Kittyburger's page

The players at my table last night couldn't say enough good things about Rodrigo Gil's original artwork for the skeletal coven aspirant and the main villain of the piece, the incredible undead cyclops witch portrait on the cover.

Hopefully NOTHING dreadful will befall the adventurers on their trip to the frozen Crown of the World! Nothing at all!

Kittyburger wrote:

It NEVER gets old to see something I wrote hit the shelves, even if the shelves are virtual.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing with us!

Thanks, let's do this again sometime! ;)

It NEVER gets old to see something I wrote hit the shelves, even if the shelves are virtual.

Project: J-ko wrote:

Definitely looking forward to the new shiny!

Also am ready for the challenge of remembering a new password. o__o

Just do what I do and use 12345, I haven't forgotten it yet!

... That's the same as the combination on my luggage!

The Monster Match, it was a graveyard smash.

Smashing in a graveyard, you say...

A bit confused, is this a one-book AP? I thought those were just "Adventures"

One-book APs are coming in the new year for Pathfinder, but clearly they're getting done now for Starfinder

As always, I am highly excited for this game. I love Pathfinder CRPGs but it makes the world that much richer when you go into different formats (like the Vampire Survivors-type top-down action game or an ARPG) and see how that changes how you interact with the game world.

Swiping right on this one!

bugleyman wrote:

Still radio silence from the powers that be on the (overwhelmingly negative) feedback on the (overwhelmingly unpopular) Society changes.

I wish I could say I’m surprised. :-/

Did you ever stop to think that others are happy with the changes? The forums are often overloaded with people that complain and gripe about things. I like most of the changes to Org Play. I do not like getting rid of the stat blocks which seems to be the biggest complaint.

They could just get rid of Society or just offload it onto the community like WotC did with AL. There's a pretty strong case to be made that OP is not really bringing in enough business to justify the costs for sustaining it. On the other hand, we saw during the pandemic where OP saved Paizo's butt and that totally justified every expense ever put into OP.

Pick your poison.

Or, failing "happy," at least "cautiously appraising the situation first."

I've had some of my best PFS experiences playing/running Quests (especially with new players who don't REALLY know the system and thus don't know what they CAN'T do - as a GM I find it incredibly liberating to hear someone ask to try something totally gonzo and just look at them and go, "You can certainly try"). The thing I think is a real problem is the removal of stat blocks, but that one is also the easiest thing to reverse. I don't want to sound like I'm completely shilling for Paizo, but to me, they've at least earned a cautious "wait and see" attitude rather than "let's get the axes and pitchforks."

That's me, anyway.

Kittyburger wrote:

Madhippy3 wrote:

Boosting? If we are lucky they won't lower the level cap.

Bad jokes aside there is no level cap is PFS. The limit is what is playable. Like there are no scenarios for level 15. We could call this a level cap but that wouldn't be entirely correct. You can, if the madness takes you, put AP credits on a character till they are level 20.

No there has been no word about lots of repeatables.

The highest-level current adventure is What Walks Again (6-19, level 11-14). That one takes a solid 5-6 hours and would be impossible to schedule on a weekday night (to be fair, even before the current age of "everything rolls up their sidewalks between nine and ten," nothing was open till midnight on a weekday but diners and pizza delivery).

If I can schedule high-level adventures on weekdays, that's a win for me. And I am nowhere NEAR the only weekday VA.

I admit my group was critting like crazy in this scenario, but it wasn't even 4 hours for us.

When you get a lot of crits, it wraps up fights real fast. Granted this is a new scenario as well so variability is going to be higher right now - but I've also seen people struggle to fit it into (and go over) a 5-hour convention slot, so we've got a variability on that scenario's length right now of more than an hour and a half.

Right now I have 2 sites that I'm responsible for - one has a drop deadline of 9 PM (so we start at 6 to get 3 solid hours in) and one has a "the workers would like us to get out so they can go home" time of 10 PM (so 3.5 hours with our usual start time of 6:30). 6-19 cannot fit in the first site and in the second site we MIGHT be able to run it but would be realllllllll compressed unless people were critting like it's Critsmas.

