Zaister's page

Please cancel my Pathfinder Battles Subscription. I'm afraid the cost of the Rise of the Runelord set, considering I'd have to pay shipping to Germany and another 20% import tax is simply too high.

I have a question about the poison effect from the various prismatic spells.

Frequency 1/round for 6 rounds; Initial Effect death; Secondary Effect 1 Con damage; Cure 2 consecutive saves

How can the secondary effect ever come into play? If you fail your initial save, you die. Doesn't that make the secondary effect and the cure redundant? What am I missing here?

A player in one of my groups is considering playing a dual-cursed oracle of time in our next campaign. Now we are wondering about the misfortune revelation:

Misfortune (Ex): At 1st level, as an immediate action, you can force a creature within 30 feet to reroll any one d20 roll that it has just made before the results of the roll are revealed. The creature must take the result of the reroll, even if it’s worse than the original roll. Once a creature has suffered from your misfortune, it cannot be the target of this revelation again for 1 day.

Shouldn't this read "The creature must roll twice and take the worse result" like in the witch's misfortune hex? As written this ability can provide rerolls for failed attempts by allies (and the oracle himself), basically preempting the 5th level fortune revelation. That can't be right?

A player from one of my gaming groups has created a very nice iPad app to track initiative and more, based on the magnetic board we've been using in my group. He is now offering the app cheaply in the iPad App Store. Check it out here if you like.

Interesting to see that rather new stuff like Jade Regent issues or Land of the Linnorm Kings are already running that low.

Comment here if you can't wait for Skull & Shackles!

Does Paizo already have a plan to publish more of the web fiction in epub format? Since the last batch in August I think, there have been quite a lot of new stories finished, as well as "Guilty Blood" from the Carrion Crown Adventure Path:
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• Blood and Money
  
• The Box
  
• Faithful Servants
  
• The Ironroot Deception
  
• A Passage to Absalom
  
• Plow and Sword
  
• The Secret of the Rose and Glove
  
• The Seventh Execution

Any chance to get them as epubs soon?

What do you think about a pacifist bard? And with pacifist I mean he would not cause harm directly by using weapons or damaging spells. He would not be above boosting his comrades or hindering opponents so they can be defeated more easily by his party though. He would just not do it himself, but he would probably prefer peaceful solutions if at all possible.

This is for a Jade Regent campaign, and I want to build this character to take advantage of the romance rules (i.e. high Charisma, good Diplomacy). I might want to take a few level of harrower later on, and I'd want to start with the Harrowing feat.

Do you think such a character is feasible in the long run?

Two question regarding the glitterdust spell.

1) It's obvious that an invisible creature affected by this spell can easily be pinpointed. Does the spell also complety negate the concealment granted by invisibility?

2) Does the spell continue to affect a creature after it has left its area of effect?

I believe the answer to both question is yes, but I wanted to hear what others are thinking.

First, a quote from the rules:

Spell Mastery

You have mastered a small handful of spells, and can prepare these spells without referencing your spellbooks at all.
Prerequisite: 1st-level wizard
Benefit: Each time you take this feat, choose a number of spells that you already know equal to your Intelligence modifier. From that point on, you can prepare these spells without referring to a spellbook.
Normal: Without this feat, you must use a spellbook to prepare all your spells, except read magic.

As you see effect of the feat is dependent on the character's Intelligence. Now, if the character's Intelligence changes by increasing the ability score when leveling up or using an Intelligence-boosting item, does the character retroactively get additional choices? Considering that changes to Intelligence retroactively affect skill points in the Pathfinder RPG, this could actually be the case

What do you think?

Oh, a Manowar quote. Well, I guess it fits with this product. :)

I have a question (or two) regarding the unarmed fighter archetype from Ultimate Combat:

Unarmed Style: At 1st level, a unarmed fighter gains the Improved Unarmed Strike feat and any single style feat (see Chapter 3) as a bonus feat. The unarmed fighter need not meet all the prerequisites of the style feat he chooses, but style feats that grant additional uses of the Elemental Fist feat cannot be taken until the unarmed fighter has that feat. This ability replaces the bonus feat at 1st level.

As written this allows a first level character to take even the end-of-the-feat-chain style feats that build on other style feats and are usually restricted to higher level characters by a high BAB or skill rank prerequisite. A first level unarmed fighter, could, for example, take Tiger Pounce which comes with a BAB +9 prerequisite or Monkey Shine which requires 11 ranks in skills and can't usually be taken before 11th level.

