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I disagree with this one from a couple different directions.

The fact that it is similar to D&D Beyond likely is a win for recruiting people who are used to 5e, D&D Beyond is so baked in that not having something comparable is just another hurdle in bringing them over.

The second part is that I believe something like Demiplane can coexist with the others. Claxon mentioned how it didn't seem to take away from the free options and that matters. Paizo has a great track record of supporting the free options, but its okay to have a more premium version. I'm not a huge fan of Demiplane's character builder yet, though its been steadily getting better. However, their rules search works better for me than Nethys or PF2e Easy and when I want to read through the books on my tablet it is amazing. The reader on its own is so much better than scrolling PDFs especially when you are wanting to reference spells and abilities at the same time.

You can access pathfinder for free and not be missing out. But if a premium version is worth it for you? Then demiplane is great. That there is a cheap and easy way within to share your books with your tables can help a lot with splitting the costs.

I'm from the olden days. We play a lot of different systems, but my group always leaned more towards D20 systems. So came from AD&D into 3.5, and started following Dungeon and Dragon magazines.

The group absolutely loved Shackled City and Age of Worms so when Paizo started to release Pathfinder adventures we merged over. Some of my players still are traumatized by Carnival of Horrors and Mamma Graul.

This is starting to sound like the premise of some sort of Cookie Clicker/Universal Paperclips style game in Golarion.

That was my first thought. As an incremental game enjoyer, I'm like 'So you buy a wand, spend three years using it to afford another. Then it only takes 1/2 years to get a third. Then pretty soon you have to drop the money on something that can make wands fast enough to keep up.'

I'm prepared for this to be an elf strategy.

I think part of this question depends on whether this is a fight the BBEG has planned or not. Like if this fight is meant to happen when the players surprise the bad guy its going to be hard for him to have a good escape route. But if they are meeting him in a planned way or especially in his lair then he can plan stuff.

Kobolds like their weird little tricks, a secret door that he can duck through and locks behind him is something that can allow an escape since the players will have to spend a few actions to bust out their tools and pick the lock(even harder if still have minions around). This is low level so the players aren't going to have a lot of tools for catching up to someone who is out of sight. If the bulk of the party are medium creatures, having him dart down a small tunnel that reduces them to squeezing speed could have a similar impact and a single small PC is unlikely to want to chase after a much tougher boss by himself.

Wouldn't an Aiuvarin Elf essentially be the equivalent of an Elf and Aiuvarin's offspring? Mechanically its not very great since you already had the elf trait, but its effectively an elf that has something else in its ancestry but a bit further upstream.

Pretty high level but the 'Vernai Shell' is a suit of armor meant for red mantis assassins. Each glove has an extradimensional space that can store an item up to bulk 1. It takes 1 action to store an item, but its a free action to retrieve one.

I think treating it as an earn income task that you can do with Nature or crafting is a pretty fair way about it. The bones being infused with Adamantine doesn't mean they are significantly adamantine- A beaver's teeth are coated with Iron rather than calcium but you would have a hard time converting that into something usable for a weapon. Breaking it down isn't going to give you much, but rewarding the players by giving them the ability to earn income at a level above what the local towns provide is a small reward that isn't going to break balance.

There was no "down there?" We were told the milestone leveling indicated we basically needed to clear the whole first floor including the drake to hit level 2.

Again, I think if we had to stuck our initial plan we could have...

I think that might be something of a discussion for the GM. You don't want milestone leveling to be too rigid or it can be punishing for the party. You can't really expect a party to find absolutely every secret or do every fight.

The Drake can be worth a decent chunk of xp, butif I was doing actual XP rather than milestone, I'd give the party some xp for figuring out and temporarily avoiding an encounter and then give them the rest when they go back and complete it. So in milestone I would consider whether they had done some extra stuff around town or maybe let them do a more normal encounter past where I had intended to level them. But honestly, I'd more likely just level them when they were ready to go to the next floor.

