230 - Piecing It Together
For a long moment Lex simply stood there, trying to process what had just happened.
He had been prepared for the possibility that the scroll had been trapped, even if the exact nature of it had caught him by surprise. That it might have injured or impaired him had been a risk he’d judged to be acceptable, given the circumstances. But that the scroll would self-destruct in the process was something he hadn’t anticipated. Even now, he was still struggling to fully comprehend the enormity of its loss. How could anyone willingly destroy that much power? That much knowledge? Even as a measure against an enemy making it their own, to willfully entertain the possibility of annihilating everything that scroll contained…it was enough to make Lex’s revulsion for Xiriel sink to a new low.
Even in death that monster has outsmarted you. His shadow’s words were full of scorn, making Lex tense as the taunt hit home. Your failure to comprehend the depths of its spite have cost you your best chance of protecting everypony now.
The hateful barb immediately sent him into denial. There had never been any guarantee that whatever magic was contained within that scroll would have been useful against the ghouls, after all. It was entirely possible that the spells embedded on the parchment wouldn’t have helped him combat the undead ponies. In fact, it could be posited this latest setback wasn’t really a setback at all, in terms of formulating a strat-
“Lex…?”
Sonata’s voice pulled him out of his stupor, and Lex belatedly looked over at where she was peering at him with obvious worry, a crowd of ponies gathered around her. The sight was enough to remind him that he didn’t have the luxury to sit around and try to analyze what this latest disaster meant. He had to deal with it and move on. “…keep gathering everypony together, Sonata.” He saw her mouth fall open before he’d even had a chance to finish speaking, and held up a hoof to stop her, hoping she didn’t notice that he had to strain to do even that much. “I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t want to hear it,” he growled. Or at least, he tried to; to his own ears his voice sounded weary. “Just do what I told you.”
For a moment she looked like she was going to protest, giving him an unhappy look, before sighing and starting to usher everypony away. Lex saw House Call arguing with her but ignored them both, turning his attention back to the scattered scraps that were what remained of the scroll. Slowly, he gathered them up with his telekinesis, his horn glowing as he lifted each and every shred of parchment that he could see, gathering them all into a single mass. This will work, he told himself silently, steadying himself before he started to gesture and chant.
He had no idea if the repair spell that he’d used on Nosey’s glasses would also work on this scroll, but he had to try. Using it now meant that his small reservoir of divine magic would be completely expended for the day – since he wasn’t willing to use the last of his circlet’s stored energy to retain it; that would be better spent toward stretching what remained of his attack magic when the ghouls arrived – but if there was any chance that this could undo what had just happened, then it had to be taken. The spell was a lengthy one, and minutes passed as he slowly continued his casting, fighting off the dizziness that threatened to disrupt the process as he continued to form the necessary verbal and somatic components.
After what felt like an eternity, the spell discharged, and Lex stepped back even as he watched with baited breath while it took effect. Slowly, the fragments held aloft in his telekinetic aura began to move about, and he released them as they started to orient themselves, fluttering around chaotically before coming to a stop in mid-air. The pieces that were touching each other immediately began to meld together, tears repairing themselves as scorch marks smoothed over and disappeared. Gaps where the paper had burned irretrievably filled in as new parchment grew to replace what was missing. Best of all, lines of writing could be seen, crisp and clear.
Despite himself, Lex tensed at that, before forcing himself to relax. That particular trap had apparently been activated by the scroll being read rather than simply unrolled, since it hadn’t exploded until he’d started trying to study the writing on the paper. Since the trap had already expended itself, restoring the scroll shouldn’t restore it, while hopefully reconstructing all of the other spells it had contained.
A moment later the scroll was completely whole again, fluttering to the ground as the reparative magic finished. Lex didn’t immediately go over to it – it was unlikely that there was a secondary trap on it, since the first one had been so conclusive in its efficacy, but after what had just happened he couldn’t bring himself to rush in headlong – but instead brought his circlet’s other power to bear, tuning his vision in to the magical spectrum. This would confirm whether or not the spells the scroll had contained had also been rest-
There was nothing there.
“No…” The whisper slid from his lips, his heart giving a lurch as he beheld the total and complete absence of any sort of magical energy radiating from the scroll. For an instant, he seized onto the idea that something had happened to the circlet itself, like when Xiriel had covertly deactivated it, but that suspicion lasted exactly as long as it took Lex to turn his head and look at the magic items on his body, their auras plainly visible to him now. Trying to fight down a wave of desperation, he turned back to the scroll, approaching it heedlessly now as he lifted it in his telekinesis once again, peering at it intently. But no matter how much he gazed at it there was no magical signature there, only the trace echoes of lingering auras to indicate that there had been, and those were already starting to decay.
It took a supreme act of discipline on Lex’s part not to scream at the unfairness of it all. Why do all of my efforts fail?! he raged silently. Why am I always punished for doing the right thing?! He very nearly crumpled the scroll right there, but instead he choked down his frustration and made himself begin skimming the lines of text on the now magic-less parchment.
Lex knew from experience that spell scrolls were virtually identical to his spell-embedded gemstones, in that both essentially stored a pre-cast spell in a physical container, waiting to be unleashed; only the physical medium differed. In the case of his gems, a potential caster merely had to look into one of the crystalline facets and view the geometric diagrams within, which visualized the instructions for how the stored energy would take effect once it was released. For scrolls, the process was virtually identical, except that the instructions were textual in nature rather than formulaic.
Looking over the scroll now, Lex could see almost a dozen different spells outlined in the writing, the majority of which would have pushed him to his limits to cast successfully, but which were useless now. Although the writing which shaped and controlled the spell energy had been successfully reconstructed along with the paper, that didn’t matter because the energy itself was gone! He had restored the ink and parchment, but that was all; like a pitcher that had been tipped over, retrieving the container didn’t serve to put back what had been spilled. As it was now, the text on the scroll was nothing more than instructions for directing energy that was no longer there; that would be useful if he wanted to independently recreate those spells at a later date, but right now they were utterly useless.
But the final insult was that, from what he could make out, almost none of the spells had been combative in nature anyway. Powerful and versatile yes, but not meant for killing or destruction. Instead, they covered a diverse range of effects, ranging from a powerful divination that directly fed the caster information about a named person, place, or thing, to a powerful illusion designed to deceive both empirical senses and divination magic, to a spell that allowed the caster to attempt to make limited alterations to the fabric of reality in their immediate vicinity…though that last one seemed to be markedly unstable in terms of how the effects would actually manifest.
Under other circumstances, the prospect of reverse-engineering these spells would have excited him, but now Lex simply rolled the scroll up and placed it back in his saddlebag numbly. All of that for nothing, he thought tiredly. He had wasted some of what little magic he had left, to say nothing of time he didn’t have, and had nothing to show for it except confirmation that the scroll wouldn’t have helped very much anyway. Putting a hoof to his face, Lex felt a bitter laugh rising in his throat, and he didn’t bother trying to fight it off. The irony of the situation was sublime. It was a microcosm of everything that had happened ever since he came here: struggling with everything he had to secure a victory, only to find out that victory didn’t equate success. And now, everypony here will pay the price for it.
“Lex? You okay?”
He didn’t look up as he heard Sonata’s voice. “I’m as far from that state as can be imagined,” he muttered, his voice flat.
“Oh…” She clearly didn’t know how to respond to that, because the only thing he heard was the faint sound of her shuffling her hooves for a moment, before she started to speak up again. “Listen, I gathered everyone like you asked. They’re all meeting up in the middle of the camp, but they don’t know what’s going on and they’re all starting to get, like, super scared.” She paused for a moment, then added, “I don’t think that explosion just now helped…” When he didn’t reply, she ventured ahead. “I think you need to say something to them.”
He snorted derisively. “And make the situation even worse?” He shook his head, flinging a hoof out toward her dismissively. “You say something to them. That’s what you do.”
“It needs to come from you,” insisted Sonata. “You’re their leader.”
Her last three words sent a wave of bitterness through him, remembering how the Night Mare had indicted his lack of ability in that area. “Apparently I lack competence where leadership is concerned,” he spat, ears folding back as he looked away from her. “So clearly this isn’t a task for which I’m well suited.”
“…well duh.”
The frank acknowledgment of his shortcoming was so unexpected that Lex couldn’t help but look over at her, shocked that she’d kick him when he felt so down. But her response to his surprised expression was to give a long-suffering sigh. “Yeah, you totes suck at, you know…other people, but that’s why I’m here, remember?” She smiled then, trotting over until she was right in front of him, raising a hoof to her chest. “I didn’t mean that you should speak to everyone all by yourself. I meant that they need to see you up there, telling them what’s going on and that it’ll all be okay. I’ll be right next to you, doing the spokespony thing and taking out all the cranky parts and genius mumbo-jumbo.”
She turned around then so that she was standing alongside him, leaning over to press her body against his. “I know you’re sad about what happened to Cloudbank and the others,” she murmured, her smile dimming, “but that totes doesn’t mean you need to do everything all by yourself.” She raised a hoof then, placing it under his chin and gently raising his head so that he was looking into her eyes. “Let me help. With this. With the ghouls. With all of it.”
A denial was on his lips, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Except…no, it wasn’t “for some reason.” It was because her words called to mind the other criticism the Night Mare had leveled against his administration up until now. “It’s feeble because you still think you can accomplish everything on your own.” At the time he’d found the charge to be hypocritical of her, since he knew she championed self-reliance. But now…now he suddenly wondered if he’d misunderstood what she’d been telling him…
"Alright." Sighing, he slowly straightened up, pushing his despair away. “Let’s go.”
The smile she gave him in reply was almost enough to convince him that everything would work out somehow.
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Here's hoping a morale-boosting speech from Sonata can pump these guys up again!
(I don't suppose the ponies under Xiriel driving back repeated waves of their fellow ponies with rocks counts as XP for the purpose of them gaining a level?)
Thats a lot more work than the Level 1 Repair spell I thought I remembered in the book when mentioned?
Alters local fabric of reality. Wish?
8889288
Sounds like Limited Wish more likely. But yeah same basic thing. Especially the part about how it would be uncertain about how things would manifest, AKA the 'DM can and WILL exploit all loopholes in your wish unless you go full rules lawyer in making it' effect.
