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So a witch's bond/pact with her familiar means she is charismatic? Clearly we all know that married couples are more charismatic than single people and that long standing relationships with gnomes are way more likely than with dwarves, right?
I was being sarcastic. There were plenty enough of people suggesting that the witch should be charisma based because of her bond/pact.
My point was that forming a meaningful bond and being charismatic are two independent things.
They are two different things - just like programming a computer and being intelligent are two different things or bench pressing a lot of weight and being strong are two different things.I was being sarcastic. There were plenty enough of people suggesting that the witch should be charisma based because of her bond/pact.
My point was that forming a meaningful bond and being charismatic are two independent things.
Yeah, but being intelligent helps program computers;
Being strong helps lift weights;And while being charismatic helps getting people to do things for you, it doesn't necessarily help form strong relations.
A strong bond requires things outside of being able to get someone to do something for you. Charisma doesn't exactly insure loyalty. In fact, if the only thing you're relying on is your ability to manipulate others, you're not going to gain a lot of loyalty from them.
Charismatic people are generally portrayed as flighty.
If you're in a strong relationship, you shouldn't need to lie, intimidate, or cheese up to keep it.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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No matter what the rules say, some of you are going to bend over backwards in order to find some Deus ex Machina justification. And that's fine. I've never said that such justifications aren't possible. I've only said that to do them consistently breaks verisimilitude.
To learn or cast a spell, a witch must have an Intelligence score equal to at least 10 + the spell level. The Difficulty Class for a saving throw against a witch’s spell is 10 + the spell level + the witch’s Intelligence modifier.
Seems like someone has bent over backwards so much he's forgotten what the rules say.
Anyway... I like Sorcerers because of my own weaknesses. Give me too many tools, I can become paralyzed. Sorcerers (and Psions) have a limited set of tools, but can get to them faster, rather than rummaging around in the toolbox or carrying a smaller toolbox (memorization) and lamenting I don't have the right tool handy.
Though bonded item does help address my weakness :-)
And while being charismatic helps getting people to do things for you, it doesn't necessarily help form strong relations.
A strong bond requires things outside of being able to get someone to do something for you. Charisma doesn't exactly insure loyalty. In fact, if the only thing you're relying on is your ability to manipulate others, you're not going to gain a lot of loyalty from them.
Charismatic people are generally portrayed as flighty.
If you're in a strong relationship, you shouldn't need to lie, intimidate, or cheese up to keep it."If you're in a strong relationship, you shouldn't need to lie, intimidate, or cheese up to keep it."
I know several strong relationships that have been based on lies (such as married couples who stay married for a long time despite infidelity), intimidation (such as the bully's relationship to a favorite target in junior high school), etc.
Infiedelity is that all as bad thing for a relatoinship. Their are worse tings like sabotaging dinner each night making sure the kids do not get to sleep and causing more pain. Making a mess of everything improperly cleaning dishes not doing any housework. Breaking things wrecking vacuum filters. That is what my mom is like and she is still married to my father. Does that mean it is a strong working relationship. I would rather have her be sleeping with someone else as then at least someone is happy. I think this relationship is more opportunistic than anything else.
"If you're in a strong relationship, you shouldn't need to lie, intimidate, or cheese up to keep it."I know several strong relationships that have been based on lies (such as married couples who stay married for a long time despite infidelity), intimidation (such as the bully's relationship to a favorite target in junior high school), etc.
I would hardly call a relationship where a person has to lie about their infidelity a "strong" relationship; if you're at the point where you must lie to and bribe your partner, your relationship is probably at it's seams.
I hardly think the target of a bully would consider himself as 'bonding' with the bully.
I feel bad for you if you really know 'several' relationships that are built on lies, bribing, and bullying. :<
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No matter what the rules say, some of you are going to bend over backwards in order to find some Deus ex Machina justification. And that's fine. I've never said that such justifications aren't possible. I've only said that to do them consistently breaks verisimilitude.
