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The welcoming and positive attitude of Paizo toward non-CIS everything is a huge value add to the entire system. Yay Paizo!
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What had been a 2-person shared room is now, suddenly, a 1-person room. Sometimes, surprises aren't great things after all. If you're interested in the room -- it's in the paizocon block -- please let me know, or send a PM and I'll reply with a phone number / email. Many Thanks!
Speaking of Amtrak: I just bought my ticket. I'll be on the Cascades 508, boarding Portland at 6:50 in Portland, arriving at 10:30 Wednesday night... Wrong direction for me :-( but perhaps we can meet at the con Cheers,
Does anybody remember if the hotel rooms had fridges? Mine did not have a refrigerator; as far as I can tell from the Marriott website, no rooms are equipped with a refrigeration apparatus aside from the air conditioning. There is, however, ice available. A small cooler could be refreshed periodically with ice and serve as cold storage. Cheers,
(Look of confusion) It takes ~5 business days to go from San Jose to Seattle by train? Just a tad over 24 hours, as scheduled, San Jose ==> Seattle. Although my experience is generally that these trips have delays ... MI
Yay! I already have my ticket ... train 14, supposedly arriving 8:37 PM 3 July 2014 at King's St. Station MI
I haven't played Werewolf since 1990s ... but it sounds like fun, regardless.
It depends on where you board, I suppose.
I was planning on driving up but ... Train is a little less than airfare; but a 24 hour trip from San Jose, CA. My plan -- and I've got tickets at this point. Given that time has value, too, I am train-ing up, and flying back. Price depends on where you board.
I'm planning to take Amtrak up to the con this year (train route #14, up the coast). Given my previous experiences with Amtrak, I'm aiming to arrive Thursday night (so a 12-18 hour delay won't be an issue), boarding in San Jose, California. Anyone else interested in that trip?
... Perhaps panache should be gained at a higher rate for higher crit weapons? x2 gives you 1 point, x3 gives you 2 points, x4 gives you 3? ... I don't know how well that would work in practice, but I think it's a brilliant suggestion / mechanic to work with.
You might consider examining the spells your players tend to use. Let them do the research of figuring out what the effective spells and melee combinations are ... ... and shamelessly steal them! MI
Mythic 10, level 20, CL 30+ for staff spells! :D Yes. Mythic. Above and beyond the capabilities of mortals ... that seems to me to be what mythic is all about. MI
How about from an Alchemist, Bard, Druid, Oracle, Ranger or Witch? None of those characters have deities and still use Cure X Wounds just fine. Yes, and? There's still a source of healing, and one can create appropriate flavor (fluff) as required. A druid's healing might simply mimic natural healing. Both oracles and witches have a patron, and the theme might be appropriate (or not), in which case the witch / oracle should decide how cure light wounds manifests when cast. Ranger similarly. Not everything has to have the same level of fluff :-) MI
... 5) Numeria is quite different: instead of a spaceship, the place is the crash site of an Engram Ark full of Chaositech (from When the Sky Falls and Chaositech, 3.X era supplements by Malhavoc Press). The Technic League and the Black Sovereign are cyborg-like Hellraiser Cenobites with lasers and energy weapons powered by blasphemous entities fallen from the outer space. You'd rather go Zon-Kuthon, trust me. ... Up to this point, Numeria has been my least-favorite and most-ignored section of Golarion. But replacing the tech with chaositech ... oh my yes. My players have already come up against chaositech several times (although I have not revealed it to them as such). At the moment they suspect it's psionic, having encountered some psi-tech previously. This is quite possibly the best idea I've heard all month. Thank you! MI
I've always treated the various Cure xxx Wounds spell's healing as flavor depending on the source of healing. In Golarion, I'd expect CLW from Zon-Kuthon or Gorum to leave scarring ... from Shelyn or Calistria, not so much. Occasionally I will apply this to disposable magic items. A wand of Cure Light Wounds (Zon-Kuthon 22 charges) will probably stay at 22 charges through most of the game as the players' characters find reasons to defer its usage ;-) Spoiler: That wand's healing powers take the cosmetic form of a spray of tiny little needle-ants that scurry into the wounds and sew everything up and/or heat up to cauterize bleeding ...
