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hectorgrey posted:For touch spells, you can hold the charge as long as you wish (though as mentioned under Combat, if you touch anything or anyone the spell immediately goes off) - this means that you can cast Cure Light Wounds on the first turn, and then wait until somebody has been hurt before walking up to them and using the spell on them. hectorgrey posted:Casting spells also requires concentration. If anything happens which could interrupt your concentration while you are casting, you must make a Concentration skill check to not lose the spell. I listed the DCs back when I was discussing skills, but it is worth pointing out here that if a spell takes longer than a standard action to cast, further injury to the spell caster can force further Concentration checks - Sorcerers in particular need to be aware of this, since using any metamagic on their spells increases casting time. Setting aside the fact that most spellcasters can simply take a 5-foot-step away from an attacker before casting, a level 17 spellcaster with 10 Con and 20 ranks in Concentration will have an 85% chance to cast a level 9 spell without provoking an AOO Even at level 1 they already have a 45% chance to avoid provoking, and Combat Casting immediately improves that to 60%. As an example of how other games tried to address this particular issue, Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved set the DC to ([Spell Level] + [the attacker's attack bonus, or 10, whichever is higher]). A level 17 Fighter might have an attack bonus of +34, turning that 9th-level spell defensive casting roll into an impossible DC 43. Pathfinder handled this rather badly: the check was still the same as in 3e, but if you failed the roll, you lost the spell entirely rather than provoking. In some ways that's a harsher penalty, but it wouldn't matter since the check was still just as easy to pass. hectorgrey posted:Wizards learn new spells in a number of ways. The one way in which they're guaranteed to learn spells is by levelling up - every level, they are assumed to have been doing their own research during their downtime, and as such receive two spells of any level they can cast when they level up. hectorgrey posted:Naturally, a Wizard's spellbook only has enough space for so many spells - a typical spellbook has a hundred pages. Writing a spell into your spellbook takes one day per spell level, +1. A level 0 spell takes a single day. Each spell takes up two pages per spell level, while a level 0 spell takes up a single page. Having done the maths, assuming that a Wizard only gets spells through levelling up and takes the most powerful spells they can while attempting to not waste spellbook space, a level 20 Wizard requires four spellbooks. The kinds of Wizard you're more likely to find in play will generally require a few more, meaning that as Wizards reach higher levels, they tend to pick up a spellbook specifically for travelling, which includes only the most regularly used spells on their list. The special inks and other materials required for writing in a spellbook costs 100GP per page. hectorgrey posted:Sorcerers and Bards do not use spellbooks and do not prepare spells; they learn spells only by levelling up, and they may cast any of their spells known that they have sufficient slots for. However, they must have 8 hours of rest, and 15 minutes of meditation to ready their mind for the casting of spells. Unfortunately as we've seen above, Wizard limits on spell-learning were simultaneously relaxed going into 3e, eating significantly into the Sorcerer's niche. hectorgrey posted:So yeah; I'm not going to describe all the spells because I could just as easily send you a link to their 3.5 equivalents and most of the spells would be identical. I will, however, describe some of the more interesting ones I took the liberty of looking up and comparing the spells that were significantly changed by the 3.5 revision: Blade Barrier in 3.0 created a spinning disc of blades whose plane of rotation could be horizontal, vertical, or slanted. And it had a damage cap of 20d6. 3.5 changed it to either be a linear wall that's 20 feet long-per-level, or a circle of blades with a radius of 5-feet-per-level (and a height of 20 feet either way. And the damage cap was lowered to 15d6. Presumably this was done to avoid all of the complicated arguments over the orientation of the blades. Blindness/Deafness in 3.0 had to define the effects of blindness and deafness in the spell description itself 3.5 changed it so that it simply referenced (and inflicted) the generic status effects of Blinded and Deafened. Call Lightning in 3.0 had a casting time of 10 minutes. It also had a duration of 10 minutes per level. As soon as you finished casting the spell, you could call down a lightning bolt immediately, and then another lightning bolt every 10 minutes after. The bolts would deal 1d10 electrical damage per level, up to 10d10. Finally, you needed the weather conditions to be cloudy/stormy, and you could only use the spell outdoors. 3.5 changed it to a 1-round casting time, and a 1 minute-per-level duration. You could call down a lightning bolt once per round, and it would deal 3d6 electrical damage. You no longer needed specific weather conditions to cast it, but if they were present, the damage would increase to 3d10. Finally, the spell was made to work both indoors and underground, but still would not work underwater. The 3.5 revision was a significant upgrade in the "usability" of this spell. Endure Elements in 3.0 would grant Resistance 5 against a particular energy type. 3.5 changed it so that it would protect the target from the hazards of being in below-negative-50-degree, or above-140-degree weather. This is a significant nerf, but then Endure Elements is a level 1 spell. Eyebite in 3.0 would let the caster inflict either a charm effect, a fear effect, a sicken effect, or a fear effect on a target. 3.5 changed it to only comatose/panicked/sickened conditions against targets with 4 HD or less, panicked/sickened conditions against targets with 5 to 9 HD, and only the sickened condition against targets with 10 HD or more. This is a significant nerf, but then probably deservedly so, since a charm or fear effect on all possible targets is incredibly powerful. Flame Arrow in 3.0 would let you turn projectiles into flaming projectiles, which would deal additional fire damage equal to half your caster level, up to +10. 3.5 changed it to add a flat 1d6 fire damage Harm in 3.0 would reduce a target to 1d4 hit points, no save, no spell resistance. 3.5 changed it to deal 10 damage per caster level, capped at 150 damage, save for half. Similarly, Heal in 3.0 would remove all hit point damage (and a number of other conditions) 3.5 changed it to retain the condition removal, but the healing was technically capped to 10 HP per caster level, capped at 150 HP. Haste in 3.0 is probably the most infamous of the revised spells. It granted a +4 haste bonus to AC, allowed a character to jump 1.5 times as far, but most importantly gave the target an extra "partial action", otherwise what would be known as a standard action. This was a huge buff that broke the action economy wide open. 3.5 changed it to only grant a +1 AC bonus, but also a +1 bonus to Reflex saves and a +1 bonus to attack rolls. The target's movement would also increase by 30 feet. To nerf the action economy aspect, the "additional action" could only ever be used to make an extra attack, and only if the hasted creature is making a full attack. Neutralize Poison in 3.0 would instantaneously remove any poisons on the target, but would not remove any damage/effects already inflicted. 3.5 changed it so that on top of that, the spell had a duration of 10 minutes per level, and target would also be immune to any further poisons for the duration. Otiluke’s Freezing Sphere in 3.0 would let you hurl a sphere of freezing matter which would ice-over any body of water that it struck. You could also shoot a cold ray that deals cold damage, or hurl an ice grenade. 3.5 changed it so that you could only use the first form of the spell. Reduce in 3.0 reduced a target's size by 10% per level caster level, to a maximum of 50%, but it still had its own definition of what that meant, including changes in weight and height and its own set of penalties just to strength. 3.5 changed it so that it would simply change the target's size to one category smaller, to be completely consistent with the rules written for such an occasion. Righteous Might in 3.0 increased your size by one category, and all that that implies (which is weird that this spell and Enlarge Person played by those rules, but Reduce did not). 3.5 changed it to add a clause about what would happen if you were in a space too small to hold your new size - you could make a strength check to burst any enclosures penning you in. Scrying in 3.0 used to require a skill check using the Scry skill 3.5 changed it to be based on Will saves instead, since Scry was no longer a separate skill Wall of Force in 3.0 could be a wall, or be forced into a flat, vertical plane, or a sphere or hemisphere. 3.5 changed it to remove the sphere/hemisphere options
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Apr 2, 2018 12:02
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Libertad! posted:NS2: Beyond the Wailing Mountains I really appreciate these bits of your write-ups, because it's a useful insight into the practical realities of running a module with human players actually poking and prodding against it. (and especially that bit about the Ice Trolls, yeesh)
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Apr 3, 2018 06:46
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There is a stunning amount of practical and good and cool advice for DMs in the 3e DMG (of either revision, and even more in the DMG2). If only people actually read it! hectorgrey posted:Around this point, we get another side bar - this time on DM tricks and tips using a notepad. It suggests drawing out a quick combat matrix with characters in initiative order down the side and turn order across the top. That way you can mark down when effects end and easily keep track of whose turn it is. This one in particular I adapted when I read it, and have been using it ever since. And I specifically had to see it in the 3.0 DMG, as this isn't in the 3.5 revision.
