Moppy's page

You do realize something like 80-90 percent of the monsters in the game are from real-world mythology, right?

Far less controversial. If Absalom was called Asgard it would be cheesy and maybe a bit lame. If it was named Al-Ḥusayn or Zhongdu it would feel quite different. I'm probably OK with it but I regularly interact with people for whom it's problematic. The whole thing can be avoided by just avoiding any name related to a current religion or nation.

Yes it would help ranged.

In my experience casters generally don't use the 'to hit' spells because they have trouble landing hits, and many of the save ones at least give 1/2 on a success, which flat-foot doesn't affect.

I mean, considering every petitioner ever we have met in every pathfinder adventure, that isn't completely true.

PCs and adventure opponents are highly unusual, and not representative of the population.

I'd actually disagree on grapple not doing much by default.

It's a pretty easy to achive "Attack" option for a plethora of martials without any serious investment, and the ability to basically at-will Immobilize+Flatfoot an enemy is not insignificant.

There's quite a few ways to get flatfoot though, and you're trading a melee hit for it. I feel that for the majority if parties, the major benefit is immobilise, which comes back to my comment on those few annoying opponents that are hard to see or hit.

However it will depend on your party composition.

Moppy wrote:

In which lore book is this explained?

Planar Adventures, the River of Souls section has a great explanation of cosmology and the soul in Golarion. It's PF1, but there are no mechanics purely the lore behind the cycle as it relates to Pharasma and the rest.

I have that book.

"Upon departing Pharasma's realm, a judged soul emerges onto its new home plane, its memories and personality from its days as a mortal wiped clean" - Planar Adventures, Page 66.

Only a small fraction retain anything, those are the ones that can become new celestials or fiends.

I suspect they are correcting for a mistake in the bulk limits, and it's not really power creep beyond the system's design parameters.

When non-sturdy shields beyond level 10 or so are adjusted, that won't be power creep either.

Searching for me isn't a problem. It's when players get told to search automatically on entering a location when they wouldn't normally think of it. You just walk in a cake shop to get a cake, as soon as you enter "oh we should search under the counter".

Grapple is one of those specialised toolbox things that doesn't do much normally , but the 1 time you meet that super elusive or hidden thing no-one can reliably see or hit, grapple saves the day.

Errata

fatal should be deadly

Adjust salvage rate to make your players do it. 1/10th was a low rate I set based on picking up shrapnel

COIN GUN HAND CANNON
rare, advanced weapon
As hand crossbow but 1d8 piercing + fatal 1d8.

This gun fires coins, one silver coin per shot. If fitted with magic runes it must gold coins or the runes are inactive. Expended coins from hits may be salvaged in d6 minutes per target, and later melted for 1/10th of their value.

Misfire: On a natural 13 the weapon suffers a malfunction after the shot is resolved. Clearing a malfunction requires 3 actions (manipulate) and a Lore (Firearm) check DC 15 or Crafting DC 20. Success is automatic in 10 min rest if Trained in either.

Story points: Is this Anathema to Abadar? Mammon? Is this Anathema to Abadar or Mammon to use it and not recover the spent coins? Where exactly did your misses go? Now the murder hobos start caring about collateral damage! Foe is shot and dies, last words "Silver? I am insulted and you're cheap". Coin used clearly visible in shot effect, either muzzle flash or it's a beam.

Insoiration: Coin gun in Terraria.

Then it's certainly intentional, but doesn't change my decision that it's nothing more than an easter egg that isn't meant to imply connection to real-world historical figures.

Thank you for the clarification.

It's difficult for us (players) to judge if references are supposed to have meaning or not.

Thais might not have special meaning, but I am sure Absalom does?

Sidenote: Paizo lore seems like a Christian religious class. I didn't know any of these names, and the 7 specific sins, and things like that until I started reading it. I'm not sure if I like the idea or not (all real world things should be kept separate; I would put zero real world names into a fantasy world), but I respect your right to print what you and your customers want.

It's a strange mix of nominative determinism.

Fighters fight.

Summoners summon (unlike the eidolon, the spell is unarguable).

Rangers range.

Magic Users. Use magic, but got changed to wizards because "reasons".

Thieves. Why are they called rogues again? Should we rename them to stealers? Rogue is a bad word, too. In all seriousness I would rename them "specialists".

Clerics should have been called prayers.

Mentalists are mental?

I maintain that the syth summoner with a dragon eidolon should be called a cosplayer.

I think it was Erfworld that called everything a -mancer? Fire wizards were pyromancers and archers were arrowmancers?

In some traditions, primarily eastern, it's not necessarily evil to end the cycle of universal creation and destruction. The concept of existence and nothingness has a different meaning to them.

For them destruction can mean attaining a state of formlessness, from which a new universe "unrelated" (using the western meaning) to the previous can arise - in this case instead of Pharasma continuing and overseeing a reboot, Pharasma goes away and something else happens. This new thing might be "nothing", but it's meaningless to speculate on in since the laws we use to talk about it are dissolved, however, they would see a continuity even if the individual "selfs" (remember this word has a very different meaning there) do not perceive it.