This seems less like a post as to whether Asmodeus is a diety or not and more as to what a 'deity' is, and does he fulfill that unknown checklist. Mechanically, in Golarion, he's a god. As to an unknown checklist? Unknown. MI
This weekend I will be starting a new campaign as a Neutral Evil Bard. I'd like some quotes or passages that help convey a sense of dread, despair, unease, lack of hope, etc. that I can use as I announce my bardic performances ... Edgar. Allen. Poe. Practically anything by Poe. Or A. E. Houseman (prety much anything) To an Athlete Dying Young, or even some William Blake (A Poison Tree) comes to mind. There's no end to dark, depressing poesy. Really. No. End. Ever ... MI
Currently running Carrion Crown, and one of the items that can be encountered is a helm of underwater action (which of course is not custom). So, given the throwaway line that it had belonged to a Taldan Marine in the text, I added a 'snappy polished appearance' effect to it -- while wearing it, your clothes are cleaned, pressed and creased, boots shined, metalwork polished ... no actual in-game statistical effect (well, if asked I might give a slight circumstance bonus on Diplomacy/Bluff from being perfectly turned out ...), definitely not in combat. BUT. Given the general messiness of the fighting (the Fighter ended up getting the helm) with various things pulping and splattering and gooping all over the place ... I've probably added the words "... which of course beads up and rolls off Roland leaving him neat, clean, and perfectly pressed." over twenty times. Which is then always followed by his enthusiastic declaration of "Best! Magic! Item! Ever!" :-)
If you have the time and leisure to relax, read and reread the rules, think about the rules, develop and game within the rules with other persons equally devoted -- then certainly. This and many other nuances are obvious, and all that is obvious is blindingly obvious. It's not blindingly obvious to persons who have less time, must read more hurriedly, or perhaps even have a less error-correcting-group around them when they do have time to indulge what is a luxury leisure activity. It's very nice for you that you have the time and resource to devote to a deep and fine parsing of these rules, and of course, once you understand exactly what's meant by 'additional damage' -- blindingly obvious. Another way of describing this niceness that appears blindingly obvious to me -- but something other readers may not considered -- is economic privilege. Certainly I'll grant that simply being on this board smacks of economic privilege, but I appreciate that a developer was keeping that kind of casual (for whatever reason)reader in mind when making a remark. It's exactly that kind of thoughtfulness I've come to appreciate and even expect from Paizo. Happiness to You and Yours!
Yet another reminder that I should never bother to check the boards on the weekend, it's not worth my time and not appreciated. One of the reasons I frequent these boards is the presence of developers on the threads -- but in the hopes of keeping the signal to noise ratio low, I show my appreciation not by commenting, but silence -- and continuing to read these boards, purchasing Paizo products, attending PaizoCon ... But they're still boards. Boards are inhabited by persons who misread, misunderstand, and even misstate their own intent and meaning. The point was a valuable one, and the concept is certainly open to misinterpretation as to when and how 'additional' damage is applied. MI
Arrived a few hours ago, now at the Marriott, in the lobby. Yay!
