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![]() grandpoobah wrote: @ Terraneaux I'm sorry your play experience was not up to your expectations, but I am enjoying this a lot. It shouldn't have been up to *any* self-respecting gamer's expectations. They should have released it as "early access" but in doing so they probably wouldn't have been able to hornswoggle people into buying it. As someone who's played a ton of Pathfinder, the balancing decisions were incredibly idiotic, and it looked like they added crazy unfun difficulty spikes to hide the fact that they didn't really finish the game. It's like playing a PF game with a horrible antagonistic DM who doesn't know the rules and who cheats to cover this up. ![]()
![]() So upon running into the collector drone in Fires of Creation, the party I'm running for found that their weapons were mostly ineffective against its hardness. Instead, three of them jumped the thing, pinned it, and tied it up. They went through the convoluted process of hauling it out through the lake, and while obviously there are NPCs who want to take it from them without paying them a damn thing, how much do you think a functional robot would sell for? That's the kind of thing the technic league demands a monopoly on, right? ![]()
![]() I have some very fond memories of running Shackled City... then again, my group was very much on the same page for this stuff - they basically played a group of busybody Pholtan missionaries, on a mission to protect Cauldron and convert it away from that misguided faith of St. Cuthbert - but they were painfully nice about it all. But I did spend a lot of time linking things together and filling in the gaps - it helped that the PCs had goals of 'set up church, build connections with locals' in between the adventures. ![]()
![]() James Jacobs wrote:
Aight. Given the context of the main villain(ess), I imagine that a lot of that is being reframed in the vein of the current cultural climate over at Paizo? I'm differentiating "rewritten' from 'updated to Pathfinder.' ![]()
![]() So I've been running this game, and I'm about halfway through adventure 3. There are 6 PCs, and while everyone has a firm grasp on the rules, nobody's particularly insanely optimized. However, fights are a cakewalk for the party to the point where it's causing us to collectively agree that something has to be done. Usually for games with 5 or 6 players I just slap the advanced template on everything if it's written for 4, but it's not so much about the numbers - mythic powers that let the PCs go super hard in terms of action economy from the getgo just mean that enemies don't have time to respond. Has anyone had success with cranking the difficulty while leaving the current schema of mythic rules intact? ![]()
![]() Tacticslion wrote: Tels, it's implied in a non-core book. James Jabobs has clarified it on the forums (that's the reason Pharasma hates undeath) - which makes it Golarion canon -, but the printed implication comes from either Undead Revisited or Classic Horrors Revisited in a sidebar. Pharasma isn't good-aligned. Just because something annoys her doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Excessive charity probably gets on her nerves. ![]()
![]() James Jacobs wrote:
Wait, like it's making the judgment that being female is a curse compared to being male? That's certainly one way to interpret it, but I don't think that's what makes that particular item 'cursed.' ![]()
![]() KahnyaGnorc wrote: Good cares for both good means AND good ends. What happens when you're forced to choose between the two? I don't know if the Operative was evil, just misguided. He thought that he wasn't a good enough person to live in the world he was creating for his superiors, when exactly the opposite was true - he was a better person than his bosses deserved to have working for them. ![]()
![]() James Jacobs wrote: But 99% of the reason why I had her use an elixir was the fact that I think that the fact that the girdle of femininity/masculinity with its traditions of being a "Cursed Item" is pretty insulting, and I'm not a fan of them and have zero interest in letting a cursed gender changing item show up in an adventure. It *is* a curse to most people. If Anevia put one on post-transformation, she would not be comfortable at all. Most people aren't happy with having their physical body's sex switched. I'm really confused as to why you find it 'insulting.' ![]()
![]() Klokk wrote: Please dun take this as a quarry or attack on the gendertransformation potion. It was much more i did think she sold an artifact for something cosmetic for her partner. (cosmetic cuz gender has no meaning in PF-Universe) It's not really cosmetic. It's a pretty important quality-of-life thing. One could take a very grim view on things and say that Anevia should have suffered through it for the greater good, but it's not a trivial sacrifice. ![]()
![]() I think the argument could be made that, based on the particular tenets of whichever deity a Paladin happens to follow, a paladin selling her sword (to get their lover/spouse a much-needed magical body alteration) may have been seen as a mistake. Not a serious-bizness mistake, but one in the vein of 'oh you should have sacrificed more. love and family relationships are not for you, go smite more evil.' As cited above, though, Iomedite Paladins don't work like this, so Irabeth is off the hook. ![]()
