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Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. I was just pop culture trolling. Mea culpa!
...or a good lawyer! We have that same skill set.
But also, I hope PF2E does the following: 1. Jettison any complexity that gets in the way of play. The challenges in the game should be bugbears and green slimes, not navigating the rules!
I've been with PF since alpha, but in the last couple years I have largely moved on to other games. If your team can pull off these things, you stand a great chance of getting back my business and time. I'm rooting for you!
On the bomb: How come an explosion powerful enough to "[break] off an immense wedge of rock in the castle’s base . . . about 50,000 tons of shattered rock" and collapse multiple floors of the keep, when the walls have 2700 hp per 10 ft section. . . . . . only does "12d6 points of fire damage and 12d6 points of bludgeoning damage to all creatures in the duct that are within 90 feet of the bomb"? PCs should be instantly vaporized, no save, by an explosion that could fell the cloud castle.
You'll want to do something to establish Vanthus as a recurring villain. Maybe some survivor describes how Lavinia's brother unleashed the shadow pearl to destroy their base of operations and abducted Lavinia. Where you're starting is a point in the AP where the PCs don't actually know how to find Lavinia; they need to use divination magic to get some clues so maybe a vision spell or something like that shows them Vanthus destroying the base/kidnapping Lavinia.
I just bought Owen's RGG Bundle. 200 PDFs for $30 is great. Downloading each PDF one at a time on My Downloads? Not so great. I'd like a way to download multiple files in one big batch rather than downloading singly. Maybe through a check box mechanism that would batch watermark them and put them in one big zip file. Another solid option would be a button to deliver the file to a Dropbox account instead of downloading it directly. As an example, DTRPG/RPGNow has this function, which I find quite handy. Finally, fwiw, the thing that auto-initiates a download after 5 seconds is annoying. I don't want to automatically download a thing to my default downloads folder, I want to right click a link to download it to the place I keep all my Pathfinder stuff. The auto download function makes me either cancel it or navigate to a different folder every time. Which is not a problem if I'm downloading 1 file. If I'm downloading a whole AP, or Owen's RGG bundle, a bunch of extra fiddling for each download gets old fast.
Nice! We built an airship in my Kingmaker game, crewed by a Medium army of alchemists. Bombs away! Even so, I have been playing PF since there was a PF and I can count on two hands the number of encounters where I've seen somebody take a range penalty with a composite longbow. It usually happens when someone's taking a last shot or two at a fleeing flying opponent.
One elegant way to do what you want to do is Expert Sniper + Master Sniper + sniper goggles + Stealth skill unlocks. It's a big investment, but ultimately lets you snipe 2 shots per round with no penalty to your Stealth check. CBDunkerson rightly notes that any distance that gives your enemies Perception penalties to notice you also gives you penalties to notice them. Boosting Perception and Stealth help you stay on top of that contest. It's also true that in most games, situations where you can bring long-range options into play are quite rare. Most combat takes place on a map that can fit on a table, limiting ranges to generally within 150 ft. - the second range increment for a longbow. This also means that if it's on the same map as you, you're taking at most a -15 penalty to Perception checks for distance.
Best designed classes:
Favorite classes to play:
Here's how you start your own event if you can't find a local one: click this link
TL;DR: Strength penalty doesn't recalculate carrying capacity and can't drop a creature.Strength damage can absolutely drop a low strength wizard. If you take ability damage equal to or greater than your score in that ability you fall unconscious until the damage is healed. So you hit a wizard with 8 str a couple times they are out of the fight. The subject takes a penalty to Strength equal to 1d6+1 per two caster levels (maximum 1d6+5). The subject's Strength score cannot drop below 1. Ray of enfeeblement doesn't do STR damage.
It's not something you'd craft at 11th level, it's something you might consider keeping if you found it in treasure at 17th. In high level games, sometimes you lose at rocket tag. Also heal on tap is pretty handy at that level.
The extra nice thing about some staves is that they cast spells that would ordinarily use expensive material components, but are charged with spells that don't need expensive material components. For example, staff of life casts raise dead without a 5000gp diamond, but is charged with heal. Staves are also especially good for spells that are highly level-dependent and might require frequent use. Dispel magic is a good example, and one that's hard to find on a printed staff (staff of abjuration and staff of the magi, iirc). When you need a dispel, you need it right now, you want the dispel check as high as possible, and you want to be able to cast it a few times in case the dispel check fails. That's perfect for a staff.
Reflex saves...are usually just to halve damage.Until you get hit with icy prison or chains of light. Or dazing fireball. On topic, a 1 or 2 level dip in sohei monk is amazing for almost any martial. Bunch of bonus feats, +3 to all saves, and always act in the surprise round? Yes please.
The reason people say greater invis isn't good for summoners is because regular invis is better. Summoners generally do not do things that would break regular invis: they summon and buff. Since regular invis lasts longer, it's better as long as you're not breaking it. Greater invis is a fantastic offensive buff to a sneak attacker, and it's a solid defensive buff to "glass cannon" PCs whose attacks would break regular invis, especially PCs who also fly and used ranged attacks or spells. Flight gets around tremorsense, and ranged attacks can put you outside the range of things like blindsense and blindsight. See invisibility, of course, has no range limit, but enemies that can use it are fairly rare.
