[Pathfinder] Let’s build a cosplay character

This post would actually better suit a forum discussion, rather than a blog post, since it deals with a rules interpretation question. While sitting around and toying with new character ideas, I thought it’d be interesting to see to what extent I could manipulate the core Pathfinder ruleset in order to bring some rather outlandish or extreme character concepts to life. Now, I know I promised to explore an illusionist build first, but, today, this is just a minor rules discussion (not a complete character build), so I’m not really skipping out on the promised illusionist build.

I’ll be basing today’s rules discussion on an attempt to recreate Mifune, a character from the popular manga/anime Soul Eater. Wikipedia describes Mifune like this:

Mifune is a skilled swordsman, who quits as the bodyguard of a mafia family after saving Angela Leon, a young witch that they captured. He uses the Infinite One-Sword Style, which allows him to utilize a number of swords scattered around the battlefield. He generally carries around one or two large scabbards filled with katana and wrapped with caution tape saying “Keep Out”. He is able to precisely launch the swords out of the scabbard and often wraps the area with the tape. He can use swords as platforms, swing multiple swords at once, instantly discard one to pick up another, and his strongest ability allows him to cause a number of swords to float around his body.

To emulate his ability to throw katanas around (and make the build financially plausible – throwing enhancements to multiple swords would be quite expensive), I planned on using the Throw Anything feat, which reads:

Throw Anything (Combat)

You are used to throwing things you have on hand.

Benefit: You do not suffer any penalties for using an improvised ranged weapon. You receive a +1 circumstance bonus on attack rolls made with thrown splash weapons.

Normal: You take a –4 penalty on attack rolls made with an improvised weapon.

Sounds great, doesn’t it. However, the text for throwing weapons not designed to be thrown reads as follows:

It is possible to throw a weapon that isn’t designed to be thrown (that is, a melee weapon that doesn’t have a numeric entry in the Range column on Table: Weapons), and a character who does so takes a –4 penalty on the attack roll. Throwing a light or one-handed weapon is a standard action, while throwing a two-handed weapon is a full-round action. Regardless of the type of weapon, such an attack scores a threat only on a natural roll of 20 and deals double damage on a critical hit. Such a weapon has a range increment of 10 feet.

To me, Mifune sounds like somebody that could throw multiple swords per six second round. Now, here comes the confusing bits:

• Does a thrown non-throwing weapon count as an improvised weapon?
• Can the restriction of throwing only one non-throwing weapon per round be considered a penalty that can be negated by the Throw Anything feat?

I vote yes and yes. Now, what about the critical threat range and multiplier?

- jatori

by your powers combined

i have a few interests/hobbies and sometimes they combine, the most obvious example of this is that what i read/watch gets put into my dnd characters……..last week i created a 2 weapon 4e ranger called death the kid, all because we started watching soul eater ….she was even a little obsessed about symmetry and her bastard swords were called liz and patty, alas she had no great ‘here we move’, but still she rocked even in death when she became a ghoul….i think that my character for this weeks session will be black star, the assassin :p…………..my question is: does anyone else do this?

Fun, Sex & RPGs

As j has pointed out on prior occasions; I tend to be on the more perverted side of life. This is great for me, but can on occasion be a bit much for player groups. In my opinion, however, there is a level of fun sexuality that is accessible to mostly everyone and that can also be appreciated by mostly everybody.

So allow me to illuminate what I mean by example. And to do so I’ll have to cover a bit of background. The epic City of the Gods campaign that we’ve been discussing in recent posts is great ofcoz – but there have been a great number of other campaigns that we’ve had. One specific campaign took place in the rule-space of BESM (third edition, I think).

To those not familiar to it: BESM – Big Eyes Small Mouth – is an anime-style role-playing rule set. The rules are very open-ended with respect to genre; so anything from sci-fi undead mecha, to historic samurai, high-school love romance or just plain slice-of-life is readily implementable in BESM.

