Goblin Squad Member. RPG Superstar 9 Season Star Voter. Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber. Pathfinder Society GM. 1,497 posts. No reviews. 1 list. No wishlists. 33 Organized Play characters.
I made a 3rd level Psychic for a PFS game this past Saturday. The party was lacking a healer, so I decided to lean into the support role. Looking at the conscious mind options, I decided Infinite Eye would be the best from a support perspective, with the Amp to Guidance and the combat bonuses / information from an Amp’d Mental Scan. As Psychic is Uncommon class with access conditions, I decided that a Rahadoumi secular medic would fit well with providing additional healing to the party as well as fitting in from a lore perspective. Given that, the Precise Discipline fit my character idea better, and having Int as my key ability score let me pick up a good number of skills.
When play testing a class, I generally play a Human, since Natural Ambition lets me pick up an extra class feat. Since I saw this character as healer and support, I picked up Unleash Self-Defense through Natural Ambition, and Mental Balm at 2nd level. I made sure to know Soothe as a signature spell; as the party’s only spell casting healer I figured there was a good chance it would be the only spell I’d cast from my spell slots.
We played the new PFS Intro scenario, 3-01, at subtier 3-4.
Spoilers follow. This is to the best of my recollection, but I played two days ago and my memory is certainly not infallible.
Spoiler:
In the first encounter, on my character’s first turn, one of the elemental enemies had gone and closed to 30 feet of me. I started with an Amp’d mental scan to learn about its saves and provide the party bonuses, and followed with a telekinetic projectile. On my second turn, the first enemy was nearly dead and the second enemy moved right next to it, so I scanned enemy #2 and cast another telekinetic projectile. This time, I remembered to use the Aid reaction to help one of my allies. (I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to roll to aid, so I just rolled a dagger attack and figured that would be close enough.) On round 3, I Unleashed Focused Intent and used another telekinetic projectile. (I didn’t need the damage bonus, but figured I might want the free amps in the next two rounds). However, the combat had finished before combat round 4 for me. After combat, the GM told us we had 10 minutes of downtime, and I needed to Refocus, but also Treat Wounds on various party members. Looking through the Refocus description from the Psychic, I could “practice
a craft or activity that gives [me] the mental space to self-reflect”. I argued that, as a Rahadoumi secular medic with Assurance [Medicine], treating wounds was something my character could do sort of automatically / subconsciously, so I’d be able to refocus while doing so. My GM told me he’d allow it today but not set a precedent on it. Fine by me. In any case, having focus points seemed to be very important, and if push came to shove I’d have refocused and told the party member to drink some potions.
In the second encounter, round one was spent striding toward and telekinetic projecting one of the enemies. It then flew towards me and attached itself, so round 2 was using Acrobatics to manually detach it, and then using another telekinetic projectile. On round 3 I finally had the action economy to amp a Mental Scan before attacking it. At that point the combat was winding down; I think I used an Amp’ed Guidance on some sort of after-combat check before taking the time to refocus and treat wounds.
When we got to the abandoned tavern hideout, I used an Amp’d guidance on our party member using Thievery to try and remove the boards quietly. Unfortunately, a simple failure was enough to alert those inside that we were coming in, so my focus point was essentially wasted and I’d enter the combat down one Focus. I had rolled low on initiative, so by the time it was my turn, our party goblin had run in and gotten intimidated by one of the scoundrels. This seemed like a good time to use an amp’ed Guidance with Mental Balm. Unfortunately, my counteract check wasn’t high enough to remove the intimidation; I rolled an 8, getting a 17 on my counteract check; I needed something like an 18 or 19 to succeed. On round 2, one of our party members was dropped, so I used my level 2 soothe to get them back on their feet. Round 3 had me approach to get an enemy into the light of my everburning torch. I then unleashed Self Defense (having cast Guidance and Soothe in prior rounds), and then cast an Amp’d Mental Scan with the benefit of an unleashed psyche. The remainder of the fight (ore or two rounds) had me using Daze or Telekinetic Projectile, and lamenting the damage penalty I was taking.
