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Regarding beasts and the belt of dwarvenkind, I am not taking any official position. But, Neil, have you seen the movie Up? "Hello, mister dwarf. You smell like tree roots. My name is Bowser, and this is m-- Squirrel!"
Doug: Run multiple. Played 2 (both Godsmouth Heresy and Crypt of the Everflame, both with 2nd-level PCs.) "We be Goblins" is a fun module. Part of the wackiness is the disposable quality of the PCs. Once players understand that getting your goblin killed will also kill the PC that you've linked it to, I imagine that people will be much more conservative in that module.
Mike, three questions: 1) Should players plan to raise their "retired 12th-level PCs" who have gone through Eyes of the Ten to 13th level? 2) Would pre-gens be able to access and spend the linked PC's prestige at all? If so, it's possible for a PC to reach the matching level and suddenly find himself with negative gold and/or negative prestige. How would that work? 3) If a pre-gen is linked to a PC who dies before matching level, can the player reassign those rewards to another PC?
My complaint is related. Right now, module play is the only way a PFS player can fix a broken character. (If the person also GMs, he could apply GM-credit to the character, but that's a much larger investment for a lot of players.) By this, I mean that things can go bad for a character, leaving her disabled in some way (a witch with a dead familiar can't prepare spells; a fighter with four permanent negative levels can't compete effectively in a party; characters can be permanently blinded) without the resources necessary to get back on her feet. (This isn't a problem outside of organized play, because the party can chip in to buy a new familiar or pay for the restoration spells, but player characters aren't allowed to buy stuff for one another like that in PFS.) Show of hands: if you were getting ready to go on a notoriously deadly scenario, would you object if I brought a crippled PC to the table, knowing I couldn't pull my weight, and was just raisng the APL? So, right now, the player's best option is to play a module. She plays a version of her character, raised to the appropriate level and fixed. Then she returns to her PC, with experience, prestige, and gold enough to call a new familiar or get a couple of restoration spells. The proposal on the table eliminates this. She won't be able to play a levelled-up version of her PC, and if the pre-gen does swimmingly, she won't be able to apply any of the benefits to her PC until she plays enough scenarios with her crippled PC to reach that level. ---+--- "Well, that player should just volunteer to GM until she gets enough GM credit to fix the PC. That's easy." That's easy for a venture-captain and a bunch of multiple-star GMs to say. It's not so easy for a player who has never GMed before, or hates to GM, or for whom there aren't easy GM opportunities. ---+--- One of the strongest positive aspects of module play is it serving as a means to help players who have beloved PCs who are really down on their luck. Losing that aspect would be a negative change to the PFS community.
Generally speaking, an improvement, Mike. And it's very clear, and it looks like you've already worked out a number of the corner-cases. Nicely done. I have one concern, one complaint, and three questions. The concern: The pre-generated characters are substantially weaker than normal player characters; that's a good thing, because we want to encourage players to build their own PCs, and who wants to build a cleric only to realize that you can't beat Kyra? (Having said that, they're probably worse than they need to be. Take a look at 7th-level Ezren's spellbook. There's only one spell in there that he doesn't have prepared. Versatility is the hallmark of the wizard, and Ezren is less versatile than a sorcerer.) Even if the stats for a pre-gen were adequate, they are drastically under-equipped. That 7th-level Ezren can't afford to just go off and buy himself some scrolls to fill out his spell-book. Re-reading your proposal, I'm not sure whether a low-level PC would use his own Fame score to buy equipment for the higher-level pre-gens, or if there would be some "default" Fame score. Without *some* fiddling, a player could take a pre-gen, link it to a beginning character, and not be able to buy anything during the adventure except Always Available items, because the linked PC would have a Fame score below 5. Even if the pre-gens were up to snuff and well-equipped, they would be harder to play effectively, because they're all new to the player. Throw a 4th or 7th-level cavalier or gunslinger in someone's lap and see how well she can play it straight out of the gate. Even if the pre-gens were up to snuff, well-equipped, and familiar to the player, they might be a level below the recommended starting level for the module. For example, if I'm offering to run Cult of the Ebon Destroyers, you'll be bringing a 7th-level pre-gen into an adventure built for characters who start out at 8th level and advance to 9th level before the end of the adventure. At best, the pre-gen will start out a level above the starting level and will be "at level" by the end of the module. In short, pre-gens die. A lot. (This is my experience, from watching several players struggle with the pre-gens at convention scenarios.) (And if you change the module rules so they don't "rezz," they won't have the equipment, prestige, or gold to afford to return from the dead.) And according to your proposal, that'll kill the linked PC, immediately. I can't imagine why anyone would want to play a module with a pre-gen and link the experience to any current character. The penalties are disastrous. And the compensation wouldn't have been adequate for that risk before, and it's worse under your proposal. The gold reward for a module, and the Fame reward, are below normal for 3 PFS scenarios. Worse, that gold would now be reduced by however much the character spent in the module. (And considering that a pre-gen might well spend a lot, just to get up to normal equipment levels, I'd be surprised if there's much gold left at all for the PC.) So, why would I play a module, again? It can kill my PC instantly, it requires the PC to survive until that level to get any reward, and the reward he gets will be minimal. That's my concern.
