By RAW, I don't think it triggers on reactions before their next turn, but I'd be willing to let it trigger on reactions too if the players prefer (consistently for the entire campaign, not a choice each time), because flavorwise it is a bit strange that it doesn't apply yet.
I don't think that'd be too strong.
If they don't go for it, I'd justify it by saying that reactions are too "thoughtless" and "instinctive" "subconscious" actions to be caught by the psychic lock and claimm that that's why you can do them outside of your turn in the first place.
It'd definitely trigger on subordinate-on-turn actions like spellstrike or draconic frenzy
For the second question, I'd only ask them for one save on their turn even if they did it multiple times because of the "the target is then immune for one minute"-clause.
As a final comment, I'd run this as the target being very aware of which action is forbidden, and that it'd hurt to do it.
That just seems to give more fun interactions than a bit of damage
I think that relying on the collective opinions of Janni are insufficient as an explanation.
This is a setting where mind control magic exist, they don't necessarily get to have a say (through the easiest and most obvious method is wisely blocked by saying they can't do it if summoned).
I don't think invoking interference from deities is super satisfying either.
This line from the ritual doesn't really sound like it implies an instant 6 second notice and response time.
Wish Ritual wrote:
The power of the ritual alters reality to such a degree that even deities can't outright undo the wish, but they can react to the wish by sending servitors to take away the newly acquired riches, for example.
Still I think it's a better handwave than the first one.
Personally I think that allowing genies to grant full Wish-as-in-the-spell/ritual is excessive with the new higher power of that.
Hm, I guess drowning doesn't work anymore against regeneration, like it did in 1E?
Now that you mention it, by a strict reading of the rules I think it still does.
Regeneration says that:
Quote:
This monster regains the listed number of Hit Points each round at the beginning of its turn. Its dying condition never increases beyond dying 3 as long as its regeneration is active. However, if it takes damage of a type listed in the regeneration entry, its regeneration deactivates until the end of its next turn. Deactivate the regeneration before applying any damage of a listed type, since that damage might kill the monster by bringing it to dying 4.
While the drowning and suffocation rules says that:
Quote:
When you run out of air, you fall unconscious and start suffocating. You can't recover from being unconscious and must attempt a DC 20 Fortitude save at the end of each of your turns. On a failure, you take 1d10 damage, and on a critical failure, you die. On each check after the first, the DC increases by 5 and the damage by 1d10; these increases are cumulative. Once your access to air is restored, you stop suffocating and are no longer unconscious (unless you're at 0 Hit Points).
So strictly speaking regeneration doesn't protect against things that kills you without involving the dying condition.
The increasing damage wouldn't matter, but before too long the regenerator is going to crit-fail a save and just die.
As SuperBidi said, biting the coin was proof that the coin was real: if it bends, it's gold. It it doesn't bend/dent, it's some other metal with a gold paint.
Funnily enough historically it was often the other way around. (it depended on the time and place)
The real coins usually weren't pure gold, but included some amount of other metals (typically ~2 parts brass or copper to 22 parts gold for the good coins), which would make it too hard to mark with your teeth.
In addition to being soft, gold is however also heavy, so any forgers couldn't just add in more brass/copper without it being a dead giveaway.
So instead they might use lead , which is also pretty heavy, and galvanize it with a thin layer of gold. But lead is also soft, and it's slightly less heavy than gold so they couldn't put other stuff in to harden it as easily. All in all the almost entirely lead fakes would be softer than the mostly gold real ones.
Personally I'd consider letting tying it up work, at least for a while, after demonstrating that they could keep it down.
Yeah, rules wise it is very capable of breaking free from that, but I don't think it's reasonable for tying someone up to be impossible unless you are so much higher level than them that you got a theivery modifier 20 higher than the best of their athletics/acrobatics/unarmed attack.
I'd also remember that it isn't a mindless creature, it too will get tired of both the physical exhaustion and the pain.
In the time spent playing, how often do you see players inte tnionally taking 1d4 damage weapons and using them? And how often are they OK with this? I’m trying to get past the feels-bad of d4 things on lighter martials, or wondering if I should cheese up to d6 stuff anytime able. (Main goal at the moment is a swashgrappler.)
On this point, the Nightstick is an absolutely terrible weapon, there is no reason to use this over a Fist or a Shield.
It's a simple 1 handed Parry weapon. There are some feats, like Twin Parry, that do more when using Parry weapons and neither fist or shield qualify as weapons.
It's niche really vanished though once Rogue got martial weapon proficiency, as before the nightstick was the only parry weapon they could get [and could sneak attack with]. Now they can get a Main-gauche for Disarm and Versatile S instead of the Non-lethal of the nightstick.
Aren't you able to unarmed strike when your hands are full? Why not just have a shield and just make unarmed strikes?
I think I already explained it... Twin Parry, for instance, REQUIRES 2 weapons and gets a bonus when one has parry. A shield bash isn't a weapon. A fist, isn't a weapon. Or Double Slice, where it REQUIRES 2 melee weapons [and preferably one being agile] and neither a shield or a fist are weapons. You seem to be missing the fact that the options you suggest aren't weapons and that matters.