And Sonata gets through Lex's stubbornness once again and despite the loss of the magic from the scroll, the spells written down on it are rather interesting since the illusion spell explain how Xiriel fooled Lex and the circlet's magic so completely and I imagine that should Nosey had been less forthcoming about Lex, Xiriel could have used the divination magic as well.
Still, given the scroll's lack of combat spells, as well as no divine or dark magic for the coming battle, Lex will have to alter his plans and if I'm correct, Sonata will likely push him towards the idea of getting help from others though given his earlier reluctance to risk any lives, any plans for them to directly fight would most likely be adamantly dismissed.
8889245
While, howard035's comment about the rock throwing members of the camp made me wonder if some could utilize their throwing skills to use(if any at all) though it's tactically unsound since it would attract ghouls towards the ones who threw the projectile more than it would hurt the horde.
8889245 Somehow I don't think that the rock-throwing ponies that Xiriel bullied/deluded into "defending" the camp from frightened, starving refugees gained any XP for their actions.
8889288
8889706 That was indeed meant to be limited wish.
Fun fact: I actually calculated every spell on that scroll, and how much it should cost in terms of Xiriel's treasure value. I'll put the breakdown in spoiler tags, just to be extra safe.
As a belier devil, Xiriel was a CR 16 creature with a Treasure rating of "double." So that's our baseline. Now, the Gamemastering section of the rules says:
"Table: Treasure Values per Encounter lists the amount of treasure each encounter should award based on the average level of the PCs and the speed of the campaign's XP progression (slow, medium, or fast). Easy encounters should award treasure one level lower than the PCs' average level. Challenging, hard, and epic encounters should award treasure one, two, or three levels higher than the PCs' average level, respectively."
Now, I'd call Lex's victory against Xiriel a hard encounter, so we'll treat the rewards as being two levels higher (i.e. we'll treat Xiriel as if it was a CR 18 creature for the purposes of determining treasure. More than that, if we look at the actual Treasure Values per Encounter table itself, we note that it has three columns: slow, medium, and fast. These correspond to the rates of character advancement, and Lex has always advanced at the "fast" rate because he typically fights alone and doesn't engage in too many combat encounters compared to your average D&D/d20/Pathfinder party. (In the course of this story, his only major fights have been against Moss/Vilzeralixus, Lirtkra and Monitor and the Cripple/Aria, Tlerekithres, and Xiriel. A few minor encounters, such as against Fireflower, ordinary sahuagin, Fencer's gang, and numerous ghouls count for very little.) So in other words, Xiriel is worth double the amount listed under the "fast" column of the Treasure Values per Encounter table at Level 18, which is 62,000, for 124,000 gp altogether.
I suspect that most people would object at this point, noting that the first column on that table says "Average Party Level," meaning that Lex - who had an Effective Character Level of 12 during that fight - shouldn't have gotten nearly as much treasure as he did. I chose to ignore that deliberately, setting it to Xiriel's effective Challenge Rating rather than Lex's character level, because I dislike the implications of that. By that logic, NPCs will have fluctuating levels of treasure depending on how strong their enemies are, which is problematic since "treasure" typically means magic items, which you'd expect NPCs to use before a fight. Plus, Lex has been chronically under-funded in terms of his expected wealth by level values.
So with that established, what was all that money spent on? Well, quite a lot of it went toward his ioun stones. He had an iridescent spindle (18,000 gp), orange prism (30,000 gp), pale green prism (30,000 gp), scarlet and blue sphere (8,000; keyed to the Use Magic Device skill so that he could actually use his scroll), and dusty rose prism (5,000 gp). That's 91,000 gp right there. I also factored in that he'd created the first ghoul in Equestria with a casting of create undead from his scroll. That's a 6th-level spell for clerics, wizards, and sorcerers, which means that it cost 1,650 gp to make (I'm assuming a wizard made it, where possible for the spells listed, for ease of use; likewise, the minimum caster level is assumed for all spells on the scroll), plus another 100 gp for the material component of the spell, which is utilized when the scroll is made (in this case, an onyx gem worth at least 100 gp, since ghouls have two Hit Dice. So 92,750 gp.
That left 31,250 gp left over, all of which I put towards the spells on that scroll. So what was on them? Well, I decided to focus on utility spells, under the idea that Xiriel was already powerful enough that he wouldn't want combat enhancements but would instead focus on manipulative spells that could help him accomplish various goals and avoid/overcome obstacles. After some thought, I eventually went with the following (note that these prices include any necessary material or focus components in addition to the scribing costs): antipathy (3,000 gp), contingency (3,150 gp), create undead (1,750 gp), dimensional lock (3,000 gp), discern location (3,000 gp), flesh to stone (1,650 gp), geas/quest (1,650 gp), limited wish (3,775 gp), mage's disjunction (3,825 gp), screen (3,000 gp), and vision (2,725 gp). Altogether, those add up to 30,525 gp, which is 725 gp short of the 31,250 I had left to spend. I spent another 150 gp of that to buy a casting of explosive runes, leaving 575 gp left over. I could have added a 3rd-level spell or lower to the scroll, but decided that was an acceptable amount to just waive.
Naturally, it's a shame Lex didn't get to claim any of those spells.
8889742 Well, Xiriel explained how it got around Lex's circlet's using detect magic back in chapter 206 - Outmatched and Overpowered. It was a little convoluted, but basically involved it using an illusion so that it had line of sight to use its greater dispel magic spell-like ability on Lex's circlet without Lex (who couldn't see through the illusion, which was of the ladies' room door) picking up on what was happening via a Spellcraft check. This was essentially an overly complicated matter of dancing around the rules, which was a bit irritating since it was yet another highlight of how they're written with playability in mind, rather simulating how a magical world functions.
(That's without getting into the fact that illusion spells, like all other magic, are detectable to detect magic anyway, which sort of undermines the point. That's easy enough to sidestep using Eclipse: The Codex Persona, but as a standard belier devil, Xiriel wasn't really using those anyway. From what I've heard, Pathfinder Second Edition is going to make illusions much more difficult to detect in this way.)
As for what Lex will do now, he seems to have accepted that Sonata will fight alongside him, but I have to wonder if that will be enough. You might be right about her pressing him to let everypony else fight too, but I agree that he'd be extremely opposed to that. Unlike himself and Sonata, those ponies have no real combat experience (and I don't think that driving survivors back into the city with thrown rocks really counts; those were a deterrent more than actual combat). As such, it's now effectively the two of them against a horde of ghouls. Will that be any better than one?
8890998
In my experience, most encounters are tied together in those themed dungeons I'm talking about, with enemies trying to raise the alarm and get reinforcements, etc. Might just be a GM who is trying to play the monsters intelligently.
That's probably a good way to judge it. If PCs are going with "no kill like overkill" and it's not a boss battle, they're probably nova-striking.
When I said forces were optimized, I assumed we were talking about chaining together fights because smart enemies are alert to reinforce their allies being attacked. It sounds like you're saying this doesn't happen a lot on Day 1 though.
Of course, but we're talking about a much larger number of encounters, and after say 3 or 4 encounters, the monsters should be almost as prepared anyway, unless the GM is softpedaling things or the party has been throwing around zones of silence. I've done one or two dungeons where we were literally in initiative combat from the moment we entered until the last monster was dead. It was very hard in some ways, but actually beneficial to the party in others: A lot of PC abilities and spells take the form of minute per level buffs, which are magnified in power in a giant 30 round fight instead of 5 separate fights with 40 minutes between them.
I mean, they have to redeploy from somewhere else. So what location were a group of guards previously occupying that their boss thought was valuable to keep them in, but now they should be moved?
Now that is very smart thinking, and a wise defensive plan. The flip side of course, is if you do have multiple exits, a cowardly boss wants someone guarding his escape route...
The thing is, they usually are living as hunter gatherers, and/or bandit/raiders. You almost never see them maintaining farms or ranches, they are just sending out hunting parties to bring down meat.
I totally agree that Menzoberranzan and various Duergar cities count as highly advanced civilizations. If the dungeon in question is a military outpost of dark elves who can communicate with their home city, then I would treat it the same as trying to raid a human military outpost of Taldor.
I do not in fact posit that. Most "dungeons" where you find a tribe of goblins or orcs they have a few dozen to a few score members, and no active trading relationship with a larger entity.
Look at Belkzen, the "nation" of the Orcs. Most of the tribes are nomadic hunter/gatherers who fight each other, take slaves and then quickly work them to death, raid for what they can get and crudely craft what they cannot. The sole "city" is a captured Dwarf Fortress with a tiny trickle of trade because most merchants know they have a 50/50 chance of being robbed and killed, even if they get the right tribal token.
Now Hobgoblins... they're a border case between civilized, evil aligned races like the Drow and Duergar, and more primitive creatures like Ogres and Orcs. In smaller groups they function on a purely tribal nature, though with more emphasis on capturing slaves and putting them to work, exactly like you'd expect. However, they do exactly what you predict in large numbers, seize and conquer Kingdoms. They've already done it in Tien, they tried to do it in the Goblinblood wars, and the IronFang Invasion is about them doing it as well.
I remember reading part of that story and thinking it was cool, though I wasn't really sure if the ecological damage that caused Mordor to become inhospitable in the first place made sense.
For a flip side of this, have you read Guns, Germs, and Steel? It's a good lense to look at fantasy worlds as well as the real one, I've found.
Yes, Belak the Outcast, who was outcast from the other druids for being evil. You have the occasional evil druid, but like a lot of evil creatures they're pretty shoot-on-sight and not big on diplomacy. (Plus they're usually either undead or a lycanthrope in my experience).
And a lot of them vastly overestimate their own strength as well, so "hah, these adventurers will wipe you out, but my tribe would crush them if they approached us!" Throw in schadenfreude at other's misfortune, the paranoia that this is all a trap, and I think you'd have real long odds of convincing another evil tribe to stick its neck out, even for a huge promised reward and a grave threat. Most of the time when you hear about lots of monstrous humanoids being united into a giant army, it tends to be by an extremely powerful warlord that defeated or killed the leaders of each tribe in combat.
Is it the smart thing to do though? I mean, how often do your PCs say "let me know when my attack drops this guy, then I switch to the other guy with my iteratives." PCs rarely waste attacks on dying enemies, so it doesn't seem likely that NPCs would do it differently. Now, if the fleeing goblin bringing warning to the second group passed a knowledge religion check and said "hey, they got a guy channeling to bring unconscious enemies back into the fight" then that's different.
