I'm highly irritated and wondering what do.


Advice


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<y kineticist has chosen early on in his career to get telekinetic haul, specifically for doing things like ripping doors out and throwing them at people. My gm came up with a way for us to figure out how strong things would need to be. Essentially i take the max weight of my throw at the time and figure out the corressponding strength that would be if it were a heavy load. This means at level 8, it is 8000 pounds, or 4 tons. The first area we ran through i was easily able to use my ability and break wooden doors (didnt even need the haul honestly). Then we came to a portcullis, using this formula we determined i had to roll a 17 to break the portcullis out (it had actually split the party when it came down, so added bonus was to allow the other half of the party into the fight. I was successful. There was much rejoincing. My character even began to declare himself the "bane of doors."

Then we got to a new area. This new area had sliding metal doors (star trek style) with keycard swipes. I was told without being allowed to roll any checks, my ability could not rip these doors out. I was like... are you sure? I can lift 5k pounds now... Gm said nope, cant do it. And i said, okay cool, whatever, lets roll. We got in pretty far until we found some more doors exactly like the others, but the keycards didnt work. THIS time i was allowed to rip the doors down, only to find some sort of nanite/poison thing behind them. We eventually got through it and managed to get it retrapped by some other doors, whatever that was kind of cool... weird though right?

Then we hit a tower controlled by an evil wizard. Om the way we find one of the doors had been damaged by a hill giant (str 25) and they tore a part off. We kill the giants, take it back, our rogue fixes the door. We enter the tower. Now, we are level8, meaning i can do 8k pounds if i activate telekinetic haul, or equivalant to 44-45 strength. The gm still tells me I cannot haul open these doors because thats not how blst doors work. He cites they are adamantine and glaucite combinations but i simply cannot do it. Now its been going on 4-5 levels of him simply saying my ability doesnt work, so i decide i'm kind of fed up. I ask him if this is the way his things are going to work, and i am cool with it if they are, i feel like i should get a free reteain of the class ability i chose, since i am being told constantly it just wont work. He starts telling me he has worked with doors like this and hes not going to "just let me walk around ripping doors out" I reitr=erate, thats fine, but i should be able to swap this out. He says i can when we have time to retrain.

I find this assinine. Itd like he decided he just doesnt want my power to work, but that i also have ti be punished and pay for it and take the time to retrain it because of the way HE has changed the way things work. So, i have been pretty sick this last week, and it was kind of last straw. I disconnected from the game. I left a VERY long rant on our discord server about hos his behaviour seems more "whim based" adversarial, and that he seems to be doing things he things is fun at the cost of the players and are not consistant.

The most important part of this all is, I have been playing with group for over 8 years. I love all our current players, I have gm'ed for all of them, and have been gm'ed by all of them, including the current one. I have never had an issue that couldnt be resolved i njusta minute or two of talking before, so not really sure what to do going forward. Did i act too crazy? Who was in the wrong? thoughts on the matter?

ANY Constructive criticism, even polite finger pointing is welcome and encouraged!


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I don't allow kineticists in my campaign so I'm not sure what's normal with telekinetic haul. But from what I've read it doesn't seem as though it is intended to throw fixed objects and your GM went out of his way to accommodate you by coming up with a way of equating the force to a strength score. If it were me, I would then look at the break/burst DC for that STR score.

One important difference between haul and break/burst, is that break has one object (usually a creature) acting on another whilst haul is applying a force directly to the object being hauled. Given F=MA, the heavier the object, the less violent the acceleration burst.

Given by the RAW, a doubling in size equates to an 8-fold mass increase, it could well be that the massive Adamantine doors are just too heavy.

Ultimately, I suspect you are right, the GM has had enough of your trope and ruled it can't work. But it might be more constructive to revise your existing ruleset taking the object's mass into account.

Of course, if you come across something too heavy then you can always work on small bits. E.g try hauling the hinge pin or the lock bolt rather than the door.


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1. yes, the GM isn't handling this right
2. Any player who over uses/abuses a single ability of their character should expect the GM to come in and put in a nerf of some kind.
3. This is part of why I play in person with my friends. We can discuss issues like this in a calm, friendly manner and find a solution that makes everyone happy.
4. I suspect the house rule you made for the doors/telekinetic haul was wrong/broken to begin with.


