Alchemaic's page

So on the most recent blog post, the design goals for the game were finally listed out and are as follows:

1. Create a new edition of Pathfinder that's much simpler to learn and play—a core system that's easy to grasp but expandable—while remaining true to the spirit of what makes Pathfinder great: customization, flexibility of story, and rules that reward those who take the time to master them.

2. Ensure that the new version of the game allows us to tell the same stories and share in the same worlds as the previous edition, but also makes room for new stories and new worlds wherever possible.

3. Work to incorporate the innovations of the past decade into the core engine of the game, allowing the best rules elements and discoveries we've made to have an integrated home in the new system (even if they aren't present in the initial book).

4. Forge a more balanced play environment where every character has a chance to contribute to the adventure in a meaningful way by allowing characters to thrive in their defined role. Encourage characters to play to their strengths, while working with others to bolster their place in the group.

5. Make Pathfinder a game that's open and welcoming to all, no matter their background or experience.

From the Halfway to Doomsday blog post

I'm making the thread for two reasons: first, since not everyone is aware of or reads the blog posts, it might be helpful to keep those people in the loop with regards to the game design behind the scenes. Second, it would (hopefully) focus discussion in here as opposed to the comments on a blogpost which has material apart from the stated design goals.

Please give us some kind of idea how much weight a single point of Bulk is in a range of actual weights. Bulk's great for equipment and armor as a way to simplify inventory management, but if someone wants to haul around some kind of random item that isn't listed (a golden statue they find in a dungeon, monster part trophies, other odds and ends, etc.) it's helpful and more intuitive to be able to say "that's like 300 pounds of gold, and it's 10 pounds per bulk, so you have 30 bulk now" instead of making everything into arbitrary units that you have to guesstimate at best. It doesn't need to be a hard rule, just a helpful way to visualize things.

You create a single common alchemical item that is of your level or lower without having to spend the normal monetary cost in alchemical reagents or needing to attempt a Crafting check. This item has the infused trait, but it remains potent only until the start of your next turn

An inhaled poison activates when unleashed from its container. Once unleashed, the poison creates a cloud of gas filling a 10-foot cube lasting for 1 minute or until a strong wind dissipates the cloud.

If I use Quick Alchemy to create an inhaled poison and then throw it, how long does the resulting cloud last? Does it remain for the full minute, or does it become inert at the start of the next turn? Does the one-round time limit apply only to items that you have not used yet? Or would other alchemical items that last for some period of time also stop functioning after the time period passes?

So unlike probably a lot of people, I actually used poisons in PF1e on a fairly regular basis (and not just Drow poison, though that's always a staple), so I decided to give the new poison rules a few looks. My first reaction was that this looks really, really similar to the Unchained poison rules (which I wasn't really a fan of), but after reading more I got over that. Still not sure if it's better or worse than Unchained in terms of design, but it's not identical. Just as a note regarding my thoughts, I'm going through these as a player who would potentially be using the poisons. I also won't be talking about the spells and the two magic weapons that do poison damage, just the alchemical items.

The Good

First things first, I do like that poisons are now immediately impactful. One of the common issues with poisons in PF1e was that they usually took too long to do their job or were a waste of money and actions when you could just smack someone with your sword and kill things only slightly slower. Now you smack someone with a poison and BAM! Dice start ticking down and it really feels like you did something with your time. The boosting of DCs for the poisons also helps, as higher-level poisons will actually do something against creatures beyond level 5. I'm also glad that Inhaled poison rules are now plain and clear, as in PF1e the fact that the cloud lasted for 1 minute was hard to find.

The Meh

One of the things that's kind of a wash for me regarding poisons is the inclusion of the various poison stages, where as a target continues to fail their saves against poisons the effects get progressively worse and worse. Now don't get me wrong, I love that idea, but I don't know why it was included as it adds complexity right back into the poison equation where ability score damage was removed. Now instead of having to keep track of which ability scores are reduced by how much, you have to keep track of which stage you or the creature are poisoned at and if you fail or pass which direction you move on the scale. God help you if you have two separate poison tracks going on at the same time, in PF1e you would just have an additional die to roll when taking your damage for the round.

I'm also a bit meh on the change to Contact poisons. Previously they were very similar to Injury poisons in function, and could effectively act as Injury poisons with the bonus that they could also be applied directly to the target. Now they can ONLY be applied to the target, as it's "infeasible" to apply it to a weapon because you would also be touching it. To which I say "Poison Use" and "How are you applying it to a creature if you can't touch it?". More of a personal gripe if anything, but it's a silly justification since by that same logic I can't poison a crown or something similar since I'd have to touch it.

