BabaNabi's page

I also find handling it this way better for managing aligned governments, cities and societies. For example in a Lawful Evil society where slavery is commonplace and accepted, a character who is Chaotic Good will be more likely to accept the laws even though he feels they are morally wrong (he chooses to follow what he believes is wrong, not acting in the way his morally good alignment would dictate). While a Lawful Good character will actively oppose slavery based on his own morality.

It is actually the Lawful Good character who would not oppose the use of slaves in that situation. LG believes that maintaining social order and upholding the status quo is just as important as good morals. If they are from the city, slaves are a reality they have been raised to accept, if they oppose the use of slaves, they seek legal avenues to getting rid of it, but they won't break the law to oppose it.

The Chaotic Good character, on the other hand, will free slaves and not care about the repercussions. They don't care if a slave farm will fail afterwards and food production for the whole city falters and thousands of people die of starvation. They probably don't even care what happens to the slaves after they're free, they likely feel that once a person is free of oppression, suddenly they have the same chance of survival as everyone else.

The Neutral Good character would weigh the repercussions of freeing the slaves and decide what to do based on which action would cause the least harm. If the slave farm provided food for an entire region or the slaves would just be replaced by more slaves or recaptured and punished, they would likely turn their backs on the situation. If the slaves had a safe place to go to after being freed and the farm produced a luxury crop, they would probably free the slaves.

It should also be pointed out that real Cavaliers were royalists; they opposed the word of law and supported the determination of individual rulers and members of the upper class. This would probably start arguments as to whether that's Neutral or Chaotic, but it's less 'Lawful' than were the Parliament supporters.

hunter1828 wrote:

BabaNabi wrote:

Wha?! I also saw it at RPGNow and it says it's over 100 megs. Why is it so giant? That's the biggest PDF I've ever seen...or is that a total for multiple download options?

Really? Wow, it shouldn't be that huge a file. I'll check into that.

Robert

It was the cover art. Wasn't properly resampled before saving the PDF. We'll be changing that and uploading new files...

Ah, good! My connection is so slow that I have to avoid really big files.

Now available in the Paizo.com store!

Wha?! I also saw it at RPGNow and it says it's over 100 megs. Why is it so giant? That's the biggest PDF I've ever seen...or is that a total for multiple download options?

KaeYoss wrote:

Note that chaotic is not the opposite of good. Morals do not counteract chaos.

Agreed but following ones morales or choosing to ignore them IS chaotic. Randomness doesnt have to involve a dice roll and characters can do the most unexpected things at the strangest of times.

Take my last session, the party where ambushing a wagon but told to kill as few as possible, the paladin however slaughtered every opponent he came into contact with, while everyone else tried to subdue or use spells like sleep and color spray.
If any other character killed regardless I would probably not think twice about it, I would remind the player of the request but if they chose not to follow that its their choice. The Paladin however has extra strictures, the opponents where not evil (except one) and were on the defensive during the encounter. This isnt the only time the paladin has turned a blind eye to evil and chaotic acts and I am inclined to remove his paladinhood with the next violation.

I disagree with Chaos as an alignment being inherently 'chaotic' just by the way it's actually written up and how it works in the game. If the way you work it seems to work fine for you that's worth a lot more than what other's think, but here's my 2 cp on the subject (disregard any authoritarian voice intended to make it sound less wishy-washy.)

I view chaos as only as much opposed to law as it is to neutrality and the same for good, neutrality and evil. Classically, law, neutrality and chaos are equally opposed to each other.

On an ethical scale, law represents one's ethics being determined by society at large and one's role within it and chaos is a personal standard of ethics and a personal idea of the workings of the world. Neutrality is not halfway in between on the ethical scale, but is actually a lack of ethics. A neutral character does not act as she wishes, nor does she act as society or law prescribes, she acts on her perceptions of need whether for the greater good, for her personal gains or as the whim of amorality dictates. True neutral is truly the most 'chaotic' alignment in the game; it is why animals and non-intelligent beings default to this category, it is completely amoral and unbound by the restrictions of ethics.

In the case of the berserker paladin, the results of his actions, the wanton slaughter of 'defenseless' enemies dictate a moral dilemma. If he had no particular reasoning behind it, I would call it neutral; if he stood to gain something from the slaughter, I would rule evil and strip him of paladin powers ASAP. The rules that he broke or did not break to do this would determine the ethical ramifications; if he broke the rules because he personally saw a benefit to slaughter the hostiles for himself or the greater good, that would fall under Chaos as an alignment, if it was a baseless breakage of the rules, Neutral, if he used some loophole in the orders to justify the slaughter, that would actually still be lawful though. The truly frustrating things about paladins is if he manipulate the letter of the law to acheive greater good, he's probably an unpleasant person, but this still falls under Lawful Good.

Anyhow, 'Chaos' doesn't really represent the actual alignment description very well and the presentation of neutrality as in between the extremes really throws a kink in the system, but it works when you don't look at it as a scale. Another fix would be to change the 'Chaos' alignment to 'Freedom' or something else that may not sound as silly.

Otherwise, I'd like to restate that Order allegiances, as mentioned above, would be a great alternative to alignment restrictions. I'd love to see how the Order priorities would trump or work with traditional alignment stances.

I bought the PDF of this a week ago and it made for an interesting read. All of the rule changes are very modular and I like the concepts behind them, but not always the end result; it would have been a nice bonus to be presented with some more options for fixes, but the reasoning behind them tends to be stated pretty well.

