Was looking through the rogue section and saw that you could probably shorten the first two bullet points in the Arcane Trickster general talent (page 296) to "provides Weak synergy".
*Edit* And on page 294, in the "synergy" paragraph of Surprise Attacks, "(subject to you maximum allowable movement)," should be "your".
I have an illustration I'll probably use for the final that I did in art markers and cray-pas, depicting one of the PCs battling a Fire Angel (from Zelazny's Sign of Chaos).
Fire Angel!! Did you make stats for it? If not, pic, pic, pic!
Fire Angel!! Did you make stats for it? If not, pic, pic, pic!
Of COURSE I have stats for it! I can't post pics here in Paizo, but I'll spoiler the stats I used tonight, assuming I remember.
Was looking through the rogue section and saw that you could probably shorten the first two bullet points in the Arcane Trickster general talent (page 296) to "provides Weak synergy".
*Edit* And on page 294, in the "synergy" paragraph of Surprise Attacks, "(subject to you maximum allowable movement)," should be "your".
Thanks! Corrections made in master document.
FIRE ANGEL CR 17
Init +2; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, scent, see invisibility, arcane sight; Perception +34
Languages Abyssal, Thari (can't speak)
AC 33, touch 16, flat-footed 31 (-1 size, +2 Dex, +5 insight, +17 natural)
hp 310 (20 HD; LW 155/HW 77); DR 30/cold iron
Immune electricity, death spells/effects; critical hits, precision-based damage, death from massive damage, etc.
Resist acid 20, cold 20, fire 20; SR 28
Saving Throws Fort +23, Ref +14, Int +11, Will +18
Speed 30 ft., fly 60 ft.
Melee 4 claws +29 (2d6+10/19-20 plus grab) or
4 Power Attacks +23 (2d6+22/19-20 plus grab)
Face 5 ft. x 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft.
Base Atk +20; CMB +31 (grapple +38); CMD 43
Special Atks pin (8d6+15 plus staggered 1 round plus DC 30 Fort or stunned 1 round)
Spell-Like Abilities (CL 17th)
At will—-discern location, plane shift
Attributes Str 31, Dex 15, Con 32, Int 12, Wis 20, Cha 16
Feats Canny Defense(B), Cleave, Combat Reflexes, Critical Focus (claw), Improved Critical (claw), Improved Grapple, Power Attack, Skill Focus (Endurance, Planar Sense), Staggering Strike, Vital Strike
Skills Concentration (20/+26), Endurance (20/+44), Fly (20/+25), Perception (20/+34), Planar Sense (20/+34), Stealth (20/+21), Survival (20/+28)
Terrible (but oddly beautiful) creatures of Chaos, fire angels can be captured when young and trained (with vast difficulty and risk, and great expense) to track and kill one's enemies. They are intelligent, immensely strong, and almost unkillable unless extraordinary means are at hand. Once given a target's psychic signature, a fire angel can track that person unerringly, even across planar boundaries.
A fire angel's favorite strategy is to pin an opponent with one or more of its limbs, to be slashed to death by the creature's other claws.
Bear in mind that this is before I looked at Paizo's Jabberwock stats, so you'd have to beef this thing up a bit if you want it going toe-to-toe with a lesser jabberwock, like in the novel.
The jabberwock from the book was large-sized if I'm not mistaken, and definitely only used melee, not any of the special attacks.
I think that fire angel's tracking ability would better be represented by Power Over Shadow as a bonus feat, rather than it's spell like abilities. Maybe I'm mistaken. Yeah, and forgot to say it when I first saw Amberite as a race in KF: You're my favorite person ever!! (On paizo at least :)
I think that fire angel's tracking ability would better be represented by Power Over Shadow as a bonus feat, rather than its spell like abilities.
