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I just assume that Rage of Elements is eventually going to need reprinting, at which point we will add in the errata, do some minimal changes (e.g. find and replace "negative/positive" for "void/vital") and change the license from OGL to ORC. I do not think there will be many changes made to the Kineticist.
I think as a GM the best way to handle "potential anathema transgressions" is to confront the player with "why did your character think doing [x] was okay, given the prohibition against [y]?" Then I'm inclined to take basically any response that includes thought behind it. The point of Anathemas (like alignment before it) is to get players to think about why their characters do what they do (and avoid doing other stuff). If it's doing that, then it's working.
I mean you need to stamp out "this guy thinks ChatGPT is a search engine" before you have any chance of teaching him how to play Pathfinder. Specifically, large language models are simply complex pattern matching algorithms, they will output the most likely token next based on their training corpus. Which is to say, that most of the characters who are taking Psi Strikes are doing it before level 8 since most of the characters who are taking Psi Strikes are Psychics, who can take it at fourth level. The whole "you count as half your level for the 'Advanced' archetype feat" is something that's so unambiguous in the rules it doesn't get talked about a lot.
Brief aside in relation to another thread, but since Kineticist is still a weird legacy/remaster hybrid, and with Botbrain mentioning doing a Kineticist and going down to 1/year. What if we got another Impossible Magic style surprise where we got a year with 2 classes, but one was remastered kineticist and one was a new class that either dealt with elemental planes or nature in some way, and then shifting to 1/year from there. Is the Kineticist really not wholly a remaster class already? Like I know Rage of Elements was the last PF2 book with the OGL in it, but there doesn't seem to be anything in the Kineticist class that needs updating more than the level of "errata".
My Kineticist is Wood + Fire.Codename: Bonfire What's funny is that Living Bonfire might be the weakest composite impulse.
I think the issue here is that a much higher percentage of "extant druids" become adventurers compared to the percentage of "extant leshies" who do. I don't think most Druids run around creating Leshies, and I think most Leshies just kind of want to hang out rather than doing dangerous stuff.
What do you mean back? Did they go somewhere? Most likely they're just being brought up to remaster standards with things like "feats that give access to flight."
Its on Bluesky the guy from Know Direction who did the blog on Investing In Necromancer.I don't have Bluesky. Any time I try a Bluesky link, it just asks me to create an account. Bluesky, unlike Twitter, does not have "Private accounts" but it does have a "nuclear block" that is enforced in part by an account option that prevents logged out people from seeing your posts (so that someone you blocked can't keep tabs on you by logging out.) That's what you're running into there. It's not enabled by default, but a lot of people use it.
What are the practical implications of this distinction? I think it's just because the number of focus points on your pool is equal to the number of focus spells you know, or 3 whichever is lesser. I think it might be cleaner (as a house rule or like PF3) to just give everybody 3 focus points and that never changes- this complexity doesn't really gain anything of note past the point where "being able to cast fire ray three times per combat" might be too strong for very low level characters.
As I understand it part of the reason that undead have a tendency towards evil is that running a machine on void energy when it was designed to run on vital energy causes something to go wrong, much like if you put rocket fuel in a regular car. Book of the Dead underlines that how this works is that every kind of undead has some kind of hunger that it needs to figure out how to handle, because if you allow it to run amok it will eventually control you (so rather than the suave vampire you're just tackling people and dragging them into alleys to get their blood out.) A specific undead can be a good person in large part because they have figured out a way to handle their undead hunger in a way that doesn't require them to act badly (e.g. a vampire who only takes a small amount of blood from willing individuals who are paid for this.) It's just that doing this is significantly rarer than the other end of the spectrum, and the person who made you into a vampire is also almost certainly an evil person.
Not to mention you do not get to conveniently change your Order just because there is war. I don't know, it seems like in the setting with roughly half the Hellknights going with Thrune and the other half going against it seems like there would be a lot of Hellknights attempting to join a different order because they believe theirs violated their oath. Like a Hellknight should not be happy following someone they believe to be a traitor.
Considering that there are Hellknights who actively oppose Thrune in the Hellfire crisis, it seems like you can just be one of those and then any absurdities make sense.