I also assume there is no save for cackle since it isn't specifically stated. The healing hex acts as cure light wounds, which explicitly permits a saving throw. In general, a deleterious magical effect permits a saving throw unless it is specifically called out as not having one. In previous editions of the game, the GM was expected to adjudicate particularly inventive uses of otherwise beneficial spells, and permit saves where and as appropriate. The ongoing standardization (not entirely a bad thing, it brings benefits along with reducing the practice of applying common sense to gray areas) efforts have added the (harmless) notation to many spells. And even when the spell is objectively harmless, it may not be subjectively harmless. A Rhahadoum zealot, for example, might wish to save against a cure light wounds even if it would save her life in the circumstances. Under such circumstances, a save is appropriate. May happiness surround all the plentiful days of your life,
...New day, new content... The Google drive link no longer appears to work. This makes Malachite Ice sad. Malachite Ice wanders off in search of sprinkles. MI
Apparently unnoticed by others, an elderly gnoll wearing a heavy blue robe embroidered with silver lotus blossoms steps up with a toothy smile. So very true, so very true ... but I fear you don't understand; love strikes where love strikes. You, my dear friend, place the blame on your elven kin. Why? Is it not the fault of the young upstarts who tempt them? He takes a long, long drag on a huge waterpipe, and pauses to blow a smoke ring, even if it's unclear just where the hookah came from. No. The right answer, the only answer, my dear fellow, is to eliminate the temptation. You said it yourself. This problem is beyond their comprehension. The gnoll leans in, towards you. Think of the deaths you will avert, think of the tears left unshed, think of the hearts left unbroken if the younger, shorter-lived races ... were to go away. He hands you a card, which says simply, Salazmandaranth. I know, I know, you aren't ready to accept the truth, but as you watch, as you yourself feel eld creep upon you, as you see these tragedies play themselves out, over and over and over ... you will understand what you have to do. Summon me when you're ready, and we will remake this world into the elven paradise it deserves to be! But where did the gnoll go? Didn't he have a hookah? At least ... at least the card remains. ============ MI
As a DM myself, I dislike wishes that create repeating ongoing intangible effects, so I might just rule this very powerful ongoing effect beyond the power of a typical wish. Players in my games usually try to figure out if this a limited wish, wish, or diety's boon level of wish. But if I wanted to mess with the character ... Groundhog Day. I'd give the character the report of his dreams. Every ship. Every manifest. The crew. The morale, name, affiliation -- the best report [b]ever[b]. And every morning the character would wake up to the exact same report, as the character's awareness and self are popped back 24 hours or so into the exact same situation. Now, that's within the limits of a wish. And now you have twenty-four hours to figure out how to cancel it. Take as many as you need. Cheers,
Well, I don't disagree (although I might phrase it differently), and I do see the connection between the benefits and that outlook. What I do not see is why these benefits incent a player with them to play within that alignment. Or perhaps we're talking past each other, and we mean different things by 'incent'? I'm looking at this as something that would prod or convince the player to act in an alignment-appropriate way (incent), not as a benefit for doing so (reward). Cheers,
So we are about to start reign of winter. I want to incent players to play within their alignment and gently nudge them toward certain alignments. So, i came up with a chart that gives certain trait style abilities to the 9 alignments. I don't see why this would incent players to play within a character's alignment, which I thought was the purpose (unless the intent to penalize violations by removing the benefit). Cheers,
Any feedback on the familiar mechanic? No one has uttered a word about it, makes me nervous. My player group does not go for familiars; ever since once particular foe targeted a familiar with magic missile. (This was hilarious to me as GM; ever after that in combat the wizard was nerfed as he frantically tried to protect the familiar that nobody else ever thought to attack ...) Arcane bonds run to amulets or rings I'm not sure why. I don't feel that I have enough experience with familiars in play to make any good judgments on familiar rules. Interestingly, I have a player who has requested to play a fey pegasi pony cleric in my upcoming Snows of Summer / Reign of Winter, so I may have actual playtest feedback after 10 March 2013. Or not. I'm not sure the request is serious yet and this particular player changes his mind about six thousand times prior to every game as he more or less thinks out loud. Cheers,
