claymade's page

Yeah that's definitely clunky. Good candidate for the errata thread since those aren't saying the same thing.

I don't see them as inherently not saying the same thing. I think it's just that one is more ambiguously worded than the other. But I certainly don't think there's any necessary, unavoidable contradiction. It's just that having the better, much more explicitly worded example in the Focus Spell section to compare against helps clarify which of the (two possible valid) interpretations their intent was in the Archetype section.

The whole question hinges on what exactly the writers meant by "spellcasting ability" in the rule you quoted. Granted, when looking at it in isolation, I am totally sympathetic to reading it as simply "the ability to cast spells" in general. But it is also 100% true that all the archetypes in question have actual, specific ability chains whose members are all named with "spellcasting". Even before taking the rules in the Focus Spells section into account, it's not an invalid interpretation to think that when they talk about "spellcasting ability" they might possibly have been referring to those specific abilities with that name.

Hence why there was already debate.

The only unavoidable contradiction arises if we take the interpretation that the dedication feat is enough, since that does clash with the more explicit rule in the Focus Spells section. But if we simply interpret it as the writers intending "spellcasting ability" to be referring to the specific, named "spellcasting" abilities that the archetypes in question do grant in a later feat, then both rules fit together like a glove.

I wonder if that focus spell one is a holdover from the old version. Because I wouldn't expect to have to look in the rules for focus spells to learn how something that isn't focus spells works.

Agreed, I don't think it was intended that players have to do that. In the archetype rules, I think they just looked at the set of abilities with "spellcasting" in their names across all the relevant archetypes, and used "spellcasting ability" to refer to those abilites with those names, thinking that would be enough to make the connection, without fully appreciating just how ambiguous that wording (in isolation) would be for players.

Fortunately, in the Focus spell section, I think the writers there were just plain more thorough, and gave a much more explicit spelling out of the fundamental principle underlying both cases, of how exactly to understand the game terms "spellcaster" and "spellcasting" in that rules context.

This was settled in the remaster. Other folks have already quoted it, but yet again...

Player Core wrote:

The spellcasting ability from a spellcasting archetype also allows you to use Cast a Spell activations of items (such as scrolls, staves, and wands).

When you take a dedication, you've now got the archetype. The archetype grants spellcasting ability, since it gives cantrips and "cast a spell", which is literally "spellcasting ability" because it's the ability to cast spells. This is pretty straightforward.

What makes the definition of "spellcasting ability" less straightforward is the "Non-Spellcasters with Focus Spells" section in the rules, which talks specifically about what qualifies as "spellcasting", emphasis added:

Though you can cast your focus spells, you don’t qualify for feats and other rules that require you to be a spellcaster or have a spellcasting class feature—those require you to have spell slots.

As best I can interpret it, if you don't have actual, outright "spell slots" you are not a "spellcaster", nor do you qualify as having "spellcasting" for the purposes of that specific game term. Which would mean that you'd need to pick up an archetype's "Basic Spellcasting" feat to count as having the "spellcasting" ability from it.

(Though yeah, it is kinda wonky in a "normal english" sense that you can cast a spell without having the "spellcasting" ability, if said spell is a cantrip or a focus spell.)

Honestly, as a GM, after you say this I'd be less willing to bend the rules in your favor.

You're essentially trying to benefit from the feats that favor bucklers for Swashbucklers and the Fan Dancer feats that require two fans at the same time, when it's pretty clear that's meant to be exclusive.

As I said earlier, that's not what I'm trying to do.

I made this thread because I was curious about the question of what, exactly, causes you to go from being considered "holding a non-weapon item that could be used as an improvised weapon" to being considered "wielding an improvised weapon", and I was trying to find if there was a conclusive RAW on the way (or ways) you can (or can't) go from one state to the other, and vice versa.

But there just isn't any answer to the above question that would enable anyone to benefit from both sets of feats "at the same time". Because I completely agree that they're "meant to be exclusive".

However the transition between the two states is ruled to work, it wouldn't change the fact that simply being in one of those two states fundamentally knocks you out of all the benefits of the feats that require the other, and forces you to re-spend any actions necessary to re-establish those benefits, even if you were to subsequently transition back to the previous state.

I'm not asking anyone to "bend the rules" in my favor. In fact (since there unfortunately doesn't seem to be any hard-and-fast RAW on the issue, like I was hoping to find by making this thread) if a GM decided that they just didn't want to deal with this can of worms at all, I'd be perfectly fine with handling the swapping between those two states solely by the (unambiguously rules-legal) method of just... drawing, stowing and/or dropping an always-weapon fighting fan as necessary.

Still, if there had been a clearer RAW statement on under what conditions "holding an item" becomes "wielding an improvised weapon", as well as when that state does (or doesn't) end, I would definitely have liked to know all the details I can learn, to more fully understand my options (or lack thereof).

At that point it sounds more like they want Parry instead of Raise a Shield with a buckler.

Unfortunately, while parry and raising a buckler are comparable in most cases, my base class for this character happens to be a Swashbuckler. And with the right feats, a Swashbuckler buckler loses that parry parity.

Realistically there don't seem to be any existing rules that would clarify the situation, so you'll have to make a houserule that you find appropriate.

Yeah, looks that way. I'd hoped that there was some rule I was missing that would bring the other rules into focus and I could find the specific RAW is, one way or another... but it looks like one of those "judgement call" situations.

I'm grateful for all the possible suggestions, though. I'll float a bunch of them when I run it by my GM so he can have a wide range of ideas to consider and work from when he decides how he wants to run it. There's a lot of really good ones!

Realistically, I should be fine either way, even if we end up taking one of the more restrictive approaches. As I said above, it's not like my build is even intended to be swapping between the two "modes" as a frequent thing at all, and worst case I can do a slightly-clumsy workaround with just drawing and dropping the off-hand fan that should work fine enough (albeit with a technically more limited use, depending on how many belt slots I devote to it) entirely irrespective of how this gets ruled.

Mainly, I started out just wanting to figure out what all my options were, one way or another... and then ended up going down a slight rabbit hole when the rules just didn't seem like they were lining up in a way that cohered. So I wanted to see if I was missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle that made it all fit, and to patch that hole in my rules knowledge if there was such a missing piece.

On a different note, I'd like to pose the question of whether it's even worth it to use a regular fan as an improvised weapon.

Sorry, that's my bad for using a misleading example. I just talked about normal fans across the board to make the example simpler, since it didn't affect the rules question that it was supposed to demonstrate. But in actual play the non-buckler-hand fan would be a fighting fan, and that would be the one I'd actually attack with if I wanted to slash something, not the buckler-hand one.

As a GM, under no circumstances am I going to let you count as wielding two fan weapons and also raise your buckler (unless you have 3 hands).

Oh, sure, I agree with this completely. One way or another, the clear and obvious intent seems to be that you have to choose. You can't have both simultaneously.

The problem I ran into is when I was trying to figure out how, mechanically, the game wants you to make that choice, since all the answers seemed to cause some level of tension or other with one of the rules.

Like, when I first started looking into it, I assumed the answer would be basically what you suggest: you have to use an interact action to wield or un-wield it. Simple.

Except... when I looked, the wielding rules seem to say you're always wielding if you're holding it in the right number of hands. So... did that mean you could never use a buckler while holding anything that could be used as an improvised weapon? That didn't make sense either.

Then I looked up the Improvised Weapons rule quoted above, and that seemed to tie it to use, so I entertained the idea that it depended on what you used it for first, with the first action that required one interpretation or the other "locking out" the others. But then that raises the question of how long that lockout "lasts" for, which nothing mentioned. So I wasn't satisfied with that interpretation either. But it was the one I had the most personal hope for, if there was some other rule that clarified those kind of lockout periods (whether round, encounter, forever, etc).

Again, I'm perfectly fine paying any costs that the rules dictate when I want to switch between "fan" mode and "defense" mode depending on the situation. I just want to get a firm handle on what exactly those costs are, and when the decisions can or can't be made, since that will impact what I can do with them.

And btw my proposal doesn't have this problem, really: the moment you use it as a weapon, it's a weapon more or less forever, either to the end of the encounter or always if you do it all the time. So no difference between 1st and 20th combat.

But wouldn't that still create a difference between the 1st and 20th combats? In combats 1 and 2, you get to use your buckler at the start of the encounter until you attack... but by the 20th encounter under this approach it would be a weapon "always" and you couldn't even do that anymore.

A dagger is a melee weapon. When you throw it, it is a ranged weapon.

Classifications can change based on how something is used.

Ergo, even something as innocuous as a fan, when wielded like a weapon, is a weapon. Therefore, you cannot combine the aforementioned abilities.

Definitely. When you throw a dagger, it is a ranged weapon. But of course, that doesn't mean that it thereafter becomes a ranged weapon for the purposes of all remaining attacks in the encounter, thrown or not. You can absolutely use a dagger as a ranged weapon... but you can also stop using it as a ranged weapon.

Which is another way to phrase the real gist of my question. "How, exactly, does one stop wielding an object as an improvised weapon?"

Does it require an Interact action to change your grip on the object to "stop wielding" it?

Would stowing it and bringing it back out do the trick?

Does the object's weapon-or-not status "refresh" at the end of the turn in which you did something that required it to be either a weapon or not-a-weapon?

Does it only lose that "weapon" classification at the end of the encounter?

Or can it never be held as a non-weapon again, once it's used as such?

I'd say if you use something as weapons constantly - you almost never can count them as not weapons for any rules intent. You can pretend as such for NPCs in a story though. But that's not rules intent, mostly narrative one. If you only just now named something as your improvised weapon - you can't discount them as weapons for the rest of the scene or encounter. Otherwise everything is open to discussion with your GM.

I suppose that could be one approach, but it seems kinda weird to me that a character who once had the ability to hold something in a way that worked with the Buckler would just completely lose the ability to hold it in the Buckler-conducive way they'd been holding it up until now.

So, absent a really direct and specific rule stating it worked that way, at the very least I (personally) have a hard time interpreting it in a way that had an object's improvised weapon mechanics function differently when bringing it into the 20th combat than the first combat it was used in.

