Paizo Games General /pgg/

Plane-hopping games are retarded user, and only appeal to those who have damaged their brains with too much MTG

Plane-hopping has predated MTG by a long time retard-user

Some people really liked Planescape and Spelljammer.

Planehopping games are a relic of a bygone age
They're really just not that interesting, much like level 15+ games or Mythic games

you sound like someone that's a preacher of Bad Wrong Fun.

I kind of don't like planehopping since it by nature makes the material, real plane, which is apparently meant to be super important, boring as hell.

And then you get out to the other planes and find there's nothing there and THEY're boring as hell too, but it doesn't fix the material now being boring.

It was epic though, proving levels mean little.

Recruiting:
app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/98182/ruins-of-azlant-ap-by-sq

I used to love Path of War but now I fucking hate it as a GM. Level 14 Gnome Warlord gets fly cast on her and one-shots a CR14 dragon with a pounce attack AFTER the dragon had hit nearly the entire party with a STR-drain breath weapon out of invisibility, laid down battlefield control, and had defenses up.

I used to like it because it gave martials more options, but I realize now how wrong it was. It just makes them better at the only thing they were already good at doing.

How much of a train-wreck is sword saint samurai? It sounds pretty fucking terrible desu. You get to vital strike as a full round, but your weapon has to be sheathed for it? Are there any ways to go about it without using the PoW stance that lets you sheathe as a free 1/turn?

Not like a buffed up 1pp bloodrager or barbarian couldn't have done exactly that with optimization.

I share your pain, user. Heck, I even still sort of like a good bit of the early stuff, but once the classes and styles went full anime it got stupid hard to account for everything a PoW user can do.

If the dragon had a counter, would it have made a difference?

>Add more PoW to counter PoW
>Instead of just not adding PoW

Not that user, but if it had PoW counters it probably would. Those things are basically Perfect Defenses from Exalted, in a system not meant to account for them.

If you let players use a subsystem, it's only natural to let NPCs get them too. Same with psionics, spherecasting/mighting, and 3.5 era stuff like Binding. That's actually why I think for all of it's fuck-ups DDS at least put out a mini-bestiary for Spheres Of Might, as an example of how to apply the subsystem to NPCs and enemies and make it all seem more "natural" as opposed to the players having toys that the enemies don't get.

user, the dragon was on action economy disadvantage agaist the party. You don't need a PoW when said dragon failing its save against one of the likely two casters' save or suck spell effectively ends the encounter too.
Also
>Not using the AoO to sunder the initiator's weapon

It's a universal constant, I swear; GMs can't use dragons properly, and have them be the hyper-powerful hyper-intelligent beings that they really are.

I feel the issue with PoW though is that you NEED to give the enemies that subsystem to stand a chance.

There's a difference between 'Oh well that's fair I guess' and 'You need to do this or things don't work so good'

SoP still works fine if you don't give it to enemies.

It's easy for a smart person to play a moron, but it's wayy harder for a moron to play someone intelligent.

>SoP still works fine if you don't give it to enemies.

that's because it replaces spellcasting, and is worse than vancian in all but certain specific niches, so long as the spherecaster in question SPECIALIZED in that niche.

Yes.

It's easier to play down than up and not break things.

Basically what says, there's a difference between letting martials do interesting things and "everything dies on turn one from here on out"

A PoW bestiary would be nice too, but it does mean adding even more shit for the DM to keep track of on top of the two dozen enemies you need in every fight to even make the slightest impression of danger to a party.

>it replaces
No? Bokor says hi.

I've been thinking lately about making a homebrew setting that is for the most part all one physical world. So all the different planes and everything are smashed up into a single world, probably a single planet. So like, the River of Souls is a literal river that people could follow down to the afterlife on earth, sort of Hades style. Instead of a whole plane, demons and devils and other outsiders probably just have a kingdom somewhere or something. Still trying to figure what to do with the elemental planes, possibly going to end up putting them in the sky as moon-like objects whose energies "flow" to and from the planet.

It can replace or work in concert with.

This is already in the 5e DMG, the "One World" cosmology.

Still worse than regular planes.

