters that remind you "holy crap, I can launch fireballs from my hands and totally incinerate those things! That was awesome!". The treadmill of increasingly powerful foes always matched perfectly to your abilities can get very tiring, and very disillusioning. There's less satisfaction in leveling up and becoming exponentially more powerful if you don't get to revisit your old pond and incinerate the amoebas there that used to give you trouble. :D

"Hello Merlo. When you last knew me, I was too weak to face you..." *bursts into flames and summons elementals* "...BUT NOW I AM MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE!" That sort of occasional experience is rejuvenating to the soul. Wholesome, even.

Likewise, sometimes you need to face a real challenge, something that strains your abilities or forces you to run away, to remind you of your limits and give you a goal of something to eventually overcome and overpower. Someday you're going to make even THAT THING bow to you.

I personally intend to cast flesh to stone on it, then use the resulting statue as part of the components for a stone golem, one of dozens that will guard my palace halls, ever vigilant against threats to my absolute rule...

...but I digress.

Neat discussion.

To the original poster:
Thank you! I'm very pleased at your attitude in this, even though you seem to be taking some flak for it. I like a GM who regards players with respect and doesn't want to just shut them down or mistreat them, but ALSO isn't willing to be walked all over.

I power-game often, and I've GM'd a few times. I've seen abuse (and sadly been an abuser) on both sides in the past, and learned from it. It's important to have a GM who is willing to work with you and treat you right. If you overstep a line or cause problems, some GMs will cause rocks to fall and kill your character outright. On the first infraction. You can guess how fun that is for the player. On the other extreme, some GMs don't lay down fair ground rules, and the game just doesn't work right when the players are not challenged or kept under a basic level of threat.

What I'm hearing from you and other posters is this:
1) Player died, didn't like it, and wants to not die again. Stealth is his new silver bullet against this threat.

2) He has min-maxed his stealth to an insane degree. Nothing is able to beat his stealth roll. He's sneaking and sniping with impunity.

3) He's getting fairly cocky (and maybe condescending to you and/or the campaign?) about how "invincible" he now is. This is not healthy. It's disrupting the storytelling, the other players (?), and you. It feels abusive to the GM, players and rules.

4) You want to resolve the abuse, but without mistreating the player. Rocks falling and killing him is unfair, as is using encounters specifically designed to outright invalidate his build.

5) There's some discussion of how stealth works, but that is being resolved. You have some new tools now, and if you've been too lenient on the rules you can fix that.

6) You can modify encounters to challenge him better, but without invalidating him (or increasing difficulty for the other players). The occasional enemy that can smell him out, see past his stealth, etc will mix it up, but not every enemy will do this.

7) Roleplay your creatures. When he shoots a deer, the rest of the herd flees at high speed (he would be hard-pressed to keep up with them and stay stealthed); shoot a bison, and the herd may charge (and stealth doesn't prevent trampling). Likewise, shooting humans, orcs or other creatures may provoke a variety of responses: running and hiding, charging/attacking, flaming and smoking him out, sending dogs or casting spells to find him, etc. Let some NPCs escape to spread word of the threat, so that some future encounters will be a little more ready for him.
And the BBEG isn't going to just stand there and take pinpricks until he dies of it. Few creatures would. If he doesn't leave or take cover, he may charge into the foliage and start a mass search & burn campaign, or do something else that the rogue can't deal with. He may just leave and retire into his underground den or stone fortress, with a nice shiny series of traps guarding the door and other entrances. This is a double-win: if the rogue doesn't notice the traps, that creates a situation he could be hard-pressed to get out of with stealth alone; if he disables the traps, then he's properly using his rogue for more than stealth, and broadening his horizons (this is a good habit to continue to nurture, until he gradually expands out of being a one-trick pony).

8) Talk to the player. If he's showing a lot of attitude, this needs to be dealt with by you, but maturely. Maintain the moral high ground. In terms of his min/maxing being disruptive to the story, if the additions above are not fixing the problem, talk to him about it. Often players and the GM can talk on grounds of mutual respect, with the shared goal of playing a fun game and telling a good story. If he won't play ball, then you can use the tactics discussed above to increase the pressure on him. It's fair game.

9) He's laughing it up now, but in a few levels this isn't going to work so well anymore. Enemies enjoy higher perception, and have more neat toys that get around even great stealth (even greater invisibility fails vs tremorsense or true seeing). It may be fine to let him have his heyday for another session or two (with some damping from the suggestions and rules clarifications above). After all, snipers are terrifying in real life for a reason... but people don't just stand there and take it. Between the NPCs' efforts to find him and his diminishing returns with growing level, he's eventually going to realize he's min/maxed himself into a corner. You can generously allow him to rebuild his character if you like, but with a gentleman's agreement that he won't be abusive when he does so.

But if he doesn't change his build too much (which I think would be a good thing), it may be a lot of fun for both of you if he's gained a reputation for his actions, which could both aid and haunt the party in the future. Living through long-term repercussions and creating new chapters through player actions can be a lot of fun, and increase the immersion the party enjoys.
Example: He's approached in town by a group who suspects he's the sniper. They have an offer for someone of his... talents. It will be very challenging, but the reward for success is very tempting.
Example: A price is put on the head of the sniper who killed [so and so]. Many adventurers are interested in collecting (and he may soon have many enemies hunting him). But nothing says he couldn't take the job himself and go "hunting" for the culprit (assuming he hasn't been identified as the sniper yet)...

10) I prefer gentleman's agreements over hard lines and hostilities, but sometimes you get that player who's way too busy pelvic-thrusting his way to self-obsession in front of a gem-studded mirror to ever look away and reason with you. Sometimes you have to get tough and lay down the law.

