Short/partial answer re: alchemical crafting in PFS - FAQ
Slightly more nuanced answer based on a quick read of said FAQ - Use the rules listed under the 'Craft' skill which give you a formula to figure out how long it'll take you to make something. You may Take 10, you can do crafting during downtime and still make a Day Job check, and your only real limit is time and the amount of money that you're willing to spend to craft the items.
Regarding crafting items while traveling place to place (such as from your current location to Yiangma and other instances where a scenario starts you in one place but then sends you somewhere else) - more than likely yes, you'll be able to do this unless circumstances (aka the scenario) dictate otherwise. That said, some instances of travel aren't given a hard duration so I'll be guesstimating for those.
Hopefully that makes sense. If I'm wrong I'm sure Zithembe or Maria will sort us out between now and when I check back in later :)
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Hah, I was working up a post at the time with that exact FAQ linked. Maria will be taking levels in Investigator so she was interested in the answer. Very well answered before I even got my post in. :)
Short answer reference crafting for Maria at least is she won't be making anything during a scenario due to the massive time-sink that can be, but at some point she might make some things during her downtime.
Does anyone know off-hand if the +1/level bonus to 'crafting alchemical items' that the alchemist and investigator get applies to the day job checks?
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Does anyone know off-hand if the +1/level bonus to 'crafting alchemical items' that the alchemist and investigator get applies to the day job checks?
The bonus has to be non-circumstantial (not in the rules meaning but in colloquial meaning) and non-temporary (you've got that part covered) unless that circumstance is "Day Jobs."
I.e. If the bonus is "+1 to Craft (alchemy) to create alchemical items" then, no. If the bonus is "+1 to Craft (alchemy)" then, yes.
EDIT: Caveat: Unless there's a special exception to Alchemists with Alchemy of which I am unaware.
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You comitment to cleric-ness is commendable, but if you've got the money to spare:
Darkwood buckler will alleviate some of that.
A darkwood heavy shield isn't that much more than a darkwood buckler and gives 1 more AC at no penalty.
MW breastplate helps.
If you can afford it, MW agile breastplate really helps.
Unless you're saving up for mithral full plate or something.
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When I sat down to do this, I was trying to compensate for spell failure before realizing that armor doesn't affect divine spell casting, only arcane.
I'll reswitch with the different items to fit. As far as armor I'm trying to save up for, I'm going big. Celestial Armor.
Redo
Selling-Studded Leather Armor: +12GP
Purchasing-Darkwood Shield: -257GP
-Masterwork Agile Breastplate: -550GP
Starting Funds: 1441 GP
Ending Funds: 646 GP
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Are you talking about upgrading stuff as you go with an end goal in sight of a specific named magic item? This FAQ is what I think you were talking about and it does allow what you say, sorta.
But I think you would have to take a very specific path for some of those named items, depending on how strictly one interprets said FAQ since the phrase has all of the abilities of the original item is technically impossible for a some of the named stuff.
For example, there is no possible way with any enhancement or material to get a +8 Max Dex Bonus on Chainmail. However, everything else in the description of Celestial Armor could be achieved with the purchase and upgrading of Mithral Chainmail.
The nitty gritty of rules and faqs and all that can be so overwhelming, but a game of this level of expansiveness is bound to be that way. Most of the stuff I find on rulings seems to be common sense types of answers, so that is good at least!
Hey folks, I know some of you might be busy for the next few days and while I don't have any holiday plans I will be working the next four nights starting tomorrow night.
So I'll update as I'm able with work but no rush if you've got better things to do than sit inside and post this weekend :)
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Posting this in all of my games:
As of yesterday, I have moved to London!
1. This should not impact my posting regularity, but it will change when I can post (around five hours earlier now).
2. If you live in London and enjoy playing with me/in my games, shoot me a PM! I'd love to get involved in the local PFS, a homegame, or even 5e (although I'd be brand new at that).
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Good luck, Rumble! Don't cause too much trouble.
Parison: You should go to my seance tracker to fill in your choices for when Zithembe channels the Marshal or the Trickster spirit.
When Zithembe channels a spirit, all allies in a 30 ft radius near him benefit from a certain boon. I usually put that in my post.
However, two of them require individual choices.
The Marshal spirit grants the boon of one of the other spirits: Archmage (+2 to spell damage), Champion (+2 to non-spell damage), Guardian (+1 to CMD), Hierophant (+2 to healing performed [excludes healing by magic items]), and Trickster...
The Trickster grants +1 to one skill of your choice and it counts as as class skill.
Hey folks, I'll be heading out of town to DieCon19 and won't return until sometime late Sunday night/early Monday morning. I likely won't have a ton of free time for posting so please feel free to bot me as necessary :)
And no, you do not get to bot me if I'm your GM :P
Thankee!
