henwy's page

Our Starfinder Group just finished the Adventure Path Dead Suns and is looking for more players before we start the next campaign. We've been meeting at The Only Game in Town (FLGS in Somerville, NJ) on Tuesday Nights, though now we're starting a new campaign, the day of the week is flexible. If you're interested in playing, please drop me a line at pfshenwy at gmail.com and I can provide you more information. At this point, I'm opening to starting one of the other two Adventure Paths or simply running scenarios depending on what players prefer.

Has there been a ruling on this? Are people completely immune to incorporeal undead if they have a personal force field up? Is it just the touch attack that they're immune to and everything else still has its normal effect such as ranged attacks of special attacks?

Has effect?
Ghost's Corrupting Touch Attack [Yes/No]
Witchfire's Witchflame Bolt [Yes/No]
Caller in Darkness's Wrap in Despair [Yes/No]
Radiactive Wind's Rending Wind [Yes/No]

In case anyone is curious why I've got all of these specific examples, I'm running Dead Suns 06 Empire of Bones and my players wanted to visit the 'Special Cargo' section of the ship so I have to come up with something since that's not addressed in the module. I decided their special cargo is every single type of Incorporeal Undead I can find sealed into metal pokeballs in individual containment fields, each marked with a symbol denoting what it is. Fire for Witchfire, Shadow for Caller in the Darkness. I figure the idea is the ship keeps these guys contained and then launches them at enemy ships/ground forces in combat. By this point, every player has a personal force field and I'm trying to figure out just how much of a threat these creatures will be if they start opening pokeballs.

BTW, in Evac 5: If the Sand Slitherer manages to catch up and then successfully engages, isn't it pretty likely it's very first attack swallows a whole vehicle? (passengers included?) That seems sort of harsh...not to mention if everyone is gulped down I imagine a lot of parties would be in trouble.

I just wanted to say that prepping this was an absolute bear. I've never spent so much time getting ready to run anything before. I've been at it for days and I feel that I could spend countless additional hours at this if I really wanted to make sure everything ran smoothly. I haven't GMed an interactive since PFS Season 5. Have they all gotten this complicated?

Blech. I personally don't even play anymore so boons and rewards are a matter of indifference to me. Wiping the slate clean and forcing me to start again is just asking me to burnout because it's functionally telling me my efforts were for nothing and in a 'what have you don't for me lately' move, I'm being tossed out with the garbage unless I run the new hamster wheel.

The nova climb has just started and you're dumping this on us too? Sounds like a burnout special with a sour grapes chaser.

Yay, first novas.

Have you spoken with the hotel? I think they may add rooms to the block as needed.

No, I just tried the online portal and saw that no rooms came up for any of the dates. Never having gone before, I wasn't sure if that was normal or not. I imagine since it's near the airport there must be tons of other hotels in the area, but do most people just stay on site?

The reason I was curious about whether it's an actual sellout is the hotel has the entire week and change blocked off from the 21st to the 31st and there's no rooms avaliable through the portal even for nights before the con begins. That seemed sorta strange....do people usually arrive 3 days before and leave 4 days after?

I had been thinking about attending this year and just noticed that the registration site was up. It looks like all the hotel rooms are already sold out. Is that normal?

Henry Chi

Date Achieved: 7/11/16

USA - New Jersey

I was just looking at this post and pondering whether I should make the push to get to 5*. Went all gung-ho getting to 4 but really slowed down in the past year. Could probably make it by the end of this year with minimal effort.

I'm sorry if this ends up being a stupid question. I've been AWOL from following the forums and PFS news and I don't have the time to catch up at the moment.

I logged in today to report a few old sessions and noticed that a bunch of my sessions seem to be missing from the count. I cracked 100 a couple months ago and hit 4 stars and then suffered a bit of burnout. Today though it's now showing only 90 sessions for some reason. Did something change in the counting or is this just a bug? I didn't try to go through the list to see if any of the actual session reports are missing.

I was super excited reading here that the Buff Deck even existed. I had purchased the Conditions Deck a while back and though I haven't had a chance to use it more than a few times, it's an absolutely invaluable tool IMO. That's why I'm more than a wee bit disappointed when I went to order a Buff Deck and saw the list of what's included. I'm sure it was hard for the staff to decide what to include and what to leave out but some of their choices are baffling. The whole point of the deck IMO is to speed play both for GMs and players, having a concise summary for a buff especially things that scale (trying to remember if something is +1 every 3 or every 4 levels can be a pain) or have a multitude of options (Blessing of Fervor anyone?). Instead, a bunch of things added were either so basic (Charge, Fighting Defensively, Total Defense) or abilities people should already know just from playing their own character (Rage, Mighty Rage, etc).