Boosting? If we are lucky they won't lower the level cap.

Bad jokes aside there is no level cap is PFS. The limit is what is playable. Like there are no scenarios for level 15. We could call this a level cap but that wouldn't be entirely correct. You can, if the madness takes you, put AP credits on a character till they are level 20.

No there has been no word about lots of repeatables.

The highest-level current adventure is What Walks Again (6-19, level 11-14). That one takes a solid 5-6 hours and would be impossible to schedule on a weekday night (to be fair, even before the current age of "everything rolls up their sidewalks between nine and ten," nothing was open till midnight on a weekday but diners and pizza delivery).

If I can schedule high-level adventures on weekdays, that's a win for me. And I am nowhere NEAR the only weekday VA.

MadScientistWorking wrote:

So you do know Paizo severely undercharges for certain PDFs and quite honestly all you have done is point out that they really should charge more for the $20.00 one.

...which, even if true, changes nothing. The market is the market; PFS scenarios have to exist in it.

In a perfect world, that wouldn't be the case: PFS would be viewed by Paizo as a promotional tool, with the understanding that the value of PFS scenarios is difficult to quantify by looking at direct revenue alone. But, since Paizo seems determined to viewing PFS scenarios in purely economic terms, I believe it makes sense to point out that they are already not viable at $9. What better way to do that than by comparing them to Paizo's other products?

And now the size (3 hrs instead of 4), scope (no stat blocks), and utility (level ranges) of scenarios are all decreasing? Madness.
They may as well take PFS out behind the chemical shed and get it over with.

(╥﹏╥)

As someone who was involved deeply in planning a transition between venues in the last few months, a 3-hour scenario makes working with our venues infinitely easier, as more sites are going to be happy with watching a group of people eat up table real estate for 3 hours as opposed to 4-6 hours (especially places like taprooms, which actually seriously depend on table turnover to make money). And even game stores are closing at 8-9 PM on weekday nights now instead of 10 PM or later. A 3-hour scenario might seem shorter in terms of word count and page count, but in practice we've already had to cut down longer scenarios to fit that kind of time constraint in the real state of play over the last 2-3 years.

I've mentioned elsewhere, but from the office of Expectation Management: Dead God's Hand is going to be a standalone adventure, NOT an Adventure Path. It'll be a bit longer than the standard 128 page standalone length, but not up to the 256 page Adventure Path length.

As a Society GM - If Organized Play is thinking about giving a Pathfinder Society metaplot the "Scoured Stars" compilation treatment, I would love to see Immortal Influence (season 6), Equal Exchanges (season 5) or Boundless Wonder (season 4) get it - particularly Equal Exchanges, which I think could benefit from a little extra material in the middle.

Adventure path change seems overall like a win, though it might be time to drop the "path" moniker. It's really just a big adventure at this point, no? Especially since pretty much everything will be hard cover now. The name "Pathfinder" is recognizable as its own thing; you don't need the name "adventure path" around. Overall, this seems like a great opportunity to simplify your branding.

The PFS changes I like much less. Removing stat blocks from scenarios means either extra prep work, more books to carry, or both. But my bigger concern is that this is 25% less content for the same price -- and said content only supports half the level band. I'm sure they'll be easier to produce, but this is, in effect, shrinkflation (and therefore really yet *another* price increase for PFS scenarios in the last few years, tripling down on the fundamentally misguided, not to mention baffling, strategy of trying to make a promotional tool profitable). Scenarios were already relatively overpriced at $9; now they'll be 25% smaller, and less flexible to boot. At the end of the day, these changes make things more painful and costly for society GMs, which seems very unlikely to end well for anyone.

I am SEVERELY unsure as to whether or not I got all my stat blocks right for Within the Glacier, but I'm glad I got the chance to write custom stat blocks for my villain and some of the crucial monsters.

On the player side of things, I am hoping very much that we get a hardcover compilation version of Extinction Curse!

Hey, it's me!

"Vlakas who witnessed the rebirth of their dying sun, Sota, are marked with starburst patterns that match their natural blessing to kindle light."

