Sanityfaerie's page

If Barathu can't pause and rest in midair though... well, you get back to "my ancestral homeworld is lethal to me at level 1" issues. You go to sleep? You fall out of the sky and die. I know that simulationism doesn't get a lot of sway in the PF2 game lineage, but this really isn't great.

Got my Sub pdf and reading through and one issue that carries forward from before unless I am missing something is that there is no in class way to get more than 2 familiar abilities without taking an archetype like familiar master or Sorcerer. This kinda feels really bad given they added the homunculus specific familiar which is clearly designed for the alchemist who has no in class way to get to the required 6 abilities.

I'm not sure how big a deal that is, given that Familiar Master archetype does exist. With the dedication counting as Enhanced Familiar, it's not like you're wasting feats.

And a Unique ability to have a 1500 ft. Telepathic link with both sides having full access to eachothers knowledge (not sure how usefull this is without an extra ability free to give it speech so that it can relay information for you not only to you.). There are some other things too just don't if I am allowed to share the full text before release.

Well, one thing it does is it lets you use it to play scout in realtime from 1500 feet away. You can discuss where it needs to go and what it needs to do and so forth. Now, you can also buy it the ability to talk, for *those* benefits, but it's by no means useless by itself.

Again, once the elemental property runes come online, there's really no way for the Q-Vial d6 damage to compete.

At L12, when the Q-Vials upgrade to 3d6, any runed d6 weapon will be doing 5d6 with 2 extra crit effects.

It's just insane to pretend that Q-Vials will at all compare.

Actual formula bombs depend on matching the right secondary effect to the situation to justify the lower damage, while weapons are much more static. A 3d6 persistent damage bomb can genuinely be superior to a weapon strike during turn 1, especially with an Additive but that'll cost you a VV.

The actual infinite bombs are crap, and they are designed intentionally to be sup bar backups/filler. The issue is that because they are sub-par but still use the exact same Strike action, you would always benefit more from a runed weapon strike.

The fact that they blocked Additives from working with QVs is what really renders this a non-argument. This is not like the Persistent Bombs of old, where you had an even lower damage bomb, but had the potential for Additives to make up for it. These are just crappy, completely rune-incompatible, Strikes.

Literally worse than unarmed attacks that can be enhanced via Handwraps + runes.

It's not xd6, though. It's xd6+x for the splash. If you're a bomber, that becomes xd6+5 at level 5. Bombers also get to choose cold/electric/fire/acid, and at level 11 they can have it also count as adamantine/cold iron/dawnsilver, or any metal you happen to be wearing. A level 10 feat can give you another +int to that splash damage, as well as increasing splash size. At 13, bombers get to increase splash size *again*.

So at level 12, the bomber slinging a versatile vial with appropriate feats is dealing 3d6+10 to the primary target, and 10 to everyone within 10 feet of the target, in their choice of four damage types, in their choice of at least three special materials. Given that the backfire mantle is a thing, and the level 8 version, delightfully, offers exactly 10 resistance to friendly splash, I'm going to say that that's a decent chunk better than the 5d6 plus some nice crit effects that you'd get out of a standard d6 ranged weapon. If you're fighting crowds, then the splash is giving you some love. If you're fighting singletons, then you weren't ever all that likely to crit anyway... and you're a *lot* better at routing around resists and into vulns than anyone with a weapon that they've actually invested in is. Pretty nice for a class that's *still* bringing heals and buff-juice to the table at the end of the day.

Now, it's not nearly as good for anyone who isn't a bomber, and it requires both feat investment and some gear investment. This is true... but it's pretty solid once you've tossed those things in there, and those investments also apply in full for when you're throwing around bombs that you've made that you *can* slap additives on... like making a sticky bomb with 10 points of ongoing damage.

For the record, I'm really appreciating this thread just as a place to go for the links.

The suits at Hasbro that decided "we should alter the OGL so it benefits us more" really didn't have Paizo in their sights.

I don't believe that this is correct. Like, as one of the steps in their walk-back, WotC pretty much specifically said "We're not targeting the small-time creators. We're trying to get money out of the large multi-million-dollar companies" Paizo is one of the few of those, and (as far as I'm aware) the most prominent.

Also, there had prior to this been a lot of churn online about people evangelizing PF2 in 5e spaces, with some success. I absolutely believe that WotC was seeing Paizo as a competitor and that this was an effort to eat their lunch.

Sure did backfire, though.

"Congratulations on your conquest of the year gone by... and good luck 0n your assault upon the year to come."

Also, yay little Akiton! Hopefully it'll be the sort of interesting place inside a place full of little interesting bits and lovable characters that can be used as a touchpoint for campaigns to return to as their characters mature.

Not having those classes in the initial book would also be a huge mistake.

You are incorrect.

The core book has enough classes to build a solid adventuring party. You've got a class for tanks, a class for ranged DPR, a class for nonmagical support, a class for melee DPR, a heal/buff caster class and a "mess with the enemy" caster class. That's enough to set up and run a game. The game at that point is viable.

Rushing the Mechanic and Technomancer before they're ready would damage those two classes. It would make them worse overall, and the damage that it would do is not the kind that's easy to fix with errata. Letting them wait has a lot of benefits. It means that they can get a bit more focus, it means that there's more feedback about how SF2 plays, it means that they get their own playtest period to work with, and it means that there will be time for the designers to set more bricks in place to support them properly. Letting them show up a year or so later than the rest will mean that we have a better Technomancer and a better Mechanic for the entire rest of SF2's lifespan. That has value.

Now, you crave these classes? Okay. Sure. Fine. You won't play the game without them? Also fine. SF1 is still there, and it has gobs of stuff written for it. It's entirely reasonable to say "I'm not going to make the switch until they bring back my favorite class. There's nothing wrong with that.

...and when they do bring them back, the fact that that extra time was taken is going to mean that those classes will be more satisfying to play.

The Raven Black wrote:

Actually, evil is still a thing. It is Evil that went away and got replaced by Unholy for PFS PC purpose IIRC.

You get what I mean. With the remaster, there's no more questionning on the morality of your behavior unless you go for extreme one that will give you Infamy. So you can play a PC that would qualify as Evil in the past.

In a more pragmatic sense, very little has changed.

- How evil you can have your actions be is unchanged. The Infamy rules stand exactly as they were, and PFS had no other applicable enforcement.

- How evil you can present yourself as outside of your actions is unchanged. If it doesn't generate infamy, then PFS doesn't address it.

- Your character options and what you have written on your character sheet will have shuffled around, because the actual options themselves have shuffled around, but there's a pretty direct correspondence nonetheless. Previously, you couldn't write down that you were evil, or take the obviously evil-flagged character options. Currently, you can't write down that you're unholy, or take the obviously evil-flagged character options.

Like, the only difference I can see is if you yourself cared about properly roleplaying the alignment written on your character sheet, at which point you could now write nothing and still have RP justification for considering yourself to be "evil". The rules themselves didn't change a lot, though.

Sanityfaerie wrote:

That's not what PFS is about, though. PFS is about generally good people doing generally good things, and making the world (in general) a better place.

PFS adventure are not really about being good per se. The PFS organization is considered neutral. And you are always performing missions for the Society during PFS adventure. So an evil character who has reasons to progress inside the PFS or who's loyal has all the right in the world to participate to PFS. Actually, PFS missions are very rarely purely selfless. The Society is very often "helping" to get allies or consolidate its position in the area. A very political reading would consider it neutral, hiding its political maneuvers behind apparently good actions.

Still, there are a few situations where the PFS clearly acted against evil. But these are more exceptions than the rule.

So, I may have overstated.

At the same time, there's the fact that evil character options aren't really allowed, and taking more than about three significantly evil acts will make you retire your character permanently.

PFS does not support play as an evil character. It's not intended to. You can cram in some evilness around the edges if you work at it, but you shouldn't be surprised when your "I'm evil but it's okay" character concept isn't allowed because you were never intended to be able to play PFS as an evil character in the first place.

Perhaps Gorum refused to truly take a side and both sides were infuriated by this, so his death was simply a means to deny either side having the aspect of War behind them?

That's a really weird take, since he'd almost certainly follow the same bog-standard pattern as all of he other neutral deities and let his followers go either way... and it wouldn't be in his nature to ever pick sides when he could instead revel in the carnage.

It is possible to play an unrepentantly evil character in a party and have it work, with or without hiding things from your fellow party members.

It is possible to have an entire party be composed of such characters.

That's not what PFS is about, though. PFS is about generally good people doing generally good things, and making the world (in general) a better place.

So this might seem like a hairsplitting question but... do we know they won't be core?

I mean we know they won't be in the play test material, but all of that is PLAYTEST. It's all subject to change after the playtest runs it's course. Like, I don't know about anyone else, but I don't expect the 6 classes they're play testing to keep their Key ability scores as all six different attribute modifiers after play test. I wasn't around for the PF2e playtest, but did they release all the available options in there?

They're not going to add a class without playtesting it. They've learned that lesson.

As such, including a class in core without including that same class in playtest would mean pausing the release of Core while they ran another playtest just for that class. That would be really very expensive in a number of meaningful ways - not just raw money.

Essentially, it would be a significant mistake on their part, one way or the other, and Paizo has learned how to not make mistakes like that.

We haven't yet seen any of the curses. They could still be pretty interesting.

We haven't yet seen any of the other path features of the mysteries, either. Those could also be interesting.

We've lost most (but not quite all) of the bit where you could turn the downside of your curse into an upside by dancing with it, but let's be a bit patient before we conclude that all of that flavor is lost.

I still have trouble understanding why people feel Unholy is the worst. You can absolutely be the worst person alive and not be Unholy.

It's just that this person cannot be Holy.

It goes past that.

It's not just "being an awful person means you can't be holy". There's a really strong argument to be made that being unholy pretty much inherently means that you're an awful person. Like yeah, there's space for GM interpretation there, and not just houserules. The rules themselves are unclear and arguably contradictory... but "being unholy means that you're an awful human being" is, I think, one of the stronger rhetorical positions in that morass.

Still, your core assertion is correct. For an individual person, the unholy sanctification functions primarily as a requirement. "You must be this evil to ride this ride". There's nothing stopping you from being whatever level of horrible with no sanctification at all.

In the context of gods, however, if unholy sanctification is a hard requirement for you... then yeah. Among deities, you are, in fact, The Worst. Asmodeus and Urgathoa are simply more horrible than Zon-Kuthon and Norgorber. None of the four are what we'd describe as good, but ZK and the Hamburglar are at least willing to accept and share power with non-awful followers who are at least potentially seeking non-awful ends. For Asmodeus and Urgathoa, that's simply not true.

I was thinking that should be part of the blessed one archetype or background.

Awesome.

