geoffrey heald's page

Coridan wrote:

Book of Erotic Fantasy, yeah it had some stupid stuff in it, but it also had a lot of great stuff.

You'll note that that book was published in Europe, if it's the one I think it is, which has a much more relaxed attitude. However, as far as I know, it's not OGC.

Apparently you are thinking of something else: the book of Erotic Fantasy was published by Valar Project, whose address was (is?) in Seattle, Washington, although the actual publication was done in China. It's also chock full of OGC: "All game mechanics and statistics herein are to be considered Open Game Content."

Ironicly for a book that came with a "Mature Content" warning, it's handling of the subject matter is often fairly juvenile, going for shocking or titalating just for the sake of being shocking or titalating, but it does have a number of good crunchy bits in there, whether you are running a regular dungeon-crawl campaign (rules for half-demons, half-dragons, half-giants that could all make interesting monsters to fight), or one that is merely suggestive and "naughty" (Bards are always popular with the opposite sex, and now they can put that Perform skill to good use :) ), or a ribald comedy (the cantrip Grope leaps to mind, as well as new uses of Command).

And a number of the spells they introduced with erotic intent have non-erotic uses:
Disrobe, 2nd level spell that will cause the target's non-magic armor to fall off.
Come To Me, 7th level spell that teleports 1 willing ally from anywhere on the same plane to a space adjacent to the caster.

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A comment about 2 books mentioned above: A Magical Medeval Society: Western Europe and Silk Roads contain virtually no rules. They are great books, but they are guides to world-building, and part of what makes them great is not wasting pages on the nearly obligatory 5 new Prestige Classes and 3 pages of Feats. :)

I'll be going through my Big Pile of Books to remind myself from where I took the gems I use, so I expect to be adding to the list.

”Dungeonomicon” wrote:

Yes, you can totally hide when there are no intervening objects between you and the victim. It's called "sneaking up behind people" and in a game with no facing it's handled with a hide check opposed by spot.

Thanks for the post. Was this official or just a poster’s opinion?

Somewhere in between, really.

On the Wizard's boards, there was a poster who went by "Frank and K". Those posts were the joint work of two guys (Frank and K, I would presume), and what they posted was Netbooks addressing what they perceived as issues with the D&D rules.

These guys were not professional writers (I assume), and their work occasionally shows it. A good editor could improve them greatly, I think. But the stuff they produced was entertaining to read and thought provoking, and so was widely liked.

You can find the netbooks at [url]http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/3.5e_Sourcebooks[/url]

These are the ones by Frank and K (with their descrption of what it is about):
Tome of Necromancy -- Unlike the Revised Necromancer Handbook, which is a compilation of the Necromancy rules as they stand, what you are reading now is the rules for Necromancy as they should be.
Tome of Fiends -- This is the second entry in our line of articles begun with the the Tome of Necromancy, which is a reflection of how the rules for fiends ought to function.
Dungeonomicon -- This is the third installment of our series exploring portions of the D&D experience that don't work at all, began with the Tome of Necromancy and continued with the Tome of Fiends. This work focuses on the most central of perplexing legacies: The Dungeon. We know you love Dungeons, but you probably have more than a little difficulty justifying them to yourself or to other players of the game.
Races of War -- No longer are we allowing our Fighting Men to go without a last name unless and until they get to fourth level without being eaten by an owlbear.
Book of Gears (no description).

Honestly, I've only read Dungeonomicon and Races of War, as I don't care much about fiends or necromancers. The best gems in each have nothing to do with he rule fixes and more to do with "fluff", such as the observation that the society described by most D&D rules fits Classic Greece better than the Middle Ages, and the discussion of what the 15,000gp limit on Wish means to the economy as a whole.

Even where I disagree with him (them), I find the point understandable and usually entertaingly made.

