Madhippy3's page

"I don't follow PF2E news closely, but for SF2E, scenarios are capped at 10th level. The reason given seems ot be to address exactly the problem you are talking about."

We shouldn't need a level cap this low when currently we can start at level 7 and all scenarios are repeatable. Sorry for stating the obvious but higher level tables are hard to play because there are only so many scenarios which can get you to that level.

In Pf2e there are enough repeatable scenarios to take you to level 6. This is nowhere near enough. 1-4 repeatable are abundant. Getting to level 5 is easy but to get higher than 6 you really have to hope a 5-8 you haven't played before is offered up. As you get to 9-12 it really is a desert. I see a lot of Replays spent here on Warhorn because its just a requirement to play. On warhorn I see unloved scenarios get filled with a huge waitlist because they are high level and its a rare chances to bring out of retirement.

That is all to say people want high level content and it is madness that when we get the shortcut and the endless repeatable that they put the level cap so low, then blame it on us for not being able to fill the same number of tables was 9-12s as we do with 1-4s.

But flight is an extremely powerful adventuring ability. The reasoning falls apart when we remember how useful in exploration and combat flight is. Even if a level 1 Strix adventurer has a max to hit of +3, they would ultimately be doing better than other level 1 adventurers.

Tridus wrote:

Setting Magus aside, the problem with it is that the Dedication is way out of whack with other Dedication feats. It gives you a LOT for a single feat, including the signature ability of the class.

Is it the signature ability of the class? Ultimately they're just focus spells. Unleash would be the better comparison point as a unique feature that can't be poached. That it's lackluster is unfortunate, but that doesn't change that it is a unique action locked to the class that can't be poached.

I don't think there is anything about Unleash Psyche which couldn't be poached if Paizo wanted it to be part of an archetype. So it isn't really different from Amp. Since UP sucks and Amp doesn't people use AMP, focusing on it while forgetting about UP entirely. I have a Psychic in my AoA game which has never UP but Amps every fight. We are starting the 4th book soon, that is how little UP matters. It is not the signature ability which people want; If Psychic dedication came with UP and not AMP people still wouldn't use UP.

exequiel759 wrote:

I think we can agree Trick Magic Item should be a baseline feature that didn't require a skill feat, so personally I wouldn't really put it as a benefit of spellcasting dedications even if it technically is. Similar to how rogues and a few other classes were the only ones that could disarm magic traps in PF1e.

Uh... I advocate for Trick Magic Item being deleted from the system, not becoming a baseline feature.

It genuinely is a big problem that means every 2A spell has to be designed around possibly being poached by literally every PC.
The devs 100% know about the Tailwind wand problem, and you can thank Trick Magic Item for single-handedly keeping the power balance of slotted long-term buff spells in the toilet.

Spellcasting is supposed to be a serious investment, and the hp/6 caster chassis is so bad, the tradeoff so serious, that Paizo has never released another hp/6 class after Psychic. Even the other upcoming 2 slot caster, Necromancer, is hp/8.

Not even needing to commit the class feats to a casting archetype, but only needing a skill + skill feat via Trick Magic Item is just too much.

I've played at a table that banned Tailwind wands, and I still agree with that GM's take on it. That's the exact power escalation treadmill that ends in unfun rocket tag.

A caster choosing to delay their staff upgrade to take an all-day buff wand like Energy Aegis is a "valid" choice. But a martial should not be able to drop 160 gp to get 8hrs of bonus move speed like that.

Trick Magic Item is why casters have to deal with "Cast: 1 minute" for all the damn buffs spells now, as that's the main crutch the devs use to dodge the Trk Mgc Itm problem.

If thats true they missed their chance with Tailwind. They had the chance to fix the spell as a remaster erata or remaster new spell and they didn't so they must not have been to bothered by it. Not like most buff spells weren't short length anyways. Most buff spells that came out at the same time were 1 minute. Some were 10, rarely more than that.

I played this scenario with the author. I probed the author about going with the Functionary. He was pretty clear we die. Which isn't the best because thats not written in the scenario, but there is the "word of god".

Do to the nature of the scenario your group might be a little mad at you for missing what happens next. (I will say no more)

Generally (I only know one exception), the APs are set in the Golarion year they are released, and so are the Scenarios (though they can be played in any order it is clearly a sequence of events). So Battles Spark should be a prequel to Hellbreakers assuming Paizo doesn't surprise us.

