Platypus's page

Our group finished Mummy's Mask, and we were thinking of doing Wrath of the Righteous as Adventures 7-9 as described at http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/v5748dyo5lhxk.

Here's my question: my character Alahazra has the power to "evade your encounter with a bane; if you do, suffer a scourge". She loves doing this because she also has the power to banish curses, take them into her hand, and throw them around like blessings. How does this work in Wrath of the Righteous?

A literal reading of the rules would seem to suggest that the power becomes "evade your encounter with a bane; then nothing happens because there are no scourges in WotR." This means her use-curses-as-blessings power is useless (and it means I should think about flipping her role card using Shrine of the Infinite Void, so she can get more scrying ability.)

Is this right?

I'm looking through the Hell's Rebels player's guide, with its list of allowed religions. I was thinking about playing a cleric of Erastil (I want longbow proficiency, and Erastil has favored weapon longbow). But I notice Erastil doesn't appear at all on the list of religions!

What does this mean? Is worship of Erastil outlawed? Is it just super super rare?

In particular, do I need to make Bluff checks to conceal my religion from people, as described on page 6 of the player's guide? Bluff isn't a class skill for me...

Imrijka has a power that lets her "...add 1d4 and the Divine and Magic traits to her check against a monster".

There's a Blessing -- I think it's Blessing of Abraxas -- that lets you add two dice to an "Arcane or Divine check".

If Imrijka fires her crossbow at a monster, then adds the Divine trait to her check, can she then apply the Blessing of Abraxas to add two dice to her Divine check?

My group (Alain, Seoni, Shardra) breezed through B1 through B3. I'm not sure why we didn't have trouble in B2; we never seemed to encounter any animals, so none of the stumps got summoned. (Maybe we just forgot to apply the rule?)

Then we had a lot of trouble with B4. Alain only had one magic weapon, despite many tries to get more; Shardra was using the poison attack spell. Seoni was the only one who could defeat the ghost minotaur, and even then only when she had an attack spell up. Then we started running into Explosive Runes, et cetera. We lost three times in a row, got frustrated, and quit for the night.

Two weeks later we came back and switched characters: Kyra, Imrijka, Crowe. (Kyra and (I think) Imrijka were picked specifically for their ability to beat the ghost minotaur.) We beat B4 handily, and went on to beat B5, AP1-1, and AP1-2. I think we appreciated the wins more for having lost so much previously.

I would recommend that there not be a villain with that many immunities so early in the game.

What's going to be more fun for the players?

If they run into a monster and they can't figure out what its damage reduction is based on, so they wind up doing 10 less damage on every hit... is that more fun? Or is it just frustrating?

I guess ideally they'd experiment with different weapon types until they found one that worked. But in practice I would worry that they'd just use a bunch of power attack and be sad that their attacks weren't working very well.

In general, players are happier when they know what's going on and they're making plans to deal with it. I recommend trying to err on the side of giving them more information rather than less.

I'm curious what items you find clog up your hand.

Besmara's Tricorne comes immediately to mind. Great card, and I'm always happy to see it, but it does take up a card slot.

I also (before Act 4) spent a lot of time with my hand clogged up with attack spells. If I get one explore per turn, and that explore doesn't hit a monster, those attack spells are deadweight.

Apologies, I misspoke. The cards do in fact come from the blessings <i>discard</i>, not the blessings <i>deck</i>.

Sacred Spring can let you "recharge a random 1d6 cards from the blessings deck". When you recharge these cards, do they go under your own deck or under the blessings deck?

(We couldn't figure it out at the table, so we just didn't use that power.)

I was really disappointed with Seltyiel when I first got him, but recently I've been a lot happier with the character.

I can pinpoint the time when this happened. It was when he got Tessa Fairwind, who says: "Reveal this card and recharge another card to add 1d6 and the Swashbuckling trait to any check attempted by a character on a ship."

Before Tessa, Seltyiel's hand would fill up with weapons and items until he couldn't do anything, and he'd be stuck making one explore per turn. After Tessa, Seltyiel can recharge his cards to help out his allies. Spells and blessings and allies actually show up and get used!

The other thing that helped a lot was when I added the Marauder prestige class, which let him turn attack spells into +3d6 on checks against barriers. Seltyiel had been really suffering on those Wisdom-check barriers -- with a 1d4 base, even blessings and Find Traps couldn't save him. The 3d6 helps a lot more.

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This suggests I may have been playing the character wrong earlier. Arguably, before I get to the point where I have all four of Seltyiel's weapons clogging up his hand, I should be using his Magus power on spells to let him recharge his weapons. Unfortunately his spell-based attacks are a lot weaker than his weapon-based attacks, and it's really hard to say, "I'm going to use a deliberately weak attack on this monster to get some cards out of my hand."

PS. Black Spot is great later on, but I leave it for the arcane casters because Alahazra has so many other great choices. Strength is pretty terrible -- if you want to buff the other characters, use a blessing on them and then Cure it back into your deck.

