epicmusic42's page

Okay, actually serious, would love to see The Gap turned into a permanent product of some sort. If it's half decent paper, then it's a good price for a sketchbook of this size and pretty comparable to what I normally pay for my larger ones.
shakes bars
Let me buy the fancy sketchbook from paizo all the time!

Will we get the opportunity to see what the various journal entries look like during the livestreams? I doubt I'm the only one who'll consider picking up the deluxe packs depending on how much I like the journal entries.

As far as deluxe pack vs pdfs + assets pack goes... Is there any consideration of offering discounts in the future? (Including on the pdfs).
For those of us who prefer to prep with a printed copy or run both in-person and online, it'd be nice to have both. As wonderful as journal entries may be, having the option to mark up a scenario while reading is always appreciated!

Story wise, I adored this scenario and loved the introduction to season 5! The mechanics are ...concerning for an introductory scenario though.

Apologies, I had a minor personal emergency come up. It should be addressed now.

This is my first time doing PbP via the forums so if any of y'all can point towards a thread or give me a run down of standards set-ups/courtesy for it that'd be appreciated.

Drkynbrakal rolls aer eyes at Oskar's antics. "Unless the laws have changes in the past few years, we should have some time to address this unpleasantness. I'm no politician, but you might try reminding your superiors of said fact. You can, of course, pass along assurances that the Society has no more desire for such unpleasantness than your countryfolk and we've been called in to address it."

Legal Lore: 1d20 + 8 ⇒ (2) + 8 = 10

I'm bringing a level 5 barbarian so frontline melee. Drkynbrakal is a bit odd in that ae can be an emergency face though uh. those skills were honed in the courtroom so I can't recommend it most of the time. Ae is quite good at Intimidation though! (in theory).

Ae fights with a greatsword—explainations as to just how the former barrister learned to use it aren't forthcoming. Pathfinders who attended the academy, or have just been around a while, may have heard a few rumors about aer. These rumors include (but are not limited to) ae was disbarred in Cheliax after attacking a judge, ae once ripped into Master Westyr over the proper preservation of ancient tomes, and, despite aer reletively young age, ae is already subject to the bleaching.

Ae's happy to serve as both meatstick and meatshield though ae's a bit short to serve as a meatshield for most folk. Kal'll seem a bit prickly at first, but will mellow out some once ae gets used to you. Please do let me know if I'm being too mean, this is Kal's first trip outside our (tiny) home lodge.

I am new to PbP so could use some guidance before we start playing in earnest. I have experience with text-based RP and have done some play by discord but if someone could direct me to or provide me with instructions for forum based PbP that'd be appreciated.

None of the core pre-gens have weapon specialization at 4th level and Obazaya is the only core pre-gen that has it at 8th level. Could we get an update correcting this or an announcement clarifying that this is intentional?

If even things don't come out that y'all can justify making premium content for starfinder, I'd really love to see a map pack or two for the starfields. For some reason the foundry hex grids don't align with the ones on the starfield maps and group has been disappointed to not be able to use y'all's starfield maps since switching over to Foundry last year.

I can see that at least some of the boons that will be purchasable with AcP are already up. Can we expect to be able to see the boons that will be available before the 28th? I'm sure there's plenty of folk who have boons they were working towards under the Fame system who'll want to know how important getting Fame for that character is while it's still being given out.

Someone else might have already mentioned it, but there isn't anywhere that provides instructions for how GMs fill out chronicles. Some things (like whether or not GMs make earn income checks) aren't clear currently. Between some of the changes from 1e and GMs that are new to society in general, a section giving GMs instructions on their own rewards would extremely helpful.

does the size of weapon not increase the damage outside of raging? that feels little off; what's the point of something such as enlarge person then?

This was brought to my attention elsewhere.

Looking over the Skill Feat section there’s a feat called Close Match, Requires: Trained in Deception.

According to the text of this feat, it makes you appear younger, older, more like another race or androgynous. Humans could get this feat at level 1, other characters wait until 2nd for their first skill feat.

