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How old was the GM Spook? Didn't any of the players voice their disapproval at this treatment?
More importantly, why did this last so long? After the very 1st of these inanely stupid events, you should have had a talk with the GM about the type of game everyone was looking for. If he insisted on continuing this inanity, it should have been with less players at the table. I know I would have left before it got that far.
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Worst mistake I made involved a 7-headed hydra, a surprise round, and my wife's character.
The party entered a partially flooded room in which a hydra was swimming in. The party failed to spot it and it charged at them (full attack due to hydra-ness).
The party was clumped up and I had to decide how many heads attacked each character. Brilliantly I decided to start with my wife's character and roll a d8. The number would be how many heads attacked her character, and then I'd work down the line. Of course, you guessed it, I rolled a 7. All 7 heads attacked her character and she was killed outright before she even got to roll initiative. LAME! "I guess we know who will be sleeping on the couch tonight." :P She was joking, but it was disappointing. We did joke that the hydra should have knocked itself out by all heads slamming into the same spot simultaneously.
Later I realized I should have assigned a number to each player and just rolled for each head separately. What a goof move.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad call.
PCs focus fire all the time (Which one did he hit? I'll go for that one.).It depends on what kind of prey the hydra is used to.
If the typical passerby is a 1HD critter, who goes limp after one bite, then I'd spread the attacks out 1/opponent, then roll randomly for who gets attacked by spare heads.
If the hydra has to compete with giant crocodiles, or levelled up NPCs with dangerous counter-attacks, all of which take several hits to take down, then the hydra's justified in biting one opponent as many times as is needed to bring them down, then pick another opponent, attack them with as many heads are needed, repeat...
Make sure of one opponent before moving onto the next. Reduce the number of counterattacks coming in.
Just like the PCs do.
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I think you missed the fact that it was my wife's character. Yeah, it was a bad call. ;D
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How old was the GM Spook? Didn't any of the players voice their disapproval at this treatment?
We were all like pre-teen, early teens or so at the time. And yeah, we all kind of expressed disapproval. This is literally like 20 years ago, but the jellyfish barmaid is something that's always stuck with me.
I sometimes joke about the 'cursed amulet of eternal DMing' as basically I always got tapped to take over in situations like this.
I would like to say that this was only the tip of iceberg of DM based insanity I've run into as a player, but its not. My own DM style is literally based on not being like the majority of my past DMs. I didn't include other 'acts of DM' like being hit by a meteor when a character of mine wanted to take up black-smithing (different DM in a 2e game), being beaten to death in a sack without getting a chance to act in a Council of Wyrms game, or when I got eaten off camera by an Ogre Magi in an online Planescape game (different DM again) for reasons of brevity.
When you're a young nerd in the ages before the internet, you took your games where you could get them.
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I had a GM once who thought Critical Fumbles were a great idea. I took the tables, ran some descriptive stats on them, and it showed typical PCs would be permanently maimed, at a minimum, by the time they reached 3rd level.Oh, you and your silly "statistics" and "common sense"... :D
Best test for fumble rules I've heard yet: "Run a combat of 10 level 1 Warriors against 10 straw dummies (Medium inanimate object, AC 5). For 2 minutes (20 rounds) each Warrior makes 1 attack per round against the dummies; the dummies do not attack back.
If (at the end of 20 rounds) any of the Warriors are dead or dying then the DM must butter his fumble rules and eat them." - hewhosaysfish, GitP forums
challenge accepted.
