Polymathis's page

Wish: If you give us a hex based starship combat system then, for the love of Desna, please also give us ship miniatures or 'top down' ship tokens so that it is easy to establish facing and weapon arcs!

Thanks Logan, you’re a star. :)

Hi, I have not yet received this order, and even with the longest date in the estimated delivery window it is now around three weeks overdue.
I know that you can not track individual overseas parcels, but do you have any feel for whether this is simply a delay in your overseas shipping to the UK, or whether it is likely to be missing in transit?
Many thanks.

PC: Lady Celeste (Cleric 18)
Adventure: Prince of Demons
Location: Battle of Gaping Maw
Catalyst: Assassinated (Death Attack) by Zulu-Thurg

This perms-death was particularly poignant as Celeste was the only (N)PC to survive the finales of both Shackled City and Age of Worms... third time is sadly not lucky!

*Heart Emoji*

In the absence of ship miniatures (and the playability of the game really suffers without them) then printed hex tiles for ships with front facing marked... SF gave us a hex map, but nothing to use on it!

PC: Lavinia Vanderboren (Aristocrat 2 / Swashbuckler 8 / Duellist 6)
Adventure: Wells of Darkness
Location: Overlook
Catalyst: Combat Death - critical failure versus Finger of Death from two Nightwings.

Having played d&d since the red box, through Ad&d 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5, and PF1, I have to say it bothers me, but it’s about feel rather than detail.
It wouldn’t bother me if Magic Missile suddenly did d6 rather than d4 damage. I’m not even fussed if a classes fundamental abilities have changed. But it did bother me with 4e that an RPG that supported a predominantly ‘theatre of the mind’ game suddenly became a grid based miniatures game modelling a MMORPG - to the point where I jumped ship to Pathfinder after a literal lifetime of playing d&d.
I’m still struggling to place PF2 - some of it feels familiar (good), but other parts feel ‘not d&d’ - so struggling to love it at the moment. At least it doesn’t feel as alien as 4e/5e does to me, so I’m hopeful it will grow on me with more play. It took a while for 3e to feel like home as well...

One piece of my turnover that hit the cutting room floor was a couple paragraphs on the Arkanen seasons of Dive, Full Breath and Half Gasp. I enjoyed it as a cultural touchpoint, but I can see that it might have added more setting complexity than was needed in a brief AA3 article. Still, my own personal head canon reverberates with those seasons, and how they affect life on the moon.

Hmm

Oooh, post details in the ‘Starfound’ thread - pretty please?

My campaign has only been running since 1990, so some of you guys have me beat! We’re still slowly transitioning from 3.5 to P1 (currently using P1 characters (with some backward conversion) in 3.5 adventures), so I don’t expect P1 to P2 to be a problem for us for at least another 10 years!

TriOmegaZero wrote:

You know people tried that, right?

People try to do lots of things. Doesn't make them good ideas.

Out of interest, do you have any handy links to people trying to houserule AD&D 2e into the playtest? I'm genuinely interested what idea they could possibly want to grab from AD&D 2e that they think would work well in PF2e.

Don't know about AD&D 2e, but my Pathfinder games still use XP progression and resurrection survival rolls from AD&D 1e. With sadness, we did give up on THACO though!

Loved: All of the classes, and the archetypes and other options to go with them.

Wanted: The Harrow Medium - please just make the playtest version a downloadable freebie or something!

Hated: The snarky and sometimes vicious sarcasm on the message boards - oh wait, thats probably not going anywhere :(

Will miss: Nothing - I've got a fifteen+ year (real play time) backlog of 1st edition material to play through! :)

Shackled City took us from May 2014 to November 2015 - so 18 months, playing one eight hour session per month.

Age of Worms took us from December 2015 to May 2017 on the same basis - 17 months.

We are now 66% through Savage Tide - 24 months and counting!

I know I might regret asking this, but have you ever heard of computers?

LOL. I have a masters degree in Information Systems, and IRL I work for one of the worlds great national libraries as Head of Information Management. Sometimes it’s just relaxing to build a small hardcopy index for a collection that doesn’t run to hundreds of millions of entries... that’s part of the hobby for me. Even in hardcopy I can usually track down a specific answer faster than my players can find it on a google search... :)

Seems massively impractical to me, leaving aside the economics. I have a complete collection of everything Pathfinder, and I maintain a separate photocopied/printed file of every class, archetype and prestige class for easy reference (I love class options!)... it currently runs to 4,560 pages...