That's lame. Do they at least hike back to the inn in town and take shifts while sleeping in their common room?
That's tough. Scrying is a 4th level spell that costs an hour to cast, so even if a hypothetical dungeon master caster has a bunch of scrolls set aside (and thousands of gold tied up in them), is he going to cast them one after another until he breaks divination? Does he want to get 8 hours of sleep that night and reset his spells? And unless he saw his enemies, he's going to have to hope they also fail a Will save with a +5 bonus.
(I'm imagining a evil wizard trying to scry his enemies to send his minions out to find them in their sleep, failing either the opposed caster checks or the PCs making their will saves through a dozen or so scrolls, before he successfully scrys them and sees their location... right outside his door.) Between the will saves and the ranges, divination magic in general is pretty fallible. Ask any PC party that wants to "Scry and Fry" how well that goes for them.
Who's casting the 3rd level spell and dividing it up in ten minute increments amongst each target? Is the boss going to be on the front lines and make himself a target? And of course, you ioun torch so they have to get off a deeper darkness to put it out.
A smart party would cast a summon monster one spell in the opening room, then run away and return in 3 hours when all enemies with triggered buffs have had their magic wear off.
It depends heavily on the base of operations though. If you're raiding a drow noble house in Menzoberrenzan, they'll have magic items and just-in-case scrolls up the wazzoo. A tribe of goblins in an abandoned mine, just how many contingency magical items are they able to afford, craft in this environment, and take the crafting feats for? And I doubt the local goblin scroll merchant came by a few months ago to trade them some spider climb scrolls.
Agree about the larger number of enemies having superior action economy in the logistics though.
For a very small value of "some." With Orcs and similar monstrous humanoids, you rarely see these dedicated orc blacksmiths putting in the skill points and ranks and taking the craft feats, because if they do create a powerful magical weapon, some chieftain will just seize it and kill them if they resist. Nobody's building a sewer system, irrigation or better roads with these groups.
They can occasionally seize slaves, but the way they treat slaves (working them directly to death, eating them, sacrificing them to their gods) means they aren't a reusable resource, so they rarely have skilled slave labor, and Orcs don't grow grains. In a large scale and a long term, a group that doesn't practice agriculture is never really going to be able to defeat a nation state that does.
The constant warring between orc clans, and among orcs in tribe for power, is what I would describe as a lack of cooperation. If there's a better term for it I'll use it, but that's a big part of what holds them back.
And justice systems are a function of trust. We trust them to be reasonably fair, otherwise people just "take justice into their own hands." An orc who thinks he's been wronged isn't going to hire a lawyer, he's going to try and stab the guy who wronged him.
In Golarion there are tons of monstrous races having their own nation states. The trick is they are groups that are intelligent, with multiple subtypes (like undead, or aboleths) where there is a huge power difference between the leaders and even the middle class, and usually a more sustainable slave sub class. There is a nation of Hobgoblins in Tien, and there is the area of Belkzen, but in general monstrous humanoids don't have large empires because they have neither the awesome powers of a large group of liches or aboleths, or everything the Church of Abadar performs for many human nation states.
See above. Hobgbolins come closest, but their god demands regular slave sacrifices, so they never build up a big labor force...
That's a classic trade-off. What percentage of sold AP books are actually played, as opposed to just read by someone? I know Paizo likes to have huge blocks of GM-Eyes-Only text in even modules and Society Scenarios. I do looooooovvvvvve me some juicy setting lore.
Absolutely. One thing that drives me nuts about Adventure Paths is they always seem to have at least one book that has nothing to do with the rest of the story. IronFang invasion? You spend an entire book fighting evil fey and meet like 1 hobgoblin. Giantslayer campaign? Murder mystery regarding half orcs in book 1. I know they say "oh, we have to have a different person write each book" but 3rd Party groups can pull it off.
That's a fair point, and why I wish Paizo used that Alert system in its APs.
That's sort of true, but a large percentage of the tactics you describe seem like they would be smart to do at any time. Not put caltrops on the main staircase or promise a demon your soul for 72 hours of guarding of course, but a lot of the handing out consumables with orders when to use them, seeking alliances, deploying guards to key entrances, etc.
In fact, when I read dungeon text, a lot of time I see something along the lines of "X strange monster is in the room, the Orcs managed to tame/trap it in this room a week or so ago after the villain launched his evil plan, it attacks the PCs when they enter." To me that reads like the dungeon denizens are pretty well set up for imminent attack.
That makes sense.
Honestly, it seems like the smart move by far is to get every single minion into the single largest room and wait.
Which leads to fun pirate-map adventures!
Part of that is just the fact that the GM is human, and one of the biggest advantages the PCs have in cooperative gaming is they have 4-5 brains, the GM has one. At this point you're talking about making real-time decisions, a lot of GMs might make worse tactical decisions than what is printed if they don't have those guidelines.
As for people on the messageboards being hostile to GMs being off-script... depends on if you're talking about APs or Society Scenarios. In Scenarios, which have to fit a four hour time slot so people can play on a weeknight, a lot of times the tactics are written so the fights end quickly, for good or bad. If scenarios were written so enemies did everything possible to drag out their death as long as possible (as is only logical), then you'd either have to have 1-2 combats a night, or just fight a lot of animals and oozes. (Maybe that would be a better thing, in the end).
But that's an attack, possibly an entire round if you don't have iteratives, while someone else is alive and trying to stab you in the face. Optimal tactics are usually not trying to finish off the unconscious person unless you are certain they will be revived by healing and attack you again in the next few rounds.
That was a big shift between Pathfinder and 3.5. In Pathfinder ghouls got a lot "smarter," and enjoy reading for pleasure. Heck, they have their own fancy city! I totally agree 3.5 ghouls would act like this.
Awesome, thanks!
Hmmm. Too bad there isn't an Ursa Minor or Timberwolf-Voltron around. Those would be large, useful magical beasts, of low enough intelligence that Lex would probably be ok using them as a beast of burden and thus asserting his Leadership.
8891004 Ah for the good old days, when sheep and cats had XP values. Then those rock-throwers could have leveled!
8891436
In the vast majority of the published scenarios that I've seen (e.g. Pathfinder Adventure Paths), while there might be some "tying together" of encounters, those are still going to be "level-appropriate" in terms of turning a normal combat encounter (i.e. at the Average Party Level) into something like APL+2 or +3 instead. That is, the structure is still set up so that even in the worst case scenarios the PCs will be likely to win unless they have spectacularly bad luck or do something stupid. There's something of a disconnect between that and them acting in a manner that's most likely to let them survive (let alone win), which goes back to what I said before about them, say, focusing all of their attacks on individuals, downing characters at negative hit points, etc.
Pretty much. Of course, that's also a qualitative judgment, but that can't really be helped since we're talking about a play-style rather than anything more concrete.
That's mostly correct. While it is a generalization, it's a staple that enemies who aren't expecting an attack won't be in a position to use every advantage they could conceivably have in that situation, and one of the most obvious examples of this is the means and/or opportunity to summon reinforcements. Hence, going in and attacking an unprepared enemy fortress means that, at least initially, you can count on the fact that you won't be fighting 100% of their forces at once. Having the defenders swarm in on the attackers because the first-responders sounded an alert, which was received, understood, and responded to by all available friendly units, is a characteristic of an installation that is ready for an assault (or at least, had enough foresight make preparations for rapid-response, though even then expecting an imminent assault will still give them an edge). That still won't be 100% of the available forces, since some of them will most likely be held in reserve or will remain to protect sensitive areas, but you'll still be facing more than your initial attack, when you were controlling the pace of the encounters.
If I'm understanding you right, you're saying that once the initial dungeon raid begins, then the monsters will detect the fighting, and so react with the same degree of effectiveness that they would as if they had reason to expect an attack in the immediate period of time before it was launched? If that's the case, I disagree, though I'll admit that what you're saying can certainly come off as plausible due to how the d20 System structures a lot of things. For instance, there's no system where you get fatigued just for wearing armor all day, so most enemies will practically live in their armor and ergo avoid the issue with how long it takes to don in the event of an attack.
Having said that, the monsters likely won't be "almost as prepared" as they will later on because most creatures won't dedicate the totality of their resources towards repelling an assault when they have no reason to believe that one won't immediately occur. Spells will be spent on research, item creation, or even recreation rather than being saved for combat advantages. Training, disciplinary actions, and mild infighting will leave some monsters with a few points of damage - lethal or nonlethal (this was the case in Casey Brown's SoR2: Against the Slavers, for the gnoll clan) - and possibly some minor deprivation of a per-day ability or two. Traps won't be set in areas that are expected to be put to major use, things which require long periods of prep (including spells with long casting times) won't be brought into play, etc. This is especially true where counter-tactics go, since it's far less plausible that enemies will be able tailor their tactics to those of their enemies (as much as they otherwise could) the first time around.
This rarely comes up, however, because as you noted, most adventure writers presume some degree of the enemies naturally expecting some sort of do-gooder interference in their immediate future anyway, despite the fact that it's now considered gauche to write "railroads" which push the PCs to pre-selected areas at scripted times. What this means is that the PCs tend to have enough freedom to go at their own pace, and often in their own direction (for at least part of the adventure), and yet the enemies will still be maintaining a constant state of heightened readiness which strains plausibility. (The common reaction to that is typically some sort of appeal to game mechanics, a la "but the game rules don't say they can't keep an attack action readied for twelve hours, so long as they stay awake!" I find that sort of sentiment to miss the point completely.) This is something of a contradiction, albeit one which most people ignore because that level of verisimilitude is not only not something they need to have fun, but is often work unto itself.
Likewise, keeping a fight going while your buffs are still active doesn't sound like a worthy trade-off for having to fight an inflated number of enemies simultaneously, or even in sequence, since they're still going to wear you down faster than they would otherwise. Similarly, the monsters get that benefit too for their buffs, so it's not like this is giving the PCs some sort of advantage.
The premise of your question seems to presume a skeleton crew that is already wholly occupied with guarding their location, having no reserve forces that can otherwise engage in rest, recreation, or otherwise serve as supplementary forces.
In my experience, such individuals prefer that their escape routes be secret or somehow personalized (e.g. a potion of gaseous form) so that they can slip out while their minions engage their enemies. Cowards tend to presume that everyone else is cowardly, and so won't expect loyal minions to guard a back way out without using it themselves.
