Aaaah, cool!
What do devils get out of a mortal selling their soul to them? Is it simply an extra soul consigned to Hell, or does the specific devil get some personal benefit from being sold a soul?
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The scale color of a chromatic dragon matches its habitat. Red dragons, who live in the volcano, have red scales. Black dragons, who live in the dirty swamp, have black scales. Green dragons, who live in the forest, have green scales. White dragons, who live in the tundra, have white scales. But blue dragons entirely contradict this rule. In D&D and Pathfinder, blue dragons live in deserts, which have always bugged me. It would make more sense if they live near the river or the sea since they are blue. And it seems Wizards of the Coast thought the same as I, considering that in Draconomicon: Chromatic Dragons (a D&D 4th book) blue dragons are said to prefer coastal regions subject to frequent storms instead of deserts (but unfortunately the book still didn't gave them swim speed and water breathing ability). Not sure who made them live in the desert in the first place (Gary Gygax, maybe?). What do you think about this issue? Maybe it's too late to change it, but do you think it would have been a lot better and sensible if D&D have simply stated that blue dragons live in the coastal regions?
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The scale color of a chromatic dragon matches its habitat. Red dragons, who live in the volcano, have red scales. Black dragons, who live in the dirty swamp, have black scales. Green dragons, who live in the forest, have green scales. White dragons, who live in the tundra, have white scales. But blue dragons entirely contradict this rule. In D&D and Pathfinder, blue dragons live in deserts, which have always bugged me. It would make more sense if they live near the river or the sea since they are blue. And it seems Wizards of the Coast thought the same as I, considering that in Draconomicon: Chromatic Dragons (a D&D 4th book) blue dragons are said to prefer coastal regions subject to frequent storms instead of deserts (but unfortunately the book still didn't gave them swim speed and water breathing ability). Not sure who made them live in the desert in the first place (Gary Gygax, maybe?). What do you think about this issue? Maybe it's too late to change it, but do you think it would have been a lot better and sensible if D&D have simply stated that blue dragons live in the coastal regions?
What you're seeing is a coincidence—a pattern where no pattern was intended.
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Aaaah, cool!
What do devils get out of a mortal selling their soul to them? Is it simply an extra soul consigned to Hell, or does the specific devil get some personal benefit from being sold a soul?
They get more prestige in the infernal bureaucracy.
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Why do you think it would be appropriate for green dragons to have amphibious trait? I mean, black dragons and green dragons have amphibious trait, which means they have swim speed and water breathing ability. For black dragons it would be appropriate since they live in the swamp. But green dragons live in the forest and have nothing to do with water. Not sure whether green dragons have had swim speed and water breathing ability from D&D First Edition or not though.
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I don't answer complex rules questions here, sorry. Your GM will be able to give you the fastest and best answer for your game.
But I am the GM and I don't know. Please help, I really don't know anyone else who could give a good answer. I tweeted the authors of the book, but they don't seem to be online often.
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Why do you think it would be appropriate for green dragons to have amphibious trait? I mean, black dragons and green dragons have amphibious trait, which means they have swim speed and water breathing ability. For black dragons it would be appropriate since they live in the swamp. But green dragons live in the forest and have nothing to do with water. Not sure whether green dragons have had swim speed and water breathing ability from D&D First Edition or not though.
You'd have to ask the design team, and Jason Bulmahn, and before them Jonathan Tweet and Monte Cook for why they did that, I guess. I didn't make that decision.
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I feel ya on the parrying, never been good at that.
While my character doesn't have the mental stats to cast some of the bigger spells I did buff Mind enough to use summons, do you have a favourite one?
I've been leaning hard onto the jellyfish and the demihuman mob, but just today I started to wonder if another one would maybe compliment my style better. The demihuman mob worked for a while because there's 5 of them and they're super distracting so I can hang back and archer or incant the boss down a bit before going into melee, but these days they're squishy, those demihumans. So I have to decide if I wanna stick with them and level them up a bit or look at another option.
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Woohoo, James is back and feeling better!
Can you worship the entire golarion pantheon without bringing someone's wrath down on your head? Akin to ancient Rome and Greece, where one might pray to Demeter at the harvest, Zeus for victory in battle, and Aphrodite if you're a mother? Or will you be denounced by priests for it?
You can, but not well. By the same extension, you can study every topic in college, but you won't excel in any subject even if you cherry-pick the right courses to avoid failing. The whole point of a cleric, in particular, is that you're hyper-focused on one deity and get rewarded for it.