These discussions would go more smoothly if we said "This is how I understand the rule to work, and how I'll adjudicate it at my table" rather than "This is the way everybody has to read the rule." for example, at my table ...
A wizard using a weapon as a bonded object needs to have that weapon in one hand, and gesture with the other. If she wants to use a metamagic wand, she needs to cast spells without somatic components. That's the trade-off for picking a weapon as a bonded object. Any object that takes up a body slot wouldn't have that restriction.
Is there a character redesign grace period by chance? I know what you mean, DAC. (Living Arcanis used to allow rebuilds for the first couple of levels.) There is no such allowance in Pathfinder Society, unless you've played (a) pre-gen characters, or (b) characters exclusively through PFS-approved modules instead of scenarios.
As a general rule, like bonuses don't stack. So wearing fancy clothes AND jewelry AND cologne is still only going to net you a +2 to Diplomacy. My 2cp Agreed, as a general rule. Circumstance bonuses ( like dodge bonuses to AC) are a special exemption. A circumstance bonus (or penalty) arises from specific conditional factors impacting the success of the task at hand. Circumstance bonuses stack with all other bonuses, including other circumstance bonuses, unless they arise from essentially the same source.
I believe it was Sean or Jason who suggested that a "masterwork tool" for UMD would be a chapbook of common activation words. Really, I think that time is the best common-sense brake on someone spending 1300 gold for a +2 in 26 skills. If someone wants to wear a fancy outfit for +2 to his Diplomacy, and also have a black suit for +2 to Stealth, that's fine, but it should take more than 6 seconds to turn from Bruce Wayne into Batman.
There are some fine items on Chronicles that are both more specific and more expensive than a masterwork tool. for example, a Chelaxian book costs 100 gp and gives +1 to Knowledge (planes) when identifying devils. It is poitless when people are carrying around 50 gp books that give +2 bonus to all Knowledge (planes) checks. Bearing in mind that masterwork tools provide a circumstance bonus, and circumstance bonuses stack, would the Chelaxian book stack with the masterwork tools?
A few comments: 1) The Shadow Lodge faction are Good Guys. They're the Pathfinder Benevolent Union, looking out for the people who traipse across the globe. If you wanted a faction that admitted assassins, that would be the Sczarni mobsters. 2) In a world with gods and detect alignment spells, Evil is quantifiable. To be an assassin, a character must be Evil, not simply nasty or unpleasant. 3) Again, what aspects of the Assassin class do people find attractive? What is Ranger/Rogue lacking?
Red-Assassin,
As a GM, I am always amused when a spellcaster pulls out a scroll of daylight in the middle of a deeper darkness effect and I ask him how he plans to read it. . Riffle scroll? . By a strict reading if the Inner Sea Magic text:Riffle scrolls are treated exactly as scrolls for the purposes of deciphering the writing, activating the spell, and determining its effects (including the chances for mishaps), save for the fact that riffle scrolls do not require verbal components—they automatically function as if they were cast using the Silent Spell metamagic feat. . I would say that, since a spellcaster needs to read a scroll, and riffle scrolls are treated exactly the same as scrolls in tems of activation, a caster would need to see the riffle scroll.. But that flies in the face of what's going on with a riffle scroll, so I'd probably bend the rules and allow it.
Potion of see invisibility works well at low levels. --+-- "Chris is a Mean GM" alert: At two of the tables I ran at "Stuffed COWS" near Chicago last month, players tried to use deathwatch as a see invisible spell, asserting they could tell that there was a living (and invisible) character in that square over there. I didn't read the spell that way, and told them that at my table, it only describes tha health status of people you can already see. If your GM rules differently than I do, then you could use the 1st-level spell deathwatch to defeat darkness.
Here's a not-entirely-hypothetical example. I have a paladin/hellknight (Order of the Pyre, specifically charged with rooting out corruption and visiting doom upon those who abuse power). I decide to play him in a scenario where the VC explains that we're supposed to protect a corrupt government official who has information the Pathfinders want, and he insists that we are to present ourselves under false pretenses in order to accomplish the mission. "Sorry, boss. Can't agree to do that."
