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No, it behoves anonymous dorks on the Internet to try and not to be dicks, however low is the chance of that idea punching through their skulls. Two things can be simultaneously true without being contradictory. It behooves everyone to be cordial with one another, but choosing not to listen to criticism because you don't like the tone it's delivered in is foolish & self defeating, and only listening to people who tell you what you want to hear isn't going to lead to better results.
So while in many ways I'm not a fan of PF2e(I hate it's lack of modularity, I hate it's tight math restricting me from engaging in power fantasy, can go on), my love for Starfinder has always been in it's setting rather than it's mechanics so I'm certainly open to improvement there. One issue I have with Starfinder that might be self fixing if 2e and the remaster of PF2e are meant to be actually cross compatible, is that I've always felt that a lot of Starfinder's class design has been in, condensing several fantasies in to more generic classes that have less individual flavor and more shallow mechanics because of it. The soldier with it's fighting styles is the fighter, the barbarian, the ranger, and the monk of starfinder, and it's hardly the worst offender. Mystics - the actual worst offender, imo - use their connections to be the druid, the cleric, the sorcerer, the psychic, the witch, the oracle, the shaman, and even the paladin of starfinder. I feel that this leaves them spread very thin and unable to truly embody the fantasies that those classes in Pathfinder offered. This is something that I think the classes get *better* at as the game introduced new and original ones; biohacker, vanguard, witchwarper, nanocyte, precog, and evolutionist all have very distinct fantasies to play as all their own. Variety within those fantasies, but they're still distinctly their own thing. You could argue that biohacker is the alchemist and evolutionist is the shifter, but being a single analogue is, to me, a better position to be in than a catch-all dumping ground. Honestly to an extent I'll be wondering, if the games are truly cross-compatible & you can just port a sorcerer, psychic, witch, cleric, ect over to starfinder with some minimal tweaking, I'm honestly wondering if the mystic class will have any reason to exist anymore.
As much as Aucturn is my personal favorite Pact World, conceptually, Chekov's gun exists to be fired, so them finally pulling that trigger is something I'm in favor of.
I will say, I find this response quite dismissive and upsetting. It's a legitimate concern that with the change to PF2 style ancestries, there will by neccessity be a lot less ancestries to play with in SF2 compared to SF1, especially given Starfinder's much slower release schedule. Seeing that very reasonable concern responded to with "The sky is not falling" doesn't actually fill me with confidence Not all useful criticism is polite, not all polite criticism is useful. It behooves all creatives to internalize that.
The creatives posts in this thread certainly lead me to believe that the move is going to be inventing something new to occupy the space rather than slotting in an existing group the way Pathfinder is doing with the serpentfolk. Which, on that note, I wonder if this means we're any more likely to get playable serpentfolk in Starfinder. Not occupying the drow's role, but just, existing.
It's not that hard to skirt around copyrights if you really want to. TES dunmer are an offshoot of elves that had their skin changed to dark grey/black & eyes turned red via divine curse, have a society structured around great houses, have a slave-based economy, are convinced of their own racial superiority, and have a spider goddess as one of the more important entities in their religion. Despite all of that, Bethesda has remained unsued over this since 94 because they took away the matriarchy, didn't make them subterranean, gave them a unique aesthetic in terms of dress & architecture, got way ahead of the curb on the "they don't have to be evil" mindset, and called them dunmer. Starfinder's drow are, by virtue of the setting, basically a name change away from being legally in the clear. After that it's just a matter of untangling their history from Golarion drow to fit in the new continuity & potentially coincidentally, they've already seeded some alternatives for themselves.
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding something but it seems to me that a lot of people are approaching the problem as if there's going to be a diegetic, story development change. IE, the drow are going to be overthrown and replaced in universe as a storyline development. From my read of the situation, not only is that not going to be the case, it literally can't be because the issue at hands' legal nature. When the change comes, whatever new species or group that gets slotted in as the oppressive corporate overlords of Apostae will, from an in universe perspective, have always been in that role and the drow will have never existed. Now personally my suggestion would be to still have them be an off shoot of elves - the Elven Diaspora Article from, was it Horizons of the Vast or Fly Free or Die? One of those mentioned a few offshoots of elven society that could have come back to the pact worlds to occupy Apostae during the gap. Combine that with, no more matriarchy(which pathfinder drow shouldn't have had to start with) & changing Houses to Corporations, and that should be enough to have them legally in the clear. Do not make it orcs, though. My first SF character was a half orc who's backstory was defined by growing up under drow oppression. Don't mess that up for me.
