Deathstar's page

Thanks a bunch. I've done some more research on this as well and found many people comparing controlled sentient undead to genies granting wishes or outsiders making contracts. They'll try to shift things in their favour if possible.

We'll see if my player's necromancer catches on.

Out of interest, what happened to the original crew of the Wormwood in your campaigns, after the end of Book 1?

The AP really only gives names, race, alignment and a short physical description for the "lesser" pirates on the Wormwood, but my PCs expressed much greater interest in some of them than they do in, say, Sandara. Rattsberger seems like the current favourite. They're about to meet the Man's Promise and the crew'll split up somewhat, but I want to keep some of their closest friends with them, but I am not sure on whether or not it's worth it having them around forever.

What happened to them in your campaigns? Did some of them end up to be major characters? Did you level any of them up to stay relevant?

...the PC's since they stole the Dominator.

How... how did they steal the dominator?

Hello fellow Pathfinders,

quick rules question regarding zombie-diseases, example being the well-known Ghoul Fever:
Do you have to die specifically from the effects of the disease in order to come back as a Ghoul? The wording in the disease mentions this fairly specifically:

A humanoid who dies of ghoul fever rises as a ghoul at the next midnight.

Also, I noticed that in a few Adventure Paths (no spoilers don't worry), people have attempted to commit a quick suicide to allegedly prevent their unwilling reanimation as a ravenous undead.

Think Dawn of the Dead or Walking Dead, however, where those infected basically come back as soon as they die, regardless of whether or not it is the actual disease that eventually kills them.

How would you rule it?

To slightly necro (hah) this thread again, I'm running it in a way that the extend of the destruction depends on how it was destroyed. As some of you mentioned, a brutal enough strike may turn a zombie into a fleshy goo, or scatter a skeleton's bones in all directions of the wind, thereby making them "uncomplete corpses", which do not qualify for a reanimate.
Also, the controlling necromancer must keep in mind that the mindless undead he creates are just that - mindless, so they may be prone to... accidents.

Hi everyone,

I recently started running a Skulls & Shackles campaign (no spoilers, don't worry), and one of the PCs really, really wanted to play a NE Necromancer (Wizard). He agreed for this to be a cooperative experience beforehand and I'm fine with his choice, really I think this campaign is kind of neat for morally ambiguous characters.

The party has not yet encountered any Undead, and at levels 1 and 2 he won't be creating any himself, yet Necromancers can channel energy to Command Undead (effect as Control Undead).

My question is: What does "controlling" a creature allow you to do? Dominate Person has similar wording, yet also has limitations (things that go against one's nature are hard to impose). How does this work when commanding the undead to do things other than act physically? Control Undead itself is a 7th level spell so I would assume it to be very powerful.

Concrete example: When successfully assuming control of an intelligent undead, can you force it to tell you everything it knows? Force a ghoul to tell you about its death? Get a lich to give away it's phylactery?

Thank you and kind regards

Thank you for your input!
What would you think about dynamic components for lower level spells, such as the Onyx for Animate Dead? Would you ask your necromancers to keep Onyxes of all sizes ready?

Hey yall,
so I'm learning more and more about the system and my current area of research is the undead. I have a few questions here:

1. Can Undead be brought back as undead after they were slain? I know some undead are either destroyed upon death while others have abilities that bring them back automatically, but what about your generic zombies/skeletons? Can you keep raising the same ones?

2. Raise Dead states that your target has to have been dead for no more days than your caster lvl and that is does not work on the undead (you need resurrection for that). What if the undead is slain and still within the time-limit? This kind of ties in with the previous question and, I think, depends on whether or not a slain zombie becomes a "normal" corpse again.

3. I would assume that weaker undead still rot unless you cast something like Gentle Repose on it. Does this decay affect the undead in your game somehow? Would their physical stats start to deteriorate?

I'm curious how other DMs handle their spellcasting players who use spells with costly material components.

