tergiver's page

Hi, I've been running a 5th edition Shackled City game. I have 5th edition conversions starting from Zenith Trajectory (chapter 4). There's a bit of a backstory there with a previous party starting Shackled City and then moving over to Savage Tide, so I started this group with some older modules and worked them back in to the adventure path in Chapter 4. Currently, the party has defeated the Cagewrights and stopped the planar rift and I've moved to a more sandbox-mode to let them clean up loose threads and decide how to proceed and when to finish.

Send me a message and I'll share what I have, and I've been meaning to put my conversions online anyway.

A straight conversion works surprisingly well, with the following guidelines:
1) Cut all monetary treasure in half and all magic items by at least 1/3, dropping any 'boring' items (mostly +1 suits and armor held by mooks)
2) Try to set up bosses and mooks to be encountered together, because the action economy is brutal to solo creatures
3) Keep an eye out for anything that changed drastically in CR and substitute in a similar monster
4) At a certain point, XP won't let the characters advance quickly enough so throw in more side adventures or just handwave levelling (which is what I did)

Also, I've been experimenting with minor legendary actions for some bosses with class levels. Otherwise, they can get curbstomped quickly.

Sure can! I have given it a kick through the system. You should get an order confirmation email soon.

If we can help with anything else, please let us know.

Thanks!
~Sharaya

I got the confirmation, thanks!

Hi, I have the same problem. Can you help me finalize the order?

I sincerely hope that it was the player character who suffered, and not the player! :)

Oops, yes. I'm not -that- cruel of a GM. As always, one more preview would have been a good idea...

I've been running the Shackled City path with my group, converting it over to the Savage Worlds ruleset. It's worked pretty well so far - magic items are a lot rarer, and I've had to fiddle with pricing and magic, but it's fast moving and relatively low prep.

My plans have recently been derailed - I ran the Dungeon module "Unfamiliar Ground" as a one-shot after Chapter 3, which resulted in a player getting mangled but surviving. (He was knocked unconscious and gelded by the imp.) The rest of the party decided they'd all go to Sasserine to find a cleric that would regenerate his mojo, and now they've decided to stay in Sasserine for a while so I'm starting up the Savage Tide adventure path.

I don't know whether we're changing paths, taking a break, or getting ready to start alternating paths. Time will tell.

And the second sentence is your point, I think. But shouldn't they threaten the square they are in?

I would say that Tiny creatures would only threaten against other Tiny creatures, since other creatures would have reach on them. (Like a large versus a medium.) Tiny creatures should be able to take AoO's against other tiny creatures or unwary larger ones - I know of some cats who are love to take AoO's.

If we think of it as rescaling the map towards the tiny creature, then a 5x5 square becomes four 2.5 x 2.5 squares, so a tiny creature would threaten actions in its own square. On the other hand, the smaller you get the less ability you have to reach outside your own square, so what the game might be saying is that Tiny and smaller creatures don't have reach (how much reach does a leech have?).

I can't recall having run or playing in a TPK, but two of my fondest memories from playing second edition were combats where the party was one die roll - made in the open - away from failure and a probable TPK. We won (though half the party died in one of those), but if I had felt that the GM would have fudged things so that we couldn't have lost, for me that would have cheapened those victories.

I partially agree and partially disagree with DM Blake. Conan gets his bacon saved by Valeria at the end, but the fight where two stood against many is cheapened if the two know that somehow, the GM will find a way to keep them from dying. I know that negotiated TPKs are OK with DM Blake - I think that some gaming groups run with a campaign-wide "We accept that a TPK is a possibility" agreement.

Some of the discussion on the page is coming from different Gamist/Narrativist/Simulationist perspectives. In other words, some GMs prioritize 'the way the world works' over 'the game', and some prioritize the other way. There's nothing wrong with either preference; they're just different styles.

My suggestion for a different way of handling a TPK - offer the players a chance to "reload from a saved game". Restart to the beginning of the fight (or before it, if it's a fight they "should" have skipped) and try it again the next week. If the players were "off" that week, or they didn't realize how much the paladin losing his powers at the last minute would affect the combat, they can adjust. It's jarring to character immersion, but IMHO not any more so than having a god save their bacon.

One change... hm. It is hard to pick. Here we go:

Make a general rule that metamagic abilities can't increase the level of a spell past what the caster can cast. This should apply to the Universalist power, metamagic rods, and if it's a general rule it can also be applied to non-OGL content like Divine Metamagic.

