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Dice roller gives option to counter bluff check with either spot or listen skill.
Pure wisdom check would be again unfair since you can't buff abilities even near to the level you can buff skills.

Simple WIS check would mean most people... well, what serbiris said. Since there's no way d20 +wis mod will beat a d20 +bluff ranks +cha mod +other bonuses from gear, feats, etc. Having Spot and Listen (which are useful skills to have in PvP) oppose it kinda means you end up at the opposite side of the spectrum, with the bluff user not likely beating those buffed up scores.

So, in conclusion, I'm with Yoss on this. There's no Sense Motive, so just lie and wait and see if the other party will call your bluff or not.

Manarethan wrote:

Rejoice, Council. I'm fairly certain its a WIS check to detect bluffs in-game, since we have no sense motive. At least, thats what the Dice roller said last I checked.

Well I don't know if that's fair, either. It should be a trained skill to provide people a chance to see through it. Otherwise we're at the opposite end of the spectrum, where people who take bluff just run rampant over other people.

Of course, this also doesn't take into account that some bluffs are harder to pull off than others (the -5, -10, -20 rule), but that's just nit-picking.

I don't mean to be a butt. I just think the game is heavily imbalanced away from socially-inclined characters, while people with no bluff skills in game (but plenty of social savvy OOC) are getting away with murder.

CouncilofAutumn wrote:

Yossarin wrote:

Sense Motive.

Personally, I like never rolling bluff in the first place. Just lie and let the player take the risk of calling the bluff.

The problem this raises is what about when people who have low/mediocre charisma and no skill at bluffing but are played by people who are very charismatic and skilled at bluffing, who end up bluffing better than people who invested ranks in bluff. All because they bothered to roll the skill. :/

I know. Which is where I say something stupid like I trust people not to do that and to play oblivious PCs as oblivious.

In a perfect world, Bluff and Persuade would be unavailable in RP servers. A "bluff check" would be wholly non-mechanical, accomplished (or not) purely through RP.

In a nonperfect world such as Amia, the best equivalent to Bluff vs Sense Motive is not Bluff vs anything, but rather Charisma vs Wisdom. If anyone were to ask me to respond in my RP to a mechanical bluff roll, I'd respond "sure, feel free to roll Charisma." Fortunately, nobody's ever asked me that, not even once in nearly three years here now.

Lizzie wrote:

In a perfect world, Bluff and Persuade would be unavailable in RP servers. A "bluff check" would be wholly non-mechanical, accomplished (or not) purely through RP.

In a nonperfect world such as Amia, the best equivalent to Bluff vs Sense Motive is not Bluff vs anything, but rather Charisma vs Wisdom. If anyone were to ask me to respond in my RP to a mechanical bluff roll, I'd respond "sure, feel free to roll Charisma." Fortunately, nobody's ever asked me that, not even once in nearly three years here now.

The problem with that line of thinking is that it doesn't allow people who aren't good at something to pretend that they're good at it. I can't cut a mind flayer in half with a sword, or incinerate a group of orcs, or teleport across time and space. But in D&D, I can. If someone wants to pretend they have a character who's good at bluffing, I'm going to let them roll the dice and pretend that it happened the way the dice state. Letting "pure" RP dictate the results of a social maneuver is actually just allowing OOC bias, when instead we should be rolling the dice and then reacting to it.

Like we do when we swing with a sword and chop off a monster's head, concentrate upon our spellcasting, offer our prayers to our gods, etc. There's plenty of room to role play in D&D. That's not the argument here. The argument is how comfortable we may have gotten with role playing social skills that our characters do not have (read: sacrificed so we can have 56 AB and saves in the 40s unbuffed yo!).

How do you mean? Rolling Charisma vs Wisdom allows for all that.

Lizzie wrote:

How do you mean? Rolling Charisma vs Wisdom allows for all that.

