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ProfessorCirno posted:If it's on your character sheet, it should be in the character building section. That would be totally unusable. That section would include the rules for AC, Initiative, BAB, CMB, CMD, class abilities, feats, skills, ability scores, movement, saves, spell resistance, critical hits, damage, weapon ranges, weapon keywords, damage types, armor check penalty, spell failure, encumbrance, spellcasting, gear and experience. That's ... basically the entire 600 page rulebook. As one single chapter.
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Nov 28, 2013 07:33
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In a book I'd probably add page references to the appropriate sections so it's easy to find them at chargen.
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Nov 28, 2013 07:40
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The Core Rulebook has an extensive index and the PDF version is exhaustively linked with every single game term linked to its explanation.
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Nov 28, 2013 07:42
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Am I the only one who doesn't use the books at all for pathfinder? D20pfsrd has everything I need and is easily searchable.
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Nov 28, 2013 07:45
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Andrast posted:Am I the only one who doesn't use the books at all for pathfinder? D20pfsrd has everything I need and is easily searchable. And you don't have to pay Paizo.
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Nov 28, 2013 07:47
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Zurai posted:That would be totally unusable. That section would include the rules for AC, Initiative, BAB, CMB, CMD, class abilities, feats, skills, ability scores, movement, saves, spell resistance, critical hits, damage, weapon ranges, weapon keywords, damage types, armor check penalty, spell failure, encumbrance, spellcasting, gear and experience. That's ... basically the entire 600 page rulebook. As one single chapter. I admit I have not looked at my copy of Pathfinder in like three years, but I believe the complaint was that how you get AC wasn't in the character generation section. What number to fill in for your basic stats should be in the character creation section. That would cover AC, initiative, BAB, CMB and CMD, ability scores, encumberance, movement, and experience. Next is classes which covers skills, saves, spellcasting. That leaves gear and everything associated with gear. Also come the gently caress on. Yeah I'm sure spell resistance on a PC is something that comes up A LOT in chargen. Oh poo poo making a character, let me look up what my number is for spell resistance. Oh, it's nothing? For everyone?
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Nov 28, 2013 08:10
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ProfessorCirno posted:I admit I have not looked at my copy of Pathfinder in like three years, but I believe the complaint was that how you get AC wasn't in the character generation section. If that was the complaint, it was a dumb-rear end complaint. That is literally written directly on the character sheet itself. The listed complaint was that the rules for AC were in the Combat chapter, which is an entirely reasonable place to find them.
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Nov 28, 2013 08:31
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Zurai posted:That would be totally unusable. That section would include the rules for AC, Initiative, BAB, CMB, CMD, class abilities, feats, skills, ability scores, movement, saves, spell resistance, critical hits, damage, weapon ranges, weapon keywords, damage types, armor check penalty, spell failure, encumbrance, spellcasting, gear and experience. That's ... basically the entire 600 page rulebook. As one single chapter. Good job illustrating the fact that Pathfinder has about a billion incredibly fiddly little stats...that also aren't important enough to include in the character building section. Of those, I could easily pare down movement, spell resistance, critical hits, "weapon ranges" (which I assume means 'critical threat ranges') armor check penalty, spell failure, encumbrance, and experience. For any of those, they either add so little to the game that they could be condensed into a single universally-applicable sentence and nothing of value would be missed (speed, saves, crits), or they've literally never come up at any table I've ever played at, because nobody loving bothers (encumbrance) or everyone automatically plays around them (spell failure). I'm not kidding, or being sarcastic. In almost two decades of gaming, centered around the height of the 3.X era, I've yet to see anyone ever actually roll for Arcane Spell Failure Chance. I could tell you what that roll might be if the character is carrying a medium or heavy load, or how best to combine the Mithral special material with the Twilight enchantment, but at the table, during an actual game, I've never seen a player toss those percentile dice. J. Alfred Prufrock fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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Nov 28, 2013 12:16
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I'm running my very first Pathfinder game (my first time being GM at all) in a few weeks, and plan to use a published adventure path to make for an easy first time. I just got Rise of the Runelords in the mail, and I see that it's written for 4 players- I may have up to six. Should I look for a different adventure path or ought I be alright adding a couple more monsters to each encounter?
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Nov 28, 2013 15:39
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You'll be fine, my group ran it with 6 without any problems. You might also want to look into increasing magic item drops as well, since both XP and Gold will be split more than intended.
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Nov 28, 2013 16:49
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Klungar posted:You'll be fine, my group ran it with 6 without any problems. You might also want to look into increasing magic item drops as well, since both XP and Gold will be split more than intended. How did you modify the combat encounters, assuming you did? I found some changes suggested by a random person on a messageboard somewhere, I might keep these suggestions handy.
