Nuku's page

but the insults against David were uncalled for - he's been an active and helpful member of the 3pp community for a while now, and doesn't deserve the vitriol.

Aw, thanks! I try to be good. This is a confusing thread all around. I just wanted to chime in that PFS is for Paizo. If that changes, do lemme know, but it is what it is until then.

I just want people to have fun playing, with my books or not.(preferred with my books though, not gonna lie)

oh no, that is not as fun, as cyber bullying a creator.
now all I have is a book - a book that PFS refuses to acknowledge or allow.

Get in line. Ponyfinder isn't any closer to approved, approaching 10 years. Fortunately, my players manage to enjoy it despite this unfortunate fact.

PFS is a marketing engine for Paizo. This is not a negative comment. They were smart and put in the work to build it, and now it humms softly, producing for them. Good on them.

Do I wish I could get in on that action? Sure, but, it's not made for me, or any dev who isn't Paizo. I have learned to accept this.

The writing will continue.

Everything's better, down where it's wetter, I'm told. We're ready to make a splash! Seas of Everglow will be a book all about the water. What lives in it, what lives on it, and adventure in either state. As a player, you get to enjoy new ancestries, spells, feats, equipment and more. As a GM, monsters, lore, and plot seeds to sink your teeth into, or into your players, we don't judge around here.

Get the book early, or even get input into what goes into the tome by grabbing up a tier before it's too late. Click here to pledge today!

As a bonus prize, the book will be fully compatible with PF1, PF2, and 5E.

And who doesn't want to try out being a lion, griffon, robot, or maybe a butterfly for a change of pace?

PF1:
Ability Scores: See physical tribe.
Ponykind: Ponies are fey with the ponykind subtype.
Medium: Ponies are Medium creatures and have no bonuses or penalties due to their size.
Fast Speed: Ponies have a base speed of 40 feet (20 feet bipedal).
Low-Light Vision: Ponies can see twice as far as humans in conditions of dim light.
Fingerless: See fingerless rules.
Four-Legged: Ponies gain a +4 racial bonus to CMD against trip attempts and increase their carrying capacity by +50%. They have forelegs instead of arms.
Physical Tribe: Ponies select a physical tribe and gain its abilities and ability scores.
Unique Destiny: Ponies gain a bonus feat at 1st level, or forfeit this trait to gain the abilities of one spiritual path. Other races with this trait may also forfeit their unique destiny racial trait for a spiritual path.
Languages: Ponies begin play speaking Common and Sylvan. Ponies with high Intelligence scores can choose any languages they want (except secret languages, such as Druidic).
---
Earth
+2 Constitution, +2 Wisdom, -2 Dexterity: Earth-bound are tough and insightful but not terribly agile.
Hardy: Earth-bound gain a +2 racial bonus on saving throws against poison, spells, and spell-like abilities. They also gain Endurance as a bonus feat.
---
Pegasus
+2 Dexterity, +2 Wisdom, –2 Strength: Pegasi are quick and cunning but not very mighty.
Cloud Walker (Su): Pegasi may treat fog or other clouds as solid, if fluffy, objects for the purposes of taking walks, playing games, and so on. Activating or deactivating this feature is a free action taken on their turn. Should they become incapacitated, cloud walker continues to function indefinitely.
Pegasus Wings: Pegasi have a fly speed of 30 feet (clumsy) while they are not wearing medium or heavy armor.
---
Unicorn
+2 Constitution, +2 Intelligence, –2 Dexterity: Unicorns are resilient and canny but not very nimble.
Horn Magic: Unicorns with Intelligence scores of 11 or higher gain the following spell-like abilities: 2/day—unseen servant, 3/day—light. The caster level for these effects is equal to the unicorn’s level.
Steady Focus: Unicorns gain a +2 racial bonus on concentration checks made to cast spells defensively.
---

Basic nibble. We have a lot of kinds of ponies to choose from, I assure. Bats, automatons, big ponies, small ponies, take your pick!

Are they huge?

