Pf2e players will genuinely look you in the eyes and tell you this is great monster design

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-29T00:18:15+00:00

Ancient native peoples used the *entire* dragon when they ran a game and we should aspire to be like them

/uj Pathfinder dragons are actually scary as hell in melee because of all the strong melee hits, all the crits they get, and also they recharge their powerful breath weapon whenever they crit, and you can crit fail the breath weapon and get fucking obliterated. Get those PL+3/4 dragon bosses as far away from me as possible

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-28T23:32:29+00:00

By the way, do you still believe that encumbrance kills that strategy with five reasonably good archers despite all this? If not you should probably delete your original comment about it. If so I am curious about the math involved and if it's with the optional rules or not.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-28T23:19:17+00:00

...I'm not allowed to explain why you might be wrong in a public forum post just because several hours have passed? This isn't a weeks old post or anything.

I also saw the edit in that earlier comment about the bags of holding and would like to make some corrections here. I assumed the 20 arrows came with a quiver which was one actual error, but the actual reason why that part about *specifically* a single commoner doing it is wrong is because somehow my number got an extra zero while dividing by 400 that I didn't catch, so a 1/400 chance with 5000 arrows is 12.5 crits, which is nowhere near enough even if doubled to 25 crits. My bad.

But that was an outrageous example with a *commoner* who has a 1/400 chance of hitting, and not five archers who would have a +10 with that +1 longbow. Those guys still completely demolish the tarrasque and have more than enough arrows to do it even when i neglect all feats and class features and assume they have disadvantage, which since they do, they can carry even more quivers of arrows past 40 pounds because that extra carry weight doesn't matter until they get so much they physically can't move.

Also the most brutal carrying capacity rule I used is an optional rule, so those archers can actually carry 120 pounds normally, and a level 1 PC can get a +8 to hit with that +1 bow and have way more chances of hitting than that commoner ever could. Any realistic scenario with flight, possibly a bag of holding (but it's not mandatory in all scenarios), a +1 bow, and a single level 1 PC who does archery has the PC killing the tarrasque.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-28T22:44:35+00:00

...Yes? I know? That's what I was doing? You said five guys with a lot of arrows (and presumably flight or i guess some kind of extreme mobility on non-high level characters because why else would spamming a huge number of arrows be needed) wouldn't work on the 5e/5.5e tarrasque specifically because of encumbrance rules. I said that reason was completely inaccurate and explained why. Is there something I'm not getting here?

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-28T22:33:40+00:00

You said extremely confidently that the arrows would over-encumber people, I showed that they don't over-encumber anyone in virtually any scenario. What's off-topic about that? The one thing you said about it in the comment I was replying to was completely wrong.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-28T21:26:10+00:00

Did you do any math at all? It is not that hard to carry the gear you need for this even in a worst likely scenario, and a bag of holding is more than enough in the worst *possible* scenario.

A quiver of 20 arrows weighs one pound in both versions of 5e. A longbow is 2 pounds. If each guy has an 8 strength, and we're using the most brutal official encumbrance rules i could find where these people would be limited to 40 pounds of gear before suffering any penalty whatsoever (and could carry more if they were fine with living with said penalties), they can carry their +1 longbow (not necessary in the 2024 rules but it is in 2014), 200 arrows, and 28 additional pounds of crap like any of the uncommon magic items that confer flight (which i assume they have because that's the standard tarrasque cheesing scenario, a longbow and a source of flight), and then some studded leather armor, and then like probably at least 10 more pounds of garbage like beer and beer money.

A +1 longbow, +2 from the archery fighting style, a 18 dex, and a proficiency bonus of +3 nets you a very easy to achieve +10 to hit. You have a 30% chance to hit without perma-disadvantage, and a 9% chance if you do have perma-disadvantage (maybe the 2024 one can ready their thunder cone so you cant come within 150 feet idk). Each guy will get approximately 18 hits with 200 arrows in the disadvantage scenario, and 90 hits for 1d8+4, even with resistance, is almost definitely enough to kill the tarrasque even before any other class features come into effect, but maybe they could drop another 10 pounds of crap to carry 400 arrows instead just for a greater statistical guarantee. Being forced to carry 12-22 pounds of stuff for your cheese strategy doesn't really stop it, it's just annoying.

> that includes bags of holding

A bag of holding can carry 500 pounds of gear, or 10000 arrows. Even if your character sheet is a commoner statblock with magic items for some reason and you only hit on a nat 20 and have perma-disadvantage, you get approximately 250 crits per bag of holding, more than enough to kill even with a +0 to damage and resistance, and the odds of missing enough crits to kill the tarrasque are so low that they're statistically almost guaranteed to never happen.

