CyberMephit's page

I can't believe that Paizo has licensed an official crossover with Mission Impossible (the 1966 television series, not the now better-known Tom Cruise movies)! Since I can't believe it, I think it's probably something else.

The capitalization definitely seems intentional, though.

Watch Tom Cruise take the test of Starstone to achieve previously unseen thetan levels in Razmir Impossible: Rogue Nation!

Inquisitor should have been an investigator archetype :(

And those who came up with and support the idea of renaming it better not read up on real-life paladins :facepalm:

At least they could have been left to optional-sanctification deities. Like, you know, Pharasma.

All aboard the steampunk hype train! Choo-choo!

I hope the Irrisen-Alkenstar railroad route will feature a finger-shaped detour ;)

Too bad the Acadamae isn't in :( but super excited for more Lepidstadt options! Hopefully it includes some Sincomakti lore too.

CyberMephit wrote:

These are all the differences, everything else is exactly or at least functionally the same - HP, saves, shield block effects.

In this state, it could have been a champion class archetype.

I don't understand what is different between your approach and making such list of differences between fighter and ... wizard for example and arriving to the same conclusion that wizard could have been a fighter class archetype.

The same list for fighter and wizard would have been twice as long at least!

A better comparison would be between a guardian and a champion, where the difference list would have been even shorter I suspect, but there is no pregen champion to emulate.

The point of the fighter comparison was to show that there's a lot of overlap in what the characters can do and the few unique mechanics of the guardian hardly outweigh the +4 to hit -2AC balance.

EDIT: as others pointed out I am not against guardian existing, in fact I love playing the sword and board knight types, my point is that there need to be more things that improve the guardian's party niche and playstyle.

I went on demiplane and built a level 5 guardian, then compared it with pregen Valeros.

Valeros:
+4 to attack (!)
+5 speed (not sure why maybe a pregen error)
+2 Perception
Bravery
Reactive Strike
Double Slice

Guardian:
+2 AC
Armor spec (2 slashing resist)
Taunt
Threat Technique (7 crit resist)
Tough to Kill
1 extra expert skill (also not sure why)
Intercept Strike
Flying Tackle

These are all the differences, everything else is exactly or at least functionally the same - HP, saves, shield block effects.

In this state, it could have been a champion class archetype. With alignment gone and divine war looming it would make sense to give up edicts/anathema/focus spells for the taunt+threat technique and defensive feats.

I would like to see better survivability to survive Taunt, even more cool shield-based options, and also situational improved mobility to catch up to allies (for example, Intercept Foe granting a speed bonus or allowing to bypass difficult terrain).

Also Taunt being a will save that affects mindless creatures rubs me the wrong way. At least they should get some advantage against it, or maybe there could be a feat to make it a different save type.

Fahrenheit confirmed as the new core 20 deity with the domains of fire, cold and obtuse measurements

If this also means that scenarios without this tag will on average have more mature content, then I'm all here for it and will consider re-subbing

Picking a non-goofy tier 1-4 scenario is hard now. I get that they open the audience to kids and such but there are still people out there who crave the classic PFS experience.

Looks very cool! I've been looking forward to this coming out.

(Also, might be a good idea to include an arachnophobia warning at the top of the post, since the guide is "spiders on the cover and every single page".)

I was going to commend the artist and the art director for choosing spider images which look relatively harmless and almost cute, but then I focused my eyes on the top of the page and nearly dropped my phone :(

Overall good direction of changes, especially with the unified spell proficiency.
Shocking grasp nerf was overdue, there should not be such a thing as the "iconic" spell which really is only iconic because it's mechanically better than any other choice so all other spells might just as well not exist. And I say it as a magus player.

Agree that rolling a 1 on a damaging cantrip would suck, but to fix this issue we would really need to return to using d3s which the devs obviously want to avoid. Maybe 1d4+1 would have been a better option instead of 1d6, etc.

Not entirely clear about focus point changes, will there be a way to have one focus spell but many focus points?

The feat is good but the level is too high. Could have easily been a 6 or a 8.

Also the wording... I get the desire to convey academic writing but I shudder to think how many players will stop reading right after the words "force damage". Why not just say it deals damage of the same type as the spell?

The idea of in-world magic schools is great, but the limitation of one specific bonus spell per rank is not. There should have been two-three per rank to choose from, with feats to get more.

The current pricing model is totally bonkers.

Not only DNDB had a much stricter license, it also had less content produced by an order of magnitude. So owning all official 5e content ever produced costs "just" 850 dollars compared to 2K in only about 1/3 of the PF2 lifecycle!

