Vivianne Laflamme's page

That was a lot of words that somehow managed to not include an apology for acting abusively and rudely.

Murder isn't inherently evil? Are you high?

But murder unlawful killing isn't inherently evil (though it almost always going to be "unlawful").

That seems pretty obviously true to me.

Vivianne Laflamme wrote:

It doesn't make any sense to say a bard cannot be lawful.

Bard wrote:

Alignment: Any.

That's the joke.

In 3.5, bards weren't allowed to be lawful. Pathfinder (rightfully) changed that. Yet the restrictions on barbarians, druids (you can be a lawful druid or a good druid, but not both!), monks, clerics, and paladins were kept.

An alphabetical listing is far superior for all spell lists for all purposes except specialty schools and spell focus (and subsequent) feats.

Wouldn't an even better listing be to do it alphabetically but have something marking school? It'd be like the superscripts put on spells with material components.

Alignment restrictions on classes. They disallow certain combinations of character/mechanical concepts. I don't have any problem with the concepts being prohibited, so I throw out the rule. It doesn't make any sense to say a bard cannot be lawful.

To clarify, as I don't want my question to be lost among all the comments, my question is about moderation policy. A lot of people have commented putting a lot of stock in the specific event that prompted me to post this. However, my concern regards the larger trend and what that means for moderation policy. At least to me, the moderation is far from transparent, and it's not clear why Paizo staffers appear to be above the most important rule.

137ben's comment here nicely captures my thoughts on this. There seems to be a disconnect between the written rules and actual moderation policy. I am seeking clarification on that disconnect.

This feat may interest you. It has a limit (100 gp) on how expensive the material components can be, but it's enough to cover a non-masterwork sword.

Another thing of note is that cross racial relationships are typically frowned upon in pathfinder, so that can cause the DC of a check to seduce to come up.

Where is it stated that anti-miscegenation laws and views are common in Pathfinder or Golarion?

Are Paizo writers on drugs?

Maybe?

I suggest playing the game from the GM's side of the screen.

My favorite* argument to see when talking about tabletop games is this sort of "if you GMed you'd agree with me" thing. It's my favorite* because clearly your experience as GMing is the only GMing experience and someone could only disagree with you because they've never GMed before. It's certainly not possible for someone to both GM and think it's really narrow-minded to assume all bards are foppish minstrels while all fighters are manly heroes beloved by kings and peasants alike.

* By "favorite" I mean rather the opposite.

So, if you optimize exclusively for combat, it's the system's fault that you feel useless outside of combat? Shenanigans.

Tripping is extremely useful in low- to mid-level play, so just because it's less useful at high-level doesn't make it "useless." Double shenanigans.

And complaining that a non-spellcasting class lacks the versatility of a 9-level spellcasting class: Triple shenanigans and moving the goal posts.

The problem is the resources it takes to make a fighter competent in a variety of combat situations. That is the fault of the system. That and the limited resources available to the fighter; they get pretty much nothing but feats and +1s to things in combat. A fighter needs to spend feats on being competent in her main style of combat, as well as a backup (sometimes you need to put down your falchion and pick up your longbow). If you want to do more than HP damage, you have to spend feats on that. If you spend a few feats on being good at tripping, that's feats that aren't being used elsewhere. Spending multiple feats on something that'll become obsolete at higher levels isn't a good trade (unless you know you'll never reach those levels). Sure, the fighter has a built-in way to retrain, but that just doesn't work on feat chains. The fighter also has to spend feats on shoring up her defenses, picking up Iron Will and the like. Because the fighter has to use her one main resource (feats) to cover many things, she actually doesn't have too much of that resource to spend on improving her out of combat ability. Also, the feats available to her really aren't that great at improving out of combat ability.

Compare the fighter to classes that don't have the issue, say the bard and inquisitor. A bard or inquisitor optimized for combat will still have things to do outside of combat, even if they spend all their feats on improving their in-combat ability. They still have skills---they both get 6+Int skills per level and have class abilities that give them more bonuses. They both have spells to use out of combat. While a bard or inquisitor will probably spend many of their spell slots and spells known on combat spells, they have enough to also use utility spells.