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Nov 28, 2013 17:35
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Admiral Lasers posted:How did you modify the combat encounters, assuming you did? I found some changes suggested by a random person on a messageboard somewhere, I might keep these suggestions handy. We ran this with 5 people for a while. Our GM usually just kept us around one level lower than we were supposed to be after the first few starting levels.
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Nov 28, 2013 17:39
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Admiral Lasers posted:I'm running my very first Pathfinder game (my first time being GM at all) in a few weeks, and plan to use a published adventure path to make for an easy first time. I just got Rise of the Runelords in the mail, and I see that it's written for 4 players- I may have up to six. Should I look for a different adventure path or ought I be alright adding a couple more monsters to each encounter? My group is currently running it with 6. It gets a little crowded, but remember that you can pad HP and keep things alive thematically until you feel is the right time to die.
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Nov 28, 2013 18:22
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veekie posted:In a book I'd probably add page references to the appropriate sections so it's easy to find them at chargen. Yes, I agree. It should say something like "Now calculate your AC (page XX), your weapon damage (page XX)...". But you shouldn't have the rules for calculating AC in two places in the book. Andrast posted:Am I the only one who doesn't use the books at all for pathfinder? D20pfsrd has everything I need and is easily searchable. I have never paid Paizo a cent. I just use d20pfsrd and some app that has all the SRD books organized for the iPad/iPhone (mostly so I'm not bouncing against d20pfsrd all the time, which is a tad slow). J. Alfred Prufrock posted:In almost two decades of gaming, centered around the height of the 3.X era, I've yet to see anyone ever actually roll for Arcane Spell Failure Chance. Neither have I, but that's mostly because every single arcane spellcaster I've played with was smart enough not to buy armor that had it attached.
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Nov 28, 2013 18:34
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Axiem posted:Yes, I agree. It should say something like "Now calculate your AC (page XX), your weapon damage (page XX)...". But you shouldn't have the rules for calculating AC in two places in the book. The Core Rulebook is on something like its 5th revision now, and every time the book is revised page numbers can shift. Keeping the page number references minimal significantly reduces editing overhead on revisions. 3rd party publishers aren't even allowed to reference page numbers. Seriously, I got a note on the first turnin I ever gave saying "CAN'T REFERENCE PAGE #S".
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Nov 28, 2013 18:40
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If it's in the same book you just tag the references within the layout and it should auto update when things move. Between books is probably a bad idea though, yeah.
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Nov 28, 2013 19:03
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Admiral Lasers posted:How did you modify the combat encounters, assuming you did? I found some changes suggested by a random person on a messageboard somewhere, I might keep these suggestions handy. The best way for someone inexperienced with encounter design is to just run the encounters as intended, and have a few extra enemies ready to jump in during later rounds of combat. For example, if an encounter has four goblins in it, run it with the four, and feel out how well your players handle the situation. If they've done a good job, a few more could join on turn 2 or 3, running in from someplace else. This is something I've done a lot when playing with new players who aren't very experienced with the game, and it allows me some flexibility in "dynamically scaling" encounters. It's much harder to explain away an extra NPC you added if the fight begins to look lopsided against the PCs.
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Nov 28, 2013 20:13
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Another fairly simple change is to just give all enemies maximum hit points, instead of average hit points.
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Nov 28, 2013 22:45
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B.B. Rodriguez posted:My group is currently running it with 6. It gets a little crowded, but remember that you can pad HP and keep things alive thematically until you feel is the right time to die. But please don't do this slaveishly, my group is up to the final chapter for Rise of the Runelords and our DM thought it was a good idea to bump the enemies hp up to 320 from the 200 it was meant to be, there was 6 of these guys as well as two bigger beefier guys, a powerful wizard and a high level fighter, who being a fight basically didn't matter but this left the group in a situation where my gunslinger was the only person who was reliably able to do damage to get 320 hp giants in full plate and resulted in a fight that went from 8pm to about 2 in the morning, with barely anybody engaged or interested in what was happening.
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Nov 29, 2013 01:25
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Calico Noose posted:But please don't do this slaveishly, my group is up to the final chapter for Rise of the Runelords and our DM thought it was a good idea to bump the enemies hp up to 320 from the 200 it was meant to be, there was 6 of these guys as well as two bigger beefier guys, a powerful wizard and a high level fighter, who being a fight basically didn't matter but this left the group in a situation where my gunslinger was the only person who was reliably able to do damage to get 320 hp giants in full plate and resulted in a fight that went from 8pm to about 2 in the morning, with barely anybody engaged or interested in what was happening. Yeah, that can happen. We also face mythic creatures so things are a little different for us.
