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Isn't the answer "well, he was one of the leading experts on Thassilonian Rune Magic, something you know very little about" a satisfying answer to "how did Karzoug do that?"
Like a major theme of Pathfinder is that the various states and empires before Earthfall were much more advanced than the ones that came after it. There's no expectation that a PC should be able to recreate the flying cities of the Shory Empire, the golems of the Jistka Imperium, or any various wonders of the Azlanti Empire since the knowledge of "how they did that" simply isn't available to the PCs. I think it's much the same with Karzoug.
By RAW if Karzoug was a PC he'd still have zero ability to turn all those advantages into a demi-plane. This is what people take issue with.
The position on this is literally "NPCs follow their own rules so they don't have to be Mythic because reasons."
Which is exactly what people are complaining about, because having such a wild double standard for what PCs and NPCs are capable of doing is extremely bad for verisimilitude compared to what we had before, and doesn't actually accomplish anything practical since those options were already GM gated.
This wasn't a problem that needed fixing in the first place, let alone made worse like this. And it kind of baffles me that a company that literally sells stories for a living (the entire AP line) has such a casual attitude towards verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief.
(As for the Darklands changes... I mean, the OGL forced them to do something there. Some folks may not like the "something", but I think people generally understood that it was a forced situation they hadn't planned on. This is not that.)
If this was the first time Paizo decided that NPCs should no longer adhere to general rules, I would at least understand the outrage, but this was a rule established since day 1 of the game, and there are things far more egregious than max level rituals that NPCs ignore the rules for (like ability score relevance, modifiers, scaling, etc). Mountain out of an ant hill IMO.
I do believe it could have been handled better, but my games, and the game as a whole, isn't going to fall apart because one ritual that isn't used at 99% of tables got changed into something else. I don't see the value in being that hypercritical about it when there are other things to be more hypercritical about that are more relevant to the topic (i.e. rituals as a whole).
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If this was the first time Paizo decided that NPCs should no longer adhere to general rules, I would at least understand the outrage, but this was a rule established since day 1 of the game, and there are things far more egregious than max level rituals that NPCs ignore the rules for (like ability score relevance, modifiers, scaling, etc). Mountain out of an ant hill IMO.
I do believe it could have been handled better, but my games, and the game as a whole, isn't going to fall apart because one ritual that isn't used at 99% of tables got changed into something else. I don't see the value in being that hypercritical about it when there are other things to be more hypercritical about that are more relevant to the topic (i.e. rituals as a whole).
So if you care so little about this change, why are you here telling people who do care that they shouldn't express that opinion? What are you gaining by being in this thread?
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By RAW if Karzoug was a PC he'd still have zero ability to turn all those advantages into a demi-plane. This is what people take issue with.
Well, RAW isn't a thing anymore. But the method Karzoug used is basically some sort of "research subsystem" thing where you need 100,000 RP to finish it and the PCs don't even have the appropriate library (but Karzoug did.)
Like it's obvious that there is a way that powerful Wizards discover new spells, rituals, runes, magic items, etc.. After all somebody had to make all the artifacts. We don't really have rules for "go in the lab and come out in a year with a new spell that's designed for specifically the purpose you have for it" but we assume that people do that sort of thing.
So the answer is "Karzoug could not have made a demiplane through the mythic Create Demiplane ritual, because he is not mythic. He did it a different way." A GM is under no obligation to offer the PCs access to whatever different ways there are to replicate mythic effects without access to mythic power, it just suffices to say that they exist.
Like Karzoug also had a unique spell.
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Okay, so if the idea is that Paizo now feels demiplanes are Mythic-specific powers, then it's at-worst a retcon of power capabilites, meaning Karzoug would have actually been a Mythic entity (or used a Macguffin like you said). It's not any worse than the retcon of the Darklands, which was met with a lot more backlash by comparison.
Except the Darklands thing (which was also adressed earlier in this thread) is a change Paizo was forced to make because of the OGL, while this change is literally a retcon for the sake of making a retcon. A retcon that, by the way, doesn't even change stuff about the setting itself but only makes it cumbersome for players that would want a demiplane. Nobody is arguing the system is falling apart because of these changes, just that we don't like this particular change.
If this was the first time Paizo decided that NPCs should no longer adhere to general rules, I would at least understand the outrage, but this was a rule established since day 1 of the game, and there are things far more egregious than max level rituals that NPCs ignore the rules for (like ability score relevance, modifiers, scaling, etc). Mountain out of an ant hill IMO.
