Playing a whole punch of games side by side by side by side by side by side like this gives one the opportunity to really analyze each game, see what one likes and doesn’t like about each, and draw comparisons and contrasts. With that in mind, here are some thoughts on each of those four games! For every game, I have a boon—something I like about the game—a burst—something that irks me about that game—and a blurb about the games I’m in for each. At the end, I’ll note some comparisons and contrasts about the games. Are you ready? Awesome! Let’s get going.

Hanjae is my Way of the Wicked PC. He’s a shapeshifter bloodline bloodrager with the urban barbarian, primalist, and metamagic rager archetypes. Click for build link.

Pathfinder 1E

Boon — PC Customization

I don’t think any game currently out in the d20 sphere can top Pathfinder 1E in PC customization, since Pathfinder 1E is a game that’s literally about making every little detail about your character your own. Every class feature can be swapped or altered in some way using archetypes, ancestry traits for most of the most popular ancestries can be peddled for new powers like trading cards in a binder, and a feat exists for literally everything. So many powerful, meaningful options existed that I personally needed to have a 20-level plan for every single character I played using Pathfinder 1E because if I didn’t, the sheer amount of options always paralyzed me with indecision. (That’s why I started making my Iconic Design articles!)

While this might be a bust for some people, and indeed it might sound like a bust for me too considering I have to sit down and research builds, I can honestly say that for me the time spent tinkering with character builds is half the fun of the game. It’s like when you play Fallout: New Vegas and take the time to tweak your stats and perks and gear so you fire plasma rifle blasts that instantly goo people. Great times, lots of fun.

Bust — Rocket Tag

The same level of optimization that makes PF1 fun from a playing perspective makes PF1 a headache to GM, in my opinion. While I adored the Strange Aeons adventure path, after completing that game I swore off of GMing PF1 without heavy mathematical and content alterations. My players might say it was James’s impossible-to-hit barbarian (who sported an AC of like 45 by the end of the campaign) that made me quit, but honeslty it wasn’t. It was more the magic, the ease at which individual abilities turned each other on and off in an instant. It broke my heart when our party skald got an ability that gave the entire party ghost touch weapons when he sang because it basically meant that being incorporeal didn’t matter for my monsters anymore. There were tons of little interactions like that which made PF1 a nightmare for me to run personally, and the worst of games involved me handing over my monsters and basically saying, “Okay. We’re done. What next?”

Current Game — Way of the Wicked

Right now I’m playing a game with Know Direction: Beyond’s James Ballod where we’re both players in the 3PP Adventure Path Way of the Wicked. It’s been a lot of fun; my character is a kitsune bloodrager with the primalist, urban barbarian, and metamagic rager archetypes so I basically swapped out half of the bloodrager’s class features for different ones. I have a wide array of magic that is mostly focused on a mix of combat and intrigue (using urban bloodrager to pick of glibness was pretty fun, in my opinion). I’m also the party’s highest AC and I have the best dexterity and most constant accuracy. My build is based on a Korean gumiho, and from using lesser spirit totem to summon a torrent of spirits to attack my phones, rage powers that let me rip people’s hearts out, and spells that let me shapeshift into a bunch of different forms Pathfinder 1E has let me build precisely the PC I wanted for this game. Of course, it also let our friend Robyn build a slayer/barbarian (titan mauler) who dual wields scythes that recently landed two crits on an angel for a total of 500 damage at level 12. That’s like almost a Cthulhu in damage.

D&D 5E

Boon — Simplicity

I was really, really shocked regarding how easy 5E is to play. Like, really shocked. For the most part it feels like Pathfinder 1E with a lot of points of contention filed off. A great example, the game doesn’t really have rules for drawing weapons—you just say you do it and you’ve done it. After a handful of player-focused options the game has enough player options that there’s meaningful choice to be made and the game just sort of feels like it wants me to be successful. Like, advantage and disadvantage is real smooth and the myriad of ways to get advantage really makes the game help you get into the mindset of looking for favorable situations without having guaranteed outcomes.

Bust — Vague Rules

Oftentimes 5E’s fast and loose rules bit it in the butt. When playing with friends, oftentimes I’ll make comments like, “Oh how do I do this?” and no one can tell me, so a house rule needs to be made. A great example using skills. They’ve all only got like a sentence or two, so what’ll usually happen is I’ll say, “Oh how do we do X,” and no one will know because the skills are very rigidly defined but what they can do is not. One common problem I hear from vets is that the game’s systems don’t let you change characters up enough from a level-to-level basis. A good example, I wanted my rogue to take the new soulknife subclass, but until Level 3 I was basically the same as every other rogue in every way. No feats, talents, or fiddly bits to really set me apart. Considering these are my first D&D characters that didn’t bother me, but knowing that complaint and having played Level 1 and Level 2 rogue myself I can certainly see how the Pathfinder side of the fence might seem greener to a 5E fan looking for those things.

Current Game — Abysswalkers and Convergence

I’m actually playing in two home 5E games right now run by two different WoW buddies in my Warcraft community—Abysswalkers is about our attempts to reestablished the lost art of monster hunting while Convergence is about a world where a mysterious new continent emerged from nowhere. Both are super cool and a lot of fun. In Abysswalkers, I’m playing a kobold soulknife rogue named Snarl while in Convergence I’m playing a talbaxi divine soul cleric named Soup for the Soul (goes by Soup). Both characters are about Level 4, and my rogue has gotten his subclass but otherwise doesn’t have a ton of unique powers or abilities to distinguish him from every other rogue in the game. Soup, on the other hand, is very distinct because divine soul sorcerers get to learn spells from the cleric spell list or the sorcerer spell list. One thing I found myself really liking in 5E is its simple spells known system, where you get a limited number of spells per level and just choose any spell you could learn at any level you can cast. I think that’s a really cool, simple system that gives players the freedom to pick the spells they want when they feel it’d be the best time for them to learn them. My rogue also does buckets of damage and his damage is mental damage so almost nothing stops it, making him a blast to play as well. If you play 5E, I highly recommend asking your GM to give you a bonus feat at 1st level from a curated list because it helps give the low-level characters an extra bit of identity. My GM in Convergence did that and I took Chef, so Soup runs around and cooks meals for people outside of combat. Lots of fun!

Asai is my Fly Free or Paizo PC. He’s a kitsune technomancer.

Starfinder

Boon — “Fast and Loose” Flavor

Starfinder, for me, has the perfect combination of simple speed and interesting customization options. It has a strong rules set that’s less complicated than PF1 without being vague in places like 5E. The game has a strong sense of balance, sure, but none of those things are why you pick Starfinder over other games. Starfinder oozes flavor. Literally oozes it. It’s flavor doesn’t permeate many of its rules, but it’s setting is phenomenal and its items in particular do an excellent job of selling the far-flung future. The monsters are the perfect combination of weird, wacky, and horrifying while the classes themselves feel fresh from a thematic perspective, especially once you look beyond the Core Rulebook’s mandatory quartet of mage / cleric / rogue / fighter. Starfinder is a game where you can be a six-armed cuddlebug wielding the power of entropy, a sapient swarm ninja, a robot whose insides are filled with nanobot bees, or just a human dude with a gun, and all those characters make perfect sense in the space western setting Starfinder works tirelessly to establish. Just as kitchen-sink with its sci-fi as its predecessor, Pathfinder, Starfinder somehow manages to weave its disparate parts together into what I find to be the most enjoyable world of any I’ve played with in Tabletop RPGs.

Bust — Monetary Nightmare

For me, Starfinder’s biggest weakness is its equipment. Starfinder has OODLES of equipment, and that’s a good thing. Where it becomes a problem is that characters’ wealth is highly budgeted to the extent that the game basically calculates how much of your money is spent on gear and where. Credits are essentially not really an add-on as it is in all the other games on this list—they’re a point-based character advancement system, similar to how Pathfinder 1E has the Big Six magic items but a lot worse. Like, your armor accounts for easily a third of your wealth at any given level, and baseline the game doesn’t have ways to upgrade or advance your armor. What ends up happening is that characters are essentially forced to spend for the Big Three—armor, weapons, and personal augmentations—then fill in the cracks with any other items they want. And honestly, it kinda sucks when you feel like you HAVE to buy, say, a way to move through three dimensions at Level 5 if you’re melee. Adding to the complication is that a bunch of items don’t feel satisfying to use (I’m looking at you, weapon fusions), are overly limited (I’m looking at you, two magic item slots), or insanely priced (I’m looking at you, medicinals pre-Core Rulebook errata). For me, I think equipment is at its strongest when there’s gear I want but don’t need, and if I decide to spend all my money on cool vehicles and houses then that’s my call. Also, the game (especially Adventure Paths) need to aware more cash, but the cash shortage is an issue that literally all Paizo adventures have. I have never been in a non-Society Paizo game that I felt rewarded my group fairly for our adventures, personally. (Society does great with cash rewards; change your ancestry policies but not your cash policies, please!)

Current Game — Attack of the Swarm!, Fly Free or Paizo, and Teenaged Wasteland

Currently, I’m playing in two Starfinder campaigns (Attack of the Swarm! and Fly Free or Die, which we call Fly Free or Paizo because the game is made up solely of Paizo Editors and freelancers) and running a homebrew game (Teenaged Wasteland). Of all the games on this list, Starfinder is the only game I’m actively GMing so I think that says something about how I feel about the game. In Attack of the Swarm!, which I play with Know Direction: Beyond’s James Ballod, I play Dr. Doctor Raptor, a hanakan medic mystic who hates technology, loves magic, and basically runs around spazzing out over every little military maneuver we do while dispensing healing to the party. I’m a healer connection mystic and I’ve swapped some spells known and other powers for the ability to triage, so when my players are out of Stamina Points my Hit Point healing converts to Stamina for them. My character build is pretty basic, we’re only Level 2 or so, but even at Level 2 my options really make Dr. Raptor stand out compared to everyone else in the party. I can honestly say that no two characters in our game feel mechanically similar, from the vanguard who melts things with her hands to James’s operative who never fails to miss a trick attack.

In Fly Free or Paizo, which I play with Know Direction: Beyond’s Vanessa Hoskins (alongside an all-star cast of names including Leo Glass, Tineke Boleman, Simone D. Salle, Chris S. Sims, and Sol St. John), I play Asai Proudfellow, a kitsune technomancer. Asai had, in my opinion, one of the best character reveals of any character I’ve ever played at a Tabletop RPG table. Without going too deep into, telling you about my character, I played through the first two-thirds of Fly Free or Die as the straight-laced foil to the party. Everyone else REALLY wanted to break away from the corporate hellscape we were in, but Asai from accounting was the voice of EJcorp, reminding people about compliance codes and protocols and consequences for our actions. Everyone thought he was the group stick in the mud until the first time we failed to meet EJcorp’s profit expectations, he willingly took the fall for it and got docked the lion’s share of compliance points (this silly metric that the Company used in our game to measure how compliant we were with their corporate values). Eventually, we got to the point where we were at risk for having our employment terminated and that’s where the big reveal was made—not that Asai was a kitsune (although he did reveal that later at a party), but that Asai’s father was the chief financial officer at EJcorp. Tineke going, “… ooooooooh,” when I told the group that will probably go down in my mind as probably one of the best reactions I’ve ever gotten to any backstory related thing I’ve ever done as a player in a Tabletop RPG.

Finally, Teenaged Wasteland is my semi-homebrew but also kinda canon home game set in Everybody Games and Rogue Genius Games’s campaign setting for Starfinder, Blood Space. Dustin Knight, from Fox’s Cunning, is one of my players. Teenaged Wasteland tells the tale of a group of military academy brats who get thrust into a crazy occultic scenario involving the Devourer, a nogitsune daimyo, and Space Nazis. Lots and lots of Nazis. It’s definitely the best campaign I’ve ever run period, and Starfinder’s zany modern-day scenarios let me play that out in ways I could only dream of in Pathfinder. I’ve done an entire series on anecdotes from Teenaged Wasteland, so check ’em out if you’re interested!

Koji Kishimono is my Adventurous: Troubles in Otari character.

Pathfinder 2E

Boon — Smooth Interactions

I think the cheap answer here is “the Three Action Economy,” which literally everyone says, so I’m gonna not do that and instead pick interactions between abilities as one of my favorite parts of PF2. Like, there’s something really satisfying about the rules saying “Perception DC” and me knowing that just means 10 + the creature’s Perception bonus. Along the same lines, those rules let you do Class Rolls by subtracting 10 from your class DC, which is neat. Most importantly for me, however, is that the game’s standard formula system lets stuff interact in ways that’s just easy. For example, Shove just being an Athletics check against Fortitude DC, or Feint being a Deception check against Will DC. Those are SO easy compared to how they’re calculated in Starfinder and Pathfinder. (I’m looking at you, Starfinder’s obsession with 1-1/2 × CR.) I think that doing Math is a requirement of this game, but Pathfinder 2E really helps you speed that up with rules that are simple, effective, and make sense.

Bust — Nothing Really Matters … To Me …

Pathfinder 2E is a weird beast for me because ultimately, I feel like the vast majority of character options don’t matter. This is a pretty weird, contentious thing to say, I’m aware. The best way I can describe it is that if Pathfinder 1E is Magic the Gathering, Pathfinder 2E is Poker. In a TCG like Magic the Gathering, every card in your deck has an explicit purpose; it’s part of your overall strategy to win the game. The deck as a whole is better for the sum of each individual part. In Poker, the objective of the game is to get the best possible hand, the most high-scoring hand if you will. Pathfinder 1E generally rewards every single choice you make as being an integral part of your character’s deck, an overall boon to your strategy. But in Pathfinder 2E, most options don’t interact with each other. Skill feats generally don’t intersect with combat save for niche examples like anything involving Demoralize or Battle Medicine (which is why those two feat chains are generally the most commonly selected skill feats), and class feats generally don’t intersect with each other unless they directly require one another as prerequisites. In my experience, feats don’t really compound on each other as much as your actions themselves do. Like you’ll want Action B to follow up on Action A, and the combo of actions you used is where the character building comes from just like how your hand in a game of Poker are the only cards in the deck that matter at any given point in time. I personally don’t like this. I don’t care for the design that tells me that some of my options aren’t really doing anything at any given point by design intent rather my personal intent, and I don’t like that you really have to stretch to get options to connect with each other. I think the first character I ever really managed to get a taste of what I loved about character building from 1E in 2E was Laychatte, my catfolk gunslinger from our Guns and Gears playtest episode.

Currently, I don’t have any 2E on my docket beyond what we’re doing with KD Plays, which is Adventurous: Troubles in Otari. In TiO, I play Koji Kishimono, a 14 year-old kitsune monk out for adventure with his older brother, Kuro Kishimono (played by Dustin Knight) and mentor, The Professor (played by Jefferson Jay Thacker). In that game, Koji also gave me a hint of option interplay that I love in 1E and in Starfinder in that Koji’s Foxfire feat counts as an unarmed strike, so I can unleash a flurry of electric blasts. Then again, I also got pretty frustrated with the kitsune rules when I realized just how bad using Change Shape to transform into a fox debuffs me, so there’s that too. That’s another thing I’m not crazy about with PF2—as a designer for PF1, I was close enough to the meta that I can look at specific design decisions in PF2 and immediately see them as heavy-handed attempts to cut out popular PF1 rules exploits, like how Pest Form basically exists as-is to ensure that the songbird playstyle from PF1 never happens again (this is why turning into a fox is objectively bad in PF2). Maybe I’m jaded, but I see the majority of feats not really syncing together well without GameMastery Guide rules like free archetype being put in place and countless examples of overreactions to PF1, and it kinda kills my mood on PF2. I don’t hate the game, but I don’t really get pumped to play it. I’m hoping that Dustin Knight can change my mind on that, however, as he’s invited me to play in a firefighting homebrew game this fall after Secrets of Magic is released, which I plan to accept. I haven’t decided 100% on a character yet, but right now I’m leaning towards a fire-based spellcaster of some kind so I can literally fight fire with fire by using controlled burns to destroy nearby structures that would fuel the fires we’re fighting. I hope to report more on this later, as both Guns and Gears and Secrets of Magic definitely look like they’ll be upping the ante for PF2 in terms of power and complexity, and as many others have said there’s a serious power creep in the ancestry options of the new Lost Omens: Mwangi Expanse book, so I’m hoping this means that Paizo’s heard feedback that their player options are kinda underwhelming in many places and is iterating and improving upon that. It’s tough to make changes to a pen and paper game—can’t issue hot fixes like video game developers do, after all—but I have faith that Paizo will bring Pathfinder to a point where it’s balanced but still feels fun to play. For me, it’s just not there yet.

Compare, Contrast, and Conclude

So, now that I’ve told you about each of these games, what are my thoughts about the set? Glad you asked!

• Starfinder’s my favorite of them. I feel it’s the simplest game with the most meaningful choices. However, I’m super biased here because more than anything else I love the sci-fi future setting of Starfinder. It’s such a breath of fresh air compared to the trope-ridden minefield of fantasy settings, even considering how much I like Pathfinder’s setting. (And honestly, I think most of D&D’s settings are boring because they haven’t really grown them all that much since 3.5 D&D.)
• I don’t think PF2’s 3-action economy is really as revolutionary as the game makes it out to be, if only because the game balances the power of an action so heavily. Like, my 5E sorcerer, Soup, basically has three actions. I can move, I can do whatever I want with my action. That is, at its core, the same as a spellcaster in PF2. Like sure, in PF2 if I wanted to do anything other than cast a spell I could do one more thing and PF2 certainly makes it easier to move more than D&D 5E, but when you compare move and cast a spell in PF2 to move and cast a spell in 5E, turns basically look the same. Except in 5E, my sorcerer can spend his sorcery points to cast a second spell as a bonus action using Quicken Spell, so 5E kinda wins out there. 5E is ABSOLUTELY kinder to spellcasters, even at early levels. Moreover, my rogue basically has four actions compared to the PF2 rogue. Snarl can use his movement, he has a standard action, and Cunning Action lets him take a bonus action from among Dash, Hide, or Disengage. If I attack, my soulknife special ability lets me make two attacks with my soul blades as if I was two-weapon fighting. In short, I don’t think PF2 actually gives you more actions than 5E, I think how you spend those actions are freer than 5E. But in many cases, your actions per round look the same between games, especially if you’re a spellcaster.
• There are a lot of rules that 5E just drops and nobody really misses them. Like, sometimes someone stops and says, “What do I have to do to draw a weapon? and no one’s really sure because the game kinda doesn’t have rules for it, but it’s also very freeing when some of the nitty gritty rules are just dropped in favor of what’s cool in the moment. In every other game on this list, I’ve had players who’ve told me that they walk around, weapons drawn and out, because it’s so harmful for weapon-based characters to have to use their first round getting weapons out. 5E is kinda like, “Nah, don’t worry about it.” I think that being as vague as 5E often is on the nitty gritty isn’t great, but I also think that sometimes 5E does a good job of showing us what rules need to go away because they serve no narrative purpose other than to make fights take a little bit longer.
• When I play 5E, I really miss how the -Finder games have actual rewards that you want to spend money on. Like we earn all this gold in 5E and no one is really sure what to do with it other than buy healing potions and the like. I think Starfinder’s economy and how it affects player power is a little much, but 5E is too little. Of all the games, I think PF2 probably has the best balance here, if only because the game has rules in place that limits the number of powerful items you can benefit from at a time, which means that you can feel better about buying a Malibu Beach Dreamhouse or whatever you want instead. You absolutely cannot do that in Starfinder, which is a problem because the vast majority of your money going to gear is in direct conflict with how we know a relatively modern capitalist society works. Starfinder REALLY needs real estate and housing rules, and honestly needs them more than it needed starships in my opinion.
• Still don’t want to GM PF1. It’s a blast to play if you’re playing with a GM who can roll with endgame punches, but that ain’t me. And the amount of changes you’d need to make to make it work is insane.
• Starfinder has the best monster creation rules, hands down. Monster creation kinda doesn’t exist in 5E; most GMs I see just reflavor Monster Manuel baddies. PF1 is very obtuse with a ton of secrets that you really only learn by studying Adam Daigle podcasts from PaizoCon, and PF2 is a little better but not much. PF2’s rules are like someone looked at Starfinder’s and said, “Nah, that’s too rigid. LOOSEY GOOSEY BABY!” But honestly? Monsters survive for like one fight. Let them be rigid and menu-oriented because they’re gonna die fast. I think speed is more important than expression when it comes to GMs making monsters, and you can literally sit down and play a Starfinder monster off of an array table in the back of Alien Archive 1. That’s a win in my opinion.
• All four games are excellent at capturing the imagination and fantasy of a tabletop RPG world. I love playing with my friends in all four games; I’ve had hilarious and awe-inspiring RP moments in each of them, from when Asai accidentally got drunk and reverted from his human form to his kitsune form for the first time in Fly Free or Paizo, or when Evelynn had to flee from Leon’s little sister in a Rogue One style flight from Darth Vadar in Teenaged Wasteland, or Hanjae and Schnicktug’s absolute domination of a small-scale thieves guild in Way of the Wicked, or Koji’s constant shouting of his special attacks in Troubles in Otari. I’ve had legit fun in every one of these games and all four are great experiences in my opinion. Of course, as a human being with a limited amount of time on this Earth, I have to choose how to spend my time and overwhelmingly that time is with Starfinder.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed my little retrospection! Do you play two or games from this list? I’d love to hear what you think about them on the Know Direction Network’s Discord. Until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m signing out!

So today, I’mma give you my thoughts and opinions on the Pathfinder 2E kitsune. Maybe someday I’ll do it for Starfinder too since Starfinder also has official kitsune now (they literally both came out in the same month), but not sure! We’ll see.

What’s to Love?

When I heard kitsune were being published, I was a little bit nervous. After all, I had / have a lot invested in kitsune both as a player and as a game designer, so I was pretty anxious to see what Paizo was going to do with them in the new edition of their game. When the Ancestry Guide came out, I found that there was a lot to love! Let me name four of my favorite things in the Ancestry Guide’s kitsune entry.

Clear Shapeshifting

As many Know Direction fans know, I got to contribute to PF2’s Advanced Player’s Guide, and during that run I got to work closely with the author who wrote the tengu. Tengu as they’ve appeared in Pathfinder 1E don’t do a great job following the aesthetics of their mythological roots—in Japan, they’re basically just humans with long noses and raven wings sprouting from their backs like angels, rather than fully animal creatures. James wanted to make sure this type of tengu was represented in Pathfinder. When we swapped drafts for some good, old-fashioned peer review I offered him some suggestions and shared with him a WIP I had been designing for what I thought a kitsune’s change shape should look like using PF2’s rules. Chief among them, I commented about the importance of noting that for player shapeshifters, the alternate form shares a few phenotypical traits with the original form and is genetically inherited, same as any other trait.

“It’s all about the tell!” I said. “Shapeshifters aren’t fun if there aren’t details for players to find that hint about their existence outside of a high Perception roll.”

Needless to say, I like how kitsune change shape is written because it uses similar language to Tengu Long-Nose Form in the Advanced Player’s Guide, and I like that because Tengu Long-Nose Form uses a lot of the ideas James and I originally brainstormed back before the Advanced Player’s Guide was so much as a digital file being shipped off to a printer. Call me vain if you must!

Kyubi Mechanic

“Kyubi” is a Japanese word that means “nine-tailed,” so when I say “kyubi mechanic” I mean the kitsune’s ancestry’s rules for gaining multiple tails. As someone who wrote every first-party means of getting Magical Tail in Pathfinder 1E after the release of the feat in the Advanced Race Guide, I am keenly aware of how much of a pain in the butt it is to gain nine tails in Pathfinder 1E, and how badly going for that goal often hurts your character’s abilities. Magical Tail is eight fights for a bunch of reality low-power spell-like abilities whose DCs don’t scale well because the highest-level spell is 4th-level, and it also causes this issue where all kitsune with nine tails are exactly the same (and not particularly powerful at that). The new mechanic is simple and elegant, allowing every kitsune to have their tails represent powers unique to them while also allowing every kitsune feat or archetype that grants spellcasting benefits that’s published to contribute to the kitsune’s advancement of magical tails. It’s a genius mechanic that makes magical tails a story progression rather than a power one, and I’m 100% here for it.

Ability Boosts

In general, I don’t like ability boosts being tied to species. I think that there’s a level of determinism when we assign Intelligence boosts to some species and Intelligence flaws to others, and ultimately PF2 and SF’s  math is SO tight that ability flaws and boosts can literally make some builds unplayable for certain species; this is why you see Starfinder and Pathfinder 1E constantly adding alternate ability score adjustments. Personally, I think that games should just get rid of species-dependent ability adjustments, but Pathfinder 1E at least does the next best thing and makes the kitsune ability boosts pretty non-obtrusive. In Pathfinder 1E, kitsune got bonuses to Charisma and Dexterity and penalties to Strength. Now me, being a defiant hooligan of a player, have made a bunch of decent-strength kitsune to go against these restrictions, but overall I’ll say that most players stuck to bards, sorcerers, rogues, and swashbucklers for kitsune because of their bonuses. Which is why PF2’s version is much better; in PF2, you get a boost to Charisma and that’s it. No Dexterity bonus, sure, but also no Strength flaw. This makes kitsune decently flexible; yeah, you’re still going to have a predisposition towards Charisma characters, but now if you want to make a brawny kitsune you can!  If we’re stuck with ancestry ability boosts, at least getting rid of the flaws helps with the determinism side of things.

Level 1 Fox Form

Honestly, the notion that you can be a Level 1 kitsune with a fox form is pretty great. While I love the lore and the implications one can do with kitsune if all of them have access to a human form, having a fox form available at Level 1 puts Pathfinder kitsune closer to mythological kitsune which I think is a good move. In 1E, I’ve heard the argument that the concept for kitsune was a phoned-in name because the ancestry had the name “kitusne” but none of the original East Asian lore. Being able to turn into foxes certainly helps bring the needs of a TTRPG player and the tales of old closer together, and I’m here for that.

Feat Flavor

The kitsune ancestry has a quite a few bangers when it comes to flavor. Star Orb is excellent, basically taking a beloved concept and making it into a little familiar rock that flies around with you all the time. Fox Fire is another incredibly flavorful feat that’s actually extremely useful. I was also super impressed by Shapechanger’s Intuition, which is essentially Stonecunning for shapeshifters, and THAT is super cool. Now remember, I love kitsune so I am super biased when I say this, but personally I think of all the ancestries in the game, no ancestry has feats that are quite as flavorful as kitsune feats, even if the Core ancestries have buckets more. Tengu’s pretty close, but it doesn’t quite reach the same pinnacle in my extremely biased opinion.

What Could Be Improved?

Now, while there’s a lot to love in the new design for PF2’s kitsune ancestry, I also think that there’s a few rough patches that, frankly, irk me. I respect if anyone doesn’t feel the same way about all of these topics—fellow Know Direction member and kitsune affectionate Dustin Knight and I have certainly had our verbal spars about some of these points—and I’m not trying to say that my vision is absolute or that the 1E design for kitsune was perfect. Anyone who’s had to try to figure out how to take eight Magical Tail feats on one character without making their character absolutely useless knows exactly what I mean. All I’m saying is that as a huge fan of kitsune in both editions, 1E and 2E, these are the places where I think the design of 2E is lacking.

Fox vs. Tailless

One of the best parts about the new kitsune system is also one of it’s biggest points of roughage. In the new system, your heritage determines whether you have a “tailless” form (ie a humanoid form) or a fox form. Now, I’m going to ignore for a moment my personal opinion that I believe that expanding kitsune to all humanoid ancestries takes away more than it adds. Instead, I want to draw attention to the fact that because every kitsune heritage specifies whether it gives you a tailless form, the rules need to have a specific caveat about what happens if you’re a kitsune with a universal heritage. Specifically, a kitsune’s change shape ability specifically notes that if your heritage doesn’t have a specific form, you have a tailless form. The problem with this is that it’s easy to come up with characters where this restriction, frankly, sucks. For example, say that you’re a kitsune whose father was a vulpinal agathion. Pretty appropriate, and because your father is literally a magical fox celestial, you should have a fox form, right? Wrong. You have to have a tailed form. What about if you’re a beastkin? You have ties to wild animals and places? Surely you have a fox form, right? Nah. This is an easy thing for a GM to hand-waive, but it should have never needed to be hand-waived in the first place.

And while I’m going on about fox form, let me talk about Pest Form, the spell that your fox form shapechanging works off of. I do NOT like this. Not at all. Because if we’re being honest, pest form is written like it wants to punish players who abused the mouser swashbuckler [1] in PF1. “Oh man, players were transforming into neigh-unhittable Tiny creatures? Tiny creatures shouldn’t be able to fight well! Better give players who use this new pest form spell weakness 5 to all damage. Yeah, that’ll teach ’em! Oh, and let’s lower their Speed to 10 feet! Who cares that cats and other Tiny animals can easily outrun humans.” And, like Pathfinder 2E’s rules SUPPORT that. The red fox in Bestiary 3 has a Speed of 35 feet! I am not sure if this is a problem with pest form being generic / designed to make sure that the songbird build never happens again, or whether this is a problem with the kitsune’s fox form, but why have this alternate form at all if you’re just going to punish people for using it? This could literally have been fixed if the kitsune’s rules said you get a +10-foot status bonus to Speed. but keep everything else; that way the weakness would have offset a benefit. But no, you shapeshift into an animal that is literally worse than the thing you’re pretending to be in every manner. (And do not DARE try to sell me on an ancestry feat that removes unfair penalties; that will only fuel my wrath.)

Chompers

In Pathfinder 1E, every kitsune had a natural weapon. The fact that this isn’t true in PF2 isn’t necessarily a problem; in fact, in a few Everybody Games products, I write a few different alternate traits to swap out the natural weapon for other features incase you didn’t want to be a bitey boi (or gurl). However, PF2 has this problem when it comes to the bite natural weapons—now called jaws. That problem is that only one specific heritage gives access to a bite natural weapon. Now, I get it. The author didn’t want to have two natural weapon feats; Retractable Claws exists now and honestly, I will ALWAYS like the aesthetics of retractable claws more than chompers when it comes to natural weapon fighting. That being said, it doesn’t sit right with me that the rules basically imply that every PF1 kitsune by default belonged to this same earthen child kitsune heritage. Why? Because in PF1, every kitsune had an alternate human form, and because the jaws natural weapon is explicitly tied to a kitsune form with a jaws natural weapon, rebuilding kitsune characters from PF1 to PF2 is made more difficult if you’re looking for a point-by-point translation. [2] This could have been made easier simply by making the Retractable Claws feat into a choice between claws and jaws, maybe with the option of choosing the feat twice to get both if you wanted them.

Shifting Faces

Shifting Faces is basically the PF2 version of Realistic Likeness, and it’s one of those abilities that really got done dirty by PF2. In PF1, Realistic Likeness let you transform into anyone you’ve seen before, creating a perfect disguise. Real talk—the PF1 feat is poorly worded; for example, many people think it lets you transform into anyone when the flavor and rules text implies it’s just a modification on your base form, meaning you can turn into humans only. Furthermore, the bonus it grants is insanely high; I have a kitsune in 1E that doesn’t have much invested into Disguise, but with the meager skill ranks I do have basically no one can catch me when I’m using Realistic Likeness. Again, I do not think the PF1 Realistic Likeness feat is perfect, nor do I think it shouldn’t be changed.

But MAN is Shifting Faces worse in the most important ways, to the extent that I personally feat it hurts the narrative potential of the kitsune ancestry. Mostly, it’s the 1 hour per day limitation. Like, for real. If you could divide the time up between multiple uses, it might be useful. If you could use it whenever you wanted, it would DEFINITELY be useful. If you could use it as written initially and its duration improved based on your Deception TEML, it would be fare and useful. But the fact remains is that you get one transformation for 1 hour every day, and that doesn’t feel true to the high concept of the kitsune. Especially not when all you’re getting is a small +4 bonus and everyone’s guaranteed to be pretty good at Perception by default.

Like I mentioned, Dustin and I disagree heavily on this. He thinks that the limitation fosters roleplaying and places the power level of the ancestry feat in check. I feel that this actually hurts the kitsune thematically, because amazing shapechanging is just a thing that kitsune can do in real mythology. Pathfinder 2E is a game that encourages GMs and monster designers to make creatures with the custom abilities needed to tell the story that the GM wants to tell, but in my opinion this practice feels super unfair and unfun as a player when you see the GM designing exceptions to player rules that have high amounts of friction like this one. Instead of feeling like, “Oh, this NPC is special and cool look how awesome it is that they have this ability,” to a player it feels like, “Oh the GM recognizes that you can’t really do the cool thing you should be able to do with this ability and they’re breaking the rules to make this thing usable.” And when it comes to games, whether or not these feelings are TRUE doesn’t matter if they’re invoked by the design. Unfortunately, if you make your players feel like you’re fudging things and that ruins their immersion, then you’re fudging things and have ruined their immersion.

More Cultural Influences

One of the most interesting things about foxes is that they’re one of a handful of wild animals that have essentially followed humanity wherever we went across the globe. Not because they wanted to, persay, but because they’re opportunistic and we were probably all going in the same direction anyway. As a result, every continent on Earth sans Australia and Antarctica have foxes, and every culture on those continents where foxes live have fox myths that embellish the same vulpine traits of intelligence and guile. Mostly; stories of br’er fox are very much exceptions to this rule and are the result of Black American traditions in the South. Regardless, the point stands that when you’re talking vulpine humanoids, you have a plethora of real-world cultures to draw from. It’s common knowledge that China, Japan, and Korea all have fox mythology that have influenced one another for over a thousand years, but they’re hardly the only ones. The Inuit have stores of foxes with magical powers tied to the Northern Lights; Aesop told a ton of stories about anthropomorphized foxes in his fables, and in Greek mythology, the Teumessian fox was blessed by the gods to be uncatchable. In Europe, there’s an entire literary cycle featuring a fox protagonist called Reynard the Fox. The amount of references to foxes in First Nations stories is arguably more vast than than of Japanese and Chinese folklore combined.

But despite all of that, and despite how well researched kitsune most certainly are, Pathfinder 2E’s kitsune are overwhelmingly Japanese in their depiction and I haven’t decided whether or not I think that’s a problem. On one hand, I think that the kitsune are well-researched in their Japanese roots and do a good job of bringing very wonderful parts of Japanese culture to Pathfinder’s primarily English-speaking, Western audience. On the other hand, there are references throughout the Ancestry Guide and Paizo’s website that imply that the Chinese word for what Japanese stores call kitsune—Huli jing—is also an old Tian word for kitsune, and that kinda has problems. Chinese and Korean kitsune folktales aren’t the same as Japanese kitsune folktales[3], but at least in the case of Huli jing, the Pathfinder rules kinda say they are without really adding many Chinese influences. And that’s a shame; fox mythology across the world is super cool, and it would be awesome to see representations of different real-world cultures in the kitsune ancestry. My biggest fear, personally, is that kitsune will become this stand-in for Japan and Japanese culture rather than their own thing. Even if kitsune are treated well in the Pathfinder world compared to, say, orcs and how Tolkien’s original depiction of orcs very much codes them as Eastern and then others them, I think keeping kitsune too close to a real world culture’s mythology and spirituality is a poor move long term.

In Conclusion,

Overall, I think PF2’s take on kitsune is great. There’s a lot to love that really opens up the design space that the species inhabits. That being said, there’s a fair bit of stuff that I also wish was done differently. I don’t think that the stuff that’s bad is necessarily SO bad that it’ll stop me from playing kitsune, but I’m going to roll my eyes every time a kitsune heritage is published that tells me what type of form I have to have, or that makes me spend a feat for an hour of shapechanging. Maybe someday we’ll see improvements on these ideas, but probably not. Not unless there’s a big errata to the Ancestry Guide, and even then I’m skeptical. But hey, you never know, right?

Thanks for reading! I’m Alex Augunas, the Everyman gamer, and thanks for listing to my Gibbering Mouth. Take it easy, everyone!

[1] The mouser songbird was a nasty PF1 build that involved taking a single level in the mouser swashbuckler archetype and either being a kitsune with Fox Form or having a magic item that basically turned you into a Tiny songbird. The mouser archetype had this really powerful debuff it could put on enemies whose space it shared, but most characters would need to trigger a relatively difficult condition in order to share the space of an enemy of their size (Medium or Small). A Tiny creature can, however, just walk into a Small or Medium creature’s space because its space is only 2-1/2 feet, so basically you’d have this insane death build where the mouser would become Tiny and occupy an enemy’s space without much difficulty and debuff the heck out of that person. The build often involved sneak attacking and unchained roguing via debilitating injury in order to make sure the enemy couldn’t easily escape your Tiny death trap. It was widely considered a build that was not easy for a GM to deal with that trivialized encounters.

[2] This, in general, is something that annoys me about heritages in Pathfinder 2E. In general, every heritage seems to need to give a special ability that each race can only reasonably get from that heritage, with a few notable exceptions. Why? To me, part of the swap to ancestry over race was to remove the determinism. But in this case, only kitsune who belong to the earthen child heritage can learn to bite people? Why? The way that kitsune heritages are name, it’s implied that kitsune who live in cold places (aka “Frozen Wind kitsune”) can’t learn to bite people? Ever? Frozen Winds is especially problematic since, as far as I know, it’s the only heritage in the game that specifies, “Your ancestors came from place X,” where X is the Crown of the World in this case. Overall, I don’t like how jaws attacks are limited to the earthen wilds kitsune, but I think my distaste for it stems from the overall implications of the heritage system.

[3]  In China, the most famous huli jing is Daji, a mythological figure that Pathfinder’s Iconic Witch is actually named for. In Chinese mythology, Daji is actually an extremely cruel fox spirit who possesses King Zhou Din’s wife and helps him devise a number of cruelties that he inflicts upon the people of China, namely various kinds of tortures for those who disobeyed the king. In Korea, the original gumiho myth largely resembles those told in Japan up until around halfway through the 17th century, when stories about gumiho transforming into beautiful women and luring good Korean boys to their deaths so they could eat their livers became popular. There’s a lot of mythological speculation that this shift in mythology happened because in 1675, Japan occupied Korea and Japanese reverence for foxes was well-known by Koreans, so many scholars believe the story was something of an allegory to worn young Korean children not to trust their Japanese occupiers.

 You load your holovid set, scanning Yousphere for something, anything to pass the time. Suddenly your scrolling stops on a familiar blue-and-yellow starburst featuring a kitsune man with dark, brown fur and narrow eyes standing alongside the show’s host, a female ysoki with a salt-and-pepper fur and flashy azure and gold clothing. The show’s title—Warpweave Theory, Or How You’re Literally Expanding Reality By Noticing It—is intriguing enough. You’ve heard of Interrobang!, of course. It’s one of the most popular shows on the Radiant Imperium’s infospheres, hosted by a spunky ysoki named Selliq. You glance at the door to the Reclamation office that you’re waiting to enter for an important appointment. Still nothing. Well, no harm in queing up a video or two while you wait, right?

You press the play button and settle in for the next 15 minutes.

A blue-and-yellow starburst explodes onto the screen with a magical sound effect as the series’ theme music begins to play, a bit of oldie photon that’s catchy and evocative of cosmic mysteries and unspoken truths. After about a minute, as the music reaches its crescendo, the show’s title appears across the starburst in yellow.

Interrobang!

Featuring Selliq the Seeker and her faithful companion, Lefty!

With special guest, Head Sage Takashi Tomoshiba.

Today’s Topic:

Warpweave Theory

After the final words appear on-screen, the music hits a deep bass note as the black screen and its brightly lettered words dissolve into a camera set that resembles an old warehouse, with a large, square-shaped stage beneath several high-powered UV lights. In the background, the walls of the chamber are illuminated purple with holographic stars. Standing on the stage is a ysoki woman, Interrobang!’s host. She waves curtly as she begins to speak.

“Welcome to another episode of Interrobang!, where we delve the mysterious myths of the multiverse and more! I’m Selliq, and this is my assistant, Lefty.” Selliq gestures to her left and a hover drone descends from outside the camera frame, its central body a blank holopad screen. As the drone enters the shot, an emoji appears on its facial display.

“:-)“

“Today, equal parts magical mysteries and quantum quandaries! We’re looking at Warpweave Theory, the magic that moves the multiverse.” As Selliq speaks, definitions write themselves in holo-chalk on a blackboard conveniently placed behind her.

“Warpweave Theory is essentially the idea that an infinite number of worlds exist. Picture, if you will, an ooze.” As Selliq tells her audience to picture an ooze, a small cart rolls in front of her from off-screen with a small ball of over-the-counter slime on it and a knife. Selliq picks up the knife nonchalantly as she stops the cart.

“This ooze represents our reality, and this knife represents internal actions taken by entities within that reality. The ooze hobbles along, growing and expanding at an expected rate as it enjoys its theoretical life when suddenly, a person living inside that reality makes a choice! Maybe they finally decide to have tacos for dinner instead of pizza, or maybe they decide to date the hunky jock from high school instead of the sensitive scientist they met in biochem 101. In any case, the choice is made, the die cast….” Selliq slices the ooze in half with her knife for effect.

“The ooze is split. The reason is simple—for every choice we make, a reality exists where that choice was not made. The science goes back to Azanian physicist, Ervellan Shrodemaven, and his famous and and always culturally significant thought experience, Shrodemaven’s Cat.” An illustrative portrait of Ervellan Shrodemaven appears on the blackboard as well as a square with a detailed drawing of a cat inside of it. Despite being a drawing, the cat is animated, bobbing its tail back and forth and meowing.

“In Shrodemaven’s Cat, Shrodemaven posited that if you place a cat inside a box and filled that box with poison, at a quantum level that cat is both simultaneously alive and dead until the box is opened and the cat inside observed. In observing the cat, we essentially split reality in twain. We create one reality where the cat is dead and one reality were the cat is alive and move into the reality that corresponds to the outcome that we observed. Both realities exists at the same point in space-time but at different molecular wavelengths. One becomes an alternate reality to the reality we experience.” As Selliq explains the most basic concepts of quantum physics, small drawings appear on the blackboard in tandem to her statements, such as a second box appearing with a dead cat, one of the box’s opening, and a drawing of multiple planet Tors overlaying upon themselves to represent the concept of two planets existing in the same space in different realities.

“:mystic_ball: ”

“This, of course, is a gross oversimplification of quantum physics, but understanding the basics is necessary to understand warpweaving. To help me explain—and maybe cast a spell or two while he’s here—I’ve invited longtime friend of the show and survivor of several episodes, Takashi Tomoshiba, to Interrobang!.” The camera pans to the right as Selliq invites her guest on-stage, zooming out slightly to accommodate for the difference in height between the plucky ysoki and her kitsune guest. Takashi stands just shy of twice Selliq’s height and is garbed in resplendent gold and crimson robes, the colors of the Radiant Imperium, with brown fur giving way to white on his lower jaw, neck, and torso. Most impressively, however, are Takashi’s nine elegant tails, which float in place behind him as he moves as though he were in zero gravity.

“Thank you for having on your show again, Selliq.” Takashi bows politely. As he does, a banner with his name and title—High Sage of the Arcana Lavos—frames him within the shot.

“Thank YOU for gracing us with your overwhelming expertise!” Selliq giggles. “Today’s topic is the Warpweave and its mystical implications. What can you share with us today, Tomoshiba-sama?”

“Quite a lot, actually, though probably not enough to make witchwarpers out of most of your audience.” Takashi grins as he steps in front of Selliq’s blackboard, several of his tails picking up pieces of chalk and writing their own notes as Takashi speaks rather than rely on Interrobang!’s animations.

“Everything you’ve said about quantum theory—and by association, Warpweave Theory—is correct, Selliq, but ultimately too small in scope. You see, current quantum theorists believe that any event, when observed, creates alternate universes. For example, a leaf falls from a tree and you observe its descent. In that instant, an infinite number of alternate universes are created for every possible path that leaf takes from the branch it fell from all the way down to the spot of ground it landed on. As a result, there are an infinite number of realities that are quite similar to our own. However, small variations exist, and as multiple variations occur within a single possibility, that reality moves further and further from what you might call the “sacred deviation” of reality, or the hypothetical most real reality. The “prime reality,” if you would. For instance, let’s say the most real reality is the one where this little life falls right at the base of its tree. Over countless deviations, one reality at a time, one version of this reality—one possibility, if you would—has our life landing several yards away onto the windshield of a speeding hover truck. And suddenly, an infinite number of additional alternate realities are born based on how the truck’s driver reacts to the leaf’s sudden presence. If he crashes, an infinite number more regarding the size of the crash, who’s involved, whether people live our die. Every event, no matter how insignificant, creates, an infinite number of possibilities destined to spiral away from our own observed outcomes.” As he speaks, Takashi’s tails draw a jumbled mess of hypothetical solution that form a spiraling pattern with his so-called “prime reality” at its center.

“Fascinating!” Selliq pips. Takashi nods in response.

“Quite! Many scientists even believe that observation can retroactively create alternate universes. In Heckruta’s Dinosaurs, Rograw Heckruta posited the idea that Toran dinosaurs were simultaneously feathered and unfeathered until cloning technology became advanced enough that we could scan fossils to determine the truth. The moment that information was observed, we all slid into the reality where Toran dinosaurs are fathered while alternate realities where they did not possess feathered came into existence.”

“:dinosaur_raptor: :quill: ❗ ”

“What Lefty said! You mean that scientists accidentally created alternate realities just by determining whether or not Toran dinosaurs have feathers?”

“Yes.” Takashi nods. “An infinite number of alternate realities, in fact.”

“Does that mean that we accidentally create alternate realities whenever we determine something we observe isn’t true?” Again, Takashi nods his head in response.

“That is a implication, but to put it simply, yes.”

“:gasp: :scream:” Takashi nods as he glances at the drone’s emotes, continuing his lecture.

“This property of reality is the essence of how Warpweaving, or dimensional magic, works. A spellcaster makes an observation about their reality and, in making that observation, creates an alternate reality that their magic either emulates or outright steals from. In general, the more complicated the deviations from our reality, the more difficult the spell is to cast.”

“This is FASCINATING, Head Sage!” The ysoki beams, barely about to contain her excitement. “But can we … perhaps … have a practical lecture? With some spellcasting? Maybe?” Selliq clearly struggles to contain her excitement, causing Takashi to grin mischievously.

“Certainly.

Interrobang!

Cast

Selliq Mysterium

Lefty

Special Guest

Takashi Tomoshiba

Also Featuring…

Selliq Mansterium . . . . . . . . . . Selliq Mysterium

Human Selliq . . . . . . . . . . Selliq Mysterium

Tengu Selliq . . . . . . . . . . Selliq Mysterium

Vesk Selliq . . . . . . . . . . Selliq Mysterium

Baby Boy Selliq . . . . . . . . . . Selliq Mysterium

Baby Kitsune Selliq . . . . . . . . . Selliq Mysterium

Tomoshiba-chan . . . . . . . . . Selliq Mysterium

No existences were altered without consent during the filming of this programming.

Interrobang!, Selliq, and Takashi Tomoshiba belong to Everybody Games and are used with permission. You can read more about Selliq and Interrobang! in Pop Culture Catalog: Infosphere Shows.

I couldn’t really figure out why that left a bad taste in my mouth at first, but it did. I then remembered the legendary segment Perram did about Organized Play’s Achievement Point unlock system and thought to myself, “Huh, is this why I didn’t like this?” So I decided to sit down and figure out for myself, “Hey, is the Achievement Point reward for species in Starfinder too much?” So let’s take a look.

Unlocking an Ancestry on a Checkbox Chronicle

Before I really start looking into the Achievement Point’s species unlock system, I decided that I should take the time to analyze what was likely the beta test for this system: the old Checkbox Race Boon that got used on occasion in PF1 for the Regional Support Program’s skinwalker, aasimar, and tiefling boons, and, most notably, in the Skitter Shot Free RPG Day chronicle sheet of 2018. Skitter Shot features four skittermander PCs who explored a starship that mysterious went dark. Skitter Shot is also notable because of its chronicle sheet; when you complete Skitter Shot, you receive a special boon called Nufriend Skittermander that allows you to create a new skittermander character. The chronicle possesses 24 boxes arranged into three rows as well as specialized rules for how you can check off those boxes. When all the boxes are checked, you unlock the ability to either create a new skittermander character or upgrade an existing skittermander character you have (such as from a promotional boon) with an additional ability bonus. Very helpful indeed.

The rules for checking off the Skitter Shot chronicle’s boxes are pretty straightforward; each time you play or GM a Starfinder adventure and receive credit on a character, you mark one or more of the boxes on the chronicle sheet. The acquisition rate for the chronicle looks like this:

• Mark 1 Box for playing 4 hours of quests, a scenario, or a 16-Page Module other than Skitter Shot.
• Mark 2 Boxes for playing an Adventure Path Volume.
• Mark 2 boxes for GMing 4 hours of quests, a scenario, or a 16-Page Module other than Skitter Shot.
• Mark 3 boxes for GMing an entire Adventure Path volume.
• Mark 3 boxes for GMing an event that receive Paizo Event Support or a Regional Support Package.

By default, this means that if you want to unlock a skittermander simply by playing a bunch of games, it’ll take 24 scenarios of play to unlock a skittermander, or 12 scenarios if you’re willing to GM. This is twice as efficient if you play at an event that receives Paizo Event Support or 1-1/2 times as efficient if you GM at such an event, meaning if you manage to play 12 scenarios in a single week at GenCon you’ll have your skittermander done, while it’ll take 8 scenarios at GenCon (aka being a Tier 1 GM) to do the same as a GM.

Now, let’s take these rates and contrast them with the current Achievement Points system.

Buying an Ancestry with Achievement Points

Achievement Points as a system are designed to do a few things. For one, they’re supposed to help OP go paperless for reporting, which is nice. Additionally, they’re designed to streamline convention access to content, as prior to the Achievement Point system Organized Play put out tons of content every year that only a small percentage of their players would get to access at a given time. After all, not everyone can fly out to GenCon or to Origins or to PAXEast, so not only was the old system of, “Go to a Con and get rewards for GMing a ton,” not really fair to people without financial means to go to those venues, it also disproportionately rewarded GMs by essentially keeping a distressingly large body of content reserved for the most affluent GMs who were willing to run an obscene number of games at conventions. Speaking as someone who did the Tier 1 GM Con a few times, it’s not a great system.

Achievement Points is, at its core, a checkbox system. You play the game, you get digital points. You spend digital points on boons. Easy, right?

Copied from https://org-play-2e-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/02.3_rewards.html on April 30th, 2021.

At a glance, this chart looks VERY similar to the checkbox system that I summarized from my Skitter Shot boon, but without the fractions. What I mean by this is that in the Skitter Shot boon, you specifically had to play 4 hours of quests to check 1 box as a player (or 2 boxes as a GM). In this system, imagine all the checkbox numbers multiplied by 4, so you get:

• Mark 1/4 of a Box for playing a 1-hour quest. (This is standard.)
• Mark 1/2 of a Box for GMing a 1-hour quest.  (This is standard.)
• Mark 1 Box for playing a 4-hour scenario. (This is standard.)
• Mark 8 Boxes for GMing a 4-hour scenario. (This is standard.)
• Mark 12 Boxes for playing an Adventure Path. (This is generous; under the checkbox system, playing an AP volume is only worth 2 boxes or 8 AcP.)
• Mark 24 Boxes for GMing an Adventure Path. (This is also generous; under the checkbox system, GMing an AP volume is only worth 3 boxes or 12 AcP.)

As a result, we can see that this system is basically the same unless you’re playing or GMing an adventure path, which is worth significantly more AcP then it would have been under the old system. Additionally, the new Achievement Points system gives a ton of bonus points if you play at a Sanctioned Event (+25%) or a Premiere Event (+50%). In general, if you’re playing at your local Organized Play lodge, you’ll be almost constantly receiving that bonus +25% Achievement Points, while the bonus 50% Achievement Points is received for major conventions like GenCon. Additionally, at 12 Achievement Points per scenario GMed, a Tier-1 GenCon GM (aka a person who runs a full schedule of 8 games across 4 days) earns a total of 96 Achievement Points for GenCon, which is enough to earn a single 80 AcP ancestry boon.

Problems with Achievement Points

In sales, a whale is a prospect that is many times larger than what is typical or average. You’ll often hear the term in mobile gaming and Trading Card Gaming, where the term refers to players who invest an ordinately large amount of money into the product compared to the average player. For example, if you’re playing a game like Guild Wars 2 and dumping thousands of dollars into purchasing in-game currency to expedite a gameplay goal you have, you’re a whale. Sales associates will often make business decisions around the spending habits of their whale players; a great example is Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft.

For example, let’s say that the WoW Marketing Team has data that suggests that on average 10% of their 5 million subscribers (this is the number of subscribers WoW during what has been regarded as its worst expansion pack, Warlords of Draenor) are willing to spend $25 USD to purchase a fancy-looking mount from the in-game shop. They pick an artist and have that artist spend half a year doing nothing but design that mount (that is almost definitely not what happens, but for the purpose of this example it’s easier than trying to predict the precise man hours that went into something like a mount). As of April 30th, 2021, glassdoor.com (a decently reliable site) stated that a Blizzard artist makes about $90,000 USD a year on average, so let’s say that Blizzard paid this one artist half a year of labor, or $45,000, to make this mount. 10% of 5 million is $500,000, so by making that mount Blizzard made five times as much money as they invested. This is, essentially, how whaling works in sales. You don’t need EVERYONE in your market to buy a product, just enough of the high-end spenders that your product becomes valuable.

So, what does this have to do with Organized Play?

In essence, the Achievement Point system is priced around Organized Play’s whales. I’m talking, of course, about people who are willing to fly out and spend hundreds of dollars to attend a convention. Allow me to demonstrate:

Above you’ll see three Achievement Point price examples that I snipped from My Organized Play on April 30th, 2021. Please note that the Catfolk Ancestry costs 120 AcP, the Kitsune Ancestry costs 80, and giving your character a Geniekin Heritage costs 80. Now, like we mentioned earlier, when comparing the Checkbox Chronicles to Achievement Points, one Checkbox is worth about 4 Achievement Points when you’re trying to earn them because the system effectively wants a 1-hour Scenario to be worth 1 point, with every hour spent playing worth 1 Achievement Point. If we translate these Achievement Point costs from Points to Checkboxes, you’d have something like this:

• Catfolk: 30 Boxes
• Geniekin: 20 Boxes
• Kitsune: 20 Boxes

In short, while things like Kitsune and Geniekin remain pretty true to the cost of a skittermander boon from Skitter Shot, catfolk (and similar ancestries) arbitrarily cost 50% more. So much more, in fact, that GMing a full Tier 1 roster at GenCon will award you with one 80 AcP boon and one only with a handful of AcP to spare. For this reason, to me this system looks overwhelmingly designed with GenCon in mind, allowing the creators to be like, “Yeah if you’re a Tier 1 GM you’ll walk away with 96 Achievement Points, which will get you a moderately priced ancestry boon. Enjoy! Meanwhile everyone else is stuck waiting, what? 80 hours of play to unlock a new ancestry? That’s a REALLY long time to be able to get to play my character ….

Conclusions and Opinions

When you compare Checkboxes to Achievement Points, where Organized Play got their values becomes pretty apparent. This is not a new system; this is the same system that Paizo has been using since 2017 / 2018. Unfortunately, the question we should be asking is, “Is this the system that Paizo needs to attract new players to Organized Play?”

In my opinion, even if this system requires the same amount of time to unlock a playable species, the biggest problem with this system is that it makes it so the default ancestries available to new players are basically ones that  are strongly associated with 5th Edition D&D. The only thing Pathfinder Society’s got Core that’s really unique to Pathfinder are kobolds and goblins, and both of those species are technically available for play in 5E. Players have to play 20 games in order to pick an ancestry that belongs to Pathfinder’s world, an ancestry that is uniquely Pathfinder. Paizo might have unique takes on gnomes, goblins, and kobolds but those are still just takes on an idea that belongs to D&D. We live in a world where Pathfinder is not the dominate Tabletop RPG, and I feel Pathfinder Society should be working to place uniquely Paizo content in front of its players. Limiting player access to Paizo content is simply making it easier to compare Pathfinder to 5E, which is currently a skill check with disadvantage for Paizo.

Perhaps more existentially, however, is the fact that ancestry is really the only aspect of the ABCs of Pathfinder 2E character building that has any real amount of access associated with it. The majority of classes have always available access. The vast majority of backgrounds have always available access. But of Pathfinder 2E’s 22 ancestries, only seven of them are always available. Less than 30%, and for what? To make ancestry participation across the entirety of Organized Play better represent the world of Golarion? Why? What does that metric serve beyond data in a spreadsheet, and how does that restriction enhance player enjoyment? To me, this system feels like it only really exists to try and reward players for playing a lot and GMs for GMing even more, but how many people have been dissuaded from playing PFS because they couldn’t play their favorite ancestry?

I want to end this article with a cautionary tale on survivorship bias. I could sit here and explain what that is, but the short story I’ve produced to the right does a much better job then I ever could, so I shared it here. Most hard-core PFS players I’ve talked to say that they really like the ancestry rewards, that limiting the content is good and healthy for the game as is giving unique rewards to the people who “contribute the most” to PFS. Maybe the developers haven’t heard many people like Perram or myself complain against the current implementation of ancestries, so therefore we’re wrong and everything is working fine and people like it.

I would caution against thinking like that, because in this particular case people who say they like the limitation? They might be right. They might be fun. But they also might just be the planes that survived, the planes of the people for whom ancestry access wasn’t a deal-breaker. They just might be the planes that made it home, and there could end up being a lot of planes—a lot of people interested in Pathfinder and/or Organized Play—who had their planes shot down early because a lack of favorite ancestries was a collision with which their investment in Pathfinder couldn’t survive.

I’m Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and I really just want everyone to have fun in Organized Play. And hopefully we’ll start to see more of that soon.

Addendum: A bunch of people have asked me about what I think about the new, “Earn 80 Achievement Points in Pathfinder 2E to unlock a species in Starfinder” boon. I think that it’s bad design for the only way to unlock a species in Starfinder is to play Pathfinder 2E. It’s like paying for a World of Warcraft subscription and being told the only way to get an in-game item you want is to play 80 hours of Overwatch. Those are two completely different games, and no one should need to play a game they might not want to play in order to access a reward in the game they want to play. This, to me, feels like someone wanted to add a reward with good intents for the “neat” factor but didn’t consider that not all players play both Paizo games, and that asking someone to play 80 hours of a game they might not be interested in is a great way to get a player to walk away from both of your programs.

Addendum 2: On 05/26/2021, Paizo Organized Play issued the following statement to the Know Direction Network in response to the previous addendum:

“Starfinders will gain the ability to purchase boons for Alien Character Deck species on Friday, May 29th when the Starfinder Society Achievement Point program goes live during PaizoCon Online 2021, so it will not be a case where Starfinder Society players will have to play Pathfinder Society Organized Play to unlock any Starfinder content.”

As a result, the issue wherein one would be forced to play Pathfinder Society 2E in order to unlock content for Starfinder Society will end when Starfinder Society Year 4 goes live on Friday, May 28th and we can expect an expansion on how ancestries are made available to players in Organized Play.

A Foreword Statement

Before I start getting too in-depth with my story, here’s some stuff to know:

1. Teenaged Wasteland is run using the Starfinder RPG. It’s set in the Blood Space Campaign Setting, which I publish through Everybody Games with Rogue Genius Games.
2. In Teenaged Wasteland, there’s a demigod named Tsukukitsu. He was a lowly kami whose ward was the light of the full moon that shone over a specific mountain called Mount Lumia, so he wasn’t very powerful initially. He became a demigod after he sealed a pact with Shigerata Fushimi, a kitsune who led a group of settlers that had nestled themselves in the arctic foothills of Mount Lumia. With the kami’s blessing the clan thrived, and as the clan grow Tsukukitsu grew in power, eventually elevating him into a type of demigod called a kami lord. Since then, Tsukukitsu has taken Lumian kitsune who descend from Shigerata an avatars whose souls reincarnate through their own family bloodline. Currently there are four avatar souls, and all but one of them is a PC.
3. The Vault of Moonlight is a sepulcher that houses the bodies of fallen avatars of Tsukukitsu. The players travelled to the vault because they discovered that the villain, who’s the fourth avatar soul of Tsukukitsu, apparently hid a blade that could kill oni within the vault, and since that fourth avatar soul became an oni, the players are very interested in having a weapon they could use to strike down their foe.
4. A kami loyal to Tsukukitsu claims the Vault of Moonlight as its ward, and while the kami can effortlessly travel throughout the vault and entomb fallen avatars there without much difficulty, mortals that wish to visit the sepulcher have to pass four trials of Tsukukitsu, each one representing a specific aspect of Tsukukitsu’s divine domain. Those domains are community, emotion, illusion, and youth. The Trial of Youth was a relatively straightforward, “Get to this one spot in the room and pass three consecutive skill checks while statues try to rip you off the pedestal and dunk you in the fountain of youth,” and while that’s super cool it wasn’t really something I couldn’t have done in-person. So instead, I’m going to talk the three areas I designed that REALLY needed VTT to shine.