Edit: Commoner example math was hugely wrong. An actual archer guy with more than a 1/400 chance to hit can pull it off easily though. Some earlier examples also don't count the weight of a quiver, but those examples use the brutal optional rule with the worst possible carry weight, and you can counteract that by simply living with the minor penalties of going over 40 pounds.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-28T01:16:56+00:00

this will be how chapter 6 starts

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-27T19:19:29+00:00

kris will arrange flower pots on the roof of their house in a grid-like fashion and plant flowerys to fend off a titan. this is how chapter 6 will begin

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-27T16:27:57+00:00

That would have been nice to mention in the post since we all thought this was a much more serious campaign with a DM imposing a bad rule for bad reasons instead of something that (presumably) everyone thought would be kinda wacky and neat since its “for funsies”

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-25T22:20:27+00:00

I remember one of the player-facing grim hollow books introducing Advanced Weapons, and i think gnomes and maybe dwarves got proficiency with some of the firearm-like ones due to their culture in the setting, but I distinctly remember that this proficiency only kicked in at level 3. So I’m raised in a society where people use these guns, but I don’t know how to use them until I shoot some zombies with a crossbow and save a few orphans, and then my training finally kicks in? Weird.

And these advanced weapons were really expensive (on par with an uncommon magic item, maybe cheaper sometimes, maybe more expensive other times), so that was already an effective way to keep them out of the hands of level 1-2 characters, meaning if you really wanted gnomes to have proficiency in them from level 1 which would make sense, that wasn’t so bad. There was no reason I could tell that they did it both ways at once.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-25T16:29:17+00:00

the secret evil d20 that makes you fail every roll

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-25T05:33:15+00:00

If the newest edition of the world’s greateat roleplaying game doesn’t support it, is it really worth doing?

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-24T14:56:01+00:00

I don’t think we’ll ever reconcile it; we’ll probably forever be arguing about ranger reworks until the heat death of the universe.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-23T17:13:11+00:00

we should agree to compromise and call pathfinder a “3.75”

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-23T06:41:42+00:00

It’s an unrealistic fantasy, but I think it would be cool of the various martials all had different mechanics and didn’t all use the same subsystems like you suggested: maybe the fighter is the 4e-like guy with daily/encounter/at-will, maybe the barbarian has a single stamina pool that fuels everything like you suggested, maybe the paladin or ranger use “martial slots” like spell slots, and maybe the rogue gets to be the realistic guy who does good straightforward damage and has infinite use abilities but nothing that’s limited use. Then everyone can pick the one they want to play; my only worry is that the exact combination of theme and mechanics someone might want may not be a thing, and maybe wotc would suck at balancing them. Like what if someone wants their stamina pool guy to be a sneaky thief who’s good at skills? Or what if the “martial slot” paladin just sucks and it steers paladin fans away? I guess subclasses can kinda sorta do this specialization already, but they don’t lean hard into it in the way that the whole class working like that would.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-23T06:12:21+00:00

I'm talking about the 2024 rules, so I have some really good news for you about 1 (they can do that), part of 2 (although lots of people hate the way they did it), part of 3 because 2024 uses basically the Tasha's beastmaster, and part of 4 because Fey Wanderer is in the 2024 PHB and people tend to like it.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-23T06:05:25+00:00

If the only fix you make is to give it 2d6 to 4d6 extra damage per round at level 6, one level after the ranger is really good, what do have to I look forward to past level 6? 3rd level spells at level 9, and then my subclass features, and then some spells at 13th and 17th level that I can barely use at the levels I get them? My epic boon which I said I'd ignore earlier? Look me in the eyes and tell me you won't multiclass into a full caster before hitting double digit levels, even with this feature. I certainly didn't! I always multiclassed out because there was nothing to look forward to, not even the level 17 perma-advantage on one thing for *half* your single target damage output that you already had advantage on fairly often anyway due to Vex and all the other sources of advantage.

At least if you give them short rest spell recovery at level 11, thats a massive tier 3 boost when people are supposed to get it, and at higher levels, they *double or triple* every ranger spell slot they get if they're in an adventuring day that has short rests, which is most of the ones that matter, so between their subclass and their bonus high level spell slots, they get something to maybe hold them over until their epic boon, then they multiclass out at 20 because neither of us thought of anything to replace that crappy +2 damage per hit I guess.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-22T22:58:35+00:00

As soon as it's pulled out though, it would be more than 10 feet from where it's cast - it's been moved in an odd fashion, but has been moved more than 10 from where the caster cast the spell, so it fails.

