Care to cite that "piece of text",a s I don't see anything like that?
And the 'sometimes undefined bad stuff happens' clause in the text of RT makes me roll my eyes.
In 3.5, the Rope Trick description says: "Note: It is hazardous to create an extradimensional space within an existing extradimensional space or to take an extradimensional space into an existing one."
I think they've mostly sorted that out in Pathfinder, though:
Extradimensional Spaces
I get annoyed when the game party consist of a Tiefling, an Oread, a Strix, and a Svirfneblin. All of which are supposed to be fairly rare...I honestly couldn't tell you the last time the party for the games I usually play in was made up of just mostly core races, and for me it ruins verisimilitude and immersion. Trying to justify why all the rare races are suddenly in the little town of Sandpoint just doesn't sit right with me.
If the party consists of a tiefling, an oread, a strix, and a svirfneblin, it sounds like four out of five people at the table want a game where non-core races are at least somewhat common. As for immersion, why do only the core races have to be common? Yes, that is mostly the standard assumption made in Golarion, but you can change that as DM. Already, some non-core races are common (kobolds, goblins and, orcs spring to mind). You could add/modify some Sandpoint NPCs to be strixes so the PC isn't completely out of place.
Edit: something just occured to me. Do your players' characters not have backstories that explain how and why they exist? If your players aren't bothering to come up with an explanation of, for example, why their tiefling is in Sandpoint, then I can understand your frustration. If this is the case, then it seems the main problem is the lack of roleplaying, not the uncommon races. Perhaps a compromise would be to allow non-core races, provided some backstory was provided.
The players I play with all admit that they choose a race based on the ability bonuses and other racial traits and how they help (or hinder) their class selection more than anything else. For our group it is primarily about optimization, not about role-playing another race that is interesting. Sometimes they will make up a backstory to explain why their character exists soemtimes they wont (both core and non-core races). I like the default assumptions of Golarion, as a GM I have less work to do when I can pull from an existing world to set up things. As GM I have power to do anything I like.
But you know what is funny to me though? How when I introduced the idea to my group everyone, everyone thought it was actually a good idea. They all agreed that we (as group, me included when I play and don't GM) overuse the non-core races and that it removes some of the unique nature of the races when everyone is playing one. Everybody embraced the idea. But here we are, some guy on the internet telling me it's WRONGBADFUN because I wont allow players unlimited access to whatever races exist.
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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Since the switch to 3.5 I've increased the duration of Bull's Strength (and the other stat increase spells) to 10 min/level. Yeah, the constant bonus is nice (as opposed to the 1d4+1 or whatever it was in 3.0), but at 1 min/level it doesn't last long enough to be particularly useful.
Heh, the 1d4+1 was one of the best parts of the spells in 3.0 Combined with the ability to apply the same metamagic feat multiple times, and PrCs that reduced every metamagic feat's level adjustement, and I once witnessed this exchange in an 18th level game:
caster: "Hey archer do you want a cat's grace?"
archer: "Nah, I already have a +6 Dex item."
caster: *casts a empowered empowered empowered empowered empowered empowered empowered cat's grace* "Here, have a +22 Dexterity"
Most alignment based spells were modified to reflect religious affiliation, but function normally against creatures with an alignment subtype.
Teleportation spells were altered so that teleportation within 1 mile was perfectly fine; after a distance of 1 mile, the chance of a mishap was significantly increased. Mishaps were expanded to include transit time and damage sustained.
Transit Time (d%): 90% chance: 1 hour minimum - 72 hours to arrive; 10% chance of d100 years (if one character suffers it, it's effectively death; if the party suffers it, we start off in the new timeline).
Damage: Ranges from 0 damage to 16d6
The idea is based off the tables given on page 121 of the Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (3.5); the traveler is sliding outside the regular geometry of space (called the Gloom in my setting) and thye creatures native to this place take an unhealthy interest. Damage taken indicates claw, bites, and other monster-made wounds. The traveler retains no memory of having received said wounds.
...But here we are, some guy on the internet telling me it's WRONGBADFUN because I wont allow players unlimited access to whatever races exist.
Well, the implication in your story was that there are people who want to play a party of non-core races and that this necessitates a home-rule limiting racial options. I guess the thing is that it's fine if your friend enjoy this limitation, and that being the case makes the rule seem superfluous.
So... the "WRONGBADFUN" doesn't come from your specific circumstance, but rather that your prescription for what makes a seamless role play experience is unnecessarily limited. I recognize that it is some work to step outside the material presented in pre-published adventures---indeed, I find it easier to just start from scratch and prepare tailored adventures. However, it seems that if you have players with a specific set of races, it seems like it makes the work of adding new races to the module easier because you only have to consider those in the party (who also have local back stories).
