Sitri's page

There's loads of monsters in D&D/PF that have more than 4 limbs. For inspiration, look at these:

Chuul
Marilith
Drider
Displacer Beast
Basilisk
Basidrond
Behir

anyone else nerdy enough to think "that's awesome they put pedipalp on the drider"?

I think most anyone who reads these boards regularly would agree that Mike does a great job, but I don't think an appeal to authority is a good reason for people to silence their opinions. Let's also not forget that player feedback, like what is happening here, is also a source of data piazo has historically valued.

It shouldn't be a problem for coordinators because there are always going to be pre-gen options or the option to create a new character

I have played a pre-gen a few times, it doesn't even feel like I am playing a role playing game. I couldn't care less about the role of party pre-gen cleric; I am a tag along mechanical device. There is a big plus to being able to play a character you designed and feel attached to.

What's the problem with extra exp tied to your extra gold?

One more vote for +2 exp.

Who else feels this was a more important story than the dead faction headline?

I understand the desire to limit wealth disparity, but I agree that removing the incentive to play up is a bit heavy handed in my opinion. It seems that it will force more tables to play down or not at all.

I also do not think this will be a "fringe case" as Mark referred to it. When playing at a store, the decision to play up or down happens fairly often. I was faced with the decision 4 days ago. The fact that there was a gold incentive to play up led me playing along and completing a table. I was on the fence, but if there was no extra gold at the end of the rainbow, I would have without a doubt dipped out and the table wouldn't have happened.

I think I saw someone earlier suggest an out of tier gold amount, like getting paid half for playing up. As of right now that would be my suggestion to address the wealth disparity without completely removing all mechanical incentive of playing up.

Another possibility would be something like a luxury tax. A table that would have each level listed and the max gold you could spend at one time without incurring a tax on the item. This tax could mitigate the wealth difference a bit while feeling much more indirect.

Well, you can sort of see why there aren't many Prestige Classes available in Pathfinder; no body asked for them. After all, there were Prestige Classes in the Advanced Player's Guide, but everyone got so excited for the new archetype mechanic presented in the same book that the prestige class mechanic was ignored for two years; they were even absent from the "definitive guides on magic and combat," which makes very little sense in my opinion.

The best way to start seeing more Prestige Classes out of Paizo is to prove to them that there is still a market in Prestige Classes; you're not going to get them if Paizo thinks they won't sell. First, get any many people as you can convince to buy Paths of Prestige. This is Paizo's only real serious Prestige Class-focused product; you don't buy this book for any other reason that to have more Prestige Classes, after all. Second, make it clear to the 3PPs that new, quality Prestige Classes will sell. Because the 3PPs are much faster at producing new material that Paizo, your feedback will have an impact on a 3PP sooner than it would on Paizo itself, and you can bet that the Paizo teams watch the 3PPs for buying and selling trends in the industry.

Of course, if you don't want to influence the market, that's fine too. Just don't complain about the lack of Prestige Classes if you're not willing to do anything about it.

The best way to get quality PrCs is to make the suppliers aware of demand, as people are here, not to buy substandard products or unusable products that share the name.

Your advice boils down to "throw money at things you don't want in the hopes someone will some day make it the way you want." I do think this is almost the worst advice I have ever heard.

My wizards typically cast one or two spells and then sip tea while the beatsticks mop up.

I work along these lines too. Once the fight is in the bag, let the brawlers do their job. The amount of time I waste on a crossbow or acid splash isnt worth the damage even if I hit. I am a tactician not a janitor. :)

Ugh. I'm a little put out that you'd think I wasn't interested in debating this since I clearly think it's important.

Well I am happy that I was wrong, as I think this type of thing worth thinking about also. In all fairness, you can't really blame me. "Can we please stop trying to use genetics, or science in general, to explain how a Planetouched child is born." Sounds a lot like a plead for ignorance so an appeal to mysticism can be made.

Also, descent with modification is irrelevant in this context because the change from generation to generation is purely cosmetic until the birth of the planetouched offspring which is blatantly not gradual. Which is something we can prove because it's defined in the metagame.

The example was given to show real life examples of basic genetics leading to fundamentally different individuals, an idea you seemed to have a problem with. While some biologist will argue whether punctuated equilibrium actually occurs or not, the time frame was irrelevant to my point.

I am not telling you to reduce the level of thought, I am telling you to use MORE! A simplistic punnet square style explanation with relative dominance of one blood factor is a far cry from explaining why an Aasimar is not Human. Thinking about it from a purely genetic standpoint causes all sorts of indirect questions to pop up. None of which are immediately related to your point I suppose.

