Silentman73's page

I haven't peeked at much for PF2E yet, waiting to get a copy of the playtest CRB in my hands in May.

This said, 4E was probably my least-favorite D&D experience in nearly 33 years of playing tabletop RPGs. Ignoring the interminably long encounters (there's something wrong if you can't get more than one fight in during a normal 4-5 hour gaming session), I disliked how they prioritized numerical parity at all costs. It didn't matter if you called it "maneuvers", "spells", "disciplines", or whatever, a Daily Power was a Daily Power. Everyone had exactly the same number of them. The damage was often nearly identical. When PHB3 came out, I was saddened in looking at the psionics rules: I've never seen a D&D psionics system that lacked more distinction than the 4E one (hell, even the Unearthed Arcana Mystic in 5E has more distinctive mechanics).

It was obvious that it was designed to pull in the MMO crowd. World of Warcraft was at its zenith when 4E was being designed & was released. WotC probably figured it was an easy market to co-opt if they could arrange some similarities. But the whole "Controller/Leader/Striker" approach was just excessive, unnecessarily pigeonholed classes, and led less experienced players to believe (much like WoW in its continued use of the "Holy Trinity" of Tank/Healer/DPS) that a given party couldn't succeed unless all of those roles were filled.

I hope PF2E doesn't go in this direction. I've already peeked at what they're doing with the magic system, and I'm not particularly encouraged. If the release version winds up being closer to 4E than not, I'll probably just have to stick with PF1E, or go to D&D5E full time.

My theory:

Aroden wasn't actually dead. The initial entry into The Drift on Golarion was catastrophic, and Aroden pulled it into wherever he's at to protect it. He may have expended all his power to do so. The gods are keeping quiet on this, as they suspect the initial exposure to The Drift may have been intentional on Asmodeus' part. While they work on how to properly pin the accusation on him & figure out how to deal with it, they're keeping quiet. Meanwhile, Triune, by way of trying to deal with a bad situation, has shown mortals a safe & reliable way to enter The Drift by giving them Drift Engine tech.

I think Golarion is where Aroden has been all along: alive, well, but unable in some fashion to interact with the Material Plane.

Even just within the Pact Worlds/Golarion System, you're still fundamentally in a frontier environment, so a 1% fatality rate is probably pretty good odds considering you're transporting material to areas that aren't always completely settled. That's just within "real space".

Use of the Drift is probably folded into the "cost of doing business". Much like in Pathfinder, it's accepted that there are dangers even in "civilized" areas, and there are plenty of entrepreneurs (adventurers) who are willing to take up guard duty: they're likely better equipped to deal with the odd Drift encounter than most rank-and-file corporate security forces.

A complete splatbook on Aucturn, if only because I'm such a Cthulhu wonk. I can never have enough. "Space Cthulhu" is even better.

Did I mention I'm probably not the right person to ask about this? I hate Pathfinder's drow almost as much as I hate FR's drow. I think they represent basically everything wrong with...

In general, most of what many think of as "drow" now are the result of R.A. Salvatore's books in the 90s. He's the one who fully fleshed out drow society. Aside from an occasional article in Dragon Magazine here and there, they were otherwise just Gygax creations that amounted to, "They're evil elves, and so people know they're evil, we'll make their skin black and make their race subterranean, because nothing good can live underground."

To be honest, I'm surprised at this point that Salvatore hasn't pitched a not-Drizzt novel to WotC that results in a serious social upheaval for the drow such that priestesses of their spider goddess are no longer at the top of the pack. Wizards in drow society are traditionally male, and Wizards are a persnickety lot given to unpredictability; if they banded together, males in drow society might suddenly find their lot much improved.

In terms of things being run as a corporation in Starfinder, I agree with most in this thread that the gender disparities really don't make much sense in a future where you have functionally androgynous androids and lashunta who choose their gender as a matter of course. If they're selling weapons, that seems a function of their soldiers, which in drow society are also traditionally male. I'd almost figure corporations would be headed up by whoever was most qualified to meet (insert drow family/conglomerate here)'s goals, and priestesses would just be Mystics insuring they weren't doing something overtly offensive to their spider goddess.

Or, if it were me, I'd just throw issues of gender out the door altogether, and leave it to players to engage with as much as they individually want, while having them fight or deal with drow who care a lot more about what's being done than the dangly bits of who's doing it.

I actually kinda like this idea of exploring humans' apparent cross-species fecundity. I imagine the lashunta, in particular, would be fascinated by it. There's not a lot of scientific basis for it if we reference real-world humans. We share something like 98% of common genetic information with bonobo chimpanzees, but we can't interbreed with them. I have a hard time imagining the science of interbreeding between humans & a millenia-living race like elves or an obviously humanoid but not human race like orcs, and don't get me started on dealing with the races in Starfinder. You'd need gene therapy for EVERYTHING to make a kid like that viable.

Then again, those kinds of gene treatments seem fairly common in Starfinder, so it might not be an issue.

Of course, Starfinder exists in that junction between pseudo-science and outright fantasy (magic), so who's to say what universal fundamentals should be taken for granted in that universe?

Hooray! Does anyone know when Herolab will have this ready as well?

Lone Wolf has indicated they're working on a Starfinder module for Hero Lab, but I don't believe there's an ETA yet.

It's okay, the game's only been out for a couple weeks. ;)

The current explanation is that it's quite literally a gap - there are some longer-lived species who have memories from before it, but all memories of the period it encompasses are excised. A great analogy to me is you wake up one morning, you get in your car, and your odometer says 20,000 miles. You remember buying the car and driving it off the lot when it had 7 miles on the odometer, but you don't remember any of the intervening 19,993 miles - where you drove, whether you've had to replace any malfunctioning parts or replace a cracked windshield, etc.

Except in this case it's a matter of thousands of years, not miles. Golarian species (the traditional Pathfinder races) in all likelihood were at the Pathfinder-level medieval development when the Gap occurred, but we don't know for sure, because we have no notation of what the Golarian calendar date was when the Gap started. It's possible things had progressed well into the initial stages of space exploration: Golarion might have been about where Earth is now in its technological development.

Again, I don't think it's an answer we're going to get from Paizo. The Gap is Starfinder's analog to the Aroden mystery in Pathfinder. For my own campaigns, I've chosen to posit that Aroden didn't, in fact, die at Starfall, but was imprisoned. He likely broke free at some point but was prevented (possibly by Asmodeus) from returning to Golarion, and set up shop in a "safe" plane to plot how he'd return to the world. I propose tech had progressed to discovery of and an initial breach into the Drift, which caused a catastrophe on Golarion. Aroden expended his own power (and life) to yank the entirety of Golarion out of its solar orbit to save it from this catastrophe, and it's now safely ensconced where he'd been, safe but unable to interact with the rest of the Material Plane. The gods are staying silent about these specifics because they suspect Asmodeus had something to do with enabling the unsafe access to the Drift, and are plotting on how best to deal with him. Meanwhile, post-Gap, Triune has delivered Drift engines that can safely access the Drift to make up for Asmodeus' temerity & callous disregard for mortal life on Golarion, enabling the status quo in which Starfinder now exists.

I'd be inclined to hand wave it, but there have been a lot of really great examples provided for why it might work that way. In a setting where you can get relatively affordable (for adventurers, anyway) cybernetic implants, where sentient rat men are scurrying about, and where a previously-invasive interplanetary empire joined forces with a burgeoning galactic collective to stop the invasion of an interstellar hive, it isn't so far to jump to consider that maintenance of environmental homeostasis would be such a fundamental feature of anything meant to be worn outside of one's native planet that they don't think about it. Self-sealing, nanite infusion, techno-organic materials that "grow" to seal apertures, or even outright technomancy are all well within the realm of viability.

It damn well is the purview of officially published material to give us representation.

A purview Paizo is more than happy to oblige.

If you or someone else is uncomfortable with the "alphabet soup" and acknowledge that it exists, that's on you.

It's the "special snowflake" syndrome, as gauche as that term's become of late (and this isn't in reference to any particular political or moral ideology, lest someone try to take it down that road). Distinctions ultimately become meaningless when everyone demands their own unique social, biological & ideological designation. If a particular play group wants to explore those concepts, I wholly believe they should. But grading the level of inclusivity in the rulebook for a game seems like nothing more than an invitation to start segmenting the playing populace in ways that serve to do nothing more than further cement the factionalism that's, now empirically in real life, only managing to force people to feel like they have to either kowtow to the race to greatest marginalization or just dig in so deep on their own definitions that all ability to function in an ideologically diverse society is wholly lost.

"Inclusivity by its nature mandates equal consideration for exclusivity."

Not sure I'm buying it.

Then it's probably good those aren't the words I used, isn't it?