It sounds like we have multiple reasonable and logical explainations as to why Charisma is the not or not always the key stat for witches and we have one person denying their validity to an extent that consistently breaks verisimilitude.
Getting back to the original topic, I really like the flavor of the wizard. It has that academic, genius aspect who may not always be listened to, even when she has a good plan.
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He said that charisma is nowhere 'required' to take ranks in Diplomacy, Bluff, or Intimidate. And that's what I said was wrong. And I never agreed with his statement.
Frankly, I believe I made that quite clear.
Ahem, to take ranks in Diplomacy? To calculate your final Diplomacy bonus, yes, but not to take ranks in the skill. For that, you need skill points to spend.
That's just the completely wrong definition, here.
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And back before the concerted effort of LilithsThrall to hijack the thread...
I see the wizard vs. sorcerer balance as the Batman vs. Superman dichotomy. Wizards are the knowledgeable, long-term capable sages and crafters of perfection, while sorcerers are great for getting the job done now--albeit not always perfectly.
I prefer Alchemists to both.
We've never defined what either of us means by the phrase 'strong relationship'. I'd take it to mean that the relationship is a fundamental part of how a person defines themself. How do you define the term?
"If you're in a strong relationship, you shouldn't need to lie, intimidate, or cheese up to keep it."I know several strong relationships that have been based on lies (such as married couples who stay married for a long time despite infidelity), intimidation (such as the bully's relationship to a favorite target in junior high school), etc.
I would hardly call a relationship where a person has to lie about their infidelity a "strong" relationship; if you're at the point where you must lie to and bribe your partner, your relationship is probably at it's seams.
I hardly think the target of a bully would consider himself as 'bonding' with the bully.
I feel bad for you if you really know 'several' relationships that are built on lies, bribing, and bullying. :<
By that definition sex slaves have a strong relation with their captor. Or a person in a wheelchair after a car accident with the person that rear ended their car.
I didn't make a concerted effort to derail the thread. I stated a fact - that the witch class makes charisma even more confusing to understand and irrelevant by basing pact making on intelligence and, also, that basing the witch on charisma makes no sense.
Then, several people flooded the thread making ridiculous, irrational counter arguments to assert that I was wrong. These people hijacked the thread. I even made an effort, following TOZ' post, to drop the whole thing but these people -continued- to flood the thread with ridiculous, irrational counter arguments. All I did was point out how their posts were ridiculous, irrational, and/or not even relevant to my point.
You are more ridiculous and irrational than them and cannot see your irrationality when it is explained to you. I suppose that's the definition of irrational. You cannot abide reason, including the rationality that attempts to get you to see reason. Please stop posting.
I prefer Alchemists to both.Interesting, what do you prefer about alchemists?
I prefer the ability to cross out the words 'alchemy,' 'spell,' and 'arcana' on my character sheet and write in 'SCIENCE!!!'
This was incentive enough to be an alchemist.
LT is still crazy. Charisma is not required to take ranks in Bluff, Diplomacy, and INtimidate. The only REQUIREMENT is skill points. Charisma is just a MODIFIER. Knowledge in this game is exemplified by ranks, not inbuilt talent.
And when you devolve to posting snide definitions, you know you lost and are just trolling. Eesh. The three skills are uses of skill ranks, modified by Charisma, that's it.
Charisma is social talent, and ranks are social intelligence.
===Aelryinth
To be honest, X-Men is more like a random roll on the 1E psionics table then sorcery is! :)
==Aelryinth
You must be someone who never "got" the X-Men then.
I see your X-men and raise you a Dr. Strange and a Zatanna. Probably better examples of the innate power sorcerers actually, being actual casters and all :)
I see this error FAR too often. Yes, people making facts and surviving them is a function of intelligence - social intelligence - which, in this game is measured by charisma.Aren't the people making pacts, and surviving them, going to be the ones that know the rules and how to manipulate them. That seems to me to be a function of intelligence. You don't come out on top of pact by being charming, you do it be being clever, that's holds true in pretty much any story I've ever seen concerning such. Now I'm not saying you can't make a perfectly reasonable case for another stat, but to just get locked into one and say it has to be that way is a bit silly IMHO.
