ThunderMan's page

The GMs that aren't allowing detect spells to work are simply being jerks. It's as much the players game as it is theirs. If they wanted to ban those spells in the beginning the GM needs to say so and the players can tell him where to stick that, cause without players there is no game.

Granted I've known and been friends with my group for a long time. This isn't something we normally have to deal with. But they know me well enough that if I bring up something as a complaint, I've reached the end of my tolerance. It should be fun for everyone or what's the point?

I remember one time where it was pick on thunderman day or something. Everything this session was going against me, and the past several sessions anything I wanted to do was over ruled by the rest of the party. Well the GM trapped us with a hostage situation, I was torn between what my character would do, and what my party wanted me to do. After the fiasco that ensued OOC, I started packing my things, and decided that the important NPC wasn't that important, the squishy party member could take the hit and the need to kill the hostage takers was more pressing. Another OOC fiasco over this choice, this one I expected but I doubt any one other than the GM knew why I made that choice.
Had the strap of my bag in hand and was about to stand up to walk out when all of a sudden the GM found there were more options, and things were resolved more favorably.

The point is if your not having fun there's something wrong and it needs fixing. Talk to your GM about it and if needed call him on his BS. In mine the problem was other party members not wanting to be as cooperative as they wanted me to be. I can take some of the blame because I should have said something prior to this snafu. It was a comedy of errors, don't let your game become a comedy of errors.

1. It's only effecting roadways, which would otherwise be salted or plowed. Which I think every one can agree is not good for the environment. This doesn't effect the normal snow run off from the peaks or other areas of snow accumulation. And this still is not on all the time only when needed to make for safe driving conditions to save lives.
Also since asphalt converts 100% of solar energy into heat! but solar panels convert 15% of it into electricity leaving only 85% as heat making it cooler overall.

2. I know now that you didn't do your research on this because it was addressed. Tempered glass doesn't break like normal glass does. It doesn't leave razor sharp shards, it breaks into pebble like pieces without sharp edges.

3. If they are already built, it makes the most sense to use them for their life span and recycle what materials we can out of them. Outlawing them would only end up with thousands of perfectly useable solar panels in landfills being a waste. Updating the technology to make more cost effective, and efficient solar panels using safer and non depleting materials would be the answer, but that does mean research and development and a project like this would create need and fund the R&D.

4. To just above freezing to get it off the roadway.

Climactic impact would be an improvement, along with the energy it generates being clean and lessening our need for polluting sources of energy. It would make sense that since the federal highway commission got them started on this the EPA is also involved, since the EPA likes being involved with things.

Might have helped if I had posted this FAQ so that you could actually do research on this without making uninformed assumptions.

1. It doesn't remain hot, it has heating elements in it that raise the temperature of the panel to above freezing, when it does snow to melt the snow on the roadway. This changes nothing about the water cycle, it's cleaner since it's not petroleum based asphalt.

2. It's tempered glass and can withstand weights far exceeding semi-truck loads. A bad accident isn't going to damage the panels anymore than it would an asphalt road.

3. These aren't the cheap ones, and that's not really accurate anymore with the advances we have made with solar panels.

4. Storm water isn't the pollutant so much as what it carries. With this I agree. Though you do seem to ignore that it's getting it safely off the roadway and after that nothing changes except the water is cleaner not being mixed with the oils in asphalt.

MagusJanus I understand that the environment is your passion, and I should have posted the FAQ in my first post so that you could have done your research or even contacted the project starters with your concerns. But as I pointed out there are some errors in your assumptions. To be honest I'm not going to turn this thread into a giant flame war over climate change, this is not the place for it. While I respect your passion for protecting the environment, I disagree, this is a net gain for the environment.

However I do promote that you get in contact with the creators over your concerns, for some one that has such a healthy respect for the environment this would seem like a given. If you would be so kind as to post their reply, I would love to read it as well since being responsible with the environment and our natural resources is important to me and others. I'm sure if you make your point they will also post answers on their site.

The Indiegogo crowd funding project, Solar Roadways is ending June 20th at 11:59 pm. At the time of this posting the project has raised almost 2 million. I wanted to spread the news and see what you all thought.

Paizo has helped out several third party developers with advertising their projects on site, while this one isn't connected to gaming I still thought it was worthwhile.

It's been too long since I've heard the name of the spice in Dune to recognize it, but I do at least remember glitterstim.