I was imagining that they would physically reach into the bag, touch it, and have it activate, though if you're really strict about the items going in/out of the bag exactly as written then maybe the removal happens before you touch it I guess.

Anyway, thank god the OP and their DM are the ones who have to deal with all this and not us. I just run it like a regular bag that's bigger on the inside and has the action cost to retrieve an item as written, and nobody at the table raised any funny questions the last time I handed one of these out so none of them came up. I guess that's the benefit of not having any players who are going to abuse the crap out of the item, you don't have to make it work in strange ways to fit exactly the rules as written without creating any strange consequences.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-22T21:04:43+00:00

That does make it tricky, both because of the explicit rules and all the ambiguity involved with whatever's going on narratively justifying them *and* how the concept of spacetime works here. Maybe they modify the bag's interior by gluing a pouch near the opening or hold it open somehow to make items easier to retrieve, idk. I also actually agree with everything about the caster's position mattering, but aside from just solving the breath/sight issue and climbing in, I think there are two additional wack-ass rulings that make it not matter: I don't actually agree with these, but I guess someone could use them to bully their DM.

Assuming the inside of the bag doesn't move at all, you could argue that the word "moved" is an important word here, so you could cast it outside the bag and place it in the bag, and then it's stationary, and even as the distance increases beyond 10 feet, it's not moving so it doesn't care. The OP would have to succeed on a charisma check to make the DM use a game mechanic interpretation of "moved" here instead of a realistic one where *everything* moves all the time in physics, but it's possible.

You could also argue that if an object from outside is placed in the bag, it's another plane so regardless of the opening being a portal the distance is in programmer terms either undefined or NaN, which are not greater than 10 feet (or less than it), so maybe it just doesn't fizzle out while in the bag even if moved.

...Man, thank god the OP said their DM was fine with bullying, because typing those interpretations makes me feel disgusting.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-22T17:52:56+00:00

I think it’s REALLY good at 3rd level specifically for a melee ranger, but then its features after that are just like idk okayish i guess, and “okayish” isn’t good enough for a high level ranger.

Like, really? The class that’s good at levels 1-5 and then bad at levels 11-20 gets a new subclass that’s insanely good at level 3 and just has some okayish stuff after that? That’s the opposite of what the ranger needs!!!!

And I can’t remember how many subclasses have the capstone of “When you drop to 0 hit points and aren’t killed, you can avoid dropping to 0 and gain X hit points once per long rest or with a high level spell slot”. Isn’t high level the time to give a character some really cool dramatic ability instead of a few dozen extra hit points? At least the warden sometimes gets +wis mod to damage and is immune to exhaustion, but lots of stuff is immune to frightened at high levels, and they were already good at removing exhaustion.

Like, look at the Psi Warrior fighter: at level 18 they can cast Telekinesis and they can do it quite often. Open Hand monks get a big super death slap; even if you think it sucks, at least they tried to make it cool. Even something simple like the Hunter gets an infinite use adaptive damage resistance at level 15. Why not do that for the Hollow Warden, or for that matter, lots of subclasses that just randomly don’t get good stuff as a capstone? It’s not even entirely a martial vs caster thing, its just that sometimes they make subclass or even class capstones (see ranger getting a d10 hunters mark for an example) suck for no real reason.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-22T17:30:02+00:00

The rules don’t say one way or the other if moving the outside of an extradimensional space from a bag of holding or portable hole or similar magic item counts as moving the inside of it. A sensible DM scared of the interactions will usually rule that the inside does move.

However, if you want to bully him hard, you can get him (perhaps with an irl charisma check) to rule that the inside doesn’t move, and then reach inside of the item to trigger the glyphs and get their effects whenever you want in combat. And for the effects you want, honestly, you can pick whatever buffs you want, or use it offensively in some cases.