I'm sorry, rather than just shouting 'you're wrong', could you please explain then how charisma allows a person to understand a contract, how it makes a person better able to manipulate the wording of a contract (not bypassing it by manipulating the other party), or perhaps how charisma allows one to better know the procedures necessary for contacting the other party and establishing a contract in the first place. I mean if you don't know that you need to sacrifice a goat on the new moon in a circle of toadstools just to talk to the Dark Lord (or whoever else you're trying to ring up), or that you need need to sing his praises while walking backwards in a circle sprinkling ash to placate him, then no amount of batting your eyelashes and being winsome is going to help.
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I see your X-men and raise you a Dr. Strange and a Zatanna. Probably better examples of the innate power sorcerers actually, being actual casters and all :)
You must be someone who never "got" the X-Men then.
Magick, Witch/Sorceress and Mutant is a great example of a character whose origin could work well for any of the 'big three' arcane classes.
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LT is still crazy. Charisma is not required to take ranks in Bluff, Diplomacy, and INtimidate.You're still wrong. Something without charisma, cannot take Diplomacy, Bluff, or Intimidate. That's because Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidate only modify the bonus set by charisma.
Oh, you're talking about things with '-' Cha, aren't you?
Do those even exist?
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Oh, you're talking about things with '-' Cha, aren't you?
Do those even exist?
Yes.
They're called objects.
Oh, okay, so only animated objects can't take Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate?
Edit: Whoops, animated objects have 1 Cha. They can't take skills because they have - Int.
Yeah. All creatures have a Cha score, even if it's incredibly miserable in some cases.
This is hilarious.
The wording of a contract is of no consequence if the contract isn't signed by both parties. The game has established (in the example set by Diplomacy) that that is based on charisma.I see this error FAR too often. Yes, people making facts and surviving them is a function of intelligence - social intelligence - which, in this game is measured by charisma.Aren't the people making pacts, and surviving them, going to be the ones that know the rules and how to manipulate them. That seems to me to be a function of intelligence. You don't come out on top of pact by being charming, you do it be being clever, that's holds true in pretty much any story I've ever seen concerning such. Now I'm not saying you can't make a perfectly reasonable case for another stat, but to just get locked into one and say it has to be that way is a bit silly IMHO.
I'm sorry, rather than just shouting 'you're wrong', could you please explain then how charisma allows a person to understand a contract, how it makes a person better able to manipulate the wording of a contract (not bypassing it by manipulating the other party), or perhaps how charisma allows one to better know the procedures necessary for contacting the other party and establishing a contract in the first place. I mean if you don't know that you need to sacrifice a goat on the new moon in a circle of toadstools just to talk to the Dark Lord (or whoever else you're trying to ring up), or that you need need to sing his praises while walking backwards in a circle sprinkling ash to placate him, then no amount of batting your eyelashes and being winsome is going to help.
Because force of personality is the best and only reason to enter into a contract, right?
Nice dodge.
There's a common misunderstanding in this thread by several posters. That misunderstanding is that if someone says something brilliant, that people will agree with him and it doesn't matter if he's charismatic or not.
And while there are a lot of ways to point out the error in that thinking, the most devastating one is by pointing out all the examples from real world history where that has proven to be false. Frankly, it'd take too much time to do so. Some of them come from the long battle of scientific progress against the status quo - the new theory of stomach ulcers, the solar centric solar system, the round earth, the germ theory of disease, etc. all had substantial scientific support, but only gained wide acceptance when championed by charismatic people.
So, just to be clear, you are saying that force of personality is the best and only reason to enter a contract?
Still dodging.
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Mathematically, if you add any Integer to NaN you get NaN where NaN means "not a number". So, no object with a Charisma of "-" could possibly have Diplomacy, Bluff, or Intimidate. Which means that Charisma is required for Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidate.
