Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[TiaC]

Toxicant is amazing. Until 14th level (so all game), you just give up one discovery for a poison that hits anyone who hits you without a weapon and can be applied to your own weapons as a swift. Starting at 6th level, the poison can daze anyone who fails the (easily-buffed) save, giving you a stunlock.

Vivisectionist is a no-brainer for melee, trading an ability that you won't be using for sneak attack.

Preservationist gets you level-appropriate SNA, which beats the pants off most of your extracts.

Sacrament Alchemist seems to give some nice flexibility and allows dumpster-diving for domain abilities, but you lose out on mutagen.

Most of the others are trash. A lot of them are basically a single variant bomb or mutagen that isn't very good but locks you out of all other variants. These could just be converted to discoveries and have the restriction on double-dipping removed. (e.g. Gloom Chymist or Inspired Chemist.) SOme are unsalvagable, like Ectochymist where you lose bombs and poison abilities for being a bit better against incorporeal enemies. Most of the unsalvagable ones suffer from being horribly narrow concepts, or just not really doing anything different.

[Point]

The standard melee combo is Beastmorph Vivisectionist (which is why it's not PFS legal): the epitome of better-than-a-standard-rogue. Ectoplasm Master fits in there, too, and is a personal favorite since it grants undead-raising, which is one of the best downtime pursuits outside of crafting. Consult with your DM to find out if Brew Potion (which it bounces) is re-purchaseable by the player.

Before taking alchemist, decide whether or not you're melee or bombs, then proceed accordingly.

*Something I forgot to mention: Preservationist does give you Summon Nature's Ally, and you should get summoning whenever possible in PF. Preservationist bounces Beastmorph, however (due to both bouncing Poison Resistance and Persistent Mutagen) which is quite a price to pay. The alternative, Horticulturist, takes out Mutagen entirely.

Ectoplasm Master becomes the best choice here as well, though at a higher cost: it has access to a special Discovery that puts Summon Monster on your list. This is a complete win.

[merxa]

Alternatively the best alchemist archetype is likely the investigator class.

[Mask_De_H]

Alternatively the best alchemist archetype is likely the investigator class.

Unless Investigator got a lot of new tech, or being INT-SAD makes you horny, isn't that the other way around?

Can't the Investigator still not meaningfully contribute to combat until level 4?

[Koumei]

So a lot of classes are basically combo-classes if you squint a bit. Some prestige classes are literally combo-classes, no squinting necessary, it's even there in the description and entry requirements. All good, no complaints there.

Fighter + Rogue is arguably a Ranger, Scout, Ninja or Swashbuckler.
Fighter + (Arcane Caster) is your choice of Spellsword, Duskblade, Hexblade or whatever.
Fighter + Cleric is Paladin or Warpriest.
Rogue + (Arcane Caster) is Spellthief or Arcane Trickster or maybe Bard.
(Arcane Caster) + Cleric is just Mystic Theurge.

Is there some kind of ideal or iconic "Rogue + Cleric" class? I mean you could say a Bard (healing and buff spells, various social/moving-around skills) fits that role? Or if you pretend a Monk actually has any kind of divine/religious link you could go that direction?

Once you add Druid as a base class that needs talking about, it probably moves Ranger to Fighter + Druid, and Scout to Rogue + Druid. I don't know what a Cleric + Druid or (Arcane Caster) + Druid would equate to.

If you decide Monk is its own distinct base class then that makes it even more of a question - Fighter + Monk is ??? Rogue + Monk is a Ninja. (Arcane Caster) + Monk is what, Airbender? Explosive Ki Adept? Monk + Cleric is someone who doesn't know what direction they want to take their alleged religion? Monk + Druid is some kind of shapeshifting focused thing?

I'm mostly just pondering over the ideas, especially for when a new player says "I kind of like X but also Y" so you can say "Well the XY has aspects of both of those, assuming it ticks the specific boxes you want".

