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Helic wrote:

A guy who is bright and wise ON TOP of being charismatic will attract more (and better) people to follow him. It's harder to respect someone who's less intelligent or more foolish than yourself - you don't look up to people like that.

Someone charismatic can _seem_ bright and wise, at least superficially. Sufficient interaction will dispel that notion rather quickly. Being able to herd people in the same direction (i.e. make them work together well) is leadership, and yes, that's Charisma.

Getting people to follow you loyally and trust you with their lives requires something extra (aside from a Feat :-); respect for their brains and common sense is IMO part of the package.

I don't really agree with that line. Partly through wanting to keep all stats somewhat useful, but also because a high charisma person is someone you will love, respect, and trust despite their occasional failures in perception. Whereas a genius whom you despise is less often going to convince you to follow them into life-and-death situations.

My experience is that gamers value practical efficacy over beauty and charm. In rl beauty and charm are far, far more efficacious in gaining followers than any amount of Int or Wis. Remember that the follower will have Int or Wis of their own, and if higher than their leader, then the charming leader will be socially astute (Cha) enough to make use of it and make them feel good about their involvement, and if less then they are hardly in a position to look down on the ideas of their charming and beautiful leader, whom they love dearly :)

-vk


Deanoth wrote:

How would you all go about handling the skill dealing with leadership. Would you have the player run the cohort? would you have the rest of the NPC's join the party of players at all? What would you do with the rest of the followers? anything?

As a DM I have always had a problem with the Leadership skill because I tended to find it cumbersome and a pain in the butt to be honest. The Cohort was just one more thing that I had to worry about as a DM and I hated that. I do not mind running an NPC for the DM but for the player too?

Can I get your opinions on this and how you would run it? Why you would or would not allow it?

As DM I allow players to run their cohorts, overriding them whenever the whim takes me.

The former, because I have enough to look after. The cohort is a loyal follower and should usually be expected to do as the player character wants.

The latter, because of that word 'usually'. The cohort represents a separate person in the game world, and it is good for balance and for roleplay if they sometimes do their own thing.

Players speak well of my DMing, but I am not a DM-as-service DM. If you think it is your job to supply whatever players believe is good for themselves, then perhaps you should never override their control of their cohort. Myself, I think it is my job to supply what I believe to be good for players, which sometimes can be a different thing.

-vk


DM Wellard wrote:

Definitely not in the spirit of the rules or indeed the game.

Thanks for point it out though.

I think it founders on the initiative checks. These peasants probably have no add to their roll, so they'll be all over the place from 1-20. Being generic peasants they have the same Dex.

One assumes everyone delays until after the count of whoever is holding the bow, so their roll is kind of important. Let's say they roll 10, and will hand the bow off to right or left depending on whichever looks best. The next guy must be on 9 or if he is on 10 we needed an initiative roll off, which if he won forced him to delay to 9. And so on...

I haven't worked this completely though, but it appears to me that you'll get a short chain of perhaps 15-30 guys that work, then peter out. Then next round you'll have a longer chain of guys who delayed into that round, but they had to do so in an order dictated by their initiative the previous round. Painful, but I suspect also yields a similar result.

What you would instead do I think is get everyone to delay, with the bow lying on the ground, and get the one guy who is at the top to pick it up. Unfortunately he might not be within one move of the bow. These peasants are spread over a few thousand squares...

Quite comedic though, even with short chains, and certainly needs a rules scrub! An adventuring party could use it :)

-vk


Umbral Reaver wrote:

Say you want an army of longbowmen. Level 1 warriors are cheap. Say 3 gp each per month of service. We'll hire a thousand warriors, at 3000 gp.

Hmm. Equipping these guys is going to cost a lot, right?

Not so! For the same 75000 gp it would take to equip the army, we instead purchase a single +3 frost holy longbow for 72375 gp and have some left over. (replace frost with your favourite element at the time)

1. Your character fires the bow a bunch of times (full) and drops it in the adjacent space (free).

2. The next warrior picks up the bow (move), fires it (standard), and drops it in the adjacent space (free).

Repeat step 2.

In the space of six seconds, this one massively magical bow has been fired over 1000 times. Next round, they do the same with the bow ending up back in your character's hands.

I haven't seen this absurd bit of fun on the internet before, but I imagine it might have been thought of. In any case, I got a laugh. :D

Nice. I was thinking how I'd DM it. I'd get everyone to roll initiative... then I thought that through and realised your plan would only partially work: a few people might be lucky enough to chain fire the bow.

-vk


Krillnar wrote:
Specifically, converting the cleric and druid into spontaneous spellcasters and folding the barbarian into the fighter.

Exactly! What I then recommend (it has worked well in play) is allow cleric/druid to only change out spells when they level. That helps DMing because you know more about what they will bring to an encounter, and it helps playing by being much easier to bookkeep. FTM it adds a little balance to Codzilla while at it.

-vk


You've taken on a huge task and to my mind you have started in the right place :) I can perhaps comment on a few of the classes, from things I am trialling (with some success) in my regular 3.5 game.

