PossibleCabbage's page

Really, I think the reason that "you can get a full power FoB at level 10 through archetyping" was so egregious is that the main reason to play a Monk in the first place is "flavor". That's not to say it's weak, the monk is broadly stronger than martials outside of the Core set for sure, but it is also a clearinghouse for tropes and chief among them is "due to my training, discipline, and hidden knowledge I can do things with my body that others would need weapons and armor for" and it sort of runs against that when the Fighter can punch better than you. All of the high level monk feats you can never get through archetyping aren't so amazing that they are the envy of other classes, after all.

The Spirit Warrior is its own specific kind of flavor, and shouldn't bother anybody, especially since it's somewhat fighterproofed.

One imagines though that the Naval theater still largely favors Andoran, who didn't suffer any similar setback and has basically oriented their economy around shipbuilding.

Of course "Andoran is a naval power" is the reason Cheliax would invest heavily in rebuilding their navy.

I think the reason to avoid giving a lore justification as to why PCs of flying ancestries are bad at flying is that the number of PCs from flying ancestries in the world at one time might be 0 and will only climb to one when a player chooses to play one and in that case the player and the GM can come up with their own justification specific to that person.

BotBrain wrote:

Same with Norgorbor's name. The fact that the secret ceased to be interesting or valuable was so very clever. No notes. 10/10.

Where was this reveled? What is it?

This was the plot of the Curtain Call AP (which is great fun).

I think one of the reasons that the Remastered Magus is going in a new book instead of trying to somehow hammer Secrets of Magic into non-OGL form, is so you have space to print a bunch of new spells to replace ones we lost in the remaster.

The "why do orcs have evil gods" is mostly explained by how orcish apotheosis works by "risking your soul to challenge an existing Orc deity for their spot." So sometimes the baddest MFer in all of orcdom isn't very nice, and they end up becoming a God.

Why it works this way for Orcs and nobody else remains a mystery.

I think one of the things Pathfinder accomplishes is that when "evil" gods claim to be one of the first beings in existence or the progenitor of entire species, there's a good chance that they are lying about this in order to manipulate mortals. Like Lamashtu's thing with potential new Goblin gods is that she tries to kill them before they get powerful enough to convince Goblins en masse to practice a different religion; it's pretty clear she's lost control of the orcs culturally, if she ever had it in the first place.

I mean, the fact that Lamashtu's divine realm is in the Outer Rifts and that she was previously a Demon Lord means that you probably should limit how much of the benefit of the doubt you give her. Of all the beings who call an abyssal realm home, she might be one of the least objectionable but that's a very low bar to clear.

People in the setting might get bamboozled by a rosy interpretation of what Lamashtu is about, but we shouldn't. She would be very happy if you just went around maiming pretty people whereas "good" gods should always object to random violence.

I think that if I was going to play a psychic, I would want to avoid Tangible Dream since my initial amps available are Shield, Figment (for flanking), and Imaginary Weapon (for melee damage). This might be worth it eventually, but playing a character one crit away from dying with that set of tools seems rough.

Like people regularly avoid the Sorcerer bloodlines that have focus spells that require touch, right? I've seen people avoid the Demonic Bloodline because of Glutton's Jaws, after all. I see no reason that's not going to happen with the Psychic.

I mean, Asmodeus is kind of just an extreme example of how cultural conservatives IRL invest heavily in hierarchy as the organizing principle of society. We just happen to know from the omnisicent rulebook perspective that this sort of thing isn't natural or trustworthy- people in the diagesis don't have access to that frame of reference.

I think the fact of the matter is that a lot of your more objectionable gods simply don't have many followers. Pathfinder has never participated in "a god's power or stature is proportional to their mortal following" and the whole "core deity" idea is about prominence (i.e. people know who you are) not about followers.

Like nobody other than a maniac worships Rovagug, but he gets talked about in the faiths of Asmodeus, Abadar, Torag, Pharasma, Desna, etc. so everybody knows who he is.

Pathfinder does set up a number of "evil" gods that do have significant mortal followings, but there's more of a case for following Asmodeus, Zon Kuthon, or Norgorber than there is in following Cyth-V'sug or Trelmarixian who might have precisely zero mortal followers.

In the broadest sense the "High Seas" meta-region should be the area you access by "sailing outwards" from the Inner Sea so I would expect the book to focus entirely on the Arcadian and perhaps a bit of the Obari ocean. We're not likely to talk about any of the large land masses on the other side, but we might talk about some of the associated islands.

