Aristophanes's page

I fing hate walls of text but if this is the only way...

In the glossary & index of PC1

Quote:

round A period of time during an encounter in which all participants get a chance to act. A round represents approximately 6 seconds of game time. 11, 435

durations measured in rounds 426

since some of you are dead set on counting it as if it was a duration, let's check that page first

PC1 p.426 is the first page of the Effects section

Duration wrote:

Most effects are discrete, creating an instantaneous effect when you let the GM know what actions you are going to use. Firing a bow, moving to a new space, or taking something out of your pack all resolve instantly. Other effects instead last for a certain duration. Once the duration has elapsed, the effect ends. the rules generally use the following conventions for durations, though spells have some special durations detailed on pages 302. (pages 302? lol typo find. also that's spells, so we won't be detouring there just fyi ~B)

For an effect that lasts a number of rounds, the remaining duration decreases by 1 at the start of each turn of the creature that created the effect. Detrimental effects often last "until the end of the target's next turn" or "through" a number of their turns (such as "through the target's next 3 turns"), which means that the effect's duration decreases at the end of the creature's turn, rather than the start.

Instead of lasting a fixed number of rounds, a duration might end only when certain conditions are met (or cease to be true). If so, the effects last until those conditions are met.

Some effects can be ended early with the Dismiss action (page 419). An effect with the sustained duration lasts until the end of your next turn, but it can be extended as described in the Sustain action (page 419).

So this entire block is talking about the duration of EFFECTS. The "cooldown" of a dragon's breath weapon and similar abilities that "can't be used for X rounds" aren't effects. They're a...

This is great! It explains everything perfectly.

Thank you Baarogue!!

Unicore wrote:

Rogues want to be in melee all the time to make the best use of their opportune strike, but don’t carry shields, and don’t have great AC. Like barbarians, their big swings of damage tend to lead to them getting focused on, only they don’t really have the HP and they literally get eaten alive by very many grab monsters (I have seen it!). It is definitely the class I see getting beaten up the most.

I see this as well. Then again as a DM, I'm a jerk in that the rogue gets focused on because to most monsters he looks like a nice soft target to crush. Who wants to hit big metal armored dudes with shields or Mr. Raging Psychopath when they can take shots at agile, slender rogue. Unless they can get to the casters, then they go after light armor, wiggly fingers caster using nasty, nasty magic.

Yeah, monsters instinctively know that Rogues are more nutritious than other Martials. They eat a more balanced diet, and so have more tender and leaner meat.

I honestly don't care one way or the other, but this change feels like it was originally intended as a 'fighter/fear' kind of deal, and they couldn't agree on the specifics, so they just went with what they gave us.

Theaitetos wrote:

While being an attack spell often is a downside, it can also be an upside. There are times where AC is a foe's lowest save (oozes?). Off-Guard and status bonuses to attack are rather common, which do not work for save spells. (and hey, Sure Strike may be 1 p 10 min, but its effect is still the same)

Overall, I agree that this nerf has more or less killed Live Wire's usage.

Live Wire's main competition was never EA, but Telekinetic Projectile (& Needle Darts).

Heightening at +2 is just so bad, as it means it will only be on-level 1/4 as opposed to 1 every 2 levels.

And LW still does the electricity damage on a miss.

Sibelius Eos Owm wrote:

Trip H. on the previous page advocated that you shouldn't be able to get rid of unwanted thralls, because (and I paraphrase a bit), having no means of turning off your own class features is interesting, and that players wouldn't use their brainpower without discomfort.

There's a lot that can get lost in the shuffle, but yeah, I'm going to take a sec to tear down that strawman.

I am against the 0A free dismiss for thralls, yes, as that would remove all brainpower from that consideration. If there really is an instant delete button with no cost nor context, then your entire thought process around creating thralls is fundamentally changed, and imo for the worse.

I very much support the addition of more tools that include more ways to remove unwanted thralls than what is currently baseline.

My main agree/disagree "line" is that there must always be some real mechanical cost around the deletion, else you no longer care/think about it. So long as a badly placed thrall creates some "need to change my plan a bit" response, then the puzzle/mechanic is "punishing enough" to meet my goal.