I tend to agree -- in fact, I almost want to give it something like:
SQ favored terrain (morphic planes); tracking (as 12th level ranger)
Sorcerer:
Iterative blast has been bugging me because it came too late and seemed pretty arbitrary. I propose moving improved blast to 8th level (replacing your 2nd blast metamagic feat), and iterative blast to 12th, for the sorcerer, and adding the notation that improved blast and/or greater blast count together as a [Strike] effect for purposes of activation. Then you can make iterative blasts as your BAB allows, or make a single improved blast/greater blast, or maybe pick up Critical Focus and Improved Critical and make iterative blasts, hoping for the improved effects to kick in on a crit. This will also make it more obvious that Vital Strike and/or Deadly Aim are easy ways to boost your standard eldritch blast damage. A sorcerer/rogue with Point-Blank Shot can be rocking eldritch blast sneak attacks instead. And with the Manyshot feat and iterative blasts, you can really go nuts!
For battle sorcerers, iterative blast would kick in at 8th level, and improved and greater would stay put.
For both, at 19th level, you'd gain Powerful Blast (Sp): Starting at 19th level, the base damage from your eldritch blast is always 10d6, regardless of your remaining spell slots.
I skimmed like 1 paragraph of the playtest doc, saw something like "+20 to initiative," and saw it as a gimmick. +20 to any opposed d20 roll pretty much represents a binary condition: the same mythic ability is needed to compete with anyone who possesses that ability, but for people who both have it, nothing is at all different from non-mythic people competing. Instead of +20 to initiative, you could as easily offer +100 to initiative. Or just say "automatically wins against non-mythic guys," and remove the bonus entirely (unless the mythic guy has low Dex and also lacks the Improved Initiative feat, and is competing with someone with a high Dex and Improved Initiative and maybe the reactionary trait, or against on the the splatbook archetypes who gets +level to initiative, which is staring to look at corner-cases far-fetched enough not to worry about). And those aren't things I especially think need doing, especially with regards to initiative.
In other words, it's not so much a new ability as it is a condition statement. "You must be this tall to ride this adventure."
Yeah that was sorta goofy. They did change it though.
on initiative checks equal to your mythic tier. In addition,
as a free action on your turn, you can expend one use
of mythic power to take an additional standard action
during that turn. This additional standard action can’t
be used to cast a spell. You can’t gain an extra action in
this way more than once per round.
Kirth, I remember a while back you mentioned you actually prefer a classless ruleset, but you resorted to keeping the base classes intact for Kirthfinder because your players outvoted you. Did you mean classless rulesets in general, or was there a specific one you were referring to?
Still looking forward to an updated copy of Kirthfinder. Segmented and in .doc preferred, but I can work with whatever's convenient.
When the next round of emails go out, I'd appreciate an updated copy. Thanks!
Almost done with some tweaking that I'm overall quite pleased with. I move into a house in a couple of weeks, but once I'm settled in and back up and running, I'll be sure to get those docs out to you guys. If you haven't gotten them by the end of this month, please yell at me to remind me!
Thanks for your interest,
--Kirth
Kirth, I remember a while back you mentioned you actually prefer a classless ruleset, but you resorted to keeping the base classes intact for Kirthfinder because your players outvoted you. Did you mean classless rulesets in general, or was there a specific one you were referring to?
My favorite system of all time was Victory Games' James Bond 007 game. The mechanics of the rules, while seemingly bizarre and pointless in some areas, led almost inexorably to the type of play experience that I most enjoy, and the fact that you grew laterally -- by acquiring and honing new skills -- rather than veritically meant that you never got into most of the issues inherent in high-level D&D play.
My group at that time, tired of D&D 2e for fantasy games, tried other systems: Amber diceless and a bunch of others, but we kept coming back to 007, even going so far as to try to convert an entire D&D campaign to those rules, with limited success. But eventually we evolved a bizarre, organic hybrid of 007 and 2e, which I continued to play happily for years, until the Age of Worms -- whereupon I decided those adventures were too cool NOT to play in, and reluctantly switched to 3.5.
