xanen's page

But there you go with your own (mild!) insult about people's social skills.

Well, I'd say that's more of an observation. It might not paint those people in the best light, but to me it's pretty evident that there are some posters who either lack the social skills entirely (which, OK, I don't really think is true) or don't think it's worth their time to exercise them. Either way, it makes for a harsh experience, and that's just not fun.

I tend to view that more as a chastisement than an insult. It doesn't take much effort to be polite, even in a heated disagreement.

More at issue for me are the people who might leave because they no longer feel welcome.

I'm pretty new to the boards, and I find the abrasive attitude and insults quite offensive. I've got better ways to spend my time than listen to some people whose social skills are nil. As soon as I see that "well, duh" attitude and condescending pose, I'm ready to check out.

*shrug*

So, yeah, I'd like this whole experience better if civility were more enforced, but if it's not then I'm fine with just minimizing or eliminating my interactions on these boards.

Just as an FYI, YMMV, FoxIt wouldn't display the Beta PDF or the web enhancement correctly on my computer. Every other page was just the background layout page, no text or text blocks. Very strange. I had to download Acrobat Reader just to read it.

For me, MT is still just a weird class I have mixed feelings about -- doubling up spell casting levels is pretty good! Less so with Eldritch Knight, because you're mixing two distinct themes -- combat and casting.

I see both classes as attempts to fix the "problem" of multi-classing -- that is, a Wizard 5 / Fighter 5 is way less effective than a 10th level character in either class. Maybe not 50% less effective, but surely not on par. In the "good old days", a multi-classed character would lag 1-2 levels behind the rest of the party, so a 10th level party might have a
Fighter 8 / Wizard 8 (maybe not that exact even split, I don't recall the differing XP charts and their progressions), and that character probably was effective in the range of a 10th level character easily.

With Eldritch Knight, you can get back to that flavor. You'd still want to split levels unevenly -- accent the fighter or the wizard as you choose, but a Fighter 2 / Wizard 3 / Eldritch Knight 5 is getting closer to that F8/W8 mix. I'm good with that!

Maybe MT is a patch on the multiclassed Wizard/Cleric. I'm down with that concept, I'd prefer a 3P spin on that incorporate domain and school powers and weave those in at a slower progression.

I've been thinking about this and wondering if any other multi-classed mixes suffer similarly. I haven't personally seen as many issues. I just recall the Fighter/Wizard one acutely because when we converted a long-running high-level game to 3.5, the elf fighter/wizard really had to juggle things around and figure out how to chop his fighter levels down so he could still cast the same high-level spells he had gotten used to casting.

(Oh, and I mean PrC's are non-core only in the sense that they're not the iconic 20lvl classes -- SRD issues aside, they're set off to the side as "special" and even are marked as optional for the DM to decide on).

My recent ruminations on this subject had led me to the same conclusions -- unifying Smite and Cleric Energy Channeling, and giving Paladins and Clerics different base feats for how they can use that energy.

I liked things in the Complete Divine series that expanded on uses of turns per day to power metamagic and such. Those particular feats seemed to be abused (I know Living Greyhawk banned them, presumably because they were seen as overpowered -- I myself never thought so, simply because no one ever used metamagic in my games when they had to memorize it specifically, having spontaneous uses per day of it was better). Anyway, it gave options.

So, I favor a rage-ish sort of system for paladins too, simply because it unifies mechanics. Barbarians have rage powers, rogues have talents, lets give paladins something similar. I'd keep the Divine Aura and Bond options core and always awarded at the current levels, but most other things could be made optional, you-pick-them items that have at most a specific level requirement.

As with barbarians, make the paladin abilities either always-on or usuable at-will during the duration of a "divine channeling". This could easily be analogous to a rage, just with smaller and more specific bonuses (so, if I "channel", I'm smiting with every attack against evil creatures the entire time -- maybe the exact smite bonus gets more modest to offset this).

I think this might sound complex, but could be made very simple, and the fact that it riffs off barbarian and rogue trends in 3P sounds good to me.

xanen wrote:

My vote is, merge tracking into survival, and remove the DC 10 cap. Give rangers a blanket +5 bonus to use of survival for tracking, and leave it at that. That would be my hand-waving of the situation, simply because I don't see a lot of abuses to it and it's a simple mechanism to keep Rangers as the "good trackers".

That's how it works right now, if I understand the pathfinder Beta rules correctly.

It seems to me that most of the people posting to this thread (thanks BTW) are in favour of keeping track a function of the survival skill. Assuming that part is in agreement, what are your thoughts on the mechanic I proposed for identifying creatures based on their tracks? From PM, I know Archade thinks the DC should be higher, and I think he's got me convinced, but what does everyone else think?

