Pathfinder 1E Broken Rules in Pathfinder

Grazzt · Dec 19, 2016

Saelorn said:
The positive energy elemental is an example of a poorly-designed monster, regardless of who wrote it.

That would be me (along with most everything else in the Tome series of books). Yeah, looking back at it, radiant damage would probably work a lot better for it than the way it's currently set up.

gamerprinter · Dec 19, 2016

Saelorn said:
GMs should absolutely allow third party and homebrew material to their own games. They just shouldn't give anything a free pass because it's in a published book, or written by someone whose name they recognize. That's the point where common sense needs to assert itself. Everything - everything - should be scrutinized by the GM before it's allowed into a game. Whether it's first-party, third-party, or home-brew scrawled on a napkin, you need to look at it before you let it into your game. Even things that are fine in isolation might become broken in conjunction with other material or with house rules, and the only one who knows everything about the game being played is the GM of that game.

I definitely don't give anything a free pass - everything requires a thorough reading by the GM and a lot of scrutiny on whether to allow something or not (even new Paizo books). I said on my previous post that there is indeed some broken stuff out of third party material. I was simply defending the notion that one shouldn't automatically disallow third party material because it's not first party (and as I said some 1st party rules are unbalanced, meaning stuff released by Paizo). I've worked on many third party projects, and I've watched designers make careful decisions and check with other designers on project to make sure nothing they've created is broken or unbalanced. I've seen infinitely more good and balanced material from third party material, than not - just in my experience.

The Crimson Binome · Dec 20, 2016

Grazzt said:
That would be me (along with most everything else in the Tome series of books). Yeah, looking back at it, radiant damage would probably work a lot better for it than the way it's currently set up.

For the sake of fairness, I'll note that the implementation you went with is the "obvious" and "correct" way that the creature should work in the language of Pathfinder; and from a systems-consistency standpoint, I appreciate that you went that way with it. If you'd gone the other route, people would still complain about it, just for different reasons.

It's kind of like how a wand of cure light wounds has an obvious price and functionality, and by following the formula it ends up dominating an entire aspect of gameplay. It's just one of those things where the GM really needs to sit down and think about what kind of game they want to run.

Grazzt · Dec 20, 2016

Saelorn said:
For the sake of fairness, I'll note that the implementation you went with is the "obvious" and "correct" way that the creature should work in the language of Pathfinder; and from a systems-consistency standpoint, I appreciate that you went that way with it. If you'd gone the other route, people would still complain about it, just for different reasons.

It's kind of like how a wand of cure light wounds has an obvious price and functionality, and by following the formula it ends up dominating an entire aspect of gameplay. It's just one of those things where the GM really needs to sit down and think about what kind of game they want to run.

Agreed. On a side note, I converted the energy elementals to 5e and went with radiant damage (for the positive) and did away with the healing aspect.

Original idea (IIRC) was from the 1e Manual of the Planes talking about how the Positive Plane itself kept adding hit points to travelers until they basically exploded in a blinding flash. I believe it mentions elementals and we just kinda winged it from there. Doing it again, I'd definitely remove the healing aspect for PF and probably go with radiant or something for damage.

Henry · Dec 23, 2016

I know one of the things we disallow in our PF house rules is most of the "Extra" class feature feats (Extra Discovery, Extra Revelation, Extra Exploit, etc.) because most of those class features are anywhere from slightly to LARGELY better than a feat, and most groups I've seen will prioritize the "Extra" feats to anything else. We do still allow things like "extra channel" or "extra lay on hands" or "extra ki" because those are usually one or two uses more of something they already have, rather than giving the PC a whole other set of abilities. Others' mileage will vary, but in our groups it does cut down on the spamming of those feats. I do think "extra lay on hands" and "extra rage" might be overpowered in letting someone select it multiple times, but they don't seem to cause problems in our games.

Ezequielramone · Dec 29, 2016

I remember a character who used that weird mathematical feat that lets you use free metamagic if you can mix the number in xd6 in a way to obtain certain result (prime numbers). It is not a rule but a feat.... Still it was crazy. Another one created an app to mix the numbers automatically.

Thotas · Dec 30, 2016

Ezequielramone said:
I remember a character who used that weird mathematical feat that lets you use free metamagic if you can mix the number in xd6 in a way to obtain certain result (prime numbers). It is not a rule but a feat.... Still it was crazy. Another one created an app to mix the numbers automatically.

Yeah, I remember seeing that. I live in fear that somebody who is kind of ... math challenged will take that feat in one of my games sometime. Same fear I have of dynamic arrays in Mutants & Masterminds. Few things more frustrating than a player who has bitten more arithmetic than they can chew, so their turn take half an hour every time.

JoeElf · Jan 14, 2017

Sacred Geometry is the feat the last two posts are about. I have read of it being broken elsewhere.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/sacred-geometry

I like math, but reading a page-long feat description just means I know it will bog down the game, even if it were balanced.