I think the unwieldly bit is future proofing

Lia Wynn wrote:

pauljathome wrote:

It just feels REALLY strange that if you want to spray a whole bunch of bullets it doesn't matter at all if you've ever seen the weapon, know how to use it, are good with it, etc.

In practice it really isn't a huge deal. Soldiers are the only characters who seem to regularly use AoE weapons other than grenades. And if you're planning on using AoE weapons as a non soldier there is lots of incentive to take the soldier Archetype anyway (especially at higher levels).

It doesn't matter. Even in IRL, you rarely aim something like an M-60. The machine gunner is suppressing the enemy and likely hitting some. Riflemen aim and make direct fire kills.

Anyone can jump behind a machine gun and just hold down the trigger and move it left and right. Now, they might suck at reloading it without training, or clearing a jam, so having area fire work off of a DC makes a lot more sense than it would to have it be tied to anything else.

That is not how I was trained many years ago in the Canadian Army with automatic rifles and sub machine guns and it was definitely the case that some people regularly scored better than others.

Note automatic rifle is NOT the same as a tripod mounted machine gun. What you're describing is pretty accurate for tripod mounted machine guns.

To add to this with my own military experience, firing to suppress and firing to kill are so drastically different if we are using that as a metric for how it makes sense in SF2e then it would also make sense that Auto-Fire (to be specific to the kind of weapon talked about above) should give your enemies a +4 to their reflex save, though apply Suppressed to all but the Crit Success. Spraying and Praying doesn't get you the results that we see in SF2e. It also isn't 2x number of targets for ammo expended either.

I think Paizo is wrong to not factor in training to Area/Auto weapons, but as was mentioned above they are committed to it, so get used to it.

I still run legacy wizard in a home game and never remade my legacy wizard to remaster in PFS. I don't care if the new schools are fun to read they aren't fun to play. Any player could have written about their school in a backstory. Paizo didn't actually add anything but ideas.

Wizards needed feats, not schools. Some new thesis ideas would be interesting, but at this point I just want all the thesises (thesi?) as part of the wizard chassis. I want them to have more skills with extra improvements (less than rogue/investigator, bet more than everyone else), I want a lot of things I am not going to get. What I never wanted was a restrictive like of school spells with a theme.

At this point I just want the magical schools back with the freedom to take anything from a big list. At least I can still have that in my home games, and the next time a level 7-10 or 9-12 PFS scenario is being run.

And to be clear: curses providing both benefits and drawbacks made each stage of those curses really messy and difficult for many players to parse. I can fully understand why Paizo wanted to rework that and make curses purely detrimental as their name would suggest. However, I also think the designers gave us the solution to that problem when they baked curse scaling into cursebound feats: by making those feats scale based on how cursed you are, you get to draw benefits from your curse in a manner that is not only much easier to understand, but also easier to mold onto the mechanics of each feat.

I never understood why people didn't like a class from the Advanced Players Guide was more complex. This was kind of the point. Swash was also more difficult to play for needing to juggle your Panache, Finisher, and applicable skill. It was nice this wasn't removed just made easier with Bravado.

Why did Oracle have to have its complexity neutered? I never thought these were classes for first time players. I didn't try Oracle till I had some game experience under my belt. And I loved it. It wasn't stronger for being complex, but it was different and gave me a lot to think about when I wanted that as a player. I would have loved some extra attention to the Legacy Oracle in the remaster so the weaknesses were addressed and brought into parity with the stronger parts.

Teridax, your ideas in the next paragraph are great. I would have been happy with the curses benefit being put on steroids is the curse negatives were as debilitating like Ancestry. If they wanted to add more spell slots, thats nice too.

Having binged all of this just now my favorite suggestion has been to take the Amp and focus point away from Psychic Dedication. Pick one of the Psi Cantrips, this alone is pretty powerful but we can't fix everything.

If we could we would fix all the other archs so they would be less generic, but thats a lot of houseruling and not something we should expect from Paizo. So we have to hope they will tone down what is to strong, though without making it generic. I don't think anyone wants it to be generic just for equality with the other deds we just need some kind of equity with the others so they are "budgeted" the same on power. Trading two cantrips for one psi cantrip might not be perfect but it works imo.

Never give Amp, thats to much of the Psychic identity, and has been the cause of a lot of frustration related to easy power.

Fixing magus is a different topic. Yes removing Amped IW will just encourage different focus spell hunting, but at least for this thread thats not the concern.

