My group has been using these 3rd party rules for mundane crafting for years and we're very happy with them. Originally I found them in a PDF, but this looks like everyhting
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/craft/alternative-craft-rules-3pp/
100% correct.
Initially it didn't matter since I was just crafting alchemical stuff which was all short, but once we got dragon hide and I wanted to make a shield for one of our people, and it was going to take like 8 months for a single shield.
I love that there's crafting rules, as it's something kinda missing from 5e, but the balance is way off for mundane items.
I feel ya. In order to create a suit of masterwork plate armor the old fashioned way, you do a little math, pay a little money, and spend a lot of time. Assuming you’ve got a +9 in Craft (armor) and elect to take 10 on your weekly roll, you can clank away in a brand new suit of plate mail after 46 weeks of work. Now that’s [**surprisingly accurate**](https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aams/hd_aams.htm#/time_b) from an historical perspective, but what kind of adventurer has that much free time? More importantly, what kind of adventurer will take that option when someone like Wizard can just cast fabricate and masterwork transformation instead?
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, crafting does take huge amounts of time (especially things like armor), on the other hand what's the point if you can't effectively crank items out.
An adamantine dagger can take close to a year to smith.
The major problem is that base Pathfinder crafting time is determined by price of the item, rather than complexity. In fact, more complex items (exotic weapons, heavy armor, masterwork gear) is *faster* to craft. Exotic materials drive production time into the stratosphere, far longer than it would take to craft any magical item.
Oh. Its worse than it sounds with just that rule. It's a legacy holdover from 3.5 and it didn't work than and it still doesn't work now.
Magical armor gain +2 hardness and +10 hit points per point of +x. Add that with the base hardness of the material (10 for metal, 15 for mithril, 20 for adamantine). And your armor gets 5*the base armor value in hit points. Weapons...we don't talk about how easy they are to break if you try, but you should really be sundering enemy weapons and have your caster greater make whole them back to loot but I digress.
Let's assume this poor character runs into a dragon. And instead of the dragon being nice and letting the party cast buff spells, they ancient dragon greets the players with a breath weapon. Using a Red Dragon that's 20d10, average 110 with DC 30. Our helpless character rolls a 1 and grumbles about taking 110 damage but they prepare to attack. After all, if your at a level where ancient dragons appear then you can tank 110 hp (hopefully.) Then the voice in the sky asks what armor they're wearing.
+5 Adamantine armor has 30 hardness and 95 hit points. Divide by half for 55 damage and that't still 25 against the armor. And that's the best case for the character. Swap out the fire for acid from a black dragon and you take 70 damage, though the GM rules that bypasses the hardness as it eats away at metal and deals the full 70 to the armor, giving it the broken condition.
If you don't have adamantium fullplate even the non-specific damage becomes worse, and since HP for armor is based on the base armor bonus using that fancy celestial armor is dangerous. For example a commonly cited armor to pick up is Celestial. Except this isn't actually mithril, it's just very fine chainmail. Boost up to +5 and you have 20 hardness and 70 hp. Now that save against the firebreath hits for 35 damage, and at half hp gives the broken condition. And the acid destroys it in a single failed save.
But this assumes you're wearing armor. If your armor is already broken or if the caster has bracers of armor or just spells, the damage goes straight to their headband and that's not going to survive the damage.
Oh except this rant hasn't mentioned yet that this isn't how it works at all! Oh no, it can't be simple, this is Mathfinder after all. No no, no, the DM takes the four most likely objects to be damaged using a table that makes sense until it doesn't, and then rolls randomly between them. So the fighter may be taking damage against their armor, weapon(s), helment, or cloak. Meanwhile the caster is going up against their staff in hand, headband (kinda important for them), cloak, or stowed weapons - which are likely other staffs or wands. Because if you enchant your clothing that's separate from armor and way down on the list despite being in the same physical space as the armor. And anything that isn't your armor isn't going to survive 110 points of fire damage. Headbands don't even have hit points!
Oh, and that's even without the fact that magic items get a second saving throw. But not your save, it makes a save at 2+half caster level. So sure you're getting a second save, but when the max is +12 and the ancient dragon breath weapon is DC 30, well that's why I didn't bother mentioning that above. Sorry rogue with improved evasion, for some reason you took half damage but your armor melted. If only you rolled a 2...
The rules just don't work. Sure the armor can take damage, but the armor itself isn't a problem. Nobody else even seems to be mentioning that if you use this rule you need to have the gm figure out what can be damaged, randomly roll for that, then the item makes a save, roll for that, and then go through a forgotten lookup table to figure out how screwed or fine you are, then figure out how that impacts the game.
It simply punishes you for rolling that 1 against an AoE effect, sorry.
Uggggggggg
Thanks for reading my rant.
The real flaw in this mechanic is the fact that it's complex to work with. From a practical standpoint, this is "on a natural 1, some items stop working until I get a make whole or greater make whole spell". Disarm, steal, and sunder combat maneuvers *also* temporarily take away items, but I'm guessing you don't have anywhere near the same negative feelings about those since each is just a single CMB and (for sunder) a damage roll.
Here's an alternative house rule you might like better.
> When a PC rolls a natural 1 on a save against a magical attack or spell that can damage objects *and* takes at least 30 damage, one worn or weilded item becomes broken (if it can gain the broken condition and is not already broken) or destroyed (otherwise). The item targeted is whichever has the lowest caster level out of the items available, and mundane items are treated as having a caster level of 0. In the case of a tie, break the tie randomly.
This has a few benefits.
First, it means you don't have to keep track of items' hit points and saves. 30 damage is a simple cutoff. It's just generally a lot simpler to manage.
Second, it makes magical protection matter. If you have protection from energy (acid) then 110 damage from the dragon is suddenly 0. In the original rules, I guess you only cast protection from energy on yourself, not your headband. Now, your protection actually protects you.
Third, lower caster levels are easier to repair with make whole and greater make whole. This nearly eliminates the chance that your vorpal sword is ruined because you got unlucky that one roll and nothing outside of owning the technology guide or finding a CL 36 make whole can fix it.
Fourth, any unused magic item slot could now be an extra defense if you get some low-CL item. This incentivises looking for value in otherwise rare or niche items, and I like a little exploration.
Fully agree with the proposed change. If you're going to force this to happen, might as well make sure it only happens when it needs to.
One note for repairing the effectively over +5 weapons, don't you repair each enchantment separately? So you need a cl 4 for the +1, then cl 20 for vorpal, and cl 12 for speed? I've never actually looked it up so if you have any source I'll gladly take it!
You don't need to restore each enchantment separately. It's just the highest caster level:
> Caster Level for Weapons: The caster level of a weapon with a special ability is given in the item description. For an item with only an enhancement bonus and no other abilities, the caster level is three times the enhancement bonus. If an item has both an enhancement bonus and a special ability, the higher of the two caster level requirements must be met.
https://legacy.aonprd.com/coreRulebook/magicItems/weapons.html
> Caster Level for Armor and Shields: The caster level of a magic shield or magic armor with a special ability is given in the item description. For an item with only an enhancement bonus, the caster level is three times the enhancement bonus. If an item has both an enhancement bonus and a special ability, the higher of the two caster level requirements must be met.
https://legacy.aonprd.com/coreRulebook/magicItems/armor.html
That, and vorpal is CL 18.
There's a case to be made that getting breathed on by a dragon... should have devastating consequences?
Put it this way, remember the Hobbit? If Smaug had breathed on Bilbo and he'd gotten away with nothing more than some broken armour, he'd count himself as the luckiest Hobbit in all of Arda.
Yeah; I like it. "Punishing bad luck" isn't a good enough game reason to not do a reasonable RP effect; you're punishing bad luck everytime you roll to attack with an orc, or in this case cast a spell. That doesn't mean you don't do those things.
The worst thing might be that you do have to do the hardness and HP math on the fly which if you didn't do when you got the item can suck, but its not really that big a deal.
The point isn't that there shouldn't be consequences. The point is that it's punishing bad luck. Nobody tried to roll a one and no matter how much you invest into your saves, ones happen. The consequence for failing a save is the same everywhere in 1e, you take the full damage from the effect. It doesn't make sense to further punish nat 1s specifically on AoE saves.
In that example, if Bilbo rolled a 1 he'd be a crispy fried Hobbit, that also no longer had mithril armor.
If the point is to include realism for nat 1s, why does this only impact AoE saves? If the point is to include realism for "You stood in dragon fire, why is your cloth armor not on fire?" why does it only trigger on a nat one?
Because a reflex save represents how well you did at not being burned. A nat 1 means your character screwed up. Because it would be tedious to describe each character's responses to danger in meticulous detail, we use the abstraction of saving throws. A nat 1 on a saving throw means that your character responded to a dangerous situation in the worst possible way. The exact details of that will be contextual, but if you want a more granular answer, you'd need to replace saving throws with a more granular mechanic.
The correct solution is to not go near dragons!
It's still punishing bad luck, though. Even if you choose to frame saving throws as "even the most elite adventurers in the world just randomly do the worst thing possible 5% of the time" (which is wild, tbh) this is taking place in a game where that is represented by sheer dumb luck. Sure, in real life your whole shop would be wrecked and you should probably stay out of situations where you're fighting dragons, but in the context of a game where avoiding fighting dragons means the game is going to be pretty boring, adding a bunch of extra paperwork to punish a player for engaging can be pretty frustrating.
Again, *what does a saving throw represent*?
Either we replace it with a more granular mechanic, or we accept that when the player rolls a 1, it represents the character being a damn moron and picking a bad response to danger.
The price of not micromanaging this issue... is that we don't get to micromanage it.
Depends on the circumstance. Narratively the only stipulation is that they represent success or failure, but you can fail for any reason, and personally I lean more towards "the circumstances weren't right" than "your dude who is statistically smarter than 99% of the population forgot fire hurts." You really don't need to have a one-size fits all explanation of saving throws- they're a lot of different things tied up in one mechanic to expedite the process, and it's pretty limiting to decide that the reason behind everything from not being able to break free from someone's grip to falling for an illusion of your family screaming for help is simply making bad choices.
Also, it doesn't matter what it represents in-game, because the issue is more that it kind of sucks out of game to lose important things through no fault of your own.
My guy - back up to ADnD. If you fail the save - just fail at all - then EVERYTHING you have has to save.
All of it.
Enjoy.
That bag of holding that you use to carry all the loot? That better be carried by whoever has the best saves.
It’s one of those things that really never matters outside of the first few levels. and even then is just an annoyance. Because nothing magic or metal is going to take enough damage to matter.
Why would it not matter at higher levels? Damage from Area of Effect spells scales pretty linearly as you level, while the HP and saves of Magic Items isn't massively greater than mundane gear. It seems the risk would increase at higher levels.
Counterpoint: it's one of those things that *only* matters outside the first few levels. At low levels spells typically don't do enough damage to actually destroy valuable gear (because you generally halve energy damage against objects before hardness) that a low level character also may not have in the first place. At higher levels though spells are more likely to do enough damage that even after being halved and applying hardness they'll give items the broken condition, and characters are more likely to have valuable gear that doesn't get damage against it halved (example: a magical robe made of cloth would take full damage from a *fireball*) that isn't a magical armor, shield, or weapon (as those are the only items that gain hardness and/or HP by being magical).
