At which point you've ignored the rules, and still said "At level 4, to deal with anything important you need one person with a maximized lockpicking skill, and a 1,600 gold item specifically to boost that skill and another person with at least a +9 modifier so they auto pass the aid another."
...Or you spend 60 gold on an adamantine bolt and never care about locks again.
Except ammunition such as a bolt, whether adamantine or not, is destroyed upon use. So your really spending 60 gold per door at that point, and if there are enough doors, your gonna run out...
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What are some tricks to make the lower-tier classes shine?
For example: How do you make a Rogue useful when the wizard can just cast "Find Traps", "Detect Secret Doors", "Knock", "Invisibility", and lots of other spells that do what Rogue does better than Rogue can.
I'm interested in both actual experience (Things that did/didn't work) and theorycrafed solutions (Things that should/shouldn't work) which promote/reward use of the weaker classes.
A few things, that are already in games I play.
1. Real encounter days with real time constraits.
It doesn't have to be just about finding who to hit and hitting them lots in a single encounter. It can be about random encounters on the way to the multi-room dungeon that can aggro if you don't use good strategy.
You can't always beg off the encounter until you have time to memorize the right spells or buy the right equiptment, stuff is happening now and you have to deal with it as is.
2. The enemy isn't just waiting for you to come hit them.They are plotting and planning, setting up ambushes, even misleading you.
If you are learning about BBEG's weaknesses, he's trying to learn yours right back. And sometimes the BBEG is trying to feed you wrong info to set you up.
Don't cheat, but don't be afraid to use the reasources the BBEG would have in the same way the players use their resources against the BBEG.
3. Don't coddle and you will need everyone to fill a role to succeed.
If the encounters are easy, one person can shine by making it look easy. If everyone is challeged than they will need to figure out synergies to succeed together and everyone will feel important, because they will be important.
4. Learn the rules, close the loopholes.
All spells have limitations, and between immunities and saves there will always be a need for variety in any party, particularly if you follow rule two.
5. Grow a party from low level up, and let people die.
Evolutionary pressures caused by rule 3 will make the group work as a group, and the best party is the diverse and adaptable party.
One trick ponies are taken out by rule 2, when the BBEG adapts.
I have never seen it be a problem if you follow these rules. Bad builds die, selfish players die, the rest thrive and the fact that the challeges force them to change and adapt means it stays exciting.
6. Encourage creative problem solving.
If there is only one way to accomplish goals in your game, of course players will end up being one trick ponies.
If your players think of solutions that never occured to you, even if you think it "breaks" the story, let them do it and follow it to the logical conclusion. These often lead to the best adventures, and let's players think of how they can use what each class has in different ways.
7. Roll initiative for no reason occasionally.
Not every danger is an actual danger. Sometimes it's just the maid knocking on the door to change the sheets and you wasted that buff spell. Sometimes you detect traps where there are none.
Sometimes the scary noise in the bushes is a lost puppy.
8. Know your world as a DM so you don't have to railroad.
If you know your world you can improvise, if not...
9. Stop metagaming.
You don't know the things you know out of game in game, you don't always know what spell weaknesses are, so you don't always cast the right spell.
10. Reward players who do the work.
If someone shines because they put more time into planning the build, good. If they don't make a good build, or can't for a class they want to playn they will be happier when they move to another class they can play.
I hate playing fighters, personally. Not enough non-damage options for my personal taste. But I have a friend who loves them, pours over the books for every edge, and is hreat at playing them.
And he would hate playing clerics, which another friend I have loves playing so she can save everyone.
Personality effects how effective you will be with a given class.
But that's looking at things realistically, as if the characters were part of a larger, living world instead of the world being static outside of the adventuring party......Or you spend 60 gold on an adamantine bolt and never care about locks again.Hypothetically, in an arms-race-taken-to-its-ultimate-conclusion kind of world in which 150 gp locks are on everything important but people just bypass them with 60 gp adamantine bolts, wouldn't all the locks on anything important end up being made out of adamantine themselves?