A subscription model, like others said, is MUCH better. I would have thought streaming services, apps and MMOs have taught marketers something. It could have tiers linked to the number of built characters or their max level, instead of content books.

Really cool to see PF2eTools represented! They really brought something fresh into the online srd space.

Maybe next time Harpy VTT could be highlighted too!

Pathfinder Beastcore would sound metal

Yacob Kress doesn't have Class DC listed for e.g. Stunning Fist (should be 22 I think?)
Eteleon doesn't have any weapon attacks listed despite having two weapons ready.

The adventure itself looks awesome, just started my PbP but so far is shaping up great. Just a little sad that the chronicle is not replayable, despite the adventure having variable elements. I really hope more One-Shots will have variable elements in the future.

Edge Points is a cool mechanic creatively lifted from some other trending RPGs :)

These One-Shots are quickly becoming my favourite Paizo product line!

Actually if he would become/supply the CTO at least it would have been a massive improvement already. I'm sure we wouldn't have such 1980s nonsense as "Customer Service cannot answer office phones remotely".

The owner of RfC is independently wealthy from his main career in IT. The Battlezoo books are crowdfunded. This basically means they don't need to make a profit on Battlezoo to keep Mark employed with better conditions than Paizo. (Though given that Battlezoo also has a 5e version, they probably do actually make a profit just because of the larger target market).

I am glad that RfC will allow Mark to freelance for Paizo but I wonder how much "core" work Paizo will allow to be done by a freelancer - and also how the rest of the design team feels about this.

I'm on the edgy bandwagon here, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Hook Mountain Massacre back in the day and I wish for more shock value in my adventures.

People point towards PF Infinite as the potential outlet for this, but can it really work? To my understanding, PF Infinite content must still be rated PG-13 and it has the following content guidelines:

"Neither your Work nor any promotional material, including blog posts or press releases, may contain racist, homophobic, discriminatory, or other repugnant views; overt political agendas or views; depictions or descriptions of criminal violence against children; rape or other acts of criminal perversion; or other obscene material"

What I don't like about this is that it means these things aren't even allowed to be put in the context where they are clearly evil; they simply cannot be mentioned. And the vagueness of "repugnant views", "criminal perversion", or "obscene" makes it easy to retroactively ban content with the ebb and flow of the zeitgeist.

And also let's not forget that Paizo gets 50% of sales from PF Infinite; so the moment someone publishes a remake of "Scourge of the Slavelords", there will be a twitter wave of "Paizo still indirectly profits from things it promised to stop publishing" and the ban list will swiftly expand in response.

Paizo has a very long history of defining as neutral things that really ARE evil, at least to todays players. At least, to any reasonably enlightened todays players (there are quite a few gamers who's online persona, at least, seem very very very sketchy and skeevy to me)

Yes this is a good summary of the issue, but is the appropriate response to just stop mentioning those things instead of re-labeling them as evil?

To your paladin point, this is pretty much why we have tenets of evil for the champions. So that you can still play your CG champion while battling an LE one as a villain. They didn't just say "welp, we will just stop mentioning paladins because the real ones weren't actually good". They put in some thought, redefined what a paladin means in the game and it worked fine. Why not do the same with slavery / edgewatch / folca / other issues?

The big outlier here seems to be [2]. [2] hasn't been addressed at all. I realize there are confidentiality issues here, but there hasn't even been a statement of the form "we can't talk about this publicly, but the circumstances of some recent employee departures are being investigated, and corrective action will be taken".

I'll just leave this here as looks like it only appeared a few days ago and not everyone might be aware of it:

I think every post in this thread and every unionize hashtag on twitter should cost a donation to Sara's Ko-Fi.

My issue has been resolved after a few more re-personalisations. I assume this involved some manual labor in the trenches and I thank everyone involved. You guys are trench rockstars.

Am totally shipping Nhalmika with Barron Ashpeak (nee Redheart)

I will just say this: it is your ground-level staff that makes your company tick. Any manager that does not protect them is more replaceable than any of your brilliant and underpaid talent. Please be on their side - they are proving every day that they deserve it.

Yes I'm reading them; they talk about sending some IRS form if you do more than 200 sales per year.. I pay quite enough taxes in my home country to also pay anything to IRS.

Gonna pull some random thoughts together here.

All conjecture so anyone who wants to say 'but you don't know' Let me start by saying I have no idea if any of this is true.

Excellent summary of a picture I have in my head too and with the right focus on the particular issue at hand rather than old grievances.