So I'm running into an odd interaction between a handful of rules that I'm not entirely sure how it works. The rules in question are:

Some fan dancer abilities require you to be wielding one or more fans, which can be a fighting fan or a normal fan used as an improvised weapon.

You can Raise a Shield with your buckler as long as you have that hand free or are holding a light object that's not a weapon in that hand.

Some abilities require you to wield an item, typically a weapon. You’re wielding an item any time you’re holding it in the number of hands needed to use it effectively.

If you attack with something that wasn’t built to be a weapon, such as a chair or a vase, you’re making an attack with an improvised weapon. Improvised weapons are simple weapons.

So the crux of the question: if I have a pair of (ordinary, not-inherently-weapon) fans in each hand, and a buckler strapped to one arm... what can I do?

Can I raise my buckler, since I'm only "holding a light object that's not a weapon in that hand"? Can I use my Fan Dancer abilities, since I'm "holding [the fan] in the number of hands needed to use it effectively"?

Or do I need to choose whether I'm "holding a light object that's not a weapon" or "wielding... a normal fan used as an improvised weapon" at any given time? If so, how do you switch between the two modes?

Presumably you can switch so you're no longer wielding the object as an improvised weapon, since it doesn't seem like raising a Buckler was intended to be blocked by any light object that could (even in theory) be used as an improvised weapon. But... then that seems to go against the "Wielding Items" rule for what is required to be considered "wielding"...?

I dunno, I've gone back and forth multiple times, convincing myself one way and then the other, and I was curious to get a second opinion. Especially if there are any other rules that I've missed.

But you aren't paying any significant build cost to get it, so just ignore that it is there and play on.

Yeah, I guess that's the only thing to do. Thanks for being a "sanity check". It was kinda twisting my brain into knots a bit, trying to figure out a way to make it do something. Probably spent more time pondering over it than I should have.

Continuous flair opens a clear exception to this allowing you to take and keep the during your exploration to use it outside of combats or even to start an encounter with the panache.

And yes as your read in Stylish Combatant, you get +1 circumstance bonus with bravado outside a combat what restricts the usage a lot but it still have some uses like the extra speed.

Huh, does Continuous Flair really allow you to generate and keep Panache outside of combat? I didn't get that impression from anything in the rules text. It allows the bonus to the skills, but that doesn't use or require Panache for them; you have those as a constant regardless, so I'm not sure where the Panache stuff is coming into Continuous Flair. Is there a rule I'm missing somewhere?

Similarly, I hadn't thought that the extra speed applied either, since the only thing that Continuous Flair says applies out of combat is "the circumstance bonus from Stylish Combatant". But the bonus to your movement speed is a status bonus. So it doesn't seem like that would apply either.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if either of those two were the case. Since, yeah, it seems like if they weren't then that entire class feature really doesn't do ANYTHING if you're, like, a Gymnast Swashbuckler. And that just seems so weird to me that I feel like I have to be missing something here.

So I'm building a Swashbuckler, and looking ahead at Continuous Flair, only to find myself a bit confused. Its description says that "The circumstance bonus from Stylish Combatant applies in exploration mode."

Okay, so... what circumstance bonus is getting that boost? Well, the text from Stylish Combatant says "You gain a +1 circumstance bonus to skill checks with the bravado trait while in a combat encounter."

Okay, so which skill checks are those, that now get the bonus out of combat as well? I did a search as best I could, and this was the list I came up with of the different skill checks that have (or can get) the "bravado" trait.

Perform
Create a Diversion
Bon Mot
Demoralize
Tumble Through
Feint
Grapple
Reposition
Shove
Trip
Dirty Trick
Disarm(via Disarming Flair)
Aid(via One for All)

Of all of those, Perform (if you're a Battledancer) was the only one I could see getting ANY kind of real use outside of combat. Maaaaybe Create a Diversion, Demoralize or Bon Mot, in niche cases where you wanted a one-round debuff? But in almost all those cases, wouldn't that usually just qualify as starting combat with a surprise round? It seems like most Intimidate uses outside of combat are going to be be things like Coerce rather than Demoralize.

Am I just reading this wrong? How is this ability intended to be used? Does it expand to all uses of the larger skills that are associated with the skill checks? And if so, how would that interact with something like Versatile Performance, if obtained through a multiclass?

Well the real life mechanics of many things in the game don't make sense. You can Ricochet Toss a Greatsword.

Heh, that's certainly true. But I still don't think that means that sense shouldn't be anywhere among our considerations.

Especially when part of the argument to give the Fighter upgrades like that is that it doesn't make sense for them to be fighting high CR foes otherwise. In that sense, I think it's quite valuable to actually look at the various numbers in question, see how they relate to known physical effects. And my personal take after doing so is that no, Fighters don't actually need to be anywhere remotely near that scale of physical strength for it to make sense for them to hurt a high CR foe.

To be honest, I don't think "gritty" and "demon lord" can coexist in the same setting. The one exception being "the demon lord eats you."

If you want to fight demigods, you really do have to be a superhero. That's the way Pathfinder is set up.

"Gritty" and "superhero" are not mutually exclusive. I mean... I did spend the whole first five paragraphs of the very post you quoted laying out a case for why a high-level fighter is already a superhero.

To take a different example, Captain America from the Marvel movies is absolutely a superhuman superhero, capable of physical feats that no real-life human could even dream of approaching. But he's still very restrained as far as the "flashy" aspect goes, still carrying a very down-to-earth feel. He can throw a projectile many, many times harder and faster than any human ever could, and do vastly more damage... but his movies can still carry a markedly down-to-earth, gritty sort of feel to them in the combat. He's certainly nowhere near a sort of over-the-top, flashy, Dragonball Z style rearranging of the landscape with each blow.

And if you look at the actual numbers, and the rough sort of things those numbers represent, then I'd contend that if you drew a spectrum that stretches from Captain America to Son Goku, the kind of fighter who could plausibly deal substantive (yet not brokenly-overwhelming) injury to high CR Pathfinder foes would fall much closer to Cap's end of the spectrum than Goku's.

Hence why I think that the Fighter can still totally afford to be (relatively) "gritty", and doesn't really need any "flashy" adds, whether magical powers or mountain/continent/planet-smashing strength.

When that nonmagical class is not allowed to be extraordinary.

Magical is one thing, but how is the Fighter not allowed to be extraordinary? Consider what a high level human fighter can already do with trivial ease.

Let's start by having him jump out of an airship flying through the upper atmosphere, giving his fall enough time to reach full terminal velocity. Our Fighter can crash into the earth... then stand up (somewhat injured but not overly so and certainly in no risk of death) and dust himself off.

Just in time to see a charging elephant coming straight at him. Our Fighter does not have to take any particular defensive precautions, however; he can simply hold his ground (fresh off a terminal-velocity fall) let the elephant try to overrun him, and instead just straight-up stop the charging elephant dead in its tracks by just standing there.

Our Fighter can then return the favor by grabbing hold of the elephant, pinning it to the ground, and/or beating it to death with his bare hands.

Sounds pretty Charles Atlas to me. The problem, IMHO, is not this idea that the Fighter does not get any extraordinary Charles Atlas capabilities. It's just that those Charles Atlas superpowers are not always "super enough" for everybody.

And of course, what is "enough" completely depends on the tastes of the asker. You mentioned Fighters cutting mountains apart with their attacks as one example of what "enough" might look like. Other people I've talked to in similar debates have wanted Fighter weapon attacks to be obliterating entire continents with their swings, and that, apparently, was what constituted "enough" for them. And I'm sure there are people somewhere out there who won't be satisfied until Fighters can actually smash whole planets with their sneezes.

But the thing is, no matter how cool and flashy it would be for Fighters' attacks to be able to smash mountains or continents or planets (depending on who you're talking to) the power scale chosen is supposed to mesh with the larger Pathfinder universe. And once you commit and say "yes, the Fighter's muscles generate enough force to smash and displace rock on the scale of a mountain", then that just raises all kinds of other questions.

Because that's a damage scale bonkers orders of magnitudes beyond any kind of effect I can think of in the game. Earthquake? Earthquake can't even take down most stone buildings. Tsunami would splash off the face of a mountain with basically no effect. Even Meteor Swarm, for all the bombastic-ness of its name, would do ridiculously negligible damage to a mountain.

So if we're saying that mundane, Charles-Atlas Fighters are able to smash mountains with the raw strength of their arms, then if their arm strength is so many orders of magnitude above everything else in terms of damage imparting, then how do we normalize this discontinuity that we've made? Why aren't Fighters turning CR20 foes (who generally can be at least somewhat injured by things like mere Meteor Swarms and terminal velocity falls) into fine red mist with the sheer kinetic force of the fighter hitting a map square in their general vicinity, if that's the completely-bonkers level of physical strength Fighters are operating on?

This is particularly important because not everyone likes those kind of "cool, flashy" attacks to begin with. Not everyone wants their character to be able to smash mountains with their sword swings, or have fireballs come out of their palms, or fart lasers. (Not even if we cross-your-heart promise them that these lasers aren't magic lasers, they're completely mundane, Charles-Atlas lasers born solely out of your martial training and dedication to proper laser-farting technique.)

Some people just want to be able to shoot arrows in a gritty, non-flashy way like they've always done, just with those arrows now packing enough punch to hurt Demon Lords. So that's why I want to argue that those same arrows don't need to be anywhere remotely near mountain-smashing damage in order for that to make sense.

And that's why I think there should always be classes available that cater to that desire in a non-flashy, gritty-feeling way.

Or maybe fix the fighter. The criticism that the fighter is not up to snuff with other classes goes back all the way to the dawn of 3rd Edition - it's not like people are suddenly butthurt about the fighter, its design has ALWAYS been inadequate, and the fact is that the people most vociferous about defending it are ones who never play it, or who only play D&D/Pathfinder casually.

Even assuming that were true, for the sake of argument, is there a reason why someone being a casual player means that they shouldn't get classes that cater to their playstyle preferences?

Because from where I'm sitting, that kind of fundamental attitude toward the desires of casual players sounds like a great way to drive said casual players away from the game. Which, in turn, does not sound healthy for the game as a whole.

