Spamotron's page

Squiggit wrote:

I don't see why you'd assume batch crafting would also quadruple the rate at which you generate wealth with crafting, or that it would somehow be useless if not given that benefit.

I just assumed that's why there are prep days at all, to balance this against every other method of earning income in the game, which has no downtime at all (pun unintended).

If you force players to Craft items in succession, then slap a "batch" label on it, you're 1) not fooling anyone, and 2) leaving no reason to Craft over using the other earn income options.

I know you're the thread creator but I really think you should split this off into its own thread in Rules Discussion. This has already dominated basically an entire pages worth of posts in the thread and I don't think you want it going on in here for pages more.

I think a question a GM should ask themselves is if they created a Resentment Witch NPC foe would they require a recall knowledge check to figure out the effect is coming from the familiar?

If the answer is yes, then against a witch PC their creatures should at least spend an action to figure it out too.

Another reminder. The Devs have also said that in these kinds of threads all they care about is that somebody found the wording confusing enough to ask for errata. As far as they're concered other people posting about why X isn't really errata worthy just crowds the thread and makes the stuff they are actually interested in harder to find. They would much prefer it if such discussion was saved for a different thread entirely.

A reminder that the Paizo Developers have said that threads like these are a lot more useful to them when people post specific page numbers. Realize they probably worked on the book months ago at this point and don't always remember where everything is.

As far as I noticed the biggest complaint about the Exemplar is that often even the people who liked its setup turn then power turn playstyle felt that the body and worn Ikons weren't just weaker than the weapon Ikons but highly situational and often irrelevant in many encounters and a waste of actions.

Hopefully the smoothing out the power spikes thing James mentioned includes making them more generally useful.

My understanding is that Gozreh represents the primal forces that drive a living world and make it habitable. The atmospheric cycle, ocean currents, plate tectonics, stuff like that.

While the Green Faith is all about the living biosphere. Animals, Plants, Bacteria etc.

The Elemental Lords represent the metaphysical elements that the material plane (now Universe in Remaster) is made of.

A sort of heirarchy would go.

The Elements are the substance which worlds are made of. (Elemental Lords) Leads to:

The dynamic forces of an active world that make life possible. (Gozreh) Leads to:

Life itself. (The Green Faith)

Now you would think this would make the Elemental Lords more powerful than Gozreh because they represent something even more fundamental than s/he does. But they're demigods and Gozreh is a full Deity. So you can't necessarily judge how potent a god is by the significance of their portfolio.

Add another vote to "I want it in the game if the lore is tweaked to make it a more general entertainer/trickster vibe."

This might be of use to you. Jason Bulmahn one of Paizo's senior designers has his own YouTube channel explicitly for giving advice to new GMs. In this video he walks his friend Dan through designing his first ever PF2 dungeon complete with Boss.

The statement is that this deity's death creates more story opportunties than they currently do alive. In the case of Pharasma, on the one hand having one absolute judge of the dead with jurisdiction over everyone regardless of ancestry, culture, or beliefs is pretty limiting in some ways. On the other hand, how many groups really interact with death and the afterlife in any meaningful fashion other than deciding whether resurrection is allowed or banned in session zero? It's probably not a big number.

This is a bit of a long video but well worth the time.
Cursed Blades and Dark Swords in Myth and Fantasy
A lot of stuff for an Evil GM in there.

Is there an actual viability of learning all 6 elements? I feel like the Kineticist is far better with 1, 2 or at best 3 elements.

Granted we don't have composite impulses using 3 elements or more, but right now I see no reason to learn all 6 elements unless you want to become a kinetic Alkenstar army knife.

(Apparently, Alkenstar is the Switzerland's equivalent :p )

I'm seeing a lot of two-gate kineticists, that's why I'm asking, because "creating the Avatar" sounds like an obvious choice... until you realize how "master of none" you end up being.

I've done some Kinetecist builds for fun. I haven't had any time to playtest any of them of course but while taking just two or three elements and going for synergies is clearly the stronger build the 6 element build where you just pick independantly good impulses doesn't seem bad and appears it should be perfectly fine in PFS or post Frozen Flame adventure paths. It might struggle at an all optimized high difficulty table but so do a lot of builds that are otherwise fine.

