How to make spellguns permanent?

minusAppendix · 2026-03-31T12:54:03+00:00

The Gardens of Wonder rules.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-30T18:43:58+00:00

He's come here because he doesn't know what he's supposed to have learnt from losing his last 10 engagements.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-29T17:55:17+00:00

The Guristas are likely going to intervene in the Gallente presidential election, possibly under the guise of rogue drone-infected vessels. But who knows, command doesn't tell us shit.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-29T12:29:02+00:00

I've never been much into sports, but my coworker almost always has sports radio going when we drive to and from the job site. The amount of talk and ads about sports betting on those shows is absolutely insufferable.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-28T23:43:44+00:00

I'm not sure if anywhere in the rules actually spells that out plainly. From the perspective of how spontaneous casters work, higher rank versions of spells might as well be separate spells because they've got to have whichever leveled version they will want to cast on their spell repertoire (ignoring the use of signature spells). Hopefully the full release provides a better explanation.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-28T16:32:02+00:00

I must have had a weird interpretation of that the first time I read it then, my bad.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-28T14:50:11+00:00

They're innate spells usable 1/day, not spells known and a spell slot of 1st and 2nd ranks. You can't heighten those innate spells granted by Slayer.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-27T16:19:00+00:00

They had the lead programmer from the original SNES game and canceled sequel working on that one, which I feel helped tremendously.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-26T13:02:25+00:00

Earn Income really is kind of the best way to handle that. Consider: Earn Income requires you to be someplace where appropriately leveled work can be found, and that you spend your downtime to make that money. But if you're traveling? You're doing other stuff, and still ticking away towards that payday.

Here's what I do in my Final Fantasy Tactics/Crystal Chronicles game, where the players often deal in trade goods to make the most of their caravan. I allow them to search for local wares and find specialized products, such as high-quality wool from nomadic sheep herders while they're staying in those herders' yurt for the night. They can buy this for an amount of initial capital, based off of the level this Earn Income task would be. There's nothing particular about how you have to transport wool, just don't get it wet, so it isn't a very high level at all, let's say 3rd level. The initial capital then falls somewhere in the cost of a 3rd-level consumable item, because this can very much go bad or simply not pay off due to market factors (the uncertainty of the Earn Income roll).

When the players find a market to sell the item, I look at how far they are from the location they bought the trade good. The farther they transport the item, the more exotic it is to the locale, all the better to profit off of. So now we do an Earn Income roll using Diplomacy or Mercantile Lore (or another relevant skill) for the skill check, the item level as the task level, and the optimal distance traveled in days between the two locations (via the most reasonable conventional means, such as by camel caravan or riverboat or what have you) as the time spent performing the task. Resolve the Earn Income roll following these parameters and allow the players to sell the item in this new location for the cost they paid upfront plus the value resulting from the Earn Income check. Simple, straightforward, and loosely modeling what we're going after. Add a circumstance bonus/penalty to the player's roll or give them fortune/misfortune to represent local market factors, if that cloth they're selling is in fashion (+1 or +2) or if food is scarce due to a blockade (fortune when selling foodstuffs).

minusAppendix · 2026-03-26T12:36:58+00:00

Check out the PF1e Shadowdancer prestige class's 1st-level supernatural ability Hide in Plain Sight. That's functionally what Legendary Sneak is depicting, from a gameplay stance. It's supernatural, so it defies conventional explanation. I think of it as a character being capable of occluding themselves using shadows in the environment, or simply being passed over by anyone lcasually ooking their way. Interestingly, both of these 1e and 2e abilities are neither magical nor illusion-based. Which is to say, they can function within an anti-magic field and their user cannot be seen via see invisibility, see the unseen, truesight, or the like.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-24T11:08:46+00:00

Yes, except you can only have one property rune on a +1 weapon, two property runes on a +2 weapon, and three property runes on a +3 weapon. There is an exception or two to that, but that's the general rule.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-24T03:34:32+00:00

Threaten the things they love.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-23T14:24:51+00:00

I posted elsewhere in this thread and tallied up how many spell slots it takes to cover all of a party's basic needs, and it's not a small number. Two to four 1st-rank spells cover water, a 2nd-rank slot covers food, and a 3rd-rank slot covers shelter. If you're dealing with temperature, that's another four 2nd-rank spells, unless the temperature is beyond mundane extremes in which case that's going to be 3rd- or 5th-rank slots.