My takeaways:
When I described my character to the party, I basically told them “Expect me to be a worse Bard”, and that ended up being fairly accurate. My character had one fewer spell slot at 1st and 2nd level, which meant as designated healer I really had to earmark them for Soothes. In exchange, I had a focus pool for psi amps, which I most often used on Mental Scan, which ended up being different but slightly worse than Inspire Courage.
That all said, I realize I was somewhat playing against type by trying to play a support-heavy character on the Psychic chassis, and I’m not going to hold it against the psychic that it’s not as good at support as the quintessential support class (and also one of the stronger classes in the game, period).
I thought the mechanics were neat, and that I could cast an amped cantrip in the first five rounds of combat in most cases (2 points + 3 rounds of Unleashed Psyche). In contrast, going into combat without a full set of focus points really hurt, and in the future I’d really need to weight the costs and benefits of using a focus point on e.g. an amped Guidance if I’m not sure I’ll be able to refocus before the next encounter.
Speaking on Guidance specifically, as an Infinite Eye psychic, it seems to be the only cantrip I would want to use on Mental Balm. Mental Scan is not actually helpful to the target, and Detect Magic doesn’t target people. My issue with Guidance is the “temporarily immune for one hour” part, which really can cut down on it’s utility. Maybe an amp’d version of guidance could get around the temporarily immune restriction? Or some language that says the temporary immunity only applies to the +1 bonus and e.g. the Mental Balm rider could still apply? I dunno.
I hope I get the chance to play one or both of the other conscious minds during the playtest, now that I have a sense for the general play pattern of the Psychic. Overall, I thought it was a fun class. The small number of spell slots is my biggest problem; I see there is a feat at 14th level that can help out there, but that is so far away it might as well not exist from my perspective of mostly PFS play.
Congrats on your move to the Design Team, Michael! I noticed you were credited as a designer in the SoM Playtest doc, but kept that on the DL until you made your announcement. :)
Lem is also near and dear to me, having played OG Lem through Rise of the Runelords, and Class Deck Lem through Season of the Shackles. I've just played Core Lem through #6-1: City of Sails and Shrouds at PaizoCon. I agree with most of the suggestions offered. However, I wanted to mention that in Core/Curse, there are Melee weapons that use Acrobatics. Much like Skull & Shackles Lem, Core Lem can use use a Raper to great effect. Well, at least good effect.
Howdy, all. I've not been playing PACG as much in the past couple of years or so, since my wife and I were both DMing RPG runs. (I was running Tomb of Annihilation in 5E, and she is running Rise of the Runelords in PF1). I've also been fairly active in the PFS2 scene locally. But I finished my campaign, and COVID has transitioned Runelords to Roll20 and PFS2 to (for me) Fantasy Grounds. And I realized I missed sitting around an actual table, so we opened up the Curse box and started last night. (I'd played Lini solo through the Dragon's Demand, and played a couple Guild scenarios with Hakkon last year at GenCon, but that is the extent of it).
After looking at the characters a bit, we decided to play Quinn(me) and Kess(her). At first I was worried that the lack of spellcasting in the party would create some FOMO, but then I realized we didn't have a spellcaster in Shackles, and that went okay. (Though the fact that my wife was playing Damiel might have had something to do with that).
So, if anyone has anything they wish they knew going into Curse, or playing Quinn and Kess, I'd love to hear it. My wife says she enjoys playing "broken" characters (Damiel and Adowyn certainly count), but we've already picked our party. That said, the runner up party was Varian(her) and Hakkon(me), and since we've only played scenario 1.Star so far, I suppose we could still change...
Hello. At the start of the month, I reduced my number of relevant subscriptions from 6 to 4, so I went from qualifying for two complimentary Organized Play subscriptions to one. I went into my account and selected the complimentary subscription I wished to receive (Pathfinder Society). However, the end of the month has come, and I did not receive my Pathfinder Society scenarios. Could someone please look into this for me?
So, I thought I had a handle on this, but the last blog post confused my understanding.
