cnetarian's page

Hmm, monk of the empty hand (1 level dip) treats one handed weapons as clubs, unfortunately unarmed attacks are light weapons which a monk of the empty hand treats as hammers, but would work for some claws.

There was a ring in the river people companion last year which required you to stick your hand into water to make a club, not sure what it was called, cannot find it in Nethys, and don't have the companion to see if it was a separate club or turned your hand into a club, but someone might be able to check it out.

Is "snacks" an option?

Well, if you like to snack on soylent green then it most certainly is an option.

Let me see, played a female halfling dual whip wielding Calista wannabe who was heavily into discipline, played a vampiric shadow demon who sired children on mortal women so he could feed on his descendants to increase his power, played a psychopath who semi-sucessfully raised an outer god. Nope, I don't think there is anything which is too taboo for me to play, at least for a one-off.

I don't understand the question, by the rules you can use a firearm to make a CDG attack. Sure with pistols it might better to use the ramrod as a club (even the dagger pistol) but two handed firearms should do more damage than a club even without being like the axe-musket and since a CDG is an automatic hit there is no effective penalty for using an improvised weapon. It would be nice if you could shoot someone with a firearm for a CDG, but you can certainly use a firearm for a CDG.

It comes down to your GM's style, if your GM likes sending multiple dangerous opponents who pack together against you then cleaving finish (and the dwarf cleaving line) is worthwhile. Contrariwise if your GM tends to use one big monster or spreads the opponents out over larger areas or only throws sword fodder out in packs, then it isn't going to be very useful.

bracers of armor.

also the free hand fighter archetype gets a faster progressing AC bonus when wearing light armor than the brawler or the swashbuckler.

cnetarian wrote:

A rifle is pretty useless to a pistolero and to properly abuse the gunslinger you need a TWFing pistolero. What puts the pistolero over the top is 11 levels to get signature deed: up close and deadly, on top of deadly aim, on top of DEX to damage all done to 9 attacks per round )at BAB 16+ with speed, TWFing & rapid shot) made to touch AC against anyone close enough to attack you. A tiefling only needs a prehensile tail to handle the reloading rules.

At level 12 a TWFing pistolero should be looking at 7 or 8 pistol attacks/round to touch AC doing 1d10 + 10 (deadly aim) + 9 (pistol training with a 26 dexterity) + 3d6 (up close and deadly) with non-magic pistols for something like 175 DPR. After level 11 and signature deed it can be worthwhile to take vanilla fighter (not trench fighter as the GM is likely to allow pistol training to stack with trench fighting) to get weapon training (gloves of dueling) and weapon specialization for more damage (and feats, the TWF pistolero uses a metric crapload of feats). And if you really want to get the gunslinger banned from play use double pistols and interpret the rules freely to make each attack a double attack which should almost double your damage output.

I find it best to take UMD for scrolls of abundant ammunition and casting greater magic weapon on ammo to get the magic pluses while enchanting pistols to +1 only with a spare or 3 for misfires, then putting flaming/distance/bane/whatever on them. Also I find that a single pistol working to rapid shot before getting a second pistol and TWFing is easier to handle than trying to get a second pistol and TWFing right away. Note that you will figuratively be shooting money out the barrels of your pistols so this is not such a good idea for a non-high-loot game.

signature deed doesn't work with erratad up close and deadly

Darn errataed 2 weeks ago, ruined signature deed too by only allowing it to be used once per round. Well with signature deed ruined there is no reason to go above gunslinger level 1. Level 1 gunslinger (vanilla) switch to savage technologist barbarian for 5 levels to get DEX to damage and raging DEX bonus, then fighter for weapon training (gloves of dueling) and feats (including weapon specialization). TWFing pistols a level 1 gunslinger/level 5 savage technologist/ level 6 fighter would be attacking 7 or 8 times per round for 1d10 + 10 (deadly aim) +10 (DEX to damage with raging dexterity of 30) +3 (weapon training:firearms & gloves of dueling) +2 weapon specialization - but this is only good for the 1 minute of combat day. For a longer day trenchfighter seems to work fine but be aware that at a certain point the lack of armor training will cause problems with the armor DEX max.