The purpose of milestone is to help players not need to be murder hobos to level. You get a level when you have advanced the story past a certain point(in a megadungeon, that is probably starting the next floor). If you have to go fight everything, then you are probably better off with XP. Are the players just taking a quick look at the next floor but still have a fair bit of the current floor to explore? Not ready to level. Are they considering that floor done even though they didn't find a secret door that had another few fights behind it? Ready to level.

A long time back Monty Cook made an online megadungeon called 'Dungeon a Day' that had a section on the tenants they used to create the dungeon. They don't apply to all of them, but one that applies to most and I like to remind my players during the start of these type of campaigns is that the dungeon increases in difficulty on its own(rather than based on your level) and can have a risk reward. Sneaking into lower levels to risk picking up some above level treasure can be a fun challenge, but also realize that you can walk into things you aren't yet ready for and planning for that and having an escape plan can be a benefit too.

When we ran AV, my players similarly identified what was nesting down there and decided they weren't yet prepared for that fight. They snuck into there at level 2 with some better gear including consumables that could help with the breath weapon. Even then it was a decently tough fight.

It was good for your DM to have telegraphed what the encounter was for you so you could come at it purposefully, and whether or not he should have pulled some punches for a level 1 group is up to the groups style. But don't be afraid to note that some things might be over your head and need to be resolved when you are better prepared.

As someone who has just run Crown of the Kobold King for a 2e party, I would be hesitant to recommend it. The story is fun, but there have been a lot of changes in encounter design from 1e to 2e and the adventure is more of a direct port. It means that things like what is expected in rest time between fights, having lots of single powerful creature fights instead of multiple equal or lower CR creatures in encounters, or just the flow feels very different. Its a fun artifact to take me back to the early days, but doesn't stand up real well to the more current stuff.

I just wanted to chime in and voice some praise for this Adventure. I have a really long running group though we don't play as often as we used to. We did Age of Ashes and then Extinction Curse before a pretty sizable break. I ran us through Crown of the Kobold as a refresher to get back into the swing of things with PF2e but was having trouble getting into it, you can really feel the different intention in encounter design from 1st edition show through and I think that had carried into AoA and EC as well as the writers were getting a sense of the new system.

As we were wrapping that up I decided our next step should be into one of the more modern adventures to see how that landed. I couldn't be more pleasantly surprised. The storyline and writing and fantastic, but the way they are backed by the rules and help encourage you to dive into the different subsystems that have been developed is fantastic. I hadn't thoroughly re-read the GM Core after the remaster and the intro to things like Infiltration and Influence in such effective ways has been great.

Coming as someone who often leans towards narrative systems but has a group of d20 at heart players and loves Paizo's fluff this adventure has ignited a lot of fire in me for the system and given great inspiration for ways to have the rules encourage flavoring a lot of the non-combat stuff.

I saw someone joke before about using the necro ability that lets a thrall be the source of your spell to effectively double the distance. Throw a thrall out 30ft away, then use him to put another thrall 60ft away.

For me you have the potential to intimidate your way out of a fight before it truly begins. If you are squaring up with each other, I'd give you a chance to either threaten your way out of it or be diplomatic before initiative kicks off and people start swinging. Circumstances can matter a lot here of course, but I don't see it a lot different than something like Animal Empathy pointing out that its likely animals will give you time to make your case.

If you are actually in combat that is another story. I normally have a mental tally of when/if enemies are likely to flee, be that when they take so much damage, or if they are being driven by a one of their allies and the rest don't care so much about the cause. I could see myself letting a PC shout 'Run' and raising that bar slightly with a coercion check, particularly when they have done something to sway the fight in their favor.

Done a lot of full length APs and AP length homebrew. In the younger years of having a lot of free time as a group we were doing an 8+hr weekly session where we'd just hang out all day playing.

