Kor I have been looking at the Max Dex and Combat Expertise issue I reported above. On the Arms_DATA tab, cells DT7 to DT12, where it is calculating the appropriate Max Dex bonus to apply, it checks armour worn and shield used, however I can find no reference made to the weight load value derived in cell F667 on the Stats_DATA page. Regarding the spurious penalty, equal to the bonus you recieve from combat expertise, the problem appears to be in cell DT19 of the Arms_DATA page. I don't know why this cell is here (it's Friday afternoon and I have had a liquid lunch so the logic for its existence is beyond me at the moment), but there is an error here. I have a hunch it should be =cell_bonusesDATA_AC-DT17-DT16-DT15-Bonuses_DATA!G19 but I don't really follow what is going on. Cheers Alan
High Kor My 1st level dwarven fighter has been playing around with the sheet. When I load up to medium or heavy loads (after selecting the option to have items affect enc), although it applies the correct skill check penalties for the loads, it does not affect my Max Dex, allowing my +4 bonus to AC from an 18 Dex to still apply in both cases. I cannot see the dwarven fighter favoured class bonus of +1 to CMD vs trip/bull rush applied to the sheet anywhere after I select it. Is this still to be done? Finally, when selecting combat expertise, it adds the required dodge bonus AND a penalty to the AC calculation, leaving your AC no better off (and actually worsening your touch AC). CMD is being calculated correctly. I'll try and have a look later on to see where the issues lie, but I thought I would flag these up for you. Cheers Alan
Pete Same thing happened to my group in Legacy of Fire when the rogue muffed saving vs elemental fire damage and rolled a 1 for the necklace's fire save. We all laughed, and then we pretended it did not happen (I allowed the use of a couple of hero points to make this so). IMHO you did the right thing. Everyone will talk about that moment for ages.
Teamwork! My lot? You must be joking. Thanks for the input. I now have a better handle on how things should pan out if they do the take-off-and-attempt-to-nuke-it-from-orbit routine. I doubt very much they are going to hold on to it after an incident involving the rogue, said necklace and a failed save vs fire elemental flame attack ..... but you have to prepare just in case.
My party of pyromaniacs and mayhem makers have got their hands on a necklace of fireballs, and I just know that this will crop up. So, the RAW seem (to me) to suggest that this tactic will not work. It states that the spheres must be detatched by the user and thrown. It also states that when the wearer of the necklace fails a save vs magic fire, the necklace must make a save (at +7) or explode. So, what if you throw a full necklace at the BBEG? I'm thinking of ruling that one sphere (the biggest) goes off as normal. Then the necklace needs to save (at +7 vs a 14). Good idea. Bad idea? Cheers Alan
Character: TPK (technically)
After having collected the necklace of fireballs, the party end up fighting the fire elementals at the entrance. The party rogue (wearing said item) botches a save vs the elemental's burn attack. He then botches the items save vs fire. The rogue's player then works out that the whole party has to eat 29d6 of fire. After laughing hard and long, the table allowed the rogue the use of a Hero Point to prevent him from burning in the first place. The rogue quietly ditched the 'necklace of Suicide' whilst no one was looking before carrying on.
Unfortunately for the squishies, they only have an AC of 11 and a CMD of 12. Seeing as the fight will almost certainly take place on a small island of rock floating on a deep lava pool, dragging the players to a firey doom seems almost inevitable. Still, we have not yet had a death by lava in the group, so it will be unique. Death by boiling bubble, we had quite a few of those years ago. Lava, not yet.
