Pathfinder General /pfg/

This may sound crazy but copy PFS and make the PCs paid employees of a powerful organization that has some very specific restrictions to looting. Basically, they do not have looting rights but instead receive a salary.

In my WotR game, I killed the entire party with the Wardstone explosion at the end of book 1. Makes more sense to me personally than "flying shards miss you but kill the enemy, and then you're paralyzed for X rounds while things happen". Instead it's "flying shards hit everything in the room, killing you AND them, and then you're dying for X rounds while things happen before the mythic shards embedded in your body restore you to life with mythic ranks.
Also they're possessed by the ghosts of former crusaders now.

How would Ambassadors from Geb hide the fact they're escorted by big spoopy monsters?

Say that it's your cousin.

my setting is basically non-dystopian, medieval-fantasy shadowrun in that the whole world is run by enormous guilds. they have so much power as to influence even the most powerful of countries. some are truly benevolent organizations, such as the adventurers which specialize in dealing with monsters, finding missing items and people, and clearing out dangerous areas. some are less so, such as the merchants which backstab eachother constantly and are all about profit over everything. if you sign up for one of these guilds, you're entered into the system. how each one hands out the currency is different, for example the adventurers have bounty boards with jobs and listed rewards, while the merchants may also have jobs such as bodyguard or transport but are more likely to have those be real jobs with salaries rather than quest-type contracts. the only way to convert the currency into gold is to sell your gear on the black market, which is elusive and dangerous. for WBL purposes, 1 currency = 1 platinum coin. so, something that costs 2000gp costs 200 currency. being signed on with a guild also grants a salary in gp so that you can buy food and pay your bills and be alive.

essentially the currency is good goy coins handed out by the happy merchants to their loyal pawns. but that's obfuscated by layers upon layers of bureaucracy, speeches, lackeys, etc.
at the very top, each guild is actually run by some sort of powerful being such as an outsider or a dragon, and the world is in a cold war type state due to the constant power struggle of these guilds.

you can also be a freelancer, being able to take jobs without signing up with any guilds. a freelancer license is hard to get and makes you a big deal, since the normal rules of each guild don't fully apply to you. usually, you aren't an actual freelancer as you have a boss to report to, but not having to sign with a guild lets you avoid stuff like mandatory service, taxes, fees, meetings, etc.

>tfw next day you think about the pathfinder session and starts regretting and being ashamed of all the stupid things you roleplayed

Which Overlewd girl is best? Who is most sexual?

no
yes

Better question: Which character is the thirstiest?

One of the kissless virgins, clearly.

The reviews last night were a hoot.

user... This is a feel we all real, especially when you feel like you did stupid shit and then look back at a scene and think of something TOTALLY COOL you could've done!

Just keep in mind, you've always done dumber, and you always WILL do dumber, and that's totally fine, what matters is that it was fun.

Don't jack off while you play, user.

I've been looking at Sculpt Corpse and was wondering what kind of fun shit you could do with it. It says you can reshape a corpse to look like another creature/gender/age/type and in the process increase or decrease its size by one step. It also says if a spell targets the corpse (examples are speak with dead or raise dead) then treats the corpse as if it had the original appearance. This isn't an illusion, also.

So some immediately obvious stuff you could do are make a corpse look like you, make a corpse look like anyone you have ever seen, or make a corpse look like a small animal. Some fun stuff is possible depending on how you interpret the "This merely changes the appearance. The corpse has original appearance for any spells that target the corpse." part but I'm not sure about it. Like if I physically changed a medium human corpse to a large bear and the insides of it were a bear it would be strange if raising it made a medium human zombie.

>make a medium human large, then animate dead
>make a human into an animal, and animate dead
>make a corpse look like you, then animate dead
>make a heavy corpse smaller and turn it to bones with Decompose Corpse to make it travel sized, then sculpt it back to its normal size later and give it back its meat if you wish
>sculpt a corpse to look like someone, then cut off their parts as proof of their death (or send the parts to them, for kicks)

Thoughts?