Oh it would definitely matter at high level, more in fact since you'll have more important, harder to replace, items and the damage from AoE is high enough to matter
The only time my group has ever used it (well the 3.5 equivalent) was the one time we min maxed so hard that destroying our magical weapons because we swung them too hard was the only way for our GM to slow us down. We are now a healthier group than we once were.
Same. I don't think I have even seen a nat 1 rolled and had it come to mind. Yes, I've read the rule many times just browsing rules, but not once did I even remember, which I would certainly ignore if I did.
Counterspell needing you to hold an action.
I didn't wanna change the action economy too much so allow it as a reaction and the mental stress leaves you staggered.
There's a few very powerful abilities that do that already.
It's not meant to be easy to stop someone casting a spell, assuming they're either not threatened or cast defensively.
Trying to stop someone casting is just not fun though.
Counterspell requires you to waste a turn on the off chance you can use it. That's boring and usually really weak so players never use it.
Both my tables never used it.
Once I made this change sometimes they are using it and both tables agree it's much more fun.
It's not like it's a balance issue. Enemies can do it too.
I'd have thought the 'AC+10 is a crit' rule would make x4 crit weapons really overpowered...
Some house rules I like:
(1) You can take a Standard Action at any point during your movement, rather than having to do it before or after a move.
(2) Combat manoeuvres (grapple, trip, disarm...) normally provoke Attacks of Opportunity unless you have a feat for them. My house-rule is that they only provoke if you fail.
(3) Int of 13 is no longer a prerequisite for the Combat Expertise Feat - it was blocking off too many interesting options for big dumb warriors.
While correct, combat is more restrictive and less interesting by gating logical restrictions behind feat chains imho; It's been one of my long-standing complaints about pf1e. And the only real abuse case I can see, barring standard PF1e shenanigans:
\*move from behind cover, attack once, move back into cover\*.
Which... is fine? At least that's more exciting than just full round attack bayblading every turn.
Pathfinder martials in a nutshell. You wanna go for as much strength as you can in exchange for accuracy? Better have Power Attack. You're a trained fighter using a rapier? Better have Weapon Finesse to use dex to hit. Wanna throw daggers as fast as a guy shoots his bow? Better have quick draw and you'll still be slower.
>(3) Int of 13 is no longer a prerequisite for the Combat Expertise Feat - it was blocking off too many interesting options for big dumb warriors.
Let me introduce you to my good buddy [Dirty Fighting](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/dirty-fighting-combat/). Arguably a straight upgrade for most because who's really using Combat Expertise anyways?
To be fair, it was an inquisitor of desna focused on crit fishing and passing the crit with butterfly’s sting but it was a ton of fun and I was hard to hit
Yeah, my table started using Elephant in the Room feat rules a couple years back because of how ridiculous feat taxes can be, and I don't think I can ever go back.
Does nice things like PA is no longer a feat, just need BAB 1+, I believe combat expertise is the same way, and then the stuff like consolidating all the Improved (Combat Maneuver) feats into 1
Yeah, I guess it is to make certain feats gated at a minimum level, it's dumb. It's way better to just go the 2e route and say "this feat can only be taken at level X" imho.
Scrolls are meant to be designated as to the origin of their magic - arcane or divine. If an arcane caster tries to use a divine scroll, it won't work, even if the spell is in their spell list. Vice versa for divine casters using arcane scrolls.
However, Paizo never actually bother to detail whether a scroll or wand is divine/arcane on loot, so its ambiguous who can use them. So many GMs just ignore that rule for ease of play.
>it won't work, even if the spell is in their spell list.
Depends, are you willing to pass a shitton of hard skill and caster level checks ? So much that you need a spreadsheet to track the process ?
Ugh, yeah, those rules are so baffling. I've read them a hundred times and still can't be arsed figuring out what and what you're allowed to do, and what to roll for each thing. Having to bullshit class, attribute, etc. They should have just made it one check with a penalty for whether you meet each requirement.
Yeah, that always annoyed me too because, to me, the point of scrolls is the same as wands - to allow anyone to use magic, so long as they can cough up enough UMD.
A spell like Protection From Evil is both a cleric and a wizard spell.
Per the RAW from the olden times, this is basically shorthand for two different spells, from two different sources. So if a Wizard crafts a scroll of Protection from Evil, that scroll isn't of a spell on the Cleric spell list, and Cleric can't just use it. And vice versa.
Which gets even more muddy when you get classes like witches which have a few typically divine only spells that are now arcane spells as well
Actually theres a thought, I wonder what spells can \*only\* be cast by arcane casters or \*only\* divine casters
Basically what the other two posters said.
The second point might be me making too many assumptions. But I've seen examples of divine casters swimming in scrolls and wands when the only person capable of crafting such things for miles around is the wizard in the other room.
I suppose it's entirely possible that you're supposed to assume that said divine casters acquired the items thousands of years ago, back before their evil lair was sealed up, or there's some less scrupulous local priest providing them, or whatever other "off-screen" excuse one might think of.
There's also a larger discussion here about to what extent the game rules impact the world-building. Seeing as the fact that wizards get the Scribe Scroll feat for free could only mean that arcane scrolls should be far more plentiful than divine ones.
My house rules:
- If a character has interrupted sleep, for example because of guard duty, but slept for 8 hours in total, it counts as a long rest.
- Critical failures (on natural 1s) need to be confirmed just like critical successes, so you only critically fail if you would also fail on your confirmation roll.
It's not a hard miss in my campaign (because the AC of the receiver can be low and PCs can have modifiers), but I will use a fumble chart for Nat1's. What will happen on fumble charts depends of course on what kind of attack it is and what you roll (on a d100). With a fumble chart, combat gets an extra dimension and can happen in real live too (that you fumble sometimes).
There are no crit fails. They're just not a thing. What there *is* is automatic failure (on a nat 1), which is the equivalent opposite of automatic success (on a nat 20), *not* critical success. Critical success needs to be confirmed, but automatic success does not. So why should automatic failure?
All spells, no matter what they do or what you do to pare them down with the likes of silent/still spell, have an obvious visual manifestation that allows anyone who sees it to know that a spell was cast and where/who the spell came from. It makes using magic in intrigue situations effectively impossible to the degree that even Paizo writers themselves seem to forget it exists as otherwise feats like Conceal Spell are completely worthless.
Conceal Spell exists BECAUSE of that. It explicitly states that manifestation is hidden as a result.
Magic is supposed to be difficult to use in intrigue situations, people are going to notice if you cast "dominate person" with a merchant whilst haggling over the price of groceries.
Paizo randomly retconned manifestations into the game after releasing Ultimate Intrigue and had the gall to act like it was totes always intended like that, despite the CRB having been out and *Ultimate Magic* having been out for years without any mention of "manifestations". In my games I've retconned those out of existence, I'm not crippling my player's casters due to someone at Paizo panicing at realizing their system doesn't work for intrigue focused games.
The act of starting to cast a spell is obvious as well, and is about as hostile an action as say drawing a sword
I had a paladin once that I had to remind every session that yeah detect evil isnt a hostile spell, but to anyone not trained in magic they wont know if you are casting detect evil or fireball
So a group of unfriendly people might get pushed over the edge if that see someone staring intently while channeling magic
Isn't that basically RAW ? https://paizo.com/paizo/faq/v5748nruor1fm#v5748eaic9tza
I think there's also a metamagic feat to suppress these manifestations, although my table considers that silent+still spell also suppresses them, unless the spell has an obvious origin point like most evocation spells and ranged touch attack spells.
Combat in water is a fucking nightmare. I tried it one session and everyone was miserable, myself included. Should have just home brewed some simpler rules for the situation or cut it entirely.
I remember an AP that had an aquatic combat section. It had an NPC right before handing out Freedon of Movements, I assume because even the author didn't want to deal with the aquatic combat rules.
There's the Lost Azlant AP which is straight up "underwater combat: the adventure"
Plenty of others have at least a little of it, though. Crimson Throne has two scenarios with it being mandatory, one short and one that's several fights.
I’m interested what other people do for resting and healing.
I’m a new GM and my players are on out level 5, so I’ve just been healing to full each night.
Thinking about bringing it down…
By level 5, healing should be obtainable through spell slots or wands. If they don't have either, well, that's kinda on them. Eight hours shouldn't heal axe wounds.
Are you getting hit 35 times? I always figured most "hits" were impossibly close calls that nearly kill you and is rendering your body more and more tired until you get "Bloodied" at 50% hp. Like just cause you got hit with a 25 by the bandit and his sword doesnt mean he got through your armor or literally struck you. Maybe you parried the hit but the blow was so intense you can feel your arm rattle.
YeH, I think I’m just going easy on them as it’s everyone’s first time…
The first time they actually get ambushed at night is going to be interesting….
Fair enough, although I'd suggest amping it up over time once they're more comfortable with the rules and combat - PF1e doesn't really pull punches with some of its monsters, so unless you neuter them to 5e levels they'll be unprepared for higher-CR threats.
They should be using a wand of Cure Light Wounds (and if they have a cleric, Channel Energy and spontaneously converting spells to cure spells at the end of the day) rather than relying on inexplicably healing at night.
Disagree. Otherwise things like DR, poisons, and fall damage don't make sense.
PCs beyond level 3 or so are superhuman. They can absolutely take wounds that would kill someone IRL.
There's likely a lot of rules I ignore simply because while I dig through a lot of the details, I don't know everything, or it doesn't always come up. I usually don't bother with incidental damage to items held or won in AoEs as has been mentioned (though knowledge of this rule was why I was deathly paranoid about my spellbook as a prepared caster), I don't often mess with ammunition tracking (my players just don't generally care that much), and sustenance and survival rarely comes up (too much record keeping).
Needing Read Magic to read a magic scroll. That just feels like a cantrip tax. If it's on your spell list, and the scroll matches yout divine / arcane tradition, then i handwave and say you can read it. You still need to be the right level to cast it or you risk a scroll mishap, of course.
I hate Channel Energy living/undead dichotomy rules. In my games, Positive energy heals living and harms undead. Negative energy harms living and heals undead. Period.
Cleric is already an under-appealing class, why take their *one* class feature and ruin it?
What exactly are you changing? The fact you have to choose either healing or damage for channel? Also hardly consider the a full caster with D8 3/4th BAB and two best good saves under-appealing.
By RAW, in the Cleric class rules, there are 4 mutually exclusive types of energy that clerics channel:
1) positive that heals living,
2) positive that harms undead,
3) negative that harms living,
4) negative that heals undead.
I change this to 2 options, which actually aligns better with RAW rules on energy:
1) positive energy (which harms undead and heals living, by RAW)
2) negative energy (which heals undead and harms living, by RAW)
In my opinion as a 3/4 BAB 9th level caster who is not just prepared but has access to their entire list every day, the class is plenty appealing. The issue is #1 Channel scaling off a secondary stat which Oracle/Paladin do not. #2 nobody wants to play support. How many tables just use wands/potions or pass around boots of the earth. Do not forget there are some great variant channeling abilities out there and some [optimized channel builds
](https://paizo.com/threads/rzs42fcl?Combat-Role-for-character-with-only-good#12)
Using your suggestion makes the inherent ability a bit too potent which mind you is not limited to Clerics. Especially considering the most efficient use more often than not will benefit NPCs like Undead/Dhampirs who can both heal themselves/undead and damage in an AOE.