I've also seen a PC barely survive a critical hit from a standard cannon. Keep in mind that the truly debilitating hits for firearms comes from their crit multiplier. And hit points are a very abstract form of health, it might be better understood that PCs should start to show damage when their hit points drops into their con range.

It was explained to the PC that he just survived a cannon shot to the chest, a more truthful explanation would have been he was barely grazed and it pulverized his rib cage from the pressure wave. But PCs are heroes, they take a cannon to the chest and say I'm gonna murder me a golem over this. Because while they should be on the ground having trouble breathing, or even living for that matter, that's not very fun. And not all PCs would have survived that.

Put it in an ioun stone its untyped and will stack.

Should technically stack with how whos_that had it.

And cats grace gives you an enhancement bonus, that doesn't stack.
Often got into debates with a friend over the "permanent" item based increases vs. the temporary spell increases. Those stack. Two castings of the same spell wouldn't.

Honestly, there isn't any good reason. Same reason why the material cost is negated so easily. It's all flavor.

As an addendum to my earlier post, and once again because of my gun nut wizard, I have been forced to continue my scaling operations because I left out range and bombards.

So cannons for every additional 5 lbs per load to be shot gain 30ft of range.

And now for the issue with bombards, they do a d6 less damage, for each like weighted load, until it gets to the heavy bombard that has a 50 pound iron ball load and does 9d6 damage.

Granted there is errata that corrects the heavy bombard from 8000 gold to 16000 gold. But it doesn't touch on ammo size.

Ballistic arc dictates that gravity doesn't really have much effect on damage done. But cannons would have a ballistic arc for longer range shots but they have no minimum distance. So the degree of angle for a bombard must be greater because they do have that minimum range.

So I'm left with some options:
Change the weight of the heavy bombard shot.
Say indirect fire weapons don't follow the ratio.
Find a better scaling ratio. For which I am currently at a loss for.
Scrap the ratio and say a gargantuan cannon shot does 10d6 with a 50 lb cannonball with other changes for range and all the rest.

Need your input on this one.

No that sounds good for them, should work out.

Since Free Captains have a Letter of Marque, they are all privateers, technically.

At least one other PC isn't acting out because he doesn't want to get his head accidentally blown in with a rubber bullet. So far cap has managed to not kill any people with a lucky crit, but there were several monsters that had the damage lap non lethal and sink them dead with rubber bullets. But the worried PC has also knowingly sold many people into slavery under the guise of ransoming them. Roguely is more than happy to support her captain/molestation victim.

I reiterate, all my PCs are weird.

You would be correct TritonOne.

Not me, Mr. Spicer sir. I had nothing to do with it. It was him. *points at random dude*

One of mine has gotten the moniker The pregnant pirate.

Magus might want to focus some on the magic side of things. I had to for an adventure, the rogue made for an interesting tank sometimes, with me alternating between main tank/ magic face smasher and alternate tank/skill master/almost dead body.
No one ever wants to be a healer anymore.

First question: yes you are correct.
Second: He knows pretty much exactly what happened.
Third: those fights shouldn't be enough to drive off a party, it's attrition for the boss.
Fourth: mine cleared it first day.
Fifth: she can if you want along with the absent hunting parties but you will have to design that yourself.
Sixth: of course he spins it. Wouldn't you if you had that history for it?

Sorry about the vagueness but I don't know forum scripts well enough to do a spoiler tag.

As soon as my captain wizard wanted her alive I knew I was screwed. Almost everything after that, the trek, the meeting with the naga elders, even some modifications to the wasp attack, along with the implementation of the decanter, and payment, I had to make up on the spot. I learned a while ago to plan for a lot but keep things loose so everything doesn't go sideways when they pull out random crap.

This wizard embodies friendship through superior firepower...with rubber bullets cause she doesn't want to kill people, just beat the hell out of them until they are her friend.

Yeah all my PCs are weird.

Islands of Plunder: Scourge of the Steaming Isle - A 9th-level adventure by Matt Goodall with Joshua Root.

Islands of Plunder: Raid on the Emperor’s Hand - An 8th-level adventure by Matt Goodall with Joshua Root.
Are the ones I'm waiting for. Although,

Treasury of the Fleet - A cavalcade of magic items both nautical and piratical by Jason Nelson and the Legendary Games Design Team.
Sounds eight shades of amazing.

She had just gotten the hypnosis spell and wanted to use it as a non-lethal alternative.

Will do, KarlBob. I think he'll appreciate it as much as I appreciate the compliment. Thank you kindly.