Using it for bounties, and putting flesh back on corpses you made travel friendly sound like the most practical, not-necessarily-evil-stop-judging-me uses.

The better thing to remember is that it's not a competition.

Loosing up actually makes your roleplay better, when you aren't fussing over every syllable!

Loosening*, that's what I get for posting on the go!

Good job. I am definitely going to steal this shit.

Newcomer on pfg talking. A friend of mine is going to DM a game of pathfinder again and he asked me to make a new character for a new smaller scale campaign. My previous one was a Hobgob Fear Knight, and I greatly enjoyed the playstyle of debuffing ennemies with intimidation and buffing allies with manoeuvres. Only real gripe is the Order system : I wanted to make a slaver knight and had to choose Cockatrice order and be greesy all the time. I'd like to make a new character following that kind of template, but more independant. What class and build should I take for a loyal evil "not-Kagain" mercenary type dwarf ? How do I make optimized martials in Pathfinder ?

Even if it is not a competition, I get anxious if there is dead silence so I am usually first to act

Fuck off nigger that card is banned

Someone's got to do it! Silences are fine mid-game however, it's a sign the DM needs to get their ass in gear.

There's the Scaled Fist archetype for Monk/Unchained Monk, but that's more about boosting your own capabilities. If psionics is allowed, there's a class called Dread you may be interested in.

Yea, but which of those is actually clearly indicated in their backstory? Surely someone must have it as a prevalent backstory motivation.

>Girls
>thirstiest

Emilia, Umbranae, Chiundra. MAYBE the gnoll. They seem thirsty

>implying I meant just the girls

How would you approach making a "dynamic duo" character? You know, Banjo & Kazooie? Alchemist and his Ogre? Two goblins in a large trenchcoat pretending to be a masked human? Do you just take, like, Squire? Play a Summoner and use your Eidolon for it?

Betrothed from Avowed.
Summoner.
Some Cavalier archetypes that give you a squire.
Leadership as a feat.

Animal Companions also work.

If you want attached at the hip like Banjo & Kazooie then Synth Summoner can be fluffed that way.

Also I suppose you can use humanoids as mounts if they're a size category larger than you.

Well... leadership is also a thing if you really want something like that. But betrothed also works. Summoner is pretty damn tricky unless you understand the class inside and out since paizo seems to hate the class and has saturated it with 'noyoucant' restrictions.

Also consider taking a familiar. Maybe a sage and his idiotic sorcerer boy.

>A genius cat and his idiot son

level 1 starts are suffering

level 1 starts with no feat tax additions, average starting wealth, and 1pp only classes.

I'm playing a Unchained Monk/Stalker multiclass from a coastal town. After picking the Ki power to hold breath for hours on end, and having had the feat Aquatic Combatant I'm now being called budget Aquaman. Are there any feats In addition to aquatic combatant I should take since I now need to save the whales?

Core only, 10pb, no feat taxes, average starting wealth, no magic items, "low-magic" (i.e no full-casters). Truly, the bane of /pfg/

At that point you might as well play freeform and make coin flips to determine outcomes, unless you're a class with cantrips.

None, but I unknowingly was carrying around an intelligent minor artifact that was, on a cosmic scale, preventing me from dying.

When it went crazy, the Lady of Graves agreed to destroy it for me on the condition that the next time that I'm knocking on death's door, there will be no cheating it. Good way to make sure that the thing keeping me unnaturally alive stops existing and that I will definitely kick the bucket for good someday.

Haven't had any Pathfinder characters actually die yet, though. We'll see what happens this time around. My group is yet to use resurrection spells, and half of us have backup characters in case our current ones die. If you play a bunch of long adventures as a character, I can see why you'd get attached. Otherwise, death is just part of their stories, so I don't understand why resurrection is seen as so necessary.

>mfw my GM still does this

I can accept 1pp classes, but some things are a step too far

you people have been spoiled
especially with the feat tax stuff

Not to mention that other players will also do dumber

pfg flies into raging autism anytime the very notion of not being magical superheroes is raised

Hey, /pfg/. I've got a build question:

I'm playing a home campaign that is basically using PFS rules. The character I want to try making is an exploiter wizard, since the +2 to DCs/ECL from Arcane Reservoir is actually pretty good (in addition to stuff like dimensional slide).

