BotBrain's page

Actually, what could "giantblooded" be called? I liked how fadrim was called, well, fadrim and not something generic like "Feykin".

I think avoiding the word "primitive" especially as applied to an ancestry option (vers. heritage or otherwise) would be prudent. Yes to a giantblooded option though.

I've made a bit of a mess of arguing my points so I'll try again.

I am arguing that dedications at 2 are the best option for the system as it currently stands. Moving them to 1 creates imbalance between classes on how customisable they are, or would introduce a 'mandatory' 1-4 gap before you can take more feats. Were you to give everyone a level 1 feat, this issue would vanish. This answers the question of why dedication feats are level 2, it is simply the best option to keep things in alignment. The actual power level of dedications doesn't matter.

I am opposed to these kinds of weird gaps because we have seen them in the system, with options like Eldritch Trickster and in my opinion, they feel bad to pick up and can sometimes act as traps for new players. My problems with our hypothetical move to level one are therefore the same problems with these existing options.

It is true that some archetypes already have such a gap, and that some archetypes have skill feats which let you 'out' faster. I dislike the former, as it just feels bad to encounter, and making it a problem for every archetype is unappealing to me. The latter is less of a problem because the archetype can (and should be) made with this in mind by weakening the dedication slightly, and avoiding powerful dips in the archetype. This isn't something possible on a class-by-class basis, because tuning dedications based on the class taking them would be exceptionally clunky.

I also understand why some classes don't get their level 1 feat, as Dragonchess Player described. It does annoy me a little, but it's only a slight gripe of mine that it exists. However, if we were to move archetypes to 1, then it would go from that slight gripe to something I actively dislike.

Those also suck! One of them sucked so bad it never got reprinted. I don't want that to be a baseline part of the system instead of just two weird jank options.

Because it becomes lop-sided very quickly.

If an archtype is at level 1, you either don't print level 2 feats so that everyone can pick their first-non dedication at 4, which would be weird, especially if FA is in play (assuming FA is amended to grant a feat at 1). Going 1-4 then 4-6 just feels disjointed.

If you don't do that, Martials (especially with FA) are able to grab their dips much faster and then start archtyping out sooner. Either way you end up with some weird asymmetry that makes your level 1 feat classes so much more customisable. I'm not a fan of the existing disparity with some classes getting level 1 feats and making it worse would move it from a slight gripe to a real problem.

I also already don't like feats like Natural Ambition and making your level 1 feat even more competitive just makes it even stronger.

I have to imagine dedication feats are level 2 because it would create a lot of weirdness with classes that do not get level 1 feats. If everyone had a level 1 feat then I imagine putting them at 1 wouldn't matter.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with valve's in-beta game "Deadlock" but there's a character in there who opens portals as part of his abilities, and he's really really fun to play. I think it's an angle I'd love to see in tabletop.

The best thing 5.5e did was add that line about bad-faith interpretations of rules. It's one thing when you're doing it for fun like this but people do seriously pull them in IRL settings and they're the kind of players who will not take no for an answer until you metaphorically throw a rulebook at them or kick them.

I would like a dedicated class built around "Space Magic" (TM).

I'm not really sure what it would be exactly, but I'm imagining heavy emphasis on gravity effects and other related phenomena. There is a risk of treading on solarian here, since they use "Sun Magic" (TM) but rn there's not really a class built around going "BEHOLD THE COSMOS!" Witchwarper comes close but they're more focused on parts where the universe goes wrong, as opposed to working with natural principles.

I have got to know what the brief the artist was given to produce that

Aw the knuckle sheller is from pf1e? I was hoping it was an ULTRAKILL reference.

I would say nothing happens. Injection shotgun has its own specific rule for this, suggesting it is an override of the general rule which would be nothing.

The injection trait is annoying here because it says lowercase a "attack" instead of "Strike" or capital A "Attack" which would imply something with the attack trait.

Since primary weapon isn't a true Strike (I.E no damage), I would find it hard to justify allowing it to inject someone without an explicit carveout to let you do it. You certainly cannot inject multiple people at once.

BotBrain wrote:

I feel like this is one of those things that isn't mentioned so the GM can sort it out themselves. You reach a point where adding rules for minutae like "can a tiny pc reach a doorknob" starts getting in the way.