So, your contribution to a homebrew forum is to tell me that I shouldn't change anything.

Cool.

Take your own advice and acknowledge that you have zero interest in this thread.

If this thread title were something along the lines of "Let's brainstorm Fighter fixes!" I'd agree with you. But in this case, the actual question of the OP is addressing the larger game-design issue of whether there is any reason NOT to make magical changes to the Fighter. As such, it seems to me that "I don't think the Fighter should be changed at all, because these existing features give what I contend is enough versatility" is a reasonably on-topic thing to assert. You might think it's correct or incorrect, but it seems a valid thing to say.

I mean, does it really make sense to have a thread specifically asking whether or not there's a reason not to change a class, and then tell anyone who thinks that yes, they think there IS a reason not make any changes that class, that they "have zero interest in this thread" because they think we "shouldn't change anything"?

If there's only one answer to the OP's question that we're allowed to say in this forum, how is it even a discussion?

Then pick an NPC class or stay at the level appropriate for your concept.

If I'm running a vampire the requiem game, and you come to the table with a promethean I'm going to say your character doesn't fit the game. If I'm running a game set purely in the wilderness, and you come to the table with a vigilante who would never leave the city, I'm mgoing to say your character doesn't fit the game. If I'm running a high level Pathfinder game, and you come to the table with a character who is basically just a town guard with a +3 sword I'm going to say your character doesn't fit the game.

If you want to be a high level warrior, you should be having your concept be like Heracles and Cú Chulainn. Not "Random knight number three".

I'd like to distinguish exactly what you're arguing here. If the point is just that the characters will eventually have to outstrip the strict capabilities of just Conan or Zorro themselves, then I basically agree. If you're going up to Level 20 play, you'll end up fighting things those particular characters couldn't.

However, I didn't interpret the intent of those examples as a strict power ceiling, but as an example of a theme. And I don't yet see any inherent reason why the overall theme needs to be discarded.

If a player wants to play a character who can swing a sword hard enough to hurt the Tarrasque, not because they can charge their sword with magic like a Magus, and not because they've got divine mojo like Heracles and Cú Chulainn, but simply because they're a completely non-magical human who just did that freaking many push-ups, and because the ceiling of human capability is that much higher for Golarion-flavor humans, and because they've got sweet gear... then I see no reason to deny that, if that's the sort of slightly-more-gritty character flavor they're interested in playing.

(Which GMs can still totally ban if it doesn't fit the style of the particular game they want to run, of course, like they can ban Gunslingers or any other class that clashes with their personal desired theme.)

Of course, there's still the separate discussion of to what degree the Fighter class as it stands delivers on that option in practice, but wherever we stand on that, I'm personally glad that Paizo at least made the attempt to include that theme in the array of options they've provided players to choose from.

Someone brought up "player imagination and creativity" as the true limit of a character's utility, which is an absolutely bogus platitude: You can imagine anything you want, but you have to work with the tools available, which for a non-magical character includes "hit them" and "use skills". Those options are both available to casters, albeit in varying amounts, plus their class spell list.

My take on this issue is a bit different, and informed by my own personal experience at my table. I fully agree that casters possess a far wider breadth of options than non-casters, and that it can be much trickier for non-magical classes to get much beyond "hit them" and "use skills".

The thing is... I've played with people who were just fine with those options. In fact, I've played with people who got overwhelmed trying to go much past them. One guy in particular, when he was just starting out, we suggested he play a Paladin, in part because we were taking the martial/caster option disparity into account. "Okay, he wants to play a front-liner... but we should steer him toward one that has at least some casting ability, so he has more options."

Except all those extra options were more bane to him than boon. For the vast majority of that three-year campaign, he largely ignored his entire spell list, in favor of--you guessed it--"hit them" and "use skills". And actually, it was more "use skill" than "use skills", namely Diplomacy. If he'd had a class that ditched those so-precious spells in favor of making him better at "hit them" and "use skills", it would have made the class work even better for his play experience, not worse.

And that's the thing. Sometimes, some people just want to play a dead-simple beatstick without a lot of options and choices and resources to manage during gameplay. And I think the game needs some classes that are designed for players like that. That might not be my preferred style of play... but then, not every class has to be designed for me, either.

I mean, why would you have a character that suddenly behaves differently when it is convenient? That damages your narrative.

I'll try to answer in my own (poor) words, but one of the well-known articles that covers the subject, among other things, is this classic one written by Rich Burlew, and he says it probably way better than I could, so I would feel remiss in not also linking it as the superior resource. Also, this description of the issue linked here provides some valuable insight, particularly the story, as a concrete example of how people can get into that way of thinking, how damaging it can be, and why the person telling the story is so averse to it now.

Anyway, the short answer is that, even for mere players who have a vastly more limited scope of ways to adjust the situation, when the starting perspective is a fixed idea of what "my guy" would necessarily do, and compromising on that is thought of as poor roleplaying, that tends to result in less-fun table experiences than tables where the perspective is to ask the question of "how can I make my character work in a way that results in more fun for all of us at the table?"

Basically (to take a more extreme case) it's the difference between:

A) deciding "my character is lecherous and insensitive, therefore I will constantly hit on my party member, despite it making her player uncomfortable, because that's what 'my guy' would do!"

and

B) deciding "my constantly hitting on my party member is making her player uncomfortable, therefore I need to come up with some in-character reason for why my lecherous and insensitive character would nevertheless stop doing that, because it's hurting her enjoyment of the game."

Some might argue that A is better roleplaying. I don't agree, and I try to foster an attitude of B-style approach to looking at these kind of issues when they crop up at tables I'm involved in. IMHO, when the "starting point" of how you look at a situation is the starting point of the "my guy" approach of A, then that creates a table dynamic that has the potential to be far less enjoyable than when the "starting point" of how you look at it is more like approach B.

(Not to mention that, as Rich Burlew's article points out, even when you look at it from the B position, if you're willing to exert some thought and creativity, you can almost always find some way to either interpret or grow your character in a way that doesn't actually violate the core concept behind him. People are very complex, and approach B can actually turn into a way to give your character some interesting depth if you're willing to embrace flexibility.)

That's not to say that characters can't clash in terms of their values, of course. Far from it! If it was the other way around, if the character didn't like the other character's behavior while the player wasn't losing any enjoyment over it, then by all means, roleplay that value clash out! But again, that isn't being justified only just on "my guy" grounds alone, but rather on the more fundamental grounds that the roleplayed clash is actually enjoyable conflict for the table to work through, in that situation.

And again: that's just for players. If we're holding players to that standard, then the GM even more so. The GM has so many more levers available to them than the players do in order to introduce new justifications or impediments or reasons or new factors or altered situations or complications to explain why it might make more sense for their NPCs to take one course or another to route them in a way that maximizes table fun.

And just to make sure I'm clear, this also isn't me saying "don't ever let your NPCs use tactics that might cause TPKs". Sometimes, for many groups, the genuine possibility of TPKs is part of what makes it fun for them. I've certainly killed my share of PCs. And some of them did result in a better appreciation of how real the stakes were, and more fun in the table overall.

Others? Others had much more of a "my guy" component to them--on my part--that I regret now, looking back. I don't think I handled those PC deaths well. What I didn't fully appreciate (at the time) was how my players and I had different ideas about what kind of game we were looking for. And because of that, I had created my world with the sort of NPCs and structures in place that turned out to severely punish the kind of gung-ho, bold-and-audacious playstyle they were interested in. But rather than work with them to make adjustments to my original vision, I kept stubbornly on, just making the world react "logically" to their actions according to the plan I started with. I guess... I expected that they would "get the picture" and start playing the "right" way.

Instead, it just ended in a mess.

No amount of patting myself on the back for how unflinchingly I held to my true, "logical" vision of that world and its NPCs would actually make it worth how un-fun the campaign actually ended up being. No, in that case, I was completely wrong. My fundamental goal should have been for the table to have a fun time, not to hold religiously to any particular NPC concept or world concept or PC concept.

I find it funny, this sounds like the DM equivalent of "But it's what my character would do."

Ha! I actually laughed out loud after reading this, because it's so very spot on.

And yeah, I don't think that kind of shifting of the blame is any more valid coming from the GM's side of things than it is from the players' side. Less valid, arguably, since the GM has far, far more tools and levers to tweak the situation from all different directions than the player does, so their ability to find an alternate outcome has a scope as wide as the imagination. Not to mention that the scope for abuse is also greater with the GM's greater power as well.

When a player comes down with the dreaded "my guy" syndrome, the inherent boundaries to their in-system capabilities can at least limit the damage to a degree. When a GM comes down with "my guy" syndrome, though... ooooh boy.

(Of course, as I said in my previous post, that's not to say that it's absolutely impossible for a GM-initiated TPK-and-res style encounter to be an overall net positive experience for the campaign's enjoyment as a whole, depending on table preferences. So I'm not saying that any attempt ever to do so would fall under "my guy" syndrome automatically. Just that "that's what 'my guy' would do" is not enough, in and of itself, to justify something like that, IMHO.)

5. It'll take too long for her to gather the necessary gems for six soul binds (there are six PCs) in addition to acquiring a way to cast the spell six times to begin with.

Well, this seems like a pretty good way to avoid a pointless unwinnable fight that the party can only survive by being rescued by your NPCs. (And make no mistake, whether the NPCs rescue them in the moment, or by later on springing for 150,000 gold worth of diamonds for six castings of True Resurrection, that is what you're doing here, either way: the players only being able to survive your villain thanks to the intervention of your NPCs.) Give her an opportunity for her to potentially get a line on six black sapphires that she does think might pan out in time for it to be worth it, and have it not work out quite in time for her after all, until after the PCs are ready for the real, do-or-die showdown.

After all, at this sort of level, if really is so crucial to her plans to stop the PCs that it'd be stupid for her not to do it, then it seems like it ought to be worth it to actually stop the PCs, as opposed to just temporarily inconvenience them.

If she gathers her allies now and confronts the PCs, the likely outcome is a TPK. Since it would be a TPK very much driven by an NPC's actions (As opposed to the PCs proactively biting off more than they can chew), how would you feel about it as a player if this happened to you?