.

One specific example of the "more tools, but not a "solve" button" push was when I proposed 2nd grave cantrip that's granted at L1:

Quote:

Manipulate Thralls:

1A [tag][tag][tag]

With a jerk of animating energies, you stir your thralls into action. When you cast this cantrip, you energize up to the same number of thralls that you could add via Create Thrall. These thralls Stride up to 20 feet, and one may make an attack as if freshly created.

Additionally, you may consume any thrall within 60 feet to energize yourself, enabling you to Step before or after your thralls act.

While the genesis of this cantrip was the thrall block question, the point is that it's a genuine multi-purpose tool that gives the whole class more depth. The ability to do a:

1A: [Step](Spender) + [Necro management](not builder!)
that includes deleting a thrall, is the missing spender...

Would being able to dismiss a Thrall with a reaction, possibly as many as one could normally create with 1A, be enough of a cost?

Scarablob wrote:

Yeah, I never really understood why in DnD gnome were a "core race"

D&D 4e agreed with you and dropped gnome from the core lineup.

4E Gnome: "I'm a monster! RRAWRR."

Martialmasters wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Because they manipulate the boundary of life and death through theory, rather than vibes or intuition.

What what is this internal dirge supposed to be? If they are studying why have a dirge at all.

That's a fair point.

IMO, I wouldn't be opposed to just giving the Necromancer a spell book like the Magus / Wizard since I still see the Necromancer as a variant of Wizard. However, you're right an `internal dirge` doesn't jive with intelligence.

I disagree. I think it jibes very well with intelligence.

ElementalofCuteness wrote:

I don't remember the original wording for Arcwn Cascade and now I do just to see if this is right, the only thing I want is a Meld into Eidolon Class Archetype for Summonert that allows them to cast magic still while being their Eidolon...But that is just me.

My biggest hope is they actually nerf Rogue from critical succeeding all 3 saves starting level 17 and they hold onto their promise for Kineticist .

I probably shouldn't open this can of worms but you keep mentioning this kineticist errata. What errata are you expecting? As far as I know, there isn't really anything that needs errata

I think it's about how Kineticist interacts, or doesn't, with Mythic rules.

I have an 11th level Bard.
These are 4th level spells that have been effective for him:

Confusion.
Invisibility - assuming it's not a signature spell
Blood Spray Curse
Enervation
Translocate-FKA Dimension Door.

Edit- Honeyed Words may be useful for your Bard. +4 for Deception checks.

Or, you could just have a cow kick over a lantern, ;-)

Errenor wrote:

Ravingdork wrote:

Aristophanes wrote:

GREAT GOOGLELY MOOGLELY PEOPLE!

PFS is not hiring Pinkertons to hack your personal computers to check up on your characters! Just fix your Oracles so they work and move on! No one but you will know!

*Points at the cheater and screeches in pod people*

* spoiler omitted **

By the way, what does 'fix' mean here? Play normal 'new' oracle? Play normal 'old' oracle?

And also it's not a subtle action at all. No GM needs to audit your chars to know if you play old or new version of oracle, it's obvious. So everyone will know actually. Then, if you play with the same people, also GM will know if you've bought a rebuild. And when you created your character. And PFS GMs (or GMs in PFS mode) tend to follow PFS rules.

"Fix" in this context would mean "use a rebuild that you technically didn't have to just change entirely to remaster Oracle", since we were talking about the situation of people that didn't get a rebuild so were still on the old class chassis but were forced onto the new mystery/curse.

And yes, if you just showed up with a remaster Oracle, only someone auditing your chronicles to see that you only played them after the cutoff date and didn't buy a rebuild would ever know anything is amiss. I doubt many people are going to audit it THAT closely if your sheets are in order and your build is legal, especially since they'd have to actually know to look specifically for this to even realize something is amiss.

But just to be clear: if the best way to get around this problem is cheating, that points to a problem with the guidelines.

If the choice is to not rebuild and play an "illegal" Oracle or to 'cheat' and rebuild to make a "Legal" Oracle, I'd say the spirit of the law trumps the letter of the law.

