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I also recommend leaning on the rule of funny when possible. In the original, the tanuki turned into a teakettle, but sprouted legs and scampered away whenever someone tried to put them over a fire to heat water. I certainly agree that heating water without damage should be fine, but it shouldn't be comfortable, unless that's funnier. XP
Mechanically, I tend to agree. It's worth noting that the original myth (or at least the version I heard) had the tanuki-teapot very much unable to withstand fire as a teakettle, halfway-reverting and running off whenever it happened. In practice, I think it's best to go with whatever is funniest.
Why? All the planer dragons are Paizo originals aren't they? I don't see a need for this and sort of just makes things more difficult. My guess is that it's a "Yes, but" situation. The planes themselves weren't altogether Paizo originals, and the old iterations were more heavily tied in with alignment. Distinct names allows distinguishing "This is for OGL, and this is for ORC". I certainly expect there's a good reason for it to be such a consistent thing of using different names.
Practically speaking, playtest the Mechanic and give your feedback on robot companions. There's one week left in the playtest. The ship has sailed on anything else- if something made it through the remaster, that's that.
Change Shape is a polymorph, and therefore can't imitate specific individuals unless the ability indicates otherwise.
Ohhh, I somehow missed that this was sustained. With just the one use, it seemed like the usual Wizard "a little worse than a real focus spell", but this is great. - Use this in a party with a Commander, and you can really start to arrange the battlefield to your liking. - Effortless Concentration brings back the relevance of this at high levels, allowing a free scoot every round.
Where does it list that Change Shape gives base speeds? As far as I can tell nothing about it would imply that you actually gain the base speeds, only that you assume the form of an ancestry. Hmm. I was looking at the Monster Core rules for Change Shape, which says that it does give movement speeds. Similarly, you get the unarmed attacks of the base ancestry, but not any heritage-specific ones, which is why there's an Astrazoan feat to get heritage- and feat-specific unarmed attacks. If that's not the case for Astrazoan's Change Shape, then yeah, you need another source of a fly speed.
According to an AMA with someone who received the Shining Kingdoms pdf, the Occult Dragon Matriculum (as in the 1e occult dragon, not the 2e category), has been retconned into being an Omen Dragon. Uncertain if this is a unique decision or if it applies to the species as a whole, and Omen Dragons are now part of the Esoteric Dragon family, though they fit the bill Id say. Now, I'm less certain about the decision to replace Occult Dragons with them; it was probably made to tie into the "prophecy" theme of Drums, but personally I'd say that Fortune Dragons are closer to what Occult Dragons were. Though they probably want Esoteric Dragons to use the Occult tradition? I'm not sure.Honestly, now that I think about it, the 1e occult dragon does seem like it'd be the Paizo-original dragon that's most at risk of just being wholly removed as a result of the remaster, just for the sake of clarity regarding names. If it does stick around, I'd imagine it'll get renamed(perhaps a collector dragon or implement dragon? I suggest implement dragon because I think the idea of letting a dragon use Thaumaturge-esque abilities in combat would be cool, even if it's a bit at odds with the original occult dragon in some ways). Easy fix, just call it the esoteric or esoterica dragon, since the category name is no longer in use and it fits what occult dragons were about. But Paizo hasn't seemed to be leaning too heavily on old dragons for arcane or occult.
Well, Change Shape already gives base speeds, so I'm not sure why you're using that example? Even if it doesn't because I missed something, then you would still be able to take the feat to modify some other source of a fly speed.
I would absolutely consider that a one-off decision. Matriculum didn't have much real detail before or any ties to "occult dragon". If you consider what type of dragon would only take one meeting to become a Kalistocrat, an omen dragon is the obvious choice. A fortune dragon, with the whole "draining magic items" thing, would actually be a terrible fit, and a menace/competition. But, if you had an occult dragon before that leaned into having a collection of trinkets and scraps of scrolls, then yeah, you'd probably use a fortune dragon replacement.
I don't think Armor Plates implies that. It's a lot more accessible at low levels with no strength requirement, it doesn't care about Dex mod, and it doesn't weigh a bunch of bulk.