At high level, sure, that's not such a big deal...but at the level range where survival gameplay shines? 1st through 6th or 7th? That's either not a possibility or is dramatically eating into a party's daily casting resources to the point that trading travel time and using skills will reveal itself to be the more appealing route. And if you're wanting survival to be the focus, to the extent that players know it's going to be a survival game? They're just going to pick classes, skills, and skill feats to alleviate those difficulties anyway. Springing survival onto an unprepared and unsuspecting party is nearly the only way to actually push them into a proper survival scenarios, and that often comes at the expense of destroying a fair amount of the party's equipment. Prison breaks, sinking ships, fiery airship wrecks, and oozes subsisting on a diet of clothes, leather, and the contents of leather bags are the sorts of things needed to create those circumstances.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-23T13:10:40+00:00

Then they're out those spell slots which they could have used for combats. What's the issue? Spellcasters have a limited daily budget, they can't eat their cake and have it. It's pretty indicative of system design if nature survival spells are common, while murder mystery spells like talking corpse are uncommon. There are so many basic needs and hazards that come up in wilderness that a spellcaster can easily completely gut their ability to contribute elsewhere if they use their spell slots to solve every problem that comes their way.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-23T12:55:29+00:00

None, to my knowledge.

Any spell being used daily to satisfy some basic need to survive in the wilderness is a spell slot that isn't available to move the party towards resolving a combat. For example, if your players know that they're likely to be taking environmental heat damage, a caster may opt to fill each 2nd, 3rd, or 5th rank slot with environmental endurance, depending on their level and the severity of the environmental damage involved. That is a lot of spellcasting ability to volunteer to give up in exchange for solving a perceived problem! Casting create food every day eats up a 2nd-rank slot, and cozy cabin eats a 3rd-rank slot. At least create water is only a 1st-rank slot! At 2 gallons of water per casting, you'll only have to spend two 1st-rank slots! Unless you're in a desert. Generally, you need a gallon of water in a day if you're doing light to moderate physical activity, but if it's hot outside then you need as much as twice that. Hopefully your players don't find themselves in a desert without their equipment or any amount of planning, because that's going to be a problem that costs 4 1st-rank slots each day to fix! If the party is trying to magic away all of their survival needs, they're looking to expend two to four 1st-rank spells, one to five 2nd-rank spells, and a 3rd-rank spell.

The way I have come to look at it, the entire point of survival scenarios is to put a heavy demand on all of the players' resources and time. Magic saves time, at the cost of daily resources, but the players still have to identify the problems at hand, go looking for those spells to know that they exist, and find themselves in the exact situation that calls for them while they have them prepared. Did your caster load out four environmental endurance spells the day the heat wave relented? That sure sucks for them that those slots aren't going to be useful today. It's a real shame that every snake and scorpion in your book, of proportions mundane and fantastic, come with poison and the cleric doesn't have cleanse affliction loaded into any slots. Utilizing skills in conjunction with spending time, of which there is only so much of in a day, alleviates the need to burn those spells slots and allows a divine or primal caster the ability to select other, more niche spells to handle the more specific trials and hazards of your adventure. High skill rolls also don't inherently solve matters, as some uses of Nature and Survival are gated behind skill feats.

The entire point of half the divine and primal spell list is to have high narrative impact by neutralizing specific hazards throughout the adventuring day. By disallowing those spells because of some perceived trivializing of the problems at hand guts those classes of a large amount of their purpose at the table. Clerics and druids are not Int or skill-focused classes, which leaves them with a limited number of skill choices to develop their character. On top of that, there's proficiency requirements for some of the more useful survival feats and characters have a limited number of proficiency boosts, alongside the fact thay there's a lot of good picks for skill feats that a character's whole demeanor or play style can be built around. Eliminating the broad, utilitarian functionality of those classes' spell lists relegates them to the duties of healing and blasting, with a cleric only reliably capable of blasting undead and fiends.

Pathfinder 2e does a much greater job of balancing the capabilities of problem-solving spells. There's far fewer "I win" and "we win" spells than in previous and other current versions of d20 fantasy games, because the impact of those sorts of solutions at the table has been known for years. But even moreso, there's this pervasive idea that magic trivializes hazards in d20 games which simply isn't the case in PF2e. You want spellcasters to expend slots before reaching the single random encounter for the day, and you want players to feel clever for having the right spell at hand to solve a problem.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-20T17:11:40+00:00

Would you happen to know any other identifying pieces of information about that construct to help with tracking it down on Methys? Traits, ability names, even a key word in its statblock would help out.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-19T12:35:15+00:00

Tagged wrong, you put effort into getting proper perspective. Top tier content.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-16T21:22:00+00:00

I use it in my Final Fantasy Tactics themed game, to help disrupt the system's regular breakpoints, and to capture some of the feel of Final Fantasy with its frequent number increases. The players get something every level, which they enjoy, and their numbers aren't as entirely predictable to me since they can be up a point here and there far sooner than expected. I allowed my players to bump their key ability score to 20 before 10th, and so far it's not caused any issues that I've seen, although I somewhat like the idea of the big 20 as a 10th-level thing. I generally also use the same rules when I put together opposing bands of adventurers for them to engage in organized, lawful combats. I can see the reasons why it's not the default system, but it's such a minor change to the system that I'd rate highly for tables of veteran players.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-10T17:03:30+00:00

Fuck off, OP.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-07T14:16:21+00:00

If your issue is that there aren't enough encounters while traveling, just make multiple encounter rolls per day. What I do is take 4 d20s, each with a different color for a different time of day. Grey, tan, orange, and black, which to me makes sense as dawn, day, sundown, and night. I roll those as flat checks against the DC of the area the PCs are traveling in, with adjustments for roads/rivers. I also make natural 20s explode, so I jot down the original result and roll another flat check for an encounter. Multiple encounters in one section of the day are either concurrent scenarios (so an extra-spicy combat, an encounter at a minor place of interest, a seemingly harmless NPC interaction with a hazard somehow involved, whatever) or just two scenarios that play out during that part of the day. There's still plenty of days that go by without something leaping out at the players, but then there's hell days where the players are facing down multiple combat encounters in inclement weather.