The bonus to Twin Parry is that the AC bonus becomes identical to what you'd get from raising a shield, instead of being inferior to it. Any given character would need some other thing to get an actual advantage from it, whether that is from the weapons other traits (doesn't apply to the night stick, since it's identical to a Fist attack), or from some other synergistic two-weapon fighting feat.
So in a sense you hadn't explained it yet, since you choose to gesture at Twin parry specifically.
Personally I think the issue here lies in reading the "lie" ability (which doesn't have the small action symbols" text of "doing so takes at least one round or longer if the lie is elaborate", as meaning it takes all your actions to do, rather than as meaning that it's still a free action, but it takes 6 seconds before they are done speaking.
Reading that section as through you where a dumb computer trying to cause a bug will give bad results with or without Pointed Questions.
Questioning someone while you walk-and-talk, so that you can automatically notice when they lie because they'll be forced to stop and stand still for six seconds would be equally nonsensical.
Castoroides are roughly black bear sized but weigh less and, IMO, black bears are pretty much on as small as Large gets: I wouldn't think twice if they were marked down as medium. So IMO, the size seems right.
Lagofirs though seem too big at large: I'd drop them to medium.
Black bears also used to be medium in PF1, so I wouldn't be surprised if the writer simply forgot that they got bumped up a category in the new edition.
I'd also drop the Lagofirs down to medium. Fits better with the description, and they don't have reach or anything.
I would however note that the 5-by-5ft for a medium creature or 10-by-10 for a large one is for battles, and includes having room to swing weapons, dodge and otherwise fight.
Living spaces can be a bit tighter than that, depending on what they are used for.
I've been quite a fan of Pathfinder since the first edition, I tried DD5, but I honestly don't like it, I much prefer Pathfinder 2e.
But I also like games with horizontal progression, so understand that I find that the HP goes up way too quickly.
I would like to know if there are rules solving this problem to stay at a "human" level of power.
Thank you all.
I too am among those whose first instinct would be to play something else that's better suited for that experience.
But in case you really like the rest of how pf2 works as a system, I have a suggestion for how you could get a lower power game with less superhuman characters.
The majority of PC power comes from levels, so I think you should go directly to the roots.
Cap the game level at 3. No PC's are higher than that, nor are "human"-level NPC (an elephant is still an elephant).
Afterward instead of levelling up, you can give them some small bonuses at whatever intervals you feel is right. An extra skill feat here or an ancestry feat - more substantive increases (and thus rarer ones) can be a class feat or a general feat.
After a bit you can give them a single 4th level feat as a capstone and/or a 5th level ancestry feat. Perhaps some increases to ability scores (if you give more than one of those they don't stack).
This is pretty close to the old E6 variant for dnd 3.5 or pf 1e, but with the level cap deliberately lowered because pf2 has a sharper power curve. (For instance by 6th level my monk could wrestle elephants, and if I had taken a different class feat I could have picked them up and thrown them too).
This should keep the power growth mostly horizontal - at some point the PC's might be close to 4th level in power, but I suspect they'd never quite get there.
You could also go with 4th level instead of 3rd, if you wanted a slightly higher power-level if you want people to be able to take more than just the dedication feat from archetypes
Given the clause about automatically defeating perception to see if they are the ancestry they appear as, and that the Shinigami's change shape is limited to one singular unique humanoid shape and can't be used to impersonate a creature, I don't think the DC matter.
Looks to me like the Shinigami can only use it for the narrow cases where the ability is unbeatable
I understand what they're trying to do, but why is it necessarily linked to an Archetype? It could have been a standard Way with its Feats added to the Gunslinger pool with the caveat that they require Spellcasting or something.
This feels like something easy to fix with homebrewing. The archetype as written is intended to accommodate an Arcadian gunslinger which is the place on Golarion that has had guns the longest but the quintessential Arcadian guns were "handheld metal tubes powered by magic that shot pellets of concentrated arcane energy". If you want to play a character in that tradition from level 1, you kind of want to have "conjure bullet" from the get-go. If you don't care about that you can just house rule that it's a regular way and the feats are just regular feats.
You have mentioned wanting "conjure bullet" from level 1 a few times in this thread as an advantage to spellshot being a class archetype.
As far as I can tell from looking at the archetype on Nethys you don't actually get that action until you take the dedication at second level. Am I missing something?
If it hadn't been an Archetype, then it wouldn't have been bound to the format of archetype feats only being available at even levels, and they could have "conjure bullet" a first level feat instead (still requiring Way of the Spellshot as its prerequisite).
The biggest example of where this leans into bonkers territory is when you evaluate the Shifting Rune and the fact that if it's allowed you could use the Shifting Rune to turn any Weapon or Object used as an Imp Weapon into ANY other standard piece of equipment in the universe that has the same general handedness which is just busted, especially if you don't end up artificially limiting Shifting to only allow the new forms be selected from either Common equipment or things the party already has "Access" to.
So shifting could work similar to a travelers all-tool, with the difference being that one could create complex tools and the other are limited to handedness for a similar price... Where is this bonkers? Both would allow for weapons and tools with a price of 200-225 gold. Seems pretty reasonable to me when the game already allows sets the expectation of having all your tools in one place at 200 gp and "A tool can usually be used as an improvised weapon": why would it working the opposite, making a weapon that works as a tool, be bonkers?