The development of especially large, primarily wooden ships intended for combat on Golarion was probably impeded by the presence of both gunpowder and wizards, but one wonders what kind of ships that major economic powers use to transport large amounts of trade goods, since "I'm going to haul grain, textiles, and oil across the ocean" is something that benefits greatly from economies of scale but you still need to survive all the depredations of pirates and various magical hazards.

The High Seas are not just "the open ocean and what's beneath" it's also "literally every relatively isolated island" which is sort of the broadest fantasy palette you can paint with. Like if you need to posit the existence of something somewhere on Golarion "put it on a remote island" is just about the most frictionless way to fit in *anything*.

I think the story Paizo is lurching towards is that the original Razmir is already dead, and was already replaced (perhaps several times) with another figurehead pretending to be him.

It's just tricky to tell that story now, since the old trope of "we will bring down this prominent figure by revealing a scandal" is sort of laughable in the modern era.

This is my third or fourth time asking for this:

For Player Core 2 please add to the feat Qi Spells (also Advanced, etc.) a section that reads "Special You can take this feat multiple times, choosing a different initial qi spell each time."

Other classes that have a "choose a focus spell" feat (e.g. Ranger, Cleric) have the option to take the feat more than once, so it's strange that the Monk lacks this particularly given this was not how it worked pre-Remaster (where Ki Rush and Ki Strike were just different feats.)

I mean, in the real world there are an unsettling number of people who believe in the divine mission of politicians who don't even profess divine provenance, so I'd believe that this sort of thing happens all the time in Razmiran.

There are assuredly some grifters in the bunch, but it's not 100%.

I consider that in the overall arc of geology and geopolitics the number of individuals on Golarion who have PC-level agency is very small.

Like a sufficient number of druids and kineticists working in tandem can solve all manner of climate/terrain related issues, but you're not likely to find critical mass of that without PCs getting involved.

Like canonically Rahadoum has been searching for non-divine solutions to their ongoing desertification problem, and that's a nation that has significantly more resources to bring to bear on a problem than Belkzen does.

I'm not sure why "the Wizard is a weaker choice for a magic focused character" is an intolerable situation when "the Fighter is a weaker choice for a sword focused character" has been a fact of life a lot of times in the history of this family of games.

The Remaster was less "let's fix all the classes" and more "let's make the best of a bad situation."

I honestly wouldn't expect much for the psychic since its not a new book but rather a remaster of DA, which means they have to stick to the page count.

The same happened with the inventor. Both are IMO classes that need the full remaster treatment.

But they did fix the Monk archetype by adding a single line to the Flurry of Blows archetype feat. They could do something similar to the Psychic dedication.

Something like "Amping Psi Cantrips is possible but taxing for you, once you have amped a Psi Cantrip you are unable to do so again until you refocus."

This is barely a nerf for most MC Psychic characters, but solves the Magus problem.

Acrobat/Celebrity/Dandy/Gladiator would have an awesome feat in Costume Change which allows you to remove your enemy's armor:

Quote:

You can remove any armor as a 3-action Interact activity.

:D

You could have killed Gorum a lot more easily I guess. It says any armor, it doesn't specify "armor you can touch."

I do think one thing that Paio should do to underline "Pathfinder classes work here" is that in some book or another to create feats, subclasses, etc. for PF2 classes that give them both the tools and also the flavor they would need to fit easily in any SF2 games. You could also do the same thing for the Starfinder classes to fit better in Pathfinder.

This would also be a way to signal like "these classes are good to go" and also highlighting which other classes might not fit easily in the other game without a lot of work.

I feel like the reason you have 6 classes in the Player Core book is due to the other 27 classes that work just fine in Starfinder 2e.

Like you can just play a Cleric or a Gunslinger or a Commander or an Exemplar. The important thing about the Starfinder classes is that they let you do something that you couldn't do with a Pathfinder character who has access to Starfinder options.

Isn't the reason for a tighter band that PF2 has very tight math, so "rolling for DCs set levels too high or too low" might not be fun?

Like a Hard Challenge for a Level 8 character is a Very Hard challenge for a level 6 character. I think it's better to set "how hard is this challenge" by the needs of the narrative rather than the identity of the character attempting it.

