Pathfinder Thread

I like the old guy with the chain shirt, three weapons, and the lantern.

Also, looks like a familiar and an animal companion? So the cloak person is a ranger, but who belongs to the dinosaur?

The guy in the cloak is a druid, and his companion is the bear cub. The gnome sorceror has Summon Monster I, so the player who made the minis made a mini for each summonable level 1 monsters. Including the dolphin, which you can kind of see in the background there.

I started Pathfinder Society play recently. After 2 nights and 3 sessions (one night we were able to get two fast ones in) my Ranger has hit level 2. So far it's been all season 0 stuff so I don't get to do any interesting Shadow Lodge things.

I had been hearing that scenarios tended to be super easy or brutal, at least the learly ones. I'm inclined to say the latter. The first scenario was kind of tough but managemeable. The second one featured 4 invisible fey and a spider swam. The DM - not particularly noted as being kind to players - blanched at that so the opening encounter (2x fey, spider swam) was reduced to 1 invisible character and this basically prevented us from whiping (and it was still a close thing). We screwed up some diplomacy and were forced to deal with what was basically invis/greater invis in the final conflict, but we got really lucky and won the day. This was at level 1.

The pathfinder adventures I've seen have a tendency to assume you munchkin out, e.g. you're level 3, why isn't someone in your party packing glitter dust? No fire resistance? Too bad! Get to level ~4? Better be able to deal with flying foes. etc.

You really have to go down the list of bad things that can happen to you at your level and have your bases covered.

With news that WoTC has cancelled the D&Di Virtual Table Top, and with two D&D 4e campaigns winding down, I have been looking around for other role playing options. I have begun looking at Pathfinder, and stumbled across this blog posting on paizo.com.

http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/v5748dyo5ldn1?Paizo-announces-Paizo-GameSpace

Paizo is making their own VTT.

As a quick question, is it worth getting the beginner's box if I intend to also get the Core Rulebook?

I've been tossing around an idea like this in my head for the better part of a year, a cloud hosted gaming service that runs in your browser, where you can just log in and join public games or host your own private ones. It would make money by selling pre-made adventures or scenarios, as well as cosmetic stuff like character tokens, and users would be able to use the system to create their own content, and even sell it (while the service took a cut). I'm glad Paizo also had this idea because they'll actually execute on it.

This is pretty much exactly what tabletop gaming needs. It's a step in the right direction.

Thanks to all who posted in this thread. I got invited to play Pathfinder by a local group, but after a preliminary board game session with them decided I would end up LARPing a TPK and end up in prison if I ever shared a table with those freaks again. Total assholes.

On the upside, I looked into the Pathfinder system, which I was completely ignorant about, and am impressed as hell by the way Paizo is handling it. Especially after following Wizard's handling of D&D throughout the years (from the sidelines). I ordered the Beginner's Box because I thought it would be fun to play with the kids (with some modifications), and was so smitten with the included cardboard monster/party pawns that I ordered the Bestiary Box and the pawns for Rise of the Runelords as it comes with a ton of goblins and other basic creatures. I made custom trays for everything out of cardstock that work fabulously (the Beginner's Box, Bestiary, and RotR stuff all fit perfectly in the Bestiary box), and am now kind of regretting Kickstarting the Reaper miniatures thing because these cardboard tokens are so incredibly perfect and easy to store. I can use them for all sorts of things, and they look great. I just can't overstate how well Paizo does this stuff. The bang for the buck is phenomenal, and I can't imagine a company like Games Workshop or Wizards providing such an inexpensive and comprehensive alternative to miniatures like this (I know Wizards offers tokens, but they kind of suck compared to these from what I've seen). And as mentioned upthread, the Paizo forums are a phenomenal resource. This is a company worth supporting.

I have the core rulebook, bestiary, and Rise of the Runelords in PDF form and can't wait to try out the system. If it goes well with the kids I might even try to get some decent chaps I know to play an honest-to-god RPG, which is something I never thought I'd do again. Looking forward to reading about all your adventures and with any luck adding some of my own.

