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I am extremely confused about the Well-Prepared feat from the APG.
Basically, one of two things must be true, neither of which make sense. Before we get to that, take a look at the feat. Pay special attention to the last line of tbe "Benefit" section.
Well-Prepared
Somehow, you always seem to have the right tools or supplies close at hand.
Prerequisite: Halfling.
Benefit: Once per day, when confronted with a situation that calls for a particular mundane item of equipment, you may make a Sleight of Hand check with a DC of 10 plus the item’s cost in gold pieces to “happen” to have such an item on your person. For example, having a crowbar would be DC 12, whereas a flask of acid would be DC 20. The item must be something you can easily carry—if you are on foot and have only a backpack, for example, you could not have a large iron cauldron. You cannot have magical items using this feat, nor can you have specif ic items, such as the key to a particular door. If you are stripped of your equipment or possessions, you lose the benef its of this feat until you have at least a day to resupply and “acquire” new items. You must pay of these items normally.
Special: At the GM’s option, a character can substitute the Survival skill for Sleight of Hand with this feat. Such a choice is permanent.
Okay, I get it. You're the Boy Scout. "Always be prepared!"
But wait... either:
a.) The feat makes no sense and is nearly worthless; or
b.) The feat has a typo and is probably completely broken.
If the last line (which I assume was meant to say "You must pay for these items normally") is correct, then when the hell am I supposed to pay for them? When I get to town? On the spot? Is there a time limit? Who am I paying? What if I don't have any gold? (And what if I never will - a desert-island campaign that I ran once comes to mind, the PCs never made any cash.) Do I pay for the items after I get some more gold somewhere else? Do I give up items of equivalent worth instead? If so, what happens to them? Do I "lose" them? Am I simply prohibited from using the feat when I'm broke? If so, why doesn't it say so?
"You must pay for these items normally" makes no sense and hurts my brain. Especially the "normally" part - but really the whole thing. If I could pay for the items normally, I wouldn't need to use the feat. So... why would I take Well-Prepared...? And where does my money go, and when? Blrargharhag.
What about option B... do we assume that line was a typo? Seems likely, except that if I never have to pay for the items, I can just use the feat to "create" items and sell them for cash. Over the course of my career, this feat will make me rich for nothing.
So that can't be right. What gives?
Thoughts? Developer insights? Something obvious that I'm missing?
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I believe the intent is that you pay the price when you produce the item. The feat is intended to allow characters to pull 'just the tool for the job' when the player never thought to buy said tool. It's assumed your character purchases and packs the items beforehand, just that the player didn't keep track of it on his sheet.
This is quantum inventory. Standard practice, really. You don't physically pay for the item. Rather, 10g of your wealth has been a vial of acid all along. If you don't have wealth, then you can't use the ability; there is no wealth to have been a vial of acid all along.
Creative Director
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The idea here is that you can reach into a bag and pull out an item when you need it, be that a rope or a tent or a tindertwig or a vial of acid or whatever. You then pay for it right there and then... even if you happen to be hiding under a rock in the Bandu Hills or lurking on the fifth level of the dungeons below Hollow Mountain or are lost in the Mushfens.
Basically; this feat turns your bags and backpacks into a sort of portable "store." So that if you're out adventuring, and you need a specific gizmo, you don't have to go all the way back to town or make do without it. You just pull it out of your bag by making the skill check, and then the money the item costs is retroactively deducted from your wealth—in game, it's assumed that your character bought the item last time he was in town. He just didn't tell the player.
If you have a very lenient GM who lets you ret-con purchases in town all the time when the need for such items becomes apparent after an adventure is well underway already... this feat isn't useful at all.
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There was a similar 3.5 feat that actually established a fund of something like 20gp/level, that you had to put gold into to replenish. Any time you needed something and had enough gold in your fund, you could just say 'hold on, I packed something for just such an occasion!' and pull it out. And you reduced your available fund by that much until the next time you put money into it.
Honestly, I do something like this for all my players anyway.