Thanks for the reminder! It's greatly appreciated! I'll be playing a second playtest character next weekend myself.
Eox, easy call. Deadly gameshows, Pharasmin terrorists, the economics and politics of undeath, the lesson of never firing your doomsday weapon from in the atmosphere, and my headcanons about how scary the planet's reputation in the Veskarium must be after being such a key part of the war.
Aren't Coualts Incan/Mayan dragons?I would unironically love a feathered dragon though. It would be so fluffy. Plus it could be a nod to the theory that some dragon myths originated with dinosaur bones, and that birds are related to dinosaurs.I'd love to see a whole feathered reptile *event* centered around the coatls that could introduce a handful of feathered snakes, dragons, drakes, and dinosaurs, and maybe finally gave us playable serpentfolk (with or without feathers). Throw in some kenku, shisk, strix, and dragonblooded options, maybe a feathered serpent medusa for kicks. It means "serpent". Quetzalcoatl means "feathered serpent", and is an Aztec deity. In Pathfinder, coatls are winged celestial serpents. The spelling was changed in the remaster from D&D's preferred spelling couatl. I don't really think any of those interpretations would be "dragons".
I would unironically love a feathered dragon though. It would be so fluffy. Plus it could be a nod to the theory that some dragon myths originated with dinosaur bones, and that birds are related to dinosaurs.I'd love to see a whole feathered reptile *event* centered around the coatls that could introduce a handful of feathered snakes, dragons, drakes, and dinosaurs, and maybe finally gave us playable serpentfolk (with or without feathers). Throw in some kenku, shisk, strix, and dragonblooded options, maybe a feathered serpent medusa for kicks. The hurdles on this are pretty much insurmountable, and it's never going to happen as a result. ... Now, if you're willing to compromise and accept tengu instead of kenku, it gets a lot more feasible.
There's certainly some worship of Abadar, and it sounds like some degree of mutual respect. I expect that's more at the lower levels. - For one, Kalistocrats as a group take the lack of divine backing as a point of pride, especially in the post-Aroden era. With the very public death of Gorum, I would expect there to be a resurgence of anti-deity sentiments and a desire for more distance. - At the highest levels, the Prophecies and Abadar have some incompatibilities that become apparent, especially when it comes to the afterlife. Kalistocrats have a ritual to sidestep Pharasma's judgement and enter an artificial afterlife. It's likely a violation of Abadar's anathema against "undermining a law-abiding court". - Worship of Abadar isn't much of a hedge to any afterlife bets, even for somebody who isn't inducted into the secrets at the heart of the Prophecies. A follower of the Prophecies would be likely to be sent to Utopia, which is where Abadar resides anyway. Abadar isn't likely to do any big favors for a "hedge your bets" follower, and the plane itself is very orderly and unlikely to be unfairly harsh to anyone. For a few edge cases, it might theoretically be the tipping factor keeping them out of Hell. Of all the deities, though, I'm sure Abadar is the one getting the most worshippers in Druma and among Kalistocrats. We'll be getting a book with a section on Druma soon, though.
Huh, thanks! Then maybe the problem is on my end. I was certainly surprised to see it acting differently.
But giving a barbarian +2 to his trained Deception does make him as good at bluffing as being expert. You have more than three trained skills.
