David,'s page

I have a thematic idea for a PFS air kineticist that goes a bit like this:

- A chaotic neutral dwarf with 5 charisma whose air blasts are fart blasts (or electric blasts are brown lightning that smell much worse than ozone).
- He never voluntarily bathes or showers (it doesn't work anyway).
- Elemental Overflow causes him to become even gassier and smellier than usual.
- Wings of Air is just flight through nonstop farting.

I’m not too concerned about hyper-optimization and it's not meant to be mechanically different from a normal air kineticist, It’s just a fun concept I had floating around. I wanted some more ideas for flavor that would fit this character if anyone has some.

I’ve hit a bit of a conundrum with PFS recently and I wanted to get a few serious opinions on the matter. A little while back, there was a thread called “Season 9, The Year of Research?”, and one of my friends (second post) basically said he hated all the skill check marathons that PFS was doing that season and got plenty of flak for it. I had joined in on the thread, but I think I just derailed it further, so I thought I’d make this one instead. Season 9 has been favoring skills over combat from what we’ve experienced head-on, and a couple of people in my group have gotten sick of it, myself included.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve made an investigator just to get through the skill marathons and dialogue. His gimmick is this: although he’s a decent investigator, he hates his class, is unsociable (7 CHA), and is just in it for the money (Chaotic Neutral). Even though I picked my skills well enough, it hasn’t made the first scenario I used him in any better aside from speeding it up a bit. We ended up skipping the first 2 out of 3 combats because of this, the last one involving acid-resistant swarms that we we’re woefully unprepared for, all the while making me wish we ran something else. Being a video gamer growing up and jumping onto the tabletop RPG train later in life might be the reason, but I don’t enjoy foregoing combat in favor of a bunch of skill checks and huge streams of dialogue, which can turn into watching the GM and the skill monkey player talk back and forth for 50+% of the session with little else to do for everyone else (fun fun).

Bear in mind, I don’t dislike role-playing characters as a whole, it would be boring just playing cardboard cutout classes, but the method that some of these scenarios do it just upsets me to the point that I’m wondering if I should even continue PFS at all. What baffles me is how almost nobody else feels this way from what I’ve seen online, either they’re a silent minority, or they get shouted down otherwise.

So out of curiosity, am I the dumb one for feeling this way, or is there anyone that gets this vibe as well?

So, over a few recent game sessions, someone in our group brought to light how silly the physics in this game are beyond magic, obviously. At first, he pointed out that earth elementals can swim just fine going by typical swim rules (y’know, despite being a bunch of rocks), and that a colossal creature smashing a diminutive/fine swarm does no damage whatsoever. Then I realized going by the logic of that first part, lead golems don't have any issues swimming either (they have +8 to swim from STR).

I decided to post this online partially for a quick laugh, and partially to see what other examples of “Pathfinder Physics” anyone else can come up with.

So in a PFS scenario yesterday, I used a waterproof hooded lantern since I think those are a better long term investment than sunrods. I told my GM and he said oil can't be conserved, so if I used the lantern for 5 minutes, it might as well be 6 hours for purposes of how much oil was used. I searched online and couldn't find any hard-set rules on lanterns and oil incrementation and its been bugging me since (yeah oil is 1 sp, but OCD wins out). Is there any kind of rule for this, or did the GM hit the nail on the head?

This is a topic I brought up in a game session a couple days ago. I've never created a spellcaster that didn't have Read Magic on him/her at all times (barring 4/9 casters), and with one tentative exception, I'm the only one out of 10 or so people in that group that does so. My main reason for this is that Spellcraft checks to identify spellbooks and especially scrolls are steep at low to mid levels. Even if it weren't difficult, sometimes a scroll could be the solution to an obstacle with no other option, and a 5% or 10% chance of messing up the Spellcraft check to identify the scroll otherwise is too much IMO.
Does anyone else here do this or am I just an oddball?

I'm playing a level 10 fighter (no archetype, 1 XP away from 11) whose primary weapon right now is a +1 adamantine longsword. At the moment, he has 7737 gp to spend and I don't want to stick to a +1 longsword for much longer. Should I save up for a Holy weapon property or just go with +2 and up?

One thing that isn't clear to me about enhancement bonuses for weapons or armor is whether or not you can increase them. Is it possible to do so? If so how exactly does it work?