The more I think about it, the more I want the ‘ranger’ to be a more skill-oriented class. They are still warrior-types, but I think I want their prowess to come mostly from knowledge of their foes and gaining advantage from their surroundings. They can still gain combat styles and …
When I started this series, I’d intended to go through the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and trim it down to the bare mechanics, then build it back up with the elements as I wanted them. That got derailed almost immediately. I figured I’d work through the source rule book as a …
A silly word, to be sure, but I find it useful at times to describe certain growth of a companion. Companions in D&D games are in a strange position. On the one hand, a horse is a horse, right? Four legs, two Hit Dice. Horses are bigger and harder to …
For all the time I’ve spent on expert paths, and a lesser extent master paths, I really haven’t spent much on champion paths. I think this is partly because I’ve got a good handle on expert paths and what they should do, and they’re easy to work on. Master paths …
In my first take on the cavalier expert path, I tried to distill the path down to the primary elements that made it a ‘cavalier’ rather than some other kind of warrior. I ended up with Mount and charge Order and challenge Banner Three elements, with different abilities gained in …
Last week I drafted a cavalier expert path, and was pretty pleased with how it shaped up. After considering my expectations regarding higher-level abilities, I realized the abilities weren’t quite there. Close, but not quite. I concluded recently (and posted today) that Pathfinder® Roleplaying Game: Mythic Adventures is loaded with …
The last couple of posts have talked about what abilities at different tiers should look like, from ‘realistic’ (for a fantasy RPG definition of realistic) through ‘legendary’. The first post was pretty non-specific, basically just introducing the labels, and the second described them in more specific terms. This post starts …
Lately I’ve been discussing abilities in terms of their realism or credibility. I use such distinctions when devising character abilities. For instance, anything a normal person could do, within training, is by definition ‘realistic’. Things that are of comparable scale and effect should also be in this category, even if …
Last week I showed how I might convert a Pathfinder base class (cavalier) to an expert path. I’m pretty happy with how it looks, even if it doesn’t quite conform to what I expect paths to look like (i.e. it doesn’t have an exceptionally shiny high-level power). For a first …
Yesterday’s post was a bit weak because I didn’t know quite where I was going with it. Today I’m on more solid ground. D&D and its descendants have long had the idea of race, of human and non-human characters. It’s been handled in different ways in different editions and in …