I feel like RPG settings are like comic book universes in that you want to avoid too much specificity in terms of the map in case you need to insert another city or whatever somewhere.

Like the planet Earth that DC Comics takes place in is slightly larger than the planet Earth we live on, in order to have both a "Metropolis" and a "New York City."

Like there could be *anything* in the vast Qadiran desert- we'll find out when we get there.

Like I imagine that the reason that most nations do not wish to engage high level PC types in matters of state, is that you do not generally wish to attract their attention since they could just as easily take over *your* nation as defeat your enemy. They might even do both, in deciding the former is part of the most efficient path for the latter.

I think the thing that the high-level PC party is bad at (and is still important in war) is "holding territory for as long as it takes" since that basically requires the PCs to stay in one place and that means they can't go solve problems elsewhere.

It's been 12 years since Reign of Winter though and someone is smuggling stuff from a portal between Irrisen and Earth, so they have access to better guns than the ones they would have had. Like Anastasia could get her hands on a Browning M2 or a Besa MG.

The standard in PF2 is basically that the durability (or lack thereof) of items in the background are subject to the needs of the story, and thus GM fiat. If the Maguffin needs to not explode even if someone threw a fireball at it, it doesn't. If the GM thinks "destroy that power coupling to inconvenience the enemies" is a fun thing to have happen that rewards player creativity, then it does.

The problem with "I have to look up rules for the material this desk is made of" is that's something that people almost never have close at hand so it slows down the game for someone to look something up. If it's something that "maybe the object gets destroyed, maybe it doesn't- I'm comfortable with both outcomes" then you just come up with HP/Hardness for the thing and let the dice decide.

If an uncommonly durable sofa survives an implausible amount of plasma fire, then maybe that becomes a fun thing (e.g. determine they need to keep that sofa).

Yeah, since "threaten" is only used by the rules in a natural language sense you could make the case that "I'm threatening everybody I can see because I have a gun out and I could Strike them" which is probably not how the ability is intended to work.

The "some ancestries are made amazing by their feats" angle often doesn't take into account how some ancestries are going to appear in one book with some feats and go years (or possibly forever) without getting a new feat. So while "Elves have a weak chassis but great feats" might be a good reason to play an Elf, there might never be a corresponding argument to play a Shisk.

It's probably worth considering that early on in PF2 they were much more conservative about the power budget for ancestries than they became later. Compare, for example, the ancestries in the Mwangi Expanse book to the ancestries in the Tian Xia book.

It might be a project worth considering to just juice some of the premaster ancestries so they're not vastly inferior to ancestries from the same game.

It's not really about "balancing across game systems" but more about "balancing across the party." Since it's a bummer when player A finds that they get to do a lot less cool stuff than player B simply because Player A wanted to play a human or an android or a ysoki and player B picked something else.

On a table by table basis for home games, the solution might be for the GM to juice some under-performing ancestries to bring them in line with some of the superstars. Like, if you wanted to bring forward the Anadi from Pathfinder they are spending a 9th level ancestry feat for a climb speed that's only available in spider-form whereas skittermanders can get the same climb speed with a heritage. If you wanted to play an Awakened Animal in Starfinder you should absolutely get all the movement capabilities of your animal at level 1.

The guidance I would want answered is how to implement something like Barathu, for example, in a game where I would not grant unlimited level 1 flight to one of the Pathfinder Ancestries that comes with wings (Sprites, Strix, certain Awakened Animals).

Like it's easy enough to just add the three flight feats to the dragonkin's set of ancestry feats. But Barathu have a 5' move without flying.

Like it's entirely possible that "the PCs can fly at low levels" is not going to matter at all in a given Pathfinder game- perhaps the entirety of the first 9 levels or so is going to take place indoors where the ceilings don't get very high. The GM of the specific game is the person who has insight on whether this is going to be the case so leaving "how you should adjudicate flying ancestries" to the GM is really the only way to handle deviating from the printed rules.

It's not totally different from how we handle amphibious ancestries- in an adventure that requires a lot of getting wet, it's potentially a huge advantage to be able to breathe under the water without help. In a campaign set in the mountains it's not going to come up much. It's just that the relative frequency of "aquatic" adventures compared to "ones where flight is a huge advantage" is much lower so we don't benefit from creating a cost to being aquatic like we do for flying.