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Nov 29, 2013 01:46
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Admiral Lasers posted:I'm running my very first Pathfinder game (my first time being GM at all) in a few weeks, and plan to use a published adventure path to make for an easy first time. I just got Rise of the Runelords in the mail, and I see that it's written for 4 players- I may have up to six. Should I look for a different adventure path or ought I be alright adding a couple more monsters to each encounter? Don't worry Rise of the Runelords is a really nice adventure for starting out. Essentially for Act 1 your focus just needs to be to have 1 or 2 more goblins in every fight only if you see they are rolling through the game. The big issue is that because your already dividing up xp, their lower level will even out the game very quickly, so its only an issue for the first 3 parts of Act 1. After that you'll be fine (and may even need to worry about giving the players more xp/gold/loot as the thing I've noticed is that a 4 man party of level 4 players are better than a 5 man part of level 3 players). Calico Noose posted:But please don't do this slaveishly, my group is up to the final chapter for Rise of the Runelords and our DM thought it was a good idea to bump the enemies hp up to 320 from the 200 it was meant to be, there was 6 of these guys as well as two bigger beefier guys, a powerful wizard and a high level fighter, who being a fight basically didn't matter but this left the group in a situation where my gunslinger was the only person who was reliably able to do damage to get 320 hp giants in full plate and resulted in a fight that went from 8pm to about 2 in the morning, with barely anybody engaged or interested in what was happening. Yeah I played in a rise of runelords where we were just getting standard gear + more hp enemies for our 6 players and against the ogre part of the game it suddenly turned into this boring grind as the fighter and ranger were doing the 50+ damage they needed to do to drop stuff and everyone else just through buffs and forgot about the fight. kingcom fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Nov 29, 2013 |
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Nov 29, 2013 02:50
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Axiem posted:Neither have I, but that's mostly because every single arcane spellcaster I've played with was smart enough not to buy armor that had it attached. Which makes it a pointless mechanic. You might as well say "arcane spellcasters cannot wear armor" and then give exceptions for specific items or bards or whatever.
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Nov 29, 2013 03:05
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I've played a sorcerer who wore armor before. Spell failure doesn't apply to spells without somatic components.
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Nov 29, 2013 03:11
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Arcane spell failure chance seems like it's one of those things that came from them seriously overvaluing melee combat once again, as well as a halfassed attempt at "balance." It could easily be removed from the game as is, or, at most, with strength prereqs on the Armor Proficiency feats. If a wizard player wants to buy 14 strength and 3 feats to wear full plate he's going to be less powerful than a wizard player who put those feats and points almost anywhere else.
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Nov 29, 2013 05:33
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I've personally used ASF before, usually on my multithreat characters, with a rod of Still Spell for when I need it to work 100%. The chance of failure isn't really that high after all, and until you get bracers of armor, the cost gap for AC is huge when you're messing around in melee.Calico Noose posted:But please don't do this slaveishly, my group is up to the final chapter for Rise of the Runelords and our DM thought it was a good idea to bump the enemies hp up to 320 from the 200 it was meant to be, there was 6 of these guys as well as two bigger beefier guys, a powerful wizard and a high level fighter, who being a fight basically didn't matter but this left the group in a situation where my gunslinger was the only person who was reliably able to do damage to get 320 hp giants in full plate and resulted in a fight that went from 8pm to about 2 in the morning, with barely anybody engaged or interested in what was happening. It's really group dependent, because my groups are relatively high in basic optimization(you can trust damage output to be high, but we don't mess around with the more anal retentive stuff). HP buffs are needed for anything to even survive contact.
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Nov 29, 2013 07:30
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Tezzor posted:Arcane spell failure chance seems like it's one of those things that came from them seriously overvaluing melee combat once again, as well as a halfassed attempt at "balance." It's actually just the opposite; it came from 3e trying to make more generous the rules in 2e that said exactly this: OpenlyEvilJello posted:You might as well say "arcane spellcasters cannot wear armor" and then give exceptions for specific items or bards or whatever.
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Nov 29, 2013 14:54
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Idran posted:It's actually just the opposite; it came from 3e trying to make more generous the rules in 2e that said exactly this: It also comes from 3E's emphasis on multiclassing making it trivially easy for anyone to dip fighter (or any of dozens of other classes or prestige classes) and get armor proficiency. Since they very nearly removed the feat tax involved in armor proficiency mentioned previously, ASF was brought in to try to patch that - along with a bunch of feat tax or gold tax options for evading ASF.
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Nov 29, 2013 14:58
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Weird question I know but...what are the dimensions of the pathfinder hardback books?