Again, this isnt' a problem about PCs not being able to replicate what NPCs do. It is not immersion breaking to know that a PC can't replicate the abilities of a solar angel or ancient dragon because those have different anatomies than those of PCs. Even with human or humanoid NPCs its not a problem because those could have an in-universe reason to have powers they otherwise wouldn't have. The problem here is that create demiplane specifically wasn't one of those things that required "special in-universe reasons" to justify but now for whatever reason they do. This isn't an OGL or balance issue Paizo had to fix or change, its an arbitrary change to something that was, to be honest, a quite weak ritual all things considered (yes, the in-universe implications of the ritual require high level PCs to do such a thing, but the effects in practice aren't much different from buying a stronghold or house). The reason we are here discussing about it is because we don't want for this become a norm for Paizo to retcon stuff out of nowhere when there's no reason to do it. Not everyone was in favor of the setting changes brought with the Remaster but we can't really argue against them because its something Paizo was quite literally forced to make, this isn't.
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Well, RAW isn't a thing anymore. But the method Karzoug used is basically some sort of "research subsystem" thing where you need 100,000 RP to finish it and the PCs don't even have the appropriate library (but Karzoug did.)
Undead PCs could potentially be alive long enough to rediscover everything Karzoug knew but unless there is a house rule or said PC becomes and NPC they cannot replicate his feat. Period.
Like it's obvious that there is a way that powerful Wizards discover new spells, rituals, runes, magic items, etc.. After all somebody had to make all the artifacts. We don't really have rules for "go in the lab and come out in a year with a new spell that's designed for specifically the purpose you have for it" but we assume that people do that sort of thing.
There absolutely should be a book that lays out rules for PCs researching new spells and creating new magic items. That PF2 lacks such options is one of the things I dislike most about it.
Anything an NPC has done a PC should be able to aspire to and have a rules-based approach to being able to reach said goal.
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To the people defending this choice, rather than debate RAW or how much impact this change has on lore, gameplay, etc., let me ask you this; what benefit does this change bring to GMs and players of PF2?
First of all, I don't have a horse in this race. No one in my games has ever even considered creating a demiplane.
But to answer your question: the benefit this brings is it gives a GM more choices. There are now two versions of these rituals, which means that she can now allow either or both (or neither) to be valid in her games.
More choices are always a benefit.
Also, by RAW, Mythic is an optional rule. If you choose not to use Mythic, then nothing has changed, so it is in no way a detriment. (The new rule element, being Mythic *doesn't even exist* if you are not using the optional rule.)
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To the people defending this choice, rather than debate RAW or how much impact this change has on lore, gameplay, etc., let me ask you this; what benefit does this change bring to GMs and players of PF2?First of all, I don't have a horse in this race. No one in my games has ever even considered creating a demiplane.
But to answer your question: the benefit this brings is it gives a GM more choices. There are now two versions of these rituals, which means that she can now allow either or both (or neither) to be valid in her games.
More choices are always a benefit.
Also, by RAW, Mythic is an optional rule. If you choose not to use Mythic, then nothing has changed, so it is in no way a detriment. (The new rule element, being Mythic *doesn't even exist* if you are not using the optional rule.)
There are not two versions in the post-remaster version of the rules and, as the new ritual has the same name as the old, the old version won't show up on AoN by default. Having to own an older version of the game's rules or look in the legacy section of online rules repositories is not the same as having two versions of a rule.
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There are not two versions in the post-remaster version of the rules and, as the new ritual has the same name as the old, the old version won't show up on AoN by default. Having to own an older version of the game's rules or look in the legacy section of online rules repositories is not the same as having two versions of a rule.To the people defending this choice, rather than debate RAW or how much impact this change has on lore, gameplay, etc., let me ask you this; what benefit does this change bring to GMs and players of PF2?First of all, I don't have a horse in this race. No one in my games has ever even considered creating a demiplane.
But to answer your question: the benefit this brings is it gives a GM more choices. There are now two versions of these rituals, which means that she can now allow either or both (or neither) to be valid in her games.
More choices are always a benefit.
Also, by RAW, Mythic is an optional rule. If you choose not to use Mythic, then nothing has changed, so it is in no way a detriment. (The new rule element, being Mythic *doesn't even exist* if you are not using the optional rule.)
Not only that, mythic clearly exists both in the game and in Golarion's universe.
Saying it doesn't exist at certain tables (and that, by implication, we therefore shouldn't be talking about it) is not really helpful and doesn't contribute anything to the discussion.