Starship Operation Manual & Whispers of the Eclipse(Horizons of the Vast book 3) both assert that space travel was pretty well established in the Pact Worlds prior to the gap starting, as I recall. I might need to recheck those, though.
I don't possess the system mastery to comment too deeply on it but to me the big thing would be not following the PF2e ancestry system in terms of, paring off much of what in PF1e would have been part of the base stats for a species into feats, for the simple, practical reason that it eats into more page space & word count for books. PF2e ancestries do not show up in playable form in monster manuals, they only appear in core books & dedicated setting books. A large part of the appeal of starfinder to me is the variety of playable species, that cantina feel mentioned in the op. By my count, there's 130 playable species in starfinder currently. Compare that to 35 ancestries in PF2e - 51, if you count versatile and half-human heritages as separate ancestries, but I will draw the line at anyone attempting to count each individual heritage as a comparable playable option to a whole new ancestry/species. So yeah, just that, pace of release isn't going to be achievable with the PF2e system so I'd like to avoid that.
Also, whether it's creative commons or not, it's unlikely Paizo will do a warlock simply because 5E's already got it as one of their iconic classes, and one of their more popular ones at that. No point in duplicating what D&D is doing when they can make their own unique and interesting stuff. My thing is that I like WotC's intellectual property, but I hate their system. I would like to be able to engage with concepts I like in a system I enjoy playing.
Some of y'all didn't have an ancient egypt phase as kids & it shows.
I suspect drow are going to be in high demand with the influx of players from 5e so Paizo might want to get on that.
Well you can get all the game information you need off of Archives of Nethys but if you want to own the physical books, pf2e aasimar are introduced in the Advanced Player's Guide, and expanded upon in the Lost Omens Ancestry Guide. Also, might be more of a DM thing, and may not be of interest to you if you just want to use the Planescape setting, but if you're interested at all in how Pathfinder/the Lost Omens settings handles the planes, PF1e's Planar Adventures is a great book with massive amounts of lore on the subject, very much worth a read in my opinion.
I do think that dragonborn represent a distinct player fantasy from kobolds or standard dragonkin in a way that justifies another ancestry being there. The trick is writing around the legal protections WotC have over them. Automatons scratching basically the same niche that warforged do proves to me at least that paizo are capable of designing around trademarks when they feel like it. I suspect the reason why we don't have a medium dragon ancestry, or for that matter, why we don't have a giantkin stand in for the goliaths, is a conscious decision that's less about Paizo being worried about legal ramifications and more about perception; they don't want to look like they're aping everything WotC put out even if they could legally get away with it.
I'm still very much on the fence about making the jump to 2e all these years later, in large part because of the trimming down of options & fewer classes from 1e. Also the lesser amount of modularity & customization in classes(the fact that I can't switch out shield block as a fighter is a grain of sand beneath my eyeball). And the lack of ridiculously high numbers. Like, I recognize that's just a different design philosophy so it's not something I'm going to actively ask for, and I recognize that people prefer the lower, more contained numbers and "tighter math" for some reason I can't fully comprehend. But the fact that the highest I can get an ability score on a character is 24 goes against every instinct I have for ttrpg. In pf1e it wasn't uncommon for me to start at level one with characters having a 22 in their primary stat. But that's a lost battle & a hill I'm not going to bother dying on. I'll just go back and play 1e when I feel like indulging in actual power fantasy. For battles to be fought in the here and now, more classes, yes please. Now I don't know that every single class from 1e needs to be carried over. The spiritualist, for example, was just a necromancy reskin of the summoner & folding them into one class isn't a terrible idea in my opinion. Though I'm also not super crazy about how the summoner was converted but that's another discussion. The medium has one of my favorite concepts for a class in terms of it's core fantasy, I really like it conceptually, but everything I read on the subject has it as one of the worst put together classes in 1e mechanically. So another take on it in 2e might be able to salvage & redeem it. The inquisitor is another class that mechanically wasn't particularly great in 1e but does have a very strong fantasy. The flavor of the inquisitor is very distinct from the cleric or the paladin/champion or the warpriest. There's something to be done with that and I think it could be done with more than just a few archetypes.