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It feels like the GM didn't think things through when they first allowed it and came up with what they think is a reasonable solution when they don't want you breaking a door.

If I understood correctly were the initial doors you were throwing just regular doors? If so yeah I can see why blast doors cannot be just broken. Those things are meant to take a beating and remain sealed, just breaking them that easily wouldn't make sense. If you were breaking blast doors from the start then the GM may have decided you were breaking too many encounters.

So just talk to them.


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Just to be clear to people, i have broken one reinforced wooden door, that any barbarian could have broken. I ripped open one portcullis, again, a reasonable break dc that was in the module that any decent strength based character could have at least lifted open/broken. 2 metal doors in a wrecked space craft(they also had a mid 20'ish break dc (without sliding keycards, or they didnt work? I dont remember exactly) thats it. Over the span of 6 or 7 levels. Its not like i have been ripping every single door down. I have also had it brough to my attention that these doors HAVE a break dc, a friend of mine checked it out, and wouldnt tell me the break dc but did tell me i had more then a 20% chance to open them based on the ruling made by the DM.


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There is a difference between "breaking" the door and destroying the door too. As a kineticist you have a scaling big damage attack, that can surpass the Hardness on most objects. Even Adamantine only has hardness 20 and only 40 hp per inch. Past low level, it's just a matter of time until you cut through any door.

As for the behavior, it's not unusual for GMs to work on a whim of what they want to fit the story they want to tell. The GM probably thought the keycards were so important that he didn't want you to just bypass them. And so he made up a flimsy not well thought out excuse of why the door breaking didn't work.


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Melkiador wrote:

There is a difference between "breaking" the door and destroying the door too. As a kineticist you have a scaling big damage attack, that can surpass the Hardness on most objects. Even Adamantine only has hardness 20 and only 40 hp per inch. Past low level, it's just a matter of time until you cut through any door.

As for the behavior, it's not unusual for GMs to work on a whim of what they want to fit the story they want to tell. The GM probably thought the keycards were so important that he didn't want you to just bypass them. And so he made up a flimsy not well thought out excuse of why the door breaking didn't work.

That is why for the keycard doors, i put up with it, but now the next area also has techn doors, he likens to the bulkhead doors in a submarine, and is saying the same thing, this will make almost 5 levels of my ability being useless despite the module having break dc's, ehich he already ruled how the ability worked, and is now going back on.


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Evilserran wrote:

That is why for the keycard doors, i put up with it, but now the next area also has techn doors, he likens to the bulkhead doors in a submarine, and is saying the same thing, this will make almost 5 levels of my ability being useless despite the module having break dc's, ehich he already ruled how the ability worked, and is now going back on.

Like I said, stop trying to use that house rule to bust down the door. Just start rolling like 30 rounds of attacks against the door.

At level 8, you should have a blast that does 4d6+4+Con Damage per attack, which is an average of 18+Con damage per round to the door. If you have 2 Elemental Overflow, that's an extra +4 damage to your blast. You get 10 turns per minute. So yeah, it's going to be a rare magical door that can keep you out if you are really determined.


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Quote:

Telekinetic Haul

Element(s) aether; Type utility (Sp); Level 2; Burn 0
Prerequisite(s) basic telekinesis

When using basic telekinesis, you can move an object that weighs up to 100 pounds per kineticist level you possess. When using your telekinetic blast, you can throw an object weighing up to 100 pounds per kineticist level you possess, but this doesn’t increase the damage. If you accept 1 point of burn, the maximum weight increases to 1,000 pounds per kineticist level you possess and the duration increases to 1 minute per kineticist level you possess.

Firstly, I think you and your GM are using this ability incorrectly. A door doesn't become a throwable object until it's unhinged/unfastened from the door frame, and it sounds like you're just telekinetically ripping doors out of their frames-- and that's not what this ability is designed to do. This is Basis Telekinesis, like Mage Hand or Open/Close. Your GM shouldn't have allowed this from the get go. If you want to pull out a set of tools, hammers, and punches to unhinge the door from the frame, and THEN use Telekinetic Haul to throw it, fine. But you can't just rip apart 8,000lbs-worth of walls, doors, and portcullises using this. That's Jean Grey overpowered.