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Apr 3, 2018 13:15
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Inescapable Duck posted:Kind of the point is you should be using tactics, abilities and above all teamwork to put yourself into the best position to be using those abilities. I keep hearing 'I use all my dailies then I use all my encounters then I use at-wills over and over, this game is boring' and like, that's the absolute worst way to play the game. For one thing, "I'll use my best move, until I can't anymore, and then I'll use my next-best move" is ... like ... how any game is played. If you build a Trip Fighter in 3e, no poo poo you're going to want to trip everything you come across until you fight something that you can't. And when you can't, you then switch to whatever else you've got. And further, it sort of flattens the combat dynamics to assuming that there's always only just the one "best" ability to use anyway. I mean sure, if you look at this level 1 power:  And you compare it to this level 29 power:  then you might conclude that "it's all the same!", but that disregards these two other level 1 powers:  And these two other level 29 powers:   If you want to make a Fighter whose whole power selection is "HIT MAN WITH SWORD", you can absolutely do that, but I think it's disingenuous to ignore the other options available to you and then claim that the game is therefore simplistic or samey. EDIT: to PurpleXVI's point, I'd also like to remark that Brute Strike and No Mercy are Reliable powers, meaning they come back if you miss - so besides taking them purely for raw damage purposes, one might also take them to avoid this nagging feeling of "wasted" turns by loading up with a bunch of powers that keep coming back until they hit. You give up utility elsewhere, but then that's the point of having options and trade-offs! And to drive the point home further, just look at the At-Will abilities themselves:   If you want to interact with the game at only the most basic level, then yeah, you might consider that it all just comes down to Reaping Strike and nothing else, but you've got Cleave for Minions, Sure Strike to ... ensure a hit when it counts, and most importantly Tide of Iron to either take advantage of positioning set-ups for the rest of the party, or to exploit dangerous terrain on the battlefield. If we grant that what is the "best" ability actually changes from round-to-round depending on the overall tactical situation, then the game couldn't be boiled down to a rote order of power use. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Apr 3, 2018 |
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Apr 3, 2018 13:47
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PurpleXVI posted:The point is, as a level one character, I had... four tricks, I think, for abilities. And two of them, the Daily and the Encounter ability, were gone once used, at least until the next big event. Which left me with a grand total of two things to do. As I remember it, for my class, one of them was being able to mark enemies, and the other was being able to take advantage of that mark. Disregarding your one Encounter and one Daily power at level 1, a Fighter is going to have Combat Challenge to inflict marks and make MBAs against people who violate the mark, and then Combat Superiority to halt the movement of anyone struck by their OA ... and then they still have their two (if non-human) At-Will powers on top of that, so you definitely must have had more than two things to do even after blowing your Encounter and Daily power. Night10194 posted:I wonder when, exactly, they decided a fighter should get -25% to hit for every attack they've had the temerity to make that round. TSR-era Fighters gained extra attacks, but first they'd get "two every three rounds", and then two-per-round, and then "five every two rounds". If you had 2/3 attacks per round, you'd attack once every odd round, and then twice every even round. It kinda sorta worked as far as granting the Fighter extra attacks without going immediately to 2 attacks-per-round flat, but it was likely considered to be excessively fiddly and unwieldy. 3e's solution was to give the Fighter a second attack per round immediately, but then plant a penalty on it so that it's not as effective as a flat second attack.
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Apr 4, 2018 03:01
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Don't do this, you're much better off playing a 3.X straight fighter with splats than anything you can do in Pathfinder. I have to agree with this. Whatever meager bonuses Fighters gained in Pathfinder from the Bravery and Weapon/Armor Training abilities is completely overshadowed by the Combat Maneuver change completely loving-over their chances at pulling off those special attacks, as well repeated nerfs to the maneuver feats themselves, and losing all of the fairly effective feats and abilities scattered all around the various 3.5 splats, such as Dungeon Crasher or Shock Trooper. Hell, there's a Fighter variant in one of the Dragon Magazines called a Targeteer that gives the Fighter Dex-to-damage, and Pathfinder still doesn't have something that basic.
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Apr 4, 2018 03:38
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Selachian posted:I wonder if iterative attacks were also a response to the perceived OPness of fighters with multiple attacks, especially after UA introduced weapon specialization and all those elves with double bow specialization started mowing down hordes of enemies. Yeah they probably also wanted to firm up the number of attacks a character could make so that you didn't have darts as an outlier, and then they also made it based on BAB so that it would be "modular" and "formalized" across multi-classing. I do also have a vague recollection that in AD&D, any multiple attacks would happen at the bottom of the round (or possibly on a separate initiative count), so it's possible that the "full attacks limit movement" issue already existed way back then, but I'm not 100% sure.
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Apr 4, 2018 05:26
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NGDBSS posted:I forget, what got changed with the Combat Maneuver implementation beyond the feats getting stretched out? In 3e, you Trip a dude with a successful touch attack, and then an opposed Strength check [d20 + STR]. In Pathfinder: * They eliminated the touch attack, which is fine, since it was a mostly extraneous step anyway * The attacker rolls their Combat Maneuver Bonus, which is [d20 + BAB + STR] * The defender defends with their Combat Maneuver Defense, which is [10 + BAB + STR + DEX] If it was just eliminating the touch attack, that would have been fine If it was just turning the defender's role from a Strength check to a passive 10 + STR score, that would also have been fine If it was just turning the defender's role to a passive score, and adding BAB to both sides of the equation, that would probably have also been fine (it would wash-out in most cases) but then they also added the defender's Dex to it, which makes pulling off maneuvers significantly harder. and just as an extra gently caress YOU, they changed it so that instead of a flat +4 bonus for anyone that has more than two legs, Pathfinder instead has a +2 bonus for every leg past the second.
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Apr 4, 2018 06:10
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NGDBSS posted:One of these days I need to come up with an equivalent for d20 games, just because enough people in my gaming circles are far too anchored to it to try much else without massive prodding. This is something I've been working on:  It still needs a bit of work to get the different save configurations set the way I like, but it should be okay.
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Apr 4, 2018 09:49
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Cassa posted:I thought you could trip slimes and oozes in 4th? Just because you don't have feet, doesn't mean you can't be upside down. To be clear, yes, you can cause oozes and slimes to fall prone in 4th Edition, but we were talking about the difference between 3rd and Pathfinder.
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Apr 4, 2018 10:50
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Libertad! posted:Concluding Thoughts: Once again the Northlands manages to throw a novel mode of play every new adventure so far, this time in the form of a low-scale wargame. Blood on the Snow's a bit rougher than the others and needs additional tweaking, particularly the Mass Combat encounter. The final fight can be extremely deadly for even optimized parties on account of Herjof and his minions having superior action economy and debilitating spells. could I ask for a short description of how the mass combat rules (or at least the simplified version you used) works? How did you find them?
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Apr 5, 2018 09:50
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 Pathfinder Unchained Pathfinder Unchained was released in April of 2015, and is a collection of variant rules or houserules that Paizo deemed to be too radical to be published anywhere else, and so was being released here to cordon it off from the rest of the material. While some parts of it are used rather frequently, every other Paizo product that was released after it still retains full compatibility with the Core rules. I decided to review this now because with the impending release of Pathfinder 2nd Edition, there's a couple of key ideas hinted at from what we know of it now, that came from Pathfinder Unchained. Unchained Classes The first chapter deals with four revisions of base classes. These are improvements over their original incarnations, but you'd never get Paizo to admit that they're supposed to be replacements. The Unchained Barbarian was made a lot easier to use since their Rage now provides temporary HP and they gain flat bonuses to attack and damage rolls, rather than the D&D 3e convention of increasing your Constitution, Strength and Dexterity scores and asking the player to recompute the new values (and then un-recomputing them when the Rage fades). A lot of their Rage powers were also changed to last the entire time that the Barbarian is Raging, rather than on their own separate duration. The Unchained Monk was given full BAB, their Flurry of Blows was made easier to use by simply letting them attack one more time, and most of their Ki powers were improved, and some of the legacy-D&D-3e abilities were made to work within the Ki power system (such as Quivering Palm costing 4 Ki points to use). They also got upgraded to a d10 hit die commensurate with their full BAB, but they did lose the Good Will save in exchange. As far as I know though, there's some compatibility problems with trying to use regular Monk Archetypes with the Unchained Monk because of how the abilities have changed (as in Archetypes that trade out class abilities that no longer exist). The Unchained Rogue gets Weapon Finesse for free, and then also gets Dex-to-damage for free at level 3. They also get a new Debilitating Injury class ability that lets them inflict AC, or attack, or speed penalties against targets. Finally, they also receive the Edge class ability, which gives them free Skill Unlocks, which is a new set of rules elaborated-upon later in this book. Really though, the big deal is just the Weapon Finesse and the Dex-to-damage abilities, since that frees up a feat tax and makes the class far less MAD and makes it more of a viable class compared to, say, the Ninja as a replacement. The Unchained Summoner is not one that I'm rather familiar with, but as far as I can tell, a lot of the changes were to how it constructs its Eidolon and its spell list - the changes amount to nerfs, one might say fairly significant ones, but also because the regular Summoner is largely acknowledged to be a very powerful class as-written. It's the Unchained Rogue and Monk that get the most attention when this section of the book is used, because they are a lot better than their regular versions. The Unchained Summoner also gets play, and I assume that the reason there's not a lot of talk about the Unchained Barbarian is because it's mostly an ease-of-use revision rather than a balance change. All in all, this is a good and useful part of the book, and I'd recommend using the revised classes if you're going to be playing any of them at all. Fractional Base Bonuses This is a rule adapted from D&D 3e's Unearthed Arcana, which basically breaks down the Base Attack and saving throw bonuses into their fractional amounts so that you don't miss out on