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As we all know there is no TN (or LN or CN) Champion Cause. Not now, not in the APG... supposedly not until Paizo gets good pitches for the entire Neutral row on the G/E Axis. While LN and CN seem relatively easy I've found myself wondering what a TN Champion Cause would even look like. Well, earlier it struck me, what about PF1e's Vindictive Bastard. Caring less about Good vs Evil, Law vs Chaos, and more about just fighting to protect (and if need be avenge) your companions? Sounds like a good TN to me. So anyways, here's Wonderwall my take at a TN Champion: The Vindicator

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Vindicator [True Neutral]
Champion Cause

Rather than be bound by some lofty ideal, you are more driven by the ones who fight beside you. You gain the Vindictive Strike champion's reaction and the Tenacious Ward devotion spell. Your Champion's Code consists of the following tenets:

• - You must never perform acts anathema to your deity.
  
• - You must never willingly lash out against an ally, either in word or in action.
  
• - You must not allow an ally to perish, as long as there is anything you can do to prevent it. This tenet does not require you to take action against the possible death of an ally at an indefinite time in the future, or to sacrifice your life to save theirs.
  
• - In the event an ally does perish despite your best efforts, you must do all in your power to avenge that ally at earliest opportunity. As the previous tenet, this tenant does not require you to sacrifice your life in the name of vengeance.
  

Champion's Reaction
(Reaction) Vindictive Strike
Trigger: An enemy within reach damages your ally who is within 15 feet of you.
You retaliate against the foe who would harm your ally. Make a Melee Strike against the foe. If your melee strike is successful increase your damage by an amount equal to 2+your level.
If the triggering action would reduce your ally to 0 HP, double this damage bonus.

Devotion Spell
Tenacious Ward - Focus 1
Uncommon, Champion, Abjuration
Cast: (1 Action) Somatic
Range: Touch; Targets: Yourself or 1 Ally
Your touch enrobes the target in Divine Protection. If cast on an ally that ally gains Resistance 6 against all damage and a +2 Status bonus to AC for 1 round. If cast on yourself you gain Resistance 3 against all damage and a +2 Status Bonus to AC for 1 round.
Heightened (+1): Increase the Resistance granted by 6 when cast on an ally and by 3 when cast on yourself.

Divine Smite
Your vindictiveness extends to your allies. If you hit with your Vindictive Strike the target gains a weakness to damage afflicted by you or your allies equal to your Charisma modifier for a number of rounds equal to half your level.

Exalt
When you use Vindictive Strike, each ally within 15 feet of you with the target in their melee reach can spend a reaction to Strike the target with a -5 penalty. The Weakness from Divine Smite is not applied against these Strikes.

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May add some Cause-specific Class Feats down the line.

So this is something that was pointed out by a member of my playtest group: Bard Composition Cantrips. According to Bard's text

Composition cantrips are special composition spells that don’t cost Focus Points, so you can use them as often as you like.

Which basically means that like all Composition spells (according to the same page) they are a Focus Spell... just one that you can spam. The thing is, because they're still a Focus Spell, if I'm not mistaken that means that an Oracle who takes any Composition Cantrip via MC Bard will treat them as Revelation Spells. Which, well... let's look at Oracle's Curse

The first time after your daily preparations that you complete the Cast a Spell activity for a revelation spell, your minor curse manifests... If you cast a revelation spell while your minor curse is in effect, you progress to the moderate curse effect immediately after you finish Casting the Spell.

Note there's nothing in there about the Revelation Spell has to be one that would normally cost Focus, just that casting a Revelation Spell advances your curse. Does this mean that a level 8+ Oracle MC Bard who attempted to use Inspire Courage the way it seems to be intended to be used (every round give or take) is going to fly through their Curse? A strict reading seems to say yes.

So what do you all think? Does this seem an accurate reading? Does it seem like definite oversight of two unrelated mechanics interacting in a way they were never meant to interact? Am I grossly misinterpreting a mechanic? What say ye.

