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Like if you're an Elemental Barbarian and the party is struggling with lack of AoEs, just take Elemental Explosion at 6th level. It's once per Rage, but it's solid damage and has the same range as your enlarged, reach whirlwind attack. The real benefit to being big as a Barbarian is fishing for Reactive Strikes. Giant Barbarians benefit much more from being able to take free swings at people who walk through their space than they do from giant whirlwind attacks.
I think a funny way to do a conspiracist character would be for your character to believe in some of the craziest stuff that happened in other Adventure Paths that the player would know because of their personal familiarity with the story but the character would have no way of knowing. Obviously you don't want to spoil other players on other stories, since that would be rude. But stuff like "Elves are actually aliens" and "The Necronomicon is in Casmaron" should fly.
I wonder if a traditional six part AP with world-changing stakes couldn't be made into two 3 part APs simply by having every third one culminate in a satisfying conclusion. Like you could split a "major war between two powers" story by having the first triplet be about "defending your homeland against invaders" and the second be about "going behind enemy lines to end the war." You'd run the risk of having there be six months of stories set in basically two places with similar themes, but I wonder if you couldn't make it work like this.
I do think there's value in an adventure that starts at like 5th-7th level, and continues on for three volumes. It's just that you couldn't chain that into another 3 part AP, it would have to stand on its own. Since one of the holdups for me with a lot of 3 part APs is "I find the first few levels of a character's career pretty dull" (having characters with very few tools is primarily useful for onboarding new players to a system), but jumping straight into 11th level can turn the knob a bit far towards "gonzo". Especially since creating a 6th level character from scratch is much easier than creating an 11th level character from scratch.
I mean, to me "let's play the elf-AP with an all-dwarf party" sounds like the beginning of an RPG Horror Stories reddit thread. This is basically* what we're doing, and it's fun. This just happened organically since SKT seemed like the most natural lead-in to Spore War. It's not like Golarion has the whole "elves and dwarves hate each other for generations" thing you see in other fantasy settings, these are just different people with a common cause who see things differently. *we have one gnome in the party.
I suspect the "heroes" of the Hell's Vengeance AP could very well still be around in Cheliax so I'm guessing Abrogail II might assign them to a special job in Isger to make sure it doesn't successfully secede. One imagines that the Hell's Vengeance party is going to have as much to do with the events of the AP as the Hell's Rebels party is going to. Which is to say "maybe those two factions go fight offscreen and affect nothing."
A hyper-specific wish that I don't expect to see come true: a snake ancestry. Basically humanoid, human-sized snakes with arms and tails instead of legs. A few different heritages that paint different types of snakes in broad strokes: desert, jungle, aquatic, venomous, etc. Feats that do things like let you climb a tree or constrict a foe you have grappled. There's a great homebrew version, but something official would be wonderful. :3Nagaji have had a Heritage for this since they were introduced, I believe! Sacred Nagaji- replaces your fangs unarmed attack you get a Tail attack (d6 B, finesse) and you get a +2 circumstance bonus to resist grapple and trip. No problem with taking this heritage on any Nagaji, but as with all heritages you run into the issue of "you can't be this and also be a Nephilim, Dhampir, etc."
Return of the Return of the Rise of the Revenge of the Runelords: REVENGEANCE
But players will never truly believe they can trust the word of Asmodeus, even when they very much can. Missing a very important never in the earlier post, in bold above. A good way to get players to question whether fire is hot or gravity makes things fall down is to give them accurate information from an antagonist who is perceived to be untrustworthy, duplicitous, and scheming.
I think one trick for running Asmodeus as a GM is that sometimes he is entirely fair and honest, because he is dealing from a position of strength. He's not always trying to get one over on everyone he deals with, because he already thinks he's better than them. If you anger him, obviously that's a bad idea but angering nicer gods is also a bad idea. Plus, the fact that sometimes he's a straight shooter means he's much better at bamboozling people when he wants to. The fact that not who deals with Asmodeus eventually realizes "well, that was a mistake" makes it easier for him to deal with the people he really wants to ensnare. But players will truly believe they can trust the word of Asmodeus, even when they very much can.
I still want to be able to be a moth-person (so I can play one as a thaumaturge who is extremely happy with their lantern implement).
She's also the goddess of sea monsters and there's nothing unholy about a kraken- a kraken just has to eat.