Every character puts down 'Various Sundries' on their sheet and marks it as 10 lbs and takes off 50gp. I periodically tell them to take off 50 to 500 gp to 'restore' their various sundries, depending on level.
At 1st, the various sundries are a hemp rope, chalk, twine, some stones, a camp stove, a plate, a couple of changes of clothes, a blanket, a steel cup, utensils, flint and steel, a backpack. If there's something else small they need in game, and ask if it's in their 'various sundries' I usually just nod and make a mark.
As they go up in level, the various sundries has more stuff in it, silk rope instead, a fine blanket, etc.
There was a similar 3.5 feat that actually established a fund of something like 20gp/level, that you had to put gold into to replenish. Any time you needed something and had enough gold in your fund, you could just say 'hold on, I packed something for just such an occasion!' and pull it out. And you reduced your available fund by that much until the next time you put money into it.
Isn't that like the entire point of the Pathfinder PrC?
If you have a very lenient GM who lets you ret-con purchases in town all the time when the need for such items becomes apparent after an adventure is well underway already... this feat isn't useful at all.
I'm a semi-lenient GM in that regards. The smarter the character (combo of intelligence for foresight and wisdom for presence of mind) and reasonable that the character would have purchased such items, via skills, class abilities, etc, the more lenient I am on a ret-con purchase.
If a fighter with no dungeoneering wants to retcon a vial of alchemist fire to handle a green slime....No. Tough bananas.
If a ranger with favored terrain (mountains), high survival, and high climb ranks wanted to retcon cleats or spiked boots when they are in the ice encrusted peaks of Mount Frozenplume, then I'm okay with it.
Very basic things, like 50 feet of rope, I almost never restrict, especially if the party was knowingly going off to investigate a dungeon or cave.
Of course, sometimes my players surprise me and self-restrict, because it can make that dungeon crawl more interesting to NOT have 50 feet of rope when you really could use it.
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It's assumed that your character bought the item last time he was in town. He just didn't tell the player.
That's a good way to put it - but you do pay for the item on the spot?
I don't know what answer I was expecting, but that wasn't it. Not to be a nag, but if that's how it works, could I leave town broke, go get a bunch of money adventuring, and then pull out an item that I bought "in town", even though I was broke at the time?
Or am I just being a jerk / overthinking this way too much, and this is just a weird, "cute" halfling feat that may or may not always make sense?
It's assumed that your character bought the item last time he was in town. He just didn't tell the player.That's a good way to put it - but you do pay for the item on the spot?
I don't know what answer I was expecting, but that wasn't it. Not to be a nag, but if that's how it works, could I leave town broke, go get a bunch of money adventuring, and then pull out an item that I bought "in town", even though I was broke at the time?
Or am I just being a jerk / overthinking this way too much, and this is just a weird, "cute" halfling feat that may or may not always make sense?
Just assume that you pickpocketed the item or lifted it when someone set it down and wasn't paying attention.
Then, while adventuring, a little hole opend up in your pocket and you lost a few gold.
From where I come from it is called KARMA. :D
EDIT: Or perhaps they threw it away because it was broken and you acquired it by chance, and made some minor repairs to get it working again.
I can think of a thousand explanations.
Well, if you get a bunch of loot adventuring, and before you make it to town you find yourself needing, say, a logging saw (the large two-man saws to fell trees with), that feat allows you to say, "Upon further examination, this bit of miscellaneous loot that is worth (insert price of the saw here) is actually a logging saw." It doesn't matter what the item is, as long as it's a common mundane item that you could probably have picked up anywhere.
It's not "pay of", it should be "pay off" - as in you get the item, and the value is deducted from your current money.
Westley: "Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak!"
Inigo: "There, we cannot help you."
Fezzik: "Will this do?"
Westley: "Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak!"
Inigo: "There, we cannot help you."
Fezzik: "Will this do?"
EXACTLY.
Fezzik's player obviously took the Well-Prepared feat, in keeping with his above-average Wisdom score.