I was looking at the Disarm maneuver, because I remember its Success effect being not great in the Playtest. I noticed that it does grant a -2 penalty to attack now, which sounds nice on the surface... but then I noticed that it (like the bonus to additional Disarm checks) seems to only apply until the start of the target's turn. This is great if you're fighting something like a Paladin or some Fighters, where they can get a lot of Reactions they can use to hit things, but it seems like most of the time this penalty is going to be wearing off right when it actually becomes useful. And I'm just curious, is this intended? Because it seems to make Disarm still not very useful unless you can reliably crit-succeed it (which is not an easy state to reach I don't believe).

One thing to get out of the way right off the bat: I'm an Anime and Video Game nut. I have this weird obsession with oversized swords. So I'm just going to share how to get the most insanely oversized sword that I've found, just in the CRB.

Also, something I'm taking as a Given, though table variation might exist: When the Barbarian's Giant Instinct allows you to use a weapon two sizes larger than you at base (aka a Small creature using a Large weapon) and then that same Instinct gives you abilities that explicitly grow your gear with you, I am going to assume you don't suddenly lose the ability to use your weapon just because it grew with you and you are no longer Small or Medium.

So going off this: Halfling or Goblin with a Large Greatsword. I can't remember exactly if PF1e gave an exact length, and the book doesn't seem to give an exact length for Greatswords, and Google has turned up Zweihanders being as long as 7 feet so I'm going to say that a Medium Greatsword being 6 feet isn't unrealistic. Follow the PF1e standard of increasing gear's size by 1 increment doubles the size. So Large Greatsword would be 12 feet. 3 foot creature, 12 foot Greatsword, already off to a great start. But it gets better.

Level 6, get Giant's Stature. You grow to Large (+2 Size Increments) and your gear grows with you. Your character is now Large at 12 feet tall, and your Greatsword is now size Gargantuan at a whopping 48 feet long. But still it gets better.

Level 12, Titan's Stature. You can now grow to size Huge (+3 Size Increments) and again, your gear grows with you. So now your character is 24 feet tall... and wielding a sword that is a whopping 96 feet long. If you pointed that thing straight up and let it fall it would probably cleave a moderately sized building in half. But there is one more point to this study...

You see, one of the hilarious things about Pathfinder is that for the most part the length of your weapon has nothing to do with how far you can hit. So that 12 foot sword you're starting with? Yeah, you can still only hit adjacent creatures (up to 5 feet away). The 48 foot Gargantuan Blade? 10 feet. And the 96-foot monstrosity? 15 feet. I guess 80-some percent of the sword must be incorporeal or something. Oh, and of course, at all these points it still does the same 1d12 damage, I'm pretty sure.

This has been a study on insanely huge blades and how to use them.

Surely we've all seen it, the character with the big-ol shield in one hand, the pistol in the other, popping off enemies from behind cover? If I'm not mistaken some recent FPS games have made it iconic, and personally I just like the aesthetic. There's only one problem: It takes two hands to reload, and you can't use a hand holding a Riot Shield to do anything. So I'm wondering, outside of the obvious (Play a Kasatha or Buy a Cybernetic Arm) does anyone know of ways to make this work?

And as an aside, I'd love to eventually be able to get Riot Shield and Shotgun/Rifle options too, using the Shield to brace the gun, though that will probably cost at least a feat if it ever becomes a thing. Kind of like the Shield Brace feat in PF1e.

With the new Playtest's Biohacker class, it made me really look at the Wraith-Sting rifles from the Armory. The problem with trying to main one of these though, is that they do no inherent damage. On the other hand, constantly swapping weapons is a pain in the butt, and I'm not very particular towards the Kasatha, so I was just kind of wondering, would Weapon Specialization interact with these to give at least a modicum of damage when you don't have a substance loaded? My group's potential GMs are leaning no, but I thought it worth asking.

Everyone (or nearly everyone? A lot of people at least) who plays in Golarion knows that Pharasma is super anti-Undead. The Pharasman Church considers Undead the most abominable abominations, to be destroyed on sight, stuff like that. And yet... Pharasmins can be NG, qualifying for the new Redeemer Paladin introduced in the 1.6 update. Part of the Redeemer edicts is that you must be compassionate towards everyone, and must always try to redeem or rehabilitate Evil before killing them.