The stuff in the Beginner's Box is extremely well done, but also incredibly basic. The real value is in the cardboard pawns it comes with, which are a great miniatures starter kit if you don't already have miniatures. It also comes with a big folded dry-erase-friendly map, which is surprisingly good, but inferior to third-party mats you can get.

If you don't need those components the Core rules are a better use of your funds. You could also buy the Bestiary Box and the Rise of the Runelords pawn kit from Amazon for about $35 total and be swimming in excellent tokens if you don't have minis.

I was talking to a game store owner a couple weeks ago about people playing RPGs now, and he put forth the theory that most people playing D&D and Pathfinder now were introduced to hobby gaming via Magic the Gathering and they approach RPGs with that mindset. So, they buy every expansion book and try to find the most powerful combos and "break" the system. These guys tend to be mega-rules lawyers and treat the DM like their opponent.

I think his observations match what I've seen the few times I've done a public game of D&D lately.

Definitely agree, Baker. Cardstock miniatures have completely killed pewter/plastic minis for me. It's just too easy to get what you want since you can use any image, they're quick to make, cheap, and easy to store. I can easily have dozens for every miniature I would have painted, and I just pulled the pics right out of the Runelords .pdfs.

Oh, and if you play Runelords, make sure to multiply all the populations by 10. ;-)

I don't think it's so much MTG, as console RPGs. And really, that mindset has always been around in a subset of the gaming crowd, especially younger kids and a certain breed of wargamer. Venerable AD&D had a bazillion splat books, which by and large tended to include things to make your characters stronger.

And really, how many of us here can claim to never have done a spot of min/maxing?

Did you get the 3.5 SRD Runelords or the newly published Pathfinder-ized version?

I'd forgotten about that. We used the 3.5 Runelords, which was a bit of a pain as you had to do the Pathfinder conversion on the fly. Not too hard if you've been gaming for a long time, but it'd definitely have been nice to have everything already converted!

If you got the 3.5 version Baker, definitely worth replacing it with the Pathfinder version!

I'll probably give it a whirl with the kids, and will have to divide the populations by 10. One of my boys has a deathly fear of taking damage and nearly passes out each time he loses a hit point. We were playing Sentinels of the Multiverse the other day and he created a wall of defenses instead of helping kill things, and each time some damage leaked through to him it was like he was physically getting hit in the gut. I told him to roll a cleric in Pathfinder so he could constantly heal himself but he insisted on being a universalist wizard because of his undying love for all things Harry Potter. When he found out he had four hit points and couldn't wear armor he just slumped. That poor kid is in for some hard times...

I got the Pathfinder version. I hate converting things, which is weird since I usually end up modifying everything extensively anyway.

Maybe take the "hit point damage isn't strictly about wounds" schtick and run with it? Make the last quarter of your hitpoints actual wounds while the rest is "close shaves" or something.

I always thought D&D worked better that way anyway.

Oh, and seriously, all the populations for cities and towns in Runelords are totally off by a factor of 10. Very strange!

Yeah, I pretty much have to wing it with them when we're playing RPGs. Combat ends up being more story-based than about rolling, which is fine by me because I hate keeping track of modifiers. I do try to get them to roll some dice and roll with the punches as often as possible, though, and they'll have some useful NPCs tagging along to mitigate problems. :)

Runelords is pretty rude at a couple points if you're not familiar with how to deal with spell casters in D&D, e.g. invisibility, flying, dimension door, mind control, stunning, turned to stone, etc. Then there's the x4 crit weapons with bane and improved crit... Let's see, did that giant roll a 19 or 20? *Rolls crit confirm* -- Oh, you're dead!

It's very easy for a DM to dumb down his encounters if his players aren't experienced.

Also what do you mean the populations are off by a factor of 10. Which way?

On the 'kids these days' front, I think a good deal of people treat D&D like a pen-n-paper version of Diablo, it kind of shows with D&D's growing emphasis on tactical combat and using a grid.

True!

They're all too small. We did a double take everytime we asked what the population of some place we'd been adventuring around was.