(Un-highlighted for de-emphasis.) Item bonuses to attack and saves are part of your budget. Item bonuses to two skills are part of your budget. That leaves a lot of uncovered skills.Status bonuses are not part of your budget... but they're hard not to trip over. Suppose you're a Swashbuckler or a Rogue or something- some non-caster, non-alchemist. You have some consumable budget to address your lack of support, buying mutagens or Heroism. We will assume your permanent gear follows the ABP progression. (Mutagens are brokenly good under the actual ABP rules as they're written, so we won't actually use ABP- that's not a fair comparison.) To not completely ignore the downsides of Heroism, one of those items will be the Pendant of the Occult. Once an hour, we can get a +1 status bonus to an attack or skill roll. Levels 1-4, mutagens (3-12gp) for everything. Heroism isn't available. Level 5-10: Heroism (30gp) for attack rolls, easy call. We had a +1 item bonus to attack back at level 2, so mutagens can't outperform Heroism, and even at nearly three times the cost, not having a drawback is pretty important. For skills, though, we only have one to two skills with item bonuses. For everything else, mutagens give twice the bonus for one-third the price. That's a pretty easy call for mutagens on skill rolls, even with the drawbacks and before considering the extra perks like preventing crit-fails. Heroism only gets used for skills if we need to make a second one in an hour. Levels 11-16: Heroism is now 300 gp a pop, and so are the mutagens. It's no longer cheaper to use mutagens. The mutagens last an hour instead, which is good for long stretches of repeated skill use, but less good for the practical considerations of a drawback lingering long enough to be a problem. We'll have two or three skills where a mutagen isn't doing much at all, and one or two more where a mutagen is only as good (without Guidance) as Heroism. Levels 17+: It's now 3,000 gp a pop. Cognitive Mutagen is notable for giving a massive +23-26 if you need to use an untrained skill. There are five skills with reduced mutagen effectiveness. Guidance no longer puts much of a dent in Heroism's relative effectiveness. At this point, it's hard to compete with a 9th slot spell, and getting ten minutes of +3 status to attack and skills is hard to replicate, even looking at other spells. To me, if you look at skills, the first half favors mutagens, and the second half favors Heroism. --- But, let's also take a look at what it takes to stop blowing absurd funds on consumables. Getting those mutagens? That's one second-level feat, and you're good for four uses per day across all levels. You also cap mutagen duration at ten minutes, meaning you don't have to worry about the drawbacks of the hour duration. A second feat gets you another four uses, with full duration. Getting Heroism at rank 3? That's two feats (2nd and 4th), and you're delayed until level 8, getting only one use. Rank 6? That's another feat (12th) and you're delayed until 16th- one level before that single Alchemist feat is getting +4 bonus mutagens. And Rank 9 is impossible; you need to actually be a caster. From a "get it yourself for free" angle, mutagens absolutely crush Heroism on skills. Even for the skills you have items for, it's level 16 before you can get a free Heroism to be better than the free mutagen.
Hey Magnaholic! Unsure about PDFs without maps since the PDFs are just digital versions of the books, and the books have maps, but as far as the table of contents, I can confirm it's on page 3 of 180 of the PDF already! Pathfinder books, and SF1 books, have a PDF table of contents that allows navigating the PDF easily. This book doesn't have one, so you can't easily navigate to the sections you want to. It would also be a huge improvement to the usability of the PDF if the horizontal maps were not included in the main PDF- they're already included as a separate download. Because they show up horizontally in the PDF, though, the PDF viewing is sized to a massive width, rather than being sized to the width of a normal page. Between the two, it means zooming in to the right size, scrolling to the right part, and recentering because of the scrolling. In a Pathfinder book, that would just be clicking to the right part of the book from the PDF viewer's navigation sidebar. (Sorry for the over-explanation; just making sure the end-user experience gets across!)
There's always some initial wonkiness with initial releases, and this is coming out before the core rules. I'm hopeful that we'll get other things moving up to settle around Space Pirate with a little time. Even AbadarCorp Rep has some bangers that are at Space Pirate's level- success-to-crit on every Intimidation-based Demoralize and Coerce is some serious power both in and out of combat, and it stacks with things like Quick Coercion or Group Coercion. I wish that it had a similar "everything feels good" cohesion to Pirate, but it's still putting in some good work. As for the two feats you mentioned, it's once per day per person. Still rough for the "Aid" option, although not taking a reaction is nice, but it's really rare to have two separate influence conversations with the same person in one day. Sales Pitch moving two attitude steps up instead of one is a very nice perk.
Just doing "Tiamat is associated with dragons in particular" was already too close to D&D for comfort- that was dropped part way through PF1, so it definitely doesn't pass the more rigorous standards of post-OGL.Tiamat was associated with dragons-as much as anything Mesopotamian can be called a dragon-in her original myths. Some of her offspring were dragons. Sure- and if D&D made a Hermes that only focused on his associations with alchemy, a fantasy tabletop RPG that made a Hermes only focused on his associations with alchemy would also be toeing the line. Paizo has not seemed interested in toeing the line. It's not necessarily a matter of being sued over Tiamat in particular; it could end up as a bullet-point in a list of dragon similarities. It's also more than a decade since Paizo last mentioned Tiamat in publishing, with a "Nobody worships her or even mentions her name". The book where Paizo is putting together a definitive presentation of dragons as they exist under the ORC license is the last place to expect that to change.
Just doing "Tiamat is associated with dragons in particular" was already too close to D&D for comfort- that was dropped part way through PF1, so it definitely doesn't pass the more rigorous standards of post-OGL.
Statistics for over 20 types of dragons, including expansions on the dragons found in Monster Core and Monster Core 2!Here's hoping that those expansions are IN ADDITION of the "20 types of dragons". ... I have some bad news about what "including" means. But also, some good news about "over", I guess?
Actually, Incapacitation Sucks: Have an enemy's save improved from a failure to a success by the Incapacitation trait.
--- And a few vanity ones:
I love the pivot to using Iconics in novels! It goves more opportunities to get to know them so much better! :3 I'm on Team Author OCs myself, but we have a pretty sizable back-catalogue of those for folks like me to enjoy. (I say that, but I'm still going to snap up the first Mios book to come out...)
Yeah, this was absolutely my feeling. Anytime I go to build a drone, it feels like I'm pouring all my feats into customizations if I want to make something other than a second MAP track.Mechanically, a companion IS a second MAP attack, that's kind of the balance niche of getting the second body Sure! But if you're going to offer something like Impersonator, with its permanent -1 to hit and -2 (or more) hp/level compared to other robots... it should be a little more feasible to make it okay at impersonating.
1. Mutagens don't cost much money. A level 3 mutagen is 12 gp. Compared to a permanent item of that level, you're getting a bundle of four or five. 2. Being polymorph is also an advantage. It means that any mutagen can also be used to attempt to counteract a hostile polymorph effect, and forces hostile polymorphs to counteract it to take effect. "But Quid, hostile polymorphs are pretty rare!" And so are beneficial ones? Missing out on battle forms is not some big loss, and not being able to stack Enlarge and Choker Arm Mutagen is pretty fair. 3. Being balanced by needing to be applied pre-combat isn't a huge factor when they last for ten minutes or an hour. 4. I think "barely" is incorrect here. They always give +1 more of an item bonus than you can get with a permanent item of that level, and they usually give that bonus to a lot more than a permanent item would. Just as an example for a recent concept I had- a Necromancer focused on social skills, running a scam where a fake "hero" defeats the "powerful necromancer". Deception and Intimidation are both critical for the concept, while Performance is nice to have. At level 3, that would be a Ventriloquist's Ring and a One Hundred Victories tattoo, totaling 120 gp. For the same price, that's ten uses of the Silvertongue Mutagen, which also covers Performance and Diplomacy to talk their way out of a problem, while also preventing critical failures, all while giving a bigger bonus to Deception and Intimidation than the permanent items. The only thing the permanent items have going for them is a once-per-day first-rank Ventriloquism, which is more likely to give the scam away since it always offers a save. If it were just that, it would be way too good. 5. Yeah, there's a downside. Potions, Elixirs, and Spells give way smaller benefits for the level, so they don't come with downsides. If I want to give myself a +2 to multiple charisma skills, I'm looking at a 6th rank Heroism spell, and I don't think the other two can do it at all. That's 11th level instead of 3rd. 6. I disagree about forgetting about the penalty. Why would the type make a difference there? It just means it's a penalty that stacks. This feels like padding the point count. 7. They're always a thematic group. "Bonus to charisma stuff, no crit failures, penalty to intelligence stuff, lose one trained skill". Once my characters are into the mid levels, they're almost always carrying a 3rd level mutagen on their person for emergencies because of the huge value. Skill mutagens especially, because there are so many use cases where their penalties don't have any impact at all. Cognitive Mutagen lets you spend a ten minute break recalling information with a bonus and zero chance of false info. Serene Mutagen is all upside if you're not expecting fights, or on characters who buff and heal. Silvertongue mutagen makes social situations a breeze. I dunno, it feels like you might only be looking at the combat mutagens?
With Dominate usually giving a new save every round, being uncommon, and having the incapacitation trait, this falls under "so unlikely to actually happen that it should just be handled on a case by case basis".
Yeah, this was absolutely my feeling. Anytime I go to build a drone, it feels like I'm pouring all my feats into customizations if I want to make something other than a second MAP track.
I just played this scenario, I guess the voting is over as the QR code leads to a closed poll. Can anyone tell me what the choices were and what the outcome was. I believe that the winner was "City McCityface".
Starfinder's drow were also a lot more distinct than the Pathfinder ones, so there wasn't as much that had to be removed. As such, Apostae is run by void elves now.
Fifteen is a triangle number, so I would assume one deck each for one, two, three, four, and five face cards.
Hang on, my math is wrong- specialization seems to be delayed until 18th level for some reason. The feature seems pretty useless for huge stretches of time, then? The Deception is bad and just falls further behind. It feels like it was balanced against choosing a creature for its movement speeds, like getting flight.
Thanks! The clarifications are much appreciated. There are still some things that I'll need GM rulings on, but the difference that makes to how we test mines is huge.
Because remastered spells, feats, skills, damage types and terminologies don't count as "rules changes" now? Yeah, that's what they can't do. "Your honor, we did not copy D&D's dragons."
I get what you're asking a lot better now, but they have to actually make and publish new dragons, not just slap an extra coat of paint on. That's why the horned dragon is meaningfully different from the green dragon, and why the empyreal dragon is meaningfully different from the gold dragon.
Because remastered spells, feats, skills, damage types and terminologies don't count as "rules changes" now? ... Huh? I'm sorry, I'm really lost on what you want. What feats do dragons get? What damage types do dragons do that got changed in the remaster? What spells do dragons have that aren't covered by the spell change rules? Do you just want the red dragon reprinted with "Telekinetic Hand" instead of "Mage Hand", and named a "fire dragon"? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Aren't what "archdragons" supposed to be???If I recall, it's the non-OGL replacement for the term "great wyrm" - basically, the term referring to the oldest and most powerful of dragons. All archdevils and demon lords are at least demigods, though, which is why they can grant divine power.
I believe the Red Dragon becoming Cinder Dragon was mentioned sometime in one of the Paizo streams, regarding the Shining Kingdoms release. Also, we (probably) know the name of post-OGL Black Dragons; in a Reddit AMA done by Ossian Studios for the Dragon's Demand crpg, they mentioned that to be remastered compliant they've renamed the Black Dragon into the Bog Dragon. Unsure if this is canon, as someone commented that they're surprised Ossian was allowed to reveal this, and Mark Moreland replied something to the effect of "yes that is interesting" with an upside down smiley. Secrets of Magic got errata around the rules changes. There aren't any rules changes impacting the OGL dragons. I don't know what you want them to "solve". If an old book says "red dragon", you can just use a red dragon; you don't need to use a cinder dragon. If you want them to release a blog post saying, "call black dragons bog dragons and call white dragons and call red dragons cinder dragons", that won't happen because it undermines the effort by making it look like Paizo is doing nothing but renaming D&D's dragons.
All this news and still no sign of Outer Dragons? That's heartbreaking :C We're getting a divine cosmic dragon for Starfinder, and the outer dragons could be material for future primal dragons in the system. (The first one is going to be a host dragon, which I'm very excited to see.)
I don't think that Paizo is going to toss in a deity of "undeath, but dragon-flavored" when they already have a core deity of undeath. Ditto for beauty and magic. We also see from the dragon they showed us that the dragons are designed to fit into the existing world and lore as it exists. That said, it was a divine dragon with a tie to a plane, meaning that you can now connect any options tied to that plane (e.g. the upcoming nephelim heritage) to that type of dragon in your personal backstory. Well, with the announcement of nine new dragon gods, I might be eating my words on this one! Place your bets, folks!
Tanks don't exist in most fantasy TTRPGs. Tanks don't exist in most fantasy MMOs and video games. Tanks exist primarily in WW2 and later warfare wargames, video games, and MMOs. --- What I wrote above is pretty unhelpful. I'm going into the discussion with a definition of "tank" that isn't going to be met. If you don't think that what a champion does at high levels is "tanking", that's fine- but then there's no reason to argue about champion not tanking well at low levels. The useful discussion would be, "Does a champion do at low levels what it does at high levels?" What a holy-or-justice champion does is reduce damage coming at the party. It uses a reaction to reduce damage to allies, and it is harder to hit itself. The original post argues that until champion gets improved armor proficiency, it is essentially a weak point, because it's no more resilient than a fighter. I would argue that being as resilient as a Fighter is enough. The extra point of AC from heavy armor means taking less damage than most (but not all) other classes, and the 10 HP base mean that there's almost certainly someone who would be less able to soak hits. The champion does their job better at later levels, sure, but I don't think it's fair to say that they don't do a good job of it at low levels.
Bypassing precision immunity, no. There are a few ways to bypass energy immunity, but that's generally for minimal consolation damage. Precision damage already comes attached to consolation damage: the main attack. Weakness has Vicious Debilitations for Ruffian Rogue at 10, Seal Fate as a fourth rank spell, and the critical effect of the Frostbite cantrip. Thaumaturge dedication gives a creature weakness 2 against your strikes, but it doesn't scale.
Not the most immediately terrifying, but a subtle spell casting of Outcast's Curse is nasty. Even on a regular failure, the target will permanently have every single new person they encounter think less of them. Every indifferent stranger will dislike them, and every potential friend who would hit it off right away simply doesn't care. It's not a case where it's just a matter of finding the right sort of person, someone similar, because it's truly everyone new. And any attempt to fix it, whether through kindness, fear, lying, or simply putting on a show, is twice as hard. Somebody pats them on the back, and the rest of their life is just worse until they can figure out what went wrong. And that's the regular failure. On a crit failure, every new person they run into who wouldn't care about them instead actively wants to do them harm. If they run into somebody who doesn't dislike them, it's only because that person would have been a ride-or-die friend otherwise. (Now, without using a spellshape to make this subtle or some other delivery method, it loses a lot of that bite. "Ever since that person at the party chanted a spell and touched me, everyone has been treating me worse" is much less of a puzzle to work out.)
Obviously, "everyone" is an exaggeration- plenty of folks were quite happy to have casters getting more slots by default, myself included. We're getting a bit of conversion guide, so little things like a slot difference for casters would be easily addressed.
Technomancer is almost as "arcane only" of a flavor as Wizard. It's very mind-material in flavor, and even if you want to bring in computer spirits, those are definitely a mind-aspect parallel to nature spirits being life-aspect. I'm definitely on board with four slots, though. They seem like they could use it.
I do feel like the languages should all have an extra, "get you started" bonus. DPS++ should get martial weapon proficiency, servoshell should give you a robot familiar, Fortrun should get heavier armor. Viper should probably get a free per day spell gem? That might be too strong comparatively, the equivalent existing ability would be the Scroll Trickster's Basic Scroll Cache which is not nearly as strong and is a 6th level archetype feat. Still, I suspect it's not gonna feel great to blow your entirely WBL on basic class functionality. Some access to free spell gems should be available somewhere. All the non-Viper suggestions are approximately a 1st-level general feat. The closest general feat for Viper is Prescient Consumable, which is much higher and wouldn't solve the funds issue. Maybe a daily spell gem of a first-rank spell you prepare?
I'm a little worried that if you want a fully customized drone, Mechanic won't bring much to the table over taking an archetype on a better base class, at least before the capstone. It's not nothing, of course - free integrated weapon slot, free "dedication", tandem movement, and eventually a permanent damage bonus. Compared to Envoy boosting everyone's attack and damage while getting way more skill stuff, or Soldier getting to AoE and attack while being nigh unkillable, I'm a little iffy.
My reading was that it definitely does increase your drone's MAP... if you make the "mistake" of not commanding your drone first. "This counts as two attacks when calculating your multiple attack penalty." It doesn't say anything about what you do when calculating your drone's MAP, so it just checks how many attacks the drone has made that round. Regardless, it could use some cleanup on the wording. Any disagreement on impacting MAP isn't important, because you can just start by commanding your drone.
Impersonator chassis got me thinking about this, so I figured I'd see what it would look like. Ideally, not just looking like a person, but actually being able to speak on behalf of the Mechanic. So, just taking the chassis gives us trained deception, looking like an ancestry, and +2 to the DC to see through an impersonation as that ancestry. However, they can't speak or hold anything, so it's not going to hold up for anything other than "not drawing attention in a crowd". We're giving up a lot of health and damage, as well as a bit of accuracy, for this, so let's see what it takes to get some actual value. Fortunately, we start out with a free Commercial Customization, and Mechanic provides an Integrated Weapon Mount. Having a sniper rifle or something in the weapon mount probably solves our damage problems, buuut it gives the disguise away. Oh well, ten-minute install/uninstall time means it's not the end of the world. The Commercial Customization gives us Artificial Personality, critically giving us speech and the ability to attempt charisma-based checks. They still can't use their hands, which is probably a good thing to remedy to draw less attention. So we'll need one feat for Commercial Customization to get Manual Dexterity. At this point, we're doing okay: we have a person-shaped bot who can casually interact with things and lie. This seems like a great spot to point out that under the current rules, companions can never activate items! This might need to be updated to "can't activate magic items" or something like that, since it does feel like a robot companion should be able to do tech item activations at some point. A second Commercial Customization feat would help a lot, grabbing Skill Module for Diplomacy. A +1 Charisma is nothing to write home about, but this will let them smooth things over. We'll also have feats locked in for Mature, Graceful/Nimble (hopefully graceful covers charisma, unlike nimble?), Specialized, and Elite to keep our companion up to date. When we get to level 6, we need to take Tactical Customization for Expertise Module (Deception) because companion advancements were designed for animal companions, and therefore never advanced the starting skill. So far, that's 1st, 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th spoken for, along with 14 and 18. At 10th, we'll really want Advanced Customization for Sapient. That frees us up to retrain the Commercial Customization used for Artificial Personality, freeing up a second-rank slot, or that can be used for Upgrade Slot to get a Glamer Projector installed for easy outfit changes. At 12th, as long as we don't feel we need +2 diplomacy, we're good. At 14th, we get a specialization. It's not exactly thematic, but Bully gives us +3 to our charisma mod, and we'll take that. At 16th, Superior Customization gets us Glow Up. It "increases" our charisma to +3, when we have +4. It feels a little bad investing so much into this and only getting that +1 advantage over a tank who took another specialization. We don't know what level 18's Elite Drone does, but given how important the other similar feats are, I assume it's also important. For the capstone, Ultimate Drone finally gives us a charisma boost. Diplomat gives us master diplomacy (freeing up Glow-Up and possible skill+expertise modules), and a whopping +4 charisma. 20th level is very late, but +10 charisma helps make up for only having expert deception with no item bonuses. That's... 10 for being a DC, 24 from expert, 10 from mod, and 2 from chassis specialty. That's a DC of 46 to recognize that they're a robot companion. An on-level high perception score sees through that 55% of the time. At level 19, though, it's pretty rough, with a high perception seeing through it 80% of the time. At 13, before specialization, that's... 10 for DC, 17 from expert, 1 from mod, and 2 from chassis specialty. That's DC 30. An on-level high perception score sees through that 85% of the time. --- Overall, this feels like a lot of work and investment. It feels like we're missing pieces of the playtest, too. The animal companion specializations don't map super well to some of the options robots get, and we're missing the level 18 option. It feels like impersonator acting as face has to make a lot of tradeoffs while still requiring everything to be invested into the concept. Almost the only free feats were ones that were freed up by a customization covering something that used to be necessary. Can a Mechanic's Drone maybe get a delayed customization progression, or feat that acts like a bulk deal? Even if it's something like Tactical Drone giving a Commercial Customization and Refined Chassis giving a Tactical Customization, where you get the previous rank of customization... Impersonator Chassis feels like it should also allow any integrated weapon to be concealed while not in use unless somebody beats their Deception DC for impersonation. |
