Clearly instead this would just nerf the bajeesus out of them.If you didn't adjust monsters, of course it would. It would make the entire game unplayable. Not just martials, either, everyone would die.
You could just fight humanoids.
You could just fight humanoids.Clearly instead this would just nerf the bajeesus out of them.If you didn't adjust monsters, of course it would. It would make the entire game unplayable. Not just martials, either, everyone would die.
Or fight things with a lower cr... Suddenly a pack of level 20 optimizers doesnt sound so overpoweredly boring... which i entirely support. Just trying to find an interesting and playable/fun way to do it.
Its not perfect. Its just a theory. It needs work. Again I appreciate the help!
Thats sort of my deal. I'm not sure I'd fiddle with enemies at all. Making a cr 15 feel like a cr20 sounds kinda awesome to me. I see a lot of posts on 'how do we give fighters more choices and 'how do we make the game grittier' and i'm an ad&d 2e guy so wbl and cr and wandering monsters being 'way above what a pc could handle' is a critique that while true, is desirable at least from my point of view.
If the power rift between martials and casters isnt exacerbated then at least I havent widened the publicly held view that the gap sucks. I don't dispute that the gap sucks Yang knows that I'm fine with the gap and she is definitely not fine with the gap. The intent of these changes isnt to mitigate the gap and absolutely wasn't intended to stretch it.
Yang's really a great contributor to this kind of conversation because there are few people on the board as quick on the draw to point out the 'endgame' of an idea and how disastrious it is as she is. I know her mind instantly arrives at many very specific ways that this will just ruin her perception of the possibility of a viable game, but I want those details... more constructive critique and less 'you're a doofus and don't know what you're doing' critique. If she has instant mental access to a hundred different ways that this makes the game unplayable but the only thing that makes it to the keyboard is 'if you do this rivers will run blood and you're a doofus' well... We can have a different forum called 'why vincent is a doofus' and deal with that later.
I've been a gm for 30 years and you bet. I've been doing pathfinder for 6 months so I've clocked in less than 72 hours total with the system, meaning yeah. I know a lot less about it. But i'm not an idiot, and I'm not unfair, and i'm not an 4hol3. I'm just curious number crunching philosophizing tinkerer about the system like everyone else is.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
so now that logical arguments from both sides have been stated, i feel the need to get this out of my system. If nothing stacked...then legos would just be choking hazards. thank you for dealing with my nonsense.
No doubt an argument could be made that I should not be tinkering with a system with such little experience in it. I just cant help myself. I'm a tinkerer. An argument could be made that I should go choke on a lego, heheheh.
Our current gm is one of those people who hates the magic item christmas tree and really wants to play a game without magic items. The logical argument is that a party without magic items can't hang in a fight with their proper cr because the cr was designed around all those buffs.
Despite this, as a group, there was a surprising amount of motivation when I suggested we play it out instead of theorycraft it. I was almost disturbed at how eager everyone was to try a few fights using just a build with no magic items and see how it went. But thats how we are. Eager and curious and perhaps even disturbingly so. I want to play it out to prove the point that its very likely to go very bad, and our current gm wants to do it to prove that its not that bad at all. And everyone else wants to do it just to see how it actually goes because maybe its not that bad. Maybe its impossiblly bad. We'll have fun either way.
Before with stacking AC bonuses a defense focused zen monk (level 9) would only be hit less than 50% of the time with this house rule that would move up to over 75% of the time. But a Magus with Empowered Mirror Image (average 8 images) and Blink (50% miss chance) will have a 6% chance of being hit.
Ah. so this is an example where the caster suffers no disadvantage but the martial takes a hit, since the mechanic the caster is using is not one of armor class but of duplicity. Now when the Magus runs out of spells does the advantage swing back to the monk? The advantage went to the Magus even before the 'change of rule' so while it does stretch the gap for the duration of the spells, i'm not sure it would be enough of a deterrent to make nobody want to play a monk... Hmmmmm. Good example!
Our current gm is one of those people who hates the magic item christmas tree and really wants to play a game without magic items. The logical argument is that a party without magic items can't hang in a fight with their proper cr because the cr was designed around all those buffs.