Like it's a bit weird that a flurry ranger will just happily pair a light pick with a sword but a fighter who is ostensibly "the master of all weapons" would never want to do that because of the proficiency issue.
Huh, I went to check Sky King's Tomb for info on the Caligni and to see who else would be appropriate. I never knew that Drow actually did get a replacement in the form of ayindilar elves, colloqually known as cavern elves. N.B. that the Ayindilar are a "replacement for Drow" in that "this is the name for the elves who live in the Darklands". They aren't really similar to the Drow in any other way (they're not a cruel matriarchal empire with a thing about spiders and poison, say.) I think part of the pivot is that the Ayindilar are supposed to be some of the nicest people you're liable to meet in the Darklands.
It does seem specifically unfortunate how a fighter built around two-weapon fighting is disinclined from using mismatched weapons: say a battleaxe and a clan dagger, or a warhammer and a scorpion whip, etc. because while those ideas are potentially thematic and interesting, it's not a good idea to two weapon fight with weapons from different weapon groups in the mid-game. This is something you could fix with feats (like a stance specific for two dissimilar weapons) though.
I think a strong argument for monkeys instead of other Primates is that monkeys coexist with humans in many places (Southern Asia mostly) in a way that more human-like primates never would. So you could have monkeys just lounging about in your temple of Abadar that would constitute only minor nuisances that we tolerate because they're sacred, but you'd always be at risk that a chimp would tear off someone's face even if they were a sacred chimp.
A rough estimate of the power of a mythic destiny is how many levels you can choose an option that does not have the text "spend 1 Mythic Point". Options that let you spend 1 Mythic Point for a single action are especially disfavored. A major issue with mythic is that "mythic points are extremely rare" so ideally you get at least 1 minute out of every high-level thing that costs the metacurrency. Better are things like the Ascended Celestial's 14th level feat that just gives you a fly speed.
While you're there, could you please do something about the pile of skeletons? It's going to hurt your vibe, if nothing else (unless "skeletons for ambiance" are your thing now.)
Like the PF1 fighter wasn't a terrible class, but it required an extreme degree of systems mastery* to make competitive whereas other classes were just as strong with relatively little optimization. * Spoiler:
For example- leave an advanced weapon training slot empty, so you can use martial flexibility gained through barroom brawler and/or a brawler dip in order to grab the Advanced Weapon Training feat, to choose the Item Mastery advanced weapon training option, to choose the Item Mastery feat that corresponds to the spell you want to cast. You cast these spells based on Con with a your BAB as the caster level, and you ignore the uses/day limits on the item mastery feats, instead being only limited by how many uses of martial flexibility you had- 8 at level 5 is doable. Congratulations, you are now a fighter with 8 top-level casts of lightning bolt. The PF2 fighter on the other hand is quite possibly the single best class for a beginning since you're almost guaranteed to have a pretty good character if you just choose feats based on their names and how appropriate you think that sort of thing is for your character.
Sarusan- PCs aren't allowed and by extension no crises that would require the intervention of the PCs are allowed.
Yeah, Hit Points are an abstraction to make combat less swingy and random, the fact that a 10th level character can survive getting hit by a dozen arrows is part of the cost of "we're not making combat even swingier than it already is." Combat is generally the best place to lean on "make the game fun" rather than "make it simulationist" since it's the kind of conflict that, if done properly, is easy to iterate on in the case of a story.
I think most NPCs should have a passing familiarity with magic, but an understanding of how a specific class works should be exceedingly rare. Like "understanding if you stop the Summoner, you stop the Eidolon" should be like "understanding that the Witch's familiar is the source of your curse."
There's LOTS of interpretations to the line of Summoner stating that its sigils "makes it readily apparent to an intelligent observer that the two of you are connected in some way". IMO "immediately knowing that if one dies, so does the other" is not one of the reasonable ones. Yeah, a reasonable interpretation (which is wrong) would be "if the tiny squishy one loses control then the big monster just goes rampaging, which would be worse."
The Warrior of Legend class archetype is pretty cool, I wouldn't mind getting more stuff like that.