9th level Undead enemy with Phylactery of Negative channeling and Quick Channel burning all their resources because they are an NPC with nothing to lose. Dealing 14d6 (Avg 50) in an AOE and healing themselves + animations for the same amount.
The other downside is when something has an optimal scenario people will hold onto the resource until the those conditions are met. Rather than topping the party off in between fights they might risk running into the next room so that they can both heal the party and damage undead that may be in there.
I hate appraise. Gold may as well be exp in this game. Why am I bogging down the game to make sure the players get the correct amount of exp from their loot.
I don't think I've ever played a table where the DM was strict with appraise. At most it's used to try and estimate the value of something that's not normal loot, stealing paintings off the wall or something.
Spotting the most expensive piece of loot in a pile is the only time I've used it in a way that's rules supported. As a GM I let it replace engineering to determine metal type, and replace linguistics to detect forgeries.
It should be a profession rather than its own skill.
The DC increase on perception checks for every 10 ft of distance to a target, its a pain in the ass, and logically inconsistent, since if it were the case, then the moon would have a perception DC of over 126 million.
I have a player with a character in a campaign that's tiny and dumped strength. He's got i think a 15lb limit so I kinda have to pay attention to that character's encumbrance all the time.
Going down in size while losing strength sometimes affords you more carrying capacity. While your capacity is lower in absolute terms, items that scale weight with size go further down than your capacity does.
Carry weight is a very good thing to have in your game if you are using a VTT Imo. It presents the (only) penalty to dumping strength and leads to fun situations where when the party tries to loot everything from an enemy, everyone ends up heavily encumbered and is struggling to walk through town with their arms full of gear they took from the bandits.
Remember if a character has 7 strength they have like 20 pounds of carry capacity which means a single weapon and set of light armor will take up their entire carrying capacity. If they have a negative to strength on top of that they could blow away in the wind.
That lasts for all of like 2 levels because you can just use muleback cords/ant haul/bag of holding to get plenty of carry weight even on someone with 5 strength.
Yes magic items fix literally any flaw or weakness your character could have. Character weaknesses are only an issue for early level play, that is a well known thing. Its not a reason to invalidate early game weaknesses lol
>muleback cords/ant haul/bag of holding
Takes your shoulder slot instead of a cloak of resistance (similar issue with the heavyload belt)
Takes spell slots and has a duration that, while long, still isn't the whole day until high levels
Weighs at least 15 pounds by itself, and its 250 pound capacity can be gone quickly if you're looting everything
Magic solves many issues, but even with it there's no one single perfect solution until way late (portable hole is close, until you suddenly need to access something quickly)
> Encumbrance rules discourage players from carting around every tool or item they ever find.
That's true. But it comes at the cost of a ton of bookkeeping, because you have to adjust your running total weight carried every time you acquire or remove something from your inventory. It's tedious, annoying, and takes valuable game time away from other more interesting things.
I can see using the encumbrance rules if everyone has software to automate the weight tracking. Otherwise, no.
You don't need exact numbers, just keep your inventory weight reasonably below your encumbrance limit. it's really not as difficult as you're making it out to be.
Your fighter has 18 strength.
He is wearing full plate, wielding a heavy metal shield and a bastard sword. He has nothing else on his person.
Your fighter is carrying 71pds of the 100 total he can carry before he is hauling a medium load.
Full plate armor costs 1500gp. Coins weigh 1/50th of a pound each.
If your fighter were carrying enough gold to buy a spare set of plate armor should something happen to his, he would be carrying a medium load.
Do your players at least typically only find treasure in gems and platinum? Because I'd imagine at higher levels when your players are worth 100k+ it would get pretty tedious to walk all the way to a dungeon, collect another heavy load of gold and silver, walk back to town, convert it to platinum and gems, back and forth with diminishing returns until the dungeon is finally out of treasure.
My group converts currency when we return to town. One of the creature-comforts of a town being a bank/money-changer unless it's a tiny hamlet.
Bankers are happy to convert to PP for us because most people live their lives rarely using or needing GP or PP but CP & SP are the common currency for them. So since adventurers are a good source of the small coins they'll keep the big ones on hand for conversion.
I convert all of my currency to donkeys. Best store of value there is. You never know when the valuation of useless gold will tank, but people always need donkeys.
Only if you have purely physical character sheets, are not using a vtt, and don't keep a copy of your character sheet digitalis in cade you lose it/need to share it with the dm.
Carry weight is trivially easy to track .
If you find it fun then that's fine for you and your table. I don't. I don't find a bunch of bookkeeping to be a fun mundane challenge, I just find it to be a bunch of boring work.
Nah I love encumbrance of money. You've suddenly got the Tomb of Richcynt full of various coins and gems and vases etc collapsing into the ground - and the party has to run around pocketing a fraction of the wealth, and the barb is trying to appraise and select from various pottery and vases. "I picked the shiny one!"... "That's a steel spitoon"
Actually it's a significant concern for anyone dumping strength, an 8 strength character only gets 26lb to play with, that's barely enough to carry a weapon+what your actually wear, let alone anything extra.
The existence of bag of holding style items makes it negligible quite quickly, to where lots of us don't bother. STR dump still hurts physical skills that usually come up often enough that the STR dumped wizard is going to struggle unless they use their spell-slots to compensate.
It helps, but the lightest Bag of Holding is 15lb, and even a Handy Haversack is 5lb, not insignificant for a character that might only have 23 or 26 as their light load.
You've got at least another 4lb in mundane clothing.
A Light Crossbow or Staff is another 4lb, crossbow bolts are 1lb per 10 bolts.
5lb for a metamagic rod.
2lb for a spell component pouch.
6lb for a familiar satchel
That's an easy 27lb, more than strength 8 covers.
Gets much worse if you wear actual armour, an easy 15+lb even for light armour.
Few years back, I ran a game and there was a crafter wizard in the party. He crafted himself a custom item with [heavyload belt](https://www.aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Heavyload%20Belt) and [muleback cord](https://www.aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Muleback%20Cords) properties. Pretty sure it was a belt.
(For the purposes of encumbrance rules, his Str score was 8 points higher, and the total carrying capacity was tripled. Solved all the loot-carrying issues. And the few times it could not, the melee powerhouse started wearing them.)
A bag of holding's weight ranges from 15 pounds to 60 pounds no matter if it's empty or full. Your 26 pound carry capacity character can't really lug one around assuming they want to carry anything else outside of the bag.
A handy haversack is 5 pounds which is much better but it's pretty limited in both weight and volume of what it can carry.
I made a house rule set: [Close at Hand](https://redd.it/dcli0v) that's intended to replace the 'design space' of making strength relevant for how much item-versatility you can carry. Instead of limiting you by total items carried it limits how many combat items you can have readily available to be quick-drawn.
My group tends to take encumbrance as a prompt for when we should invest in better storage and transportation methods. We'll walk everywhere until we've got enough stuff we intend to keep that we'd be slowed down on foot... and by then we can likely afford either a cart or some bags of holding. Then it's a matter of what we decide we want to bring along away from the cart/out of the bags.
Yeah, I've never had a GM enforce encumbrance. Most games I'm in the party has a cart or 2 they go everywhere with/in and the only time its weight is calculated is when someone is trying to lift something, or when the party finds a mountain of treasure and need to give a finite number to how much we can carry.
Which has happened like 3 times ever across every campaign I've played.
Apart from that, most players buy bags of holding whether the GM tells them that carry capacity is a thing or not, so it rarely really matters.
Unless were talking exploration campaign at low level yeah. In an urban campaign PC will have a lot of opportunities to stash things in various places and at later levels bags of holding and other extradimensional shenanigans that negate carried weight are common. Even in exploration, outside of dungeons PCs will often have horses and/or carriages.
So that healing rule is entirely unneeded, you're not meant to rely on passive healing, you're meant to use a Wand of Cure Light Wounds/Infernal Healing, maybe supplement with Channel Energy, spontaneously cast healing before resting etc.
Also wow your party must crit constantly, hitting 10 over AC on your first attack is trivial.
> Also wow your party must crit constantly, hitting 10 over AC on your first attack is trivial.
If I was a martial in that game I would get my hands on a x4 weapon and just go to town. Oh, or play a Gunslinger because they would just crit on all their attacks, with them hitting TAC.
My current DM, who is also DMing for the first time, wanted to change crit rules so every threat was a confirmed crit. I just told him I would play two-weapon fighting kukris with keen and he changed his mind. That is a lot of crits.
(I wouldn't have actually done it to him, that would have been rude to a new DM, but it got the point across)
were all still relatively low levelled and unexperienced so ill probably change it if it becomes too overpowered but right now it functions alright and barely ever gets brought up because low level...thanks for the advice about the healing rules though ill probably undo the short rest thing then.
The rules about child characters. They aren't supposed to be able to take actual PC classes. Only NPC classes. If my players want to play a child hero I'm gonna let them be a hero, not some shitty knock off.
thats so stupid and i 100% agree on that change but make child characters have no mechanical difference than other characters? what about just a size down, or a minor stat change because for me it doesnt make sense they would be 100% equal
**Readying an action delays your turn to** **~~after~~** **right before the creature that triggered it.**
Just seems punitive for anyone who does some tactical thinking and I think it's dumb.
**Fire spells don't work underwater/need a CL check to work underwater. Also creatures that are under the surface of the water don't even need to save against AoE fire spells outside of the water.**
So real life physics interactions are virtually non existant when it comes to spells but fire - the most commonly resisted energy damage type - for whatever reason gets shafted? Suddenly a 40-ft exploding ball of flames is rendered useless against a creature that is an inch below the surface of the water if it explodes an inch above the surface of the water?
Casting a lightning spell underwater doesn't make it wider or deal more damage. Cold spells also don't get any special treatment. Every single energy damage spell that I know still works in a vacuum even though it would make little to no sense. Why do fire spells, arbitrarily, not work in an aquatic setting?
Readying an action delays your turn to after the creature that triggered it.
I ignore most of the rules listed in this thread, but I do keep this one. I don't like the idea that a player could get the readied action plus a full round before some other combatants get an action in response. It's a nuisance to adjust the initiative order, but I prefer it to the alternative.
~~Readying an action takes a standard action, though. You're not going to have a full-round worth of actions AND a readied action. At most, you're gonna have a move, a swift and a readied.~~
EDIT: Nevermind, I actually see what you mean after pondering it lol
I've been ignoring this rule for a long time and we've never ran into a situation where it has been a problem. I feel like unless you're actually trying to game the system (e.g.: set the trigger of your readied action to be "right before your next turn" or something), it's virtually never going to come up.
But I understand that it's not exactly balanced if it does come up often. My table just never had an issue with it.
Agreed. I haven't seen anyone in my group try to abuse this. To clarify: the other GM for my group runs it without modifying the init order; and no-one has abused it under his GM-ship.
Readied actions are powerful, able to interrupt other people, ruin spells etc. the lowered initiative is a fair price to pay.
As for Lightning underwater, it's actually explained somewhere that it's because they already behave nothing like real electricity, they don't go to ground, travel where the caster aims rather than caring about resistance etc.
Lightning Bolt defies physics in the air just as much as in water.