A rifle is pretty useless to a pistolero and to properly abuse the gunslinger you need a TWFing pistolero. What puts the pistolero over the top is 11 levels to get signature deed: up close and deadly, on top of deadly aim, on top of DEX to damage all done to 9 attacks per round )at BAB 16+ with speed, TWFing & rapid shot) made to touch AC against anyone close enough to attack you. A tiefling only needs a prehensile tail to handle the reloading rules.

At level 12 a TWFing pistolero should be looking at 7 or 8 pistol attacks/round to touch AC doing 1d10 + 10 (deadly aim) + 9 (pistol training with a 26 dexterity) + 3d6 (up close and deadly) with non-magic pistols for something like 175 DPR. After level 11 and signature deed it can be worthwhile to take vanilla fighter (not trench fighter as the GM is likely to allow pistol training to stack with trench fighting) to get weapon training (gloves of dueling) and weapon specialization for more damage (and feats, the TWF pistolero uses a metric crapload of feats). And if you really want to get the gunslinger banned from play use double pistols and interpret the rules freely to make each attack a double attack which should almost double your damage output.

I find it best to take UMD for scrolls of abundant ammunition and casting greater magic weapon on ammo to get the magic pluses while enchanting pistols to +1 only with a spare or 3 for misfires, then putting flaming/distance/bane/whatever on them. Also I find that a single pistol working to rapid shot before getting a second pistol and TWFing is easier to handle than trying to get a second pistol and TWFing right away. Note that you will figuratively be shooting money out the barrels of your pistols so this is not such a good idea for a non-high-loot game.

If a healer be needed then the bard is a top-notch option from the core classes, it has all the cures and most of the removes so it can fill the role of party healer while being charisma based so it can also function as the party face. Plenty of archetypes to make the bard function as you want it too, take the arcane healer to get cleric type channeling, (I think the songhealer is a better primary healer) - a personal favorite is to make a sound striker (overpowered archetype once you get weird words) and play Roberta Flack during combat.

Don't use a trap door, have the floor collapse under their combined weight and send them all into a basement room with walls covered in runes that they really do not want to touch, as would be required to climb out. At this point you should mention that you hadn't expected them to come here before they had access to a fly spell, but that there is another way out and you're pretty sure that they might be able to handle this dungeon with their NPC's firepower, so you'll just roll with it as is.

Orfamay Quest wrote:

Kyaaadaa wrote:

I would play it as such: If the meaning of your puzzles doesn't become apparent to the party within a real life time frame of a set amount, allow them skill checks to provide hints and clues.

That doesn't work.

I'm quite serious. You can't provide clues to someone who's downstairs getting drinks, or who has just popped out the cell phone and no longer cares enough to pay attention. "What? Think of a rainbow? Whatever,... Hey, have you seen this YouTube clip with the annoyed cat?"

OK, I don't think we need to pretend that every group behaves this way toward puzzles. It's apparent from many of the above posts that that's not the case.

However, it is a valid point to suggest that no matter how well you handle a puzzle, your group may still throw their attention out the window anyway. I think the first thing you need to do is talk to the group out of game about their stance ON puzzles, tell them there may be puzzles, and how can we come to a stance as a group to make it not suck?

Doesn't work as a group, each individual has to be willing to do the puzzle or you wind up with half the players solving the puzzle while the other half is throwing m&ms at each other and making occasional stupid suggestions.

The other problem I've seen is players getting hung up on something which the GM threw in as off-the-cuff flavor that has absolutely nothing to do with the puzzle.

You know, I think the most classically evil character I've ever managed to get away with was a paladin. No one is quite as good at being evil as the truly good. Especially when your deity has an oath with some wiggle room for violent action in it. Sure, I can't use poison, or torture folks, but I can intimidate, hold summary courts martial, execute the accused, and do all sorts of pretty wicked stuff, without ever breaking a law or violating a paladin's oath. Just because you're good, doesn't mean you have to be nice, after all.

So, if your GM won't let you be evil, be lawful good instead, and show them just how evil lawful good can be when taken to its crusading and utterly relentless extreme.

While I cannot agree with the last sentiment, the first part I agree with and have had a paladin who was similar. His default response to surviving intelligent foes was to persuade them to confess their sins and then execute them so their souls could be judged before being weighed down by future sins. A nasty SOB who I grew to hate playing - completely lawful and good* with not a smudge on his paladin code escutcheon.

