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Perhaps I can reiterate the problem; it would seem that, if a ghost or similar incorporeal creature casts a three action spell, then they cannot fly, meaning that by the rules they plummet to the ground. Unless this is a specific lore choice, which is doubtful, this is simply a rules oversight, since it is much more common in fiction for ghosts to be able to hover wherever they wish, even while casting spells. Therefore, the rules clarification is necessary: is this the intended behavior for incorporeal creatures? Saying that it’s a game of make believe doesn’t help resolve the perceived mechanical disconnect.
I heartily recommend Dungeon World and similar games, your observations regarding Pathfinder are spot on. I still have a shine for the system and Golarion’s lore, but only because of the fun I’ve had with my friends throughout the years. Observing Pathfinder as a system, it’s just not what I’m looking for in an RPG, as the mechanics far too often suppress player choice and role play, yet don’t yield enough benefits to justify this sacrifice.
However, we can only say that about Starfinder because they had the good fortune of releasing a system that people enjoy. Starfinder could have just as easily been released with mechanics in place that would have turned people away. Just because it worked out for them before, not holding a playtest, doesn't mean it's good practice.
Just remember, regarding Hetuath: that the sun from the habitat module isn't the only sun that can destroy him permanently. Any of the kasatha can be destroyed if their remains are struck by Golarion's regular rising sun. So even if your players took Hetuath's remains with them, there's a chance that he'd just disintegrate the next morning.
I’m thinking that this is likely my favourite season. It especially stands out after the unfocused nature of the last season, what with the three different acts they went for. I’m also glad they killed of Ruby, she was a villain that was good to hate and whose themes tied in well to the whole “inescapable future” metaplot. I really hope Coulson kicks the bucket by the end of this season, though, otherwise the teasing will have been a bit lame.
This deserves quoting for future reference... Oh man, that quote is just deliciously wrong in all the right ways!
As reiterated countless times, Goblins are a monster race specifically created with the intention that they could be killed without qualms. As a whole, they're evil creatures, and the world's better off the fewer there are as they're a tangible danger to everyone around them. Killing a Goblin on sight is not only a justifiable reaction, but usually the right reaction.
Man, it's weird to see so many Goblin apologists. They're a monster race, specifically created to be vicious little buggers, so that they can be killed by the PCs without much remorse at the best of times. Obviously you can have a story about your special Goblins that aren't like the rest, but that's precisely that, they aren't like the rest. If they're included as a Core race, the implication is that the race as a whole is capable of being compared to more sane, less homicidal races. Like, to the people who are using real world analogies, that doesn't work in a fantasy setting where the Goblins aren't just some other culture, they're literally different creatures with a strong penchant for vileness. So unless Paizo is retconning Goblin culture up till now, allowing Goblins to potentially be in every adventuring party is just a way to make people tilt even more murder-hobo than ever.
"Hermaphroditic" also doesn't work as an in-character term in a world that knows neither Hermes nor Aphrodite.True, but we're translating. Plenty of words wouldn't work without their historic roots. As a bit of a tangent, but to prove thejeff's point, Star Wars has both a ship called the Millennium Falcon and a person called Rose, yet in the setting there are no falcons or roses. So while saying in Pathfinder that someone made a "herculean" effort might not make sense, I don't think anyone would hold it against you.
Finally: Why has this not seen a big announcement on the paizo website? Yeah, I have no idea what's up with this game. By doing a bit of research online, it seems to be completely legitimate, but everything about it just screams of a cheap knock-off. After having played some more, I can say that I really like the mechanics and strategy of the game, but everything else from the UI, the sounds, music, grinding progression, etc..., just leaves me cold. Maybe that's why Paizo hasn't announced it here, or anywhere, it would seem. Which is a shame, because I like Pathfinder, and I was kind of looking forward to the CRPG Paizo commissioned; however, with the extremely long and choppy Pathfinder Adventure launch, the MMO stuck in Alpha purgatory, and this weird Chinese phone game, I'm not so sure if anything with the Pathfinder brand that isn't a tabletop game can work.
From what I can gather the Pathfinder CCG doesn't even have a forum heading on this website, though granted, it did only come out yesterday. How do people like it, so far? I think the basic mechanics seem sound, and I like the 6-way grid positioning, though I think it could use a better interface for sliding your minions around. It could probably use a better interface in general, and the sound design sounds really cheap, here's hoping it's just placeholder. Another thing, it's probably just because they forgot their decimal point, but what's with everything in the store costing upwards of 350 Euro? You'd think that wouldn't get past QA!