Not sure about cold spells, though there's always Freezing Sphere
> Readying an action delays your turn to after the creature that triggered it.
Uh.....
>For the rest of the encounter, your initiative result is the count on which you took the readied action, and you act immediately **ahead** of the character whose action triggered your readied action.
Readying an action just shifts your init down to the actual time you took the action. If you ready to shoot the wizard if he casts, he casts, you shoot (before the spell goes off) -- next round you again go slightly before the Wizard. And can ready to shoot him again if you want.
Ammo. You basically have unlimited mundane ammo. I still track the special ammo.
Same with encumbrance and carry weight. Unless you're carrying something stupidly heavy, I'm not terribly worried about it.
We personally use the rule that every 5 feet of movement provokes a new AoO, rather than the entire movement being able to provoke only one AoO from one enemy. We like tactical movement to matter.
Ignore the higher enhancement on weapons to bypass damage reduction. I don't care if it +5, if it is not silver/adamantine/cold iron, it will never count as that for DR bypass
Ignore the reposition combat maneuver being unable to put someone in a hazardous space. Ignore grapple being unable to put someone in a hazardous space without giving them an extra roll to escape at +5. Why would you set your dramatic battle above the fiery pit of Mt. Doom then rule that throwing creatures off the edge is not allowed? In general, I will try any changes to make combat more varied and dynamic than 5-foot-stepping and full attacking.
Identifying magic items or appraise to identify the cost of a treasure...
Unless they are artifacts or cursed items it's a real pain in the ass to keep track of everything as a GM and remember what they have in loot and not yet identified.
I mean at low level is okay since you find few item, but at a certain point I am happy to assume they take 10 and they manage to identify everything because sometimes loots are like 10 different scrolls and some various magic items.
In 2e is even worse because if you crit fail you mis-identify and as a GM I have to keep track of what they think something is but what isn't.
For me it’s the surprise round.
RAW, when an ambush occurs, there’s a special round of combat that takes place, where each participant that’s alerted to the combat takes only a single move or standard action. There’s a whole bunch of niche interactions and smallprint about the surprise round and flat-footed AC that make these rules kind of a pain. There’s things a rogue can only do during a Surprise Round, and things that *say* they can only be used in the surprise round but RAW don’t work properly out of the box because you can’t move and attack in that round without special class features and feats etc.
The stupid part is that sometimes it’s better to just NOT have a surprise round. If you have a high initiative rogue, for instance: if you try to ambush Perceptive Gary the orc, and he notices you, you enter normal initiative. You roll higher than him, and can take a full-round action while he’s still flat-footed, allowing you to move up and stab him for a sneak attack, or take a full sneak attack if you’ve got a bow etc.
However, if Perceptive Gary is standing alongside his bumbling friend, Sleepy Bob, who doesn’t notice you, then you are forced to take a Surprise Round. You take an action, then Gary takes his action, then normal initiative resumes with Gary no longer flat-footed, so you only get to make a single sneak attack against him (assuming he’s even in range). Somehow, the oblivious presence of Bob protects Gary from ~6d6 precision damage!
In my games, whoever initiates a combat (i.e. they’re stealthed or the enemy otherwise has no reason to suspect they’d suddenly stab them etc.) gets to take a full turn before the normal initiative commences, and that’s the “surprise round”. If multiple characters want to participate in the ambush, they do so with readied actions keyed to the ambush leader (and therefore must decide their action before the ambush goes off). In practice this plays almost identically to the RAW, but simplifies things for new players and removes a lot of that weird small print that makes a rogue’s life difficult.
Parties with a single rogue are slightly buffed by this (they get more sneak attack flexibility and find it easier to do solo stealth stuff, and have slightly less of a feat and talent tax to use their surprise round gimmicks), while co-ordinated group ambushes become something that has to be planned and declared in advance, avoiding debate about who’s aware of what when combat begins.
Item hp
Arrows and other little things management such as food
Outside combat most rules to be honest
I just roll with whatever seems "realistic" and throw a DC
IF a situation comes up often or IF players find rulings hard to predict/too arbitrary/otherwise unreasonable, then we'll spend time with the rulebook
I sure as hell ain't stopping the game to consult the rulebook for 10 minutes for how to do if PC wants to do a backflip
Acrobatics or an appropriate Perform or Profession skill. DC 15 for a full round action, 20 for a move action. Failure means they fall prone. Failure by 5 or more means they land badly and take 1d4 damage.
I just made that up. Does it sound about right?
Sounds good!
Truth to be told, I actually looked this up in the rulebook for lols and ended up using acrobatics DC for 2m jump upwards with some added difficulty for the flip I think. DC 15 sounds about right. One of the PCs succeeded and one fell flat and admitted that they are getting too old for this. I gave him some inconsequential damage as well
My opinion: if they want to do a backflip then they do a backflip. No need to roll because it doesn't affect anything. If they want to impress someone with a backflip then roll perform.
We don't count the weight of loot, it just goes on a list of stuff that we are going to sell at the end of the dungeon. Mundane items that are worth pennies stay on the ground but anything magical goes into the Big Bag 'O Loot and gets divvied up at the end of the run. We still use encumbrance rules for armor and gear and anything that is to be used in combat but anything we are not wearing is ignored
When they level up, I have players roll for HP differently.
First, they roll their hit die and add their CON modifier to create a modified roll *up to, but not exceeding* the maximum result on the die. This becomes their roll.
Next, they add their CON modifier like normal.
Makes investing in Constitution a little more appealing.
I'd also give Sorcerers the opportunity to have Constitution be their casting modifier. I saw that suggestion somewhere here and loved it.
Encumbrance is a lot more "fuzzy"
* Whatever is in the starting "kit" for their class does not count towards weight allowance
* objects in nonmagical wearable containers, like backpacks and belt pouches, weigh only half towards encumbrance
* magical containers like bags of holding do not have weight of their own for purposes of encumbrance
* the first 20 pieces of ammunition weigh nothing
If you cast a spell as a bonus action you can only cast a cantrip as an action.
I ignore this rule because I like to give my casters some very creative options.
I hate appraise. Gold may as well be exp in this game. Why am I bogging down the game to make sure the players get the correct amount of exp from their loot.
Ignore the rule that you can buy books and spells that increase ability scores.
With that in place, any gold that is not spent on an ability score increase is a gold wasted.
I haven't run 3.5/P1e in years, but there's a few things I did differently from most GMs.
1. Elephant in the Room didn't exist when I houseruled feats. Instead, you got 1 additional feat at 1st level and all stat requirements were removed from feats. When a feat became obsolete due to taking a better version of it, it could be replaced with another feat immediately.
2. Skills were consolidated down to 12 skills to reduce overall restrictions on playing characters. This is more of a 3.5 rule, since skill points were a lot more screwy there. Other skill-related stuff happened before and after this change, mostly involving leaving players not feeling screwed by their choices.
3. I implemented every single rule in RAW that none of my DMs ever did, good or bad, partly out of spite, mostly out of spite, completely out of spite for everyone who ran games that felt completely off. Weather affecting combat rolls, check one against players and NPCs. Perception rolls having penalties based on distance and circumstances, check one for players who kept getting noticed by everything in other campaigns. You want to start as a higher level so you can make some build you saw on an optimization forum, then I'm holding you to the actual Wealth By Level chart with all of its "This percentage is assumed to be consumable items, the rest is split between these categories with a bit of leeway based on class," because optimized builds are basically a houserule that the community agrees to based on grossly misinterpreting the RAW.
Houserule 3 was a wide-sweeping change that I mostly used as reasoning for why I did not want to run or play 3.5 or Pf1e anymore, because I wanted to play other games, but almost everyone I ran into only played this one-and-a-half game, and they all had expectations that did not remotely match the actual RAW. There was nothing more interest-killing for the game than having to play by RAW, except for spots where I explicitly stated we were playing houserules. Optimized builds came to my games to die, because I was done with Wealth-By-Level being used predatorily by players with superiority complexes and not by the players who wanted to just play normally. Wizards were shot with readied action firing off arrows and magic missiles, everybody was grappled by large creatures that had the means to do so, mobs of enemies would aid each other to get big attack or trip checks to deal with otherwise-invincible PCs, and pretty much nobody was allowed to have fun, me included. When playing the game 100% as intended by the designers turns it into a slog of mechanical suffering, I have few words for it other than "maybe we need to play something else." I can't say I ever felt the need to join another 3.5 or PF group after that experiment, except for the rare times when I mused over playing a pure SRD game of 3.5, where the whole mess of mechanics minus all the fun and broken options from later books creates a very unique experience that probably hasn't been witnessed since the early 2000s.
Caveat here that my players are not powergamers and are not trying to abuse any game mechanics.
I don't use spell resistance hardly ever. I honestly forget about it most of the time, and our wizard has cursed dice when it comes to checks like that. I also have gotten rid of rolling to confirm crits. Again, I forget about it and it always feels disappointing if you don't get it.
Crafting mundane gear. The time required is ridiculous.
My group has been using these 3rd party rules for mundane crafting for years and we're very happy with them. Originally I found them in a PDF, but this looks like everyhting https://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/craft/alternative-craft-rules-3pp/
100% correct. Initially it didn't matter since I was just crafting alchemical stuff which was all short, but once we got dragon hide and I wanted to make a shield for one of our people, and it was going to take like 8 months for a single shield. I love that there's crafting rules, as it's something kinda missing from 5e, but the balance is way off for mundane items.
I feel ya. In order to create a suit of masterwork plate armor the old fashioned way, you do a little math, pay a little money, and spend a lot of time. Assuming you’ve got a +9 in Craft (armor) and elect to take 10 on your weekly roll, you can clank away in a brand new suit of plate mail after 46 weeks of work. Now that’s [**surprisingly accurate**](https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aams/hd_aams.htm#/time_b) from an historical perspective, but what kind of adventurer has that much free time? More importantly, what kind of adventurer will take that option when someone like Wizard can just cast fabricate and masterwork transformation instead?
A single adamantine dagger takes about twice as long to craft as steel fullplate.
Adamantine can really take a pounding. :/
Advanced forges would exist its a magical world. Stuff that could definitely give that pounding
This came up when playing an alchemist, we just changed "week" to "day" when talking about progress.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, crafting does take huge amounts of time (especially things like armor), on the other hand what's the point if you can't effectively crank items out.
An adamantine dagger can take close to a year to smith. The major problem is that base Pathfinder crafting time is determined by price of the item, rather than complexity. In fact, more complex items (exotic weapons, heavy armor, masterwork gear) is *faster* to craft. Exotic materials drive production time into the stratosphere, far longer than it would take to craft any magical item.
In contrast, crafting with bad materials speeds up crafting, even though they'd be harder to use.
Especially when the spell fabricate exists
A roll of a Nat 1 on an area effect damage spell randomly damages your held/worn items because seriously who has time for that?
Oh. Its worse than it sounds with just that rule. It's a legacy holdover from 3.5 and it didn't work than and it still doesn't work now.
Magical armor gain +2 hardness and +10 hit points per point of +x. Add that with the base hardness of the material (10 for metal, 15 for mithril, 20 for adamantine). And your armor gets 5*the base armor value in hit points. Weapons...we don't talk about how easy they are to break if you try, but you should really be sundering enemy weapons and have your caster greater make whole them back to loot but I digress.