Even the barbarian, the class whose entire shtick is getting angry and hitting things really hard, has more to do out of combat than the fighter. Barbarians have more skills and access to rage powers like Spell Sunder. They can even spend their feats on those rage powers!

As far as I can tell, "scientific realism" is neither. The process of science is based on examining reliably replicable data whose truth or falsity can be empirically determined. If this type of data is completely absent from a field of discussion, I can not realistically define it as science.

You seem to be laboring under the misunderstanding that scientific realism is supposed to be a replacement for science or a kind of science. That's not the case. It's a philosophic position about science. It shouldn't be defined as science because it isn't science.

Judging from your comments, you yourself are a scientific realist. You think that "scientific theory construction aims to give us a literally true story of what the world is like, and that acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true". Or, as you put it, you think "the process of science is based on examining reliably replicable data whose truth or falsity can be empirically determined". I'm not sure why you're criticizing scientific realism.

That doesn't mean it isn't useful and educational to deconstruct gender roles and language on an academic level. However I am of the opinion that the people like Cori Marie who are getting their butts out there in the real world to fight for our rights are exponentially more useful and educational than any amount of high-end postmodern philosophical discourse that has a limited audience by its nature.

A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her groundbreaking work on “Intersectionality” has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. Crenshaw authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nation’s World Conference on Racism, served as the Rapporteur for the conference’s Expert Group on Gender and Race Discrimination, and coordinated NGO efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration.

Crenshaw has worked extensively on a variety of issues pertaining to gender and race in the domestic arena including violence against women, structural racial inequality, and affirmative action. She has served as a member of the National Science Foundation’s committee to research violence against women and has consulted with leading foundations, social justice organizations and corporations to advance their race and gender equity initiatives.

In 1996, she co-founded the African American Policy Forum to house a variety of projects designed to deliver research-based strategies to better advance social inclusion. Among the Forum’s projects are the Affirmative Action Research and Policy Consortium and the Multiracial Literacy and Leadership Initiative. In partnership with the Aspen Roundtable for Community Change, Crenshaw facilitated workshops on racial equity for hundreds of community leaders and organizations throughout the country. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Crenshaw facilitates the Bellagio Project, an international network of scholars working in the field of social inclusion from five continents. Currently, she serves as Committee Chair for the U.S.-Brazil Joint Action Plan to Promote Racial and Ethnic Equality, an initiative of the U.S. State Department. A founding member of the Women’s Media Initiative, Crenshaw writes for Ms. Magazine, the Nation and other print media, and has appeared as a regular commentator on “The Tavis Smiley Show,” NPR, and MSNBC.

Much of Butler's early political activism centered around queer and feminist issues, and she served, for a period of time, as the chair of the board of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Over the years, she has been particularly active in the gay and lesbian rights, feminist, and anti-war movements. She has also written and spoken out on issues ranging from affirmative action and gay marriage to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay. More recently, she has been active in the Occupy movement and has publicly expressed support for a version of the 2005 BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign against Israel.

On September 7, 2006, Butler participated in a faculty-organized teach-in against the 2006 Lebanon War at the University of California, Berkeley. Another widely publicized moment occurred in June 2010, when Butler refused the Civil Courage Award (Zivilcouragepreis) of the Christopher Street Day (CSD) Parade in Berlin, Germany at the award ceremony. She cited racist comments on the part of organizers and a general failure of CSD organizations to distance themselves from racism in general and from anti-Muslim excuses for war more specifically. Criticizing the event's commercialism, she went on to name several groups that she commended as stronger opponents of "homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism".

In October 2011, Butler attended Occupy Wall Street and, in reference to calls for clarification of the protesters' demands, she said: "People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible – that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible."

She is currently an executive member of the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace in the United States and The Jenin Theatre in Palestine.[52] She is also a member of the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

The criticisms you are pointing towards "postmodern" academia are the same anti-intellectual criticisms pointed towards academia in general. The idea that academics are useless and never engage with anything outside the ivory tower is a prevalent, though false, idea among the American public.