Sure, and that works pretty well for small groups, especially if they're only in a given locale for a particular period of time. But the more individuals there are, and the longer their period of habitation, the more that lifestyle is likely to fail due to them exhausting what the local ecology can support. If you've got twenty or thirty individuals who have only been there for a few months, you're probably fine. If you're talking about a mountain full of kobolds who've been there for generations, that's another thing. (Though it helps if the mountain keeps plane-shifting.)
I bring that up because a lot of these modules do posit that various locales are permanent strongholds for the monsters that live there, and often include a sizeable population of individuals for the given area. But "Gygaxian naturalism," though not eschewed by Pathfinder, often takes a backseat in such considerations, to the point that such questions tend to be ignored rather than answered. Just getting through winter, when there's less game available than in the warmer months, should be an issue, but virtually never comes up.
Being a formal military has little to do with their responsiveness, readiness, ability to adapt and counterattack, etc. That simply formalizes the structure and tactics which are used. Virtually any creatures, regardless of alignment (and are of Intelligence comparable to humans), should be able to understand basic concepts of "staying alert after you're attacked," "making use of everything you have to survive," "calling for backup," etc.
Right, and that works fine for a small area. But consider where those humanoids come from; there needs to be a fairly large population of them somewhere, since one of the characteristics of those creatures is fecundity, and they'll need to be able to find each other in order to breed. Hence, there are large numbers of humanoids somewhere in the game world, and they're going to need food. At some point, hunting-gathering will not be enough, and they'll be problems of mass starvation going on.
But even if we limit ourselves to a few dozen to a few score, that's roughly five pounds of game per individual per day that need to be consumed. If we say that they have, say, thirty individuals, that's one hundred-fifty pounds of food every single day, and if we presume that they take most of that in meat, then in six months they're going to eat 27,000 lbs. of animals. That means that they're going to be depleting the local population of game in fairly short order, since they're not working to sustain the local environment's food production capabilities in any way. (Which is why Survival checks to find food should have their DCs slowly rise if you stay in the same area long enough.) At some point, there aren't going to be enough game animals to eat. It's a Malthusian nightmare!
Urgir, the "city" in question, has almost thirty-thousand people, twenty-eight thousand seven hundred to be exact. At five pounds of food per day (lets be generous and presume that it's four-fifths grain, a half-pound of fruits and nuts, and a half-pound of meat), that means they'll need 14,350 pounds of meat per day. Given that Belkzen is described as "an unforgiving wasteland filled with shrub brush, steep mountains, and uneven badlands," it doesn't sound like much food is available even during the best of times, let alone after the orcs living there for centuries. One year alone would require that Urgir eat over five million pounds of meat! If we presume that the majority of the population wants to eat meat entirely, rather than mixing it with grains and other foods, that rises to over fifty million pounds of meat per year! Clearly, hunting-gathering isn't doing it.
Which is to say, looking to established game worlds isn't very helpful in this regard, as they tend to fall apart upon any sort of close examination. Hence, they're not very good points for shoring up a particular argument.
Exactly why this is doesn't seem to make much sense, as it's clearly not an issue of alignment (drow are chaotic evil, remember). Likewise, neither Intelligence nor Wisdom doesn't seem to be much of a factor either. Drow don't have penalties to either of those ability scores, but neither do goblins, kobolds, hobgoblins, or bugbears. Yet hobgoblins are portrayed as having some level of civilization, whereas goblins are portrayed as being akin to the monsters in Gremlins. So there's clearly some other salient issue going on here, but what it is remains unclear.
I confess that I don't know either, but it certainly seemed plausible enough to survive at least casual scrutiny, which is a victory unto itself. More notably, some very off-the-cuff research suggested that everything was on the up-and-up, though I have no idea if that's actually the case.
I haven't, though now I think I know what to do with that Amazon gift card I received the other day! Thanks!
Whoa now, let's clear up a few things first. Insofar as I'm aware, the original adventure (I haven't read the 5E adaptation in Tales of the Yawning Portal) doesn't say anything about him being outcast because of his alignment. Rather, he says (page 27) that it was because he "dared to expand nature's reach in ways their puny minds couldn't grasp." Obviously, he's biased, but that's pretty clearly a reference to what he's doing with the Gulthias tree and turning people into twig blights. There can still be plenty of evil druids (roughly one-fifth of the druid population, I'd say), and it's reductive to say that they're "shoot on sight" and "not big on diplomacy."
We're not talking about a giant army, though. We're talking about being recruited in a mercenary-like fashion of being promised payment to get a job done. While the points you make against the idea of them receiving aid aren't without merit, they're fairly presumptive of the idea that said tribe has no interests to protect with regards to their neighbors, which strikes me as questionable. While the stereotype of "living just far enough apart to (barely) tolerate each other's existence" is well-known, I find fault with the idea that each tribe of evil humanoids are living with such isolationist positions. When those humanoids are not only a great source of, say, pelts, and are one of the few places that are willing to trade you for the slaves that you routinely capture, then not only do you stand to lose access to something you've come to rely on, but you stand to gain more if you respond to their offer.
PCs rarely "waste" attacks on dying enemies because, in my experience, most GM are content to assume that NPCs and monsters that hit 0 hit points are "dead" rather than "dying," and don't play up the monsters' tactics (as we've discussed) because they're not running them as fully-realized individuals, and so they often don't bother with healing at all, let alone effectively try to keep people up and fighting. Hence, we can dispense with the idea of how the NPCs act being in any way instructive. Likewise, the idea of "why would they finish a downed enemy when there are enemies still on their feet?" has an easy answer: the ubiquity of magical healing - particularly its connections to clerics, who are all-too-often very easy to identify - means that it's readily obvious that if you don't put down a dying foe, they're going to get back up. It's a certainty, not a "maybe."
Are you kidding? Most of the time I'm just happy if they bother to look for a defensible position before bedding down, though taking shifts does seem to be standard practice at least.
You're misunderstanding me. This isn't a question of "casting them over and over." It's pointing out that even if the PCs do take anti-divination countermeasures, there are plausible ways in which they can still be discovered. You brought up a +5 bonus, presumably because rope trick is being used, but it's just as easy to say that injured PCs left behind enough blood, hairs, etc. to let the scryer hit them with a -10 penalty. Likewise, clerics and druids et al don't need eight hours sleep to regain their spells, etc.
The point isn't that these things will work, but rather that the PCs can't play these up as being flawless methods of foiling any sort of counterattack. Rather, these are the steps that they need to take in order to maximize their chances because they need to assume that their foes are bringing their A-game as well, and that if they (the PCs) don't seize every advantage, they're courting death.
Given that the popular conception of the "scry, buff, teleport" routine is that it's a combination so potent that it tends to be fun-killing for how easy it makes it for them, that seems to work rather well. That's because most individuals are going to know to scry the guy with the heavy armor who was wielding the two-handed sword, since fighter-types have the worst Will saves, for example. Moreover, the PCs are the ones that are "on stage" the longest; divination magic might fail to find them once or twice, but the idea that it will fail a dozen times is, quite frankly, preposterous. More than that, the first time the PCs get hit with a nighttime raid that comes anywhere close to killing them, they'll start to change how they do things, presumably to help maximize their chances of it not happening again (and, hence, not doing a fifteen-minute workday).
Presumably the local spellcaster, obviously.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the previous question, particularly since a spell duration measured in tens of minutes is a very long time where combat is concerned. That said, why wouldn't the "boss" be out there? The idea that the most dangerous entity in the dungeon will necessarily be waiting at the end for the PCs to get there is a stereotype, not a rule.
You don't need a deeper darkness spell to snuff that out; as I said before, just whack it. It's only AC 24 with 10 hit points and hardness 5. That's one, maybe two hits from a melee-type, and then it's gone. Given that it has an independent AC, you arguably don't even need to make a sunder check.
Only if they think they're in a video game, where enemies function by drawing aggro and not thinking clearly. After all, that spell takes an entire round to cast, during which time it can be identified and disrupted, and if they turn tail then the guards will send the all-clear signal and no one else will use their buffs, though they'll make sure to have them on hand for when the PCs come back.
Remember that this doesn't really depend on creature type, or really anything else insofar as d20-based enemies go. As irritating as it is, the functions of what enemies are going to have will depend entirely on their gear value (whether standard NPC fare or if they're treated as PCs for wealth purposes) and their treasure values as enemies (which, as noted, contrast rather oddly with PC/NPC gear values). Likewise, the issue of "environment" doesn't really apply insofar as crafting goes. The game doesn't get into any specifics beyond having the requisite time and money to spend (even the right spells aren't strictly necessary anymore, though they still are for certain categories of items, such as spell completion or spell trigger items). All of that is wildly irritating, of course, because it eschews simulationism in favor of gamism, but that's how most of these things are constructed in d20-based worlds, despite the lapses of internal logic.
Which is another reason why the PCs shouldn't go on the defensive if they can afford it (that is, don't fall back unless you have to).
It's pretty clear that orcs do have some sort of weaponsmithing, since the "orc double axe" is a standard weapon (albeit an exotic one), meaning that it's fairly ubiquitous. Likewise, the idea that they don't make magic items because they'll just be stolen by someone bigger and stronger doesn't strike me as being very plausible; that level of self-destructiveness is such that the tribe itself would have trouble surviving. There has to be at least some basic level of inter-reliance and cooperation that allows for functioning as a group. Otherwise they don't have any sort of society at all.
A nation that doesn't practice agriculture can easily defeat a nation that does, so long as they have the military strength to do so. In fact, conquering them to dominate their domestic food production is one of the primary reasons why they would attack in the first place. I think what you're thinking of is the truism that a nation that imports (the bulk of) their food supply from another nation won't be able to attack that nation, since otherwise the country they're attacking would simply cut off food exports and let them starve.
In game terms, there's absolutely nothing holding them back. An orc can become as powerful or as skilled as any other humanoid. Likewise, we've eliminated issues of alignment, so that's not it either, since there are Chaotic Evil societies that greater civilization. All that's left is to presuppose that orcs are caught in a state of perpetual feuding at every level of their society, and that it weakens them as a group while simultaneously making them more dangerous to everyone around them. In other words, the popular conception doesn't really work when you examine it and try to place it within context in the world. This is easy to resolve - or at least, resolve enough to be more plausible - if you make it so that orc society isn't trapped in a state of perpetual low-grade warfare at every level, to the point where it cripples their ability to accomplish anything. You can still have feuding and raiding and pillaging, without assuming that they're all one dirty look away from killing each other.