There's a difference between someone who's trained in bluff and someone who's just naturally charismatic, just like how there's a difference between someone who's muscular and someone with a high base attack bonus (trained in martial skills).

Sure, but there's a just as much of a difference between someone who's got keenly trained senses and someone who's good at discerning when they're being lied to. But the game doesn't allow us to recognize that distinction. Therefore any matchup of roll vs roll is going to be flawed to some degree. I think Cha vs Wis is a better representation of what's actually occurring than Bluff vs Spot/Listen. Still flawed, yes. But less so.

Lizzie wrote:

Sure, but there's a just as much of a difference between someone who's got keenly trained senses and someone who's good at discerning when they're being lied to. But the game doesn't allow us to recognize that distinction. Therefore any matchup of roll vs roll is going to be flawed to some degree. I think Cha vs Wis is a better representation of what's actually occurring than Bluff vs Spot/Listen. Still flawed, yes. But less so.

I've been arguing against the Bluff vs Spot/Listen comparison from the get go.

I think it should either be Bluff vs Bluff, Bluff vs Persuade, or something along those lines. It should take special effort to see through what it takes special effort to set up in the first place.

Agreed. I'd be totally on board with the next hak update (whenever that is) adding a true Sense Motive skill. But I doubt either that or implementing Bluff vs Bluff/Persuade is ever going to happen, if for no otber reason than the flood of rebuild requests that would immediately follow, from people who wanted to be able to invest in the "official" counter-bluff. Among the advantages of Cha vs Wis is that every character in the game already has a Cha and a Wis.

Lizzie wrote:

Agreed. I'd be totally on board with the next hak update (whenever that is) adding a true Sense Motive skill. But I doubt either that or implementing Bluff vs Bluff/Persuade is ever going to happen, if for no otber reason than the flood of rebuild requests that would immediately follow, from people who wanted to be able to invest in the "official" counter-bluff. Among the advantages of Cha vs Wis is that every character in the game already has a Cha and a Wis.

I just feel sad for the people who take bluff already.

I thought it was said in at least these three threads that the "social" skills of bluff/persuade etc were only useable against NPCs.

http://www.amiaworld.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=49602&p=817929&hilit

http://www.amiaworld.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=33968&hilit

http://amiaworld.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=68964&hilit=persuade

I agree with you, Council. It's rather awkward playing characters who have strengths and weaknesses you don't, and knowing you can't represent them adequately. It's also part of the charm of role-playing, I guess.

I may be boring, but I've deliberately chosen skills for my PCs that I can pull off convincingly. I can play a priest and a scribe because I study theology and medieval history, and because writing speeches or essays is easy. But when it comes to being a warm, compassionate and helpful listener, confessor and shepherd for the flock, I'm out of my comfort zone. That's both interesting and challenging. Luckily I haven't invested a lot of points into Charisma and Persuade, so I can resort to a comical blunder when necesary.

I'm not entirely sure how good I should pretend to be at bluffing, persuading and other social skills. The concept of my character requires it, but I've avoided putting points into it since I'm not good enough to show their worth. So I've figured I'll stick with a low value and bluff or persuade to the best of my ability when appropriate. If pressured, he'll start sweating or stammering to show he's nervous, but it's hard to justify a smart person making unconvincing arguments even without those social skills. (Then again, he stammers and sweats even in quite ordinary circumstances, so figuring out the reason isn't straightforward.)

This is going pretty off-topic, so here's my opinion on rolling: I'd make my case by freeform role-playing (as appropriate for the PC) and then roll to show my investment in the skill. I don't expect a counter-roll and I don't even care how the d20 lands. All that's relevant is to show this character is a good liar or a smooth negotiator by virtue of his skill points, and others can react accordingly. At least that's how I treat other people's rolls: I try to respect their investment and play dumb even if they get a bad roll. (That is, unless intentional ignorance somehow discredits an important and serious story we're making.)

<.< I never roll a Bluff check with Zelly...