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Creative Director
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It's assumed that your character bought the item last time he was in town. He just didn't tell the player.That's a good way to put it - but you do pay for the item on the spot?
I don't know what answer I was expecting, but that wasn't it. Not to be a nag, but if that's how it works, could I leave town broke, go get a bunch of money adventuring, and then pull out an item that I bought "in town", even though I was broke at the time?
Or am I just being a jerk / overthinking this way too much, and this is just a weird, "cute" halfling feat that may or may not always make sense?
It's not to everyone's taste—it certainly has potential to break verisimilitude for a lot of folks, although probably less than if your buddies at the gaming table are chatting about Monty Python quotes.
You could certainly make the feat more complex by saying "only funds you had available in town last you visited are available," but I think that's getting to be a bit too complex.
Personally... I'm fine with a character "buying" an item in this matter even though he left town broke. It's a kind of amusing character quirk. If a player specifically started leaving town broke just to wallow and glory by making fun of the rules, though, I'd probably be less inclined to let that character use the feat.
Westley: "Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak!"
Inigo: "There, we cannot help you."
Fezzik: "Will this do?"
ROFLMAO! One of the better movie references I've seen in a LONG time.
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Westley: "Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak!"
Inigo: "There, we cannot help you."
Fezzik: "Will this do?"
EXACTLY.
Fezzik's player obviously took the Well-Prepared feat, in keeping with his above-average Wisdom score.
You win the internet.
But honestly, I love the RP that can occur with feats like this. I had a 3.5e old-fart of a character (really old, like 380 years) with the Careful Planner feat that had a similar effect to this one and it was always great.
I got to deliberately miss-hear a word as "Asparagus" and pull out some vegetables, offering them to a very confused character. Later someone asked what the holy symbol of a given god looked like, so my character (who had copious ranks in all knowledges) pulled on out to show it to him.
If you don't like the way this feat plays out, don't allow it in your campaign. It's definitely an odd one, but I like it ^.^
I got to see this feat in action a couple years ago at the Fables panel at Comicon. The author's friend (who was the model for Bluebeard, so you can easily picture him) would give prizes to people who had random things he asked for on their persons. There was one guy with a backpack who kept producing more and more things on the list, up to and including the "hot sauce" when it was asked for, which came in the form of a miniature Tabasco sauce bottle which the guy had indeed picked up at breakfast that morning.
Bluebeard quoth, "Okay, next item, anyone except the guy with the Bag of Holding."
About my only trouble with this feat is only having it as a halfling shtick, when there are any number of humans who evidently have it as well, and it would hardly be surprising for other races to do this trick either. The elven princess who's a compulsive shopper? The dwarf who truly believes in having tools for every eventuality?
This feat generally wouldn't be needed in my campaigns -- I'm willing to an extent to simply let the player spend "x" amount of gold to start with and the use it as a pool to have as "standard equipment" provided he's past 3rd level and nothing he pulls is worth more than 1/10 of his "gp pool" (or magical).
I do a similiar thing for spell casters with expensive components -- put the gold into the pot pull out what you need when you need it until you are out of wealth.
Generally the players over estimate how much they'll need in the pool (often by a LOT) and it ends up just sitting there as a bit of a resource drain -- but they know they got it if they need it so they don't pull up all the stone tiles in the dungeon because they might have need of them later for spell components.
i think this feat is awesome, you just buy the bags and then when a situation comes up you make the roll and pay the cost then instead of trying to figure out what you might need when you are in town.
the one question i have is is there a maximum to the DC, foe instance if you try to pull out an Ever burning torch which costs 110 gp what would the dc for that be?
But halflings only? Every Iconic character in the Pathfinder rules looks like they're carrying a corner store bursting from their backpacks and stuffed in their belts. :)
I think this is a nod to Kender from Dragonlance of old. They always had crap in their bags and had a class/race ability that let them pull things out of thin air.