Like it doesn't entirely feel correct to separate "the scientific aspects of the natural world" from "the magical stuff the Nature skill covers" in a setting in which Primal Magic exists. Scientists in Starfinder will be at least aware of Magic and have some idea about what can and can't do as part of doing science.

Like a dragon shouldn't be able to fly or breathe fire based on the laws of the natural world, except for the inherent magic that dragons have that let them do that. You can't really "study the laws of the natural world without regards to innate magic and the like" in a setting in which dragons exist.

I was genuinely surprised reading the Solarion that at no point do you get a 3rd trait for your solar weapon or unlock additional traits (other than that one feat that gives you Twin). Like the sample Solarion has an illegal build that suggests a third trait should be possible.

I honestly wonder if Reach and 2-hand d10 shouldn't just be one trait like the others, since the reason you make them two is "so you can't take them together" but a 2 handed reach weapon that does d10 is just something anybody with martial weapon proficiency can buy at the shop.

I guess the thing is that your Starfinder character probably isn't doing graduate research in glaciology on Triaxus, or anything. We're going on space adventures and need to test things relevant to space adventures and those tend not to be very academic. Like it feels bad to have invested greatly into meteorology and just never have the weather come up in the entire adventure because you're spending the whole time indoors on space ships/stations and caves/caverns.

So it just seems like we're unlikely to design a bridge, but might need to MacGyver a new capacitor for the deflector array so crafting does mostly apply to this. If you want to represent "my character knows about oceanography" that seems like what the Lore skill is for (which could stand to have a rebrand honestly) since that's "specialized knowledge that's not guaranteed to come up."

Different solar system, not galaxy. Vesk are from the same galaxy as golarion, so can come to Golarion via a rank 10 teleport. (On this note, every ancestry in Starfinder, except for ancestries that do not exist yet, like the Shirren (They'd need time travel, plus this), could theoretically access Golarion via a rank 10 casting of Teleport.)

I mean, as a GM hearing about this character my first response is "tell me more why someone used a 10th level spell on a 1st level nobody?" I'm not saying there can't be a good answer to that, but I hope the answer is more interesting than "this is what I need in order to justify playing this character."

I think the reason for Paizo to avoid releasing a "conversion guide" is this might create a "well, Paizo says I can do this" problem. It genuinely seems like the community is better doing this on their own.

Like Shirren are mostly fine if you wanted to play one in Pathfinder. You would probably want to change the flying heritage, but other stuff feels fine. Except during Pathfinder times the Shirren didn't even exist yet, they were still part of the Swarm and a GM is justified in saying "I don't think you should play that in Pathfinder." Even things like a Vesk fell through a portal so now despite being from a different galaxy you get to play one should the sort of thing that happens rarely.

I understand Paizo wants to change around their announcement or release schedule, that's fine and normal. But the reason this is somewhat bothering about this particularly book is that was the book we playtested the classes for where they wouldn't even tell us the title of the book for the playtest (a thing that they hadn't done before.)

So some part of this has to be "they are holding their cards close to their vest" because the very title of the book is predicated on something big happening.

Like the thing about two different canons (as well as "the very existence of the Gap") is that the people who write for Starfinder can't be expected to predict every single thing that happens in Pathfinder forever, nor should the people writing Pathfinder refuse to do something fun or interesting because "that's not how it is in Starfinder."

So it's more about how things need to work, than "we want different canons on purpose". If the PF folks want to give Iomedae a cool new hat, they can do that. If Starfinder previously didn't depict her with her cool hat, they can just decide to do that going forward and nobody should worry about it. It's nothing more than "The SF folks also liked Iomedae's cool hat."

Waterhammer wrote:

So, folks over on the Inner Sea War speculation thread seem to think that the war will be modeled on WW I.

No, we really don't.

If there's a sense it models WWI it's less in the "how war was conducted" sense and more in the "entangling alliances get more nations involved in what is essentially a local issue."

Part of what makes me think this is a society issue is that it's trivially easy to keep people from bringing flying ancestries from SF2 into PF2 games- as a GM you say "no." It's easy to keep options from one system out of the other system, whether it's for flavor, or balance, or whatever.

But as Unicore points out this is a limited problem since they probably won't let you do this again, or at least shouldn't. What I'm concerned about is the problems from "bringing a flying ancestry from Starfinder to Pathfinder" are going to make people less likely to cross-pollinate with the fun stuff that works well.