I imagine there's no chance they'll put out a Buff Deck 2 with some of the buffs they left out? The focus really should be on those buffs with variable details which are often easily forgotten.

I'm still ridiculously new to PFS, but it seems like a bad idea to me to allow all stars to automatically refresh each year. Maybe I'm just worried that it'll cause a decline in GM quality more people flood in with the goal of just a numerical advantage. Of course, having it never refresh also makes it a sort of worthless boon since most people will never use them, saving them up for a rainy day that for most will probably never come. I really think the right answer has already been offered, a refresh with a hook/requirement requiring people to GM a certain number of scenarios over the past year for their replays to refresh. It should be incredibly simple to add something which not only counts your total tables of credit but how many you've accumulated since the last Gencon. I'd hope the added advantage of this is it helps keep GMs more active as well.

I'm pretty sure not a single sense motive or bluff or diplo was rolled the entire scenario. The GM ran it without the social interaction skills, which in many cases is just as well. Not much is going to skew your perception of an interaction like a prompt for a roll and from a player perspective it's usually an attempt for more info, but everyone had already broken into camps based on past experience.

Sometimes shooting little girls is justified.

These sort of debates just seem weird to me. Maybe it's because I'm still pretty damn new to PFS (Only been playing for like half a year and GMing for less than 3 months) or maybe it's simply that I'm too old to be full of piss and vinegar about these sort of things. Things should never devolve to a point where you run games with the mindset of it being you vs the players. I can see someone bogarting all the action and making the event less fun for other players, but that's a player type more than it could be applied to any particular class or build.

Maybe I'm not the best person to weigh in on this since the second PFS character I created is a gunslinger and I also haven't seen any gunslinger run amok at any table I've run. My 'slinger is a musket master with the much maligned double barrel musket but the odd thing is I almost never fire both barrels. To me, PFS play is about the long haul which means it's about efficiency. 98% of the time I spend my first action getting abundant (because bullets are freaking expensive) and the -4 penalty to hit just isn't usually worth it. It is worth the extra misfire chance to me just to have the option if things go pear shape one day though.

In the end, I think if you do run into a gunslinger who is unloading the bullet storm each and every encounter, besides talking with them about sharing the limelight, the best thing to do is make sure they actually are spending the gold for the cartridges. 6 GP a pop is not chump change, especially if you're rapid shotting and double barreling it. That's 36 GP a round. Eventually that will start to weigh upon your WBL.

Chapter 1: "The Snows of Summer"
by Neil Spicer

The Reign of Winter Adventure Path begins with an exciting new adventure from RPG Superstar winner Neil Spicer! Every 100 years, the Witch Queen Baba Yaga returns to the nation of Irrisen to place a new daughter on the throne, but this time, something has gone wrong. Far to the south, winter cloaks the forest near the village of Heldren with summer snows. The heroes venture into the wood and discover a magical portal to the frozen land of Irrisen, whose supernatural winter will soon engulf all of Golarion unless they can discover the fate of the otherworldly witch Baba Yaga—a quest that will take them through snowbound Irrisen to even stranger lands beyond.

Currently I only have two people signed up to play in this event. If you'd like to join, please drop me an email. My address is henry323 at gmail. This is a two-part module so you'll need to play in both parts for full credit. Only PFS sanctioned material will be used so bring a lvl 1-2 character.

Usually what makes a character fun for me isn't the class or build. As far as those goes I usually just optimize the hell out of something since I find the ignominy of dying aversive and the least entertaining part of a game. What does make a character fun for me is the personality. I tend to prefer quirky and downright unhelpful characters. This is another reason I try to optimize the hell the hell out of things because I want to make sure that I can full my own weight and no one else dies because of something my character got them into.

As such, so far I have....

A stuttering paranoid summoner with about every phobia known to man. (Her Eidolon is batsh!t insane, like a cheshire cat with daggers for teeth but she's the only one who doesn't seem to realize it's a psycho)
A pyromaniac gnome wizard who helps the Sczarni sell 'insurance'. (His familiar is Mr Fluffy, a large white rabbit who he talks to and it tells him to burn things)
A completely lawful stupid tiefling paladin of Ragathiel who makes no distinction between jaywalking and mass murder as crimes.
A hippie stoner zen archer a la Keanu Reeves
A complete hick fast-talking gunslinger

Sorry to have to put this here but I have a question about Warhorn. If I'm not the event organizer and just a GM, is there any way I can collect the email addresses of players who have signed up to play in the event? I just want to make sure there's not some easy way to do this that I'm missing.