My only major nitpick is I would have liked to see some better sourcing on where much of the data was drawn from or how it was extracted from the core rules. Most of it made sense within the context though.

Actually, if something like the 'allegiance' system from d20 modern was tied into the orders, I think that would work much better with the concept than alignment restrictions.

It would also free up much of this poignant alignment discussion to be put towards distilling the motivations of the individual orders.

We now run off the core PF rules and if whichever GM wants to work in major rule changes from other books we discuss it. Otherwise spells, items, classes, whichever outside of the core books or older edition, the player would always get the GM's ok to work it in...usually for really oddball stuff, after the player got the ok for it, they would still have to wait for it to come into play and usually with some strings attached.

It's actually getting pretty hard to find some core 3.5 content from even just a couple years ago too. Pathfinder was really good for some of our newer players who couldn't find 3.5 books at decent prices; we like to switch up GMs pretty regularly, open to whoever is interested, so we need enough hardcopies for a few people at a time to do the homework.

Oracles are not directly empowered by the gods themselves at all. The gods contribute their divine power to certain ideals (part of their portfolio). In some cases the gods have interests that overlap with each other, even if they do not share a similar view about how that ideal should be put forward or advanced. In any case, the ideal itself can manifest through mortals that have some link to it, either through a strange omen at their birth, the divine event, or some other reason. In this case, these mortals become a conduit for the divine power that fuels that ideal, becoming oracles.

The gods themselves have an odd relationship with the oracles. They cannot control them or dictate whether or not they get their powers, but the gods vie to sway them to their view of the ideal. The oracles on the other hand, are trapped in the middle, trying to understand why they have this power and making sense of the ideal that provides the strange powers that they possess.

I hope that makes some sense...

This does actually make a lot of sense after reading the class description. While reading, I was actually drawn to the fact that they were not direct Divine emissaries. After all, in both history and fiction, oracles traditionally tend to be far more notorious as manipulative charlatans co-opting faiths rather than true seers and often head up their own personal cults whether their gods like it or not. On the other hand, you also have the Revival style oracles who represent a voice of true faith outside of the traditional system.

I'm not sure I like some of the offensive combat focus of many of the revelations, but otherwise I think it represents real and fictional oracles quite well.

Thanks for posting the Table of Contents

I kept stumbling over the Chapter headings though, 'Wha?! Only one page for the classes?...oh...silly me...Wha?! Only one page for the skills and feats?...oh...duh...Wha?! Only one page on spells?...oh...I need to stop that...'

I really like the mixed bag approach Paizo took for the main Pathfinder CS; if you want a certain genre flavour, you can stick to certain areas or you can go on a big genre roulette tour. Much like Ravenloft, the realms each also have a very modular design that can be 'cut and pasted' into homebrew campaigns with relative ease on different scale levels.

Third party publishers would be taking less of a gamble if they wanted to do more specific CS material, but they'd have to shape it into a similar modular design scheme that I could take bits and pieces from and please, please stop creating an entirely new core rulebook every time you have some clever campaign ideas.

I assume you are asking about Luven Lightfinger's Gear & Treasure Shop? It will be a catalog of new gear, armor, weapons, alchemical items, clothing, and magic items. We'll be doing an official (more detailed) announcement on it around the time PoP is released in a couple of weeks.

Ah! Ah! Will it be anything like Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue? That was the greatest book ever written.

PoP also sounds very interesting though.

I've always thought of Law and Chaos more along the lines of lawful characters believing in predestination, or a natural order to reality and one's role within it and a chaotic character believing more in self-determination and one's dominion over their environment and the course of their own fate. It could also be thought of as traditional left-wing and right-wing ideology; self-determination vs. state oversight. This tends to give my players a much better grasp of the Law and Chaos concepts at the least.

*ahem* But coming from that interpretation of the alignments, I tend to read restrictions a bit looser than some, so it may not amount to much, but I can see the Cavalier working with chaotic alignments. I would think a chaotic character considers her personal oaths and allegiances to be far stronger than those of a cavalier she believes only made those decisions through social pressure or as a result of politicking. In my opinion, it's just that level of personal conviction really forming the backbone of the class more than the Letter of the Law of oaths and treaties.

I think this all has a lot more to do with locking retailers into a contract and controlling selection more than it has anything to do with piracy. Pulling all sales on account of three suits? There's no way that's the determining factor in this move.

No, I wouldn't say you're a bad person at all for having these feelings, but if you get too caught up in vindication, that can lead down some very self-destructive paths. Two family members of a friend of mine were murdered years ago and she really broke herself up trying to figure out the whys and hows she would never get answers for and when one of the murderers committed suicide soon into his life sentence she was livid and depressed for weeks because he took the 'easy way out.' You can't help the way you feel and you can't be blamed for a lot of negativity when you or someone close to you has been wronged to that extent, but the lengths to which you allow those feelings to intrude on your life can cause you to continue letting yourself be a victim long after the crime.

I think it was mentioned before, but I like to run my games with half-orc and half-elf races. OP brings up the very good point of why they should justify a racial entry in the PHB if it's only half-breeds, I personally never understood why half-elves would Trance if born of a human mother (I hate Trance anyway, heee) plus as a half-breed, that really puts way too major of a pathological background detail into your PCs background by default. In the Tolkien material, half-elfs and half-orcs were the product of magical unions anyhow. Two other good examples of 'halfsies' that aren't actually half-breeds would be the half-giants from the Dark Sun setting and halflings. On that point, they don't necessarily even need to have any racial connection to elves or orcs, but it might make sense to change up a couple of abilities in that case.