using 5 warriors and 5 wizards casting acid splash. to make it even warriors have 0 str mod and using a sickle to crit on natural 20. using the crit and fumble deck from paizowarrior1- 9, 17, 14, 6, 10, 17, 10, 13, 13, 14, 10, 10, 2, 15, 19, 5, 3, 5, 2, 12
warrior2- 6,9,14,12,2,6,9,3,20(5)norm dmg+permanent blind (ref saves), 10,14,5,14,17,14,9,5,7,14
warrior3-12,1(15),18,16,15,3,1(5),14,10,11, 14,1(15),14,7,9,17,10,8,2,9
warrior4-8,14,3,8,5,12,4,18,6,3,18,14,10,10,7,5,18,11,16,12
warrior5-2,5,6,4,12,10,8,6,16,9,11,10,9,11,11,16,4,15,17,6
wizard1-5,6,6,5,19,15,4,10,10,12,15,10,13,15,7,13,16,14,2,2
wizard2-10,17,6,13,16,2,5,12,1(7),7,8,20(13)x2dmg+daze1rnd, 2,12,10,14,16,14,6,8
wizard3-17,1(12),18,4,10,9,4,10,20(9)x2dmg+2d6 random energy dmg,13,12,10,18,18,17,19,15,6,1(3)take2d6electricity dmg (3dmg),18
wizard4-18,16,9,16,16,18,19,11,12,8,18,17,6,6,13,13,12,18,13,18
wizard5-5,8,4,18,1(16),17,6,3,15,17,15,17,8,5,6,10,12,2,16,6
mmmmm no one died at all.
...
As per...
Even with confirmation rolls, the chance of a fighter fumbling increases as he gains levels, which to me just seems farcical.I mentioned only that descriptive stats show a permanently maimed character by 3rd level (in one DM's case) but facts like what Blakmane wrote are another common and totally counter intuitive effect as well.
In game, under the same circumstances, how is a 20th level fighter more likely to fumble than a 1st level one? ...
1) It is not all that hard to come up with a method of threat occurrence and confirmation roll which would be less likely as level increased.
2) I don't think it is all that unrealistic. Have you ever watched a champion martial artist practice their really peak all out moves? they actually screw up pretty often. Why? Because it really is horribly difficult even for them. If they are in a match against a brown belt, they won't try something like that very often because it isn't needed and could conceivably lose the match for them.
Similarly your hypothetical 20th level fighter, up against a constipated koala bear, might decide he doesn't need to use all 20 feats and umpteen iterative multi-weapon ginsu attacks.
.
.
...
I like the solution I proposed earlier in the thread of using Critical Fumble Tables only for cursed characters. Adds a lot of flavor over, "Your PC is cursed by the Witch King of Angmar so you get -2 on all your d20 rolls until its removed by a High Priest". ...
I actually like this a lot and intend to implement it immediately. =0
The favor of the Malachite Priest will give you access to the critical deck for X days. The disfavor of the Onyx priest will subject you to the fumble deck for Y days.
... then you ought to at least first house-rule out the D&D 3.x/PF "facing doesn't matter" stupidity. How the <bleep> can facing not matter?
Yeah, that one has always bugged me quite a bit.
Furthermore, in my experience, players who bring up statistics with respect to dice rolls tend to be of a... certain kind, which I would normally prefer to avoid. I'm making no extrapolation to forum users here - personal experience is a poor indicator of a general rule!It depends on what the GM is trying to do. Outside of games like Paranoia Crit Fumbles muck up the game, or at best slow it down, in the vast majority of cases.
As per...
Even with confirmation rolls, the chance of a fighter fumbling increases as he gains levels, which to me just seems farcical.I mentioned only that descriptive stats show a permanently maimed character by 3rd level (in one DM's case) but facts like what Blakmane wrote are another common and totally counter intuitive effect as well.
In game, under the same circumstances, how is a 20th level fighter more likely to fumble than a 1st level one?
I like the solution I proposed earlier in the thread of using Critical Fumble Tables only for cursed characters. Adds a lot of flavor over, "Your PC is cursed by the Witch King of Angmar so you get -2 on all your d20 rolls until its removed by a High Priest".
I also like what...
The other rule I have had used in a campaign I played in, but not used as a gm is that all fumble damage is non lethal damage.Good idea! A compromise in the useful sense.
critical hit and fumble deck are pretty quick to draw from and incorporate the effects of in my game. I would invite you if I could.