They are Medium, and can become Large. They are also specifically not andro or gyno sphinxes, being their own variety (That is not huge).

Would you like a peek at PF1, PF2, or D&D5?

Yes, one you can play.

Depths of Everglow

New ancestries!
New heritages
New spells
New feats
New equipment
New monsters
And plenty of atmosphere to use them in, written for PF1, PF2, and 5e, ready for you, now! Available in PDF and Hardback.

Get it now!

I feel like any great divergence in the lists is a bad place to squint right now, something to expand on with each supplement instead.

+10 PER level? How would this work at any level?

Is ANY PC still viable if they have no Wealth by Level to spend?

Is a Wizard who had his Spellbook stolen or Destroyed viable?

Is a Druid who is shackled in metal armor viable?

Is a Monk versus flying enemies viable?

...

This argument is painful.

Is a naked level 15 cleric still useful to a level 15 party? I dare say they could easily be.

Is a wizard with not a single gold spent (the spellbook is free) still useful? Bet they can be.

Most spellcasters can fake it without spent gold.

Martials cannot. Is this even really a debate? Is this questioned?

Not getting it. Monsters are monsters. If they want an NPC in an AP to have the effects of spell A, Spell B and Spell C, they can, at this point, say they have them. Pre-buffing won't be a thing they have to worry about.

Heck, an NPC spellcaster might have a special one action move that they can do and a huge burst of sparkles happens as an array of things happens to them.

How balanced will it be? That's a different thing and up to the adventure designer, but saying you can't do it is silly.

A legendary sword is +5 to hit, and no one's really complaining about that part, I think? You do want that.

You also don't need to make OGL products if you are making it for DM's guild.

That aside, I pray that all books Paizo makes remain OGL. WotCs 'only the core stuff is OGL' model is irksome.

David Silver - Ponyfinder wrote:

...

Assuming a 5 person party, sure. The game assumes 4 people though, so it should be 1/4, but otherwise yes.

What? No. You, the fighter, are dealing 1/5th your expected damage. You can't help this, your weapon lost 1/5th of its dice.

There is no such thing as a caster level.

Boots of elvenkind, whenever you would be slowed by difficult terrain or trigger a reaction due to movement, you spend a resonance to ignore the triggering thing until you complete the action you were in the middle of.

Numbers given? None.

That does answer one of the big questions. However, is an Asleep/Unconscious person willing? I would think so?

Still doesn't cover picking them up, and their bulk remains an inferred number in an unrelated effect.

Tholo, that's great, except it still doesn't, by the rules, let you actually pick someone up. Can you stand in their square? Are they occupying their square? Do they make the square they're in difficult terrain, or basically don't exist for sake of movement, or block it all?

A thousand guesses, but this really shouldn't be a GM discretion kind of 'thing'.

You are Asleep or Unconscious. Can someone pick you up? How can people interact with you? Are you still considered a person, occupying a square and refusing others to pass? Are you effectively an object?

This is not really optional. Please. I have assumptions, as I'm sure most people who read this do, but it really should be in the book.

Being able to set your DC seems to be the most elegant answer, in my limited view. If you can decide what level to check against, depending on if you're time crunched or not, that would change things nicely. Then even a level 1 healer can go for broke, and accept the risk involved, or a level 20 healer can gently kiss the papercut a random peasant has and cure it without thought.

So, playing through part 3 as a level 7 paladin.

I decided 'I will be a mountain. None shall assail me!' and I focused on defenses. Heavy armor, heavy shield, put the spirit in the shield, of course. I went with the lion shield, cause why not? It's like a durable one with an extra option.

I also have a hammer, and I used ancestries to be good at that dang hammer.

Fight! I'm accurate with the hammer. I keep my shield up. I'm blocking attacks at my friends, shield blocking for myself. I block some attacks entirely, those feel super great.

Oh no, my shield is dented, what will I do?! Oh yeah, master crafter, quick repair, give me literally a minute. Alright, back in working order.

The GM was annoyed at how hard I was to hit.

