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harbqll wrote:

Mathmuse wrote:

I read this aloud to three of my Ironfang Invasion players. One responded, "Has the GM forgotten about the players having fun?"

Like I said, there are no kids in our game.

My group's playing style (theme? environment? philosophy?) is much more "game of thrones" than "disney candy-coating".

The player who said that is 62 years old.

That's actually very interesting. If you have a 62yo in your group then I can only assume most if not all of your players are at least in their mid to late 20s, probably older. So I'm a little surprised by your inability to separate your emotions from your character's emotions.

Do you watch horror movies (or worse: *French* movies)? If so, do you walk away feeling like it wasn't any fun because something scary (yet imaginary) happened to you for a couple of hours? If so I feel as a public service I should advise you not to watch The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix). I thought it was great, at least until the final episode.

It's also strange that you seem to think they'll be arriving at Fort Ristin at level 2...they didn't even know it existed until last Saturday, but all they have is the name and not the location.

Anyway, we're now several sessions in and they just made 3rd level. Once our Bloodrager gets back from his two week National Guard drill I'll let them find the final clue to lead them to the Children of the Stone. They better hurry as they'll need the food stores I've placed there - their little group has now been on half rations for three days and there have already been small scale food riots.

So far they've let Edrin join their group, and then a couple nights later he murdered an NPC, stole a week's food, and ran. The party tried to hunt him down but were unsuccessful - I gave them a shot at vengeance but their die rolls were uncooperative.

They were almost TPK'd at Gristledown, when I rolled two critical hits against their party tank and he went down in the first round of combat. The Halfling cleric managed a couple good rolls on some channels and saved the day by burning the undead to the ground. Between her and Rhyna they managed to patch everyone up before we needed to roll up two new characters. It was a close one.

H3 was a lot of fun. I got to murder 5 NPCs, including two children, one of which was a party member's adopted child and apprentice (and again, when they found little Marvin's headless body...*chef's kiss*!). The scene where they finally caught up with Shalrak? The payback was gloriously brutal. It was almost an anatomy lesson.

Oddly, none of the players has said anything about how terrible the conditions are and how they want to exit stage left. I guess what I'm getting around to here is that you need to drop this whole judgmental attitude, and learn to accept that not everyone likes to do things your way...and that that's ok.

Any good DM knows to "interview" new players before they join the group to ensure they'd be a good fit. I did that years ago. Soft-skinned people need not apply.

On the other hand, when I run the "kid's game" which is made up mainly of the teenagers of my regular players, I keep it all sweetness and light. What can I say? I'll eat candy, but I prefer steak.

"A +1 short sword with a thin, dull gray blade, this weapon provides a +4 bonus on its wielder’s attack and damage rolls when she makes a sneak attack with it."

So +4 to the weapon damage roll. **NOT** +4 to the sneak attack roll, and certainly not +4 to EACH DIE of the sneak attack roll.

Or am I wrong?

Aubrin gets hit by a ballista.

Your choice on what to do with your campaign, but IMHO a crippling blow rather than death is more representative of what the campaign is about.

Yeah he did. He got the "leaf in the wind" treatment right in the middle of a joke.

The look of shock on their faces when it happened was just *chef's kiss*.

After the quick battle in the Taproot, during which one of the kids the party had helped gather up his loose sheep during the previous game session also got killed, I had Jet fill the role of directing them to gather survivors and head for the bridge.

The several ensuing fights during the round-up and flight to the bridge were AWESOME. I kept having them find NPC friends (and in one case family member either already dead or actively being killed. The gradual conversion from initial shock to determined anger amongst the players was glorious to watch.

Powerful stuff. At the end I had an Ironfang troop which was obviously far more than they could handle chasing them over the bridge...which they blew just as the bad guys were crossing. Talk about catharsis!

We ended the game session with the party patching up wounds while frantically setting up shelters against the massive storm of rain and sleet that's heading right for them.