I'm not uncomfortable, just bored. You can't surf the internet without tripping over a million discussions that are basically, "Yes, but is it TOO gay?" It's all the same s$#@ everyone else says. You either want more queer stories, or you don't.

I want to see new stuff, awesome character concepts, and story ideas for those of us who want more queer content in our games.

PS. The idea that being tolerant means that you should be tolerant of everything always is such laughable idea in this day and age that I'm not even going to argue it.

Questions of "Is it too gay" or "Is it not gay enough?" aren't questions I'm presenting. I think that's up to individuals within their own groups. I personally see no point to making those kinds of questions the primary focus of content in a science-fantasy role playing game about intergalactic heroes (or villains) going on adventures, but that isn't a rejection of the importance of those issues themselves, merely a request to avoid turning the game into a platform for hot button issues that may wind up moving the focus off heroic adventures and onto things that, while more divisive than they should be, are nonetheless divisive. It isn't without cause that almost every gaming group I've been a part of in the long time I've been involved in the RPG hobby has a general rule of not discussing politics or religion during play. It's one thing to discuss hanging out in some other social venue, but to make it the focus of a play session (much less Adventure Path or rules supplement) seems needlessly inviting of conflict that only serves to make the game less fun for some (or all), if only BECAUSE it's so personal and involving of deeply-held convictions.

I didn't use the word "tolerant". I pointed out inclusivity, a lofty goal that's overall a good thing to strive for, within the context of attempting to control the parameters of a discussion with your own statement of "I for one would vastly prefer thread take those answers as a given..." You might prefer it, but if the discussion is to be had, you need to be ready for interactions with that discussion which might not line up with your own preferences. Though as a tangent, you don't personally have to be tolerant of ideas or statements you personally find objectionable, but that doesn't remove the right of those espousing such notions to present them. Be intolerant (or tolerant) if you like, as that's a personal choice - but whichever direction you lean on that spectrum, it doesn't provide objective authority sufficient to silence whatever (or whomever) you disagree with.

Inclusivity by its nature mandates equal considerations for all perspectives, no? Is it truly so problematic to note that it isn't really the purview of officially published material to delve into issues that are A) Ultimately personal and B) Are so emotionally charged that they can't help but veer into areas of conversation that may grow uncomfortable for some?

I picked up my copy of Starfinder over GenCon, and as I read through it, I'm pondering ways to throw characters around who aren't all cis and straight. Let's start with a quick look through the races!

Androids- Specific thought was given to the notion that a race that doesn't reproduce sexually is going to have a whole lot of agender, genderfluid, and non-binary people, and this is even reflected in the iconic operative. A

Humans- Eh, they're humans. Iconic is explicitly a lesbian though, so that's a good precedent. B+

Kasathas- Nothing really jumps out at me here since they're basically just humans-with-more-arms, but there is a note about barely perceivable gender differences which... none of the artists seem to have caught. C-

Lashuntas- If I am reading between the lines correctly, roughly half of all lashuntas are now explicitly trans, and there is specific language differentiating a given lashunta's actual gender vs. their dimorphic body type. I am absolutely delighted to see that, even if I don't necessarily think the designers meant to do it. A+

Shirrens- Between having 3 genders, and a culture explicitly based around celebrating individualism, this is hands down the race I'm most excited about in the specific context of making queer as hell characters, but also the one with the greatest need to clarify a hell of a lot of things first. Like, what is the whole pronoun situation here? If I had to guess, I'd say males go he/him, hosts go she/her (specific reference in the stat block to 'queens' and all), and females have their own pronoun set going on. This is something that really needs to be sorted out officially before anyone can really properly write about any non-male shirren NPCs.

Also having 3 genders calls for a lot of specialized terminology for attraction. If you're straight, or ace, that's fine. A certain percentage of them being trisexual is a given. If you're specifically only interested in others of your own gender, that's manageable. But, what if you're, say, a host who's...

I suppose a better question, to me at least, is why this is a concern at all. Representation matters, and I get that, but putting an active focus on it just winds up politicizing things that don't need to be politicized. To a certain degree, high-level exploration of identity politics matters when you're discussing a fundamentally asexual race like androids, or a race where gender plays heavily into societal norms like the lashunta, but aside from that? I would think it would have more to do with an individual player's character than it would with active exploration of this in the rulebook.

This may just be a byproduct of the area I live in, which is so heavily involved in identity politics, but I know that with how touchy that subject can be (as a gay friend of mine has put it, "I'm kind of frustrated with the alphabet soup that being gay has turned into"), the last thing I want in a game is an explicit focus on identity politics.

Put another way, if I'm negotiating with someone in a back alley on Absalom Station, or doing a run 'n gun fleeing locals on a non-Pact world, their gender identity isn't of much concern to me. Whether they're trying to burn away my body or stick an energy blade into it is.

By nature of dealing with not just different ethnicities but actual different species, Starfinder's setting would have such a cosmopolitan perspective that these things just don't seem terribly likely to enter into most folks' minds (which is kind of the goal to begin with, isn't it?).

Still reading the CRB, so I haven't formulated a theory yet, but in general, I suspect this is going to be Starfinder's version of Aroden: lots of speculation, but never an official word from Paizo on what happened.

Playing a 10th level human Soulknife (you can find the class on the d20 PFSRD site if you aren't familiar with it). Going to be dual-wielding, likely crit-fishing with it via emulating a katana & wakizashi. Character has a Strength of 26 currently, and a Dexterity around 17 or 18. Would love your recommendations on a good build for this character to really maximize its survivability & damage output!

There's several reasonable cases being made for not doing a formal "Pathfinder 2.0", but I still personally maintain that a reorganized/"cleaned up" Core Rulebook wouldn't be an awful idea. Clarification on often-misunderstood concepts (people still seem to get lost with what does or doesn't provoke an Attack of Opportunity, and arguments about what does or doesn't happen when you change your shape are ongoing; the rules are there, but aren't always easy to find), reorganization of the Combat chapter, and inclusion of classes like Magus, Gunslinger, etc as part of the core rules (which would of course necessitate including appropriate material for the use of firearms).

Since it would be such a massive book, it makes sense to me for it to be a digital product.

As an aside, to agree with hiiamtom, I'm generally of the same school of thought regarding magic: Vancian magic is one of the last holdouts of the Gygax era, which had issues not with creativity, but with often poorly thought-out systems (happens when you're a trailblazer; it wasn't Gary and Dave's fault that they had no other tabletop RPGs to compare Dungeons & Dragons to). The one spectacular change that 5th Edition has made has been a movement to a spontaneous caster system instead of the formal exclusionary preparation system that 3rd Edition had kept for Wizards, Clerics & Druids. I think a "spell slot" system makes more sense: you "know" these spells, and you have a limited amount of energy available per day to cast them, but you should choose how to use that energy based on the situation.

I always thought, in particular, something like this should have been in place for Clerics. The idea is they're praying to their god for power to deal with a threat. It never made sense that they're representatives of their god, but in their god's interests they're unable to cast a particular non-healing spell unless they had thought to prepare that specific spell at the start of their day.

I got into a discussion with someone today and a few other people agreed that antipaladins don't make sense. The very fact that they must enter into some kidn of contract with an outsider makes them inherently lawful. Not only that, but the description seems a little odd because it says they "promote tyranny" which is LE, and they are 'antiheroes" which aren't really what the Antipaladin is.

The Anti-Paladin has never made sense. It only appeared in an issue of Dragon back in the 1st Edition days, and was largely only alluded to in 2nd Edition. It finally made an "official" appearance in 3rd Edition as the Blackguard prestige class. It was one of those "legends" from the early days that took on a life of its own and got built up to be a lot cooler than it actually was.

It makes more sense to me that there are dedicated holy warriors for most any god. It makes as much sense to have a holy warrior who worships Asmodeus as it does to have one who worships Desna or Iomedae. A Paladin is likely to refer to themselves as a Paladin, but an "anti-paladin" isn't likely to refer to themselves in such uncreative terminology. If anything, I'd say "Hellknight" would be more appropriate, but that's a specific thing in Golarion, not necessarily just the antithesis of the Paladin.

If there was one thing that 4th Edition got right, it was the utter removal of alignment restrictions for the Paladin class (or any class, really, though to be fair, 4th Edition had a radically stripped down alignment system to begin with, something 5th Edition has chucked in favor of the traditional nine alignments). I'd personally angle for the removal of alignment as a feature entirely, except it's baked into the mechanics for Pathfinder, and removing it creates a lot of headaches as adjustments would need to be made to a variety of spells (if not outright removal of many spells) and damage reductions. I think it's an outdated holdover from 1st Edition that just has no real place in an RPG that actually wants to have people, you know... role play.