Area 1: The Trial of Community

One of the areas where the Teenaged Wasteland players struggled in-character was working together as a group, and considering Tsukukitsu is a deity of community I knew that I needed to make this room special. So I designed a trust-fall scenario. Essentially, players would enter the chamber by the northern platform (it’s teal with white diamonds), and that platform is surrounded by a wall. As a result, the players couldn’t see into the chamber. I randomly created an order for the players to be assigned that looks like this:

1. E guides H and is guided by Y.
2. C guides R and is guided by S.
3. H guides S and is guided by E.
4. L guides Y and is guided by R.
5. R guides L and is guided by C.
6. S guides H and is guided by Y.
7. Y guides E and is guided by L.

Then once I had an order, I asked for volunteers that wanted to do the challenge first. When a player agreed, I deleted their “normal” token and replaced it with a “blind” token that had its vision values limited to 1. As a result, they couldn’t even see a full Square in front of them. From there, all I needed to do was explain three rules: a guided player “escaped” the maze when their space touched the square that is teal with a white diamond on the inside, guides can’t move more than 10 feet from whomever they’re guiding, but otherwise can move as though they were seeing through an arcane eye spell, and that if a “blind” character moved off of the path for any reason, they had to make a Reflex save or fall. (Falling caused the character to lose 1d3 years of age, which is kinda a lot when you’re only 16 to begin with.) Luckily only one person fell, but it was great to watch these characters have to work together to ensure their safety and the safety of others. Hooray!

Area 2: The Trial of Emotion

The trial of emotion was a TON of fun. In Foundry, I designed it so there were six kitsune busts on the wall, each fixed in one of six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. Each bust had a cool glowy effect around it in a color that corresponded to the emotion (red for anger, green for disgust, yellow for fear, pink for joy, blue for sadness, and purple for surprise. A mirror in the room worked like an ordinary mirror, but when the players looked into it they could see an emotion on each PC’s face that corresponded to one of the statues. The players figured out on their own that they had to go to the statue that matched their emotion and make that expression; when they did, I turned the lighting effects off for that statue and reduced the brightness of the room’s glow by 1/6th until all the emotions were extinguished and the door to the next chamber opened. Simple, but pretty fun!

Area 3: The Trial of Illusion

The final area, and one of the ones I’m most proud of, is the trial of illusion. At its core, the trial is very simple. I literally sat down and made a maze, then I programmed that maze for dynamic lighting. It took forever, but it basically let me shut up and let my players traverse the maze. In the dark. It was a TON of fun to watch them assign lightning effects and try to move about the maze. At one point, one of my players decided to just AFK and let the other players handle the maze. When she got back, I was like, “Nah dawg, everyone’s gotta walk themselves through the maze.” She did the walk of shame; we RPed it as the character having gotten hopelessly lost. Meanwhile, the other PCs discovered a secret spa for kami elsewhere in the maze and RPed hanging out there until he finally found his way out.

You might be wondering what the kitsune bust in the maze is for. Basically, it was placed behind a secret door to curse anyone who opened the door as a trick, but it got bored and spent the entire trial shouting at the players, begging them to open the secret door. They did, it shouted, “Great, now I get to curse ya!” and they promptly slammed the door in its face and nothing happened. Hooray?

Finally, you’ll see the small, secret passage to the center-north of the room. That was a secret door that unlocked when the players finished all four trials. However, the door didn’t just opened; it unlocked. They still had to find the door. One of the kami gave them the clue—all doors in the shrine have plain tiles that lead out from the rooms into the next chamber, so look for the place where the pattern breaks. My players then immediately went BACK into the room and tried to find the place where the secret door was hidden. Eventually one of them figured out that the perimeter of all the rooms was outlined in diamond tiles EXCEPT where the entrances to rooms where, and they used that to find out where the secret door was. Hooray, they did it!

In Conclusion,

I know this year has been really difficult for many of us gamers. We miss playing face-to-face, seeing each other’s expressions and emotions, laughing as we play together and make memories together. Virtual Tabletop certainly can’t replace the in-person experience, but I also think that there are adventures that we can do in Virtual Tabletop that are impossible (or very difficult / resource intensive) in person. I could not have built a maze and had my players navigate it in-person; mazes simply don’t work on a map because you can’t remove the bird’s eye view at the table, and while you could theoretically cover the maze strategically with paper or other items, it would be insanely difficult. If you take the time to learn your VTT’s tools, however, you can tell stories and build encounters and challenges with Virtual Tabletop that would otherwise be impossible in-person. For as long as we remain socially distant gamers, I recommend to take a look at your favorite tools and challenge yourself to build creative, innovative encounters with them.

Until next time, I’m Alexander Augunas the Everyman Gamer signing out!

Anyway, on to the article!

The “Operative” Problem

Starfinder has a ton of great pre-written adventures, but designing them can be challenging because of what I like to call, “the operative problem.” You see, Starfinder and Pathfinder 2E have this design quirk wherein both games identify a character building niche and then assign that niche to a specific class. The assigned class is henceforth decreed to be the, “Best” in that niche, and every other class that gains access to said niche isn’t allowed to come close to the golden niche-holder. This is a problem that people in the Know Direction Network discord channel talk about all the time; the most common complaint is attributed to Pathfinder 2E’s cleric class, which is given supreme domain over in-combat healing to the extent that no other character, even the life mystery oracle, comes close. It’s pretty hard to compete with over 3 bonus, max-level spell slots per day usable only for healing.

Starfinder has similar problems with niches, but not so much with healing. That’s because any character can spend a Resolve Point to heal half their total Hit Points. Having a mystic (the only spellcaster who is apparently allowed to have Hit Point healing spells by default) is nice, but it’s hardly mandatory for the healing. While I can go on about the niches of the spellcasters of Starfinder and how they ultimately detract from the flavor they try to create all day, they’re not the trope namer for the most glaring example of over niche-ification in Starfinder. That honor goes to the operative class, a class that virtually everyone I talk to has identified as being overpowered, but no one really understands why. It’s definitely not for the damage; trick attack is not the power house of rogue in Starfinder. The operative’s trick attack is more about debuffs than damage. No, the operative’s real niche problem lies in the fact that, mathematically, it is so good at every skill in the game that it completely destroys the mathematical progression for skills. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s look it over.

Skill DCs in Starfinder

When we look up Skill DCs in the Starfinder CRB, this is what the book has to say:

It is up to you, as the GM, to determine the DCs of the various skill checks the players will attempt during play. Many of the skill descriptions include guidance on typical DCs for skill checks, but there may be times when you need to come up with a DC on your own. If a skill check does not have a predetermined DC, or if a player wants to attempt a task that is not covered in a skill’s description, use the following guidelines. A challenging DC for a skill check is equal to 15 + 1-1/2 × the CR of the encounter or the PCs’ Average Party Level (APL). For an easier check, you might reduce the DC by 5, while increasing the DC by 5 makes for a more difficult check. Changing the DC by 10 or more makes for either a trivial check with little chance of failure or a prohibitively high check with little chance of success, so be cautious when adjusting skill check DCs!

Okay, so a challenging DC is 15 + 1-1/2 times the CR of the encounter or the PC’s APL. Rather than explain with words, let me go back to my roots and explain … with … MATH!

Here’s a delightful little table, and some notes about what everything is.

• APL/CR is the Average Party Level or the CR of whatever is setting the DC.
• Challenging DC is the DC For that APL or CR, based on the formula in the Core Rulebook.
• Max Ability Mod is the highest possible ability score modifier you could have at that level. It assumes you bought an 18 at 1st level, put an ability boost into that score at every possible level, and have the best possible personal upgrade for that level.
• Normal PC is the total skill bonus a PC that does not get an insight bonus to skill checks would have at that level if they had the maximum possible ability score modifier. It does not include the floater +1 bonus you can get for having a theme with a skill bonus.
• Normal Success is the chance that you succeed at the skill check. The math’s a little janky; you should round down to the nearest 5 for all of these (so at APL / CR 1, the success change is 55%, not 58%). You round down because each side of the die on a d20 is an even 5% chance, so while these calculations take in the .5 average on a d20, in my opinion that’s not practical.
• Operative is the total bonus an operative (or another PC who has a scaling +1 insight bonus) has at that level. Note that non-operatives with a similar bonus, such as mechanics or biohackers, usually have this bonus on a delay of 1-2 levels, while envoy is a whole different can of worms because their insight bonus is a random value.
• Operative Success is the chance that someone with an operative bonus progression succeeds at the challenging skill check. This number should be treated as I described in Normal Successes.
• Normal Vs. Operative is the difference between the operative’s bonus and the normal bonus.

So, looking at the numbers the thing that becomes immediately apparent is that the operative absolutely destroys in skill checks. By a lot. These numbers will probably reflect Dex-based skill checks, such as Acrobatics or Stealth, more than any other, but it’s a good note about just how impactful that scaling insight bonus is in a game that otherwise doesn’t really have skill bonuses. The difference between someone who has an operative insight bonus and those who don’t is stark, and ultimately one of the biggest problems is that Starfinder characters don’t really have a way to mitigate that. You basically have a scaling insight bonus ability, or you don’t. Skill Focus can help mitigate this at lower levels, but at higher levels the bonus is just sort of forgotten, and the Skill Synergy bonus isn’t great, only giving a +2 insight bonus to two skills.

Now, I want you to look at these numbers and imagine what they would look like with an average ability score. Or don’t, and let me show you.

So for this table, I replaced “Max Ability Mod” with “Average Ability Mod,” which assumes you started with a 14 in the ability score, boosted it at every level, and started applying a lower-rank personal upgrade to it at 7th level, after upgrading your old Rank 1 to a Rank 2. And if you compare the numbers, you start to see the issue. At Level 20, a normal PC has a 25% chance to succeed, but the operative still has a 55% chance. That’s insane! Comparisons like these are, where you compare something you’re mediocre at, are more important than comparing the highest echelons of play because this is the point where one player is mostly failing and one is mostly succeeding, rather than both succeeding but one with a little more ease. This is FRUSTRATING, and this is also going to be the case for a ton of skills.

One more thing, if you take the “Average Operative” results and compare them to the “Maximum Normal PC” results, the operative either has the same bonus, or better. That’s right, the operative’s bonuses are THE SAME OR BETTER in skills they have a mediocre ability in compared to a member of another class who “specializes” in that skill. Add the fact that operatives of 10 skill ranks per level before Intelligence in a game with 20 skills (19 if you ignore Profession), and you can start to see why people are just frustrated with the operative’s overwhelming mastery.

So, how do we fix it?

An Elegant Solution

Changing Starfinder’s math would be a pain, but what if we adjust where the math is coming from while also securing the operative’s role as, “The skills class?” There’s an easy, two-step approach to doing that; allow me to show you.

Skill Focus

You are particularly adept at a certain skill.

   Benefit: Choose a skill. You gain a +3 insight bonus to checks involving the chosen skill. The bonus improves to +4 if you have 11 or more ranks in the chosen skill, +5 if you have 15 or more ranks in the chosen skill, and +6 if you have 19 or more ranks in the chosen skill.

   Special: You can take this feat multiple times. Each time you take this feat, it applies to a new skill.

Skill Synergy

You understand how two skills work well together.

   Benefit: Choose two skills that you do not already have a theme bonus to skill checks with. These skills become class skills for you. If one or both were already class skills, you gain a +1 theme bonus to those skill checks instead.

   Special: You can take this feat multiple times. Each time you take this feat, it applies to a new skill.

Step 1 is to completely change Skill Focus and Skill Synergy so insight bonuses and theme bonuses (yes, we’ll be renaming that untyped bonus that most theme knowledge perks give to “theme bonus”; it’s easier that way) are no longer exclusive to specific classes and themes. While some might mourn the loss of exclusivity, I think that this opens up character building and makes encounter design easier. It’s a worthy trade-off.

Step 2 is to change EVERY class feature in the game that grants an insight bonus to skill checks to instead grant Skill Focus with those skills, with the sole exception of the envoy’s expertise die. This means EVERYTHING else though; bypass, scientific method, all of it. The ONLY one we’ll be changing is operative’s edge, because operative’s edge currently applies to every skill. Instead, we’ll make this tweak:

Operative’s Edge

Your diverse training as an operative grants you a +1 insight bonus to initiative checks. You also gain Skill Focus as a bonus feat three times—once with each of your specialization’s associated skills and once with any skill of your choice. At 3rd level and every 4 levels thereafter, this insight bonus increases by 1 and you gain Skill Focus as a bonus feat.

This will dramatically cut an operative’s skill coverage while also normalizing the bonus they gain. As a final tweak, we’re going to improve Jack of All Trades, an operative exploit that doesn’t work with the new system.

Jack of All Trades (Ex)

You’ve learned how to handle any situation. You can use all skills untrained and add half your operative edge class feature’s bonus to skill checks you attempt with skills in which you have at least 1 rank, or twice your operative’s edge class feature’s bonus to skill checks you attempt when using a skill in which you have no ranks.

This cleans up Jack of All Trades to work with the new rules set while also increasing its value, since it applies to basically every skill you don’t have Skill Focus with now without creating the same overwhelming “I’m better than you” effect.

Thanks for reading my article! What do you think? How do you handle skill DCs in Starfinder? Does your group like playing with operatives? Is this overboard? Let me know in the comments, or hop into the Know Direction Network’s Discord Channel and let me know in person in our #Starfinder channel!

I’m Alex Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and I’m signing out! Peace!

I should instead write my article about —why— I have absolutely zero passion about the technomancer spell list. Feel free to disagree with me as always, fam, but I’m diving into this face-first!

#1 — Damage Scaling

What are thooooooose … spells?! Seriously, I have to LEARN some of these? Blech!

When you take a look at the technomancer spell list, one thing is immediately made clear. The technomancer is supposed to be the blaster caster; the spellcaster that has tons of awesome, flashy spells that deal damage to enemies. In practice, however, this doesn’t hold true and largely this is due to how spell damage is scaled in Starfinder. If you compare the damage of a given spell to the damage of any heavy weapon, you’ll find that the Starfinder spell does about twice as much damage as a heavy weapon whose item level is equal to the minimum caster level to cast the spell. For example, a laser artillery weapon deals 1d10 fire damage, for an average 5.5 damage, while magic missile deals a maximum of 3d4+4 damage, an average of 11.5. This formula generally holds pace with Starfinder’s weapon design, but this means that spells tend to fall behind their weapon counterparts every time a new spell level is unlocked at minimum, which is sort of a major problem with the balancing metric you’re using is effectively unlimited. Do not try and lie to me and say that you, as a GM, have ever hard-core made your players track their ammunition the way you make casters track their spell slots, because you’ll get really mad when I accuse you of fibbing. Even if you are a literal axiomite and you successfully manage to police your players’ ammunition, ammo doesn’t increase in level for anything except a grenade launcher / grenade arrows, so by high levels nothing is stopping you from basically having unlimited ammunition by Level 5 or so while spellcasters are stuck with extremely limited spells per day.

Oh, and it’s also worth mentioning that the technomancer doesn’t have the highest single-target damaging spells in the game. That honor goes to the mystic’s mind thrust, which is the highest single-target damage in the game. And you might be thinking, “But Alex, it’s fine to give that power to the mystic! Technomancers are much better at Area Attack spells so it all evens out.” Except that’s NOT true. Being better at area damage in a d20 game has NEVER been better than being stronger at single target because of how the Challenge Rating system works. Lower-level enemies are easier to kill without magic, so magic is better when it can be used against big single target enemies because of how limited it is. You don’t want to explode a storm trooper because that storm trooper’s going to miss you and die. You want to explode Darth Vadar, or better yet, Senator Palpatine. But the technomancer, the master of damaging spells, isn’t good at hurling damage at bosses. They excel at wiping out low-CR enemies, and that does not feel good. But this isn’t the full extension of the technomancer’s issues. The technomancer has many, many more of them.

#2 — Number of Spells Known

The technomancer has fewer spells known than the mystic or the witchwarper. All three classes use the exact same Spells Known chart, but mystics get an extra spell at every level from their connections and witchwarpers get Infinite Worlds; while Infinite Worlds isn’t technically a spell and is kind of awful until you can cast 3rd-level spells, technomancers literally just get what the chart says they get. Which is probably for the best, if I’m honest, because truthfully….

#3 — Most Technomancer Spells are Hyperspecialized to Near Uselessness

Technomancers have like five different “junkbot” spells that each do a slightly different thing. They have like five different spells for scanning their environment, a bunch of different spells for hacking, spells like life bubble that replicate things mundane tech can already do, and plenty of other spells that simply don’t do much of anything useful. It’s a great example of one of the technomancer class’s biggest weaknesses—it’s theme governs the class so heavily that it can’t really do anything cool or fun outside of it. I think there’s a problem when everyone picks the same three or four spells (flight / haste / dimension door) because all the other spells just aren’t versatile enough to see mainstay use.

#4 — Technomancer Spells Have Planned Obsolescence

This isn’t so much a problem with technomancer spells as it is Starfinder spells as a whole. Because of how saving throw DCs scale and the fact that spells in Starfinder (unlike those in PF1) do not scale their effects at all save for some very specific examples, all technomancer spells are doomed to become obsolete after two or three spell levels. At that point, you’re better off swapping your combat spells for some of that hyperspecialized utility that you’ll never use because saving throws don’t scale, so neat spells that you got as 1st-level spells but aren’t variable level spells just disappear into the void, never to be used again. A great example of a spell that would be good at every single spell level if saving throw DC math didn’t scale it into oblivion is incompetence, which causes a target to lose its proficiency with a specific kind of weapon of your choice. A -4 penalty is always useful, but after Level 7 or so nothing will ever fail its saving throw against a 1st-level spell.

In conclusion,

Technomancer hits a ton of snags and missteps in design that the mystic just doesn’t stumble into, and the spell selection is probably it’s most glaring area. To me, the technomancer is a case study in how design can be numerically correct, but not satisfying to play. Ultimately it doesn’t feel good to essentially have your primary class feature constantly rendering itself into obsolesce; you have to constantly cycle your combat spells into the latest, greatest options while relegating old options into niche choices you might sometimes use. And honestly, I feel like the technomancer class admits that it has this problem by virtue of having a few different magic hacks that let you throw away spell slots for different bonuses. That way you can always toss your obsolescent junk for a +1 bonus to hit and an extra d6 of weapon damage or something.

I’m Alex Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and hopefully next week I can think of something a bit more positive to write about. Until next time, take care!

But one thing you will hear me say frequently is that even if we love something, that shouldn’t mean that we’re above critiquing it fairly. It’s important to be able to recognize faults in your game experience so you know how to better tailor your GMing around those problems or how to temper your expectations as a player around those limitations. For me, however, I think Starfinder is a rare gem in that there are really only 5 things that drive me crazy about Starfinder’s design. Oh, what’s that? You … you want me to go on? Well, okay, don’t pull my leg! If you insist ….

5. Environmental Protections

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. GM designs a monster with something they do to the air. Maybe it’s a toxin the players breathe in. Maybe it’s a pollen. You describe the effect in full, when suddenly your players stop you. “That shouldn’t affect me, I have environmental protections on.” As a GM you scramble and read the rules for environmental protections. It’s this massive series of paragraphs that basically makes even the most basic armor grant full immunity to a huge number of effects. And, honestly, I kinda wish it didn’t. At least, not for free anyway.

Like, I get it. Of course in a space-age game you would want armor that can ward against the environment. I get it. But couldn’t it have been an armor upgrade, so at least it came at an opportunity cost of something else? At least then you’d have the flavor of, “Did everyone activate their life support systems?” At the very least, there should be rules for breaching an armor’s environmental protections. A standard space suit has that rule, so why not armor? Fights with plants that want to infect you with their spores get a whole lot more dangerous when suddenly they’re trying to break your armor so spores can get into your space suit…

Here’s what I’d do:

• All armor would have the default item level 1 protections described in the Core Rulebook. If you wanted immunity to medium radiation, you’d need to install an item level 7 armor upgrade.
• All armor has an internal battery, and armor consumes battery charges at a rate of 4 per day, so a standard 20 charge battery would last you five days. You could upgrade how long the environmental protections last by placing a better battery into the armor. This seems pretty generous, right? Because that means low-level armor has more days. Yes, that’s true. Except the armor’s upgrades would also draw from that same battery rather than having their own. This would lead to cool scenes like in Iron Man where as a character, you have to decide whether to power your armor or your gadgets.
• Finally, an armor’s environmental protections would worsen if the armor was broken or destroyed. The environmental protections of broken armor consumes battery charges at a rate of 1d4 per hour that the environmental protections, and the armor’s defenses against effects related to breathing, pressure, and radiation cease. All environmental protections cease for a broken armor.
• Some monsters would have abilities that allow them to treat your environmental protections as though they were offline. For example, in the example of said plant, maybe it would have an ability that, while you’re being grappled, it could force its tendrils into your armor and pump your suit full of its pollen. This, admittedly, is not a humongous fix as much as it is a needed addition to Starfinder monster design.

4. Calculating Your DCs Needs to Go

I CANNOT be the only person who hates how GMs have to calculate EVERY DC on the fly. Like, you know how half the skills in the game use “15 + 1-1/2 × your CR” as a DC metric? Yeah, that. I hate it. That should just be called a Stunt Class, SC for short, and it’s simply calculated as 15 + 1-1/2 times your level or CR. Abilities that use a higher calculation can say, “Your Stunt Class + 5.” Along similar lines, PF1’s Combat Maneuver Defense needs to return as a third type of Armor Class alongside Energy Armor Class and Kinetic Armor Class—Maneuver Armor Class. The calculation literally does not need to change, but it does not feel good when you tell players that the number they need to hit is their Kinetic Armor Class + a number. That feels punishing. Saying, “Here is a number I need to beat, here, it’s on your sheet for you no math with a wonky number like 8 required,” is a million times better. That’s a precise measurement too—1,000,000 times better. I don’t make the rules (except when I do, like in COM and SOM).

3. Loot

The d20 system is built on robbing people, but Starfinder, a game that is supposed to take place in the far-flung future, is more egregious about this than literally any other d20 game I have ever seen. What do I mean by this? Well, the d20 system sort of has its roots in “Killing the Other” and “Taking their Stuff;” this is a problem that goes back all the way to the very first adventures of 1E D&D, where you are supposed to ignore the goblin tribes you happen upon and the sociopolitical and socioeconomical reasons for why those people—yes, humanoid monsters with humanoid intelligence are people—are robbing their wealthier, more technologically advanced neighbors and simply enact “justice.” You murder them all to the goblin and take their stuff, and the spoils of your brutal conquest are yours to reap. You can read all about this phenomenon in an article I wrote about racism in TTRPGs last year.

This problem is even worse in Starfinder, and here’s why. Starfinder is a game were your best equipment can cost hundreds of thousands of credits, but your non-combative ways to earn credits by default are restricted to MAYBE a hundred a week. Earn a Living checks give you credits equal to twice what you roll, and since at 20th level you’re probably looking at a maximum bonus of +40 to +45, if you roll a nat 20 you’ll be earning maybe a 130 credits? This ultimately means that murdering people and taking their gear, which is worth hundreds of thousands of credits, is more lucrative then just sitting around making checks. And that’s probably okay, right? Well, no. Because generally speaking, who’s going to have money and gear? Random monsters, or people? You guessed it, PEOPLE.

Yes, I am aware that you can give the party treasure that they can sell for credits. But Paizo’s adventure writers don’t often do that. I’ve played all of Dead Suns and Signal of Screams, the first volume of Against the Aeon Throne, and about half of Attack of the Swarm! and Fly Free or Die. ALL of these adventures overwhelmingly give you loot that you take from the smoldering, dead bodies of sapient that you slew. Literally the Starfinder Society is the only place where I’ve had a Starfinder NPC pay my character a decent wage, and one can argue that the money you earn in those scenarios is based off of the value of the equipment that the people you’ve killed possess.

And just when you think that loot can’t be any more annoying then it already is, there’s the “sale for 10% value” rule. I literally loathe this rule, to the extent that I house rule it away at every opportunity I get. Especially in prewritten Starfinder adventures, where the “wealth” your characters acquire is based on the value of the equipment you find and not the wholesale value of that same gear, you’re usually put into a situation where you use the gear that the adventure writers give you (and like it) or you’re basically cutting your total wealth acquisition by about 60 to 70% depending on the generosity of the adventure (specifically, how much they’re willing to give you credsticks over equipment). So, how would I solve this problem?

• Resale is 10% + 1% × your total Diplomacy bonus. If you have expertise in Diplomacy, you add the maximum value of your expertise die to this total. You can try Diplomacy checks to haggle, but if you fail you can end up losing the deal or getting a worse price. (And walking away from a deal penalizes checks to haggle the item as your character gets more desperate to sell and word spreads about it.)
• You can “upgrade” items into other items of the same type (light armor, computer, etc); if you upgrade an item of the same kind into a high-level model (such as a null-space chamber mk 1 into a mk 2), then the item applies its full price to the price of crafting the higher-level version. If they’re the same type but different kinds (like two magic items), then the item you’re using to upgrade into the new item applies half its price to the new item.
• The game should have some baseline rules regarding patronage and maybe set some tone regarding the murder of sapient and how killing people for their stuff earns you Infamy. (A Organized Play mechanic that, frankly, should be baseline.)

2. Equipment

This is probably something of a shock to many Know Direction fans who are aware of my close relationship with the Equipment chapter of the Starfinder Core Rulebook; I was one of three freelancers who was honored with the opportunity to work on the Starfinder Core Rulebook. Usually CRBs are done completely in-house, and while I don’t know for sure why we were brought on my guess is that Paizo was pretty strained for staff at the time, as not only were the Adventure Path, Player Companion, Campaign Setting Guide, and Core Rulebook products for Pathfinder 1E still expected to ship on-time, but based on comments Jason Bulmahn and Mark Seifter have made on various social media appearances, it seems likely that the the Starfinder Core Rulebook and the Pathfinder 2E Core Rulebook were in development simultaneously and Starfinder was already an all-hands-on-deck project. Take a look at the Core Rulebook’s entry in the OGL and see all of the Paizo people (and not-Paizo people) whoworked on it and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, this isn’t to imply that the Equipment Chapter has any one colossal thing that spans every section that I dislike. Rather, you can really feel that a bunch of different people worked on the Equipment chapter of the Starfinder Core Rulebook and that the rules often feel like they don’t quite line up as a result. Sort of like when you take a Flip-Map and upload it into Roll20 and use the Align to Grid tool to try and make the squares on the map line up with Roll20’s Grid, but it’s off by just a few pixels so while the map works it also triggers one’s uncanny valley. That’s how I feel about the Equipment Chapter. My uncanny valley is triggered. A lot. And by a lot different things.

Armor and Weapons

I hate how the model (aka “mk”) system works for armor and weapons. Every six lines on any given armor or weapon table are fundamentally the same item, just locked off for a higher-level weapon or item. This means that the amount of content that is actually available to players at any given level is inherently small, necessitating books like Armory and constant weapon and armor expansion. I am also not a fan of how armor is a necessity in Starfinder; most of our favorite sci-fi series and shows feature unarmored characters (all of non-Mandalorian Star Wars, Firefly, Serenity, and so on). Yes, I am aware that plenty of different types of armors are designed to replicate, even display, a character’s clothing. No, I do not feel that such designs are the same as actually allowing unarmed characters to be viable.

Here’s what I would do to fix this:

• Armor works like weapon fusions and gives damage reduction; you have a few different styles of armor with statistics that scale based on item level, and a table that tells you how much the armor costs based on item level. Light armor has no armor bonus and a high max Dex bonus, Heavy armor has an AC bonus of +2 and a lower max Dex bonus, and Powered armor works mostly as it does now. Add in the ability to modify armor’s base price using special materials, and I think you’re looking at something pretty good.
• Armor Class, on the other hand, would just be a value that increases as you gain levels. Your skill, not your armor, determines how difficult it is to hit you and your armor makes hits more survivable.
• Weapons would just be weapons; each weapon would have a base item level determined more by the weapon’s properties than it’s damage. You would upgrade a weapon’s damage by applying weapon upgrades, which would take the form of “Machs” or Mks. Think of them as how weapon potency runes work in Pathfinder; weapons are Mk 1 by default and you can apply Mk upgrades to the weapon to increase its damage. For example, applying a Mk 2 upgrade to a laser pistol transforms it from a Mk 1 laser pistol to a Mk 2 laser pistol. Each Mk addition would increase the weapon’s damage dice based on a chart in the book to ensure relative damage symmetry.

Computers

Computers need a complete overhaul. Literally no one knows how they work or what they’re capable of doing to the extent where they’re basically the most hand-waived item in the game. And honestly, that’s okay. I think it’s fine to be able to say, “A computer does X, Y, and Z” as a paragraph or two and leave it be. But if we’re going to do that, there’s no reason that we need four pages that everyone just hand-waives away.

Vehicles

Vehicles are another place where it feels like the game was afraid to give something to players. The vehicle rules in Paizo games are generally obtuse, involving a ton of checks that everyone at the table would rather just ignore. I think some rules are needed, sure, and I’m pretty certain that the intent was to try and prevent the best Starfinder combat strategy from being, “Buy a car and ram people with it,” but sometimes simpler answers are better ones. (Collision rules! Collision rules!)

1. Spellcasters

I could write a whole article about everything I do not like about spellcasters in Starfinder, but let me summarize quickly:

• It sucks to have to fall back on agun, especially if you’re a mystic. 0-Level spells should be viable at all levels of play.
• Spellcasters use a completely different progression metric than any other character in the game. They all have complicated “you only get your chosen powers every 3rd level instead of every 2 levels,” mechanics that make archetypes harder to use.
• Spells are overwhelmingly “save or suck” in a game whose math makes save or suck spells into suck or suck.  Basically, SF math is derived from PF1’s math, and SF spellcasters are derived from PF1’s partial spellcasters, like the bard or magus. Those classes had a notoriously hard time with their save or suck spells because PF1’s math (and by extension, SF’s) is balanced around 9th-level spellcasters, meaning that spells in Starfinder quickly start to fall behind in their save DCs by as much as 3. (The difference between having 9th level spells at 16th level and 6th level spells at 16th level.) This is a problem that only really becomes apparent if you play beyond 7th level or so, as your spells quickly start to fall off in their chance to work against enemies.
• The technomancer and the witchwarper are not strong classes. There, I said it. The witchwarper falls behind because Infinite Worlds costs precious spell slots and generally has low impact (honestly much lower than the spell slot you’re using to cast the effect) while the technomancer literally gets one bonus spell slot per day as their cool and unique power at 1st level, and then as they level up they just have at-will low-level spells when the truth of the matter is that low-level spells quickly fade into obsolesce in combat anyway because their effects don’t scale. Compare this to the mystic, who gets power house abilities like healing channel at 1st level and you can plainly see the power discrepancy between the classes. Worse still, the technomancer and the witchwarper have no ways to flavor the kind of technomancer or witchwarper you are. The mechanic has AI options. The operative as specializations. The vanguard has aspects. The mystic has connections. The soldier has fighting styles. The biohacker has a field of study and their choice between Int or Wis. The envoy picks which skills their expertise applies to. The solarian chooses between weapons, armor, shields, and flares. The technomancer and witchwarper have NO choices to make at first level. Here’s a spell cache and the ability to change your bedroom around; have a nice day, kids.

How would I change this? Honestly, both classes need an unchaining. And since all spellcasters are balanced around these two to some extent, the mystic and soon the precog would probably benefit too.

• Technomancers and Witchwarpers need something to pick at 1st level that defines what kind of witchwarper or technomancer they are.
• 0-Level spells need to be overhauled so they’re useful.
• All spells need to have scaling DC; 10 + 1/2 your level + your KSAM instead of spell level. This would actually go a long way towards making Spell Focus less of a mandatory feat tax too, honestly.
• More spells need to have variable level options so spellcasters aren’t stuck taking the same spells at every level.
• All spellcasters need to go on the same “even levels are talents” paradigm as all the other classes, and be balanced around that.
• Spellcasters need to be better about not having mandatory, numeric options as talents. For example, the magic hack that adds half your level to damage? That’s so boring but also arguably so mathematically necesscary; why is that not just baseline?

In Conclusion,

Starfinder is, like, my favorite version of d20 but it’s important to remember that no game will ever be perfect. We should always analyze the games we love for places they could be better so we can all work together and have better games! Blindly supporting a game as flawless just leads to mechanical staleness, and no one wants a stale game.

Until next time, I’m Alexander Augunas the Everyman Gamer signing out to play more Starfinder!

So instead, I decided to write my blog article about something that, frankly, is a little difficult to write about. As I’ve mentioned in several articles over the past few months, I’m currently running a Starfinder campaign for some friends that I call Teenaged Wasteland, where the characters are a bunch of high school kids at Metroheim’s Imperial War College in the Blood Space Campaign Setting. For the most part, running Teenaged Wasteland has been a ton of fun, but anytime you get a group of people together—especially a group of people that have never played a Tabletop RPG together before—you’re bound to run into conflict regarding playstyles and what motivates people to play the games they play.

Now, I’m going to be drawing mostly on my experience resolving this particular conflict as a tool for helping you, my wonderful readers, learn to resolve conflicts that arise at your table on your own. But knowing this, I ask that you bare with me if my examples seem somewhat vague. While I want to do my best give concrete examples to strengthen the usefulness of this blog article, I also don’t want to put any of my players on the spot or make anyone feel uncomfortable. Remember, you’re here for advice, not drama! (I hope, anyway.)

Anywoo, let’s get started!

The Tangled Webs We Weave

The most important piece of advice that I will give you in this article is as follows: Conflict is a natural part of interaction. Chances are if you never had a conflict with someone, you weren’t interacting closely with them. As humans, we perceive the world around us and process most of that information within the confines of our own minds, based on the information we have available when perception occurs. We can certainly look back on things we’ve perceived and reassess our perceptions based on new information, but in general reassessment is an active process while perception tends to be passive in the sense that something happens and you form an opinion on it in the moment. This is an important idea, because one event can happen to two people simultaneously, and those two people might form wildly different opinions on the event based on their own learning histories and perceptions. In this way, it’s important to remember that all perceptions are subjected to the bias of one’s personal history; true objective observation is rare and in many cases, is a skill that one must develop rather than one people just have inherently. (If you’ve ever heard of mindfulness training, the art of mindfulness is, in many ways, learning to take a more objective stance at observation in order to calm one’s anxieties and emotions.)

To give an example of how perceptions can differ on a single event, let’s talk about Teenaged Wasteland. In what I dubbed the “Season Finale” of Teenaged Wasteland’s first season (Levels 1-3), I had the players face off against a group of cultists that were trying to break a CR 22 nogitsune daimyo free from her multiple-millennia imprisonment. In that encounter, the party sat and planned this delightful blitz strategy where they would try to interrupt the ritual by smashing this evil-sealing jar that was present at the ritual sight, hoping that without the careful release of chakra from the jar they would lose control and the ritual would backlash on their enemies. Unfortunately, the ritual was mostly about unsealing said jar, which only a certain member of their party could break due to his ties to the deity that sealed the jar in the first place, so their plan broke open the jar and immediately freed the trapped demigod. From there, things got weird. A few PCs tried to attack the demigod and were polymorphed for their arrogance. One PC stood their ground and tried to apologize for capturing the demigod by offering to hug her. As a GM, I wasn’t exactly sure how this group was going to get out of this situation to regroup so I pulled a dues ex machina that I had developed in advanced for a situation such as this, a sort of, “Smash the Glass In Case They F#@! It All Up” safeguard. The demigod was sealed at a shrine to a second demigod, and that demigod manifested, empowered one of the PCs with a buff that let the rest of the group “fight” the demigod long enough to escape, and rah, save the day! Or, so I thought.

After that game, I got feedback from about half of my group that they felt the dues ex machina devalued their character’s own abilities, and that they should have been able to fight the demigod on their own. There was a strong sentiment of, “The way this played out removed my personal agency within the campaign and that wasn’t fun.” The net result was a conflict between these three players and myself, the GM. And of course, conflict doesn’t have to mean, “We’re all screaming and yelling and throwing chairs like we’re on Orange County Chopper.” Sometimes it means that we all awkwardly sit in Discord as a bunch of grown-ass adults and try to talk about our feelings and perception of events.

How to Awkwardly Share Your Feelings in Discord

When conflict happens, the most important step is dialogue. A dialogue needs to open up between all parties involved, and it needs to happen soon. In my experience, what often happens is something like this:

1. Someone has a problem with someone else. Begins conflict.
2. The conflicted party attempts to outreach to others, typically those perceived as neutral, in an attempt to build solidarity.
3. Once solidarity is achieved, the group attempts to correct the problem, using numbers as justification. If solidarity can’t be achieved, the conflicted party usually attempts to leave the group.

GMs, players, literally anyone reading this article. Mustering an army is not how to resolve a conflict in a tabletop RPG. Because ultimately, that’s what you’re trying to do, whether you can admit it or not. You’re mustering forces in order to take on a perceived threat. And this sucks. Why? Because in doing so, you’ve labeled the person you’re in a conflict with as your enemy, and if you tell someone that they’re your enemy, chances are that they’re going to start seeing you as their enemy too, and that can persist even after the conflict has been resolved. This will likely lead to more conflict down the road, or can simply make things awkward at the gaming table—it depends on the person and the circumstances.

That being said, a private discussion isn’t always the safest option either, nor is a group discussion. There’s a certain level of vulnerability that comes with letting people know how you’re feeling in front of a group, and not knowing how others are going to react to your opinions and emotions that can be really tough for the typical person to place themselves in, especially when it’s one-on-one, you against the source of your conflict. Seeking support is a natural response to that kind of vulnerability, but it’s likely to leave others feeling vulnerable as you feel less vulnerable. So, what do you do in this situation?

In the Teenaged Wasteland situation, one of my players reached out and reached out to three of my six players players. Of those three players, two agreed with them and one partially agreed with them. So what ended up happening is that I heard through the grapevine that the one player wasn’t happy and I called a group meeting together. The player who reached out to me lashed out a bit and then the rest of us talked. I offered to sit down and chat with everyone one-on-one about the campaign, discussed story arcs, what they liked and didn’t like, and where they saw their character going as we headed into Season 2 of Teenaged Wasteland. My conversations with the player who rallied the others were difficult for me for the reasons I already stated; it is difficult to view a friend as a friend when they muster other people against you. It took me a fair amount of time (and mindfulness) to pull myself out of that conflict and reach a point where I could work with them; this is why I flat-out don’t recommend the “rallying your friends behind you against another player/your GM” approach if you don’t want that game to collapse. Removing your own vulnerabilities is great and all, but you ultimately end up shunting them to someone else, and if that person can’t handle it you’ll probably watch your game crumble. Even with my willingness to hear feedback and improve, Teenaged Wasteland had to go on a hiatus for the entire month of January while we talked about and resolved those issues. For another GM, that hiatus could have flat-out destroyed the campaign, because I certainly went through a period of, “Why am I putting all this work into Teenaged Wasteland when I’m being treated like this?”

The most important thing is that, at the end of the day, the people you are playing a Tabletop RPG with need to be people you trust, but you also need to be a person that the people you play Tabletop RPGs with trust too. If you crusade against someone, they’re not going to trust you.

Dawn of a New Day

I wish I could say that I knew exactly how any conflict that you get into during a Tabletop RPG will resolve. I really, truly don’t. Conflict is such a group-sensitive, personal thing that it’s impossible to predict how it’ll play out every time. At the end of the day, I think it’s helpful to take a moment and reflect on the following before you do anything that could cause a conflict in your group.

• Do I want to continue to play this game?
• If yes, what needs to change for me to be able to play this game?
• Am I willing to compromise on this change?

Do I want to Continue to Play?

This is probably the most direct question. Is the conflict sufficient that you don’t want to play anymore, or do you want to keep playing? If the answer is, “No, I don’t want to play anymore,” then honestly, it’s probably best for you to make the decision to leave the game. Tell the group why you’re leaving, but don’t play the game of, “Convince me to stay.” That’s really narcissistic and ultimately it just strains the lives of people that you might not want to play with. Knowing when to back out of a game is honestly an artform that takes a real sense of maturity; the person I know of who is best at this is Know Direction’s own James Ballod. James has an amazing ability to be like, “I am not enjoying this, so I’m done. Nothing against y’all, but I need to do me first.” There is nothing wrong with bowing out from a commitment that you cannot do or no longer wish to do, especially when that commitment is supposed to be something fun and enjoyable like a Tabletop RPG.

What Needs to Change?

Knowing the change you’re looking for is really important. Try to make your desired change actionable, such as, “I want to see adventures increase player agency by relying less on GM fiats that feel like they trivialize our abilities.” That’s a helpful statement of feedback that can let other people know exactly what they can do to make your tabletop RPG experience more enjoyable for you. An example of feedback that isn’t quite so useful (and isn’t what I got from my Teenaged Wasteland players) is a laundry list of complaints. For example, just flat-out saying, “I’m upset because X,” isn’t all that helpful because it’s not offering any solutions on how to fix the issue. Telling others that you’re upset is important, but it’s only half of the solution. You need to be able to verbalize why you’re upset and what can be done to change it.

Is Compromise Possible?

Sometimes the things that cause conflict can’t be comprised about. Sometimes they can be. It is important for you, as someone who is experiencing conflict, to know where that line is for you. A great example that is unrelated to Teenaged Wasteland—X cards. If your GM has your group fill out X cards and the source of the conflict is that yours has been violated, there’s probably no compromise there and that’s okay. Everybody has lines in the sand that should not be crossed, and the fact that the conflict stems from your safety being violated and that you will not compromise on that is both useful and important information. Other times, compromise is possible. Going back to Teenaged Wasteland, one of my players felt like a story development rendered him unable to connect to his character, and he wanted to swap characters. This wasn’t a hard conflict for them, though. I offered to sit down with them, chat about their story arc thus far with them and pull back some of the curtains a little bit with my future plans privately. After that, I suggested that they continue to play with this character into the next story arc, and if they still felt disassociated with the character that we could retire said character and bring a new one in. The player agreed, so we sat down a few days later and chatted for a bit about what his goals were for the character. We came up with some tweaks and set a plan to review how they were going after the next adventure concluded (which happened on Valentine’s Day). I checked in with him, asking if he still wanted to switch his character, and they declined. The new direction and improvements to the campaign were working with them so far, and they wanted to continue with what they had.

In Conclusion,

Conflict between friends is messy, and in a setting as intimate as a tabletop RPG, that conflict can accidentally become personal because so many players accidentally invest tangible amounts of their personality and values into their characters. As a result, conflict between players often becomes personal real fast, and as a result it’s best handled seriously and with compassion. I hope my anecdotes helped you understand how to resolve conflict between members of a Tabletop RPG group, and hopefully my advice helps you keep your gaming group gaming the next time you experience a little bit of conflict at the table.

This is Alexander Augunas, Know Direction’s Everyman Gamer, signing out to figure out how to build at least four dozen foxes in like two different Paizo game systems!

… you did know those were there, right? No? Well, honestly, that’s not too surprising. Paizo doesn’t really market their adventure content for players after all. But if you look in any recent Starfinder AP volume and literally any Pathfinder 2E AP volume, you’ll find player options. And no, I’m not talking about a fancy named magic sword or a powerful MacGuffin or whatever, I’m talking class options that are part of your character build, alternate class features that dramatically change up how your character works, new feats, that and literally anything else. Now, personally, I have complicated feelings about this topic, and for my first article of the new year I’m gonna share those complicated feelings with you, and probably get a whole bunch of people unreasonably upset at me in the process!

That is, after all, what I’m here for. I think?

They Got Their Peanut Crunch in My Marshmallow Fluff: A Memoir

Okay, so let me preface this by saying that I did NOT go and reread every volume in my extensive Adventure Path collection, nor do I claim to know all of the content that exists in every Adventure that Paizo has ever published. Sorry, I’m good but I’m not THAT good.

At any rate, Pathfinder adventures have always been split into three basic parts: the “Adventure,” the “Bestiary,” and the “Toolbox” going back as far as I’ve ever seen. In general:

• The Adventure is the game you actually play with your friends.
• The Bestiary is a collection of monsters and NPCs that are on-theme for the adventure that may or may not be featured within it. A given is that the major antagonists (and sometimes other helpful NPCs) always receive a write-up in this section.
• The Toolbox is a collection of articles that are useful, but not always necesscary, for running the Adventure.

Overall, the Adventure Path design and layout strongly resembles that of a magazine, which makes sense. As a company, Paizo was originally founded to handle Wizard of the Coast’s old Dungeon magazine, and when they split off from Dungeons and Dragons to build their own content they largely kept the layout that their staff was comfortable working with. But you’ll note that in the description, there isn’t a place where I’ve necessarily said that Player Options exist. Part of that is due to the difficulty in defining what a player option is; in fact, I’ll even go as far as to hazard that no one’s ever sat down and tried to define what, precisely, we mean when we say “this is a player option” beyond “a thing that players take. Personally, I think player options are about two things—agency and purpose.

• Agency refers to how players acquire options. I think we can all agree that despite giving players special powers and players having a decision how they manifest, Horror Adventures’s corruptions weren’t really a player mechanic. After all, you have no real agency in whether you acquire a corruption! To some extent, status as a player option necessitates that the rule is something that a player can decide to take or not take, so a corruption, despite providing player power, is not truly a player option. Along the same lines, I don’t think that the mythic ruleset from Mythic Adventures was truly a player option either. After all, players could be told, “We’ll be using Mythic Adventures,” sure, but until the GM says that the book is being used there’s an understanding that the book isn’t for standard play.
• Purpose refers to what the option does. Ultimately, something needs to benefit a player in order to be a player option. That’s why at the end of the day, players typically don’t consider new deities to be new player options despite having the agency to choose which deity their player worships, if any. Along similar lines, your character’s ethnicity is also a choice that your character makes that you as a player have complete agency over, but most players wouldn’t consider the addition of a new Golarion human ethnic group to be a new player option by itself—it would need to have some spiffy new feats attached to it, and even then one might argue that it’s the feats rather than the ethnic group that are the true option.

So, why go through all this trouble defining player options in an article about Adventure Path volumes and player content? I think it’s important to have these types of definitions so we can pinpoint the difference between old-style “player options” in Adventure Path volumes and new-style ones.

• In Pathfinder 1E Adventure Paths, “Player” options, if any existed, were mostly kept to the Toolbox and usually took the form of unique magic items and treasures discovered during the Adventure. Equipment sits in a weird spot in regards to its status as a player option, since it’s true that equipment often plays a crucial role in a character’s build (purpose), but one can make the argument that one’s agency in acquiring gear is limited by the GM (agency). What do I mean by this? Well, at the end of the day the amount of wealth a player acquires really isn’t in their hands. There’s guidelines, sure, but anyone who’s played a Pathfinder or a Starfinder adventure is aware of how stingy those books typically are in regards to wealth, especially compared to Organized Play. I’ve been in home games where the GM showered us in treasure and I’ve been in home games where the GM starved us of money; sometimes those two feels were the same exact game at different stages of the story. too. Personally, I don’t see new equipment as player options; especially not as presented in an Adventure Path, where the equipment is earned during the adventure. Players have the agency to decide whether or not to use the item or to sell it for something else, sure, but at the end of the day being handed treasure at the GM’s whims just doesn’t feel like a concrete part of a character to me in the same way that I level up, I get the new ability.
• Starfinder Adventure Paths were advertised as having articles pertaining to players, but prior to Attack of the Swarm they largely just did what PF1 adventures did; mostly new equipment and treasure, with occasional options for Starships and a new player species here or there. I hesitate to call Starship options player options, however. While it’s true that the Starship is basically built like a character, it’s sort of a character you only play with once every few levels or so. Around Attack of the Swarm, the idea of what sort of content could be in a Starfinder Adventure Path volume started to change, however. We started getting new spells, new class features, and even a few archetypes here and there. Some good examples include Fly Free or Die Vol 2’s new solar manifestation, Lunar Weapon, which allows a solarian to form an operative melee weapon for their solar manifestation, or Attack of the Swarm Vol 6’s new spell sergeant archetype, which is basically Pathfinder 1E’s magus as an archetype. These are clear examples of options that players can take and are even described as such.
• Pathfinder 2E Adventure Paths basically came out of the gate in the same vein as Starfinder APs, with every volume having new options for players. Famously, Vol 2 of Extinction Curse introduced an entire new ancestry, the shoonies, and each Vol 6 of every AP we’ve seen so far has had new capstone feats for almost every class that allows characters of those classes to have a capstone ability that reflects the AP’s themes. Vol 6 of Age of Ashes even had new backgrounds that low-level characters could take to reflect that they lived in a world where the PCs of Age of Ashes succeeded in stopping the Scarlet Triad. As with Starfinder, these are clear examples of player options in Adventure Path volumes, but that’s not even where this stops. The new Pathfinder Adventure, The Slithering, features the oozemorph archetype players can take, so now we’re looking at a world where Player Options aren’t just confined to AP volumes, but all adventures in general. Organized Play is starting to do this too, with several scenarios unlocking access to special feats.

But Did We Make a Fluffternutter Sandwhich?

Y’all ever hear of a Fluffernutter Sandwich? It’s from Massachusetts and is kind of a Northeast USA thing; basically, you take Marshmallow Fluff and spread it on one side of a sandwich, then spread peanut butter on the other side. Slap ’em together and you have a delicious sandwich that’s full of peanut butter and marshmallow goodness. It’s an example of how mixing two very different things can create something wholesome and unique. But is slapping Player Options into Adventure volumes, two very different kinds of content, a Fluffernutter Sandwich, or is it a hot mess? There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Advantages:

• More people buy the Adventure. This is REALLY good for Paizo, since they need to make money on their work. If only one out of every five players is buying adventures, at what point does adventure writing stop being profitable? And if adventure writing stops being profitable, people at Paizo lose jobs and Paizo arguably loses its one edge over Wizards of the Coast—that Paizo puts out tons of high-quality pre-written adventures.
• More player options get published. This is also a really good thing for players. After all, more player options means more control over what your character can do, especially when those options are high-quality and vetted by many different people. Having player options in Adventure Volumes is also really crucial to Starfinder, a game that typically gets less content per year than Pathfinder due to the limited size of its team. Pathfinder, after all, has the Lost Omens line, which gives it an edge of hundreds of pages over Starfinder.

Disadvantages:

• Finding Content Becomes Harder. All of a sudden, you can’t just go to your major book and be all like, “Oh hey, I know if I’m looking for solar manifestations I should look in a hardcover.” Now you have to remember to check every Adventure Path volume you have too, which can get overwhelming fast. APs don’t even have the adventage of Player Companions, where at least you could go, “Oh, this ability was a fighting ability, I should check Weapon Master’s Handbook or Melee Tactics Toolbox for it.” This is especially true when the content doesn’t necessarily fit the theme of the book it’s in; for example, Threefold Conspiracy Vol 6 has a bunch of new technomancer alternate spell caches, and those new spell caches aren’t themes around subterfuge or intrigue or anything else that would make sense for an AP about conspiracies.
• The Vetting Isn’t Always As Good. I have tons of friends at Paizo who are probably going to be mad at me when I say this, but generally speaking player options in an AP are more likely to have problems with them that those in a big hardcover, and the reason is almost always due to their being fewer eyes on an Adventure than on a big hardcover book. Here’s an example—Threefold Conspiracy Vol 6 has a mystic epiphany that allows the mystic to gain a solar flare, exactly like a solarian. This is balanced around a similar option in Character Operations Manuel that allows a mystic to gain a solar weapon. There’s just one problem, however. In Threefold Conspiracy, the new mystic epiphanies aren’t labelled with the minimum mystic level you need to have to select them. In a big hardcover, Paizo freelancers typically get to participate in a big open forum where they discuss new options and bounce ideas like this off of each other. A typical Paizo hardcover has over a dozen freelance authors on it, so even if an Adventure volume has everyone on the Starfinder team double-checking all of the new options (which I find unlikely, simply due to the fact everyone has their own deadlines to hit), typically only one freelancer is getting to look at each of those options, which is already a ton fewer people. In my experience, developers and designers are masters of making new rules and adhering to a system’s mechanics, but freelance authors tend to have really niche interests that cause them to recognize small things that bigger-picture developers will often miss, like the fact that technically there’s no listed level at which a mystic can take a solar flare. That isn’t a strike against Paizo developers or designers; the human brain can literally hold only so much information at a time, and the amount of work that goes into any book is herculean.
• Players Don’t Always Know To Pick Them Up. Players aren’t really conditioned to pick up Adventures, and Paizo products don’t really advertise, “Hey! We got options in here for you!” What often ends up happening instead is that the options find their way to Archives of Nethys and players just use that site, or pick up a book if they’re in OP. This can lead to a weird issue where the GM has the book and maybe knows the option exists, but requires that the option be handed out as a reward for the adventure rather than part of the character building process. I’d argue that this line is a difficult one, since it sort of blurs the identity of a player option in my mind. To me, a player option is an expression of player agency, and as soon as the GM has the right to tell you that you can’t take something, it starts to become a little dubious. I’m of a similar thought process when it comes to Uncommon and Rare options in PF2; I get why they’re labelled that way, but I also don’t really like that those labels exist for player options in the first place.
• Adventures Don’t Get Reprinted Typically. It’s worth noting that Adventure Path volumes commonly go out of print and then they’re just not available anymore. This infamously happened with Book 2 of PF1’s Kingmaker, mostly because that volume introduced the Kingdom Building rules that eventually found their way into Ultimate Campaign. I worry that if a player option that people love to the extent that the book gets sold out is printed, that option will just kinda disappear, or if it does come back it’ll be in a changed form, such as how the lore warden fighter was printed in a sold out book and was dramatically changed when it was included in the Adventurer’s Guide years later. That’s a weird case in and of itself because the Lore Warden was definitely too strong, but at what point did they simply not print the thing people liked?

So, What’s the Verdict Alex?

I don’t really think there’s a strong argument for Player Option content as a good thing or as a bad thing for Adventures, because while I think that the issue of finding content becoming harder and the dubiousness of access being problematic, I truly think that getting more people to buy Adventure Path volumes is a good thing for Paizo financially, and I also think that if players have an Adventure sitting around on their shelves, they might be more inclined to read it and one day run it for others. I think that Player Options introduced in APs should be publicly advertised; “This book has a new solarian manifestation!” and whatnot. I also think that the options have to find their way into a proper book in the future, and they should get as much team vetting the first time around as possible to prevent another Lore Warden situation. And they should definitely be subjected to errata even if they can’t be outright reprinted.

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoyed this article. In two weeks I’m going to do a Starfinder Iconic Design where I build a solarian using that shiny new Lunar Weapon solar manifestation I mentioned today. Until then, take care everyone!

… today is one of those days. Inari help me….

What Are Kitsune?

It’s probably no surprise that kitsune exist in the Blood Space campaign system, and ergo in my Teenaged Wasteland campaign. After all, my company’s brand is literally kitsune and my personal brand as an author is literally kitsune. Years ago when the amazing Amanda Hamon got hired by Paizo, I bumped in to her at the PaizoCon ballroom while I was leaving; it was either the night of the PaizoCon banquet or I was leaving a Pathfinder Society Scenario, I can’t recall which. Anyway, I recognized her as a new hire and wanted to introduce myself to her. Everybody Games was young at the time, but after I said my introductions Amanda was like, “Oh, I recognize you. You’re the guy who only writes kitsune, right?”

… partial success.

Anyway, the point is that there were always going to be kitsune in Blood Space, and there have been since the first time I wrote about the Blood Space campaign setting, in the Starfarer’s Companion. Since Starfinder is an evolution of Pathfinder, kitsune in Blood Space are purposefully similar to those in Pathfinder. They’re humanoid foxes in their true forms and are able to use their natural shapeshifting to assume a human identity that’s unique to that individual and inherited from their parents. In a sense, a kitsune inherits genetic traits for their human form the same as they do their original form. This is very much a survival mechanism; if a baby kitsune looked too different from their parents or siblings while transformed, it could very well give the family away as something not human. This idea, that shapeshifting isn’t just a magical “poof I’m a human” thing and is very much a core part of their being is integral to the Blood Space campaign setting. Along the same lines:

• A kitsune’s human form maintains as many of the same physical traits as their original form as possible. For example, if a kitsune puts on 10 pounds in their original form, their human form’s going to chub out too. Similarly, a kitsune’s hair color and eye color don’t change between transformations, they’re roughly the same height and of the same build, and they can’t change the pigmentation or length of their hair. Individual kitsune with superior shapeshifting can buck these trends, of course, but generally speaking these are the limitations.
• One of the core ideas to the Blood Space setting is that kitsune can sire kids with anything humans can while in human form, but the resulting children are always kitsune themselves. A kitsune born to a pairing between a kitsune and a non-kitsune also has traits that strongly favor the non-kitsune parent; as a result, there are kitsune with human forms that resemble just about every human ethnic group imaginable.
• Kitsune can’t typically “repair” their bodies using their transformations. For example, if you lose a hand in your human form, that arm’s also gone in your true form. If their eye in kitsune form gets gouged out (more on that later), it remains gouged out when they change into a human. Again, kitsune with superior shapechanging can bypass this somewhat, but for most kitsune that’s not an option.

Kitsune Mythology in Blood Space

When you talk about kitsune, one of the first topics that comes up is the magical tails. Those exist in the Blood Space campaign setting, but they’re specifically very rare among the general population. That being said, a lot of the mythology surrounding kitsune hasn’t changed much across time; on Twitter, James joked about digital storage units that work like the old Star Balls from kitsune mythology, but with a digital twist. I … didn’t like that approach in Blood Space. Not because I don’t think things should improve as technology advances, far from it. But in the Starfinder RPG, where everything is very advanced and technologically derived, there’s a certain level of mysticism that exists when one chooses to remain with the traditional. In fact, it’s probably more special in a Starfinder setting, where high technology is the assumption than in, say, Pathfinder, where the star ball is just another magic item. It’s a stylistic choice that plays into the idea that for most kitsune, that type of magical item is very old, very sacred, and very traditional. It’s really easy to take technological trappings and just paint them onto everything in Starfinder, but knowing when to stop, look at a thing, and say, “No, this needs to stay mystical and occult,” allows you to develop a contrast that you can build an entire campaign around, similar to how the decision to actually have technology in Golarian’s Numeria and not, say, highly advanced magic items that replicate technology, is a strong decision that adds to that nation’s mystique.

So, how does the kitsune mythology work in Blood Space? As so!

• Kitsune star jewels exist, but they’re few and far between. Most of the original ones are relics from thousands of years ago and are highly prized. Some take the form of rechargable spell jewels, others are solarian crystals. No two star jewels are the same.
• Kitsune mostly speak whatever prevailing languages are available on the world(s) they grew up on, but they do speak a cultural tongue called Senskrit, the language of the kami in Blood Space. Most kitsune don’t use Senskrit all that often; it’s the equivalent of learning Hewbrew in Judaism. Most kitsune kids don’t use it much outside of religious or spiritual traditions with their families and communities, but kitsune who become priests tending to shrines and whatnot use it a ton more. It’s as much a cultural treasure as a living language.
• Kitsune that are able to develop multiple tails are called kyubi. Gaining so much as a second tail is rare among kitsune, with each subsequent tail being increasingly more difficult to acquire. Additional tails are acquired through attuning to one’s inner chakra, and unlike humans, who have only seven chakras, kitsune have a total of eight (the eighth chakra is located at the base of the tail bone and is the aptly-named Tail Chakra). As a people, kitsune are very reverent regarding those who have multiple tails, as acquiring them is seen as a sign of greatness or grandness.
• Most kitsune don’t have foxfire; dancing lights isn’t a core spell-like ability for kitsune in Blood Space (at least, not in the most recent iteration of kitsune: Star Log.Deluxe: Blood Space Species Reforged). That’s because of one of the core ideas surrounding kitsune—they’re magical shapeshifters with a proud and ancient past, but most of that magic is lost to the daily grind of modern society (more on that in the next section).

Radiant Imperium Kitsune

Dustin’s PC, Yoko Fushimi

In the Blood Space campaign setting, the Radiant Imperium is the primary government, much as how the Pact Worlds is the government of the Golarian System or the Veskarium is the government of the Vesk System. One of the core ideas of the Radiant Imperium is that the players should feel like they’re in a civilization that’s capable of progress, but still has a ways to go. One of the ways we do this is by talking a bit about the Radiant Imperium’s past; long before the Nova Age, before space flight was discovered and invented, the original Radiant Imperium was a humanocentric government that completely conquered its home world of Azan, and had no qualms settling on other occupied planets and either subjugating or eliminating whatever peoples were native to those worlds. It wasn’t until the Radiant Imperium encountered a civilization that had technologically surpassed them that they began to really revise those toxic ideas, but as far as society has come the government and its institutions were built on a rotten foundation, and that very much persists throughout the Radiant Imperium if you, as a GM, want to delve into those themes and your players are comfortable with exploring systemic injustice.

While all non-human races have their human haters in the Radiant Imperium, kitsune specifically receive human ire worse than most. Circling back to the idea that kitsune who have kids with humans always have kitsune kids, there’s a really gross thought process among the worst of the Radiant Imperium’s humans that kitsune essentially want to erase humanity, which obviously isn’t true, but it’s a hurtful stereotype that’s been passed for hundreds of generations that results in a lot of the toxicity humans have towards kitsune. This, specifically, is why kitsune historically use their shapeshifting to live among humans. There are unquestionable benefits to participating in society, but doing so is significantly easier if they don’t have to be human most of the time. Unfortunately, the specifics of how a kitsune’s shapeshifting works results in a ton of hate crimes designed to out them; for example, eye gouging is a common “punishment” that racists inflict on kitsune because most can’t grow new eyes when they shapeshift. This is why Hansune, Everybody Games’s iconic operative, is depicted with an eyepatch. (We even depicted this formative scene in the Advanced Skill Guide. I won’t post the art here due to how triggering knowing the context is, but if you want to see it, artist Jacob Blackmon has it up on his Deviant Art portfolio.)

