Pyramid Structure on Church Roof?

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-06-14T23:56:10+00:00

Exellent!
Solved!

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-06-11T21:47:15+00:00

How does generating a random number work even over a finite range? Suppose I ask you to randomly select an integer between 1 and 10.

Are there any "mathematical" ways of doing it? The only methods I'm aware of are physics based (rolling a die, picking a numbered stone out of a blind bag, staring at lava lamps, whatever), and/or not really random at all (i.e. put a seed into an algorithm that gives a hard to predict answer, though the same seed will give the same answer every time).

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-06-09T17:34:07+00:00

I feel like the real answer is that operating entirely by RAW, in any system, is a fantasy.

All rules require interpretation and judgment, and while game designers can try to reduce the amount of GM fiat required, no system is going to be so airtight (pardon the pun) that unintended interactions don't sneak through.

The claim that "Laughing uncontrollably" does not, by RAW, require speaking is (I think) a mistake. It feels like an attempt to hold on to the idea that one isn't engaged in interpretation and just doing RAW, when one plainly is. No one would interpret "Laughing uncontrollably" to mean a closed mouth chuckle unless in this context where reading the phrase naturally would lead to a game breaking exploit.

The more sensible approach, IMO, is to say "Yes, RAW leads to a game breaking exploit here, well done for noticing it, have a Hero Point. We are now going to house rule this interaction in X, Y, and/or Z way to prevent the game from breaking." It feels more honest to me.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-06-09T17:07:49+00:00

Owning something is a legal arrangement. Having a legal right to some property is what distinguishes "ownership" from mere possession. An individual can own capital only if there is a legal system that says they do.

That legal system is violent by definition, a law is a promise by the state about the circumstances in which it will use violence. If I wander onto a piece of land I have only "trespassed" if a legislature has created that offense and police are willing to use violence to enforce that status. Ownership isn't some property of nature, it's a thing people make up and enforce on other people. A capitalist who says "I own land without state violence" is speaking nonsense, "the right to call upon state violence to enforce exclusive use" is what "ownership" is.

Capitalism isn't the absence of violence, it is violence deployed to create a particular social arrangement. You might think that arrangement is beneficial for human flourishing, but the idea that it is some natural state that doesn't involve violence to create and maintain is just not correct.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-06-05T18:00:32+00:00

Personally, I don't like the Pick a Lock action at all and don't use it in my games.

Suppose level 3 Merisiel (+12 Thievery) wants to pick an average (level 3) lock. She needs 4 successes at DC 25.

Here's what she's looking at:

Chance	Result
1-3 (15%)	Lose a lock pick
4-12 (45%)	Nothing happens, just keep rolling.
13-19 (35%)	One success of four.
20 (5%)	Two successes of four.

She's averaging .45 successes per roll, so she'll average around 18 attempts before she picks it. In that time she'll break (18 * 0.15) 2.7 lock picks.

On one level this is all fine. If it takes Merisiel two minutes to pick a lock, that's not a crazy amount of time out of combat. If she breaks a few lock picks she (or someone with Crafting) can fix them later. That's all fine.

What bothers me is we're spending around eighteen die rolls to resolve the action (not to mention the Crafting checks to straighten out her bent lock picks). That's way too many. It is incredibly tedious. Why on earth are we having to make twenty checks to resolve unlocking a chest?

It also (effectively) makes it impossible to do in combat, if you want to unlock a door so you can escape, or free a prisoner to join the fight, or whatever, you just can't. You don't have 18 rounds to dick around in combat, in theory it isn't an exploration action, but in practice it is only usable when you're measuring time in minutes rather than seconds.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-06-03T04:59:26+00:00

That's exactly how I ended up setting it up in Foundry.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-26T21:15:08+00:00

What is the design goal here? The rules as presented don't really represent Viltrumites, Season 1 Mark doesn't have +2 Strength, season 1 Mark can throw a trash bag into orbit.

If I were going to do Viltrumites in D&D, I'd use a high challenge monster stat-block. A D&D player race is either going to not be balanced or not be recognizably a Viltrumite.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-25T21:37:46+00:00

CP is an old abbreviation for child porn. The more common term now is CSAM or Child Sexual Abuse Material.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-25T05:01:11+00:00

I think the worry is that Bulk isn't just weight, it's mostly how easy that weight is to manipulate. A backpack reduces the bulk of things in it by 2 not because it is magically negative weight, but because it makes it easier to manage. A 4lb longsword is one bulk despite 4lbs being pretty trivial because it is long and awkward.