Pathfinder is a 3x retro-clone. It was published so Paizo could keep publishing APs. It innovated nothing, fixed nothing, and that's fine. People liked 3x, it pretty much saved the hobby from even more obscurity and irrelevance, and it was a fun game. Nothing wrong with what Paizo is...

I'm not certain I'd go so far as to say they did it solely so they could keep publishing APs (though I imagine that was definitely a reason). For the most part, I sort of feel like WotC published 4th Edition because it had been 10 years and "it was time for a new edition of D&D". I still maintain 3.5 is the best iteration of the game, and WotC is well-aware of the fondness people have for it: several concepts have stuck around in minimally-changed form in 5th Edition (feats, the Sorcerer class, Attacks of Opportunity), and the general utter silence on 4th Edition's mistakes seems a good indication they realize it was a misstep (there's also the relatively short lifespan of that edition... it lasted about half as long as previous editions of the game had).

Since it was all OGL (something WotC may regret having done at this point, as Pathfinder was outselling Dungeons & Dragons until 5th Edition came along; GenCon wouldn't exist at this point without Paizo's backing, and in fact the D&D dev team isn't even going to be at this year's GenCon), it only made sense for Paizo to pick up the dropped flag of a system that a lot of people honestly loved.

It isn't to say the game is without flaws (primarily a bit too much baked-in complexity to attempt to cover most eventualities of player choices in a game), but a lot of the most glaring ones were fixed in the transition from 3.5 to Pathfinder (removal of "empty" levels, removal of the d4 hit dice for arcane casters, etc.).

I STILL maintain the worst mistake made was from 3.0 to 3.5, when they nerfed the living blazes out of Haste. ;)

Hands down, Dreamscarred Press' "Ultimate Psionics". I never once thought that the 3.5 "Expanded Psionics Handbook" could be outdone. DSP did it, and with aplomb. It's a monster book (with a monster price tag, sadly; $80 brand new), but man, is it worth it...

Point of reality: Paizo, while doing well, isn't floating in gobs of money. They aren't owned by a major international conglomerate like Wizards of the Coast is. WotC can make a business case to Hasbro if they need an influx of cash, and have a chance of getting it. Paizo is on their own.

Printing a new book is expensive. You have to pay the staff to do the work, then pay to print it, then distribute it.

Creating a new digital product is pricy, but not as expensive: you don't have printing costs or distribution costs, merely creation costs and hosting costs (for the download).

A Kickstarter has two beneficial elements to it: it provides the money for a project, AND it shows interest via the number of contributors. A Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing has given us the first "next-gen" smartwatch (the Pebble), a movie continuation of a popular television series (Veronica Mars), and before either of those existed, fan interest in "Firefly" is what convinced Fox to do the "Serenity" movie after they'd (foolishly) canceled the series after only half a season.

If it would result in something more than "just another PDF", I'd happily contribute to a Kickstarter for a digital "consolidation/cleanup" product for the Core Rules. Full art, properly indexed sections and words for easy/efficient search functions, reorganization so things flow properly (I still think the Combat chapter ought to be organized in the typical order of combat; it should start with a quick "What to Roll" section, then start with "Initiative" and a description of how it works, then "The Attack Roll" with a description of common bonuses and penalties, then "Armor Class", with a description of regular AC, Touch AC, common bonuses/penalties, and then adjustments based on circumstance; move on to "The Damage Roll" with common bonuses/penalties; then "Terrain Considerations"; each section could include a subheader for movement considerations affecting each element to account for Attacks of Opportunity, etc.).

Include classes from the books outside of the Core Rulebook that many players just consider "core" now anyway. Include a link to the SRD psionics information from Dreamscarred Press' "Ultimate Psionics" for players and GMs who want to incorporate psionics into their campaigns.

The more I think about this, the more I'm starting to think that a Kickstarter might not be a bad idea to convince Paizo to do an "update/consolidation" project like this. If, after reaching the goal, Paizo still said, "We just don't want to do this", the money could be donated to a couple charities instead (or refunded to individual contributors).

At this point, it seems the most sensible thing for Pathfinder would be a reorganization of the Core Rulebook, and likely (to save costs) as a digital product. Inclusion of classes most everyone I know of considers "core" as it is (Gunslinger, Magus, Summoner, etc.), cleanup of rules presentation (I can't tell you the number of times I've seen questions on what you do and don't get when you're changing your shape; the answers are there in the SRD and other materials, but the fact that people are asking is indication enough to me that the presentation of those rules isn't intuitive to locate), and adjustment to wonky rules combinations that send people scurrying to find errata or a FAQ to get a ruling (as opposed to, I dunno, just letting the GM make a ruling and calling it good...) seem to be the highest priority.

I'd personally angle for inclusion of psionics as built-in from the ground up, since it hasn't been there in that fashion since the absolutely unplayable presentation in the 1st Edition Player's Handbook...), but Dreamscarred Press has done an amazing job with Ultimate Psionics, and I don't think Paizo would want to step on their toes.

A fully (and efficiently!) searchable digital "New Core Rulebook", that works well on not only desktop PCs but on laptops and tablets, centralizing all the classes, more intuitively presenting the rules (perhaps organizing the Combat chapter in typical order of actions in combat), incorporates classes currently residing in other Paizo books, maybe a slight cleanup of action economy inefficiencies (I honestly don't see the point in having both a free action and a swift action; better to just declare free actions to be a "non-action" and move on from there), and BAM!

So here's my thought.

Initially I wanted to do a Pathfinder Ravenloft campaign. Found a great "official" Pathfinder Conversion, but after starting to read it, realized it was much more geared towards starting the campaign in the Demiplane of Dread, and wouldn't work so well for bringing in PCs from outside of Ravenloft.

Then I started thinking about doing a Planescape conversion. I loved Planescape, and was sad that its only real continuation past 2nd Edition was putting Sigil in the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide 2.

Then I started thinking about how much I love Lovecraftian stuff (and if you have heard "Dreams in the Witch House: a Lovecraftian Rock Opera", you're seriously missing out; I found it at a booth at GenCon in 2014, and listen to it at least twice a week without fail), and it all finally started gelling.

This is very broad stuff, so recommendations on specifics are most welcome, or just commentary on the overall idea, and even if you'd personally want to play in a campaign like this.

My thought is this: PCs are in a small rural village area, and discover that there are some children that are going missing. As they start to investigate, they learn that there's a small cult involved in the area that's been kidnapping the children. They eventually find the cult's sacrifice location, and at the conclusion of the battle, discover on the body of the high priest some odd symbology that they've never seen before (nothing much would be revealed from a Knowledge: Religion check other than "it's something ancient, hidden, and very much buried; people don't talk about it").

They learn that this cult was just an outpost of a larger organization, which can be found headquartered in a larger town a few days' travel away. After dealing with that, they find out a bit more about the symbology, enough to lead them into a city where a knowledgeable occultist can tell them a bit more, just enough to learn the "cult" is active in the city itself, something to do with a prophecy heralding the birth of a child who's meant to bring back some dark force.

After dealing with this in the city, likely having to slay the woman about to give birth to this child, they learn from the body of the priest overseeing the interrupted birth that "This is just the beginning. You can't stop this... you can't stop his coming." The priest will utter a name (it might be Cthulhu, or something similar, haven't decided yet), and this name is going to lead them on cross-planar adventures, starting with a journey to Sigil, the City of Doors. There, with all the knowledge of the multiverse theoretically available, the PCs will learn that efforts to revive this dead god are a massive, multiplanar affair. This journey will lead them to progressively more difficult encounters across the planes, opposing Abyssal lords, rulers of Hell, and eventually into a "Far Realm"-type plane where they'll finally have to stop this ancient Elder God itself in a climactic battle of planar armies, the forces of good and neutrality, and even sensible forces of evil in a tenuous alliance to stop the arrival of a thing which even they realize should not be.

Thoughts? Recommendations? Entreaties to stop playing and go bury myself somewhere deep & never roll a d20 again? :)

Looking to find a Pathfinder group! Well-versed in the system, with a distinct "non-power gamer" bent in my style. I have a love of psionics and would really love someone who'd be fine with me using the material from Dreamscarred Press' monster "Ultimate Psionics" book (subject to GM inspection beforehand, of course!), but if you're not down with psionics, that's fine, I'm very good with the existing classes in the Core Rulebook.

I have one friend who would likely be interested in joining as well. He's in his 30s, I'm 41, we're both stable, professional, non-smokers, no "stereotypical" gamer hygiene issues, experienced gamers who are looking for a comfortable, regular, reliable weekly game in the Seattle area after work hours. Not looking for marathon sessions, prefer 3-4 hour sessions once a week. We have our rulebooks, our own minis, and otherwise would be a relatively low impact on your home.

