This seems like a very arbitrary inconsistency that is designed to operate against the player, and frankly seems rather hostile. Is the root of the intent to prevent the eidolon from becoming more powerful than what the class feature intends, but also allow it to become weaker? The logic should follow that if class features cannot benefit from boons, that they should certainly not be impacted by negative boons. Or you allow class features to be impacted by positive boons and negative boons. The approach must be consistent. Inconsistent rulings are inconsistent.
Agreed on disallowing the carry over of undead. Though I'm not quite subscribed to the example you quoted. There are some very interesting monsters that would be out of place in terms of balance in scenarios from which they don't originate. Right now just saying "undead don't carry over between scenarios" is a very simple and elegant rule that leaves very little room for error. I think there's also a strong chance that many people don't realize that the animated undead lose class levels upon being reanimated, and that leads to some balance problems and perhaps also contribute to the resentment of this mechanic. I also think with the onyx cost for Animate Dead is well balanced for the scope of one scenario. That being said, I think opening up some of the variant animate undead options (such as fast zombie) would be good. Admittedly, I had thought they were legal up until I noticed this thread.
Because it lasts a minute per level, and costs your first action in combat to cast (unless you quicken it). It's expensive in a different way.
Because information from it is used in scenarios, reading the Core Rulebook is cheating. The snark here is unhelpful and doesn't actually advance your argument. Searching for a chronicle sheet you don't have requires that you read scenarios before you have played them. Reading a scenario in advance is strongly discouraged unless you are going to be running it in the near future. This is because there are players that have trouble managing the advance knowledge they obtain from reading a scenario and wind up spoiling or metagaming (intentionally or otherwise). Not terribly difficult. If you want to do it and not impact anybody, be discrete and non-disruptive about it. People won't smile at that practice, though.
Personally I am happy with it being a convention boon, I would just like it to be more reliably available to GMs at those conventions. As someone who mostly GMs, an Expanded Narrative boon would be far more useful than the GM reward Undine race boon that I received at my last event. Convention boons are good to help encourage/reward convention attendance. But I think Expanded Narrative is a boon that is not good to limit to conventions. There are plenty of local GMs that can't attend conventions that do enough in their local circle that they would deserve this reward. It should be distributed like the Star Reward Boons Chronicle.
After a long bout of reading CRB on this matter, the simplest explanation I was able to derive was the following (hope it helps or makes sense): 1. Harness and Energy Attacks (specifically halving energy damage) are properties of objects. 2. Harness and 'Energy Attacks' rules are separate, and are not tied together in one package. 3. A Robot is not an object, it is a construct, so it does not have the 'Energy Attack' rules. It is given the Harness rules explicitly. Spoiler has the CRB sources. Rules Quotes and stuff:
At least this is how a lot of us concluded prior to the FAQ that robots didn't halve energy damage. Edit: Corrected "object" wording. Edit 2: The thing I have yet to see addressed that I'm still not sure how to rule on is the precedence of hardness and vulnerability to electricity. Do I subtract harness, then multiply damage by 1.5? Or do I multiply damage by 1.5, then subtract hardness? Or do I ignore hardness altogether?
Last year, I thought the best answer for this initiative issue was "GM does what makes the game easier to run for them as long as they still provide positive experience for the players." And a year later I still can't understand why people are so worried about this that it needs to become a campaign policy. Did the GM clump initiative to create an unfair situation, kill a bunch of PCs and make people mad? That sounds like they did the wrong thing. Did the GM clump initiative and nobody noticed and had a good time? Then what's the problem? Is this really a big problem in PFS? Do we really need a ruling for this? Aren't there more valuable things we could spend time discussing on the forums? Sometimes I wonder if the incessant arguing here about little things is a deterrent for new people.
How would PFS Campaign Management practically issue a ruling exactly? That might work going forward but that doesn't address the 7 seasons of content that have been previously designed around different assumptions. It's not practical for legacy reasons.
Potential alignment infraction for G-E axis and L-C axis, but there's no catch all and it should be something negotiated with the GM. Here are some questions to ask: Lawful-Chaotic: Is killing this person violating regional laws? Does the Paladin's Deity approve of this action? Is the Paladin violating their Code of Conduct? Good-Evil: Is the kill necessary? What are the motivations? Did the opponent attempt to surrender? Can they present any realistic threat anymore? CDG is probably not a good action, but it is also contextually not evil. It is also likely not a lawful action, but it is contextually not chaotic. Here's a similar thread that might be useful to continue this discussion. Hope this is somewhat helpful! EDIT: Fixed typos.