He's gone through this step-by-step further upthread, with the basic conclusion that, assuming the game rules reflect the laws of physics in the game world, then people do not rely on locks as anything other than a visual notice.
1. Real encounter days with real time constraits. You can't always beg off the encounter until you have time to memorize the right spells or buy the right equiptment, stuff is happening now and you have to deal with it as is.
9. Stop metagaming.
I like your list of good gaming habits, but even following it, I haven't seen the problem of class disparity at higher levels disappear. I do have a minor nitpick with two of your specific items as well.
1. This hurts warriors as much as, if not more than, casters. Once past low levels, I see fighting characters run out of hp and healing far faster than their caster allies can possibly run out of spells.
9. This is a pet peeve of mine. Look at it this way: I personally, on planet Earth, have a pretty good grasp of the laws of physics at a human scale, and of human interaction. If I jerk the hand brake of the car and yank the wheel, I have a pretty good idea of how it will react. I know that "red" lights mean that I should stop. I know that speeding tickets have as much to do with revenue as they do with safety. Etc. None of this is "metagaming" on the part of a phantom puppet-master who controls me; rather, it's the direct result of how things work, and of experience in living in a world in which they work that way. 90% of the stuff that people call "metagaming" is stuff that I'd call "common sense from having lived there."
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And people thought adamantine was rare.
Well...it is.
Remember that most of the world is made of low level commoners.
60 gold pieces is a lot of money to a commoner. It can be half your starting money.
When you have these discussion, discussion of level needs to come into play.
Not to mention knocking a lock out is about as loud and inconspicuious as cutting through the door.
And yet we're talking about every lock ever made being adamantine.
It seems crazy, but if we're starting from a premise that there are 150 gp locks everywhere but people are just smashing them with 60 gp adamantine bolts...
Really, I think the more sensible solution is to derail one of those starting premises, because why would anyone learn to open locks if a universal skeleton key was that cheap? Or why would there be locks in the first place? By trying to "play as though the physics of the game were real" in this case I think you just end up knocking down the first in a long line of dominos that require the world to contort into stranger and stranger ways relative to our own to continue to make any semblance of sense.
Hell, even deciding "Adamantine stuff doesn't ignore hardness when it's being used as an improvised weapon, because it's really hard metal, not a lightsaber" is a step in the right direction.
And yet we're talking about every lock ever made being adamantine.It seems crazy, but if we're starting from a premise that there are 150 gp locks everywhere but people are just smashing them with 60 gp adamantine bolts...
Really, I think the more sensible solution is to derail one of those starting premises, because why would anyone learn to open locks if a universal skeleton key was that cheap? Or why would there be locks in the first place? By trying to "play as though the physics of the game were real" in this case I think you just end up knocking down the first in a long line of dominos that require the world to contort into stranger and stranger ways relative to our own to continue to make any semblance of sense.
Hell, even deciding "Adamantine stuff doesn't ignore hardness when it's being used as an improvised weapon, because it's really hard metal, not a lightsaber" is a step in the right direction.
The Moon. You know.. you have found it.
It doesn't matter what the locks are made out of.
If they are made out of adamantine, then an adamantine weapon would be used to cut the lock out of the door, bypassing the lock.
As a side note, if an admantine arrow is fired into the lock, it breaks the lock, but doesn't necessarily open the lock. If you hammer a spike thru a lock, chances are all you have done is made it so that no one can open the lock, not unlocked it for yourself. At best, you have to pull little pieces out of the lock, to be able to pull the bolt or some such.
If it is a common tactic to use admantine arrows on locks, then likely the locks would be either fail locked, or would have some kind of trap that would go off when the arrow broke the lock. And quite likely, be set up in such a way that you had to be close to fire that arrow - like the way gatehouses and streets were often designed to not allow charges.
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1. Real encounter days with real time constraits. You can't always beg off the encounter until you have time to memorize the right spells or buy the right equiptment, stuff is happening now and you have to deal with it as is.
9. Stop metagaming.
I like your list of good gaming habits, but even following it, I haven't seen the problem of class disparity at higher levels disappear. I do have a minor nitpick with two of your specific items as well.
