Blake's Tiger's page

I'd like to maintain the current Awaken Animal that only increases the animals mental capacity. The ancestry can come from a new ritual, and I don't care if it is or isn't called the same thing, or the same ritual but a higher rank version.

I would still like the in-world room for creating intelligent animals without automatically granting them size changes, bipedal locomotion, and prehensile thumbs.

If the Uncommon feature--whatever kind of feature it is--does not have Access criteria that can be met, it typically will require a boon (that may or may not exist).

The work around was being Adopted by Humans for the Unconventional Weaponry feat. :)

It’s a very long work around.

I am familiar with those, as a Year 4 player / GM myself.

But sometimes, despite diligence in reporting games, a new player will hesitate to get themselves organized, not yet having access to the Organized Play Boons section, before even wanting to build a character.

They will need to go there to take advantage of their free 80 AcP, though. But, yes, DougH’s site is a handy resource.

The Boons tab in My Organized Play will list them by cost (not rarity) and those are default legal.

Don't forget that anything with a quote from a flagged/removed post gets removed too, even if the content of the author's post isn't a breach. That can have a pretty big cascade effect on the number of posts being removed.

How can we fix this?

Here's a small dose of radical candor:

You can fix it by looking for a non-PFS game that does not require a demonstrable PbP/D track record in their recruitment. I linked the general recruiting forum earlier. That is the place to look for home games, homebrew, and generally non-PFS games. You'll even find D&D 5e games there.

Search patiently for what you actually want to play and do not torture yourself by trying to fit into a game whose rules you, and I quote you, "despise and hate." It will benefit you in no way to try to force yourself to play such a game. It's not vegetables. You don't have to eat it.

I was thinking Tarnbreaker but the same could be said of the final battle of Trailblazer (except slightly less of the XP budget went into the last fight). The path you take (clockwise vs counterclockwise) in the caves can also have an effect on how tough it is.

It can be. It's one of those where all the XP is piled into that one encounter and the Challenge Point effects can turn it brutal. However, there is also some GM control in how brutal it is.

Lesrek wrote:

Also, are you actually interested in society play? Just today another beginner game was posted on RfC and yet again, you did not sign up for it. The vibe I am getting is that you don't actually want to play society, you just want to use it as an excuse to complain about something. That has been your most consistent interaction with society as a program.

Though to be honest, I’m mostly NOT interested in PFS

I’m kind of annoyed that almost all PBPs are PFS, and that there is a “you have to play PFS to earn the right to play in a non-PFS pbp” culture that has formed online

Go here instead, then, rather than PFS forums.

Hmm. Having never been forced to suffer that specific manner of hazing, I had not seen it from that perspective. Thank you.

I like Absalom Initiation, personally, but players have expressed to me fear of that scenario. It is easy to TPK with the wrong set up, I acknowledge. With a gentle GM hand guiding character selection, it is probably fine. If new players are left to their own devices, you could randomly end up with a team set up to fail. So the caveat there is that the GM may need to be more involved in character selection for new players.

It's been a while since I've run it it, so I could stand to be educated on that issue.

I would include Pathfinder Trials (2-11). The rationale is a huge spoiler, though:

Thanks for all these, Doug!

I can't keep up! I need more hours in my day... Anyone got a fix for that?

10-20-30-40-50 for your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th glyphs respectively. Added all up, by the time you get your 5th Glyph, you should have at least 150 table credits.

I think you might have been a little too math-y for the average reader.

1 Glyph = 10 GM credits
2 Glyphs = 30 GM credits
3 Glyphs = 60 GM credits
4 Glyphs = 100 GM credits

To earn 5 glyphs, a GM must fulfill the following criteria:

Earn 150 GM credits
Run and report 50 unique adventures
Run and report 10 adventures with the Exclusive or Glyph tag. With the exception of multi-table interactives, a particular scenario can earn credit for a maximum of 3 of those 10.
Complete 3 evaluation games in the presence of a Qualified Evaluator (A venture-captain, regional venture-coordinator, or Paizo Organized Play staffer) using the Organized Play rubric.