Of course, having a setting where, “If you play species X, you will unerringly experience in-game racism for the entirety of your play experience” isn’t particularly fun, so the Radiant Imperium has made some strides in this regard. The setting talks frequently about the Kitsune Rights Act, which was passed about 40 years prior to the current year (320 AN, or After-Nova). The setting tries to paint an image of the Radiant Imperium where this aspect of playing a kitsune is only a plot point if the GM wants to depict it and the players want to take part in it. In my experience as a GM, a player, and someone who’s been targeted by discrimination before, any topic of discrimination in a Tabletop RPG needs to be handled like this; it needs to be something that everybody at the table consents to (and in fact, when I started Teenaged Wasteland I specifically asked all my players how they felt about this topic as part of their session zero X-Card).

TL;DR

So, to quickly summarize:

• In Blood Space, kitsune possess many of the same old rites, traditions, and magic as in games like Pathfinder, relatively unchanged. This isn’t because these things are necessarily endearing; more because they’re tradition and updating those traditions too much could expose their true identities.
• Most kitsune deal with a lot of systemic injustice in the Blood Space campaign setting, but the setting is designed so that whether or not you and your GM choose to use those plot hooks is a matter of your own comfort and preference.
• A HUGE theme of the kitsune is being a magical fox person that’s essentially been forced to conform with the ordinary masses; you might be a special somebody, but the Imperial war machine needs cogs, so you better use that shapeshifting to turn yourself into a cog and STAY THERE.
• Kitsune counterculture, which is relatively new in the Raidant Imperium, is about bucking those trends. Walk around in your true form! Be who you were born to be! You don’t owe your life to the Imperium!

Why Go Through All This Trouble?

As I close out this article, you might find yourself asking: Why go through all this trouble? Personally, I think that our stories are more interesting when we acknowledge that different people have different life experiences. One thing that I think that the Starfinder RPG (and oftentimes the Pathfinder RPG as well) sometimes misses out on is that they treat all the different species of the Starfinder universe as a monolith. Individual species have their own cultures stemming from their own home planets, but the setting doesn’t ever really take the time to talk about how those cultures gel together, and how they often don’t. For example, you can’t convince me that vesk living in the Pact Worlds don’t experience a level of apprehension from their human peers due to the fact that the Pact Worlds was essentially at war with their entire species for a few centuries, or that ysoki aren’t hassled by the fact that most of Absalom Station is built for human occupation.

I think that too often, we design species for our games and don’t really think about how they fit into the world, how their presence has shaped society and why that species’s involvement is an immutable part of the world’s development. I wanted kitsune to be different from that. I went through all their core game mechanics and made sure that they were a unique part of the kitsune experience. You can’t just replace kitsune with astrozoans in Blood Space and get the same result; the mechanics of who they are play in heavily to their role in the story. As for adding all that social conflict and strife, I wanted GMs to be able to make kitsune’s presence mean something more than just a Disguise bonus and some low-light vision. I wanted GMs to be able to look at the species and realize, “Oh, I can use this to tell a story.” To quote my colleague Jason Tondoro, “I wanted their involvement in this thing to mean something, so that this game could mean something.”

And honestly, that philosophy of Jake’s is a huge part of Teenaged Wasteland. I ended up getting two players who decided to play kitsune (one of them is Dustin Knight), and both of them built the social issues of the Radiant Imperium that I described into the very fabric of their characters. Yoko, Dustin’s character, began the campaign as a kitsune boy who was isolated by a toxic, racist human friend into believing that he and his people / family were lesser simply because of who they were, and overcoming that toxicity has been a major story arc for Yoko throughout Season 1 of Teenaged Wasteland. (I run my game like an anime, and Season 1 is levels 1 through 3.) The other kitsune character, Heizen, was assaulted as a young girl because her parents are rich and powerful, and in the aftermath had one of her eyes gouged out. Heizen spent the entire first half of Season 1 as something of a recluse, a gifted mechanic who preferred robots to people because she could program her robots not to hurt her. Her arc in Season 1 has been finding comradery and companionship in her new friends and slowly learning to open herself up to them.

As Season 1 draws to a close, I feel really satisfied with how this depiction of the kitsune has affected my game world. I think the different players have their own thoughts and feelings about how important ancient kitsune mysticism has been to the plotline of a Starfinder RPG, but regardless of whether they loved it or were just lukewarm about it, all of the players have told me that this is one of the best campaigns they’ve ever been part of, and in my opinion, that’s because this campaign and its story beats mean something.

The Pitch

Perhaps the most important part of running a game like Teenaged Wasteland is to make sure that the fact that slice of life roleplaying features heavily in your campaign is a major part of your pitch to the players. When you start a new campaign, you should essentially give a sales pitch to your players so they know whether or not the story is the sort of thing they’ll be interested in. In my opinion, a good pitch includes things like:

• What campaign setting are you using?
• What house rules are you using?
• Are there any parts of the character’s backstories that their characters need to have?
• What adjacent rules systems will you be using / what rules won’t you be using?

Campaign Setting

Obviously, your players are going to want to know where they’re playing. When I pitched Teenaged Wasteland to my players, I told them that I’d be using the Blood Space campaign, but they were allowed to build characters from the Pact Worlds campaign setting as long as their character had a reason that they were attending the Imperial War College on Tor. Of my seven players, only Coren wanted to be from the Pact Worlds setting; he chose right away that he was a street rat from Absalom Station, and that his reason for being in the Imperial War College was that his Parent sent him away to a Military School that was as far away as possible from him, using Coren’s own hard-earned credits no less! One of the fun roleplaying bits for Coren has been his discovery that the Imperial War College isn’t some correctional institution like he and his Parent thought, however; the Imperial War College has one of the finest private secondary educations in the entire system, so much so that most of the political and military elite send their kids there! The RP that ensued as Coren realized just how different he was from his new friends was something that really grounded him to the setting.

House Rules

It’s pretty rare that a GM runs their game exactly how it’s written in the Core Rulebook; most GMs have house rules. For Teenaged Wasteland, I had a number of House Rules and I was very adamant about making sure my players knew about them:

• Instead of the standard ability adjustments for species, all characters got +2 to one ability score of their choice. At their decision, a character could take a -2 to one ability score to gain a +2 to another, and the two +2 bonuses can stack (for example, you could have +4 to one stat and -2 to another). Starfinder has exceptionally tight math and not having good ability scores hurts. I wanted my players to be able to play any species they wanted without feeling like they made the wrong choice.
• I allowed my players to use my Species Reforged rules. It’s a little more power and a lot more customization. They liked it!
• I developed a Special Snowflake list of perks that they could have going into the game. It was basically a small way that they could tell me what kind of assets they had from their families and backgrounds that tied neatly into the campaign.

Backstory Requirements

For most campaigns, it’s great to just let your players play whatever they want. Sometimes, however, you have a story in mind that you want to tell that requires the players to fit a certain mold. For example, the 3PP Adventure Path “Way of the Wicked” requires the PCs to be criminals going to the worst jail in the land. This type of restriction can breathe creativity in your players, so it’s important to be willing to loosen those requirements a little bit so both you and your player end up with the kind of story that you want. For example, Teenaged Wasteland’s big backstory requirement is that every character needs to be young enough to be an attendee at the Imperial War College’s high school program; they need to be their species’s equivalent of a freshman, or a 15 year-old. Most of my players had no problem hitting this number, but where the story became interesting was that one of my players wanted to play an android. They’re built as adults, so at first android didn’t see, like a great back for this campaign. But then I sat back at got to thinking; isn’t a teenage just an adult with no experience? I decided, then that my player could play an android as long as he was younger than 5 years old; we went with 1 year old, and it worked!

Adjacent Systems

Your players should be aware of what other game mechanics you plan on using in their campaign, as well as which commonly used ones you might be skating by with. This helps to set your players’ expectations about the game so they know what kind of options are worth taking. For example, if you’re upfront with your players and tell them that your campaign is going to heavily feature vehicular racing rather than starship combat, your players will know that options that boost their ability to participate in vehicle chases are much more important than those that enhance starship combat. In Teenaged Wasteland, I presented a rules system for tracking how my players handled their grades (a slightly tweaked version of my work in 52-in-52’s Magical Academies product) and let them know that we wouldn’t be doing much starship combat because it didn’t make sense for a bunch of 15 year-old kids to have free reign of a starship. (That, of course, hasn’t stopped two of my players from begging for a starship at every opportunity, of course!)

The Hook

Okay, so you’ve told your players everything that they should expect in your campaign. They know what systems are important, they know where the game is taking place, all that kind of stuff. Ideally, the information you gave your players primed them for this next step—the hook. Ultimately, for your players to really care about the place they’re adventuring, they need to be given a reason to care about that place. It can be really, really difficult; some players are gonna resist your bait no matter how masterfully you cast it. But ultimately, isn’t that the secret? If you wanna hook a player, you gotta cast the bait.

Require A Backstory and Use It Heavily

This is the place I see GMs fail the most. If you want to hook your players, have them write a short backstory AND draw on it heavily. When you ask for a background, however, don’t just have your players write whatever and submit it to you. Target that feedback. When I first started Teenaged Wasteland, I told my players that their backgrounds had to meet two criteria: they needed to fill in all the information I gave them in a short form and their backstory couldn’t be more than 750 words (about 1 page). My form was super, super simple as well:

• Gender / Species / Class. This is the basic identifying information for the game.
• Age / Height / Weight. This is vital statistics; it tells me what your character looks like. Specifically, I asked for adjectives like “average” or “emaciated” rather than numbers; telling me 6′ 2″ doesn’t mean anything without comparing it to something else, after all. But telling me that you’re short and overweight does.
• Physical Appearance. This is a section for the player to describe to me what their character looks like. All of my players mentioned skin and hair, but some included clothing, some did eyes, and others did general demeanor. By letting your players describe what their characters look like, you learn what that players sees, which lets you note the things that are most important to them as roleplayers, which is a trick you can use to get them to buy into their world. For example, one of my PCs, Coren, mentioned that they wear trendy clothing. This tells me that wearing nice or stylish clothing is an important part of that character’s identity, so I know to include NPCs who comment on the character’s clothes or include clothes shopping as a slice of life thing the player might be interested in.
• Background. This is a short section where the player tells me some important information about stuff that happened to their character. Some told me about their families and their parents, some told me about experiences they had. Some told me very broad strokes about the character’s personality. Whatever you are told, this is another aspect of the character that’s important to the player, so this section tells you what sort of things you can do to add to the player’s slice of life experience.
• Relation. This entry is a quick place where the players can name any other characters they have a connection to. This can be other PCs or NPCs that the character knows and likes, and if you have a team of four players this can be a great resource for pulling helpful NPCs or building antagonists that can carry through an entire campaign for you! Whatever you choose, nothing gets your PCs more invested than when things are personal.
• Goals. In my write-up, I split this section in twain; immediate goals and long-term goals. The former are things the character wants to do now, and the latter are things the character wants to do someday. Knowing these two bits of information helps the GM establish rewards that motivate the PC into participating in the adventurer; this section is basically your PC telling you what motivates them, so take it seriously. If you use your players motivations to lead them along the story, they’ll follow you willingly rather than you needing to rail-road them along.
• Personality Quirks. This is a little entry I like to give my players so they can tell me something interesting or unique about their character. Quirks are usually the little things that the players do to help them get into character, the small details they can focus on as they work on building their roleplaying identity for the PC. It’s a really good idea to have personality quirks as a result.

Sample Backstory

Here’s an example of a backstory given to me for Teenaged Wasteland!

With this in mind, here are some things I’ve done with this backstory to help pull this character into Teenaged Wasteland.

• Background: I did an entire story arc where the players had to spend a week with this character’s mercenary family. During this arc, I took a bunch of the basic ideas here, such as the fact that the entire family consists of solarians and that they value job completion over compassion to really give the players a good sense of how this PC got to be the kid he is. Needless to say, all the PCs left asking this character, “How on earth did you survive here for 15 years?!”
• Relations: In the team’s first starship combat, I had the enemy captain be this PC’s little sister. It was literally the first time I drew from this player’s backstory, and it was super clear that I caught him off-guard. Trust me, folks, your players give you this stuff but they never expect you to use it; USE IT. Their reactions regarding the fact that you read their stuff and liked it enough to make parts of their plot an important part of their play experience is incredibly satisfying.
• Immediate Goals: Originally I thought that the, “To Kill Goblins” bit was a joke, but the first time it came up in an RP I immediately grabbed on it. Humans in the Blood Space campaign setting have a bad history of being human supremacists, so the several times this character acted on those comments I had it be an immediate consequence for him; he was speaking to a catfolk boy at the time, and the catfolk spread around school to all the other non-humans to “watch out” for this PC. Using Discord, I was able to pass the gossip around to all the non-human PCs in the party, and later in the game when the party confronted an actual human supremacist, that same character made a comment to the PC along the lines of, “Oh, I thought you were this way too because you made that comment about goblins at gridiron practice.” Needless to say, this PC turned his tunes around after that encounter and even ended up bringing the school’s only space goblin NPC to Homecoming!
• Long-Term Goals: This one has been interesting, because literally the entire line is against the basic plot for Teenaged Wasteland. Most of the story is being kids with no autonomy, having to live under the rules and regulations of adult society and do what they say, when they say it. Part of my mission, then, is to give the player reasons to stick around, then give him the opportunity to take the freedom he wants and see what he chooses. Basically, a Han Solo moment where he’s delivered Leia to the rebels, has his ship repaired and is ready to go. Han could leave, but ultimately he stays to fight because ultimately, he believes in freedom and cares about his friends, I want to give this character a similar moment where he can choose—is leaving and getting to act on these selfish goals what he really wants, or does he want to stand with his friends and save the world?!

Looking Forward

Teenaged Wasteland is a huge part of my engagement with Tabletop RPGs right now, so I’m planning for a ton of my future content to focus around the campaign. Long-term, I think I want to talk a bit about how my special snowflake rules, as well as some of my tricks for impromptu GM storytelling. I also have written accounts of a vast majority of the RP and sessions we do, and I’m considering releasing those as content on Know Direction, but I haven’t decided yet. If you’d like to read the transcripts, so to speak, you should let me know by messaging @Alex on the Know Direction Discord! I’m never really sure how many people read these Teenaged Wasteland articles after all, and would love to hear what you have to say! For now, that’s all I’ve got. I’ll see you next time, on Guidance!

Now, my need for Discord likely isn’t the same as everyone’s need for Discord. As I mentioned in my blog last week, I invited a whole bunch of friends who have varying levels of experience with Tabletop RPGs to this campaign. Almost everyone has played at least D&D 5E or Pathfinder 1E before, but no one has played Starfinder significantly. The most experience anyone at my table has with Starfinder is the Know Direction Network’s own Dustin Knight, who ran a 8 slots of a 1st-level adventure at GenCon 2017, and while that displays an understanding of the basics of Starfinder, 3 years and a lack of getting to see many custom characters in play definitely means that Dustin isn’t exactly a powerhouse rules lawyer at my table!

No, the one thing my crew DOES have in common is the fact that none of us live near each other. Dustin and one of my players live on opposite ends of Seattle, but that’s about as close as it comes. I live in Philadelphia, one of our players lives in California, another in Boston, one in Texas, one in South Carolina, and one in New Orleans. We’re literally all over the place! And as a result, getting together around a table was never an option for us, pandemic notwithstanding. That made having a place where the campaign could live the upmost importance, so with that in mind I designed a Discord home for us!

The Nesting List

When you’re designing a Discord Server, the “Nesting List” is sort of like how the different channels is organized. Discord is split into categories that you can assign channels into; both text channels and voice channels. Here’s a brief rundown of how I set-up my server.

Campaign Info Category

This is basically my section for information about the game. Most of the channels in this category are locked so that everyone can see them and react to them, but no one but the GM (that’s me) can post there. The idea is that this is a place where I give official information.

• Introduction: This is basically a welcome page that also gives some very basic instructions about how to proceed with things like character building.
• House Rules: This section has a HUGE list of special house rules that I incorporated for Teenaged Wasteland. Some of it was product access, other parts of it was a unique “perks” system that was based on Perram’s Special Snowflake Cards for PF1.
• Setting Lore: This channel has some basic setting information about the Blood Space Campaign Setting, by Everybody Games and Rogue Genius Games. It also has some specific information about the Imperial War College, the school where my campaign is taking place.
• Downtime: This channel has link to the Downtime Rules from Character Operations Manual (as hosted by the Archives of Nethys) as well as some modifications to how downtime works in order to keep it in spirit with the setting—a high school. I also wrote up some examples of how the downtime system works in practice.
• Classes: This channel basically just listed the academic classes that the PCs could take. Teenaged Wasteland has five mandatory classes (Language Arts, Math, Science, PE, and Social Studies), and each PC gets to pick three electives they can participate in. I used my Adventurer’s Academy rules (which was published as part of Rogue Genius Games’s Starfinder 52-in-52 product line) as the basis for these rules.
• Starfinder Products: This channel has helpful links to all the major Starfinder products; specifically, links to their product pages at Paizo. I am nothing if not an enabler.
• Starship Combat: This section has links to all the starship roles and their major crew actions for Starship Combat, as well as general rules for how to engage in Starship Combat. In my opinion, this gameplay mode is the most difficult part of playing Starfinder.

Teenaged Wasteland Category

This category is essentially the major directory for everything involving the Teenaged Wasteland campaign. It’s set so you need a special permission (the Teenaged Wasteland role) in order to view or post in these channels. I can also type @Teenaged Wasteland to message everyone with that role on my server simultaneously, which is really helpful for scheduling new sessions!

• General: This channel is my general chat, meaning the players can talk about whatever we want here. I commonly use this chat to schedule my next sessions by using @Teenaged Wasteland, combined with emojis for quick voting. We also tend to talk Out-of-Character in General Chat as stuff is happening in the In-Character channels.
• GM Notes: Originally, this was a secret channel that only I could see that I used to use this channel to write notes about what happened during the games, but it ultimately proved REALLY ineffective because of how much out-of-session RP my players do. Instead, I took all the notes out from here and used Microsoft OneNote to make a massive OneNotebook that I used to store all my campaign setting lore. MUCH easier to navigate!
• Pop Culture: One of my most popular Everybody Games product lines is the Pop Culture Catalog, and I love doing tie-ins when I can. As a result, I’ll commonly post little snippets of Pop Culture here that the players can reference; popular movies, holovids, sports teams, that sort of thing. This channel is locked so anyone can see it but only I can post in it.
• RP Rolling: This channel has a dice-rolling bot programmed into it that my players can use to roll dice when they’re roleplaying during in-character text RPs. I use Dice Maiden for this.
• Sidestories: One of my players LOVES gathering everyone’s RPs into text documents and posting them to share, so I made her a sidestories channel to post them. However, I’m thinking about removing this channel and switching to, like, a G-Suite or something else; a bitter online repository for stories, as the channel basically requires you to upload a word file and download it whenever you want to read it. Not super great, but adapting any technology takes time and innovation!
• Voice Channels: Currently I have four voice channels; a General channel that we use when actually playing the game, and three “Team” channels that I use when I need to split the party. Because I’m diabolical. I can simply click and drag my players into different voice channels and BOOM! I’ve prevented them from speaking to each other. One of my favorite tactics with online roleplaying is this idea that I can unevenly distribute information between players using all these tools that I have, and splitting the party when it makes sense is one of the best ways I can do this.

Player Categories

In my eternal benevolence, I’ve given each of my players their own category in the Teenaged Wasteland discord. Each of them has complete control over their category; they can add new channels, edit and upload whatever they want, and so on. The catch? The players can’t see each others’ categories. (Though as the GM and admin, I SEE EVERYTHIG.) This is another way that I enact that idea of uneven distribution of information between my party members, which you’ll see more clearly momentarily.

• Private General:
• Downtime Tracker: This section has all the info my players need to conduct their downtime and reminders of the different days of the week in the Blood Space Campaign Setting. More than this, however, its where my players plan their characters’ weekly downtime routines and post them for me to see. I take the information from those routines and play it into my spreadsheet to determine their grades for the grade boo kchannel.
• Dice Rolls: This channel is exactly like RP rolling, but for private dice rolls pertaining only to the player for whom the category belongs. My players commonly use it to roll dice in secret from each other as well as to make their downtime rules, since those take a LOT of rolling.
• Secret Messages to the GM: This channel is designed as the proverbial, “Pass the GM a Note” but in Discord form. Basically, if my players want to ask me anything in secret, they can do so here.
• Grade Book: Part of the players’ downtime has them attempting checks to maintain or boost their grades, which I track using a rad spreadsheet that I designed. Each in-game week I take a snapshot of each character’s grades and post them in the Grade Book channel.
• Personal Comm Unit: This channel is 100% dedicated to phones. Specifically, if my players want to text / have phone conversations with NPCs, they do so here. The joys of playing Starfinder!
• In-Character Diary: This is pretty self-explanatory. This section lets my players write a diary if they want to. Currently only Dustin really uses it!
• RP Events: This channel is for any in-person RPs that my players want to engage in. Do they want to meet a favorite NPC for coffee? Go shopping? Do anything else that doesn’t require another PC? They RP it out here, then I take the RP and copy it into my Microsoft OneNotebook for quick viewing AND add the event to my official Teenaged Wasteland calendar of events. (A must when you have as much downtime RP as Teenaged Wasteland does!) “But Alex,” you say, “What if your players want to RP with EACH OTHER?” Excellent question, strawman audience! I will now answer that question.

Group RP Category

The final category in my Discord (besides an off-topic category for memes and art, of course) is the Group RP category, which features numerous channels that are each named for a specific groupings of PCs. I have these categories alphabetized by first name, so if one character’s name is Yoko and the other is named Coren, then the channel would be Coren-Yoko. These channels are set so that only the characters who are named by that channel can view or post in them, so Coren-Yoko is only accessible by the characters Coren and Yoko; no other PC can see it. In addition to having one category for each PC combination, I also have a Boys-Dorm channel, where all the boys can talk together as though they were in their dorm, a Girls-Dorm category (same idea, but for the girls), and an Everybody category, which is a channel for everybody! I’ve also made it clear that my players can request more specialized channels based on their need, but I wasn’t going to sit down and do every channel combination larger than 2 people if it wasn’t needed! THAT WOULD TAKE FOREVER!

Discord Roleplaying

So, what do my players primarily use the Discord for? Roleplaying out of session. I have a general policy that as long as the RP happens on the Discord it can be canon, and I draw plot points from the RPs ALL the time for my actual in-person adventures. This style of RP is super important to my slice-of-life style of storytelling for Teenaged Wasteland, as a ton of the stuff that my players are roleplaying are things that would be REALLY boring if I made them all sit in front of a virtual tabletop talking about it. Discord RP-by-post lets them roleplay at their own pace in canon time slots that fit the story’s calendar.

Of course, I strongly enforce the idea that the players can’t RP when it’s inappropriate to do so. For example, right now my players are in a spooky, haunted asteroid base so their RP has to center around the events that are happening. Essentially, they’re allowed to roleplay whatever and whenever they want between the in-game dates that each in-person session takes place in, but once a session happens they’re no rewinding before it happened. So right now the seven of them are RPing their reaction to having fought a small host of undead, and it is GLORIOUS. Tons of drama, blaming, and in-fighting that will 100% carry over to the next in-person session. Drama that is perfect for a game featuring a party of teenagers, but would have felt like it was slowing down the pacing of the in-session adventure if it happened while we were all at th etable.

And that’s sort of the big advantage of Discord roleplaying; if you give your players the space to breathe and really enjoy the events that transpire, and put the work in to make those events happen, they help your players develop their characters into actual, breathing people while giving every other PC a chance to see that PC as a person. I can’t tell you how many times I wrote a character background and motivation that I loved, only to have an adventure where no one ever really got to interact with that character’s backstory because of a misconceived notion that “combat is the means that drives the story forward, so if we’re not in combat or rolling dice in some way the story is stalled.” Using Discord to give my players a bit of slice of life has been EXACTLY what they needed to get the opportunity to explore their characters as people and to show each other the people their characters are.

Looking Forward

Teenaged Wasteland is a huge part of my engagement with Tabletop RPGs right now, so I’m planning for a ton of my future content to focus around the campaign. I really want to talk about my interviewing of the players and how I’ve used what I’ve learned to build cohesion in story and theme around them, and I also want to talk about how I portray NPCs in my campaign. I also want to share some of my tricks for impromptu GM storytelling, which is actually pretty easy because so much of my slice-of-life stuff is written down as, like, notes. So I can give EXAMPLES! Hooray! Plenty of things to talk about, and we’ll explore together next time, on Guidance!

Alex: “Dustin … have you ever PLAYED Starfinder?”

Dustin: “Yes! Once. At GenCon. The year it came out. In a 1-hour quest. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Designing a Homebrew Campaign in 2020

Now, I’m not gonna lie. My homebrew game is the first campaign that I’ve run that wasn’t an Adventure Path since 2015, easy. It’s been a LONG time. So I wanted to make sure I did things right. Or at least, right by me.

1. Gather Players

For me, the most important part about designing any campaign is making sure that you have players to play in it. This was pretty easy for me; I’m an officer for a Horde guild in World of Warcraft, and I had a bunch of friends that I raided with and did dungeons with that I knew played Tabletop RPGs and would be interested in an online game of Starfinder. I decided pretty early on that I was going to have a fairly large group—I offered player spots to a total of seven players including Dustin. It’s a lot, but it’s not unmanageable in Starfinder, with its lower-tier magic system and it’s relatively simpler action economy. Compared to both editions of Pathfinder, after all, Starfinder is much more about modifying and improving the game’s basic actions than adding oodles of new actions to the list of things you can do. Plus, you know, I helped write most of the biggest Starfinder books that are out so far, and all but one of my players has experience playing D&D 5E or Pathfinder 1E. I was confident that I could handle teaching them the game, and four weeks later I’m still confident that I can teach them the game.

2. Pick a Setting

Once you have the players assembled, I think that the next most important task is actually choosing a world for your game to take place in. When you’re doing this, you can generally go one of two directions—you can design the setting yourself or you can use a preexisting setting. I, of course, am extremely difficult and did both of those things. I used an established campaign setting that I am one of the primary authors of, the Blood Space campaign setting, by Rogue Genius Games and Everybody Games. I had just finished writing and publishing Blood Space Gazetteer: The Radiant Imperium when I got the itch to run a new campaign, so I decided immediately that I was going to set my game in Blood Space, using a lot of the new lore that I wrote specifically for the Radiant Imperium.

When you’re talking about Starfinder, though, you also need to pick a “scope” for your setting, in that you need to know whether your campaign is grounded in a specific location or whether you’re travelling all around the galaxy. From what I’ve seen Starfinder Adventure Paths tend to do more of the traveling; so far I’ve completed Dead Suns, have played a good chunk of Book 1 of Against the Aeon Throne on Stellar, and I’m nearing the end of Signal of Screams in a home game, and all of those adventures change which planet you’re on from book to book. I didn’t want that, in part because I haven’t published fully fleshed out gazetteers for every planet in the Blood Space campaign setting yet, but also because I’m dealing with new players and I want them to feel like the places they’re going to matter. This is a personal preference, but I find it’s really tough to connect with the places you’re going to in adventures that have you constantly moving around, especially when the places you’re going to aren’t well foreshadowed. I think it’s one of the reasons Kingmaker remains one of Paizo’s most popular adventure paths to date; you’re building a place, which means you’re building a connection to that place. It’s a powerful thing.

With all those ideas swirling around in my head, I decided that i wanted to set my game on the planet Tor in the Blood Space campaign setting’s Xa-Osoro System. I was going to allow characters and story beats from the Pact Worlds and the Veskarium if the players expressed interest in using them for their characters’ backstories, but I wasn’t going to involve either system in the campaign at all beyond lip service. The campaign would stay  in the Radiant Imperium and use Tor as a base of operations of sorts. Now, with this as the limiting factor, I needed to come up with a reason why the players couldn’t just up and leave Tor. At least, not at first. Ultimately, I decided on a high school campaign, which brought me to my next task:

3. Pick a Tone

When you’re designing a campaign, an effective tone is critical. What’s the campaign going to be about? Obviously having a game about a group of high schools using a system that’s largely based around combat means one of two things: I was going to need to go out of my way to make sure that the players weren’t in any real danger, or I was going to need to go DARK. In order to do this, I drew on some of my favorite media involving Starfinder and high school.

• My Hero Academia is an anime about a bunch of kids with super powers going to school to be super heroes. One of the things I love about My Hero Academic is that the show really goes out of its way to give you time to get to know its main, secondary, and tertiary characters. I wanted a game where the people that my players interacted with mattered, so My Hero Academia was a real influence for me. I also really liked the idea of, “These kids are the best of the best, and as a result they have more privilege than ordinary kids would have,” as an explanation as to why my PCs would have powerful weapons and/or a starship.
• Ender’s Game is a book about a boy who gets enlisted into a military school. He’s super bright and smart, but in the game he becomes a military pawn for the government and commits some real heinous atrocities. One of the things I really liked about Ender’s Game is the idea of the kids having to routinely practice military drills and exercises against each other; that seemed like something the Radiant Imperium would want its young cadets to do.
• Kill La Kill is an anime about a high school that basically serves as the fascist government for an entire community of people. Kill La Kill is a really good anime despite its raunchiness, but what I really liked about Kill La Kill for this game is the idea that the kids would have a pecking order in the school, and maybe that pecking order meant something to the society beyond it. I didn’t want to go to the Trigger levels of extreme that are shown in Kill La Kill, but the idea that the kids have status for being at a prestigious military school was something I really liked.
• God of High School is basically an anime that’s all about a fighting tournament arc. It’s really gonzo, over-the-top action along the lines of Dragonball Z or Bleach, but it’s really grounded in the characters’ motivations alongside a really interesting subplot. I liked God of High School for its escalation; the kids were always strong, but in a short period of time things really get out of hand. Kill La Kill is like this too, and I think that as the story goes on I want it to explode in its escalation.
• Fruits Basket is a slice of life anime that’s all about kids being kids in High School while unraveling a supernatural plot. To be honest, I don’t think that the supernatural elements of Fruits Basket have gotten the attention they serve in Seasons 1 and 2, and that’s something I’d like to do better with in my campaign. However, the idea of a story that unfolds based on the characters that the players interact with and how well they like those people really appeals to me; dumb action is fun, but in my experience what makes a campaign a legend to its players is the emotional connection that’s established between players and the world, and Fruits Basket does this REALLY well.

So with this in mind, my tone is definitely an action-heavy series with a strong emphasis on slice of life roleplaying to further the plot and the action.

4. Know What You’re NOT Using

Oftentimes your campaign can be defined as much by what you choose to exclude from your influences as what you are purposefully omitting, because that helps you focus your game.

• Harry Potter is, like the #1 thing people expect me to base my game on the minute I say, “It’s about high school kids!” I’m not really interested in doing things like houses, which I feel replace interesting character dynamics with stereotypes about the people who belong to said house, or OP all-powerful baddies like Voldemort. Moreover, the story really focuses on Harry in Harry Potter, which makes sense I guess, but there shouldn’t be one main character in a tabletop RPG. Also, RK Rowling is a huge trans-exclusionary radical feminist and I refuse to let myself consciously draw upon the work of someone who actively hurts transfolx.
• Star Wars / Star Trek / Firefly are basically the biggest, most used properties when it comes to science fantasy, and honestly? Meh. Like, they’re not BAD, but they feature space stuff so prominently that I kinda don’t really need them. Plus starship heavy games for teenagers in high school feels weird.

Looking Forward

I’m planning to talk more about Teenaged Wasteland in the future, particularly about how I’m using limitations imposed by the pandemic in order to enrage the engagement of my players. In my next article, I’m going to talk about my use of Discord and how I’ve been using that to promote the slice-of-life style storytelling I set out for as one of my major tones for the campaign, and I also want to talk a bit about communication with players and the weaving of stories together into a whole. Oh, and I also want to talk about NPC portrayal. So yeah, plenty of things to talk about! But we’ll worry about that next time, on Guidance!

The sick Teenaged Wasteland banner was made by one of my players as the banner for the Teenaged Wasteland Roll 20 game. He gave me permission to use the banner for my articles, but wishes to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him Witch. Thank  you so much for letting me use this, Witch!

Okay, so do you remember almost two months ago when I wrote Alex Analyzes: A Hero Forge Color review? Yeah, I can’t believe it’s been two months earlier. Welcome to the Twilight Zone that is pandemic time, am I right? In any case, Hero Forge’s Marketing Director, Fox Howell, reached out to me and offered to send me some sick Hero Forge 2 miniatures that had been updated with their latest calibrations of their new Color Printing technology. I said, “Heck yes, I love minis!” and BOOM. They gave me swag. So please, when you read this interview, keep in mind that I am 100% biased, partially because I was given swag and partially because I am obsessed with HeroForge. You might recall that I used to do a lot of custom modeling back in the day, and let me tell you, as someone who has previous little time to model miniatures or paint anymore, Hero Forge will always be my jam. Take that as you will.

With this in mind, for these articles I try to be a journalist first and a fan second, so let’s go and do the thing, shall we?

What’s New With Hero Forge?

As you might have heard, Hero Forge literally just underwent a massive upgrade as its Kickstarter-promised features went live to the general public. We (us Kickstarter backers) have had these tools for about a week longer, but they’re still very much new as they were only published on September 29th, 2020. The UI improvements that went live with this update are spectacular, and I’m going to walk through what’s new with creating a mini after the update. Please be advised that the original walk through in the previous Alex Analyzes article (link above) is much more in-depth than this, as for today’s article I’m only going to show you places where the UI has changed and how you use it.

Hero Forge Pro Subscription

I mentioned in my Walkthrough that there’s a new Hero Forge Pro subscription. Basically, you pay a monthly fee and you get access to a number of bonus perks. You can read about them here, or see my summary below.

• Token Maker Unlimited: Anyone can make a token, but you have to pay to download it. If you subscribe to Hero Forge, you can use TMU as much as you want.
• Portrait Mode: Did you like my fancy portrait? Portrait mode is exclusive to Pro subscribers.
• Library: You can save custom paint colors as a Pro subscriber, import paints and paint sets from saved miniatures, and create special folders for organizing the multitude of miniatures you’ve made (see the pic below).
• Importing Outfits and Poses: If you make a custom outfit or pose on one mini, you can important it to future minis.
• Early Access: Hero Forge does weekly content drops on Tuesdays, and Pro members get access to that content early. You also get early access to new features.
• Badge: Everything you do can have a fancy little badge on it. Neat!

Hero Forge Color Calibration Updates

In addition to playing around with Hero Forge 2.0, the Hero Forge crew sent me some test miniatures using their latest color printing callibrations! Not only did Hero Forge send me two brand-new sample minis, but they also gave me credit to purchase a reprint of my Hansune Mini! So now, allow me to share those with you!

Hero Forge Samples — White Kitsune and Bunny

Up first are the two miniatures that Hero Forge sent me as a sample — a nine-tailed kitsune and a bunny. This REALLY made me laugh; Fox knew that I was a kitsune fan from my first article so he definitely set me the Nine-Tailed Fox mini purposefully, but there’s know way he could have known about Luis Loza’s rabbitfolk ancestry, or that I would show him this IMMEDIATELY after opening it up in the package. Luis’s verdict? “Omg, that is wonderful.”

Both miniatures have extremely vibrant color palettes — some of the nicest color I’ve seen from the new Color Printing technology. The white nine-tailed fox has this lovely red glowing effect for its eyes, and the little candles are really cute. 3D Printing technology works REALLY well for stone and wood; the ground on these minis looks significantly better than the metal I got on my first Hansune mini. The precision on the bunny’s armor is especially incredible; when it showed it to Ryan Costello, he made the comment, “I thought this level of precision in 3D Printing was years away!” No, its very much here and it’s very much AMAZING.

Print Redux — Hansune

Can you tell which Hansune is the original, and which is the new one?

…

The answer is that the new Hansune is on the right; I built the new one using the updated “furry mammalian” body type like I originally designed in the article from last week, so the feet are a little different and the hands are actually the color I wanted originally. But let’s talk about the color quality, shall we?

There’s not a ton of difference between the pre-calibration and post-calibration colors. The metal parts of the base still look kind of faded, and there’s not really any color to speak of in the eyes. This was also true for the bunny model, though, so it might just be that at this size the printer doesn’t have the fidelity to do color beyond giant globes, like how the kitsune clearly has red, glowing eyes. One of the big things that this print doesn’t show is that the new miniature’s gun is a LOT straighter; the original one looks like it might have warped a bit and is slanted off to the one side, but the new one is straighter and looks more like a weapon. In both cases, however, the new gun doesn’t have any of those neat glowing effects from the build. The orange fur on the mini is also a little bit brighter on the new one, but the detail work is the same (which is good; the highlights on the tail were wonderful).

Overall, there’s some small improvements to the printing but it’s not earth-shatteringly different from my first miniature. I’m currently chatting with Hero Forge to determine if the differences were supposed to be more pronounced; its possible (but unlikely) that they simply got my order too soon and printed the second one under the original calibrations. I’ll add an update to this section after I learn more!

In Conclusion,

The improvements to the Hero Forge UI are phenomenal, and their new services are pivotal during an era that is seeing virtual tabletop grow at unprecedented rates. With Hero Forge, you can make custom icons and tokens to to precisely your specifications, and the process has never been easier or cleaner. Some of the portrait style prints that you can get are so good that if Hero Forge offered a commercial license to Tabletop RPG designers, I am positive you would see a MASSIVE number of Third-Party Publishers using art generated with Hero Forge modeling in their products. It’s just that good.

To say that my new Hansume mini didn’t impress me wouldn’t be entirely fair or accurate. I mean, I gushed hard about this mini in my last article, and the second mini is virtually identical to the first one. Which, I suppose, is the part I’m not really impressed by. The miniature itself impressed me, but seeing as the calibrations didn’t appear to make a massive difference in the quality of the product I ordered I’m not really convinced that they’re all that necessary. Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind if it turns out that my mini wasn’t printed at the new calibrations, which means I’ll have to buy more Hero Forge to review. Oh no. 😛

In any case, Hero Forge 2.0 is every bit as amazing an industry leader as I said it would be back in July. They’re ahead of the pack and just keep sprinting forward into the future! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to making MORE Hero Forge minis for #HeroForgeTuesday! Ciao, and have an awesome week!

Today, Alex is Analyzing Critical Hit Cookies!

What is Critical Hit Cookies?

So you might not have heard of Critical Hit Cookies before. CHC is a bakery of sorts, run by Karee Vogrin. Karee bakes all of her confections in her own kitchen using her own ingredients, which range from cookies to brownies to blondes. Critical Hit Cookies is known for being a cookie delivery service; Karee packs the cookies by hand and mails them to your door! According to their site, Karee opened Critical Hit Cookies because she was a fan of Tabletop RPGs and started listening to the Order of the Amber Die podcast episodes. She would bake them cookies for their marathon games, and the members of the Order told her that her cookies were so good  that she had to open a business and bake cookies for people professionally!

You can check out Critical Hit Cookies’ website here!

They also have a Twitter handle!

Ordering the Cookies

Price Point

As you can see from the images, a dozen Critical Hit Cookies runs you $15.00 USD plus shipping fees. Since you’re looking at about 12 cookies per order, that means each cookie is priced at just a little bit over $1 per cookie. In my experience, that is fairly reasonable, especially since these aren’t like Keebler Elf cookies; these are high-quality, sophisticated Mordant Spire cookies!

Alex’s Experiences

Alex has a sweet tooth? No way, never would have guessed it. I mean, just because he makes a PaizoCon tradition out of eating a monstrous-sized sundae and has been on record as saying, “The best part about PaizoCon is PaizoCon. The second best part about PaizoCon is all the free cookies this hotel gives us,” doesn’t mean he has a sweet tooth. NO. WAY.

I’m afraid that I don’t have many pictures for this next section, dear readers, for a very embarrassing reason. I confess to you all that I have a MONSTROUS sweet tooth, and in my excitement to eat these cookies I forgot to take pictures. Oops!

The cookies arrived at my doorstep about 3 or 4 days after I had placed my order. Karee sent out a thank you message almost immediately, and her site has built-in shipping updates so you know exactly when your cookies will be arriving. I consider myself pretty fortunate; Karee is a fellow Pennsylvanian, so shipping from her to me didn’t take very long at all. If you’re out of state, consider the the distance between you and PA as well as the fact that the USPS is currently having its capacity gutted in an attempt to steal the elec NO POLITICS ONLY COOKIES!

For my first order, I decided to try Karee’s Chocolate Chip Crunch Blondes. Believe it or not, but despite my colossal sweet tooth I had never had a blonde before, so I was eager to try something new. My order arrived in a standard USPS Priority Mail Tracking, and it was stuffed in a way that would have made Crystal Malarsky proud. No, the box didn’t explode glitter all over me and my home, but it was filled with special home-made packing paper that was cut in fun zig-zags from a pale yellow paper. Critical Hit Cookies’ logo features a dragon holding a massive cookie, so I think that this paper was designed to look like gold, giving the impression that I was opening a dragon’s horde of cookies. Very nice presentation there.

In addition to the paper gold, the sugary gold was also inside! I’m not really sure what I was expecting to receive in the mail; maybe a stacked tray of cookies on a plate wrapped in plastic wrap or something? Critical Hit Cookies is FAR more professional than my meager idea of how a cookie should be shipped, however. Each cookie was custom- wrapped and sealed for freshness inside of a cute, little plastic baggie that had the Critical Hit Cookies dragon logo stamped on it. They were packed throughout the box; fishing out all of them took a fair bit of time, and while the pessimist in me noted that it took a fair bit of time to find all of the cookies inside of the box, the kid in me loved the treasure hunt for cookies amidst the treasure-paper. Also included is was a bit of cardstock with a bit of advertisement for Critical Hit Cookies and a signed thank you from Karee, written in gold sharpie. I too am a fan of gold sharpie, so this was much appreciated.

Onward to the cookies! If I was a Pathfinder Second Edition RPG character, my ancestry would be something like “Sweettooth Human,” because literally everyone in my immediate family has a sweet tooth; even my sister, who does the low-sugar diet (bless her tenacity). Naturally, my family was super excited to hear that I had purchased cookies, and everyone tried at least one. (Of course the rest of the cookies were MINE. I BOUGHT them. They can’ts haves them!) Now, obviously taste is subjective and not everyone appreciates the same food textures, so I can only speak from our experiences eating Critical Hit Cookies, but here’s a brief summary of our experiences eating the Chocolate Chip Crunch Blondes.

1. They are decadently delicious.
2. They are really moist, one might say almost gooey in texture. Yet despite of being a fairly gooey cookie, they also have this unique crunchy texture to them that I’ve never had in a cookie before. Based on the ingredients list, I think this was the addition of Rice Krispees to the blonde. I can’t stress how much this added to the cookie’s enjoyability.
3. The cookie hit the perfect balance between cookie and chocolate ratio. The chocolate didn’t overpower the cookie taste, and the cookie taste didn’t overpower the chocolate. It was truly a blissful balance of sugary flavors.

After my family tried their cookies and we discussed their flavors, I quickly grabbed the rest, brought them into my office, and hid them. THEY ARE MINESES! THEY CAN’T HAVE THE COOKIES! Needless to say, I really enjoyed these cookies and have recently placed an order for more.

In Conclusion,

Tie-in products like coffee and cookies for nerds inherently have me skeptical. I’m not big on the pandering, so things like the Goblin Brand coffee or the Song of Ice and Fire liquor sets don’t really appeal to me. Like, you can’t just slap a fantasy name onto a food product and expect me to go all crazy over it. I’m not 12 years old; I want a quality product. So obviously, I was a little bit skeptical at first ordering from Critical Hit Cookies. This seemed like a bakery that was just trying to cater to nerds, and putting a dragon on the logo and naming your cookies after nerd culture isn’t enough to make me interested in your product.

I originally decided to order myself some Critical Hit Cookies after Know Direction’s head honcho and resident G.I. Joe fanatic Ryan Costello bought a few dozen of them and mailed them to Paizo’s Warehouse crew as a gift. We got immediate feedback that these cookies were special, and so I decided to order myself a dozen. After all, we’re in the middle of a pandemic with death tolls mounting and increasing evidence of election tampering NO SORROW ONLY COOKIES! Let me tell you, readers, I am SO glad I bought these cookies. Critical Hit Cookies is the opposite of the kind of company that I’m wary of. The cookies themselves are phenomenal; they are artistically baked by someone who is clearly a gourmet baker AND a nerd. The product is delicious and the nerd trappings are genuine. I thought the dragon iconography and the “cookie horde” aesthetics were adorable, not asphyxiating, and the product was so wonderful that I felt I could proudly share them with nerds and non-nerds alike. This is one damn fine cookie, and I highly recommend Critical Hit Cookies for all your needs, whether it’s for your next TTRPG session, to share a special treat with your family, or to save off the crushing despair of the prospect of another year of quarantine under a science-denying administration NO SAD ONLY SUGAR.

Until next time, I’m Alexander Augunas and I’m signing out!

The envoy is one of my favorite character classes. I love skill monkeys, and I love that the envoy is great at non-magical support. It’s really refreshing to see people helping people without resorting to magic in a Tabletop RPG. The envoy sometimes gets flack for its design, but I’ve found it to be a super versatile class that can cover a ton of Starfinder character builds. Don’t believe me? Let me show you a build that I’ve dreamed up for a Dawn of Flame adventure path group that I got invited to, code name Dr. Envoy!

Character Build

• Race: Any.
• Ability Score Priority: Cha, Int, Dex
• Theme: Battle Medic
• Class: Envoy (Medic) 12
  • Alternate Class Features: motivational expertise 1d6+2 (replaces expertise)
  • Expertise Talents: Miracle Worker (3rd), Surgeon (7th), Battlefield Medic (11th)
  • Improvisations: Inspiring Boost (1st), Quick Quaff (4th), Bedside Manner (6th), Inspiring Oration (8th), Watch Your Step (10th), Quick Inspiring Boost (12th)
  • Replacement Class Features: Doctor (2nd), Medical Specialist (9th)
  • Skill Expertise: Medicine (1st), Diplomacy (5th)
• Feats: Medical Expert (1st), Weapon Specialization: Envoy Weapons (3rd), Quick Draw (3rd), Quicker Trickler (5th), Skill Focus: Medicine (7th), Extra Resolve (9th), Tailored Serum (11th)

Playing the Build

So, the goal of this character is to do whatever it takes to keep allies alive using good, old-fashioned science rather than spellcasting. This build accomplishes this using several different class features and abilities that work together to make the treat deadly wounds task of the Medicine skill as efficient as possible; this is very important, as the number of times per day that you can treat deadly wounds is limited based on your equipment. By default, you can treat a character once per day if you have access to a medkit, an additional time per day if you have the patient in a medical lab. Interestingly enough, you can use an advanced med kit to set up a temporary one-patient medical lab, and based on the rules written for the Medicine skill I think that this temporary lab qualifies for a second use qualifies for the “additional uses of treat deadly wounds” clause, but you’ll have to talk with your GM about that. The difficult part, of course, is that treating deadly wounds is time-consuming and can’t be done nearly as often as casting spells.

Enter this build.

• By default, Treat Deadly Wounds heals Hit Points equal to the level or CR of the creature you’re healing, plus additional Hit Points equal to your Intelligence modifier if you succeed by 5 or more (DC 30 for a basic medkit or DC 25 for an advanced medkit).
• Miracle Worker (Expertise Talent) and Bedside Manner (Improvisation) both have a component that allows you to add your Charisma modifier to the total amount of hit points you heal with Treat Deadly Wounds. Unlike bedside manner, miracle worker requires that you beat your target’s DC by 5 or more as well. It’s important to note that currently these two sources of additional Hit Points stack both with themselves and your Intelligence bonus. Furthermore, miracle worker allows you to forgo your expertise bonus on your Medicine check to treat deadly wounds in order to heal a buttload of additional Hit Points if you succeed; it looks akin to the highest-level mystic cure spell that a mystic of your level could cast.
• Medical Specialist (medic archetype, 9th level) allows you to add your level to the number of Hit Points that your treat deadly wounds cures when you succeed at your check by 5 or more.
• Surgeon (expertise talent) allows you to use treat deadly wounds on your targets additional times each day, but you have to do so at a higher DC. Battlefield Medic (expertise talent) gives you a free treat deadly wounds on anyone that you stabilize or stop the bleeding of with Medicine, once per day. (This doesn’t count as your treat deadly wounds for that target, and if you have Surgeon you can use Surgeon to use Battlefield Medic again.)
• Motivational Expertise (alternate class feature) allows you to add your expertise die to any healing that you do, but the healing is Stamina Points. Doctor (medic archetype) causes any healing that your equipment or actions do that heals your target to full Hit Points to “overheal” into their Stamina Points, meaning excess Hit Point healing is applied to Stamina Points.

So with all this in mind, let’s figure out what a treat deadly wounds from this build can do.

• Assuming you used the ability priority I listed (Cha, Int, Dex), then at 12th level you probably have Cha 24 and Int 20 if you maxed out those ability scores (start with Cha 18 and Int 15 at least, then boost Int and Cha at 5th and 10th levels, then apply a +4 personal upgrade to Cha and a +2 Upgrade to Int).
• Medicine is an Int -based skill, so if you maxed out Medicine and have the Battle Medic theme (which buffs Medicine), you’d have a Medicine bonus of +23 using the statistics I provided here. (This includes +3 from Skill Focus [Medicine] and +1 from your theme). I didn’t include the minimum result from motivational expertise since I assume we’ll be forgoing that bonus using miracle worker to try and get the bonus healing.
• Since the Medicine DC is 20 to treat wounds if you have an advanced medkit (you should at 12th level), this means that by default your checks should always succeed, so you should always heal your target for their level / CR plus your level / CR plus your Intelligence bonus +5) and twice your Charisma bonus (+7). Using the numbers we have here and assuming you’re healing a party member (who’d have the same level as you), that’s 36 guaranteed healing, plus 1d6+2 Stamina Points and any overhealing from this action spills into the target’s Hit Points. That’s fine, but a 3rd-level mystic can heal the same amount of Hit Points using healing touch for the same number of times per day. The big advantage is that if you have sprayflesh, the Medical Expert feat allows you to do this as a full action instead of 1 minute (the latter of which is STILL faster than a mystic’s healing touch, though, which takes 10 minutes).
• As a result, you REALLY want to be going for miracle worker’s bonus dice. This means you have to hit DC 25 instead of DC 20, which means you have a 5% chance of failing the check baseline. Assuming you pass, you’d heal your target for an additional 12d8 healing. That changes this to 12d8+36 Hit Points of healing, which overflows into Stamina Points, plus 1d6+2 Stamina Points. This is a substantial number, as a 4th-level mystic cure spell heals 12d8 + your Wisdom (assuming you use it for the Hit Point healing and not the breath of life effect).
• At 13th level (which is beyond all but one Adventure Path, the new Devestation Ark AP), you’ll get an extra +1 to your checks, plus a max-level personal upgrade, which means you can do this at-will. Additionally, if you can weasel additional bonuses elsewhere (such as a +1 enhancement bonus from a biohacker’s serums or a mechanic’s miracle worker, or a +2 racial bonus from your race such as for being a lashunta, a ghoran, or a hanakan), you can hit this magical “always max” healing sooner. You simply need a Medicine bonus of +24 or better.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Alex! This build is too powerful. You can out-heal the mystic with this build!” Okay, fair. Here are some considerations, however, regarding why it might not be as crazy as it seems.

• This build can’t heal multiple targets efficiently. A healing-focused mystic can pick up channel heal and life link, both of which are super efficient for healing.
• This build needs a full action to heal one target for this massive amount. A healing-focused mystic uses a standard action.
• A healing focused mystic can heal their target for as many additional Hit Points as they’re willing to sacrifice. (This puts the mystic in danger, of course, but the fact remains that a mystic can theoretically hit MUCH higher numbers if they want to.)
• Treat deadly wounds has a failure chance at all but the highest levels of play.
• This ability only works with a total of two improvisations (one normal, one replaced with an archetype feature), two expertise talents, a feat, and a skill expertise. It represents a sizable commitment of the envoy’s class features and feats, all of which are limited abilities. A mystic need only choose a single spell to accomplish a similar feat.

It’s also worth noting that massive healing via treat deadly wounds isn’t this character’s only trick. You can also do a lot with serums. Quick Trickler allows you to administer a serum as a standard action instead of a full action, and serums count as a weaponlike item for the purpose of the Quick Draw feat, so you could move, draw a serum as a swift action, and administer as a full action. If you took the time to make the serum into a tailored serum, you would get to add the serum’s item level to the amount of healing it does (+9 for a mk 3 serum), and using that item activates motivational expertise, healing the target for an additional 1d6+2 Stamina Points. You can actually buy a ton of low-level serums and just sit there, trickling them down a patient’s throat to fully restore their Stamina Points and Hit Points using a combination of doctor and motivational expertise. You’re also extremely good at treating poisons and diseases thanks to bedside manner and medical specialist, and inspiring boost allows you to use your actions to restore a friend’s Stamina Points after they get hurt. I’d also recommend picking up a small arm called a shield generator; at this current level, you could buy a 9th-level one and use it to give a target a force field / energy shield that absorbs the next 2d6 damage that the target takes. Considering the cost of using all those sprayfleshes and serums of healing, an ounce of prevention from this shield gun could in fact be worth a pound of cure!

And that’s my doctor build! Hope you enjoy it, and please continue to stay safe while quarantining and check out all of our awesome Know Direction Network content throughout the week!

Today, Alex is Analyzing HeroForge Color!

What Is HeroForge Color?

HeroForge is an online 3D miniature customization and printing tool. HeroForge uses state-of-the-art 3D moldeling technology to allow you to assemble your perfect miniature from hundreds of different appearances and styles and then ship those designs off to a 3D printer (currently Shapeways at the time of writing) to be printed in your choice of material and shipped to you for your games. The default miniature size is perfect for the 1-inch squares so commonly used in ttRPG games, and you can scale them up to be larger if you want.

If you’ve never heard of HeroForge before, you can try it out here at this link.

HeroForge Color, by extension, is the code name given to the 2.0 version of the HeroForge tools, which are designed with color 3D printing capabilities. HeroForge Color is designed to allow you to color the characters you design using a myriad of options and coloring styles that are specifically designed to replicate the techniques of master painters. HeroForge Color is currently in Beta, and was funded via Kickstarter. You can learn more about HeroForge Color at their Kickstarter Page at this link.

I was a Kickstarter backer, so not only do I have access to the Beta Tools, but I designed and printed a 3D HeroForge Color model. So today, I’m going to go over the steps quickly before sharing my thoughts.

Designing a HeroForge Color Miniature

HeroForge Products

HeroForge color has three primary products that you can purchase using the assets you’ve assembled using their 100% free 3D character building tools: they have a download, a printed plastic, and a token maker. A fourth product, professionally painted miniatures, is incoming but is currently unavailable to Beta testers.

Downloads

If you’re like the Know Direction Network’s own Perram, you might have a 3D Printer at home. And if that’s so, you can actually purchase the raw files from HeroForge that you can use to print your miniatures however you want. I don’t have a ton of experience in this regard, but I’ve downloaded HeroForge files before and had other companies who are cheaper than Shapeways (HeroForge’s printer) print them with varying levels of success; Shapeways is expensive, but they’re high-quality. Perram says that HeroForge is super generous with the tools they send you via this Export, and a skilled 3D modeler could essentially build a T-Pose rigging of their character using HeroForge’s software and remodel it however they want on their own. Of course, this would require a TON of work on your part, and HeroForge makes modeling easy enough with its Advanced Modeling tools! Finally, most of us aren’t going to have need for that level of fiddliness, but it’s something to keep in mind when choosing whether or not you want a Download of your miniature.

3D Printing

This is the service you *probably* came to HeroForge for. The printing tools allow you to print your miniature in a number of different materials, ranging from plastic, premium plastic, premium color plastic, steel, bronze, and pre-painted premium plastic. I’ll go over each of these options quickly, but I only have actual consumer experience with plastic, premium plastic, and premium color plastic. After each material’s name, I’ve noted how much it would cost to print my Hansune miniature in each material.

• Plastic (19.99 USD): This is the cheapest option, but it tends to have a rougher texture, which might make the miniature look weird. I don’t recommend this one; James had a miniature in this material, and while it looked nice and he enjoyed it very much, I didn’t think the colors sat well on the plastic, not compared to the premium plastic miniatures I’ve ordered. I would recommend this purchase if you’re like James, and want a custom miniature at an economic price and aren’t too concerned with how the miniature looks painted; after all, most people will only see it from table distance, and they look fine from that vantage.
• Premium Plastic ($29.99 USD): This is what I would recommend purchasing if you want a miniature that paints real nicely. The miniatures are extremely smooth when they arrive; next to no texture or roughage, and the plastic they’re sent to you in is decent at holding paint without any base coats (I still recommend base coats, however). I would recommend this purchase if you’re like Perram, and are planning to put a lot of time and effort into painting your miniature; premium plastic is for painters first and foremost, or for people who want their miniature to look good upon close inspection.
• Steel (34.99 USD): This is like Super Plastic; the miniature rough and bumpy because steel, but unlike the plastic or the premium plastic, this miniature is DURABLE. You are unlikely to harm this miniature ever. But be advised, this is BUMPY, and if you paint the miniature you will notice the texture. Furthermore, where you could take a file or some other tools and try to even out the plastic miniature, this is STEEL; good luck smoothing this miniature out! I recommend the Steel miniature if you’re like James AND you have a good reason as to why you need an extremely durable miniature; maybe you’re clumsy, maybe you have kids at home, maybe you’re just paranoid. All valid, all good reasons to invest in a steel miniature if you are okay with the very rough texture.
• Nylon Plastic (59.99 USD): You’re not going to use this, not likely anyway. Nylon Plastic is a white, rough, sandpapery finish that is basically like the standard plastic, but much more expensive. Why? Nylon Plastic is specifically priced assuming that you’re printing a “jumbo-sized” miniature. It’s for miniatures with up to a 2-inch base, so it needs to be sturdier to avoid the miniature’s delicate bits collapsing. Currently this is the only material available for such large miniatures, so you’ll use this if you want an XL miniature and you won’t if you don’t.
• Bronze (99.99 USD): If Steel is Super Plastic, than Bronze is Super Premium Plastic. This is a heavy-duty material that prints smooth. I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen a Bronze miniature in-person so I can’t comment on their quality. That $100 USD price tag is more then I can afford for a miniature, but if you want a miniature that you can paint to be smooth and gorgeous while also being reasonably impervious to damage, consider bronze if (and only if) you have the money to spend. In any case, I would only drop for a bronze miniature for a character that I knew I was going to be playing a long time, and that I knew the GM would work with me if my character died so I didn’t waste $100 USD on a fancy mini that I had to shelve.

Premium Color Plastic (44.99 USD)

Here’s the topic you’ve been waiting for though, right? You want to know how my Hansune miniature, which was printed using color plastic, looks. That’s the new, revolutionary technology after all! I can’t blame you for being curious. Well, don’t you worry—I HAVE received my miniature, and I will GLADLY show you what it looks like!

Some overall thoughts, a lot of the unique color choices I programmed into the miniature don’t show up well. Especially metallic “sheen” and glowing effects; you can barely see the subtle yellow lights on the sniper rifle, and the metal on Hansune’s armor and the ground basically just looks gray in person. That being said, the precision on this is phenominal. I checked the whole miniature over, and nowhere does it look like one area’s color “bleeds” into the other. I’m 100% capable of slapping on some metallic paint, maybe a color wash, but I will tell you this readers—I could NEVER be this precise with my paint brush. I simply lack the skill. Honestly, this miniature’s coloring looks a lot better than many of the prepainted miniatures I’ve got in blisters from Wizkids and the like. Am I said the eyes have no color? Sure, but I couldn’t paint good-looking eyes anyway. This far exceeded my expectations, and if you’re like me and you want a quality, colored miniature but lack the time or skill (or both) to get that on your own, HeroForge color is AMAZING, especially considering the cost to use color plastic is just $15 more. Sure, that’s a 50% increase in price, but $15? Getting someone to paint your mini costs a TON more normally.

Prepainted Premium Plastic (149.99 USD)

This option isn’t up for Preorder or Betatesting yet, but based on how HeroForge has described the service, it sounds like you’ll design your miniature and your color palette, they’ll print the miniature for you using their standard plastic options, and then they’ll hand the miniature and your color palette to an artist to paint for you. So that’s where all this money is going—assuming you get a premium plastic miniature, this is an extra $110 USD on top of that. And honestly? That is an EXTREMELY fair price. I wrote an article on my experiences getting a miniature custom-designed and painted years ago, and that process—custom modeling and custom painting, probably cost me about $500 USD; $300 or so to get the mini made, and another $200 to have it printed and painted. So this? This is VERY affordable if the quality is high. Similar to the Bronze models, you’re not going to want to do this unless you’re sure your character has some longevity I think, and honestly I think that HeroForge should offer this service with their bronze material too so you can make sure that you get your custom-painted miniature in a high-durability material if you want it; probably looking at roughly $300 for that, which is STILL cheaper then my experience (and in a much stronger material). So I think this is a good deal if it’s something you want.

