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I will say that blank-slate players absolutely do not accept / assume that other humanoids just get to have entire stat blocks and damage profiles that "cheat" via monster rules.
You can't really say this with any amount of absolute certainty, though, because I've played with players who are brand new and none of them have ever cared about that.
They've mostly just had fun learning their character and how to play - the monsters are for the GM to worry about.
People all have different experiences, of course, but again, you can't say something like that with absolute certainty at all.
Also, it's not really cheating if the NPCs have rules for how to make NPCs and they are just using those. Different doesn't mean 'cheating' or whatever.
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That expectation is actually more likely to come from someone who played previous editions, since previous editions had the precedent of NPCs having to use the same math structure of PCs, but merely had differing ways to reach the desired numbers.
This edition doesn't adhere to that whatsoever. The closest it does is say "Here's a table of projected values at these levels, pick one and use it, other attributes be damned."
As I am currently running SoT, you're party should have 2 striking runes by now. You also had a comically large amount of downtime in book 2 to buy them, and you could easily earn the income for them in that time, even on top of school work.
Yes, there have been 2 Striking runes within the entire campaign by level 10. That's on the level of a "joke" compared to the other APs I've played/seen.
My PC literally wore armor without the STR requirement because I think it's the only +1 Resilient we have ever seen. Because the magic AP rewards armor that requires +3 STR...
And unfortunately, we've not had the ability to benefit from downtime because of the study system. You cannot both work to advance your branch ranks and earn an income at the same time.
All the PCs have also needed to take 2+ weeks for retraining, partly because the balance of options changes when we are this absurdly poor. My staff is L3 junk that we found, I've got 0 wands, and I think the most expensive purchases the PC has made are the lesser Alch Goggles and 3 min-level spellhearts.
There is a per month stipend, and I remember it was significant. At level 1. Couldn't remember the amount and looked it up, yeah, 4 gp a month is not going to do crap, sorry.
I have half a mind to tally it up now, but thinking specifically about this, I think SoT might genuinely have 1/4th the gp of Abomination Vaults, perhaps even less.
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The vast majority of games outside of the DnD lineage and like. Cyberpunk and BRP. Don't have NPCs using the same construction rules as players, because that's frankly ridiculous and I don't know why it was ever the idea besides old fears that GMs may somehow "cheat" by letting NPCs just do things that make sense. Which is how we get such high quality PF1E character options as Site-Bound Oracle or Dreadnought Barbarian.
In level 4, you gain 225 gp, and you are supposed to get 200 gp. at level 7, you gain 450 gp out of an expected 720, but the additional level 9 armor worth 700 gp makes up for that even if you sell it. At level 8, you get 10025 gp out of an expected 1000gp. Seems like it lines up fairly well.
Also, I'm not sure if you didn't see my edit, but there are 4 striking runes by 10th level. I forgot some later level ones.
I have no idea how accurate your gp tally is, but even that value sounds way too low for a party.
I can recognize that you are not cutting the gp value in half for things like the Leopard's Armor.(and i'm guessing that 10025 is a typo for 1025)
I've also heard that most APs ignore the book's gp by level table because of how unrealistically low it is.
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Not sure if we as a party have missed anything, I can only say what my PC's state is.
I have the survival minimum, but do not have any of the basics covered beyond that. I have +1 Striking Returning Thrower's Bandolier (thank you Ubanu) and +1 Striking Handwraps. No grimoire, no staff, etc. I have spent a significant amount of gp on alch formulas and spells, but less gp than my other PCs have done. Didn't track that, I think roughly 3-400 gp. (the PC partially used old alch rules where every single formula @ level had to be paid for)
I'm currently "inflating my gp value" by wearing some armbands of athleticism we recently found, which we cannot yet sell.
So it's not just a matter of gp contained within the AP, but how appropriate the specific items have been (because selling cuts value in half).
I only remember the stone ghost and fire pot ubanu having Striking runes, certainly possible there's been more.
I remember the other recent humanoids we fought, Thiarvo the ruin looter's goons only had +1 weapons. In another "SoT moment" the AP hyped up a neat unique weapon of Thiarvo's aaaaaaaand it's a martial weapon that none of us can use. That might have been striking/had it baked in. Had no chance to sell it yet, and pulling out the runes would break the unique item.
