| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Salty Barbarian/Anius the Talewise: Getur bollar þín að vera alltaf fullur! Einnig gott tilvísun með nafni og tilgreind kyni ! Ég missti af nafngiftir venju fyrr en ég sá kyn og þá áttaði ég hvernig þú skeyta þeim saman . Mjög góð tök á forbears tungumáli okkar örugglega !
We should totally make a Salty Norse Thread wherein we complain about history and the various things the rest of the world gets wrong (NO MEAD?! MADNESS!!!)! Are you game for it, landa?
And yes, before you ask, I have studied most of the old Norse languages. As a proud scholar of my family, which is one of the most prominent Franks in history spliced with an offshoot of the Skjöldung, I made it a point to learn these things.
Salty Barbarian/Anius the Talewise: Getur bollar þín að vera alltaf fullur! Einnig gott tilvísun með nafni og tilgreind kyni ! Ég missti af nafngiftir venju fyrr en ég sá kyn og þá áttaði ég hvernig þú skeyta þeim saman . Mjög góð tök á forbears tungumáli okkar örugglega !
We should totally make a Salty Norse Thread wherein we complain about history and the various things the rest of the world gets wrong (NO MEAD?! MADNESS!!!)! Are you game for it, landa?
And yes, before you ask, I have studied most of the old Norse languages. As a proud scholar of my family, which is one of the most prominent Franks in history spliced with an offshoot of the Skjöldung, I made it a point to learn these things.
I study Old English rather than Old Norse.
The Salty Barbarian is of nonspecific Germanic origin (non-specificity makes it easy for me to make jokes as the Salty Barbarian) but I am actually polish! c: I have been studying Germanic history for 5 years and I am a devotee of Thor.
Also Scyldingas!!! ! ! ! !!!! ! !! I'm writing a story about them!
But yes I'm totally up for a Salty Nordic Snarking thread.
I might be wrong here... but I always thought you only made knowledge checks for things a character didn't directly experience.
If he designed the town's layout he has intimate direct experience with it.
There is no explicit clause about it as far as my memory reaches, but then again the rules are supposed to be interpreted reasonably with common sense in mind. But then again again, most people are not reasonable people.
Also you should be able to make untrained intelligence checks for DC10 or less information. DC10 representing common knowledge.
Can you take 10 on knowledge checks? I never found an explicit clause on the matter.
I might be wrong here... but I always thought you only made knowledge checks for things a character didn't directly experience.
A stupid thing I've noticed: that isn't in the rules, as far as I can tell.
You may be a camel-riding druid and have your own camel who you take everywhere with you and who is your best friend, but unless you can make a Knowledge: Nature roll you can't identify a camel.
Casting Anthropomorphic Animal on an Orca (or other sea creature) doesn't give it a base land speed.
You may be a camel-riding druid and have your own camel who you take everywhere with you and who is your best friend, but unless you can make a Knowledge: Nature roll you can't identify a camel.
Personally, I would say that this is reasonable. You know that that creature over there is Dewdrop, your faithful companion, sold to you by some crazy Qadiran guy who called it a "camel"... but you'll be damned if you know what these things are supposed to eat.
|
A note on the knowledge checks and why they need to be explicitly spelled out somewhere in the rules: I made a druid recently in a campaign that attempted to identify monkeys and got a 43 on the roll, the DM's response was that they looked like weird capuchin monkeys and I didn't know anything else. A new stupid thing that is no longer stupid: with the errata you can now blow someone's head off reliably with one shot using vital strike+raging finish with a sawed-off shotgun.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
A note on the knowledge checks and why they need to be explicitly spelled out somewhere in the rules: I made a druid recently in a campaign that attempted to identify monkeys and got a 43 on the roll, the DM's response was that they looked like weird capuchin monkeys and I didn't know anything else.
Show him this and this too. Maybe even this if you want.
