Murphy's Rules: Your Favorite Game Is Weird

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Murphy's Rules: Your Favorite Game Is Weird

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

LightWarden posted:

The skies above Greyhawk are black and empty. None have ever seen the stars.

Incidentally, that's also where Monte Cook has been hiding all this time.

e: To actually add some content to this thread: due to the way Knowledge skill DCs to recognize creatures are calculated in D&D 3.5, it's quite likely for a Cleric with maximized ranks in Knowledge (religion) not to be able to recognize their deity should their god appear before them in the entirety of their divine glory. This in a game where it's assumed that deities have corporeal forms that not infrequently make appearances on the Material Plane.

The DC to recognize a creature with the relevant Knowledge skill is 10+the creature's Hit Dice. Most deities have in excess of 30 hit dice, meaning that the DC to recognize a deity with Knowledge (religion) will be in the region of at least 40. A level 20 Cleric with maximized ranks in Knowledge (religion) and average Intelligence will have a +23 bonus to Knowledge (religion), meaning that they'll have only a 20% chance to recognize a deity with only 30 hit dice.

Also, the more powerful (and thus, likely more influential) the deity, the more difficult will they be to recognize.

Ratpick fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Feb 13, 2013

# ¿ Feb 13, 2013 00:13

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 07:39

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Bedlamdan posted:

You take a standard action that lets you increase the range of your attacks by five. This lasts until the end of your turn. Because increasing the range of your attacks takes a standard action, you can't actually make any attack. And because it only lasts until the end of your turn, you don't even benefit from an increased range for attacks of opportunity.

Actually, there is one way, which was discovered by 4chan's /tg/ some time ago. Basically, take the Crane Deflect feat, which allows you to take an attack of opportunity against an enemy that attacks you.

Now, stand 10 feet away from an enemy with a reach weapon, activate Monkey Lunge (a standard action), drop prone (a free action) and get up (a move action), provoking an attack of opportunity, allowing you to take an attack of opportunity against the enemy attacking you!

Yes, there is one way to use Monkey Lunge as written. No, it still doesn't make it a good feat.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2013 00:26

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

OpenlyEvilJello posted:

You could also cast a quickened touch spell, which of course leads to the question of why the hell you took Monkey Lunge in the first place.

You could also combine it with the aforementioned Prone Shooter feat which, while functional now that it's been fixed, actually has absolutely gently caress all to do with shooting!

One of the many ways in which the designers of Pathfinder consider the relationship between rules and flavor! :pseudo:

# ¿ Feb 14, 2013 13:20

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Kwyndig posted:

Also wasn't one of the Potion table results 'potion effects permanent'? I always wondered how the hell that was supposed to work for something like a potion of healing.

You would obviously gain 1d8+1 permanent hit points, which are sort of like temporary hit points but not at all because you can never lose them.

Enjoy immortality from being killed through HP damage.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2013 06:12

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

This is less of a weird rule than a weird interaction in rules caused by the fact that the people responsible for the Pathfinder FAQ didn't think things through. My friends, who are active in Pathfinder Society, call it the early access Mystic Theurge, and it hinges on nothing outside the Core Rulebook except for an FAQ that was supposed to clear up confusion with the rules.

So, the Mystic Theurge is a prestige class that's basically half divine caster and half arcane caster. The requirements are being able to cast both 2nd level arcane spells and divine spells, meaning in practice that the quickest way to qualify for it is Cleric 3/Wizard 3. Even though it boosts the spell levels and progression of both your casting classes, it's actually not that great: even though you'll have an impressive array of spells you'll still have just one action per turn to cast them, in addition to which by the time you qualify for the class you'll be lagging two spell levels behind a focused caster.

What if we could qualify for it two levels ahead of time though?

Here's the thing about the FAQ: the question asked was something to the effect of "Do spell-like abilities count towards spell-casting requirements for a prestige class?" And the answer given was "Yes."

So, if you somehow got a spell-like ability that emulated a 2nd-level spell it's count as spell casting ability for the sake of qualifying for Mystic Theurge, right?

Enter our Wizard 3. Upon his next level he'll dip into Cleric and pick up the Trickery domain (appropriate, because he's tricking the world and its rules). The Trickery domain ability is a spell-like ability that emulates mirror image, a 2nd-level spell. Because the spell comes from the Cleric, it counts as a divine spell for all intents and purposes.

Congrats, you just qualified for Mystic Theurge as a Wizard 3/Cleric 1!

# ¿ Feb 7, 2015 13:14

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

sfwarlock posted:

Please tell me there were rules for dying of dysentery along the way.

You know, Fantasy Oregon Trail doesn't sound like a bad concept for a campaign, provided you've got good rules. These are clearly not those rules.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2015 09:27

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Wouldn't a single use of this spell cause economic instability in the region? The high priestess casts the spell, the dwarves use it to buy lots of necessities from the local human city, because how are they to know that it's special dwarven magic gold? At some point someone along the chain (probably one of the humans) is going to want to spend the money on baubles and trinkets, only to find that once the transaction is complete the gold disappears.

The only thing this spell achieves is destabilizing the local human economy for the benefit of the dwarves.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2015 08:57

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

The Lone Badger posted:

Also, starting wars.

That'd actually be a neat (and by neat I mean stupid) starting point for a campaign: a human city is waging war on their dwarven neighbors after one such dwarven gold hair scam. When the war eventually leads to the dwarven city falling on even harder economic times than they started, the high priestess suggests another casting of the spell so they may trade for goods with another human settlement.

