idwraith's page

I've seen a lot of people arguing that spellcasters are broken at any level higher than five. I've got one friend who has flat out said the game ends for everyone else when the spellcaster gets fireball at level 6.

I'm pretty confused by this because there are a LOT of ways to keep spellcasters from dominating a game.

1. The Feats list has an entire tree dedicated to Disrupting spellcasting ability. Combining Step Up with Disruptive to Spellbreaker and you've got a melee character who gets an AoO every time the caster ties to cast a spell, can follow if the caster takes a 5' step and basically threatens the bejeezus out of the caster.

2. Most higher level spells have expensive material components. If DM's are being diligent in tracking those costs the spellcaster can run out of money REALLY fast, especially if they're doing item creation. Stoneskin alone requires several hundred gold per casting.

3. Controlling the amount of magical armor items in a game limits spellcaster's AC and keeps them reasonable.

4. Monsters with high SR, natural immunity, Golems, Rings of Spell Turning, Wands of Silence... there are a lot of ways to prevent spellcasters from making effective use of their powers. Give the enemy party a couple of one use magical items that produce short term Anti-Magic fields.

There are so many ways to limit the power of spellcasters to control how they make use of their powers. For instance, use your own judgement on Teleportation's definition of "well known" terrain. For instance if you decide that living in a place for a minimum of 6 months is what it takes to have a place considered "well known" then suddenly just teleporting around the planet is going to be a LOT more hazardous. Same with plane shifting and other forms of magical transportation. Those spells tend to have error radius built in for a reason.

When you look at the stuff a melee character can do with Improved Critical and the Critical Strikes and realize there is no saving throw offered for those effects, you realize that Pathfinder has worked pretty hard to keep things balanced.

I had a question about the mutate ability of the Master Chymist. It states that it works just like taking the mutagen.

Now my understanding is that each morning when the Alchemist makes his mutagen he decides which physical ability score he'll be improving and takes the corresponding mental damage (or vice versa for the cognatogen.)

But he can switch which physical ability score he wants to raise every time he makes a new mutagen.

Are the physical scores that get adjusted when the Chymist mutates into his alternate form fixed or do they change whenever the Chymist wants them too and uses a Mutate to do so?

For instance if the Chymist knew he needed dex and mutated into his alter-ego could he increase his strength instead of strength, despite primarily using strength as the normal score that gets adjusted?