Still committed to running our games here as planned, of course, lest anyone worry :)
I'm back and rested and have spent the requisite time with loved ones who missed me (the weirdos) while I was away on my con adventure! Thank you for your patience :)
Hey folks, in accordance with this announcement I have reported this scenario early. Chronicles obviously won't be issued until we actually finish but if you prefer to keep track of your sessions and such through Pazio and notice some of your totals for your character seem off, that will be why.
Nudged Hepsubia via PM earlier to make sure all is well and that the campaign didn't stop showing new notifications again~
Happy Father's Day to all you dads, grandpas, step-dads, godfathers, and father-figures out there! Hope you have a fantabulous day today!
If you (general you) have reason to find today sad rather than joyful, I hope you're able to have a good day today just the same. Hang in there, okay?
For everyone else, Happy Sunday :)
Been a bit of a confluence the last day or two between work, VO stuff (PbP Gameday VIII, go check it out!), and some other RL business; updates a bit later tonight if all is quiet.
So...pulling a bit from the current topic of discussion over in Flaxseed Discussion, I'm curious:
Do you folks prefer to know the DCs for skills and such up front or would you prefer them to be 'secret' like they usually are in a F2F game?
When it comes to reactive saving throws that may or may not affect the tide of battle and the actions of others, would you prefer for me to roll them immediately to save time or would you prefer to stick to the current system of rolling them yourselves?
I'm good either way (though secret DCs and rolling some saves for you does make slightly more for me to do when composing) but I'm curious as to your own thoughts on the matter.
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I do saves outside of combat at my PbP tables because if I happen to post just after the person who needs to roll has completed their screen time for the day, the entire table is stuck sitting out a day waiting for the action to move. Consequently, if you want to roll surprise saves for me/us, I'm completely fine with that.
What I do is allow players to retcon their re-rolls. I know you're not supposed to know the result of the roll when choosing to use your GM Star re-roll or certain other abilities, but, as the GM, I find it an acceptable concession in exchange for maintaining the pace of play.
For example, in a recent PbP MTS, the players killed a balor. Balors explode for a lot of damage when they die. Everyone was in range. A lot of them failed the save I rolled for them. So, I then let them use their GM Star re-rolls, which saved most of them (aegises of recovery and a boon saved the rest).
For DCs on skills that I should know the results for immediately, especially if I need to react to the outcome to move action forward, are helpful to know up front (like knowledge checks). For my personal experience, it doesn't matter to me if I know the DC or not. So whatever is easiest for you and keeps the action flowing the best.
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I'm fine either way, I roll everything except when I can take 10 on climb checks with a knotted rope or rope ladder. I also pretty much save my re-roll for my first failed save vs. a spell/ability/trap so if you wanted to handle all those yourself just incorporate that rule into my save rolls.
I would also be up for establishing an SOP that includes taking 10 on perceptions and 20 when we have time to search stuff, or just having a block of rolls for the SOP. I'm not sure if we have discussed or set up anything like that other than marching orders.
^There might have been a rough SOP set up way back at the beginning of this little endeavor but there have been quite a few cast changes since then and so whatever was decided probably isn't applicable anymore. I'd be perfectly happy for you guys to set up some basic SOP for dungeons and the like; talk it over and figure out who will be doing what.
Also, I'm going to give folks a little more time to react to the info that Maria has shared with you before moving us forward since folks are busy with travel and such.
Speaking of travel, is anyone going to be out of pocket this upcoming week or next weekend? I have no plans or shindigs to attend for July 4th so I'll be around like usual.
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I'm back, no more holiday related absences here!
As far as rolls, I'm currently testing out where the GM rolls pretty much everything and the players can look at them/use their rerolls as they see fit (which seems similar to how Zithembe does it). I've only posted a DC when it was relevant to movement in combat or would otherwise slow play. My goal was to keep the pace up as smoothly as possible, while maintaining player agency. This is my first time doing it that way, but the players haven't mutinied (yet) and we seem to have been able to move forward pretty well.
My two notable observations from having the GM roll everything:
SOP: As long as Rumble is in frontish, Rumble is happy :)
Hmm...this may just be me being dense but if you at least provide the target DCs for checks and the relevant information should a character succeed, I'm not really sure what the difference is in player agency between the GM rolling everything vs. the players rolling their own checks? I always preview my rolls as a player so I can adjust my post accordingly; if I tank a diplomacy check I'm sure to have my character say or do something off-putting to represent that failure.
Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand a different method of GMing :)
*edit* Just realized that it could make sense if you're talking about Monster IDs.