When a caster can empower/quicken/maximize/twin/whatever their highest-level spell, this boosts them past their normal power level in a bad way.

(Our playtest game has wrapped up, so I'm more of an ex-playtester than an active playtester.)

Have you seen the Charm & Compulsion section in the glossary chapter (on pages 393-394)? It's a pretty good reference for adjudicating enchantments.

No, I hadn't noticed that, thanks for pointing it out. I think it's a good start and covers general power levels for charm and compulsion spells. However, this conversation does highlight what's the most frustrating aspect of Pathfinder for me - the lack of cross-references.

I know it's really hard to do cross-referencing right in the beta, but I'd like to see better referencing in the final version.

In my playtest game, one of the PCs is an enchantment-focused wizard. I find that the dividing lines for enchantments could use a little clarification and collection, and I think a sidebar along the lines of the Bluff DC chart would be helpful.

The enchantment spells are also short of examples, so having a few would help DMs figure out what's a "reasonable" or "unreasonable" suggestion. I was also applying a DC modifier to Suggestion spells based on the temperament of the monster (law/chaos, good/evil) and the phrasing of the suggestion, and that could be generalized to fit most enchantments.

Enchantment spells can have a big impact on a combat and also greatly affect how much fun players are having, so I think it's worth spending the time to shape enchantments in a fun but challenging way.

Hm, just to clarify an edit that went awry - the "new house rule" comment was meant to apply to the agreement that Metamagic Mastery couldn't be used to raise a spell level over the maximum possible to cast.

I converted some kir-lanians in my City of the Spider Queen playtest, and noticed they were built with natural weapons and fighter levels. The chart on p. 28 doesn't have a "natural weapons" group (claw, bite, etc.), but I let them take weapon training in natural weapons anyway.

I'd like to see a quick blurb somewhere about monstrous fighters being able to specialize in their natural attacks. I don't think that's the same as unarmed strike, and the idea of everyone with claws being a monk is... weird.

Last one - till February, at least.

1. The PCs leveled up to 12th level with no problems. I talked to the cleric about contemplative, and ruled that the "third domain" just meant that she could extend a domain relating to her god in the prestige class. That wasn't what she was looking for.

I'm definitely taking a look at the 3.x prestige classes with an eye toward "Can I just make this a feat chain?" So far pretty much no go.

2. Figuring out the rules for coming back with negative levels and what that means was a huge pain. The rules are scattered all over the book with no real cross-references or even hints. We did eventually figure it out.

3. I thought I had read something about permanent negative levels going away when you leveled up, but I couldn't find it. If it's not a rule, I think it should be - not everyone's going to have 2,000 gp on top of raising costs.

4. The PCs got to fight incorporeal drow wizards, and did pretty well at it. Spell Resistance + Miss chance makes for some pretty solid survivability, except when the wizard readied magic missile and used it to disrupt the opposing spellcasters. New house rule, I guess.

5. As written, death ward lifts the penalties from permanent negative levels. The druid player figured that out, and it was a big help for him.

6. As a first cut, the penalties for dying and coming back (two negative levels) seemed noticeably painful but not abusive or unreasonable.

7. I talked to the wizard player about the Universalist metamagic class ability - he agreed that it was reasonable to limit it so that you can't raise a spell beyond the maximum level you can cast. That limits him as well as the bad guys, so the party was hit by a cone of cold and not an empowered cone of cold.

Game 7 notes:

I decided to make it a test of the magic items system (but only a test). I gave the PCs a chance to pick any one magic item of 10,000 gold pieces or less that wasn't just a stat-booster.

-) There seems to be a mismatch on the necklace of adaptation - is it 40,000 or 9,000 gold? It's listed differently on the list and in the item description.

-) One of the players commented that the "robe of useless items" still qualified for its name. Maybe this could be jazzed up by making it a permanent - not charged - item that can generate non-magical items of a certain gold piece value? Food, water, 10' poles... all the sort of stuff that a wizard isn't going to want to worry about or carry.

the players picked:
-) A ring of mind shielding, as a flavor item to mitigate the brain sucking/mind reading aspects of the Underdark
-) A tan bag of tricks, because it generates level-appropriate monsters for ten minutes
-) a rod of metal detection, as a flavor item for the kobold dragon disciple so he can be more dragonish
-) a metamagic rod of lesser empowerment, because the cleric wanted to boost her healing and her searing light damage

Game notes:

1. Suggestion is still a tricky spell to adjudicate. I think it would work better with a sliding scale of difficulty, and it would be great to have an enchantment sidebar with suggestions to differentiate between different stages of difficulty. Something similar to the bluff table would be great.