So, the book I suggested earlier, Samurai Sheepdog's Ancestries of Omen: Drakorins, presents dragonkin as one of the three heritages for the drakorin race it creates. Other two being 'afflicted' drakorin who are humans turned into dragon people, and 'legacy' drakorin, who are kobolds or lizardfolk manifesting full draconic ancestry.
Unrelated to ancestries since we have another thread for that; I'm going to require a chainsaw weapon be statted & reasonably optainable by the inventor class.
So not to rehash the argument at the start of the thread, but the Ancestry Guide does explicitly use the word "genocide" to describe the Quest for the Sky, though it does so from the perspective of the orcs themselves. So, you know, the correct perspective. Anyway, working on a second pf2e orc character. She's an aphorite & an inventor, with a weapon innovation, and the sterling dynamo archetype. Also toying around with using her for a hypothetical Salt-in-Wounds campaign where she uses her custom invented weapon to carve into the tarrasque in her duties as a Marrow Miner. If I use her for a more baseline Golarion thing, I think I might go with Ustalav as her point of origin.
Paizo has seen fit to narratively handwave centaurs navigating areas they have little to no business actually getting around in before; one of the notable centaur populations in Avistan is in Kaer Maga, a very tightly packed city built inside a superstructure that's described as very dense and maze-like, with narrow passages, tight stairways & ladders between the various levels. Rather than relegating the centaurs to just the ground level or one of the more open areas, the book say they've just adapted to getting around. Now I'm all for large or should-be-large-if-we're-being-honest-with-ourselves-but-we're-gonna-bend-t he-rules-slightly-and-say-they're-at-the-cusp-of-medium ancestries. I'm a big fan of goliaths in D&D and while I understand that paizo can't adapt them directly, I think the idea of a giantkin playable ancestry that's right at that line between medium & large, in the same way that dwarves are right at the line between medium & small, is a niche that Pathfinder needs filled. Personally my pick for that role in PF has always been the cyclops. I think there's a lot to work with, narratively, with the lore of their lost civilization, the curse of their hunger, and their limited ability to see the future.
I imagine part of the difficulty there is that the difference only would have been apparent after the invasion succeeded; Deskari would have ruled over Golarion as part of his domain, tormenting it's inhabitants. Had the Worldwound been a daemonic invasion, after breaking through the wards they'd have made a b-line for the Pit of Gormuz & dedicated their efforts into releasing Rovagug & bringing about the end of all life. Edit: Sidebar, this is kind of why I feel that Golarion should get a lot *more* daemonic attention as it's the planet that contains their win button.
I guess my issue is that subtle corruption should be the devil's job, not the demon's. Though as I grow older & more prone to self examination, I suppose non-subtle jackbooted conquerors works for devils, subtle manipulation for demons, and annihilation for daemons.
Now, half-ogres are going to be a bit of an issue. As was discussed quite heavily in this thread a little while back, Paizo's take on ogres in pf1e was heavily influenced by the Hillbilly Horror genre, taking from such films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. In the vein of such fiction, ogres were depicted as isolated backwoods clans of inbred serial killers. Now, putting aside for a moment that while that was a bit of a stroke of brilliance for distinct ogre characterization at the time, it does run up against their current stance on 'monstrous ancestries' laid out earlier like a collision test where you have to get a new crash test dummy afterwards, the more relevant point is how they doubled down on this concept in relation to the idea of half-ogres. Which, technically in pathfinder parlance, the term would be "ogrekin"; "half-ogres", refers to ogres crossbreeding with other giants, while ogrekin refers to ogres crossbreeding with other humanoids. And the way they depicted them was, to put it bluntly, as shambling collections of birth defects. So, I don't know what form that's gonna take as far as any reworkings or updates Paizo wants to do regarding ogres. I didn't even bring up that can of worms when we were talking about ogres a few weeks ago.
Lost Omens Character Guide.
