Ectar's page

Ectar wrote:

I find it to be one of the many "oh so quirky" things that are, to my taste, too prevalent in Paizo products these days.

Hmmm. Goblins are an ancient early days tradition as I understand. What are the recent examples? Because I don't remember anything even close.

Lost Omens: Firebrands is probably the most egregious example.

So...

Anyone else find it hilarious that Fumbus was picked to be the Iconic that represents the Apocalypse Rider Mythic Archetype in War Of Immortals. And for his apocalypse mount, the artist chose to give him a dog.

Not really. I find it to be one of the many "oh so quirky" things that are, to my taste, too prevalent in Paizo products these days.

But I'm glad that many people seem to have a stronger sweet tooth than I. Happy for them.

Fwiw- Lost Omens: Absalom definitely mentions the missing orb and gives kind of rumors regarding what it might be being used for. A somewhat interesting read.

I must admit, my party was far more interested in trying to recover that orb than going into the darklands to try and snag that one.
I just didn't have the energy/motivation to fully rework book 5 when, by then, I wasn't even really looking forward to book 6 anymore.

Huh. What a lovely collection of references. I hope they make the people who understand them happy.

Moving along, now.

Barbarian am find traps.
Spirit Barbarian am deal positive or negative damage to many haunt.
Barbarian am smash complex hazards.

I don't have the book, but I haven't seen almost any complaints about the Animist, except that it's complex, which most people are taking to be a good thing. Pretty cool since I remember it being heavily criticized in the playtest.

I will concede that the reactions here alongside my initial trepidations means I'll probably skip on this book. Maybe I'll grab it as a pdf in the future when there's a Humble Bundle or something.

TheFinish wrote:

Mammoth Daddy wrote:

TheFinish wrote:

There is no art, it's presented as the chapter opening for the Mythic Vault part of the book.

** spoiler omitted **...

You’re a gem! Thx!! And RIP ** spoiler omitted **

You can also press F to pay respects for:

** spoiler omitted **

I'll say one final thing I found funny, leave the rest for when the book comes out: several people in Razmiran have been empowered by the Godsrain and are challenging good ol' Razmir, but the man has not stepped out to fight (yet).

** spoiler omitted **

** spoiler omitted **

Could you or someone else expand on "Dragon Gods"? I have a PC heavily invested into draconic deities.

Ugh, I swear I don't try to stir up arguments on the forums. Most of the time.

Can you speak more to Mythic Weapons?
That sounds like a potentiality cool story telling tool to defeat the one and only Mythic big bad, who already kicked the party's butts once.
Do Mythic Weapons do anything behind defeating mythic resistance?

What's the word on Mythic Monster templates? How much stronger are they than un-templated versions of the same monsters?

Do the made originally as mythic monster give any indication of how mythic one must be to fight them? Or is it feasible for non- mythic heroes to best them?

4e was even more granular than that: it also had the critical condition at 25% hp.

I don't think most would go so far, but having a threshold of 1/(n+1), with n being the individual creature's level difference with the caster wouldn't be the most arduous solution.

I'm cautiously unoptimistic about what we've heard so far.
It feels to me like there should be some direct way to translate mythic power to non-mythic power.

For instance, a level 20 non-mythic party, I imagine, beats a level 1 mythic monster. And a level 2 mythic monster. But at some point, that changes. And it seems like that would change before the mythic monster was level 24. So hopefully there's a kind of guidance on where that line, blurry though it may be, is.

And to curtail the comments of "only mythic parties should be taking on mythic monsters", it was a commonly recommended path to mythic ascension in 1e that the PCs would defeat a mythic monster at the conclusion of a long quest. So there's plenty of narrative precedent for it.

Ezekieru wrote:

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the previous level 26-30 creatures were re-balanced to be level 21-25 but with many new Mythic abilities put onto them. Their increased threat level would still exist, but it'd exist under the framework on the PF2E system instead of what they were in PF1E.