In a way, it's very similar to the "what happens when you die in Golarion" debate we are having but it's the other way around.

What's strange for me is that some people believe souls in Golarion have a continuity so even if you die and lose your memory you somehow still "remember", therefore selling your soul to Asmodeus is a BadThing, but for universes "dying" there is no continuity and "it's all over" means it's all over. Surely one's beliefs would align on both those 2 issues?

Moppy wrote:

Humans, and maybe dogs and wolfs, like to imagine or declare dogs and wolves are different but nature can't be fooled - they can interbreed.

Modern human, Denisovans, and Neanderthals can interbreed. it doesn't mean these are the same things, the question is why are you all bringing up speciation in a conversation about a game of magical elves, dwarves, etc?

Why do you think inheritance works differently from dogs than it does for humans? We like to declare categories and classifications based on some narrow feature that we like, but nature is its own thing and makes the real rules.

Moppy wrote:

In which lore book is this explained? I haven't seen that (yet) except in the case of undead and the rare individuals that get to star in an adventure or become demon lords.

It's mentioned a few places, but more importantly it's inherent in their Alignment remaining the same. That's definitely personality, and it's definitely stable between mortal and post-mortal existence.

I don't understand the logic about alignment being applied here. Clearly, there is something that continues, but the question is whether mortal you is aware of it. A book reference would be very helpful.

Humans, and maybe dogs and wolfs, like to imagine or declare dogs and wolves are different but nature can't be fooled - they can interbreed.

If you read the wikipedia article on dromeosaurs and its links (I just did to write this and it was unpleasant trying to type the link codes on a tablet) there is a section on feathers and debate about whether they are birds. (Its the entire classification secrion, and don't just cherrypick the subheading that says relation to birds), Some claim they are related, and some claim they are. In any case, birds are surely dinosaurs.

Moppy wrote:

The Raven black wrote:

IIRC, the vast majority of petitioners have zero memories of their mortal life. What melds into the plane is not really your PC, even if it is their soul.

If you lose everything when you die, then you don't experience an afterlife, as that's a different being, so you are free to trade your soul to devils etc with no consequences. Unless you are one of the very unkucky few that do remember and Paizo write an adventure about you.

This is not correct. One can, in real life, argue how much of one's personality is based on specific memories, but in Golarion's cosmology there are definitive indicators that most of one's personality and drives are contained in the soul irrespective of memories because there are lots of examples of souls continuing to behave, in broad strokes, as they did prior to losing memories afterwards.

So no, the person you're screwing over by doing this is recognizably you, even if they do lose their memories.

In which lore book is this explained? I haven't seen that (yet) except in the case of undead and the rare individuals that get to star in an adventure or become demon lords.

IIRC, the vast majority of petitioners have zero memories of their mortal life. What melds into the plane is not really your PC, even if it is their soul.

If you lose everything when you die, then you don't experience an afterlife, as that's a different being, so you are free to trade your soul to devils etc with no consequences. Unless you are one of the very unkucky few that do remember and Paizo write an adventure about you.

Dromaeosaurs have feathers and are debatably avian. Wolves and dogs can interbreed, so I'm not sure where you're trying to go.

Scientifically, birds are dinosaurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniraptora

We played Golem using the rules on Aonprd since we don't have the module.

It doesn't work heads up as the golem will be an invalid hand.

If the golem wins, the pot odds can grow so huge that everyone is going to be all in on every hand no matter what, and at that point, it's a total RNG fest.

It might be playable with carefully managed stakes and a cap on the Golem addition to the pot.

It's not the dice roll being bypassed that concerns me. It's the creation of a themepark by a feat. I am OK with it if the players are, but a lot of them aren't.

Excessive dice rolling is always a problem, whether t's the GM making people roll for everything, or the players that make perception checks every minute.

This shows the importance of names, just like in fantasy.

Eidiolon has wings at level 1 but can't fly. I am uspet.

Rename the Summoner as the Cosplayer, and problem is solved.

As a GM, I'm having a problem with the Investigator breaking plots.

It has a number of feats that automatically reveal information. Let's start with That's Odd. "When you enter a new location, such as a room or corridor, you immediately notice one thing out of the ordinary ... skipping obvious clues that can be easily noticed without a check."

Although it isn't as bad as Who Dunnit (which I see is PFS restricted) it's still causing me problems. In an adventure based on finding leads, the investigator automatically finds one, even if they just are just passing through and couldn't normally search. In a detective adventure, this is the equivalent of a dungeon crawl with a mob automatically dying as the party enters the room.

Can't I fix it by adding more clues?

If the clues are random and unrelated, the players will complain about being trolled by GM cheating. "We're here to investigate a murder. I learn that the Hand of the King has sneaked an extra cake from the kitchen while the cook wasn't looking. You literally just made that up to save your adventure, didn't you?". Or, the investigator can take feats like Red Herring which automatically eliminate false positives.

Can't I just design my adventure with multiple significant plots?

Thanks APG! How many more hours will that take? What do I do if I'm using a published adventure to save time?

Cthulhu got blown up once already. Today we refer to the event as the Big Bang.

