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I've always thought that some ancient Roman peoples being able to cast Light would change the course of human development substantially, so the whole "it's still a medieval shithole!!!...but with wizards" has always struck me as wrong and I'm glad that Pathfinder just segments the world like a theme park.
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Sep 5, 2023 15:38
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I've always thought that some ancient Roman peoples being able to cast Light would change the course of human development substantially, so the whole "it's still a medieval shithole!!!...but with wizards" has always struck me as wrong and I'm glad that Pathfinder just segments the world like a theme park. I don't think the "segments the world like a theme park" approach is much more realistic. To be fair, the 2e lore has moved towards the different parts of the world interacting more. (My biggest issue with Golarion's worldbuilding, though, is the stuff involving alignment and the afterlife. I feel like certain knowledge not only of the afterlife in general, but also of which afterlife you, specifically, would go to if you died right now, would drastically alter human behavior in ways that are mostly ignored. One benefit of the remaster's removal of alignment is that it adds some ambiguity about the fate of individual souls; the sort of people who would have been classified as Neutral Evil don't actually know that they're going to become one of the Hunted when they die.) Edit: I guess the lore was always a bit more nuanced than that; ordinary people's ideas about the afterlife aren't completely accurate, there were a lot more possible afterlives than just one per alignment, and Pharasma's judgments are supposed to be individualized rather than being reducible to a Detect Alignment spell. But this always struck me as a bit handwavey. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 16:00
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I think as far as afterlife stuff goes, it's also always possible you've just got people who don't believe in one. I mean, if you're John Turnipfarmer, and some rando is telling you about how they died and met their God and then came back to life in time for lunch, you'd probably think they were insane. Hell, even a regular Fighter could decide that their friend who was rezzed at the Temple, while claiming to have met God, just had a really vivid dream while dead based off of their religious beliefs. Agnosticism and atheism are entirely possible even in a fantasy setting. And even if you're an evil character who does believe in Super Hell, you can always just be convinced that your bid for immortality will work and it won't be an issue for you.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:41
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the_steve posted:I think as far as afterlife stuff goes, it's also always possible you've just got people who don't believe in one. This isn't really how religion in Golarion tends to be portrayed, though. In a Golarion context "atheism" means rejecting the worship of gods, not disbelieving in their existence.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:47
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oh god we've gone from "mundane fighters are boring" to "atheism is a thing in this fantasy setting" pull the gently caress up, thread
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Sep 5, 2023 16:49
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me, gingerly stepping by the undead faerie dragon lich from an alternate dimension, I have a bone to pick with the realism of state interactions and paths of historical development I swear to god if the relations of landlord power to development of democratic emergence across golarion are not approximately in line I’m gonna lose my poo poo sugar free jazz fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 16:49
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sugar free jazz posted:me, gingerly stepping by the undead faerie dragon lich from an alternate dimension, I have a bone to pick with the realism of state interactions and paths of historical development I don't think it's absurd for fantasy settings to at least try to deal with these kinds of questions, and I don't think it's too unfair to say that Pathfinder tends to worry about them less than, say, Exalted and Runequest do. That said, I recognize that Golarion is intended to be a world for having adventures in, and social-scientific realism and even logical consistency have to take a backseat to fun to some extent. (Arguably Glorantha's weird and complicated worldbuilding has been a major limit on Runequest's mass appeal.) Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 17:00
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Silver2195 posted:I don't think it's absurd for fantasy settings to at least try to deal with these kinds of questions, and I don't think it's too unfair to say that Pathfinder tends to worry about them less than, say, Exalted and Runequest do. That said, I recognize that Golarion is intended to be a world for having adventures in, and social-scientific realism and even logical consistency have to take a backseat to fun to some extent. (Arguably Glorantha's weird and complicated worldbuilding has been a major limit on Runequest's mass appeal.) I think you severely under estimate the average person's ability to ignore things they don't like regardless of any evidence or facts to the contrary. In our world a portal could open in the sky and an alien entity could descend and tell us we've got it all hosed up and they have solved the death equation and it turns out you just wake up on a different planet and start your true eternal life as a ball of sentient immortal energy and we'd have still have people openly going "not my god" and enacting violence on anyone who would dare claim they could be mistaken. The idea that a land where dieties are tangible and real would not matter one ioata to the people who don't give a drat.