I stand corrected. I don't know how I missed that (well, I do, but it's not germane). Mark me more impressed. I was thinking along the lines of the destiny mark giving spellcaster ponies domain spell access from an appropriate domain. I hadn't thought as far as non-spellcasters. MI
Surprisingly well done (well, I was surprised. Perhaps I should not have been ...) and they look extremely playable. In my interaction with those obsessed with the Show Whose Name Will Not Be Mentioned In This Post (no, never seen it, but heard much of a muchness ...) the tattoo/sigils seem of great importance, but your writeup makes no mention or use of them. I would propose for your consideration removing the variable feat (something I personally prefer to be restricted to the endlessly variable Humans) and integrating something around the sigil, instead, as both additional flavor and a unique racial differentiator. In any case, this is well done, and the thought that went into shines through. Thank you for sharing this! MI
I just got HeroLab as a a GM tool, because building high-level fully legal characters is time-consuming. HL cuts down the prep time for me by about 85%. Totally worth it. So far I have not noticed any errors beyond questionable warnings, and certainly none in the numerical calculations for attack, defense, CMB/CMD (although I haven't put any monk archetypes together, and the calculations get weird there) which I have spot checked. As for the penchant of publishers and others to blame HeroLab, I suspect a good amount of that is "the dog ate my homework." Sure, blame a computer. This *so* sounds like a white lie that ... the best response might be to ask for the trouble ticket / defect report number :-) (whatever the good folk who do HeroLab call their bug-tracking entries). I don't know if a person is 'cheating' or not; cheating is a question of intent, and it's simply not feasible to detect intent over the internet -- it's hard enough in meatspace. You can know, however, that the character does not conform to whatever combination of RAW+House Rules you use, and take steps to make the character conform. And when the psychic cost of taking those steps outweighs the pleasures of gaming with that person ... well, it's time to take additional steps. Good luck with your situation. May it resolve favorably for you. MI
Opposition Research basically free's up all of the spell book to me. The Opposition Research arcane discovery removes the penalties associated with one opposition school. The build you present has it only once; so the build will still have one school with opposition penalties. Happiness --
Or perhaps they're all veiled masters ... watching us ... testing us ... everywhere ... the eyes, the eyes!
I notice that Polymorph Any Object would allow a character to use this aboleth device for 12 hours. An animated aboleth effigy construct armor, or something similar, might also work depending on what you as GM want the players to succeed with. In one of my own games, one of the artifacts was a pylon that supplied infinite psionic power (in point of fact, it was one of a set of one-hundred and seventeen pylons whose original function had been to euthanize all air-breathing creatures with an INT of 3 or higher to reset the experiment-space ...). The pylon the characters encountered was (deliberately, as it happens) damaged. The leakage empowered spells and conjurations as well, so the demon-enslaving gnolls (who broke it) built an interesting (to me, anyway) culture around enslaved demons. They were having a grand time until psionic humans landed and showed the gnolls that infinite psionic power trumped even a huge number of enslaved demons. Of course the pylon shattered completely a few centuries after that, destroying the human civilization that had been built around an infinite power resource :-| But something designed as a suit suggests mobility or protection ... Here's my very third thought (the first two didn't make it past my own 'good idea/bad idea' censors): Let us assume that, in the deeper depths of the negative material plane, spheres of annihilation are, if not common, not uncommon. The aboleth used this device to find and retrieve spheres of annihilation. So, the suit ...
The device could be made less player-friendly by removing the plane shift ability (after all, any aboleth worth its tentacles hardly needs a mere device to accomplish so plebeian a task). The overall fearfulness factor of the device could be increased by changing Permits the wearer to bring a sphere of annihilation with her when she plane shiftsto Permits the wearer of the device to bring a sphere of annihilation with her when she shifts from the negative material plane This means that using this power always ups the threat -- there's no correspondingly easy way to get rid of a sphere of annihilation. Maybe the aboleth had some other means of disposing of spheres of annihilation? Your thoughts? Cheers,
edit: Clarify ambiguous reference: depths of such a place to deepest depths of the negative material plane.