There absolutely should be a book that lays out rules for PCs researching new spells and creating new magic items. That PF2 lacks such options is one of the things I dislike most about it.
I think this is solely because there are only so many slots on the release schedule, and only so many pages in the books so priority is given to "things that apply in a lot of different stories" and "things that apply to a lot of different characters" as well as "things that help us tell new stories."
The problem with a subsystem for "designing new stuff" is that it kind of only applies to very high level characters of certain classes (that and it's very hard to balance.)
In practice it's probably always going to work better if you have a cooperative GM and this jives with the premise of the campaign to work together to figure out a way to do it with some of the abstract subsystems in the Gamemaster's Guide. This probably takes the place of "a big downtime project" so other people in the party can benefit from something else they can get done during the downtime. I think the important thing for this sort of system is "the GM signs off on what the thing you're inventing does before you go out and invent it" since "let players design anything they want with a power budget" is a dangerous thing to let into the wild, since people in this hobby are talented min-maxers.
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There are not two versions in the post-remaster version of the rules and, as the new ritual has the same name as the old, the old version won't show up on AoN by default. Having to own an older version of the game's rules or look in the legacy section of online rules repositories is not the same as having two versions of a rule.To the people defending this choice, rather than debate RAW or how much impact this change has on lore, gameplay, etc., let me ask you this; what benefit does this change bring to GMs and players of PF2?First of all, I don't have a horse in this race. No one in my games has ever even considered creating a demiplane.
But to answer your question: the benefit this brings is it gives a GM more choices. There are now two versions of these rituals, which means that she can now allow either or both (or neither) to be valid in her games.
More choices are always a benefit.
Also, by RAW, Mythic is an optional rule. If you choose not to use Mythic, then nothing has changed, so it is in no way a detriment. (The new rule element, being Mythic *doesn't even exist* if you are not using the optional rule.)
Not only that, mythic clearly exists both in the game and in the Golarion's universe.
Saying it doesn't exist at certain tables (and that, by implication, we therefore shouldn't be talking about it) is not really helpful and doesn't contribute anything to the discussion.
I'm *not* saying you shouldn't talk about it.
One person wanted to know if there were any benefits. (And was using the fact that "no one could list any benefits" as an arguing point.) So I listed a benefit.
That benefit also has drawbacks, and it is entirely appropriate to decide that "the drawbacks outway the benefits" but that doesn't mean that it isn't a benefit.
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Having to own an older version of the game's rules or look in the legacy section of online rules repositories is not the same as having two versions of a rule.
Umm, it is *exactly* that.
Personally, I am *always* toggling between Legacy and Remaster versions of rule elements. It is extremely easy to do.
It may not be something that fits your playstyle, but that doesn't make it a wider problem.
So if you care so little about this change, why are you here telling people who do care that they shouldn't express that opinion? What are you gaining by being in this thread?If this was the first time Paizo decided that NPCs should no longer adhere to general rules, I would at least understand the outrage, but this was a rule established since day 1 of the game, and there are things far more egregious than max level rituals that NPCs ignore the rules for (like ability score relevance, modifiers, scaling, etc). Mountain out of an ant hill IMO.
I do believe it could have been handled better, but my games, and the game as a whole, isn't going to fall apart because one ritual that isn't used at 99% of tables got changed into something else. I don't see the value in being that hypercritical about it when there are other things to be more hypercritical about that are more relevant to the topic (i.e. rituals as a whole).
When you put it that way, then you know what? That's a fair point. Sometimes having a reminder to just walk away from what is an obvious echo chamber is more helpful than one might think.
I think this is solely because there are only so many slots on the release schedule, and only so many pages in the books so priority is given to "things that apply in a lot of different stories" and "things that apply to a lot of different characters" as well as "things that help us tell new stories."
The problem with a subsystem for "designing new stuff" is that it kind of only applies to very high level characters of certain classes (that and it's very hard to balance.)
Traditionally the rules for creating new spells and custom magic items have been available starting at low levels. You'd just be limited in the scope of what you could create at those levels.
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Having to own an older version of the game's rules or look in the legacy section of online rules repositories is not the same as having two versions of a rule.Umm, it is *exactly* that.
Personally, I am *always* toggling between Legacy and Remaster versions of rule elements. It is extremely easy to do.
It may not be something that fits your playstyle, but that doesn't make it a wider problem.
It clearly wasn't intended that way or they'd have given the new rituals different names and thus clearly stated that both versions are valid. The route they chose didn't go that route which is what people are taking issue with. Even worse, the mythic versions of these rituals don't offer a meaningful change to the old versions so aren't really adding anything new.