There's a tv show called Justified, about a US Marshall & his trials & tribulations dealing with criminals in the hill country of Kentucky, living as essentially a modern day cowboy. Pretty good, on the whole. In one episode, one of the main characters who's a career criminal and child hood friend of the Marshall, is trying to go straight & reform, but gets roped into a heist plot with some of his coworkers at the local coal mine, who plan on betraying & murdering him after the heist is done. However, he outsmarts them, catches onto their plan, outmaneuvers them & foils the heist, killing them both and saving the life of the security guard at the mine in the process. Later when explaining to his romantic partner what had happened & why he did what he did, she asked him why he didn't just call the Marshall & turn the criminals in, rather than going through with the heist & murdering them before they got the chance to kill him. His response was something along the lines of, "Would you believe that the thought of doing that legitimately never occurred to me?" All that's to illustrate, for some people, when faced with a problem, the instinct is towards the dangerous, the violent, the destructive, the manipulative. And the idea of doing something in what society would consider the "right way" doesn't immediately enter their minds as an option. Take that to an extreme, it can lead towards behavior that can be categorized as evil. Now, that can be checked by introspection, consideration, and self control over impulsiveness. Anyway, that's my thoughts on the subject.
Okay so Feng Kesh was my Rise of the Runelords character & the first pathfinder character I made. He's a half-orc from Kaer Maga who's mother was an exiled Minkai nobility who ended up in the Hex along with her newly ronin samurai father. To make ends meet, she ended up working in Hospice, doing what you're going to do in Hospice. One customer was an orc trader from Belkzen, and boom, Feng Kesh is born. Later, she'd marry a proper business man & her half-orc bastard becomes a bit of an embarassment so she fostered him off with her father who taught him how to fight, though couldn't make him a proper samurai - Feng Kesh was a fighter, but this is how I justified him having & using a nodachi. Anyway, he joins a gang, gets in trouble, needs to get out of town for a bit so he signs up as a caravan guard heading to Sandpoint, and the rest is history. Had a solid character arc of going from a disciplined but self-interested & pragmatic youth to genuinely caring about & wanting to help other people. He remains perhaps my favorite character & I'll still take any opportunity I get to rp him. Hrolf Orcsen was my Reign of Winter character, originally rolled up as a bard for another game & transitioned into a skald for RoW, he's half-ulfen from the Ironbound Islands who went travelling & seeking his fame & fortune. He loved a good fight & would always be quick into the fray, singing praises to Gorum, but he never forgot the importance of poetry & romance have in giving life something to fight for, nor the importance of wits in battle. Gundahar was my Wrath of the Righteous character, a half-kellid warrior devoted to Gorum who went to the World Wound because he figured that's where the best fighting would be, and he wasn't disappointed. A lot of his character arc ended up being about simply avoiding the temptation of sliding from CN to CE, but even while fighting to save the world he never quite became a good person, but was nevertheless a useful one - turned Baphomet into a fine red mist in the first round of combat & would wear the pieces of the demon lord's shattered horns as a necklace. As I mentioned in another thread, his post-campaign story would have involved him basically conquering a large chunk of northern Avistan, uniting Belkzen & the Realm of the Mammoth Lords. Rajnish was a half-orc fighter sensate that I played in a game taking place in a homebrewed world, where he was from an area of tropical islands. I borrowed a lot from the Matanji(who weren't well established at the time) in terms of traits & racial abilities to build out his culture, with the opposition to demons & the importance of shamans - though in this context 'shaman' was just their cultural name for people with psychic power. Rajnish's sensate abilities had marked him as a layman shaman & he had gone out into the world to develop them. Arikan was a battle shaman I rolled for a short campaign that only lasted three sessions & I mainly remember because I had decided that I was going to jot down every time she got hit in that campaign & catalog every scar she received because it was a specific thing that battle shaman wounds always scarred regardless of healing, and the campaign ended before she took a single hit in combat. Was very disappointed with that. Zaud the Chainbreaker was a vigilante I made for a small game focused in Kaer Maga; by day he was the runner of a small trade business, moving goods in and out of the city. By night, he was the Chainbreaker, masked champion of the Freemen & enemy to slavers throughout the Asylum Stone. In hindsight there's probably more than a bit "white savoir" mentality in the character which I'm not without some regret over, but still. I love Spartacus stories, John Brown was right about everything, and it was a good excuse to roll a character who used the spiked chain & have an actual justification for it, being symbolic and all. Those are some I got more use out of than others or who stuck out in my memory more. Actually at one point rolled up a half-orc of every class in 1e though I didn't get to play most of them.
Honestly, it seems to me that if Highhelm is getting it's own book, & people are talking about Kyonin getting it's own book rather than be folded into a Shining Kingdom's book, then Belkzen & Oprak should have their own books to highlight the non-human dominated nations of Avistan & devote full page count to the shift they're continuing to work on for the orcs & hobgoblins. Though it does leave the Eye of Terror book a bit bare. Edit: but mostly this was for the pun.
