Recent content by grep

I wouldn't make it a spot check. Spot is with your eyes, not your nose. Make it an untrained wisdom check. If your characters really want to be good at smelling things, I would reccomend a "smell" ability, akin to spot and listen.

Try to invent situations where they /have/ to work as a team, or use special tactics to survive. Right off the top of my head, if you want them to use trip attacks, you could have them fighting on a narrow beam on top of a pool of acid or something, where being tripped would mean certain death...

I'm specifically talking about the darkmantle here, but it could apply to other monsters as well. The description for improved grab says that it can only use the ability on creatures at least one size category smaller than itself. This means that it can only use the ability on tiny creatures...

That reminds me of an unresolved issue in one of my games. My character was at 0 strength; all the life sucked out of him by a roper. The sorcerer ran up, and teleported me out of his grasp. Would the roper have the option of going along, if he was willing? DM said yes, players unanimously...

Quick draw doesn't allow you to sheath weapons as a free action so he'd still have to be dropping them.

I was thinking about how to make an anime style character with a big sword. Sort of like Inu-Yasha. Giving a monk martial weapon prof: bastard sword just didn't work right, but I finally figured it out with a monk/psychic warrior. As for nunchaku, how about a magical one? You can't get that...

People have given plenty of good ideas about how the merchants can defend their wares so far, so I won't give any more of those. But do remember that any merchant worth stealing from is going to have defenses against invisible thieves. I really don't think you have a problem. If the PCs want...

Personally, I like the "general downtime" rule (I think that is what it was called), basically, leveling takes 1 day per character level, but you don't need to pay for training or anything like that. This reflects the couple of days a character needs to refine his new sword technique in a...

That was then... That was then, and this is now. I can't speak for feudal Europe, but if you look at the wages of soliders in WWII, you'll notice a huge differences in salaries compared to what it is now. It was probably even worse back then, when the serfs were not much better than slaves...