Envall's page

So the pet is a roleplaying element. A wizard can have a book in his pouch, the witch a rabbit, but only one of them gets roasted if there is a chance of fireballs in the local weather forecast. I get it why everything living has to have simulated life, but this is one of those things where I cannot help but go back to the age old bad doctor advice: "Help my Witch player's pet keeps dying!" "Well stop killing it".

Ah yes but the pigeon the witch has could possibly fly and spy and carry small keys in my dungeon puzzle, truly this practical use for it requires us to make sure it has an entry in the list of targets the dungeon monsters have and truly one of the disposable mooks will make his job to make sure the pet pig gets chopped up. But from narrative perspective, it is not really immersion breaking if the fairy companion manages to survive each encounter.

Being a class in PF2 asks for a larger thematic load than being a class in PF1, because already baked into the cake right from the start are all the many subclasses built into each class. So only something that has a lot of thematic baggage can really work as a PF2 class without feeling too thinned out. Druid is a good example, how overstuffed the old dnd druid package was ended up being an asset because PF2 could effortlessly divide it into different aspects of being a druid. Druid with nature control opposed by druids that shapeshift and druids with animal pets, very clear distinct thematic borders.

But this means that PF1 basic classes needed fattening. PF2 Cleric absorbed Warpriest into itself right from the get-go, which spells out the obvious: Warpriest does not make sense as its own individual class anymore. I would be very perplexed if Paizo did bring Warpriest back with a different name, because why would you? What would it serve?

Bringing it back to the playtest, swashbuckler feels too specific, it feels complete. The feat list seems well thought out but also exhaustive. I don't see the same kind of potential as many other classes have on further exploration. By that I mean, "Finisher Gun: You gain ability to finisher with a gun" is not transformative.

The world is really, really big.

It works even better in Starfinder since space is REALLY REALLY big.

Nine out of ten, best way to reclass is to ask your GM if you can remake the character into the new class.

A new feat with "You become expert in light armor. If you already were expert in light armor, you gain expertise in medium armor. If you were expert in both, you become expert in heavy armor. Requires trained in X, etc. etc." as its text is super easy to write, and feels like a natural extension of the existing rules, but will not still give what few of you want.

This is not really a rules or math issue. This is not about how powerful wizards would be in their heavy armor, this is about the emotional reaction that wizard class is meant to use robes and only robes and that is it. And that is actually a valid response all and all.

Considering lvl 14 Champion multiclass benefit is getting expert on all armor types, I doubt general feat is an investment of equal size. Heavy armor is merely now a more exclusive club than before.

So what is assumed normal? Because I know it is assumed normal for things to take place in temperate woodland area, but you probably do not run into wolves in the desert or the ocean and these places are also normal places.

The task of isolating both versions from their past and only having the core rulebook in front of you is a tough one to put anyone up for. The quality of the core rulebook is unknown by itself, these things really come to life when you begin adding on top of it. Like an empty house, you only know what it is like to live in it when you have it full of furniture and few years of chores.

You don't start the ruleset with gunslingers, spell dueling and social combat. What is Pathfinder 2 like when it has atleast half of the books Pathfinder 1 has?

As far as I understood, you can always get uncommon things even in the "character building" process, but they have somekind of opportunity cost to them. You want dwarven battleaxe, you have to be a dwarf, etc.

The rarity system existed in a far more faint manner already in PF1, lot of gameplay options were locked behind gold costs for lot of items, feat chains for feats, prestige classes for class features, etc. Just like lot of elements, in the transition it is now an actual, sitting in the plain sight, system rather than a collection of disparate, unconnected functions. It is just that wizard spell selection was not really regulated in any way, very vaguely by what book they came from and what level they were.

This is all still feeding into the reading of skill points that is ignoring the fact that level bonus IS STILL NOT ABOUT PROFICIENCY.

Ant can drown in a puddle. I cannot drown in a puddle, and it is not because I know how to swim and the ant doesn't, I am a freaking human and the puddle is a size of my foot. It is about literal POWER LEVELS.

Accept the abstraction.

I mean, I get where it's coming from. Didn't older editions use rounds to represent time intervals much larger than six seconds? Meaning that an attack roll was actually the mechanical resolution of multiple individual weapon strikes? Under that paradigm, the more top-down perspective that AC-as-defense bonus operates under fits. Less so when one attack roll is really one in-universe attack attempt.

