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I find the setting fascinating, but I'm not interested in learning a new rule set. Anyone have any interest in playing a conversion of the setting to Pathfinder 1e?
Okay, so as I was saying before the site took the weekend off...
Now THIS seems more my speed! Especially after looking at all that gorgeous artwork for the game. How have I missed that? It seems like Dark Sun, but less... dark.
What kind of creation rules were you thinking? There's quite a few technology archetypes in the rules that might suit this setting pretty well, to boot.
Well, actually there are a lot of Mythos like elements if you scratch the surface (google "The Bloom" and "The Endless Gate" if you want a sampling of some of that), but I think it can play as less dark.
I'm open to discussing the rules -- the Cypher system uses a sort of bast class system like True 20 where there's a 'magic class', a 'warrior class', and a 'skill monkey' class, and you modify that with point buy. There's a system for generic classes like that in Unearthed Arcana that could be adapted to Pathfinder.
I'm open to rules suggestions for stuff that would capture the tone/spirit of the setting -- like maybe hero points can reflect cyphers, or something like that.
Um... we'll need some more players too, any chance you can try to recruit from other games you're in with players who might be interested?
bump now that the forums are back on.
Anyone interested in this?
I don't know the setting, though it sounds intriguing.
Would the learning curve be great?
An amnesiac character is one option!
Most of it is unexplained weirdness -- there are 8 previous 'worlds' over a billion year period leading up to this ninth version of earth.
The current culture is like medieval/renaissance, but there are remnants of essentially magical technology, worm holes to other dimensions etc. All of this is essentially background coloring -- there's no definitive description of the previous worlds, and a lot of the technology is a complete mystery.
I was thinking amnesiacs would be a good way to do it -- something like the recent computer game Torment: Tides of Numenera. I was actually going to see if I could use part of the maps and game script to do a game based on it.
Numenara was always an interesting setting; I'll be for it once you have creation guidelines all set up.
Does anyone want to suggest rules?
Should we try to model the Cypher engine or just fit pathfinder stuff into the setting with appropriate archetypes?
There's a third party system called Eclipse: The Codex Persona where you design a character with point values -- so you buy your HD, BAB, etc. at every level, and can endlessly mix and match. Would anyone want to try something like that if we're going to do something closer to a PF attempt to emulate the Cypher system?
How would everyone feel about some of the rules from Horror Adventures for the cosmic horror elements like the stuff I referenced above (seriously, google 'The Bloom' and 'The Endless Gate' -- this setting can get seriously creepy).
I do recall the Torment game is something of a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment with its amnesiac main character.
So long as there is an SRD or equivalent that I can refer to, I'm game for variant rules.
Perhaps a condensed skill list?
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/consolidated-skills-optional-rules/
I kind of like the consolidated skills + skill groups option
Lol Paizo (smh).
So, did anyone else want to propose some rules?
I was also going to give a lot of extra feats to make it more like a point-buy system, as well as allow you to stick any archetype on any class, instead of replacing the features (more like the StarFinder model of archetypes).
Automatic bonus progression and background skills.
Feat tax
And that archetype rule sounds interesting. One archetype per character or options to combine them?
I was thinking of making everyone take one from the technology guide for the setting and one of their choosing, and those abilities just get slathered on top of whatever class you pick.
Cool.
A thought occurred to me: story feats. Some like accursed could work even with a amnesiac character.
Yeah -- that would be interesting too. Let's see if anyone else responds. Unfortunately, the outage kind of disrupted stuff, and I'm currently trying to resuscitate by Dark Sun game, as well as a couple recruitment threads :(
Character Creation Proposed Rules
(1). Ability Scores:
Ability scores have an active an passive bonus based on your modifier:
Strength (Force/Resist);
Dexterity (Pursuit/Evasion);
Constitution (Physique/Durability);
Intelligence (Fluid/Crystal);
Wisdom (Deduction/Insight);
Charisma (Appearance/Personality), or something of that sort.
You can push the base bonus up and down for each 'side' when you generate stats (i.e., you could have a +5 for strength, and make force +7 and resist + 3).
These apply to active/passive checks with these stats.
(2). Race:
Pick a template to modify your race.
(3). Classes:
(A). You choose 1 class from a 'group' -- marital/trad. arcane caster/spont. arcane caster/trad. divine caster/spont. divine caster/skill monkey/'buddy '/creature class'/unarmed combatant (am I missing anything major?) -- maybe just martial/skill monkey/caster?
(A1) Anyway, you get to choose 3 archetypes -- all have to relate to that 'category' of class that you chose as your base chassis, and one needs to be tech oriented if possible.
You slather all those on top of the base class chassis.
(A3) Start at 5th.
(B) You choose 1 level of a prestige class.
(4). Skills:
Skill groups + grouped skills from Unchained.