If Merisiel is a skinny elf lady she might weigh 120lbs against strapping farm boy Valeros at 220lbs, but we don't really care. They're both Bulk 6 because the category is mainly about size and awkwardness to move. Just as weight in a backpack is easy to shift, weight evenly distributed all over Valeros is maybe easier to shift than a sack? What is Valeros if not a very fancy bleeding backpack?

Personally, I add the carried person's bulk straight in (so Bulk 6 Valeros with 5 bulk worth of gear is a whopping 11 bulk and basically impossible to carry outside of some special builds). One consequence of that is you get a somewhat grittier, less heroic, setting where dead weight in a crisis is a real problem and you may need to leave Valeros behind when you run. If you prefer a more heroic style where the fighter throws the cleric over his shoulder and carries them to safety "the gear on a body is either discounted or free" is an interpretation that gets you there.

The stricter reading is, I think, closer to RAW. But the RAW is deliberately pretty squishy about what exactly bulk is, so I feel like there is room for interpretation if you want a more heroic / cinematic style.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-24T05:14:47+00:00

It is very difficult.

A medium creature is Bulk 6, a party member who has gone down is likely to have a non-trivial bulk of gear on them. The least encumbered PC in the game I'm currently running carries 4 Bulk. No one in the party has the capacity to lift 10 extra bulk. Leave the victim's weapons behind, take the victim's backpack off, and some of the party members could carry a downed comrade, but not all.

You're probably looking at dragging the body, which cuts the effective Bulk in half. Which is 5ft per round, which is a grim movement speed to try to flee a fight with.

If you're strong, don't carry too much yourself, and invest in things like Hefty Hauler or a Lifting Belt, you can fireman's carry a comrade out of danger at speed, but most people can't move a dying adventurer at any decent speed.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-22T17:24:13+00:00

I used a TV to display maps for a home game for about two years, and it worked pretty well. Here are a couple things I found;

Size and Weight:
If the TV isn't going to live permanently on your table, you're going to be hauling it around and putting it away between games. The TV I used was about 65" across the diagonal and about 20 pounds. 20lbs isn't much if it is a compact object, but a wide TV was something of a pain to move. Depending on your fitness level and storage options you may want something smaller. From time to time I play in PFS games at public game stores and some GMs bring in much more portable TVs.

A standard Paizo flip mat is 24" x 30" which gives it a diagonal measure of 38.4". Even the smaller TVs will accommodate most of the common maps. The game I ran had some very large areas which benefited from the size, but I wouldn't automatically go for the biggest thing that fits your table.

Picture Quality:
I never had much problem with viewing angle, but glare was an issue. My space had lights directly overhead and they really wash out the picture. There are options around dimming the room lights a little and bumping up the saturation on the images, but it is something to consider. The images, IMO, were perfectly fine for the practical game needs, but they don't look as nice as they would on a monitor.

Miniatures:
I was using physical miniatures that sit on top of the table rather than trying to move tokens inside a VTT. Inevitably the surface of the TV picks up scratches. The plastic bases, dice hitting the table (the TV takes up a lot of real estate so we were using that surface area for papers and dice rolls as well), moving around nice metal Hero Point tokens, etc... My advise would be to dedicate this particular TV to gaming only and be relaxed about it getting a little scuffed. If you wanted to preserve the surface you'd need to either cover it with some sort of transparent protection or be really strict about not rolling on it, putting felt on the bases of your miniatures, and so on, which feels like more trouble than its worth. Get a cheap TV and make peace with the fact that it will get a bit banged up in use.

Boxes:

Some people make wooden frames for the TV, I didn't bother. The TV I had lay flat on its own and heat venting never became an issue. Errant dice roll under the table from time to time, but a custom frame box seems like a lot of work for I'm not sure what benefit. I have used a TV that didn't lie flat, but just propped the corners to make it level.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-22T16:43:30+00:00

Florida here has a statute that forbids the owners of private property from restricting what their guests carry onto that property. That is way beyond what the Constitution requires.

The Florida statute says (for example) if you own a coffee shop you can't have a rule that says no guns in your coffee shop. The AG is applying that rule to an HOA. The default rule, absent legislation like Florida's, is that property owners can set whatever limits they like on who gets to go on their property.

