xn0o0cl3's page

I created this class for an upcoming Curse of the Crimson Throne. The class is inspired by the urban witchcraft of Dishonored's main characters, Corvo Attano and Doud, and China Mieville's Bas-Lag series, which I found difficult to create in Pathfinder. Witch/rogue/arcane trickster was just too weak to build and I didn't think it really got the feel of Corvo just right, so I built this instead. It's mostly just for personal use, since I found the style of Dishonored to be really cool, but I hope some other people out there might like the class.

Any critiques/suggestions are welcome, of course. In particular, if anyone has any suggestions for a better name, I'd be glad to have them. Athame is the only thing I could come up with that fits the typical Pathfinder pattern. Personally, I'm calling it a witch assassin.

Anyways, check out the witch/slayer here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12sB6waaS1TZcT2dVZuTXzHpmBV7eZL_75PyM38x R4tc/edit?usp=sharing

From where I sit, Scott has been very reasonable. If you'renot inteested in discussion on this topic why are you in this thread?

Yea, I'm kind of in the same boat... I've been having a good discussion with him. We'll probably be much smaller on the mods' lock-radar if you guys just stop posting to each other in here.

Can anyone explain what a piece of "honest" game journalism would look like? I honestly can't really conceive of it. What can a game review actually be except for an extension of game advertising? Are honest game reviews supposed to be objective or something? How would that even be possible if the review is literally just the opinion of the journalist? What else could it possibly be?

Or maybe a Mad Monkeys variant.

If I had to venture a guess, I would say that negative reactions to using toon to refer to characters in Pathfinder (and probably other tabletops) is a symptom of the 3.5-4e edition wars. One of the major complaints that came up again and again was that 4e was felt more akin to a tabletop MMO than a PPRPG. Regardless of whether that complaint was valid or not, it was prevalent, and since toon comes from MMO jargon, I would say that people became more adverse to its being used in PPRPGs.

Personally, I don't care if people I play with use it because I know some of them come from MMO backgrounds, although it does make me automatically expect them to enjoy combat and character builds more than RP. The constant appearance of debates over the Stormwind Fallacy are evidence enough that a lot of people have adverse reactions to players favoring "role-play" over "roll-play," so when someone says toon there's a good chance someone else will have a knee-jerk negative reaction to it.

A warpriest with the community blessing that dual wields a hammer and sickle.

In our Evil Kingmaker game, our grand diplomat has had to shout, on more than one occasion, "WE HAVE MORE TO WORRY ABOUT RIGHT NOW THAN A DEAD PROSTITUTE!"

"Scandal" shows up a lot on our event phases.

Our party is actually playing the evil clockwork empire in our Kingmaker game :p I'd love to see what you came up with for Pitax! We have a few homebrew additions from our own game, namely a Gunworks and a Factory building as well as a revised Hellknight PrC, which I can share if you'd like.

That spell is awful and I have a vested interest in hearing the conclusions from this thread.

As far as I know, there's no official ruling about how actions that take place at the same time resolve. I let the spell work against attacks, but that just seemed like a common sense adjudication to me. If you can't use it against attacks, why can you use it against a ceiling collapse? Also, even though there's no general rule about getting to interrupt other actions, the general rules also do not restrict when they can be used:

an immediate action can be performed at any time—even if it's not your turn.

Emphasis mine. So there's no limitation on when you can use them in the rules. My guess is that whoever wrote EFS forgot to define the parameters under which it can be used, but we'll never know that unless a dev comes in to clarify. I'm just gonna call the spell OP for now.

This is the thread where dead horses are beaten.

"I found this gun. It's the manufacturer's fault that I killed someone with it!"

We are currently running an Evil Kingmaker. Since we are all in school, GM included, it's been largely run as-is. As other posters have noted, this hasn't been a huge problem since most enemies in KM will come after you regardless of your party's alignment. I think the biggest problem we've had was that the antipaladin has barely used his smite, but your regular paladin will encounter the same problem in an AP filled with neutral monsters.

