Dunwright's page

Do the slavers have to be human? Duergar, hobgoblins and drow are obvious candidates.

I don't think the drow even exist anymore. Pretty sure they had to retcon them away with the remaster due to IP conflicts with the other company.

Another reason I prefer to focus on rarity in this case literally describing the actual rarity of exemplars in the setting rather than assuming it to be based on some notion that it's narratively disruptive somehow is because I find the latter to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and to actually make the class unusable in general if taken seriously. If you've decided that exemplars have the rare tag because they tend to be super-special world-revolves-around-me protagonists then what are you going to do if you actually allow one in a game with a party that involves other classes? Are you just going to let them dominate the table and be the main character? If you don't then you're not really letting the class be what you've already decided it's supposed to be- and also if you're not doing that then you're demonstrating that there's no need to treat the class that way in the first place and you never needed to imagine it like that. If you DO let the exemplar player do that, well, that's just a bad and unfun idea for all the same reasons it would be to let a lone player do that in any circumstances. Rare tag or no I don't think Paizo is designing player classes around the idea that some of them are meant to be more narratively important than others. I think rare literally just means there aren't a lot of exemplars on Golarion or in the Inner Sea in Paizo's Lost Omens campaign setting and most that do exist are tied to a very recent and very specific metanarrative event in that setting. Nothing more.

Realistically there don't seem to be any existing rules that would clarify the situation, so you'll have to make a houserule that you find appropriate. Some people have made their own suggestions above, mostly houseruling a one-action cost to switch between "modes". I dislike this because as far as I can see there is typically no action cost to "switch" any suitable object into an improvised weapon; you simply attack with it and then it becomes one. My suggestion would be that a normal fan is not an improvised weapon until you attack with it, at which point it becomes an improvised weapon and remains so until the end of combat, and you cannot "revert" it in combat. This is a little more restrictive than Castilliano's suggestion of letting you decide its "mode" for free at the start of each round but it makes more sense to me.

On a different note, I'd like to pose the question of whether it's even worth it to use a regular fan as an improvised weapon. A quick review of the rules: an improved weapon is a simple weapon with a -2 item penalty on attack rolls that deals whatever type and amount of damage the GM deems appropriate and has whatever weapon traits the GM deems appropriate. This is pretty open-ended besides the item penalty, but if a GM was ruling according to verisimilitude (or at least my sense of it) this would be a pretty terrible weapon! For one thing, a regular fan (which as far I can tell has no description anywhere) doew not have a blade on its edge like a fighting fan, so I see no reason it should deal slashing damage as opposed to bludgeoning or possess many of the fighting fan's traits like backstabber, or the knife crit specialization effect. Arguably without a blade it shouldn't really do as much damage as a fighting fan either, which is already a meager 1d4. Your GM could of course rule that a normal fan being used as an improvised weapon has the same damage type/amount and traits as a fighting fan even if doesn't make much sense (Personally it doesn't make sense to me that you'd be able to slash with an unbladed fan- you can go out and buy one right now and try it), or at least rule that it works that way for fan dancers because rule of cool and you've already sunk feats into this, but then what distinguishes the two? Concealability I suppose would be the answer, but a fighting fan's description does note that in a performance it can disguised as a frilly accessory. I can't imagine it would be worth it to bother with an ordinary fan most of the time- certainly not in any situation in which you'd find yourself also already wearing a buckler on your arm.

EDITED to add: as an open-ended question for anybody to answer, what damage type/amount and weapon abilities would YOU rule an ordinary fan being used as an improvised weapon should have?

Sneak may say you're undetected on a Success, but this feat doesn't. This feat changes the Success condition to "you can make a melee Strike against your foe at the end of your Sneak."

This is incorrect. The feat does not replace the success condition. It adds an effect. The normal effects is still present.

Problem is, at the end of your Sneak, Sneak's rules make you observed if you don't have cover or concealment.

Sneak's rules normally make you automatically observed by a creature you do not have cover or concealment against, because Sneak's rules normally prevent you from rolling against such a creature, which would allow you to remain undetected on a success. The feat allows you to take such a roll.