After all that, it might seem that the consensus is the base DC should be determined by the rarity of the monkey. If it was common, it should be 10+CR. If it was rare, it might have been 20+CR. For hitting that basic DC, you should know what it is and all the basics that go along with it (monkey, likes to climb, eats fruits and other plants but can eat meat too - basic stuff like this). Actual game features (immunities, can use Invisibility as a SLA, has a breath weapon, poison fangs, whatever) are all the "bits" that you learn for rolling above the baseline DC, one "bit" for every 5 that you beat the roll.
This should be a fairly simple no-brainer although I admit the rules are a little fuzzy on it, but unless this was a unique alien monkey grown in a vat by a mad alien scientist on an undiscovered world in an undiscovered outer plane, it probably was not rare enough to warrant your GM's obfuscation; it seems like your GM might have made a bad call (not a bad rule).
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Though there are many references to what you can do with a corpse, I've yet to see an official statement indicating that you leave one. While this is certainly a common sense problem, here's the bigger half of the story : I've never seen a clause that says an ethereal undead does not.It's people like you that are the reason the game's rulebooks are thick enough to kill a cat with.
Do you have any particular examples of gratuitous rules text that explains the blindingly obvious, or are you just spouting needless and baseless hyperbole?
Besides, if people who were more mechanically inclined wrote the crunch for the rulebook, it's size would probably decrease substantially. Imagine how small the CRB would be if instead of this:
A cleric casts divine spells which are drawn from the cleric spell list. Her alignment, however, may restrict her from casting certain spells opposed to her moral or ethical beliefs; see Chaotic, Evil, Good, and Lawful Spells. A cleric must choose and prepare her spells in advance.To prepare or cast a spell, a cleric must have a Wisdom score equal to at least 10 + the spell level. The Difficulty Class for a saving throw against a cleric's spell is 10 + the spell level + the cleric's Wisdom modifier.
Like other spellcasters, a cleric can cast only a certain number of spells of each spell level per day. Her base daily spell allotment is given on Table: Cleric. In addition, she receives bonus spells per day if she has a high Wisdom score (see Table: Ability Modifiers and Bonus Spells).
Clerics meditate or pray for their spells. Each cleric must choose a time at which she must spend 1 hour each day in quiet contemplation or supplication to regain her daily allotment of spells. Time spent resting has no effect on whether a cleric can prepare spells. A cleric may prepare and cast any spell on the cleric spell list, provided that she can cast spells of that level, but she must choose which spells to prepare during her daily meditation.
Chaotic, Evil, Good, and Lawful Spells A cleric can't cast spells of an alignment opposed to her own or her deity's (if she has one). Spells associated with particular alignments are indicated by the chaotic, evil, good, and lawful descriptors in their spell descriptions.
Orisons Clerics can prepare a number of orisons, or 0-level spells, each day, as noted on Table: Cleric under “Spells per day.” These spells are treated like any other spell, but they are not expended when cast and may be used again.
You had something along the lines of this:
Clerics are Divine Prepared casters (See pXXX). A cleric's spellcasting is Wisdom based. A cleric knows all the spells on their spell list.
Unlike other casters, a Cleric does not need to rest in order to regain spells. Each cleric must choose a time at which she must spend the 1 hour needed to regain her daily allotment of spells(typically spent in quiet contemplation or supplication){note: this could be interpreted more than one way, so I am not cleaning up the wording much}.
Chaotic, Evil, Good, and Lawful Spells A cleric can't cast spells with the descriptor of an alignment opposed to either her own or her deity's (if she has one).
Look how much clearer that is. Then you stick a single section in somewhere explaining Prepared VS spontaneous casting, casting base ability scores, the meaning of the word "knows" and how it relates to prepared vs spontaneous casting, resting to regain spells and a bunch of other crap that is universal to each class. Once they absorb that very clearly set out information, every single class's spellcasting feature makes sense. Seriously, there are a whole bunch of things that are always in the rules but have to be spelled out every single time. See: minimum ability scores, spell DCs, extra spell slots off ability scores, arcane spell failure, orisons/cantrips not being expended. All of this crap being repeated makes it harder for new players to learn the game because they don't know how to prioritize information. They don't know that the Alignment restrictions are a cleric thing while the ability score things are universal to all casting classes. The only way for them to figure that out is for them to read through every single class with spellcasting and notice "hey, all of this behaves the same". For experienced players, all that crap just becomes noise that obfuscates any niggly little class specific details. Oh yeah, and it bloats the book, because that crap about (for example) save DCs, minimum ability scores and extra spells is repeated in at least 6 places in the CRB alone.