Would greatly prefer the north Seattle area, but areas closer to the center of town would work as well. South Seattle is not preferable. Optimally, very transit-friendly, as I don't own a vehicle.

If you've got a game looking for 1-2 more players, shoot me a private message, and let's see if we can get things working!

It's really going to vary depending on the nature of the ring. Obviously, you aren't always invisible when you're wearing a Ring of Invisibility. You're going to need to do something to activate/deactivate the ring, and a command word seems the easiest way to do this. I would say that, just like activating a magic item, speaking this command word is a Standard Action.

Conversely, a Ring of Regeneration is just always working. It's activated by wearing it.

Other things require specific things to be done: a Ring of Three Wishes requires you to speak your desires, as per the Wish spell, and one of the Wish spells stored in the ring then activates.

A Ring of Djinn Summoning requires you to do something to summon the djinn.

A Ring of Fire Resistance is just always active.

In short, there's no "one rule to rule them all" when it comes to magic rings. Common sense should rule on this.

Inspired by a recent discussion, I came to wonder: Can the alignment of a deity change based upon the actions of the deity, or can a deity redefine alignment by their actions?

If a Lawful Good Deity ordered their worshippers to execute any members of an "evil" race on sight, regardless of age or activity, would the alignment of the deity change, or as a Lawful Good deity, do their dictates decide what is Lawful Good?

Which is more powerful, which rules the other, deity or alignment?

I suppose a lot of the answer to this question depends on how YOU interpret "alignment".

If we hearken back to 2nd Edition's campaign setting "Planescape", it seems obvious that the traditional nine-point alignment graph supersedes individual deities (or Powers as they were called in Planescape, and 2nd Edition at large; that edition's hallmark was renaming "devils" into "baatezu" and "demons" into "tanar'ri" to get the religious extremists off D&D's back; likewise, while The Abyss remained unchanged in name, the Nine Hells became Baator). A Power would set up their domain in the plane that matched their own moral comportment. If their individual alignment changed too much, the planar real estate would just shift to the appropriately-aligned plane over time.

It seems that 3.5 (and thus Pathfinder) kept up with the basic concept that the alignment system is a force that's more powerful and set in stone regardless of an individual's involvement with it. An individual demon could, in theory, be something other than Chaotic Evil, but it's still an Outsider with the Evil subtype, which means weapons and spells designed to do more damage to an Evil Outsider are going to work against it.

If you, as the GM, figure that it has a lot more to do with the individual, however, you don't seriously break anything in the game if you rule that isn't the case; if you have a succubus who pursues redemption (like the succubus party member in the most-excellent PC game "Planescape: Torment"), she'll always have the Outsider subtype, but may not have the Evil subtype if she is, in fact, no longer evil in alignment (though a case could be made that it might still permeate her for some time if she chooses to remain in the Nine Hells, regardless of reason, or perhaps that Evil subtype might linger for awhile after her actual alignment change as the multiverse "responds" to her shift).

This is probably overthinking it a bit (which I know we're all wont to do on these forums anyway). As it relates to a god, they're divine beings whose very thoughts reshape reality. I don't think a Lawful Good deity could go into the Nine Hells and set up their own domain where Lawful Good is the "rule".

Then again, it might amuse Asmodeus to no end to let them do just that, and watch what happens when the other Lords of the Nine respond to this, particularly since it would likely mean they'd leave him alone for a bit. ;)

For my tower shield lugging bard (he's using his puppet theatre as a pavise), I would like to delve a little deeper in how I can encode a readied action.

Tower shields have the ability to become total cover on expending a standard action, which is the potential that you buy for lugging around a -10 Armor Penalty shield.

So, what I would like to know is; can I use an IF-ELSE-THEN statement to describe the trigger for my action? For example, say that my bard has his tower shield and readies as follows;

"My bard scans the battlefield for any threats to the wizard. If the bard is not attacked by [insert ranged enemies] before his next turn, he will cast Compel Hostility on the first enemy potentially threatening the wizard with a ranged weapon after their round is completed. Else (if the bard =is= attacked), he will duck behind his shield and take no further actions".

Would that be legal? Is that kind of detail allowed?

Readied actions can get ridiculously complex if they aren't kept, well... not complex.

The easiest way to deal with them is this: "If X does Y, I do Z."

"If the archer shoots at the Mage, I step in front so the archer has to hit my AC." If the archer doesn't shoot at the Mage, you've wasted your action by waiting to see what someone else in the battle does.

Once we get into multiple conditions, I think you're dealing with multiple readied actions, and you may instead just be better off delaying to deal with consequences.

I think in general people get too caught up in the whole "RAW/RAI" argument. It's only logical that you can't retrain a feat that's used as a prerequisite for other feats. But there are feats that are less useful as time goes by, and those ought to be retrained away.

I'm using my Soulknife as an example. I'm playing in a Mythic campaign right now (using the Soulknife from "Ultimate Psionics"), and early on, her mindblade was Keen for the higher crit threat. However, as I'm progressing through Mythic tiers, I want the Mythic version of Improved Critical, which requires the non-Mythic feat as a pre-req. I didn't previously have need of it with a Keen weapon, but after reformatting my mindblade to have Corrosive instead (I otherwise want to maintain the maximum possible enhancement bonus for my mindblade at a given level, which right now is +3, so it often means I can only assign a +1-value ability to the blades themselves), I took the feat, training away something else (I don't recall what).

That's just an example of needs changing in the game.

Every time I see RAW/RAI arguments, I just boggle at them. What kind of game world are these players/GMs in where these arguments arise at all? It seems that you either have:

1) Players trying to get away with something they know they likely can't without drilling down on some specific detail, or

2) GMs who are so worried about things getting out of hand (or dealing with players like Option 1 on a repeated basis) that they clamp down as tightly on things as possible to avoid power creep.

That's just never been my experience. As a player, I take what seems fun. If the GM doesn't want it, I can find other options. More often, the GM (and this is how I behave as a GM as well) just adjusts things to insure that the encounters are still challenging.

The game just doesn't need to be an ongoing argument over the rules. I think they're pretty clearly stated, and the GM can always invoke Rule Zero as needed, or just say, "Material from <insert sourcebook here> isn't available in my campaign."

Guys,

I run a weekly game which I put a lot of effort in. I also participate in a bi-weekly game where another person DMs, and honestly, I find him to be a pretty crummy DM and I'm not sure if I'm just being arrogant or what but what would you call a DM who:

1) In the months that we've played together has never once tried to relate the environment to the characters, he has never taken interest in our characters personality and goals, and just runs his adventure completely stock out of the book (it's a pre-written adventure).

2) Despite the fact that it's a pre-written adventure, he never comes prepared in the sense that he must read the details of the dungeon rooms and encounters as they occur and we all need to sit there patiently for minutes at a time for him to finish reading and then be greeted with "hmm, wonder what they mean by this..." or "Hmm, oh okay they're refering to this page". And he will read the environment descriptions directly off the book with little to no emotion in his voice.

3) Despite the fact that our party is clearly overpowered, has never adjusted the battles to increase the challenge. We have hence never once had what I could call a tense fight. We usually finish all fights in two rounds or less, and with barely any damage.

Is it just me or does he just not care all that much or maybe has poor taste in what makes a good game? And being faced with this situation, I have difficulty imagining the situation where I would come up to him and tell him to up his game, and hence since I am hosting the game at my house, I'm just tempted to either cancel the whole campaign and/or try to change the DM, both things which are pretty damn politically uncomfortable and are bound to ruffle more than a few feathers and cause people to leave (we're not particularly close friends outside the campaign).

What would you guys do?

It might just be a different GMing style. To be honest, the prepublished adventures contain a LOT of information in them, and frequent reference is necessary if the GM doesn't have a gift for memorization.

For myself, for instance, I love telling a story, I love interacting with the rules, but I despise making maps. I love the Pathfinder Adventure Paths, but I so seriously wish each one of them came with appropriate fold-out maps for each area in the module, that I could just put down, plunk minis on and have at it. The mapmaking has largely been what caused me to leave behind the campaign I was running and let a friend handle it instead (well, that, and I had finally gotten my copy of "Ultimate Psionics", and was dying to try out the Soulknife).

If you're finding this GM isn't doing well with the pre-pub stuff, consider asking him/her to put their own adventures together. Offer some suggestions like bookmarking relevant stuff in a Bestiary for each session, using whatever they use for their own notes as references for the bookmarks. Give them a couple minutes to read each entry as they come to it; there's a lot of information on some creatures, and Pathfinder is rules-heavy.

...melting point of iron, 1500ish celsius, or 1800ish Kelvin. Melting point of rock (ala red dragon) generally around 1200 celsius, granite melts at 1200-1260 C?