In this case, I ruled that "Kill all the fire giants you can" was reasonable to the extent that they're evil, but unreasonable to the extent that they were lawful, so I gave the giants a +4 on their saving throw. That meant that one failed instead of three.

2. The fire giants were tougher than their CR10 rating. I gave them improved critical (greatsword), which came up a lot. It may have been how I was rolling, but power attack + double damage on a 17-20 was pretty severe on the party.

3. The druid dropped the first round, when he tried to cast detect magic when the party was walking up to four fire giants who were, after all, only waiting around to kill them. I think I hit all four times and power attacked, so the druid died. Ooops. He got to play the NPC fighter this fight.

4. Despite the cleric's healing and his guarded stance, the fire giants were able to kill her barbarian cohort. Guarded stance + shield of faith meant that the giants couldn't power attack a raging barbarian, which was great news for him. They could still critically hit, though.

5. Turning monsters against their companions is still a rather effective way of shifting the balance of power in a fight.

6. The party didn't concentrate on taking one monster down - that's an odd DnD ism that you're always better off concentrating attacks on one monster, because you fight at full strength until you die. It seems to be counter-intuitive.

Next time: we'll playtest negative levels by letting the druid and barbarian get raised, and the wizard will take a level of war weaver from heroes of battle.

Game six:

Prep notes:
1) The player of the now-deceased rogue came back as a kobold sorcerer/dragon disciple.

My kobold rules, based strongly on [http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/paizoPublishing/pathfinder/pathfinderRPG/feedback/alpha3/racesClasses/howToPFizeKobolds the Paizo thread]:
-4 strength, +2 dex
small: +1 size bonus to AC, +1 attack
normal speed (speed 30')
keen senses - +2 perception
crafty & cunning: +2 on craft (craftmaking) & profession (miner)
+1 natural armor
light sensitivity
languages: draconic & common as automatic
favored class: sorcerer or rogue

Game notes:

1) I had been operating under the assumption that Pathfinder characters were +1 LA compared to 3.x characters. That's definitely not true at this level of play.

2) There are no spells that affect CMB except Free Action. There should probably be more at some point.

3) I found it surprising that Freedom of Movement is not a sorcerer/wizard spell.

4) We talked about whether the weapon finesse feat should subsume agile maneuvers - the sorcerer player votes yes, but can see it either way.

5) At one point in the combat, the wizard was nauseated, panicked, grappled, and stunned. Rough night.

6) The kobold is one tough little guy - he has 117 hit points at 11th level.

I've been remiss in posting the notes, but I've run some more games. My next prep notes:

1) There's no explicit provision for fighters to specialize in their natural weapons.

2) Improved Grapple requires improved unarmed strike - it would be good to have verbiage about whether a monster with natural attacks also qualifies.

3) In the bestiary, be sure to break down where the components of armor class come from. I found it pretty irritating to have to back-calculate it when updating monsters from City of the Spider Queen.

4) Power attack is worded confusingly to a non-mathy player.

5) Kir-lanians channel negative energy as a cleric and are also healed by it. This is much more significant than it was in 3rd edition - it means they could heal themselves up and damage the PCs. I increased their CR by one.

Play notes:

1) Although the players figured out that the monsters were healing each other and damaging the PCs, they didn't use positive energy to try to harm the monsters. The reason is that the cleric was evil, and wanted to heal her party members more than she wanted to hurt the bad guys.

2) Confusion was interesting, although the player characters suffered from it more than the bad guys. The PC wizard is a universalist who took shadow weave (Realms game) and specialized in enchantment magic. So far it's working interestingly, but we're still working out the edge cases.

3) I had to handwave grappling + flying - the flying rules made it more straightforward to figure out how to combine actions. I do think the flying rules could be a bit simpler, though.

4) The drow rogue player gets to create a new PC because he was grappled and dropped off in a dragon's lair, and in the last round of his confusion he rolled "attack nearest".