The Bad

The first major problem I have with poisons is that they're incredibly and absurdly expensive now. Before they were pricey, but if you had a bit of change lying around you could still buy some vials of the cheap stuff, and if you saved up a bit you could get Tears of Death or something for a special occasion. Now a vial of Tears of Death (which was one of the most expensive poisons in PF1e at 6500 gp) costs 9000 gp and is listed as a level 20 poison, meaning that a single-use consumable item will cost you a gigantic chunk of your money. Alchemists can sidestep the cost with Quick Alchemy, but that presents its own issues because of the one-round time limit on created items.

Contact poisons (at least the ones listed in the playtest) have an onset time of 1 minute, which is well out of scope of combat and even most poisoned traps a person would lay, so unless there's a way to dunk someone in a Contact poison those are not usable with Quick Alchemy outside of the Alchemist's Poison Touch feat which makes the whole thing cost 2 Resonance Points and 2-3 actions for something that won't even take effect for 10 rounds. Inhaled poisons have only one particularly impactful option in Brimstone Fumes, but that's 16th level, and the other two are handy debuffs but I'm not quite sure how the inert rule applies to a cloud of toxins. Ingested poisons are right out. And that leaves Injury poisons, all of which require 3 actions to apply to a weapon making them impossible to use. Rogues get a pair of feats that DO let them apply poisons to their weapons faster, but handing the poison off to the party rogue means that you took your entire turn and part of theirs to maybe possibly get a poison off on a target. There's also the option of multiclassing, but that would take an Alchemist two feats and 8 levels to get ahold of, three feats and 16 levels if they're going for the ability to not waste gold and resources.

And speaking of wasting resources, that's another thing that's kind of grinding my gears. In PF1e if you missed with an effect that would trigger on a hit, you didn't waste it. That worked for touch spells, and it worked for poisons. Until you hit your target, you could get as many tries as you needed. Don't know if touch spells work the same way any more, but poisons magically fly off your dagger if you miss your target, rendering them useless despite the cost both in terms of actions to apply and gold. I guess it's meant as a balance point for the increased DCs and damage, but you already have a balance point in the incredible cost that it takes to use the poisons. It would be like drinking a healing potion, except part of the time it just turns into water as you drink it, and even after you drink it your body might just reject the healing anyway. The best thing I guess I can say about that is that the Injury poisons are on average cheaper than the other ones, but that's still a big chunk of change to use them.

Finally, there's still significant falloff in terms of effectiveness. Injury poisons (the only combat-viable poisons) go up to level 13, so past there they essentially have no more use. Contact poisons sort of take over on that front, but the only class that can make use of them in a combat manner is the Alchemist, and it needs to spend 2 resonance to do it per round with a non-insignificant chance of just wasting their action and Resonance. Not to mention that the onset time still exists.

The Ugly

So, the DCs for the poisons have been upgraded since PF1e. That's great, and anyone who looks at the list will agree that a DC 40 poison is threatening at level 20, and was even in PF1e where the highest Fort save in the game was a +36 from Father Dagon.

For players.

For monsters, on the other hand, it's more of a drop in the bucket. Purple Worm Venom is the highest level Injury poison at level 13, and has a DC of 29 at a cost of 400 gold. An Ice Yai is a level 13 creature and has a fort save of +22. That's the PEAK of poison use in combat. At level 13, you have a 70% chance to waste your resources and actions, 60% if you're an Alchemist with Potent Poisoner. A natural 1 always fails of course, but those are some terrible odds, and only entrenches the strategy of dousing your entire arsenal in Sleep Poison (the new Drow Poison) and just hoping that you hit that 1 in 400 chance that your target rolls two natural 1s in a row.

Another issue is the lack of special effects in the new poisons. Poisons in PF1e have way more to them than most players probably realized or bothered to learn. The vast majority of them did simply do ability score damage, yes, but there were many that had interesting and unique effects beyond that, and were usually the most powerful and fun ones. Cytillesh Extract and Confabulation Powder could be used in concert to rewrite a creature's memories with poison. Tongue Twist and Scholarblight could be used to very specifically shut down a caster for assassination, and Bloodpyre was a poison that people could actually use as a desperate power boost. The closest thing to any of those is the note that Wolfsbane can cure Lycanthropy if the victim survives the dose, but I have a strong hunch that it's more of an outlier than the norm. The newest poison with the Cytillesh name, Cytillesh Oil, is just a damage-bonus Injury poison, where the other poisons had effects that muddled their target's memories in interesting ways. I can only hope I'm wrong on that front.