That might mean ruling against him in the rules of stealth or available source books; it might mean introducing encounters that inhibit or disable his abilities (either occasionally or often, until he's willing to play ball); or it might mean having NPCs react in a way that puts him in a lot of danger. There are a lot of ways though to remind him that he's not invincible, and any illusion of being untouchable is just that: an illusion. Even players who are perfectly within the rules with insane power abuse (see the discussions about crazy-powerful spells) have to deal with rule 0 and rule 1, which are in the book specifically to allow the GM to put sane limits on what happens and stop the game from collapsing in on itself. When all else fails, you can still salvage the situation.
But! It usually doesn't come to that.

Good luck, man!

edduardco:
Normally intelligence is detached from skill points, except in the case where a class enjoys having intelligence as its core stat. It's reasonable to contrast the sorcerer's skill points with those of the fighter, but the wizard is unreasonably skilled in comparison. Wizards don't compete with rogues, but they do well against many other classes in total skill points because they already have a high intelligence (while most other classes won't). There are some classes that are able to take exception to this without major losses, but most others boost their Int at great cost to their core stats.

So it's not accurate to say Wizard and Fighter are on the same footing in terms of skill points. It's just not being honest to ourselves when the default wizard will have 6+ per level and the default fighter will have 2 or 3.

colemcm:
I'm not keen on adding more rules to the already over-rules-burdened maneuvers, but I get your intent. It would be nice if the player could avoid some OAs using, say, intelligence or wisdom. Or even dex? Or a feat that covers all maneuvers. But it probably should not add much to the complexity of trying a maneuver, or require that the player sink too many resources (e.g. feats or stats) to use it effectively. Maneuvers are already a mess of rules and are costly to specialize in for their effects, and that's when you're fighting enemies they'll work against. ;) All too often, enemies laugh at the poor fools who try maneuvers because of the way CMD is calculated.

For avoiding the OA: Maybe make a basic dex/int check vs opponent's wisdom? Might be too simple though, and heavily favors certain characters on one side or the other.

Note that there are also weapons which overcome the OA issue for specific maneuvers, though that does restrict the player's weapon choice a lot. If the maneuver feats were reworked the way we were discussing pages back, we might not need any special OA bypass rules?

I argue that you can't separate intelligence, particularly with the wizard vs fighter comparison because it consistently matters a ton. Wizards are very skillful mages, fighters are rarely skill-blessed martials. But anyway...

I do agree that Pathfinder doesn't lend itself very well to varying character creation. It's very much a package deal: you get a bunch of features in a bundle called a class and there's not a ton of mix & match. But it's still lots of fun if you go into it knowing this. And there's a lot you can do with dabbling across classes and with your feat & spell selection.

But the martial and caster disparity is troubling. Improving martials is what we're here to figure out.

The fighter and wizard do NOT get the same number of skill points. Remember, Intelligence is the wizard's core stat, so it will generally be very high. A wizard is likely to have 6+ skill points per level. Plus more for favored class or human if he takes those options.

The fighter? Well, if he's going with 13 Int for certain feats, he'll enjoy 3 per level (plus any for human and/or favored class, if he takes those). The fighter often has little incentive to put more points into Int, especially if he's stretched thin between strength and either Con, Dex or Cha (depending on his focus).

Many games claim that learning spellcasting is incredibly complex and time-consuming, and thus spellcasters enjoy fewer points for skills than other classes normally do. Martial characters supposedly have more time to expand out. However, in D&D they said "oh well, fighter training is extremely hard! And fighters get all these feats. Yippie for them! Why, they don't need any skills at all, they just stab things. And if anybody gets uppity about it, we'll just swat them in the ears." (read in the style of Zero Punctuation)
;)

But spellcasters like sorcerer have 2+int and don't necessarily have a high int score, right? Well... here's the problem: they have spells. The range of effects available with skills wilt in embarrassment when compared to the breadth and utility of spells. Especially as levels rise. So it's fitting that a spellcaster has so few skillpoints. It's... odd... that a martial character like fighter has so few. In balance terms, it makes no sense at all.

Strength is someone's physical force and power. This is the ability to swing a sword or hammer powerfully enough to smash through the opponent's armor, lift heavy objects, and jump and climb effectively (as this involves moving the weight of your body under abnormally difficult circumstances).

Constitution, on the other hand, is a matter of health and endurance. This is your ability to endure pain and injury, resist disease and poisons, survive heat and cold, and push yourself beyond your normal physical limitations.

One way to imagine strength is as an anaerobic task: you're swinging a sword powerfully, but in an instant. A high constitution is more about aerobic tasks like endurance running.

A spry and physically weak person may nonetheless have the constitution of a lion, surviving life-threatening injuries, resisting diseases, and pushing himself to keep going long after the bodybuilder has passed out or given up.

Dexterity is one's agility and quickness. It covers the macro-tasks like dodging, wielding a blade with precision, and performing acrobatically challenging tricks. However, it also covers micro-tasks like precise manipulation with your fingers, for disabling traps or applying poison.

Someone who is not very physically strong, but who is very clever, dexterous and enjoys a strong constitution, is a nice contrast to the typical bodybuilder warrior played in D&D-like games. This is someone who can't lift a castle gate over his head and who doesn't rely on brute force to land a blow or overcome obstacles. Instead, precision, agility and cleverness get him through most situations, and his ability to survive injury get him through those that backfire.

Wisdom covers intuition, awareness, and mental resistance. A high-wisdom character is in touch which his sense of intuition, his deity, etc. He's perceptive, notices things around him. And he has a high willpower against being threatened or controlled. There's also a lot of emphasis on personal and imparted experience, favored over book smarts, clever ideas, and theories.