The way I see it, there are three possible systems:

1. Allow your players to cash in the money when they cast the spell and assume they would have bought that component anyway.

2. Allow your players to set aside a certain amount of their liquid cash as sort of a spellcasting-fund. If they want to cast a costly spell, they must have enough money in this fund. Maybe only allow them to add to the fund while in town?

3. Be super harsh and argue that for realism's sake, you wouldn't be able to cast something like Resurrection if you do not happen to own a diamond worth 10.000gp. And how, in the middle of the forest, will you procure this diamond? This approach was my initial reaction to the question, but I realise this makes the whole spellcasting-schtick a whole lot more tedious and difficult.

What would you say, allow them complete agency over which components they would have or be draconic about it?

I've run it with three before. I just make an NPC to go along with them. It's easier than changing the entire AP.

Thank you for your input. I might allow them a temporary pseudo-cohort for particularly tough bits, but I really wouldn't want to be playing a permanent protagonist who travels with the party.

Hey yall,

I'm looking to run this AP some time soon and have already made a number of alterations to it, some of which based on the feedback here on the Paizo-boards! From what I gathered here and simply by reading through the books, the difficulty of a number of encounters is pretty high for parties of four to five. From the looks of it, we will be running it with a solid group of three players, plus one occasional on-and-off character who will just disappear within the ranks of the crew when the player is not available.

My question is, has anyone here run the AP with a small group before? Are there any things in the books that are in need of immediate changes just because the party is smaller?

On some product pages some of the reviews are not shown. It seems they are still counted for the average rating, but the reviews themselves are not visible.

I found this here:
https://paizo.com/products/btq06urc?Pathfinder-Society-Scenario-520-The-Rak shasas-Court
and here:
https://paizo.com/products/btq02alp?Pathfinder-Adventure-Night-of-the-Gray- Death

This might be a problem on more product pages, I didn't check them all.

The deadly weapon trait in the SF2 playtest is using a different scaling than the deadly trait in PF2.

On a critical hit, the weapon adds a weapon damage die of the listed size. Roll this after doubling the weapon’s damage. This increases to two dice if the weapon has a greater striking rune and three dice if the weapon has a major striking rune. For instance, a rapier with a greater striking rune deals 2d8 extra piercing damage on a critical hit. An ability that changes the size of the weapon’s normal damage dice doesn’t change the size of its deadly die.

On a critical hit, the weapon adds an additional weapon damage die of the listed size. Roll this after doubling the weapon’s damage. The damage from this trait increases for each damage dice the weapon has. For instance, an advanced nano-edge rapier deals an additional 2d8 piercing damage on a critical hit. An ability that changes the size of the weapon’s normal damage dice doesn’t change the size of its deadly die.

PF2 scaling: 1d8 -> 1d8 -> 2d8 -> 3d8

I am not sure if this is an intentional change or if something got tangled up.

I have a question regarding the Mist Evasion ability that some of the vampires possess.

Mist Evasion [reaction] Trigger Bolger would take damage from a critical hit, or from critically failing a saving throw against a damaging effect. Effect Bolger’s body briefly evaporates into the surrounding mists, dispersing the triggering attack. The attack has the results of a failure instead of a critical success.

So if this was triggered by an attack it turns a crit success into a failure (maybe a bit too powerful without any limitations, but whatever)

But what happens if it was triggered by crit failing a saving throw?

I have a strange problem with my paizocon schedule.
After the lottery ended i was signed up for 2 night slots (Saturday and Sunday).
I am pretty sure i did not add them during the lottery sign up.
They block all the events in that slot for me but there is no event from which i can remove them.
Can someone please look into this and remove them.

Thanks

While preparing that book i ran into problems with map E.
According to map these are supposed to be 5ft squares but this makes the map very cramped.
Is this an error and these are in reality 10ft squares?

