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I've found a thing that is very much in line with my wishes for INT - cooking via cooking lore! There is even a first attempt at it in Kingmaker. RP activities like this should have mechanical benefits, so this makes me very happy. These are people, after all, not machines.
More of stuff like this please! I would love a full cooking subsystem, even. Cooking Unleashed comes out in a few days, but I would still like some official things.
Weird shower thought (literally). I'd be interested in seeing Paizo's take on a counter-attacker class. Someone who switches from defense to attack and vice versa, depending on what is happening. Possibly based on stances. No idea if that'd even work or be fun, but I loved the Lawbringer in For Honor, so it'd be cool :D
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I really have but a simple wish: Ancestry, heritage and class design rules. Not guidelines, rules. Under which all the currently released and future official ones are rules-legal.
Please no, then the entire potential for inventive new material would be constrained entirely to what that book outlined as possible.
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I don't see the issue. The whole life on Earth is constrained by the - comparatively simple - rules for how atoms may assemble and interact with each other. Yet both the variety of real life and the potential for it is staggering.I really have but a simple wish: Ancestry, heritage and class design rules. Not guidelines, rules. Under which all the currently released and future official ones are rules-legal.Please no, then the entire potential for inventive new material would be constrained entirely to what that book outlined as possible.
If budget, time and all the other things that go into a book would allow for this kind of complexity, then you would have had a point. But as I don't think Paizo have developed godlike powers yet, that is the mother of all non-arguments.
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If budget, time and all the other things that go into a book would allow for this kind of complexity, then you would have had a point. But as I don't think Paizo have developed godlike powers yet, that is the mother of all non-arguments.I don't see the issue. The whole life on Earth is constrained by the - comparatively simple - rules for how atoms may assemble and interact with each other. Yet both the variety of real life and the potential for it is staggering.I really have but a simple wish: Ancestry, heritage and class design rules. Not guidelines, rules. Under which all the currently released and future official ones are rules-legal.Please no, then the entire potential for inventive new material would be constrained entirely to what that book outlined as possible.Let's compare it to a game then, in fact one rather old by now: BattleTech. It has precise rules for building units. This naturally limits what kind of units can be build. In fact, when looking at the Master Unit List, I see at the moment "only" 3959 different official Mech units built using these rules.
Would a rule set - note that I neither asked for a simple nor easy one, just an official one - which limits Paizo to only ever releasing a few thousand ancestries, heritages and classes before they run out of possibilities or have to amend them be all that limiting, really?
What possible point would such a product have, cutting off your creativity like that? Especially since it is literally guaranteed to be amended, defeating any purpose it might have in the first place. I don't know BattleTech, but I'm guessing the options there are pretty much the general mech type plus the head, extremeties, weapons and so on as your "loadout"? The current 2e character creation rules - even just counting backround, ancestry, class and a handful of feats - allow for literal millions of variations. There is no way that such a book will ever be released.
Something like the poison weapon feat in-class for alchemists. It feels awkward to have to dip rogue or poisoner to pick it up, and the action economy on poisons is so bad, especially for reload weapons.
Had a player approach me with an idea for an alchemist with a hand crossbow and poisoned bolts, but draw/quick alchemy > apply > load > shoot is five actions, four if you're a toxicologist, three if you're a toxicologist who made the poison ahead of time and just carry the vial in your hand all the time.
Something that lets you apply/reload a weapon, or quick alchemy/apply, or something would be kinda neat.
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Thinking about this the other day and one thing I hope we get more of are more archetypes like captivator. I could see a combination of any two of the remaining six magic schools as a single focused archetype, free of the strings of multiclassing and all the fun bits that a focused archetype like that brings. Being able to be a martial with higher Wis and divine magic but not having to pick cleric multiclass would awesome, for example. On the flip side of that, a cleric who wanted moar heals could take a necromancy focused archetype. That sort of thing would be great, imo.
