FanaticRat's page

Planning on running this as a new GM to the system. I heard this adventure was deadly and... Wow, people were not kidding. I do have some questions though:

-I plan on starting at level 2 with milestone leveling. How much of a difference will this make for the adventure? Is there anything I need to be wary of adjusting?

-The adventure mentions that the store has no alchemical reagents and that it's been awhile since anyone used them. Since it's pretty heavily implied that the town doesn't like alchemists what is a good way to allow anyone who needs alchemical materials for their class to obtain them? I know there's some as loot, but that still means that characters who need said materials are at a disadvantage going into the adventure.

-Is there character art for Phinick? I am scouring the pdf but I don't see any.

Shoot, that really makes an unarmed drifter unviable, huh? Oh well. Thanks for the responses.

As the title says, I'm a bit unclear on a few of the gunslinger feats:

1. For the Munition Crafter feat, it says you gain an additional 4 formulas on top of the ones granted by Alchemical Crafting. Are these formulas limited to common formulas like the ones gained by Alchemical Crafting?

2. Can Sword and Pistol be used with unarmed attacks, or only those with melee weapons? I've seen it both ways and I don't know which one is correct.

3. Do the Alchemical Shot and Shattering Shot feats apply a bomb's secondary or non-damaging effect, or only damage? For example, if I tried to alchemical shot with a tanglefoot bag would it apply the speed penalty to the target or would it do nothing?

4. Does using Black Powder Boost require an action in addition to Leap, High Jump, or Long Jump, or is it considered part of said actions?

I'm going to posit that "Class DC as a concept sucks" is getting a bit off-topic for "is a kobold bard with snarecrafting viable?"

I'm not saying that it's not a conversation worth having, but... perhaps in a new thread?

Yeah, I gotta second this. I appreciate all the advice people have given me in this thread, and I know what to plan for now. That's all I was after when I made this thread.

Whoooo boy, this thread got a lot more attention than I thought it would have.

In any case, I guess the main takeaway for me here is that Powerful Snares isn't mandatory and to talk with the GM beforehand if there would ever be opportunities to set them up before encounters and if enemies would route around them by default (or just try to throw the party into them whenever possible). So long as they're not completely worthless all the time then I think I'll go for it. Maybe I'm just too paranoid from my previous games in PF1 and other systems.

... Peanut butter and beef?

Bards are supporty but they get strong support options for 'free', inspire courage and the occult spell list are automatic.

The loss of powerful snares is a bummer though.

Peanuts and peanut sauces combined with beef is more common in recipes than you'd think. Also, if you have never had a burger with peanut butter as a topping I highly recommend it.

But I digress. If I'm understanding correctly, so long as I have Inspire Courage and Lingering Composition I'm all good, right?

I should preface this by saying I've played PF 1E but not 2E yet, and all I have to go on thusfar is guides and trawling AoN and forums. I also do not have a group yet, but I'm working under the assumption that the rest of the party would be amenable to the concept. I'm also assuming that I will ever get to use snares, which, I will admit, I'm not 100% convinced on yet despite the forum posts I've read.

So, I've been wanting to play a kobold bard, and since kobolds and traps go together like peanut butter and beef, I was interested in taking the kobold snare feats as well as the Snarecrafter archetype. However, from what I have gathered, bards are supposed to be all support all the time and every +/-1 is crucial. Taking dedication feats would of course cut into that.

My question is, would a character like this be OK to play, or would they be a liability due to not being optimized? I'd be missing out on some class feats after all. I don't know just how optimized you need to be to not screw over your party. Not to mention, I wouldn't be able to use Powerful Snares, so I don't know if that renders the entire concept moot just on that hiccup alone.

I haven't played PFS in years, but since I moved and can't find any home games, so I thought I'd give it another shot. One of my characters is a summoner, before the ban on original APG summoner so he was grandfathered in shortly before I quit. I have the chronicles and character info to prove it, if it still matters.