Yeah, from the various hints devs have been giving that's my impression as well. If Baba Yaga or Varklops are statted in 2E their math will be that of a level 25 creature, not 30. But they'll have rulebending Mythic Abilities that will have the likes of Treerazer going "Wait, you can do what?" Before squishing him like a bug.

If a level 25 creature can squish another level 25 creature like a bug, that sounds like a good indicator that the first creature should have a higher level.

I'm interested to see how in the world this system is going to be balanced. Not that original Mythic ever was, but with the tight math being such a selling point of the 2E system, this preview seems to fly in the face of that.

Mythic proficiency sounds bonkers, even if limited in scope and number of uses per day.

How does the character have 18 starting strength as a witch, when Int is your key ability score?

In The Hobbit film, Smaug's breath weapon is shown to be strong enough to blast apart stone towers during the sacking of Dale and Erebor. However, in the opening cinematic of Baldur's Gate 3, we see the fire breath of red dragons having virtually no effect on the nautiloid, the bizarre flying ship used by mind flayers, as if it is pure flame with no concussive force.

My main question is: Does the fire breath weapon of red dragons in D&D and Pathfinder lack any physical force, functioning more like a very large flamethrower? For example, if a red dragon were to use its fire breath on a stone tower, castle, palace, modern military tank, battleship, or starship, would it have virtually no effect at all, since stone is non-flammable? Likewise, if I were wearing bunker gear, the personal protective equipment used by firefighters, would it make me immune to a red dragon's breath weapon, since it has no physical force and only deals fire damage?

Firefighting equipment largely protects the wearer from the damaging effects of hot ambient air temperatures. Being exposed to direct open flame is still going to have an impact on the person. Doubly so if we assume (as I would) that dragon flame is hotter than a burning building. Which makes sense, imo, since most fire breath weapons do more damage than environmental fire, but YMMV.

If pressed, I'd say the breath weapon does exert a force (how else would the flame escape the dragon's mouth/ throat?), but not so great a force that a living creature won't be able to resist said force and maintain their footing.

As has been suggested above, most objects are not fully immune to fire damage. If dealt enough damage to destroy (not break) a wall, it'd go on through and hurt whatever was on the other side of it.
Iirc, object resistances and immunities aren't fully enumerated and are largely purview of the gm. So once again, YMMV.

Archetype- hard to beat acrobat, at least for the dedication feat. Scaling skill proficiency is worth a level 2 class feat a lot of the time, even without Free Archetype. Maybe even especially without FA.

If Pathfinder and Starfinder are to be compatible, I think there is some credence to the discussion. Gas giants aren't exactly uncommon.

(Though I do admit to a certain amount of intentional silliness)

How dense of a gaseous atmosphere would it have to be to stop someone's descent via Earthbind?
We've established that 1g/cm³ is sufficient. How about half that? A quarter?

The Diabolic Dragon grows from Large to Gargantuan across the three age categories that have stats.
Its attack ranges do not grow with it.

Every other dragon goes from Large to Gargantuan, while their melee attacks go from:
Bite 10ft
Claw 5ft
Tail 15 ft

up to
Bite 20ft
Claw 15ft
Tail 30ft

Except for the Diabolic Dragon, whose melee attack ranges do not change at all.
(Also except for the somewhat more diminutive dragons who do not advance to Gargantuan, but whose melee attack ranges at least still increase while going from large to huge: Conspirator, Mirage, and Omen)

I dunno, as a player character I've long been ready for meaningless death. It comes with the territory of promoting good through violence.
If that comes from the current big bad, great. If it comes from a mook, that's fine. If it comes from a random anaconda we encountered trudging through the jungle, also fine.

I think probably partly that comes from a place of having more character builds I'd like to play than chances I'll have to play characters.
Some of it is probably just a hint of nihilism.