I still see a feat involved there to "unlock" some part of a skill. I think every other skill does that by simply increasing DCs, and there's no need for this one skill to work differently.

So, give Rangers a class-based bonus to Survival checks for tracking, and if you want to scale it up further, they get Skill Focus (Survival) as a free feat later on. I might say that the tracking bonus kicks in after 1st level, just to avoid too much temptation to dip one level in.

I can see that for some people, this might be a mechanic that's of vital importance, but I think tracking in the game really comes down to GM fiat and what the story demands as much as anything else. If you want them to follow people and find them, they'll find them. If you want them to fail to find the BBEG, they'll fail. I'm not saying we all go right to diceless LARPing, but I'm just pointing out that we might be fiddling with numbers that don't end up mattering all that much. If that's at all true, simpler is really better.

I think backwards compatibility should take a back seat to the fact that being able to track isn't something that has to go intrinsically with any particular class. It's fine if Rangers are the masters of tracking, starting with a big leg up... but anyone should be able to do it at some level if they want, and spending a feat on it seems too high a cost.

As so many people have said... when the rubber hits the road, they tend to just brush off any requirements for Track anyway. Obviously, for role-playing purposes, it's convenient and desirable for a party who wants to follow someone to have a means of doing so. Making track a Feat just means the real tracker is going to end up being a spell-caster who uses a divination, a polymorph (into something with Scent), or some other weasel method to get there. If it were a skill (and I'd make it a class skill for rangers and barbarians, possibly no one else), then a greater range of people could and would take some ability in it.

My vote is, merge tracking into survival, and remove the DC 10 cap. Give rangers a blanket +5 bonus to use of survival for tracking, and leave it at that. That would be my hand-waving of the situation, simply because I don't see a lot of abuses to it and it's a simple mechanism to keep Rangers as the "good trackers".

xanen wrote:

Eldritch Knight, balanced or not, is at least in the category of "nice fixes". Mystic Theurge is broken, but similarly fixes up Cleric/Wizard characters.

Why do you consider the Mystic Theurge broken? Do you think it's too powerful (unlikely) or too weak?

I think it's too powerful. In 3.5, I traded very little to get quite a lot. I could be a Wizard 3, Cleric 3, take 10 levels in MT and have

In Pathfinder, I presume you'd be giving up a lot more -- if the HD stayed at d4, that's a compromise down from the Wizard d6. Also, if you lost out on cool domain / school abilities, then that by itself probably balances it out.

Anyway, it's double-dipping. That's pretty powerful. I don't see how anyone can think that's weak, although apparently people think that. Why do people think that's weak?

I'm currently anti-PrC, as I see plenty of ways to leverage the flexibility of 3P to do these things without having to make non-core classes. To me, this is a good thing.

One area I still find them compelling for is as a "fix" for multi-classing. As it stands right now, a Fighter 10/Wizard 10 is so sub-optimal that even a player who values RP value over pure optimization is going to be bummed that his character is so overshadowed by the Fighter 20 and Wizard 20. That is the build that is the most broken, and it still saddens me -- having played many a Fighter/Wizard in my youth, that's an iconic build I still love (Melf is my hero!).

Eldritch Knight, balanced or not, is at least in the category of "nice fixes". Mystic Theurge is broken, but similarly fixes up Cleric/Wizard characters. Most other multi-class characters don't seem to suffer as much, but there's still the slight "offness" there.

This is a long-winded way of saying "I'd like to see a nicely balanced Eldritch Knight and Mystic Theurge". Oh, and Assassin is nice too -- although I'd prefer that be retro-fitted as a directed rogue talent tree.

Blackguard, I never cared about. I would vastly prefer paladins in 3P be able to be of any alignment, and vary their specific abilities by alignment (Smite Evil == Smite People I Disagree With).

The rest, they can all go. :-)

I like the idea of giving more of an always-on bonus, either replacing smite or adding to it. I liked the changes to barbarian that let him rage more often rather than "saving it up". I would even be OK with smaller bonuses that just always applied consistently, giving more of a linear and constant progression.

I wonder if the smite ability shouldn't be scaled similar to Holy Word and other "burst of good energy" abilities -- large effects on opposed alignments (LE,NE,CE), smaller effect on differing alignments (LN,N,CN), no effect on close alignments (NG, CG, LG). That would mean even if the GM shifted away from pure evil opponents, the paladin isn't completely nerfed. I think of a paladin as bone-headed enough that he'd want to still be able to punish Chaotic Neutral selfish people :-).

xanen wrote:

Intercepting Movement

---------------------
As an immediate action, take a 5 foot step that places you either in the path or adjacent to a moving enemy. If the enemy does not avoid you and continues to move, you make take an AoO even if you have no AoO's left for this turn.