The TL;DR

New poisons are more impactful than before but still as complicated if not more so. They're also too costly to use both in terms of action economy and gold. The DCs also seem to be scaled to be more effective against PCs than monsters. Poison effects are also very heavily pared down, and generally only do damage or specific status effects. Seems like poisons are going back to GM-only territory.

Since the playtest is still several months away from being public, this might be a good time to just list hopes and fears for the playtest ahead of time in a little game I like to call "Please do this, Please don't do that". I'll start.

Please do this:

Cut down on feat taxes, so people don't have to dedicate half of their feats to do one thing.

Condense and significantly simplify all the fiddly rules that nobody really uses often enough to commit to memory but happens often enough to be a pain, like breaking/bursting objects and object hardness/HP, environmental/falling damage and strange interactions, the swim and fly rules, etc.

Remove or fix trap options. If someone wants to be the best gosh darn crossbowman there ever was he shouldn't be locked into a single option that still functions worse than a regular person with a bow.

Bring back Wordcasting. It's a pipedream, but I can still hope.

Please don't do that:

Completely remove options, either by just not printing them or writing the rules in such a way that old feats and options are completely incompatible with the new edition.

Make martial characters moderately good at a single thing at the cost of being able to do anything else.

Or worded differently, what exactly does "a natural attack augmented by your claws" mean? Does the Shifter's Edge bonus apply to all natural attacks that recieve the DR bypass benefits of Shifter Claws (i.e. all of them), or does Shifter's Edge only apply to whatever natural attacks gain the damage boost from Shifter Claws (which would be whatever claws have lower damage, or two of your natural attacks)?

So, was there ever a word of god on whether Teleportation Mastery counts as being able to cast Dimension Door for the purposes of feat prerequisites or other similar things?

Can you Bull Rush a wall? Not into a wall. Bull Rushing a wall itself. Or any other solid object really, such as a tree, house, etc. Bull Rushing smaller movable objects (boulders, horses/carriages, etc.) falls within the normal use of the rules to an extent, but what about immovable objects or things that are intended to be immovable?

I'm mostly asking so I can figure out if my Bulette Charge Style character can Kool-Aid Man through a wall and into someone. Or into someone and through a wall. I'm not picky.

I know about Nothing Can Stop Me, but that's a different effect than what I'm looking for and I'd prefer something that's class-agnostic.

So, Psychic Asylum is a spell that lets you spend 15 "mind minutes" in a mind palace, which takes about a swift action-worth of real time. In the spell it explicitly says "If you're able to prepare spells, you can use the time to prepare a single spell" which matches up with the time it takes to prepare a single spell as per the rules on magic.

Now, what about if the caster is a Wizard with the Fast Study discovery? Fast Study would let him prep his entire spell list in 15 minutes, which is well within the bounds of the spell's duration. Do those abilities interact with each other in that way? What about if the Wizard took the Brilliant Spell Preparation feat (twice), could they prepare two spells in that time or are they limited to one? What about an Exploiter Wizard with the Quick Study exploit? Can they swap out multiple spells during their mind time, or is it still limited to just the one?

As per the recent FAQ, the Potion Glutton feat now has the following text:

Benefit: You can drink potions, elixirs, or other potables (but not extracts) as a move action without provoking an attack of opportunity.

The Accelerated Drinker trait says the following:

Benefit: You may drink a potion as a move action instead of a standard action as long as you start your turn with the potion in your hand.

So is Potion Glutton ever worth taking now, considering that it's twice the "feat space" of Accelerated Drinker, has the same overall action cost, and also has a god-based restriction? Avoiding AoOs is a pretty small benefit considering most AoOs can be avoided as a free action by moving 5 feet. You're not using that move action anyway, you had to spend it to draw your potion.

For reference (before things get changed), this is the original text:

Benefit(s): You can drink potions, elixirs, or other potables as a swift action without provoking attacks of opportunity.

So Horror Adventures brought with it the Blood Alchemist, which has the intriguing Alchemical Circles ability. On the surface it seems simple: you get a blood pool that can create circles, and with those circles you can then empower them to gain at-will castings of spells but only within those circles.

There are a few problems with the archetype as-written though, so I'm trying to figure out what the intent was and/or get some official words on it.