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I'd really love some stuff that focused on daggers. Similar to single element focused blasters, a sneaky type equipped with just a dagger and her wits is such a classic archetype to me that is strangely sorely underrepresented. PF1e had the Knife Master archetype to help make daggers a not horrible weapon, the Spheres of Power 3pp system I played with PF1e also had dagger specific talents you could pick up to make them more competitive. I'd love something like an archetype or some feats to make daggers stand as their own option and not have to make "well i know this is just plain worse" sacrifices.
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A class archetype like flexible spellcaster that makes prepared casters 100% spontaneous would be so awesome.
I don't understand. The flexible spellcasting class archetype already do this.
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I think stances and stance-like abilities such as Duelist's Challenge have a lot of leftover potential that isn't used right now. Monk gets what feels like 90% and the fighter also has a few, but outside of that things look rather sparse. They also only cover a rather limited amount of ground compared to what
I'm sure there are plenty of niche and not-so-niche builds that could be smoothed out or spiced up with a stance or two. Looking at you dual-wielding one-handed ranged weapon builds, ranged builds in general, two-handed builds get next to nothing and one-handed builds mostly "just" get various flavours of "+2 circumstance bonus to AC". I think we can do more than that, as Everstand Stance and Arcane Cascade with its many variations show.
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A lot more of what the Travelers Guide had. More info on each nation or regions holidays, different kinds of dress, foods, drinks, common sayings, things like that so each area really feels different. I mean in RL you can see major regional differences with in a single country in food, drinks, even clothing styles. I imagine in a fantasy setting with a lot more difference ancestries, magic, monsters etc it would be even more noticeable.
Expanded heritages, example teifling different ones based on each of the different demons, devils, deamons etc. Sure some might be similar enough, but some should be radically different. Would like to see the same thing with changlings which are now all hag, would like to see Satyr, dryad etc versions all with some differences.
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A lot more of what the Travelers Guide had. More info on each nation or regions holidays, different kinds of dress, foods, drinks, common sayings, things like that so each area really feels different. I mean in RL you can see major regional differences with in a single country in food, drinks, even clothing styles. I imagine in a fantasy setting with a lot more difference ancestries, magic, monsters etc it would be even more noticeable.
Expanded heritages, example teifling different ones based on each of the different demons, devils, deamons etc. Sure some might be similar enough, but some should be radically different. Would like to see the same thing with changlings which are now all hag, would like to see Satyr, dryad etc versions all with some differences.
What is Traveler's Guide? Is that from PF1E? Sounds interesting.
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What is Traveler's Guide? Is that from PF1E? Sounds interesting.A lot more of what the Travelers Guide had. More info on each nation or regions holidays, different kinds of dress, foods, drinks, common sayings, things like that so each area really feels different. I mean in RL you can see major regional differences with in a single country in food, drinks, even clothing styles. I imagine in a fantasy setting with a lot more difference ancestries, magic, monsters etc it would be even more noticeable.
Expanded heritages, example teifling different ones based on each of the different demons, devils, deamons etc. Sure some might be similar enough, but some should be radically different. Would like to see the same thing with changlings which are now all hag, would like to see Satyr, dryad etc versions all with some differences.
What the others said, I didn't have the book at hand so was guessing at the name.
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No, flexible spellcasting works completely different from true spontaneous casting. I want signature spells and I want to never prepare anything.A class archetype like flexible spellcaster that makes prepared casters 100% spontaneous would be so awesome.I don't understand. The flexible spellcasting class archetype already do this.
Isn't that called "Play a Sorcerer?"
Or one of the other spontaneous classes.
I was looking at my D&D 5E books the other day. Never really looked at them before, and I noticed that D&D Wizard is now more or less a spontaneous caster over there. Except you get more spells than sorcerer, and can whichever of them you want out of any slots you want, on the fly, no picking which and how many - so basically everything sorcerer has, plus the ability to do more. I started to wonder why the sorcerer was even still in the book over there.
I'd rather they NOT repeat that here. If you give spontaneous casting to prepared spellcaster classes, then the existing spontaneous classes would need a MASSIVE BUFF to keep them worth using, and Martials might also need a buff to keep them worthwhile as well...