Striking is only worth 65 gp, it's a very minor part of this equation, but illustrative of how the AP just does not provide the expected essentials.
That "can't sell anything" detail is worth a specific mention, because the AP has pulled the party away from civilization for I think 2 ish levels and many in-world months, where we have had 0 access to commerce as a concept.
While my PC has magical crafting for times like this, that only works with the existing liquid gp we have, I cannot sell/mulch any items we have found during this increasingly-extended research trip.
When even the GM has openly acknowledged the AP seems very low on GP, I don't think this is a player/table issue.
As I am currently running SoT, you're party should have 4 striking runes by now. You also had a comically large amount of downtime in book 2 to buy them, and you could easily earn the income for them in that time, even on top of school work.It was certainly a "f-ing seriously?" moment for the whole party. This is also just a few sessions after an undead martial appeared to have a lightning rune in their weapon, but nope, monster-cheat rules for damage. I'm still stuck with +1 Striking at L10.
I'm also GMing SoT right now and while I 100% feel the frustration of players in this situation (it feels so ridiculous that a human can outdamage you with no runes at all, or that a human at that level would actually somehow not have decent gear), SoT gives you so much time to operate on that players do have tools to work around this.
One of the things I tell players in Session 0 is expected timelines, or more directly: "will crafting be usable in this campaign?"
In some campaigns its tough (Ruby Phoenix has multiple periods on timers where you can't just get 2 days of downtime to do stuff). Kingmaker and SoT are on the other end, where crafting downtime is absolutely available and at level 10 you could simply make yourself a +2 rune, along with whatever damage runes you want. One of my PCs is a crafter for precisely that reason, and we have TWO people in Kingmaker that are decent at it (though since one is an Inventor that's kind of a gimmie).
That's not to belittle the frustration in the moment, because I absolutely agree with how it feels (and I tend to modify the AP to add runes in situations like that), but PF2 does give players a way to get these items themselves in this style of campaign.
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I think the problem here doesn't have anything to do with NPCs functioning different from PCs (at least not for most of us not liking the changes made to the rituals in this book), but that in a sense we as players lost some agency with these changes. Rituals are in essence narrative tools even if players can use them without GM fiat (in this particular case it isn't exactly like that since I believe these were uncommon or rare) but the fact that now they also require mythic is like putting restrictions on something that's already restricted. Another way of saying it would be to put "hard" restrictions on something that "light" restrictions, as if you were playing a rules-light system but out of nowhere the system demanded you to spend the few resources you have (in rules-light systems resources are way more scarce than in more crunchy systems like PF2e) to do something. Rituals in PF2e are kind of rules-light even if their mechanics themselves could be described as "hard" because they work more like narrative tools.
I have the feeling I'm probably not wording this appropiately. I guess I could also describe it when in a videogame you beat a boss but in the next cutscene that same boss beats your ass for some reason. Rituals would function like interactive cutscenes with quick time events (skill checks) rather than gameplay itself (the fight agaisnt the BBEG).
I'm not really sure what PCs can possibly do to work around the issue without homebrew, such as asking the GM to side quest for gp or something.
I don't know if the GM has given us the exact listed downtime or not, but it is *not* true that you can "just make a +2 rune" such as
during that one student-->teacher timeskip. We don't have the gold.
Earn an Income / Craft are all-day activities, and you in-story cannot do that and study in the Magambyaa at the same time. If you are Earning an Income, that's all you are doing that day. Just because there is a timeskip does not mean that your PC is free to spend every day trying to earn gp. Canonically, your PCs are very busy.
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I do want to try to give the AP author some slack, as each AP has its own gimmick that I'm sure they attempted to quantify in terms of how much pseudo-value to put on it.
SoT has the school system which adds a few outright bonus feats, which is pretty neat.
That could have made the author gp shy, but I've got no clue if it's an explanation; as far as I know the author has no idea there is a gp problem in SoT.
I can say that our GM reacted to the no-gp situation by letting us retrain the specific branch class feat into any feat of that unlock level (so I think right now it's +1 L6 class feat for the 3 of us), which has helped a significant amount.
