IsawaBrian's page

A 1e race has at least 4 of the first level 2e feats as well as a heritage.

+2 Dex +2 Cha -2 Con which is how I translate those ability boosts and flaws makes for a surprisingly fragile doggy. Unless the shoony has ambitions to join you in lichhood (the natural ambition with those stats) you might want to alter something there.

That is exactly how they're meant, I'm afraid-- they're pugs, basically. They have squashy-faces, which doesn't just do horrible things to breathing-- the wrinkles are REALLY prone to infection.

That these are the breed that Aroden chose to bring to life...

(Well, the cleric who turned out to be Aroden reincarnated: "One great idea doesn't excuse f%%*ing it all up... I'm working on the faces, but I'm not sad about the society!")

(He's still waiting for the elf conjuror to make him a straw big enough to suck the Eye of Abengo back in...)

Someone in my group wanted to make a neon sign for their bar, which kicked off a whole debate on "if it's not paizo published, it's not real" regarding the laws of physics and if people are actually made out of "real-world" atoms and if oxygen, helium, neon, etc actually exist in pathfinder. Arguments thrown up were "what if everything's made of anti-oxygen," etc. Super dumb. I'm saying that at some level, everything in pathfinder has to follow at least some laws of physics and be made of atoms or else we wouldn't be able to comprehend the game, at least not without a really odd ruleset.

People made some good points about handwaving and player knowledge vs. character knowledge, which honestly should shut down most of it, even if you're playing in Numeria-- glowy bits there do not appear to release toxic gas.

But to answer the question about the laws of physics, et al, I would say the answer is, "Yes, except where it conflicts with the rules as written. Then the rules win."

A roleplaying game simulates many things-- a story, lives, etc. It abstracts some things, and hyper-concretes others-- your barbarian does not actually move 40' over 6 seconds in-character. Sometimes she moves 38; sometimes she moves 42, and so forth. It's just that saying "move 20+5d6" would be incredibly awkward and frustrating for the *game* side of things-- and would still be far too coarse-grained to simulate actual movement. Your wizard's spell formulae don't really take exactly one page per level, and you don't just get advancement at certain points.

You're still describing a world, and it's one where the laws of physics-- unaffected by either abstraction or preternatural effects-- are close enough to our own to be familiar, so whether it's "anti-oxygen" or whatever doesn't matter-- it works. The scientific method, for example, is in many ways actually strengthened by magic-- you do x, you get y repeatable results in z range. _How_ it does that may be weird-- the mass goes to the ethereal plane, the bleedout energy from the sudden stop filters out along the magical backdrop of reality, etc.-- but presumably, if someone REALLY studied it forever, they'd be able to figure out a how, even if it was, "negotiating with the protognomes who pull strings behind the veil of so-called reality."

Of course, that's part of why a neon tube probably won't be created unless the character is a refugee from a standard earth with a nostalgia kick. People don't just randomly say, "Cars. What a neat idea." They either say things like, "Okay, I know how a carriage works and wheels does. I know how fuel powers things like steam engines. Is there a better fuel for this? Can I apply it to make my carriage go very fast and without muscle power?" or "This is an interesting property of this gas I was poking with the scientific equivalent of a stick. I wonder what cool things I can do with it?"

In character, if your PC wants "big lighted letters and signs for my advertising campaign," why would he default to, "A gas I don't know about or have only encountered as a hazard in little tubes?" when he has cheaper, more standard options? Continual flame as per the others just _works_. Illusions may be more efficaceous yet more expensive, but that's why you leverage a bit of both magic and conventional tech-- pre-made shapes that are limned by the continual flame.

This, incidentally, is why the asylum doctors getting cranky about divine magic in Strange Aeons sort of makes sense. Yes, sure, potent divine magic could heal a *given* patient. But not everyone can afford ringing up the Bishop or the Matre or the whatever. Enough people with money have, though, which reduces the amount of funding and political will to look for treatments that -- presumably -- would work without having to make Sunday's post-sermon afternoon tea being a queued event. In turn, people just saying, "Oh, lock them up until a generous cleric has time," would frustrate the BLEEP out of someone with a passion for it, which is why they whine over a wand of bless.

Funnily enough, this gets back to the leveraging-- just like the glassmaker or the smith or the jeweler can make reflective/light-distorting technological products (in the sense of "things we make to do things we can't with our basic biological chassis"), so too-- theoretically-- would a scientific understanding of the mind and insanity help with magical cures. If you knew that a given series of soothing lights and sounds could help alter the brain enough to reduce and potentially even remove an OCD trigger, or a phobia, or whatever, then you could get away with Silent Image, Auditory Hallucination, and so forth, with some Heal checks. So there's also reason to keep looking other than "not everyone paid for the Temple of Pharasma's nice new gothic organ, complete with spooky sounds and orangutan-adjustments last year."