Just finished GMing and reporting Thornkeep: Forgotten Laboratory to earn my first GM star.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!

Congrats. Just got mine too as of a week ago.

Steven Huffstutler wrote:

I have seen one adventure so far that players were not happy with secondary success condition.

** spoiler omitted **

Other than that the response at my location has been positive.

That's the players own fault.

I don't see why. Unless they were given some special emphasis of why it should be saved, life > property. The idea that if they had taken the people and used them to beat out the flames and gotten that second point may be reductio ad absurdum but it's immediately what comes to mind.

Maybe it's because it's become expected that PCs should get 2 prestige per scenario. If the 2nd point was supposed to be a bonus for going above and beyond in years past, it clearly failed miserably. The general feeling is that you should get 2 unless you bork something majorly. The fact that we're shifting to a system now where the 2nd point is more uncertain changes the entire perception and mechanic. It's not that the players didn't earn a bonus (as maybe is the intent) but instead that you're punishing them by removing something they would normally receive. Now, maybe over the course of a year or two the change will filter down and people will look at that second point as a bonus but for now, it's nothing but punishment.

It's just not always clear there's even an option IMO. I ran The Goblinblood dead today and the

Now, we can argue that a careful DM would have made note of all that and broached it in the conversation somewhere but it could be a really easy thing to miss. Without the deliberate emphasis as given in the faction mission, it's hard to blame them for not discovering there even was an extra mile to go. And the worst part is it's actually specific to those devices. If the PCs had decided to dig a moat for them it wouldn't have counted scenario as written.

It's just not my cup of tea as it stands. I'd be happier if the secondary missions were handed out like a group faction mission of some sort and not this fumble and hope you find.

I don't care for it, mostly because it's a patch that often isn't well integrated into the scenarios. There is often nothing in the briefing that event hints at the condition since it's post-hoc and thus the players are left stumbling around. Maybe this will change and as DMs get used to cross-referencing the list they'll plant their own hints or downright orders, but as it stands it's been a bust from what I've seen so far. Half the time the GM doesn't even look up the success condition until after the module ends and it's as much a surprise to them if the PCs succeeded.

Reign of Winter

Chapter 1: "The Snows of Summer"
by Neil Spicer

The Reign of Winter Adventure Path begins with an exciting new adventure from RPG Superstar winner Neil Spicer! Every 100 years, the Witch Queen Baba Yaga returns to the nation of Irrisen to place a new daughter on the throne, but this time, something has gone wrong. Far to the south, winter cloaks the forest near the village of Heldren with summer snows. The heroes venture into the wood and discover a magical portal to the frozen land of Irrisen, whose supernatural winter will soon engulf all of Golarion unless they can discover the fate of the otherworldly witch Baba Yaga—a quest that will take them through snowbound Irrisen to even stranger lands beyond.

This is a module that will be split into two separate days.

Part I: 10/27/13 Sunday 7pm EDT

Part II: 10/29/13 Tuesday 7pm EDT

Please only sign up if you can make both parts. For completing the module you will receive 3 xp and 4 prestige. (And a pretty kickass boon to boot)

If you're interested, please muster here at the 9-5 warhorn group: http://v1.warhorn.net/9-to-5ers-roll20-pfs/schedule/month.php

Yep. Just decided not to play. The table was still legal without me and IMO, not playing is better than going through a mismatch. The response from many people has been to complaints about tiers that you don't have to play and can choose not to. That's a far better outcome than playing what you don't want to.

Just earlier today I logged in to play a game online and there were three other players. I had a 4th and there was a 3rd, a 5th, and a 1st. The 1st clearly wanted to play their char rather than a pregen so I dropped rather than play down. It's usually hard to get the high tier to go off in online games I find. If it's at a LGS, you pretty much know who's likely to show up and what characters they have and at what levels. Some extra communication beforehand allows the GM to pick a scenario that fits everyone. Playing out of tier often feels to me like I'm wasting a scenario. Either it's a romp or I'm stuck in the back trying my best to hide and not die. Since you only get to play each once, I find dropping to be the better solution.

I'm going to bite the bullet here and ask some really stupid questions. Please bear with me. I've only just started running PFS events recently and have some questions about reporting. Is the idea to only create one event # and then just add sessions to that one number no matter when they take place or what gets run or should I be creating a new event number for each event I run?

