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Class: Crossblooded Sorcerer (Gold Dragon/Brass Dragon) Party Role: Bringing the magic pain Race: Gnome Deity: Desna Name: LPer's choice (don't forget to grab Precise Shot cause a lot of your good spells are ranged touch) RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Feb 11, 2024 |
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Feb 11, 2024 00:34
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:Class: Crossblooded Sorcerer (Black Dragon) Cancel my vote and count me on this one, with Elemental (Earth) as the second bloodline since Warcraft black dragons are also associated with Earth, and it comes with a handy-dandy little toggle to turn all your damaging spells into Acid damage so you can blow everything up with the +1 damage/die from Black Dragon. (Though Acid is a very common resistance, there's a nice little mythic option to turn those resistances off.)
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Feb 14, 2024 04:02
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:One's Fifth Crusade is another's Worldwound Tour. PEOPLE OF GOLARION, I PRESENT TO YOU YOUR OPENING ACT: ARMOR CLASS/DIFFICULTY CLASS! Thunderstruck intensifies
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Feb 15, 2024 07:52
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Gun Jam posted:Apropos of nothing - anyone know which game brought this innovation into RPGs? The first game to do this particular style was Pillars of Eternity, and I had a lot of hate for the concept back then - I still do, really, because it forces you to get pulled out of the game to read a dictionary definition instead of using context clues to give you information. But it was the natural progression of things with the domination of in-game Codices and being forced to read through them if you wanted to understand any proprietary conceits of the settings.
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Feb 28, 2024 04:00
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idonotlikepeas posted:Removing racism from D&D and its derived settings has been... let's call it an ongoing process. I do feel like a lot of progress has been made in the last couple of decades, but there's still a ways to go. Decade. Singular. Nobody even bothered trying to remove racism from the mainline D&D settings until fairly recently. And of course you're always going to have the neckbeards and grognards screaming about how they want real-world politics kept out of their tabletop gaming, even when those settings involve expies of real-world ethnic groups and include all the stereotypes and racism (see: Greyhawk's Rhennee, Forgotten Realms' Gur, Eberron's Shifters, Golarion's Varisians) and never see the irony in their screaming.
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Feb 28, 2024 10:24
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CommissarMega posted:But again, those sins are forgivable- Pathfinder was new on the scene, they didn't have a lot of established writers, and this was a part of the product life cycle where they were trying to innovate on D&D 3.5, I get that. I can forgive mechanical and narrative roughness, that can be papered over. But what cannot be papered over is that while Paizo was establishing their original IP world, where they were stablishing their original racial mechanics, they chose to just stick that Ham bullshit in there and think it was cool and good. I don't think you can really be all that forgiving with the APs. Second Darkness was the sixth Adventure Path - the third for Golarion, sure, but their sixth overall, as three previous ones had been published in the pages of Dungeon Magazines (which Paizo had been publishing since 2002, taking over the publishing from WotC when WotC made an effort to divest some of their stuff) before they moved to making "D&D 3.75". These earlier Adventure Paths - Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide were in the hands of the vast majority of the writers who would go on to make the later APs as well, and who were regular writers for Dungeon and Dragon magazines - and some of which, such as Jason Bulmahn, James Jacobs, et. al., in charge of Paizo and Pathfinder as a whole. Further, these earlier APs were ostensibly set in Greyhawk, with setting notes to move them to Forgotten Realms, Eberron, etc., so they had plenty of opportunity in researching where these would fit to actually, you know, not repeat a lot of this stuff. Szarrukin posted:I love Ember. She's the ultimate opposite of your average Avellone NPC - instead of wise, cynical, "there's no difference between good and evil" old woman we've got naive, purehearted, idealist child (I guess? I do not remember her age, she's either a child or acts like one). It's not really a spoiler, but she's basically Carrot from Terry Pratchett books and it will soon become clear why. Ember is both one of the most mechanically sound and narratively enjoyable characters in the game. She comes with Point Blank Shot and Precise Shot, meaning she can directly contribute to combat with ranged touch spells from the get-go, and has the Witch spellbook which has a delightful mix of healing, damage, crowd control, buffs, and debuffs. She also gets access to Witch Hexes, which in themselves have some very powerful effects - the Slumber Hex is a single-target sleep spell with no HD limit, and sleep is a very powerful effect. She is also not an Adult by Elf standards - she is somewhere just under a century old, and Elves in D&D 3.5/Pathfinder aren't Adult until they reach 110+ years of age (and with the random ages, minimum ages across the 3 categories are 114, 116, and 120). Ember is essentially an idealistic teenager, and along with Seelah, brings a much-needed dose of optimism to this game.