*as defined by the alignment rules, with a twist.

The only reason anybody wants to play chaotic neutral or evil characters in a non-evil group is to disrupt the game, that's why those alignments are often banned. Now, if you're playing in an evil campaign with a group of evil PCs, that's perfectly fine. But if that's not the makeup of the campaign or group, then it becomes a huge problem. My advice to the OP: recommend your group try out an evil campaign.

I disagree, while CE is usually an excuse to be jerk it isn't always so. I once partied with a character who was abundantly greedy and obsessively (should see a shrink level) independent which made him chaotic evil, but the only serious intra-party conflict we had was the one occasion when we went all altruistic and there was no loot in sight, and that was easily resolved with a bribe. Being chaotic doesn't mean you have to defile every rule and social convention ever created while being evil doesn't mean you have to strangle every kitten you come across - CE no more has to be a psychotic anarchist than LG has to be lawful stupid. Being evil can be as simple as primarily looking out for #1 while being chaotic can be as simple as not blindly following rules.

That said, it does take a good role-player to pull off CE without being a drag on a party, it is just so easy for CE characters to slip into caricature.

I suspect the bans are really aimed at players who use their characters' alignments as an excuse to be jerks. While it is certainly possible to create a chaotic-evil character who works well with a party, it takes a serious role-player to do so and most of the CE characters one is likely to encounter in games are solely there to screw over the rest of the party. It is also possible to create LG characters who cannot work with a group, but again, it takes a serious role-player to do so and most of the LG characters one is likely to encounter in games are not going to be a problem.

As has been mentioned CN is one of those alignments which is often used by players to create characters with no actual character who are often incapable of functioning in a party. It tends to be cyclical in my experience, players start abusing CN alignment to justify bad characters, DM bans CN (or evil or whatever, once I saw CG get so abused it was banned) out of hand, a player comes up with a reasonable CN character and talks DM into relaxing the ban for that character, players make some reasonable CN, players start abusing CN alignment to justify bad characters... .

The same level unless there is some really good reason otherwise. There are two practical reasons for this: 1) the replacement character almost always takes over the same role as the dead character, and if the player was unable to handle the role with one character without dying a new character at lower level is even more likely to die, 2) it is much harder as a DM to build interesting encounters for parties with characters of diverse levels.

And then and sign of barbarism stops after looking at the class skill list... almost as if the class skill list is the only mechanic at all that seems to link barbarians with their sterotype fluff...

The rules are flexible enough that there is nothing which forces any character to match their class fluff, just rules which make them more efficient at being like their class fluff. A wizard can grab a two-handed sword, strap on some plate and charge into battle without ever using a single spell - it would be rather foolish since wizards aren't proficient with two-handed swords or plate, have half the hit points of a barbarian and have little in the way of class abilities to aid them in charging into battle, but the rules don't force wizards into wearing a bathrobe and using magic to twist the world to their liking. A barbarian can have an 18 int and act as a skill monkey while never using a single round of rage, or even engaging in combat, but the class isn't a good choice for that type of character. Rage itself is a major mechanic which drives barbarians to acting like their fluff, it significantly rewards barbarian characters who engage in combat as enraged killing machines.

those librarians are likely to be different people from the berzerkers.

Which is probably a good thing for those who return library books late.

Show me where in the mechanics where it says that has to be your character's flavour.

If you check the class skills for barbarians you'll note that barbarians are the only class which doesn't have profession as a class skill. While the class description doesn't dictate any individual character's flavor, the barbarian is a mechanically inferior class for building a civilized character.

Barbarians don't get profession for the same reason you can't be a lawful barbarian. For some reason the sterotype of all barbarians being idiots from tribes is semi-enforced as rules, despite the fact that their are jobs and roles in tribes, and a member of the barbarian class doesn't have to be tribal at all and can be completely civilized.

