Aestriel's page

Euan wrote:

AoN, and Blake, are brilliant. I'm glad they'll get more Paizo support to do what they do.

I will also join the wagon of folks who say this was done poorly. AoN does NOT have everything the PRD had - particularly with regards to the rules section. And all that is gone now. Likewise all my characters have spell lists which link to the PRD. That is all gone now and I'll have to go through AoN and relink everything. This last is a minor thing perhaps, but time consuming.

Paizo has pulled the plug on something that, admittedly worked poorly at times, and was woefully out of date, but functional for all that.

Paizo, for the last months, all you've done is make it increasingly harder to play games.

I hope that trend changes, because your repeated technological failures are really pissing people off - and they are leaving. This is just another failure, but at least there's a strong community presence (AoN) to take up the slack.

If only there was a mirror of the Paizo PRD somewhere

Ooo, Brilliant. That should stop a bunch of the whining until AoN gets up to date.

I understand why the design team would want all characters to improve as they level, but currently it makes no thematic sense on how it works.
How can the untrained sultry Cha 20 prostitute be as good at diplomacy as the legendary, but ugly Cha 10 Spymaster? My concept to fix this would be capping your bonus based on your proficiency level.
Untrained: you gain no proficiency bonus to the check
Trained: You gain your level as a proficiency bonus to the check up to 5
Expert: The cap is raised up to 10
Master: Cap is 15
Legend: Cap is 20
Each proficiency level could impart the bonus or negative it currently does also (-2,0,+1,+2,+3 respectively).

Joe Mucchiello wrote:

Grapple makes no sense:

You attempt to grab an opponent. Grappling requires you to roll
an Athletics check against the opponent’s Fortitude DC.

Fortitude? There's nothing in there about size of the opponent at all?

In... MOST... descriptions of what a character with a high Con would look like, I've heard most often that high Con are stocky. High Con is high endurance is wrestler build. Even though they may not be good at wrestling, it's still hard to choke someone out when their neck is a freaking tree trunk.

Hyperbole, and one gentleman o' fortune's attempt at explaining it.

It should be vs the targets Fort or Reflex which ever being higher. This would make small super dextrous things very easy to grab. Flying bugs are not easy to grab!

Captain Morgan wrote:

I REALLY liked the Muse idea when I first saw the word, but the descriptions of the available muses don't really... sound like muses. Maestro, Lore, and Polymath all sound like specializations, where Muses tend to be specific people or personified forces that inspire you to greatness. The concept of a Muse sounds more like something half-way between a deity and a rage totem, but without an anathema. Perhaps there is some flavor text in this vein, I dunno.

On the other hand, not being locked into a Muse and being able to take different feats from them is great. Artists are inspired by all sorts of things after all.

As a bard, you have a muse that leads you to great things, which might be a physical creature, a deity, a philosophy, or something more nebulous. While there are nearly as many different muses as there are bards, muses grant a limited number of different abilities to bards based on their theme.

Lore: Your muse drives you to uncover the hidden secrets of the multiverse.
Maestro: Your muse inspires you to ever-greater heights of performance.
Polymath: Your muse flits about to almost every skill and pursuit.

So your muse could be Shelyn, the B5 muse fey, the philosophy of Tamashigo, or your own inner feelings.

I think people are getting the verb form of muse confused with the noun form.

Wands should be spend one resonance per spell level of the wand to attune it for the day, then you can freely cast it's charges at your whim.
Staffs should be spend one resonance to attune, then spend further resonance per spell level to cast a spell contained within the staff, no charges.

Aestriel wrote:

Dedication feats seem quite like a feat tax to play an archetype. Pirate dedication doesnt quite have the same power as the class feats it would replace, do the further archetypes feats make up the difference? At face value here it seems archetype players will be set back in power level a bit than a base class player.

Considering that the Dedication feat adds a signature skill, in addition to its other benefits, I'm not sure that it's really underpowered. Signature skills are (as far as I understand) required to take a skill to Legendary proficiency, which gates a number of the most powerful skill feats. People have been wondering about ways to get additional signature skills, and the Pirate archetype chain offers at least two of them (Acrobatics and Athletics). Not too shabby IMO.

For myself, I like the design, don't think it looks at all underpowered, and plan to use the heck out of it on characters I build.

Thats a fair point. Curious to see how it pans out during the playtest.

Dedication feats seem quite like a feat tax to play an archetype. Pirate dedication doesnt quite have the same power as the class feats it would replace, do the further archetypes feats make up the difference? At face value here it seems archetype players will be set back in power level a bit than a base class player.

It'd be cool to go one day.
Also... Last!