Alahazra absolutely is a support character, but it's not because she has scouting; it's because she has divine spells which can be Cure. Take all the Cure spells you can! Your whole party can use blessings more aggressively if they know you'll be healing the blessings back into their deck. Don't forget to Cure yourself frequently, because that will reshuffle your deck and get all the good stuff you recharged back into circulation.

I only use Alahazra's scouting power if she's about to end her turn and she still has divine cards in her hand. (Or if there's a deck where it's particularly important what card is on top.)

My Alahazra runs with all three Cure spells (I don't use the expansion pack because I feel the extra Cure spells make the game too easy). She has a few attack spells (can't adventure without an attack ready) and also runs a few Find Traps because they're awesome.

Alahazra was adventuring without an attack spell (foolish!) and ran into a Ghost.

"I can fight the Ghost with either combat or wisdom/divine," said Alahazra. "I can't do combat, so I'll use divine."

Then she noticed the text on the Ghost card: "If the check to defeat does not have the Magic trait, the Ghost is undefeated."

Technically, Alahazra's Divine skill does not have the Magic trait.

"Fine," she said. "I'll use my Ruby Of Charisma to substitute my Charisma die for my Charisma die on this roll. My Ruby Of Charisma has the Magic trait, so now the Ghost should be defeated."

Normally, when Alahazra substitutes her Charisma die for something, she does not get to include her +3 skill feats. In this case she included them, though, because she was substituting Charisma for Charisma. (Perhaps she was thinking: the stat gem does not transfer the skill feats to, for example, a Strength roll. But in this case the skill feats are already there and do not need to be transferred.

She rolled a 4 on the die, and added her +3 charisma and her +2 divine skill for a 9. The difficulty was 8, so she beat the Ghost.

Did Alahazra cheat?

Four questions:

(1) Does it make sense that a Divine check can't normally defeat a Ghost? Perhaps the Ghost should say: "if the <i>combat</i> check to defeat the Ghost does not have the Magic trait..."

(2) Is it legitimate to use the Ruby Of Charisma to substitute Charisma for Charisma?

(3) Can you use a stat gem on a skill such as Divine, which is not one of the basic six stats?

(4) When using a stat gem to replace a stat that has skill feats, can you use the skill feats of the stat you replaced?

In RotR I played as Kyra, who had a great setup: she had a strong melee skill for combat, plus she had a bunch of spell slots she could use for utility spells. (ie, lots of Cures).

In Skull and Shackles I picked Seltyiel, who seemed to have a very similar setup: strong melee skill, plus spell slots for utility. (I mean, technically he's got that skill that's about recharging attack spells for an extra 1d6 to a combat roll, but he's pretty good at combat already and I usually don't see a need to add more to that.)

Seltyiel can't seem to find any good spells.

Alahazra is doing great with divine spells -- she's got Cure and Find Traps and Flame Blade and it's awesome. But Seltyiel can't seem to find a single arcane spell he wants to keep.

Ideally I'd like to find an arcane spell that's as good as Cure or Find Traps. Augury would have been good, but it looks like it was removed from this edition.

People who play Seltyiel: what spells do you usually run with?

In Scenario 4 of Plunder & Peril, my ship is anchored at the harbor. But if I go to the Shipwreck Graveyard, a strict reading of the rules is that my ship takes structural damage. What does that mean?

Can my ship really take structural damage from things I do, if I'm not at the same location my ship is?

I suspect that adding the C deck to our game made it way easier.

A small part of the effect would have been adding some low-level monsters and barriers. I'm not sure how many of them are non-basic non-elite and would have lasted until the end. Anything that did last would have diluted the monsters at the top.

A much larger effect was giving us extra spells and blessings. In particular, there were _three_ Cure spells in the C deck. Our characters ran with all or nearly all of the Cures, so we (four characters) had double the healing power compared to a group without the C deck.

If I had it to do over, I think I would run without the C deck.

I was hoping someone would say: "Oh, there's an epic-level expansion planned..." ^_^;

Toward the end of the game, rebuilding our decks at the end of the scenario started to seem like a bit of a chore. When we beat Karzoug for the last time, we looked at each other and said:

"Should we divide up the loot and choose our last card feats and record our final configuration?"
"Well, are we ever going to use these characters again?"
"I guess not..."

So, I see there's a thread called: "We Need A Snapshot of Your Conquering Heroes!" And my question is: for what? ^_^;

If someone died in my group, here is what we would do: we would restore the game state to before the scenario started, and we would play the scenario over. No other consequences. But we would all remember that we had not done a perfect PACG run, because one of our characters died in session X.

After we played the game out, if we felt like it, we might decide to play the whole thing (all 33 sessions) over again, trying to get a perfect run-through. Or we might decide that that would be boring, and we were willing to accept that we hadn't done perfectly.