[Omegonthesane]

Is this for a specific version of D&D or in terms of flavour?

Bard fits in to the tactical niche of Rogue + Cleric as the talky person who can fight a bit and also heal and buff.

I honestly don't think it's particularly sensible to treat "Cleric" as a base flavour unless wedded to D&D tactical roles, since as Frank has pointed out you would want a Cleric of Pelor to be a Paladin and a Cleric of Nerull to be a Necromancer and a Cleric of Kord to be a Barbarian and a Cleric of Boccob to be a Wizard and a Cleric of Ehlonna to be a Druid and so on and so forth.

Druid has a more specific flavour so doesn't fall into that trap (indeed it was one of the examples above).

I think I saw someone try to claim that Monk was meant to be a lawful knockoff of Thief of all things back in early D&D, but in the present it's probably best understood as a flavour of undiluted Fighter. At least, it is at the level of abstraction where Paladin = Fighter + Cleric.

[Koumei]

Not really for any specific version, just general flavour. So Cleric would probably be better represented in this case by "Final Fantasy style White Mage or Disgaea style Healer/Priest or whatever". Which really does point to "ignore the whole thing about Bards being Arcane (or Nature if you go a ways back?) and Clerics being Divine, the Bard is essentially a Rogue-WhiteMage cross-up".

[Omegonthesane]

The early generation Red Mages were explicitly meant to be Final Fantasy knockoffs of D&D Bards just as the FF1 White Mage was meant to be a knockoff of D&D Clerics. Though that was probably back when Bard was just a "win D&D" prestige class rather than something intended to be balanced, and it's definitely something that sticks to White Mage spells these days.

inb4 facetious implications of racism for the purpose of attempted comedy

[Mask_De_H]

There's a Divine Bard in 3.5, the non-Arcane magic bullshit Monks can do plus the pseudo-Oriental pure soul mysticism makes them Cleric + Rogue if you squint, but the Pathfinder Inquisitor is flat out Cleric + Rogue.

Cleric + Druid is a Druid that doesn't turn into a bear, or a Spirit Shaman. Arcane + Druid is Planar Shepard and another PrC (I think it had Hierophant in the name).

[erik]

Arcane Heirophant. Arcane and Druid combines familiar and animal companion.

http://dnd.arkalseif.info/classes/arcan ... index.html

[Point]

Is there some kind of ideal or iconic "Rogue + Cleric" class?

There are prestige classes that smoosh Rogue and Cleric but I don’t think I’d call them iconic. The sole base class that combines some of their elements is the Savant, the class you forgot existed because its opening gambit is “makes Knowledge checks” and its follow-up is “have level-inappropriate spellcasting” which could have been done with less hoop-jumping with a core caster dipping a full BAB-class. (Or not dipping and just using spells to be better in melee.)

Prestige Classes with sneak attack (which I take as designer intent to rogue-up a class) and divine spellcasting are Daggerspell Shaper (wild shape to enter), Temple Raider of Olidammara (which grants a new progression of a unique list, a concept pregnant with “no”), Slayer of Domiel (same, but with a tediously bad death attack), Strifeleader (levels granting sneak attack don’t grant spellcasting), Black Flame Zealot, and Shadowbane Stalker.

Black Flame Zealot is the 3x Assassin but cleric. That’s pretty much it. You lose spellcasting on level 1: that’s why you don’t hear much about it. Well, the main reason why.

Shadowbane Stalker is the closest to a reasonable hybrid, losing 2 spell levels over 10 and granting stealth bonuses at 2 and sneak attack without losing a spell level.

None of these classes are terribly mechanically compelling.

The Unseen Seer, which advances arcane spellcasting, is just a more straightforward application.

