Seven-Eyed Witch's page

I find the flavor to be aggressively bland for the most part, centered around vague connections to crystals and ectoplasm. Instead of summoning creatures, they create vague blobs assembled from a menu. Instead of any number of animals as a familiar, they get a crystal that is associated with a personality type.

Really? Astral Constructs are amazing because you can design them however you want. They're not "blobs," they're custom-order monsters. They're like eidolons. Blue-and-black-scaled sabertooth with a star-shaped web of burning eyes? Spider-legged bronze throne with a faceless iron king half-melted into it? Collection of floating crystal claws and teeth centered on a mass of soft pink unformed ectoplasm that sometimes giggles with a child's voice? Go nuts.

Ditto psicrystals, actually. Mine's a silvery little tentacle-willow-tree thing based on the children of that one Lovecraft fertility goddess that I can never remember the name of. It's all made of crystal, except the tentacles, which are a dark, dark green ectoplasm.

There's an aesthetic, sure, but there is no way it's bland.

So to try and get back onto topic. Earlier in the thread (there are too many pages for me to go back and find the quote, sorry) postulated that the reason there were so many nerfs was because Paizo was trying to bring the games overall power level down.

Let me ask the community: Is bringing the overall power level of the game down a peg a good thing? If so, are there better ways to accomplish it? What better ways would you suggest trying to do that?

Bringing it down a peg would be awesome, but they're not doing anything like that. The Scarred Witch Doctor isn't the high end. Undercasting and Exploits are the high end. Instigate Psychic Duel is a 2nd-level Save or Lose against anything that isn't also a psychic caster, because you're not going to "duel", you're just going to freeze them and defend yourself while the party beats them to death in real life. The summoner isn't considered powerful because it got a great eidolon and Haste earlier, it's because it can Summon Monster X repeatedly for massive durations at a standard action, an ability that went untouched.

There was nothing wrong with Parry/Riposte. There is something wrong with dominate person. There was nothing wrong with pounce on a barbarian. There is something wrong with the strict fighter requirement of being able to reach and engage an enemy, usually on the ground, when enemies in the bestiary can fly, teleport, and become incorporeal.

The overall power level of the game continues to grow, and errata isn't touching it at all. The best way, honestly, would be to give up on 9th level casting except in special, limited thematic cases - remove the wizard, bring back warmages, beguilers, and dread necromancers, but at 6th-level casting with lots of helpful class features to compensate. Buff the summoner's eidolon and casting and take away its SLA Summon Monster duration boost. Stop making things like the psychic altogether - the occultist, mesmerist, and spiritualist are great. The medium is as great as it can be, considering almost all of Mark Seifter's work was cut for new psychic and wizard spells. That's the direction the game needs to go in.

Not nuking aasimar ages and vanara climb speed. That's not a power level concern.

Seven-Eyed Witch wrote:

Can anyone really say that the Vanara were breaking the game with their extra 10 feet of climb speed? In what module, adventurer path, or homebrew campaign did those 10 feet enable an unfair advantage, considering they still keep 20?

THANK YOU for bringing this thread back on topic!

I consider it as sure a sign as any that there are often times when Paizo just gets lost up in all the things they have, and asserts control over something for the sole purpose of reminding themselves that they have control.

There's no use case where it made sense to do that. Without even getting into how little sense the race point system makes in the first place - "2 RP for +2 to a skill," one of the most common references for races, only makes sense as long as you never look at anything else that costs 1 or 2 RP - it's just bizarre to take a race that almost no one ever played and certainly no one ever ABUSED and cut its primary distinction. Even if it wasn't a balance issue and they just wanted to normalize Climb speeds, THAT wouldn't be a good decision.

It's hard not to see third party competitors growing in prominence now and think about what happened between 4E and Pathfinder. I feel like the game is slipping off the rails the way 4E's product bloat and constant rebalancing eventually devoured it from the inside even as low sales killed developer morale. More and more, it doesn't make sense to use Paizo for something a third party has done, not because the indie dev is more interesting - which used to be their key selling point, boldness and innovation - but because they've done it better.

Buzzt!

Nope. The GM can do more or less whatever he wants. The GM can say, "No. The spell fails because I said it does." If the player doesn't like it, then they can negotiate with me after the game or they can get up and leave. The player cannot overrule the GM.

Out of curiousity, why do you think that? The player can renegotiate instantly, while not leaving, and further - can oust you as DM and take over provided the table agrees to it. You're only arbiter by consensus, and in the case where you're actively punishing intelligence and teaching players to be dull-eyed conformists incapable of roleplay or creative thinking (by ignoring RAW, no less) I don't think any table on Earth is going to allow you to make that ruling.

I can guarantee that in any of the dozen groups I've participated in (or the half a hundred con games) over the last thirty years you would not last another round as a DM if you told a player they could only be as smart as you were, or you'd start erasing options from their character sheet.

You can rule it however you want. I go by my earlier statement and that is how it works in my game. You don't like it. Don't play in my game. Simple as that.

I certainly wouldn't advise it!