I think a whole minute was dedicated to one round, so each attack could be representation of a whole duel between two combatants. Higher level fighters could kill whole TWO orcs in one minute, compared to the measly one orc in low levels.

It is easy to say AC and HP would make more sense if you made them more defined and took away away the abstractions. But the problem has never been that you COULDN'T do so, the problem has always been that the act of doing so is so bloody herculean.

d20 is pretty deviant dice, has a big spread of values. Heavy abstractions, but d20 just kinda works. All checks are binary, you rarely have to consult tables, it just works right? It can be shallow, but then again, nobody can drown in shallow waters. Any attempt to fix it by taking away the abstraction elements and adding more rules is asking for trouble, because eventually the interconnected elements of the ruleset pile on and you have exponentially growing list of interacting elements and boom, you become unsure of the quality of the final product.

Armor as DR for example has been tried so many times. Armor as damage reduction is much more intuitive idea than armor as extra abstractions of evading damage which is not real damage, rather just "reduction of overall representation of avoiding fatal woulds". But calculating the correct DR numbers, weapon penetrations, etc. is just so much work that AC stays.

Giving me examples of bad PF1e monster design (arbitrary bonuses) isn't going to convince me that a completely arbitrary system is somehow better. Let's not take the worst examples of PF1e and make them the norm.

I want the interconnected web of monster stats. It means if I make a change as a GM - change weapon, change armor, select a different feat, add HD, etc. - I know where to make all the "trickle down" changes. It also means that as a player if I manage to do one of those things it has the same effect on the monster as it would on me.

I don't need to know that the shopkeep is a level 3 expert with a full stat block. But I do want to know that the various NPCs are all level something somethings, and that they interact with the world the same way my PC does.

Because the GM can literally not play the same way as a player, NPCs cannot interact with the world like a PC does.

The "PF1 NPC gallery method" is precisely what I want out of an RPG game world. It ensures consistency and helps greatly with suspension of disbelief. No in-game test or experiment should be able to discern whether someone is a PC or NPC. A game world where NPCs and monsters are just random collections of numbers innately makes no sense; it's like a movie set where all the buildings are just facades painted on wood, but the audience can also see the wood on camera.

It just really hammers home that you are playing a game, the PC is your game piece, and the NPCs/monsters are the GM's pieces. It makes it so much harder to feel like you're telling a cooperative story because the arbitrary mechanics keep pulling themselves to the front.

NPC gallery makes no sense either if you refuse to buy into the logic of it. The 2 level beggars, the 14th level kings, it is all just as arbitrary as the GM puzzling it out himself with a simple system as his basis. You CANNOT make a believable world out of adventurer classes. It makes no sense for people to be random PC classes, beggar to have a rogue level just so he can sneak attack you. It just makes level 1 Rogues, player characters, seem even more pathetic if you do any kind of side by side comparisions. Or the fact that house cats overpower grown ass men and kill them easily.

Sorry if I take the bad doctor approach to this, but first step if the game world makes no sense if you construct it out of "lvl x class npcs", stop making it out such elements.

I know Paizo compromised and told that NPCs made with PC rules are legit, but do not do it. A town demographic no longer is a distribution of many low level npcs and then few higher level npcs. Infact, majority of the world will never be statted, only the exact pieces that end up interacting with the PCs do and they will have arbitrary numbers made up by the GM.

Level 10 cleric was not born level 10, but became level 10 after adventuring to that point from level 1. Everyone ought to kill the idea from their heads that the PF1 npc gallery method is still legit.

Lot of confusion seems to come from trying to use both levels and proficiency to measure the same things. Level is merely abstraction of power.

This is very different from PF1 where only pure skill rank mattered. Consider this metaphor: Artisan of past, present and future all craft an expertly made weapon. All of them are equally fancy inside their own cultures, but they operate on completely different level: sword, assault rifle and plasma destroyer.

As to why to still keep the d20? Because you can't be great at everything. Your best stuff should basically eliminate the need to roll - but you'll be average at some stuff, and bad at some stuff, and for those things the roll is still valuable.

To stay logically consistent, if you auto-succeed where you are good at, you auto-fail at the things you are not good at. Thus there is no need for rolling at any point then.

So I find the argument that expecting mid/high level characters to succeed at actions on low die rolls is somehow about optimization to be unconvincing. IN PF1e even mediocre characters succeed on low die rolls at higher levels. This is a virtue of the system to me.