Heat of Sun (Core): 15ish MILLION celsius.

Perfectly valid. This said, "immunity" isn't tiered, it doesn't go by "degrees" (pun intended). You're IMMUNE.

Fire won't kill you, but the g forces certainly will.

This is accurate. ;)

The times I've seen it, its usually from the players that notice the inconsistencies and gaps and want to exploit them. "Look the rules don't say your technoarmor is immune to <this spell> so I win!"

And even within setting, "Immune to fire? Apparently that also means immune to being dropped into the sun right?"

The former example is just a player being asinine. Non-magical things (not antimagical) as a rule aren't "immune" to magic. Tech-based armor is, logically, used to counter specific threats. Tech-based armor that's meant to provide resistance to impact ballistics (bullets) would very likely not do much to stop a directed-energy weapon (which relies on heat or other energy instead of impact for its damage).

In the latter example, within magic it's perfectly feasible to conclude that a spell providing immunity to fire would prevent one from dying if somehow thrust into a star. Those spells are often meant to not only protect from combat encounters (the Wizard tossing a Fireball at you), but also to provide environmental protection in supernaturally hot environments (some layers of the Abyss, some circles of the Nine Hells, or the Elemental Plane of Fire).

It isn't a far stretch to conclude that supernatural fire can be hotter than the naturally-occuring heat of a star.

I think one terrific takeaway from 5th Edition is the removal of rigid preparation for magic. In it, a Wizard might have to choose which spells are prepared for the day, but they have complete freedom in which of them to cast; the current Pathfinder system's biggest drawback for preparation casters is "If I've prepared 2 Identify spells, and we hit a big haul and need to identify more, we're SOL until I can prepare more, unless I've spent the money to bring some scrolls as well." In 5th Edition, if you prepared Identify for the day, you can cast it as often as you have appropriate spell level slots (or higher, since you can plug any spell into a higher-level slot).

This said, "fire and forget" is a legacy behavior I wish Pathfinder would work its way out of. There's a wonderful point-based magic system they can make use of, the one used for psionics from Dreamscarred Press' "Ultimate Psionics". It helps magic feel a lot more organic, and less rigid.

This said, I still maintain that in any world where magic is common enough that the commoners know it's around and they don't question its power or effectiveness, technological development is going to be arrested. Technology in the real world raced forward to meet increasing efficiency and quality-of-life demands. When magic can do that, you aren't going to find ways to mine metals, refine them, form them, and assemble things with them. You aren't going to worry about generators for electricity when you can instead figure out that copper wire conducts it, and then pay a Wizard to bind a lightning elemental to your service.

I'm fine with a mixture of tech and science (our current Pathfinder campaign is an adaptation of John Carter of Mars, and I'm playing a Soulknife from "Ultimate Psionics"), but if we're attempting to provide TOO much real-world reason to it, the reality is either magic OR technology will have ascendancy, as the prevalence of one removes the impetus for development of the other, at least in the Pathfinder magic paradigm.

We've all been part of at least one of these "discussions" in our times as gamers. Maybe you wanted to play a Spellslinger and your DM slapped you down hard. Maybe you wanted to be an alchemist that hunts dragons. Perhaps you were asking to bring something out of Numeria. So many players don't want any technology, even alien technology, interacting with their fantasy worlds.

Why do we do that? Where does this knee jerk reaction come from?

I think that it's because the incompatibility of science and magic has been the standard for so long that it's left an imprint on genre lovers. The sliding scale of technology and magic, I'm referring to it. Why do we treat it as the standard though?

More About The Sliding Scale Right Here

I don't think magic and technology are incompatible. I merely think the prevalence of one tends to invalidate the need for the other.

If you have magic that can toss a flaming ball of fire (Fireball) at someone, you don't have much need for a firearm. It doesn't preclude the development of firearms; not everyone is capable of using magic. But the advancement of firearms is likely to be stunted. You're probably not going to get far past what most medieval RPGs have for firearms.

In its current Pathfinder implementation, the nature of magic is such that the materials are readily-available for most common spells, and it merely requires training (and sometimes not even that if you're a Sorcerer) to learn how to achieve your desired effect. So someone can go purchase (likely at very high cost) an imperfect firearm they then have to purchase equally-expensive ammunition for... or they can learn to cast a spell, and roll up some bat guano and sulfur and have at it.

Conversely, you're going to find greater development of technology (firearms, as an example) when a more cost-effective method (magic) isn't available. Development of firearms will proceed, and the firearms will become more affordable as they grow more common and less expensive to produce, when you can't toss a ball of fire at something you want to kill.

Development of more resilient armor was a direct result of improvement in weaponry. Firearms sort of removed the usefulness of traditional medieval armor (even wearing crafted plate armor was sort of useless when a blunderbuss ball could just punch through it, at range). Modern-day armor is in direct response to firearms development, but it focuses on mitigation, not total protection.

There are genre conventions to take into account in Pathfinder itself, many of which have informed tabletop RPGs since Gygax and Arneson got started. Imagination provides for a melding of technology and magic, but practicality says you're going to have one or the other.

For the most part, if I'm going to play in a fantasy game, I prefer swords 'n sorcery. I'd be fine with games that push fantasy tropes into modern settings ("urban fantasy") like Shadowrun if they had better game mechanics: I've yet to find a single RPG out there that I've liked better than the Dungeons & Dragons system and its derivatives (Pathfinder, since D&D has moved two entire game systems down the line; I still think 4th Edition was an abomination, but I'm quite enamored with 5th Edition, while acknowledging I still prefer Pathfinder/3.5; the preference margin isn't as large as it was with 4th Edition, however).

Pathfinder, at its core, is swords 'n sorcery role playing, which is why any support for greater technological concepts is ancillary and relatively sparse. In theory you could take the d20 Modern or even the d20 version of Star Wars and use them with relatively minor tweaking to fully acclimate them to Pathfinder, and there you'd have your tech.

The simplest, and probably best, answer is:

Because Pathfinder is a game, and your friend's novel is a book.

What do I mean by that? Well, every medium has certain strengths. One of the strengths of a book is that the author controls 100% of the actions and consequences within the book. That means magic can have wild and unpredictable side effects for even minor spells without ruining the entire experience. However, games do not share that strength (indeed, they would not be games at all if anyone had absolute control over the entire game; games require actions and consequences, and if you control everything, there are no consequences to your actions). In a game, if your character stands a chance to blow up the local area whenever he casts a spell, basic statistics will tell you that eventually your character will unintentionally blow up the local area. That's not fun (especially to the mage's companions).

Another reason is that mages just plain wouldn't get used. Take a look at Arcane Spell Failure for an example of this: ASF is a small chance for any spell you cast which has a Somatic component to fail. This is essentially the same thing as your "magic with consequences" concept except less dangerous. How many mages have you ever seen in any game ever wear armor with an actual Arcane Spell Failure chance? I've never seen even one unless they had some way to Still Spell most or all of their spells (and thus avoid ASF). It'd be even worse with your idea, because on top of not getting the spell off, actively bad things would happen.

From my perspective, you're coming at this from a view of "Magic should be difficult to use." That's fine if it's how a given GM wants to run things, but the core concepts underpinning magic in Pathfinder are that it isn't comparatively difficult to use. The assumption is that whatever you had to go through to learn to use it (whether that's the formal training of a Wizard or the intuitive casting of a Bard or Sorcerer) was gone through prior to the start of your adventuring career. You're proficient enough with your magic (whatever its source) by the time you're 1st level that you can presumably focus "on the spot" to create a willed effect even in spite of someone running in clanking metal armor to go swing a sword at a beast out of legend and myth (even if it's really just a troll; you're 1st level, your worldliness is definitely lacking, or should be). Past that, the general assumption is you're doing the things that lead to the automatic higher-level spells you get as you go up in character level "between adventures". This glosses over a lot. If you wanted to RP it, the Wizard is probably sitting there at camp every night with a "spare spellbook", an experimental log, trying things out. He/she may be experimenting with different components and channeling "raw magic" through them to see if an effect can be created. It would be both comical and threatening if they discovered Fireball by accident. Or maybe they just channeled a tiny bit of "raw magic" and extrapolated from there that "If I put some bat guano and sulphur together and push the magic through it this way, with my hands forming this focal pattern, I can generate an explosion of magical fire." It's nice fluff, but the mechanics don't require it: they gloss over that stuff to keep players invested in the "fun".

5th Edition seems to use this "raw magic" concept a lot more concretely, since you're no longer required to prepare spells ahead of time. You have spells you know, and you have a certain number of slots of each spell level per day, in which you can cast spells of that level, or insert spells of a lower level for a more powerful effect. It provides a lot more versatility and freedom to spellcasters. It was apparently concluded that too much forethought into what spells to prepare each day was negatively impacting fun. I happen to agree.