There's no catch-all for what alignment CDG falls under it is completely within the domain of GM discretion. Trying to box it up is probably unhealthy. The motivations of the OP are a useful piece of evidence that could help categorize it, but unfortunately it's just one anecdote among an infinite number of possible scenarios. So I'm not sure we should say "CDG is evil" just based on the motivation put forward in this thread. And I don't think blanket declarations about what action it is will help anybody. GM discretion is a simple way to look at it that can be handled on a case by case basis by people who fully understand the situation.
There's no argument being made for it being a good action, just a question of whether its an evil action. Typically killing helpless opponents who have no practical way of threatening you in the future leans towards evil, but I think an argument could be made for it to be a neutral action if there's the right justification. I don't think the reasoning of "I want to get the last hit" would really qualify as neutral though.
But this is a fine example of GM discretion.
Mike, I think this website suffers from a lack of webdesign and as a result is cluttered and difficult to navigate for new users. Even though I've been browsing paizo.com for a few years now I still find myself stumbling on new links that were put in a place that I didn't expect that would have saved me a bunch of page traversals. This does not seem to be a PFS problem, because the PFS site is constrained by the web design decisions made for the entire paizo site. I don't think PFS leadership will get very far on their own unless the web team is willing to do a more global revamp (which I would strongly suggest). The first thing I thought when I started PFS was that the paizo.com site looks like a college senior design project. It's not exactly professional, and more problematic is that its difficult to navigate. There's an apparent lack of planning on how content should be organized (at least from this user's perspective). It could very well benefit from an overhaul especially given how sharp the website of paizo's primary competitor looks. The feedback sounds harsh I imagine, but please don't view it as an attack on the developers or anyone working at paizo - the criticism is directed specifically at the product. It's difficult to change software that's been around for years because it's hard to justify dedicating a budget towards revamping something that already works. Overall, I think the product could heavily benefit from some reorganization and great deal of usability testing. Admittedly, it's been a very long time since I've done any web development, so I don't think I can provide any specific advice (not that my opinion was exactly solicited anyway), but web design consultants are aplenty so there should be many professionals available to provide some insight into how to improve the experience here. For an easy improvement, people also seem to be suggesting that "Additional Resources" is somewhat of a misleading name. I think that's a reasonably sound observation. Naming is a very tricky business, but it is also very important because names are one of the most important tools that users can use to learn about the software they are interacting with. "Legal Resources" may be a more concise, intuitive name. Hope that helps, sorry if I offended anybody.
Sure, but while you and some others see a pearl of power not qualifying for that objective as being needlessly difficult, others see it as being too permissive. Neither point of view is wrong, and ultimately its not that big of a deal either way. Both sides have really well justified opinions.
I can think of a certain set of rather notorious boons in season 4 that might be abusable with this proposal. Not to say that this isn't a good start though, just gotta point out corner cases.
How many times are we going to have the CLW wand argument before we realize that it's not productive and only pisses people off? Maybe we can just acknowledge that it's not the end of the world if someone doesn't bring their own wand, move on, and try to have fun.
Summon Neutral Monster is a wonderful feat. Never underestimate the power of 1d4+2 (empowered?) stirges! Except its a potential of 1d4+2 of that every round that you have them out and all they need to do to trigger the CON damage is make a successful touch attack. And you can summon 1d4+2 of them for the cost of a 3rd level spell. And it's also CON damage, so if the target goes to 0 CON they're dead. Their fortitude saves also suffer. It's a good tactic. EDIT: Also note that the stirge is grappling the target. There's some weirdness involved with it's size and I'm a bit fuzzy on the implications for exactly what that means for spellcasters. I also seem to remember a FAQ regarding stirge grapple, but I can't seem to find it.
There are no officially scheduled PFS games in any afternoon slot. Attendees are free to organize their own tables or attend seminars/actually eat. I thought this change was kind of nice. Last Paizo con I found it difficult to find time to eat in between games. Maybe that's my fault for scheduling back to back PFS sessions though :)
I know it's kind of difficult to understand what goes on behind the scenes but I assure you doing registration manually like this would be an enormous burden on the staff, and it would still be error prone. So I could not disagree with you more, there is nothing to gain by doing it manually. Bugs happen. They are difficult to predict and sometimes difficult to fix. Hopefully the defects they found this year will be fixed by the time next year rolls around.
