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A lot of good things to think about. Ill be going the same route and making gunpowder complicated to produce (even by alchemical standards), and requiring scarce resources which requires careful handling to avoid being harmed by the substance. (Something like 4E's Orium metal from...

I want to run a Pathfinder game using firearms rules but I want to have in-game explanations for why they have not completely dominated international warfare, made fortifications and heavy armor useless, etc. While also allowing advanced firearms more or less as readily available as low- to...

I guess that skills which are truly complementary ought to be merged together. By complementary, I mean two (or more) skills which inseparably go together within a given adventuring niche (such as thievery) and which most characters occupying that niche (such as rogues) will want to pump up said...

Escape Artist is only useless in campaigns where GMs or players don't consider prisoner-taking a practical alternative to simply killing the opponent. If a clever GM manages to take every PC alive, you can bet everyone will high-five the one player who figured it couldn't hurt to dump a few...

When Meddling with skills you have to keep in mind what activities you want to emphasize and what actions are meant to be iconic for the game. Folding thiefly skills into one big tent is all nice and good but you sacrifice flavor for the sake of making the game mechanics "better". For this...

Looks like Ultimate Equipment just got added to Paizo's online SRD. Awesomeness shall now follow.

The general idea behind the system I posted originally was to treat each archetype as its own separate class co-equal with the 'null' archetype (class without archetype). Characters would be able to level up in archetypes, and even combine different archetypes of the same class. This way you...

What do you think of these house rules? This system is an attempt to make it practical for characters to reach beyond 20th level without getting absurdly powerful. This is done by essentially elevating archetypes to work almost like separate classes in their own right. In other words, all the...

I once ran a game under d20 Future rules which included D&D style magic(FX). In one encounter, the party were in pressure suits on a zero-atmosphere planet, and fighting bad guys (also in presure suits). The party FX-user gets the bright idea to simply cast Create Water _inside_ the enemies'...

I've made my games more immersive in the following ways: 1) Concealed and secret skill checks. Concealed checks are when the player knows his character is being tested, but may not immediately know the result (success or failure), the extent of the result, or the consequences of the result. I...

In My humble opinion, every spell should belong to at least one subschool and/or have at least one descriptor. Subschools and descriptors are good breeding ground for other things like magic items, other spells, class features, monsters, and so on. Keep up the good work.

This is also a player mindset issue. If a player is told, "If you go into such-and-such dungeon, you'll have to fight to fight a bunch of monsters," most will reply, "great, let's go" because (1) this is an acceptable and fun part of the game, and (2) there are tangible rewards for defeating...

This may sound somewhat vindictive, but how about any time the party gets through an encounter or challenge a little bit easier than you thought they should have? In the movies, you always hear the line: "that was too easy"and then the worse happens. And in your game, it should too. Even better...

This is a nice idea. When to add another die to the pool? Probably whenever you notice any of the players beginning to take for granted their characters' current health and safety. You don't want PCs acting like Shaggy and Scooby-Doo at every turn, but only when you pick up on some excessive...

312. Falchion's Crest: The surface of this falchion's blade remains continually cleaned and brightly polished throughout combat, allowing you to use it as a mirror to see around corners.

Returning to this discussion, I had the thought of basically enshrining the concept of "level dips" as a house rule. Firstly, figure out what 4E-style class category any given PF class would belong to: Leader, Striker, Defender, Controller. (We will not be using power sources.) Then, at 5th...

All I am saying is that any rule that involves a die roll is simply a useful abstraction of a more complicated process or event which has multiple possible outcomes. Hitting something with a sword Disabling a trap Surviving the effects of dehydration Constructing a working siege engine...

This is splitting hairs... "Exactly who is a foe depends on the invisible character's perceptions." This ought to preclude, for example, an elf caster trying to lie to himself that those orcs behind the door won't attack on sight, because he still knows the truth that orcs are generally nasty...

I'm glad you were able to say what I tried to say in my previous post, but in fewer words. For any that try to understand what we're getting at, think of Pathfinder's rules System as a basic language that describes how the laws of nature function in that universe. It is a mistake to try to...

If Pathfinder operated under real-world "laws of nature", you would not see spell effects manifest in integer increments, any more than you would see characters constrained to move around in 5-foot increments in the middle of a combat encounter. Having spell effects be dependent on class level...