D20 is weird. The designers, especially those that stay on despite turnover and layoffs, show increasingly during its lifecycle and even beyond that they are perfectly happy with iterated content. Nevertheless, there are bizarre gaps where you’d expect them to have wuzzled stuff together and they just . . . didn’t . . . and maybe instead chose to do something like they had already done, like let you become a bear, so you could transform into a bear while you shapeshift into a bear with a bear companion you’ve heard this one before. PF continues this deficit: it presents no natural sneakpriests.*

*I disagree with the notion that Inquisitors are a clear case of Rogue/Cleric hybrid. I agree that they match the spirit of one rogue concept, that being violent social engineering, but that’s not an explicitly core competence of the d20 Rogue class, it’s just something they can do. My deliberately narrow view is that Rogue (for d20) is stealth/sneak attack. Inquisitor’s shtick is that it has Teamwork feats so it works well with others. . . which isn’t the default rogue cliche, I think we can agree. If you expand rogue’s concepts out of its base mechanics, things like Inquisitor do make sense as a hybrid.

[Prak]

Is there a decent, or at least functional, crowd favor and fame system that measures both players winning over a crowd in the moment and their overall growing fame over the course of the campaign, either already written for D&D or generic enough that it could be stolen for D&D with little difficulty?

Fame systems already written with non combat performance in mind is a plus.

[Mask_De_H]

*I disagree with the notion that Inquisitors are a clear case of Rogue/Cleric hybrid. I agree that they match the spirit of one rogue concept, that being violent social engineering, but that’s not an explicitly core competence of the d20 Rogue class, it’s just something they can do. My deliberately narrow view is that Rogue (for d20) is stealth/sneak attack. Inquisitor’s shtick is that it has Teamwork feats so it works well with others. . . which isn’t the default rogue cliche, I think we can agree. If you expand rogue’s concepts out of its base mechanics, things like Inquisitor do make sense as a hybrid.

Inquisitors are stealthy, gritty skillmonkeys in light armor with vaguely swashbuckling weapon proficiencies who deal burst damage in droves against an opponent they've set up against (Judgment + Bane). I can see saying a stock Inquisitor isn't, but Sanctified Slayer straight up gives you Sneak Attack. It's also one of three go-to Inquisitor archetypes.

They're a fucking Rogue/Cleric.

[deaddmwalking]

In the campaign I'm running, the players are about to access a lost tomb of Dwarven Kings; the current king knows that there is cool stuff in there, and he wants the PCs to retrieve it to deal with a bigger problem he has. I had some plans as to what the PCs would find as far as magical equipment, but I'm certain that people on this forum have some creative ideas. If you don't have to worry about the system (it's not 3.x), do you have ideas for items that a dwarven king might be buried with? They have a strong emphasis on earth/fire magic, but because of that, there's no reason they might not have magic items that do unrelated things. So if you were a player and you were finding these tombs, what would you hope to find?

[Prak]

Random ideas for Dwarf Magic:

• A slate which automagically records every slight offense and wrong done against the dwarves (could be super valuable to the party through giving it to the king who can use it as casus belli, and would give, iunno, his daughter's weight in platinum for it or whatever)
• A sort of dwarven voodoo doll, a stone that can be attuned to a person, and then triggered to melt into lava, and kill the attuned person by turning their heart to lava
• A Spellrod- basically a lightning rod for magic. Stick it in the earth, and any spell that goes near it hits it instead of it's intended target
• (Hammer/Axe) of the Earth Elemental- thematically appropriate weapon that can swim through mineral matter like an earth elemental, also strikes with the strength of an earth elemental
• Tunnel Eater- A dwarven WMD. When triggered in a tunnel, it consumes the oxygen in the tunnels, causing asphyxiation, and almost inevitably leading to tunnel collapse as the internal pressure suddenly changes. Could be valuable to the party as a threat to the dwarf king if they want. Dwarf king might want it to use against a rival kingdom. Probably actually made by a non-dwarven race and held there for safekeeping
• Demon Core- Two hemispheres of metal around an inner core, with interlocking edges on the outer shell. When the shell halves are twisted to close around the core, an incredibly powerful wave of energy and heat, sufficient to destroy a building, is released. The halves can be separated by anyone in melee range immediately if unhindered, but anyone within that range when they were closed will die withing 1d10 days.