For one thing there's much more expensive options than 200 gp.
If you play in a world where they exist, a 6000 gp Steamflight pack is a non-magical object that could theoretically be used to hit people (using two hands I'd guess it's about the shape of a backpack and has a bulk of two).
Congratulations on your newfound flight for 250 gp (plus some water, a mundane funnel and whatever the cheapest two-handed weapon is)
Even if you don't a Greater Alchemical chart is a sturdy and ridgid one handed object that costs 19'000 gp - and the shifting rune doesn't contain the Any-tools limit on not creating "anything more complex [than basic tools]".
That's quite some savings for a high-level Alchemist right there
From a less cash focused perspective there's also the various mundane items that grants slight item bonuses to various checks, many of which could theoretically be used as an improvised weapon (again generally excluded from the Any-Tool for not being "basic").
The reason that taking damage can remove the confused condition is because it causes you to be able to clearly identify who your enemies are - the group of people attacking you.
So if your ally attacks you while you are confused and removes the confused condition, then you would consider your former allies as hostile towards you and act appropriately until the original duration of the confused condition ends.
But that isn't RAW either.
I don't think so, I think the idea is based around the shock, pain and adrenaline might give you a moment of clarity, rather than by making you identify foes.
After all someone confused might even attack themselves (or babble incoherently), so I don't think it's just a can't-tell-friend-from-foe thing.
In general I don't think that it's an oversight that confused doesn't specify foes attack - I think it's deliberate that you can snap your allies out of it that way.
Quote:
Also, for balance considerations:
The strict RAW reading (yes, you have to deal all damage that you are eligible for when hitting an ally to remove the confused condition) makes Snap Out of It a worthwhile feat.
If you are allowed to attack an ally for 1 point of damage with no feat investment, then the value of Snap Out of It goes down dramatically.
That said, I wouldn't let someone deal 1 point of damage through. It wouldn't make sense to me for you to have that level of control against a resisting foe that you still have to hit.
I could be convinced to let someone not add sneak attack, or weapon specialization bonuses and similar, but they would still have to roll their weapons damage dice, including any from runes.
Through I'm not sure how it'd change the usefulness of Snap Out of It if I did, since that feat makes the roll to get rid of confusion automatically succesful - removing the need for extra actions (and turns where the confused ally is trying to kill you) seems equally useful whether you are dealing 1 hp per hit or normal strike damage
I don't think ladders involve a skill check to climb, at least.
A ladder is the first example of an "untrained" sample climb task, through I do think that following the GM advice for untrained task and setting the DC at 10 sounds pretty unreasonable.
That'd be far to high a failure chance for a typical average person untrained in athletics, even in a stressful situation. (a trained first level adventurer with a decent but not amazing strength would feel even worse. 14 str AND athletics should definitely not give you a 1-5 chance of failing to ascend a ladder).
However I was a player in a game where it was given a DC of 0 in a combat situation, meaning that you mostly rolled to see if you crited (and thus moved faster) and that even untrained you only failed on a 1.
That seemed pretty reasonable to me.
Trip.H wrote:
Blocks is a weird item I'd not thought about before.
Quote:
Blocks - - - - - - Item 0
Source Grand Bazaar pg. 58
Price 1 sp
Hands 2; Usage held in 2 hands; Bulk L
These wooden blocks can be stacked to build flimsy structures. A standard set comes in a small sack with 12 blocks.
Could be useful to make a shoddy barricade with? Or jam up machinery? Not sure if this is supposed to be the child's toy or something bigger.
I think those are supposed to be the children's toy considering the light bulk for a sack of 12. Plus dolls is also on page 58 while toy carriages are on page 59 so I think that's the section of the book for various toys.
I'd note that Word of Recall also cannot change the location once cast (except by paying for the ritual again, much like how they could craft another magic tattoo).
Using Word of Recall as a basis for a scroll you'd also have to include the cost of the materials. rather than saying 5600 gp I think it's fair to divide the cost out among the 7 targets.
Rounding to a neat number 5000/7+600 = 1300 gp (before rounding we get 1314.29). That's the same price as the 8th level scroll of teleportation, so I think we might be in the right neighborhood here.
Now the scroll would allow you to go basically anywhere, rather than a preselected location, but at the same time it'd also
a) take up one of your hands,
b) take 10 minutes to cast (the activation time of the tattoo hasn't been explained) and
c) not give any bonus to hiding it.
I think that ultimately long-range certain-escape-by-teleportation just seems like something the game deliberately makes expensive, so as to restrict it to high levels, and perhaps to prevent it from being trivial even then.
If you really want it cheaper as the GM I might suggest as an explanation saying that the hidden wizard order needed to set up a big expensive ritual at the "point of return" that the tattoo's can then connect with.
That also gives you the option for plots related to the inquisition learning the location of the secret base and thus threatening to remove the escape option. (both plots where they do learn, and attack the place and plots where the PC have to stop them from learning/stop someone who did figure it out from reporting the location).
Going back to rule about initiative moving when people get knocked out:
I think that the bit about increasing time for the rest of the party to help you is only half of the story.
The other half is that it guarantees that if they [italics]do[/italics] heal you, then you are guaranteed to get to act before the foe who knocked you out get to act again.