But yeah, the "broke professor" joke is very real. This PC has no Collar, no Retrieval Belt, etc. Our combat strategy is to hide under the Timber Sentinel while each of us prioritizes persistent damage and "not dies" for 5+ rounds. We've got some loooong combats because of our low dmg.
Creative Director
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In the "Not an excuse but still important contextual information" category...
Remember that by the time we get feedback on an Adventure Path, it's often months or even a year after the Adventure Path is published because folks want to play the campaign first before reviewing it... and we work over a year in advance on Adventure Paths. By the time we started getting feedback from folks on the first year of 2E Adventure Paths, we were already done working on the 2nd year of them and were deep into working on the third year of them.
We also didn't have the team luxury of taking a breath to do feedback and training and discussions at the time, so the three folks we had working on Adventure Paths at the time (myself on Age of Ashes and then on Kingmaker, and two other folks on the other ones) didn't have a lot of time to give each other guidance or feedback, so each developer was kinda on their own. Something that the pandemic wreaked further discord on.
All that said, for the current Adventure Paths we develop, we encourage our authors to aim for 150% to 200% (skewing toward 200%) of the GP values listed in the GM Core, because it's pretty obvious that not every bit of treasure in any adventure will be kept, be appropriate for any one specific group, or even be discovered. We also are trying harder to ensure that when we create NPCs, the math of their weapons and armor works a little bit more in-line with expectations... a 12th level NPC should probably have a +2 striking weapon at the least, and maybe even a +2 greater striking weapon if they're in a boss position.
We've learned an AWFUL lot in the many years we've been doing Adventure Paths, but that doesn't do anyone any favors when they run the earlier ones. In those cases, posting thoughts and advice here for other GMs to consider is a great use for the boards!
That said, the topic of "the PCs don't have enough weapon or armor runes" is a very different one than mythic rituals, and probably deserves its own discussion thread.
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In the "Not an excuse but still important contextual information" category...
** spoiler omitted **...
Back on topic now, on the subject of "NPC being allowed things the player can't have", I think the real issue here isn't the notion of them having different rules at all, and more about them not following the same rules on the few subject where they are directly comparable to the PC.
Obviously, a magical monsters can have abilities the PC never could. Obviously, the great ancient lord of greed have access for far more ressources and minion than the PC, he can possess multiple artifacts, all of that is fine. But that same lord of greed is still a human, and still a wizard, so the PC come to expect that in those regard, he work with the same rule they do, so if he suddently started doing things a player wizard couldn't do if they had access to all of his ressources (like if he was spam casting "quickenned mass heal" for exemple), then it's going to break immersion.
Pathfinder 1e is very good at avoiding that, thanks to the fact that foes are built with the same rule as the PC, and that all the powers the PC can't have are almost always due to unique monster rule or specially made artifact. Pathfinder 2e, despite a few hiccups in the starting APs, and despite having entirely different "building rule" for player and NPC, was also generally very good at avoiding that. But cutting off these rituals from nonmythic caster did break immersion on that subject, because now these NPC aren't doing something the PC could if they had their ressources, they are doing something the PC can't do, no matter what, showing that they indeed operate on different rules.
I do think a lot of the perceived pain around mythic exclusivity could have been / could be solved with an official item, the "Mythical McGuffin" getting published.
If there is an official tool to gain temp access to mythic spells/abilities/status, that psychologically feels very different to read compared against the current "pure-exclusive" mythic content.
In my opinion, the "temporarily mythic" concept is a "better" route than making non-mythic versions of every mythic ritual, etc.
Because, we've got to deal with the reality as it is. Mythic rituals are a thing now, and there's 0 chance they are going to get un-made.
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Heck, there should / could be a few different versions of the "temp mythic" concept.
The Mythical McGuffin is the perfect consumable mythic moment, either for a spell or ritual, but there should also outright be a "mythic infusion" ritual that simply grants the targets temporary mythic status. Give it a duration of "X daily preparations" or something.
Ugh, I'm thinking again about the mythic defense nonsense. Dealing with that unavoidable reality is a *much* bigger yikes than the mythic rituals.
So why not use the new mythic ritual concept to help lower that yikes level a bit.
Said ritual for temp mythic status could be designed to cut through mythic defenses, which would make it desirable even for those already mythic PCs, so they don't need to spend a rare arbitrary point for their damn spells to work.