But it also brings up an interesting thing: cantrips no longer get "used" when they're cast. Whatever cantrips a Wizard has prepared, or a Sorcerer just knows, can be cast as many times as they like. In that kind of scenario, yes, there's no mechanical reason for a spellcaster doing their own dishes by hand: Prestidigitation would just clean their dishes for them, Light would illuminate things for them, etc.

Which then brings us back to fluff: it's easy to come up with an RP reason for why magic shouldn't be used so casually. The fallback is often "Magic has a price." But if you start implementing a mechanical price above/beyond the fire-and-forget system, you're going above and beyond the rules themselves, and those kinds of house rules should be discussed with your group, as it can have a meaningful effect on whether a given player wants to play a spellcasting class or not.

Me, if I were to encounter a GM who wanted to place additional restrictions on magic beyond what's in the rules, I'd just choose not to play a spellcaster. I think there are more people than I care to think about who just like to nerf magic as much as they can because they just don't want to put in the effort to deal with its effects.

Yes, higher-level play puts a lot of power in the hands of spellcasters: they can fly, teleport, throw around massive collisions of energy, and at the highest levels can speak their desires and see them made manifest. They stand toe to toe with the immortal servants of the gods (if not the gods themselves), they create their own pocket realities, they travel into the afterlife with impunity.

And this is power those players have earned if they started at 1st level: they went through the sucky levels where they could fire off three or four spells and be done for the day, when the martial types never have to do more than swing their weapon. They put up with the fact that martial types get improved efficiency with their weapons such that they can get in multiple attacks in the same period in which a spellcaster can never, without meaningful feat expenditures, cast more than one spell. They put up with being counterspelled, when you can't counterspell a sword: if the Fighter gets past the AC and damage reduction, they always do their damage. Mid and higher levels are their chance to shine.

This is just me: I'm just tired of people constantly trying to find ways to weaken magic. It just smacks of laziness on the GM's part, instead of them being creative enough to use the tools the game provides them to provide challenges to the players, who are using the tools the game provides THEM.

Thanks, THD and Zedth. I don't necessarily MIND cost if the product works; I'm playing a non-standard character (a Soulknife from Ultimate Psionics), which means the content needs to be uploaded to the program. It has been, but the last time I played with it (admittedly in the early part of this year), it was radically incomplete. I also hadn't purchased the Mythic Adventures module, which is necessary for our campaign.

I'm at 8th level, and I'm already overflowing with abilities, feats, powers, etc. When I do periodic checks to make sure my bonuses are where they should be, that my damage totals are what they ought to be, etc., it would be nice to have a program that just does the math for me, and that I'm feeling relatively confident is doing it properly.

To be honest, I'm surprised Paizo at this point hasn't created an official character generator for the game.

To me, alignment needs to be as much in the background as possible, because it just winds up putting players in a straitjacket, particularly ones playing classes with alignment restrictions. The stereotype of the jackass Paladin arose because players just misinterpreted (or too narrowly interpreted) Lawful Good, or they had GMs who were doing the same.

The problem is alignment is hard-coded into the Core Rules as an actual mechanic. Class restrictions, damage reduction, etc. It's almost not worth it to untangle all the things it's snarled up in to maintain rules consistency while excising alignment itself.

For the most part, I like to use it as a guideline. I'd rather someone play the character with the personality they want; if I find a player who wants to be a Paladin but winds up burning and murdering their way across the countryside without at least a modicum of righteous justification, then I may suggest they consider another class. It's easy enough to come up with enchantments/curses/whatever to just swap their Paladin levels for Fighter levels or something else, or if they player wouldn't be inconvenienced too much by it, actually role play a path of corruption or attempted redemption by the character (though without loss of class abilities).

I kind of wish alignment could be chucked out the window entirely. If there's one thing 4th Edition did right, it was its loose approach to alignment.

I'm looking for a character generator for our Pathfinder campaign, but one that actually WORKS, presents a nice, easily-printable character sheet (even if it's multiple pages), and most importantly, that does full calculations and includes (or has available) fully integrated modules for optional rulesets like Mythic Adventures and (most importantly for me personally) Ultimate Psionics (from Dreamscarred Press).

In short, I want to be able to input ability scores, feats, Mythic abilities, etc. and have all the math properly work out, appropriate number of attacks per round (and damage per attack), etc.

It may be the "holy grail", but I'd like to look for it.

Hero Lab isn't doing it for me; it's not an intuitive program (for me at least), costs more than I'd really like to pay (particularly for subsequent modules), etc.

Anyone know of anything?

My understanding is that the "effective level" of a spell with a metamagic feat applied to it is equal to the actual level, except with respect to level-dependent variables (more damage on Fireball, etc.).

In other words, if you have a metamagic feat that increases the required preparation slot by 2, and you're applying it to a 4th level spell, you need the ability score to be able to cast a 6th level spell (which is 16).

Logically, it just means if you're dealing with suboptimal spellcasting stat, the caster just can't wrap their capability around what's required to fully make use of the metamagic feat. Higher-level spell slots at that point merely become an opportunity to prepare additional lower-level spells that they can cast.

Outside of flavor, there's never a good reason to play a spellcaster whose spellcasting stat isn't such that they can't reach 19 by the time they're able to cast 9th level spells.

I don't have her character sheet right in front of me (I'm at work); we didn't use point-buy, we used a house-ruled stat rolling method (roll 3 sets of scores @ 4d6-drop-lowest, then pick the best set). But I have a 17 Dex. With an enhanced manifestation of Inertial Armor and the Force Screen, in conjunction with her Dexterity and a +2 Ring of Protection, she's rolling with a 24 AC without armor penalties (if she has a round to manifest Force Screen before she closes).

I'll play around with numbers tonight once I'm home in relation to maxing out the enhancement bonus and combining in Emulate Melee Weapon for a wakizashi. I can take the 8 hours to reform the blade @ +2 Psychokinetic as well if I need. I don't have Alter Blade right now; the penalties associated with it didn't seem desirable at lower levels, and I don't play around with my mindblade configurations much to begin with, at least with any frequency that would make the valuable blade skill slot worth spending on that particular blade skill.

I'll also take a look at wearing actual armor. Thanks for the recommendations. :)

Heya Justin. Right now, it's a human Soulknife using Gifted Blade. I'm using her Gifted Blade powers for defense via Inertial Armor and Force Screen, with additional power points spent on Inertial Armor to increase its bonus. Only combat enhancements are coming from the mindblade itself (currently dual-wielding +1 keen mindblades; with the additional +1 at 7th level, I was thinking of adding Psychokinetic Weapon to the mindblades, which gives an additional d4 of damage per hit, that bypasses damage reduction).

Currently feated with Two Weapon Fighting and Improved Two Weapon Fighting as far as taking out the penalties for dual-wielding. Strength is 21, far and above greater than my Wisdom (which I believe is around 16 or so), so Focused Offense doesn't make as much sense, since I'd be losing accuracy by applying my Wisdom bonus instead of Strength bonus to my attacks.

I've waffled on whether to take Twin Strike, as I don't see a lot of scenarios where it would be of great use aside from the first round in case I had to move more than 5 feet to close with an opponent. But even with that aside, I'm only 7th level right now, and I can't take Twin Strike until 8th level.

Does that help?

I need the wisdom of the number crunchers. :D

I'm currently playing a Soulknife (using Dreamscarred Press' Ultimate Psionics book), and the current construction is such that she's dual-wielding. She's feated out to maximize her attacks per round (currently four per round at 7th level, with a fifth if she spends a Mythic Surge), and she threatens a crit currently on 17-20.

The problem is, the per-hit damage suffers a bit. I think right now, on average, she's hitting maybe twice out of her four attacks (so a 50% hit rate), at 1d8+8/1d6+8 per hit. It can go up with a crit (an additional d6 of bleed damage per crit), and as she's just gained a new enhancement bonus to her mindblade, I'm adding in the Psychokinetic Weapon ability (which is +1d4 damage per hit, ectoplasmic damage that ignores DR).

So really, my question is this: would I, on average, be doing greater damage by having her wield a 2-handed weapon instead of dual-wielding? If so, which feat choices are optimal for increasing the damage output at 7th level? Your help is most appreciated. :)

Apologies if someone already did a thread like this one before, but I never saw it if there was one and I really want to discuss this.

I'm sure we've all seen it... the player who thinks Chaotic Neutral is the best alignment because they don't have to do good things but they don't register as evil to Paladins and they can pretty much do whatever they want whenever they want without that pesky alignment system really bothering them, right? Right? I hate Chaotic Neutral to the extent that when a player wants to play a character as CN I immediately begin to suspect that they want to take it to avoid the alignment restrictions. I've seen everything from "I'm Chaotic Neutral because I'm insane!" to "I must be the embodiment of Chaos itself so you never know if I'm going to jump off a cliff, attack the party or dance a jig while the party is trying to do a stealth mission... because I have to do -everything- completely at random". It's enough to drive a (semi) sane gamer insane!