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I really have but a simple wish: Ancestry, heritage and class design rules. Not guidelines, rules. Under which all the currently released and future official ones are rules-legal.
This is basically known as the Hero System. What the old tRPG Champions evolved into when they tried to do this.
A simple small 64-page stabled rulebook for playing super heroes became a massive multi-volume beast with hundreds of pages in each volume, and needing more than one volume to just cover character creation... Because everytime you think you've gotten every idea humanity can possibly come up with covered already... some punk asks a question, and you need to write another 300-page book to handle it.
Better to just tell people to "write it, make it fun and interesting, and then test it to ensure its balanced."
- Then actually do the testing... ;)
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What I need is more lore books. I realize "nobody" buys them (except a lot of us here... ;) ). But that's what I'm into.
The Travel Guide was great. The Mwangi Expanse book was great. Impossible Lands was great. More of that.
What I just said no to for rules - the insane 'cover everything Hero system approach - is what I say yes to when it comes to lore.
Then find some way to make it as popular as it should be given much better designed the Pathfinder setting is than pretty much any other 'd20 based setting'.
What I know I will never get: Errata for the population numbers. The numbers for many places are comically low as they seem based on D&D 3E DMG advice that was based on Europe during the Black Plague when most of Europe's cities were full of abandoned buildings because almost everybody had died the week before the census guy showed up. Ever since D&D 3E put in those silly low numbers, we've been getting populations for towns and cities are not even food-crop and birth-rate sustainable. Somebody just look at what Europe was like during any other year than 1351, or well, even what anywhere else in the world was like that year... and then adjust the numbers and call it errata. Old pet peeve of mine that's been driving me nuts since D&D 3E's DMG first came out.
Won't ever happen because no one ever questions that book as if it was the Holy Dogma of modern RPG world design... but I wish it would.
Another thing I need: All of the APs and Adventures having Foundry support - even the old ones.
What I need is more lore books. I realize "nobody" buys them (except a lot of us here... ;) ). But that's what I'm into.
The Travel Guide was great. The Mwangi Expanse book was great. Impossible Lands was great. More of that.
What I just said no to for rules - the insane 'cover everything Hero system approach - is what I say yes to when it comes to lore.
Then find some way to make it as popular as it should be given much better designed the Pathfinder setting is than pretty much any other 'd20 based setting'.
What I know I will never get: Errata for the population numbers. The numbers for many places are comically low as they seem based on D&D 3E DMG advice that was based on Europe during the Black Plague when most of Europe's cities were full of abandoned buildings because almost everybody had died the week before the census guy showed up. Ever since D&D 3E put in those silly low numbers, we've been getting populations for towns and cities are not even food-crop and birth-rate sustainable. Somebody just look at what Europe was like during any other year than 1351, or well, even what anywhere else in the world was like that year... and then adjust the numbers and call it errata. Old pet peeve of mine that's been driving me nuts since D&D 3E's DMG first came out.
Won't ever happen because no one ever questions that book as if it was the Holy Dogma of modern RPG world design... but I wish it would.
This is the first time I've seen the complaint about urban population numbers backed up with a reason why those numbers were perceived to be too small. I'd love to be righteously indignant about popular misinformation about history right with you, but so far my (sparse, futile) endeavours in trying to find an accurate gauge for population centres has yielded terribly little in the way of sources, and those I have found suggest that 10-12k is a pretty average size for a city for the Medieval period.
(Mind you, even the best analysis of Medieval population figures is only so useful to our purposes in Golarion, given, well, everything that makes up the whole 'fantasy' side of the equation, but I'm still terribly curious about these sorts of metrics for getting a cleaner picture of the realities of life)
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I think that, between the level of technology and and the existence of healing magic, we can at the very least assume larger numbers than the Romans had going on: tens of thousands in smaller cities, hundreds of thousands in the major metropolises.
I think that, between the level of technology and and the existence of healing magic, we can at the very least assume larger numbers than the Romans had going on: tens of thousands in smaller cities, hundreds of thousands in the major metropolises.
