Pathfinder RPG

[Demon]

I like the idea, but I also would like to use the normal settings
I find the arcane and divine magic more interesting than fighting, due to the fact that you can create some nice PC's and NPC's with a decent role without even trying to optimize them
Thank you for the idea, anyways

[banana]

While divine casters seem to be fairly straightforward, I have to point out that arcane casters, mainly wizards, need quite a bit of optimization in order to avoid becoming liabilities, and not just in terms of min-maxing your casting stat. A poorly made wizard will be overcome by his weaknesses or if he prepares the wrong spells or casts them at the wrong time (especially when he has to think about scribing scrolls and crafting wands for himself, spending money to improve his preparedness for the unexpected), and a poorly made sorcerer risks becoming one-dimensional and useless outside of a narrow set of situations, like a hammer in a room full of loose screws and hanging wires (a good trait for NPCs to have, to fill a tactical gap in the party, but a bad trait for PCs to have). Warlocks from 3rd edition are more versatile and surprise-proof, but they pay for it with a lack of potency. I don't know much about the classes Pathfinder introduced, so I can't say anything about them - maybe that's what you were talking about.

[BlueLight]

I have never played a magic user in D&D4e so i might try it.

[Demon]

Ok just compared the 3,5 and 4.0 wizard to the pathfinder wizard.
Pathfinder wizard looks almost the same, but with a lot more options.
My opinion about the wizard is that he is better for role play itself rather than pure battling.
At least in my campaign, the story and interactions should take the biggest part.
In battle situations....well.
I recently played a wizard who did very well in a campaign. He actually ended up as a Lich.

[BlueLight]

He actually ended up as a Lich.

Isn't that normally bad? I mean other than being really powerful and undead I would consider that a bad thing. And if you have a god like the raven queen she might try to kill you for not releasing you soul to her.

[Demon]

Being a lich is actually pretty good (without including that good clerics are your weakness).
You get darkvision, +5 natural armor,all you HD become d8 and you are inmortal if you hide you phylactery in the right place.

[banana]

It's good for your ability to kill things. It's bad for your ability to enjoy life, since you're an abomination of nature.

Lich: "Fear me, mortal, for I am your death! What are your last words?"
Hero: "After six hundred years, how's the dick workin'?"

or conversely

Cleric: "I joined your cult so that I could grow in power and become a lich like you"
Lich: "Be like me? What'll you do with all that power? What's all the gold and land in the world worth when you can't appreciate a hot meal or the touch of a woman?"



I think of a wizard as sort of like a combat engineer, similar to a rogue but much wider in scope. His purpose is to solve problems that would be unsolvable to other types of characters - problems like how to cross a wide chasm, escape detection by a search party, locate a missing person or item, stop the big bad who is hundreds of miles away, and perform all kinds of trickery to manipulate enemies. He does this by having a wide selection of useful magic spells at his disposal, such as Fly, Invisibility, Charm Person, Teleport, Dimension Door, Comprehend Languages, Knock, and so on. Some of those spells can kill things, but if the goal is just to kill things, that's what fighters are for (their only job is to fight, hence the name!). Because wizards need to prepare their spells ahead of time, they're not much good at handling situations that they can't predict, such as ambushes. At low level, they have to ally with fighters for protection from thuggery, and at high level they have to devote resources to creating magic items and contingency spells to cover their asses against a wide range of potential threats that frequently endanger a high profile character. 4th edition repurposed that to the role of a machinegunner, mowing down large groups of weak enemies, and left the problem solving to be done with rituals, which are so expensive that people rarely ever use them, forcing the GM to spoon-feed solutions to the party the way one would bail out a mismanaged investment company.