There was a sorcerer next to me. He was much easier to hit. Didn't stop me from thrusting my shield in the way 1/rd, but he was much easier to hit.

Just saying, for all the talk, there is a difference between 'guy who specialized in a thing' and 'guy who did not' in actual play.

Since when did armor absorb hits like that?

I would love an official poll on that.

thejeff wrote:

magnuskn wrote:

Yeah. It always seems to boil down to the same conversation.

Martial: I'm jelly of casters! They can do more stuff than me! Nerf nerf nerf!
Caster: Well, how about the developers give you more stuff you can do, instead of nerfing me?
Martials: NO! Anime! Anime BAD!

I don't think the lines are that clearly drawn.

Those arguments exist, but it's not clear it's the martial players yelling about anime and the casters suggesting boosting martials.

At least from my side this has been the argument I've been getting out of the last weeks. I'm not sure there is a single fan of casters who has said that martials don't need buffs (although the nature of what those buffs should be is different between people), but there have been plenty of martials fans who want casters to be nerfed and who are vehemently against martials being buffed with abilities which are not strictly mundane in nature.

I remain firmly in the 'give martials magic' camp. The entire world is magic. We wield magic no matter our class. Even the most superstitious barbarian is going to be crowned with magical items.

Can we stop pretending martials shouldn't have it? Their magic should reflect them properly, but this insistence on mundane techniques for martials baffles me.

Let's keep this grounded, and with current nerfs. How about.... level... 5.

I picked that level without checking spells, which I will do now.

Alright, so you finish bopping a bad guy, good job, using what powers you have to win combat. We all have those, not interested how you did it, it's done.

You find out the king is going to be murdered, gasp! You set off to reach him as quickly as possible.

As a fighter: You can hustle to get there faster, hurry!
As a wizard or cleric or druid: You can do that too, but you also send a dream message (level 3 spell) to send a direct warning to the king and/or anyone else you may know that's close enough to act while you're hurrying over there.
As a bard/sorcerer with occult spells/druid: No horse around? No big deal, you summon one to get there faster, go go go!
If you can't make a horse, you can probably longstrider yourself for +10 feet all day long at this point easily.

Who has more options? This was done with 5'sh minutes of glancing at the spell lists. Narrative power, spellcasters have it, fighters don't. Both can win fights, but when the fight is over...

Martial: MY power is getting a bunch of less-able people to hang around.

Spellcaster: I can step through walls when I'm not skipping through dimensions.

Martial: Pfft, lame.

Are you alright? You sound hurt.

In what way were martials 'brought up' in narrative power?

Is this a unique thing to some martial class? An edge they have that, say, a wizard couldn't get without multiclassing feats?

It used to be a thing. Get to high enough level fighter, you got respect, and people just kinda showed up, eager to be led by you.

Doesn't really help my ranger though, still, sure, that's a step in the right direction. I'd still recommend such a leader plunk down a skill-up in diplomacy and other things to actually lead his folks to victory and around problems that will arise. Even Conan took the time to learn how to use his voice to effect when his sword wouldn't cut the problem alone.

And when the fight is over? When your problems are past 'deal damage to the thing and not die', what then? That is where I point at as a problem.

Narrative power, I repeat.

Combat power, we all have that. It's not the bone of contention, at least for me.

So how was this in PF1? Since I could make a spellcasting rogue there with all the features given out.

I could also make one with rage.

I could make a barbarian with dex to damage if I wanted.

What you can't do right now, in the core book, is less telling than what you _can_ do, which is plenty. It will only get wider, not narrower.

I... think you are under the delusion that I'm making things up. This is the current system. I'm not proposing anything, just saying how it is.

Stop defending the past.

A wizard, druid, or sorcerer or other spellcaster can do it at level 9.

Narrative power.

Can martials keep up? I say they can not.

Yeah I'm with Lore on this one. If you have a class system where everything is available to everyone else and everyone can do the same things...then frankly you missed the point of a class system.

