Forum: Public Forum

Dear Players,

River into Darkness is about to finish on November 6th, in fact depending on the party's choices, it could end on a diplomacy skill-check.

The Saturday game is meant to be a non standard Pathfinder RPG session. ((River Into Darkness|River Into Darkness) for instance has been played with Advanced Player's Guide classes only.

After River into Darkness, I propose to run a Level 17 adventure called The Witchwar Legacy. Follow the link to the Paizo website. Greg A. Vaughan is a good author, he wrote high-level material back in the days of "Dungeon Magazine".

As usual, if you want to know more about Irrisen, Paizo's take on the myth of Baba Yaga, and the world of Golarion in general, "Vague Connections" could sell you books such as Pathfinder Chronicles: Campaign Setting and the Pathfinder Chronicles: Gazetteer.
This would be run only with standard classes (no APG elements). We can discuss prestige classes of course. Again I have never run a high-level adventure so I would rather limit the complexity and min-maxing opportunities.

If you are interested in shorter adventures, I have the entire first season of the Pathfinder Society scenarios to play. These are technically three to four hours adventures, so at worst it would take us two session to go through one, and start another.
These would not be campaign style, thus would call for new characters every time, in turn allowing to sample classes you would never play in a long running campaign. The levels are scalable, in the sense that the adventure design can accommodate power tiers. The low level tier is LV1-LV3 for instance.

If you fancy a specific Pathfinder adventure found on the Paizo website, I could run it for you too.

The only thing the Saturday game will not be is a new campaign.

Discuss your views in this thread of course.

Laurent,

High level one off sounds quite fun actually.

Very few players ever get to reach those sorts of heady highs without at least one death to their name or even a few resurrections so would be quite interesting to say the least.

Other thing would be to see whether or not items do make all the difference. Cherry picking the best items for a one off campaign is very easy. Ferreting around the trash you pick up while adventuring is slightly different. You end with very interesting (read rubbish) items that you would have never picked yourself...

Would like to see the sorts of characters people pick...

Hi Laurant,
I'd like to throw my hat in for the high level adventure.

Nick

Nick,

You smell like a regular to me , but you are a decent enough gentleman so you are in.

I need to read the adventure at some point, but I believe the theme to be icy.
Sure, a flame throwing Sorcerer would have it easy, cold creatures tend to have vulnerability to fire of course; but for RP purposes, the magicky types should be more cold than fire... even if indeed the cold spells are likely to be less than optimal choices.

Am I right to assume you are going to play a mage of some sort?

One reason for this little experiment is to test whether or not the Pathfinder RPG system has succeeded in narrowing the gap between spellcasting and martial type classes at high level. So I would advise the gaming group to have more martial classes than spellcasting ones, just to see how it goes.

I may go for a point buy system this time with the rule that any positive racial modifier should not be applied to the highest bought (or rolled) ability. For instance, a Dwarf with an 18 cannot put it in CON to get a 20 at LV1. The free statistical increase every four levels could be dropped anywhere though. I am trying to avoid STR 30/CHA 3 or INT 30/STR 3 characters here, assuming a "stat +6" item being purchased .
In other words, I would expect players not to min-max because an LV17 start could easily produce game-breaking PCs.

Laurent,

I'd have to have a look to see what class would take my interest, although I'd admit I have a thing for magic using clases. The martial classes tend to confuse my poor little mind
Without haveing the books to hand something like the Mystic Therugs (probably spelt it wrong), or Spell Sword (if its in the core book .. i cannot remeber) interest me as well.
If the APG is open for the picking the Inquisitor looks interesting as well.

(See I can make a post on here without using the square brackets)

Nick,

They have everything on line you know: List of Pathfinder RPG prestige classes

Let's also play the prestige classes as "prestigious", i.e. something that a PC would love to get in at all costs. So, as soon as a Prestige Class is entered, no more multi-classing, the PC must collect all the available levels, usually ten. If the LV17 built allows to collect the full ten levels, one may multi-class again. A prestige class cannot be a preferred class, as per the rules.

