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Hey folks, any pathfinder games out here? I'm willing to travel for a weekly game, so let me know if you have a game 'round these parts. I live in San Jose, but Hayward, Dublin, Fremont, etc are within range for a good game! I'll be moving to the south bay (from Seattle) in the summer, and I'm sure I'll be looking for a game at that point.
I was bored during class today, so I made an outline of what I consider a "prototype" for how Paizo APs seem to be put together. This is based solely on my own observations, not on any insider information on how it's actually done. So, here it is, adventure by adventure: Introduction
Threat
Rabbit Hole
Exodus
Regroup
Climax
Feedback welcome!
I think I know what killed mine, but I'm still interested in hearing the actual comments.
Three times per day, when the horn is sounded as a standard action, it produces the effect of a sympathetic vibration for 16 rounds, with a range of 600'. This effect may target any structure, freestanding or not, and the horn may not be sounded again until the effect ends. Skilled musicians may extract additional soundings per day by expending four rounds on bardic performance and succeeding at a DC 20 (+5 for each additional sounding) Perform (horn) check. A failed check means that the rounds of performance are wasted.
Based on the precedent from 3.5e where anything exceeding a +10 total bonus was considered "epic level" and was vastly more, I'd go with Seeker's interpretation. Yes, I know that the 3.5 limitation doesn't automatically apply, but this strikes me as something that may have changed simply by accident/poor wording rather than as a deliberate design change.
I was a little dubious of the name before I saw the playtest, but once I saw the abilities, it really clicked for me. The way I think of them is as a mortal incarnation of a particular concept or ideal, a living manifestation of a primal supernatural force. Now that it's clicked for me, I really REALLY like the name.
Oracle of Magic - get detect magic, identify, and other spells in that vein. all it's revelations have something to do with making the oracles magic stronger. Metamagic feats that don't cost levels etc. On the same note, I want to see an oracle of antimagic, with counterspelling, dispelling, and possible a localized antimagic field. Think Darling from The Black Company.
The bug is still marked as "open" in Apple's database. I've updated it with a notation that it's not fixed in 10.6.2. I actually filed an internal bug for this over the summer during the SnowLeopard pre-release testing, when I was working for Apple. They're aware of it, but it didn't seem to get very high priority consideration.
I just wanted to throw out that, for myself and a number of other people I've talked to, we like psionics because it doesn't use spell slots. I'm somewhat indifferent to the flavor, but I really, really dislike playing a Vancian-style caster. The psionics rules give me an outlet for playing a caster without having to use the Vancian system. In short, switching psionics from points to a Vancian system is pretty much the one thing that will guarantee that I will not buy it.
THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING SUGGESTION EVER AND MUST BE MADE INTO A BOOK NOW!
My FLGS had a pretty decent policy. Every guest was allowed a total three free items, at most one of which could come from the box of "high demand" items, which included both the PF Bestiary and the Eberron adventure. A little sad that I couldn't get the Eberron adventure, but, well, PF takes precedence! Also, they had exactly two sets of the specialty dice, so they were giving out raffle tickets for them.
Due to work circumstances, I won't be able to attend PaizoCon like I had planned. Fortunately, one of my friends is interested in taking over my badge/dinner ticket. Is there (or will there be) any procedure to transfer them over to him? Um, how do I email you? ;-)
I live in an apartment building. I have a little tiny mailbox for letters, while packages are delivered to the main office, where I can pick them up. This works well enough, except that sometimes the postman decides to try to CRAM my poor Pathfinder AP issue into the tiny little letter mailbox. The envelopes are often practically shredded in the process, and the book itself is rather badly bent. So, I was wondering, would it be possible to put a DO NOT BEND sticker on the envelope or something? I considered contacting the post office, but we don't consistently have the same person delivering here, so I doubt it would help. Thanks!
Addressing the original point: Someone has to understand (at least the basics of) probability, or else nobody would found a casino! Think about it. Unless you know that the house always wins, then starting a casino (as opposed to a bar where players can gamble with each other) is a pointless undertaking. And knowing that the house always wins implies at least a rudimentary understanding of the odds of the games being played. A historical backup: probability and statistics both date from the mid 17th century CE. Roullette, typically considered the oldest house-edge casino game, wasn't created until a century later. Prior to this, most gambling took the form of wagers against an opponent (i.e. who would roll higher on the dice). Pre-casino gambling houses depended a percentage excise rather than a house edge (or just by selling other goods/services to the gamblers) for income.