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Feb 28, 2024 22:49
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Cythereal posted:
Oh yeah, can we talk about this? This is a direct lift from WH40k 5e Grey Knight Codex in which the Grey Knights did this exact thing with a group of Adepta Sororitas - slaughtered them to purify their weapons in the blood of the sanctified Brides of the Emperor so they could kill the daemons. From this interaction I can only assume this is someone at edit: I meant to type Paizo instead of Owlcat, but Owlcat's writing definitely puts it more in the poking fun of Matt Ward camp than Paizo's original entry in the AP. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 00:12
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"Our weapons barely scratch the demons' hides! We're sacrificing this girl to Iomedae so we can consecrate our weapons with her innocent blood and gain the power to destroy the spawn of the Abyss! It's extreme, but we have no other choice. We have to defend this city somehow, or else we'll all perish — including her!"
[Lore: Religion - 10] "That's ridiculous! The teachings of Iomedae directly prohibit the killing of innocents! The goddess will curse you for making this so-called 'sacrifice'!"
[Success!] "Exactly! What were you thinking? The goddess would never allow this!"
"Good point, whose idea was this?" (The knight looks at his comrades in suspicion.) "I think it was yours!"
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CommissarMega posted:
Whoops. I meant to type Paizo, though Owlcat's writing definitely makes the scene feel more like laughing at Matt Ward's edginess than the original Paizo entry.
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Feb 29, 2024 00:17
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I literally just posted the AP encounter that inspired this scene.
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Solitair posted:Goddammit, Baldur's Gate 2 also does this and I didn't make the connection to blackface until just now. The BG2 novelization makes it so much worse, as well. I'll not get into it more than that.
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Feb 29, 2024 02:32
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Cythereal posted:
So, fun fact without spoilers: These are used for Something(TM), and what they were used for, when the game came out you could initially miss the shot - or if it didn't miss, sometimes its Special Effect(TM) could fail to activate - and you only get so many shots. Patch 1.0.5g, then Patch 1.0.9c addressed the scripted effect so it always fired, and then update 2.0.7k finally made it so it couldn't miss. (Don't look up these patch notes if you want to remain unspoilered.) These patches came in at 20 days, 43 days, and 518 days after the Full Release, respectively - though, granted, the last one took so long to nail down because the failures only happened due to specific positionings, and those bugs are a bitch to nail down.