whole points because of rounding-down issues. It's a good rule that I imagine most people were already using long before Unchained came out because it came from D&D 3e, and I have to assume that this is here mostly to pad the page count. quote:As an aside, a lot of rules from Unchained are going to come from Unearthed Arcana, but it's also the case that variant rules from Unearthed Arcana have also popped up in various other Pathfinder books, such as Ultimate Combat containing the armor-as-DR rules and the wounds-and-vigor rules. Staggered Advancement This rule splits up a level into quarters and lets you get partial level-ups as you earn experience towards those smaller benchmarks. Normally, one would require 2000 XP to get from level 1 to level 2. What this rule does is it sets a benchmark at 500 XP, 1000 XP, and 1500 XP. Whenever you get to that point, you choose either to increase your BAB, increase your saving throw bonus, increase your HP by half of your normal gain, or increase your skill points by half your normal gain. You still need to get to level 2 to gain everything, but the idea seems to be to let players earn some things sooner than later. It's a ... workable rule, but it's also very book-keepy, and assumes that you'd be using the XP rules, which I imagine most playing groups do not. Background Skills This rule shifts most of the knowledge-based skills into their own separate category of Background Skills, of which everyone always gets 2 skill points to sink into every level. Consolidated Skills This rule merges a lot of skills and cuts them down to just 12, from an original 35. It does however also cut down on the number of skill points that every class gets. For example, a Fighter only gets 1 skill point per level, plus half-a-point per +1 Int modifier. Or a Rogue gets 4 skill points per level, plus half a point per +1 Int modifier. This means that where a Fighter used to be able to cover 5.7% of all the skills (2/35), now they get to cover 8.3% of the skills (1/12). Or where a Rogue used to be able to cover 22.85% of all the skills (8/35), now they get to cover 33% of all the skills (4/12). Grouped Skills This rule creates six different skill groups: Natural, Perceptive, Physical, Scholarly, Social, and Thieving, and then places all 35 regular skills somewhere within those groups. Characters then gain a number of skill groups and a number of skill specialties. If they make a skill check with a skill that they have as a specialty, they add their character level to the roll. If they make a skill check with a skill that's inside a skill group that they know (but the skill is not their specialty), they add half their character level to the roll. If they're both unspecialized in the skill and don't know the corresponding skill group, then they don't add anything except their ability modifier. For example, a Fighter knows 2 groups and 1 specialty at level 1. They gain a second group at level 10. A Rogue knows 3 groups at level 1, and they gain an additional group at levels 8 and 18 (so 5 out of 6 groups total). All characters start with 1 skill specialty at level 1, and gain an additional one about every other level, ending at 11 by level 20, though this is the one that's actually affected by having high Int. The rule broadens the capabilities of characters, and simplifies character creation by eliminating the process of having to allocate skill points, but it does come at some cost in relative power, since you're losing a +3 to the check at the top-end. Between the different skill rules, it's the Background Skills that require the least work for the most benefit for those that really need it (such as effectively doubling the skill points of a Fighter), and then it's the Grouped Skills that simplify and broaden your horizons by a lot with a minimum of headache. The Consolidated Skill Rules are good in theory, but require a lot of conversion work with existing items, feats, abilities, etc. Alternate Crafting Rules This rule rejiggers the way Craft works so that you measure progress on a per day basis: like the standard crafting rules, you still complete the item once your "progress" matches the item's cost, but there is now a table that gives you the amount of progress you can make per day, eliminating the multiplication and per-week calculations of the regular crafting rules. It's a good change in my opinion, though I don't know how many people closely track the Craft rules anyway. Alternate Profession Rules This rule includes tables and references on how to set-up an actual business to support your profession, whether you're a cook, an innkeeper, a librarian, a shepherd, a barrister, and so on. There's rules for the size of the business, hiring labor, determining profits, etc. etc. I can't imagine myself ever using this myself, and I have no doubt that there's some math flaw in this somewhere were someone to dig deep into it. Skill Unlocks This section of rules adds special abilities that you can gain once you hit so many ranks in certain skills. A character can take the new Signature Skill feat to make themselves eligible to use the skill unlocks for a single skill, but then the Unchained Rogue's Edge ability lets them get skill unlocks for free. As an example of what Skill Unlocks are capable of: Acrobatics 5 halves the penalty for trying to Tumble through spaces without provoking an AOO Acrobatics 10 lets you use Acrobatics checks against trip attempts and Reflex saves to avoid falling Acrobatics 15 eliminates provoking AOOs when standing up from prone Acrobatics 20 lets you double your Acrobatics results when jumping Bluff 5 halves the penalty for successive Bluff attempts on the same creature Bluff 10 eliminates the penalty Bluff 15 lets you make a Bluff check to foil attempts at mind-reading, or alignment detection, or magical truth-telling Bluff 20 lets you cast the Suggestion spell Climb 5 lets you keep your Dex bonus to AC while climbing Climb 10 gives you a flat climb speed of 10 feet as long as the climb DC is 20 or less Climb 15 gives you a flat climb speed equal to your normal movement as long as the DC is 20 less, and 10 feet for everything else Climb 20 gives you a flat climb speed on everything Disguise 5 lets you create your disguise in 1d3 minutes Disguise 10 lets you create your disguise in 1d3 rounds, and eliminates the gender, race, and age penalties if you take the normal duration Disguise 15 lets you create your disguise as a full-round action Disguise 20 lets you create your disguise as a standard action, or a full-round action that includes a Bluff check to let you hide The rest of them are all like this, with the Climb ones perhaps being the most daring. Everything else is just reducing penalties and letting you accomplish things faster. It would have been an interesting development if Skill Unlocks were something more like Legend RPG granting you the ability to Acrobatics on a snowflake at a high enough DC, but no such luck. Characters are still going to be largely terrestrial sans magic. Variant Multiclassing This rule allows you to trade away every other feat (that is, the feats at level 3, 7, 11, 15, and 19) to gain a core class ability from another class. As an example, you can get the Barbarian's Rage at level 3, their Uncanny Dodge at level 7, a single Rage Power at level 11, DR 3/- at level 15, and Greater Rage at level 19. The problem with this rule is that the abilities are way too far apart and way too conservative from discouraging people from trying normal multiclassing, or even against just taking the feat that they traded away. The Gunslinger is perhaps the exemplar of how bad this section is: you gain proficiency with firearms at level 3, and then the Gunsmith class feature at level 7, and then the Amateur Gunslinger class feature at level 11. It would take you more than half the game to gain basic use of firearms via VMC, when you could just as easily either take a 1-level dip in Gunslinger, or just take the feats themselves, or take an Archetype. It's a bad rule, and one whose badness should have been easily detectable. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 14:31
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Pathfinder Unchained The Alignment Track This is a set of rules that seeks to "gamify" the alignment system (further). First, it presents us with this alignment track:  Then, it allows players to place themselves either in the middle of the track, or wherever they want to start as. Classes with alignment restrictions are instead automatically placed in the most central position that still hits their alignment prerequisites, such as a Paladin starting at position 3 Lawful and position 3 Good. And then the book tells the GM that they should present the players with scenarios and decisions that will cause them to move across the track, with whatever repercussions that that implies. And then, if a player is already on the extreme end of a track, and continues to make decisions that would have made them move beyond the end (even more Good when you're already at position 1 Good), then they gain an Affirmation, which is basically a meta-currency that you can use to obtain a thematically appropriate bonus. For example, spending a Good Affirmation gives you a +2 bonus to damage or healing when using positive energy, or allows you to impose a -4 penalty to damage if the blow is about to made against an ally or an innocent character. Spending a Chaotic Affirmation allows you to roll twice and take either result when attempting a Reflex or Will save. The section also has Alignment Feats, which are feats you can get at level 10 or later, and they allow you to store your Affirmation points for longer than 24 hours, as well as boosting the effects of the Affirmation spend, as well as granting you some other small active or passive ability, such as the Champion of Freedom feat for very Chaotic Good people letting them cast Freedom of Movement. Personally, I'm someone who doesn't really bother with alignment at all, but if one were to use alignment, then this is probably more the shape of what it should probably be - as a descriptor of what one has done, rather than a prescriptor of one's behavior during gameplay. On the other hand, the reason why I don't bother with alignment in the first place is because it gets into all these tricky questions of "who is innocent?" when you're trying to determine if the Affirmation can be used to protect a certain NPC. Removing Alignment This section suggests doing away with alignment completely. It has some class-specific guidelines on what to do, such as Smite Evil being redefined to "any foe whose loyalties are directly contrary to the paladin’s highest loyalty". This still strikes me as somewhat vague and narrow, but the book ultimately shies away from simply letting the player Smite whoever they well please. The Full Removal option is perhaps too short to be useful, since it only says that you'll need to come up with something to replace all the alignment-specific stuff. Shameless Plug posted:but if one were to consider something more fleshed-out, I do recommend Quasar Knight's Death to Alignment supplement, which covers this topic extensively and in detail. This section also proposes a couple of other alignment-model alternatives: Aligned Loyalties lets you assume alignments are based on characters pledging loyalty to the various concepts of alignment. It's implied that this is different since it allows a person to behave however they want, so long as it's nominally in service of the loyalty that they have pledged to. Outsiders Only lets you project alignments onto supernatural creatures only. Mortals exist in a world with shades of gray, but a devil is still Evil absolutely. Radiant and Shadow lets you remove the normal alignment definitions, replace them with "Radiant" and "Shadow", presume that every creature is tied to or related to or is derived from one of these two forms of energies, and call it good. Like Aligned Loyalties, it frees people from the prescriptivism of normal alignment rules since it's simply something that you're both with, though this does come with some potentially unsavory implications. Subjective Morality quote:You can make your world extremely complex by replacing all alignment-based effects with subjective morality based on loyalties. As I've said, I personally don't use alignment, but the Full Removal option here is lackluster because of how it doesn't really address the issue at all. Aligned Loyalties and Radiant and Shadow are perhaps the more easily-used options that don't require a lot of formal rejiggering of the rules. Subjective Morality sounds way too involved for someone to ever want to bother with. Maybe you should be playing something Dogs in the Vineyard or Fiasco for something like that.