Anyway, tl: dr version is-- try to find out why the character wants it or would even know what to look for and push from there, and ask players to keep metagaming within your comfortable norms.

TheMadTemplar wrote:

BigNorseWolf wrote:

The other race your forgetting are tengu.

When it says race options, it doesn't mean options OF other races it means options FOR other races... IE blood of angels has a lot of options for aasimar. The advanced race guide has nifty options for tengu including the ability to glide etc.

Ahhhhh... ok. That's disappointing. haha So then how do I get, idk, permission? How would I get permission to play as a Dhampir or one of the other featured races from the advanced guide?

"You get a boon. Primarily you get a race boon from Dming or playing at a convention large enough to get con support. (which for me makes it a big convention). You can try to beg for one on the Boon trading thread, but its pretty unlikely unless you have your own race boon trade. (ie, I tried to get a kitsune boon for a painted mini: time waiting 1 year 3 months. Once i had an ifreet boon i had three responses in 28 minutes)

For a Dhampire, Kitsune, The four elemental races (oread slyph. air thingy, Ifrite) and a few others they were fairly common when they were handed out. Getting any other boon should let you trade for one.

Goblin boons were handed out as a one time thing. You're NOT going to pry those out of someone's cold dead hands with or without a crowbar. "

Holy cow, that's immensely disappointing. I've recently been brought into PF-- this being literally my first post-- and was debating PFS as a way to get RP in between sessions since I'm really burnt out on GMing, but I think I'll be sticking to non-society play when/if I can get it, then.

Strike one for me was reading a post while searching for ideas that Aasimar were out; I've always liked the holy/prophetic types and a blood tie to the Celestials (beyond just the Bloodline powers, which feels like pigeonholing too much for me) and the resultant backstories have always seemed neat to me.

After that, I said, 'Hmm, let's make some characters and see what sticks.' I looked around, thought about the Cavalier, checked a few guides and figured that a Small race would be best so that mount and character could fit into more potential environments. I like playing unusual characters, so I came up with a Goblin Cavalier, Order of the Dragon and Beastrider, devoted to Sarenrae.

Smart and tough for his kind, he realized that Goblin life, as it is, is terrible for Goblins, and that part of that comes from being cruel gits who eat people. He self-trained himself and out of most of his cultural assumptions (though he's rather bitter and cranky) and badgered a missionary of the Dawnflower to teach him about deities that didn't eat and torture their followers and this whole 'civilization' thing. Learning about writing was the worst part, but he figures that's the god's job to protect him from.

Now, he wants to civilize his own kind, except for one problem: he's an uncharismatic and short-tempered type. He means well; it's more along the lines of, "You give that boy his toy back or I will STAB YOU IN YOUR DOG-RAMMED EYE," but between that and being stuck between two worlds, he knows it's going to be hard for him to convince any of his people to change. Which means he needs a 'face'-- someone tough enough to impress other goblins but who's good at this whole... organizing... talking... getting people to -agree- with you thing. Hence, Pathfinder Society. He gets a chance to meet people, and if he's careful (ie, I have no intention of using the background/temperament as an excuse to disrupt table play), he might be able to find his "face of the revolution."

So I did a quick skim of the stats building rules, made sure I wasn't looking at any third party choices, and then made the character. Around the time I was going to work on his mount and equipment I remembered the whole reason I hadn't gone with my first blush, and checked back up at the top. "Huh. That's a limited group of non-Core races," I thought, "What's this race boon/Chronicle stack thing?" Strike two, I grit my teeth and look around

Which began my search. They aren't referenced in the character generation rules or the quick guide other than that one line, and they aren't called by that name anywhere in the PDF; ctl-f found me nothing. I read through the GM's section, and figured that it must mean things you get access to via Section U on the Chronicle sheet. By this point, I was already getting irritated that there wasn't a spelled out way to get access to stuff that's restricted but apparently sort-of legal, in the sense of a fairly normal fantasy race that, as near as I could tell would only be of concern if Rogue Stealth had become a gamebreaker.

Then I do searches, and here I am. "Nope, core plus four forever, especially the one you've got a backstory you like for." I know that the rules committee or whatever isn't specifically targeting the latter, but it seems so arbitrary to me when the wayang, for example, are permitted, and it's just a continuing frustration coming to a head. The fact that it isn't spelled out that "No, actually, you're really not ever going to get access to the majority of these characters, don't even bother looking," feels worse, like the conditions are being deliberately hidden.

I can kind of understand, especially since it seems like there's an economy in them, that there'd be concern over player anger over giving new access to rare PC types. To me, though, as a new player, it really discourages my interaction to know that I can't even work towards this as a goal. That functionally, the idea of privileging it to create an economy like this in the first place was a poor decision, and the obscurity of it when transitioning from Pathfinder as a rules system to Pathfinder as organized play really makes it burn worse.