Furthermore, you're not making a Sneak check for Sneak. You're making a Stealth check for Underhanded Assault.

Sneak has you roll a Stealth check. The penalty to your Stealth check mentioned is referring to the Stealth check you roll with Sneak.

You're not even technically Hidden; the feat says "as though you were Hidden."

Yes, this is necessary to trigger the roll per the Sneak rules; it is rolled against creatures you were hidden to or undetected by at the start of your movement. The purpose of the feat is to let you take the roll mentioned in the Sneak action and referenced in the feat. After the roll, you become undetected if you succeed, per the Success description of Sneak ("You're undetected by the creature during your movement and remain undetected by the creature at the end of it) and also the general description of Sneak ("You attempt to move to another place while becoming or staying undetected").

I suppose it does allow you to Sneak out in the open, without cover or concealment, but since you have to end your turn adjacent to the enemy, you likely don't have cover or concealment against them and so become Observed at the conclusion of your movement as normal for Sneak.

I think this conclusion is wrong. The Sneak rules say:

Success You're undetected by the creature during your movement and remain undetected by the creature at the end of it. You become observed as soon as you do anything other than Hide, Sneak, or Step.

If you succeed at the Sneak check you remain undetected at the end of your Sneak action. You do not become observed until you do something other Hide, Sneak, or Step. Your lack of cover or concealment is irrelevant because the feat lets you roll as though you were hidden; without the feat you would not be able to make this roll and would be automatically observed, per the Sneak rules:

You don't get to roll against a creature if, at the end of your movement, you neither are concealed from it nor have cover or greater cover against it. You automatically become observed by such a creature.

Since you have the feat, you CAN take a roll and thus are not automatically observed by such a creature:

You can roll against the foe you’re Sneaking up on, even if it’s currently observing you, as though you were hidden.

You can not be automatically observed because your success on the Sneak roll declares that you remain undetected until you take certain actions. The reason you are automatically detected normally in such cases is because you are not allowed to take the roll normally.

Seems pretty clear to me. If you wanted to you could read this in an obnoxiously particular way and say the feat lets you take the roll to not be observed but doesn't erase the text saying you are automatically observed, but besides there being no reason to do this, it also introduces a new problem, which is that being automatically observed at the end of your movement contradicts the natural language meaning of remaining undetected at the end of your movement, so then you'd just have an ambiguity that you should obviously resolve in favor of letting the feat do something.

I tend to agree that by my own reckoning there doesn't seem to be anything to the exemplar that inherently suggests it's more likely to be disruptive to roleplay or narrative than any other class... in a vaccuum. But perhaps we're forgetting here that on the face of it the rarity tag literally suggests that something is rare in the setting. Okay, sure, that's not the only thing the tag is used for, but it's at least one of ots purposes. I don't think a wakizashi is likely to cause any serious roleplaying issues in any campaign, but it gets the uncommon tag because it is literally uncommon in the Inner Sea. Examplars, as far as I can tell, are literally rare on Golarion. There aren't many of them and most of them that do exist just came into being as the result of a very recent cataclysm, which is a very specidic narrative event. If you're running a campaign on Golarion you might want to consider that fact, just like you might want to consider wakizashis are probably not very abundant outside of Tian Xia. I think you could make another campaign setting where exemplars are not rare and there would be nothing inherent to the class that would really warrant a rare tag... but the same could be said for gunslingers. In Paizo's campaign setting they are rare.

Dunwright wrote:

While the monk clearly has its origins in martial arts movies and mostly-fictional shaolin fantasies, it's also something that's becomes established as an RPG archetype in its right, both in various TTRPGs (like the one we're talking about and its ancestor) and also video game RPGs (Warcraft, Diablo, Final Fantasy, Pillars of Eternity, Path of Exile, about a million others). Which is not unlike the druid, or cleric, or paladin, or several other classes.

I would be careful to avoid relying too much on other RPGs as a cultural model rather than primary sources, because a huge number of those RPGs share the same DNA. Warcraft and Diablo's classes in particular are heavily based off of D&D, and many other RPGs that have followed have either taken inspiration from D&D as well or Blizzard's own games. Using D&D-descended games to justify tropes in another D&D-descended game comes across to me as a case of the serpent eating its own tail.