So a salamander's tail slap does does 2D6+1 plus 1D6 fire damage if it hits. It MAY then attempt to establish a grapple as a free action because of the grab special ability (at -15 on the roll if it does not want the grappled condition). Furthermore, it causes an additional 2D6+4 plus 1D6 fire damage WHEN it establishes a grapple because of the constrict ability. Please, for the sake of my players, tell me I have got this wrong and explain to me how it does work. I keep reading the passages in the Bestiary and come to this conclusion every time. If I have not made an error, I take it the damage for the constrict ability is only ever applied when a grapple is established, and not every round. Cheers Alan
Thanks for all the answers. I think I understand the RAW situation now (loads of rolls) with a possible increased to the DC of the save after a failure. However, I liked the doubling suggestion of kenmckinney, and shall be invoking Rule 0 to use that. It seems more straight forward to me. Now I need to go and apologise to all my players for getting poison so badly wrong and applying the damage for each failed save. (No wonder they now fear giant vermin).
Talonne The +2 adjustment you quote, is that a standard pathfinder adjustment to deal with multiple exposures to the same ability. In other words, if am hit with 4 identical poison arrows, is it +6 to the save DC but only ever one application of damage, rather than save four times and apply damage for each failure? I seem to have missed this reference in the rules. Cheers Alan
Does he have to make a save against the stench ability for each one? (And therefore does the DM have to keep track of which trogs he has saved against?) OR Does he save once, but against a higher DC? (Which is far more DM friendly) I am hoping that somewhere I have missed something that makes the latter case valid. Cheers Alan
I have sitting on the wall, beside my game table, a 36" flat screen hooked up to my mac mini media server. I can make quite reasonable battle maps using CC3 from profantasy (although printing them can be expensive). Whilst clearing away the last session's figures, maps etc, I looked at the TV on my wall and though to myself there has to be something easier than this. So, what software do people recommend I use for a VTT to support face to face play. The priority is displaying maps and moving characters about. Lighting and spells effects would be nice too. I am not that much of a tech (it took me forever to get to grips with CC3), so in any replies, please assume I know nothing. I have at home the mac mini and a PC with a reasonably fast wi-fi network.
I am running Howl of the Carrion King with 6 in the party. They are an unoptimised bunch with little or no appreciation of game tactics. We are using the hero point system from the APG. They are killing the mooks (I am adding 50% more mooks to any encounter), but are being battered by the named monsters. Which is odd, as I thought they would have no problems due to the shift of the action economy in their favour. I had intended to advance all named monsters, but I am afraid if I did that they would all be dead.
I have just wrapped up the Battlemarket from Howl of the Carrion King with 1" scale maps printed on a monstrous plotter (this thing literally can print wall sized maps). The only limit to this wondrous device is as you blow up the PDF the quality begins to drop. It made running the boss fights so much fun (especially as PCs were tossed off the balcony back to the ground floor). As an aside, these things are no use to me any more and take up far too much space (according to my wife). I paid nothing to print these (the plotter is an asset in the department where the party cleric works) and I would happily recycle them, although they have minor game damage (pizza and tea stains, as well as a corner having been nibbled by my infant son). Unless doing this is a big no-no for some reason. Cheers Alan
Hello Kor I do not think a small one-handed crossbow equals a hand crossbow by the RAW although the logic behind that train of thought isn't bad. Having to take a feat to use a small one-handed crossbow in one hand IMHO is not necessary in this case. You will suffer a -2 to hit due to size penalty plus an additional -2 to hit from firing a light crossbow one handed. That is a -4 even before we look at TWF silliness. I do not see any exploit here and I think it keeps the value of the Hand Crossbow EWP. As for bows, I would take a rather harsh view and say, NO, a bow not sized for you cannot be used. I have absolutely no archery experience to back this assertion up (unless you include hopeless attempts to win teddybears for my wife at a fair). I say this only because I am an old school GM of 30 odd years who is just mean that way and I doubt very much that the RAW would support me! Anyway, just my tuppence. Cheers Alan