So there's all kinds of things on the internet that have potential to get a player or GM's mind spinning with ideas. If you find something that made you think "hey I bet I could use that in a game." Post it here.

For the monster homebrewers: What is over a hundred tons, lived in shallow water where even PCs in a non-aquatic campaign could run into it and is carnivorous?

Meet Perucetus Colossus

For PC inspiration and character artists: It's pretty common knowledge that in the time periods that inspired fantasy roleplaying pretty much everyone carried a knife of some kind. Have you put any thought into what kind your character carries?

What does your character's dagger say about them? Eat cheese or die, perhaps?

I think this needs to be spun off into it's own thread in rules discussion. It's also more likely to be seen by a paizo dev that way.

I'm hoping golem rules get reworked, because as written it would seem that you're just screwed if you can't use an energy type that causes damage to them.

I think there's a good chance. While the Golem of Prague is Jewish mythology the concept that Golems are animated by elemental spirits and immune to magic is 100% DnD original. So a rework for Pathfinder Golems to distinguish them more was probably strongly considered given they're the company mascot.

When it comes to Bugbears, Pathfinder already has a God of Fear who isn't evil in Kalekot. It seems like his edicts would totally be in their wheelhouse.

So apparently a gaming outlet called Bols released a Water chapter preview a few days ago. But, I guess it was completely overshadowed by the early subscriber releases. Even the Paizo social media people never said anything.

keftiu wrote:

Today's Paizo Live apparently talked a fair bit about the new Witch.

Where can I see Paizo Live? Is that YouTube, Twitch, Paizo.com, or what?

Twitch

Consuming souls is much more of a D&D lich thing. I came to a lot of classic fantasy stuff through Pathfinder rather than D&D, and was surprised when I heard about some liches in D&D lore having to sustain themselves with souls because that's not really mentioned for Pathfinder liches.

While there were liches that consumed souls as an aditional source of power throughout DnDs history it wasn't until 5th Edition that it became something almost all liches did. Apparantly the reasoning for it was that the designers thought about all kinds of scenarios for a lich and its goals and concluded that pretty often their smartest move when encountering any real difficulty was to abuse their immortality by hunkering down and waiting for the problem to die of old age. This created the issue of either making a really frustrating scenario for the players of parties without access to high level scrying or supposedly genius liches somehow always missing an obvious tactic. By making them need to regularly send out minions to hunt for souls it created a way for any party composition to have a way to investigate and find them.

While AFAIK no Paizo designer has ever mentioned anything about it, the concept that Pathfinder liches obsesively hunger for new knowledge is another way to solve this problem. Instead of souls their minions are always out and about searching for essential magical experimental components and subjects, lost tomes of lore, etc.

At this point the whole thread has degenerated into people going in circles and repeating themselves with slightly different wording.

Rembember, you* don't need to get in the last word. Not responding to someone doesn't mean they "win," the argument.

*This is a plural you by the way. Not a specific poster.

My first thought was to have a Beastkin awakened animal to put an animal in your animal to have an animal squared. But then I remembered that Beastkins have to be humanoid. I hope that restriction is removed in the remaster.

Demons want to indulge in the Sin that defines them as much as possible.

Daemons want to kill everything including themselves eventually.

Well, the ambiguity has been settled. Drow are gone, gone.

From this thread: Post 336

We are really trying hard to keep the remastering/ORC version of Golarion the same, but in the case of drow, we've decided to retcon them. Feel free of course to use drow from our previously published 1st and 2nd edition products, but going forward, they won't be in Pathfinder.

So for people who haven't heard the news Paizo has determined that it isn't feasible to salvage the Drow from the OGL mess. There's an ongoing argument about if they've been retconned from existence, but either way Paizo is never publishing anything about them again.

Check out The-Magic-Sword's writeup for a summary of the whole Darklands Panel.

Since they're gone for legal reasons and not story ones that means they can't be used in Starfinder either. Which is messy because Apostae and it's mysteries is a pretty big Pact Worlds subplot.

An entire planet in the Pact Worlds system just not being mentioned ever again probably isn't a viable solution.

How do we think the Starfinder team is going to sqare the cirlce? Are the Drow going to dig too greedily and deeply and get wiped out the same way the Ilee were?