That temp effect would not heighten every spell cast to mythic prof, nor grant mythic points, but it would at least add a new way to make save spells usable again (though I worry most mythic foes will still have overinflated save defenses...)
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I think the biggest problem I have with the Create Demiplane mythic ritual from War of Immortals is that it's not more dramatic than the one pre-remaster one we had from the APG. Like it's a mythic ritual to create a demiplane, you should be able to make one much larger than 400x400 squares since you're mythic.
Like a Mythic Demiplane should be able to be the size of like a country estate or Liechtenstein, if not an entire world unto itself.
A non-mythic private demiplane should be something like "a place an Archmage can have a very private laboratory in order to run their experiments". A mythic private demiplane should be dramatically more than that.
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I agree with PossibleCabbage that wizards have spells that create temporary demiplanes with specialty contents already, with the understanding they may not be 'permanent' they are still creating it and in a sense being able to be daily creating temporary things, it isn't hard to imagine it not being past their ability to create a permanent one. It doesn't seem that these rituals should be gated behind a Mythic trait, unless all those spells like Planar Palace, and I suppose the old Rope Trick spell may no longer exist.
Maybe looking at the Rituals created for pre-remaster created larger spaces than in retrospective were intended, and it might have worked to try to debuff them a little, but it really seemed like the choice to rip them out of normal play didn't increase the stories you could easily tell, but really cut the stories you could easily tell. (unless you delete new rules) I don't think deleting the new content shouldn't normally reduce the common story-sets you can tell.
I think others mentioned what came to my mind too. Perhaps make Non-mythic demi-planes smaller, make them either not be able to grow (other than growing to critical size) or make them grow very slowly and only on critical successes.
It also seems perfectly reasonable to have certain types of desirable planar traits (such as Bountious) possibly be gated behind Mythic access. If someone wants to seem to recreate it they might have to import enough animals and plants into it. There could be other traits (I worry Elemental might be a base trait that might be expected by others, but you might gate it, or limit it to one, and/or don't allow it to be changed once set)
Otherwise limit non-mythic planes to where future rituals can only be used to create new/replacement keys for access, be limited to one portal etc.
If you are allowing the party access to the Plane Shift spell, so giving them access to be able to create a DemiPlane doesn't seem more story shattering/building that Plane Shift itself. (after all they can potentially simply planeshift somewhere and simply take over an existing space someplace, that could even be even larger) I'm presuming that Plane Shift isn't retroactively being made a Mythic only Spell.
Heightening the ritual would increase its size and potentially unlock certain planar traits. Heightening it with Mythic would unlock larger sizes at specified levels, allow larger growth and unlock more planar traits than the non-mythic versions.
The concept of rituals that while base are not Mythic, but can have a Mythic Heighten option seems like a wonderful mechanic to be explored, I really wish this was the route taken/considered.
I appreciate James taking the time with interjection, and while I may disagree personally that it should be the case, I am none the less happy to have a better understanding of how he perceived it as being narratively better for normal non-mythic mages to not have access to such planar creation within the realms of Golarion, barring of course some narrative exceptions. And he has pointed out that his view isn't reflective of specific conversations with the Rules staff's intent. It none the less likely has some weight to any changes they might consider based on feedback they get, if their intention wasn't exactly what got written down.
Yes, those of us negatively impacted by the change, can always homebrew. Paizo isn't going to repeal the ORC if I homebrew a non-mythic create demi-plane back into the remaster. But taking rituals that don't really seem to have any more functional regional impact than saying the PCs are allowed to buy a house or tower somewhere, and putting it behind a Must-Be-Godlike wall does actually negatively impact the game for anyone in Organized Play, or playing with GMs whom are not comfortable venturing into homebrew rules. Being able to provide feedback and express concern behind such decisions on the part of the community should be welcomed. Guess what, that means I need to accept and understand that someone said they as a GM had run into issues with the Create Demiplane having caused them problems. Honestly, I'd love to know more about that, but that is likely too detailed for this discussion.
I suppose also at a root to this is that when I saw the opportunity for Rituals in Second Edition, I was exited, as it made sense for their existence, and I thought it was something that could really shine and be another thing to make Second Edition a draw. But they were really so very minimally explored, they didn't really meet this expectation for me. Then turning around and pushing what were actually already existing rituals, and making them even less accessible really was going in the completely opposite direction. In summary, I think that is part of what is driving my reaction in this case too. The new rules are making Rituals 'less' a part of the game than the used to, when they seemed to originally have had even more potential than they eventually emerged with.