The "largest city in the world" is something like 10k people, with features that don't match such a small population, the "trade port" you adventure around (during I think part 3) is measured in the hundreds, etc. I understand they wanted a "depopulated world", but it's like they just changed the numbers without changing anything qualitatively. If you multiplay the numbers by 10x they're still small enough to fit the larger "post cataclysm" setting, but then they also fit the local descriptions.

Ha. I thought you were talking about the encounters being too easy. I'm sure my boys wouldn't bat an eyelash if I told them the capital city had ten people in it. :)

It's a direct symptom of the "gotta fill every slot" explicit paper-dollness of modern D&D. Take out that angle and keep the same emphasis on grided tactical combat and the Diablo munchkinism dies way down. I like to use an Earthdawn inspired approach, where you can "attune" roughly two items (depending on feats), and attuning anything further costs you directly out of max hitpoints.


I also get good mileage out of tamping down on potions (fewer kinds, no instant healing potions, Witcher style potion toxicity) and removing most (especially in battle and/or free) healing magic, which removes the Diablo-esque constant quaffing/healing and zero risk short of a party wipe.

Really, the root problem is that the D&D mechanics as written are very Diablo like.

Not that we did any of that when playing Runelords though!

We did run without a Cleric though, relying mostly on a Ranger henchmen's Cure Light Wands for post battle healing.

An interview with the lead designer on Pathfinder
http://penny-arcade.com/report/edit...resent-future-and-lessons-learned-from-the-pa

So, we finished the first part of Kingmaker. Their most difficult encounter was with a shambling mound I rolled up as a wandering monster. The most memorable episode was their bluffing their way into the Stag Lord's fort, and the colorful, complex melee that followed (high point being when an escaped owlbear died on top of the half-orc rogue and nearly crushed him to death, weird point being when the big bad boss villain was basically harassed into a corner to die a humiliating death of a thousand cuts, learning point being when the gnome sorceror's failsafe color spray failed to save their asses). Everyone survived intact and they're all totally into it and want to play as often as possible. I wish I had more room in my schedule!

At this point, I've put in enough time with the system and the Adventure Path to have some annoyances with Pathfinder.

Foremost among them is the rules around Attacks of Opportunity. What an unwieldy, confusing mechanic. Can someone give me a precis on how AoO are supposed to work, exactly? The most baffling part is that taking a 5-foot step is a free action that doe snot provoke an AoO, so what's to keep people from taking a 5-foot step each time they are going to perform an action that would otherwise provoke an AoO? If I'm on the ropes and I want to drink a healing potion, I can just take a 5-foot step and drink the potion without provoking an AoO, right? Am I missing something?

The AoO rules are so convoluted and exception based that I really don't see the point. Even the phrase "Attack of Opportunity" is unwieldy. We're in for the long haul, so I'm committed to the rules as they stand, but I need to find an easy way to think about and communicate the issues around AoO. Any help would be appreciated.

Jason Lutes: 5' step abuse is a fundamental flaw in D&D 3, since you can generally step back and cast a spell safely, fire arrows, quaff a potion, etc.

There are several ways within the rules to prevent this, but they're unsatisfying:
- Pin people in overlapping zones.
- Weapons with a 10' reach.
- Difficult Terrain prevents 5 foot steps.
- Pathfinder adds the feat "Step Up"

You can also "Ready" an attack action against your target (same as you would versus someone charging you), which lets you interrupt their turn after they take a 5' step, step up yourself and attack (though only one attack), and thus cover them with an opportunity attack. That's convoluted, and there's a catch 22 anyway -- you can't take a 5' step if you otherwise moved during the turn, so it doesn't work the turn you move next to someone... D'oh!

I've seen several reasonable solutions to this:
- Always allow a 5' step on a Ready action, even if you otherwise moved.
- Make 5' steps only safe if the action taken afterward is safe. So you can use it to safely shift in melee, but not much more.

These retain the spirit, but cut the cheeze right out. I prefer the second as it's simpler and more intuitive.

The 5' step isn't a flaw, it's a feature. Without it, once a melee type gets adjacent to you you're fucked.