The party consists of a human antipaladin who is essentially a walking, flesh bound force of violence that we just point at any problem that we need to be murdered. He is the warden. The king is a 3pp clockwork oracle who builds clockworks and machines ("miracles"), and runs the kingdom just like Machiavelli would have. The kobold synthesist summoner turns himself into a black dragon and wades into melee. The antipaladin usually rides him, and he serves as the general. We also have a Tyrion Lannister-esque rogue/sorceror who has his diplomacy and bluff skills jacked so high he can talk us out of virtually anything, and a tiefling gunslinger who runs a brothel and acts as our spymaster. She occasionally hints at eating patrons.

Here are some of the ways that the AP's most significant plot points were resolved with an evil party as well as the more interesting changes that have come about as a result of the evil party (warning, spoilers ahead!):

- Book 1 was almost completely normal. Our treatment of the bandits was just exceptionally brutal at times and the antipaladin seduced Svetlana into cheating on Oleg at one point.

- Book 2 got more interesting. Our ruling council is quite a bit more aggressive than a normal party might be, so we broke out the mass combat rules early, raising a militia in order to deal with the troll horde in the south. We still dealt with Gregori through diplomacy in front of our people, but he was mysteriously "disappeared" that night. We decided that Melianse was a threat to the kingdom's industry and killed her. Unfortunately (and hilariously) the antipaladin had decided to see what living as a werewolf for a while would like, and he turned in front of the lumberjacks after we saved them, meaning we had to kill them too so word about the lycanthrope on the council wouldn't get out. We plotted a conspiracy against Jhod, the priest of Erastil, in which we blamed him and Erastil for all the trouble that nature had been giving us. The king instated a new state religion by simultaneously unveiling our nation's first clockwork miracle, a large construct designed to defend the capital from future owlbear attacks, and convincing the public that Jhod, his religion, and nature were to blame for all the nation's recent troubles. The state religion, which worships machines, innovation, and industry, is mostly used as tool for maintaining state control by inspiring nationalism.

- Book 3 continues to become more insidious, as there are many more opportunities for evil solutions to the problems your PCs face. When we discovered the souls of the citizens of Varnhold, we sold them of course, summoning a contract devil and selling the souls to the forces of Hell. We populated Varnhold with our own citizens, and forced the centaurs off of their land with an army.

Our GM tells us that Book 4 will be significantly altered to include some good enemies. He has also included some encounters that indicate that Erastil is pretty upset with us for trampling over nature with industry and banishing his faith in the region. I'm also currently writing a sequel campaign which takes place 150-200 years in the future where the PCs will lead a revolution to overthrow the evil empire that we create in Kingmaker.

Our group is currently playing Kingmaker with an evil party (Tyrantmaker!)

We are aggressively expansionist, so we sold the souls of the citizens of Varnhold and moved our own people in. This made the process of expanding into Varnhold take about two months.

Our GM statted up the centaurs as an army. We'd had reports that small bands of centaur had begun patrolling Varnhold and the rest of the western Nomen Heights, and when our first group of settlers arrived the centaur army quickly descended on the village. Luckily, our alchemist and our antipaladin, who is one of our primary martial characters, had decided to provide escort. While the army approached we quickly barricaded our citizens in the fort and the antipaladin met the centaur leader, who basically gave us a "leave and never settle these lands, we've already had enough conflict with the other humans who lived here" ultimatum. We naturally refused, so the alchemist did a plague-bomb run while the antipaladin managed to slaughter their leader, the second in command, the third in command, and about 30 centaurs in what was definitely one of the most impressive combats we've had in our six years of gaming.

After that we raised our own army and marched them east to drive the centaur out. Our scouts discovered that the centaur were in such poor shape after two weeks of being ravaged by leprosy from the alchemist's plague bombs that they were packing up and getting ready to abandon their territory. Their army was still active, however, and we discovered that they had allied themselves with a bunch of fey and several sympathetic azatas that Erastil had sent to aid them (we've been really brutal to anything nature too; we've built a pretty strong anti-nature discourse and our citizens hate Erastil). The azatas met us in a small copse of trees and gave us yet another "leave or die" ultimatum, which we refused yet again. They attacked, but as we fought we found out they were just trying to buy time - a small army of treants was hidden in the trees and began bombarding our army. We rolled well though and managed to fight them off. The centaur army arrived shortly after we finished off the treants, and we summarily decimated them, thus securing the eastern portion of the Nomen Heights.