...and now I'm imagining a version that's nearly identical other than the fact that he instead worships Pharasma specifically in her role as creator-deity. They'd work well together, but their theological debates would be legendary.

One thing to notice about Foretell Harm is that it's also another dip on the available vulnerabilities, if you were able to hit them once already.

Alright, that's it. If I get a chance I'm playing my Stout Halfling Mummy as a bones Oracle who worships Urgathoa as a liberator and provider, despite the fact that his kindness and mercy piss her off, causing his curse.

...and if there's any way at all, try and see if you can get sanctified Holy.

So the thing I notice is that "cursebound" looks like an encounter resource. Like, "take more curse" is explicitly intended as a cost, and higher-level characters are supposed to be able to get more cursed than lower-level characters. As such, I'm thinking that ones you've maxxed out your current curse level, you don't get to push it any further, and all of those shiny feats turn off until you can (somehow) get your curse to subside.

Zoken44 wrote:

My point was more "Urgathoa should allow for non-sanctified clerics" and not "I don't understand sanctification".

I kind of don't understand sanctification. Like, the description of the trait implies a clear moral standard in line with pre-remaster good and evil, but Paizo elected to not attach edicts or anathema to the act of sanctification, which weirdly suggests that unholy clerics who are sweethearts and holy clerics who are evil manipulative monsters are both valid (if odd) conceptual spaces.

As stated, the trait definition does suggest some moral boundaries, but... this is also specifically what the anathema system was created for and the omission of any coverage of sanctification there is very conspicuous.

First of all, I honor that confusion. It's not clear. It's especially unclear because sanctification is clearly and explicitly a thing in Golarion, but the mechanisms are only vaguely implied, rather than actually explained. If you decide you want to be sanctified, what determines whether or not you are worthy? What is the method by which the sanctification is applied? If you see the error of your ways and either fall to corruption or redeem yourself, does the sanctification remain? Is there *any* way to get rid of it? Is it technically possible to be both holy and unholy at the same time?

That said... I think that the best way to take it is as if it *is* a personal edict/anathema. Like, if you're sanctified Holy, then that means that you really care about helping people and opposing the forces of the hells. If you're sanctified unholy, then you really are dedicated to cruelty in some way, and also you've firmly aligned yourself with the devils and against the celestials.

Now, this take really doesn't work well for the game of "How far can I twist alignment definitions/expectations". That's true. It pretty much both assumes and insists that you not do that. At this point, though, I think it's either that or houserule. We simply don't have the close-look clarity on it right now.

The Pathfinder Society is trying to save the world.

Asmodeus seeks eternally to damn it.

It's a bit of a conflict of interest.

My point was more "Urgathoa should allow for non-sanctified clerics" and not "I don't understand sanctification".

Also, this is all up to the actual GM I play with. Though this is not the first character idea I'd like to play with.

Ahhh. Got it. My misunderstanding.

Well, once you allow for house rules on this stuff, anything goes. Before that... I think it's more interesting to consider what it means that she doesn't allow unsanctified than to argue that it's incorrect. Like, at this point she's the most important goddess Geb has left, and she insists that her clerics must declare for a specific side in the War in Heaven. That's interesting.

Some interesting ones from Tian Xia World Guide: Hei Feng now only allows holy sanctification if you're tengu (I can't help but think it's for earning brownie points from Lady Jingxi lol), while Yaezhing went from LE/NE only followers to allowing both holy/unholy sanctification.

Hmmm. Yaezhing also added an intro description that makes him a lot mroe evenhanded, and added "slaughter indiscriminately" to his anathema.

The Hei Feng/Lady Jingxi thing says quite a lot in relatively few words... like how three of Lady Jingxi's anathema are basically "Be Hei Feng". It's like, he's still trying. The social toolset he's got is 100% wrong for the job, but he is trying.

Hei Feng Edict: "make token attempts to apologize to those you have wronged"

1. Be a solarian.

2. Stand next to windows and starship portholes.
3. Attune to gravitons.
4. Create wormhole, one inside, one outside.
5.
6. Profit.

5. Create a fantastic closed-room mystery about your own death?

I still maintain I could create a "good" cult to Urgathoa in Cheliax that embracess her two big points: Hunger/indulgence and Undeath.

Not if you want any clerics you can't. That's the point. Clerics of Urgathoa are now *required* to show devotion to "victimizing others, inflicting harm, and battling celestial powers"... and Urgathoa is the one who required this thing.

Like, you can have random whackadoos believe anything they want about whatever deity strikes their fancy. You can even have clerics delude their flocks in any of a wide variety of ways... but every cleric of Urgathoa who's actually receiving spells is a fundamentally horrible person.

Basically, if Urgathoa allowed for nonsanctified clerics, I'd agree with you... but she doesn't, so I don't.

Edit: On further consideration, I must acknowledge that there's a viable read where you can basically fake a sanctification - where you don't have to have devotion to "victimizing others, inflicting harm, and battling celestial powers", you just have to convince the appropriate infernal authorities that you have those things.

Even so, a sect that's being run by clerics who are pretending to be awful in these ways isn't likely to be a particularly good group to hang around... and if everyone in the local leadership is faking it, they should probably be worshiping someone like Norgorber instead.

Sanityfaerie wrote:

Pharasma is None/Holy

Typo here, she's Heal/No Sanctification.

Right you are. Thought the right thing, wrote the wrong thing. Ah well. Past the edit window now.

Kinda feel that Pharasma should have the harm font. Obviously you can't use it to heal under, but she is still the god of death so it would make sense for some of her clerics to finish off people who are trying for immortality...

My understanding is that generally they do that by either embracing undeath or becoming gods. For undeath, she'd rather have the heal fond. The ones that try to become gods are another deity's department.

Still crossing my fingers for an eventual Darklands book for those to show up in alongside Caligni. I know James Jacobs has said no such book is on the docket at the moment, but I can hope.

Darklands is huge. We're not getting a comprehensive darklands book because there's way too much of it. We are going to get little bits of darklands sprinkled around in other books (indeed, we've already gotten some of that). We might at some point get a Lost Omens book for some particularly interesting or important part of the Darklands and/or an AP that involves delving into the darklands, and thus dials in and reveals more about specific chunks of the place.

The AP seems more likely than the LO, really. In particular, for a LO book to be worthwhile, it has to be an area that people really want to know about. So... we might manage a LO of the Darklands under the Inner Sea or under Avistan or something, but people would have to really want to know about that specific chunk of the darklands, and in order to have that be a thing, we'd have to have some sort of major event that made that specific chunk of the darklands more important.

Actually... probably a more sane way to do it would be to split the difference. Pick a spot on the map that has an unusually high degree of interaction between the darklands and the surface world. Write a LO about that area that goes 50/50 darklands and surface world and goes into some detail about the relationship between the two areas and how they interact with and affect one another. Then you can set an AP in that area that explores that in a more dialed-in sort of way. Lets you play the wave caster thing of taking half and half in a way that lets you make it more than just a sum of its parts. At that point, including an appropriately sized event wouldn't be necessary, though it might still be helpful.

The real issue there is picking an appropriate spot. I'm not aware of any spots on Golarion that are that way already, which means that either they'd have to pick a spot that was not previously sufficiently explored and say "hey, check out what we found here" or they'd have to pick a spot that didn't have that kind of connection before and then add the upheaval that would come with gaining such a connection.

Now, recent events have indicated that the team's not afraid of a bit of upheaval, but it's something to be used judiciously. So, even if they do pull somethign like that, it probably won't be soon.

I would like to apologize to everyone for having started this thread. I would like to especially apologize to those people who made a good-faith effort to engage with the very narrow intended topic of this thread. I am still interested in the original idea, but I simply do not have what it takes at this point to wade through the thing that this thread has become, and I can now see that attempts to *just* discuss that one topic in this space are pretty much doomed.

To @Unicore in particular, I wish to acknowledge that you were entirely correct, though I did not see it at the time.

I may at some point attempt a version of this thread on the homebrew forum with more care given to the title and the wording. Now is not that time.

So... in the lead up to the remaster, we did a lot of talking about how deities might blur the lines. Well, now we have some more information to blur the lines with. So let's talk about that.

Most of the good gods were Heal Only, can choose Holy. That all fits, and we won't bother hitting them individually.

Most of the neutral gods were Heal/Harm, can choose holy or unholy. That all fits, and we wont' bother hitting *them* individually either.

Asmodeus is mandatory unholy/harm. Anathema change from "don't free slaves" to "don't share power with the weak". No surprises here, and not much to say. Asmodeus continues to be an awful individual. News at 11.

Gozreh is Heal Only, No sanctification, which is interesting, but not surprising. Way more interested in making things alive than in making them dead, but wants no truck with the war in heaven.

Iomedae is mandatory holy/heal, which really ought not be a surprise to anyone.

Lamashtu is heal/harm, can choose unholy, which does that thing that lots of people have been looking forward to where you can play a nonhorrible child of the mother of monsters.

Norgorber is harm/can choose unholy, which opens up the possibility of... a non-horrible follower of Norgorber? Well, it's an interesting idea, at least.

Pharasma is None/Holy - basically the same schtick as Gozreh, except that she's more interested in the "smite the undead" part of the heal font than the "promote life" part.

Rovagug is, again, mandatory harm/unholy. No one is surprised.

Urgathoa is *also* mandatory harm/unholy, which puts a bit of a spanner in the gears for anyoen who was hoping to run a non-horrible splinter sect of hers.

...and finally, Zon-Kuthon is harm/can choose unholy. He's still a very edgy boy, but non-horrible devout followers are a real possibility (...and they probably mostly live in Nidal).

/**********/

Interesting breakdown bits:
- Iomedae is the only deity of the pre-war Core 20 at mandatory holy.
- Asmodeus, Rovagug, and Urgathoa are literally The Worst.
- Lamashtu, Norgorber, and Zon-Kuthon are there for your alignment-twisting pleasure, for those who want to run a character who's potentially sympathetic once you get to know them but is still super-creepy especially at first.

Lamashtu:
- Edicts: bring power to outcasts and the downtrodden, indoctrinate other in Lamashtu’s teachings, make the beautiful monstrous, reveal the corruption and flaws in all things
- Anathema: attempt to change that which makes you different, provide succor to Lamashtu’s enemies

Norgorber:
- Edicts: keep your true identity secret, sacrifice anyone necessary, take every advantage in a fight, work from the shadows
- Anathema: allow your true identity to be connected to your foul dealings, share a secret freely, show mercy

Zon-Kuthon:
- Edicts: bring pain to the world, mutilate your body
- Anathema: create permanent or long-lasting sources of light, provide comfort to those who suffer

Shelyn and Zon-Kuthon accidentally Gift of the Magi'd themselves into a combined entity stronger than the subparts by simultaneously accepting defeat and sending all of their life force to the other to continue the battle against Nyarlathotep.