PC: Jakara of the Tiger Clan (Ranger 5 / Totemic Demonslayer 7)
Adventure: City of Broken Idols
Location: Lost Temple of Demogorgon (Used to expand Taboo Temple)
Catalyst: Combat death - vapourised by a Destruction spell from the troglodyte High Priest.

I'm AFB at the moment, but I don't recall the Reincarnate spell imposing negative levels/level loss.

"A reincarnated creature recalls the majority of its former life and form. It retains any class abilities, feats, or skill ranks it formerly possessed. Its class, base attack bonus, base save bonuses, and hit points are unchanged. Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution scores depend partly on the new body. First eliminate the subject’s racial adjustments (since it is no longer necessarily of his previous race) and then apply the adjustments found below to its remaining ability scores. The subject of the spell gains two permanent negative levels when it is reincarnated."

I'm normally pretty generous with hand waving level loss once they get back to the big city, but in this campaign lack of resources due to being cut off from civilisation is part of the challenge... ;)

So in our Age of Worms campaign the Gunslinger's pc's player is a complete klutz IRL, and recently had managed to give himself concussion and nearly knock himself out whilst alone in a toilet stall.

During 'The Hall of Harsh Reflections' the players split up in the city to accomplish various crafting and shopping exercises, and the gunslinger goes off alone to buy a new pistol. He returns to the inn after an uneventful trip.

Later in the dungeon they find the gunslinger tied naked to a chair; these were all relatively new players so the jaw drop when they (including the gunslinger player himself) realised that the pc they had been playing with for the last six hours or so was a doppleganger was an amazing moment - they had never experienced the 'unreliable narrator' in a game before.

But the real gold was when they asked me what had happened to the gunslinger pc whilst he was off camera, and I/he revealed that the last thing he remembered was looking for the gents facilities at the Armory and locking himself alone in a toilet stall...

Ouch, the bilewretch is nasty. It's a long time since I read STAP, but levels 8 and 10 seem low for COBI?

Six players and multiple NPCs splitting the experience, coupled with far too many reincarnation spells without Restoration to hand!

PC: Morgause (8th lvl Slayer)
Adventure: The Lightless Depths
Location: Holashners Ziggurat Q3
Catalyst: Combat death - Dissolved by Bilewretch spittle

PC: Captain Amella Venkalie (Fighter 6 / Rogue 4)
Adventure: City of Broken Idols
Location: Taboo Lake
Catalyst: Combat death - Swallowed by the Giant Crocodile.

PC: 8th lvl Life Oracle
Adventure: City of Broken Idols
Location: Taboo Temple (Room 3)
Catalyst: Combat death - a frontal assault on the Skinwalkers went badly. Two other pcs needed to be reincarnated!

Ability: 4d6 and lose the lowest die x6, arrange as player chooses
Alignment: No CE (LE and NE requires GM approval)
HP: Max for first level, roll thereafter
Skills: Background Skills (with Artistry & Lore)
Player Count: 4-6, balanced by splitting fixed experience award (e.g. average party lvl for larger parties tends to be one lvl lower than recommended); with six players, assume bad guys are ready buffed at start of encounter.
Races/Classes: Any official Paizo content
Item Crafting: Only if both RAW and story allows...
House Rules: Uncapped skill points (if a player wants to dump 40pts in Escape Artist then they can!); 1st Ed D&D resurrection survival rolls, and max number of 'lives' equal to starting Con; crits do not need a confirmation roll; critical hit and fumble tables; all clerics are pantheists unless they want to take an archetype to specialise as cleric of a specific deity.

As you can see, my table plays up the random!

75. Skills are not capped. If a hero wants to put 40+ skill points into Escape Artist and take no other skills at all then let them!
76. 1st Edition XP tables.
77. Metamagic Feats affect all spells known/granted that day, but only one can be applied at any time (with the exception of Silent and Still, which can be stacked). This came about because no one ever used them in my game as the thought of burning a feat just to get 50% extra something or other on a single spell just wasn't palatable to anyone, given that certain other feats can get you +5% to hit on every single attack you will ever make etc. Strangely, in practice this has had almost no effect on game balance.

A continuation of the first 30 years of Dungeons and Dragons, once Wizards lost the plot and created an entirely different game with that name.

The best iteration of the d20 system.

A complex game of intricate character design, context specific subsystems, and millions of options, used to support the best fantasy RPG stories on the market.

From what I've seen of the playtest I am hopeful that Paizo will at least continue to tell the 'best fantasy RPG stories on the market'. The rest of what I love, not so much. :(

Please please please!