During our traditional AGR (after game review, instead of after action review) and mead drinking session, my favorite part was one of the players dropping herself onto the couch next to me with a "that was hardcore".

I read this aloud to three of my Ironfang Invasion players. One responded, "Has the GM forgotten about the players having fun?"

Like I said, there are no kids in our game.

My group's playing style (theme? environment? philosophy?) is much more "game of thrones" than "disney candy-coating".

My group is starting the IFI (proper) tonight for the first time. I'm killing off Aubrin right at the start.

I already ran them through a "game zero" last week, which was role play in Phaendar getting set up for the spring market fair. No combat or anything at all. I wanted them to feel secure in town. They all now have friends and associates among the NPCs, including family members. Everyone loves Aubrin the Green (who I gender swapped to male) and sees him as the defacto "King of Town".

Which is why later tonight I'm going to brutally kill off Aubrin and about half their friends and family, with as much horrific description as I possibly can.

This entire campaign is about loss, having what you thought was solid ground being ripped out from under you, everything you thought was yours being taken away, being on the run, and desperately in fear of your lives.

I want the players to FEEL IT. I don't run games for children. I'm going to force them to decide who starves when the refugees run out of food. They'll need to act like the group's leaders when one refugee kills another over a scrap of bread. Do we let a murderer escape justice? Do we execute a friend for his crime? If not, why should anyone follow these so-called "leaders"?

This going to be great. I've been planning for weeks, and can hardly wait for tonight.

I realize it's been 5 years since this thread, but: did you ever finish the maps for the remainder of this adventure path?

are you talking about innate item bonus

or maybe automatic bonus progression?

YES! Bonus progression - that's why I couldn't find it again. I never woulda remembered those keywords for a search.

But rather than attunement it will be that the items increase in power due to (some BS narrative reason I invent at the time). What I'm stealing here is the "at what level should I give them access to this?" aspect of it.

Many thanks.

Mysterious Stranger wrote:

Creating a divination specialist who can contribute to combat is probably going to be extremely difficult.

Hrm, I'd try to use options beside spells here. If the diviner is a wizard, high Knowledge results are relatively easy to achieve and do contribute to party's success. Spellcraft allows to tell the party what actual nasty things the opponents are doing. The Bruising Intellect trait means Int based demoralize attempts - which are no game winners, but should contribute more than firing a crossbow.

And maybe you covered the scouting before, with your spells. Maybe See Invisibility will become necessary once in a while. And for sure you will cover the appraisal and identification of loot afterwards. So IMO it's completely ok if you lean back most rounds of combat and chomp pizza instead. Though it seems wise to speak about this at session 0.

Well, in the novels, Alex is extremely difficult to hit in melee because he can see the future. He literally knows what you're going to do before you do. The character has also capitalized on this with a lot of mixed martial art training. But a lot of the time he simply avoids the fight by knowing when and where the badguys are going to be looking, and simply not being there. He's also a big fan of some variation of 'running out into traffic just in time for the delivery van rounding the blind corner to plow into the person chasing him'.

All things that are fine for a novel but not really for an RPG. But yeah, I'm more interested in the one-trick-pony mage aspect of it than the divination specialist.

So we're starting a new campaign and I'm taking over the DM's chair. I finally get the chance to do all the weird little rules changes I've been thinking about for the last few years. Implementation of John Walt's Silver System, for instance.

Anyway, I had found and saved at some point a rule set for creating custom magic items for the players that scale up along with the players as they level up. That removes the "video game" dynamic of finishing an adventure, going back to ye olde Magic Walmart, and trading in your +1 weapons and armor for +2, also let's head over to aisle 18 and stock up on healing potions, and ya know I think we might have finally saved up enough for that Magic Carpet I've had my eye on for the last few months.

Problem is, now that I need it I can't find it.

Any pointers from the Hivemind?