Token Maker

The last service I’m going to show you in this article is the new Token Maker! Basically, you can use HeroForge to take special screen shots of your miniature, then outfit that miniature with a number of unique borders to make a token similar to what you’d use on Roll 20 or other virtual tabletops.

So, is this tool worth it? Not sure yet, to be honest. Currently Token Maker is free for all HeroForge Color backers to use, but at some point it will become a paid service to everyone who didn’t purchase the Lifetime Color Token subscription reward. (Both Luis Loza and I purchased this; HOW COULD YOU NOT UNLIMITED TOKENS!) Based on the Kickstarter, a 1-year unlimited access to the Token Maker was valued at $39.99 USD, while Lifetime Access was valued at $149.99 USD. So I imagine that the Token Maker will cost SOMETHING to use, but hopefully the price point is kept low enough that people actually justify using the service. Personally, I think somewhere in the ballpark of $2 to $5 is probably fair, but we’ll have to wait and see.

In Conclusion,

It’s a regular occurrence for new Tabletop RPG products to be released and for people in the community to tout them as an “industry game changer.” Most of the time, I feel that this is just a way for someone who’s in the know about the industry to comment on their excitement for a project—especially one that completely defied their expectations. In my limited experience with the industry, however, HeroForge Color is *the* Game Changer that no one in the industry seems to really be acknowledging yet. Yes, normally things that people say will “change the industry” are business practices based, they’re ways for Tabletop RPGs to make money. But if those same industries aren’t careful, HeroForge Color might just be how industries *lose* money. Especially prepainted miniatures, because sweet Daikitsu this service is incredibly good. The ability for players to custom-design their perfect characters across a variety of IPs and settings is next to none, and has 3D printing technology improves and becomes more affordable, the value of this service will only increase. A world where a 3D printer is as common a household item as paper printer or a computer isn’t far off. We’ll see it in my lifetime. And when that happens, HeroForge stands poised to be at the top. Their service is phenomenal, their product, even in Beta, is of extremely high quality. And it will only increase in quality as time goes on. Personally, I’m of the opinion that companies like Paizo and Wizards of the Coast should be investing in HeroForge as the industry leader of the future that it will no doubt end up becoming. See if you can’t get them to work with you, get your partnerships in with them now before they blow up. Ride that wave to success. But then again, maybe I’m just dreaming of a day when I’ll be able to make myself a skittermander miniature in HeroForge!

Until next time, I’m Alexander Augunas and I’m signing out!

So, if many of the gamers in our Network are comfortable with this change, why am I writing an article about it? Well for starters, the internet is a toxic place where not every person is as inclusive as the Know Direction Network, and an article on the subject has value for that reason alone. But in addition to that, I think it’s worth exploring why something is racist so we as a community can do a better job identifying it in the future. Before I start, however, I feel that it’s important for me to mention that while I have some experience regarding the psychology of racism, I’m ultimately not a person who’s experienced a lot of this first-hand and am by no means an expert on the topic, I suggest that you use my article both to serve as a springboard for own reading, preferably featuring people of color and psychologists who’ve studied the psychology of racism. In fact, as I’m writing this I’m currently reading a book called White Fragility on my Kindle; check it out, I’m only a few chapters in so far but it’s a very good read on the subject.

Speaking of subjects, let’s get started!

Defining Racism

Before we get too deep into this discussion, I think it’s worth making sure that we have a strong definition of racism so we know what we’re talking about.

Racism is:

• The belief that different groups of humans are superior to others based on differences in genetics and/or behavioral traits corresponding to social perceptions of each group’s physical appearance.
• Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people due to the aforementioned beliefs, both at an individual and a systemic level.

So with these definitions, lets take a look at some specific elements.

• Racism based on genetics tries to explain differences in physical or cognitive ability between people as a product of their ancestry.
• Racism based on behavioral traits tries to explain differences in behavior between people as a product of their ancestry.
• Social Perception is the study of how people form opinions about one another.
• Individual racism refers to a specific person’s racist beliefs or assumptions.
• Systemic racism refers to racist beliefs that are encoded into a society’s functioning. It can be further broken down into institutional racism (discrimination that derives from individuals in power enforcing the racist dictates of authority figures) and structural racism (discrimination that derives from inequalities in how society operations or works for its people).

This is a lot to take in, and not all of this probably makes sense to those unfamiliar with the philosophies of racism. Basically, racism is based on how one group of people perceive another without anything other than anecdotal evidence and manifests either as thoughts or acts committed by an individual or by the inner workings of a society.

There’s also one REALLY important idea that we need to understand when we talk about racism as it pertains to the WWW, the “White Western World,” and that’s the idea of white fragility. Racism — and by extension, racists — have a very nefarious trick that they’ve been using for over a century to silence conversations about racism, and that trick is basically the transformation of the discussion of racism into a moral issue. Before I explain further, let me confirm something to all the white people reading this article right now. At some level, you’re racist. I am too. How does that make you feel? Did you shrug it off? Feel a little uncomfortable? Did reasons that I’m wrong immediately appear in your mind, either as a flood that caused you to stop reading my article for a few moments (or longer), or as a nagging itch in the back of your brain? Maybe as a cute laugh that you just did. “He’s not talking about me.”

I am. And the fact that most white people react how I just described is proof of it. That reaction is white fragility, the most insidious tool of racism. It’s a complex idea that can be basically described as white people’s complete and utter inability to handle being called racist, because for us being a racist is morally repugnant. I can very clearly remember a time when I was little, maybe 5 or 6, and our neighbors moved in. They’re a wonderful family of Jamaican ancestry, and they were the first black family I had ever seen. One day after I had met them, while I was in my backyard with my Mom, I turned to her and asked her, “Why are they black?” My mother got really hushed, as if she were worried that our neighbors would hear what I had said. She replied to me, “Never ask that again! You can’t ask people about being black.” And so, for many years, I never did.

That was my first experience with the idea of white fragility. I’ve never spoken with my mother about the incident, but looking back on the memory now, what I remember was panic. She was worried that she had did something wrong, that her 5 year-old son was a racist and was trying to correct it. Even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, she was so worried about the perception of having a racist son because that would mean other families would assume she was a racist herself. And—here’s the key idea—to most whites, being racist is a character flaw that cannot be corrected. Many white people view racism as being a thing that “bad people” do or are, so they tell themselves that they aren’t bad, so they can’t be racist. They never stop to really question themselves or their institutions. That’s how events like the murder of George Flyod end up blindsiding so many white people, or why so many white people get upset when people claim institutions are racist. Analyzing those institutions forces white people to come to terms with the idea that they hold inherent advantage simply because of how they look. Police socially respond to white people differently then people of color, and as we noted before, racism is based entirely on social perceptions.

Racism is wrong. It is wrong to look at another human and make assumptions about them physically, cognitively, or behaviorally based on nothing but their ancestry, on the color of their skin. But we need to move past the idea that racism is a rot that cannot be cleansed, and we need to observe the fact that a system built by racists enforces those racist beliefs upon its people. This is true in society, it is true in tabletop RPGs, and it cannot change unless we look those truths in the eye, understand where they came from, and change them.

Now, let’s begin.

In the Beginning: Tolkien, Orcs, and Racism

Tolkien, the writer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is not the first fantasy author, and certainly not the last. But when analyzing modern fantasy Tabletop RPGs, we need to recognize that most of these works are derivative in some way from Tolkien. His writing has shaped modern perceptions of things like elves and orcs and introduced beloved ideas like hobbits, the foundation of TTRPG’s halflings.

Tokien was an exceptional man. He was a soldier who fought against fascism in Europe, a linguaphile  who literally invented his own language, and an author of a series of novels that would capture the imagination of millions for generations. He was also the product of a racist, white Western system and whether or not he himself was racist, institutional racism permeates Tolkien’s writings. A great place you can see some of this is reflected in the very structure of Middle-Earth, Tolkien’s so-called Morality Map.

In Tolkien’s works without fail, the “more good” something is, the further West on his world map that place is. The “more evil” something is, the further East that place is. Don’t believe me? Gondor (the kingdom of men), the elf nations (Lindon, Doriath, Lorien), and the Shire are all located towards the West of this map, with most of the elf nations closer inland (the “center” of the region) reflecting their aloof disposition. Mordor, the realm of the orcs, is located to the East. A West-versus-East battle, eh? Well, surely Tolkien didn’t do something outlandish like base his orcs on any Asian cultures ri—

In a private letter, Tolkien describes orcs as: “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” (Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. (1981), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-395-31555-7)

Oh.

For the record “sallow” is a shade of muddy yellow, racists often refer to people of Asian ancestry as having yellow skin, and a mongol is a native or inhabitant of Mongolia, an Asian country located due north of China. Pretty damning, if I say so myself.

But, then again, Tolkien does paint a story where people of different ancestries (humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits) need to work together in order to overcome a dangerous enemy.

Oh, you want ANOTHER letter? Well, okay…

In The Two Towers, the character Treebeard says, “It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman’s Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it. I wonder what he has done? Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!” (The Two Towers, Lord of the Rings Book 3, Ch. 4, “Treebeard”)

Oh. OH. So, Tolkien privately compared orcs to mongols, an Asian ethnic group, and then added to his book that it would be a “black evil,” which not only has issues because associating blackness with evil is also racist, but it’s also directly stating that it would be evil for the Men (who are all coded as white Europeans, remember) and Orcs (who Tolkien associates with Mongolians) to blend. And, you know, maybe I’m pedantic but another word for “blending” is “mixing….”

But hey, I’m sure none of this affects our hobby, right?

Oh $#%^.

A Rotted House Built Upon a Fetid Swamp

So yeah, Gary Gyax definitely based a ton of Dungeons and Dragons off of Lord of the Rings and was a product of the same systemic racism as Tolkien (Surprise!), basically every one of Tolkien’s ideas that’s rotten found its way into D&D, and for good measure he added his own! Let’s take a look at some of the problems D&D has or has had, shall we?

Orcs

Orcs are traditionally tribal or clan-based (likely stemming from the Medieval mongolian clans of Asia) who are berskers, violent, and above all else, irredeemably evil to the point where the game has historically stated that most half-orc children are the result of nonconsenting sex usually instigated by the orc. Even after wiping away some of Tolkien’s racism literally just painting orcs green, slapping them on the butt, and saying, “This baby is now so not-racist!”, orcs remain incredibly racist. They’re typically portrayed as tribal savages who are incapable of having larger societies beyond simple family structures, which is still a stereotype that many Mongolians face today due to their nomadic traditions.

Drow

Drow are a creation wholly of Gary Gygax, and oh boy are they famously racist! Drow have been traditionally depicted as evil elves who despite everything good and wonderful about their surface kin. And oh yeah, before Paizo came along their skin was black. They were also notorious torturers and slavers.

Not only are they basically identical to elves, who are presented as “always good,” in every way (except they’re black), but they’re also notoriously evil and cruel, favoring things like torture, slavery, murder, and more. Their matriarchal society is also one of constant distrust and backstabbing, where people get on top by being the cleverest or the most powerful. There is a lot wrong with this portrayal, but some of the big ones include the idea that a group of dark-skinned people would naturally gravitate towards evil (compared to their fair-skinned cousins, who are portrayed as usually good), the idea that a matriarchal society would also inherently lean towards evil, and the idea that a predominately black society would exalt in slavery (more on that later).

Gnolls

Gnolls are partially a Gygaxian concept; they’re ravenous hyenafolk who are spawned from fatten hyenas who dined upon the flesh of a demon lord and became mindless servants to that entity. But the notion of hyenas who could assume human shape is a real folklore myth in Africa called boudas (it’s less of a anthromorphic hyena thing and more of a witch who turns into a hyena thing). They’re seen as demon worshipers, usually dressed in ragged skins and armors with very basic weapons, incapable of real society beyond the “pack” which is basically portrayed as a tribe, and of course they like to eat people. Oh, and hyenas are from Africa and gnolls are often coded as African. (I talked a lot more about the problems with gnolls a few weeks ago. Check it out!)

Vegepygmy

Vegepygmies are short humanoids who are born from mold that transforms other creatures into these vaguely humanoid plant monsters. So, what’s the problem? A “pygmy” is literally an African ethnic group that’s known for below-average heights (vegepygmys are Small) that has long been stereotyped as being cannibalistic, mindless, and overall evil with weird fetishes and trinkets. Just like vegepygmys! It’s really gross.

I picked four examples of racist ideas in Dungeons and Dragons, but there’s a lot more if we really took the time to dive into them. However, I want to stop for a moment and talk some common, racist thems that plagues these ancestral groups.

The Brute Caricature

The brute caricature is a stereotype that was (and still is) commonly applied to black men. It’s the idea that the brute is an innately savage, animalistic, destructive criminal who deserves punishment, even death. They’re often described as hideous, terrifying, and predatory, and you’re probably thinking that this sounds a lot like how games portray orcs and gnolls. And you’d be right! This is a stereotype that is applied to basically every “always evil” ancestry in Tabletop Roleplaying Games; its basically the monstrous “license to kill” card, something that we see applied to black people as recently as a month ago at the start of the George Floyd riots.

Reverse Racism

Reverse-racism as its usually applied refers to the idea that acknowledging and trying to change systemic racism is inherently racist against white people. The idea is commonly applied to things like Affirmative Action or diversity hiring, which states that organizations “hired a black person to fill a quota,” which is then perceived as discrimination against whites based on a social perception. This is bullshit because it’s an example of white people make the outcome (them not getting a job) about themselves rather than about minority groups. Programs like affirmative action exist so that black people can overcome social perceptions that would prevent them from finding employment or gaining access to certain opportunities. Affirmative action and similar policies don’t take away opportunities from black people, and the notion that they do is racist because it frames the issue as if the opportunity were being taken away from a white person who deserves it more; the implication is that the black person is inferior to the white person and is taking something they have no right to.

Applying the idea of reverse racism to the ancestries mentioned above (drow and gnoll), note that both of these races are black coded in some way (drow have black skin, gnolls are based on an animal from Africa and are loosely tied to African mythology). Both of them are portrayed as slavers: drow and gnolls are infamous for slavery; gnolls in particular run the slave trade from a city located in the fantasy Africa of Pathfinder’s Lost Omens campaign setting.

This was actually a common argument of white slave owners in the 1700s and 1800s; “If they could, these black people would enslave us right back!” The fact that drow and gnolls are coded this way and, moreover, and described this way universally is a form of reverse racism, which is itself racist.

Othering

Every single one of these ancestral groups also has another issue—in being presented as always evil, they are presented as the Other. Othering is a concept where an individual or system establishes a discriminatory social perception in an effort to essentially establish racism. When othering occurs, its usually for the specific purpose of justifying some sort of action between You, the group you identify with, and The Other, the group that isn’t your group.

A great example would be during 9/11, where Middle Eastern people (specifically followers of Islam) became The Other. According to the authority, they attacked Us, so We had to retaliate against Them. It was Us against Them. American versus Muslim.

The concept of Othering is usually used to incite violent and hatred towards another group, justified in the idea that they’re The Other. When we’re talking about history, think of the acts of violence committed against Muslims during 9/11. Think of the innocent Japanese-American citizens thrown into Japanese interment camps in the US. The innocent lives ruined during the Red Scare, when everyone was out for blood in a communist witch-hunt. The innocent women murdered for suspect of witchcraft in Salem. The village of orcs slaughtered you slaughtered for gear and XP for simply being near the road you were traveling on. They don’t matter. They’re not Me. It’s Me versus Them. They’re the Other.

It’s inherently racist, and it teaches us that these ancestral groups are subhuman, which is a problem when your game specifically codes orcs like mongols, Africans like gnolls, blacks like drow. Because in coding the fantasy people as the Other, you’re also coding the real-world people they’re based on as the Other too.

Why Race is Racist

The final thing I want to talk about is the concept of race as it pertains in fantasy RPGs, and why it’s racist. Race is a social construct. It’s the idea that there are different “breeds” of humans based on physical traits, ancestry, and geographic location. Science has proven that the physical traits that make us look different from each other account for less than a percent of our genetic code. And yet the idea of race persists, and it’s an idea that has hurt millions across history and continues to hurt millions more today. And that’s where the issue with the term comes in. It doesn’t matter that games are trying to come up with a “fantasy” way to say the word “species.” It doesn’t matter that race as we know it doesn’t exist in these games—the word itself is poison. It’s a venom that reminds people who’ve suffered its existence of the pain they’ve endured, of the othering that affects them and their families every day. The concept is the problem, but usage of the term as a game mechanic perpetuates the concept simply by keeping the word in use. That’s why it’s so important that Paizo and others have begun to change that in our hobby. Race is a made-up term, so we should just throw it away and make up a new one.

So, What Do We Do?

After an article FILLED with doom and gloom, you might be wondering, “How can we fix this?” The simple answer is that there’s no simple answer, but we can make sure that no ancestral group in our games is a monolith. Let people be individuals, and if something’s humanoid you should never assume it’s morality. Basically, stop doing “Always Aligned” and let people be people. To that end, shift the conversation away from how the ancestry acts and towards whattheir cultures value. What types of trades do their cultures have in common? How do they organize? What are some of their advantages and disadvantages? Focus on what a typical member of the ancestral group does daily, rather than making monolithic statements about how “All dwarves are gruff drunks, all elves are beautiful and mysterious.” Talk instead about how dwarf culture is a drinking culture where all important decisions are made with an ale in hand, and how that can be difficult to navigate for dwarves who don’t care for it. Talk about how elven speec and social norms are extremely intricate due to extreme levels of subtext that takes decades of etiquette courses to master, and that elves who have trouble doing so often end up leaving elven society for civilizations less labyrinthine. In short, leave room for people to be people. Let there be diversity within every culture.

Moving beyond this, we honestly might need to abolish all but the most biological of ancestry traits. The fact that Intelligence is an ability score in our games is inherently problematic (stay tuned for a future article), but when we frame cultural learning as something inherent to the species, we start to create a social heritary for them based on Intelligence. That’s a major problem when so many of the ancestries have roots in real-world ethnic groups and cultures for the same reasons I’ve said before: when you make generalizations about a fantasy people with clear roots in a real-world ethnic group, you extent those generalizations to those real-world people.

Finally, we need to encourage diverse people to join the Tabletop RPG field, give them a place to shape and tell their stories and experiences, make them more than so-called “diversity hires” as Wizards of the Coast seems to have done to Orion Black.

But before we can do anything, my fellow white people (especially the white people who make and purchase our games), need to step past our own systemic fragility, stop being afraid that people won’t like our content if we acknowledge and fix our racist system, and do better, looking to the voices of people who’ve been hurt by our words in doing so.

I’m Alexander Augunas, and I’ll see you next time.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games since 2007 after a friend pretended to be his father in order to smuggle him out of high school so his gaming group had enough people to run a module. Today, Alex is the owner and publisher of Everybody Games, a co-host on Know Direction: Beyond and RPG Design Club, and a player on Stellar. You can follow Alex’s exploits on Twitter (@AlJAug), on Facebook, or on Patreon. Know Direction fans are also welcome to “@Alex” him on the Know Direction discord server!

Most of the ideas in this article are synthesized from my own thoughts, but many of the terms came from other, better established sources such as:

• Forms of Racism, Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre
• Revisiting Race in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Constructing Cultures and Ideologies in an Imaginary World, Dr. Dimitra Fimi
• Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, The Artifice
• Was Tolkien Really Racist, The Conversationalist
• The Brute Caricature, Ferris State Museum

Interested? Well, let’s take a look-see at some relevant information for ourselves.

But First, an Anti-Meme

Before we get started, we should take some time to clarify what, exactly, the Gap is. According to the Starfinder setting, courtesy of StarfinderWiki:

The Gap is a recent phenomenon affecting all the memories and records across the multiverse. All memories and records of the planet Golarion were removed from all of the multiverse’s inhabitants along with all memories of an indeterminate number of years. Even the deities are silent on the subject, vaguely referring to the safety of the lost planet of Golarion. No members of any species remembers what happened during the unknown number of years covered by the Gap.

Very little is known about what happened during the Gap, or even how long it lasted. Judging from carbon dating and astrochronology, it seemed to have lasted several millennia, although the exact end dates vary by location. Some planets record that it ended 310 years ago, while on others it seems to have ended only 275 before the present day.

Alright, so basically all this information makes the Gap an anti-meme, and if you’re thinking that means “the opposite of a JPEG or GIF that you share on your personal comm unit with your friends,” you’d only by half-right. You see, the idea of a meme is actually much older than the internet itself. The term was coined by a 1976 book by one Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene. Rather than bore you with all the details, I’ll skip to the part where Dawkins coined the term “meme.” In Dawkins’s work, a meme is an element of culture that an outsider might view as a replicator, specifically that the element self-replicates when exposed to humans. Examples include music or fashion; when a human is exposed to a song (such as Strawberry Machine Cake’s late hit single, Operation: Songbird Smash!) or a new fashion trend, it replicates in that the new human begins humming the song to themselves or tapping along, or changes their style to match the latest fashion trend. The modern definition of a meme has been further extrapolated on to the following, courtesy of Wikipedia:

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

So, a meme is an idea, symbol, or practice that spreads from person to person within a culture through media like speech, gestures, rituals, or some other imitable phenomena. But I said that the Gap is an anti-meme, so what does that mean? Well, if you go with the practical definition, an anti-meme is basically a “meta-meme,” or a meme that pokes fun at existing memes, usually by changing a popular, imitated format. For example, if you were going to anti-meme a popular fashion trend, you might wear an outfit that is counter to a popular, well-established trend. Actor Billy Porter’s tuxedo dress is a worker example of an anti-meme in fashion, but it’s not what I’m talking about when I call the Gap in Starfinder in anti-meme. No, when I’m talking about an anti-meme, I’m talking about something that is the literal opposite of the definition of a meme. Allow me to show you.

Damn, that tuxedo dress looks good!

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.

A meme anti-meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads dwindles by means of imitation from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying expropriating a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying dissipating cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.

To wrap this up, an anti-meme is an idea, behavior, or style that removes itself from the a person’s mind as soon as it’s comprehended. As a result, memes don’t convey information, they remove it. In the case of the Gap, the anti-meme wiped away everyone’s memories of everything involving the cultural ideas, symbols, and practices associated with the time frame that the Gap took place in. This is why the Gap’s memory deletion is so selective, and why organizations like the Starfinder Society are able to find clues and information that helps them narrow the frayed edges of the Gap, so to speak. The Gap isn’t absolute brain bleach; as an anti-meme, it was only capable of removing ideas and information central to whatever the precise anti-meme was. That’s why you might remember that you have a wife and that she likes Strawberries and that her name is Jolynne, but you might not remember where you met or where you went on your first date. Your wife’s identity has nothing to do with the anti-meme that lays hidden at the center of the Gap. But if you met her on Golarion, and Golarion is, for some reason, the anti-meme….

However long that might have been, which is impossible to know because that information has been deleted from people’s minds. Right?

Reading the Frayed Tapestry of Space-Time

The funny thing about an anti-meme is that you can’t definite it by its qualities. As soon as a quality of an anti-meme is known, then by definition knowledge of that quality must be immediately lost because it belongs to something that actively expunges itself from your mind. So, how do you define an anti-meme?

If you’re a fan of the SCP Foundation like I am, you might know the answer to this conundrum already. For those who’ve never heard of the SCP Foundation, it’s a community of storytellers who write a shared public mythos centered around the SCP Foundation, which stands for Secure-Contain-Protect, the Foundation’s ethos. At its core, the Foundation claims to be an agency devoted around removing paranormal creatures, objects, and hazards, securing them in safe locations, containing their anomalous properties, and protecting both the world and the hazards themselves from one another. If you have extra time on your hands, I strongly recommend checking out the SCP Foundation mythos through Youtube audio readers like The Exploring Series and TheVolgun (those two are my personal favorites).

One of the SCP proposals is SCP-0055, which you can read here (and I’m going to be spoiling in literally the next few lines). SCP-0055 is an object, but nobody knows what it is. As soon as anyone encounters it, they immediately forget everything about it as soon as their attention drifts elsewhere. Furthermore people are unable to take actions that would create any physical products detailing the mysterious SCP-0055. For example, anyone tasked with drawing the object loses interest and forgets what they were drawing as soon as their focus shifts from the object to the paper in front of them or the pencil in their hand. Likewise, anyone who looks at a picture or recording of the object forget what they saw as soon as they turn their attention away from it. As you know from above, this object is a literal anti-meme, but the proposal offers us an interesting way to gleam information about an anti-meme that is absolutely applicable to the Gap, which I’ll report here.

In the SCP universe, the researchers were able to remember things that SCP-0055 wasn’t, even though they instantly forgot anything it actually was. This is because things that aren’t an anti-meme don’t purge themselves from your mind because they’re … not an anti-meme. Confused? That’s fine!

Taking this principle to the Gap, we know Golarion can’t be the anti-meme. If it was, people wouldn’t remember that Golarion existed, which we know is true because we’re told many times that Absalom Station occupies Golarion’s place in orbit around the Burning Mother and the system is named the Golarion system. So whatever the reason for the Gap, it isn’t Golarion per say, but no one knows where it is anyway. Now, what else can we tell? Well, we know that the Gap ended between 300 and 275 years ago; the fact that there’s some debate about means that the anti-meme was likely active up until 275 years before the current time, but it stopped affecting some places as many as 300 years ago (which is the official start of the Starfinder timeline anyway).

What else do we know? Well, we know that the Gap wasn’t 6,000 years ago. How do we know this? By being good Starfinders and investigating the places where the “fringes” of the Gap exist, of course! This paragraph of information is from the ijtikri article in Alien Archive 3. I’ll highlight the important part.

Ijtikris started as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Adoption of stone tools 6,000 years ago allowed them to implement agriculture, build villages, and fend off predators. When vesk starships landed on Vesk-2, the ijtikris had city-states with iron-age technology. Resistance to vesk rule was brief. Within several years, the planet became part of the Veskarium. Ijtikris who have just emerged from the sea readily adopt almost any accepting group as surrogate families, so they are natural recruits for Veskarium organizations. Modern ijtikris have largely adopted vesk culture. Those who remain on Vesk-2 contribute to local industries, such as fish farming, salt production, and defrex ranching.

Do you see it there? 6,000 years ago! Based on the fact that we can remember the date, we can ascern that the Gap wasn’t 6,000 years ago, and since the Gap (as we currently understand it) is a period of time with a definitive start and end, we know that the Gap occurred over a span of 6,000 to 300 years ago! So, what else could I find? Eagerly I dove through my collection of Starfinder books, using all manner of searching tools to aid me and, and I found … nothing. Absolutely nothing! As far as I can find, this note from Vesk-2 is the first definitive year we have of something happening more than 300 years ago.

Which makes it all the more important.

In the meantime, my dear friends, I will continue hunting for any more dates that make their way into Starfinder canon, and hopefully together we can put together the mysteries of the Gap, as all good Starfidners should! But until then, see you next week!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Whenever I talk to people about Pathfinder 2E, Paizo’s shiny new game, the two things that I always hear that people love are the 3-action system and the changes to the Medicine skill that essentially allow parties to function without a healer, provided they have enough time to lick their wounds. One of those two things is MUCH easier to adapt to Starfinder than the other, and it isn’t the action economy. So let’s take a few minutes and look over how to implement something like PF2’s Medicine rules to Starfinder!

What Do We Have?

Before we start porting over rules from a different game system, let’s start by looking at the rules we already have. In Starfinder, there are three different ways that you can use Medicine to heal Hit Point damage from characters. Let’s take a look at those methods now:

Long-Term Care

You can use Medicine to provide long-term care to a living, wounded creature. This can take a day or more, requires a medical lab or a medical bay on a starship, and has a DC of 30. If you succeed at the check, the patient recovers Hit Points and ability score damage (as well as recovers from poison states) at twice the normal rate. If you exceed the DC by 10 or more, the patient recovers Hit Points and ability score damage (as well as recovers from poison states) at three times the normal rate. You can tend as many as six patients at a time, attempting a check for each one each day to determine the rate of healing. You cannot take 20 on a Medicine check to provide long-term care.

Providing long-term care is the first real way Starfinder has to provide healing, and it is NOT easy. It has a DC 30 Medicine check strapped to it, meaning that if you perfectly optimize your character at 1st level you need a natural 20 to provide it unless you have a racial bonus to Medium checks, in which case you need an 18 or better. So, what’s your reward for this super-difficult check? You recover Hit Points and ability damage at twice the normal rate. So, what’s the normal rate?

• Recovering Hit Points Naturally: With a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or more), you recover 1 HP per character level. Any significant interruption during your rest prevents you from healing that night. If you undergo complete bed rest for 24 hours, you recover 2 HP per character level.

• Recovering From Ability Damage: Temporary ability damage heals at the rate of 1 point per night of rest (8 hours) for each affected ability score. Complete bed rest for 24 hours restores 2 points for each affected ability score. Ability drain does not heal naturally. See Ability Damage, Ability Drain, and Negative Levels on page 252 for more information.

That’s pretty darn slow! Of course in Starfinder, you heal all of your Stamina Points after 10 minutes of doing nothing, so it’s not like restoring yourself is extremely difficult. More like restoring yourself above half your Hit Points is extremely difficult. It takes a lot of time to provide long-term care (8 hours or 24 hours) and doesn’t give a huge return compared to magic (1 HP/level for 8 hours or sleep or 2 HP/level for 24 hours per sleep). One thing I don’t like about this rule set is the inefficiency. Sleeping for 24 hours literally heals less than sleeping for 8 hours 3 times (aka 24 hours) would no matter how you look at it, and considering the lowest Hit Point class has 5 Hit Points per level, resting isn’t a good way to help anyone get back onto their feet. That can be really frustrating when you’re trying to build a party because the mystic’s niche is so grounded that you sort of don’t have party healing in core without one.

Treat Deadly Wounds

You can use Medicine to restore Hit Points to a living, wounded creature. This takes 1 minute, and the DC is based on the medical equipment used. If you succeed at the check, you restore 1 Hit Point per level or CR of the creature you are treating. If you exceed the DC by 5 or more, you add your Intelligence modifier to the amount healed. A creature can receive this treatment only once every 24-hour period, unless it is delivered in a medical lab. Most medical labs allow you to treat a creature’s deadly wounds at least twice per day.

This is Starfinder’s “fast healing” option, and right away you can see it has some benefits and some downfalls. For one, it heals as much as 8 hours of rest with 1 minute of work, which is nice. However, it has a 24 hour limit and the number of Hit Points healed doesn’t scale well at all; only 1 point per level, with a bonus equal to your Intelligence modifier if you pass by 5 or more. You might also notice that Treat Deadly Wounds doesn’t have a DC; instead, its based on the kind of medkit you have access to. A basic medkit sets the DC at 25, while an advanced medkit sets the DC at 20. Every Starship with a medical bay has access to an advanced medkit (medical bays count as those after all), but that means that until you’re 5th level and able to afford your own advanced medkit for the field, you’re only really able to use deadly wounds on a person once per day when you’re not on your starship. All in all, a difficult check combined with a low result makes treat deadly wounds … not the greatest.

Pathfinder 2’s Way

So Starfinder’s medical healing is extremely limited. Let’s take a look at Pathfinder 2’s version for comparison.

Treat Wounds

[ Exploration ] [ Healing ] [ Manipulate ]

You spend 10 minutes treating one injured living creature (targeting yourself, if you so choose). The target is then temporarily immune to Treat Wounds actions for 1 hour, but this interval overlaps with the time you spent treating (so a patient can be treated once per hour, not once per 70 minutes).

The Medicine check DC is usually 15, though the GM might adjust it based on the circumstances, such as treating a patient outside in a storm, or treating magically cursed wounds. If you’re an expert in Medicine, you can instead attempt a DC 20 check to increase the Hit Points regained by 10; if you’re a master of Medicine, you can instead attempt a DC 30 check to increase the Hit Points regained by 30; and if you’re legendary, you can instead attempt a DC 40 check to increase the Hit Points regained by 50. The damage dealt on a critical failure remains the same.

If you succeed at your check, you can continue treating the target to grant additional healing. If you treat them for a total of 1 hour, double the Hit Points they regain from Treat Wounds.

The result of your Medicine check determines how many Hit Points the target regains.

Critical Success The target regains 4d8 Hit Points, and its wounded condition is removed.
Success The target regains 2d8 Hit Points, and its wounded condition is removed.
Critical Failure The target takes 1d8 damage.

So looking at Pathfinder 2’s rules, we can see that Pathfinder 2’s rules are designed to heal significantly more Hit Points than SF’s. The Pathfinder rules have scaling DCs with scaling outcomes in them, and they’re designed to be significantly more impactful.

Comparing and Contrasting

When comparing the SF and the PF methods, it’s important to take each unique game into consideration. Here are some things for us to consider.

• When comparing SF healing to PF healing, Treat Deadly Wounds is not what we should be comparing. It’s Starfinder’s 10 minute rest to regain Resolve to Pathfinder 2’s Treat Wounds. Both heal large amounts of health, but both do so in very different ways. PF’s major limitation is time. The healing received is random and you can botch it up bad with poor Medicine checks (this becomes less of a problem later on). Starfinder’s major downside, on the other hand, is Resolve. Taking a 10 minute rest is super reliable; it basically refills half your Hit Points every time you do it. But you’re limited in the number of times you can rest, and your resting takes points from your big point pool that determines things like how often you can use your cool abilities or when you DIE.
• Pathfinder’s rules are definitely designed for high fantasy. Characters rest for a short while before they’re ready to be back in the fray. It’s very heroic, very inspiring.
• Starfinder’s rules are definitely designed for grit. Wounds are more impactful, and without magic they’re harder to heal. Magic becomes more important because without magic, you’re healing extremely slowly.

With this in mind, we should talk about Starfinder’s feel.

• Any solution to healing that we make to the Medicine skill needs to be able to maintain this “gritty feel” that Starfinder has. Rapidly healing Hit Points is going to take away from that sense of grit. At the same time, that feeling of grit can already be removed simply by putting a mystic in the party. That being said, there is a strong need to keep magic as the best option.

Solutions for Improving Medicine

Here are a few different ideas for how to improve Medicine to reduce the need for a mystic (or a similar healer).

Treat Deadly Wounds

You can use Medicine to restore Hit Points to a living, wounded creature. You spend 1 Resolve Point and treat the target’s wounds for 10 minutes, 8 hours, or 24 hours; you must choose how long to treat the target’s wounds when you spend your Resolve Point, and your treatment is disrupted, wasting all spent Resolve Points, if you are interrupted by anything more than a moment of conversation. At the end of your treatment, attempt a DC 20 Medicine check. If you succeed, your target can spend 1 Resolve Point  to heal a number of Hit Points equal to 2 × your total ranks in Medicine, plus your Medicine skill’s key ability modifier (usually Intelligence). For every 5 by which your Medicine check exceeds the DC,you and your target can each spend 1 additional Resolve Point at the end of the treatment. For each additional Resolve Point spent, the target heals additional Hit Points equal to your ranks in Medicine . For example, if you beat the DC by 5, the target can spend a total of 2 Resolve Points to heal Hit Points equal to 3 × your ranks in Medicine plus the skill’s key ability modifier.

If you spend 8 hours treating the target’s wounds, you gain a +5 circumstance bonus to your Medicine check to treat deadly wounds, or +10 if you spend 24 hours treating them.

If you have access to a medkit, you reduce the total number of Resolve Points that you and your target must spend to treat your target’s wounds by 1 (minimum 1). If you have access to an advanced medkit (including a starship’s medical bay), you instead reduce the total number of Resolve Points that you and your target must spend to treat your target’s wounds by 2 (minimum 1).

Neither you nor the creature you’re treating can spend a Resolve Point to regain Stamina Points while you’re treating the creature’s deadly wounds, nor do you count as resting for the purpose of determining whether you can make your daily preparations to regain daily use abilities (such as and Resolve Points).

This is my solution to the problem. I think that it holds onto Starfinder’s grit while also making the medicine skill a little more useful. Let’s go over some notes.

• The static healing fits Starfinder’s out of combat healing better, specifically the healing touch ability of the mystic. It allows the healing to be quick and efficient without forcing the player to roll insane numbers of nice. (There was a version of this where I considered having the player roll 1d4 per rank in Medicine so nonmagical healing was more unreliable, but the prospect of asking a player to roll 15d4s at 15th level felt terrifying. Starfinder in general shies away from the “bucket of dice” of other games, instead preferring to have you roll bigger dice.
• Spending Resolve Points, both provider and the patient, ensures that Medicine still has a cost that limits how far people can adventure during the day.
• Long-term care gets folded into this by having long-term care effectively make high roles more effective; you’re more likely to succeed and can succeed by more, allowing you to spend more Resolve Points to heal quickly.

Well, I hope you found this system interesting. What do you think? Did I fix a problem you had with the Starfinder system? Retrofit something you liked from PF2 back into Starfinder? Or did I just mess with something for no good reason? Leave me your thoughts in the comments below, or on Know Direction’s Discord server where I’m an active member. Remember, practice your Medicine skill and stay safe out there!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

A good boy, or the BEST boy?

If you haven’t picked up volume 3 of Extinction Curse, you’re going to want to. In addition to being a lovely adventure boasting some truly beautiful art, this volume is the first Adventure Path to ever feature a brand new ancestry: the shoonies! They’re adorable little pitt bull people who believe the god of humanity created them for pleasant company after raising the Isle of Kortos from the ocean. Listen, folks, like them or love them, they’re gonna be popular. SUPER popular. I know that they’re listed as a rare ancestry in their group, but believe me—they’re gonna blow up like skittermanders. You can quote me on this, and if I’m wrong y’all can laugh in my face two years from now, on March 25th 2020. Do it.

So, now that you’re inevitably going to have players begging you to let them play shoonies, you might ask yourself? Why shoonies? How do I fit this adorable group of 3-foot-tall dog people into my campaign? Well, that’s exactly the topic we’re going to be talking about today on Guidance!

Retcon Revolution!

So, there’s a very vicious cycle that inevitably happens to GMs who are looking to make their own campaign setting (or heavily modify the Age of Lost Omens setting). It goes a little something like this:

• GM creates an intricate setting and explains every last detail. Accounts for every major city and the precise populations of entire nations.
• A company (usually a 1st Party like Paizo but sometimes a 3rd Party like Paizo) puts out a new race / ancestry in a book.
• GM’s players IMMEDIATELY fall in love with it and beg the GM to allow them to play a character of that race / ancestry.
• The GM is caught in a no-win situation from their perspective. The player could be devastated if they’ve fallen in love with a character and can’t play it, but at the same time the GM has no real way to tie the character to the setting, and therefore the player’s experience could be diminished as a result anyway.

Personally, I’ve been part of this cycle on every level. I’ve planned intricate settings that I’ve had to expand quickly before a session to explain something the PCs wanted. I’ve wanted to play a newly published ancestry that the GM never had before in their campaign setting and couldn’t figure out where to put it. And I’ve published new ancestries and races that absolutely did this to different GMs. So, how do you add a new race to your established campaign setting when in actuality SOMEONE should have probably heard about it somehow?

You retcon, of course!

Retcon is short for retroactive continuity, and it basically means “changing something you’ve previously established using new information.” Retconning is an AMAZING tool for any storyteller’s toolbox, provided it’s done well. A good retcon needs to cover three important bases:

1. Compatibility
2. Believability
3. Utility

Compatibility

A good retcon needs to be compatible with existing lore. If a retcon doesn’t abide by the fundamental rules of the setting, the chance of your players buying it as a reason to be is extremely slim. This goes back to the suspension of disbelief; a retcon that isn’t compatible with the story thus far shatters suspension of disbelief by making the impossible seem to happen.

Believability

Being compatible with a story isn’t enough to make a good retcon, however. In addition to being compatible your retcon needs to be believable. This one is much harder to pull off than mere believability though—its easy to make something plausible; you just use Yes/No logic to see if something could work. But for something to make sense, every character involved needs to feel like its playing its part in a manner that fits previous bits of information. One of the best ways to do this is to come up with the thing you want to retcon and then break it into pieces, giving each piece to your players or readers one at a time, out of order. This allows your players to take each individual piece of information as simply information, and only with time figuring out that the rough edges are actually the markings of a jigsaw puzzle.

Utility

The final element to a good retcon is utility. What purpose does the retcon serve? Does it add anything of value to the world or the story? In our case, allowing players to play the characters they envision is often a worthy purpose, but when we’re talking value, what sort of element does adding the retcon bring? Players aren’t going to like them if you tell them they can play the exotic race they want only for it to never matter; in my experience, the players who are okay with it are also the ones who are so jaded that they’ve come to expect getting to play what they want with zero additional effort added by the GM.

Retconning in Practice: The Shoony

Okay, now that we have some guidelines for retconning, let’s see if we can put them into practice with the shoonies. Here’s what we have to work with, according to Paizo’s blog:

“Diminutive humanoids who resemble squat, bipedal dogs, shoonies are sometimes mistaken for weak and insular pacifists. However, their sheer perseverance, incredible work ethic, and resourceful use of diplomacy make shoonies far from helpless.

According to shoonies, Aroden created their kind to provide him with pleasant company soon after he created the Isle of Kortos. Shoony culture is rooted in this myth and its implications, which help to explain the ancestry’s long reputation for hospitality, good will, and pacifism. War is antithetical to the shoony way of life; shoonies rely on cooperation and persistence to make their way through a world that can seem at times hellbent on destroying them. Shoonies are unflappable in their optimism and always see the best in others, even when faced with frequent subjugation and exploitation that might create bitterness or xenophobia among other societies. To shoonies, peace is a goal always worth striving for, and no villain is beyond redemption, so they aim to resolve problems with peaceful solutions.”

Okay, so let’s take this information and apply our three rules to see where it stands.

1. Compatibility: The major bit of “connecting” lore that we have hear is that shoonies believe that Aroden created them for company. This is pretty compatible with Pathfinder lore; Aroden created the Isle of Kortos by raising the Starstone up from the ocean. He was a mortal at that time, albeit an incredibly powerful one who had already performed miracles of magic across the world (such as in Arcadia, the topic of which is the basis of Paizo Developer and Know Direction staffer Luis Loza’s adventure, Borne by the Sun’s Grace). Since the current lore says Aroden was granted godhood after raising the Starstone from the depths of the ocean, if Aroden created the shoonies as a deific act that would certainly fit. (Although creating the shoonies as a mortal wizard certainly has even more … creepy connotations!)
2. Believability: Wizards doing crazy things is sort of a fantasy trope; it has been in “modern fantasy” ever since Gandalf in Lord of the Rings and it’s a trope that’s literally older than storytelling. Considering that the shoonies live pretty much exclusively on the island that Aroden created, this is a fairly believable tale. One detail that isn’t mentioned in the summary—shoonies are rare, mostly because they’ve noted lower birth rates since Aroden’s death. That detail is another interesting tidbit that, for me, makes the tale even more believable. Their rarity combined with the fact that they’re pacifists and don’t seem to like to cause problems is a pretty good reason why no one’s really heard of them up until this point either. Word just doesn’t spread quickly about folk who live ordinary lives and do ordinary acts of good, after all.
3. Utility: For me, the utility of the shoony “retcon” is sort of the biggest issue they have. What does adding the shoonies to the Age of Lost Omens actually do? What kind of stories does it let Paizo tell? With the description we have, they’re sort of an underdog (heh) farmer archetype; a whole ancestral group of them. A purely pacifist culture is droll, sure, but pacifism isn’t inherently a trait that’s an interesting thing to tell a story with. Shoonies are kind of the anti-goblin; they exist to be saved, really, and that’s about it. For the addition of the shoonies to be great, they need a storytelling utility that they don’t currently have. So why not brainstorm a few?

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Teaching a New Dog New Tricks

So, shoonies don’t really have many stories inherent to their ancestry. Let’s talk about some additional lore we can add to the ancestry that doesn’t compromise their strong believability or compatibility with the Age of Lost Omens. When we’re looking at storytelling, we want to try and create hooks that are interesting and flavorful first and foremost, adding an element that gives them a role in the story. Here’s a few samples that you can use as an example.

Aroden absolutely created the shoonies, and he was mortal when he did.

Paizo’s site mentions that shoonies believed Aroden created them. This is kind of appropriate, seeing as Aroden is the god of humanity and humanity did create dogs through selective breeding. Now, while it’s easy to say that Aroden just magicked them into existence, maybe turned a common dog into a shoony the way Cayden Cailean transformed the soul of his own companion into the first cayhound. it might serve your story more if Aroden was still a mortal wizard when he created the shoonies. Maybe he used magic that basically imparted what amounts to generations of selective breeding and behavioral training on a kind of creature that we already know to create them. Are there any other canine humanoids in the game that Aroden might be motivated to “get rid of?”

Oh totally. Gnolls.

Gnolls are hyena-like humanoids, and while in the real world hyenas are more akin to cats than dogs, it kind of “feels” right to have a story that goes something like this:

“After raising Kortos from the Inner Sea, Aroden set to work building the Starstone Cathedral within which he would house the Starstone, protecting it from those who would seek to use its power for evil as the aboleths did. Despite his immense powers, constructing the cathedral that would one day become Aroden’s heart required months of toil, and during that time a cartel of gnoll slavers from Katapesh happened upon the newly-risen Isle of Kortos as they sailed north in search of prey. The gnolls landed upon Kortos’s shores, the first humanoids ever to do so after Aroden himself, and found the skeleton of what would become the Starstone Cathedral. In their hubris, the gnolls attached Aroden as he labored but proved no match for the would-be God of Humanity. With a flick of his wrist, the snarling gnolls were sated, withering in size, form, and ferocity. Aroden called the creatures he created shoonies and set them to task helping him protect the Isle of Kortos.

The shoonies are guard dogs.

While I haven’t read much of Extinction Curse, the synopsis from PaizoCon told us that there are pillars located around the Isle of Kortos and these pillars are responsible for supplying life energy to the island somehow; when the pillars run out of energy, the land and all living upon it starts to wither and die. The shoonies are likely affected by this over the course of the adventure, being farmers and harvesters mostly. But what if keeping vigil over these towers was something Aroden tasked them with that, over the course of thousands of years, they’ve forgotten? What if the shoonies are guards the same way my yorkie Archie is a guard; they’re not there to fight, basically just to make a ton of noise to alert people with actual power.

In my dog’s case, Archie barks to alert my family that someone’s coming up to the house. Maybe the shoonies are all farmers because the crops would logically be the first thing affected should one of these pillars malfunction, and their “barking” is to go get help from people more capable of dealing with it.

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In Conclusion,

I hope you found this article on retconning and how you can use it to enhance your world useful. I also hope you found the shoonies fun and interesting; even if they don’t have a lot of storytelling utility right now, I do think they’re an adorable addition to Pathfinder 2E and I’m happy we’ve got them. I look forward to seeing what other lovely things Paizo does with the shoonies going forward, especially as they carve out a niche for their newest (and doubtlessly instant hit) ancestry.

Note from Alex: If you liked this article, consider purchasing Pathfinder AP: Life’s Long Shadow from Paizo or your FLGWebsite. With everything that’s happening right now, gaming companies are going to be hit REALLY hard as all the means of printing and shipping are shut down completely. Even if you’re like me and prefer print products to digital ones, consider purchasing PDFs from your favorite companies in the meantime. It’s a scary thought, but these are tough times ahead for the Gaming Industry. Without your support, we could very well see the industry as a whole wither and starve itself.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

If you’ve been listening to the Know Direction podcasts lately, you probably know that I just concluded a Kickstarter. It’s for a book called the Advanced Occult Guide, and I’m happy to say that after a very tenuous period of uncertainty, we funded! Feeds good, fam.

Now, I’m currently buried up to my neck in stuff to do for this Kickstarter, so I thought it might be fun to go meta and talk a little bit about my experience running Kickstarters. This isn’t my first you know; in all I’ve run a total of four Kickstarters, all of them funded (Grimoire of Lost Souls, Dynastic Races Compendium, Advanced Skill Guide, and Advanced Occult Guide).

I don’t know which of our reads will ever need this information, but part of the magic of being a blogger is that I get to write about basically whatever I want, so enjoy!

Tip 1 — Don’t Rely on Facebook for Advertising

If you only take one tip away from this article and throw the rest of them into the garbage, PLEASE choose this one. Seriously; do you remember how I said that we had a tenuous period of uncertainty when running this Kickstarter? This was why. Originally, I put most of my resources (monetary and social) into pushing my ads on Facebook. Monetary resources are obvious, but when I’m talking social resources, I mean trying to work Facebook’s algorithm (the one that determines which posts get shown to which people) by having friends comment, like, and share posts at strategic times. For the most part, Facebook CAN be gamed. Many of my products are quite successful at it, in fact. But one thing I learned is that any mention of a Kickstarter in your post, and Facebook throttles it. Even if you paid for advertising.

Seriously, according to Facebook my original adds got like 50,000 views and had hundreds of clicks, yet NONE of that translated into actual backers on my actual Kickstarter. Instead, by the time the last day rolled around of the Kickstarter, I was sitting at 4K of 5.5K needed to fund, and getting to that 4K was a GRIND that took four weeks of hard work sharing and tweeting and coordinating boosts. Please, be better than me. Don’t rely on Facebook for advertising.

Tip 2 — Know Where To Find Your People

So, you might be wondering, “Hey Alex, you just said that your Kickstarter was sitting at 4k of 5.5k just 24 hours before it ended. How on earth did you get 1.5k pledges in a single day?” Great question, strawman audience member! I can’t take complete credit for this idea, to be honest. One of my company’s discord fans actually made a comment the night before the Kickstarter ended. It went something like this, “I can’t believe that over a hundred people pledged to the Advanced Skill Guide Kickstarter and less than half that number are interested in your Advanced Occult Guide.”

That’s what actually got me thinking about Facebook, got me considering the facts that ultimately led to Tip 1. So, if I had fans who’ve shown they liked my work, how could I find them if Facebook wasn’t going to help me? Well, I targeted them where I knew they DID find me. Our (Rogue Genius Games and Everybody Games) best-selling site is DriveThruRPG, and I knew that plenty of people followed my work on Kickstarter. So, with 24 hours to go, I pinged Owen and asked for permission to write … a newsletter.

Yup!

I made a preview product for the Advanced Occult Guide specifically for this newsletter, and advertised it (and indirectly, the Kickstarter) as the first of three to four products in the list. This is due to the fact that DriveThru doesn’t allow links off of its site in its emails, so making a free product that I could point to and embed a hyperlink into was super helpful.

Next, I wrote an email and slightly customized it for every Kickstarter Owen or I had ever run. Then I used Kickstarter’s message tools to send out messages to anyone who had ever contributed to any of our Kickstarters. The email was quick, actionable, and included a link back to the Advanced Occult Guide.

This was my best chance to target people that I knew had a high probability of helping our Kickstarter fund. I figured out where to find my people.

Tip 3 — Be Bold

It’s pretty bold to e-mail a few hundred people asking them to help fund your Kickstarter with only 12 hours on the clock, in my opinion. Sometimes if you want to see a project be successful, you need to be bold. I was worried about using Kickstarter’s messaging system to personally message so many people. I was kind of worried that they would find me … intrusive? Let’s go with intrusive.

Ultimately, my fears were proven unfounded. We added a huge number of backers over that time and jumped almost 3k in pledges; going from 4k to 7k in a single day was incredible. Being bold isn’t always going to work out for you, the lesson I took away from this experience is that if you want your project to become a reality, you need to be confident enough in it that you’re willing to march over to someone’s inbox and throw your project directly into their face.

Tip 4 — Always Have Your Updates Ready

Okay, so I admit that despite my boldness, I wasn’t sure if my plan was going to work. I sent out my emails and left for work without breakfast; I used literally all my time for my morning routine to email as many people as I could, so I had to stop at a convenience store for breakfast on the way. I was hoping my plan would work, but I didn’t know, and so I didn’t have any of the images I prepared to update the page to represent unlocking stretch goals when suddenly my phone exploded with messages about the Kickstarter funding and me needing to update the page’s stretch goals.

You win some, you lose some I guess.

Ultimately this taught me that I should have kept all that Kickstarter stuff in my Dropbox, rather than on my hard file on my desktop. If I had, I could have updated the pictures on the go. But I didn’t, so I had to wait like 5-6 hours until I got home to do it. Whoops!

Tip 5 — Do Your Homework, Have a Budget

This one is sort of just standard Kickstarter advice. Do the work, make sure you know how much money you need to do your project and have a plan to get there. If you need to order art and hire freelancers, make sure you know how much art and how many freelancers you need. Talk to them in advance about their rate and work to make sure you have a plan going in. Kickstarter takes about 10% of your total funds in processing fees, and my personal partnership with Rogue Genius Games (specifically the fact that Owen allows me to use his Kickstarter page to run my Kickstarters, which nets me name recognition beyond what my name alone affords me) also knocks about 10% of what I raise to them. So the Kickstarter’s funding goal, as well as every stretch goal, is chosen with the knowledge that I’m probably going to get about 20% less than what’s on the funding page.

Additionally, it’s important to make sure that you balance your budget so that you make some money. That can feel really dirty, “These people are making my book happen! I shouldn’t be profiting off of my Kickstarter!”

Uh, yeah. You should. You might set it so you make less of a profit off of your backers (my strategy), but ultimately every person who backs your book is a person who won’t be buying it when you release it formally. You need to make sure you’re making some money so you can afford to do your next big project!

And those are my tips for Kickstarter based on my month-long hell experience! But these are just my thoughts and I want to hear yours! Do you have any experience with Kickstarter? What’s worked for you or what have you seen work? Owen once told me that he’s never seen a Kickstarter defy the Kickstarter prediction sites the way that the Advanced Occult Guide Kickstarter did, and while I’m proud of that it also makes me a little sad because it makes me wonder whether I could have spread the word to more people if I had figured all this stuff out earlier. Don’t be like me, go off and run successful Kickstarters immediately!

Alex Augunas, signing out!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games since 2007 after a friend pretended to be his father in order to smuggle him out of high school so his gaming group had enough people to run a module. Today, Alex is the owner and publisher of Everybody Games, a co-host on Know Direction: Beyond and RPG Design Club, and a player on Stellar. You can follow Alex’s exploits on Twitter (@AlJAug), on Facebook, or on Patreon. Know Direction fans are also welcome to “@Alex” him on the Know Direction discord server!

Today’s banner image is copyright Everybody Games LLC and was commissioned from Jacob Blackmon. If you like his work, you can e-mail him at commissionprodigyduck@gmail.com or support him on Patreon!

So, if not the Adventure Card Game, what? Well, my friends, I’m switching up the formula. I’m not talking about a Paizo game today. Instead, I’ll be talking about my new love, Tales from the Loop. You might have hard of it; the game is getting an Amazon adaptation in a few months that looks pretty sweet. Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s dive into it!

What The Heck Is This?!

Oh, right. You might not know what this game is, right? Okay, so to briefly summarize this game, its a TTRPG that takes place in an alternate future version of earth where humanity developed robots and particle accelerators in the 80s, as well as other “strange science” contraptions. You play a kid living in this world that’s otherwise identical to the real-world 1980s, specifically a whippersnapper living either in Boulder City, Nevada in the United States or the Mälaröarna islands outside of Stockholm in Sweeden. You solve mysteries that the adults in your life are either too stupid or too incompetent to solve themselves. And that’s basically the game. It’s very much inspired by things like Stranger Things. If you want to learn more about the game (perhaps buy it for yourself), check out this link.

Okay, NOW let’s get started!

Like 1 — The Mechanics are Simple

This might sound like a weird thing for me, Mr. Game Mechanics, to like, but Tales from the Loop has a delightfully simple game mechanic system. I’m going to try and explain it quickly and without a whole lot of detail.

1. Whenever you’re in Trouble (ie something happens that you need dice to determine the outcome), the GM tells you how difficult the Trouble is by telling you how many successes you’ll need to overcome it. This is typically a number between 1 and 3, but the game doesn’t actually say you can’t require more successes if you want. The GM either tells you what skill you can use to overcome the Trouble, or sometimes the GM will allow the Kid to pick what skill they’re going to try and use instead; skill use informs the number of successes needed, so if you try to use a skill in a way that’s unlikely to work, the GM can bump up the number of successes you need.
2. The Kid who’s testing for the trouble picks up a bunch of d6s. The number is equal to the number of points they have in the skill (1 to 5) plus their attribute (also 1 to 5). The kid might get to add additional dice if they’re using an appropriate item or getting some other benefit. They then roll all of those d6s.
3. The Kid counts the number of “sixes” they roll out of all their dice. Every six is a success.
4. If the Kid gets enough successes, they succeed. If they get more than enough successes, every skill has a list of “bonus effects” that the kid can choose to impose upon the situation. The GM and the Kid can work together to make up custom effects if appropriate. If the Kid doesn’t get enough successes; something bad happens. This is often a Condition, which represents things like being Upset or Scared.

And that’s basically it for the game’s mechanics. There are other rules, of course, but that’s how you play the game. And it’s so delightfully simple! Very easy to touch to just about anyone. I really enjoy a complex game like Starfinder or Dungeons and Dragons, but I found Tales from the Loop’s simplicity refreshing.

Dislike 1 — Items are Kind of Boring

I mentioned earlier that there are other rules in Tales from the Loop, and one of the rules I’m not a big fan of is the item mechanic. Basically, if you have an item that’s particularly relevant in a situation, having that item gives you a bonus to the number of dice you get to roll when you’re in Trouble … and that’s about it. I would have liked more in-depth item rules. For example, a mechanic of “vices” that can temporarily relieve conditions for at a cost (obviously not actual vices since this is a kid’s game, but you get what I mean). A great example is chewing gum. Maybe my character REALLY likes to chew gum, so if I’m Upset I can chew gum once a mystery to get rid of the condition. This is an easy enough house rule, but I feel like items were wasted potential in this game because they could have really added to the roleplaying and flavor each character brings to the table, but the writers didn’t go that extra mile.

Like 2 — The Balance of Age

Anyone who follows my imprint, Everybody Games, knows that I love me some good rules for playing young characters. Since Tales from the Loop is all about playing Kids, you’d hope this game handles playing young characters well, right? Well friends, I’m pleased to tell you that this game has a lovely mechanic for balancing playing young kids against teenagers. Before I get into it, however, you need to understand that Tales from the Loop has a hero point system called Luck Points, where you can spend a point to reroll your Trouble dice (yes, all of them). Now, your number of Luck Points is limited; they only reference after each mystery (the equivalent of an Organized Play scenario), so you have to relish them. With this in mind, the number of Luck Points you get is equal to 15 minus your age. In Tales from the Loop, you can be between 10 years old and 15 years old, so this means that you have 5 Luck Points if you’re the minimum age (10 years old) and 0 Luck Points if you’re the maximum possible age (15 years old).

Okay, so clearly Luck favors the young in this game. So what do you get for being old? Well, I mentioned early that the game has attributes, right? There are four in all: Body, Tech, Heart, and Mind. You start with a number of points in your attributes equal to your age, and can have up to 5 points in each. Also, you need to have at least 1 point in each attribute. This means that a 10 year old effectively has 6 points they can flex wherever they want while a 15 year old has 11 points.

This means that if you’re older, you have a better chance to succeed with every roll you make, but if you’re younger you have more opportunities to recover from failure. And since the average Trouble only needs one succeed, it really is a toss-up regarding which option is better. In earnest, its probably best to balance between the two; play someone who’s 12 or 13 so you have a few Luck Points and a few extra attribute points. Its such an interesting mental puzzle that I adore this rule set for its depth and simplicity.

Dislike 2 — Adventures Aren’t Very Detailed

As you might expect from a game whose rules can be summarized in a paragraph, Tales from the Loop uses most of its page count to explore its setting and offer some sample adventures. In fact, most of the published books I’ve seen from Tales from the Loop are potential adventures. I wouldn’t call them campaign settings, because the only places in the book to set your games are the two loop locations I mentioned earlier; it’s still like, “A factory releases a new toy based on a popular comic book. The toys are miniature robots and are alive.” And this is pretty cool, to be honest. But I am SO spoiled by Paizo giving me a detailed list of what happens, where, and why that to me, Tales from the Loop’s prewritten adventures seem more like outlines to me rather than a fully prewritten adventure. Don’t get me wrong, the adventures do a TON of work for you and they were great for me as I worked to plan my own Tales from the Loop setting and adventure, but overall none of the adventure outlines I read really grabbed me as something I wanted to run. But that might not be the case for you; this list is very subjective.

Like 3 — Character Building Is the Breakfast Club

Tales from the Loop has “classes” in a way that’s amazing and fun. Instead of “fighter” or “mage” or “cleric”, however, Tales from the Loop uses the archetypal teenager cliques as its classes. Bookworm, Jock, Popular Kid, Troublemaker, Weirdo, these are the classes you get to play. The classes themselves are pretty basic; each “archetype” has a a few key skills (which means you can start with a higher-than-1 value in that skill) and that’s basically it. I wasn’t lying when I said that this was a VERY simple game and that I love it for it.

