One of my Kingmaker 2e players has chosen to do a Air/Wood Kineticist for Kingmaker... He brought to my attention that the Feat "Timber Sentinel" will allow him to basically create an entire grove (or even forest!) of trees over a few days time. I cannot seem to find anything to refute this. How would this affect the Kingmaker Kingdom building? I can see him spending a lot of downtime creating forests, which in turn, can be used to build lumbermills, help the local fey, and all sort of potential repercussions.
Sure, the forests will be basically a forest of saplings until they mature (as Timber Sentinel leaves behind a normal tree after it expires). Any thoughts on how to make it that it will not break the game? Thanks!
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Any thoughts on how to make it that it will not break the game? Thanks!
I don't know this for sure, but isn't there already options in the rules for characters to terraform hexes as one of the things to do? Kineticist generally and Timber Sentinel specifically for forests could simply be the character justification and flavor for using those existing rules options.
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So, based on looking stuff up online:
- Each kingmaker hex is about 375 square miles
- Forests typically have 100-200 trees per acre
- 640 acres per square mile
When running in combat time (ie, pretty much at full intensity - not something you can sustain all day long) a wood kineticist with Timber Sentinel can plant one tree every six seconds. If we go with a light fill, then, we're talking about an acre of forest every 10 minutes. Each square mile is going to take you 6400 minutes, then - very roughly 15 days of working 8 hour days on this.
Each *hex*, then, is going to take a smidge over 15 years of dedicated downtime. If I had a Wood kineticist player tell me that they wanted to spend 15 years worth of downtime turning a plains into a forest, I'd probably let them.
That would be me being kind, though, since those numbers are assuming that you could maintain "combat intensity" levels of pace, 8 hours a day, for 15 years. That's... not really plausible.
Great points! I personally love the idea, but I was skeptical. Thank you for your insights!
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Impulses are spell-like and sustained casting of spells should leave a character exhausted, and thus unable to keep up exploration activities for more than 10 minutes.
As a GM I would be happy that a player wants to narratively engage in downtime activities and have that connect to their characters abilities, but at most I’d give them a circumstance bonus to an otherwise defined downtime activity, rather than completely replace that with infinitely repeatable “auto-win” activities.
Can't a kineticist use proliferate to turn those saplings into big trees?
Can't a kineticist use proliferate to turn those saplings into big trees?Proliferate is still bound by bulk limits per RAW.
While creating a sapling by itself is possible by mid levels, a full grown tree is probably above the bulk limitations of proliferate.
With respect, I disagree. The verbiage of the "cause the element to expand to fill its square" option is clearly intended to remove such limitations.
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How would this affect the Kingmaker Kingdom building? I can see him spending a lot of downtime creating forests, which in turn, can be used to build lumbermills, help the local fey, and all sort of potential repercussions.
This stuff seems (largely) like a very-long-term sort of question, so I think it's interesting background stuff that might reasonably translate in to some modest benefits down the road.
Sure, the forests will be basically a forest of saplings until they mature (as Timber Sentinel leaves behind a normal tree after it expires). Any thoughts on how to make it that it will not break the game?
As a GM of a Kingmaker 2e campaign with an Earth/Wood Kineticist PC, the real risk of Timber Sentinel breaking the game lies in combat. If the Kineticist is willing to keep spending the actions to use it in combat (and she usually is in my campaign), the trees are a veritable force field. She's casting it at 3rd Rank at this point, which can eat 30 damage, and she doesn't necessarily even let the things die but will recast when they have blocked 20 or 25 points.
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As a GM of a Kingmaker 2e campaign with an Earth/Wood Kineticist PC, the real risk of Timber Sentinel breaking the game lies in combat. If the Kineticist is willing to keep spending the actions to use it in combat (and she usually is in my campaign), the trees are a veritable force field. She's casting it at 3rd Rank at this point, which can eat 30 damage, and she doesn't necessarily even let the things die but will recast when they have blocked 20 or 25 points.
Yeah, it's blatantly overpowered to cast a max Rank spell with the same actions and no other restrictions or costs.
Protector Tree already scales +10HP per Rank, so 5HP per PC level, some of the best scaling in the game. It provides proactive protection instead of reactive healing. It lingers without being sustained, and cannot "waste" HP due it only triggering when the protected target's AC is actually struck.
The "trick" of the tree is that it acts as an HP barrier for multiple creatures with different defenses at once. If you attack protected PCs that have high AC, that tree's HP is worth much, much more.
So my main advice for a GM in such a campaign is to target the tree, not the PCs. It has a static AC, and the plant trait makes me think it's a full "creature" so it is not a crit-immune object.
Even if you can hit the tree with near auto-crit damage, it's still an amazing impulse, but not quite as blatantly overpowered.
If you want to be sure to put some RP into it, the GM can let the tree trigger its protection once per unaware set of foes, then they can learn to break the tree first.
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Keeping the enemies mobile, and/or large enemies (so that the kineticist can't protect both sides of a flank) are also easy ways to disrupt Tree spam.
In my experiece, there are fights it shines, and fights the kineticist is better spending his actions elsewise.
Also its power is greatly reduced, to the point of well-balanced IMO, if the tree cannot protect the caster as per RAW AFAICT.
Impulses are spell-like and sustained casting of spells should leave a character exhausted, and thus unable to keep up exploration activities for more than 10 minutes.
Impulses are magical, but I think it's pushing it a bit to call them "spell-like" and then draw that conclusion. They're fundamentally supposed to be the kind of thing you can keep doing over and over and over again.