CRB, pg 432 wrote:
Regional Languages
These languages are uncommon outside the region of their genesis. A character hailing from one of the regions listed below automatically has access to that language. In the Inner Sea region, the language referred to as Common elsewhere in the rules is the same as Taldane—a result of Taldor’s legacy of control and influence over the whole region. Nearly every language listed here is spoken on the melting-pot streets of Absalom.
Okay, so depending on where I'm from, I get access to uncommon languages. My PC hails from Varisia: I get access to Shoanti and Varisian. Great.
PFS Guide to Play: Player Basics wrote:
A character with a high Intelligence score can select bonus languages from the list of modern human languages above or the bonus languages listed in the source for the character’s ancestry..
I read this as opening up ALL of those listed uncommon languages ( Erutaki, Hallit, Kelish, Osiriani, Polyglot, Shoanti, Skald, Tien, Varisian, Varki, Vudrani) to PFS PCs. Given the CRB blurb about Absalom being a melting pot and also the headquarters of the Pathfinder Society, makes a lot of sense to me.
PFS Character Options Blog wrote:
Add the following regional languages to the options listed on page 432. As with other regional languages, a character hailing from the region listed below automatically has access to these languages. Erutaki: Saga Lands, Varki: Saga Lands
And now I'm confused. Was my understanding of the PFS Guide to Play: Player Basics on regional languages incorrect? If it meant that we can only pick from the Regional languages we have access to with our intelligence bonus, well that's already the CRB default.
The CRB section on Resting refers to the 8 hour rest, IME typically taken by adventurers at night. However, there is another type of rest mentioned in the rules in a few places: resting for 10 minutes. It's the way to lose your wounded condition if you've already been healed to full HP, and Gnomes with Vivacious Conduit recover hit points just by taking this rest. However, this type of rest is only mentioned indirectly. I was wondering what activities could be undertaken during this rest.
I suspect that most PCs taking a 10 minute rest can be Refocusing during that rest, since many refocus activities don't seem particularly strenuous. Playing music, praying, meditating, reading, etc all seem fairly restful to me. But that might be it. Thoughts?
I'm trying to map out a character's progression, and have run into an interesting question. He is an Animal order Druid, often uses his Heal Animal Order Spell. He has a few ways of potentially obtaining/recovering focus points (Familiar ability, Gnome ancestry feat, Druid's Vestments at level 10). However, his Focus Pool starts each day at 1 point, because he only has the initial order spell.
Looking at the text of Wild Focus: "If you have spent at least 2 Focus Points since the last time you Refocused, you recover 2 Focus Points when you Refocus instead of 1." Well, with the above ways to gain/regain focus, it is easy enough to spend 2 Focus from my pool of 1 focus point before refocusing. So my question: Is the size of ones focus pool intended to be the normal limit, or is it just the starting point, which can be exceeded with the various focus-regaining class feats?
Nice! I have yet to play a Sorceror in PACG, though we did have a Sorceror in our party when we played through the Season of the Shackles. Celestial Runecaster Seioni seems like she'd be a lot of fun, especially with Sacred locations and recharge blessings. Soothing Word seems appropriate for her, too.
We learned that Signature Spells (spontaneous heightening) are a class feature for Bards/Sorcs here. Given that it's not baked into casting for those classes, it seems like spontaneous multiclass casters are at a disadvantage compared to their prepared counterparts. Basic/Expert/Master multiclass casting get you 1 slot per spell level. If you're a prepared caster, you pick whatever you'd like each day for those slots, heightening as appropriate. If you're a spontaneous multiclass caster, you have 1 spell known and 1 spell slot per spell level, which doesn't seem all that spontaneous. Maybe you can use a higher level spell slot to cast one of your lower level spells known? I'd assume you can do that, but don't actually know for sure.
Things get better for the multiclass spontaneous caster if they can pick up their Breadth feat, which gets them an extra spell known and an extra spell slot for all but their highest two slots. But yeah, I'm a little bummed that they don't seem to get access to Signature Spells.
