Pathfinder Is Still Bad

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 5:05 am

Works like Dodge works in 3E, not Pathfinder. In Pathfinder it's just a flat +1 bonus when you aren't denied your dex bonus to AC, because declaring your dodge target was annoying busywork people constantly forgot to do.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 5:38 am

Grek wrote:Worst case scenario: Your DM rules that you need to have the candle burning for the full 1 hour of your spell preparation. The candle only burns for 4 hours, so you can use it at most 4 times for spell preparation.

Best case scenario: You have access to tindertwigs to light the candle, an assistant (or strong winds, or your DM ruling that it is a move action) to immediately put the candle out, and your DM rules that burning the candle for any length of time during the spell preparation gives the full benefit. Four hours at a rate of one round of usage per spell preparation gives you 2400 non-gate uses before the candle is exhausted.

Correction- Worst Case Scenario- your DM realizes how crazy he was to allow Candle of Invocation, and retroactively declares that they do not exist in world. So, 0 or 1, depending on how you're counting, and how totally he retcons them.

Silent Wayfarer · Post by **Silent Wayfarer** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 6:36 am

name_here wrote:Works like Dodge works in 3E, not Pathfinder. In Pathfinder it's just a flat +1 bonus when you aren't denied your dex bonus to AC, because declaring your dodge target was annoying busywork people constantly forgot to do.

I remember when Crane Wing used to allow you to autocancel any one melee attack against you every round for free AFTER they rolled the attack, that pretty much fucked over everyone without pounce or a way to move+full attack (which was also pretty much everyone)

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 6:47 am

Silent Wayfarer wrote:I remember when Crane Wing used to allow you to autocancel any one melee attack against you every round for free AFTER they rolled the attack, that pretty much fucked over everyone without pounce or a way to move+full attack (which was also pretty much everyone)

Or, as crazy as it sounds, have more than one person attack him. Even then, this is a monk we're talking about. They need to stand still, opening themselves to full attacks, to imagine being a threat in combat.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 6:49 am

Unless they brought a buddy, or rendered you flat-footed or otherwise prevented you from triggering it, and the user had to be fighting defensively.

Cancelling one successful attack per round is powerful, but not game-dominatingly so by itself.

Silent Wayfarer · Post by **Silent Wayfarer** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 6:51 am

Who takes it on a monk? That's retarded. Take it on an Unarmed Fighter, THEN stick it onto a class who can run around and full attack (like a magus who uses Force Hook Charge/Bladed Dash + full attack, or a meditant psychic warrior with psionic lion's charge).

Of course, that's still a bunch of feats you're sinking into making DMFs suck more.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 7:00 am

TOZ wrote:Crane Wing has been adjusted again.

I didn't realise it was adjusted in the first place. Good riddance. I never liked the original version.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 7:05 am

Except that once you charge them, they get to full attack you on their turn. You want to hard counter a single opponent, you need something that allows you to get more than a five-foot step from someone you're engaged with without provoking an attack of opportunity, and if you want to win you need to actually attack them during that process.

I'm pretty sure that eating an AoO with it would count as the attack for the round; I'm not sure if the count would reset at the beginning or end of your turn, but either way if you get charged, eat an AoO, and get charged again you only get to deflect two of those.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 7:40 am

I love the illusion school a lot, especially at low levels. Silent and Major Image has won me more encounters than any other spell, including crazy town face-rockers like Stinking Cloud and Confusion. However, I'd like to do a little poll here:

How many of you have experienced games where the Illusion school was subject to a bunch of little metagame nerfs like orcs deciding to brave the wall of spinning blades or rolling marbles down the hall and stuff like that? To be honest, while I whine about it a lot it actually hasn't happened to me a whole lot -- hell, a lot of the times the DM is actually pretty tickled pink if I or someone comes up with a creative illusion.

MisterDee · Post by **MisterDee** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 8:08 am

Hasn't happened to me, but I'm a player only once in a while.

As a DM, I tend to appreciate clever use of illusions. If a player found some sort of always-applicable illusion autowin trick, I'd ask him to tone it down instead of relying on in-game bullshit to counter it.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 8:34 am

The most common nerfs of the illusion school I see is on the end of "you can't do that" or giving everyone saving throws the moment they see the illusion (because that counts as interaction, amiright?). Now certainly, I've rocked the house with Silent Image several times in several different games, but I've also played in games where Silent Image was completely worthless because shooting an arrow out of an image wall miraculously counted as incontrovertible proof that the wall was illusionary and then all the enemies got to auto-pass their disbelief saves.