It's fine if the player isn't a jerk and the GM knows how to handle it. There are a great many other RPGs out there that are more encouraging of evil-aligned PC, so the concept has been shown to work, for anyone that disbelieves me.

Whoah this is amazing.

I prefer my mythic as pure extra levels and not keen on mythic being points over a base level (there's a Mythic 6 monster in your book) but since 1E Mythic worked like that I see why you did it.

I would have put a kaiju in the book. I think they're the highest level things I've heard whispered about, CR 30 or so according to one of the devs on here?

There is something in that book that could use some of these - the magus. Capturing a spell and throwing it back is very magusy. I don't recall if it is already in the playtest but it should be on that class somewhere. Madam Holly Venger is being robbed by a dirty gish.

Too late to edit, but just to be clear, that last comment was basically about capitalism not alignment as such. I meant to write 'capitalism alignment' and missed the word.

It's probably a good idea to remove both posts.

Started reading this to run it. Surely written by an American. Villain has sabotaged the safety nets. Obviously the correct thing to do is to postpone the act until the equipment can be repaired, or improvise some solution to find new nets, but the XP reward is for continuing the act and convincing the performer to go on regardless. It's like the Jaws movie when the shark attacks and they don't close the beach. I will do it differently and award points for any solution in line with the players alignment.

Beyond a certain age 1E dragons were sorcerers.

Kenku could fly in old D&D. As the edition wheel turned they lost the ability.

As a dragon you would buy all the stuff but you didn't wear it in 1E because of arcane spell failure. Starfinder understands. Their dragons carry laser rifles.

Heritage or Ancestry?

If heritage are you assuming evil elves turn into drow and good drow turn into elves (the "Drizzt-NO-Urden Rule")?

GMG guidelines for items say 1st level spell muiltiple times per day is a 5th level item but I am convinced that is too low for "True Strike on a stick".

I'm aware of the Staff Wizard Archetype in APG but I feel that does a different thing by expending spell slots for it.

I'm experimenting with True Strike:

(a) as a focus spell

(b) on a magic stick

(c) as metamagic allowing a wizard to modify a spell as cast or memorized.

The reasons likely involve a mix of Japanese legends and PF1.

OG Tengu (the ones from Japanese legends) are nature spirits and certainly not "bird people". Being able to turn into a bird was one of their spirit abilities.

With arcane spell failure gone there's no excuse for dragons not to have armor anymore.

The thing is, podcasts aren't really there for you to sit down and do nothing, they're there to fill exactly the times when you want to listen to something but got your hands full, be it during commute, drawing (if you're an artist like me) or doing chores at home.

I know nothing about podcast figures but I know audiobook sales dropped below toilet level when people stopped commuting for work-from-home. I agree that I listen to podcasts when I'm doing other things like exercise. I rarely sit down and reserve exclusive time for them.

The Black Blade Thoughts, questions, concerns? Don't be lazy, please don't be lazy. I don't want to see this supported with a Class Feat or even a Class-Path for Magus. PLEASE just make it an Archetype

A black sword that talks? Be careful what you ask for! As a wishing dragon I could legitimately grant you Stormbringer! I think it's somewhere here in my pawbag of holding.

But why not type up some home-brew?

But more seriously isn't what you are after like being given an intelligent relic weapon in the GMG? Why do you need an AT to get one?

edit: I understand, GM permission and all that, but mechanically the rules have been done so all you need to do it make an AT that uses the relic weapon rules from GMG and put intelligence on the weapon.

Put in on drivethru and I'll buy it so long as the math is right.

Why do you keep ignoring the actual complaint in your efforts to defend the game?

The complaint here is not "spells are too weak" or anything else where a response of "spells and not-spells to be fairly balanced" is relevant.

The complaint here is that spell attacks are too weak.

As the author of the original post and presumably the "original complaint" I don't remember complaining and I didn't say spell attacks were to weak.

I'm creating a bunch of homebrew stuff and searching for obvious gaps in current content and this huge gap was obvious to me. So I'm asking why it exists just in case there is some reason I shouldn't fill it.

Which operating system? Their built in screen readers are all different.

Whatever it is, you should be able to get it to read the web rules (2e.aonprd.com) without trouble.

What is the spell casting equivalent of striking and potency runes?

Another show, the same act again. Usually the audience expects the same act for a season (perhaps an AP). You can change which performers are on, but when you're on, do you want to roleplay your trick the same once each week? Doesn't it get repetitive?

Simple firearms sounds like modern? If you're loading powder and shot separately that's the sort of thing that martial training represents. Maybe some lasers from Numeria might be simple?

If there is just 1 roll, what happens if a fighter takes magus dedication?

Cast a disable. The magus boss will lose 1 action and then be unable to operate.

I suppose it's legit. The arms are bigger than my leg. They just look tiny on a t-rex.

Moppy wrote:

Been there, done that, GM'ed the AP.

(Reign of Winter)

Back in my day it was Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga.

The play group I had at the time would have had the hut dancing to lead an army of zombies because Michale Jackson's "Thriller". Everything was music to them. I'd have given them a game bonus for it too, because they bought me food.