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I'm *not* saying you shouldn't talk about it.
One person wanted to know if there were any benefits. (And was using the fact that "no one could list any benefits" as an arguing point.) So I listed a benefit.
That benefit also has drawbacks, and it is entirely appropriate to decide that "the drawbacks outway the benefits" but that doesn't mean that it isn't a benefit.
I don't even see it as a benefit as the new versions don't meaningfully add anything that didn't already exist. They just take an old thing, lock it behind a new requirement, and now you need to jump through hoops to even see the old version of the rituals. This really doesn't meaningful add to the game.
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I don't even see it as a benefit as the new versions don't meaningfully add anything that didn't already exist. They just take an old thing, lock it behind a new requirement, and now you need to jump through hoops to even see the old version of the rituals. This really doesn't meaningful add to the game.I'm *not* saying you shouldn't talk about it.
One person wanted to know if there were any benefits. (And was using the fact that "no one could list any benefits" as an arguing point.) So I listed a benefit.
That benefit also has drawbacks, and it is entirely appropriate to decide that "the drawbacks outway the benefits" but that doesn't mean that it isn't a benefit.
So, I can tell you the difference between our perspectives. You are thinking of the rules as fiat. I think of them as negotiations.
Every game that I have been in, rarity tags are an invitation to negotiate between the GM and the player for access. More options, (even if "hidden" behind a single, highlighted button press) gives you more of an opportunity to advocate for what you want. More words -- more versions -- give more of a picture of how the parts fit into the whole.
If that isn't how you play the game, that isn't how you play the game. It is not a benefit *for you*. But you needn't be so harshly dismissive of other approaches.
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So, I can tell you the difference between our perspectives. You are thinking of the rules as fiat. I think of them as negotiations.
Every game that I have been in, rarity tags are an invitation to negotiate between the GM and the player for access. More options, (even if "hidden" behind a single, highlighted button press) gives you more of an opportunity to advocate for what you want. More words -- more versions -- give more of a picture of how the parts fit into the whole.
If that isn't how you play the game, that isn't how you play the game. It is not a benefit *for you*. But you needn't be so harshly dismissive of other approaches.
Rarity tags are, simply put, fewer options available to players by default. They're only an invitation to negotiate because they force you to negotiate for them in the first place. I generally run my games wide open, if it exists in the official rules we're using it. So for me, all rarity does is waste page space and add visual clutter.
This change is the worst of all worlds from my perspective. It makes PCs and NPCs even more different. It forces players to interact with the mythic subsystem if we want to use the most up-to-date RAW version of these rituals. It takes away page space from something more interesting that could have been printed.
I'd much rather have rules that expand what players can do, not rules that add extra barriers, however minor.
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Having to own an older version of the game's rules or look in the legacy section of online rules repositories is not the same as having two versions of a rule.Umm, it is *exactly* that.
Personally, I am *always* toggling between Legacy and Remaster versions of rule elements. It is extremely easy to do.
It may not be something that fits your playstyle, but that doesn't make it a wider problem.
"The old version still exists if you go look in the legacy section" is a way to mitigate the impact of the change. It is not a defense of the change.
Because yeah, while the old version does exist, the rules makers have very directly weighed in on what they think of it by changing to the new version. That carries weight with folks looking to use things.
Also, the closest thing Paizo has to an official stance on that is PFS policy. PFS doesn't apply directly because neither Mythic nor Rituals are in PFS, but their policy on the remaster is pretty clear: if it's reprinted with the same name, it's errata and the new version is the one that applies. (Just ask Oracle players about it: we'll tell you in excruciating detail.)
Non-PFS GMs can also ignore that, but we're ignoring a lot of things at this point and there's going to be GMs that look at that and go "well there must be a reason they did that, so we're doing that" without giving it a ton of thought, because frankly they've got other things to focus attention on. That's the impact a change like this ultimately has.
Ultimately I think everyone would have been a lot happier if these were modified to do different things with a Mythic user, such as getting a better demiplane, or making Imprison/Freedom require a mythic caster to work on a mythic target. That doesn't change anything that already existed while amping it up for Mythic play, which is what Mythic is really about, isn't it?
(Hell, my Rise of the Runelords Cleric has gone from having his own little demiplane cottage because he was a 17th level Cleric in PF1, to needing the skill and ritual access to have that, to needing a GM houserule to have that. It's the same character in the same game world so my GM is just going to ignore this rather than retcon it away from me, but he shouldn't have to do that.)