We wake up Tuesday morning and there's a certain, "waaaa, why did Sara get fired and Diego resign in protest due to management activities?"

And it ends there.

I'm not so sure. Sara fired alone - OK. But Diego resigns in protest? Now that's not something you see every day. People here say that supporting the company keeps employees afloat, but now it seems that employees are actively wanting out of that company! So perhaps layoffs will not be such a problem?

Having thought more of this, I would probably be content if Jeff said something to the effect of "while I disagreed with Sara Marie on business practices, I am very grateful to her for the years of hard work she put into keeping our customers happy and nurturing a community and that's why you can rest assured that I gave her a generous leaver package in appreciation of that and I wish her success in the future".

But I see no hint of that, and I still see no way of helping Sara Marie, despite numerous unrelated Patreons and Kofis popping up.
EDIT: I went ahead and helped Adam Daigle. I was thinking that surely a good company such as Paizo will take care of his medical debt. Now I am not sure anymore.

However unless you (as in everyone) know the reason for termination I don't think we should be passing judgement on Paizo for making a business decision they felt was appropriate.

In the face of at-will employment and lack of reasonable legal protections for employees - yes, actually, it falls on the colleagues and community to protect employees from abuse of power and also to pass judgement on the appropriateness of their business decisions.

One should note that, at least to my knowledge, Sara Marie has not made any accusations.

In my opinion this just doubles up on what a great character she is and how undeserved this has been. Diego Valdez is the hero of this story, Sara Marie is the victim. Period. Twitter personalities are the chorus, amplifying but also distracting.

I mostly agree (looks like I misunderstood the question in your previous post), however:

management needs to keep their grubby little hands out of the creative part of the business

This has nothing to do with the issue at hand - CS is not the creative part, it is business operations. And that is personally what irritates me the most. For creative staff you can always imagine that the management didn't like their product output. But CS staff have been fighting an uphill battle on behalf of the company for years trying to make the company look better, and then get the boot over something that evidently has nothing to do with the quality of their work. I used to be in a job role similar to Sara Marie for a number of years and I know first hand how destructive this approach can be.

Why are you/we thinking about this?

I'll admit I'm going mostly off of interwebz, but my impression is that with the coming of Jeff Alvarez into power Paizo management has gone from out-of-touch but ultimately hands-off enough that the dept leads had some freedom to run their teams, to actively trying to control everything that happens within the company and making sure everyone steps in line. Which in a creative industry cannot be a good thing.

To put it bluntly are we getting this part of the story only from Jessica price? Since honestly I wouldent believe Jessica price if she said water was wet so I would like other sources besides her since something clearly has happend.

Well it's not like anyone will fire Jeff Alvarez if he comes forth with the true version of events... right?

Erik Mona already was quoted in the Twitter thread with some corrections, and in frankness this part of the twitter rant sounds a bit overblown to me.

However Sara Marie had a stellar track record and was universally well-liked with customers which was her actual job and also evidently with the colleagues so I cannot imagine a good reason behind firing her. It was a mistake so big PF2 doesn't even has a word for that size anymore.

a really rosy picture of customer service being painted that doesn't match the reality.

I think the point here is, that the CS team staff should not have been blamed for the customer service issues. However counterintuitive this sounds. CS teams often go above and beyond their pay grade in a system which is designed to shield those actually responsible for the issues from any backlash. This is not exclusive to Paizo at all (coming from someone with a 15-year career in CS and adjacent roles).

Hey I am sorry to have been absent for a while! Back to regular posting for the nearest future.

Reminder that Cracked Tusk had Shattering Gem cast on him. The gem has 5 Hit Points. Each time a creature Strikes Cracked Tusk, Cracked Tusk attempts a DC 11 flat check. On a success, the gem blocks the attack, so the attack first damages the gem and then applies any remaining damage to Cracked Tusk. If the gem is reduced to 0 Hit Points, it shatters, immediately dealing the creature that destroyed it 1d8 slashing damage (basic Reflex save), as long as that creature is within 10 feet of Cracked Tusk.

Roumatha nods at Sir Reinhart. "As an old Nirmathi saying goes, a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man."

He is willing to take the chances and stands on a skipping stone, drawing his shortbow to start with.

Is it just one reroll per combat or per round as long as I'm on it? if we get a prebuff round, Roumatha will cast Gravity Weapon on his shortbow.