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Perhaps they didn't want the ritual to be stepping on the toes of the Archfiend mythic destiny; having a massive, personal demiplane is a large part of that archetype's gimmick and its appeal.I think the biggest problem I have with the Create Demiplane mythic ritual from War of Immortals is that it's not more dramatic than the one pre-remaster one we had from the APG. Like it's a mythic ritual to create a demiplane, you should be able to make one much larger than 400x400 squares since you're mythic.
Like a Mythic Demiplane should be able to be the size of like a country estate or Liechtenstein, if not an entire world unto itself.
A non-mythic private demiplane should be something like "a place an Archmage can have a very private laboratory in order to run their experiments". A mythic private demiplane should be dramatically more than that.
I don't feel like it would step on the toes of that destiny though.
The demiplane comes free with the destiny, and even comes with minions.
Create Demiplane, on the other hand, takes a lot of time, 9 days per expansion, costs 800 gp per expansion, requires successful checks per expansion, and was a rare ritual, meaning it would be an endeavor to obtain in the first place. And lastly, Create Demiplane does not grant you higher-thinking inhabitants to live in it. You have to populate it yourself.
An Archfiend already has a huge advantage over someone who merely knows Create Demiplane.
Not to mention it would be really dumb to nerf an already existing option that has been in the system since the beggining of the edition and in the setting itself since the 3.x days to make their new thing look good.
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Just reading this thread now, and I'm disheartened to see that it was an intentional move to remove access in non-mythic games.
I had been hoping it was just a convenient re-print location for some flavourful rituals, which had the tag added by mistake.
Create Demiplane was one of those things which I thought was neat to have as an option, though have yet to personally find a reason to do it. It doesn't feel good however to know the option has been removed for the sole purpose of enhancing the value of a particular new rule set.
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Just reading this thread now, and I'm disheartened to see that it was an intentional move to remove access in non-mythic games.
I had been hoping it was just a convenient re-print location for some flavourful rituals, which had the tag added by mistake.
Create Demiplane was one of those things which I thought was neat to have as an option, though have yet to personally find a reason to do it. It doesn't feel good however to know the option has been removed for the sole purpose of enhancing the value of a particular new rule set.
"Enjoy our video streaming service where it's ad-free even in the basic subscription package."
Later...
"Oh, you sweet summer child. You thought not having ads was going to be a permanent thing? That's precious! But if you really want no ads, we'll let you pay extra to go back to what you already had."
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"Oh, you sweet summer child. You thought not having ads was going to be a permanent thing? That's precious! But if you really want no ads, we'll let you pay extra to go back to what you already had."
"I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."
Except, we still have the old rituals. They did not burn your old books. This seemed to be an artistic choice instead of monetary one, like a streaming platform originally having foreign movies be dubbed, but then later adding subs and making that the default because they think its better, but leaving the dubs as an option. It may be slightly annoying to go though the menu, but its not the end of the world.Just reading this thread now, and I'm disheartened to see that it was an intentional move to remove access in non-mythic games.
I had been hoping it was just a convenient re-print location for some flavourful rituals, which had the tag added by mistake.
Create Demiplane was one of those things which I thought was neat to have as an option, though have yet to personally find a reason to do it. It doesn't feel good however to know the option has been removed for the sole purpose of enhancing the value of a particular new rule set.
"Enjoy our video streaming service where it's ad-free even in the basic subscription package."
Later...
"Oh, you sweet summer child. You thought not having ads was going to be a permanent thing? That's precious! But if you really want no ads, we'll let you pay extra to go back to what you already had."
I would be more inclined to agree with this premise if the rituals were reprinted in either of the Player Core books.
The fact that isn't the case suggests that, like printings and PDFs of the OG Core Rulebook, the "old rituals" will be eventually phased out of the game.
Back on topic now, on the subject of "NPC being allowed things the player can't have", I think the real issue here isn't the notion of them having different rules at all, and more about them not following the same rules on the few subject where they are directly comparable to the PC.