Someone may have a low intelligence but high willpower, meaning they don't put a lot of stock in book smarts, but instead feel their way though the world. They trust intuition, divine inspiration, and their own senses to guide them... They rely on feeling and experience, not learning.
And a high-wisdom character won't back down from something she's set her mind to accomplish, and won't be controlled or forced to back down. Even given physical weakness and fragility, they will still doggedly pursue their goals. Willpower: mind over matter. Think of the movie Gattica, where he is facing severe physical problems and major discrimination, but he never gives up and won't be threatened. He out-swims his brother not by strength or constitution, but by the will to keep going even in the face of exhaustion and death. "This is how I got so far; I never saved anything for the way back!".

Intelligence is a combination of book smarts, cleverness, and personal brilliance. An intelligent character has a wide breadth of learning to inform his actions, and ha can come up with clever ideas on his own. Intelligence imparts the ability to think very deeply about both pragmatic and esoteric problems. Even in a situation where another character would have given up long ago, the intelligent character may enjoy the mental challenge (just as a strong, healthy character would enjoy a physical challenge).

A high-intelligence character with little wisdom is likely brilliant, but unwise. Imagine someone with amazing ideas and cleverness, but he frequently cuts himself with his razor-sharp mind. Brilliance, un-tempered by wisdom, is a very fun trope to play IMO.

Charisma is one's presence, force of personality, and ability to direct people, animals and the forces of nature to your will. Charisma is not the same as beauty: a beautiful person may have no ability to influence others, while a scarred half-orc can enjoy the presence and force of personality to direct the whole town as soon as he walks in. In D&D, Charisma has nearly all social skills wrapped together in one place (save for a couple which go to wisdom, like sense motive). Other games like to split it into several attributes.

A high intelligence but low charisma is the brilliant doctor or scientist who doesn't know how to interact with others: he's shy; he doesn't know how to get people's attention or make small talk; he has trouble getting people to give him what he wants; he may be socially abrasive; he may send the wrong nonverbal signals; etc. So he has trouble getting funding for his research, convincing the peasants that his tesla tower won't in fact destroy the world, or getting his patients to stop gnawing at their bandages.

High wisdom but low charisma indicates someone who is very aware, very present, but not very social. He notices things about people, understands what is happening, catches body language and intonations, etc. But he doesn't care to engage: for all his perception and intuition, he's not very good at small talk, making demands, or smoothing situations over. Imagine the ranger sitting in the back of the bar, watching carefully. Or a wallflower who, if you talk to him, has deep insights into what's going on. Or the cleric who understands what has the peasants so worried about that tesla tower, but not the force of personality or presence needed to calm them before they charge the laboratory.

I hope that helps ya. :D

I think a T-rex fighter in armour would get the same rolled eyes and chuckle as a dragon in full plate.

Really dm? You had to have that extra AC?

Yea but my T-Rex grants wishes (but only if you wish for more T-Rexes).

Edit: You could always have living armor, such as a Dullahan, wearing full-plate. Which itself is enchanted with intelligent self-awareness and thus wears full-plate, to protect itself from taking blows for the Dullahan. Let's not get into what the sword is doing.

Hmm... A T-Rex Fighter with Armor Training, Full Plate, Vital Strike, and Lunge. Awwwwww-Yeeeeaaaaah!
(Also known as casting Devour Person at-will)

But a T-Rex that can cast Wish? *shudder*

More seriously:
Yea, casters are generally a lot more serious a threat to the party. Partially because magic is flat out better with its variety and effects, and partially because NPC casters often don't have to ration their spells as carefully as players do (they can nova all they want because they're not playing for the long term -- often for just one encounter, unless the GM is playing them well). Also, casters can be specifically tailored to make use of spells that just pick the party apart (curse, dominate person, or whatever else will exploit the party's weaknesses), especially if the GM is feeling evil or the enemies have had a chance to analyze and strategize against the PCs. Harder to do that with an enemy fighter NPC.

Sir Thugsalot:
That's pretty cool. It's a very specific case that other martials have trouble living up to, but really cool nonetheless. I like survivor builds, especially when they start hoarding resources to resurrect the party members after what should have been a TPK.

How does he hold up to non-ray spells that require a fortitude save though? I suspect spellcasters can still cause him serious problems? Maybe not.
(edit: I'm trying to think about how I, as a GM roleplaying the monk's nemeses, would try to challenge the monk and put him back in danger)

But in martial vs martial or vs rays he's obscenely well-protected.

I wanted to share something from our GM, who is already worried about the power creep in Pathfinder:

One thing to consider in powering up martials is the inevitable backlash: Everything you give to a martial character in Pathfinder will inevitably find itself in Pathfinder monsters and intelligent enemies. Our GM is frequently dismayed at the wide variability of encounter difficulty. One CR7 battle is trivial, another CR7 battle nearly TPKs because of only a couple lucky hits (with very high damage) or other problems for the party.

Our group fighting a T-Rex was facing near-one-shot kills if it managed to bite someone other than the fighter or barbarian, as only the fighter or barbarian could hope to absorb a hit and live (and never a critical hit). If the rogue or cleric was even slightly injured, one bite could end him. This was the T-Rex without Vital Strike.

Our GM says compared to D&D3, Pathfinder has a lot more swing in its battles. With ease things can rapidly and violently slide from manageable to disastrous, based heavily on what the dice do instead of what the players do. Monsters (and perhaps players) have so many feat slots and bonuses powering them up that the balance of combat is very hard to maintain, and the players are kinda pinched on the types of builds that will even be effective. At higher levels you need a certain accuracy to hit and contribute, period. Your AC must be "this high" to ride this ride (or you should cast displacement), or else you're going down on the first round of arrows. Don't even try combat maneuvers against many foes.

If you add new toys and features to player martials, then enemies will likely get all the same buffs unless you deliberately resolve to not give that to them. This includes normal monsters like a T-Rex, and intelligent enemies using the fighter or barbarian class template. And with new buffs on each side, the combat swing gets more and more unmanageable. Further, if players are owning everything they meet, increasingly dangerous monsters must be introduced to challenge them, and the fickle dice become more powerful than strategy. Power creep frequently means player deaths and TPKs are a greater risk.