Justice systems aren't a function of trust; if you trust people to do the right/fair thing, then you don't need a systematized process to begin with. That's still the case even if you think that the system has been subverted. It's just that competent justice systems don't exist in most d20 quasi-medieval societies, though that's largely a function of game designers not knowing much about medieval justice systems, let alone being able to adapt them to worlds where magic works the way it does in D&D/Pathfinder.
Likewise, orcs are going to have some way of dealing with redressing wrongs that doesn't devolve to "kill the other guy." Otherwise they wouldn't have any sort of society at all, and we know they do. It's just that the popular examples for Pathfinder do a terrible job of recognizing their contradictions, let alone addressing them.
Golarion is a poor example of world-building, in terms of its societies being cohesively constructed to the point where you can say why certain groups get to have civilization and others don't. As I noted above, it largely boils down to presupposing the underlying premise about the nature of certain groups of humanoids, despite issues of alignment and ability scores not speaking to that, let alone available resources and access to various abilities and powers. Again, that's why I miss class and level limits, since if you're going to presume inherent limitations on what various races can do, then it helps to reflect that under the game rules, since those govern how the world works.
Now, you certainly can posit sociological issues that result in certain civilizations being superior to others, but tying that to a sort of racial determinism strongly suggests that it's something inherent to that race; physiological, rather than psychological, and so should probably be reflected more under the game rules. Unfortunately, that's not what we got, because of the push to allow for more options for possibilities for PCs. As such, the best we have is an awkward marriage of ability score modifiers and a power or two (e.g. "orc ferocity") that nod their head in that direction, but overall I find it unsatisfying.
"It's their god's fault" isn't a good enough answer. That's specific to a particular game world, which means it's useless for purposes of pointing out general truisms, and even that world has multiple deities anyway.
I also enjoy world lore, and I don't even begrudge dropping stuff into the game that no one but the GM will be able to appreciate (that goes back a couple of editions, easily; there's bits of narrative fiction in Wrath of the Immortals, after all). But I find that they do it to the point where it becomes intrusive with regards to actual playability, whereas Way of the Wicked was all about playability, giving you just enough information about the setting to make it worth your while to learn more without ever overloading you with background.
To be fair, there's no right answer to any of this; it's all issues of play-style. I remember when Dungeon magazine went through a phase of listing the level of illumination and detectable auras in each encounter area. It was great, but apparently they found it too burdensome, because it went away fairly quickly.
What we're debating right now is whether or not giving dungeon denizens an extended period of downtime (e.g. a day) after an initial attack on their lair would enable them to better defend/counterattack against a second incursion later on. Your stance is that it wouldn't make very much difference, because their overall level of readiness and tactics would be the same regardless. I'm saying that it would make a great deal of difference.
The problem with this debate it that it invokes two aspects of the game simultaneously; issues of the rules and issues of verisimilitude, and these have numerous areas where they don't mesh (at least, not as much as I'd like). Under the game rules, you can walk around all day in heavy armor, maintain peak alertness while you're awake. More than that, they're completely (necessarily) silent on things like sentries getting bored and wanting to relax, traps being deactivated because people want to walk down the corridors they're in rather than taking the long way around, being too proud to ask for help, keeping certain magic items under lock and key because you don't want anyone else to use them, and any of a million other factors that are particularly salient but mechanically meaningless.
There's no reason, under the game rules, why you can't hand out scrolls and potions to everyone in the dungeon ahead of time for their defense. You can absolutely set up an alarm system with gongs and memorized codes about how many rings mean what. You can go ahead and forge alliances well in advance, and keep a scroll of whispering wind ready to use when you want to call them in. For that matter, everyone can walk around with their weapons in hand at all times, keep an action readied to attack anyone who bursts into the room, and make active Perception checks to notice invisible foes during their every waking moment. You can always lock every door, spread caltrops across every hallway at night to slow down potential intruders and then clean them all up every morning, and make Sense Motive checks on everyone you meet when you meet them to see if they're under an enchantment. That's all entirely permissible.
It's also a horrible way to live, if you were actually living like that, and would be extremely implausible if you told your players that was why they couldn't get the drop on their enemies. At some point, it's taken for granted that a certain amount of inefficiency will be present in exchange for personal comfort and convenience, and that this inefficiency will persist until and unless there's an a perception of an imminent threat, at which point personal comfort and convenience will be suspended and inefficiency eradicated in the name of maximizing your chances of survival, with that state maintaining itself for a certain period of time after the event(s) that trigger it.
In what I've seen - both in official Pathfinder materials and in the default presumptions of many GMs - the issues in that last paragraph tend to be ignored, or at least glossed over. Enemies will be presumed to be in a state of heightened alert as a default, with a great deal (if not necessarily all) of their inefficiency eradicated in order to maximize their survival chances, despite the fact that in many of these instances they won't have advance knowledge that an attack is imminent ("imminent" here being the operative word; if you know an attack might come, but not when, you still can't keep everyone on edge for a prolonged period of time; the stress is simply too much to deal with). Certainly, a progressive narrative helps to smooth this over, but that's a band-aid rather than a solution, since many if not most of those have gaps and open-ended areas where the PCs can take as much or as little time as they want in reaching the end-game area.
So really, that about sums it up.
A good rule of thumb is, if the PCs know to adopt a tactic, the NPCs will know to use it also.
See above. This is one of those things that's entirely permissible by the game rules, and yet doesn't seem very viable when you think in terms of "what would that be like if I was actually living it?" (Don't get me started on the fact that you can engage in physical combat forever without being fatigued.)
Well, it did before; now you can just cast create treasure map and let the GM try to figure out what to do.
Which points out something that should be fairly obvious: GMing is hard to do, and not everyone can do it (well). The best GMs will not only have put in a lot of planning and prep work, but will also be able to think on their feet and quickly adapt to curveballs thrown by the players. That's not inherently adversarial, by the way, but rather an acknowledgment that GMs need to do more work than the players do with regard to the campaign. Ultimately, there's only so much that can be outsourced to a sourcebook, and aids run the risk of becoming crutches if the GM thinks that they just need to administrate what's written there without making it their own.
Part of the reason for this is that when Third Edition came out and tightly integrated the game engine, adherence to the unified rules became fetishized. I was there Third Edition was announced, and during the one-year period between August of 1999 and August of 2000, the game was talked about as being a toolkit, rather than a whole, and even the books made it very clear that the rules were regarded as being modular in nature, with a lot of the integration being for the purpose of making it easy to evaluate and tweak whatever alterations you wanted to make. But that wasn't the message that the community received; rather, the guidelines became the immutable Word of God, and deviating from them at all bordered on heretical (at least where online discussions were concerned), even when the books allowed for it.
In some ways, the Pathfinder Society is the apex of this. While "living campaigns" (i.e. organized play) goes back to AD&D 1E with the Role-Playing Game Association (RPGA), the issues of standardized scenarios really only seemed to flower (to me) with the Pathfinder Society. I might be out in the woods on this one, but it seems like I can't help but see "Society legal" coming up in various conversations as a shorthand for "sticking strictly to the RAW" (and then some, since Society play imposes additional restrictions beyond what's in the books). While D&D living campaigns are no less rigid in their structure, Pathfinder Society seems to be the only one that encourages this view of "what's printed is law, and the GM is subservient to that" rather than the other way around.
I honestly don't see how anyone wouldn't be certain of that. You don't need a Knowledge (religion) check to know that the guy waving the holy symbol around and calling out to his god is probably a cleric, and clerics have healing magic. It strikes me as being so ubiquitous as to be common sense to presume that armed attackers would have access to some sort of magical healing, and so you'd need to slay downed foes before they get back up and rejoin the fray.
Meh, Nemret Noktoria strikes me as being Pathfinder's version of the White Kingdom (which was originally in the Underdark before they moved it to the Abyss; see Dungeon #70 "Kingdom of the Ghouls"). Of course, they're both ripping off Clark Ashton Smith, but there you go. That said, your 3.5 ghoul isn't any smarter than your Pathfinder ghoul (though the latter is apparently more charismatic). The Pathfinder entry just makes an allusion to Smith (and/or Golarion's lore) is all. I don't find that particularly compelling, in terms of being a requirement for how they're portrayed.
Sure!
I dunno, the only d20 write-up I've seen for an ursa minor gives it 20 Hit Dice, which Lex could control but it would be tough. Also, if that sounds unusually high, take a look at the stats for them in the Tails of Equestria RPG. Their stats in the Bestiary of Equestria give them a Body trait of 3d20! Compare that to a 1st-level young adult pony, who has a Body trait of a d4 or d6 (or, for earth ponies, d6 or d8).
8891437 Dude, in the old days cats slew commoners. It was a meme.
8893035
For a trained military outpost, I would expect this even for a surprise attack. For a random dungeon that is not part of some imminent plot, you're right they would be less prepared.
I can see this logic, it's just been my experience in the APs that most of the time the dungeon you are raiding does believe an assault will occur almost immediately. It's quite rare when you manage to reach a dungeon without fighting some kind of spy/patrol that either reports in that the adventurers are in the area, or if a whole patrol goes missing, the dungeon denizens have strong reason to suspect they are under attack. Perhaps the real issue is just how hard it truly is to get a "Day 1" assault on a dungeon, with total surprise.
That's a really good list of how dungeon environments function in the absence of a threat, by the way.
If not a skeleton crew, one where most of the members have guarding as at least one function of their duty.
Sure, which is why a lot of the tribes seem to be semi-nomadic, they need to move around. That's also got problems, but I think it's a better explanation than clearly non-existent farms.
But alignment goes into training, because who puts in the resources to pay for training and equipping of others? A chaotic evil society has a hard time setting aside resources for the common good and future needs, because every individual knows they can pilfer common resources for their own gain. To a limited extent a powerful warlord at the top can enforce discipline through terror, but there's only so many layers that can filter through.
Honestly, the really unrealistic thing about fantasy societies isn't orc tribes, it's Menzoberrenzan, where everyone is constantly murdering someone else but somehow the society keeps functioning because... Lolth makes it so?