The longest campaign I ran was The Drow War which was a 3x campaign meant to use epic rules to go to 30. We weren't really enjoying the Epic side of things so brought forward a lot of the endgame stuff and wrapped it at 25.

This thread is a few weeks old, but I would imagine you could use some level of the squeezing rules for this. Not literally making the wagon squeeze, but it would do a pretty good representation of hacking away brush and moving back and forth to find wider gaps in trees the wagon could fit through.

Gross, I can't imagine forgoing the extra damage and extra target from the normal amp just to use the unamped cantrip effect at range. The sorcerer tentacle option or getting a couple of wands of Ghostly Carrier makes more sense.

I would point out that if there are multiple(which generally means weaker) targets there are normally better options than multi-attacking magic weapon. At the moment particularly tanky creatures have been the parties weakspot though and being able to land a high force damage hit that can also adapt type if the creature has a weakness has been impressive. One of the creatures had the ability to do a high damage area effect around itself and being able to hit solidly from outside of it saved the parties bacon.

For the wand, its a good call though they have been based out of a smaller town. On demand wands haven't been readily available.

This seems like a good spot to allow the players a reaction to identify the spell since they aren't quite in combat yet. Misunderstandings can lead to conflict, but at least there is the opportunity to have the players base their recourse off the spell being cast or the fact that they don't know what spell it is.

I'm really curious how this is going to change because I'm running a campaign at level 5 right now with our groups first psychic. The player tends to go for goofy concept characters so she's pretty far from min-maxed(she's a mushroom leshy who makes people trip so most of her spells are illusory stuff).

After getting smacked pretty hard at first level when she got into melee she picked up warp space to hit with imaginary weapon from wherever she wants and has been a powerhouse. Unleash Psyche is rough on you if the fight goes very long, but with imaginary weapon letting you pick a damage type as well as having the force trait she's been the one who could handle anything the rest of the party was having trouble with.

The reward is always the same for those who serve the purple (previously known as golem) well : transformation into an Automaton Lich.

To keep on serving forever without fail.

Now I just want to build a conspiracy board and see how many lines of string I can draw between Paizo and Droskar.

There can be a lot of opinions on things without someone being a troll. I'm really not a d20 fan and never have been. My tastes tend to fall towards either an annoying amount of crunch or being extremely rules light. For me either of those give options- Either there is a rule for damn near everything or its flexible enough to easily handwave. D20 has always fallen into the middle for me.

With that said, my group has always been more d20 system based. I run most of our games so I used to always run a 3x adventure and then get them to do a short burst of WoD or Shadowrun. I love the settings that Paizo makes which adds a lot to the fun with me, but I'd still rather have used the setting with the Genesys system or something.

PF2e has been the best d20 system to me though and between that and how much the world building has continued to grow I enjoy running it, but there are definitely folks out there who appreciate the system for what it is without it being made for them. The idea that a class based system is inherently constraining and that PF2e has done a lot to add to the ability to customize your classes aren't exclusive.

Good calls on those!

The Leshy Glide is what brought this question up- a character was fighting at the bottom of a pit after failing to scout ahead and the rest of the team was trying to climb down. Our Leshy was bad at climbing so the question came up if she could just do it 3 times a round to reliably be moving down 15ft. In my head I had it as a sustained action but it makes sense as just a normal one.

Bless I didn't realize the sustain wasn't needed for the time but I see that in the description. I'm glad I asked the question.

Hi All!

Are you able to sustain an action more than once in a round? Sustain calls out that if you sustain again it won't extend the duration even further, but if something has an effect on a sustain can you trigger that multiple times?

Examples:

Bless- Each sustain expands the area

Spiritual Armament- Each sustain triggers an attack

Leshy Glide- Each sustain moves 25ft forward and 5ft down

I believe that butt wiping falls under an interact action with the manipulate trait.

Small note on that- Firing through a creature's square(ally or enemy) gives anything behind it lesser cover(so a +1 circumstance to AC). But that can be avoided by lining up your shots without something in between.

