nobu_the_bard's page

I'd also consider finding ways to get immunities to effects, or the ability to reroll certain saves, so as not to get screwed by a bad roll. Cap of the Freethinker, taking the Improved Great Fortitude/Iron Will/Lightning Reflexes along with a Defiant Weapon, all allow you extra re-rolls.

Ah yes, this is great. I hadn't seen that Cap before. Immunities are probably a good idea too; I'll have to look into some things. You also gave me the idea to look up Robes of the Archmagi, and I discovered Robe of the Resplendent Thespian, which completely crushes my Cloak of Resistance.

All mythic play is Rocket Tag.

Haha I was dreading that.

You should have inspired defense (marshal path ability). At 15th tier 7 that should give like +10 to all saves with a mythic point spent to start inspire courage.

That's awesome! BUT, I'm not the Marshal. A little more information: I'm a level 15 dervish dancer (typically using Rain of Blows rather than Inspire Courage), with most of my current abilities focused on mobility or self buffing. My main path is Trickster but I dual pathed into Champion.

I had been the front line fighter along with the Paladin (Champion/crit build) for the first part of the campaign, but we were joined by a Monk (Guardian/cleave build) so I sometimes focus on buffing. The rest of the party is an Oracle (Archmage/counterspell build - odd build), a Ranger/Low Templar (Marshal/throwing weapons build), a Cleric (Hierophant/crafting build, but tends to healbot or buff).

It's not exactly an optimized party, but I thought asking wouldn't hurt.

Hey all; I've been having trouble lately in a campaign in avoiding instant disablement. I built a mobility-based melee bard just to try something crazy, and it mostly works, but I have absolutely dismal fort/will saves. My CMD is also not great (been pinned and silenced at least once, polymorphed once, etc). I'm not accustomed to having these kinds of problems; not used to high level "rocket tag" gameplay. I've been wrecked repeatedly on turn 1 or 2 by failing one of these saves and effectively sitting out the combat when this happens. The material cost of the deaths/regeneration/healing/etc isn't really what is killing me as much as seeing the party struggle without me.

I've been trying to mitigate with buffs (Extended Augmented Heroism) which has helped a lot, and I took Master of Escape which has saved me a few times. I can post my whole build on here if it'd help but I was thinking of general suggestions, like if there's a higher level particular spell or item worth looking for. I'm dreading we'll soon start seeing more Death effects. I already took Greater Fortitude in anticipation!

The campaign I'm in is using mythic rules. It will be going to max level & tier eventually (we're level 15/tier 7 right now). We had to houserule nerf a bunch of the mythic abilities to keep things from getting too busted but the spirit of all of the abilities is intact (the paladin has a crit build and mythic power attack is ridiculous as written, in particular). The DM wants the party to be challenged at least some and I'm bound to bite it from time to time, to keep me check, but I figure it doesn't keep me from asking if anyone can suggest anything.

Hey guys! I'm having fun playing my first melee character, a polearm master fighter/hellknight that is mostly relatively effective. However I'm hurting for dealing with being grappled. I've been effectively negated in two fights via that Black Tentacles spell, since I couldn't escape, and am writing this now waiting for a combat to end where I got eaten by a purple worm. I'm used to spellcasters dimension dooring or being a clever rogue bastard.

I'm level 14 (polearm master 9, hellknight 5) right now, mainly rely on a ranseur, armor spikes, and potions in combat. I will admit I'm a little short on gold compared to where I should be at this level and my build's not exactly optimal. My CMD's a 33 right now.

The party is huge. Bard, barbarian, gunslinger, druid, monk, paladin are the other characters.

Anyone have advice, general or specific?

You can't change a slotted item into an unslotted item normally, to my knowledge. It's a decision made when the item is crafted.

"Wizards who select a bonded object begin play with one at no cost. Objects that are the subject of an arcane bond must fall into one of the following categories: amulet, ring, staff, wand, or weapon." The description of Arcane Bond goes on to note you need to be wearing or wielding the bonded item, so you can't get away with just levitating it in front of you somehow either, I suspect.