One of the wierdest experiences I ever had as a player vis a vis a GM call was at a table where I was playing a bard and was told by the GM that I was breaking the game because I was doing support for my group. Appearantly he felt that PCs should stand and fall on their own with no interplay whatsoever, as we were all members of a "dark" rogue's guild. The group appearantly agreed, if only so I'd stop saying "don't forget to add +3 to hit and damage" at them. I was additionally the only healer (in a group full of rogues). I shrugged and rolled with it. I made a cleric who worshipped Istus (this was during the late 1e days in Greyhawk) who refused to heal the party, even when their characters died, who said "it was your fated time to die". ALOT.
My favorite part, however, is that my cleric never died, and the group would only play rogues, so I ended up with a TON of rogue gear. magical leather armor and shortswords abounded. eventually I just started my own rogue's guild, and we immediately became the powerhouse guild in the Duchy of Ernst.
It was a fun campaign and all, but as someone who really enjoys support characters, it was a tough pill to swallow.
One of the worst rulings a GM did to me was in a 2nd edition game. I was playing a gnome illusionist/thief. We were sneaking past a bunch of sleeping goblins. The GM ruled that I made so much noise that I woke the goblins. It wasn't the paladin in full plate (his best friend) or anyone else. It wasn't the prisoners we had just freed. It was the completely silent, unarmored, no metal carrying or wearing character trained to be silent. He used it to cut me off from the rest of the party.This was a common thing, in 1E and 2E games.
Because the rules didn't include an official skills system, except for the handwavy 'secondary skills/professions', or the 'non-Weapon Proficiencies' of 2E and late 1e (from Oriental Adventures , Wilderness/Dungeoneers Survival Guide), there were wide swathes of the game for which no rules existed, and you had to rely on GM fiat.
One of the ways GMs got round that was to ask for ability checks, after all, the NWPs were ability checks, so there's precedent, right?
And the skills a Thief got as part of his class were things that, strictly speaking, there was little reason to disallow other people doing...so...
The player of a Thief would cross-ref his level on the table (or in 2E, he'd spend a pool of points), to find his success chances.
The Thief would either be great at one or two things, or 'meh' across the board, till he'd got some levels.The non-Thief PCs? They didn't have a Move Silently skill, or Hide in Shadows, or anything else. And that can't be right. So the GM says "Roll a Dex check" with the aim of rolling less than their stat.
Result? Everyone in the party is allowed an attempt, at chances of (stat x 5%).
The Thief?
"No, you've got a skill listed for this. Use that."
"I've got Dex 16, so I should pass 16 times out of 20."
"No, you've got a skill listed for this. Use that."
"But that skill is only 30%. I stand a better chance at 16/20."
"No, you've got a skill listed for this. Use that."Deciding to play a...
But that's not what happened. He just made a ruling on the spot. I didn't get to roll to move silently. He didn't roll behind the screen. He simply said that my thief made too much noise and woke up all the goblins. If (as someone else suggested) he didn't want me in the game he should have just said so. He treated everyone except his best friend similar to how he treated me. He didn't have a good group after a while. Most people just quit.
In college I had a gm who said you could cast all the spells held on a single scroll with one action.
Hooboy. Welcome to the written word being the most powerful thing in existence.
For some time the DM I wrote about a few pages ago also believed that if you had scrolls with multiple spells, you could only cast one of them...and then the entire scroll burned up. I had to physically make a scroll that was 10 pages long, and then I just cut it into 10 pages in front of him and said "I now have 10 separate scrolls." At that point he understood the folly of his interpretation.
I had a GM once who thought Critical Fumbles were a great idea. I took the tables, ran some descriptive stats on them, and it showed typical PCs would be permanently maimed, at a minimum, by the time they reached 3rd level.Oh, you and your silly "statistics" and "common sense"... :D
Best test for fumble rules I've heard yet: "Run a combat of 10 level 1 Warriors against 10 straw dummies (Medium inanimate object, AC 5). For 2 minutes (20 rounds) each Warrior makes 1 attack per round against the dummies; the dummies do not attack back.