I give my NPC access to PoW. Usually, a commander or sniper uses maneuvers to support mooks without maneuvers. Other times, I make lone minibosses.

Relatedly, what's the best non-Material Plane plane?

Mechanus

Dragon whiffed the AoO to bite>grab (snatch feat).

Dragon started out with buffs and invisibility, caught party in a breath weapon that caused 6 str drain on a failed save + blindness, or 1d4 (rolled 4) str drain. Dragon used its surprise round on that, webbed the mass of party in initiative and took to the sky 100 ft up to prepare for a strafing run. Warlord said "hurdur winged boots, fly time", used a boost and a pounce maneuver to get 6 attacks and absolutely fucking crushed the dragon instantly, through its defenses (darkness, shield, mage armor). Nobody else even touched or came close to taking ANY offensive action on the dragon. PoW user just PoW'd.

Also, it's an AP, but I'm going to leave out the dragon's "tactics" because they're retarded and I ignored them outright.

Four out of six party members were completely crippled by the dragon's initial attack. This wasn't an "oh no action economy fucked me", this was "PoW is cancerous". Warlord's player couldn't even defend their ability to absolutely delete anything they wanted, minimum once per encounter, all day, without using any resources.

That's the Bloodrager and Barb's shtick, at least. And they at least have to use resources (minimal, but still) to do so. Warlord does it, and has a shitload of other abilities on top of it.

My main issue with PoW has become that it gives its classes way too many overcomplicated abilities to do absolutely everything related to directly dealing damage, with no limitations. And it doesn't fix the problems that make martials low-tier in the first place, the lack of versatility in and out of combat.

Explain exactly which maneuvers they used. A dragon has too good of abilities and defenses to merely be killed by six hits on it. There had to be some crits involved, at the minimum.

Stat best girl

other than Tsuyu.

Alright guys, I promised I would post this as soon as I got it like 3 weeks ago. And the artist finally finished her and was paid for it.

So here's my Tiefling Lust Wizard. Have fun you degenerates who asked for her.

Also, Spider Silk Bodysuit is the best armour in the whole game for reasons like this.

>Giving enemy NPCs class levels
>instead of just not giving PCs class levels

In the context of a game that uses PoW, this is what you sound like. Maybe even in the context of a game with any 3PP stuff. You can't just dump an entire new systems of mechanics that relies on internal features to balance against itself and not change the world around the PCs to account. The problem is not that the PCs become too powerful, but that you're giving them something and giving NPCs nothing. Just using higher CR encounters doesn't really solve the issue, partially because CR is a little broken in the first place.

This is what I'm learning for running my first game using PoW. I'm starting to give any and all major enemies (as in, non-canon fodder enemies) some amount of initiating, sometimes from class levels and sometimes just thrown haphazardly onto their stat block. The real issue I'm worried about now isn't PCs one-shotting enemies, because the enemies have counters and other defenses, but enemies one-shotting PCs because not all of them have their own counters. The fact that counters can't be used flat-footed also makes the game turn into rocket tag from even lower levels, where a single botched roll for initiative could very easily spell game over for someone. This are the issues I'm currently trying to find work arounds for.

Oh, I'll have to look it up then and see if I can't find anything interesting to steal from it. What are the particular issues it succumbs to in 5e that I should try to avoid?

Any plane that feels like a real, finite place with definable internal geography. I say definable, bot defined, for a reason. It's important that when I think of the place I can imagine how it could be split up into nations/factions and have varied terrain features, but those things don't need to be all spelled out with the detail that's usually reserved for the Material. I can fill that in as I need.

You could also try slotting the Legendary Actions/Resistances system from 5e directly into pathfinder. It makes bosses way more fun to play if they aren't fucked by the action economy when facing large parties. If you don't already know what that is, it's pretty easy to look up and pretty simple to learn for DM's.

Essentially give the boss extra actions it can perform in between player turns.

Agreed. I'm considering banning Path of War from my games from now on. It makes combat bloat up far too much. At least SoM/P are relatively simple.