I don't think one can really invoke the Flynn effect here. IQ testing is only slightly more than a century old, and that was a century during which education, nutrition, and technology-in-people's-lives all increased. The have been times in the past when those were in decline. We simply do not have the data to extrapolate very far into the past or the future. For example, the Egyptian Moscow papyrus (1820 BCE) attests the use of basic integral calculus to find the volumes of complicated shapes. By the time of Archimedes (287-212BCE), and certainly by the time of the Romans, integral calculus was understood to the level of your average highschool calculus student, if not in the full rigor that mathematicans define it today. Of course, huge amounts of that knowledge was lost (at least in Europe), during the Middle Ages. But, and this is the interesting part, it wasn't lost everywhere. In fact, around 1000 CE, the Islamic mathematician Ibn al-Haytham was devloping a more accurate numerical integration technique. In the 11th and 12th centuries CE, Indian and Persian mathematicians were discovering the basics of differential calculus. To summarize:
- We have significant historical evidence that *knowledge* both increases and decreases over time, and is not uniformly distributed geographically. It's quite possible for a branch of civilization to forget knowledge it once had. It's also quite possible for one reqion to be in an intellectual "boom" while others are stagnating.
IME, the free feat has always been the big draw that makes people play humans. Yes, many of the other races gain abilities that are approximately equivalent in power to a feat, but that ignores one crucial point: Most interesting feats come in trees. A human character can have "second tier" feats at first level, since they have two feats available. Racial abilities, even if they're on the same power level as a feat, are effectively "dead-end" feats.
(such as the "Demiplane of Cheese," which almost made it into an official Wizards product...) Is it sad that I've run a Planescape game where this would have been a perfect fit? My players were fascinated by the idea of imported planar cheeses, and held all of their meetings in a cheese shop in Sigil, rather than an inn. Their greatest caper even involved stealing a still-life portrait of some cheese from a demon lord!
Read a good book... Pick up George R.R. Martin or Robert Jordan.. Just to share part of my fantasy reading history: I read Wizard of Earthsea somewhere around age 12, and thought it was pretty boring at the time. Have never felt the urge to try again. I've read all of Robert Jordan's books, though I'll freely admit that they went downhill after the first few. I was just invested enough in the characters and story to want to know what happened next even if the next book wasn't very good. GRRM's A Game of Thrones has the unique distinction of being the only novel I have been so disgusted with that I simply gave up on it. Usually I try to persevere to the end, to give the book the benefit of the doubt. But by the midpoint of that one, I hated every single characters, thought all the motivations were horribly contrived, and didn't give a rat's behind what happened to any of them. To this day, I still do not understand why people like it.
Yeah, I actually didn't realize there was a spell for doing this until after I already had the item concept! Good start. Good practical limit by making it so huge. Good theme. But a single power, just not enough there. I also dont know why you include non-freestanding structures. That goes beyond the spell effect. Plus, apparently the casting time is no longer 10 minutes, it just takes the blowing of the horn. So while you introduce some limitations due to its size, you also introduce some things that the spell itself does not do. That sure makes pricing a pain in the youknowwhat. Yeah, it does. The reason for the non-freestanding thing was that I wanted it to be used as a siege weapon, y'know, like the name claims. It would be kind of lame to have a siege weapon that couldn't target the walls of a fortress! Plus, I think you fail to maximize what you could have here. The Pathfinder Beta rules have new bard rules for bardic performances. While you include a skill check to extract extra soundings, maybe you could have tied that mechanic to the as-of-yet-untapped bardic performance powers from the Beta rules. Ooo... that's a good idea that didn't occur to me at all! I like! Thanks for the feedback!