I had an absurd number of half-orcs in 1e but never played a full orc due to the ability scores they had & the light sensitivity. The first character I've made for pf2e is an orc tiefling fighter loosely based off an ooold oc I had many years ago before I started playing ttrpgs. Reworking the concept to him being thought by his tribe to be blessed by Nulgreth due to his blood-red skin. I want to use him in a Salt in Wounds campaign if I can get it off the ground.
I feel this is self-explanatory, self-evident, and true.
Does PF2E have an official dragon person race? Because one of the obstacles right now to my D&D5E campaign transitioning to PF2E is that one of my players (my husband as it happens) is playing a Dragonborn. Official, no. This is one of those things that WotC's trademarks has made Paizo very leery about making their own version of. Well, that and they also claim to not want to do it specifically to distinguish their brand from D&D. But if you're open to using third party content, my suggestion would be Samurai Sheepdog's Ancestries of Omen: Drakorin.
For some reason I imagine Akitonian food as being particularly spicy.
Well by Paizo's statement yesterday regarding the OGL situation, their official stance is that an OGL free Starfinder would look exactly like Starfinder currently looks. Their position is that Starfinder & PF2e are sufficiently different from WotC/Hasbro IP that they don't require the OGL to publish them, but rather, have been publishing them with the OGL so that third party publishes can continue to use it to make Starfinder/PF2e compatible works.
Copy/pasting this from a thread I made in the main Paizo forums because I couldn't get into the thread for the official announcement due to technical difficulties, here are my thoughts; My main takeaways are in three points; 1. That Paizo's official position is that WotC/Hasbro does not have the legal authority or ability to revoke the OGL. However, implicitly by the existance of the following two points, Paizo recognizes that WotC/Hasbro disagree with that position, intend to do it anyway, and any legal action to stop them would either be too long & disruptive to creators even if won, uncertain to succeed on the merits, or potentially unwinnable through sheer attrition with the simple fact that WotC/Hasbro has a bigger warchest than anyone to devote to a legal battle. 2. Paizo's assertion is that while Pathfinder 1e *was* reliant on the OGL, Starfinder & Pathfinder 2e are distinct & divorced enough from WotC's IP that they no longer rely on the OGL to be published, and that when WotC/Hasbro decide to revoke the OGL & replace it, Paizo is perfectly within it's rights to continue publishing it's current product lines without concern of violating any license or IP ownership WotC has. I have to imagine that Paizo is supremely confident in this position, and imagine that preparing for this eventuality may well have gone into the specific design process for both Starfinder & PF2e, to the point that they are confident that either WotC/Hasbro won't pursue legal action to dispute this assertion, or otherwise that Paizo will win in the event WotC/Hasbro do pursue legal action. 3. Paizo's further assertion is that it's continued use of the OGL in Starfinder & Pathfinder 2e, despite their Point 2 assertion that said license wasn't necessary for their own publication, was to allow other 3rd party publishers to use said license to iterate off of Starfinder & PF2e using the license for convenience. In following that mentality & to circumvent this & any future attempts by WotC/Hasbro to nullify the OGL, Paizo is collaborating with several other publishers to create an independent open license, not tied to one mechanical system, to continue to allow these other publishers to iterate off of their own IP, and further, to insure trust in said license, it will be held by an independent separate entity without a financial incentive to abuse it, as WotC/Hasbro clearly have with the original OGL. Is that about the sum of things? If so, my main & biggest concern is this; what happens to Pathfinder 1e material when Wotc/Hasbro pulls the trigger on doing the thing that Paizo asserts they can't do, but also implicitly admits, they can't be stopped from doing, & revokes the OGL? I recognize that PF1e isn't Paizo's primary product anymore and hasn't been for years now, but I still would like to know; will these books be available? Will the pdfs be available? Will Paizo pull them from their storefront & recall them from brick & mortar shops? Paizo can assert that PF2e & SF are safe to carry on, business as usual, but they stipulate in their own statement that PF1e did rely on the OGL to exist. I've got other questions, as well, but they relate more to what, exactly, the ORC is going to cover, what with it being "system agnostic", but I imagine the answer to that won't come until the license itself is hammered out and actually released to the public.
