ryric's page

I just noticed today that all my subs had vanished. I've gone and restarted them but hopefully missing Wednesday won't mean I miss the December releases.

I have no idea whether I really had Legacy status - been an AP/rules/setting sub since 2010 and Starfinder since go. Not sure if that make me legacy or not, and it seems like it might not matter.

Edit: Kinda sad that all my now defunct subs won't appear on my account anymore, like Dragon magazine and the Adventure Card Game. Was nostalgic seeing those from time to time.

I just want to say thanks to Paizo for changing the Starfinder Core pdf to be available as normal, as it makes creating my SFS character for Gen Con much less stressful and now it won't eat up my convention time.

The Gen Con event catalogue says the Starfinder seminar is on Saturday, not Friday, at 10 am.

I hope the event list is accurate because I have a conflict on Friday, ironically playing SFS 2e.

Yesterday's blog:

Quote:

Be the first to play Starfinder Second Edition by subscribing to the Starfinder RPG or Starfinder RPG (Special Edition) lines and receive a free PDF when your book ships!

I mean, technically, you do get a free pdf, just not of the book. Very "What am I supposed to do with an empty case?" vibe to it though.

Is today the day?!!

Also relax on the PDF hold folks. God forbid you have to wait an extra week for something you get for free. They did the same thing for P2 when it came out and we all lived.

It's just super inconvenient for those of us going to Gen Con - they used to let you pick up the physical books at the convention, but they've stopped doing that. I'm signed up for some SFS sessions at the con, and I can't create my PC ahead of the convention now, so at the convention I'll have to squint at my tiny mobile screen to use the pdf. It's very unlikely that my physical book will arrive before I leave for the convention. I was honestly suspecting that the pdf would be delayed due to previous years, so I was actively checking and looking for such an announcement. Finding this out now if really disappointing.

Is it the end of the world? No, I'll manage. But I do feel disappointed that they couldn't even let us know this except through a passive-aggressive placeholder pdf. Having my expectations built up and then knocked down is never fun.

Looks like you'll need to be spending approximately $340 at once to make 500 gold for 10% off to have the same value as just redeeming it for straight money.

So if you're just barely skirting Legendary, you'll get about 1000 gold a year to spend, which hopefully can be spent on subscriptions. There's a threshold where just barely being legendary and just taking sub discounts isn't sustainable - your discounts will cost you the status.

I think if you spend $850 per year(so $1000 before the 15% discount), you can then turn your ~1275 points into $85 worth of discounts and still be above 750.

The amount you have to spend to keep legendary against the cash discounts climbs slightly with the extra gold earning activities like reviews and birthday.

If you just take free scenarios then they don't count against you.

I like doing math :)

... which by all accounts is exactly what happened with the 4E playtest.

As a 4e playtester, whose group submitted 50-70 pages of feedback after each session of the playtest, I was later told at GenCon by WotC people that any playtest feedback that went against their preconceptions was largely ignored. Our group identified most of the issues the fan base ended up having with 4e and it was all tossed aside.

GGSigmar wrote:

How is Disney using the OGL?

Knights of the Old Republic uses d20 modern.

And yeah, I don’t expect miracles from that quarter, but the threat that Disney’s legal team might be having a slow week and decide to litigate Hasbro (one of their toy competitors) into insolvency might keep the most egregious actions Hasbro could take off the table, like trying to forbid sale of anything using OGL.

I’d rather that crap not be tried in the first place, even over “tried but did not succeed in court.”

To be pedantic, Knights of the Old Republic uses the d20 Star Wars system, of which there were three different "editions," an original, Revised, and Saga. The problem with going this route is that those games were actually published by WotC - so that further muddles things involving those RPGs and computer game versions. Basically I'm not sure they actually used the OGL in any meaningful way instead of just doing normal licensing agreements.

Although the thought of Hasbro telling Disney they need to see all their financials for each year over a two decade old computer game is kind of hilarious.

It seems like there's no in-person seminars this year, which makes me sad. I'm also not seeing any indications of convention subscription pickup.

In D&D Beyond, if the DM has bought a book, all the players in their campaigns have access to that material. I don't see any indication that this is true here, in which case I'd have to pass. There's no way I'd get my entire group to shell out for the books they'd need/want.