As usual, players are invited to play whatever they want in the end. Keep in mind that the Mystic Theurge after a while is only a class that "pisses" spells, i.e. the apparent flexibility (arcane and divine) may become boring. I think Andrew decided against playing one in the "Rise of the Runelords" game, he has now entered the Pathfinder Delver path.

Martial classes are pretty easy to play, though I agree the choice of feats, and development paths, can be more challenging at the character building step.

No APG options, as pointed out above. I would like to curtail the options as much as possible for this first high-level game. Depending on how it goes, I could run other high-level adventures later on and open them to the Advanced Player's Guide and other supplements.

As for the square brackets, I shall ask Len or one of the Alans to give you a sweet for being a good boy and not creating bad links!

Laurent,

Nick,

(Reply to a PM)

A high level game calls for prestige classes, I am curious how they play too, so I sort of expect people to get their PC into one.
Most of them can be entered around level 7, thus most of them could even be played to the hilt (ten levels).

For Eldritch Knight, only one level of Fighter is needed I think, to get the weapon proficiencies. Look at the Seltyel iconic on Paizo, he starts as Fighter 1 / Conjurer x then gets into Eldritch Knight.

Dragon Disciple is indeed an obvious choice for a Sorcerer with a Dragonic bloodline. Do not forget to include your allies in that breath weapon of yours!

Laurent,

Hi Laurent,
How would a CN or TN Fighter/Wizard*/Eldritch Knight of Calistria.
(* either universal or Evocation school) sound as a possible build of a character.
Not totally sure of back story yet as I don't know much of the back story for the Adventure (although I probably could come up with something going on the Campaign setting of the area)

Not sure of race as yet.. though thinking of Human/Half Elf/Half Orc

include me laurent, was thinking on playing a magic class as normally play martial ones will discuss with you later about it

Nick, Ian,

Play whatever you want honestly.
I expect PrCs to be taken and played, we all know about mobility and spring attack, but have yet to see the funny special abilities of PrCs, so please go ahead.

The only brake I would like to put on enthusiasm is "Please limit min/maxing".

If one feels courageous, a Commoner 17 with a masterwork quarter staff for a family heirloom and a potion of cure minor wounds to stop a bleeding ally below 0HP could be a challenge!

Laurent,

Dear Players,

Current adventure

I mentioned to Andrew that my research group had received a "Please send us a report by yesterday" type of email yesterday.
I am not 100% sure that I will be able to run River into Darkness this week but it is more likely now than it was last night. There is still the likelihood of my receiving an email later tonight or early tomorrow morning asking to amend the report over the weekend, thus call for my staying in front of my PC to work.

So, if I am not here by quarter past two tomorrow, the game is officially off.

Now... if the owner of "Vague Connections" could pay me more than University of Nottingham does for my services I would be happy to GM instead of working on composite materials.

Next adventure

Plan your PC with standard point-buy with the following restrictions for the first level built:

• No statistic below 8.
• Buy at most one 18.
• Do not apply a positive racial modifier to an 18 (for a potential 20 at LV1).
• Do whatever you want with your statistical increases every four levels.

I am trying to have sort of balanced and rounded PCs.

For classes, as mentioned before, I expect - and I am perfectly fine with - PrCs.
Make sure that once the PrC is entered, your PC does not multiclass anymore unless they have collected the whole ten levels.

Laurent,

Hi Laurent,
Yes I know the high level game isnt for a while (20th I think or did I make that up!), but as I'm going to be away most of the time between now and the game I'm going to be building him this weekend.

I've used the standard point buy as per core rulebook (15 points to spend). No stat at this point above 15.
Thanks to PCGen I have a basic outline of feats/spells and the like to get.

Personally I'm working on a Arcane Archer!

Will be an interesting build as I also had time to develop a Halfling Tank and a Halfling Blender/DPS.

I think Simon is also intersted in playing a High Lvl Character as he has never gone above 7, I'm also thinking that Greg is interested as well... But we will have to see...