Is this intended? If yes, then this can potentially allow first level characters to gain powerful abilities that are originally intended for possibly very high level characters. If not the ability is quite useless, seeing that it replaces the usual fighter bonus combat feat with a more restrictive bonus feat selection.

The second question is, since the ability says you can't use this to take a feat that grants Elemental Fist uses unless you have that feat, shouldn't it be the same for additional Stunning Fist uses, for example?

Simple question: can a creature with regeneration die from Constitution damage?

Here are the rules (emphasis added by me):

Regeneration (Ex) A creature with this ability is difficult to kill. Creatures with regeneration heal damage at a fixed rate, as with fast healing, but they cannot die as long as their regeneration is still functioning (although creatures with regeneration still fall unconscious when their hit points are below 0). Certain attack forms, typically fire and acid, cause a creature's regeneration to stop functioning on the round following the attack. During this round, the creature does not heal any damage and can die normally. The creature's descriptive text describes the types of damage that cause the regeneration to cease functioning.

Attack forms that don't deal hit point damage are not healed by regeneration. Regeneration also does not restore hit points lost from starvation, thirst, or suffocation. Regenerating creatures can regrow lost portions of their bodies and can reattach severed limbs or body parts if they are brought together within 1 hour of severing. Severed parts that are not reattached wither and die normally.

A creature must have a Constitution score to have the regeneration ability.

Ability Score Damage, Penalty, and Drain

Diseases, poisons, spells, and other abilities can all deal damage directly to your ability scores. This damage does not actually reduce an ability, but it does apply a penalty to the skills and statistics that are based on that ability.

For every 2 points of damage you take to a single ability, apply a –1 penalty to skills and statistics listed with the relevant ability. If the amount of ability damage you have taken equals or exceeds your ability score, you immediately fall unconscious until the damage is less than your ability score. The only exception to this is your Constitution score. If the damage to your Constitution is equal to or greater than your Constitution score, you die. Unless otherwise noted, damage to your ability scores is healed at the rate of 1 per day to each ability score that has been damaged. Ability damage can be healed through the use of spells, such as lesser restoration.

So, what do you think, which ability "wins"?

A few questions came up yesterday, which, I think, are not addressed in the rules.

When does an oracle prepare spells? And how long does it take?

The Core Rulebook says this about spell preparation:

Arcane: needs to sleep 8 hours, wizard (prepared casting) prepares for one hour from spellbook, sorcerer/bard (spontaneous casting) meditate for 15 minutes.
Divine (all CR classes are prepared casting): does not necessarily need sleep, but prepares for one hour at fixed time, usually determined by deity.

Now the oracle is a divine caster, so he would probably fall into the spot as the cleric with the fixed time, I guess, but then he is also spontaneous, so he would probably only need the 15 minutes. However, oracles don't necessarily follow a specific god, so when would they have to meditate for new spells.

Is there anything in the rules I may have overlooked?

A sorcerer in my Legacy of Fire campaign has taken a liking to a certain lucky cat. She would really like to take the cat as a familiar, mostly to protect it from harm. Unfortunately she has a bloodline that does not include the Arcane Bond ability. I'm considering allowing her to spend her next feat to get this ability. Is this a viable solution, or can anyone think of a better way? Or do we already have a way to make this happen that I'm not aware of?

Thank you for your advice.

I have a question regarding the mites in Stolen Lands. What do mites call themselves? I'm pretty sure something different then the rather derogatory "mite". And what do the kobolds call them? I'm fine with them being derogatory, but not being exactly much taller than the mites, "mites" seems unfitting.

The rules for clerics say that clerics cast spells from the cleric spell list, and never restrict those, except by alignment. (The same thoughts apply to druids and other spell-preparing divine casters as well.) The implication is that a cleric has access to all cleric spells (except those forbidden by his or his deity's alignment). For the spells for the Core Rulebook, I think this fact.

However, as soon as new source books are considered, the question arises, are new spells automatically added to a cleric's spell list? For general rule books, like the Advanced Player's Guide, or Ultimate Magic, I think, this can generally be assumed. Are the rules supposed to be read like this?

But what of the various spells spread around through, for example, Pathfinder Campaign Setting source books? As an example, there are new spells in the Rival Guide. Are divine spell casters assumed to be able to prepare new spells like these by default, or would they have to go through some kind of process to gain access to them? What would such a process entail? Or, can divine spellcasters "research" spells, like wizards can as indicated in the Core Rulebook?

How do you handle this in your game? Are there recommendations by the game's designers?