If (at the end of 20 rounds) any of the Warriors are dead or dying then the DM must butter his fumble rules and eat them." - hewhosaysfish, GitP forumschallenge accepted.
using 5 warriors and 5 wizards casting acid splash. to make it even warriors have 0 str mod and using a sickle to crit on natural 20. using the crit and fumble deck from paizowarrior1- 9, 17, 14, 6, 10, 17, 10, 13, 13, 14, 10, 10, 2, 15, 19, 5, 3, 5, 2, 12
warrior2- 6,9,14,12,2,6,9,3,20(5)norm dmg+permanent blind (ref saves), 10,14,5,14,17,14,9,5,7,14
warrior3-12,1(15),18,16,15,3,1(5),14,10,11, 14,1(15),14,7,9,17,10,8,2,9
warrior4-8,14,3,8,5,12,4,18,6,3,18,14,10,10,7,5,18,11,16,12
warrior5-2,5,6,4,12,10,8,6,16,9,11,10,9,11,11,16,4,15,17,6wizard1-5,6,6,5,19,15,4,10,10,12,15,10,13,15,7,13,16,14,2,2
wizard2-10,17,6,13,16,2,5,12,1(7),7,8,20(13)x2dmg+daze1rnd, 2,12,10,14,16,14,6,8
wizard3-17,1(12),18,4,10,9,4,10,20(9)x2dmg+2d6 random energy dmg,13,12,10,18,18,17,19,15,6,1(3)take2d6electricity dmg (3dmg),18
wizard4-18,16,9,16,16,18,19,11,12,8,18,17,6,6,13,13,12,18,13,18
wizard5-5,8,4,18,1(16),17,6,3,15,17,15,17,8,5,6,10,12,2,16,6mmmmm no one died at all.
The 2d6 electricity damage came close, actually!
In all fairness, this happened in a purposefully difficult and gritty campaign. We were okay with the ruling, and able to get it fixed...mostly.
A monk was attacking an enemy knight, and rolled a 1. The DM used a crit fumble chart he found online, The rolled result was "Attacker is disarmed"
Monk: Not bad since I don't have a weapon to drop.
DM: Nah. We'll just disarm you literally. he cuts off both your hands.
... that chart is for vorpal weapons back in 2nd edition....
... that chart is for vorpal weapons back in 2nd edition....In all fairness, this happened in a purposefully difficult and gritty campaign. We were okay with the ruling, and able to get it fixed...mostly.
A monk was attacking an enemy knight, and rolled a 1. The DM used a crit fumble chart he found online, The rolled result was "Attacker is disarmed"
Monk: Not bad since I don't have a weapon to drop.
DM: Nah. We'll just disarm you literally. he cuts off both your hands.
And that wouldn't disarm a monk who can still kick, elbow, head butt, ect...
I listened to an argument between a fellow player *cough* Mike *cough* and the DM about how dark the darkness spell made an area... for over an hour.
Right after that argument - the party entered a room with a pressure plate trap next to the exit door. When standing on the pressure plate, a spear ejected and retracted from a hole in the wall around chest level. We broke the door from a distance, then tried to crawl over the pressure plate and under the trap... Yeah... all of a sudden, the spear, which was consistently shooting out at chest level shot out at ankle level... then ensued another argument between Mike and the DM about the chest high spear hole not being able to hit someone crawling.
This didn't happen to me...it happened to a friend:
Setting: GenCon 200? (not sure which year, but not long after 3.0 was released
Situation: Main tournament event. Round 2 (or maybe 3, not sure) My friend is playing a druid, which was handed to him when he sat down at the table. Apparently the druid is big on shapeshifting, but does not have profiles for various animals on the character sheet.
The Ruling: No one but the DM is allowed to have the PHB, DMG or the MM. No exceptions. The DM refused to assist the druid by handing out or reading off basic stats for bears, tigers, wolves, etc
End result:Druid ran around stabbing things with a dagger and was generally useless. The table did not advance.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This one happened to me (and it colors my decision to go to GenCon each year)
Setting: GenCon 1996 Grand Tourney Semi Finals. We blazed through the adventure. We actually finished it. We found the undead bad guy with the glowing gem in his skull that was bleeding black mist. Our paladin took the gem out and we destroyed it.
