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Remind me again while making the casters do a bit extra work is a bad thing? If everyone at your table likes the changes then its never a bad thing. Its only a bad thing if you've decided to nerf it because its a style of play that your players like and you don't or if its a playstyle that one of your players likes that nobody else at the table has a problem with but you. Me personally I never had a problem with not being able to make magic items back in 2e because rolling on random treasure tables meant sometimes the kobolds had a staff of the magi hiding away somewhere. Between that and random encounter table use it wasnt very hard to find what you wanted... But that was back when we played 6 hours a day 7 days a week because we didnt have jobs or responsibilities. Take away random encounters and random treasure tables and 40 hour gameweeks and I think the magic item crafting becomes a welcome alternative to 'lucky find' especially when the people at your table are burning up valuable feats in order to be able to do so. Especially considering you still have the gm fiat power to limit their crafting time.
At least a third of my gaming experience is with palladium while the rest is 2nd edition. We never used the battlemat for any of it, so theater of the mind is definitely my forte. We discovered that most of the folks at my new table are 3.0/3.5 only and having been exclusively on the battlemat heavy 3.0/3.5/pathfinder battlemat mechanics made my mapless style of gaming a tough transition for them, while the opposite was true for me. I find a palpable transition with the folks at our table dropping theater of the mind as soon as the mini hits the mat, and suddenly its a game of battlechess with funky rules... It helps make the theater of combat more definitive, but in my personal opinion the advantages of that don't outweigh the disadvantages. Sadly pathfinder combat is largely built on battlemat mechanics so getting away from the mat in pathfinder games is tough at our table. I prefer systems where the mat isnt necessary.
I dont see a problem with it. As a player I'd never play this kind of thing only because I don't enjoy the 'go forth and destroy, my minions' kind of personality, but its a valid playstyle so if its what you like to do... its not game breaking. If I were in this guys party and the gm were able to keep it interesting I'd love these kind of antics. Keep the gm busy dealing with the atrocity you've created on the battlemap while I quietly go about my own business. If I were a gm I'd just make sure that any opponent who had any clue about this party or its fighting style would do their best to subvert it. Attacking at night or sending in waves until the animal horde is depleted. Letting a character show off their strengths is ony half the battle as a gm. The other half is showcasing their weaknesses, and there's plenty of ways around this build. Its a strong setup in an ideal scenario where nothing is stopping you from doing what you want to do, but thats going to be a rare scenario if your gm is worth his salt.
1. Started in what... 1982? Gaming since redbox D&D. Went up through goldbox and then switched to 2nd ed AD&D. Heroes Unlimited, Rifts. Long hiatus when all the gamers moved away. New group has done a 2nd ed, d20 future, 3.5, heroes unlimited, Palladium's Dead Rising, and we're now running a pathfinder and warhammer 1st ed game. 2. First game was actually gamma world, but i didn't realize it was an rpg at the time. Only thing i remember about it was maps and traps...3. AD&D 2e, Heroes unlimited/ninjas and superspies, trying very hard to make pathfinder number 3... 4. Have no recollection of the gamma world character, my first redbox character was a cleric, who travelling the wilderness by himself died very quickly. I never played a cleric again. 5. Nope. Only one of them left in town and he was always more of an antagonist than a gamer anyway... 6. Trying to capture the sense of community that my hobby is supposed to entail, share experiences and opinions...
We have a GM at our table who is very opposed to summoners because he's experienced the crocodile horde version of this...
Is there some sort of dpr calculator out there that I dont know about?
No early editions of D&D used anything like armor as DR, and my early Pc's were so wealthy that they made Midas cry himself to sleep. True but reigning in the massive damage of the higher levels has to happen somehow and this definitely makes the toughs tougher while the squishies still have to stay quick. Reworking the whole hp system and damage system to closer reflect 2e is way too much of a pain.
