asaris's page

I'm prepping for the thwarting of the bank heist, but I don't see the employee entrance on the map. What area did people have it leading to?

fryguy1013 wrote:

I feel like there's a bunch of XP missing from chapter 3 as well. ... Maybe I'll need to make a sidequest to make this level feel not short.

That's what I have wound up doing. I am adapting the PFS scenario "Grim Symphony" to slot in, shifting the location to an abandoned mansion in the Precipice Quarter. The scenario feels to me like a good change of tonal pace, so I think it might work nicely.

Did they enjoy it? I found from the first book that my group wasn't gaining enough xp, so I had the same idea -- side quests! I'm adapting The Dragon Who Stole Evoking Day, replacing Evoking Day with the Radiant Festial, before starting Sixty Feet Under, and I'm eager for any other suggestions about what PFS scenarios work well.

I seriously cannot believe that it is expected for a lvl 1 party to take on the menagerie after a day of patrolling. I'm surprised there weren't more TPKs from this series of encounters. Very tough series of encounters for even a lvl 2 party.

I made it relatively easy for them to capture the animals. They lured the rust monster into one of the wagons with iron, and baited the cockatrice into another one. I don't see how a first level party is supposed to be able to kill a rust monster.

I'm about to run the House of the Planes section, and it seems trivial. How have y'all run it? What was your experience like?

So, poking around, apparently Deft Shootist allows you to reload without provoking (which is necessary for a melee gunslinger). But it requires dodge and mobility, which is hard in an already feat starved build...

I've been working on a somewhat unique Gunslinger build, and I wanted to see if anyone had any advice on how to tweak it. I'm fairly sure that it is not an optimal build, but it sounds like fun to me, and I want to make it as useful a member of the team as possible.
Stats are rolled, and listed below as rolled. He's starting at 10.
S: 15 D: 16 C: 14 I: 11 W: 15 C: 8
Half-Orc, +2 Dex. Gunslinger (pistolero) 7 / Fighter 3

1 Gun Point Blank Shot
2 Gun
3 Gun Precise Shot
4 Gun Deadly Aim
5 Gun Rapid Reload
6 Gun
7 Gun Two-Weapon Fighting
8 Fight Improved Critical (Pistol)
9 Fight Rapid Shot, Improved Critical (Falchion)
10 Fight

I decided against weapon focus (Falchion) since the +1 isn't going to help much against the -4 - he's basically hoping to get crits with it every once in a while. I haven't looked at Fighter archetypes yet, so advice there would be helpful. And I take it there's no way to avoid provoking attacks from reloading the pistol?

Thanks guys.

Is there a feat/magic item/spell that will enable a mounted character on a horse to charge through difficult terrain?

ie. Would Horseshoes of a Zephyr work?

Nimble Moves will allow your horse to ignore 5' of difficult terrain; Acrobatic Steps with allow him to ignore 20'. It's also much easier to qualify for these feats than Dragon Style, since they only require Dexterity and 3 Int.

Does anybody have any experience with and opinions on the APG archetypes? Just reading through them, I'm leaning towards a Sandman bard for my PFS character, but it's hard to get a feel for them when you're not at the table?

Well you would have hated me then. Okay, time is meaningless in the fey plane.. So at what time did I use my spells? Earlier? When was earlier.. time is meaningless, so there was never a time i used my spells.

In fact, when did we enter this fey demiplane? Time is meaningless in it, so we never did actually enter the demiplane and yet we were here the whole time.

Do we run into ourselves? Did that three rounds of combat take three hours? Are our buffs still up.. We've had to have already accomplish our goal, so..

Essentially, I would divide by zero collapsing the demiplane of the fey especially if time = consciousness. Prepare for bill and teds most excellent adventure.

You must be fun to play with.

One word: Bullrush.

My campaign's Ruler is an Oracle. Makes sense stat-wise without the crusades that would pop up with Paladins.

Our ruler is actually my cavalier; you get similar stats to a Paladin, plus it seems to make more sense fluff-wise than an oracle. You get to avoid the crusades, and he can be sworn to defend his own kingdom.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but when your Mount (Animal Companion) dies the process is:

1) You must wait 1 week to replace your Mount (Animal Companion).
2) You perform the 24 hour ceremony (just like a Druid would), to get a new Mount (Animal Companion).
3) This Mount (Animal Companion) is considered your bounded Animal for purposes of special Cavalier abilities.
4) This Mount (Animal Companion) does NOT have the following abilities: Link, Evasion, Devotion, or Improved Evasion until you level.
5) This Mount (Animal Companion) DOES come the Ability Score Increases and Multiattack.

Am I missing anything?