I saw that happen in PF1 sometimes.
First a dangerous monster would knock someone down into the negatives.
Their turn would pass, without them dying, but while still bleeding out.
A friend would heal them.
Only for the dangerous monster to knock them down again (possibly killing them outright) on it's turn.
It was a bit bad feels, and also rather silly to my mind that you'd lose your turn due to having faster reaction-time than your friend the healer.
(Reaction time to danger was what initiative represented).
That's way more than 15 Scrolls and I only took the money spent on a weapon.
Shroud where presenting the scrolls for a single level (lvl 15 specifically) and calculated that starting with the lump sum of gold for that specific level you'd have 15 scrolls for that specific level.
Your calculation is for the entire 20 level career. Those numbers clearly aren't comparable.
If you divide those 94 scrolls by 20, you get 4.7 scrolls pr. level, which is a lot less than the 15 Shroud calculated.
Your main disagreement seems to be that Shroud thinks 15 scrolls would be to few, even if you only need to spend them while you is level 15 yourself - while you seem to be arguing that ~4.7 scrolls pr. level is plenty for the playstyle you have suggested.
I don't have the experience with high level play to judge that myself
Would this change how Stunned interacts with haste and other sources of conditional Quickened conditions? With this revision, because Quickened from haste only lets you Step, Stride, or Strike, it wouldn't let you use that action to reduce your Stunned condition. As I understand it in the existing rules, being Quickened would let you recover from Stunned faster because it doesn't matter what you could do with the extra actions from Quickened, Stunned just takes them away and reduces the Stunned value accordingly.
Good question! As written it would, as you wouldn't be able to use your extra action to recover, but if the intent is to be able to just lose the quickened action to reduce the stunned condition, that wouldn't be too difficult to implement either (e.g. "if you're quickened, you can always use the extra action to try to recover"). In practice, this is unlikely to come up very often, as most stuns don't tax enough actions to eat into your quickened action on top of that.
I'd come up much more often than that.
Currently you get to choose which actions you loose to Stunned per the rules on gaining and losing actions.
So you'd presumably choose to loose the extra action from quickened instead of one of your unrestricted actions.
What if a PC followed through, but then later retrained out of Druid Dedication? Do they really forget a whole language somehow?
I'd presume they'd lose it, much like how a PC would forget the Dwarven and Jotun they picked up with the Multilingual feat if they retrained that. (or for that matter same way they'd lose their training in Nature).
There wouldn't be anything supernatural about it either, it'd just be an exaggerated for game purposes example of people forgetting abilities they once had. Such as all the people who could speak one of french/german/spainish/etc. etc. back in school, but who then forgot it from disuse.
It just happens over 5 day instead of decades for both balance reasons and because decades are too long for most games.
If the story calls for a bean counting contest and someone comes out with a jar full of beans that feat has you covered.
The really sad thing about Eye for Numbers is that, Eye for Numbers wouldn't even let you win the "guess how many beans in the jar contest" (assuming the GM doesn't just go "wow, someone actually took Eye for Numbers I guess you win the contest then).
I wrote down the first 39 answers (skipping one that mumbled too much for me to hear), got bored and then skipped to the bit where the video maker said how many beans were actually in the jar (520).
Out of those 39 guesses - 3 where closer to the correct guess than the 500 Eye for Numbers would have given you, and 3 more where within the full "error margin" of Eye for Numbers.
Almost but not quite getting a bronze medal at the village fair bean guessing contest is pretty disappointing for a skill feat.
A good starting point might be the analysis in this forum post by Pronate analysing how existing weapons are balanced and their guide linked therein.
It boils down to some math about baseline damage and number of traits, as well as not all traits being equal.
Now this isn't perfect, and the systems have some limitations but it's a start, particularly if combined with the discussion in the rest of the thread.
for instance some combination of traits and stats doesn't appear in the game because they might be too much together even if they aren't to high "cost" in general.
It's probably relevant for what you want that the only weapons with both more than 1d6 damage and backstabber are requires two hands. Almost certainly because off-guard isn't that difficult to get and 1d8 is the max damage for a 1 handed weapon martial weapon in general.
For a not-complex version of the weapon I might go with something like the temple sword/khopesh like Jerdane suggest.
Martial sword, 1d8 Piercing damage, 1 hand, trip.
I'd accept the lack of an anti-shield trait from it's curve in much the same way I accept that a flail doesn't get anything like that despite being able to go around a shield with the chain. That is to say, all weapons have ways to avoid shields somewhat and I'd just accept that representing minor differences in how easy they are to use is below the system resolution.
If the shield trait is important to the conversion and I was willing to be a bit more ambitious I might homebrew a special trait.
Here I'd stay away from a to-hit bonus. That's real powerful in this system, even if circumstancially restricted, and outside of the normal weapon design space.
Instead I'd give it extra damage when the target used a shield block reaction (to the wielder not the shield) - probably equal to the number of damage dice (similar to the Razing trait which is also mostly an anti-shield trait in practice but halved since creature HP is more important than object HP).
I'd be OK with letting that stand on a 1-handed martial 1d8 weapon since the circumstance is so relatively narrow.