Mathematically, if you add up the number of creatures in Pathfinder with a Charisma score of "-", you get Nada, where Nada = Zilch = Zero.
LT has, however, established that Objects are not able to form meaningful social relationships because they lack a Charisma score (unless they're Animated Objects, in which case they have a Charisma score of 1). Therefore, a Chest of Drawers cannot be a Witch.
Well done, sir!
I'm beginning to have a major preference for sorcerers over wizards, especially in the role playing department. Here's why:
A typical wizard will have a staggering hodgepodge of useful utility, damage, debuffing and other spells. You get so many new spells granted that you can learn large chunks of the classes' spell list.
On the other hand, a sorcerer has so few spells to gain per level that he can sort of collect every spell around a certain theme. For example, a necromancer can make it his goal to collect only death spells and related dark, icky spells like black tentacles, undead anatomy and perhaps magic missiles modified by sickening spell.
On top of that the sorcerer gets awesome flavor abilities based off his bloodline which in many cases are actually pretty damn good.
It's a preference lots of people have. Currently I'm playing a sorcerer in a game where you're allowed to add to your spells known via spell research, and I'm using the human favored class option to get extra spells instead of HP/Skill Points. She's themed as a necromancer who calls herself a witch with a smattering of different spells to mix up her weirdness.
I see wizards as more of a minmax class and sorcerers as more of a role playing option, with wizards summoning dire badgers one minute and throwing fireballs the next where a sorcerer can have a more cohesive theme and still function fairly well.
As Treantmonk pointed out, this is not a truth for either class.
Anyone agree?
Truthfully I prefer psions over wizards and sorcerers most of the time. While they lack the raw power of both wizards and sorcerers, I find their intuitive spellcasting system and flavor set them up as more suited for being generic spellcasters. Their system revolves around using powers (their spells) from a power point pool (like a personal mana reserve from within) to produce magical effects through their will/spirit/mind. Instead of being born with magical power, they practice hard and spend hours meditating to replenish their reserves, whereas wizards and sorcerers both basically have magic guns. They "fire and forget" and load their slots and then unload them through the day.
Likewise I feel like the whole theme with crystals is closer traditional magics, where crystals have associated magical applications, along with types of wood (such as oak, yew, etc), and other similar things.
There's a common misunderstanding in this thread by several posters. That misunderstanding is that if someone says something brilliant, that people will agree with him and it doesn't matter if he's charismatic or not.
And while there are a lot of ways to point out the error in that thinking, the most devastating one is by pointing out all the examples from real world history where that has proven to be false. Frankly, it'd take too much time to do so. Some of them come from the long battle of scientific progress against the status quo - the new theory of stomach ulcers, the solar centric solar system, the round earth, the germ theory of disease, etc. all had substantial scientific support, but only gained wide acceptance when championed by charismatic people.So, just to be clear, you are saying that force of personality is the best and only reason to enter a contract?
Still dodging.
I'm saying that entering a contract requires persuading others to agree with your arguements and this is a factor of your personal magnetism.
That's not a dodge.
No, entering into a contract requires persuading the other party that you have something they want, or actually having something they want. You'll note the latter doesn't require any great personal magnetism. I work in a business were nearly everything is done in one year contracts, and believe me when I say that the most socially retarded and uncharismatic people get signed on regularly, because they have something the person offering the contract wants.
And if you have something a patron wants enough to offer you a pact (a soul, first born, championing their cause, the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop, et c.) , then that brings us full circle back to my original questions. So if you would like to actually address them now, by all means.
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Pact making is influenced by both Int and Cha, and even Wis. However, since almost no one likes having spellcasting depend on more than one stat, a single stat was chosen to determine a witch's spellcasting ability.
You can stop arguing personal views now.
In fact, we can even argue the merits of having all spellcasters determine spells known by Int, bonus spells by Wis, and save DC by Cha, if you feel up to it.