Hello. I had selected GenCon pickup for the subscriptions I had. I then added The Pathfinder Maps and Pathfinder Accessories subscriptions to my account. Now those subscriptions show as available for GenCon pickup, but all my earlier ones show as in my sidecart. I do have 2 lines of "GenCon Indy Pickup" at the top of My Subscriptions page, so I'm hoping that's just a graphical thing and I'll be able to pick up all my stuff at GenCon. But I just wanted to make sure everything was in order.
Hello. I just placed Order# 7464239. I wanted to apply the 10% downtime discount to it, but I did not see a place to enter codes or payment information. Perhaps this was because I combined the order with a pending subscription order? (I know I don't get the discount on my subscription items in the order I combined it with). Thank you!
Interesting. It's nice to have a "mercenary" faction for all the RPG players that really like the "so, what does the job pay?" aspect.
Comments on the boons:
Starship boons: I was a little confused at first as to how you'd slot multiple Starship weapon boons, before I realized that the table pools together Starship boons to bling out their ship. Seems pretty snazzy, and will probably make Acquisitives a popular faction when one is expecting starship combat in a mod, at least in the earlier levels.
Sponsorship: This post implies that the Tshirt and Character Folio might not both offer rerolls, as they do currently in PFS. This also seems like it will make a popular generic boon, if none of the specific Social boons called out at the briefing seem like they will be relevant.
My first SFS character is likely to be an Envoy a la Star-Lord from GotG, and this faction certainly presents some allure.
I have definitely noticed that Balazar has a hand-clogging issue, since activating Padrig requires placing a card on top of his deck instead of recharging a card. Meanwhile, my wife, playing Adowyn, has no such trouble, since Leryn lets her recharge an arbitrary number of cards per turn.
As a PSA, Pathfinder Adventure Card Guild Adventure #2-1—Dark Waters Rising is part of the Goblins Invade sale going on through Saturday. There's other stuff that could be of interest to the PACG crowd as well (The burnt offerings PDF for RoTR flavor, Syrinscape music packs, and of course Ranzak and Ekkie).
I've just gotten halfway through the Shield of Rannick with Meliski, and finally get to pick up the Brawler role and the weaponless d6 power. I've been wanting to play Brawler Meliski from the RotR box so he'd have access to Amulets of Mighty/Flaming fists since shortly after the Bard class deck came out, and, well now I'm there. But that's just a long aside.
Anyway, I was looking at the Gambler power of []When you ... would fail a check ... you may bury a card ([] from your discard pile) to succeed.
We've had a number of threads discussing how adding feats should typically add options, and not take them away. In this case, the wording on the ([] from your discard pile) seems to remove your hand as the option of where that card can come from. I would think the parenthetical ought to say ([] from your hand or discard pile).
Just a question for those of you that have waited to play (or replayed) WotR once you had acquired all of the promo cards. Did you add the cards in all at once with Deck 1, or did you stagger their inclusion by waiting until the deck with which they were shipped?
Ooh, that's neat! Will probably give Wraith a go with it's heroes in all their mythic glory first, but I'd be quite tempted to send Valeros and Lem into the abyss after that. (Pirate Queen Jirelle, not as much).
This isn't the forum post I wanted to make, but it's the forum post I get to make.
I had taken a solo Merisiel all the way through Rise of the Runelords. Alas, she was not victorious against the Runelord of Greed. Part of it was bad luck, part of it was suboptimal strategy/planning. Here are some brief notes; I'll add to them later.
*) Playing a solo character in the Runeforge means you start every turn down a card. I was maxed out at 6 cards on my Thief role, but in hindsight i may have better off an Acrobat with 7. Ideally, I'd go into an encounter with Karzoug with 6 cards in hand, have Weapon/Blessing/Discard Fodder for each check. (All of my weapons had Recharge or Discard for extra damage).
*) Similarly, damage mitigation that stays in your hand is important. I got lucky and pulled a Ring of Energy Resistance in a prior scenario. Of course, in my second and final encounter with Karzoug, I rolled a 4 on the d4 and still had to discard a card.