[totalolness]

wow... either they are really cool or are really sucky, i just depends on how you use them. (Besides, if it gets to much of a hassle, do what meh old DM did. Hack out most of the magic systems and replace them with a mana/memory system. if you want to cast a spell, you just had to remember the spell name and made sure you had enough mana/energy. he even wrote out his own spell book for future use. It surprisingly added a realistic element to the game when your wizard player is calling out an enchantment on your bow while your rolling for your archery shot on a drake. It was simple too.)

[Demon]

it COULD work but not here. Since the internet would be your spellbook. XD. It would lose the realistic part too since it's going to be on the forum

[RavenLord]

What about modern and medieval fixed like Warhammer 40k. You can use power armor concept and combine it with some of the DnD's spellcasting.

[Demon]

Not a bad idea, as long as people are willing to play such thing.
I repeat my request: i would like those interested to post what type of campaign setting they would enjoy/like/preffer

[RavenLord]

Maybe somthing starts as a gang war of the hive cities. Players choose between two gang. And overtime as RP grows new factions emerge with players can join. Its all up to GM's imagination.

For setting it would be great if we use warhhamer 40k deathwatch settings customized for this. (İ have the whole book.)

[BlueLight]

I personally would like a medieval and light comedy RPG

[RavenLord]

Well about light comedy its hard to force a RP to be comedy. Its best to let it to the flow. So at some point you will have funny situations and at other times dramatic.

[BlueLight]

True but having the GM direct the follow that way but not forcing it can go a long way.

[banana]

I can't parse that sentence.

RapinLord is right. Comedy requires a mixture of what's real with what's absurd. Players trying to play characters realistically can only create comedy if they end up encountering absurd things (like when King Arthur is sidetracked by a conversation about coconuts, or about progressive systems of government). Or, if they're absurd to begin with, it's only funny when they encounter realistic things (like when a guy running through an airport to say goodbye to his girlfriend gets tackled by security, tazed, and interrogated for six hours). Some people like to make realistic characters, and others like the make characters that are objectively absurd (though they often don't realize it themselves - emo vampires, for instance). A GM can throw things at the players that might be funny, but it would take away from the ability of the players to influence what kind of situations they get into, based on what kind of places they visit and how they interact with people, and so on.

On the other hand, the GM could specify an absurd premise at the beginning, setting the tone for the whole RP. Something like a band of misfit adventurers being sent to journey to the dark wizard's tower to pick up a vial of elbow grease.

[BlueLight]

True but having the GM direct the follow that way but not forcing it can go a long way.

Ya um lets forget it about that post... *Clearly even i don't understand it.*

I think was trying to say is

True but having the DM direct the course of the events towards comedy but not forcing them can go a long way.

Okay question. So i know a bit about the lore in Dnd or what was provided in the 4E books. Does most of that apply.
Or does some of it apply like undead can be smart or brainless. soulless or with a soul?

Just asking. If said vampire was emo is he wearing leather pants, and if said emo vampire is wearing leather pants is he or she bisexual? *okay now im just being silly*

[banana]

Most of it is the same, only the setting is different. For example, there are no dragonborn in pathfinder, since the race was invented for 4E. There are also no warforged or shifters, because they come from the Eberron campaign setting (for 3.5 edition), which is copyrighted. And all the deities are different, of course, and a major thing to note is that unlike 4E, magic items are rare and expensive, and sometimes cursed, and there is no such thing as residuum for recycling them.

Undead are defined as having no souls, or in the case of liches, the soul exists outside the body, which is what allows the body to rot like a corpse. They can be mindless or intelligent. The mindless ones represent this by having "n/a" for their intelligence score (which is different from zero). In the same way, undead have "n/a" constitution, which is different from zero (zero con means no hp and instant death). A minor difference is that necrotic damage is called "negative energy" in 3E/Pathfinder, and it heals undead, while "positive energy" (the stuff of healing spells) damages undead. Another minor difference is that zombies come with DR 5/slashing, and skeletons come with DR 5/bludgeoning. So arrows and spears and such are greatly gimped against them.