Madhippy3 wrote:

A few people I've talked to and I think that Seneschal Witch is perfectly fine for Pathfinder Society play and should be allowed as an option even if it has to be with a boon, in the next errata.

The only ability we imagine to be problematic is Patron Glamor and if that's going to be a problem it'd be okay to ban that.

Relationships with PC's patrons in society games don't come up at all in play anyways. All witches might as well have absentee patrons for all the story of the scenarios care. There is no reason to ban it so lets not ban it.

It was made available via charity boons at cons.

I guess that is okay then, but in my friends and I's defense not everyone would know that. I'll pass that along.

A few people I've talked to and I think that Seneschal Witch is perfectly fine for Pathfinder Society play and should be allowed as an option even if it has to be with a boon, in the next errata.

The only ability we imagine to be problematic is Patron Glamor and if that's going to be a problem it'd be okay to ban that.

Relationships with PC's patrons in society games don't come up at all in play anyways. All witches might as well have absentee patrons for all the story of the scenarios care. There is no reason to ban it so lets not ban it.

I remain in the "disgruntled about the 2e Environmental Protections nerf" camp. Especially because many of us pointed this out as a potential massive problem in the Playtest. It doesn't make sense in-universe (outside of convoluted "Megacorps said so" rationalizations) and I struggle to understand the nerf outside of universe, either. I am left to conclude that this is another sacrifice on the altar of "to make the game more compatible with PF2's meta-states?" but even that doesn't feel satisfactory.

It's basic starfaring exploration gear, and enabled the kinds of stories that Starfinder is meant to tell: exploring arctic moons, the chromosphere of a star, a super-chilled server farm, or who knows what else! If a Pathfinder character got access to it - they should be able to laugh their way through environmental challenges!

And to those who say "oh 1e Environmental Protections were too powerful, they obviated too many classic environmental hazards" - if that's your attitude, why are you even playing Starfinder? If you want to worry about a room flooding with water, or smoke, or poison gas, go play Pathfinder. Not mention - you can still have meaningful environmental hazards in Starfinder! You just have to come up with a rationale that makes sense. And - it's Starfinder! That's not even hard! Breathing in poison gas can just as easily be breathing in protections-shattering nanites. Room filling with water just as easily becomes room filling with acid. If an atmosphere-impermeable shell stymied all of your environmental threats, then it's time to sit down and dream up different environmental hazards!

Bah. Environmental Protections didn't deserve this.

(And don't even get me started on ** spoiler omitted **...

I too would like to hope that in the future we didn't just overcomplicate technology to get the same effect. That we aren't still living in the medieval era of environmental protections, but now it is flashy.

If you want a space walk to be dangerous, add a threat. Sudden meteor shower, an eldritch entity from the space between stars which has clung to the ship. If you want a survivalist game make the environments stupid extreme. Your survival campaign is on the sun with technology pushed beyond the warranty so that its listed duration cannot be relied on.

Also as someone else said it doesn't seem like you should be able to eat in a lethal environment. So at its most basic level, they will eventually starve to death if they get lost and don't take the terrain seriously. Use that.

I just like this as a thought exercise and a little socializing.

Whatever Paizo decides for Impossible is fine, even if it isn't what I am advocating here. I don't mind I am disagreed with here because I am enjoying reading thoughtful posts and considering counter arguments. I don't even expect to change minds.

I am just having fun.

I repeat my point. Animated the dead bones and flesh of others to use against other monsters. I don't mean constructs. I do mean mindless undead. It is a tool like any other when you look at it as a tool. An archer who doesn't practice care can misaim and hit an ally. A fighter loses grip of their weapon and if stabs an innocent. A wizard doesn't consider their fireball is to close to a thatched roof and it starts a massive fire in a village.
These are not even acts. These are negligence.

Sorry but I still don't agree. There will be more classes in the future, but there are 8 for the forseeable future and we only need to make tables for those 8 if there is actually something to say. So far, and maybe you or someone else will point to a SF1e adventure that proves me wrong, but I don't see any adventures which these 8 classes we have will be inappropriate the way a legacy Alchemist would be in FotRP which was called out in its own Player Guide. Which class in Guilt of the Grave World needed a "this class is not recommended" or even "appropriate"? To me, they were all Recommended. So far they aren't doing anything niche enough to be inappropriate for any adventures except maybe a low combat high social intrigue adventure which probably only Envoy is Recommended, Mystic and Warper are Appropriate, and the rest are Not Recommended.