If I as the GM could buy all the books and then my players could build PCs using that content, I'd be much more interested.

I am also not showing Paizo Advantage on my order, 36531534.

...sort of. it shows all the prices crossed off but has the same price next to it.

I don't think anything would stop a player from going to physical Gen Con, while also signing up for Gen Con online and choosing to do online Paizo events from their hotel wi-fi or phone hotspot for a few hours. Might be a decent compromise.

CrystalSeas wrote:

Xathos of Varisia wrote:

Those of us who did get fully vaccinated now have had something we were looking forward to taken away.

I'm really glad Paizo decided not to do GenCon in person this year.

I'm fully vaccinated.
I don't feel like anything has been taken away from me.

The vaccine is not 100% effective, so there's no way of knowing whether you're going to become ill because someone who is not vaccinated is at your table. Personally, I'm glad I don't need to deal with the unvaccinated people who refuse to wear masks, and expose me to the virus.

I really appreciate that Paizo didn't put staff and volunteers in the position of having to choose whether or not to accept those risks.

Obviously my mileage varies a great deal from yours.

I agree with you largely, but if you want to attend gencon in the future, that is a decision you'll have to make unfortunately. This virus isn't going anywhere, and neither are those sorts of people :(

Paizo will have to make that decision for their volunteers and staff as well next year.

Pretty much this. I don't foresee much difference between September 2021 and August 2022 at this point, at least for US vaccination levels in adults. We're already pretty much at the stage where anyone can make an appointment today to get the vaccine tomorrow. Everyone who wants it will be able to have it. And it's not 100% effective, but nothing is. I could trip on level ground and die from the impact tomorrow. From what I've read, my vaccinated risk of serious illness or death is less than my risk of driving 200 miles to get to Gen Con, and those are risks I find acceptable. YMMV of course.

Obviously Paizo can do as they like, but I suspect this might have as much to do with the date change and lower attendance as it does the ongoing pandemic situation. My main event draw from Paizo at Gen Con was the card game anyway, so with that being done I'm not really missing out on anything I'd planned on doing except picking up my subs in person.

An antipaladin smiting good gets to add double his level against good aligned clerics and paladins on the damage of the first hit. This ability was written before warpriests were a thing. Since warpriests are a cleric hybrid class, do you think RAI they should also be subject to extra smite damage if good aligned?

This came up in a session recently. We went with the extra damage as it seemed appropriate but I was wondering what others thought.

Yeah, my June and July sub shipments are currently both stuck at the exact same place, seemingly at the transfer point from UPS to USPS.

I remember reading somewhere that the split up shipping was "safer," but I don't recall an explanation for how or why. I'm hoping as things return to normal this too will revert because it's certainly an extra expense. If it's keeping warehouse employees safer I'm okay with it as a temporary measure.

Just see that I got the shipping email for these items, so no action needed. Thanks!

My March order got split in two for unknown reasons and while I got the Pathfinder AP issue, I never got the Starfinder items. I know things have been crazy but I've not gotten any follow-up emails and my March order is still Pending. Just thought I've give a nudge to make sure my items hadn't gotten lost in the confusion, especially with the talk of April stuff starting Monday.

Thanks!

I switched my Stafinder game to Maptools and Discord, and after a brief period of getting everybody logged in and used to the software, the first session went quite well.

Based on the new update, those of us who are still waiting on March subs will not be seeing them for a while yet. Stay safe everyone!

A GM I had in college rolled a 10 on a d10 9 times in a row - 1 in a billion chance of that, if the die was fair. He stopped the game to buy a lottery ticket. He didn't win.

I've seen six or so consecutive natural 1s on a d20. We had a friend who would roll a 4 on d20 so often we just called the 4 a "Dale."

Now, I've been gaming for over 35 years, and average 3-5 games a week for that period with probably dozens of rolls per player per night, so that's a lot of opportunity to see some weird patterns.

I do miss the class/level notation in NPC stat blocks. It's a very good shorthand for quickly recognizing what the NPC is expected to be able to do, and at least in the most recent AP it seems to be gone. Even knowing someone is built off a "martial" or "caster" chassis would be useful.

There's the idea that a spell component pouch contains infinite supplies of every single possible inexpensive spell component listed for every spell for any class. Quite a few nifty things in that little bag.