Kor I have been playing with the sheet (with the include Enc option ticked). It calculates the speed and maximum run speed fine. What I cannot get it to do is to apply the load penalties to skill checks and Max Dex for medium and heavy loads. What am I doing wrong? I have also noticed that the Sacred Conduit trait is not adding 1 to the save DC of the Channel power. Finally something came up about weapons (I could not really post without mentioning them could I?) Possibly more of a rules interpretation than a bug. Should a small warhammer become a light weapon for the purposes of two weapon fighting calculations? Paizo have kindly dropped one into the first Legacy of Fire adventure and working out how it works causes my player's brains to bleed. I think it should be considered light, but I may be getting the rules wrong (again)? Anyway, I could not work out a way of forcing a weapon to become light. Is there currently a way? Cheers Alan
Kor Just to let you know I have been using this sheet for my Legacy of Fire Campaign and it is such a time saver. I cannot thank you enough for all the effort you have put in. Something has come up that I did not notice at first. Now that we are a few sessions in, the PCs have picked up lots of loot and a couple are now on Medium Encumberance (something we tend not to get during the creation process). The ACP and Max Dex penalties for Medium (or Heavy) encumberance (from Table 7-5, p171 of the Core rules) are not figuring. I popped the bonnet of the sheet to see if it was a typo somewhere, but I cannot find any reference to them anywhere (perhaps my Excel Fu is not good enough). I have created a simple work around using a tally of the Load values shown in cells E389 to E389 on the Stat_DATA page, a couple of new definitions and two tweaks elsewhere, but I thought I would not waste time posting it in case you have already put this in somewhere. Cheers Alan
Kor My half-orc fighter is now having a problem with the tally for the weight of his equipment. If I just add equipment via the Items sheet my enc tallies correctly. However, when I start adding weapons to the weapons columns on the arms sheet, it seems to be deducting the weight of the weapon from my total Enc? (Adding armour or shields on this sheet does not effect my final enc). The culprit for this anomaly seems to be cell FF24 on Arms_DATA tab. I cannot work out why you have the 'Modified weapon weight' section of this sheet so I cannot offer a solution. Just thought I would flag this for your attention. By the way, I really like what you have done with the new spells layout. Cheers Alan
Hi Kor I had a half-orc fighter wearing chainmail have a -4 penalty applied to his acrobatics skill for jumping. Going into the sheet I found the cell that was responsible, Skills_DATA2 BS7. My understanding of the rules (and I accept that I may be wrong here) was that it was your BASE land speed that affected your jumping, not your land speed as modified by armour and load. If the latter was the case then you would suffer a double whammy of speed modifier and ACP, which seems a little harsh for me but YMMV. If I am correct then I think all references to cell_statsDATA_LANDspeed in this cell should be changed to cell_bonusesDATA_LANDbase. Cheers Alan
Kor I was doing more messing around with a 1st level Wizard and have come up with a work around for the Hand of the Apprentice special ability. It involved adding this ability to the list of Feats that can be applied to a weapon (list_armsDATA_feats on the Arms_DATA tab). I decided to have it display conditionally by putting the following into cell CR11 and redefining list_armsDATA_feats to include this cell =IF(ISERROR(MATCH("Universal",cell_classesDATA2_wizardschool,0)),"","Hand of the Apprentice") I then added two rows to Weapon 1 on the Arms_DATA tab, one in the Attack Modifier box beneath the dervish dance feat, and one in feats box below Rapid Reload. I then entered in one of the new cells, P146, =IF(ISERROR(MATCH("Hand of the Apprentice",O$105:O$107,0)),0,1) and put this in another new cells, P135, =IF(AND(P146=1,P6="melee"),cell_intmod,-99) Finally I changed cell P129 to =IF(P$4="","",MAX(P130,P131,P134,P135)) The seemed to add INT modifier to attack rolls at the appropriate time. Alan
Kor My first level wizard is not proficient with unarmed strikes, rays, and both kinds of touch attack. I thought all characters were proficient with these by default? Adding them to cell Bg18 on the classes_DATA tab would solve this. By the way the sheet has worked very well for my group, turning character creation into a breeze. Cheers Alan
Ok Kor Here is another one for you. I was statting up a cleric and noticed that the spell DCs on the Spelllist tab were returning an error. I looked into it and found the logic in cell M80 contained the following IF statement that I think was the reason an error value was being returned +IF(K80=10,0,K80-n$64) If I removed this from the cell it would calculate the save Dc as expected. I could not work out what this bit of the logic was for? Cheers Alan
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For reference:
Having Bulwark and Laminar on the same armor with no drawbacks aside from the standard Heavy Armor speed penalty was always good. But given how much the Guardian wants to dump Dex and has so many of their abilities tied to their armor it might border on outright nerfing yourself not wearing it if you play that class. If you don't like the aesthetic. Too bad. Also does anyone else find it strange that O-Yorori is just Full Plate but Better and didn't get a drawback trait in the Treasure Vault Remaster?