They also have these things called acquired templates, where you transform your race slightly and get all kinds of bonuses, but from then on your XP gains are reduced as though you were a few levels higher. So if a werewolf bites you, you acquire the lycanthrope template, and if a vampire blood-drains you while you have 5 or more hit dice, you gain the vampire template (4 or fewer hit dice means you turn into the "vampire spawn" listing in the monster manual).

And some monsters, like drow, have what they call "spell resistance" (SR), meaning when you cast a spell on them, you have to roll a caster level check against their resistance, or the spell fails to have any effect on them (but this can be bypassed by some indirect-damage type spells, such as the ones that conjure acid or webs or rocks or the like). So a fireball can go off around the guy, and he just stands there undamaged.

[BlueLight]

Most of it is the same, only the setting is different. For example, there are no dragonborn in pathfinder, since the race was invented for 4E. There are also no warforged or shifters, because they come from the Eberron campaign setting (for 3.5 edition), which is copyrighted. And all the deities are different, of course, and a major thing to note is that unlike 4E, magic items are rare and expensive, and sometimes cursed, and there is no such thing as residuum for recycling them.

Undead are defined as having no souls, or in the case of liches, the soul exists outside the body, which is what allows the body to rot like a corpse. They can be mindless or intelligent. The mindless ones represent this by having "n/a" for their intelligence score (which is different from zero). In the same way, undead have "n/a" constitution, which is different from zero (zero con means no hp and instant death). A minor difference is that necrotic damage is called "negative energy" in 3E/Pathfinder, and it heals undead, while "positive energy" (the stuff of healing spells) damages undead. Another minor difference is that zombies come with DR 5/slashing, and skeletons come with DR 5/bludgeoning. So arrows and spears and such are greatly gimped against them.

They also have these things called acquired templates, where you transform your race slightly and get all kinds of bonuses, but from then on your XP gains are reduced as though you were a few levels higher. So if a werewolf bites you, you acquire the lycanthrope template, and if a vampire blood-drains you while you have 5 or more hit dice, you gain the vampire template (4 or fewer hit dice means you turn into the "vampire spawn" listing in the monster manual).

And some monsters, like drow, have what they call "spell resistance" (SR), meaning when you cast a spell on them, you have to roll a caster level check against their resistance, or the spell fails to have any effect on them (but this can be bypassed by some indirect-damage type spells, such as the ones that conjure acid or webs or rocks or the like). So a fireball can go off around the guy, and he just stands there undamaged.

It's good to know that playing all those rougelike games payed off. Ya i was kinda annoyed at 4e for not having a better enchanted weapon system.
From what i could tell it had no cursed items what so ever since i didn't remember reading about them in the players hand book.

Not that stopped me from making a overpowered enchanted sword that had a curse on it.
Basically it was a sword with the soul of a demon trapped in it. My saying his name you embodied his power in the sword giving you +2 to the weapon and +1 to the element of the soul. How ever when you used the power the weapon acted like a cursed weapon and you couldn't unwield it. I might have also added some disadvantage to it.

[banana]

3E gives you support for that kind of thing. It's what they call "Intelligent Items". Such items typically have their own agendas, and try to influence their owners into following that agenda or, failing that, they influence their owners into situations that allow the item to fall into the hands of someone more powerful and aligned to the desired agenda. So a demon sword would probably goad the hero into challenging a powerful villain, so that he would die and the villain would get the sword and use it for destruction on a much larger scale than the hero ever would.

I can understand 4E's decision to remove cursed items. In 3E the only way to really detect that an item is cursed is to cast an expensive 6th level spell, and realistically who's gonna do that for every item they haul out of a dungeon, especially when the spell costs more than the item is worth? There's a cheaper 1st level "Identify" spell, but all it does is tell you what the item is supposed to do, and cursed items easily fool it (there's a 1% chance to catch the curse). The whole concept probably pissed off so many people that WotC just threw it out of the design for 4E.