Yup, see above.
That's a great idea, I totally agree.
Definitely. But the more realistic answer is probably to say that those tribes should be nomadic. I mean, if you start calorie counting for goblin tribes, you have to start calorie counting for all those 20 foot tall apex predator monsters in close proximity of each other.
Drow seem to be the exception rather than the rule. I think the idea is that in the incredibly unforgiving environment of the underdark/darklands, no matter how much chaotic evil species want to freely murder each other, they are slightly more afraid of facing the wilds alone, so they just do it a little bit rather than full bloodbath.
Where are you getting the idea that Druids split roughly 1/5th evil? I don't think its a bell curve with equidistant distribution of good and evil around the neutral bulge, since good and neutral tend to get along with each other a lot better than evil and neutral.
Alignment is meant to be a simplified cue showing a character or civilizations outlook, attitudes, practices, and beliefs. Yes using a 9 point chart for all that is a bit reductive, we're talking about analyzing entire worlds based on a limited point of view of information, reductive is absolutely necessary. It's what we do with ponies when we judge them based on an equally limited view of them from the show, and CE monstrous humanoids are going to be far more different from a baseline human psychological and sociological point of view than ponies would.
I think trading is much more infrequent than intra-tribal raiding. If a hunting party of ogres spot a hunting party of 5 orcs out in the wilderness, their first thought is "sweet, we can just eat them instead of having to keep hunting." So when the orc tribe comes to the ogres to promise fantastic rewards for aid, he's ignoring the pile of orc skulls in the corner, and the ogre is quite possibly in the mood to eat the orc because they are hungry, and they figure they can go raid for that promised reward at the orc camp tomorrow.
Based on all my combat experience, I'd have to disagree. Maybe every party you play with has a channeling cleric, but most of the time in the combats I'm in when someone drops unconscious they are out of the fight. Absent channeling, in combat an unconscious character means another character has to cast a spell, move and touch that character, and if you're lucky they have to pull out a potion to do it. That's multiple rounds of non-offensive actions they are taking, versus just continually attacking if they see their comrade is dead, and often they provoke attacks of opportunity in the process. And even if the new person regains conciousness, you bought yourself 2-3 rounds of non-attacks from multiple people, and the enemy who has just regained consciousness has a few hit points and is prone, open to an Attack of Opportunity when they stand.
There's a reason for the military theory that wounding someone is better than killing them, because when someone is wounded healthy soldiers around them need to protect and evac them instead of keep fighting. If your players are wasting attacks on enemies that are unconscious to kill them when they could instead move on to conscious characters, they are playing sub-optimally. (Unless, as I said there is an obvious cleric with a holy symbol standing around). Therefore, if enemies are following this strategy, they're not doing it because it is the most logical or strategic thing to do.
Sneak a few assassins in their room, maybe poison some food. They can't get away with dropping their guard like that!
Actually it was because unless the scryer saw them in person, he's only got a second-hand account of them. Rope Trick would add a second, stacking +5 bonus I believe. That +10 should cancel out the body parts bonus, and that's assuming they let a living enemy escape with a weapon that harmed them to get that hair.
True, but they do only get their spells once per day, I was making the standard assumption that the hypothetical divine caster's 1 hour meditation/prayer was in the morning, and if they don't rest they're fatigued like everyone else. Realistically, a dungeon in a Day 2 assault should probably have most of its defenders fatigued (assuming fatigueble species) if they were up all night, alert and setting traps.
A lot of the hard part isn't locating someone with a scry, it's finding them from there. Paizo made a comprehensive guide on this sort of stuff in their Rules of Intrigue supplement, I'd check it out here: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/intrigue/ In short, finding someone from a scry link is really hard, unless they move around, that 10-foot square doesn't provide a lot of context clues. Seriously though read through it, it has a pretty good list of the strengths and weaknesses of each type of divination tactic and counter-tactic.
It's common, certainly on Day 1, the leader usually wants his guards there to wear down enemies before he has to face them himself. On Day 2 the boss/spellcaster would be in a large antechamber, surrounded by his top guards, where once he hears the fighting he will have them all wait a few rounds until he has cast the necessary buffs to put them at peak, then send them on ahead while he follows.
At low levels that's pretty hard to pull off, and it's pulling attacks from just stabbing the guy whose head the ioun torch is circling. At higher levels you're right it does make sense to do that, though I would hope the parties start throwing around an echolocation or two.
The single most neglected tactic that NPCs don't seem to use because players would complain, in my opinion? Greater Dispel Magic. Xiriel knows what's up!
I'm assuming poor lines of sight here. If they have a bunch of traps at the front entrance that start clattering and exploding, are people in the back room going to wait until they get the go-ahead to start buffing? That's a crucial few rounds lost. Yeah, if the enemy can clearly see you casting the spells and knows that's not some animal companions (or a called outsider), then the tactic doesn't make sense.
It's not just money to spend, it's "expensive material components worth half the price." You can't pour a bag of gold on a sword and make it magic after 8 hours, you have to actually go to a market and trade for magical reagants and such, which again is an advantage of civilization.
Exotic weapons are not meant to be that common, and definitely not ubiquitous. And orc doesn't mean orcs make them all, it can mean an orc invented the first one and human smiths copied the idea. The closest the orcs have to weaponsmiths in Golarion are the Steel Eaters, "half-mad" smiths and engineers who use captured dwarven technology to build their weapons at all, and who have apparently been nearly conquered by orc tribes multiple times in attempts to just seize the weapons. When you have to set up your own fortress/tribe just to create weapons, you have not created conditions conducive to easy crafting.
How did it get that military strength? Remember that talk about calories in the first place? Nations with agriculture have vastly higher populations than nations without, who usually have to be at least semi-nomadic to eat. To conquer a nation to gain their food source you need enough numbers, but you need that food source to gain enough numbers in the first place. Raiding those who do practice agriculture is nowhere near a reliable substitute.
Above, really don't think we have.
In Golarion at least, they worship Rovagug the god of destruction, so the constant warfare is a religious thing. But if you're going to start being more realistic in the game world, the first thing to do is probably cut the population counts by 90-95% to fit the available calorie budget. And what you have left isn't going to conquer anything.
That's pretty much exactly how their culture is described. If you said they were basically green-skinned humans, and despite their alignment they could harmonize and trust one another and make investments over future generations and empathize with their fellow orcs enough to help them out and dedicate themselves to abstract principles that put each other first, then sure they could build up a civilization and take over. Just like Taldor did, and Cheliax is trying to do, and many other human empires have. But if a change to the game world needs to be made to make it work, it should be done in a way that preserves the diversity of creature types, rather than have a bunch of humans with green skin, short big-headed humans with green skin, etc.
I would say "beat that guy unconscious for minor stuff, kill that guy for major stuff"
might fit But it's still might makes right, so orcs don't believe a 3rd party will enact justice on their behalf, especially if they are killed, which lowers the overall trust in society.
So what psychological/physiological thing do you think class/level limits represents? As I recall, it was supposed to suggest that humans were the most adaptable species of all, and other races were unable to grow as individuals.
I would love to see that reflected more in the game rules, I think it's reflected in flavor text of campaigns, but I will certainly admit you're right there is a big disconnect between the way the world is set up, and the mechanical statistics presented (see Taldan Armies crushing hordes of dragons). I guess my view is that there are certain group traits that don't really become apparent until you have large numbers of the species together which helps determines the success or failure of a civilization, and that those traits, while they may be inferred from lore and the setup of the world, are not mechanically reflected in stats.
Definitely. Sounds like we are in total agreement about Goblin Alchemists then.
"It's their god's fault" is the answer to dumb NPC behavior 90% of the time, (see cultists fighting to the death). At least on Golarion, almost all monsters worship the same god for their species.
I think I'd like that. Even I have to admit I know no one who tracks that beyond "we have a light source" "oh no they cast darkness!" But if that was standard text, we could really get into it. Make it even more worthwhile to throw around echolocation, one of my favorite spells.
Yup, that's a fair summary.
I agreed with all the other stuff in this paragraph, except I don't think you can ready actions outside of initiative, that's what surprise rounds are for.
I mostly agree with you. It's wildly unrealistic to think a tribe of humans or orcs or anything would do that, for exactly the reasons you describe.
My thinking is that when the enemy dungeon is say, an abandoned temple with a cult that has been working on a 2 year plan to release the Great Devourer or whatever, and the ritual will be complete in 1 weeks' time, and a local spy from the village says those nasty adventurers rescued the sacrificial maiden and are asking questions about the abandoned temple down at the tavern, I could see the dungeon being on that level of alert until either the adventurers leave town or the plan proceeds and the adventurers can't stop it, in like a week. What I'm saying is that a lot of the time in APs, it feels like the dungeons we are exploring are similar to the example I just gave, in the time-frame I just gave, because of narrative reasons, and that's why they should be on that level of alert.
Yeah, I agree. I might just have a GM who hates unprepared enemies.
Oh you found this section after all, that's awesome! Yeah, sometimes I avoid using divination just to avoid making the GMs life harder. Tell the GM your Augury requires them to come up with a cryptic phrase or riddle on the fly, watch him flop-sweat, and feel like a jerk. I have an Occultists with Outside Contact that I've almost never used, because I don't want the GM to have to spend a bunch of extra time in a PFS 4 hour slot coming up with the answer.
This is all true, the problem is if you have a system where only the best GMs GM, not a lot of playing gets done. You gotta have a script that people can read off of, improvising is probably the hardest thing there is to do. If you're lucky to have a GM that can throw you curveballs though, a smart group of players treasures that. (And chips in sometimes to cover the GMs share of takeout).
This paragraph is entirely true. I am a huge PFS player. I can tell you a big reason why many of us didn't make the switch to 5E was "rulings not rules." I think with Pathfinder, where basically every class has its own rules sub-system, the fear is that table variation will lead to some players not able to basically play their build half the time.
My current GM is great, but our entire campaign runs only on PFS rules, even though its a homebrew game.
Thanks for the literary tip. Is he why Gugs are afraid of Ghouls?
Ah, but imagine the advantages of a big old Timberwolf! A regenerating monster with hardness makes a fantastic front-line tank for Lex, provided he protects it from fire.
But seriously, Lex will fill that slot out someday right? It breaks my heart to see the squishy wizard getting thrown into melee so often.