Personally I might handle paying NPC's transferring runes like this:
From one weapon/armor etc. to another it'd cost 10% and take a few days to around a week. Optionally they might be able to pay for a "rush job" to have it done in a single day. (no more than 15% of the total cost)
This logic is based on a comparison with crafting stuff (where it cost you the same to craft or to buy unless you spend extra time) - presumably the NPC need to spend that extra time to actually get some profit from it.
Transferring from a Runestone I'd make cost something similar to the "earn income" result for an expert of the items level (possibly increasing to master or legendary for truly powerful items). This is deliberately a mostly symbolic sum to reflect that transferring from a runestone start at free.
These options change balance and feeling somewhat, of course.
Yes, they do. Sometimes quite drastically. Either that or you are summarizing them too much to be accurate.
Replacing the dice with cards wouldn't be losing too much. But I don't see how it is gaining much either. Rolling dice takes about the same amount of time as drawing cards.
Popcorn initiative sounds like a terrible idea. What prevents some creatures from simply not being given a turn solely on the whims of the other players? 'Nope. We don't like you and/or your character. You just don't get a turn.'
And if that doesn't happen, then it feels like you are replacing the dice rolling and the minor bookkeeping of writing down an order, with no dice rolling but a lot more bookkeeping of having to keep track of which characters have gone this round and which haven't. As a side effect, this will also throw off the calculations and value of effects that last for one round. Which is something that I am used to simply accepting when playing with the block initiative organization that is popular in play-by-post.
Popcorn initiative still means everyone have to get a turn before the round is over. If it didn't the problem would be less the risk of targeted favoritism and more that there wouldn't be any reason to ever give the enemies a turn.
It's not my personal cup of tea through, I prefer the directness of rolling for initiative.
In regards to other possible systems of initiative, I also like how pathfinder uses the ability to shift your spot in the order when you go down to ensure everyone get's a chance to help you AND that if they do you get another turn before the foe that downed you. That way people don't get stuck in a loop of getting knocked unconsious and healed without getting to do anything as easily
I have also always read the ground as being an adjacent surface.
It's a surface and it's adjacent to you whenever you are standing on it.
Neither of those term have a special game meaning
That clause seems to be there to exclude those cases where there isn't anything for the target to be stuck to.
For instance a flying foe or one swimming in water.
This conversation is interesting because I have never run scrolls as parchment you need to read. I have always thought that scrolls basically had magical instructions written into the parchment and by pushing magic through it it "runs" the instructions and creates the effect.
Kind of like the scroll being a macro, the writing being the code, and the caster just needing to execute it by pushing magic through.
Its also why someone who can't cast a spell can't cast a scroll. Its not that they can't read it, but that they don't have the magic to execute the command.
It also solves the sticky problem of characters with disabilities, language barriers, and light levels.
Interesting and makes sense … until we sort out how to Trick it to work, simce the feat only requires skill proficiency, not spellcastimg, I think.
Under that interpretation you probably do it the same way.
It's just that you don't personally know how to shape magical energy into a spell, but your knowledge of the specific magical tradition (as represented by your skill proficiency and skill feat) still allows you to push the required magical energy into the scroll.
(either from yourself or ambient magic from the world in general depending on how your game table has magic work).
Perhaps it might be worth it to go Kobold instead of human to gain the kobold breath, ancestry feat. That'd give you another offensive ability targeting reflex that doesn't "just" give off-guard. Plus it's another area of attack thing which isn't restricted to enemies directly next to you.
You could either add Dragon Breath for a 1/hour damage and area boost or Dragonblood paragon for persistent damage on a crit fail at 9th level
"Sorry, you rolled too well!" is very unlikely to happen at my table.
Agreed. At most I might increase the DC slightly if they needed to land on an exact and narrow spot - as in enough less than 5ft that the difference would seem worth bothering about.
Them being generic probably make them better for my purposes. I find that for me It's generally easier to adapt those to the specific NPCS needed for my campaign rather than the other way around.
My fighter had additional lore two times on dinosaurs and xulgath in an extinction curse game alongside an INT of 18 by level 10, so, yes? He also had blind fight and a movement speed of 35 in a party that used a lot of solid fog and wall spells to control enemies. He was a he also had improved knock down, swipe, and his runes were absolutely not damage focused with ghost touch and greater fearsome by level 12.
I was almost always getting 2 attacks of opportunity against a boss creature with a massively debuffed AC (flanked and knocked down) or the boss was attacking with a -4 from being afraid and prone , usually also with a 20% miss chance that didn’t affect me and paladin to give me damage resistance and take advantage off all the accuracy my debuffing gave out.
Maul crit specialization was too good and worthy of nerfing (swipe was ridiculous against mounted foes), but that is only going to make Improved Knockdown strike better.
But my main point is that your build at level 12 could do 10 to 15 more points of damage with an attack (something I doubt) and I still wouldn’t say your character was more powerful than mine in a way that would have ended encounters faster or with my party taking less damage. So I don’t see any version of power creep that would affect actual game play and not just white room math.
I don't think this changes your overall argument, but being flanked and knocked down doesn't stack for debuffing AC. Both of them makes the creature flat-footed
The blurb mentions both guidance on making your own NPC's and a lot of premade ones.
Could you say a bit about what sort of NPC's the premade ones are?