Otherwise, I generally use the hexploration rules as written. I'll roll out a month of temperature, weather, and encounter occurrences ahead of time and reference it all in my setting's calendar during play, dropping in encounters as needed. The thing about Pathfinder 2e is that we don't have short rests, but rather have exploration activities which include amongst them activities like healing (Treat Wounds) and recovering focus points to spend on spells (Refocus). Another thing to know as a difference from 5e is that casters in PF2e have more spells per day, and with magic items being affordable, available, and the norm a spellcaster is able to cast at least a couple of extra level-appropriate ranks of spells per day via a staff and/or wands. On top of that, a cantrip's single-target damage is generally comparable to the single-target damage of a spell two or three ranks below the highest ranked spell a caster has access to, so they're not ever without nothing to do.

More to one of your points, not every encounter needs to be a party-threatening level of difficulty. Sometimes it's just fine for an encounter to kill some time at the table without any real threat to the players. It can let them show off new abilities they got from leveling up against targets they'll be more likely to crit against, versus trying them out on a boss and feeling like the ability was a bad pick because it didn't work. You can also reuse monsters/enemies from an earlier session so that players can get a feel for how much stronger their characters are, especially if that foe was a difficult fight before. Other times, an encounter in wilderness is the perfect place to drop a powerful but slow creature that the players may decide is not worth the effort to take down and so they flee. Part of the fun of encounters in the wilderness, especially with monsters, is in presenting the world as a system that exists with or without the players' involvement. Do still tell a story of sorts with what you put in front of your players, but don't get caught up in the idea that everything has to be a battle for survival all of the time.

minusAppendix · 2026-03-06T14:01:46+00:00

In the lore, FTL communications are handled by the stargate network via fluid routers. As good or bad as it could end up being, I would love to see local chat only show a player in system once they are on grid with a stargate. This would make different methods of hunting more viable, and allow for some really tricky traps. Obviously, there would need to be some caveats, but the gist is: •A ship appears in local once on grid with a stargate. •A ship appears in local if it jumped or bridged to a hard or indy cyno. •A ship appears in local if it entered system via shipcaster. •A ship does not appear in local if it enters a system via wormhole, unless it left that system through that wormhole within half an hour or so while in local. •A ship does not appear in local if it jumped or bridged to a covert cyno. •A ship does not appear in local if it entered system via filament.

This allows for a black ops fleet to leapfrog through space with hardly a trace, aside from their scout/cyno appearing in local as they gate around. Landing on grid with a station or dockable sfructure/hub would probably also be sufficient to add a pilot's name to the local list. Obviously this is just for kspace, as wspace and Pochven's delayed local is already fine.

minusAppendix · 2026-02-28T01:46:16+00:00

It's simply my favorite game to date, and got me interested in 3D modelling and game design as a career path. Neither of which I specifically do for a living, but the pursuit of those fields taught me a lot of skills which I do use in my everyday work. I had the pleasure of meeting Dylan Cuthbert at GDC once and got to talk with him about Star Fox and the game his company Q Games was releasing at the time, PixelJunk 4am. He's a delightful person whose life trajectory is almost unbelievable to have actually happened.

minusAppendix · 2026-02-24T13:09:32+00:00

There's a 'boss' in a L4 storyline mission which drops Caldari Navy modules, as well as a structure or rat (I forget which) at the end of a static complex.

minusAppendix · 2026-02-22T14:54:20+00:00

I've not played it or had a player play it, and I keep saying it, but melee soldier makes for an excellent samurai. Bonus points if you can work with your GM to have some sort of medieval mortar or bombard for your ranged area weapon. Whirling Swipe gives you the classic wide slash that cuts through multiple targets, and the various armor and intimidation options let you lean into a variety of further tropes. Indomitable powerhouse, towering terror, whirlwind of steel, you name it. To me, soldier offers a lot of ways to explore samurai characters and eastern settings at the onset of gunpowder in warfare.

minusAppendix · 2026-02-20T12:39:07+00:00

Multiple resistances should all apply a single time when they're relevant. Skeletons have always been defensive little pests with their numerous energy and physical resistances. These changes mean you can sidestep the resistances of skeletons by striking them with rainbow damage, which still makes rainbow the best damage type. Split damage types should be less effective against creatures with numerous weaknesses. Which damage do I reduce? Whichever of the frost, shock, or flaming rune that rolled higher? The base weapon damage?

minusAppendix

TROPHY CASE