Secondly, I think you should get to retrain this for free, but I'd say keep it tbh; this ability is still really good because you never know when you're going to have to move something that weighs 8,000+ lbs.

Shadow Lodge

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8,000lbs sounds impressive, but:

  • Air pressure at sea level is 14.7 lbs/square inch
  • This means a tiny (1' x 1') hatch that is supposed to hold against depressurization on a space ship needs to withstand over a ton of pressure.
  • A typical 80" x 36" door would need to withstand over 21 TONS of pressure in a similar situation.
That's just air: Water pressures are often orders of magnitude higher:

...

The pressure increases about one atmosphere for every 10 meters of water depth. At a depth of 5,000 meters the pressure will be approximately 500 atmospheres or 500 times greater than the pressure at sea level.
...

Give that submarine bulkhead doors are presumably designed to function to at least 400m*, a 'typically sized' door of the same strength would probably withstand at least 800 tons of force without any issue (that's 1,600,000 lbs)...

*Modern Los Angeles class submarines have a public 'Test Depth' of 450m, so their hatches presumably top out somewhere in the 67 to 90 atmospheres range (assuming a Crush Depth in the typical range of 1.5x to 2x the Test Depth, at which point it doesn't matter how strong your hatches are) and these values will vary by submarine class, but the 40 atmospheres I am using is probably a very conservative estimate...

Now that the numbers have been hashed out, let's get down to brass tacks: OP, it seems like this power is breaking the adventure, and your GM was probably correct to rule that it doesn't work on these doors (assuming the key cards are linked to a significant portion of the adventure, which you'd be ignoring by just ripping them open).

That's all there is to it: It's basically a lower level version of the high level "Let's just skip the actual adventure by teleporting to the boss's bedroom and kill him while he sleeps" situation, which might go very poorly for your party if the parts you skipped had key information (or just the XP to keep you from being under-leveled for the Boss fight).


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@Taja - respect for your research

I was starting to look at it from a tensile strength perspective. Finding a table on Wikipedia revealed wood's tensile strength is 40MPa and Steel can withstand 400+MPa depending on the variant and up into the thousands for things like carbon nanotubes.

It soon becones apparent that being able to apply a force sufficient to lift 8000 lbs isn't enough.

For simplicity lets equate 8000 lbs to 4000 Kgs and G to 10 m2, so that equates to 40KN of force that the Telekinetic haul can apply as pressure.

1 Pa = 1N/m2

Lets say the average door is 2m2.

So a Wooden door needs 40MPa of pressure applied to fail and 40KN over 2m2 = 20MPa.

Conclusion, the Telekinetic haul should never have been allowed to work, the kineticist will need to be level 16 to force a wooden door and level 160 to contemplate a steel door and perhaps level 1600 for Adamantine.

Scarab Sages

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Hugo Rune wrote:

@Taja - respect for your research

I was starting to look at it from a tensile strength perspective. Finding a table on Wikipedia revealed wood's tensile strength is 40MPa and Steel can withstand 400+MPa depending on the variant and up into the thousands for things like carbon nanotubes.

It soon becones apparent that being able to apply a force sufficient to lift 8000 lbs isn't enough.

For simplicity lets equate 8000 lbs to 4000 Kgs and G to 10 m2, so that equates to 40KN of force that the Telekinetic haul can apply as pressure.

1 Pa = 1N/m2

Lets say the average door is 2m2.

So a Wooden door needs 40MPa of pressure applied to fail and 40KN over 2m2 = 20MPa.

Conclusion, the Telekinetic haul should never have been allowed to work, the kineticist will need to be level 16 to force a wooden door and level 160 to contemplate a steel door and perhaps level 1600 for Adamantine.

If we're talking real world values how does the high str and official break dc's compare?


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The DM made a bad initial ruling letting you do this OP and has come to regret it. That's pretty obvious.