1. This hurts warriors as much as, if not more than, casters. Once past low levels, I see fighting characters run out of hp and healing far faster than their caster allies can possibly run out of spells.
I agree with you on "metagaming" being overused as a term. My rule is "if you faced it before in this campaign, I'll tell you even if you don't remember IRL, but if not you have to roll even if you personally know."
I am blanking at the moment on specific examples, but I agree with what you wrote. I find when I play with fellow DM's it isn't an issue as we all get where the line is.
As to hit points, I've never seen it be a major problem outside of low levels to recover between encounters. Between potions, channeling clerics, and at later levels items that heal hit points per round get passed around, in my experience.
Either way, you "can" get hit points back. Spells are gone until you rest for 8 hours.
And it isn't just running out of spells, it is running out of useful spells if you are carrying any kind of utility spells. This is of course less so for spontaneous, but they lose the versatility and have a slower progression.
Back to hit points someone is going to soak the attack damage if there is any damage to be taken. There is at least a decent chance they miss the armored person.
Arcane casters get hit also, and they also can't heal themselves. They just don't have as many hit points and they are at risk of losing spells if the opponent is next to them, at least at low levels.
Dear God people, obviously if there are rules like Adamantite ignoring hardness that end up breaking world design then perhaps those rules should be modified in a way that no longer breaks the world.
Adamantite blades provides a nice set of visual imagery that has been used throughout genre fiction, most famously with Sniktbub's errr Wolverine's Adamantium claws. In comics the ability to neatly bypass any sort of barrier with claws really only steps on the skill set of Gambit (maybe Storm) but mainly exists as an interesting toolset for making Wolverine "the best there is at what he does".
However looking at the context of D&D where there is a core archetype whose primary role is skillmonkey having a weapon special ability that makes skill use somewhat irrelevant is a bad design.
In the case of bad design you can come up with all sorts of reasons why the ability as written doesn't work in 75% of the situations or you can just accept that adamantite weaponry makes disable device checks somewhat irrelevant both of which are instances of the RAW trapping you and forcing you to make bad world building choices or you can re-write the section on adamantite weaponry so that it no longer functions as a +5 vorpal lock pick ;)
My personal choice would be to give adamantite weaponry some intrinsic ability to bypass hardness but that higher levels require significant magical bonuses. This would mean that cleaving through a column of solid iron would be something more appropriate at a higher level than 3rd :|
Viola locks remain useful tools for more than 2-3 levels of the game :D
Or was this thread not about making other tiers more viable?
I think I lost a few brains cells reading the off-topic posts in this thread.
Marvel is a silly comic book universe that doesn't even have internal logic. PF is a extremely high fantasy setting where hundreds of monsters exist, and magic can do all the stuff skills fails to do.
Want the secret of of adamantite? Get a huge chunk of iron (or any other metal), buy a scroll of polymorph any object, turn it into adamantite (same kingdom, shape and so on, means it is permanent), cast fabricate and make lots of masterwork swords. Only drawback is that you need to invest ranks in craft (Weaponsmith).
If you are cool enough to cast fabricate on your own (lv9 wiard), this whole ordeal costs you whatever a big piece of iron costs, 3000 for a lv8 scroll and a day of making the smiths want to kill themselves for not studying magic.
In cases where the skill restricts who can achieve certain results, such as trying to open a lock using Disable Device, you can't aid another to grant a bonus to a task that your character couldn't achieve alone. The GM might impose further restrictions to aiding another on a case-by-case basis as well.I always took that to mean you couldn't Aid Another for a skill that can't be used unskilled if you don't have that skill, basically.
In other words, you'd need to have a point in Disable Device to assist with Disable Device.
That's how I read that line. It's up the GM to apply any other restrictions like the small size part.
Marvel is a silly comic book universe that doesn't even have internal logic. PF is a extremely high fantasy setting where hundreds of monsters exist, and magic can do all the stuff skills fails to do.
Want the secret of of adamantite? Get a huge chunk of iron (or any other metal), buy a scroll of polymorph any object, turn it into adamantite (same kingdom, shape and so on, means it is permanent), cast fabricate and make lots of masterwork swords. Only drawback is that you need to invest ranks in craft (Weaponsmith).