More or less, unless it changed somewhere that I overlooked, the timeline for when an AP takes place corresponds 1 to 1 with the day it is publicly released converted into Golarion time so to convert you add 2700 years to our current year and you get the Golarion calendar year.

In other words, the idea is that in it being 2022 mid-December now, if there were the first volume of an AP to drop TODAY then that would correspond to mid-Kuthona 4722.

Very cool. Thanks! The pathfinder wiki very helpfully lists the publication dates of all the adventure paths. This places the one I want to start as beginning roughly 8 years after the conclusion of our current campaign. That fits perfectly.

BLUF: I want to know if paizo defined their published adventure paths as taking place in specific years of the Golarian timeline.

My gaming group is just about to finish up an adventure path after nearly two years of real time gaming. Once we finish that, we plan to start a new campaign and I'll be taking over as DM. I'm looking at starting a different adventure path series, but I'm curious:

Did paizo create a timeline anywhere that the events of the various adventure paths fit into? I've found a few events in the pathfinder wiki that specifies the year (or close enough to approximate) that the event happened.

I want to be able to have the events of our old campaign to have happened in the relatively recent past, so that the new campaign will be influenced by them - people, places, items, etc might turn up from time to time in the new game. Old PCs might reappear as NPC encounters, that sort of thing.

I'm perfectly willing to just shoehorn it all together, but if there's already a pre-existing timeline somewhere that would save me some work. Or as the old Tom Lehrer song goes: "PLAGERIZE! Let no one else's work evade your eyes!"

So lately I've been reading the Alex Verus books by Benedict Jacka, and they're making me want to explore a new character idea.

The main character in these books is a mage, in a modern setting, similar to Jim Butcher's Dresden files. But the way magic is organized in these books is that mages tend to be, if not one-trick ponies, then very focused.

The main character, for instance, is a diviner. And that's about all he can really do. He can read the future, and a few other scrying type abilities, but that's all. No fireballs, lightning bolts, flying, healing, etc.

And the question I've finally gotten around to: Is there already a variant spellcaster class in one of the PF books that is restricted to a single school of spells? If not, I guess I'll have to brew one up.

BLUF: Need advice for my divine spellcaster half.

This time around, I want to try something different from any character I've previously run. I'm usually combat-heavy as a fighter-type, battle mage, monk, or combo of the above.

So this time: elderly (in his 60s), cowardly librarian who only recent left his life-long job in the monastery library for (as yet unwritten plot reasons). I figure to eventually use the mystic theurge prestige class.

For the arcane half I'm thinking wizard (abjuration), for two reasons. (1) The highest he will ever reach in this class is 7th level and for most of the wizard subtypes that means he loses out on his second class ability which most give out at 8th level, and (2) the self-protection aspect fits the character concept.

I didn't go with sorcerer or arcanist because I need to be able to cast 2nd levels spells to qualify for mystic theurge, and both those classes have to wait for caster level 4, as opposed to caster level 3 for a wizard.

For the divine half...I don't think I've ever actually played a cleric class before (excepting paladin) so I'm a little in the dark.

Cloistered Cleric seemed like a good fit for the character concept, but to honest it seems like a pretty underpowered class variant. I wanted a boost to knowledge skills but the loss of spells per level is too much.

So currently I'm defaulting back to the base core rules cleric. Anyone got advice on a different archtype/variant that might work better for this character build?

I know somewhere I read about a spell, feat, or magic item that allows a caster to see through the eyes of a summoned creature. But I can’t for the life of me remember it now.

A little help, O Great Hivemind?

So, let's say we have a thief in the party who likes to hide/stealth in available terrain, and then snipe with his crossbow to score his bonus sneak damage.

And let's say there's a mage in the party who also likes to hide outside of combat, and who could cast Ricochet Shot on the thief (or who could brew a potion of Ricochet Shot which the thief could use at need).

Would our sneaky thief get his bonus sneak damage on both the primary and secondary/ricochet targets?

