Swordpriest's page

I'm saddened and amazed that this is an issue.

My heart just bleeds for you. I know that it's so tragic that someone doesn't bow before the Wondrous Altar of Prostitution and sing its praises all day long, with bright and happy expressions and squeals of rapture and Politically Correct yowls of delight -- I can see why you're "saddened".

i would argue that a profession would be any trade used to gain goods or services, in that thinking the first profession would be prostitution because using sex for favor's or food or protection would have been the very first trade.

I would presume that it would be a skilled flint-knapper trading a handaxe that he spent the whole day making, and thus was unable to hunt, with the hunter who had a spare muskrat but needed a good handaxe, was probably the first profession. After all, food, tools, and a place to take shelter usually take priority among people living in very marginal conditions, over using the services of a whore when you probably already have spouse/mate anyway, since you need to start reproducing young and early if the tribe isn't going to die out because of massive mortality rates.

Especially since prostituting yourself is likely to get you killed by an angry spouse, or thrown out of the tribe to starve in the wild for causing disruption in the social fabric through jealousies, fights, and possibly violations of taboos -- which are not an invention of Queen Victoria, no matter what the revisionist PC historians would like to say, but generally exist to place some limits on potentially destructive human behavior. And screwing around for favors, especially in a very small, closed society like a tribe, IS destructive behavior -- there are too many powerful emotions and too much possibility for conflict in a situation where you all need to work together, or die, for it to be tolerated, generally.

Honestly, the modern world's obsession with its genitals gets a little wearisome after a while.

Rolling here. Mostly because it's a lot of fun.

Pretty heavily detailed -- negotiating with shopkeepers, stopping at inns for the night or setting up camp and a system of watches, and so on. The players love it, and it's not something I need to stat up, so it's fine with me.

The one thing that I don't have my players (I'm the DM) track is food. It's just too nitpicky for me. As long as they say "we buy food at a stall as we go through the town" or "we stop for 20 minutes to eat our rations" no more tracking is needed. I think they'd do it happily, but it's something that I can't stand keeping track of in detail, for whatever reason.

Swordpriest wrote:

Yet by the attitude of many posters here, this should also be disallowed.

I have no issues with mechanics (as there are none), just the background states "caused death of celestial". This is a tricky part in my little mind. It's a death sentence for the PC unless they can somehow convince me of how exactly the blame was shifted in the face of divination magic being common.

S.

And yet, the same might be said for good-aligned PCS as well. Why wouldn't causing the death of powerful fiends working the dark will of their masters on the material plane be a death sentence for a character as well?

As far as that goes, openly smiting devils and demons is part of the PCs' job. Why doesn't it result in their inevitable death as the overlords of these fiendish beings use all their resources to squash the meddling insects who are opposing them?

Or is it assumed that the celestial powers are more efficient with revenge than the infernal ones?

(Please note that I'm not trying to be difficult here -- I'm genuinely enjoying this debate and interested to see where it will lead.)

Godwin's Law AND TvTropes?

I love you guys.

I'm in agreement with most of the posters in that yes, it was a ham-handed way of dealing. Cosmetic changes are appropriate, and the character would get warnings, visions, visitations at least three times before it all hit the fan, since it was not addressed at creation.

Pardon me for being dense, but before what hit the fan? The character seems to be, by all accounts, totally "legal" in a RAW and RAI sense. Does having an interesting backstory that has absolutely no impact on the mechanics of the character, that does not go beyond the scope of the Pathfinder book, constitute some kind of cheating?

You can also note from my previous post that I'm not opposed to using the backstory for plot hooks. What I can't fathom is the attitude that the the player has "gotten away with something," or has broken the rules or gotten some kind of unfair advantage somehow -- because objectively speaking, the character is totally legal by the rules.

The bloodline has no alignment prerequisite. All the player did was come up with a rather intriguing way to explain why this evil character has a celestial bloodline.

It all boils down to this: the player has an evil character with a celestial bloodline. This is totally within the rules. The rules are written to permit this. The rules are working as intended.

So what on Earth is the big problem? Why does this need to be "corrected"? Why is this something that is "going to hit the fan"? What needs to "be addressed at creation" when the creation is entirely in line with the rules?

Does every celestial bloodline character need to be a cookie cutter image of each other? What about an infernal bloodline character who is chaotic good, struggling to overcome his heritage -- isn't that an interesting concept also? Yet by the attitude of many posters here, this should also be disallowed.

It's trying to get something out of the system, to which, as DM, I would reply: "Well, you THINK you did, anyway ..." because there is always something the character does not know. If they want to use this from their background, they do so with the attendant risks that somebody has found out and he will end up on a wanted poster. The character with celestial abilities uses them with the risk that the powers that be might one-day figure out what has gone on and be right royally annoyed.

