Cupcakus's page

Thanks everyone for your input on this issue. It would seem there is still some confusion around this rule. I think we all interpret it mostly the same way...

I can easily see how a PC could read this rule and assume one Stealth roll would be sufficient until something sees them or they choose to do something else.

However as a GM that sets off OP alarms

Grimm and I have decided it will work like this, which we both believe is the spirit of the rule, and I think what everyone is saying here too:

-We don't have to roll initiative unless he's spotted and the enemies want to attack him.
-He needs to roll his stealth check once for every room/area he peeks into, or if he does anything else that might get noticed like opening a window or door or something.
-If he spots enemies in the room and isn't noticed he can retreat while still in exploration mode. If he wants to try to sneak through the area or attack them, or do anything else that might get him spotted we will enter encounter mode to play it out with the specific rules for those actions. (Such as sneaking and hiding)

All of the exploration activities make sense to me and we use them to great effect, however my players and I have a disagreement on how Avoid Notice works.

The rogue player wants me to roll stealth in secret, and then he wants to run all around the map opening doors and peeking around corners and assuming his stealth roll is greater than the perception DC of the enemies (It usually is) he can just go back to the party wherever they are waiting and give them all the information about the enemies and the map layout.

How long is he unnoticed? Can he pass through a room with enemies and into another room?

The rule as I read it is he does not roll a stealth check until we roll initiative as soon as he runs into enemies. Then, as long as his stealth initiative roll beats their perception DC's he is unnoticed until he does something on his turn to become observed, or the enemies use seek to locate him.

The problem with my method is, he is still very likely to be able to peek into a room, remain unnoticed and then retreat back to the party. By rolling initiative and playing it all out in encounter mode instead we've just made it take longer.

RIP My players... They reached Laslunn and her Interlocutor and the entire party wiped... it was a close fight, but the Interlocutor does so much damage, and they were a little light on consumables from the Jaggaki fight a few rooms before.

So Laslunn has managed to escape, and all the slaves drowned... taking suggestions on how to handle that going forward...

My players encountered a golem last night and when the champion hit it with his +1 striking silver longsword we had a debate over whether the damage dealt was magic, or just physical.

The golem is immune to all magic (Except it's specific weakness), and resist physical 10.

I ruled that it resisted all the damage (Due to it being a magically enhanced weapon), but we can't seem to find a specific rule on this in the PRD.

I am still unable to report Fall of Plaguestone in the online tool. I handed out the chronicles a week ago...

The worst so far has been the dragon charau-ka with their Draconic Frenzy activity. Crit-crit-hit-hit chunked almost 100 hp off of our Barbarian, which seemed... excessive along with the pillar blinding people. The Barbarian only has 21 AC at 6, and with that pillar being the closest to the east, they came up against someone with +20 to hit. Because of MAP maxing at -10, they swing at +20, +15, +10 and +10... rough stuff.

Yes! The Akujae tell the players to search east, so this is likely the first Pillar they will encounter, and in my play through the pillar crit blinded a front liner first round, and the party had to retreat as the Charau-ka were just too strong for them. I decided there was no pursuit.

There's always smashing doors open with a greataxe! My players call this the "Direct approach"

For chests, a crowbar is just as good as a lockpick for lower level characters.

Over half the Iconics have issues like this... I just moved them all into Fantasy Grounds and had to correct a bunch of these. Keep an eye on the attack bonus, damage, AC, correct spell slots, and the inventory for all the lvl 5 iconics.

I have a primal caster in my group that wants to take the Trick Magic Item feat to be able to use some Holy Beads she found. The idea being to be able to cast bless or heal once a day. But forgoing the 1 HP benefit to herself for casting the spell.

This seems like it would work OK, but I'm wondering if others have thoughts.

I always award XP based on the level and count of monsters/hazards in the encounter and never base it on the 'Moderate X' encounter header. If your party is the correct level the XP award will match, but if they are under leveled you will not be advancing them quickly enough.

For my group it's largely mechanical, but they are excited about the upgrades once the repairs are complete. They put Warbal in charge of things and then continued adventuring, paying wages and hiring help as needed when they return. Owning the citadel is a very background endeavor for my players, and is definitely not a castle-simulator. But what little there is, is fun and appreciated.

I just finished running the Cinderclaw Mine here's a couple notes that might help other GM's with this really challenging area for my players.

1. Having Hezle pop a smoke to hide and then run up north to release the caged dino creates a really long slog of a difficult combat, if I were to run it again I would not have done that. The fight took almost 2 hours for 4 players to fight off both of them.