They said previously existing worshippers of Shelyn and Zon-Kuthon still get their powers from the combined entity. So you can create a Mystic in PF2 who says they only worships one of them and gets access to the Zon-Shelyn domains via that feat. I'm sure they won't waste space publishing separate Shelyn and Zon-Kuthon stat blocks.

Wait, seriously? That's canon?

If so, it argues for many of the less horrible Zon-Kuthon interpretations, at least for the pre-fusion Starfinder version of the deity. The idea that there legit were circumstances where he'd be willing to extinguish himself on Shelyn's behalf argues pretty hard that he wasn't entirely lost.

...and now that I've checked, I can see that the PF2 remaster version is can choose unholy, rather than must choose unholy. So that's interesting.

Jirelle has legendary athletics confirmed.

Also... Zon-Shelyn??? What?!? Ummm... what happened to Shelyn? Why has she changed her name? Please, someone, tell me she hasn't gone full cenobite like her brother...

Best available information is that Zon-Shelyn is somehow both of them together.

Also, I think I recall the Paizo folks mentioning somewhere that worship of baseline Shelyn was still available.

People keep mentioning technomancer and mechanic, but those both need to be in the 1st book released.

The first book released is going to have soldier, envoy, solarian, witchwarper, mystic, and operative.

Technomancer and mechanic are coming, but they won't be the first book. It was decided that they needed some more time in the tank. It's possible that they also need a bit more build-out on the gear list.

I feel like that'd be a very cool angle for a primal witchwarper. Assuming witchwarpers are still focused around altering the areas around them.

Well, that's fair. "Terraformer" works just fine as a background, and "primal witchwarper" is a very solid place to go with that one.

Do we know for certain that Nanocyte is going to be a full class? Especially if it's toned down to just the cloud version, it seems like the sort of thing that might make for an archetype instead... and if it did it well, I'd be pretty down for that. Why yes, I would like an archetype that's all about giving me a friendly nanobot swarm aura.

I kind of feel like I did in the second half of my post, but I guess that wasn't what you're looking for?

It's fair. You didn't ignore it entirely. At the same time, the "MP vs Spell Slots" question is very nearly orthogonal to the question of when and how your resources refresh.

@OceanshieldwolPF 2.5 - just wanted to say that I see your post, and it is worthy of response, and I just do not have the time right now. I'll try to get to it later.

The first trap I immediately see is this.

Sainityfaerie wrote:

Further, they shouldn't start the day maxxed out on this stuff. Going to sleep for the night should return you to a baseline, but there should be plenty of space above the baseline for you to accumulate resources that you can later spend, if you're fighting conservatively.

This concept being part of the system is going to encourage conservative play. (To be clear, I'm not saying that sort of play is incorrect, but it does seem to be a style of play you're trying to get away from.) Look at gold, and specifically consumables, as a current example, or heck, even spell slots under the current paradigm. Folks are always talking about keeping all their consumables so they can sell them all later and get one better thing in some future point, and there is also the concern over spending your highest level slots because, well, what if there is a more dangerous fight later you don't know about? If there is a way to gather resources to be above a baseline so you can have a big turn, then people are going to hoard those resources to have that big turn, and there is going to be friction. That's where the fifteen minute adventuring day comes from in the first place, no?

If you have a system that requires generating and spending a resource, and allowing that resource to be stockpiled, then the natural inclination is to find ways to generate as much as possible, while spending as little as possible, and getting to that zenith stockpile as quickly and as often as possible. That's why I see attrition and husbandry as indivisible. Any form of resources going down is going to encourage some behaviors that try to keep that from happening. We saw similar kinds of behaviors with hit points and wands of cure light wounds in the previous edition; people hoarded as many as they could because it was the most effective way of keeping that resource from depleting. It was the most effective way to husband that resource between encounters.
That mentality is different in PF2E, because PF2E has implemented rules that expect that resource to be filled between encounters, or at least, nearly filled. That's sort of what I'm proposing here. Your maximum pool of power is considered your baseline, and it's relatively easy to return to that baseline after any given encounter; daily attrition is essentially a non-factor because encounter attrition is king.

So... various reactions

As you say, this already exists in the current game. I accept that. I'm also not particularly trying to wipe out conservative play, or at least not entirely. The people who are particularly bad at it... tend not to play casters. I know that I personally avoid casters because I have this issue, and it makes the primary gameplay loop uncomfortable for me. At the same time, I expect that the assurance that more is available later, and the sort of "suggested budget" of your per-encounter income, should moderate those issues.

Still, yes. It's going to mean that people probably play a little conservative and try to build up resources over the course of the day just in case. That's true. That's part of what the resource husbandry game is.

The problem of the fifteen minute adventuring day comes from the fact that going to sleep fills you back up again on all of those shiny temporary resources. So, the caster wakes up, they head into their first fight, they blow all of their most important resources and get to feel super-awesome about it... and then they start complaining that they need to go back home and rest because they don't have any more of the really good spells. That's the fifteen-minute adventuring day. This one avoids that pretty handily. It starts you out with a bit in the tank, but it's actually to the caster's advantage to have a few encounters before the big boss, so they can go in with more of a full tank than they started the day with. Fifteen minute adventuring day isn't nearly so much of an issue with this one.

The "people will play silly games for stockpiling advantages" is an issue. That's true. I believe that it's one that can be overcome with proper implementation, though. That's part of why I came up with the idea of having it be dependent on the challenge level of the encounter, hitting at the time you roll initiative. We don't want it to be anything that you can do out of combat, because then people will just sit and spin in relative safety. We don't want it to be anything that people can do in combat, because they'll beat the enemy down to the "no real threat" level and then sit and spin in relative safety. Thus, the two obvious times to do it are as a charge-up at the start of battle or as a reward at the end, and scaling it to the level of threat seems like a bonus as well.

Now, can this be cheesed? Probably. In particular, it seems like a situation where you might want another rule that caused you to lose charge if you ran away. It's also something that might be a bit tricky to fit into the world thematically. It's a work in progress, and it hasn't progressed all that far as yet. Still, from what I can see, something like that could work.

I understand what your looking for fine. Not sure why you think I don't. What I'm trying to illustrate is the problem you state only exists for one caster. Just the one.

We haven't squared the circle with the wizard.

The reason that I don't think you understand is that the issue I'm trying to address is almost entirely agnostic of the specifics of the classes involved. It's even largely agnostic to the overall comparative strength between casters and martials.

The fact that you're trying to talk about the details of specific classes as anything other than brief illustrative examples means that, regardless of what you might think, we're not actually talking about the same problem. You think that I'm proposing the thing that I'm proposing in order to fix a specific issue that you're aware of and dislike, or in response to specific complaints made by others. I'm not. I'm proposing to fix this thing because it is a problem in and of itself, mostly for the second and third order effects that it generates, and the whole wizard thing is just the expression of those effects that happens to be most visible and frustrating to you.

Now... "primal caster based on terraforming". It's an interesting thought.

There's two ways to take it, too. The first is that it's a skillset that's designed to *do* the terraforming. That doesn't fit particularly well, though. Like, I could easily imagine that primal casters might be useful in terraforming, and that there even might be specialized practices of primal casters that worked to optimize their arts for terraforming... but terraforming is slow. The primal caster who are out there optimizing for that are the kind that specifically aren't out there adventuring. They want very different things in life. The only way you're going to get a lot of terraformer primal casters of that variety pouring out onto the adventurer job market is if there was some awful cataclysm that somehow rendered a bunch of them unemployed and also radicalized them at the same time. Also, they probably wouldn't be going for magitech. Terraforming is a big enough job that you want specialists. You'd have them working with biohackers and whatnot, each one focusing on the jobs the other wasn't great at. You might want some kineticists in there too.

On the other hand, if terraforming is a thing, then you might have terraforming druids that get in tune with its spiritual essence, that vibe with planets as they are being terraformed and really try to grok that stuff... and walk away with new insights into their magic. They might drop by and pitch in for a while, but they're also a lot more likely to be adventurers, because they have a ready-made reason to want to travel across the galaxy, in order to visit many planets and understand their environmental differences, especially those that are being terraformed (or, I suppose, horribly polluted).

,,,and yeah, that sounds like a full primal caster with some interesting additional terrain modification tricks. I'm not sure it's interesting enough to be worth implementing, but it's na idea.

I agree, I was stretching for Vanguard to fit in the magic book. And a new class would be AWESOME they did that for PF2e, so why not with SF2e?

What about a Primal caster? "The Terraformer" with some flavor text about not being sure if he is using magic, or technology or both." But what kind of mechanical signature would they have? Obviously battlefield control focused.

I expect that we will get new classes for SF2. We might not get them as fast as we've been getting them for PF2 (unless SF2 becomes fantastically, gloriously more successful than I expect... which would be awesome.) but... there's only thirteen classes in SF1. We're getting six of those right out of the gate, and we've gotten confirmation that a seventh has already been eaten by one of the six. Some of the ones that remain might be downshifted to archetypes. Even if we get every single one of the remaining SF1 classes as classes, I really don't expect that they're going to hit six more classes after the first release and then stop. Like, PF2 has 23 of the things, and 4 more in the tank.

Most likely to go archetype? You're probably going to hate this, but I'm thinking Nanocyte and Technomancer, with Vanguard as the most likely to be dropped entirely. (...or somehow turned into a Solarian class archetype?) Alternately, we could get them all. At the same time, it's worth remembering that "number of SF1 classes that get dropped or downshifted" has essentially no bearing on "number of SF2 classes we wind up with in the end". The only question is whether we're filling those slots with old classes or new ones.

I don't think that's possible, at least up to a certain point. The less of a role resource attrition plays, the less important husbanding those resources becomes. I suspect you are going to need to compromise on one end or the other, and that is inevitably going to alienate someone.

That being said, working within the limits you've been discussing, my current suggestion would be to have some mana pool or point system that refreshes every encounter. Make the pool large enough that a caster can cast lots of small spells if they like, or go big with a heavy-hitting spell or two, but not so large that they can go full bore with their top-level abilities each and every turn. Or, conversely, give them a large pool that can handle lots of heavy lifting, but put a limit on how many of those nova-style abilities they can employ in any given encounter. Give them a baseline to fall back on, such as the cantrips we have now which are OK but not amazing, so that a caster can do something even if their actual points are all expended, and I think you could get a lot of that attrition feel without needing to worry about daily encounters.

First of all, thank you for trying to meet me where I am. I appreciate that.

Second... I think there are ways to get the one without the other, and that the issue was that they were tricky and/or would have secondary effects that might need to be worked around and so forth. At the same time, I had also thought I'd laid out at least a general sketch of how they might be found or addressed, and your stated position seems to take as an assumed that they're indivisible.

