Jakk's page

Wow... almost 2,200 posts, and now we know that we have another full year-plus to add to this (Bestiary 5 will be next year, it seems). All the folks at Paizo will have to do is dump all the monsters on the virtual table, sort, and stat... which, admittedly, is the time-consuming part, but still... :-)

Just because I don't want to leave a thread sitting with a final post dated Friday the 13th (no, not really)...

Do we even know if there will be a Bestiary 5 this year? I suppose there's still time; my most recent catalog includes the Bestiary 4 at October 2013... but I haven't seen a Bestiary 5 come up for preorder on the website yet, and this makes me sad. :'-(

An official response to this would be awesome, but I'll happily settle for speculation. :-)

More Great Old Ones plz! And everyone else so far has had excellent ideas. Keep them coming! Paizo has a year to put this together... although I wish I didn't have to wait so long. :-)

Pyratheon wrote:

Great suggestions. I'll certainly mention them to him tomorrow.

However, I think he's quite set on being an Urban Ranger, as he's essentially the party's Rogue, so those skills come in handy.

Anything not entirely conventional could be worth considering, too. Perhaps something as simple as an extra feat, or maybe taking elements from the archetypes you two mentioned? Let me know what you think. Anyway, it doesn't necessarily need to be in any rulebook, I'm perfectly happy with houseruling it.

I'm not sure if you are aware or not; he can be both an urban ranger and a skirmisher as neither archetype give up any of the same features. I'm actually planning on mixing the two myself in an upcoming game.

I love this combination, myself. The easy house-rule alternative to this, if the skirmisher abilities don't catch his interest, is a bonus feat at 5th level and every 2 levels thereafter, but this might be a bit rich for the palate of some GMs, as it gives the character 2 feats at every odd level from 5th up.

Yes, but the living are no match for the undead. I win. *looks around nervously for the clerics and paladins...*

Okay, this has gone far enough... gran is banned for banning the scientist for looking like khazan's twin butler. :-)

Lobolusk wrote:

If you have 6 attacks a round with FOB and one Kama, you can't take all 6 attacks with that Kama you have to split it up with 3 fist 3 kama? is that what the Devs are saying? so you in essence need 2 Kamas to effectively use the ability?

Yup, that's my understanding. So you lose your magic/flaming/etc. bonus's on half the flurry, unless you have two magic/flaming/etc. somethings. I actually like the flavor-boost here, as it means having (say) a Magic Fang'd fist and +2 Flameburst Sai is functionally meaningful - but it is a loss of efficiency.

Problems come up with reach weapons (which treating as a double weapon with the other side = monk unarmed seems to solve for me), non-light weapons (e.g., temple sword) in the off-hand (solve by disallowing/lowering the flurry to hit bonus's?), and bow flurries (need a new method to support this?)

First, I'd just like to say that the quotes from SKR and JB by the original poster make perfect sense to me. I'm coming into this debate rather late, largely because nobody in my group plays monks. The idea that a monk can't flurry with a single weapon (even a monk weapon) as all of her attacks should be a no-brainer; the whole point of the monk's flurry ability is that they're using hands, feet, elbows, knees, and even head to make these attacks.

As far as handling bow flurries, I would treat it the same as a two-weapon flurry as described in glandis's quoted post above. You're making half your attacks with the bow, and half your attacks are unarmed (for the sake of logical flavor description, they're probably kicks). If you're not using your bow in melee, you can't flurry. For this reason, I'm not a big fan of restricting archer monks from using the ability with monk weapons. At the very least, they should always be able to flurry with a staff, because a staff is just a sturdy unstrung bow, when it comes down to fundamentals.

Anyway, there's my two coppers.

Edit: Oh, and I second Talonhawke's praise of the alternate monks presented here. I haven't had a chance to look them over closely, but they look very well done from what I've seen at a glance.

Very interesting and well done, Stragen. I was rather frustrated with GoogleDocs not allowing me to properly print to PDF, and I noticed that the "save" option had been disabled. Is your tracked-changes version a PDF or Word document? If so, I'd love to get a copy.

Many thanks!

You fail your SAN check, lose 87 points of SAN then proceed to wish yourself out of existence. Azatoth then proceeds to [redacted]. Roll new character for the upcoming "Heaven was WIPED OUT MAN!!" campaign.

But this is where Ourobouros comes in, forcing an endless series of SAN checks... You wish yourself out of existence, which means you don't exist to be able to cast the wish, which means you exist, which means you wish yourself out of existence, which means you don't exist to be able to cast the wish, which means you exist, ... ad infinitum. Hrm... maybe this is what really happened to Karsus in FR... either way, there's no creation of new characters, because all of reality has been thrown for a loop by this stitch in causality, and it's "Groundhog Day" all over again... and again... and again... :-D

Edit: Sorry, there's no endless series of SAN checks... that's been attempted and failed, and it's just an endless loop of unmaking and causality-induced un-unmaking that envelops all of reality simply because Azathoth never just messes with ONE mind. What fun would that be? :-)

Jeremy Mcgillan wrote:

Point is quit whining, if you don`t want epic level play don`t buy the inevitable book that comes out simple as that, period. Many staff have said they will be doing epic play eventually, they`ve gone so far as to call it "a natural extension of the rules". Point is your the GM or customer just don't use or buy it and move on. Just because you don't want it doesn't mean others don't.

**DING DING DING** We have a winner!

You've just won this thread and summed up my feelings quite nicely. Thank you sir.