If you're trying to get out of the slot limitation, maybe just bond to a Hand of Glory?

To those who were wondering about his build, I don't have his character sheet right in front of me, but I've looked over it before and it seems correct (he got gravity bow from a magus arcana that lets you learn wizard spells). Key feats include imp. snapshot, clustered shot, precise shot, & rapid shot. He enhances his bow to have holy and a smattering of other elemental damage types. Casts, shield and interposing hand for cover and fights defensively. Potentially casts greater invis., fly, greater magic weapon, and gravity bow. No save is particularly weak.

Okay, so...

He's heavily specialized for ranged combat, probably relying on flying and invisibility for defense along with his cover. If your campaign has gunslingers, a sniper type one would be very dangerous to him (negating most of his AC advantage) and give the front line to have someone to chase around. It'd make sense if one was hired to deal with someone that dangerous.

He has a "smattering of other elemental damage types" after having the bow made holy? So I guess he's relying more heavily on energy-based damage bonuses instead of his own power (you didn't mention Deadly Aim for example). That suggests an opponent could minimize the damage by having a lot of energy resistances. Maybe some non-evil opponents who won't take much alignment based damage get hoodwinked into fighting the party? I've had good-aligned enemies who were mislead by a clever villain, and suddenly all of our "evil slaying" was rendered useless.

Also, again, traps that force the party to waste time between encounters going around, disarming, or dealing with the consequences. If the party has enough time to leave and come back via teleportation, maybe the bad guys have had time to realize what happened to the first guys that were attacked the previous day and are now more prepared (reset some traps, set up ambushes, moved furniture to give them cover, whatever).

Just some thoughts.

BP is a Kingdom mechanic, it's Build Points. You generally don't have to worry about it unless you're using the Kingdom building rules from Ultimate Campaign. In those rules it's mainly gaining from monthly Economy checks (tax collecting - it represents the spending power of the Kindgom).

Based on what Chemlak said I'd just disregard the maintenance cost and have some NPC nobles or whatever provide the support.

It doesn't lose its abilities even if the target knows it is fake. When I played an illusionist, it was one of my tricks to get some utility out of my specialty when I was up against True Sight.

Not sure about scrolls, I assume they're similar to wands; for a wand, all you need is to be able to hold the wand and point it at the target(s) when you use the activation action.

In my group, we couldn't find rulings on how Rods work exactly, except that it's mentioned they need to be held. As Metamagic rods usually modify spellcasting rather than being a part of the casting itself, it was ruled you need an open hand in addition to the one holding the Rod most of the time, but sometimes for "Rule of Cool" reasons other things have been allowed (in my group anyway).

Casting a spell with a hand that was holding a buckler deprives you of its AC bonus until the start of your next turn, though.

The single most useful spell I found was Overland Flight. Take it if it's available. At level 10 (by which most of those who can learn it have it, I think) it allows 10 hours of 40-foot flight; that's usually enough time to cover the entire adventuring day. You probably won't need to recast it but I usually carried a magic item capable of casting it too as a precaution. You're effectively immune to pit traps and falling, can move out of range of melee enemies, etc.

Any fast teleporting spell is good; you need at least one if you can take it. Dimension Door is probably the best get-out-of-trouble one (you can use it escape grapples in addition to a mess of other things).

Some other more minor great ones: Prestidigitation (various stock "magic" stuff, great for roleplay), Resist Elements (for 24 hours ignore the weather), Create Water (all kinds of creative uses). Don't underestimate the utility of your level 0 spells for problem solving.

EDIT: Oh, and Find Traps, particularly if your party doesn't have a rogue.

We've had the GMs take various measures to balance things out. In one game our Gunslinger was severely outpacing everyone else in terms of effectiveness. The GM had us fight a high level Giant with sorcerer levels who Dominated the Gunslinger and forced us to deal with the problem. That was pretty effective (it helps that the Gunslinger was one of the more experienced players and willing to play along with it, though).