Once we have all of this gone, we have plenty of space to toss in things vaguely along the lines of...
"Creatures that are dead are no longer considered or behave like creatures - their soul departs for the outer planes and is generally incapable of acting on the environment they died in, and their physical body is left behind as a corpse, which is simply an object."
The text makes it clear that creatures can't do anything meaningful while dead. We also cleaned up something else - it is clear that (unless stated otherwise) dead creatures leave corpses.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Though there are many references to what you can do with a corpse, I've yet to see an official statement indicating that you leave one. While this is certainly a common sense problem, here's the bigger half of the story : I've never seen a clause that says an ethereal undead does not.It's people like you that are the reason the game's rulebooks are thick enough to kill a cat with.
my rebuttal is Warhammer Fantasy Battle.
Warhammer Fantasy Battle is also my rebuttal in the event this turns into a physical fight.
Snowblind: What you are talking about happens to be the exact reason why legal documents tend to have a chapter of definitions at the beginning of the text.
It also happens to be the reason why when writing software, you wrap up any repetitive content into functions and just call the function instead of repeating the text over and over.
Perhaps the rulebooks need a makeover by a good software developer and/or legal scholar?
EDIT: Fun fact, the successor to Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Age of Sigmar's core rules is like 4 pages. Then again, all the rules for specific units are outsourced to codexes. But this was also true for WFB.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Though there are many references to what you can do with a corpse, I've yet to see an official statement indicating that you leave one. While this is certainly a common sense problem, here's the bigger half of the story : I've never seen a clause that says an ethereal undead does not.It's people like you that are the reason the game's rulebooks are thick enough to kill a cat with.my rebuttal is Warhammer Fantasy Battle.
Warhammer Fantasy Battle is also my rebuttal in the event this turns into a physical fight.
Snowblind: What you are talking about happens to be the exact reason why legal documents tend to have a chapter of definitions at the beginning of the text.
It also happens to be the reason why when writing software, you wrap up any repetitive content into functions and just call the function instead of repeating the text over and over.
Perhaps the rulebooks need a makeover by a good software developer and/or legal scholar?
EDIT: Fun fact, the successor to Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Age of Sigmar's core rules is like 4 pages. Then again, all the rules for specific units are outsourced to codexes. But this was also true for WFB.
I find it amusing that you point this out to a Software Engineering major who filled up half his breadth slots with Business/Corporate Law.
I find it amusing that you point this out to a Software Engineering major who filled up half his breadth slots with Business/Corporate Law.Though there are many references to what you can do with a corpse, I've yet to see an official statement indicating that you leave one. While this is certainly a common sense problem, here's the bigger half of the story : I've never seen a clause that says an ethereal undead does not.It's people like you that are the reason the game's rulebooks are thick enough to kill a cat with.my rebuttal is Warhammer Fantasy Battle.
Warhammer Fantasy Battle is also my rebuttal in the event this turns into a physical fight.
Snowblind: What you are talking about happens to be the exact reason why legal documents tend to have a chapter of definitions at the beginning of the text.
It also happens to be the reason why when writing software, you wrap up any repetitive content into functions and just call the function instead of repeating the text over and over.
Perhaps the rulebooks need a makeover by a good software developer and/or legal scholar?
EDIT: Fun fact, the successor to Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Age of Sigmar's core rules is like 4 pages. Then again, all the rules for specific units are outsourced to codexes. But this was also true for WFB.
Well, I'm not clairvoyant and didn't know what you majored in haha. Or perhaps I did subconsciously glean the thought process of a software developer from your post, however.
