Dunwright's page

On the other hand, if the party's solution to "try to catch a yak" is "spin a madcap top at it", it can be a suitable challenge at any level.

To be honest, now I think your table not letting you use skills to calm an animal may be the least strange part of that entire incident.

None of us were at your table so we can't speak as to whatever fine details if any may have thrown this off, but based purely on what you've told us I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to use your skills to calm the animal (though I agree with Dragonchess Player that Diplomacy is a more suitable skill than Nature here; Nature can command an animal, but I think this is more like changing attitudes under the Diplomacy skill, and Nature's command an animal automatically fails if the creature is hostile or unfriendly anyway).

Koschei the Deathless—effectively the progenitor of the very concept of the "lich" in a form close to the modern one.

Well, Pathfinder actually did try to use this one a little; in 1e there was a demon lord called Kostchtchie, who wass a originally a mortal that struck a bargain with Baba Yaga to become immortal and had his wish twiated by having his soul placed in a torc and made him a giant, after which he fled to the Outee Rifts and eventually became a demon lord without ever having died. There was at least some mythological inspiration here, though a lot of his attributes were inherited from the D&D demin lord of the same name who was similarly loosed based on the Slavic myth, and I think he was quietly dropped from 2e, partly because they wanted to get away from shared gods with D&D due to legal concerns (see also Orcus among others) and possibly partly because that interpretation of him was extremely misogynistic (a characteristic inherited from D&D depictions- not sure if that's accurate to the myths) in a way Paizo's writing teams have moved away from depicting. It would be interesting to see a more faithful rendition attempted, but I think they might avoid it on account of the potential legal concerns re: the D&D character.

I'm not sure how one could ascertain the speed of a creature without having observed it moving, which is not something that should be specific to thralls anyway (and of course you could judge it wrongly, especially if isn't using its full speed every turn). And, some thralls have a more normal speed, like the aforementioned Skeletal Lancers. I'm not sure how relevant necromancers being "common" is; summon undead is a common spell, command undead is a common feat... and this just goes back to an earlier post I made in the thread; since the skeleton ancestry is rare, does that mean sometimes an enemy will assume a Skeleton PC is just a thrall and ignore it trying to get at the party's wizard who must obviously be my summoner until it's too late? You say "NPCs will base their assumptions on a creature based on the most common creatures it looks like", so I can't see why this wouldn't be the case. What about my uncommon/rare undead companions from the uncommon undead master archetype? Maybe I take the uncommon corpse tender archetype and bring some zombies with me (what if am a zombie, rare archetype?)? If I take the rare necrologist archetype, will people mistake my necrologist zombie horde for the necromancer's uncommon spell Zombie Horde? Nevermind that the Necromancer can himself learn the summon undead spell and the uncommon create undead ritual, and with the Conjurer of Corpses feat can target his summoned undead with spells as though they were thralls. It would seem a bit inconsistent to me to suggest "people in the world will knkw all about this class and its features because it's common" if we don't also suggest that people will sometimes mistake uncommon or rare things for the more common thing.

And for that matter, if "NPCs will base their assumptions on a creature based on the most common creatures it looks like", we then have to consider, what does a thrall even look like? This was also mentioned earlier in the thread, and the answer is "it's extremely variable".

Also, summoners are also common and the aforementiones rules about the eidolon sigils implies there will be intelligent enemies who have never seen a summoner before and don't know they work, but can make certain deductions about them through observation. "Common" does not mean "everybody in the world knows everything about them"; factually, adventurers are rare. The rarity tags are all necessarily relative to that fact.

There are just so many different types of undead and so mant ways for the player to be undead or to command undead with varying degrees of direct control, and so much variation even within the categories and types as to their capabilities... I'm fine with enemies automatically knowing things that are usually implicitly assumed to be universal knowledge in the game system (like what spaces can be walked through and what creatures you can share a space with), but I just don't see how it should be automatically assumed that everybody knows what a thrall is, can automatically identify them with no check the moment they are observed, and automatically know everything about they work and their relationship with necromancers (the class, not the generic concept which can be filled by many different classes and archetypes, some of which are also common).

The thrall has all the characteristics mentioned in the RAW and none other. We can flavor it as we wish, but yes NPCs will not confuse them with more dangerous undead, will move through their space and push them aside. Because it is exactly what the RAW says.

I will disagree slightly here. I think enemies should generally be aware they can enter and pass through a thrall's space, because it generally seems to be the case that are creature are aware of this (e.g. Tiny creatures don't need to pass some kind of Recall Knowledge check to know they can occupy the same square) and because the whole concept of "occupied space" and squares and whatnot is all a game abstraction and characters aren't really thinking in those terms anyway. I disagree that this means enemies will automatically know that the creature is a thrall, what a thrall is, what the capabilities of a thrall are, what extent of autonony it has or control the necromancer (if identified) has over it, of that it isn't some other type of undead being controlled in some other way (or if it's even being controlled at all)- enemies won't have an enyclopedic knowledge of all this stuff anyway to know it wouldn't be possible for a "normal" zombie's square to be passed through as difficult terrain (again, they wouldn't even think of it in these terms anyway), not that there even is a normal zombie (or even a normal thrall) rather than like a dozen different kinds just counting player options, let alone bestiaries.

Maybe a clarification that all of a thrall's characteristics are obvious to any onlooker, similar to what we have for eidolon, would help.

I also think this is a mischaracterization of the Summoner/Eidolon rules text. It is certainly not the case that all of an Eidolon's characteristics are obvious to any onlooker. It merely the case that an onlooker can figure out the two are connected somehow on account of the undisguisable magical sigil they share and the way they move together. Somebody with no knowledge of summoners wouldn't be able to deduce from that alone that, say, you can kill a summoner by attacking their eidolon because they share a pool of hit points. In fact, if they assumed the summoner was the master they might think they need to focus their attention on him specifically, believing that killing him will disrupt the conjuration but not the other way around.

In fact, I'm curious where PossibleCabbage is quoting from, as the only similar text I can find is:

Your magical connection with your eidolon takes the form of a sigil on each of your bodies. As long as your eidolon is manifested, the sigil glows with light and can't be covered or disguised via any means; it will shine through clothing, appear over cloaks, and remain unaffected by obfuscating magic. This, combined with the way that the two of you clearly act in tandem, makes it readily apparent to an intelligent observer that the two of you are connected in some way, even if the person has never encountered a summoner before.

Which is eminently reasonable, but notably does not say it should be obvious to any intelligent observer who's "in charge". Granted, in some cases one would probably assume correctly anyway; not a lot of people would guess the Ooze eidolon is running the show. With a Dragon Eidolon though, who's to say? One imagines a dragon will probably tend to act like it's in charge.

At this point it seems worth noting that there also thralls that can strike at enemies (lowercase strike because I don't think it's technically a Strike action) without any command from the necromancer, like those created by the Skeletal Lancers spell, which attack and damage enemies who make strikes in their reach- technically those should probably be visually distinct on account of the lances, but taking into account the visual appearance of the thralls raises its own issues as mentioned in my previous post.