Can you add the operative trait to the syringe that is used to do the melee injections?
Since the class is supposed to use DEX as a secondary ability score doing it as a normal melee weapon based on STR feels very odd.
Most Biohackers will not invest in that ability score and therefore will be far worse in using their injections in melee range than otherwise.

Will be available for purchase approximately Tue, Aug 7, 2018.

but is still listed as unavailable.

When can we get this, or do we have to fulfill some special requirement to get access to this?

Right now you only take a -2 proficiency penalty to your AC for wearing untrained armor.
This means that the best AC option for wizards and sorcerers is wearing heavy armor untrained.
I have already seen a wizard wearing splint mail at level 1 and getting an AC of 16 which is better than a wizard with mage armor or bracers of armor while costing less money and no spell slot.

Unless we want all wizards/sorcerers to wear heavy armor i hope this gets changed somehow.

Personally it would rather break my concept of an arcane caster if they all wear heavy armor, and to be honest this will happen because it is just so much better.

Right now the proficiency modifiers are too low to make it feel like an investment into them really matters.
The ability score gives a higher modifier to the roll than proficiency, so characters with a high score and a low proficiency will have a higher bonus than someone with a low score and high proficiency.

This is not really surprising based on the math.
At level 1 your proficiency modifier can go from -2 (untrained) to +1 (expert) for a total spread of 3.
Your ability modifier can go from -1 (8) up to +4 (18) for a total spread of 5.

And even at 20 the spread for proficiency is only 5 points while ability gives an 8.

Right now investing in skills to get a higher proficiency (master/legendary) feels like a waste because you only get marginally better.

I am thinking that doubling the bonuses you get from proficiency might make this better.
So it would look something like this:
Untrained -2 (right now i am not sure if is better to keep this at -2 or make it even more like -4)
Trained +0
Expert +2
Master +4
Legendary +6

Right now i am at 32 tables of credit for starfinder society but my second nova is not appearing.
This was never a problem with pfs stars or with my first nova so i have no idea why this is happening.

Will the playtest scenarios be replayable?

I started prepping the scenario and i am a bit worried about the disease in encounter B, especially in low tier.
A DC 14 or 16 Fort save is something level 1 or 2 characters can fail and once someone is infected the Con damage/drain has a good chance of killing people.
In regards to this i would like to know how far away the village is from the next city because the PCs might need access to a healer to cure them.

edit:
Another thing in encounter B.
Th only way to solve this encounter seems to be to deal repeated fire damage to the diseaesd trees. You need 10 damage to destroy a tree.
Do you need to deal all this damage in one attack or can you deal it over multiple turns?
How is party supposed to solve this encounter if they don't have the ability to deal 50 points of fire damage? i guess most parties will have a few alchemist's fires but not enough and they will be used against the swarms.
Also what is the AC of a tree (AC 5?)?

After all the trouble of the last days i am no longer able to report or edit PFS event #82826. Can someone look into this?

In 9-00 the commander of the

After reading the scenario i have some questions.

All encounters in the scenario use the underwater combat rules which means alle bludgeoning and slashing attacks take a -2 to hit penalty and deal only half damage. Many of the monsters used here have no piercing attacks so they would suffer from that penalty. Is this intended? it seems to make most of the encounters far easier than they look at first. Even the haunt in area area A8 would suffer from that because it deals bludgeoning damage.

Regarding the jellyfish hazard in the first encounter how should i handle players trying to attack or destroy the jellyfish? There is no information about AC or hitpoints.

According to the tactic Razethka is supposed to use invisibility to surprise the party but an invisible creature gets only normal concealment (20%) while submerged. So she gets no bonus to stealth and being large with DEX 11 and no ranks in stealth she gets an incredible -4 stealth bonus to hide from the party. That is not going to surprise anyone.

Just started prepping this scenario, and i have a few questions regarding the final fight.

The boss seems to be the same in both subtiers. Is this a mistake, or am i missing something. The only difference i found is in some (not all) of the randomly appearing hazards. Is that really all, seems weird to me.