2. The wyvern poison on Hezle's crossbow bolts is *very* lethal for level 6 or 7 PC's... especially if they've already spent their hero points and can't reroll a save or recovery check. The party ranger died from it rather rapidly despite using several greater antidotes.

I'm unable to select this adventure when creating an organized play event. And I'm unable to select it as well when reporting for said event. My players are likely to finish this adventure tomorrow and I want to issue them chronicles for their characters but I'm not sure how to report it online.

Hello players! I'm going to be running Fall of Plaguestone soon using Fantasy Grounds/Discord. If you would like to play, please sign up here. Details below:

VTT: Fantasy Grounds
FG License: Ultimate (No FG license needed to play)
Game System: Pathfinder 2E

Time Zone: Eastern Time USA (GMT-4)
Day of week and time: Thursdays (Time TBD based on player availability. Somewhere between 6:30PM to 8:00PM)
If new game, planned start date: October 3rd, 2019
Planned Duration & Frequency: 4 Hour Session, Weekly
Term: We will complete this adventure module only. Probably 8 to 12 sessions

Text or Voice: Voice
Voice software used: Discord
Will this be recorded and/or live streamed? No, webcam is not required

Roleplay & Combat mix: 30/70
Number of Players in game & needed: Need 4 Players
Character starting level & equipment: Starting level is 1, equipment is up to you from any common items (including common magical items such as potions) and starting 150sp.
Character restrictions: No evil characters. No optional rules (You cannot take 2 faults for an extra boost, or roll for stats).

Details of your scenario: We are all new to this system, so players of all experience levels are welcome. This will be a friendly group, if we're not laughing every session we're doing it wrong. Please be sure you can commit the time for the full adventure. Missing a session or two will likely be OK.

A TROUBLED TOWN
A group of new adventurers traveling through the village of Etran's Folly—also known as Plaguestone—must come together to solve the murder of a friend. What starts as a simple investigation quickly turns sinister with the discovery of forbidden alchemy, mutant animals, and a nearby forest rotting away due to a mysterious blight. It becomes clear that if these heroes don't intervene to stop whatever evil is brewing, the fall of Plaguestone is all but certain!

Order 8091251

This has been pending for over a week, just want to make sure all is ok. I also have a sidecart item that is supposedly in stock so I'm hoping they ship together.

Disregard, shipped today

Order 8091251

This has been pending for over a week, just want to make sure all is ok. I also have a sidecart item that is supposedly in stock so I'm hoping they ship together.

What would be the purpose? AC wouldn't stack, and you wouldn't have extra reactions for blocking with more than one.

If you use them to shield block, you normally wouldn't be able to cast it again for 10 minutes, I think OP is asking if he can cast it again from another spell list without waiting and I wouldn't think so.

Hi everyone,

My players yesterday encountered the Grauladon, and we all came to a friendly disagreement about how one of it's attacks works.

The attack in question is this one:

Body Slam; Requirements: More than one enemy is adjacent to the grauladon.; Effect: The grauladon swings its tail at each adjacent enemy and attempts to Trip each creature adjacent to it. It rolls only a single Athletics check and compares the result to the Fortitude DC of each target.

Now, normally a Trip action is Athletics vs Reflex DC, but we played it against Fortitude like the attack says. The confusion came when I rolled a critical success for this attack. A normal trip would have caused 1d6 bludgeoning to everyone in that regard, but the players were adamant it wasn't a normal trip action and so no damage should be applied, unless the attack itself mentioned a critical success effect.

I'm fairly certain the damage should have applied, but I also had to consider what if the Body Slam roll was a critical failure? Does the Grauladon fall prone? What if it only critically failed against one of it's targets?

I have two problems with it in 3-4 sessions. One is perceived value, the players and I expect an adventure path to take about 30-35 sessions. The second and more important issue is the XP rewards are on pace for a 6-8 session book 1, but the pace is not, they will run out of scripted things to do before they are the proper level to take on the final stage. I'll try to slow things up a bit next session.

We had our first session of Kingmaker yesterday and I'm worried I'm running the progression too fast. We played for about 6.5 hours so it's really a session and a half, and I have 6 players.

Since the players should just be level 4 at the completion of this book, I assumed it would take around 6-8 sessions to complete, with an average of one level gained every 2.5 sessions.

After our first session and a half, they have fully explored 19 hexes, encountered 9 of the locations on the map (Although the bandit camp at K they retreated from after finding it, finding it too challenging at first) I only rolled one random encounter which was quite trivial (A boar encounter, which was really just free hunting/food/gp for them), and they only completed one quest (Radishes)

All six players now have 1523 XP which is on pace for 6-8 sessions, but they've knocked out quite of a bit of the greenbelt and I worry we will finish this first book in no more than 3 or 4 sessions at this pace.

