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What an Intelligance bonus became a penalty to the overall Sanity score?
airing grievances about the feeling of being dismissed if not a mage
Which is why I've been putting out the numbers and examples I have been. There are so many options and full BAB classes already have their main "point" already given to them. 3/4 BAB classes often come with several buffing abilities to make up for that difference. The rare case for this is the paladin. Even if you take away its fear immunity per Horror Adventure's recommendation, it still has a TON of options directly around HA's themes outside of its spells. Clerics are a super special case being both 3/4 BAB and 9th level casting.
Clerics and druids, you mean. :P
Full BAB really isn't that important, though. Especially if you're a wizard or something. I'm not sure how it connects to this discussion.
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In fairness, casters have a lot more gold to spare than most martials. That's a lot of extra weight to carry.
Don't tell the martials that Wizards get +25% WBL for free (Ultimate Campaign rules) just for taking their first level.
In fairness, casters have a lot more gold to spare than most martials. That's a lot of extra weight to carry.
This hasn't been my experience. Martials eat up the Big 6 where as casters do that and then love to tinker. For example, I've not seen many fighters vying for a robe of stars or much dealing with anything outsider-y or dealing with the planes.
I'd put bards up higher, personally, but that's largely stylistic.
Clerics and druids, you mean. :P
Woops!
I feel like a lot of people on this thread have never played a Ravenloft game before. ;)
Nope. Zero D&D pre 5E games played here.
I'm talking more about those who say that 3.x games are horror-incompatible, honestly.
Pathfinder isn't the best system for horror. The book even acknowledges that. But it's not exactly the "best system" for roleplaying, either, or for long-term campaigns, and we certainly make do.
...I'm gonna be honest, here, I don't think Paladins and Horror mix very well to begin with. XD An important part of horror is a certain degree of powerlessness - whether it's a creature you can't seem to stop or an inability to understand what's going on, you DON'T want people to feel that the big, nasty monster is just something whose face needs to be pounded in. And Paladins are pretty good at standing up to any kind of darkness and pounding its face.
Paladin works well in horror themed action though, which I think fits HA and Pathfinder in general a lot better than true horror. Less Silent Hill and more Resident Evil 4. Less Halloween and more .. I dunno, Blade or Evil Dead or something.
Mind you HA suggests running modified paladins. There's even an archetype in HA called the Tortured Soul that is a paladin archetype. They can't LoH others and iirc a lot of their auras don't affect allies either. It's perfect.
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That would help.
Paladins are great thematically for Horror games... but that whole 'immune to fear' and aura concepts just gut the mood. I LIKE paladin characters and players, and I still wouldn't let any play in a game that was designed to be 'scary'...
Horror Adventures actually offers a tip for the immunity stuff, too: Immunity to fear basically just becomes a very nice resistance. Lesser fear effects like Shaken don't affect you, but you can still get majorly freaked out by stuff.
Not speaking to the mechanics, but I think the flavor pans out well for intellectuals being resistant to sanity. The only reason they always go mad is they tend to seek out such forbidden knowledge. When it comes to a group, though, it is always the simpler ones that lose it first.
And as far as the whole caster/martial disparity, You can also throw dead magic zones at the players. That will make the players scared. That, or you can use some of the rules from Pathfinder Unchained to make magic powerful, but dangerous. I'm a fan of the latter, personally.
This thread is way to long to read all post, so I'll just stick to the OP.Or are we not supposed to use melee characters in any of these modules? Because as written, these rules overwhelmingly favor casters.They do indirectly favour casters, yes. But this doesn't mean that we should't play martials in horror games (just like how you can play small races as martials).
I actually don't consider this as another strike in the C/MD, it just seems like a very weird compilations of rules that aren't really compatible with the Pathfinder game: I wonder what they where thinking when they wrote:
"Lastly, if your total sanity damage equals or exceeds your sanity score, you become insane as per insanity (no saving throw) until all your sanity damage is healed and all your madnesses are cured."
This means that any average human, first time after you finish a combat encounter, goes insane (as their Sanity Score is 0, and you take a minimum of sanity damage of 1 on a successful save when witnessing a "gruesome scene of death"). It seems like a way to early breaking point to start attacking your friends and yourself at random.
So does that mean that you can drive a whole bunch of commoner rabble stark raving mad by walking up to someone in a crowd and butchering them?
Wait a minute.
If you turn a bunch of people inside a city into crazed lunatics, and some of those people kill themselves/someone else in a gruesome manner, does that create a chain reaction which will consume the entire city in mad bloody death? Can a single character destroy an entire city with a few swings of their greataxe?
Now that's giving Martials narrative power!
That would help.
Paladins are great thematically for Horror games... but that whole 'immune to fear' and aura concepts just gut the mood. I LIKE paladin characters and players, and I still wouldn't let any play in a game that was designed to be 'scary'...
I don't know I kinda thing there is a certain kind of horror that comes with being the only one left that hasn't run in fear or gone stark raving mad. Being along and clearheaded against an enemy that you are woefully unqualified to deal with on your own is pretty scary. Add in that you probably need to protect your terrified and insane friends and it can get pretty bad. The Paladin Oath doesn't help much easier. Horror games should probably produce a lot of fallen Paladins.
Playing the Paladin in a Horror game isn't about playing the character that thinks they are going to die and runs away. It's about playing the guy who knows he is going to die and can't afford to run away.
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What if your Sanity cap was based off Cha and Con, being a nurse and having family have mental health issues I konw that it does take a toll on your body as well.
It is kinda the best of both worlds because the more you suffer the harder it is on your body and the harder you suffer the harder it is on your body.
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In my opinion, things are a little more balanced in favor of casters, but casters do have a lot more ways to winnow away their sanity. Spells (yes most of them are optional, but if I was running a game I'd find ways to make those spells very attractive), summoning stuff, etc. I just found out that our undead-blooded sorceress is going to be a bleeding sanity wound for our party... And hey, it makes Path of War characters more attractive (since generally having less than 14 in your initiating stat is counterintuitive), so it can't be all bad.
My only beef is that some creatures don't fit into the rules on sanity attacks. Gibbering mouther or aboleth? Yeah, sanity attack. Flumph or reefclaw (the latter of which is a popular dish)? Not seeing it. At least it's up to GM discretion; there's a setting I work on which has an aberration player race. They already have a bit of a self-esteem problem without their very appearance causing sanity attacks.
Just change your playstyle from hack and slash games. Unless you want to play a caster, in which case carry on.
And if you want melee, play a melee caster.
/shrug
I could play my Lore Warden with the sanity rules and he would work just fine. Would not even have to tweak his stats.
I have several rogues that would excel at a horror adventure.
Not all non-casters dump their mental stats.
What if there was a 4th base save track - Sanity Save? All classes progress in it at the same speed.
You could set it to a Good track (1/2 HD + 2) for a less intense horror game, or set it to a Poor track (1/3 HD) for a more amped up feel.
I like Con, Wis, and Cha being tied to the Sanity score. And now the knowledge-hungry Wizard is truly in danger like he should be, because now his primary stat doesn't help his Sanity score, and his Good Will saves won't save him either.