[Edit] To expand on why: Why would I want to roll a Bluff check on a well-constructed lie and by doing so OOC'ly inform the other player that what my character just said is, in fact, a lie? The webs of deceit in a persistent world such as Amia work best without OOC flags saying "Hey! Here's a perfect opportunity for you to accidentally metagame later! This is a lie!"

CouncilofAutumn wrote:

The problem with that line of thinking is that it doesn't allow people who aren't good at something to pretend that they're good at it. I can't cut a mind flayer in half with a sword, or incinerate a group of orcs, or teleport across time and space. But in D&D, I can. If someone wants to pretend they have a character who's good at bluffing, I'm going to let them roll the dice and pretend that it happened the way the dice state. Letting "pure" RP dictate the results of a social maneuver is actually just allowing OOC bias, when instead we should be rolling the dice and then reacting to it.

Like we do when we swing with a sword and chop off a monster's head, concentrate upon our spellcasting, offer our prayers to our gods, etc. There's plenty of room to role play in D&D. That's not the argument here. The argument is how comfortable we may have gotten with role playing social skills that our characters do not have (read: sacrificed so we can have 56 AB and saves in the 40s unbuffed yo!).

A fair point but this OOC bias isn't something to get rid of unless we want to forgo the social aspect entirely and reduce conversations to objectives+contests or dialogue trees or something. This is true for P&P too I've noticed - playing the party face *requires* that you can to some extent plan and manoeuvre social situations. Sure, there will be times when you can wave around your numbers and brute-force through a problem but most of the work is in actual player thought and skill rather than character. In NWN the only difference is that the brute force option isn't reliable due to lack of enforcement. For me immersion really breaks down when someone blurts out a terrible lie or a lame attempt at intimidation and they expect me to abide by their ridiculous skill roll. This is the limit of roleplaying. We're limited only by the system when it comes to physical capabilities - including magic basically essentially it amounts to the same - but we can only be a "best fit" for the mind. The same applies for character vs player intelligence. A wizard with 26 base int should be able to devise perfect plans but none of us are capable of that, so we kind of have to rationalise why they're being surprised/making mistakes etc (the usual argument goes that their intelligence is as a result of extreme focus and not general smarts, although that can't always hold).

I do get what you're saying about how it goes the other way - people with 0 social skill ranks being capable of the aforementioned social manoeuvring is about as bad as the earth genasi orc with 6s and 8s for mental scores devising Wellingtonian battle plans (shut up that's totally a word) because the player stole them from the interne came up with them. But well that's the crappy system we're stuck with, made worse by the above disjunct when it comes to assuming a character's mental faculties. I feel sad for the people who took bluff too but hey, DMs seem to show kindness to them in certain events at least?

Why the hate on teleport spells/effects when we've got Shadow Jump and Flight?

Take that one here, or it may go on a while.

My problem with the rolls for bluff and a counter roll is now the dice are two fold.

A.) It's immersion breaking.
B.) It's no longer role playing, it's dice rolling.

Every time I have to break character go go "Lets flip to inventory page eight, click the dice widget, click on myself... attributes... charisma..." immersion is broken and the interaction looses something. I have to switch out of my character's mind set and back into a far more technical one. At that point, the game switches from people interacting and having a discussion into a giant spread sheet filled with modifiers and probability equations. At this point, I start to cease interacting as Dominik the Wizard in over his head to Erroch the guy trying to beat the system. I do that enough with work and other games. I role play to get away from system and immerse myself in story. If I'm forced to use a system, I will do my damnedest to win at it. I can't help it, it is part of who I am. If I can stay in character and immerse myself, I forget about the system and the statistics.