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Well I suppose it wouldn't relate to things like rolling diplomacy (since you would get a roll for speaking) and are more for things like knowledge (and other stuff that PC's just know/do). For example, I personally find it annoying when the GM throws a spoiler up for knowledge and then one of two things tends to happen:
1. Multiple people read the spoiler, pretend they don't, but then write actions suspiciously close to what was deemed beneficial by the spoiler. Then the person with the knowledge gets around to posting/sharing the information, but at that point it doesn't matter if that player bothers to share it since everyone has already acted on the information. To me, this is a loss of player agency with regards to the player who invested in knowledge skills at the hands of their fellow players. 99% of the time they would have shared it anyways, but the choice was no longer theirs to make.
2. Posting stops while everyone waits for the one person with the knowledge to make the roll. My current method does nothing to mitigate this, but I don't really know how to mitigate this, given the medium, without telling everyone the information based on my roll of their knowledge (which is actually fine with me if the PC with that knowledge informs me of such).
The benefit of the GM rolling and not posting DC related spoilers, to me at least, is that the person with the knowledge gets to share the information the way they want to (this won't stop people from opening spoilers not listed for them, but, again at least to me, it makes it clear who is supposed to know/share this information). Also, if they don't make the check, the information isn't out there for everyone to pretend to not know either.
Player agency might not be the best word for it, but idk what else to call it! :) This is far from a perfect system, but given my gripes with the current popular system, I figure it is worth experimenting with!
@Rumble - Gotcha. I admit that I'm not particularly concerned about meta-gaming but this is probably either because I don't see/notice it (though just because I don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't happen) or I've been lucky enough to largely play with folks who are good at keeping player and character knowledge separate. (There's a reason I generally don't do FCFS recruitment for my games outside of convention offerings.) I try to be a pretty laid-back GM and give people my trust until they show me that I should do otherwise.
The bit about Monster IDs in particular has always been a little tricky for me and I've gone back and forth on how I present it. Sometimes I've put the information in a specific spoiler for whoever made the check and other times I've posted it out in the open because I assume that any good Pathfinder is going to share what they know. Admittedly the latter method does take away some player agency (they don't get to RP sharing that knowledge with their team) but I've always figured that it balanced out somewhat because at least said player(s) got to roll their own check. I tend to play with people who strongly prefer to make most of their own rolls themselves, barring standard PbP-SOP like the GM rolling initiative checks, and I strongly prefer making most of my own rolls as well.
That said, it's important as a GM to work out your own preferred method of handling certain things and I applaud your efforts to find an alternative that appeals to you! Whether I agree or disagree with them, it's always fascinating to talk GM shop with other GMs and get insight as to why they run their games they way they do :)
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And no worries Zith; I just got home from work myself and I'm super tired so I'll probably update later after I've slept.
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Bad play like metagaming (intentional or not) or blatant cheating is honestly such a rare thing to see. I just don't think it is worth the effort added to a GM's already very high load of work (a good GM does about 60-80 percent of the work in a game in my experience).
As for the GM rolling knowledge checks and whatnot, here are my thoughts. In combat checks to ID a creature, keep doing them as spoilers. You can't take 10 in combat, so that entire issue of showing the DC and having a player know they can hit it by taking 10 instead of rolling is moot. Plus most of us want to get a max roll on that to get the highest return on our checks. I personally like to use a spoiler that ID's the creature and then have the player ask what tidbits of knowledge they would like to know to prevent spoiler opening and use until after the roll is a success.
Out of combat, either just list the DC and deal with the delays of us rolling and you then providing the information OR have us set up a block of formatted knowledge rolls in the slides for you to quickly use and roll for us.
Maria's would by something like this right now (with the brackets added of course on the slides).
dice=K: Dungeoneering/Engineering/Nobility]1d20+6[/dice
dice=K: Arcana/Geography/Local/Nature/Planes]1d20+7[/dice
dice=K: History/Religion]1d20+10[/dice
Regardless of the end results of this discussion, I'd be happy to try out some of the methods discussed as a trial basis to figure out what works best for the group. New ways of doing things could improve my GM'ing as well as our group run here.
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A formatted block of knowledge rolls would be the way to go for any GM-heavy rolling (haha as I have learned in the game I am running time and time again XD).
I've unfortunately played with several crummy players throughout my relatively brief gaming career (I feel like a magnet for them sometimes, woe is me!) and I do believe that this has colored my perspective. Having faith in my players? WHAT?! ;)
I am cool to roll with whatever you want to do GM Ladile, I apologize if it came across as me trying to instill my ways into you! I also enjoy talking shop, it's fun and something I think the gaming community (in general) could use more of!
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Player agency might not be the best word for it, but idk what else to call it! :)
Player recognition, essentially. Getting credit for being the one to accomplish a good roll.