Once again Paizo has opted to put out news on its social media but not its own website or forums. Bluesky Link Apparently someone is going to roleplay one of the Iconics with a Vtuber model while they play video games.
So for people who haven't heard it turns out that Echolocation is a skill humans can learn and teach. That sounds like something that would be useful to adventurers. From what I've gathered: There's passive echolocation that uses ambient noise. There's active echolocation where the user relys on things like clicking their tongue or tapping their feet. Now for a starting point we have the level 1 Awakened Animal ancestry feat Natural Senses that grants 10 feet of Precise Echolocation as an option. As well as the level 5 Beastkin ancestry feat Greater Animal Senses that grants 30 feet of Imprecise Echolocation. Finally we have the human Ancestry Feats General Training and Advanced General Training that imply General Feats and Ancestry Feats are considered roughly equivalent in power. So the Homebrew seems fairly straightforward. Basic Echolocation General Feat 1
Advanced Echolocation General Feat 3 (Would 7 with an upgrade be better?)
This splits the difference between the two existing Ancestry Feats. Given the precedent of giving Deaf Characters the Sign Language Skill Feat for free it would make sense to be able to have echolocation as a blind character from level 1. Something like: As an optional rule if your character is Permanently Blind at level 1 they can take Basic Echolocation for free and have the option of trading their level 1 ancestry feat for Advanced Echolocation as well. The real world version of this uses human audible sound unlike say a bat's ultrasonic echolocation and is a conciously used skill. Giving it a Concentration Free Action to turn on and a penalty to stealth checks would likely fit. But would that be too fiddily or make the feats too weak? Other opinions? Sources: Also I remember in the mid 2000s to early 2010s there was a story about an ATV racer who could use passive echolocation from his and competitor's engine noise so well he could use it to race at over a hundred miles an hour. Implying that yes if you get good enough it can be predcise and fast enough to use in combat. But I can't find it. Anybody have any better luck with Google?
So there's all kinds of things on the internet that have potential to get a player or GM's mind spinning with ideas. If you find something that made you think "hey I bet I could use that in a game." Post it here. For the monster homebrewers: What is over a hundred tons, lived in shallow water where even PCs in a non-aquatic campaign could run into it and is carnivorous? Meet Perucetus Colossus For PC inspiration and character artists: It's pretty common knowledge that in the time periods that inspired fantasy roleplaying pretty much everyone carried a knife of some kind. Have you put any thought into what kind your character carries? What does your character's dagger say about them? Eat cheese or die, perhaps?
So for people who haven't heard the news Paizo has determined that it isn't feasible to salvage the Drow from the OGL mess. There's an ongoing argument about if they've been retconned from existence, but either way Paizo is never publishing anything about them again. Check out The-Magic-Sword's writeup for a summary of the whole Darklands Panel. Since they're gone for legal reasons and not story ones that means they can't be used in Starfinder either. Which is messy because Apostae and it's mysteries is a pretty big Pact Worlds subplot. An entire planet in the Pact Worlds system just not being mentioned ever again probably isn't a viable solution. How do we think the Starfinder team is going to sqare the cirlce? Are the Drow going to dig too greedily and deeply and get wiped out the same way the Ilee were?
I keep getting this error message every other page: Error Message wrote:
I'm wondering if it's my internet or the website.