Unicore keeps mentioning that thralls do not act unless commanded, but besides this not being universally true (depending on your definition of "act") as per the above, to the extent it is true it is broadly true of creatures with the minion trait (which are not thralls, though they can sometimes be used like thralls as per the Conjurer of Corpses feat) and especially mindless undead with the minion trait (which continue doing nothing if left uncommanded for a minute or more, unlike animal or sapient minions who proceed to act on their own instincts or will).

Strictly by the rules:

Companion wrote:

You can have only one animal companion at a time.

So having two different companions with different abilities would not be allowed.

Beastmaster Dedication has a very explicit override of that general rule. "Contrary to the usual rules for animal companions, this feat can grant you a second animal companion."

Correct... so what happens if you do take an archetype which grants you an animal companion when you already have one? Presumably the actual granting of an additional companion is just a dead feat, but do the subsequent upgrades from feats later in the archetype apply then to your already existing companion, or are they also dead feats? Should you even be allowed to take the archetype/feats?

Rolling untrained for lores is not an issue, asking for a reduced DC is.

Right. I think for me the pertinent question is, firstly, setting aside the Investigator with KR, is it in general correct (or rather, is it in general something you as a GM would allow) to let somebody using an untrained Lore skill to RK gain beneficial DC adjustmentd to that check for using a specific Lore? Whether one answers affirmatively or negatively, I would say proceeding from there there is no reason to change that one way or the other for an Investigator using the KR class feature, which in the case of an untrained RK check should just be providing a flat bonus over what it would look like to be attemlting the same thing without that class feature.

Setting the finicky rules questions about actions needed to raise a shield after being downed and all that, assuming he could have done this legitimately RAW I don't see how it would be such a big issue narratively that it would break my immersion and cause me to want to disallow it. Truthfully, I don't see the issue at all. Maybe what you're picturing in your mind's eye is totally different from me but it seems perfectly plausible to me that you can be pushing yourself off the ground with one hand and also use your other hand to interpose a shield between you and an inciming blow. It's not even the sort of feat of superhuman athletics that RPG heroes are typically capable of anyway, that just seems like an entirely ordinary thing. More philososphically, I would say when narrating the effects of rule interactions like this (if it even needs to be narrated instead of just saying "okay you blocked it") the onus is usually on you to translate the rules abstractions in a way that's coherent. If what you're imagining doesn't quite work for you, imagine something else. I don't think this is such an out-there scenario you can't possibly imagine how to describe it sensibly.

I think art of Azaersi has consistently used the 1e Hob design in 2e. In World Guide there's one art piece where she's a little footballish, but not to the typical degree and that's the only one I've seen where she's actually depicted up against other hobs, and her headshot is distinctly human-shaped with tusks.

I'd guess they just don't want to outright redesign an actual NPC, even if the ancestry has gotten a remodel.

Personally I like the football head design, the 1e version look too much like Orcs and doesn't link to the iconic PF Goblin design to me.

Yeah, I think because Azaersi is an imlortant named character with an established appearance they don't want to totally reshape her head/face. This does create an inconsistency with the rest of the species being redesigned but it's not that big of a deal and I think it's an understandable choice.

Personally I find the football heads a little silly, but on the other hand I do appreciate it being used as a shared distinguishing feature that sets the goblinoids (goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears) apart from other humanoids- it makes the "goblinoid" category feel more like a real coherent thing and not just a somewhat randon smattering of otherwise unrelated species.

The only descriptions I can find of thrall appearances are actually under the Grim Fascination selections, which say:

Your thralls often resemble vampiric spawn or constructs of hardened blood.

Your thralls generally take on the form of zombies and other creatures of dead flesh.

Your thralls often resemble ghosts and spirits.

No such description accompanies the Bone Grim Fascination, perhaps because skeletons are the "default". Even here though, these seem to be more like suggestions than anything ("often", "generally", etc.), so it's probably intended to be the case that you can flavor your thralls' appearance however suits you (within reason, and GM abiding). Generally when that's the case it's probably safer to assume that the appearance has no mechanical significance (it's usually not great for balance to let people gain advantages or disadvantage for flavir choices), and so maybe thralls should just look like "thralls" to enemies and not specifically skeletons or zombies or ghosts or whatever else... but that all seems very open to interpretation. Also, some Thrall spells do call out a specific appearance, such as:

You create a perfect thrall that’s the conglomeration of all aspects of necromancy. The perfected thrall is made of pure, dense muscle, covered in a layer of hardened bone, and inhabited by the spirit of a mighty warrior.

Or Skeletal Lancers, which specifically says it conjures skeletons wielding bony spears (that are thralls). Probably this latter one could be reflavored to suit your usual thralls' theme.

Spells that affect multiple creatures in an area can have both an Area entry and a Targets entry. A spell that has an area but no targets listed usually affects all creatures in the area indiscriminately.

Pain of Ages has an area listed but no targets, so it's at least a little ambiguous... granted, the rules only say a spell with an area but no targets listed usually affects all creatures, not always, and Pain of Ages specifically calls out enemies in its description, unlike (just to toss sone examples out) Fireball (another spell with an area but no targets) which makes no mention of enemies or allies or Divine Aura which has a Targets entry that limits it to allies. I would lean toward saying it only effects enemies, since that's the natural English reading and there is no firm rule I see that would counter this, but I do wish Paizo would put in the effort to be a little clearer and just add a Targets entry to spells like this if it's intended to not affect all creatures, especially since by their own assertion in the Player Core this should usually be the case (which naturally means it will cast at least some doubt on the natural English reading of these spells when it is not done for many readers).

Take a wizard's spell book away from him. Wait a day. He now has a bunch of empty spell slots he can't fill, because he needs a spell book to do that. I don't see how you can claim that a spell book is useless.

To be clear they're saying the spellbooks sucks as a game/class design feature, not that if you're trying to play a wizard you should burn your spellbook.

I dunno Raven. I feel like it’s pretty simple to find plenty. For example Point Blank Stance keeps telling me to hold its beer. Why does anyone need a feat to take an action to enter a stance to aim better? Can’t you just…take an action and aim better - like without the need of the feat? Or even better, the Archer archetype says hold *their* beer, as they don’t get it until…level 4. As an…Archer.

The action is tax enough. It isn’t some uber special part of being a fighter, and shouldn’t be the archer’s 4th level ability to suddenly aim better.

Vicious Swing and Double Slice are in the kitchen with the drummers and bass players crying into *their* beers because there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about either of them that needs a feat to lock you from doing them.

So if stopping folx from just doing everyday things is what feats are for then yes. Drink yourself silly, working as intended. But I’m not a fan. Fighters should have feats that do something cinematic, narratively interesting and perhaps, actually skilled. None of those three seem like “feats” of grandeur.

I get it. You’ll have lots of reasons why mechanically and game-development wise these absolutely need to be feats because “reasons”. But I just don’t agree. They are merely actions that anyone should be able to undertake. What about Vicious Strike is *more* than a PC should be able to do without the feat? Or Double Slice, or Point Blank Stance?