Dislike 3 — It Uses the “Adults Are Useless” Trope

Many different media outlets that use young characters often fall into a trope called “Adults are Useless.” You can read about it here, but the gist of the concept is that Tales from the Loop assumes that aside from getting comforted by a parent or older sibling, adults can’t do anything for the Kids playing the game. The policemen will fail to do what’s needed, or if the kids go to someone for help there’s a negative consequence for doing so. The example given is something like, “You can ask your older brother for help, but he’ll make you give him your allowance for a month.” I don’t really care for this trope, personally. One of the most refreshing things about Stranger Things to me was the fact that it was multigenerational, and that the kids were always doing something interesting. Sure, when the kids and the adults got back together, the adults always try to engineer the situation so the kids are as safe as possible and that goes horribly wrong every time. But ultimately, Stranger Things never had the adult characters act in ways one would consider useless; there’s a strong sense of family between the characters, both biological and found. While it might be genre appropriate that Tales from the Loop sort of just tosses this out of the window in favor of “Adults are Useless,” I personally dislike this element of the game strongly and will be ignoring it whenever I run games with the system.

Like 4 — The Art is Incredible

I love the art for Tales from the Loop; all of the art is drawn in the same style. Simon Stålenhag, a Sweedish artist, is the person to thank for this. Rather than talk about it, here’s some links to his art. Go check it out.

Dislike 4 — The Setting Doesn’t Feel Very Occult

I mentioned before that I was going to make my own Tales from the Loop setting rather than use the one in the book. Why? Well, one of the things that I’m not all too crazy about in this book is its focus on the ordinary and the mundane. There are fantastic robots and weird technologies in Tales from the Loop, but those things are described as being relatively ordinary to the kids. I mean, all kids are going to experience things that are new and fantastic to them simply because they’re young, but the fact that the setting has these wondrous automated robots and we’re told to just treat them as being normal … nah. I’m not really a fan of that.

Like 5 — There’s a Sequel / Expansion!

I haven’t bought the book yet, but there’s apparently a second book called Things from the Flood that’s a continuation of Tales from the Loop. It serves as a stand alone game using the same mechanics as Tales from the Loop, with the major different being that you play teenagers instead of kids, and you can very much die in the game. Things from the Flood takes place in the 90s, and features weird technological “things” coming out and causing bad times for everyone. In my opinion, that’s a pretty brilliant way to expand your game; create it in a way where the new game feels like a natural expansion and continuation of the original one. It’s definitely a book that I want to pick up and own myself!

Dislike 5 — This Book is SUPER White

… yeah. I have to talk about this. There’s ONE picture of someone who isn’t a white kid in this book; it’s the archetypical book worm character, and it’s for a piece of art that isn’t in color. Every other picture of a person in this book is of a Caucasian person, kid or adult. This kind of felt out of place to me since this book was published in 2017, and black people ABSOLUTELY existed in the 80s. The art in the book does overwhelming feature Sweedish locations over American ones, sure, and Sweden isn’t known for its black populations, sure, but ROBOTS are ordinary in this world. Surely if robots are going to be commonplace in this world, they could take a few additional liberties and add some black people to their 1980s game too.

In Conclusion,

I’ve had my eye on Tales from the Loop since it won an ENnie a few years ago, and I finally got around to picking it up this year. I regret not buying this sooner. It’s a great game that manages to have a lot of mechanical depth despite its relatively rules-lite system, and I’m super excited with how expandable the game appears. I have some neat stuff that I want to do with Tales from the Loop in the near future, and I’m so pleased that this is a game that I feel I can use to tell the story I want to tell!

Thanks for sticking it out with me as I discuss a game you might not have heard of before. What did you think? Did you like me departing from Paizo Land, or do you want me to stay there a bit more? If you have Tales from the Loop, what did you think? I’d love to hear from you at the Know Direction Discord when you get the chance!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games since 2007 after a friend pretended to be his father in order to smuggle him out of high school so his gaming group had enough people to run a module. Today, Alex is the owner and publisher of Everybody Games, a co-host on Know Direction: Beyond and RPG Design Club, and a player on Stellar. You can follow Alex’s exploits on Twitter (@AlJAug), on Facebook, or on Patreon. Know Direction fans are also welcome to “@Alex” him on the Know Direction discord server!

But First, A Recap

Just in case you forgot, my initial pitch was basically that the entire Adventure Path center around this event that was foreshadowed in a Starfinder adventure called the Data Plague—it’s a mysterious computer virus that crippled Pact Worlds communications and ultimately led to the Veskarium engaging the Pact Worlds in military conflicts, ultimately defeating them, decommissioning Absalom Station, and relocating the Starstone Reactor to the Veskarium. This is important, because the Devestation Ark AP specifically involves this same reactor, which is one of the big pillars my theory is built on.

For more information about the SF AP side of my theory, use the above link to check out that article. For the SFS portion, let’s get started!

Year of Salvation’s Plague

So, if you’ve read through my article on the Data Plague AP, you’ll recognize the references from my SF AP article. Salvation’s End is a moon-like structure that the Starfinder Society currently has exploration rights to. It’s an artificial vault complex that apparently holds simulations of events from across the galaxy’s timeline—past, present, and future. The Plague refers to the Data Plague. Now, Books 5 and 6 in my proposed Adventure Path, To Seek Salvation and Escaping Salvation, both reference Salvation’s End because of its weird timey-wimey properties. Not that the moon meddles with time, but it appears to either exist outside of time or otherwise knows major events that will (or could) happen. The idea for this season completely exists in the periods between Book 5 and Book 6. In the Adventure Path, the PCs go out to Salvation’s End when it becomes clear that the Veskarium is treating there, but for the Pathfinder Society, the entire season’s metaplot (or the overarching story) is split into two arcs; we’ll call them subseasons.

Now, obviously, I can’t really predict or speculate on what non-meta scenarios could happen during this season, so I’m going to focus on major Metaplot beats. Ready? Let’s go!

• SFS X-00: Anarchy Aboard Absalom Station. So in Paizo’s organized play campaigns, the -00 scenario always kicks off the season, and thus far it’s always been a multi-table special. This would be no different, and it would basically be set during the events of SFS AP: Data Plague Book 3. While the PCs are stuck in Ringworld Amusement Parks, the Starfinder Society is returning home to Absalom Station, triumphant after some victory that happened in the -99 Scenario (also a multi-table special, but this one’s designed to close out a season; more on that later). In this scenario, the Starfinder Society agents find Absalom Station in complete disarray after the Data Plague has wiped out almost all computer systems aboard the station, and its up to SFS agents to help the Stewards restore order and figure out what’s going on before all the life support systems on the ship shut down. The scenario’s ending is designed to coincide with Data Plague 3’s ending, with the PCs doing something that helps the PCs of that other book ultimately purge the Data Plague from Absalom Station’s Starstone Reactor. For now.
• SFS MP1: Depths of Salvation. After -00, many of the early Starfinder Society scenarios become focused around rebuilding Absalom Station, with several Starship tagged scenarios featuring inexplicable skirmishes with Veskarium ships. However, in the first Metaplot scenario in the season, Depths of Salvation, the Starfinder Society is called back to Salvation’s End after receiving unusual readings from Salvation’s End. The PCs delve into the moon’s heart, and what they find ties the moon to the ancient alien race that built the Devastation Ark.
• SFS MP2&3: Into the Dragon’s Maw Parts 1 & 2. The next metaplot scenario takes an unexpected departure from the Salvation’s End storyline. The Veskarium have agreed to peace talks with the Pact Worlds in wake of the Data Plague and have invited the Starfinder Society to act as intermediaries. Part 1 is  a delightful social scenario with only one, maybe zero, combats. The Thurston Hillman special. But what the PCs don’t know (or have an extremely low chance of discovering) is that the entire event was a ruse just so the Veskarium could lure high-ranking Starfinders to Vesk Prime in order to seize as much of their information as possible. The Veskarium end up capturing Venture-Captain Arvin and try to use him as ransom in exchange for the SFS’s Data. The PCs fight off the Veskarium and win, but what they don’t know is that a friendly skittermander they met during Part 1 decided to “help” himself to the Starfinder Society’s data codes, and ends up making a back door into Guidance’s databanks. (Guidance is a super computer/AI who has access to all of the society’s records). The Starfinders don’t know it, but they’ve already lost.
• SFS MP4: The Battle At Nightarch. The final Scenario in this part of the Starfinder Society plotline would be the Battle at Nightarch, a scenario where the Veskarium attack the drow city of Nightarch, where a SFS ally happens to be. The PCs rush out to defend the planet, engaging in Starship Combat and direct battle against Veskarium troops along the way. This battle is depicted in Data Plague as well, and the PCs win! This is the moment where the Veskarium flagship suddenly retreats. Straight to Salvation’s End.
• SFS MP5: Salvation’s War. This scenario would essentially be the -99 for the season. Essentially, the Starfinder Society (alongside the Stewards) race to Salvation’s End and try to fight the Veskarium out of the moon base while learning why they’re there in the first place. It turns out that Salvation’s End’s purpose is to act as a backup to reality and the timeline, and the Veskarium are currently hacking the system to try and rewrite the course of history. The Scenario ends on a climax of not really being clear on what happens, and that’s because the Scenario is written assuming that the events of the Data Plague AP happen. The Veskarium succeed and rewrite the Pact World’s history to their vision, but the PCs manage to stop the Veskarium’s emperor and correct the course of history. So the scenario ends with a weird outside of time experience, and any changes to the Starfinder timeline can be explained that way.

In Conclusion,

I hope y’all enjoyed this little what-if experment for what  could happen in the penultimate SFS and SF AP seasons. What do you think? Are my ideas likely, unlikely, or just plan nuts? Tell me all about it on Discord, and I’ll catch you next week. I’m gonna try to do another 5 Likes and Dislikes on a different rules system, but a lot of that depends on how quickly I can digest the system I want to write about. But until then, stay safe!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games since 2007 after a friend pretended to be his father in order to smuggle him out of high school so his gaming group had enough people to run a module. Today, Alex is the owner and publisher of Everybody Games, a co-host on Know Direction: Beyond and RPG Design Club, and a player on Stellar. You can follow Alex’s exploits on Twitter (@AlJAug), on Facebook, or on Patreon. Know Direction fans are also welcome to “@Alex” him on the Know Direction discord server!

We know that eventually, First Edition Starfinder will end and Second Edition Starfinder will start. It’s inevitable that at some point this is going to happen. But what sort of major events could shape the Starfinder campaign setting to the same extreme as, say, Iron Gods? Well my readers, instead of my usual blog where I talk all about game mechanics and build characters, I’m going to propose (not speculate, but fully make up with my own brain) a potential campaign setting event that I think could make a really neat “endgame” to Starfinder First Edition, the same way that Tyrant’s Grasp was a very poignant ending to Pathfinder 1E. My proposal is split into two parts, one directed at the Adventure Path line and one directed at Starfinder Society.

You ready? Let’s do this.

Starfinder Adventure Path: Data Plague

So, you might be wondering, “What’s the Data Plague and why is this an appropriate end game for Starfinder First Edition?” To answer this question, I need to spoil a Starfinder Society Scenario, specifically Starfinder Society Scenario 2-04: Future’s Fall. This is a relatively new scenario (it came out at GenCon 2019), so if you’ve never heard of it that’s quite alright. If you don’t want to be spoiled, I’m going to put spoilers in the following paragraph, which is going to be indented to show that it has spoilers. If you don’t want spoilers, skip the next paragraph.

**Spoilers Starting**

Okay, so basically the Starfinder Society found a weird moon / asteroid thing called Salvation’s End. This asteroid was the subject of Starfinder Society Scenario 1-00, Claim to Salvation, which was the first Starfinder Society scenario ever to be released. It was a special scenario where you’re supposed to play the iconic characters only, and from what I’m told it was very fun. Now, Salvation’s End is basically a Vault World; for some unknown reason, it’s insides are filled with vaults that show different exhibits of places across the galaxy. All of the vaults that have been shown thus far are from Golarion specifically, with one featuring the dwarven Quest for Sky and another featuring a sort of “What-if” scenario where a bunch of creatures with evil societies are peaceful and a unicorn is on a murderous rampage. Prior to SFS 2-04, all of the vaults were assumed to show only events from the distance past, but Future’s Fall is about a vault that shows a future event. Whether it’s a potential future or an assured future is unknown, of course, but in the vault you explore a version of Akiton where the Veskarium have conquered the Pact Worlds after the Pact Worlds government was crippled by something called the Data Plague. The scenario features a ton of worrisome potential events, such as the destruction of the Pact Worlds armadas, the dismantlement of Absalom Station, and the relocation of the Starstone Reactor to Vesk Prime, so starships can essentially fast travel to the Vesk home world instead of the Pact Worlds. The rest of the scenario is super fun and I won’t spoil anything else (because really, what I did spoil is a LOT). but you should absolutely check out this scenario! Its great stuff.

**Ending Spoilers**

Anyway, the Data Plague is basically a foreshadowed event from Starfinder 2-04 where some sort of computer virus ravages the Pact World system and the Veskarium takes advantage of the chaos, launching a military invasion of the Pact Worlds and basically ending the ceasefire that the two governments have had. My Adventure Path proposal is that this event actually happens, and it happens BIG. Similar to how Return of the Runelords assumed that Rise of the Runelords and Shattered Star both occurred, let’s say that Data Plague assumes that at minimum the upcoming Devastation Ark occurred. Why Devastation Ark? Well, check out this snippet from Devastation Ark Book 2’s product page:

The heroes travel to Absalom Station to warn the Pact Worlds government of a fast–approaching threat from beyond the stars! But before they are fully prepared, the titanic spacecraft arrives and shuts down the fabled Starstone Reactor, plunging the station into chaos. The heroes must find a way to bring the power back online, while rescuing citizens and dealing with Azlanti spies, angry outsiders, and confused spirits. Can they save the heart of the Pact Worlds and take the fight to the strange alien vessel?

So we have a weird alien spacecraft that’s somehow able to shut down a reactor that’s built using a deific mega-artifact? Seems fishy to me. Also seems reasonable that it’s due to some sort of wireless signal or transmission. So let’s assume that’s true; let’s assume that the Devastation Ark’s arrival and subsequent method of shutting down the Starstone Reactor not only disabled it, but infected it with some sort of virus. The players probably manage to turn the Starstone Reactor on, right? But what if the wireless signal had a fail safe, a virus that infected the Starstone Reactor and spread to everything it powered? In time, the virus moved across Absalom Station, and as the Station at the Center of the Drift, basically anything and every thing that docked at the station was exposed to the virus. Some civilizations got hit harder than others, but for the most part it’s going to be the Pact World’s enemies that are most guarded when going to Absalom Station. They’re the least likely to connect to the station’s wi-fi out of fear of international espionage after all, and a warfaring empire like the Veskarium is absolutely going to take those precautions, so the Veskarium doesn’t catch the virus.

• Book 1, The Ringworld Riots (1-3): While visiting Ringworld, a galaxy-famous amusement park suspended in orbit around Verces, the PCs’ vacation suddenly becomes a fight for survival when all of the park’s technology stops functioning, threatening to send Ringworld and everyone on it on a collision course with Kashak! The PCs must fight their way through malfunctioning amusements and security drones while protecting civilians in order to save the station from disaster.
• Book 2, Unaugmented and Unshaken (3-5): After isolating and disposing of a virus aboard the Ringworld systems, the PCs make their way to Kashak to depart from Verces, only to find the technologically advanced city embroiled in chaos. As the PCs discover that the virus has infected not only Kashak, but the entire system, the city’s Unaugmented inhabitants have taken advantage of the chaos to take the leaders of the Assembly of Nations hostage. The PCs must stop the terrorists while thwarting the so-called Data Plague.
• Book 3, Patient Zero (5-7): After ridding Verces of the Data Plague, the PCs have triangulated the virus back to its source—Absalom Station. Upon arrival, the PCs must content with waves of malfunctioning security drones, rampant gangs, and city-wide riots in order to reach the virus at its source and put an end to the Data Plague once and for all.
• Book 4, A Declaration of War (7-9): The PCs may have cleansed Absalom Station of the Data Plague, but as reports flood in from across the Vast it becomes clear that the plague is far from over. The PCs have little time to respond to the myriad of cries for help, however, as Veskarium ships suddenly appear in Pact Worlds space. The PCs must stand with the armada of the Assembly of Nations to defend their homes from the invading vesk.
• Book 5, To Seek Salvation  (9-11): After dealing a crushing blow to the Veskarium, the PCs race to meet the enemy flag ship head-on after it retreats to position just outside of the Pact World system. What was to be a simple military operation becomes a frantic race against time as the PCs discover that the canny vesk have retreated to Salvation’s End and seek to use the mysterious vaults as a weapon against the Pact Worlds.
• Book 6, Escaping Salvation (11-13): Tricked by Veskarium forces, the PCs find themselves as the newest residents of the enigmatic vaults of Salvation’s End. Can the PCs escape from the mysterious false moon and stop the Veskarium once and for all?
• Book 7, Glory to the Empire (13-15): The PCs have escaped from Salvation’s End with a little help from rebel Starfinders, only to discover that years have passed since their previous confrontation with the Veskarium. The Pact Worlds have fallen, Absalom Station is dismantled, and the vesk seek to relocate the Starstone Reactor to Vesk Prime. With the help of the Starfinders, the PCs must fight their way off Salvation’s End and rally their allies if they’re to have any hope of reclaiming the Starstone Reactor and freeing the Pact Worlds from under the Veskarium’s heel.
• Book 8, The Pact Worlds Avengers (15-17): After breaking free from Salvation’s End, the PCs must scour Nearspace for help against the Veskarium’s forces by locating pockets of resistance and recruiting their assistance in stopping the vesk and retrieving the Starstone.
• Book 9, The Emperor Ascendant (17-20): With the help of their allies, the PCs have fought their way into Veskarium space. But to retrieve the Starstone Reactor, they must battle against the Veskarium’s greatest warriors, including its emperor who has all but ascended into a god using the Starstone’s power. Can the PCs save the Pact Worlds, or are they doomed to fall before the newest Ascended God?

Starfinder Society: Year of Salvation’s Plague

This was a ton of fun to put together, but it also took a ton of my writing time for the week, so that’s it for this installment of Gibbering Mouth! Next week I’ll conclude with a follow-up to this article where I talk about the thrilling Starfinder Society season that could be released to support this—The Year of Salvation’s Plague. If you like this type of content from me, make sure to let me know in the comments and in Discord; I read all of them to get an idea of what sort of new content to try next.

And until next time, stay safe out there.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games since 2007 after a friend pretended to be his father in order to smuggle him out of high school so his gaming group had enough people to run a module. Today, Alex is the owner and publisher of Everybody Games, a co-host on Know Direction: Beyond and RPG Design Club, and a player on Stellar. You can follow Alex’s exploits on Twitter (@AlJAug), on Facebook, or on Patreon. Know Direction fans are also welcome to “@Alex” him on the Know Direction discord server!

Creative Commons Credit: Alien Invasion by Lapec

So, you might be wondering what exactly I have to say about Wrath of the Righteous? Well, for those of you who haven’t been following the Kickstarter, the Kickstarter funded and Owlcat games is hard at work adding stretch goals to their Kickstarter. One of those goals was an addition of a new ancestry to the tabletop RPG, and if you’ve ever followed me for even a little bit you know where this is going. Owlcat announced that for the $845,000 stretch goal, backers will get to vote on adding a new race from a pool of three: catfolk, ratfolk, and kitsune.

I’ve had a ton of people message me about this as soon as the goal went live; after all, my fondness for kitsune is basically known throughout the industry now. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this story, but back when I was first introducing myself to then-Developer Amanda Hamon, now Starfinder Managing Developer Amanda Hamon, the very first thing she said to me was, “Oh, I know you! You’re Alex who writes all about kitsune!” So obviously I have some thoughts on this reveal, but they might not be what you’r expecting. And since I’ve been REALLY hard-core talking about game mechanics and mechanical aspects of different Tabletop RPGs for a few weeks, I felt like this week was a good time to take a break from that and gibber a bit about something different. Like a stretch goal.

Predicting the Ancestry Race

So, one of the questions I get asked all the time in regards to this goal is, “Who do you want to win?” The answer is, of course, kitsune. They’re super awesome and fun to play. The next question is usually, “Who do you think will win?” And I feel like everyone I’ve asked expects me to repeat my answer by saying, “Oh, definitely kitsune.” But, believe it or not, that’s NOT my answer. My name is, “It depends on what communities Owlcat Games attracted to their Kickstarter.” And this might seem like a cop-out answer to you (and I guess in a way, it is), but let me explain why this is my answer: each of these three races is popular with different crowds for different reasons.

Catfolk, the Internet’s Choice

Catfolk have a real shot at winning this contest because catfolk (as well as cats in general) are super popular with internet communities. Cats have been a dominating force on the internet for ages, moreso with modern Dungeons & Dragons fans. If you’re up to date on common Dungeons & Dragons trends, you’ve probably heard of the tabaxi. That’s the ancestral name for what’s essentially Dungeons & Dragon’s version of catfolk; they’re basically anthropomorphic cat people and they’re incredibly popular with Dungeons & Dragons fans right now, especially online. They’re so popular that Wizkids has two different sets of tabaxi minitures in their Deep Cuts line, which is more then you can say about Paizo’s line right now. (Author’s Note: Paizo’s Deep Cuts line is incredibly safe, picking mostly “traditional” monsters and ancestral groups whereas Wizards of the Coasts picks all the wild, out-there creatures and peoples.)

The tabaxi’s popularity is worth bringing up because CRPGs like Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous found their audience among fans of the Baulder’s Gate series, which was a CRPG for D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting. If we take information as meaning that there’s a ton of old-school fans in the Pathfinder CRPG community, then that could mean that the Owlcat fandom has a ton of people who would want catfolk (a Pathfinder equivalent to the tabaxi) in their game, meaning we get a ton of votes for that ancestry.

Ratfolk, Paizo’s Choice

Ratfolk have a real shot at winning this contest because ratfolk are super popular with Paizo’s developers, and therefore they’re popular with Paizo’s fans. Don’t believe me? Compare the amount of lore that Paizo’s published for ratfolk to the amount of lore they’ve published for kitsune or catfolk. Of the three ancestries listed, ratfolk are the only one that had a significant showing in a core Pathfinder RPG book outside of their inaugural publication: ratfolk had a full article in the Monster Codex, whereas catfolk and kitsune have only appeared in the Bestiary that introduced them (Bestiary 3 and 4 respectfully). Moreover, ratfolk are also a core race in the Starfinder RPG, where they appear under the name “ysoki,” whereas neither catfolk nor kitsune have even been mentioned in Starfinder. (There’s a catlike race in Starfinder race called the pahtra, but they’re not the catfolk from Golarion.) This means that its very possible that the Paizo community might be more predisposed to ratfolk than the other two ancestries; whether that’s because Paizo has accurately read the community’s interest and produced content for them or because Paizo’s developers are more personally interested in ratfolk than the other two and their popularity grew because of Paizo’s continued support of the race is up for debate, however.

Kitsune, Fandom’s Choice

Kitsune have a real shot at winning this contest because humanoid foxes are incredibly popular with fans of anthropomorphic animals. I’m talking, of course, about the furry fandom but as well as people in general that like that style of character. Without going into too much detail, tons of people who are *really* into this fandom have things they call fursonas, which is kind of like a tabletop RPG character but they all have to be a humanoid animal of some kind. From what research I’ve done on the topic, foxes are one of the top 3 most popular fandom characters, alongside dragons and wolves. Cats are usually top 10 and rats don’t usually make the cut, but the point is that both are behind foxes, and if we go by the fandom’s trends, we could see kitsune winning the contest. You know, if Owlcat Games’s fans count a lot of people in that extremely specific fan base among them.

Alex’s Thoughts

So, as you can see there are pretty good reasons that any one of these three might win the contest. So, what do I personally think about it? Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of polarizing the community with this decision. I think I would have liked it more if the campaign promised that more pledges would unlock more ancestries from this list if only because your character’s ancestry is kind of the most defining choice you make about them. Like, your ancestry determines your general look and appearance, the core experiences you had growing up, and colors everything from your background to your class. And honestly, if Kingmaker had a flaw it was that it didn’t really embrace any of the stranger ancestries that make Pathfinder what it is; like, every game has humans, elves, and dwarves. Heck, even tieflings are common. Impress me by doing something new already! Stand out!

This contest does have some interesting components, however. For instance, Owlcat Games *did* post a tweet in January asking players to post their favorite Pathfinder race using only emojis.

That post didn’t explode by any stretch of the imagination. It has about 50 likes / comments and 4 retweets. VERY tame as far as Twitter explosions go. But at the same time, I find it interesting that their tweet’s emojis are essentially “bat grin,” which is a deadringer for dhampir (vampire bats + teeth). And huh, wouldn’t you know it about a week later they followed up with this:

So they used that post as a way to announce a new playable race for the upcoming game, and they even confirmed it prior on their Discord. Personally, this makes me wonder if the request for catfolk / kitsune / ratfolk is coming primarily from people in the community that they’re surveying. And if that’s the case, it’s interesting to see kitsune up there listed with two ancestries that are, for lack of a better word, more supported by Paizo in Pathfinder Second Edition. After all, we’ve already talked about how Paizo writes a LOT about ratfolk, but catfolk have been appearing in artwork fairly often in new books like the Pathfinder Lost Omens Character Guide, and both ratfolk and catfolk are printed as creatures in the Pathfinder Second Edition Bestiary and are slated to be playable ancestries in the Pathfinder Second Edition Advanced Player’s Guide. In fact, every single bonus race that Owlcat Games has noted for Wrath of the Righteous is already slated to be a heritage or ancestry in Pathfinder Second Edition; aasimars, dhampirs, and tieflings are all going to be heritages in the Advanced Player’s Guide, while catfolk and ratfolk are going to be new ancestries. And yet here are kitsune, who’s only appearance in Pathfinder Second Edition is a single NPC in a Pathfinder Second Edition Society scenario.

So to be completely honest, while I’m really hoping that kitsune win so I can play Kyrshin in Wrath of the Righteous, at this particular moment it feels pretty good to see kitsune put on the same level of importance as a bunch of ancestry options that Paizo thought were important enough to be in the Advanced Player’s Guide. Might mean that my buddy Mark’s finally going to have to acknowledge that I might have been right about the popularity of my favorite foxes after all!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games since 2007 after a friend pretended to be his father in order to smuggle him out of high school so his gaming group had enough people to run a module. Today, Alex is the owner and publisher of Everybody Games, a co-host on Know Direction: Beyond and RPG Design Club, and a player on Stellar. You can follow Alex’s exploits on Twitter (@AlJAug), on Facebook, or on Patreon. Know Direction fans are also welcome to “@Alex” him on the Know Direction discord server!

I’ve looked at both Pathfinder’s editions, so today I’m going to look at Pathfinder’s far-flung future kid that’s also Pathfinder’s predecessor. Time travel is kinky.

Anyway, you know the drill so let’s get going!

Like 1 — The Setting

I hope this isn’t a cop out, but Starfinder’s setting is absolutely its #1 Strength, and it benefits immensely from being wholly unique in ways that Pathfinder just isn’t. Pathfinder’s setting is heavily built upon its developers and designers’ favorite tropes, with entire countries existing to serve as a playground for a specific flavor of fantasy. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it can lead to the Age of Lost Omens feeling very patchwork and sometimes disjointed with one another, especially considering that Pathfinder rarely has those different regions interacting with one another.

Starfinder has none of that. All of its many influences are baked evenly throughout its setting, and different regions collide with regularity. The very first adventure path has the players go from a gritty exploration of the more dystopic parts of Absalom Station before going on a trek through a jungle, navigating a creepy undead city, and discovering a ruined society where the native species has stumbled backwards into a millennia-long dark ages. Basically all of the adventure paths are like this, and it gives Starfinder this feeling of a rich tapestry of adventure that is just so satisfying. Also, being set in the far-flung future means that Starfinder can safely use topics and concepts from the modern world that some fans might balk at in a “Medieval Renaissance” game like Pathfinder, such as a Starfinder Society adventure that features a Pop Concert.

Gosh, the setting is so good.

Dislike 1 — Tiered Equipment

I figured that if I’m going to place my #1 biggest like about Starfinder first, I might as well put my #1 biggest dislike about the system first too. I absolutely DESPISE Starfinder’s system of tiered equipment. Specifically, how they handle armor and weapons. Personally, I think it’s a huge waste of space when the majority of weapons and armor follow one or two simple formulas for damage that are pretty easy to figure out. Light armor, for instance, is in the ballpark of 1 + item level in AC if the armor has the maximum Dexterity bonus for its level, and an extra +1 for every 1 lower that the Dex cap is than this maximum. Heavy armor has a similar formula, but has an extra +1 or +2 armor on top of that, and powered armor has another extra +1 or +2 on top of that. Weapons scale based on average damage done for the level and have difference dice numbers as a result.

There’s a timeline where all of these tiered systems are summarized, similar to how fusion seals work, and weapons and armor just reference a specific progression. That would save SO much space on tables and make referencing the items so much easier. I wish we lived in that timeline, because now whenever I get a weapon I have to not only remember which book the weapon came from, but also have to hazard a guess regarding where on the weapon table that weapon came from. Finally, the heavy reliance on equipment (moreso armor than weapons) can make adventures where you can’t visit a city to shop even more punishing than, say, PF2 where you can easily transfer runes around. Personally, I think that this difficulty makes it imperative for the GM to make as much treasure as possible drop in UBPs so the party can at least craft their own equipment.

Like 2 — Stamina and Resolve Points

Okay, I’ll admit it. When Starfinder was first released (including when I was testing it in the Playtest), I had my reservations about how Resolve Points worked. At the time, it didn’t seem all that fun to be risking your long-term survivability by using actions that consumed Resolve Points. But as I’ve played Starfinder, I’ve seen the beauty of the system and am now convinced that the combination of Stamina and Resolve have created the best vitality system of all of Pathfinder’s games.

Mathematically, Starfinder is specifically designed to solve PF1’s issue of rocket tag at all levels of play by requiring multiple successful hits to truly drop a character. Most enemies who are the same level as you need somewhere between four and six hits to successfully take a player from full Health and Stamina Points to 0 Health and Stamina Points, and the separation of Hit Points and Stamina Points creates a mechanical “Oh No” feeling. In games like Pathfinder, you’ll often hear that “The only Hit Point that matters is the last one” because effectively, you fight normally up until that final Hit Point is taken. But in Starfinder, there’s a real sense of vulnerability when your Stamina Points are at 0 because the game is specifically designed to shower you in Stamina but to make Hit Points difficult to recoup (sometimes distressingly so). And yet for as easy as it is to recover about half your health after a battle, that battle still has consequences for your character in the form of the Resolve Point you spent to rest because every Resolve Point you spend resting is one fewer Resolve Point that you can spend on your higher-level Resolve Point abilities, and it could mean the difference between life and death if you get knocked down too many times.

Overall, it’s tough to find a game in the same genre as the “Paizofinder” games that has a system with as much grit and consequence to it as Starfinder. By far, it’s one of the best parts of the game.

Dislike 2 — Role Compartmentalization

Have you ever noticed that in Starfinder, no class is really all that good at healing Hit Point damage except for the mystic? How about that no class can really heal Stamina Point damage all that well except for the envoy? How about the fact that baseline, the biohacker’s ability to do both is significantly lower than that of the mystic (for Hit Points) or the envoy (for Stamina Points)? If you have noticed any of these things, congratulations! You’ve noticed that classes in the Starfinder RPG are insanely compartmentalized in regards to what roles they can perform. Starfinder basically has three roles, and we’ve known what they are since Alien Archive when their general themes were used to develop the three different arrays that all monsters are built from: combatant, expert, and spellcaster. Every single Starfinder class falls into one of these roles, that’s fine, but they also get assigned specific things that they’re best at. For example, you might have noticed that the soldier and the solarian both pump out way more damage than any other class can manage with melee weapons. Or that despite being literal mechanics, mechanics can’t numerically best the operative in Computers or Engineering except by having a better Intelligence bonus. Or that, as I mentioned, the only class in the game that can heal is the mystic despite it making perfect sense that a witchwarper could shift a person’s body into another reality where they weren’t wounded.

This philosophy of role compartmentalization stands in stark contrast to Pathfinder 1, where any class could do almost anything with an archetype or two and some elbow grease. Personally, I think the game’s more fun when you have meaningful choices regarding which classes can do which roles and what the benefits and trade-offs for those choices are, and while we’re starting to see some changes in COM (such as how mystics can take an epiphany for a solar weapon) overall Starfinder’s classes are still very much kept in boxes. Hope you like mk 3 Healing serums!

Like 3 — Archetypes

Oh man, how archetypes work in Starfinder is so smart, and it only works because with the exception of the mystic, every class is built using a basic framework that allows archetypes to thrive. The first few archetypes weren’t great; let’s get that out of the way. But now that they’ve been out for a while and especially with COM where archetypes now offer flexibility regarding when and where you get them, and they’re super cool and awesome. Sometimes I wonder what the original two archetypes would have been like if they were built with the foresight of the COM archetypes; I hazard a guess that people would be more into them. Archetypes are strongest when they add a universal flavor to a character build without taking away over half of that character’s class, and now that we’ve seen archetypes that do just that I’m really happy with the system.

While I think that PF2’s version of archetypes is just a little bit better than SF’s because it’s even more friendly to players, that dosen’t change the fact that Starfinder pioneered the concept of the class-neutral archetype and, with the release of COM, I think we can firmly say that they mastered the concept.

Dislike 3 — Starship Building

For a feature that’s supposed to be the cornerstone of the system, Starship building is a major regression on how players essentially build a character (their starship is basically an extra character at the table, after all). The starship suffers from many of the same problems that mass combat did in PF1; aside from the player’s skill modifiers, starships largely disregard the PCs and their abilities save for several small exceptions like the Sky Jockey feat, diminishing them to their number of ranks in a skill, their ability modifiers, and their base attack bonus. Building a starship is long and tedious, requiring selections from multiple menus that aren’t even presented in an order where the selection is relevant. More importantly, building a nonfunctioning starship is too easy, as is building a starship that technically works, but is no fun at the table. In our Dead Suns game, for instance, we let our party mystic fiddle with the starship bits because he was really into them. When we got into our first combat with that starship, lo, he built a starship that James literally could not hit except on a natural 20, but our star ship had no weapons so the most damage we could do was like 10-20 points per round. Against an enemy with hundreds of Hit Points …. James wisely called that fight, but asked our mystic to rebuild a more balanced starship so that kind of gameplay block wouldn’t happen again.

Personally, I would have preferred a system where the starship frames preset more of your starship’s capabilities and the upgrades you chose for things like armor and weapons had a noticable impact, but the floor was just raised higher without adjusting the ceiling of the starship’s power.

Like 4 — You Can Play Anything

I love how in Starfinder there are species rules for basically anything you can find in the setting, and how they’re all pretty well balanced around each other while also being flavorful and unique. There aren’t many options that are decidedly OP from a perspective of character species (the kish are the only one that come to mind for me at the moment), and I think Starfinder is proof of how a simple but sturdy set of rules makes for truly interesting player characters. In PF1, the balance for races was all over the place and was overwhelmingly slanted in an effort to try and portray the Core Races as being balanced with one another, so you’d end up with books releasing these crazy powerful races that many GMs would hesitate to allow at their tables, or that OP would have to lock away behind incredibly rare boons to avoid granting too much player power. In contrast, Pathfinder 2E’s approach has ancestry as a meaningful choice, but any given ancestry requires 4 to 6 pages of content now; the likelihood of seeing a Starfinder approach where more and more creatures are designed as playable ancestries seems unlikely and one can argue that the sheer amount of content surrounding Pathfinder 2E ancestries only enhances the amount of creature determinism associated with your ancestral group rather than meaningfully diminishing it. I am sure that someday Starfinder will receive a 2E and that version of SF will be more like PF2, but when that happens I hope that PF2’s approach to ancestry feats is something that the Starfinder Design Team leaves at the door; it absolutely clashes with the “Play the Cantina” philosophy of the game.

Dislike 4 — Asymmetrical Math

One of the things that strikes me as odd in the Starfinder roleplaying game is that the math differs dramatically between PCs and monsters. If you look at the game’s rules, PCs basically have higher AC values (both EAC and KAC) while monsters have higher attack bonuses. The net result is that the game works as the designers intended when players attack NPCs and vice versa, but the math gets REALLY wonky when you start trying to have NPCs attacking NPCs or PCs attacking PCs. For PCs, the fact that their attack bonuses are inherently lower than their NPC counterparts means that your awesome soldier actually has kind of a rough time hitting your friend. In contrast, if you want to use Starfinder’s awesome array rules to make a helpful NPC for the players to meet, you better either sit down and design them with the PC rules or make sure that they’re significantly lower level than the PCs; otherwise the inherent attack bonus edge and AC disadvantage that the math gives NPCs will mean that your ally will ALWAYS hit your NPCs and will always BE HIT by your NPCs.

According to the designers, this philosophy was adapted for mind control. For example, if a player got dominated by dominate person, it is tough for a dominated PC to wipe the floor with their party. (This is a serious thing that happens in PF1, to the extent that any time one of my NPCs used an enchantment on James in our Strange Aeons game he started wishing the other players a fond farewell at the hands of his blade.) However, I’m not entirely convinced that this was a problem that needed solving in Starfinder. In PF1, dominate person started hitting combats around 9th level, as dominate person is a 5th level spell and that’s about when high-level enemies start to have it on their spell list. In contrast, it’s a 6th-level spell in Starfinder, which you don’t start seeing until about 13th level (much less have in your repetoire until about 16th level). Furthermore, saving throws are so tightly scaled in Starfinder and Stamina Points make PCs so sturdy that it just doesn’t seem all that pertinent. Instead we’re left with a disjointed math system that makes the PCs look significantly different numbers wise in the world they populate, which isn’t always a great feeling.

Like 5 — Ability Score Generation

I won’t go as far to say that Starfinder has the best ability score generation of the X-finder games. I’m still deciding whether I like Starfinder or Pathfinder 2E’s system better. I will say, however, that Starfinder’s ability score generation is among the best in the industry right now specifically because of how personal upgrades work. Even Pathfinder 2E largely keeps itself anchored to the “I wear a magic item to boost my stats” paradigm, albeit at a much higher level. Starfinder doesn’t have this; instead, personal upgrades are a special type of augmentation that have their own slot because they’re so good that trying to tie them into anything else will just make those other augmentations obsolete, similar to how every magic item that came out for martial characters that was a belt was basically dead on arrival because it had to go against the stat boosting belts. (I’m sorry, blink-back belt. You are so cool, but you have to compete with enhancement bonuses!) Starfinder let upgrades affect your ability scores without making entire swaths of augmentations useless while also providing a good system for designing ability scores. Is it perfect? No. I am not a fan of the floating +1 from backgrounds, nor do I like the design concept of, “Oh man, let’s make options that require odd-numbered ability scores just so the background bonus matters.” I think that lacks real transparency. I also think that Starfinder has a real problem with playing against your flaw, as Starfinder (and PF2) lack significant sources of bonuses that can offset your racial ability penalties. There’s something cool about having a low ability score but being good at the thing anyway; it kind of feels like you’re overcoming one of your character’s disabilities with magic and special techniques.

But for all that said, I think ability score generation in Starfinder is more meaningful in PF1 and has more customization then what you can get out of PF2. (Because of how your ABCs work with ability scores, so much of your ability scores are predetermined that it can feel like you don’t have a ton of choice in the matter despite you getting to technically choose where over half of your ability boosts go.)

Dislike 5 — Content Comes Out Too Slowly!

I am sure all of my friends who work on Starfinder are going to want to smack me for this, but content comes out WAY too slowly for Starfinder. A Starfinder AP is shorter than a Pathfinder AP and has less content, Starfinder doesn’t have anything akin to the Lost Omens Guide line, so one of the game’s three books every year is a Campaign Setting Book (except 2019, which had a Beginner Box instead of a setting book). Classes go a LONG time without new content as a result, and when players tend to rely on something like an Advanced Player’s Guide or constant innovation to show them what they can do with a system, a slow stream of content can really make picking up a new game kind of difficult. Hopefully someday we see more Starfinder, because Starfinder is awesome! (I honestly prefer it to PF2, if only because memes exist in Starfinder’s world and that’s all the reason I need to play any campaign setting.)

In conclusion,

In an interview, Jason Bulmahn once said that the team that designing PF2 was a necessity because they couldn’t just fix Pathfinder 1E’s math and make the system do what they wanted. When I heard that quote, I honestly wondered whether Jason had played Starfinder much, because while Starfinder’s math isn’t perfect, it is such a marked improvement over PF1 that I remain convinced to this day that the 3.5 game design engine’s math is absolutely salvageable. For me, Starfinder is incredibly fun and I have such a hard time picking it apart for things that I honestly think are flaws with the game. PF2 might be the new shiny and it might even have an objectively better mathematics system and action economy, but its design makes a lot of the things in Starfinder that I love impossible. Like, how would the PF2 ancestry system work in Starfinder? You could never publish as many races as Starfinder has when PF2’s rules demands an allocation of 6-8 pages per species for feats and the like. Starfinder made its characters sturdier and grittier without making its enemies any less deadly, and the fact that you have separate pools of points makes the loss of Stamina feel dreadful. Your Stamina is gone, you’re cutting into your Hit Points. You could DIE!

But these are just my thoughts, and I’d love to hear yours. If you’ve played SF and PF2, which system do you like better and why? Do you think I should review more TTRPGs in this format? I know a ton of people want me to talk about Fifth Edition, and I kind of want to write up Big Eyes, Small Mouth in this style. Leave your thoughts on Discord (tag with @Alex); I can’t wait to read them!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games since 2007 after a friend pretended to be his father in order to smuggle him out of high school so his gaming group had enough people to run a module. Today, Alex is the owner and publisher of Everybody Games, a co-host on Know Direction: Beyond and RPG Design Club, and a player on Stellar. You can follow Alex’s exploits on Twitter (@AlJAug), on Facebook, or on Patreon. Know Direction fans are also welcome to “@Alex” him on the Know Direction discord server!

Anyway, I’ve got some bad news for all the people praising me for harping on Pathfinder 1E and taking that to mean that I love Pathfinder 2E. Some really, really bad news.

Let’s talk about Pathfinder 2E! As always, there are just my thoughts and opinions, but I know that’s not going to stop the internet from hating on me so BRING IT!

Likes 1: 3-Action Economy is Great

I don’t think this is going to surprise anyone. Pathfinder 2E’s action economy, which gives you 3 actions that you can spend however you want, is basically the most celebrated aspect of the system. EVERYONE talks about how it makes Pathfinder 2E easier and more satisfying to play because it gives you unprecedented fidelity over the actions your character takes during a turn. Essentially, this is the perfect action system.

Unless you’re a spellcaster.

Dislikes 1: 3-Action Economy is Great … for Martial Characters

Pathfinder 2E’s action economy is INCREDIBLY unfriendly to Spellcasters. A martial character can use their actions to move 4-5 squares on the map and attack twice, change their weapons around, raise their shield, or do any number of super fun, flavorful, and helpful actions. Spellcasters, on the other hand, cast spells. Almost every spell in Pathfinder 2E takes 2 actions to cast; spells like magic missile and heal that “ramp up” actions are currently rare, and as a result spellcasters don’t get to access to the action economy to anything near the same degree as martial characters do. As a result, a spellcaster’s turn ends up feeling rather samey, and they don’t respond well to situations that require them to use one or more actions. For example, if you need to move away from an opponent, you can forget about that reach metamagic feat you considered using.

In my opinion, this is a major flaw with the system because manipulating the action economy is a huge part of PF2’s system mastery, and spellcasters largely don’t get to play with it. Whereas martial classes get feats that allow them to combine actions in new and exciting ways to stretch their actions further, spellcasters don’t really have anything like that, and the few options that do exist tend to be high-level options. There are very few spells or spellcaster feats that can be triggered as a reaction or that require single actions to cast, so you don’t really get the same gradient of gameplay that martial characters get. For example, imagine a world where dimension door can be cast with up to 3 actions, and each action increased the distance you teleported. 60 feet for 1 action, 120 feet for 2, and 180 for 3. Suddenly you have a spell that allows spellcasters to teleport small distances (effectively two and a half Moves for most characters) in an instant and still cast a spell! But instead, spellcasters are largely shackled to the three action paradigm.

Likes 2: Medicine is Useful

I was never a fan of the wand of cure light wounds spam, even if it was the most effective way to recoup after a combat. It doesn’t feel good to go into a fight severely wounded, but it also doesn’t feel good to sit around and just spam a low-level wand. As a result, I think the Treat Wounds activity is among the greatest innovations of Pathfinder 2, giving real ways for science and alchemy to restore wounds. Battle Medicine makes Medicine even more fun in my opinion, though I truly wish they didn’t feel the need to keep Battle Medicine restricted to once per day; I think something like 1 + 1 per proficiency rank above untrained would have been better. I would have loved for Battle Medicine to be a way for anyone to become a passable in-combat healer, but even if Battle Medicine isn’t perfect I still want to acknowledge that the Medicine skill’s usefulness is one of the shining stars of PF2.

Dislikes 2: The Rules Are Sometimes Wishy-Washy

So when it comes to Tabletop RPGs, there are two basic models of player agency—allowances and adjucations. All current incarnations D&D are allowances games while a game like Big Eyes, Small Mouth is an adjucations game. In an allowances games, a player basically can’t do anything unless a rule says you can. (It’s worth noting that one rule most allowance games is GM fiat, so even if no rules exist to do a thing GM fiat allows the GM to make judgment calls for themselves. Still, when a player benefits from GM fiat it’s still a GM making a decision for a player rather than the player getting to use the rules themself.) In contrast, in an adjucations game a player tells the GM what their character does and the rules exist to help the GM determine how successful the player is. The key difference between the two is that in an adjucations game, the player typically has significantly more freedom do whatever they want without an explicit rule needing to exist that gives them permission to play in a certain way.

Pathfinder 1E is an allowances game, and Pathfinder 2E inherited this from its predecessor. But one thing I dislike about Pathfinder 2E is that it has globs of adjucations-style gameplay mixed into the rules without actually giving the GM any guideline regarding when to allow players to access those adjucations. The #1 place where this is a problem for me is in the initiative rules. As you might be aware, PF2’s initiative is skill-based, so according to the rules you roll either a Perception check or a skill check with any skill that represents what you were doing that the GM allows you to roll. Normally, this is Stealth but the rules call out that other skills can be used.

Me: Okay. How? Give me some examples on when it would be appropriate to start a combat using Intimidation or Religion or Arcana or literally any other skill that isn’t obvious like Perception or Stealth.

PF2: Nah, but we’re going to publish a class that basically has a rage mechanic that you can only access if you start the combat by using a skill you would never think to use for initiative, for initiative.

Me: …

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think games that give players the ability to adjucate on their own are awesome. They make players active participants in the game’s worldbuilding rather than passive consumers. But if you’re going to have an allowances-based system dabble in adjucation, you need examples and/or allowances for those adjucations. In places like initiative, Pathfinder 2E’s allowances feel lazy because the rules don’t do a good job of giving examples of when and how such adjucations are appropriate, and that drives me crazy!

Likes 3: GMing is Easy

Alright fam, I’m going to admit something that’ll probably get me into trouble. As a grand experiment, I’ve GMed roughly 3-6 PF2 scenarios and book 1 of Age of Ashes, and aside from a quick read-through of the material I haven’t prepped ANYTHING. At least, not like how I’d have to prep PF1. I didn’t have to go and find stat blocks, take pages of notes on how abilities interacted, download Jen McTeague’s awesome PF Prep files, do research on monster tactics, redesign encounters substantially to suit my players, spend HOURS coming up with mechanics that might increase the fun for a group of terrifying death machines with unhittable characters.

Nope. None of that.

PF2 is generally pretty simple to GM; if you know enough to play it, you probably know enough to run it as long as you’re willing to look up rules on the go. I think that this is generally a strength of the game; you want the barrier to GMing to be low because more GMs means more tables of players.

Dislikes 3: Perception is a Pseudo-Skill

WHY IS PERCEPTION NOT A SKILL?

It works like a skill. It uses proficiency ranks like a skill. YOU USE IT TO DETERMINE INITIATIVE ALONGSIDE OTHER SKILLS. Just. Make. It. A. Skill!

Seriously, Perception not being a skill has some serious consequences for the game. It’s the reason that “Champion Initiative” exists. Champions have a notoriously poor initiative because they’re one of the game’s few classes that don’t have an inherent way to boost their proficiency rank with Perception above expert. There’s no good reason for Perception to not be a skill, and there’s no good reason for the game to have classes that are less good at Perception than, say, the rogue. Or gosh, the CLERIC. I understand the concern of Perception being a must-invest skill if you could invest in it, I really do. But in that situation I feel like the answer is to:

A) Make the other skills better (Seriously, have you seen Athletics? That skill is AMAZINGLY good now.)

B) Pull back on some of the uses of the Perception skill.

I don’t know which of these options would have been the best one. Personally, I’m thinking that most of the game’s other skills could have used a serious buff or two, especially if Perception was formally reclassified as a skill and a good place to start would be to add some of the class feats back to baseline. Regardless, we’re left with this weird system where Perception is basically just a skill that you can’t spend a skill increase on, and it’s not great.

Likes 4: Traits Make Citation Easy

Of all the various additions to the game, I think traits make the most sense. They basically work like keywords from Magic: The Gathering after all; they’re universal rules that when you see them, they’re easy to look up and reference. You can now say, “Whenever you use a fire effect” and that means something, because the game defines that effects with traits are effects with traits. It’s simple, easy, and overall a great way for the rules to stay consistent with themselves. (And if we’re being honest, a large reason this system works is that PF2 has that BEAUTIFUL appen-index in the back of the book!)

Dislikes 4: Rocket Tag, All Day Every Day

I might be the ONLY person who thinks this, but did the Pathfinder Design Team SERIOUSLY take one of the things nobody likes about high-level play (rocket tag, or the ability for players to go from full HP to nothing in a single turn of actions) and make it a core feature of every level of play? In my experience, PF2 characters seem to be designed in a way that they’re always one critical hit away from being knocked unconscious, as if you take two hits per round (very likely given the math) and one of them is a critical hit, that’s the same as taking a full suit of hits in the same round and dropping.

“Oh, it’s just Luck Alex. It won’t happen often Alex.” Friends, I’ve literally done this to someone EVERY TIME I’ve played Pathfinder 2, sometimes multiple times to the SAME PERSON. And the reason is simple—the Math in PF2 is so tight that generally speaking, the PCs are largely punching up more than they’re punching down, meaning it’s more common for them to be attacking foes with higher ACs (meaning crits are less likely) and higher attack bonuses (meaning being crit is more likely). The math is really in the favor of a PC going from zero to nothing in one round, and in my experience there’s not a lot you can DO about it beyond “use a shield last round and hope for the best.” There aren’t any good, widely available actions for protecting yourself from critical hits.

So maybe calling PF2 rocket tag is unfair. It’s more like “Rocket Bullying,” where the GM can just constantly shove player’s Hit Points into the dirt until they either die or manage to scrap a win past a monster. You know, luck is KIND of a factor here!

Likes 5: Buffs Are Brought in Line

I REALLY like how buffs use a small list of buff types (conditional, circumstance, status). I think that this not only makes the math more managable for the GM, but it also ensures that you can have a larger variety of people at the table and not worry as much about their class abilities canceling each other out. Paradoxical, I know, fewer buffs means less self-canceling? And no, that’s not entirely what I mean. Hear me out.

Generally speaking, most spells give status buffs, right? That means that you can’t take a spell / feat and expect to always have that benefit up. Instead, the question becomes, “Which character among us has the best version of this spell for our current situation?” It changes the nature of the game to picking the spell you need in the moment rather than just always having it active. For example, if it makes more sense to have EVERYONE get a status bonus, bless is a better answer than heroism because bless is multiple targets. But if only one person in your party is attacking things, heroism is the better option because it gives more benefits to that one target.

It makes choosing from among buff spells a more tactical choice, rather than PF1’s answer of, “JUST APPLY ALL THE BUFFS ALL THE TIME!”

Dislikes 5: Pathfinder 2E is Afraid of Players

I made this dislike last, because I’m expecting this one to be the most controversial. Pathfinder 2E is afraid of its players. What do I mean by this? The game is absolutely riddled with relatively heavy-handed stop-gaps to make sure that player power doesn’t get out of hand, and oftentimes it doesn’t feel particularly good. Perhaps the best example comes from the incapacitation trait, which makes it so your spells automatically one degree of success less successful against anyone who’s level is more than twice the spell’s level. This generally means such spells(s) have about a 10 to 20% chance to have their success effects against any foe that’s a severe or an extreme encounter on their own, while they have NO chance to critically fail. Which is a problem, since incapacitation spells generally don’t have worthwhile effects unless your foe critically fails. (I think the “best” is baleful polymorph’s 1-minute long sickened condition that can’t be retched, but my familiarity with higher-level spells is less then that of lower-level spells.) This, honestly, might have been a fine mechanic if most incapacitate traits weren’t spells, and spellcasters weren’t limited to a meager 3 spell slots per level per day. In practice, this makes incapacitate spells a “mook-only” level mechanic without actually saying as much to the player.

In conclusion,

I think that mathematically, PF2 is a superior game to PF1 if only because the math is tight enough that the game doesn’t fall apart at any point during the game. PF1 notoriously falls apart around Level 7, and I think its safe to say that PF2’s design is cohesive enough that something like that won’t happen. But that having been said, just like how PF1 has its flaws PF2 has flaws too, many of which center around what some have called a “trademark PDT heavy-handedness” when it comes to fixing power creep. (For reference, such people usually cite things like the Crane Wing nerfs of 2010-ish when talking about how the PDT prefers to “break” things that are too strong rather than fix them. Whether or not this is accurate is a matter of personal opinion, and not an opinion I share personally.) I think that there was always destined to be some controversy around the release of a new addition, but I also think that we also need to critically examine the games we play so we can identify their strengths and weaknesses. For all of its excellent mathematics and fun action economy system, PF2 does have its design issues. Like with any game, however, it’s up for you to decide for yourself whether those issues are bugs, flaws, or features.

I hope you all enjoyed my Likes and Dislikes of Pathfinder 2E. I was originally going to do SF today, but I had so many PF2 fans hating on PF1 last week that I decided to set the record straight and do PF2 first. Next time I’ll take a look at SF and discuss what I like and dislike there. Until next time, ciao!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games since 2007 after a friend pretended to be his father in order to smuggle him out of high school so his gaming group had enough people to run a module. Today, Alex is the owner and publisher of Everybody Games, a co-host on Know Direction: Beyond and RPG Design Club, and a player on Stellar. You can follow Alex’s exploits on Twitter (@AlJAug), on Facebook, or on Patreon. Know Direction fans are also welcome to “@Alex” him on the Know Direction discord server!

So with that in mind, I’m going to be doing a series here I’m calling 5 Likes & Dislikes. I’m going to be touching on  a few different Tabletop RPGs, starting with Paizo TTRPGs and branching off into others as I have the time to read them through. Over the next three weeks I’m going to be taking a look at Pathfinder 1E, Starfinder, and Pathfinder 2E in that order, and afterwards I’m hoping to have time to finish my thoughts on Shadows of the Demon Lord, Tales from the Loop, and Big Eyes, Small Mouth 1E. But who knows? Maybe by the time I finish the Paizo games I’ll need a break.

Maybe.

Let’s get started!

Like 1: Customization

Your ability to customize your character in Pathfinder 1st Edition is second to none right now. There are over 30 classes and you can freely multiclass between them however you want. There’s over 40 different playable ancestries to choose from, many of which have alternate racial traits that allow for further customization, and literally hundreds of feats. That’s sort of the advantage of a mature system; there’s just so much amazing content for it that you can pretty much build whatever you want.

Dislike 1: The Math Engine

I don’t think that Pathfinder 1E’s Math engine was really ever designed to work. After all, it was basically uplifted from the 3.5 Math engine, and most of the problems we see in Pathfinder 1E are carry overs from that game, exacerbated by the fact that Pathfinder 1E is a very high-power version of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. Way back in the day before I  made the jump to Pathfinder (back when I was mostly playing D&D 3.5), I actually lauded the system for it’s rampant player power, and this was back when there was only the Core Rulebook to go off of. Pathfinder has almost a dozen different kinds of bonuses, and the game’s monsters simply can’t handle that. It’s too many variables for making a balanced combat.

When looking at this issue, I’m reminded of the difference between World of Warcraft and Classic World of Warcraft. During the early days of World of Warcraft (especially the Burning Crusade), basically every class brought powerful buffs that you wanted in your raid. Warriors had battle shout, paladins had blessings, priests had Power Word: Fortitude, mages had arcane intellect. I could literally go down the list of all 10 classes that were in the game at the time, note any one of them, and each brought a powerful buff to the raid that you absolutely needed. Then a lot of that vanished between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. Why? Because the WoW Developers came to the same realization that the Pathfinder Design Team probably came to when making Pathfinder 2E—if you have too many variables, you either have to encourage your players to find ways to acquire all of them or you have to live with the fact that groups that have all will be significantly stronger. In World of Warcraft, this meant “bring the class” over “bring the player.” In Pathfinder, it means picking the same six items over and over again and using the same cookie cutter builds because their math was so strong that there was never any real risk of failure or defeat. Both of those things negatively impact the respective game’s fun in some manner.

The mathematical disparity causes numerous problems throughout the game, the biggest one being that it actually created two separate “needs” within the community. If I might draw comparison to World of Warcraft again, one of the things Warcraft raiding is famous for is the sliding scale of difficulty in the game. You can play “Normal” raids which are accessible to nearly everyone, “Heroic” raids that are significantly more challenging, and “Mythic” raids which are accessible only to the top 10% of players in terms of their difficulty. Pathfinder 1E developed two separate communities of players—a “Normal” player base that consists of people who are either new to the game or enjoy the baseline power level, and a “Mythic” player base that is entertained by high power levels and intricate levels of optimization. And where World of Warcraft’s rules are GMed by a computer programmed to be able to flawlessly execute both Normal and Mythic raids, your GM in Pathfinder is a person who might not have that same level of competency, and more over, they might not find it fun to develop the skills and invest the extra time into painstakingly customizing every encounter to their players’ abilities. We can’t all be Mark Seifter, after all!

Like 2: Choice is Significant

With some exceptions, every character in Pathfinder 1E makes a significant choice at every new level. Whether you’re getting a feat or choosing a new class feature or spell, you have choices to make all the time and one could say that a PF1 character is the sum of those choices. Knowing that a character’s effectiveness is the result of your own smart planning is an immensely satisfying feeling, and it’s one of the driving forces of Pathfinder 1E.

Dislike 2: Trap Choices

For every significant choice you can make in PF1, there are an equal number of choices that are traps. A trap choice is an option that looks deceivingly good on paper, but in practice it’s a waste of space. There are PLENTY of feat choices and class feature choices and archetype choices that are notorious traps for one reason or another. A particularly infamous one was the original version of the Prone Shooter feat, which had an effect that was already baseline for all characters. In a sense, it did nothing. There are also plenty of archetypes that are considered traps because they make generally poor trades or worsen the capabilities of the characters who take them. Part of the issue with PF1 is that system mastery makes you a god, but not having system mastery (or ignoring it for other reasons) can cause you to make bad choices.

Like 3: It’s Familiar

I think that this like is going to be the thing that draws a ton of people into PF1 now. PF1 uses a game mechanics engine that we’ve been playing with for, what, over 30 years now? As a result, if you’ve been playing the 3.0 / 3.5 engine for a long time, the game feels REALLY familiar. Moreover, if you’re internet savvy it’s VERY easy to find some really good content from content creators on the web that help you with your builds and with understanding basic game design ideals. This is something a new game doesn’t end up having for a while; experts who’ve played the system, run it through it’s ropes, and can speak with experienced authority on the topic.

A great example for how a newer game and end up suffering for not having this kind of authority comes from Starfinder. For a long time, there were a ton of players who ragged hard on the envoy and the soldier early on in Starfinder’s life while extolling the virtues of the operative. “The soldier,” they said “Doesn’t do nearly enough damage to keep up with the operative and the operative just gets more, more, more! The envoy stops getting meaningful abilities after 8th level and doesn’t have anything they really bring to the party because they can’t bring damage. Damage kills monsters!” Now a few years later, the community mostly agrees that those three points aren’t true. The soldier effortlessly out damages the operative round per round, the envoy’s party buffs and debuffs are invaluable, and the operative (while good) supports a number of specific playstyles that don’t necessarily make it the burst-master of the PF1 rogue. These are things that took time to figure out because players and GMs weren’t familiar with the system and it’s expectations.

Dislike 3: Needless Complexity

For everything I love about PF1, it’s got a lot of needless complexity. These are mechanics whose presence doesn’t really add anything significant to the game. A great example is Hit Dice. I loathe Hit Dice as they’re implemented in PF1, as they basically only exist as a mechanic that prevents some effects from working against some monsters. For example, if you have a human who has 10 Hit Dice, you can’t affect it with the daze spell. Despite them being Level 10. This mechanic basically exists only to ensure that monsters are different at a superfluous level, as the value of a Hit Dice doesn’t really exist and the Hit Dice you set your monster at isn’t as important as the numbers they get from it. That the process for determining Hit Dice differs for every creature type makes it more unwieldy, and I’ll even go as far as to say that this mechanic is what makes monster design so difficult for new GMs. It shouldn’t be.

Another place where complexity rears its ugly head is in feat taxes. TONS of feats have taxes for no other reason than A) tradition or B) as a way to give a minimum character level for a combat feat that a fighter can bypass by virtue of having more feats than anyone else. This ends up leading into fighting styles where you’re basically locked in to specific choices from Level 1, and if you didn’t start working towards a chain before you even built the character there’s zero chance of you ever getting the feat later. And plenty of feats have requirements that don’t even build well off of one another. For me, the most famous is how Whirlwind Attack needs Spring Attack. WHY? What about those two feats is  helpful?