My first question is is this character still legal to play or was there another ruling that forces me to convert? Secondly, if I do play OG summoner, would that be disruptive or unwelcome at a table? I know I got a lot of grumbles whenever I tried to play mine, and had at least one GM try to go out of his way to screw me over.

I dislike the idea of money spent giving any special bonus, be it feats or whatever.

Maybe you should look at it another way: if a character *doesn't* spend a certain level of income on either their family (making other people happy), their own addictions (liquor & companionship) or conspicuous consumption (clothes, bling jewelry and socializing) then they take a penalty to something. Like applying an adverse condition if they aren't paying for adequate upkeep at an inn, owning a house, supporting dependents and so on. Or supporting their social standing through social spending (going to the right taverns, or the right clubs, to gain social influence).

Or not. Even thinking about it makes it sound far too fiddly and complex to write rules about. <g>

Blades in the Dark actually has a system for that and it's really neat, though I don't know if it would fit with this kind of game. I know in FantasyCraft some of your cash got automatically deducted for this each adventure but again I don't know if that would sit with people.

I would love ab "in golarion" blurb but I doubt they'd do that, if not for wanting to really push Golarion, but also for the word count it adds which would probably be a pain in the ass for printing. That said I remain cautiously optimistic that it won't be too hard to homebrew.

Also, do games that now feature goblins as cannonfodder suddenly evil, wrong, and a sign of them being terrible people in real life?

No? Why would it be? I mean humans get used as Canon fodder all the time and no one seems to bat an eye at that.

I can't say I really care one way or the other about goblins as core races. I don't really play golarion that much because I don't particularly care for the setting, but in a game that does I'd be fine with gms nixing PC goblins. It's your game after all.

What I am more concerned about is how stats are being handled. One of the things I disliked about the racial attributes is that it severely hindered some races and pigeonholed them into concepts, which is why stuff like human, aasimar, and tiefling were the most optimal races (seriously, if you played pfs back when tiefling and aasimar were allowed they and humans were basically filling the table. I hope the new way they're doing this fixes this otherwise we'll run into the same problem. Honestly I'd rather racial stat penalties be flat out abolished like in 5e or 13th age, but I doubt that will fly with the target audience.

The ancestry feat concept seems cool, but from reading I'm afraid that they might include trap options. That was also a real problem with race feats, and I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll fix it.

I like the parts they stole from 4e.

No seriously.

I feel like Save or Die/Save or Lose effects should affect regular enemies differently than PCs or boss enemies. It makes sense to just take out regular jobbers, but to instantly kill a PC or Boss just feels really anticlimatic and frustrating, doesn't it?

I would much rather these spells depart a debuff on special characters, or at the very least, have the effects take place over a couple rounds as opposed to instantly, so you can do something about it.

Please This:

-Keep all different kinds of species/races/ancestries whatever. Having a lot of different PC options for species is one of the things I like about this system.

-Keep releasing a lot of premade content. I know you will because that makes bank, but having APs and Society scenarios and the like is very nice. Even if I don't use the whole adventure or anything, it's nice to steal a few things from it or reuse maps and such for different games.

-Cut down on really wonky rules for the sake of the nebulous concept of verisimilitude. I understand that the system is supposed to be simulationist, but having a ton of rules for things often ends up getting in the way or getting ignored.

-Keep enemy and PC gen rules separate. I don't got time anymore to stat up every enemy--in fact, I usually just say screw it and give enemies abilities and such as I see fit to make an interesting encounter, the rules be damned.

Please Don't

-Heavily bias ancestries in stats and whatnot. I like being able to play a lot of different species; I don't like being completely handicapped because I didn't pick the right one. This also applies to making species that are just flat out better: humans and old aasimar and tieflings were always great choices for a reason.

-Require feat taxes and chains for things. These were both annoying because not only did you have to all in on something to be reasonably good at it (looking at you combat maneuvers), if you got in deep and realized what you took wasn't that good you were screwed unless your GM was nice and let you restat your character. Things like these make it very easy to trap yourself into a subpar character. It would be more cool to have feats that just evolve as you level up or something.