I am also slightly confused with the ceiling height. It is 15 ft above the bridge in B2 but there are no other mentions of it in the other rooms.
Since the boss is gargantuan it should be 20 ft high, so it does not fit in the area and could only move by squeezing, therefore limiting its ability to do anything useful.

Also the boss is not resistant or immune to fire, so it will take a lot of damage from the hazards. Is that intended?

I am preparing this scenario and i have a few questions:

The runeslave curse on Pahg-Vahr:
Since you need at least a limited wish to remove the curse and limited wish is not available to cast or buy as spellcasting service or scroll for characters below lvl 12, it seems more or less impossible for a party to remove it. Is that correct or am i missing something here?

The inverted ogre/giants:
They burst forth from the mountain in round two. Do they immediately attack in that round or do they spend the round bursting?
Also they have the ability fear aura but no further description what it does.
The generic universal monster ability references the fear spell, but this seems quite broken in subtier 10-11, where you have to 2 auras and everone who even succeeds on both saves gets frightened. (The fear spell makes you shaken even on a successfull save and applying the shaken condition to an already shaken creature makes it frightened). Also there is no entry about creatures being immune to the aura after a successfull save, so all creatures that are not immune to fear are frightend for as long as they are in both 60ft auras.

The Spellwarding Trap:
What is the caster level of the trap? It might be needed if people try to suppress it with dispel magic. Or is the trap immune to dispel magic/greater dispel magic?

Scarab Sages faction reward
Can GMs also check two boxes in their faction journal, or is that a reward only available as a player? (I guess it is player only, but i want to be sure)

Do I understand this right?
I never do any roll against the second target, he gets automatically damaged regardless of AC, concealment or any other defenses he has(except DR).
That seems quite exploitable to me:
Just put an easy to hit target (summon monster, bought animals, ...) next to Mr BBEG and attack that creature instead of him and ignore all his defenses.

Maybe some sort of additional target definition would be nice (Something like "the target needs to have at least half your level/HD").
Otherwise I see people just buying a dozen chickens per day and behead one each hour to get their temporal hp.
Unless it is intended to work that way.

I think i broke something while reporting.
In PFS event 49131 session 25 I apparently did not correctly delete a session. Now the session is still visible in the session listing but without a GM and i cannot edit it. If i try to edit it i get a blank sheet and trying to fill that and saving it creates a duplicate session with every player being marked as having already played that event.

is it possible for seomone from IT to either totally delete that session or recreate it so far that i can access it?

I am not sure on the PFS-specific rules here.

i understand that normally in PFS a familiar cannot activate a magic item.
But then there is an exception made for a few improved familiars, including the faerie dragon to use wands.

So I am not sure if that also covers staffs, because they are also spell-trigger items or if they are considered something else and their use is not allowed.

And a second question, related to the whole thing:

"A faerie dragon casts spells as a 3rd-level sorcerer."

Is it considered a sorcerer in regard to spell-trigger and spell-completion items and would it in PFS be able to use scrolls or would that also count as activating a magic item and therefore not be allowed in PFS?

I was playing an investigator in the PFS scenario 5-08 The Confirmation.
I tried to go for a more skill based build focused on social skills and urban encounters so less heavy weapons and armor. I tried to circumvent to low combat abilities by using alchemical weapon which i could craft cheaply.

we had a big 7 player group:
Investigator 1 (me)
Ranger 1 (archery)
Rogue 1 (melee)
Bard 1
Druid 1 with badger companion
Cleric 1 (negative energy channeler)
Mauler 2 (Tiefling Onispawn)

Stuff we encountered:

2 spider swarms
Bad initiative roll, spiders acted first swarmed the whole group.
So i spend the first round of combat moving out of the swarm and retrieving an alchemist's fire. By the time i finally got to act at the end of round 2, the cleric had channeld and the rogue used his alchemist's fire, there was only 1 swarm with 1 hp left which i killed with the splash damage from a missed attack with the fire.
So even in an encounter where 4 out 7 people were unable to deal any damage i didn't do much. Only good thing was i made both fortitude saves while swarmed.

social encounter with Ouri
The bard had the higher diplomcy skill, so all i got to do was doing an assist roll, YAY...