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But I am the GM and I don't know. Please help, I really don't know anyone else who could give a good answer. I tweeted the authors of the book, but they don't seem to be online often.I don't answer complex rules questions here, sorry. Your GM will be able to give you the fastest and best answer for your game.
My advice there is to try things out. Playtest your choices, and work with your players so they know if your choice ends up being off or wrong that you will adjust and let them rebuild their characters as they see fit. That's the best way to work these things out for a home game, since it also helps build skill and confidence at the game as a GM.
ALTERNATELY: Abandon the concept and do something else. If an RPG is like a cookbook, not every recipe in there is something you and your friends will enjoy. Some recipes might even contain elements that you or a friend are allergic to, so using that recipe is hurtful. That metaphor works for a complex RPG like Pathfinder—some rules options aren't gonna mesh well with every group or player so don't be afraid to just not use them in your game or make replacements.
(Side note: the main reason I get hesitant to answer super specific and complex looking questions like this one is because they're so specific and complex that there's a significant amount of guesswork and opinion involved—too often, an answer I provide someone works for them but breaks the game for others, and then those who clash with my ruling, be they customer or gamer or employee, use my post against me to undermine my self-confidence and, in worst-case scenarios, get people complaining to my manager that I don't know the rules and use that as evidence that Paizo doesn't know how to play the game they create. I just took a 2 month hiatus from the thread for a similar reason—not because of a ruling, but because someone was offended about a whimsical and jokey reply I made to a question. I've even had folks deliberately try to bait me into answering a question in a way so they can take my reply out of context and weaponize it against their GM or players or the Org Play program. So I've been trained to be super picky about which questions I answer and how I answer them—and one of the red flags to me to NOT answer a question is when it's a long, detailed question that looks complicated and leaves out basic details—such as what edition of the game the question is for.)
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I've been leaning hard onto the jellyfish and the demihuman mob, but just today I started to wonder if another one would maybe compliment my style better. The demihuman mob worked for a while because there's 5 of them and they're super distracting so I can hang back and archer or incant the boss down a bit before going into melee, but these days they're squishy, those demihumans. So I have to decide if I wanna stick with them and level them up a bit or look at another option.I feel ya on the parrying, never been good at that.
While my character doesn't have the mental stats to cast some of the bigger spells I did buff Mind enough to use summons, do you have a favourite one?
Thats… actually exactly which ones I used starting out XD
I’m using one that enjoy that you can get really early, not gonna spoil but she has a lot of cool abitlies.
What do you think of the setting?
I know that, due to not actually being a god, there are no clerics among Razmir's followers- but are any of his followers non-cleric divine casters, trying to mimic clerics? Oracles, divine bloodline sorcerers, etc?
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I've been leaning hard onto the jellyfish and the demihuman mob, but just today I started to wonder if another one would maybe compliment my style better. The demihuman mob worked for a while because there's 5 of them and they're super distracting so I can hang back and archer or incant the boss down a bit before going into melee, but these days they're squishy, those demihumans. So I have to decide if I wanna stick with them and level them up a bit or look at another option.I feel ya on the parrying, never been good at that.
While my character doesn't have the mental stats to cast some of the bigger spells I did buff Mind enough to use summons, do you have a favourite one?
Thats… actually exactly which ones I used starting out XD
I’m using one that enjoy that you can get really early, not gonna spoil but she has a lot of cool abitlies.
What do you think of the setting?
Love it. This is on the track to becoming one of my favorite ever games.
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I know that, due to not actually being a god, there are no clerics among Razmir's followers- but are any of his followers non-cleric divine casters, trying to mimic clerics? Oracles, divine bloodline sorcerers, etc?
Yes. We've used a wide range of those sorts of shenanigans in previous adventures.
Black, blue, and bronze dragons have amphibious trait and thus have swim speed and can breath in water. Then can I assume that they have fins, gills, swim bladder, and webbed feet as well?
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Black, blue, and bronze dragons have amphibious trait and thus have swim speed and can breath in water. Then can I assume that they have fins, gills, swim bladder, and webbed feet as well?
Nope. They're dragons, and therefore don't have to have real animal anatomy. Make what inferences you can from the art we do for them, I guess.
In Second Edition I found out that a gold dragon's innate spells are divine. Which is very strange because all other true dragons' innate spells are arcane and gold dragons too were arcane spellcasters in First Edition. What's the reason behind this change?
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In Second Edition I found out that a gold dragon's innate spells are divine. Which is very strange because all other true dragons' innate spells are arcane and gold dragons too were arcane spellcasters in First Edition. What's the reason behind this change?