My PCs fixed it with a decanter of endless water at the source letting the nagas know the command words to control it. Curse super good and surprising diplomatic crafting wizards, always finding ways to give me more work than I already have.

The ones I'm talking about haven't come out yet and I'm not sure how much Matt wants out and I don't want to step on his toes because I'm excited and impatient.

There are two that I am very curious as to their reception. ;)

After some research I have discovered the weight of cannons during the golden age of piracy. Now with so many sizes of cannons the ratio works out as, the weight of the cannon is 200 times the weight of the iron cannonball to be fired.

For example a common cannon size was a 1600 pound cannon that fired 8 pound cannon balls. 24 pound shots were known as ship wreckers, anything larger were normally used in coastal defense.

Pathfinder rounded and used 25 pounds as their base cannon shot for a 5000 pound cannon. While a fiends mouth cannon is 30 pounds as base shot with a 6000 pound cannon.

Following this ratio increasing the poundage of the shot fired by five increases the damage by 2d6.

Now before any one starts saying that's op, every five pounds for a cannonball also increases the cost by 3000 gold. And for a bit of realism each shot needs half the weight of the cannonball in gunpowder to fire properly.

All because of the fabricate spell I had to do this. Blasted wizards.

My city has,
• City 347,483
• Density 2,400/sq mi (930/km2)
• Urban 523,994
• Urban density 3,785.0/sq mi (1,461.4/km2)
• Metro 839,631
• Metro density 103.3/sq mi (39.9/km2)
The city limits are just under 150 square miles. And this is a pretty big agriculture city.

In golarion, I think only Absolom is bigger with a higher density. Most other towns and city's in the golarion setting you could fit on the island. Keep in mind this island already held a town of Cyclopes for a very long time and was able to feed at least a hundred of these guys.

So you could have a town of over 2000 people and still be in good shape with modern farming techniques. Or in golarion, have a Druid or two help with your farming, having domestic herd animals will help and don't need the space people do but that does mean farmland for grazing, or animal feed. And fishing is a staple food supply in many places.

So the island is plenty big enough to settle with a good population of people, you just can't look at population standards in a modern era.

And if it still isn't big enough for you, magic is the solution. There is a lot of dirt that can be moved from a 500 foot tall Mesa that is several square miles in area.
So a square mile, is 5280 ft multiplied by 5280 ft, with a 500 foot tall Mesa, we get with a single square mile of Mesa moved with magic is 13,939,200,000 square feet of rock dirt and filler that can be moved into the surrounding sea to expand the island, and this also discounts doing the same to the ocean floor to dredge up some land.

Don't have the time or people to do it yourself? Animate object, and let them work it out.

Best thing about golarion is that you have options to solve problems.

Okay had a nice long talk with the player that retired the magic user, (the sole voice of reason in the party), the problem is no longer insurmountable, although as her deity is Desna and she is in good standing, that does give me an in for a dream if they do screw up, since she wants to rejoin the party. Thank god.

Things might actually get back on track, or at least as close as they will ever get with my players. I really do like them but they sure don't make it easy on me. Thanks for the help Story Archer.

I would like to point out I never said what condition they would be in when rescued. On the fair side though. That's pretty demented. >_<

The magical support retired, and the rest are sailing straight to harrigans the party rogue has the means to save herself, (a scroll that can get her out if she chooses to use it. I think she will.) so we'd actually only be losing the fighter and the marksman.

The funny thing is the retired char was the captain the letter of marque was issued to, so the other chars are no longer operating under it. If Harrigan gets them he gets off Scott free from the council. And since they didn't even bother with investigating the spy ring for Tessa and took their sweet time on a side quest for a month and a half in game, Harrigan would have his reinforcements. And since most of the crew was loyal to the captain many of the significant NPCs have left. I don't even think they could get past the sea serpent at this point.

I suppose they could just get captured and can be rescued with the rest when they are strong enough to actually fight him. Might even work out better to have the two disruptful chars out of the picture for a little bit.

My players have decided that they wanted to go after Harrigan in tempest rising. They managed to find the location of harrigans island, it's a party of three level 7s. I think it's going to be a tpk, and I'm thinking I should just let it be. They wanted a challenge above their pay grade, and just lost their magical support. I don't see this ending well for them but they want to do it against recommendation. Any thoughts as to how to fix this outside of a total party kill?

Yep. Gonna use that.

Dotted.

Burn the place to the sand, then replant. Island should be good to go then.