Nope, as far as I can tell this is correct.

asaris wrote:

Are there any rules about which feats from the APG can be taken by an animal companion with an Int of less than 3? Any guidance you can provide for my DM? Some of the feats certainly seem like they should work, but I can't seem to find a spot where anyone talks about this.

PRD=Animal companions with an Intelligence of 3 or higher can select any feat they are physically capable of using. GMs might expand this list to include feats from other sources.

So what if the companion has an Int less than 3? What feats from the APG could it take?

Are there any rules about which feats from the APG can be taken by an animal companion with an Int of less than 3? Any guidance you can provide for my DM? Some of the feats certainly seem like they should work, but I can't seem to find a spot where anyone talks about this.

Yes , a standard zombie with the "staggered" ability is quiet possibly one of the fastest land moving things you will fight LOL. Because its only viable in combat to charge with them , they move 60ft a round and hit with a +2 .

I can't access the srd 'cause I'm at work, but I'm not sure this is correct. Don't Zombies only have a move of 30'?

There are a couple of bars in my area that seem like they would be amenable. Not too crowded and encourage board game playing, pretty laid back places. We're meeting at one of them for the first time tonight, I'll try and post back and let you know how it went. Of course, depending on the age and inclinations of your players, this may not work for you.

For the record, it went well. The main downsides were the noise and poor lighting. Space was an issue -- you probably want to make sure where ever you end up has fairly large tables, and/or that you organize yourselves well. The plus, in addition to just having a place to meet, is the ease of getting drinks and food.

There are a couple of bars in my area that seem like they would be amenable. Not too crowded and encourage board game playing, pretty laid back places. We're meeting at one of them for the first time tonight, I'll try and post back and let you know how it went. Of course, depending on the age and inclinations of your players, this may not work for you.

If they had said Charge provoked, it would mean that when Charging creatures WITHOUT Reach advantage, or where you successfully Tumble, that the final Charge ATTACK (part of the Action) provokes an AoO. The current RAW avoids that situation.

If you charge an enemy while mounted, with the ride-by attack feat, and the enemy you are charging has reach, would you still provoke? For some reason I was thinking rba only helps after you've attacked, but looking at the text of the feat, I'm not sure that's the case.

All,

My question is, should my horse's hooves be treated as primary attacks, because the mount is combat trained, and thus the Docile ability no longer applies? Or are they still secondary attacks, because the horse has a primary bite attack, and thus all of its other attacks (i.e. its hooves) should be secondary?

It seems odd to me that a horse should have two primary attacks (both the bite and hooves), so my initial assumption is that the hooves should be secondary attacks, but I'd like to know for sure.

Thanks!

My understanding is that the fact that the Cavalier's horse is combat trained means that the hooves are primary attacks, making it a bit better than a druid's horse companion.

Does a horse need armor proficiency to wear barding?

IIRC, all combat-trained horses get light armor proficiency.

Name: Dmitri
Race: Human
Class: Cleric of Erastil 3
Adventure: Stolen Lands
Catalyst: Healing magic.
The Gory Details: The party finally located the lair of the bandits. They were able to convince the bandits that Kressel had recruited them and sent them on to the keep while she searched for a lost flask of liquor. The bandits became suspicious when, after a duel with Oak, one of the 'new recruits' healed Gilman, the party's fighter. Upon figuring out he was a cleric of Erastil, the bandits attacked. The majority of the party was in the south end of the keep, while the Enlarged cleric kept the Stag Lord and one of his henchmen at bay on the north end. A few devastating strikes from the Stag Lord later, and Dmitri lay dead in a pool of his own blood.

Maybe it's my old-school roots, but whenever I see huge stats, I immediately think "Paladin!"

Especially if replacing a cleric. :)

You want two-handed? Get proficiency in bastard sword and have the best of both worlds. :)

-The Gneech

Sadly, Paladin is out, as I suspect our gnome is CE. I'm leaning towards cavalier, actually, if anyone has any advice.

I've been involved in a Kingmaker campaign for a while. The party is a sword and board fighter, a gnome aberrant sorcerer focused on summoning, a archer ranger, and a melee cleric of Erastil. I, the cleric of Erastil, ran into trouble when I went to engage the Stag Lord, and it didn't end well. So I'm rolling up a new character.

I rolled a 17-16-14-13-13-12, and I'm curious to see if people have interesting ideas about what to play with these stats. I don't want to do a cleric again. I'm leaning toward a two-handed fighter, but considering a monk, and open to suggestions.

Even if this worked as intended (creating a giant creature in space that immediately suffocated), I would never award xp for it. XP is awarded for overcoming challenges. There is no challenge here.

This seems like as good a place as any to ask...Can anybody, anywhere, tell me why Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. would be useful for communication compared to a forum like this? Facebook I vaguely get, although it's difficult to wade through all the general "noise" to get to anything useful. Blogs are just random stuff for the most part, save for a few people that actually have some talent/insight. Twitter is noise through and through and I've honestly never found it even vaguely useful.