For some, there is only rage. In the ways of their people, in the fury of their passion, in the howl of battle, conflict is all these brutal souls know. Savages, hired muscle, masters of vicious martial techniques, they are not soldiers or professional warriors—they are the battle possessed, creatures of slaughter and spirits of war. Known as barbarians, these warmongers know little of training, preparation, or the rules of warfare; for them, only the moment exists, with the foes that stand before them and the knowledge that the next moment might hold their death. They possess a sixth sense in regard to danger and the endurance to weather all that might entail. These brutal warriors might rise from all walks of life, both civilized and savage, though whole societies embracing such philosophies roam the wild places of the world. Within barbarians storms the primal spirit of battle, and woe to those who face their rage.(PF, almost word-for-word identical to 3.5)

In 4 years of somnolence no one pointed out the obvious reason barbarians don't get profession as a skill, professions require training and barbarians don't do training. Sure there are barbarians who are goat herders, but they aren't trained at it, the tribe just throws a baby barbarian into the goat pen and if the goats don't eat the baby they become a goat herder. There can even be barbarian librarians, but they wouldn't be trained to it, instead the tribe would just leave a bunch of barbarian babies in a library and those who learn to forage for food alongside the wild thesauri become barbarian librarians.

The goto 3rd level my paladins use is burst of speed. The ability to move through large enemies (medium enemies if you're a halfling or other small paladin) creates tactical advantages that are not to be sneered at. The others have their uses, but I almost always keep burst of speed on my memorized spell list.

I understand the usual technique used by kingdoms is to offer admission to the royal family to whichever adventurers survive killing the dragon. It may not be efficient in terms of adventurers since one might go through thousands before some manage to slay the dragon but for the kingdom it is very efficient, no actual expenditure to slay the dragon (the adventurers become part of the royal family and if the adventurers have any wealth of their own it gets added into the kingdom's wealth) and potential out-breeding with proven superior stock. As an added bonus, from the kingdom's point of view, it is also a good way to cull the murder-hobo population which is (even when not slaying villages of goblin subjects) quite disruptive with all their trying to sleep with every mildly attractive citizen, starting bar-fights, conspiring with priests and so forth.

Are you tied to having the super weapon be a regular weapon, or would a deity destroying weapon like lyrta spores which gestate into a rapidly reproducing deitivorous (deity eating) fungus that does exponentially increasing damage to the deity (1d20 damage on the first round, 2d20 on the second round, 4 d20 on the 3rd round, 8d20 on the 4th round and so on - only one dose of spores is available) and can be applied by any character work for the climactic show down? When dealing with killing deities I prefer to give the players one-shot weapons just so that they are less likely to use them on the wrong deities.

cnetarian wrote:

right, there is a weapon which can use slashing grace and weapon finesse without houserule, you need whip mastery (and usually exotic weapon proficiency:whip) on top of weapon finesse, weapon focus:whip and slashing grace.

Actually - now Slashing Grace works with all light weapons.

Is that FAQ official yet, or is still pending?

SwiftStriker wrote:

oldsaxhleel wrote:

Slashing grace in the ACG, problem is it requires a 1 handed slashing weapon, so your choices are pretty limited. off hand, I can only think of 2 weapons that even qualify if you're wanting a weapon that actually qualifies for weapon finesse(why wouldnt you?), those being the dagger and the shortsword. rapier doesnt count because of piercing damage, and neither the longsword nor the scimitar can be used with weapon finesse. decent feat for TWF rogues, but that's about it.

I am actually using this for a TWF halfling rogue using daggers.

Also if you wanted to use dex based damage for a scimitar then you would just take Dervish Dance.

As previously indicated, daggers (and shortswords) are Light Weapons rather than One-Handed Weapons, so if you want to use Slashing Grace you have to hope for a GM who is willing to overlook that requirement.

right, there is a weapon which can use slashing grace and weapon finesse without houserule, you need whip mastery (and usually exotic weapon proficiency:whip) on top of weapon finesse, weapon focus:whip and slashing grace.

1. it cannot be done with a spell warrior because weapon song replaces the inspired rage raging song, so a spell warrior skald cannot grant the linnorm death curse to his allies.

2. The rule is that bonuses from the same source do not stack.

• the +1 comes from the rage power
• the 1d6 comes from the weapon enchantment

Average Total Modifier is a better method of comparison because of the even/odd problem (modifiers kick in with even values and odd ability scores are only slightly more valuable than the even score below them - a character who roles straight 13s has a PB equivalent of 18 but has inferior modifiers compared to a character with a 15PB of 5x 12s and a 14 in one attribute.