For an artifact, you need to go further afield. Artifacts are game-breaking in some way. They go beyond the rules, they break the rules, they create new rules. Artifacts trump mortal magic, mortal logic, and mortal expectations. Many of the artifacts presented are simply 'impossibly powerful magic items' -- they break the rules in fairly boring or staid ways. Ability bonuses beyond +6, total weapon bonuses beyond +10 (or at +10). For stuff like that, you can look up the 3.5 'Epic Level Handbook'. And, if all you want is sheer power -- then that might suffice for you. More interesting is some kind of game-breaking, world-breaking weird stuff. Consider the m*** f***** nullification annulus (I forget the exact name) -- it did some minor interesting things along the lines of dispel, break enchantment -- but eventually it built up enough charge to completely and utterly nullify anything. A star, for example. Or another artifact (which IIRC was actually its destruction method ...). Or a diety. Nullify the Eye of Abondigo? The Worldwound? Treerazor? Arazni? Geb? Nex's Refuge? Who wouldn't be chasing that thing down? Do you intend for the players to get their hands on this artifact? What's the worst thing that could happen to the players? And what's the weirdest way it could happen? That's a good place to start designing yon artifact. Good luck.
Isn't it a fundamental ability of sentient creatures to analyze and change one's thoughts? (as an aside, I'm still not sold on the dichotomy of thought and action) Your long-term mantra does not correspond with objective reality. I'm not going to offer a definition of sentience, but whatever it is, 'analyze and change one's thoughts' isn't it. Thought experiment.
Tons Of Joy --
I suspect that we may be asking the wrong question -- or at least a question several conceptual layers away from the real uncertainty. What does it mean to be 'divine' in a Pathfinder setting in general, and on Golarion in particular? There's been some attempt at importing some real-world notions and behaviours, but I suggest that these notions and concepts do not suit a Pathfinder world. The most obvious example is that of phenomena we would deem supernatural is part of the Pathfinder-world objective reality. The debate and framework of any such understanding must start from first principles since the debate and understanding of our own world is so completely different. I don't pretend to know what that understanding might end up being, but it is interesting to ponder. Happiness All --
Sigma-six applies to a situation in which there is enough significance to make the error-bar LESS than 00.0001% That takes a great deal of quantized data, and applying it to something as vague and poorly characterized as belief in some kind of diety is ... an inappropriate use of the concept. Enjoy your game!
@Malachite Ice: Golarion paladins do not require deities unless PFS or playing a houseruled game. I really do like your Hellknight idea, though. Very nice. You are correct. I'd mentally ruled that out as a possibility as Tvarog said the player in question did not measure up to Paladin ideals at this point in his career, so spontaneous paladinfication didn't even occur to me. Much happiness!
How does one, in PF, *become* a paladin? If you take paladin as your first character level, all the joining up and oaths and such are nearly always handwaved away, but what about the lawful good fighter who has aspirations of becoming a paladin later in her career? ... This seems world-dependent, so it depends on the GM. For a more-or-less canonical Golarion / Cheliax campaign, the character would need to find a diety to accept him (Abadar? Shelyn?) for candidacy. As to previous actions, unless those actions interfere with an Lawful Good alignment, I don't see why they would be held against him. Paladinhood is a higher calling, and if the character is ready to up his commitment, then there's no reason he shouldn't be accepted for that. If his alignment as LG is sketchy or questionable, then by all means, more is needed - atonement, a quest, something to prove his dedication to himself. Perhaps he needs to seek out the victims of his transgressions and achieve forgiveness before he can take his first level of Paladin. That's the GM's perogative, always. As to Asmodean intrigue, I doubt that Asmodeus would concern himself with such a piddling trifle. On the other hand, a recruiter for the Hellknight order of the Godclaw might be tempted to pay him a visit and tempt him with something like paladinhood, and so much easier to achieve ... Enjoy your game!
No. Not even remotely the case. Although this (or some variant thereof) may be true for some persons, it is not true for others. Quite a number of real-world atheists (many with significant theological or religious-study background) consider the current world to have significant evidence to NOT be a world in which a 'God Hypothesis' (be it Christian, Islamic, Hindu, or merely Deist) is true. And quite a number of real-world religious persons are convinced of the existence of some form of diety. I'm not sure what 'six-sigma' means in relation to the strength of a sophont's belief -- in this context, it seems like a weasel-word to deny without denying certainty of belief. As to whether a rpg-world character's belief in the existence of dieties should affect whether or not divine magic functions on that individual -- RAW says the magic does. The GM is free to modify that to suit his own playstyle and world. Philosophizing beyond that is unhelpful.