Now, along with that, once that bluff check hits, I know in my head, you're now lieing to me. This has two effects. One, on a subconcious level I'm probably taking into account the deception. I'm not perfect, no matter how much I try, all question and doubt is gone, and that will probably influence actions even if I don't realize it. Also, in the situation that the roll fails, even if I -already- knew the statement was false, I feel like a dick for not rolling with it. To you, I've just failed the roll and ignored it unless I further break character to explain why I'm ignoring the results fo the roll. Alternatively, You may have me completly convinced in character, and then the bluff check hits, and lets say I win the roll. Now suddenly, I have to edit what my character was thinking and make up some reason -why- I knew you were bluffing.

Most importantly to me, it removes choice. If forced to deal with these bluff checks, I can no longer choose how MY character would react to the conversation. It's now down to the luck of the dice.

Contrary to popular belief, not all of us play this game to win. Most of us (I hope) are trying to play our characters as true to themselves as possible. Once you replace that choice of reaction and the choices in a characters decision making process with a die roll, we may as well just stop talking and play rock paper scissors.

I think Cha vs Wis is still good for when you do need a simple brute force attempt. It represents the intangible, visceral feeling you get when talking to certain people, the qualities we can't represent in text and emote. It should work, provided that both parties are good with it and the result is handled well. All the roll would really imply is that they speak with a force that can't be ignored by the listener - either sounding honest, or forceful, or just plain *charismatic*. But that's just how I would handle it.

BLUFF in particular

they

They

they

appropriately

(or send it in a Tell to Skeptic)

(Seems like everyone already either doesn't know or forgets they exist, anyway.)

SOCIAL SKILLS and DICE ROLLS

(or RPS, or any other result-determining-mechanism)

develops

That is role playing

(That even works for the role playing that happens in the bedroom. Hurr hurr.)

LetumLux wrote:

SOCIAL SKILLS and DICE ROLLS
asd

I tell Ashra she should give me all her money/clothes/jewelry then roll a persuade check of 89. What do you do?

Cool, do it in game. Context matters. Let's find out.

Is there lore on where a familiar goes when it isn't summoned or is that up to the caster?

"Summoning" of familiars is lurely an NWN invention. In PnP, your familiar just hangs around with you all the time, or stays wherever you tell it to. There's no lore on that (at least, not that I've ever heard of) because it's not a thing that any source other than NWN would have ever had to consider.

Lizzie wrote:

"Summoning" of familiars is lurely an NWN invention. In PnP, your familiar just hangs around with you all the time, or stays wherever you tell it to. There's no lore on that (at least, not that I've ever heard of) because it's not a thing that any source other than NWN would have ever had to consider.

So me summoning my skeleton out of an urn makes sense? Or is it in its normal form at all times?

I'd love to see some homebrew lore for familiars and animal companions that explains the different mechanic. Especially since the NWN familiars are much beefier than the PnP ones anyway. Then again, I've seen a lot of clever ways to explain it when it's left to the individual spellcaster. I RPed my elf's panther as being a disembodied presence in his subconscious until he used a bit of magical energy giving it a physical body of shadostuff. Hackums had a wooden marionette turn into his mage's pixie familiar.

Mine kept himself busy torturing soulbags within the Iron City of Dis until he was brought back to do a wizard's bidding through a calling.

TL:DR Ninja's stuff: YOU GET TO PICK!

We're a relatively high-magic setting/server, so I don't think it's unreasonable that every caster has their own magical Pokéballs. There are dimensional pockets like Bags of Holding which can store stuff, so I'm going to role-play storing my familiar in one. That works for a flying eye construt, but I guess it's a little cruel if you have a cat.

serbiris wrote:

It's just too broken to actually bother with the dice on this, dude. Either it's opposed by spot which is extremely useful mechanically and therefore most people will beat a modest investment or you're dealing with one of the insane few people who max bluff at 100 and can tell you they didn't stab anyone while holding the bloody knife and knifed corpse in their hand and get away with it.

I agree with serbiris. This is also why you do not see any murder/mystery on Amia. A majority of players don't realize the investment in a mechanically useless skill, and will either immediately roll against it with their l33t 100+ spot, or (sometimes subconsciously) metagame it. Yes, you can wait until someone calls your bluff before you roll, but then eventually everyone starts calling you out, then it becomes pointless.