![]() A lot of NPC's are flagged as being intimidate-immune because winning an encounter with social skills, especially one like Intimidate that is not based on ingratiating or making friends with the NPC's, is seen as 'too easy.' Nobody took hit point damage or anything. Plus, if a PC can intimidate an NPC, it makes a value judgment about that PC's protagonism and 'coolness' that most GM's are somewhat leery - the PC's are oftentimes the perennial underdogs only able to succeed when they jump through certain hoops set by the GM. ![]()
![]() James Jacobs wrote: Furthermore, if ANY paladin is going to be accepting of another despite race... it's Irabeth, who's had to go through the same prejudices in her time in Lastwall due to her orc blood. Really? Just because someone is from discriminated minority A doesn't mean that they don't have as much, or possibly more, dislike of discriminated minority B. ![]()
![]() If a character is a follower of a deity, and the deity's domains grant spells that would be uncastable by alignment, how would you resolve this? The particular example is Tsukiyo, who grants the darkness domain, which has as its 5th level spell a Summon Monster V which can only be used to summon 1d3 shadows. Summoning shadows is casting an evil spell, and thus is something that Tsukiyo shouldn't be able to grant. Do we have the cleric summon LG shadows? Do we not allow the cleric to prepare/cast the spell? ![]()
![]() I've always thought a dragon as the overall villain of an AP would be pretty awesome, since dragons are both smart and physically powerful. So a dragon can be a plotter/schemer as well as an overwhelming physical threat, like M. Bison (Dictator) from SF. Throughout the campaign you'd be dealing with the dragon's minions and machinations, and then actually having to go up against Big Red (or whatever) once you'd foiled his plans to destabilize the geopolitical region. In this case, I imagine a dragon villain as a sort of James Bond-esque villain. You could have Mengkare decide that the only way for his perfect society to work is if all of the rest of human civilization is destroyed, since it keeps screwing up the sterility of his perfect experiment. Since he doesn't want to attract undue attention, of course he works through intermediaries to throw all of Avistan into a self-destructive cycle of rebellion and war. And it's up to the PCs to find the man behind the curtain and eventually defeat him. ![]()
![]() FrankManic wrote: Yeah, speaking of Impositions - Is there ever any explanation for why you can suddenly pull off high level magical effects? The special abilities seemed really arbitrary and weird. Having a reputation might get a ship to surrender without a fight but it's not going to turn your ship into a submarine. I always assumed it was Besmara intervening personally. She's shown as kind of a tryhard diety as far as answering her follower's prayers and supplications. Though in my group I always give credit to Pazuzu. He cares, after all. ![]()
![]() MrSin wrote: It bothers me you need to correct me. I meant from the players meta perspective they shouldn't have to die 50% of the time and that should influence their decisions, and from a meta-game perspective if fights took half of your group every time your game wouldn't last very long. And Fair for whom? The NPCs aren't people and don't have nearly as high a value as the PCs. If its not fair to your players, its just not fair at all. My point is that in 99% of all fights in DnD, the PC's enjoy a substantial advantage. If the fight was fair, they'd lose half the time. ![]()
![]() Backfromthedeadguy wrote: Tell them they're supposed to be playing heroes, not children. If they persist have NPCs start treating them like cowards. Who knows, I had a really terrible GM once who would throw overwhelming challenges at the PC's, browbeat them for not running away because they weren't 'thinking tactically,' and then have all the NPCs treat them like shit for running away. Also he'd get really nasty towards players who tried to optimize. My point is, OP, the players you're talking about have a perception that the encounters they're running into are likely to kill them. Are you new to this group? Maybe it's got a culture that you're not aware of. Talk to them, and try to change their perceptions. ![]()
![]() Alleran wrote: If anybody inherited the mantle of Death from Pharasma, I'd love to see somebody like Death of the Endless (as in, her character and concept) take on the role. Yeah, I meant what would happen if someone who seemed to care more about mortals inherited the role. Cayden Cailen with the death portfolio... suddenly wakes and funerals become much more raucous, energetic affairs. Like a New Orleans funeral. To a certain extent, though, the Pathfinder setting has the ideas that undead=evil and trying to extend your time alive indefinitely is an inherently bad thing encoded into it. That's a big part of what makes Pharasma and the context of death in Golarion what it is, to have a different take on death it's likely those things would have to change. Urgathoa has the right idea, except that she's a terrible person. A good-aligned Urgathoa analog would be pretty awesome. ![]()
![]() Kthulhu wrote: I'd go with the movie version of zombies, where, while mindless, they can sometimes respond to certain stimuli with "remembered" behavior from their life. I.E. about the intelligence of a dog or other mammal. Long story short, mindless undead and constructs should have intelligence scores of at least 1, for the most part.
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