What restrictions are there for a CN character? I'd like to hear what folks think Chaotic Neutral should truly be all about.

If we're being completely honest, there are typically no restrictions for someone who's Chaotic Neutral, which is often the reason many players pick it.

It's traditionally been the "crazy alignment", though that isn't always the case (much like someone who's Lawful Good doesn't always have to have a two-handed Giant-sized polearm stuck up their posterior cavity).

The thing to realize about the alignment system is it has two components: a social component and a moral one.

Someone who's chaotic inherently doesn't support any sort of organization on a macro level. It could be due to an inherent rebelliousness, it could be due to a reasoned conclusion that the more systematized things become, the more they cease being useful as an increasing number of exceptions arise, the list goes on and on.

Someone who's neutral on a moral basis could believe in maintaining a balance between the two extremes (good and evil), or they could literally just not care, and do what's most expedient/convenient in the moment.

Just as a Chaotic Neutral individual could be a raving lunatic, they could also literally be someone who places pragmatism and expediency above all other considerations, within a framework of actively defying any attempt to restrict their behavior according to the morals of someone else. They're as likely to be a radical individualist as they are to be an unpredictable force for chaos.

I think the fact that discussions about the nature of the classic nine alignments has continued with such vehemence for so many years is testament to the fact that alignment, as a concept, is a lot more restrictive (even if unintentionally) than it should be. If you'll notice, in the tabletop RPGs that came out in the wake of AD&D, the first thing to get tossed from their rules was a systematized social/moral definition. A character was left to be who their player wanted them to be, with as much (or as little) nuance as they wanted. 3rd Edition and 3.5 formally codified alignment in a way that no previous edition of D&D ever did, by involving actual system mechanics beyond the previous class requirements for Druids, Paladins and Rangers. When it became a component of Damage Reduction, that was when it went overboard. To now extricate it from a Pathfinder game requires a fairly intensive overhaul of more than just alignment requirements for classes.

4th Edition went too far in an odd direction (in more ways than one...). It reduced the nine alignments to five: Good, Evil, Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil, and Unaligned. One could make the case that Good and Evil were, in reality, Neutral Good and Neutral Evil, but it ultimately didn't matter, because class alignment requirements in that game were completely removed. You could encounter an evil Paladin who wasn't automatically an "Anti-Paladin", you could find a Ranger who wasn't Good, and you could find a Chaotic Evil Druid if you wanted.

They should have just removed alignment entirely.

It's a system that hearkens back to thought processes about fantasy which are honestly outdated. The moral milieu in fantasy at the time of Gygax and Arneson was radically different than it is now. Knights were always virtuous, you could tell an elf or dwarf was evil because his or her skin was black and they were subterranean dwellers, and Druids had to be Neutral because they cared more about managing the health of the world than they did about the petty causes of factionalized warfare which typified fantasy games. For the same reason, Clerics could never use bladed weapons, and only a Fighter or Paladin could EVER wear full plate armor.

I'd rather see it tossed out the window, as a concept and a mechanic. I don't see that happening, and I don't want to put in the work on retooling a Pathfinder game to enact that desire myself, so I put up with it.

But while it's here, just realize that Chaotic Neutral isn't always crazy, and isn't even always unpredictable. That's just the most popular perspective on it, and the easiest to settle into as a role.

Not to mention, some players deal with really structured, often restrictive environments in their real lives (school, work, parents, etc.), and they want to cut loose and be as far from what they are in life as possible, and they have a game providing a convenient reason to do so. :)

Specifically, PrCs being the best options forever, 100 base classes and 500 PrCs, a zillion special materials, and so on.

I ask because of the paper-bound abomination known as Inner Sea Gods and the monstrosity known as Evangelist. From what I have seen of the book, namely Walter's guide to it, it seems to be almost universally terrible from a balance standpoint. Especially evangelist. You lose one level- one fricking level-of your class, and it's easy to get a feat to bring class features back to hit dice. Then you get 100% free features for another 9 levels.

And then exalted has straight spellcasting progression, permanent protect from ______, AND a free domain.

Sentinel is disgustingly cheesy as well. Bonus feats, free +1s to hit and damage, fricking LEADERSHIP for free, +4 to initiative DR, Diehard, and cure critical wounds as a swift action on yourself?

Am I overreacting or should this book never have been written and its authors terminated posthaste?

I think you're reaching for a presumably objective determination (whether 3.5 bloat is returning or not), and then justifying it in the post of yours following the quoted one with a subjective position. That sort of falls apart.

The undeniable reality of most any tabletop RPG that ages past a certain point is that bloat's unavoidable. You either have to keep releasing new material (resulting in bloat), or hope your existing library is enough to keep cash flowing in so you remain an actual company, and not just a publishing house like some of the popular 90s RPG designers (who shall remain nameless) have become.

At this point, the amount of bloat in a given game is reliant entirely upon the allowance of the GM. I recall personally towards the end of my time in 3.5, I was considering, at the conclusion of the campaign we were in at the time, starting a new campaign which used only the Core Rulebooks. If it wasn't in the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide or Monster Manual I, it wouldn't be in the game. That meant feats, classes, prestige classes, etc. It would have been interesting to see how the game played without all the ancillary, optional material.

While technically all material in Pathfinder is "optional" due to Rule Zero, most players can typically rely on all the content present in the Core Rulebook being present in a vast majority of games they'll encounter.

Pathfinder doesn't seem headed for a new edition any time soon (nor should it ever really, as far as I'm concerned; it's the near-perfect distillation of 3.5, which was near perfect on its own; what needed fixing got fixed and called "Pathfinder"). Consequently, new material is just going to add to the bloat. It gets even moreso once you add in third-party "authorized" content like stuff from Dreamscarred Press or Rogue Genius. I mean, DSP just released Ultimate Psionics, finally adding back into the game the one really "iconic" element it's been missing. Even so, most people have always treated psionics as optional material. Its proponents are relentlessly dedicated, its opponents are ravenously opposed to it. It's like watching those arguments that always crop up amongst rock fans once someone brings up the band Kiss. There just doesn't seem to be much middle ground when it comes to psionics.

If you're uncomfortable with the amount of bloat in Pathfinder, run a game utilizing only the material you want in the game, and let your players know that stuff not in approved rulebooks won't be showing up in that particular campaign. It's a pretty easy (and elegant) solution.

I think we need a psionic system where psychic energy is harnessed after 8 hours of rest and each psionic ability is prepared during an hour of meditation and the psychic energy is stored as a specific energy pattern that is released by the psion. Now some psychic abilities may require material components to harness because the psychic energy is too much to release without a physical conduit. Additionally certain physical movements may be needed for some abilities to channel the energy, basically the body needs to align to focus chi in order to release the stored energy. Many spells will also need a verbal trigger to release. I would really like to see a psionic system like this. We could even have books that explain how to store the psychic energy in your minds so that a psion could learn many different abilities too store in themselves.

Of course! So while your component-requiring "Psion" is tied up and gagged, unable to do a thing ('cause he didn't invest in the feats to remove the component requirements...), my actual Psion will just grin, mindwipe the people holding her captive, then burn off the ropes binding her. ;)

So I'm doing my initial planning for when I can start my Soulknife in a few months (once I'm done running our group through Wrath of the Righteous). For those who have picked up Ultimate Psionics, it'd be interesting to hear thoughts on whether one should stick with the Soulknife for all 20 levels, or possibly go with a Soulknife 10/Dark Tempest 10 (using the Gifted Blade archetype to satisfy the 1st level manifester requirement for the PrC).

If you were going to use the Dark Tempest, what powers would work well so the implementation wouldn't just become "Fire off a power, then close for melee"?

Curious to hear thoughts.

Restricting magic items tends to have an unfortunate effect on the game without some retooling; the core Pathfinder rules make assumptions about the presence of at least baseline (defined as items with nothing more than an enhancement bonus) magic items by certain levels. There are generally-used rules to get around this (often keying off concepts like the Monk's unarmed attacks being equivalent to enhancement bonuses or materials at a given level; you can also do what Dreamscarred Press did with the Soulknife in Ultimate Psionics. That class will never be without a level-appropriate magic weapon unless you start going crazy with null psionic or dead magic zones).