(5). Hit Points/AC
Wounds and Vigor; Armor as Damage Reduction.
(6). Feats,
(A) Feat tax rules.
(B) 2 feats per level.
(7). '1 unique thing' -- you choose a single epic level feat/power/spell/item from 3.5 Epic Level Handbook. You need to come up with a story to explain it.
(8) Horror/Insanity rules from Horror Adventures.
(9). No alignment variant
Radiant and Shadow: You can instead have alignment-based effects apply to everyone, or nearly everyone. Remove the alignments and replace "good" and "evil" with stand-ins that lack moral implications, such as "radiant" and "shadow." These are then treated as simply two more forms of energy that exist in the world, and any creature can wield a weapon that deals radiant or shadow damage. You'll need to make appropriate changes, such as changing DR 5/good to DR 5/radiant, making unholy weapons, shadow weapons, and so on. Creatures that were once strongly defined by their alignment become more unpredictable. Maybe some angels are just as corrupt as devils, despite their celestial forms, and the PCs must team up with a noble demon and wield shadow weapons to defeat their foe. You can choose to grant certain creatures immunity; for instance, perhaps angels don't take radiant damage from radiant weapons or radiant smite, the stand-ins for holy weapons and holy smite.
(10). Exploding dice -- critical hits for DC checks.
Sounds great!
Where would the likes of paladin or warpriest fall under that?
Prestige class level on top of five?
Hm... hybrid classes are difficult, we might have to judge some on a case by case basis. Like Warpriest/Paladin/Cavalier/Inquisitor are to me clearly a 'group' of some kind.
Yeah -- prestige classes, they're not very good in Pathfinder, so for me it's mostly like giving a free bit of flavoring.
My goal is to get people to choose a really weird assortment of abilities more like it was a point-buy and see what zanny things get imagined.
The setting is really weird, I want to see how weird the characters can get.
What about a random template as well?
I'm not sure anyone else will play with such crazy rules, let's wait a day or two and see if there's some more interest.
I really like creating variant 3.0 systems with all the Pathfinder options, but it's sometimes a hard sell :(
So I've played through the Torment: Tides of Numenera game and would be interested in exploring what you might do with the setting. I'd probably like to see how a kineticist/monk/something extra else might play out (Monk is probably glaive and Kineticist would be nano I guess, so they might combine?) but I'm game for trying just about any glaive, jack or nano concept.
Great, let's see if we can get some more takers :).
This won't be a straight port -- I just will probably borrow a lot of stuff from the wiki for the game, so I hope it'd be interesting even if you've played the game.
Primary stat might be another way to group classes.
Also, I think hero points, stamina, and some other kind of 'pool' would help to emulate the pools from the Cypher system.
I wonder how hard it would be to use the tides to replace alignment:
The Tides represent complicated concepts that aren't entirely definable by language. Those who acknowledge the Tides have given them symbolic colors based on how they appear to correspond with emotional and psychological reactions:
Blue Tide: Represents wisdom, enlightenment, and mysticism. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to expand the mind and the spirit.
Red Tide: Represents passion, emotion, action, and zeal. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to live in the moment, to experience life to its fullest, or to follow their heart wherever it leads them.
Indigo Tide: Represents justice, compromise, and the greater good. It is the Tide of people who view life's difficulties from a broad, global perspective rather than an individual one.
Gold Tide: Represents charity, sacrifice, and empathy. It is the Tide of people whose primary goal is to help others, especially at a cost to themselves.
Silver Tide: Represents admiration of power and seekers of fame. It is the Tide of people who seek to influence the lives of others or who actively seek to be remembered.
What if we made it so you choose a 'dominant stat', and then you can pick each level the abilities from any class that calls into that 'stat' group.
What about 2 'talents' or class features each level from your 'stat group'?
The archetypes are on top of that.
I think that would make the system more like cypher's point buy generic classes, but offer a lot of customization.
Okay, to update, here's a summary of my rules proposals:
My basic aim is to make it more like a generic class/point buy system and sort of replicate some cypher system features, I'm open to discussing individual issues.
Character Creation Proposed Rules:
(1). Ability Scores:
Point buy 40 pts.
Ability scores have an active an passive bonus based on your modifier:
Strength (Force/Resist);
Dexterity (Pursuit/Evasion);
Constitution (Physique/Durability);
Intelligence (Fluid/Crystal);
Wisdom (Deduction/Insight);
Charisma (Appearance/Personality), or something of that sort.
You can push the base bonus up and down for each 'side' when you generate stats (i.e., you could have a +5 for strength, and make force +7 and resist + 3).
These apply to active/passive checks with these stats.
(2). Race:
Pick a template to modify your race.
(3). Classes:
(A). You choose 1 class from a group based on 'dominant stat'. At each level you select two 'talents'/class features from any class in this 'group'. This is to imitate the 'generic classes' of the Cypher System.