Now, I'd only come up with one such way (very roughly), and I'd wanted to leave things a lot more open under the theory that other folks could come up with other ways, but if I far enough out in space that I need to plunge into implementation to even make myself comprehensible, then I guess this well-meaning alien will do just that.

At least in a general sense, I propose a system where casters have important resources that persist between encounters, that they will therefore wish to husband, but that they both consume and generate during encounters, such that the default average encounter is resource-neutral.

Further, they shouldn't start the day maxxed out on this stuff. Going to sleep for the night should return you to a baseline, but there should be plenty of space above the baseline for you to accumulate resources that you can later spend, if you're fighting conservatively.

This means that for a caster, the difference between a 1-encounter day and an 8-encounter day isn't nearly as big a deal, but they still get to have those fun decisions about how heavily to spend on any given fight... and they get to keep having those decisions all the way through the aforementioned 8-encounter day (or 12, or 16...)

Now, is this an easy thing to implement well? No. That's why I'm hoping for some help here - to figure out some of the traps before we step in them, and try to come up with something interesting and coherent that makes sense and could work.

You don't seem to be understanding this caster resource problem only exists for certain classes.

You do not feel as constrained on resources with easily replenished class abilities or all day usable ones.

A bard doesn't feel resource constrained because they have all day usable abilities between focus points and cantrips.

Even when I play sorcerer, I have focus spells for use and a lot of spells slots I can flexibly use as needed.

When I play a druid, I can use my focus spells all day. A focus spell like Untamed Form built with feats has a huge amount of utility usable all day.

So you're attempting to paint this picture of resource attrition when only certain classes suffer from this, primarily the wizard.

So how can you paint a problem that exists for only a single class and then expect a solution when the solution is already present and part of the other classes?

You don't seem to understand that the problem I'm trying to address is not the problem you think it is.

I'm trying to address a core underlying structural issue that has a number of implications, some of them fairly subtle. It sounds like it's not directly impacting your personal enjoyment of play, and that's great, but that just means that it's not an issue for you and your friends in the games that you play. You've reached a rough general "number of encounters per day" that works for you, you've developed a good understanding of the amount of resources to spend under various conditions, and your GMs are consistent enough in their patterns that those intuitions remain accurate. That's great! That's how it should be. I'm happy for you. That doesn't mean that the issue doesn't exist.

Your proposed solution is to ensure that all classes have interesting, fun, impactful powers that they can use all day long. Okay, sure... but that's like a lot of the other suggestions we've seen. It's not trying to separate Husbandry from Attrition. it's just making both of them less important. It makes Attrition problems less of an issue, but it does it by raising the floor to the point that it doesn't matter nearly as much whether or not you have enough slots, and you're less likely to run out of slots because there are fewer situations where you want/need to use them. That's effectively the watered-down version of the "make every caster a kineticist" arguments. I mean, if what people really want is the set dressing of spell slots while not having slot management actually be a thing, then I guess it achieves that, but that's not really the thing I was trying to address.

It's not about how much Attrition matters or should matter. That is an entirely different discussion. It's about trying to come up with a system where the Husbandry part of Attrition can exist as a meaningful thing, that you can't just handwave away, where people can and do plan around it, but where the downsides of the rest of Attrition aren't a thing. I'm hoping to come up with a system where budgeting out your spell slots matters (...and potentially matters a lot) but doesn't suck... regardless of how long the day gets

...and yeah. I'm willing to believe that your group has managed to square that circle. You all seem to be having a lot of fun. At the same time, the fact that it's possible to find a niche where the issue is basically handled (for most classes) doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist or is unworthy of consideration. There are people out there who aren't finding those niches.

In terms of macro changes, it just genuinely seems like a bad idea to design a game that minimizes the impact of attrition and then design a class within that game that is specifically balanced around resource attrition. Either rethink spell slots or rethink the rest system.

...and, indeed, this is what I'm trying to do with this thread.

Is it me? Have I been unclear? Like, literally no one else in this discussion has addressed the issue as I presented it and asked for assistance on. Nobody. When you look around the room, and you're the weird one out....

I try, one more time, to explain the actual issue I'm trying to address.

- Caster Resource Attrition: this is the bit where, over the course of the average adventuring day, the standard caster will slowly run out of resources. I assert that this is bad, for reasons mostly centered on how it makes certain parts of the balance math ooky, and also provides perverse incentives. I would like to have casters that, over the average adventuring day, maintain a pretty even balance on resources spent vs resources gained.

- Caster Resource Husbanding: This is the bit where, in each individual encounter, a caster has decisions to make about how many resources they're going to spend on that encounter. This is the thing that lets them go heavier on the harder fights and lighter on the easier fights. I assert that this is good. It makes casters feel more like casters, and it's something that a notable chunk of the playerbase enjoys playing with.

In basically every game of this lineage I've played, the two have been completely inextricable from one another. Resource Husbandry has only every been achieved through a Resource Attrition mechanism. That is the thing I want to change. I want to let people play the Resource Husbandry game without the downsides that Resource Attrition brings with it.

As a side benefit, just about any way of doing this would also make the Resource Husbandry game more intuitive. One of the things that makes it weird is that you don't know how long your day is going to be. You don't know if the encounter you're in is the last encounter of the day or the start of a long slog. It means that you have to estimate reasonable expenditure with a component of wild guessing... and "guess what the GM is thinking" is not actually a fun game, regardless of what the GM might think. On the flip side, if you're somehow recovering a semi-predictable level of casting resources every encounter, then you know what the budget for that encounter is. You can go over budget or under budget based on the needs of the moment, but, critically, you know which one you're doing. I feel like this might make casters more accessible. They'd certainly be more accessible to me. That's just a side benefit, though, of uncertain utility. I'm not presenting this as a solution to the "casters are too complicated" complaint.

Literally, this is me saying "Caster Resource Husbandry is cool and useful and worthwhile, but the rest of Caster Resource Attrition isn't great. Is there any viable way to get the one without the other?"

Am... am I making sense here? I think that I'm being pretty clear, but....

...or is it just that everyone else is more interested in asserting their own proposals of "how to make casters awesome" than engaging with the topic I'm trying to engage with? Was it the thread name? Do I need to just be way more precise about my thread names?

I'll have to see how well the builds click, but... there are possibilities here.

I just don’t think potential PF3 discussions belong in a PF2 general discussion forum because they just will innately attract edition flame warring here, and don’t actually represent a PF2 conversation, and will sour a lot of folks coming to Pathfinder 2nd edition forums to learn about the game with excitement or sincere curiosity. At this point it is really a homebrew conversation.

I dunno. I see the argument that you're making, but in my experience, discussions like this (especially when clearly labeled) attract a lot less flame warring (and thus newbie souring) than, say, discussions about how (person) feels that (class) is too weak.

Like, have any of these responses been something you'd describe as "edition flame warring"? I'm not seeing any.

If you analyze the current classes, what separates caster class is quality feats, innate class abilities, and focus abilities.

These abilities are built to help a class sustain without using slots. A caster class with quality feats and class abilities that feel impactful they can use all day makes a class more satisfying.

When the caster is solely reliant on a limited resource like spell slots or slotted abilities that run out daily with a roughly 50% fail rate, then things start to feel bad save for a few players who are satisfied with the class for reasons other than how it performs. They don't even measure performance and go almost completely by anecdotal evidence or feel.

It's boring, bad, useless, or hard to work class abilities that kill a class in PF2. Even some of the martial classes like investigator and swashbuckler have the same problem.

Which is another reason why the caster vs. martial discussions are such a joke. You telling me a sorcerer or wizard isn't much better off than an investigator or swashbuckler? No one is buying that.

I'm trying to address a very specific thing here, and it's something more structural than that. It's not about whether any given class is a good class or a bad class, or is fun to play or isn't. That's not the point of the thread. It's about trying to address the way that "cares about husbanding resources between encounters and deciding when to throw the impressive stuff and when to hold back" (which some people really enjoy) is currently linked hard to "becomes significantly stronger in very short adventuring days and much weaker in very long ones" (which warps balance math in weird ways and has a number of mild but unfortunate second-order effects). The rest of it... there's plenty of threads to argue about that stuff. This thread is trying to come up with general solutions to a very specific problem that exists in a potential space that's still vague enough that it doesn't have any specific classes in it yet to argue about.

3: Magic: include the Technomancer and the Vanguard. Lots of spells, and spell-tech items. Get into some lore (and mechancis) of how tech and magic can work together. Introduce some ancestries that have to do with magic

Putting the Vanguard in the magic book seems like a really weird stretch. I mean, I get that you're kind of running out of options at that point if you want a magic-using class from SF1, but why does it have to be an old class? Why not something new?

Of course, that's an interesting question in and of itself. We'd want a class that...

- Was a slot caster of some variety. Maybe a wave caster, maybe a primary caster.
- Not any of the existing SF1 classes *or* the existing PF2 classes. Like, yeah, psychic works as an SF2 class... and if you want one in SF2 you can pull that thing directly out of Dark Archive and use it straight. No need to reprint it.
- Not overly bland. We'll have enough caster options at that point that "generic caster" isn't what we're looking for.

I almost feel like... two "different" kinds of technomancer. They'd need different names, of course. Still, on the one side we have the artificer-type, who creates and uses magitech items (temporary or otherwise) and is particularly good at drawing more power out of them and has a variety of buffs that they can use on tech items. On the other side, we have the hacker-caster, flips it around. Instead of using magic to empower tech, they use tech to inform and empower magic. They make deals with tech-spirits, they run magical scripts on their portable device, they cast spells through security cameras.

I feel like both of them are maybe wave casters. The magitech engineer gets some spells, but is also reasonably good at using weapons, and gets a lot of their class budget in being able to magically enhance gear. They probably have a class path that's really into the SF2 version of Beast Guns. The original technomancer is focused in on their spellcasting, but they're still technically a wave caster... it's just that they have an incredibly robust suite of metamagic that lets them swing like a full caster while using wave caster slots.

Sure. I'm sure there are interesting ports out there to do interesting things in. I'm just saying... you're not likely to get particularly good answers on that one by asking. Being in a position to answer the question means that we don't know what the answers are.

D&D4 ditched the spell slots and players roughly hated it. Casters were not feeling like casters anymore the same way a Kineticist is no caster for anyone who likes casters.

I'd personnaly strongly modify the slotted spells. 10 ranks are far too many, for no valid reason. I'd reduce the number of spell slots, limit them to the significant spell ranks (the 2 top ones) and allow Arcana/Religion/Occultism/Nature checks to reproduce the effects of basic spells (Detect Magic at Trained, Comprehend Languages at Expert, Fly/Spider Climb/Swim at Master, for example).

So casters keep their utility without having to micro manage tons of resources and you keep the high level spells for extra oomph.