If you are cool enough to cast fabricate on your own (lv9 wiard), this whole ordeal costs you whatever a big piece of iron costs, 3000 for a lv8 scroll and a day of making the smiths want to kill themselves for not studying magic.
Incorrect Polymorph any object cannot be used to make material of great intrinsic value such as copper, silver, gems, silk, gold, platinum, mithral, or adamantine. It also cannot replicate Cold Iron for the purposes of bypassing DR.
Infinite wealth exploits have been significantly revised or eliminated from PF.
Mischievious look
What if destroying the lock with the adamantine arrow activated some kind of anti-magic field, which collapsed the ceiling of the room (magic no longer holding it up), crushing everyone in the room?
Assuming there is a Rogue, trapfinding means he knows there is a trap and will disable it first.
So that will only work if no one searches for traps.And yes, Rogues have the extraordinary ability to disable a trap despite the method may not be normal. They just can.
Marvel is a silly comic book universe that doesn't even have internal logic. PF is a extremely high fantasy setting where hundreds of monsters exist, and magic can do all the stuff skills fails to do.
Want the secret of of adamantite? Get a huge chunk of iron (or any other metal), buy a scroll of polymorph any object, turn it into adamantite (same kingdom, shape and so on, means it is permanent), cast fabricate and make lots of masterwork swords. Only drawback is that you need to invest ranks in craft (Weaponsmith).
If you are cool enough to cast fabricate on your own (lv9 wiard), this whole ordeal costs you whatever a big piece of iron costs, 3000 for a lv8 scroll and a day of making the smiths want to kill themselves for not studying magic.
Incorrect Polymorph any object cannot be used to make material of great intrinsic value such as copper, silver, gems, silk, gold, platinum, mithral, or adamantine. It also cannot replicate Cold Iron for the purposes of bypassing DR.
Infinite wealth exploits have been significantly revised or eliminated from PF.
Good catch. Then getting a huge chunk of adamantite might pose a problem, depending on availability, until you can just go to the moon and have a huge earth elemental tug one out. Still easy enough to make stuff though.
Mischievious look
What if destroying the lock with the adamantine arrow activated some kind of anti-magic field, which collapsed the ceiling of the room (magic no longer holding it up), crushing everyone in the room?
Assuming there is a Rogue, trapfinding means he knows there is a trap and will disable it first.
So that will only work if no one searches for traps.
And yes, Rogues have the extraordinary ability to disable a trap despite the method may not be normal. They just can.
I have no doubt that if a rogue were there, they would have a chance of spotting that kind of trap, if they were looking.
My tongue in cheek post was directed at the idea that adamantine arrows make all locks irrelevant, that there was no defence against them. Any weapon/technique, if used often enough, will generate a counter weapon/technique.
wouldn't knowing where to poke with your improvised adamant e bolt to disable the lock actually be a disable device chichi? given you on fact can not cut with a bolt just poke holes at 1d4 damage.
the bolt itself seems extremely game me hanivy given the cost difference between it and a dagger.then using the bolt like itbwere a dagger.
When fired, yes. You're not shooting it.Except ammunition such as a bolt, whether adamantine or not, is destroyed upon use. So your really spending 60 gold per door at that point, and if there are enough doors, your gonna run out...At which point you've ignored the rules, and still said "At level 4, to deal with anything important you need one person with a maximized lockpicking skill, and a 1,600 gold item specifically to boost that skill and another person with at least a +9 modifier so they auto pass the aid another."
...Or you spend 60 gold on an adamantine bolt and never care about locks again.
So your doing a d4 of weapon damage to a lock with an improvised weapon. The lock probably should have close to 30 HP's. It also specifically states that objects take half damage from ranged weapons, which bolts are listed as (though thats a different arguement as to whether that would count if using it as an improvised weapon), and really without firing it, I would rule that poking a lock with a stick with a metal point on it would fall under the innefective weapons portion of the rules.