I don't see what any of that has to do with what I wrote.

Do you think your posting behavior and attitude are more likely to get the staff to answer your about specific rules questions you want answered*, or less likely?

Is the implication here that you'll refuse to respond to the at least sixty-something people who have asked for a response to this ice tomb hex issue because you don't like how one person is talking about it?

While it's slightly less of a problem for me since I give fighters the 4 + Int skill points, I have never had this issue, which leads me to believe that, yes, it's a problem with the players/campaign and not the classes.

My friends might just be weird, but sometimes it seems like they have as much—if not MORE—fun joking around about what their characters can't do as they do with succeeding at the things the characters excel at.

The amount of laughter the barbarian's horrible Diplomacy check, which usually expressed by a rediculous in-character comment, is remembered longer and more fondly than the 12th consecutive time the bard managed to lie the party out of a bad situation.

"Learn to enjoy being useless" isn't very good advice. There's nothing wrong with playing an incompetent character (assuming the rest of the group is all for it and are okay with the consequences). However, it should be something you do on purpose, because you built your character that way, not because you accidentally picked the wrong class. Suppose there was a Fighter* class which was like the Fighter, except it could contribute out of combat. You could play a Fighter* who's bad at diplomacy or whatever while someone who wants to play a Fighter* but not be bored when out of initiative order could do so. Everyone wins.

Look up Zarus if you don't mind non-Golarion specific. He's technically Lawful Evil, but that's just other races being jealous; he's more LN to humans. I could definitely see him having Paladins

That's an odd way to spell Pelor.

And I second the request for a definition of scientific realism.

I think van Fraassen does a good job giving a concise definition of scientific realism:

Scientific realism is the position that scientific theory construction aims to give us a literally true story of what the world is like, and that acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true. Accordingly, [scientific] anti-realism is a position according to which the aim of science can well be served without giving such a literally true story, and acceptance of a theory may properly involve something less (or other) than belief that it is true.

Anti-realism isn't really a single thing. Different anti-realists have different ideas on what it means to accept a scientific theory, what the aims of science are, etc. Further, anti-realism doesn't require one to think that scientific theories don't work, contrary to what some naive scientific realists thing (see, for example, this xkcd comic). It's empirical fact that scientific theories have been deployed to produce e.g. technology. Regardless of whether you think electrons are real physical objects or whether you think they are abstract objects, ideas postulated to explain certain phenomena (or you may be agnostic on the question), computers still work. And of course, being a scientific realist doesn't mean one thinks every current scientific theory is true. Recognizing something as bad science doesn't require one to think one way or the other on this issue. Realists and anti-realists can agree that the rash of computer generated nonsense papers being published in computer science journals is a bad thing.

From earlier in the thread:

Now, maybe there are trans and cis people that depend on opposition identity ("I'm not a man") within a binary to assert a claim over their gender identity ("therefor, I am a woman")... Now, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I don't think that either trans or cis people need opposition identity to assert a claim over their gender identity. I think cultivating a gender ought to be a positive process, where we appropriate the elements of our gender and accumulate our identity... It isn't enough that people want or need to be the gender that they are, medical discourse makes gender a negative process, one where suffering is the "critical element of gender dysphoria."

Opposition identity is found in statements like "I'm not a man, therefore, I am a woman". It's one's identity being defined in terms of what one is not, rather than in terms of what one is.

To my knowledge it's not a standard term. On the other hand, I'm not aware of any standard term for this phenomenon.

Bob_Loblaw wrote:

So some medications, like isotretinoin, can cause serious birth defects....

Sigh... the conflation of being a woman and being (potentially) pregnant all rolled into strict barriers placed on medical access for women. And all for clear skin! sigh what's a girl to do?

This is actually a really good example of a case where saying what we mean, instead of just collapsing everything into sex, would be good. Rather than saying that women should jump through hoops for this specific acne medicine, we should say that it's not appropriate for people who are or may become pregnant. This doesn't cut off the possibility of someone classified as a man being pregnant. It also doesn't equate woman with potentially pregnant person. Focusing on what we mean, rather than collapsing everything to sex, would benefit cis women here. Cis women who don't want and don't intend to get pregnant wouldn't be forced to jump through these hoops due to some paternalistic concern about their reproductive capacity.