The Ruling:We did not actually cast detect magic or detect evil on the gem before destroying it. No points awarded. The thing was obviously magical (glowy with black mist bleeding out of it). Paladin actually did use Detect Evil on the undead guy, but since it was not specifically cast on the gem itself, no points.
End result:We did not advance. :P
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I listened to an argument between a fellow player *cough* Mike *cough* and the DM about how dark the darkness spell made an area... for over an hour.
Right after that argument - the party entered a room with a pressure plate trap next to the exit door. When standing on the pressure plate, a spear ejected and retracted from a hole in the wall around chest level. We broke the door from a distance, then tried to crawl over the pressure plate and under the trap... Yeah... all of a sudden, the spear, which was consistently shooting out at chest level shot out at ankle level... then ensued another argument between Mike and the DM about the chest high spear hole not being able to hit someone crawling.
In the DM's defense, he DID say "chest high". Not his failt you lowered your chests. :D
One of my favorite bad GM rulings occurred when we had just gotten out of a combat at 1st level, and had no healers in the party and no healing items. Instead we had a PC or two who had taken the Heal skill with Healer's Kits. They say "We use the Heal skill to Treat Deadly Wounds!" The GM says...
When treating deadly wounds, you can restore hit points to a damaged creature. Treating deadly wounds restores 1 hit point per level of the creature. If you exceed the DC by 5 or more, add your Wisdom modifier (if positive) to this amount. A creature can only benefit from its deadly wounds being treated within 24 hours of being injured and never more than once per day. You must expend two uses from a healer's kit to perform this task. You take a –2 penalty on your Heal skill check for each use from the healer's kit that you lack.
The GM ruled that the bolded section meant "Uses fewer than the maximum for the healer's kit you are using." (Side note: a healer's kit contains 10 uses.) This meant if someone used four uses of their healer's kit, they'd take a -8 penalty to the check to treat deadly wounds with that kit, injuring the patient further if they failed hard enough. The end result (After a 30-minute argument) was that we couldn't get treatment and had to suck up having fewer hit points for the day.
This one happened to me (and it colors my decision to go to GenCon each year)Setting: GenCon 1996 Grand Tourney Semi Finals. We blazed through the adventure. We actually finished it. We found the undead bad guy with the glowing gem in his skull that was bleeding black mist. Our paladin took the gem out and we destroyed it.
The Ruling:We did not actually cast detect magic or detect evil on the gem before destroying it. No points awarded. The thing was obviously magical (glowy with black mist bleeding out of it). Paladin actually did use Detect Evil on the undead guy, but since it was not specifically cast on the gem itself, no points.
End result:We did not advance. :P
Having judged in the AD&D Open in past years, I hear you. Some of the scoring was very nit picky and excellent groups could be passed over for advancement if they figured out shortcuts around certain obstacles, misinterpreted something was a time-waster when it was not and had points they needed to score.
A player went crazy and started killing civilians in a town square so as to sell their body parts to a flesh golem crafter. When the party found out, I was the only one that tried to stop him since the rest of the party said that if the city has no actual laws, then there is nothing we can do. I killed the murderous PC as it was the only way I could see to stop him, after he had already caused massive problems before hand and nobody else was willing to do anything. It was kind of a last straw and multiple in-character warnings situation.
GM Ruling: Killing an ally, even a former one, for any reason is an evil act. Drop alignment from NG to CE.
I argued that he was not an ally but a villain at that point and "what if en enemy was secretly a party friendly NPC? Would it be an evil act to take him out when he reveals he is the BBEG because he used to be an ally?"
I let it go after that as the ruling stuck and I had to earn my alignment back. It's kind of a joke now and nobody really is upset over it I think.
That is possibly the dumbest ruling on this list. Granted, that spot is hotly contested, but that ruling is a serious contender.
