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A thing about planes is that they can be kind of inacessible if someone sufficiently powerful can control the plane and wants to make it inaccessible. So it's entirely plausible that the evil elemental lords just put the other two elemental planes where they were extremely difficult to access, but the things native to the planes hardly noticed.
Eh... True, I suppose. But it could have been an order based on the plane, an esoteric order from antiquity few knew about and so on. The same book mentions Talos and Ardande existed on golarian in small enclaves despite the loss of their planes.Yeah the decision to not have a metal order in RoE really annoyed me. Paizo broke from metal = unnatural and even introduced an elemental plane of metal and then ... druids didn't get a order for it. Very frustrating.The reappearance of the Metal plane is VERY recent. Having something as structured as a Druidic order based on it suddenly appearing out of the blue feels somewhat off. It was my understanding that the planes of metal and wood existed within the other four planes for a while until some cosmic event made them their own planes. Like there are ancient beings on the elemental plane of metal that predate the plane on which they live by eons, they just used to be in a very metal oriented part of the plane of earth (since the earth is where you dig to get metal.)
To preface, I HIGHLY doubt what I am about to say would actually happen. But Starfinder 2E did grant its undead full undead benefits. On the one hand, I think there is a small chance that Remaster Pathfinder 2E could go the same route. But on the other hand, the fact that Automatons upon remaster only got partial construct benefits instead of full construct benefits does give precedence for Pathfinder undead to still only get partial benefits. Not something I'd count on, but I don't think the chances are 0%, especially if errata is a possibility for the Automatons. I think part of this is the different assumptions of the games. Starfinder kind of assumes that even low level characters are able to survive things like the vacuum of space or on a planet with a poisonous atmosphere, etc. Which is most of the problem spots for "undead benefits" in Pathfinder. Since it's generally bad if one PC can completely circumvent an obstacle other characters have to commit significant resources to. It's much like how flying ancestries are less of an issue in Starfinder because Jetpacks are low level items and most people have ray guns.
It might be worthwhile to clarify that Command Thrall is a grave cantrip like Thrall Charge. My observation is more that this should be errata, since the Necromancer ordering their thralls around should not be subtle, so as to avoid situations where an intelligent opponent might not realize that the problem is "the person responsible for them" rather than the 1 hp things that fail every check.
I am puzzled as to why many parts of Golarion seem to have to be inspired by real world regions of earth?? Well, it's fundamentally because most of our ideas about people and places are at some level inspired by "our ideas about what our own planet and its people are like." So in a fantasy game you want access to things like Vikings, and also Dracula, and Pirates, and Conan, and organized crime, etc. because players might want to play characters that are related to those themes or a GM might want to tell a story related to those themes. This is part and partial to how Golarion is a grab-bag setting that's supposed to let you play basically any character or any story that fits somewhere in this flavor of fantasy, so you need to put that somewhere on the map and for whatever reason it makes sense to have your Vikings be geographically distinct from your Pirates and your Samurai so we can have a story that's "just pirates" if we really want.
Varisia is tricky here, since the entire nation of Varisia was originally conceived of as "an entire fantasy setting" so it has access to more different fantasy tropes than is standard for a fictional nation.
The druid already establishes that "shapechanging isn't especially hard on your body" so I don't think there's a reason to make Con the KAS for a shifter class- if the Druid can change into a sparrow and a hippo and a t. rex without any inherent stress on their body, the class whose thing is "shapeshifting" should be able to do it too. If anything, you would give it a STR/DEX KAS and some limit based on CON, like how a Monk's Ki Spells have a Wis based DC.
Yeah the pre-remaster Ankou got renamed to Ozthoom in Monster Core 2. As someone unfamiliar with Celtic myth/lore, what was wrong with the Ankou that made it a travesty? I think it's more that the role that the Ozthoom plays (fey assassin, basically) doesn't really match the role of the Ankou in Breton folklore- which is basically more of a psychopomp than a murderer. Probably the number one thing you want to avoid when adapting the stories from a culture is to misrepresent the role of the mythic being, since more people are going to read your RPG sourcebook than are going to do research on folklore from a different culture.
I think considering that Pathfinder has always underlined "it is clear to anyone intelligent enough that the Eidolon is under the control of the Summoner" that the Necromancer and their Thralls should work the same way.
It might be worthwhile to clarify that Command Thrall is a grave cantrip like Thrall Charge.
I think it's natural for a player whose character has an endless ability to do something to constantly be looking for ways to use this out of combat. So I think it might reasonable to interrogate why "the PC with a climb/fly speed is always looking to get up high to look around" is less annoying than "the necromancer player wants to trigger all the pit traps with disposable bodies." Since "I'm going to march a thrall down the hallway to see if it's dangerous" strikes me as just as natural a thing for the character to think of as "I'm going to go on top of that building to see if I can see anything." Particularly since the GM has comparable levers to prevent both (e.g. "you're indoors" and "it's incumbent on the party to be stealthy.") Like a lot of GMs dealt with a Kineticist in 1e where the desire was to "be constantly invisible, flying, and sculpt the battlefield" right? The way I always handled that is that there are times when that is an amazingly useful ability for the party to have access to, but you limit how often that comes up.