I am well aware of this, and I don't see why it's a problem (and, by the way, what you've said about Warcraft/Diablo is also true of all the other examples I listed and to a varying extent is true of almost all TTRPGs and computer RPGs that have been made in the past 50 years). That simply is the space which this game exists in and it's a trope that's been propagating and reinforcing itself with minor mutations for at least half a century. I don't see any particular reason Pathfinder needs to look to "primary sources" (whatever that could even mean in this context) over the cultural niche it actually exists in and I don't think Paizo does either; they're more than happy to draw on other RPGs and modern fantasy media for class inspiration rather than, what, medieval manuscripts? The fact that "monk" is a well-understood archetype in this space is my entire point. If you are going to have an RPG with a mystic martial artist who focuses on beating enemies with his fists (which you don't have to do, but if you do it) then "monk" is simply the most immediately recognizable name for that sort of thing and a monk is exactly what it is (in an RPG sense of the word). Similarly if you were making a nature-themed mage who focuses on shapeshifting into animal forms and maybe calling animals and plants to fight beside him, "druid" is the most recognizable name for that sort of class because that's simply what a druid is in RPGs. You can of course name them something different if you want to stand out but everybody will know it's still just your RPG's version of a druid.

Makes complete sense to me to call the "monk" something else, it being a very inaccurate name to all but a few real world monastic orders/traditions. Other d20 fantasy games have already tried this, with Level Up Advanced 5e being the first that comes to mind with "Adept".

I don't think it necessarily needs to be renamed. While the monk clearly has its origins in martial arts movies and mostly-fictional shaolin fantasies, it's also something that's becomes established as an RPG archetype in its right, both in various TTRPGs (like the one we're talking about and its ancestor) and also video game RPGs (Warcraft, Diablo, Final Fantasy, Pillars of Eternity, Path of Exile, about a million others). Which is not unlike the druid, or cleric, or paladin, or several other classes. Of course you still could rename it, like happened with paladin -> champion, and it might be a good idea of you intend to totally rework the class fantasy. But if it the basic concept is still going to be a semi-mystical martial arts master with a focus on unarmed combat, I think monk is fine and probably preferable, because in context it probably evokes moreso the typical RPG concept of a monk class than it does kung fu movies, especially nowadays.

Kind of nice to see this easy to miss contradiction get highlighted by the thread.

Eidolons don't make narrative sense right now, because they are both "summons" in the newer meaning, where they are magic-sustained beings that dissolve and don't exist when unmanifested.
But Eidolons are also outsiders with a home plane "where it goes when unmanifested."

It creates a contradictory image where the eidolon either has it's own independent life when away from the summoner, or it's a dependent lifeform sustained or suspended by the summoner's magic.

Trying to act like both of those are true at the same time, really, really does not work.
You just end up with a bunch of non-sapient essence that for some reason needs to travel between dimensions in order to be assembled into a sapient creature, only to magically travel the planes again for the sake of dissolving back into random essence.

A contradiction kinda asks to be resolved, and I personally would pick to put the whiteout across the "home plane" nonsense. For starters, that's the far more consistent presentation, with the whole "one being with two bodies" angle, the shared mark, even the odd limitations of the eidolon's capabilities all support that dependent-lifeform version of "an eidolon."

The notion that "your eidolon is living an independent life while not summoned" is just not viable from a narrative standpoint.

Far too many issues.

Like, the moment you go to their home plane, you can bypass the entire "summon" aspect by just, ya know, being next to the outsider without Manifesting them? If Manifesting is an act of teleportation, then an act of teleportation can render the need to Manifest moot. Just plain dumb.

This is probably sensible, but it's a bit of a flavor loss because with certain Eidolons one likes to imagine they actually are an devil that resides in Hell doing devilish things when it's not by your side and maybe even reporting to their superiors in the infernal hierarchy or something. Devil eidolons aren't actually a thing in 2e but you get the idea, and there are angel and demon eidolons. I find "eidolons are just some planar/magical essence that don't really exist or do anything when you're willing them into existence" to be much less interesting narratively. It feels less like you've formed a supernatural bond with a powerful being and more like you're just a sorcerer who figured out a strange summoning spell.