1. armor as dr
We decided to have a ninjas and superspies campaign and forewarned the players that it was going to start out at a sort of hidden island kumite sort of scenario. Gladitorial arena kung fu style. Classic 80s fare... Our brilliant auto expert decides not to play a martial artist but to once again play an auto expert and so he made this heavily weaponized semi. We're like uh. how are you going to get your semi to the island. So he goes out of his way to hire a ferry to take his semi to the island, is very particular to the island natives and the ferry operator about the specifics of how his property is to be handled and every time he talks to them they simply say 'Yeeeeees!' He cant be a fighter in the tournament so instead of playing a high roller he says he's posing as a reporter... The party arrives at the island where the high rollers are treated like honored guests, the fighters themselves are treated like royalty, and he is put into a tiny little rickshaw once again with a little old island native who answers every question with 'yeeees!' He is placed in a tiny little room thats almost a stone walled prison. In the bathroom he finds a bar of soap. Written on the soap is the word 'yes!' Turns on the tv and its a commercial for the soap. Yesfully clean.... yesfully clean!
In a heroes unlimited campaign our automotive expert had made a heavily armored nuclear powered 70's era lincoln continental with superfuel efficiency. A car that would never run out of gas... He had to dive out of it for a reason that was not memorable and lost it forever. The memorable part was the ludicrous number of cameo appearances it made in campaigns after that... the unmanned lincoln continental, rolling through the fields of postapocalypse rifts earth... Someone tried to shoot it down with a smoke grenade and just broke out the window, so now it rolls through the fields unstoppable with smoke billowing out the window. Oh and an angry bunny riding where the hood ornament should have been. But thats another story...
If you want to know the first memorable moment I can think of its my buddy playing a barbarian named Booger, and his battlecry was his name.
And my contribution was our first AHA moment about how to properly handle PVP in a campaign... and the lasting reprocussions if you don't.
I agree. I've always liked the palladium alignment system better.
There was a guy in our group named Ben who had an habit of getting a pack animal (typically a horse or a donkey) and naming it sprinkles... The gm seemed to have a problem with it so the dozen incarnations of sprinkles invariably met an untimely death. Ben moved away but his legacy lives on. The gm who always murdered sprinkles is now a player and makes a habit of getting a donkey and naming it Ben in the hopes it will meet a grizzly death.
Introduced a buddy of ours to gaming back in 2e. He decided to play a wizard. 1st level. One spell. Sleep. Wanted to test it out, but before they encountered a baddie so he cast it on another player. Saving throw worked... Dirty look from the other player... Wizard useless for the rest of the day. Three days of this and not a single success, but every morning *sleep* *grrr*. *sleep* *grr* Finally on the 4th day a wizard lost his head. Thus started the 13 year vengeance of Traitor Travis. *** A much larger group has gotten together to play ninjas and superspies and one player is a special vehicles character who is very proud of his military jeep with the 50 cal mounted in the back. After hacking into the blueprints of the base, the party has decided to let the jeep guy drive his jeep through the double doors and down the hallway, storming the gates per se. He calls out "I have to drive! I need someone to take the gun (the rear mounted 50 cal)... guess who volunteers? Traitor travis... Who promptly hopped up, grabbed the gun and shot the driver in the back of the head. *** Playing a group of brigands and hackers and fringe elements in cyberpunk 2020.
*** Traitor Travis decides he wants to play a Death Master (dragon magazine silver anniversary edition I think) who gets experience points for digging up graves... We entertain the notion so the whole party is in the graveyard and along comes the town watch... Everyone else jumps up and hides in the trees... Traitor travis? Hops the fence, gets the watchmen's attention, points into the graveyard where we're all hiding and shouts 'Look! Graverobbers!" Be kind to your party members gents, the damage can last a lifetime.
If they had more than one Vogon working the booths the line would move a lot faster.
1: they are meat shields for the casters
GMing high level campaigns is like any other kind of activity. If you never do it, you'll seldom be great at it, and the more you practice the better you'll get!
And as for not being able to wash your hair or hit the latrine without taking your belt off, I say thats what the clean cantrip is for!
Giving everything max hit points isn't changing the system, it just implies everyone and everything is as healthy as they could possibly be when they march into battle... and armor as Damage Reduction is an optional rule thats printed right there in the CRB... Technically you're not even changing the game at all. You're using an optional rule that the publisher handed you on a silver platter. Don't knock it till ya try it ;) Iz good.