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Sep 5, 2023 17:13
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social scientific consistency is based on contingent factors of the real world which don't apply within a fantasy make believe world where food can be conjured from thin air, people can be resurrected from the dead, and where otyughs can be used to get rid of trash. absalom doesn't need to fit its welfare state within esping-anderson's framework, galt doesn't need a history of enclosure and cross class coalitions, there doesn't need to be a tilly style history of war leading to state emergence or an accurate representation of authoritative management of trade practices and trade guild formation. it's fine, none of that poo poo matters when there are archwizards who can and do create their own planes of existence at a whim.
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Sep 5, 2023 17:18
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Ravus Ursus posted:I think you severely under estimate the average person's ability to ignore things they don't like regardless of any evidence or facts to the contrary. Also, it's not like degree of punishment stops people from committing crimes. Especially not in this case, since petitioners and souls barely share memories, meaning there's no downside for the mortal.
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Sep 5, 2023 18:43
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Everyone knows your true goal should be to rip the gods apart for their delicious juice and I'm just glad Pathfinder understands this and is even making a class about it
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Sep 5, 2023 18:55
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Cyouni posted:Also, it's not like degree of punishment stops people from committing crimes. Especially not in this case, since petitioners and souls barely share memories, meaning there's no downside for the mortal.
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Sep 5, 2023 19:36
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Impermanent posted:if I knew an action would lead me to become become an amnesiac who suffers eternally i would consider that a hefty downside. That's because you're a logical human being who can probably entertain a hypothetical scenario. Many people are not and can not.
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Sep 5, 2023 19:50
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Impermanent posted:if I knew an action would lead me to become become an amnesiac who suffers eternally i would consider that a hefty downside. What about if it caused you to become an amnesiac who has fun eternally But the action of most people would be "that's that guy's problem".
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Sep 5, 2023 20:58
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Arivia posted:oh god we've gone from "mundane fighters are boring" to "atheism is a thing in this fantasy setting" pull the gently caress up, thread There's absolutely nothing seedy or morally wrong with discussing the implications of the religious system that Golorian lays out here in the Pathfinder 2e discussion thread. Ravus Ursus posted:That's because you're a logical human being who can probably entertain a hypothetical scenario. The Catholic Church has a good chunk of people dancing to its tune with absolutely no evidence; I suspect that if it (and its competing organizations) could literally manifest miracles they could probably get even more pull. The average person probably wouldn't be too secular because the easiest way to a post-afterlife existence and some worldly comfort is godliness. What I don't understand is - and I know that ultimately this is a game balance thing doing meta stuff to the narrative - why would our hypothetical believer ever align themselves with the evil organizations? They have no more power than the other guys and their followers end up in Actual Hell, so I imagine this is where the disinformation/marketing side comes in. Cultural mores against ever signing a contract without reading it to make sure that some evil-aligned guy didn't slip in a claim on your immortal soul, that kind of thing.
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Sep 5, 2023 21:25
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Silver2195 posted:I don't think the "segments the world like a theme park" approach is much more realistic. To be fair, the 2e lore has moved towards the different parts of the world interacting more. Kinda sounds like Christian reasoning where they think the only reason everyone isn't a murdering rapist child molester is because of fear of God, so atheists who don't believe in Hell are inherently dangerous people because they have no reason not to give in to all their evil urges. People don't go through life worrying about the afterlife every day. Even believers do "bad" things and hope they get the chance to repent later. Why would people in Golarian do evil if they believe the evil afterlife is real?