Eh? Is this the real quote? "muscle, covered in... bone"? What?! It has an exoskeleton? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Ok, now I'm a bit afraid.You create a perfect thrall that’s the conglomeration of all aspects of necromancy. The perfected thrall is made of pure, dense muscle, covered in a layer of hardened bone, and inhabited by the spirit of a mighty warrior. This was the impetus for me wanting to make an Anadi Necromancer, since from that person's perspective exoskeleton's are normal, the internal frame is a costume you put on to not freak people out.
Two things occur to me: thralls are easily identified, though it takes an action to do so (which raises a question: if a given character identifies some creature during some adventure, adventure path, or scenario, is he later, in another adventure, etc., required to identify it again, or does he automatically recognize it as that creature?) and if thralls create a difficulty for the GM's party or parties of monsters or NPCs, then the GM is in the same boat as the party of PCs who has difficulty dealing with the monsters, NPCs, hazards, or whatever, with which the GM presents them. Turnabout is fair play, no? :-) I think in terms of "using thralls as forward scouts" this is going to happen in exploration mode, so we're not tracking things action by action. So I intend to run it as "anything I deem to be intelligent is going to know basically what this is" (i.e. an undead thing that isn't autonomous). I figure it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a thrall and an actual zombie because thralls will just sit there idly when not being commanded, whereas zombies are generally moving constantly (albeit slowly).
But on the other hand "when you use these tactics to solve these problems it's annoying to the GM" and "we use those tactics to solve those problems because those sorts of problems aren't fun for us" is the sort of situation that can only be resolved by the players and the GM talking to each other like adults. Like, I haven't run a "corridor of death" in a long, long time because I don't think it's fun or interesting.
Is it good for the ooze? what really gets left behind after a thrall is destroyed, and for how long? With oozes being mindless I figure that "it just keeps doing that whenever it has the opportunity" is as good a model for "what the ooze wants" as anything.
Like "and I just kept feeding thralls to the ooze while the party made their escape" seems like a good time for the ooze and also for the party.
I think the Necromancer player should shine in some fights where the enemies are not equipped to deal with massive numbers of disposable obstacles, just like other classes get to excel in other situations that are entirely appropriate to their skillsets. It's just that not every encounter needs to be like that- someday you will fight a dragon and the dragon will laugh at masses of thralls (they have breath weapons). If the party gets especially bored of "we win the fight by bogging down the opponent with thralls" then you just run more encounters where that doesn't work and fewer ones that do. If the party is having fun, then you're doing your job as the GM.
Isn't the solution to "the entire fighting area is gummed up with threalls" just "somebody has an AoE attack"? Like if the PCs were fighting a whole mass of zombies, somebody would think "throw a fireball into the biggest group" so it's reasonable if an NPC does that too.
It does seem fair play to have the GM play the antagonists to be more intelligent when the PCs are using smart tactics. Obviously some antagonists are going to be more intelligent than other guys, but if the party wants to play a very smart game it's also a kind of fun if they don't solve the puzzle immediately every time.
Yeah, if there's a mindless undead that's not familiar to the intelligent person observing it, and they're not aware of another reason there might be an undead thing around (e.g. they're not working with someone who uses those) they're at the very least going to figure "something's up." Like if you're crewing a guard tower at the perimeter of the bandit king's forest fortress, you're not going to say anything about deer or birds or woodland critters but you're absolutely going to key on "a zombie" and while you might not raise the alarm immediately you will be on high alert.
The thing about searching generally as an exploration activity is that thralls are really terrible at any of it except walking into traps. They don’t talk or inherently see anything, so they aren’t really any good for spotting hidden enemies. Especially as the trap thing was called out in the class description, they really should just make “Thrall Sweep” into its own specific exploration activity that calls out what it does. Honestly in my experience "being stealthy" is relevant a lot more often than "avoiding traps" and Thralls are fantastically bad at "not giving away the fact that there's a Necromancer nearby."
I think Pharasma being the most powerful of all deities shouldn't be overlooked when discussing why other deities listen to her. It also colors how I interpret the "rightness" of her actions if no one can stand up to her. I think it's a mixture of "Pharasma is more powerful than the other deities" and "it would put Pharasma in a very compromising position if she were actually to intervene against one deity or in favor of another." Since you're pretty confident Pharasma isn't going to come for you, if you antagonize her just a little because her position is not just "she's the oldest and most powerful" there's also a lot of "her position is dependent on being trusted as a neutral arbiter." Like Asmodeus doesn't like Pharasma, but he also needs to send a lot of infernal barristers to her court to argue for souls, so antagonizing her isn't smart.