If it is a virtue, then that is a strong argument for just getting rid of d20 all together. Why bother keeping the power of the roll of the dice for rest of the game?

Character's prowess should be defined by the situation they are in at the moment they make the skill roll rather than the size of the bonus modifier. We can't do anything about d20 at this point, but repeated rolls and crits allow even small number differences to make them feel distinctive. "Oh it is just 3 point", well the DC difference between something severe and impossible is also just 4 points.

Also the fact that the roll of the dice meant less and less the higher level you got in PF1 was not really as much a planned feature as the bug in the system. There is no reason to keep that, unless you are just so risk averse that your power fantasy is killed the moment your character does not succeed.

So, do you make the game to fit people who play it, or make players fit the game you make?

Because lot of people, I would dare to say most, just play Lawful Good as Ideal Hero and GMs just go with it. Appeal of Ideal Hero is easy to understand and it is appealing. In that context, whatever you write to the paladin code becomes more superficial, as long as it is easy enough to incorporate to general way to play good stern friendly smiter of evil.

But it is just more intriguing if paladins are ... weird. Alignment corners have lot more nuance to them if you consider them as places for people with extreme personalities, rather than faction camps for heroes and villains. In the first perspective, the Ideal Hero perspective, the difference between the LG and CG paladin is not important because there, alignment itself is not important. Like, "my paladin is chaotic good, he is cool and wears leather jackets, but no drugs because winners don't do it."

If I giver the baker in the town infinite HP and nobody attacks him, does he actually have infinite HP?

At some point both developers and players could truly, with all their heart, believe that the world could be reasoned and built from the class levels like building a castle from lego blocks. The "NPC Gallery" from the Game Mastery Guide, the 2010 book is to me kind of a ... bible of old faith. For example, let's take the humble "Beggar". One level commoner, one level rogue. I mean, when it comes to citizens in your world, this is one of the lowest positions you can be, and even then, the beggar is LEVEL 2 entity! Commoner levels in general are element of "non-importance" and one rogue level? Ah, the class "rogue" was after all meant to represent all kind of thuggish, criminal, backhanded level. In another way, his classes could read "non-important low life, lvl 2".

You can see rogue class being treated as measurement of "rogueness" every where. Merchant Prince has rogue levels because being a shrewd merchant has to involve rogueness. Pirate Captain has rogueness. Criminals are plenty rogueness.

Of course, this method of trying to build the world ran into many problems. First of all, there is not enough paper in the world to print enough NPCs for there to be one for every occasion. Second, NPC levels are also arbitrary. A generic King is a lvl 16 NPC. Alright, what does that actually mean? Why does it matter? So he can have +32 diplomacy modifier? If the king used his diplomacy on players, he could make it "illegal by the rules" to attack him. Ah, rules driven world! You can do anything you want, as long as it is written into the core rulebook!

In a way, there is a lot of desire to expose the strings holding the puppet show together. Tabletop RPG challenges have always been completely arbitrary, PF2 is just lot more honest about it than DnD 3.0+ ever was.

You cannot cling to the one perspective of the overall abstraction when going from system to system. You might have an idea what 18 looks like, but you also have to be able to re-calibrate that through out the years.

The third edition player's handbook did state that score of 18 strength was found in such creature such as centaurs or minotaurs. But PF2 18 does not have to mean what 3.0 wanted to represent with it. Not to mention, how strong are centaurs or minotaurs really.

Ok but what does scaling feats look in practice?
Is the selection of them limited to first levels only, because there is no way it will be acceptable to pick a feat later in your character's career that makes them a master of a "chain" instantly. Dedication still ought to be rewarded.

Well the problem is about being rigorous about getting rid of the "something for nothing" options you were able to get in Pathfinder 1. If you think about 3.5 Druid, the one and only list of abilities you get are the ones listed into the class advancement table. Pet, nature sense, spells, stride, step, wild shape, thousand faces, etc. All druids follow the same list.

Paizo's archetypes and "swapping bad class features for good ones" was not really sustainable model for future. Weak class features are either meant to be not written, or endured. If your class has an anathema for example, it would be bad design to allow players to freely bypass it with an option. If you write out all the bad class features away, you are once again just trading scarce features away since good class features are not free.

Lacking the high levels tools to take on the high level tasks can also be presented as being unprepared for them, and it is very reasonable to be unlikely to succeed unprepared.

No.