Although I do agree that this is a problem, and have witnessed this trivialize fights in D&D, I question how this is any different from the case of the Dragonkin trivializing the obstacle: if we're okay with the party skipping bits of exploration gameplay entirely, what's wrong with the party shortening encounters by the same amount by taking potshots at the melee enemies from the air until they die? Is it really okay for any part of the game to be trivialized in either manner when Society play normally aims to avoid this kind of situation?

The difference between "skipping exploration material" and "trivializing obstacles" is that the game basically works by setting a rhythm for alternating "you can do what you want here" and "you need to overcome this hurdle to progress". When players skip exploration material they are looking to get to the next obstacle quicker, but ideally there are still obstacles that create challenge and drama. If the party would make the obstacle trivial or otherwise uninteresting, a GM should either tweak it or skip it entirely.

My understanding is that PFS GMs are supposed to run the adventure exactly as written, but the person writing the scenario can't account for how many obstacles the party can simply bypass with "one PC who can fly". For a given session it could hypothetically be every single obstacle or it could just be one obstacle. Ideally every PC should get to feel special occasionally because of their capabilities being useful, but it shouldn't be one person most of the time for just a single choice they made.

So flying PCs seem acceptable in Pathfinder games where the GM knows the capabilities of the party in advance and can plan to challenge them appropriately, but they really shouldn't be in PFS.

Yeah, the standard for unlimited flight at level 1 in PF2 are "a GM can make an allowance for it when it makes sense for an ancestry to have it, with the understanding that this is going to force the GM to make a lot of changes to adventures since flying will trivialize a lot of stuff at low levels." But there are no PF2 ancestries that have unlimited flying by default at level 1, because this is something that generates additional work for the GM and should be something a GM has to sign up for.

The same standard should be applied to bringing flying ancestries from SF2 into PF2. If you're allowing Barathu and Dragonkin into a PF2 game you should also allow Strix, Sprites, etc. to have unlimited flight at level 1 per the optional rule on Page 66 of the Lost Omen's Ancestry Guide (also on Page 9 of Howl of the Wild.) If you're not going to allow the latter, you shouldn't allow the former.

Like I would say rule #2 about bringing SF2 content into PF2 (after "don't use anything that depends on technology unavailable in the fantasy setting") is "be careful with flying ancestries" since they're both about "understanding that the assumptions of the two settings are different." If you make Strix PCs do the jump flight -> limited true flight -> true flight progression through ancestry feats, you should under no conditions allow Barathu or Dragonkin PCs in a PF2 game.

That boon (a couple of SF Ancestries usable if you did enough of the SF2 playtedt stuff during the playtest) IS a curated short list. It isn't bringing in any other SF content.

Then I disagree with the curation for that list. Since one thing you should do in curating a list of SF2 ancestries to be PF2 appropriate without reference to the specific campaign is "filter out everything that has access to unlimited flight at early levels."

Like I don't even have whatever Starfinder book this Dragonkin thing is in, of the ones in the Player Core the only one that would have balance problems is the Barathu, which is mostly a core ancestry because "we want to demonstrate how SF2 is less restrictive in how ancestries can work than PF2 is."

There's specifically a problem for a GM to navigate with rules going from SF to PF or vice versa based on assumptions of the setting. One of them is "everybody in the future has access to really good ranged attacks" so "unlimited flight from level 1" is specifically not a problem, whereas many things you fight in Pathfinder stay firmly rooted on the ground and want to end you with claws and teeth.

So I'm not sure why PFS would give that boon to begin with. A curated list of SF2 options you could use would be a much better choice.

Generally I think using rules back and forth works better in a context where you know each other and someone is making a good faith effort to make a character that works outside of their native setting. Like you can absolutely play an Envoy in Pathfinder, but you would want to avoid stuff like "Guns Blazing" and "Infosphere Director" for your subclass (the other four are fine.) Like you should avoid things that involve the computers skill, rather than asking the GM to seed the world with computers for you to use.

I think some part of the fun of playing an Exemplar is choosing your epithets based on what actually happens in the story, so I wouldn't want to plan the character too far in advance.

But the Exemplar I really want to play is sort of an "Anti-Barbarian" an Orc with a giant axe who is impossibly calm and heals himself constantly between Barrow's Edge and Scar of the Survivor. Take the Ferocity Feats so it's disturbingly difficult to bring you down in a way that sticks.