But still, nothing compares to needless complexity as much as Precise Shot and the firing into melee rule. That rule (and Precise Shot by extension) literally exist to ensure that people who specialize in ranged combat are better at it than people who don’t. Nothing more, nothing less. It requires 3rd level (1st if you’re a fighter) and exists only to take away a penalty that’s designed to make sure that someone who wants to be ranged is better than someone who flirts with the notion of bows and arrows. It’s needlessly complex and it’s design that’s actively unfriendly towards the players.

Like 4: Crazy Gonzo Action

It’s common knowledge that high-level Pathfinder is like a super heroes game where people are throwing out insanely potent effects left and right, where gods rip mortal souls asunder only to watch as they come crawling back from the brink anyway. High-level Pathfinder is really a different kind of game, and MAN, when you get a group together that’s all playing at that same high-power level with a GM who can throw challenging encounters at you, Pathfinder 1 feels incredibly good. One of my favorite Pathfinder 1 experiences of all time has to be the Passing the Torch series; me and a group of friends (that included James Ballod) played both two parters on hard mode at the highest possible tier, and I must say readers, I have NEVER played a game like it. I ache in my heart for that level of power and subsequent challenge, and it’s a feel that neither PF2 nor SF can replicate unfortunately.

Dislike 4: Building Anything Takes FOREVER

Hey, remember how I mentioned I loved the Crazy Gonzo Action? You might be asking yourself, “Alex, if you love it so much why don’t you run games like that?” Because, my dear friends, building anything from PCs to monsters to encounters in PF1 takes FOREVER. Skill ranks take forever. Spending gold takes forever. Building monsters using Bestiary’s rules takes FOR-EV-ER. Tweaking monster stats to the myriad of player options and capabilities takes FOREVER. In PF1 you can’t really make assumptions about player power; the bonuses are so all over the place that you basically have to take every player’s numbers and use them to build challenges. It’s painful, time consuming, and often requires you to rewrite entire stat blocks just to get an inkling of a challenge. And the worst part is that there’s no easy way to do this. You gotta customize everything to your group to a degree, and it just takes FOREVER.

Like 5: Room for Trade-Offs

One of the best part of PF1 that you don’t see in PF2 or SF is this idea that if you build a character with weaknesses, gear and equipment exists that allows you to shore up those weaknesses. For example, if you decide to prioritize Strength over Intelligence at 1st level, PF1 has easy ways to help you play catch up if your character should have a good bonus in some Int-based things. There are tons of different skill bonuses, items that boost ability scores, and more. While you can use the system to push yourself over the top, you can also use the system to make more balanced character choices that the base rules don’t allow you to do at first level, which feels REALLY good. SF and PF2 (especially PF2) don’t really have this option; it’s why Altronus, the iconic Solarian pregen, is so notoriously bad in Starfinder Society until his Level 5 incarnation where he gets a better array of ability score adjustments from leveling up.

Dislike 5: Paizo Never Embraced the Gonzo

For me, one of the strangest side effects of PF1’s design is that outside of Pathfinder Society (which has some of the best designed, challenging encounters out of the company’s entire product line), Paizo never actually put any effort into designing challenging content. Everything was always designed at the so-called 3.5 baseline, with the game never really going into the gritty in how to play high power games. Sometimes I wonder if a majority of people at Paizo don’t like building high-powered characters for one or more of the reasons I talked about here, but oh man is it FUN to have an insane group of characters! It’s why it disappointed me when I ran my first Adventure Path (Strange Aeons) and I realized just how low the bar was actually set. Sorry if this sounds like I’m calling out people who enjoy that level of play difficulty; I’m not trying to, but I’m legit disappointed that a game about fighting Cthulhu monsters isn’t designed to be Paizo’s one really difficult AP. Ultimately, running Strange Aeons sort of opened my eyes to where the majority of Paizo’s customers probably are in terms of the power level of the games they’re playing, and it sort of left me with this weird paradox—do I redesign everything and make it sufficiently challenging for the high-powered group I have, or do I leave it as-is and preserve the Paizo-intended integrity of the game? Ultimately I decided on a mix of the two; I only changed important set piece encounters and left all the other ones the same. That worked for me, but MAN what I wouldn’t give for Paizo to hand the reigns over to Linda Zayas-Palmer and John Compton for an AP series; have them make an AP of adventures tuned at the level of games like Salvation of the Sages and Passing the Torch!

In Conclusion,

I think Pathfinder 1 is a game system that allows for unparalleled customization at the cost of peerless complexity. As you advance in the game, you need to increasingly custom-tailor games to your players in order to offer them challenges to the limitless no-holds-bars of the system. While I think the game’s ability to make the players feel like they built the perfect character is second to none, the fact that it puts so much strain on the GMs to meet that rising uptick in power almost made it certain that eventually the game would have to evolve and change, if only to make running the system less stressful for the GM.

I hope you all enjoyed my Likes and Dislikes of Pathfinder 1E. Next time I want to take a gander at Starfinder, and conclude with a look at PF2. I’m not sure if I’m going to do these straight or put some Iconic Designs in between; maybe you can lend me your thoughts? Tag me on Discord in our Blog Discussion section and let me know which you prefer! Until next time, ciao!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, has been playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games since 2007 after a friend pretended to be his father in order to smuggle him out of high school so his gaming group had enough people to run a module. Today, Alex is the owner and publisher of Everybody Games, a co-host on Know Direction: Beyond and RPG Design Club, and a player on Stellar. You can follow Alex’s exploits on Twitter (@AlJAug), on Facebook, or on Patreon. Know Direction fans are also welcome to “@Alex” him on the Know Direction discord server!

Now, when you hear a title like “human cruelty,” you probably start by thinking to yourself “Goodness me, Alex! I NEVER depict human cruelty at my high-class Tabletop Table!” Sadly, chances are that you do and honestly, in some situations that’s FINE. I’m not here to tell you that bad things can’t happen in your campagn. What I am here to tell you, however, is that any depictions of human cruelty need to be handled with grace, compassion, humility, and most importantly CONSENT. So, ready to get started? I certainly am!

Defining Human Cruelty

Before we get started in earnest, I think that we need to take a moment to define exactly what I mean by human cruelty, because it’s a term that I coined specifically for this article. To the best of my knowledge, this term doesn’t really exist outside of this blog (but if a better, scholarly accepted term that matches my beat exists, please inform me about it on the Know Direction Discord). I define human cruelty as follows:

• A system of behaviors that promote discrimination, oppression, or violence between individuals that is overtly or covertly promoted by a culture or society.

To put another way, human cruelty a term that I use for systemic discrimination and oppression. It’s a term that broadly encompasses behaviors like racism, slavery, trafficking, and similar acts between people.

The Argument for Portraying Human Cruelty

While my personal stance forms the fundamental basis of this article, I would feel remised if I didn’t note the argument for unabashed inclusion of topics involving or relating to human cruelty in a tabletop RPG. Typically, these arguments include:

• “These are real issues that happen in the real world, and my game doesn’t feel real without them.”
• “People are inherently terrible towards each other. Human cruelty is a byproduct of human interaction.”

I would like to take a moment to address these issues. Regarding the first, most tabletop RPGs gloss over your character’s childhood and instead focus on a period of 1-6 months where your character evolves from an average person to a godslayer. Is this going to be all TTRPG experiences? Of course not. But if your campaign was that way, you probably wouldn’t think twice because rapid acquisition of player power via leveling up is a hallmark part of the Tabletop RPG experience. You’re willing to overlook the unrealistic aspects (“Hey guys, I know I just got run through by a minotaur horn a minute ago but that Treat Wounds use of the Medicine skill has me feeling fine and dandy now; let’s keep moving!”) because they directly contribute to the play experience, sometimes enhancing it. Likewise, it’s not always fun to have your character bedridden by the flu for a week even though that’s SUPER realistic, so you have the player try a few Fortitude saves and gloss by the rest. Topics of human cruelty are sometimes better treated like the flu; glossed over to improve the player experience (more on that soon).

Regarding the second point, that is such an overwhelming pessimistic view of humanity that I’m honestly not really sure where to begin refuting that. The real world has plenty of real examples of extremists who inflict terrible acts of human cruelty and suffering onto each other, yes, but the world also has plenty of real examples of helpers who give generously and greatly to others. People who need help receiving help from others; people who reach out and offer a helping hand during times of tragedy; people who, in a single moment, save lives. In general, TTRPGs tend to ignore the helpers in the world unless they’re PCs. After all, many such games are predicated on the PCs taking the roles of those helpers, those heroes. If you can ignore the helpers of the world, you can ignore the extremists of the world too.

The Argument Against Portraying Human Cruelty

So we’ve discussed human cruelty and why many GMs feel like they need to include it as a theme in their adventures. Let’s talk about why that’s not always a great idea. Ultimately, it boils down to the concept of escapism. For many people, tabletop RPGs and other forms of entertainment are about escaping the problems and plights of the real world in favor of something better, or at least a place where those problems aren’t something the player has to deal with. And that’s a good place to bring up the concept of privilege. If there’s one thing that progressives aren’t great at, it’s conveying the meaning behind their ideas and privilege is a great example of this. By definition, privilege is a right or advantage granted to a particular person or group. Generally, when people claim they don’t have privilege they think about the advantages they have rather than what they don’t have: that’s because society is very discrete in how it assigns privilege to people, and privileged people are often taught from a young age that their privilege is “just the way things work,” so it’s becomes taboo to look one’s privilege in the mouth, so to speak.

In regards to human cruelty, many of the people who need help understanding why human cruelty might not be a great topic at the table probably have privilege that makes a deeper understanding of these topics unnecessary. For example, systematic racism is absolutely an example of human cruelty, but if you’re white you’ve never actually encountered systemic racism. You might have encountered someone whose actions towards you were racist, but that is a single person. White people don’t have to worry about realtors in unique denying them the ability to purchase New York City homes in affluent areas of the city, and Christians don’t have to worry about nation-spanning organizations united only by a desire to see people of their faith eradicated from the country deciding to bomb their place of worship during mass. But these are very real concerns for many people in the country (let alone the world), and they are EXHAUSTING. Anyone who’s ever worried about anything for an extended period knows that true anxiety saps anything out of you, and someone looking to tabletop RPGs for escapism and instead finding a privileged GM trying to make a “real” setting by forcing the worst aspects of their life upon them during their moments of escapism add to that exhaustion rather than alleviate it. The cost of enjoyment isn’t worth the inclusion of human cruelty in your games, no matter the circumstances.

Consent and Cruelty

So, we’ve talked about what human cruelty is, debunked two common reasons people like to include human cruelty in their campaigns, and discussed why you shouldn’t use human cruelty in your campaigns. So, when SHOULD you discuss themes of human cruelty?

For many people, topics of human cruelty are exhausting because they hit close to home for them. These people actively lose enjoyment of a tabletop RPG session the longer that they’re exposed to such topics. But for other people, the chance to interact with and change systemic human cruelty is exactly the experience they’re looking for in their tabletop RPG. These people don’t mind the fact that racism and violence exist in the game world if their characters have the chance to successfully fight it, much as they might fight some other overwhelming force like an ancient dragon. But the most important aspect of this mindset is the desire to engage with human cruelty.

As a result, my recommendation in regards to human cruelty is to ask your players for their thoughts on the subject. If you’re using a data gathering matrix like an X card, it’s a good idea to tell your players that you want their thoughts on consent in addition to any other lines or veils they have so they can submit that feedback to you. If your players are cool with it, then go for it. If they’re not, it’s understandable and you now have an obligation to either gloss over or omit entirely those themes. Pretty easy, right?

So your players say YES to human cruelties in their game. How do you engage them? Remember that human cruelties are, well, cruel. Don’t try to portray them (or the people who engage in them) as sympathetic. In the best case scenario, people who engage in oppression or discrimination do so because they’ve been systemically taught that such behaviors are “just how things are,” but just like you wouldn’t forgive a soldier who committed a war crime they were unaware of, ignorance should not excuse anyone from engaging in human cruelty. More often, you’ll want to go to the extreme and portray people who partake in human cruelty as the worst of the worst. Paizo’s new Age of Ashes adventure path follows this idea well; it heavily features slavers as unapologetic antagonists that the PCs need to disrupt and defeat. And speaking of Paizo…

Publishers and Human Cruelty

In general, I don’t think publishing about human cruelties is generally wrong, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. For good examples of both, we can actually turn to our friends at Paizo. For all of First Edition Pathfinder, Paizo had this problem with slavery in particular in that Paizo wanted to portray slavery as being something that was morally reprehensible (as portrayed in many PFS adventures where players aggressively engaged in actions aimed at ending slavery in the Inner Sea region) while also portraying it as a legal practice in many locations in the world, to the extent that several books listed common prices for slaves in them. Slavery threads popped up on the forums frequently with people essentially debating whether slavery was human cruelty if it was also institutional (yes, it is, and gross) and claiming that PFS’s freedom fighting faction was actually a terrorist organization (also ick).

Moving into Pathfinder Second Edition, Paizo corrected this by abolishing slavery as a legal practice in most of their campaign setting, save in places explicitly coded as being run by evil governments. This was accomplished in part by a major PFS 1st Edition scenario where Pathfinder players working with Liberty’s Edge actually accomplish their mission of freeing every single slave in the city of Absalom (check out Siege of Absalom, which I believe is 9-00), and that deed is carried forth into the new edition. Plus as I mentioned, their first adventure path hammers home that slavery is wrong by having the main antagonists be a group of slavers resisting the new world order.

Good on Paizo for fixing a grossness in their campaign setting!

In Conclusion,

Human cruelties such as slavery and racism are heavy topics with a ton of baggage that people are still weighed down by to this day. As real as you might think they make your setting, your setting is also a place where dudes in pointy hats lob fireballs that 10-ton dragons who I guess can fly. If you can tell physics to shut up and take a seat, you can tell human cruelty to shut up and take a seat for the benefit of your players.

As I sign out, I’d like to reiterate that human cruelty doesn’t have to be perpetrated by humans or against humans in a roleplaying game. Obviously elf slavemasters and kitsune slaves or whatever can still be uncomfortable topics for players to grapple with, so use all themes of human cruelty perpetrated by anyone and to anyone with care. This has been Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and I’m signing out!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

It started out innocently enough. One of my players took Nimble Dodge for his rogue character in my Age of Ashes campaign, and MAN, let me tell you, that feat is like the worst feat I’ve ever seen. It’s so bad that my players have made a meme out of tracking how often it actually affects my poor player’s fate. I loathe Nimble Dodge so much that I even made a thread about it on Paizo.com with many of these points.

I LOATHE YOU, NIMBLE DODGE!

For those who don’t know, you use Rogue’s Dodge as a reaction when someone attempts an attack against you, and it gives you +2 to your AC against the triggering attack. On paper, this sounds amazing. In practice, the feat isn’t worth the ink it’s printed on. Allow me to explain.

Mathing Out Nimble Dodge

Since the feat is giving you a +2 bonus, you might think, “Oh, that’s a 10% increase to the chance that I won’t be hit. That’s great.” It can turn a Critical Hit into a Hit or a Hit into a Miss. However, since a Critical Hit is attack result = your AC + 10 and a Hit is attack result = your AC, there are actually only four die results wherein Rogue’s Dodge actually benefits you.

Let’s say you have AC 20 and your opponent has an attack bonus of +12. This means your opponent Hits you if they roll an 8 or better or Crits you if they roll a 16 or better. Since Rogue’s Dodge gives a +2 circumstance bonus to AC, using Rogue’s Dodge changes those numbers to 10 to Hit or 18 to Crit. In effect, that means Rogue’s Dodge only stops a Hit if your opponent rolled a 8 or a 9 (because now they need a 10 to Hit you) and it only turns a Hit into a Critical Hit if your opponent rolled a 16 or a 17. If your opponent’s result is 10 through 15, surprise! Rogue’s Dodge didn’t change the outcome of your opponent’s attack. Likewise, if they rolled an 18 or better, Rogue’s Dodge did nothing. Don’t believe me? Lemme make like James Ballod and toss a mathematical table in your face.

RAAAAAAAAGE!

TL;DR this feat makes me angry because it’s a reaction that never really has more than a 1520% chance to do anything. My players track the success/failure rate of Rogue’s Dodge, and it’s currently at 1:8 (meaning 1 meaningful use to 8 failed ones); this is out of a sample size of about 24 currently and actually fits the napkin math fairly closely (as depressing as it sounds, my player’s stats actually slightly out-perform the projections!)

So, why am I posting this? Well, the new swashbuckler class literally got the same feat, and I’d like to raise awareness that this feat is awful so hopefully we can get an errata someday; at the very least, make sure the swashbuckler also doesn’t suffer a very ineffective feat.

Issues With Fixing

One of the issues with errating Nimble Dodge is that it’s pretty common for rogue-like monsters and NPCs in Pathfinder Second Edition to get this feat. For example, in Age of Ashes there’s an enemy rogue fairly early on that has Nimble Dodge. Apparently this is common, and because PF2 spells out so many abilities in the stat block, what ends up happening is that this one ability has been reprinted about six times. (Of course, the entries aren’t consistent between printings; several refer to the trigger being “your opponent attempts an attack against you” while others refer to “your opponent hits you with an attack”, which is a HUGE different.)

My argument, of course, would be that you don’t need to worry about what a MONSTER’S version of the ability does. A monster with Nimble Dodge will probably be around for one fight, and the GM can always fiat the ability if it doesn’t work. A player with Nimble Dodge is making a long-term gameplay commitment, and it had better be a good one!

Solutions

There are a few different ways that I personally think that Nimble Dodge could be fixed in order to make it a not-terrible feat. Let’s go over some.

1. The Bonus applies retroactively. Instead of being triggered when your opponent attacks you, it’s triggered when the attack hits. This, honestly, still isn’t great if the GM chooses not to tell you the result of their attack roll. Personally, I would make it say something like “hits by 2 or less or crits by 8 or less”. That’s a mouthful, but it would be more useful because it would only allow you to trigger the reaction when it actually helps you.
2. The Bonus applies until the end of the triggering opponent’s turn. This doesn’t make the bonus stronger, but it does allow it to potentially apply to more attack rolls, which means it’s chance to be useful increases.
3. The Bonus changes a crit into a hit or a hit into a miss, but you fall prone after using it. This is the most drastic rewrite of the feat but it is also likely the most interesting. Triggering the action has immediate consequences under this version; you are guaranteed to prevent something bad in the now, but you leave yourself vulnerable (aka flat-footed) immediately afterwards.

In Conclusion,

I don’t care for Nimble Dodge because the feat is deceptive in its strength. Where a +2 bonus looks good, the math behind it’s triggering just doesn’t justify it as a feat option. If this was in a SPLAT book, whatever, but this is a Core feat, literally the first one in the book new rogue players will see. I strongly feel the power level of this feat needs to be brought up to make it worthwhile. But what do you think? Leave me your thoughts and solutions in the comments below, or on Discord. Some people in the Paizo thread I link feel that the feat needs to be weaker because reactions “are weaker than actions” or that it’s good because rogues don’t get many reactions. I don’t agree with this (every reaction competes with one another due to the multiclass system after all), but I’m certainly excited to hear what y’all have to say!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Creative Commons: Summer De-stressing by kanzeNatsume

Now, of course, you’ve probably figured out what my article is about for this week—the Playtest Classes! The first dedicated Player Options book of a new edition is a super important one because it almost sets the stage for how that game is going to grow and evolve over time. Sure, we got Lost Omens Character Guide and plenty of content in the various Adventure Path volumes, but when you get down to it those products feel like they solidify existing territory rather than explore anything new. And what could be more “new” then new classes, right?

So for today’s article, I’m going to do a quick rundown of each of the four classes in the APG as they appear in the Playtest—the investigator, the oracle, the swashbuckler, and the witch. I am going to be giving my 100% opinionated opinion on each, comparing what was done by the design team to my initial predictions earlier in the year while also providing some thoughts and commentary as appropriate. So sit back, relax, and get ready to read!

Investigator

The investigator is literally one of my favorite classes in PF1; it’s tied with the bloodrager for me. As a result, I had a TON of feelings going into this one. Observe:

 Alex Said:

The investigator in PF1 is a very strange class. It’s parents are the alchemist and the rogue, and yet somehow the investigator developed into this very distinct class that sort of transcended both of them. In PF1, the investigator is the BEST at skills, and it truly does a good job of feeling like the “smart” fighter. In PF2, the rogue is awesome at skills and is very clearly the agility fighter. As a result, I think that there’s room for the investigator to simply be an awesome skill-focused class. Drop the alchemy and the spellcasting, focus on expertise and studied combatant, and have feat options give you new ways to use your inspiration and skills. Want to be a standard investigator? Grab the alchemist multiclass archetype. I think an emphasis on what makes the investigator unique could see it developed into the perfect detective / skill-emphasizing class for PF2.

• Fact vs. Fiction: A LOT of my initial predictions ended up being right. Alchemy is just one facet of the investigator; a single choice you can take instead of one of several different “flavors” of investigator. In it’s place are a ton of different ways to use the investigator’s “expertise” mechanic, which is now called Take the Case. Sadly the randomized component is gone, but this simple +1 bonus DOES make the investigator good at skills when they’re doing their namesake (investigating). The investigator also gets as many skill feats as the rogue, but the bonus ones they gain have to either be mentally focused or based on your methodology’s key skill (like Crafting for the alchemy-focused one or Medicine for the forensic-focused one).
• Pros: The investigator class is extremely recognizable here. The designers did an excellent job at picking what feels the most like the “investigator” and making sure we saw it here first. There are a ton of cool feats that mess around with how Take the Case works, and I really like that about this class. Compared to other PF2 classes that feel almost hobbled together around a class identity rather than game mechanics, the investigator has a core mechanic that supports its theme and runs with it. In my opinion, this makes the investigator better designed then a class like the fighter, which is basically just an assortment of random weapon-focused feats.
• Cons: There’s a lot of weird stuff in the investigator right now. One of the big ones is that Study Suspect’s success and critical success effects seem to do the same exact things, but worded a little bit differently. I don’t care for the fact that the rogue is allowed to take whatever bonus skill feats they want but the investigator isn’t. I think it’s an arbitrary distinction. I also think that the usage limitations on Take the Case are wonky; the rogue is already mathematically better than the investigator in damage. Yes, I know studied strike is a thing. I also know that it basically takes an action and a successful skill check to “set up” studied strike, whereas the rogue merely needs to attack someone who’s flat-footed.
• Alex’s Suggestions
  • Bonus Skill Feats: Just give the investigator bonus skill feats like a rogue. The limiters are pointless and if a criminal can be an absolute master of skills, so can an investigator.
  • Study Suspect: Make this a free action with the flourish trait. It would make it feel more “Sherlock Holmes”-sy (see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows) because it happened in a split second while also preventing it from being spammed, which is clearly the intent. Also, fix up the wording on the Critical Success effect; I assume that it’s supposed to mean that if I critically succeed I get the bonus until either the start of my next turn or the end of my next turn.
  • More Feats! Currently the investigator is missing all of the cool special abilities it got to take when they successfully hit a foe they were studying. Things like sickening offensive allowed an investigator to be awesome at debuffing opponents. A feat that allowed you to add your Study Suspect bonus to all skill checks that resolve against a foe’s save DC (such as Fort DC or Ref DC) would also be awesome.
  • More Methodologies! We definitely need more than three flavors of investigator. I personally want an occult-themed methodology.

Oracle

The oracle is a beloved fan-favorite class in PF1. Here were my thoughts on the oracle in PF2:

Alex Said:

Oracle … is not in a great place conceptually coming into PF2. The oracle and its mystery mechanic was always presented as sort of the “sorcerer 2.0”, and now that sorcerer feats work kind of like revelations and sorcerers can kind of be oracles by picking bloodline that grant divine spellcasting, what is there even left of the oracle to salvage? The curse mechanic? That’s cool, but is that really the part of the oracle that made the oracle fun to play? I would argue that it isn’t. I don’t want to see the oracle fade away, but at the same time we need to accept that an oracle class in PF2 can’t be built the way it was in PF1; that entire design ground seems to have been consumed by the sorcerer.

Instead, I would recommend having mysteries work similarly to bloodlines but focused on natural phenomenon (the way they are in PF1) and to give the oracle a hybrid spell list that combines the divine spell list with specific, appropriate spells from either the occult or primal spell list depending upon the mystery. For example, maybe the flames mystery gave spells like fireball and produce flames as primal spells while the dark tapestry mystery might give some occult spells instead. This would transform the oracle from being a simile divine spellcaster to a hybrid  spellcaster. If we further give oracle feats an emphasis on divination, harkening back to its Greecian roots, and make those divinations tied to their mystery, we could have a very unique class that wouldn’t be competing for design space against the sorcerer.

• Fact vs. Fiction: So a lot of my thoughts are kind of what we see in Paizo’s oracle class. Kind of. I mentioned the idea of hybridizing spell lists. Well, we got that; only it’s a single feat for elemental-themed mysteries only. But we didn’t get a whole lot of emphasis on divination (only one or two feats), and we did get a curse mechanic.
• Pros: One thing that I like about the new oracle class is that it’s curses don’t fall into the trope of “supernatural disabilities”, in which you have a condition that is a real-world disability, but you have magic so it doesn’t suck. I think that disabilities where the disability is magically a benefit undercuts the real-like struggles people with those disabilities have. I am glad to see that mechanic go in favor of curses that are decidedly magic and divine in nature.
• Cons: I’m just gonna go out and say it—the oracle class is SUPER underwhelming as currently written. If I had to summarize my thoughts into a single sentence, it would be this: the PF2 oracle lacks presence. In PF1, the oracle was a bombastic class. Its revelations were super-powered abilities that had effects no other class dared to dream of. Many of those revelations were too powerful, yes, but you noticed them. The identity of the oracle was a class where every power you had centered around a common theme—flames, waves, stone, and so on. This class has NONE of that. Instead, it’s filled with cherry-picked feats that it shares with every other spellcaster, the same focus spell system that every other spellcaster has, and literal scraps from the cleric. I’m speaking mostly of their ability to pick up domain spells; oracles don’t need this. Oracles need their own, interesting powers and abilities.
• Alex’s Suggestions
  • Cut Back on Curses: Literally every oracle curse takes up about 1/6 of a page, or about 100 words. Across all the curses, it’s about half a page of class features whose primary purpose is to hinder you.
  • Cut Out the Cleric: I honestly don’t get how this made it live. Why does the oracle get a free cleric spell? Yes, I know that paladins can also pick up domains, but all of the domains are listed in the cleric section of the book and as cleric focus spells in the focus spell chapter. You gave the oracle a cleric spell before you gave them an oracle spell. Did that never strike anybody as odd? To fix this, oracles should get their choice of a revelation spell from their mystery at 1st level.
  • Make Curses Simpler and Mystery Agnostic: This whole “every oracle has the same curse for the same mystery” concept is boring. It actively removes a place where characters can express themselves by making every oracle with every curse exactly the same. Why is an oracle who gets their life powers from the Eldest cursed in the same way as one who gets their powers from the Tian god of medicine?
  • Rework Revelations: Right now the oracle has no really new mechanics other than being cursed with suck (ie having FOUR major class features that penalize them for using them). Why not try something else instead? For example, drop the initial / advance / greater spells. Instead, every mystery gives one revelation cantrip. As the oracle levels up, they could take revelation feats that are essentially metamagic feats; they allow them to change the cantrip into a full-blown spell, spending focus points to dramatically alter the cantrip’s effects. It would be strange, different, and more in-line with an oracle is—a unique expression of divine power.

Swashbuckler

The swashbuckler is a somewhat controversial class in PF1; it was extremely front-loaded, granted one of the most powerful immediate actions in the game but completely pointless to take levels in beyond 5th level. What were my predictions for swashbuckler? Let’s check’em out:

Alex Said:

So, I’m gonna say it—in a world where the PF2 rogue exists, why do we need a swashbuckler? The PF2 rogue hits all the high notes of the swashbuckler—awesome with finesse and agile weapons, great at acrobatic skills, great attack bonus with its favored weapons. Where does this leave the swashbuckler? Well, the first thing I would do is take the grit / panache mechanic and make it into an extraordinary variant on focus spells. Instead of spell points, you gain grit points and your deeds are basically abilities you spend grit points to activate. Like focus spells, your grit comes back when you rest. You could give grit and deeds to all nonmagical martial classes—barbarians, fighters, rangers. It would definitely fill a niche for those classes.

Now, as for the swashbuckler itself, I’d combine the gunslinger and the swashbuckler into a single class: the daredevil (or something equivalent). The daredevil would be THE best at grit points and deeds; they’d have ways for regaining grit points on the fly when they critically succeed at certain attack rolls and skill checks and have an impressive list of deeds for use in and out of combat. The class would also have a built in weapon style system sort of like how the champion has paladin / redeemer / liberator, except the daredevil’s would be based around the character’s mystique rather than their alignment. Things like braggart, craven, lionheart, lone wolf, and so on. This would take the emphasis of what is current the swashbuckler away from a small list of weapons and move it towards the character motivations, which has always been the focal point of the archetypal swashbuckler.

• Fact vs. Fiction: Heh, I got NOTHING right, eh? Panache is a state you enter like rage, no reference to deeds, no real use for Charisma aside from using Charisma skill actions to enter panache. Definitely a distinct take on the swashbuckler.
• Pros: I actually think the concept of using panache as a state you enter is a neat one, and I like the notion of entering panache based on stuff you do. It’s a very smart use of Pathfinder’s action economy. Additionally, I also think that the back-and-forth between the finisher trait and the retort trait is pretty cool. It’s one of my favorite parts of the class.
• Cons: This write-up hasn’t convinced me that the swashbuckler deserves to exist outside of being an archetype or something, and I think that’s a problem. For one, panache comes in two flavors—spam one specific action or hope that your GM fiats you into panache. Part of me really likes the idea of entering panache for using Acrobatics or  Charisma-based skill for initiative … but … there’s a major problem with this mechanic. You see, the Core Rulebook says something VERY specific about initiative. This:

Basically, the rules for initiative tell the GM to have players roll Perception unless they tell their players to roll something different, and don’t give any real guidelines regarding when other skills should be used aside from Stealth. This means two things are going to happen: 1) Players are going to feel as though they’re at the GM’s mercy regarding when they can use their primary class feature, and 2) Players are going to spam the hell out of that one action their style grants them that allows them to enter panache. Additionally, you’re going to hear players say stuff like, “Instead of moving I Acrobatically twirl everywhere” in hopes that they can use that as justification regarding why they get to roll Acrobatics for initiative. To put it bluntly you cannot build a player class’s primary ability around a mechanic that you left to the GM.

• Alex’s Suggestions
  • Open Up Precise Strike: Right now, it doesn’t work with ANY ranged Strikes. But swashbucklers throwing stuff at people is SUPER iconic. Why can’t I strike precisely with a dagger I toss at my enemy? That was literally a PF1 archetype. (I know because I played it to Level 5, then took 6 levels of fighter because that’s how you built an optimized swashbuckler in PF1).
  • Open Up Panache: The swashbuckler needs a general list of things they can do to earn panache, and it can’t be left up to the GM’s whims. You want a swashbuckler to feel like they’re a presence on the battlefield, so using a variety of different skill feats, skill actions, and special abilities should activate panache. Give more panache triggers baseline and give more panache triggers to each of the styles.
  • Parry: Where’s Parry?! This class needs a parry reaction that’s a retort, meaning you trigger the reaction when an enemy attacks you, then your panache ends. For what parry does, a recent Lost Omens World Guide has an ability that uses your Attack DC (aka 10 + your attack bonus with a weapon you’re wielding) against a foe’s attack. That, please. That would be AMAZINGLY cool and the swashbuckler needs it. You could even have a feat that was one reaction to Parry, then Opportune Riposte if your parry worked. Perfect callback to PF1.
  • More Styles! Yeah, I’m gonna need more styles please. Those three are NOT enough. But I guess that’s a good problem to have.

 Witch

Finally, the witch. I’d be shocked if this wasn’t the #1 most favorite not-Core class in PF1; I saw SO many witches in PFS. Let’s look at my predictions:

Alex Said:

Witch is SUPER easy to design in PF2. A witch gets a familiar at 1st level without needing to spend a feat, and their hexes are a special type of cantrip called hex cantrips. Gone are the days of having to pick a healing hex a dozen times; its all built in and scaling with hex cantrips! Also, I think witches should be the prepared spellcasters of the occult spell list; I know we’ve gotten used to them as arcane, but if ever there was an occult spellcaster, it was the witch! Maybe part of the patron could be pulling a small themed assortment of spells from the divine, arcane, or primal lists and adding them to the witch’s occult list or something.

• Fact vs. Fiction: So witches can absolutely be occult in PF2, but they can also be arcane or primal based on what patron they chose. I guess I was kind of right there, just like I was kind of right about hexes. They’re focus spells rather than focus cantrips, which has its ups and downs. Some of the hexes do heighten though, which is cool.
• Pros: So obviously a big piece of the familiar puzzle is missing (specifically, does this book have more familiar abilities) but as-written, the fact that the witch has the best familiars out of anyone is SUPER cool. I’m all-in for that. Additionally, I like how your patron determines the type of magic you have, but I wish it was a player choice rather than an if-than thing.
• Cons: The coolness of the patrons is also a downside. The way it’s worded has some problems for current Pathfinder content. For example, lessons of snow (ie winter witch) is currently associated with primal magic. Meaning winter witches are primal spellcasters, which sort of feels wrong for all of Irrisen. I dunno, maybe it’s just me but I prefer my witch queen arcane.
• Alex’s Suggestions
  • Multiple Spell Lists per Patron: Have each Patreon offer 2 or even all three spell lists. It’s a choice the player (or the GM) makes when the character becomes a witch. That way a winter witch can choose whether their power comes from primal spirits or arcane secrets.

In Conclusion,

Those are my thoughts on the new classes! Overall I think the investigator and the witch are awesome, and the oracle and swashbuckler need polish (the oracle WAY more than the swashbuckler). I hope you guys found this article informative, and I hope to revisit the topic after I get more experience with the playtest classes. Until then, see you around!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

So, right now I’m in the middle of this massive pair of Starfinder freelance design for Paizo that I can’t talk about yet and am completely overworked, so I thought it might be more fun to share a bit of my “Ace Hindsight” stories with you guys instead of doing a big mechanical blog post. Don’t worry, those will be back but my brain is fried today. So let’s get started on my Ace Disaster Stories! (Because there are PLENTY.)

First Tale: Reign of Romance

Many of our devoted followers know that James Ballod and I played in a Reign of Winter home game. He played Reynard, a jerkwad dhampir rogue/swashbuckler and I played Zanzo, a kitsune bard who specialized in singing and playing a lute. Now, minor spoilers for Book 1 of Reign of Winter, you end up going to this ice tower during the adventure, and the tower is guarded by a troll lady. Ms. Troll is guarding the way in, and our party is trying to figure out how to fight the troll because none of us have a good supply of fire or acid to beat its regeneration. I pipe up, “Hey, I know charm person, why don’t I just put the magical moves on her?” The party laughs, and I go and do it. The spell works! Except according to our GM, the troll has never had a friend before so it mistakes the feeling of friendship I’ve magically forced upon her for love. (Think Wreck-It-Ralph 2.) So the troll picks up my charcacter and starts hugging and squeezing him. Zanzo tries to talk back to the troll, but she doesn’t speak any languages that my character knows. Great.

Meanwhile the rest of the party sees my character getting picked up and caressed, so they come in thinking things are okay. Well, they’re not. Charm person makes my target like me, but it does nothing for my friends. And I can’t talk to the troll to leverage the spell, so she gets mad. Our dwarf shaman, who CAN speak with the troll (he spoke Giant; who knew) tells the troll to put me down so they can walk throw. And she’s like, “Uh, no. Go away!” and starts attacking.

So here I am, being held in a troll’s arm like a damsel in a King Kong movie. I pretty much stay grappled for the whole fight, and when my friends win the troll collapses. With Zanzo right under her. My GM has a flair for the dramatic, so she describes me as getting lodged directly between the troll’s boobs. I squirm my way out and I make a joke involving getting smoothered my boobs and how that wasn’t how I’d want my first time to go; something dirty but overall harmless. James slams his hands on the table, stares at me, and yells something like, “I’ve known you for two years and this is the FIRST time I’ve ever heard you talk about sex even a little bit, and you’re joking about a TROLL?!”

What can I say? A near-death experience makes comedians out of all of us, I guess!

Second Tale: All Dem Ladies

My absolute favorite character, Kyrshin Yilenzo, who’s also the mascot for my company, Everybody Games, is actually from a campaign that my GM ran for me back in 2014. In fact, my very first product, Psychological Combat (and later Ultimate Charisma) was designed specifically for Kyrshin because my GM wanted my character to have a way to aggro enemies. Kyrshin was a weird character that I cherish dearly. When I originally wrote him, he was this braggart of a character who was kind of a playboy knight who was going on an adventure on his adopted daddy’s payroll. But as I played him, the character mellowed out a lot; he became clever, diplomatic, and above all else a leader. Eventually we ended up carving out a small plot of land to build a settlement on, which we did because Kyrshin ended up having a legion of hobgoblins as allies, and these poor boys and girls simply did NOT know how to take care of themselves. They are all like malnourished and constantly drill instructing despite their ancestors having been essentially left to die in the jungle by their commanding officers. This legion was basically still carrying out business as usual despite it all, and they needed a place to stay gosh darn it!

So they had a prophecy that a red hero would come and save them, and while hobgoblins can have red skin in this campaign, it turns out that the prophecy might have been referring to my red-haired (and furred) kitsune hero instead! So they give us a mission to prove our might (slaying a babau-possessed allosaurus; its as horrible as it sounds) and in doing so we got an army. Hooray! Except not hooray, because my brother’s character, a magus named Dyne, had a black blade. And this black blade possessed the soul of a trickster copper dragon. Dyne wanted access to his sword’s power, but it wouldn’t talk to him. As a trickster, Dyne surmised that if he could pull a trick on someone that he might earn the blade’s respect. So in the middle of negotiations with the hobgoblin elders, he calls out, “My sword is ancient, and he says that if Kyrshin is going to take over as Supreme Commander of your legion, he’s got to eat the testes of the raptor after we kill it.

Okay, gross. But Dyne is book smart, not Charisma smart. The GM has him roll a Bluff check. Natural 20. Great, but Kyrshin is Charisma-focused and he has Bluff and Diplomacy as trained class skills. Kyrshin can talk his way out of this. Kyrshin rolls a Diplomacy check. Natural 1. With the bonuses, 12.

GREAT.

So we’ve killed the death dinosaur and brought its testes back to the village. The ENTIRE legion is assembled to watch me eat these things. And the shaman inform me that if I can’t hold them down (aka not vomit all over the place) I might not earn the legion’s respect and the near-death we almost suffered at the hands of the dinosaur would have been for nothing.

GREAT.

So with all the resolve he can monster, Kyrshin takes the melon-sized teste and chomps down on it. GM has me roll a Fortitude save. Natural 20. I AM THE GREATEST!

GM agrees with me. Also chimes in that the all of the lady hobgoblins think that I’m officially a fertility god. And here, folks, is where Alex gets as red as a tomato. Not when he’s chomping down on deviled dinosaur nuts, but when the ladies come a-knocking. I immediately tell the GM that Kyrshin eats and parties for a bit, then runs off to his tent to sleep. GM allows it, if only because it’ll allow us to move on with the story. Whew, escaped THAT roleplay!

Third Tale: Date Night with My GM

Okay, take the story from Tale Two and fast forward it a bit. Kyrshin has rescued an entire clan of kitsune from beig cyclops slaves. He has a cohort named Shira now, and their settlement is booming. Its mostly kitsune, hobgoblins, and some jungle elves that Kyrshin has befriended. Now, my GM for this game had a thing where whenever we established holidays with the Kingmaker rules we had to roleplay out the holiday. Our summer festival was awesome, except for the roleplay that led up to it our GM told me that I would be roleplaying my cohort instead of my character. Why? Because we had a B-plot going for a long time in our campaign where one of my followers was mad in love with one of my cohorts and had been working up the nerve to ask her out for a long time. And he did! Except I had to roleplay the interaction.

You know that meme that goes something like, “You can attempt to seduce all the ladies you want, but remember that I, your brother, have to roleplay every single one?” Take that and have your GM initiate it. And man, this NPC planned EVERYTHING. My ruthless kitsune ninja had to go to the dress shop and pick out a dress she liked and then she had to go and have dinner with the guy and then they went to the holiday party at the docks. Looking back on it the whole scene was so cute and my GM did such an awesome job with it. Except for one problem. I am so freaking ace that both in-character AND out of character I had no idea what was happening. (Which made sense for Shira, thankfully). It wasn’t until the very end of the RP day where my GM, playing my follower, asked me, playing my ninja cohort, to go steady with him that I was like, “OOOOOOOOOOOOOH.” And Shira and I were both flustered. Me because I had no idea how to roleplay this and Shira because she had no idea how to answer this. Its funny how much of yourself you find in your characters, eh?

In the end Shira and Shai, my follower, ended up going steady. And my GM said, “You really had no idea what I was doing?” My brother, who has autism, chimes in, “And I thought I was oblivious!”

That’s life, I guess!

I think those three tales are the only stories I’m going to share for now. I personally can look back at those stories and think to myself, “Man, I’m so ace it hurts,” but that’s part of the fun of roleplaying. It’s a great way to evaluate yourself and figure out who you are.

What did you guys think about these stories? Have you ever had any weird experiences with romance in your campaigns? Do you want me to do more stories like this? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll see you next time, back for our regularly scheduled Alex content (hopefully; I still have a TON of Starfinder on my plate…).

Next week is going to be my Part 2 of “How to Do PF1 Ultimate Classes in PF2” speculation series, and then I’ll finish this Tian Xia series with the Samsaran. Three weeks later I’ll be doing “How to Do PF1 Occult Classes in PF2”, and then I have an article on character roles like tank / healing / control and how Dev design is affected by them.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Creative Permissions “Kitsune Kissing” by Jacob Blackmon, used with Everybody Games’ permission.

Before I return to doing Tian Xia kineticists and writing about design, I wanted to take some time looking back on this year’s PaizoCon, mainly from a “What’s coming from 2E Pathfineder” perspective. This is going to be a quick article because my current exposure to the new game is minimal, but I hope it’s helpful nevertheless.

A Whole New Game

The #1 Impression that I got playing Pathfinder 2E for about 30 minutes was that this polished version of the Pathfinder Playtest was actually an entirely different game. Yeah, sure, the 3-Action Economy was still there as was the (in my opinion) over reliance on the word “feat”, but from a game mechanics perspective much of the game was entirely new and different. When I sat down at Luis’s Pathfinder 2E delve with Perram, I very intentionally picked the pregen Champion (formerly the paladin), Seelah. I played pregen Seelah in the Pathfinder Playtest delve the year before and the first character I built for the Level 1 area of our Doomsday Dawn actual play was  also a paladin. Even a year ago, I knew I wanted to be able to compare the Playtest Paladin to the final product, Pathfinder 2E’s Champion.

The Playtest Paladin was something of a hot mess. Lay on hands wasn’t useful in combat unless you burned a specific 1st-level class feat on it, as it provoked an attack of opportunity and healed for a measly d4 Hit Points. The Champion paladin got around this by having a ridiculously powerful human feat that let her pick an extra class feat, which gave her an additional paladin power. The net result was that when I made my elf paladin for Doomsplay, I basically had good Lay on Hands and that’s it. It was very not-fun to play, and I personally complained about both in the survey.

Based on what I saw in 2E, that “really annoying feat” seems to have been made completely baseline for the champion, or at least the paladin and the redeemer; I haven’t seen what the liberator looks like, but the paladin definitely has the feat rolled in and I’ve seen Sara Marie use the redeemer’s lay on hands to similar effect in the Oblivion Oath actual play podcast. This is great, as it freed up Seelah to take a paladin feat that gave her a cleric domain. The domain power she had was INCREDIBLE; basically, she could use it as 1-Action to Stride, Climb, or Swim normally AND get an extra 10-foot movement speed to all such actions she could take that round. It cost 1 focus point and Seelah only had one, so I had to choose between that power and lay on hands each time, but seeing as Oblivion Oath has shown us that you get your focus point back with 10 minutes of rest, and suddenly both powers seem SUPER useful. I’m notorious for hording powers with limited daily uses, so I LOVED seeing a mechanic that was like, “Nah, you can have this back man.”

Along similar lines, Seelah didn’t have a human feat that gave her an extra class feat, so I’m assuming that means that option is GONE. Which is awesome. The extra human class feat was a problem because not only did it ensure that human was always optimal for builds (imagine if humans were the only ones who could take the “Extra” class feature feats in PF1), it also forced classes that wouldn’t normally have 1st level class feats to have a couple in case you were a jerk human who just HAD to take that ancestry feat at 1st level. And of course you did, it was BROKENLY good. I’m not really sure what Seelah had instead of that, but I was relieved to see the problem gone.

A Brisk Pace of New Content

At the PaizoCon 2019 Preview Banquet, we got a good taste of what to expect from the World Guide product line going forward, and it left me feeling fairly optimistic going forward with the new edition. The World Guide line is basically a Campaign Setting Guide supplemented with a Player Companion or two, and occupies all four of those product slots for any given month. From a business standpoint, I assume that Paizo is doing this because Barnes and Noble won’t stock the flimsy 32-page Player Companions (I’ve never seen a Player Companion OR a Campaign Setting Guide in my Barnes and Noble, personally). From a consumer standpoint, this saves subscribers of both lines some money while also giving us a deeper look at various topics. The World Guides announced seemed very broad in scope to me; there’s a Character Guide for the Lost Omens Campaign Setting, a general dossier on the Lost Omens Campaign Setting, and a book on the Gods and on Magic. Currently, it seems like my predictions weren’t all correct, seeing as between August and January we’re only going to see three new ancestries (Hobgoblin, Leshy, and Lizardfolk). This doesn’t seem like enough to me, personally, so I hope Paizo finds places to hurry up and do more soon!

PaizoCon 2019 also saw the announcement of the GameMastery Guide, surprising no one. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of content they put in the new GMG, seeing as some of its ideas from 1st Edition became staples in adventures (looking specifically at haunts). We know this book will have dueling rules, but beyond some very minor content drops we don’t know much, and we don’t know what to expect in the Core Rules line beyond this book in 2019. I’m expecting to hear about more releases at GenCon, personally.

Overall Impressions

Currently, I’m feeling pretty great at Pathfinder 2E. What I saw of the game at PaizoCon leaves me to believe that this is going to be a game worth trying out, and that there’s a lot of lessons learned from community feedback there. This is sort of a difficult conclusion for me to pass onto you, my readers, since as a part-time freelancer a portion of my livelihood is invested in Paizo’s success, but I truly think that Pathfinder 2E has all the trappings of a great game. Will it be better than your 1st Edition Game? Hard to say from a 30-minute delve and a 30-minute banquet presentation, but I’ve got my fingers crossed! Heck, if high-level play works then that’s already a feather in this game’s cap, no?

Thanks for listening to me ramble, and I’ll see you guys next week for more of the content you love. I think I’m going to do either a tengu kineticist or a samsaran kineticist. Got an opinion on which one I do next? Tell me about it on the Know Direction Discord, @Alex Augunas, the Everyman Gamer! Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder and Starfinder Roleplaying Games, owns Everyman Gaming LLC, and cohosts Know Direction: Beyond with James Ballod and Jefferson “Perram” Thacker. You can keep up with Alex’s exploits on the Know Direction Discord or at his Twitter, @AIJAug.

As you can imagine, with a topic like redemption on the menu it’s clear that we’re going to be serving up some big philosophical quandaries here at Guidance, so strap yourselves in and let’s get started!

What Is Redemption?

Before we begin, I think it’s helpful to actually stop and define what redemption is. If you Google the word “redemption”, this is what you’ll find:

So when we talk about redemption, we’re talking about saving someone or something from wrongdoing, mistakes they’ve made, or evil in general. But when we’re talking about saving someone, we don’t necessarily mean like rescuing a dude in distress from a dragon. That’s definitely a rescue from something evil, but redemption has a strong connotation of, “saving one from one’s self”. The second definition actually reinforces this; when you look at the second definition and you see we’re talking about regaining possession of something or clearing a debt; in this case, you’re regaining possession of your goodly virtue.

So when we talk about redemption, we’re talking about saving someone from their own mistakes, sins, or evil actions.

“Earning” Your Redemption

To summarize a very long paragraph that I wrote and later cut because it was KILLING the flow of this article, many individuals get upset when redemption comes too easy to characters in a story. It’s a commonly held belief that redemption is something that has to be earned by a character, usually through a long process that involves gaining others’ trust and proving they’re deserving of that trust. The golden standard of this idea is, without a doubt, the character of Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender. If you’ve never seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, first things first GO OUT AND CONSUME THAT CONTENT. Seriously, Avatar: The Last Airbender has its flaws but it is by and large one of the most influential piece of American animation to be released in the last decade and it probably end up being a major “cultural icon” in the way that Star Wars is. Seriously, go watch it.

Zuko spends the first two-thirds of Avatar: The Last Airbender as the series’ primary antagonist, though the show goes to great lengths to flesh Zuko out and make him an interesting character that the audience really ends up becoming attached to. This changes in Episode 21, the first of Season 2, when Zuko is basically forced to stand down to a new antagonist, resulting in he and his uncle going into hiding. This is where we start getting hints that Zuko might not be a terrible person behind his previously single-minded role as the series’ antagonist, but at the umpteenth hour when Zuko has a chance to make the right choice he blows it and reaffirms himself as an antagonist at the end of the second season of the show. It isn’t until Season 3, at Episode 53 and a whopping 32 episodes after the series starts exploring Zuko as a character, that his redemption is “complete” in the sense that he’s allowed to join the main cast as a hero. Yet even after this episode, there are two ADDITIONAL episodes whose sole purpose is to allow Zuko to win over two specific members of the main cast, so really it takes about 34 episodes for this character to be redeemed.

If 17 hours of television makes a “justifiably earned” redemption, its no wonder that many other redemption arcs seem too quick to some fans. To provide an interesting contest, Steven Universe, another one of this decade’s powerhouse animated features that is going to be influencing the medium for decades to come, is notorious for its relatively quick redemption arcs. A typical episode of Steven Universe is about 15 minutes long, and it isn’t uncommon for villains to get their redemption in the final moments of one of these lightning-fast episodes. For many critics of the series, this is too fast. But I’d like to make the argument that it ISN’T too fast because we as fans don’t really understand redemption. Here’s why.

What Makes a Redemption?

So when we’re talking about a redemption, what’s the most important part? If we look at Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender, we can identify several key character moments where Zuko’s worldview begins to change rapidly, and ultimately his changed worldview leads to his redemption. As much as good and evil are cosmic forces in a game like Pathfinder, redemption for us mortals is more a change in behavior reflective in a person who engaged in behaviors that we did not like suddenly engaging in behavior that we now like, and doing so with enough consistency that we trust and respect the individual for having changed. With this in mind, let’s examine a number of “important moments” in Zuko’s adventure that caused him to change his worldview to align with those of the primary cast.

• When Zuko is being hunted by the Fire Nation, ruled by his father, he encounters a young healer who opens his eyes to what war does to a population. He’s been fed Fire Nation propaganda all his life, and now he has real, tangible proof that the ideas he’s been led to believe are wrong.
• Zuko teams up with the Avatar and his friends to fight an enemy. That exchange doesn’t end well for Zuko, but it lays the groundwork for his redemption.
• Zuko encounters one of the Avatar’s animal companions and decides to free them from captivity without any promise of thanks or compensation. This decision fills Zuko with so much conflict that he passes out ill from it.
• Zuko betrays the Avatar and almost kills him, hiring an assassin soon after to try and finish the job. Furthermore, Zukosacrifices a loved one in order to regain his lost status within his homeland. At this point, it seems like Zuko’s redemption has collapsed.
• On an “anime beach episode”, Zuko reveals that he doesn’t know right from wrong anymore and it infuriates him. It’s a huge, emotional scene that confirms to the audience that Zuko’s old character development wasn’t gone. Later he rejoins his father as his right-hand man, but realizes that it feels wrong and he is only perfect to his father if he isn’t himself.
• In the very next arc, Zuko renounces his father and decides to join the protagonists, defying him outright and escaping in true dramatic fashion.

As you can see, Zuko’s redemption arc has a lot of small points that slowly show the character changing. But do all redemption need to be this involved? The simple answer should be “No”, but many people expect them to be anyway. Ultimately, redemption represents a dramatic shift in worldview, usually from one deemed “evil” to one deemed “good”, to the extent that the change is actionable for the redeemed character. As soon as the character takes a high-stakes action with a different worldview, they are essentially redeemed. Let’s look at this in deeper detail.

• Redemption must be actionable. It isn’t enough to simply say, “I’ve changed my ways”. You need to do something to prove it.
• Redemption, like righteousness, demands sacrifice. A character isn’t really redeemed until they take an action that requires them to sacrifice something. For Zuko, his redemption occurs at the moment he defies his father, sacrificing the royal lifestyle he wanted so badly to reobtain. In Steven Universe, Peridot’s redemption happens the moment she mouths off to her superior and defies her orders, thus labeling her an enemy of her home world. But do redemptions need to be so dramatic in scope? Not necessarily. Simply admitting one was wrong and asking for a chance at forgiveness can likewise be the action needed for a redemption, because at that point you’re sacrifice is the notion that what you did was acceptable. The acceptance of true guilt can be a form of redemption if that guilt is acted upon in a way that changes their outlook and future actions.
• Redemption needs to be acknowledged and accepted in the eyes of the redeemer. Yes, this one sounds weird, but let me try to explain. A character is only redeemed in the eyes of individuals, not universally. In the case of Zuko, the moment he became redeemed in the eyes of the audience he became vilified by his father. Redemption isn’t universal, even in stories, and as a result one is only redeemed in the eyes of an individual if said individual recognizes the actions and sacrifices taken towards redemption. No matter what you do, you are only redeemed if those you are seeking redemption from view you in such a light. (Hence why Avatar: The Last Airbender gives us a hilarious scene of Zuko practicing his apology speech to a frog.)

This brings up one of the most important aspects of redemption—we as audience members only get to decide what constitutes a satisfying redemption in OUR eyes, we don’t get to decide that from the eyes of other characters or people. Let me explain further.

A Faster Redemption

So now in order to finish the topic of redemption, we need to turn to animation’s ultimate redeemer, Steven Universe of the TV show with the same name. Steven Universe’s creator, Rebecca Sugar, has said that Steven Universe, “Has no villains,” and in many ways that’s true. No one’s really evil so much as they’re operating on broken logic from places of fear or personal suffering. This is one of the reasons why so many villains in the show get redemption arcs, though they’re arcs that many fans aren’t particularly satisfied with because they happen so quickly. I would like to posit, however, that the fast-paced redemption of the show is less of a flaw and more a result of character development. Let me explain why.

• In Steven Universe, the character Peridot is literally the first recurring antagonist that the series ever had. Before her, it followed a monster-of-the-week format exclusively that Steven and the Crystal Gems always defeated. When the Crystal Gems finally defeated Peridot, however, her final words before “poofing” (thing of her gem as a super computer and poofing as the process by which that computer is turned off temporarily due to damage to her artificial body) worried Steven, so he rebooted her anyway and tried to work what she knew out of her, eventually winning over her trust. Peridot’s knowledge made it clear that the Crystal Gems needed to drill down to the center of the Earth to save it, so they recruited Peridot to help them. These early episodes were VERY terse, with the Crystal Gems and Peridot feuding constantly.
• As the arch continued, Peridot became more helpful as she learned more about the Crystal Gems and their way of life.
• Eventually, Peridot gains an opportunity to radio to her boss, to whom she is very loyal to and is actively opposed to the Crystal Gems. Steven and the Gems try to stop her for fear that the boss will basically destroy the planet, but Peridot puts her job before her new friends and contacts her boss anyway. The Gems can’t risk being seen by Boss Lady, so they basically can’t interfere with the space phone call.
• Peridot ends up defying her boss to the extent that her boss tries to have her killed. Twice. This solidifies her allegiance to Steven and his friends.

Now, I’m sure you can see some similar progression here, but one important thing to note is that the start of this arc and the end of this arc are only eight 15-minute episodes apart, or four hours. MUCH faster than Avatar: The Last Airbender. And in terms of screen time, this isn’t even the fastest of the redemptions. Three characters get redeemed after roughly 3 minutes of real effort in Steven Universe’s season finale, and that’s okay.

Why?

Because Steven Universe is a completely different character from Katara, Sokka, Toph, and Aang.

Steven Universe, the Ultimate Redeemer

One of the most important character traits of Steven Universe is his optimistic outlook. Steven always sees the best in others and is always willing to give them a chance to be better people. In the aforementioned Peridot redemption arc, we see Steven accept Peridot for who she is and the help she can provide less then five minutes after he and the Crystal Gems have defeated her. He’s always looking for the best in others and giving them opportunities to be better. In a sense, Steven actively tries to help people be redeemed. In fact, Peridot’s whole redemption arc was about HER making the decision to help Steven and become a crystal gem and the Crystal Gems coming to accept Peridot’s redemption. Peridot, Garnet, and Amythest (the Crystal Gems) all treat Peridot like garbage throughout her redemption arc up until the point that she tells off her boss. All three of them question Steven’s decision to trust her throughout her arc. They’re the first to basically say, “I told you so” when it looks like Peridot might betray them. And yet Steven’s faith in Peridot ends up being well-placed when she defects and joins them. This is what establishes Steven Universe as an ultimate “redeemer” character and allows him to redeem others faster as the plot progresses. Steven’s intuition about Peridot ends up being right, so more and more the Crystal Gems trust him in his calls. They respect his pacifism and his ability to see the best in everyone, and ultimately come to trust him.

To put another way, redemption arcs are faster in Steven Universe because unlike Avatar: The Last Airbender, Steven doesn’t need proof from others that they’ve turned a new leaf. He doesn’t need to go on a special adventure with Peridot the way that Katara needed to go on one with Zuko. And it proves the most important facet of redemption stories: the difficulty in redeeming someone is determined by the judgment of the redeemer.

Tying this Back to Roleplaying Games

After reading all these examples and stories, I hope that the one big idea that you take away from this article is that there’s no right or wrong way to redeem a character in your stories. Ultimately your redemption needs to be sufficient for the characters (or players) whose eyes that you want to be redeemed in. Some people are less trusting and need mountains of proof. Some people are more trusting and don’t need any. Sometimes a simple change of heart via the power of friendship is enough, and sometimes real sacrifice is needed to earn redemption.

As a final thought, worth mentioning that redemption is not atonement. Here’s a slick definition for you:

Atonement is reparation, it’s taking something bad that you did and doing what’s needed to make it right. In Zuko’s example, he earns his redemption from Aang and the others about halfway through Season 3 of Avatar: The Last Airbender but he doesn’t truly atone even by the end of the story. He pledges to devote the Fire Nation to helping repair the world, and that story is the start of his atonement. He has a lot of work to do in order to make up for the wrongs he did, after all.

Basically, redemption is being saved from wrongdoings while atonement is fixing the wrongdoings you’ve done. You can’t atone if you haven’t redeemed yourself and vice versa. So the next time you experience a redemption story, don’t look for the main character to have fixed everything as a prerequisite for redemption because redemption is merely the first step towards atonement and nothing more.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Prediction #1 — Regular Spurts of PF2 Information

This one probably will surprise no one, but I don’t expect the Pathfinder Design Team to be quiet from January to GenCon 2019. I expect to see and hear a LOT of information from Paizo about how the Pathfinder Playtest shaped Pathfinder 2’s design and what sort of changes they made with our feedback. There are a couple of reasons that I think this.

• Paizo was VERY regular with information about the Pathfinder Playtest between March 2018 and GenCon 2018. There were weekly blog posts and plenty of Designer Posts and interactions on the forums. Considering that they did this in order to hype the community up for the Playtest’s release, it stands to reason that they’ll do the same leading up to Pathfinder 2.
• 2018 saw Paizo’s self promotion via Twitch skyrocket, and they’re gonna need stuff to talk about. The looming Pathfinder 2 release is a low-hanging fruit for the Pathfinder Twitch Channel, and its one with obvious marketing benefits for the company (see above).
• Paizo REALLY needs damage control right now. It’s no secret that the Playtest wrought a massive schism in the community, and it does Paizo no good to let their new flagship sink after investing almost four years (or more) into its creation. Regular spurts of information is an effective way to do this.