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Mar 1, 2024 13:03
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In my own experience, Cammy got benched because her voice acting grated on my nerves. I didn't put any more thought into it than that, since I have an autism-fueled life-long disgust of certain voices (Norm Macdonald comes to mind, his voice grates enough that I always wanted to punch him in the face whenever I heard it) so her eventual reveal just ended up justifying my dislike. I kept her around only to see the end of her storyline in a single playthrough. Now she dies the moment she reveals herself. As far as I'm concerned, trading Aravashnial for her wasn't worth it in the least.Poil posted:Is "fixing" companions something that's common in rpg's? I can barely think of any examples, but there are plenty of games I haven't played. It's fairly common, yes, there's a number especially in tabletop-esque cRPGs. BG2 is the most notorious of that niche - you can "fix" Jaheira, Viconia, and Aerie - helping over the trauma of losing her husband, making her more suited to surface life, and helping heal her trauma, respectively. Notably, you don't get to "fix" Anomen in that game - you only reinforce his holier-than-thou attitude or disillusion him. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 23:18
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Lord Koth posted:Aasimars live notably longer than normal humans, but unlike elves it's never really been defined that they age to adulthood any slower. They don't live any longer than humans anymore. Technically, Human "adult" starts at 15, while Aasimar "adult" starts at 20, so they do sort of age a bit slower - though, granted, it's hard to know which version of the Advanced Race Guide Owlcat is using for them. ARG's 1st Printing had all the Planetouched (Aasimar, Oread, Tiefling, Ifrit, Sylph, Undine) in the same age categories, so Aasimar and Tiefling used to hit adult at 60. The ARG 2nd Printing moved just the Aasimar and Tiefling to adult at 20 with identical age categories to humans (middle-aged at 35, Old at 53, Venerable at 70, +2d20 years maximum lifespan) but kept their training ages the same (+4d6, +6d6, +8d6). Daeran can be, by the rules, anywhere between 24 and 44 as a "starting" Oracle, if using the 2nd Printing ARG - though it's entirely possible by the now very screwy rules to have a 68 year old 1st-level Aasimar/Tiefling Wizard, too. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Mar 13, 2024 |
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Mar 13, 2024 02:51
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MonsterEnvy posted:I can’t really consider the love potion thing rape by proxy on the grounds he told two people to drink a love potion while drunk and they agreed to do so. He ordered people in his employ to drink a love potion and then locked them in a room together. That is, in fact, rape by proxy, with a side order of quid pro quo sexual harassment.
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Mar 14, 2024 00:20
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achtungnight posted:My question is- did the guards in question know what they were drinking? If yes, they consented and there was no rape involved. If no, well, yeah, we got a problem. But the game doesn't tell us either way. Someone doesn't understand power dynamics or what it means when someone in authority orders a subordinate to commit to something like this. Drakenel posted:Does a love potion mean immediate aphrodisiac? Not being sarcastic, I actually don't know how that works in pathfinder verse, if that means immediately bang the first person you see or if they're both realizing they're horrible romantic poets. Pathfinder's Love Potion, 'Philter of Love', forces love onto a person and is permanent without at least mid-level magic. There's also a lower level version that lasts 1d3 hours - but either way, it's coercion at best and date-rape drugs at worst. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Mar 14, 2024 |
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Mar 14, 2024 02:39
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ProfessorCirno posted:So...no. It's not a date rape drug. As fun as it is to imagine all the horrible and lurid things Daeren inflicted on the guards, it is not written to be the equivilant of sexual assault, nor in the text is it the equivilant of sexual assault. Sorry? Forcing 'good feelings' onto a person that you can then take advantage of isn't the definition of a date-rape drug? Hey guys ProfessorCirno just solved the 'can you give consent while drunk' question - they're in favor of it! Guess we can let Azure Horizon back on the boards! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 14, 2024 03:01