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Apr 6, 2018 10:18
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Pathfinder Unchained Revised Action Economy This extensive set of new rules changes things so that each character has 3 "Acts", and then all possible actions simply take one, two, or three Acts to do. An attack is one Act. Combat Maneuvers are one Act. Aid Another is one Act. Moving your speed is one Act. Taking a 5-foot-step is one Act. Casting a spell or using an ability that normally takes a Swift Action is one Act. Casting a spell or using an ability that normally takes a Standard Action is two Acts. Charging is two Acts. Making a coup de grace is three Acts. Casting a spell or using an ability that normally takes a Full-Round Action is three Acts. It's supposed to make the game simpler, and in some respects it manages to do that. For example, reducing a 5-foot-step to an Act removes all of the normal exceptions and special cases surrounding it. But in other areas, things are either more complicated, or at least still requires its own special set of exceptions. One big example is making attacks. There are no more "iterative attacks". Instead, you can (just) spend multiple Acts on the Attack action, with each succeeding attack having a cumulative -5 penalty. If you're dual-wielding, then on your first attack, you can attack with your main-hand and your off-hand. If you have the Improved Two-Weapon Fighting feat, then you can attack with both hands on your first and second attacks. If you have the Greater Two-Weapon Fighting feat, then you can attack with both hands on all your attacks. And then the same special case applies to Flurry of Blows, and so on. Drawing and nocking an arrow is a free action. But reloading a crossbow is two Acts, and reloading a firearm is three Acts. So they still kept that particular wrinkle in the rules. Haste gives you one more Act per turn, but that Act can only be used to make an attack action. Now besides the "simpler or not" mechanical consideration of these rules, it also has some knock-on effects towards balance: Martial classes no longer have iterative attacks, which means they actually lose the fourth attack at +16 BAB and up. At the same time, characters can make 3 attacks per round beginning at level 1. The second and third attacks are likely to miss, but you can still fish for a nat 20. At the same time, monsters can do this too, and it potentially makes the game a hell of a lot more dangerous at that level. Because Swift Actions still count as one Act, it potentially screws over classes that heavily on them, such as Investigators. You may need to still give these classes their own version of "this takes no Action, but you can only do it once per turn". quote:As an aside, what we know from Pathfinder 2nd Edition preview content is that the game is moving towards this model as its standard rules. A couple of variations on the Unchained rules is that supposedly some weapon types and special abilities will allow characters to mitigate the effects of the -5 successive attack penalty, as well as spells taking 1 Act to per category of V, S, and M that they use. It's wonky, and it's not actually simpler for anyone who's a veteran of d20 D&D, but I would absolutely use this to introduce the game to newer players. But for any game where you're all deep into the system mastery of Pathfinder, I feel like you'd spend too much brain power doing the conversions back-and-forth. Removing Iterative Attacks This seeks to streamline the process of rolling three or more attacks and their associated damage whenever someone takes a Full Attack action. Basically, you only roll your attack once, at your full attack bonus and then: * If the result misses the target's AC by 6 or more, then you miss completely and nothing happens * If the result misses the target's AC by 5 or less, you deal a Glancing Blow, which is defined as "assume you rolled a one on all your damage dice, plus all modifiers, and then cut the total in half" * If you hit the target's AC, then you hit. * For every 5 points that you exceed the target's AC, you hit again, but with a cap on the extra hits based on your BAB (so you can't hit more times than you normally could) * If you're dual-wielding, use the attack bonus of whichever hand is lower. For every hit that you score, you also hit with both weapons. * If rolled high enough to hit multiple times, and you threaten a critical hit, roll to confirm. If the confirmation roll still confirms, then two of your hits will have been considered to have crit. If the confirmation roll does not confirm, then only one of your hits will have been considered to have crit. Let's examine this in some more detail: assume a level 17 Fighter with a total attack bonus of +31, attacking a CR 17 monster with 28 AC. code:Compare this to rolling the dice the normal way: code:From my personal perspective, I've been spoiled by roll20, so I can't see myself using this rule since it's easy for me to type "[[d20+31]]; [[d20+31-5]]; [[d20+31-10]]; [[d20+31-15]]" and get all my attack roll results in one go. Trying to do this on paper might yield a different experience. On the one hand, this alternative method requires less rolling. On the other hand, coming up with the "success margin" requires an additional bit of math that might take some getting used to. It is nice though to have a rule where the math isn't hosed, and for that I give this section some credit.
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Apr 7, 2018 05:22
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Libertad! posted:Concluding Thoughts: Even barring the racist overtones of reducing Native Americans into monsters for loot and EXP, The Return of Hallbjorn has a lot of flaws. One, Hallbjorn himself does not play a large role beyond the initial opening. Second is the fact that it seems that the writing process took a sudden left turn: the Jomsviking threat was initially played up in the text and even featured their handiwork on the cover art, but then were reduced to a single optional encounter. Unlike Raven Banners Over Gatland or Plague in Trotheim there is not a sense of impending doom to spur PCs onward. The open world sandbox may be interesting, but the vast majority of locations are single encounters with nothing in the way of dungeons or complexes to explore. Although there's an impetus of "we must save the colonists," this adventure is very greed-driven whereas prior ones just as strongly played on PCs' possible altruistic intentions. Between this and all of the sex stuff you've had to excise, I kinda feel bad for how many rewrites this campaign is requiring.
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Apr 8, 2018 03:52
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Pathfinder Unchained Stamina and Combat Tricks This section details a fairly extensive set of rules to introduce a new mechanic: Combat Tricks, which are powered by Stamina points. First, how do you get it? The simplest way is to make it into a feat Another suggestion is make it into a feat, and then make it into a free feat that Fighters get at level 1, since it's supposed to boost them (and other martial classes) Yet another suggestion is to make it into a free feat that all martial classes get at level 1 One last suggestion is to make it into a Fighter-only ability, so that Fighters get the new abilities, but not anyone else What does it do? Combat Stamina, as a baseline, lets you earn Stamina points. You have a maximum equal to your BAB + your CON modifier. You regenerate 1 Stamina point per 1 minute of non-strenuous activity. This practically means that you get all of them back after every fight/encounter, unless you're a real stickler for detail. The ability, all by itself, lets you spend 1 Stamina point to gain a +1 bonus to your attack roll. You can spend them after you make the roll, but before you're told of the result. You can spend up to 5 of them in this way. This is a marginally useful ability all on its own, but the real meat-and-potatoes of this rules section is supposed to be its interactions will all of the combat feats - you're supposed to be able to pull of "Combat Tricks" by spending Stamina points to gain special effects based on what combat feats you have. For example, if you spend 2 Stamina points on Power Attack, you can shorten the effects to just until the end of your turn, instead of until the end of your next turn. This is supposed to be advantageous since your Attacks of Opportunity then won't suffer from the attack penalty (in exchange for the damage bonus). I'm going to draw mostly from Core Rulebook feats here so that they're most familiar with you all, but to demonstrate the kind of things that these Combat Tricks are supposed to let you do: * Combat Reflexes - if you miss with an AOO, you can spend 5 Stamina points to make another AOO (triggered by the same action). This second AOO has a -5 penalty, and it costs one of your AOOs for the turn. * Improved Critical - if your attack roll is short of threatening a crit by 3 or less (so like a nat 16, 17, or 18 on a 19-20 weapon), you can spend 5 Stamina points. If you do, you can roll to confirm a critical. If this confirmation roll is successful, you deal double damage (specifically only double, not whatever crit multiplier you would normally have). * Improved Trip - you can take this feat even if you don't have 13 Intelligence, but it will only work as long as you still have 1 Stamina point. Also, you can spend a number of Stamina points equal to your Str or Dex modifier to gain a CMD (that's DEFENSE) bonus against Trip attempts made against you. * Greater Trip - you can take this feat even if you don't have 13 Intelligence, but it will only work as long as you still have 1 Stamina point. Also, you can spend 2 Stamina points after a successful Trip attempt to deal an additional 1d6 points of falling damage against the tripped target. * Point-Blank Shot - you can spend up to 6 Stamina points to increase the point-blank range by 5 feet per point spent * Precise Shot - you can spend 2 Stamina points to make a ranged attack against an enemy engaged with an ally. If it hits, the attack deals no damage, but the ally can choose to either get a +2 AC bonus against that enemy, or a +2 attack bonus against that enemy * Quick Draw - as long as you have 1 Stamina point, you can sheathe a weapon as a swift action * Rapid Reload - you can spend 5 Stamina points to reduce the action economy of the reload action by one more step * Shield Focus - you can spend up to 2 Stamina points to gain an AC bonus against one attack. The bonus is equal to the number of points you spent. * Stunning Fist - you can spend 5 Stamina points to be able to declare a use of Stunning Fist only after you already know that the unarmed attack has hit * Weapon Specialization/Focus - you can spend 2 Stamina points to make this feat work with a weapon that you don't currently have it selected for, for one round * Whirlwind Attack - you can spend 5 Stamina points in order to make one more extra/bonus attack that you'd normally be able to do. If all of this sounds underwhelming, that's because it really is. The Combat Reflexes and Improved Critical effects are probably the most blatant examples of how unambitious all this poo poo is. It's very similar to Skill Unlocks in that the concept is laudable, but the execution leaves you something to be desired because it's all just nickel-and-dime poo poo. One of Sid Meier's design rules is that if you're going to adjust something in a game that's too small or too large, you shouldn't dick around with 5% or 10% adjustments because nobody is going to notice that, and since you have a limited number of patch cycles/development time, you need maximum impact. I feel like the same should apply here: notwithstanding that none of these things ever makes a martial class capable of "supernatural" abilities, it's also the case that asking someone to track Stamina points and spend them to ... get a CHANCE to do an extra thing is just tedious busywork for not much results. If you're going to staple-on a new system to the game, it had better have some real impact: spend a point to guarantee a crit and a confirm. Spend a point to do a full-attack where all your attacks are whirlwind attacks. Spend a point to guarantee a Trip attempt. Spend a point to guarantee an AOO. And so on and so forth. Mind you, they covered all the combat feats from all of the heretofore released supplements, Ultimate Combat, Advanced Class Guide, Advanced Race Guide, etc etc etc. For them to spend 23 pages on this stuff only to have it be this piss-weak is frustrating to say the least.