I'd also strongly think about cantrips that properly scale, unlike current cantrips that quickly become useless. And same thing for Focus Spells that have massive discrepencies with some very valid ones and tons of very niche or bad ones.

I also think casters should have more impact than martials to compensate for their lack of tanking ability. So Focus Spells/Cantrips and other at will resources should be on par with martials attack.

Broadly speaking I agree with you on the caster vs kineticist thing. I'll say that there were a number of reasons that people didn't like 4e, and the caster thing was only one of them. There were also a lot of people who did like 4e. I was one of them. That said, it wasn't the abandoning of spell slots specifically that did it, I think. It was the fact that the resource economy for casters and the resource economy for martials was the same. I don't think we need to tie ourselves to the slot system itself, necessarily, but I do think there's real value to having casters able to play with resource economies that persist beyond individual fights.

I think the idea of effectively limiting slots to your highest spell ranks is interesting, and it lends itself to an entirely different idea of cantrips and focus spells. Like, just going off of the current progressions for the moment, let's suppose that you're level 9. You can cast 5th level spells as slot spells. You can cast 4th level spells by spending a focus point. You can cast 3rd and under for free... and just follow that all the way up. The spells we know today as "cantrips" would be the 0-level spells that anyone could use.

Obviously that's not the final form. There's some hairy math in there that would need serious massaging to get anywhere with, and it might not be worth the effort to balance. There's also the feel of it. Maybe they just wouldn't be able to give the big spells that awesomeness feel without separating them from the free-use spells by more of a margin than that. Still, I feel like the idea of "as you go up in level, your big powerful spells turn into your cantrips" is potentially kind of cool. It also combos in potentially interesting ways with an entirely separate idea to make most spells be scaling across levels, rather than individual distinct spells. It becomes a question of "how much fireball do you want to pay for this time? How much fireball do you think you need?" That could be interesting.

At the same time, I feel like it thins the issue, but doesn't actually solve it. Again, you're stuck with a starter pile of daily resources, and no natural way to recover or unlock more. We're still in a situation where short days favor casters and long days favor martials.

Maybe... somehow tie it to exp gain? I know it feels kind of janky, but if we had some handwavy explanation of what exp was, then we could tie it to that. A challenging encounter charges up this many spell slots, and an extreme encounter charges up that many. Works even better if you have the charge-up hit on rolling initiative. It woudl be giving the PCs information, but that could actually work.

"Guys... guys? I don't know what that thing is, but my spell slots just filled. All of them."
"Run."

Sanityfaerie wrote:

All of that is fine. The problem is when it comes to the length of the adventuring day. Casters run out. Martials don't. A caster who can be assured that their adventuring day is one fight long can unload everything they have. A caster who's gong to be in a day that's six or eight encounters long is going to be seriously struggling. This causes a number of issues in both directions. In the one side, casters are motivated to advocate for the ten-minute workday, which can make games feel skewed, and if they get it, they can feel overpowered. On the other side, in a game where the days run long, or where the casters have credible reason to expect them to run long, the rationing of slots can make them feel weak.

While this is true, it is worth noting that the game does not just encode resource consumption as a downside. It is also encoded as an upside.

I did mention that in the section you quoted. Perhaps I wasn't explicit enough about it? Indeed, that's part of the problem. Effectively, the "Some classes are constrained by daily resources. Others aren't." paradigm leads to a situation where game balance skews between the classes depending on the length of the adventuring day. That's the issue I'm hoping to get ideas for here.

So my final suggestion would be:

1. Raise the floor of spammable, sustainable options like cantrips and focus spells (and just expand on focus spells in general, they're very cool). In particular, make 1-Action cantrips and focus spells so that options like Elemental Toss, Psi Burst, Force Bolt, etc become standard rather than exceptions (notably, it feels like the game sometimes assumes my spellcaster is carrying a bow, even if I don't want to).
2. Lower the ceiling of the top rank of slots relative to the rest of the stuff in the game. This will probably have a run-on impact on the rest of the proficiency scaling and rune scaling in the game.
3. Make your explosive and sustainable options more "fungible", so casters can choose to extend their resources for long days and compress them for short ones. This is probably best achieved via something like mana points.

That doesn't actually address the issue, though. I'm not saying that these are necessarily bad ideas, but at best they're reducing the overall intensity of the "daily resources" thing, both good and bad, and not really changing its nature.

Wont happen, but a book that provides a non-spell slot magic system.

I think it's pretty likely that we'll get a class or two with a non-spell-slot magic system (as kineticist was for PF2) but if you mean a method to convert casters into something that doesn't use spell slots, i agree with you that it almost certainly won't happen. We might see something like that out of a third party, though.

I will think about PF3 casters in about 5 years or more when Paizo announces a new edition after many new classes and books released, after a tested a played the new D&D 5.5, SF2, DaggerHeart and DC20 and get new feelings and ideas from these experiences.

Now is too early to discuss such thing.

I disagree. It's way too early to be trying to come up with final conclusions, but the early discussion can be helpful. Get the ideas out there, get them into people's heads, let folks think about it for a while and come up with new ideas. Then, when we finally do get to the point where things have actually started to happen, there will be a body of thoughts and ideas that people have already worked with to a degree. You won't be starting from scratch. That kind of early prep can result in better answers overall.

Also, in particular, when the new version finally does come out, that's suddenly going to be a time to talk about all sorts of implications and suggestions and whatever. The hype will be high, the discussions will be frenetic, and the mental resources to consider this stuff will have many, many topics to consider. Getting this kind of discussion started early, and working through at least some of the implications now means that when we finally do get to that time, we won't need to spend as much time/energy on it to get answers of comparable quality, and can afford to spend that time/energy on the hundred-some-odd other topics that will suddenly be immediately and intensely important.

How about if you have a Wizard that casts a limited set of researched and learned spells like a PF2 Kineticist?

Or a Wizard that has a collection of useful focus spells?

Part of the point is that I don't want them to be another kineticist. I love the kineticist, but that's me. There are people out there who enjoy the idea of having medium-term resorurces to consider and husband and use efficiently. That's part of the game for them, and I don't want to take that away... and saying "everything is a cantrip or a focus spell" would do that.

I have never played SF1. For me, Absalom Station sounds pretty cool. It's the sort of place the's just filled with corners and crevices and people living out lives in their own little niches that they know quite well but that are completely unknown even a relatively short distance away. Those kind of crevices and niches are where the weirdness lives - the stuff that makes perfect sense inside its own very-dialed-in context but is completely bizarre to outsiders. I want to see a bunch of *that*.

Other than that... I don't know. I mean, I haven't done much with SF1. I don't know the archetypal locations. I heard there was a planet full of dark elves that's being heavily reimagined, and I'm kind of curious what that's going to look like. I've heard that there was a profoundly eldritch planet that hatched, and I'm curious about the results there... but I suspect that there's other stuff that I'd be interested in if I knew it existed.

Mostly, I'm here for the stuff that is deeply weird, but also internally consistent... and that goes beyond just the overarching locations. I want to be able to make friends with an undead spaceship and fly around in it. I want to fill my body with grafts and have that be a cool thing that it actually made sense for me to do. I want to sneak into the stronghold of some deeply nefarious group, thwart them with extreme prejudice, and then post an edited version of the thing on Youtube-equivalent for the likes.

So, first, I know that PF2 still has a good solid set of legs on it. I wouldn't be surprised to see it keep going for another 5 years or so, and that's cool.

At the same time, we all know that PF3 is coming eventually. Eventually the lifespan of this version of the game will come to a natural close, and it'll be time for it to be rebuilt.

We also know that the Paizo designers sometimes read these boards (and respond!) and so if we see structural issues with the current game, and we can come up with interesting workarounds, then that's maybe worthwhile.

This one is to talk about caster vs martial longevity over the course of the adventuring day, and some of the cool stuff, and some of the not so cool stuff, and possibly try to come up with solutions that let us keep the good bits without so much of the bad bits.

Martials are relatively simple. The core ability of the martial is very consistent. if you have enough healing power in your party to get their HP back to full, that generally means that they're good to go for the next fight, and can pretty much keep going indefinitely. They're great for people who don't want to worry about resource economies over the course of the day.

Casters are more complicated. Their more powerful effects take the form of a pile of daily resources. This means that they can burst a lot harder. A caster burning top slots is a lot more effective than that same caster throwing cantrips and focus spells. This is great for people who enjoy the resource-juggling game that it creates, deciding which fights to focus on and which to dial back on, picking the moments to use their more potent effects, and so forth.

All of that is fine. The problem is when it comes to the length of the adventuring day. Casters run out. Martials don't. A caster who can be assured that their adventuring day is one fight long can unload everything they have. A caster who's gong to be in a day that's six or eight encounters long is going to be seriously struggling. This causes a number of issues in both directions. In the one side, casters are motivated to advocate for the ten-minute workday, which can make games feel skewed, and if they get it, they can feel overpowered. On the other side, in a game where the days run long, or where the casters have credible reason to expect them to run long, the rationing of slots can make them feel weak.

Also, in some ways it can feel like the various options that add sustainability to casters are not necessarily as well-balanced as other parts of the system. They're harder to plug into the math.

So this thread is about discussing ways to separate these two concepts - to let the people who want to play caster have their ability to prioritize some encounters over others while not making them overpowered in short adventuring days and underpowered in long.

This is *not* a thread about specifics of anything having to do with the current classes or the balance of power between them. If you want to argue about whether casters are too weak and/or too strong there's an entirely different thread that's doing that just fine right now. Please go do that there.

/**********************/

So... the clearest answer that I see is to have some sort of resource that the caster can build up or spend down in encounters, that lasts at least as long as an adventuring day. Wake up int he morning with a decent supply of this stuff, but not a full tank, and then let you build up by going low-power or really unleash for the stronger stuff.

Of course, this has some weirdness of its own. In particular, it means that low-risk encounters actually give resources to the party. This has obvious bag-of-rats cheese issues, but those at least have well-known solutions. The weirder thing is that it does this on intended encounters as well. Like, suddenly, if you toss a few easy goblin encounters between the party and the big bad, they're likely to be walking into that big bad fight with more resources, rather than less. That gets a little odd.

In many cases, it also gives the players reason to want to drag their fights out. Like, if casters are regenerating magic fuel by blasting with cantrips, then once you've beaten the enemy down tot he point where they're not much of a threat, the thing you really want to do is disable them as much as possible, and let the casters chip away at them with those cantrips until they finally keep over and die. You might even want to heal them a few times, if the economy of ti works out right.

So... maybe something in the loot pools? Like, in addition to exp and whatever treasure there is to be found, there's some sort of caster resource that they can draw from defeated foes to fill up their resource pools. This has issues too, of course. Like, if all you do is drive your foes away, then you're not exactly in a position to extract their essences. It also seems like it might be a little tricky to square with doing things nonlethally... and that's before we get to the part where drawing the energies that power your magics from the bodies of fallen foes is just so very edgy, and all that that can bring with it.

