@Nyoze So this is a structured arena type game, with regular fights and leveling up? Are there any other rules you use, like rounds to buff, equipment, etc?
@Magician 1 Prep round. Maybe 2 if spell caster is fighting non-spell claster, with condition that lasting effects last for half duration. No OHKO skills such as assassination. All levels are done at fast progression, and XP/GP is awarded at 100x ACL for a loss, or 1000xACL for a win.
@Sandwich Oh, and no traits. I forgot about that, thanks.
Auto-kill effects (such as quivering palm or circle of death) deal an amount of nonlethal damage equal to half your current HP instead of auto-killing on a failed save (plus whatever damage they normally deal).
@Magician Yeah. And you enter the battle with no existing buffs, so free hour long ones are no good.
But putting a lower level total non-caster against a higher level caster in an arena setting (where I assume the non-caster probably can't get a drop on the caster) and the caster gets an extra round to buff... I think I'm out of ideas. xD
@Miniman This is a game-changer roughly equivalent to the time I found out my GM was using a spell point system that recharged mid-combat off the PC's casting stat.
I was going to say, a preference for human for the bonus feat is mentioned in the question, but if all Paizo material is available, it's entirely dependent on whether your build needs that bonus feat. There are some good races out there for various applications.
Crafting is if you can do it yourself, time doesn't really matter and you can just outright purchase it for craft price. If you don't have the feats or spells to do it yourself, you have to pay market price.
Yeah... I popped obscuring mist in my latest game, which worked awesomely as a druid, but I'd need to rebuild my entire druid to focus on a dex build, and I think I just want a new non-caster just to screw with casters.
Have loadstone. Pre-cast remove curse on it days ago, so it doesn't haunt you. At the start of fight, cast silence on loadstone, then slip it into opponent's pocket. Bingo.
@Sandwich Er, no? Unless you're fighting a creature with force immunity. (The only one I've ever heard of is the Force Dragon. By the time fighting one of these is a possibility damage is off the table as a viable strategy.)
there was one kid in particular who couldn't stand losing, every game was just inundated with immediate rule changes in his favor
it sounds like a lot of house rules and mistakes have been made in the favor of this higher level caster character and such
not to say it is automatically specifically to give him an advantage, but from what little I understand, and what people in this discussion have said, PF already has plenty of advantage going to casters to begin with
I have a very skewed view of this arena PF game going on, but from what it looks like, I would not play with this group due partly to the system they use, but GREATLY because of all the freaking red tape they seem to have spread all over it
the closest system I know is 3.5, and if you had to fight a wizard in 3.5 as anything other than another equivalent caster that was bad enough to say you were likely to lose
give that guy the ability to ignore or fudge certain rules and give him at least 4 levels over the other guy and it's just a joke now
but anyway, I just don't play 3.5 anymore partly because of the HUGE class disparity in terms of power
But from the perspective where you have a game where four or five people are trying to work together, it screws with things when various party members start becoming more and more useless the further the game progresses, and when some of them start unlocking world-changing powers. Some players get marginalised, create way more workload for the GM trying to keep them relevant, etc etc.
@doppelgreener Yeah, that's what I keep seeing. I want to break the mold with a melee character, but I want to have a decent chance against the casters at the same time. I'm not worried about taking on the jugernauts at like, level 9 or whatever. When I get there myself, that's something to look for. For now, I just want to have decent TAC against any level 5 people trying to juke me with Scorching Rays, and be able to hold my own against an average melee class as well.
All of that is fine if that's what you want, if you want your dude to get more powerful than everyone else as the game goes on, if you want a party where the Fighter is going to be relatively useless unless the DM panders to them directly.
@doppelgreener @trogdor @Sandwich In a party based system, I'm always of the feeling that casters are better support then nukes... But I play a support caster, so my opinion is worth 0 lol
Nothing in the Wizard job description is "make the martial guys more powerful", they're equipped with more than enough to just win combat on their own.
@doppelgreener I updated the bit about the feats. There was a table afterwards showing what RP cost what feats, which I don't think would be viable as any build would need at least 1 oe 2 feats to be viable, I would imagine.
then at the very end (it's a good tale) they mistakenly conclude that a high tier = you win, so he makes a fear lockdown samurai to destroy them again to show that no, optimisation = you win.
he didn't describe the build, but have a story.
So yeah, casters being more powerful is fine lore-wise.
He used three levels of experience on Craft Contingent spell and wiped the floor with a full group of level 20s using.. I think Abjurant champion or something like that
I just don't want to play in a game where I either maginalise my party or get marginalised myself. (Unless we work around this system problem by very carefully staying on the same tier. That requires more system mastery than I know, so I can't do that.)
@doppelgreener And the exact kind of character I don't want to play... I don't want to just click play and watch the novas explode, I'd much rather actually get in and do something myself.
it's hard to balance classes that are based around "deal more damage" against classes that are based around "end the encounter immediately and render all opponents helpless for long enough for you to patiently bash their skulls in with a rock."
I only ask because everything I hear says that Monks are at like, bottom of the bottom tier wise. This arena I'm looking at, the top ranked player is actually playing a monk...
What are tiers?
Tiers are a ranking of how "powerful" the various 3.5 base classes, with low numbered tiers being considered more capable than high numbered tiers. It's important to remember that certain caveats apply to the rankings:
Tiers assume similar levels of optimization. Someone playin...
@Nyoze someone's not pulling their weight then. (but that's obvious, since the caster opponent is focusing on a blaster build, which is the slowest way to defeat anyone.)