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Apr 9, 2018 05:34
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The other big elephant in the room is that this chapter introduces the Skill Challenge rules. Skill challenges are in the Dungeon Master's Guide proper, so I won't go into them much here other than to say they're terrible. Much was made out of how the initial math for skill challenges didn't work...which was overhauled into a different set of math that didn't work...and at the end of the day I legitimately don't know what the rules are for skill challenges any more because they've been overhauled so many drat times. I've even heard that there are published adventures with "skill challenges" that don't match the mechanics in the DMG or the errata'd mechanics when they were written. The point is that the system doesn't work and doesn't fix any of the problems with them. Perhaps one of the biggest by-the-book flaws regards skills was that, deliberately or otherwise, the DM was never (clearly) told that they could resolve singular tasks with singular skill checks. It was implied as far as the skill definitions including how to use them to resolve singular tasks, but the DMG would go straight to describing things in terms of Skill Challenges, and adventure modules would only ever frame such things in terms of whole encounters being skill challenges. It probably would have gone over a little better if they had a few examples of "there is a 20-foot chasm across the dungeon" and you can solve it without invoking the entire Skill Challenge framework. Hostile V posted:So what skills exist do in 4e. I don't have the core book and am more familiar with Gamma World 7e 4e. Also it sucks how poo poo changes but then what is the initial RAW for Skill Challenges? The 4e skill list: Acrobatics Arcana Athletics Bluff Diplomacy Dungeoneering Endurance Heal History Insight Intimidate Nature Perception Religion Stealth Streetwise Thievery In contrast, D&D 3.5 had 45 skills, and Pathfinder had 35 skills. D&D 3.0 had more still. This is what the recommended DCs were in the DMG 1  They were later revised in DMG 2  They underwent one more revision going into Essentials, and this is how they looked like in the Rules Compendium  The Rules Compendium finally did provide an explanation for what these DCs were supposed to represent/how they were arrived at: quote:Easy: An easy DC is a reasonable challenge for creatures that do not have training in a particular skill. Such creatures have about a 65 percent chance of meeting an easy DC of their level. An easy DC is a minimal challenge for a creature that has training in the skill, and it is almost a guaranteed success for one that also has a high bonus with the skill. In group checks (page 128) or when every adventurer in a party is expected to attempt a given skill check, particularly when no one necessarily has training, an easy DC is the standard choice for the scenario. So for example: Level 1 character, 18/+4, with Training (+5): 100% chance to pass an Easy check DC 8 90% chance to pass a Moderate check DC 12 55% chance to pass a Hard check DC 19 Level 1 character, 8/-1, without training: 60% chance to pass an Easy check DC 8 40% chance to pass a Moderate check DC 12 5% chance to pass a Hard check DC 19 The DMG 1 numbers would have been ludicrously hard, while the DMG 2 numbers would have been too easy. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Apr 9, 2018 |
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Apr 9, 2018 07:40
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Pathfinder Unchained Wound Thresholds These rules are designed to change the current model of characters always being 100% fighting-fit right up until they're knocked-out/dead, as a means of driving tension, increasing the strategic value of healing (beyond just keeping a character above 0 HP) and as a sop to realism. If you're below 75% of your maximum health (Grazed), you take a -1 penalty to attack rolls, skill checks, saving throws, AC, and caster level. If you're below 50% of your maximum health (Wounded), you take a -2 penalty. If you're below 25% of your maximum health (Critical), you take a -3 penalty. The game then even recommends a "Gritty Mode" where the penalties are doubled, as well as recommending that the GM only use the Wounded state to avoid monsters from becoming too complicated to run. To its credit, the book correctly warns the reader about the possibility of this rule turning fights into "death spirals": where the side that's already behind only ever falls behind even more, and falls faster, and can't ever recover or snap back, because being hurt already makes you worse. The main problem with this rule is that it is at its most significant at low levels: a Fighter with the -2 Wounded penalty is losing something like a third of their total attack bonus at level 1, but they're only losing maybe 15 to 20% of their attack bonus by level 5. But the lowest levels of the game are already the ones that are the most difficult and dangerous. It also doesn't really solve the issue of healing having being less important than it otherwise might be. Without getting into a broader discussion of game design, the causes for that are much more deep-seated.
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Apr 9, 2018 13:28
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White Coke posted:What if the Millennium Falcon was a Star Destroyer is an amazing idea for a game. That actually happened in one of the X-Wing Expanded Universe novels.
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Apr 10, 2018 02:52
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Pathfinder Unchained New Disease and Poison Rules These rules replace the normal rules for diseases and poisons. First, it creates a 6-step track: Healthy - Latent/Carrier - Weakened - Impaired - Disabled - Bedridden - Comatose - Dead Then, it defines: * penalties for every step of the track * the saving throw DC against the effects of the poison/disease * the frequency of the saving throws against the effect (failing it means moving down the track by 1 state) * how the effect can be cured (besides the usual cure spells) For example, let's take the Demon Fever disease: * when you're Weakened, you suffer from the Sickened and Fatigued conditions * when you're Impaired, you suffer from the Exhausted condition, plus whenever you take a Standard action you have to pass a Fort save or you lose your turn * when you're Disabled, you suffer from the Disabled condition, plus you lose 1 HP whenever you take an action * when you're Bedridden ... you're bedridden. You can't move or act on your own and can only converse * when you're Dead ... you're dead * the Fort DC against this disease is 18 * you make a Fort save against it once per day * you can Cure it (i.e. move UP the track by 1 state) by making two consecutive successful saves And then as an example of poisons, let's take the Id Moss poison: * when you're Weakened, you take a -2 penalty to all Intelligence ability checks and Intelligence-based skill checks. You also get a -2 penalty to the save DCs of all your Intelligence-based spells, and you cannot cast your highest level of spells * when you're Impaired, you also no longer gain bonus spell slots from having high Intelligence, and any ability pools that are based on Intelligence are no longer increased by your Intelligence. The save DC penalty increases to -4, and you cannot your your two-highest levels of spells * when you're Animalistic, you suffer from the effects of the Feeblemind spell * when you're Comatose ... you're comatose. * when you're Dead ... you're dead * the Fort DC against this disease is 14 * as with all poisons, you take HP damage as soon as you're exposed to the poison, whether you successfully or not. The damage is equal to the save DC, minus 10, and then divided by 2, or in this case 2 damage * you make a Fort save against it once per per minute for 6 minutes * you can Cure it by making a successful save There's a fairly extensive list of diseases and poisons of varying potencies and potential uses, and sometimes they play around with the mechanics: some effects don't go beyond the third or fourth track (and so can't kill you), while some effects can only be cured by magic, and some effects have (near-)permanent effects even after they've been cured. This section I would say accomplishes some of the goals that it set out for itself: because the effects no longer just inflict stat penalties, they're both easier to integrate into the game without needing to do a lot of derived-stat-math, and the penalties can be both gentler at the early onset and harsher at the late stages. This sort of progression is also more intuitive to deal with, and dare I say realistic, but in a good way. It divorced itself from the D&D 3rd Edition model of diseases and poisons, and is arguably all the better for it. What it does not address is the relative power of spells like Neutralize Poison and Cure Disease and Heal to simply remove most of these effects completely. High-level spellcasters that are willing to put in the effort will not have a problem dealing with most diseases and poisons unless they're shackled/limited in some other way. Overall, I'd say these rules are well worth using. EDIT: As Alien Rope Burn later pointed out, a version of these rules were included in Starfinder. That makes two so far (the other being the Revised Action Economy) that Paizo took from this book and carried forward into their later work. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Apr 11, 2018 |
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Apr 10, 2018 15:54
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hectorgrey posted:So we continue this chapter by moving straight into the variant rule that allows for multiclassing at first level. hectorgrey posted:After this, we get the rules for creating a character above first level. This is easiest to do by creating a first level character and increasing them level by level. There is also a table of starting money for higher level PCs - 900GP for second level PCs, going up to 760,000 GP for 20th level PCs. My take is that this sort of thing always existed: Fighters needed +x weapons to hit high-level enemies, Magic-Users needed Bracers of Protection AC 4 or whatever, and everyone wanted stuff like Gloves of Dexterity or Belts of Ogre Strength to actually be able to use the high-stat-modifier rules that would normally be unreachable because of old-school D&D's random stat rolling. There's even guidelines by Gygax himself on the back of the AD&D DMG on how to create higher-than-level-1 characters similar to this, and it does include giving them a set of magical items. The difference though is that, in true Gygaxian fashion, you had to roll for poo poo. By making the wealth levels determinate you could make things a lot more predictable. Unfortunately, this did also introduce the issue of the game now having a direct and literal "item treadmill", which DMs would often fail to account for when planning out their campaigns, especially when they wanted to run "low magic" campaigns for whatever reason. It would be a problem that D&D would, and perhaps still does, struggle with to this day. hectorgrey posted:Next, we get a side bar on how the Leadership feat works. Basically, you have a leadership score equal to your character level, modified by your Charisma modifier. So long as you have a leaderhip score of at least 2, you can attract a cohort (an NPC who joins the party at a lower level than your PC). If it is 10 or higher, you gain a number of followers - eventually this can become a small army with officers of up to 6th level. A cohort gains XP equal to half the XP that the PC gains, and levels up independently to a maximum level of one lower than the PC. Leadership gets a lot of flak for being an "overpowered" feat, but it's worth mentioning that all Leadership really is, is a formalization of the "name level followers" of old-school D&D. It's even level-gated to character level 6. They perhaps failed to account for how powerful it would become once you factor in having direct control of a more-or-less fully-kitted-out second character, and especially when combined with the formalized action economy, but I think Leadership is one of those things that suggests that D&D 3e was still being written with previous editions in mind.