Also, pretty much the same thing can be said for the Search skill, for example, it'd be pretty cool to see a PC Cordor guard who invested in Search so he/she could look for clues like an investigator. But, it's a mechanically useless skill that will most likely never be used because someone could just take spot instead. (Sure you can see traps with search, but that barely counts!)

wolfurt wrote:

This is also why you do not see any murder/mystery on Amia.

Whaaat? I feel like this is all I do sometimes. As for the rest, I've had my maxxed out Search save the group many, many times in DM events.

Cerpin Taxt wrote:

Lizzie wrote:

"Summoning" of familiars is lurely an NWN invention. In PnP, your familiar just hangs around with you all the time, or stays wherever you tell it to. There's no lore on that (at least, not that I've ever heard of) because it's not a thing that any source other than NWN would have ever had to consider.

So me summoning my skeleton out of an urn makes sense? Or is it in its normal form at all times?

I just play it as my mage calls for the familiar and thus is appears on screen. Like Marcus' pseudo is flying around chittering and such off screen and Lucious' panther is just roaming around nearby doing panther things.

NinjaClarinet wrote:

wolfurt wrote:

This is also why you do not see any murder/mystery on Amia.

Whaaat? I feel like this is all I do sometimes. As for the rest, I've had my maxxed out Search save the group many, many times in DM events.

<3

Quote:

Generic Summoner

This is a widget which allows you to summon a weak, generic creature for an unlimited duration with f_voice functionality which can be combined with the Summon Reskin (detailed below). This is perfect for mundane pets (such as dogs, birds and so on), as it is a cheaper option than a bottled companion and can speak directly, unlike the bottled companion. The total price of both the Generic Summoner and Summon Reskin is 10 DCs - we only charge once.

What all about the Generic Summoner can be customized? Name, portrait, bio?

As mentioned in that quote, you combine it with the Summon Reskin to customise it. So read the Summon Reskin section to find that out.

Oh, I thought that was an optional clause; it can be, rather than it must be.

Can classes that can't normally summon creatures still utilize the Generic Summoner?

Yep. That's the idea of it!

Awesome, thanks!

Where do posts about typos on the website go? I've noticed them in the past, but I made the mistake of posting them in the module typo thread, which I imagine the administrators don't always get a chance to look at.

It's fine in there. Pretty sure I've corrected every typo which was posted in there at some point.

Thanks.

I was tweaking my character builder spreadsheet to incorporate some of the changes since I last actually built a character here (2010?) and I noticed that "pixie" wasn't on the list anymore.

Has that subrace been removed? Not that I'm planning on building one, I'd just like to get this thing complete one day.

viewtopic.php?p=1157903#p1157903

Update 4.13e wrote:

The pixie subrace has been disabled. This will not affect the small amount of pixie PCs already present on the server. Note that fey can still be requested, but they will be asked to use the feytouched subrace and are subject to the same high standards of submission as pure celestials, demons and devils, as they too are alien, immortal creatures.

Should we look forward to Chultan being disabled too?

Bini wrote:

Should we look forward to Chultan being disabled too?

Why?

Chultan and pixie were not even on the same planet in terms of balance. Pixie stealth was game-breaking, and encouraged people to try and make 6-inch ninjas.

Chultan can't even be roleplayed correctly on Amia. Their favored class is Ranger and yet if you make a Ranger Chultan you can't draw divine spells from Ubtao. It should just be removed so that folk don't have to create contrived stories, like any of my Chultans, to abuse the +2 Dex -2 Cha.

I'd say it's more that pixies are too weird for players to be put in the same category as the other "approved with a good request" options like snow elf, vs stuff like celestials/fiends which were all "approved if sufficient number of minds are blown".

Because even pixie stealth can't beat a spotter cleric, or bioware TS.

Yup. Chultan needs to go bye bye.

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