Back in the 3.5 days I had a gm that would apply random modifiers to random things, use rules from an obvious third party supplement even though he said no third party (which we were fine with) and made the gmpc's more important than the pc's. We had gotten into a few scrapes and figured that we should probably all have some kind of bucket of water on us (gm never asked until the day we used it). Our cleric had gotten hit by some kind of demon with a template and was bleeding out. He's going to die next round so the barbarian and warlock go to fight the demon thing. My rogue/wizard grabs his bucket of water and I say "I drown him." His response "That's not going to work." My response, (gm liked to bet xp and we were around level 5) "I will bet you all of my experience and all of my gold that I can save him." Gm took the bet and read the swim rules. In 3.5 if you drown you go to -1 hp and are automatically stabilized. Guess who went up a few levels that night? Not the rogue/wizard because the gm thought it was stupid, I didn't lose any xp because I was right, but the gm said the cleric bled out on the next round because "that's not right."
Playing a ECL 3 character with 1d8 unarmed attacks The DM's own creation; two-weapon fighting doesn't work with unarmed attacks. When I try to pick up the Boar fighting style, you need to be 3rd level for that and I don't care what ECL means.
Different GM from the one before, 3.5 game:
My half-orc barb was drinking in a bar literally at the start of the game (makes sense, right?), so eventually...
The GM says "Roll me a Con check."
Me: "Kay!" *Rattle rattle* "18 on the die, so with my con mod: 21.
GM: "You failed to roll under your Con score, you pass out."
Me: o.o (I would bet money that if I had rolled too low, I would have "missed the DC.")
This was the same GM who had us roll ridiculously underpowered characters (4d6 drop lowest, in order. Oh and if you don't like the first set, you can roll again but you MUST take the second set.), made us roll gold (That's fair.) but then placed us in a sprawling metropolis where the average commoner made somewhere on the order of 1,000 gp a year (if not month) had a military that rode dragons, and everything cost twice as much after Character creation. There was no reason for any of us to be there or take any of the general-of-said-military's jobs. D&D is supposed to be about the party's characters, not showing off how pathetic and insignificant they are next to you behind your GM screen.
I have to bring up the Murphy's Rules:
"In a 30-minute RuneQuest battle (Chaosium) involving 6000 armored,
experienced warriors using Great Axes, more than 150 men will decapitate
themselves and another 600 will chop off their own arms or legs..."
Butt let's see...
The Champions referee who proudly told me "So I looked at the player's character sheet, and I saw he had "Hunted by Mechanon" as a disadvantage. So I think to myself, "Hey, Mechanon is an evil robot that doesn't care anything about humanity. So he just nukes the city and kills the guy. Five minute game, dude!"
And then there was the D&D DM who redid the encounter table to be TRULY random- everything had an equal chance of being encountered. There was an qual chance of meeting 1D20 orcs as there was an elder dragon. Which is why, as soon as the 1st. level party started walking down the road, *rollrolllroll" "You meet a lich. Roll for initiative." ONe round later, "Yo're all dead. Make new characters."
But the worst?
A friend mentioned the first time she gamed, with the first guy mentioned above as DM. The scenario boiled down to in the first five minutes, "Your elf is caught and raped by a hundred orcs. ..what? You failed your Hide in Cover roll!"
4d6 drop lowest would still average to 9 right?
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Playing a ECL 3 character with 1d8 unarmed attacks The DM's own creation; two-weapon fighting doesn't work with unarmed attacks. When I try to pick up the Boar fighting style, you need to be 3rd level for that and I don't care what ECL means.
That's actually the way that ECL works. Level + Racial HD + LA = ECL, but only the Racial HD/Level count for qualifying for Feats. So if you are playing a +2 LA creature with 1 Class Level, your an ECL 3, but you only count as a 1st level character for anything but XP purposes.
4d6 drop lowest would still average to 9 right?Even straight 3d6 doesn't average to nine, much less 4d6 drop lowest.