Pharasma is Objectively Correct in her opinion that not everyone should worship her, and should do what they want, she's just a referee, accountant, and logistics agent for what results from that. Yeah, you can be a good person who does necromancy, and be accepted and celebrated by the people around you. What you cannot do, however, is square that with the endorsement of the deity that specifically disapproves of "the existence of the undead." Pharasma's likely to give more leeway to necromancers whose activities will expire when they do, than ostensibly immortal necromancers, though. It's much like if you're a Robin Hood type that breaks into rich people's estates and steals all the valuables- if you're defacing the art that's too difficult to move/sell, then Shelyn will never be a fan of you. But the eventual fate of the Universe in the Pathfinder canon is that the Maelstrom will eventually consume everything and reduce it to a sludge of undifferentiated potential, at which point the next universe needs to get started. So I imagine "mortal necromancers using soul-stuff to create temporary help" are about as irritating to Pharasma as "people who live their lives in a way where their souls get sent to the Maelstrom."
It strikes me that it's obvious that the reason we're not doing "let's fix Geb" stories (indeed the one Geb AP was about "let's keep the status quo from collapsing") is because they want to resolve the Geb/Nex feud in a context where both nations are in their most recognizable form. But on the other hand, it's more defensible that "the immortal necromancer is sitting on his hands" in terms of "not resolving ongoing plots" than Razmir doing the same. But I genuinely don't think "a necromancer class" is liable to create a broad tolerance of necromancers in the setting, any more than the gunslinger class made guns omnipresent. PCs are still singular weirdos.
Unless the party is needing you to play like a turtle and has a lot of other striking options, a Dex based Monk is not as good as a STR based one, in my opinion. Given that the Finesse styles are agile, don't you average more damage with Tiger or Wolf investing in Str up to +4 than you would from Dragon with max strength? Sure, the Str based Tiger style monk will do more damage than the Dex based one, but that's a static amount of the difference between their relative strength scores, so at most 7, at least 2.
I don't know if it's useful to maintain a distinction between "Focus Spells" and "Spells that cost Focus points."
I think the thing about the monk is that you're generally going to have a third action to play with, since FoB is one action and attacks made at -8 /-10 are generally a bad value proposition. If you need to move that rules out most spells, but anything reliable you can get from an archetype that's one action is great. I've played monk/bards for Inspire Courage/Courageous Anthem, and I've played monk/psychics for Shield and Guidance. As long as you're taking the caster archetype, you might as well buy some scrolls.
Yeah, the Exemplar I think is a well designed class since the mechanical appeal is that it's very fun to play, rather than being a powerhouse. Most other classes fall more easily into loops than the Exemplar, and while the Exemplar might be in a "swap between ikon A and ikon B" holding pattern, your third (or fourth) ikon is likely something that you're going to want to use sometimes. I do wish there were more feats, but that's the case for almost every class.
Yeah, I also disfavor consumable items just in general (in all games) but monks do have an advantage over other classes in terms of consumable use since they will almost always have a free hand (basically always unless the scene involves something like the old Onion headline "Jackie Chan attacked while holding world's most expensive wedding cake.")
I have never felt that my monk characters have an AC that is lacking, but I've also never built a monk without +4 (or 18) Dex at level 1. Like a major draw of the Monk class is your access to d8 Finesse attacks.
So you can use a two handed weapon to Transcend every turn without dealing with handedness issues. Or to keep a free hand for other nonsense while you normally transcend every turn. Aren't the only non-weapon Ikons that care about your hands the Shield (which obviously you aren't using with a two-handed weapon) and the Horn of Plenty (which can eventually produce Tentacle Potions that you can use to pull other stuff out of it anyway.)
What is the actual benefit to having your sword be both, say, Gleaming Blade and Barrow's Edge? Just so you can invoke the transcendence of either without losing your bonus spirit damage on attacks. You can already keep your spirit damage up all the time by shifting your spark to a non-weapon ikon and just using that transcendence at the start of your turn, like Gaze Sharp as Steel will add precision damage to your strike with your weapon ikon on top of the spirit damage it's getting. Like I guess this means you could then invoke a weapon transcendence every single turn, but that genuinely doesn't seem as good to me as the other stuff you do with your other transcendences. Like maybe you could heal with Barrow's Edge every turn, or you could instead just juggle Barrow's Edge and Scar of the Survivor and heal every turn anyway (you don't need to cycle through them, you just need to put the spark in a different ikon than it was- you can just swap between your favorite two ikons), the +1 to fort saves is more useful than extra damage on strikes when it's not your turn. Taking two weapon ikons just seems like a weaker choice compared to "taking a weapon ikon and a useful other ikon that makes it easy to switch back to your weapon ikon." Though I guess there are valid character concepts where you might want to have a melee ikon and a ranged ikon, but this seems weaker than just taking Victor's Wreath and a Weapon ikon.