As a GM, I try to give character kills more meaning and I will pull a few punches, especially running the earlier PF2 APs.
But ultimately, the bad guys are trying to win, and I think it's important that it feels that way, even when I'm ultimately trying to make sure the party succeeds (albeit not necessarily every single member of the party)

If we are talking about potentiially renaming monk in a way that preserves the many different things it does, what about Cultivator? It covers the wide array of abilities monk has rather well and always had cultivation fantasy elements.

Cultivator makes them sound more like horticulturists than martial artists, imo.

The Bloodrager adding the rage trait to their spells while raging is good design.
It's also effectively my house rule for the Elemental Instinct Barbarian, for Impulses which match the Barbarian's Elemental Instinct.

Am I a joke to you?

I mostly feel it in the stat blocks, tbh.
Alignment was always an easy shortcut for how a monster might respond to some stimuli or the kinds of worshipers a deity might attract.
I have found the Edicts and Anathema to be somewhat more cumbersome in determining those things regarding the latter, and descriptive text woefully inadequate for the former.

On the one hand, alignment's removal theoretically gives a GM more leeway to use a creature in a wider variety of scenarios, by the other hand requires the GM to select monsters from a larger pool with less guidance.

Besides, WRT monster alignment I always considered the listed one as "typical", not absolute (except for fiends and celestials) . So I don't actually buy in to my own point about using a given monster in a wide variety of situations.
I just find the removal irksome as pertains to the shorthand of monster and deity temperaments.

Regarding player character alignment, I see no significance since the removal.

RAW Aid goes crazy. After a few levels the DC becomes trivial and the bonus is often relevant.
Your third action for a +1 or better is nuts.

Getting back to Ectar's original post, the answer appears to be "no to going up, if your baseline is Paizo's October 2023 post which Michael Sayre links to. Yes to going up, if you were unaware of that announcement."

To look at the specific examples OP gave, HoW did come in at 224 pages and WoI is listed as coming in at 224 pages. That puts both books in between the $59.99 listed for 192 pages and $69.99 listed for 256 pages, and hey look, the prices for both books are in between those two numbers.

Now the prices for the two books are inconsistent while the page count is listed as identical. So that might represent an increase Paizo made between HoW production and WoI production. But (a) WoI is still within the price range Paizo announced in October 2023 for books of it's page count, and (b) it could instead mean that WoI is going to be a few more pages than initially announced.

The discrepancy has me miffed, I'm not gonna lie. The blog post specifies that hard covers are going to vary in price, based on page count, which is something I can get behind. And Howl of the Wild actually perfectly fits the estimation between their listed price examples.

Is this the result of the character guide featuring an in-world narrative, like a lot of the other recent books?

I've found these to be real hit or miss, depending in the narrator.

Interesting. The prices for HotW and WoI doesn't perfectly match any of the examples in that blog post.

Interpolating from the blog post, does that mean that HotW has ~224 pages, and WoI has ~246 pages?

Oh. No, the page numbers are listed on the product page, and they're both 224. HotW matches expectations, but WoI priced higher than was explained as "typical" for its page count.

Was perusing the War of Immortals blog post and when I went to look at the books, I saw a $67.49 price tag, which I'd never seen before.
Started looking around and noted that Howl of the Wild was $64.99.

Sorting rulebooks by price, it became clear that those are the two most expensive non-Special hardcover books right now. The Core series of books are all $59.99.

Is this the expected price for hard covers going forward? I was already pretty on the fence about buying HotW and WoI before I noticed the price disparity. Like, $5.00 and $7.50 isn't a lot of extra money. It's just kind of a sentiment thing. "Do I really want to pay more money for a book I wasn't super excited about anyway?"

If this is the new price, I'll probably just end up being a little more discerning about which books I end up getting.

Times is tough all around.

edit: Yes, PDFs exist, but I strongly prefer physical books. So in almost all cases, if I'm interested enough to buy a RPG book, I'm interested in buying a physical one.