I'm of the camp that the bag of holding is effectively letting them access a storage space per its description(I'd probably go as far that if a bag was destroyed with something critical inside we could do a quest to figure out where that dimensional space was so they could plane shift to it to retrieve it, even though that goes against the 'lost forever' section).

However, it also feels like a lot of this argument falls into a very similar level as arguing the physics in a game. How the bag does it is pretty much just fluff beyond that its magic and it needs to access another plane(so if an effect stopped planar access it wouldn't work). But the actual function of what it does is let you ignore up to 25 bulk of items. If it stops working, the bag is suddenly however many bulk it had inside of it harder to handle. Its a backpack that doesn't like anti-magic fields.

I have a bit of a broad question on this one-

I'm going to be running this adventure as our next campaign(thinking of bringing it into curtain call, for the back half). About 80% of our group have been together for basically ever and we ran through through the early Varisia Aps when they came out.

That means its been long enough that my group has vague memories of things(I'm sure they will immediately remember the hagfish when its brought up, but I don't know that they will remember many details about NPCs).

So the question is; what should I remind them? What bits of setting and history around the town have people gotten the most use out of?

It sounds like you are probably using the ranged combat mod.

There is a 'reload' macro that you can use to take care of it. If you go to the compendiums tab and search 'reload' you will find it. You can drag that down onto your hotbar to have it readily available.

Doubling names is a tradition that extends before Pathfinder. We had a character in a 3x game that was playing a warmage/warmage.

Making someone frightened when you roll initiative seems easier if you are sneaking. I'm assuming the battle cry is 'boo!'.

I tend to try and use creature tactics from their perspective. Something less intelligent is likely to focus on whatever hurt it last or hurt it the most. Something more intelligent might be more predictive and try and make sure that when it drops something it stays down. That can be very influenced by how the battle is going though.

We had a creature recently that was a high threat for the party and due to a number of factors(bad rolls, setting that worked in its favor, catching a couple characters while they were scouting a rounds movement ahead of the party) the combat tilted very against them quickly. As a result there were a few rounds where most of the party were trying to heal, get buffs up, etc, and the couple who attacked it missed.

The creature had an ability that would bind their souls to it if they died, so since it didn't see them as a threat he spent his time making sure everyone was tagged with that power and just doing some other attacks here or there to keep them from getting to full strength. It didn't feel like pulling punches, it felt like a monster in a horror movie toying with its victims.

Lots of creatures have unique powers, whether its a shadow wanting to create another shadow, or wolves wanting to team up. Those powers might not be the most tactically strong option, but having a creature lean into what is special about it rather than what is going to be the most deadly can both help control the difficulty and make the creatures feel more thematic.

This isn't a power build, but if we are talking just use case its easy to forget the advantage that any of the non-claw natural attacks mean that you still can flank even when you don't have your weapons out or have your hands full. It also gives an option during grapples.

Hello!

I'm going to be a bit unspecific because its an item out of an adventure, but in the next session its very likely that my players are going to run across a cursed gauntlet. Part of the curse is that once put on the gauntlet forces their hand closed into a fist, effectively removing the 'free hand' trait so they can't use that hand beyond gauntlet strikes or using the items other powers.

This matters because its very likely that my team is going to be able to identify the items abilities, but not catch the curse. And upon doing that are going to decide those abilities are most useful for their swashbuckler.

The swashbuckler has a number of abilities that require them to be wielding a 1 handed melee weapon and have their other hand free. I'm pretty confident RAW it violates both of these things(The gauntlet would be a second melee weapon, and by definition it doesn't have free hand). However, I'm curious of people's feeling on this interaction. I think in spirit, he's not intending to use it as a weapon and for the swashbuckler feats their hand needs to be free for balance and pose rather than to grab someone.

I will say that I'm probably going to have it apply just because it will add some pressure and the party has the ability to resolve it(they have a scroll of remove curse).