You mention dwarf and orc. Those aren't classes, I am talking about classes. I don't expect Paizo is going to jump to suddenly recommending Fighter for their new game. Yes it is cross compatible... like 100% compatible, but the point is this is a new game not a PF2e expansion. They will want to maintain the identity of the game. SF1e had dwarves and orcs. Yes its a fail on their part to already be referencing something from the other game, but at least these are things we would have seen in SF1e. Fighter and inventor are not. That feels like a small difference when the games are cross compatible, but it isn't a small distinction for maintaining the flavor of the setting. Since the options are cross compatible guidance is given to GMs to incorporate them. Thats natural, but I wouldn't expect the other game's class options to become recommended choices for this game.

Great post, immensely illuminating.
I only disagree with FORTRUN fixes.

You treat light armor very poorly in a way that I worry you misunderstand the difference between Light and Medium. Medium armor will not give more AC. Medium and Light armor both max at +5 AC, they just do it with different Dex Caps and item bonuses, but they also have different strength necessities.

If you give FORTRUN users medium armor you are encouraging them to become MAD as now they will need points in STR too to avoid a skill penalty. With how you want Technomancer to be skill versatile I don't think you intended to imply they should also be taking -2 to their STR and DEX skills.

What Medium Armor provides that Light Armor doesn't is armor specialization benefits. I don't think adding these fixes the subclass, but if it helps it will be easy enough to allow Armor Spec for Light Armor at level 1 as a class feature. This way they can keep the DEX score they will already have at +3. We might consider having STR penalties reduced by 1 for light armor as well so FORTRUN users can get something that is Dex 3 / Item 2 at level 1 without a skill penalty.

But circling back I don't actually think that slightly better armor is the fix. It should really be something dramatic. Maybe refreshing temp HP represented by a "force field". Something which artificially makes the FORTRUN a lot less squishy. Excitingly, maybe later level can have a damage conversion. Take a % of damage as a one time addition to spell damage. Something that encourages taking the risks of being a caster in the front.

Seriously though, other than that I think this is a fantastic post and I will definitely be holding it side by side with the final Paizo release. I wish you were writing the new Technomancer because it sounds like you've got the correct idea already established in your head.

The bringing up of Undeath as an allegory for fossil fuels and the eroding of our world reminds me of an old 2017 thread I stumbled on. I am pretty sure I saw some of the names here in that thread so maybe some of you remember the thread that asked "Is using the drift evil".

It interests me now what I perceive to be an inconsistency. Word of God (Paizo) and the majority of the community took the side of using Drift is not evil despite it being an allegory for using fossil fuels and the slow destruction of our setting. The big difference is we know how Drift travel destroys the multiverse and that Pharasma is not against Drift travel. We do not know how Undead destroys the multiverse, only that it is confirmed by Word of God (company) and Pharasma is against it.

There is an inconsistency in the allegory as we have two fossil fuel allegories but one is treated a lot worse than the other. I am sure there will be very well thought out reasons given how undeath is objectively worse than Drift travel but in the most macro of scales, the lifetime of the setting, the distinction is trivial. Both lead to the destruction of the multiverse. One by the expanding maelstrom, the other by unknown means.

I submit that if there can be ethical drift travel there must be a way to ethically raise monsters. While more niche than space travel, the control of monsters to fight other monsters and preserving life is a very real triumph. IRL and I am willing to gamble on Golarion there are more beings that have died than are currently alive. What remains after death is a resource which can be used instead of manpower.
Maybe this means intelligent undead aren't ethical and conjuring souls is icky too, but skeletons and zombies puppetted by magic and put to work to defend the living is hardly evil and if Pharasma has a problem with that I am going to point at Drift travel and tell her to stop being a hypocrite.

I am not sure I agree that this will be necessary in the near future. We will only have 8 classes for the forseeable future. If Paizo announced more I missed the announcement. As long as the AP sticks to scifi all eight classes have a thematic reason to be there. A whole table for eight classes could be excessive.

What I will compromise on going forward is an expanded Class Section of the guide. A short description per class where their abilities fit into an adventure's setting and their mechanical impact in game. Nothing more than what we see in PF2e APs.

I got to be critical, that vorpal dragon is just to damn edgey. Tone it down.

gesalt wrote:

Do tell me about drowning though. Not something I've given much thought to outside of the monk suffocation combo.

Spells like Aqueous Orb, Wall of Water, and Pillar of Water can instantly put foes underwater, and rely on them getting out of the water to avoid drowning.

