Natural Six's page

I am not currently subscribed to anything. If I've understood correctly what I read, the Paizo Advantage 15% discount applies to new orders after items from each of the first four lines have been charged and shipped. My question is: does this include successive items from those four subscription lines, or does it apply only to extra items and subscriptions beyond the first four? I wasn't sure the language had to mean one way or the other.

Second, I'm having that problem where I try to select the Second Edition materials as a starting point for my subscriptions, and they don't stay selected in my Cart at checkout. In case someone from CS sees this post before my email (sent 7/28, 11:09 EST), I figured I'd put that here. I also figure y'all are pretty busy with a little to-do in the Midwest somewhere, so I've left the subscriptions in my Cart for whenever I'm first in line. :)

Thanks in advance,

Six

I don’t expect I need to tell anyone in this crowd that Stan Lee died today. He made it to the grand age of 95, and I’m sure he was an icon to a lot of people here.

For many in my age bracket, he was more than that; Stan provided refuge. He told you “freak” was nothing but a made-up word once you got to know people. I bet most of us here have a short list of refuge names like Lee or Roddenberry, and several novelists besides. They gave us places to go where we weren’t the weird kid anymore, and we could stay there almost as long as we liked.

Then gaming came along, and we added more names of people we’d likely never meet. Gygax, Arneson, Cook and the rest didn’t just make magic. They gave us textbooks full of strange tables that referenced stranger dice, and they told us we could do it ourselves. Ever since I heard Stan the Man was gone, I’ve been thinking about the names I carry with me like talismans, and I’ve been thinking about this playtest.

Somewhere out there, right now, is a kid who doesn’t know yet. He doesn’t know it isn’t supposed to hurt that much. She doesn’t know she’s not alone. They don’t know “freak” is one of a million things people call you when they want to pass their own fear on to someone else and get rid of it. None of them know “freak” is a myth we tell ourselves. Not yet.

They do have their own growing list of anonymous names, I’m sure. I’m plowing through middle age at the moment, so I won’t embarrass myself by trying and getting the names wrong. But there are so rarely enough, and these kids, in whom I see my younger self, well, many don’t know yet that they can make the magic themselves.

When I think about this playtest, especially today, I think about holding a Dungeons & Dragons box in 1982. I think about discovering a world a couple friends and I could build ourselves, where we weren’t weird, we weren’t freaks or nerds, we didn’t even need to fit in. We were heroes. And my younger self, who never had the chance to thank those providers of refuge and magic, would like to thank you folks instead.

Thank you, game developers, for the sleep you’ve lost between July and now, and for enduring all the threads complaining that your work didn’t work right. Thank you, forum people, for the dissections of plus-one-per-level, of wild shape armor class and double slice damage-per-round. Somewhere out there, that kid I was exists again. He/she/they don’t know yet that they’ll pick up a strangely heavy book with a captivating fantasy cast on the cover, then be drawn to the glossy tables full of arithmetic and magic. But they will, soon, and slowly they’ll realize they haven’t just opened a book; they’ve opened a new home. On their behalf, thank you.

And thank you, Stan, for pulling the curtain back on “freak.”

Excelsior!

I've been putting off the general surveys until I thought I had a good enough grasp of rules and play at the table to give better answers. The trouble, of course, is that "good enough grasp" changes each time there's another update, until you've put it off too long to be as helpful as you could. So here's my situation: My group has finished Chapters 1-4, and we're in the middle of running Resonance Test. My best judgement is that Resonance Test should be done with update 1.4 to get the data yon developers want, so I won't be running 1.5 and 1.6 until December, when my fifth player once again becomes available and we jump ahead to Chapter 7.

Those of you who have filled out the surveys on classes, magic, rules elements, and et cetera, what do you think would give the best bang for the buck? Do it now and get Paizo some more results, or wait until we've had a chance to use the last two updates, then send in responses at what will be the end of the playtest window?

You're a Rogue with Ranger options. You fire Hunted Shot from an Unseen position, so the target is flat-footed to you. You crit with the first shot and hit with the second. How does this play out?

In contrast to PF1, there is no specific carve-out I can find for critical hits and precision damage. There is a mention of doubling your "usual damage" and a specification that one does not double damage that happens only on critical hits. Given the wording, I am somewhat at a loss whether rogues now double precision damage. "Usual damage" suggests no, unless Sneak Attack is a "usual" enough thing, and the specification at the end on p. 308 of the Playtest Rulebook could mean that damage resulting from criticals themselves is the only damage not doubled. Thus far, I have doubled precision damage on the strength of this indecision.