Can't you just say that those events didn't happen, and move on? It's your setting, after all. I can understand why the session in question was frustrating, but the setting doesn't exist anywhere except for in your mind, it is whatever you say it is, so I don't understand how they could have destroyed it.
That's sort of the problem; at level 10, so halfway through your progression, you only get 4 unique shifted forms per day. They last a very long time, sure, but unless you want to stay a mouse for 10 hours that's hardly useful. The idea was that the shifter should be the class that could change form to suit the situation, not be the class that would rather remain a tiger than have to morph out and lose one of his daily uses.
It was great seeing you at Lucca today, I’m still a bit star struck! My question is, with the iconics, were there some that were easier to come up with than others? If so, is there a specific type of character that comes to you more naturally, or a conceptual genre that you feel more at ease with?
Perhaps I expressed myself poorly; I understand that PFS exists in order to have games at conventions, and there is a reason to have a more streamlined ruleset in place for those occasions. What I don't understand is why, when people like a certain plotline from these scenarios, they don't just play them with their own group at their leisure. Even if one has played the other scenarios with Valais in them in PFS, for example, they can just play this one with their own group. What I mean is, there is no necessity to abide to the Pathfinder Society ruleset in order to play a scenario on your own time amongst friends, and you can utilize whatever character you see fit. It's not like Paizo is watching over your shoulder, or anything.
Another good scenario, yet best re-adapted for a homebrew campaign where the players can fully enjoy the plot with the same characters. Honestly I'm quite supportive of these mini-modules and scenarios they create for the Pathfinder Society, but for the life of me I don't understand why people still subject themselves to the Pathfinder Society ruleset when one can just as easily play these scenarios with friends, on their own time, with their own rules.
Be forewarned, a lot of book 3, book 4, potentially book 5, and all of book 6 are full of combat slog. When I ran that AP, I also tried to focus more on the roleplay elements; true, it could have been the PF system that failed me, but I think that the books are just written in a way that implies a fairly heavy handed, combat oriented approach that chafes with a more subtle, atmospheric game. The only two books that really worked as I had hoped were the first two. In any case, I'd recommend Dungeon world and D&D 5th Edition as well, but it also depends on how much you want to rewrite preexisting material.
In fact, I'd argue it's actually easier to be an atheist in Golarion, at least, going with the modern terminology as referred to the great monotheisms. Of the various Pathfinder gods, some have phenomenal cosmic power, some less, but generally they're treated as the gods in many other pantheons of the past, such as Greek, Egyptian, Norse, etc... Meaning that they're fallible, prone to human emotions and their negative aspects thereof. And if you make the comparison, for your average citizen a level 15 anything is already godlike, and with the myriad mystical beings there are, it would be hard to draw a definite line between what's a god and what's just a huge mystical creature that demands worship. So in this sense Golarion atheists aren't necessarily saying that gods don't exist (though some do), they're saying that no being deserves that title, and even if they do, they aren't inherently worthy of worship just because they're really good at a few things. As far as where they go after death, last I knew they went into simple coffins within the Boneyard, and eventually were served to Groetus the Mad Moon by Pharasma in some ritual or another. It's possible this was retconned, however.
Just my experience, in Carrion Crown I had a pyrokineticist that was literally the simplest character at the table. He loved to set things on fire, and sometimes, he would gather power to set things on fire harder, and in rare occasions he would take points of Burn to set things even more on fire. The player himself was dyslexic, and yet he truly had fun with that character over others he had in the past because it was so simple, just point and shoot. If we want to talk complexity, the Inquisitor in the group never quite got the hang of his various Judgements, and the Druid started combing all the creatures in the game before just sticking with one cause he said it was too complicated. Conversely, when the pyrokineticist died and was replaced by a Brawler, I just wrote two or three of the better combat feats for him, cause that’s another class that asks for encyclopedic knowledge of the majority of feats. My point being, Kineticist was darn simple and fun.
It's not that I'm necessarily looking for hard science in my fantasy, but not knowing how the majority of that which you encounter in the game interacts with open space would be like having a nautical themed campaign and having no rules for how things function underwater. Apart from my example which happened in plain Pathfinder, in Starfinder there's almost certainly going to be a time when you, your equipment, or monsters will be floating around out there, and it would be good to know if the vacuum is uber deadly or just a minor annoyance.