Neither 1e nor 2e state that only positive energy harms them. The rules elements state that take damage from positive energy. They still take Piercing, Bludgeoning, Slashing, and all other damage types except for Negative as a character normally would.

Though a living creature, a dhampir reacts to positive and negative energy as if it were undead—positive energy harms it, while negative energy heals it.

You have the negative healing ability, which means you are harmed by positive damage and healed by negative effects as if you were undead.

There is a saying that applies here: if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn't true.

You don't need to be from Varisia to be of Varisian ethnicity. They are well travelled.

New Thassilon is more tightly bound to some newish lore and a smaller nation.

That said, the wilderness of Varisia would be more appropriate for your intentions.

This is not news to anyone who has read Prestidigitation.

The simplest magic does your bidding. You can perform simple magical effects for as long as you Sustain the Spell. Each time you Sustain the Spell, you can choose one of four options.
Cook Cool, warm, or flavor 1 pound of nonliving material.
Lift Slowly lift an unattended object of light Bulk or less 1 foot off the ground.
Make Create a temporary object of negligible Bulk, made of congealed magical substance. The object looks crude and artificial and is extremely fragile—it can't be used as a tool, weapon, or spell component.
Tidy Color, clean, or soil an object of light Bulk or less. You can affect an object of 1 Bulk with 10 rounds of concentration, and a larger object a 1 minute per Bulk.
Prestidigitation can't deal damage or cause adverse conditions. Any actual change to an object (beyond what is noted above) persists only as long as you Sustain the Spell.

This widget is going to prove handy right now...

I agree (with the first two sentiments and conditionally on the third--in PbP and VTT lodges you're on your own dime for scenarios).

The OP's choice and the rationale for the way the system works are separate, though, and I wasn't speaking on the latter in my latest post.

Please allow me to reframe the point to help you perceive the lack of malice, antipathy, or callousness you're assuming.

OP asserts the position: Playing PbP requires years before you can accrue enough AcP to afford another AcP-locked ancestry.

Super Zero refutes by relaying their experience: In 10 months of only PbP play, they accrued enough AcP to purchase 2 Rare ancestries, not years.

(edit: and not just refute but also encourage that they can accrue faster than they think)

Now, Super Zero did fail to appreciate that the OP had stated that they were 1) only going to use one character at a time and 2) won't GM, and so I pointed out that by limiting oneself to that strategy, it would take considerably longer to accrue AcP.

Nobody said, "You're not playing enough" or "You're not playing the right way."

I'm primarily a pbp player. I've been playing PFS for less than a year. My oldest table credit is from last August.

As of last week, I have both a poppet and a sprite character.

I, too, am a primary PbP player with plenty of AcP. The OP’s self-inflicted restriction is that they only want to play AcP ancestries and do not want to GM. If you restrict yourself to 1 character to gain AcP, it is true it will take a good while.

I disagree that those are "functionally indistinguishable in PFS".

Very occasionally specifics might make a difference.

Example where it probably wouldn't make a difference.

"Followers of Shelyn automatically recognize the depiction of her in the mural."

Example of where it probably would make a difference.

"Due to the sanctity of the Holy Sculpture room, followers of Shelyn get a +1 circumstance bonus to their Spell DCs"

Solely for the sake of discussion while I wait for something IRL, both of my examples might worship Shelyn (or both might not), since we're talking about the source of a power. I could have a witch who worships Shelyn whose patron is some nebulous source, which I believe is identical mechanically to my having a witch who worships Shelyn whose patron is, in my head canon, a powerful night hag, whether secretly and not know to my witch or even overtly and known to my witch.

What would be different is having a witch who worships <insert random sketchy but PFS-legal deity> who claims falsely to be a worshipper of Shelyn, whatever the source of their power or their awareness of the source of their power.

