Category: Challenges

A graded wand or staff can include metamagic feats. The metamagic feats apply only to spells activated from the wand or staff, count as qualities of a grade equal to the spell slot adjustment, and increase the number of charges needed to activate the spell. Below I present the wand of miltiary …

I thought I’d take a few minutes and do a quick summary of where I stand with this year’s A-Z Challenge. The big topic this time around is graded items, special items with abilities of various grades or degrees of power or utility. I’ve got a few posts about encounter …

Last night I wrote about 2,400 words on legendary/spontaneous graded items. On my way in to work on the bus this morning, I realized I might have overthought things. As much as I like the ‘quest’ aspect of it, the entire thing can probably be simplified. Spontaneous Graded Items, Simplified …

During this year’s A-Z Challenge, many of my posts have discussed graded items, items with multiple qualities of different grades. Often these items are enchanted, and many of them are simply very well crafted, with special materials and processes to get around spell prerequisites. I’d overlooked another option: spontaneous enchantment, as …

In many encounters, “kill everything!” is often an effective plan. A little predictable, perhaps, but it often lets the PCs get the job done that they came to do. In fact, it’s so effective and can be so predictable that it can become kind of monotonous. Taken to extremes the …

Yesterday I wrote about improving encounter economy and design. Today I’m going to explore how to implement encounters as designed in certain Japanese (console) RPGs. There are several elements to encounters in these games that stand out, and that I’ll describe below, that I don’t often see in encounters in most published …

Developing encounters for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game can be simplified, and easily made more flexible and scalable. I will show how below, contrasting with the PRD Designing Encounters text. Sample Encounter Design In the sample encounter design in the PRD, the party consists of two fourth-level PCs and four fifth-level PCs. This can be done …

I admit, the title is a bit of a stretch, but it lets me publish this on ‘H’ day instead of waiting for ‘P’ day, and I do sometimes refer to the polyhedral process as a One True Hammer in my toolbox. I’ll roll with it. The polyhedral process originated in …

Graded weapons and armor are very simple. Rather than working spells, exactly, they work with enhancement bonuses, plus weapon, armor, and general qualities. They can be crafted or enchanted, and follow the same guidelines regarding assignment of graded abilities. Graded Qualities for Weapons and Armor Many weapon and armor qualities are …

Over the last week or so I’ve talked about assigning graded abilities, graded wands, graded staves, how I determined their market price, and how to adjust their caster level. The first post was fundamental to all graded items, and the other articles were because spell trigger items are quite easy to work …