Facebook Aunt fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 21:45
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Facebook Aunt posted:Kinda sounds like Christian reasoning where they think the only reason everyone isn't a murdering rapist child molester is because of fear of God, so atheists who don't believe in Hell are inherently dangerous people because they have no reason not to give in to all their evil urges. People don't go through life worrying about the afterlife every day. Even believers do "bad" things and hope they get the chance to repent later. I think a simpler explanation for this one is "main character syndrome" insofar as a lot of people think they are always in the right, and therefore anything they do or think therefore must be correct, or at least can be justified. And they'll twist themselves into knots to come up with ad hoc reasons for why shouting the N-word at a small child and throwing rocks at them was totally justified, because... even though the kid hadn't done anything wrong, clearly that kid was gonna grow up to be a murderous, thieving thug. Introspection is something a whole lotta people straight up don't do. Basically, very few people think of themselves as evil or bad. They may necessarily have incredibly warped worldviews in order to come up with reasons why they're not, but human beings aren't exactly know for being perfectly logical or rational. Also, alignment is loving garbage.
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Sep 5, 2023 21:51
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Dick Burglar posted:I think a simpler explanation for this one is "main character syndrome" insofar as a lot of people think they are always in the right, and therefore anything they do or think therefore must be correct, or at least can be justified. And they'll twist themselves into knots to come up with ad hoc reasons for why shouting the N-word at a small child and throwing rocks at them was totally justified, because... even though the kid hadn't done anything wrong, clearly that kid was gonna grow up to be a murderous, thieving thug. Right. Which still comes back to not believing they are evil. Everything they did was justified.
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Sep 5, 2023 22:06
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“They don’t believe they’re evil” doesn’t work as well in a world where effects like Divine Lance exist. (This isn't even a purely hypothetical issue; at the risk of sounding like hyphz, I can think of at least one Adventure Path antagonist where this issue is likely to come up if a PC is a Neutral Good Cleric.) The point about beating the system is a fair one in theory, though it feels like the actual villains we see tend to be demon/devil/Dahak/Rovagug cultists more often than worshippers of rear end in a top hat “neutral” gods like Calistria and Abadar.
Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 22:20
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Silver2195 posted:“They don’t believe they’re evil” doesn’t work as well in a world where effects like Divine Lance exist. The point about beating the system is a fair one in theory, though it feels like the actual villains we see tend to be demon/devil/Dahak/Rovagug cultists more often than worshippers of rear end in a top hat “neutral” gods like Calistria and Abadar. Stuff like Divine Lance won't do that once the revision comes out. Rules for playing a game don't need to define the physics of a setting. e: Otherwise we'd have to ask why anyone would believe in gods when doing so makes medicine work significantly worse on you (Godless Healing). Clearly the gods are parasitic entities that make you weaker and your immune system less robust. KPC_Mammon fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 22:26
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KPC_Mammon posted:Stuff like Divine Lance won't do that once the revision comes out. That was part of my point, yes; removing alignment is a definite improvement to the setting.
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Sep 5, 2023 22:31
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Silver2195 posted:“They don’t believe they’re evil” doesn’t work as well in a world where effects like Divine Lance exist. The point about beating the system is a fair one in theory, though it feels like the actual villains we see tend to be demon/devil/Dahak/Rovagug cultists more often than worshippers of rear end in a top hat “neutral” gods like Calistria and Abadar. I'm talking more banal evil. A shady businessman who mistreats his staff, cheats his customers and beats his children doesn't get hit with spells like that. People who are cruel and cowardly but don't like have an evil lair.