Everything would depend on execution. But generally speaking, I think one big factor that comes to mind right off the bat would be that my annoyance would be largely proportional to the amount of time out of a session that the TPK took. If it's an early session in the campaign and the BBEG and her army teleports in and crushes us in a single round before we can even act, and its clearly part of the plot that we get resurrected, then eh, that's not inherently an awful thing. We die, get resurrected, and go on from there in pretty short order.

But if it's a sprawling combat that takes a whole session, and I realize at the end of it all that there was no practical way for us to win it, and it was basically that the GM wanted the campaign to have multi-hour cutscene where nothing we did was likely to have any practical effect on anything, then that would feel a whole lot more annoying, personally.

So I wouldn't say it would be impossible to do in a fun way, especially if you set up the fight in such a way that the party could still do meaningful actions in the context of it. ("Sure, maybe we got mulched, but at least we managed to damage the Lambent Foobar MacGuffin in the process, which means that fight still hurt her plans to some degree, and we're in a better position now even after getting resurrected than we would if we'd done worse in that fight and still needed to get resurrected.")

Still, even if it's not impossible to do in a fun way, it's definitely trickier territory than usual to get right. There's a lot of ways I can see it going quite un-fun as well. Just comes down to the execution, like I said.

Of these the only ones that would work in the specifically brutal case of Power Word Stun would be AOO's/Readied Actions, not be a valid target, spell turning (need at least a 2 on the roll)

Just a note: in the case of Spell Turning, while you'd need at least a 2 on the roll to get a guaranteed deflection of that particular spell, even if you only get a 1 your odds are still pretty good. Per Spell Turning's wording:

"When you are targeted by a spell of higher level than the amount of spell turning you have left, that spell is partially turned. Subtract the amount of spell turning left from the spell level of the incoming spell, then divide the result by the spell level of the incoming spell to see what fraction of the effect gets through. For damaging spells, you and the caster each take a fraction of the damage. For nondamaging spells, each of you has a proportional chance to be the one who is affected."

So even if your luck on the initial roll is bad, you're still only shy of perfect deflection by one, and for a high level spell like that you've still got a much greater chance that it'll be the opponent who'll end up on the unpleasant end of that "proportional chance to be the one who is affected".

Normal Pathfinder Paladins and Clerics are one thing. They can certainly work... but the reasons they work include a couple different factors that the above solution seems to be missing. A few of the ones that jump out to me are as follows:

Plausible In-universe Justification

The alignment restrictions on Paladins and Clerics make total sense, given that their powers are given from outside entities for the specific purpose of championing certain principles. Should the character act contrary to those principles, it makes total sense that the granting entity would cease their support. Indeed, it would strain credulity were that not the case.

I realize that the suggested system also has attempts at such justification as well, but the key word here is "plausible". Many of the explanations took my suspension of disbelief out behind the woodshed and shot it in the head.

The idea that a Wizard, who has the arcane knowledge to study his way up from level 1 to level 11, becomes suddenly completely unable to muster the "discipline and dedication" required to learn better spells if his motivation for such study shifts organically over the course of the campaign is not something I find plausible. As though the desire to save the innocent was somehow an order of magnitude less capable of generating the required criteria of "discipline and dedication" than self-interest?

(Most humorously notable in how the reasons given for why the Wizard must be Lawful Neutral and why the Fighter can't be Lawful Neutral both basically boil down to that they wouldn't have enough "dedication" to their art if they were each others' alignment.)

Presence of Other Options

When a player picks a Paladin or a Cleric in Pathfinder, they do so knowing basically what they're getting into. A player who picks one of them (and reads the class description) understands that alignment is consequently going to play a fairly significant role in the game for them, and that they should be prepared for that sort of play experience.

But there were always far more other options for players who weren't interested in that sort of play experience. Not everyone enjoys the experience of having the viability of their character held hostage by alignment arguments and interpretations.

Alternatively, some players may be specifically interested in characters that develop and change organically (and substantially) based on their experiences. Paladins, obviously, are mechanically endangered by any change to their value systems that exceeds a certain threshold, so a player looking to play out grand redemption/corruption narratives would know that it might be best to avoid that class, and would presumably do so.

Fortunately, the vast majority of other Pathfinder classes didn't share that restriction, so the choices were still wide and numerous for both kinds of players. But in this system, the "safe" classes for players who don't want to have to be paranoid about how their alignment is changing (or players who enjoy having large degrees of character development based on their experiences in the game) each have far fewer choices to support that playstyle.

In short, one of the main reasons the Paladin does work in Pathfinder is specifically because classes like the Fighter also exist, and (even from the beginning) players who wanted to play a front-line-weapon-combat-type that could undergo a broader character development without being paranoid about it gimping their character could at least have somewhere to go.

The simple fact that an alignment-restricted Paladin is a viable play experience does not make it a good idea to enforce that style of play experience on such a wide scale. It makes about as much sense to me as arguing that the play experience of a 1/2 BAB, 9-level caster found in a Wizard is a perfectly valid play experience, so therefore we should make nearly every class a 1/2 BAB, 9-level caster.

Just because a certain play experience can work does not make it a good idea to stomp on the alternate forms of play experience that people also enjoy. Not to this extent.

Conclusion

The OP asked whether I'd want to play a campaign with these requirements. I wouldn't. And that's only partly because of the requirements themselves.

I mean, sure, the fact that (for instance) I would never get to try playing a Wizard would suck, since I don't particularly want to play a character who can't save too many orphans from being horribly slaughtered without wrecking his powers.

But it's more than just that.

Even if I happened (just by sheer luck) to have a character concept that I both wanted to play and also fit within the added constraints (and even if I was comfortable with the character never having any character development on a scale that would kill his effectiveness) the constraints themselves feel like a big, flashing red warning light, complete with accompanying siren blaring at ear-shattering decibels.

Because if a GM is willing to go to such contrived lengths to create extra punishments for any character development that dares to go outside the narrowed-from-Pathfinder confines of what they consider "allowable" for all the various classes, I have no particular faith that such a desire to control the players' play and characterization will end there.

You'd have to cite some section of the rules where that phrase is applied to spells. Context matters.

Take the spell "Stone Fist" as just one example. "While this spell is in effect, your unarmed strikes do not provoke attacks of opportunity and deal 1d6 points of lethal bludgeoning damage (1d4 if you are Small)."

So, once again: how exactly are you defining the phrase "in effect", in such a way that it makes sense that both spells and performances can be "in effect", since they clearly both can be (and have been) described using that same term?

Finally, the last sentence says that only one bardic performance can be "in effect" at a time. Given that the other rules in this paragraph have all been talking about 'per round' performances, in context I take this one to be so also... you cannot 'maintain' two performances simultaneously. However, that is then no bar against completing one performance which has an effect that does not need to be maintained and starting another.

Specific trumps general. Sure, Deadly Performance gives specific exceptions to the general rules for bardic performance. That doesn't mean that other sentences in the same paragraph also don't apply to it, unless Deadly Performance also calls out a specific exception for those rules. Same with Triple Time.

If the rule had been that the Bard can't maintain two performances at once, then the rule should have talked about the act of maintaining rather than whether the performance was "in effect" or not.

Because, as seen in the case of the Stone Fist spell, you do not need to be actively "maintaining" something for that thing to be considered "in effect". They're two entirely separate concepts.

They are two different phrases with different meanings.

Once a hurricane is over there is no longer a hurricane warning "in effect", but the "effects of" the hurricane still exist.

A bardic performance is only "in effect" while it is being performed, but the "effects of" such a performance can potentially be permanent. For example, Deadly Performance is only "in effect" for one full round... but the resulting "effect of" the target being dead does not go away the next time the bard uses Inspire Courage.

The "effect" of Deadly Performance is not the target "is dead", the listed effect is that the target "dies". A character dying isn't an effect with a duration; it's an instantaneous effect, as also seen in spells like Power Word Kill. Instantaneous effects only last the blink of an eye before completing. So no, the effect of the target dying is not a "permanent" effect, and as such, there's nothing for a subsequent performance to disrupt, because the "effect" is over long before the Bard could even have a chance to do anything else.

A permanent effect would be something like the Blindness/Deafness spell, which--unlike a death effect like Power Word Kill or Deadly Performance--does truly have a duration of "permanent". So in that case its "effect" really is ongoing. And since the "effect" is ongoing, it can also be dispelled, or otherwise interfered with, which would not be possible with an instantaneous effect.

Triple Time, obviously, is neither instantaneous nor permanent; the duration listed in its "effect" section being precisely 1 hour.

Similarly, to borrow your hurricane example, if a level 15 Druid cast Control Winds to create a hurricane, the "effect" of that spell itself is certainly not permanent. The "effect" of the spell is 175 mph winds, and that "effect" lasts for only 150 minutes. Depending on where it's cast, the "effect" of the spell might (or might not) in turn cause other knock-on effects, which might in turn cause yet more effects, but those aren't inherent effects of spell itself. The "effect" of the spell itself is the winds, and they last for the duration of the spell, at which point the spell ends.

And it is precisely then--and only then--that the spell is no longer "in effect".

I'll close by reiterating the request I made at the end of my last post. If "in effect" really means "actively being performed", what does it mean for a spell to be "in effect"? What is your (general) definition of what "in effect" means, such that it can apply equally to spells being "in effect", bardic performance being "in effect" and other abilities being "in effect", yet retains the characteristics you're claiming for it with regard to Bardic Performance?

My understanding continues to be that you can only have one bardic performance "in effect" (i.e. actively being performed) at a time, but the 'effects of' any number of bardic performances/masterpieces can be active simultaneously if they extend beyond the duration of the performance.

I am... honestly quite flummoxed on how I could read "in effect" as not referring to whether the "effect of" the performance is currently in place.

How can we say, with a straight face: "Triple Time is no longer in effect" even while the "effect" of Triple Time absolutely is being applied to our characters? That's not what I've ever taken the words "in effect" to mean.

Saying that Triple Time is no longer "in effect" once the Bard stops performing makes as little sense to me as saying that Haste is no longer "in effect" once the Wizard stops casting.