Personally, I never rule out racial options, because no matter the level of "rarity," my players articulate their character races into their biographies. I know that there is a level of optimization involved in the players decisions for race and racial traits, but that in no way conflicts with enjoyable role play. In fact, the production of competent (or sometimes circumstantially incompetent) characters is closely tied into making a believable, role-playable character.
I mean, what I have a hard time believing is that in a universe where we find genies wielding unimaginable wish granting powers, awesome planar deities, and immortal undead; simple boring, vanilla, gender-binary humans (and humans of differing proportions: elves, dwarfs, gnomes, etc) seem to make up the majority...
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every race my players play becomes a common race in homebrewed setting. In all actuality humans don't exist in my home games because no one ever plays them. heck most core races are rare now. If you want your players to stop playing exotic races, instead of stopping them from playing the character they want, simply make the races non-exotic. I once ran a setting of all genie-kin, so trust me it's possible.
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Care to cite that "piece of text",a s I don't see anything like that?
And the 'sometimes undefined bad stuff happens' clause in the text of RT makes me roll my eyes.In 3.5, the Rope Trick description says: "Note: It is hazardous to create an extradimensional space within an existing extradimensional space or to take an extradimensional space into an existing one."
I think they've mostly sorted that out in Pathfinder, though:
Extradimensional Spaces
The risk in 3.5 and earlier version was that of opening a rift on the astral or ethereal plane.
To be lazy and citing Wikipedia instead of typing all the relevant texts from several editions:
In the physics of Dungeons & Dragons, putting a bag of holding inside a portable hole will cause a rift to be opened to the Astral Plane, and both items will be lost forever. If a portable hole is placed within a bag of holding, it instead opens a gate to the Astral Plane, sucking in every creature in a ten foot radius, and destroying both the bag and hole. The contents of the bags are either scattered throughout the Astral Plane or destroyed. Placing bags of holding into one another (or within a Heward's handy haversack or vice-versa) has no adverse effects in the current[clarification needed] edition of the game and would allow one to store an unlimited quantity of items (each bag of holding being limited in total weight capacity to roughly 40 additional bags, depending on the size of each).[citation needed]In earlier editions of Dungeons & Dragons, putting one bag of holding inside another would have the same effect as placing a portable hole into a bag of holding. Interactions with portable holes had the effects listed above.
That is the risk depicted in the old spell text. It wasn't something indefinite, it was defined in another section of the rulebook, the DMG.
honestly, I still don't get Pathfinder's race rules. Is there any exp penalty or hampering at all for playing an Aasimar or Tiefling even though they get better stats? Is there any level or exp delay for playing anything with only 1 hit dice, no matter how powerful it is?
For the weaker ones like Aasimar and such, no. Which frankly is fine by me, I don't see them as all that much better than the base races. (Especially human, with that damned bonus feat and skill points - I've finally got races in my own games that are both thematically interesting and mechanically robust enough to dissuade my players from all- or nearly-all-human parties. But it took some doing, quite a lot of homebrew work, and discussion with my players extensively about what kind of creatures they wanted to be playable in our world. Thankfully I have a group that's just as interested in more non-standard PCs and less "humans and humans with slightly different physical traits" as I am.)
For the really powerful ones like Noble Drow, their statblock recommends that they be held back by a level.
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As for my own spell rewrites, the only changes I've made that I can think of off the top of my head are the above-mentioned relocations of healing and raise/rez spells to Necromancy.
That is the risk depicted in the old spell text. It wasn't something indefinite, it was defined in another section of the rulebook, the DMG.
Note: It is hazardous to create an extradimensional space within an existing extradimensional space or to take an extradimensional space into an existing one.
Upon checking the PF srd, I'm happy to see that this passage has been omitted. But this is the passage that's always invoked in debates involving the brokeness of pre-2008 Rope Trick.
RT-is-fine Guy: Rope trick doesn't break the game, because everyone knows not to camp out inside of it!
RT-is-broken Guy: What, how do you figure?!
RT-is-fine Guy: Because you can't bring your bag of holding inside, and who wants leave their loot unattended?
RT-is-broken Guy: What's so bad about bringing your bag inside a rope trick?
RT-is-fine Guy: It says right in the spell text...it's hazardous.
Maybe the hazard is defined somewhere in the DMG, but a quick scan of the planar section doesn't reveal any details or even mention extra-dim spaces.