Our GM has actually considered powering down some monsters or increasing their CR, because the way they work in practice is very different from the way they look on paper at first glance.

That's how our GM sees it, anyway, and I wanted to share (I think I agree a lot with the concern). Hopefully I don't get too heavily flamed for it. :)

Lamontius:
That's where the bluff bonus comes in.

It's important to be able to talk big when size matters. ;)

Ilja wrote:

So how come noone mentions the risk of onyxes running out?

Maybe because it's a third-string limiter on undead: the first being the ability to cast the requisite spells (which disqualifies most people right there), and the second being the HD limit (I actually use limits in my game, but whatever). In any case, the onyx isn't the main limitation in the rules. Lead on the other hand requires no skill, has no limits, and is nearly free.

Lead-lining a room will still take a craft skill (or a team of artisans that you can kill later). Fabricate tends to require a craft skill too, if you want to make a thin, uniform sheet of lead that doesn't have uneven/thin spots or holes that could compromise protection.

But in the end, this just means that scrying is not the all-powerful, all-seeing eye that people expect. There are simple countermeasures people can take, if only they would. In our world, a strong password is also important, but how many people don't have one on their accounts and computers? But Secret Evil Inc. probably does have extensive protection, especially if they've been burned in the past.

Still, there are lots of soft points in an organization, modern or medieval. The minions on patrol outside the castle are probably scry-able. As are the supply wagons and support crew that visit the castle every 2 weeks, unless those too have been heavily warded. And sometimes what you can't see is quite informative, telling you someone wanted to protect something.

Eventually someone will let slip something, if you know where to look and who to talk to. But it will often involve more than sitting at home looking into a silver mirror, hoping to find answers without moving.

Polymorph any object? :P

Fabricate is 5th level, vs Polymorph Any Object at 8th. Both are ways to ensure you have needed materials for the cost of a spell slot and some rock or other slag to transform. Probably other spells are similar to these, too. So from 9th level onward, lead scarcity isn't necessarily a blocking issue anymore (though GM can probably still intervene to some degree for campaign circumstances).

Lamontius:
"Pathfinder pouch" refers to the backpack and not the codpiece?

More seriously:
I suspect most people don't wear lead-treated clothes, even if they're affordable and relatively non-toxic, for the same reason that most people don't wear tin-foil hats, or bundle up for winter weather at the beach. Or install a firewall and antivirus on their computer. Or use strong passwords, etc.

Most people aren't worried about being scried, or they don't realize it's important and preventable. But the king with many enemies, or the hunted criminal, will be wearing it as one of several overlapping layers of protection (including anti-scry spells and magic items, and safe rooms where he can go and not be watched). And you can bet that any self-respecting vampire or lich will lead-line his coffin/sarcophagus/phylactery/tomb/pets/everything else. There are some places or things you don't want anyone finding with a common spell. ;)

Though sometimes a "no" is more informative than a "yes", especially for an adventuring party wandering around examining things. Why would this one coffin have so much protection? Or, Why can't I see into that room? What's going on in there?

1. If you put the adventure on a timer, you're basically telling the PC wizard to scry ahead and teleport the party to the final encounter right away, since they clearly can't afford to waste a lot of time slogging through unnecessary encounter after encounter after encounter. There are ways around that, but sooner or later you realize that, instead of making divination- and teleport-proof magic ubiquitous and free, it's easier to fix those tactics by rule, if you don't want them used. Something as simple as "one foot of stone blocks [teleportation] and [scrying] spells will do it," but that's a RULES change. (P.S. You might put stronger limits on wind walk, too).

Actually I recommend using more story-oriented fixes than that to limit teleporting straight to the BBEG. Remember, it's a lot to say that the players already know who's bad and where to set their goal, even with scrying. Unless they've spent the last 2 days/weeks/months/years dutifully scrying on the foe (assuming the foe hasn't taken anti-scry measures), then the players could easily be mislead by circumstantial evidence, lies by other parties, or no evidence (my gaming group calls these "wild assumptions", which gives them an air of legitimacy).

If the party teleports into someone's castle because they're supposedly nefarious people doing nefarious things (or so says that one elf they talked to), then killing everyone there and looting the room could have certain consequences. For example, they just killed someone innocent and unimportant, or at the very least they're now confident that they succeeded when really they've missed the true threat, and they've possibly helped the BBEG knock out a competitor or the party's only true ally.

There's more to intermediate encounters than just waves of annoying, devoted minions the party has to slog through to reach their boss. That's a very linear approach: The boss is at the top of that tower, now get walking. If instead you just drop the party "naked in the woods" with little to go on, then that opens up many more possibilities for why they're having these intermediate encounters in the first place. On the long way there, the creatures they meet, parley, or attack could have information, necessary items, etc that may be necessary for success.

And once the players do have a clear target or destination, that may not make it wise to just blink in and start blasting. For example: The foe may have obscenely powerful summoned demons on his side, who will wipe the party clean if they just teleport in blindly... but they learn how to cut the 300-meter-wide summoning circles surrounding the towers first, to unsummon the demons.
Another example: teleportation may trigger a trap which deals 10d6 damage to each teleporting creature, then redirects the teleport to a random plane (per person) if they fail a Will and Reflex save. Blindly leaping in isn't often a winning strategy.

And all this is after they discover the BBEG has taken some basic measures against scrying so that he can't just be listened to or targeted (but thankfully, some of his minions outside the lead-lined castle have not... loose lips sink ships). Scrying can tell you a lot, but not everything. Sometimes you have to show up in person and talk to, mind control, kill, threaten, steal from, or otherwise interact with something that isn't the BBEG.