Actually a 5 pound weapon is pretty small. Go to a gym, look at the 10 pound iron weight that can be attached to a bar. It's about 6 inches in diameter- longswords are much bigger.

I have no clue why you would try to estimate the weight of a weapon by comparison to exercise weights (which are designed to be fairly dense) when we have a much better real life comparison: actual weapons. Paizo didn't invent swords for Pathfinder, they exist in the real world.

Actually there still may be some weird interactions with these proposed rules. Namely, some of the things that boost Leap distance also lower the DC for Long Jump, like Crane Stance, which boosts Leap distance by 5 and lowers Long Jump DC by 5. This means your normal Leap distance (assuming a 30 foot land speed) is 20 but you can succeed on a Long Jump check which lets you Leap a distance "up to your check result" with a 10. Even if you apply the Leap bonus to that cap as I suggested above, you could have a scenario where a success lets you Leap 15 feet and and a failure lets you Leap 20 feet. RAW this is even worse as a success could let you Leap a mere 10 feet. Perhaps we should simply amend this to say a success's cap should be no lower than your normal Leap distance. But we're moving well beyond the bounds of RAW by this point.

Really feels like a case where they found a very neat way for long jump to work (distance is based on check result for a success, which starts at 15, which is also the default Leap maximum) and didn't account for the fact that this breaks completely as soon as you modify either Leap distance or Long Jump DCs.

Just High Jump if you have a low Speed and all those effects adding distance (do they stack BTW ?).

Only Long Jump has the distance restriction based on your speed after all.

Amusingly, Cloud Jump's wording seems to imply this distance restriction applies to High Jump, even though it does not exist there.

Cloud Jump itself adds thhat distance restriction to High Jump, I believe:

"When you successfully High Jump, use the distance jumped and distance limit for a Long Jump but don’t triple the distance."

In any case, there do still seem to be some inconsistencies in the jumping rules RAW. The malleable movement feat referenced abive seems to assume there is a distance limit on a normal Leap which is tied to land speed, but no such limit is mentioned in the Leap action description. This is probably because Leap has its own inherent limits which are smaller than your land speed (if you have no bonuses to Leap distance) and so they didn't see a need to spell it out in the action description. As Trip notes, the Long Jump action does have such a limit, but only on a success, whereas a failure has you perform a normal Leap, which does not have the limit, which can result in the strange interaction of a failure potentially allowing you to Leap further if you have enough Leap bonuses. However, and I may be mistaken here, I think this problem still exists even without the land speed cap. The Long Jump success result says you Leap a distance UP TO your check result, rounded down to the nearest 5. "Up to" is also a cap, by my reading. If you are a PC with a land speed of 30, your normal Leap distance is 15 feet, and DC for a Long Jump is 15, so this works out neatly such that success will always take you at least as far as the maximum distance of a normal Leap, and maybe further if you rolled well. Makes sense. If, however, you have, say, the Greater Spry Sinews mentioned near the start of this thread, your normal Leap distance could be 25 feet, thus creating a range where a success on a Long Jump check can take you less distance than a failure.

To the original question of the thread, both High Jump and Long Jump say you Leap on a success, and then impose their own seperate modifications to that, so I would say Leap bonuses do apply to them, but it's unclear if they modify the caps in those actions. Of we have Greater Spry Sinews, which i creases our vertical Leap distance by 6 (from a base of 3) to a final result of 9, what does that mean for High Jump, which states you Leap up to 8 feet vertically on a crit success? Is our normal Leap now just better than High Jump, or should we apply that +6 feet distance to the High Jump success/crit success results?

It seems like none of these actions were really written to consider what happens if your normal Leap is enhanced by bonuses, nor are many of the Leap-enhancing items or feats written to consider how they interact with Long/High Jump.