With Paizo's new classes that are seemingly "hybrid" classes, it seems they're moving Pathfinder closer and closer to a classless system. I can easily see them throwing in a classless ruleset to expand the glut.
Yeah, at some point you look at 47 "base classes" and 68,000,000,000 "archetypes" and say, "ya know, seems like they should have just made it more modular from the start." But while that's a good strategy from the standpoint of coherent rules, it's a lousy one from the standpoint of a sustainable business model that involves continuous publication of new rulebooks. So, while I don't doubt they might throw in a classless variant, they'd be sure to make it incomplete enough that you'd still need 27 more books to flesh it out.
Or, at least, that's how I'd do it, if I were in this as an actual career instead of just a niche hobby.
Yeah, at some point you look at 47 "base classes" and 68,000,000,000 "archetypes" and say, "ya know, seems like they should have just made it more modular from the start." But while that's a good strategy from the standpoint of coherent rules, it's a lousy one from the standpoint of a sustainable business model that involves continuous publication of new rulebooks. So, while I don't doubt they might throw in a classless variant, they'd be sure to make it incomplete enough that you'd still need 27 more books to flesh it out.
Or, at least, that's how I'd do it, if I were in this as an actual career instead of just a niche hobby.
well they came out and said that there wasn't going to be a class builder system, but they were going to include guidelines on how to construct classes. btw I was looking at my kirthfinder character sheet and it was lacking an intuition slot.
btw I was looking at my kirthfinder character sheet and it was lacking an intuition slot.
:(
It may be a moot point; Mrs. Gersen has half-convinced me that I went the wrong direction in patterning my Kirthfinder sheets after the old 007 ones. She saw one of my 1e retro efforts and said, "This one's prettier. I might be able to stand having to use at it for hours on end like you guys do. Throw these other ones in the recycle bin!"
Be prepared: just reading them, they seem pointless and arbitrary. It's when you stop and match individual pieces of them to the overall play experience that you realize the rules very, very nicely support the "world" and "feel" that they're trying to re-create.
The also went needlessly overboard in making a highly-granular dice resolution system that isn't limited to 20 "pips." I guess my biggest gripe overall is that there's no "super-excellent" results available only to people with higher base chances. In other words, a high-school dropout can potentially build a space shuttle, with a lucky throw -- although, again, this is the sort of crazy thing that happens in the Bond movies all the time, so I think that was intentional on their part.
It seems straightforward that base weapon damage listed is for medium creatures in the equipment chapter. Weapon damage does change based on the size of the creature it was made for, the same as Pathfinder, correct?
Changelings and dopplegangers should get the (shapechanger) subtype.
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btw I was looking at my kirthfinder character sheet and it was lacking an intuition slot.:(
It may be a moot point; Mrs. Gersen has half-convinced me that I went the wrong direction in patterning my Kirthfinder sheets after the old 007 ones. She saw one of my 1e retro efforts and said, "This one's prettier. I might be able to stand having to use at it for hours on end like you guys do. Throw these other ones in the recycle bin!"
Ha! Good for her! Down with grognard nostalgia! :)
well they came out and said that there wasn't going to be a class builder system, but they were going to include guidelines on how to construct classes.
It wouldn't surprise me if they have a class builder system... for internal use only.
I've been reviewing the humanoid vs monstrous humanoid issue today, based on the discussion that arose around a character being created for my game.
In Pathfinder:
They are separate creature types.
The humanoid type has many subtypes, including humans, elves, goblins. The Giant type got subsumed as a subtype of humanoid.
The monstrous humanoid type doesn't really have many subtypes. Dopplegangers do have the (shapechanger) subtype.
In Kirthfinder:
Most of the various humanoid subtypes have been consolidated into two subtypes: civilized (elves, humans, halflings, mountain dwarves, etc) and uncivilized (wood elves, orcs, goblins, hill dwarve, etc).
Giants may remain their own humanoid subtype (based on ranger favored enemy list), or may be a humanoid subtype (based on their absence in Saving Throws table in introduction).