If it's the former, should I go back into the events to edit/add in the new dates for whenever the next event occurs or am I supposed to clone them or what? Normally, I'd just muddle my way through creating or clicking or mucking with the system until I figured out how it worked but I didn't want to make a potential mess I couldn't fix.

Second, if I GM a scenario under someone else's event, how do I go about reporting the session? Does whoever organized it have to do it and I just give them the info or is there some way I can enter an event id and have it pop up on my event list to report?

I'd join if I weren't running a game at that same exact time. =(

I'd join if I weren't playing in your game running at the same time :P.

We have a few, but still looking for more!

1. Robert - Warlock 8
2. Benny - Fighter Rogue 5
3. Michael - Wizard (Illusionist) 6
4. Henry - Gunslinger 6/8
5.
6.

If you'd like to play, please send me an email at ssior [dot] 27 [at] gmail [dot] com with the game's name and date in the subject line, containing:
Your name
Character name
Class / level
Faction
PFS ##-#
Desired Token Image if you have one

Is it really evil to eat sentient creatures? I mean, I can see how it would be evil to kill people just to consume them, especially if you're willy nilly about who you kill, but if someone's already dead then isn't it just a case of waste not, want not? It'd be almost like embracing that whole freegan ideal of not wasting food. It's not evil that we loot the bodies of those who unfortunately expire while trying to kill us, so I think the same should go for bodies.

What got me thinking about this was the witch major hex 'cook people'. I was thinking it would be fun to chop up enemies post-hoc and then hand them out as gingerbread men. It's not even like my witch would likely kill the person in the first place, but there are bodies left lying around it'd be a crime to let them just decompose and go to waste.

I understand that that petitioning for cannibalism to be morally ambiguous is probably not going to get me far, but I think it would have been a fun character to make.

Few things are more frustrating than table variations on these sort of ambiguous elements.

Sorry to resurrect this, but has this question ever been definitively answered from on high? I had a DM tell me today that mistmail only stays misty for 3 minutes while at another recent table another allowed it the entire time. Could we please get a FAQ on this or, failing that, a consensus?

Aasimar 16th level Dervish of Dawn / 2nd level Master of Many Styles / 2nd level Lore Warden
Azata-blooded, favored class bonus for Bards (Inspire Courage)

This looks like a ton of fun. If you don't mind I have some questions...

The dip into fighter....is it for the BAB for some of the necessary feats? If so, why make the dip at 11 and 12 instead of somewhat earlier? Also, is there any reason for Lore Warden in particular?

I would think that you would need Combat Reflexes much earlier seeing as that's critical to the build. If it's feat starved...maybe human is better even without the inspire courage boost from favored class?

I just installed combat manager and was trying to load up some .cmpt files from the shared GM drive for a game I'm running and got an error message:

"The version of the file is not compatible with the version of windows you are running."

What am I doing wrong and how do I fix it?

I also noticed another quick thing....

In the monster database, the program crashes whenever I try to apply 'advanced' to the 'riding dog' for some reason.

Let me guess.

** spoiler omitted **

Also, did the character even get a fort save?

Whoa. That's pretty impressive that you picked the module out just based on that. Or is this one of the infamous ones?

He got his fort save but it was no good. At 2nd level, making a mid-20's fort save just isn't going to go well.

I've only just started playing pathfinder society games earlier this year so I'm still trying to get a feel for the difficulty levels of the various tiers but nothing throws a fear of God into you like seeing a character die 2 minutes into a module.

It didn't help that the other player keeping watch (me) also failed the perception check but still.... It sort of makes you never want to never let your character sleep during a module again.

Seeker's Sight:

This sight can be attached to a single two-handed firearm. When this is done, the sight becomes part of the weapon, but can be removed from that weapon with a full-round action. A firearm wielder using a firearm that has this sight can choose to spend a full-round action to either locate an invisible creature within line of sight or make a single shot that ignores the invisibility of a creature that she knows is in the area.