Obviously, a magical monsters can have abilities the PC never could. Obviously, the great ancient lord of greed have access for far more ressources and minion than the PC, he can possess multiple artifacts, all of that is fine. But that same lord of greed is still a human, and still a wizard, so the PC come to expect that in those regard, he work with the same rule they do, so if he suddently started doing things a player wizard couldn't do if they had access to all of his ressources (like if he was spam casting "quickenned mass heal" for exemple), then it's going to break immersion.
What is a wizard in the game world, though? Ok, wizards aren't the best example here because there are actual schools they can graduate from, but what's a rogue? What's an oracle? Is there some Golarion standard that grants you those titles when you show that you are able to learn a specific set of abilities, but not certain others?
One fighter may have a special talent that allows them to learn and use an ability like Exacting Strike, while another fighter isn't fit for that and instead does something different - maybe something unique to them, even though they are just another human fighter.I mean, there have been many football players in the world, but no matter how much they trained, none could possibly learn to dribble the way Garrincha did, except for Garrincha himself (mind you, I'm not saying dribbling with the same proficiency as Garrincha - even though that's already very hard to match - but with his own style, his own kind of... feats). Does that mean that he wasn't part of the 'footballer' class? Nope, he was, just in his distinctive way, with his unique skills.
PC rules are for PCs - who will have some abilities they probably won't ever see replicated by others. NPCs are something else, and they can also have a knack to do things in a way that is only meant for them.
What's an oracle?Oracles though are very distinct, like many of magical classes. Divine curses giving full repertoire of spellcasting abilities are rather outstanding. They could be called differently in different places though.
Yes, but what I mean is, why should all oracles in Golarion have access to an identical set of abilities and spells? If there is someone who gets unique bits of divine power from a stranger mystery, aren't they an oracle too?
What is a wizard in the game world, though? Ok, wizards aren't the best example here because there are actual schools they can graduate from, but what's a rogue? What's an oracle? Is there some Golarion standard that grants you those titles when you show that you are able to learn a specific set of abilities, but not certain others?
A wizard is a savant that studied arcane magic (the "widest" magical tradition) to learn to control it. Now, the Wizard can be called a "sage" in it's culture, or a "mage", or an "adept", or they could even be called a "sorcerer", but it doesn't change the fact that the wizard is defined by "in world" characteristic, beyond the mechanic of their class. The sage, mage, adept and "sorcerer" of the four different culture could come together and would understand that beyond their title and cultural difference, they have sensibly the same job. Likewise for actual sorcerers, druid, cleric, oracle, etc etc...
No matter their skills or area of expectise, a wizard is a wizard even when we completely abstract the gameplay element, due to the fact that they all share well defined "in world" characteristic. Most classes are like this, I'd say the only classes that are mostly "gameplay abstraction" without hard in world definition are a handfull of the martial classes. Fighter, rogue, barbarian and ranger, any of those could be a mercenary in the same troop, or soldiers of the same rank in the same army, and while their way of fighting is different, that difference isn't as "hard" as the difference that exist between a wizard and a druid. "In world", I expect that a "bow ranger" that meet a "bow fighter" and a "dual weapon ranger" would think that they are closer to the fighter than the other ranger.
So indeed, if a human wizard PC meeting a human wizard NPC, there is an expectation that the NPC can't do think the player wouldn't be able to do if they had access to the NPC ressource and levels. "In world", they are the same thing, therefore they come with the expectation that no matter how different the PC and NPC building rule are, the NPC will not have any ability that are completely impossible for the PC. If they do, then it break the suspension of disbelief, which is very important for roleplaying game.
Simulationist design makes players happy.
Does it? More often than not it's my players who aren't interested in tracking ammo and rations or survival mechanics or realistic economics systems and so on.
I also think the whole assumption is somewhat off track because D&D has never been particularly simulationist (and the core question of whether a ritual is mythic or not has nothing to do with simulation anyways, though on the subject I've also seen more interest in rituals being made simpler and more accessible rather than the other way around).
I will say that blank-slate players absolutely do not accept / assume that other humanoids just get to have entire stat blocks and damage profiles that "cheat" via monster rules.
Can't say that's been my experience either. No one would assume that a monster follows the same rules as the players, it doesn't even make particular sense because the characters are designed for entirely different purposes.