I was always curious about how frequently this actually happened. Not just that example but power loss in general. It happened at my table, but only ever as a joke because the paladin's player would swear IRL, lose his powers, stare up at the ceiling and say "Sorry!" and instantly gain them back. I don't think I've ever encountered serious, persistent power loss in the wild.

The two instances I think of in my history were pretty non-standard. We had a paladin who was possessed and did some pretty bad things. The player proposed the losing of his powers even though he wasn't in control and it became a part of the story having him try and right his bodies wrongs.

The other instance was an old 3.5 adventure. The players were pretty high level and exploring a temple in a shadowplane. There was a pool of unholy water that they players needed to get to the other side of and the adventure had a note about how touching the water could break a good characters contact with their god. There were several divine characters in the group, but the fighter was easily the most devote person so of course he is the one who dropped into the water first. The look on his players face was devastated when I told him that it doesn't affect any of his abilities obviously, but he could no longer feel his faith.

Random fun add on to that, we had a mystic theurge(wizard/cleric mix) in that group and we always joked how he just prepped all the weird utilities spells so he would have something for every situation. There was a running joke that he would let the fighter do something stupid and then pull out the perfect spell for the situation. When the fighter was looking devastated, the theurge chimed in that he casts control water and parts the pool and just stares at the fighter as he walks across.

I'm very happy to be beyond it. At the moment my biggest challenges come from the fact that one of my players just made a character who is sanctified and I'm running a pre-remaster adventure so I need to keep either finding remastered versions of the creatures or something equivalent so I can determine if they will have any holy/unholy effects.

From the RP perspective, I think edicts and anathema are so much better at establishing character motivations.

I mean, no one would be surprised if a Genie responded to a wish of "bring upon the end of all things" with "there is now a minor flaw in the cage of Rovagug, so he will escape one day sooner than he was going to anyway."

I'm just having fun now imagining a cult of Rovagug that have divined the day of his release rolling up and just starting to prepare their protection ritual to commune with him when all of a sudden he's out a little early.

This can vary pretty wildly by the group makeup as well. In my current game we don't have any true healers(A bard is able to give a little and battle medicine can help each character once a day) so we tend to have a longer period between fights of him patching people up. But with a group that keeps up the healing better during the fights or has a few people with focus abilities that can heal, just one or two ten minute sets is common.

I'm curious on this now too because I don't think you are missing anything. It even is a flourish so can only be done once a round but doesn't add anything else.

I suspect this was intended to be a 1 action ability.

I started to answer this question confidently, that I would probably allow it for rule of cool but by the book I think it would trigger if they threatened the square you stepped into. However, looking things up while I was saying that I discovered I was wrong.

Essentially, the step into the open air square doesn't trigger, and then you start to fall. Falling is covered by 'forced movement', it is specifically called out in the article even, which doesn't provoke.

So you would step without triggering reactions, then immediately begin to fall which also doesn't trigger. Even outside of rule of cool the character should be safe.

I don't have anything useful to add here, but the title did make me laugh from shared experience.

Way back in the days when Pathfinder wasn't pathfinder yet(one of the 3.5 edition APs) my party ran into a wendigo they were completely unprepared for. They ended up casting Force Cage on it, which in 3.5 lasted 2 hours a level, so they literally slept while it was in the cage and came back prepped specifically for it.

The AC doesn't even matter. A red dragon wearing gold dragon-hide barding has some good intimidation factor.

I think that is all very reasonable; given 5-10 minutes. But half-hour? An hour?

It's just such a wonky amount of time; 5e has this problem too with it's short rest being an hour.

In a dungeon delving based game I think it makes PERFECT sense; in that genre of game the Random Encounter via wandering monster is still a thing and the PCs are kinda operating on their own anyways.

But in most adventures, especially Pathfinder, you are in a far more dynamic and time sensitive situation than your typical dungeon.