First: The problem with requiring “Trained Deception” to play an androgynous character is a problem. There are more than enough gigabytes of digital ink spilled about associating androgyny, gender fluidity and trans experience with deception, disguise and impersonation. This feat’s wording and existence needs another sensitivity pass.

Second: It doesn’t actually do anything. Nothing in the Impersonate activity mentions penalties for disguising as a different gender, race, age or even size. The only thing that comes close is opposed Perception checks gaining a secret GM determined bonus.

So not only have you printed a feat that’s hurtful for members of the community, it doesn’t actually doesn’t even do anything.

Please revise the feat (or remove it entirely), androgyny or non binary gender choices are best left as flavor choices, applying game rules to them is at best silly, and at worst deeply offensive. This will make for better more welcoming tables.

^^^ This! While having a completely voluntary trait that amounts to 'this character has any easier time convincing people that they're being dumb when misgendering said character' is kinda cool, having a feat that only provides bonuses to deception is ignorant at best and deliberately malicious at worst. Hopefully the devs will get this fixed since I'm fairly certain it was just a lapse in judgement on the writers part.

BretI wrote:

The fighter archetype only allows you to become expert at a weapon type — at level 12!

I can’t find anything outside of a class that allows you to improve armor proficiency.

Gray Maiden prestige archetype.

It actually doesn't. The prerequistes are : "Strength 16, expert in Fortitude saves, trained in heavy armor and all martial weapons, member of the Gray Maidens," so you have to be a class that has proficiency in heavy armour in order to take the dedication...at 6th level. (page 281)

The fighter dedication feat does let you become proficient in armour types though! "You become trained in light armor, medium armor, heavy armor, simple weapons, and martial weapons. Athletics is a signature skill for you." So there's that, but you have to spend 2 more feats on it before you're allowed to learn any other archetypes so there's an argument to be had that there's feat taxes involved. (page 280)

I like the idea of giving Signature skills from Int bonus. For each +1 you get to choose a Signature skill.

Seconded! The current set up just isn't that functional and this would solve multiple issues at once

Skills improve at higher levels across the board because as your character is adventuring they should pick up some knowledge on a wide variety of things. At level 20, my barbarian with 8 intelligence, who only learned basic maths and how to read and write about 5 levels ago when the wizard decided they were done dealing with my crap, is still intelligent enough to remember how last year when they fought a dragon that looked kinda like this one they're fighting now, the wizard said something about it's breath being ice and some mumbo jumbo and that they needed to hit it like so. Ergo, they need to hit this dragon like so...right?

A real world equivalent would be how I, a biology major, know preciously jacksquat about nuclear physics. My friend, a nuclear engineer, knows a ton. Some jerk is rambling about how houses emit radon radiation and it's bad. I'm able to recall a conversation my friend and I had a couple weeks ago, in which they explained that radon radiation is only a problem if you're exposed to high quantities for an extended period of time, thus allowing me to tell that the jerk doesn't actually know what he's talking about.

That being said, I WOULD like something so that if I want to play an absolute idiot with like 2 intelligence it still works at high levels WITHOUT me having to essentially tell the GM that the numbers are wrong because backstory.

Perhaps provide us with some sort of cap on untrained skills? Example, my level 20 barbarian has an 8 intelligence so they CAN'T get more than a 20 on an Arcana Recall Knowledge check since they aren't trained in it. They can still recall a bunch of stuff from either experience or conversations with the wizard, but they're completely incapable of recalling in depth ideas about how [insert magic theory here] works. The GM should be setting DCs appropriately based on how easy it'd be for an untrained, vs trained, vs expert, etc to recall said knowledge.

I'd also like to see something akin to dubious knowledge be automatically applied to any recall knowledge checks for skills one isn't trained in. Considering how often I get to have conversations in which engineers with 4.0s can't remember if it was X or Y for something they finished the class for a month ago...it'd make perfect thematic sense for someone who's never studied something to know that it had something to do with X, but that something might have been Y or Z.

As somebody mentioned, likely the PF veterans skipping the char-gen walk-through are the ones taking longer. Also, veterans tend to rely on system mastery a bit more, which most won't have. So they take time reacquiring it and end up looking up all those options to weigh them against each other. Or looking up all the cheap magic or alchemy. Or every domain ability rather than run with one. Etc.