In general I find players like having magic doodads. If they aren't finding what they really want in treasure troves, I encourage them to stake claim to suboptimal items to get them to the next decent-sized town, where then selling the item(s) and using their personal funds will often let them craft the things they really want. At the end of the day, I never treat Pathfinder (or any other RPG) as a "players vs. GM" arrangement. I'm there to challenge them, but when boots hit the dirt at the end of the day, they're supposed to ultimately win. Some of them may die, but I can't recall honestly having a TPK in the last 20 years or so (though I've often come perilously close, and in a couple cases wound up having to use a fairly heavy-handed deus ex machina to salvage the campaign; sometimes the dice just aren't nice to the players).

I've been playing and DMing for the past 12 years. The past seven I've been the main DM for my group.

When I look at the feats that modify spell casting, it's a level requirement.

Now when I see a feat tree like the fighters weapon focus. That player has to burn four slots when one scaling feat would suffice.

I have read about the lack of flexibility to some martial characters. I think some of that could be addressed by streamlining feats to make out of combat feats more available. Streamlining could also open up a master of many styles type combatant.

Anyways, it's just a thought that been nagging me for a while. Thanks for taking time to read.

I don't inherently object to the nature of scaling feats; some may or may not agree, but I tend to think feat trees are an issue of maintaining some semblance of mechanical balance more than anything else. Likewise, feats in the original 3.5 set of rules that were the foundation for Pathfinder had a lot more importance than they do now, in terms of power. "Great Cleave" in 3.5 meant something radically different than the top of the "Cleave" tree now.

I have one person in my group whose primary complaint with Pathfinder (and 3.5) is what he feels is the "necessity" of character planning. He doesn't like the notion that you should be looking up to the late teens (or even as far as 20th level) so you can plan feat trees to do the things you want. He'd rather just take a feat 'cause it looks neat and gives him power/ability he wants vs. having to plan it out. I see his perspective, though I don't necessarily share it (I'm honestly apathetic about it; I just see it as the nature of the d20 System, much like hit points and Armor Class are).

I don't think martial characters are quite as gimped as some think they are. One important thing to realize is a lot of the discussions on these forums skew towards the optimization end of the spectrum, and players not as interested in optimization tend to represent a smaller (though not non-existent) number of regular posters. Casters have a lot more utility and versatility by nature of their abilities; martial characters are generally improving on their ability to hit things, to survive (or avoid) things hitting them, and dealing as much damage per hit as they can manage. Skills not related to those goals, as well as stuff specifically oriented towards "fluff" (or RP) tend to be secondary to them.

A caster often isn't worried about hitting things (they're more worried about minimizing things' ability to resist their spells), and they don't worry as much about being hit (it isn't always the case, but casters tend towards being ranged, and will often just place themselves out of harm's way as much as they can manage, often by just making sure martial types can stay alive long enough to keep foes focused on them instead of the caster, whether by healing or buffing or both). They have to balance utility with damage output. There are players who come up with creative uses of spells (for which those players ought to be lauded), and then there are players who rules-lawyer their way into near-unassailable characters. If it isn't too blatant I don't worry about it; if it's too in-your-face, I have no problems at all wielding Rule Zero when I'm the GM.

So I was walking past one of my shelves today, and I suddenly realized how much PF stuff I've actually gotten. Currently what I own takes up the entire bottom shelf of a five shelf bookcase. This is more than any other rpg game I own if you don't count magazines (dragon/dungeon).

The only other one that is pretty close is 3e/3.5 (which includes the FR books [there were a LOT of those] and I also include DL though most were officially D20 instead of 3.5).

I have a lot of 2e and 1e, but nowhere close in comparison to how much Pathfinder is now in existence on my shelves.

The Warhammer 40K and Fantasy RPG sections would be the next largest, but they aren't really as big in relation to PF to tell the truth.

Most other RPGs are only two or three books, so nothing close to PF in regards to content owned.

The realization simply struck me as a wee bit interesting, as I've invested a LOT into PF in such a short time period.

How big is your collection of PF stuff?

A large bulk of the PF collection in my place is actually owned by my roommate; the only books I personally have purchased are the Inner Sea World Guide, Bestiary 4, Mythic Adventures, the Core Rulebook (we each have our own copy), and Ultimate Psionics. Between the two of us, however, we have all but one or two of the hardbound books, as well as several adventure paths (he's a subscriber). There are some miniatures, a couple map poster packs, and some digital-only player's guides we've also downloaded.

Our PF is quite nicely complete. :)

Anzyr, let me take one relevant piece of your post; it'll show why I have zero interest in arguing with you.

Any builds that do not conform to the standards I established in my post are not really worthy of being called "uber"

You're not interested in objective argument, you're only interested in argument which accepts your personal definitions as the baseline from which to argue. In other words, you're doing what, in debate, is called "begging the question". One can't logically refute what you say if your premise is based on the pre-existing notion of what you say already being the only method by which truth can be determined. It's like a fan of heavy metal saying, "Any music which doesn't conform to my definition of 'good music' can't, in reality, be good." In short, they're saying that no music aside from heavy metal can be "good". You're saying that no definition of uber that doesn't meet your personal criteria can, in fact, be "uber".

No thanks. Internet discussions requiring massive logical fallacies just make my head hurt. :)

Silentman73 wrote:

There are players who enjoy the one-trick pony types; they really like doing some things, and are content if their GM lets them do those things. That's great if it's the type of game they're playing, but when they're looking for a particular kind of game that isn't available, they can become discouraged.

When I see "uber-build" as a phrase, I tend to think about the overoptimized multi-class/prestige class/unending third-party-resource-using builds that are near-guaranteed to one-shot most anything within a 5-6 CR range of their level. It's, again, great if those players are in a game with like-minded players, but when they aren't, the other players wind up becoming, functionally, their cleanup crew, and that stops being fun very quickly. I pity the GM that doesn't get a scenario like that under control with "the quickness". System mastery is nice, but I think those players lose sight of the game's ultimate goal of fun for everyone, not just for them. I just think back to my 3.5 dragon-wildshaping Druid with an ongoing AC of 72... :(

Power is fun. Optimization can even be fun. But sometimes I think GMs can be too lenient, and need to be willing to say "Nope, you can't use that." I still recall, before I took a several-month break towards the end of 3.5 (I came back to playing with 4th Edition), considering running a campaign where the players had access to no books other than the Core Rulebooks (which, as a player, meant they had the Player's Handbook). It was really appealing to me after months of severe power-gaming in 3.5 to strip the game back to its fundamental elements.

You are mistaken, deeply so Silentman73. The only uber builds that multiclass/prestige class are from 3.5. I can't think of many PF builds that are truly uber that multiclass more then 1 single level and I can't think of any that take Prestige classes. And no one considers 3rd party material at all when creating uber builds, so that's just plain incorrect. Furthermore, most uber builds...

That's a whole lot of emphatic statement and presumably axiomatic content in one statement there, Anzyr. ;) I'll concede that in your experience there may not have been any instances you've encountered that go past a 1-level MC dip and no inclusion of PrC content to create an "uber build", but I'm not accepting it as empiric evidence, much less irrefutable evidence, of a more general existence of an uber-build that doesn't follow your criteria.

In short, your experience/belief, while valid for you, don't make an objective statement of exclusive reality. My own experiences have been different, both in PF and in 3.5. It's possible our definitions of "uber build" may differ, but... that is what it is. I'm not otherwise interested in arguing with you over the issue. :)

There are players who enjoy the one-trick pony types; they really like doing some things, and are content if their GM lets them do those things. That's great if it's the type of game they're playing, but when they're looking for a particular kind of game that isn't available, they can become discouraged.

When I see "uber-build" as a phrase, I tend to think about the overoptimized multi-class/prestige class/unending third-party-resource-using builds that are near-guaranteed to one-shot most anything within a 5-6 CR range of their level. It's, again, great if those players are in a game with like-minded players, but when they aren't, the other players wind up becoming, functionally, their cleanup crew, and that stops being fun very quickly. I pity the GM that doesn't get a scenario like that under control with "the quickness". System mastery is nice, but I think those players lose sight of the game's ultimate goal of fun for everyone, not just for them. I just think back to my 3.5 dragon-wildshaping Druid with an ongoing AC of 72... :(

Power is fun. Optimization can even be fun. But sometimes I think GMs can be too lenient, and need to be willing to say "Nope, you can't use that." I still recall, before I took a several-month break towards the end of 3.5 (I came back to playing with 4th Edition), considering running a campaign where the players had access to no books other than the Core Rulebooks (which, as a player, meant they had the Player's Handbook). It was really appealing to me after months of severe power-gaming in 3.5 to strip the game back to its fundamental elements.

I just received my "non-mint" copy of UP; I can't find a SINGLE FLAW with the book! This thing is in utterly pristine condition! I wanted to thank Paizo for their great, speedy shipping on this, and thank Jeremy and all in DSP who worked on this book... I can't WAIT to use it!