Aublin Dudmer's page

Just a quick thought regarding quicksand from the ankhrav encounter in the last section. It seemed weird that as soon as players stepped into quicksand they immediately fell in up to their middle and then on a good initiative roll, the quicksand could absorb them up to their neck before they get a chance to respond.

That feels unfairly dangerous, especially given the difficulty of escape and the awful consequences of going under and suffering from the drowning rules--which are just brutal.

I'd argue that a starting condition of immobilized would be a better start. The character steps into the muck and it swallows them up to their ankles and they realize with horror they can't free their feet. Roll initiative. If the quicksand wins, they get pulled down to their waist. If not they have a chance to fall back onto land and free themselves.

That feels more like quicksand, both the way you see it portrayed in the media as well as how it works in the real world.

So I made a point before I run my next session to read through all the new rules, and I found one that stood out as weird, down near the bottom of page 4:

Page 284—In Animal Companions, in both Nimble and
Savage Companion, at the end, add “Its attacks are magical.”

Now as I understand it, Animal Companions are basically just animals that have been trained sufficiently that they're given a template that lets PCs have a better bond with them. There's nothing to say that the gods have sent the animal or that it's some manifestation of magic or the natural power of the world--they're pretty much just a critter, right?

If so, giving them magical attacks seems weird within the narrative of the game. I get that you might well run into creatures in the game that can only be hurt by magic, and that unless an animal companion has magic paws or whatever, they might get sidelined--but those same creatures would sideline most characters too. That's what Magic Fang is for. I don't personally see why that's a change we'd want or where it came from.

One thing I love about the character sheet is how the save DC for their effects are right up at the top. I wish there was something like this for monsters. I'm having a rough time figuring out what their class DC equivalents are supposed to be--which is especially bad when I'm trying to calculate death save DCs on the fly. Can someone point this out for me? Thanks!

Just a quick bit of feedback here. Slowing both in everyday use as well as in the legacy of the game has always talked about effects that reduce movement speed. That it means a reduced number of actions is needlessly confusing. There is a word that means that, things happening that get in your way and make it so you can do less: Hindered.

I'd seriously suggest swapping the game definitions of those two terms. It will make the game a lot more intuitive.

Plus, on a related terminology issue, the term "Bolstered" as used in the game gets really problematic when it gets used in connection with positive effects.

So I just sat down to watch the livestream of the Lost Star playtest with Jason Buhlman and realized we've been running shields in our game off of the same rules, but doing it totally wrong.

The thing is our way seems to fix what a lot of people have issues with about how shields work and conceptually I just like it better than the current RAW. I sort of want to put it out there to see what folks think. Maybe it's a low impact rules fix?

You have a shield with a hardness of 3 let's say. The RAW says that if you take a hit for 5, your shield takes a dent and absorbs 3 of those damage points and you take the other 2. If this were to happen again, your shield would be broken and no longer usable. This seems unsatisfying for two reasons: it makes the rules in the book that talk about shields taking damage from a single heavy hit and being instantly destroyed not make sense (ie. say you take 9 damage with your shield...according to the RAW your shield would take three dents and be destroyed, but according to the example in the livestream it would seem to take 3, be dented and 6 would go through to your HP). It also doesn't really model how you would want a shield to work in the narrative: if you get hit with an axe in the shield and it hits hard enough that it blows through the shield and does you damage--it feels like the shield is destroyed, or at least has a big axe-blade sized gash in it. That it's only dented, and yet you're taking damage paints an oddly inconsistent image.

So here's how we read it:

You raise a shield, it negates damage up to it's toughness. A 2 point hit would just go away, completely absorbed by the shield and doing no damage.

For every amount equal to it's toughness, it takes a dent. A hit doing 4 damage would dent the shield by one and the final point of damage wouldn't be enough to dent the shield again, and would thus be absorbed. Six points would break the shield so it wouldn't be able to be used to block subsequent attacks (though if an attack did say 8 points, the remainder of that attack still wouldn't go through because it doesn't bypass the hardness of the shield's destroyed level).

If a single hit would be enough to destroy the shield (10 or more damage in the case of a 3 toughness shield) the remaining damage would transfer to the character and the shield explodes in wooden splinters.

I like that interpretation. It makes shields feel better narratively and makes them more worthwhile mechanically.

What do you folks think? Does this fix it for you?

So you're a paladin and you just hit third level and a holy outsider manifests to join in your cause! Maybe you get a glorious weapon with Returning or Ghost Touch! Maybe you get a mighty celestial warhorse! Maybe you get a shield that breaks after 4 dents instead of 2 before being destroyed.

This seems really weird. You'd want a paladin's Righteous Ally to have some kind of magical ability akin to what you get with the blade version, but unlike the other two (maybe glowing like a torch in the darkness with a continual flame, having a chance to reflect the gaze of monsters in a nod to Perseus, or resisting evil magic). Also in this version of the game, shields are consumables. If you're going to have a shield get destroyed in combat you would it to magically reform and appear bright and shiny at the foot of the paladin's bed every night. Better though, just make it indestructible so long as the paladin wields it. I mean what kind of paladin has a Righteous Ally and just lets them get pummeled to death the first fight they're in?

Okay so I've been helping a Sorcerer player get their 4th level character together for the second part of the playtest module. There's an ability they get that looks pretty cool: Spontaneous Heightening. The problem is, other than Heal (the character casts Primal spells), every other spell on their spell list that I've looked up doesn't heighten to a spell level the character can actually cast. Most require a third or fourth level slot. You're supposed to be able to pick two a day. My player can't even do that--he doesn't have two that work. That's a frustrating development for a class ability that kicks in at a specific level--either hold off on giving it until the class gives you the spell level slots you need, or ease back the restrictions on what spell levels are required to heighten spells. A lot of the benefit of heightened spells only gives you a slightly bigger die (a d4 to d6, or d8 to d10) or lets you add your key ability score to damage--that doesn't seem like something you need to wait to cast using a third level slot.

Anyway I'd suggest the developers take a look at it.

I noticed going through the benefits granted by the Fighter Dedication archetype:

You become trained in light armor, medium armor, heavy armor, simple weapons, and martial weapons. Athletics is a signature skill for you.
Special - You cannot select another dedication feat until you have gained two other feats from the fighter archetype.