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Nov 29, 2013 15:56
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The core book is 21.6 x 1.9 x 28 cm according to amazon uk.
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Nov 29, 2013 16:00
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CaptainPsyko posted:It also comes from 3E's emphasis on multiclassing making it trivially easy for anyone to dip fighter (or any of dozens of other classes or prestige classes) and get armor proficiency. Since they very nearly removed the feat tax involved in armor proficiency mentioned previously, ASF was brought in to try to patch that - along with a bunch of feat tax or gold tax options for evading ASF. Is that from the 3e devs? I only ask because they still potentially could have gone the route of "you can't cast arcane spells in armor at all (unless you're a bard or it's mithril) no matter your multiclassing", since that was how it worked for multiclass mages in 2e if I remember right; a fighter/mage or a priest/mage still couldn't cast spells in armor. Edit: I just broke out the 2e PHB, and yeah, that was how it worked. quote:Wizard: A multi-classed wizard can freely combine the powers of the wizard with any other class allowed, although the wearing of armor is restricted. Edit2: Wait, no, I flipped back, and I'd just misrembered what exactly the restriction was. I thought it was "you can't cast spells in armor", not "you literally can't wear armor at all". I'd forgotten how weird 2e could be about that sort of thing. Idran fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Nov 29, 2013 |
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Nov 29, 2013 16:14
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CaptainPsyko posted:It also comes from 3E's emphasis on multiclassing making it trivially easy for anyone to dip fighter (or any of dozens of other classes or prestige classes) and get armor proficiency. Since they very nearly removed the feat tax involved in armor proficiency mentioned previously, ASF was brought in to try to patch that - along with a bunch of feat tax or gold tax options for evading ASF. Becomign a "character with two classes" was trivially easy in AD&D, provided you had the ability scores for it. Strength 15, Intelligence 16, you could start as a fighter, got to 5th level or whatever, then change into a wizard and be a tough wizard. But you still couldn't cast in armor, at all. So AD&D had Arcane Spell Failure, it was just 100% for all armors and you couldn't reduce it. Arcane spell failure is nice, it's one of those "game physics" things that tells you what, exactly, happens if you put on some armor and try to cast a spell. I would have done it in a different way, but I don't object to the rule being there. (I would just apply armor check penalties as a penalty to Concentration checks for spells with somatic components, if I were the Rules Pope).
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Nov 29, 2013 16:23
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I distinctly remember a post by one of the 3e devs (I wanna say it was Mike Mearls) who said that early in 3e's development cycle they were convinced that being able to cast spells 100% of the time in armor was broken, and it took them quite a while to figure out that it actually isn't. The Hexblade was the biggest casualty of this, but once they realized that it wasn't nearly as broken as they thought it was we started seeing classes like Warmage and Duskblade.
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Nov 29, 2013 16:38
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3e was made by people who were trying to make a new edition of AD&D and made something entirely new and alien, and they had no idea. If you've never seen them, look up their playtest characters from back when 3e was first being developed. The druid took a bunch of feats to help them hit things with a scimitar and virtually never use Wild Shape. The wizard was full on blaster. WotC's 3e materials were so largely hit or miss - with so many spectacular misses - because they sincerely did not understand their own engine. They kept thinking it was AD&D despite the incredible differences between the two systems.
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Nov 29, 2013 17:08
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goatface posted:The core book is 21.6 x 1.9 x 28 cm according to amazon uk. And is that the thickest of the Pathfinder books? Sorry for the weird question.
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Nov 29, 2013 19:25
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Yeah, the Core Rulebook is almost 600 pages. The rest are slimmer by at least a couple hundred pages.
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Nov 29, 2013 19:29
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1.9 cm actually seems a little thin when I think about it, but I don't have one to hand to check.
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Nov 29, 2013 19:36
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1.9 cm is roughly 3/4 of an inch. That's pretty drat thick for a rulebook sized product.
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Nov 29, 2013 19:55
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Is Pathfinder a new player friendly system?
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Nov 30, 2013 01:05
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Doc Dee posted:Is Pathfinder a new player friendly system? I'm hoping so!
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Nov 30, 2013 01:06
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Doc Dee posted:Is Pathfinder a new player friendly system? The Beginner's Box has a pared down set of rules which is pretty easy to pick up. My wife has traditionally hated rules-heavy, dice-based RPGs, but she played the Beginner's Box as one of the pre-generated characters and had a pretty good time. The game taken as a whole has a lot of rules, and different spells and abilities that selectively ignore or change the rules, which makes for a fairly complex game. If everyone goes in with the right attitude, you can fudge your way through rules that you don't fully understand by just rolling a d20 and adding whatever you think makes sense to it.
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Nov 30, 2013 01:30
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