If you combo a water spell with some form of holding the foe in place, they can drown pretty quick.

Pillar of Water has an up to 15ft radius, meaning that there's rooms in APs like Abomination Vaults that if door-blocked, can become drowning traps filled with water.

I'm pretty sure devils need to breathe by default, so uh... yeah.

To add to this. I have a player theory crafting a game where they will use Aqueous Orb plus the Investigator's Pointed Question to force drowning.

True, but for the narrative my stupid idea still requires Starfinder Agent. You can start Xenoarcheologist at level 4.

Here is my one dumb idea of the day

SFS and PFS adds free archetype but it can only take the Star/Pathfinder Archetype in it. Add then a special rule that the FA doesn't have the SPECIAL.

Maybe then players would all have some minimal skill level which devs can plan for and players can feel connected to the org and each other as members and not feel so much adventures who just walked in off the street.

Also, DMs of home games should be able to know what the rules are. What good is buying a rulebook that gives you unclear rules and says "I dunno, figure it out for yourself?"

Which is not an insignificant reason some players swapped to PF2e from dnd5e. That game is so full of holes and minimal options my swap to PF2e is pretty which and complete. Haven't played a game of 5e in 3 years and don't miss it.

So the release of the newer wizard subclass and schools isn't addressing what people feel the class was lacking?

I also consider this to be a Paizo level mistake. Instead of fixing the core problem they try to "patch" the problem with a fix only in subclass. We saw this with Sorcerer options in the dnd5e book Tasha's Cauldron. The new options are objectively better mechanically than the older options. Its a great fix to what Sorcerer was missing, but it wasn't retroactive and thus is just power creep.

There doesn't seem to be any guidance for GMs if a PC wants to accept the bad guy's offer. I get its not a common thing to worry about but the bad guy legitimately asks for people to come peacefully on their terms. Its not as outrageous of other false choices we have seen in TTRPGs, and eventually someone is going to do it if for no other reason than to go against the grain. Leaving the GM to make something up.

Going to be a common problem? Not in the slightest. But I would have liked to see a short response for what stops a PC from accepting the offer.

I don't think it is myopic in the slightest to see the energy this and past threads get and see that the community at large does not think this class is A tier.

Reverse even, to tell someone to just move on when this is clearly a problem and say "its A tier to me so whatever" (paraphrasing of course) is just covering your ears to problems. We have legit criticism and even better ideas just here. Though they haven't so far "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". As long as we are vocal, insistent, and polite there is a non-zero chance someone will take this into consideration. Maybe it just keeps the ideas alive for new people to find and make into homebrew. I vehemently disagree with moving on. There is nothing wrong with talking.

I tried to be insistent but my idea seems not to have impressed anyone so I'll certainly move on from that, but not from my stance that Wizard isn't appealing to play. As anecdotal as it might be I insist that I hardly see wizards played in more than 300 online games through Warhorn. Its not a popular class. Other classes are more engaging to play, are more enjoyable to play, and live their specific fantasy better. That might be anecdotal, but its backed up with what is said here.

And yes it has been 53 days since the first complaint on the changes on this thread and the most we have heard from them is Mr. Jacob's reassurance that they are discussing our feedback. While I appreciate Mr. Jacob's speaking to us, the longer the silence the less contented I am about it.

Have they been in talks for 50 days? Have they made a decision? Are they going to tell us if they did? Or can we expect 7-09 to land without any more acknowledgement.

It was probably always to late, 7-09 and later scenarios were probably to far along to do a major rewrite for normal level bands from the day the announcement was made. Paizo made their decision, and there wasn't anything more to say, because they waited to late for feedback to matter.

Madhippy3 wrote:

Unicore wrote:

It just seems like it will be harder to get the numbers to run those except at large conventions.

Maybe in person, but these will fill up fast on Warhorn.

... great? I sure hope "this is fine for online play so it doesn't matter what happens in person" isn't a decision point.

I am willing to say, not great. I brought up in my first post on this thread that the decisions seem made with online play in mind. I am almost exclusively online PFS2 and things seem to fill up with at least 5 players very quickly no matter what scenario it is. As long as it is at a reasonable time and on Foundry, I've never seen problems with tables firing. This is why I think Paizo are committing to the narrow level bands so hard. Without even waiting to see how well it works in SFS2 Year 1 they are bringing it to PFS2 because I can only imagine that their internal data shows these changes won't be significantly harming the online space.