If I just level up from lv12 to lv13, my Medicine improved by +1.
At the same time, the DC to heal myself increases by +2.

I just got better at something, but my success chances worsened.
This is absolutely a number problem, if not an item problem.

(Example is made win Treat Wounds and base 10.2, but you could make another with, say, Bard’s features and the new 10.2, it’s the same issue on a different line)

Task DC must assume you gain bonus points from other sources instead of just yourself, because treasure that assists you is fact about the game. Treat wounds is a special case since it targets a person and his level is the basis of the DC.

But in the abstraction, it is not based on the level of the person as much as it is assumed that higher level people have been wounded by more and more exotic means and thus it is harder to heal. The wounds are scaling up.

Hard, Impossible, Incredible tasks scale faster than you level, fine.
But regular tasks also scale faster than your level, so what's the point of adding to them every level if it's not enough to keep up with my level????? How is that training???? Why do I need a magic item to be able to do just as well as before in the things I already got better at???

Well "Trivial lvl 20 task" does seem a bit oxymoron.

Maybe the table has a bit of a flavor problem rather than a number problem.

Whenever there is a huge change in the character, the character has a life changing moment and want to change into a different character, it is just so much better to talk to the GM and remake the character. This of course breaks the kind of "organic change" some people like, but personally I believe it is not that important. You got a Rogue that by plot twist gets divine powers, shuffle papers, rebuild the character, and you got narratively much better result. This applies to both editions, especially in PF1 it was much easier to just rebuild characters if players wanted big character changes instead of dipping into classes and realizing that multiclassing gets you just an ugly mess unless you planned it 5 years in advance.

That logic doesn't work.

The guy in the OP's audience who did the elbow nudge (out of combat) could have been a monk doing an unarmed elbow strike, or could have been somebody delivering a touch attack with a gentle elbow nudge (or, alternatively, a gentle finger poke or a light caress).

How is one kind of unwanted contact (elbow nudge) different from another kind (gentle poke or caress)?

What is it about "Hey, we're in combat now" that turns one kind of elbow nudge (free to do whenever you want even during the casting of a spell) into another kind of elbow nudge (nope, you can't do it at all, you have to wait your turn, because combat).

In a RPG where "RP" stands for "Role Playing" played by people who like their stories to make sense, having some kind of mechanically gamist logic that certain laws of physics apply ONLY during combat and entirely different laws of physics apply out of combat is just not going to be well received by these people.

Each to their own, some people like that kind of thing. Others don't. Maybe this might turn out to be the kind of game that only works for one kind of player, not both.

We differate the two to ALLOW roleplaying to exist. To "Strike" is not just hitting someone, it is meant to represent any way of KILLING other person. In any situation, a character can slap a character. Because we know this is not a combat thing, we do not have to go insane and start counting out non-lethal unarmed attack penalties to hit the AC for a narrative moment.

We do not think walking in the park as "move actions". We do not count rounds when characters are talking to each other, remember, you are only allowed to speak 6 seconds at time before the other person has its own turn to speak!

A combat scenario is a combat scenario and GM ought not to make it too hard to distinguish when you ought to just roll init and have a surprise round and when not to. It is important that the players can assume it is not combat and if it turns to combat, the GM will signal it somehow. Usually it is just a skill roll to notice ill intent/hidden weapon/crossbows in the balconies and then get down to the surprise round. But an actor does not need to roll fist fighting attack rolls to see if they successfully slapped the other actor on the face with a glove.

Combat rules only apply during combat.
This was made even more explicit in PF2.

Just take a mallet and hammer it in to all future module writers.
"THE TABLE LEVEL REFERS TO TASK LEVEL, NOT PLAYER LEVEL"
"THE TABLE LEVEL REFERS TO TASK LEVEL, NOT PLAYER LEVEL"
"THE TABLE LEVEL REFERS TO TASK LEVEL, NOT PLAYER LEVEL"

More often not, they retreat, think another plan, and try again.

It's much more fulfilling for the players to have to think and to actually triumph, rather than waltz right in someplace and know that somehow, they'll win "just because".

I don't meta game to "win". I make smart opponents with real plans, so that the players can actually feel like they beat something meaningful rather than a bag of HP and abilities.

And they are for some reason allowed to retreat?

And roleplaying a godly intelligent being with Int of 18-24 as having int 4 is not suspension of disbelief?

Wizards are beyond clever. Not playing them as such breaks immersion much more heavily.