The system is a snap if you just run with an idea with few worries. Since there are fewer traps in PF2 plus retraining, and it's a playtest (!), one might as well.

It's not just PF vets skipping the character-gen walk through seeing a ridiculous amount of time spent on character creation. The book has info you need in multiple spots so if you're not noting everything down from the very start of character creation you're gonna spend a bunch of time flipping or scrolling back and forth. A chart that gives you all of the basic information on all of the classes, ancestries, and backgrounds would go a long way to smoothing this out.

I read the character creation walk through 4 times and watched the walk through they did on leading up to the release...the lowest I've gotten time for creation down to is 42 minutes all said. While yes, I agree that veterans should be comparing the time they spend on characters in new systems to how much they're spending on these characters NOT how much they regularly spend on a PF1e character, most of the people in this thread do seem to be doing so.

The time being spent is really concerning when compared to other first characters. I spent more than 3 hours on my first PF2.0 character, comparable to my first 3.5 character (literally my first character ever), half the time of my first AD&D character, and only an hour less than my first Shadowrun character. Add in that my first 4e character took about an hour, 5e about 20 minutes, and half an hour - with restating! - for Pathfinder 1e...I'm not particularly impressed with the character creation in PF2.0.

Hopefully the devs will pay attention to the concerns being brought about how long it's actually taking people. I'd love to see some run throughs how those on this thread are getting through so fast since the only explanation I've seen so far was that they had their character mostly built prior. That and hear how long it takes people with minimal experience in tabletop RPGs.

It took me about 3 hours all said to make my character (Goblin Barbarian). About half of that was spent re-reading sections and running around in the book though so not horrendous for a first character.

Character number 2 (Dwarf Monk) took about 40 minutes. Again, a large chunk of time was spent re-reading sections and running around in the book.

Character number 3 is actually a conversion of one of my 1e bards and is already up to an hour t only half way done. Biggest time sinks are - again - re-reading and running around in the book, big suprise. That and finding the correct equivalent, which I expect to take a bit to make sure happens. I'm expecting another hour to hour and a hlaf on this character.

Biggest frustrations: I'm spending considerably more paper on these characters than I do on 1e characters and too much time ofn the character sheet. I'm only down to 2.5 pages in a spiral to figure everything for one of these characters - with trying to keep things as rows rather than my usual columns - and this is without a rough sketch of the actual character. I managed to get everything but spells on a single page with an initial sketch for my 2nd 1e character so I imagine I'll be increasingly annoyed with this.

Also, putting everything on the character sheet takes 10+ minutes. It's a completely different set up than most other RPGs and not really intuitive to players who don't have experience in other systems either I don't think? (I'm likely going to try and have my little cousin try building a character to figure out how intuitive it is).

I plan to build a character of each class and try to cover each ancestry as well as to see where my biggest time sinks are. Assuming the character creation is as easy as they claimed it would be, by character 4 I expect to be down to 30 minutes for martial characters and 40 minutes to an hour for spell casters (10 minutes each for running around the book, 10 minutes for the character sheet, and then 10 minutes for actual creation/decision making, with an extra 10 to 30 minutes on spell selection depending on the class).

That's...still more than I'm really comfortable with for a game that's supposed to have quick and easy character creation. I imagine once we have reference docs up that'll drop to about 3 minutes spent on locating information and double checking it's all correct, and I can see the character sheet eventually (at least 10 sheets later) dropping to 5 minutes. But that's still more than the 15 they claimed...for someone who currently spends about 5 minutes on a bard. -_-'

I love this! A spread that has some sort of table/chart that I can use to quickly reference 2/3 of my character instead of having to check at least 4 different pages not including feats, skills, and equipment would be amazing! I've seen a few people say that charts scare new players, but I feel like it'd frustrate new players more to be trying to find all of the info they need than to have a spread that's just a chart labeled Quick Reference.

Seconded! I don't even have any major visual impairments - just a little bit of nearsightedness - and there's a few spots I'm having to fight with the pdf to adjust in a manner that lets me actually be able to read it and then having to jump someplace else to understand. I can only imagine how difficult it is for players who have more serious impairments.