The Thaumaturge is a build complexity class, not a play complexity class. By the time you've figured out the build, you've basically also figured out the common play loops. The big difference between the Thaumaturge and the Exemplar here is that the Exemplar starts with all three Ikons, but the Thaumaturge starts with 1 Implement and grows to 3, and only powers them at certain levels so there's a lot more "plan your character from the jump" than there is with the Exemplar.
It does just seem as a GM the best solution to "players are over-reliant on a specific strategy" is not to put your thumb on the scale and say no, but to simply provide a few situations where that strategy doesn't work or at least that it's less efficacious than a different strategy the players can also access. This is 100% fair play GMing, since if players can come across a tactic and exclusively use that for the next six months of games then they're going to get bored before the story reaches a conclusion. Like if the party has to sneak up to the bandit fortress in the woods, a bunch of thralls wandering around aren't helpful. They're also not particularly helpful on a sailing voyage, or at a fancy party that's about to turn violent, etc.
You can have a purple skinned human with green hair and gold eyes if you want. There are no rules for aesthetics.
It seems like "your tactic is annoying the GM" is a thing we can just have a reasonable conversation about as adults. If you're sending thralls ahead in the hallway to trigger any traps (a tactic that also works with the Kineticist's familiar feats) you either "don't use traps like that anymore" or you seed in a few traps that are better to never trigger at all, since the disposable thrall triggering the trap puts the party at risk.
One assumes the upcoming Darklands AP is going to give us quite a bit more on the Ayindillar, though I doubt it will ever be an ancestry of its own (just an Elf heritage with a collection of feats, most likely.)
I guess my question is whether feats that enable "a set of options available to a bunch of classes" can't just be done with an archetype, specifically if the initial feat in the archetype is valuable. Since the things I want most for expansions for classes are mostly the sorts of things that are specific to those classes: I want more kineticist impulses or another element, I want more inventor modifications/innovations, I want more thaumaturge implements, I want more barbarian instincts, etc.
I feel like in terms of unbalancing things "this is really good at mitigating damage" or "this is really good at healing" is less of a problem than "this is very good at doing damage or otherwise ending fights." Since the game of resource attrition isn't really a fun one for players except when they're winning, and someone has to actually end the fights and it's not going to be the guy spamming "tree." If some builds end up delivering the party to the next fight with more resources than others do, that's just the game.
I think giving the tree Overflow just locks the phytokineticist into an even more stable loop, since you already have "timber sentinel then one action to do whatever with (likely blast)" and now you have "Gather elements, use the free blast, timber sentinel" every round. If I wanted to keep people from spamming it, I think giving it a 1d4 round cooldown (like a breath weapon) would be much better than making it an overflow since 2 action overflow impulses are spammable (I have played a character who used Lava Leap ad nauseum.)
Yeah, the real difference between "Protector Tree" and "The Kineticist can spam walls" is that the former is more poachable through multiclassing and how the wall impulses show up late enough into your career that your toolbox already has a bunch of fun options.
Yeah "the tree is subject to AoE, it automatically fails reflex saves since it can't move out of the way, but is mindless because it's a tree, and uses the caster's fort save" is how I've been running it.
I always thought that there should be an "only physical damage" element to parallel how Fire is only energy damage. Whether that's wood, earth, or metal is up for discussion though. My pick would be poison for wood, and acid for metal and nothing for earth.
I think there's very little room to make Timber Sentinel worse without also just making it something an actual kineticist would never bother with. So the problem might actually be poaching it with multiclassing?
Also helps to keep in mind that nothing is stopping you from spawning the tree along a wall or from a ceiling which makes using it during indoor aerial combat more of a possibility. It feels like "the protector tree grows like a normal tree- its roots are in the ground and its branches reach up" is a reasonable call for the GM to make to prevent you from putting it on the ceiling or whatever.
It does seem like the best solution to Timber Sentinel is just to adjust enemy tactics so that the First Order Optimal solution no longer works as well. But Protector Tree, if it costs a spell slot, is a bad spell I would never bother with as a Druid. It's odd that this results in more hand-wringing than the Kineticist's access to Flight and Invisibility which are good spells that people do use.
And Timber Sentinel is just broken on principle. No feat should allow unlimited uses or a max rank spell that would otherwise require a spell slot. I don't know about that. The Kineticist is supposed to be better than actual casters at things that are specifically in the class's narrow purview. Like the aerokineticist can cast the equivalent of "fly" and "invisibility" all day long at no cost, and nobody is concerned about that. It makes sense to me that someone who has a gate to the elemental plane of wood in their soul is better at "making trees grow" than druids or sorcerers etc.