My understanding is that a spellcaster piloting a mech has no line of effect to the outside and so can't use 90% of their spells. Given that the complaints that starship combat had nothing for spellcasters to do ultimately lead to mystical weapons and the magic officer position it seems odd that mechs have nothing equivalent.
My thought process: Champions are a really popular class. Adventure Paths are designed to reach 20 and have many sessions at a high level. Celestial Form is a really tempting feat for all champions from both a mechanics and flavor perspective. Said feat explicitly says: Celestial Form wrote: You take on a celestial countenance, appearing like a type of celestial who serves your deity; for example, as an angel, you would gain a halo and feathery wings. Hence the thread title question is soon to be quite relevant for a lot of parties. Another thought is how do such champions fit in with the rest of the celestial host? All other celestials of comparable power to a level 18 champion slowly worked their way up the ranks over millennia. Suddenly having a peer who is from a life experience perspective practically a newborn infant by their standards seems like it would be disconcerting.
For Reference: Pantheon, Godclaw My understanding of worshiping a Pantheon is that the worshiper picks one patron deity from it as their primary so in the case of conflict between edicts and anathema, they take priority. But if a situation arises where the patron deity has nothing to say the other gods' teachings still have equal weight. Abadar, Irori, and Torag don't care that much about the things Iomedae and Asmodeus care about while the two of their teachings come into conflict almost all the time. For example, a follower of the Godclaw has Abadar as their patron deity. During a fight a wounded foe attempts to surrender. That's something Abadar doesn't really care about but Iomedae says fight with justice and honor which includes accepting a genuine surrender but Asmodeus says granting mercy is an insult to his creed. (They aren't an "enemy of your people," so Torag doesn't care either way). His choice of patron deity appears to be irrelevant and he's in just as much a dilemma if he didn't have one at all. So it appears that the only way to have a functional PC who worships the Godclaw is to take Iomedae or Asmodeus as your patron. Is there something I'm misunderstanding?
To give appropriate context first I need to set up my understanding of how you're supposed to set DCs for lore skills. As I understand it the intention from Paizo is that the more specific a Lore is the lower a DC the GM is supposed to set when a circumstance to use it comes up. For example, a group of adventurers is in Ustalav and have learned the mastermind of the scheme they are attempting to thwart is a Vampire Noble. They aren't under any pressure at the moment forcing specific exploration activities so the GM rules they can all try to recall knowledge. The Vampire is 10th level so he sets the master check as Religion with a target DC 27. The first PC doesn't have Religion but does have Society and is from Ustalav in his backstory. He argues that since the undead nobility is such a big part of Ustalav's history there's a chance he's heard of this guy. The GM agrees but decides that using a lateral skill like this would be very hard so sets the Society DC to 32. The second PC has Undead Lore which is even more specific than Religion so the GM sets the DC for him as 25. The third PC was envisioned as a vampire hunter and has Vampire Lore. With an even more specific skill, the GM gives him a target of DC 22. The fourth PC has Clever Improviser which says it allows him to treat any untrained skill as trained. PC 4 says he wants to use it for Vampire Lore. The DCs in this example are secret but PC 4 knows more specific lore = lower DC. RAW would appear to allow it. But a Clever PC can in principle use the most specific Lore possible in any given situation. Effectively making them as good or better than the specialists more often than not. Thoughts?
WIRED video on Disco Clam vs. Mantis Shrimp So I was inspired by the above video to try out the monster creation rules. Giant Disco Clam Creature 8
I based the Flasing Aura on the Medusa's Gaze but with different Conditions. Any notable mistakes?
The human ancestry feat Adapted Cantrip has that as its prerequisite. https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=66 I've seen it recommended for human Champions and Monks to take a divine or occult caster multiclass dedication and then take the feat to pick up Electric Arc or Telekinetic Projectile for a strong dex independent ranged attack. But does that even work RAW? Are the couple of cantrips you get from a multiclass dedication feat a "spellcasting class feature?" Do other people think this prerequisite is confusing enough that it should be put in the errata and FAQ thread? |