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Military outpost or not, the defenders would still be less ready to receive attackers if they didn't have advanced notice of an imminent attack than if they did. It goes back to what I said before about issues of personal readiness that aren't covered by the rules but instead speak to plausibility.
This really speaks to why the Adventure Paths aren't the be-all end-all of adventure design, though I think you're overstating how much they have every enemy location ready in the manner in which you describe. Even then, if you wipe out a patrol group and then simply move in and attack before they're expected back, that's kind of a moot point. "Megadungeons" and other sandbox-style locations showcase this much better than pre-scripted adventures, where they're not written under the presumption that you're already operating on some specific backstory that would lead to an assault to begin with.
I know.
To my mind, things like that (should) come up a lot, even if a large number of pre-made adventures rarely go that far.
Again, I don't think this is the case. There needs to be some sort of "support staff" who can be pressed into service. I suspect that you'd say "slaves" in this case, but even putting aside that slaves can be forced to fight, I think that there are other possible answers here, the classical one being the female members of a given group of humanoids, who would otherwise be performing domestic duties.
Again, semi-nomadic lifestyles are only "semi" because they're "living usually in portable or temporary dwellings and practicing seasonal migration but having a base camp at which some crops are cultivated." That's how it is for most humanoid tribes as well, since if we hold that they're fecund by nature (as a response to high infant mortality, or just high mortality in general), hunting-gathering won't be sufficient to supply the necessary amount of food if there are a fairly high number of tribes in the region. There's going to need to be alternate sources of food procurement, which will include some forms of trading and yes, even agriculture. The latter doesn't have to be at human levels, but it does have to be there.
This is another issue where the d20 rules don't run up against the reality, since unlike in AD&D First Edition, there's no training necessary for, well...pretty much anything. It's all just a matter of leveling up, since that's how you gain military prowess (i.e. your BAB and saving throws), and for that matter all other occupational ability (i.e. your skills). Chaotic Evil societies certainly have problems with sacrificing for the common good, but they are capable of working together for it when it's fairly obvious that each individual would suffer more otherwise. Likewise, they can coordinate and work in groups, they just don't do so without there also being a perception of personal gain in it.
That's because the city isn't in the perpetual state of low-grade warfare that you ascribe to the orcs and similar humanoids, which to me makes it more "realistic" (which is always a loaded term). Being Chaotic Evil doesn't intrinsically mean that you're just looking for an opportunity to put a knife in whoever offends you. At the very least, you're looking for a way to do that and get away with it and/or make it somehow worth your while. Even demons have cities and societies that engage in commerce.
Though it's worth noting that some are better than others.
As an ad hoc, I'd increase it by 2 per day (meaning that, all else being equal, the same result will feed one less person than it would have yesterday). But that's just an off-the-cuff idea.
The issue here is that, if you have those tribes being nomadic (and presumably following some sort of steady pattern, wherein they circle around the same swath of territory over time), this entails that they leave a given area long enough for it to replenish itself by the time they come back (which also means that no other tribes are overlapping in their territory). But this doesn't work, because the nature of a humanoid population is to swell over time, since they don't have natural predators. Eventually, their usual routes won't turn up enough food anyway, and then you have a recurring problem where the local area becomes critically denuded of hunting-gathering resources, and the framework of nomadic living becomes unsustainable. At that point, the underlying premise is completely shot (which is typically the case anyway if you put humanoids in a particular geographic region and say that they don't farm or trade for food).
As for apex predators, they are by definition the least populous members of a given ecology, since they're a keystone species. That means that you shouldn't have that many such creatures in a given area, since you need to have a massive prey population in order to sustain them. Humanoid fecundity runs afoul of that; if you've got even a few hundred humanoids living together, then they're already beyond any sort of comparable scale in that regard.
Right, but here's the thing, though: that logic ("band together for mutual survival in a hostile environment") holds true everywhere not just the Underdark/Darklands. That's because the subterranean environment isn't considered especially deadly because of the environment unto itself (environmental hazards there don't seem to be particularly numerous, based on what's written, so long as you have adequate sensory abilities), but because of the monsters there. Except that d20 worlds have monsters everywhere. Golarion has six bestiaries' worth of monsters (plus more from numerous other books) crawling all over the world in assorted numbers, so whatever truism drives subterranean races to band together for survival will also be true aboveground as well.
Insofar as I'm aware, there's nothing to suggest that the alignment division among druids isn't a (relatively) equal five-way split between Neutral Good, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Evil, Lawful Neutral, and True Neutral. Given that druids have always classically been depicted as protecting Balance (with nature as an aspect of that), that seems like a safer assumption to make than the asymmetric distribution that you're positing.
I think this conflates "simplistic" with "reductive." What you're talking about is a shorthand that sketches some very basic outlines as to how one approaches basic elements of personal conduct and interpersonal interaction, but which can't be used to draw any sort of overarching conclusions. Saying that "Neutral Evil characters (druids) are loners who kill others on sight" is drawing far too large a conclusion based on nothing more than their alignment. It's right up there with saying that paladins are "Lawful Stupid" because of the rigidity with which they're presumed to live by (albeit in conjunction with their class's code of conduct).
I disagree. What you're discussing doesn't really work at anything above the level of individuals, which is to say that it doesn't really function at anything that approaches a societal view. The reason for that is that raiding necessarily carries the risk of death in the engagement, and any thinking creature is going to want to minimize its own chances of dying in its pursuit of what it wants. If you can tumble to the idea of "give me what I want, and I'll give you what you want," and that doing so will serve to more likely get you your desires without risking your life, then you'll probably want to go that route, as a general rule. Even for creatures that deal with death on a daily basis, that doesn't mean that they'll necessarily stop taking it into concern.
Even if you don't have a cleric, it's a given that every party is going to have some sort of healing, even if it's just a wand of cure light wounds. That much can be taken completely for granted, both at the meta-game level and in-game, at least where any sort of credible threat is concerned. That's because, from an in-game standpoint, healing magic is extremely ubiquitous and no one who knows they're going to be putting their life on the line wants to be without easy access to it. From a meta-game standpoint, dying is considered to be (for the PCs) a "loss" condition, wherein death is what they're specifically trying to avoid (along with other things that put long-term/quasi-permanent debuffs on them, including losing the items that they've come to take for granted).
More than that, most players that I've met don't optimize at the level that you're talking about. The idea that they'd balk at taking a round or two of inefficient actions in order to prevent their comrade(s) from dying strikes me as being ridiculous, since outside of an extremely difficult fight that's not something that they're overly concerned with (and if a character has died, it usually means that there was a spectacular string of bad luck, or the character did something incredibly stupid, rather than this fight being a hard one). Rather, they're more concerned with making sure that the underlying social expectations of "we're working together" are fulfilled by trying to prevent the other PC's death, since being downed usually means that death is now considered to be near-imminent for that character. (And if they were worried about tactics, taking a round to get someone back up is worthwhile anyway, since if they're down then you're losing X rounds when they would have been contributing anyway.)
That theory isn't applicable here, because it follows the real-world logic that someone who's injured will A) suffer from diminished (if not completely negated) combat capability, and B) healing them is a slow and difficult process, which requires an immediate withdrawal from the area. Neither of those are true where d20-based systems are concerned. Characters can fight just as well at 1 hit point as they can at full hit points, and healing can be performed near-instantaneously thanks to magic. Hence, finishing off downed enemies is entirely logical, since the presumption of healing magic means that their being downed is only temporary unless you make sure they're dead and not just dying.
It's things like that which have earned me that "killer GM" moniker. Which is to say, they've already internalized the standard regarding what's "fair play," and I can't really change their minds. Believe me, I've tried.
Even overlooking that the issue of not personally seeing them is one that's not that difficult to overcome via invisibility, arcane eye, looking through a familiar's eyes, etc. - and this usually is where the conversation takes a tangent into "well those tactics are so un-optimized that I can't believe you'd suggest them with a straight face!", which I never find very convincing because the presumption of absolute combat efficiency in all things at all times is exactly what I'm arguing against in the first place, even before we get into issues of particulars meaning that general wisdom has limits; it's why the online theory-crafters' take on game-play so rarely resembles actual game-play, in my experience - I'm not sure why you'd need to have a living enemy escape with that weapon. You can just say that some hair. blood, etc. fell to the ground during the melee, since most parties aren't going to do a thorough clean-up of the area on their way out.
We need to clear up the issue with not sleeping: nowhere in the Pathfinder Core Rules does it say that if you don't sleep then you're fatigued. The closest that we have is from Pathfinder Adventure Path #44, "Trial of the Beast," where it says "Characters who do not get a full night’s sleep may suffer the effects of fatigue. If a PC does not get at least 6 hours of sleep, she must make a DC 15 Fortitude save or be fatigued and take a –1 penalty on all other checks and saving throws against sleep effects. A second night without sleep requires another DC 15 Fortitude save. A failed save results in the character becoming exhausted and the penalties increasing to –2. A third failed save on the next night increases the penalties to –3." Insofar as I'm aware, that's it.
I'm a little surprised you think I haven't read that before, particularly since I linked to it in my previous post (which you acknowledge later on). Moreover, you don't seem to realize that the entire reason that Paizo printed this in the first place was because they felt it necessary to counter the "common sense" regarding the efficacy of these spells. (Though that was typically done with regards to their use as the aggressor, e.g. "fine, if they just so happen to save against my scry spell today, so what? I can try again tomorrow, since there's no penalty for failure," and similar lines of logic.) The idea behind scrying being that you don't need context; you need to visualize your destination so that you can teleport there (provided that you also know where it is).
The problem with this is that it, once again, runs counter to a lot of the d20 System's internal logic. The idea of "wearing down enemies" via obstacles and cannon fodder typically has to do with exhaustion and ammunition, and in most d20 games the former is a complete non-issue whereas the latter only tends to apply to spells and consumable magic items...and even then, unless the PCs are leaning seriously hard on the "nova strike" tactic, you don't expect much consumption of those latter things. It's really only worthwhile if you're throwing troops with substantial stopping power in their way.
"Hard to pull off" is relative, considering how easy it is to bump up your attack bonus; moreover, it's tactically sound because when you succeed, the other guy is going to be completely blind, at which point you've effectively won the fight unless they have a backup (something that I've seen be surprisingly iffy; most PCs that I've seen really don't expect much from their enemies besides the most elementary of tactics).
