Ed Reppert's page

I've never understood why there are so many numerophobes in the world. In particular I don't understand why higher numbers are a problem. Is it just because they're higher?

Comparing the level 5 Kyra original statted for the playtest (PT) with the one for the resonance test (RT), I find the following:

RT Kyra gains "Versatile" from update 1.4, giving her Alertness resulting in an additional +1 to Perception from upgrading to Expert.
RT Kyra gains 4 Focus Points and loses 5 Spell Points. Net loss of one point.
RT Kyra gains 2 Resonance points, but her Resonance points can only be used to invest worn items. Net gain overall, I think.
RT Kyra upgrades her sling to Expert. She still appears to be only trained with simple weapons.
RT Kyra loses the following gear: antidote, material component pouch (MCP), comprehension elixir*, darkvision elixir*.
..... The MCP was unnecessary; she has a divine focus (religious symbol). * these two elixirs were described in PT Kyra's "how to use my gear" list, but not listed in the equipment list. Maybe the descriptions were an error.
RT Kyra gains Divine Prayer Beads, and a Scroll of Heroism.
RT Kyra's wand lose about half their charges (healing goes from 10 to 4; sanctuary from ten to 6). Net loss.
RT Kyra's wand of healing is upgraded to the second level spell (making it a 4th level item). Net gain.
RT Kyra's Fire Ray and Healer's Blessing spells now each cost a Focus Point, each cost a Spell Point for PT Kyra. I guess that's a wash.
RT Kyra's Healer's Blessing is no longer a Free Action. Net loss.
Both PT Kyra and RT Kyra list Protection in the descriptions of spells she can cast, but this is not a prepared spell for her. Calling that an error in the listing.

PT Kyra's Spell Points can be used to cast Fire Ray or Healer's Blessing (1 point per casting). RT Kyra's Focus Points can be used to cast Fire Ray or Healer's Blessing (1 point per casting) or to cast Heal or Restoration from her wand the second time she does so (1 point per casting).

PT Kyra's Resonance Points can be used to cast spells from her wands (1 RP for each casting). Net plus for RT Kyra.

Oddities: All of Kyra's spells (whether cast from slots or otherwise) have somatic and verbal components, except shield, which is only verbal, and heal, which can be verbal, verbal and somatic, or verbal, somatic and material. Heal is the only spell with (possibly) a material component, and she has a divine focus for that.
I don't see the point to her religious text. Functionally it does the same thing as her religious symbol. I think.
A general thing: all the human RT iconics seem to have taken Versatile for their human Heritage. Coincidence? Or is Versatile that much better than anything else?

Overall, I think RT Kyra doesn't lose much, if anything. What did I miss? :-)

That is precisely my point! Why do we need a focus pool for wands when they are loaded with charges, that once are used render the wand useless?

Not useless. You can still poke someone (or some thing) in the eye with it. :-)

This "use it once for no focus cost, then use it the second time for one focus, then after that as many times as you want (up to # of charges) mechanism is the pits. And pity the poor dwarf, who by default has *no* focus points.

Paizo is looking for a mechanism to limit the amount of magic a character can use. They still haven't found the right one.

"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." -- Senator Carl Shurz (1829-1906), remarks before the Senate, 1872.

How much chance is there for a Jade Regent AP in the card game? I've really enjoyed the first four.

True, but that particular nit dug itself in and latched on with a vicegrip back in medieval times. One may as well talk about how romance doesn't actually refer to love stories.

Again, from my dictionary: the sense ‘genre centered on romantic love’ dates from the mid 17th century.

Ed Reppert wrote:

DM_Blake wrote:

* Note: the prefix "in" has two common meanings. One, used here, means "into" (e.g. "interior". The other means "not" (e.g. "inappropriate"). In the case of "inflammable", we're using the former definition ("into") but clearly some people mistakenly assume it's the latter ("not).

The first syllable of "interior" is not a prefix.

Indeed! It's the first two syllables. (The first syllable is more accurately described as a "root.")

I don't think so. My Oxford dictionary says of "interior"

ORIGIN
late 15th century: from Latin, ‘inner’, comparative adjective from inter ‘within’.