Next, Hunted Shot. Is the rogue-ranger Unseen to the target for only the first Strike, per Strikes and Unseen, or is the PC Unseen throughout, because all this occurs in one action? How quickly does one become Sensed out there in the woods? This determines whether the enemy remains flat-footed for the second arrow, so far as I can tell. In the heat of play I gave the PC precision damage twice (and doubled it for the critical!), but I'm beginning to think I shouldn't have, under Specific Overrides General.

It was a fine combination, either way. :)

Hero Points are, to my knowledge, the only thing I have house ruled in the playtest. "Sorry, Father. . . I tried." Thing is, we weren't using them at all until I modified how they were given out in play.

Here's how it ran:

We always play at the same person's house, for space and other reasons. I could give that player an extra point every week, but that doesn't sit well. Same for whomever takes notes, although it wouldn't bother me as much because it's more choice driven. I'm low on ideas for this category. As for in-game behavior and points, does anyone remember Humor Karma from the first edition of Shadowrun? That was fun, but it sure led to some slaphappy sessions, as players tried to find the sweet spot in the GM's sense of humor. Fast forward to PF2, and I didn't want to reward foolhardy behavior. As a result of all this, I hadn't been awarding many HP, and they all disappeared at the end of the session anyway, so they were reserved as death insurance.

And here's what I changed it to:

The points I award for in-game play carry over, up to a maximum of three, so people will use any at all. Reason for awarding points goes beyond especially brave or selfless acts to things like fine use of tactics and even, in one case, a novel character build that helped save the day. (I wouldn't use that in a campaign, naturally, but when you're building new people every other adventure, it seemed reasonable.) This change has players using their Hero Points now and then, at least, but I'll have to lock something down more precisely if we're ever to use the notion in earnest.

I suppose I could reward one person for hosting and the others for driving all that way, but that seems odd as well. . .

So how do you do it? Are you getting good use from your Hero Points? If you use them more than we do, are you liking the rerolls and extra actions?

Cheers,

Six

Given how quickly things change in a playtest, I figured I might as well start a new thread. Apologies if that's inappropriate.

The title above represents what I think is the most tricky part of adjudicating afflictions. Pertinent are the following:

"If you have a persistent damage condition, you take the damage at this point. You also attempt any saves for your afflictions at this time." (End Your Turn, Playtest Rules, p. 306)

"When you're first exposed to the affliction, you must attempt a saving throw against it. . . If you fail the initial saving throw, after its onset period (if applicable), you go to stage 1 of the affliction and are subjected to the listed effect. On a critical failure, after its onset period (if applicable) you go to stage 2 of the affliction and take that effect instead." (Afflictions, p. 325)

So your hapless PC is bitten by a giant centipede and fails a saving throw. Centipede poison, Stage 1, causes d6 damage and flat-footed for one round. Does this begin immediately, as the Afflictions quote states, or at the end of the player's turn, as the End Your Turn quote indicates? I'm inclined to think it's immediate, under Specific Overrides General. If so, though, when does the poison's effect roll over? One round of flat-footed would end on the centipede's next initiative, and repeat saving throws to resist the poison occur at the end of the player's turn.

The closest I have come to working this out is to have the first effect of the poison begin immediately, then take the interval between the centipede's action and the end of the PC's next turn to be the first round of the poison's duration.

Another way I've seen suggested is that the PC makes an initial save immediately, but starts the effects of Stage 1 at the end of the PC's next turn, thus getting the durations to even out. On a failure, PC takes d6 damage at end of turn and becomes flat-footed until the end of the turn after, at which point a second saving throw is necessary. This would be the same, essentially, as delaying the initial save until the end of the character's first turn post-bite.

How does this play out at your table? Whatever the answer, I would love to see a round-by-round example included in the Second Edition rules to avoid confusion. I also might suggest that repeat poisonings reset the maximum duration.

You have a spell that specifies humanoid targets, and you announce that you're going to cast it on a dog. Per RAW under Ranges, Areas and Targets (p. 196) ". . . your spell fails to target that creature." Rules specify that a multiple target spell can affect the rest of the targets. What does this mean for a single-target spell?

A: Sorry, you can't cast that spell on a dog. Try something else.
B: Your spell fails because your target can't be a dog.

Has anyone found clarity on this?