That's right everyone.... LASER WOLVES 2.0

And at the Festival of Rekindling, you can buy a miniature replica of the star, Sota.

Yes, that means you can have a...

MINI SOTA.

Ectar wrote:

This makes me feel too old and out of touch for contemporary Pathfinder, and that makes me sad.

Individuality and identity just aren't a big focus in my life at this point, but is typically the focal point of many of these characters' stories.

They're well written and seem to resonate really strongly with the other folks in the comments. I just can't see almost anything of myself in them.

More than anything it's just that with so many bad people in the world, especially in the US now, trying to erase queer joy, being out in the open and loud about our beautiful, diverse identities is the most meaningful form of protest we can show and solidarity we can give. Everyone who plays a TTRPG wants to be excited about their character and story they have to tell, it isn't just about pride- that's just a bonus ;)

Every Game Master is going to take the published adventure and tweak it to suit their group, I've never once run anything exactly as written. I encourage you to lean into the aspects of the stories that suit you and discard the rest, as always, but never say that "identity" isn't an important aspect of play for you, because whoever you are and whoever you play as, I'm sure you're great and we're thrilled to have you in our gaming community, Starfriend!

Also worth mentioning that four of the six basic conflicts (character vs. nature, character vs. supernatural, character vs. society, character vs. self) are conflicts surrounding a character's basic nature. Identity is a fundamental force in fiction.

Not me needing transfemme characters who have to learn as adults how to operate in queer spaces...

For this is war

It's where the strong protect the weak
I know not if I'll die
but know I'll try
I'd gladly give my life for others

For this is war
I do not care whose side I'm on
I'll kill a Troll or Gnome
Or burn a home
And it was fun to start this war. Who knew?

A warning to the people

To the soldier, the civilian
The martyr, the victim
This is war

It's the moment of truth, and the moment to lie
The moment to live and the moment to die
The moment to fight, the moment to fight
To fight, to fight, to fight

To the right, to the left
We will fight to the death
To the edge of the earth
It's a brave new world
From the last to the first

To the right, to the left
We will fight to the death
To the edge of the earth
It's a brave new world
It's a brave new world

I won't forget the first time one of my fellows in a Pathfinder Lodge called my attention during their game to mention "hey! This gnome is non-binary!"

I won't forget the "aw yeahs" I heard myself chanting as I read about a trans man who helps spark a rebellion in a Pathfinder AP.

I won't forget the first time I learned about Arshea.

Paizo is doing some incredible work, and not just for me. Keep up the good work! I hope some of my work can do some good, too

I read that for a moment as "This gnome is gnome-binary."

Every week I try to find little ways to make my Pathfinder games more gay.

I STRONGLY advise against playing this in an uptier party. Many of the DCs for tier 11-12 are flatly impossible for a level 10 character, especially the save DCs in the final encounter.

Jon A wrote:

Prepping this for a con in a couple of weeks.

I don't see this explicitly addressed in the scenario, but I get the impression that the Mythic system replaces the Hero Point system. In other words, we do not hand out Hero Points during play. Is that correct?

It seems that adding Hero Points on top of Mythic Points would skew things too much.

Right, mythic points replace hero points. You don't get both. And mythic points are not handed out the same way either.

So far I've only played this as a player (and in an uptiered game to boot) and I did NOT have a good time. The mythic rules as presented in this scenario didn't make me feel like a mythic hero, they made the combats feel very unfair and designed to squash PCs flat. Maybe it was the fact that my character WAS undertiered (level 10 in a tier 11-12 party) but I felt like I was trying to make saves that I had at most a 1 in 20 chance to succeed at.

"Lost Golarion"??

Lost Golarion has been a thing since the beginning of Starfinder! Golarion is VANISHED FROM THE UNIVERSE, the only thing present is Absalom Station.

It would not be fun for the player that it happened to on, but is there any reason why penumbra would not want to use her soul cage to drop a 6th level banishment spell on a player to thin out the PC's Ranks. It might to anti-fun to do first round and basically make someone miss out on a whole fight if they fail but if she where being threatnend by a big scary melee combatanbt I dont see any reason she would want that person to stick around.