Prediction #2 — We’ll Start Seeing a Lot of Pathfinder 2 in April

Paizo’s printing schedule for GenCon products is super predictable. The product needs to be in warehouse two months before release date, which is August 1st this year. That’s basically a July release, since Paizo typically releases at the end of the month, which means the product needs to be in the warehouse by May (which, conveniently, is PaizoCon). That, in turn, means that the PDF needs to be created and the product sent to the printer about 3 months ahead of that, at the end of February. This makes the schedule look something like this:

• Playtest Ends Mid-December, Designers finish compiling feedback and decide on changes. Begin writing End-December.
• Writing and Editing ends Late January / Early February, with Internal Office Playtest Games sprinkled throughout. Art team begins laying out the book Early February as sections are complete and the entire product is written by the end of February.
• Late February PDFs (Bestiary and CRB) goes off to the printer. Design team begins working on whatever comes after those books.
• Early to Mid April Paizo begins running in-office Playtest games of Pathfinder 2 in the office. Blog Posts become more frequent at this point as well.
• Late April / Early May 3PP are given early access to the PDF to begin planning their support products for the launch. Copies are likewise given to Glass Cannon Podcast and similar Actual Play podcasts. Maybe even sample adventures, though I am guessing that they’ll be told to convert older adventures / write their own for use with the rules if they want to participate. (There’s no way that they give PF2 AP-01 or any Pathfinder 2 Organized Play scenarios out early.)
• Late May is PaizoCon, so we hear a LOT about Pathfinder 2 at the PaizoCon banquet and it’s likely available to play on the floor. Whatever product comes after the Core Rulebook and the Bestiary is announced.
• June / July see lots of in-depth information given via Paizo Twitch and Paizo’s blogs. We’ll definitely get a “Best of Pathfinder 1” blog series at some point where the creative staff talks about their favorite Pathfinder 1 things.
• August 1 Pathfinder 2 is released at GenCon 2019.

Prediction #3 — Pathfinder 2 Won’t Sell Out at GenCon 2019

Starfinder had insane amounts of hype attached to it, and it famously sold out on Day 1. That won’t happen with Pathfinder 2 for three reasons.

• There is NO WAY Paizo won’t bring enough copies. This product is their baby, and every day they have no books left at their storefront is a day they failed to sell Pathfinder 2 to players. They definitely learned their lesson with the Pathfinder Playtest, and my guess is that they’ll have even more product to peddle this year.
• The other reason is that I am predicting that many customers will be cautious around Pathfinder 2. There was a LOT of negativity surrounding this Playtest; people who don’t even play Pathfinder know about it. A common complaint I predict is people citing Paizo’s need for what less friendly community members call “Week 1 erratas”, or the need to put out FAQs for their books within a short while. Everything from Paizo’s most beloved books (aka the Starfinder CRB) to their most reviled ones (aka Ultimate Wilterness) have needed a lot of polish from Paizo early on in their release for the past few years, and with the time crunch that Paizo needs to launch this book there will likely be a decent chunk of people who don’t pick up this book in print until they’ve gotten an “all clear” from their friends and families.
• Along the same lines as above, I am betting that there will be a population of people who feel burned by the Playtest who won’t give PF2 the time of day until a few books down the road. Again, they’ll probably cite examples like “the Advanced Player’s Guide is what made Pathfinder Pathfinder!” or “Starfinder was unplayable until the Alien Archive came out!”

Prediction #4 — WotC and Others Will Launch Something

As mentioned, its pretty common knowledge that there’s a sour taste in the Pathfinder Community following the Playtest, and the time between October 2018 (when the feelings started) and GenCon 2019 (when PF2 launches) is plenty of time for rival RPG companies to try and mobilize a product to try and “Paizo” Paizo. Yes, that includes WotC; they don’t NEED to Paizo Paizo, but if they pull it off, they could take a chunk of their customer base back.

That being said, I don’t think anyone who tries to Paizo Paizo at GenCon 2019 will be successful in doing so. Anyone who hasn’t been won over by 5E likely won’t be since the most common reason cited is the game’s lack of Player-facing options and complexity, while no one else is going to be able to put out a product that caters to the Pathfinder community with the same polish, charm, and recognition. Paizo themselves didn’t do that; Pathfinder 1 came after 4E after all and it was a relatively slow climb to the top. Regardless, I expect to hear about other companies launching big RPG products around GenCon 2019 to try and take a slice of Paizo’s pie.

Prediction #5 — Pathfinder 2 is Going to Be GOOD

Yeah, I know. “Alex, you’re such a shill! You write for Paizo!” At the same time, I am part of a public gaming group that quit playing the Pathfinder Playtest. We never ended up giving our thoughts on Pathfinder Playtest, but my opinion on it was fairly sour. I think you can see and hear a lot of that in our recordings, especially in Part 2 when I’m playing a sorcerer. Despite this, everything I’ve seen and heard from the PDT leads me to believe that they’re willing to make the hard choices for the betterment of the game, such as:

• Completing reworking the math. I don’t know if I agree with the numbers Jason gave personally from a design perspective, but as a designer I can say that reworking ALL the Math in a 500 page book is no easy task. If you’re willing to do that, you’re willing to do a lot.
• Axing Resonance Points. From the outside, it sure looked like the PDT was willing to do whatever it took to keep Resonance as a mechanic. Yet one of the first things announced was that Resonance would die. Permanently. Being willing to make a massive change like that is an excellent sign of devotion to the fans.

There are others I can cite, but I think these are the two big ones people complained about and they’re definitely the two that I think show the devotion and dedication of the PDT more than anything else.

Prediction #6 — The Next Big Release Will be Spring 2020, and It Will Be All About Ancestries

Okay, final prediction. Remember that book announcement I mentioned? I think its going to be dedicated to ancestries, and we’re going to get it in Spring 2020. Why not Winter 2019? I think that the Bestiary will technically be occupying that slot from a production perspective, so we won’t see another big release until 2020. And why ancestries? Well, I have a bunch of reasons regarding that.

• Pathfinder is NOT a new world. There are a lot of established creatures and cultures in it, and to have a seamless transition narrative-wise you need those missing pieces. Until they’re added back, the world is going to feel incomplete, like Paizo retconned someone’s favorite ancestries from the world.

Okay! And those are my Big 6 Predictions for Pathfinder 2 in the new years. But those are my thoughts; I want to hear yours! Comments below or hop into to Know Direction Discord, go to our Pathfinder 2 Channel, and @Me with your thoughts. (I’m @TheEverymanGamer on Discord.) Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great day!

Until next time, I’m Alexander Augunas the Everyman Gaming, and I’ve just blessed you with guidance! Take care!

So, I’mma do it, and I’m going to start with something that I see a TON of people err on—numeric bonuses in the Starfinder RPG.

What’s a Numeric Bonus?

This isn’t a trick question—a numeric bonus is any number that you add to a d20 roll or check in a Tabletop RPG. Games like Pathfinder 1st Edition and Starfinder are defined by how players accumulate and distribute numeric bonuses, where games like Dungeons and Dragon’s 4th Edition and 5th Edition are more about garnering advantage, which is a very different beast. (The Pathfinder Playtest , by contrast, don’t really use numeric bonuses or a reroll mechanic; it places a much bigger emphasis on the value rolled on a single d20.)

One of the most important aspects of these games is a concept called “bonus types”, which is this idea that bonuses stack if they belong to different categories, but don’t stack among the same categories. This restriction allows the game designers to limit how big the bonuses get. I’m going to eschew talking about Dungeons and Dragons for a bit and focus on Pathfinder and Starfinder, as I have more familiarity with these games and, frankly, don’t want to say anything incorrect about 5th Edition.

Essentially, in Pathfinder and Starfinder, bonuses fall into several distinct categories that look like this:

• PF1: Alchemical, Ability, Armor, Base, Circumstance, Competence, Deflection, Dodge, Enhancement, Inherent, Insight, Luck, Morale, Natural Armor, Profane, Racial, Resistance, Sacred, Shield, Size, Trait
• SF:Ability, Armor, Base, Circumstance, Divine, Enhancement, Insight, Morale, Racial
• PF2: Ability, Armor, Circumstance, Conditional, Item, Shield

Now, when you look at these bonuses the first thing that you can immediately see is that later iterations of Paizo games (PF2 and SF) both have significantly fewer types of bonuses than PF1 and its fore bearer, 3.5, do. The reason for this is simple: every new bonus type that’s in the game represents a place where the game’s math can go out of control. Let’s take a look at PF1’s bonus system to see what I’m talking about.

Pathfinder 1: A Trainwreck of Bonuses

Pathfinder 1st Edition has 18 different types of bonuses, and each is assigned to a specific set of values that it is allowed to influence. For simplicity, let’s take a minute to sort these all out.

• Alchemical: Ability scores, saves.
• Ability: Basically any d20 roll or check.
• Armor: AC
• Base: Attack rolls and saving throws.
• Circumstance: Attack rolls, ability checks, skill checks
• Competence: Attack rolls, damage rolls, skill checks, saving throws
• Deflection: AC
• Dodge: AC (stacks)
• Enhancement: Ability scores, AC, attacks rolls, damage, speed
• Inherent: Ability scores
• Insight: AC, attack rolls, skill checks, saving throws
• Luck: AC, attack rolls, skill checks, damage rolls, saving throws
• Morale: Attack rolls, skill checks, damage rolls, Strength score, Dexterity score, Constitution score
• Natural Armor: AC
• Profane: AC, skill checks, attack rolls, damage rolls, save DCs, saving throws
• Racial: Anything
• Resistance: Saving throws
• Sacred: AC, skill checks, attack rolls, damage rolls, save DCs, saving throws
• Shield: AC
• Size: Ability scores, attack rolls, AC, Intimidate checks, Stealth checks
• Trait: Anything

One of the reasons that this system is so incredibly unwieldy is due to how difficult it makes numeric balance of the game. After all, playing a game you stomp through isn’t fun for the GM to run, and it gets boring for the player fast. But if we take a brief look here at these bonuses, let’s imagine we wanted to min-max our attack rolls. Well, our base bonus is determined by our class, so let’s say we’re 5th level in a full BAB class, so we have a base bonus of +5. Then we maxed out our Strength, so now we have roughly a +5 ability bonus, for a total of +10. If these valued are the baseline design, we might say, “Okay, I want you to have a 50% chance to hit someone with a CR equal to your level, so I’ll give them AC 20 so you only have to roll a 10 to hit them. That means you’ll hit about half the time.”

But what. Bonuses. Circumstance bonuses are usually gained from battlefield positioning and similar effects that players rarely have control over, but its easy enough to get a +2 competence bonus from a bard by 5th level. You probably have a weapon with a +1 enhancement bonus. At this level divine favor could end up giving a +2 to hit if you somehow got it on your character, a luckstone could give you a +1 luck bonus, heroism could give you a +2 morale bonus, and anything that adds a bonus to your Strength (like alchemical and size bonuses) also add to your Strength, so let’s say your full BAB class is any one of several that give you a mutagen (there’s a fighter and a brawler class that do it), which could easily net you +2 Strength or +1 to your attack rolls. With very little effort, you’re looking at an additional +9, which means you’ve got a+19 bonus or you’re hitting on anything but a natural 1!

Is this a little insane? Yeah. Is it unlikely? Not really. The only bonus here that’d be hard to get is divine favor, which is a personal-only spell. Otherwise you’re talking about being a fighter with a Strength of 20 and a +1 weapon at 5th Level and having a bard and a wizard in the party. That is VERY doable, and that is in essence the issue with Pathfinder 1’s bonus mechanic. For a system that wants to restrict bonus types, it does a REALLY lousy job at it. (Don’t get me started with dodge bonuses, which ignore the no-stacking rule and get insane super fast.)

Starfinder: The Reductioning

When I get new freelancers who are designing for Starfinder, one of the mistakes that I commonly see are freelancers who think that Starfinder bonuses work like Pathfinder’s. Basically, that they’re all over the place. In reality, they’re very tightly controlled, and I’m going to show you how.

• Ability: Basically any d20 roll or check
• Armor: AC
• Base: Attack rolls and saves.
• Circumstance: AC and attack rolls, sometimes Perception checks and Stealth checks.
• Divine: I don’t know. I would love to tell you, but so far the only divine bonus in the entire game is on the Divine Blessing feat for Ibra’s often, which is essentially a +2 divine bonus to any skill check to ask a question. So extremely, extremely rare.
• Enhancement: AC, attack rolls, saves, skill checks
• Insight: AC, attack rolls, saves, skill checks.
• Morale: Attack rolls, saves, skill checks.
• Racial: Basically anything.

So Starfinder’s first strategy is to condense the bonus types, but make them much broader. Basically every bonus applies to multiple things, with Armor being the only bonus type that applies only to a single aspect of your character. In theory, this reduces a LOT of the bonuses you can get. Looking at attack rolls again, you’ve got your ability bonus, your base bonus, an enhancement bonus, and an insight bonus, plus a single feat that offers you an untyped bonus (its Weapon Focus). Assuming you get a +2 to each of those like we were having back in PF, that’s looking at roughly a +5 bonus which is about half of what we saw in Pathfinder.

But that’s the beauty of bonuses in Starfinder. The numbers are HEAVILY controlled. Here are some of the rules:

• All bonuses granted by a class to the character taking the class are insight bonuses. For example, the operative’s edge ability gives the operative an insight bonus to skill checks, while the laser accuracy gear boost gives the soldier an insight bonus to attack rolls with laser weapons.
• If you’re getting a bonus from a class option, its almost always an insight bonus unless you’re giving the bonus using an envoy improvisation, in which case it’s a morale bonus. Morale bonuses are given out exclusively by the envoy class, particularly by its envoy improvisations. This is to ensure that basically everything else in the game stacks with the envoy’s class features.
• Generally applicable bonuses are limited to a +1 bonus. For example, Coordinated Shot’s bonus to attack rolls is limited to +1. The only exception to this rule is when the option forces the character to be using a less-optimal bonus. For example, the solarian’s armor manifestation requires the solarian to be wearing light armor, which has the lowest bonus of any armor type.
  • Skill bonuses range from +1 to +6 if they’re insight bonuses, are generally +2 if they’re racial bonuses (major exception is the ysoki’s moxie ability, which gives a massive bonus in a specific situation that’s designed to make a very difficult check easier), and are +1 if they’re from just about anything else that isn’t the aid another action.
  • AC, Attack, and Save bonuses are never higher than +1 except in the conditions described above.

These extremely hard rules have some benefits that make Starfinder a MUCH better-feeling game to play than PF1 (especially if you’re using the monsters in Alien Archive as opposed to the ones in First Contact). First, the rules ensure that the players CAN take meaningful benefits and be rewarded for them, but their rewards never make gameplay trival. This is due to the fact that for the most part, the only bonus you’re ever really going to be chasing down is the insight bonus. Enhancement bonuses are EXTREMELY rare; currently only a single mechanic class feature and the armored solar manifestation give out enhancement bonuses with any regularity. You do not see enhancement bonuses on weapon fusions or armor upgrades to further bolster AC, for example, and you absolutely NEED to understand this if you’re going to design for Starfinder.

So to Recap:

• Armor Bonuses come from the armor you wear. You’re usually not going to see it elsewhere.
• 99% of the bonuses you’re going to be designing in Starfinder should be insight bonuses. This is done specifically to keep the insane number of bonuses applying to things limited. Insight bonuses are generally +1 to attack rolls and AC and +2 to skill checks unless they’re coming from the Skill Focus feat (a +3 bonus) or a major class feature like operative’s edge or techlore. Most classes give an insight bonus that scales from +1 to +6 over the character’s career.
• You’re only going to use morale bonuses on envoy improvisations. That bonus type is unique to the envoy so other character building options don’t invalidate the envoy’s choices. Morale bonuses are usually +1 to AC and attack rolls and +2 to ability checks, skill checks, and saving throws (for saving throws, you’re usually expected to spend a Resolve Point to use the ability however).
• Divine bonuses are INCREDIBLY uncommon, and if you’re using them they should difficult to get and applicable only in very niche circumstances. They seem to follow the same rules as insight bonuses, ignoring everything I said about class features and the Skill Focus feat.
• Enhancement bonuses are generally used to compensate for a weaker choice (such as the armored solarian’s armor manifestation) or as a very limited window of opportunity bonus (such as the mechanic’s miracle worker class feature). They seem to follow the same rules as insight bonuses, ignoring everything I said about class features and the Skill Focus feat, and allowing attack rolls and AC to go up to +2 instead of capping at +1.
• Circumstance bonuses stack in Starfinder and are the realm of the GM only. With only a few exceptions (like the Coordinated Shot feat), you gain circumstance bonuses only when the GM says you do because of battlefield conditions.
• Racial bonuses also follow the same rules as insight bonuses, barring things like class features and the Skill Focus feat.
• Generally speaking, all stuff gives a bonus of +1 to attack rolls and to AC, +2 to ability checks and skill checks, and up to a +2 to saving throws.

And that, my dear readers, is everything you need to know about bonus types in Starfinder! What do you think? Was this informative? Did I miss something important? Leave your comments down below, and shoot me some messages with your thoughts on our Discord channel. In two weeks I’m planning on tackling other common freelancer faux pas in two weeks when I talk about designing archetypes for Starfinder and Pathfinder. A common mistake that freelancers make with archetypes is trying to jam all the things into them, and I’ll be talking about why adding more … more … more! to your archetype tends to make it less desirable. That being said, if there’s a different faux pas you’d like me to cover, let your preference be known in our Discord server or in the comments! It is a LOT easier to write these articles when I know what you, the fans, want to read about, so don’t hesitate! Ask me all your design questions today!

Until next time, I’m Alexander Augunas the Everyman Gaming, and I’ve just blessed you with guidance! Take care!

For the last few weeks, I’ve been writing an awful lot about the Pathfinder Playtest and different design choices that have (or haven’t) gone into it. I know I said I was going to try to do a blog each week throughout the month of September, and I ended up missing one or two. I’m sorry, everyone! It’s kind of hard to write about something that’s in such flux, you know! So instead of talking about something hectic and chaotic (as well as someone that I haven’t really had much of anything nice to say about in a little while), I’m going to switch gears and talk about something completely different—Pathfinder Society Scenario design! I’ve mentioned it a few times in the KDN Discord group, but I WROTE MY VERY OWN PFS SCENARIO! If you count KDN Alumni, this makes me the fourth KDN person to do so! (Luis wrote Ageless Ambitions, Monica wrote Captive in Crystal, Anthony wrote Return to Sky, and Ryan wrote Elven Entanglement). Despite having so many of us PFS authors on-staff, as far as I know no one has ever talked about the experience of actually WRITING a scenario, so that’s what I’m going to do today on Guidance! Huzzah!

NOTE: There will be ZERO spoilers for Pathfinder Society 10-05: Mysteries Under Moonlight Part 1, A Testament of Souls in this post. Read at your leisure without fear!

The Developers! They’ve Choosen me!!

Step 1: The Choosening!

So, how do you get chosen to be a Pathfinder Society author? Honestly, I have no idea. My developer, the esteemed Linda Zayas-Palmer, chat all the time, and she sort of just asked me out of the blue after previewing the general hook to me. Now, Linda knew I wanted to write a scenario (It was actually on my Pathfinder v1 Bucket List, ala the list of things I wanted to do before PF1 ended) and I had a lot of good vibes surrounding my work on the … half-dozen products I’ve written between Pathfinder and Starfinder. I also had some adventure-writing experience; I wrote Yuletide Terror for my imprint company, Everyman Gaming LLC, and gifted Linda a copy for the holidays. (Whether or not she read it, though, I had no idea. I gave her a copy because she was a neverending fountain of support and good vibes while I was writing that behemoth of a product.) To put it another way, I had a LOT of notches on my belt before I got this gig.

If you’re looking to try to get Choosening’ed yourself, I’d recommend checking out the OP Open Call. LOTS of people get their start there, and Linda has assured me that its something she and John Compton use to determine who they want to offer work to. That just ain’t my story is all.

Step 2: The E-mail Bombardment and Outline #1

So, what does it look like when you get offered OP work? A million, million e-mails with a million, million words. No, seriously. The OP team gave me TONS of e-mails that included stuff like style guides, a general outline, a work timeline, Excel Spreadsheets with crazy-complex formulas for calculating treasure, and more. In contrast, I’ve gotten work from the Pathfinder Design Team that was basically, “Here’s an outline of what everyone’s doing. Get busy, and e-mail us back for a milestone and the final turn-over.” Getting all that information at once was overwhelming, even for someone as established as I am. I’m luckly that I was doing a two-parter, and had the experienced (and amazing) Crystal Malarsky to help guide me through the process. With Crystal and Linda, I hammered out my first working outline for the scenario, that had a basic table of events and encounters, as well as other plot-relevant information. This outline was VERY particular; I had to hit specific key bits of information that the team asked for, and it was even submitted for approval (which included revisions and changes that had to be made). With all that placed together, I moved on to the rough draft.

Let’s be serious, who WOULDN’T want to marry this guy?

Step 3: The Rough Draft

Despite the name, the Rough Draft is basically a full copy of the scenario, written as if it were going to be published tomorrow. I had to write EVERYTHING. Encounters, box text, story, and so on. Now, for me, I ended up writing in a flurry of anxiety. I had the whole rough draft done about one week after the scenario was assigned to me, which is REALLY not how you should do it. But hey, anxiety prevailed? I think? Getting done early doesn’t let the developer get to your turnover faster; after all, a scenario is basically released to the world within a few weeks of its completion, so Linda had work she had to do. She couldn’t read my scenario until my schedule said that it was done—my schedule was also her schedule.

So a few weeks later, I got the report back from Linda. It was a huge, two-page document of things that needed to be changed that was frankly the best bit of feedback that I have ever gotten for a professional piece of work I’ve done. Seriously. There were notes about how encounters should be changed, story elements offered, and so on. As an example, my scenario takes place in Magnimar, and one thing I REALLY wanted to do was perform some good, old-fashioned character surgery on the infamous Venture-Captain of Magnimar, Shelia Heidmarch. As a result, my scenario included a scene where the PCs get to see Shelia interact with her husband in a very different light then is typical. I wrote them like a married couple, with quips and whatnot. I also couldn’t recall Shelia’s husband ever being in print anywhere, so I wrote him as a foil to Shelia’s character. (He was very “Coran” from Voltron: Legendary Defenders.) Turns out that my knowledge of Golarion is incomplete, and Mr. Heidmarch is just as professional as his wife. Whoops! (Don’t worry Coran, I’ll get you into a fantasy world someday, just you wait….)

My scenario needs a LOT of tweaks, and I ended up spending another week cleaning it up. Again, take more time then I did. The 16-hour days I spent working on my scenario are NOT something I’d advise to others. I just got obsessive, really, really obsessive. (NOTICE ME, COMPTON-SENPAI!!!!) As I worked, I pretended I was a GM running my scenario for others, and read it aloud in my best GM voice. I even did a little bit of wacky encounter design, and put stuff that I think are pretty “hallmark” of my style in the adventure. Yes, that does mean that there’s at least one kitsune in the adventure (which I’m told by a number of fans is a big deal because apparently the PFS Community thinks that OP hates kitsune and is ignoring them), but more importantly I put a lot of fun investigative, social encounters into the adventure. Basically, I wrote a PFS scenario that I would want to play and that features plenty of opportunities for skill-based characters to shine! (And later get mauled to death in zany, atypical combat!!!)

Step 4: Two Month of Agonizing Waiting

Turns out that once you hand over a scenario, there’s a lot of waiting to see what it’ll look like. The worst was September! But then my scenario came out, and it turns out that the month AFTER the scenario comes out is even worse, because you gotta wait for people to play it! No!!!

But during this time, I did get a chance to sneak a peak at my scenario and look at stuff that changed. For one, a lot of my box text ended up getting shrunk down into small bits of descriptive text for the GM to use as they wanted. Personally, I prefer a script, but apparently the rest of the world doesn’t. I guess that’s life—a lesson in learning. Text was shifted here and there, and overall the scenario looks a lot cleaner. (Though there are some places that I, as the author, look at the scenario and go, “NO! HOW WILL THE PLAYERS KNOW ABOUT LITTLE TIMMY’S TRAGIC BACKSTORY NOW?!?!”, overall it’s probably best that what was cut was ultimately removed.)

One of the most fun parts of seeing the final product is seeing the boon you’re assigned. We writers don’t have any say or input in that, but it’s fun to see the outcome.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, I felt that scenario-writing was a lot of fun, even if I totally wasted my opportunity to enjoy the experience by power-driving through it so quickly. I’m hoping that y’all like my scenario, and I’m REALLY looking forward to seeing what people thought of it. (I’m also hoping I get to write more, but I guess we’ll see, won’t we!)

That’s all for my article this week. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do next week; to be honest, a few REALLY awesome Player Companions have come out, and I’m thinking about doing some Iconic Designs. What do you think? Leave all comments below, and don’t forget to chat with me on the Know Direction Discord Server. Until next time, I’m signing out!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

That being said, one thing that EVERYONE agrees on is that is seldom fun to feel like you’re forced into healing, and this happens a LOT with prepared casters like the cleric and druid, who are forced to prepare heal rather than choose to cast it whenever they want. This means that the ability to heal comes at an opportunity cost to the player, which isn’t always fun because not every player appreciates healing. (Although let me tell you, the person being healed ALWAYS appreciates it. And if they don’t, you let them die next time so my statement is correct.)

Many people agree that healing is in a bad place in PF2 right now, manly because an issue that PF1 had at its start has returned. That issue is the simple fact that you’re only good at healing if you’re a cleric.

“What?! No, Alex! Say it ain’t so!” Well, it IS so. Let me tell you why.

Case 1: Divine and Nature vs. Occult

So, let’s begin by comparing the healing capabilities of each of the spell lists. Currently the Arcane spell list doesn’t have any healing spells listed on it, so it’s basically out of the running before we even started. That leaves us divine, nature, and occult, and between these two spell lists there are two “bread and butter” healing spells: heal, which is on the divine and nature spell list, and soothe, which is on the occult spell list.

To start this off, I want to compare these spells so we can get an idea of how well occult spellcasters (currently bards and sorcerers) do at healing.

Heal

Let’s start off with a quick link to the Heal spell. With this in mind, here’s a quick breakdown on what this spell’s healing looks like.

• Single-Target
  • 1st — 1d8 (4.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 2nd — 3d8 (13.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 3rd — 5d8 (22.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 4th — 7d8 (31.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 5th — 9d8 (40.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 6th — 11d8 (49.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 7th — 13d8 (58.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 8th — 15d8 (67.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 9th — 17d8 (76.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 10th — 19d8 (85.5) + Spellcasting Mod
• Area Target
  • 1st — Spellcasting Mod
  • 2nd — Spellcasting Mod + 1d8 (4.5)
  • 3rd — Spellcasting Mod + 2d8 (9)
  • 4th — Spellcasting Mod + 3d8 (13.5)
  • 5th — Spellcasting Mod + 4d8 (18)
  • 6th — Spellcasting Mod + 5d8 (22.5)
  • 7th — Spellcasting Mod + 6d8 (27)
  • 8th — Spellcasting Mod + 7d8 (31.5)
  • 9th — Spellcasting Mod + 8d8 (36)
  • 10th — Spellcasting Mod + 9d8 (40.5)

Sooth

Now, let’s look at the soothe spell. Or at least, that’s what I’d like to say, but apparently the Pathfinder Playtest doesn’t have this spell. Sorry! Anyway, the basic idea of soothe is that it has d6s for healing instead of d8s and gives the target a small bonus on its next saving throw attempted within 1 round, but lacks an AoE or undead damaging component. With this in mind, here’s a quick breakdown on what this spell’s healing looks like.

• Single-Target
  • 1st — 1d6 (3.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 2nd — 3d6 (10.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 3rd — 5d6 (17.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 4th — 7d6 (24.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 5th — 9d6 (31.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 6th — 11d6 (38.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 7th — 13d6 (45.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 8th — 15d6 (52.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 9th — 17d6 (69.5) + Spellcasting Mod
  • 10th — 19d6 (76.5) + Spellcasting Mod

 The Verdict

Okay, so this isn’t really a contest, right? Soothe is absolutely worse than Heal. And normally this is where you guys expect me to pull out some super cool build out of my butt where I show you all how you’re totally wrong and soothe is amazing. But I can’t do that because there are no options in this book that’ll help soothe make up for a (roughly) 25% reduction in healing AND the loss of the game’s only multi-target healing option.

Sorry bards. I know that being healers has already been part of your fantasy, but it looks like you’re gonna have to make do with something else.

Case 2: Clerics vs. Sorcerers vs. Druids

Okay, now that we’ve ruled that divine spellcasters have access to the best healing spells, let’s take a look at the classes that get divine spellcasting. We’re going to be comparing the kits of the cleric, sorcerer, and druid. Before we do this, it’s helpful to point out that in PF Playtest all three of these classes have the same base number of spell slots / spells prepared, unlike PF, and we’re going to assume that the spellcaster uses ALL of their spell slots and class feats for healing. I think that’ll help us more in looking at the role of healers, for a reason I’m going to get back to in a minute (Hint: its opportunity cost). But anyway, let’s get started.

Cleric

Assuming you go all-out as a healer, cleric gets the following:

• Channel Energy: This baseline class feature gives you 3 + your Cha modifier in free heal spells that are automatically heightened to the highest-level healing spell you can cast.
• Communal Healing: When you use the Heal spell to heal an ally, this feat allows you to heal for the same amount if you used the single-target version of heal.
• Healing Hands: You spend a free action to add 1d8 to your single target heal (2d8 at 10thl evel, 3d8 at 20th level).
• Healer’s Blessing: This domain power adds 2 points of healing per die to a heal spell you cast as a free action, costing 1 spell point. This is an initial domain power, so if you picked a deity with the healing domain you got this for free. (Strangely, if you take this ability using the Expanded Domain feat, you can actually use it more because that feat gives you an extra spell point.)
• Healing Font: This ability allows you to spend 2 Spell Points to basically use channel energy for free. If you take this domain power, you have a total number of Spell Points equal to your Wisdom + 2, because taking Healing Font gives you 2 additional spell points.
• Improved Communal Healing: Now instead of keeping that healing for yourself, you give it to someone else. You effectively get to heal two targets with your super awesome single-target heal.
• Fast Channel: This 14th-level feat lets you replace one of the spellcasting actions to cast a heal spell with a reaction.

So, let’s take a moment to assess the insanity here. Assuming we’re 14th level with the healing domain, you have 6 cleric feats at 14th level. That means you could definitely take Communal Healing (2nd), Advanced Domain: Healing Font (4th), Improved Communal Healing (6th), Healing Hands (8th), anything you want (10th), and Fast Channel (14th) to have all this stuff. If you do so:

• You’ll have 3 + your Cha of your highest-level healing spells each day in addition to your regularly prepared spells.
• You’ll have your Wis + 2 spell points, which you can use to either cast 1 to 4 additional heal spells at full power or add +2 per die to your heal spell as a free action (your channel energy is heightened to 6th level, at 14th, which means you’re rolling 11d6+22+Wis (average 60.5 + Wis)
• When you heal someone, you reflect the healing onto another target within range of your spell using Improved Communal Healing (if you use the two-action version of heal, then that’s 30 feet). This means that two people are being healed for 60.5 + Wis.
• You can use a free action to add an extra 2d8 (9 damage) healing to each of your spells; if you’re using healer’s blessing, it’ll be 2d8+4 instead (13 damage).

In short, the cleric is absolutely SICK at healing at high levels. Now, let’s look at the Druid!

Druid

Assuming you go all-out as a healer, druid gets the following:

• Goodberry. You can take 10 minutes to imbue a “freshly picked” berry with magic that allows the eater to heal 1d4 Hit Points + your Wisdom. This is an average of 2.5 + your Wisdom, and you create an extra berry for each spell level you advance. This means that on average, good berry will give you more healing but requires each party member to take an action to eat the berry. In short, it has the potential to outheal healer’s blessing, but basically can’t be used in combat and forces your allies to take actions to use them.
• Healing Transformation: You add a free somatic casting action to a polymorph spell to heal the target for 1d6 hit points per level of the triggering spell. So basically, you turn every polymorph spell into a less-powerful soothe spell (see the occult list). This is cool, but you don’t get it until 10th level.

And hey! There are no other abilities that druids get to heal. So what you see in the heal spell is what you get. That two-spell slot / 2 channel energy / 4 spell point burst of healing for a total of 242 healing across four characters up to 30 feet away from you? Nope, you can’t do it. Move along.

Sorcerer

Assuming you go all-out as a healer, sorcerer gets the following:

• Divine Evolution: You can channel energy once per day like a cleric, or you gain one additional use of channel energy if you already have that class feature.
• Blood Magic: If you have persistant bleed (which the feat lets you inflict onto yourself as an Interact action), you can give allies a small number of temporary hit points when you target them with spells. This is nifty, but not enough to be considered useful. (It’s 1d6 + the spell’s level.)

And hey! That’s it. Sorcerers have roughly the same healing burst potential as druids, save they can cast their big-gun heal one additional time per day.

The Cleric Archetype

Multiclassing is handled via archetypes now, so let’s take a look at the cleric archetype to see if it could help our sorcerer or druid.

• No Channel Energy: This archetype doesn’t give you channel energy. (So what was the point of the divine evolution call out? Unnecessary future proofing?)
• Several More Cleric Spell Slots: You could invest a lot of feats in order to get a few extra spell slots that you could use to cast heal.
• Domain: You could take healer’s blessing and healing font, the later of which might actually be useful for a sorcerer or a druid. You would get to add 3 more spell points to your sorcerer / druid spell point pool and be able to throw out spell points to heal people.

Overall, this still can’t match the cleric’s tricks or do anything comparatively cooler / burstier.

The Verdict

Overall, I personally think that healing as it pertains to the cleric is in a good place mechanically. If you want to be a healer, you can REALLY push the numbers and build for it. It’s cool, fun, entertaining, and exciting. But no other class can do that, which is a major problem. The cleric can literally heal 4 times as well as every other class by end game, and I don’t think the answer is nerf the cleric. Let’s talk “Why”.

Assuming you’re Level 4, the average character is going to have roughly (15 * 8) + (14 * Con) for Hit Points. Assuming the average player has at least an 18 because of that sick magic item that sets your Con to an 18 that has an item level of 14th, that’s 176 Hit Points at 14th level. (The 15th “8” in my calculations is a stand-in for ancestry Hit Points.) Considering the average group has four characters, that’s a total of 704 Hit Points. If you’re a cleric, using ALL of your magic to heal and in a single round you’re healing for about 70 Hit Points per highest-ranking healing spell, and you have a total of 3 spell slots + 7 channel energies, that means you have a hard cap of 10 “best level” channel energies you can call on. Even assuming you “double heal” with Improved Communal Healing, you’re hitting two people for 70 Hit Points an action (assuming you’re clustered together), for a total of 140 healing per action, with 3 actions per spell. That’s a total of 30 actions, or 5,400 healing per adventure.

Which SOUNDS like a lot, but then you have to remember that we need to divide that healing amongst four people for 1,350 Healing per person assuming you’re as perfectly balanced as Thanos, which means you can be brought from “empty” to “full” a total of 7 times per day, assuming your healing is absolutely flawless and everyone takes damage in perfect, predictable ways.

And that SEEMS pretty good, pretty reasonable. But if you’re a druid, you get 3 castings of heal that cannot be split between targets, so you’re stuck with roughly 210 points healed for the entire day. If you’re a sorcerer, you get 280, and now you’re starting to see where the issue with healing is, right?

The problem is not that healing is bad. The problem is that healing efficiency is 100% wrapped up in the cleric class, and that efficiency build needs about three to four specific cleric feats to work. Healing doesn’t work unless you hyper specialize in it, and that’s where the problem is.

Solutions?

It’s really tempting to sit here and rattle off solutions that the PDT could try to work on this problem, but they didn’t ask for that. Actually, in the Playtesting document they specifically asked us NOT to give them solutions, so I won’t. Not this time, anyway. 😛 That being said, I think that this is a solvable issue that requires healing be properly acknowledged as a thing that people need (and sometimes want) to do, but generally don’t want to have to build their entire character around. The life of a healer is not glamorous, but it is an important part of any fantasy RPG.

Well, that’s my thoughts on PF Playtest healing for now. I’ve shared my thoughts, now I want to hear yours! Tell me what you think about Resonance, both on the armchair and in playtest games, in the comments below. I haven’t decided what Playtest Pondering I’m going to do next week, so if there’s something you want me to chat about / research, please drop a link on our Discord server or leave a comment on this page. I want to make sure that my articles are targeted to things that the community is talking about so we can make the next iteration of Pathfinder as awesome as we can! Until next time, I’m signing off. Bye!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Regardless, I’m kind of glad that I DID wait, because a lot of what I was going to talk about regarding resonance and its intended purpose was covered by Paizo in this blog. It’s nice to not have to beat a dead horse! This did, however, cause me to have to delete the entirety of my original article and start from scratch this weekend….

Anyway, resonance! Let’s talk.

What is Resonance?

Resonance is the name for a new Charisma-based mechanic in PF2 that essentially works as a limiter to how much magical energy you as a character can draw from items and equipment. You have a pool equal to your level + your Charisma bonus, and when you attempt to activate most magic items you spend Resonance to do so. Additionally, many magic items that you would normally wear for a passive benefit now require a resonance investment; you gotta shove a point into that item like a battery to get it to do anything.

To say that Resonance has been met with mostly negativity is a bit of an understatement. In all of my forum perusals, I haven’t seen a single post out of like 400 that have anything more positive then a “Meh, it exists” about resonance. Most people seem to not like it. Myself? I fall in the “meh” category personally. Now, I’m not super interested in repeating the comments Stephen made in the Positives and Negatives blog (the one I linked above), but I am interested to look at the different aspects of that blog. Let’s take a peak!

Addressing Consumables

“First, they’re meant to address the economy of lower-level consumable magic items as you level up. This is colloquially referred to as the wand of cure light wounds issue in Pathfinder First Edition, but it’s more systemic than that. In short, as you go up in level and your ability to purchase and craft (or find) lower-level consumable magic items increases, they actually become the most economical use of resources. When you are limited only by what you have on hand, the amount of bang per buck makes higher-level magic items nearly pointless.

This problem and the Pathfinder First Edition method of item pricing also played havoc with lower-level items with limited uses per day. Designers, by nature, want you to use the items they created in actual play. But adventure designers are often under budgetary constraints to make not the best item for the story, but the one that does the trick while still conforming to the amount of treasure output in the design guides. These factors often created a race to the bottom, design-wise, spawning tons of these little X-per-day buggers that characters could afford, featuring relatively powerful (and always useful) effects that often became more useful as you gained levels. All of this creates a sort of mini-nova during climactic encounters, as characters spend a handful of swift and immediate actions ramping up to their optimal tactics. This is especially true for classes in the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, since they typically have fewer class-based options competing for the use of swift and immediate actions.”

So, this is a super interesting point here. What Stephen is essentially saying is something that we see a LOT in Pathfinder, especially Pathfinder Society. It is generally cheaper to buy a lot of low-level consumables that allow you to benefit from a low-level effect longer then to buy a high-level consumable. To get an idea of what Stephen is saying, let’s compare the value of a Cure Light Wounds wand to a Cure Moderate Wounds wand.

• CLW: Cost 750 gp, heals 1d8+1 per charge (50), average of 5.5 healing per cast, 275 healing per wand.
• CMW: Cost 4,500 gp, heals 2d8+3 per charge (50), average of 12 healing per cast, 600 healing per wand.

With this in mind, a wand of CMW costs exactly six times as much as a wand CLW, but only heals for about 2.1 times as much. This means that if you spent literally half as much gold on wands of cure light woulds, you would overall have a net increase in the amount you healed only buying the cheaper one. The expensive wand is only useful in combat, which begs the REAL question: why are people buying wands of CLW in bulk in the first place? The simple answer—one that is not addressed by the resonance change—is that people want to be able to heal up outside of combat, something that neither PF1 nor PF2 do very well. Most other consumables don’t have this problem—people don’t horde low-level wands or scrolls of burning hands once they’re high enough level for fireball because fireball is intended for use during combat, an area where the more powerful effect is favored because you want the biggest effect over the shortest amount of time.

As a result, this response sort of confuses me because it starts chatting about swift and immediate action magic item consumables, which personally I’ve never seen hit play before. People get their actions from class features and feats generally, not magic items. In my opinion, this whole justification is centered squarely on the wand of cure light woulds, and in this specific case resonance seeks to cure a problem (suckling wands of CLW is neither cool nor heroic) without replacing the reason why people engaged in that behavior in the first place (healing is difficult in Pathfinder and people don’t want to go into encounters with low Hit Points).

Addressing the Christmas Tree

“Another problem Resonance Points are trying to address is what is often called the “Christmas Tree” effect of games that impose limits based solely on magic item slots. This goes hand in hand with the cheap consumable (or X-uses-per-day items), as many players rush to fill their slots with items featuring charges or uses per day. While slots still exist in the Pathfinder Playtest, they are the exception rather than the rule, and their primary goal is simply reducing redundancies (like wearing two pairs of boots at the same time and similar nonsense).”

You might not remember, but I did a blog article on the Christmas Tree a LONG time ago, and ultimately I think that this is a place where the resonance system does a good job acting as a limiter … somewhat. On one hand, the “investing points” mechanic works, but it also punishes low-Charisma characters, who are able to benefit less from powerful magical items. Personally, I think that the punishment would be gone if the investment requirement was removed from items that absolutely WILL be consdiered mandatory, namely the stat boosting items like the gloves of giant’s strength. When you see an item that provides you immense benefits like that belt, you’re going to feel like the game MAKES you spend a resonance on that item rather than it being a choice. That’s going to feel somewhat bad. It is functionally the same as making you invest resonance into weapons or armor. (Side Note: The fact that you don’t need to invest in weapons or armor BECAUSE it would feel bad, but not other items like the belt of giant’s strength, is likely contributing to Resonance’s “gamey” feeling.)

That having been said, I think there’s a relatively simple solution to this. Pathfinder 2 is all about the new tag system and it’s done a good job so far. So make a tag for it. This theoretical tag would note magic items that don’t need resonance to function, but characters can only wear a limited number of them simultaneously. This is essentially what Starfinder did with its, “Two magic or hybrid items per character” rule, which basically sets out to do the same thing resonance is doing here, but in a less gamey way. In Starfinder, the rule applies to ALL magic items equally, so it feels like part of the world. Because Resonance doesn’t apply equally and its inequities aren’t explained in-world, it feels gamey and people don’t like it for that reason. (Imagine if the rules specifically stated that potency runes act like resonance batteries and fuel the weapon / armor’s magical power without the wearer needing to invest in the item!)

Eliminating Bookkeeping

“Lastly, the Resonance Point system is intended to eliminate or at least severely limit the bookkeeping involved in those X-uses-per-day and X-rounds-per-day items. Instead of tracking a bunch of little point pools, Resonance Points can do the job in most, if not all, cases, with the rest limited to once per day. Admittedly, this aspect was not as thoroughly implemented as it could have been in the playtest rules.”

This, actually, is where I think resonance has been the most successful so far. By giving players a unified pool of points to spend that all items share, Pathfinder 2 has effectively increased the power level they can assign to items. As a great example, look at how much more cost affordable staves are in PF2 compared to PF1. It’s REALLY noteworthy, in my opinion.

Resonance is (Likely) Here to Stay

One of the major themes throughout Stephen’s blog post about Resonance is a sort of implication that the designers don’t have any real intention of getting rid of resonance, and honestly, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea. Resonance is neat for a bunch of different reasons: it has the potential to make bookkeeping easier, it makes Charisma into a desired stat with penalties for dumping it, and it offers an interesting look at this idea that magic might be pervasive throughout the people of Golarion. Maybe the reason that Earth is a low-magic setting is that our specific branch of humanity doesn’t have access to Resonance for some reason. But for now, we can only really guess about Resonance because the mechanic isn’t really rooted in Golarion yet.

So, with all this in mind, here are my final, summarized thoughts on Resonance:

• I *like* the mechanic, but I think it needs some dramatic in-game flavor to make it understandable. What is Resonance? Where does it come from? How does it work? The designers have told us that resonance was basically lifted from the occultist class, but the occultist’s mental focus was tied into their psychic powers. Resonance doesn’t have that, and if the system isn’t going to feel like a staple-on to the system, we need to know where it comes from and why our force of personalities allow us to use more of it compared to, say, our intelligence or our wisdom.
• Healing needs to be addressed. Big time. Pathfinder 2 has a real problem with healing, from the fact that only the cleric is any good at it to the fact that it is incredibly difficult to heal outside of combat because the ability to treat deadly wounds is no longer baseline (and can’t be used on multiple people reliably anyway). Pathfinder 2 could sorely benefit from a system like Starfinder’s 10-minute rest, which single-handedly makes healing less of a requirement and more of a nice thing to have in Starfinder.
• There need to be more exceptions to Resonance, and in-world reasons for those exceptions need to exist. Tell me WHY my sword doesn’t need to draw on my resonance, but my magic gloves do. Some decisions need to be for ease of play, but those decisions also need to be wallpapered in the setting.

Well, that’s my thoughts on Resonance for now. Hopefully we’ll see more about Resonance as the playtest evolves. But I’ve shared my thoughts, now I want to hear yours! Tell me what you think about Resonance, both on the armchair and in playtest games, in the comments below. Next week my article is going to talk a little bit about spellcasting, specifically my experiences with the PF Playtest spellcasting system. Don’t forget to keep an eye out on the Know Direction Facebook group for information regarding when the Network will be doing Doomsplay games, and you can ask me anything on our Discord Server! (There’s a link to the right on the home page.) Until next time, I’m signing off. Bye!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

1. Ryan and Perram’s Overview Episode of KD:P
2. The Staff’s Reactions
3. My Reactions after running it at GenCon
4. Doomsplay, Episode 1

With this out of the way, I plan to take some time this September talking about my personal thoughts about design decisions made in the Pathfinder Playtest, and while I agree or disagree with them. I can’t promise that all my articles in this series are going to be positive, but I also can’t promise that I’m going to spend hundreds of works dissecting every little decisions that the Pathfinder 2 Designers made. I don’t have time for that, and you don’t have time for that.

Instead, I’m going to focus on things that impacted my choices as a Pathfinder Playtest Player or GM or on issues that people have brought up to me in. So if you have issues, make sure to let me know and maybe I’ll comment on them too! But for today’s article, I’m going to focus on my “Hill to Die On” from the Staff Reactions article that I linked above. For those who don’t know, when we KDN staffers talk about Hills to Die on, we’re talking about positions we have about the Playtest that we’re pretty unwaivering on. If you don’t feel like clinking on the article and scrolling down, brief summary of my “Hill to Die On” is essentially that ancestries in the PF Playtest don’t have depth to them, and that long-term this issue is going to make converting a LOT of races to PF2 ancestries very difficult for Paizo.

Before I can explain this, however, it might help if we go over the difference between depth and complexity in games. Let’s take a slight detour and get busy!

What is Depth?

I think a perfectly succinct definition for what “Depth” is in terms of game design can be summarized by Extra Credits, in their video on the difference between Depth and Complexity in gaming. EC defines depth as, “the number of meaningful choices that come out of one ruleset,” and complexity as “a limiter to the number of meaningful choices that comes out of one ruleset, based on the girth of the ruleset.” To describe this another way, I want you to think about wall paint. Yes, wall paint, the stuff you use to paint walls in your house. People like wall paint because it allows them to customize the way something looks, to make it pretty. Typically the more you paint the inside of your house, the better it looks. Not only in the, “Gee, all the rooms of this dwelling are lovely and colorful” sense, but also because wall paint tends to become more vibrant when you put multiple coats of paint the wall.

That having been said, there is a hard limit to the amount of paint you can put onto a wall. Adding too much paint to a wall causes the paint’s coat to run, while not adding enough causes the paint’s coloration to look wrong. In this analogy, depth is wall paint and complexity is the number of coats of paint you apply to the wall. Not enough complexity and your game lacks depth. Too much complexity and your game’s depth doesn’t look or play good because it’s being marred by excess.

Depth, Complexity, and Ancestries

With the concepts of depth and complexity in mind, let’s look at ancestries. Ancestries in Pathfinder 2 represent the different types of creatures you can play. Humans, elves, goblins, and more are all considered ancestries. Each ancestry includes just over a half-dozen feats that your character can choose from when you’re building your character. You get ancestry feats at odd levels, interchanged with general feats. Generally speaking, the ancestry feat decision is an example of a system with a good depth to complexity ratio. You get a decent-sized list of feats and get plenty to choose from. Most of the feats provided meaningful bits of game power and add to the overall feel of the ancestry.

Where the ancestries start to fall apart, however, is when you consider them as a unified package. How much does a member of any one ancestry have in common with one another, and how meaningful is the choice of ancestry separated from the feats themselves? All ancestries end up granting a net +4 to ability scores and define the race’s speed and vision mostly, but offer very little outside of that. What’s worse, while ability scores are handled in a quantifiable, balanced manner, things like speed and vision aren’t. Let’s take a quick look, without the razzle-dazzle of the ancestry feats distracting us.

• Dwarf: 10 HP, 4 squares of movement, 1 bonus language, darkvision, unburdened
• Elf: 6 HP, 6 squares of movement, 1 bonus language, low-light vision
• Gnome: 8 HP, 4 squares of movement, 1 bonus language, low-light vision
• Goblin: 6 HP, 5 squares of movement, 1 bonus language, darkvision
• Halfling: 6 HP, 5 squares of movement, 1 bonus language
• Human: 8 HP, 5 squares of movement, 1 bonus languages

So, let’s take a look at this and try to build a rules system around it.

Hit Points

the minimum amount of ancestral Hit Points that a character can have is 6, so let’s assume that “buying” 6 Hit Points is worth 1 ancestry point. If so, then we have a progression that looks like this.

• 6 HP = 1 Point
• 8 HP = 2 Points
• 10 HP = 3 Points

Ability Scores

Unless we’re to assume that the designers value some ability scores over others, every ancestry has a total of +4 to their ability scores in the form of +2 to two or more ability scores. If an ancestry has three +2s, then it has an ability flaw of –2 to balance it out. As a result, we can assume the following:

• Two free ability boosts = 1 Point
• Two specific ability boosts, one free ability boost, and one ability flaw = 1 Point

Bonus Languages

All ancestries get two languages. Humans are less set-in-stone, but generally their additional language is tied to their ethnicity. As a result, we’re going to assume the following:

• 2 Specific Languages = 1 Point
• 1 Specific Language + 1 General Language = 1 Point

Speed

Every race has a speed, and the slowest seems to be gnomes at 20 feet and no “unburdened” special ability. For the purpose of this analysis, we’ll assume that dwarves have unburdened as a way to give them 5 extra feet of movement under special circumstances, so we’ll charge it as a 1 ancestry point ability. This gives us the following.

• 20 ft. speed = 1 Point
• 20 ft. speed + unburdened = 2 Points
• 25 ft. speed = 2 Points
• 30 ft. speed = 3 Points

Vision

So, for vision we assume that having no special vision is worth 1 point, something humans and halflings share. The way darkvision is worded makes it definitely seem like it’s an improvement on low-light vision, giving us the following:

• No Vision: 1 Point
• Low-Light: 2 Points
• Darkvision: 3 Points

Final Scores

With this all in mind, let’s total up the ancestral point values of these ancestries!

• Dwarf: 10 HP (3), 4 squares of movement (1), 1 bonus language (2), darkvision (3), unburdened (1)
• Elf: 6 HP (1), 6 squares of movement (3), 1 bonus language (2), low-light vision (2)
• Gnome: 8 HP (2), 4 squares of movement (1), 1 bonus language (2), low-light vision (2)
• Goblin: 6 HP (1), 5 squares of movement (2), 1 bonus language (2), darkvision (3)
• Halfling: 6 HP (1), 5 squares of movement (2), 1 bonus language (2), normal vision (1)
• Human: 8 HP (2), 5 squares of movement (2), 0 bonus languages (1), normal vision (1)

Adding 1 to each of these totals to represent the ability boosts gives us the following results:

• Dwarf: 11 Points
• Elf: 9 Points
• Gnome: 8 Points
• Goblin: 9 Points
• Halfling: 7 Points
• Human: 8 Points

As you can see, these races aren’t greatly balanced when you look outside of their ancestry feats, and honestly, that’s a problem. For humans and halflings to be “balanced”, we would have to assume that they either have better ability boosts (they don’t) or that their ancestral feats are somehow stronger than those of dwarves, elves, gnomes, or goblins (they’re not). I’ll take this another step further and state that expecting ancestry feats to make up for deceits like this hurts the feats system as a whole, since the point of having feats is to have options that are decently balanced against one another.

This “ancestral points” system isn’t perfect, but it does touch upon an important question here—is there really any question on whether or not my system is fair? And my answer to that … is no. There IS no question, because unlike PF1 where race had special abilities of varying degrees of power that could offset for point balances like this, the benefits of an ancestry are simple to quantify because they’re a sliding scale of power. To tie it back to what I was saying earlier, there is NO complexity in ancestries outside of ancestry feats, and since those feats are supposedly balanced against one another that means that baseline some races are just quantifiably better than others. (Dwarf is an absolute STEAL as you can see.)

What’s worse is that this mathematical issue that I pointed out doesn’t even consider the thing I specifically don’t like about this system—the flavor issues.

From a Flavor Issue

Pathfinder is an awesome world filled with a delightful assortment of ancestries beyond the eight core options detailed in the Playtest Core Rulebook, and since we know that the designers’ intentions is to “update the world” to to PF2 without causing a major calamity, we know that all of the races from PF1 are canon in the updated world. After all, you can merge the magus class into the wizard class without causing issues because ultimately, class is an abstract concept used by players to design characters, not a real job or vocation in the world of Golarion. (In fact, most of the non-core classes were never even properly placed in the world during 1st Edition.) But ancestries? You can’t just say, “Oops, all of these strixes are now something else,” without some major Spellscar-level shenanigans, which is why you’ll constantly hear me say that it’s more important for Paizo to update PF1’s races then classes quickly. We already know these things existed, and you gave us the power to make them into characters in 1st Edition. Keeping them away for too long invalidates those characters in your new edition, which WILL stop people from switching over quickly.

But I digress.

The linear nature of power within the base ancestries described above is going to cause a LOT of problems for Paizo when they’re trying to figure out how to translate races from 1st Edition into ancestries for 2nd Edition because this system doesn’t have the complexity to handle nonhuman biology. Don’t believe me? Okay.

Here are some abilities that races in PF1 have canonically that this system has no way to adjust its power for. I’ll even skip races that should really be an add-on to another race, like how half-elves and half-orcs are add-ons to humans.

The “I Can Pass for a Human and Therefore Can’t Really be Slower Then They Are” Club

• Vishkanya are defined by their naturally toxic blood. That’s literally their schtick.
• Kitsune and Reptoids all change shape.

The “My Ancestry Has a Movement Type That We’re Born With” Club

• Grippli and vanaras have a climb speed.
• Merfolk have a swim speed.

Solutions

I could keep going, but I’m not going to because you guys get my point (I hope). Instead, let’s talk briefly about some ways that Paizo could fix this issue, thereby futureproofing their system for when they inevitably have to deal with this.

• Give every ancestry two ancestry feats at first level. This doesn’t solve anything, really, other than increase character power. It also doesn’t stop people from being able to break assumptions about people from each ancestry. (For example, that all kitsune can change shape.)
• Give every ancestry a bonus, locked-in ancestry feat. This would be like how druids get a druid feat that’s determined by their druidic order; its technically a feat choice, but its a choice that’s locked in for you. This would make it so you definitely don’t have any “why can’t this person do this basic thing I thought all members of their species could do?” issues, but it does have the downside that it doesn’t correct the power imbalance we noted before because all ancestry feats are assumed to be of similar power.
• Give every ancestry a “base ability”. This is by far the easiest way to solve this problem—every ancestry has a base ability that’s roughly as good as an ancestry feat that they get just for being a member of that ancestry. Since this ability isn’t a feat, it can be “adjusted” for the relative power of the other things the ancestry has, like their speed and whatnot.

Ultimately, I think adding a base ancestry ability is the best option, but I am curious to hear yours! Please tell me what you think in the comments below, or shoot me a tweet about it at my Twitter Handle (see below). Next week I’m going to talk a bit about the Resonance system, it’s apparent purpose, and how it’s working as a means to fill that purpose. See you then!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

• The math in the system feels super great. Going from a three sessions of tightly woven PF2 to Hao Jin Cataclysm was super jarring.
• I don’t like how minimalist ancestries are, specifically at 1st level. (You will hear me talk a lot about this in the future. All of us KDN folk have a “Hill will we die on,” about the Playtest as Loren puts it, and this one is mine.)
• The 3-action System is super intuitive and easy to use. I had a bunch of 5E people try the game and they loved the new action economy.
• None of the 30 players this week that I GMed for loved Resonance. It was either hated (specifically for having to spend it to benefit from the scenario’s healing potions) or met with a resounding “meh.”
• Skill checks as initive checks was weird. My players tended to like the RP aspect of it. For me as the GM, I thought it was difficult to know when I should be asking for “what the PCs are doing when initiative is rolled” and felt that it was kind of metagamey.
• I really like exploration mode and it’s new tactics, specifically how you can’t always “do” everything. I specifically liked the existence of the defending and the seeking tactics; it makes a lot of sense to me that you can’t be walking around with your weapon drawn while looking for traps unless you have a special ability to do so.
• I don’t like how everything—from monsters to spells to feats—looks entirely identical to one another in terms of layout, and the color palette for the Playtest is bland. Red + Green + Beige equals a muted, brown asthetic that I do not like. I’m almost baffled by how this product was put out by the team that made the artistic masterpiece that is the Starfinder CRB.
• I was hesitant about the bonus consolitation, but overall it led to a lot of meaningful choices for the players.

 

… and I’m sure half of you are now humming its catchy theme song. And those of you who know it and aren’t, are. God I’m awful.

The Pitch

Gravity Falls is a Disney Channel… wait! Come back! I promise I have a good reason for talking about this! Come BACK!

Ahem. Right.

Gravity Falls is a Disney Channel series about two twins, Dipper and Mabel Pines, who are sent off to Oregon to spend their summer at the fictional town of Gravity Falls, where their “Grunkle” (Great + Uncle = Grunkle) Stan lives. Stan’s something of a … hackney business man? Yeah, let’s go with that. He runs a shop called the Mystery Shack where it’s established very early on that he basically swindles peoples into believing that different junky attractions he and his worker, Sues, builds are actually paranormal relics. At first Dipper is very skeptical about the whole ordeal while his sister basically tries to make the best out of a bad situation when he discovers a mysterious journal out in the middle of the woods. The journal has writings about all sorts of strange paranormal occurences around Gravity Falls. Before Dipper can ride the book off as the ramblings of  a madman, however, he and his sister encounter one of those supernatural occurrences, and the rest of the series is centered around exploring the mysteries and oddities of Gravity Falls!

A LOT happens in this series despite only being two seasons long, and the series heavily focuses around the mystery of Dipper’s journal—who wrote it and what does it mean? The narrative is expertly crafted as a mystery, and while it’s safe to say that there are filler episodes (especially in Season 1 when the show is trying to find its legs), most of those filler episodes have a great payoff in the series finale. It’s a fun, entertaining show that does the mystery genre better service then many adult series. Much, much better….

Lessons for GMs

Gravity Falls has a lot of lessons for GMs looking to run a mystery-themed campaign. Here are a few of them:

• The GM PC: Gravity Falls has an AMAZING GM NPC in Grunkle Stan in that the series only uses him when it’s important. In the early seasons, he’s almost a minor character in how much he contributes to the plot, but once the status quo has been established and the big reveal had in Season 1, the writers start to indicate that there’s more to Grunkle Stan then initially thought, and the mystery surrounding the character becomes the main focus of the first half of season 2, which naturally results in him joining the main cast for the action bits more often.
• A Sprinkling of Clues: One of the important ideas in Gravity Fall’s writing is that clues to the story’s mystery don’t come in predictable ways. You don’t see clues at the end of every episode, and when an episode gives a clue it’s not always right at the end. Sometimes our protagonists don’t realize they’ve found a clue, and that’s okay. Our protagonists don’t really realize what sort of mystery they’re in for throughout most of the series, and even when all of the mysteries seem lost and the heroes are placed in the climatic battle railroad, questions still arise regularly.
• Strong Supporting Cast: One of the big problems that mysteries often fall into is that they don’t have a strong supporting cast of characters who are friendly—it’s usually a very us-or-them mentality in that most of the supporting characters are suspects (see Scooby Doo for a perfect example on this: every character, even the nice ones, are effectively suspects on the show). Having a strong supporting cast of friendly characters allows Gravity Falls to really up the stakes of a number of its episodes, and it allows the protagonists to have something to fight for throughout the series.
• Multiple Villains: The series has a LOT of villains, but as the series goes on and explores them it starts to reveal which ones are evil by choice and which are evil by circumstance. It makes for an incredibly satisfying sequence as people that are initially presented as “bad guys” get explained and broadened as the show goes on. By the end of the series, several villains even have satisfying, series-long redemption arcs. This is a little harder to pull off in an RPG where the mentality is KILL EVERYONE, but if done well its very satisfying.
• Prophecy Awry: There’s this major prophecy in Gravity Falls that’s hidden in sight in the shadows for most of the series, one that you might literally miss if you’re not paying attention. The circumstances set by the prophecy come to pass, but when the heroes go to try and make use of the prophecy to save the day—IT FAILS. It leaves the main characters scrambling about for a solution to solve the problem and defeat the villain, and it’s so satisfying because it completely flips the trope and all of its expectations on its head. You think you’re at the conclusion, but NOPE IT’S JUST GETTING STARTED.

There are plenty more reasons to love Gravity Falls as a GM, but I need to spend some time packing up for GenCon 2018, so I’m cutting it short here. If you’re not going to the show, why not pick up Gravity Falls and check it out? It’s a fun adventure with strong mystery elements that will keep you guessing even when everything’s seemingly in the open. I won’t have an article out next week, but when I return fresh from GenCon, I’ll be going over my experience as a Tier I GM running nearly endless sessions of Pathfinder 2E! Looking forward to it! But until then, take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Build Concept

Any information important to understanding the build or its roots goes here.