It gives you training in everything except shields. Is it meant to be like that, or is that a bug? It seems like a weird thing to exclude...

So I have a player who will be getting Counterspell as a Sorcerer and I'm trying to help him figure out how the spell works. Start the merry chase! First we get sent to the section on Dispelling, on page 197. Here we find out that Dispelling is a Counteract Action. Off to page 319! Here we get a table that...I don't know. I think one side is the level of the effect to be countered and the other is the level of the spell slot you need? I think? This gets weird though because the text seems to say that you compare the spell level slots straight across--that a caster casting Magic Missile in a third level slot and a player trying to counterspell it with a first level slot would take a -10 to their roll, for example.

When attempting to counteract an effect, compare the counteract level of the effect with the counteract level of the ability you are using. A spell’s counteract level is equal to its spell level...If your ability has a higher counteract level than that of the effect to be counteracted, you automatically succeed. If your ability’s counteract level is the same as the effect’s counteract level or lower, you must succeed at a check using the relevant skill or ability against the DC of the target effect. You take a cumulative –5 penalty to this check for every level by which your ability’s counteract level is lower than the target’s. If your ability is 4 or more counteract levels lower than that of the effect you are trying to counteract, your attempt automatically fails. On a successful counteract check, the condition or effect immediately ends.

So I'm not sure about my interpretation of that at all, but it seems to be what the text is saying. Problem is, it's not at all what the chart is saying. The chart is weird.

But mostly I'm concerned by this part:

If your ability’s counteract level is the same as the effect’s counteract level or lower, you must succeed at a check using the relevant skill or ability against the DC of the target effect.

That doesn't even look like words to me...

So you roll a check? Like Arcana? Against "the DC of the target effect". I have no idea where to even find that. There's the table of DCs of various difficulties by level in the Difficulty Classes section under Game Mastering. Is that what we're talking about? At what, the High difficulty? So a 19 at 4th level? And the roll takes a -5 for each level higher the spell your countering is from the slot you're blocking it with?

Is that right?

Our group didn't quite TPK during Lost Star but about half the characters died and the rest weren't in any shape to try and rescue them and had to withdraw.

Now originally I'd thought it would be fun to give the players more time to enjoy their main cast by running them through the Rose Street module (reflavored as taking place in and around Underbridge and dealing with the murders of slaves rescued from Korvosan infernalists). But it seemed politic to have the players who's characters died just make their 4th level characters along with everyone else and reward them with brand new 10th level characters when the time comes.

So this leaves me with extra time before the Pale Mountain surveys become available to test out the Pathfinder Society module and a group of new characters the players are interested in trying out. So my hope was to do the Rose Street Revenge with these new fourth level characters--since Tier One is levels 1-4 right? The idea is to reflavor the adventure as the PCs helping Valeros, Ezren, Kyra and Merisiel get a handle on a local rash of crime targeting former slaves in and around Kelmarane.

But it brings up a big question. I think I have the right table to figure out the new XP budget and how many creatures to add. Taking the first encounter from Snippets, you have four level 0 characters which would total 120 for a Severe encounter. Accounting for the extra levels of the PCs drops that to 40, or Trivial. To bring it back up to 120 would mean adding back in EIGHT more gang members! With the new action economy and high skewing to-hit bonuses I wonder if this would just murder everyone? Maybe mix in a couple of stronger thugs to drop the overall number of combatants? A Mercenary Scout would be 30, so I could add 2 of those and 2 more lackeys and be up to my full budget. I'm not sure. What do you guys think?

For playtesting purposes I kind of want to run the Barber scenario with the more conservative build with the two 3rd level enemies and 6 level 0 lackies, and then in the Dragon scenario just go nuts and have a full budget worth of level 0 kobolds to test out both ways of spending the XP budget and see how it works in practice? Hopefully that will give some good feedback.

I was a little unsure about posting feedback on this, since I wasn't sure ifthe feedback the designers were looking for should have to do with how modules are written, or if we were trying to focus on the mechanical end of things--but I had a few things to say and it's easy enough for folks to ignore them, so here goes.

Encounters in Lost Star do some things really well. You get a good sense of the monsters as living creatures, all of them doing different things with relationships between one another and all the elements of the dungeon seem to tie together. The gory goblin bodies are set out as examples. The fungus is, at least in theory, a tool used by the boss to keep his minions in line. The centipede cave is the collapsed section that once connected to the front entrance of the ossuary, and why people believed it was completely inaccessible until the robberies. The fountain was once for anointing bodies but as a morale boost for the Lamashtu worshipping goblins and to make sure it wasn't used to break his control, he corrupted it. The skeletons are restless undead from the family driven to protect their burial niche. I like that the story is cooked into the encounter design.

There's also weird stuff though, mostly with the scripting. The centipedes are mindless bugs that eat whatever they can. They're in the rubble room and never leave, even if they're alerted to food out in the main chamber. If they are engaged in hunting the PCs in the room and they withdraw to the main chamber, the centipedes apparently don't follow. If the PCs somehow manage to maneuver the enemy goblins into the rubble room, it specifically says the centipedes won't attack them. Why?

I accidentally hadn't read any of this when I read the module over previous to play so things went really differently. The alchemist was sneaking around at the entrance and the centipedes became aware of him and came pouring out. Panicked he hucked an alchemist'f fire hoping to bottleneck them, but missed the throw only catching them in the splash damage. They boiled out into the chamber and all the PCs ran in. Lighting was poor, a single torch thrown on the floor. Because we had six players instead of four, I had a couple of goblins wake up in the commotion and ambush the PCs as well. One of them ended up between the PCs and the surge of bugs and so got run over by them like in the Mummy, bitten and poisoned to death in a round. Big yikes moment. The PCs rid themselves of the centipedes that had crawled on them and the remaining goblin and were able to finish off the centipedes at range. Very effective, engaging encounter.

I think part of what made it engaging was that (wrongly) I had let what was supposed to be a contained encounter spread out into another part of the dungeon. There were a variety of different opponents--centipedes and goblins, both of whom act differently. There was an implicit fear that if some noise had awoken two goblins, that more noise would wake more--so the PCs were wary of making noise. There was concern that it was pretty dark and if the torch goes out, all the PCs except one goblin would be blinded. There was a lot to think about.