Animal Totem: essentially takes away any proficiency when attacking outside of rage. this is the of trade-off I could see making on my first character because it sounds cool and later realizing sucks since I can only rage for about 18 seconds.

Dragon Totem: ....I'm gonna need some explanation on how exactly they're envisioning a character who gained the dragon totem after watching their village get burned down by a dragon is gonna respond to a very similar looking dragon - perhaps even the same one - telling them to do something....and said character actually obeying. Like I can imagine a few different reasons, but there's nothing i've seen in the book to convince me. if anything, i'd envision a lot of characters that end up multi-classing into fighter because they encountered said dragon and refuse to obey them. (also, for organized play, will that mean that I can't be connected to chromatic dragons? or that if i slaughter my entire party on one's order I still don't have my alignment changed to evil and get to continue playing said character? or something else?)

Fury Totem: not bad, not something I really see myself playing since it doesn't give much for roleplaying, but I can think of a few different concepts that it'd work quite nicely for. don't particularly like the implications that rage is entirely out of other barbarian's hands, it kinda implies that they can't even choose not to rage...actually that would make for a very interesting outlook of a barbarian with fury totem now that i think about. overall, pretty good, but language could be better

Giant Totem: how many penalties do I get because of my oversized weapon? cause I can see GMs going two different directions on that. please make it clear in the CRB, you're gonna have to clear it up in errata or society info anyways.

Spirit Totem: this feels a little more OP than the other totems, that may just be that somehow my barbarians always end up having to deal with undead though. this and fury are gonna be the most popular for organized play next year though.

Superstition Totem: as someone who fell in love with barbarians because of AD&D, i'm loving this. i'm gonna end up having like 5. I disagree with you on what some of it's problems are though.

The anathema says that continuing to adventure with someone who refuses to stop casting spells on you isn't allowed, not that you can't adventure with spell-users. Playing these characters is rather simple (assuming you don't have a s***ty group to play with). Someone goes to heal you or whatever, and you freak out. cue conversation about how 'look, you get that the wizard is weak af and can't hit monsters very well so needs to use magic, but for the love of all the gods don't use it on you.' it's really not that hard to not cast spells on somebody so this shouldn't really be an issue.

it's more liable to be an issue in society though, since if someone decides to be a jerk and refuse to stop having a character use magic on your character then those characters can't be at a table anymore. which would make for some interesting situations where you have two players show up to a game, with only one character each, having to be at the same table, and aren't actually allowed to play said characters together. it'll be interesting to see how paizo resolves this.

the ability to use potions without committing anathema is decidedly weird though. what exactly is the difference between potions and spells and how would a barbarian with the superstition totem think of potions such that they're okay consuming liquid magic even though spells are still the bane of their existence?

the consistent +2 bonus against spells does feel a bit underpowered though. now i know normally the save against anything magic would be a will save, but given that they don't say it gets added to will saves i think it's a safe bet that there's some saves to be made against magic that aren't will saves. and adding 2 to a save at even just 5th level doesn't seem like it'll make much of a difference on average and there doesn't really seem to be anything that raises that bonus available specifically to barbarians.

1. Do you currently like pathfinder 1e? yep!

2. Did you once like pathfinder 1e but now find it troublesome? not really, if anything it's more the opposite. 1e isn't the most new player friendly because you're extremely limited in what you can do with the core - or at least it feels that way when you know how much more you can do if you have more books. in addition, there's too much math for a lot of people stating out. between that and the fct that 1e feels just a little TOO much like D&D, i've seen a lot of people decide they just aren't interested

3. Do you like 4th or 5th edition D&D? yep, though 4e is in no way shape or form a good system for introducing players to tabletop-leave it to more experienced players who just want some game mechanics to build a world within. i've only played a couple of one-shots in 5e so i can't really say i know anything about it, but i've enjoyed what i have played, it's just a bit more forgiving than i would commonly like when i'm playing with adults

4. Which are you looking for class balance, smoother high level play, more options, or even all of those things? more differentiation from D&D and more new player friendliness. while i definitely enjoy ridiculous games that you really probably should get an experienced player to gm so you can learn, i don't think that's a niche pathfinder should even sorta be moving towards. 1e currently feels kinda like d&d's math loving little sister rather than a related but still very distinct game. I definitely want a game than feels like i have more options from the get go, which the endless feats - while irritating- do pretty well.