So your doing a d4 of weapon damage to a lock with an improvised weapon. The lock probably should have close to 30 HP's. It also specifically states that objects take half damage from ranged weapons, which bolts are listed as (though thats a different arguement as to whether that would count if using it as an improvised weapon), and really without firing it, I would rule that poking a lock with a stick with a metal point on it would fall under the innefective weapons portion of the rules.
Actually, bolts aren't ranged weapons. Crossbows are ranged weapons.
Read the rules: bolts are melee weapons in the PSRD.So you don't deal 1/2 damage.
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/equipment.html
Locks do have 30 hps so I hope the guy is power attacking with the bolt.
Forgot to ask in my last post, what happens when you run into a door thats barred on the other side rather than having a lock on it?
CoDzilla, pathfinder paladin at the same tier of the 3.5 paladin is laughable.
I strongly suggest to play a PF game before posting similar stuff.
As for Paladin tiers, you're right. It's probably lower.
You stopped from having the minimal chance of being taken seriously exactly here.
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As for Paladin tiers, you're right. It's probably lower.
This needs some explanation. The Paladin got a huge buff in Pathfinder. Please enlighten me as to how the Paladin got worse. I can understand your arguments on the other martial classes even if I don't necessarily agree with them, but this one just flabbergasts me. So, if you would be so kind, please support that statement. I'm genuinely interested in knowing why you think this.
Forgot to ask in my last post, what happens when you run into a door thats barred on the other side rather than having a lock on it?You break it down, but you still don't pick the lock. And to your other post: Nope.
I am sure your all caster group is great at breaking down a door.
And Kaiyanwang would be right, if being taken seriously was the desired reaction, which it obviously is not.
This needs some explanation. The Paladin got a huge buff in Pathfinder. Please enlighten me as to how the Paladin got worse. I can understand your arguments on the other martial classes even if I don't necessarily agree with them, but this one just flabbergasts me. So, if you would be so kind, please support that statement. I'm genuinely interested in knowing why you think this.As for Paladin tiers, you're right. It's probably lower.
Some "if"s in here if his statement is to hold true.
There are a few spells still that offer no save, and debilitates ways outside HP. Because a paladin is one of the few classes that reliably WILL make saves. I am playing a lv8 paladin/monk (1 dip level for flavor and archery boost), my saves are F+15, R+13, W+13, before buffs. I have means to increase them.
Hitting me with enervation will steadily reduce my levels, and as long as the mage is able to keep out of sight and hit me several times, I will go down from negative levels. Not quite sure how he would do that, if some Greater Invis mage is spamming me, I ready an attack to shoot at the origin of the ray. With 3.5 splats, no problem, core... not so sure.
Summons? Meh, nothing you can summon will stand even a round against me barring huge level differences. I got oils, scrolls and potions to overcome any resistance and such.
He can't get me when I sleep, because I don't. Lay on hands to remove fatigue when I get tired.
If he is given time to prepare against me, I imagine he could build up a load of scrolls and whatnot, and keep hitting my weaknesses. No-save stuff that does ability damage and such can be a hassle.
If the mage is evil, I win. Seriously, no level-appropriate mage will hit me, even with ranged touch, on anything but a 16+ when I smite it, and given two rounds, I make all your saves on anything but a 1.
If we look away from the whole Me vs Imagination Wizard, and look at the contribution I can offer, sure, I kill stuff. But I do it damn well. A caster can do all manner of stuff, but any trick he can conjure is prone to failure, due to saves, low to-hit, inferior combat abilities and so forth. Unless you include the fallacy that "Caster always knows what it is going to fight, and is always prepared and fully buffed."
Also, any approach along the lines of "get them to waste buffs on traps" really just means "party runs through traps and is better off than if they did not".Shame on your DM for that.
If they don't have things go far tougher for you barging and stomping around then why bother not doing so?
Not sure what 3,600gp item you were referring to either, was it your adamantine tool to destroy the 150gp locks that others would have collected?
-James
1: Traps are trivial in PF.