That's our story about the Centaur Wars!

Guys we just had a 100% successful thread with a problem presented and then solved, don't try and bait a religious (or whatever) argument, DON'T SCREW THIS UP BRO

It´s a Christmas miracle!

Kingmaker is awesome, although I dunno how the kingdom ruling subsystems would fly with a new group. It's a great campaign though, so you could just run it with the "kingdom in the background" option.

Skull & Shackles is all right. Our group never really got into it. I dunno if new players would be able to handle the moral ambiguity in that game. It usually takes some finesse to play non-good characters, especially when you're doing piratey stuff.

Jade Regent is supposed to be a great one, Paizo put a ton of work into it.

You'll have a hard time finding any AP that doesn't have demons or devils in it though. You may want to consider just swapping them for something else when they appear in the AP, cuz they're in just about all of them to some degree or another. I think Kingmaker has the fewest - there's just a couple daemons scattered around.

Well the rolling method you used is going to generate much higher than average ability scores to begin with.

I'd recommend just switching to point buy though. Our group got to a point that our rolled ability scores were getting crazy and we made the switch. We've all been much, much happier with point buy.

Bouncing back and forth, reading through:

I do have to agree on the Advanced Race Guide. I was extremely frustrated with that entry, like Orcs of Golarion before it. Looking closer at the Half-orc entry in the ARG might be worth a follow-up though, because it actually offers more positive possibilities that the Orc entry failed to deliver.

I'm honestly surprised the ugly origins traditionally forced on half-orcs didn't get a closer look. That's always been one of my biggest problems with the stereotypical take on orcs.

Looking at how videogame settings like Warcraft and Elder Scrolls bucked many of those stereotypes and actually took orcs in new directions might be worth a look too. Always felt tabletop gaming fell short compared to those takes.

Not saying I don't love Elder Scrolls and Warcraft a whole whole bunch, but didn't they just turn Orcs into the Noble Savage? I've never seen the imaginary cultures those two franchises came up with for Orcs as being particularly free of racist cliches either.

Because Tolkien said that was what he meant by what he wrote. In the end the only thing that matters is what the author meant. To say otherwise, just simply means your wrong. Period.

Intentional Fallacy

Day 8: Hope running low.

Got email from Paizo. Spirit rises! Smile begins to grow!

"Beginner's Box set PDF has been updated."

FUUUUUHHHHHHH-

Everyone needs to just enjoy a good read of Foucault's History of Sexuality and realize that gender and sexual orientation aren't even real and that no one should want to get married in the first place.

One of the players in our group is a big fan of making silly/clever items like these.

I think my favorite has been a variation on the necklace of fireballs that people have been mentioning here. Just tie one to an alchemist's flask! Kind of expensive for a grenade, but awesome. (Upon rereading the rules, I'm not sure if an alchemist's flask counts as a magical fire attack. As a GM I'd say so, just for the sake of awesome).

A sack of weasels and sovereign glue also made for fun, if not particularly useful shenanigans. You can really find all sorts of uses for unbreakable glue though and I've become a big advocate of its use.

Yea, this whole idea of "evil automatically = self-centered, paranoid sociopath" just doesn't hold up. Being evil does not bar you from feeling love, loyalty, trust, or any other emotion that leads people to work together.

If backstabbing, power-hungry, "mwahahaha" cliches are the only evil characters you can imagine, then sorry bro, you've gotta work that imagination a little harder.

DigitalMage wrote:

ImperatorK wrote:

I don't understand. I know there are adventure path. So?

I guess some people feel that the quality of the Golarion setting and the Adventure Paths makes the Pathfinder RPG what is? I have seen it before in RPG.net threads where someone asks to sell them on the Pathfinder RPG, some people talk up the setting rather than actually talk up the RPG.

Exactly that. In fact, I mentioned it earlier in this thread.

