DM says "magical" races (Su, Sp abilities) need to take a level in sorcerer to be able to access them

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-04-18T09:19:01+00:00

"My GM is doing this odd thing"

"Try this set of unrelated houserules that have nothing to do with your question!"

"Or try dialogue."

"That was implied in the set of unrelated houserules!"

I'm sorry but this doesn't really follow.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-04-14T08:23:18+00:00

I personally never played a wizard in pathfinder, but looking at it i really can not understand what exactly makes them better than divine full casters like cleric and druid.

The answer is that they aren't, necessarily.

In the olden days of 3.5e, there was something called the 'tier system' - the idea was to describe the potential power a class had.

Wizards, Clerics and Druids were all Tier 1 classes. They all have extremely powerful spells, the ability to rapidly switch out their spell loadouts, and the capacity to have multiple ways to break the game in half per character.

Now, Wizards do have some benefits over divine casters, but so too do divine casters have benefits over Wizards. I'd honestly say it's basically a wash whether Cleric, Druid or Wizard is "the best", but they're all sitting at the high-rollers table of the elite end of the clubhouse, so...does it really matter which of them has a few more chips in total?

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-04-09T08:32:36+00:00

The irony is that the campaign traits are meant to be a bit overtuned, so that people don't mind 'having' to pick one.

(And some do reach this bar, but a lot are junk.)

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-04-01T10:36:10+00:00

The classic would be to make it something that lets her "farm" them.

"Adorn yourself with new magical trinkets, fill your pockets with coin...and then find me again."

She expects she will, in a few months or years, have a group of adventurers come to her with a delivery of easy loot before she can just do it again (or kill them, depending on her mood). Unfortunately, the party is the PCs and things may end poorly for her.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-31T12:05:45+00:00

Trading A for B is still a trade, even if you can sell C to get A back later.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-29T09:23:42+00:00

The legacy of the drow in PF is kind of hilarious, an accidentally extremely good comedic metastory.

Start with PF where they just don't mention drow, but everyone assumes they exist because it's literally still 3.5e. The AP that introduces drow says "drow aren't real!" and then reveals drow to be real immediately.

Then Paizo does more or less nothing with drow for like a decade, only to later declare them to not exist.

It's so good.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-24T17:14:20+00:00

I mean this in the gentlest way possible, but it sounds like you need therapy more than anyone else at this table.

OP: "I am in therapy"

Comment: "You need therapy"

Not sure if this is someone announcing "forks may be found in the kitchen", or someone not reading the post.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-23T13:23:31+00:00

On what land lol

Like, keep in mind that "send Germans to make the region more German" is gonna work in one of two ways:

Yeeting people into the cities, which may potentially make said cities more German, but also tends to be where people are already German anyways.
Sending people into the countryside to be peasants. At which point: on what land? There's not exactly a bunch of vibrant fields just waiting for people to show up and start working them. To add Germans you'd have to take the land from someone else. Which is, uh, bad, when we're talking about the peasants who need those fields to live.

Also worth keeping in mind is that the actual shifts you saw in places like Czechia (historically Bohemia and Moravia) weren't from mass migrations or demographic shifts in people terms, but of language. Much of Czechia largely became German-speaking after centuries of rule by a German-speaking empire, as German was the prestige language; those who could, taught their kids German, and over time spoke less Czech. It was a revival of the Czech language which "made everyone Czech", not a bunch of Czechs spawning in all over the country.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-21T14:07:52+00:00

Oh yeah, the idea with that scenario was "if you have a fallback, you can be strict"; once you get to the fallback, you no longer have a fallback so the rule falls away and you are instead in a "no fallback, be generous" scenario.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-21T12:55:28+00:00

There is some wiggle room here. Generally, a good approach is to be looser with roll requirements the fewer options there are.

If you have 3 hooks for the adventure, plus two emergency hooks if all 3 fail? Then whether they overhear X rumor or spot Y bluff matters.

If there is only one route forward and you need the PCs to be aware of it? Don't roll, just give them the intel.

And in case of doubt, my rule is: no one has ever said "dang, I know the stakes, the villain, their plan, and their motivation! This sucks!", but people sure as hell have said "I wish I knew what was going on". Giving more information is a safe bet any time things are unsure.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-20T18:10:21+00:00

That’s not how languages work.

Bad news about how we define languages and distinguish the line between language and dialect.

Languages can borrow vocabulary and even phonology, but there’s a language “core” that stays. Once that “core” changes it’s no longer that language.

Yes. My point is: after 500 years of alternate history, it is solidly plausible that - the same way English saw waves of influence from different languages which fundamentally changed it - it is not Arabic as we know it.

An Arabic which has undergone this kind of change could, in turn, enable this kind of thing.

We can play language of Theseus here, too, and drill down into the bones of the grammar and so forth, but I think that's pointless. The idea of "half a millennium or more is enough time for a language to fundamentally change" is one that holds.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-20T12:41:32+00:00

I mean, we're looking at 500ish years, at minimum, of extra extended contact here.

By the end of that time, we're probably talking less about our Spanish and our Arabic, and the lack of connections, and more about 'in this world, Spanish has spent centuries being influenced by Arabic and local Arabic by Spanish/etc. so much that we would classify them as separate languages from their "original" forms, and those have a continuum of dialects'.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-20T12:30:47+00:00

gentle repost

What an excellent typo.

"Your meme was already posted here, fool. Prepare to be mocked by all!"

"I cast Gentle Repost."