"Pathfinder War of Immortals" in the last paragraph has a broken link.

In fact, all the links in the last paragraph are broken.

The real problem with kobolds is that at the rate I'm progressing, they're going to have more heritages than any other ancestry, even account for the versatile heritages they already have access to. XD

I love the ideas, by the way, especially the first two. Sphere of Annihilation kobolds would be so eerie.

** spoiler omitted **

Oh man, it's a small shame Crown of the Kobold King was remade prior to PC2. That would be an exceptional place to drop a new heritage, related to the stuff that lives below that tribe.

Yakman wrote:

maybe, and this might get dark, the more mundane the setting, the less... prolific... kobolds get. their young die in their eggs if they are laid in some random, droll, place. so the little guys have to find weird magical locations to keep the species going... darn... that's pretty good!

Shameless self-promotion (kind of), but the supplement I'm working on right now has a band of mutant-y kobolds who inhabit the Mana Wastes and absorb wellspring magic. :)

But shredder's point was, "sure, but then why is only Arcane [and Elemental] represented yet?" Which I think is a space constraint, personally.

Genuinely, I think the thread is helping me get over my frustrations and look forward. At least the Lore ones, anyway.

I want to read about kobolds with weird sources of power.
Like a clutch of eggs laid near of Sphere of Annihilation (or other raw destructive force since that didn't make the Core jump).
Numerian Kobolds whose eggs were warmed by the residual heat of a starship engine.
Kobolds born into the Circle of the Stones, infused with the power of an Aeon Orb. Or even better, irradiated Kobolds from Vask.

I finally sat down to categorize the stuff that has changed. Insofar as I can tell, the following feats did not make it in to PC2:
- Kobold Breath & Dragon's Breath, probably too dragony
- Slither, not a great feat to begin with tbh
- Dragonblood Paragon, both has prereqs that no longer exist AND are too dragony
- Wyrmling Flight, y'all already know how I feel about that

I'm not including the weapon stuff, due to that basically being a universal change for all the ancestries.

New feats:
-Tumbling Diversion, It's kinda cool I guess but the use cases seem very limited. In my games, I don't know if anyone has ever used Tumble Through to end up somewhere other than directly next to the opponent.
-Benefactor's Majesty, It's very cool effect. Befitting of a level 17 feat. I do think I would like it more if there were effects more particular to a kind of benefactor. I mean, I want that just all throughout the lil ancestry, so.

... It's sort of interesting, in the sense that the SF2 operative has basically nothing in common with its SF1 counterpart.

The SF1 operative was the most mobile character in a static system, while the SF2 version cares the least about mobility since it can bypass cover. Skills have been extremely de-prioritized, exploits made a smaller component of the class budget.

I almost wonder why it's called an Operative tbh.

I think this is really the root of my disappointment. This new Operative seems fine for what it is being designed for.

Could make it so you can only use it against a target you had Aimed at on your previous turn.

It's still very strong, but at least it be more limited. Kind of.

PF2E on Foundry runs it like this, else I wouldn't have even thought of this as a potential reading either. I was hoping someone would either be able to point me to something that disproves it, explain why this is fine actually, or else call for an errata or something. Sorry, I should have made that more clear in the OP.

I'll give it my best:

This feels like a RavingDork post.

While I can't see anything that disputes the supposition, I also can't think of anyone I know personally actually running it like that.

It's far from the only slotted item without a worn slot that's been published. I suspect that it was no accident.

Oooh, what else is there?

They're both originally from Golarion, so far enough back they must, right?
Taxonomically speaking, that it.

Probably Humans and Halflings, too.

Elves and Gnomes aren't originally native to Golarion, so likely no commonality there.

I wonder about Dwarves, tho. Both from Golarion, but Dwarves were never on the surface.
Could be a very distant common ancestor under ground where it eventually evolved into modern Dwarves. Or perhaps life developed today independently down there. Who knows!?