5. How do you feel about making the game more accessible in general? please! like i've mentioned a few times already, i really don't think pathfinder should be working towards becoming a niche game. while it needs more differentiating it from d&d, it should also increasing accessibility so it can really stand on it's own as an intro to tabletop game. (a good test of how well it fulfills this is to give it to a bunch of 5th to 8th graders who've never played tabletop games before and see if they can make sense of it....in a similar manner that experienced players do)

6. Are you willing to give up on accessibility if you can still gain all of the benefits listed in question 4? a tiny bit, like i said one of the things i want PF2.0 is for it to be extremely accessible so while i'd love to see the classes become more of a guideline than something that actually matters and some decidedly NOT d&d like game mechanics get introduced...it doesn't really feel like it fits for me if it makes the game difficult to get into

7. Would you be willing to play an alternative rules system then what we have been presented? (A different version of pathfinder 2nd edition if you will). potentially, it would really depend on what was being changed. there's definitely some things i'd love to see that i don't really want to be part of standard play since they would make getting into the game difficult for those complexly lacking in experience

8. And if you said yes to the above question what would you like to see in that theoretical game? (Most of you will see what I'm doing here, I'm finding common ground)
I'd really like to see more exploration of how the game meta is influenced by the game mechanics and less of an influence from the classes. more easily available fleshing out of the setting or an abandonment of a pre-made setting altogether so that the setting is entirely up to the GM. ancestries setting some things about my genetics and some things that i grew up with rather than throwing all of the above at me over the course of my adventuring career.

tivadar27 wrote:

(by simply telling them not to multiclass)

"Hi Jane, well, you see, you are a new player so just please don't multiclass because you can't handle it. John here can multiclass because he's smarter, I mean, more experienced than you".

If you can't tell what kind of problems does telling players "please don't do that unless you're *that tall*" bring, I don't know what to tell you.

Telling a new player to hold off on something shouldn't be an issue if you're not rude about it. I've run AD&D for my younger siblings and some of their friends and regularly had to tell kids that they shouldn't do something I was letting n older and/or more experienced player do. It's a matter of actually explaining why you're saying not to do something rather than just flat out saying no.

Example: "Hey Jane, you said this is your first time playing a tabletop RPG so I would prefer you not multi-class. I want you to have fun and even with years of experience I sometimes find myself not having fun when I multi-class since it can be really hard to make functional characters. I know John is multi-classing and his build sounds really cool, but he also has even more experience than me so he knows how he can still have fun with his character. If you're really really sure you want to multi-class why don't we ask John to sit down with us and try to build a character that you'll be able to have fun with still."

You notice how I tried to make it clear that I'm concerned about Jane not having fun and that it's not something she can never do? This goes a long way. Just, explain your reasons and provide some assistance if they still want to try.

Trust me, if my 8 Charisma self can get a 6 year old to understand why she can't play a thief in AD&D, but my friend that's in Calculus can, you can explain to an adult why you don't want them multi-classing as a new player.

That being said, I definitely agree with you on not being a huge fan of the inability to multi-class. I can appreciate giving me alternatives to having to multi-class in order to reap any of the benefits, but I'd still like the option of multi-classing if I want.

So Armour Class is calculated as:
10 + Proficiency + Armour bonus + Dex modifier + any other bonuses + any other penalties
with Touch Armour Class being calculated in the same manner.

Based purely off of text, this could easily result in a monk, being untrained in any armour, subtracting 2 from their AC to account for proficiency. Since I doubt this is what was intended, there should be a note made that the proficiency added to one's AC is the character's proficiency with the type of armour being used.

In addition, WHAT IS the proficiency bonus for a character not wearing armour supposed to be? As a GM I'd treat it as 0 so that's what I currently have it marked as for my monk, but I couldn't find anything to confirm that. (To be fair I'd been up for over 24 hours when I made my monk and at least 27 when I noted this so I may have just overlooked it).