This isn't something that's just for the benefit of trans and intersex people. Not collapsing many disparate things into the single category of sex benefits everyone.

The problem is, the idea that their bodies being a certain sex as prewritten by medical professionals is the entire basis for what led to the rise of gender reassignment surgery. It's basically the assumption that makes the surgery actually considered a sound medical practice within medicine. Because it comes with it a possibility: The mind does not match the body. The mind not matching the body, with the body being a prewritten determination, indicates that something is malfunctioning. And since medical science predicates upon fixing malfunctions within the human body, the idea that the biological sex is prewritten and does not match the mental gender creates a scenario where a correction of the biological body to match the mental gender is an approved course of action and actually considered beneficial to the patient.

I think this raises an important point. Whatever the problems with the current establishment, it is the current establishment. Our lives are shaped by it. I'm reminded of the ongoing issue of "gender dysphoria" being in the DSM. Clearly, transgenderism isn't a mental disorder and hence shouldn't be in the DSM. At the same time, this categorization is what makes it possible in the current system for a lot of trans people to receive medical attention, be covered by insurance, etc. Just removing gender dysphoria from the DSM without changing anything else would lead to material harm to a lot of trans people.

I think something similar is happening with this idea of body sex versus brain sex. The idea of a prediscursive body is important in modern western medical science. It informs how transgenderism is considered. We can't excise just that one idea while leaving everything intact without causing harm to a lot of people. At the same time, the idea that all trans people fit a narrow spectrum of experiences, that all trans people desire the same process of medical treatments, hormone therapy, surgery, etc., is false. It excludes a lot of people. We're in a situation without an easy solution because the real world is s&$&ty like that.

What does it mean that some people pursue hormone treatment and surgery even though they are not strictly necessary for the experience of being trans or of transition?

I don't think it really means anything. Hormone treatment and surgery aren't necessary for the experience of being trans, but they are necessary for some people's experience of being trans. There isn't only one way to be trans.

I do think there is something to be said about how the system of making trans people jump through hoops to receive medical treatment has shaped behavior. I was reading something a month or so ago (I believe it was a piece by Julia Serano, but I'm not absolutely certain) about some psychiatrists referring to their trans patients as deceptive and lying. What was happening was that these trans people were presenting themselves so as to try to convince the doctors that they were "truly" trans, that they fit the checklist of things being watched for. That way, they'd be allowed to transition. Their patients were just trying to make their lives livable in the only way made available to them, but the psychiatrists pathologized them for this. Rather than being a problem with a system which forces people to subject themselves to powerless situations, it must be a problem with these individual trans people. That totally makes sense!

The point is, the power within the medical establishment will influence how trans people act. Are people meeting the standards of being a trans person because those standards are accurate, or is it because they are acting that way so that they can receive necessary medical treatment?

I thought the point of the story was that the patient was upset that the pharmacist had to check because of the patients perceived gender identity. Perhaps I misinterpreted the story from your quote and your statement that medicines/treatments should be assigned more specifically based on biology and genetics.

My point was neither biology nor genetics are obviously apparent in some cases so confusion is still possible.

Oh, my point wasn't that the patient was or wasn't upset. My point was that the confusion arose out of the equating of man with prostate-haver. Of course, just changing how medicine is labelled won't immediately change how pharmacists and doctors think about these things. This is how we'd get your scenario of the pharmacist wanting clarification to make sure the prostate medicine is intended for the female patient.

But since the confusion arises out of this collapse of men with prostate-havers, the way out of this confusion is to move away from this collapse, even if it takes time for the confusion to dissipate.

disciplining medical surveillance

Michel Foucault much?

How is labeling medicine "for a man" different from "has a prostate" if you can't tell by looking at someone. After all, you can't see someone's prostate. The pharmacist in question would have had the same problem regardless. "Patient appears to be a woman. Women don't have prostates. Has a mistake been made."