In general, the Illusion school requires a really long discussion with the DM, because the description of what silent image does is partially in programmed image even though there isn't a page citation and that's confusing as fuck. Once you've had that discussion, Illusion is probably going to be brutally brutally powerful, but some DMs throw tantrums and make it essentially worthless. So you want to have that conversation before you commit to taking Illusion as your specialist school.

-Username17

shau · Post by **shau** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 9:07 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I love the illusion school a lot, especially at low levels. Silent and Major Image has won me more encounters than any other spell, including crazy town face-rockers like Stinking Cloud and Confusion. However, I'd like to do a little poll here:

How many of you have experienced games where the Illusion school was subject to a bunch of little metagame nerfs like orcs deciding to brave the wall of spinning blades or rolling marbles down the hall and stuff like that? To be honest, while I whine about it a lot it actually hasn't happened to me a whole lot -- hell, a lot of the times the DM is actually pretty tickled pink if I or someone comes up with a creative illusion.

I have, but considering I was just dominating the battlefield with illusory cloudkill spells, it was to be expected.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 2:02 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:How many of you have experienced games where the Illusion school was subject to a bunch of little metagame nerfs like orcs deciding to brave the wall of spinning blades or rolling marbles down the hall and stuff like that?

At worst I've seen stuff like "the orcs get a saving throw because watching a wall appear from nowhere is 'interacting' with it", as Frank suggested.

But even at best, illusion spells seem to give you a chance to take a breather in a battle or a chance to plan an ambush. Again, as Frank noted, most GMs give a big bonus to saves once attacks start flying harmlessly through an illusion.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Dec 22, 2014 1:03 am

I can see a compromise in illusions doing one of a list of generic effects like...

-concealment: obscuring walls
-difficult terrain: floor is marbles
-fear: "it's a dragon oh no!"

And all the saves are switched to WIL based instead of whatever else they would have been.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 6:17 pm

Does anyone have any experience using the downtime and kingdom building rules in Pathfinder? What was your impression of them? I've only scanned them once, but my impression of them is like most things in Pathfinder: doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, but is plausible enough that if you're running a 10-12 session game it probably won't collapse.

Pixels · Post by **Pixels** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 10:16 pm

I don't have any experience using them, but I've thought about them a fair deal.

If you're talking about the crunch rather than the fluff, there are clear trap options and a few rooms that are way better than the rest of the bunch. Funny exponential growth things happen if you let businesses reinvest their earning into more rooms while you're away adventuring, but that really only gets silly when you start talking in terms of years.

Why anybody goes adventuring when setting up a massive empire of docks or gardens is the safe path to crazy wealth, I will never know.

In the short term, using rooms that generate magic capital are ridiculously cost efficient compared to anything else, but you have to put in money to generate the resources rather than take money out. It's totally worth it though, since you get capital for half cost by generating it during downtime, and you can use magic capital to pay for creating magic items. Everything at 1/4 the cost rather than 1/2? Sign me up. It generally takes less than two weeks to break even on the cost of the rooms, and then everything else is gravy. Get everybody in the party to putter around your set of alchemy labs carrying beakers for you because whatever they would be doing would be less efficient.

The downtime events can throw a wrench into everything, but you can solve this either by letting a manager handle everything (events don't happen when the PC isn't around), or by attaching 9 illegal game rooms, which forces the event roll to give you taxes (if you always make Bluff DC 20, nothing bad happens), criminal activity (if you always make Intimidate DC 20, you actually gain resources), or roll twice. I guess if you use 10 illegal game rooms you would always get roll twice, but then your DM will look at you funny and tell you that everything collapses into a black hole of infinite recursion.

Teams are never worth it compared to rooms, unless you plan to use them for something other than their resource generation. E.g. acolytes for heal spam during downtime, or because your DM insists that you need staff rather than just renting out your alchemy labs to generate their capital.

I haven't thoroughly gone over the kingdom rules, but my impression from my reading months ago was that a person who was in it for the gold should never ever touch them.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Dec 30, 2014 10:46 pm

The downtime rules also have a quirk with rather dramatic results, caused by Paizo apparently not realizing that 2d20 is not the same as 1d20.

