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Fencer Swashbuckler Martial Artist for Stumbling Stance+Feint taking the Monk archetype to grab Flurry of Blows at 10th level so you can feint (to gain panache) and strike twice for one action. The Swashbuckler overall is in a better place for sure, and "letting other people poach full strength FoB" felt bad for people playing monks, but that was my Ruby Phoenix character and I had fun with it.
Andoren troops in Isger feels like quite the escalation to one Andoren citizen's execution - by Hellknights, not even Chelish troops! The reason this is a good Casus belli is that Hellknights are not de jure agents of the Chellish state, but it's easy to see many contexts of them being seen as de facto agents of Thrune. Like there has to be a compelling reason for the two sides not to prefer to deescalate. Cheliax is justified in saying that they are not responsible for Hellknights, and cannot tolerate Andoran troops that close to their border, after all.
Note that if you want to discuss ambiguities in the rules, rather than flag them for potential errata it's better to do so in a different thread. The whole "what if you fork the gate after taking elemental overlap" question was discussed heavily in the rules forum when RoE came out and no consensus was reached, so it's appropriate to point out that this would benefit from clarification.
Class: Monk
Like the thing about Villains in an ongoing story that is not building to a specific conclusion is that you need for villains to lose both because "good triumphing over evil" is generally satisfying to the reader and in order to make room for new villains. Like we closed the Worldwound, but then Tar-Baphon got out. When Tar-Baphon gets put down for good, almost certainly something worse is going to crop up. So even if the Thrune dynasty were ended completely, there is very little that Cheliax has contributed to the ongoing story that couldn't be replaced going forward with an expansionist Molthune or Mzali or Oprak if they wanted. I'm all for putting the "devil-themed" villains in the background for a while so we can have other problems, just like how Batman has to beat the Joker from time to time so we can tell stories about Bane or Clayface or the Riddler.
Maybe we shouldn't conflate Pathfinder Society the faction with Society Play here. I mean, they've solicited the PFS scenarios that start the season, which is how we can infer "what the Pathfinder Society thinks".
It genuinely feels unlikely that Cheliax is going to prevail here, since the Pathfinder Society is throwing its weight against Cheliax (what with Thrune closing the lodges in her country) and we know how much weight they carry in the metaplot.While Cheliax is one of the few that outright kicked them out, many nations would like the Pathfinder Society to be more careful, then there is the Aspis thing. The observation that "whichever side the Pathfinder Society ends up on is likely to prevail" is less about actual geopolitics and more that the actions of the Pathfinder Society in the metaplot will he modeled in PFS scenarios and you don't really want to just tell your dedicated organized play people that everything they did was pointless due to editorial fiat. Like when PFS sets out to do something over the course of a season, that thing usually happens.
This consideration is exactly what has kept everyone from dogpiling on Cheliax for the last six years, but it seems no one finds it persuasive any longer. I mean, the Whispering Tyrant is going to be more patient than the conventional powers trying to make the argument "we should put aside our differences and band together to defend against the Whispering Tyrant's inevitable next move". In fact, the Whispering Tyrant's specific goal might be to wait until several of the powers between him and the Starstone Cathedral weaken themselves naturally, and then strike. It would not be at all surprising if the Whsipering Way is actively trying to foment this conflict.
It genuinely feels unlikely that Cheliax is going to prevail here, since the Pathfinder Society is throwing its weight against Cheliax (what with Thrune closing the lodges in her country) and we know how much weight they carry in the metaplot.
I imagine the ending of the war after Cheliax loses is not going to be "Cheliax is a good place now" but "Cheliax is deeply unstable- even if parts of it are better, other parts are much worse." Since the history of Pathfinder, Cheliax has served as "the stable authoritarian country where the evil people are in charge" but they don't really do much in the metaplot sense than "be menacing" and "take 'L's." "Cheliax falls into chaos" is more interesting than "Cheliax just continues as is."
I find one-dimensional good or evil sides absolutely boring as far as mortals are concerned. But, I mean, the perspective of a "Good person" who lives in Cheliax would be something involving how the House of Thrune (and perhaps most of the Aristocracy) needs to be replaced, perhaps violently. So it's not like you'd sign up to fight on the side of literal devils here.
I'm still kind of annoyed that the remaster, inexplicably, makes it so you can't get both Qi Rush and Inner Upheaval when you could get both Ki Rush and Ki Strike in the pre-remaster and there was no reason for this to change. Like yes, this is easy to change with house rules (add a "special" section to the Qi feats saying "you can take this again, if you do, choose a different Qi spell.") but just because a fix is easy doesn't mean it's not worthy of errata.
Genuinely the only fix for the Exemplar archetype is "it's rare, you can only have it if the GM explicitly allows it." Like I'm going to run a FA game where the Exemplar archetype is mandatory as the premise is "you got your hands on some godstuff" but I'm not going to allow it otherwise.
Happy that Elemental Barbarians with the Kineticist dedication can now use impulses without raging.
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.
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