I have from testimony like yours that this will hurt the local con scene and so I am afraid that this very well might be a decision point for them. That they are discounting the local scene knowing Gen Con will survive and Paizo Con is almost all exclusively online anyways.

Madhippy3 wrote:

I disagree. This is a long thread and it isn't filled with wizard defenders. Everyone has one reason or another to explain why the wizard is only playable compared to where other classes are excelling.

Yeah because these arguments have been going on for years now and most people are exhausted. You're late to the party

That doesn't rebuttal what I said in the slightest...

I disagree. This is a long thread and it isn't filled with wizard defenders. Everyone has one reason or another to explain why the wizard is only playable compared to where other classes are excelling.

We want spell substitution as part of base despite it being something you can already have at level one. The class needs a lot more added to it than getting what you already have as a default.

It is well detailed by Firelion that PF2e Wizard is PF1e Wizard with all the bells and whistles pulled off. Now we wouldn't want them back on because we don't want the PF1e wizard back, but importantly it really has very little to show how it has adapted to 2e, making it the worst of all solutions.

I agree fully that the perfect solution is one of the grander ideas above that can really address the wizards flaws at its core, making a whole new class, but these ideas are limited also in how system wide they would be too necessitating a wait till 3e.

My idea is only a band aid, but at least we could say that the class identity of wizard could be as simple as "the fighter of casters" and its simple enough it could be in an errata.

While I respect that there is a lot of fun theory crafting happening, a few of these ideas we would be lucky to get in a 3e as it is to major a change. I am not convinced that making the Wizard more potent is bad merely because it doesn't fit the idea of the versatile wizard, which we acknowledge wasn't everyone's idea of a wizard anyways.

It doesn't really matter about making it wrong as long as we don't make it worse, because the current wizard is the worse it has ever been. It is so bad it created a misconception about the Arcane list that started this thread. This is all a hope dream, but if there is ever going to be a Reremaster of the Wizard that we will see and be able to enjoy in this edition we should theory craft towards simpler changes to the class. So far we have a lot of that.

Unless it would absolutely break the game I am not convinced that letting flexibility be from a huge spell list, swappable spellshapes and spells between combat, and emphasis of spell power through earlier Expert, Master, and Legendary is something to simply dismiss because its not perfect for everyone. It is practical on a printing level and thats what might, with luck, get Paizo to change. Things that already have page space get moved from the feat and thesis side to the class chassis side, and you change Trained to Expert, Expert to Master, Master to Legendary, and delete the redundant Legendary, where you find them related to Spell Modifier. Secondarily Paizo can emphasize more exclusively Arcane spells with new book releases.

While there might be more fixes to add, this is simple and practical. It doesn't matter if it isn't the wizard everyone wants because the wizard we have is the wizard no one wants. We need a buff for the wizard practical enough that someone is going to want to play it and Paizo is willing to print it. Hell my suggestion is so simple it could be done in an errata.

How would the game be effected if Wizards were the "fighters of casters"?

Meaning, Expert in Spell Mod from level 1, gets to Legendary at 13, and build flexibility (spell substitution as part of chassis and Combat Flexibility for Wizard Feats).

It just seems like it will be harder to get the numbers to run those except at large conventions.

Maybe in person, but these will fill up fast on Warhorn.

Madhippy3 wrote:

I am so sick of 1-4s. There is enough level 1-4s which aren't even repeatable to take someone to level 5. The foundation of the level band pyramid is to damn wide! And now they want to waste our time with 1-2s! We don't need these levels. We need more 5-8, 7-10, and 9-12. We need to build the pyramid to be better proportioned.

FWIW, the announced scenarios that follow the 2-levels band are

Lvl 3-4 on January 7th
Lvl 13-14 on January 7th
Lvl 7-8 on February 4th
Lvl 5-6 on February 4th
Lvl 9-10 on March 4th
Lvl 3-4 on March 4th

If thats how it is then I missed that and will chill out about level bands. I don't care for 3-4s but its a lot better than 1-2s. 13-14 is exciting, would prefer 11-14, but I am still excited about that regardless.

I don’t know if there is an answer to this but I am going to try anyways.

Is Season of Ghost book two supposed to have such a dull combat gauntlet? We are on a linear path and it is just one encounter after another and the encounters just aren’t interesting. Especially two which are so obvious it was miserable to be forced into an ambush. Two so far because we still aren’t done with this linear gauntlet.