Delay of PDFs because of print run issues is sad. PDF should be the primary product, print runs should be collectors' editions. The genre should be renamed to stylus-and-tablet RPG. Embrace the revolution, comrades! Vive le Galt!

thumb twiddling intensifies

Thurk is happy to entertain the children with the magical renditions of sounds made by various animals and monsters he has encountered during his studies at the Arcanamirium, repeating some of the classic freshman pranks.
When Jaldan brings him a gift, he is surprised and flustered.
"You are too kind! I just had some fun with the kids, we can't be all serious all the time or we lose the sense of what it is we are supposed to protect. Thank you for this amazing gift!"

Overnight, Thurk changes some of his prepared spells, to choose the ones dealing and protecting from physical harm rather than mental, as he learned the forces at play here are unlikely to be swayed by verbal compulsions.

If anyone else wishes to play Sundered Waves, please check out my recruitment thread!

Hello, I am recruiting for a PbP run of the Sundered Waves one-shot to start this weekend. However it will not be held on the Paizo boards, but on the Role Gate platform, which I find to be better suited for PbP, especially for posting from mobile devices.

The game will be reported for PFS credit but it is run in campaign mode using the pre-made level 5 characters that come bundled with the adventure. These characters are not members of the Society.

If you haven't heard about the Sundered Waves adventure, all the details are explained in this Paizo blog., which also has the link to the pre-made character sheets.

I'll be happy to help with filling the sheets on Role Gate and figuring out any questions about the platform.

Player Name/Alias (for Chronicle): CyberMephit
Character Name: Thurk von Volkowitz
Org Play and Character Number: 194005-2003
Faction: Vigilant Seal
Ancestry, Class and Levels: Human(Half-Orc) Wizard 1

Perception(Initiative): +4, Darkvision
Stealth(Initiative): +2
Default Exploration Activity Detect Magic

Downtime Activity and roll(s) Undead Lore: 1d20 + 7 ⇒ (6) + 7 = 13

Cyanomys Guide To Playing RPGs Online could be a useful read for those evaluating different VTTs.

For myself I have settled on Tableplop which in my experience is everything I wanted Roll20 to be - minimum hassle, maximum ease. It's not anywhere as sophisticated as Foundry, which is probably the top choice for real-time groups, but it is very simple and good for PbP, especially on mobile. Also there is no upfront cost!

Dr. Galvanus is grumbling something to himself as he lets others take the lead this time.

"Them upstarts from some magical sewer tapestries think they know everything about explosions... I bet their university doesn't even have a listed citation rate and this strange portable bow of theirs wasn't ever peer reviewed!"

I was comparing to the Medicine skill - at least in this explosion flavor it really jumped out at me that cauterizing wounds with explosions can help more reliably than checks notes actual medical science.

I guess my problem with it that while it is a class feat that's roughly equal in power to 2 skill feats mechanically (battle medicine and continual recovery) over a long time period, I find it strange that the traditional medicine has a wider variation of results of a single usage compared to Inventor's crazy way of approaching it.

Also to my previous question, I have never played/run PF2 with an animal companion in the party and searching the messageboards didn't really give me an answer except some strong opinions. Is it still undefined what they can do or established that they can do nothing?

Sorry if this has been brought up already but I just realized that Searing Restoration has no limit to how much it can be used per day (well, technically up to 96 times while still allowing to rest I guess), making it the most stable Unstable power and the inventor with that feat one of the best non-combat healers. Not sure if this is intended?

Ah, no that's fine then, it's just most GMs I've seen ignore the starting gold and only write in the gold gained/spent within session. All clear now!

Examples that come to mind for inspiration include ...

Well, I confess to only being familiar with maybe 20% of what you listed, but I am not saying "take all the mad science away", I am saying "give at least one viable build that's about more serious and less slapstick science". Leonardo DaVinci is actually a good example here, if I could just play a character that can implement all of his drafts I would be pretty happy already without gigaton explosions being involved. The most powerful real-world explosion was 5% of that and destroyed everything within 50 miles, while the shockwave has circled around the whole world three times. A gigaton of TNT would probably be close to what Golarion experienced during Starfall. Maybe the strike could be named after Starfall to get away from the real-world references?

Over-the-top, hyperbolic mad science chicanery is what I love most about the class.

Also, to answer your questions, because SCIENCE!

Well I don't want to be badwrongfunning anyone, but currently I feel that mad science lovers get much more mileage out of the class than old-school hard sci-fi lovers like myself. For me part of the appeal of Golarion is that it manages to preserve a degree of verisimilitude behind the fantasy trappings and I would love to see some more bits to the inventor which could be conceivably traced to real-world science.