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Apr 11, 2018 05:18
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Pathfinder Unchained Simplified Spellcasting These rules are supposed to "simplify" spellcasting by changing low-level spells into a spontaneous pool. The book explains that once (prepared) spellcasters get to higher levels, they have a lot of low-level spell slots that they need to track, and this gets fiddly and tedious. Therefore, they propose converting all but the three-highest spell levels into a shared pool that can be cast spontaneously. For example: A level 6 Wizard has three 1st-level spell slots, three 2nd-level spell slots, and two 3rd-level spell slots (plus bonus spells). This does not change under Simplified Spellcasting, since the three-highest spell levels are all the spell levels that they currently have A level 7 Wizard has four 1st-level spell slots, three 2nd-level spell slots, two 3rd-level spell slots, and one 4th-level spell slot (plus bonus spells) under Simplified Spellcasting, a level 7 Wizard instead has a Spell Pool, three 2nd-level spell slots, two 3rd-level spell slots, and one 4th-level spell slot (plus bonus spells) The Spell Pool at level 7 is 1, plus 25% of your spellcasting modifier, so at 18 Int, the Spell Pool would be 2. The Spell Pool lets the Wizard spontaneously cast any level spell covered under it. In this case, they could cast any two 1st-level spells that they want, without having to prepare/memorize them ahead of time. To extend the example, a level 20 Wizard has four 7th-level spell slots, four 8th-level spell slots, four 9th-level spell slots, and then a Spell Pool of 5 (plus bonus spells), and then the Spell Pool covers everything else from 1st-level to 6th-level spells. Two things are immediately obvious with this system: * You are effectively losing a TON of potential spells this way - even the level 7 Wizard is going from four 1st-level spell slots, down to two or so. * The assumption is that you won't need that many - a level 7 Wizard has six spells before they have to dip into their Pool. Now, the idea is that you'd mostly use the Pool spells for "utility"-type spells, and that this helps the player by letting them freely pick between Alarm, Hold Portal, and Floating Disk without having to commit ahead of time, but if you kept the old system and simply used the extra spell slots to have two Alarms, two Hold Portals, and two Floating Disks, then you still get all the utility that you need anyway, and this system is still technically a restriction on your power! So from a practical standpoint, I'd use this system - it restricts the power of spellcasters by robbing them of spell slots, and then it also does reduce the book-keeping. But it doesn't really just simplify spellcasting - it actively changes the power level of the game. Limited Magic These rules change how spell DCs and caster levels are computed. It assumes that all spells are cast with the minimum possible caster level with the minimum possible spellcasting stat. If you cast a 1st-level spell: * the spellcasting stat is always considered to be a 10/+0 * the save DC is always considered to be 11: [10 + 0 spellcasting modifier + 1 spell level] * the caster level is always considered to be 1: so a caster level check to overcome Spell Resistance would always be [d20+1] Aid would always last just 1 minute and only offer 1d8+1 temp HP, while Magic Missile would always have a range 110 feet and would only ever shoot 1 missile. If you cast a 5th-level spell: * the spellcasting stat is always considered to be 15/+2 * the save DC is always considered to be 17: [10 + 2 spellcasting modifier + 5 spell level] * the caster level is always considered to be 9: so a caster level check to overcome Spell Resistance would always be [d20+9] Cone of Cold would always only deal 9d6 cold damage, and Wall of Stone would always create 2-inch-thick walls and only be 9 squares long. This has some practical utility: if the spell stats are static, then you could pretty much treat them as "ability cards", since there's never any computation required. The more obvious change is that it significantly reduces the power of spellcasters. The problem with these rules is that it still preserves a lot of power anyway, because actual effects can vary wildly depending on what the spell actually does. Anything that lasts a minute or an hour per level and just applies a flat effect is probably going to be just fine, such as Fly lasting for 5 minutes or Haste lasting for 5 rounds and still being able affect up to 5 targets. Feeblemind is going to be resisted maybe between 40 to 50% of the time by vulnerable targets, but as long as you land it, then the target is just as disabled anyway. Meanwhile, direct damage spells are hit thrice as hard: their damage is locked, their save DC is locked, and their Spell Resistance check is locked. I wouldn't be totally against trying these rules out for a spin, but at the same time, I can understand why people would just refuse to play a spellcaster if I did, and especially a "blaster"-type build. I can kind of tell what they were going for with these rules, but it just seems like if you wanted to restrain spellcaster power, there are other ways to do it, up to and including playing a different game that doesn't require so much rejiggering.
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Apr 11, 2018 08:53
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Is it even role playing? The game is purely tactical. X-COM has always had a sort of "emergent behavior" RPG feel, where the troopers come to you with zero backstory, and then create a backstory all their own as you play through them, with the player often projecting personalities and idiosyncrasies of their own make onto the otherwise faceless troopers. It's kind of like playing OD&D in a way, where Rob the Fighter is the 3rd iteration of Bob and Dob the Fighters, but then Rob is the one that makes it to a third dungeon as a level 5 character, and in the process he's done things that have gone down in legend. I'm also of the opinion that the only real thing separating "wargames" from "RPGs" is force persistence. Panzer General is an RPG, and so is a proper game of ASL: Red Barricades. Libertad! posted:So, that's it. We literally have nothing else to cover besides the OGL, the book's back cover, and a full-color poster map of the Northlands. I am glad that I got the opportunity to review this thing in such fine detail and share with you this truly unique adventure path and setting. I appreciate the effort that went into this review. Reading adventures is a weakness of mine, but the attention to detail you showed even for the adventure parts that you hadn't run yet was very cool.
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Apr 15, 2018 09:53
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Alien Rope Burn posted:This really feels like "Man, we couldn't come to a full decision on any of this, figure it out yourself." Like, they know there's an issue, but... well, it also feels like Tweet's influence of "Eh, maybe do it this way... or this way, whatever?" In a sense, you've got to hand it to Gygax for sticking to his guns on critical hits. Dude really did not want to give any ground on it - and then as soon as Zeb Cook and the AD&D 2e gang introduced them into the game, they immediately started hemming and hawing: crits were in, nat 20 is double damage, but then there's a sidebar of "uhhh perhaps you can make it such that a nat 20 is only an extra attack roll" ... and then Combat & Tactics adds more crit systems on top of that.