I have a question regarding the Leadership subdomain. (I already posted this on the APG forum, but Vic indicated it might be better to post it here.) The text for the Inspiring Command ability is as follows:

Inspiring Command (Su): As a standard action, you can issue an inspiring command to your allies. The inspiring command affects one ally plus one additional ally for every three cleric levels you possess, who must all be within 30 feet of you. Affected allies gain a +2 insight bonus on attack rolls, AC, combat maneuver defense, and skill checks for 1 round. This is a language-dependant mind-affecting effect.

I'm wondering if it is intentional that this sounds as if the ability could be used at will. I think a sentence like "You can use this ability a number of times per day equal to 3 + your Wisdom modifier." might be missing here. The Nobility domain power replaced by this subdomain, Inspiring Word, for example, like many other domain powers, is limited in this way. Can someone shed some light on this?

I think something is weird with my sidecart. On March 17, I submitted order #1649914, containing, among other things, a preorder for "Book of the River Nations: Complete (PFRPG) Print Edition" by Jon Brazer Enterprises, which at the time was said to include the PDF. This item was moved from the order to the sidecart some time later. Now, finally, this product is available, but it is still sitting in my sidecart, unable to be added to my current pending order, and I'm not able to get access to the PDF. Is there anything that can be done about this? I'd really like to get access to the PDF soon. If necessary, please cancel the old order of this item so I can reorder the current print/PDF bundle product.

More than a year after its first publication, I'm finally starting my Kingmaker campaign next week. I thought I'd be able to use the fabulous "Kingmaker for 6 PCs" conversions from these forums, but some last-minute player reshuffling between my groups now leaves me with 5 players for Kingmaker, so I'm a bit between the original and the conversion.

However, there seems to be a lot of other good GM advice for this campaign around, but I have kind of lost track during the wait for my previous campaign to end. That's why I'm asking around which threads or posts in particular the community can recommend from this forum. What went over particularly well in your Kingmaker campaigns? I'd be happy to hear something.

Thank you all in advance!

I'm starting a new campaign with my group, and we are going to play Kingmaker. Previously we've been playing Shackled City and Savage Tide, so Golarion is completely new to most of my players. The Pathfinder RPG, however, is not. Now some of the players have expressed about starting a new campaign now when new player options will soon become available with Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat which might be useful to have for character creation. One player, for example, is interested in playing a gunslinger, and would rather wait to start with the final version than using the playtest version and convert later.

All this means we might be waiting until August before we start on Kingmaker, so another player suggested to play a stand-alone adventure in the meantime. So, now I'm looking for a module or Pathfinder Society scenario (or set of scenarios) that are ideal for introducing players new to Golarion to this world. Any ideas as to what would be most suitable for this?

I have a question regarding the caster level of the racial spell-like abilities of serpentfolk. In Bestiary 2 the caster level is listed as 4th, and the book gives no indication that it improves with level for advanced serpentfolk. Also, all serpentfolk in The Thousand Fangs Below have caster level 4th listed for their racial spell-like abilities.

However, Yarzoth in Souls for Smuggler's Shiv and the serpentfolk in Sanctum of the Serpent God have higher caster level for their racial spell-like abilities, mostly equal to their Hit Dice, except it seems it is capped at 20th level for Vyr-Azul.

So, I'm wondering which way is correct? Does the caster level improve with gaining class levels? And if yes, how is it determined?

The Paizo offices will be closed February 22 to observe Presidents' Day.

Isn't Presidents' day today, i.e. Monday, February 21?

Just wondering, as a non-American...

Can we please make the GM Reference threads in this forum sticky, like in the other AP forums?

I'm trying to create a character that is some kind of a con artist, slightly based on the Saffron ("Our Mrs. Reynolds") character from Firefly. She should, of course be good at bluffing et. al. but also able to hold her own in a fight, maybe even unarmed.

My current idea is a rogue with the spy archetype and master spy prestige class, plus Improved Unarmed Strike and maybe Improved Feint. I don't see her as a spellcaster. She should be around 10th level.

Does anyone have any good ideas?

Fear effect in Pathfinder are usually described as "mind-affecting fear effects". The Bestiary glossary entry on "Fear (Ex or Su)" even states that "All fear attacks are mind-affecting fear effects." Fear attacks usually result in the affected creatures becoming shaken, frightened, or panicked. However, there are some abilities that can cause creatures to become shaken, frightened or panicked that are not explicitly spelled out as fear effects or even as mind-affecting effects, for example the demoralize option of the Intimidate skill. Now, neither the skill description nor the glossary entry for the shaken condition (and the whole "Fear" block of the glossary) say anything about this being a mind-affecting effect, or even a fear effect. Still I have a hard time imagining, for example, a stone golem being impressed by someone's demoralization attempt or even becoming panicked and running away.