The current part has broken me. Its too linear with forced fights. I run abomination vaults and in comparison, this is to many fights in too forced a setting. I really want to give my GM a suggestion to spice it up because I am not the kind of person to make a request and leave the GM to do all the work.

My whole point of buying APs and not making something up from scratch is I don't want to do that kind of work and trust professional writers to write better than I do. Thus I go out of my way to not go "off script".

That said sometimes it is inevitable, usually a strong desire by the group. When my group got tired by so many fights in Age Of Ashes, I removed fights and swapped to milestone leveling. That was an easy one. It was negative work really.

I've changed a dungeon layout once. I am sorry, the writing was good, but the architectural design was atrocious. Thats the furthest I've gone "off script".

Most changes are adding and changing items. Like, oh this fight was hard but there is no reward. Lets add some gold for the PCs' trouble; or oh there is a staff in the next chest, but it isn't for anyone's tradition, lets swap that real fast.

PFS lore becoming default in PFS has been among the changes I have been most pleased with to my own surprise. It just makes sense and it comes up a lot. IDK how it works in Starfinder Society, but all but the Legacy Field Promotions spent 3 years in Pathfinder College before their initiation. It just made sense.

It is a little silly. Too late now, but having it be 0 credit cost would have been fun.

I am adding my +1 for Slow Track.

I've used in in PF2e for a character I wanted more time with. It is hard sometimes to let go of a character because they outlevel the scenarios currently available or what a local lodge is running.

Please consider this soon.

The Realy has an interesting rule I have not seen used before.

"Non-participants may loan the participating PCs equipment but may not otherwise assist in any way."

I'm courious how/if players have been taking advantage of this.

Is this a new rule? I always believed a PC could give another PC their equipment, but that it is automatically returned (if not consumed/destroyed) at end of session.

So far I haven't seen this much used. A player shared a Celebrity Serum once and I as a player used spells to buff, but this is only a 1-2 and players likely have what they need / can afford. The basic kit is cheap enough I assume everyone has.

My question is should PCs be explicitly warned if they use Exposed armor that they will likely die? Does seem like maybe this should be made more explicit what the environmental effects are?

So is the 2nd Cheliax AP getting previewed soon?

Before Hellbreakers gets a preview? Not likely.

Did they say if the part 2 was going to be immediately after Hellbreakers release?

I am so sick of 1-4s. There is enough level 1-4s which aren't even repeatable to take someone to level 5. The foundation of the level band pyramid is to damn wide! And now they want to waste our time with 1-2s! We don't need these levels. We need more 5-8, 7-10, and 9-12. We need to build the pyramid to be better proportioned.

On top of the great posts from Tridus and Talgeron about what smaller level bands are actually going to do to tables in practice. My own petty contribution is that a few people I know and myself are very tired of the low level focus and want more opportunities to flex the cool builds we earned with actual play and to show off our game mastery. In short we want variety and opportunity. Not a reset to more 1-2.

Referring back to the announcement of changes coming to SFS for 2e. It is clear whatever picture Paizo is getting from reporting, it is distorted or their analysts need another go at it because their stated conclusions are empirically wrong. To refresh anyone who cares, we were told that high level content was unpopular so they weren't even going to try (thus the lower level cap for SFS2e).
It was pointed out to blind eyes and deaf ears that the obvious reason PFS2e high level play don't get scheduled as often is there are less scenarios in the range, no repeatables of that range, and fewer players with characters in that range. Not that people were avoiding high level play. (In personal experience even high level scenarios which are badly reviewed get filled because people want to play their high level PCs that got retired for lack of scenarios). People point out that the level cap is unnecessary because Paizo already fixed the above problems with their other changes, more repeatables, and makings new PCs at level 7 will make more characters available for those scenarios. Paizo only needs to sell us scenarios which can get us there (or allow us to make up characters higher than 7, but this is probably a bad idea as Talgeron has already stressed).

My point is that Paizo's data and analysis suck and they are coming to faulty conclusions. We have to hope they are reading these posts because they are missing very real and lived experience which contradict their stated policy.

I am sorry for your lose. I hope you are doing okay.

The original question misses it is okay to make evil campaigns. PF2e has lich archetype too and no one thinks we are trying to reform liches. Its not an archetype for all games. It might work for a reformed Hellknight who still fights like one even if that is no longer their cause. Could be your token evil team member who is tolerated and tolerates because there is something worse than peace, love, and freedom to stomp on right now. Or as said in the top, its an evil campaign and everyone is a bastard.