Mark Seifter wrote:

Ouranou wrote:

The Kyra pregen has a wand of Heal at 2nd lvl. I thought wands couldn't be heightened? Have I been cheating myself out of crafting heightened wands this whole time?

You can definitely make a heightened wand. You just can't take a non-heightened wand and then use it to cast the heightened version.

Good to know, from reading the text on wands it seemed that you couldn't put a heightened spell into a wand at all.

Wands wrote:

Each wand holds a specific spell of a certain level, determined when the wand is created. The spell can’t be heightened.

I think what they meant was that you can't heighten the spell that's in the wand when you cast it. It could be clearer.

* Note: the prefix "in" has two common meanings. One, used here, means "into" (e.g. "interior". The other means "not" (e.g. "inappropriate"). In the case of "inflammable", we're using the former definition ("into") but clearly some people mistakenly assume it's the latter ("not).

The first syllable of "interior" is not a prefix.

I never liked x times a day use items. And now they're mostly one use free plus focus.

You start the day with a fully charged (10 charges) Wand of Heal. You use it once. You use it again, this time costing you a focus point. After that, you can use it as much as you want, until either tomorrow or you run out of charges, whichever comes first. Tomorrow you get to start over if you have any charges left.

Still, it does seem a bit of an odd mechanic.

I'd also get rid of the name Resonance Points and just state that you can invest up to 10 items at a time. It's simpler.

May be, but it doesn't accurately reflect the current rule. You can, at least in this resonance test, use up all your Resonance Points by, during your daily prep, repeatedly donning and removing whatever it is. Knowing that, surely no one would actually do it, but the point is that "you can invest up to ten items at a time" doesn't account for it.

90% of my problems with system complexity in the playtest seem to come back to the character sheet.

I found the character sheets for the pregens at the back of the resonance test document to be fairly well laid out and easy to understand. Of course, they don't look a whole lot like the one in the back of the rulebook or its version 1.1 descendant. One thing I noticed: for these level 5 characters, all of the casters' sheets are three pages; all of the martials' are two pages. I suppose it makes sense that casters would need more room, but it did make me wonder how long level 20 sheets would be. :-)

I think paizo should print card decks for every item, spell, and feat (and perhaps all the actions not already covered, too) in the core rulebook, to come out concurrently with the book. And then each later book should also have accompanying card decks. Maybe I'm crazy. :)

I'm surprised Paizo doesn't follow a format closer to the Strategy Guide.

Well, I asked James Jacobs about a Strategy Guide for PF2e, and he said that if they do the core rulebook right, we won't need a Strategy Guide. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

The Kyra pregen has a wand of Heal at 2nd lvl. I thought wands couldn't be heightened? Have I been cheating myself out of crafting heightened wands this whole time?

Heal (the spell) can be heightened to any level 2 through 9. A wand can be made with any spell 1st through 4th level. Including a 2nd level heal spell. It would be a 4th level item. What Kyra has, though, is a 2nd level item - a wand of heal (1st level) so it's not heightened.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of a non-caster being able to cast spells, whether it be via UMD or "Trick Magic Item" or this new mechanism.

In another game, my fighter found early on that trying to use a healer's primary healing tool (a "moonstone") caused it to explode. The results were … not pretty. :-)

I'd really like to see a "strategy guide" similar to the one for 1st edition published concurrently with or soon after the 2nd edition core rulebook. Any chance of that?

Voss wrote:

It feels like a non-feature, really.

It also consumes a class feat. You'll notice that full casters have 8 feats compared to other class's 11.

It doesn't consume a class feat, it *is* a class feat. Or rather, three of them. Without them, the caster has no way to increase his spellcasting proficiency beyond trained. It might be better to make them regular class feats, fold them in to the list at the appropriate levels, and let the caster choose whether to improve his proficiency, but would that gimp them too much at high levels?

The question whether the proficiency increases are at the "right" levels currently is I think a separate issue.

From the wikipedia article on slings: "The staff itself can become a close combat weapon in a melee."