But that's just not how a lot of the dungeon is set up. There's usually one kind of enemy, and usually not very many of them. They fight with a specific routine and don't leave the room they're in. As clever as the set ups are, finding them in the middle of doing things like making statues or fighting over food, no roleplaying opportunities or interesting tactical twists ever come of any of it. They're all fanatics. They all fight to the death. None of the terrain is different enough to be useful. None of them really interact with each other in interesting ways.

Mostly I guess if I had a wish it would be that we could set things up so that we could have fights where there could be more enemies, where there could be more combinations of enemies, or of enemies and traps (the rock trap the goblins set is a fun one) and encounters that can rove around between rooms allowing PCs more opportunity to choose where they want to stage their defense--or for them to get pushed into situations they don't expect and have to react to.

I guess the encounters just felt a little anemic, too few creatures per encounter and not enough interesting stuff going on with tactics and staging--and not enough permission given to GMs to shake things up.

Our party found the owlbear claw, which took a fair bit of doing, but when we looked up its stats everyone just kind of deflated. The only character that could have used it would have been a fighter (we don't have one). That hypothetical fighter would have to have critted with it for it to even do anything and even then it would only unlock an ability that happens when you crit--and when that happens you get to move an enemy around or give them a status effect that it feels like you could much more easily give them some other way.

As someone who loves owlbears I want this item to be awesome. I'd say make it something any class can use, and ideally something they don't have to crit to make happen. Offhand I like the idea that it makes the next attack with the weapon you affix it to a critical hit and then it burns away into ash. But it could be anything really. It just bums me out that my players got this cool and rare feeling thing and then found out it was kind of useless.

One thing that has come up any time a fantasy game has gone under scrutiny has been the issue of the +1 magic sword or +1 chainmail. Two issues here. First of all, and perhaps most glaring, is that for as big a deal in the setting as they are supposed to be, there's NO in world name for them thus far. Our groups over the years have tried various things. My favorite has been Longsword of Minor Enhancement for a +1 to a Longsword of Epic Enhancement for a +5 (Minor Enhancement, Lesser Enhancement, Enhancement, Greater Enhancement, Epic Enhancement). That at least gives characters something to say.

But in practice I've found that weapons with pluses don't feel very magical. They become a crutch that gets factored into the game math anyway so it's not like you even get a bonus for having them--the EXPECTATION is that you have them. So you're obligated to get this thing and then, because the numbers are already set up to where it's assumed you have it--you get no enjoyment from it. Plus a +1 to hit and damage has never once gotten a woo-hoo from anyone who's ever used it. It's such a small bonus, I doubt the characters even notice much of a difference (except that now they can fight monsters they couldn't before...but probably didn't run into until they got weapons they could use).

Whereas weapons with powers are neat. They aren't factored into the math so you get to enjoy being different and unique, plus they usually do something with some visual pizazz--like ice blades or lightning. Maybe they they give you darkvision. Maybe it's a set of daggers that look like fuzzy spider fangs that poison themselves and when you wield both you get spiderclimb a number of times per day. It always feels like the crazy magic items are the things players want and the kinds of magic I like to give them.

I sort of wonder if we might just recalibrate the math so that weapons with +'s are no longer expected of us and just let magic be something cool?

I really approve of the idea that there's no set XP for a particular monster modified by the ECL of the party. No weird rules for combining creatures where multiples of the same creature are CR + additional monsters of that type.

No things are intuitive and straightforward. It feels like the difference between working with THAC0 and modern AC. Like we've finally worked our way to the right side of the math. Each monster is worth a certain number of XP based on the level of the PCs relative to it. That's it. Then you count monsters. The XP budget is similarly easy to arrive at with fewer or greater players added as a simple extra lump of XP.

Its one of those changes in the math where it feels so intuitive it makes you wonder why it wasn't always like that, like you can't imagine going back and doing it the other way. Good job guys!

So the dying rules section talks about Undead and Construct creatures being destroyed at 0 hit points, but I wonder if broken would be more fun? PCs could always take an action and destroy them if they're worried about it, but they could also break a berserk construct and then try to fix it, or a necromancer might come along and patch together some broken zombies still twitching on the ground. They still would be out of the fight, it would just have less inherent finality to it.

One thing I always loved about first level characters is that for the most part, that was the only level where the damage weapons did actually made sense. You imagine what a mace would do to someone, or a greataxe, or a longsword and the number values you get in the equipment list compare quite favorably to the hit points first level characters have. In other words, you're lucky to come away with a bleeding wound, if it's a bad hit chances are you're on the ground. I've always felt it made low level combat the two things you want it to be: dangerous and fast.

Starting players this time around have about 16 hit points, give or take. That's enough that even the very top end weapons wielded by the very strongest creatures are unlikely to be able to fell anyone--even unarmored. Then every level you're guaranteed to get max hit points. So effectively hit points are basically double P1. I wonder if that's going to make combat less dangerous? And if there's no real risk, will it be as fun?

Granted this is an open question. I'm not assuming the answer will be yes. I assume there's plenty of people who like more survivable characters and want something to try and counteract the impulse toward 10 minute workdays.

It's a strong temptation, but something I didn't particularly love when they did it in 4e and I'm not loving it here. There's always been an assumption I had that the characters and monsters lived in the same world and that there weren't separate rules for heroes and everything else. This erodes that notion. Player goblins have 14ish hit points. Monster goblins have 6--which makes more sense, really.

I wonder about halving the hit points you get from each source, so 3 for goblins, 4 for humans, etc. and also 4 + Con for alchemists and bards, 5 + Con for fighters and paladins--what that would feel like in play?

Maybe if it isn't for you, it could be an optional rule for grittier play--so everyone could be happy?

There are five levels of proficiency:

Untrained - Level -2
Trained - Level
Expert - Level +1
Master - Level +2
Legend - Level +3

There's a few problems I have with this. Mostly its the introduction of more terminology you don't need. It would be as if every +1 you had in an ability score had a different name. You just don't need it and it causes you to have to convert things in your head from words to mechanics every time you make a roll, which slows things down.