-Include enemies with really wonky damage resist or immunity mechanics or other such oddities at level one. It's not fun to run into a dungeon as a newb and be unable to hurt something because you didn't know to bring multiple weapons or buy that oil of magic weapon, or being completely shut down by a flying or invisible enemy because you didn't know about the chalk in a bag trick.

-Include deeper darkness. Seriously, that spell can burn in hell. Actually, don't have complex light and dark rules to begin with, they're just cumbersome.

-Require the Big Six. I know this was partially addressed in Unchained, but it's not cool to be like "oh wow this magic item is really interesting! But I gotta keep my +4 cloak of resistance so I don't get bodied so...".

-Have a huge list of skills. The skill list is kinda bloated in my opinion and could be trimmed down.

-Be afraid to test something because it could be seen as "too much like 4e" or "not enough like pathfinder". This is your chance to break new ground, and if something don't work, you can throw it out and try something else during the playtest period.

Right now all I'm trying to figure out is a removal of racial stat adjustments in favor of just being able to assign a bonus where you like. Which takes away from humans a bit, so I wanted to figure out some cool racial features for them to make them less...bland.

I've never gotten a chance to play one, sadly.

You'll have your time to shine one day, Kukgud, Master Chef and Slayer of Dogs.

I think balance is important, but as a means of fun rather than an end in and of itself. It doesn't have to be perfect or anything but it should make the game easier to run and the game more fun for the people playing it.

I recall reading a blog post about a week ago in which the author angrily asserted that game balance doesn't matter, that it was spotlight balance that did, but it feels like he didn't consider that game balance might be a contributor to spotlight balance. I dunno tabletop games are weird.

Er, I don't think that's how diplomacy works, though...

That's fair, and I agree. I was just interpreting the problem as the feasibility of the builds before they sweetspot given variances in parties, reliance on very specific gear, types of enemies faced, etc.

I think we're getting a little off topic here, which was the narrowness of builds not rping stats and stuff.

I will still argue that some of the reasons of people following guides and builds to a t may be that they don't know what they don't know but know they don't know a lot so want to play it safe.

Seranov wrote:

It also shouldn't need to be said. Anyone with any sense looks at a guide and says, "Okay, I don't particularly want to follow this to the letter because of personal preference/my group's houserules/etc." and then uses it as a guide and not a pair of shackles.

I wish I had your faith in the good sense of humanity, old boy. Unfortunately it does need to be said because, at the end of the day, the average gamer is, like the average person, just not all that bright. I don't know what sorts of people you game with (maybe you're lucky like Jiggy and don't run into the hard cases), but I've seen plenty of folks follow the guides more-or-less to the letter, to include gratuitous stat-dumping, initiative-cheezing, gory dipping shenanigans (more a disease that attacked 3.5 than PF, but it's making a comeback...), and so on.

Let's be careful calling those who follow these guides to the letter not bright--you have to understand, it takes some experience to actually KNOW what you can follow to the letter, or what your group is like or how their houserules will influence things, etc, and it's not always readily apparent. That means when you are new to the game or even a different class, you have to take a lot of things on faith, and there may be a lot of tricks and other things that you might not have even thought of.

But what's important to remember is that you do n't want a character that is bad, like Lucy said. My first character was a fighter and he was terrible and unfun, so when I made my oracle I followed a guide despite my personal preferences because I didn't want to make another unfun character. Unfortunately, I didn't know all the subtleties and ramifications of choices , nor all the other material that could help me, so I ended up with a character with a lot of choices I didn't like or didn't help me. That's not to say the character is useless, but if I had the experience then opposed to now I'd have a much better idea of what I should and shouldn't have followed in that guide.

You just have to keep in mind, you sometimes don't know what you don't know and when you're new you might not even know what questions to ask. Moreover, you might not even be able to distinguish bad advice from good advice when you do your research unless you have some experience. So please don't confuse ignorance with stupidity.