Even Average Total Modifier isn't a perfect method of comparing actual utility since not all statistics are equally useful to all characters and the SADder (single attribute dependent) a character is the more they benefit from an outlier score in their primary attribute and less they benefit from other attributes. This utility factor means that with a 10 PB about 80% of characters created by players will have one outlier attribute of 16+, while 4d6 drop lowest results in at least one attribute of 16+ about 56% of the time. Then again modifiers are only important to the utility in terms of die rolls, the more rolls a character makes using a modifier the more useful that modifier is and a fighter who rolled a 14 charisma (considered a wasted attribute for fighters)is going to benefit from that modifier any time he has to make a roll involving charisma.

Since it varies from person to person abd campaign to campaign, there is no way to mathematically calculate a comparison of the in-game utility of characters created using PB values and rolling methods. Effectively you're going to have to come up with a rule of thumb for comparing PB to roll methods based on the min/maxing ability of your players, their preferences for SAD classes, and what balance you have between roll-play and role-play.

One of my favorite 'tricks' is to put some zombies in shallow graves behind where the party is likely to fight - nothing says you care like a zombie swarm from the rear. Archers who fight from behind traps are also fun, see barbar charge enemy, see barbar fall into pit, hmm maybe the hunter won't send his pet to make a melee charge.

However if it more than new tactics you need then switch things up. Everyone knows about ghoul paralysis, why not throw the ability onto a pack of corpse-eater wolves? Crossbreed ogres with trolls and throw some regenerating ogres-of-troll-ancestry at the party.

57. A green glass container which can only be described as a gigantic goblet as tall as a man, containing small objects with no discernible order or purpose. Feel free to select the contents but be sure to mention their arrangement, example: in the nearest portion of the goblet a chunk of fossilized bat guano the size of a cat's ear rests on top of 3 glued together copper coins which have turned green with age while both brush up against what looks to be the front pocket from a pair of trousers.

The road paved with good intentions is an easy way to handle this sort of reversal. Start with defeating evil, move to the more neutral then before you know what is going on the good guys are your target.

Certainly the goblins which were attacking the town were a valid target. It just made sense to investigate the mercenaries who had sent a recruitment letter to the goblin chieftain. And who wouldn't have followed up on all those wagons of weapons found in the mercenary camp? Admittedly burning down the smithy might have been a bit extreme. But it did lead us to the cleric who was paying for the weapons and mercenaries, although in retrospect we probably shouldn't have just assumed that a cleric of Torag creating a mercenary army was an evil traitor to the deity. Those secret letters between the priest and the minister of the army were soooo incriminating and it was public knowledge that the minister of the army had a better claim to the throne than the king, there was no way we could have known that she declined the throne in favor of the king and was one of his strongest ... .

You really need to put risky striker in there. After all, it isn't often that a halfling fights something that isn't at least two size categories larger than them.

CR is never and always useless. If you run 1,000,000 different parties through an encounter, then CR is going to be a good indicator of how much of a challenge that encounter is going to be, on average. If, like most of us, you only have one or three different parties going through an encounter, then CR is a poor indicator of how difficult the encounter is going to be for the one or three parties you have going through the encounter. About level 10+ with my players, the characters start to develop some sort "tricks" which can trivialize a lot of encounters, but that is less a problem with CR than with the way character development works.

The normal 'dip' is five levels of gunslinger for DEX to damage, which even a warpriest would find useful. If not using advanced firearms (revolver is advanced) then amateur gunslinger is pretty essential for non-gunslingers, need the quick clear deed. If using 2H firearms then there is no sure way around 3 levels of Musket Master and using a musket to get free action reloading, a GM ruling could permit free action reloading of an advanced 2H firearms either through rapid reload or metal alchemical cartridges (the rules for reloading advanced firearms are incomplete and the rapid reload feat actually slows down the reload speed of advanced firearms).

My halfling barbarian used to dress up in a wizard's robe over her armor and even carried a spell pouch. She provided quite the surprise for anyone who thought she was easy pickings in melee combat. She started with it because she dyed her skin blue and everyone mistook her for a gnome, and since even halfling barbarians know that gnomes are all magic users she just went with it, but it is perfectly viable to present to the world as a class you are not.

