I love your tool, it just gets a bit silly when placing a creature 4 levels above the party. The bar stays on Extreme instead of going black like if you add several of a weaker mob. It caused me some confusion on the first ten minutes or so when putting a creature 5 levels above and slapping the Weak template on it.

Good that it helps your game. I advocate for doing things manually because you get to know how the system works better but I also have a lot of free time as a student. Whatever suits you and yours better! :)

I don’t know.

I don’t know of any resources, but what I do is using skill actions. Athletics, Deception and Intimidation are what you’ll be mainly looking for because Athletics has a lot of fun stuff on it, Intimidation is Demoralize and Deception is Feint.

But never attack thrice, moving away is better even for meele and unintelligent monsters. If you look into animal fights videos you’ll see that, unless they’re grappling, they always do the back down-charge!!-back down-charge!! cycle as well. Even lions hunting larger prey do that.

I always build characters by hand in any TTRPG. It’s not complicated after you get the hang of it (after your first sheet).

I feel you.

On my table, I banned Alchemist, Summoner, Oracle, Psychic, Thaumaturge, Inventor and Kineticist. They are all more complex than the Wizard, which means “more complex than pratically a beginner box character”.

Some possibilities:

I had this problem with PCs that antagonized everything in the world whatsoever and got no allies. I realized it was directly correlated with the perception that, although I was not railroading them, I was GMing an adventure in railroad format (read: 99% of adventures in the market made after the release of dnd 3.5). In railroad format, the encounters are carefully balanced to always be winnable. The PCs act brazen simply because they know they’ll get away with it every time. Even if the consequences are nonphysical (you fought the Prince of Mendev, now the guards are hunting you), they know they’ll brush those consequences easily as well because the GM’s plot must continue. Which brings me to…

Railroad is the ugly word. No one will ever admit they are railroading and everyone has a different version of what “railroad” means. I recommend some reading of The Alexandrian blog and bankuei’s blog. They have the pretty radical definition of raiload. For both, railroad is when you run a prewritten plot. Alexander writes this in a very gentle manner like a pre-school teacher, Bankuei will accuse you to your face like a drill instructor.

I don’t agree with their definition of railroad, but I recommend you to read both nevertheless. I had this same problem, as I said before, and this was the solution: Stop running pre-written plots, as they were the reason for 80% of my woes in tables (the other 20% are dealing with lost players who don’t know how to play without being railroaded and players who think the GM is their fucking personal jester instead of another player with their own opinions and boundaries).

Not to nerf them needlessly.

I think it is silly. Should have been a heritage.

You will need to:

1. average the damage of the agile attack

2. average the damage of the non-agile attack

3. multiply both by their chance to hit (taking crits in consideration). You can find an average AC per level here.

On your reading of the rules: The agile weapon list has a lot of weapons that were used alongside bigger weapons irl (dagger, wakizashi, main-gauche). I assume your reading is correct.