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Sep 5, 2023 22:32
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I'll throw a few points into the discussion, sure. 1) As I understand it (and as other people already brought up), petitioners lose enough of their old sense of self in the process that you start running into a Roko's Basilisk situation. Sure, a grim facsimile of me is going to turn into a larva and tortured for an indefinite period of time, but it's not me in a directly comparable way and the idea of a happy facsimile eating cake for an indefinite period of time isn't going to do much to convince me to not be an rear end in a top hat in my heart. 2) If you do care about what happens to your soul after the fact, the fact that there's a bunch of evil gods and similarly influential figures willing to take you in does meaningfully change the mental calculus when the only way to really gently caress up Pharasma's sorting is to not believe in anything and get stuck wandering the astral plane until she takes pity on you. So sure, if you're an authoritarian scumbag you're going to Hell, but if Asmodeus' dogma gels with you you'll go to his slice of it. You'll still be a tortured shade, but you're probably on the fast track to being promoted to devilhood and you're better off than if you were just earnestly a scumbag at heart by yourself. (Alternatively, your religion just frames the bad afterlife you're getting as cool or deserved. Yeah, if you worship Achaekek you're going to be turned into a larva in a jungle full of hunters, but at that point you're a bug-themed murder cultist. You probably think that's cool.)
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Sep 5, 2023 22:41
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KPC_Mammon posted:Stuff like Divine Lance won't do that once the revision comes out. Rules for playing a game don't need to define the physics of a setting. I like the read that Pathfinder's world is so crammed and messy with apparent contradictions that pretty much everyone in-universe rolls with whatever perception seems to keep working for them and blithely accepts every other weirdo that contradicts them in their way.
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Sep 5, 2023 22:44
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I've always thought that some ancient Roman peoples being able to cast Light would change the course of human development substantially, so the whole "it's still a medieval shithole!!!...but with wizards" has always struck me as wrong and I'm glad that Pathfinder just segments the world like a theme park. The disconnect between how radically all these magical abilities would revolutionize a society and how the settings are always still very medieval despite that usually seems best addressed by rarity and lack of broader communication whenever I have to deal with it. An arch-wizard can't just upload his spellbook to the fantasy internet, these are very complicated trades and fields that would probably require one-on-one training, and delivering information from one place to another is usually going to involve a guy on a horse taking weeks to carry letters somewhere if he doesn't get eaten by a wyvern on the way. Even common stuff that could spread by word-of-mouth will get hosed up by telephone-game style corruption of message. There probably shouldn't be enough wizards running around a country for a bunch of them getting wrapped into civil service, though it's a little hard to argue that when a setting sets up a higher-fantasy magical college or something like wizards are just fantasy STEM-majors. Introducing the idea of student loans to a setting doesn't exactly evoke 'fantasy' to me. Vanguard Warden fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 22:44
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This is why you just follow Pharasma and get to go  when you show up at the Boneyard.  ...now I want to play a Pharsmin Redeemer predicated on Her ideas of preventing untimely deaths and poo poo.
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Sep 5, 2023 22:44
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Alternatively, your religion just frames the bad afterlife you're getting as cool or deserved. Yeah, if you worship Achaekek you're going to be turned into a larva in a jungle full of hunters, but at that point you're a bug-themed murder cultist. You probably think that's cool. Actually, Achaekek "slumbers in the blood of heretics and worshippers alike in an immense cleft carved into the base of the Boneyard’s spire, a realm known as the Blood Vale." Not sure if Achaekek sleeping in your blood is supposed to be better or worse than becoming a Hunted.
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Sep 5, 2023 22:45
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:There's absolutely nothing seedy or morally wrong with discussing the implications of the religious system that Golorian lays out here in the Pathfinder 2e discussion thread. It’s not morally wrong it’s just bad D&D thread discussion bingo lol
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Sep 5, 2023 22:47
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Silver2195 posted:Actually, Achaekek "slumbers in the blood of heretics and worshippers alike in an immense cleft carved into the base of the Boneyard’s spire, a realm known as the Blood Vale." Not sure if Achaekek sleeping in your blood is supposed to be better or worse than becoming a Hunted. Eh, I was being a bit blithe and wasn't sure how to describe Pharasma going "you were a good Red Mantis Assassin, so your soul gets to hang around in your god's weird jungle cave".