If there was a decent narrative reason that one physical object might count as two ikons (e.g. "the blade of the sword" is one ikon, and "the gem in the pommel" is another), I wouldn't have a problem with that. Like hypothetically you could have a combination item, like a bow staff, that has both a ranged ikon and a melee ikon. But you still need to go through the same process of "your spark is in one ikon at a time and getting it somewhere else requires spark transcendence or shift immanence. Like I don't think it's all that meaningful to differentiate between your belt and your shoes in this way.
I mean, the basic thing about the Pathfinder setting is that it's built to allow you to tell basically any kind of story you want that fits in the fantasy genre. Do you want a story with vikings? We got you. Pirates? Sure Ninja? Absolutely. Do you want to have a story where a Viking, a Pirate, and a Ninja explore a crashed spaceship overrun by undead robots? We have that too. This sort of "narrative maximalism" also covers "the afterlife" since you can justify basically any sort of "post-mortem fate" that you need the story to. PCs need to be able to get up from death over and over again, but you might want damnation for a villainous NPC, some sort of elevation into a kindly outsider for a heroic figure who dies tragically, reincarnation for someone else, and yet another person might sit around in Pharasma's waiting room for 100,000 years before the right person brings them back to do something. So if you're finding the afterlife complicated, it's because it's set up to enable you to tell literally any story you want about someone dying.
I think a big issue here is that people in the setting do not understand most of this stuff either- characters should not have a really clear answer for "what happens when I die" and generally neither should players lest they concern themselves more about the death of their characters than the story that precedes it. So part of it is that it's weird and confusing and complicated both so "whatever fate the story needs for a character is possible" and so players don't try to get the best death they can. The difference between raise dead and summon undead is as simple as "the first one brings back PCs, the second one gets you something to fight for you." If you are concerned about the difference Summon Undead and Create Undead you can simply explain that spell slots generally do not create situations that are permanent, to get a skeleton that doesn't collapse into bones at dawn or whenever the spell runs out you need a ritual. The ritual conveniently has the unholy tag on it so you can point out that the Goddess of Death objects to this.
I don't understand anything that happened in this thread.
Like "Refusal of the Call" is either the second or third step in the monomyth, depending on who you ask.
Well, an Astomoi would have no sense of "dark" or "light" and would have no association between "darkness" and "evil".
Protip: you can edit your posts for a short time after you make them. I do this a lot if I realize there's something I want to add, or if there's something I want to rephrase.
It's easy enough to see that: Hobgoblins see Bugbears and Goblins as undisciplined.
Is there a reason the PDF for the damn book is impossible to find??? It's not out yet. Subscribers get books early, but "buying it from the Paizo webstore" isn't possible until your FLGS gets their order fulfilled (because doing it the other way would damage those relationships.)
I'm pretty sure that you're never going to do justice to a "war" with a series of 4 vs. 6-8, and you're also not likely to retrofit Pathfinder to be able to support battles with 10,000 troops involved. Even actual wargames never hit that scale, where you instead want 100s of models to represent thousands- the skirmish system is sort of the same deal.
If they add anything, they need to make clear that is only a selection of examples. The more examples you list without explicitly saying they are examples, the more people think it is a Blacklist and anything not explicitly mentioned is somehow exempt. I think you could pretty cleanly change the description via "(such as talismans, ammunition, or Activations with a frequency limit) (changes in bold.) Like a hypothetical hand crossbow that has sharp bits and is designed for throwing should also not bypass reloading and you definitely shouldn't get special ammo for free this way.
Do the slavers have to be human? Duergar, hobgoblins and drow are obvious candidates.I don't think the drow even exist anymore. Pretty sure they had to retcon them away with the remaster due to IP conflicts with the other company. The Drow don't exist anymore and neither do the Duergar, the Duergar have been replaced by the Hryngar who are subterranean mean Dwarves who are into usury and multi-level-marketing rather than slavery. We haven't met the subterranean Elves yet, but the report is that they're going to be a lot nicer than the Drow were.
What happens when you put a combination weapon that uses ammunition (like a dagger pistol) in the Exemplar Ikon Shadow Sheath? A dagger pistol is a "one-handed thrown weapon of light Bulk or less" that fits in a sheath or holster and the Ikon says "you can Interact to draw an exact copy of the weapon from thin air." You probably shouldn't be able to bypass reloading this way, so it should probably be clarified?