Being generous here I think you're just complaining that the feat descriptions in question don't sound epic enough for you. That's a fair opinion though I don't really have a problem with them myself. Being less generous I think that if you think things like the ability to make multiple attacks at the same MAP, or to add extra damage dice to your attack, or to eliminate a range penalty from a ranged weaapon are all things that don't need to be feats because their narrative descriptions sound like things you should just be able to do because you can describe how you would take an action that could cause those effects, then you might prefer a more rules-lite TTRPG system where you can just narratively describe the consequences of making a wild swing or attacking with two weapons simultaneously and you don't need to worry about fiddly things like damage dice and attack rolls. Pathfinder puts a lot of emphasis on the G in RPG.

I don't feel like the people inside the game know they live in a world where every enemy fills a 5x5' space. I don't think it's reasonable to say that thrall mechanics would be invisible to uninformed observers. It seems weird to treat the Necromancer or their thralls as some unknowable enigma as if people haven't been dealing with the hundred kinds of undead for thousands of years.

Personally, the only thing that makes sense to me is that somebody looking at a thrall 'just knows' it only counts as difficult terrain in the same way they 'just know' where to stand on the 5' grid--it's an abstraction of something that isn't materially real which exists for our benefit. They only know they can't pass through the wide gaps between enemies because it's simpler for our purposes not to drill any deeper that in the basic positioning game.

Besides, a shambling troop already operates on basically the same principle--not all zombies are hard to move past or individually difficult to kill.

I'm probably inclined to agree that creatures should be able to judge that thralls are difficult terrain that can be pushed through, just because that's how things generally work, at least as far as I know- creatures can usually identify difficult terrain if it's not concealed somehow and are generally aware of what creatures they can share a space with (e.g. swarms, or tiny creatures occupying the same square). This is basically a gameplay abstraction and so not necessarily any more meta than any of the normal acts of playing the game itself. I don't agree that identifying a given skeleton or zombie or ghost or however else you flavor it as a thrall should be so automatic; there are just far too many ways for there to be any of those things around.

Dunwright wrote:

Would hostile undead be willing targets of an enemy's Harm spell, though? I mean, there's nothing that says an enemy can't be a willing target of a spell of course. The only rule I can find is that as NPCs the GM will decide if they are willing. But how does being a willing target of a spell even work? Does the enemy automatically get to know instinctively what the spell will be or what effect it will have on them as it hits them and they make the split-second decision to be willing or not? I mean, maybe. I figure it usually works that way for allies in practice, if only because the other real people at the table can hear you say what spell you're trying to cast so they're bound to know what you're doing on a meta level anyway... but do enemies? I'm not so sure it's RAW that an enemy gets an instant mind download of what the exact effects of an enemy spellcaster's spell would be any time they are given the option of being a willing target or not. Well, maybe they don't know and can choose to be willing anyway. Actually, they probably should be able to, since:

I feel it has to work that way though, right? Being willing a beneficial effect like that. Otherwise we wouldn't have feats like Selective Energy that allows Heal to exclude targets for the purpose of not healing unwanted targets, and Heal is written exactly like Harm but flipped on damage and targets.

Also, thank you TheFinish for breaking it all down like I wish I could in my head! It's much easier to visualize laid out like that.

And yes, I think everyone is on the same page on what the RAI is. I mean, the example given isn't shy about it either. Getting it to match up with the RAW is what stumped me. Maybe it's a good candidate for errata/clarification but now I'm not sure if it should be on the Necromancer ability or on the Harm spell.

Hmm. I guess you're right, there seems to be an implicit assumption that any time you have the option to be willing or unwilling to an effect you get to automatically know exactly what that effect is. If this wasn't the case I'm sure there'd ever be much risk of accidentally healing an enemy with Heal, which is one of the things the Sleective Energy feat calls out as something it can help you avoid doing. It's not really stated outright, and the feat could just be calling out an rare scenario (since it does have other uses which are also mentioned), but I think based on that it's more likely the designers meant for enemies to know automatically whether it'd be beneficial to be a willing receipt of your spells.

How often does it come up that someone tries to forcibly heal an unwilling target? What is the plot and story purpose for needing that written into the spell's mechanics?

Probably not that often, but Rahadoumis are a thing in the setting and RPing as one is basically begging for the moment you get to reject the Cleric's divine healing. Just to give one example.

The Raven Black wrote:

Way I read Mastery of Life and Death, the Invert Harm feat and the Harm spell, when you cast 3-actions Harm with only MoLaD :

1. Living ally, you choose vitality damage for the target = no harm done.

2. Undead ally, you choose void damage for the target = no harm done and healing occurs.

3. Living enemy, you choose void damage for the target = they get hurt.

4. Undead enemy, you choose vitality damage for the target = they get hurt. And they do not get healed because it is vitality they get rather than void energy. Otherwise, the example provided at the end of MoLaD description would make no sense.

The problem (and confusion) is that this isn't how Vitality/Void damage (or healing) work, nor how the harm spell works.

A normal harm spell has two very different effects depending on what it targets:

If it targets a living creature, it deals void damage.
If it targets a willing undead creature, it heals them.

Mastery of Life and Death has two relevant parts that change this:

- "Whenever you Cast a Spell or use an ability that would deal void or vitality damage, you can choose for the spell to do either void or vitality damage to each target separately." -> This is what lets us change the damage in harm to vitality when we target a living creature.

- "When you Cast a Spell or use an ability that would affect or target only living creatures or only undead creatures, you can affect and target both. This does not apply to the healing effects of spells or abilities." -> This is what lets us target Undead creatures with harm's void damage (which otherwise can only target living creatures), which we then change to vitality thanks to the other clause in Mastery of Life and Death.

The problem is that harm is worded such that these changes effectively make the spell say this:

"If the target is a living or undead creature, you deal 1d8 void or vitality damage to it (chosen for each target...

Would hostile undead be willing targets of an enemy's Harm spell, though? I mean, there's nothing that says an enemy can't be a willing target of a spell of course. The only rule I can find is that as NPCs the GM will decide if they are willing. But how does being a willing target of a spell even work? Does the enemy automatically get to know instinctively what the spell will be or what effect it will have on them as it hits them and they make the split-second decision to be willing or not? I mean, maybe. I figure it usually works that way for allies in practice, if only because the other real people at the table can hear you say what spell you're trying to cast so they're bound to know what you're doing on a meta level anyway... but do enemies? I'm not so sure it's RAW that an enemy gets an instant mind download of what the exact effects of an enemy spellcaster's spell would be any time they are given the option of being a willing target or not. Well, maybe they don't know and can choose to be willing anyway. Actually, they probably should be able to, since:

Even if you or your character don't know what the effect is, such as if your character is unconscious, you still decide if you're willing.

But why would a hostile NPC choose to he a willing target of an enemy's unidentified spell? The GM decides if an NPC is a willing target or not, and I can't think of any reason why, were I a GM, I would have enemy creatures be willing targets of the party's spells without knowing what they are. If the enemy question has identified the spell somehow and knows it will be beneficial to them to be willing to it, then sure.