Dunno. You'd have to ask the Design Team. It might even be a typo.
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Pathfinder trolls have a very conspicuous characteristic: their hugh jaws. I'm not sure who made this decision, and also not sure whether you like it or not, but this boar-like appearance makes Pathfinder trolls very unique. But in Second Edition, while normal trolls and troll kings from Bestiary 1 still look like boars, special trolls (cavern trolls, frost trolls, jotund trolls, trollhounds, and two-headed trolls) look like generic ugly giants instead of boar-like giants. I really hate this change. Not sure why they are called trolls anyway, considering they don't even look like trolls. Perhaps this is an artistic error and shall be corrected once Paizo publishes the revised version of the book?
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Pathfinder trolls have a very conspicuous characteristic: their hugh jaws. I'm not sure who made this decision, and also not sure whether you like it or not, but this boar-like appearance makes Pathfinder trolls very unique. But in Second Edition, while normal trolls and troll kings from Bestiary 1 still look like boars, special trolls (cavern trolls, frost trolls, jotund trolls, trollhounds, and two-headed trolls) look like generic ugly giants instead of boar-like giants. I really hate this change. Not sure why they are called trolls anyway, considering they don't even look like trolls. Perhaps this is an artistic error and shall be corrected once Paizo publishes the revised version of the book?
That decision was Wayne's when he painted the cover to the 1st edition Bestiary. I loved it then and I love it now. It's a really compelling and distinctive look that instantly moves away from the long beak-like nose that D&D trolls have, which makes them look less comical and more scary.
Not all artists are the same, and some will depict things differently, but as you see on the cover of the 2nd edition Bestiary, the base troll look is with that big underbite.
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What was Iomedae's intention when she took the test of the starstone? Was she trying to become a full deity, or only a demigod with the intention of being Aroden's herald? Was she trying to gain power to accomplish something specific, or was it a more personal "I want to/deserve becoming a god"?
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What was Iomedae's intention when she took the test of the starstone? Was she trying to become a full deity, or only a demigod with the intention of being Aroden's herald? Was she trying to gain power to accomplish something specific, or was it a more personal "I want to/deserve becoming a god"?
I'm not 100% caught up on all the Iomedae lore we've published, and she's not a deity from my homebrew setting, so I don't have any long-term historical insights there. My gut feeling is that her intention was "I see what Aroden does and I can do better than him at protecting the people he claims to represent." AKA: She admired him for what he'd done for humanity, but found fault with the fact that he wasn't good and kind and had increasingly seen the flaws in his nature making him into something more of an impartial patron than an ally to humanity.
In other words, take her alignment (lawful good) and her areas of concern (honor, valor, rulership, and justice), and consider that "being a deity" would only help her to achieve those goals for society.
In Guns & Gears, it's mentioned that black powder exists on Golarion. But the book doesn't mention brown powder or smokeless powder. Are they not invented yet on Golarion?
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When considering the massive size of the multiverse and how large a deity's sphere of influence/concern must be, just how important, in the grand scheme of things, is Nidal to Zon-Kuthon? If an effort was made to free it from being under his (church's) thumb, how much attention/effort (in the form of directing his servants) would he give to stopping it?
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When considering the massive size of the multiverse and how large a deity's sphere of influence/concern must be, just how important, in the grand scheme of things, is Nidal to Zon-Kuthon? If an effort was made to free it from being under his (church's) thumb, how much attention/effort (in the form of directing his servants) would he give to stopping it?
Very important. It's the reason he's not still trapped, after all. And while the multiverse is immense, a deity's influence is not equally spread throughout that multiverse. That said, as a deity, Zon-Kuthon wouldn't directly intervene in any attempt to change Nidal to something else—that job is for his worshipers, not him.
AKA: If the house you grew up in as a kid got bought out and turned into a convenience store, you'd be sad and nostalgic and depressed and angry and so on, but you wouldn't cease existing.
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So glad you're back! This thread is one of my very favorite corners of the internet, seriously.
I know you're a big fan of Call of Cthulhu and other horror games. Pathfinder, however, falls more into "combat as sport," and there's a soft, unspoken feeling with a balanced game like this that the GM wing throw things at the players they can't generally defeat in combat.
My question is how often do you break this, when running PF2? Put monsters out there the party absolutely should not engage with? Do you telegraph pre-encounter or just make it clear once they run across something? Or do you not break it at all and just play within the encounter design rules always?