All we'd need is a core mechanic that works like this and you'd have no more problems: d20 roll + Level + Ability + Skill. Then you could just label the bubbles +0,+1,+2,+3,+4.

Though this brings me to another issue that bugs me. Untrained skills start at a -1 rather than 0. You're basically spending your first point of proficiency to just not take a penalty, just to get back up to zero. Ugh. Would it kill the math to just have everything shift up one?

Untrained - +0
Trained - +1
Expert - +2
Master - +3
Legend - +4

Here's another gripe about the names here. A person who's what, five percent, better at a skill (whatever a +1 equates to) than someone else is now an expert? And another five percent better is a master? And five more and now they're a legend? So basically a legend in martial arts (say Bruce Lee) going up against a white belt is going to have a difference in skill of 3 on a d20? I don't like that. If you want skills to represent expert, master and legend levels the jump in value needs to be a big one. You'd want the idea that in a competition between two people at a skill check that the person who's trained would need to roll amazingly to have a chance against and expert and would have no chance against a master or legend. I like the idea of 3-5 point jumps maybe?

Untrained - +0
Trained - +3
Expert - +6
Master - +9
Legend - +12

That way legends feel like legends and trained people feel trained.

Though really I'd much rather do away with the per level titles entirely and just have the bonuses expressed in numerical +'s.

Ancestry Feats seem to have met with two general responses in the discourse since the playtest launched:

1) Elves aren't Pokemon. Having racial abilities pop up as you level feels like you're evolving and doesn't feel reasonable.

2) It's nice to customize my character and see how their experiences on their adventures shape them.

Thinking this over I wondered if there wasn't a way to make both groups happy: what if instead of getting an ancestry feat every few levels you instead got a background feat? In other words, mark the growth of your character by noting something they've done or become in the levels since they started adventuring. Been crafting a lot in your downtime? Pick the Blacksmith or Merchant background. Been travelling all over? Get Nomad. Does your character feel the pull toward a certain religion? Acolyte.

That way you're changing and evolving as the game goes on, but in an organic way that matches your in character experiences. I would like to float this as a possible change to the system we have but regardless I think it's a change I'll probably houserule in when I run future P2 games after the playtest is done.

When a PC goblin is assured of having at least double their hit points it sticks out as a glaring problem. They need more hitpoints.

Likewise you'd want goblins to benefit from sneak attacks because they're sneaky and creepy and can see in the dark. Plus they should be able to set impromtu traps for PCs--at least some caltrops or something. It would be nice if any time goblins knew the PCs were coming they had a chance to rig some kind of awful trap for them, throwing beehives on them or setting up rusty beartraps to swing down on a rope and hit them in the face when they come around a corner. It doesn't have to do a lot of damage--just show that they are cruel and inventive creatures with hearts full of black comedy.

Also goblins chatter a lot. Goblins that don't know there are enemies about should be noisy.

I also like the idea that they can hide in places that aren't technically spaces on the map, squeezing into partial squares or climbing into small alcoves.

Just some things to think about to up the gobliney flavor of goblins.

A creature that's made of the cesspool it's hiding in, that waits for a party to clump up and then hoses them all with an acidic breath weapon sounds great! And with 40 hit points it seems like it should stick around long enough to be scary. Right?

Well its armor class is 5. That means when folks spot it hiding (even against a background of stuff identical to what its made up it only gets a +5 to hide) they can take all three actions to make ranged attacks and cut it apart in a single round (that's 12 attacks more or less assured to succeed).

Plus it's mindless. It has no interest in hide and seek. When it sees food it abandons any pretense of hiding to go eat, which dramatically just kills this idea of it being a creepy ambush predator. It also doesn't have the tactical sense to bypass a frontline fighter to use its breath attack on a vulnerable mass of other adventurers--it just eats the meal in front of it.

I'm not sure if there's a way to make it work. Maybe if there were more of them in the encounter that people had to juggle? Maybe if it was a different kind of creature, more like the sewer blight it was based off of, that are formless but intelligent?

It was just kind of a dud of a fight.

We started the playtest adventure. Half the group hadn't started character creation yet, which is the only reason they didn't blast all the way through the adventure in a single sitting (we play from 6-10 but this week the first hour and a half was character creation).

The first encounter with the solitary muck monster with an AC 5 was over in a round. They saw it hiding because it's +5 to stealth and a lowball roll made it easy to spot. Once they saw how easy it was to hit, they all stood in the antechamber and used all three actions on ranged attacks while the bard psychically threw wet wreckage at it. If it wasn't immune to criticals it wouldn't have made it through the PC lineup. I feel like an ooze makes a bad ambush predator because they don't seem smart enough to commit to hiding well. If it were a creature that understood how camouflage worked or had a premade hiding space I could argue for a bonus to its preparations. Likewise a creature with a burst attack would tactically benefit from waiting to get everyone in a tight group--but as is, it's just a blob that would have moved toward food as soon as it saw it and would use its blast attack as soon as it couldn't just wack an adjacent foe. Dramatically those attacks are fun and you'd want to see them work, but the abilities just seem a mismatch for a mindless enemy. Regardless people seemed to have felt clever for having spotted it and taken it out so easily.

Everyone was suitably paranoid about proceeding into the tunnel in the pitch black except the goblin alchemist, who could see fine. One player lit a bullseye lantern and another lit a torch, but there was a real fear that while that was the only way to see, it also made them easy to see. The goblin decided to scout ahead.

The group's a little bigger than standard, with 6 players instead of 4, so I added some sleeping goblins to the catacomb and had them wake up as various encounters triggered. That worked out nicely to flesh out what in the module feels like a pretty underoccupied area. The fitfully sleeping goblins also made the PCs nervous, that if they made too much light or noise that they'd trigger a much bigger fight.

