Aerys Trajyon's page

Probably a stupid question - but the bloodseeker Attach ability states: "When a bloodseeker hits a target larger than itself, its barbed legs attach it to that creature. This is similar to grabbing the creature, but the bloodseeker moves with that creature rather than holding it in place. The bloodseeker is flatfooted while attached. If the bloodseeker is killed or pushed away while attached to a creature it has drained blood from, that creature takes 1 persistent bleed damage. Escaping the attach or removing the bloodseeker in other ways doesn’t cause bleed damage."

So how does one Escape the Attach? Is it just an Acrobatics/Athletics check against the bloodseeker's athletics DC? They're not trained and have a -4 str modifier - would it really just be one of those checks against a 6 DC and then you'd avoid the bleed damage?

I apologize in advance for the ridiculously long post, but I had several inter-related questions so I kinda wanted to keep them together as opposed to breaking them into several more-reasonably sized posts.

We have several GMs in our group, so we have about 3 campaigns going on different nights - currently I’m the only 2E GM, and my campaign’s pretty low level so far. My friend runs a 15th-level PF1 campaign, but he’s interested in converting. So as an experiment I offered to come up with a series of encounters for his current campaign (a temple of Orcus, so kind of demon-y) for him to run as a one-shot, with everyone temporarily converting their characters. (I would play as well, but keep silent during any decision-making.)

So going by the encounter-building tables, it looks like a 17th level creature would make for a good boss fight against our 15th level party - I chose a marilith. I then used the Pathbuilder 2E app to convert a couple of our characters, just to see how things might line up (the party’s light-armored archer-fighter and my own draconic-bloodlined sorcerer.)

At first, numbers for our characters looked incredible - ACs in the 30s, saves in the low 20’s, mid to high 20’s for skills that you wanted to excel at. But then I compared the numbers with a couple of the encounters. The marilith (granted, boss fight so should be tough) has an AC of 40 - archer/fighter shouldn’t have a problem with that, but my sorcerer’s spell attack bonus of 26 needs a 14+ to hit, and its appr. +30 saves vs. my 36 DC seems kinda mismatched - although I totally get this is offsetting 2E’s lack of spell resistance. And I’m hoping a lot of spells with “take x on a successful save helps out as well. But its attack bonus of 35 seems to suggest LOTS of successful hits, as well as its own save DCs of near 40 means its damaging spells are extremely likely to succeed.

Does this all balance out in high-level play & I’m needlessly concerned? Is the idea that you do get hit a lot more, but you now have more HPs to cover it, and with 4 or more party members spreading out the damage taken and with numerically more actions it all evens out? Or am I totally messing up the character conversion and numbers for 15th level characters are generally higher? Or am I reading the encounter building table wrong and 17 is just too high?

Quick question about innate spells and monsters: In the CRB it says: “The ability that gives you an innate spell tells you how often you can cast it—usually once per day.” While in the introduction of the Bestiary it says: “Spells that can be used an unlimited number of times list “(at will)” after the spell’s name.” Does this mean if no number per day is given (or “at will”), it’s once/day by default? For instance, soulbound dolls have an innate 3rd level spell (levitate), plus an additional one depending on alignment - with no frequency listed does this mean they can only cast each once per day?

I know I’m probably in a weird minority on this, (really, that’s where I am most times in life), but I was just wondering if the next two APs might include sidebars on how how to run them NOT as part of a circus or as Absalom cops?

My characters all may have wildly different motivations, but at the end of the day, they’re all simply adventurers. They don’t have to get up at a given time in the morning, they don’t care about gluten or saturated fats or health care costs. They adventure. One thing they would never, ever do is hold down a real job - that’s exactly the kind of thing I play to NOT think about. I don’t want to answer to employers, or deal with unreasonable clients, or deal with anything that comes close to looking like actual responsibilities.

I certainly don’t mind the occasional AP that says you might not want to be a paladin in this, or a cleric of X might really do well here, but when it’s themed that you simply ARE real estate agents in Nidal or a crack team of building superintendents from Druma, it just kind of makes me hope there might be some tips on reworking things to make them suitable for traditional adventuring parties. Or am I just really weird in thinking this? OK, maybe real estate agents in Nidal has some potential...

I apologize if this has been brought up before. I’ve done searches but not found anything mentioning these issues.

While I honestly like many aspects of the new rule system, the current way conditions are dealt with I do find problematic. The sheer number of conditions seem overwhelming, with a substantial number of them also applying other conditions that require still more page-flipping to reference. Quite a few of these were previously not conditions but the effects of spells, and the (lower case) conditions they imposed were listed in the spell description. If something else might impose these conditions, it was merely listed as “You are Slowed, as per the spell,” which I always felt was easy to find. Other effects in PF1 might tell me that I’m at a -2 to something or other, whereas now I’m told I’m Restrained, which means I’m Immobile and Flat-footed, leading me off onto 2 more frantic searches. If a spell or a trap or a creature has Restrained me, I’d rather just be told I can’t move and take a -2 hit to my AC under the text for that spell. While I understand and appreciate the thinking behind codifying effects as Conditions, and then grouping them together, I feel the constant cross-referencing, with conditions nested within other conditions actually makes things far more confusing than the original format of simply listing the effect in the description of the effect’s causation.

A number of Conditions also seem to overlap quite a bit. Quick, Accelerated, Hampered, Slowed, Sluggish, Confused, Stupefied, Immobile, Restrained, Paralyzed, etc. seem to share a lot of commonalities - could they maybe be condensed down to a smaller number of conditions, with the lesser ones results of fail/crit fail/success of the saving throws? This would not only cut down on the sheer number of conditions, but remove non-immersive terms like “Hampered 5” from game play.

Once again, I apologize if I'm merely rehashing things that have been previously stated.