Then in the interest of thinking more, perhaps raise your peripheral concerns rather than saying scrap the whole endeavor. I would be happy to hear them.

A mule is not fundamentally different to a Horse or a Donkey in the same way that an Outsider (Native) is different to its Humanoid <race> parents. On the one hand you have direct hybridisation between two related species, on the other you have the sudden transformation of the genetic lineage from one race to an entirely distinct one with unique metaphysical properties.

A mule is a separate species from a horse and a donkey. It cannot breed with members of either group. It is fundamentally different in terms of DNA....as well as some other average phenotypical properties that fall outside the normal ranges of both groups combined.

There's no protein structure, no pathway, no interactions that could possibly justify the fusion of a soul and a body. It's absurd!

Why is that so? In reality we have no evidence of such a thing, but in reality I am not convinced of the idea of a soul to begin with. But in Pathfinder, souls are scientifically verifiable. You could run a great number of tests to verify how they behave.

In a land where souls are present and do have some type of link with living creatures, why could protein structures not be responsible for the creation and/or binding of such a thing? If a soul is a sort of software, recording signals from the nervous system and endocrine system to store up memories and behavior patterns to continue running once the hardware is gone, why can't proteins be that hardware that helps to generate the initial program? In this case, the average creature would have their proteins transfer their soul to the "cloud" when they die, but outsider proteins don't have this wireless capability. Natives apparently don't require as much work to pull old files off a crashed system by hand as regular outsiders due to their greater similarities to the systems we are used to working with.

Not to mention that some of the features would be carried by the parents, so to say it was entirely heritable and then mysteriously isn't expressed in either parents or familial line in any record and just shows up in a number that can't be quantified but can easily be explained by a Punnet Square is not something that makes any sense.

This is still no big problem for a number of reasons. The simple one, many of the outsider genes could be recessive. The more realistic one would be there is an epistatic relationship where one gene needs to be activated for others to manifest physical traits. This would be the route that I would go with in this explanation. Using my iP gene from earlier to activate other genes would both solve your "what about the other genes" problem and simultaneous solve my previously unmentioned "phenotypical ratios between Natives and Sorcerers suggest odd genotypical ratios" problem. Additionally, it would play to the cannon in Blood of Demons about the recent influx of Natives. An environmental condition has activated the epistatic gene.

That's not to say you couldn't attribute it to genetics, Faith Hunter's Rogue Mage novel series does a reasonable attempt at it but it doesn't have this 'only when the stars align' do you see a planetouched. It has obvious issues of hybrid sterility, implied genetic relationships between Seraphs and Neo-Mages because of viable offspring (I think that's what they're called IIRC), and logically consistent points. Pathfinder/DnD on the other hand really just uses the "Because ... Dragons!" reasoning for this sort of thing with the way the fluff/crunch is written.

I am not really asking for stars to align, only genetic codes ;) I was doing my best to remove the mysticism and because dragons.

When I first read the OP's concerns about sorcerer bloodlines and outsider bloodlines I thought "He is right, this is kind of b!$~~@+*." But I took a second to think about how it might happen, and it alleviated my concerns. Apparently the thought wasn't so helpful to the OP :/

<tongue in cheek>

If their character isn't as good as mine they don't know how to make a character and are just riding my coattail.

If their character is better than mine they are power gamers who violate the true spirit of the game.

:P

When I first read Lou's comment, my knee jerk reaction was "Holy %$#@, what is he thinking?" But after thinking for a second, I don't care if deviations are made in a scenario as long as it is fun. While I don't think I have seen this tier swapping happen, I have seen people do fast and loose interpretations to keep a healthy pace. I would take the GM that focuses on fun more than scenario's letter of the law any day.

That being said, I would be kinda pissed if I knew he cranked up the challenge and it caused me to lose a character. Since it didn't, I wouldn't begrudge him. If I was sitting at his table I would probably have walked away happy. The main point that I could sympathize with on the nay-sayer side is that if he had to start pulling punches then giving out a high rewards would have been a bit inequitable.

Jiggy, I have read a lot of your posts and normally think your opinion and knowledge is quite solid, but the idea of players getting mad when they share their stories with others sounds a bit reaching to me. If I can even manage to remember what events went with many of the titles, I can't see myself caring if someone played it a bit different. I wouldn't even think it worth the effort to find out who played it "more right".

When you make an attack roll and get a natural 20 (the d20 shows 20), you hit regardless of your target's Armor Class,
In regards to action A, condition C satisfies requirement R

and you have scored a “threat,” meaning the hit might be a critical hit
and starts potential supplemental event E.