Despite this, as a group, there was a surprising amount of motivation when I suggested we play it out instead of theorycraft it. I was almost disturbed at how eager everyone was to try a few fights using just a build with no magic items and see how it went. But thats how we are. Eager and curious and perhaps even disturbingly so. I want to play it out to prove the point that its very likely to go very bad, and our current gm wants to do it to prove that its not that bad at all. And everyone else wants to do it just to see how it actually goes because maybe its not that bad. Maybe its impossiblly bad. We'll have fun either way.
Yeah, I'm the same way, I like to tinker. My group started making houserules pretty much the first week 3.5 was released, lol. I'm very close to just writing up an entire set of rules rather than trying to patch PF. But patching is kinda fun...
You guys will do fine in the lower levels. If you play APs you can do fine for quite some time since they are tuned down quite a bit. Once you get to the mid-levels though, you're going to hit a point where you all just go splat. ;)
Our gm wants us to just do a whole campaign this way and see how it goes but I'm not sure I want to invest that much time into it... We were basically talking about setting up some encounters. No point in trying this at level 1 since most characters usually dont have any magic items at all at that level... Its already been proven to work in the low levels... Pick something on the other side of that curve... say level 10. Then pick some cr10 appropriate encounters... A few variations of a single big baddie, a few variations of a large group of less powerful baddies. See how long we can survive. I'm guessing not long, but everyone seems jazzed about it anyway.
Sure, you could put your 20th level party against CR 15 threats so that martials will still be able to contribute.
Here's the problem: now that you've scaled back the threats, the fighter and barbarian, who were hammered by the rule change, aren't quite as useless anymore. Unfortunately, the summoner's eidolon, whose bonuses to hit and damage both come from almost entirely from its huge Str score (which in turn consists almost exclusively of its base stats and its size bonus), is hardly affected at all - and it was already on par with a fighter in power even before the rules change. If the fighter can hit it at all, the eidolon can autohit it; and if it can hit the eidolon, it can autohit the fighter. You have two party members trying to do the same job, but thanks to the rule change one of them is way better at it - and unless you're going to split up the party and put the fighter and barbarian against weaker threats, or give everything DR/manufactured weapons, there isn't much you can do there.
The same could be said of the blasting sorcerer, the save-or-die wizard, and so on - they're all targeting creatures with less HP, saves, and SR, but their own spells are still operating at full power.
The sad truth is that martials really don't have a lot of interesting options in Pathfinder, and the ones they do have (e.g. combat maneuvers) still require the ability to stack numbers. A lot of the more interesting options are punished by this rule too. I've mentioned maneuvers before, but really anything that has Combat Expertise as a prerequisite suffers because Combat Expertise no longer does anything at all. Anything like Whirlwind Attack that has Dodge and Mobility as prerequisite gets worse, because now the feat tax is two feats that do absolutely nothing. Want to use whips? You'll need Whip Mastery, so you'll need Weapon Focus (whips) - but that feat no longer does anything, so enjoy your tax. (And the best uses of whips are maneuvers and Whirlwind Attack, both of which are already suffering.) You gave "Duelist doesn't take Improved Initiative because it gets initiative bonuses as a class feature" as an example in the opening post - but with their Int-to-AC class feature gone, the entire Duelist class may as well be banned for all the good it does. Two-weapon fighting needs several static bonuses to damage in order to not be worse than two-handed fighting despite costing extra feats, but since such bonuses don't exist now, that's not a viable option anymore. Even basic tactics cease to matter. Don't bother to flank - that +2 flanking bonus to hit doesn't exist anymore. And while Power Attack's bonus doesn't work anymore, its penalty is still fully functional (which makes it another pointless feat tax for a lot of things like cleave).
EWP Falcata still works though.
You want people to do interesting things with their money? Just get rid of the WBL table, give them the bonuses of the big generic items inherently when they hit the appropriate levels, and let them pick up other cool stuff.
You want martials to do more interesting things? Write new interesting things for them to do.
It is funny now that you mention just making feats/ability scores scale by themselves when you level because one of the things I liked most about palladium is how you pretty much got all of your variety and powers up front, they just simply became better as you leveled.
Maybe you had a ton of variety out the gate, but power/competence was pretty much the only thing levels meant. Some consider that a weak mechanic because your characters abilities never change, so they characterize that as a lack of 'growth' that would make characters boring...
I never thought so myself and always enjoyed palladium for the fact that it ran that way.
Hmmmm.