But halflings only? Every Iconic character in the Pathfinder rules looks like they're carrying a corner store bursting from their backpacks and stuffed in their belts. :)
Except Seoni, you mean. The others are carrying the rest of her wardrobe (Seelah in hopes she'll actually wear it, Valeros to keep her from wearing it, etc.). ^_-
Westley: "Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak!"
Inigo: "There, we cannot help you."
Fezzik: "Will this do?"
EXACTLY.
Fezzik's player obviously took the Well-Prepared feat, in keeping with his above-average Wisdom score.
And everyone knows Fezzik was really a halfling after all. Just abnormally tall.
i think this feat is awesome, you just buy the bags and then when a situation comes up you make the roll and pay the cost then instead of trying to figure out what you might need when you are in town.
the one question i have is is there a maximum to the DC, foe instance if you try to pull out an Ever burning torch which costs 110 gp what would the dc for that be?
Would an everburning torch qualify as mundane? I would tend to think it would be considered magical but it might be alchemical and not count as magical.
Anyway, the DC for that would be DC 120. I would say the DC doesn't need a hard cap. After all, mundane items of the expensive variety would be hard to roll for anyway.
This feat is utterly useless to my characters. Not because I have a lenient DM. Not because it breaks verisilimitude or anything like that.
But because I'm usually the party skill monkey...and I almost always have all of these items that I would ever need in my Utility Belt to begin with.
Guess I took the feat myself :B
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Creative Director
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This feat is utterly useless to my characters. Not because I have a lenient DM. Not because it breaks verisilimitude or anything like that.
But because I'm usually the party skill monkey...and I almost always have all of these items that I would ever need in my Utility Belt to begin with.
Guess I took the feat myself :B
The good news is that there's still quite a lot of feats for you to choose from even though this one's not all that useful for you! :)
The good news is that there's still quite a lot of feats for you to choose from even though this one's not all that useful for you! :)This feat is utterly useless to my characters. Not because I have a lenient DM. Not because it breaks verisilimitude or anything like that.
But because I'm usually the party skill monkey...and I almost always have all of these items that I would ever need in my Utility Belt to begin with.
Guess I took the feat myself :B
could you pleas confirm my question about the ever burning torch.
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The good news is that there's still quite a lot of feats for you to choose from even though this one's not all that useful for you! :)
Honestly I love this feat, and if it weren't limited to halflings alone, I know for sure my current character would have it. At level 3 my witch has most of his encumbrance taken by situationaly useful items and the like. Glow ink? Got it! Several bags of powder? Check, I even make sure to have different various types of powder, from flour to sanitation chalk (Character is a Tengu, and as we all know birds rarely truly bathe).
i think this feat is awesome, you just buy the bags and then when a situation comes up you make the roll and pay the cost then instead of trying to figure out what you might need when you are in town.
the one question i have is is there a maximum to the DC, foe instance if you try to pull out an Ever burning torch which costs 110 gp what would the dc for that be?
It is pretty clear the DC would by 120. Good luck with that. A normal torch would be much easier then you just need to spend some time lighting it.
i think this feat is awesome, you just buy the bags and then when a situation comes up you make the roll and pay the cost then instead of trying to figure out what you might need when you are in town.
the one question i have is is there a maximum to the DC, foe instance if you try to pull out an Ever burning torch which costs 110 gp what would the dc for that be?
There's a feat in the APG that let's humans be considered another race for purposes of taking feats. So, you could take that feat and select 'Halfling' and then qualify for all the feats that have Halfling as a prerequisite.
I wonder though, would that allow you to qualify for feats that require small size? If you are considered racially a Halfling for gaining feats, and halflings are small, do you qualify?
But halflings only? Every Iconic character in the Pathfinder rules looks like they're carrying a corner store bursting from their backpacks and stuffed in their belts. :)Except Seoni, you mean. The others are carrying the rest of her wardrobe (Seelah in hopes she'll actually wear it, Valeros to keep her from wearing it, etc.). ^_-
Yes, I'm pretty sure all Kender get this feat as a racial bonus feat, right next to their "Annoying As $hit" racial ability.
this may be my new favorite feat for halflings.