What I do:

• Prep - look in the adventure for sorcerers and clerics, and pick bloodlines and domains ahead of time, then write down the appropriate powers. This is something I've found difficult to do on the fly and try to get done before game start. When quickly converting wizards, I just make them universalists.
  
• Add six hit points to all the monsters, give undead a charisma bonus, and favored class bonuses to monsters. Easy to handwave on the fly. If the monster has the toughness feat, give them +1 HP/die to represent the new feat.
  
• I created a quick table to help me figure out how many new feats creatures got:

  1st-4th - no change
  5th - +1 feat
  6th - no change
  7th-10th - +1 feat
  11th-+2 feats
  12th=+1 feat
  13th-16th=+2 feats
  17th=+3 feats
  18th=+2 feats
  19th=+3 feats

  I've been able to just throw in feats on the fly. Usually I give Toughness, Power Attack, or Improved Critical. If I have time, I give the monsters new Pathfinder feats to test them out. Picking feats is the part that makes most of the difference - I gave dire bears Improved Critical and I should have given them Power Attack, and I gave fire giants Improved Critical (Greatsword) and almost killed off my test party.
  

• When guessing perception most monsters seem to split one 'skill' worth of Listen + Spot so I just give them Perception of HD+3+wisdom if Listen + Spot is about the same as their hit dice.
  
• I don't always calculate CMB unless the monsters are intended to grapple or bull rush.
  

An alternative to the current metamagic system are the 'sudden' metamagic feats from the Miniatures Handbook. Sudden Empower lets you empower a spell for no additional spell cost 3x/day, etc. Sudden Quicken has a bajillion feat prerequisites. I don't know what the OGL status of those feats are, though.

I wouldn't be averse to making silent spell and still spell +0 feats if they turned the casting time into a full-round action or something. Just so there's some cost for doing things the non-standard way.

IMHO, the metamagic system in general is a good idea badly implemented. I'm not sure if it's fixable in the D20 format, although Monte Cook has done some interesting work with eldritch feats that are +0 level and add a little boost to your spells.

This cropped up in my 3.x game with a fighter who had a lance and spirited charge. I came down against being able to ready a charge, even a partial one. To me, charging inside someone else's move is an unrealistic interrupt.

It's a ticklish situation because of the turn-based system. Someone comes around the corner, and they get charged. That means that the charger gets to move at least 10 feet, possibly up to 30', 40' (fast move), or 60' (haste) while the chargee is standing like a chump.

If you want to wait until someone shows up and -then- charge, then just delay. That does run the risk of the baddie getting within 10' and spoiling your charge, though.

That does make me think of another problem with 'partial charge as a standard action' - a character could single move out of combat, then partial charge back in. Yes, they'd trigger an AoO, but I know at least one character who would have happily taken that attack in exchange for charging damage.

These are good ideas; I would like to revisit the defensive casting decision and try to find a way to avoid a roll. I don't think defensive casting is an integral part of casting, and removing it or making it harder is one way of nerfing wizards with regard to melee characters. (As long as those melee characters have access to some battlefield control abilities.)

I think that half skills is too much - no matter how high the skills go, you're still rolling a d20. That means that the 'range' is pretty limited, and half skill ranks is far too swingy.

The house rule I swiped from another DM is:
* a 15 aid another gets a +2 bonus
* a 25 aid another gets a +3 bonus
* a 35 aid another gets a +4 bonus
etc.

I could see boosting it to +2/+4/+6, but no higher.

I also generally let players collaborating on skills pick the 'primary' after the dice are rolled, so you don't have a 35 aiding a 15.

And, while I'm talking house rules, I do try to limit the number of players who can effectively aid another on most skills. Too many cooks, and all that.

Thats an interesting idea. I think, however, this idea would simply mean that EVERY primary spellcaster would take that feat, and thus we would be left with no attacks of opportunity would be allowed against any spellcaster, and then you haven't really nerfed spellcasting at all - you've actually made them better.....except for the one less feat they would have.

I don't think they'd all take it, particularly at lower levels. In my games, I rarely see arcane casters in a spellcasting situation that can't be fixed by a five foot step.

I could be wrong, though.

I'm going to push my idea again of abandoning casting defensively. I think I've seen a consensus that spellcasters need a bit of nerfing, and this seems like a way to accomplish that and maybe speed things up.