*) I weighed my cards heavily in terms of scouting, with Revelation Quill, 2 Magic Spyglasses, and a Wand of Treasure Finding, in addition to Broderick Quink and Isolanthe Galadius (If they were real people, I'd feel bad about butchering their names like that). Do to a bad shuffle I needed to use a lot of that, but had I gotten more lucky with my Emerald Codex pulls and ended up with an Augury/Scrying I wouldn't have had to spend all those cards on deck maniupulation.
*) On the codex; I could have banished it for card advantage, if I held onto it until the turn I encountered Kargzoug. It would have provided cards to chuck towards Sneak Attack, as well as unavoided damage.
What's ahead for my Rise of the Runelords box now? Maybe I'll pick up my solo Lini run, I believe I'd gotten her through deck 2. Alternatively, I might give the Shield of Rannick a try. If I try to solo it, I'd probably use Meliski; I've been itching to see how he'd do going Brawler with access to Amulets of Mighty / Fiery fists. Or, if my fiancee is willing, we'll take a short break from our S&S game and see how Ranzak and Ekkie roll.
So, the designers started threads for the box sets, but I'm curious about what people's PFSACG characters look like after finishing out the Season of the Shackles. If you've got a character that you took all the way through that adventure path, why don't you give the same feat/role/card breakdown as in the Conquering Heroes thread, perhaps with some relevant commentary (like which Loot cards you often subbed into your deck, things like that). Hopefully the designers and developers will find this information useful, or at least interesting. :)
Hi, All. Harrison's Comics and Pop Culture in Salem, MA is hosting a Free RPG Day event this Saturday, starting at 11 AM. I will be running demos of Wraith of the Righteous from 3 to 4 PM (in between the morning and late afternoon sessions of We Be Goblins Free!). Feel free to stop by; they will have Ekkies, but of course supplies are limited.
If you want to play the RPG adventure We Be Goblins Free, I recommend you sign up on Warhorn.net, under the Boston Lodge Pathfinder Society recurring event.
One thing I'm not sure about. WoTR Kyra has a limited heal triggered on either using her "Alignment Channel" power or playing a blessing on another character's check to defeat a bane, with a feat to also allow the heal when she plays the blessing on herself. If she has the relevant feat and does both during an encounter (Uses "Alignment Channel" and plays a blessing), does she get to heal once or twice? What if she plays two blessings on the same check to defeat? (This is possible with her Blessing of the Dawnflower promo card).
So, I've come to the conclusion that I left a couple of cards at PaizoCon. Specifically, my WoTR Kyra token and role cards, since I was playing WoTR Kyra in Organized Play. No, I didn't have a good reason to have the role card out. I'd probably have put them in clear UltraPro sleeves.
They are probably long gone. It's not a huge deal since neither card is actually needed, given the printable character sheets. But if someone noticed some extra Kyra cards that didn't belong to one of the base sets, well they might have been mine.
Hi, all. I'll be at Comicazi (in Davis Square, Somerville MA) this Thursday at 7 PM. I'll have adventure 1-1A: Cloven Trail, the first adventure in the Season of the Righteous. If you are less familiar with the game and would like to learn it, I can also offer demos. I hope to see you there; feel free to post if you plan to stop by.
I've got a question about the Shimmering Veils of Pride: If you encounter a villain and defeat him, does one still need to recharge a card for succeeding on the check before the "When Permanently Closed" text triggers and the card flips? My gut says yes but I am not entirely sure.
Hi, all. I just wanted to call attention to PFSACG play going on now, and coming in the future.
First off, if you're near the MA/NH border, come check out Myriad Games in Salem, NH on Thursday nights, starting at 8PM. We'll be playing Brine Dragon Hunt this week.
If you're a little further north than that, Myriad Games in Manchester, NH is running on Wednesday nights, starting at 7 PM. This week they are going after the Lone Shark.
Other venues will be coming up in the next month or so. I plan to make it up to Pop Culture in Raymond, NH for demos sometime in November, and will look to see if there's interest at Harrison's in Salem, MA.
Pathfinder Society GM. 1,497 posts. No reviews. 1 list. No wishlists. 33 Organized Play characters. 