For what it's worth, Matt, I'm not in the "15-point buy PCs are legal" camp. I think a precedent was set with the pre-gen iconics for Master of the Fallen Fortress, but were I king od the world (or Mike B, which is much the same) I'd say that the pre-gens there were a mistake, and I'd say that characters need to start as 20-point-buy to be legal PFS characters. In particular, I would make a distinction between "what you need to do one a one-time basis for me to let you into this game" versus "the way you have to permanently cripple your PC for me to let you into this game". (This is also the reason that I have fewer problems with "you have to agree to dump consumables, even though the rules say you don't" than I do with "you have to agree to kill your PC if she dies in the module, even though the rules say she'd just get less experience, fame, and gold.")
Matt, I draw a distinction between a well-advertised local game versus a private game, even if both occur at the same game store on the same day. I would give the local gameday organizer less slack to be weird about that sort of thing than the fellow running the home game. That's true whether it's a question of "only 15-point buy characters welcome" or "you have to agree to discard consumables and/or kill your character if the module demands it" to "no gunslingers need apply". By the way, what was the name of the original Star Trek episode where nations were playing at computer-simulated war and had to enter machines that actually killed you when the simulation indicated that you were a war casualty? Painlord's offer reminds me of that.
Matthew, Because that's how rules always work. Your fighter is allowed, for whatever reason, to strike for half damage within the rules. That doesn't mean that my fighter is allowed to strike for double damage. Barring any minimum posted, you're allowed to drive at half the speed limit. That doesn't mean I'm allowed to drive at twice the speed limit. Painlord's players are allowed to throw away consumables and gold even though the rules don't require it. That doesn't mean that other players are allowed to keep consumables and gold when the rules do require them to be thrown away. To be precise, Painlord isn't enforcing scenario play-rules during modules. He's offering a contract: he agrees to run players through a module, and in return his players agree to throw away consumables, etc. Presumably, the economics of game-play in his area is such that some players think he's offering a reasonable contract.
Considering there is an infinite amount of time between scenarios, if this was sprung on someone, and the GM didnt allow the player to remove both of them before the start of the scenario he was about to run, I think he's probably purposefully being a jerk. . For the most part, there's an indefinite amount of time; one exception I can think of is Before the Dawn parts 1 and 2, which follow immediately upon one another. There should be, at best, a day of hard travel between the two scenarios. I haven't played the Eyes of the Ten series, but I am led to believe that there is a similar time pressure there.. Otherwise, I agree that the two negative levels should be removable between scenarios. (I try not to attribute motives to GMs. In particular, I think the number of people willing to donate time and money in order to sit in the GM's chair, just to make other people's lives less pleasant, is pretty small.) --+-- Can anyone speak to why Josh Frost decided, back in Season 1, that he wanted to ameliorate the penalties for death in PFS?
Are you saying that if I am sitting at your table in a PFSOP game and my PC pulls out an Everburning Torch that he bought 3 adventures back that it will be, ah... a stick? No spell? To answer your question, nosig, let's put two Pathfinders on the streets of Absalom. Both are humans (how sad) and need to see in the dark. Pathfinder A goes to Ezren, a wizard, and asks him to cast continual flame on the end of a torch. For argument's sake, Ezren agrees. Pathfinder B goes to a merchant and buys an Everburning Torch, which is, by definition, an otherwise normal torch with continual flame cast on it. It's not a magic item, but rather a "goods and services" item. If you can tell me that Pathfinder B now owns something other than "an otherwise normal torch with continual flame cast on it," I'd be happy to hear your explanation. And in PFS, that spell ended as soon as you received your Chronicle sheet. Unless there's something special on that Chronicle giving us an exception to that rule. At my table, if you pull out an undead skeletal bird to which you want to give a command, which you purcased 3 sessions previous, it needs to be created with Craft Wondrous Item and the item creation rules, or else it's just animate dead on a bird, and that spell fizzles at the end of a session. I don't write the rules, nosig. I just follow 'em.
Jiggy, your +1 full plate requires Craft Magic Arms & Armor. There's a whole process the crafter goes through to make it. That's the case for almost every single magic item in the book. An everburning torch is a stick serving as the focus for a spell with a permanent duration. The same is true of an ioun torch. They represent a special case. At least, they do at my table. A wayfinder, on the other hand, is a regular magic item.
nosig,
Any spell cast by a PC during the course of a scenario that is still active at the end of a scenario ends when the scenario does. For example, if your cleric PC casts bless on the party and bless is still active when the scenario ends, the bless spell ends at the conclusion of the scenario. This includes spells with an instantaneous or permanent duration, such as continual flame, create undead or fabricate. . The work-around some players proposed was to pay NPCs to cast those spells, and the campaign staff (at that point, the VCs were doing most of the heavy lifting, because Mike hadn't moved into his office yet) quashed that by declaring that NPC spellcaster would refuse to cast spells with instantaenous or permanent duration.. There is a Gentleman's Agreement in place that does not apply this rule to spells that heal hit point damage or remove conditions.