The goblin could hear bickering goblins at the far end of the chamber, the boss directing underlings to put together the sludge statue, so he backed away into a side chamber try and find a way around the encounter. He ended up in the centipede room. Just then the gnome from across the way starts trying to call out in a hushed voice to make sure the goblin was all right. The centipedes roll to sense the nearby commotion and a fight begins as they boil out of the rubble. The goblin freaks out and throws a bottle of alchemist's fire into the horde, not hitting any of them, but splashing several. The light and activity wake three goblins, who crawl out of their sleeping creches, grab weapons and position themselves for sneak attacks (that goblins don't have special mechanics to sneak attack or lay traps for people feels like a wasted opportunity--most should carry caltrops or something nasty).

The ranger comes into the room and pulls his scythe but doesn't have enough actions left to attack, so the goblin jumps on his chest and stabs him on it's turn doing max damage. That was fun. The goblin, who gets bitten once and is about to be swarmed by centipedes and worried all the goblins are waking up, sneaks away from the swarm and into a creche with a skeleton and ends up finding the silver ring as he plays around with the bones. The bard comes out to help the ranger and just obliterates the goblin on his chest, psychically impaling him with her crowbar--because she's Carrie White on a bad day and nobody messes with the psychic bard. It's a fun scene but it strikes me as weird that NPC goblins now have a third the hit points of our goblin alchemist, that discrepancy bugs me.

The second goblin jumps out from behind the column and swings a dogslicer at her neck but she ducks and it chunks into the funerary shelf above them, dumping bones and dust on them both. In come the swarm of centipedes and I realize my math was wrong and there's one too many goblins in the encounter. That and the idea that the centipedes don't attack the goblins seems a little lame to me. How would that work? So like something from the mummy this swarm of six centipedes just murder and climb over the goblin that had just attacked the bard, two last centipedes hadn't attacked, so they attack her. It's nasty. She takes half her health from one centipede biting her and doing poison damage. Centipedes are deadly to first level characters, 1d4-1 plus 1d6 poison is nine damage with another 2d6 the next round. A single bite can one shot most characters at my table by the time the venom does its thing.

The hiding alchemist notices a goblin try to sneak by his creche and rolls out and swings his dogslicer at knee level. Natural 20. The strike hews off it's leg and killing it as it hops around squirting blood out it's leg stump. People laugh and are impressed with the awesome attack.

About this time the main group of goblins get ready to attack. The gnomish bard can smell them up ahead with her uncanny sense of smell and they creep up to their location. The ranger makes his way up with some light to help them out as the goblins stop whisper bickering and break into movement. One moves into position behind the column the ranger is crouched by, leaps out and once again he gets hacked hard with a dogslicer across the back (the old one is still imbedded in his armor, they've been afraid to pull it out). The human osirionologist runs to help the ranger when the two goblins who have been lying in wait for just such an opportunity fire their bows at her. The arrows miss, but it's an intense moment as she dives forward and takes out the goblin and rolls around the corner. The alchemist runs up cackling and lets his second alchemist fire go, sailing up and tagging the boss goblin in the chest. The other one laughs, but gets splash damaged. Then the terrifying bard sends her grappling hook out and gets a natural 20 on the boss goblin, catching him under the throat and lifting him up the wall and dropping him. The last, smoldering goblin gets put down with arrows.

The PCs poke around some of the other rooms. The human osirionologist spots the exsanguinated goblins with the unusual bite marks. The gnome rogue detects the magic from the owlbear claw as he goes all through the crypt casting it on everything. They find the room filled with fungus but are too weirded out to investigate. The bard makes an improvised torch from a thighbone and rags and moves into the fountain room. They all take a long hard look at this room because apparently it seems like a deathtrap. Finally the osirionologist takes the goblin's new horsechopper and pries the Lamashtu totem out of the pool, averting the quasit encounter. Good for them. Then the bard opens the trapped door and all the armor comes crashing down. Whoops. They decide not to go that way and begin working to unlock the other door. Four rolls, three 20+ results. The only one to fail was the rogue who specifically is all about traps and locks. Oh well.

As they stare out at these two passageways it turns 10 and we decide to call it.

Overall it was fun. We had a good time with it. The backgrounds seemed really railroady until half the players hadn't made characters and when they did they turned out to be two random gnomes and a ranger with no connection to anyone or anything. But when the one was a fellow mindquake survivor, all of a sudden there was a tie between her and the bard, who suffered similarly but has turned it into fuel to ignite her excitement about aliens and spaceships (her muse). The other gnome was an Osirionologist librarian learning to be a rogue as part of a journey out to the sands, which means he's got ties into where the story is headed and is curious to test his new skills against a group of antiquities burglars, and the ranger is a Varisian whose family have become targets of the Night Heralds and is looking to join the Palatine Eye for allies. Integration became a snap!

Everyone loved the new system of +'s and -'s for ability score generation.

Initiative based on Perception caused some grumbles.

Crits based on hitting 10 over AC slowed everything down and never happened except on the sludge monster that couldn't be critted.

A lot of the language created weird scavenger hunts: this special ability causes this status. Look up the status: this status causes a target to suffer this status. Look up that status. Oh okay. Everything doesn't need a different name. All the different terminology is so much harder to parse through. It happened a lot and could have slowed down the game a lot if we hadn't been so good about doing it in the background. The solution would just be to not have terminology definitions link to other obscure terminology, just describe the mechanic and then maybe in parentheses say what that mechanic is called.

So you picked a feat you didn't like? Learned a spell you aren't a fan of? That's okay, you can go to town and pay someone to retrain you in a new feat or spell. Hey great. Now you just have to forget the old one. What? Why does that work? I paid this guy to teach me, not stick a hose in my ear and siphon out my old skill.

At first thinking about this, I was approaching it from an entirely "real world thinking" approach. Like yeah but that's not how getting taught things works. I learn to play the piano I don't forget how to do origami.

But then as I thought about it, I saw it from a better perspective. Normally you buy one of a set of feats and you can't ever get the others, but what if it was the same thing as getting a magic item. You pay an NPC some gold, you get an interesting mechanical boost your character gets to use. How is that different from buying a magic amulet? The game is already full of this kind of stuff to spend your treasure on. This would be just one more thing you could invest gold in to make your character better. Especially now that magic items are much less of a factor. And that way you don't have to learn one thing at the expense of another. You get to keep both.