I like the rarity system. I like that there are things that can't be easily bought or chosen, it prevents every sorcerer from picking spells lost to time from ancient Thassilon just because they leveled up. That's an advantage to me. I guess I see Uncommon as "this should be findable, but you will have to at least look." Which means you should be able to get access if you want it.

One thing I thought of that could be neat in a home game is a PC deliberately making a desirable item less rare. Example: PCs find a nice Rare or Unique magic item, crafter PC reverse engineers the formula, and then distributes said formula far and wide so that after a while, the item becomes easier to get. For me, PCs being able to make changes like this to the campaign world is part of the fun.

In a physics sense, cold is even less "energy" than acid is. Cold isn't actually a thing, it's a lack of energy if anything. IMO just go with it.

In the original versions of D&D, each armor type had a specific AC: leather 7, leather+shield 6, chain 5, chain+shield 4, plate 3, plate+shield 2. So your armor class was a number based on the category of armor you were wearing. Then as time passed new armor types were added, dex bonuses became a thing, so things got more complex, but the original name stuck.

It's not that the sphere blocks teleportation, it's that walk through space has an additional requirement of line of sight that the sphere does block.

If you want to simplify the trigger, why not use "if I am about to be injured by an attack?"

The easy way to resolve this is to ask, "Is the target at or above their maximum age?" - if yes, the resurrection magic does not work. If no, it does.

Assuming someone like the bartender even wants to come back - I mean, he already retired once while alive, he's probably not too keen on being dragged out of Heaven or wherever by a random group of young adventurers.

XP Tables, if we're not using milestone leveling. What? They aren't an easy progression like 3.X.

Rules for the APG combat maneuvers when they come up.

There are some universal monster rules I feel like I have to reread every time - whirlwind comes to mind.

Concentration DCs except for defensive casting.

A lot of the more uncommon skill check DCs, especially for PC actions not anticipated in the adventure using things like Fly or Ride.

I'm assuming "looking up monster stats" as a GM doesn't count.

My group just started Curse with Fumbus, Hakon, and Quinn. So far it's been going pretty well. I'm enjoying how Quinn stabs enemies with his brain.

I can think of two of the extra role cards offhand:

It's a neat trick, but fire resistance really cuts the rug out from under it as you're stacking multiple instances of relatively small damage. Each "mini fireball" does 5d6+20, which is only 50 even if maximized. So fire resistance 30 means they take 20 damage per ball, or nothing if they make the save - which many super tough opponents will. Obviously 260 against someone who fails the save is not nothing, but you're not really going to be one-shotting CR27-30 demon lords with this trick.

We use the cards until we get our first feat, then switch to the sheets. Of course, in the new sets without a B adventure and getting hero points very early, that's now a much shorter timeframe.

I think that it may in fact be different in Core - the new rulebook seems to indicate that everything in the power box is a power. In fact, based on how I see the revised rules, using armors that let you recharge at end of turn would even count as playing them for their power.

My guess is this is to cover things like Blessing of the Gods - it copies the "add dice" power of the hour, but not the "if this card matches the hour recharge it instead of discarding" powers of many blessings, because the latter power doesn't require playing the card.

To clarify: there are blessings in CotCT of level >1, but all of the Harrows are level 1 so all 54 mix in right away. There's far fewer "basic" blessings so you end up with a stack comparable to the initial stack in any earlier AP, just about 2/3 Harrows at first.

In CotCT, we have the whole new set of Harrow blessings so I want to be sure I'm using them correctly. They go in the Vault, so they are generally treated just like any other blessing in that they can be in locations and can be in the hourglass. At the start of each adventure (not scenario), I'll need to go through the stack and fish out the nine Harrow blessings that correspond to the adventure's suit, and each player will pick one randomly to get as an extra for their starting hand for all the scenarios of that adventure. Players can also acquire and keep Harrow blessings from locations just like any other boon, and I'm assuming that any Harrows in decks are not available for the random "start of adventure" draw.

I think these statements are correct.

What happens if too many Harrows of the appropriate suit are already in players' decks, such that there aren't enough to draw one for each player? Right now my solution is "try not to do that."

The main reason our group ever chose to "auto-fail" checks to acquire was to perma-banish Basic(Elite) boons after AD3(5) started. I'm given to understand that culling the box will happen differently with this version so we may not do that nearly as much.