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Apr 15, 2018 16:05
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I don't think anyone actually LIKES Diablo-style itemization where you continually swap out items for new bonuses. People tolerate it because its in a lot of games and is really easy for designers to implement, but I've never seen anyone post about how this hat gives them 5% more fire damage than the hat they got 10 minutes ago and it totally makes their crushing breakup tolerable. People will go for the bigger numbers, but a ring that turns you perpetually invisible is just going to be more exciting than raising your firebolt damage. I think it's also the case that games with an "item treadmill" still fail at implementing Diablo-levels of power creep anyway. Whether you're talking about the second or the third game in the series, the bonuses in those games increases your character's numbers by orders of magnitude. Or to put it another way, people have never tried to solve the Linear Fighters Quadratic Wizards problem by making the Fighters straight-up goddamned Quadratic, much less Exponential. You know what BAB should do? It should act as a multiplier on all damage. TheGreatEvilKing posted:If the Races and Classes preview book is to be believed, early drafts of 4e actually had everything on a per-encounter schedule and were convinced to ditch it by Mike Mearls (who later spun the draft into Tome of Battle). This is true. They shied away from it at the last minute because ostensibly they couldn't swallow the idea of removing the "daily" layer of adventuring, but if you look at Tome of Battle classes and compare it to 4e's design, it's clear that there's actually no "daily" throttle to ToB classes save plain running out of hit points (which is easily obviated with Wands of Cure Light Wounds anyway, but let's assume that that wasn't intended behavior). TheGreatEvilKing posted:Other than that, combat is mostly the same with the exception that everything is measured in squares instead of feet, AoEs are squares instead of circles/circle equivalents, and everyone in 4e-land can fold space and time to move diagonally without penalty. That's different, but it's not actually objectionable as...well, you already play D&D at a table with dice, go ahead and use a board. It's a game. One difference from 3e that I want to point out is that instead of the "cone" shape, they instead use a "blast" shape, which is a square shape of x number of squares to a side. It was a lot easier to adjudicate than trying to figure out what's the jagged-diagonal edge of a "40-foot cone" TheGreatEvilKing posted:What the chapter also points out is that you have a little pile of fiddly ongoing effects, which can end at the beginning or the end of your turn. It also introduces the saving throw mechanic, which is intended to prevent people from getting permanently paralyzed, but manages to gently caress up in every possible way. At its core, you have a 55% chance of ending an effect on you each turn, regardless of the effect or originator. If you are a god - an actual thing the game says you can become - and you mind-control a commoner, that commoner has a 55% chance of breaking free of your control every turn. If said commoner somehow gets a domination power and hits you with it, you have a 45% chance of not making your save. A significant change from 3e is that durations were all revised to last so many turns, or until the end of the encounter, or until a saving throw is passed. This has a tendency to become fiddly, especially when making distinctions between turns, rounds, and starts and ends of rounds and turns ... but the alternative was trying to adjudicate the management of buff spells that lasted x rounds versus x minutes versus x hours versus x days. TheGreatEvilKing posted:To start with, you need a feat to use rituals. Now, already we see that wizards and clerics get that feat for free, but it gets better! Many of the rituals are keyed to arcana, religion, and nature checks - skills the wizard and cleric have, but the fighter doesn't. Now, if you get a scroll of the ritual instead of learning to use it yourself, it takes half the casting time and anyone can use it, but that costs more money. This was definitely one of the "cowardly" outcomes of 4e. The Ritual system was still hugely biased in favor of spellcasters anyway. TheGreatEvilKing posted:4TH EDITION DIDN'T FIX poo poo Since you already dropped an Obamacare reference, my clumsy political analogy is that 4e is lot like Bernie in that this is the compromise candidate. 4e is a lot better in peoples's heads and with the benefit of a lot of internal houseruling that's sort of been inculcated at this point, but just like Sanders's stance against airstrikes in Syria is merely procedural instead of moral, so it goes with 4e being very held back by a lot of hidebound traditionalism within the D&D milieu. People here tend to look upon it nicely because the rest of the party is trash and sucks (and 5e is actively reactionary) and you're maybe one of a dozen people that's ever leveled a criticism against it that wasn't mired in disingenuous horseshit*, but "attacking it from the left" as it were does reveal a lot of flaws that are otherwise glossed over since good alternatives have been so niche and paltry. * I personally have very little respect for the idea that you should be able to carry over your campaign across multiple games, but you do you.
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Apr 16, 2018 08:28
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Nessus posted:To be fair, wasn't Paizo's whole thing basically that one of their company people took an MBA class and developed a marketing campaign - it was just that in the context of tabletop RPGs, this picking up of basic information was tantamount to the Sa-Matra of the Ur-Quan clans? Paizo used to publish Dungeon and Dragon Magazines for WOTC under license. When WOTC decided to move to 4e, they took Paizo's license away from them. They then also created the GSL to replace the OGL, and it stated that you could no longer publish material for 3.5 if you started publishing material for 4e. Paizo was now in a position that they had lost their primary line of business. They needed to create a game that they owned, completely, so that no one could ever take their licensing away from them the way WOTC did. Enter Pathfinder. But you don't get people to play your 3.5 spin off just because it's there, you need to make a reason. Enter the birth of the "4e is WOW for babbies" and "4e is just TOO DIFFERENT" and "Pathfinder is the true heir to the D&D tradition" talking points. They had to deliberately peel players away from 4e by pooh-poohing it before it ever came out, or else having their own license wouldn't matter because nobody would play it anyway. Now, one might excuse this as "just business", that Paizo was simply doing what it needed to in order to survive, capitalism thrives under competition and all that, but the ethics/morality of instigating toxicity within the hobby for the sake of business is ... not great.
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Apr 16, 2018 10:11
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This discussion got me curious, and set me down a path of Just How Much Did D&D 4th Edition's Monster Manual 1 Get Right? I compared the on-release monster creation guidelines with the later ones from the MM3, and came up with the following: Brutes at level 1: * 20 + Con HP, gaining 10 HP per level. No change going into MM3 * 13 AC. No change * d20+4 to attack. MM3 increased the base attack to d20+5 Soldiers at level 1: * 8 + Con HP, gaining 8 HP per level. No change * 17 AC. MM3 reduced the base AC to 15 * d20+8 to attack. MM3 reduced the base attack to d20+6 Skirmishers at level 1: * 8 + Con HP, gaining 8 HP per level * 15 AC * d20+6 to attack No changes at all going into MM3 Lurkers at level 1: * 6 + Con HP, gaining 6 HP per level. MM3 reduced the base HP to 5 + Con * 15 AC. No change * d20+6 to attack. No change Controllers at level 1: * 8 + Con HP, gaining 8 HP per level * 15 AC * d20+6 to attack No changes at all going into MM3 Artillery at level 1: * 6 + Con HP, gaining 6 HP per level. MM3 reduced the base HP to 5 + Con * 13 AC. No change * d20+8 to attack. MM3 reduced the base attack to d20+6 Other notes: 1. When trying to assign a Con score, a 16 can be assumed. DMG 1 assumes that this Con score increases by 1 every two levels. 2. All monsters would gain 1 AC and +1 to attack per level. MM3 never changed these rates, only the base amounts. 3. All monsters had 13 to non-AC Defenses at level 1, gaining 1 Defense per level. MM3 never changed the base amount nor the rate. Elites and Solos: 1. Three out of the four defenses (AC/Fort/Refl/Will) of an Elite should be increased by +2. DMG 2 removed this point. 2. Solos should have four times the HP of a normal monster, and then five times if the Solo is level 11 or higher. DMG 2 removed the 5x clause for level 11+ Solos, so all Solos would only have 4x HP. 3. Three out of the four defenses of the Solo should be increased by +2. DMG 2 removed this point. Damage: According to the DMG 1, the "Medium Normal" damage roll for a monster is supposed to average 8.5 damage (such as 1d10+3), increasing by 0.5 per level, top out at 23.50 average damage by level 30. According to the MM3, the Medium Normal damage roll was instead supposed to average out to 9.0 damage (such as 2d6+2), increasing by 1.0 per level, to top-out at 38.0 damage by level 30 quote:A Medium Normal damage roll is supposed to be used for the At-Will powers of most monsters. In summary, the big changes were: * making everyone deal more damage * making Soldiers less well-armored * reducing the defenses of Elites and Solos, and the HP of Solos In the cold hard light of 2018, you could probably still reduce everyone's HP by 25 to 50%, and you could probably still double everyone's damage (or more), but it's surprising to me how marginal some of these changes actually are. The lack of damage was a very latent issue that reared its head as soon as the game released, and had a variety of knock-on effects (long combat length that felt "meaningless" and "sloggy"), but you think the rest of the numbers would have adjusted more radically, and you wouldn't even really feel the Solo HP change until halfway into the game. It's my suspicion, though not thoroughly investigated, is that a lot of the "long combat" issues that were encountered were caused on the back-end by using over-leveled enemies, as well as players lacking the item-based and per-tier bonuses that would have made enemies feel hard to hit. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Apr 16, 2018 |
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Apr 16, 2018 11:52
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There's this 2005 essay from Jonathan Tweet where he talks about how Hit Points are supposed to provide a sense of predictability - you fight a dude, he stabs you for 3 damage, and you know you have 20 HP or whatever, so you know you can take another 4 hits before you're really in trouble. (as a follow-on from that, effects like Cleric turning and charm/dominate/other save-or-suck spells are "bad" because they don't attack HP and their binary nature means that there's no warning before you're killed or disabled. Of course, the funny part with this is when you realize, despite Tweet's high concept, 3rd Edition was terrible with giving people enough HP to be able to react appropriately to the tide of a battle.
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Apr 16, 2018 16:04
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Nessus posted:I'm a partisan of GURPS, the Insane Clown Posse of RPGs. look all I'm saying is, if you're going to use a single RPG to run every genre anyway, why houserule DnD 5e when this already exists and has done your homework for you
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Apr 17, 2018 00:36
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I think that trying to draw a correlation between the "success" of a game line and the hiring-and-firing practices of the parent company is a fool's errand, because any kind of exposure at all to corporate culture tells us that these things are not meritocracies or rational decisions.