Dead Shot Deed:

At 7th level, as a full-round action, the gunslinger can take careful aim and pool all of her attack potential into a single, deadly shot. When she does this, she shoots the firearm at a single target, but makes as many attack rolls as she can, based on her base attack bonus. She makes the attack rolls in order from highest bonus to lowest, as if she were making a full attack. If any of the attack rolls hit the target, the gunslinger’s single attack is considered to have hit. For each additional successful attack roll beyond the first, the gunslinger increases the damage of the shot by the base damage dice of the firearm. For instance, if a 7th-level gunslinger firing a musket hits with both attacks, she does 2d12 points of damage with the shot, instead of 1d12 points of damage, before adding any damage modifiers. Precision damage and extra damage from weapon special abilities (such as flaming) are added with damage modifiers and are not increased by this deed. If one or more rolls are critical threats, she confirms the critical once using her highest base attack bonus –5. For each critical threat beyond the first, she reduces this penalty by 1 (to a maximum of 0). The gunslinger only misfires on a dead shot if all the attack rolls are misfires. She cannot perform this deed with a blunderbuss or other scatter weapon when attacking creatures in a cone. The gunslinger must spend 1 grit point to perform this deed.

I'm assuming you can't mash these two together? There's a traffic jam on the full round actions but dead shot is still technically one single shot.

Very unlikely at this point. Friends had to run errands that took way longer than I thought it would. Still in the Chicagoland area

Late start. Not leaving until just now. It's iffy whether we'll get there by four

We should be leaving chicago for indy somewhere between 10-11am with a couple errands to run. I'm hoping to make it down there by game time but I hear the traffic running down has been a bear. I'll try to keep you updated.

Hello everyone!

I was wondering if anyone would like to partake in a last chance running of Way of the Kirin, right before the cut off date. This will be run at the Embassy Suites in downtown Indianapolis at 4:00 pm on Tuesday, August 13th(if needed, we'll work with the time). I'll make sure to have reporting in and done before midnight to ensure everything is legal.

I will be running this scenario, and I already have 1 player interested in playing. Just respond to this thread to RSVP, and I'll put down your screen name on the following list.

Way of the Kirin
Embassy Suites
GM: Zauron 13
1. Jim
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

I and two friends woiuld be interested. I'm trying toi introduce them to pfs and this would be a good opportunity to do it. where in the embassy?

I've just started playing here in jersey and at cons and local games I've probably played with around 35-40 pathfinder chars so far....I've been the only gunslinger. 2 Zen Archers though.

IF you add online games, another 25 people or so...no gunslingers other than mine. Another 2 zen archer though.

I have a paladin concept that I've made but I can't seem to find a God that would be fitting. I was thinking about how paladins may be the most heavily stereotype class in existence and I wanted to put a twist on the paladin from a personality standpoint. Most paladins you run into tend to be those sort of Type A charging go-getter optimist. So what if you had a paladin who was morose and more resigned to the hopeless cause of good. I've decided to make him a Tiefling to add that extra dimension of conflicted, self-loathing and the suicidal trait to boot. Personality-wise, I sort of want to play him as an Eeyore with the sort interaction like, 'Maybe the rest of you should flee for surely this evil will overwhelm us all and I'll stay here and die to perhaps buy you an extra minute or two to run'.

The problem is most of the LG gods seem to be all gung-ho and smite the evil doer. I can't see this guy fitting in anywhere. Can you even believe in laws and goodness and embody them if deep in your heart you believe chaos and evil is consuming the world and your cause is hopeless?

You know what they say about old dogs and new tricks. It would be sort of spiffy to be able to play online but it'd probably take me a while to sort out how it's done. I haven't had a webcam or headset in years, never having gotten into any of the games which use voice/video chat. I've kept it pretty old school really. I'll take a look though and thanks for the heads up.

It seems like the general consensus of the RAW crowd is that Wednesday is one day too late and us Way of the Kirin people would be borked as far as the boon is concerned. I don't suppose there are any GMs around on Tuesday who would want to run the scenario? :P Pretty please? Pretty please with a beer on top?

It's not something I'm really familiar with and I wouldn't know where to start. I remember playing a dnd game once years ago through IRC but it seemed clunky and slow.

Everyone had said they thought playing on the 14th would still count so I didn't worry too much about it. Spent some time getting the character to third the past couple weeks in anticipation. Didn't expect this and there's no one running it locally before the deadline.

Well this is depressing...

There seems to be some general confusion about when the deadline for playing Way of the Kirin (and rivalry's end too) and having a chance to receive the boon. Some people seem to believe that the 14th is the last day you can participate or GM it for it to count, as in before the end of the 14th, and others are saying that the 13th is really the last day because it literally says before the 14th.

Could perhaps the powers that be ring in and clear this up? It makes a big difference to me since I'm signed up to play in Way of the Kirin as part of the PFS pre-gencon hoopla at Scotty's and I was really hoping to have a chance a the boon for my character.