In any case, this wording would not mean that by RAW Harm modified by MoLaD would both deal vitality damage to and also heal undead; it would mean they take vitality damage and may also be healed if they are a willing target, which for an NPC is determined by the GM.

Necromancers and thus thralls are Common in the setting. Even though they are new to us.

NPCs shall react accordingly. It is not metagaming when it is IC common sense / common knowledge.

So, at your table NPCs would be able toe easily and automatically distinguish undead thralls from, say, undead minions created by the Create Undead ritual, or summoned undead from the Summon Undead spell, or undead companions like those from the Undead Master archetype, or an undead eidolon (at least that one will have a summoner's mark), or a horde from the Necrologist archetype, or a Skeleton or Zombie PC in your party? If several of these are on the battlefield can everybody instantly and unerringly tell which is which? What about mindless or unintelligent NPCs?

Well, some of those options are rare instead of common. So maybe NPCs will assume my Skeleton PC is a much more common thrall and try to pass through me like difficult terrain on the way to party's spellcaster (surely they must have summoned me!) and get whacked in the face for it. I guess that's what common sense gets you in a fantasy world!

I don’t think their wizard archetype needs to reflect making great choices all the time.

Contrarily, I don't think page space should ever be wasted on character options that are mechanically bad choices just because it makes some sort of sense lorewise. Inevitably this is going to happen sometimes by accident, but it should probably be avoided to whatever extent possible.

I'm speculating here, but I think part of the confusion on this point is because, as the OP notes, "class and ancestry are chosen at the same time", and this seems to carry an unfounded implication that this means two incompatible options can be legally selected together because neither one has priority. But this isn't actually a rule anywhere, and I think if you imagined a scenario where they did have priority it becomes clearer that it just shouldn't be legal to take inconpstoble options (even if their incompatibility is a future commitment).

Say for example a character took a feat *V* at level two which contained the clause: you cannot take any feat other than *W* or *X* as your 6th level class feat. Now suppose upon reaching 4th level they wish to take a feat *Y* that says: you must select feat *Z* as your 6th level class feat. Would you say it it legal for the character to take feat *Y* even though it will "crash the game" at 6th level? Well, maybe you would, but for me it's obvious enough to say the character simply cannot take feat *Y*. They're just as incompatible as if that character had reached level 6th and tried to take a class feat other than *W* or *X*: you just can't do that.

This same principle of incompatibility still applies in the actual situation where you are trying to pick these options "simultaneously" before the start of the game, there's just no priority and no choices already locked in. But the correct resolution (IMO) is that you simply can't pick both of those.

Gray Warden wrote:

- Level 1.

- Character creation: Ancestry and Class are picked at the same time.
- I pick Ancient Elf (XYZ Dedication) and Gunslinger (Spellshot).
- This is 100% legal RAW.

(bolding mine). This is where you run into trouble.

You are, at level 1, simultaneously committing to both taking and not taking a particular feat. That is clearly impossible. Therefore, the combo is not allowed by RAW. The fact that actual feat does not come until level 2 is irrelevant: The commitments, and therefore the illegality, come online at level 1.

This does not appear to be the majority view (although I really do not understand why - "you cannot take incompatible options" is damn near a tautology), but I am comfortable saying the majority is wrong in this case. I am not going to get into a protracted argument about it (because I already have - I'd link the previous thread, but search seems to be down). EDIT: Found it! I must admit that my arguments in that thread were not always as good as they could have been, but the basic logic underlying them was (and remains) sound.

I make no argument that this RAW interaction is RAI, or even good (although the principle of "there is no need to specifically state you cannot take incompatible options - their incompatibility is enough" is both). But that it is RAW is crystal clear.

I'm inclined to agree. The incompatibility is already "locked in" at level 1 and can't be averted by any means, so to my mind the build is already illegal at level 1 and it makes no sense to say it was legal at level 1 and became illegal at level 2. I would say RAW you just can't build that character. I would argue this would be the case even if the incompatibility were obscure and hard-to-predict rules itneraction that only becomes relevant at level 18, but thankfully this is a very obvious interaction that the player or GM should notice pretty easily so you can probably nip it in the bud at character creation (or devise a houserule to allow it if you prefer), so it's not that big of a deal.

RAW your ancestry is just Skeleton and whatever you want to say your skeleton was made from is irrelevant (it might not even be just one thing, since the skeleton ancestry describes seeking out new bones to mend yourself as its undead hunger). The Skeleton ancestry is not a template being applied over something else. If you wany to ignore RAW and use flavor to effect your vision abilities mechanically, consider that skeletons don't even have eyes.

Thralls cannot make skill checks. Locked doors, even trivially locked ones cannot be opened by them. Same with heavy or stuck doors that might require athletics checks. Set up traps on the doors to trigger after unlocking unless the PCs manage a high thievery check.

Thralls are not alive and are mindless. They probably would not trigger most haunts and traps that sense or target living creatures/thinking minds would ignore them.

Thralls are slow. Without feat investment using them as minesweepers would be time consuming. A nercomancer would be moving at below half speed because they need to spend time to command the thrall forward periodically and standard movement for thralls is 15ft. Put a time pressure on your players.

Thralls are not ever-lasting. You'd be well within your rights to say a thrall coming into an encounter has a reduced lifespan since it was summoned before the fight.

Thralls have 1 HP. Are of effect traps, nested effects, multi-pronged ambushes... all of these could take out the thralls and threaten the PCs or lure them into a false sense of security.

Necromancers aren't uncommon. You are justified in having suitably intelligent enemies identify thralls and react much more tactically.

Let your players have their victories here by being able to bypass or work around problems with their thrall supply but nothing about the advantages they give is insurmountable or 'irreparably broken'.

Some of these are relevant points, some of these are not. For the purposes of "minesweeping" it doesn't matter that thralls are slow, have low health and are short-lived- the whole point of using them for this is that they're expendable, and new thralls can be endlessly summoned as a one-action cantrip. Their 15 feet speed hardly even matters for this purpose, you can spend the same action you'd use to command one making 2-3 new ones up to 30 feet away from you, or use 2 actions to create 1-2 in that range and immediately command one to move an additional 15 feet. The slow speed is relevant in combat or if you wanted to try to march with an army surrounding you but it really isn't an impediment to using them as trap bait. The points about them being mindless and unable to take skill checks or or other complex actions are valid and do present some important limits to what kinds of traps or hazards a thrall can actually help you with.

Ultimately the class that revolves around being able to constantly and effortlessly create undead fodder is going to excel at solving problems that can be solved by throwing fodder ahead of you, which describes some but certainly not all of the dangers that you might encounter in a dungeon. I don't think this is necessarily such a big deal or a game breaker personally but it is kind of an inherent feature of the class. Personally I think if you find your dungeons have been trivialized by letting somebody send a thrall to walk ahead of them it probably wasn't a very complex dungeon to begin with. The same problems could also probably be solved with some ten foot poles, ropes, some nice throwable rocks, etc. I mean what, were they just walking headfirst into traps and facetanking them before?

QuidEst wrote:

Gisher wrote:

QuidEst wrote:

Gisher wrote:

On the topic of Rune traditions, does anyone else find it strange that Thullax, Rune of Corrosion is Arcane rather than Primal?