GREAT GOOGLELY MOOGLELY PEOPLE!
PFS is not hiring Pinkertons to hack your personal computers to check up on your characters!
Just fix your Oracles so they work and move on!
No one but you will know!
Do VOs audit character sheets anymore? Not since PFS2 started.
This isn't the "Aasimar won't be PFS legal next season so we'll speed run through a bunch of repeatables" kind of problem!

So Teridax, honest question:
Do most or all of the encounters in the games you play happen in areas that are larger than a 20' radius?
I myself play mostly PFS, which often has a lot of encounters inside dungeons or buildings, or Museums, and so don't give the party the luxury of spreading out.
Don't mistake me, there are also scenarios that primarily take place outdoors, one of which I played last night.

Tim_K wrote:

I recently purchased an RPG Bundle: Pathfinder 2nd Happy Birthday Remaster from Humble on 15 November 2024, ensuring I paid the full amount ($35) to receive the complete bundle as advertised ("You will get all 72 items. Thank you for giving extra and helping the Humble community!"). However, I noticed that only half (35) of the bundle's content was delivered to me. I kindly request your assistance in rectifying this issue. I don't have any of the books advertised in the bundle and should have received all 72 books. Paizo please help resolve this matter quickly. Thank you.

Did you redeem all three codes humble bundle gave you? If you only got 35 items it sounds like you only redeemed the $30 tier code. There's separate codes for the $5 and $15 tiers of the bundle that will give you 8 and 29 items respectively.

Thank you! I made the same mistake. I hadn't noticed that I needed to redeem the other two codes.

I was a player in a 3.5/PF1 hybrid homebrew that went from level 1 to 35.
We met more or less every Monday evening for two years with a few weeks off for Holidays, illness, the GM's wedding. That game was a blast! My character was a Binder, and focused on front lining with some healing.

Something I'm confused about when people hype up Amped Imaginary Weapon:

The rules say that the two attacks MUST be against different targets. While it will be more damaging as scales (since Amped Imaginary Weapon heightens damage at 2*rank instead of rank), you still have to make them against different enemies. So, you can't really use it against a lone Boss...

Also, I feel like the best way to buff Unleash Psyche is to remove the spell failure chance from the stupefy it inflicts. And yeah, I know it's a flat 6 DC, but still, what if your dice rolls just suck?

Darksol the Painbringer wrote:

If we rebalance the Psychic cantrips and make them 3 slot casters, it might be enough to fix them.

And this. I would gladly support this.

What do you usually do with any character when your rolls suck?

I'm having a blast with my PFS Gnome Distant Grasp/ Emotional Acceptance Psychic! With the Energized Font ancestry feat, he can start one encounter a day with the possibility of using 4 focus spells in the 1 encounter. Now, being PFS, he hasn't needed to, nor really had the opportunity, but it's there if I need it! *Hmmm..a gnome psychic with a familiar could start with 5*
He generally manages to do a competitive amount of damage with amped cantrips, and the Unleashed recovery has yet to be a serious factor.
So far through 8 levels, he has only failed to overcome stupefied twice, and both times, the next one in initiative order has ended the battle.
What is kind of frustrating, is when he uses the amped ray of frost he got from Parallel Breakthrough, gets a boatload of temporary HPs...and nobody attacks him!!

Unicore wrote:

Yeah, looking at the Ikons again after the playtest, I don't really think the issue is the mechanical power imbalance offered by the dedication feat, it is the fact that we basically have a class offering extra special magical items which are not usually a resource tied to class feats and class abilities.

I personally just don't think such a class needs to offer a dedication at all, because we already essentially have magical items and artifact rules to cover "My X class character finds this really cool item that they invest a part of themselves into and grows over time."

The whole Ikon system feels like a way to have a class that just uses magic items differently, which is cool, but letting other classes access that through a multiclass dedication was always going to be a disaster (hyperbole in the extreme, really "a power balancing issue"). The problem here is that the disaster errs on the side of making characters too powerful instead of too weak, like the kineticist and alchemist MC.

Thaumaturge/Inventor: Am I a joke to you?