My question is this: I'm going human, and probably going to take Improved Initiative as one of my two feats. Is it worth it to use my other feat to get a familiar, or should I consider doing something else (Greater Spell Focus, Spell Penetration, etc) with it?

Resurrection is something the gods (or nature) rarely decide to imbue upon servants who haven't fulfilled their purpose. Otherwise it lies solely in myth. So far I have one character in the party who might deserve it, but she's still too far from her god's goal to warrant it. If she dies he'll offer her a chance to finish what she started as a mummy but bar her a place with her dead husband in the afterlife. She'd probably just accept death considering her primary motivation is to avenge her husband and rejoin him in death.

You can keep the feel of not being magical superheroes while also not having shit/boring mechanics. That's all about tone.

What happens to a person if they get hit by dominate person?
Do they try to hide that?
Can their personality change?

The moment you lower anything here, it's decried as crippling and boring. So, no, you can't.

/pfg/ I'm playing a lvl3 one armed bard that does nothing but inspire courage and intimidate enemies in combat + support spells. What else can I do to be useful?
I'm already healbitch with my wand of CLW.
How can I support harder? About to hit lvl4 btw.

It's a DC 15 to notice if they're under the effect of an Enchanment Effect, I'm not sure if they can bluff it.
>personality
You carry out your given task and only your given task with single mindedness unless you need to attend to things related to your survival. So I'd say yes.

Clearly the only true way to play this is starting at level 19 with enough xp that killing a rat gets you to 20, quadruple gestalt and mythic gestalt, infinite money to buy anything and at least 4 major artifacts as starting gear, only wizards, sorcerers and arcanists from paizo allow, rest is 3pp only 60pb, gargoyles and driders only.

If you're clever then most people won't know the difference, but when forced to do actions they wouldn't normally do I roleplay it as a sort of dissonance between how they act and what they're doing. Like say they're told to kill someone, they'll act as though they're going out shopping while plunging a dagger into their friend. I don't think a personality change is warranted unless the controller assumes direct control.

Holy heck this, start reading into other posts and notice the flaws. That intimidating slab of detail isn't as sterling as you might think.

Yes but does the will of the person in control affect them
Like, cold calculating vampire dominates something and now they act with the emotion he would act because he commands people to do how he imagines it
When you command someone "to kill", will they kill the way you imagine it?

Familiars are great for this kind of thing. The many archetypes let them fulfill lots of functions without stepping on too many toes or stealing too much spotlight from the rest of the crew.

That's a good question.
I'd say they'd "default" to their normal personality with in reason unless commanded to something outrageously out of character or commanded to act a certain way.

How about this...

Game that starts off with everyone as lvl 7 Commoners With stat assignment to match their chosen class, then at the end of the first or second session, everyone Job changes to their preferred PC class at lvl 1

I just got #30 - Firearms of Legacy and loved how this "Legacy Weapons" works. I'm looking for more books like that. Any recommendation?

That sounds retarded for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is how hard it fucks over entire character concepts. Most of all is how it screws with the math, unless you have the level up process be "you're retraining commoner levels" until you hit 7 with your actual class.

Chargen rule debates are retarded as well. It varies from campaign to campaign, from person to person. You can point at chargen rules that are almost universally reviled by people on here ("PFS style", "15 PB low fantasy 1pp only with RAW ABP", "Kineticist banned but Master Summoner is fine") but there's too many variations of "acceptable" rules to really nail it down.
I'm still pining for a game that's mainly just 1pp+jolly+forrest,
no PoW/SoM, but the likelihood of that is infinitismally small.

I want,
>Level 7 start
>Gestalt
>3pp open for consideration
>25 PB
>Mythic

well it came to question when our slayer was mind dominated by a feral vampire and the player decided to ham it up
so the slayer attacked the party in same feral manner, because "the vampire told him to rip and tear basically the party"

user from last night with the shitty DM here. Tried confronting him about powerfagging and railroading the story. I told him that I think the game would benefit more from having us play our characters rather than just follow the story he's already plotted out. He basically said "You want to play your characters? Well, I want to play my characters too, and my characters want to progress the story" and just shrugged me off.