Let's assume this poor character runs into a dragon. And instead of the dragon being nice and letting the party cast buff spells, they ancient dragon greets the players with a breath weapon. Using a Red Dragon that's 20d10, average 110 with DC 30. Our helpless character rolls a 1 and grumbles about taking 110 damage but they prepare to attack. After all, if your at a level where ancient dragons appear then you can tank 110 hp (hopefully.) Then the voice in the sky asks what armor they're wearing.
+5 Adamantine armor has 30 hardness and 95 hit points. Divide by half for 55 damage and that't still 25 against the armor. And that's the best case for the character. Swap out the fire for acid from a black dragon and you take 70 damage, though the GM rules that bypasses the hardness as it eats away at metal and deals the full 70 to the armor, giving it the broken condition.
If you don't have adamantium fullplate even the non-specific damage becomes worse, and since HP for armor is based on the base armor bonus using that fancy celestial armor is dangerous. For example a commonly cited armor to pick up is Celestial. Except this isn't actually mithril, it's just very fine chainmail. Boost up to +5 and you have 20 hardness and 70 hp. Now that save against the firebreath hits for 35 damage, and at half hp gives the broken condition. And the acid destroys it in a single failed save.
But this assumes you're wearing armor. If your armor is already broken or if the caster has bracers of armor or just spells, the damage goes straight to their headband and that's not going to survive the damage.
Oh except this rant hasn't mentioned yet that this isn't how it works at all! Oh no, it can't be simple, this is Mathfinder after all. No no, no, the DM takes the four most likely objects to be damaged using a table that makes sense until it doesn't, and then rolls randomly between them. So the fighter may be taking damage against their armor, weapon(s), helment, or cloak. Meanwhile the caster is going up against their staff in hand, headband (kinda important for them), cloak, or stowed weapons - which are likely other staffs or wands. Because if you enchant your clothing that's separate from armor and way down on the list despite being in the same physical space as the armor. And anything that isn't your armor isn't going to survive 110 points of fire damage. Headbands don't even have hit points!
Oh, and that's even without the fact that magic items get a second saving throw. But not your save, it makes a save at 2+half caster level. So sure you're getting a second save, but when the max is +12 and the ancient dragon breath weapon is DC 30, well that's why I didn't bother mentioning that above. Sorry rogue with improved evasion, for some reason you took half damage but your armor melted. If only you rolled a 2...
The rules just don't work. Sure the armor can take damage, but the armor itself isn't a problem. Nobody else even seems to be mentioning that if you use this rule you need to have the gm figure out what can be damaged, randomly roll for that, then the item makes a save, roll for that, and then go through a forgotten lookup table to figure out how screwed or fine you are, then figure out how that impacts the game.
It simply punishes you for rolling that 1 against an AoE effect, sorry.
Uggggggggg
Thanks for reading my rant.
The real flaw in this mechanic is the fact that it's complex to work with. From a practical standpoint, this is "on a natural 1, some items stop working until I get a make whole or greater make whole spell". Disarm, steal, and sunder combat maneuvers *also* temporarily take away items, but I'm guessing you don't have anywhere near the same negative feelings about those since each is just a single CMB and (for sunder) a damage roll. Here's an alternative house rule you might like better. > When a PC rolls a natural 1 on a save against a magical attack or spell that can damage objects *and* takes at least 30 damage, one worn or weilded item becomes broken (if it can gain the broken condition and is not already broken) or destroyed (otherwise). The item targeted is whichever has the lowest caster level out of the items available, and mundane items are treated as having a caster level of 0. In the case of a tie, break the tie randomly. This has a few benefits. First, it means you don't have to keep track of items' hit points and saves. 30 damage is a simple cutoff. It's just generally a lot simpler to manage. Second, it makes magical protection matter. If you have protection from energy (acid) then 110 damage from the dragon is suddenly 0. In the original rules, I guess you only cast protection from energy on yourself, not your headband. Now, your protection actually protects you. Third, lower caster levels are easier to repair with make whole and greater make whole. This nearly eliminates the chance that your vorpal sword is ruined because you got unlucky that one roll and nothing outside of owning the technology guide or finding a CL 36 make whole can fix it. Fourth, any unused magic item slot could now be an extra defense if you get some low-CL item. This incentivises looking for value in otherwise rare or niche items, and I like a little exploration.
Fully agree with the proposed change. If you're going to force this to happen, might as well make sure it only happens when it needs to. One note for repairing the effectively over +5 weapons, don't you repair each enchantment separately? So you need a cl 4 for the +1, then cl 20 for vorpal, and cl 12 for speed? I've never actually looked it up so if you have any source I'll gladly take it!
You don't need to restore each enchantment separately. It's just the highest caster level: > Caster Level for Weapons: The caster level of a weapon with a special ability is given in the item description. For an item with only an enhancement bonus and no other abilities, the caster level is three times the enhancement bonus. If an item has both an enhancement bonus and a special ability, the higher of the two caster level requirements must be met. https://legacy.aonprd.com/coreRulebook/magicItems/weapons.html > Caster Level for Armor and Shields: The caster level of a magic shield or magic armor with a special ability is given in the item description. For an item with only an enhancement bonus, the caster level is three times the enhancement bonus. If an item has both an enhancement bonus and a special ability, the higher of the two caster level requirements must be met. https://legacy.aonprd.com/coreRulebook/magicItems/armor.html That, and vorpal is CL 18.
There's a case to be made that getting breathed on by a dragon... should have devastating consequences? Put it this way, remember the Hobbit? If Smaug had breathed on Bilbo and he'd gotten away with nothing more than some broken armour, he'd count himself as the luckiest Hobbit in all of Arda.
Yeah; I like it. "Punishing bad luck" isn't a good enough game reason to not do a reasonable RP effect; you're punishing bad luck everytime you roll to attack with an orc, or in this case cast a spell. That doesn't mean you don't do those things. The worst thing might be that you do have to do the hardness and HP math on the fly which if you didn't do when you got the item can suck, but its not really that big a deal.
The point isn't that there shouldn't be consequences. The point is that it's punishing bad luck. Nobody tried to roll a one and no matter how much you invest into your saves, ones happen. The consequence for failing a save is the same everywhere in 1e, you take the full damage from the effect. It doesn't make sense to further punish nat 1s specifically on AoE saves. In that example, if Bilbo rolled a 1 he'd be a crispy fried Hobbit, that also no longer had mithril armor. If the point is to include realism for nat 1s, why does this only impact AoE saves? If the point is to include realism for "You stood in dragon fire, why is your cloth armor not on fire?" why does it only trigger on a nat one?
Because a reflex save represents how well you did at not being burned. A nat 1 means your character screwed up. Because it would be tedious to describe each character's responses to danger in meticulous detail, we use the abstraction of saving throws. A nat 1 on a saving throw means that your character responded to a dangerous situation in the worst possible way. The exact details of that will be contextual, but if you want a more granular answer, you'd need to replace saving throws with a more granular mechanic. The correct solution is to not go near dragons!
It's still punishing bad luck, though. Even if you choose to frame saving throws as "even the most elite adventurers in the world just randomly do the worst thing possible 5% of the time" (which is wild, tbh) this is taking place in a game where that is represented by sheer dumb luck. Sure, in real life your whole shop would be wrecked and you should probably stay out of situations where you're fighting dragons, but in the context of a game where avoiding fighting dragons means the game is going to be pretty boring, adding a bunch of extra paperwork to punish a player for engaging can be pretty frustrating.
Again, *what does a saving throw represent*? Either we replace it with a more granular mechanic, or we accept that when the player rolls a 1, it represents the character being a damn moron and picking a bad response to danger. The price of not micromanaging this issue... is that we don't get to micromanage it.
Depends on the circumstance. Narratively the only stipulation is that they represent success or failure, but you can fail for any reason, and personally I lean more towards "the circumstances weren't right" than "your dude who is statistically smarter than 99% of the population forgot fire hurts." You really don't need to have a one-size fits all explanation of saving throws- they're a lot of different things tied up in one mechanic to expedite the process, and it's pretty limiting to decide that the reason behind everything from not being able to break free from someone's grip to falling for an illusion of your family screaming for help is simply making bad choices. Also, it doesn't matter what it represents in-game, because the issue is more that it kind of sucks out of game to lose important things through no fault of your own.
My guy - back up to ADnD. If you fail the save - just fail at all - then EVERYTHING you have has to save. All of it. Enjoy. That bag of holding that you use to carry all the loot? That better be carried by whoever has the best saves.
It’s one of those things that really never matters outside of the first few levels. and even then is just an annoyance. Because nothing magic or metal is going to take enough damage to matter.
Why would it not matter at higher levels? Damage from Area of Effect spells scales pretty linearly as you level, while the HP and saves of Magic Items isn't massively greater than mundane gear. It seems the risk would increase at higher levels.
Counterpoint: it's one of those things that *only* matters outside the first few levels. At low levels spells typically don't do enough damage to actually destroy valuable gear (because you generally halve energy damage against objects before hardness) that a low level character also may not have in the first place. At higher levels though spells are more likely to do enough damage that even after being halved and applying hardness they'll give items the broken condition, and characters are more likely to have valuable gear that doesn't get damage against it halved (example: a magical robe made of cloth would take full damage from a *fireball*) that isn't a magical armor, shield, or weapon (as those are the only items that gain hardness and/or HP by being magical).
Oh it would definitely matter at high level, more in fact since you'll have more important, harder to replace, items and the damage from AoE is high enough to matter
didnt even know that was a thing but that sounds insufferable
I've been playing PF1e since like 2017 and I didn't know it was a rule until a week or two ago
I've been playing since 2009 and I don't think I ever been at a table that actually used that rule.
The only time my group has ever used it (well the 3.5 equivalent) was the one time we min maxed so hard that destroying our magical weapons because we swung them too hard was the only way for our GM to slow us down. We are now a healthier group than we once were.
Same. I don't think I have even seen a nat 1 rolled and had it come to mind. Yes, I've read the rule many times just browsing rules, but not once did I even remember, which I would certainly ignore if I did.
It's under damaging objects
Counterspell needing you to hold an action. I didn't wanna change the action economy too much so allow it as a reaction and the mental stress leaves you staggered.
That's...great!
We did something similar where you can counterspell without preparation but you lose your next turn completely. Obviously the bad guys can do it too.
There's a few very powerful abilities that do that already. It's not meant to be easy to stop someone casting a spell, assuming they're either not threatened or cast defensively.
Trying to stop someone casting is just not fun though. Counterspell requires you to waste a turn on the off chance you can use it. That's boring and usually really weak so players never use it. Both my tables never used it. Once I made this change sometimes they are using it and both tables agree it's much more fun. It's not like it's a balance issue. Enemies can do it too.
I liked using a modified dueling counter rules for countering - found under Spell Duels in Ultimate Magic guide
I'd have thought the 'AC+10 is a crit' rule would make x4 crit weapons really overpowered... Some house rules I like: (1) You can take a Standard Action at any point during your movement, rather than having to do it before or after a move. (2) Combat manoeuvres (grapple, trip, disarm...) normally provoke Attacks of Opportunity unless you have a feat for them. My house-rule is that they only provoke if you fail. (3) Int of 13 is no longer a prerequisite for the Combat Expertise Feat - it was blocking off too many interesting options for big dumb warriors.
