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Having just finished prepping and running most of Tumbaja Mountain...it was really disappointing to have a Forbiddance effect in place, and then include a monster who's whole schtick is teleporting. I'd be tempted to say just ignore that, and say the mirror jump is special and not constrained. Also...the ghostly inquisitor was fantastic. One of my group wanted to just let him get killed by the dragon, but he got dragged along when everyone else rushed to help the ghost in his quest.
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Personally, I have yet to run any 2e APs, but for 1e (where I've run 6ish APs now)...I almost always use specific xp at lower levels, where the amounts and impacts of player actions vary more. Somewhere around book 3, or levels 6-9, I switch to milestones, since players not being the expected level has a larger impact on encounter difficulty. From my player experience with 2e, assuming you are using scaling as expected, balancing encounters is much easier and less swingy. I'm more likely to stick with specific XP in most cases. Having said that, I've previously identified Malevolence as an example of poorly-designed XP rewards. If you follow the XP awards in that adventure, your players are highly likely to be under-levelled against the almost-exclusively high level enemies. Not sure how this AP compares.
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Bellona wrote:
In the interests of accuracy...SD was not actually written for the Pathfinder RPG at all, but for 3.5. I even have articles in this forum with character conversions.
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Snapshot wrote:
I know I'm necromancering this, but... The speed of a sailing ship in PF1 is actually 48 miles per day (Vehicle Speed Table). So, if the travel time is actually 6 weeks, then 42 days at 48mph is actually right on 2000 miles. As a related fact, normal Teleport only has a range of 100 miles per caster level.
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I understand not being able to locate the temple from the Watchtower, but...why on earth can't it be seen from the heights of the island? As a minimum, I cannot understand how you could miss it from the wheels of heaven. I mean, if you can spot the Pillars from there, how could you possibly miss the 10 foot high, 100' long chunk of bronze??? I also noticed the amount of XP for this book is enormous. Even without any bonus XP for hitting the time limit, there is enough XP for the default 4 characters to get from level 7 to about halfway to level 11. As such, I'm actually considering cutting the entire cathedral courtyard scene, to make things a little more realistic to me.
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GM_Alex has a fantastic point - the Crown of the Kobold King has one of the Lesser Seals breaking as the inciting incident for the whole adventure. It could provide great in-world foreshadowing of things to come. Or, if the characters won't get directly involved, they could happen upon the area, or hear discussion of the events later?
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Quote: Any thoughts fellow GM's or is there enough stuff going on already for your games? Having now prepped and run most of the last book, there are a couple of portions there that would need some editing to fit with happening while the Drift is offline. You'd likely want to have it resolved before then, or else need to rewrite some events.
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bearcatbd wrote:
Grab is a different ability to grapple. Grab is a creature ability that allows a creature to auto-grapple someone they either just hit with an attack with this trait, or else renew someone already grabbed with this ability. Grapple is an action to grapple a target for a round.
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Sartugha wrote: I just took a look and unless Im missing something, it doesnt look like Krulveth should have anything to use RP with. I could be wrong, there's a lot to look through on her stats and I would love to know what I am missing. You are wrong. She needs them at least for her Entropic Pool vanguard abillities. Quote: I am curious why you need a DC for Reflecting Armor. If its for dispelling reasons, I'd think that preventing returning 10 damage is low on the list of things that should be used for. Did you actually look any of this up, or just comment from general knowledge? Reflecting Armor allows a save when dismissed, despite not having a Save on cast. It's frustrating to look at a stat block and see a DC for a useless spell like Ghost Sound, but no DC on the spell that is in their tactics block. Quote:
Except that the encounter description says 'CR14+ and CR13'. I'm pretty sure the CR13 is referring to the Orb. 2 Guards are indeed CR13, and so 2 guards and Krulveth is CR 15, which is certainly higher than CR14. But then, 4 guards would be CR15, and Krulveth added would still be over CR14...no real evidence there.
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Lord Fyre wrote:
Return of the Runelords has one major chunk of one of the books set in Riddleport, and seems to account for a version of events from Children of the Void. However, the chunk in question really only involves one location that wasn't really used in Second Darkness, and heavily involves a character who was likely killed in most playthroughs of Second Darkness. Oh, and a part of the final book involves the Cyphergate, and it's construction. And, to add my thoughts to the thread, I really enjoyed running most of Second Darkness, and my own group (who are/were more roll than role players) didn't even notice any 'changes' in motivations. But there weren't many parts of the story that stuck with us, and that could be divorced from the Drow/Elf connection. However, if I were to rescue any part of the AP, it would be Children of the Void. It is the most self-contained, standalone and overall interesting part of the narrative to me, and barely involves the Drow at all. The only other piece of the AP I would think that deserves rescue is the concept of the Armageddon Echo. I actually really liked the concept of exploring a ruined city, and then visiting what appears to be the city in its prime. It wouldn't even need to involve the Drow at all, and could easily be altered to any other group with shapeshifting or glamour magic, and that magic could then be borrowed for the infiltration of the perpetrator's home.