There is absolutely no issue with a class having an item-shaped power boost that can be gained via their multiclass archetype, because they did it twice with no issues. They just, for some reason unknown to mankind, decide to give ~3 multiclass feats worth of upgrades plus unbounded scaling in the dedication itself. Somehow.

Fundamentally, the issue is that Exemplar is a good class, Exemplar dedication is a good idea, someone wrote the dedication feat while drunk and we're now left in a situation where the extremely illogical choice of having to ban the dedication feat of a perfectly functional class.

Nah, this looks more like a "hyped up on too much Red Bull at 25 or 6 to 4 in the morning kinda deal.

OceanshieldwolPF 2.5 wrote:

Gnomes, dwarves and halflings.

Leshy, goblins, poppets and shoony.
Gnomish flickmaces.
Elves called Anthony, or Justin or Frances.

All banned.

I get shoony and kinda everything behind it

but why ban half the core races?

This is just a guess on my part, but I surmise that it's because those Ancestries tend to bring out the..."Whimsical" side of some players, which can be disruptive if the GM is trying to run a more serious campaign.

You had me at "Roger Angel"!

You’re missing the new player core 2 version.

Ah...Aon isn't fully updated.

The memories of long-dead spellcasters grant you their
knowledge, making your spells more formidable. You gain
either a +1 status bonus to the next spell attack roll you attempt
before the end of your turn or an enemy within 60 feet takes a
–1 status penalty to the next saving throw they attempt against
a spell you cast before the end of your turn.
Heightened (5th) The bonus increases to +2 or the penalty
increases to –2.
Heightened (8th) The bonus increases to +3 or the penalty
increases to –3.

So what's the 'unintended abuse' combo that makes it a problem?

Imaginary Weapon and Ancestral Memories are problems too, but they're problems two feats deep into archetyping and draws from the same focus pool many of your cool in-class stuff draws on as well. Exemplar Archetype gives its main benefit immediately and said benefit is a passive that works perfectly with no action cost on whatever your class wants to do. It's a significantly bigger problem.

OK...what am I missing?

Does the Android Nanite Surge Ancestry feat "Offensive Subroutine" work with spells that require an attack roll?

I mean, I say this because its something I don't like about the base system but its not something that has an effect in my table because I ditched skill feats a long time ago. Do you meet the prerequisites of the skill feat? Its yours. There's a very short list of skill feats I don't give for free (Additional Lore, Assurance, Automatic Knowledge, Dubious Knowledge, Experienced Professional, Kreighton's Cognitive Crossover, Master of Apprentice, Skill Training, and Unmistakable Lore) which are now general feats. So far its been a change for the better and even when I don't GM those I play with took this as a house rule too.

So any character that is trained in Acrobatics gets Cat Fall

That certainly adds to the power and versatility of skill monkeys.

They cannot. Haste grants quickened. Quickened specifies "You gain 1 additional action at the start of your turn each round." Haste specifically then restricts how you can use the extra action (for a stride or strike).

Finoan

Quickened wrote:
Because quickened has its effect at the start of your turn, you don't immediately gain actions if you become quickened during your turn.

Ah. They left that part out on AoN.

Thanks

Can a spell caster who casts Haste on themself benefit from the extra action in the same round its cast?

I think it would be cool if there was a conflux spell that let your AC buff the AC of your AC!

Wizards should be the meta-magic, or spell-shapes if you prefer, masters.
There should be shapes only a wizard can know. And no, you shouldn't be able to get the better ones from the Archetype. Wizards should be able to do things with spells that Witches and sorcerers can only dream about.

Many events have a multiplier on Achievement points earned. See Lorespire for the exact details. This isn't entirely new, but I think the system was expanded this year to cover more types of events.

Ah, OK. Thanks!

I just signed into my Organized play account to review my characters to see which has already played a repeatable, and it looks like all the scenarios I've played since February have awarded 5 AcP instead of four. Did I miss a memo? was this a reporting error? I'm just a bit confused...but not critfail confused.

Are there any spells that affect an enemies ability to use reactions, that don't carry the Mental trait.
In other words, is it possible to affect an opponent that is immune to Mental effects.in such a way as to prevent reactions?