The other offensive damaging runes may be primal, but they also have elemental connections, unlike acid. Seems like a fair enough distinction to put it under arcane instead.

I thought acid was associated with Earth just like cold is associated with Water and electricity is associated with Air.

In PF1, yeah. Not in PF2.

Yeah, Kineticist versatile blasts swapped earth to poison. Wood is also poison for whatever reason

I'm not so sure versatile blasts is the most solid place to look for the "typical" elemental associations in this edition since it's explicity unusual manifestations: it also assigns cold to both fire and air, electricity to metal and, notably, acid to water, which means acid would still have an elemental association if you were using this as your guide. I would say the actual base elemental blasts of kineticist are more likely to be typical, which are:

Air: electricity or slashing
Earth: bludgeoning or piercing
Fire: fire
Metal: piercing or slashing
Water: bludgeoning or cold
Wood: bludgeoning or vitality

Dr strange is definitely a wizard. It's all study and practice (at least as far as the movie was concerned)

In D&D/Pathfinder terms comic Strange is really more of a Warlock/Witch than anything, as most of his magic involves invoking specific supernatural patrons (like the Vishanti or Cytorrak) who lend him magical energy for his spells (and occassionally come calling on him to repay his debt, like when the Vishanti called on him to be the general of their forces for some thousands of years in a supernatural war), or using magic artifacts which isn't particularly coded to any class.

My opinions:

1a) I can see no reason in the rules why a voluntary fall wouldn't work. No such distinction is made in the trigger, and the flavor text (which I don't suggest reading mechanically anyway, but even if you do) only says must be "imperiled" by the fall, which can still be the case even if you jumped off willingly.
1b) The destination must be an edge or handhold within 30 feet. That seems pretty clear.

2a-2b) Afterimage is pretty unclear here but the presence of the illusion trait and the text both imply it should be able to deceive others. It's unclear but I would suggest a creature would need to spend an action interacting with the illusion in some way to disbelieve it, whether by a seek check or trying to hit it or moving into its space. Since it fails all checks it is easy to catch. If the afterimage cannot fool anybody it should not have the illusion trait.
2c) Yes, you can have multiple afterimages active.

3) It should have the teleportation trait, yes.

Requiring them to be from a sapient source probably a good way to make the hungers relevant for that kind of system. AFAIK only ghouls actually have a requirement for humanoid flesh in Golarion canon but I could be wrong about that. Most of the other hunger requirements aren't that bad otherwise, people eat blood sausages IRL. Brain-eating is a little less common nowadays but presumably zombies don't need to worry about prion diseases. But maybe you could tweak this for individual types of undead for interesting narratives. The zombie archetype may not have a strict requirememt for humanoid brains, but it is described as constantly deteriorating and needing to repair itself and has a feat that lets it gain a boost to recall knowledge checks after eating a humanoid brain. What if we altered it so that a zombie can sustain itself on non-sapient brains but it take intelligence penalties for doing so and risks eventually becoming a mindless zombie if it doesn't feast on a sapient brain for too long?

Yeah, I've even considered playing an all Undead campaign where the PCs were unwillingly turned into Undead and as ancillary system, they need to make periodic rolls to maintain humanity (conceptually similar to what Vampire the Masquerade does). I haven't actually came up with an entire ruleset on the descent into Evil/lack of humanity, but I think the idea could make for an interesting campaign if the whole group wanted to explore the concept of humanity.

Definitely sounds like an interesting concept, I haven't fully read through PF1E's Horror Adventures, but I remember back when I was running Rise of the Runelords, I got to skim it, and it had a sanity system. I'm currently starting to read Starfinder 1E's Signal of Screams Adventure Path, which also seems to have some corruption-based mechanisms, but haven't started on it just yet. But Horror Adventures might be a good start to jump off from.

Never played VtM, so maybe this is already a thing there, but one idea I have regarding the idea of rolling to maintain "humanity" for undead is incorporating the lore from Book of the Dead (and maybe written elesewhere too, not sure) that different undead each have a distinct hunger that they must satiate (blood for vampires, brains for zombies, humanoid flesh for ghouls, etc.) and having distinct "undead hunger" stages that progress the longer you've gone without sating your hunger and make rolls for maintaining "humanity" harder. This places pressure on PCs to "feed" to maintain control of themselves, which itself can be an ethical or at least practical dilemma and may lead them to decisions that gradually cost them "humanity" anyway.

Source:

Dragon Eidolon Impossible Magic p75 (notes from AoN)

Quote:

Dragon Eidolon

Astral Dragon Eidolon
Source Impossible Magic pg. 75
Because dragons have a strong connection to magic, their minds can often leave an echo floating in the Astral Plane. Such an entity is extremely powerful but unable to interact with the outside world on their own. Dragon eidolons manifest in the powerful, scaled forms they had in life; most take the form of great dragons (albeit smaller), but some manifest as drakes or other draconic beings. You have forged a connection with such a dragon eidolon and together, you seek to grow as powerful as an archdragon.
Tradition choose Arcane, Divine, Occult, or Primal
Traits (Variable) The trait matching the eidolon’s tradition
Home Plane Astral Plane

So that natural state of the Eidolon without the summoner is...

An Echo floating in the Astral Plan.
That creature but is UNABLE to interact with the outside world on their own.

My very arbitrary conclusion from reading the above was that it doesn't have a body on its own plane to return to and bleed out, and play video games while not being a hero/villain in the 'conventional' universe.

Having thought on this a little more, I think if we're being totally fair, narratively speaking there probably *isn't* just one way that eidolons are supposed to work. Some of the eidolon descriptions like Angel eidolons state they are "true angels" from the celestial realms who work with mortal partners to carry a special message to the mortal world. Others like the Ooze eidolon state that they did not even exist prior to you forming them with your mind and they don't seemingly have anywhere they would actually *go* when you dismiss them; their listed home plane is simply the Universe (presumably this is just where you first formed them) and as an arcane eidolon it is a "being formed into simple shapes through arcane magic and held together through mental fortitude", so it would make more sense for it to simply dissolve or something when not active. Narratively, it's actually probably fine for different eidolons to function differently, and even for Paizo to be vague about how eidolons in general or specific types of eidolons work to let players adapt the class fantasy as they see fit, but mechanically for the sake of balance Paizo would probably prefer for eidolons to mostly work the same except for in the specific ways they are mechanically noted to be different. This tension is fine if you can keep the narrative openness from crossing paths with the more precise mechanical rules, but unfortunately things like conditions persisting when unmanifested or the banishment spell call attention to the specific details of how eidolons work. This is an unfortunate situation because Paizo would probably actually rather *not* clarify that sort of thing, but stuff like "does my eidolon keep burning and taking damage if I unmanifest" probably shouldn't be that ambiguous. You could just handwave this by saying "you're not supposed to be worried about your eidolons mechanically when they're not present", which is probably how this was often handled at many/most tables in practice, but I suspect (as Unicore suggested above) that this new rule was added because Paizo was worried that people were abusing that forced dissonance to let eidolons tank curses or poison and just clear the condition by "resetting" the eidolon, which is also not something Paizo intended to allow. This is possibly why the "dissolving" text was also removed to avoin giving credence to the notion that this should be plainly possible, though it has also confused the issue of, again, how exactly eidolons even work, and arguably changed it rather substantially for a quiet mid-edition update if we try to really make sense of it.