Curiouser and curiouser. I did, I admit, have some strong suspicions when Madame Eglantine served so much pork, so that does not come as a surprise. I have some suspicions about Madame Eglantine herself, given the earlier comment that she's "poison". But. I am hardly one for spoilers, and I daresay Mr. Murphy will manage to surprise me yet. He generally does, and I am generally the happier for it. Cheers!
The room is of insufficient size for the audiences I've seen there. MI
Euclidian space is called that because it fulfills Euclid's fifth postulate, the so-called parallel postulate (there are a number of different ant equivalent formulations), but it is that postulate that causes space to be flat - and therefore one which Euclid's geometry describes. So it's not a coordinate system, but rather a description of the expected behavior of space and movement through that space. Cheers,
While you *can* embed fonts in an ePub, not all ePub readers support them, and even in the readers that do, customers are able to override them anyway. If the presentation of particular fonts—or, frankly, even font styles—is important to your document, ePub is really not a very good format to choose. This is so. But the loss of formatting control is, IMHO, more than made up for in accessibility and portability. Persons with visual impairments who have different or unusual display requirements can easily cause an ePub to be presented to them in a manner suiting their needs. ePubs are about content, not presentation. Cheers,
I know something about ePubs, having created one (a fairly nice one, if I do say so myself) from a 100K+ word complex word processor document. Cleaning up a conversion isn't actually as hard as it might seem at first, but you need to be knowledgeable about CSS, XHTML, and regular expressions. Use Sigil to open / package the ePub. ZIP programs sometimes use compressions or enhancements that ePub readers are not expecting. This Sigil editor is surprisingly good, considering that it's WYSIWYG and gives you access to raw source. It's still not anywhere near good enough, but that's fine, it doesn't need to be. Use it to extract the stylesheet and the chapter you want to work on, and edit them in a purpose-built text editor (I suggest notepad++). Use regular expressions to replace all of the ghastly XHTML style garbage into clean CSS-dependent code <p class="class1"> very quickly, allowing you to move all of the formatting details into the stylesheet. At that point, you can adjust the formatting at your leisure. Fonts are a potentially tricky detail. Although you can embed fonts in an ePub, it is a violation of most foundry's software licenses to do so. If you do embed your own fonts, make sure they are covered under a SIL or OFL license (some of those are listed on the SIL web site). I choose Linux Libertine, as I wanted a fully designed glyph set for regular, italic, bold, and bold italic (and not just composed glyphs for, say, bold italic). I have absolutely no idea if this is useful information for you. I hope it is, but if not, please clarify what you're looking for and looking to achieve! Cheers,
Hmmm ... we're still in the first game, and the players have used the planchette a couple of times. I've altered the way it works - without telling them - and the percentage of a false answer only applies if the spirits with which they are communicating want to lie. And yes, I determine what they contact on the Other Side is and how it feels about them. If truthful, they get the simplest possible answer, or a 'maybe' if the question assumes some falsehood (or is beyond the ken of the spirits). Unless they're communing with Father Charlatan (which they did, catching him in his pre-haunt-trigger state). He lies. Cheers,
If what you really want are tables, than why not request an actual [table] tag (and row, cell) instead? HTML is already set up to handle tables. Trying to fake an already-supported feature ... seems like a waste of creativity :-) Although I quite happily grant that it's not a resource that seems in any great need of conservation from either Paizo or the posting community. MI
My personal understanding has always been that the soul is simply stored in the phylactery. When the phylactery is destroyed, the soul is released. If the body is still around, it goes back to the body. If it's not, the lich has died. That would seem to take much of the fun out of it, even if that interpretation is extremely favorable to the lich. Personally, I prefer the "everyboddy's gotta da problems" approach. But yes, of course it is up the GM. Which is why GM's should read threads like these to improve their already ingenious schemes :-) MI |