minneyar's page

Personally, I'd rather play with a party of aasimar, kitsune, and catfolk who love their characters and are really into roleplaying them than a party of humans who are human because they wanted an extra feat. I can understand restricting races in some circumstances, such as the desire to use them as convention prizes or making sure they fit in the lore, but I don't think that making them rare just for the sake of ensuring their rarity really makes the campaign better overall.

ohh, what about a Reincarnation boon that let a dead character come back as another PFS Legal race - or apply a race boon at the time of Reincarnation.

Even if it's completely unrelated to how Paizo decides to handle race boons, I think it'd be really neat to have a "Reincarnate" boon that could be used to bring a character back from the dead as a random PFS-legal race.

I waited a few days after reading this to comment because I've got a lot of opinions on race boons, so I figured I should mull it over a bit first...

First of all, I like using race boons to draw attendance to cons. For many people, the opportunity to get a unique boon is the primary reason why they would be willing to go to a convention rather than just play at their local gaming store.

On the other hand, I know a lot of people don't have the opportunity to go to cons, and I would like to see a way for them to get boons without begging or bribing the con-goers for theirs.

With that said, I think a time-limited lottery system is a bad way of handling it. First, for any given race, you have to consider that there are many people who aren't interested in that race. Some people don't think any races other than the core six belong in PFS, some are only interested in races that are the best mechanically, and some people just don't like the flavor of particular races. If you hand out races via a lottery, inevitably there will be a lot of people who get a racial boon and simply don't want it.

In fact, despite the clamor I see on message boards, in real life I don't see a lot of people playing unusual races. After aasimar/tiefling/tengu were made open, there was not a sudden flood of them. I know a couple of players with characters of those races, but the core races still vastly outnumber them. Almost every long-time player I know has at least one kitsune, nagaji, or wayang boon, and most of them have never been used. There are a lot of people who hate seeing non-core races who worry that making a boon easy to get will lead to a huge surge of people playing that races, but I don't see any actual evidence that makes me believe that.

The situation this leads to is that you'll have some people who really want that boon, and they'll try as hard as they can to earn it legitimately, but they don't get one just due to the luck of the draw. This leads to the people who don't want those boons selling them to the people who do, and I know Paizo doesn't want to see boons getting sold for cash. If there's a time limit on the lottery, that also means the boons will become rarer and more valuable as time goes on, and players who start playing later will feel like they're punished for not having started earlier.

I would much rather see a guaranteed way for somebody who wants a race boon to get one; unfortunately, I don't know what Paizo's database is capable of doing, so I don't know what I can suggest that wouldn't involve a lot of software development. I think that offering a race boon as a prize on a chronicle sheet for completing a scenario is a better solution than a lottery, although I know some people think that will make the races in question too common.

With that in mind, there should probably also be some kind of limiting factor that makes it more difficult or more time-consuming to get the boon. I like the idea of a boon being a reward for completing an entire season; after you've played or GMed every scenario in a season (all of the ones that are legal, at least), you automatically get an appropriate boon. If an entire season is too long, maybe make it a prize for completing all the parts of a multi-part scenario or a module?

A reward for earning GM stars is a possible idea, too, although again, that'd probably take more database work for Paizo. Earn a star, pick a boon from an approved list. That is simple enough in concept.

Another idea that occurred to me is having a chronicle sheet that lets you pay prestige in order to buy a race boon, but after thinking about it, that leaves kind of a bad taste in my mouth; I don't want to have to spend one character's resources just to make another character. I have a feeling that would lead to people making "dump" characters whose only reason to exist is to earn enough prestige to play as the race they really want. Maybe a better implementation of that would be a chronicle boon that lets you transform that character into a different race? (you could write it off as a "Polymorph Accident")

Anyway, those are all the thoughts I have. The main thing I object to is having it be random; I would like to see a way for players who want a particular boon to earn it rather than either get lucky or get it from eBay.

Hey, I've never seen them in the same room at the same time. For all I know, they could be the same person.

Which was wierd, because there's nothing evil about vivisection.

There's nothing inherently evil about vivisection, but the vivisectionist archetype has some fairly evil stuff in it. Here's a few quotes:

Unlike a chirurgeon, a vivisectionist's goals are not related to healing, but rather to experimentation and knowledge that most people would consider evil.

Torturous Transformation: At 7th level, a vivisectionist adds anthropomorphic animal to his formula book as a 2nd-level extract. When he uses this extract, he injects it into an animal as part of a 2-hour surgical procedure. By using multiple doses of this extract as part of the surgery, he multiplies the duration by the number of extracts used.

At 9th level, a vivisectionist adds awaken and baleful polymorph to his formula book as 3rd-level extracts. When he uses the awaken or baleful polymorph extract, he injects it into the target (not a plant) as part of a 24-hour surgical procedure. He can make anthropomorphic animal permanent on a creature by spending 7,500 gp.