A Pit is the cheapest thing you can build. It produces gp or Labor (I think) with a +1 bonus. Now, let's say you have twenty pits.
A) You combine them into a dump and run them as a single business. It produces (on average) 3 gp or 3 Labor.
B) You run them as twenty separate businesses. They produce (on average) 22 gp or 20 Labor.

This applies to everything, especially the cheaper buildings / teams. It can be fixed with a rule that production starts from 10 - meaning that a result of 20 on a pit produces 1 Labor instead of 2, for instance.

Then you just have the problem that:
1) The gp gains are tiny and crap, you probably don't care about them.
2) The only other resources that matter are Magic (up to the amount you need for crafting, anyway) and Influence (if and only if MC lets you spend it for social skill bonuses). Everything else is just to build more buildings that don't do anything either.

I'm pretty sure the way the building rules are actually designed is more like:
1) Players decide they want to build ___, just because it would be cool.
2) Downtime rules tell you how long that takes and how much it costs.
3) It gives some tiny benefit so you can say it isn't pointless, but nobody really cares about that.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Dec 30, 2014 10:58 pm

Now the kingdom rules, on the other hand. Ok, they're actually pretty stupid if you look at them closely. But for doing what they do in Kingmaker, which is giving you a reason to care about the places you find while exploring, and tracking your progress with an increasingly large and profitable kingdom, they work reasonably well.

They made a revised version of them that's in Ultimate Campaign. It adds a bunch of external constructions (windmills, mines, stuff like that) which is good, nerfs magic shops from "core of your economy" to "no reason to build it", and adds some more buildings. It doesn't really change the core system, or the core issues with that system.

However, if you try to combine the Kingdom and Downtime rules, you're in for a bitter surprise. The Kingdom rules are so ambiguous on what 'buying' a new building actually means, that it's completely unclear who owns those buildings for downtime purposes.

Like - ok, you're the king. Does that mean you own all the businesses in the city, and can directly gain the Downtime profits from them? Or do you just own the land, and the building/staff belong to someone else? Who can say? Not the Kingdom rules. Not helped by the fact that the list of buildings in the Downtimes rules is partially a different list than in the Kingdom rules.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 11:33 am

Orca wrote:The Ecclesitheurge is probably going to be buffed before it's nerfed too. The text makes a reference to an ability it doesn't have (blessing of the faithful) and people on the Paizo boards seriously think it trades away more than it gets.

Errata preview

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 2:18 pm

I liked the sniper before Errata. That was some hilarious "yeah, we only edited half the book, tops" shit right there.

Slade · Post by **Slade** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 4:48 pm

I like how the Warpriest is supposed to be a hybrid cleric/Fighter, but is weaker in melee than a buffed Cleric and with 3/4th BAB as worst than Fighter.

So you can be a Sacred Fist archetype get feat Crusader's flurry and be full BAB armored Warpriest, but that seems a lot of work to do what it thematically should do.

Archmage Joda · Post by **Archmage Joda** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 6:59 pm

So, with the Spell-Like abilities count for PrC requirements ruling, does the Mystic Theurge become any good? And if so, how would one best go about making one (wizard/cleric, cleric/sorcerer, sorcerer/oracle, etc.)?

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 7:17 pm

I don't see it. maybe there are some shinenigans you can do with the caster cleric archetype thingy whose name I can't remember to save my life. But for every other cleric this seems like a downgrade. If you could get the wizard as your primary with a divine spell like, I could see at least some semi interesting synergy you would get out of this.

Just set it on fire.

Archmage Joda · Post by **Archmage Joda** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 7:20 pm

I'm pretty sure that you can use Fate inquisition, Trickery domain, or Oracle with the Wood domain to get a divine spell-like and be primarily arcane. Or one of the variations of aasimar for divine spell-like.

As for why I keep bothering with such things as mystic theurgism, it's because I want to play a character who is a veritable god of magic, able to go above and beyond what the average wizard can do, to have as much magic as I possibly can. And something that lets me have both wizardry and divine magic seems to me like a good step in that direction, though I could easily be wrong...

Ghremdal · Post by **Ghremdal** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 8:58 pm

Anyone know some monsters that have either time or divination related abilities (or both)?