I feel like food production and especially food transportation is probably a greater barometer for determining how large the population over all and how densely urbanized settlements are around the Inner Sea (among various factors). Rome hit a million people at its height, but it was feeding from as far away as Egypt.
... That said, put an acolyte of Erastil or two in every village and you have some very useful low-level agricultural magic to help keep crops healthy and safe, so you can definitely justify numbers with a little magic and a little bit of polish. Just need a way to get those supplies into town in large enough quantities to feed the larger cities--settlements on the banks of Encarthan no doubt do well.
I wonder how far away Geb ships?
I was looking at my D&D 5E books the other day. Never really looked at them before, and I noticed that D&D Wizard is now more or less a spontaneous caster over there. Except you get more spells than sorcerer, and can whichever of them you want out of any slots you want, on the fly, no picking which and how many - so basically everything sorcerer has, plus the ability to do more. I started to wonder why the sorcerer was even still in the book over there.No, flexible spellcasting works completely different from true spontaneous casting. I want signature spells and I want to never prepare anything.A class archetype like flexible spellcaster that makes prepared casters 100% spontaneous would be so awesome.I don't understand. The flexible spellcasting class archetype already do this.
What make the sorcerer worth in 5e is basically sorcery points. It allows a sorcerer to cast spells using it and as it can convert spellslot of different levels into Sorcery Points and vice-versa you can easilly transform low level spell slots into higher levels or the opposite, also theres some good metamagics that can use sorcery points. This makes the class more flexible than a wizard.
What I need is more lore books. I realize "nobody" buys them (except a lot of us here... ;) ). But that's what I'm into.The problem of lore books is that not everyone wants to play in golarion set. For examplo a table may prefer to play in Indigo Isles instead. There's a large number of homemade worlds that don't need extra lore books(yet they buy some for inspiration), that's why the rule books usually sells better, simply because they are scenario agnostic (yet many Lost Omens books also sells well due it's large set of rules).
What I need is more lore books. I realize "nobody" buys them (except a lot of us here... ;) ). But that's what I'm into.
The Travel Guide was great. The Mwangi Expanse book was great. Impossible Lands was great. More of that.
What I just said no to for rules - the insane 'cover everything Hero system approach - is what I say yes to when it comes to lore.
Then find some way to make it as popular as it should be given much better designed the Pathfinder setting is than pretty much any other 'd20 based setting'.
What I know I will never get: Errata for the population numbers. The numbers for many places are comically low as they seem based on D&D 3E DMG advice that was based on Europe during the Black Plague when most of Europe's cities were full of abandoned buildings because almost everybody had died the week before the census guy showed up. Ever since D&D 3E put in those silly low numbers, we've been getting populations for towns and cities are not even food-crop and birth-rate sustainable. Somebody just look at what Europe was like during any other year than 1351, or well, even what anywhere else in the world was like that year... and then adjust the numbers and call it errata. Old pet peeve of mine that's been driving me nuts since D&D 3E's DMG first came out.
Won't ever happen because no one ever questions that book as if it was the Holy Dogma of modern RPG world design... but I wish it would.
This is the first time I've seen the complaint about urban population numbers backed up with a reason why those numbers were perceived to be too small. I'd love to be righteously indignant about popular misinformation about history right with you, but so far my (sparse, futile) endeavours in trying to find an accurate gauge for population centres has yielded terribly little in the way of sources, and those I have found suggest that 10-12k is a pretty average size for a city for the Medieval period.
(Mind you, even the best analysis of Medieval...
Well, about fantasy. Someone said one here in the Paizo's foruns that's surprising that we had so many humans communities living in a world infested of many devastating creatures.
This may explain the low numbers. IMO the biggest problem to explain is how small villages and farms could live in relatively safeness in so dangerous world.
my issue with population is that all the core non human ancestories are treated as sort of omnipresent minorities that are found, to some degree almost everywhere, but in numbers so small that they cannot possibly be a stable population there, like, do half of all elves and dwarves just decide do nomad throughout golarion until they find a human city to settle down in or something?