Barbarians get rage and rage related things because that is what Barbarians do. That is their identity and the reason someone devoted a bunch of man hours into making that class and other classes don't get that (instead they get their own things unique to them). It's the same with Rogues, Wizards, Paladins, and every other class that's been deigned to exist. How wide or narrow the niches are is up to the designer, but if you have a class system, you're going to get constraints and opportunity costs (and conversely unique benefits) for going the way you did. That's the system at work and a feature of it, not a bug.

Sure, a rogue can't rage, by default. They will spend feats to do so. Then they can.

This is not the end of the world.

If my Fist Mage wants to go into fits of rage, they will spend the feats, and then do so.

This is still not the end of the world.

Niche protection can find a comfortable place to curl up and wither.

There's nothing wrong with a sword-swinging rogue, or a fist-mage, or a ranger that dabbles in the occult in his strange path. The idea of 'protecting' the core archetypes is laughable in my view. We've come some distance since their inception.

A car has fallen over, pinning a random kid, oh no!

Everyone rushes over to help. This is gonna be a hard task. Who thought filling a car with cement was a GOOD idea?!

Bob isn't the strongest there, but he finds a good spot to wriggle under and apply good pressure at an ideal angle, he's helping!

Joe isn't the strongest, but he spots something in the way and heaves it out of the way while everyone else is working, making it easier, good job Joe!

Tim isn't the strongest, but he holds the part just over the kid so it doesn't crush the tyke more than it already has.

George is the strongest! With all the help, he barely heaves the car up and over with a grunt of effort and bulging veins.

They did it, yay! Everyone critted, except george.

What's the problem again?

Anime as an adjective is annoying outside of describing animation styles. There are few things done in anime that aren't done outside of anime.

Lyee, that's totally fine. Now tell me how to be a demigod fighter. Or an angel summoner-tier ranger.

Agreed, but at no point should some of the players be on one power level and others be at a completely different power level.

Then you should stick to lower levels.

Glad you brought that up. Why can a level 1 kobold scout create a trap AND move as an action, but rangers have to blow a feat and wait for level 8 to be able to make a trap in 3 actions, still unable (and always so) to replicate the feat of the level 1 kobold?

I really like Tarik's take. Pick a power level, stick to it.

If someone, anyone, is allowed to rip apart reality at level 16+, everyone should be able to do that kind of thing at level 16+, or where is the balance? It may not be precisely the same mechanic, and why should it be, but it should be in the same league.

Are these super humans, gods in flesh, or just 'exceptional people'. Pretty sure, even in their nerfed state, spellcasters exceed 'exceptional people'.

Let's bring martials up.

What do we want Martial characters to be capable of?: I want them to start an 'anime' and get better from there. I could care less what is realistic. What I want is what would look awesome in a movie/show I was watching. 'move, swing sword, swing sword' isn't exactly nail biting, edge of your seat excitement. Now let me grab a goblin by the neck and beat another goblin to death with the still struggling first goblin and that's something I'd want to watch.

Yes, please. More of this.

I want to kick a door open not just as a means of entry but also a surprise ranged attack on something inside the room that I might not have even known was there until I kicked the door.

I want to sleep with my hand on my sword and bound to my feet in a flurry of attacks if an enemy comes near before they even notice I've spotted them.

I want to suddenly stop in the middle of a tunnel and crouch down, shield raising and my eyes set on a blank spot in space. I can hear it breathing/feel its energy/notice the ripple in the air/whatever.

I want to grab a portal that's disgorging demons and try to brute force it shut. A wizard or cleric is likely a better call for the job, but I'm there, and I'm doing it. It may take ten times the effort and three times as long, but I'm doing it, because I'm a badass martial who will win by his own hands.

Why can't we embrace this?

Sounds like an exception, not a rule. Let us not muddle the rule. Shieldblock, 1 dent.

If your 3 hardness shield blocks 6 damage, it takes 3, and is dented. You take 3.

It does not take 2 dents and you take 3, since that would be _9_ total damage.

Corwin Icewolf wrote:

Basically, I think it's a dependency issue. Some of us like playing characters with a really strong independent streak, but that makes no sense if your character is heavily dependent on magic items.