I don't understand your point. It seems like your scenario is completely analogous to what happened in Bob_Loblaw's story. Which would mean that labeling the medicine as for prostate-havers does not put an additional burden on doctors and pharmacists.

What additional burden is being placed on doctors and pharmacists? If the medication in question was labeled as for people with prostates, how does that place any additional burden on doctors and pharmacists?

you know you are biologically a man but look like a woman

I hope it's not necessary for to me to explain in this thread why that phrasing is problematic.

I think one way to understand what Annabel was getting at is that we should say what we mean, rather than collapsing a bunch of different things into sex. For example, if there's a certain medical procedure for people with prostates, then we should talk about it as a medical procedure for people with prostates, rather than as a medical procedure for men. If there's a medical procedure for people with XX chromosomes, then we should talk about it as a medical procedure for people with XX chromosomes, rather than a medical procedure for women. The problem is, collapsing all these different things into the categories of woman and man leads to conflicts when, as is common, someone doesn't fit perfectly into these prescribed categories. Consider the anecdote Bob_Loblaw shared:

I have seen the pharmacist contact the prescriber over a medication because it was inappropriate for a woman (prostate medication is one) but then we were informed that the patient was transgender.

The problem here is that medication inappropriate for a woman is actually medication inappropriate for some women. By saying what is actually meant rather than collapsing everything into one category of sex, we can avoid these issues.

When people whine and groan in a public space, instead of taking his issue to a private email with the developers or other private means, it just makes you look like one of "those" gamers.

Strange. You wrote that on a public forum, rather than in a private message to Finlanderboy.

There are medically relevant classifications that aren't put on standard forms. There's also the fact that gender/sex is singled out as especially important and important for reasons beyond medicine (at least on forms I've seen). Name, sex, age, SSN, and such are grouped together while things like sexual activity or allergies are pushed elsewhere.

Hey all, a friend of mine is looking to play a cleric character inspired by Chains from the Locke Lamora novels. You see she originally wanted to go straight rogue, but since she's the last one to join the table,.. and we didn't have a healer yet... Well you know. Cleric it is!

If inquisitor isn't an appealing option for her, then just let her play a straight rogue and give the party some wands of CLW and lesser restoration. Don't force your friend to play a class she doesn't want to so the party has some role filled (especially when that role is healbot).

Rynjin wrote:

Vivianne Laflamme wrote:

Most monsters don't have the ranks of Knowledge (arcana) to recognize a rope trick. How does the troll know that the rope hanging from midair has an extraplanar space at the top?

"Well gee there's this suspicious rope hanging out of the air, but since I have no Kn. Arcana ranks obviously it's not really suspicious and I should not investigate it further."

"Hey, Mokmak, where'd the adventurers go?"

"Dunno, Makmok, but there's this weird rope hanging in the room as if there's some sort of magic surrounding it."
"Must be a human thing. Just ignore it."
"'Kay."

There really needs to be a spell that creates what looks like a rope trick but is really a bomb. Someone try to climb up and then BOOM! Then, you can have scenarios where the party casts trick rope trick and teleports away (or turns invisible or does one of the many other things PCs can do to disappear). If the kobolds chasing the PCs investigate the magical rope hanging in the air, they trigger the trap.

Unfortunately, if your GM is metagaming enough to have all the monsters know what rope trick is, they'll probably metagame the monsters into knowing when it's a trick rope trick.

Oh, so you admit there are no rules for how to add/remove SLAs? But that was the original point: there are no rules---or even guidelines---for how to determine what SLAs a simulacrum has. The GM can make rulings or house rules, but that doesn't mean there are rules.

>Kidnapping

Has anyone actually considered that if a PC isn't interested in playing along with Iomedae, they could simply say, 'thanks, but no thanks' and ask to be returned to the Material Plane? There's nothing that says she isn't willing to let one of them pass if they don't think they are up for it. I doubt she would send anyone who wasn't willing to even sit through her interview. Nothing says you can't opt out.
Also, it mentions she brings them to Heaven when the players start to get restless or look for other things to do, so it's not like they weren't already interested in the next step of the war. That's a big giant clue on what they're to do next.