Too short to reach a doorknob?

There is some overlap here with the rules for in-game disabilities, and PCs who need assistive items like wheelchairs. The general guidelines oin the rulebooks recommend allowing everyone to adventure together without "roadblocks" and therefore PCs get free assistive items.

Of course, if you are talking about opening a door in combat, and you need to be wielding your "door stick", that's getting into mechanics, and - as you say - groups need to discuss that. But out of combat, it should certainly be 100% possible for the tiny people to use doors.

Exactly, as a GM you're able to puzzle it out yourself and work out where it would apply and where it wouldn't. Having hard coded rules would be a hindrance in this case.

Is it me or does it feel like Druid isn't winning and who is really winning is a handful of classes? Such as Animist, Sorcerer & Thaumaturge with a side order of Magus (Where they keep trying to add new Magus studies but everyone only wants to Spellstrike). I know this isn't the book for it but like, where's the content for Swashbuckler...:

Points aside, it is good that Druid is getting something, it been ages but what about Witches?

Unseen World is set to have a section called "Autumn Witchcraft". Witches are also one of the core classes that have had a fair amount of expansion. By my count 4 books have had witch content in them, excluding PC1, and any additional familiar stuff is also primarily used by witches.

I feel like this is one of those things that isn't mentioned so the GM can sort it out themselves. You reach a point where adding rules for minutae like "can a tiny pc reach a doorknob" starts getting in the way.

Yeah the whole point of the garrote is the suffocation. It could deal literally no damage and it'd still be really strong.

Tridus wrote:

Theaitetos wrote:

I really think they should have made this a player option: Gun Witch

Truth!

Damn that would have been a cool archetype.

I'm so upset it wasn't in either Battlecry! or Impossible Magic. It could have fit in either.

We have gun magus but I want gun witch!

It's really straddled the line, and I think it depends heavily on the option in question as to which one is best.

A bard muse makes perfect sense to lean into stories, truth and lies etc. Whereas a druid order focused on the primal forces that fey tap into also makes perfect sense.

Imo, the best example of this is fey eidolon, which gets around this by also giving the summoner illusion and mental spells to shore up the primal list which doesn't have those things. You see this again on fey sorc where all granted spells bar one are occult.

While I get why you'd be concerned about occult cornering another niche this is honestly more precedented than occult necromancers were.

Aw that's a bit of a letdown. I was hoping for a smidgen more, but alas.

At least it's a very good example of why you can't use LLMs to answer rules questions, because the LLM is clearly pulling from the older books since that's what it's got more data for.

Anything notable wrt to new class options? You don't need to transcribe them all obviously, but I'm wondering what's in there outside of the bard muse mentioned in marketting. I'm especially curious about psychic, since the memory magic struck me as a good fit.

Oh it's so much less jank and confusing. Splitting it across three archtypes made narrative sense but it also made building a hellknight far more clumsy than it needed to be.

Oh the "which books have been remastered" is going to be useful to point people towards. Good idea.

Numerian metal kinecist feats would be so cool. Paizo please I will pay you to let me write the numerian book.

I don't think I remember it ever working properly.

On topic I played one in a one shot, and thematically it was very fun. Drained wasn't a big problem out of combat really, and in combat it was easy enough to alleviate.

+1-ing wanting more Druid stuff than yet more plant-based orders.

Including better fungus-based ones. I mean, I just learned Hollow Knight's story might have been the result of a proxy war between two parasitic fungi: https://www.reddit.com/r/HollowKnight/comments/8jyn56/lore_spoilers_royalty _radiance_and_wyrms/ We need mind-control druids!

A 5e option I really miss in pf2e is their Spores Druid. It could be a really good necromancer class archtype actually!

Probably not, but even if we put my specific build aside I do think it's a bit of a gap in the system, and if more classes come out like mechanic which are encouraged to keep a hand free, I do think people will feel it.

Not a fan of accusing people of having issues for wanting something you don't.

Besides, there's options that require free hands, ways to increase magazine size or decrease ammo expenditure, and it's really not a stretch of the imagination to see some kind of feat that lets you reload if you have a non-weapon in your hand.

