Recent content by FrozenNorth

The question is « who decides whether an Int 8 character is smart enough to toss a pebble to distract the guard? ». The rules are pretty clear that the decision is supposed to be the purview of the person who plays the character.

How you play your character. Not how the DM thinks you should play your character.

« Something » in this case being substituting their judgment for that of the person actually playing the character.

I think the point is that both factions believe they are correct, which would make them both « Good, but disagree on the means ».

« Hey, sometimes to only way to stop a genocide is to commit a different genocide. » Ghandi, probably.

True, but I’m placing my criticism in the context of the OP, a situation where the players have not played before and the GM has, though the criticism also applies where neither the players nor the GM have played before.

That’s a fair statement, but my actual criticism was a bit more nuanced. Because « Pathfinder is a heavy game to GM », mistakes tend to be more frequent and because « Pathfinder fights tend to be finely tuned » mistakes tend to have a greater impact.

My father is a Monopoly purist. He doesn’t like the changes that have been made to more recent editions of the game to make the playtime shorter. Were the changes excluding him? Of course not!

4e actually did do this, though mostly by power source. The martial power source was striker secondary, so all else being equal, fighters, warlords, rogues and rangers did more damage than equivalent roles with a different power source. Divine was leader secondary, so paladins had more buff...

You can also use them as a heroic second wind when you are downed, so if the GM only grants them sparingly, it could kill your character.

When a character is downed, their initiative is changed to immediately after the character that downed them. This ensures that the party has a full round to intervene to save them. Forgetting this rule increases the lethality of the game. The second issue is more niche, but there are quite a...

I think this is overly reductionist in the ways DMs can make mistakes. Yes, DMs can make mistakes by throwing fights that are too tough against the party (as several early modules did) or by combining encounters because they didn’t understand encounter math. But it is a heavy game for a DM to...

For me personally, this approach would restrict the toolset that DH gives me too much. For example, say the Tier 2 party wants to recruit a criminal to break into the lord’s manor, and their prior reconnaissance has determined that certain specific valuables are held there, which they let slip...

Yes, so 4 rolls that generate 1 Hope/Fear rather than 4 rolls that generate 4 Hope/Fear. And players may expend resources of their Reaction rolls in order to pass. True, though outside of new players I tend not to adopt that level of hand-holding.

Like @zakael19 said, the book itself takes both positions, so either reading is correct. Definitely for me, outside of combat, I tend towards objective difficulties. I feel that it makes it easier for players to assess what will work and what won’t if « this would probably be pretty tough in...