VoodooMike wrote:


Cleric: Healing, Divination, Buffing, some combat
Fighter: combat with an emphasis on skill and finesse
Paladin: Destroyer of worlds under PF? Mix of melee combat and minor healing... though not so minor under PF anymore. PF Paladin is "boss killer"
Ranger: Again, uncertain. There's little they do that isn't done better by another class
Sorcerer: arcane magic with an emphasis on power rather than finesse... like a spell barbarian!
Wizard: arcane magic with an emphasis on skill and finesse, like a spell fighter.
...

Cleric and Sorcerer: In a design move that many will find unacceptable, I place the Cleric with the Sorcerer as a channeller of power granted by some supernal entity. Channelling means that their powers tend to be focussed on dealing with specific anathemas (hence aligned or aimed at specific creature types). I make them both spontaneous casters, but restrict both to exchanging spells on a per level basis (similar to, but more generous than, the Sorcerer spell exchange rate). For DMing, this helps me a lot because I can set up encounters knowing with greater certainty what the group may bring to it. For players, spontaneous casting offers a flexibility that feels very pleasant in play.

Ranger: The ranger is foremost a guide - a leader through difficult pathways. Therefore he needs stronger sensing skills and transferrable buffs that are more widely applicable.

Wizard: The wizard is foremost a sage - able to draw on a wide store of utility magic and knowledge to answer problems with.

Paladin: In a move that I know will be unpopular with many, I plan to deny clerics their heavy armour, and recast the heavily armoured cleric as in fact a paladin. The paladin is an exemplar - bolstering others by his very presence. I feel to some extent the paladin should be the heaviest armoured, most stubbornly resistant, class. I know that may tread of some player's preference to emphasise the exemplar part of the role, and to eschew the traditional knightly part of the role. Still, I feel that is what also distinguishes paladin from fighter.

Fighter: To me the fighter is not properly described by thinking just of warrior - although that certainly is apt. I make the fighter a professional martial artist. He may have every skill relevant to combat (balance, bluff, heal, tumble), and can be educated (a strategist, knowledgeable of his enemies), and most of all has the focus to refine a style (whether that be a crude bludgeoning style, or a finesse/fencing style). I don't draw much distinction between fighter and barbarian. The berserker is just a kind of fighter. Mechanically the fighter has most access to martial feats: perhaps rage is better cast as a feat tree?

-vk


DM_Blake wrote:

So I have here a houserule. It is a little bit complex, but then so is metmagic in general. It uses rules for Concentration (I have updated the description to be consistent with the new rule presented in the Cleric preview) and for Spellcraft, so knowing those rules will help understand the metamagic houserule.

** spoiler omitted **...

Allowing metamagic to be applied spontaneously by all casters as a full-round action sounds okay, but relieving the cost (an increase in spell slot level needed) and relieving the cap (staying inside levels you can cast) is cheese.

You favour casters and want them to work well, but you need to take the peg off your nose ;)

-vk


Beckett wrote:
What "costs" are you refering to, here?

Well, the basic arguments against introducing BCS to casts seems to come down to either a) they already have them, or b) using up a spell slot is the cost.

Since a) is not true of some spells, nor of most spells some of the time, a) alone does not alleviate the need for a BCS to be introduced. (This is *not* a statement of the desirability of doing so, but rather relates to the functional fulfillment.)

OTOH b) also fails, since under the vancian system costs are deferred: so it is not possible to make precise claims about the value of b). That is to say, a refutation resting on the concept that using up a spell slot is a cost is on shaky ground. Even if you concede that the DM can and should invariably force the pace to a four encounter day, some spells some times will not experience that cost: the extra cast over the limit that supposedly 'paid the piper' turned out not to be needed after all, so the spell slot expenditure proved not to be a cost.

So back to the derail into what daily spell limit might mean, then. ;)

-vk


vonklaude wrote:

Vancian limits are problematical in a particular way. The cost of expending a spell-slot is not paid during the use of that resource, but only on a later occasion when you want to use it and it isn't available.

Deferred costs in any game system encourage players to exploit them. Most typically by finding a way not to pay the cost, or to diminish the cost by paying it when it doesn't matter so much. From a designability standpoint, that means it is not possible to know the price paid for a given cast.

That being so, a correction - that taken by 4th - is to prevent costs being deferred: i.e. to ensure all costs are paid within the same frame of reference.

Hence it is not inappropriate to look for other costs, such as a BCS; and we should not conveniently overlook all the spells that have no saving throw (summons, target selfs, buffs, some attack spells) and the many casts that are made without fear of distraction.

Quoting myself to draw attention to the point. Grrr...

-vk


Beckett wrote:
Nope. Arcane casters can get their spells back after 8 hours of rest, but more than once in a 24 hour day. Most divine casters can not, though, but only because they have a set prayer time each day.

Are you referring to the absence in 3.5 of a clearly defined statement that you cannot take more than one 8 hour rest per day? It might be there, but it's not something that I can readily locate. Likely it's left up to the DM.

Whatever the case, vancian limits are problematical in a particular way. The cost of expending a spell-slot is not paid during the use of that resource, but only on a later occasion when you want to use it and it isn't available.