What you see as fragility, I see as room for the DM and players to fill in the blanks. From what I've experienced of 5E, it's a very rules light system on purpose, made less for the slog and grind of Pathfinder combat and more for interpretative moments and roleplaying. Then again, any system can be set aside in favour of roleplaying, so what do I know?
Nothing immediately comes to mind, though I agree, the level of self-righteousness in this thread is obnoxious. I know that some people can have a knee-jerk reaction to anything remotely sexual, but the OP didn't ask for that sort of advice, nor does claiming oppression or sexual assault even seem warranted. For supposedly open minded people, there seems to be a lot of "wrongbadfun" going on here.
I've since gone over all of my characters that I've had since I started playing D&D in 2001, and I counted precisely one human among them. Even when I play computer RPGs that allow for character customization, I never pick human. I suppose it's similar to what Set said, that when I'm gaming it's time to set myself aside and have some fantastical adventures as someone else; therefore, picking human to me just feels like more of the same, sort of like a wasted opportunity. As in, I could be whatever interesting race the setting has to offer, I can see the world from so many different perspectives, so why would I want to pick the one race that I am in real life? It just seems terribly bland to me, is all.
Holy thread necro, Batman! That aside, I'm rather certain how it works is that when you generate your character, if you have a bonus to intelligence, you get extra languages that must be picked from the starting list. Then, if you put points into linguistics, you can pick whatever language you want (except for secret languages like Druidic). In your case, you would start with Common, then you would have to choose from Aklo, Draconic, Dwarven, Gnoll, Gnome, Goblin, Halfling, Orc, or Undercommon for your language gained from +1 INT, and then with your 1 rank in Linguistics you could pick whatever language you wanted.
Just my two cents, and there's a modicum of change depending on how he's played, but Geralt from the Witcher series of games is a shining example of True Neutral done right. In any case, I'd say I've always had the hardest times with CN characters, but that's mostly because it's an alignment that attracts disruptive players who want an excuse to just do whatever they want.
One of my favourite animated films that nobody else seems to have heard about is Red Line. All I know is that the film took about 11 years to complete, and it bankrupted the studio, but it is a treasure. It's the story of a racer in a futuristic space world that gets thrown into a battle between crime syndicates and the law, all while trying to prepare for the biggest race in the galaxy, the Red Line. The whole final act is like an exquisitely animated, super inventive episode of Wacky Races, and there wasn't a moment in that film I didn't like. I would super recommend it!
What a silly thread. It's actually baffling how a power such as Hide in Plain Sight has people claiming it does not, in fact, let you hide in plain sight, just because the observer's eyes are a bit different. It's as silly as the Adamantium Golems not being made of adamantium argument, or the dead character still able to act argument.
The problem I've found with the whole presentation aspect is that the players just don't care. Sure, you could have them find an intriguing magical item with a cool design, a bit of backstory, and a unique effect; that will just make them want more for it when they haggle it away in order to buy their next iterative bonus to their armor, headband, weapon, etc... Magic items in 3rd edition games are, as noted, part of the wealth advancement track. This means that characters of a certain level will expect to have generally around a certain amount of gold, and if you give them cool magical items with the intention that they keep them, more often than not they'll just sell them so they can get whatever it is they need for their build of the day. The only way I see around this is to face the problem at the root, and get rid of the need for so many magical items in order for PCs to be considered capable. 2nd edition worked pretty well for this, and so does 5th. Other systems have also been invented, in the Unchained books. However, if you play Pathfinder as is, you've got to accept that magic items are run of the mill and that your players will almost always buy their big 6 items, and use everything else they find to fund their spending habits.
There was a naval battle wherein Valeros, Amiri and Lini happened upon the PCs ship as it was being attacked. The iconics helped out, the PCs were very appreciative, and the PCs even repaid them with a treasure map that the PCs didn't have time to investigate themselves. The important thing to remember, I think, is to make it so it's unclear who's the Npc in the relationship!Was that a homebrew campaign or a part of Skull and Shackles? Oh yeah, it was a homebrew campaign. Still going, actually. I know I could have introduced any old NPCs instead of the iconics, but since they're already so fleshed out I don't have to work so hard to characterize them. Also, it's really fun to just have Pathfinders being Pathfinders in the background, it does help the setting come to life a bit more.
There was a naval battle wherein Valeros, Amiri and Lini happened upon the PCs ship as it was being attacked. The iconics helped out, the PCs were very appreciative, and the PCs even repaid them with a treasure map that the PCs didn't have time to investigate themselves. The important thing to remember, I think, is to make it so it's unclear who's the Npc in the relationship!
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