No, the confirmation comes from this FAQ:
Arcane Strike is an effect that affects weapons, therefore, it affects rays. It's a separate question whether or not the FAQ'd Weird Words ability is a ray--not all ranged touch attacks are rays.
quibblemuch, I agree with The Raven Black here. Detect magic would count as interaction when determining whether or not you get a Will save to see through the illusion, but that Will save would not determine whether or not detect magic would detect the presence of illusion magic. As ProfPotts mentioned, that's the point of magic aura. Clever illusionists get around this by obscuring the auras of their illusions with other magical auras; detect magic notes: "Magical areas, multiple types of magic, or strong local magical emanations may distort or conceal weaker auras."
quibblemuch, that's a reasonable way to rule it. Detect magic should count as interaction. Now if you are detecting illusion magic from a wall, and you suspect it's an illusion but still fail your save, you can always try to walk through it. PRD: "A character faced with proof that an illusion isn't real needs no saving throw." Walking through a wall is pretty clear proof that it isn't real.
Also, the ability to make your arrows magical is not the gold saver you think, because you don't need magic arrows, only a magic bow. PRD: "Ammunition fired from a projectile weapon with an enhancement bonus of +1 or higher is treated as a magic weapon for the purpose of overcoming damage reduction. Similarly, ammunition fired from a projectile weapon with an alignment gains the alignment of that projectile weapon."
Even under Run As Written, GMs have the leeway to softball scenarios for an effective easy mode--far more leeway to make it easier, in fact, than to make it harder. That's why hard mode is useful and easy mode is not.
A ranger with a trait for Diplomacy can be a very effective jack-of-all-trades and master-of-combat. Good skill points, scouting ability, 4-level spellcasting that opens up a lot of staple healing and utility spells for wand/scroll use. Aelryinth is correct about bards, too, but also do not underestimate a bard built for melee or (especially) archery. They can more than adequately hold their own, especially at the upper levels with buffs like dance of 1000 cuts. And protip: past 7th level, smart bards use extended good hope instead of heroism because it also buffs damage and works for the whole party. Inquisitor is an effective generalist right out of the box, and combat specialist when fully buffed--but they can't do that for every combat.
If I'd had this book, I might have broken out of the Top 16 :) Seriously, monster design is Master's level stuff as far as Pathfinder goes. This product provides a more robust system than what we have in the Bestiary, allowing designers to balance a bunch of weird special abilities against the basic attack and defense values in the Monster Statistics by CR table. In other words, it simplifies and quantifies what would otherwise be a difficult and qualitative design process. Indispensable if you want to create or modify monsters, or learn about how to design and balance monsters in Pathfinder.
b) WBL wasn't a constraint, and c) no custom magic items, spells, etc. You couldn't activate all the candles yourself in time, but your 163 followers +cohort could each gate-burn one. That'd give you enough of a head start on the power curve to get it done.
I think there are some faulty assumptions in some of the answers. 1) I seriously doubt there's an in-flight abort button somewhere. 2) Time of flight for most of these weapons will be substantially more than 3 minutes, so a 3 minute timeline means you can't simply destroy them at launch. You will be destroying them as they descend toward their targets, maybe even after MIRV warheads have deployed. I also understood as part of the constraints that a) you didn't have unlimited time prior to the event to e.g., make simulacra, b) WBL wasn't a constraint, and c) no custom magic items, spells, etc. (which would also preclude time travel).
There are essentially 2 methods. 1) stopping the nukes, 2) protecting the targets. 1) 15,000 nukes / 30 rounds = 500 nukes per round. Impossible under given parameters. About as close as you could get would be if you had max Leadership, 163 followers +1 cohort, all of a race with flight and rings of telekinesis. You spend all your rounds teleporting them into low orbit to use their rings of telekinesis to kinetic kill the nukes and hope fratricide will destroy more than one nuke per follower per round. Problematic because 3 minutes remaining means that the nukes are way close to detonation, therefore more dispersed geographically, so fratricide is less likely. Also fallout would prob still wipe out all life, it'd just take longer. 2) 15,000 nukes with MIRV warheads = 15k x ?? targets. Also impossible. But tbh reacting to a worst case scenario is not how wizards operate. Preventing it is. The earlier you can prevent, the easier it is. For instance, the followers-with-rings-of-telekinesis kinetic kill tactic works much better if you can hit them at launch, thus destroying the other nukes that haven't yet been launched from each launch site. Also less problem with fallout in that case because launch sites tend to be fairly remote, afaik. Even easier if you can get them before launch; it doesn't take much imagination to see how something as simple as charm person in the right place could prevent the whole mess.
It's true that PF and its D&D forebears were grounded in JC (and, as I called out upthread, Aristotelean) concept of evil as a perversion of good. It's also true that PF is equally grounded in classical and Norse mythology, and, e.g., Moorcock, which represent a much more dualistic view of good and evil. This tension is evident in the alignment system. Because culturally we are more intuitively familiar with the tropes of the JC concept of evil (easy temptation, difficult redemption), we find certain aspects of the dualistic alignment system... perhaps unsatisfying? Insufficient? Counterintuitive? Bottom line, they cut against some fundamental cultural assumptions. Nonetheless, dualism (especially as a corollary of polytheism) makes for great heroic fantasy. Good vs. evil, the stuff of legend. Adventuring isn't interesting if you know the side of the angels always wins in the end, right? IMO, I find the game most satisfying under an approach that combines the two. Start with the core dualistic approach, and all it entails, but deal with alignment changes based on the JC approach. You can have angels enlisting bold heroes to fight against the demons, and also Faustian temptations and diabolical bargains. This approach is possible under the rules because they are mostly silent on the topic of alignment changes.
It has to do with the CR system. For a bruiser type monster, having a lower BAB allows it to have a higher STR score for the same expected to-hit value, meaning it also has higher damage. Having a smaller hit die allows it to have a higher Con for the same hp value, which also increases Fort saves. If you had full BAB and larger hit die, you'd need lower STR and CON scores, which would drive down your damage per hit and Fort saves. Take a look at Table: Monster Statistics by CR and it will make more sense.
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