A patron is not required to be the character's deity or for the character to have a deity at all.

To further undermine the assertion of the random Reddit poster:

In Organized Play, since the plot of the scenario is never about your character beyond their role as a PFS agent, a character asserting that their witch patron is X and is correct vs. asserting that their witch patron is X but is incorrect is a distinction without a difference.

Example:

A changeling witch who believes their Fervor powers come from Shelyn but is actually secretly granted by a powerful night hag for some future (and never actually attained) purpose.

A changeling witch who knows their Fervor powers come from Shelyn.

The two examples are functionally indistinguishable in PFS.

The difference in PFS is that you, the player, need to come up with the secret machinations of the night hang on your own and it only ever matters for your own personal head canon instead of telling the GM that you want your witch patron to matter in some way, tell me what I know about my character's patron.

I also don’t like the precedent PFS set. A lot of places that do PF2e don’t allow uncommon ancestries period because PFS introduced the concept. There was this WM/living world that forces players to “work” for uncommon ancestries. There are even home game non-PFS tables that like setting up a system where players have to earn uncommon ancestries, and I hope I’m not unlucky enough to not have those tables be my only option

The historic roots behind that go back much farther, so it isn't a PFS thing at all.

Indeed. Restricting what ancestry is available in a campaign is not a PFS thing. It's a TTRPG thing. I've run a D&D campaign where all you could play were humans. Ancestry access is one of those things that has always been a negotiation between the player's imagination and the GM's imagination. The one has a setting fantasy in mind, the other has a character fantasy in mind.

EDIT: Compilation credit to Doug Hahn

But yeah, I should start playing SFS especially after i helped changed a very stupid rule in it lol

...fails Will save.

Uh. *stunned 5*

She said "relatively" swiftly.
First step is to register a character for the system you want to play so you can earn AcP in that system. I don't mean the character stats, I mean the account alias that will assign the character number. Doug H used to have instructions in his guide, but it 404s now.

Go to My Account.
Scroll down a little and on the left should be Organized Play.
Click Make Changes in that box (or maybe something else if you haven't ever gone to that box before).
Click Create Character for XXX.

It may inadvertently be one of those historical things from 1e that never actually made it into the guide for 2e or was accidentally deleted during a revision or is present but tucked into a remote corner of the guide.

As a primarily PbP PFS2 player, it does not take years.

Maybe if you will only play with your favorite Uncommon ancestry, then, yes, building another 40-80 AcP playing only without GMing and only using 1 character created with the initial 80 AcP welcome gift could take quite a while.

But that is a individual choice rather than a function of the game.

Oh, there could be so many opinions on how to handle that.

The first handful of scenarios were written before the final version of PF2, so your assumption on why the tactics don't match what the spell can actually do might be accurate.

I would have the spell work the way it states it does in the rules and may need to be a bit more creative if there's a need for the antagonist to use that spell, e.g., self is a willing creature.

Bounties are useful for trying out builds because they're a hybrid between Adventure Mode and PFS: you have to use a PFS legal build, but nothing us permanent--not death, not consumable use.

An important nuance: you're not locked in until you play that character at 2nd level (or higher for GM/AP blobs). So you reach 2nd level with Character X, you can reconfigure it as many times as you like while pondering its final form until you play Character X again in a game.

Blake's Tiger wrote:

... since gaining access to uncommon/rare ancestries is the data demonstrated best way to get more people volunteering to GM?

Can link to that data? I don't remember it ever being demonstrated as true.

I wish I had enough free time to search for an link all the pages and pages of forum discussion and Paizo blogs on this topic.

I wish I had enough free time to search for an link all the pages and pages of forum discussion and Paizo blogs on this topic.

Humoring the premise that it is better for Organized Play to make all ancestries and heritages free, what is your solution for incentivizing people to GM, since gaining access to uncommon/rare ancestries is the data demonstrated best way to get more people volunteering to GM?