It reminds me a rogue player of mine that was saying I was meta gaming for putting every single magical trap behind a thin sheet of lead, so that Detect magic wouldn't pick them up.

I was like "wut mate? You know the wizard has both 24 int and the detect magic on his list right? Why wouldn't he cover up his traps?"

Playing casters as morons to make a setting work is not "doctor was right" it's the doctor seeing you have gangrene and going "wear this glove so that no one notices it"

And yet all villains exist to fall.

So for whose benefit do we do GOTCHA! moments for? So the wizard is super smart and has a contingency plan for every single thing that party could imagine. Let's say players did not assume far enough and the party loses. What then? Do you WIN as GM?

What's stupid? Wizards? Invisibility? Flight? Fireballs?

If a wizard can do all those things under the rules, it's stupid for them not to when confronted by, say, an army.

Because it fights against many people's suspension of disbelief. You can pick apart the setting, but then it becomes really hard to run an adventure in it if everyone is already ready to disbelieve it. You can call for change, but change what? Change the rules or change the setting? Changing the setting can result in setting people don't care for, changing the rules can result in ruleset people don't find fun anymore. So the best option is to not do it.

This time the doctor was right, if it hurts, don't do it.

Just because something is allowed, does not mean it is intended behavior.

You can make invisible wizards flying high in the air shooting fireballs down to the ground. But that is stupid, so you ought not to do it. There is no solid arm of the law to stop you from doing bad ideas, that is left to your own intuition. You can question everything, but the reality that it gets you nowhere.

It would become a roleplaying game focused on player expression rather than challenge. The adventure would become completely undetermined, because the players could derail the intended story as they pleased.

It would probably get boring fast, but I doubt it would much resemble a novel.

Well you could still have challenge. The challenge is what numbers you demand your players reach. They might reach it, or they might not, but it would be certain success or failure.

Better word than novel is screenplay. The players enter as actors and play their role. They see which checks they can make and which they cannot make and know the proper lines based on this information. Of course this is all talking about this imaginary game even more extremely determined than just encounter-based spells. A roleplaying system that works more like a visual novel, critical story paths have branches that are unlocked with different attributes. But I digress.

It is starting to become a really common line of thinking that anything that inconveniences players/characters is bad because inconvenience is subset of frustration and thus inherently negative emotion. If we can get rid of all negative emotions in the game, surely we will have just net more Good Fun and the game would be Better.

But these little things give the game friction. Rulesets ought to push back at at player desires every now and then. That is why we have dice involved in skill checks, instead of deciding expertise by binary numerical check. We could just ask players to have X amount of skill points to pass this challenge. But we do not, because the game wants to disobey the player.

Okay so we increase the pace by making things per-encounter. That means removing the attrition idea from the encounters. So each encounter has to be individually dangerous rather than maybe dangerous as a collective. So then we create encounters where you are assumed to have all your best spells, so we make every encounter very dangerous. On a road with no friction, only way to slow down is a sudden stop.

Ruleset with zero disobedience stops being a roleplaying game and just becomes a novel. The adventure becomes determined.

Yeah, that's why I think we do need explicit examples. Because the alternative is really bad.

Except that would call for reverting back to how skills were handled in Pathfinder 1. There is a certain level of mutual exclusivity here, the streamlining makes things ambiguous because that is the price of commonality. Ok, how do I think about this...

Let's take acrobatics. PF1, acrobatics has a whole section for "trying to cross a narrow path", aka the classic tiny ledge the whole party has to slowly nudge through by hugging the cliff side. PF1 sets ... concrete DCs. The book even says that if you got a wide path, was it 3 feet, DC is zero. But then in the nitty gritty where you can make the slope 30 degrees, wet, how fast they want to go...

This is not streamlined. Explicit examples were the TARGET OF ELIMINATION. In the end, it is just as arbitrary that 1 feet ledge is DC 5 challenge that it is whatever 10-2 tells you. In the PF1 method, you are handed a pre-thought world that you then ought to follow. Hard to pass ledges are narrower than 3 feet, make a such ledge according to these rules. It gives no real advice what is actually proper challenge, it just lets you turn a world into DC. PF2 is only concerned with challenge. Whatever you imagine the ledge, it is a challenge of your choice if you follow 10-2.