So yeah. It's not a trivial issue... which is why I figure that it's a potentially useful issue to brainstorm about and chew over and maybe have people come up with ideas that I can't come up with. Anyone have thoughts?

Or it's just that players who want their PC be as good as martials in what martials are best should simply play martials.

And same the other way too.

It's not that. Reading the original post, It's that they don't know how to excel as casters, and so "compare to martials in what martials are best at" is all they have left.

Honestly, the argument of "Casters are good, you're just playing them wrong," only really highlights that Casters aren't a class that gives you much build versatility, and supports the "One True Build" idealism that PF2 has tried to go out of its way to demolish by enabling a lot of ways to build a character.

It's also not that. It's not that they're lacking in versatility of viable builds. It's that it's too easy to get yourself dialed into bad strategies and bad builds and have a hard time getting yourself back out again. If you know how to build and play casters, there are plenty of options that work fine. The issue is that if you sit down with a martial class, knowing absolutely nothing about the game, and you put together the three to five most obvious builds/strategies with that class, all of them will *basically* work. That's just not the case with casters in the same way, and if you get dialed in on a caster strategy that isn't successful, ti can be hard to climb up out of that and find one that is.

Hi all,

I wanted to ask if by now there was some kind of box insert for the core set / curse available?

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to start playing the new sets, but I wanted to finally open my boxes and organize them, to make it more likely when I finally get the time to play them.

While I appreciate the foam box inserts, I'd prefer something a little more rigid and sturdy.

Hi,

please cancel my pathfinder adventure card game subscription; unfortunately, shipping the big boxes to europe makes them unaffordably expensive, so I need to buy them from a local vendor.

I'll start a new one if small boxes are announced.

Best regards,
Doppelschwert

After another roughly 9 months of work after Revenge of the Wicked , I proudly present to you my new custom AP

Emerald Legacy!

In this AP for Skulls and Shackles, you get to join a warship from Tian Xia - including Ninjas and Samurais - and go on a wild chase through the Shackles to find a Tian noble that stole a valuable heirloom from his clan; no ones knows what he's up to, but you might find out that you need to stop him!

Instead of the various ships of the original game, you get a powerful ship from Tian Xia that acts as your base and is similiar to a character in that it gets analogues to skill feats, card feats and even power feats for its crew during the the AP!

But don't get too confident because of your ship, since this time, you will face an adventuring party from Tian Xia which grows in strength just as you do! Eventually, they even learn some new tricks and acquire new power feats during the course of your journey!

There are 28 (!) new custom cards included this time, made beautiful by the awesome LudwigO, and I even painted some of the artwork myself!

The AP is meant to be compatible with all class decks, and there are special rules to incorporate them thematically into your game. While not necessary, the recently released Hayato and Reiko with their ultimate decks, as well as the Monk deck can make for a great thematic experience!

By the way; there are also sidequests that you can do (or neglect), and they will have minor and major repercussions on the overall story, which may or may not include how the ending turns out!

This first draft surely has some typos and inconsistencies, but if you help me to find them, I'm dedicated to fixing them :)

Looking forward to hear what everyone thinks
- Doppelschwert.

Take the location Scorched Obelisk from MM:
'When you succeed at a check to defeat a bane by 4 or more, you are dealt 1d4 Electricity damage.'
How does this work if I encounter any bane that has two (or more) sequential checks to defeat?

Which of the following cases describes correctly when you are dealt Electricity damage:
- at least one check is succeeded by 4 or more
- all checks are succeeded by 4 or more
- the last check is succeeded by 4 or more

(I think the potential remaining cases can be safely ignored.)
I'm sure this has been asked before, but I couldn't find it with a quick forum search.

I'm currently playing through some homebrew SnS scenarios with a party of MM Yoon, Siwar and Lesath, and I've realized that Yoon is a big factor why it's not feeling challenging at all lately.

With 9 blessings and the ability to recharge one from her discard pile each turn, I basically have unlimited blessings support in a 3 player game: No matter the check, Yoon can throw a blessing on it, and the combat checks feel especially trivial since she she has a lot of BoEstrasil, which can add 2 die to everyone in this party. Since Yoon can recharge blessings for her combat check, she gets to cycle her deck fast as well, so the BoEstrasil come up again quickly.

In fact, her blessings power feels much more versatile and stronger than the 1d4+1 from Siwar, which is quite strong already but at least locked to the location she is at and couldn't be played on herself pre-role. It's gotten to the point where I don't even need to bother with healing anymore, since I succeed on almost all the important checks (banes and the boons I need) without discarding anything other than Yoons blessings, and so there simply is no need (for villains and henchman, I have all the blessings from the other characters available on top of that).

I can only imagine this being even better when just playing Yoon alone, while still being effective with higher player counts just for the sheer amount of blessings.
So, while I think this is a problem that should be adressed with a faq somehow, I'm not quite sure how to solve it.

One approach would be to change her combat power from recharge to discard, so that there is less cycling, and a greater need to spend the blessings on yourself rather than anyone else. Used on her combat check, the power still gives at least 1d10+2, which is still much better than what a normal blessings would have given for a discard (1d6 for strength or 1d8 on dexterity).

A more radical approach would be to just remove the power that recharges a blessing at the end of her turn, bringing her more in line with the monks, or changing it to something similar to the CD Yoon power for healing.

I dunno, is anyone else experiencing the same issues with her?
I'm not quite there yet, but once I finish AD5, I want to play through Best Served Cold to confirm my assessment and get back to this thread.

We're starting a goblin campaign tomorrow and I want to make pets for the non-iconic characters (Ranzak and Reepazo). Ranzak's will obviously be the parrot, but has there even been an official name?

If not, I'm open for suggestions for thematic names for the parrot and some bugs I'll have to come up with for Reepazo (also, I'm open for suggestions on bugs that jump, as I can't think of any besides grasshoppers).

Reepazo is either completely broken or I'm not understanding her power feat correctly, so I'm asking you to show me the later in order to disprove the former.

When you encounter a card, you may display a card that has the Divine trait. [While displayed, good things happen and there are some restrictions on playing cards.] ([ ] For each card displayed by this power, add 1d4 to your checks.) At the end of any encounter, you may recharge all cards displayed by this power.

Now, Reepazo can get up to 6 Spells and 6 Blessings into her deck, which gives her a guaranteed minimum of 12 cards she could display over the course of 12 encounters for this power; I somehow doubt that the intention is to end up with an additional 12d4 on every check, so surely I must be missing something. You could argue that this is balanced by the risk implied of throwing away more than half of your deck, but really, 3d4 is a very strong buff already with almost no downside, and there is no limit on the cards you can acquire just in order to display them.

The way I read the power is that while the cards are displayed, you get all the benefits - even after the encounter ends, since it's completely optional to stop displaying them after the encounter, and there is no indication of a time limit.

The following came up today:

Display this card next to your deck. [Good things happen while displayed.]

At the end of your turn, if you do not have the Arcane or Divine skill, banish this card; otherwise, you may succeed at an Arcane or Divine 18 check to recharge or to continue displaying this card; otherwise, discard it.

Do you first decide whether to recharge or continue displaying this card and then make the check, or do you first make the check and decide afterwards? If you do first make the check and decide afterwards, is it a check to recharge a spell even if you decide to continue to display it?

I'm asking because I'm not sure if CD Seltiyel power is applicable when I want to continue to display the card:

You may recharge a weapon ([] or any boon) to succeed at your check to recharge a spell.

There are numerous other cards/powers that care about checks that recharge your spell, so I'd like to know in general if this is the case if I want to continue to display the Winds of Vengeance.

When I try to buy the PDF
'Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild #4-4—Relic in the Wastes'
with my VISA card, I can't complete the checkout, the reason stated being 'Transaction declined'. I've often bought the PDFs like that, so I wonder what's wrong?

I'm currently working on another homebrew AP, this time for SnS. Right now, I'm halfway done, and while I'm working on the second half, I'd like to get some feedback for some new mechanics I want to include.

I'm keeping this vague on purpose to not spoil the surprise when it's done, but there will be a mechanic similiar to the MM traders, which allows you to get some new cards at the end of each scenario.
For this to work, I need to categorize the boons of the box into 5 categories of 2 types each, which all should be equally desirable.

The idea is that you trade cards of one such type against another card of the same type that comes from outside of SnS; you can make this process more efficient by investing in the corresponding category, so you will always improve two card types at the same time.

Right now, my 5 categories are as follows:

- Weapons that have the Melee trait
- Armors that have the Shield or Heavy Armor trait

- Weapons that have the Ranged trait
- Allies that list Survival in their check to acquire

- Spells that have the Arcane trait
- Blessings and Items that lack the Divine trait

- Spells that have the Divine trait
- Blessings and Items that have the Divine trait

- Allies that list Diplomacy in their check to acquire
- Armors that have the Clothing or Light Armor trait

The question would be whether this is a good partition of all the cards in the box or if and how you would do it differently, given the following constraints:

- each category should be priority for some kind of character
- it should be a hard decision between focusing on one category or spreading over several categories
- each card type should be well represented in the SnS set

Feedback would be greatly appreciated, and I might use this thread in the future for further questions.

I'm wondering, has anyone ever considered to compile the cards of a gamebox into a class deck?

An 'SnS CD', for example, would contain 100 cards selected from SnS and its expansions, such that a character could use it to become a swashbuckling champion by using it as a CD in a homegame using the card game rules. Such a CD shouldn't cater too much to a specific type of character, so that it could be viably used by everyone.

I don't have time for such a project at the moment, but I'm curious if anyone is up to the task, and how it would look like.

What do you think?

Right now, the only thing that is keeping me from getting more character decks is having a proper way to store the ones not in use. I use several deck boxes from ultra pro to store the ones in use, but it's getting annoying to move the ones not in use around all the time. I'd rather use the deck boxes for the ones in use and store the remaining decks in a sorted fashion somewhere else.

I'm looking for some kind of card organizer that is a single piece and can hold multiple class decks, but I don't really know where to find one. Living in germany certainly doesn't help (broken token has shipping fees that match the price of what you want to buy in the first place), but I'm still open to suggestions for US manufacturers (might have luck on ebay).

Are there any cheap solutions available? What are people using on the forums? I'm willing to pay some money for this, but not to the point where I could get another base set and expansions for the same money.

The download is broken for me. I get the the first three scenarios as a single pdf each instead of the usual single file, and the fourth and fifth scenarios is missing.

It's been 38 days since this order shipped (Hells Vengeance CD2, 2.11.17), but it didn't arrive so far; by now, I'm suspecting that it either got lost on the way or the postman never made the effort to deliver it to me, as I never got a note to pick up a missed parcel at the post office.