3d6 is ((1+6)/2)*3 =3.5*3 = 10.5; you can't roll a zero on a six sided dice - it isn't 0-6 its 1-6. To average nine it would have to be 3d5.
4d6 drop lowest is roughly 12.5. (12.25 to be more precise)
For edification, here.
http://rumkin.com/reference/dnd/diestats.php
He did say 4d6 drop lowest in order. But yeah, 4d6 drop lowest in order would only go for "underpowered" characters if you had to choose what you wanted to play BEFORE rolling, which is a definite dick move.
Would I play it...hell yeah...but I'd hardly consider optimal, or even normal power levels bu most modern gamer standards...
...I've played 3d6 game (with a single reroll for one array) ouch!
I see 20 to 25 point buys being floated at Roll20...
The other night while playing my cleric in an arena-based pvp thing, I cast bestow curse on a foe. I chose the '50% chance to do nothing' curse. On the foe's turn, the GM rolls a d100, and ends up with a 1 on the d10 and a 00 on the d%. Everyone knows that means he rolled a 1, but he gets an evil grin and tries to act like he rolled a 100. It takes several people cajoling him about it for him to agree it's a 1, and then he proceeds to act like he had to roll under 50 for the enemy to act normally. It took me confronting him on whether he made the decision that it was supposed to be under or over 50 after he rolled for him to finally concede that my spell took effect. In the same night he also ruled that pounce didn't grant rake attacks (even though it explicitly states that it does).
Playing a ECL 3 character with 1d8 unarmed attacks The DM's own creation; two-weapon fighting doesn't work with unarmed attacks. When I try to pick up the Boar fighting style, you need to be 3rd level for that and I don't care what ECL means.That's actually the way that ECL works. Level + Racial HD + LA = ECL, but only the Racial HD/Level count for qualifying for Feats. So if you are playing a +2 LA creature with 1 Class Level, your an ECL 3, but you only count as a 1st level character for anything but XP purposes.
Skill ranks are based off of hit dice, you need three ranks in intimidation to get boar strike, an ECL3 character can put 3 ranks into a skill thus allowing them to get the Boar style feat at class level 1.
Old school GM decided to put facing rules into the game rather haphazardly, essentially your square behind you was flat-footed so pointing yourself was weird and time consuming; also if any rogues were about, they could sneak attack at will basically. It sucked, even though I played a rogue.
Skill ranks are based off of hit dice, you need three ranks in intimidation to get boar strike, an ECL3 character can put 3 ranks into a skill thus allowing them to get the Boar style feat at class level 1.Playing a ECL 3 character with 1d8 unarmed attacks The DM's own creation; two-weapon fighting doesn't work with unarmed attacks. When I try to pick up the Boar fighting style, you need to be 3rd level for that and I don't care what ECL means.That's actually the way that ECL works. Level + Racial HD + LA = ECL, but only the Racial HD/Level count for qualifying for Feats. So if you are playing a +2 LA creature with 1 Class Level, your an ECL 3, but you only count as a 1st level character for anything but XP purposes.
Wut?
ECL 3 character with LA +2 has only 1 HD.
Unless the LA+2 came from racial hit dice. Though I can't remember a race with racial hit dice that has a +0 level adjustment.
I also felt level adjustment was a terrible system, and was glad to see that removed for Pathfinder.
Unless the LA+2 came from racial hit dice. Though I can't remember a race with racial hit dice that has a +0 level adjustment.
I also felt level adjustment was a terrible system, and was glad to see that removed for Pathfinder.
I thought it was a good concept, just not implemented quite correctly.
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i didnt realize how hard core one my gaming group is.
we auto confirm crits and fumbles, we use both the crit hits (modified to be more deadly for weapon focus, they get to draw two cards) and crit fumbles deck and all combatants from the mooks to the bbeg gets to use the use deck.
Our GM did offer to allow only auto confirms on 20's once we got higher level and the game was getting even deadlier, but all us declined:).
i play in another game with no fumbles and rolling to confirm on crits and it's just not as exciting, differn't strokes i guess.