Am I worrying for nothing? Most of the major encounters have yet to be done and I know they will take longer, and because the first two northern rows of hexes on the map have very few locations of course they were faster and easier to explore.

Because this is 6 players I up the CR on random encounters and on the combat encounters, but I still only award 400xp for quests and 100xp for explored hexes.

So I guess my only real question is, is our pace on par with what you others saw when you started? How far did your players get in the first couple of sessions?

I hate to be a downer but I agree, while this announcement is exciting and would be interesting to play, I take this announcement with great skepticism.

I've been a senior programmer in the video games industry for many years, and shipped many titles on a multitude of platforms and MMO's are by far the most expensive, and difficult to build and maintain.

This is a new development company, (I've certainly never heard of goblinworks) Without an engine, and a huge staff of experienced MMO designers/engineers/producers, and artists this will never come to fruition. The costs are going to be staggering.

The goblinworks website is crawling already because of the traffic :-)

The guide is pretty clear that GM's can not allow players to play at their tables for any reason they deem appropriate. I would think that naming a character Darth Vader is just ridiculous and would affect the other players that are taking the theme and their characters more seriously. If the other players thought it was cute, or funny, I probably wouldn't care either, but I might not allow that character at my table if other players didn't like it.

I don't see why it would matter at all if you kept the name/image from the pregen. As far as I know that's perfectly legal.

Hi all,

I'm going to run my first scenario as a PFS GM this weekend at Neoncon. Not only is it PFS, it's a con game, and I was wondering what advice people had.

What can I expect in terms of resources: Just what I bring?

What do GM's tend to find hard to handle in PFS?

Thanks in Advance,

Lavachild

Here's my experiences, yours may vary.

I always bring extra dice, lots of pencils, and printed pre-gen characters for walk-ins.

The hardest thing for me is the player's character builds, they are almost always PFS illegal somewhere, or attacks are calculated wrong, or the player pulled traits from some very obscure supplement you've never seen. Granted, they are supposed to bring the books with them, or print the relevant pages. But they don't always do that.

I have to say though all the players I've played with have been great.

Also, some GM's I play with seem to be very lenient about giving out chronicle rewards and prestige. I tend to think the players get a more rewarding session if they don't always find everything, or accomplish their missions. They will try harder and pay better attention next time to not miss out.

So my wife reminded me that Ravenwood is a vineyard out here in California and we buy their wines a lot, including just recently, that would explain the origin of my mispronunciations.

Cupcakus wrote:

Thank you so much for these notes! They way out shadow the ones I did and will be incorporating much of your work into my session. Because I have more time to run mine than you did I have added some more things as well.

My pleasure and I hope you find them useful. Regarding your additions:

** spoiler omitted **

I don't know why I keep calling it Ravenwood, my players keep calling me out on that as well. I'm not sure where it came from, but it's sure stuck in my head.

So the question is: since the Crypt Breaker archetype is legal for PFS organized play, does taking this archetype replace the Extra Bombs bonus feat, and is this legal?

It's legal as far as I would rule it. HeroLab replaces the Extra Bombs feat when you chose Crypt Breaker, and I would also rule that that is exactly how it should work. PFS just doesn't want you brewing potions.

Holy cow! This is great! I noticed there were some complaints about this recently and it's awesome that it was addressed so quickly. +1 for Paizo's IT Team!

Now it's even better that I'm running Ravenwood next weekend.

I had Echoes of the Overwatched scheduled for this weekend and 7 players all signed up, but alas! I had to last minute change out and go back to Season 2... Boo.

OK here are my notes for running Feast of Ravenmoor as a PFS scenario over two 5-hour sessions. If you're going to play this module, these notes will just spoil it for you, so don't read them until afterwards! If you're going to GM this module, I hope you find them useful and I'd be interested to hear your feedback and suggestions. Thanks, of course, to Brandon Hodge for the wonderful source material!

** spoiler omitted **

Thank you so much for these notes! They way out shadow the ones I did and will be incorporating much of your work into my session. Because I have more time to run mine than you did I have added some more things as well.

I'm running this next weekend as a marathon session, I'm glad to hear it only takes 7 hours or so, I have 12 hours slotted, so it will be great to finish early maybe.

I'm also planning to run it again split up for the players that couldn't make it to the marathon session, I'm hoping I can run it in two 4 hour slots.