Now all that...

Now, you see it as trying to get it something out of the system, but I have to respectfully disagree. The character is absolutely identical to one who had this same class, bloodline, and alignment without the backstory. He's getting nothing extra because of this backstory that the rules would not allow him in the absence of the backstory as well.

Since there are no rules-based alignment restrictions on the bloodline, I fail to see that he is in any way using this to get anything "bonus" to what the rulebook allows, so I also fail to see why he should encounter special disadvantages or GM meddling because of it.

Mind you, I might use it as a source of plot hooks if I were the GM, like any other backstory. But I certainly can't see that he's getting any benefit from it beyond what the rules allow to a sorcerer character, so I really can't understand the urge in some of the posters here to "get" him for what he's doing (I'm not saying you're one of these, just that half the people here seem to assume he's "getting away with something" that is bending the rules, when in fact he appears to be following both RAW and RAI).

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I feat this system is going to make another GM backlash because it'll make characters sound like they have seven different dips into prestige classes. If it was label free then it would just be nice discreet Lego parts that would just be in the background and not give offense to those players who insist that the classes have an in-game meaning, rather than a purely meta-game meaning.

I think that the system you're advocating is what would be like seven different dips into prestige classes, with a purely meta-game meaning. The idea of the packages appears to be the opposite in just about every way. In short, I'm afraid I'm not seeing the logic of your argument.

Her question and mine is: why does the LG god of Farming, Hunting, Trade and Family have to be written as being sexist? Just wondering what the designers had in mind when they included this unnecessary tenet into the god's doctrine.

Perhaps because being a wife and mother, kind of like being a husband and father, has something vaguely to do with the FAMILY?

How on Earth are humans supposed to survive if women are too "independent" (i.e. wage slaves to some corporate entity, rather than running their own place) to have children? This is exactly why Europe is dying out at the moment -- because the women have this idea that by having children, they're subjecting themselves to some kind of oppression, and by swinking for some greedy board of directors, they're somehow "independent."

I like this Erastil -- greatly.

You know you get that ranger bonus if you deal non-lethal damage right? As far as the judeo-christian morality, that just doesn't bear out with history, as the crusades, and the taking of america were all examples of judeo-christian morality not at all in conflict with an extermination goal. But you are right that it is culturally shaped morality, and people with different backgrounds will think differently, a human paladin of serenrae (goddess of redemption) would probably save them while an elf ranger with favored enemy goblin will not.

Except that your opinion here is based on anti-European revisionist propaganda based on modern European self-hate, and not on fact.

The fact is that neither the Crusades nor the colonization of America were motivated by a policy of extermination, nor was a policy of extermination followed in either case.

The Crusades were a counterattack against several centuries of Muslim aggression against Europe and Christianity. The Moors invaded Spain, conquered much of it, and enslaved part of the population, then went on to invade France, with only Charles Martel stopping their advance. They also conquered Silicy and a good part of Italy, which they occupied until the Normans expelled them. Muslim aggression continued long after the Crusades, with Eastern Europe being subjugated and ravaged repeatedly until the Turks were finally driven out over the course of several centuries.

Crusader fiefs in the Middle East were full of local peasants, who often preferred the Crusaders to their former overlords (who were themselves conquerors, and had little sympathy with the locals despite their shared Islam). There were occasional massacres at the end of a siege, but those happen everywhere and were not a peculiar feature of the Crusades, nor part of a wholesale policy of extermination. Most of the people living in the areas invaded by the Crusaders survived, since there was no extermination policy.

Similarly, the United States was founded by colonization, not genocide. In fact, the fact that there are still Indians left shows that mercy was extended because of the Judeo-Christian culture -- in Indian vs. Indian warfare, the defeated were usually wiped out to the last infant, and if the Europeans had applied this rule instead of their Judeo-Christian ones, there would be literally no Indians left. Fortunately, this was not the case -- the Indians were SAVED from extermination by Judeo-Christian cultural beliefs.

Well, if you go by Tolkien, who influenced RPG's current versions of orcs and goblins heavily --

"For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so." -- Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter 2, "The Council of Elrond"

Of course, in the case of his books, he had a good reason built into the storyline for all the orcs to end up evil, since they were all under the mental influence of a powerfully evil being, Sauron in his corrupted form. And they were originally elves corrupted and distorted by Morgoth, Sauron's master.

Their evil alignment in RPGs, in short, is kind of a Tolkien legacy with the original reason for the evil removed. So, in the absence of Sauron and Morgoth, it seems most logical to assume it's their society that turns them to the bad, as someone pointed out upthread.