In many ways, the APs as complete campaigns lend a missing balance component to the rules. And the intent of the rules is clarified by the campaign and the contexts that it generates.

This is not whimsy. Without this understanding of the APs, I would probably be in the camp that complains about all the balance problems etc. But if you see the rules in practice, and in context, in the APs, the game makes a lot more sense.

+1 to that man, Pathfinder wouldn't be half as awesome for our group without the AP line. I know that sounds kind of lame if you prefer making your own campaigns, but for someone without the time to make his own games anymore the APs are generally really high quality & a LOT of fun.

I'm pretty sure Paizo created the RPG in order to give continuing to support to their AP line after Wizards ditched them too... So Pathfinder is based on 3.5, but is also based around the AP line.

"Harrigan's Folly"

Cuz we're ballsy.

I find the lack of a supreme being to be vastly more comforting than the alternative.

This is a mostly-related post a friend just made. I decided to share, cuz it's damn funny:

Dear Kirk Cameron,

If bananas fitting perfectly in our hands is evidence of God's existence, then certainly pineapples are evidence that there is no god.

A**hole.

And exactly what is the intention ofthis trhead BNW?

To prove hell.

So, I'm mulling around the idea of running an AP starting in August, but I'm not looking for something that will require an enormous amount of my time to GM (Kingmaker was my last game, had to quit because it just required too much of my time to run alongside school. Friggin love that campaign though). I'd like to have something I can complete in 6-7 months since I spend my summers out of the country, and I would also REALLY like to run Carrion Crown, which seems like it would fit the bill. From what I've gathered there aren't many sandbox elements and it's fairly rail-roady. With regular 5-6 hour sessions once a week, would completing the campaign by say, May, be plausible (7 months)?

Thanks for the feedback. I'll talk to the DM and we'll probably agree to not do that again.

As it stands, the group is fairly new to PF and this DM is new to that role in general. The small party we have was in danger of being wiped out by one ghoul as a result of some bad dice rolls so I'm sure that played into his ruling.

Unfortunately, the ghoul escaped and when I stop raging I'll be tired and paralyzed along with at least one other character. Guess we'll deal with that next week.

- Cule

If you guys are new but your GM is willing to not only make an on-the-fly call like that in a tough encounter for dramatic effect, but also go back after the session and consider the balance implications of that call, then my friend, you and your group are headed in the right direction.

Dude, you're the GM, don't make posts on forums mid-session to get past a rules problem. Know why? Cuz you're the GM, and your interpretation of the rules is the LAW. Plus you never want to let a rules question halt your game. Make your judgment call and explain to your players politely but firmly that any further discussion will have to wait until after the session, when you will be glad to hear their arguments.

But for real, this is a problem? The goblin falls asleep. What do YOU think happens when someone suddenly falls asleep?

And I think it should be pretty clear by now that the argument against his interpretation of Asmodeus is pretty moot by now (looking at you, 8 red wizards). Nearyn's Golarion is not your Golarion, which is not my Golarion, which is not even the devs' Golarion. To argue any differently is to defeat the purpose of... well, Golarion.

Burn a pentagram into the door of an opposing god's cleric? Help a lawful evil government official in his next power play? Trick a good official into doing something tyrannical? Help a cleric of Asmodeus bring a devil into the world by subsidizing the price of the planar ally spell, then help said devil attain a position of power in the mortal realm?

Hey! Glad to hear you're about to run Kingmaker! It's an awesome campaign. After having run it myself though, I would actually recommend doing away with the xp system entirely in this particular game & simply leveling the PCs when the book says to. I found that due to the hugely open ended nature of the game I was finding places where I wanted to add in extra encounters & quests, be they my own home brew, Paizo modules, etc., but was unable to for fear that the party would end up with an xp surplus & plow through later events in the AP. A lot of this problem did come from having an overpowered group, but since Kingmaker really does leave you so many tantalizing opportunities to expand upon what it provides you, I would highly recommend nixing the traditional xp system. I think it'll help you out a lot in the long-haul :]

Especially in a game about pirates. No one wants to play realistic pirates. They're gross.