With the release of miniatures for Starfinder being a complete disaster / no show, please can we at least have some ship tiles (with facings etc) suitable for hex grid combat?

Love:
1 - Three action system
2 - The concept of the new alchemist using alchemical items (but the execution is pretty dire)
3 - Weapon traits

Hate:
1 - Tight maths and scaling challenges means you can run the game on coin toss without stats or dice - success is always approximately 50/50 so your characters never get any 'better' in comparison to the challenges.
2 - Resonance / disposable shields / everything else designed to stop you using equipment and magic items in the logically intended fashion
3 - Skill investment is worthless (Legendary feels no better Trained as the math is too tight), and Skill Feats do not feel as if you have accomplished a 'feat' any more than getting out of bed is a 'feat' of agility - most skill feats are something anyone trained in the skill should be able to attempt with varying success.

Houserules:
1 - Shield always grants bonus without wasting an action
2 - Retain skill point progression from P1e
3 - Break Ancestry into Race and Region and restore core racial abilities from P1e

PC: All four of the Jade Ravens
Adventure: Tides of Dread
Location: East Gate of Farshore
Catalyst: Combat death - the Jade Ravens attempted a frontal attack on the entire tribe of Troglodytes and their Giant Lizard pets, and were overcome by weight of numbers.

Love:
1 - Three action system
2 - The concept of the new alchemist using alchemical items (but the execution is pretty dire)
3 - Struggling to think of anything else...

Hate:
1 - Tight maths and scaling challenges means you can run the game on coin toss without stats or dice - success is always approximately 50/50 so your characters never get any 'better' in comparison to the challenges.
2 - Resonance / disposable shields / everything else designed to stop you using equipment and magic items in the logically intended fashion
3 - Class locked feats that make no sense (many abilities in life can be learned regardless of your chosen profession...), ancestry feats that make no sense (innate species abilities should be innate, and cultural abilities should depend on upbringing), calling everything a feat...
4 - Spell points are used for everything except spells. Ummm, what?

THanks Chris - all fixed now!
Cheers.

Hi Katina,

The 'ready to download' line on the digital content screen shows up as 153 bytes (as opposed to around 5Mb), and the resulting download is empty.

Many thanks.

Hi,

Re the order above, I purchased Star Classes:Envoys from Legendary Games, but the pdf download file is empty/corrupt.

Please can you investigate and advise?

Many thanks.

PC: Avner Meravanchi (Aritocrat 3 / Cavalier 1)
Adventure: Here There Be Monsters
Location: Olangru's Harem, Temple of Demogorgon
Catalyst: Combat Death - ripped apart by Bar-Lgura

PC: Skald (5th lvl Ranger)
Adventure: Here There Be Monsters
Location: Domogorgons Shrine
Catalyst: Combat Death - decapitated by Olangru (critical hit)

It is also partly about the strange coincidence that adventures always seems to be lucky enough to face encounters +/-3 the level.

My games have always explained this away by saying that the DM's narrative focus is on the lucky ones. What you don't get to see is that 'offscreen' hundreds of 1st level wanna-be adventurers walk into dungeons guarded by dragons, manticores, stone golems and the like, and are therefore never seen or heard from again...

I too want Pathfinder2, not an entirely new system with a Pathfinder logo.
I want the maths on show, with a clear family tree tracing back to D&D3.5. I do want the complicated to be simplified, but I want the genuinely and legitimately complex to be left alone. I want many rich character options in strongly differentiated classes.
And like Mark, "I want Pathfinder fans and new Pathfinders alike, here and elsewhere, to be excellent to each other as we work on discovering, understanding, and improving the new game together."

PC: Janore Stormwave (4th level Cleric)
Adventure: The Sea Wyverns Wake
Location: Journeys End
Catalyst: Combat death - beaten unconscious by Vine Horror, then dragged away into the Sargasso.

PC: Tavey Nesk (2nd lvl Expert)
Adventure: Here There Be Monsters
Location: Dark Mountain Pass, Room 6
Catalyst: Combat death - dissolved by Black Pudding

For some reason the Kish instantly made me think of the Gith in terms of both stats and culture...

I still prefer the old 1E Raise Dead and Resurrection restrictions to give it a real weight. "System Shock" saving throw to survive (or forever perish), being brought back from the dead incurs a permanent loss of 1 Constitution, and you can never be raised more times than your initial Constitution score, even if you manage to raise it later. Being brought back from the dead should be a major event from the character, with real risks and consequences.

We still houserule the first and third of these in my home campaign, to give death more weight. The loss of Con is replaced by the negative level from normal Pathfinder rules. For my players, death is always far more than just an (expensive) inconvenience...