I just found this in the rules for it which would seem to indicate it's not a useful combat ability at all, I don't know how I missed this before:

"The distraction of a nearby combat or other dangers prevents the ability from working."

I'm going to have to rule it then that if the creature can see or hear combat, or has already acted in the combat, it's immune.

I have a level 2 Bard in my group, that likes to use Fascinate whenever possible, and leaves it up to me to tell him if it's possible in that situation. Which is fine, but I just want to ask how other GM's have been ruling on it during combat. Here's how I am running it and it seems fair, but maybe I'm still giving it too much power.

During combat, he can Fascinate one target at a time, if the target saves against it, it can never be the target again. If it fails then it is fascinated and he must keep performing to keep it that way.

If anyone attacks in the area, I let the fascinated bad guy roll a save each round on his turn, as an "obvious threat" occurred near by but not to him specifically. If he saves, he can immediately act, and doesn't have to wait for his next turn. If he fails, he can delay.

If he is attacked directly, fascination immediately ends, and if he is still delayed he will act immediately after the attack on him is complete.

I have heard that some GM's only allow fascinate in battle if the Bard uses it during a surprise round using stealth before the NPC feels threatened at all. I've also heard GM's not allowing it's use in combat all together.

I don't think it's so bad for the Bard to take one NPC out of the fight momentarily, but it's really quite a powerful tool against monsters with low Will, as they will likely stay out of the battle entirely.

Also, when the Bard get's higher in levels and can affect more than one target, and the saves get much harder to hit, the way I'm running it might become very troublesome for me to have any meaningful combat encounters with the group.

What do you think?

I am running a game online - when completing the chronicle sheet, I can easily update the pdf and send the the pc's electronically ....except for the signature. Is an e-sig ok, or must I use a physical signature, scan and email to the players?

I just created a signature in MS Paint and put a watermark behind it. I just import these into my PDF's and email them to the players. Works fine, is fairly secure, and very fast.

I worry a lot about actually permanently killing a PC in PFS before raise dead becomes an option for them. If I kill a PC in PFS they are not permitted to recreate a new character at the same level as their old one, so they might not be able to play with the group anymore as the levels diverge, that would be uncomfortable and a disappointment if I lost players because of it.

It's always seemed a bit wrong to me to keep hitting on a downed PC when other targets are available. A lot of time and effort goes into building these characters. Am I too soft? Should I be actively trying to kill PC's outright?

I have 7 players in the rotation now, and I already came up with the idea to split them up, and play a pregen on the table that would be short, and/or get another player which might happen. But so far, only 6 players have signed up for the next session, so I'm going to keep them together.

I must have missed that rule about adding 1 to the APL for 6 players, maybe I can convince them to play up, although that will be very challenging for them.

If this was a normal campaign we'd be fine, but everyone wants to play PFS, so we'll stay within the rules.

I've run through the intro scenarios with my group and we're about to start Season 3. The problem I'm facing is the group is 6 players, plus a tiger the druid has with him. Now that the group is level 2, they are insanely powerful for a group of this level, and the scenarios are just far too easy for them.

During the intros they passed just about every skill check, and combat encounters were a joke, they last maybe three rounds at best and I can only inflict minor damage on the PC's, which ends up being a little pointless as the Cleric's have basically free cure wands (2 PP) with 50 charges each that easily heal the party up completely between encounters.

Now I've got a Zen Archer Monk with +6/+6 ranged flurry, a Fighter with an AC of 22, a Druid with a very strong melee attack, and his Tiger, with two Cleric's buffing, and healing everything. Everyone upgraded to masterwork weapons and armor.

So my question is: Is it permissible to adjust the difficulty of a scenario without going to the next tier? If a scenario has 1-2 and 4-5 tiers, can I adjust it slightly so it would more likely be a Tier 3? This would help me increase the challenge of the scenarios and make them more fun for everyone.

So after further discussion I think we have this one figured out, he'll be +3/+3 all said and done next session.

I was GM on this session, and I'm happy to be wrong, as it seemed really weak to do this, and I mulled over how to handle this days before the session with another GM, and we both settled on this.

Flurry of Blows says it acts as if you are using the Two Weapon feat. This feat causes you to have -4/-4 when attacking with two weapons, instead of the normal -10/-6. Because a lvl 1 Monk has a Flurry BaB of -1/-1, I took this to mean the total penalty was -5/-5 + DEX MOD, so for this character that is -1/-1 in the end for using Flurry of Blows.

If I'm not supposed to use the two weapon fighting penalties, why does the book say to use the two weapon feat at all then?