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Broken Rules in Pathfinder
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<blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6975164" data-attributes="member: 6775031"><p>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 - <em>everything</em> - 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.</p><p></p><p>The positive energy elemental is an example of a poorly-designed monster, regardless of who wrote it. It shouldn't have been allowed at the table in the first place. Once it's there, though, the GM has to deal with their decision to let it into the game, and they have a couple of options on how to go about that. Saying that the higher-up elementals are going to come beat you up for exploiting a loophole is a bad way of doing that; it's highly adversarial and borderline meta-gaming (in that they only go after the PCs who do this, without regard to the NPCs who would obviously have done this a countless times before). Better solutions would be to fix the creature so that it's not actually broken (have it deal radiant damage, like a wisp, that does extra damage to undead but doesn't heal living creatures), or wholesale retcon it (that never happened, positive energy elementals don't exist, your memory is playing tricks on you).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="The Crimson Binome, post: 6975164, member: 6775031"] 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 - [I]everything[/I] - 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. The positive energy elemental is an example of a poorly-designed monster, regardless of who wrote it. It shouldn't have been allowed at the table in the first place. Once it's there, though, the GM has to deal with their decision to let it into the game, and they have a couple of options on how to go about that. Saying that the higher-up elementals are going to come beat you up for exploiting a loophole is a bad way of doing that; it's highly adversarial and borderline meta-gaming (in that they only go after the PCs who do this, without regard to the NPCs who would obviously have done this a countless times before). Better solutions would be to fix the creature so that it's not actually broken (have it deal radiant damage, like a wisp, that does extra damage to undead but doesn't heal living creatures), or wholesale retcon it (that never happened, positive energy elementals don't exist, your memory is playing tricks on you). [/QUOTE]
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