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I vastly prefer Owlcat's take on Mythic Paths to Paizo's introduction of the concept, which only ever gets touched upon in this AP anyways. Paizo's very "good" at designing new subsystems that then quickly get thrown away when their original purpose is done with - except Mythic actually ended up having some staying power beyond Wrath of the Righteous, mostly because it came in its own sourcebook released the same month Book 1 of Wrath of the Righteous released. It is now a very popular subsystem for Living Worlds and campaigns, and that's without having these more interesting, non-generic paths that Owlcat created. But creating these specialized mythic paths would have likely led to the 3.5 Prestige Class Problem, so... Anyways, the moment of becoming Mythic is, as CommissarMega pointed out, a moment of gently caress Yeah for the PCs. The tabletop buffs do make the Babau fight effectively unloseable unless they get very lucky with flanks and sneak attacks - it's a straight up curbstomp. And it's a moment that's needed, because if the 17 updates haven't clued you in, Book 1 is a slog - I'd go so far to say it's the biggest Book 1 slog of any AP except possibly Savage Tide. Low-level d20 games, for those who may not have played them, are a constant war of attrition between HP, low numbers of spell slots, mobility, and player retention. I really feel that Wrath of the Righteous would have been better served as starting as a "normal" campaign of a couple of adventures across the countryside on your way to Drezen and then hit you with the hosed-up situation of Deskari and the Shield Maze when you were level 3-5 and proceeding from there, when you actually have the resources as a party to survive the urban nightmare the campaign makes it out to be. It took my table group something like 6 4-hour sessions to clear Book 1 - and we played gestalt and started at level 3. (My MC also had us start as Mongrelfolk greeting the displaced surfacers, so we skipped quite a bit of intro, then got to bring in different PCs when we hit the surface.) You can breeze through Book 1 in the cRPG in a couple of hours by comparison - or if you've minmaxed everyone, I've managed to clear it in about 45 minutes. My point is, as a player, you feel incredibly good the moment that first hit of Mythic Power slams home because of the misery you've suffered to reach that point. Absolutely laying utter waste to the babau makes it all feel worth it. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 16:43
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Solitair posted:The Accidental God mentioned in the last update is Cayden Cailean, who passed an infamous, nigh-impossible test to ascend to godhood while he was blackout drunk. Imagine the horror of this - waking up after the test, with zero memory of what the gently caress just happened over the last three days with a blinding hangover... made worse by being able to see and hear everything out to Divine Rank miles and not knowing how to shut it out yet.
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Mar 23, 2024 11:26
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Cythereal posted:Ember Level 6: +1 Stigmatized Witch (Stigmatized Witch 6) So, to harp on Ascendant Element just a little bit more... You may be surprised to learn that Demons in Pathfinder are typically immune to electricity. For those who aren't familiar with Pathfinder's setting Golarion, there are three distinctly different delineations of the "Evil beings from hellish realms that like to gently caress with mortals" - Devils, Demons, and Daemons. Devils are your classical "We'll make a deal with you and uphold it to the letter of the agreement" types who really, really like to gently caress mortals over in their deals. Devils are the ones most concerned with corrupting and torturing mortals, and are Lawful Evil - these are the ones immune to Fire (and poison) as you'd expect from these entities. Daemons are what edgelords think of when they think of hellish afterlives - mortal souls twisted and corrupted by their own evil. The very first daemons came from the first cataclysm, where too many mortal souls died and overflowed out of the Boneyard (the post-death, pre-afterlife judgment) and into Abbadon, a plane noted for being a depressing place, and the first daemon was one of those souls so twisted by their own evil that their soul warped into a creature that would be called a daemon that set about consuming its fellow souls that didn't also twist into daemons. Daemons are Neutral Evil, seeking out Evil for Evil's sake above all else, and have immunities to acid, death effects, diseases, and poisons, and Daemons want nothing more than the extermination of the entire multiverse. Demons are ravening fiends seeking chaos and death. It's worth noting that the daemons created the demons by combining larvae (the basest form of a chaotic evil soul) with other chaotic entities known as qlipphoth, which are the opposite of the Aeon people have discussed. Instead of being concerned with Order over everything else, qlipphoth were the purest form of chaos and evil, concerned only with causing as much death, destruction, and absolute batshit insanity as they could. It should come as no surprise then that Demons are raveners that want to cause death, suffering, and chaos as much as possible, and are rarely, if ever, interested in the goings-ons of mortals beyond how much damage they can wreak on them. Demons are immune to electricity and poison.
