gharlane's page

I'd mention that now that sphere's of might is out, you can pretty much create any fantasy style character you want. the two systems come about as close as pathfinder/3.5 systems can to a truly flexible system without being a Hero or M&M style point-buy system.

Lady Firebird wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I have never seen a Drizzt clone in the wild. I've seen plenty of good-aligned "dark elves" but none of them particularly evocative of the famous Forgotten Realms character.

Often, the whole thing is a buzz word that the person complaining can't even accurately expound upon. In my experience, the people who rabidly hate on these alleged "Drizzt clones" are often far more toxic and harmful to a good game than the objects of their ire.

I like dark elves and I like the idea of going against the grain. As exceptional heroes are wont to do. That might take the form of my Drow Monk who seeks personal power out of a desire to personally throw down Lolth and break the tyrannical hold over her people. Or it might be a mischievous Drow Sorceress whose passion is only matched by her elemental power, facing gods and monsters for their secrets and for the love of a good challenge. Or maybe I have other ideas. Surely other players have just as many ideas.

Likewise, I'm feeling the same vibe here: Goblin hate is honestly far worse than the goblins themselves.

The issues is when you can no longer claim to be "going against the grain" and it's not a single special snowflake but a blizzard of them. When you go to a tavern and can't swing a dead cat without hitting 16 heroic goblins and/or drow, to pushes credulity past the breaking point and ruins what 'playing against type' is.

That's the main issue with core goblins: how common they will be. So it's NOT goblin hatred but core goblin hatred. It's one thing if your goblin is a rarity for being able to get along with others but it's something entirely different when there is a flood of them.

I recall a joke game one of my old DM's ran in college. We were all playing angsty drow who were good and fighting the power, and after a desperaate mission to the underworld to find out what evil the now silent drow kingdoms were playing we found...

At most what this one goblin could do is eventually become so famous in a given town that he finally after many adventures and lots of effort puts the stigma behind him. Mind you, HIS stigma, any other goblin still is in for it when they also first appear.

Which is another problem about goblins--you can do that, but it suddenly makes it all about the goblin. It devours the rest of the plot, because you're always having to explain why nobody kills the goblin. It turns them into the precious Mary Sunshine character that devours everyone elses storyline.

Comical adventurs aside, Goblins are a race that A. eats babies (literally, in some of the source material it's mentioned that is a sign of a growing goblin infestation) B. Love torture for its own sake, such as burning people alive. C. Are the kind of idiots that are likely to burn down their own village. They're the insidious fusion of a kender and a rabid halfling.

Now could avoid all that by.... not playing a goblin, just someone who wears a goblin suit, but for some reason doesn't act like a goblin. But given how much of their cultural baggage and attitudes you have to drop to make them at all group friendly, you're not really playing a goblin anymore. So why waste the page count in the core?

Ideally, trap options are removed via rigorous playtesting.

Paizo's general response to playtesting does not fill me with confidence.

Oh, I don't think that anyone doubts that Paizo could pull off the description for goblins in such a way that they could be non-evil creatures with a fondness for fire and explosions.

The question is how on Golarion they'll do so in a way that doesn't invalidate a decade of lore that describes the race as being 99.9% evil, sadistic, and insane.

Yeah. Goblins in Golarian aren't just pyro's, they're pyros who enjoy lighting babies on fire to hear them scream. Getting over anti-goblin racism requires modifying the race to where every other goblin isn't going to try and murder you and burn your house down and not even really have a good reason for it.

And I've always hated that, because Goblin's should be extinct or on their way to extinct. They're stupid, violent, cowardly, and will always antagonize something more powerful than they are. Even evil races shouldn't like them, because they're useless and destroy resources that others can use.

And again, there are a ton of other species in Golarian that are far more interesting. I think Paizo has mistook "we think this is a funny race" for "we think this is a race that needs to become a part of the core."

Goblin's as written are a walking advertisement for extermination. They're a literal plague, that will--not if, will, destroy the region if they're allowed to breed, and produce nothing of value.

So, if they want to make them not a plague, you get a horde of GINO's (Goblin's in Name Only), if they keep them, anything like the stupid, murderous (let us remember, having goblins in teh region is generally the source of most of your vanishing children, who they ate), backstabbing plagues, then you get the traditional horde of "But I'm playing my character!"

If not, then why use them? Paizo has loads of damned species that are far more interesting than Goblins, from just about every viewpoint.

This is very concerning to me, because a lot of the best spells in PF1E were ones that didn't scale with CL anyways (or if they did only scaled by duration). Consider the Haste vs Fireball, for example. Even if Haste never improved beyond 5 round duration it would still be very usable at 20th, while Fireball would go obsolete almost immediately if its damage didn't scale.