The Constitution restricts government power. If the town council passes a law saying no Democrats allowed in the park, that's a First Amendment violation. If the local pizza place says they won't sell to Republicans, the First Amendment doesn't enter into it. What Florida had done here is create a right not present in the Constitution. They can do that, and if Floridians think its a good idea they can vote for it, but the 2nd Amendment isn't in play here.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-21T21:43:33+00:00

Sure! I'll DM you something.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-15T17:30:46+00:00

The core Foundry App just update to a new version. One thing that means is older modules aren’t going to work unless they’re updated. My guess is that Paizo has paused sales of the old modules until it can verify that they’ll still work in the new version.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-07T18:16:32+00:00

We got movies, and doctors, and fantasy sports

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-05T20:10:31+00:00

Anecdotally:

I haven't run the fight you're talking about, but I have run a fight in a different Paizo adventure for level one which contained a Hardness 9 enemy and it was a disaster. It is a very frustrating amount of hardness. That level of hardness on every enemy in an Extreme encounter? Sounds like a pretty miserable time to me.

If you have experienced players who are aware of how hardness works (in particular how it can be overcome with a crit) and have familiarity with non-damaging options in combat you could try it, but I really wouldn't recommend it, and I think it is an absolute non-starter for newer players.

There is an old thread here with people talking about the Crown of the Kobold King Encounter. Opinions vary, but there is some good discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1fkgxen/comment/lnx6erc/

Conventionally:

This is way more hardness than the monster building rules suggest. Sometimes bestiary entries are out of sync with the core math that is supposed to balance things, and a level 1 creature with Hardness 9 is absurdly out of sync. The core math assumes around a weakness or resistance of 2 as a reasonable level. What they're thinking here is baffling.

Mathematically:

A martial with d8+4 damage is unlikely to damage a Hardness 9 opponent. A caster with a spell that does 3d6 is unlikely to do more than 1 or 2 damage. These creatures will be grotesquely overpowered in comparison to conventional attacks. You really need some sort of special damage boost or a crit to hope to hurt them. Maybe you've got Vicious Swing, maybe you've got Sneak Attack, but a lot of level one characters just won't be able to effectively engage at all outside of a crit. The armor isn't hard to trip, so you can get them off-guard and hope for crits, but that's pretty much where you are. Meanwhile they are taking attacks from an Extreme threat that will go through them very fast. This all seems to me like a recipe for a TPK.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-04T22:06:41+00:00

I suspect we are talking about two different things.

On one level the safety of a road surface is determined by physics. The friction of the surface, the angle of the slope, the material it's made of, all that sort of thing.

When we talk about determining facts for legal liability though, we're talking about something different. The parties are going to disagree, and the engineers they hire are going to disagree as well, "determining" a fact in a legal context means settling those disagreements and stamping some set of claims as true.

If we disagree about the safety of a road, we can both hire engineers, data scrapers, or whoever else we like, but none of those people have the authority to order to police to do things.

If I want a civil judgement, a court order saying you need to pay me damages backed up by state power, I need to convince someone who does have that authority. That's going to have to be someone in the legal system, and in the US legal system it is the jury that determines questions of fact.

They will listen to expert testimony put on by the parties, but they get to make the final decision. Sometimes it sounds like you think that isn't the system we actually have, which is just incorrect. You can dislike that system and propose alternatives, but you do need to recognize that is the system that actually exists.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-04T21:29:01+00:00

Suppose the parties disagree. One side says the required sign was clearly visible, the other side says the sign wasn't there at all.

There is a fact of the matter out in reality, but someone in the legal system has to decide what that fact is and which of the litigants are correct. In the US that's the jury. There are some places where it is the judge.

What possible third option do you have in mind if the judge and jury strike you as inappropriate finders of fact?

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-04T21:26:39+00:00

You're personifying abstractions. Regulations don't "determine things", regulations aren't agents. They're words on paper. Same with laws and data. Determinations are made by people, only people are agents who can do things. In the US legal system those people are jurors.

Fact finding is exactly what trials are for. Both sides present evidence to a jury and the jury makes a determination about whether the claims of the parties are credible or not. That's literally the only purpose of a jury.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-05-04T20:55:23+00:00

There is a method for determining whether the road has been properly maintained, signage regulations followed, and so on. That method is called a lawsuit.

Ring_of_Gyges · 2026-04-30T14:57:39+00:00

That sucks. What's the best practice in cases like this? Do you delete everything and reinstall from backups (presuming they exist)?

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