Isn't it 5/7PP per level? In general, it takes 7 days to retrain one level in a class into one level in another class. Some classes are more suited for this kind of retraining, as they have a similar focus or purpose—this is called retraining synergy. If your old class has retraining synergy with your new class, retraining that class level takes only 5 days instead of 7 days. Determine class retraining synergies according to the table below. When utilizing these retraining rules, you must expend wealth as outlined in the Retraining section of Ultimate Campaign, as well as 1 Prestige Point per day of retraining since time between scenarios is undefined. So assuming you get 2 PP a scenario, it costs 5/6 of your total fame in PP to do a rebuild to a different class, and it does not cover the cost to change feats gained at odd levels. I think it would be more than reasonable to assume that Ninja has retraining synergy with Rogue.
So it sounds like you would be ok with getting fireballed in that situation. Cool. Someone else might not be ok with getting fireballed in that situation. Their desire to not get fireballed should be respected, even if it is tactically not the best decision to make. In that situation, if you are the one launching the fireball, it's not up to you to say whether it's ok to nuke your buddy. You need to ask first and respect their wishes, regardless of how illogical you think their decision is. It's about as simple as that.
Except this:
So no double dipping, no rebuilding. I feel like this is being made more difficult than it needs to be.
You turn them away because they are among the 90% of us who don't have early access to the Unchained Book (it hasn't been released), so they can't play a new summoner. I think you're forgetting about a few other options they have: 1. Rebuild their character to something other than summoner.
None of these involve booting that player out.
Sure, that's some really good insight that I have also observed and I share your take on it. My main point is high initiative isn't actually a problem in and of itself, it's just another means that people can use to trivialize the scenario. The core of the issue of the GM or the players not having fun here is that someone is trivializing the scenario, and that's a separate cultural issue. People can have high initiatives and use that advantage responsibly.
The most important thing is that people have fun. It sounds like the players had fun at the table, so mission accomplished. I've played in (and run) games where the BBEG has a super cool build and has a bunch of really interesting tricks and tactics. Having those encounters get shut down with a SoS can be a huge bummer for the GM. It's also important for the GM to enjoy themselves, and in this case it sounds like it was at least a little bit disappointing. My suggestion is to accept that the SoS stuck, and then see if the table wants to run the encounter as if the SoS had never been used without PC risk. At least then the GM has a chance to have fun running the BBEG and the players get to see a cool encounter for free.
You know, I don't think anybody's going to demonize you for not liking people having tons of rerolls. I sympathize; it is kind of a bummer because they make it that much more difficult to create suspenseful situations. But the real problem is when you try to twist rules to legitimize your dislike and enforce it. You may not realize it, but the person at the end of the table who has invested (financially or otherwise) in collecting various means of rerolling out of a bad situation now has to be told that they can't do that because you happen to not like it. Sounds great for a homebrew where you can very easily establish these constraints and work with your players. In PFS it just creates unnecessary potential for sour situations. Particularly at conventions where you don't know many of the people. I'm trying not to be sour about this myself, but I'm finding it difficult to not be, because it seems like a trend with many people on the forums. I've said it before: it is fine (and inevitable) to have table variation because of legitimate rules interpretations. It is not ok to introduce table variation by twisting the rules to your whims. EDIT: Changed wording, the previous phrasing sounded waaaay too personal. Sorry.
That's somewhat of a technicality, don't you think? You can certainly narrowly look at the PrC rules and the SLA rules as two completely separate entities, but ultimately they were at one time very closely coupled because of the old FAQ. SLAs were at one time (and technically still are at the moment) a valid method of meeting the prerequisites of a PrC. The fact of the matter is that with the FAQ, PrCs were more accessible. Now they are not. Period. Saying that this FAQ didn't change PrCs is disingenuous at best. That being said, I don't think we need a grace period for this. I know that people would abuse it to get as many early entry PrC characters as possible while the opportunity was available. What does need to change though is that the design team needs to be more aware of the ripple effects of their FAQs.
To those of you who hold MB/jc blameless for this ruling, I think you failed a save vs Delusional. FWIW I'd like to declare that I'm in the camp that doesn't really see how playing the blame game is of any kind of importance. Talking about what was done that caused an issue is productive. Complaining about who did it won't change anything and it makes people bitter.
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