[OgreBattle]

I'm mostly just pondering over the ideas, especially for when a new player says "I kind of like X but also Y" so you can say "Well the XY has aspects of both of those, assuming it ticks the specific boxes you want".

In the Dark Spire DS dungeon crawler, Thief+Priest makes you a ranger. Druids that turn into birds and snakes might functionally do a lot of what rogues do.


It's also halfway to making a skill based progression system to no classes, I find that when I think about multiclassing for a bunch of hours I end at skill based stuff.

I like 4 core classes for multiclassing

Alchemist- Magic as study and memory, writes talismans, builds constructs. Shadowrun Sorcery.
Shaman- Magic as contracts and social, communes with spirits, summons spirits. Shadowrun Conjuring

Warrior- Magic as Super Limitless Training. Shonen manga feats of strength and skill.
Hunter- Magic as Just As Planned fate manipulation. It really could be part of Warrior, but Detective Conan and Yugi are different enough from Goku and Luffy to be their own thing.

You then pick 2 concepts which each make up 50% of your character. Some free 'feats' style thingie give you dips into other classes for rounding out concepts and versatility.

So everyone stays level appropriate (at least 50%) with varying levels of versatility.

Alchemist/Shaman- Your D&D full caster
Alchemist/Fighter- sidescroller protagonist who fights and preps tools, like the Belmonts, turn a break wall into a healing turkey.
Alchemist/Hunter- combines vancian prep with Just As Planned. Lots of ninjas with their ninjutsu

Fighter/Hunter- From hard training Vegeta to always getting a lucky break Big Trouble L-China guy
Fighter/Shaman- You punch them in the face and so does your Stand

Shaman/Hunter- The tricky Stand users, guys who adjust their glasses with a smirk


---

Dwarf magic... biblical stuff. shave their beards and they lose their power

[Emerald]

If you don't have to worry about the system (it's not 3.x), do you have ideas for items that a dwarven king might be buried with? They have a strong emphasis on earth/fire magic, but because of that, there's no reason they might not have magic items that do unrelated things. So if you were a player and you were finding these tombs, what would you hope to find?

- An iron gauntlet that can change the size and/or weight of the wearer or of touched creatures or objects. It has all sorts of uses--shrinking yourself to slip through a narrow tunnel, expanding a shield to block off a tunnel from attackers, making a mine cart lighter than air to take it up a vertical shaft, crushing a giant under its own weight, and more.

- A mithral circlet that lets the wearer speak to the spirits of his clan ancestors, either purely mentally or manifesting a visible spirit for others to see and hear as well. With the proper rites, the wearer can even allow the spirit to control his body for a time, letting him channel the skill of an ancient smith or granting him the martial prowess of a famous warrior.

- A stone "map" formed of layered sheets of mica and obsidian that can shrink to a handspan in width or grow as wide as a yard across. With a command word, the marbling and veins in its surface will rearrange themselves to depict nearby tunnels, mineral veins, underwater rivers, and other long and meandering terrain features within 50 miles, though there is little detail and it takes some familiarity and skill to interpret. With another word, it will shatter itself into shards and arrange those shards into a crude but detailed hovering three-dimensional map of the terrain within anywhere from 100 yards to 1 mile, zooming in or out as the owner commands and rearranging itself as necessary to stay current as the owner moves.

- A hammer that can rapidly heat or cool any metal or stone that it hits, from as hot as scalding magma to as frigid as the deepest lightless caverns, and maintain that state regardless of the ambient temperature as long as the wielder desires. It appears to be a blacksmith's hammer, though it is balanced well for use in combat, and it can change an object's temperature in increments of 1, 10, 100, or 1000 degrees with each hit, allowing the wielder to bring a piece of scrap iron (or an enemy's metal armor) to the melting point in seconds or finely adjust the temperature of a delicate silver bracelet over several minutes with equal ease.