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Hi, I use rituals in my game, this means that to some guy I'm qualified to express I don't like this change or see the point right? Yeah, I don't like this change or see the point for it. I dislike having to do more houserules.
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That doesn't sound like a very healthy table mindset - and if any GM does that, they should not be GMing.
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Hi, I use rituals in my game, this means that to some guy I'm qualified to express I don't like this change or see the point right? Yeah, I don't like this change or see the point for it. I dislike having to do more houserules.
I mean, most tables use rituals in their game to some extent (Resurrect is a ritual, after all). But generally players are only going to get access to a rare ritual when it's something that is specifically relevant to the plot.
Like if I need the players to be able to get to the demiplane of dreams regularly, they're going to get a ritual to do that. Like "create demiplane" was already rare and I've never seen a player cast it (or get access to it.) The way I've always played "Rare" is "it's only going to be in the game if I specifically grant access to it." This calculus is different with a rare ancestry (something you get at level 1) compared to a rare 8th rank ritual.
Making Freedom and Imprisonment mythic rituals basically means that "freeing/imprisoning the thing is going to need the mechanisms of plot, rather than the one-size-fits-all ritual" which is more or less fine. It's generally better if the PCs have to go somewhere and do something in order to accomplish their narrative goals rather than just using a ritual.
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Every game that I have been in, rarity tags are an invitation to negotiate between the GM and the player for access.To me, it feels like coercion. It artificially creates a situation where the GM can make the player feel like they owe them a favor for allowing the use of an option that exists in other games and in previous editions. I find this distasteful and refuse to engage with it on principle.
Agreed. There's something especially distasteful about having to negotiate for the ancestry and/or class you have your heart set on when the player next to you can expect a pass if they pick something more standard vanilla. I mean, if everyone had to negotiate and spend clout for their character ("Ah, you want to play a human fighter? I need you to justify that"), that'd be one thing. But it's demoralizing to have to put yourself out to play, say, a catfolk monk that you're looking forward to when the guy next to playing an elf wizard, maybe because he's even more into it than you are your's, maybe for no better reason than "Eh, haven't played a spellcaster lately, whatever".
It communicates that some ancestries are only there out of begrudging obligation, merely throwing a meager bone to players who need their badwrongfun stamped out in favor of the standard vanilla ancestries and/or classes that are the correct things you should want to play, as evidenced by how you can just expect to play them. Is that what the designers intended? Probably not. But it's how it reads. Very exclusionary.
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You're never going to be able to solve personal problems with game rules. Either a player is going to see "no, you cannot play a poppet in my very serious horror campaign game" as "unfair" or the GM is going to have to do extra work for every session in order to figure out, like, "how a hobgoblin PC works in Ironfang Invasion."
It has always been the case that the GM has the ability to insist that players not play certain things in a given campaign (I have played in multiple games where "elves" were banned for narrative reasons.) Either you trust that the GM is doing that for good reasons or you don't. But "you don't trust your GM" is not something that Paizo can write rules to fix.
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At the end of the day, chuuni/special/edge/snowflake level is something the table needs to negotiate and would likely negotiate regardless of the rarity system. The rarity system just makes that negotiation obvious to everyone involved.
It's just offputting to have one character's flavor significantly out of whack with everyone else's. I personally believe this is something the whole table should coordinate, and everyone should have a bit of a say; however, most people just let the GM say what they do and don't find appropriate instead. The rarity system is an acknowledgement of this, and points at things you'd probably still need to get a GM pass on from an experienced GM even without it.
Don't get me wrong—I love tables that go full ham. My Season of Ghosts table is full ham, and everyone is going chuuni mode with rare archetypes with their FA and so on and it's a blast. But that just isn't appropriate for every story or gaming group, and I don't think it's the system's place to force things more removed from PF2E's "default trope space" onto all tables.
EDIT: This isn't a pass for fantasy bigotry or something, fwiw. It's more about preventing the weird narrative feeling—and the weird table dynamics and sort of lopsided narrative demand—of 3 bog standard human fighters and a minotaur oracle in the same party. If the fighters were more unique themselves, it'd be fine; if the minotaur were less unique, it'd be fine. The problem is the mismatch.
EDIT EDIT: Unless you can run that like a perfectly straight-faced magic realism story where no one ever acknowledges there's anything extraordinary or comparatively unique about the minotaur. That'd be pretty hilarious. I'd play in a campaign where that's the gag.