Yeah, I think they pretty much do that already. They have some very tightly controlled substitutions in place, like a feat to let you use Acrobatics to Jump. We might see an archetype that grants access to "trip with Acrobatics", but that's the most I'd expect.

Remember that you can use Assurance on maneuvers to ignore MAP. Maneuvers are really powerful. You really want to be careful when you start introducing new elements to that system to make it better, and the ability to pump your AC and get a third action to trip someone, with no need for Strength, is a pretty darn big landmine to start dancing on. Thieves would become a bit of a terror.

Tumbling Opportunist gives us an idea of Paizo's attitude to this kind of skill swap for manuevers. It's a 10th level archtype feat that lets your trip with acrobatics, if and only if you succeeded on a tumble through check already and is restriced to once per minute. That's a lot of caveats.

Pity there isn't a "suspected bot," in the Flag menu.

Right now the tags represent a weird blend of two different concepts: how common are these options in the 'default' Golarion region and how restricted they should be because of power concerns.

Just trying to head off this missconception. Uncommon and Rare options aren't more powerful than common options. Everything is bound to the same Level Math. What they can be is really unpredictable in how they affect the game. Many divination spells are uncommon because of how they can easily blindside a GM who hasn't thought through all the implications to his puzzles and mysteries. Likewise Antimagic Field is Rare not because it's more powerful than other 8th level spells but because the ability to shut down all magic can radically change the dynamics of encounters and not necessarilly to the party's benefit because of all their magic items and such shutting off.

So this is the next big theme book like Book of the Dead? Animals, Beasts, and wilderness adventures. Is Baranthet taking Geb's role as commentator for this book?

You are sure! But when I talk about the quality of the armor, it's not even so much the thickness of the metal, but also the quality of the work in its manufacture (which certainly goes hand in hand with the quality of the arrowheads too, you're right...

Remember that the period and place you're talking about spanned 700 years of time and an entire continent. There were absolutely times and places where good plate armor was relatively cheap and available to the common soldier. As for arrow penetration check these out.

Arrows Vs. Armor

Arrows Vs. Armor 2 Playlist

Probably the most thorough and well researched tests on the matter anybody has done so far.

Aboleths. Sure Paizo has fleshed out enough variety of Veiled Masters that losing the OG won't affect the setting much. But it still stings.

There's the ongoing subplot of Rahadoum's desertification that's being explored in 2E. The Cult of the Dawnflower's fanaticism was instrumental in the Laws of Mortality being adopted. So in a sense their legacy is very much alive as long as Rahadoum gets any focus.

Paizo is a small company and it's an open secret that most of its employees work two jobs because Paizo salaries can't meet the cost of living in the Seattle area. If there's some kind of disruption that ends 2E prematurely it doesn't mean a 3rd edition is coming it means Paizo is going out of business.

I think the fluff of the 1E Mesmerist is a product of the early to mid-2000's Edge that resulted in things like Hook Mountain Horror and the Cult of the Dawnflower and labeling a bunch of countries and NPC's who's actions were clearly evil as neutral. Paizo is in a very different place now and if they do the Mesmerist the fluff will likely be much more tasteful.

There's also a special kind of petitioner created from Atheists who wanted to truly understand the truth of reality beyond the gods and they gain special insights to do so. It's one of Paizo's gibberish names that I don't remember so I couldn't search for it on Nethy's. I want to say Bestiary 3?

But the thing about Cheliax that caught my eye initially and then gets expounded upon us in the History sidebars.

Is it Cheliax banning chattel slavery but replacing it with de facto debt slavery and other predatory practices? Like the forums heavily speculated would happen?

Perpdepog wrote:

It's also heavily hinted that the Worldwound was tied to Aroden's death, which is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, mysteries of the Pathfinder setting. It's not surprising that the Worldwound may not follow the usual rules for interplanar incursions.

It was only hinted at. In Wrath of the Righteous, it was explained that there was no connection to Aroden's death except in timing. Whether Deskari was waiting for Aroden to be occupied before making his move or he was taking advantage of the chaos I forget, but /shrug.

My understanding is that the opportunity for Deskari to create the Worldwound, the Eye of Abendego and Aroden's death are all related in the sense that they were all made possible by the much bigger deal of the Death Of Prophesy.