Yeah I get why the team are hesitant to add one handed automatic weapons but I don't think 1d4/1d6 automatic weapons would set the game alight. Playing a technomancer with some inspiration from Overwatch's Sombra is one of those builds I have floating around but rn there's no real way to get her gun.

Impulses are as text-heavy as normal feats though...

Adding 2 or 3 per element shouldn't be this complicated.

Same with general feats for the class, such as "you can use Element A with Area of Effect B".

2-3 feats per element is 12-18 feats which is a lot.

I like doing it! It's really fun but yeah it doesn’t come up too much.

I checked my copy of ROE to be sure and the preamble on page 5-6 states that elemental planes were all created together, but then the evil elemental lords' plot caused the planes of metal and wood to vanish.

Yeah it is more of a sustained effort. I am really hoping for some kind of outer planes book where you could easily justify Aether/Void feats.

NotADragon wrote:

I think Paizo should provide more support for existing classes.

However, I do not think my players would buy a book with no classes in.

I would, but I'm the GM, and therefore a smaller market.

So I think the solution is either adding content for older classes into new class books, or relying on 3rd party publishers, some of which are actually good.

Yeah you hit the market reality I think. As a GM I'd love a book of "just stuff for already existing classes/ancestries", but it almost certainly doesn't sell as well as a new class.

They have been doing more of this though. Battlecry added the Thaumaturge shield implement for example, and I hear we're getting another one.

Some classes have gotten more of it than others and there's ancestries that really need some love (looking at you, Shoony), but I'm upbeat about the general direction with these kinds of releases.

The upcoming unseen world is getting pretty close to it tbh. Annoyingly for the thread here there's no kinecist options, but from the content page up on the store, we've got a thaumaturge implement, wizard school, witch options, monk spells, druid order and animist apparitions. There might be a couple others but it's hard to judge what's setting details and what's class details. I wonder if "Tools of invocation" are inventor options or just regular items.

If we see more of that going forwards I'll be very happy.

BotBrain wrote:

Yeah the decision to not have a metal order in RoE really annoyed me. Paizo broke from metal = unnatural and even introduced an elemental plane of metal and then ... druids didn't get a order for it. Very frustrating.

I remember reading that they were going to have a metal-related order in RoE, but then the OGL thing happened and the base druid lost the restrictions it had on metal armor and such. Doing a bit of googling, this wargamer article mentions an iron druid archetype. So I guess they didn't have the time and/or resources to retool it after the change.

Hm, I didn't know that. Maybe one day...

BotBrain wrote:

Yeah the decision to not have a metal order in RoE really annoyed me. Paizo broke from metal = unnatural and even introduced an elemental plane of metal and then ... druids didn't get a order for it. Very frustrating.

The reappearance of the Metal plane is VERY recent. Having something as structured as a Druidic order based on it suddenly appearing out of the blue feels somewhat off.

Eh... True, I suppose. But it could have been an order based on the plane, an esoteric order from antiquity few knew about and so on. The same book mentions Talos and Ardande existed on golarian in small enclaves despite the loss of their planes.

Yeah the decision to not have a metal order in RoE really annoyed me. Paizo broke from metal = unnatural and even introduced an elemental plane of metal and then ... druids didn't get a order for it. Very frustrating.

There's probably also an element of preventing redundancy in there. If you make a generic potion option that functions identically to scrolls, what's the point outside of flavour?

Not to denigrate flavour by the way, it's probably more important than mechanics to me a lot of the time, but if I wanted a potion of whatever buff to function like a scroll, I'd just rename a scroll.

Assassin's Garrote! With ghost operative, alter ego and a pistol or two you can be agent 47 from hitman.

Bahhhh stop doing research on easily accessible resources you're making me look bad.

To be fair the starfinder team has managed to implement ancestries in their APs with them feeling like fully fleshed out ancestries. Obviously the two teams are different, and tackle things very differently, but it could bleed over.

NoxiousMiasma wrote:

We've got several different species that have really drastically different biology between their adult and immature forms (like, skittermanders aren't even sapient when immature!), so I'm wondering about a new ancestry based on, like, mayflies, botflies, or silk moths, where the adult stage has no digestive system or mouthparts, and lives only for a short while on nutrients obtained as a larva. What if we had a playable option that was only sapient as a larva?