Or...

Let's say instead the mage created a Wand of Magic Missiles for the thief. Would he get sneak damage using the wand instead of the crossbow? And if so, could he fire one magic missile at each of several targets and get sneak damage against each?

And...

The Ricochet Shot spell description does not specify an arrow, bolt, or bullet. All it says is "projectile weapon". A Wand of Magic Missiles is a weapon which fires projectiles. So in theory, our (10th level, for this example) thief could fire his Wand from stealth at 5 different targets, hit all 5 with no to-hit roll needed and no saving throw, doing d4+1 +5d6 stealth damage to each target, and then Ricochet all five missiles to each hit another five targets, again doing d4+1 +5d6 damage.

I’m having a rules argument with my DM. Hoping I can get some clarity on this.

Does a monk get an additional attack when using Flurry of Blows while under the effect of a Haste spell?

I'm having trouble understanding how monk attacks are supposed to work; I hope someone can break this down for me.

Let's assume a 2nd level monk. He has a BAB+1 and Flurry of Blows bonus+0/+0.

So, he can do 1 unarmed attack against a single target, with his BAB+1. Or, he can do FoB for two strikes also against a single target at (+1+0)/(+1+0).

At 3rd level his bonuses increase to BAB+2 and FoB+1/+1, so again two strike against a single target at (+2+1=+3)/(+2+1=+3). Which would mean it makes absolutely no sense to not use FoB every single time he attacks: double the number of attacks, with an extra +1 to each.

Same thing up the 5th level: BAB+3 and FoB+3/+3.

I have to assume I'm misunderstanding something here, because using FoB for every attack you ever do gets you two strikes instead of one, with an extra +3 to hit for each. It would make zero sense to ever NOT use FoB.

My next question shows up at 8th level when the to hit bonuses become BAB+6/+1 and FoB+6/+6/+1/+1.

So he can not strike two different targets once each at +6 and +1 respectively. Or he can use FoB to hit a single target four times at +12/+12/+2/+2?

Or does each of the attacks from his BAB generate it's own FoB strike? Which would give him one FoB at +12/+12/+7/+7 and a second at +7/+7/+2/+2.

That can't possibly be right. That's 8d10 potential damage per round.

A 15th level monk gets three attacks per round and FoB of six attacks per round. Is this guy throwing 18 punches per round at 2d6 damage each?

Third question: What if he's using Haste? It gives one additional attack per round. Does that give an extra attack on the FoB streak? Or does that generate an entirely new FoB streak? Or would he just do a regular attack without using FoB and gain 1 extra attack from the spell? If so, what's the benefit to a monk of using Haste?

I remember a magic item back in 1st or 2nd Ed D&D - it was a belt with a bunch of small pouches, each of which was a mini bag of holding. It was for magicusers to carry material components.

IIRC, when reaching into a pouch, whatever item you were looking for was automatically on top.

Does anyone else remember this, and what it was called?

Pan, definitely not a Kitsune wrote:

Lelomenia wrote:

Forgefather’s Hammer

[…]

All effectively increase crafting speed, with certain restrictions.

I can't find anything with that name. Only the Forgefather's Sledge, which can transform into a blacksmithing hammer, but offers no actual benefits over using a mundane one.

Father’s Forgehammer, sorry.

Perfect!

So I basically just need to make a knock-off of an Improved Ring of Swimming, except with +10 to spellcraft instead of swimming.

Then I enchant some masterwork toolkit to have the 25% crafting time reduction (I can make the argument that I'm not asking for the other abilities of the Forgehammer, to make it a better sell to the DM).

End result - I can now craft things in ~37% on the original time. The magic item factory is now 3 times faster! And an extra +5 to my spellcraft rolls to boot!

@Firebug: Those give Spellcraft bonuses, but they don't increase Crafting speed.