Penumbra's tactics in general are pretty anti-fun for the player who, say, gets slammed as a 10th level champion with a dominate from a 13th level boss monster that her character has to roll a natural 22 to clear...

So many train puns that I'll be shocked if there isn't a steamtrain

Did he buy too many games

PF2 also just doesn't publish class specific content very often in general. Classes like the Investigator have never gotten a new subclass and only a tiny handful of new character options ever. In general, other than the APG there hasn't been much for any class. If anything the Champion is batting above average here.

Plus like, the Champion is a great class and it's kind of wild to point to that horrible new cleric archetype as evidence of some anti-Champion conspiracy.

Writers and editors are human beings and make human decisions. If they don't like/don't want a particular character (class) in their world, they're less likely to write for that character. No conspiracy required, just a plot element that may or may not be to a particular group of writers'/editors' taste.

Pronate11 wrote:

Kittyburger wrote:

Mangaholic13 wrote:

Kittyburger wrote:

Literally ANYTHING for Champions.

I'm starting to feel like I should have rebuilt my PFS champion as a cleric because right now it feels like the champion's narrative space is getting steadily squeezed out of the game - you've got exemplar for the god-adjacent melee beatstick space, guardian for the stop the enemies from beating my friends space, and battle harbinger for the divine gish space; and champions don't even have their full premaster functionality back yet.

It kinda feels like Paizo hates champions and only even still has them in remaster to retain backwards compatibility with premaster.

The Oaths are back, and vastly improved, from my understanding.

This is about NEW class features, not bringing back stuff that got cut out in favor of other classes.

They are not saying they should be brought back, but that they literally have been brought back. They are in divine mysteries. People have read them.

I was honestly on the fence with the Oaths back in the Premaster; a lot of them felt like they were extremely campaign-dependent (no point in taking the Shining Oath if you almost never fight Undead), or too circumstantial to pick over even just a basic Dedication feat. They're almost as bad as the PF1 Ranger's Favored Enemy feature, or even the current edition's Bane property, in that they're either super powerful/must-haves, or they're useless.

I will wait until the Divine Mysteries book hits the streets, but if the Oaths still operate mostly the way they have previously (again, that's an if), then I'm not holding out hopes that they will be amazing. If, on the other hand, they are significantly changed and instead give some more universal benefits, while adding an additional Edict/Anathema, then it will at least be worth reading them to see if certain build options open up.

This to begin with - Vengeance Oath seems to be the only one that's even remotely universal in applicability, but that seems more like Babby's First Smite than an oath the way the other ones are. The problem is dribbling out old features that were held back from Player Core 2 for space reasons is not the same as introducing new content, and there's been very little post-Remaster new content for Champion players.

"My class is too good at spellcasting, and I wish I had fewer spell slots so I could Strike more" is a really weird way of justifying the Battle Harbinger, but there's a valid point to be made that the Warpriest is more of a spellcaster with some gishy elements than a full gish. A Warpriest will want to Strike when they can, but they also have a lot of power to leverage via their spell slots and of course their divine font, so even a Warpriest who leans heavily into the Striking aspect of their playstyle will still cast spells. It's valid to want a Cleric doctrine that goes full gish, and trades off that spellcasting power for proper martial power.

Trouble is, the Battle Harbinger doesn't do that very well, and in fact it doesn't even do that better than a Warpriest. Despite the former's faster scaling, both end up with the same attack modifier, because the Battle Harbinger gets stuck with a Wisdom key attribute and is thus behind most other martials in accuracy half the time. When either hits with a Strike, they end up dealing the same baseline damage, because the Battle Harbinger still only gets weapon specialization at 13th level, and doesn't get greater weapon specialization, putting them significantly behind other martials. A Warpriest could use any 6th-rank or higher spell slot the Battle Harbinger doesn't get to prebuff with heroism and match or exceed the latter in accuracy, and could use any of their many lower-rank slots to cast bane, benediction, bless, and malediction on-tap, also to the same effect as a Battle Harbinger in any instance that doesn't involve counteracting. Effectively, the Battle Harbinger falls short at its intended assignment compared to existing options, and whatever feats the archetype picks to make up for it, the Warpriest can do equal or better, such as by picking Channel Smite for divine Spellstrikes (the Battle Harbinger is also behind a feat due to their dedication requirement).

