Howdy folks. After re-educating myself on the called shot system in my Ultimate Combat book, I decided to find out who actually uses this system?
My group has been doing called shots for as long as we've been gaming, using a house ruled system. Mainly it was the DM had a general number for the difficulty of called shots, and depending on what you did would make for a DM call on the effect. Such as, our rogue stabbing someone in the eye, or our sorceress casting True Strike and chucking a spear at the big bad's head. At least half of us would generally make called shots at least half of combat.
Needless to say, when I found out there was a called shot system in Ultimate Combat, our group was thrilled... Then we cracked the book open, and our jubilation came to a screeching halt. We pretty much decided to stick to our system, but like I said, I'm curious who uses Paizo's called shot system.
As far as we were concerned, the called shot variant rules are alright, but to obtain the desired effects we were looking for, and that our DM (a stickler for mostly realistic combat effects, being an avid military historian) used ludicrous amounts of logic to obtain... All required a debilitating blow. See, we generally went based on how much damage we did to a body part (logical, right?)... So stabbing someone in the heart with a rapier (a favorite tactic of mine), despite imparting large penalties if the target wasn't grappled or otherwise restrained, always resulted in SOME bleed on a damaging enough hit. A direct slash to the limbs on critical hits severed them completely, while bashing tended to cripple them.
As I said, we like a bit of logic to our combat. Yes, we know this is a fantasy game, thus we allow wild things like our monk firing himself out of a bloody catapult directly into the heart of an invading army... Half the rest of the party followed, and acrobatics checks were enjoyed by all for minimum damage... But the whole requirement on debilitating blows needed to deal half of a creature's hit points, with a minimum 50 damage necessary, which immediately calls in massive damage rules rendering called shot debilitating blows pointless, is just silly....
So, thoughts, opinions, and what not on PF's Called Shot system, and who ACTUALLY uses it as is?
I use it a lot with my THF rogue that uses a ECB, with a 30% chance to crit he usually can get the crit effect to trigger.
but i have two problems with it.
1)the factors for getting the desired effect(Debilitating Blow) will usually kill the foe with just the minimum of 50 damage or half HP, depending on how long combat has gone. which brings up why bother with called shots if you could just kill the creature anyway.
2)I kind of wish that they would of combined some of the effects from Dirty Trick onto some of the normal called shot hits.
using dirty trick you can throw sand into someones eyes and blind them for a round or so depending on the CMB result
or you could do a called shot get a normal hit and only get a 20% concealment(unless youve already hit the eyes once before)
All in all I like it but thats because When I play I go for style over anything else(that way when the bards sing of my characters tales they will never have to fluff it up, no need to fluff the already fluffy)
I have yet to use it but I personally think the best class to do called shots with would be the gunslinger(though they alraedy get a built in class called shot feature) just for the fact you target touch AC to hit the target so all of those -'s dont hurt your chances too much
nice catch, cause i dropped the ball on that one.
then with that being the case id say leave called shots to a THW high crit scout rogue or a Smiting THW pali to make the most of the single attack with possibly of high damage.
We started using it in the campaign where I'm a player, but it quickly degenerated into me and the dwarven barbarian stabbing doing out best to stab everything we see in the danglies... So our DM said to just stop it.