Occasionally we'll get an older player crowing about how 'it used to be' (kind of, sort of, if you ignored all the ways in which it wasn't), but the newer players don't really bat an eye at it because why would they?
Especially those with backgrounds in video games, where enemies that resemble the player character are unique exceptions by design.
What is a wizard in the game world, though? Ok, wizards aren't the best example here because there are actual schools they can graduate from, but what's a rogue? What's an oracle? Is there some Golarion standard that grants you those titles when you show that you are able to learn a specific set of abilities, but not certain others?A wizard is a savant that studied arcane magic (the "widest" magical tradition) to learn to control it. Now, the Wizard can be called a "sage" in it's culture, or a "mage", or an "adept", or they could even be called a "sorcerer", but it doesn't change the fact that the wizard is defined by "in world" characteristic, beyond the mechanic of their class. The sage, mage, adept and "sorcerer" of the four different culture could come together and would understand that beyond their title and cultural difference, they have sensibly the same job. Likewise for actual sorcerers, druid, cleric, oracle, etc etc...
No matter their skills or area of expectise, a wizard is a wizard even when we completely abstract the gameplay element, due to the fact that they all share well defined "in world" characteristic. Most classes are like this, I'd say the only classes that are mostly "gameplay abstraction" without hard in world definition are a handfull of the martial classes. Fighter, rogue, barbarian and ranger, any of those could be a mercenary in the same troop, or soldiers of the same rank in the same army, and while their way of fighting is different, that difference isn't as "hard" as the difference that exist between a wizard and a druid. "In world", I expect that a "bow ranger" that meet a "bow fighter" and a "dual weapon ranger" would think that they are closer to the fighter than the other ranger.
So indeed, if a human wizard PC meeting a human wizard NPC, there is an expectation that the NPC can't do think the player wouldn't be able to do if they had access to the NPC ressource and levels. "In world", they are the same thing, therefore they come with...
Well I completely disagree. I see little in-world reason for any two wizards (and even less for other spellcasters) having to have the ability to learn the exact same set of abilities and spells, nothing more and nothing less. It doesn't break my suspension of disbelief that some wizard NPC has got a unique ability to use spells a different wizard (PC or not) can't access.
There are common abilities, sure, but they don't define what a wizard is, nor the limits of their potential.
I am now be reminded of one of the denizens of Sandpoint, Arika Avertin, who claims to be a rogue in Sandpoint, Light of the Lost Coast
As a 2nd-Level expert, Arika's hardly prepared for the adventurer's lifestyle, but this doesn't mean she won't try. She might join up with the PCs early on, claiming to be a down-on-her-luck rogue, only to get in over her head in the first adventure.This indicates that NPCs are aware of certain classes existing.
Well, cultural roles anyways.
My magus pirate is a "rogue" and scoundrel. :P
Given the example provided by JJ, I would have no problem with a PC creating a demiplane in the exact same way that Karzoug did.
It's just that no PC will ever put all these efforts and time and ressources in it. But if they do, then the GM can just say Yes.
I grew up playing the 2D Sonic platformer games. You can go in any direction, even backtrack if you like. Sometimes the level is laid out in a fashion that cuts you off from backtracking, but it was always due to something in universe (a one-way door closing behind you, Sonic jumping off a platform too high for him or even Tails to reach.
I also played Adventure 2 and Shadow, but I otherwise missed most of the 3D Sonic games, including the advent of the so-called Boost formula. My first exposure was Sonic Generations, and I immediately dislike the Modern Sonic levels, though it took me some time to figure out what it was that wasn't working for me.
You weren't allowed to backtrack.
At certain points in the Modern levels, you're meant to run into the screen, progressing further towards the goal. You can run forward, boost even faster, strafe from side to side, jump and slide, but stopping, let alone turning around, is completely denied to you. Occasionally, the level might justify it by showing the path behind you disappearing or you're being chased by a murderous semi. But usually, you can't go back for no better reason than "you're not allowed to turn the camera around".
Soured me on the whole thing.
So I totally agree with you here. I'm fine with the GM saying that Karzoug has his demiplane because he spent ten years on it, something we could also accomplish if we had the same resources, but since the campaign won't last that much on-universe time, you're SOL. That's justified, at least.