Nagaji doesn't work because they cannot qualify for racial heritage (a human feat) to qualify for scaled discipline (a kobold feat). Unless scaled discipline has made it into some new book, this isn't PFS legal as nothing in Kobolds of Golarion is PFS legal.

The easiest fix if you want to change the firearms rules is not to ditch touch AC entirely but to only allow it at short range. Early firearms with touch AC at 1 range increment and range increments of 20'/40' work fairly well to give you a concept of what ranges might work. "Reward" the player with touch AC attacks when he gets into the right position and "punish" him with normal AC attacks when he is too far from the front line.

Move a creature with reach and combat reflexes next to his character - he can either eat an AoO for each attack he makes and every time he reloads or he can take a move action to move more than a 5' step and not take a full attack action. Air elemental is my first choice.

Terrain & spells like wall of ice can also shut down ranged characters (like the gunslinger) pretty easily if they don't stick with the party. For that matter an occasional ambush on isolated party members (like the lone gunman) by a second group of baddies is not an unfair thing if the party often gets split up in combat.

non-existent. there may be some cants different groups come up with for situations where silent communication is necessary, but there should be no actual language. there is just too much magic to have a significant deaf population when one can buy a 3rd level cure blindness/deafness scroll(375gp) or hire a cleric (150gp). throw in a world where spells like telepathic bond and detect thoughts exist and there is no need for a full sign language to be created, most mutes will just use the written language and spells/scrolls/magic items when writing won't work.

Only if your opponent has the teleport tactician feat.

So assuming I'm not doing 5 levels of gunslinger but that I am doing some, am I better off as Pistolero 2/inquisitor X or as Musket-Master 3/Inquisitor X?

If those two are your only choices go MM3/InqX.

If you can, going vanilla gunslinger1/InqX who uses a pistol would be better. deadeye is a better deed than up-close-and-deadly.

Vanilla Gunslinger beats the pistolero for dabblers in firearms, it isn't until the pistolero has some levels in the archetype that it takes off in daamge dealing. There isn't enough advantage in taking 2 levels of pistolero (vanilla) to make it worth delaying inquisitor abilities coming online.

you mean "reloading as a free action", using an alchemical cartridge you can reload a musket as a move action at level 1 when you get rapid reload (muskets).

reloading as a free action is important when the number of attacks per round exceeds 1, because otherwise you cannot make more than 1 attack per round. Most characters which use guns try to get this as soon as possible by using rapid shot, but since bane is arguably a better choice than a second musket attack, the gunfighter/inquisitor can go musket master for one level then inquisitor for five levels then musket master for two more levels hitting +6/+1 BAB as a MM3/inquisitor5.

I think the extra attack of rapid shot is worth more than bane. An extra musket attack does 1d12 + static bonuses for -2 to hit while bane is just +2d6 to damage and +2 hit and hit bonuses aren't as important for gunslingers as other classes. Further if you go MM3 then Inquisitor with rapid shot you will have BAB +6/+1 at level 7 and be making 3 attacks per round because gunslinger is a full BAB class while inquisitor is a 3/4th BAB class.

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All that said, you're probably better off going vanilla gunslinger 1/inquisitor X if your character is intending to be a firearm using inquisitor. There is no real advantage to going pistolero 2 instead of gunslinger 1, nimble is nice but not worth delaying and weakening just judgement, and the up close and deadly deed is going to be less useful than the deadeye deed.

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Also if you are doing Iron Gods/Reign of Winter with their firearms which don't need to be reloaded every shot and longer ranges then the necessity of free action reload becomes less important.

Bah, someone spends years in a lab drinking whatever strange chemical cocktail they created at 4AM after being up for 6 days and people have to expect that it might have the odd side-effect like the rubbery bones. If people thing the occasional tentacle growing out of someone's forehead is "creepy" then I shudder to imagine what they think of an alchemist who grows claws and fangs while suppressing their intelligence. Just because an alchemist spends his time talking to alternate personae is no reason to call him "creepy". An alchemist is just another character trying to survive as a murderhobo, if you cut him does he not bleed (warning the blood of some alchemists has been known to induce nausea)?

meh, wall of force scroll for 1,125gp around the vamp to keep him from escaping topped off with a few sunburst scrolls. Admittedly they're 3,000 gp each and off the druid list, but someone should have a decent enough UMD to have good chance to roll a DC 35 check, and if they fail just use another scroll (there's also dust of emulation). 3 should be enough. If you're using a patron's resources there is little reason not to bring out the big guns.