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So, I am in agreement, rarity invites negotiation. that's fine, I think most of us GM's agree that's a great feature of the 2E system. But rarity only invites negotiation when rarity is the limiting factor.
I don't know if this is unpopular or not, but I really don't like rarity traits. I feel the whole "rarity invites negotiation" aspect of them is mostly useless for my table because I play with my friends who know they don't need to come up to me to ask me if X weapon or feat is available or not. I also think that even for those tables that could use them most of the time Paizo puts the uncommon or rare traits for stuff that makes sense to be uncommon or rare within Golarion but not in other settings. Funnily enough I do use Golarion as my setting, but if you were to, for example, use a katana as a weapon as long as you are from Tian Xia or have something in your background that could connect you with Tian Xia the uncommon trait doesn't mean anything to you either.
What I'm trying to say is that, since PF2e has kind of moved away from the Inner Sea what does "uncommon" or "rare" mean? A katana is uncommon in the context of the Inner Sea Region, but not in Tian Xia. If rarity traits would be more about stronger options I would probably understand their need a little more, but if stronger options were gated behind a trait that requires "ask your GM" then most GMs would get asked to death about using X or Y overpowered options.
If anything, the only thing I would really agree the rarity traits make total sense is with rituals since there's rituals like resurrection that could be disruptive in certain campaigns. But then you have other examples like the exemplar that despite having the highest rarity the system allows was mentioned to be one of the most played classes back in the playtest. That doesn't sound too rare, isn't it?
There's also a pretty big difference between saying "that character concept would work better in a different story, do you have something else you would want to play" at character generation, in case being an Android or a Skeleton or an Exemplar would be a bad match for the story on the table and insisting that a rare high rank ritual or spell or high level item is not something you can get.
Like the specific thing about rare ancestries is that you need to pre-clear them, because you need to have a character for session 1. So asking the GM "I really want to play an Anadi PC, would that work for you?" is normal and fine, even if the answer is "no". But something you wouldn't get your hands on until 16th level or so is not something you should ask the GM for.
Like generally the way rarity works for things that aren't top level choices made at chargen is, anything that's common you can just have, anything that's uncommon you can have with a little work or justification, and nothing rare comes into the game without the specific endorsement of the GM or the person writing the adventure.
There's a big difference between "helping the GM come up with a list of stuff the PCs would like to find someday" and "asking for a specific ritual that mostly exists to short circuits narratives or as a vanity piece for the PC.
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you can just play with those Rituals as they were before WoI - Paizo isn't actually coming into your game and telling you 'no'.
I'm pretty sure that I'm very, very far from unique in that my main rules resource is Archives Of Nethys (even though I own most of the rulebooks and all of the rulebooks with content that I actively use).
Absent this thread, I very likely wouldn't even have realized that this change had been made. If Create Demiplane came up, I'd check AoN, see that it was Mythic and very likely decide not to use it since I just don't want to mess with Mythic.
I wouldn't even know that the older Ritual even existed unless I was sufficiently curious to click through their Legacy link.
Its all very well to say "Just use the old version" but surely you recognize that not everybody even knows the old version exists and the portion of the audience that knows about it gets smaller and smaller over time.
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....
There's a big difference between "helping the GM come up with a list of stuff the PCs would like to find someday" and "asking for a specific ritual that mostly exists to short circuits narratives or as a vanity piece for the PC.
So Imprison and Freedom I suppose could be used to short-circuit narrative in that it opens up a way to 'eliminate' an enemy which you have already defeated (given the requirements are pretty explanatory that you have to have control of them) without killing them. Or opens up a narrative that would otherwise be unavailable to release someone from a narrative imprisoning which has already taken place.
But I think with keeping the context of the requirements that Imprison has of needing to have the target subdued the whole time does the opposite of 'short-circuiting the narrative' and simply enables a new narrative that doesn't have to include killing as your means of presumably eternally defeating an evil.
Freedom, again is something that lets you narratively bring someone whom was 'lost' back, I suppose someone might say having arbitrary narrative McGuffins would be better to collect and free them from an arbitrary narrative prison, could be a 'reasonable' proposal for narrative solution, but the old ritual required a certain relatively detailed level of knowing who they where, where they came from, and where they got imprisoned amd/or get access to where they are being held prison, so they seemed to be intending to insure the narrative was addressed in the original ritual. So I'm not entirely certain that the ritual was that much of a narrative short-circuit as it was.