Aroden's death was the biggest consequence of that in Avistan and it's focused on in the lore because that's where most Pathfinder PCs operate. But as far as the world and the multiverse is concerned his death was a footnote to a much bigger disaster/paradigm shift.

When it comes to the Boneyard at least one creation myth has the Pathfinder Multiverse made by Pharasma herself. And if it's true using an artifact that disrupts it's balance would be betraying her for an Usher. So their motive could be that nobody gets the artifact for any reason, period.

YuriP wrote:

Great News!!! We finally have something from Tian Xia.

But there aren't anything about classes (with exception from Magus Hybrid Study) and many players call for oriental themed classes like Samurai, Ninja and even Onmyoji, Wu Shi, Musa, Fangshi and Mudang.

There's some prevision for such more cultural related classes? (I also miss this for Garunde region I think maybe there classes related to such culture too) Because we already have many region and cultural related ancestries but the classes are all generic.

Lost Omens books are never gonna be the place you find a new class.

Why do those concepts need standalone classes? What is a full Samurai providing to the game that a Fighter from Minkai in full O-Yoroi with a katana isn't?

The PF2 classes are all pretty broad, archetypal identities: you can find Rogues and Sorcerers and Psychics in all sorts of cultures, on every continent. Making new ones that are tightly-bound to specific geography is a losing bet.

Lost Omens books often have Archetypes though. That would probably be a good compromise between your viewpoints.

Any AP with Belimarius as one of the big bads probably needs the option to fully redeem her for good. After all Paizo doesn't want to send the message "mercy is for suckers," to the gaming groups that spared her earlier.

Saw this offer online and have some interest but was wondering what is the best way to learn how to play this? Are there some decent explainer videos or introduction videos?

Jason Bulmahn one of PF2's central architects has a YouTube channel. He has a Tutorial Playlist that gives advice for running RPGs in general but the latest videos in it are about PF2 specifically.

I imagine part of the difficulty there is that the difference only would have been apparent after the invasion succeeded; Deskari would have ruled over Golarion as part of his domain, tormenting it's inhabitants.

Had the Worldwound been a daemonic invasion, after breaking through the wards they'd have made a b-line for the Pit of Gormuz & dedicated their efforts into releasing Rovagug & bringing about the end of all life.

Edit: Sidebar, this is kind of why I feel that Golarion should get a lot *more* daemonic attention as it's the planet that contains their win button.

My understanding is that Daemons have no interest in Rovagug because he's ultimately part of the cycle of reality. He's supposed to eat the universe to make room for the next one. He just decided to be an ass and eat everything hundreds of billions of years before he's scheduled to. Daemons want the cycle broken. They want total nonexistence with no new universes ever being born again. Rovagug can't and won't do that.

It seems to me that the obvious ratio for 3 part AP's is 3 1-10 and 1 11-20 per year based on the format's respective popularity. If you did the 11-20 last each year you could have a page in front giving ideas on how that years 1-10s could plausibly link into it.

I also think that CR 26 is a fairly conservative when it comes to his power.

My personal ballpark is Level/CR 29.

To get the obvious caveats out of the way. NPCs aren't built like PCs and PF1's mechanics are just one way of presenting the world of Golarion that can and will be changed if it makes a better story for PF2. Also estimated levels often present actual effective power quite poorly. All of that said I feel it's better than pulling numbers out of thin air.

We know that when he fought Aroden it wasn't a one sided beating in the God's favor and is actually presented as a major feat for the God of Humanity. That implies to me that Tar-Baphon was already up there and was probably already Mythic 10 for that fight. Level 20 M 10 is CR/EL 25. Then he became a Lich which by PF1 rules raises your CR by 3 (I know officially he's actually a Mythic Lich which operates by different rules, but many feel Mythic Lich is underwhelming and actually a downgrade from the Archmage he likely was before.). Then he crafted his major artifact crown to enhance his powers even further. There are other PF1 NPC's with artifacts that state if they're separated from them to decrease their CR by one. So logically invert that and assume the Crown increased his power by one level when he made it. 25 + 3 + 1 = 29. I take the CR 26 statline for when he had the shard of the Shield of Aroden lodged in his hand weakening him. Given the general wisdom that for classic D20 characters a 2 level difference is a rough doubling in power that's a substantial downgrade.