If the players are taking an extended amount of time like that often enough that you want to curb the behavior I'd probably go the opposite way. After they make some noise and then sit around for a half hour before checking on any locations that may have heard them, I'd have them go into the next room and find no enemy but see it has been hastily stripped.

It doesn't really matter whether there would have been anything of real value in there. Having the players think that the enemy heard them coming and took the opportunity of their rest period to grab anything they could in the room and run away tends to play on the players base instincts and will have them subconsciously weighing whether they actually think they need that one extra lay of hands, ect.

As an additional note to all this, even if there isn't a strict time pressure in a broad sense, the players knowing that you might adjust other encounters by their delays.

For instance, the players get in a fight and there are a few rooms around them. If enemies behind those doors hear the combat there are a few possible reactions. They might come charging out and join in the fray. They might decide the original group should be able to handle it and just be conscious of the players approach. They might ignore it(under paid mook, overconfident demon). Or they might prepare.

Its that last case that can be used for time pressure if the players know its a possibility. If the players walk into a new area immediately after a fight, they might find some enemies scrambling into more defensive positions without much change. But if they take at least a few minutes, the enemies might be bunkered down and have some environmental/defensive bonuses, might have called in support, or just have caused a bit tougher of a fight. Players don't need to know for sure when this happens, just an awareness that the world isn't static in the spots they can't actively see can express that.

The Goblin 5th level feat 'Kneecap' doesn't seem to have a duration.

Ramarren,

I'm just a casual realm works user and not an official voice for them in any sense, but I can say that the software is able to do all the NPC/organization/relationship type of things you mentioned above and it functions pretty smoothly.

I make use of realm works for campaign planning for pathfinder, but where its really shined for me is as an NPC, location, ect codex for games like shadowrun or edge of the empire where I tend to have things a lot more RP and politic heavy so being able to keep close track of those kind of relationships and connections plays a much bigger part for me.

You can create both public and private relationships between objects(So how they act vs how they actually feel about them), create your own tags, and also link and sort them in a fair number of ways that works really well.

For me, the calendar/moon phase aspects are less important, but I know from their forums that its a pretty requested feature and they are intending to implement it. It sounds like they are intending to release something that will suit your needs pretty well, I recall a statement that they didn't want to release in game calendars until they could make them extremely flexible.

However, I am also pretty sure that has taken a bit of a back seat to getting the content market fully working, but with that just hitting launch, hopefully you'd be able to see what you need soon.

I'm in the same boat as the others. I picked it up and tinkered around with it for an hour or so. I like the idea and I think there is a lot there so I'm happy to have supported it, but I tend to steer clear of putting much time into early access games. I would rather get the full experience when its ready for launch than have half of it early and a more watered down exploration when all the features are ready.

Yeah, at this point its been almost two weeks since I noticed. Very odd.

Are they? I don't normally follow 3pp too well so I might have totally missed the loop on that(which would explain why no one had mentioned things going down). Dungeonaday going down is a new thing, though I don't know how long supergenius was down and the dungeonaday subscription was still coming out as supergenius.

Thanks for the info though!

Hi all!

I've been making use of dungeon-a-day for some time now and recently noticed that the site had gone offline. This wasn't totally surprising, I think it was known it would be going away for some time so I had mostly prepared for that.

However, when I went to check if there was any statement about it, I noticed that the supergeniusgames.com website appeared to be down as well. Its been a little over a week and the website just redirects me to advertising spam like they lost the domain.

There isn't any update on their wikipedia page or changes on the facebook page(last post there was a couple years back, so it wasn't commonly used), but I know they were a pretty big 3pp so I'm not sure if I missed some sort of announcement somewhere.

I know Stan! and Hyrum are frequenters on these boards so I figured this was a good spot to reach out. Anyone know the fate of the company or what is going on?

I had a fighter who considered himself a ladies man, and took skill focus: profession - gardener, as he maintained a set of roses and would grow a new breed for whoever his new prize may be so he could always bring her a unique flower.