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Organized Play Member. 13 posts. No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 2 Organized Play characters.
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I'd like to posit a scenario, to make sure I have what you're saying correct:
Let's say I show up for a game day and discover I've left my character sheets behind. No problem, I'll play a pregen. Let's say for the sake of argument that I'm running a level 7 pregen and assigning the credit to my level 6 character.
Now, things go badly. The entire party gets wiped out. Result: 0 gold on the chronicle, and I need a body recovery to boot. Now, per this new ruling, the gold and prestige have to come from my character. I believe my character has the gold and prestige to cover this, but I'm not certain (and the character's at home).
1. How do I resolve having my character pay for these items if I don't have the info there?
2. Is it your opinion that if I don't have my character present, I am required to mark him as dead in this scenario, even if my character would be capable of paying all costs?
The first issue seems to make an impossible task mandatory, and the second seems to defeat the entire purpose of making pregens available.
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Nefreet wrote: The gold spent isn't from the player's actual character.
It couldn't be, for the reasons you describe.
It's from the Chronicle for the game being played.
This is how it worked before, too.
It can't be done, true. Nonetheless it seems to be required:
• The player can use the pregenerated character’s
funds—including selling her gear at half price—to
pay for these spellcasting services. In addition, the
player can contribute the associated Roleplaying Guild
character’s resources (gp and Prestige Points) to this
end. The Roleplaying Guild character must contribute
a minimum amount of gp before spending the
pregenerated character’s wealth in this way, depending
on her level: 0 gp for a 1st-level pregenerated character,
1,000 gp for 4th-level, and 2,000 gp for 7th-level.

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You know, even if you entirely leave aside the adversarial nature of this rule change, how's it even supposed to work, in practical terms?
One of the most common reasons for playing a pregen is forgetting your character sheet or otherwise leaving it behind. So, suppose a player leaves their character on the kitchen counter and doesn't realize it until they've sat down at the game table. They've got to play a pregen, right? So they play a pregen and put the credit to that character left at home.
Now suppose the pregen dies, or meets some other horrible fate. The player has to spend one or two thousand gold from their own character before they can touch the pregen's stuff.
How are they supposed to record that? How can they even know if the character can afford it? If the character can't, is it even legal to sell things to make up the difference, considering the character isn't actually there?
It seems that the player is essentially required to have his own character sheet with him to resolve everything, which defeats the entire point of playing a pregen when you forget your stuff.
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John Compton wrote: Finally, to answer the original poster's question, no, a GM should not decide that a character's skin is too dark to be legal for play. Thank you John. As I stated earlier, seeing this said in an official voice pretty much answers the concerns I had. I've been largely reacting to the thread of last year, in which several posters said or implied that they would turn players away if their characters were non-white elves. I'm satisfied to see it explicitly stated that such a viewpoint is not officially sanctioned, intentionally or by oversight.

A note before I begin: my issue is only tangentially related to the Blood of Shadows thread, which is why I'm not posting this there.
Perhaps it's something about the season. A year ago we had a newcomer to the board asking if it was legal to play a drow-descended elf or half-elf. He was told this wasn't legal, and someone suggested that he just play a dark-skinned half-elf and imagine it to be half-drow inside his own head. And that's where the conversation took a turn.
Several posters jumped in to argue that elves were only ever lily-white, and that playing an elf or half-elf with darker skin was illegal. Others pointed out that per the ARG elves have the same variations in color as humans, that Golarion has an existing example of darker-skinned elves in the Ekujae, and that half-elves could well take after a human parent in any case. Unfortunately, many in the former group were adamant that playing an elf with skin darker than snow was reskinning a drow, and thus grounds for dismissal from the table.
Mike Brock eventually closed the topic with the statement "You can't reskin a character to look like a drow," and said that this would be documented where necessary.
The problem is, it's been a year (and a day), and no documentation or guidelines have been forthcoming. And because the most notable aspect of drow appearance is dark skin (not actually certain if it's black, blue, or purple in Golarion), that essentially leaves the rule as "A GM may, at his own discretion, decide that a character's skin is too dark to be legal for play."
Which is, quite frankly, a horrible rule.
Now it's possible that Mike just didn't get to the issue before he left, which is what I'm hoping. In which case, hopefully we can get the issue resolved now. Could someone in campaign leadership give us some guidelines on what exactly "no looking like a drow" means?
Ideally, guidelines that don't allow a GM to kick out a player for saying "My character is Black."