Are they specific ones (Commander Examplius Hellknight of the order of the for instance) with backstories and personalities and such or more general ones (like Dark Knight commander)?
I'd also be interested in what their philosophy with regards to how "PC-like" an NPC should be.
The shadow is an undead creature not an extraplanar creature. It is not affected by the spell. What the text is talking about is if the shadow dancer decided to send the shadow way, not the spell. The description makes that clear by the stating “the shadowdancer chooses to dismiss it”.
Extraplanar is not mutually exclusive with Undead, I think you are confusing it with Outsider.
Extraplanar is just a subtype literally any creature gets whenever they are a different plane from their native one.
The bestiaries just add the subtype to creatures expected to be encountered outside of their native plane but that's just a shorthand as the actual rules for the subtype makes clear.
If the Wight or Skeleton is not currently on their native plane it'd work perfectly well on them both.
Azothath wrote:
so incorporeal undead (in PF1) are from the Material plane and not affected. The incorporeal ability has replaced etheral and shadowplane (flavor) connections from DnD 3.5.
That's not actually true the Incorporeal subtype and is straight from 3.5, (slightly changed in that magical but non-ghost-touch attacks now do 50% damage with a 50% chance other effects either don't work or has their full effect, while in 3.5 it was just 50% chance of no/full effect for everything magical but not-ghost-touch).
Now a lot of incorporeal undead in Golarion are native to the prime material, but that's not universal (not even in that specific setting), there's also some Shadows native to the Shadow Plane for instance and ghosts would presumably either be native to the same plane as when they where alive or where they died depending on DM judgement.
To return to the original question:
Whether a Shadowdancers Shadow could get banished by Dismissal would depend on whether it was currently on it's native plane. If it is then it's immune but if it isn't then it can get sent back to that plane.
Which plane is it's native plane would depend on where the Shadowdancer summoned it from. Which is unspecified in the ability, and therefore a DM call.
Personally I have always imagined it as being made from the dancers own (literal) shadow and would thus see it as native as the same plane as the shadowdancer, or perhaps the plane the ability was first used on. But it could be any plane with shadows native to it, like the material plane, shadow plane, negative energy plane or even certain layers of the Abyss.
Sorry to cast thread resurrection, but I can not figure out all Arueshalae skills and feats. Can someone show me how, especially starting with "default succubus" skills / feats.
Also, is there a level up for her?
thanks,
-- david
I know this is a pretty late response, but on the off chance that it is still helpful I am going to make it anyway.
Her feats pretty simple through they aren't based on the default succubus, but instead directly on her HD (you can also do this with default monsters if you feel like it to make them a bit more special, just watch out for bonus feats.)
14 hitdice make for 7 feats.
Her skills on the other hand are a lot tougher.
They appear to also be a redistribution of her skill points from her racial hit dice 8*(6+int) plus those from her class level 6*(6+int+1 for favored).
However after adding all her various bonuses ie.
+8 racial to bluff and perception (from being a succubus)
+4 to disguise and bluff from deceitful (assuming at least 10 ranks)
+3 from all her skills being a class skill (fly, from having a fly speed, everything else except acrobatics from Master Spy and presumably acrobatics instead of intimidate from the succubus since that is no longer "thematically fitting as the outsider type specifies" and we need the bonus).
+6 to bluff, disguise and sense motive (from her levels in Master Spy)
+1 luck to all skill from her Swallowtail Bracers
My calculations results in her needing the following number of ranks:
14 Acrobatics
15 Bluff
6 Diplomacy
15 Disguise
11 Fly
6 Knowledge (Geography)
6 Knowledge (Planes)
8 Knowledge (Local)
7 Knowledge (Religion)
14 Perception
15 Sense Motive
15 Stealth
15 Use Magic Device
The problem is that this is a) a total of 147, rather than the 140 she should have and b) her maximum number of ranks should be 14 due to her hitdice.
However I noticed some other strange things about her sheet, specifically she has +1 more to Reflex and Will than she should, and she also has 3d6 sneak attack instead of the 2d6 her levels would give her. this is exactly what she would have gained with a 7th level in Master Spy.
I therefore hypothesize that she at one point in the design process had 7 levels in Master Spy and that a few small mistakes were made when her level was lowered.
The Imbue with Flight spell lets you. Cast it multiple times on boulders of up to 500 lbs/caster level, fly them over the target at an altitude beyond the range of dispel and dismiss the spell. How much damage does a 3500+ lb rock falling 3000 or so feet do?
20d6 as it happens. Colossal object falling (10d6 base) falling over 150ft (double). The castle is probably going to survive without much worse for wear.
Actually it would only deal 4d6 damage, rock is quite heavy you see, so even if 3500+ lb meant 4320 lb. then that would still only be a boulder 3 ft on each size, meaning that it would be small sized not colossal.
And that weight doesn't even help for arguing that the damage should be increased as an inverse of the rule for lowering damage for light falling things, because rocks are explicitly the baseline.
Falling object damage was severely nerfed in pathfinder (probably because it used to be an ridiculously easy way for a 3rd level wizard to beat down the Tarrasque*, shrink item a flying familiar and a readied action was really all it took.)
*or other high level monsters, but it was usually the Tarrasque
You need the entire skin of the animal, however you "wear" it as part of transforming yourself not as clothes beforehand.