I cannot 100% support either solution. Because from one perspective, the world matters not one bit. This wide ledge, that wide ledge, why does that matter one bit? The GM just wanted a ledge that the party can fall off, do we need to study the geometry of balancing on such and such wide ledges? On the other hand, tying the logic of difficulty classes to somekind of worldbuilt logic gives them credibility like people have been saying. 10-2 is honest in the arbitrary of the challenge, how the sausage is made. I get strong feelings why I want to say that is better, because you could pretend to be all hardcore, "it is so good because roleplaying is now harder and demands more from everyone! Durr hurr I'm so good at this game!" It feels fake, roleplaying disconnected from a tactile connection to the imaginary world. Honesty exposes the lies we try to suspend to belief.

But PF2 cannot have explicit examples because its goal was to kill them to begin with.

That's a really haphazard way to go about it. Freelancers get selected because they're good writers, know how to make a story come to life. They have to be competent at rules, but they're not the experts; that's the development team. Just because they got a paycheck from Paizo doesn't mean a freelancer is a rules expert.

And a given module is only going to contain a handful of skill uses. It's not going to give you a systematic framework to work with.

Yeah, I can see it being super haphazard. But outside of writing explicit examples into every skill entry, it is the way it is going to go. Playtest scenarios will eventually get to high levels, which means someone at Paizo has to had a thought spent into creating that context. So either they see nothing wrong with it, or they will change it.

Envall wrote:

When we get the first high level module with skill checks, it will give examples what they consider the DC appropriate context.

Will it? Module authors are usually not from the Development Team. They're usually freelancers. All they've got to go on right now is table 10-2.

They make it official by proxy. Eventually someone has to write the book with nothing but upper two-digit level challenges and the DC numbers are XX so at that point doing so is that DC. Development team be damned, Paizo product is a Paizo product, be it written by a developer or commissioned writer. They gotta carry that weight.

When we get the first high level module with skill checks, it will give examples what they consider the DC appropriate context.

They made it easier to die permanently to offset the increased post-combat healing. You are expected to lose PCs.

Envall wrote:

I can see zombies just wanting to right away eat whoever they finally down. Goos too. I have to agree that "mindless" monsters have no interest in self-preservation would just focus on the one person for good.

But does a mindless creature even have the capacity to understand if a downed creature is unconscious or dead?

Probably not.

I can see zombies just wanting to right away eat whoever they finally down. Goos too. I have to agree that "mindless" monsters have no interest in self-preservation would just focus on the one person for good.

There's a term for an option that is intentionally bad. It's called a "trap option," and its only purposes are to make other options seem artificially better and/or to punish those foolish enough to fall for it.

I cannot accept this logic on options that are outside of permanent character option choices. A s~!*ty potion is s+~~ty, sure, but it can also be your ONLY option. And it is always a net benefit. There might be a situation where, yes, you can choose from a weak potion, lean wand and powerful scroll. But these are not interchangeable AND they are not equally distributed.

"Potion did not save me, it was a trap to drink it" is a valid statement, BUT it is not proof that the potion is too weak. It can also mean that drinking the potion at the wrong time was a tactical mistake. It is not a fact that potions ought to be good source of healing in middle of a combat.

I am sure healing weak to make sure combat is not prolonged by potions in your belt being "extra health bars". The NPC is near death, he chugs a potion, he is now topped off, party needs to repeat the combat.

The desire to not die is super strong among players, for obvious reasons. But proper challenge curve is meant to make sure that one dungeon either kills someone or results in a near death situation. I am one of those who can subscribe to the thinking where loss can lead to triumph, victories have to be earned with blood. Bad potions and resonance exists to make damage last, and if your enjoyment is tied to your character staying alive, you can never enjoy resonance, because it literally exists to kill your comfort zone.

The trap of thread is in the title.

There is no real collective "we" in this.

One way to solve the "combat attrition" design is just to assume the party will do one single long combat event per dungeon. The combat encounter literally never ends. When one wave of monsters is dead, the next one spawns. Or maybe put a delay of 1 minute until next wave barges in from the door for some emergency healing.

There does exist genre fantasy that interweaves its magic into its world-building much more solidly, and holds together more consistently, than Dragonlance or Harry Potter. It's not all that hard to find, and give that being possible, I am inclined to think it is desirable in a setting; it improves plausibility for some players, and does not that I can see make the setting any less fun for people who can enjoy just taking something at face value without wanting to understand it at a deeper level, which is not my preferred playstyle.