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Well, in some cases it’s because of the morality issue. A paladin is based on the idea of objectively true and objectively verifiable alignment, which we don’t have in the real world. Thus, when there’s a conflict between the GM’s idea of good and the player’s idea of good, some GMs will take advantage of the opportunity. Some will try to show that they are more morally developed than their players (“Well, maybe you can’t understand what good is”). Some will level an attack on the very concept of morality (“Good is just a lie anyway”).
In most cases, though, I think a lot of GMs want to see a paladin fall because they want to try to run a redemption arc. What it really reminds me of is the concept of the Ultimate Punisher Story, which requires some explanation.
There was an interview I recall reading with a comic book editor, whose name I can’t recall, who was in charge of the Punisher series of comics. For a time they accepted open story submissions on the comic, and the editor had kept a bunch of rejected submissions in a drawer he labeled “Ultimate Punisher Story.” Because every one of these submissions was the same:
Frank Castle (the Punisher) makes a mistake and kills an innocent person.
Frank Castle gives up the vigilante life and becomes a priest.
Years later, a big threat arises that draws Frank out of retirement, to put on the skull shirt one last time.
These stories were submitted by many different people, and they differed in the little details. Sometimes the innocent person was a boy, or a nun, or a cop. Sometimes it was a crimelord who Frank came back to fight, sometimes a supervillain, sometimes a corrupt politician. But the basic story was always the same.
The editor wondered why so many people were obsessed with this idea. It didn’t fit the character at all, as the Punisher was driven by revenge and obsession, and wasn’t religious. And since you can’t really set anything after the Punisher’s last big mission, it was effectively a dead end for the series. So why this story?
Ultimately, the reason’s fairly simple: all those would-be writers wanted to be remembered as the one who wrote the Ultimate Punisher Story. Not as the guy who wrote a story where the Punisher guns down some goons. And if the series was wasted after that, so much the better, because it also meant they would have written the Last Punisher Story. And thus their submissions went into the drawer, because the readers were paying to see the Punisher gun down some goons, not to feed some particular writer’s ego.
When a player shows up with a Paladin, some GMs start imagining the Ultimate Paladin Story. The paladin will make a mistake, and fall from grace. He’ll spend a long time wandering the earth, saving people, proving that he can do right without the power of heaven. And then there will be some big threat, and the paladin will stand up against it, and all his powers will come back, and he’ll smite the demon or the dragon or whatever with righteousness. And then presumably everyone will shed a tear in awe at the storytelling skill of the GM who made it happen.
Nevermind that it may not fit the character at all. Nevermind that it makes supposedly “good” gods look like cruel bullies. Nevermind that the player may have just wanted to play as a shining knight and smite some orcs. The GM wants to be remembered for being the one to tell the Ultimate Paladin Story, and that requires the paladin to fall.
And thus, one way or another, the paladin will fall.
The only way things will ever work out is for GMs to actually talk to their players beforehand. If they want to do the whole fall and redemption thing, go for it! Work out some appropriate fall. Decide together what sort of thing will raise a fallen paladin up again. But for the love of all that is holy, don’t try to be an auteur and force the story on a player who just signed up to kill some goons.
I've run into this same issue myself (well, with the urumi rather than the scarf, but the effect is the same). There are a few cases where more than one version of something exist in the rules. The Dueling weapon property is a rather well-known instance. When it's intended for one version to completely replace another, this has been made explicit in Additional Resources. Take, for example, the Living Monolith prestige class. So, if the AR says it's legal to play, then it's legal to play.
You may end up running into trouble, however, with GMs who state that only the most recent version is allowed, although you won't see an actual source on that. The "most recent version only" rule does not exist. It never has existed. But many GMs will enforce it anyway, and there's not much you can do about it.
End result: it's legal, but expect table variation. If all the local GMs are against it, you may have to bow to custom over law.

Michael Brock wrote: You can't reskin a character to look like a drow. You also can not play a character who is descended from a Drow, including a half-elf with drow ancestry. Since this is, unfortunately, not clear, I will make sure it is documented where it needs to be.
Drow are evil. Drow are despised and hated. Drow are essentially kill on sight because they are considered a monster for all intent and purposes. The Society would likely not accept a character that looks like a Drow due to the problems that come with it.
If you want to use a disguise kit or a hat of disguise or whatever to try to look like a Drow, then it is an option. However, the reactions of NPCs will likely cause grief for the other characters and the GM is well within his or her rights to have NPCs act accordingly if they fail their perception and think the character is a Drow.
Alright, I want to be very sure on this issue, to make certain I'm not misreading you here. So, let's put this as a hypothetical:
I show up at your table, and when we're doing character intros, I describe my character as a half-elf with white hair and very dark skin. I use a pre-painted "Drow Warrior" figure as my mini. However, I never use the word "Drow" or describe my character as being descended from "dark elves".
Is that character legal, or a forbidden reskin?