Use combat maneuvers like trip and grapple if you don't want a guy moving away with a 5' step, or, as Jasper said, use a reach weapon.

As for attacks of opportunity, the rules are pretty simple but the conditions take some remembering. Taking certain actions provoke an A0O from anyone who threatens you. Standing up from prone, casting a spell, moving out of a threatened square.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/combat#TOC-Attacks-of-Opportunity
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/combat#Table-Actions-in-Combat

You can remove the Attack of Opportunity from the game entirely if you don't like it (the Basic rules do this), and the 5' step can be thrown out with it, but that will give spellcasters a big advantage in higher level games.

You're crazy. The result is that you can stand next to someone with an Archer or Mage and fill them full of Arrows or Spells with no danger -- and there is little you can do about it other than "use a reach weapon" or specialize in grapple (you can still 5' step while prone!), and so every fighter winds up doing one of those things.

That's just silly.

Moreover, you're not "fucked" if a fighter gets adjacent to you -- you can use commonplace tricks like Dimension Door to get away, or simply Disengage and put some terrain between you. Or just make a Concentration roll to Defensively Cast in safety anyway. Or a Still spell.

And no, the Opportunity Attack rules are not simple -- they screw people up all the time. The only people who get it right are those who memorize rules minutiae like you and I.

I disagree with everything you've said. But we can still be friends if you'll have me.

1. You cannot 5' step while prone. You can take a Crawl action, which moves you 5', and provokes an AoO.
2. Most wizards don't have a weapon readied and even if they do who cares, make the grapple attempt. They'll miss or perhaps hit and do 1d4+1. You'll likely succeed in the grapple, which will totally shut them down unless they have a one of the few escape spells handy (which would fail unless they passed a very difficult concentration check).
3. Disengage is a full round, and nothing stops the fighter from using his round to close the distance. So you've changed nothing unless someone intercepts the fighter. Casting Dimension Door on the defensive (which has a non-zero chance of failing for most casters, about 50/50 for a lvl 7 wizard with +5 int) is a viable escape.
4. I've been playing D&D for like 20 years so my simple isn't your simple, I'll concede that.

Thanks for arguing it out, you D&D bastards. That helps me sort things. I think we'll go with Jasper's simple solution of allowing only non-provoking actions after 5-foot steps if you don't want to provoke an AoO.

And yeah, walla, Jasper's right, the AoO rules (among others) are really kind of a mess. I have the GM's shield with all of the list of what provokes and what doesn't but the fact that they have to have a table for that actually points up the clumsiness of the concept as implemented. None of my players have really played a hardcore RPG before, but after something like 12 sessions we're all still having problems with rules consistency and exceptions. We're not idiots. DD 3.5 is just not particularly accessible, which is too bad.

Happy to oblige. ;-)

Ooh -- bullet points!

1. I'd missed that! It's helpfully tucked away under Move rather than 5' Step. :-/ What could be more simple?
2a. True, you can (somewhat) safely grapple wizards. I still think it's silly to have everyone grabbing or tripping Wizards rather than running them through. Such easy wizard-counters also undermine your argument that Wizards need the easy 5' step escape.
2b. A grappled Wizard is often more dangerous than their grappler: they probably have a summoned creature for aid (often of the sort that will destroy most grapplers), and while the fighter can only attack once the Wizard can still likely cast spells -- defensive casting is easier than you suggest, since you are neglecting stat boosting items and the common feat Combat Casting.
2c. I suppose your recommendation for dealing with Archers stuffing adjacent foes full of arrows is to grapple or trip them too?
3. Wizards are generally faster, either due to a warrior's armor or the ubiquitous Expeditious Retreat, or simply Flying or Spider Climbing out of reach -- fleeing is usually effective. Dimension Door is a verbal only spell so doesn't normally provoke opportunity at all... with the specific exception of when you're grappled; there's that simplicity rearing it's head again.
4. Aye, and I've been playing for more than 30 years. Let's not go down the road of arguments from dubious internet authority.

