Warded Man world

[sona]

Ok this is a big one.
I am creating a world for my group inspired by Peter V. Brett brilliant series the warded man/the painted man. if you haven't read it do, they are awesome.

well I am happily creating the world, the monsters, the organisation and every thing else that you have to do when creating a world. But I am having a little trouble with the warding ability of the books.

People are able to write wards to protect them from the monsters.
in the books this is a semi magic skill every one can do. write the right pattern of wards to stop the monsters from getting to you.

The idea is to make the creation of the wards a wisdom based skill check VS the CMB of the monsters.

so a character creates a protected area by making a skill check. The monsters will attack this area with there CMB. If the CMB total exceeds the skill check of the Character the monster gets though.

I want the protection wards to have something like HP as well. so eventual monsters will be able to get though by attack a protected area multiple times. As it happens in the books. Monsters will attack a protected area for an entire night. A freshly protected area needs to be strong enough to survive a couple of nights. But when left unattended it should fail after that.

So any ideas. When i get an idea how this can be achieved I'll post it here as well to get your opinion's

thanks in advance

[TimD]

Agreed, excellent series. If I hadn't read Name of the Wind just before I read The Warded Man I'd say it was the best first novel I'd ever read.

Regarding the Demons vs. Wards system... I would probably go with an alternate "hardness & hp" system for different ward types and give bonuses to those who specialize in ward magics. Rather than having the demons roll standard melee damage against the ward type, have the amount of damage they can inflict based on their HD or demon type so that better wards (like the city wards) can take effectively infinite amounts of smaller demons as they can't get past the hardness. Throw in some sort of "upkeep" system for the wards to diminish & fade if not maintained and you should be set for "place wards".

If your PCs start warding themselves and using the wards offensively, I'd probably use the hardness of the ward types as a base for the enhancement bonus of the weapon / appendage or as a deflection bonus for armor vs. the demons.

Hope that helps.

Good luck!

-TimD

[Weirdo]

Yeah, I'd use the rules for Sunder as a basis for what you're doing, opposed by a skill check instead of CMD. If you don't want this to be used mid-combat, make the skill check take at least a few minutes.

Wards can get hardness and HP based on, for example, length of time spent drawing the ward, material the ward is inscribed in, or expensive reagents expended in creating the ward.

Certain classes would get Write Ward as a class skill, and a few feats could offer improved wards. For example, wards that have more HP or hardness, can be drawn more quickly, or can be set to be extra-effective against specific demons. Consider allowing some characters, such as clerics, oracles, inquisitors, wizards, or aasimar, to select these as alternate class or race features. For example, make a "Warding" domain. Consider giving certain demons special skill at bypassing or destroying wards.

Make sure to compare ward strength to a selection of demons to make sure that what you've designed won't be too easy or hard to punch through.

[sona]

Thanks for the input i really liked the idea of using a sunder like system. so i played around a little with that last weekend.

But the problem i am running in to is that it need to have rediculas amounts of hp to works.
Take a travel circles, these should survive at least one night without to much trouble. I have run simulations giving it a hardness so high that demons only do 1or 2 damage each round. But given there are a couple of demons attacking for a entire night this comes down to thousands of damage. witch would mean that to survive the circle would have to have close to ten thousand hit points to survive for one night.

No it is of course possible to make this but it just feels wrong to me having items that have tens of thousands of hit points to be effective. Nothing in Pathfinder has so many hit point for good reason.

[angelroble]

Its better to think about it the other way. Start with a table that shows a relationship of skill bonus and monsters, with the time you think it's right for that monster to break the ward. For ex. a Demon (Babau) [CR 6, attack +12 dmg 1d8+7] could break a ward of +10 skill bonus in 48 hours, a ward of +3 skill bonus in 3 hours, and a ward of +20 skill bonus in 72 hours. He couldn't break a wall of +30 or more.
Do this for 5-7 monsters, then you have an idea of the parameters you can play with.

Then choose a measure of the monster "power", it colud be attack bonus or damage, but I would choose CR to account for possible uses of spells or other abilities. It also allows to add any number of monsters if they are working together to break the ward (2 CR 1 monsters equal 1 CR 3 monster, etc.)

Then you may have to add some randomness to the time needed to break, using the table you made before. For ex. roll 3d6, and substract 10. That is the % of time to increase or reduce from the average. For a Babau vs a +10 skill bonus ward, with an average of 48 hours, if you roll a 13 it comes for a +30% time or about 15 hours more.
Hope that helps