With casters, they can have spells prepared for most situations, and magic items end up just feeling like an extension of what your character is already capable of, especially if your character can craft magic items. But with martials that magic sword is proof that some of your damage came from a wizard, and in 2e, thanks to the crazy magic item dice bonuses, it's proof that most of your damage comes from a wizard.

I got to ask this. Do you think wizard or sorcerer is the source of all magic? What if fighter could forge magic weapons? Would that solve your issue? I am preaparing for mythic campaign as a gm. The issue that you pointed out is to be honest alien to me. I never had a player who had issues with magic items otherthan the WBL limiting those which is solveble. I am seeing a lot of people who dislikes magic items and i think this forum has a chance to effect my table. So at which point magic stops representing the wizard? Why is it so bad to need magic items in a high magic game where magic is everywhere otherthan the obvious WBL issue. Is it possiable to add magic to your martials in way that wont make you think the wizard? If it is possiable than how would you like it to be?

I am seeing a lot of people who dislikes magic items and they just say i want to do this x thing while some of them hate anime,some of them hate magic,some of them hate otherthings. You see there isnt exactly many things to go with here. Whatever you do you upset someone.

I would like my 14th level fighter to have some abilities inherent to his being that he/she could draw on even if stripped naked and thrown in demon's pit.

This is not the case. On the plus, he is at last not hopeless at skill checks, +14, yeah! But basically any caster will be better than him. A level 10 wizard or cleric or druid could easily exert more narrative impact.

Heck, the level 10 spellcaster could be a fine opponent for the level 14 fighter, provided they never tried to get in a direct fight, and why would they? They can make the fighter's life miserable without a problem.

The big bad is dead, you all threw your various talents at it, good job.

Now the treasure is floating at the top of the room. The walls are smooth and slick, and there's nothing to grab onto on the ceiling either. What do?!

Spellcasters have a lot of tools to approach this problem, possibly even just flying out there to snatch it.

Fighter, significantly less so (Can I shoot an arrow at the treasure?).

Oh no, the King is possessed and is currently a huge demon. No problem, we smack him until he's defeated, good job, but we still have a demon-king. How do we get him back to normal king?

On the plus side here, maybe a ritual in PF2? A fighter could maybe help with that.

Oh no, we are lost in the wilderness! Too bad survival can only help one person at a time. Oh wait, the spellcaster has this handled.

In order to defeat the true source of evil, we must confront it in its fell plane! Anyone bring a spare extraplanar gate?

My paladin is being attacked by a swarm of flying harpies with bows. How doomed is he/she? Can they even strike back without surrendering a large portion of their power in the process? Let's replace this with a bestial barbarian. Good luck getting your claws on them, sucker.

We hear something coming! The ranger is a trapmaster, he'll lay some traps. Wait, due to a want for simulationist realism (only when martials are concerned), he cannot get any out fast enough to matter before they bad guys show up a round or two later.

My vote is for elevating martials. This is a magic world, let them magic in their actions. Let the ranger throw down traps as casually as a fighter swings his sword. A fighter being able to swing so hard they can hit things at a distance? Love it, more please.

Can my barbarian cleave the nature of reality itself and rip open bloody portals between worlds? Sign me right the heck up.

I do not comprehend the hatred of non-mythological martials, especially past the low levels. As the wizard advances past magic missile, the martial should also be unfolding into increasing levels of awesome.

Or so I say, but I'm just a neigh-sayer.

Potions. Take it off those and most of my issues evaporate. Were potions ever really a problem? This includes elixirs and mutagens and other one-and-done items.

For wands? I'm actually alright with it there. For staves? Sure. For basically anything but potions, which are already, economically speaking, horrible. Give them a purpose. Let them always work. Then having a spare potion is a really good idea. Out of resonance? Chug the potion.

I am entirely on board with the idea of shield potency runes that enhance it on a scaling scale of sturdiness. Sturdy shields are functional but boring, make them a rune and let shields join the rest of equipment (armor/weapons) in the same basic mechanic.