*shakes hand*

I agree. I loved the 3E ELH, even though I never used it in play once; the only campaign I was ever involved in that lasted long enough to break the level-20 mark was in 2nd Edition, and I was the DM then too; the highest level I've ever played a character at was 17. Yes, some will say that there isn't much difference between level 17 and level 20; it's simply that 20th level has (from the early days of RPGs) been seen as the pinnacle, just because that's where the rulebook's tables end.

The biggest problem I had with the ELH was the cliff's-edge cutoff, particularly with respect to magical item gp values. For me, properly-done "epic level" (whatever that means) rules need to entail a slow blending, not an abrupt cutoff, particularly in terms of character abilities; that seems entirely too much like "you must be this tall to go on this ride" and mechanical precision and rejection when faced with a group of kids who are all just a quarter inch too short. However, we would need to redesign the core advancement system to accomplish this, which isn't likely to happen until Pathfinder 2E (which is hopefully several years away, right, Paizo?). Until then, we need something for the people who like and will use this material, even if it is a "band-aid" product.

My advice to Paizo is, don't do what your predecessors did and break their own rules. Their advice for designing feats told us not to use character level as a feat requirement, then they introduced a whole new category of feats that required you to be at least 21st character level. If someone has a character build that allows them to take an epic-level feat at 19th level, good for them. This isn't likely to happen for epic combat feats, which will almost certainly have BAB +21 as a requirement. Anyway, I'll stop my game-mechanics rant there, even though I could say more; those of us who have been playing the game since 3.0 are familiar with all the mechanics, and those of us who aren't have a community here who can answer their questions.

Anyway, Jeremy (quoted above by Tiny Coffee Golem) sums up my thoughts on that matter as well. I just hope that the product is in fact "a natural extension of the rules" (which the 3.0 ELH was not in any way, from my POV; every piece of elegance from the core rules class design was ripped out and replaced with something else hammered in the wrong way).

Turning the question back on you, with all the monsters being published, do you really need any more? Sure, it may be nice to have more variety... and that's why some people want more NPCs. Having more stat blocks makes it more likely that you'll have the sort of NPC you want without having to work out the details yourself - same with having more monsters. All those NPCs can give you ideas that you may not have thought of - just as having extra monsters can. Same reasoning in both cases.

This is a good point... but I prefer to have my NPCs established within a setting, and a new NPC book (which I can see the value of, now) would be better off as a Golarion supplement rather than a core rules title, and it doesn't need to be a huge book. We could easily see both it and the Bestiary III in the same year, regardless of existing Golarion plans, given that Paizo is giving us more than one setting-specific book per year anyway, unlike certain coastal wizardly realms I can think of. ;-)

Finding this thread a bit late, as I looked for info on a release date for Bestiary III... so you can guess which way my vote goes. That being said, I love the idea of a book of monsters as characters... but rather than specific individuals, I'd like to see something more in the vein of 3E's Savage Species. Something that provides PC options for normally "unplayable" (in a standard campaign, anyway) monster races, such as giants and dragons, along with race-appropriate new feats, spells, equipment, etc., would ROCK. So...

- Bestiary III

- skip a year, do the monstrous characters book (in whatever form)

- Bestiary IV... or...

- alternate to Bestiary IV: maybe even a big book (APG-sized at least) on cosmology and pantheon design (kind of the love child of the Manual of the Planes and Deities & Demigods, except more about designing deities than simply providing stats for RW mythoi; the two fit so well together)... or... and this makes me drool almost as much as the monstrous characters book... Advanced Player's Guide II.

But I guess we'll see what's left for a possible APG II after Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat appear. I'd love to see an "official" system for converting Pathfinder to point-buy classless mechanics similar to Eclipse by Distant Horizons (which is what 4E should have been, and that's all I'm saying; I LOVE what has been done with Pathfinder); VERY excited to get Ultimate Magic and see the final form of Paizo's take on spell-point-based magic. The two variant spell systems in UA 3.5 (yes, BOTH of them) are the only rules system material from my 3.5 books that I still use; feats, spells, and magical items get converted as needed, and there hasn't been a lot of need since I got the Advanced Player's Guide. Anyway, this is turning into a fanboi unrant, so I'll stop there. Looking forward to Bestiary III... or whatever you decide to put in its place... but I probably won't buy a hardcover full of pregenerated NPCs. I have my Golarion and FR books for those. :-)

Never mind; found them! The fonts are named at the beginning of issue #277 in a sidebar at the bottom of the letters page. (I decided that it was as good a reason as any to go back and flip through my actual magazines... I do miss getting new ones every month!)

For the convenience of others, the names of the fonts used in early 3E Dragon are: Wrongfont, Replicant, and Sloth (among others; those are the distinctive ones).

Now I'm off to see how much getting these fonts will cost me...

One more thing that might help: I know the font was mentioned in the front pages (either the letters or the editorial) of one issue, but I can't remember the issue number and I can't find it with Google; my post-250 PDFs are homemade, and so are not OCR'ed (and therefore not searchable).

Thanks again!

Hi!

This is my first post on these boards; I've been lurking since I first heard about Pathfinder (so about 3 years now).

I've recently been trying (with no success at all) to find the font that was used for the titles of Dragon and Dungeon in 3E before they went to the "balloon type" titles that I never really came around to liking. Yes, the one with the "3" superimposed over the "g". If anyone can help me out with this, it would be greatly appreciated. And yes, it goes without saying that I'm willing to pay for it... if the price is reasonable. I would expect it to be a commercial font anyway.

Thanks in advance!