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Sep 5, 2023 22:48
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Vanguard Warden posted:The disconnect between how radically all these magical abilities would revolutionize a society and how the settings are always still very medieval despite that usually seems best addressed by rarity and lack of broader communication whenever I have to deal with it. An arch-wizard can't just upload his spellbook to the fantasy internet, these are very complicated trades and fields that would probably require one-on-one training, and delivering information from one place to another is usually going to involve a guy on a horse taking weeks to carry letters somewhere if he doesn't get eaten by a wyvern on the way. Even common stuff that could spread by word-of-mouth will get hosed up by telephone-game style corruption of message. To be fair, I don't think Golarion is supposed to be all that medieval (outside of some impoverished rural areas). The usual vibe seems to be circa 1800.
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Sep 5, 2023 22:51
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Vanguard Warden posted:An arch-wizard can't just upload his spellbook to the fantasy internet, This is how you get megami tensei.
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Sep 5, 2023 23:00
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Some lovely duke theoretically having a wizard on retainer for advise and education on matters arcane that in practice spends most of their time doing emergency clothes washes and invisibility spells to get the duke out of family visits sounds correct to me
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Sep 5, 2023 23:01
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Vanguard Warden posted:The disconnect between how radically all these magical abilities would revolutionize a society and how the settings are always still very medieval despite that usually seems best addressed by rarity and lack of broader communication whenever I have to deal with it. An arch-wizard can't just upload his spellbook to the fantasy internet, these are very complicated trades and fields that would probably require one-on-one training, and delivering information from one place to another is usually going to involve a guy on a horse taking weeks to carry letters somewhere if he doesn't get eaten by a wyvern on the way. Even common stuff that could spread by word-of-mouth will get hosed up by telephone-game style corruption of message. There's also lots of apocalyptic disasters. There are ruins everywhere! Even the beginner box has ruins under Otari that hint there was once a much grander place there then the current village. A consequence of wanting lots of dungeons to explore is that it means lots of interesting places had to die. It is hard to maintain progress when libraries keep getting burned to the ground a cities reduced to handful of refugees or nomadic tribes who have only stories of the wonders of the past.
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Sep 5, 2023 23:01
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Silver2195 posted:To be fair, I don't think Golarion is supposed to be all that medieval (outside of some impoverished rural areas). The usual vibe seems to be circa 1800. It is pretty funny in Guns & Gears where they basically have to say "yeah so guns are a thing but only really on this one continent because reasons" but yeah the usual technology vibe is very late medieval/Renaissance/early Colonial, with 19th Century weirdness thrown in wherever it would be fun.
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Sep 5, 2023 23:03
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And now loving tesla coils are getting imported from earth so who knows what the tech level looks like in a decade
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Sep 5, 2023 23:24
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"The tech fucks with magic/god stuff so there's pushback and limits the tech to only the areas where it's most fun."
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Sep 5, 2023 23:39
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mind the walrus posted:"The tech fucks with magic/god stuff so there's pushback and limits the tech to only the areas where it's most fun." Ah, Arcanum.
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Sep 6, 2023 00:48
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Taciturn Tactician posted:Ah, Arcanum.
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Sep 6, 2023 00:55
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I have a player for my game who saw the Alchemist and is now 100% on the Alchemist train and really wants to play one. However everything I see online says that they're underpowered and overcomplicated. Overcomplicated isn't a problem - that's exactly his deal - but is there a set of like recommended ways that a GM can houserule things to make the alchemist less underpowered?
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Sep 6, 2023 04:34
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Impermanent posted:I have a player for my game who saw the Alchemist and is now 100% on the Alchemist train and really wants to play one. However everything I see online says that they're underpowered and overcomplicated. Overcomplicated isn't a problem - that's exactly his deal - but is there a set of like recommended ways that a GM can houserule things to make the alchemist less underpowered? They're being remastered, so just wait and see what they do with the class.
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Sep 6, 2023 04:37
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