Or, to be more precise, I should say that I think it's a reasonable GM ruling to assert that repeated use of impulses can exhaust you, but I think it's a reasonable GM ruling either way. I think it has to be a GM ruling. I don't believe the rules themselves provide any kind of real clarity. I personally would be ruling that it does not exhaust you in that fashion.
This still does not make the reforestation of hundreds of square miles a rapid process, however.
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Also its power is greatly reduced, to the point of well-balanced IMO, if the tree cannot protect the caster as per RAW AFAICT.
While it's another knob a GM can use at their table, IMO it's pretty clear in the spell's text that the tree creature itself is subject of discussion when it gets to "an ally adjacent to the tree."
Meaning that "ally" is talking about the tree protecting its allies. If the text used "creature" then it would protect foes hostile to the caster.
I really don't think there was any intention to have the tree ignore the one who created it as they get mauled to death while in reach.
The "but not the caster" ruling also makes the impulse / spell more of a headache to run, and could potentially disrupt other spells/effects that use similar wording.
It also does not reduce the power of the impulse so much as it changes how it's used, pushing the Kin into a 2nd row, melee-avoiding playstyle.
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Moreover, if you look at the spell and not the impulse, "caster yes" Protector Tree is actually fine from a balance perspective. It is Primal only, which is a spell list that also has Heal.
2-A Heal actually scales its HP a bit more than PTree does, leaving the spell to have the comparative pros of proactive, lingering, ect, but actually has comparative cons in ease of use, only blocking Strikes, can be targeted and crit, ect.
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Timber Sentinel being absurd is entirely on the Kin writers who decided that an infinite max Rank spell in a system where squishy, melee-adverse casters are lucky to have 3 max R spells per day was a good idea.
A challenging reality of PF2 is that almost every ability in the game is written and balanced almost exclusively for combat encounters, with a couple tailored to exploration mode or downtime. But...Adventure designers and the GM Core all use other kinds of encounters that don't work at the scale of combat encounters (or really any of the official modes of play), encounters like: social encounters, chases, gathering information/research, environmental hazard/exploration encounters bigger than a battle map, etc.
In these situations, I think many players default to trying to extrapolate their abilities that are clearly written for a different kind of challenge and apply it as literally to these other kinds of encounters as possible. But it is nearly impossible for adventure writers to anticipate the extrapolation of all of the class feats, the movement based skill feats, the spells, etc. into narratively setting up a fun and exciting chase, or a social encounter, or a flooding dungeon.
I think a lot of GMs understand this and are pretty comfortable winging these situations, but it would be helpful to have more specific advice about it somewhere. James Jacobs does a really good job of responding to people in the specific AP discussions where these situations come up, but can't patrol the whole message board for places they pop up, and really, I think advice about giving circumstance bonuses far more often than automatic success, and how to navigate players who can jump 30 ft vertically without even making a roll in combat, might have to still make rolls to use their jumping abilities repeatedly over the course of an hour of exploration or a whole down time activity, or how the ability to make trees suddenly grow, might still take regular enough nature checks or agriculture lore type checks to provide some downtime activity boon.
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It seems perfectly fine to allow that use as part of their Kingdom role and duties and could even been a good monthly source of a reason and location to introduce your random encounters and events.
They can use their time in a productive way, fulfill their role, and you can use that location and conveniently enough the map itself that you would draft for whatever encounters you place there, multiple times and gradually update it with growth changes. Shoot, even could have them and their various guilds/organizations of the Kingdom to rally around performing regular Plant Growth Rituals in order to reforest an area.
You could do it to help offset the harvesting of natural resources from your region, give your party a small recurring BP discount due to you creating FUTURE timber resources (which would in effect help ensure the lumber prices in your area have high confidence that supply won't dry up and stabilize the price), or even simply just employ this as a means to SPREAD the wilderness further.
I don't see any way that this could break your game at all, besides, like others noted it would be a MASSIVE undertaking even if the PC took 8 hours a day five days a week for every month Kingdom cycle in order to really put a meaningful dent into populating a Hex as they're actually each quite immense as is. Any such PC would be equipped with sufficient Nature skill or other Lores to personally know without even researching that they'd HAVE to space the saplings out with at least 2 squares between each of them (perhaps staggering them instead of doing neat rows or just going wild without a pattern) in order to avoid branch and root crowding which would make that wood fail to grow and be viable for industrial harvesting.
On the note of the COMBAT utility of that ability though, now that's an entirely different beast. It is, hands down, one of the best defensive abilities in the system and runs circles around what Shields can do before the phalanx fighter gets out of bed, so to speak. It's not broken, but it is more than solid so I would suggest that you brush up on how to handle combat and try to prepare yourself and probably the party for the prospect of how the combats will play out with new obstacles sprouting up frequently and the defensive benefits it offers the party.
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So my main advice for a GM in such a campaign is to target the tree, not the PCs. It has a static AC, and the plant trait makes me think it's a full "creature" so it is not a crit-immune object.
Area-effect powers are also potentially useful here. They're not strikes, so the tree can't stop them, but they'll happily take chunks of tree HP, and the tree itself is both useless when not adjacent to anyone and makes the party generally inclined to cluster up, thus magnifying area-effect effectiveness.
Also its power is greatly reduced, to the point of well-balanced IMO, if the tree cannot protect the caster as per RAW AFAICT.While it's another knob a GM can use at their table, IMO it's pretty clear in the spell's text that the tree creature itself is subject of discussion when it gets to "an ally adjacent to the tree."
Having been part of a rather involved version of this debate, I can tell you... it is not clear.