Lead and Scrying:
I have a problem with declaring stone as the universal anti-scrying tool. It's too plentiful and common, literally everywhere. Every mundane creature that can cobble together a hut made of rocks -- ranging from kobolds to dwarves to displacer beasts hiding in a cave -- now has automatic and unintentional anti-scrying as a simple feature of their dwelling. That's a big problem, bigger than the economics of lead. Also, assuming that powerful forces couldn't procure enough lead to thinly line every room in their castle is assuming an awful lot about their financial resources , connections, and conviction.

*Lead is not rare, even in a medieval society. Not as common as iron or copper, but not rare. It's easy to refine, mold, etc and has been used since ancient times. It's too soft for making tools and weapons (except slingshot bullets, where it's valued for its density), so you're not competing with weapons dealers for ingots. It's used instead in art and in every day durable items, like pewter mugs. And in sling bullets.

It was a big problem when we all realized it was dangerous to the human body, because it was just so darn plentiful and useful.

But in terms of safety, remember people drink from pewter mugs and some bathe in lead tubs. Lead sheeting could be under the wall surface, embedded and unseen but still protecting. Lead paint doesn't need to be the exposed surface (and below I'll calculate for .1" thick lead lining).

*Leaders even at medium levels have great enough financial resources and connections that lead lining fits comfortably within their interior decorating budget... right along with those skull candles and that snake tail whip trap they installed to impress visiting dignitaries (read: sacrifices). At mid-level people are making statues of solid gold and fitting them with expensive magic gems that vaporize the living, so a few wagonloads of lead ingots won't be outside of their power to acquire. And they're the bad guys: theft, slave labor, etc are free. Plus magic can fabricate the stuff en-mass!

But for an example, let's assume sling bullets are made of lead. That should give us a baseline for magic-fabrication prices. And bullets are plentiful -- after all, they're ammo. For 1 sp I get 5 lbs of lead. If lead weighs about 708 lbs per cubic foot (source), then 1 cubic foot will cost me 141.6 sp. Let's say I must cut or pound this to the right thickness of 0.1 inches (I arbitrarily picked this thickness, so correct me if this is too generous or stingy). I can slice that cubic foot 12/.1 times to produce 120 .1" sheets. (please correct me if I'm flubbing my math) Or I can just ask my wizard friend fabricate it that way.

TL;DR: This means scry-proofing my house costs 1.18 silver per square foot. A 10' cubed room is 600 sq feet of surface to cover on all sides, costing about 71 gp. A paranoid level 1 fighter could scry-proof his bedroom in his parent's basement and probably still have money for a sword and light armor.

How much area do I need to cover to keep my evil schemes secret, and how much money do I have available for such tasks? Even if I want to go the extra mile and scry-proof my entire castle instead of select rooms, I'm not sure cost is gonna stop me at mid to high levels. Nor will availability -- after I've finished repeatedly molesting the economy (muahahaha) I'll just start magically fabricating the stuff.

*If a thin sheet of lead provides personal privacy (dude, I'm peeing here!), protection from being caught doing things that have legal consequences ("gee Bob, if the king's spies saw us experimenting with creating negative energy-exuding undead fleas with the bubonic plague and laser eyes, we'd be in a lot of trouble; it's a good thing they're not here"), protection from enemies that want to plot an attack vector or single out targets, and the ability to speak and act freely in one's own domain... AND lead is commonly known for these properties... then YES, that king, duke, lich, illithid, dragon, sorcerer, commander, wizard, etc is going to procure all he/she needs. That might mean buying, that might mean magically fabricating. But they're going to do it; they'd be fools not to.

There are times when even a rich enemy (or player) might have trouble procuring enough lead (bad economy and materials for fabricate spell just ran out), and there are enemies and players that don't have enough money for those kinds of measures. There are many enemies that don't realize or care about the risk of scrying. But lots of enemies WILL make the effort, and most of those will succeed. Don't trivialize lead. :D

And all of this is ignoring the spells that protect specifically against scrying. Lead is the "poor man's scry protection" and it's stationary; those with mid- or high-level magic can have the equivalent of a moving sphere of lead keeping the party safe all day, so long as they stay together (and the foe doesn't beat their DCs -- that too is important).

I'm not too worried about lead toxicity: people are worried about much greater threats in this world on a daily basis, and a healer can fix a long list of diseases that probably includes lead poisoning.

BTW, has anyone speculated on the type of radiation that would be blocked by "1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt"? (see Detect Magic) I'm wondering if arcane and divine magic auras are the equivalent of alpha, beta, gamma, infrared, radio, etc radiation. ;) Is that wand of cure light wounds I'm carrying close to my crotch giving me cancer?

One way to "consolidate" feats for specific classes only is to assign keywords to feats, such as "maneuver" for Improved Trip & friends. Then classes like Fighter and Monk might have Maneuver Master as a class feature:

Maneuver Master
You make take the "Improved" versions of any maneuver feats even if you do not meet the prerequisites. If you have the Improved feat, you also gain the Greater feat automatically when your BAB is 6 or higher.
---

Other feat chains could be handled similarly. In an even more generic approach, each feat chain could have the "chain" keyword. Then classes like Fighter could have a feature that lets him automatically gain all subsequent feats in the chain as long as he a) has the base feat and b) meets the BAB requirement (ignoring other requirements).

I also like the idea of feats like Combat Expertise or stats like Intelligence not being required, but giving bonuses when present.

So a third idea would be to create class features that automatically give the character those the first feat in a chain as bonus feats (ignoring all requirements), plus additional feats down the chain as his BAB + intelligence mod reach a certain level. For example, the fighter chooses Step Up as one of his class chains, and gains that feat for free. When his Int Mod + BAB reach 4 (or 6?), he gains Step Up and Strike automatically (this can happen very early for an intelligent fighter). Following Step would happen somewhere in between.
Then the fighter would pick one Feat Chain at 1st level, and an additional chain at levels 4, 8, 12 and so on. This is similar to how he gets new weapon trainings at various levels, and the ranger gets new favored enemies.