BTW, personally I think the 1d4 for a staff undervalues the weapon. Especially after watching a youtube video in which a test was run, putting a fencer's helmet on a watermelon, and whacking it with first a sword and second a quarterstaff. First effort (sword): zero damage to the melon. Second effort (staff): the melon was split open. If that was somebody's head... :-) Anyway, I think the staff ought to be 1d8.

1. The character creation rules aren't intuitive or simple to understand to new or uninformed players.

There's a Google Drive copy of the rulebook someone put up that has all the errata in it. Personally, I would be happier if Paizo had done that themselves, but I do understand that's time consuming and they have other things to think about.

Perhaps the steps (1-9) of character creation could have been explained better, but the order, at least, is fairly straightforward.

I built a simple spreadsheet for attribute allocation. Took me ten or fifteen minutes, I think.

2. The character sheets are cluttered, mismatched, and seem backwards in design.

Agree the sheet needs a good redesign. Actually, I'd like to see something like the PF1 Character Folio.

3. The formatting of several sections in the book need major revisions to be intuitive and easy to reference.

Agreed. In particular, there should be an index to the tables.

4. Decision Paralysis is still in place, and adds a lot of time into character creation.

I don't know how to solve this one. :-(

5. Several core decisions are highly underwhelming and unfun in relation to certain players.

Or this one.

6. The book not having errata information causes a clash of information that players may not be certain of which set of information is correct.

See my response to your point #1.

Wow, I always dreamt to be expert at crawling. /s

I admit that IRL I only found skill at crawling to be useful once or twice, but at those times I found it very useful. People were shooting at me. :-)

My father would have been better able to address the doctor/nurse thing than I am (he was a cardiologist) but unfortunately I can't ask him. I do remember learning, as a new Ensign, USN, to listen to my Chief Petty Officers — they after all had been doing it a lot longer than I had. I don't recall ever relying on their expertise and having it bite me.

Personally, I like the current Potency/Property Rune system. It seems like these changes are moving in the direction of "everyone is a spellcaster", and I don't like that.

I had no trouble downloading mine on October 4th.

Well, really, I'd just use a completely separate proficiency system.

I've said before that I have a fondness for the Harnmaster system where everything is a skill, you have a "skill base" (SB) derived from attributes (HM has more attributes than PF) and skill mastery ranges from an "opening level" which is a multiple of SB to a maximum of 100+SB. At low skill levels, it's easy to increase ML. The higher you go the harder it gets. Using a skill is a simple d100 roll, perhaps with situational modifiers. Swinging a sword? Skill. Swinging an axe? Different skill, but it works the same way. Casting a spell? Skill. Doing stuff makes you tired. Getting hit in combat makes you hurt. These things modify your ML for whatever skill you're using. No spell slots, no "points", no classes, no character levels. The most significant downside, I think, is that anything more than a minor wound is going to take a while to heal. Still, it's a pretty good system. I doubt Paizo wants to go in that direction, though. Oh, I forgot to mention: armor is basically damage reduction. No hit points. Graphic injuries, with "injury points" that are used to determine how long it takes to heal.

"'Contact' is *not* a verb!" -- Nero Wolfe. :-)

Very nice! Well done!

Basic abilities: what I did is make a simple spreadsheet. 7 columns, one for each ability, and one for labelling the rows. Then 11 rows: Starting value (always 10), Ancestry boosts, Background boosts, class boost, free boosts (4 of these, and repeat lines for level 5, 10, 15 and 20 free boosts). Then a line to total each column, and under that a line to compute the modifier (Round((total-10)/2)) and you're done. The player (or the character sheet) tells you what choices were made for ancestry, etc, you plug in the numbers, and there you go. Nothing fancy, but so far it's worked well.

Could probably come up with something similar for die-rolled abilities, but I haven't bothered. Not yet, anyway. :-)

Puppies are fun. OTOH... "Any man who hates children and dogs can't be all bad" (said of W.C. Fields by a friend of his). :-)

I get a sense that almost everyone on Galarion, at least every PC and most NPCs PCs might run into, is literate in at least one language. Where do they all learn to read and write?