I love the party not always being on the front foot, but they look at me like I'm betraying them if there's an enemy that they can't defeat...
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Love it. This is on the track to becoming one of my favorite ever games.I've been leaning hard onto the jellyfish and the demihuman mob, but just today I started to wonder if another one would maybe compliment my style better. The demihuman mob worked for a while because there's 5 of them and they're super distracting so I can hang back and archer or incant the boss down a bit before going into melee, but these days they're squishy, those demihumans. So I have to decide if I wanna stick with them and level them up a bit or look at another option.I feel ya on the parrying, never been good at that.
While my character doesn't have the mental stats to cast some of the bigger spells I did buff Mind enough to use summons, do you have a favourite one?
Thats… actually exactly which ones I used starting out XD
I’m using one that enjoy that you can get really early, not gonna spoil but she has a lot of cool abitlies.
What do you think of the setting?
Yay! Do you have a favourite area so far?
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In D&D black dragons are called skull dragons due to the general shape of their heads. What about in Pathfinder? I have seen several arts of Pathfinder black dragons but not sure. Do you think black dragons in Pathfinder have skull-like heads?
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When Nocticula ascended, did any demons follow her? I like thinking about the possibility that she might have led to the creation of a new class/category/subtype of Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Good outsider, who may have been risen demons, whose main concerns are controlling their sins so that they can create beauty and penitence in her new domain and across the Great Beyond. I understand that before her ascension, she had succubi and seraptises serve her. And the succubus, seraptis, and marilith are some of my favorite demons!
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Why didn't Lastwall's territory include Adorak and Gallowspire? If part of the country's existence was to guard against the Whispering Tyrant's return, would they not have wanted to control and guard the territory around his prison?
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In D&D black dragons are called skull dragons due to the general shape of their heads. What about in Pathfinder? I have seen several arts of Pathfinder black dragons but not sure. Do you think black dragons in Pathfinder have skull-like heads?
That's not a thing in Pathfinder. They don't have skull-like heads. We deliberately went for different designs for our dragons from D&D.
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So glad you're back! This thread is one of my very favorite corners of the internet, seriously.
I know you're a big fan of Call of Cthulhu and other horror games. Pathfinder, however, falls more into "combat as sport," and there's a soft, unspoken feeling with a balanced game like this that the GM wing throw things at the players they can't generally defeat in combat.
My question is how often do you break this, when running PF2? Put monsters out there the party absolutely should not engage with? Do you telegraph pre-encounter or just make it clear once they run across something? Or do you not break it at all and just play within the encounter design rules always?
I love the party not always being on the front foot, but they look at me like I'm betraying them if there's an enemy that they can't defeat...
I break that pretty much all the time. I certainly include tactical combat in most sessions, but it's about a 50/50 split between tactical combat and roleplaying/exploring/story building. I also do a lot of ad-lib stuff so that I roll with the changes to the story, be they things I come up with on the fly, things the PCs do, or the results of the dice.
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When Nocticula ascended, did any demons follow her? I like thinking about the possibility that she might have led to the creation of a new class/category/subtype of Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Good outsider, who may have been risen demons, whose main concerns are controlling their sins so that they can create beauty and penitence in her new domain and across the Great Beyond. I understand that before her ascension, she had succubi and seraptises serve her. And the succubus, seraptis, and marilith are some of my favorite demons!
Not many, no. I'm sure at least one did, because I don't wanna close any potential story doors.
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Why didn't Lastwall's territory include Adorak and Gallowspire? If part of the country's existence was to guard against the Whispering Tyrant's return, would they not have wanted to control and guard the territory around his prison?
Because those areas were too dangerous to live in for living people who couldn't resist crusading against undead, I guess.
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Pathfinder trolls have a very conspicuous characteristic: their hugh jaws. I'm not sure who made this decision, and also not sure whether you like it or not, but this boar-like appearance makes Pathfinder trolls very unique. But in Second Edition, while normal trolls and troll kings from Bestiary 1 still look like boars, special trolls (cavern trolls, frost trolls, jotund trolls, trollhounds, and two-headed trolls) look like generic ugly giants instead of boar-like giants. I really hate this change. Not sure why they are called trolls anyway, considering they don't even look like trolls. Perhaps this is an artistic error and shall be corrected once Paizo publishes the revised version of the book?That decision was Wayne's when he painted the cover to the 1st edition Bestiary. I loved it then and I love it now. It's a really compelling and distinctive look that instantly moves away from the long beak-like nose that D&D trolls have, which makes them look less comical and more scary.