Monstrous humanoids remain their own type.
I feel like the distinction between Monstrous Humanoid and Humanoid is superficial at best. Gnolls and Lizardfolk are humanoid (gnoll) and (reptilian), respectively, while a Minotaur and a Centaur are monstrous humanoids. The list of spells and effects that target humanoids specifically incluse: Charm Person, Hold Person, Enlarge Person, Ghoul Touch, and the Curse of Lycanthropy. Why is a dog-man (gnoll) or lizard-man(lizardfolk) more susceptable to Charm Person than a human torso on a horse body (centaur), or a bull-headed man (minotaur); does it make sense that a small green-skinned woman (goblin) can be infected by a werewolf, when a large green-skinned woman (green hag) cannot?
The rulings that I'm making for my campaign are that monstrous humanoids and giants are a subtypes of humanoids, humanoid (monstrous) and (giant), respectively, Monstrous-looking or mixed humanoid-animal creatures are humanoids (monstrous) category, and very big humanoids are humanoids (giant).
Helio,
Those are very good points. The only reason they're separate types in PF (and in 3.0/3.5) is that they have different HD and/or BAB progressions. But if we're addressing that with personalized "monster class" progressions in Chapter 2, that need sort of disappears - especially infofar as I've pretty blatantly erased the dividing line in the case of bugbears and others.
well they came out and said that there wasn't going to be a class builder system, but they were going to include guidelines on how to construct classes.
Wow, I'm behind the times:
Last but not least, the final chapter in this book [Advanced Class Guide] will give you a peek inside the design process for classes and archetypes, giving you plenty of tips and guides to build your own! Since class design is more art than science, this won't be a system (like in the Advanced Race Guide), but rather a chapter giving you advice on how the process works.
I would love a copy of the pdf when you have time to send it please.
Would also like newest files. In .doc, please.
I'd love a copy of the updated pdf when the next wave goes out
Adding my email to the list for the new doc when you get to it.
In the works:
and a cover page I hope?
I've been reading through the incarnate mysteries and some of them seem just a bit too good to be true.
Battles: Combat mastery: 1 relevation (you get 1 every 4 lvls) that grants in itself 6 combat feats.
===================================================================
Nature: Compared to a druid, the nature incarnate gets a whole lot of more stuff. By selecting the right relevations, he can have:
- An animal companion
- The plant domain
- The animal domain
(a druid can only have one of the 3)
- One druidic initiation
- Wildshaping (at lvl-3 so almost as powerful as full lvl)
(a druid can only have one of the 2)
It's true the druid gets some more abilities (as does the incarnate) but it seems the nature incarnate just gets more than double the core abilities a druid has.
===================================================================
Rage: There is some redundancy between the damage reduction relevation and savage seer. Damage reduction is already incorporated with savage seer (in addition to a lot of more synergy).
Scorpioni,
Admittedly I went a bit gonzo with some of the revelations. Ideally, a fully-loaded incarnate will be the living embodiment of his or her mystery, but not at the expense of handily out-competing other classes. That said, prepared spellcasting is a lot better than spontaneous; and I've also been leaning towards requiring incarnates to have half of their regular spells known pertain in some way to their mystery, narrowing their focus and decreasing their versatility a bit.
Also, incarnates were an early effort I haven't revisited as carefully as I should have. I'll do so in the near future, especially after having read your observations.
Thanks!
Update: My home is nothing but boxes now, and the computer will get packed up soon. I'll back up the houserules before shutting it down, so one way or another they'll make it through the move intact, but it may take some time to get everything back up and running and proofread properly. I appreciate everyone's patience -- hopefully you can give me some more time to move, get settled in, and make the necessary edits. I'm shooting for a release date of the latest docs (and mailing) before Halloween. Wish me luck!
Good luck Kirth. Moving sucks, just had to move myself twice in the past 6 months.
Can't wait for the updates.