Here's mine, on which I totally missed the deadline: Siege Horn
This immense horn is the size of several men, carved whole from the tusk of some unidentifiable creature. The horn is typically mounted on a large cart, with a raised podium allowing access to the mouthpiece. Three times per day, when the horn is sounded, it produces the effect of a sympathetic vibration for 10 rounds, with a range of 600'. This effect may be used to target any structure, freestanding or not. Skilled musicians may extract additional soundings with a DC 20 (+5 for each additional sounding) Perform (horn) check. Construction Craft Wondrous Item, sympathetic vibration; Cost 57,500 gp
You've got mail! ;-)
As for sacrificed advancement: What are you talking about? The build took standard feats and power selections. Nothing in the build needed to sacrifice anything. OK Overchannel might not be a common choice but still you do not sacrifice anything if you take it. Spending feats to get Astral Construct and Schism are probably two of the best spent feats. While Psionic Meditation (or whatever it is called) is a must feat if you plan to use any MetaPsionics (which I do not see why you wouldn't). MetaPsionic feats like Empower and Quicken are standard that almost all arcane casters take as we He has chosen to invest a large portion of his advancement (mostly feats) into abilities that make him better at nova-ing, as opposed to putting them into more generally useful options. My point is that this is not a "normal" psion. This is a psion who has deliberately tried to be good at nova-ing. Overchannel is simply not very common except for psions who deliberately try to be good at nova-ing. Same for taking Expanded Knowledge to get nova-able powers. Now, psions DO frequently take Psionic Meditation, even if they're not deliberately trying to nova. Same for metapsionics. Hence my concern over whether "normal" psions are overpowered or not. In summary: I have absolutely no problem with the fact that a psion who invests a signficant number of feats for the sole purpose of being good at nova-ing is, in fact, good at nova-ing. I am more concerned about psions who don't go out of their way to do so still being good at it.
I'm not going to enter this argument, but I'd like to point out that I don't think it's terribly relevant either way. You're talking about a build that has sacrificed the majority of their advancement JUST for the purpose of being good at nova-ing. I'm not sure I see the beef with a character that has poured a lot of his advancement into being able to nova, is in fact able to nova. I'm much more interested in the potential for "normal case" abuse, i.e. could a relatively standard psion (not one specifically engineered for nova-ing) be overpowered with respect to nova-ing? Maybe, maybe not. As I've said before in this thread, I think the major source of abuse by "normal" psions is Psionic Meditation, which is such an obvious choice because it essentially obviates one of the major throttles of psionic power output. Schism could be another target. In my personal experience, I've never seen a psion take Overchannel. Most psions I've seen were played more like wizards or sorcerers in that they were pretty frail, and their players wouldn't have wanted to risk damaging themselves.
Secondly, the Psionic Meditation feat can allow you to become focused as a move action (though it still provokes an attack of opportunity). This means you can gain your focus and then expend it when you use your standard action to manifest a power. This is why I was proposing weakening and/or splitting up Psionic Meditation. It's important for Psionic Warrior and Egoist builds that need to expend focus frequently to empower attacks, but it's overpowering when combined with metapsionics. With the relatively low number of career feats in 3.5e, Psionic Meditation was already a strong choice for most psions. With the increased number in PF, I doubt any psion would NOT take it as written.
... good sorcerer/psion comparison ... I've been pondering your example, and I think it boils down to one fact: Psionic Meditation is too good. Under 3.5e, it's already almost a given that a psion will take it. Under Pathfinder rules, where feats are much more common, its an absolute no-brainer. The need for psionic focus and its expenditure is a good and flavorful way to throttle a psion's output. Psionic Meditation makes it too easy to get around that throttle. Given that, here's a possible rewrite, split into two feats: Battle Meditation
Psionic Meditation
To help illustrate this, I made a chart of the amount of damage a sorcerer and a psion can do in a given number of rounds of combat. See here. Rounds are on the X axis, cumulative dice of damage on the Y axis. I only showed through round 20, because the psion essentially craps out at that point while the sorcerer continues to gain.
So correct me if I'm wrong... Based on what Epic Meepo said, the Sorcerer still has the advantage in the short-term, as well. I recall hearing that the average fight is less than ten rounds. Let look at five: the psion can deal 100 dice of damage in that time, while the sorcerer can deal 120. It evens out a little at 10 rounds: the psion deals 200 while the sorcerer deals 224.
One idea for a throttle mechanic would be to give manifesters a per-encounter sub-pool of points from their total daily allotment. Basically say "You can use X pps per day, but only Y per encounter." Perhaps the wilder and/or psionic feats could allow the manifester to go past Y at the cost of taking damage? A psion could still conceivably nova in a desperate situation, but would almost certainly kill himself doing so. Seems nice and heroic to me. I know lots of people aren't fans of per-encounter abilities around here, but it seems like the simplest way to add the throttling that some people desire, and would be easily ignored by people who liked the old way.
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