Unbreakable Talons (Boost, Thrashing Dragon 6) -- TWF attacks this round deal +4d6 damage, overcome DR as if adamantine.
Battle Dragon Stance (Stance, Thrashing Dragon 3) -- Reduce TWF penalties by two, +4 initiative, add 1d6+CHA to damage rolls when TWF
Raging Hunter Pounce (Strike, Primal Fury 2) -- Charge, make a full attack at the end of the charge.

Warlord's attack statblock, guessing based off what I remember. 14 bab, +5 dex mod (weapon finesse, deadly agility), size mod, friendly bardsong and some class features. On a charge:

+3 Corrosive Shortsword, +28/+23/+18 (1d4+5d6+19 +1d6 acid)
+3 Shortsword, +28/+23/+18 (1d4+5d6+13)

Warlord has Darkvision, beating Darkness spell, so no concealment. Dragon had AC 35, gnome rerolled one miss into a hit with the good hope racial (natural 1). Gnome had 5 hits after all math.

I've solved rocket tag by inflating HP well above suggested. This way neither full attack machines from PoW or paizo tear things apart in a single round, pushing characters to actually invest in active defenses.

He's going to say "Oh, just ban thrashing dragon/primal fury". Don't listen to him, user, PoW is a busted as hell system and you're better off without it.

>you paid for this
How much?

Everybody plays dragosn wrong except you. Here's the thing "intelligent(i.e obtuse power gamey meta bullshit spellshit that no one would come up with organically outside of optimization) encounters aren't fucking fun. Especially in the context of dragons and the like.

Hopefully it was just on fivr.

I'd thought about and tried over-inflated HP pools before I started handing more enemies counters, but didn't really like the way it played out since it just meant enemies lasted two turns instead of one and got to flub an attack roll that a PC could themselves counter. Inflating HP beyond that is more than I want to do since that'd start getting into the truly absurd realm of giving enemies several hundred hit points. Admittedly, it's silly to complain about something being too absurd to do when I'm already this deep into 3PP and homebrewing. But giving enemies just enough HP to usually survive getting nuked while flat-footed before their turn and then some counters to survive after that could be a good middle ground.

Yeah I know, it'd be so much better if the Wizard had just cast a spell and killed the dragon the way Paizo intended.

Yeah, and you could try using the rest of 5e's mechanics too! Maybe restrict classes to 5e ones only while you're at it...

>There is only one person who ever disagrees with me!
Kill yourself

How much extra HP do you give exactly? Because I tacked on an extra 500 to an oracle they fought at level seven and she still went down in two rounds. Admittedly that involved the archer-rogue getting in a surprise round, still being ahead of her on init, and then the barbarian and magus stepped in...

user, it's obvious to anybody with half a brain that it's a shitty attempt to impersonate fennic user.

Is my player dumb? He's playing a path of war class and level 8, and he's strong but he isn't running around one rounding bosses. I've never really seen stuff like this occur with Path of War characters outside some gestalt games.

Why didn't they just make Scorpion Whips the regular Whip? A regular Whip is fucking useless while the Scorpion Whip is at least an actual weapon.

Only like 20$, it's cute, I like it. I've bought more expensive comissions before, so this was worth it to me.

I know, and I hate it. I hate that it SEEMS to be a good thing for narrowing the gap between martials and full casters at high levels, but it just turns shit into rocket tag because the only maneuvers people see as worth taking (rightfully so) are the "add shittons of dice on damage rolls" ones. I'm giving PoW to some enemies in chapter 6 of CotCT and I'm going to see if I can TPK the party. I'm just fucking done with the system. I wish Spheres of Might didn't have issues with half their spheres being garbage, because it's actually somewhat interesting.

What spell? I'm serious, name a spell the wizard could cast that would have a reliable chance at oneshotting the dragon like that. The warlord pounced and rolled slightly above average and deleted an encounter. Tell me what a level 14 wizard or cleric could do that could reliably end a dragon with 25 SR, F/R/W of 15/10/15, and immunity to "cold, death effects, energy drain, paralysis, sleep".

I know it's fun to call wizards and their ilk out for being completely broken at high levels, but that's because they can do everything to the highest degree of ability.