Then, Creating demi-plane falls smack into the former category of being something primarily only relevant in the 'wish-list of things we'd like to bump into' to develop our character in the direction we would like to see. It simply doesn't provide access to really break anything that the player can't already break. For nearly all cases I can imagine, it absolutely requires access to Interplanar Teleport... which has an uncommon tag on it because 'it' might bypass certain narratives, or enable travel the GM doesn't want to enable. However, I don't really see how create Demiplane allows anyone to 'break' any games unless you are talking about things that aren't broken by the ritual, but are instead broken by Interplanar Teleport.
It makes perfect sense to block players from creating Demiplanes in a low magic universe where mortals can't access other planes. If that is the narrative being sold by the GM, I'd realize that I probably couldn't expect them to let me create my own plane, unless they were very inclined to make exceptions for us the heroes in the long game.
But why when a mage can cast a spell and summon an undead for a minute, and a few levels later, they can potentially take and learn to cast a ritual for a cost that allows them to make a permanent instance of such a creature and potentially control it.
So why when a wizard can manipulate the same magics to create a Demiplane and prepopulate it with a mansion for a day, and then why is the default that it is completely unreasonable for them to potentially be able to make a simpler empty Demiplane that is permanent or whose duration is beyond the life of the maker, if they apply some of the same elongation techniques via a ritual? It doesn't seem like it passes the narrative or regional tests from my perspective to fall into a can't be done without Mythic. It absolutely can't be done without powerful magic, but that isn't the same thing as Mythic.
It is absolutely true that higher level rarity items you might not even realize they are important to you and so they are the items that are most likely in my opinion to trip people up, because someone may ask the GM to later after they started getting set on the idea.
Someone claimed that create Demiplane actually created problems for their campaign, I'm really curious how, and want to ask, was it really the Create Demiplane that caused the problem, or was it creative or overuse of InterPlanar teleport, or treated the Demiplane as a mobile Tardis, which the ritual itself clearly does not allow by raw. Was it allowing them to have an armory always withing 'teleport' distance from their front line in the dungeon? Again, that isn't the fault of the Demiplane, but the teleport. Allowing you to teleport back to a nearby castle a weeks ride away every night would be the same situation, so it isn't the Demiplane.
Maybe it is that it allowed them to hide somewhere where they could go but others couldn't' readily follow. But again that seems more like an Interplanar Teleport issue again.
I just don't see how gating these items past the prior Rare tag really did anything to improve the sorts of stories you could tell with them. The only thing the did was made the critical successes a bit bigger for the mythic instances. Which could have easily be handled as a mythic Heightening note added to the original rituals, or making the modified version have a different name and larger sizes, and then just leaving the old ones be.
For example... I'd suggest the mythic versions of ritual, for create Demiplane, the primary caster should hence be considered themselves as a key for the Demiplane, and that the primary caster should be able to choose any of the other three secondary casters as becoming alternate keys for purpose of entering the Demiplane. That makes sense as part of being a mythic entity, that you yourself would gain a relationship with the plane you helped create. That has more mythic flavor to me, in that instance.
I mean, if I was GMing a story where the ending requires the PCs to either Imprison or Free something, I would genuinely prefer every single other way to do this sort of thing over a ritual. Like "Go go get the MacGuffin, take it to the specific place you need to learn about, and destroy it in a specific way at a specific time all while people are trying to stop you" seems more fun to both run and play than "you do the ritual."
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So, I am in agreement, rarity invites negotiation. that's fine, I think most of us GM's agree that's a great feature of the 2E system. But rarity only invites negotiation when rarity is the limiting factor.I don't know if this is unpopular or not, but I really don't like rarity traits. I feel the whole "rarity invites negotiation" aspect of them is mostly useless for my table because I play with my friends who know they don't need to come up to me to ask me if X weapon or feat is available or not. I also think that even for those tables that could use them most of the time Paizo puts the uncommon or rare traits for stuff that makes sense to be uncommon or rare within Golarion but not in other settings. Funnily enough I do use Golarion as my setting, but if you were to, for example, use a katana as a weapon as long as you are from Tian Xia or have something in your background that could connect you with Tian Xia the uncommon trait doesn't mean anything to you either.
One of the reasons rarity was added was to solve the PF1 problem of "a book added some obscure ancient spell only the Runelords knew, RAW says that I can add it to my spellbook when I level because there's no distinction between that and a bog standard spell of the same level."
The GM can say no to that, but thats the rules putting the GM in the position of having to say "no" a lot. Some GMs are far more comfortable doing that than others.