[Edit] Oh, and I forgot -- reach weapons! Generally they threaten 10' away but not 5' away, and so don't particularly help against Wizards... Unless of course you've taken Improved Unarmed Strike so you can threaten adjacent foes with kicks, or abuse Enlarge Person (a level 1 spell!) for your reach.

I just now noticed that there was some actual recent discussion in this thread after talking to a friend about playing Pathfinder. We will almost certainly never find enough people to actually be able to play, but it is still fun to read about and wish there was a Pathfinder NWN-style videogame. It also brought up a curious question or two:

What level do you guys spend most of your time playing around? And what levels do your campaigns cap out at before you retire and start new ones?

Also, on the recent topic of this thread: Considering I know DnD pretty much just through videogames AoO seem pretty simple to me, do anything involved besides make a melee attack next to someone with a melee weapon and you get hit. People taking a 5 foot step to get away from a fighter for their action doesn't seem like a huge problem either considering you cannot take any other movement actions if you use it, so if you don't kill the fighter he gets to take his own 5 foot step up to you and do a full attack on his next turn. Also, the rules state that you straight up cannot cast a spell with a somatic (hand-waving) component while grappled, period.

We've been playing Pathfinder for about a year an a half now. The party is 4th level, about to advance to 5th. We only play once a month though, so we go pretty slowly.

My previous campaign went for 8.5 years and they went from 1st level through about 19th. That started as a DnD3E and morphed into 3.5E about a third of the way through.

I'd love to see this quoted. We had this discussion yesterday with a grappled Cleric/Wizard (he was in the mandibles of an ankheg). He pulled this quote from the "grappled" condition:

So according to him, even though it says grappled creatures can't take any action that requires two hands, there's nothing saying that spells with a somatic component use both hands. So do the concentration check and either it's cast or it fizzles.

So it generally takes you about three play sessions to level up? Was spending that long at level 1 painful? In your mega-long campaign there did you feel the rules and magic system start to collapse under its own weight as you approached level 20? That seems to be a common feeling past level 13 or 14.

From the "Actions in Combat" section of the core rulebook!

Yeah, about three sessions. I've actually given up on XP because the APs that we use always have a sidebar that says "By the time the characters finish X, they should be at least 3rd level," so when they finish X, I just tell them all to level up. The good thing about that is they stop looking at everything as big bags of XP and decide to let some stuff live, or even run away from combat sometimes.

Oops, posted before answering the other question--

At higher levels there were a lot of save or die situations. So in most cases we had some real, "You MUST make this role" situations, but mostly coming back from missing it wasn't as painful as at earlier levels.

So no, it wasn't that big a deal for the magic at later levels, but we knew that a single battle could take an entire session, so I planned accordingly. The bard kind of hated his character at high level, and was prestige classing to become more of a sorcerer instead. He was jealous of the barbarian who was a damage machine. The cleric wanted to be the wizard, because he thought the wizard spells were awesome, and the barbarian wanted to talk to people once in awhile and use magic for more than bonuses to attacking.

So this time around the barb is a high charisma druid, the bard is now a fighter who's been min-maxed so he can barely talk, the cleric is a dual classed wizard/cleric, and the wizard is a witch. We've also dropped some players and picked up others, so it's not a one-to-one thing from one campaign to the next.

Ah, the difference there is "grappling" vs. "grappled." If you're trying to hold onto someone/thing else, then no spell casting. If something is holding onto you, then you can cast if you make the concentration check.

I love the character changes your players went through over time and when starting new ones.

Ah, the semantic arguments that rpg rules leave themselves open to! If someone is grappling with you you aren't really grappling with them, so even though you're grappled you aren't grappling! Good times!

You can also try this one from the section on spells, though:

RAW in Pathfinder is definitely that you can't cast spells with somatic components while in a grapple. (This is the first thing I am house ruling out when my RotR game starts.)

Note: grapple rules are, IMO, one of the places they really failed. They're still a billion times more complicated than they need to be.

EDIT:

This may help: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/metzger/wikis/grapple-flowchart

I have to agree. This should fall under the caveat that if you have to use razor thin semantic arguments to defend your interpretation, your action fails (unless you're dealing with Infernal Contract Interpretation).