You can already hire people in town to teach you formulas or wizard spells. So instead of 'retraining' you're just doing this. You're finding another elf who has keen hearing and training blindfolded with him until you've honed your own inner gift. Great. You paid for it. Enjoy it. No need to 'pay' for it again by mysteriously forgetting the innate cantrip you could always cast.

I don't think we need retraining at all the more I think about it. Am I overlooking something? Is there some downside to all this I'm neglecting? It just seems like a better way to handle it.

We've gotten a lot of great weapon qualities that I hadn't seen before. I love deadly.

What about a riff on older editions of D&D and a little something to make combat feel a bit more like the source material?

Slow and fast weapons might be as simple as an add or penalty to initiative--say a three? You might take a page from the crossbow mechanics have slow weapons require an action between attacks for the wielder to recover whereas a fast d4 four weapon might give you a free second attack.

Just something to add a little more strategy to weapon choice, where a dagger is not necessarily always a bad weapon and a two handed sword is not always necessarily the best.

It's getting close to the start of the Playtest. Close enough I want to get my group thinking about characters. But I don't want to take them out thinking they're going to make this awesome character they have in their head and it turns out they get stuck playing a pregen.

If it's going to be pregens I want enough lead up that I can pitch them all the stories of the various Iconics and get them excited to play them.

Either way I sort of need to know as soon as I can.

Thanks.

Let's make this new edition a goodun'.

I'm newish to Pathfinder (I was around in the early days circa Paizocon 1, took off for a long while and now find myself running a Pathfinder game again) but not to roleplaying. These last few sessions I've been really surprised how many times it feels like ordinary assumptions I have about fantasy adventure gaming just don't track with Pathfinder.

I had an idea that the corpse of one of the player's enemies got grabbed down from the castle wall where they'd displayed it, dragged off and reanimated as a ghoul--a regular old 1st level ghoul. Seems like the sort of thing your typical necromancer might do, right? Not so! It turns out the spell you need to cast to create one requires the necromancer to be LEVEL 11! Why a level 11 anybody would have any use for a ghoul is beyond me...but that's what it takes. Weird.

Or you've got a tribe of lizardfolk out in the woods. I thought it would be nicely Blair Witch/Supernatural feeling to have them make hex bags from the City of Seven Spears that they can imbue with effects...for flavor. The least expensive one cost hundreds of gold to make. The better ones cost tens of thousands. They're supposed to be literally a hide bag full of bits of bird bones, weird pebbles and knots of hair. Needless to say they're so expensive that no one who would be culturally inclined to make them could, and folks who have the money to afford them wouldn't because they don't come from a subsistance level aboriginal society.

And I feel like I keep running into stuff like this all the time, weird crossroads where I'm forced to either choose flavor and fun and a good story or following the mechanics of the game at all. I think maybe if it was clearer what the world is supposed to be like in a Pathfinder game my stories could hew closer to whatever reality they're supposed to feel like--but like I said I'm a rookie. And the world feels really weird. It feels like the only cool stuff can only be done by people of such high level that once you get there the stuff isn't cool anymore. And that's a bummer.

Oh! Here's another one. I wanted to have a plant--basically a dire flytrap as the base creature, but that has the ability to shoot little bolts of fire...something modeled off of the druid spell Produce Flame. Now you'd think grabbing a monster and adding a little goodie to it like that would be a common enough thing that there'd be an easy table somewhere--like +1 CR per level of the spell the creature can use or maybe count it as a potion or wand in terms of effect, translate that to gold and that gives you a CR adjustment you can apply to your well "equipped" plant monster. I can't find anything like this. There's rules for "advancing" a monster in terms of its combat numbers and there's universal monster creation rules...but that way lies madness (I tried to figure them out, but quickly forgot how to breathe).

Do I just not grok the setting? Is there a paradigm I'm just not in on? Or does it really feel like the game rules actively work to constrict what can happen in a game by burying it under layers of level requirements, extreme gold costs and over-complex detailed bean counting requirements? Does that bother anyone or is that what you sign up for?

Just curious what other peoples' experiences are so I can get my bearings.

I'm wondering if the idea of something like a grisgris bag, hexbag or medicine bag has been introduced in Pathfinder at all? If so, what's the official way they work?

If not I'm thinking they might work a bit like runes or potions, in that they require a feat to create but that they allow you to imbue a spell into the bag which you can set off later. I like the idea of making some raise dead hexbags and leave them around on dead bodies so you can raise them as needed. Or that you can plant one on an enemy and then curse them with various malignant spells. That sort of thing.

If it already exists in some form I want to run it the official way, if there isn't anything like this yet, then what do you folks think of my way of handling it?

Reading up on the First World, at least how it's portrayed in early Pathfinder articles and it doesn't seem too weird if you play your game on a single planet. But it gets super weird in space or on other planets.

Apparently the plane is infinite (unlike, I might add, any of the other planes--which are vast beyond imagining but finite) and composed of an eternity of pristine wilderness. So a spaceship in deep space between galaxies, were it to be able to cross into the First World, would appear (in the sky presumably?) over a big forest with a breathable atmosphere.

It sort of makes you wonder if cutting through the First World isn't a easier way to travel in a lot of ways than plunging through the freezing vacuum of material space inside a high-tech coffin.

But I wonder if that's right? Or is there a kind of space in the First World connecting the equivalents of material plane planets? I'd like to think that if you go to a far and distant alien world that its First World would be a primordial first draft of that world with unthinkably alien fey--not just an earth forest with pixies and centaurs. That seems just too weird.

So I want to customize a Clockwork Soldier my players are set to face off against in the next session or two. I know some Clockwork constructs have spells--the various Clockwork Dragons breathe fire, flaming tar, sleep gas and all sorts of other spell-like effects so conceptually I know it works. I'd like my Clockwork Soldier to be more of a mage--more Burning Hands and Magic Missile instead of chopping folks in melee.

I'd normally just consider swapping out its +1 polearm for a couple of built in wands to reflect it being able to cast the spells I want--but wands are spell completion items and I'm pretty sure a Clockwork creature can't be a spellcaster. Then again a Clockwork also can't breathe fire...but the Clockwork Dragon does. Can I just swap gear? That would really make things easier.

My question, really, is if I add some spell-like abilities to my construct, what does that do to the CR and what's the underlying math for doing that?