I'd like to propose some additional (and probably wacky) additional monk content:
- A monk sutra with synergy with barbarian (or specifically rage), representing deep mystical trances a monk can enter to hone his body to the limit. Never mind, just found you can be a domain disciple with the fury domain.
- A monk sutra (or sutras) that adds additional "spells" to their ki power list. I'm thinking spells like fireball, fly, scorching ray,... This represents a mastery of ki allowing monks to manifest more powerful (and ranged) ki effects.
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Additional content for the Ninjitsu training rogue talent:
Now it is only possible to give up ki powers for synergy with skill tricks (unless I have some old version). Maybe allow instead to give up skill tricks for synergy with ki powers? This would allow for a more ki focused ninja.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Another question: How would you model a Red Mantis assassin? the prestige class has a weird mix of arcane casting, shapeshifting (and similar abilities), fighter only feats (in kirthfinder this probably can be waved), sneak attack and a death attack.
A daggerspell shaper would be my first guess (maybe allow/houserule not only daggers but things like swords to transfer their bonus to claws; like the Red Mantis prestige class) but this option has no arcane spells, and specifically illusion spells. In addition, picking a druid to play an assassin feels... 'weird'.
Pure kirth rogue, with two unique talents? Or rogue/incarnate with custom mantis mystery?
For the Red Mantis assassin, I would actually suggest something a little different: kensai battle sorcerer multiclassed with monk or fighter. Or just a straight kensai battle sorcerer. I feel like monk would fit well with a finesseful, lightly-to-un-armored magical melee fighter. You have options of shapeshifting and illusions with spells. You don't get a sneak attack with a monk (and it seems worse than fighter talents, though you could take it with levels in fighter), but kensai (or fighter levels, I suppose) gives you a way to an instantaneous death strike in a surprise round. Well, not quite a "death" strike per se, but maxed damage, which is pretty close.
Plus monks aren't penalized for using only one melee weapon, thanks to Flurry of Blows with Two-Weapon Fighting.
I failed my Will save and now I'm fascinated.
Put me down for an updated Doc, I look forward to the development!
Quick question, where is the First Blood exotic weapon proficiency feat?
EDIT: My apologies, a quick search revealed the case.
Move successful! Busy as hell unpacking, but wanted to quick address questions.
I'd like to propose some additional (and probably wacky) additional monk content: A monk sutra (or sutras) that adds additional "spells" to their ki power list. I'm thinking spells like fireball, fly, scorching ray,... This represents a mastery of ki allowing monks to manifest more powerful (and ranged) ki effects.
You could do that a la carte with the Expanded Arcana feat, or for an entire bonus spells list with the Domain Disciple sutra. For the latter, I'd also add a paragraph saying, "Depending on the campaign, the domain list might be altered or expanded (for example, to include elemental domains). There is also potential to expand this sutra to include sorcerer bloodlines in place of domains."
Additional content for the Ninjitsu training rogue talent: Now it is only possible to give up ki powers for synergy with skill tricks (unless I have some old version). Maybe allow instead to give up skill tricks for synergy with ki powers? This would allow for a more ki focused ninja.
I agree. I'll update the talent accordingly.
Another question: How would you model a Red Mantis assassin? A daggerspell shaper would be my first guess (maybe allow/houserule not only daggers but things like swords to transfer their bonus to claws; like the Red Mantis prestige class) but this option has no arcane spells, and specifically illusion spells. In addition, picking a druid to play an assassin feels... 'weird'.
Hmmm. Haven't looked at the red mantis until today, but it looks like most of their stuff can be grabbed with existing base classes and feats -- sneak attack, fascinate, Killing Stroke, Resurrection Sense, Magical Talent (summon monster, etc. It's the shapeshifting and related stuff that's harder to translate, but I concur that a daggerspell shaper druid is a good way to go -- maybe invent a new Druidic Initiation for a rogue/druid to make it match level-for-level. If I get some time in the next month or so, I'll see what I can come up with for that.
To all: next mailing still (hopefully) by Halloween.