Lucy is 100% correct, but I'd like to add that sometimes guides should not be followed blindly, and that you should double check with others because they make mistakes. I followed a guide for my first character and it gimped him good, partly because it didn't adequately explain the ramifications of the builds (by the way, if anyone says you should dump wis if your class has a good will save, they are very very wrong). I've seen some really crappy advice in guides, so new players not only need the guides but someone with experience too to help them interpret them.

Yknow I've only ever really seen one character use crane wing consistently, and he also got beat up the most. Maybe my sample size sucks but I never did see it negating encounters in play, nor have I ever been in a party that would have a problem against it.

I was gonna try using this with an eidolon but I don't know if it actually works nor did it seem worth it. Carrying capacity is a pain in the butt, even with any hual.

Ok, thanks for the input (but quickened time stop plus prismatic sphere? That's some SMT level stuff right there).

Another slightly unrelated question, but how dramatic is the fight usually? What I mean is, by this time has karzoug really built himself up against the PCs so that there's a lot of tension and personal reasons for winning, or does it tend to just be a sort of here's the final boss type thing?

FanaticRat wrote:

I have to ask; I can easily do at least one post a day, but I'm unfamiliar with PbP as a whole. How do you expect the game to be pced, gm? A book a month, two months, three?

I would be floored if the pbp cleared a book in a month. Maybe two or three if everyone stays on the ball.

I mean, it's probably possible ... just not very likely. Though maybe with a smaller, dedicated crew, it can be done. I guess we'll find out. :)

I see. I was afraid of much...I tend to not really like slow pacing all that much. Well, regardless, I hope the game goes well.

I have to ask; I can easily do at least one post a day, but I'm unfamiliar with PbP as a whole. How do you expect the game to be pced, gm? A book a month, two months, three?

Dotting for interest. I want to try a character I wanted to play in another RotRL game, a Kensai magus / martial artist monk, basically being knowledge monkey, melee fighter, linguistics buff, and general support I guess.

God, you know what I mean. I just got the names mixed up because I didn’t have the book in front of me.

I haven't been using brilliant energy, but I don't think I've hit at all. Regardless, I still have some buffing scrolls or somethin'.

Kirth Gersen wrote:

Artanthos wrote:

You need to read the thread title. DPR is not the only metric being measured.

Unfortunately, if you force people to walk into a dungeon and clear it, room by room, in a set time frame, you're not looking at much else. Even a hold person spell, by that measure, is nothing but instantaneous DPR.

The other factors -- the ones that actually make the upper tiers what they are -- aren't showcased in that sort of a setup.

In the scenario given, the time differential between a full caster, a barbarian and a monk is irrelevant. Encounters taking 60 seconds to resolve instead of 12 won't affect the outcome. Running out of spells or healing will. Failing that Fortitude save, not a wizard or sorcerer strong point, will.

To be fair, failing that will save is just as bad, and that usually ain't a martial strong point. I am unsure how often you really run out of healing or spells at higher levels; I can only recall one time I ran out of in combat healing as a life oracle, and technically we all had potions and wands left.

Thinking of running this again, and looking at Krune he seems competent. However, I am a terrible judge of difficulty, so I have to wonder how difficult he really is. How does he hold up against an optimized party? Have you guys had to buff or nerf him to provide a challenge, and if so how?

Is that 100 touch? If his touch is above 60 then I think I'm better off trying to buff.

@Fanatic; he'll do a round recap at the end of this turn.

@fnord or cast death ward on yourself and be immune like me :); as far as dcs and hps etc go -- most of us can otk lucifer, he's probably not a good metric for this level of min/maxery.

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound like that guy. Like I said, first time doing pbp here and I'm used to gms responding to actions or comments (or at least saying if you hit or not), so I was feeling like I was being flat out ignored, especially since the gm had responded to people before.

So I was reading through Kobolds of Golarion and thinking about it; kobolds are super subservient and suck up to dragons really easily, yeah? That's why any sort of chromatic who doesn't just eat the little things has them as underlings.