Protect Ally

------------
As an immediate action, place yourself in the path of harm for any single ally adjacent to you. You declare this intent anytime the ally is the target of a successful attack, but before damage is determined. This protection extends to all weapon attacks, as well as weapon-like spells such as rays that require a target roll. By taking this action, you received the damage in place of the ally

Well, the exact feats need to be worked on. My biggest thought was, is this a direction to even look into? I'm phrasing my intentions as feats because that seems to be the best way to embody this. In 3.5, these sorts of things ended up either as abilities of non-core classes (like the Knight) or as PrC's. Neither one is a 3P kind of thing, in fact more and more everyone seems to be saying "minimize or eliminate prestige classes".

A lot of these abilities seem too good to be normal maneuvers, though. If we slide them over to feats and have a clear path of "here are feats for controlling movements, here are feats for protecting your allies, here are feats for nerfing opponents (daze, stun, etc)", I'm all in favor of that.

I'll keep working on these, maybe playtest them a bit myself. Suggestions welcome.

Why not just add Combat Maneuver option to allow the fighter to control the battlefield with. A "Slide" maneuver, a "pull" maneuver could be added. A push maneuver allready exists = bull rush.

These could be made more difficult and add the ability to do them as an immediate action. This would definately slow down the game however.

They might be possible to do by default with no feat, but they should be AoO-provoking and non-immediate in that case. The feat would then open up the improved maneuver that is non-provoking and immediate.

Mosaic wrote:

Anyone have any more experience with this, good or bad?

It works okay until you use it against the PCs. Then it's no fun and seems drastically unfair. The same would probably be true if you ported the idea to 3.0/3.5/3P, but I've not played with anything like this in these systems.

Peace,

tfad

Why is it that letting the fighter (or paladin, or whomever takes the relevant feats) 5-foot step as an immediate action (in restricted circumstances) is unfair, but the wizard with a Quickened Grease (or even a readied action for the same) can nerf someone just as bad or worse?

I'm not in favor of any supernatural-ish "you must attack this person" abilities, but if I told my players "The wizard's bodyguard is staying very close to him, moving to either strike people approaching or to put himself in front of attacks", they'd be OK with that. I know from prior campaigns with these players that they definitely like to use tactics like that themselves.

Where I find taunt abilities and the like to be very MMO and not sensible as default abilities, these sorts of tweaks seem very in keeping with the just-slightly-beyond real abilities fighters should be developing in the game. If you can accept that these characters have beyond-Olympic ability scores and beyond Special Forces training, you can almost buy that they are incredibly dangerous foes that should be able to threaten anyone within 10-15 feet of them, and should be avoided at all costs.

I've been reading the threads about "what's wrong with fighters", and I sympathize. You can make a fighter that competes fine in the damage arena (giving it out and taking it), but has issues with anything that interferes with that straight-forward "I hit them really hard" ability.

One area I see discussed a lot is battlefield control -- intercepting enemies before they spike the spell-casters, denying enemies their actions, etc. I think this is a very valid area to focus on, and hopefully doing that will bring out a couple ideas for improving upon this.

I'm not a big fan of 4E attempts to better this (as I understand them; I'll admit to only skimming the rules, because I'm not interested in changing my games to that large an extent -- this is why 3P appeals to me), but I think they are dead on in noticing that fighters need more options.

One class that catches my eye is the Knight from PHBII -- the knight has abilities that let her force enemies to treat her threatened squares as rough terrain, which is a simple enough ability that can make some differences in a battle -- you break charges, deny 5-foot steps, make people pay double movement, etc. They also have the ability to absorb blows that would have struck allies (the Devoted Defender PrC from 3.0 also did these sorts of things).

I propose making feat chains along these lines. One simple enough feat might be:

Intercepting Movement
---------------------
As an immediate action, take a 5 foot step that places you either in the path or adjacent to a moving enemy. If the enemy does not avoid you and continues to move, you make take an AoO even if you have no AoO's left for this turn.

