My very first PC was a Dwarven Cleric of Cayden Cailean. During a dungeon battle most of the party was beaten unconscious. I managed to get them dragged behind our fighter who bottlenecked the entrance for a 300-esque last stand.
I took a sling bullet to the head and was brought to 0 HP. With more enemies about to emerge from a rear corridor I Channeled Energy to bring the rest of the team up, took the -1 HP as penalty, and then fell unconscious myself. In the battle I was an easy kill as I lay helpless on the ground.
It wasn't until TWO YEARS later I realized I had forgot to include myself in the Channel Energy! Sigh......
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I once posted a "Gamer Talk" message in "General Discussion". ;)
My rookie mistake was not checking wether or not an enemy was dead. We took him with him and decided a hole interviewing strategy before we found out he was dead all along. (Luckely we had a spare.)
Grappling a bigger creature next to a very large pit... It jumped in and took me with it. Needless to say, that particular beast had half-orc monk for lunch that day.
I made a sorcerer without ranks in Knowledge arcana, and thus had big trouble IDing magic items.
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My wizard was at a mid-to-high level, and was worried about getting into a building unobtrusively. Having prepared the whole day beforehand, preparing plenty of spells that would hamper detection or non-lethally disable any passing guards, I had to fiddle around with scrolls of Knock and Wizard Lock to unlock the door, get in, and re-lock it from the inside. After all of that, I slapped myself across the forehead and said:
"Passwall beside the door. Why couldn't I have just done that?"
So in my first group I ended up having to play someone else' character by reason of him being gone that day (standard practice in this group).
We got ambushed by something or other, and his Rogue failed his Will save (as did everyone else, besides my Monk), and was enthralled by some nice bell sound. Out pop a bunch of Spriggans, and they do something else.
Everyone already enthralled again fails (including the Cleric -.-), and runs away panicked...except his Rogue. Who's now caught in the middle of about 5 Spriggans grown to Large size.
We fight for a bit, and it becomes quite clear that my Monk and I can't beat these 5 guys alone. I beat up one but the other 4 are standing around playing whack-a-mole with the Rogue. So I decide "He needs to run away".
"He'll provoke from all of them." the GM said.
I didn't figure I had any other option. So I have him run off. He gets missed by one attack, and makes it about 5 feet and then gets thwomped by the other 3. I run over and shove a healing potion in his mouth (high AC and Snake Style saved me from all the AoOs). He immediately gets thwomped again, and dies.
Took me until the next week to realize there was a Withdraw action, which would've saved him. =/
I once posted a "Gamer Talk" message in "General Discussion". ;)
Ah. Classic. I would say I did that for irony, but I am not that clever. :)
Rynjin: Given that the Spriggans were large, I doubt that withdraw would have helped that much; it affects only the square you start in.
Would've at least let him avoid a few of 'em the way they were set up. I'm pretty sure he would have survived if he'd only been hit by two, not three.
It doesn't make me feel too bad since the guy was thinking of changing his character anyway (this Rogue nearly died in EVERY combat we'd had up to that point), but still.
I once posted a "Gamer Talk" message in "General Discussion". ;)Ah. Classic. I would say I did that for irony, but I am not that clever. :)
I'm just wondering how long it will take for the mods to move it. They may be a while since there are some other hot threads underway.
Talking is a free action- using diplomacy to talk someone down is not. Yeah...
I recently told my group of new players that a sorcerer and a witch could learn spells they can cast from scrolls and wizards books....at least I was partly right with the scroll with the witch lol.
Could have tried Acrobatics to tumble through the threatened squares.
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Spending half an hour trying to work out how to open what appeared to be some kind of a door to a mountain complex.
...until the GM asked if we realised it had a knob.
He managed a whole half hour before he said something?
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He managed a whole half hour before he said something?Spending half an hour trying to work out how to open what appeared to be some kind of a door to a mountain complex.
...until the GM asked if we realised it had a knob.
Something like this happened to me when I was in a group of paranoid beginners. I myself got to use it on a similar group later on. Just present them with one big closed, yet unlocked, door, and wait to see how long it takes before someone says, "I... open it?".
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He managed a whole half hour before he said something?Spending half an hour trying to work out how to open what appeared to be some kind of a door to a mountain complex.
...until the GM asked if we realised it had a knob.
It was a combination of the language we were using to work out what to do next/thinking about what to do/resolving the issue, and the GM being a little preoccupied while we did it.
I played a Monk :'(
<cringe> Arriving on the Paizo boards and assuming that mentioning my feelings re: Pathfinder vs various editions of other games wouldn't cause a giant flaming meteor to descend, burn everything in a 10 mile radius, and leave a giant smoking crater.
I played a Monk :'(
Wait where's the mistake
Starting early on Monk's the best way to go about it. The system mastery you accrue trying to make a good one makes it all the more satisfying when you move to a different class and become a billion times more effective.
That and they're hella fun but that's just my opinion.
I played a Monk :'(
I did that too! Although for me that wasn't a mistake and my monk was CRB only (by choice). To each his own.