Is it an oversight that creatures immune to mind-affecting effects, and even more so, mindless creatures, are not stated as being immune to the shaken, frightened, and panicked conditions? Is it just assumed? Or are they, in effect, not intended to be immune, so that I really can actually demoralize the golem with impressive swordplay, or use the intimidating glare rage power on a skeleton?

I have always been playing the Acrobatics skill for jumping so that every bonus to speed automatically affects the Acrobatics bonus to jump with +4 for every additional 10 ft. of speed. However, now I have been made aware that the rules about the Acrobatics actually say (emphasis mine):

Creatures with a base land speed above 30 feet receive a +4 racial bonus on Acrobatics checks made to jump for every 10 feet of their speed above 30 feet. Creatures with a base land speed below 30 feet receive a –4 racial bonus on Acrobatics checks made to jump for every 10 feet of their speed below 30 feet.

Not that it says base land speed. That would mean, for example that the fast movement class abilities of the monk or the barbarian do not contribute a bonus to their Acrobatics checks made to jump (as they do not affect the base land speed), and neither would temporary effects like haste. On the other hand, expedition retreat and longstrider explicitly affect the base land speed and thus would grant the jumping bonus. Also, encumbrance reduces speed, but not base speed and thus, a character slowed down by encumbrance would not get a penalty to jump.

I wonder if this interpretation is correct?

I wonder, why do various Pathfinder PDFs often have such weird file dates? Lots of times they have random dates from 1970, and now I've noticed that some of the most recent batch have dates even from 1956! It's not really a problem, but it's so weird that I really wonder how that happens.

Maybe Gary got some cheap really old servers...

I also wonder what the books might have looked like if they actually were from 1970, or 1956. (I guess that is what catching up on Mad Men over a span of a few weeks does to you...)

Edit: to make matters even more weird, the APG 2nd printing I just downloaded seems to be from the future, with a 2092 file date...

I'd like to get some opinion about something that has been coming up from time to time in my games and has just recently been a point of discussion again, namely teleporting onto a vehicle, for example a ship.

The question is, what kind of "teleport difficulty" applies to this, and is it even possible? Is the ship still "the same place" when it has sailed to a completely different location? One could argue that the ship remains the same, so the difficulty could be "very familiar", but one could also argue that the teleport attempt fails with "false destination", as the original destination no longer really exists anymore.

What do you think?

I'm not sure where to put this. I think I have lost a USB stick on the bus that might have had a copy of my Advanced Player's Guide PDF on it, of course watermarked with my name. In the - I think - unlikely event that this copy might show up anywhere on the internet in the future, I'm giving notice of this loss, so I hope you believe me that I did not give this away to pirates.

Regards,
Stefan.

Quick question: do PCs get XPs for a trap they walk blindly into? Or only if they actually do something about the trap?

I know it's a strange question, but is possible to download older versions of the PFS guide somehow? I am missing versions 1.0 and 3.0.1 which I'd like to add to my collection. ;)

Considering his importance for the Serpent's Skull Adventure Path, would it be possible to add the symbol of Ydersius to this package?

Is there an estimated time when the PRD will be updated to contain the Core Rulebook fourth printing errata?

Also, what about GMG/APG contents? Are there plans to add those?

PCGen, the worlds most flexible d20 character generation and maintenance software, announces the release and immediate availability of the Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Magic Playtest Round 1 Dataset for PCGen.

Download your free copy here!

This dataset is an out-of-cycle dataset release designed to be compatible with PCGen version 5.16.3. It can be installed from within PCGen, by using the "Install Data" menu entry from the Tools menu. It contains everything necessary to build a magus form level 1 to 20, including the spells from the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player's Guide on the magus spell list.

PCGen is an RPG character generator and maintenance program (d20 systems). All datafiles are ASCII text files so they can be modified by users for their own campaigns. For more information about PCGen, join us at PCGen@Yahoo! or visit our website and wiki.

This software uses trademarks and/or copyrights owned by Paizo Publishing, LLC, which are used under Paizo's Community Use Policy. We are expressly prohibited from charging you to use or access this content. This software is not published, endorsed, or specifically approved by Paizo Publishing. For more information about Paizo's Community Use Policy, please visit paizo.com/communityuse. For more information about Paizo Publishing and Paizo products, please visit paizo.com.