. .The ioun torch is a special case. The item description reads: "This item is merely a burned out, dull gray ioun stone with a continual flame spell cast upon it." There's no item creation feats or crafting hoo-ha going on. Get yourself a burnt-out stone, cast a spell, voila you've got yourself an ioun torch. . . And the spell ends at the end of the scenario.
Hey there, Shar Tahl. Here's my realpolitik answer. I'm sure there's an official one out there somewhere. Honestly, I don't care if your PC is acting too good, or too lawful, or too chaotic. But PFS is a marketing arm of Paizo, and it serves the purpose of introducing new players to Pathfinder, to Golarion, and to our little corner of the hobby. If I sat down at, say, an "Arcanis, Shattered Empires" game, or a Living Greyhawk game, and met the world through a group of PCs who routinely tortured NPCs through sexual violence, and killed kids for fun, I would have a negative impression of that entire game system. If I were a blogger, or member of the press, my impression could damage the product line. We don't get the same problems if your druid is being too nice.
Dragonmoon, It occurs to me that part of your concern is the distinction between people in Painlord's position versus someone who just tries to fill a table at a home game or in-store game. You consistently capitalize "Organizer", when you speak of Painlord. Is it his official title as an Organizer of Pathfinder Society that gives you pause?
A thought: if the current consequences of death in PFS-sanctioned module play were tweaked just a little, there would be ramifications for death. Right now, dying in a module costs your PC one XP, 1 point of Fame, and a third of the money. Instead, if it cost 1 point of Fame, and a third of the money, but still gave your PC full 3 XP, then it would sting more.
Now, by "broken", I mean "damaged and hard to play" rather than "very powerful". There's currently a hot thread about sanctioned module play in PFS, which has been hijacked by an even hotter discussion about who can modify what when it comes to hosting module-play sessions. This has nothing to do with that. But Mike Brock has announced that he's planning on releasing a new set of guidelines for module play later this week or next, and I wanted to mention something they're very good at. Mike, whatever you decide, please bear in mind that sanctioned module play is currently the only means through which we have to repair a broken character. There are always going to be characters that are crippled by misfortune. I have seen with my own eyes:
I'm sure everybody has seen some character like that. In a home game, the GM can compensate and throw in something that can help that PC, or other party members could work together to buy the witch a new familiar, buy scrolls for the sorcerer, buy a +1 sword for the barbarian. Not in Pathfinder Society. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to join a party with one of these down-on-her-luck PCs; for at least one scenario, and maybe more, she'll be almost useless in the party. The best solution right now is module-play. The player can assign the rewards of the module to that PC, giving her the money or experience to fix her problem and rejoin the active campaign. From my perspective, allowing people to repair their favorite PCs and continue play is much better than requiring them to start up a new 1st-level PC. Mike, however you decide to alter the rules for module play, please keep this in mind. Thanks for your time.
Matthew, and Dragonmoon. I suppose the distinction is that some people see "agreeing to run, but only looking for players willing to restrict themselves in a particular way" as being different from "changing the PFS rules about how your table works". I keep coming back to the example of a GM who wants to run, say, an all-gnome party. She solicits interest, is willing to run, but sticks an artificial limit on that particular table: only gnome PCs. Some of us think she's just "agreed to run, but only looking for players willing to restrict themselves in a particular way". And we can't see how you would consider that to be "changing the PFS rules about how your table works". Can I ban synthesists and gunslingers in the Society? No. Can I agree to GM an in-store game, conditional to my preference that nobody at my table brings a synthesist or a gunslinger? You're still free to play a synthesist, just not at my table. Have I changed the rules of PFS? I'm sympathetic to your desire that no GM be allowed to modify the PFS OP rules to suit his or her whim. But, despite Dragonmoon's assertions that remove that topic from discussion, many of us don't see that as what's happening here.
Dragonmoon, the rules are the same, wherever you go. Painlord's in California. Go to his neck of the woods and offer to run modules according to the rules, giving players their whole rewards. That's fine, you're allowed to do that, and players are allowed to play in your games. They are also allowed to play in Painlord's game, in which they'll make things tougher for themselves as part of the admission ticket. They are also allowed to play in the scenarios run by Pirate Rob, who announces a limitation, requiring that every player at his table play a mounted character, because he wants to run the scenario like that. A character who plays under Painlord's restrictions is probably allowed by the rules of the game to ignore that covenant when the Chronicles are handed out. But that break in the social agreement will probably result in that player not being invited back.
Skjald, what aspect of the Assassin prestige class do you think is cool? I ask because the trademark Death Attack really isn't anything to write home about in an organized play environment. Not that many fights against the bad guy are going to afford you the chance to sit and watch him for three rounds and then make an undetected sneak attack.
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