Hmmmmm my rookie mistake...
At the end of a campaign during the final fight, I solo'd the dragon with my 3.5 fighter, while the rest of the party fought off the BBEGs and mooks.
This interrupted the wizard's ritual. Said BBEG wizard turned around and blasted me and someone else with meteor swarm, killing both of us.
I took too much damage from the dragon while I was killing it, but during the free round I had I didn't use an item to heal myself.
That amount of HP would have kept me alive. Only one party member survived that fight.
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I played a Monk :'(
Only a bad idea if you don't optimise it.
I narrowly avoided one mistake like this: Nobody though to bring a shovel when we were attempting to dig up buried treasure.
The good news was that my pregen's eclectic equipment list included one! the bad news was it was less "treasure" and more "watery grave filled to the gills with sharks and fishmen.
A rookie mistake on my party's behalf was a full party of various fighting types... and not a single flaks among them. My character brought 3 of them, but when a spider swarm arrived they were all completely flummoxed, and after a few round of trying to take acid off my rapidly-being-devoured corpse, they fled.
It probably didn't help that I set off a trap that covered me with spider pheromones and so they were targeting me first, but in my defence I used a 10-foot pole to poke it first, so I thought I'd be safe. Ah well.
Forgetting the "Fight Defensively" rules at low levels.
I even swapped to a 1-hander and a shield, but being on the defensive would have given me that extra oomph I needed.
i played a bard with 7 constitution
i played a monk
i played a 2WF rogue
i played a few finesse builds who dumped strength
i played a slum wizard with no knowledge skills who picked up a lot of roguish skill choices
I thought I'd hate summoner because he'd never be able to cast the high level wizard spells that I hold so dear... Then I discovered UMD.
I let another player convince me to give the whole idea of "roles" in _Pathfinder_ a chance. Some ideas, like Russian roulette, don't need to be tested to know they are dumb.
What exactly are "roles" in this context?
Anyway, my rookie mistake: letting a player get away with things like pulling off 2 spells with a full-round action in my first game as GM (and in Pathfinder, since it was previously 3.5 for me).
I let another player convince me to give the whole idea of "roles" in _Pathfinder_ a chance. Some ideas, like Russian roulette, don't need to be tested to know they are dumb.What exactly are "roles" in this context?
Anyway, my rookie mistake: letting a player get away with things like pulling off 2 spells with a full-round action in my first game as GM (and in Pathfinder, since it was previously 3.5 for me).
"roles" in this case means taking the idea of "roles" from 4e and pressing them over Pathfinder. So, people who believe in roles believe that each class has a specific role it must fill. To give an example, Sorcerers are criticized if they don't take Knowledge Arcana and, instead of taking a certain set of skills, take another set of skills (such as face skills for the Sorcerer). "roles" means believing that the party needs a "defender", "leader", "striker", and "controller", so you should take a class to fill a missing role.
The whole idea of "roles" is just dumb.
Well, I don't know if I'd call that dumb, honestly I don't even think it's so alien to Pathfinder as-is.
While I don't believe players need to be overly concerned with having a character devoted entirely to a specific role and having one of everything, you cannot deny that a class system in-and-of-itself creates roles for characters of that class. I mean that's practically the definition of classes. The Bard excels at support. The Barbarian excels at dishing out damage. That's how it is.
When we had a critical hit on the table, I used to roll a die and double or triple the result.
From what I've been told, you actually need to throw more dice depending on the critical modifier instead.
I used to think spellcasting was stupid and I'd only play martials and never ever cast their spells(and trade them out if I could even).
I used to think humans were the worst race. They didn't even get a bonus to a stat!(in 3.0.)
My first pathfinder character was a witch who didn't have misfortune or evil eye at level 5. All of his feats were extra hex.
I used to never buy healing items.
Though I was a long time veteran of D&D, my first 3.0 campaign was a disaster involving letting players choose any race available from "Savage Species", a generous dollop of bad houserules, not knowing the actual rules very well, dimension hopping, and a Nazi invasion. Soon after things went to hell in a bucket and got way out of hand. I just folded it up after a time and tried to forget about it.
My first game was a two-person party where one player started the game with an artifact weapon and the other was a wizard with an unlimited spellbook.
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I was the DM.
I had a 7th level party meet a shadow Demon. I rolled randomly to see who got magic jarred. It was the tank. By letting the dice determine this, I had a TPK on my hands, because now we had a tank with 10th level casting ability, deeper darkness at will, an unhittable AC, and the best melee DPS in the party (and POUNCE!).
Also, the player was highly technically proficient.
Finally I had to end the combat with a DM Fiat. None of us felt good about it, but it was the only way to save the campaign.
My shame is great.
My biggest rookie mistake was playing with other gamers that I didn't particularly like because they were the only gamers I knew. I was 14 at the time, and these gamers were both a bit older, and a bit rougher that I was. I gamed with them for about three years.
I only quit playing with them after they started race-baiting another player I'd brought into the game who happened to be Jewish. He and I started our own gaming group.