After some research I think I have gone as far as I can with the resources at my disposal. So help would be awesome.

Okay ley lines exist in Pathfinder and lend credence to the belief that the cosmology is alive. This ley line energy is the lifestuff of the universe much like mako energy from Final Fantasy VII. I want to talk about this raw magical stuff use a precise smart sounding term like an arcanist loremaster would use. Magical energy feels imprecise and sloppy.

Now mana is a word in Pathfinder. Specifically the Mana Wastes are called that because they are overrun with magical energy from the world getting messed up in a magical war. So mana seems to be the Golarion word for magic energy. On the other hand, this magical energy is "wild" magic from beyond Golarion and comes from "beyond the Cosmos" (in a tentacle way). So it comes frustratingly close to being what I'm looking for, but also kind of isn't.

So what's your guys' judgement? Is the Lifestream of the cosmology also called mana, just mana from a different source? Or do you see mana as it's own thing describing leakage from the Cthulhuverse?

If not, what to call this Lifestream energy? Ley Juice?

So I've been out of the Pathfinder gig for a while, but I have a game I've been running for the last few weeks. The PCs are 5th level and what I really want is a lab with a four corporeal undead with serial numbers stamped onto them that will be clues to a puzzle the PCs find.

I'm hoping for something much like a lower CR version of the electrified flesh golem. I could probably get away with monkeying around with the flesh golem stats but I figure with as long as Pathfinder has been around it's gotta' be something that someone has needed at some point. Like a zombie thing with a big sparking dynamo backpack covered in cables with big metal gloves and glowing bolts in its neck. That kind of thing.

Anything folks? Thanks in advance.

So I'm that guy. When Pathfinder first started up, I loved Golarion, bought all the books (that were out at the time anyway--up through the first Bestiary). Jumped ship to 4e pretty much as soon as it came out. Helped playtest 5e. Really didn't look back--I was super enmeshed in D&D and didn't really see the need for another D&D. Checked in periodically to see if there was a reason to dust off the Pathfinder books, and really nothing jumped out at me. I thought the "everything exists in Pathfinder" idea was catchy, but it seemed to get applied really unevenly and in ways that didn't much distinguish the setting for me.

Cut to a couple of weeks ago. I hear Paizo is coming out with Starfinder. I immediately start digging in to find out what I can, let folks on social media know what I've learned. Now here I am, back on the forums, talking with folks again about Paizo stuff. Pretty much only because of Starfinder.

So yeah, Starfinder has attracted at least one 5e hardcore back.

So I've been gone for a while. Like gosh Second Darkness maybe? I'd really kind of put Pathfinder to my rudder. I ducked my head back in a time or two, almost ran a PBP or two (but they all stalled out).

But now all of a sudden I hear about this Starfinder thing and I find my interest in Pathfinder reigniting! It reminds me strongly of the old Fantasy Flight Dragonstar setting, which we played to death back in the day--so many awesome stories and probably one of my favorite characters ever.

I am really excited to see how this turns out in a year. Oh man, I might get back into Pathfinder again!

Man, wonders never cease. Congrats you guys!

I'm running a pbp game for some folks on a page they posted looking for a DM. I stumbled across a page that said that if I'd inherited a roleplaying thread from someone else to e-mail my account address and the thread address to the webmaster. I tried, but the e-mail bounced. Below is that information. Thanks!

My Account:
http://paizo.com/people/Grimcleaver

The Recruitment Thread:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2q5g2?looking-for-pbp-4E-game#26

Quotient, also known as "the Exodus", is a divided city. Providing power to fulfill the limitless hunger of the deep mining aballonians has granted the energy interests of Quotient, a small council of brain-bots and their logistical cadres, a staggering amount of wealth and power.

Quotient is also a factory city, home to a gifted and idealistic master designer known as the Lyracist and a priesthood of obsolete or outdated aballonians who make the arduous trek to see him--their only hope that he will see some inspiration in their malfunctioning grotesquery and remake them into the envy of machine society. Otherwise they face dismemberment and reclaimation.

Meanwhile in the backstreets gangs of outmods band together to target and assimilate the dragonfly shaped reclaimers that are always on the prowl for them. These old model bots have remade themselves into the apex predators of their sectors--and when they have finished with each reclaimer, they part out their foes amongst themselves, retooling themselves in a frenzy of backalley upgrades to become even more fearsome carbon scarred monstrosities.

There are others as well, political dissidents and revolutionaries, pilgrims choosing deletion on their own terms by striking out on heroic suicide missions, upgrade addicts so maddened by their desire to outrun obsolescence they have turned to cannibalism, and researchers intrigued by the strange organoforms that have begun to teem and multiply in the liquid water coolant shafts established in the ice wells surrounding the city.

Ever since Distant Worlds came out I've been excited to do a game set entirely on one of those amazing worlds. Quotient is a noir machine city flavored by Blade Runner, Tron: Legacy, the Machine City from the Matrix, with a little bit of Cybertron from the old Transformers cartoons.

So if you're interested in getting in on it, let me know!

So I've moved to Wenatchee Washington the end of last year, and left behind an awesome game group I've gamed with for over 10 years. I've been eager to start up a new group here but it's been slow going with a lot of stalled or folded campaigns. So I thought I'd toss out a post and see if there's anyone else in the area looking to maybe start a game group. If you're interested just throw a reply up here or come to our local gamestore, Gamesmith--on Walla Walla across from the Toyota Center. It'll be nice to meet some more of the local gamer community.

So I've moved to Wenatchee Washington the end of last year, and left behind an awesome game group I've gamed with for over 10 years. I've been eager to start up a new group here but it's been slow going with a lot of stalled or folded campaigns. So I thought I'd toss out a post and see if there's anyone else in the area looking to maybe start a game group. If you're interested just throw a reply up here or come to our local gamestore, Gamesmith--on Walla Walla across from the Toyota Center. It'll be nice to meet some more of the local gamer community.

Guess nobody likes a HIPPO CRIT!

Heh!

So weirdness occurred last session and the game we were planning to do didn't happen (which was a bummer...I was looking forward to it). Instead the DM sort of threw us a bunch of more or less pregens (with some input as he went about making them). But we pretty much got what we got.