Save-or-Die spells & effects reduce you to minus {spell level} hit points and you are dying, rather than delivering insta-death.
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That is the risk depicted in the old spell text. It wasn't something indefinite, it was defined in another section of the rulebook, the DMG.Note: It is hazardous to create an extradimensional space within an existing extradimensional space or to take an extradimensional space into an existing one.Upon checking the PF srd, I'm happy to see that this passage has been omitted. But this is the passage that's always invoked in debates involving the brokeness of pre-2008 Rope Trick.
RT-is-fine Guy: Rope trick doesn't break the game, because everyone knows not to camp out inside of it!
RT-is-broken Guy: What, how do you figure?!
RT-is-fine Guy: Because you can't bring your bag of holding inside, and who wants leave their loot unattended?
RT-is-broken Guy: What's so bad about bringing your bag inside a rope trick?
RT-is-fine Guy: It says right in the spell text...it's hazardous.
Maybe the hazard is defined somewhere in the DMG, but a quick scan of the planar section doesn't reveal any details or even mention extra-dim spaces.
It is under bag of holding and portable hole. The tear open a hole in the astral or ethereal plane when placed in each other.
Further pieces around different WOTC an TSR product for 1st and 2nd edition specify that it happen every time you place or create a extradimensional space within another extradimensional space.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You know, you could just let it function as a camping spell, and a pretty good one, like it used to be.
Having it leave identifiable evidence (the rope) is a nice new balancing factor but the truth is, if you're relying on attrition to balance your encounters, rope trick is just going to be the first in a long series of annoying disappointments with your campaign.
Instead, just assume that players will do whatever it takes to avoid taking on perilous encounters while vulnerable (i.e. less than full HP and spells). When they camp in a rope trick mid dungeon, let NPCs and monsters roll to spot the rope, and then roleplay accordingly (including spellcraft checks). Sometimes they'll figure it out and lay an ambush. Sometimes they'll leave the rope alone and move on, and the players get a nice, refreshing nap. Big woop.
It's rather naive, I think, for GMs to insist that challenging the party means forcing them into marathon encounters when basic logic demands otherwise.
I houserule a lot so have many spell houserules at low levels:
colorspray: all durations reduced, 2d4 and 1d4 to 1 round
invisibility: Any action out of your personal space break invisibility
summoning break it after creature summoned. Without a houserule like this everyone debate over what is hostile action and it breakes immersion
silence: target is fixed point in space or creature(with will save), no rock throwing
i may even make original spell 3lvl and swap it with with zone of silence(reduced to 1min/lvl) as it was spell's original intent not anti-caster nuke
resist energy: scales as 10/15/20 instead of 10/20/30
The players I play with all admit that they choose a race based on the ability bonuses and other racial traits and how they help (or hinder) their class selection more than anything else.
You're lucky, most of mine are serious roleplay nuts. That means I get flak in-game whenever I try to wing it. They can be demanding.
As for the races, I use over 30, but I employ Umbral Reaver's idea of paying for 'Races' with character points. I retained this from GURPS play, the more 'special' the snowflake, the more you should be willing to 'pay to play'. Despite the Human being the mechanically 'best' buy, only 2 of 8 of the semi-regulars are Humans.
Without going into too much detail, Dwarves cost 2, Elves 10, and the most expensive costs 15 in a 15 point game.
You know, you could just let it function as a camping spell, and a pretty good one, like it used to be.
Having it leave identifiable evidence (the rope) is a nice new balancing factor but the truth is, if you're relying on attrition to balance your encounters, rope trick is just going to be the first in a long series of annoying disappointments with your campaign.
Instead, just assume that players will do whatever it takes to avoid taking on perilous encounters while vulnerable (i.e. less than full HP and spells). When they camp in a rope trick mid dungeon, let NPCs and monsters roll to spot the rope, and then roleplay accordingly (including spellcraft checks). Sometimes they'll figure it out and lay an ambush. Sometimes they'll leave the rope alone and move on, and the players get a nice, refreshing nap. Big woop.
It's rather naive, I think, for GMs to insist that challenging the party means forcing them into marathon encounters when basic logic demands otherwise.
My player's did this in RotR, and it worked fine UNTIL they used the spell to camp mid-dungeon where the BBEG for that section was specifically scrying on them. He gathered his forces, marched them into the room with the rope trick and then dispelled it. One minute, snoozing, the next you landed on a mummy. Good times.
Oh, and bags of holding and the link inside a rope trick space do not explode, they just stop working.