It's how shapeshifting works in scandinavian mythology/folklore, if you want to imagine how it looks
this pictureof Loki transforming into a Hawk could be helpful.
I find it interesting that everyone but me so far has almost reflexively assigned this quote to good:
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”
I think the direct appeal to good and evil is somewhat deceptive here, as the quote itself does not indicate what the speaker believes to be good or evil. It's very easy to see this statement being twisted to support knights templar-like extremism. In that light I feel it could skew towards any alignment.
While I cannot speak for anyone else, I didn't assign the above quote to Good reflexively.
Rather I placed it there because I feel one of the key differences between good and neutral lies not in what they would wish to happen to other people but rather in how much of their own comfort they are willing to lose for the sake of a stranger.
While it could be twisted into extremism by a deluded evil, so could most if not all, philosophical underpinnings of good, and I don't feel that this quote has such a special danger of this that it should be taken as representing it.
Ooh this sounds like a very interesting idea.
Probs by the way for selecting significantly more than nine quotes by the way.
Spoiler:
Quote:
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
Could be any alignment, as long as it is in their active variants rather than their passive variants.
Quote:
“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.” ― Elie Wiesel
Again equally aplicable to any alignment.
Quote:
“May you live every day of your life.” ― Jonathan Swift
Chaotic good or Neutral
Quote:
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” ― Albert Camus
Any, depending on what they say that ”man” is, and whether they think that it is a good or a bad thing.
Quote:
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” ― William Shakespeare
Lawful neutral to evil.
Quote:
“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.” ― Isaac Asimov
Chaotic Good or Lawful evil.
Quote:
“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.” ― Voltaire
Lawful but not strongly so.
Quote:
“Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.” ― Terry Pratchett
Definitively Chaotic but Good, Neutral or Evil depends on what sort of thing seems like good ideas to the believer.
Quote:
"The ends justify the means." – Niccolò Machiavelli
Lawful evil, Neutral Evil or any of the Neutrals, through the end closer to evil than not.
Non-evil can subscribe to similar ideas but the sympethatic Evils embody it
Quote:
“The life of man (in a state of nature) is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” – Thomas Hobbes
Depends entirely on whether they see this as a good thing or not. Druidic Neutral Evil, or any cynical Lawful from good to evil are the classic answers.
Quote:
“One cannot step twice in the same river” – Heraclitus
Any.
Quote:
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation” – Jeremy Bentham
Communal Lawful good – as opposed to code based lawful good.
Quote:
“Liberty consists in doing what one desires” – John Stuart Mill
Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Evil.
Quote:
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance” – Socrates
If we ignore that Socrates mean that you won't do evil if you truly know what you are doing?
Neutral Evil. If we include the context then Neutral Good.
Quote:
“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god” – Aristotle
Lawful Neutral
Quote:
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation” – Plato
Philosophy of Sense Motive, no strong alignment implications.
Quote:
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” - ?
Any Good.
Quote:
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong” – Bertrand Russell
Any Neutral, or Evil. More non-Lawful than Lawful.
Quote:
“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness” – Immanuel Kant
A stern Lawful Good - ”ourselves” is the key word keeping it from neutral or evil.
Quote:
“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Any non-chaotic
Quote:
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest” – Denis Diderot
Chaotic Neutral at best, easily slips into Evil like any fanatic.
Quote:
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” – Karl Marx
Any Alignment again active rather than passive variants.
Quote:
“Virtue is nothing else than right reason” – Seneca the Younger
Neutral to Lawful Good (implicit assumption that all people that reasons well will chose to do good). Alternatively any intellectual Evil (implicit assumption that good and evil doesn't exist and reason should therefore be judged only on it's competence).
Quote:
“Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature” – John Locke
Lawful Neutral
Quote:
“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”― Immanuel Kant
Good with a capital G. Expressed in a lawful manner but the underlying ideal can be found in any of the good alignments.
So damage at range takes the fun out of the contest, but literal immunity to the rats doesn't?
You're right, that does seem entirely arbitrary now that I think about it. Probably just because we were more familiar with the various races that can grant flight from level 1, and the combo of one of those + any of the classes with a damage dealing cantrip seemed more obvious to us than the synthesist did.
But sure, if you have some more interesting way in mind of using flight + a ranged attack/think that is more fun than the alternative go ahead.
Val'bryn2 wrote:
And based on the rules you give, I'ld go for elf monk, combat reflexes and weapon finesse. Dex is your primary score, strength can probably be left at 12, and there you go. AoO every time a rat tries to hit you, so you'll be killing between 6-7 a turn.
Hmm. Lets assume the elf gets to use their movement to always move at least 10 ft away from the nearest rat (to ensure they don't avoid all those tasty AoO's by 5ft-stepping). I don't think the elf would actually get such perfect conditions as the rats would probably surround them after a few rounds.
If the rats have to charge to reach the elf then they get hit on a 6 (+5 dex, +1 base attack) or 75% of the time.
With a strength of 12, each hit knocks a fresh rat unconscious outright 3/6th of the time, and staggers it a further 1/6th of the time given that the rats have 4 HP, however since it takes 1 damage when it attacks, it too goes down right after.
All in all, half of the elfs attacks kill a rat, so approximately 3.5 dead rats a turn.