Granted, going by business days, I still need to wait another week for it to be considered out of the expected time (I'm at 31 business days out of 36), but it never took so long to be delivered to my place, and Hells Vengeance CD1 only took about 14 days to get to me, which makes me quite suspicious.

Could you please look into this (maybe it got returned to you somehow)? This order was my most anticipated product of this year, so the delay is rather dissappointing.

I'm working on a couple of custom cards for a new homebrew AP, but I can't find any artwork that is covered by the CUP for some pivotal cards I really want/need to include.

If I wanted to comission the artwork of, say, at most 5 cards, how would I go about it?

How can I find some artists, and how much costs (if any?) should I expect?

Also, what kind of disclaimer would I need to include to the pdf, and are there other things to look out for (is there a need to separate whats covered by CUP and what's not, for example?).

I still want to keep the Card Game subscription, but my need for class decks is satisfied for now.

This looks amazing; must have been a ton of fun at PaizoCon!
You never fail to deliver :)

I'll go ahead and just ask the obvious question:
Are there any plans to make this available to the general public somehow, or are the complications due to copyright stuff and the likes?

So I bought 4-2 last week, but due to some website errors, I have no means to access it currently; a report has been sent to customer service, but I guess it will take a while for programming to get there.

Since it'll take me several months to actually start playing season 4, that's not a big issue for me right now, but I'm super curious to know if the reward contains any character unlocks, so are there any?

We started playing Season 0 recently, and so far, it's just been really hard for the most part, especially 0-1A, 0-1B and 0-1E.

We easily lost both 0-1A and 0-1B during the first try, so we decided to move on to 0-1C and 0-1D to get some feats, and today we barely succeeded at 0-1E on the last turn through sheer luck.

0-1C and 0-1D have been so much easier than the other scenarios so far, and I wonder why the more difficult scenarios are at the beginning. Have people been complaining about a lack of difficulty in SnS?

I found the original campaign already pretty unforgiving at times, and the scenario setup/rules in A, B and E just seem to make everything more difficult than a comparable scenario from AD1 in the box.

As a reference, our party was Ak, Mogmurch and Zeta for scenarios A-D, and now Koren joined our ranks for E.

Hey,

I just bought Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild #4-2—Fanning the Flames PDF, but it wasn't added to my downloads, so I can't access it.

EDIT: I just saw that my payment is on 'Pending', which is likely the reason why it doesn't show up. However, this never happended with any other pdf I bought; they always were set to 'Complete' immediately, so I'm still kind of wondering what is up now.

Best regards,
Doppelschwert

Normally, you can only use your powers once per check/step, but do powers separated by OR count as separate powers or as the same power?

As an example, Zetha from the Summoner CD has the following power:

You may banish a monster from your hand to ... use your Stealth skill in place of the listed skill for a non-combat check ... (□ OR to add 1d6 to your check to defeat a barrier).

In this case, the question would be if Zetha can banish 2 monsters to use her stealth skill against a barrier and also add 1d6, using both clauses once.

My feeling is no, but that would make the second part of the power very situational... using your stealth skill will most likely be better than adding 1d6 to a non-stealth skill, since using Stealth itself gives a guaranteed +3 over Dexterity, and is most likely better than any other check encountered by a barrier (even Arcane if you focus Dexterity).

This is a really cool idea to incorporate the characters, and the execution is great as well. :)
One of the more original ways to use this reward would probably be to unlock the reward with one of the characters of this deck (or even with the same character - you could have two versions of the character, one for each role, and advance them in parallel, switching them out on a case by case basis).

There is a lot to look forward to - the preview, the decks themselves, the second promo scenario and the resolution of their story arc!

I'm excited!

After roughly 9 months of work in progress, I proudly present to you my custom AP

Revenge of the Wicked!

In this AP, you get to play the bad guys - cultists of demon lords, to be precise - and go on a lenghty campaign all over Golarion and the Abyss to prove to the world that you are not to be trifled with!

Instead of using the mythic paths of the original game, everyone gets to be a Demoniac, which lets you summon demons to fight for you and power up temporarily through abyssal power, along with new ways to use cards that have the Corrupted trait - cultists have no need for the redemption table, after all!

There are 25 (!) new custom cards included, and the game should feel quite differently from the original WotR campaign, both in tone and core gameplay mechanics (limited d20, incentives to expend and (new options) to get mythic charges, just to name a few).

The AP is meant to be compatible with the Hell's Vengeance CDs just as the Season of the Goblin is compatible with the Goblin CDs, so once released I hope those decks will containt a lot of evil cards that will improve the atmosphere of the game even more. :)

I've played through the campaign as it is with Melindra, Wrathack and Grazzle, and I would appreciate any feedback while I'll start another playthrough with friends.

Looking forward to hear what everyone thinks
- Doppelschwert.

And sometime after that—I can't give you a date just yet—we have a capstone scenario planned.

Given that the next season is scheduled to start at GenCon, is the PluTo capstone scenario still planned, and if yes, will it debut at GenCon or be made available earlier as a download?

Awesome! The wait was definitively worth it.
Is the picture of the third magus missing on purpose?
There is only a role card.

Hey,
I just wanted to start a PACG Class Deck subscription with the Magus Deck, but it is not available as starting point; only the Summoner Deck that came before and the Pathfinder Tales deck that comes after are available.
How can I start with the Magus Class Deck?

When an item that has the Poison trait requires you to banish or bury a card, you may discard or recharge it instead.

If you played a weapon on your combat check, reveal this card to add 2d8 and the Acid, Cold or Poison trait. After the check, succeed at a Disable or Craft 12 check or Tears of Death deals 1d4+1 Poison damage to you then bury your discard pile.

By my interpretation of RAW, Executioner Zadim can recharge his whole discard pile every time he plays Tears of Death and fails the Disable/Craft check.

Is that intended, is my interpretation wrong or do we need a FAQ?

The Unstable Accelerant reads, among other things, the following:

When a character at that location rolls a die, treat odd rolls as 1 and even rolls as the highest number on that die.

My reading is that this applies to rolls for taking damage or healing as well - is that really the intention?

I agree overall, even though I think the game is more fun if you have less healing. Playing Grazzle lately, the game becomes a total easy mode, since there is no risk at screwing up anymore (I seriously think the Bog Medic role should be errata'd to be less good at healing, as his healing is way more broken than the pre-errata Alain could ever hope to be - using his healing, I easily shrugged off 2-3 'Rite of Heraldry induced' handwipes per character (!) without breaking a sweat, all in a single scenario).

Regarding the temptations of WotR, I think most of them are supposed to be the analogue of the various chests in RotR, the plunder in SnS and the traders in MM, namely a thematic means to increase the odds of getting better cards. They don't need to be overcome since you can usually just ignore them; they only introduce an optional layer of risk vs reward.
As soon as you remove the nasty barriers like Demonic Horde and Arboreal Blight, you are, in my homebrew experience, much more likely to encounter a beneficial temptation than a normal barrier, at least up to getting your role card.

The Treachery Demon occurs as an AD5 Monster in RotR and as an AD5 Henchman in WotR. The WotR version is 'buffed' compared to the RotR version, since it has an additional (cosmetic) trait, increases the difficulty to defeat by 3 and has an additional power.

I get why the WotR is the way it is, but how can this discrepancy be reconciled with the guideline that cards with the same name should do the same?

After you explore, succeed at a Wisdom 9 check or be moved to another location.

So, do I move to a location of my choice or is this supposed to be random?

I couldn't find anything with the search function.

Sorry for the off-topic question, but why has the Brodert Quink card gotten a facelift and is listed with a copyright at 2017, while the other cards seem to be the original versions of the original release with a 2013 copyright?

Having seen the original card so many times, this strikes me as very odd, especially since it's missing the 'POWERS' bar above its text.

Thanks for the information, that is very enlightening!
Definitely looking forward to what you come up with in the future.

And an Aasimar Magus is a combination I'm especially excited for :)

According to the updates thread, we are encouraged to make suggestions for Class Decks we would like to see, so it may be nice to gather them in one place for ease of reference.

I'd like to see
- Ninja
- Samurai

If that is too niche, a single CD themed around Jade Regent similar to the Hells Vengeance CDs would be cool as well, where I imagine it would include the iconic Ninja, iconic Samurai and then someone else as well.

From the recent blog about GenCon:

The Adventure Card Guild has a full stock of events spanning all seasons of organized play, including Season of the Shackles, Season of the Righteous, and Season of the Runelords, Season of Plundered Tombs. We are putting final touches on the next season and hope to announce more information soon.

Sounds great, but I wonder what box that season would use? Would be awesome if they went all out crazy and had the season span multiple base sets (changing inbetween ADs), but I doubt that's going to happen.

Chronologically, I guess it would be SnS's turn again, but since I like that set the least, I hope that is not the case.

While browsing ebay, I found a seller that allegedly sold a 'Slayer Class Deck', even though it had the image of an Inquisitor class deck. Since there is no such thing to the best of my knowledge, I was curious and clicked the link to find an official sounding description of the product, so I did a short search to come up with this product in the pathfinder wiki.

I guess I'm late to the party and missed something major, so might anyone enlighten me to what the story behind this class deck is and why it was apparently cancelled? I can't find anything relating to this product on the official paizo site.

Hello,

I've bought the wizard class deck for the adventure card game a while back from a third party seller, and now that I've finally came around to open it, I saw that the card 'Spellsword +2' with adventure deck number 4 is missing. Unfortunately, the seller doesn't seem to respond to me anymore, and so I'd like to ask if there is another way to replace the card somehow.

Best regards,
Doppelschwert

I'm very confused about the relations of demon lords and the material plane.

I'd like to know if its possible in golarion to summon a demon lord to the material plane, and if so, how difficult is it?

In particular, can a demon lord be summoned to the material plane without consent, and if so, can it be blocked from returning to its abyssal realm?
If not by default, is there a plot device consistent with the setting that I could use to do so?

Can they even move freely to the material plane by themselves, and does it even make sense for a cult to actively try to summon a demon lord to the material plane?

Since demon lords gain a lot of bonuses in their abyssal realm, it seems like it would be a good idea in a mythic campaign to move the fight somewhere else.

I couldn't find a proper answer to these questions in Lords of Chaos.

Excellent news!
Though I guess you meant the MM stalwarts when refering to the occult classes instead of the WotR stalwarts ;)
Especially looking forward to the Magus and HV decks!

Hey everyone, I'm working on a character concept and would like some help with designing the roles.

My goal is to have a goblin that works with the Goblins Burn deck, and is a mixture between a monk and a kineticist; the goblin in question would love to be a monk with the elemental fist feat, e.g. set his fists on fire and punch people, but alas, goblins are usually not enough into introspection to achieve the necessary training to do so.