Instead of being salty about it, work out what your average damage of your blast is and let your DM know that you can deal X amount of damage per minute to see if you can just batter things down over time.

The party using adamantine weapons to break down walls/doors is a time honored tradition, but one that takes more than a single action and can have ramifications (altering nearby enemies). While busting down the door in one action will also alert enemies, they don't have the same amount of time to respond.

Assuming there isn't a something taking action in response to your attempts to break down the door, it shouldn't be much difference in saying you rip out the door vs you batter down the door over 10 rounds. Or 10 minutes. You can get through it, it simply requires time, but in game time vs table time.


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Senko wrote:
Hugo Rune wrote:

@Taja - respect for your research

I was starting to look at it from a tensile strength perspective. Finding a table on Wikipedia revealed wood's tensile strength is 40MPa and Steel can withstand 400+MPa depending on the variant and up into the thousands for things like carbon nanotubes.

It soon becones apparent that being able to apply a force sufficient to lift 8000 lbs isn't enough.

For simplicity lets equate 8000 lbs to 4000 Kgs and G to 10 m2, so that equates to 40KN of force that the Telekinetic haul can apply as pressure.

1 Pa = 1N/m2

Lets say the average door is 2m2.

So a Wooden door needs 40MPa of pressure applied to fail and 40KN over 2m2 = 20MPa.

Conclusion, the Telekinetic haul should never have been allowed to work, the kineticist will need to be level 16 to force a wooden door and level 160 to contemplate a steel door and perhaps level 1600 for Adamantine.

If we're talking real world values how does the high str and official break dc's compare?

Don't know off the top of my head, probably not well but it's also a different set of mechanics. Telekinetic haul applies it's force as pressure equally across the entire object. Typical break techniques involve

striking, twisting or similar agaibst a perceived weak point. Increased strength will allow a creature to move more mass, faster and in a more controlled/focused manner, which makes it easier to work a weak spot more effectively.


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Hugo Rune wrote:

@Taja - respect for your research

I was starting to look at it from a tensile strength perspective. Finding a table on Wikipedia revealed wood's tensile strength is 40MPa and Steel can withstand 400+MPa depending on the variant and up into the thousands for things like carbon nanotubes.

It soon becones apparent that being able to apply a force sufficient to lift 8000 lbs isn't enough.

For simplicity lets equate 8000 lbs to 4000 Kgs and G to 10 m2, so that equates to 40KN of force that the Telekinetic haul can apply as pressure.

1 Pa = 1N/m2

Lets say the average door is 2m2.

So a Wooden door needs 40MPa of pressure applied to fail and 40KN over 2m2 = 20MPa.

Conclusion, the Telekinetic haul should never have been allowed to work, the kineticist will need to be level 16 to force a wooden door and level 160 to contemplate a steel door and perhaps level 1600 for Adamantine.

Mostly an entire door won't have to be shattered. The weak point will be the hinges, or how they attach to the door, or to the frame. Break the hinges and you get the rest of the door for free. :)

Though a blast door is likely set is a frame in such a way that you do in fact need to break the door itself. So there's that.


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Hugo Rune wrote:

@Taja - respect for your research

I was starting to look at it from a tensile strength perspective. Finding a table on Wikipedia revealed wood's tensile strength is 40MPa and Steel can withstand 400+MPa depending on the variant and up into the thousands for things like carbon nanotubes.

It soon becones apparent that being able to apply a force sufficient to lift 8000 lbs isn't enough.

For simplicity lets equate 8000 lbs to 4000 Kgs and G to 10 m2, so that equates to 40KN of force that the Telekinetic haul can apply as pressure.

1 Pa = 1N/m2

Lets say the average door is 2m2.

So a Wooden door needs 40MPa of pressure applied to fail and 40KN over 2m2 = 20MPa.

Conclusion, the Telekinetic haul should never have been allowed to work, the kineticist will need to be level 16 to force a wooden door and level 160 to contemplate a steel door and perhaps level 1600 for Adamantine.

Just realised I had a brain fart and thought a Mega Pascal was a thousand pascals, not a million... so that last calculation should be 40KN/2m2 = 0.02MPa

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