This lets the fighter at least have an option to engage the enemy rather than be run around. He's going to force the enemy to stop in a square of his choice, and probably be able to also place himself near allies in order to use a second feat like this:

Protect Ally
------------
As an immediate action, place yourself in the path of harm for any single ally adjacent to you. You declare this intent anytime the ally is the target of a successful attack, but before damage is determined. This protection extends to all weapon attacks, as well as weapon-like spells such as rays that require a target roll. By taking this action, you received the damage in place of the ally

I think these sorts of ideas, developed into a chain of 2-3 feats each, could give a reasonable fighter some extra options for dealing with "weird stuff". If you have a mage casting spells but surrounded by summomned flying demons, you need some option that lets you affect them, and deduce their air superiorty

I dislike "super-natural" ability justifications for why tough guys attack fighters first (which is what 4E uses) -- an essential magic ability lets your fighter taunt enemies into battle so he can be the tanker. I'd like to see less of that and more or "I'm the commander, I know the field of battle, I will force you to fight on my terms.

In looking at 3P, pondering a 5 lvl fighter, I see that he has 7 feats;
he can easily take a killer package of Power Attack, Cleave, Great Cleave, One of the +2 to saves bonus sfeat, Skill Focus: Diplomacy (so he can keep him men in order. With Toughness a nice choice too, he'll take that an leave himself with one feat choice. Taking something like Intercepting Movement at last give a chance for the fighter to be a movin nerfer in the combat, bolluxing up their lines and setting up th rogues and spellcasters to pick apart the less focus enemy ranks

Just from these basic ideas, could something come out? I think being oble to more swiftly and the battlefield and to take control of foes and friends is how a fighter does battlefield control in the large.

I'd be most interested in a couple simple feats and feat chains that give the fighter a chance to pursue some options that might better his enjoying in playing.

Mine is actually stolen from a friend's character, but in my defense he only ever played him in our solo games with me DMing, and when he lamed dropped out of role-playing for several years, I couldn't let a good name go unused. I had just gotten into MUDing, and so I used it for my online character. So many people came to know me through that, that I stuck with it for other online things.

The original character name, Xanen Kryst, came from him being bored in Chemistry class and bastardizing the element Xenon and adding on a deliberate mangling of "Christ", just with a hard-K sound and a "cool Y in place of an I".

I've had several memorable villains. A couple from my last Greyhawk campaign come to mind.

Draven Hawk (aka Drakhirt) 7th lvl (anti)paladin

I didn't like the blackguard as a prestige class, so I just had paladins of all alignments, and Drakhirt was of the Neutral Evil persuasion. My players first encountered him in a short diversion I had planned for them during a week when I didn't quite have the adventure in the Wild Coast ready to go. So, an attack by some orcs turned into an abduction/imprisonment when I mis-staged the encounter and had to turn a TPK into something less nasty.

So, instead of killing them, I on the spot decided the orcs were selling slaves to an anti-paladin who was busy building an army for conquest. I left the exact motives pretty loose.

The players did end up escaping, in a spectacular fashion (of course), with the end of the escape involving the paladin of the party grappling Drakhirt in his bed-chamber, pulling him off a peasant wench he was raping. Both of them wrestled naked (the party hadn't found any weapons in their escape process, since they quite deliberately tried to just sneak past all opposition), and I had a fun time describing their mutual auras of good/evil crackling off each other.

They ended up defeating him (by the time he broke the paladin's grapple, other party members had picked up improvised weapons and clubbed him) and seeing he got imprisoned. Having seen how they reacted so well to his utter evil, I decided to bring him back and give him more of a backstory. I decided his real name was Draven Hawk, and he was the supposed son of a noble in Veluna, but was in fact the son of an evil dragon near the nobles domain. As he realized his true heritage in his adolescence he had run off to join his father Draxbret the Great Wyrm Black Dragon, and heartily embraced the worship of Nerull the Reaper.

So... when they journeyed to Veluna to handle the death of Lord Falen Hawk, they were quite surprised when they were expected to hand the noble's lands back over to Drakhirt, recently escaped from imprisonment and presenting his seal to prove he was Draven Hawk! He had (of course) engineered his (supposed) father's death, and already secured things such that the players had little chance to accuse him of crimes that he had committed hundreds of miles away. They ended up fleeing, and spent several sessions trying to figure out how to fight him, both politically and martially.

After his second defeat, the party had plenty of evidence of all of his crimes, and Veluna sentenced him to death. He ended up being executed by disintegration wand, and my entire party attended the trial and execution. His last words to them were that this was not over, and even after death... he would have his revenge.

I never ended up bringing him back, but the party always feared that maybe I would, and the third time he'd be a death knight or something even more badass. That they kept talking about him the rest of the campaign was a good sign that he was a fun villain, more than just a set of stats.