Rarity now says "this obscure ancient spell can't be found at your local outfitter's shop." If the GM doesn't want it in the game, they now have cover because the rules set the expectation that it's not there. If they allow it, they get to say "yes" and look like the cool GM that everyone likes.
When it's doing that, its doing its job. The trouble starts when it does other stuff...
What I'm trying to say is that, since PF2e has kind of moved away from the Inner Sea what does "uncommon" or "rare" mean? A katana is uncommon in the context of the Inner Sea Region, but not in Tian Xia. If rarity traits would be more about stronger options I would probably understand their need a little more, but if stronger options were gated behind a trait that requires "ask your GM" then most GMs would get asked to death about using X or Y overpowered options.
Yeah this is a challenge at times.
If anything, the only thing I would really agree the rarity traits make total sense is with rituals since there's rituals like resurrection that could be disruptive in certain campaigns. But then you have other examples like the exemplar that despite having the highest rarity the system allows was mentioned to be one of the most played classes back in the playtest. That doesn't sound too rare, isn't it?
Rarity can run into problems as it's doing two different functions, and you hit both of them:
1. This thing is uncommon/rare because it might be disruptive. See: Rituals, Teleport, the weird backgrounds that require much more active GM intervention, etc.2. This thing is uncommon/rare because canonically there aren't a lot of them in Golarian or they're region/faction locked. See: Starlit Sentinel, Exemplar, most of the content of Guns & Gears/LO Firebrands/etc.
It's not always clear which of the two the rarity tag is intended to do. Ironically, Exemplar itself I'd argue is #2 while Exemplar Dedication is intended to also be #2 but actually falls into #1 because it's so overpowered that if its allowed it's the best feat in the game for almost every martial character.
Who says anything about identical sets though? And what is 'identical' when each feat is an ability and having different ones is completely normal. And identical sets of spells is kind of absurd. I probably don't understand at all what you mean at this point...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'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.
Sorry for the late reply. I mean identical sets of abilities and spells that they are able to learn, if they so choose. I don't think that it's something required for an NPC to belong to a class. A fighter NPC with some rogue 12th level feat they couldn't possibly get from the dedication if they were a PC, doesn't break my immersion at all, for example; same if they have sheer numbers unattainable by PCs of that level - they are just especially good at something. And if they happen to have access to some totally unique spell or ritual, even less.
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Somestimes a GM has to just say no:
I remember running Rise of the Runelords from some college friends. A girl told me they wanted to play a 7 foot tall faceless changeling witch who gets whispered to do bad things by Barney the Dinosaur.
I had to say no after questioning whether or not it was a serious request (it was a serious request).
Wow. Was she a child actor on the show or something? That's really messed up!
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The heart wants what it wants, so sometimes the GM needs to be able to say "no" or "maybe in a different campaign."
(...) The position on this is literally "NPCs follow their own rules so they don't have to be Mythic because reasons."
Which is exactly what people are complaining about, because having such a wild double standard for what PCs and NPCs are capable of doing is extremely bad for verisimilitude compared to what we had before, and doesn't actually accomplish anything practical since those options were already GM gated.
This wasn't a problem that needed fixing in the first place, let alone made worse like this. And it kind of baffles me that a company that literally sells stories for a living (the entire AP line) has such a casual attitude towards verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief. (...)
I completely agree with this sentiment. Alas, for the last decade or so, moving away from such in-universe verisimilitude for some (unexplainable)(*) reason(s) seems to be the vogue in the RPG scenes. Thus I'm in an emotionally perpetual turmoil regarding this matter ever since...
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The rituals printed in War of Immortals aren't sitting right with me. It's not that I have a problem with the rituals in-and-of themselves, but I can't say I'm fond of classics like Create Demiplane, Imprisonment, and Freedom are now inaccessible to anyone who lacks mythic power.
Like, are evil wizards all suddenly going to have to get into the real estate market? In THIS economy!? Jokes aside, I dislike the idea that one must be mythic to seal away the immortal evil, or magically reinforce a structure. This feels like a needless restriction on rituals that are already tagged uncommon or rare, and thus plainly subject to GM discretion to begin with.
The evil wizards are already in the real estate market. Who do you think is selling all these trap filled dungeons?
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If possible, I would like to know, even if it's in a private message.
I can guess that the explanation will blame short attention spans and a lack of willingness to embrace things that require time to understand fully. There has been a trend in all areas of entertainment towards keeping the pace brisk and minimizing periods where engaging action isn't front and centre.