Why draw fights out? Combat in AD&D tended to be resolved a lot quicker, especially since characters generally had a lot fewer options for what they could do in combat. Armor as DR wouldn't really be in keeping with old-school either... there was no DR in AD&D, as far as I can recall; something was either immune to your attack or took full damage. I don't know which AD&D you were playing but I found the opposite to be true. Pathfinder fights are over in 3 rounds or less. That never happened to us in AD&D. I cant count the number of forums that have that 'we dont play above level 8 because every fight lasts one round' kind of flavor. No fight feels gritty if punching something with 400 hit points in the face makes it curl up into a fetal position in one blow. I feel like the trouble with pathfinder losing that gritty feel is that at higher levels fights are over in 3 rounds. That was never true in AD&D. In pathfinder damage numbers are through the roof 20d6 this 20d6 that... Hit points went up but not nearly as high as they should have to accomodate these monster swings you see from the optimizer builds. So, max hit points does 2 things. One it makes fights last longer because everything can take twice as many hits so even if you are an optimizer you still got to hit it twice as much to kill it and it'll have twice as many chances to hit you back. Two it means twice as many chances to hit you back means your healing magic feels sort of nerfed by 50% so you've got a tighter budget on staying alive the more prolonged a fight is. Armor as DR does 2 things. It makes the sturdy stuff 'feel' sturdier because yeah, you're hitting that bulette as if it was a schoolbus parked in the middle of the road, but its like beating a buffalo with a baseball bat. Three swings isnt gonna get the job done. Dexxie McDex still feel like 'I never get hit because i'm quick on my feet', still never getting hit but when your highdex monk eventually does get hit with a claymore he's got no DR from armor so he gets to see exactly what it feels like to take a claymore to his bare chest. If a half dozen peasants with longswords charge a paladin in full plate mail the odds that he's even going to feel anything at all is next to zero... Full plate mail feels like full plate mail again.
Give everyone and everything max hit points and then use the armor as DR rule... Thatll draw fights out a bit and with every thing hitting every other thing its feels a lot more clashy.
Yes, lets talk more about the succubus paladin ^_^
Put a little scally in your wag... Make it an airship, use a bag of holding as the latrine and empty it on the heads of your enemys... The HMS Poopoo Bombadier. Classy I am not.
Taking from players to accomplish something that can be fixed by better encounter design is just flat out poor DMing. Brave words on these forums but I agree entirely.
& a Bard using the feat and making the skill check. This. As long as someone has the craft magic weapon skill making the check there can be plenty of contributors to an items construction. Absolutely. Gotta have that feat.
I particularly like random encounters during adventure paths because some folks have played adventure paths more than once already... It's next to impossible not to remember how certain things go down so it's fun as heck when a party is saying ok... the next room has Spoiler: and instead there is some other inexplicable horror going on in that room. It is true that you have to keep in in context. If your party is 800 feet below the surface in caverns that make a dwarf feel cramped, having a 100 foot long dragon sleeping in the basement may not be appropriate, but then maybe you do. Maybe the thing outgrew the exits and would be willing to parlay for the party's help to get it out of these caves that it cant fit out of... Oh to see the light of day again... or maybe there's another huge cavern that leads out that just happens to not be the one the party came down... As a gm I love trying to fit something crazy in where it wasn't before especially in cases where the party can't help but know what's coming.
ripnuggets harem Maybe it's npcs.. A caravan... More adventurers? Allies? Rivals? A medusa going for a skinny dip... Open your mind, Quaid, open your mind!
Yeah, I wouldnt allow the crafting of magic items without the magic item crafting feats, thats what they're there for... Regular crafting skills don't come close to magical crafting. If all you have is normal crafting then the best you can do is masterwork. Even if you want someone else to cast a spell to make it magical that someone else had better have the craft magic item feat.
I second the nomination for Grimtooth. Grimtooth makes tomb of horrors look like wonkaland.
Not to broach an odd subject but this thread sort of boils down to a particular version of the argument certain religious/political groups have about gay marriage... They say 'let 'em have a civil union... just don't call it marriage.' One side says why do you have to make up a different name for it.
While my opinions on the specific above argument is irrelevent, my opinion on what constitutes a paladin falls solidly on the second side. [imho] Doing good doesnt make you a paladin. Robin hood is not a paladin. Riddick is not a paladin. Superman and Batman are not paladins. Iron man is not a paladin. Qui Gon Jin is not a paladin. I may be able to imagine what a succubus draining a bear looks like, but talking myself into the idea that Ironman is a paladin is a stretch too far for me. Doesn't mean they're not all cool and badass, but paladins they are not. Doing what you think is best isnt paladinhood. Paladinhood and Cavaliers and Samurai and all of that are all about doing the best you can while maintaining a restrictive framework. Without that framework, you're not a paladin, you're something else...