Any rules regarding elixers and mutagens interacting with each other?
For instance, Blood Booster[This elixir bolsters your body's natural defenses and ability to resist maladies that travel through or affect blood. For 10 minutes you receive the listed resistance to persistent bleed and persistent poison damage, and you lower the DC for any flat checks to end persistent bleed or persistent poison damage as if you received particularly appropriate aid.} counteracting The Sanguine Mutagens drawbacks[Whenever you take piercing or slashing damage, you take 1d6 persistent bleed damage].

Helvellyn wrote:

The one exception is Medicine and associated feats which has been present on most characters. The feedback I get is they have Medicine so they don't need to worry about whether they are going to be on a table with a dedicated healer.

Which really means that organized play should come up with a rule to cope. Offer groups an item which does slow healing with a ten minute activation, or a pacifist NPC healer, or some other item as compensation, on a rental basis.

In Organized play (PFS) every character gets a Healing Potion or two from the Pathfinder Society at the beginning of the scenario.

There are a bunch of niche skill feats I never touch, but overall my characters seem to spread out to all the skills depending on their flavor.

Also, Additional Lore is SSS+ tier.

Oh yeah! Most definitely!!

Kittyburger wrote:

Kobold Catgirl wrote:

Oh, also, they renamed the slayer, too, pretty obviously because "slayer sounds kind of murderous". I'm not actually saying the inquisitor change was entirely about offensiveness. I think they probably thought "inquisitor sounds kind of evil and might distract players".

Source, by the way: One of my players who didn't know the game well once played an inquisitor of Shelyn. His read on the class was that of an oppressive heel, so the joke was an extremely aggro orc Shelynite. The connotation is there.

I'm pretty sure the devs would change barbarian to berserker if they could get away with it, just because it's clearer, but it was a core class.

To me, "Slayer" should be some kind of magical rogue subtype - but I'm admittedly a 90s girl and when you say "Slayer," I think Buffy.

Buffy is just the only fighter in a party of envoys, thaumaturges and a couple casters. Her apparent superpowers are really just that extra +2 to-hit.

If that's what you think...you really don't know what a Slayer is!

kaid wrote:

Agonarchy wrote:

The poison system basically encourages pounding in as many exposures as possible as fast as possible. This makes them very powerful against single, vulnerable targets, but harder to use in more general conflict, especially because it's hard for a non-monster to actually have that many doses on hand and is action-costly to apply them over and over.

Of course, poison immunity is common, so it's important to have other options anyway.

The poison immunity thing is why the tox alchemists are some of the few who will make a lot of use of them as their poisons basically are poison/acid so should always be able to do something.

Yes, and I wish it were available to other poison users, even if it's costly.

Oddly enough, before I had ever gotten involved in Pathfinder, I had the exact same poison to acid mechanic for a 5E homebrew class I was working on. I was *very* happy to see that Pathfinder beat me to the punch.

Wait! Are you saying Pathfinder spiked the punch with Poison/Acid?! No wonder my cups kept dissolving!

Not RAW, or even RAI, but my head canon is that a non-humanoid bitten by a were-creature can't become one, but can become a "carrier" of the curse.

A downloadable PDF character sheet would be really helpful. Tried scanning the one in the book, did not turn out well. Or if anyone knows where I can get one?

I got this from reddit by the link below:

www.reddit.com/r/Starfinder2e/comments/1ekwgxv/formfillable_starfinder_2e_c haracter_sheet/

This came up in a Starfinder Playtest, but it's relevant for Pathfinder as well.
If a character gets a +2 Status Bonus to Athletics checks, can they also benefit from a +5' Status bonus to speed?

I just played my first Starfinder 2 Playtest adventure: “Shards of the Glass Planet”.
I ran my Android Witchwarper and have a few thoughts.
He was very useful in the skill challenges and exploration.
I need to remember that his Quantum Field has a 120’ range.
The spells I chose for him were mostly from the playtest doc,
And were all 30’ range, so for the long range combats he was less than effective
Because I forgot the QF has 120’ range! @%*!*%
I haven’t decided if I should pick up a longer range weapon,
Or just use Needle Darts, which has 60’ range.
As a Precog, his QF effect was +/-5’ movement, of which the party took good advantage.
We had two Mystics in the party, one of which was a monster healer and buffer!
My next game will be Lvl 5 scenario “It Came From the Vast!”
Hopefully I’ll be better prepared.