In PF though it is relatively easy to see that ANYTHING that is made up of solid substance and impedes vision between you and your opponent grants you COVER not concealment. Concealment is only granted by things without substance that make you harder to visually pinpoint (IE: dim light/darkness/Obscuring Mist/Lightning Stance/invisibility). A lot of people have noticed something wrong with Jack not being able to hide in the bushes but, IMO; they are targeting the wrong problem. Many are arguing that concealment, in this case, should be enough to let him hide in this scenario, but the real problem is that the hedges should be granting COVER and therefore Jack should be allowed to hide. Actually I think the Corn Field, if it granted anything, would grant cover as well, not concealment.

Okay, under that definition of concealment: smoke grenades.

He doesn't have cover. He SHOULDN'T have cover: I can just start throwing things at that cloud and I DO have a chance to hit him. But he can't hide from me: I may be taking a penalty to hit him, but I am fully aware when he moves and where he moved to.

As for sneaking around when your opponents back is turned. There really is no mechanic to hide with no cover/concealment and no way to get to any.

Dungenomicon, a netbook for 3.5 hosted at the Wizards Boards and several other places (like this one) (I find it is easiest to find it by Googling "Races of War", which is another netbook by the same author) has one: an opposed check of Hide versus Spot.

Hiding in 3.5 D&D is Dumb

OK, we all know that it makes us feel kind of bad when the Rogue sneaks up on people and stabs them in the face without them ever seeing who did it. But you know what? People totally do that crap all the time. It's not even an uncommon occurrence, and there's really no cause to get excited about. The 3.5 rules for hiding, where you need cover or concealment to hide, are retarded. That makes Rogues run around with tower shields so that they can hide themselves and their equipment behind the cover of the tower shield (including the tower shield itself, which makes my brain hurt). Yes, you can totally hide when there are no intervening objects between you and the victim. It's called "sneaking up behind people" and in a game with no facing it's handled with a hide check opposed by spot.

If you attempt to hide in a combat setting, you are under a number of restrictions:

* A character who has been attacked automatically can guess what square you are in. You may retain your invisibility, but that's just Full Concealment, and they could very plausibly hit you.
* There is a -20 penalty to Hide for attempting to fight while hidden. The distance penalties on Spot are pretty amazing, but most people can't hide at a -20 penalty.
* Once they see you, they see you. If an opponent successfully spots you even once (and they get to try every round while in combat), they just plain see you until you manage to get all the way out of their field of view (generally requiring you to leave the scene or make bluff checks or something).
* Spot Bonuses can get quite large. A spotter who knows what he's looking for gets a +4 bonus, and a spotter who is extremely familiar with the target gets a +10 bonus – these bonuses are weirdly listed under the Disguise skill, but they still apply (so if someone says "There's a halfling Ninja over there!" every other Guard gets a +4 bonus).

But you can do it. Hiding in combat is hard, but it's a thing that powerful characters may be able to do against some opponents. Some of the D&D authors have an outdated idea that Rogues should be forced to "hide in shadows" or something. But this is D&D, and most enemies have Darkvision. There are no shadows. Attempting to force Rogues to hide only in areas that they could plausibly hide in if a suspicious person was looking right at them and knew what they were looking for is incredibly cruel. In any kind of stressful situation that isn't an accurate picture of what is going on.

Take out the rule that says it is impossible to Hide without concealment or cover, and you are halfway to fixing it. There is a world of difference between very very hard and impossible.

I do not recall right now where to find them, but I recall there being a fairly hefty bonus to Spot if you know what you are looking for: that stealthy halfling thief becomes a lot easier to see if someone yells out, "there's a halfling behind you!".(edit: they're quoted in the quote above. +4 to Spot) Thus, trying to hide from someone who has already seen you (knows what they are looking for) without the benefit of concealment or cover (both of which, IIRC, list the bonus they provide to hide behind them) will be extremely difficult. But not specifically and explicitly precluded by the rules.

(Please note I am not advocating that we all adopt the rules from Dungeonomicon here, I am merely pointing to their existence to refute the idea that making such rules would be impossible, or even just really hard.)

I insist on completely missing the point of this thread, and instead believing it to be a discussion of a really nice box for carrying your books in.