I mean, the issue with Timber Sentinel in my experience is that if you're regularly spamming it, as a 2 action impulse you don't get to do a lot else. It's not like playing the "dedicated healer" of old because your class kit gives you a lot of other things that maybe you might want to do, but can't if you have to keep putting up trees.
But if I was in charge of a new edition thing, my main goal would be to make the weakest things from the last edition much stronger and the strongest things from the last edition somewhat weaker. There is a larger problem of "non-save stats are often irrelevant if they're not your KAS" that probably won't be solved going forward, but we're not going to fix "you don't need STR/INT/CHA if they're not your KAS and you're not going to specialize in skills based on that stat" until PF3.
I also don't think "the Wizard is the weakest casting class" if it were true would even be a problem. That identity is always going to fall to one of the caster classes, people concerned with power can pick something else, and people who love the class will stick with it even when it's mediocre (goodness knows I've played a Monk in so many editions where it was a bad class.) If there is a problem here it's in the feelings of people who were drawn to the Wizard as the strongest class who feel let down now that it's not.
My conceptual pitch for a class niche for the Wizard is that the class's understanding of magic on a theoretical level allows them to do metamagic type stuff much better than anybody else, in the same way that a chef who understands culinary theory can substitute ingredients. So you could do things like the PF1 Arcanist Exploits where you can change the damage type, area, etc. better than anybody else.
Class niches need to be smaller than "I am the best at fighting" or "I am the best at doing damage." Since like a fighter is the best at accurately hitting people with weapons, but doesn't have the defense of a Champion or the damage potential of a Barbarian, or the action economy and mobility of a Monk. So I think "the Wizard is the best at magic and should be King Caster" is wrong-headed and doesn't belong in the game. Obviously there should be something that Wizards are better at than anybody else, and that can't just be "they have access to the Arcane list, which is strong" since Witches and Sorcerers get that too and other stuff.
It's already simple to get your immanence for your weapon ikon every time you make an attack. Just spark transcendance with your weapon and move your spark into a second ikon that the transcendance condition is simple/beneficial (Gaze Sharp as Steel for example) then you spark transcendence at the start of your turn and move your spark back to your weapon. The only benefit I can see of having two ikons in the same weapon (aside from having a combination weapon, which seems a legitimate reason to have both a ranged and melee ikon) is to set up "I am sparking transcendence on my weapon every turn" when that just doesn't seem like that strong a strategy, since most of them have reasons you wouldn't want to use them (e.g. you're full on HP, allies would get caught in the AoE, you're only fighting a single enemy, you miss, etc.)
I think the thing about "I want to play Merlin" is that Merlin is not a low level character and a level 18 Wizard can more or less do whatever they want anyway (just not to the degree that they could in PF1, where stuff like "infinite free wishes" and "no one can make the save against this spell" were on the table.) You shouldn't set your sights on being some sort of fictional archmage who is a mover and shaker in global politics without first considering what that person is like as a low-level schmuck.
One way to make this work is to do what the rare Amnesiac background does where the GM chooses where the new flaw goes. So if you wanted to roll a Dwarf Sorcerer and you wanted high Wis, Con, and Cha you could ask the GM to move the flaw and then they would put it in Str, Int, or Dex. If they're concerned about every caster dropping Str for min-max reasons you could just drop it in Dex to cancel out another bonus the player will want to put there.
I really want a second dedicated primal caster. For Arcane we have the Wizard and Magus; for Occult we have the Bard, Necromancer, and Psychic; for Divine we have the Cleric, Oracle, and Animist; but for Primal it's just the Druid. There has to be a second concept that revolves around Vital+Material essence.
Yeah, a system like this would be better in a game where the stats are equally balanced against each other, as opposed to Pathfinder where you never want to start with a -1 in Dex, Wis, or Con and indeed you probably bump those stats every 5 levels until you cap your armor or get to +4.
I feel like in terms of "player expression" it's better to just do two free boosts and leave the stat you would have put the flaw into at 10. Since I feel like the issue is that allowing players three boosts with their choice of flaw is going to enable a lot of min-maxing builds where someone decides they really don't care about Strength or Charisma or something.
It's mostly that Wizards who are decent and keep to themselves mostly but are positive influences on the community, etc. don't tend to have "stories that require heroes" told about them. The quota for "good wizards" is mostly filled by the PCs, but it's not like Jatembe isn't an important figure in the setting.
I think the story of "Good Lich" is not "you never did anything bad to become a Lich" but that you took a look at yourself, and realize you regret so much of it and all the work you put in towards making things right. Since you can't become a Lich without doing some truly awful stuff, but you have a long unlife ahead of you and you aren't like a ghoul or a vampire where you *need* to hurt people to continue living.
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