Deferred costs in any game system encourage players to exploit them. Most typically by finding a way not to pay the cost, or to diminish the cost by paying it when it doesn't matter so much. From a designability standpoint, that means it is not possible to know the price paid for a given cast.

That being so, a correction - that taken by 4th - is to prevent costs being deferred: i.e. to ensure all costs are paid within the same frame of reference.

-vk


Suicidal wrote:

Take human vs. Elven wizards: Ignore the optional Favored class rule in Pathfinder (which I like but truth told makes humans even more favorable) Epic point buy, Planned all wizard.

Human stats: Str 10, Dex 16, Con 14, Int 18, Wis 10, Cha 10.
Elven Stats: Str 10, Dex 18, Con 12, Int 18, Wis 10, Cha 10.
Less hitpoints, 1 more armor, toss up on which is better or worse depending on your philosophy. All in all, in building stat points, they're more or less a wash across the board.

It skews the answer to lay out as the basis of discussion Epic Point Buy. Try using Modern. One frequently finds one values two +2s and a -2 over one +2.

Of course this might not matter on averages over thousands of cases, but when you are playing just a couple of new characters a year it does.

Try it out.

-vk


Karui Kage wrote:
Were people back in Medieval times (or whatever year D&D revolves around) less intelligent than now? If Bounder existed back then, would there be people to calculate the odds and decry it, or would it thrive? The fact that it also exists in a CN city may mean something, I'm not sure.

You need to look at the tools for thinking and how wide-spread they were. Surely the wetware hasn't changed, but the point of our wetware is that it's configurable. That means that where a new concept comes to exist, or comes to more widely exist than previously, we effectively gain intelligence.

If you contrast card games of chance played in Medieval Italy and Germany (tarrochi games) they show a good awareness of odds, but that is often submerged beneath a clutter of little rules that we later pared away to produce games like Bridge and Poker. There's a book called 'Twelve Tarot Games' by Dummett that has some interesting info on this.

These were not simply games for the wealthy and educated, but how can one comment on how smartly people played them? Games like Backgammon have been played in very similar way since - so far as I know - the middle ages; and as gambling games. Backgammon has a very refined comprehension of odds.

On the other hand, look at very high-end gambling on stocks, currencies, and futures. Double-entry book-keeping was around, and credit notes, but not much more than that in the middle ages. Check out the middle ages texts resource project on the web to read some examples of what was around.

I think overall one could conclude that there are certainly some ways in which we are more intelligent now than people were, due to not just education but development of tools for thought, but when it comes to gambling I think that although we have developed (a lot!), we have not done so in the specific area of parlour games.

-vk


Erik Mona wrote:

The current plan is to release between 2-3 hardcover rulebooks per year, including additional Pathfinder Bestiaries.

What form would you like these books to take? Would you be interested in subscribing to such a line, provided the books cost somewhere around $35 a pop?

What titles/ideas would you like to see us explore?

We're all worried about rules bloat. What is your opinion of new classes and races?

Are you as tired of prestige classes as I am?

I'm very tired of Prcs and feel disappointed when I see pages and pages that I know neither I nor my players will ever use.

An item I would buy are preconstructed groups of foes. Take a look at the classic Runequest campaign book Griffin Mountain to see what I mean. Such a book might also contain micro-settings or adventure nodes. A simple tomb, or caravan, or whatever. Such a resource is useful to me because while I have a core game thread I let my players roam widely, and so it helps me a lot to have well-crafted foes available, with possessions etc already worked out correctly. Because this is level specific, I suppose you could picture more than one book: not one for each level of course, but one for each tier. I do look in published modules for this kind of thing, but I find that the foes are often too tied to the particular scenario. Note that character-class groups are most useful to me, and also most time consuming to stat correctly. WotC did have an online resource for that, but the foes were always so quirky they weren't easy to fit in. You typically want 10 half-orc mercenaries, not 10 half-man half-displacer-beast mercenaries.

In fact I seldom run modules, whereas I do appreciate pieces of modules I can pull out and use elsewhere.

Another item I liked a lot was Tome of Battle. Let's face it, even though in PF melee types have a bit more interest, they're still not a scratch on casters. A book giving a coherent set of melee awesomenesswould be interesting. Of course, there's a lot of work there crafting the system additions, but I think something along the lines of the techniques in ToB might work. Otherwise yes, I support you in fearing rules bloat.

The Magic Item Compendium was a good thing though. It's always nice to have a wide variety of things to reward players with. If only the WotC one had a simple alphabetical listing somewhere :) but otherwise it is very good.

And I agree with everyone who is saying put stuff that is the same in the same book. Don't give me a few spells, a few feats, a few prcs, give me a book of spells, a book of feats, a book of prcs (well, not that last), and make sure they are properly play-tested when used in combination!

-vk


Carnivorous_Bean wrote:
6. And this is the real kicker that finally pushed me over the edge -- 4th edition, it turns out, is being printed in the U.S., while Pathfinder is being printed in China. If given a choice, I will support a company which supports American families rather than the People's Liberation Army slave-labor sweatshop factories.

Lols at Amerika-worker. Amerika-elite haz ur muneez.

;)


I'm just curious. In the alpha Monks still have what they had in 3.5.