Wrexham3's page

Its a hole. Leading to infinity. I think infinity is core....

houstonderek wrote:

Paizo's "old school" roots aren't in the rules (obviously - calling 3.5 "old school" is just wrong on so many levels - heck, I call 2nd Ed. "middle school" because it was the fifth version of the D&D rules published). Their old school roots are in the way they approach world building and adventure making. Much of it is homage, really, Easter Eggs of a sort in many of the adventures and in the campaign setting.

I wasn't aware of that. Do you have an example (without spoiling anything if possible)?

Well, as a specific example (hopefully not spoiling anything), Golarion has a land with a crashed spaceship in its background. Right at the beginning of RPGs, Dave Arneson put a crashed spaceship in his 'Blackmoor' campaign - the Earth explorator 'FSS Beagle'. Players could visit it to get their hands on advanced technology. Blackmoor and the 'Beagle' were later incorporated into TSR's Mystra/Known World setting, while Gygax himself wrote 'Expedition to the Barrier Peaks', which explored similar themes. I don't know if the Paizo designers are deliberately referencing these, but I suspect so.

I'm not sure you're taking this entirely seriously....

I've seen people on these boards advocate methods of bypassing traps such as using summoned monsters to trigger them off, like this is some kind of automatic slam dunk. Might work in some cases, but what about traps with automatic resets, or big area effects, or those that summon big otherworldly gribblies up? The 'summon monster' trick would have been absolutely disastrous against a recent portcullis/flooding corridor trap I used. What the party needed was someone with the best possible chance of disarming it - and luckily they had one at hand. I do think a lot of the tropes on these boards can be over-stated.

I think Wraithstrike highlighted one of the intrinsic problems of the class in a recent thread. There's even a debate on something as fundamental as whether RAW supports sneak attacking from Stealth. I personally allow it in my games and take into account factors such as which way an opponent is facing, for instance. In these circumstances I find the rogue works fine and is easily one of the most effective and adaptable classes in my games. I just don't think the rules as written serve the class very well.