Because of (what I suspect are) conflicting developer intentions here between gameplay and narrative I think this probably won't be errata'd and the "GM will decide what happens if it's unclear" bit will do a lot of heavy lifting. Resolving some of these tensions properly would probably require sitting down and rethinking the summoner from the start and how they really want it to work and aligning the rules to that model, which is probably not on the table for the near future.

An eidolon having two seperate bodies, one of which is constantly remade and dissolved while the other just chills in the home plane somewhere, makes even less sense (and seems even less justified by the rules) to me than it just dissolving when unmanifested, for so many reasons I don't even want to bother trying to explicate them all... but to keep it to the relevant question I'm not sure how sickened would be a condition which automatically transfers itself from the manifested body to the "real" (platonic?) body and then transfers itself back to the manifested body if manifested again before clearing, nor can I deduce why one would think this would apply to the sickened condition but not burning or bleeding- and if I could make any logical sense of this notion I still certainly wouldn't wany to run through the full list of conditions and try to figure out which ones are transferable and which ones must magically disappear for reasons. Is blinded transferable? The eyes that were blinded no longer exist after all. What about fatigued? And so on and so forth...

Dunwright wrote:

If you're not bothering to command the thralls to follow you then I guess you could just keep spawning them 30 feet in front of you as you travel and have a 300 foot line of thralls standing still 30 feet apart trailing conspicuously behind you as you travel... but with the limited movement speed of thralls, the limited range of grave spells and the limit on how many you can command at once you still wouldn't *functionally* have that many thralls at the start of combat.

EDIT: I hadn't considered the blood necromancer thing, I guess it could be useful to have a steady drip of HP refreshing every round.

Indeed. In any case, the thing I reached with my GM was basically just a compromise to smooth out narrative time and avoid exactly these kinds of debates, constantly going back and forth about the rules. We don't even count the passage of time overly much in narrative time (kind of the point of it), since the whole purpose of it is 'abstract stuff since there is no time pressure', and similar to how we've started to simplify things like lockpicking, it's easier here to say 'I order my three thralls to stand besides the beast with platters to get the slices of toffee' rather than 'I use Command a Thrall to order this thrall to go stand there with a tray. I use Command a Thrall to order this other thrall to go stand there with a tray...' ect.

As said by QuidEst (need to answer their post, I forgot), the petty laziness is a huge part of the fantasy of the class for me. Just having undead do stuff instead of the character.

Yeah, I think it makes sense to just come up with some simplified way of handling exploration mode thralls rather than trying to work out (and keep track of) the logistics of how many thralls you can create and command and blah blah blah while moving, which is both annoying and is also probably not something Paizo really intended for anybody to try to work out or even thought much about... I might have chosen to limit it to one thrall while moving though (with the option to stop in place and make more if you need them for something), since "starting combat with two fresh thralls out" is a 14th level feat in Instinctual Creation which gives at least some indication of where the designers' heads were at with this sort of thing. Letting you start combat with three thralls out with their full one minute duration remaining with no feat cost is probably breaking the intended power curve of the class at least a little.

If you're not bothering to command the thralls to follow you then I guess you could just keep spawning them 30 feet in front of you as you travel and have a 300 foot line of thralls standing still 30 feet apart trailing conspicuously behind you as you travel... but with the limited movement speed of thralls, the limited range of grave spells and the limit on how many you can command at once you still wouldn't *functionally* have that many thralls at the start of combat.

EDIT: I hadn't considered the blood necromancer thing, I guess it could be useful to have a steady drip of HP refreshing every round. A 17th level blood puppeteer necromancer who did this could have like 15 HP flowing in every round for the first ~10 rounds of combat, not to mention the possibility of healing out of combat while on the march... that's some pretty remarkable cheese right there. On the other hand you could shut this down if you argue thralls aren't "destroyed" when their duration ends but only when something actively kills them (whether an enemy or a grave spell), but that seems like a pretty ambiguous language argument.

Trixleby wrote:

Sure. And Thralls still only last for 1 minute.

Edit:

From the text itself:

"A thrall is a level –1 creature with the mindless and undead traits. It's not a minion, nor does it have the summoned trait. It has 1 Hit Point and is immune to bleed, death effects, disease, mental, and poison. Thralls automatically fail all checks, and any check made against a thrall automatically succeeds. They can take actions only when commanded to by a grave spell or necromancer ability. A thrall is temporary and is destroyed after 1 minute if no other duration is listed."

Bolded emphasis mine. There is no way to have an "Army of Thralls" ready before combat because they only last for 1 minute. So if taking a 10 minute break, and refocusing, and still casting Create a Thrall, only the last 3 would remain during the last minute of that 10 minutes.

Yes. Thralls last one minute. I am perfectly aware of that. Seriously, at what point did I indicate I wasn't ? You're treating me as if I know literally nothing of the class and haven't read its most basic rules. Which is deeply confusing, to say the least. Plus, how is that a limitation ? When I say army I don't mean 'hundreds of thralls', I mean like 20-30 thralls. A large group of minions by PF2E standards, swarms excluded.

If you have one minute of exploration, assuming you spend one action moving every round, you can cast Create a Thrall once per round and still have an action left over to do whatever you want. Assuming you only get one Create a Thrall cast per round (though you could argue for two, but that's a very forced and extreme interpretation of the rules, I think we can all agree), that's three thralls a round for puppeteer. Assuming you do this for one minute or longer (and generally it will take your party more than one minute to move to the next fight), that's thirty thralls out and about at the start of the fight, with three crumbling every round (starting at the beginning of your first turn) until a minute has passed and...

I think the argument is that this doesn't work if you're actually moving because you don't have the actions to command 30 thralls to follow you while also moving yourself and constantly generating new thralls. If you find a hidden spot out of an enemy's perception you could try to quickly conjure up an army to ambush then with but you can't actually just march around with that many thralls.

Telling me that, for example, a divine eidolon is "formed of spiritual essence" doesn't really move the needle toward it not existing when unmanifested for me because, as far as I am aware, it is also perfectly accurate to describe normal non-eidolon angels or demons in the setting as being "formed of spiritual essence". Furthermore, what a being is formed of doesn't have any bearing on whether it ceases to exist when unmanifested. You seem to think these are necessarily related but this is just a non-sequitur to me.

Playwars wrote:

To simplify things, in exploration/narrative time my character has three thralls with her at all times, to do with as I please.

I’ll have to read the class writeup, but it is interesting to me that you can have a thrall (or three!) “with” you in Exploration mode or a more narrative moment. I thought Create Thrall was an Encounter mode Action and created a thrall in a tacit space on a combat map. Even the class writeup mentions that in Encounter Mode you “might summon a thrall to trigger traps”. That’s a little different to having “three thralls with (one) at all times”.