You're lying in bed when jackbooted thugs bust into your home, throw you into the back of a windowless van and then drive you somewhere. When the van stops, you politely ask them to return you to their home. So they drive all the way back and let you leave. Would you say that this wouldn't be a case a kidnapping?

Honestly, if you have a group of PCs that mouth off to a goddess DMPC or attack her, they deserve exactly what happens to them. I'm from an old school group and all of them agree, you sit down and you shut up when a God DMPC talks. Any PC not showing proper deference, followed by an expectation of courageous or self assured actions, is gonna get it.

Any group not willing to show proper respect to a Goddess DMPC has a serious case of their own prideful self worth, a weakness the Abyss will quickly use to destroy them. Consider the PCs got their Mythic from the Wardstones which were placed by Iomedae said DMPC. They owe her all of their strength and their actions should reflect it.

"There is one and only one right way for players to roleplay their characters in this encounter."

In general, removing any control or agency from the players and forcing them into a narrow spectrum of possibilities is bad GMing. Saying that your players should be roleplaying their characters in a specific way is bad GMing. This sort of railroading doesn't become okay if the GM deploys a deity to try to enforce it. It doesn't become good GMing because it is written in the AP.

Also consider that by this point in the campaign, the PCs can be nearly god-like in their powers. Hell, it's possible they can even grant spells to followers. In some respects they are more powerful than deities: they don't have the non-intervention pact. This is why Iomedae needs to ask the PCs for aid in the first place. A common defense of this scenario as written is that Iomedae is allowed be petty and cruel and demand respect because she's a god and hence deserves respect. The same reasoning lets the PCs demand respect because they are near-gods. Either the power of a god means you deserve this respect, or it doesn't. You can't have it both ways.

andreww wrote:

Cerberus Seven wrote:

What other mythic spells and abilities for casters have caused you that much of a problem?

I would guess the ability, given out at Tier 1, to cast any spell off your list regardless of whether or not you know the spell for the low low cost of a single mythic point. It is pretty much better than any ability available to any of the martial paths and just keeps getting better as you go up in level.

...

Caster cast more. Oh no! Not a significant power increase.

I'm pretty sure that paragon surge on crack represents a significant power increase.

Vivianne Laflamme wrote:

I agree completely with Sunbeam. Major villains need narrative power to fulfill their role. A class with the built-in ability to influence the narrative will have an easier time being a villain than a class which only gets the ability to hit things really hard.

NPCs are by definition running on narrative power. It dosent matter if it is a figther or a Evil god. They are the creatures of the GM and the GM have exactly the narrative power he think he need.

But if your NPCs all have to follow the rules the players used to make there characters then i guess yes, we are looking at a game with humanoid adversaries and Lots of spellcasters in the high levels.
My point is that no one will have a hard or easy time being a villan. Because you dont need to play the NPCs up from level 1 when preparing the game. You can make them just like you want them, give them the background they need and fit them rigth in to the story because you are the GM.

Note I did not say that it's impossible to make a fighter the big villain, only that it's easier to do so with a class with narrative power. I could say that the fighter BBEG knows what the party has been up to because a god told her or because an artifact told her or because her wizard follower told her. I could even just simply not bother to give a reason. The wizard BBEG can scry, cast contact other plane, etc. It requires less effort on my part to have the wizard be the villain; she can do the villainy things without me having to make up anything outside the rules to explain how she can do them. Also, anything the fighter BBEG can do outside the rules, so can the wizard. So it is in fact easier to make a wizard the main villain than it is to make a fighter the villain.

Also of note, Iomedae breaks the fourth wall as well.

Quote:

Players who can

answer the questions truthfully (and without
consulting notes or the Internet!) impress
her greatly, yet if the players themselves
do not know the answers, skill check DCs
for their characters to know the answers
are provided.

The more I read the scene, the more I cringe, really.

It amuses me to imagine that's a setup for an event at the next Paizo con. 4--6 attendees will be whisked away to a stage where Iomedae (James Jacobs in a cosplay outfit) will put them through a trivia quiz! Iomedae/James Jacobs is impressed if they can answer the questions correctly without using the internet.