I'm just looking for arms/armour and shines for my character.. with 410,000gp (as per core rule book) is a nice amount to going shopping with!

This si the discussion I've been having in the store with the regulars recently. High level Magic Items, Love 'em or Hate 'em they've got to be done.

It sounds like a huge amount of cash to begin with 410,000. But there is no point buying that +2 ring of protection when you can buy a +5 which is going to be a hell of a lot more useful. Cash difference 42,000. Bollocks...

All that cash gets filtered away on high cost magic items. So Instead of being the glowing magic arua you think you are going to be, you end up with as many items as a level 8-10 character just massively buffed similar items.

just been working out some items and different builds and either way you end up with about 15 items (including weapons and armour) and about 2 utility items and 6 potions.

As for wizards I hope you're all remembering the spell components. They are going to be 30% of your cash total before it even starts...

Are you sure that the spell components come in at 30%?
I just went through all my spells, only 16 of them had material spell components.
Only 5 spells had a cost given to them in the spell (either material or focus).
Unless I read the material component bit wrong but it says that "Unless a cost is given in the spell component, its cost is negligible.... don't bother to keep track of material components with negligible costs. Assume you have all you need as long as you have your spell competent pouch"
The same is said for Focus items too (though they are not consumed).
Spell component bags come in at 5gp!
Granted it could get to 30% if I was flung Limited Wish about 81 times in total (not likely) and had the focus component for Contingency spell!

Dear Players,

Gaming group.

With Simon being interested to play in this high-level romp, I guess the game has failed to attract any new player at all. In a way this is not too bad as we all know how we play together.

Character building.

At the close of River into Darknesson Saturday, we obviously discussed the forthcoming game. When I thought of the limitations, I must admit I had not even had a look at the actual Point Buy method. As it turns out, a player can only buy one 18 at level 1, and this is very costly too. So the method itself means that optimising the spending of the points lead to a balanced character. The rules stay the same though, do not go below 8 in any statistic (you can have more than one at 8) for your first level built, then spread your four points as you see fit.

If you boost INT, remember that a quirk of Third Edition/Pathfinder is that bonus skill points are not applied restrospectively, unlike HPs with CON increase.
If you have an INT statistic boosting item, work out roughly at which level you would have been able to acquire it, and at which levels you could only afford lesser versions of it.

Because of the high-level character generation issue, I propose that players exchange their PC sheet for cross-checks before we start the game: Prestige class spell progression, weapon and armour proficiencies, missing feats, HP from preferred class, missing skill points from being human or preferred class, INT boosts, racial modifiers and attributes, etc.

No free 1st level feat this time, but the usual two traits from the standard free web supplement. The Big Meet, in Derby, is on Saturday. So we shall start this game next Saturday.

Party composition.

I shall ask everybody, at least those who have not done so yet, to post something about what they intend to play so as to let the other know of the composition of the forthcoming party. If it turns out you are missing a healer or a thief, make sure to stock up on healing and utility scrolls.

Things to take into account:

• Item creation feats are basically means of giving you a serious boost in wealth per level. There is no longer an XP cost to make items, so there is no fear to start a level lower.
• The Leadership feat could give the party access to a high-level cohort who could plug a role deficit in the party, like a healing/warding battery for instance. If someone wants a cohort, they would need to prepare an additional PC sheet.
• If you have a Summoner type for a PC, make sure you also have prepared monster sheets for your typical Summon Monster/Nature Ally xxx spells.
• Druid types, with Wild shape, are easier to template on the fly now, but if you decide to have a signature shape, you may opt for an additional PC sheet too.
• Animal companions should have their own character sheet.

I will set-up a game page soon.

Laurent,

Also people remember the "Life Insurance Clause on Death".

Prefereably written over 2 pages on a scroll of raise dead and a scroll of restoration.

Dear Players,

I have created a game page for The Witchwar Legacy and also entered the corresponding calendar event.

See you all on November 20th, 2010 then.

Laurent,

i shall be using a lvl 17 halfling scorcerer (elemental- air bloodline)