If "the ability's effect is active" is not sufficient to make an ability "in effect", then what exactly does it mean--for both a performance and a spell--to be "in effect"?

Your assuming Pathfinder even pretends to be realistic. Which it really isn't. And I don't want Saitama, and the examples I've given (Paths of Wars, Dark Souls humanoid enemies) are nowhere near Saitama. I already posted some examples of maneuvers from Paths of War, and none of them are OP compared to a caster's spells of that level. I'm not even arguing that Martials should be able to create demi-planes and so on, just be as good if not better than the wizard at the job they were supposedly designed for.

Also, the Balor takes ten hits to kill from terminal velocity. My question to you is, how many hits can a Fighter kill it in? Assuming no friendly buffs from the Wizard?

Well, if you don't want Saitama, or even the Naruto-level "rearange the countryside with your punches" sort of craziness, then I probably don't disagree with you. I also think that the Fighter could use some buffing, as I mentioned in that post myself. I only disliked how people were jumping on The Sword for wanting to play a level 20 character that didn't have all the crazy powers that were being claimed as part and parcel of that level of play.

As for how many strikes it would take the Fighter... well, I'm not a Fighter expert, so I'd have to defer to those who know that class better than me if you want a really optimized answer, but supposedly there was a Fighter build up-thread that could do it in one hit. I didn't look too closely, so take that for what it's worth. 200HP per round was also thrown out as a benchmark, IIRC. *shrug*

This entire post falls apart when you realize that terminal velocity is not that significant of a speed or force. It's roughly 122 MPH. A bullet moves much faster. An ARROW achieves almost precisely double that velocity, at the low end.

The arrow is also going to have a higher force output than even a "fall" of the same speed, because the fall is going to spread damage equally over the entire surface area of the impacting and impacted objects, where the arrow compresses all of that force to a single, much smaller point.

Yes? I'm not sure I follow what your objection is. I didn't mean to say that the fall and the arrow had the same speeed, and certainly the surface area aspect gives an arrow or a blade an advantage in penetration and getting to internals for more effective damage to a creature. That advantage doesn't make the point of the post fall apart, it makes it stronger, since the force compression allows for greater damage efficiency on the part of the Fighter.

The fact that terminal velocity is, as you say, "not that significant of a force" is exactly the point. The point is: "if a CR20 Balor can be substantially harmed by 'merely' hitting the ground at 122 MPH, then why would we insist that a Fighter needs to have "devastate the ecology with his weapon strikes" levels of power in order to fight it, or other CR20 foes?

The Fighter needs to be strong, but he doesn't need to be that strong, not by a long shot.

You know, with all the people talking about how high level Pathfinder play should only ever be Saitama-esque dudes with flashy, planet-shaking superpowers, it got me thinking: a few pages back, we in the M/CD crowd kept on crowing about how--looking at how hitpoints scale--a high level Fighter could easily survive a terminal velocity fall. In fact, we kept harping on the math on that over and over to make our point (me included).

Well, IMHO, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Let's throw a Balor out of an airplane.

(After hitting him with Hold Monster and Dimensional Anchor, of course. Wouldn't want the subject messing up the experiment by trying to run away.)

20d6 averages to 75 damage. Take off 15 for his DR, leaves us with somewhere in the neighborhood 50 to his actual hitpoints shaved off for a given fall. So hey, he certainly survived, right?

Right, but it was absolutely a noticeable hit. That's over 10% of his max HP gone. Seven or eight more hits with that level of force, and this Balor is going to be in serious trouble. Which means that if your character is killing a Balor in one or two rounds of full attacks, then you've got about a (vaguely) rough parity going on in terms of the damage delivered by the individual blows to the individual falls.

So to those of you who are getting on The Sword's case for having the temerity to want to play to level 20 without his characters' strikes necessarily being able to wreck the local ecology, or other crazy stuff like that, my question would be this: about how many ecological disasters can you name that have been caused by the sheer kinetic force of someone falling out of an airplane at terminal velocity?

'Cause really, that's (very roughly speaking) all the kinetic force you need behind your individual blows to kill a CR20 threat like that in fairly short order.

Meanwhile, the attacks of the likes of Saitama eclipse that benchmark so utterly it isn't even a comparison. If a character whose strikes have a force that operates on a planetary scale like him goes up against a character who can be substantially harmed by the fall from an airplane, the former should be able to turn the latter into a faint red mist with more or less a flick of their finger.

That said, yes, the fact that a Pathfinder fighter can hit on the terminal velocity scale of imparted force is still incredibly superhuman; I haven't changed my mind on that. But you certainly don't need continent-shattering punches, or any techniques that go "swing your sword so fast it does magical effects that we're going to say toooootally aren't magical, wink-wink-nudge-nudge" to contribute against foes of that level.

If someone wants to play a character whose concept is "I did enough pushups that my individual strikes do comparable damage to a terminal velocity fall, but aside from that superhuman hitting power and damage resistance there's nothing flashy or supernatural about me personally"... well, I certainly think it's not "the most optimal build", and there's almost certainly going to be a notable level of disparity between what you can do and what a caster can do, but if you can beat the Balor's initiative and chew off a few hundred of his HP with your arrows all on your own, that's not too shabby in my book either. If that's the playstyle someone wants...

...well, I'm glad we still have a class that can accommodate that. Even if I'd personally like it to be a little stronger even within that setup.

You might wonder why I'm still arguing my point when clearly outnumbered. I know there are others out there who feel the same way. I think both sides need to be represented.

For what it's worth, even though I typically tend to argue on the side of the M/CD being a real problem that ought to be addressed, I nevertheless do hear you on what you're saying, and I appreciate you taking the time to represent those points despite all the crossfire you're getting in reply. I think you make your case well, and (despite my personal belief that the Fighter could use some "Unchaining") I think I agree with you more than I disagree.

I do agree that one class doesn't need to be able to handle everything the game can throw at a party, and (given that there's obviously a segment of the player base that enjoys it) I think it's worth keeping around classes with more narrow scopes that focus on mainly bashing things in the face with weapons and not worrying about too much else.

The party might need a way to do things like "stop enemy casters from teleporting away"... but the Fighter doesn't necessarily need to be the one that worries about that, any more than he needs to be the one that provides the ability to heal negative levels to the party. I don't think there needs to be a fundamental expansion of the "kind of role the fighter plays" or the "kind of things they bring to the table" for the class to be workable.

And I very much agree that, to the extent that any changes are made to the Fighter, in keeping with its theme they should be "non-flashy" ones. Even though I contend that a high-level Fighter is definitely superhuman and should absolutely be treated as such, it's still an earthy, mundane-feeling sort of superhuman. I have no particular desire to turn the Fighter into something that invokes flashy, kewl-looking effects, or wrecks continents with their blows, and I don't think that's in any way necessary in Pathfinder.

Like I said before, for me, in practical terms, 90% of what I'd want in an Unchained Fighter could be summed up with "better saves, better skills, and some way to get pounce". And those are all still pretty mundane, non-flashy sorts of things, IMHO.

The only reason the aforementioned spells lack the destructive force of their themes is a deliberate act from the game designers to protect the setting and make no sense.

Wait. So... let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Are you saying that the root cause of this balance argument of why we (supposedly) absolutely positively need to buff martials to Saitama levels is because you first buffed your casters orders of magnitude beyond what Paizo's RAW has them at... so that what they can do would be consistent with the spells' names?

I... well... yes, I can see why you'd have an especially serious case of martial-caster disparity in your games, if that's what you're doing. But--just IMHO--that's not a very good standard to argue for a general redesign of the game's power tiers around.

In most every game I've ever played in, we actually run the spells by RAW. And if a series of 40' explosions aren't typically what we think of as a "Meteor Swarm", we don't houserule a completely different powerlevel to make it consistent with the name. We just assume that whatver ancient Golarion mage first came up with the spell had a flair for the bombastic in his naming sense, and it stuck. But that regardless of the name, the spell does exactly what it actualy says it does, no more, no less.

So no, our casters are not causing extinction-level events every time they cast Meteor Swarm, they're at most making 40' radius craters in the landscape. Which is still pretty dang powerful... but nowhere even remotely close to even being on Saitama's radar screen, much less a threat to someone like him.

And frankly, I don't think I'd even want to play in that kind of system. "Oh, sure, you've got this really cool ninth level spell. And you can even cast it! So long as you don't mind killing everyone on this particular hemisphere of the planet." As you said yourself: ecological/geological devastation.

No thanks, not interested. I much prefer Pathfinder's actual power level.

By the 5th Tier her mobility and physical power are immense, flying to the opposite end of the world should take less than an hour. Were she to truly do battle to her utmost limit with enemies of equal power, the ecology would be devastated... if the geology survived.

Actually, could you elaborate on this a bit? Not just on this in particular, but more in general on how you've several times now talked about the need to boost martials up to this kind of level, to balance the fact that casters "don't need a single mythic rank to do god status stuff".

Now, I know that the martial/caster disparity exists. I've seen it in action. But I can't help but feel that this is still overstating the extent for straight-up Pathfinder casters. What exactly can Pathfinder casters do that's comparable, RAW, that could induce devastation on a geological scale?

(I mean, Tsunami can wreck a 200' x 150' area, and Meteor Swarm can give you four 40' radius explosions. Earthquake gets you out to 80', and I do vaguely recall a couple more less prominent spells that managed to have effects in the kilometer or greater range, although the names are escaping me at the moment. But even that is pretty small potatoes stacked up against the scale of "wreck the world's ecological system" levels of power that I know Saitama operates under, and it seems these new martial approaches do as well.)

There are like 35 classes in Pathfinder. THIRTYFIVE!! Some few people really want a 100% "mundane class".

If it's "mundane" in the sense of "not supernatural", then I agree. In fact, I already said exactly that upthread. I don't think we need to give the Fighter out-and-out magic abilities. I don't think the themes of the Fighter necessarily need to go beyond what can more or less be encompassed in the themes of "really strong" and "really tough" and "really, really good with weapons".

So, if there is a "Mad Martigan 'till 20 crowd" then let them have their one class. Why not?