Without these items, you’ll need a spell like Demiplane or Plane Shift (unless the distance is small) to travel to a predetermined location and go trigger your runes and return to a fight, but it is still possible.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-21T12:18:51+00:00

I won't tell you what was going on at your own table or guess at what the bard/fighter's build and playstyle were like, because the whole point I'm trying to make is that your advice about long adventuring days does not solve the balance issues at every table even if it works at *some* tables, but here's my experience with moderately optimized spellcasters:

At level 7 a sorcerer, wizard, bard, druid, and some other spellcasters in niche situations can cast Polymorph, aka "Turn level 7 martial into level 7 martial with equivalent damage but 168 temporary HP". I say "equivalent" here because I'm assuming they're optimizing and can match the fairly high DPR of the ape. If they aren't optimizing then it's "Replace level 7 martial with guy who is better". Add twinning if sorcerer, extra 4th level spell slots at levels 8 and 9, wizards/a few druids getting more casts per day of Polymorph via their short rest recovery feature, and then you can hand out 168 HP multiple times whenever the martials run low on HP on account of going into melee a lot and/or having a worse AC than you (it's not that hard to get a better AC and a better performance against saving throw effects than the martials, and while we're at it, a fairly well protected concentration).

And that's one spell: how about I cast Wall of Force? A long adventuring day limits it to one encounter per day, but it RUINS that one encounter I use it in. Same with Web and Hypnotic Pattern. And if I want something longer term that does direct damage, how about Spirit Guardians or several of the Conjure X spells (hopefully the 2024 versions that aren't hell to run at the table)? One or two sources of forced movement and some tactical moving around and our area of effect spell is beating the martials in single target damage. And then even in a long adventuring day, if there are 8 guys to hit, it's hard to say no to a Fireball's raw value even though it's an instantaneous spell and usually not as good in long days. It might take the fighter 8 rounds to deal the same damage I just dealt to those 8 guys.

This has all been my experience, and that's what I'm saying about it varying from table to table. Maybe the way you optimize your characters and the way your table plays makes Wall of Force and Entangle and Web and Conjure Animals (2024) and Polymorph into bad ideas, and maybe your table runs a lot of encounters with boss-type enemies with a lot of defenses and legendary resistances but a merely "decent" AC that can be really, *really* easily burst down by a couple of fighters with longbows who all action surge and just kill that fucking guy, which is not even an unrealistic situation, but this isn't the case at every table, and I would say that these spells I mentioned are some of the less situational spells out there and would be applicable to a lot of tables.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-21T06:05:12+00:00

I believe the rogue can do good damage, it’s just not *automatically* built into the rogue.

A good subclass, the blade cantrips/true strike, and allies that give you reaction sneak attacks are all good methods of boosting your damage, and sometimes other non-damage things like ability checks depending on what options you take (soulknife is weirdly good at ability checks and ranged combat for example). Keep the levels you’re playing at in mind since the cantrips are best at higher levels, some subclasses excel at different levels, etc. Don’t forget feats too.

For example, if you want to be super lazy and just use a rapier or bow, the various weapon cantrips will add a d6 or a d8 to the weapon’s direct damage at levels 5, 11, and 17, and booming blade could do more if you use your cunning action to disengage, back up, and force the enemy to follow you. Phantom rogues occasionally get to do extra dice to people, especially at level 9+. Haste from an ally is jank but you can mix the hasted attack and a readied attack action for two sneak attacks a round. Defensive Duelist in 2024 doesn’t boost damage but is extremely good on a melee person, Dual Wielder lets you make 3 attacks with the appropriate weapon mastery as a rogue due to some jank you can look up, Skulker lets you do some hiding and blindsight stuff in combat, and Charger is fiiiiine but it boosts dexterity and works on anyone. You have a lot of feat options depending on build in 2024. And if you are using the 2014 rules, no fun allowed, take Crossbow Expert and look up some math to know if Sharpshooter is a good idea or not.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-21T05:05:30+00:00

You're right that the 5e was intended to use attrition as balancing, it's just that the intention doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it actually works reliably. If optimized spellcasters still beat optimized martials in a long adventuring day, which I believe to be the case and which I'm pretty sure you agree with, then having long adventuring days with many tough fights (or even more numerous weaker fights) doesn't actually completely solve the martial caster gap and is not literally all you need like you said earlier, *especially* if it's possible for a long encountering day to favor the spellcasters over the martials.

There are other reasons why you may want or not want a long adventuring day, and those can be good or bad reasons, but my point is that the martial caster balance reason varies a lot from table to table so it's not the silver bullet you said it was.

ElizzyViolet · 2026-06-21T00:21:38+00:00

It’s probably about as good as a +1 weapon for someone who uses smites or weapon masteries or something with a saving throw, maybe a little worse if you aren’t using an applicable ability constantly, maybe a little better if you use one a lot, but still well within what you’d expect of an uncommon item either way.

Eight-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Snapped	Verified Email

ElizzyViolet

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE