ReyalsKanras's page

And Pharasma was surprised by the disappearance of the Seal and prophecy being broken. IIRC she tried to contact Yog-Sothoth to know whether such a thing ever happened in any of the previous universes and what the consequences might be. But the Watcher did not answer.

Wow, Commune is so useless not even Pharasma can get the silly thing to work? At least as a ritual it is more likely to be overlooked entirely, which it should be.

I am not certain a biology discussion would provide any useful answers. Well, not any relevant answers. You need sunlight which is nonexistent in all but the most contrived sealed rooms in a dungeon. A single plant character could not reasonably be expected to keep pace with multiple mammal characters. My photosynthesis cycle is a little rusty, but I seem to recall plants use oxygen like the rest of us when they are consuming stored energy reserves such as at night. Granted at a much slower rate given their generally low activity level and with exceptions because nature loves being difficult.

Given the precedent for making player options balanced, it looks like you need to breathe until something explicitly states you do not need to breathe.

Fireball wouldn't be blocked because the Fireball simply originates in a square of your choosing

This is directly contradicted by the rules for Line of Effect.

When creating an effect, you usually need an unblocked path to the target of a spell, the origin point of an effect’s area, or the place where you create something with a spell or other ability.

And the Wall of Force is invisible, so it doesn't block line of sight, which is basically all you need for Fireball to work.

This is directly contradicted by the rules for Line of Effect.

Visibility doesn’t matter for line of effect, nor do portcullises and other barriers that aren’t totally solid.

The Wall of Force specifically calls out Teleportation and Visual as things that pass through. If you were curious, Fireball does not have either trait.

That definitely makes sense. I think the overall power shift for most classes is arguably small. It absolutely unbalances specific classes in relation to other classes. FA might be a variant and thus not inherently tested or balanced to the same degree, but I find it works very well as a stress test for Archetypes as a system. If a player is trying to break the system, FA makes it easier.

I do not think this necessitates a blanket ban on the variant, unless of course your group of players is predestined to exploit anything and everything within reach. Presenting it as a variant sets the correct tone. This should be a no by default just on the basis that not every party is going to respond the same way. Let the GM decide if they trust their party not to optimize the fun right out of their own game.

On a personal note, I have more complaints with the inherently unbalanced Archetypes than I do with the variant that gives ten feats. Ten feats can be spent a lot of different ways. It is, by itself, a simple decision to raise the amount of stuff a party gets. That it specifies Archetype entangles it to a separate problem. That being, why is Fighter dedicated into Wizard so much better than a Wizard dedicated into Fighter? Anyone running an optimization routine will see the aforementioned reduction of diversity.

Is it weird that the class that used to get the most bonus feats is now the class that most benefits from bonus feats? I suppose not. Fighter is a great chassis, an empty frame begging to be fitted with the latest and greatest tech.

Is there an actual problem? It looks like it falls under the Effects part of "Effects and magic items". I suppose it does raise questions about detect magic. Also, there are Elixirs with the Necromancy trait so we either have three errors or Elixirs are allowed to be associated with a school of magic. It does seem weird that such a small percentage of Elixirs are associated with a school.

Y = Youthfulness, or lack thereof. Age categories are back in the spotlight!

Oh, hey, the grinding path to space samurai Jedi from a long-defunct MMORPG!

An in the wild Galaxies reference? Must be my lucky day.

Open a Shifter up to being someone who drank out of the big ooze pond in Nex or was blessed by a Protean’s touch and I’m much more interested.

Definitely agree. To expand upon the idea, I will say I do not want a Shifter to be seen as the fix for Druids. If Wild Shape needs to be improved that should be handled separately. There is a lot of creative space for a Shifter, they really should steer clear of trampling over the Druid.

The Petrified case is interesting.

You have been turned to stone. You can’t act, nor can you sense anything. You become an object with a Bulk double your normal Bulk (typically 12 for a petrified Medium creature or 6 for a petrified Small creature), AC 9, Hardness 8, and the same current Hit Points you had when alive. You don’t have a Broken Threshold. When you’re turned back into flesh, you have the same number of Hit Points you had as a statue. If the statue is destroyed, you immediately die. While petrified, your mind and body are in stasis, so you don’t age or notice the passing of time.

It again states "can't act" not "you have no actions". While I understand the thought behind saying an object is effectively dead, I am not convinced the Eidolon cares. It only unmanifests if the Summoner is reduced to zero hit points. Petrified is very clear that the object retains the same number of hit points. If this truly is a partnership, petrified sounds like the summoner becomes a silent partner and the eidolon is on a leash tied to a lawn ornament.

GM discretion already exists. The option to houserule, the need for occasional adjudication and the importance of GM to player communication have already been established. There is no benefit in having a particularly nuanced rules interaction get handwaved behind another redundant "you figure it out" moment. Unless you are genuinely concerned someone forgot they could houserule it, which admittedly does happen, it is not helpful to keep telling us something the book has made perfectly clear. Why would I even buy the book if it was only going to tell me to write my own rules? The fabulous artwork I suppose, but you hardly need me to poke holes in my own argument.

Most of the time I have a pretty good idea about how to resolve a situation and move the story forward. But I really do want to know the opinions of the Paizo developers. This is in fact why I buy their books. If a player joins my table and has P2e experience, I would really prefer if my interpretation of the game closely matched their previous experience. This consistency forms the shared language that we use. The hard questions, these ambiguous situations that surround the problematic powers (Invisibility is certainly not an easy topic) are the exact times I would like more guidance, not less.

If we consider the rulebook as a set of possible solutions to our problems then it feels like a shortcoming when it leaves so much as an exercise to the reader.

It needs to be relative to the story you are telling. One round of combat lasts six seconds, so if it takes you an hour to play through that the conversion is steep. But then it might only take a minute to say, "you all camp for the night and wake up the next morning". The story takes as much time as it needs or as little time as you want.

Where is this question coming from? Is this that nonsense from that other game (DnD 4e I think, but I might be misattributing this) where the book tells you to advance one day in game after every single real world hour spent playing? Without commenting on the overall quality of any other games, I will say that specific idea is ridiculous. There is no prescribed conversion for real world to in game time and it will take a great deal of effort to convince me that one is required or desired.

If I have missed your point could you be more specific about what you want to know?

I would like to reiterate the absurdity of this approach. Battle Medicine does not tell us what to do on a critical success, success, failure or critical failure. It seems strange to single out the idea "Battle Medicine does not specify it deals damage on a critical failure" while overlooking that it does not tell us what to do on any other result either.

Battle Medicine

Feat 1
General Healing Manipulate Skill
Source Core Rulebook pg. 258 4.0
Prerequisites trained in Medicine
Requirements You are holding healer's tools, or you are wearing them and have a hand free
You can patch up wounds, even in combat. Attempt a Medicine check with the same DC as for Treat Wounds and restore the corresponding amount of HP; this doesn't remove the wounded condition. As with Treat Wounds, you can attempt checks against higher DCs if you have the minimum proficiency rank. The target is then temporarily immune to your Battle Medicine for 1 day.

Attempt check, receive health. Plain as day. Not only does it not do damage on a critical failure, you in fact still get your healing.

Please note I am not actually advocating for this approach. It is technically correct (the best kind of correct) and could be viewed Rules As Written. More importantly, I would like to see our assumptions taken to their logical conclusion. If anyone is going to try and tell me that Battle Medicine does not rely upon Treat Wounds to establish its functionality then they had better go on to conclude that Battle Medicine does not even need that d20 to stop rolling. Is it too much to ask that we present our nonsense in an internally consistent and fully developed format?

and no longer having an oversized weapon due to being oversized themself

Equipment grows with you. Otherwise the now large barbarian would lose part of their damage bonus.

Your equipment grows with you... When wielding such a weapon in combat, increase your additional damage from Rage from 2 to 6

To some extent, the idea of a critical success against an area spell doesn't make sense in general.

Whereas I see that completely avoiding damage is one of the four expected outcomes and thereby determine the affected area is probably not a solid cube of magical effects.

The logic I am using to say that Battle Medicine doesn't deal damage is simply that it doesn't say so, nor does it say it is using the damaging properties of Treat Wounds.

The feat gives you all the information you need. It also does not explicitly state that anything happens on a critical success or failure. Attempt a check, receive health. Pass, fail, die rolled off the table- who cares! It was the attempt that mattered, receive your hp! It is only functional if you refer back to treat injury and apply the results as normal. If additional modifications were intended, they would have been stated. Group consensus has been pretty clear on this one, houserule it if you need to change it.

Without deception, I would say anything else you're doing is obvious to observers. It's not just the act of physically manipulating cards or whatever, but doing it in a way that goes undetected that is important.

You might be aware of this but-

Thievery Untrained Actions

Palm an Object
Manipulate
Source Core Rulebook pg. 253 4.0Palming a small, unattended object without being noticed requires you to roll a single Thievery check against the Perception DCs of all creatures who are currently observing you. You take the object whether or not you successfully conceal that you did so. You can typically only Palm Objects of negligible Bulk, though the GM might determine otherwise depending on the situation.

Success The creature does not notice you Palming the Object.
Failure The creature notices you Palming the Object, and the GM determines the creature’s response.

Getting it done undetected is entirely the point of rolling a success. I do still feel Deception has a place if they are roleplaying the whole scene.

Thievery is Dexterity based. Deception is Charisma based. Most card tricks that could be relevant to cheating rely upon manual Dexterity, quite heavily in fact. But the inevitable accusations of malfeasance are a staple of saloon scenes. There is ample opportunity for all three skills to show up during the scene. I believe the associated attribute reveals a lot about which skill matches a particular task.

For maximum clarity: changing which cards are in your hand or what face a die shows? Thievery. Deflecting accusations and generally keeping an amicable demeanor? Deception. Recalling knowledge or earning income? Gambling lore. Lore is generally only used to represent physical activity in an abstract sense, such as when taking an average of a long time period.

The skills were condensed quite a bit compared to previous editions or different games. I agree with consolidating related skill checks under a common name, but taking an overly literal view of the name itself helps no one.

We could make this as reductive as possible. Fighter? No complaints. Ranger? No complaints. So lets go. Rager. Done.
May I also suggest, Healer, Caster, Fister, Performer and Stabber for the other etymologically loaded classes? Hmmm, and Blocker. And other Caster. And other other Caster. All right, it needs some work.

Right now, fighters best simulate individual heroes, like Celtic warriors, skirmishers, scouts, rangers, etc. that don't fight in organized, regimented groups

The most important skills a soldier learns in basic are boring. The really important stuff is hygiene, communication, discipline and how to do eight counts until someone falls out. Turns out moving a formation of hundreds or thousands efficiently without everyone starving, getting sick or wandering off is hard. Sanitation and hygiene in the wilderness are slightly problematic. Sanitation and hygiene in the wilderness but now with five thousand of your best friends travelling with you?

I am mostly agreeing with you. Fighters are absolutely not Soldiers. The core concept is way off. Most of these games come out a little closer to militia or irregulars, more like spec ops dramatizations or vigilante romanticizations. Not complaining about that last part, efficient soldiery is boring. How does it go? Amateurs gather in the war room to discuss strategy, veterans discuss logistics. Something like that.

That being said, if Cackle in PF2 still has a Verbal component, it would still require speaking in a strong voice. If you were gagged or deaf, for example, it would mean you have the potential to not succeed at the action.

To stay on target with PF2 Cackle, the presence of Verbal and absence of Auditory puts us in a situation where you have to actually laugh aloud but no one has to hear you. Almost makes sense, the Witch's Spell is the real target of Cackle, not whatever creature got targeted originally. The Witch being silenced is a hard no, as that directly interferes with Verbal. The afflicted creature being deafened makes no difference at all.

Not to suggest I think Cackle must be interpreted as that overly narrow Hocus Pocus styled Witch. Reflavor to your hearts content, just keep that Verbal tag in mind. Grin real loud or something. I really like the concept of ringing a bell but that might be my bias talking. Still good to see a fellow Bloodborne enjoyer out in the wild.

There seems to be some consensus that alignment is more relevant to extraplanars or outsiders, whatever we are calling them these days, than it is to mortals native to the prime material. I must confess I may be carrying around some old edition baggage, but it seems like P2e streamlined the mechanics supporting alignment and may have thereby removed some of the specifics that kept the system functional. The GM can and should actively adjudicate what constitutes a sufficiently opposite alignment to be susceptible to aligned damage. Alignment as a tangible, mechanically significant concept is central to DnD and its successor PF. Devils are made out of evil. They may exercise some nuance, they may explore a wide palette of depravity, they may even dabble in short term almost good in order to facilitate longer term evil. But their very substance is evil made tangible. Taking complex philosophical ideas and equating them to tangible, material values is a foundational aspect of this brand of roleplaying. War-Murder-Torture is awful. Some things are worse. So much worse in fact, the CRB (and an evolving sense of societal decency) asks that we obfuscate it behind Lines and Veils. But I want to defeat War-Murder-Torture-andWorse! I want to take a stand against the symbolic representation of all that awfulness and I want to Bonk it on the head with goodness made manifest! Roleplaying allows us to abstract complex ideas into relatable situations using standardized symbolism. But this does not necessitate the death of nuance. Planar entities represent extreme manifestations, the highest highs and the lowest low, but there is more to the concept. Mortals might use the same labels to broadly categorize their morality but they must not be considered equivalent to beings quite literally composed of those labels. The Detect Alignment spell even allows for mechanical differences in how different targets express their alignment. A commoner or even a low level adventurer (but not a Cleric or other divine caster) can have LG written on their character sheet in towering bold letters and it makes no difference. Overlooking this nuance is detrimental to the system as a whole. If spellcasting and various magical abilities interact directly with creatures of strong alignment in mechanically significant ways, we have a fixed metric to use as reference. This makes it easier to explore the thousands of shades that lie between our reference points, not harder. Mortals are free to set their own destiny, to change their alignment through a hard won redemption arc or even on a whim. The alignment system gives weight to these decisions by providing a framework to determine how these differing shades of morality contrast with the concrete representations of absolute alignment. This argument brought to you by the Coalition for Bonking complex metaphysical problems on the head.

I still don't know why they didn't keep the Vital Strike name, that would have made it more clear.

Wholeheartedly agree. There is an element of tradition to all of this. Power Attack has history. The new mechanics are fine, it serves a decent purpose. But it is misleading, in an admittedly trivial way, to someone who is familiar with that history.

Are Unarmed Strikes allowed in spider form? If yes, Wolf Stance has very specific requirements. Is this an armored spider? The descriptive, flavorful portions of the text are written from the baseline assumption of a small or medium humanoid monk. There is an established format for listing hard requirements or rules related restrictions. It seems a little peculiar to discriminate against spider people just because here in the real world the book was written for humans by humans. Why are spiders being restricted from dealing piercing damage with unarmed strikes? In the interests of fostering an inclusive, welcoming environment for all gamers this needless anti-spider bias must stop.

1d12 from the greatsword (not 2d6, I'm being senile)

All I was talking about. Senile is too harsh, anachronisms can be endearing.

Weird. Cleric used to dominate this sort of hypothetical set up and yet here we are with no one (else) even mentioning them. Seriously, the four Paladins are getting more discussion and they are not even a full class. I get a little disagreeable over certain particulars, but credit must be given to Paizo for seriously shaking things up.

The all Investigator party sounds fun. They could do an occult adventure in Arkham country, they could do a police procedural like L&O:SVU (nevermind, 2e took a step back from the edge) CSI, they could even do a comedic crackdown on piracy such as The Pirates of Penzance. I might need to go pitch a Film Noir adventure path to my group.

It feels like a two-handed Fatal weapon would get one damage die at the size specified by Fatal. If you roll a crit on the strike that does replace the weapon's damage die at the time. I do not feel as though it would confer the second die Fatal usually grants but we might agree on that detail. I also agree the benefit feels in line with what other options can offer. Certainly not game breaking.

There's also the alternative you can be knocked prone without being dismounted, and since you can't use the Mount action while prone and can't Stand or Crawl while mounted you're just stuck there forever.

I like this one a lot. Imprison or Trap Soul now have a non-spellcaster equivalent. 2e really empowers the martial classes.

Okay, cool. We are talking about Archetype feats, which are Class feats not General feats. The book pretty clearly states an Archetype Skill feat is not a Class feat and to my knowledge none of them have the General trait either.