Add to that, even though likely 50% or more of the population are unrecorded in rural areas, it's funny to picture elf and dwarf farmers even though objectively they must exist.
It's even worse for halfling. At least lore implies that there are elf and dwarves nations/settlement scattered around, so their small number in human settlement can be visitors/immigrants from these places. Likewise for goblin tribes being almost omnipresent, and gnomes being cannonically both pretty long lived and natural wanderers.
Halfling not so, as lore describe them pretty much always tagging along with humans, and not having any nations, and very few actual halfling town. So those 37 sandpoint halfling? they aren't immigrant from a larger halfling settlement, they're sandpoint native, just as much as the thousand+ humans. It's just that there are in all 37 halfling to keep the population stable, including elders and children. I predict quite a lot of inbreeding here.
I understand that elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings population being less due their long lifespan something that usually affect their population growning. Goblins, Hobgoblins, Kobolds and Orcs usually lives in a very risky way and was considered as monsters for a long time (and they still are in some places) so I don't disagree too much about the numbers difference when compared to humans.
My only problem is with small settlements outside big cities and fortress. Golarion is too dungerous world to have too much sparse population has we currently have (like Etran's Folly for example).
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This is the first time I've seen the complaint about urban population numbers backed up with a reason why those numbers were perceived to be too small. I'd love to be righteously indignant about popular misinformation about history right with you, but so far my (sparse, futile) endeavours in trying to find an accurate gauge for population centres has yielded terribly little in the way of sources, and those I have found suggest that 10-12k is a pretty average size for a city for the Medieval period.
Look outside Europe.
The problem you have with looking at Europe is the Black Plague dramatically lowers the numbers for a while. Before and after you have much larger numbers.
But if you look in the 1200s and 1300s you have cities reaching several hundred thousand to perhaps a million in Asia and Mesoamerica. Likely Africa also.
Tenochtitlan forms my favorite example because in the late 1400s they are essentially Bronze Age / Stone Age hybrid, in the middle of a swamp, and have over 1 million. Around the swamp are several more cities of very large size. Modern day Mexico City exists in the space of all of these cities and even during the Aztec period they were interconnected. They were before the Aztecs got there also, just nobody lived in the swamp itself. Pre-Aztec cities rounded it like a modern day metro-region. New York or San Francisco Bay. The Aztecs just put another million people on the water itself, on artificial islands that in time became landfill.
The 1200s to 1300s is the pre-Aztec period where that area was still very heavily populated, just not on the swamp. And that's right smack in the middle of the Black Plague numbers of Europe. And these people were in constant war with each other. But that's just not enough to lower the numbers.
But you can also look to the major cities of China, and some African Empires like the Songhai or Ethiopia.
- These are all places that show what the lack of a plague means. China was more advanced than Europe at the time, Africa and the Middle East were about equal, and MesoAmerica was trailing behind - yet all of them had vastly larger populations because they hadn't been hit by the Plague.
Europe's cities... need to be looked at closer. Most of them were full of vast tracks of land that were slowly reverting back to farmland as the people died off from... the Plague... Cities were shrinking, something that took a very long time to fully recover from because the Plague was devastating on a scale that's just hard for us to imagine.
But a lot of those cities were larger at one time, and then shrank dramatically during the Plague.
Unless your fantasy world has about half the population currently sick and dying, and a number equal to the current total already dead, and a lack of enough resources to recover without some strange miracle intervening, like finding a whole new continent of resources to grab from... then it's numbers should not be based on Europe in that time period... even if the cultures are.
I get that this is my own pet-peeve. Studying demographics is not something most people are into. But if you're gonna put numbers in there, you gotta do some basic research first on what drives population numbers up and down. How food supply, disease, and war actually impact these things. You can't just pick a date and a location on the map where the people wear the same kind of clothes as the people in your fantasy world do, and call it a day...