That "might summon" text is actually under "while exploring", which definitely implies exploration mode to me. Anyway, while you're correct that this definitely isn't actually in the rules I think what the OP was getting at is that this was done to simplify things, because there's technically nothing that prevents you from just spamming the create thrall cantrip to always have thralls active, so their GM just simplified this into letting you have some always-active thralls in exploration. This follows the general principle of good game design that if the optimal way to play is tedious you should either make that not optimal or not tedious.

EDIT: Actually though, you could probably cover this with the Repeat a Spell activity in exploration and simply say that you can keep your thralls up but it will slow you down.

Yeah, I have to say I don't really see any solid evidence anymore for the position that eidolons don't physically exist when unmanifested, and I see a lot of strong evidence to the contrary. I prefer that answer narratively, but I'm not so pleased with the notion that we should have to track things like persistent damage. In general I think you shouldn't have to worry much about your eidolon in a mechanical sense when it's in its home plane; it might technically make sense for your demon eidolon to pick a fight with some greater demon in the outer rifts while you were sleeping and get killed, but your GM would be a jerk to actually do something like that to you. My [i]guess[/] as to the intention of this rule is that it's meant to make it so you don't just immediately unmanifest and remanifest your eidolon between combats to clear negative conditions, and I think tracking persistent damage while unmanifested is probably outside og the intended scope of this, though it isn't stated clearly. I don't think the rules on eidolons are well equipped to handle what happens if an eidolon "dies" while unmanifested either. The rule does say the GM will make a ruling on specific effects when it's unclear, so I expect some table variation here.

SuperParkourio wrote:

Errenor wrote:

SuperParkourio wrote:

There's also still the summoner's precaution spell, reprinted in Impossible Magic, which unmanifests your eidolon to prevent one instance of damage (unless it's a death effect), "though your eidolon still suffers any other adverse effects that accompanied the damage."

This spell was already strong evidence in SoM that the eidolon still suffers adverse effects while unmanifested, and the new Unmanifested Eidolon section further supports that by clarifying that those effects are still there.

Not at all? It suffers them and they do nothing while unmanifested (but the time still ticks per the new paragraph).

What "suffering" is being done if the effects do nothing? Like, if your eidolon crit fails against banishment and their physical form is now banned from the Universe for 1 week, is your eidolon still "suffering" if the ban just... doesn't count?

If the eidolon had a physical form anywhere, it would have its own HP. The physical manifestation of your Eidolon is a part of you, not it. I would absolutely not have banishment work on Eidolon, especially not to ban it from the game for a week of play time.

I agree that banishment working on an eidolon seems a bit unfair to summoner PCs and I think it's reasonable to houserule that it shouldn't, but I think by both RAW and RAI it is meant to.

From the full Eidolon rules in both Secrets of Magic and Impossible Magic (the wording doesn't seem to have changed):

This is the eidolon's home plane, where they go when unmanifested. This can help you determine the effects of abilities dependent on a creature's home plane, such as banishment.

That actually also carries implications for the conversation about unmanifested eidolons (they "go" to their home plane when unmanifested, whatever that means), but more relevantly it seems pretty clear banishment is supposed to work on eidolons (which is a hidden point in favor of eidolons whose home plane is the universe in most compaigns).

Taking away a PC's main class feature for a week is pretty brutal though... I would think many GMs would prefer to just houserule that away.

I wasn't aware of any eidolons that call the Universe home.

Per AoN there are at least 4 eidolons that always call the universe home (Beast, Ooze, Plant, Swarm) and one that can call the universe home (Aberrant). I think that makes it actually the most commonly listed home plane for eidolons.

Isn't Manifest Eidolon just teleporting the eidolon from their home plane to your plane or vice versa?

How would that work with eidolons whose home plane is the universe? Do Beast Eidolons just get teleported to somewhere else on Golarion when they unmanifest?

EDIT: I guess this is the same question as how do eidolons from other planes work if the summoner goes to that plane... the "eidolons don't physically exist when unmanifested" way of thinking about them probably introduces the least issues here, but I do find it lame because I like to imagine a Devil or Angel eidolon has its own existence doing devil/angel things in hell/heaven/etc. when not actively aiding its mortal partner.

First I need to state what the purpose of the rarity tag is, in my view, to discuss it clearly. TTRPGs are social games and the question of what content to allow in them is a social negotiation. Generally, if you sign up to play PF2E, you expect PF2E content to be presumptively permitted because that's the system you agreed to. If something is disallowed, the onus (in a social sense) falls on the GM to justify that decision to their players to their satisfaction to avoid discontent or conflict. That sounds pretty serious, but it isn't necessarily; these discussions happen all the time and they're usually friendly and reasonable. Still, this is an obligation which lies with the GM socially, and it can cause issue at a table if the GM is regularly disallowing things and is not able to justify this to his players' satisfaction. The purpose of the rarity tag is to lighten the GM's burden by shifting that social obligation. When an uncommon or rare tag is placed on something, the onus now falls on the player seeking to use it to please his case before the GM. This gives the GM more social leverage and makes it socially easier to disallow these items without upsetting the players.

I think overall this is probably a noble goal if applied to a handful of options that could be problematic at certain tables. My issue with the rarity tags (perhaps ironically) is that they're just too common. According to AoN, there are at least 6,000+ entries in their PF2E database with the uncommon or rare tag. Out of around 6,000 entries in the ewuipment category, around 2,900 have either of those tags, or nearly half of them. I think it's poor game design for so much of the system's content to be categorized this way and has probably encouraged bad habits in content writing if Paizo devs feel so free to churn out massive loads of content that they don't feel should be presumptively permissible at any table. It's a bit of a cop-out; by slapping rarity tags on something you neither need to worry about making it generally suitable for play or about frustrating GMs by forcing them to assume the social cost of refusing it regularly. Of course, this just shifts the frustration of such things onto the players. This is a personal preference, not an objective statement, so many may disagree, but: I feel that most content produced for a game system should be generally suitable for any given table. I like the concept of the rarity system, but I feel its scope should be greatly reduced, or at least more focus should be placed on common content. It should be noted that multiple GMs who enjot the rarity system in this thread have stated they don't feel any need to individually review common options selected by their players and just trust the system to be reasonably designed; this is a GOOD thing, and I think MORE of the content produced for the system should be like this.

GlennH wrote:

Looking it up the French use Terra for Earth, which would make earthfall become Terrafall. Close to Terrorfall which would be an appropriate name.

Terre actually. Earthfall has been translated in French as la Chute du Monde. So Worldfall.

Although arguably "world" should be as immersion-breaking as "earth", of eother of them are, since it comes from proto-Germanic "weraldiz", or "wer" = man + "eld" = time, literally "the age of man". You can see why such a word evolved from referring to the collective sum of human experience to its current meaning here in the real, ahem, world, but it's hard to imagine why, say, elves would ever use such a word in such a way.

That French "Monde" in this case is arguably cleaner, since it comes from Latin "Mundus" meaning, well, "clean" or "trimmed", and was a calque of Greek "kosmos" meaning an orderly arrangement.