To be honest, this is why I think I'll kinda pass on playing future APs that start at level 1. The damage / HP math is so absurdly bad that it's just not fun once you learn that your are one zero-agency 5% chance roll away from Dying 2 at all times.To be fair, player HP math is done in such a way that, even at level 1 (the as-stated most brutal level in the game) a creature that is AT LEVEL with you will not one-shot you with a crit barring some f@#%in' WACKY exceptions and extremely poor luck. Double damage from a crit will get you CLOSE, but your ancestry gives you HP at level 1 specifically to avoid 100-0 scenarios being an extremely common occurrence. Yeah, ancestry HP exists specifically to make this sort of thing (i.e. "unlucky crit, make a new character") much rarer, but you can as a GM mitigate it even further with house rules. Like the math of the game will tolerate "just give everybody 10 extra HP at level 1." Why I don't like starting at level 1 is more about "playing level 1 characters is dull, compared to playing higher level characters who have more tactical options."
I don't think "a class archetype that removes shield block" is really on the table, for two reasons. - Getting the Shield Block feat as a bonus feat basically represents what used to be "Shield Proficiency" in the previous edition. If anybody should be proficient in the use of shields, it's the "master of arms and armor" that is the Fighter class. - Archetypes that let you trade a thing you aren't going to use for something you want are really more of a PF1 thing. Class Archetypes in PF2 mostly exist to grant abilities to a class that need to be online from level 1 for thematic reasons, and/or abilities that are larger than a single feat but don't really work with the basic chassis (e.g. a spellshot gunslinger gets archetype spellcasting through later feats, a non-spellshot gunslinger doesn't need that.)
I think the mitigating factor on timber sentinel is that it is fully two actions, which prevents you from using any other two-action activity and generally just leaves you with one. Like I'm playing a wood kineticist now, and I genuinely find that I don't want to spam it because then I don't get to do anything else really. Like you want to be able to land Hail of Splinters early, throw up some jagged berms or a wall or a sanguiviolent roots. "Stand there casting Tree" is really very boring! The Summoner is specifically the place where you can snag it via the Kineticist Archetype and "Act Together" still leaves your Eidolon two actions to do things. So I think it's a more potentially problematic thing to bolt onto a Summoner than in its original context. It is potentially super-thematic though- my Strength of Thousands character was a Leshy Plant Summoner with the Druid (Leaf Order) archetype, so I wish the kineticist existed so I could have grabbed Infinitree.
The analogy I would draw is that the positive integers are infinite, but in some sort of hypothetical "elemental plane of numbers" if someone started taking huge quantities of prime numbers then some math-elemental would get annoyed at that and want to fix the situation. Like just because there's no shortage of water in the elemental plane of water doesn't mean that somebody liked the water you took and would like to replace it.
I honestly have no idea why Paizo thought it was a good idea to omit playtesting entirely for War of Immortals. The Exemplar and Animist were both extensively playtested, I figure they didn't want to run two playtests for one book or overcomplicate the WoI playtest (since they previously found that doing 4 classes at once for the APG didn't work as well as the 2-class playtests.) Like the Mythic rules were something they could have playtested, but so are the rules for guns. The precedent is mostly that they always playtest classes but don't (publicly) playtest anything other additional material. It will be interesting to see how much of this will need to change for SF2e, since there are "additional rules" that should receive additional playtesting for that game which are not classes (e.g. "Mecha rules").
I assume that whenever someone on a planet opens a plane to the elemental plane of water to take some water out, later on an adjudicator from the elemental plane of water removes an equivalent amount of water from somewhere on the same planet, just to keep the books balanced. This means "take 10,000 gallons in order for people in a city to drink" is a workable solution since later on the ocean is going to lose 10,000 gallons.
I must have missed the Mythic Rule playtest. I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention. I do want a more usable Mythic ruleset than PF1, but I don't want it to not feel very mythic. I guess I'll see when I use it.You didn't miss it: there wasn't one. Mythic really felt like the sort of thing we should have playtested, but it would be harder to run than a class playtest for sure.
Yeah, the things that are going to be easier to drop from SF2 are probably more along the lines of "ancestries (with the GM making adjustments for flying ones)" and "certain classes (e.g. Solarian)" than equipment.
When can we learn the actual title of the book that these classes are going to be in? Presumably it wasn't in the playtest because of some sort of metanarrative event we haven't broken the seal on, but it's awkward to refer to the book without a title (as in "X is coming out in 2026.")