If there's no casting defensively, then spellcasters have to take five-foot steps. If they're facing an opponent with reach, and they're well within that reach, casters will end up taking AoO's retreating or casting. I'm OK with that.

If a spellcaster wants to cast defensively, let them take the Combat Casting feat. If a spellcaster has Combat Casting, they can always cast without triggering and AoO. No roll, but still no big change from the 3.x state of the art for mid-level or higher characters. We can then give rangers and paladins Combat Casting as a bonus feat so they don't have to worry about casting in combat.

There's a feat in Complete Arcane which lets arcane casters pick up a familiar. Any sorcerer who wants can take that feat.

Given how useful bonded items are compared to familiars, I expect that if a wizard has a familiar, he's going to get it with a feat as well.

Perhaps Improved Familiar should be rolled into the Obtain Familiar feat?

After a travel-related hiatus, the game picked back up again.

Reactions from the fourth session:

- It was straightforward to covert Stone Giants over to Pathfinder.

I gave stone giants the "Large and In Charge" feat from Stone & Fist, but changed it so that it worked as a combat maneuver. It seemed to work well - the stone giants were frequently able to force back the party, but there were enough misses or acrobatic AoO avoidances that it didn't seem abusive.

- Converting two NPCs that were stone giant elder sorcerers was more time-consuming. I went ahead and picked a bloodline for them (elemental) and wrote down their powers. I think there's going to be more of an update curve on some classes than others.

- Converting Dire Bears was also pretty easy, but I think they would have been tougher if I had given them Power Attack instead of Improved Critical. Something to consider for the inevitable monster book.

- Haste was difficult to cast effectively when the party was spread out, and players kind of expected that it was a burst and not 'no two more than 30' apart'.

- The ranger was weak without a favored enemy involved, and the player noticed that he wasn't accomplishing a whole lot in combat.

- The rogue player thought it a bit odd that Irresistible Laughter didn't allow sneak attacks, since the irresistibly laughing person still has their dexterity bonus.

- XP calculations are quick and easy, but 'fast' is not as fast as I was expecting. I went ahead and had the players level up after four sessions, and I may continue to level them up on demand for the playtest.

I'm doing flat 6, applied to every creature. PC, NPCs, monsters, summoned creatures. I find that it makes the summoned creatures a little tougher and often gets them an extra round of combat.

I agree, I don't care for the whole concept of rogues getting a familiar, it just doesn't belong in the class feature list. A more generic feat that could be taken by anyone would be ok but not something specific to rogues.

I agree with making it a feat; it doesn't seem unbalancing to me but it doesn't seem like an integral rogue concept and it should be open to other arcane classes.

Going by the non-core Obtain Familiar feat in Complete Arcane, a rogue with the minor magic talent could get a familiar anytime after 6th level (caster level 3), and a bard or sorcerer could take it at 3rd level.

I wasn't looking for the abilities to change in a combatant type of way but more along the lines of they evolve past normal animals in the same way. Other flavor elements could be added in as well. So familiars would gain more HD/HP and the abilities that all the animals of a magic user/divine caster would have but the wizards familiar is smarter than the normal while vs. the druid's animal companion which is hardier(the ac bonus and stat boosts). When I mean common abilites, I'm talking about things like Share Spell, Empathic link, etc.

I think I disagree, but we might actually agree.

I think that 3rd edition familiars have always been fairly lame and forgettable, as illustrated in the Order of the Stick. With the introduction of arcane bonds, familiars are now a suboptimal choice. I'd like to see familiars be a reasonable class feature and not a stuffed animal with a static bonus, one that gets more arcane as the caster increases in caster level. However, I don't think they need to get more strength, dexterity, hit dice, armor class, etc. the way that mounts and companions do.

For example - the new Share Spell only lets 'personal' spells be cast on the creature. That means that animal companions count as a person for transport via plants, but also that familiars count as a person for teleports. That'll sound the death knell for familiars if it doesn't get changed, but I can understand wanting to avoid the 'druid buffs himself and his companion using wild shape and natural spell' that was common in 3.x.

So the familiar and animal companion would get some shared abilities like evasion, but I think they would be different enough to be two charts.

I would suggest familiars be put in it also but they aren't really in the class of combat-ready critters.

Yeah, I'd like to see familiars more of a special case for bonded objects than animal companions.