(A1) Anyway, you get to choose 3 archetypes -- all have to relate to that 'category' of class that you chose as your base chassis, and one needs to be tech oriented if possible.
You slather all those on top of the base class chassis.
(A3) Start at 5th.
(B) You choose 1 level of a prestige class.
(4). Skills:
Skill groups + grouped skills from Unchained.
(5). Hit Points/AC
Wounds and Vigor; Armor as Damage Reduction.
(6). Feats:
(A) Feat tax rules.
(B) 2 feats per level.
(C) Everyone gets the Stamina/Combat tricks feat for free
(7). '1 unique thing' -- you choose a single epic level feat/power/spell/item from 3.5 Epic Level Handbook. You need to come up with a story to explain it.
(8) Horror/Insanity rules from Horror Adventures.
(9). No Alignment Variant
This would replicate the 'tides' from Numenera.
(10). Exploding dice -- Critical hits for DC checks.
(11). Hero points.
(12). Story feats and traits.
(13). Unchained Action Economy; however instead of having 3 AP every round you roll 1d6 to determine how many AP you get that round. If you roll a 6 the dice 'explodes', and you get to roll another 1d6 AP.
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If we can organize all the information somewhat (it is a lot), I think this sounds like it could be a blast to play! Count me as interested.
And by organize I just mean we work together to lay things out in a way that allows you to get through character creation and feel like you can keep track of what you're doing. Maybe creating a simple Google sheet for people to fill in their choices or something.
Actually, for the class rules, let's say you can replace an individual class feature at each level with another class feature from another class in your 'dominant stat' group -- that will be easier to deal with in terms of making NPCs than choosing two every level.
Yeah, I totally agree, I'm just still working through my ideas. I'll come up with something that organizes everything clearly.
Here's my first run at a document
So let's see if I'm understanding. Tell me where I'm getting things wrong. I'm just throwing together a potential build with no real attempt to coordinate or anything, but I'll go with a Blue/White character who's unsure how they came to be in the 9th world, but strongly believes it is their duty to lead and protect some group of people.
Let's start with a Paladin as the basic Chassis which would have Charisma? as a primary stat (and maybe also strength or dexterity? Would it depend on how the Paladin is built?)
I could then add on the Crossblooded Sorcerer Archetype, the Fractured Mind Spiritualist Archetype, and the Fated Champion Skald Archetype all at 5th level (probably the class and archetype abilities, but not BAB, HP, skills and saves as those are on the Chassis?)
Additionally I'd add Dragon Disciple at level 1 which will give me the special abilities, but not hit points, saves or spells per day as those are already covered by the Paladin class (with spells in the Crossblooded Sorcerer Archetype.)
For Race I'd go with a Half-Celestial Gnome which does a lot of things, but one of which is add +4 to 3 stats and +2 to the other three. In addition to the Gnomes +2 to CON and CHA, -2 to STR I think?
Stats could be something like this:
Strength: 14 -2 R +4 T = 16 (+3) (+4 Muscle, + 2 Stamina)
Dexterity: 14 + 2 T = 16 (+3) (+1 Aim, +5 Balance)
Constitituion: 16 + 2 R + 4 T = 22 (+6) (+6 Health, +6 Fitness)
Intelligence: 12 + 2 T = 14 (+2) (+4 Reason, +0 Knowledge)
Wisdom: 14 + 2 T = 16 (+3) (+2 Intuition, +4 Willpower)
Charisma: 17 + 2 R + 4 T + 1 L4 = 24 (+7) (+10 Leadership, +4 Appearance)
There are other things to explore, but let's see how much of that I've got right so far. Is this the level of power that you're intending or am I giving too much (or maybe even too little I guess with HP and Saves?)
That's pretty much it; I meant class features from the archetypes layer, not BAB, saves, thanks for helping to clarify that.
The prestige class you do get the saves, hp, bab -- it's like normal multi-classing.
And wouldn't that be a cool character too!
OK, a level on top for the prestige class. Interesting.
For the primary stat(s) you're just looking for us to tie things in in some reasonable way? Again, I think back to the monk, kineticist that I mentioned earlier, where if Unchained Monk was the chassis with dex and wis as stats the Kineticist would qualify if they were dex based? And then I could find some wisdom something to throw around it as well and we'd call that fun?
The Gnome would probably be fun, and I'd probably enjoy playing it, but the chances to tinker with various options make it hard to think that's where I'd settle.
Yes -- any of the primary stats connect them. So a class with dex and wis could use any archetype with dex or wis as one of the dominant stats.
You could only choose one class as your chassis. At any given level you, as an unchained monk, could take a class feature from Kineticist instead of from Monk because they share a primary stat.
How broadly are class features defined. For example, if an archetype had spell casting, would spell casting be a class feature that you would take once, or would you trade out a class feature from the chassis each time you wanted a level of the spell casting?