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I'm about to run the Battle for New Harmony, and am finally looking at the Armada combat rules for the first time...anyone else run this? Does anyone have any tips? Anyone know how fleet ranges and range increments (i.e. short, medium, long etc) are supposed to work?
Saint Bernard wrote:
Urm...was purchasing a Core book actually ever a requirement to play either Society? I thought it was the other way around - that all players were assumed to have access to the Core books.
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Yes, it looks like it should be CR13. A miscalculation may have been made by the author on the part of treating the nightmares as NPCs. Normally, an NPC with class levels has less gear than a PC, and has a CR equal to level -1. As to difficulty...for my group, it wasn't much of an issue. Your milage may vary?
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Something else that occurs, 4e D&D explicitly disallowed reactions during a reaction for pretty much this reason. In PFS2e, you could legitimately Sudden Charge a hovering Gargoyle, which triggers the Gargoyle to use Clawed Feet in reaction to you moving next to it. The Gargoyle could then hit, causing you to trigger reactive shield. We're now resolving a reaction inside a reaction. Similarly, if the Clawed Feet hit, and you are about to take damage, your friendly Champion could then trigger Liberating Step on you to reduce the damage. That's now reaction 3 triggering. As part of that Liberating Step, you could Step away from the Gargoyle. If you had run out of movement and didn't have reach, the Strike part of the Sudden Charge would now fail due to changing circumstance. It wasn't Disrupted, but it now fails thanks to not having a valid target.
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breithauptclan wrote:
Then what about reactions such as Reactive Shield, Nimble Dodge or the Wing Deflection of a Desert Drake? These ONLY make sense if they happen immediately, in the middle of the resolution of other actions or activities. According to your logic, Reactive Shield would take place after a Sudden Charge is completely resolved??
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breithauptclan wrote:
I missed some nuances in your examples that were different to prior examples. Namely, I was thinking we were still triggering on movement, say similar to a hovering Gargoyle. I suspect some of the disagreement here is from the idea that a reaction has to go before the thing it's reacting to. I'm not sure that's the case - it happens exactly when the trigger says it happens. For the Wing Thrash, it triggers on being dealt damage, so that's when it happens - when the damage is dealt, but before working out the effect of the damage. So, yes, this could end up as a kharmic strike, where they both knock each other down.
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breithauptclan wrote:
Yes, that is exactly how I would treat this situation. It makes far more sense than having the damage wait around for the charger to complete his activity, and then fall over unconscious.
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I think people are confusing 'Disrupting' an action with an action being disrupted by the actor falling unconscious. I agree with Cordell - regardless of whether or not the AoO is a crit, the hit point loss happens immediately on the attack being resolved. If the hit point loss knocks the target out, then they are no longer able to do anything. Although this might look mechanically similar to the action being Disrupted, it isn't. It just isn't able to complete any more. Similarly, if an AoO somehow caused the target to be immobilised on a hit...are people seriously saying they would allow the target to complete their move after triggering on a non-crit? Really?
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The animate dream IS the simple version of the fight. Those creatures have very generic abilities and attacks (and the players may have already fought some of them, if they have had trouble with the Dream rituals). The more complicated form of the fight (which I ran) is to build NPCs based on the player's characters. This obviously takes more time and preparation (to obtain and build the characters) and more knowledge (you need to know how to run each of the updated versions of the characters). In my case, I thought the interest of this fight was worth the additional effort. The same might not be true for you. Personally, I had covered my need for the character sheets by asking for new sheets each time they levelled up prior to this event. I built the shadow versions by assuming the characters changed alignment to an evil version of whatever they had before, and then built them up from level 1 to the level of the fight. In a couple of cases, the alignment change forced some other change (like deity worshipped for instance, or energy channel type).
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In theory, a character dedicated to a particular skill in Starfinder will keep increasing their modifier. At a minimum, they will add a new skill rank every level, but there are also regular stat bumps, and the addition of new feats and items, including Personal Upgrades. It is not too hard for a character at level 1 to have a +11 to a skill (+4 Stat, one rank, class skill, skill focus), making the DC 12 trivial. Assuming they only add a skill rank every level, by level 4, they have +14, at level 6, +16, and at level 20, +30. This would keep most of those DCs still trivial, until the last few levels, and this is without adding Operative's Edge or Envoy Expertise. If you look a little further afield, a number of Starship Combat DCs are calculated similarly. A number of them are 10, 15 or even 20 plus Tier or one and a half tier. Tier is generally within a point or two of character level.