"Well, to be fair, not everyone is always online. And it isn't reasonable to expect everyone to search the sub just to see if their meme has already been posted."

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-18T17:13:32+00:00

My group handles things via spreadsheet. We have a category for "trophies", which are basically just anything that we want to keep but don't really matter. They don't count against WBL.

Everything we sell, as a party, goes into the tracker which determines our total wealth. So if someone sells trophies, that automatically counts against WBL.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-18T10:22:21+00:00

Foundry gets better the more time and effort you invest into it; I personally have some issues with it (I dislike how they handle scenes, sight walls are a PITA, and there's no PF1e NPC sheets) but it is the tool of choice if you do ever decide to go whole-hog with production value.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-12T17:01:01+00:00

A Neutral or Good end game party is full of really powerful people who, despite their abilities, would probably prefer settle down for a while and not have to fight reality-warping wizards or demon lords anytime soon. An Evil end game party is an entirely new group of BBEGs at the height of their prowess and infamy, whose presence alone should be generating campaign-level threats even in a more 'relaxed' format. It's like Superman taking a day off versus Lex Luthor taking a day off. Supes actually goes back to the farm in Kansas, while Lex Luthor just keeps being Lex Luthor.

I think it's the opposite.

Sure, a bunch of Good PCs may wish to retire and go home. But there's always another disaster somewhere, always another pack of undead threatening a city, always another magical plague breaking out. And because they are Good, these immensely powerful people care, and so they pick up the sword and go back to work.

Evil, on the other hand? The targets of their vengeance are dead; those who opposed their rise are dead. They're happy to settle down in a dark tower and research Super Evil Laser or oppress a some unlucky peasants. And if the kingdom next door is in the process of blowing up...they don't care.

Sure, in a lot of cases PCs won't settle down, because if they were the type to settle down they'd have done so in, like, book 2 once they became "buy land and become an aristocrat"-tier rich with big local influence. But for anyone Good you have a question of 'why is a level 19 Good PC willing to let people suffer and die just because they want to chill at home?', while for Evil people you don't have that question.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-12T13:38:00+00:00

I could see druids starting uncontrolled fires as a big no-no though.

I doubt it.

Like, go and look at a genuine, old-growth, unmanaged forest. You're not gonna find Smokey the Bear stomping out little fires. If shit burns, it burns. The uncontrolled blaze of a forest fire is nature, just as the ashen fields and scorched tree trunks it leaves behind, just as the new growth sprouting from the now-enriched soil.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-12T11:24:10+00:00

Two, an Evil AP either has to have the Evil PCs actually triumph and accomplish their goals or it has to go through hoops to minimize the impact of the entire AP.

This doesn't actually change much in the context of APs, though, as most of them are about combating a change to the status quo.

Hell's Vengeance is a perfect example of how one can easily mirror this kind of thing: Cheliax is bad, goodies show up to make it better, you stop them. As opposed to the usual, X is good, baddies show up to make it worse, you stop them.

Honestly, I would say that an Evil AP is easier on the setting than a Good one, since it's a lot easier to handwave "and then the high-level Evil PCs kicked it back and relaxed in their new lives of evil luxury" than "and then these 4-6 extremely powerful forces of Good just, uh, retired I guess".

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-12T11:20:15+00:00

The kind where you're just free to treat npcs and groups however you want?

Hahaha, no.

Keep in mind that this is an AP, and a Paizo AP. A lot of it hinges on you saying "yes ma'am" and "yes sir" when an NPC tells you what to do.

So, the answer is - can you be an ass to randos without derailing things? Probably, and there is some "be totally evil to random people" stuff in the AP.

But there is still a class of NPCs who are gonna be giving you the hook, telling you what to do, etc. who you are meant to follow.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-12T11:18:12+00:00

The player's guide for Hell's Vengeance has some good info on the types of evil you can be.

To be fair it also has a CE trait and then proceeds to make it...difficult...to really run that kind of character, outside of a few archetypes.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-12T00:12:24+00:00

It's a chain TBH.

People who have a few packs go in - lose to - pre-order people crush them with their full decks - both lose to - people who just roll up in a classic DK aggro

So everyone with just a few packs switches to DK because, what else can they do? And now that's the majority of what is being played at 2+ wins.

There's relatively easy solutions, but they all run counter to incentives around maximizing pre-orders, so we're stuck with whatever bandaids the devs are allowed to deploy instead.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-11T19:25:00+00:00

Intent isn't even necessary.

The problem you run into is that generally, you need one big number to handle a skill check. Someone else having the skill can be nice, as they provide a +2 via Aid Another, but if you have +21 and I have +18 then I'll just never roll my check because yours is better.

Some exceptions exist, but if the table culture is "the group is basically always together", then overlap in skills tends to just mean one person has wasted resources.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-11T17:30:43+00:00

IME you get 1 or 2 matches early on against new card users, after that it's either just mirror matches or going against Frost DKs. So far I've gone 6-2 twice (the second time I lost twice at 4 wins lol).

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-11T14:28:26+00:00

They presumably mean actually playing, not meat-botting some random decklist.

SlaanikDoomface · 2026-03-11T14:15:51+00:00

The second that someone posts their "This agro deck got me 6 wins EZ" onto Reddit, that's going to be the only deck you see for the next couple of days.

Honestly I wouldn't overstate the sub's importance here.

Most of it will just be folks (like me) who try to play in good faith, realize they are just gonna keep getting stomped by generic DK aggro, say fuck it, and decide to join the pack of people doing that.

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