It's genuinely weird how the Beast Lord is written to be "you and your animal companion are two halves of one whole" but while you're significantly harder to put down in a way that lasts, your companion is not. So you're going to be replacing your wolf/cat/bird/bear/whatever with some frequency because, being mythic, you find yourself in more dangerous situations than a normal PC does. That's kind of an issue of "it doesn't do what it says on the tin."
Yeah, a thing Paizo is doing in 2e (which is good mind you) is "write about an 'exotic' place from the perspective of the people who live there, for whom this is all normal." So an Arcadian sourcebook should be more about "making characters who are from Arcadia" than "having adventures in Arcadia" anyway. The assumptions of a book about "having adventures in a place" is that most of the people in the party are from this place, and there shouldn't be special allowances for a specific kind of outsiders since we know people could travel so your Arcadia party could just as readily have PCs from Tian Xia, Garund, or Castrovel as it could characters from Avistan. Like the main reason Avistan is special is "that's where Varisia is" since Varisia is the original Pathfinder setting.
How often does "there's a law against it" stop a PC from doing something though? Like "characters trying to survive in a hostile place" is a pretty standard story in this sort of thing.
The Qadira story just seems like a different one than the Cheliax/Andoran one. Like Geb and Nex are not going to choose sides in the Cheliax/Andoran war either.
There's eventually going to be errata on War of Immortals and sometimes they address balance issues in errata.I would like them to make far fewer of these balance issues to start with. Sure, it's better to not have these issues. But they have shown a willingness to address these kinds of issues with errata, so I hope they do so on the next pass.
I think this is a toggle the GM can turn on or off depending on the characters people want to play. Like do you want to make "two separate key stats" appealing to your PCs, or are you fine with people doubling up on one for maximal synergy. Any time you're using a variant rule there's going to be some adjusting needed by the GM (like the dual class rules specifically say "you might disallow combinations" and "you should limit how much of a benefit a character gets from feats that scale based on the number of feats you have".) So there's no such thing as RAW when it comes to variants- it's whatever sort of game the GM wants to run.
I know we don't use this naming convention for books anymore, but I still crave a book titled "Ultimate Weirdness." Also a First World book in the style of Book of the Dead titled "Masters of the First."
There's eventually going to be errata on War of Immortals and sometimes they address balance issues in errata. Like the fact that "Mythic Points are genuinely very difficult to regain" and "Rewrite Fate makes most of the effects of the form "you can spend a Mythic Point to attempt the check at mythic proficiency" from the callings irrelevant" seem like something worth addressing.
Like the Common language on Eox is Eoxian, the Common Language in Russia is Russian. These are both places your Pathfinder character could go (or maybe even be from).
Another example here is that Phlegyas will train some (many?) atheists to become Psychopomps, not out of any loyalty to Pharasma, but because "helping all the dead things in the universe cross over" is a job that requires an incredible number of hands and atheists are available for this job as there isn't a different divine realm they were looking forward to or anything. At that point you're not really "beholden" to Pharasma any more than you're beholden to your boss at work (or more specifically your boss's boss.) I imagine there are Rahadoumi folks that would be fine with the opportunity to contribute useful consolation to a great number of people, and one thing many atheist or irreligious people find value in is "helping other people for the sake of doing so."
Wasn't one of the big criticisms of Necromancer is that there was no way for the thralls to help with flying enemies as levels got higher and that became more common? Or being a completely dead feature in an underwater campaign? Surprised that wasn't mentioned at all. They don't usually drill down too deeply in these sorts of debriefs, they mostly give the "here's the big questions we were wondering about at the start of the playtest" resolutions. Like I'm sure they're going to do something about the borderline game-breaking damage a runesmith can do on a two-round loop if they're able to get off a bunch of one action traces, but they don't need to admit that here.