Don't get me wrong, I love that human ethnicities are part of the rulebook. I just feel that they are out of place on page 35. To solve the above issues, here are some techniques that I hope are considered:

- Add a chapter to the rulebook that details the setting of Golarian. Throughout the rulebook, point readers to this later chapter if they are interested in learning more about the game's setting and its inhabitants.

- In this chapter, include a map of the entire planet and, within separate sections, maps of Golarian's continents and/or regions too.

- Move the "Human: Ethnicities" subsection from page 35 into an appropriate regional section of this new chapter.

- Add in key, missing human ethnicities to their appropriate regional section.

- Add in missing ethnicities for other ancestries to an appropriate regional section as well.

Personally, I would also love to see this chapter include the various factions and organizations—and their motivations—outlined at a high-level on a per continent/region basis. The "Setting" chapter in the Starfinder rulebook is a good place to find inspiration, though I don't think blindly copying that structure is the right approach for Pathfinder.

This would be amazing! As it stands, The information given about the different Human ethnicities tells me next to nothing. Like okay, My character can be from this area - that I don't really know where it is - and as a result can probably speak this language and has this type of colouring. That...doesn't actually give me multiple ethnicities. The page on them barely even gives me enough to tell me I want to go read the three pages I SHOULD have on each culture.

Also, the way it's currently set up Humans are the only ancestry I would believe actually have a culture in Golarion if I was a new player. I get that they don't want to give me 50 pages on culture in the rulebook, but uh...can we do SOMETHING about the single hat races? I can deal with a very brief overview of the largest cultures with a promise of more in depth discussion to come, but as it stands I have to write multiple entire cultures for each race.

This is a really good question! Like, if I take the Nomad Background I gain the feat Assurance for Survival. Based on the character creation walk-through paizo did in the videos leading up to release, I don't automatically become trained in Survival. But do I just gain the effects of the feat without being trained? Or am I required to spend one of my skills on becoming trained in Survival? This needs to be clarified in text.

First, about Sign language :

Why should Sign Language be a feat ? I would expect it to be treated as any other language. A group of adventurers could have learned it just to be able to silently speak while ambushing their opponents.

This seems even more weird since your GM can hand you sign language as a bonus feat. This means that, if your GM is kind enough, you would never spend a feat to learn sign language (and I suspect even if your GM does not git it to you for free, most players will not take this feat if they are the only one taking it).

Oh my gods yes! Sign Language is just that! A language! This is especially weird cause they made such a point in Starfinder that you could voluntarily learn the signed or braille version a language instead of the spoken or written version. With paizo having given me, completely independent of my GM, rules for how I can play a character with certain disabilities in Starfinder I would have expected them to continue the trend with PF2.0, not give me access to some options with the requirement that I sacrifice other opportunities that don't make sense to.

Also, about Read Magic/Esoterica :

Those abilities state that you can read and understand magic writting if it is written "in a language you can normally read".

I... always assumed magic was written in its own language, and anybody with some magical expertise could attempt to "read magic" no matter their background. I could grab a scroll from a goblin lair and read it, even if its creator was an elf or a goblin.

Now, I have to speak a specific language to read a scroll ? So if I'm a human with Common and Elven languages, I can't read a scroll crafter by a Goblin, a Drow or a Dwarf because I don't speak goblin, undercommon or dwarven ? This makes looting scrolls and spellbooks less interesting in most cases, and we lost the somewhat "universal magic" vibe from PF1.

Plus, does this mean GMs will now have to determine in which language each scroll is written ?

I don't recall how exactly it was explained in PF1, but I know I had pretty much the same idea as you as a hold over from playing AD&D. I guess I understand where they're coming from in some aspects, like my Taldan noble that's studying magic is going to record all of their notes in Common since they're learning in Common and that's their native language. But my tengu acolyte that studied in a major city of Tian Xia would have recorded his notes in a tian language. (My apologies for the poor example, I've done next to nothing within Tian Xia and have read next to nothing on it as well).