Of course, I know this is partially due to me heading down the "old geezer" road...

I don't find fb/twitter particularly useful for gaming, outside of the informational 'this is what we're publishing next' sort of thing. But I read a number of DnD blogs, and have found them a great source for ideas on how to run a game as well as things to insert into my game. But as far as I can tell, the OP is right. Compared to 4e, or even 1e, there just aren't very many good Pathfinder blogs, if any at all. If there are, I'd love to see some links!

Thanks! We're running through Kingmaker right now, but I'm thinking about running my players through this once we're done (or as a break). Your notes will be very helpful!

I'm not sure how it would work, since d20 currently relies on a strong interaction between positive ability modifiers and class abilities, but you're unlikely to have all the +s you really want across the board.

I would aim for something along the lines of needing a 9 in a relevant ability to do class things, and a 13 (probably no more than that!) to do more interesting things, but the actual number of rounds or uses per day of anything being fixed. The whole thing suddenly becomes much simpler to keep track of, but less prone to abuse, and still maintains the flavour (perhaps even more so as it is less numerical).

This may have been intentional, but this is essentially the way it worked in 1st and 2nd Edition. The bonuses you got for very high stats were much less than they are in 3rd/PF.

The swift enlarge from Growth is crazy-good, but only if you DO plan on being combat heavy. I think Feather would be better for Eyes of the Hawk.

Your second choice, hmm, I think that the Family domain ability is quite good. Making your Fighter immune to Entangle? Seems pretty good to me, along with the solid buffing spells that are associated with Community.

Selective Channeling seems like a no-brainer for me, but beyond that I'd hold off and get a feel for the rest of your party before making a decision.

As far as the rest of the party goes, we have a combat rogue, a bow ranger, a fighter, and an illusionist, IIRC.

I'm working up a Cleric of Erastil for a Kingmaker campaign. The focus is on buffing/debuffing with a minor in combat. I'm a veteran 3.5 player, but this is my first experience with Pathfinder. So I had a couple questions:

1. What are good feats to take? I wanted extend spell, but with a lot of the buffing spells being changed from hours/level to minutes/level, it seems less useful than it used to be. Similarly, I'm tempted by Spell Focus (Enchantment), but it seems like there are fewer Enchantment spells than there used to be. I'm leaning towards Selective Channeling and Scribe Scroll right now, but I don't really see myself healing much in combat, and crafting wands in a couple levels is better than crafting scrolls.

2. I'm not sure what the best domain options are, especially with the APG in the mix. I'm leaning heavily towards Growth for my first domain, but I'm not sure what a good second domain would be. Feather maybe?

I appreciate your help!

I have long believed that TSR and Wizards had things backwards - focusing on rules rather than great adventures. Granted there are many classic adventures from those days but it was not the primary focus of the company.

I like that Paizo has a focus of adventures and the rules are there to support what they are doing in that realm and not the opposite.

I should add, +1 to this. My group is largely composed of professionals. None of us has the time to invent adventures by themselves, and WotC's published adventures just aren't very interesting. I think it's this philosophy that attracted me to Pathfinder in the first place.

As a brief history, I played BECMI back in the day and switched to 2nd ed. when it came out, but had pretty much stopped playing when I was in college. In the early 2000s, a good friend of mine talked about 3.5 and what a good system it was, so we got a group together and tried it out. It was fun, so when I moved, I put together another group and played 3.5 for a couple years, in addition to sporadic Living Greyhawk on my part. I had never used Greyhawk as a setting, and I really liked the feel of it. It felt more like an organic world than the Forgotten Realms ever did, and was much better than anything I could put together on my own.

Fourth Edition came out right around the time of my most recent move. In fact, I played it before it came out at DnD Experience when we were looking for a place to live! I liked the playtest well enough, and so when I moved, I put together a group to play 4e. We played two campaigns of 4e until recently, one campaign reach mid paragon-tier. But we became dissatisfied. Whatever the possibility of DM intervention may be, all the crunchy bits of the system revolve around combat. Besides, I missed Vancian magic. So we decided to try Pathfinder.

We still haven't actually tried it yet. We rolled up character last week, and will play next week. But the more I looked at the rules, the better the system looked. It has the elegance and simplicity of 3.5, while avoiding the bloat that made 3.5 unwieldy. I especially appreciate the effort to make base classes viable from level one until twenty. Additionally, I like Golarion. It has the depth I enjoyed in Greyhawk, but it also has a weirdness that is reminiscent of some of the source literature like Wolfe. We'll see how it works in actual play, but I'm looking forward to it!