Taking a guess at what Paizo may have intended here and trying to make everything work together:
1. Other parts of the system seem to assume Leap has an implicit cap of no further than your land speed in addition to its normal limits, and those parts of the system cooperate more neatly if you also assume this, so I would add that in.
2. Long/High Jump both say you Leap, so I would add Leap bonuses to them, and extend most limits mentioned in those actions (like the distance limits in High Jump success/crit success and the "up to your check result" limit in Long Jump) by the amount of those bonuses, to avoid creating scenarios where a failure is better than a success.
3. However, the land speed distance cap in the Long Jump success result, as well as the implicit one added to Leap in point 1, should be unmodified by these bonuses, to make the Cloud Jump feat sensible. Because this limit applies to both Leap and Long Jump this still avoids scenarios where failure is better than success- at worst they could be equal, which is fine. This still leaves High Jump without a land speed distance cap (unless modified by the Cloud Jump feat as noted above), however High Jump distances are naturally short enough that I don't think it matters. If necessary you can assume this cap is implicit to High Jump as well- actually since we've decided that High Jump uses the Leap action it probably should already have it from that anyway.

I THINK if you run things this way everything shakes out properly, but I could be wrong.

It occurred to me yesterday that I've actually been using these new "resist all" rules for a while now. I knew the old rules, but just forgot them in the heat of combat and it made everything go more quickly and smoothly to lump all the damage together and then subtract resistance from it as opposed to having to split out each damage type and do the calculation for each.

Well that's actually not quite right either, as the new rules still want you to split up the damage types and then just pick one to substract from. So if you have resist all 10 and get hit by an attack that does 5 slashing and 5 fire damage, you get to negate either the slashing or fire damage entirely and still take 5 points of damage, rather than adding them together to 10 and resisting the whole thing.

Holy crap, wtf is that L4 Almiraj monstrosity. Into the Earth is a 1A. Any time a PC is grabbed, save or suffocate.

I think some misguided Paizo dev might genuinely think instant kills make the game fun or something, that is even more explicitly a "you're dead" ability than the L19 dragon's...

Quote:

Almirajes have a nasty habit of grabbing their prey and vigorously shaking them until they go limp. If this fails, they'll drag their prey underground until they suffocate deep in the earth. Few have ever escaped the burrow of an almiraj.

While this is obviously a different source and probably a different writer than the dragon, I think this quote lends credence to the notion that the (in my opinion rather natural) interpretation that a creature burrow-dragging you beneath the earth is burying you in such a way you are trapped and can suffocate is at least sometimes intended by Paizo, and not (as Squiggit suggests) something we are simply adding to these abilities on our own.

I think we know much more about the mechanics of Pathfinder's cosmology than almost anybody in-setting does, and we still don't know a lot and in some.cases have contradiction information about what we do know. Furthermore not even Pharasma knows everything, and with prophecy being broken even what she thought she knew (and what WE think we know about what she thought she knew) is questionable, especially about such murky matters as the distand end of the cosmos. So there's plenty of room for an "ethical necromancer" to simply disagree that what he's doing has some sort of grand cosmic blowback in the long run, and that's if he's even aware of the arguments that it is. And besides, it's not totally clear how necromancy is supposed to hasten the universe's end with what we know anyway. At best we can say it might hasten the end of the planes the Maelstrom is eating away at- planes which some say were created sometime after the universe began anyway, and thus logically are neither essential nor unable to be created again. The Windsong Testaments say the Maelstrom is older than even Pharasma! If the Maelstrom consumes everything else it will still then be feeding into Creation's Forge which produces souls and its own native outsiders and seeds whatever else exists with them, so at least these will still exist, and so will intelligent life. And how does the Void, which seemingly is not even part of this cycle but also creates its own native outsiders and sustains the undead, part of this? What about the Dark Tapestry and the Great Old Ones? Circling back to more immediate concerns, are the undead's temporary delaying of the cycle even really that big of a threat to a universe so large and so long-lasting or is Pharasma just overly paranoid? Even with so many around it certainly doesn't seem like any of the planes are about to collapae due to insufficient soul input- and if they were I'm sure Asmodeus wouldn't hesitate to drop a meteor shower on Geb to sustain the Hells, same with many of the other gods.

I'm sure people will have many different answers to these questions, but my point in saying all this is to say, there's plenty of ambiguity and unknowns here for a necromancer to feel pretty confident he's not doing anything wrong, cosmically, if he's even aware of the implications.