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This is the first time I've seen the complaint about urban population numbers backed up with a reason why those numbers were perceived to be too small. I'd love to be righteously indignant about popular misinformation about history right with you, but so far my (sparse, futile) endeavours in trying to find an accurate gauge for population centres has yielded terribly little in the way of sources, and those I have found suggest that 10-12k is a pretty average size for a city for the Medieval period.Look outside Europe.
The problem you have with looking at Europe is the Black Plague dramatically lowers the numbers for a while. Before and after you have much larger numbers.
I appreciate your examples of the way population demographics look outside of Europe, however it seems I may have misunderstood. It is primarily the medieval European milieu I was interested in learning about, so while these numbers from around the world are interesting data points for other societies at other stages in their development, they don't precisely inform my focus. That Rome hit a million people at its height shows that far greater urban numbers are possible, but it doesn't offer any insight as to what the state of urban populations were in and around the medieval period (or a medieval-inspired fantasy world living in the wake of a partial or complete empire collapse depending on your preferences toward retaining a fantasy equivalent of Constantinople)
Meanwhile when I do look for actual settlement numbers in Europe before the Black Death, I seem to find that the largest city (pending wildly varying estimates) seems to have been Paris, clocking a population of up to 270,000 before plague, and Milan, which likewise tops out around 200,000.
(Meanwhile, considering the Inner Sea region should by all rights include both shores of the Mediterranean in its source material, it should be noted that these European cities are both outclassed by the largest African city of Cairo, which goes for the 400k in the decades before plague hits, with Fes (of Morocco; south of Spain) bringing up a 200k showing for second place).
Unfortunately, I'm not in a position where I can do a deep dive to look for averages but these seem to hold sway with the largest settlement numbers in the Inner Sea, at 300k in Absalom and 212k in Katapesh, with another five settlements in the 100k+ range.
Immediate Addendum: The number of 100k+ cities in Italy alone (4-5) however, does strongly suggest that south Avistan's coast might be under represented with only Westcrown and Oppara... though I suppose the Age of Lost Omens did hit Cheliax pretty hard last century.
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Of course, please understand this is not an attempt to challenge your understanding of demographics with poorly researched figures. I have at least a passing interest in the subject, mainly from a worldbuilding perspective, and seek to better understand what the ranges of medieval settlements looked like. Settlements around the world are pertinent to the larger picture of agricultural societies, of course, but also I have limited foundation for grasping what the situation in those places were, with the modest exception of Han China
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Once again, I'm here for my regular appeal for both a straightforward two-handed damage Gunslinger Way and a dedicated dual-wielding Way, that makes it not a clunky mess.
Also, firearms and crossbows taking the -2 penalty from prone has always been silly.
Thank you, that is all.
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Just one more thing - a Way focused on alchemy, specifically alchemical ammunition, would be great, because activating items and the gunslinger action economy really don't like each other too much.
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This is probably really specific but a lot of other fantasy fiction has spellcasters actively holding a magic book to enhance spellcasting. I think it's kind of a neat image and think it would be fun if there were any mechanics that allowed this.
Grimoires don't even need to be on your person to be activated and the Magus' Raise a Tome is both underwhelming and very class specific.
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my issue with population is that all the core non human ancestories are treated as sort of omnipresent minorities that are found, to some degree almost everywhere, but in numbers so small that they cannot possibly be a stable population there, like, do half of all elves and dwarves just decide do nomad throughout golarion until they find a human city to settle down in or something?
I think it needs to be left vague since the players are responsible for populating parts of the setting so you never want to dictate from on high that "no, you can't be an [X] from [Place]." In other words, there are exactly as much of everything in any given place as a given story requires.
Like if you want to tell a story about an Amurrun gang in Varisia, you can do that without having to worry if there are enough Cat People in Sandpoint for this to "make sense." The number of people who needs to travel for the story is just "the people in the story" not like, their ancestors back 20 generations since people travel. Like there were African people in Scandinavia during the Viking Age, not like a lot of them, but enough so "you can have several black people in your Viking story."
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I really need a 1st or 2nd level Magus class feat that makes reload weapons viable for spellstriking. Recharge + Interact to reload as a single action for example.