I'll be starting both a Serpent's Skull and a Kingmaker campaign in the foreseeable future. I plan to limit player character creation options for these campaigns to official Pathfinder sourcebooks, and I want to use the Hero Point rules from the Advanced Player's Guide to replace my old action point rules (taken from the Eberron Campaign Setting). I'd like to get some feedback as to how players use these points in actual gaming from other GMs that are using the rule already. Do players hoard their points to always be able to escape death by paying two points?

Has anyone made any experience with the "Antihero" option? Is the option to get an additional feat too abusable?

I'd love to hear some feedback.

I have just finished coding up the Magus as a playtest dataset for PCGen. I hope this can clear our dataset release workflow quickly, so it can be released as a downloadable OOC dataset soon.

For some time now, it seems that when a thread shows the "(x new)" link that the link does not actually go to the first new post anymore, but to the last one read. The same is true of the tooltip you get when you hover over this linke. It shows the last read post, not the first new one. Is this intentional? I liked it better when the link and tooltip referenced the actual new posts.

So how doe you pronounce Saventh-Yhi?

Today marks the 120th return of the day of birth of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Here's to his memory, his imagination, and his influence on our favorite campaign setting! Thank you, HP!

Has anyone of our resident artists taken it upon himself (or herself!) perhaps, to create some artwork for this book as presented in the foreword to "Sound of a Thousand Screams"? It would be awesome to be able to present the players with an actual book. Unfortunately I can't even do stick figures justice with my drawings :)

Now that the logos of all product lines are getting streamlined with the logo of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, I think it is time to replace the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game logo on the Paizo web site (over there on the left!) with the current one (the one with the red lettering). The one currently in use, I believe, is still from the Beta playtest.

Don't you think?

Let me just say that I approve of sending this order in 2 shipment, with the Flip-Mat shipping separately from the rest.

Putting merchandise like that together for shipping to Germany usually results in the package being detained for at least a week in customs, and full value added tax of 19% on all items, when books alone usually are 7% only.

Thank you! :)

In our last gaming session I came across the magic item pipes of pain in Dungeon Magazine's Savage Tide adventure "City of Broken Idols". I was confused that it isn't listed in the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, even though it is in the SRD. What happened to it?

Tangent: for a 12,000 gp item, placed in an adventure for 13th-level characters, the save DC of 14 is a bit underwhelming,

I just placed two separate orders for some reduced GameMastery card display. Please make sure that these get order do not get combined in to one package. I've spilit this up to avoid the shipment getting held up in customs on the way to Germany and to make each one individually fall under the customs fee free limit.

Thank you!

Dragon CRs have changed in Pathfinder. It is general knowlege that in 3.5, dragons were rated lower CRs than they should have been - a design decision that Paizo has decided to abandon. However the actual CRs in the Pathfinder Bestiary confuse me.

For example take a dragon like Arkrhyst from Pathfinder #5, "Sins of the Saviors". He is a standard 3.5 old white dragon with a CR of 15, just like the 3.5 SRD says. Assuming now the his is actually underrated, I would assume his actual CR should be somewhere around 16, maybe 17.

Now I'm comparing this to an old white dragon from the Pathfinder Bestiary. The base CR for white dragons is 2, and an old dragon gets +11 to this, for a total of 13. Now what gives? This is even less than in 3.5, and when I build the statblock I find that the Pathfinder old white dragon is indeed significantly weaker than the 3.5 old white dragon: for example 17 HD vs. 24 HD.

Why is that? What was the design decision to tone down dragons in relation to their age category?

And if one were to convert the Arkrhyst encounter to the Pathfinder RPG, would I use the CR 13 old white dragon, or rather a dragon with CR 15 as the encounter originally indicated (this would make him ancient), or even a higher CR (e.g. a CR 16 wyrm) to compensate for the original underrating? What do you think?

Maybe one of the designers could even say something about this, that would be cool.

I'm wondering if it is possible to play a barbarian/druid multiclass character that is actually mechanically viable. Or does multiclassing in this combination limit the individual classes too much for the character to be competitive with single-class characters of the same level.

I'm not looking for role-playing related stuff, I know that any character can be viable for play if you have fun role-playing it; I'm looking at this from a purely mechanical viewpoint.

What do you think? Can this multiclass combination created in a way so it can keep up?

An aside: my favorite race for the character I'm envisioning is dwarf.

Hmm... no more Planet Stories logo?

I have a question about the book size used by Paizo for their Pathfinder books. Amazon lists it as 10.7" x 8.2". Is that correct? and is this a standard book size in the US, specified somewhere, or if not, where did it originate?