To find out if it's a critical hit, you immediately make an attempt to “confirm” the critical hit—another attack roll with all the same modifiers as the attack roll you just made. [b]If the confirmation roll also results in a hit against the target's AC, your original hit is a critical hit. (The critical roll just needs to hit to give you a crit.
For E to take effect, repeat A and check for R.

So for the original question, is there any rule to make exceptions to C satisfying R? I don't see it....assuming it is an otherwise legal attack.

I will side with the camp of "Slavery is evil in our modern context, but it is painting with broad strokes to say every character in every setting should think it such." If you look at the big three monotheistic religions, you will find provisions for slavery in texts they all call holy. While most modern apologists will claim those standards are not meant for this era, an extremely significant number of people throughout history call, or did call, those texts with provisions for slavery the ultimate guide to goodness.

I had this typed up in hopes of seeing r2 of rpg superstar. I felt compelled to post it somewhere. Originally I named it Ghiest Driven, but seeing as how I was struggling to make word count I changed it to Indepted. All comments welcome.

Indebted (Witch)

Indebted (Witch)
Some argue the Black Sisters of Gyronna not only become stronger in death, but will barter for this power. Desperate, disenfranchised people go to great lengths for power, and to the indebted her soul is a tradable commodity.
A witch of Gyronna, or with no religion, having a patron relating to death, darkness, deception, or insanity can take the indebted archetype.
Charisma Dependent: An indebted uses Charisma instead of Intelligence when determining the highest level of spells she can cast, her spell save DCs, number of spells known, and any effects of her hexes normally determined by her Intelligence.
Gheist (Su): At 1st level, the indebted is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The gheist manifests when the indebted communes for power. Her gheist acts in all ways like a witch’s familiar for the purpose of preparing and gaining spells. The gheist is perceivable only by the indebted and only while manifesting; it may not otherwise be interacted with.
When the indebted casts a spell granted by her class, the gheist will manifest itself for a number of rounds equal to the level of the spell cast; casting more spells adds extra rounds to the total. While manifest, some gheists try to claw through to the material plane, some whisper portents of the indebted’s torturous fate, and some simply stare ominously.
No matter how the spirit behaves, its presence is so unnerving as to give the indebted the shaken condition (DC 15 Will negates, +1 for each consecutive round the ghiest is manifest.) Once affected, the indebted remains shaken for the duration of the manifestation. Nothing in life compares with this horror and the indebted is otherwise immune to fear effects.
This ability replaces familiar.
Damned (Ex): At 1st level, when an indebted dies, her gheist instantly claims her soul. Any character attempting to resurrect a slain indebted must succeed at a caster level check equal to 10 + the indebted’s level or the spell fails. That character cannot attempt to resurrect the indebted again until the following day, though other characters can attempt to do so if they please.
Horror Kin (Ex): At 2nd level, an indebted’s repeated exposure to horror physically warps her. She gains a bonus to intimate checks and penalty to diplomacy checks equal to half her class level.
Concentrate Terror (Su): At 8th level, the ghiest bond becomes strong enough to channel its essence. When using the demoralize action, an indebted may increase the fear level generated by increasing the DC of the check by 10 for each step desired. Creatures repeatedly targeted by this ability receive a cumulative +5 bonus to resist.
This ability replaces the witch’s 8th level hex.

How many people like the hex grid better?

*raises hand

I have decided that the next time my CN sorcerer is in a party with a paladin he needs to start hitting random people with his wand of infernal healing and watch hilarity ensue. :P

My two cents:

If your argument in favour of a particular interpretation of the rules involves the words "Webster's dictionary defines this word as...", you've already lost the battle. ;-)

Yes by all means, lets not have objective, unbiased, interpretation of the english language getting in the way of what we want a sentence to say. :/

If everyone that played this game had an above average vocabulary, it wouldn't be as necessary. Since that is not the case, there is nothing wrong with a little education mixed in with a hobby.

I find it offensive that grown men and women call themselves witches and think that gives them the right to make demands on someone else's fantasy game.

To the original question, I have played several witches, they are quite fun, but I have never really considered the patron something accessible to me. From the lines "This patron is a vague and mysterious force, granting the witch power for reasons that she might not entirely understand. While these forces need not be named, they typically hold influence over one of the following forces." I kind of always thought of it a deistic type creature that occasionally turns a knob. I don't really talk to it and it doesn't talk to me, rather it discreetly sets up the pins in my path.

That being said, if I had a DM willing to make the patron some sort of recurring NPC, I would think the idea awesome and would be happy to play it up.