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's people like you that are the reason the game's rulebooks are thick enough to kill a cat with.
Hey, you better be careful around that cat, especially using a non-proficient improvised weapon. Unless you have a couple class levels to make it a fair fight (for you).
On the other hand, maybe you have a previously undocumented twin brother to join your family after that cat kills you...
If you have multiple rulebooks and use them as ranged weapons from an elevated location you might be able to defeat the cat or at least drive it away.
Most of us are following this thread to get a chuckle over "Murphy's Rules, Pathfinder Edition." Others are combing over it looking for wording loopholes they haven't tried to exploit yet. Have you found yourself going "Ha!" or "Hmmm..."?
Most of us are following this thread to get a chuckle over "Murphy's Rules, Pathfinder Edition." Others are combing over it looking for wording loopholes they haven't tried to exploit yet. Have you found yourself going "Ha!" or "Hmmm..."?
^ Pretty much the reason I am here.
Though there are many references to what you can do with a corpse, I've yet to see an official statement indicating that you leave one. While this is certainly a common sense problem, here's the bigger half of the story : I've never seen a clause that says an ethereal undead does not.It's people like you that are the reason the game's rulebooks are thick enough to kill a cat with.my rebuttal is Warhammer Fantasy Battle.
Warhammer Fantasy Battle is also my rebuttal in the event this turns into a physical fight.
Snowblind: What you are talking about happens to be the exact reason why legal documents tend to have a chapter of definitions at the beginning of the text.
It also happens to be the reason why when writing software, you wrap up any repetitive content into functions and just call the function instead of repeating the text over and over.
Perhaps the rulebooks need a makeover by a good software developer and/or legal scholar?
EDIT: Fun fact, the successor to Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Age of Sigmar's core rules is like 4 pages. Then again, all the rules for specific units are outsourced to codexes. But this was also true for WFB.
Age of Sigmar is also terrible, and you should feel bad for mentioning it.
That being said, much as I enjoyed WHFB, it had its own issues, like a tendency towards poorly worded rules that allowed peculiar shenanigans. 40k is probably worse for that sort of thing, but not by much. Although, that 1+ FNP that's been floating around the internet is fairly shenanigans. Even for 40k players. It's worse than a rerollable 2+ Invuln save. And that's pretty tough to beat.
I play with a couple of programmers, ironically they have the lowest level of rules knowledge in our group. The walking rules reference in our group works in a warehouse.
Go figure.
I would like to see 'physical' and 'mental' actions get some published text... and every action/spell/effect etc. be classified as one or the other. Lots of work, but overall I think would preemptively settle a lot of arguments.
Age of Sigmar is also terrible, and you should feel bad for mentioning it.
That being said, much as I enjoyed WHFB, it had its own issues, like a tendency towards poorly worded rules that allowed peculiar shenanigans. 40k is probably worse for that sort of thing, but not by much. Although, that 1+ FNP that's been floating around the internet is fairly shenanigans. Even for 40k players. It's worse than a rerollable 2+ Invuln save. And that's pretty tough to beat.
I've played neither, I'm just aware that age of sigmar exists and am astounded that they apparently managed to create a core rulebook with just 4 pages.
Apparently people are upset about it and I can't blame them.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
If I recall, if you look at the trade goods table in the Core Rulebook, 1 pound of gold is listed as equal to 50 gold pieces. Elsewhere, I believe it's called out that 50 gold pieces weighs 1 pound.
|
|
A note on the knowledge checks and why they need to be explicitly spelled out somewhere in the rules: I made a druid recently in a campaign that attempted to identify monkeys and got a 43 on the roll, the DM's response was that they looked like weird capuchin monkeys and I didn't know anything else.Show him this and this too. Maybe even this if you want.
After all that, it might seem that the consensus is the base DC should be determined by the rarity of the monkey. If it was common, it should be 10+CR. If it was rare, it might have been 20+CR. For hitting that basic DC, you should know what it is and all the basics that go along with it (monkey, likes to climb, eats fruits and other plants but can eat meat too - basic stuff like this). Actual game features (immunities, can use Invisibility as a SLA, has a breath weapon, poison fangs, whatever) are all the "bits" that you learn for rolling above the baseline DC, one "bit" for every 5 that you beat the roll.