Thanks, Zman.

Skills The first number is the creature’s base skill modifier, which you add to the relevant ability modifier for any skill not listed.

This would seem to be (mostly?) the proficiency modifier. For example, the base skill modifier for goblins is -2, which suggests to me that they are untrained in skills not specifically listed. But the training modifier for "untrained" has been changed from -2 to -4 (for characters, anyway). Should base skill modifiers for monsters now be two less than what's listed in the Bestiary?

Heh. Couple months ago, I got all kinds of brake warning (and other) lights on my dash. Long story short, all the brake lines were rotted and leaking. $1500 repair bill. Couple weeks ago I'm driving home, and the car starts to slow down all by itself. Transmission lines rotted out. $2000. Eleven year old car, 95000 miles. Other than underneath, the car's in great shape. Hoping to get another 50k miles out of it - at which point I'll either be dead or not driving 'cause too old. But another $2000 repair will probably kill that idea. :-)

Just been reading the new Sandpoint book, and it's excellent! I do have a question though. :-)

Page 174, Item level, last sentence: "may imbalance the game". "Imbalance" is a noun. The correct verb is "unbalance".

Jason Bulmahn wrote:

If I wanted to, say, create an archetype that was all about fighting with a two handed weapon effectively, I could do so in a way that it packages all the pieces you would need to build that character in one tidy place, one that could then be taken by everyone. The old system allowed us to do this.. kinda, but it was all over the place, and was easily seen as bloat, especially as the years went on.

But that would be cool. A two-handed weapon archetype that any class (yes any class) could take (along with bowmen archetypes, sword and board archetypes, one-handed archetypes, etc) would be higher in flexibility and customization and allow you to fix the stuff that "all over the place". This was a paladin would be a warrior for a patron god. If that god likes backstabbing dagger wielders, he isn't locked into heavy armor, sword, and shield native to the current class. The ranger becomes an outdoorsman. Whether that involves bows or dual-wielding or just a big ol' greataxe is up to the player, not the class designer.

This strikes me as approaching the Harnmaster situation, where *everything* is a skill, and the only limitation on the skills you can learn is finding someone to teach them to you (or an instruction manual) or developing them yourself. But then you have to maintain them. If you don't maintain your skills, you may not be as good at them later on as you were originally.

Reading these forums, particularly the playtest ones, has made me realize once again that Harnmaster is probably not a good fit for most PF players. Too much "realism" and not enough heroic fantasy. Oh, well.

John Napier 698 wrote:

Today's my Birthday! I'm fifty- ... something. Well, whatever. The years seem to blur together after fifty.

Yes.

yes they do.

Happy 50-something! Enjoy many more! :)

I wouldn't know. I started backing it down at forty. This year, I'm nine. :-)

With a title like "Maniac" how could it not be? :-)

No. :-)

Okay, so they're better at the end point. And until then?

Heh. Guess I shoulda stuck with pdfs from the get-go. :-)

Then why bother, I wonder? Are the toys worth the downside (you're going to lose at least *some* of the abilities of your primary class).

Fair enough. Though I would swear I've seen both descriptions applied here to Paizo's own products. I suppose the same interpretations apply. Unless for Paizo's own products "out of print" means both out of print and sold out.

I note that if you compare a fighter with the wizard archetype (just for example) to a fighter with no archetype or a wizard with no archetype, the multiclass character will be worse at fighting than the fighter, and worse at wizarding than the wizard. The question then seems to be whether that downside is worth the upside of having access to two (or more) classes' feats, while not gaining any additional feat slots.

Okay. So that would mean that, having taken the dedication, your cantrips (and powers, if you take the associated feat(s)) will scale just as if you were a full caster, regardless whether you take Basic Spellcasting. Is that right?

Maybe the dedications need a reference to that bit on page 193.

Awesome, Marco!

I have set #2, and set #1, and I had to cancel my battles sub, but I'll still buy this new set. :-)

Question: what's the difference between "out of print" and "sold out"?

Not sure where to put this. I'm sure someone can move it if need be.