There's also always traps, ambushes. If the party decides to rest, have the team beset upon without giving the Magus time to set up his buffs. Dispel Magic traps, too... our GM threw at us "second one through the doorway trips the Greater Dispel Magic trap" one time.

For a long while my current Kingmaker party consisted of a Paladin, Fighter (+ Inquisitor cohort), Barbarian, Bard, Monk, and Gunslinger.

We were doing alright up through level 10 but sorely lacked for ways of dealing with disease or item crafting. I think the lack of item crafting was hurting more than anything, but we had a couple close calls with disease (and one short-lived party member, a Rogue, died messily of disease, a first for our playgroup over some 10 years). We are also lacking badly for Knowledge skills (the bard is an archetype without Bardic Knowledge).

On the other hand, our front line is so heavily stacked that nearly everything dies as soon as we are able to charge. A lot of combats have actually been pretty boring as a result.

It's an extreme contrast to our last game where everyone was a full or spontaneous caster (two Sorcerers, Magus, Cleric/Wizard (Mystic Theurge), Wizard, Bard).

Wow, the Lyre's incredible. I'll have to talk to our GM to see if we can use it, he hasn't been too keen on having the PCs directly responsible for settlement improvements very much. He tends to want to remind us "you can claim X hexes, you know" all of the time, which I think is how we got into this situation. I also would have run it by the Bard, I'm not sure which perform skills he has, and the DC for succeeding is an 18. He'd probably also have to craft it (we have limited ability to import things right now due to poor diplomatic relations).

King Lawful Stupid Paladin hasn't threatened anyone in awhile luckily so we probably aren't looking at mass combat soon. I'm taking measures with the Spymaster to try to keep him out of audiences with diplomats as a safety measure.

I need to check about the Lairs. I'm not sure what the breakdown is for where all of our scores are coming from at the moment. I didn't know about them providing +1 stability, I'm pretty sure no one else knew, and I know we've claimed several, plus we even have their locations marked on the map. I can figure it out next session.

I like the look of the aqueducts, we might be able to place some without too much trouble, but it depends on how our budget ends up looking. There's not much point in building them unless we can complete them all at once.

Thanks guys!

I got some of our kingdom stats; I didn't have time to learn the breakdowns of where everything is coming from, though. The sawmills look like they're going to work nicely so far, though. We were only able to build two so far and have limited forest hexes we can build more in though (most of our claimed forest hexes appear to have landmarks).

Size: 41
Control DC: 67

Economy: 46
Loyalty: 45
Stability: 52
Consumption: 12
Unrest: 0

BP: 20

It seems we were able to move the Spymaster's bonus to apply to Stability to help us make checks, and we had gotten something like +4 to checks in the last Kingdom phase from some event, so we scraped by the most recent month alright. But it looks to me like we're not out of the woods yet, since it seems all of our checks require high rolls to beat the Control DC. From my understanding it still looks like we need to roll a 15 to make stability checks.

One of the players suggested filling most of the large amount of empty space in Olegathorpe (the trading post turned settlement) with nothing but houses and shops to try to crank up Economy. I'm still liking the Sawmill strategy since we seem to have one or two more Forest hexes we can build them in. There's no way we can afford defense buildings or armies right now, though.

Incidentally, we apparently have roads in nearly all possible hexes.

Apparently the roleplay explanation for how the "Royal Enforcer" (recruited kobold NPC) is keeping unrest down is because "executing the unrighteous" is practically a monthly festival everyone in the capital attends. I just realized that my DM gave me a magic item with undectable alignment after I butted heads with the Paladin over things like this and wonder if that's to keep me from being targeted by him if my LN turns LE (it has threatened to do so at times).

Wow, I never thought about that, in regards to the craft DC. I've only had my GM put +5 CL on there for not having the spell. It is worth looking into.

It doesn't generally specify whether the spell required is arcane or divine, does it? I assumed you could have an arcane Belt of Giant Strength as easily as a divine one, as Bull's Strength is on both spell lists, for example.