This should be a fairly simple no-brainer although I admit the rules are a little fuzzy on it, but unless this was a unique alien monkey grown in a vat by a mad alien scientist on an undiscovered world in an undiscovered outer plane, it probably was not rare enough to warrant your GM's obfuscation; it seems like your GM might have made a bad call (not a bad rule).
I already talked to him about it, and it happened whenever I tried to identify anything that had a template or disease basically. It just would be nice if it was spelled out. I quit the campaign anyway as my character was a wild whisperer druid and without the knowledge bonuses I couldn't play my character how I wanted.
There is no concept of "conversion rates" between countries that mint their own currency in Pathfinder, so unless there is some deal done between the kingdoms (unlikely) value has got to be based on actual worth.
That might explain why there is no skill for counterfeiting coins in PF. No one would bother because a gold coin with the local monarch's face on it and a blank disk of the same metal of the same weight would have the same value.
That might explain why there is no skill for counterfeiting coins in PF. No one would bother because a gold coin with the local monarch's face on it and a blank disk of the same metal of the same weight would have the same value.
Well, it'd just be a linguistics (forgery) check + craft (mint) check wouldn't it?
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Making it difficult to identify a creature which has a disease sounds pretty weird.
Fighter: "Hey, is that a dog?"
Druid: "I don't know, man. I think it's got diarrhea though."
Cleric: "No way, you joker, that's chicken pox!"
Fighter: "So it's a chicken?"
Cleric: "I'm not sure, but it might be fiendish..."
Fighter: "Ok, what CR is it?"
DM: "Stop metagaming!"
Fighter: "I don't know what to do, so my PC is going to just go sit down in the grass."
DM: "Hah! That's carefully sculpted green slime which only looks like grass! You should have invested ranks into Knowledge (Dungeoneering)! Lose 1d4 Con!"
Cleric: "I think it is 1d6 Con."
DM: "Stop metagaming!"
|
Well, it'd just be a linguistics (forgery) check + craft (mint) check wouldn't it?
That might explain why there is no skill for counterfeiting coins in PF. No one would bother because a gold coin with the local monarch's face on it and a blank disk of the same metal of the same weight would have the same value.
If anything, it'd be a Craft (silversmith) check. (Failing by five or more would get you silver, all right... as in, "the local guards dip your hand in molten silver." =p)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Also real life conversion rates for copper to silver and silver to gold are 80-90 to 1, making WoW more accurate in that area.I'm not an economist, so I must ask: is real life conversion rate for metals standard, or does it fluctuate over time?
The price of metals has changed greatly and many times over the centuries, in both directions. But I can site a specific example: In skull and shackles you have the option of capturing a tiny fishing village (65 people, including children and elderly) and selling them as slaves for about 1000 GP. About 15 GP each. Maybe half that for children/elderly and double for adults (about 30 GP per adult). In real life, at 33 a.d., an adult slave laborer cost 30 silver.
1 gold aureus = 2 gold quinarii = 25 silver denarii = 50 silver quinarii = 100 bronze sestertii = 200 bronze dupondii = 400 copper asses = 800 copper semisses = 1600 copper
Thats from wikipedia. The big gold one is 1/45 of a pound (1/50 lb. in pathfinder, but close). Way more complex than we'd ever want, still by trying to make the conversion rate 10 to 1 is way off.
denarii --> dinero O: gotta love that vulgar latin
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Conversion rates between coins of various metals were really an insane headache through history. True, the powers that be did not understand it well at the time, but the principles of supply and demand still worked. Different coins were used for different things, and the different classes got different coins as payment, the value of each shifted dramatically with say, new mines, and a fixed conversion rate was a distant dream.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It'd be pretty useless, since you wouldn't have any choice of destination. You'd appear "somewhere" in a plane infinite in size.Why is this stupid? Technically dimension door is interplanar travel, as all forms of teleportation magic pass through the astral plane, should it be able to cross planes?It should at the very minimum allow for instantaneous travel through the astral plane.Uhmm no. It would actually allow you to appear at a different location on the plane you cast the spell.