It does look like there's a general consensus that (level - 3) is better than (level / 2) for keeping abilities relevant.

I think the idea of breaking the progression down into finer chunks makes sense, and if there's a unified pet progression that should free up the room to allow it.

I think it's a great idea, and it would help 3.5 players trying to decide whether to try Pathfinder or starting the game.

It would be a lot of work, though. A wiki might work for distributing that work out.

1) do items such as rings, belts, amulets, etc. no longer meld into the caster's body when he polymorphs?

They do, but they still work if they provide a constant always-on bonus like a ring of protection or a belt of dexterity. Unless it's an armor bonus - so as written, bracers of armor stop working in wild shape. That seems like a bug to me.

2) do the new polymorph spells allow for the full spectrum of attacks available to the form you have changed into? ie. do you actually get the multiple attacks and pounce special attack available to an actual megaraptor, or the free trip attempt special attack of the wolf, or the improved grab feat of the bear?

There's a special list of abilities you can get for each spell. Beast Shape I doesn't grant any of these, but BS2 and above do. So at 8th level, a wildshaping druid could pick up pounce, trip, or improved grab.

3) does wild shaping for the druid require the material component that the corresponding polymorph spell requires, namely a body part of the creature to be transformed into?

I don't think so - Wild Shape is a Supernatural ability, so it shouldn't have components.

4) finally, if you choose to use only the rules that have been released so far in the beta, what is your best choice of tactic when facing an enemy which has DR/good or other such situations where the combination of fighter and magic weapon or weapon buff is usually needed to bypass the obstacle?

1) Shift large and Power Attack to try to overcome the DR that way

I wonder how you feel about my own pet solution:
1) Casting a spell in a threatened area always triggers an AoO unless...
2) The caster has the combat casting feat, in which case they never trigger an AoO and...
3) The ranger and paladin get combat casting as a bonus feat

Most spellcasters can use the 'screw it, I'll step 5' back' technique, but a surrounded spellcaster can still be in a world of hurt. Plus, it removes a couple of rolls and a skill sink.

I'm with Jal Dorak; if you say the fighter is able to ignore the movement restriction in medium armor rather than letting the fighter treat medium armor as light armor, then you're keeping a couple of cans of worms closed.

Alternatively, some people may like the fully armored fighter/caster idea.

Also, at... 15th? level, I'd lke to see fighters able to ignore the speed restriction in heavy armor. A reason to make heavy armor out of things other than mithril...

What about Jason Bulmahn's alternate rage system?. That's just CON+2+(2*level) rage rounds. It should be much easier to convert and track for DMs, which I think was a major motivator.

I like the second low-level spell a round, but I'd start it at first level. The zero level spells aren't really worth trying to adjudicate.

I'm in total agreement with Monkeygod that a big problem with the existing MT is lack of flavor.

In my 3.5 campaign I house ruled item creation feats down to Craft Single Use, Craft Charged, and Craft Permanent. I left the minimum caster level limits in pace, so that you needed to be 12th level and have Craft Permanent Item to create most rings.

Something to think about are the 'Magical Artisan' type feats that give a bonus or a price break on one class of item - I left those alone. It also might not work well with letting higher-than-first-level PCs get magical items they could craft for 50% off during character creation.

I figured it was less of an issue in Pathfinder now that characters get more feats, but I still like it and endorse this plan.

Size bonuses do kick in, and it's in the general polymorph subschool rules on page 159, right column, third from the last paragraph. There should really be a reference to the general rules for the basic Shape spells, since it's not the first place I would look either.

OK, I made a mistake. I meant for it to be Great Fortitude feat not the Iron Will feat, as to symbolized the cleric influenced.

I gotcha. That makes a lot more sense. Still not what I would add, but not something I particularly object to.

As to the armor casting? It only makes sense, and I don't think it is over powering, while one class can cast in heavy armor with no minuses, one can't wear any armor, you think a combination of the two would at least be able to cast in light with no problems, and with light shields.

I can see where you're coming from, but there is already a feat progression for it. That feat progression does block quickened spells, though, and the mystic theurge does have a kajillion spells so they might want to go the quickened route.

Is it worth trying to rebuild the Mystic Theurge as a class with fewer, but higher level, spells?