That's a common tale, but I have to wonder, do any metallic dragons take on tribes of kobolds? I mean, if a dragon is good (or just needs some underlings to take care of minor stuff he can't bother with) then wouldn't he want kobolds, either as servants or to actually try to redeem them with his draconic goodness? I mean, Apsu is a dragon god but there's nothing really established in the book that says any kobolds worship him, even though one of the creation myths presented credits Apsu with creating the kobold race from his dying draconic children after his war with Dahak.

So I'm wondering, is there any official instances of metallic dragons having kobolds? Do kobolds generally see metallics with disdain, or is it just too rare a circumstance?

I guess but I'm starting to wonder if I can even push my numbers that high. That and I still have no idea if anything I'm doing has any effect.

If it's a death effect, stun, fatigue, exhaustion, or energy drain, I'm immune. If not:

Fort: 1d20 + 33 ⇒ (11) + 33 = 44 add +4 if this is poison or disease

First, I'm trying to roll an acrobatics check. The bonus is +47

Next, I'm trying to roll my attack rolls. The bonuses are, in order, +72, +52, +47, +47, +42, +42, +37, +52

The damge rolls seem fine now, as is the grapple roll, but for some reason those other 9 rolls refuse to roll correctly. I've tried changing the order of the modifiers, putting in spaces and line breaks, adding a 0+ to the beginning of each to hit roll, but nothing seems to be working and it completely baffles me why.

My initiative should be 54: my level 19 Kensai ability makes my init rolls always nat 20s

Alright in that case, I'll have the following:

-Mythic point to increase my speed by 100, bringing it to like 220, 270 with haste.

-Try to use a scroll of barkskin (at CL 12th I actually have to roll for the DC 32) 1d20 + 28 ⇒ (13) + 28 = 41 if it works my nat armor increases by 5

-Use my scrolls of resist energy to resist fire, cold, elec, and sonic 30 DC 31 on each
1d20 + 28 ⇒ (5) + 28 = 33
1d20 + 28 ⇒ (7) + 28 = 35
1d20 + 28 ⇒ (7) + 28 = 35
1d20 + 28 ⇒ (9) + 28 = 37

-Cast Overland Flight, Ablative Barrier, Mythic Stoneskin, and Greater False Life 2d10 + 20 ⇒ (7, 7) + 20 = 34

So after all that crap and all my other buffs, I'm looking at 73 AC, 360 HP, Fort: 33 Ref:41 Will: 33 with +4 vs disease, poisons, and stun, dr/10 adamantine which probably won't matter, a total of +8 to my to hits and damage, 16/23 Mythic points and 22/23 Arcane points left. Let's see how quickly I die.

Because I don't feel like statting and doing purchases for every single friggin' enemy. Building one good NPC takes long enough, I don't want to do that 15 more times for like two or three sessions of gameplay, and potentially have that all wasted or backfire.

Ok before my turn comes up, just to clarify once and for all since it wasn't answered, are we or are we not permitted our all day buffs (hr/lvl and 10min/level) before the fight?

It's OK, it's understandable. See you.

I already posted my character, though, so I don't even know if I can buy anything to deal with it at this point, but surely someone else can?

Ok was just checking. I feel like I should have prepped more support spells.

Wait, if you got annihilated, doesn't that mean all your gear is gone? If so can it be wished or miracled back?

I see. Well to be fair pretty much every mythic boss and plenty of nonmythic ones have made up their own rules in published material so yeah.

We get three rounds to buff before entering the fray, right? Does that include all day buffs or can we do those beforehand?

@Grem Well what do you suggest? Trying to wish the sphere into outer space? Not really destroying it per say or throwing it into a different dimension like Gate but...

@Vrog The only way I know of is using your eidolon as a mount and using mounted age, but there's no way that'd work while fused.

Yeah but it's probably still there, and I don't think there's a way to Miracle or Wish it away.