Not all artists are the same, and some will depict things differently, but as you see on the cover of the 2nd edition Bestiary, the base troll look is with that big underbite.
At first I thought the green giants on the cover of First and Second Edition Bestiary are trolls. But now I come to think of it, they lack a troll's iconic look. I mean, while they seem to have huge jaws, they don't seem to have a troll's iconic boar-like appearance. So, can I assume that the green giants on the cover of First and Second Edition Bestiary are something else entirely, and not trolls?
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At first I thought the green giants on the cover of First and Second Edition Bestiary are trolls. But now I come to think of it, they lack a troll's iconic look. I mean, while they seem to have huge jaws, they don't seem to have a troll's iconic boar-like appearance. So, can I assume that the green giants on the cover of First and Second Edition Bestiary are something else entirely, and not trolls?
They're trolls. And in fact are the iconic look for our trolls, as established by Wayne.
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Why do you think it would be appropriate for green dragons to have amphibious trait? I mean, black dragons and green dragons have amphibious trait, which means they have swim speed and water breathing ability. For black dragons it would be appropriate since they live in the swamp. But green dragons live in the forest and have nothing to do with water. Not sure whether green dragons have had swim speed and water breathing ability from D&D First Edition or not though.You'd have to ask the design team, and Jason Bulmahn, and before them Jonathan Tweet and Monte Cook for why they did that, I guess. I didn't make that decision.
I'm not familiar with the development history of D&D. Did Jonathan Tweet and Monte Cook develop D&D First Edition? Perhaps my knowledge is not correct, but I thought Gary Gygax created D&D First Edition and Ed Greenwood created D&D Second Edition.
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Hello James！ Will the backstory and adventures of the main characters in Kingmaker Companion Guide be different from the computer game? If so, can you give a little hint? I'm very excited about all the possible new settings, especially Linzi and Valerie.
Hi James.
In your opinion, when a changeling transforms into a hag would they retain their memories and emotions from their previous life?
For example, might they have still have some affection for their family/romantic partner?
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I'm not familiar with the development history of D&D. Did Jonathan Tweet and Monte Cook develop D&D First Edition? Perhaps my knowledge is not correct, but I thought Gary Gygax created D&D First Edition and Ed Greenwood created D&D Second Edition.Why do you think it would be appropriate for green dragons to have amphibious trait? I mean, black dragons and green dragons have amphibious trait, which means they have swim speed and water breathing ability. For black dragons it would be appropriate since they live in the swamp. But green dragons live in the forest and have nothing to do with water. Not sure whether green dragons have had swim speed and water breathing ability from D&D First Edition or not though.You'd have to ask the design team, and Jason Bulmahn, and before them Jonathan Tweet and Monte Cook for why they did that, I guess. I didn't make that decision.
Jonathan and Monte were key folks in the creation and design of 3rd edition. Gygax and Dave Arneson were the key folks behind 1st edition. David "Zeb" Cook led the 2nd edition work.
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Hello James！ Will the backstory and adventures of the main characters in Kingmaker Companion Guide be different from the computer game? If so, can you give a little hint? I'm very excited about all the possible new settings, especially Linzi and Valerie.
Yes, because the "main characters" of the tabletop version of Kingmaker are your player characters. The NPC companions who we picked up from the video game for the separate "Kingmaker Companion Guide" have backgrounds that are inspired by the video game, but in some cases vary a bit to bring them more in line with our version of Golarion (licensed partners like Owlcat get close, but as with any GM, they make adjustments to suit their game here and there). Those NPC companions are not a part of the 640 page Adventure Path in a significant way, apart from a few of them having a cameo in the first adventure.
Linzi and Valerie are two of the 7 that got funded enough in the companion guide to have full entries, including personal quests, so you'll wanna pick up the Companion Guide at least.
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Hi James.
In your opinion, when a changeling transforms into a hag would they retain their memories and emotions from their previous life?
For example, might they have still have some affection for their family/romantic partner?
They would retain their memories but in most cases would change alignment, so in most cases existing relationships would grow awful and toxic and be wrecked. There can be exceptions of course, but what makes them exceptions is that they are just that—exceptions.
Unless someone's playing an out and out evil character or monster, I feel that what really draws folks to these types of characters is the FACT that they're exceptions. It helps to make your PC feel special and worthy of being a primary protagonist of a story if, right out of character creation, they buck the trend and go against type and expectation. PCs remain the rarest of the rare in any one game, remember—while there's millions of PCs out there across the various games, there's only 4 or so in YOUR game.