Aristophanes wrote:

The character is a Pilot type. I like the Flight Suit look with Sunshades, but the Second Skin is better protection at 1st level.

Should work fine the better of the two would be the one that takes effect. Second skin is literally a skin tight bodysuit so if you can wear something normally there isn't any reason you couldn't wear it over second skin.

Easy enough to also play it as a pilot fully understanding you can never have too much redundancy when it comes to life support and having a backup air supply in the second armor could be handy.

I'm also going by the assumption that, since Second Skin is "Tech", you can't get around the rune restrictions by putting them on the Flight Suit.

The character is a Pilot type. I like the Flight Suit look with Sunshades, but the Second Skin is better protection at 1st level.

Can a character wear a Flight Suit over Second Skin?

Oh gods no!
Avoid Grease 2! Awful!
The original Grease is a classic! Great score, Olivia Newton John, wonderful!
But Grease 2? I mean, I love Michelle Pfeiffer, but the movie is an abomination!
How can you...Huh? ...What?... Ooooohhhh...Never mind.

This brings to mind a AD&D campaign I was in back in the late '70's/early '80's. Our Party had just killed a 'god', a booming voice from above said "To the victors goes the spoils". The sky opened up and an enormous mountain of treasure fell before us.
For the next several days, dragons came from all over and carried off huge amounts of treasure... and it didn't seem to make a dent. So, to avoid destroying the world's economy, we cast Hallucinatory Terrain on the whole thing, set up Guards and Wards, and continued the adventure.

*BUMP*.......

Very nice! Thank you!!

As someone who has very little experience with SF1, and thus has no preconceived notions clouding my brain, I like that Witchwarpers have Occult as an option. It was the only class that, after reading, nearly instantly inspired a character, whose origin has some Lovecraftian influences that just scream Occult.
Primal is the only tradition that doesn't come to mind with Paradox. But that's just me.

Unicore wrote:

TiMuSW wrote:

Try having the wizard and sorcerer in your example both RK a ghoul (or most undead), or better, play a undead scenario, then tell me wizard is still better at RK than Tap into blood imperial sorc.

Or your wizard takes Additional Lore Undead if you are not going to move religion past trained, and is doing better than the imperial sorcerer in Abomination Vaults an undead heavy campaign.

First of all, you cannot always take undead lore depending on how you interpret the ruling on lore skills. It’s often vampire lore + ghouls lore + zombie lore + lich lore + skeleton lore and some other lore I can’t remember on top of my head. Yes I did play a wizard in undead campaign and took a bunch of lore skill. Guess how many feats it took me? And guess how effective my character is on RKing other creatures and subjects we came across in that campaign?

Secondly, even if for some reason you wizard decides to keep religion as your highest skill and wisdom as second highest stat. They are still only ‘as effective’ as your tap into blood imperial sorcerer. Who has the added benefit of having their thematic skill as their most proficient skill. And once again, guess how effective that wizard is at recalling none-religion things.

Do I really have to explain to you, that I used undead RK as an example to show that for non imperial sorcerer character, how limited dedicating a single skill is at RK, rather than to nitpick a scenario sorcerer can beat wizard in? Because with tap into blood, there are many of them.

Of course you can always take Undead Lore. It's more specific than Religion, so its DC will be -2 compared to RK-Religion. Vampire Lore is specific, so it would be DC -5 compared to RK-Religion. That's how the lore skills work.

You retrain with Downtime, just like regular PF2.

You get 8 days of Downtime after a Scenario (2 days for Quest/Bounty).

It costs 7 days of Downtime to retrain a Feat.

So after you complete a Scenario, instead of rolling Earn Income for 8 days, spend 7 days to retrain and 1 day to Earn Income (or craft or something else).

Thanks!