You can squib a ship in under a week apparently. I'm thinking only a couple months to build a standard ship with enough guys, less if magic is involved.

The PCs could see she has wooden teeth and take them out after she's been knocked out, also finding the poisoned spine.

Yeah Isabella is evil, but she can also be a very sympathetic character after the life she's lived. She's a very broken and hurt woman, and I will greatly enjoy the captains efforts to rehabilitate her, getting her teeth grown back would probably help that.

The PC captain is a spellslinger, with the oddest luck. There have been several times she's criticaled something and killed it with a rubber bullet. One memorable instance she managed to knock out the brine brood queen in the opening shot, then promptly got eaten by the whale when it goes nuts.

She did manage to escape, by making a concentration check and using scorching ray to give him some heartburn. She's only slightly traumatized by the ordeal.

With over a hour long RL debate on tactics, the PCs managed to take the dominator as their own. So far the old captain is still tied up, but the first mate was offed later by an irate PC. The now Commodore being the devote desnan that she is named it Starknife.

After a long discussion of names a good party should have and avoid, mans promise was renamed black dagger.

A clutch of dragon eggs.

The gm we had for this part wasn't our normal gm, and did things so badly if I had the time, the means, and the power I totally would have burned it to the ground. Almost died because of those peasants several times, then got run out of town when we were doing everything we could to help them. I don't think he understood the fact that we could earn trust and it wasn't just deducted at every opportunity. Bad start for the AP, and even after switching gms it didn't get much better. Considering there's a lodge in a forest that needs to burn, Jack the Ripper needs to move to lipistat and go to town, once he's finished there he can vacation in illmarsh, and every one in caliphas needs to flush with holy water.

At least when we camp out in the wilderness monsters attacking is normal, and animals will generally leave us alone unless we tick them off. At least most of the nobles have been pretty cool, outside of the ones we needed to kill.

Only if it has jaegers in it as well.

A mask that the dragon used to change the shape of its breath weapon. Changing it from the normal one of its kind to a burst, a line, and a cone, as per its age category for size and strength.

Ohh. That's a good one Lincoln. Maybe expand that one to it being a fertilizer, so any crop is grown in a day. This could be useful to adventurers running the kingdom building rules.

Less than 20 minutes left. We are close we need a few more people.

My group uses the heroic rolls. 2D6+6. This way the fighter doesn't have to be a moron, and the wizard can survive some one looking at him funny. So your lowest roll is 8 and you don't have to be the retarded fish frog with a 3 intel, or whatever dump stat you prefer. Point buy simply makes every one average, let the PCs be heroes and do epic world changing things.

A cauldron enchanted to hold the dragons chosen element in its natural state safely. An acid one would be able to hold any kind of acid without dissolving and be immune to rust. While a magma one could hold that magma indefinitely without it cooling down or solidifying.

I hate myself for this but it does need to be said.

A diamond sword.

I am very sorry....

The formula for the philosophers stone. This dragon was making his gold the smart way.

A spell book full of household, or lairhold spells. A currency polishing cantrip, a tunneling spell for lair expansion, a leveling spell ( I hate it when my coin bed is lumpy), a wall cleaning spell ( that doesn't do windows), a window cleaning cantrip, along with many other mundane spells and cantrips.

ThunderMan wrote:

A furnace specially made to take advantage of the dragons elemental nature and breath weapon, to craft weapons and armor for adventurers so the dragon can scry on them.

Ooh, that's actually pretty awesome!

I had, ages ago, a vampire wizard who designed a spell that drained blood from an enemy and gave some of it back to the caster as healing (a ranged variation on vampiric touch), that also gave a percentage of the stolen blood to the vampire himself, that he spread far and wide, because every time someone cast his spell, he got a little rush of blood out of the deal, but this idea of a dragon using his breath weapon to create magical weapons (fire breath to make flaming weapons, etc.) that he can also spy on (keeping track of local champions, and perhaps, through the 'intelligent sword' suggesting courses of action to them that further the dragons interests?) is great!

Set you explained my good idea in a much more eloquent way than I could. You sir get a gold star and a favorite.

A furnace specially made to take advantage of the dragons elemental nature and breath weapon, to craft weapons and armor for adventurers so the dragon can scry on them.

It's not one of those. Some sick person attacked children. In either case, no matter how you want to try and spin it. It is the same thing. It's pretty basic, I'm not going into end results, I'm stating in both cases some one attacked a bunch of kids. What I'm not understanding is why you think it was ever more than that?