Firstly I would like to apologize for creating another thread on this subject. However, I have been trying for over three hours to get into the blog post/thread for the official announcement and the page. Will. Not. Load. I have been getting costant 502 errors and pictures of the yoshki mechanic doing "scheduled maintenance ad nauseam. I recognize that this thread will likely be closed regardless, but I want to make it clear that I'm posting this here in a separate thread because I am literally unable to post it in it's appropriate place due to technical difficulties. So, with that out of the way, let me put down my thoughts & take aways from this announcement while they're relatively fresh, and welcome any clarifications or corrections for where I am mistaken, and let me voice my own concerns & uncertainties for what doesn't seem to be explicitly addressed. My main takeaways are in three points; 1. That Paizo's official position is that WotC/Hasbro does not have the legal authority or ability to revoke the OGL. However, implicitly by the existance of the following two points, Paizo recognizes that WotC/Hasbro disagree with that position, intend to do it anyway, and any legal action to stop them would either be too long & disruptive to creators even if won, uncertain to succeed on the merits, or potentially unwinnable through sheer attrition with the simple fact that WotC/Hasbro has a bigger warchest than anyone to devote to a legal battle. 2. Paizo's assertion is that while Pathfinder 1e *was* reliant on the OGL, Starfinder & Pathfinder 2e are distinct & divorced enough from WotC's IP that they no longer rely on the OGL to be published, and that when WotC/Hasbro decide to revoke the OGL & replace it, Paizo is perfectly within it's rights to continue publishing it's current product lines without concern of violating any license or IP ownership WotC has. I have to imagine that Paizo is supremely confident in this position, and imagine that preparing for this eventuality may well have gone into the specific design process for both Starfinder & PF2e, to the point that they are confident that either WotC/Hasbro won't pursue legal action to dispute this assertion, or otherwise that Paizo will win in the event WotC/Hasbro do pursue legal action. 3. Paizo's further assertion is that it's continued use of the OGL in Starfinder & Pathfinder 2e, despite their Point 2 assertion that said license wasn't necessary for their own publication, was to allow other 3rd party publishers to use said license to iterate off of Starfinder & PF2e using the license for convenience. In following that mentality & to circumvent this & any future attempts by WotC/Hasbro to nullify the OGL, Paizo is collaborating with several other publishers to create an independent open license, not tied to one mechanical system, to continue to allow these other publishers to iterate off of their own IP, and further, to insure trust in said license, it will be held by an independent separate entity without a financial incentive to abuse it, as WotC/Hasbro clearly have with the original OGL. Is that about the sum of things? If so, my main & biggest concern is this; what happens to Pathfinder 1e material when Wotc/Hasbro pulls the trigger on doing the thing that Paizo asserts they can't do, but also implicitly admits, they can't be stopped from doing, & revokes the OGL? I recognize that PF1e isn't Paizo's primary product anymore and hasn't been for years now, but I still would like to know; will these books be available? Will the pdfs be available? Will Paizo pull them from their storefront & recall them from brick & mortar shops? Paizo can assert that PF2e & SF are safe to carry on, business as usual, but they stipulate in their own statement that PF1e did rely on the OGL to exist. I've got other questions, as well, but they relate more to what, exactly, the ORC is going to cover, what with it being "system agnostic", but I imagine the answer to that won't come until the license itself is hammered out and actually released to the public.
So far as I've been able to tell there isn't a way to give your character tentacles outside of certain spells. Every ancestry feat that gives natural weapons gives most anything but tentacles.
I'm taking a look at alchemist for the first time and I'm sorely disappointed that they seem to have lost a lot of the more bizarre, mad science/body horror elements 1e alchemists had. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places but I can't seem to find anything for tentacles, preserved organs, tumor familiars, vestigial limbs, all that good stuff. Can we get all that back? I would like to have all that back.
I had a very long, somewhat sanctimonious post written up regarding the - to my mind - false equivalency between orcs/drow & algholthus, but I'm going to trim it down to this; if you can't see how certain fictional, fantasy creatures can be more susceptible to harmful coding & applicability towards real world racism & bigotry than others & just leave it at the level of "they're fictional creatures", I consider that to be a rather one dimensional, shallow read of the situation.
The only people I've found who are at all concerned about the potential allegory are political activists. Not everday people. That was never the point of Tolkien writings. Yes, most people aren't consciously aware of harmful subtext in the media they consume & only really take it on a surface level. Doesn't change that the harmful subtext is there.