It's not really over the top, but it doesn't fit into the goals of PFS as it is, and they don't want to set a precedent of making corner-case exceptions and modifications to class and archetypes to make them fit into PFS better. So, it got banned.

Here's some interesting trivia: at the Q&A with Mike Brock (bah! for some reason I had the "Q&A with James Jacobs" thread stuck in my head...) at Owlcon, he hypothesized that the vivisectionist was originally intended to be an evil counterpart to the alchemist class, similar to the relationship between the anti-paladin and paladin. It was decided to make it an archetype instead of a full class.

Why do they hve to ban things that work just fine in Pathfinder Like leadership and magic item creation?

Both of those things are absurdly overpowered compared to other feat options. Leadership essentially gives you an extra character who is almost as powerful as your primary character, plus a small army of weaker characters. It also has a number of situational modifiers that are largely a matter of opinion and very difficult to regulate in an organized society format.

Magic item creation allows players who have the appropriate feats to acquire equipment much more cheaply than anybody else, which breaks the wealth-by-level curve and causes that character to be much more powerful than characters who can't craft magical items. Furthermore, keeping track of whether the crafter met all of the appropriate requirements and skill checks when crafting is also difficult to do in an organized society format.

Heck, I've seen both of those things either banned or only situationally approved in home games, even.

So far as I am aware there is currently no mention of catfolk existing in Golarion as one example.

In the "Ask James Jacobs" thread, he actually commented that they are native to Southern Garund. (link)

For what it's worth, I'd love to see a Pathfinder-themed side-scrolling brawler in the vein of Shadow over Mystara. There aren't nearly enough good brawlers nowadays.

And heck, the d20 rule set doesn't lend itself very well to action games anyway, so you could just toss it aside and avoid the licensing issue entirely. Just make an action game that uses Golarion as its settings with the iconics as its main characters and has abilities and spells that are named after their PF counterparts.

While taken on it's own, it's a fun scenario to play, honestly I wouldn't mind seeing The Many Fortunes of Grandmaster Torch be retired. I know the Pathfinder Society can sometimes be morally ambiguous, but some of the stuff you have to do in here is just evil.

For what it's worth, I've helped out with some of the closed playtesting (I'm Phillip!) and have really enjoyed what I've played with so far. If you're a fan of WotC's Tome of Magic or the previous Spirits of Pact Magic, or if you're interested in a magic system that is completely different from the traditional Vancian system, I highly recommend checking this out. It's awesome.

But as I said, if it's not stated, why would people assume it would replace? Just a pipe dream.

How about if I used Holy Vindicator with an Divine Strategist cleric instead?

My point is that is not published anywhere that subbed out abilities would get boosted by prestige class abilities that boosts the base ability. Sometimes it's because Paizo didn't think about it, others might be a specific design decision to make players choose. We don't know, and until they start doing that, I don't understand why people would assume those would stack onto the new class ability instead.

You can come up with examples of unrelated class abilities all you want, but that really doesn't have any relevance to this issue.

I'm pretty sure that she is not assuming that these class abilities would stack. She's asking. That's the entire point of the thread. There would be no thread if she was just assuming they stacked.

For the record, here's why this is a valid question:
1) Master Chymist is a melee-focused alchemist PrC. It advances the alchemist's primary damage-dealing mechanism, Bombs.
2) It was written before the Vivisectionist archetype.
3) The Vivisectionist archetype is a melee-focused archetype that replaces one damage-dealing class ability (Bombs) with another (Sneak Attack) that advances at the same rate.
4) It seems logical that if the Vivisectionist had existed before the Master Chymist, the Master Chymist would have been written with that in mind and would have either advanced bombs or sneak attacks.
5) There have been other discussions on the subject, and people generally agree that they'd let Master Chymist advance sneak attack instead of bombs in their own games.
6) Thus the question, do they work together in PFS?

If the answer is "no," that's fine. There's no need to be rude about it.

Now, we know that switching which hand you're using to hold something is a free action (see http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/paizoPublishing/pathfinder/pathfinderR PG/rules/archives/layOnHandsWithALightShield&page=1#24 ). Would it be possible for a monk with a single temple sword to pass that weapon from hand to hand inbetween attacks, thus using that sword to attack with both his left and right hands?

And you can't tell me that the concept of a monk juggling his weapons around while he attacks with them isn't cool.

The thing I like a lot about prestige classes, and why I actually like them more than archetypes, is precisely BECAUSE they're so much more flexible; you can be multiple different classes and still qualify for a prestige class, whereas if you want the swashbuckler archetype you have to be a rogue.

For what it's worth, I find hearing that to be very reassuring. One of my least favorite things about PrCs is when they require levels in a specific class. Even worse are the ones that require levels in two specific classes and then end up just being a hybrid of those classes that combines all the best aspects of both.

Fortunately, I think your quality control is a bit better than WotC's was, so I'm not worried about having a glut of incredibly specific, obscenely overpowered PrCs. ;-)