The particular BESM campaign I have in mind was a lot of fun – and, similar to the City of Gods, the sessions were run by a different GM each time (often the DM would be determined by a twist of fate, such as throwing a dice at the end of one session). The setting was (mostly) modern normal, with a twist. (If any of you have seen Excel Saga… that could more-or-less be it.) But the genre varied a bit, or a lot, with each DM/session. So one session might be a harem-anime, the next a cyber-crime investigation – just the characters were a constant.

Which made for great role-playing diversity; since often a character would be completely ill-built for the particular genre of session that was being played.

But I digress a bit much… to get back on track. Since we were doing a fun modern anime style environment, and we kind of thought of the sessions as “episodes”, and naturally anime tends to be a bit formulaic, so it was obvious to me that I had to DM the Beach Episode: the entire point of the session was the characters having an off-day at the beach. Some minor plot detail was thrown in as well, but 70% of the session was designed to merely be frolicking about.

This is also where the healthy fun sexy bits come in. (J, be thankful, I think that sentence will make the blog skyrocket on the Google searches.)

A lot of the fun was in creating stereotypical events on the beach that would have the typical anime hero get gushing nose bleeds. I believe it was pb that ended up changing into a good dozen or so different swimming costumes/bikinis in the course of the session (as each set would somehow be rendered unusable – and each new set was described in exquisite and loving and sexy detail by pb). Throw in the odd ballgames, watermelon hunting, ice scream and the other usual details and you got yourself a meaningless but very fun day at the beach.

Not to mention – put a bunch of erratic weird anime characters (with vastly differing personalities and abilities) on a beach, and it doesn’t take long for them to come up with a myriad of ways to entertain themselves and give the whole event a spin that is unique.

I think this kind of environment (the beach) is a perfect setting to instill a sense of sex in players, as the characters are confronted with their gender realities when everybody is running around in skin-generous beachwear. Sure, this isn’t romance – but that isn’t what it is about: sexyness is a momentary, fleeting aspect of RPGing; whereas romance has the benefit of slow, gradual unfolding over the course of a campaign.
Where eroticism can be readily instilled at mostly any time – romance is something that blossoms independent of any input. Possibly between player characters, or maybe between players and NPCs. I guess it is fine to fabricate a romance between two NPCs, but this is primarily a plot device or background story – when romance happens naturally between player characters (and possibly a NPC) then there is a sense of reality and a measure of severity that gives a subtle sense of gravitas to the gaming sessions. Or at least a bit of a soap opera.

…uhm… guess it’s time to finish the post – until next time, remember that succubi aren’t merely something to slay.

99 red balloons

enjoying the title? :p the post is entitled such as i am convinced that i must have had close to 99 characters or something like it as the only ones that stand out in my mind are the newer ones…….i know i’m a terrible player, i don’t have a little scrapbook of the characters i played from one to 99 :p in this post i’ll be touching on two things i wanted to blog about and didn’t really get to. …….the first is a sort-of response to something i saw on one of the blogs on the rpg bloggers list.

a female blogger had put up a post on how guys – read guy geeks and gamers – could find a girl like her – read geek and gamer. i found the post slightly offensive on behalf of the guys i know – most of whom are geeks. they don’t seem to have problems finding girls like them, or at least girls who are semi-interested or at least willing to put up with their “silly boy” habits. then i realised that the guys i know and game with have managed to find the girls that have latent geek ability………….laugh all you want at the phrasing, but think about it, think about your SO and her/his hobbies, could they be construed as geeky/nerdy in some way? i admit that there are guys that aren’t all happily coupled up, but it could be that way for 2 reasons: 1) they don’t want to be and 2)they are afraid of unleashing their playboy gene the second thing i wanted to blog about was my favourite character, but i think she deserves her own post :0

Ps. this is also the 99th post on the blog :0

beautiful boys are this country’s treasure

The screen shot above is from Sekirei an anime jatori and i have recently started watching. As with most other harem like anime there are pantie flashes galore and moments of extreme humour, such as the one above………the female character above comes across the beautiful boy while he is being chased buy some baddies leading to the intrepid lady to jump to his defense and say “Beautiful boys are this country’s treasure!”…….clearly she’s a bit of a fan girl :p

For those of you wondering how this fits in with gaming……..i’d say it fits in with the gaming lifestyle, as all the gamers i know watch anime