In my opinion, here are the changes the Battle...

Battle Harbinger really would have fit better as a Champion archetype, but nooooooooo...

Kittyburger wrote:

Literally ANYTHING for Champions.

I'm starting to feel like I should have rebuilt my PFS champion as a cleric because right now it feels like the champion's narrative space is getting steadily squeezed out of the game - you've got exemplar for the god-adjacent melee beatstick space, guardian for the stop the enemies from beating my friends space, and battle harbinger for the divine gish space; and champions don't even have their full premaster functionality back yet.

It kinda feels like Paizo hates champions and only even still has them in remaster to retain backwards compatibility with premaster.

The Oaths are back, and vastly improved, from my understanding.

This is about NEW class features, not bringing back stuff that got cut out in favor of other classes.

An Exemplar Class Archetype that gives them a Deity an dtheir spark is a small portion of the deity's actual divine power kinda like a Champion but more offensive.

The Champion's narrative and game mechanical space is already being stomped on by like 3-4 other classes now without Exemplar just blatantly getting a class archetype that's "I'm you, but better in every way."

Literally ANYTHING for Champions.

I'm starting to feel like I should have rebuilt my PFS champion as a cleric because right now it feels like the champion's narrative space is getting steadily squeezed out of the game - you've got exemplar for the god-adjacent melee beatstick space, guardian for the stop the enemies from beating my friends space, and battle harbinger for the divine gish space; and champions don't even have their full premaster functionality back yet.

It kinda feels like Paizo hates champions and only even still has them in remaster to retain backwards compatibility with premaster.

Is there an option to be a ‘Champion’ of Razmir too, or just a ‘Cleric’?

Haha, champions don't even have their full premaster ability set back yet, let alone anything new.

What HMM and Bret said. 1.5 to 2 hours is great for Quests, when it gets to 3 hours or so it's REALLY hard to sell for players.

Wooooooo!

Oh, also, they renamed the slayer, too, pretty obviously because "slayer sounds kind of murderous". I'm not actually saying the inquisitor change was entirely about offensiveness. I think they probably thought "inquisitor sounds kind of evil and might distract players".

Source, by the way: One of my players who didn't know the game well once played an inquisitor of Shelyn. His read on the class was that of an oppressive heel, so the joke was an extremely aggro orc Shelynite. The connotation is there.

I'm pretty sure the devs would change barbarian to berserker if they could get away with it, just because it's clearer, but it was a core class.

To me, "Slayer" should be some kind of magical rogue subtype - but I'm admittedly a 90s girl and when you say "Slayer," I think Buffy.

KoriCongo wrote:

Michael Sayre wrote:

CyberMephit wrote:

And those who came up with and support the idea of renaming it better not read up on real-life paladins :facepalm:

As of the remaster, PF2 doesn't have paladins, either.

I'm...unironically mad it took me two months for me to realize you guys did that...

Kind of does justify my point that the asterisk text there is showing your hands too much.

I would hazard a guess that moving away from paladin was to divorce from D&D-isms primarily and that this aspect is a happy accident. Where divorcing from associations with the people who destroyed the history of the Mayans, the Meshika(Aztec), and probably more cultures on Turtle Island(North America), is just good sense

Did I miss something? The Paladins were the 12 knights-companion of Charlemagne. The application of that name to characters who were more like the Knights Templar was largely an example of the anachronism stew that was Gygax's D&D game.

My pregens are updated (for level 1 at least, I'll update the other ones later)

I'm going to assume that schedule slip did what schedule slip does with the PC2 pregens?

Saw some archetype pictures in the twitch stream. The Rivethun emissary is Shardra, so combining the archetype with the new animist class...

:)

So glad to see Shardra make her triumphant return. I was hoping she wouldn't be consigned to the history books after Crystal left.

I’m still curious how illustrations are being accused of being “photoshopped”.