Also real life conversion rates for copper to silver and silver to gold are 80-90 to 1, making WoW more accurate in that area.Just because it is called a gold coin doesn't necessarily mean it is made from pure gold or from gold at all . Currency usually does not have the exact same value as the material it is minted from.
Even roman's gold was at least 90% pure back then. Most gold currency today is 90%, or better. Although they say the exact percent, down to 1/100 of a percent. The only reason the keep it at only a 90% alloy, is that pure gold is too soft. You can bend that stuff like clay. I've seen 24k stuff from china and india and it falls apart super fast. Don't buy 24k gold jewelry.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
A Shadowcaster which is capable of adding Solid shadow to the Shades spell (rod, trait, whatever) is probably able to summon an illusion more real than reality itself.
There are people that play this game that read every occurrence of the word "concentration" as having no meaning other than referring to spell duration.
That is a stupid thing I have noticed recently.
It has come up discussing Call Lightning, and the Fly spell.
A Shadowcaster which is capable of adding Solid shadow to the Shades spell (rod, trait, whatever) is probably able to summon an illusion more real than reality itself.The way I'm reading that is that it either is real(80%+20%) or less than real(20% of 80% + 80%=96% of reality)
I don't recall the mechanics behind it, but a friend of mine made an illusionist that did 120% damage, and could create whatever effect he wanted, this may be related.
I kinda blacked out with rage when he explained it to me, so it's fuzzy... but apparently it was 'RAW'.
I told him he had to make another character.
He made a Summoner. It was marginally less rage inducing.
A Shadowcaster which is capable of adding Solid shadow to the Shades spell (rod, trait, whatever) is probably able to summon an illusion more real than reality itself.The way I'm reading that is that it either is real(80%+20%) or less than real(20% of 80% + 80%=96% of reality)I don't recall the mechanics behind it, but a friend of mine made an illusionist that did 120% damage, and could create whatever effect he wanted, this may be related.
I kinda blacked out with rage when he explained it to me, so it's fuzzy... but apparently it was 'RAW'.
I told him he had to make another character.
He made a Summoner. It was marginally less rage inducing.
That is a misinterpretation of RAW:
"Shadowy Specialization (Ex)
At 10th level, when a shadowcaster casts shades, shadow conjuration, shadow evocation, and similar illusion spells that have a listed fraction of the strength of real effects, he increases the percentage of damage caused by the spell’s effect or summoned creatures by one-fifth (+20%) against creatures that make their saving throw against the effect, up to a maximum of 100% of the strength. For example, shadow evocation and shadow conjuration deal 40% normal damage on a successful save instead of 20%."
Your friend added this ability of the Archetype to make the base 80% into 100% and then applied the metamagic to get to 120%... but this ability clearly states the ability caps at 100%, even if you don't interpret the ability as only adding up to 96% in the first place(which technically it probably should, although the way the RAW is written the intent seems to be just a straight addition to get to 100% anyways).
I appreciate the clarification, but I'm still comfortable vetoing something even if it is RAW.
One nuclear capable party member in a group of happy elven bards does not a good game make.
Balance is a good idea, regardless of mechanics. :D
I clarified it because that was the first time I've seen it in RAW, and players are adding x+y+z not realizing the formula is capped because of a clause in x... most likely because unless you build at the appropriate level for the combo all you see is a straight 20% bonus on your character sheet as what x is... even though x is probably only 0-20% of y, and never was a straight 20%.I appreciate the clarification, but I'm still comfortable vetoing something even if it is RAW.
One nuclear capable party member in a group of happy elven bards does not a good game make.
Balance is a good idea, regardless of mechanics. :D
The dangers of playing with someone that has an eidetic memory and no scruples... he only quotes what benefits him.
A lie of omission. ;)