While I can appreciate this, I'm also a little partial to Magic being it's own language that anyone can learn. If for no other reason, it's rather amusing to have my barely literate barbarian pick up a magic scroll and inform the wizard that it says it's a fireball spell (though to be fair that's a bit of a pain to do in PF1 as is). It'll be interesting to see how they're wanting magic writings to function in -game.

The way they currently have it set up, it almost feels like they're wanting us to back off on the number of half-elves and half-orcs that get played-either that or they were after thoughts. Having them hidden inside of Human feats makes it look like they aren't an option, and making players spend their 1st level ancestry feat to be ALLOWED to have mixed blood will likely make it unappealing to newer players. (Like seriously, I don't play humans as a rule and despite reading through the ancestry chapter twice I still didn't catch that half-elf and half-orc were playable races in 2.0. If I were introduced to PF2.0, coming from D&D, I won't know that I could play my half-orc barbarian UNTIL I sat down at a table with someone who's playing a half-elf or half-orc and end up asking what book I need for it).

If they want half-elf and half-orc ancestries to be available with the CRB, then they need to make them separate ancestries, not a special way of playing humans. Now personally, I'm fine with them being removed; bit sad to see them go, but paizo'd have no complaints from me if they removed them from core ancestries entirely and gave me another book a couple months later that let me mix and match ANY two races.

Hopefully they'll see the concern and we'll get half-elf and half-orc as actual ancestries in the official release.

YES!!! I would love to see some sort of mechanic that runs to the (IN-game fiction) effect of "if you treat the wound and clean it every day it should only scar a little." While high fantasy doesn't tend to come with a ton of magic nowadays, it can still be interesting to play a low magic campaign where you're having to hunt down some magic thing to fix another magic thing, or to travel through a city that's liable to burn you all at the stake for having associated with magic users in that one battle 20 years ago-let alone what they'd do if they realized your "eccentric scholar" was actually a wizard!

Also, just because there's magic doesn't mean everyone can afford it or even wants it. Why get the magic healing from the religious zealot down the street when you can have a cool scar and avoid a lecture?

GameDesignerDM wrote:

Lucid Blue wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Aren't most uses of skills something that we can't explain before they are attempted, so you can't help but provide mechanics before context?

Not at all. The diplomacy skill says what it does. You are talking to the person and trying to convince them. Or persuade them to react a particular way. That's why you have to speak the same language. If they can't understand you, you can't persuade them.

It doesn't say, "spend one action and the creature thinks better of you."

Yeah, but it doesn't state how every single use of Diplomacy is going to go, because the narrative is always shifting.

Same for Planar Survivor.

No, it doesn't explain every possible outcome. But it still gives an explanation. It tells you what diplomacy IS.

Planar Survival gives NO explanation. It says "roll a die and if you succeed, food appears. Even if there's no food." Battle Medic says "spend one action, and the target heals x number of hit points."

Neither one says HOW. Neither one is grounded in the world. They're both just a disembodied math block that gets applied.

The whole thing that makes an RPG what it is, is that there's in-world fiction that contextualizes the activity. And gives the gm and players a way to reason through whether an action is successful or not. Or what factors might get in the way.

For everyone who thinks that none of this is an issue, would you also be in favor of removing the explanations everywhere else from the game? We could greatly cut down the length of the book if it's just a long list of math.

How about this one?

Spend two actions. And everyone in a 30' radius takes 6d6 damage. (old fashioned fireball.)

Or this one?

Spend a standard action, and your target gets 1d8 hit points. You may only make this action once a day. (cure light wounds)

Once you remove the game world, all of the context is gone. What about beings immune to fire? What if your target is undead? Oh,...

On the topic of Battle Medic: the description of the feat is "You can patch up yourself or an adjacent ally,

Now, I imagine that what Battle Medic is intended to mean I essentially Administer First Aid at a higher DC. Though a clarification that that's what I'm doing would be appreciated. (Now as someone who enjoys getting into the nitty gritty realism of fantasy settings, I would prefer it if those hit points were fully temporary in a you lose an equal number in half n hour if you don't get proper healing kind of way, but I digress).