The Fighter--right now, in its current form!--is not actually a "Mad Martigan 'till 20" class. That's the point that this whole last page has showcased in excruciating detail.

To reiterate: Mad Martigan cannot jump out of a high-flying airplane, hit ground at terminal velocity, then pick himself up and then immediately wrestle a nearby rhino to the ground and pin it, and/or literally beat the rhino to death with his bare hands.

This in the natural result of trying to make the Fighter anything even resembling a threat to the kind of foes you see at CR20. Aragorn couldn't go toe-to-toe with a Balrog. He wasn't even remotely in the Balrog's league. If you're a level of being that has attained enough martial might to fight a Balrog on anything resembling even footing then the character you're playing doesn't much resemble Aragorn anymore.

That's the point of the article. That's the fundamental cognitive dissonance. We want level 20 Fighters that can fight Balrogs, but simultaneously can't do anything that completely transcends what Aragorn could do. The problem is that fighting a Balrog itself completely transcends what Aragorn could do.

I'm not saying "we should change the one 'Mad Martigan 'till 20' class to not be that anymore". I'm saying "we should admit that the Fighter isn't even a 'Mad Martigan 'till 20' class in the first place and stop trying to pretend it is."

Again, just to re-emphasize, I fully agree that we should keep the Fighter's abilities as not inherently supernatural. But at the same time, we should also admit that the (natural!) abilities of a high level fighter include a level of martial prowess that is extremely superhuman (by the standards of our world) and not try to shy away from that.

Uh no.

Level 20 isn't "hit a Rhino so hard he explodes."

It is, "Expertly stab it in a vital location and kill it in a single stroke."

For Rogues relying on Sneak Attack to hurt their foe, sure. I mean, "strike a vital spot for extra damage" is exactly the description for how Sneak Attack works. If it were how the Fighter was getting all that extra damage too, then it would A) be precision damage, and B) fall off just as badly as the Rogue's damage does when going up against something homogeneous like an ooze that literally, specifically does not have any such "vital spot" to target.

But it doesn't, because it isn't.

Heck, let's take the whole "vital spot" question off the table entirely. A level 20 Fighter can also stroll right up to a Rhino and, without any assistance, wrestle it bodily to the ground and pin it there, with basically no difficulty at all. Like, literally only fail on a natural 1. Is that something you'd call "still within human capability"?

Why mess with something that, by all rights, you obviously hate when you have options that are viable enough.

I don't hate fighters. I've played them, enjoyed them. Heck, I probably want less changes to them than some of the people on this thread do.

I'm fine with them being predominately a class focused on "killing/maiming in not-terribly-flashy ways by hitting enemies with their weapons". I'm not arguing for sword beams or air-pressure punches or magical chi blasts. I mean... if it were hypothetically up to me, I'd increase their mundane capacity: give them better saves, better skills, maybe feats that allowed them to do cooler mundane things, eventual access to pounce or something like it in a straightforward way, etc. But I don't particularly want them to be "punching holes in reality".

(And yes, I have heard that some of the paperbacks give options to help with some of what I mentioned. Which is cool, and appreciated, though it's not exactly intuitive for newbies, like some players in my group. In order to call it a "good class" I'd want those fundamental sorts of things to be available in a more "out of the box" sort of way, not a "scour the splatbooks for the secret option" sort of way.)

Anyway, I'm getting off track. That's all to say that I agree with them being non-magical. But I just think they're inescapably superhuman. They already are just plain stronger, more resilient, more durable than anything in our world could even come remotely close to.

And what really bugs me--more than anything else--is when even the things that martials do have already get nerfed or complained about in the name of "realism". Like when people complain about or fiat away the rules on how high level characters are able to do things like survive terminal velocity falls, or (to go back to the example the Frank Trollman article gave) trivially kill a rhino with their bare hands.

That's how I see Fighters, as "being able to do the things that the game allows them to do". And I wish we'd lean into that paradigm in a cohesive manner, rather than trying to keep one foot in that world, and one foot in the still-just-Mad-Martigan world.

Some guy named Frank Trollman (who's written a lot of homebrew stuff for D&D 3.5 on just this topic) said this:

Wow, that's brilliantly put, and encapsulates the inherent cognitive dissonance so well. Particularly so, since the things that the "Mad Martigan 'till 20" crowd want to preserve are... honestly, already lost in the current system when you really look at it. Just... without the actual balance to show for it.

If you play to 20, even in the current system you're no longer playing anything resembling Mad Martigan. Mad Martigan cannot hit a Rhinoceros so hard that it invokes the "chunky-salsa rule" from sheer damage and explodes, after the Rhino spends several rounds futilely trying and utterly failing to do the slightest bit of damage to him as he just stands there. (Much like that first Saitama clip, actually.) kyrt-rider is exactly right. It's a level question, not a class question.

So as long as that's the case, as long as Level 20 means that you're a full-out ludicrous superhuman who is supposed to be able to go toe-to-toe with Balrogs Balors that Aragorn couldn't remotely hold a candle to, then let's at least own that, and lean into the kind of Figher that actually, thematically entails in a way that's consistent across the board, rather than the current approach of "make Aragorn's capabilities our thematic benchmark... eeeeexcept for a handful of raw numbers that blow it out of the water anyway, but without which we couldn't even pretend that it's balanced".

If you really, truly do want to play an actual Mad Martigan or Aragorn through a whole campaign, an E6 campaign is a perfectly viable way to do so. But let's not limit level 20 by trying to have a foot in both worlds, providing a "realism" it--even now--doesn't actually provide.

My experience with Shield Slam has been pretty positive. Used it on a enemy NPC I threw at the party's Paladin. The Paladin had a habit of splattering most things in one round thanks to Mythic Vital Strike, and I wanted an opponent that could give him a bit more of an actual "duel".

So I worked up a comparable-level Barbarian who combined Shield Slam with the "Come and Get Me" rage power, such that he could use the Shield Bash on the attacks of opportunity that were triggered by his opponent trying to whack him. The AoO would, of course, not get any of the iterative penalties, and he could smack away melee attackers into a position where they couldn't reach him any more once the AoO was resolved. Then he'd follow that up with a pounce and pound on the enemy in close quarters, then bash him away again when his opponent tried to retaliate.

Seemed to work pretty well; by the time the Paladin realized that his best bet was to go for his backup reach weapon in order to effectively attack, he was already in a pretty tight spot damage-wise, and he actually got KOed, though the rest of the party was able to turn the overall encounter around and rescue him.

So like how a werewolf has DR silver that makes it's wounds close from mundane weapons, so to does Cthulhu's wounds close when rammed by boats. His body is some weird incorporeal-like thing.

That description doesn't sound even remotely like DR to me. A hit that's fully absorbed by DR has no effect on the character's actions in combat; if you flavor it as some kind of limited recovery/healing, it's healing so fast the wound might as well not have happened in the first place.

In the very section you quoted, the boat hit Cthulhu so hard that the creature was actually physically "scattered". And when Johansen looked back, the "recombining" process was still going on, taking long enough that Cthulhu was unable to catch up to them.

That's not like hitting a werewolf not hard enough to punch through it's DR; that's like hitting a troll hard enough to chunky-salsa its body, only to have its Regeneration kick in because you didn't have the countering substance required to keep it down.

A martial guy should be able to do that with mooks, sure. With equal-CR martial combatants, 50/50 -- he dies or they do. And you can hit that benchmark with a reasonable PB. But that's not all he should be able to do, so that he pretty much has to sit out any encounters that don't involve a mundane opponent walking up to him and offering to trade blows Queensberry-style.

So I still don't understand enough of what you mean by "competent" to tell if I even disagree with you or not.

Because if by "competent" you mean the benchmarks above, and by "reasonable" you mean the 25 PB you were saying earlier was "barely enough" to make a "competent" martial, then in my experience a well built martial can hit around those kind of thresholds with way less than 25 PB.

Conversely, if all you're saying is just "the martial-caster disparity is a thing that exists", then... sure, whatever. If someone with decent system mastery builds a caster designed to overshadow the martials, then yeah, the caster will probably be able to do it. I agree that's a legit issue that can be talked about. (Though preferably not in this thread, since it's not terribly on-topic.)

So if by "competent" you mean "can contribute effectively--without relying on help from party members--in a situation designed to push a well-optimized non-support full-caster to their uttermost limits, along all axes" then I could understand that. No serious disagreement.

But for me, if you can take a class/PB combination into a module and have it contribute meaningfully to a majority of the encounters therein, it meets the base standard of being at least what I would consider "competent".

And I have absolutely seen martials do that on less than 25 PB, so I don't see how it's necessary to being "competent" in that sense.

Point buy is a tool of the magocracy. As noted upthread, 15 PB is more than enough to make your wizard or cleric into a god, whereas 25 PB is barely enough to make a competent martial. The problem isn't with the number of points; it lies in the martial/caster discrepancy that's built into nearly every aspect of the game from the ground up.

What do you mean by "competent"?

Is "competent" for a martial supposed to mean "has a somewhat comparable breadth of narrative options to a caster"?

Or is "can solo a CR appropriate encounter in a hail of arrows or raging pounce(s)" enough to qualify as at least "competent" for the purposes of this evaluation?

the fact that the side saying it's not a good idea, focus solely on character traits is the point, what if they're not character traits? what if they're simply human traits?

this all falls apart when you don't focus on someone say getting a will save to skim from the register, and it moves onto a will save to win a staring contest.

can I for the maximum greyest area possible, force a will save or fall in genuine love at first sight? I mean, it's usually argued that you don't get to choose to fall in love. Yet, i willing to bet that this is a no-no to most people.

"Falling in love" is NOT a universally human trait in the same way the blink reflex is. Asexual people are a thing that exists. You're saying players should not be allowed to play them?

What's more, the characteristics that cause someone to fall in love are even less generically human. If the GM is allowed to just decide based on a Will save that you fell for someone, you might end up falling head over heels for the tall, busty tavern maid when you personally see your character concept as being attracted to short, shy, intellectual men, and that tall, busty tavern maids don't tempt him in the slightest. Or vice versa.