Well as my idol, the late, great Eddie Gerrero used to say, it's only cheating if you get caught.
It's only problematic if you mind circumventing the rules. Which I don't. But, I suppose some people do get a little... particular, about such things, which, fair enough. Different strokes.
One of the things that really bugs me about the removal of Voluntary Flaws is that, of the 100 or so characters I've made over the years, I have no (easy) way to know which ones used Voluntary Flaws and which ones didn't. So I can't even fix them to be compatible with the new updates. If you don't know for certain that they aren't compatible with the updates, then they're compatible with the updates & no one's going to go through the time & effort & energy to check the math otherwise.
Here's a question, is there any discussion of the big attribute change being implemented in Starfinder as well at some point?
So the latest errata for PF2e has established an optional rule for all ancestries to take +2/+2 to any attribute at character creation without penalty, as an alternative to their previous published arrays. This has sparked significant discussion & debate over in the PF2e general discussion forum, especially with the combined rule change that the optional flaw system, while still available, no longer grants a bonus & just exists for flavor now. Feel free to go skim those threads for details as I lack the energy to recount the debates over here. But the question I have for the Starfinder dev team is, with the stated intention of this change being to address concerns of bio-essentialism, introducing nuance into pf2e's ancestries to "show they aren't a monolith", and the unstated but clearly implied bit of simply opening up all class options to all races without feeling like one is being deficient at one's role, is this something that will be implemented in Starfinder as well? More broadly and for the room, I ask; does Starfinder's science fiction, space opera nature create enough disconnect between the playable species & real life people & cultures that bio-essentialism is less of a concern? Or does Starfinder's vast setting with near limitless potential environmental conditions to have shaped any member of any species apart from their "core" culture, mean that casting them as monolithic is even more egregious than in a contained fantasy world like Lost Omens Golarion? Is Starfinder's math capable of accomodating a change like this? Presumably in SF the change would be to +2 to any attribute like humans enjoy rather than +2/+2 as that's Starfinder's baseline. Still, I'm constantly told how tight Starfinder's math is so one questions whether a change like this would be particularly disruptive to the meta.
I will say that I think the single best & most underappreciated thing that Bioware did with the fantasy genre in Dragon Age is that rather than tying a mage's abilities to something like intelligence or wisdom, they created a more esoteric "magic" stat that was divorced from other concepts of mental capacity, thus allowing you to play a mage who was both a powerful caster and a complete idiot. But yeah, I've personally become convinced that the concept of "raw intelligence is a myth & the reality is more complicated & complex & multifaceted than any stat in a roleplaying game is ever going to be able to meaningfully convey.
I'm torn on this a bit, myself. Because on the one hand, I do think stepping away from the bioessentialism aspect is largely good. But on the other hand there's that part of me that has a visceral disgust at the idea of the world's strongest elf or strongest gnome or strongest halfling or strongest leshy being as strong as the world's strongest orc. It's probably a reflection of my worst instincts, but never the less it hurts me on a spiritual level.
I've personally always cast Gorum as being the primary orc god over Rovagug or even the orcish pantheon(what with Gorum having a detailed write up many years before the orc pantheon had proper names). When looking at good gods to catch their eye, I tend to look towards the Empyreal Lords. Valani & Tolc are the two that I think are natural fits. There are a few others for whom we only have names & titles & no real details for, but based on the titles (Ogoun Of Fire and Iron jumps out) I could definitely see them being developed into something that would appeal to orcish culture & sensibilities while still being, you know, good. Also Sarenrae's confirmed to be trying to convert at least one orc clan.
