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Assuming you're playing 3.5, the defender gets a bonus on its Sense Motive check equal to its base attack bonus. It can actually get very hard to feint successfully at higher levels because of this.

Liberal application of the suspicion bonus to Sense Motive, mostly. There are more item and spells for Bluff, certainly, but Sense Motive has significant bonuses built into the skill description that you can use whenever it's plausible and important that an NPC would be suspicious. Plus, in...

Hmm... I think that's how I would do it, yeah.

As long as it only increases the base damage, maybe, though still too powerful, I think. If it also multiplies Strength damage bonuses and weapon enhancement bonuses to damage it's insane. If it multiplies dice-damage like sneak attack or skirmish it's just nutty-nutty-nutbar. More generally...

Depends on the critter and the level, really. At higher levels I'll typically just give monsters (especially NPCs!) a few inherent bonuses to stats just to keep them competitive or to shore up a weak point, like a Will save that's 14 points lower than the Fortitude save. When I do that, I...

I generally play wizards as having some kind of stock incantation for their spells, plus complicated hand gestures. Sorcerers just have to say something, to help them concentrate you know, and it doesn't have to be the same thing every time or even especially magic-y.

So you're saying I did not, in fact, ruin a motif? Huzzah! I was afraid I'd never be able to show my face around the philosophy department again. :p

Hey, I was one of the players in this thing! Credit where it's due and all that. :D Even if my big darn mouth did get us "documentarians" almost run out of town when a good liar was five feet away the whole time. :uhoh:

Hmm, sign me up for Morning Game 8 and Afternoon Game 4, please. Man, it's been a while since the last one! I'm looking forward to this.

A lot of times, though, and especially at higher levels, you don't even need a standard action. Inspire courage has no particular duration, so you can just start it up and maintain it until you get into a fight. If you have Subsonics, you can do this without alerting anyone to your presence...

I've been intending for a while to write up some minor incantations for day-to-day use in my fairly high magic setting, but so far haven't gotten around to it. I'm still surprised that nobody's written any more of the things, considering how cool and relatively high-profile they are (originally...

I... have no idea where these numbers are coming from. By my math they should be 78.75 ([15 * 3.5] * 1.5) and 105 ([20 * 3.5] * 1.5), respectively. I agree with your assessment of the Desert Wind school, though. That particular maneuver is so unwieldy as to be effectively useless - it bursts...

Even more than the epic feats being too weak in many cases (most of them, actually, in my opinion) is that a lot of them are boring. You're generally not getting any new class abilities at epic level, epic feats should let you do some cool and new for at least a vast majority of them. For that...

That's true, but "a few" (3-4) mages of 4-5 levels below you would also have an EL at or just below the level of the single mage they're almost-but-not-quite shutting down. And they have to ready actions, and they'll all die messily as soon as you do manage to get a spell off. Heck, past a...

I may have distorted his speech... In any case, don't forget that there's also an enemy cleric and a guy who could otherwise be using the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords to summon, IIRC, a greater earth elemental with maximum hit points. So I'd call it a wash at worst. Still, if I get through the...

Actually, I myself would be less likely to use this material than if it were generic Dragon stuff, since I'm not playing Oriental Adventures. I doubt I'm alone there.

So you think the harmonic chorus should still be in effect until the beginning of my next turn?

Actually I only use that many splat sources because it's basically impossible to build the kind of character I wanted just out of the core rulebook - a bard quasi-primary spellcaster focusing on sonic effects and metamagic. I could do it in the core, but the character would be pretty weak, as...

No, it's immune to stunning, a generally worse condition, and to mind-affecting effects, which includes daze and daze monster, but not to the status condition of being dazed per se. I don't think anything is straight-up immune to being dazed, actually, except perhaps for mindless creatures...

Yeah, I might feel bad about all that if I weren't having to deal with a mage 4 levels higher than me all on my lonesome... Hating on non-core material doesn't seem like a very fair criterion for making a ruling to me. I find AuraSeer's argument pretty convincing, though. Dang, unless someone...