3 mites and a centipede
Bad positioning at the end of the group and bad action economy (having to spend a move action to draw a dagger because of BAB 0) meant all i got to do was missing with a thrown dagger.

1 ooze (don't remember what it was exactly]
Mediocre initiative meant i got to deal 2 damage with the splash damage from a missed alkali, it died before i got to my second turn.

the Minotaur
The minotaur dropped Janira in the first hit then attacked us. I used
my expiditious retreat extract and spent rounds 1 and 2 to sprint to her to stabilize her. By the time i got to her and would have been able to do something the combat ended. I did an untrained heal check to check if she is still alive, rolled a 5 (for a total of 6), used inspiration, got a 1 (so still failed). Luckily she had already stabilized and the cleric healed her with a wand.

4 skeletons
I won initiative, went to the front to get them with a wand of burning hands we had found earlier, and rolled a 1 on use magic device. Then the mauler punched them to dust with some additional damage from the badger and the druid with his quarterstaff. All i could do was providing flanking positions while missing with a dagger, which would most likely not have dealt damage anyway.

other stuff
There were a lot of checks for knowledge religion, nature and dungeoneering, 3 skills i hadn't picked, so not much for me to contribute. While i had hoped to use an inspiration-powered intimidate in combat for demoralizing, everything but the minotaur and the mites was mindless, so that didn't work out. Only good roll was a natural 20 on the day job check which gave me an impressive result of 33.

Conclusion.
Most of the time i felt rather useless. My combat abilities were pathetic, i did a whole of 3 points of damage from missed splash weapons. Out of combat i either had the wrong skills (knowledge), someone else had the same skill but better (diplomacy the bard, identifying potions the cleric's detect magic and spellcraft), or i rolled crap (heal, UMD). I used all 3 points of inspiration, and it never changed a failed roll to a passed roll (2 times the roll still failed, and 1 time using acrobatics to get to Janira the roll would have passed anyway). The only good thing was craft alchemy providing me with cheaper stuff and additional gold. While i was sort of expecting to suck in combat it was quite a bad surprise that i also sucked in the skill department. While having many skill points is sort of nice, with so many skills depending on different attributes you get a lot of average but not great bonuses so you will get outshined by the specialists. And with most skill checks being done by just one guy and everbody else supporting, the investigator falls flat in bigger groups with lot of skilled characters.

I am slightly confused about when i actually get out of subtier gold and when i get the normal value?

I thought i get it whenever my character level is not in the played subtier, but then i had the following happening:

I was playing a 1-5 scenario as a level 3, because all other players were level 1 or 2 we played the 1-2 subtier. How much gold do i get for finishing it?

I thought i get ~1100 gold for playing out of subtier.
My GM says i get ~500 gold because i actually played the 1-2.

Related question:

How much gold would i have earned if i played the 4-5 subtier?

I am rather new to PF and recently got hooked. While trying to build my first character and looking around the message boards here I was starting to ask myself a question regarding character optimization.
How much minmaxing is needed to survive and how much is too much and killing the fun for everybody?

A lot of guides for example advise to dump 1 or 2 abilitiey to the lowest possible level while maxing 1 or 2 others. Then I read stuff like "If you have CON 10 and get one-shotted at level 1 it is your own fault". So from this I get the feeling that some of the adventures are so hard that you need a near perfect character to survive.

On the other hand people are complaining about overpowered characters ("slumber hex witch", "kitty-pounce"?)more or less soloing all encounters while the rest of the party is just watching bored.

So I am really unsure how to build my character

Any advise from more experienced players would be welcome