But hey, it's fine right? Cause Anathema falls behind Deity Anathema, and surely Pharasma's Anathema calls to destroy Undead on sight right? Well let's look at Pharasma's entry:

Alignment N

Edicts strive to understand ancient prophecies, destroy undead, lay bodies to rest
Anathema create undead, desecrate a corpse, rob a tomb
Favored Weapon dagger

*Emphasis mine

Uh oh. Destroying Undead is on there alright... but it's not mentioned in Anathema. It's in Edicts, and the Paladin Code has no interaction with Edicts, just Anathema. So it looks like by RAW (especially for PFS and PFS-esque games where GMs are extremely limited in/unwilling to modify the RAW) Paladins of Pharasma are going to have to do the exact opposite of what you'd expect a Pharasmin to do.

So what's the point of this thread? Well, mostly to point out that oddity, but also to mention this: This undoubtedly isn't (or at least won't be once other Deities are re-added) the only such... quirk of Edicts clashing with extra-deific Codes. I think it might be worth-while to add a mention of Deity Edicts to such Codes so that such clashes hopefully won't result in Deity getting shoved to the wayside because the Class calls for something else (seemingly not the intention, given Deity Anathema are placed at Tenant 1.)

So I was working on a Barbarian, and when I was looking at weapons I noticed the Charge trait on the Lance.

If you moved at least 10 feet on the action before your attack, add a circumstance bonus to damage for that attack equal to the number of damage dice for the weapon.

So I was thinking, that seems pretty cool. But then I thought about it. It explicitly only works if the action before your attack was a movement. As a melee Barbarian I of course have the Sudden Charge feat, which lets you move up to double your speed and Strike as a single two-action activity. So I'm just curious how these two interact? There's two real ways I can see it working:

- The "Move up to twice your speed" part of Sudden Charge is the first 'action' of the Activity, and thus it would meet the conditions of the Charge trait.
- You would have to take a Stride (or other movement) action that moves at least 10 feet before performing the Sudden Charge in order for the Charge trait to trigger.

I'm curious which it's supposed to be. I hope it's the first one, but suspect it's the second. If it is the first, it might be worth making that more clear, and if it's the second... I'm curious as to why that is, whether it's an oversight or some kind of balancing function or something.

So I was looking through the Vehicle rules and just something I noticed. The smaller a vehicle, the higher the DC to avoid damage (typically collision) from it is. But there's nothing about size modifying speed, so this seems weird to me.

To illustrate why this seems weird to me, have an example. To start with, say you're standing on a planetoid in a vacuum (so that by physics any two objects dropped from equal height will fall at the same rate). Now say someone some distance above you dropped a marble directly above your head. You look up, see it coming, and casually step to the side, the marble hits the ground below you.

Now, same vacuum planetoid, say someone drops a skyscraper from the same height. It's falling at the exact same rate, so you have the same reaction time... but you can't just side-step this one. In fact, depending on how high it was, chances are you can't actually run fast enough to get out of the way.

So I ask then, why is it when dealing with vehicles, it's easier to dodge that skyscraper than the marble?

Okay so this may seem a bit of a leap, but hear me out. As near as I can tell, Groetus's big day is never going to come, for one simple reason. Monks of the Four Winds.

Let's start with Groetus's big day. According to what I've heard and read, Groetus is schedule to come when the last soul is judged, being sent to its resting Afterlife and all that, leaving the world empty. Basically he'll swoop in and pack everything up for the big Reset or whatever, but he's very specifically not supposed to come until the last Soul is Judged, right?

That brings me to my second point. From what I've heard the various Rez spells, including Reincarnate, are Pharasma deciding you're not up to be Judged yet, and sending your soul back to Golarion with her blessing. As such, as long as you are brought back by a Pharasma-approved (aka non-Necromantic) method, your soul is not yet Judged.

Okay, so let's look at the Level 20 Monk of the Four Winds. To start with, Immortality, they will not die of old age. Okay that's neat. Being monks, they also can't die from Poison or Disease, because they are immune to those effects. Neat. So the only other way I can think of that they could die is to be killed, right? But then there's the other clause of their Immortality, any time they are killed they are Reincarnated. This means, as I mentioned in my previous paragraph, that Pharasma is sending their soul back unjudged. And this kicks in every single time they die. Their soul basically will not, arguably even cannot be Judged, which means that from the moment the first Monk of the Four Winds survived to hit level 20 Groetus's condition was rendered un-achievable.