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I don't know of a global map, sorry. Can't say it's lack has impacted my campaign (we're up to book 5) Quote: Citizen from the player's charter probably have suspicious feelings about the Plaustov charter because they are so close, many must feel that Plaustov Charter was cut from their own lands. Plaustov must know this, and so make big efforts to try to make friends with the players charter. Can't say I agree there mate. While the charters are neighbours, and perhaps closer than most others, there is still a buffer distance between them. They don't actually touch, as far as I know. There is more concrete info about Plaustov in a later book though (book 3 I believe). I'll have to check, but I believe Weydana-4 only has one moon.
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I was under the impression that nobody was ever interred within Rosler's tomb itself. I had instead thought most of the undead within had come from the surrounding cemetery. No, I don't think Arazni or anyone else purposely damaged the tomb. I thought it had just not been maintained at all since it's near-completion, and that the Radiant Fire was what caused the damage in its current state.
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From what I recall, there is nothing preventing this course of action, other than the reluctance to leave a powerful enemy behind. If the players decided to leave, then the turncoat attack would likely happen in transit rather than in the moonbase. I would also expect there should be some consequences to leaving the Sceadinaur behind. Perhaps it follows the ship's wake back to the colony? Maybe it also attacks in transit?
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Anguish wrote:
If that's the case, wouldn't the ability be triggering constantly as the cleric walks down the street? Quote:
You are making a lot of assumptions. Perhaps they specifically DIDN'T want you to have to use a hand, and that's why it's not mentioned, allowing sword and board clerics to still channel? The actual ability text reads 'A cleric must be able to present her holy symbol to use this ability.' Note that you don't have to actually present, just be able to present. What is the difference? Who knows. There certainly doesn't appear to be a concrete RAW answer.
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vhok wrote:
Thrust that side of your face forwards boldly? How does one present a holy symbol around your neck? It's not like the rules are explicit in the description, but given that an action is described, it seems unlikely that the ability is mental only to me. YMMV. There is certainly no RAW answer.
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vhok wrote: yes you can channel while paralyzed as long as you can present your holy symbol. birthmark on the face is popular for this. It depends on whether or not you believe 'presenting' an item can be done without moving. I personally don't believe you could, regardless of where the holy symbol is. Never really had a definitive answer. Also had a real shock of dejavu when I saw the thread title. Had a laugh when I saw I started it :)
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Quote: Handwraps of Mighty Blows (+1) cost 35 gp. A Magic Weapon (+1) also costs 35 gp. Y'know, that little reminder there cinches it for me. Nonmagical handwraps must exist (else how do the magical ones get made), and the cost of them is likely negligible. A good thing I'm not doing this in PFS, I suppose.
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I could be missing a nuance, but...Mounted Combat (p478) explicitly says "You must use the Command an Animal action to get your mount to spend its actions. If you don’t, the animal wastes its actions." What's ambiguous there, sorry? if you Command it, you get one-for-one actions, so still max of three actions. With an Animal Companion Mount, you get better action economy, more overall actions, but a little less flexibility.
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Quote: What are you trying to accomplish? I feel that the motivation is immaterial - I'm trying to work out some specifics of low-detail items. However, in case it matters...I am playing a character who focuses on natural attacks in an ongoing campaign at lower levels. I have not yet had the funds or opportunity to purchase HMB, but everyone else in the group already has a magic (i.e. basic potency) weapon. We just found a new magic weapon, which is surplus to requirements. I could sell the magic weapon, and put the funds towards handwraps, but I'd basically be losing half of the value, and still have to find the other half. If I did not use natural attacks, I could either pick up the new weapon and use it, or I could transfer the rune from the new weapon to a preferred weapon. In my case, the preferred weapon is Handwraps. The rules for handwraps says you can transfer or upgrade runes on it just like a weapon. This implies the rune is separate to the actual wraps. So, what I actually want to do is transfer the rune from the found weapon to a new set of handwraps. If I have to buy them with a minimum of a potency rune to be able to transfer, then this won't work. But if there is some cost for a basic wrap, separate to the rune, it would be worthwhile.
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Is it possible to buy or make Handwraps of Might blows without a rune? Since Handwraps say you can transfer or upgrade as though it were a weapon, can you transfer off the basic Potency rune, leaving... Just cloth wraps? Do the empty wraps have a cost or crafting recipe?
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