The upshot is I have a character who belongs to an organization that hunts anyone who practices arcane or divine casting and forsakes it's use seeing that mortals can't be trusted to wield that kind of power.

So what does that mean? The way I figure it, it puts me at odds with not only the PCs, who are gonna' see my guy as some sort of sociopath, every mage and cleric in the setting, probably the gods too...really. Plus the casting abilities my character has are no go, and really I can't concience using potions, magic items, holy water...even alchemical stuff?

Normally I'd be all too happy to hug this nuke of a character all the way to the ground, whooping with diabolical glee, but part of the setup for this game is to meet new gamers in town and give some love to the local gamestore by supporting it's local game night, and my character's antics during the two hour intro already seemed to have folks uncomfortable. I don't know these guys very well and want to make a good impression. I certainly don't want to come across as "that" guy.

I could probably scrap the guy...but that feels like quitter talk. I'd rather take the concept and do an end run around it and try to make something playable and fun out of the core idea, while trying to figure out how to keep him from being a homocidal jerk who refuses to use any of the gear he needs to pull his weight in the group.

So first off this is just wild speculation, but fun wild speculation.

We know that the Material Plane in the Great Beyond is basically the same universe as ours, and that potentially every other setting could exist out there--so I've been thumbing through my Atlas of the Universe with an eye toward scouting out Golarion going off of clues gleaned from various settings. See, I told you this was going to be wildly speculative.

Let's start by looking at our Milky Way Galaxy. It's pretty well explored in most space opera settings: Star Trek alone has carved it into quadrants and gives a pretty good sense of a galaxy carved up between the Changelings, Borg, Klingons and Romulans. You throw in Vorlons, Daleks, Guo'uld and all the other stuff in our galaxy and it's getting pretty crowded.

So let's move out to our neighboring galaxies:

M31 the Andromeda Galaxy. If you've ever seen a map of the Star Wars galaxy, you'll immediately recognize this as that galaxy. So let's assume it is. It's about three million lightyears away...far far away, but close enough for folks with hyperdrives to have occasionally visited (which you get some fair indications in Star Wars lore has happened). That said, if M31 is Star Wars, it's pretty well charted, and not a great candidate for Golarion's universe.

The only other spiral galaxy in our local group (spiral galaxies coalese all the heavier matter useful in making planets in their outer arms, so make the best candidates for having stars with planets) is M33, the Triangulum Galaxy. Not sure if any of you guys know about a game called Dragonstar, by Fantasy Flight Games--but it's really good. The Dragon Empire is located in a galaxy that looks a whole lot like M33. That and it has a huge black nebula at the center with connections to weird eldritch powers and has a very Dark Tapestry feel to it. The planets of the Dragon Empire have roughly Star Wars era technology as well as full knowledge of clerical and divine magic. If a group were to send automaton miners to Aballon and then just lose contact, it would be these guys. Plus according to Dragonstar, the unexplored hinterlands on the Empire are mostly primative (ie. Golarion) tech level worlds which frequently get visited for first contact (or violently subjugated) depending on what House is ruling at the time. They go so far as to suggest that many of these hinterlands worlds could be the ones you're currently gaming on.

So were I a betting man, I'd put Golarion in the deep hinterlands of the Dragon Empire in the Triangulum Galaxy--at least I do in the games I run.

So one of the characters in an upcoming game (Serpent's Skull) comes from a family of drow sent on a suicide mission to clear the aboleths from the mid layers of the Drowning Stones in the darklands. To their credit they've been able to clear and secure a valuable arcane laboratory and claim a freaky powerful magic item/artifact (so powerful the family has sent their daughter back home via the surface world to avoid losing the artifact to other darklands factions in order to use the item to leverage the redemption of her house).

So I've been researching aboleths like crazy. I like the idea that their anatomy is different enough that their magic items would be difficult for a humanoid to interface with--basically you need to reverse engineer it or create some kind of adapter, but other than that and some description of aboleth runes I don't get much sense of what their magic items would be like. I looked at high end psionic items, but they're mostly "Venom-suit" style skins you can wear, psicrowns or forehead crystals with somewhat unimpressive powers. I want something big that's worthy of the absolution of a whole drow minor house.

I looked over the top end psionic spells for inspiration but mostly it's Wish or plane-hopping, or else things that aren't that impressive. I want this to be game-changing.

Mostly it just needs to sound cool and worthwhile because 1) anatomically the PC won't be able to use it anyway and 2) it will likely be lost (permanently or at least for a good while) as soon as the first events of the AP kick in. So balance isn't a thing. I just want something gonzo cool that isn't Wish or plane-hopping (because I tend to overuse those two in games)...

Gearing up to run Serpent's Skull and one of the PCs wants to be an elf. I looked to see what elven culture is like in Sargava...and there isn't any! In fact, from what I understand from my research, elves exist mostly in a handful of cities in northern Avistan, mostly deep in the forest and tremendously isolationist. There's a few forlorn elves out there, but that's like if an elf dies while travelling from one xenophobic enclave to another and the baby is rescued by human farmers.

Elves seem to be so rare in Golarion, one wonders why they are a core race. I'm trying to figure out how to get an elf out of their isolated communes at all--much less all the way to Sargava.

Have an alchemist NPC to play Monday so it's important I find out:

Does using an extract/mutigen/whatever take a standard action (the way most other caster-types' spells do) or a full round action (move to draw the vial, standard to drink it) the way potions do?

Just when you start to feel like Pathfinder doesn't have any suprises left...you know the names of all the planes, all the countries, most of the history and metaplot. You think you've got it handled.

Then you read an article that suggests that the gods are travellers from another universe. Dude! That's an interesting idea. It suggests that every god in the universe is an interloper deity..and that the true rulers of the universe really are the Great Old Ones.

Brings up an interesting thought. You know how Zon Kuthon went out into the realms beyond the outer sphere and came back all corrupted? What if that's because the outer sphere isn't the edge of the cosmos...what if it's a dam, built by the gods to hold back the qillithopic tides--and the abyss is the cumulative effect of mortal sin and negative emotion making cracks in that wall. Beyond it is the cosmos as it's meant to be if not for the interference of the gods.

Yikes.