You're now at a critical point in your relationship with this DM. Do you want to work through this revelation, or cut your losses?

I'd prefer to work through it and somehow come to a compromise at the very least. I've been friends with both him and all the other players since high school, so at least ten years. His campaign is just getting unbearable, though. We just whiz through towns and NPCs and battles because, according to him, we've been slacking off on the main story that he's been planning for months.

Is there a VMC for Psionic classes kicking around somewhere?

With luck, paizo might release vmc for the other classes if they ever do another unchained book.

>Psionics
>Paizo

bitch you tell me point-blank shot is useful beyond being a prereq for everything that's also another prereq to be an effective ranged combatant

Archers are already powerful, I don't know what sympathy you are trying to dig out of me

I dunno man. 3/4 Bab classes really need that +1 atk/dmg specially during the lower levels.

>TWF does not need to be three feats long
>Weapon Finesse, in the mainly 1pp environment it was created for, does not need to be a feat agile maneuvers should still be one though
>Point Blank Shot should still be a thing, but it should be a bonus, not a mandatory feat
>hell, Precise Shot is a tax in and of itself
>Power Attack should just be an option for anyone with 13+ Strength
>do I seriously have to explain why combat expertise and the maneuver feats don't need to be spread out the way they are?
>the tax breaks are not thorough enough with how they COMBINE feats, and perhaps slightly over where they should be with freebies

Ranged Styles that don't involve a bow need the most help. Bows being so easy to use is also moronic.

they're poweful after about 10 levels

at which point the full casters in the party can just rocket tag enemies and you are no longer needed except that you're probably the skill monkey.

at least bigsword mcfighter can manage to kill himself with his sword how are you supposed to shoot yourself with a longbow?

>full attack into the air
>stand still

>other than bow
"muh waterballoon fighters"

brilliant

>"muh nonsensical comparisons"

you have to go back

Reposting Starfinder Campaign Pitch, who's in?
>Developed colony world is suddenly cut off from FTL
>The laws of physics have suddenly shifted
>At the same time a massive tree of living steel has appeared in what was the capital
>Ever since, strange creatures have been appearing
>They are amalgamations of blades able to cut through the fabric of reality itself
>In their wake are portals to another universe, where magic reigns instead of technology
>These things have been hunting people and offering their bodies as fertilizer to the tree
>Its been growing larger, the branches beginning to blot out the sun, and no one has been able to stop the shrikes

Make a character that's supposed to be stupid. Problem solved!

What about wind? Or a ceiling? Even if neither are present you'd have to wiggle around to get hit by assuming that while turning around the arrow doesn't go all over the place.

you did not get the reference fool

that's why I told you to go back

...

This is cute

We know that Sean is full of shit in that regard, but how does this have anything to do with water balloons?

Because he started it?

So basically your concept is "ignore all the space stuff" and also ignores the fact that magic is a thing in starfinder.

And then we proved it could be done...

>only using other people's settings

But is it as cute as you?

>there are people who don't remember the water balloons

what other dumb shit did SKR say that people may not remember?

Well I started playing this whole system about a year and some months ago and have made an effort to avoid everything that isn't mechanical talk with my friends and nonsensical shitposting on /pfg/ which usually includes me waiting for somebody complain about point buy below 25 or how, admittedly, unbalanced the classes are and how a wizard needs only their little selves to survive anything (which I find an irritating idea: Ain't no party of 4 wizards going to survive your average start that isn't above level 5) and have made a specific effort to NOT read any forum posts on paizo.com unless it's looking for a consensus on a particular ruling.

So please, enlighten my shit addled mind.

Would I be better off trading the traditional casting for spheres, as a life oracle?

Vancian healing is subpar, spheres healing is actually really respectable.

Of course, this will mean you're trading away your ability to do just about anything else well with spellcasting.