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The ARG notes that Golarion elves physically change to reflect their surroundings, and that their coloration is even more diverse than humanity's. If anything, pale elves should be the anomaly in anything but an arctic-type setting.
But I think the specific issue of what color elf matches what terrain could overtake what I see as the larger issue, so I'll restate it more generally: the PFS campaign provides rules for which mechanical choices are allowed in character creation, and which are not. However, beyond the actual mechanics of race, class, equipment, and so on, the rest of the character is for the player to determine. This includes the character's hopes, dreams, goals, and personality, and also the character's physical appearance and backstory.
To attempt to stretch the reskinning rules so as to forbid players from making those decisions does a great disservice to the game. If a GM can decide that a character's skin color (or gender or sexuality or political views or whatever else) is "wrong" and bar the player from the table on those grounds, then something has gone horribly askew.
So again I say, if you're going to make an argument here, please look at what you're saying and consider carefully the implications.
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I always prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I'm assuming that some people here have gotten so caught up in arguing that you're not looking closely at what you're saying. But, well... look at what you're saying.
The rules don't allow playing as Drow, true. But if someone's playing a dark-skinned elf (whether they imagine their character as a Drow or not), I don't see that the rules stop them. I don't see that the rules should stop them. In fact, I see no way that such a rule could be anything but a horrendously bad idea.
Think about it for a moment. If your argument comes across as "Playing dark-skinned characters shouldn't be allowed, and I will prevent them from playing at my table," is there any interpretation in which that doesn't sound horrible?
I have to say: you're doing it wrong. Sure, any of these resolves the problem with the gunslinger, but that's just the gunslinger. What about the other players? Did you even give a thought to how you'd demonstrate your moral and intellectual superiority in their eyes?
No, you're going to have to loudly denounce the gunslinger for playing a class that is objectively wrong. Otherwise, players might get the idea that it's somehow acceptable to play a class that's permitted and supported by the game. And then where would we be?
Plus, you've got to take Poe's Law into account. Granted it's not on the player resources list, but it's still important.

I'm still having a little difficulty with the exact details on this. I'll give you my impressions, and could someone kindly tell me if I'm incorrect on any major details?
Let's assume, hypothetically, that the Carrion Crown AP gets sanctioned (we're assuming that because I have a copy of AP43 sitting next to me).
1. Someone at Paizo will go through Haunting of Harrowstone and pick out a section that best maps to a PFS module. This will probably be Harrowstone Prison itself, possibly just sections S-U. A chronicle will be created for that section, meaning that Haunting of Harrowstone now effectively contains "Harrowstone Prison", a Lvl 2-4 PFS module.
2. This pseudo-module is now a legal option for PFS in its own right. So if we're running modules at a games day or something, we could offer the choice of "Harrowstone Prison" or Masks of the Living God, and players could run a PFS character through either one. Harrowstone in this case would follow all the normal PFS rules on GM variance and so forth.
3. If I happen to be running a home group through Haunting of Harrowstone, nothing changes about the gameplay. However, once the party has completed the appropriate section, I can say "As a free bonus, have this chronicle to add a level to one of your PFS characters." This works like GM credit, more or less, and will be spelled out in more detail in 4.3.
Basically, this decision both adds some extra modules to PFS, and gives some home players free chronicles to entice them into society play. Do I have anything remarkably wrong?

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Looking through the Additional Resources list recently, I noticed that there's some allowed equipment in AP 9: Escape from Old Korvosa. Among that is the urumi, a weapon so ridiculous I decided I had to build a character who used one. Or better, two.
In discussing things with some of the local GMs, however, I was told that the urumi had been changed in one of the later books, and that the new version no longer had reach, amongst other changes. We assumed that characters are required to use the newer version, though I couldn't find any specific ruling to this affect. Most likely explanation is that this is just a glitch: AP 9 is old, and possibly out of print, and thus it's possible that whoever's updating the Additional Resources list didn't even realize what was in it.
So, two things:
1. Where more than one version of an item (or feat, spell, what have you) exists, is there a general ruling on which one is legal and which one isn't? We assumed the newer one is required, but I'd like to be sure.
2. You may want to take a look at AP 9 the next time the Additional Resources list is updated. It's possible that all of the weapons there have since been revised.
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