I suspect you may be letting your sense of realism get in the way of your sense of fun. This is almost always a bad idea.

Yup, and I will add that you are treading a dark and dangerous road by allowing this to happen.

I dunno what's up with all these negative nancies in here (WE ALL KNOW x class could do it better, that's not the point), but I think that sounds like a damned-cool combat for your magus. Kudos on the epic last stand!

- It is incorrectly noted that Thomas Edison invented push-ups in 1878. Nikolai Tesla had in fact patented the activity three years earlier, under the name "Tesla-cize."

- In Victorian England, a commoner was not allowed to look directly at the Queen, due to a belief at the time that the poor had the ability to steal thoughts. Science now believes that less than 4% of poor people are able to do this.

- In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. Like everything he did, Lincoln freed the slaves while sleepwalking, and later had no memory of the event.

- Edmund Hilary, the first person to climb Mt. Everest, did so accidentally, while chasing a bird.

- The first commercial air flight took place in 1914. Everyone involved screamed the entire way.

- Before the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, anyone wanting to fly anywhere was required to eat 200 pounds of helium.

- Before the invention of scrambled eggs in 1912, the typical breakfast was either whole eggs still in the shell, or scrambled rocks.

- In 1948, at the request of a dying boy, baseball legend Babe Ruth at 75 hot dogs, then died of hot dog poisoning.

- William Shakespeare did not exist. His plays were masterminded in 1589 by Francis Bacon, who used a Ouiji board to enslave playwriting ghosts.

As I recall, the rules in the 3.5 DMGII for running a business weren't half bad, especially if you're just looking for an interesting little side-game. Since they were all profession based (90% sure on that) they would slide pretty seamlessly into Pathfinder :] I'd suggest getting a hold on those.

In fantasy-land I conjure fire from my finger tips, take axes to the chest, and come back from death on a daily basis.

I will wheel my Doppelhaken around the battlefield too, by God.

Oh just an archetype... because that makes it so much better that ultimate COMBAT has wizard crunch in it.

Glad I didn't get my hopes up for this book.

I was also completely outraged that this book had material for almost every class. Clearly it's expansive coverage makes it worthless.

Thanks for the link, MinstrelintheGallery. The ability still seems less than useful. I can't think of any instance where a druid has run out of time while wild shaped, except for the first level or two after gaining access to it. On the whole, this ability only seems to have any real effect between levels 6-10ish and just becomes a burden in the 'teens.

The earlier access to sizes especially bugs me because of the lack of huge creatures, especially since, as Jason pointed out in that other thread, you can't technically wild shape into templated creatures. This makes the bird shaman's ability fairly useless, as there is virtually no way (without houseruling) to wild shape into a roc. Seems like a big oversight to me. I'll just be houseruling that young/giant animals are fair game, as are other size modifications when they make sense (e.g., no tiny bears. No one wants a fetus in the party).

Animal shamans gain the ability to use wildshape at their druid level +2 for their respective animal, while taking a -2 to anything else. I'm kind of confused as to what exactly this affects and why it is useful. From what I can tell the only thing that is level dependent in wild shape is the level of beast shape you can use. However, this means that the ability works at level 6 when animal shamans get the ability, increasing their wild shape to beast shape III rather than beast shape II, but after level 8 when beast shape no longer increases, all this ability does is hinder you.

This raises another issue: the bird shaman, for example, gains the benefit of the increased wild shape level when turning into eagles or rocs. Rocs are gargantuan, a size category which wild shape doesn't grant access to. Is this to say that you can use wild shape to turn into a large category roc, as per the druid animal companion, or a huge category roc? Can druids alter the size of ANY animal they wish to turn into?

I'd like to think I'm just missing something about wild shape, but this animal shaman ability seems fairly pointless. Could someone enlighten me? Please?

I had expected the kingdom building portion of Kingmaker to bring its own special type of fun to the Adventure Path, much like building up forces in an RTS or the Villa in Assassin's Creed 2, but so far it's just been really, REALLY boring! Everyone likes constructing a kingdom, but whenever we get to the actual process the game grinds to halt.

Has anyone else had similar issues or found ways to spice up the process?