Not in my games. I noticed a long time ago traps = free XP. I am very much against free XP so if I have a trap and it goes someone someone(s) because I always design them to affect several people will either be on their to dying or have a serious affliction. I normally throw the trap in front of a fight so they party goes into the fight weaker, and I make sure it is not a safe zone for resting. Hitting someone with (insert bad thing) just so they can rest and prep the correct spell before they continue on is pointless to me.
PS:I am well aware we are not talking about my games. The point was if anyone is going to use a trap then don't make it convenient to go back to town/rest/etc to get rid of the bad thing. Codzilla I was just using your post to get a point across.
Breaking out a metal lock with a metal spike is just about the stupidest thing I've heard on here.
You missed the explaination of why telekinesis deals more damage than evocation spells.
This needs some explanation. The Paladin got a huge buff in Pathfinder. Please enlighten me as to how the Paladin got worse. I can understand your arguments on the other martial classes even if I don't necessarily agree with them, but this one just flabbergasts me. So, if you would be so kind, please support that statement. I'm genuinely interested in knowing why you think this.As for Paladin tiers, you're right. It's probably lower.
I am waiting to hear this one also.
Of course, a symbiosis between party members is more or less what the game is all about. My paladin, for all his capability alone, is that much more effective with a haste, enlarge person and a prayer going. And the casters are so much more effective when they don't have to worry about having their faces torn off by the opposition as I step in and stop the big bads dead in their tracks.
And yes, the casters are the ones that "win" the fight for the most part. They arrange so I can come in and kill the beasts that much easier. Looking back at the encounters we have faced, the casters "own" one of my best hits per round from Haste alone.
However, unless you are running an all caster party and start at lv5-7, there is no way of always knowing what is around the corner, and without me standing there, there would have been several TPKs. Level-appropriate animal companions are strong, but nowhere near as resilient and powerful as my character.
I do worry about higher levels though, when monsters have more SLAs than you can shake a stick at, and even though I can take anything they can chuck at me, my party cannot. And there is no mechanism in PF to let me draw their attention. So, barring the acquisition of magical items (we already have several threads on this) that allow me to continue doing my job, I will find myself in the crap tier, as my superior resistance and damage output will become irrelevant.
Luckily, the rest of the party are casters, and should be able to bring things down so I can eviscerate them.
A good way to limit spell casters is to throw out 4 to 6 encounters a day (not per session, unless your session is a day). They will run out of spells, leaving the rogue and monk still able to do the majority of their stuff. Make this the norm and mages will have to ration their spells.And if you don't want to have that many per day? What do you do if you have less? What do you do if you have maybe 1 encounter per day?
Split the parties efforts. Ensure that the encounters win conditions are set up so that every member of the party must be forfilling their niche in every turn of the combat, or the group is likely to fail.
- locked door (rogue needs to opens so the group can escape before drowning)
- rising water (time sensitive encounter)
- veritabe horde of monsters (wizard and cleric crowd control)
- boss monster (Figter kills)
I felt like the Paladin stayed about the same, powerwise. What makes it get worse in PF vs 3.x?
The problem with "symbiosis" is that you don't need half of it. It's parasitism - the martial class needs the caster, but the caster doesn't need the martial class. A fighter can be replaced with a cleric, or a druid's animal companion, or even a wizard who has shapeshifted or summoned a monster. The wizard cannot be replaced with a fighter.
The problem is this: Class (or prestige class or characters with feat) X gets a class feature, this feature is one of two things. It is either a really cool feature that people will like and in the next splat (or chapter) Spell Y will replicate it, or it is a rehash of Spell Y which was already designed, and invariably it will be more costly than the spell slot Spell Y occupied.
It takes the hasted many-shot ranger all day to roll his attacks, even if I just tell him what the AC is.
You might want to suggest to the archer that they have several sets of dice, different colors, and roll them all at once.
ex: hasted archer, manyshot at 7th would have 4 shots, so they roll 4 d20s and 4 d8s. If they know that the *blue* dice are the secondary attack, then it only takes a couple of seconds to know which shots hit and what their damage is.
My group has been doing that for ages and it has sped up game play when multiple attacks are happening.