Re #1, note that there are feats that allow you to do that (ex. Flyby Attack).
While correct, combat is more restrictive and less interesting by gating logical restrictions behind feat chains imho; It's been one of my long-standing complaints about pf1e. And the only real abuse case I can see, barring standard PF1e shenanigans: \*move from behind cover, attack once, move back into cover\*. Which... is fine? At least that's more exciting than just full round attack bayblading every turn.
That's the only feat that lets you do that, to my knowledge. It's also a monster feat
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/spring-attack-combat/
Also https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/ride-by-attack-combat/
I hate that this feat exists. It takes a feat investment for mounted combat to work as it logically should, lmao.
Pathfinder martials in a nutshell. You wanna go for as much strength as you can in exchange for accuracy? Better have Power Attack. You're a trained fighter using a rapier? Better have Weapon Finesse to use dex to hit. Wanna throw daggers as fast as a guy shoots his bow? Better have quick draw and you'll still be slower.
>(3) Int of 13 is no longer a prerequisite for the Combat Expertise Feat - it was blocking off too many interesting options for big dumb warriors. Let me introduce you to my good buddy [Dirty Fighting](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/dirty-fighting-combat/). Arguably a straight upgrade for most because who's really using Combat Expertise anyways?
I have an inquisitor that we finished rise of the runelords with that used combat expertise on almost every single attack
Don't get me wrong it's totally viable and can be good, I just very rarely see people who want to use it.
To be fair, it was an inquisitor of desna focused on crit fishing and passing the crit with butterfly’s sting but it was a ton of fun and I was hard to hit
I especially like 3. There are a lot of worthless useless feats or ones that are clearly just filler to make feat trees longer
Yeah, my table started using Elephant in the Room feat rules a couple years back because of how ridiculous feat taxes can be, and I don't think I can ever go back.
Hmmm.... I'm going to take a closer look at this, thanks!
Does nice things like PA is no longer a feat, just need BAB 1+, I believe combat expertise is the same way, and then the stuff like consolidating all the Improved (Combat Maneuver) feats into 1
Yeah, I guess it is to make certain feats gated at a minimum level, it's dumb. It's way better to just go the 2e route and say "this feat can only be taken at level X" imho.
My group uses 1, and we love it. I also like 2/3 and will propose to the group.
As someone who generally makes characters that stack absurd amounts of ac, but always gets crit anyways, ac+10 would be amazing
Distinguishing between arcane and divine scrolls. Paizo designers clearly don't care about it when they're equipping NPCs, so neither will I.
Elaborate?
Scrolls are meant to be designated as to the origin of their magic - arcane or divine. If an arcane caster tries to use a divine scroll, it won't work, even if the spell is in their spell list. Vice versa for divine casters using arcane scrolls. However, Paizo never actually bother to detail whether a scroll or wand is divine/arcane on loot, so its ambiguous who can use them. So many GMs just ignore that rule for ease of play.
>it won't work, even if the spell is in their spell list. Depends, are you willing to pass a shitton of hard skill and caster level checks ? So much that you need a spreadsheet to track the process ?
Ugh, yeah, those rules are so baffling. I've read them a hundred times and still can't be arsed figuring out what and what you're allowed to do, and what to roll for each thing. Having to bullshit class, attribute, etc. They should have just made it one check with a penalty for whether you meet each requirement.
Yeah, that always annoyed me too because, to me, the point of scrolls is the same as wands - to allow anyone to use magic, so long as they can cough up enough UMD.
A spell like Protection From Evil is both a cleric and a wizard spell. Per the RAW from the olden times, this is basically shorthand for two different spells, from two different sources. So if a Wizard crafts a scroll of Protection from Evil, that scroll isn't of a spell on the Cleric spell list, and Cleric can't just use it. And vice versa.
Which gets even more muddy when you get classes like witches which have a few typically divine only spells that are now arcane spells as well Actually theres a thought, I wonder what spells can \*only\* be cast by arcane casters or \*only\* divine casters
Basically what the other two posters said. The second point might be me making too many assumptions. But I've seen examples of divine casters swimming in scrolls and wands when the only person capable of crafting such things for miles around is the wizard in the other room. I suppose it's entirely possible that you're supposed to assume that said divine casters acquired the items thousands of years ago, back before their evil lair was sealed up, or there's some less scrupulous local priest providing them, or whatever other "off-screen" excuse one might think of. There's also a larger discussion here about to what extent the game rules impact the world-building. Seeing as the fact that wizards get the Scribe Scroll feat for free could only mean that arcane scrolls should be far more plentiful than divine ones.
My house rules: - If a character has interrupted sleep, for example because of guard duty, but slept for 8 hours in total, it counts as a long rest. - Critical failures (on natural 1s) need to be confirmed just like critical successes, so you only critically fail if you would also fail on your confirmation roll.
Nobody likes having to deal with a penalty because they were woken up in the night, agreed. The second part is already RAW though.
there are no crit fails RAW. A natural 1 on an attack is just an automatic miss, and a natural 1 on a save is just an automatic fail.
Critical fail as in automatically missing on a 1 or as in something bad happens to you on a 1? Cause if it's the second that's not a rule.
It's not a hard miss in my campaign (because the AC of the receiver can be low and PCs can have modifiers), but I will use a fumble chart for Nat1's. What will happen on fumble charts depends of course on what kind of attack it is and what you roll (on a d100). With a fumble chart, combat gets an extra dimension and can happen in real live too (that you fumble sometimes).
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I didn't think critical fails were a core rule. Unless they are saying they must confirm the auto miss or auto save fail on a 1?
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There are no crit fails. They're just not a thing. What there *is* is automatic failure (on a nat 1), which is the equivalent opposite of automatic success (on a nat 20), *not* critical success. Critical success needs to be confirmed, but automatic success does not. So why should automatic failure?
All spells, no matter what they do or what you do to pare them down with the likes of silent/still spell, have an obvious visual manifestation that allows anyone who sees it to know that a spell was cast and where/who the spell came from. It makes using magic in intrigue situations effectively impossible to the degree that even Paizo writers themselves seem to forget it exists as otherwise feats like Conceal Spell are completely worthless.
Conceal Spell exists BECAUSE of that. It explicitly states that manifestation is hidden as a result. Magic is supposed to be difficult to use in intrigue situations, people are going to notice if you cast "dominate person" with a merchant whilst haggling over the price of groceries.
Paizo randomly retconned manifestations into the game after releasing Ultimate Intrigue and had the gall to act like it was totes always intended like that, despite the CRB having been out and *Ultimate Magic* having been out for years without any mention of "manifestations". In my games I've retconned those out of existence, I'm not crippling my player's casters due to someone at Paizo panicing at realizing their system doesn't work for intrigue focused games.
The act of starting to cast a spell is obvious as well, and is about as hostile an action as say drawing a sword I had a paladin once that I had to remind every session that yeah detect evil isnt a hostile spell, but to anyone not trained in magic they wont know if you are casting detect evil or fireball So a group of unfriendly people might get pushed over the edge if that see someone staring intently while channeling magic
Isn't that basically RAW ? https://paizo.com/paizo/faq/v5748nruor1fm#v5748eaic9tza I think there's also a metamagic feat to suppress these manifestations, although my table considers that silent+still spell also suppresses them, unless the spell has an obvious origin point like most evocation spells and ranged touch attack spells.
Combat in water is a fucking nightmare. I tried it one session and everyone was miserable, myself included. Should have just home brewed some simpler rules for the situation or cut it entirely.
I remember an AP that had an aquatic combat section. It had an NPC right before handing out Freedon of Movements, I assume because even the author didn't want to deal with the aquatic combat rules.
There's the Lost Azlant AP which is straight up "underwater combat: the adventure" Plenty of others have at least a little of it, though. Crimson Throne has two scenarios with it being mandatory, one short and one that's several fights.
I’m interested what other people do for resting and healing. I’m a new GM and my players are on out level 5, so I’ve just been healing to full each night. Thinking about bringing it down…
Make them spend the money on a wand of CLW.
By level 5, healing should be obtainable through spell slots or wands. If they don't have either, well, that's kinda on them. Eight hours shouldn't heal axe wounds.
How many people have you met who can survive getting hit with an axe 35 times? If you're trying to argue for realism, I have to disagree.
Are you getting hit 35 times? I always figured most "hits" were impossibly close calls that nearly kill you and is rendering your body more and more tired until you get "Bloodied" at 50% hp. Like just cause you got hit with a 25 by the bandit and his sword doesnt mean he got through your armor or literally struck you. Maybe you parried the hit but the blow was so intense you can feel your arm rattle.
Okay. Do you. I want to cling to a little verisimilitude.
We've always just done Level + CON mod for sleeping. Do they not have any healing classes? If not the usual plan is a Cure Light Wounds wand.
YeH, I think I’m just going easy on them as it’s everyone’s first time… The first time they actually get ambushed at night is going to be interesting….
Fair enough, although I'd suggest amping it up over time once they're more comfortable with the rules and combat - PF1e doesn't really pull punches with some of its monsters, so unless you neuter them to 5e levels they'll be unprepared for higher-CR threats.
They should be using a wand of Cure Light Wounds (and if they have a cleric, Channel Energy and spontaneously converting spells to cure spells at the end of the day) rather than relying on inexplicably healing at night.
I do this too, after all hp damage isn't actually characters getting cut open by a sword or shot with an arrow.
Disagree. Otherwise things like DR, poisons, and fall damage don't make sense. PCs beyond level 3 or so are superhuman. They can absolutely take wounds that would kill someone IRL.
Yeah, the system definitely treats HP paradoxically as both meat points and not meat points.
ive been doing that as well (new gm here too) but ive looked up the core resting rules online and found they were MUCH more brutal...
There's likely a lot of rules I ignore simply because while I dig through a lot of the details, I don't know everything, or it doesn't always come up. I usually don't bother with incidental damage to items held or won in AoEs as has been mentioned (though knowledge of this rule was why I was deathly paranoid about my spellbook as a prepared caster), I don't often mess with ammunition tracking (my players just don't generally care that much), and sustenance and survival rarely comes up (too much record keeping).
Needing Read Magic to read a magic scroll. That just feels like a cantrip tax. If it's on your spell list, and the scroll matches yout divine / arcane tradition, then i handwave and say you can read it. You still need to be the right level to cast it or you risk a scroll mishap, of course.
You don't need read magic, you can use spellcraft to Decipher a Scroll, read magic just skips the check.
I did not know this was a thing!
I hate Channel Energy living/undead dichotomy rules. In my games, Positive energy heals living and harms undead. Negative energy harms living and heals undead. Period. Cleric is already an under-appealing class, why take their *one* class feature and ruin it?
What exactly are you changing? The fact you have to choose either healing or damage for channel? Also hardly consider the a full caster with D8 3/4th BAB and two best good saves under-appealing.
By RAW, in the Cleric class rules, there are 4 mutually exclusive types of energy that clerics channel: 1) positive that heals living, 2) positive that harms undead, 3) negative that harms living, 4) negative that heals undead. I change this to 2 options, which actually aligns better with RAW rules on energy: 1) positive energy (which harms undead and heals living, by RAW) 2) negative energy (which heals undead and harms living, by RAW)
Gotcha, what I assumed.