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Apr 17, 2018 04:37
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Serf posted:They should just release the Book of Nine Swords again with the core rules bolted on and call that 6e There's been three different goons who've taken a shot at Book of Nine Swords for 5e:  http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/219565/The-Martial-Disciple-5E  (by Magil Zeal, since their name isn't on the cover) http://www.dmsguild.com/product/224017/Combat-Expertise-25-New-Maneuvers  http://www.dmsguild.com/product/230244/Norts-Universal-Martial-Maneuvers
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Apr 17, 2018 15:08
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very close to recreating Warrior, Rogue, & Mage now
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Apr 17, 2018 17:46
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I was thinking recently of how one might as well throw out the fighter class. Not many characters in pulp fantasy that don't know how to fight. Just let every class be fight-worthy, and avoid the trap of an archetype that only comes into its own when there are fights around. I was just thinking about how, for example, Diablo has the Paladin, the Barbarian, the Amazon, the Druid, and the Assassin, and that's not counting the melee possibilities for the Necromancer and the Sorceress. Meanwhile, Diablo 3 has the Barbarian, the Monk, and the Crusader. Diablo 1 has the "Warrior", but even then they weren't locked-out of magic - arguably you even needed to train on magic to be able to tele-kill Succubi and Advocates in Hell. WoW also has the Warrior, but it has a distinct class identity as being The Tank (or at least, began that way). Back in the tabletop space, Legend d20 has the Barbarian, the Monk, the Paladin, the Ranger, and the Tactician. I think that at the same time that the "universalist Wizard" needs to be cut down to narrower spell schools, so we also need to ditch the "Fighter" as an overly-broad, overly-generic concept. It doesn't even describe how the Fighter fights.
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Apr 18, 2018 05:30
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I mean the only reason why the issue of "everyone is magical" keeps coming up is because the game is otherwise set up in such a way that non-magical characters are so much more limited in their capabilities than magical characters. You wouldn't need to "drop the Fighter and replace them with a spellsword" if the Fighter could do poo poo without narratively needing to write "magic" on their sheet.
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Apr 18, 2018 15:26
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potatocubed posted:Female Monsters With Their Tits Out: 9 (I'm including unique female NPCs in this one though.) Yes yes that's all well and good but how many of them are perfect?
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Apr 19, 2018 09:45
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Pathfinder Unchained Wild Magic This is a d100 table of effects that the DM can trigger to introduce some lolrandomness to spellcasting!    There are 34 entries in this list: * 12 of them are explicitly detrimental to the caster * 11 of them are situationally good or bad * 2 of them don't really do anything * 9 of them are explicitly beneficial to the caster If the result that you roll can't be applied because of the specific nature of the spell, then there's a Universal Surge Effect table: 1 to 20 means the caster takes 1d6 damage, 21 to 80 means the caster is affected by Faerie Fire (which is usually bad), and 81 to 100 means the caster gains 1d6 temp HP. When a Wild Magic roll happens is supposedly left deliberately vague so that the DM can use it at their discretion, but the book recommends the following triggers: * whenever the caster fails a concentration check * whenever a spell is dispelled or counterspelled * whenever a spell is cast inside a DM-determined "Wild Magic Zone" * whenever a caster wants to apply metamagic without spending a higher-level slot - they can make a caster level check with a DC equal to [10 + spell level + 5 for every one increased spell level caused by the metamagic]. If they succeed, they cast the spell successfully with the metamagic applied, plus they get to roll on the Wild Magic table. If they fail, they still get it, but the Wild Magic roll has a penalty equal to the margin of failure. The book also mentions that DMs can apply bonuses and penalties to the d100 Wild Magic rolls, since the table is weighted such that high rolls have the good results and low rolls have the bad results. Spell Fumbles If the target of a spell rolls a 20 on their saving throw, they might cause a spell fumble. They roll a second time to confirm. If the confirmation roll is still a successful save, then the spell is Fumbled, and the caster rolls a d10 to apply an effect based on the table below:  Personally, I don't like mechanics like these, and I can't see myself using them. When people get to thinking of applying "fumble" rules, it's usually the martial classes that get shafted because magic still goes off without a hitch, but the solution isn't necessarily to also give the spellcasters a random chance at loving up, it's to not use fumbles at all. Spell Criticals If the target of a spell rolls a 1 on their saving throw, they might get a spell critical. They roll a second time to confirm. If the confirmation roll is still a failed save, then the spell is a critical. Any numeric effect is doubled, and any effect that does not have a numeric effect, such as charm, instead has its duration doubled. Direct book quote posted:The GM is encouraged to apply other types of doubling where appropriate. For instance, a poison spell might afflict a target with 2 doses of poison on a critical hit instead of doubling the effect of the poison. I had forgotten to write this section at first and had to edit it in later, because this "rule" is such an afterthought that it barely takes up a paragraph and simply tells you to double-up on some stuff and make something up. It's so lazy. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 11:51
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On the D&D Ranger and dual-wielding: The Ranger first shows up in The Strategic Review, Vol 1 No 2, dated to "Summer 1975"   The class's abilities are, as has been said by other posters, oriented around emulating the persona of Aragorn, but they do not yet support dual-wielding. The Basic/Expert / Rules Cyclopedia line never had a Ranger class, but they had rules for dual-wielding: the character could make one additional attack per round, but the second attack always has a -4 penalty to the attack roll. AD&D 1e had the Ranger class, which mostly resembled the OD&D version, but with all the additional bits and bobs of rules that AD&D added. The class still does not specifically mention any particular predilection towards dual-wielding, though AD&D's DMG does have explicit rules for dual-wielding: The secondary weapon must be a dagger or a hand axe The primary weapon gets a -2 penalty, and the secondary weapon gets a -4 penalty If the wielder's Dexterity is 5 or lower, the "Reaction/Attacking Adjustment" penalty is added to the attack rolls of both weapons If the wielder's Dexterity is 16, the primary weapon penalty is -3, and the secondary weapon penalty is -1 If the wielder's Dexterity is 17, the penalties are -2 / 0, respectively If the wielder's Dexterity is 18, the penalties are -1 / 0, respectively AD&D 2e mostly preserved the dual-wielding rules: -2 penalty on the primary weapon, and then a -4 penalty on the secondary weapon. Dexterity's "Reaction adjustment" column was then made to apply as a modifier on these penalties: at 18 Dexterity, you'd have a +2 Reaction adjustment, so your penalties would become 0 / -2, respectively. You'd need 21 Dexterity to remove the penalties altogether, but you could only make them 0 / 0, never a bonus. This is also the edition of the game where the Ranger finally gets a dual-wield related ability: as long as they are wearing studded leather armor or lighter, they suffer no penalties for dual-wielding. EDIT: To unseenlibrarian's point, AD&D 1e's Unearthed Arcana does list the Dark Elves / Drow as being able to dual-wield with no penalty. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 13:05
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unseenlibrarian posted:Drizzt's first appearance was actually in The Icewind Dale trilogy in 1988- Homeland is just his backstory. So the timeline fits?
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Apr 19, 2018 13:48
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Pathfinder Unchained Overclocked Spells This is a fairly simple rule: the spellcaster can take a Spellcraft check, with DC equal to [15 + spell level + minimum caster level needed for the spell]. If they succeed, then they can choose to increase the save DC of the spell by 2, or their effective caster level by 2 If they fail, nothing happens and they lose the spell slot If they fail by a lot, they suffer a Spell Fumble The main interaction of this rule seems to be to combo it with Limited Spells: if they succeed at overclocking, instead of a +2 to DC or caster level, they instead get to use the spell at their full caster level and full ability score, instead of the Limited Spells cap. To use this in an otherwise regular game is just another buff to casters who are likely taking lots of ranks in Spellcraft anyway, so largely redundant/unnecessary. Spell Attack Rolls This is a snippet of a rule originally in 3e's Unearthed Arcana, where you convert the spellcaster's passive DC into an attack roll, and then convert the target's saving throw roll into a passive Defense. In 3e, this was done as part of the "Players roll all the dice" rule. Here, it's supposed to be done so that the spellcaster's player is "more proactive" in casting their spells, as well as dovetailing with the Spell Criticals and Spell Fumbles rules by having the caster roll 20s for the former and 1s for the latter. The conversion to this system is: quote:Spell Attack Roll: [d20 + spell level + spellcasting ability modifier], or basically the same modifiers that you add onto the base DC of 10 Let's dig into the math of this. Assume a level 1 Wizard with 18 Intelligence casts Sleep against a level 1 Fighter with 12 Wisdom Under normal rules, the Sleep has a DC of [15 = 10 + 1 spell level + 4 Int mod], while the Fighter has a saving throw of [d20 + 2 base bonus + 1 Wis mod] If we plug [d20+3] into anydice ...  ... we find that the Fighter has a 45% chance of rolling a 15 or higher, and thus a 45% chance of not falling asleep. Let's then convert this to the Spell Attack Roll system. The Wizard would have a spell attack roll of [d20 + 1 spell level + 4 Int mod] The Fighter would have a spell defense of DC [14 = 11 + 2 base bonus + 1 Wis mod] If we plug [d20+5] into anydice ...  ... we find that the Wizard has a 60% chance of rolling a 14 or higher, and thus the Fighter has a 40% chance of not falling asleep. The conversion into a spell defense actually has to be 12 + modifiers in order to make it completely equivalent, or else the defender is losing 5% from their original stats. What I find irksome is that this same mistake gets repeated over and over and over! Unearthed Arcana (2004):  True20's Warrior's Handbook (2008):  Pathfinder Unchained (2015):  and nobody in those 11 years ever bothered to check the math, or perhaps to listen to the people who realized the mistake. And Paizo even ups the ante by including an example, but still gets the math wrong there anyway! To tell you the truth, I actually like this rule - it appeals to a certain sense of consistency to always have the attacker rolling, and to always have a passive target number for the defender. But the sheer laziness of the editing/proofreading is bothersome.
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Apr 19, 2018 16:21
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