On the topic of Planar Survival: the exact verbiage is "You can attempt to Survive in the Wild on different
planes, even those without the resources or natural phenomena
you normally need. For instance, you can forage for food even
if the plane lacks food that could normally sustain you, and you
could find your bearings on a plane that doesn’t have stars, a sun,
or other normal aids to navigation." Now this says survive in the WILD so as a GM I would throw out any solutions to finding food that involve obtaining it from some form of society by theft or bartering (though I may allow them to use it to find a source of food in such a situation).

And this has been brought up a number of times already, but I'm going to reiterate for the sake of covering all of the potential issues with this feat: it says "you can forage for food if the plane lacks food that could NORMALLY sustain YOU." This means that, due to my super survival skills, I can figure out how to make the highly toxic leaves of the void turtle's shell-or whatever bullsh*t thing I want to make up-into a rather disgusting, but still edible soup. Now, I haven't read through the GM section yet, but I imagine any issues that arise could easily be solved by offering the GM a few suggestions for situations in which the feat might be used.

The explanation is there (or the framework for such at least), it's just not in the place you're expecting or wanting it to be. Which oops, big deal, paizo please make sure to put it someplace more obvious in the official release. (I'm totally with you on the please give me at least the basis for in-game fiction explanations. I enjoy getting to make stuff up about why such and such works when it shouldn't, but give me a jumping point for it at least!)

Has anyone found how exactly the armour upgrades for Androids work? Because all that I've read on it is the note about there being Androids having an Armour Upgrade slot which can be used to install any one armour upgrade that can be installed into light armour.

For most of the upgrades available at low level this makes sense. However, by this logic I could give my android character tensile reinforcement since they can be installed into any armour and take up a single slot. Now the issue I have here is that tensile reinforcement essentially raises the hardness and hit points of your armour by 5 levels. This would normally make your armour more difficult to break. On average a sturdy piece of equipment has a number of hit points equal to 15+3*its level. So a first level object has 15, a second level object 21 and so forth.

But applying an armour upgrade to an android would effect their body from what I can tell, meaning that if I were to purchase this upgrade for my android I automatically raise their hit points to that of a fifth level character? Since it's being applied to the armour that is my own self?

So Absalom Station is supposed to be 5 miles in diameter and house 2 million people? Is this a typo or something cause that's physically impossible. Mechanically medium creatures seem to be a 5'by5'by5' cube, so without squeezing the majority of Absalom Station's citizens take up said space.

Now going back to the 5 mile diameter; Absalom Station is supposed to be a dome. This means that the volume of Absalom Station, i.e. total space within it, is equal to half the volume of of of a sphere of equal diameter. Therefore, the volume of Absalom Station is equal (4*pi*2.5^3)/6, or 32.725 miles cubed. Now since there are 5280 feet in a mile, multiplying the cubic miles by 5280 will give us the cubic feet of 172,788.

Returning to my previous point about the space most citizens take up without squeezing; this is 172,788 ft^3 that can be divided amongst the citizens and visitors of Absalom. So, since the most citizens are medium, we can simply divide the cubic feet by 5 to determine the MAXIMUM number of medium creatures that can be in Absalom Station: 34,557.

This is assuming that there's next to nothing except people in Absalom Station. At most this could also include walkways to account for the part where this number has people onto of people. However there would always be someone next to someone else, privacy wouldn't actually exist, etc.

So will this be corrected at any point? Cause the inaccurate world building is really kinda irritating. I'll even make it easy for y'all! 2 million people in the station? So that's 2 million 5'by5'by5' cubes to make math simple. multiple by 5 for cubic feet, that's 10 million cubic feet. Then you divide by 5280 for the cubic miles, 1893.9;round down to 1893. That's the MINIMUM possible volume. Now multiple by 6 and divide by 4*pi for the radius cubed, 903.8; round down to 903. The cubic root of 903 is 9.66 so the diameter of Absalom Station had to be at least 20 miles for it to CONTAIN 2 million medium creatures.

Let's add infrastructure, privacy, space for visitors, businesses, etc. Let's be really really conservative and only triple the space we want. 5679 cubic miles, so a diameter of at least 28 miles. And honestly, I'm probably massively underestimating how much more space you'd need.