Actually I'm not understanding something. For the three archetypes I'm adding on top, those stack in addition to the base chassis or they have to replace features from the base chassis?
Is the replacing a feature for any archetypes beyond that or does it apply to those three as well?
Also, can a vanilla class count as an archetype?
Sorry for the confusion on my end, just trying to sort through various implications.
No, it's completely fine, I'm still sorting out all the implications myself
I intend the 'features' that can be switched consist of the things listed in the class table for each level under the 'special' column.
The archetypes don't change out features, you just add all those abilities at each level they apply.
You can only exchange features of your chassis class for 'special' abilities from another base class with the same dominant ability scores.
A base class cannot count for the archetypes -- this isn't gestalt, it's adding archetype features on top of a base class -- they stack so you don't have to deal with conflicting archetypes.
So then the example that I gave up above for the gnome probably wouldn't work because the archetypes were from separate classes and we wouldn't be adding those new class features to the paladin (which would have made it gestalt.)
Just looking at the crossblooded sorcerer archetype stacked onto the paladin, for example. That would have assuemed we were adding bloodlines and sorcerer spells to the chassis which would have essentially made it a gestalt (everything that the paladin had plus effectively levels in sorcerer.) That's beyond what you've got in mind.
Right?
the archeytpes can be from different classes that all have the same dominant ability score, the dominant ability score(s) are the organizing principle.
The crossblooded sorcerer can be added to paladin as long as they share a dominant stat.
The things you stack are the things listed in the archetype -- if it explicitly mentions spells, you get that, but it doesn't assume all the base class features, just the listed abilities.
So for sanctified slayer, you're not getting every inquisitor ability + the sanctified slayer abilities and adding that on top of another class. You only get the features mentioned for sanctified slayer like studied target, etc.
You would get spells from that archetype because it mentions it in the archetype description -- the bloodlines are part of the archetype features, and that's separate from the base sorcerer.
But with the crossblooded sorcerer the archetype mentions essentially every class feature for sorcerers. Spells, bloodlines, bloodline powers, bloodline arcana, bonus feats, bonus spells. Is that really different from a gestalt at that point (other than not giving the better of saves/skills/BAB?) Is there anything you wouldn't get from the class in that case?
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So I'm picturing an unchained rogue chassis. For the three archetypes, I'd do the unchained rogue's phantom thief archetype, the swashbuckler's inspired blade archetype, and then I haven't picked the 3rd yet. This is going to make someone supremely deadly with a rapier, I think... Now, though I would have a large panache pool from inspired blade, I wouldn't actually have any way to spend panache, right? Not until 11th level when the inspired blade archetype gives me a deed--until then I have no deeds because I'm not a swashbuckler.
It's similar to gestalt in that sense -- the determination I'm making is because spells are specifically listed as a heading in the description of the crossblooded archeype.
There are still, for instance, basic inquisitor abilities that are not mentioned in the sanctified slayer archetype description, that wouldn't be included in the package.
until then I have no deeds because I'm not a swashbuckler.
if unchained rogue and swashbuckler share a dominant ability score, you can choose a swash buckler deed instead of a sneak attack bonus, for instance, on any given level.
for instance, sanctified slayer doesn't mention monster lore, so you don't get that inquisitor ability, does that make more sense?
OK, it's getting clearer. Looking at The Fractured Mind Spiritualist Archetype we'd get spellcasting from the start as Emotional Spellcasting switches spells with all their bits from wisdom based to Charisma based I'm pretty sure.
For Emotional Power which starts giving spell like abilities based on her phantom's emotional focus, does that mean that she would get a phantom at 5th, she'd just choose an emotional focus and not get a phantom or something else? The phantom is mentioned in the fluff at the description of the arechetype as being a fragment of the Fractured Mind's own inner thoughts and emotions rather than a spiritual ally, but I assume that it needs to be in the abilities section for it to kick in.
The Unsworn Shaman archetype would get hexes as described, a Spirit Animal starting at second, the spontaneously cast Spirit Magic also at second, but not the shaman's typical prepared casting as it's not referenced I think?
In that case, would the Lore Spirit Arcane Enlightenment Hex just not do anything unless the character had access to shaman spells via some other method?
but not the shaman's typical prepared casting as it's not referenced I think?
right, you wouldn't get the prepare spells
The spirit can give you the power, but you can't use it because you don't have prepared spells. It would be pointless -- it's modifying an ability the player doesn't have
Right, so I'm still working through a potential build in more detail this time and have another question. For the prestige class, do we need to qualify for it (ruling out anything with 6 ranks in skills or +6 BAB or more?) I'd assume yes, but that cuts out a fair amount of options that we'd be one or two levels away from qualifying for.
You would have to qualify, but because of the skill consolidation, what you need is ranks in whatever skill the pre req is subsumed into.