I really really want to play a Rogue Gunslinger with the Exemplar Archetype and Shadow Sheath. Because the Dagger Pistol combination weapon in its melee form is indeed a 1h thrown weapon of Light Bulk. Would the dagger pistols you pull out of your shadow sheath come out loaded, assuming the one you put in to copy was loaded?
Asmodeus is one of the two "big bads" of the setting (the other being Rovagug). So all the titles for "being awful" go to him in a tiebreak scenario. Although Asmodeus is the "Dark Prince" in the sense of "evil; iniquitous; wicked" and Zon-Kuthon is the "Dark Prince" in the sense of "having very little or no light."
Shadow Sheath would be fine if it didn't also apply to finesse based melee weapons. It is written as if that is probably NOT the intent but the words definitely say that it does. Does it? My reading is that Shadow Sheath requires a 1-handed weapon with the thrown trait, so you can absolutely use daggers and hatchets but not rapiers and short swords. The strongest choice here is probably the chakram, but I confess the one I want to play uses an endless supply of corset knives she pulls out of her hair.
The exemplar archetype though is something that potentially has a lot of fun value. Like if you've decided "I want to be a thrown weapon character" well that's obviously not the most powerful thing you can play, but it's a reasonable class fantasy, and Shadow Sheath solves a lot of problems for thrown weapon characters with zero friction. So I can see why you'd want to allow it sometimes, because it makes a weak thing more fun rather than a strong thing even more powerful.
I think the closest I've done was my Ruby Phoenix unarmed Swashbucker who took Martial Artist for Stumbling Style/Feint (stumbling Feint is unusable without Flurry of Blows) then grabs Monk at 9th with Multitalented to pick up Flurry of Blows at 10th. This worked better than just taking the Monk Archetype since you couldn't get Stumbling Feint with Monk Archetype feats until 12th level, but Martial Artist could get it at 8th despite never being able to make use of the feat. But that's "taking two archetypes that overlap for layering reasons." Of course this character no longer works since I don't think the PC2 version of Martial Artist can even get Stumbling Feint, and Flurry of Blows is no longer full strength from archetyping.
I am constantly surprised by the pf2e community and how much debates and decisions always default back to Golarian lore accuracy, golarian rarity, and the inabilty to reflavor anything. Is it because much of the online community primarily plays PFS? I am a homebrew GM, and havent really run into this in other RPG spaces. During the development of Pathfinder 2nd edition there was a deliberate choice to make the material for the game not setting agnostic, with the understanding that "if you want to use Golarion stuff in another setting, you can figure out how it works there" instead of trying to make things generic so you can fit them anywhere (like PF1 did). If nothing else, baking "how this works in Golarion" the original version is a prompt for "how you can make it work in your setting." Like my homebrew setting has a huge number of dead gods (i.e. most of them), and the Exemplar being rare on Golarion doesn't stop me from making it common in my homebrew setting for exactly the same reason. It's just that my dead gods are mostly underground rather than falling from the sky, so maybe I can make it a metaphor for like "atomic power." Nothing here was anything Paizo needed to tell me, I could just take what Paizo told me and apply it to my own setting. I think issues of rarity are particularly setting specific by nature. Since some of the first rarity concerns yoú'd run into are "ancestries" but obviously the demographics of different places are going to be different. Some place other than Golarion might have zero gnomes but tons of androids.
There’s a big difference for main character syndrome between the Exemplar’s “I have inherited/stolen/acquired divine essence from a god answerable now only to myself and am a self sustaining demigod” vs the champion or cleric kneeling before a good who can take away their powers if they misbehave, or an oracle whose divine power comes with a curse they cannot avoid. I mean, the sorcerer, champion, and cleric are potential issues with "main character syndrome" since "I have special blood" or "I am chosen by god" already sort of lean that way. It's just that there's a lot of history in this game of people playing those classes whose character is not the most specialest special boy or girl, but just "a regular member of an adventuring party" so we mostly think it's fine. If someone plays their character in an annoying way because "I'm just RPing my class" we can point to numerous ways to not play that class that way. It's just that the Exemplar is new, no one had ever played one in a D20 game in 2009. So there's more of a risk of "playing it in an annoying way" is the thing that sticks, and that would be a shame since the class is pretty fun. If nothing else the rare tag always being a "ask the GM" thing is a check against "am I too much of a spotlight hog?"