Yes, I'm pretty sure all Kender get this feat as a racial bonus feat, right next to their "Annoying As $hit" racial ability.But halflings only? Every Iconic character in the Pathfinder rules looks like they're carrying a corner store bursting from their backpacks and stuffed in their belts. :)Except Seoni, you mean. The others are carrying the rest of her wardrobe (Seelah in hopes she'll actually wear it, Valeros to keep her from wearing it, etc.). ^_-
When asked if there are Kender in my world, my answer is, "Yes, there are halflings with ADHD, but there is no social custom that makes other races find this quaint or charming. That goes double for the other halflings."
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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When asked if there are Kender in my world, my answer is, "Yes, there are halflings with ADHD, but there is no social custom that makes other races find this quaint or charming. That goes double for the other halflings."Yes, I'm pretty sure all Kender get this feat as a racial bonus feat, right next to their "Annoying As $hit" racial ability.But halflings only? Every Iconic character in the Pathfinder rules looks like they're carrying a corner store bursting from their backpacks and stuffed in their belts. :)Except Seoni, you mean. The others are carrying the rest of her wardrobe (Seelah in hopes she'll actually wear it, Valeros to keep her from wearing it, etc.). ^_-
+1
Actually, Kender aside I was thinking of the (very) old DC Heroes RPG. They had a 'power' called omnigadget. Basically you'd buy X ranks of 'power' and it would be undefined until you needed it. This is how they handled the Bat Family's Utility Belts, Lex Luthor's inventions etc.
That said, yes I lament 'halfling only' Because my current Bard would love this, and be constantly broke.
So.. it makes you into a cartoon character?
That's awesome.
Warning: Links might not be safe for your spare time.
But halflings only? Every Iconic character in the Pathfinder rules looks like they're carrying a corner store bursting from their backpacks and stuffed in their belts. :)I think this is a nod to Kender from Dragonlance of old. They always had crap in their bags and had a class/race ability that let them pull things out of thin air.
Which is exactly why it shouldn't be Halfling only.
In 3.x we houseruled a magic satchel that let a bard character of mine do exactly this, The Bag of Many Things. It was rarely expensive stuff, but a broken match, half burned candle, odd shaped keys, little bits of junk that were only useful in odd circumstances. That was a fun character :)
I'm happy to see that the book has things that promote ROLEplaying rather than ROLLplaying. I'm even more happy to see that the book has a fair share of both for all kinds of play groups.
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And everyone knows Fezzik was really a halfling after all. Just abnormally tall.Westley: "Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak!"
Inigo: "There, we cannot help you."
Fezzik: "Will this do?"
EXACTLY.
Fezzik's player obviously took the Well-Prepared feat, in keeping with his above-average Wisdom score.
Halflings of unusual size? They do not exist.
No, no, no.
"Halflings of an unusual size? Inconceivable!"
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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This feat is utterly useless to my characters. Not because I have a lenient DM. Not because it breaks verisilimitude or anything like that.
But because I'm usually the party skill monkey...and I almost always have all of these items that I would ever need in my Utility Belt to begin with.
Guess I took the feat myself :B
I'm curious - what's in your character's magic bag as a matter of standard operating procedure?
And everyone knows Fezzik was really a halfling after all. Just abnormally tall.Westley: "Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak!"
Inigo: "There, we cannot help you."
Fezzik: "Will this do?"
EXACTLY.
Fezzik's player obviously took the Well-Prepared feat, in keeping with his above-average Wisdom score.
Enlarge Person permanent?
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Enlarge Person permanent?And everyone knows Fezzik was really a halfling after all. Just abnormally tall.Westley: "Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak!"
Inigo: "There, we cannot help you."
Fezzik: "Will this do?"
EXACTLY.
Fezzik's player obviously took the Well-Prepared feat, in keeping with his above-average Wisdom score.
Hmm... I dunno about being abnormally large but I would let somebody take the young template if they like for their character.
I don't think this feat makes much sense, and this is exactly why I love it.