Yeah. One of hte biggest power imbalances between casters and martials has nothing to do with the damage but the flexiblity and the ability to pull out spells that can do stuff that a martial flat out can't.

While I still enjoy PF1 I also know that RPG's reach critical mass after a certain time and these things are neccessary from a business point. It also allows for a chance to make improvements that cant be done under the current system.

Of course players will be lost because they don't care to convert for whatever their reasons may be, but typically enough stay to bring on new players, and things continue going uphill.

Will it? The thing is, if they're trying to make it simpler and faster, well that is D&D 5e's territory. So they're not just trying to compete with people who liked old pathfinder, but an already existing and popular system.

Then there's the fact that, much like Pathfinder's origin, there's a huge number of third party publishers out there, many of them quite good. It's not like the old days, when if you wanted to play at all, you had to go with the new edition because it was that or just stick with what you have with nothing new coming out.

If it is completely incompatible, I predict it won't be nearly as successful as Paizo is hoping for.

If you want to lay a conan- or Soloman Kane style "limited magic" campaign, using the Scholar "caller" archtype and the knacks found later in the book-- everyone else has to use the dabbler and ritual feats, which pretty well defines most of the wizards we find in the more pulp settings-- not that powerful compared to your normal pathfinder setting, but since a wizard is quite literally a one in a million find, they are very powerful compared to most of the people they face.

I've got to agree with Painful Bugger, this class is a real disappointment. Even if you ignore spells, the Druid class is better at shifting than the Shifter. To make matters worse the archetype I was looking forward to most, the Oozemorph is basically unplayable at low levels, you can only maintain humanoid form for 1/hour per level a number of times per day equal to 1/2 your level. That means that at 1st level you can be in humanoid form for 1 hour a day. Sounds bad, but it gets worse, when in ooze form, in addition to other restrictions, you can't hold items. So I hope the rest of the party is cool with carrying your stuff.

That looks pretty bad. I mean, the druid gets a 9th level spell progression, and wild shape and other bennies, so if they're better than the shifter at shapechanging, well, why not play a druid? The oozemorph is just bad design.

Good news, I have sphere's of power, so I can fairly easily come up with a tradition for a shifter using that system.

TriOmegaZero wrote:

Malefactor wrote:

Is the Shifter better at shapeshifting than the druid (i.e. can it turn into more creature types, are the forms they take more powerful than a druids etc...)?

No. It gets to choose a limited number of aspects with minor and major forms. At 1st level, it gets to take on aspects for a number of minutes per day. At 4th level it gets wildshape but only for its chosen aspects. As it gains levels, more aspects are granted.

Sigh.... another class classed in its own game... Are there at least good archetypes?

This has actually moved the book out of my "I'll probably buy it column." If your "It's all about shapeshifting" class isn't better than the druids, especially considering a druid *also* gets 9/level casting, I think you have a serious problem, especially given how many good shapeshifting 3rd party classes there are.

Dragon78 wrote:

I wouldn't call gnolls, "fluffies".

Nonsense. Gnolls are anthropomorphic hyenas, and hyenas are adorable.

You know, it's funny, but with a lot of the modern work being done on how Hyena packs form and interact, you could actually make a real good case that the Gnolls would be more likely to be nice than the "noble lion" people.

Note, if you want to run a Conan style campaign with SOP and SOM, it's actually pretty easy. Use the basic talents from SOM, but for any wizards in SOP, you can allow them only a few basic talents, with most of their powerful spells being used as incantations. A wizard may have a few incantations of Monster Summoning VI ready, but if he's caught unprotected, or exhausted (say, because he's preparing to summong one of hte dark gods Conan wizards were so fond of), he'll be largely restricted to basic sphere talents that aren't really overwhelming against a sullen eyed barbarian's good steel.

Tacticslion--remember that if you're exposed on the road you may be in worse danger than if you find a place to shelter in place. I would suggest making certain you know of any shelters or safe areas on your projected evacuation route in case you can't get out of the danger area.

I am sad that Paizo didn't deicide to murder the sacred cow of alignment interacting with rules. Oh well, I guess we'll still have "how many castings of death knell on dying space-chickes do I need to break bad?" threads after all.

Amen brother. My fondest hope is that one day, Alignment will be taken out, burned and then the ashes scattered to the wind, with the sole exception of spiritual beings such as angels and demons.

hey'll get it at 5th or 4th.

However, the reason they decided against shapeshifting at game start was simple. New players. They want all classes to be relatively easy for a brand new player to sit down and play a level 1 version, and any form of wild shape at level 1 will confuse things dramatically. Thus they tried to give a few options for the flavor of shapeshifting, while giving the players some time to get used to the class and system.