A couple of the suggestions in particular aren't working for me - the bonus feats of Iron Will and Toughness. The Mystic Theurge is built out of two high-will classes, one of which usually has Wisdom as a key stat, so their Will save is going to be quite high.

It's possible to build a Mystic Theurge with an absurd will save, or that can use armor while casting, or that has a lot of hit points - through feats.

If Mystic Theurge needs a bump, it should be in the areas where it's broken. Normally, I'd say "or the player needs more options", but I don't think that Mystic Theurge has an option problem.

1) Character level as caster level works, or just two 'practiced spellcaster' bonus feats
2) Extending the progression past 10th level

Re: the missing feats - I don't see an official response, but there are several threads and two main paths people took. Pick which one you like.

From what Jason's said, I don't think there will be room in the Pathfinder PHB for more Ranger fighting styles. That's too bad, since I'd really like to see at least one more style, but that may be a limitation we're stuck with.

They'll have to wait for another book.

There's already (at least one) thread about whether selective channeling should be a feat, so I won't repeat myself.

Letting positive & negative energy be resisted is a good idea, but that opens up two cans of worms:
1) What about the will save to flee, for positive energy? I say that if the undead creature takes any damage, it has to make the safe.
2) What about protection from energy? That would slurp up enough damage that evil clerics could essentially make one particular undead turn-proof. I'm not sure how cleric players will feel about that.

You have to watch how many powers the paladin gets at first level, otherwise you encourage level-dipping. That being said, I would like to see good & axiomatic strikes for the paladin, but not till fifth or seventh level.

Tonight's question was "What's the DC to identify a spell being cast when you can only hear the caster?"

I said 25+ spell level.

This might not crop up often enough to be worth adding to the list.

That doesn't make a lot of sense in all situations. For example Small Earth Elemental grants a bonus to strength even if you are a medium character. Many medium forms give strength bonuses even when your size doesn't change.

Oops, I didn't notice that, I've just been looking at the beast shape spells.

It would be cleaner for all the polymorph spells to use the same bonus type, I think, so that does rule out size.

Wild armor is not part of OGL but a similar item could be published subseuqntly by pathfinder. Indeed I think this would be excellent for melee druids.

Wild Armor is part of the SRD, and already in the Beta (p.343).

The Wild power also can be applied to shields - I never noticed that before. I guess it becomes a shield that can somehow be used by the form, but that's still kind of odd. I guess shield bonuses aren't that big compared to armor.

I do think you're right about the beast shape natural armor bonus, and that it replaces normal natural armor and stacks with barkskin or amulets of natural armor.

The ability bonuses could be size bonuses, so that they'll stack with enhancement items but won't stack with enlargement spells.

Again the more I look at it the more I think that Paladins should be able to access the Glory domain (at least at CL 12 and lower) it's just a really good fit.

That's a really interesting idea, I like it. It makes the paladin a bit more castery. Maybe it should be a feat? Spend a feat, get access to a single appropriate domain. Is that too powerful? Would you need to give something up, like smites?

How's that look? Adds a tiny bit of scaling, while taking away a lot of the complexities of the spell.

I like most of the decomplexity a lot, particularly making it an 'attack' and letting it interact with other attack feats and options. I have some fighter 2/wizard 5's in the City of the Spider Queen playtest with mithril spiked chains - I'd like to see them able to use hand of the apprentice to do trip and disarm attempts.

I do have a couple of quibbles:

I'm OK with it. Many wizards will take Craft Wondrous Items, many barbarians and high-strength fighters will take Power attack, most druids will take natural spell...

Some feats end up being more generally useful than others. It's still possible to build character concepts that don't include them, though, and those concepts get 'extra' feats by not going down that path.

Requiring selective channeling mean that in-combat healing will be limited at low levels, and level dipping into cleric won't be quite as useful.

Remember that Paladins get energy channeling too, and also have to decide about Selective Channeling vs. a combat feat. Characters get more feats in Pathfinder than in 3.x, but the decisions about what feat to take are still important.

That is an interesting idea.

One of the problems with high-level play is the prep time, and one of the problems with prep time is that clerics can check every spell in every book.

Edit: I do think there's an approach to granting everying in core to divine casters, but limiting non-core books. That does seem to be entering optional rule territory, though.

I'm with the people who would like the bloodlines, schools, and domains in the class section. If it was a separate chapter, that would be OK but not my first choice. Domains and schools seems to bloat the spell list right now.