I don't see the point of the rare tag other than to allow a DM to disallow the class based on the rare tag. This is the only point of the rare tag in any context. It's about worldbuilding a la "spells that are only found in ancient Jistkan libraries are not available anywhere else" not any guarantee that those things are useful or powerful. When something is rare, and not especially powerful, that makes it more likely for the GM to allow it when it doesn't clash with anything else the GM is up to. Like asking "hey, can I be someone who got splashed by godstuff?" is roughly as big an ask as "hey, can I play a Minotaur?". It's just that there are a lot more Minotaurs on Golarion than there are people who got splashed with godstuff. Remember how people in PF1 wanted to argue that their Sorcerers could have access to Blood Money because "my spells just pop into my head because I'm a sorcerer" despite that spell only existing in two of Karzoug's spellbooks and nowhere else in the universe? This sort of thing is specifically the problem that the rarity system is designed to solve. Even if Blood Money was terrible and nobody would want to cast it, you still shouldn't be able to get it unless you got it out of Karzoug's spellbooks.
I figure you can conjure something like "the local bandit lord has oppressed the underclass in their vicinity to varying degrees" almost anywhere remote enough to have bandit lords. But like "the international slave trade" or "chattel slavery in general" are gone in the Inner Sea. What you're likelier to see are more modern forms of slavery- things like prison labor, debtor's prison, and economic slavery; or ancient forms of slavery - various flavors of serfdom, or with cultural institutions that do provide modes of manumission even if they're inconsistently applied (Ancient Roman households would sometimes just "let go" their household slaves as a reward for service, but if you were a manual laborer you were SOL.) Probably the cleanest way to do it in canon would be to be a PC from Geb who escaped from being one of the thralls who are bred as a food source for vampires et al.
It being Paizo, it's entirely possible that, as a nigh-all-powerful, irredeemably evil FEMALE character, she redeems herself and becomes a good guy [Sorshen, Nocticula, Arazni].I don't think it's fair to put Arazni in the same category there - she was never in that category of "loved being evil, loved doing evil, willing did it for millenia". She was obviously being forced into her role, and resented it - both the evil forces putting her in that role, and the forces that were aligned against Geb but did nothing to rescue her. She's angry, she's resentful - but she was never, in my opinion, irredeemably evil. She was doing evil things in a terrible situation. Another important thing about Arazni is that she's not really one of the good guys. She might end up there eventually, but she's decidedly not good. The goddess of "survive at all costs" and "hurt the person who hurt you bad enough they can't hurt you again" is someone a good person *could* follow, but she's not personally invested in good except insofar as a good number of the entities she hates are evil.
I think the Exemplar is more of a "fun martial" than a "bleeding edge powerful martial." If you're allergic to how martial characters sometimes have a reliable loop that is often the best thing to do, the whole "spark juggling" mechanic of the Exemplar is sort of designed to cater to you, especially when you start adding riders to transcendence effects with epithets.
It does feel like Ravounel's expansion is more "people near the border decided they would rather be citizens of Ravounel than citizens of Cheliax" for obvious reasons, and Ravounel not being willing to say "that puts us in a tough situation, so we're going to ignore human rights for a bit" because of the national character of the young nation
I Think the main difference between "goblins" and "halflings" in terms of "who gets to have a nation" is that goblins are frequently unwelcome in human cities and are positioned as outsiders, whereas Halflings are generally welcome there. Halflings are gregarious and mostly like people, goblins might be friendly but are not historically tolerated by pink-skinned folks.
Nidal has its own civil war brewing that I don't believe is resolved in the Hellfire Crisis (but is described in the Hellfire Dispatches Lost Omens book.)
It does seem like "there are more people in Ravounel than was previously reported" is an easy handwave to fix a lot of problems. Like one of the reason that fantasy maps are generally sparse is you you might need to posit "oh, there are 5-6 other cities roughly 80% of the size of Kintargo and Vyre in Ravounel" because that's what the story requires. There are assuredly many cities in Golarion that have simply never been visited in an adventure or described in a setting book. Like the norm for Pathfinder for the past decade plus has been that the borders of countries rarely change outside of an event that explicitly changes them. The norm for fantasy writ large has been that every city is underpopulated relative to what it should be realistically, after all there should be many more farmers in Golarion just to feed everybody.
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