Of course all of these are languages not spoken on Golarion so it's all a moot point, as mentioned earlier. But, my point here is, if you want to quibble about the etymology of English words like "earth" in a setting lke this you'll find all sorts of surprises that don't really make sense, if you're intent on not letting them make sense anyway.

Setting aside the other posts explaining that you have the etymology backwards and that characters aren't diagetically speaking English in setting anyway, my question is what else would you call it?

For now, AoN is still an officially recognized rules source, and in my opinion will continue to be as long as the weblink printed on their actual physical books still routes to AoN (which for all we know it will continue to do). Furthermore, AoN cites the source and page numbers of all its rules anyway (which you stated would be your alternative), and nobody (yourself included) is seriously questioning the continued reliability of AoN in that regard, so referencing AoN should still be perfectly fine for rules discussion and you can just regard their citation as your citation and the AoN page as an easy online reference.

If the paizo.com/prd link goes dead or stops redirecting to AoN it will be a different story. I think in that case most of us will agree to just keep relying on AoN for rules discussion here for as long as it remains reliably accurate, but you're right that somebody could be a stickler about, say, an errata'd rule that they have an older edition physical book of and demand that somebody share a picture of an updated physical book to contradict them since they won't accept a "non-official" online rules source as evidence. If such a case were to emerge, since this is an online forum and not an actual table the correct move would be to tell that person to stop being ridiculous and discontinue your participation in that particular conversation with them. You can just do that.

If we reach a point where there is no easily accessible non-paywalled official rules source AND there are no easily acessible non-paywalled *unofficial* rules sources that are reliably accurate with rules for some reason, then we'll have a real problem, but that doesn't seem to be a likely outcome for now. Probably must of us will have left the game behind anyway in that depressing hypothetical.

Frankly not really that interested in trying to kill Paizo. Seems to be what people on reddit and now on here are angling to try.

Agree that some of the reactions seem pretty excessive, saying that as somebody who made some pretty critical posts in some of thr other threads. This seems like a pretty remarkable failure of communication and PR on Paizo's part, which doesn't inspire in me much confidence about the company's long-term ability to weather its current Diamond-induced crisis, but in actual pragmatic terms it seems to be just a pretty minor decline in quality of an accessory service. I struggle to see this as the sort of thing I would swear off buying Paizo books for as some here have threatened; but I think a lot of people (especially on this forum) are very invested in what they see as Paizo's moral character as an organization, which has a very sociopolitically progressive and pro-consumer image that Paizo has deliberately and diligently cultivated over many years, and perhaps consequently are actually more scandalized by the total PR failure than the blow to AoN.

Really this just whole thing just screams of amateurishness to me. Paizo has been the second biggest name in the TTRPG industry for two decades now, you'd think they would have better communication and PR. Realistically AoN losing some art and having to push their updates back a little isn't a *huge* loss, and there are definitely ways this could have been messaged to the community that would have minimized backlash and assauged concerns. Instead it seems Paizo failed to maintain timely or consistent communications with the team of volunteers doing unpaid labor for them, neglected to try to get ahead of this story at all and left those volunteers to shyly inform the community that they'd have to be implementing these changes in a mere 10 days in accordance with the deadline Paizo itself set many weeks ago, thus dropping a PR bomb in their own face. Then they have apparently a total of one employee who is tasked with interacting with the community at all that is forced to wade through the crapstorm, so you have other Paizo employees going on Bluesky to try to use this fact to guilt trip people into not using the only form of communication Paizo makes available to its customers, then the CEO has to rush out a blog post where he tries to politely shade AoN for being forced to lets its user know what will be happening to the site in less than two weeks because he can't follow up on his emails (which he actually gets paid to read) or direct his own professional communications people to inform the public about this change in their partnership they initiated and set the deadline for. I can't help but feel like none of this needed to be as big of a deal as it has seemingly now become and a professional company should have been much more on top of things.

While this blog post dies go some way to explaining Paizo's reasoning, Jim's comment about Archives making the anouncement was uncalled for. The deadline was too close and there was too much labor. Failing to make an anouncement around this time would be irresponsible, and Jim's failure/refusal to recognize that comes across as vindictive.

Honestly just wanted to second this, especially in light of the Archives' explanation of their correspondence in another one of these threads. It's a bad look.

Dunwright wrote:

I'm curious here- does anybody know how early AoN had actually been receiving these new books to target updates for street release date? That is to say, how much will this actually delay updates compared to the way they've been doing things? Will they come a few weeks after street date? A few months? Paizo doesn't pay AoN and is encouraging them to still keep the site running and updating in accordance with their Community Use Policy, so I can only conclude that somebody at Paizo has calculated that the amount of money they lose from people just going to AoN for their rules in whatever timespan will be created by these delays is significant enough that it was offsetting the money they gain from AoN bringing players into the game and needed to be corrected. Presumably the idea is that if AoN takes weeks or months to update after a new release then a significant number of people exist who really want the new rules *immediately* and have the money to buy new releases immediately but don't otherwise care enough to actually buy them if they're available on AoN will be compelled to buy these books in that timeframe because they just won't be able to wait for AoN to update. How many such customers actually exist, I wonder? Paizo probably has better data on this than any of us can speculate but it feels like it must be a small niche to me. Maybe my intuition here is wrong though.

I'm not sure either. The answer there is fairly easy though; just request--I doubt they'd even need to make it any sort of order--that AoN delay new releases for a few weeks after street date. Provide some buffer time for folks to get the books and read the lore. The actual mechanics are available on Pathbuilder and Nexus anyway.

I can't help but wonder if this was some sort of mangled decision-by-committee brought about by Paizo's recent struggles. Like some executive who's been trying to stem the bleeding since the Diamond fiasco and the layoffs floated the idea of shutting down free rules resources to force free-loaders to buy books, and somebody else argued back that this would be a bad idea for a number of reasons, and back and forth until you end up with this weird decision that doesn't seem to accomplish anything meaningful but annoys a lot of people and was pushed through because somebody has to be seen to be doing something about the decline. Maybe that's way more speculation than is warranted here, but to me it bodes poorly for Paizo a business.

I'm curious here- does anybody know how early AoN had actually been receiving these new books to target updates for street release date? That is to say, how much will this actually delay updates compared to the way they've been doing things? Will they come a few weeks after street date? A few months? Paizo doesn't pay AoN and is encouraging them to still keep the site running and updating in accordance with their Community Use Policy, so I can only conclude that somebody at Paizo has calculated that the amount of money they lose from people just going to AoN for their rules in whatever timespan will be created by these delays is significant enough that it was offsetting the money they gain from AoN bringing players into the game and needed to be corrected. Presumably the idea is that if AoN takes weeks or months to update after a new release then a significant number of people exist who really want the new rules *immediately* and have the money to buy new releases immediately but don't otherwise care enough to actually buy them if they're available on AoN will be compelled to buy these books in that timeframe because they just won't be able to wait for AoN to update. How many such customers actually exist, I wonder? Paizo probably has better data on this than any of us can speculate but it feels like it must be a small niche to me. Maybe my intuition here is wrong though.