Blah. Unorganized brain dump. Sorry.

Ilja:
Agreed. Feats need to be more condensed, and core class powers need to be less dilute and more defining.

I've always balked at things like the ranger's Favored Enemy, because I feel it's a minor bonus that will affect him a small fraction of the time (unless he knows it's going to be an undead or kobold-centered campaign). The fighter's weapon focus is flat-out better, because the fighter can control his weapon choice better than the ranger can control which enemies he fights.

But the fighter is as bare-bones as classes come, relying totally on feats. The other martials aren't too far behind. Even the ranger relies on selecting several feats for his combat style. Those feats need to be potent, meaningful. Or they should be replaced by (or paired with) class features that do better.

Where and how we draw those lines is tricky though. :(

Jess Door:
Sounds like a good start.

Feat chains I want combined:

*Step Up: This should auto-scale with level instead of taking 3 feats to get the effect.

*Disruptive: The Spellbreaker etc feats in the chain might be appropriate to pull into one feat.

*Combat Maneuvers: The Improved and Greater for each combat maneuver shouldn't have the feat tax of Combat Expertise. Improved and greater should merge into a single scaling feat, but I'm okay keeping them as separate feats for each maneuver for specialization. A more generic feat should make the player better overall at combat maneuvers (+2 to all), while the Improved-Greater feat for each type gives special bonuses when you trip or grapple a foe. Right now a player is crazy to invest in multiple maneuvers, since the feat count is large and the usefulness is low. Too many enemies are effectively immune to maneuvers because of broken-high CMD. The foe doesn't even have to be large or multi-legged.

*Weapon Focus: The Greater Weapon Focus is supposed to make fighter feel special; it doesn't. It should auto-scale for the fighter, maybe for everyone (and the fighter gets it sooner). We're talking about a feat that gives a +1 to attack for a single weapon only, and many players throw away the equivalent in BAB by multiclassing once or twice in a medium or low BAB class. Why does it require 8 or 12 dedicated fighter levels (I forget) to pick up one more +1 for a single weapon type?

*Weapon Specialization: This is a prereq for a feat or two, but it should at least auto-scale to greater spec at a certain BAB or fighter level.

*Vital Strike: Even making this auto-scaling it won't compete with a full attack most of the time, but it's a start.

Feats that should become class features or default options:

*Auto-scaling Step Up should probably be one of the fighter's default ability options, maybe as a free feat.

*Rogues could stand to start with weapon finesse, so they can spend their talents on their unique abilities instead of making themselves aim right.

Narrative Power and Skills

Fighters need the ability to influence NPCs or make paths. Bashing through doors and walls, intimidating foes (with scaling effects), and being able to accomplish increasingly powerful athletic and acrobatic actions like rapidly climbing walls and leaping pits with an ally tucked under each arm... those might be a good start. Some people will balk at it, but oh well.

I liked some of the ideas from a page or two back for trying to give more narrative options to fighters, rogues, etc.

Frankly, crafting items takes a lot of skill to make something relatively mundane. Even with select feats and traits that imitate caster crafting, the martial character cannot make something nearly as good at high level unless his caster buddy enchants it for him. That Adamintine Greatsword is silly compared to the Hasted Adamantine Greatsword of Flameburst +5. I don't know how to address this reasonably though.
I always avoided craft trap as a... trap. Seemed like a lot of work to make something that doesn't scale so well. Martial characters like rogues being able to craft mechanical constructs to serve them in battle or everyday life would be cool, especially if the constructs didn't outright suck compared to what a caster can assemble already.

The profession skills are severely weakened variants of the knowledge skills, and it takes effort to remember to incorporate them into a campaign. Many players ignore them unless they feel it's important for their own roleplay (or the GM makes them). Having a better defined role for these skills would help a lot.
And getting one or two free skill points per level to spend on the Profession skill would be a good idea. Now the player isn't skipping out on Escape Artist or Ride just to back his claim to being in the military or crafter's guild.

Intimidate's shaking effect on foes needs to scale, both in effect and number of targets (even if those advances are limited in use per day). If a high level fighter can't slice a bad guy in two and let out a roar that makes weaker beings soil themselves and flee on a failed save, then the fighter needs to go sit down and get out of the wizard's way, because magic already does that. :)

Give fighters moar skill points. 4+Int, maybe more. But everyone's beat that one to death.

Knowledge(local) seems to be the streetwise of Pathfinder. Or maybe some situational application of diplomacy/intimidate/disguise? It's your ability to get out into the social environment (for example, a city, pub, sewer full of kobolds, etc) and gather information, procure allies and items... or otherwise navigate a society, foreign or domestic. I found this to be a valuable skill in games that supported it (Battletech, D&D4, others I've since forgotten). It's not so obvious here.
If you want martials with narrative power, this is one way to give it to them. Let them hone this ability to gather allies, raise armies, gather info, locate targets without scrying, and push the knowledge advantage.