For this reason, said goblin chooses to set himself on fire and just punches his enemies anyway, figuring that that is probably the way monks do as well. He eventually got accostumed to it, but as a result, picture the goblin bandaged all over his body, with scorched skin being visible inbetween.

The base looks like this:

Name

Male Goblin Kamikaze

SKILLS
Strength d6 □+1 □+2 □+3
-Melee: Strength +2
Dexterity d8 □+1 □+2 □+3
Constitution d10 □+1 □+2 □+3 □+4
- Fortitude: Constitution +2
Intelligence d6 □+1 □+2
Wisdom d8 □+1 □+2
- Survival: Wisdom +2
Charisma d4 □+1

Powers
Hand Size 5 □6
No Proficiency

When you encounter a bane, you may display any number of blessings from your hand; the total number of displayed blessings may not exceed your Constitution modifier +1 (□ +2).

You may recharge a displayed blessing to add 1d12 plus 1d6 for each displayed blessing and the Fire trait to your combat check; you may not play a weapon on that check.

Cold (□ or combat) damage dealt to you is decreased by the number of your displayed blessings.

At the end of your turn, (□ you may reveal a card with the Liquid trait to recharge a displayed blessing, then) you are dealt fire damage equal to the number of displayed blessings.

Cards List
Favored Card Type: Blessing

Weapon - □1
Spell - □1
Armor -
Item 4 □5 □6
Ally 4 □5 □6 □7
Blessing 7 □8 □9 □10

Remarks

The displayed blessings measure how much the goblin set himself on fire. The fire slowly dissipated by hitting enemies, so in principle, it can be used for multiple fights; the intent is that I may display 3 blessings for a bane with a combat check, recharge 1 for the check, and use the other 2 blessing in another, unrelated combat check later in the same turn for the effect again.

With a lot of blessings, you can make a lot of high combat checks per turn, but if you don't get into enough fights, you'll get a heavy amount of Fire damage at the end of your turn as well; alternatively, you can only play one blessing in each combat as you go along, so you won't get fire damage at the end, but then you're initial checks are weaker than if you had played them all at once at the first check. It's supposed to be high-risk high-reward to fit into the goblin theme.

I'd like to make two roles, but I'm somehow not coming up with anything clever for them.

The first role would be 'Living Torch', which is about the mastery of staying on fire indefinitely.

The second role is 'Fake Mummy', where the goblin embraces the fact that he is bandaged all over his body due to the scorch marks, and develops traits from mummies.

Any ideas how to do this in a cool way?

As far as I'm aware, WotR Adowyn and WotR Crowe are the only characters from a base set prior to MM that are currently not confirmed to be playable in OP at some point, as there is no means to unlock them yet, and neither class deck is announced (as compared to the Magus, who is also not available yet, but will be once the class deck hits the shelves).

For Crowe, the reason is that there is not really a class deck covering arcane/melee yet, and it was hinted at his likely unlockable inclusion in the upcoming Magus Deck, which makes a lot of sense and takes care of him.

What I don't understand is the lack of availability for Adowyn, since she would easily fit into the Ranger class deck. The reason I'm making this thread is that I just bought 3-4, which features the 3rd unlockable class deck for Mavaro as a reward, which I feel is a strange priority given Adowyns exclusion so far. I think its cool that Mavaro has the possibility to choose between class decks, but at this point, I wonder if Adowyns lack of availability is just an oversight, or if there is a deeper reason involved?

It would be cool to see her unlocked at some point :)

I'm a bit confused right now. Let's start with the cards in question.

For your combat check, bury this card to summon and play a random non-Basic weapon from the box.

If this card has the Corrupted trait, a character at your location must discard a blessing or you may not play this card.

Now, I got unlucky and Grazzle used the Wand of Sacred Weapon to summon and play the Unholy Aspergillum +3, but is alone at his location and has no blessing to do so.

According to the rulebook:

If one card tells that you cannot do something and another card tells you that you can, comply with the card that tells you that you cannot.

So, the obvious conclusion is that I can't play the weapon. However, I'm not quite sure how to proceed now, since I originally played the Wand to define my (combat) check, and that failed. The relevant rule now is this:

If a card instructs you to do something impossible, like draw a card from an empty deck, ignore that instruction.

So I'm wondering how much I am supposed to ignore. I read that as ignoring the instruction to define my check, and so I get to use another card to define it. The wand gets buried (or recharged, depending on my check), and I need to play another card to define my combat check to not end up with my Strength / Melee.

Is that correct? I could see an alternative in the aspergillum denying me playing the wand in the first place, or something strange like that.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to play the MM campaign right now due to diminished free time and still running campaigns in both SnS and WotR.
To increase my anticipation, I'd like to know about some cool rewards in MM without getting to know about the story.

I'm not interested in specifics of any Loot cards, and I'm aware of most of the new mechanics, so I'm curious for things like the following from SnS and WotR:

Without getting to know about the story implications, I'd like to know if there is anything like this in MM?

Also, I'm curious about the reward structure of the feats. Sorting in parts of the base set, I saw that you already get a skill and power feat in the base scenario, so I'm curious if those will be skipped sometime later or if there is some other trade-off?

While I'm still miles away from actually starting MM, I'm curious about what other people are doing.
With AD4 out now, will there be some thread where you ask for snapshots of parties going through MM at midpoint?

Hey, just so people are aware, the app now features variants of the original cast of RotR. The slight changes can be found here.

Now the obvious questions:
Is there any chance to get them available as character sheets for the physical card game?

Also, in the long run, whats the plan for custom content in the app? Is it supposed to stay there or will it come to the physical card game?

On a related note, there is some major rebalancing going on in the app. Might we see another errata that brings the RotR rules in line with the state-of-the-art wording at some point, updating the balance as well?

Hey,

since there is a lot of life in the homebrew section lately, and since I had a day off today, I started a little 'dream project' of mine.

I'd like to write a homebrew AP based on WotR, were you play as the bad guys. I also actually started, and thought about posting the first AD I've written up today:

Revenge of the Wicked

Now, I post this link for the following reasons:

1) Feedback
Obviously, I'd like feedback, about basically everything that sticks out:
Does the story make sense, and more importantly, is the premise interesting?
Are the scenarious too similiar to the original scenarios, or are people satisfied with a slight variation?
Are the mechanics fun?
How is the difficulty?

2) Cleaning up the writing part
English is not my native language, and I won't delude myself into thinking that my writing is as good as it could be (for the record, I wasn't even sure how to write delude just now, so...)

3) Playtesting
I have to confess that I just wrote up everything today and was not able to playtest it yet. More to the point, I haven't even finished the AP yet and I don't think this will happen anytime soon, knowing how hard it can be to schedule this with my friends, and since I don't have too much time on my hands, I won't set up the box for playtesting until we're done with the current campaign.
I guess what I'd like to know here is, to which extend to people believe you can design scenarios without actually playtesting them?

Even when I will playtest, I have absolutely no idea how to play with parties bigger than three, as I personally never will play with parties of this size. I'd just be content with designing the AP for three characters, but that seems to be lacking.

4) General tips/insights
I have absolutely no idea how to go about locations. I normally know what kind of story I want to tell, and I can gather some cards around that, but choosing locations seems really hard. I could just copy existing location lists, but I doubt that would be in the spirit of a new AP.
Since the box is meant to be a good vs. evil campaign, does it bother people if I have to workaround with additional rules to tell a bad vs good story? I'm obivously constrained by the available henchman/villains, without using heavy modifications.

5) Any advice, really
If you have some ideas to make everything more fun/awesome, I'm open to suggestions.

Based on the following contribution, I'd thought it was fun to give some more alternatives (and make the list more visible in the homebrew section).

To appease those such as Houstonian who would like to use the Witch characters without necessarily owning the Witch deck, and also just to add some variety to witch familiars for home games, I have created the following public cards on drivethrucards.com:

Tentaskull
Ugly Carp
Pygmy Orca
Wild Cat
Pet Rock
Poison Spider
Squirrel

Check them out, order them, have fun!

I don't know how to access any free art, so I'll refrain from uploading any cards, but I made 3 familiars taylored to SnS. I don't own the witch deck, so I based them on the examples given here - I'm not sure if they are balanced against the class deck, so feedback is welcome.

Hermit Crab [Traits: Animal, Arcane, Familiar, Aquatic]
Power:
Display this card. While displayed, if you have the Witch trait, gain the skill Arcane: Intelligence +2 and reduce Structural damage to your ship by 1.

While displayed, when failing a combat check, place this card on top of your deck to reroll 1 die; you must take the second result.

Comment:
This card is motivated by the Giant Hermit Crab from RotR. There is actually a King Crab familiar in the RPG, but it grants bonus to CMD, which is not really part of the ACG, so I made this instead.

Blue-Ringed Octopus [Traits: Animal, Arcane, Familiar, Aquatic]
Power:
Display this card. While displayed, if you have the Witch trait, gain the skills Arcane: Intelligence +2 and Dexterity: Stealth +1.

While displayed, place this card on top of your deck to add 1d8 and the Poison trait to your combat check, or to evade a monster with the Aquatic trait.

Comment:
This octopus is on the familiar list of the RPG and grants bonus to the swim skill. I focused on its ability to spray ink instead, which helps with hiding (stealth) and lets you evade aquatic banes.
Then I read some info on wikipedia (you should, too!) and found out that the venom of these things can easily kill a person, so a poison attack was natural. (Guess where they live? Australia, of course.)
However, the posion can be treated efficiently, and there have only been a few cases where they bite people (its usually only due to provoking them).
Turned out very similiar to the poison spider, but I feel the theme fits too well to differentiate it just for the sake of being different.

Capuchin Monkey [Traits: Animal, Arcane, Familiar]
Power:
Display this card. While displayed, if you have the Witch trait, gain the skill Arcane: Intelligence +2 and you may add the Swashbuckling Trait to your check.

While displayed, place this card on top of your deck to add 1d6 to your craft check; if you have a role card, add an additional 1d6.

Comment:
I wanted to do a parrot badly, but the parrot is already available in SnS (same goes for a turtle, and snapping turtles are already in the witch deck). So instead I made a cute little monkey that helps you fix your ship and lets you look like a cool pirate!
I copied the Swashbuckling idea from the pigmy orca because the orcas design is just awesome and the trait fits the theme. I give the d6 bonus on the craft skill instead of the actual skill since I think having craft with a high intelligence class would take away a good part of the challenge in SnS (you can always play SnS Feya for that anyway).
Furthermore, I picture the monkey steals a potion whenever you succeed at the craft check to acquire one, while not being too helpful with high craft checks (it's just a monkey after all).

Feel free to give feedback and post your own familiars!