The fixation on bloodlines and genetics and lineage superiority always felt yucky and weird and made playing a properly arrogant kobold feel incredibly awkward, and making them actually descended from dragons completely missed what I saw as the point of the rumor: That nobody actually believed kobolds about it. Kobolds were the scrappy underdogs, and with very few exceptions, no kobold could really find a way to prove they were technically Tiamat's brood. Making kobolds explicitly draconic as their main Thing totally changed that. It made kobolds much less dynamic.

This is precisely the relationship my AoA kobold has with our party. He is convinced about the truth of the Kobold draconic heritage, but nobody else is. They actively call him "lizard" to his face, despite frequent insistence otherwise.

(Doesn't help that the other Kobolds we've encountered have been wholly incompetent at best and [loveably] moronic at worst)

I would like to present the difference between the old Gloves of Storing and the new Retrieval Belt.

While I think if the item in its current incarnation is stronger than the old one, the lack of Worn Belt I suspect to be an error. Every other belt has it so dollars to doughnuts it'll receive an errata at some point.

But that left the beloved Kobold Ancestry without a distinctive flavor. So Paizo went for the magical energy sponge idea that helped keep the existing Kobold NPCs around with no need for a retcon, while at the same time opening possibilities for other kind of Kobolds.

Which definitely makes Paizo Kobolds different from the other game's creature.

I think this departure will end up being a very good thing, if unsettling at first.

I think this would sit better with me if the Surki didn't give me a similar vibe, released one book prior.

Or if they leaned into it way harder with their new heritages and feats.

For context, as a single action with the Attack trait, you attempt a Medicine check vs the Fortitude DC of a target within your reach.

Critical Success- The target is either clumsy 3 or stupefied 3 until the end of your next turn. The target is then immune to Surgical Shock for 1 hour.

Success- As critical success, but the target is either clumsy 2 or stupefied 2.

The rest don't matter, because the question I have is: which one is it?

The target is either stupefied or clumsy. Do I get to pick? Do they? Is it random?

It's probably meant to be the former, and that's how I would recommend it to anyone. But it doesn't specify.

This comment isnt directed toward the mechanics side of things but on the lore side.

As an example of some of the freedom we now have with kobolds look at the idea I asked for help refining in this thread. Because of the lore changes I chose to use kobolds for this encounter.

Go to Any Ideas for Kobold Traps.

Genuinely, I am glad that some people prefer the increased flexibility over their previously less flexible, albeit more defined, lore niche.

I don't have PC2 yet.

Also, I don't mean to invalidate or contradict your frustrations. I fully support your right to speak your mind on the matter.

Ectar wrote:

Kobolds can no longer gain a permanent fly speed.

They still get access to the garbage Winglets feat at level 5, which is a prereq for the Fly once per turn style feat that is so popular in the flight feat chain they get at level 9 (which the flight capable ancestries get 4 level earlier).
And that's it.

There's no third feat granting access to an actual fly speed, so Kobolds are limited to 1 fly action per round forever.

I do find this interesting though. That is a really clever way to mechanically represent clumsy flight.

Normally what I see is a full fly speed. Either permanent at higher levels or 1/day for about 1 to 10 minutes at mid levels. Sometimes rechargeable on a focus spell.

But having a 1/round Fly action available means that you can stay in the air for multiple rounds at-will. Really nice in exploration mode and terrain traversal. And still somewhat useful in combat.

But you couldn't Fly for two or three actions in order to move faster than the single action allows. It also means that you couldn't Arrest a Fall or do other similar things that require a permanent Fly speed.

I appreciate the validation.

The once per round fly speed style feat seems to be somewhat standard in PC2. Both Stormborn Tengu and Dragonblood VH have access to a functionally equivalent feat at level 5, with a 9th level feat for a full fly speed.
Strix and Sprites received errata to their feats to get access to a similar feat at 1st level (w/ a 15 ft fly speed) with subsequent 5th and 9th level feats granting a 25 ft once per round fly and permanent fly speed, respectively.