Unless you're suggesting that the "+5 for double speed" modifier can be stacked multiple times with itself, anything past the first +5 Spellcraft is pointless for this topic.

Yeah, my main interest is simply to speed up construction time.

I have this mental picture of a circular workshop table with a hole in the center for the mage to stand/sit, which has a sort of "Doctor Octopus" style multi-arm component, allowing the user to craft at some increased percentage of speed.

I figure making it immobile, instead of something that could be taken out on adventures, would make it more palatable to a DM.

Between myself and the other mage in the party, we've put together a pretty impressive list of items we want to make. The problem is it would take over a year of campaign time to put any kind of real dent in the list.

Obvious solution - first we make a magic item that speeds up making magic items!

The simplest first move is to simply make an ioun stone (or a piece of stationary lab equipment, whatever) which gives a +5 to spellcraft (or may as well go +10, why not?).

That would let you use the basic rules of doubling your work speed (pg 549, core rulebook) while essentially removing the penalty +5 to item creation DC.

Item with skill +5 is only 5k, and 5 days of work. Simple. Now I can work twice as fast.

But what if I want to go even faster? Any ideas?

PS And while I'm on the subject, what's the cost/requirements/CL/DC for a magic item that gives skill point boosts without boosting ability scores?

You are on track on figuring out the caster level. The primary effect, once created, the caster level will have on this device his how easy it is to be suppressed by a dispel magic or similar thing, although Lelomenia is correct that the 11th level ranger would have a caster level of 8.

The spell formula is the last, not the first, method a GM should use to determine a price. Your post say 'my mage' so it sounds like you are a player, and while you certainly can do the homework and propose a custom magic item to the GM, including your thoughts on appropriate pricing, the final determination of the price, or even if the item is allowed, is in their court. There are only guidelines, not rules, for the proper price of a custom magic item.

Our GMs policy for custom items/spells/whatever is "give me a write-up and I'll let you know". The more you adhere to the rulebook in such things, the more likely he is to say yes with minimal tweaking.

Re-reading the book, I see now that placing a class restriction on the item drops the price by 30%. I missed that earlier. So now I can make it a monk-only item (who else would want it anyway?) and put the price at (Druid L7 x Spell L4 x 2000 x 0.7) = 39.2k.

Skipping finding a druid spellcaster to help, the DC is now a 17. As a newly minted level 7 mage with Forge Ring, my spellcraft is at +16.

So all I have to do is not roll a 1.

Famous last words.

For some things figuring this is easy; for potions and scrolls, you literally use the Caster level of the spell.

I want to make a ring, intended for a monk, which acts as a continuous "Strong Jaw" spell. This boosts his unarmed combat damage by two size classes.

Per the base rulebook (table 15-29, pg 550), base price is (spell level x caster level x 2000gp) for a continuous spell effect device.

Strong jaw is a 3rd level Ranger or 4th level Druid spell, requiring a minimum 11th level Ranger or 7th level Druid, respectively.

So punching the numbers, that comes to 66k if I get a Ranger to cast the spell for me, or 56k for a Druid.

Do I therefore simply use that caster's level as the item Caster Level? To me, it just seems arbitrary to do that, as the CL is used to calculate the item creation DC.

IOW, it's cheaper, faster to make, and has a lower DC (12 vs 16) if I find myself a Druid instead of a Ranger spellcaster to assist my mage.

Or am I totally off the track, here?

I'm playing a wizard/monk, and the central idea of this guy is that he carries no weapons, and most of his spells are non-direct damage oriented (he's a specialist conjurer, uses a lot of summon spells and creative uses of unseen servant, that sort of thing).

I was thinking of crafting an enchanted rope which is sort of a combination of the rope of climbing and rope of entanglement. So my actual question is this: if I fling out my rope and entangle someone, could I then cast a touch spell through the rope at a target 20 or so feet away?

Currently I use a monkey familiar for this sort of thing, but in-character I think this fits better.