Well from a starting point I incorporated a lot of elements from other settings, which involves messing with the map a bit. Stretch out the west coast a bit around Conqueror's Bay, put some no-man's land between Nidal and Varisia, slap a Waterdeep right in the middle of it. Freeport goes down in the Shackles because of course it does. Dragon Age's qunari set up shop down in Sarusan. Things like that. Then in the first campaign I ran in this mixed up setting, final session ended with Rovagug being released for about ten minutes before being put back which caused apocalyptic levels of destruction across the world. Next two campaigns were prequels/going to be happening parallel to that first campaign so we didn't have to deal with that fallout on top of the AP's we were doing. Rise of the Runelords went off pretty well with my group taking over Xin-Shalast & deciding to set up their own little fiefdom there from which they'd eventually unite Varisia. Wrath of the Righteous ended up going *very* well with most of the characters taking off to other planes to pursue higher goals but my half-orc fighter/champion deciding to remain on Golarion and conquer himself a kingdom, uniting the Realm of the Mammoth Lords & Belkzen, along with carving off a chunk of Numeria for himself, then going into the land of the Linnorm Kings and slaying Fafnheir and taking over there. Got Irrisen as a vassal state because our Reign of Winter group helping run the country was very good at negotiations. Also, Nocticula? Very dead. Permanently, irrevocably dead. Name number one on the "let's go hunt down & kill demon lords" kill list. Idea of redeeming her or any of them wasn't even entertained for a moment. Anyway, the idea was that kingdom & the emerging power of this New Thassilon were going to weather the devastation caused by Rovagug's release - that is to say, earthquakes, volcanic erruptions, storms & floods, the awakening of the Great Spawn, all that good stuff - better than the rest of the world & be the centers of power in the post apocalypse that was to come. But then some personal issues happened & myself & the groups I was running that setting with at the time largely fell out & went our separate ways & then Return of the Runelords & Tyrant's Grasp happened & the shift to 2e happened which left me in the awkward position for continuing with that backlog of events being that I would no longer be working with people with an attachment to those developments. So I went off & played in other games & other settings for a while & now am in the process of dipping my toes back into the pathfinder waters & maybe starting with a clean slate again or at least toning some of the changes down to reconcilable levels with the change of the world state. One thing I found in the mean time that I want to incorporate but is proving narratively challenging to do so is the third party mini-setting of the city of Salt-in-Wounds, city based on having captured the Tarrasque & survives of butchering it constantly & living off it's meat. I love that idea & really want to do a campaign there but I do find some of the details of the setting as published a bit boring & want to inject some Golarion flavor into it to spice it up a bit. Which dove-tails nicely with the Rovagug getting released thing, but it's kind of central to the city's concept that it's been around a while, long enough for corruption to set in & for it's purpose to have shifted from trying to find a way to permanently kill the tarrasque to profiting off of it's harvest. Which creates another little wrinkle in, how do you have a city that exists & stays free by means of mutually assured destruction(attack us and we'll release the tarrasque and we'll all die) when on Golarion the tarrasque isn't just a random giant monster but the spawn & herald of a god with an active cult who doesn't *care* if they die and actively want the thing released. Now that second problem I've more or less worked out but the first has me thinking I'm either going to have to do a time jump or retcon the "rovagug gets released" thing to taking place a couple hundred years ago. Also, probably retcon it to just the tarrasque being released.
It's almost to the point where if & when I achieve my master plan of getting enough money to secretly buy both WotC & Paizo & set up a special licensing agreement between them that'll allow paizo to publish all the non ogl stuff under pathfinder rules, making them do warforged might be a little redundant.
Alright so the word is, cavern elf is not meant to represent drow. Devs have been very clear on that point here on the forums. So my question is, why is it a thing at all, then? One of the core design elements of 2e, as I understand it, is to be more setting specific. Everything published in 2e is tied to the Lost Omens setting with no pretenses of being setting neutral as the core books for PF1e tried to be. But, cavern dwelling non-drow elves aren't really a thing on Golarion, at least not a thing that's been explored or mentioned or developed to any degree. The Jinin elves, kind of, but they just got to Tian-Xia via the Darklands, they don't live there anymore, they've been on the surface for centuries. In the Lost Omens character guide break down of the five different elven cultures of the inner see suggests the heritage for *one* of them, specifically the Mordant Spire heritage, and even then, it's the third suggestion for those who've spent their lives inside the Spire, which... I mean that's not really a cavern, but sure, I guess. I suppose this just bugs me because 1e actually had an equivalant to cavern elves in the Advanced Race Guide where they have an elven racial subtype called the dusk elf that gets dark vision not from having lived underground but by being magically "linked to the night" in the same way most elves are tied to the terrain around them. And, okay, that's a more esoteric, mystical type explanation that does conveniently allow for elves of such a heritage to pop up in any cultural group because the sun still sets pretty much everywhere. But the ARG was one of those, pretending to be setting neutral but just barely, type books.
Structuring champion codes in a manner similar to 1e cavalier orders wouldn't be a bad way to go about it, actually... room to explore that idea.
What's the best option on the flag list to get the nun talk taken out of this thread because I really don't want to deal with it.
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