Maybe he's intentionally gimping himself or taking utility maneuvers and counters. Thrashing Dragon, Primal Fury, Scarlet Throne and Broken Blade are big offenders for stacking ridiculous damage and deleting encounters. The other disciplines have less raw "fuck you" power, in general.

>Also, it's an AP,
Well no fucking shit the dragon got wrecked, APs are designed with the assumption that the players are as bad as making characters as Paizo is.

Excellent counterpoint.

That's the fucked part. He's a broken blade user, which everyone bitches about.

>20 bucks
>for that
A fool and his money are soon parted.

Hey at least with a wizard the dragon would have SR, literally monstrous saves, and potentially an aura or even their own spells to counter it, with martials if they've boosted their to-hit and damage output to hundreds of HP per round there's not much you can really do to stop it other than BS some reason why they have equally stupid AC or bloated HP.

I'm currently doing 3x max hp (for all things associated in combat) and might up it to 4x at level 11. At those points a well optimized paizo martial or two would chew throw an equal amount of HP in the same amount of rounds, just not 75% first round 25% second round.

The oracle sounds like it just lost to action economy desu, 4 turns of save or sucks from a caster would have invalidated them just as easily.

Another thing that's important to judge is how high an enemie's AC is vs the most accurate strategies your PCs have. Having a mix of decent AC and counters and mooks (I usually have the PCs outnumbers 4-5 to 8-10 with 2-3 lieutenant type enemies to pad out initiative and to prevent the PCs from gunning for the "Boss"

I agree with the other guy, it's entirely probable that he's intentionally taking maneuvers that aren't just "add this damage, wow you killed it in one shot" stuff, which despite the memes every maneuver pool DOES have.

Level 8, so he should have 4th level maneuvers. Bronze Knuckle or Iron Knuckle combined with Steel Flurry Strike is what makes Broken Blade super powerful. The rest of the maneuvers are utility and control though, mostly against humanoid opponents. So if he's not using the wombo combo to trivialize combat, chances are he's the playing the vanilla monk version of the Path of War system (which to be honest is still really strong, but actually reasonable).

>what is "a single 1st-level counter like the Mithral Current option to completely make the entire pounce useless"
>what is "immobilize the foe with Hold Person so he can't use his maneuvers turn 1"

Never played PF before. need advice;
Joining into a 7th level group, party is mostly good with an evil necromancer DM has revealed the necromancer will likely be the end boss and when I pitched my character concept I requested a custom feat which I need help working on. I played a decent amount of DnD so I have no idea how this powerlevel matches up.
Context; My character is a skeletal Obitu and I based this feat off of the Dhampir feat "Life dominant soul"

Unlife-Dominant soul (working name); Your connection with death has attuned you to the powers of negative energies. When you would take negative-energy damage from non hostile sources instead you regain 1/2 that many hitpoints. If the source is you, regain the full amount.

If this is too powerful I was thinking of adding a clause about Healing you recieve from non-
negative energy is halved.

Thoughts?

The number of times you actually run into negative energy will likely be low even if you're going to be going up against a Necromancer, since most undead that have special effects related to negative energy don't channel it or anything, they usually just give you negative levels or Energy drain your stats. With that being the case it's highly situational, but the kind of situational where when you run into a situation where it's useful you're going to be VERY glad you have it.

Also name it Death-Dominant Soul, it flows off the tongue better.

>20$
Many, I really need to learn to draw. Is she supposed to be an amputee?

It's really not strong at all.

Cheers. Reason I wanted this was because as an Anti-paladin I want to be able to use the "Touch of corruption" ability as a self-only lay on hands, as well as if the necro has any negative-energy AOE effects he would not only not have to worry about hitting me with them, but be encouraged to do so.

Would I be better off taking some other feat, then? I was also considering Touch of Evil or Channel Viciousness

Neither of those are good either. We have no idea what you're playing; but apparently it's something with channel energy. In that case the feat you pitched is a good pick (but not extraordinarily strong).

Sorry thought I mentioned, I'd be playing an Obitu Antipaladin.