@Sandwich Yeah, there's a lot of archers... And watching them fight usually ends up with them shooting at each other until someone gets to melee range and obliterates them, or in the case of 2 archers, till someone runs out of ammo.
Use this handy list of...
Dungeons and Dragons, 3rd Edition and Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Products from Wizards of the Coast in Order of Publication
The following presented in year/month order for easier sorting. Products released in the same month are presented alphabetically. Parenthetical ref...
see this answer in particular and enjoy your scrolling.
RPGs are inherently difficult to survey, because their communities tend to be disassociated pockets. We have no idea what fraction of players don't have any online presence at all, for example, or what overlap there is between offline players and con attendees.
You could easily get a subsection of (Players at X location prefer Y) or (Players Online through B website prefer C), but since players at X could be online at B as well, not including players at V, D or online at G, J.... Not going to work.
Any Internet- or convention-focused survey is going to necessarily marginalise people who have chosen to avoid those venues (people who not-un-justifiably consider geek communities to be cesspits of trolls and toxic masculinity, for example) or are unable to participate because of finance or life circumstances.
I myself have fallen into both those categories at points during my RPG participation.
Based on the prevalence of violent games available to today's generation (GTA, Etc), is it still applicable to refer to the protaganists of a RPG campaign as murderhobos compared to what is generally available in popular culture now?
@Miniman I don't know what verion of GTA you're playing... I always went out of my way not to hurt civilians, while most people I know go out of their way to do it. :(
if those video games turned to ultraviolence and there were no games under R18+, we'd still have murderhobos. if all violent video games ceased to exist, we'd still have murderhobos.
Well. I was going to kick myself off, but about the time I left, our dog in the garage directly beneath my room started barking and has not yet stopped. :P
@doppelgreener Without doing a lot of research, it is the act of a character walking through killing things for the sake of EXP/Loot and no moral basis.
@Pixie The dog wants you to call in sick tomorrow.
Murderhoboness is basically this: characters progress by killing things, and getting loot and XP. They have extremely little incentive beyond roleplaying value to develop any deep ties with any individual or location in the world. In fact, such ties tend to be exploited by DMs who will target the individual or location with torture, attacks, or other injustice, so there is disincentive to form ties.
That creates a behaviour where you can't afford to tie yourself down to anything (hobo) and you devote your attention to killing stuff. That's not the full part of the murder picture though. Because you're invested in nobody and nowhere and a drifter, each individual blacksmith's life is not worth much. So they are either selling you good loot, or they're causing you trouble, in which case you might as well kill them and take their stuff (free loot).
There's no particular incentive not to kill the blacksmith. You'll be leaving town, and you're big damn powerful characters.
Video game protagonists often reflect this mode of characterisation too, especially in lazier stories or ones where the protagonist is deliberately a gamer surrogate.
This behaviour just tends to emerge spontaneously as a consequence of the various incentives and disincentives in the system for the players, and what the DM is given to work with.
@Nyoze Doesn't take a cruel DM. It's just a really easy way to try to get the players to care about something and please for the love of god care about this world I'm creating for you all [breaks down in tears]
In both D&D and video games, it's partly an artefact of the game system placing such a strong focus on "kill people, acquire stuff" that it takes conscious effort to make other interactions worthwhile, but the mechanics don't really give any support to that effort.
@doppelgreener I guess I've just been lucky that the only time we've had players who don't care was the one time we ran an evil campaign just for the fun of it. We got bored after 3 or 4 sessions though.
(See: the way various "morality" systems which try to encourage non-violent interactions in video games get praised extravagantly even when their impact is trivial and the choice is illusory. eg Bioshock.)
(Similarly games like Shadow of the Colossus rely on the gamer's learned murderhobo behaviours, exploiting them to make the gamer uncomfortable with the habits he's been trained to.)
Both those games start with a standard "the game will tell me what to do, it will involve killing folks and getting stuff, and I will obey these directions because it is what I do in this kind of game."
As the story progresses, they encourage the gamer to question his thoughtless obedience to the game's instructions, and use that obedience to make the character's moral plight resonate more viscerally with the gamer.
@Pixie Ursula Vernon's #dnd tweets are full of the GM's constant surprise at what they will and won't kill or befriend.
@BESW In Exalted, we befriended giant spiders, came up with an intricate, multi-part scheme to free a bunch of slaves without slaughtering the slavers involved (which probably would have been the simpler route), and let a captured enemy ninja go. He was kinda cool, that one. We also usually try to get people to join us before anything else.
In both games the gamer's experience is that of the character: going into the events expecting to be the default hero protagonist, but being manipulated (the character by another character, and the gamer by the game) to do things in the interests of someone else's hidden agenda--an agenda neither the character nor the gamer agreed to support.
(Unfortunately Bioshock dropped the ball by adding another 1/4 of the game after the wham moment, every second of which undermined its theme.)
"You've been manipulated to do whatever we tell you, but you're free now! Free to continue to follow the plot rails wherever the game wants to take you!"
Your loved one was captured by an evil dinosaur and you have to travel across the universe on my intergalactic space station powered by nondescript macguffins to get there!
I mean, even setting aside how the rest of its runtime undermines its own themes, the last quarter of the game feels lackluster and rushed and the final boss fight is just sadly pedestrian.
@Nyoze Weapon Finesse allows you to use your dex mod for certain weapons. I'm not sure how much that helps you, just depends on how you're attacking and what with.
Be aware that all in all, you're probably spending more on feats for crossbow efficacy. But if you're really set on dex, they're the better bow choice.
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