Sure, but (and I know a lot of people don't use the words to the same rigor I do) the things you mention are technology, not science. Science is a method, technology is a result, Rahadoum takes 1/4 of the generally accepted paradigm of how magic works and tosses it behind the shed which is scientifically far more harmful than most other nation's biases and that does result them having progressed more in a technological way on account of, well, shooting themselves in the foot magic-wise and forcing them do so. First of all, General Relativity is definitely not technology, it might not even be science, but it's for sure Math. But I would think that the thing one would do when you're doing science on Golarion is ignore 100% of the accepted paradigm of how magic works, because the sine qua non of science is that it's repeatable and magic is emphatically not that. Magic and Science are generally portrayed as antipodes, in fact. Specifically the kind of science it is publicly valuable to do is the kind of science that does not require a particular range of magical talent to reproduce.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that Rahadoum is a more biased nation than Cheliax or Thuvia or Osirion or Molthune or Taldor. They just have different biases. Everybody generally operates from the assumption that their experience is normal. Nothing about Rahadoum's anti-divine bias gets in the way of anybody doing research, unless that specific research is related to divine things. Like Rahadoum is entirely capable of discovering antibiotics, the integrated circuit, plastics, or general relativity.
Play a Skeleton with a phantom eidolon that's your own ghost, your choice whether it's more motivated by anger or devotion.
Here's the thing though, Rahadoum should be seen as a less actively antagonistic country than the likes of Cheliax, Nidal, and Geb. But we have, in terms of the presentation in books many more examples of reasonable people who aren't wholly opposed to their own culture or way of life in each of those three places than we have about Rahadoum. Part of that, of course, is that the northern coast of Garund is somewhat under-represented in Pathfinder adventures, but this is an opportunity! Every country, no matter how unusual they are, should have reasonable people who are more interested in reforming their own country than "drastically upending their civilization." Like people in Rahadoum should be proud of the fact that matters of public health and public education are managed with the interests of the general public in mind, rather than the competing interests of deities. It's a better system to have a public clinic you can go to in order to get treated for your injuries than to have to go to a temple for this.
The moment Rahadoum knows that the rain-splashed folk are not conspiring with gods/churches, it would be absurdly over the top "bad land evil" for the writer to have execution as even something worth considering. I think legitimately this is just a way to foreground the basic issue with "Rahadoum just has a problem with Clerics and actively religious people, right? My Divine sorcerer can cast heal all day and not get in trouble, since I'm not in service to any Deity my powers just come from someplace." Since part of the premise of Rahadoum is that this is the place where Divine magic isn't available, so they had to learn science. But Divine Magic probably should be available from Sorcerers, Witches, Oracles, and Summoners since none of those classes require obedience to any deity. There's probably an adventure they plan on someday in Rahadoum that involves some moderation of the country's policies, since the PCs generally leave Golarion a better place than they found it. It's just that until they write and publish it, we have to leave Rahadoum as the mean and scary atheists so that the adventure works. Like as a thought experiment, if Rahadoum actually allowed whatever religious people they wanted inside the country, they just didn't allow you to build a temple or to proselytize in public places, what would change other than "Rahadoum is less able to be a villainous actor in a story"? Rahadoum has been ardently atheist for like two thousand years, the average Rahadoumi citizen probably doesn't have that much interest in "so, what's Desna like?" since their entire existence has been filled with other stuff to care about instead.
It always seems like whenever a fiction setting has a group of hyper-atheists there's some contingent of players that aggressively latch onto them like this. Like the thing about antagonists, is that the GM has to inhabit them in order to pilot them, so trying to make their perspective more nuanced and understandable is natural. Like the thing about Rahadoum as a hyper-atheist fascist state is that it's boring and one-note. They, as should every fantasy nation, be considered holistically as a place with lots of different people that don't necessarily agree with each other, and who spend more time thinking about things that will never affect the PCs (the weather, local sports, what's for dinner, etc.) than anything of interest to the PCs. Like there's a general trend in PF2 (a good one) to think of places from the perspective of someone from that place for whom all of this is just normal and understood. The basic nature of the "I had to flee Rahadoum because I randomly gained divine power through no fault of my own" is a story from the outsider perspective and it's annoying. There's been a large problem specifically with northern Garund that these places mostly had a premise and no depth, and just like Thuvia needs to have more going on than "it's where the Sun Orchid Elixir is", and Osiron needs to have more going on than "It's Fantasy Egypt", Rahadoum needs to have more going on than the mean ol' Pure Legion. Like a valid read on Rahadoum is that they're attempting to implement Marx's thesis that's basically "if we just make sure everybody has a good life, we will remove the sorts of things that drive people to religion (alienation, hopelessness, etc.)" I mean, if nothing else, Rahadoum is likely the place in the Inner Sea where standards of Public Education are the highest.
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