In other words, no, I don't consider it a "gray area" in the slightest.

The problem with Cthulu's statblock is that his immortality explicitly notes that he fades away to "his tomb in R'lyeh" until he's released again. But what if some form of trap to damage or harm him is placed in his tomb? Or what if his tomb is destroyed? The fluff text notes that he's bound there (and it's fortunate), but that negates the text of his immortality entry, and there's really no backup text to indicate what happens. Probably intended to be implied that he can't be beaten down permanently anymore, but rules-wise, without a R'lyeh, his essence goes to R'lyeh... which is nowhere. He'll never be released from the tomb, because it doesn't exist. He's gone for good.

Personally, I'd probably go at it from the opposite direction were I GMing such a clash. Treat R'lyeh itself as more or less an enormous artifact, complete with an artifact's quirk of "only one way to destroy it". That method being, in this case, to permakill Cthulhu.

If I were going to explore that angle, I might let that be accomplished by killing him in the actual heart of R'lyeh itself, after he's already where he's been sent back to. Or maybe something more involved, depending on the needs of the campaign.

Swarms, incorporeal creatures, and certain kinds of regeneration can all completely shut down an unprepared party, with little chance of a workaround.

Of course, depending on how the regeneration is canceled you can obtain counters at early levels if you're thinking ahead and are willing to shell out the gold. Swarms can be similar, depending on where you fall on the whole "splash weapons against swarms" debate.

Still, they can both technically still serve that sort of "gateway" function, even if its a gateway you can go through fairly early (so long as you're experienced enough to know how important it is to prepare for).

Josh-o-Lantern wrote:

This link covers my entire opinion on the topic

I couldn't agree with this more. If your GM has ever has you combat Cthulhu in any physical way then they have no idea what they are doing.

Even in Lovecraft's own mythos, there are things that would squash Cthulhu like a bug, so if Cthulhu occupies "a place" in a GM's world-narrative, that place needn't be at the very top. And if you're in a world where humans have as much "upward mobility" as Golarion does... well, they can climb a lot higher than the level 1-4 commoners that Lovecraft's world probably mostly contained, and face things that would break those commoners' brains to try to comprehend.

Granted, doing so would mean that, even if such a game incorporates "elements from Lovecraft", its overall genre would not qualify as "Lovecraftian Horror" per se. Okay... so? True, if you tell a story about a bunch of heroes ascending to demigod levels of reality-warping magic and punching the Eldritch Abomination in the face until it runs back to R'yleh with its tail between its legs... then yes, you're not telling a story about a hopeless struggle against existential dread.

But those are hardly the only kind of stories you're "allowed" to tell with Cthulhu, any more than mystery-genre stories are the only kind of stories you're "allowed" to tell with Sherlock Holmes.

If the whole thematic "point" of your plot arc is the contention that humans actually can grow beyond what we thought our limits were yesterday, and stake out a claim even in a big, scary universe that doesn't much care about us... then Cthulhu actually makes perfect sense to use as a final boss, for the exact reason that he's the go-to poster child for the opposing view.

So... maybe it's not the case that those GMs "have no idea what they are doing".

Maybe they're just doing something different.

If that's a concern, you'll want to have a team to go with the Tarrasque on his quest to hit level 20, because there's plenty of time to undo the helmet on that journey. The team'll be there to re-up it if they need to.

Oh, sure, I guess I should have made that explicit, but yeah, I'd assumed you'd be watching over it along the way in case some crazed cultist manages to hit level 17 in a full-casting class that has access to Wish or Miracle, and decides to try to free the Big T from your plot.

As mentioned upthread, there are slightly faster ways to remove its immunity to Mind-affecting stuff, but in the time-frame of this plan, it doesn't matter much.

Yeah, I went with that particular approach because my cursory check didn't find much about Ember Weavers on d20pfsrd, which is my main go-to site, and I wasn't quite sure how that fit in with mainline Golarion or what it might entail to get one of those. I figured I'd just stick with an approach that I was familiar with.

You could pretty much just stop after step 4, since "The Tarrasque" as an engine of doom is dead, personality-wise.

True, but plot-device level deity powers could doubtless undo the effect of a Helm of Opposite Alignment.

The particular goal with this one was to tackle the "bonus round" of putting the solution to the Tarrasque beyond the power of even Rovagug to undo, should he ever regain his former ability to once again menace Golarion directly (as opposed to through his various proxies).

And undoing the Monk of the Healing Hand's capstone is one of the very few things accessible to mortals that are explicitly stated to be beyond even that level of power.

But yeah, you're absolutely right that for normal in-the-course-of-most-campaigns purposes, you wouldn't need to go nearly so far to effectively end the threat, practically speaking. This was, admittedly, in large part an exercise in support of the most holy Lord British Postulate. ;-)

I was imagining a few hundred people on shift at once, for maximum redundancy. An automated "Body-smasher" seems like it would work, though you'd want to have multiple going on, and a support staff to make sure one breakdown doesn't ruin everything.

Well, if you're only interested in keeping it at bay, and not actually killing it, my favorite method is the old lock-it-in-a-permanent-timeless-null-magic-demiplane-with-no-egress-portal method. That's another situation where you more or less need direct divine intervention to get it out.

Anyway, while almost any mortal means of killing the Tarrasque (or any other living thing in existence) won't stop a deity from bringing it back, there is one single exception that I'm aware of. If the victory conditions isn't "perma-kill the Tarrasque in a way that it stays dead as long as Rovagug doesn't get free from his prison to revive it" but rather "perma-kill the Tarrasque in such a way that it stays dead even if Rovagug breaks free and wants to resurrect it" then I submit the following approach:

Step 1) Beat the Tarrasque into the negatives, and keep it there
Step 2) Create a Simulacrum of Nocticula
Step 3) Keep exposing the Tarrasque to the Simulacrum's Seductive Presence Aura for days until it fails its save, removing its immunity to mind-affecting effects
Step 4) Find a Helm of Opposite Alignment, and put it on and take it off the Tarrasque's head until it rolls a natural one
Step 5) The Tarrasque is now Lawful Good, making it much easier to deal with now that it's benevolent. However, what we really care about is that it's now lawful. Next, hit it with a Geas to become a Level 20 Monk of the Healing Hand
Step 6) Take it to a monastery you scouted ahead of time for its initial training. Then, take it on a whirlwind adventure of power-leveling. You're going to need a LOT of xp, but hey, we never said this would be easy.
Step 7) Once it's level 20, manufacture a fake situation where it looks like your party is losing, and the whole world will be doomed unless you win, prompting the newly benevolent Tarrasque to sacrifice itself using its level 20 capstone to save Golarion.

Congratulations! The Tarrasque is now dead in a way that even if Rovagug did escape from his captivity, he could do nothing about.

The possibility of divine intervention is explicitly invoked by the Sphere of Annihilation.

I don't follow what you're trying to say here. The text in no way, shape or form says that there's anything about what the Sphere does to its victims that makes direct divine intervention more likely, or in any way easier. It just notes that it's the only thing that could ever possibly work.

So yes, if Rovagug is both willing and able to directly intervene on Golarion to resurrect the Tarrasque from being sucked into the Sphere, then there's no logical reason I can see why he couldn't use that very same direct divine intervention to thwart any other plan the PCs might bring to bear against the Tarrasque, just as easily.

Or, more likely given Rovagug's temperament, just rip the PCs to tiny shreds before they can implement it, no save.

The fact that he isn't doing things like that--given his observed behavior when he was free--is one of the many indications that he's no longer capable of exerting the kind of direct divine intervention on Golarion.

Which is, once again, the whole point of sealing something like him away in the first place.

That the Tarrasque is directly tied to a deity is also explicit in the statblock.

Out of curiosity, where? I looked on this link, but I wasn't able to find it.

What if the Tarrasque is a spoiled favorite child?

Then Rovagug becomes especially sad at losing it?

Like I said above, there's no indication or evidence that I'm aware of that Rovagug is even capable of that level of direct, personal divine-scale intervention on Golarion itself while he's sealed away. When you boil it down, that's the whole point of him being sealed away at all: to keep him from adversely affecting the larger creation. Wouldn't be much of a seal if it didn't limit what he could do...

And sure, you can always play the "what if?" game. The GM can always say "what if Rovagug wasn't actually as limited by the seal as the evidence seems to point to him being, and he resurrects the Tarrasque, even though he didn't resurrect Xotani?" But now you've gone way beyond the Big T's actual stat block into straight-up plot device land, and the same thing applies just as equally well to literally anything else the players could come up with.

Witch Generational Eternal Slumber Hex plan? "Oh, but what if Rovagug just uses direct divine intervention to make the Slumber Hex just not work on the Tarrasque?"

Soul Bind approach? "Oh, but what if Rovagug just uses direct divine intervention to make the Soul Bind fail?"

The classic plane shift it to sun? "Oh, but what if Rovagug just uses direct divine intervention to make your plane shift fail?"

Hit it with a sword? "Oh, but what if Rovagug just uses direct divine intervention to make you always miss?"

At that point you're not even talking about "the Tarrasque" anymore, making its actual nature (and statblock) rather irrelevant. It could just as easily be a level 1 commoner that Rovagug (or any other deity) has taken a shine to for whatever "what if" reason.

Certainly if you use the Golarion setting. But for people who don't, a sphere of annihilation would work quite well.

Even in the Golarion setting, I think it's extremely unlikely that it would recover from the Sphere. It's not just the "will" of a deity that's required, it's their "direct intervention". And Rovagug's ability to directly intervene (on a deific scale) in Golarion has pretty clearly been compromised by his seal, given how he's not blasting creation with his "direct" power in a rampage similar to his usual MO, and has been reduced to squeezing a new spawn through the keyhole every few hundred years.

There's also the fact that he never intervened via resurrection when, say, Xotani got mulched. And that wasn't with anything near as hard to ressurect from as a Sphere of Annihilation, AFAIK. I see no particular evidence that he'd suddenly do so if a different one of his spawn is killed (and so much more permanently).