Player agency is the player being able to make choices for their own character(s). Do I kick open this door or do I let someone try to pick the lock? Do I jump the pit, climb down the pit and back up, or use my potion of fly? Do I try to win this NPC over with diplomacy or browbeat them with intimidation?
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Thanks Zithembe! Player recognition it is. Variable bonuses are something I hadn't considered before... hrmm... That does throw a wrench in DM rolling. If you have to start retconning rolls all the time, then there isn't really much of a benefit anymore. It'd be easy in a home game/AP since I'd have a much better tab on each of the characters, but for PFS every game can have a different cast. GAH!
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I've also run across some players that don't really feel super comfortable with a lot of RP, but really enjoy the rolling aspects of the game.
So taking away some of their player recognition (I like that term) would likely just push them farther away from caring about the game. My wife is a bit like that, she checks out during most non-combat stuff but greatly enjoys when she can make a skill check to help the group or in combat when she can unleash her attack(s). There are also players in pugs (pick up groups) that are pretty much there for the xp and do the barest minimum. Giving them even less to do is probably something I would not pursue in my games.
All that said, most of the players out there seem to range from decent to excellent with a few outliers here and there.
@Rumble - No, not at all! I said that I wasn't trying to be argumentative and yet I feel like my follow-up post after that initial one ended up having a slightly argumentative tone anyway, which wasn't what I intended. For that, I apologize. I was being serious when I said that I enjoyed getting to talk shop with other GMs and I appreciate you going into further detail about why you've been trying out the alternate system.
@Zithembe - I also like the differentiation between 'player recognition' and 'player agency'. I'd never thought of player recognition in quite those terms, just more of a nebulous 'everyone deserves a chance to shine' manner of thinking. Going forward I think I'll be using 'player recognition' to express that concept more succinctly.
@Maria - Yep. While I personally prefer a more RP-heavy approach to games I know others get more enjoyment out of the tactical combat or getting to put their skills to use. I try to cater to all of those as much as I can (scenario selection does affect this) but I also have no problem directing players towards GMs whose styles they might enjoy more than my own.
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I haven't weighed in on this discussion because I feel like I've not gotten enough PbP experience under my belt to do so.
I've been a live GM for Pathfinder for almost six years with a couple of completed AP campaigns under my belt for my home group. I've got 17 scenarios under my belt as a GM for Pathfinder Society live in the past year and a half, and I've been a player of PFS at least on a once-a-month basis for almost three years. Until a couple of months ago, I'd only done one PbP game and that was almost a year and a half ago when I got to play in GM Ladile's 'Night March of Kalkamedes' table that she ran.
When we finished that scenario, I had enjoyed myself but felt at that time, PbP wasn't an experience I wanted to immerse myself in. It wasn't the GM or the players. I just enjoyed the live experience better and I'm a little bit more extroverted in that sense, but I didn't rule out not wanting to do PbP again. My thought was to maybe do one PFS scenario via PbP a year if it became an itch I wanted to scratch.
Said itch occurred but in a different way. I wanted to do PbP, but I wanted to be a part of an AP PbP game. I submitted characters for consideration and wasn't picked. In one case, my lack of PbP experience and my earlier choice to not really get into it worked against me in the recruitment process (but I understood where the GM was coming from in being concerned about that).
Ladile approached me and asked if I would be interested in playing in her PFS campaign. While not an AP campaign, she helped me understand that by doing so, I could build up my PbP experience and that getting it would open doors to future PbP opportunities and I accepted the spot she was offering me. Two months ago, around the time this group was finishing up House of Harmonious Wisdom, I applied for a D&D 5E campaign module recruitment thread here on the forums and I got accepted. Since then, I've been invited to play in a Pathfinder module for PFS credit and I managed to get selected for an Iron Gods AP PbP game.
All that being said, I'm playing in four currently active PbP games and in each, I'm simply trying to learn the play style of each of my GMs in terms of posting speed as well as their narrative style as well as figuring out my own. It's been easy to find the voice for a couple of my characters and the other two I'm still trying to flesh out and figure out who they are. Oddly, one of those characters is me in terms of speaking and personality and its one of the two where the voice doesn't come so easy because it's not easy to stay true to an accurate portrayal of self.
For writing purposes, my one goal is to make sure that when I post, I'm not rolling dice with each and every one. I enjoy the storytelling aspect that PbP enhances and I don't try to roll unless the GM calls for something I can roll for or it's a situation where I feel that making a roll is important in my post narrative.
For this game and my other ones, I just simply put my trust in the GM that they know what they're doing and what's best in terms of presenting the adventure to the players and be ready to adapt to whatever play style they roll with.
All apologies for such an 'Albuquerque/Alice's Restaurant Massacree' response in getting to the point. Main thing, though, is I'm still having fun in all four games, including this one!