There is always a cost to a more deeply explained systems. You have to spend lot of energy and time building them, and they have to be incorporated to the rules to matter, and if the players do not care for them, they get in the way because they still come up every now and then and are probably pain in the butt to resolve. I can just say SHADOWRUN, let it float in the air for all to see. Not everyone wants to know how the sausage is made. It is not even always relevant.

This is why one ruleset can never ever satisfy all bases, because some desires are mutually exclusive.

I'd rule that they're customarily kept in a little tube like an eyeglass repair kit, or in a little box like an emergency sewing kit, and dispense like Tic-Tacs or Pez; different manufacturers may have different ways of packaging them, but those are likely the most common. My guess would also be that they're fairly durable; I imagine them being rubbery (like a firm eraser) until "directed" to be either more or less rigid.

Why is the word "ikons" spelled that way?

It's a valid alternate spelling, and actually closer to the original Greek. Besides: "icon" is already a Starfinder background.

Said it before, and I'll say it again: they should have Apostae be inhabited by either (in order of my personal preference) lashunta-based or elf-based nephilim (the new term for what were formerly tieflings and aasimar, but I specifically mean tieflings here). Keep the ties to Castrovel; give them a reason (i.e. fiends had been working them over for generations) to be culturally a bunch of manipulative finks.

The main thing I'd change in Starfinder is to streamline starship combat, to be honest. Making it more like PF2e (aside from making them more compatible, mixing up ability benefits, and so on) doesn't particularly interest me.

Coffee shops have a separate line for Shirren, be a use they are (a) obviously caffeine fans, and (b) their coffee orders take five minutes each to recite.

It's a running joke that if a new shirren customer walks in, their first order will become an overly complicated fancy special named after them.

Kasathe are in hot demand as baristas and mixologists at places frequented by shirren, for their ability to mix multiple drinks at once.

Same would go for skittermanders, I'd wager.

Neat - a Shriek-infused plant pahtra (...plahntra?) evolutionist! The real question is: how do you pronounce Kyyduh? K-you-duh? Kai-duh? Kee-duh? Kyu-oo-duh? Something else?

My guess was "Kee-də." (Which kind of sounds like "kitteh," but I'm sure that's coincidental.)

Deep Cuts makes a set of two skittermander minis (looks like Eshki in a suit, and a nufriend in a military uniform) that aren't too horrible-looking.

Lashunta seem to be inspired by Ralph Milne Farley's Cupians; they're telepathic, look like attractive humans with antennae, and originated on fantasy Venus. Based on that, the antennae being connected to telepathy (and possibly balance, although I don't recall that being explored) would seem likely.

That said: Cupians were also deaf (in fact, they were completely earless). Lashunta appear to have both hearing and ears. Therefore: the antennae might serve a different purpose.

160) Goblins overcame their fear of the written word. Of course, from there, it was only a matter of time before they discovered numbers; and, from there, it was only a matter of time until someone divided by zero.

Quelvai is the result of proteans—likely of surpassing power—dragging small fragments of the Plane of Water and the Boneyard into the Material Plane, playing with them for a few millennia...and then, as the fickle proteans will, abruptly getting bored and abandoning their toy.

Still further millennia later, an Ilee exploration ship crash-landed. The survivors, in an attempt to adapt and preserve resources, shaped themselves into malleable semiaquatic forms the approximate size of house cats. Their descendants have never either directly confirmed nor denied that they were "nudged" in that direction by the glowing kelp-like seaweeds among which they make their homes. One way or another: it's known that the seaweeds resist any attempt to study them too deeply unless "permission" is asked—be that directly, or via the kelp-dwellers.

The origin of the other sapient inhabitants of Quelvai is more of a mystery. When a ship landed a hemisphere away from the kelp-dwellers, reports given of multilegged swimming creatures—human-sized or larger—were originally dismissed until a group of them approached a research platform.

They clambered out of the ocean on four pairs of webbed claws, rising onto the hindmost set to heights of over seven feet, their sleek, mottled blue pelts shedding water. The word "strovion!" is said to have been muttered by a vesk security officer as she reached for her sidearm.

Upon seeing this, the foremost of the newcomers raised his hands—all six wrists decorated with seashell bracers—in a conciliatory gesture, and addressed the researchers in heavily-accented Vesk:

"Greetings, nufriends! How can we help you?"

The strangely-altered skittermanders seemed to be unwilling or unable to explain how, exactly, it was that their forebears had gotten there. A few cryptic statements regarding how Quelvai must have somehow needed them were all that was forthcoming.