Charging rats hit the elf on a 11 assuming a AC of 17 (+5 dex, +2 wisdom), and 5 rats get to attack each turn (4 max in the square, but one goes down immediately after attacking and thus another can take it's place). If they hit they inflict 1 nonlethal damage, so 2,5 non-lethal a turn.
Assuming the elf have 9 hit points (10 con, +1 favored) they go down in turn 4 or 5 having defeated 14-18 rats.
Given that monks are relatively poor with an average 35 starting gp that leaves 332-336 rats alive and consious.
If the Elf positions themselves so that the rats don't charge then they need an 8 to hit (65% chance) and the damage is the same as otherwise, for an average 3,033... dead rats a turn.
The rats now need a 13 to hit for an average damage of 1,75.
The elf now goes down after 5-6 turns, having defeated around 15-18 rats.
All this assumes that both Int and Cha is dumped completely, and you can alter the numbers a bit by distributing the points a bit differently between Wis and Con, but ultimately that doesn't change too much.
So some of my friends and I were shooting the breeze and came up with a fun silly little optimization challenge, which I thought some of the fine folk on these message boards might also find entertaining.
The basic premise is as follows:
You are a 1st level character that has spent ALL your starting gold to buy rats, at 1 copper a piece.
You and they are then placed on an infinite flat featureless plane where you will do battle. You win if you kill all the rats, they win if you die before doing so.
Rules:
20 bp, average starting wealth (which remember is all used to buy Rats) and 2 traits.
You are not allowed to have both a source of permanent flight and any way of doing damage at range, as this takes all the fun out of the challenge.
Currently our most successful build is an Aasimar Synthesist Summoner, since those can gain DR 1/evil from their favored class bonus, and thus be imune to the 1 nonlethal damage a rat does when it hits.
Can you fair community come up with any other builds which can complete this Ratslayer Challenge?
Hard Mode: spend a trait on Rich Parents for a total of 90000 rats.
Fundamentally Spellcraft is used by anyone that have it to identify spells, not just spell casters.
This is because Spellcraft itself represent having studied how to identify Spells and their effects, so your hypothetical sorceror who haven't studied magic wouldn't have spellcraft, in the same way that he wouldn't have Craft: weaponsmithing if he hadn't studied how to smith weapons, or knowledge: the planes if he haven't studied the planes and their outsiders.
I guess you are right, while i'm just bad at english...
So in order to use effectively the exceptional pull feat i should have a STR score of 24, in which case the feat is simply "+2 damage and maybe save some gp"...
well thanks, vegetalss4
No problem, we have all misread something at one point or another in our lives. I am just glad I could help :-)
Well, firstly Exceptional Pull just allow you to ignore the penalties on your attack roll from not having at least as much strength as your composite bow. It doesn't allow you to add a strength bonus that you don't have to damage .
So in your example both situations would do 1d8 damage.
Now a different example
a)
STR 20
+1 Adaptive composite bow +0 STR.
price: 3400 gp
Damage: 1d8+6
b)
STR 20
+1 composite bow +3 STR.
price: 2700 gp + 1 feat
Damage: 1d8+6
In this case character b spends one feat to save 700 gp, but have to buy an entirely new bow should his STR ever increase in order to take full advantage, which will quickly become much more expensive.
Also even if you know that your STR will never increase, 700 gp is a rather poor return for a feat.
If you and your GM are okay with having to make up the rules for how exactly it would work, you could use Polymorph any object to turn yourself into one of the diminutive or fine creatures out there, possibly using one of the above methods to shrink from diminutive to fine.
I would suggest being a gnome and turning into a Sprite or Elder Witchlight. Gnome to get the +2 "related bonus" to the duration.
I haven't, because the numbers are only used in international relations, where you normally wouldn't be rolling for NPC kingdoms against the PC kingdom. And it's not like the players would know what the exact scores of other powers are, although they would known general reputations.
If I where to use fame/infamy as a way to measure the relative glory of the PC's kingdoms as compared to their neighbors, I would indeed have to actually tell them what their neighbors score actually are.
But as they cannot be famous if no-one has heard of them, I am fine with doing this.
Spatula wrote:
If you wanted numbers, I would base them on the kingdoms' age. Places that have been around forever might have several hundred Fame just from events over their long history. Fame gained from buildings would be rather paltry in comparison. In that sense, it would hard for the PC kingdom to ever catch up, because it doesn't have the history that older powers do.
True, this would be a problem. However I might be able to solve that problem if I house-ruled fame from events so that it only lasted for a given amount of time (say 10-25 years perhaps).
So, I am about to start GMing a kingmaker campaign using the "new and improved" kingdom rules from Ultimate Campaign, and would like some advice.
When I saw the Fame/Infamy Rules, which got me thinking: While it might be pretty fun to use these rules as a kind of measure of the prestige of the players nation, this would be even more fun if they could compare their scores with other kingdoms.
After all having a good reputation is good, having a better one than your neighbors is much better.
However I am unsure how much fame/infamy I should give said neighbors so that they can serve as milestones to meaningfully surpass/fail to surpass depending on actions throughout the campaign.
Therefore I now ask you the forums if anyone happens to have done something similar? and if so which scores did you use?