If they are wrong, they get blasted with sonic damage.

Bad GMing or no, neither does it provide evidence that the feelings of pride and hope are anything but the genuine sentiments of the PCs.

Here's the thing: the feelings of PCs are---excluding supernatural compulsions---entirely the decision of the players. You cannot legislate how your players' characters feel about something. If you're going to try to micromanage how your players roleplay like that, then you shouldn't be running an rpg. You should be writing a novel.

What a dumb encounter. 5d6 damage can't be "a small spanking" on one hand, and "a severe offense that must be punished with perma-blindness".

No, you see, it's not the damage that matters, it's who the damage is against that matters. Spanking the PC with 5d6 damage? That's okay. Doing the same to the DMPC deity? That's as evil and chaotic an act as possible.

Maybe, maybe not. I don't think most kidnappings "fill each PC [victim?] with a feeling of pride and hope".

There's two ways that quote can be taken. The first is that it's the module is telling the players their characters' emotional response to something. This is a cardinal sin of bad GMing, but perhaps not surprising in an encounter with a stated One True Way of how the players should roleplay it. The other way to take it is that the feeling of pride and hope is a compulsion. The PCs' emotions are being supernaturally manipulated.

Either way, that quote provides no evidence that this is not a scenario of kidnapping and torture.

You skipped one very important phrase that was intentionally made prominent in that description: with the GM's permission. So, no, they aren't intended as PC options unless the GM permits it.

Also, just because a race can be used as a PC that doesn't mean every option for that race is meant for PCs. There are plenty of feats that are probably not going to be used my PCs but are just fine for NPCs. The same goes for spells, archetypes, equipment, skills, and every other option in the game.

Prince of Knives already responded nicely to this. I'll just add that indeed, nowhere in the ARG does it state that this archetype is not intended for PCs.

This particular "problem" looks like it's meant to make for some interesting goblin enemies that don't take out the party quickly. Remember that the game is designed so that the PCs win. They may have to work a bit for that win but it's not meant to be a fair fight.

This messes with the CR system. A goblin with this archetype and alchemist discovery has the same CR as a goblin who picked up an option for PCs---i.e. an option that is not horribly nerfed. If abilities for NPCs are going to be intentionally weak so that the PCs can win, the CR system should reflect this. Already, NPC classes are treated this way by the CR system. A level 4 adept has a lower CR than a level 4 cleric. The same should be applied to intentionally subpar options for NPCs.

You CAN use [goblins] as a PC, but as with any rules that aren't intended to be fully for PCs, they start to get weird.

While the seven core races are the primary focus of the Pathfinder Roleplaying game, they're not the only ones suitable to be played as characters. Other, even stranger races help populate the world, and---with the GM's permission---also work well as player character races, creating fun and exciting new roleplaying opportunities.

To summarize that in ten words: "the races in this chapter are intended as PC options."

It was never our intent to "bait traps" and be "rude" to fans of goblins, frankly. I'm sorry if that's the way some folks have interpreted our design philosophies, but it's not the intent at all.

An easy way to avoid the appearance of setting traps for goblin fans is to not present goblins as a PC option but then give them underpowered abilities because they are supposed to be NPCs. There is a dissonance here.

I'm still frankly kind of surprised at how violently some folks have reacted to the encounter in question. And that violent reaction really caught me off guard.

Would you say that reaction is more or less violent than attacking people with 20d6 of sonic damage? ;)

Kirth Gersen wrote:

When the DM just declares stuff, and ignores the rules, that's fiat, and I'll call it that.

Worldbuilding is not fiat. Deciding the fighter can cast teleport this once is fiat. Finding a portal under the castle is not. See the difference?

Let's turn this around and look at it from the perspective of GMing. Consider two imaginary groups of PCs. The first, Party 1, consists of a druid, cleric, wizard, and witch. The second, Party 5, consists of a cavalier, a fighter, a monk, and a rogue. Let's say in my campaign, the party wants to travel to a far away place. With Party 1, this is easy. Teleport, wind walk, plane shift, and the like will let them easily get there. With party 5, as a DM I have to put a portal under the castle or have an NPC caster willing and able to cast the necessary spells.