If high level scrolls are off the table, use a scroll of resilient sphere(level 4 wizard spell, is he more than 7' tall?) to contain the vampire for 7 minutes. During those 7 minutes you can use the scrolls of gaseous form and trace and such to prepare to follow the vamp to his coffin, being ready to go when the wall of ice wears off and perhaps crush some garlic to give you one round of free action while he recoils from the garlic. If you're like me however, you use those 7 minutes to use a scroll of stoneshape (level 4 wizard spell) to enclose the vamp in a resilient sphere in an outer airtight stone sphere. 2 hours latter when the vamp cannot return to his coffin he is dead instead of undead.

Realistically longsword is off the table until level 5 so you have some time to figure it out, you could decide at level 3 by taking weapon focus then or can put it off and taking weapon focus & slashing grace at the same time at level 5. IIRC the increased crit chance of a 1d4/18-20X2 results in a greater average damage in the long run than 1d6/19-20X2 but I might be wrong as it is a long time since I've actually checked the math. Regardless of which weapon does more damage on average in the long run, I favor the increased critical chance with magni because it seems to increase the effective damage more (although this might just be an observer effect due to criticals with a spell doing outrageous damage).

Hmm, if magic item crafting is on the table then the obvious choice is a singing sword because they are so cheap to create.

A temple sword with bells would seem probably be a good base, if your GM will let you consider it to be a musical instrument. The Hurrican quarterstaff is designed to whistle when swung and should be able to qualify for musical instrument status.

For the first, I do mean heavy crude, that sinks in seawater after the lighter stuff has evaporated (probably somewhat similar composition to the bitumen you are thinking of).

For cooking oil, I have never seen cooking oil (or solid grease) that failed to float on water, as long as it wasn't stuck to whatever surface was under the water.

But I accept that if you have trouble convincing yourself that vegetables are food, we might be thinking of different things, and might even have mutually alien metabolisms . . . .

It's a definitional thing, once crude oil gets to the same density as water (actually little higher) it ceases to be heavy crude oil and becomes bitumen. As for the milk thing, it was a too subtle (judeo-christian) biblical joke, sometime maybe 5,000 to 6,000 years ago a religious injunction forbidding cooking an animal in it's mother's milk came into effect, which I spun into the "modern fashion" of using oils for cooking instead of milk.

The best way to up damage as a musket master is to fire more, and that means staying a musket master. At level 3 you should take the rapid shot feat, which combines with rapid reload (muskets), fast musket deed, & alchemical cartridges to fire twice per round - this will result in a much greater increase in damage than any class will give you. At level 5 you get DEX to damage on each hit, which also should be a bigger damage boost than 2 levels in any class can give you.

The decent set of early feats for a musket master is:

lvl 1: rapid reload(musket) free for being musket master, point blank shot
lvl 3: rapid shot
lvl 4: deadly aim
lvl 5: precise shot

After level 5 the musket master can do well by changing class, but the musket master still has a few 'tricks' to increase damage. Musket training increases damage by +1 every 4 levels and then there are deeds. The level 7 deed 'dead shot' is not to be overlooked against creatures with DR or which are really hard to hit, and at level 11 a MM can combine signature deed with the bleeding wound deed to add DEX bleed damage to every attack. Admittedly these are nothing compared to the pistolero who can take signature deed with up close and deadly, but they have to be factored into the value of taking a new class. Personally I find 'dead shot' too valuable to ignore and would never switch class until level 7, but others might not find that to be true. When taking another class consider the effects of the BAB on the number of attacks made, a musket master 5/fighter 6 gets 4 attacks/round while a musket master 5/rogue 6 only gets 3 attacks/round which can result in less damage per round.

---edit---
WRT to the DR 10 golems, a musket master is one of the few able to do any damage with a ranged weapon at level 1.