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Mar 24, 2024 20:58
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Gun Jam posted:Similar names, similar thing they want... Essentially it's the difference between causing bad things to happen to get what you want (Neutral Evil) and causing bad things to happen because you want to make bad things happen (Chaotic Evil). A daemon might honor a deal if it doesn't get in their way while a demon probably would never honor a deal to anyone not stronger than them (and even then would go out of its way to get out of the deal/kill the dealmaker). RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Mar 24, 2024 |
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Mar 24, 2024 22:13
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There's a reason so many spellcasters switched almost wholly to battlefield control with the advent of 3E and later. Between the HP bloat and the liberal sprinkling of resistances and immunities, "I throw fireball" stopped being a useful contribution. There's ways to make it useful - Mailman Sorcerers for 3.5, Orb Wizards in 4E, Crossblooded Sorcerers (Orc+Draconic/Solar) with Blood Havoc and Blood Intensity and Empower Spell for Pathfinder - but it involves pigeonholing yourself and dedicating all your levels to making it useful instead of it just being something else you can do.
RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 02:34
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Cythereal posted:Depends on whether you're reading classic literature or more modern takes. You really only get that post-Malory, going to the Arthurian Mythos before Malory "codified" it cited Lancelot's courtly love of Guinevere as being part of his strength, and notably, as positive aspect of his character - notably, this was mostly in the French Vulgate/Post-Vulgate Cycle and everything before it. Malory's the one that really began screwing over the Arthurian heroes and removing or demonizing the more "pagan" elements of the stories a few centuries after the Vulgate/Post-Vulgate Cycles. A lot of the Knights featured in tales and poems mostly managed to actually succeed at things - and then Malory happened. There's a few reasons for it, but suffice to say courtly love was seen as a virtue for several centuries, and then for shifting religious ideologies and social mores it became seen as a sin and adulterous, and the Church really wanted to excise/pave over a lot of what they had adapted from what the Romans had syncretised into their faith and then Catholicism through their colonization and cut ties entirely with the pagan roots and, yeah it was a whole big thing. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 02:53
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Capfalcon posted:See, like that's just a dick move. I doubt you're running around disenchanting all your magic items because "Steel shouldn't be that sharp or on fire." Nah, you don't need Aeon powers for that, just mage's disjunction.
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Apr 4, 2024 08:26
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anilEhilated posted:Wasn't Lancelot himself a later French addition to the Arthurian myth, though? It's been a while but I vaguely seem to remember it was originally Mordred who seduced Guinevere and there wasn't much of courtly romance about that. Slightly, but yes, French; there's the 12th century poem that first introduces him and the courtly love aspect with Guinevere (Troyes' Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, ca. 1177-1181, about 40ish years after Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae) which got later incorporated into the 13th-century Vulgate Cycle. Courtly love as a virtue was a very French thing, but it spread throughout a lot of the medieval world, especially in high literature. I did misspeak about it being 'everything' before the Vulgate cycle though - just a decent chunk of literature that led into the Vulgate Cycle post-Geoffrey of Monmouth, my bad.
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Apr 4, 2024 12:25
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Man the Order of the Godclaw really gets no love.
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Apr 14, 2024 01:25
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I like how Golarion's lore goes out of its way to say "They're not Evil, they're unconcerned with morality!" and then makes things like the Order of the Coil which was a cluster of Hellknights intent on preserving the culture of colonizers against "native corruption" and then have the major orders being strike-breaking union-busters, anti-religious zealots, enforcing slavery and rigid social structure, and literal gestapo.
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Apr 21, 2024 21:40
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Kanthulhu posted:A gnomish fighter specializing in a janky weapon is a fun character idea. Too bad about everything else about him. Gnome hooked hammer is probably the least janky cultural weapon they could have given him. It's just a double weapon with differing ends. They could have given him the battle ladder, piston maul (a hammer that uses a thunderstone to clap the piston and make it hit harder), or the ripsaw glaive (Regill is unironically the one character I could see using a chain-glaive).
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Apr 22, 2024 06:25
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Kanthulhu posted:Those are very cool, thanks. If I ever play tabletop pathfinder I'm doing a "gnomish weapon master" that only uses weird rear end weapons and looks down on people that wield swords or axes as simpletons. Can't wait to spend a million feats on exotic weapon proficiencies. Fun fact, if you're a gnome, they count as martial weapons, so no excessive feat spending there, just need a class with "all martial weapon proficiencies".
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Apr 22, 2024 23:03
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