I remember those books. I think I still have my high level campaigns book... I seem to remember one of those books splitting attributes into two separate attributes each... Like instead of having an 18 stregth that did hit bonus, damage bonus carry capacity all at a given level you could adjust each attribute by a split of 2 in each direction so your 18 strength would become a 20 in terms of damage but a 16 in terms of carrying capacity.... I found that idea particularly awesome.
I like giving everyone and everything max hit points.
Just get a high level cleric or oracle of your diety to cast miracle on you...
To be honest I think this is a horrble idea and support the fact that a paladin by any other alignment is no paladin at all.
I thought for sure I read that anyone calling themselves a paladin and it was discovered that they were not a lawful good paladin provoked inbound smites of opportunity from everyone within reach... Maybe thats wrong... Maybe that was just a wish spell someone made... My mind isnt what it used to be.
Well if its not magic then I recommend the level 2 spell 'shatter' on the chip.
The possibility of using a farraday cage would imply a wireless transmission (wide band fidelity or not). If indeed this chip is communicating to other chips using magic then we ought to be discussing antimagic shells or walls or somesuch.
Wait so this whole thing is running through wifi? Just unplug his router.
This is sort of a fine example of how much gray 'area of personal interpretation' still exists in the core books though. More and more these forums prove to me that the span of this gray area is much larger than I would have expected.
I do love seeing forum posts with questions that have been bandied about for 30 years... the great alignment war will never end. I don't ever remember 2e being subjected to so many possibilities of a RAW/RAI separation... but then I don't remember there being internet forums back when 2e came out. Now it feels like every paragraph in the published works has some word use that leaves things up to interpretation... Our current GM loves playing in this vast gray area because it leaves him open to call all the shots however he sees fit, but if you've got a different interpretation of rai than he does then there end up being far too many game sessions that get interrupted by 'philosophical debates about the definition of the word 'attended' and stuff. I feel like in 2e when you weren't sure how something worked, you cracked open the book and you got an answer and nearly every time everyone was on the same page what it meant.... With pathfinder I feel like you wonder how something works and you crack the book open then you have a 40 minute discussion of semantics and turn of phrase... I wonder if its just that I was too young to notice semantic disparities or if the pathfinder books really are written to be purposefully vague to encourage 'discussion'... I like the social aspect of discussion but I don't think it helps the game out to have so many gray areas over so many small details... But that article just reminds me that maybe all that is just because I'm old.
The Whole Half Ogre... Best darn door opener there is... Ah Dragon magazine #73 how I miss thee, may 1983... What a long strange trip it has been.
Mirror of life trapping? What exactly is the nature of this separation of his consciousness?
Rumplestiltskin?
I was thinking shortbeard, but I'm not sure halflings can grow beards... Toebeard?
Barnacle Burlfoot
The microburst of monte-cristo
Stunty the Mauler
Thank you, I was hoping someone would take that and run with it. Thats the beauty of succubi... They're so open ended.
The funny part about your wish is digging in a little deeper into the mechanics of how it goes about being implemented. Typically a wish is granted by the 'nearest wish granting power' or 'most applicable wish granting power', so clerics making miracles are being granted their miracles by their specific diety, and miracle magic items work the same way... So the wishes in a luckblade created by a priest are being granted by that priests diety. Presuming this luckblade was created by members of your own church presumes your own diety is deciding to grant your wish or not... which is what makes the second bit fun and funny and interesting... In the strictest sense, smiting isn't something your character does by himself. Smite is coloquially "you designating a creature which brings down the finger of your god to whomp it extra hard..." so what you're really wishing for is 'I wish my god would smite everything instead of just the few things he prefers I be asking him to smite at the moment", which is to say you feel like he's not smiting thoroughly enough and perhaps he should rethink his philosophy on what is deserving of a smoting based purely on your 'suggestion'... your wish is a critique of your god's wrath being not as total as you'd prefer, and the suggestion you dropped into the suggestion box is going straight to upper management... It's pretty funny... |