So yeah, even if a GM is running canon Golarion (in which Spheres of Annihilation explicitly do exist) then if the players can pull off enough Knowledge checks and/or Legend Lore castings and/or whatever else they come up with to satisfy that GM that they ought to have picked up a trail from their research, then it is totally possible to kill the Tarrasque with stuff that has explicitly been stated to be present in the canonical Golarion setting, in a way that the Tarrasque would not be able to recover from in and of itself.

And once so killed, it is IMHO highly doubtful that Rovagug could do anything about it (in his current state). Now, if Rovagug were to break from his seal, then yeah, sure, he could probably resurrect the Tarrasque with a direct application of his divine might. But if Rovagug ever regains the ability to act that directly in Golarion, that means Golarion is about to have waaaaaaaay worse problems to deal with than the Big T.

Guess I could have worded it better... Most of the leadership style abilities affect all allies, not just the leader's companions. The commands are just for the companion.

No, I got that the leadership styles already apply. That's why I said "At the very least, I'd suggest letting Commands apply to any of your allies who are willing to listen".

If the point of your class is that you're a "good commander", I don't see any reason why you're only able to command one single person in the whole entire world. It's not like you have a special psychic link to only him, like with an eidolon or a animal companion or whatever.

And I did have a capstone, but removed it just before I posted this. It gave the leader a 2nd companion, but only at level-2. That seemed a bit too powerful, though. Any ideas on something better?

Beats me. I mean, it should be an awesome, thematic culmination of the principles and themes of the class... but like I mentioned, the class seems pretty bland (to me) to begin with, so I'm probably not the best person to ask as far as something like that goes.

Still, feels like it ought to have something, though.

----

Also, one other thing I forgot to mention: for the "Stand" command, players already automatically can apply morale bonuses to your AC to your overall CMD as well, so the bonus to the specific maneuvers is, as worded, redundant since the morale bonus to AC would in and of itself transfer to CMD against every combat maneuver already.

Personally, I don't think I'd play it. Just... comes across as feeling kinda barren, mostly.

I mean, yeah, you can make comparisons to the Summoner, with the critter being the "main event", but it feels like A) even with the Summoner, there were still more diverse, flavorful things the Summoner herself could do with her casting and such, and B) even the eidolon itself feels like it had more flair and wonkiness in how it was built, the different ways you could evolve it.

I dunno, when I look at this class, the main feeling I come away with is essentially "pick this class, and you can play through the game as two NPC classes instead of one PC class, but with one of them buffed sometimes!" Which just doesn't feel very exciting to me. The buffs you can hand out to your NPC buddy help a little bit, but they don't feel all that terribly interesting.

Add to that the fact that the eidolon was more designed to keep up on its own merits, while the parameters of this class mean that you're trying to (essentially) keep an NPC class and your main character APL combat-relevant on about 1/2 WBL each... I just look at it and my default response is "ugh".

(I mean, the classic heal-bots and crafting-bots you often see through Leadership are one thing--not nearly so gold-intensive--but if the player is actually trying to go the direct-combat route with their minion that a lot of these buffs seem to be pushing the player toward, that seems a lot more gear-dependent.)

Also, how do the Leadership styles work once you start getting more of them? Do they just stack, or do you have to pick which one you're using? If the latter, how do you switch between them?

At the very least, I'd suggest letting Commands apply to any of your allies who are willing to listen, not just your one dude. The whole shtick of this guy is supposed to be his overall magnetic ability to lead, right? Not a special spiritual bond to one single person. Why would it only work on one person in the world at a time?

Oh, and it could use a capstone. Capstones are cool.

But yeah, even if you did all that, and even if the WBL situation was mitigated somehow... even then, I still don't think I'd find it all that enticing. There's just not much in the overall progression here that I'd honestly look forward to. Like, most other classes tend to have more of a "oooh, I can't wait until level X, when my character becomes able to do Y!!!" factor.

Heck, both the Leadership Styles and Commands are free-pick and lacking any kind of prerequisites, so players will probably pick the ones they consider the best first, meaning each successive level will see them grabbing the ones they care about less and less as time goes on.

In the end, it's just... yeah, there's one more NPC on the board, one that you can buff in a handful of ways, and you get more bonuses the higher you go. Still doesn't, IMHO, match the same distinctive... "flair", I guess you could call it... that you can find in the other pet-owning classes, both in terms of how interesting the pet feels and how interesting the pet owner feels in and of themselves.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

Also, just to concentrate on what was alluded to above, don't underestimate how nifty Shield Slam can be, as a way to actually physically prevent a lot of opponents from reaching your squishier members. Especially if you can get Enlarge Person and/or Long Arm cast on you. If you Shield Bash for your AOOs in that widened threat area, not only do you get to whack incoming opponents, but you can also send them flying right back the way they came.

I've never used games as representational replacements for what would, in the narrative, be non-game skill rolls. I have, however, used games twice when the characters in question were actually playing said game as part of the plot.

The first time was when the PCs came across Death, who was curious about them and decided to check them out because they had just become Mythic (Death, in that setting, had a particular interest in mortals who started down that path). He offered them the chance to take one of four tests (or not, it was all completely optional). The Test of Intellect, the Test of Strength, the Test of Luck, and the Test of Deftness.

Anyway, long story short, the Test of Luck was playing a game of Liar's Dice with death, and for any PCs who picked that, we just plain played it out with the actual dice there. For all the challenges, if you won, Death granted you an extra point to your maximum possible Mythic Power reservoir. If you lost, he took one.

The second time was quite a bit later on, when the PCs were stuck in the depths of Limbo, without any way to Plane Shift out (since the only one who could cast it was an oracle NPC who had gotten separated from the party). So they visited a local denizen called the Player of Games, who had a large trove of magical items that he'd put up as the stakes in his games.

So they, along with a bunch of other people who had gotten sucked into that place, went to the portal to his pocket realm. He welcomed them in, and explained the game he was playing that day. Turned out to be, essentially, a variant of Go Fish with some odd rules. Among other things, the victory condition wasn't scoring points, but rather getting your hand down to zero. Also, it was never played with the same cards twice. Once the game was over, and cards left in your hand at that point became truly yours, and the game would begin with a fresh deck.

The Player of Games did a trial run playing for a potion of cure light wounds to show how it worked. Everybody anted up, and two of the PCs decided to play. I conscripted the others to play the NPCs, a Protean and a Qlippoth. The PCs won the potion, the losers took their cards, and then we started the next game, this time playing for what they were all actually here for: a Spherewalker's Staff that would allow them to get off the plane. Everybody anted up for that (a quite higher chunk of change) and the Player of Games brought out the new deck that they were going to play with.

Specifically, a Deck of Many Things.

I'd made modifications to it, of course, filling out more cards to get to the full 52 so that you could actually play a Go Fish game with it. And due to the Player of Games' magic, it worked like he promised. The cards wouldn't truly become theirs until after the game was over. So the one who won wouldn't get any effects, good or bad. But there were two PCs playing the game. And only one had a high enough Knowledge(Arcana) score to know what each card actually did. And the Player didn't permit table talk.

So, yeah, they played Go Fish with a Deck of Many Things. Pretty tense session, that one. But they managed to both win and make it out in one piece. Even got some nifty bonuses out of it, for the one who still had some cards left.

What I want to know now is why. In what way does this rule make the game better or more functional?

It makes the game better because it's a standard rule that can be applied across the board, rather than trying to argue each spell individually based on flavor text where the spell writer might not have been thinking of those particular considerations when writing it.

Take Call Lightning. It says you can call lightning bolts down from the sky, to a certain location. But how does the targeting work? And in what direction does the magic flow? Are you sending magic up into the sky, with the target location pre-encoded in that magic somehow? Or do you shoot out the magical equivalent of a "targeting flare" to the point you want the bolt to strike, whereupon it activates and from there calls down a lightning bolt to that point, lightning rod style?

Both of those are entirely valid ways that the spell could be said to work. If the general rule wasn't there, each and every spell would have to make explicit the precise "path" that its magic follows.

Rather than create that kind of a quagmire, they made a general rule instead. For spells where you're creating an effect at a location, unless the spell says otherwise, there's always at least some necessary element of targeting magic that has to flow from you to that target point, to specify where the effect you're creating should, in fact, occur.

I... really don't see what's so awful about that notion. It's not the only way it could have been done, but it makes sense enough to me, and I honestly far prefer one general rule to trying to argue out the answer for each individual spell based on each one's respective fluff text. The way things are, I can just quickly point people to that one section, have that settle it, and continue with play.

(This is actually exactly what happened to our group two sessions ago, funnily enough. We were doing exactly that, bogging down a fight in back and forth discussions of whether this spell or that spell required line of effect based on the details of its fluff text, but pulling out the straightforward rule cleared it right up and ended the uncertainty. So yes, I do think it benefits the game--in ways I have direct personal experience with.)

I am trying to create a backstory for a campaign I am running and it involves Aroden and speculating on his death. But in order to do that, I need to understand his "power level" when compared to other beings. My campaign involves the Demon Lord Kostchtchie a lot, and I am trying to tie the two together. But according to what I can find, Aroden would be much more powerful than Kostchtchie (I believe?). I cannot however figure out Aroden's power level when compared to Asmodeus (and other archdevils / major gods)

For what it's worth, if the question is how a demon lord would stack up against a Pathfinder deity, there is one official instance where one of the former managed to kill one of the latter. Namely, when Lamashtu killed Curchanus, becoming a deity herself as a result of her victory.

So, apparently, just being a deity doesn't put you utterly beyond the reach of lesser beings in the CR30-ish range. Particularly instructive is how Lamashtu accomplished the feat: she lured Curchanus into her territory (where he was presumably weaker, in a non-matching plane) and then zerg rushed him with swarms of minions until he was worn down enough for her to engage. So, interestingly enough, not only can people in the demon lord CR range technically cause damage to deities, but even lesser beings can harm them with enough of a massively overwhelming numbers edge to how much simultaneous firepower they can bring to bear.

At the same time, though, it's pretty clear that Lamashtu, before her own ascension, could not have taken Curchanus in an actual straight-up fight, even with home-field advantage. Still, they weren't so far apart that he was completely unreachable to her, either.