In the new Archetypes update that came out yesterday (24 Sept 2018) the second paragraph of the "Basic <class> Spellcasting" feat says, for all five spellcasting archetypes "Even though you can cast spells, the spell level of your <class> cantrips and powers is still half your level rounded up." The word "still" jumped out at me, since I didn't see anywhere else in the update that mentioned this. So I went back to the original rulebook. That paragraph was then "Even though you can cast spells, the spell level of your cantrips and arcane powers is half your level rounded up." No "still". And yet there was no other mention of this anywhere, that I could find. So what's going on, I asked myself.

Thinking about it, I think the intent is that when you take the dedication, you gain the ability to cast cantrips, but only at minimum level. Cantrips are not heightened when you level up, unless and until you take the Basic Spellcasting feat. It's also true (I think) that you don't get the related class powers unless you take the associated feat (e.g., Domain for the Cleric Archetype). But that gives you only one power, and that doesn't get heightened either, even if it would for a member of the full class. It's only when you take the Basic Spellcasting feat that you gain heightened cantrips and powers, and then they're only heightened to "half your level, rounded up".

The way this is presented seems unclear to me. If I'm right about the intent, then I would suggest adding the following to the Dedication feats: "You do not gain access to class Powers (but see <the appropriate Powers feat> and your cantrips cannot with this feat alone be heightened (see the Basic Spellcasting feat)." And I would remove "still" from the second paragraph of that feat.

So a full caster's cantrips are heightened to spell level 2 when she reaches level 3, and to spell level 3 when she reaches level 5. A caster archetype's cantrips (and powers if applicable) are heightened to level 2 when at the earliest she reaches level 6 (because level 2 spells aren't available until then) and to level 3 at level 8. They can't be heightened above level 3 unless and until the character takes the Expert Spellcasting feat at (minimum) level 12, or above level 7 without the Master Spellcasting feat.

Have I got this right? Is the rule clear with the changes I propose, or should something else be added?

I'd like battlefield control to be easier.

So would anyone who's ever had to manage a battle. :-)

Agree regarding sign language being a language in the same sense that Taldane or Shoanti or Varisian is a language. Also agree, in theory, that different regions would develop different versions of sign language, but I wonder if it would be more practical, for game purposes, to ignore that and just have one universal sign language which is the same everywhere. Plus perhaps some specialty sign languages for specific groups, like thieves or soldiers.

In general I think players should specify in their PC's backstory where they grew up, and to what they were exposed in growing up. This would inform what languages and other things to which the PC might have access. For example, we (or "the game") treat Taldane as a common language all across the Inner Sea reason for two reasons: in the background/history of the region, it is a common language, and for game purposes we need such a language or the game gets bogged down because the players can't talk to each other. But the game assumes that if you "know" a language, you are perfectly fluent in it, and that's not always the case. A Varisian who grows up in a caravan moving around that region may be able to make himself understood in Taldane, but he's not going to be as fluent in it as a native speaker. The game ignores that, and that's fine, but it's still true (or would be, if Golarion really existed). OTOH, the Varisian is going to be more fluent in Varisian, and probably Shoanti, than somebody from Oppara.

As for access to Ancient Azlanti, how would that work? Azlant died more than 10,000 years ago, and the only native speaker to survive for any length of time, so far as we know, was Aroden, and it's been a while since he's been around. Even when he was around, why would he speak the language if no one else understood it? Maybe he might teach it to a few, but I doubt it would be commonly known. And as usage faded, so would knowledge, over the years.

Certain languages might be taught, as Latin and Greek were taught long after the collapse of the Roman Empire. That can be accounted for in the PC's back story. But it seems to me there should be a reason in that backstory why the PC knows that language, not just that the player wants his PC to know it.

Absalom will be an interesting case. Not addressed (so far) in PF2, and AFAIK has no "native" language of its own. Come to think on it, that seems odd. The greatest city in the world, been around for 5,000 years or so, and never developed its own language. That's not just odd, it's damn near unbelievable. Unless of course Absalom's "own language" is Taldane.

Maybe the sorcerer just has more of it.