1) The blood pool never refills. The Alchemist gets a pool with a number equal to his level + his Int modifier, and it never refills if you use a point. Any circle you draw becomes locked to the spell you designated when you drew it, no matter what level you're at now. Which brings me to my next problem...

2) The circles never go away. They lose power when the Alchemist refreshes extract slots, but the circles themselves remain indefinitely. Since the RAW says that blood pool points never refill this is fine since you spent a non-renewable resource to get a permanent thing, but the problem is that the permanent thing is locked to "the ground or another permanent fixture", which is really terrible. It'd be like playing a Kineticist and permanently taking Burn to create a Cloud infusion in one specific location, or playing a Sorcerer and having a spell slot permanently dedicated to a single Silent Image you cast once that never goes away. Yeah, you totally own that spot now, but it's really useless when you're going to leave and never come back. I know it's still something you can cast on the floor of your party's wagon/boat/airship or whatever, but you can never do something handy like create a big arena and cast Stone Shape to grant your allies cover or create holes to drop enemies down out in the field because then it becomes permanently locked to that one location. Which actually leads me into my final major issue...

3) The size of the circle is never specified. The closest I can figure is that it functions somewhat similarly to the Occultist circles. The Occultist circles are also never specified dimension-wise (which isn't an issue since they're just for binding outsiders and can be assumed to be however big or small is necessary), but they supposedly function like Magic Circle Against X, which is a 10-foot radius. That's the only thing I have some idea about, but it may also have been intended for you to draw a circle of any size as you see fit.

Anyway, those are my issues/questions. I know what I'd assume the rules are for balance and to make the archetype playable in a real game (blood pool refills daily, circles go away, 10-foot radius) but I'm curious what other people think and, again, hopefully get some word of god on the matter.

So Agents of Evil came out to day, yay woohoo. Down to the nitty gritty questions.

Sunder Blessing (Combat): You can attempt to sunder an ongoing divine spell effect or divine spell-like ability by succeeding at a combat maneuver check.

So, what exactly defines a Divine spell? Obviously one cast by a Cleric/Oracle, but is it tied to the spell list or the caster themselves? If it's the caster, does that mean you could sunder only spells cast by a cleric, or could you sunder spells from a magic item crafted by a cleric? Is there a difference between a Belt of Dexterity crafted by a Cleric and one crafted by a Wizard? What happens if you happen upon an ancient spell that could have been cast by either a Wizard or a Cleric? Or a Witch or Shaman, are they divine casters? If it's the spell list, what happens if it's something like Magic Circle against Evil which can be cast by a Wizard? What about something like Wall of Force which can be cast as a domain spell but is technically not a divine spell (maybe)? What about the SLAs, how do you define what's divine about those? If an Archon has a divine SLA, would a Demon or another kind of outsider?

tl;dr What can Sunder Blessing cut?

So I was looking over the style feats from Weapon Master's Handbook and Outslug caught my eye as one that seemed particularly weak. Take a 5-foot step and get a little bonus? That's nice, but not worth the feat slots, and since it's tied to close weapons you can't dodge back and full attack with a reach weapon. Outslug Sprint even puts you out of range of Lunge, so you can't use it fully and still attack from a distance, and there's already feats for following people who 5-foot step away from you so using it to chase seems pointless.

But then I thought to myself "Self, you're being awfully hard on it. Maybe there's a use for it? That bonus to AC is a dodge bonus after all and those stack, and that bonus to damage is untyped. Does that stack?"

So, let's say I'm using an Advancing weapon, which gives me a second 5-foot step per turn. Would that allow me to trigger Outslug Style's bonus twice, giving me a +2 to AC and damage (or +4 with Outslug Weave)?

So my character needs to get buff, and a Manual of Gainful Exercise might do the trick. The only problem is that while he can craft wondrous items, he doesn't have Wish or Miracle available. Are those required components for the crafting, or would I just add 5 to the DC at the end of crafting?

Hi, just a quick pair of questions:

1) The Fury enchantment give a +1 to the weapon for each attack, up to a total of +5. Does that mean a +3 Fury weapon (for example) could reach a +8 enchantment, or does it have no effect since Fury is a +2 enchantment?

2) If I have a Furious Fury weapon and I max the bonus from Fury, can I then rage to make the weapon a +7 or will the bonus from Fury drop to keep it below +5? Similarly, would a +4 Furious weapon be able to break +5 on the enchantment level?

Edit: Mixed up Furious and Fury. It's fixed now.