We have a thundercaller in our current campaign. The lack of bardic knowledge is extremely annoying for us since we do not have a good variety of knowledge skills in our group. However, his ability to just pump out the sonic attacks is nice. I haven't seen him use any of the more advanced abilities, which I assume is a shame; it looks like he really should be using those.

Generally losing Inspire Competence isn't a huge deal, I haven't used Suggestion much without getting myself killed. I haven't gotten to play a higher level bard personally so I can't comment on other abilities.

For the spells, for all spontaneous casters, try to choose things that scale well with level and have a variety of utility.

Sorry guys, I forgot to mention, we are using Ultimate Campaign rules. I am still learning them myself. I also only just started getting involved in the "big picture" planning of the kingdom so there's a lot I am fuzzy about. We aren't using the ones from Kingmaker, we are just using that setting.

I like the sound of sawmills. I wasn't reading the improvements carefully enough, I think I am overfocusing on settlement development. I'll look into it! :)

To my knowledge, taking Profession: Blacksmith would allow you to craft nonmagical mundane equipment that would fall under the description (like swords, armor, horsehoes, etc). The item creation feats are required for magical items generally.

Usually, spellcasting classes are better at crafting things, because they can learn the spells that are often required to keep the DC from getting out of hand. They generally can also just use Spellcraft for all of the skill checks. Prepared spellcasters are better than spontaneous in this regard since they have a larger variety (a wizard can just learn bull's strength and crank out the +2 strength belts, a cleric gets it even more easily). You can use scrolls instead but I think it is more troublesome; it's far more expensive and less reliable.

There is a feat I think for making magical items without being a spellcaster, but it still requires the other feats to be taken, and probably is not worth the trouble.

If you allowed the Race Guide you can make races that are specialized in crafting, but I am not sure any of the standard ones have any particular advantages besides the free feat humans get. It is kind of neat if you make such a race, as they can gain abilities like having proficiency with any weapon they have personally crafted and such.

My group is running Kingmaker with a very large party (7 players!) each of us with "Council Positions" (which I will use to refer to the players). I am one of the players, the general, a LN Fighter. We are on Book 3 I think (beginning to look to moving west, I did not read much out of the books to avoid spoilers).

The King is a LG Paladin by the way and our main way of dealing with unrest is assassinating people. He also threatened to declare war on Cheliax when they sent an ambassador (note: we have no army). I am slightly frustrated with this.

Our Kingdom is kind of suffering for lack of direction; we are failing stability checks frequently, and are having trouble affording fixes due to poor economy. I was formerly trusting the others to mostly deal with it, particularly the spymaster and the king. As the general, and so expected to mainly concern myself with armies, but I find now that we need them, we cannot even begin to afford them.

I am learning the system now and trying to figure out how to fix things. I think the main problem is we have been trying to claim the maximum number of hexes whenever possible until fairly recently. I don't know the exact stats for the Kingdom but I'll see about getting them tonight to get a more solid idea for patching it up. I know our stability is not nearly high enough; we have been "assassinating dissenters" to keep it down. Stability checks require us to roll like a 17 to avoid unrest.

One thing, for example, that I had us do was build a stockyard in a settlement surrounded by farms to get consumption down fast. (Went down from like 18 to 12 or so.)

Does anyone have any suggestions for getting stability up fast and consumption down fast? It seems there aren't a lot of places we can build farms right now, so I was trying to think of things to maximize the ones we already have. I am trying to do a crash course since it seems I'll need things running smoother to have an army operational.

We have about six settlements, I am a bit fuzzy on the names (the capital Waterford, Varnhold, the old trading post settlement, another incorporated settlement [Tazleford?], and a new one down by the silver mine). I'd say at a guess we've claimed roughly half to 2/3 of the first area and roughly 1/3 of the map with Varnhold. Originally we were going to have the kingdom info posted online to make planning easier, but the other players didn't feel it was worth maintaining.