Let's consider another scenario: someone in the party dies. For Party 1, this is trivial. The cleric can cast raise dead. If the cleric is the one who died, then limited wish will work. Or using planar binding or wish to get an ouutsider who can do it. For Party 5, I have to introduce an NPC who can raise the dead character.

It's clear Party 1 has more narrative power than Party 5. Party 5 requires me as GM to introduce elements in the world to make up for their lack of narrative influence.

Yeah, that was my favorite part about the Nibelungenlied too. I really liked the part where Siegfried was an ordinary mortal until he found a really cool pair of boots and the boots made him superhuman. I really liked how his heroism had nothing to do with himself, but rather was entirely due to the spiffy boots he wore.

I don't play 4e, nor do i regard it as relevant. So, pointless comparison.

In a discussion about what is a core race, it's very relevant what other games in the same genre do. Its relevance doesn't depend on whether you play them. I don't play WoW, but that doesn't magically make WoW not a fantasy game.

Plus Wizards consider every race they publish core AFAIK.

So if every race in the ARG had been called "core" instead of "featured" or "uncommon", you wouldn't think playing a tiefling in Pathfinder is done for mechanical reasons? I mean, my point is that your argument puts too much stock in the specifics of how Pathfinder's race choices are organized, putting too much emphasis on whether a race is considered core or not. Your response appears to be to double down on your emphasis on that distinction.

Also, I've mostly seen that people take non core races for the mechanical benefits, not roleplaying opportunities.

"People who don't like playing humans are minmaxing rollplayers."

Question: if someone plays a half-orc in D&D 4e, do you lump them in with this trend (half-orcs aren't a core race in 4e)? What if that same person plays a half-orc in Pathfinder, where half-orc is a core race?

Using multiple free actions in a round is stretching action economy thereby cheesy.

Archers are cheesy now? A 6th level archer ranger with haste cast on her will use at least 4 free actions per round.

Pig #1 wrote:

Doesn't Seoni need to have her tattoos visible as part of her magic? I thought I read about that somewhere.

Then again, I never play with the iconics in my campaigns so I know very little about them.

They don't need to be visible, but she's quite proud of them and wants to show them off and wants the world to know she's a sorcerer.

Isabella "Inkskin" Locke [female human sorcerer (tattooed sorcerer) 9] wears little in the way of clothing, the better to show off her many tattoos, including a large stylized sea snake tattoo on her lift hip and abdomen.

Anyway, asinine comments speculating on why people don't like playing humans aside, let's look at some more selections of "core" races in things besides Pathfinder. This time: video games. In The Elder Scroll games, you have your choice between four varieties of humans, three varieties of elves, orcs, lizardfolk, and catfolk. That's ten options (or five, if we count human and elf as each one category). That's not much more than Pathfinder's seven options. Concerning broadness of options, I think TES wins easily here. Pathfinder's dwarves and two flavors of hobbits just don't bring enough.

Next up: World of Warcraft. If we look at the original selection of races before the expansions, we see eight options: dwarves, gnomes, humans, night elves, orcs, tauren, trolls, and undead. Again, comparable in raw number of options to Pathfinder. However, Blizzard provides a broader set of options. Pathfinder doesn't have any PC race options that fill the same niche as tauren, trolls, and especially undead. It's really bad when WoW is offering more options for roleplaying than your game.

There seems to be an assumption that the core races of Pathfinder are more central and important to building a fantasy setting than the races featured in the ARG. This underlies the idea that non-core races are more alien than core races. I don't think this assumption holds. If we look outside Pathfinder, we see a lot of variety in "core" races. Halflings aren't inherently more relatable than tieflings. Half-orcs aren't more central to the setting than orcs. Pathfinder's selection of seven core races isn't any more "core" than anything else's selection.

Personally, I don't actually think a low-level flying race is as unbalancing as people make it out to be.

I agree. But even if you think low-level flying is unbalanced, that doesn't mean winged PC races aren't possible.