The PCs' job of course is to stop this before things spiral completely out of control as well as teaching the dwarves about the dangers of divine hair-based economies.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2015 09:48

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Serf posted:

Wizard casts "create fire", forgets to specify what sort of fire, proceeds to drop the hardest album of the year.

We didn't start the fireball

# ¿ Mar 25, 2015 17:45

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Some items, the staff of the Archmage for one if I recall correctly, have additional effects when broken. Basically, if you're doing the end of the campaign boss fight against the lich king with a staff of the archmage, there are worse ways to end the campaign than sundering that staff while the lich is holding it and going out in a blaze of glory as the staff snaps and does a little localized supernova centered on the lich.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2015 09:47

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

So, Pathfinder's Crafting rules are kind of weird. I'm sure someone's touched on this subject before.

However, there's something to the Craft skill that is better than in 3.5: you can also use it to practice a trade. Basically, you can use Craft like you'd use Profession, to make a bit of money when you have some downtime. This makes sense: if you're a skilled armorer you can probably set up shop fixing people's armor and make a bit of money that way.

The Murphy is that it doesn't flow the other way: you can only use Profession to practice a trade, not to produce goods.

Cooking is a Profession skill. You can build a character with a Profession (cook) skill through the roof and make a bit of money by practicing your trade, but you literally can not make food.

Insert joke about a big chain restaurant making lots of money while not producing anything remotely like food.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2015 10:25

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

LightWarden, I think it's been said before, but you tearing apart Pathfinder is probably the best thing about this thread. Good job.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2015 09:54

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Dareon posted:

Yes, but not in these systems and not for the effect you think.

The Urban Arcana expansion for d20 Modern included the "Sponsored" enchantment for armor. It covers your armor in corporate logos and reduces the purchase DC.

Wait, really? It's been really long since I read Urban Arcana and I've since given all of my d20 Modern books to a friend who might actually have some use for them, but I don't remember that bit. That's actually really cool.

That sort of thing would be perfect for something like X-Crawl where dungeon crawling adventurers are basically celebrities. Hell, corporate sponsorship deals would probably be huge in that kind of a setting. If you get a sponsorship deal you get your stuff for cheaper, but you must spend at least some amount of downtime doing advertising and photo ops at sponsored events and so on. You could even extend it to entire events and venues having corporate sponsors.

Oh gently caress, now I'm imagining corporate sponsored Wizards working day and night to create corporate mascots for the dungeons. This event is being sponsored by Red Bull, so by god they need a red minotaur with wings as the end boss of the dungeon, and they need it by tomorrow!

I kind of want to run X-Crawl now but with a less terrible system.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2016 08:18

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Pathfinder sort of improved on the "minimum of 1 damage for every attack" rule: if your damage based on the die roll and modifiers went to 0 or below you'd deal 1 point of nonlethal damage.

That doesn't mean that house cats aren't still a threat: it's just that instead of scratching you until you bleed to death they'll scratch you until you pass out and then eat you.

Which actually leads to an interesting situation: the house cat's natural weapons (claws) are designated as a weapon that deals lethal damage by default because they are not mentioned as dealing nonlethal damage, even though they deal such a low amount of damage that it'll always be nonlethal. By the rules you can deal lethal damage with a weapon that would normally deal nonlethal damage by taking a -4 penalty to your attack roll.

So, of course the house cats pummel you to negative hit points, at which point you'll be unconscious, and then they can just attack you while taking the -4 penalty (which will be overriden by the fact that you're unconscious as well as the fact that you'll no longer gain �our Dexterity modifier to AC). But the question is, since the house cat's weapon is designated as a weapon that deals lethal damage, can a house cat take the -4 penalty to attack to change their (inevitable) nonlethal damage to lethal?

Even though it's arguable whether a bunch of house cats can actually kill you (because by a strict reading of the rules they'll always deal nonlethal damage due to their poor damage range and they can't take the -4 penalty to change that to lethal) house cats can totally pummel you to unconsciousness.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2016 08:54

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

senrath posted:

Nothing arguable about it. Any nonlethal damage you take in excess of your max hp turns to lethal in Pathfinder.

Well, poo poo, that's another minor change to 3.5 that I'd completely missed about Pathfinder. So, house cats in Pathfinder can, in fact, kill you by pummeling you unconscious and then scratching you until you slowy bleed to death.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2016 09:24

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

ZorajitZorajit posted:

Mieville is rad. Perdido Street Station has his literal D&D party get murdered by xenomorph moths. If you don't mind the word 'effluvial' on every page. There was supposed to be a Bas-Lag RPG, but I don't think it ever got released. He also wrote a couple of Pathfinder adventures though.

The reason for the Bas-Lag RPG never getting released is the same as Far West not being out yet: Gareth Michael Skarka.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2016 15:50

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 07:39

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Kurieg posted:

The idea behind karnath is that they were basically blackmailed by an undead cult into switching over to a skeleton economy because they were that desperate for soldiers and skeleman power. The current king hates the situation he's been forced into and is trying to oust the lich queen that wants to set up her own undead duchy to get revenge on the elves and dragons who cast her down.

Also the King is a Vampire who has ruled the kingdom for three generations now and who occasionally fakes his own death and just increases the numeral behind his name to keep up the pretense. So King Kaius III is actually King Kaius I-III.

Eberron owns.

e: I messed that up: apparently he skipped a couple of generations and only came back as King Kaius III, his great-grandson.

Ratpick fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Jan 6, 2017

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 12:08

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