Imagine a species that lives their whole personhood in their larval stage, and regards metamorphosis and their adult stage as the first point of the afterlife. Decorating cocoons with flowers and garlands, and then farewelling their elders again when their animal-selves (and animal-souls?) depart after laying eggs. It'd be really cool and different, I think.

Speaking of insects and metamorphosis, it might be interesting to have an ancestry where, as you level up, you go through metamorphosis and change form.

Surki or Automaton have a good model of how this could be handled, feats with extra stuff you need to activate with a higher-level feat.

One sad point about the power of the class being so dependent on feats is that Natural Ambition becomes very much a feat tax. Meaning a Kineticist who does not take Human ancestry or Adopted Ancestry Human is definitely one big step behind one who does, especially at low levels.

Idk whenever I've made a kinecist build I've never felt like I really need another first level feat. The fact you get two impulses and an additional class feat on top of that is incredibly generous. Several classes don't get a first level feat for less.

I also don't know how notable it is to say that a class with natural ambition is better than one without, because that's true of most classes. Natural ambition is just really bloody good.

Driftbourne wrote:

"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue."

So who's getting married?

Could Raia and Danese be tieing the knot? They're the only long-term relationship among the 2e iconics that I know of.

Or maybe Keskodai and his partners are renewing their vows, and Chk Chk is going to bring Dae as his plus one?

I have to see Chk Chk in a little tux now.

I would like a Dominion of the Black themed book. What are THEY up to? Now that Nyarlathotep* has been banished, has that effected them?

In the same vein, I'd like to see what the Grioths are up to now. Since their primary god is gone, has their society changed?

*spelled that right first time, hehe

Perhaps this is me but I don't see why someone couldn't self-teach themselves a hybrid study. If they're able to work out regular spells on their own, or via a book, they could have come across a tome describing their hybrid style, or lucked into it. It's unlikely but adventurers become adventurers after unlikely events.

BotBrain wrote:

The feat literally says that it doesn't work on hostile animals. I'm not seeing why it's unreasonable to apply that to an animal being actively threatened by a dragon.

Is this a case where if there's a bear in the vicinity, you become hostile to everyone that's not your friends?

No, because you're a person and not a computer who can't work out nuance.

BotBrain wrote:

FlyJonat wrote:

BotBrain wrote:

I don't think this is a contradiction, really. We could have the same conversation about why a legendary in athletics can't jump 1000 feet in the air unaided, or a legendary in survival can't forage when there is literally nothing around. Some things just aren't possible with skills, and attempting to calm an animal that is in active danger (against a dragon no less) is one of those.

Is is really impossible when there is literally a level 1 skill feat to reduce panic of creatures? This exact feat is diplomacy instead of nature but you get the idea. And yes, my PC has +30 diplomacy.

The feat literally says that it doesn't work on hostile animals. I'm not seeing why it's unreasonable to apply that to an animal being actively threatened by a dragon.

I get your frustration here but this just isn't a failing of the rules, as is being framed. Your GM decided a check was impossible and didn't let you do it. Legendary proficiency doesn't let you override that.

It does not talk about hostiles animals

"You attempt to reduce panic. Attempt a Diplomacy check, comparing it to the Will DC of creatures in a 10-foot emanation around you who are frightened. Each of them is temporarily immune for 1 hour"

My bad, I thought you were talking about tame animal.

Oh sure I don't expect mech rules until several years into the systems lifespan, if for no other reason than the starfinder team pretty recently already did mech rules, and they seem to prioritise doing new things not yet done in starfinder.

BotBrain wrote:

I don't think this is a contradiction, really. We could have the same conversation about why a legendary in athletics can't jump 1000 feet in the air unaided, or a legendary in survival can't forage when there is literally nothing around. Some things just aren't possible with skills, and attempting to calm an animal that is in active danger (against a dragon no less) is one of those.

Is is really impossible when there is literally a level 1 skill feat to reduce panic of creatures? This exact feat is diplomacy instead of nature but you get the idea. And yes, my PC has +30 diplomacy.

The feat literally says that it doesn't work on hostile animals. I'm not seeing why it's unreasonable to apply that to an animal being actively threatened by a dragon.

I get your frustration here but this just isn't a failing of the rules, as is being framed. Your GM decided a check was impossible and didn't let you do it. Legendary proficiency doesn't let you override that.