I say Nethys is a bad example because while he has TN on the sheet he really has three alignments based on the lore of his shattered mind. He acts Lawful Good when his preserver/protector aspect is dominant. He acts Chaotic Evil when his destroyer aspect is dominant. Finally he acts True Neutral in his rare moments of lucidity displaying his original pre-ascension personality but that's the "doesn't particularly care about Good/Evil/Law/Chaos," version of TN. It's some of his worshipers who try to understand Nethys in his entirety who practice the "balance," version of TN.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

It's hard to see Razimir as the next big bad because he's not even a top 3 Wizard in the setting. If you actually go ahead and have him pass the test of the Starstone, he's no more touchable than Norgorber so that's not happening.

The test of the Starstone doesn't immediately make you a deity, so you could actually have a plot where he is in the process of ascension and the PCs are in a race against the clock to prevent the ascension from happening. If you wanted to have him be a BBEG across a whole edition, you could say that he didn't quite fully succeed at the test, and it's a multiple year process for him because of that.

There's been multiple contradictory sources of how the Starstone works over the years. James Jacobs has stated that to clear things up it is now definitive that if you pass the Test of The Starstone you become a full major Deity immediately.

Now that does raise questions. Like when Tar Baphon fought Aroden his defeat is treated as a major accomplishment for Aroden that he potentially could have lost, not lol, look at the idiot necromancer who tried to fight a God. What did Tar Baphon have is his back pocket that allowed him to go twelve rounds with a major deity? Is it the same thing that allowed him to curbstomp Arzani? Does it only work on Deities? Because if it worked on anything he should have been nigh-unstoppable. Does he still have it now?

I like Kyyduh the more we get to see of them! Seems like the kind of easy-going, oblivious, Chaotic Good that's easy for folks to emulate at the game table :) Kyyduh is moisturized, unbothered, and in their lane.

Kyyduh seems to have both a melee and ranged adaptive strike; did I miss a way to do that, in the rules? (Or, it's just artistic license, and I'm here for it.)

Spamotron wrote:

she

Kyyduh's pronouns - they, them, their - appear in this short story (written by an agender author, who, it looks like, is also using they/them pronouns, incidentally) seventy times. Seventy.

This appears to have been taken down and reposted. When made my post "She," appeared for Kyyduh at least a few times in it.

So I take it Kyyudah was originally a cybernetics path evolutionist but when she was changed to plant based biotech it was too late to change some of the art orders?

Nice portrayal of hyperfixation by the way.

On the subject of religion, something that occurred to me is that a Golden Road book could really do some interesting things with the Sarenites, and looking at just how the Cult of the Dawnflower really differs from the orthodoxy of Qadira and Kelesh.

There are Dev comments here on the forum and on Reddit that the Cult of Dawnflower is gone for good. From piecing together said comments is that apparently Sarenrae finally gave up on trying to subtly steer them away from extremism and just straight up appeared to all the Dawnflower Clerics and told them to give up their crusades because they had gone too far. Those who didn't fell and lost their powers.

Now there's story potential in fallen Dawnflower cultists becoming villains and seeking other sources of power, but the impression I got is that no one in the Paizo office wants to do anything with them at this time.

I have this vague idea of a party gaining a spark of power from various Kaiju and at the end of the campaign helping King Mogaru put Varklops down for good.

If we get more Book of the Dead-style monster books, aberrations are at the top of my list by far... and fey are near the bottom.

You probably don't have to worry about a fae book anytime soon. After all it's Paizo policy to treat third party well, being former third party themselves. They won't want to steal Legendary Games thunder.

One problem with making Kobolds bigger in Pathfinder is that their current popular depiction is all WoTC's baby. Before D&D 3rd Edition aside from their trap fixation they were pretty generic "other goblins." The whole bit about being tiny wannabe dragons who worship bigger dragons, invented whole cloth by WoTC's writers. No basis in mythology whatsoever.

When Paizo took Goblins and turned them into the pickle loving pyromaniacs we all know and love they were still just pretty generic fodder monsters in D&D. There was plenty of room to do their own thing.

To really expand on kobolds while still using all that draconic lore that WoTC developed could be seen as poor creator's etiquette.