Let me put it like this, Clerics have a level 1 domain ability that allows anyone they touch to count as undead for the purposes of being affected by negative energy, so for the time they're affected they get healed by negative and harmed by positive. The ability you're proposing is active at all times, but only heals you half of what you'd normally get. Even if you stack that with having Touch of Corruption as an Anti-Paladin the fact that you're only getting half the healing as a feat is pretty balanced in my opinion, if even a bit underpowered. If this is what you want to go for and your DM is allowing it then go for it.

Good pick then, since you can heal self as a swift action with Touch of Corruption. It's a very good pick in this case, but not overpowered in context either since you could've just rolled Dhampir (or Paladin kek).

Could also go Knight of the Sepulcher prestige class and get essentially that for free too. (minus being healed by positive still)

Thanks dudes. I appreciate the feedback

Touch of Corruption can't be swift-actioned to self like LoH can.

Unless there's a feat or something I'm missing.

archetype* not prestige. 4AM fuck me

Could've sworn this was possible; atleast we always allowed that, since it's essentially LoH.

For some reason, evil people are worse at touching themselves than good people.

well yeah, your hand-eye coordination gets messed up if you masturbate so much, it hurts your vision!

Actually looked a bit deeper into it; Touch of Corruption doesn't actully deal negative energy damage. The healing effect is entirely based around being undead type.

This means that being a dhampir OR your feat will not allow you to heal yourself with it. Your only option is the Knight of the Sepulcher archetype for Antipaladin (or homebrewing another feat altogether).

Couldn't I just add the clause "For the purposes of Touch of Corruption, you count as undead"

That would work!

Is it impossible that a game could have just a few mechanics that are worth stealing? Hell, I've already been fiddling with similar homebrewed stuff in Pathfinder for a while now.

In theory, isn't that what PoW is meant to do? I've seen people say time and time again that PoW is basically meant for letting martials be good at combat without having to spec into combat so hard they can't do non-combat stuff, but people go and spec really hard into combat anyway and then layer PoW on top of it.

I have two unrelated questions.

Firstly, is the sword saint archetype for samurai decent? I want to make an enemy samurai npc for the pcs to face off against, but I don't want him sitting on a mount. If the archetype is trash, are any of the others good? Sovereign blade would be workable, and yojimbo would be doable too with a bit of story work.

Secondly, is there still a way to gain early entry into a prestige class such as eldritch knight or arcane archer? This time it was an inquiry from one of the players, as they really liked the idea of "fighter but it casts spells". I know it's my game and I could houserule it, but I was just curious if there was any specific rules relating to it.

Is a build oriented around Vital Strike just boring in general or is there other ways to make it more 'interesting'? Hitting people once with a big attack but nothing else is...not much in terms of fun for me, conceptually

if you can get the giant subtype, you can snag Giant's Whallop or Giant's Crush to daze and prone nemies you vital strike and power attack

1. Sword Saint isn't terrible, if you combine it with Mithral Current from PoW:E, else it's just a Samurai, which is one of the worst classes in the game.

2. There is no way to bypass the Skill Rank requirements for such a class. If they're interested in mostly using blast-y spell, Magus might be what they're looking for.

Unfortunately thats very unlikely, oh well

you're better off using mercurial duelists from asian archetypes by legendary games. its a vigilante archetype, but does all the cool samurai shit youd want

>Firstly, is the sword saint archetype for samurai decent?
No. It's trash and all it'll be good for is doing damage to one character eat round as a full action while also losing on its AC, meaning after one round he'll be gables and killed by the party faster than you can say masaka. Honestly, for martial enemies you're better off with either a Slayer or a highly optimized Fighter

For magic archers, your better off making an Eldritch Archer Magus. As for a "fighter that casts spells", you're better off playing either a Magus or a Bloodrager. Eldritch Knight is not casty fighters, it's for Caster who wants to also hit things

What are ways to make Mercurial Duelist more interesting? At first, I was interested, but then I find that no, I would rather do more stuff than just doing iaijutsu slashes on people once per round, even if the iaijutsu slashes have stuff attached to them later on. It's still pretty much "I only do one thing once per round"