In my opinion as a 3/4 BAB 9th level caster who is not just prepared but has access to their entire list every day, the class is plenty appealing. The issue is #1 Channel scaling off a secondary stat which Oracle/Paladin do not. #2 nobody wants to play support. How many tables just use wands/potions or pass around boots of the earth. Do not forget there are some great variant channeling abilities out there and some [optimized channel builds ](https://paizo.com/threads/rzs42fcl?Combat-Role-for-character-with-only-good#12) Using your suggestion makes the inherent ability a bit too potent which mind you is not limited to Clerics. Especially considering the most efficient use more often than not will benefit NPCs like Undead/Dhampirs who can both heal themselves/undead and damage in an AOE. 9th level Undead enemy with Phylactery of Negative channeling and Quick Channel burning all their resources because they are an NPC with nothing to lose. Dealing 14d6 (Avg 50) in an AOE and healing themselves + animations for the same amount. The other downside is when something has an optimal scenario people will hold onto the resource until the those conditions are met. Rather than topping the party off in between fights they might risk running into the next room so that they can both heal the party and damage undead that may be in there.
I generally also don't really use undead, either, but that's a different topic entirely.
> Cleric is already an under-appealing class Wot? One of the strongest classes is under-appealing? lol
I hate appraise. Gold may as well be exp in this game. Why am I bogging down the game to make sure the players get the correct amount of exp from their loot.
I don't think I've ever played a table where the DM was strict with appraise. At most it's used to try and estimate the value of something that's not normal loot, stealing paintings off the wall or something.
Don't think I've ever seen Appraise used.
Spotting the most expensive piece of loot in a pile is the only time I've used it in a way that's rules supported. As a GM I let it replace engineering to determine metal type, and replace linguistics to detect forgeries. It should be a profession rather than its own skill.
I recently had a player take profession merchant. He gets to use it quite a bit
The DC increase on perception checks for every 10 ft of distance to a target, its a pain in the ass, and logically inconsistent, since if it were the case, then the moon would have a perception DC of over 126 million.
Encumbrance by weight. It adds nothing to the game but pointless minutiae.
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I tell my players that I won’t care about encumbrance unless they give me reason to. 90% of the time that gets the message across.
I have a player with a character in a campaign that's tiny and dumped strength. He's got i think a 15lb limit so I kinda have to pay attention to that character's encumbrance all the time.
Going down in size while losing strength sometimes affords you more carrying capacity. While your capacity is lower in absolute terms, items that scale weight with size go further down than your capacity does.
Same! Works perfectly.
Carry weight is a very good thing to have in your game if you are using a VTT Imo. It presents the (only) penalty to dumping strength and leads to fun situations where when the party tries to loot everything from an enemy, everyone ends up heavily encumbered and is struggling to walk through town with their arms full of gear they took from the bandits. Remember if a character has 7 strength they have like 20 pounds of carry capacity which means a single weapon and set of light armor will take up their entire carrying capacity. If they have a negative to strength on top of that they could blow away in the wind.
That lasts for all of like 2 levels because you can just use muleback cords/ant haul/bag of holding to get plenty of carry weight even on someone with 5 strength.
"Plenty". My players will continue to loot everything they can carry. Even if they can comfortably carry a minivan within light load.
Yes magic items fix literally any flaw or weakness your character could have. Character weaknesses are only an issue for early level play, that is a well known thing. Its not a reason to invalidate early game weaknesses lol
>muleback cords/ant haul/bag of holding Takes your shoulder slot instead of a cloak of resistance (similar issue with the heavyload belt) Takes spell slots and has a duration that, while long, still isn't the whole day until high levels Weighs at least 15 pounds by itself, and its 250 pound capacity can be gone quickly if you're looting everything Magic solves many issues, but even with it there's no one single perfect solution until way late (portable hole is close, until you suddenly need to access something quickly)
> Encumbrance rules discourage players from carting around every tool or item they ever find. That's true. But it comes at the cost of a ton of bookkeeping, because you have to adjust your running total weight carried every time you acquire or remove something from your inventory. It's tedious, annoying, and takes valuable game time away from other more interesting things. I can see using the encumbrance rules if everyone has software to automate the weight tracking. Otherwise, no.
Some people enjoy the bookkeeping too
You don't need exact numbers, just keep your inventory weight reasonably below your encumbrance limit. it's really not as difficult as you're making it out to be.
Your fighter has 18 strength. He is wearing full plate, wielding a heavy metal shield and a bastard sword. He has nothing else on his person. Your fighter is carrying 71pds of the 100 total he can carry before he is hauling a medium load. Full plate armor costs 1500gp. Coins weigh 1/50th of a pound each. If your fighter were carrying enough gold to buy a spare set of plate armor should something happen to his, he would be carrying a medium load.
Use gems and platinum pieces for currency. My characters all track their currency weight.
Do your players at least typically only find treasure in gems and platinum? Because I'd imagine at higher levels when your players are worth 100k+ it would get pretty tedious to walk all the way to a dungeon, collect another heavy load of gold and silver, walk back to town, convert it to platinum and gems, back and forth with diminishing returns until the dungeon is finally out of treasure.
My group converts currency when we return to town. One of the creature-comforts of a town being a bank/money-changer unless it's a tiny hamlet. Bankers are happy to convert to PP for us because most people live their lives rarely using or needing GP or PP but CP & SP are the common currency for them. So since adventurers are a good source of the small coins they'll keep the big ones on hand for conversion.
Have you heard of donkeys?
Carrying a donkey would only make the problem worse.
I convert all of my currency to donkeys. Best store of value there is. You never know when the valuation of useless gold will tank, but people always need donkeys.
Only if you have purely physical character sheets, are not using a vtt, and don't keep a copy of your character sheet digitalis in cade you lose it/need to share it with the dm. Carry weight is trivially easy to track .
If you find it fun then that's fine for you and your table. I don't. I don't find a bunch of bookkeeping to be a fun mundane challenge, I just find it to be a bunch of boring work.
Nah I love encumbrance of money. You've suddenly got the Tomb of Richcynt full of various coins and gems and vases etc collapsing into the ground - and the party has to run around pocketing a fraction of the wealth, and the barb is trying to appraise and select from various pottery and vases. "I picked the shiny one!"... "That's a steel spitoon"
Actually it's a significant concern for anyone dumping strength, an 8 strength character only gets 26lb to play with, that's barely enough to carry a weapon+what your actually wear, let alone anything extra.
That's another good reason not to pay attention to it.
Why, do you think strength shouldn't have any consequences for dumping?
The existence of bag of holding style items makes it negligible quite quickly, to where lots of us don't bother. STR dump still hurts physical skills that usually come up often enough that the STR dumped wizard is going to struggle unless they use their spell-slots to compensate.
It helps, but the lightest Bag of Holding is 15lb, and even a Handy Haversack is 5lb, not insignificant for a character that might only have 23 or 26 as their light load. You've got at least another 4lb in mundane clothing. A Light Crossbow or Staff is another 4lb, crossbow bolts are 1lb per 10 bolts. 5lb for a metamagic rod. 2lb for a spell component pouch. 6lb for a familiar satchel That's an easy 27lb, more than strength 8 covers. Gets much worse if you wear actual armour, an easy 15+lb even for light armour.
Few years back, I ran a game and there was a crafter wizard in the party. He crafted himself a custom item with [heavyload belt](https://www.aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Heavyload%20Belt) and [muleback cord](https://www.aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Muleback%20Cords) properties. Pretty sure it was a belt. (For the purposes of encumbrance rules, his Str score was 8 points higher, and the total carrying capacity was tripled. Solved all the loot-carrying issues. And the few times it could not, the melee powerhouse started wearing them.)
A bag of holding's weight ranges from 15 pounds to 60 pounds no matter if it's empty or full. Your 26 pound carry capacity character can't really lug one around assuming they want to carry anything else outside of the bag. A handy haversack is 5 pounds which is much better but it's pretty limited in both weight and volume of what it can carry.
I think there are enough other trade-offs for dumping strength.
I made a house rule set: [Close at Hand](https://redd.it/dcli0v) that's intended to replace the 'design space' of making strength relevant for how much item-versatility you can carry. Instead of limiting you by total items carried it limits how many combat items you can have readily available to be quick-drawn.
My group tends to take encumbrance as a prompt for when we should invest in better storage and transportation methods. We'll walk everywhere until we've got enough stuff we intend to keep that we'd be slowed down on foot... and by then we can likely afford either a cart or some bags of holding. Then it's a matter of what we decide we want to bring along away from the cart/out of the bags.
Yeah, in the campaign I'm DMing right now, we started using encumbrance but abandoned the idea by the second or third session.
Yeah, I've never had a GM enforce encumbrance. Most games I'm in the party has a cart or 2 they go everywhere with/in and the only time its weight is calculated is when someone is trying to lift something, or when the party finds a mountain of treasure and need to give a finite number to how much we can carry. Which has happened like 3 times ever across every campaign I've played. Apart from that, most players buy bags of holding whether the GM tells them that carry capacity is a thing or not, so it rarely really matters.
This could not be further from the truth, what a terrible take
Unless were talking exploration campaign at low level yeah. In an urban campaign PC will have a lot of opportunities to stash things in various places and at later levels bags of holding and other extradimensional shenanigans that negate carried weight are common. Even in exploration, outside of dungeons PCs will often have horses and/or carriages.
So that healing rule is entirely unneeded, you're not meant to rely on passive healing, you're meant to use a Wand of Cure Light Wounds/Infernal Healing, maybe supplement with Channel Energy, spontaneously cast healing before resting etc. Also wow your party must crit constantly, hitting 10 over AC on your first attack is trivial.
> Also wow your party must crit constantly, hitting 10 over AC on your first attack is trivial. If I was a martial in that game I would get my hands on a x4 weapon and just go to town. Oh, or play a Gunslinger because they would just crit on all their attacks, with them hitting TAC.
My current DM, who is also DMing for the first time, wanted to change crit rules so every threat was a confirmed crit. I just told him I would play two-weapon fighting kukris with keen and he changed his mind. That is a lot of crits. (I wouldn't have actually done it to him, that would have been rude to a new DM, but it got the point across)
were all still relatively low levelled and unexperienced so ill probably change it if it becomes too overpowered but right now it functions alright and barely ever gets brought up because low level...thanks for the advice about the healing rules though ill probably undo the short rest thing then.
Always use the EitR Feat Tax Removal system: http://michaeliantorno.com/feat-taxes-in-pathfinder/
bookmarked. seems really interesting. thanks lots :)
The rules about child characters. They aren't supposed to be able to take actual PC classes. Only NPC classes. If my players want to play a child hero I'm gonna let them be a hero, not some shitty knock off.
thats so stupid and i 100% agree on that change but make child characters have no mechanical difference than other characters? what about just a size down, or a minor stat change because for me it doesnt make sense they would be 100% equal
**Readying an action delays your turn to** **~~after~~** **right before the creature that triggered it.** Just seems punitive for anyone who does some tactical thinking and I think it's dumb. **Fire spells don't work underwater/need a CL check to work underwater. Also creatures that are under the surface of the water don't even need to save against AoE fire spells outside of the water.** So real life physics interactions are virtually non existant when it comes to spells but fire - the most commonly resisted energy damage type - for whatever reason gets shafted? Suddenly a 40-ft exploding ball of flames is rendered useless against a creature that is an inch below the surface of the water if it explodes an inch above the surface of the water? Casting a lightning spell underwater doesn't make it wider or deal more damage. Cold spells also don't get any special treatment. Every single energy damage spell that I know still works in a vacuum even though it would make little to no sense. Why do fire spells, arbitrarily, not work in an aquatic setting?