I work in a convenience store, and have found many products that come in boxes that adapt well to that purpose, so you can probably pick them up for free if you just ask the store nicely to save some for you.

Snapple 16 oz bottles, 12 pack.
Monster Energy drink, 24 oz can, 12 pack.
SoBe 20 oz bottles, 12 pack.
Most 22 oz beer cans that come in a pack of 12.

Also, most of the 24-packs of the above product come in a box that will hold 2 of the 12-pack bottles, should you desire a large flat box instead of a stack. Many of those boxes are available in a variety of depths, as well: the Monster sometimes comes in one about 2 1/2 inches high, but sometimes comes in a box as tall as the can with a closeable top.

Also, Modelo Especial beer comes in a box that is slightly larger than the others, making those boxes an excellent lid.

A little paint (or duct tape) and nobody in your gaming group need know the origin of your cool box that holds all your rulebooks.

:)

Iron Heroes, from Malhavok Press. It was the Classes that sold me, as well as the idea that the system was tailored to a low-magic campaign. Most 3.5 settings had far too much magic for my taste.

I never got around to folding these into my game, but both of them looked interesting to me, and both were mechanics for making Favored Class work:

In Conan, you get an extra Feat at certain levels in your people's Favored Class. I think it was every 5 levels, so if your Favored Class was Fighter, you'd get an extra Feat whenever you picked up that 5th level of Fighter.
In Iron Kingdoms, you get a one-time bonus at the start of play if you took the Favored Class for your people. Examples include upgrading your starting weapon to Masterwork, a special Holy Symbol that grants a bonus to Turn Undead for a few months, or just 500 XP.

Both struck me as decent ways to nudge players to combine certain races/ethnicities with specific classes.

AEG turned out a bunch of good books. I especially liked Mercenaries and War, although I didn't use any of the rules or classes therein.

I came in a bit late to this, and I haven't read everything here, but I think many folks have missed a few key points
1) yes, a smart thief does his sneaking in the dark when he can, but that doesn't make it impossible to sneak up on people in sunlight. In the real world, you can hide from someone in a brightly lit field if you can just manage to stay behind them as they turn around. They can be actively searching for you, and you are successfully hiding despite a total lack of concealment and/or cover. The game should have some way of reflecting that.
By fifth level, a character should be vaguely superhuman in his primary focus: Albert Einstein can be built as a 5th level Expert, Olympic athletes perform as 3rd or 4th level Experts, so a 5th level Rogue who decided to be as sneaky as he could (maximum ranks in Stealth) should be sneakier than anybody you've ever met.
I've met plenty of people who could hide from someone with a hedge between him and them. Many of them were small children who presumably had no levels at all.

2) Combining hearing people and seeing people into one check certainly makes sense from the standpoint of simplifying the rules, but when the rules as written make it easier to hear people if they are standing where it is brightly lit, ... that's seriously broken. So broken that it seems almost everyone saw it, said "That's stupid. That can't be what they MEANT." and then created a house-rule to cover it.
And while many people seem to be saying "That's not a problem at all, it's easily covered by a simple and obvious house-rule", I certainly agree with the idea that if EVERYONE is using a house-rule of some sort then the original rule is obviously bad and should be fixed.

Silence should not make me harder to SEE. Sunlight should not make me easier to HEAR. Hiding from people who can't see me due to intervening objects should not be impossible, even if those objects are so flimsy that they will not stop an attack (concealment but not cover), no matter how sunny the day.

I am sure the editors at Paizo worked very hard to make sure that each rule was cross-referenced against other rules that affect it (like the rules for daylight and the rule for stealth), but as we've seen a few things fell through the cracks. It's kind of inevitable in a book of that size, and it's not like 3.5 was error-free or a poster-child for good organization to begin with. When someone finds an inconsistency or "Murphy's Rule" and points it out, he should be thanked for trying to make the product better, and perhaps offered some temporary fixes for the problem to hold until the official correction is released.