It's a way of discrediting the artists (and by implication, the company that commissioned them) by accusing them of plagiarism. It's also trivially easy to prove wrong, as many if not most of the comparisons he made are between images that share little more than a slight cosmetic resemblance (he moved off of the claim of "photoshopping" when challenged, revising it to a claim that Lucasfilm or Paramount might sue over a "vague resemblance" when the legal standard for copyright violation is "striking similarity," i.e. the presence of features whose ONLY explanation is direct copying of copyrighted material).

It's also a way to derail the conversation by moving the topic onto something unrelated but at least mildly spicy.

To me it sounds like the flip-tiles line wound down some time ago. As an organized play GM/Venture-Officer, I haven't seen a scenario in a couple of years come out using flip-tiles (except for the PFS Season 5 intro scenario, a use that was widely panned - most people I know who run that scenario have run it using a printed custom map because of how awkward the scenario map is to put together), and I think that's partly because the flip-tiles are difficult to use.

I assume US law requires Paizo to have made efforts to protect their IP or else lose their rights to it. IANAL, I don't know for sure.

Copyrights are a simple monopoly on the use of the work throughout the period of the copyright (which is why preservation of old films is such a pain - in many cases the owner of the copyright of the film literally does not exist anymore and there's no clear heir to those rights). If copyright was lost due to non-use or non-protection it would clear up a LOT of problems in archiving copyrighted material.

Trademarks, on the other hand (which is a weird blanket that basically covers every single possible proper noun in a fictional work that could be economically exploitable) do have to be protected or you do lose them.

I also don't get why someone's fan AP, if they're not charging any money, isn't protected as a transformative work even if it does use Golarion proper nouns. What would happen if someone posted their homebrew Numeria content to AO3?

Generally speaking, transformative uses are, to quote the US Copyright Office, "those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work." (emphasis mine) Fan APs actually DO "substitute for the original use of the work," which is why you can't use "Golarion proper nouns" without a license to do so. You can make fan APs because the rules qua the rules are not copyrightable - i.e. the common observation that you can't copyright game mechanics, only a particular expression of them.

Copyright law sucks and is a huge headache for everybody.

I am very concerned about the abruptness of this change. This feels really sudden and awkward, as well as problematic from an Organized Play perspective since Starfinder 1st is still going to be supported through the Year of Era's End season through GenCon 2025. This feels like it wasn't fully thought-out before it was announced.

I'm so stoked to see the final release, and sink my teeth into the new witchwarper and precog!!

I really don't like calling their "alternate [reality / timeline / spatiality / whatever]" schtick a Quantum Field. I have said it before, but, the word "quantum" is so overused and diluted in sci fi, it's lost all meaning. Especially given that quantum science and quantum computing are still burgeoning fields in real life, the more that those fields develop and mature (and usage of the word "quantum" along with that), the more that using "quantum" as a stand-in for "something weird, spooky, and/or high tech" will feel quaint and outdated.

Fun fact: There was a "Radio Cleaners" in downtown Minneapolis in the 1930s. It had nothing to do with radio, just a dry cleaner shop, but "radio" had connotations of new, modern, and high-tech.

In the 1940s-60s it was anything to do with aviation and space (jet-, strato-, rocket-, space-age...) In the 1970s-90s it was computer tech. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.

Terevalis Unctio of House Mysti wrote:

What information do we have on the dragon folk heritage?

The Dragonblood versatile heritage will be very customizable. You can choose how dragon-looking you are (ranging from "basically a humanoid with a dragon for a head, to just having horns and draconic eyes, and everything else in-between). There'll be 4 lineages to choose, one of each magical tradition (Arcane, Divine, Occult and Primal). And a fair bit of the Kobold's draconic features were ported over and adjusted for the Dragonblood.

So everything from Dragonborn (D&D) to Dragonborn (Skyrim). Cool!

Starcatcher wrote:

RIP... no, wait, he'd hate that.

I believe the appropriate epitaph would be RIV.

}

This feels like a trend for Quinn, but I’m not sure why I think that.

Also what is Quinn’s orientation? MLM?

Mark Moreland just said he's gay. And apparently clueless. ;)