Anyway, you've gone from RAW to saying that RAW has no place at your table...at this point, I feel like you'd probably be better off inventing your own gameline than trying to overrule Paizo on something as small as rope trick. But in either case, I think we can move on from rope trick if you're down to your interpretations.

Why do you feel - since you disagree with them on at least one spell - that Paizo is an absolute arbitrator of balance? They're just guys, many of them less experienced than members of the community, doing the best they can with a limited capacity to receive, interpret, and implement feedback (as we've seen with popular playtests, where immense weight of opinion goes unregarded because the project lead is only one (usually) man). They're human. It's okay to see where they falter and help them.

Can anyone really say that the Vanara were breaking the game with their extra 10 feet of climb speed? In what module, adventurer path, or homebrew campaign did those 10 feet enable an unfair advantage, considering they still keep 20?

Insain Dragoon wrote:

I suggest reading Walsh posts, but not replying to them.

He has a right to be heard and state his viewpoints, as does anyone. However this is not a debate with end goals, so you cannot "win" unless your definition of winning is to entertain yourself with a meaningless debate for a few hours.

Uh no... This isn't. Nice try.

You made the statement that putting Rope Trick 100 feet in the air was "Sneaky and Clever" I pointed out that the spell actually doesn't allow you to do that based on the spell's description of how the rope hangs.

Perpendicular means touching at a right angle.

So the rope must touch the ground at a right angle. That is how the spell works.

I agree with Insain Dragoon, but I happen to love meaningless debates. Perpendicular cannot be defined as "touching" at a right angle; it only references vector, not an absolute position. By RAW and RAI - I'm sure I've heard about a Paizo writer using this exact trick for a fun scene - you can rope trick from any position, including airborne. It's just a clever side benefit. You can already cast feather fall - rope trick is just a tricky version of that.

More to the point, earlier you reference something that IS impossible - giving a spell an unexpected failure chance and removing it from a caster list. It is impossible for any DM to emove a spell from a caster's list without granting them a homebrew class, at which point they're free to renegotiate any part of their build or character as usual when you introduce homebrew gameplay.

By a strict reading of RAW, you couldn't possibly remove Rope Trick no matter how it's used, as long as it's used legally. And airborne rope tricks are legal so long as you're perpendicular to the ground, which remember, is a vector statement only.

What's really interesting is when the skillful player contemplates what "the ground" is defined as...

Last thing I want is for the rules to be determined by a vocal minority.

They already are.

Also it seems that a lot of what the devs can do in terms of community awareness is bottlenecked by Jason's limited free time. I wish we could see the FAQ process a bit more unchained. A lot of the FAQs could be handled very quickly if someone like Mark was given more power to implement FAQs.

Honestly? They should just hand the entire company to Mark. Can we get a poll for that, see how many people would welcome that never-going-to-happen change? I have my own speculations about the demographics on that.

Pathfinder started out with the noble goal of acting as a "patch" for 3.5, and it did pretty well at that for a while.

Now it's well in its way to trying to be its own thing. It released an unchained Summoner that cut back on casting and the Eidolon, the things that people actively care about, while ignoring the power of its native Summon Monster SLA, the thing that makes it so powerful. They nerfed the stuff that's fun because they felt the class was too strong without actually making the class weaker. They attacked a popular Witch archetype for the sin of using Constitution to cast, because not dying easily was considered too powerful on a class loaded with tools to avoid engaging in melee, and in trade made it a stronger caster than ever before, the real source of power in the game.

A class was just released, centered around blasting and doing damage, that is reliably outdamaged by an Expert with a bow.

In the same book, a better, stronger version of the Wizard was released.

There is a fundamental disconnect here. There's a design philosophy that doesn't go to a good place. Let's be honest here, everyone defending Paizo, defending Jason, arguing that this is about balance:

Which of y'all found, in your home games, that there was a real and present threat to the fun of your experience due to the Vanara climb speed?

No. Pathfinder was a wonderful dream back when it just wanted to be a patch to D&D. At this point? That's what it's best used for. I use heavy applications of houserules and third-party material to preserve the spirit of D&D, everyone having fun and adventuring together and not bickering over whose class is inherently worthless and easily replicated by the inquisitor's spare allosaurus, because I do not believe that the direction that Paizo has been charging down for the last several years is a good one. I rely more on Dreamscarred Press than Pathfinder material and I don't even really like the crystals-and-telekinesis flavor of psionics, it's just that they produce reliably good, fun, usable content and Paizo's rate at doing that is bad enough that it looks accidental.

That's when I play Pathfinder at all. Honestly I feel like I'm just in a holding pattern waiting for 5th Edition to build up its usual cornucopia of options.

The best part of Pathfinder is an increase in class features, the merging of skill lists, and the revisions to many (not all, by no means of all) of the spells most commonly used to turn the game into a caricature of itself. Those are good works. Everything it did in its first few years of existence were largely good works.

A few of the things that came later are good, too, it hasn't been all bad, but at this point I sincerely believe the overall direction Paizo is moving in under its current leadership is one that's poison to the game. So long as its basic chassis remains free, it has value.