If you think the DM is going to keep tossing high DR encounters your way then you can invest some gold in special materials for bullets (adamantine should have worked against the iron golems), I recommend combining them with level 1 scrolls of abundant ammunition. You ought to buy some special materials to make into bullets anyway (make them with gunsmithing, do not buy them premade - 61G for an adamantine bullet is just too expensive), but usually it is something which isn't needed for the first few levels.

cnetarian wrote:

Don't be silly, heavy crude is lighter than water, are you thinking of the extra heavy sludge (bitumen) which comes from coal sands, because that isn't really crude oil. I use the oil that is so good it is sinful, I use milk of the animal as my cooking oil - cow milk for beef usually. As for French fries, I gave up long pig as it has too many chemicals in it. Unless you are talking about french fries made from plants dug out of the ground, which might be interesting if I could find a potato oil to cook them in and were wiling to accept that vegetables actually are food.

So when you say "cooking oil", you're talking about milk? Because I just checked, and my dice sink in milk also.

I actually asked my roommate (a materials engineer) about it when salt water failed for me, and when I suggested milk, he said that milk is the same density as water-- the minerals and substances dissolved in it that make it milk are of equivalent density as the water itself (which is why it doesn't separate in the jug).

Heavy cream, on the other hand...?

Milk's (specific gravity @1.03( a hair denser than water (specif gravity 1), skim milk (SG @1.07) is denser too but salt water (SG @1.03 sea water but can be as high as SG = 1.20 at saturation) is considerable denser. --edit-- heavy cream(SG@.98) is actually less dense than water.

If you have saturated salt water (somewhere between 1/3rd & 1/4th salt) you can pump the density up to about SG1.28 by dissolving sugar into the salt water until the sugar saturates the solution (you can dissolve more sugar than salt, but it increases the density less). That's about the limit of kitchen physics. From what I remember of my *cough*cough* year old physics, dish soap varies in density by brand, but because of the way it plays games with surface tension dish soap can float heavier objects than saturated salt water, however don't mix soap and water (the soap dissolves in the water and plays a whole different set of tricks with surface tension).

cnetarian wrote:

{. . .}

on a more serious note, better to change to a denser fluid than changing the salt in the salt water. if you feel like going all out, switch to glycerin (cheaper than caesium chloride too) but cooking oil or liquid soap should do the trick for most dice and does not require a trip anywhere but the grocer.

----edit---
completely forgot that what most people use as cooking oil these days is less dense than water. why people would want to cook perfectly good food in light oils is beyond me, but it is the fashion.

Wait, you cook in heavy crude or halogenated hydrocarbons? I'm not eating your french fries . . .

Don't be silly, heavy crude is lighter than water, are you thinking of the extra heavy sludge (bitumen) which comes from coal sands, because that isn't really crude oil. I use the oil that is so good it is sinful, I use milk of the animal as my cooking oil - cow milk for beef usually. As for French fries, I gave up long pig as it has too many chemicals in it. Unless you are talking about french fries made from plants dug out of the ground, which might be interesting if I could find a potato oil to cook them in and were wiling to accept that vegetables actually are food.

There was an experiment done a few years back where d20s were rolled 10,000 times and the results recorded. The experiment was to compare the randomness of Chessex dice against GameScience dice. It was demonstrated that the GameScience die rolled more true than the Chessex die.

However it has been pointed out that a typical d20 is more egg shaped than round, with the flattened axis being aligned through the 1 and the 20. If you look at the bar graph of the Chessex die in the link above you will see that the numbers that came up less often were the 1, the 20, and the six other numbers that share a side with them (2,7,8,13,14,19). The numbers that came up more often were those along the "equator".

Because of this shape it makes sense that the 1 and 20 would come up more often in the saltwater test, but I would expect the same thing to happen when they are rolled, contrary to what the data show.

The saltwater test will not detect a die which is 'out-of-true' shapewise, only one which has poorly distributed weight. The saltwater test demonstrates the heaviest side 'sinking' to the bottom resulting in the rotating die stopping with it's lightest face (or vertex if the weight is really off) on the top. If the weight in the die is evenly distributed then the shape of the die is irrelevant in the saltwater test and the die won't roll to any favored side.

Just because a die passes the saltwater test doesn't mean it is fair. Also one shouldn't expect too much of a die in the saltwater test, what one should really look for is how long it takes to come to rest after being spun than what number it comes to rest on, the faster a die comes to a stop the more unequally the weight is distributed.