You know, by the time your picking up books like advanced wilderness, I'd be surprised if more than a few players were new at all. It also seems like a case where if that's the main reason, they're also harming the utility of the class by toning down it's defining trait.

I don't think it will fail or split Paizo in half. For one thing, many people who just play pathfinder will probably grab aspects of Starfinder.

And, since it's in the future, you don't have the problem you get with things like Starjammer, where some players feel that now planetary adventures have been made to look irrelevant in the face of the mighty Elven Armada. STarfinder is in the future-- it has no impact on Pathfinder itself.
Which is actually a pretty smart decision.

You know, these classes sound like they'd be perfect for vampire NPC's with teh ability to have two, relatively separate lives.

Is there an available release schedule for the varoius sphere centric book or is it more "when we get it ready it does out? I'm really interested in some of the spheres so I'd be thrilled if I had an idea whenthey were planned to be released.

i don't generally mind bloat, with two ground rules.

If you want something that isn't in the core book, you have to let me know before the campaign gets started. This is especially true for 3rd party products, which range from great to terrible in terms of writing and balance. If I don't *have* said product, you are responsible for loaning me a copy.
That solves 90 percent of my problems. Generally I'll only say no if the material is not compatible with the current campaign for balance or setting reasons.

One big point--do mages know how the natural world works? IE, if magic is just impresisng your will on the world, or using hte power of a god, you may not actually know anything more about germs or natural law than anyone else. That alone explains why a lot of tech doesn't happen on a fast basis.

Rothmog wrote:

If you want to be that guy who hoists aloft the skull of your god's most revered saint while blasting your enemies with power, wades through combat with a blessed and smoking censer to grant your allies new power, or draw from the holiness of a tattered shroud emblazoned with the scorched image of your deity to protect yourself from harm, this is the class for you!

So we finally have a class that let's us purge the xenos while praising the God Emperor?

But Brain, why do we also need a Tutu for the Black Cat?

Ed Reppert wrote:

gharlane wrote:

The thing is, Psionics long predates the original system in AD&D-- I dno't know when it appeared, but I know for a fact that you had mental powers being described *as* psionics in the late 1950s in Analog Magazine (or Astounding as it was back then). So if you name it something else you're making a dramatic break, not just with the gaming tradition, but in truth a theme that has been running through sci-fi for decades before there was a pathfinder game.

There was a time when "sci-fi" was a term vehemently rejected by serious fans of the field as being derogatory and insulting. I guess times change. :-)

The term "psionics" was coined, iirc correctly, to impart some "scientific" credibility to the concept. Personally, I prefer "psychic ability". I also prefer a system of magic based on the existence of such abilities. In other words, magic (whether arcane or divine) and "psionics" and "occult abilities" all derive from the same source. But Pathfinder isn't that.

Nearly all magical power flows from the rulebooks, be it by RAW or RAI. It is said that those who research new spells endeavor to invoke the true source of this power directly: the GM.

Well, let's be honest, the big thing for psionics was that it let a sci-fi writer put "magic" in his setting and say: NO, IT'S NOT MAGIC! IT'S JUST A FORM OF SCIENCE WE DON'T UNDERSTAND! See, the hero vaporized the baddie with psychokenesis, not a fireball. totally different thing. And in truth, from a cold blooded marketing point of view, that could actually impact a book's success.

And that's a big part of what the original systems was-- you had points (which were more quantifiable and made more sense then vancian system, or rather gave you a science 'feel') and the arts were even described as disciplines and sciences. Lord, sometimes I miss 1st edition AD&D psionics. You could just create such broken char-ahem, in any case, personally, I intend to use both. At least from looking at the playtest, I'd say both DSP and this system are nicely compatible.

Yeah, I'd be interested in any spoilers myself.

The simple fact is that you cannot make a class that focuses on crafting while systematically allowing those craftables to be made by every other class. Balance-wise, its a nightmare. (Believe me, I tried it for early renditions of the book.) I'm sorry you don't like the flavor that we went with to justify why its mostly just technicians using this sort of tech, but your options are limited when you want A) a true technology-based artificer that B) does not use a lick of magic in the standard class.

I think one thing to focus on is what your craftables do and how flexible they are. PFRPG abstracts a lot of stuff just like D20 and a "normal" gun or rifle isn't going to do much more damage than a crossbow because in many cases the assumptions are different from a "hard reality" setting. A gun that can fire lighting bolts and then freeze rays or be set to ignore magic-- well that's not a mundane gun, it's a technological version of a magical item and should be just as hard to build.

Amusingly, the most dramatic "setting breaking" stuff an engineer can make are things like printing presses and freezers-- stuff that you'll likely never see in a dungeon, but that will result in a world completely unrecognizable compared to your typical fantasy setting.