The Unforgiving Fire used to give a unique boon to the assigned character. Since moving boons to AcP store, it changed to access for any character, so that rationale is now moot.

However, wasn't the Repeatable tag reserved for adventures with multiple different iterations? That should be the difference in structure. Not that it matters terribly much a few months after release when people have repeated them multiple times.

Grinding is elemental to games with advancement not just video games. I was grinding in D&D for gold and XP long before any TSR Gold Box video game was released for the Commadore 64.

The AcP system doesn't exist to force a grind. Like Doug said, it's an incentive to GM. In 1e PFS, the only way to get the really diverse ancestries is to GM at public events. They changed it so that people who didn't GM could eventually gain these boons, too.

The restriction on what ancestries are available is a creative direction choice. Not everyone who comes to try PFS is happy with it, no, but that doesn't make it inherently bad that there's a creative director to the story and feel of the living campaign that limits what is and is not available.

Note that there are Adventure Mode games where you can build by whatever rules the GM allows. They're less common than Organized Play scenarios and sometimes take longer to play, but they exist as an option for one to play whatever kind of character one might desire.

It does take longer to /complete a scenario/ in PbP than live, yes, but it doesn't take more scenarios. You accrue the AcP at the same per scenario rate.

I can sympathize how having fewer immediately available ancestry options can feel restrictive when you're coming from AL where you have open access to 40 ancestries from the get go of any character you create.

AL isn't the same kind if living campaign as PFS, there are different rules. If the OP team chooses to change some rules/access to make campaign more appealing to other groups, I won't be bothered in the least. However, that the character creation rules are different does not make them unfriendly. Unpopular, maybe.

However, at the end of the day, any new player can create any 80 AcP ancestry/heritage character as their first character.

I don't think my Level 10 Spells Druid has ever taken a damaging spell scroll.

Agreed.

There's no rule that prohibits you from creating a Bonuwat human living in Alkensar.

You don't gain both "Home Regions" (Mwangi Expanse and Impossible Lands) unless you take the boon for a second one. You need to pick which one you start with.

However, you would qualify for things that required "Ethnicity: Bonuwat," for example, regardless of which Home Region you selected.

I think your 5th appears based on a manual process, which would mean the person in charge of flipping the switch hasn’t flipped it. Everything from 0-4 is automated. If I recall old blog posts correctly.

That is a misrepresentation of the discussion between the two people you quoted. Flagged as baiting.

And the only reason I post is in the hopes of preventing the people involved from taking the bait and derailing the thread.

My observation comes from conventions, since I'm primarily a PbP GM/player now. However, I do occasionally run/play on VTT and once upon a time had a meat space venue.

There are two circumstances that drew out run time: 1) more and more people want to embody their role play probably as a side effect of streaming campaigns they watch, and 2) new players or new to content players (run times increase around me for the next couple of months a new class is released).

None if those are bad things, but they are part of the variables.

I was in a very high level scenario where one of the spellcasters rode a pony to gain increased mobility. Ignoring that it looked like has was forgetting most of the mount in combat rules, there came a point where the enemy won initiative and did a large, very damaging AOE that no pony would survive even on a save.

So static low level animals really don't age well in adventuring life.

Hopefully doing 5 adventures then switching. Else you'll be 9th level before anyone likes you. ;)

I could have sworn there was a price for Guard Dog, but I cannot find it. However, if there is, then that +4 Survival is going to fail to keep up with the level-based challenges very quickly.

Dog has no stats so cannot Track or Perceive. The Bird has no stats so cannot Perform.

This is all just to shed a light on the value of the feats in PFS.

That said, depending on your goals, sticking with one faction is the fastest way to revered. If you spread it around, reaching any threshold in any faction slows down.

it's a Module/Adventure and so not run with PFS characters or PFS rules. You can earn a chronicle to apply to a PFS character.

Link to rules for other modes of play

Scenarios in this order:

2-11
1-01
Intro 1
Intro 2

Then, if you're bold... 3-18