- A head-sized topaz that will embed itself into any unworked subterranean stone surface to which it is pressed. Once embedded, it will give off light equivalent to the current color and intensity of the sunlight on the surface above.

- A lens that automatically identifies the volume, weight, composition, purity, value, and magical or alchemical properties of any metal or mineral viewed through it, at a level of detail proportional to the time spent inspecting a given sample.

- A set of eight silver stakes inlaid with iron runes. When hammered into the ground in a rectangular or octagonal formation, they will prevent any corpses in the area from rising as undead, prevent corpses from being taken across the threshold, and incinerate any undead who try to pass the threshold in either direction. These were not so much "buried with" the king as set up around his body to prevent tomb-robbers from desecrating the body or necromancers reanimating him to trouble the living.

In the Dark Spire DS dungeon crawler, Thief+Priest makes you a ranger.

That makes a lot of sense, actually. While Ranger was originally a Fighter subclass in D&D, rangers are definitely more Thief-ish thematically, with their light armor, stealth capabilities, focus on studying creature weaknesses to kill them, and so forth. The "stealthy, gritty skillmonkeys in light armor with vaguely swashbuckling weapon proficiencies who deal burst damage in droves against an opponent they've set up against" description of Inquisitors that Mask gave fits rangers just as well, if not better.

[Shadeseraph]

In the Dark Spire DS dungeon crawler, Thief+Priest makes you a ranger.

That makes a lot of sense, actually. While Ranger was originally a Fighter subclass in D&D, rangers are definitely more Thief-ish thematically, with their light armor, stealth capabilities, focus on studying creature weaknesses to kill them, and so forth. The "stealthy, gritty skillmonkeys in light armor with vaguely swashbuckling weapon proficiencies who deal burst damage in droves against an opponent they've set up against" description of Inquisitors that Mask gave fits rangers just as well, if not better.

Well, I suspect that ranger was originally included in the game basically to represent Aragorn, who early on has a roguish feel but quickly settles down to a more fighter-y archetype, up to including commanding armies. The other archetypical ranger, Robin Hood, is similarly a rogue with a background of nobility. So ranger as a subclass of fighter makes certain sense. But if we were to use more straightforward analysis of the raw concept as it's understood nowadays, it's either a pure fighter (Drizzt clones) or a nature-themed thief - I'd argue that druid-rogue would make more sense than rogue-fighter.

[RobbyPants]

Is there a decent, or at least functional, crowd favor and fame system that measures both players winning over a crowd in the moment and their overall growing fame over the course of the campaign, either already written for D&D or generic enough that it could be stolen for D&D with little difficulty?

Fame systems already written with non combat performance in mind is a plus.

Unearthed Arcana has a reputation system that I was never interested in. It has to do with how well recognized a PC is based on level, class, and events.

[*]Demon Core- Two hemispheres of metal around an inner core, with interlocking edges on the outer shell. When the shell halves are twisted to close around the core, an incredibly powerful wave of energy and heat, sufficient to destroy a building, is released. The halves can be separated by anyone in melee range immediately if unhindered, but anyone within that range when they were closed will die withing 1d10 days.[/list]

Sounds like someone was reading about early studies with plutonium.

[Emerald]

Well, I suspect that ranger was originally included in the game basically to represent Aragorn, who early on has a roguish feel but quickly settles down to a more fighter-y archetype, up to including commanding armies. The other archetypical ranger, Robin Hood, is similarly a rogue with a background of nobility. So ranger as a subclass of fighter makes certain sense. But if we were to use more straightforward analysis of the raw concept as it's understood nowadays, it's either a pure fighter (Drizzt clones) or a nature-themed thief - I'd argue that druid-rogue would make more sense than rogue-fighter.