On a darker note: both groups of sapients have warned off-worlders that people who die with unfinished business "tend not to stay dead" unless the proper rituals have been performed. This has since proven to be more than mere superstition, and is attributed to the shattered and warped shards of the Boneyard which still rest at the core of the world.

Regarding the starship critters?

A couple of responses:

Currently playing a skittermander envoy (unless the game collapses, because Junk Happens). Deliberately hacked her name together out of a kasatha name and a vesk name, with the implication being that she named herself after the two earliest people she remembers having an influence on her life.

Uplifted Bears? From like Golarion? I honestly don't care I've been wanting to play a bear like race for forever now.

Like Dickson's Dilbians. Let's hope they're on the upper end of Medium (if not actually Large) and have kind of a boisterous bruiser vibe.

And, seriously: I'm looking forward to the dirindi, sazarons, and various Veskarium and Azlanti Star Empire subject species to the same degree that I was looking forward to the maraquoi. Or, to switch away from playables: more Castrovel critters and everything outside of the Pact system.

Arevashti wrote:

My all-time favorite has already been confirmed as off the table, unfortunately.

Who's/what's that?

The coeurl.

This time around, we've got some nice, kid-friendly introductory games. It's also the first Bundle of Holding that can be given as a gift. (A Christmas present, perhaps?)

A percentage of the profits from this bundle will be donated to Save the Children and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

And to ice this cake, if you break the threshold price, you'll get three extra products. Including this. (Yes, I have a vested interest in promoting it. Why do you ask?)

Race of Humaniod or Outsider(native) that have a third eye.

*Whistles innocently*

Take back what you said about Agathions not having hyena forms; hyenas have very caring, close-knit family communities. They take proportionally longer care of their children than any other animal (other than humans), and are not deserving of their nasty reputation at all. Lions steal hyena kills more than the other way around.

Crocutals are known for their tenacity and resourcefulness. They have a generally friendly but occasionally heated rivalry with leonals, and dislike being mistaken for gnolls. :)

Also, they cast hideous laughter.

See, I think it's more that we're introducing the idea that the expectation that everyone at your table behave like a respectful human being (which, incidentally, includes not spouting sexist/racist/homophobic/what-have-you crappola regardless of who is or is not present) is not synonymous with special consideration.

Hear, hear. No one's talking about "special consideration;" we're talking about basic consideration and not acting like a pillock to begin with.

Well...I've been treated like an unwelcome interloper at the local game store. I eventually quit patronizing the place altogether. At other game stores, I've been treated like a valued customer (or at least as valued as it gets), so I tend to consider that place at least somewhat anomalous.

I don't like the whole "special butterfly" thing. In fact, I tend to prefer not being the only woman in the game group.

Most of the real nonsense I've seen has been on the Internet, where being openly female is considered a ploy for attention and sexist comments are considered cute.

Paizo has hinted that psionics exists Golarion, it's more common with the Vudrani and I think one of the other planets.

Castrovel, IIRC?

My husband is actually at work on an alternate psionics system in the form of feat trees. Not sure when he'll be ready to actually show it to the public, but even so.

Thread Doesn't exist.

Try this link. Hopefully, that works.

Dragonfolk

Triga wrote:

Please can we see a Dragon born type race? Please, please? I do not think that lizard folk count, they are reptiles.

Just please don't give the females boobs (and make them mammals like in 4e). Look to the (large sized, and winged) dragonfolk/dragonkin of 3e (Forgotten Realms) for inspiration instead.

Well, the general consensus is that dragons are at least endothermic...

...but then again, so are birds.

Gargoyles

Gargoyles.
I'd love rules for gargoyles of small, medium, and large size, as player characters. They can only glide, not fly, and have a hefty racial bonus to climb and can always take 10.

I once came up with a strongly Gargoyles-inspired race for a homebrew idea. Unfortunately, my notes are long since lost

What I remember is that they were on the upper end of size Medium (think Goliath) and had some DR (weak DR, but even so) and a minor camouflage ability.

Lizardfolk

Both regular(bulky strong) and Poisondusk(lithe) variety for players. Make the racial levels optional.

Gnolls
Racial Levels available but optional.

I'm not sure why those races have racial HD at all. (Probably just to make them tougher?) It's always seemed to me like they'd make almost ideal alternative playable races if only they were class-defined.