DMing with Charisma

I had a rule of thumb for the capstone abilities: if a player read the ability I was trying to give them and their only response was “are you high?”, I did it right. Each capstone is ludicrously powerful, able to swing a battle all on its own. They’re basically custom 10th-level spells, atomic representations of the characters both by the dictionary definition of atomic and the fact that they’ll blow up an entire combat. With that in mind, I love this capstone. Of all the things I’ve written for D&D, this ranks among my favorites, alongside the healer class or spells like Grog’s audible profanity.

Angeline’s item is something like the opposite of Jace’s. Jace wanted to be good at one specific spell, but Angeline could end up with any spell in the book, so she needed an item that would complement almost anything and everything Pathfinder had to offer. Also, it had to be pretty. As if that wasn’t rough enough, Angeline is also the party’s smart guy by omission (Liam, the bard, is actually the chick, and Sarai, the scholar, is actually the big guy) but had exactly zero ability to perform that role. The solution I got was to ignore the build entirely and focus on the character. Angeline isn’t a sorcerer, she’s a magical girl, so I looked for neat magical girl powers and translated them into Pathfinder rules. That’s what I did the whole time, really, but here it stands out more than in other places.

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I ran the first draft of these items by each player, but I didn’t mail the entire group. I wanted everybody’s item design to take place in a relative vacuum. Each player knew the early levels I posted in March, but nobody knew how everybody else’s items progressed until they were all almost done. This wasn’t to avoid an arms race or prevent players from working together for ridiculous combos. Heck, I want ridiculous combos as long as they’re cinematic instead of blatant rules manipulation. But I thought it would be easier to get something each player wanted if they weren’t worried about how it would interact with anybody else. Balancing things was my job, not theirs. The versions posted here are the canonical item descriptions, so you’re finding out about this only slightly after the players themselves. I hope you’re proud.

Sarai wants gears. Her player asked for the ability to escalate when situations seemed especially dire, to have a well of power or resources she doesn’t tap until it’s time to disable her limiters. Pathfinder hates that, and it has no design space for characters getting stronger as the situation gets worse. I had a whole character build based on it in 3.5E and not a single thing in that build got ported to Pathfinder, so I just stole things from a previous edition. Sarai’s desperation mode is based on the alternate barbarian rage from the 3.5E Player’s Handbook II, and her limit break is the logical extension of it. Besides that all she really wanted some some extra accuracy so her big attacks hit more often, so I had a bunch of room to come up with weird abilities for a scholarly magic/fighter snake who worships a bug of camaraderie.

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One thing I do like about Pathfinder is that it goes out of its way to avoid dead levels, or points where a character gains no new abilities. I tried to mimic that in these items. At every level a player gains either a new ability or an improvement to an old one. It’s not always big and obvious, but it’s always there. I charted it to make sure.

Liam’s item was harder than everybody else’s. I had to make a healer and support character interesting, and I wanted to do it in a way I hadn’t before, so I couldn’t just steal things from the healer class I rewrote. Luckily, Liam’s player gave me a large list of things she wanted to see in the item, larger than any other player had. Unluckily, she then built several of those abilities into her leveling plan so I had to go back and redo a large portion of the item. But that forced me to get creative and look outside of Pathfinder for ideas, which was the explicit point of the entire exercise, so in the end I’m thankful for the inconvenience. It let me give Liam powers to fit both his focus in music and his role as the party’s chick without dwelling too hard on what the rules think a skald should be.

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If there’s a single running theme across all signature items, it’s that they’re objectively powerful. Consider today’s item, where the capstone ability is a more powerful, more useful version of time stop, a top-tier 9th-level spell. This is one of the few occasions where a player worried their item was too powerful, specifically because he could use it, damage his allies with something like inflict mass wounds, and give everybody three or four rounds to buff themselves while the enemy had to sit and watch. But the theme for this campaign is super-powered action anime. If I’m not giving the players bosses for whom they desperately need several rounds of preparation to have even a fighting chance, I’m not doing my job. The power level of these items isn’t a gift, it’s a warning.

Jace had one big ask: he wanted murderous command to be his signature spell, like Goku’s Kamehameha or Naruto’s Rasengan or Gon’s going on hiatus. The problem was making it flavorful and usable at higher levels. It’s a spell with a one-round duration that affects one enemy only if they fail a saving throw where the DC starts low and doesn’t scale. That’s fine in 5E, but in Pathfinder Number Party we had to ramp up what it did to keep it competitive. A lot of Jace’s neatest abilities come with an additional cost, and that’s intentional. I’m giving the players a lot of power but I’m also not stupid.

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