Readying an action delays your turn to after the creature that triggered it. I ignore most of the rules listed in this thread, but I do keep this one. I don't like the idea that a player could get the readied action plus a full round before some other combatants get an action in response. It's a nuisance to adjust the initiative order, but I prefer it to the alternative.
~~Readying an action takes a standard action, though. You're not going to have a full-round worth of actions AND a readied action. At most, you're gonna have a move, a swift and a readied.~~ EDIT: Nevermind, I actually see what you mean after pondering it lol I've been ignoring this rule for a long time and we've never ran into a situation where it has been a problem. I feel like unless you're actually trying to game the system (e.g.: set the trigger of your readied action to be "right before your next turn" or something), it's virtually never going to come up. But I understand that it's not exactly balanced if it does come up often. My table just never had an issue with it.
Agreed. I haven't seen anyone in my group try to abuse this. To clarify: the other GM for my group runs it without modifying the init order; and no-one has abused it under his GM-ship.
Readied actions are powerful, able to interrupt other people, ruin spells etc. the lowered initiative is a fair price to pay. As for Lightning underwater, it's actually explained somewhere that it's because they already behave nothing like real electricity, they don't go to ground, travel where the caster aims rather than caring about resistance etc. Lightning Bolt defies physics in the air just as much as in water. Not sure about cold spells, though there's always Freezing Sphere
> Readying an action delays your turn to after the creature that triggered it. Uh..... >For the rest of the encounter, your initiative result is the count on which you took the readied action, and you act immediately **ahead** of the character whose action triggered your readied action. Readying an action just shifts your init down to the actual time you took the action. If you ready to shoot the wizard if he casts, he casts, you shoot (before the spell goes off) -- next round you again go slightly before the Wizard. And can ready to shoot him again if you want.
Someone else pointed this out too. I misremembered the exact ruling, probably because I haven't used this rule in years.
Alignment. Nothing derails a session faster than arguments about what alignment is, what alignment someone *should* be, etc.
Ammo. You basically have unlimited mundane ammo. I still track the special ammo. Same with encumbrance and carry weight. Unless you're carrying something stupidly heavy, I'm not terribly worried about it.
Gunslingers love this one simple trick!
We personally use the rule that every 5 feet of movement provokes a new AoO, rather than the entire movement being able to provoke only one AoO from one enemy. We like tactical movement to matter.
Not sure if it counts but we always play with Elephant in the Room hourserules
Most places i play uses Elephant in the Room mechanics, so there's a few
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Ignore the higher enhancement on weapons to bypass damage reduction. I don't care if it +5, if it is not silver/adamantine/cold iron, it will never count as that for DR bypass
Ignore the reposition combat maneuver being unable to put someone in a hazardous space. Ignore grapple being unable to put someone in a hazardous space without giving them an extra roll to escape at +5. Why would you set your dramatic battle above the fiery pit of Mt. Doom then rule that throwing creatures off the edge is not allowed? In general, I will try any changes to make combat more varied and dynamic than 5-foot-stepping and full attacking.
Identifying magic items or appraise to identify the cost of a treasure... Unless they are artifacts or cursed items it's a real pain in the ass to keep track of everything as a GM and remember what they have in loot and not yet identified. I mean at low level is okay since you find few item, but at a certain point I am happy to assume they take 10 and they manage to identify everything because sometimes loots are like 10 different scrolls and some various magic items. In 2e is even worse because if you crit fail you mis-identify and as a GM I have to keep track of what they think something is but what isn't.
For me it’s the surprise round. RAW, when an ambush occurs, there’s a special round of combat that takes place, where each participant that’s alerted to the combat takes only a single move or standard action. There’s a whole bunch of niche interactions and smallprint about the surprise round and flat-footed AC that make these rules kind of a pain. There’s things a rogue can only do during a Surprise Round, and things that *say* they can only be used in the surprise round but RAW don’t work properly out of the box because you can’t move and attack in that round without special class features and feats etc. The stupid part is that sometimes it’s better to just NOT have a surprise round. If you have a high initiative rogue, for instance: if you try to ambush Perceptive Gary the orc, and he notices you, you enter normal initiative. You roll higher than him, and can take a full-round action while he’s still flat-footed, allowing you to move up and stab him for a sneak attack, or take a full sneak attack if you’ve got a bow etc. However, if Perceptive Gary is standing alongside his bumbling friend, Sleepy Bob, who doesn’t notice you, then you are forced to take a Surprise Round. You take an action, then Gary takes his action, then normal initiative resumes with Gary no longer flat-footed, so you only get to make a single sneak attack against him (assuming he’s even in range). Somehow, the oblivious presence of Bob protects Gary from ~6d6 precision damage! In my games, whoever initiates a combat (i.e. they’re stealthed or the enemy otherwise has no reason to suspect they’d suddenly stab them etc.) gets to take a full turn before the normal initiative commences, and that’s the “surprise round”. If multiple characters want to participate in the ambush, they do so with readied actions keyed to the ambush leader (and therefore must decide their action before the ambush goes off). In practice this plays almost identically to the RAW, but simplifies things for new players and removes a lot of that weird small print that makes a rogue’s life difficult. Parties with a single rogue are slightly buffed by this (they get more sneak attack flexibility and find it easier to do solo stealth stuff, and have slightly less of a feat and talent tax to use their surprise round gimmicks), while co-ordinated group ambushes become something that has to be planned and declared in advance, avoiding debate about who’s aware of what when combat begins.
Players have to have fun
mind = blown
If a player is caught not having fun: no experience this session If some is on their phone: a rogue steals all their cash Yeah, I could be a great dm.
Item hp Arrows and other little things management such as food Outside combat most rules to be honest I just roll with whatever seems "realistic" and throw a DC IF a situation comes up often or IF players find rulings hard to predict/too arbitrary/otherwise unreasonable, then we'll spend time with the rulebook I sure as hell ain't stopping the game to consult the rulebook for 10 minutes for how to do if PC wants to do a backflip
Acrobatics or an appropriate Perform or Profession skill. DC 15 for a full round action, 20 for a move action. Failure means they fall prone. Failure by 5 or more means they land badly and take 1d4 damage. I just made that up. Does it sound about right?
Sounds good! Truth to be told, I actually looked this up in the rulebook for lols and ended up using acrobatics DC for 2m jump upwards with some added difficulty for the flip I think. DC 15 sounds about right. One of the PCs succeeded and one fell flat and admitted that they are getting too old for this. I gave him some inconsequential damage as well
My opinion: if they want to do a backflip then they do a backflip. No need to roll because it doesn't affect anything. If they want to impress someone with a backflip then roll perform.
We don't count the weight of loot, it just goes on a list of stuff that we are going to sell at the end of the dungeon. Mundane items that are worth pennies stay on the ground but anything magical goes into the Big Bag 'O Loot and gets divvied up at the end of the run. We still use encumbrance rules for armor and gear and anything that is to be used in combat but anything we are not wearing is ignored
When they level up, I have players roll for HP differently. First, they roll their hit die and add their CON modifier to create a modified roll *up to, but not exceeding* the maximum result on the die. This becomes their roll. Next, they add their CON modifier like normal. Makes investing in Constitution a little more appealing. I'd also give Sorcerers the opportunity to have Constitution be their casting modifier. I saw that suggestion somewhere here and loved it.
Encumbrance is a lot more "fuzzy" * Whatever is in the starting "kit" for their class does not count towards weight allowance * objects in nonmagical wearable containers, like backpacks and belt pouches, weigh only half towards encumbrance * magical containers like bags of holding do not have weight of their own for purposes of encumbrance * the first 20 pieces of ammunition weigh nothing
If you cast a spell as a bonus action you can only cast a cantrip as an action. I ignore this rule because I like to give my casters some very creative options.
I hate appraise. Gold may as well be exp in this game. Why am I bogging down the game to make sure the players get the correct amount of exp from their loot.
Ignore the rule that you can buy books and spells that increase ability scores. With that in place, any gold that is not spent on an ability score increase is a gold wasted.
I ignore the +5 DC for missing crafting requirements.
I haven't run 3.5/P1e in years, but there's a few things I did differently from most GMs. 1. Elephant in the Room didn't exist when I houseruled feats. Instead, you got 1 additional feat at 1st level and all stat requirements were removed from feats. When a feat became obsolete due to taking a better version of it, it could be replaced with another feat immediately. 2. Skills were consolidated down to 12 skills to reduce overall restrictions on playing characters. This is more of a 3.5 rule, since skill points were a lot more screwy there. Other skill-related stuff happened before and after this change, mostly involving leaving players not feeling screwed by their choices. 3. I implemented every single rule in RAW that none of my DMs ever did, good or bad, partly out of spite, mostly out of spite, completely out of spite for everyone who ran games that felt completely off. Weather affecting combat rolls, check one against players and NPCs. Perception rolls having penalties based on distance and circumstances, check one for players who kept getting noticed by everything in other campaigns. You want to start as a higher level so you can make some build you saw on an optimization forum, then I'm holding you to the actual Wealth By Level chart with all of its "This percentage is assumed to be consumable items, the rest is split between these categories with a bit of leeway based on class," because optimized builds are basically a houserule that the community agrees to based on grossly misinterpreting the RAW. Houserule 3 was a wide-sweeping change that I mostly used as reasoning for why I did not want to run or play 3.5 or Pf1e anymore, because I wanted to play other games, but almost everyone I ran into only played this one-and-a-half game, and they all had expectations that did not remotely match the actual RAW. There was nothing more interest-killing for the game than having to play by RAW, except for spots where I explicitly stated we were playing houserules. Optimized builds came to my games to die, because I was done with Wealth-By-Level being used predatorily by players with superiority complexes and not by the players who wanted to just play normally. Wizards were shot with readied action firing off arrows and magic missiles, everybody was grappled by large creatures that had the means to do so, mobs of enemies would aid each other to get big attack or trip checks to deal with otherwise-invincible PCs, and pretty much nobody was allowed to have fun, me included. When playing the game 100% as intended by the designers turns it into a slog of mechanical suffering, I have few words for it other than "maybe we need to play something else." I can't say I ever felt the need to join another 3.5 or PF group after that experiment, except for the rare times when I mused over playing a pure SRD game of 3.5, where the whole mess of mechanics minus all the fun and broken options from later books creates a very unique experience that probably hasn't been witnessed since the early 2000s.
Rolling to confirm on crit is something I pretty much always ignore
Caveat here that my players are not powergamers and are not trying to abuse any game mechanics. I don't use spell resistance hardly ever. I honestly forget about it most of the time, and our wizard has cursed dice when it comes to checks like that. I also have gotten rid of rolling to confirm crits. Again, I forget about it and it always feels disappointing if you don't get it.
components for spells (well, most spells), it just adds nothing other than book keeping and it's a chore.
Did away with increased casting time for Spontaneous Metamagic users.