I almost never post on here - the last time I made a non-AP post was when Pathfinder was first announced, and what I said was 'You have my money!'

The reason I whole-heartedly backed Pathfinder, and have bought every hardback, AP, and adventure for it, is that it was Dungeons & Dragons by another name in a way that 4e wasn't. 4e didn't deserve the name of Dungeons & Dragons and neither does 5e - they are an entirely different game that has no continuity with basic / 1e / 2e/ 3.0 / 3.5 - and that is in terms of feel, playstyle, whatever - the rules dont 'feel' right.

So that's my plea for PF2e - change whatever you like, but don't lose the feel baked into the game's DNA. I have been playing 'real' D&D in whatever guise for 30+ years now, and I don't want to stop.

I love Paizo. I love the respect that you have for your customers, and the quality of your products and storytelling. I truly don't understand some of the quite vicious negativity that I see on these boards; its the reason I don't play PFS.

I get that 10 years is a long time in this industry without a refresh, and I agree that one is needed. I'm cautiously optimistic about PF2e, and if I don't like it, I have probably another 15 years of content from PF1e still to play, and I thank you for that.

For what its worth, I also have some minor observations based on what has been revealed so far:

- Please keep the maths 'on show' rather than invisible to the players/GM; thats a major part of what makes a game 'D&D' for us

- Please dont oversimplify. Some of my players have been cheating on me and playing in a 5e game, and just last night they said that what they preferred about Pathfinder was the vast array of customisable options. 5e is simplistic to the point of feeling like a board game. Its just flat.

- We love Starfinder. We like the revised action economy, so the changes in PF2e to action economy sound good to us. We like the 'scalable' weapons in Starfinder, but thats in a SciFi setting; we're not so sure that will 'feel' right in a Fantasy setting.

- We hate the Starfinder Archetypes. Please don't do that in PF2e -
class based variations are what we love about PF. We quite like Themes though; the suggestions of what options to put together to create a specific type of character are good - we effectively use them in the way we use some of the more vanilla Pathfinder Archetypes.

PC: Skarneck, 6th lvl Abyssal Bloodrager & Piran Trevelyan, 6th lvl Seasinger
Adventure: The Sea Wyverns Wake
Location: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (inserted as expansion of area C)
Catalyst: Combat fatalities

Crushed to death and devoured by Xilonen, the ancient plant spirit. The other players fled, leaving their bodies behind...

The Grand Finale - final PC death:

PC Name: Heather (Female Elven Ranger Lvl 20)
Adventure: Dawn of a New Age
Location of Death: Under Lashonna's mansion
Catalyst: Combat death
Long description: Ripped in half (critical hit) and then swallowed and digested by an Overworm.

We're now just about to confront Kyuss. Since last time:

PC Name: Allustan the Sage (Human Mage)
Adventure: Into the Wormcrawl Fissure
Location of Death: Dragotha's Lair
Catalyst: Combat death
Long Description: Blasted to ashes and soul annihilated by Deathwind breath weapon (failed save) and then raised to undeath as a Dread Wraith.

Non permanent deaths so far: 19

We're half way through, playing with Pathfinder rules. Perma-deaths so far:

PC Name: Trixie (Halfling Rogue)
Adventure: Hall of Harsh Reflections
Location of Death: Doppleganger Lair
Catalyst: Combat death
Long Description: Beaten to death by invisible stalkers whilst exploring alone on the plank walk - don't split the party!

PC Class: ??? (Human Gunslinger)
Adventure: Hall of Harsh Reflections
Location of Death: Illithid Lair
Catalyst: Combat death
Long Description: Beaten unconscious by illihid then brain extracted and eaten.

PC Name: Tom Bombardil (Human Bard)
Adventure: The Spire of Long Shadows
Location of Death: on the road to MagePoint
Catalyst: Combat death
Long Description: Poisoned by Osyluth then impaled on its stinger.

Non permanent deaths so far: 8

We just played this encounter at the weekend with six Pathfinder (rather than 3.5) PCs of lvls 1-2. Primary PC tactic was to spread out and pepper them with ranged attacks - Ranger, Gunslinger, Halfling Rogue with sling etc. One died, and three others were down and bleeding before the other two finished them off. Primary PC tactic was to spread out and pepper them with ranged attacks - Ranger, Gunslinger, Halfling Rogue with sling etc.
So, difficult, but survivable for a large party of lvls 1-3. I think would be almost impossible for just 4 PCs though unless they were very smart/lucky.