I do want to reassure folks that Mob of Undead will never summon Castothrane. My chance blog shows what's on the Undead table.

Ah, I didn't know about the table for random encounters at the time. My previous experience with "summon a random bane" is to shuffle all the cards of that type and draw one, so that's what I was envisioning.

Having "built in" proxies should help henchmen and villains from the new scenarios go smoother. I know I'm not the only one to accidentally use the stats of the proxy. Tougher to do that when the physical card doesn't have its own stats.

My wife and I like to play a scenario or two at Gen Con each year.

With four scenarios per adventure, it sounds like the "default" will be one of each feat, plus one hero point for reroll/not dying. So about the same pace as getting one die bump per adventure, although you can choose to have more rerolls if desired. (For example, if you decided you're done with card feats).

Most likely going to take up a bit more than that though because of the henchmen not being printed and instead having to use proxies.

Where are you getting that the henchmen are not being printed as cards? Apocrypha uses proxies but the henchmen-equivalents are still cards. You set the appropriate henchmen/villains out on the table and when you draw the proxy you refer to the card, not the scenario book. It just means they only need to print 1 copy of each henchman instead of 7.

I also go with enchantment - too many spells have 1 round casting times, and they are often "all or nothing" effects that can lead to a wasted turn if the save goes well. Reducing a fight to a single die roll is ok occasionally, but gets tiresome on repetition.

Where's the non-random healing abuse coming from? Just curious.

I think they're referring to "healing" in a broad sense, of "any effect that gets things out of discard." There are several examples of people breaking the game or finding unlimited combos involving retrieving specific cards from discard over and over.

If the average adventure continues to have five scenarios, and you can buy one of each feat per adventure, that leaves two leftover hero points per adventure to use for rerolls and avoiding death. I'm also in the camp of "why use a point for a one-time reroll when I could have a permanent benefit?" but it seems to be structured so that the permanent benefits cap out, so you might as well take the reroll.

In the 3.X spending XP comparison, it's more like the Eberron artificer, who had a special pool of "extra" XP just for spending on stuff.

The only thing that will suck is having, say, three hero points saved up then dying because of someone else's roll - so you can't use them for rerolls before losing all of them. This can happen, with, say, monsters who hit everyone at their location. Or you could be in a bad situation where rerolls don't matter - rolling a d4 Strength with no weapons or spells against a difficulty 16 bane or such.

The way I see it in general progressing, is that early on people will tend to take feats right away, but by AD#5 or so you might actually want to slow down on feats and increase your safety against the nastier threats.

I guess the hero point death avoidance is supposed to make up for the lack of being able to hide at safe closed locations when near death?

It's not super clear, but assuming most monsters are cubes is a fairly normal thing IME. That means a Huge purple worm actually takes up space 15 feet up, so if you're 20 feet up you're only five feet away from it.

I've done this before; it worked pretty well, but I warned the players that the start would be a little odd and they needed to trust me. This was a 3.5 homebrew game so I let the PCs transfer their class levels to various alignment-appropriate outsiders.

If you want to maintain Golarion canon cosmology and take into account the issues raised by Bob Bob Bob, you could always have the initial encounter cast them bodily into Hell without killing them. That way they get to keep their "stuff," but low level PCs have no easy access to planar travel so you can still do the long journey home plot.

I'd go with this:

In general, use the (normal, lower) spell level or the (higher) spell slot level, whichever is more of a disadvantage for the caster. The advantages of the metamagic feat are spelled out in the Benefits section of the feat, and the increased spell slot level is a disadvantage.

To me, the intent seems clear that you can't construct a spell that would be over 9th level if all the metamagic adjustments applied.

If you had to actually touch skin then winter clothing would protect just as much as full plate. I look at it like this: does armor prevent someone from clapping you on the shoulder or hitting you with a snowball? Those are touch attacks.

LordKailas' description is accurate, but there is this small tidbit for your specific example:

Incorporeal (subtype): “An incorporeal creature is immune to precision-based damage (such as sneak attack damage) unless the attacks are made using a weapon with the ghost touch special weapon quality.“

So sneak attack works with touch spells, but sneak attack doesn't work at all(usually) against monsters with the incorporeal subtype.