No reason to remove Hellknights from PC options. Just an understanding of what kind of story the group is telling and setting some ground rules and boundaries at session 0.

I would say the barrier acts like a wall for the purpose of Line of Effect and only the Field is effected, and not the character within. Whether to assume failure or crit failure is harder to answer. Its probably GM dependent as I don't see rules on this. Crit Fail seems the most logical (it literally didn't move), but a simple failure is a nice gesture to the player. As long as it only counts as one attack the shield breaking should be the only outcome with the PC being unaffected. Though becoming Blinded is an interesting effect you might still allow. The damage was blocked but not the light.

I think the Book of the Dead did a pretty good job of why necromancy doesn't ever really get a good reputation.

It's easy to imagine what sort of things could create normalization of undead: the business incentives could make undead labor commonplace, or charitable necromancers could use undead labor to repair natural disaster damage or protect towns. Book of the Dead covers why that doesn't work: even controlled mindless undead work worse around the living and cause more accidents. Between that and undead slipping free of control and killing or injuring people, enough attempts at using undead in a pro-social way would be marred by deaths and injuries that it would never be able to turn its reputation around. The businesses would always be breaking reasonable safety laws for an advantage over their competition, not just following normal practices. The undead helping do repairs would cause accidents, or a natural undead would come along in the disaster aftermath and nobody would believe it hadn't just gotten loose from the work crew.

Except this isn't true. Kaer Maga has a large mindless undead menial workforce. There are dangers, but aren't there always. Is there a significant difference between a necromancer losing control of a zombie vs a living employee just "going postal"? I don't see evidence that losing control of the dead is any more common than a living person flying into a deadly rage. At least in the former case we know who is responsible and can exact vengeance. Kaer Maga is proof it can work. In a more ordered society than Kaer Maga it might even be safer.

Appeal to authority's only a fallacy when one's authority is merely a social position or one's scholarly work/authority lies outside the topic, i.e. quoting Einstein outside of physics. Until Nethys and similar deities develop an evidence-based consensus that disagrees with her (or you develop a way us players can investigate Golarion metaphysics), Pharasma IS the authority based on her actually knowing.

Yes, we as players might consider she's mistaken, but in world there's no reason to suspect that. She's as objective as one can get barring James Jacobs giving a definitive answer (unlikely until it serves a narrative purpose in some adventure).

I disagree here for the reason that you have already explained. Why would we use Einstein as an expert of non-physics and why should was ask Pharasma about about universal truths? In Three Fears she seems to be figuring this out for herself too. She doesn't have the answers you think she does. Interestingly it seems to be Yog-Sothoth in his role as the watcher who knows but will not tell. Pharasma doesn't know how this will end and we know Prophesies are borked now anyways.

I disagree that there "are a lot of (dangerous) things in Golarion that aren't treated with near this level of stigmatism". Undead (and the medical issues around corpses) are ubiquitous threats with emotional gravitas.

Here too. You cannot call something ubiquitous when you have good PCs and NPC around that are Undead. The undead aren't even required to prey on the living as we see tombs of forgotten undead survive for centuries or even millennia. I think when we think critically about the topic we see that there is nothing inherently evil or predatory about the mindful undead. So why do we perceive them as such? Probably because those are the stories we are told, and it isn't like there isn't a power structure in place which has a vested interested in maintaining that status. You are ready to draw earth parallel and so am I. There are lots of underprivileged groups that are demonized like this IRL for the purpose of power. With the exception of the mindless undead I think there is a possibility of undead as lifeforms which are predators by nature like many other animals, beasts, and humanoids, but can make their own decisions to not act like predators and still exist without starving.

The Three Fears is beautiful writing. I note though it doesn't mention the undead or damage to the cycle. It gets the mind racing of "if there is undead then who is ultimately the survivor at then end" and referring back to the last fear, maybe she fears it will be forced to be her if no one is born, and no one dies, but existence continues at the end of it all.

All that is to say that it is thought provoking on the implications, but light on facts. Or even guarantees of its truth. Being official doesn't automatically make it true. For writing like this that doesn't really have an answer, not taking everything to be unquestionable is safest. It is certainly canon, but does that mean it is true?

Circling back to my first post, the prophecies of Pharasma are compelling, but not proven fact. It seems reasonable for scholars to question this truth, and once faith is shaken new traditions can grow. Such as necroethics and the application of undeath as a tool shunned by one goddess in a sea of gods and goddesses.