Oh, the ranger was definitely an Aragorn clone, complete with the ability to travel easily in forests and use kingsfoil to heal wounds "gain limited druidic spell ability" and safely use a palantir "employ all non-written magic items which pertain to clairaudience, clairvoyance, ESP, and telepathy." It didn't get a "summon army of ghosts" feature, but (A) that would have been a bit on-the-nose and (B) the fighter didn't actually have any special ability to command armies, only the ability to attract some mercenaries after he built a keep.

But it's still kinda weird that rangers were a fighter subclass. They only had a d8 HD instead of a d10 (but started with 2d8 at 1st level for some arbitrary reason), close to a thief's d6, and like a thief and unlike a fighter they couldn't build a keep and instead attracted up to 24 followers, had some percentile-based skills, were good at surprising enemies, and gained an ability to use a subset of magical items at 10th level. The only thing the ranger has in common with the fighter is the combat tables and extra attacks per round, and the only thing it doesn't have in common with the thief is that the thief could only be NG while the ranger had to be LG/NG/CG, but the better and more attacks could have been a function of a ranger-specific ability to replace or augment Backstab, and if a Fighter (Ranger) could add an alignment restriction then a Thief (Ranger) could certainly have changed the thief's alignment restriction.

I dunno, I just find it interesting to look back at early D&D and see how things evolved over the years and ponder how things might have worked differently.

[zeruslord]

Some treasures of the dwarves:

• A hammer golem and command hammer; when the command hammer is struck against a surface, the golem will strike the same spot. A master smith's untiring assistant.
• A Folding Pit; as Portable Hole, but infinitely deep. It's nearly impossible to create enough empty volume for an underdark city without one of these.
• Stonewalker Plate: Magic plate armor carved from stone, fitted for a dwarf. The wearer can walk through stone as if it were difficult ground, and can ascend or descend through it at half his move speed. Descending into empty space is widely regarded as a bad move.
• Extending spear: Magic longspear shrinks to a foot in length on command. Simplifies caving tremendously.

Some things that are expensive because they need to be imported from the surface (assuming you take a more underdarky approach to your dwarves)

• Empty volume. Every cubic inch of empty space is something that was put there by hand; volume needs to be imported to the deeps of the world (unless you have a Folding Pit).
• Wood. The bigger a solid piece of wood is, the more expensive. Ikea-style flatpacked furniture is brought to the depths by expert cavers at great risk. The prize of a thane's collection might be a simple rocking chair. A king's grave goods might include a rustic table for six.
• Textiles. Decide arbitrarily what's producible underground and what needs to be imported.

[OgreBattle]

I dunno, I just find it interesting to look back at early D&D and see how things evolved over the years and ponder how things might have worked differently.

60's Wuxia and Ninja novels, movies, etc. are how I would've liked things to be grounded

[Trill]

In SR 4e, are you able to default on Knowledge Skills?
You are able to default on language skills, but it isn't clarified if you can do so with Knowledge Skills

[Iduno]

In SR 4e, are you able to default on Knowledge Skills?
You are able to default on language skills, but it isn't clarified if you can do so with Knowledge Skills

I can't find anywhere that specifies, but doing a word search for default brings me to the Uneducated quality, which forbids defaulting on knowledge skills you do not possess. That at least implies you can. However, the defaulting rules (page 64 in the SR4A rules, which are the ones I have for some reason) state you automatically fail if it is "too difficult for someone who lacks the proper skill to attempt". So you might know which gang is up ahead based on their colors, but you probably don't know exactly how the security is set up for x building if you don't know anything about security design (or whatever your group decides is too high a bar to clear for someone who is not knowledgeable about a topic).

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, my understanding was always that you could default but since KSkills are an ad hoc kludge there's no real work around for the fact that the MC can--and hell, probably should--be setting some thresholds so high as to be effectively impossible. It's a tough thing to offer guidelines for since there's no clear consensus on how much easier it should be to know where you're going if you have Miami Smuggling Routes instead of just Smuggling Routes.