In terms of knocking down walls and buildings, Knowledge: Engineering might be the place to start. A fighter wielding a large hammer might be able to bring a castle turret down onto the battlefield as a full-round-action if he knows where to strike its weakened structure. He might be able to get into/out of a prison or dungeon. Looks fairly GM-dependent though. Spells make it a lot easier to cheat your way past physical obstacles than skills do. :D

Edge Points:
I find myself pining for the way we used Edge Points in Battletech (we played it as a roleplaying game instead of a war game). Spending an edge let you reroll a failed roll, add a bonus to a roll, OR (most importantly) change the scene, environment, etc. For example, a foe tosses a grenade through the door at you: you're certainly going to die. You edge in an emergency close switch right next to you and pull it, closing the the emergency blast door just in time to block the grenade. You can't do game-breaking changes (e.g. edge in an armada of allies to blast the enemy ship), nor can you violate anything that's been established already ("I spend an edge to say that Jane suddenly lands her ship nearby and opens the door for us", "Uhh... we already established that Jane is on the other side of the galaxy. She can't suddenly be here").
It made it a lot of fun, and every player had the ability to influence the story in controlled but useful ways. One guy played Inspector Clouseau, solving a case with no inspection skills whatsoever. He spent his few edge points to edge in clues to help him solve the case. But edge is limited, and it's a skill-based game, so he eventually trained himself in inspection. :)

Aren't there "hero points" in Pathfinder? I forget what they do, but if they're similar to Edge, giving martials some that scale with level might let them influence the narrative on par with casters without being spellcasters.

That's what came to mind so far.

I used to say to people who were mad at the unrealism of double weapons, "But when your character gets stabbed in the stomach, the cleric just heals him and tells him to walk it off. And that mage over there just summoned fire with his mind. I think we can excuse double weapons for their unrealism."

But people become irate at unrealistic martials all the same. ^_^

Bodhizen:
Agreed, though I'd like to point out that the martial enemy one-shotting a player isn't that far off from the magical enemy that is already one-shotting players. :)

Nem-Z & Kthulhu:
I liked a lot of the ideas of 4E, including the way the fighter played his role as party defender so well. They experimented with a lot of novel and clever ideas. But at the end of the day I agree that the overall execution of 4E failed. Too few people liked it -- I have a stack of 4E books collecting dust because people want to play Pathfinder instead. 4E was a bit too ambitious, changed too much too blindly, felt too little like D&D and too much like an MMO, etc. That's too bad, since I had a lot of fun with some of the changes despite the flaws.

I do think we can learn something from 4E though: Fighter had a lot of tools on his belt that actually did stuff. He wasn't just a stat & feat fridge with more space for lackluster magnets and bad children's drawings. The fighter had several paths he could take that worked very well for him, and he was designed right out of the box to be a proper and effective party defender. He had the ability to stop enemy movement, pull hate onto himself and away from his allies, etc. If you want to even begin to do that with Pathfinder's fighter and feat system, expect to spend lots of feats AND wait until level 12 or so. It's that taboo. I'm guessing the defender role isn't very popular in the Pathfinder crowd (my GM hates it and has effectively banned defender-like feats), or at the very least the developers don't care for it.

But here's the point I'm trying to make: 4E tried to add well-defined features to its fighter because that's what the fighter was lacking. Maybe they botched 4E overall, but they recognized the problem facing martial classes. Players were told they could swing a sword or fire arrows, and here, have some lackluster feats that do nothing compared to the god caster next to them. So the developers tried some very experimental fixes, and I liked a lot of what they tried.

They also greatly weakened spellcasters, to many people's chagrin.

I don't think we have to go that far to fix martial vs caster disparity in pathfinder. But something ought to be done, like fixing the martial feat tree and giving martials more skills and fun & effective features. "I cast spells" is apparently the only class feature people on these forums consistently think is worth while. And some people seem to think if you're not a full caster, you should just go home. That kind of domination screams of failure to properly design the classes, or at least upkeep the power balance sanely. Original design or power creep, something is flawed here.

An aside:
Of course, as others have suggested, I suspect that time management also comes into play. Medium- and high-level spellcasters are literal gods of time and space if they're allowed a 15-minute work day. Too many people optimize for that easy campaign with a rest stop every few steps, whether it's something the GM gives them or one they create.

But this is not a video game. A wise GM uses enemy behavior and time pressures to encourage the party to manage its resources carefully and stick it out before taking a full rest, or bad things happen. Hostages are killed while they're away, enemy won while they slept, enemy reacted to their initial attack and improved its preparations, enemy skipped town with the magic items, Mordenkainen's Arcane Dynamo (which the party was supposed to reach and fix in time) destabilized and sucked half the plane into nothingness, etc.

This doesn't solve everything, but a good portion of disparity comes from spellcasters having more god spells than they can reasonably cast in a single encounter, and they're in a rush to blast out as much power as they can at once. However, if they know it's going to be a long day, they won't waste all their ammo on one battle and the team works more uniformly as a natural product. This might involve lowering the difficulty of each battle slightly so the casters don't have to burst, but even if that's necessary it can certainly be done.

Sprinting vs Distance Running are very different challenges. And most casters expect (even demand) sprinting, claiming a TPK is on the horizon unless they can rest between encounters. A distance run changes the game, and once players learn to expect an endurance challenge, they manage their energy reserves differently and that TPK isn't the threat it seemed to be.

Porphyrogenitus:
Agreed. I think martial classes can be made more interesting and effective, independent of what the casters are doing. We don't have to nerf casters. 4E tried radical changes and made a lot of people mad. Pathfinder took a more conservative approach and fixed a few things, but not enough. Some of the non-core classes like Gunslinger and Cavalier have taken that route, but with very specific focuses (and I've not played those classes, so I don't know how successful they were). Maybe fixing the fighter will look more like that.

.....
If I disappear for a bit, I'm dodging assassination attempts. One does not claim "4E had some good ideas despite the bad ones" in these forums and live to tell the tale. I need to move my family to a secure location. ;)

I'm looking at pairing Vital Strike with Felling Smash. I know there are a lot of very strong opinions on this forum about Vital Strike, but rather than start a war on whether it's a good feat, I just want to solicit advice. I want to know how many other effects can be reasonably and effectively wielded on the same "attack action to make a single melee attack".

Are there many out there that are worth piling into the same build?