I really don't like this decision either since kobold flavor was really cool and its worse now, but that is how you get back what it used to be.

My current Age of Ashes character is a Kobold Thaumaturge worshiper of Apsu, whose overridding goal is to better understand the lineage between Dragons and Kobolds. So the divorcing the two hurts.

Never liked the change to moving Kobolds from little dragon guys to ambient magic sponges. (Didn't we just get Surki for that?) It's another in a long line of making options more flexible at the cost of a concrete identity. I'm rarely a fan, but whatever. I was mostly planning on looking the other way as much as possible and playing my Kobolds largely as before.

Finally got a chance to delve into my PC2 this morning.

Kobolds can no longer gain a permanent fly speed.

They still get access to the garbage Winglets feat at level 5, which is a prereq for the Fly once per turn style feat that is so popular in the flight feat chain they get at level 9 (which the flight capable ancestries get 4 level earlier).
And that's it.

There's no third feat granting access to an actual fly speed, so Kobolds are limited to 1 fly action per round forever.

Arguably, access is somewhat easier because there's no heritage requirement, but this change is terrible.
3 ancestry feats, imo, was already a steeper cost than 2 ancestry feats and a heritage. But now we can't even choose to make that inefficient trade.
Oh, and as a fun kicker: A remaster Kobold can't even use the old 3rd feat, since Hatchling Flight (the prereq to Wyrmling Flight) got renamed to Winglet Flight. Gotta make sure everyone knows that Kobolds aren't dragons. We've got a shiny new selling point versatile heritage for that.

I usually try not to be this rage posty, but it feels like mechanically and thematically my favorite ancestry is no longer what it was, and that's extremely frustrating to me.

SF1 operatives getting 5 levels worth of early access to a typically highly thematic exploit did a lot to engender me to a particular specialization.
I fell in LOVE with the Ghost because of level 5 cloaking field.
The early access was the biggest draw of the entire class to me and helped define the specializations. Sure any other operative could pick it up at 10, but by 11 I get a unique thing anyway, and 5-9 is a massive chunk of adventuring time.

Looking to the SF2 Operative:
At character creation we get a skill increase and a skill feat for something relevant to our specialization. The latter is kind of whatever; any two operative could end up with the exact same skillset irrespective of specialization. The skill feat is one level early access, since we don't start with a free skill feat, but it's only a level before any other operative could pick up the same thing.

The actual unique things the specializations grants, the exploits and advanced exploits, are almost all combat-specific abilities. Intellectually I understand the desire to make the operative into more of a striker and shift skills more over to the Envoy, but it feels like this is too far in that direction. It makes the specialization choice irrelevant outside of combat, which feel wrong to me.

Two changes I'd like to see for the operative:
1.) Auto-scaling of the specialization skill. Possibly in lieu of the free skill feat at 3,7,15. I think the raw numbers increase is a better indication of the operative's abilities than the skill feat.
Granted, the skill feats actually ARE early access to something that could be obtained a bit later by other specializations, but they just aren't that cool, imo.

2.) A unique, not specifically combat-related, ability somewhat early on. I'm thinking like the 4-6 range. Could be something baked into the base specialization or, I think more likely, actual class feats with a specialization as a prereq. Just something the specialization can get that helps them stand out. Especially outside of changes to the turn-by-turn combat routine.

Also note that for official playtesting, it is requested to not use Pathfinder Second Edition ancestries, backgrounds, classes, equipment, and feats that aren’t explicitly included in the playtest.

Huh. That seems to fly in the face of the text in the book, itself:

I mean, I get the desire to focus the playtest on the new stuff, but why include that line IN the playtest book?

Insofar as I can tell, every SF2 weapon should have Analog, Tech, or Archaic in their traits, with the latter currently reserved for PF weapons.
The Neutral Lash has none.