Ah, I think there are several "dick moves" that are completely rules-legal but typically overlooked due to the PCs not liking it when their own tricks are used against them.
Assuming poor lines of sight throws some serious penalties into any assumptions that involve spellcasting, since most things that block your line of sight will also block your line of effect. While that's not the case for darkness, fog, etc., you can expect it for pretty much anything else that's getting in your way, no matter how flimsy they are. Hence, there's typically going to be fairly clear two-way sight going on between you and your enemies.
The problem is that there's no "enforcement" mechanism here. By which I mean, with no clear delineation of precisely what those expensive material components are, or how rare they are, there's no real way to suggest that you have to go to a market and purchase anything. You can simply justify it with non-specific materials on hand, or that you're Crafting them (which, with no clear indication of how many items or what they each cost, pretty much requires a hand-wave), etc. This is the same reason why there are no component lists of what you can harvest from dead monsters. Ultimately, this might as well be dumping out a bag of gold, since there's no way for the GM to give this restriction any teeth.
Actually, "exotic" weapons are so called due to the level of training that they require in order to become proficient with them. Ultimate Equipment tells us that when it says "Weapons are grouped into several interlocking sets of categories. These categories pertain to what training is needed to become proficient in a weapon's use (simple, martial, or exotic)..." There are, after all, no "rarity ratings" for various weapons; the closest you'd come is the purchase limits for towns, but given that mundane weapons cost very little, that's not going to be any real deterrent where exotic weapons are concerned. Essentially, there's nothing to suggest that they're any less common than simple or martial weapons (unless you want to suggest that their difficulty to master makes them rarer, but nothing in the game rules backs that up).
As for the Steel Eaters, it says that they "produce the best weapons in the region," which makes it sound like other weapons of inferior quality are also produced there. In other words, that these are the guys turning out the highest-quality items, is all.
Again, this isn't the case in a d20-based world. Lanchester's laws only apply if you consider the basic capabilities of the people on each side to be, broadly speaking, equal. That's not true in a d20 world, where different races can have wildly different degrees of personal power simply by virtue of what they are, and leveling up can quickly catapult someone out of the realm that ordinary people can feasible resist. It's why high-level characters are essentially people of mass destruction. Not having enough food doesn't mean you still can't go out and gain experience points. Hence why they can still gain that military advantage.
You can't just say "the drow don't count," and disregard that they throw the idea of "Chaotic Evil people don't make societies" out the window. It's not like they're the only ones either; we know the Abyss has cities that conduct interplanar trade.
Even leaving aside the presumption that the majority of orcs are religious (for that religion, no less), that still doesn't presume that the underlying problems will be sidestepped in favor of that. Likewise, it doesn't make sense to cut back on the overall population when we don't really know what the overall population is; only cities give much in the way of hard numbers. Even then, this is much easier to solve if you just have the orcs engage in some basic subsistence-level trade and agriculture, instead of insisting that everything else be retrofitted to match a conception that otherwise doesn't hold much water.
Again, this just shows that Golarion is a poorly-conceptualized world. You don't even have to look that far in order to see better-conceived options: just look at the Orcish Empire of the Pomarj, in Greyhawk. The description in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer is adequate, but the best overview is in the AD&D Second Edition sourcebook Slavers. It shows that the humanoids of that realm are still violent and brutal, but can exist in something resembling a civilization. To quote liberally from it, "As it stands now, despite their differences, the various races and tribes of the Pomarj enjoy their current status and the security gained by their informal alliance, and it is likely that any tribe that rebels against the group will quickly be devoured by its neighbors, and not necessarily in a figurative manner." (Page 82)
On that same page, discussing the major humanoid tribes: "They are better disciplined and carry better equipment than most of their ilk, and are used to fighting as part of a large force. All have a well-established food supply, whether subterranean mushrooms, herd animals (surface or subterranean), simple crops, or access to good fishing. They conduct trade with one another for different food and other goods..."
From page 89, discussing the city of Highport: "Much of Highport was left in ruins. The orcs rebuilt enough to make it livable and eventually reopened the city for trade."
Now, again, this is all done under the auspices of a strong overlord and his organization, and it concedes that there's still flare-ups of tempers that have to be managed, but overall this illustrates the point that I've been making fairly well.
See above. Even if you have a violent and brutal society, you can still create a working society, which has things like commercial activity and agriculture and ranching, not to mention cooperation among different groups. It's how hard that is to maintain that's the major issue.
They represent some sort of innate limitation on advancement, not dissimilar to how real people in the real world have upper limits to what we can do; in the case of different races in a D&D world, those upper limits were defined by race, rather than physics or universal truisms regarding humanoid biology. Now, you could ask why that was the case, but it's likely going to be some sort of (rather boring) answer regarding what passes for evolution in those worlds, magic, and the will and function of the gods. Other races could grow as individuals, but not very much compared to the limitless potential of the human race.
To be fair, not everything needs to be represented at this level (as Sean K Reynolds wrote, you can just assume that anything not explicitly stated otherwise works the same way that it would for humans), but if you're going to make something into definitional aspects of those races, oftentimes to the point of being a caricature, then it helps to actually represent that within the context of the game rules. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to distinguish things like the numerous different humanoids and goblinoids if you, say, looked at their stat blocks with the names (and sizes) removed. Unless you've memorized their Hit Dice amounts, an orc looks a lot like a hobgoblin at that level, and a kobold looks a lot like a goblin, etc.
Yeah, I'm not wild about the idea. Half-orcs I could live with (though that means confronting the idea of "orcs as rapists"), since they're part-human, but the whole thing with goblins now being a Core PC race (especially with Paizo's take on them), and alchemist being their characteristic class, just makes me sigh.
You're misunderstanding me, here. I was discounting godly dictates out of hand because we're discussing things in terms of generalities, and deities by their very nature are campaign-specific, and so are only of incidental note when discussing a broader context. Even "generic" deities don't really help much; Corellon Larethian isn't to be found in Birthright, Eberron, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, etc.
I suspect that it was one of those things where the issue was "information management," though I suppose "page count" might have had something to do with it, since having to list those over and over might have taken up a lot of space altogether. Given how often illumination and auras likely came up in most games (let alone in every single area), I can't hold their removing that against them too hard.
In sprawling conversations, it's important, I think, to stay on track about what's under discussions, lest tangents derail everything.
This strikes me as being iffy at best. While the description for readied actions presents itself in terms of initiative, there's a logical disconnect in saying that someone can't barricade themselves in a room and be ready to shoot the next person who comes through the door.
Right, which is why I think most players would be extremely skeptical if you presented things this way, even though it's technically allowable under the game rules. There's a degree of verisimilitude regarding personal habits and actions that transcends what's mechanically enforced.
I'm not suggesting that you can't have the dungeon be in a state of heightened alert if they have some method of knowing that their about to be invaded or are otherwise engaged in something sensitive (though in the latter case, there's an argument to be made for trying to keep your activities secret if you don't have any indication that anyone is coming after you). Rather, I just don't think that this is the majority of instances, since dungeons by their very nature are static structures, and long-term habitation will induce some level of relaxation outside of a specific threat...and a lot of presentations are given without any sort of narrative build-up regarding the PCs being brought there by a series of scripted events. Virtually any "set piece" will be given like this (though I'll admit that a lot of popular conception seems to have shifted away from these, and from episodic and picaresque gaming in general).
That, and not having to deal with varying degrees of tactical readiness does ease the burden on the GM, albeit at a probable loss of some verisimilitude. I much prefer combat as war.
See, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. It doesn't even end with divinations, either. When's the last time a GM actually sat down to figure out what sort of metal rod was needed to plane shift to the right plane? Most just seem to require a low-DC Knowledge (planes) check and move on, often presuming that you just have literally every variety on you or simply overlooking it altogether, even though it's a focus item, and so Eschew Materials won't negate the need for it. (Check out Dragon #120, "Plane Speaking: Tuning In to the Outer Planes" for a great article on this by Jeff Grubb).
Sure, and that's an entirely legitimate stance to take. Increasing the number of people playing the game requires democratizing the role of the GM, but at the same time there's something being lost here, in that the bar is being continually lowered regarding what the GM need to/should do. I get why this was done; just look at this quote for a great summary: "...player narration and DM fiat fall apart whenever there’s anything less than an incredibly high level of trust for the DM. The general trend of D&D’s design up through the end of 4e is to erase dependence on player-DM trust as much as possible, not to create antagonism, but to insulate both sides from it when it appears."
There's an old story about how, back when AD&D and D&D were separate games being published simultaneously, TSR did some polling and was shocked to find that GMs found D&D to be more difficult to run, despite its simplified rules. When they asked why, it turned out to be because of the simplified rules; a lot of GMs wanted rules to tell them how things worked, rather than making rulings themselves. I understand that, but at the same time there's something to be said for holding the person running the game to a higher standard, rather than a lower one.
Right, and I'm saying that I'm not exactly enamored with that style of play. To be sure, I used to be, but in the last several years it lost its luster for me, as the mechanical meta-game stopped being fun and started to be a chore, or even an exercise in frustration when a concept that wasn't born from the game itself proved to be difficult to transition into the game rules while being as effective as a moderately-optimized build.
That's why I love Eclipse: The Codex Persona so much, since it bypasses most of the mechanical sub-game (while still having some of it) and offers more flexibility than I'd have otherwise. Of course, being a point-buy character-generator, it necessarily requires more discipline and cooperation on the part of the GM and players, which seems to run counter to what I see from a lot of Pathfinder players these days, who honestly seem to think that the rules exist to restrain their own bad impulses, in that if they do something disruptive or exploitive under the game rules, it's the game's fault for not having put a tighter leash on them instead of their own fault for being disruptive.
Hm, I may have gotten his work on ghouls mixed up with Lovecraft (which is not unexpected, since they were contemporaries).
Well, I'd need stats for timberwolves before we ever got that far, but it's somewhat moot; they're Everfree creatures, and aren't found in White Tail Woods, which is the closest forest (and remember, A Royal Problem made it clear that there are no timberwolves in White Tail Woods).
As for Lex, well...let me just say that I certainly have some ideas. But don't ask me how soon they'll come into play.
Here's to not surviving!
9219849 Aw, surely there's some way out of this mess?