I'm thinking these are good picks:
*Vital Strike
*Felling Smash
*Furious Focus: Power Attack still hurts OAs, but since we're making only one attack on rounds where we use vital strike, we might as well enjoy full accuracy.
*Fury's Fall: More accuracy with Trip.
*Greater Trip: If the trip is successful, I and my flanking friends get to murder the foe with OAs.
*Dazing Assault: If I'm feeling super-confident in my accuracy and trip CMB, I can make sure the target stays prone for another round. Though the -5 to attack affects my attack before the trip, the trip, the OA after the trip, etc until my next turn.

I'm sure people are itching to point out that no single-attack combo will ever begin to touch the majestic glory that is the common full attack, but humor me and let's think of some neat effects to pile onto our hapless foe. The full attack vs single attack war has been fought to death in other threads already, and we don't need to duplicate their efforts.

I'm more attached to Felling Smash than to Vital Strike, btw, so if there's a conflict, Vital can go first. Of course, this is assuming I'm fighting enemies that are not effectively immune to combat maneuvers. Our gaming group has found that there are generally two types of enemies: those with lots of abilities, and those with lots of great stats. If your foe has lots of abilities, combat maneuvers will be stupid-effective against him; if he has few or no abilities, never try a combat maneuver because you will fail. So maybe the trip focus is misguided...?

Hello all,

I'm building a mounted Arcane Archer, and I'm trying to decide whether I'll be better off focusing in rapid attacks (Rapid Shot + Many Shot), or in heavy & accurate single attacks (Bullseye Shot + Vital Strike + Deadly Aim). Or taking both. I'm not allowed to take Clustered Shots (GM banned that one with ferver).

Here's the core dilemma: Rapid shots make the most of any damage bonuses added to each attack, but they are less accurate and more vulnerable to DR. Vital Strike and Bullseye Shot will hit more often and get past DR more easily.

I'm mounted on a Heavy Horse with Chain Shirt barding (plus the Mounted Combat feat to mitigate some of the damage it would take). One of my traits is Rich Parents, to afford starting mounted at level 1. He should hopefully survive a while, and using a full-attack or move+attack each round while the horse moves its speed and/or 5-foot steps away from foes is my intent. This will give me some nice mobility. Later flying mounts would be fun.

Other feats I plan on taking include:
*Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Weapon Focus (Arcane archer requirements, and just all-around useful)
*Weapon Specialization
*Deadly Aim
*Improved Precise Shot
*Pinpoint Targeting
*Mounted Combat
*Mounted Archery
*Hammer the Gap?

This character is starting at level 1, so it will be a long time before he hits his stride around level 7 or 8. I have 6 levels of fighter and 1 level of bard before I can start into arcane archer levels (level 8 is the earliest I can figure out for taking AA), and Many Shot and Vital Shot are both BAB6 feats. So I'll need to be moderately competent in the mean time too. I'm planning on 1 level of fighter, 1 level of bard, 5 more fighter levels, then all 10 Arcane Archer levels. Maybe follow up with more fighter at the end of my career.

[u]Notes about the campaign:[/u]
We get a 20 point buy, but the races are all changed from normal. For example, only a couple of races can be Fighters; most haven't developed organized martial warfare and weapons training to the necessary point the specialize the way a fighter does. The variant of human I'm taking (that can be a fighter) doesn't get a bonus feat: instead he gets +1 to AC and +1 to all saves. The bonus to defenses is very nice, but note that I'll be 1 feat behind for a human.
Also, some feats like Clustered Shots have been banned as way over-powered. Sad days. :( I'm wary of many third-party feats for that reason.

[u]Notes on DR:[/u]
I plan on casting Abundant Ammunition with Bard on a quiver holding one of each type of non-magical ammunition that interests me (and that I can afford at the time). These include Cold Iron, Alchemical Silver, Blunt, Raining, and Adamantine arrows. And I'll have spares of each for when I run out of spells per day to do that. Eventually Arcane Archer will add Magic to all my arrows, bypassing that DR too. But I'll still have some DR to deal with on occasion, I'm sure. Especially on long days when I run out of spells and special arrows before I can rest or buy/build more. Or we meet those foes that simply have DR 5/-.

Damage Bonuses I plan on having at level 8 (apply to both single shots and rapid):
Point-Blank: 1
Weapon Spec: 2
Composite Bow: 2
Arcane Archer enhancement: 1
Fighter Weapon Training: 1
Deadly Aim: 6

My Guesstimates
===============

Rapid
-----
At level 8, a full-round attack grants 4 shots (2 from BAB, and another 2 from rapid shot + multi shot) using 3 attack rolls (multi shot puts 2 on one attack).
Rapid shots will be made at +11 to attack for the first 3 arrows (2 arrows with first attack using multi shot, 1 arrow from second attack with rapid shot), or +14 without Deadly Aim.
(BAB 7 + 5 dex + 1 wpn focus + 1 point-blank + 1 arcane archer enhancement + 1 weapon training - 2 rapid shot - 3 deadly aim)
The 4th arrow will be at -5 to attack, so +6 (or +9 without deadly aim).
End Result: +11x2, +11, +6 or +14x2, +14, +9

Each arrow that hits will deal 1d8 + 13 damage when using Deadly Aim (or 1d8 + 7 without). This gives a damage range of about 14-84 per round, assuming at least one arrow always hits and there's no DR reducing the damage.

Single
------
At level 8, a bullseye shot will have +17 to attack, or +20 without Deadly Aim.
The arrow's damage is 2d8 + 13, or about 15-29 damage each round (I assume this would hit reasonably often).

---

Damage-wise, rapid wins out big-time. By spamming shots like that, at least 1 or 2 arrows should hit each round, easily out-pacing single shots.

However, against enemies with high AC, or DR I can't trivially bypass, the single shot method starts to look good too. I'm thinking I should take feats for both paths (rapid shot, many shot, vital strike, bullseye shot, and deadly aim), though maybe I don't need to take Improved and Greater Vital Strike.

Am I figuring this right? What's your take on this?