• Species: Any (avoid races with Dex or Str penalties)
• Ability Scores: Str 11, Dex 16, Con 10, Int 10, Wis 10, Cha 14
• Classes: operative 14
• Theme: Space Pirate
• Feats: Weapon Focus (1st); Versatile Focus (3rd), Opening Volley (4th; Combat Trick), Quick Draw (5th), Multi-Weapon Fighting (7th), Step Up (9th), Step Up and Strike (11th), Coordinated Shot (13th)
• Operative Exploits: uncanny mobility (2nd), combat trick (4th), versatile movement (5th; Specialization Exploit), uncanny shooter (6th), bleeding shot (8th), staggering shot (10th), stunning shot (12th), multiattack mastery (14th)
• Abilities: debilitating trick, operative’s edge +4, evasion, quad attack, quick movement +20 ft., specialization (daredevil), specialization power, specialization skill mastery, trick attack 6d8, triple attack, uncanny agility

 Gameplay

So, I don’t usually do 14th-level builds for Starfinder because its beyond the range of Dead Suns, but hey! First time for everything, right? I mostly went this high-level because I wanted the Space Pirate’s sweet sword and pistol ability, but also because this build (sword and pistol) doesn’t really come online until the build has the multiattack mastery operative exploit. This AMAZING ability allows you to automatically inflict a debilitating trick on a foe if you use triple attack or quad attack, make all attacks against one opponent, and manage to hit them at least twice. It basically allows you to have the utility of trick attack while still getting to make all of your attacks.

This begs the question—is using full attacks as an operative good? Well … maybe? Basically, triple attack and quad attack never increase the penalty you take for making a full attack the way that soldier’s onslaught and solarian’s onslaught do, and quad attack does effectively allow you to make four attacks at a –4 penalty. But when you’re using quad attack, your opponent probably isn’t flat-footed because a quad attack isn’t a trick attack. This means that compared to a trick attack, you’re taking a –4 penalty from the full attack AND your opponent isn’t flat-footed, so its AC is 2 higher. This is basically a six point swing in the monster’s favor, which is (in fairness) comparable to a soldier or a solarian using their onslaught ability. In effect, the operative will (mathematically speaking) be very likely to deal similar damage to the operative and soldier ON AVERAGE with a full attack using quad attack, or a single attack using trick attack. So I guess the real question is, “Do you want to take that chance?”

Well, our pirate build has some cards stacked in their favor. Opening Volley is a very impressive 2 point swing for the operative’s next melee attack after making a ranged attack, so theoretically on round 2 you could use trick attack to get in close to an opponent, fire with your ranged weapon to trigger Opening Volley, then full attack on your next round for that sweet, sweet bonus. Multi-Weapon Fighting is also a GREAT boost for this operative build (unlike my armored solarian build), as it reduces the penalty for all these attacks by 1 as long as you’re using two or more different weapons. (Easy!) Combined with bleeding shot as your debilitating trick, and you’re effectively taking a bigger risk then you would with a trick attack for a much higher reward (four weapon hits plus four times your static bonuses is NICE).

This build also has some nice utility. The space pirate theme lets you make two attacks as part of a standard action, and uncanny shooter lets you wade into battle pistol drawn without fear. Because guarded steps take an action in SF, you’re very susceptible to enemies just moving away from you, so Step Up is a must-have. I ended up picking daredevil for this build because nothing else felt “piratey” in terms of operative specializations, but even with that as the case the build’s versatile movement and ability to auto-trick attack enemies who are balancing, climbing, flying, or swimming is EXTREMELY good. Since you’re going into melee, Coordinated Shot is a useful feat but it might not be necessary. Hopefully you have a sturdy soldier or solarian in your party if you’re playing this build, because you CANNOT take hits well. If you’re the only one in the party brave enough to get into melee, your allies will love you for having Coordinated Shot. If you’re not the only one and your friend has the feat, I’m not entirely sure if it stacks. Owen?! OWEN?!

Overall, I think that this looks like a very different kind of operative build, and that’s exciting. Most operatives are one-trick-attack ponies, and this build tries to do something different. It tries to juggle a bunch of different types of weapons to unload for massive damage, and what could be more pirate then that? Next week I’m going to a Guidance blog focusing on a great kid’s cartoon that has a lot to teach us about presenting a good mystery. But until then, take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Well, turns out I needed it. All last week I was in bed praying to at least twelve different gods that the bacteria on my throat would die a horrible, flaming death in the toxic heck-hole I was turning my body into using the antibiotics. And hey! Five days later and it worked. I’m alive and reasonably caught up on my Master’s classes. Huzzah! Everything’s great except for one, tiny little thing.

I forgot to write my Iconic Design.

… so. Let’s talk about the disease rules in Starfinder!

The Unchaining of Diseases

The Starfinder RPG doesn’t use the same rules for diseases that Pathfinder does. In fact, the rules it uses are nearly identical to the “unchained diseases” used in Pathfinder Unchained. So throw out everything you know about d20 diseases, because what we’re looking at is quite different.

• On the Right Track: All diseases in Starfinder are categorized by whether they kick the ever-living heck out of your body or your mind. As a result, all diseases can be categorized into physical diseases and mental diseases.
• Steps to Recovery (or Death): Both disease tracks consist of eight “steps” by default, starting at “healthy” and ending with “dead.” The second step for both types of diseases is “latent,” which is where you’re a carrier of the disease but haven’t suffered any of its effects yet (or haven’t fought it off all the way). Every time you fail a saving throw against a disease, you progress one step further down its track. Every time you pass a saving throw against a disease, your progress down your disease’s track is reduced by one step. In this way, you don’t “recover” until you’ve passed as many saves as you’ve failed. These conditions get worse and worse until you finally die.
• Multiple Exposures: Unlike in PF, multiple exposures to a disease doesn’t increase the disease’s save DC, nor does it progress you faster down the track. Once you have the common cold, exposure to more common cold doesn’t necessarily make you sicker. (This is why you can recover from an illness when everyone else in your house is sick, after all.)

Specific Diseases

In addition to these base rules, each disease has its own unique set of rules that modify the base disease tracks and their steps. For example, many diseases that cause a creature who dies from them to rise from the dead have “undeath” replace “death” as the disease’s end condition. Some diseases never advance to the point where they can kill you, while others have you start further down the track (and therefore can kill you faster). Essentially, the disease track serves as generic rules to be modified by the specific rules of each individual disease.

Alex’s Experience

In my experience, the new disease rules feel much more robust and powerful as a storytelling instrument then PF1’s. For example, it is much better as a GM to be able to say, “Well, based on the disease’s progress you’re now bedridden,” instead of, “Well, based on the disease’s progress you’ve now taken another 4 Constitution damage that you immediately heal away with restoration.” The former is less gamey; damage is an abstract game mechanic, but being bedridden? Well, we all have an idea of what that’s like and know how serious it can be. In James’s Dead Suns game, my soldier, Shoku, was rendered bedridden by an infestation of words, and I was so hysterical that I practically begged the other players to take a few downtime days to admit us into a hospital. I can assure you that if it was just Con damage, I’d have been like, “Yo Mystic, lesser restoration this away please!”

But like in the real world, Starfinder’s diseases are much more dangerous and much more deserving of worry.

I hope you all enjoyed this article—it’s definitely shorter then what I’d normally do, and I apologize for that. Hopefully I pass a few Fortitude saves this week and am in good shape to give you the pirate article you’ve been waiting for next week. Until then, take care (and try to pass your saves versus disease)!

Welcome to Guidance! There are a lot of factors that go into presentation when you’re designing something new for an RPG, especially when you intend for your design to fill a niche that is similar to a niche that’s already been filled elsewhere. This is the kind of zone that you theoretically see things like the paladin, ranger, and fighter occupying in Pathfinder. Those three classes are VERY similar when you get right down to it—high attack bonuses, great with most armor and weapons, designed to deal damage and have a strong battlefield presence. Yet if you ask your players whether those classes feel “the same,” the answer is likely “Heck no!” The reason is that those classes are constructed with a design niche, a specific area that they perform best in. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look.

• At 1st level, the fighter gets a bonus feat. While far from the most glamorous or even the most exciting option among our three contenders, a bonus combat feat basically says, “Do with this what you will.” As a result, we establish the fighter as our generalist class, the class that has the potential to be built in a bunch of different ways and styles. The fighter also has the ability to qualify for a staple (for better or worse) of PF feat design faster: feat chains. If a paladin, a ranger, and a fighter all want a specific feat chain, the fighter is probably going to climb it first. (There are some exceptions, of course—rangers can be faster in the specific avenue of their combat style, but the fighter holds no such limitations.)
• At 1st level, the ranger gets favored enemy. This allows them to out-hit and out-damage the fighter when combating a specific array of enemies, and to be honest that doesn’t even come from the damage bonus—its the attack bonus that makes the ranger so lethal. By 10th level, the ranger’s bonus of +6 is high enough that they basically auto-hit most at-APL enemies with their first attack, and their second attack is at a +1 advantage over a fighter’s highest-bonus attack. This is balanced by making the ranger’s bonus apply only against a specific list of enemies that they’re trained to fight, but against those enemies the ranger is VERY strong.
• At 1st level, the paladin gets smite evil, which is like a super-powered version of favored enemy against one opponent, provided the paladin invests heavily into their Charisma. Adding your Charisma to attack rolls and AC is insanely good; at 1st level its very likely that this is a +3 swing, and it will continue to rise so long as you invest into it. The paladin’s damage bonus starts out lower at 1st, but quickly soars under the right circumstances. Since this ability is so much better than favored enemy, it has a limited number of daily uses that tends to stop mattering around level 13 or so. Once you have 5 uses per day, you’re very realistically going to get a smite evil off at every opportunity.

On paper, this looks pretty good, right? The fighter gets the more general toolkit, while the ranger and paladin are progressively more limited but get more power to compensate. Well, I’m here to say that, no, this is not terribly good design for a number of reasons. Most importantly, the stress it puts on adventure designers.

Adventure Design: The Mechanic No One Remembers

This funny thing often happens to players and designers of TTRPGs—we focus on the character as it appears on paper, but not as the character plays at the table. Having a hyper-specialized character can be super awesome when you can get your awesome combo off and look super cool while everyone around you fawns at your mastery over the system, but that hyper specialization comes with a very strange downside. In other to make the game fun, the GM has to basically disrupt your cool combo / ability.

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s assume that we have a party that includes a fighter, a ranger, and a paladin. And let’s say that as GM, I’ve designed that I’m going to run a campaign like Ironfang Invasion where the PCs are assumed to fight a lot of hobgoblins, and so my ranger wisely takes favored enemy (goblin). Because of the prevalence of that favored enemy type, my adventure design choice has unwittingly made the ranger more powerful than the fighter. While I know for a fact that not every fight in Volume 1 of Ironfang Invasion consists of hobgoblins, imagine if 2/3 of the encounters did. That means roughly 60% of the time, the ranger is going to out-perform the fighter. Is that a fair expectation, for the fighter’s to shine roughly 30% less often than the ranger simply because the ranger read the Player’s Handbook?

Let’s take another step forward and talk about playing a ranger or a paladin in Wrath of the Righteous, a campaign where you’re put up against a demonic horde and their cultists. As in literally EVERYTHING you fight is evil, and most things until Book 4 or 5 are either demons or humans. Pretty much EVERYTHING. What’s worse, Book 3 mostly consists of one-a-day encounters, so about the first third of that book the paladin’s big limitation (smite evil) doesn’t really do anything. And let’s be real, with a mechanic as limited as the paladin’s smite evil, its basically just asking the paladin to horde smite evil until the big bad boss comes out, meaning the encounter with the MOST importance from a storytelling perspective is the one that the paladin is simply going to crush. As a result, the niche aspects of these classes has a negative impact on the game’s ability to tell stories because those classes are basically designed to be metagamed. (And with good reason; if you don’t metagame, those classes are worthless—imagine trying to play a paladin in Hell’s Vengeance or a ranger with favored enemy (samsaran) in Carrion Crown. Not fun.)

Shifting Gears to the Stars

This sort of niche gameplay has another problem—it typically needs to be strong enough / unique enough that a player is willing to buy into it. That’s why numerical benefits for niches like these are often a difficult sell—it is easier to see advantage in a simple bonus (like a ranger’s favored enemy bonus or a paladin’s smite evil bonus) then a cool special ability that you get to do under niche circumstances. One great example of how a well-balanced ability can end up looking and feeling awful because it lacks luster is the exocortex mechanic in Starfinder. Comparing an exocortex mechanic’s starting package to a soldier’s starting package looks a lot like this:

Soldier

• 4 + Int Skill Points per Level
• Eight class skills
• Proficiency with all armor and all weapons (except special weapons)
• Full BAB at will
• Good Fort and Will, poor Reflex
• A primary style technique that is typically as strong as two feats (see: Blitz)

Exocortex Mechanic

• 7 Stamina / 7 HP per level
• 4 + Int Skill Points per Level
• Eight class skills
• Proficiency with light armor, basic melee weapons, grenades, longarms, and small arms
• Full BAB against one foe as a move action
• Good Fort and Reflex, poor Will
• A scaling +1 bonus to Computers and Engineering checks and a free datapad.
• A free Skill Focus feat that you can reassign however you wish.

Now, if you take these two classes and compare what each has that the other does, Starfinder is essentially saying that this:

• +1 Stamina / +1 Hit Points per level (Basically, Super Toughness)
• Heavy Armor Proficiency
• Powered Armor Proficiency
• Advanced Weapon Proficiency
• Sniper Weapon Proficiency
• An ability with benefits equivalent to that of two feats

Is worth the same as this:

• The ability to boost your base attack bonus to equal that of a soldier against one foe at a time as a move action.
• A +1 bonus to Computers and Engineering checks.
• A free Skill Focus feat that can be reassigned.
• A free datapad / tool kit / engineering kit.

It really, really doesn’t look very good on paper even though its balanced. The mechanic doesn’t get more skills because Intelligence is its most important ability score, so they’re bound to have more skills then the fighter. But when you break it down as “your core combat ability simply boosts you to being at the same point as a soldier for a limited amount of time” and add that to the fact that the exocortex mechanic really isn’t that great at the skills its supposed to be the best at. For instance, if you compare any mechanic to an operative with the hacker specialization (which gives Computers and Engineering as free Skill Focuses), then that operative is going to have a bonus in both of those skills that is at least +2 higher then a mechanic with a similar Intelligence because a mechanic’s free insight bonus starts at +1, while Skill Focus’s bonus is +2.

Again, this is why trying to define niches with numbers is usually not good for the long-term health of your game. But for now, I’ve said all I care to say on this topic. What do you think? Can you think of any examples where using numerical bonuses to carve out niches worked well? For me, I think that spellcasting classes (especially cleric versus druid versus shaman) show off best how abilities like spells offer a better way of developing niches. The numbers behind both classes are exactly the same, but they feel super different because of the flavor of abilities they possess. Next week, I’m going to be making a build that messes around with some of the new Planar Adventures goodness, until then, I’m Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and I’m always here to offer you a little bit of Guidance!

Now in my experience, for most GMs crafting a horror experience  is a lot like following a cooking recipe that your grandmother wrote. Yeah, you know it’ll make something amazingly delicious, but all of the advice you got uses imprecise measurements and general tidbits of lore rather than actual steps. “Put a pinch of salt when the stew’s ready,” sounds a lot like, “Make your atmosphere creepy,” doesn’t it? Now, if we’re being honest, talking about running a horror game is NOT something I was originally going to devote to a blog. After all, every year at PaizoCon the Paizo Staffers put out an amazing podcast that gives great tips to running a horror game. Go listen to them! However, what got me to write this blog a new-ish PFS scenario written by my friend and colleague Isabelle Lee called Oath of the Overwatched. Now, let me tell you this one teeny spoiler—Oath of the Overwatched is basically a Cthulhu-lite scenario. Play it if you want the experience, but know that I’m not going to spoil it further here.

With that out of the way, Oath of the Overwatched is 100% a game that works well as a horror game, but interestingly enough the designers in this one don’t really give any advice for running it as such. (In context, another scenario called Reaping What We Sow does give advice for running it as a Horror Game; likely because Horror Adventures came out around the same time.) It always struck me interesting that Oath of the Overwatched doesn’t call out how to run it as a horror game, given its subject matter. When I spoke about it to one of the PFS locals, they pointed out that even running the game as written with the horror emphasis, Reaping What We Sow doesn’t really hit the horror vibe. So what did I do? I decided to test my Strange Aeons horror strategies by running Oath of the Overwatched at a local convention for some friendly players (including our friend Robyn, my former Reign of Winter GM and current Dead Suns compatriot who had actually run Oath of the Overwatched).

Spoiler Alert—I REALLY creeped my players out.

How did I do it? Well, that’s the focus on today’s article! Players beware, you’re in for a scare!

Understanding the OP Atmosphere

 Whenever you listen to one of those “How to Run Horror” seminars, one of the first things they always tell you is, “Make sure you use spooky music and set the atmosphere to be extra spooky.” I am going to preface by telling you that spooky atmospheres are NOT a good idea for trying to scare people who may not be bought into the horror experience. It is very, very easy to ruin spooky atmosphere with an inopportune joke or casual conversation—people have TONS of defenses against music, as effective as it may be. Additionally, when you’re running Organized Play, you’re likely in a venue whose atmosphere you have no control over, like a convention hall or a store. Music is easy to talk over and even Syrinscape doesn’t work in places with no internet connection and loud noise (see: GenCon).

Use this stuff in the comfort of your own home or in a private setting, but don’t think that this is going to work for OP. No, there are WAY more effective ways to scare your players.

Know Your ABCs

When you’re trying to scare your players, you need to remember that miniatures are not inherently scary, neither is art in a monster manual. Instead, your most powerful tool for scaring your players is your words. More importantly, its how and where you apply your words—especially your descriptions—that are your biggest weapon in the fight for fright. When you’re picking words, remember your ABCs: Audio/Visual, Body, and Circumstanial!

Audio/Visual

Remember how I said that music wasn’t always scary? Its not, but what IS scary is descriptions of audible stimuli—things your characters hear. If you want to scare your PCs, pick these words CAREFULLY and make sure to keep them varied. Remember, ultimately things your players can process are immediately less scary simply BECAUSE your players are processing them in an environment they consider safe. For example, playing a sound clip of a wolf howling is not scary because its recorded, static and unchanging. But if you tell your player, “Your character hears a canine howl in the distance whose hungry, bloodcurdling screech raises the hairs on the back of your neck and rolls beads of sweat down your shoulders,” that is intrinsically less scary because you are giving your players a description, forcing their brains to take the information you’ve given them and process it. And often times, when you use words that have a scary connotation you’ll trick your players’ brains into processing that information in a way that is uniquely scary to them.

Author’s Anecdote: In Strange Aeons, there’s an event where your players go to a party where everyone is dancing around while something is reaching down with webs and hoisting party goes up into the shadowy rafters. The partygoes refuse to acknowledge it for fear of offending the host, but this is an opportunity that is ripe with horror. Knowing this, I described the scene as something like this:

PC: “Okay, we ask her where the prince is.”

GM: “She lifts her nose at you indignantly as she begins to speak, but then suddenly a tendril of white, sticky material falls from the ceiling and attaches itself to the woman’s neck. Before she can turn around to see what’s happened, she’s hoisted up into the air and begins screaming for help. Curiously, everyone around you seems to turn away from the spectacle even as she’s raised 30 feet into the air towards shadowy rafters above.”

PC: “Ah! I cast break on the webbing! I can do that, its an object, right?”

GM: “Yeah, it is. The webbing breaks and she plummets 30 feet towards the ground….”

PC: “I move to catch her!”

GM: “But before she falls so much as an inch, two additional tendrils shoot out from the shadows, grab her by each arm, and hoist her into the shadows in a blink of an eye.”

PC: “Wha?! I can’t do anything about it?”

GM: “You can try to find your way up there, but you hear a loud wail in a feminine voice coming from above, followed by a sound that can only be described as bears ferociously mauling a thin wooden tree. You hear wet ripping and snapping noises before the screams fall silent.”

PC: *says nothing, face agap in horror*

Doing terrible stuff to the PCs’ bodies is one of the best ways to scare them.

Body

Back to description words, the absolute best way to scare the pants off of your PCs is to describe something happening to their bodies. If someone describes something icky happening to your flesh suit, as in, your PERSONAL flesh suit, it is psychologically difficult to not imagine the thing being described. This needs to be something more then a simple, “You lose your arm,” or “You have a deep cut.” You need to really sell the details—that’s where the devil is.

Author’s Anecdote: In Oath of the Overwatch, my players had to fight these horrible monsters with a nasty poison. This was their first fight into what I would consider the “Lovecraftian reveal” of the scenario, and I wanted to drill the horror home (up until this point, I had been very horror-light). So when they fought the monsters, this happened.

GM: “Okay, so the attack hits. Roll me a Fortitude save against poison.”

PC: “I roll a 24!”

GM: *Checks notes. A 24 is sufficient to succeed* “Okay. Where the creature bites you, a dark, blue liquid pulses through your veins. You can see the ichor pushing its way through your arm slowly through your skin, up towards your chest. Wherever the ichor touches, your skin begins to gray and eventually turn white. After a few seconds, the ichor stops spreading and although the color doesn’t revert to normal, your arm doesn’t feel any worse then its fit after taking similar puncture wounds.”

PC: *Face is twisted into an expression halfway between disgusted and horrified as she clutches her nondominant arm*

Circumstanial

Its important when you’re trying to portray horror that you do it circumstantially—meaning when the stars are right. If you try to be horrifying every minute of every game, you’ll fail. Your players will get fatigued, they’ll start telling jokes to try and rationalize what you’re saying to them, and essentially horror will become the new “normal,” so you’ll have to amp up your horror game even more to phase them (which is NOT an easy task). So instead, you need to lull your players into a false sense of security to do horror well. You CANNOT give them any preparation for the horror you’re about to throw at them. This means you need times of “normal” behavior. Times where you’re silly, serious, heroic, et al. If you try to be horrifying all the time, you end up being horrifying none of the time.

Along these same lines, one of the best ways to BE horrifying is to make your players think that you don’t realize how horrifying the situation is. You need to act like everything is completely normal. Blue ichor coursing through the veins is stated as something that just seems obvious, rather than creepy. The reason this works is the reason why so many people sit down for a horror movie and aren’t scared. When you pop a scary movie into your DVD player or order it on Netflix, you’re mentally preparing yourself for the horror. You’re watching the movie set up the characters while thinking to yourself, “Okay, based on their personalities who is this movie gonna kill?” It’s a survival mechanism to deal with potential psychological trauma. But if you want to scare your players, you need to hit them with horror before those mechanisms can come up, and retreat them just as quickly. You gotta float like a witch and sting like a killer clown from outerspace.

Author’s Anecdote: Oath of the Overwatch takes place entirely within a magical library of sorts, but I wanted to catch them with their pants down on the horror stuff so I could inflict horror upon their poor, feeble minds. To do this, I described the library fairly unremarkably, relying on box text and the flip map I bought to explain information to the PCs. However, I wanted to give them clues as to what’s coming. A jump scare before drowning them in the horror, if you would. So this happened.

GM: “Okay, you failed a skill check. The entire library seems to rattle and shake ominously, as if an earthquake was happening. Then, suddenly, a small tear large enough to stick your head through appears in the air in front of you, leading out into an inky black starscape twinkling with motes of light. Suddenly, an eye the size of your torso appears in the rip, slowly blinks once as it recognizes you, and simply floats away followed by a trail of bitch-blackness that lasts several seconds before the starscape reappears behind it.”

PC: *The player who failed the skill check* “What the #### was that?!”

GM: “While this happens, all the librarians in the library continue putting away the books without so much as stumbling. The librarian you spoke to has a furrowed brow and appears to be muttering complaints about the library’s organizational system as he reaches up on his toes to put the book away.”

PC: *More cursing*

In Summary

The best advice I can give to you regarding running horror games is, “Evoke your player’s brains using your descriptions.” The more energy you put into describing something scary, the scarier it will become. This has the double-edged sword of making sure not to try too hard. In my experience, describing scary stuff in a nonchalant tone that seems almost dismissive of what’s happening works best, as if you’re talking about a footnote or a similarly insignificant bit of information. Within this disconnect, your players start saying, “How can you be fine with this? What’s happening is TERRIFYING!”

To close out this article, I want to give a follow-up on the third anecdote—the one with the eye. After I read my bit, the player asked me if he could stick his head into the rift to see what was looking at him. I told him yes. He did it, and I asked him for a DC 10 Constitution check. He passed, so I said:

GM: “Okay. You successfully hold your breath.”

PC: “What?!”

GM: “Yeah, you stick your head out there and there’s no air. What do you do?”

PC: “I pull my head back in.”

GM: “Oh. Okay, you don’t need to make Constitution checks anymore.”

PC: “That’s it?”

GM: “A huh.”

PC: “If that goes out to space, why is everything not being sucked in towards it.”

GM: “I don’t know.”

PC: “That’s how airlock breaches work, Alex! It all goes and tries to fill the void but it can’t, so the stuff just gets sucked out.”

GM: “Yeah, you’re right. It’s weird that there’s no vacuum though, isn’t there? Anyway, are you ready to keep looking for books?”

PC: *Unleashes a desperate wail of angst*

What a fun adventure! Speaking of fun adventures, Monica Marlowe (author of KDN’s Inspire Confidence blog) recently got into a fight with an internet troll about paladin code of conducts. After yelling into the void for a bit, I’ve decided that I want to talk about what makes a good paladin code of conduct next week, so I’m going to do that. But not next week. Next week I’m going to be taking a common Starfinder Design request for Iconic Design by building a melee technomancer. Will it work? I dunno, let’s hope so! But until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

If you like the art for this blog, contact Jacob Blackmon at commissionprodigyduck@gmail.com! He’s really fast, great at PC / party / boss villain pictures, and frequently has commission slots open. Immortalize your PCs today!

Seriously, its weird when your family figures out the things you like in your gaming habits. But hey, buying me neat things is WAY better then what, like, a Thanos of the internet does. And yes, I did just use the name of a Marvel villain as a stand in for the words “one-half.” I’m hilarious!

Anyway, game communities tend to not be particularly kind to gamers who like playing non-human character races that aren’t “Tolkien.” Like, virtually no one makes snarky comments about you want to woohoo a dwarf, an elf, or a halfling if you play exclusively those races. But oh man, if you so much as play ONE anthropomorphic animal race (e.g. kitsune / catfolk / ratfolk / etc.) then lots of people immediately sit you down, roll up a television that’s inexplicably on a cart, dust off a ’90s VHS tape, hit the play button, and the first thing you see on the TV screen is:

And while the person playing the character might be like, “Oh yeah, I totally did! I like this character,” or “I thought they looked pretty,” or “I really like this animal,” or “I really liked the lore / powers that are associated with this choice,” or “This is my damn game and I can play it however you want,” what most people REALLY mean when they make this observation is:

And while I know there are TONS of people in the furry fandom who don’t fit the description that Captain Rodgers is about to say on the next picture, and that they’re all generally great people who are in no way sexually deviant and do great things like supporting artists they like and constructively adding to the body of their fandom’s art and literature, when the vast majority of people say the “You’re a furry” thing to someone, what those people REALLY mean is:

There. I’m pretty sure that I just ruined the “Captain American detention meme” forever. Thanks, internet. YOU MADE ME DO THIS.

But yeah, it is absolutely, 100%, undeniably true. I’ve gotten this both to my face, behind my back at my local PFS, and online at message boards and other sites. (Fun aside—apparently there’s a group of 4Chan people who absolutely despise me for either A] actually being a furry for real and/or B] creating content that they feel empowers and/or legitimizes the fandom. And here I thought I was just playing characters I like while also being a capitalist swine, preying upon the wallets of people who’ll give me their actual money for writing kitsune stuff. Silly me!)

Now, interestingly, this isn’t a problem that people who play any other race have to deal with. Like, imagine if someone came up to you at a convention and was like, “I see you are playing a female human wizard. That must mean that you secretly want to ‘woohoo’ with human men, amirite?” It’s pretty ridiculous, but it’s something that people playing RPGs the way they want to have to put up with all the time. So today, I’m going to take some time to talk about this phenomenon and offer some solutions that’ll help alleviate it from both a player/GM perspective and a designer’s perspective. And to begin that, we need to start with addressing a MAJOR problem in how we play and portray these characters.

Animal Humanoids =/= Actual Animals

Illustration by Jacob Blackmon. Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Note, Zulvr does NOT appreciate being scratched behind his ear without his consent. Don’t try it.

A few weeks ago, I was playing a PFS scenario with my catfolk bloodrager. My buddy traded me his boon for my naiad boon, and I REALLY wanted to play the “prowler at world’s end” archetype I wrote for Blood of the Beast, so I swapped with him and have spent time leveling my catfolk up. Also at this table was a tengu swordmaster rogue, a ratfolk gulch gunner gunslinger, and a kitsune sorcerer. Obviously, we had ALL the animal races. I made a Facebook post about it, and immediately I had a million people post stuff like, “Aw man, that ratfolk better watch out around the catfolk! Cats eat rats!”

Another time, when I was playing this same character, I asked my party to participate in my seance for summoning my cheetah spirit. Basically, I flavor my catfolk as having a plain, golden coat of fur and to channel my spirits, I need to make my fur up with whatever markings the real-world animal I’m trying to channel has. This means stripes for my tiger (champion) spirit, spots for my cheetah (trickster) spirit, neck markings for my lion (champion) spirit, and body paint for my jaguar (guardian) spirit. When I described this to my group members, one of the other players at the table was all like, “I do it… and then scratch you behind the ears.” Zulvr growled at that PC and threaten to take off his arm if he tried anything like that again.

What do both of these stories have in common? In both cases, one or more players / people made an assumption about the player characters at the table based on their physical attributes (aka being animal-like races) that, when you get right down to it, serve to legitimize those races and those individuals. I know it’s sort of weird to use the words “stereotyped” and potentially “racist” when referring to characters that don’t actually exist, but let’s take that same logic and apply it to fantasy humans. If someone at your table said, “Wow, you’re playing a Garundi character? I bet you put lots of ranks in athletic skills and took the Fleet feat,” isn’t that not exceptionally racist? Again, I AM AWARE THAT IT IS NOT PERFECT EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN STEREOTYPING A MEMBER OF A FANTASY SPECIES AND A MEMBER OF A REAL—AKA HUMAN—SPECIES. But the point is that making stereotypical assumptions like that only serve to disenfranchise the player’s choice of character.

And really, when you get right down to people who do this KNOW that they’re doing it. Why? Because when was the last time you saw someone make an assumption like this on a character that was explicitly coded as human? How often do you see players assume that all aasimar are good and righteous, that all tieflings are vile and cruel, that all samsarans are wise or that all skinwalkers like to shift into beast form and beg for belly rubs. It does not happen because those races are coded by designers as humans, not anthropomorphic animals.

Coding Your Species Poorly

So, when I say, “code your species,” what do I mean? In a nutshell, “coding” refers to how you present a character. Obviously a game designer normally doesn’t have the space or mental capacity to tell you every little thing about a given race that you want to know. (I say normally but ….) Instead, we take our time describing generalities of a given race to paint a broad enough picture that a reader has a general idea regarding what a member of that race is like so that it fits in their game world. And for the rest? They rely on reader schema to fill in the gaps until they have the time or budget to give more information.

What’s a schema? Great question. In behaviorism (you know, that thing I’m working on getting my Master’s in), a schema is basically an organized pattern of thought that organizes our mental perception of a given topic. To put another way, it’s everything we already know about a topic and how those things are related and connected. Relying on a schema can be very helpful to a designer. For example, there is a high probability that if you are reading this article, you’re probably a human, and therefore your schema on how humans behave and the types of societies they make is massive. Likewise, Western nerd fandoms have an incredibly broad collective schema for popular fantasy races like elves, dwarves, and halflings because so much of the shared fantasy schema is based on the writings of Tolkien, for better or worse. But when we talk about anthropomorphic animal races, lazy designers will often try and “cross the streams” between their fantasy race and the behavior of actual animals. And you see this ALL the time. So much, in fact, that there is an ENTIRE TV TROPES PAGE ON THE TOPIC. To summarize, your race is a stereotype if their culture embodies traits that real-world humanoids impart on the animal they resemble. Some good examples include: loyal canines, loner felines, cunning foxes, gross rats, and so on.

Now, this sort of coding isn’t always a bad thing and can lead to general character dysphoria of subverted too hard, like if your catlike race ISN’T agile or if your foxlike race ISN’T guileful. Tropes like this exist for a reason—they make quick, easy cues for players and GMs that make picking up the race easier. In fact, many players enjoy playing these kinds of races because its easier to pick up a few simple bits of choice animal symbolism for an anthropomorphic animal race (like kitsune, which have generations of mythology and worldwide symbolism to help guide your roleplaying) then try to learn an entirely new culture that has few existing cues and might not be fleshed out well (like wayangs, which are based on shadow puppets and have little other context to go off of besides what has been printed about them). This is likely a major factor regarding why you see more kitsune then wayangs in places like Pathfinder Society.

The problem lies when these races don’t have enough substance to lean back on besides animal stereotypes. That’s where you get things like catfolk licking themselves for grooming (uh, no, a bipedal body can’t do that), gripplis eating flies (dude, that is NOT a viable food source; they’d have to eat their body weight in insects, which would lead to their extinction), or uncomfortable assumptions about an anthropomorphic animal’s junk. (Yes, I have encountered this several times. The more uncomfortable time was with someone questing a tengu player on their private biology….) And seriously, if someone takes the time to ask what a character’s junk looks like, chances are that they already don’t view the character as a person; more of an oddity or curiosity, really.

Fixing the Issue

So, as designers, how can we help players properly code our creations? For one, we need to make sure that our descriptions of our races focus not on bodily appearance, but on their culture and ideology. As an example, here’s the kitsune entry in Paizo’s Advanced Race Guide:

Kitsune, or fox folk, are vulpine shapeshifters known for their love of both trickery and art. Kitsune possess two forms: that of an attractive human of slender build with salient eyes, and their true form of an anthropomorphic fox. Despite an irrepressible penchant for deception, kitsune prize loyalty and make true companions. They delight in the arts, particularly riddles and storytelling, and settle in ancestral clans, taking their wisdom from both the living and spirits.

Quick-witted and nimble, kitsune make excellent bards and rogues. It is not uncommon for one to pursue sorcery, while those few born with white fur and pale eyes usually become oracles.

When you read this, ask yourself, “What did this tell me about a kitsune’s culture or society?” We got a lot of adjectives that focus on the “I look like a focus,” really. Words like “love of trickery,” “salient eyes,” “loyalty,” “true companions,” “delight in riddles and storytelling.” This is all basically pulled from a textbook on how cultural symbology for foxes without actually telling us how members of this race work and interact with one another. (Granted, this is a problem with the entirety of the “Unusual races” section of the Advanced Race Guide, but I’m hoping this shows my point.) Now, I don’t like to extol my own work over anyone else’s, but here’s an “introduction” for kitsune that I did in the Dynastic Races Compendium. See if you can spot the difference:

Living clandestine lives among human acquaintances, kitsune are able to not only survive in humanity’s shadow, but thrive amongst them thanks to their shapechanging abilities. At first
glance, these capricious fox folk appear localized in select human settlements and regions. In truth, kitsune inhabit nearly every human civilization in the world to some extent, using
their natural powers and wits to build homes for themselves directly under humanity’s collective nose. Despite their human masks, most kitsune have none of humanity’s ambition for power or desire for riches. Rather, kitsune are motivated by less hazardous claims to fame and seek success and notoriety through more enduring mediums, such as artwork, storytelling, and song. As a result, kitsune embrace art in all of its forms and seek to build their legacy through their creations.

Kitsune often keep to their human guise when travelling outside of the rare kitsune village and their impersonations are so spot-on that it is difficult to identify a kitsune as something other than an ordinary human unless one chooses to make her true nature known; the fact that kitsune communities have endured and prospered despite the constant state of conflict that defines humanity’s history bears testament to their tenacity, resourcefulness, and guile.

I am not in the business of telling people what to take from my writing, but I think its pretty clear that my introductory paragraph focuses on kitsune from a culture and psychological perspective, compared to a physical one. This is an advantage of budgeting more room for your races in products, but when you get right down to it if you’re trying to summarize an entire people in just one paragraph because that’s all the space you’ve budgeted for them, then you’re probably doing it wrong. (In my opinion, you need at least four pages to give a good look at a given race, and it needs to be a very tight four pages that offers information on a variety of topics and information.)

So, moral of the story—make sure your description of your anthropomorphic animal races focuses on their culture and psychology, and that you avoid relying on comparisons to their animal-like qualities. That is the BEST way to make sure that no one takes your race seriously, and they spend an entire 10 minutes joking about the shape of your race’s private parts. (Also from the tengu incident.)

Concerning Furries

To end, I wanted to loop back around to where I started with furries. One of the reasons people take the “anthropomorphic animal = furry” potshot is that fandoms have this weird, occultic hierarchy system in which each fandom secretly wants to be the “least weird,” aka “most mainstream without actually being mainstream.” For many groups of nerds, the furry fandom is apparently the group to dis for credibility. “Well, I might waste 40 hours of my life obsessing over a child’s cartoon, but at least I don’t dress in animal costumes and woohoo!”

For a long time, I didn’t like people assuming that I was part of the furry fandom because of allegations like these. Ask James—it used to make me REALLY angry. But when you’re a publisher, you’ll hunt for good artists anywhere you can find them. And hey, I learned that there are plenty of artists who’ve worked for Paizo and maintain accounts on popular furry fandom community sites. I was curious, so I did some sleuthing and here’s what I’ve found out:

• Furries REALLY celebrate their artists. You can look at anything from the most basic drawing to the guy who drew the art for Strange Aeons’ first bestiary, they praise everything. Along those same lines….
• Furries seem to be MUCH better at paying their artists / content creators then most nerds. Like, as a 3PP I can’t tell you how many TTRPG fans have asked me and artists I know and care about to create stuff for them for free. Furries seem to have a much better rate at actually paying their content creators. (Speaking personally, I can attest to the fact that if I put a kitsune on the cover of my product, it’ll often sell about 25% to 50% better then products that don’t. Is this furries’ doing? I have no clue. I just want money, man!)
• Furries are decently nice to anyone who has questions about what they like, and are really accepting. (Sometimes too accepting; lots of furries like to jump the gun and assert that you’re in with them even when you aren’t.) This isn’t to say that ALL furries are great people (there’s apparently a group of furry nazis, which is like the biggest combination of “Nope” that I’ve ever seen), but most of the ones I’ve met are.

So, furries aren’t all bad, then what’s the harm of coding people as them? Well, its twofold. First there’s that “sexual deviancy” undertone that I mentioned earlier that no one, even actual furries, want. On a deeper level, however, no one should be coded into a fandom that they don’t want to be a part of, and the majority of this miscoding comes from the fact that we as authors don’t do a great job emphasizing what makes anthropomorphic animal races as being “unique” and “different,” both from humans and from the animals they physically resemble. To that end, the goal of this article isn’t, “Let’s recode how we handle races so furries have nothing left to enjoy!” On the contrary, it’s “Let’s recode how we handle races so we make better quality content that more people enjoy and respect as being part of our game.” Because the flip side of this is that you create something that you’re later afraid to support further lest you get branded with a label you’re not comfortable with by a group of people who aren’t even associated with that label. But then again, it’s never the witches accusing people of witchcraft, is it?

Next week I’m going to be talking about horror. Specifically, some tips that you as a GM can use to make your players creeped out by the stuff you’re writing. But until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Today, I’m going to take about an error that is less mechanical in nature, and more philosophical. I’m talking specifically about purposeful design, but before I can do that I need to give you a bit of an anecdote….

An Anecdote

I want you to imagine that you’re a kid again. Let’s say somewhere between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. You’re sitting in your den playing Nintendo when a traveling door to door salesman knocks on your window. “Why, you’re playing Nintendo I see!” the salesman says excitedly. “Do you know what you need to really improve your game?”

Obviously, you’re the most hardcore video gamer ever, so you’re intrigued. “What?!” you ask eagerly with all the anticipation of an 8 to 12 year old.

“Why, the Power Glove of course!” the salesman grins, and he whips out this bad boy for you to drool over.

The Power Glove, an Infinity Gauntlet for your gamer Infinity Stones.

So naturally, you’re like, “HECK YES I WANT THIS MORE THEN I WANT A GOLDEN EGGY CRAZY BONE.” You reach out, prepared to pelt the salesperson with money faster than Fry at a Leela Convention when your friend rests a knowing hand on your shoulder.

That friend is me, and I say, “Touche, salesperson. But what does the Power Glove do? What’s its purpose?”

Purposeful Design Philosophy

When we talk about purposeful design, we’re essentially asking the question, “What does this game mechanic do? What is its reason for existing in our game?” It sounds like a dumb question, but all too often game designers design things that, when you get right down to it, have no mechanical purpose for existing. And I choose the word mechanical very poignantly, because it is very, very easy to create a flavorful reason for something to exist in a campaign setting. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say I’m trying to design a new product that I want to call Star Log.EM-9000: Dragonkin Options. In this product, I know that I want dragonkin characters, these big, hulking, Large creatures, to interact pretty heavily with numerous races of Medium sized humans. So I sit down and I say, “Okay, I’m going to design a feat that makes sense for the flavor that these dragonkin characters are interacting regularly with human characters. This is what I write:

Squeeze Endurance

You can squeeze into areas for a long time without growing tired.

Prerequisite: Dragonkin character.

Benefit: Whenever you’re in an area sized for a Medium creature, you can squeeze into that area for twice the usual amount of time before you become fatigued.

Do you see the problem with this feat? If your answer was, “Wait, you’re fatigued if you squeeze for too long?” you’re corrected! This feat has no purpose because it doesn’t really do anything. In fact, this instance actually creates a rule that doesn’t really exist. Neither Pathfinder nor Starfinder gives you the fatigued condition for squeezing for a long time.

The Dangers of Wasteful Design

When we design things that don’t have a purpose, the end result is a bunch of jarred, angry fans who are legitimately upset that you created a thing that does nothing. A good example of this reaction happening to Paizo is the reaction to the old Prone Shooter feat, which read like this:

Prone Shooter (Combat)

While prone, you use the ground to stabilize your aim while using a crossbow or firearm.

Prerequisites: Weapon Focus (crossbow or firearm), base attack bonus +1.

Benefit: If you have been prone since the end of your last turn, you can ignore the penalty the prone condition imposes on ranged attack rolls you make using a crossbow or firearm with which you have Weapon Focus.

Special: If you have the Prone Slinger feat, Weapon Focus (sling) satisfies this feat’s Weapon Focus prerequisite, and you can apply this feat’s benefit to attack rolls you make using a sling with which you have Weapon Focus.

He means literally bad, not figuratively bad.

Prone Shooter was essentially a feat that did nothing. It talks about ignoring the penalty imposed on ranged attack rolls you make using a crossbow or firearm, but the rules actually don’t penalize you for attacking with crossbows or firearms while prone. What the rules actually say is, “You can’t make ranged attacks while prone.” This is a feat that literally does nothing, but even worse, it references a rule that doesn’t exist. As you can imagine, there were a LOT of unhappy Pathfinder fans at the existence of a feat that literally did nothing.

So what’s the moral of this story? When you create a rule element that you intend for your players to interact with, make sure that rule has a logical, worthwhile purpose. Those purposes don’t have to be completely equal, and they don’t necessarily need to be desirable. But when you look at a rule, it should be easy to discern that (A) the rule has a reason for being there, and (B) that rule makes sense and works in a logical way. In my example of the Power Glove, that accessory does NOT have a logical purpose. For one, you need two hands to operate a Nintendo controller, but the Power Glove places the controller on top of one of your arms, making it impossible for you to have both hands on it at the same time. Since it is a game controller that cannot be used to control games, it has no purpose. Even if the purpose of your magic item is simply to spread butter, having that purpose and having the item’s value reflect the value of that service is decent enough design (if questionable in terms of effort spent designing). But that’s it for this week’s topic. Next week I’m going to switch over to Iconic Design again and show off a Starfinder build that I mentioned on the Solarian Class episode of Know Direction: Beyond. Hopefully it’s out of this world, but I’ll leave that for you to design! Until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

What’s Imposter Syndrome?

Imposter Syndrome isn’t a cutesy thing I invented for this blog. Similar to the Sunk Cost Fallacy, Imposter Syndrome is a real psychological phenomenon that was coined by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. Boiled down to its basics, Imposter Syndrome is essentially a persistent, internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud resulting from a personal doubt in one’s accomplishments. People experiencing Imposter Syndrome usually find ways to explain away their succeed and talent using some or all of the following:

• Dismissing success as luck, timing, or deception.
• Specifically, deceiving others into overestimating one’s personal intelligence or competence.

Who Gets Imposter Syndrome?

So maybe the above description sounds like you or a creative friend you know. Naturally, you are probably asking yourself, “Well, who is susceptible to Imposter Syndrome?” The answer? FREAKING EVERYONE. Here are some statistics on the topic*.

• Imposter Syndrome is not gendered. In their original study, Clance and Imes concluded that Imposter Syndrome was more prevalent in high-achieving women then in men, but additional study has proven this claim false. Imposter Syndrome happens just as frequently in men as in women.
• Imposter Syndrome is particularly common among high achievers, especially graduate students and tenure- track professors.
• People belonging to minority / oppressed groups are more likely to experience Imposter Syndrome. A study by Queen Hoang suggests that people of color experience Imposter Syndrome more often then white people. Suspicion that they only received their position due to Affirmative Action is the most often cited fear in regards to Imposter Syndrome. Asian Americans are more likely to experience Imposter Syndrome than African Americans, who are in turn more likely to experience Imposter Syndrome then Latinx Americans. (This is based on a study conducted on college students at the University of Texas in 2013. Your mileage may vary.)
• 70% of people will experience at least one episode of Imposter Syndrome in their lives.
• Famous People: Famous people who’ve documented their experiences with Imposter Syndrome include Neil Gaiman, John Green, Tom Hanks, Michelee Pfeiffer, and Emma Watson, among many others.

Managing Imposter Syndrome

To manage your Imposter Syndrome is to accept that everyone experiences anxiety about their accomplishments, and to try and allow yourself to feel pride in your work while acknowledging that you always have room to grow. Illustrations by Jacob Blackmon, Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Used with permission.

So, you know what Imposter Syndrome looks like, so how do you manage it? Well, psychotherapy, especially group psychotherapy is a common and often successful way of alleviating Imposter Syndrome if you’re willing to pay for it. Another common therapy involves creating “permanent products” of your successes that you can use as indisputable proof that you’re not a fraud. The most common permanent product is writing, specifically a writing journal, and is called writing therapy.

However, discussing your feelings of inadequacy with trusted and respected members of the field in which you’re feeling like an imposter is by far the most effective management technique according to studies. Mentors can help you identify where your Imposter Syndrome is prevalent and where there is a legitimate need for growth. This sounds mean and unhelpful, but the combination of being told that you’re overexaggerating your shortcomings, but aren’t entirely wrong, actually seems more helpful to your overall mental state based on psychological findings because these discussions help foster growth. Along the same lines, reflecting upon your feelings of imposterdom is crucial, as is making a list of accomplishments, positive feedback you’ve received, and success stories you’ve experienced.

Remember, if you’re experiencing Imposter Syndrome then the best thing you can do is talk about it. Don’t let yourself hide in the shadows for fear of being fraudulent; it is only by confronting those fears and identifying where you can improve that you will improve! But that’s it for this week’s topic. Next week I’m going to go back to talking about purposeful game design, the idea that things you write serve strong mechanical and flavorful purpose in the context of your game world. But until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Footnotes

*- I pulled these statistics from Wikipedia. Before I did, I read all 19 reference articles that Wikipedia has listed. They’re all legit and pretty fascinating to read. If you want to know more about the research on Imposter Syndrome, head to Wikipedia’s Imposter Syndrome page, scroll down the References, and give those articles a read.

About halfway through, after I had cooked the bacon, I had the idea to try and make my soup’s roux using the bacon fat from my bacon. (For those of you who aren’t culinary types, roux is a starch / fat mixture that you can add to a soup to make it even creamier.) I poured my roux ingredients into the bacon grease pan, and it immediately turned ash-gray. It was extremely unappetizing. At this point my sister, who is convinced that I don’t know how to cook, showed up. She took one look at my roux and was like, “Ew, do you actually want to add that to you soup?” She was convinced that adding it would turn my soup gray. However, I kept telling her, “Nah, let’s keep going with it!” Eventually, I had this loppy, ash-gray mush and a decision to make. At that moment, I realized what had gone wrong. I had succumbed to the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Mine had the ingredients spread throughout the soup and a nice dallop of sour cream on top, but this is pretty close to what I was going for.

What’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy?

To put it simply, the Sunk Cost Fallacy is the idea that you have to keep working on an idea because you’ve already invested a lot of resources into it. “Resources” can mean anything from time to money to man power—whatever valuable thing you’ve invested into the project. In my cooking story above, the resource I was worried about losing was time and ingredients. I had actually used the last of the flour in the house making my roux, and I was worried that my soup’s ingredients might burn if I left the house to go get more. Rather than worry about the quality of the finished product, I was more worried about the quantity of resources I had already spent getting to where I was.

That, in a single sentence, is Sunk Cost Fallacy.

How Does This Affect Me as a Writer?

Whether you’re writing for pleasure or writing to meet a quota, Sunk Cost Fallacy absolutely affects writing. From game design to storycrafting, you’re spending resources when you create. You’re using time, electricity, and manpower (typically your own, but sometimes others). Sometimes you feel like you can pull that magic item out of the gutters if you devote just one more page to it, or feel like you can really clean up a plot hole if you tweak a few things just one more time. At some point, you need to stop and ask yourself whether the resources you’re devoting to a task are worth it. Is there really an end in sight, or are you dooming yourself to continue to waste more and more resources on a project that isn’t going anywhere. Having the wisdom to spot when you’re at risk of falling victim to Sunk Cost Fallacy is an import part of being a professional writer, and its also an important part of being a GM. You only have so many days to prepare between sessions after all. If you constantly cancel sessions to get your game “just right,” you’re basically embodying Sunk Cost Fallacy.

What Do I Do If I’m Sinking?

Your next step after realizing that you’re falling into the Sunk Cost Fallacy is an important one, but it’s also one that there’s no default answer to. Some helpful questions you can ask include:

• What from my project am I okay with scrapping? Is there anything that you know right away I’m willing to let go on the spot?
• From what’s remaining, what do I want to hold on to? Why?
• Is there anything I want to hold on to that I don’t have a strong defense for? Meaning, something more then “I like this / I think other people will like this?”
• Do the things I want to hold on to serve a strong need in my project?
• How far am I able to go with my fix?
• Is fixing my project more time efficient then starting over?
• Do I run the risk of falling deeper into the Sunk Cost Fallacy if I keep heading the way I’m going?
• Am I sacrificing quality for ease?

When you’re armed with this information, you’ll start to see the places where you might be able to trim things down and fix them. Now, I’m going to run through the above questions using my roux as an example to show you how it works.

• What from my project am I okay with scrapping? Is there anything that you know right away I’m willing to let go on the spot? I don’t really want to scrap any part of my soup.
• From what’s remaining, what do I want to hold on to? Why? I can’t let go of the vegetable broth or bacon because the vegetables, bacon, and cream that comprises them cost a lot of money.
• Is there anything I want to hold on to that I don’t have a strong defense for? Meaning, something more then “I like this / I think other people will like this?” The only reason I don’t want to scrap the roux is because I don’t want to leave my house to get more flour / take time to cook a new roux.
• Do the things I want to hold on to serve a strong need in my project? All of the parts of my soup are important; without a roux, the soup won’t be creamy.
• How far am I able to go with my fix? I can’t make a new soup if this one doesn’t turn out well. It took me over an hour to prepare the bacon and vegetables. The roux took time too, but it was relatively laborless compared to the other parts.
• Is fixing my project more time efficient then starting over? Scrapping the roux and making a new one is definitely less time intensive then making the whole soup again from scratch if adding the roux ruins it texture / color.
• Do I run the risk of falling deeper into the Sunk Cost Fallacy if I keep heading the way I’m going? If I add the roux and it ruins the color, no one will eat my soup. It’ll look gross.
• Am I sacrificing quality for ease? Probably. I really don’t want to go out….

In the end, I turned off the heat for my soup and went out to get ingredients to make a new roux. I got my mom on the line because she’s an amazing cook, and together we made a significantly nicer-looking roux. My soup looked and tasted amazing, although later James Ballod (author of Code Switch and culinary major) told me that my roux probably would have tasted and looked fine if I had used it. But I wanted to make sure my presentation was on-point, and I was satisfied by the changes I made. Overall I consider the project a success.

If you want to learn more about Sunk Cost Fallacy, I recommend this video by Extra Credits. It is an extremely good guide on the subject if you want to know more. Next time, I’m going to be taking a break from Game Design to take a turn back towards Iconic Design. After all, I’m feeling a bit skitterish after having not done any builds for a while. But until then, I’m Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and I’m always here to offer you a little bit of Guidance!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Should It Stay or Should It Go?

When you’re designing anything, one of the questions you need to constantly ask yourself is, “Should this be a thing I keep, or should this be something I get rid of?” In my case, as I looked over the three “basic” effects I had come up with, I decided that I ultimately needed to ditch my original “Doctor Strange” crystal idea. Why? Well, when I stated out the crystal, the initial idea was to make the armor crystal akin to Doctor Strange’s cloak; able to dance about and do things on its own. Specifically, I was thinking of a crystal that let you spend a Reaction to move the solar armor’s enhancement bonus to AC to a nearby ally within 30 feet. That seemed pretty cool and different to me.

However, in practice, that mechanic didn’t work well. It ended up being a “weaker” version of the Core Rulebook’s Bodyguard feat, which is a reaction to use the covering fire action on a nearby ally. I didn’t like how similar it felt, so I dropped the idea. Sometimes that is a thing you need to do as a design—recognize that you can’t keep pouring man hours into a thing that has no value to you as a designer. (This is called the Sunken Cost fallacy, and its a design problem that I want to talk about next week.)

At any rate, my other two ideas—Symmetra Barrier and Orisa Barrier—were still really cool. They were easy to write because I thought they were fun and active. So without further adieu, let’s look at them!

Crystal #1 — Impenitrite Crystal

Impenitrite crystals are almost completely opaque and have a metallic sheen. When inserted into a solar mote, an impenitrite crystal allows you to project an immovable barrier at a grid intersection within 10 feet while in graviton mode. You must have line of sight to a grid intersection to place your barrier there. Once formed, a translucent, 10-foot tall barrier extends 10 feet outward from the point of direction in one direction of your choice, as well as 10 feet outward in the opposite direction. The resulting barrier is 20 feet long and 10 feet high as a result, with its center being its point of origin. The barrier is semi-permeable—opponents moving through the barrier requires a successful DC 10 Strength check, and creatures who successfully pass through the barrier take all of the penalties associated with being in a high-gravity environment for 1d4 rounds afterwards. The barrier blocks line of effect for your opponent’s ranged attacks, spells, and spell-like abilities, however, functioning as total cover against such attacks and cover against melee attacks despite being completely translucent. This doesn’t allow creatures to use the barrier to make Stealth checks, however. You and your allies take none of these penalties.

The barrier has hardness equal to 2 × the impenitrite crystal’s item level and a number of Hit Points equal to 15 + 3 × the impenitrite crystal’s item level. A barrier created by an impenitrite crystal lasts 3 rounds, after which the barrier and all effects caused by it fades. Once you’ve used an impenitrite crystal to project a barrier, you can’t use that same crystal to do so again until you spend 1 Resolve Points to regain Stamina Points or spend 2 Resolve Points as a swift action.

So the idea for this crystal is that you’ll pick a grid intersection and create a barrier there. I wanted to keep the feel that this isn’t a barrier that just prevents movement; you can move and even make melee attacks through it. However, the barrier has some hardness and a respectable-but-not-overwhelming number of hit points. You can even project multiple barriers if you want, but it’ll cost you a LOT of resolve very fast.

One of the design problems that I wanted to solve was, “How do I give a lot of armor crystal options while also allowing PCs to pick and choose favorites that they can keep relevant across the game? My answer to this problem was to allow armor crystals to be made at different item levels, sort of like how you could make scrolls at different caster levels in Pathfinder. This barrier is a neat thing that you can do as early as 1st-level if you have the money for it, and if this is the only armor crystal you want to use, you can always get a higher-level version of it. (This is a design idea that holds true in the other crystals I’ll be showing to you.

Speaking of that, let’s see another!

Crystal #2 — Lightforge Crystal

Lightforged crystals are cut from a unique material that is so clear that it is almost invisible to the naked eye. When inserted into a solar mote, a lightforge crystal grants the solarian the ability to shape light shed by their solar armor into physical—albeit temporary—structures while in photon mode. As a standard action, you choose one grid intersection that is adjacent to your space and create a shimmering barrier of light along two of that grid intersection’s lines. This allows you to create a line-shaped barrier that is 10 feet long and 10 feet high, or an L-shaped barrier that is 10 feet high and whose sides are 5-feet long each. Creatures and objects can pass through the barrier without difficulty, and creatures incur no penalties for making melee attacks through the barrier. The barrier blocks line of effect for your opponent’s ranged attacks, spells, and spell-like abilities, however, functioning as total cover despite being completely translucent. As a result, you can’t use a barrier created by a lightforge crystal to make Stealth checks. This barrier doesn’t block line of effect for your or your allies’ ranged attacks, spells, and spell-like abilities, however.

Each round, you can move the barrier up to 10 feet as a move action. The barrier cannot move vertically, but it can pass through creatures and objects at your leisure. If attacked, the barrier has hardness equal to 4 × the lightforge crystal’s item level and a number of Hit Points equal to 10 + 3 × the lightforged crystal’s item level. A barrier created by a lightforge crystal lasts 3 rounds, after which the barrier fades. Once you’ve used a lightforge crystal to project a barrier, you can’t use that same crystal to do so again until you spend 1 Resolve Point to regain Stamina Points.

I REALLY like that I have two types of crystals that use barriers, but use those barriers are very different, the smallest of which being that one is intended for graviton mode and the other for proton. The lightforge crystal’s barrier is smaller, but harder and mobile. There’s also no penalty for moving through it if you’re melee, and you have to rest to use it again once you’ve used it. There’s no paying Resolve Points to use it again. But since its harder, theoretically it’ll last you longer.

Now, it wouldn’t be fair to show you two similar crystals AND cut the different one, would it? So I DID design something completely new and different to show you, and I’mma do it. Because this is MY blog and no one’s tried to shut me down yet for doing crazy things!

Crystal #3 — Steelshard Crystal

Steelshard crystals are strong and durable in appearance, resembling chunks of iron in crystalline form. When inserted into a solar mote, this stellar crystal causes your solar armor to absorb additional punishment. You gain DR/– equal to the steelshard crystal’s item level. Each time this ability reduces the kinetic damage that you take, the steelshard crystal takes an equal amount of damage that can’t be reduced by the item’s hardness (a steelshard crystal has a total number of Hit Points equal to 15 + 3 × the steelshard crystal’s item level).

There’s a couple things I wanted to note about this one. First, I acknowledged that not every player is going to want to have the super strong utility that the barrier crystals provide. Some people are going to want more selfish protection. This crystal was specifically requested as an option by my friend who’s playing the armored solarian in James’s Dead Suns campaign. She wanted something she could do to feel like her armor was reducing the damage she takes by a little, so I designed this armor crystal to be reminiscent of Pathfinder’s stoneskin spell. One of my favorite parts about this item is how it uses the broken condition as its own personal limiter. Because it transfers your damage to the crystal, and because crystals stop providing their non-AC benefits when they gain the broken condition, this item basically has a point where the DR just stops working, which feels very cinematic to me. (And is a great balancer; can’t have huge amounts of DR at will as a cheap item, after all.)

Wrap-Up

So, this is basically my personal design process for whenever I make anything new. Whether it’s Ultimate Charisma, the Skill Challenge Handbook, or the Advanced Weapon Training options, I try to identify a need, do my research, look for inspiration, and then design to fit those three criteria. I hope this helps you as you design your own unique items and abilities for your games! If you have more questions about my design process, feel free to leave them in the comments. For now, however, I’m pretty ready to move off this month-long topic and start talking about something new. Specifically, about the Sunken Cost Fallacy and how it relates to RPG design. But until then, I’m Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and I’m always here to offer you a little bit of Guidance!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

As we’ve been working, we’ve 1) determined that there is a noticeable gap in defenses for the armor solarian, and 2) designed the fundamental framework for a new type of equipment that is designed to solve the issue, solarian armor crystals. With this in mind, let’s get started!

Last Time, on Guidance!

I don’t want to make you guys constantly flip back and forth between articles, so here’s a reproduction of how solarian armor crystals currently work.

A solarian armor crystal adds defensive properties to a solarian’s solar armor. The solarian can place the crystal inside their mode as a standard action. While within a mote, a crystal applies its effects any time that mote is in a solar armor form. A crystal within a mote can’t be interacted with in any way other than via abilities that specifically target a mote. The solarian can remove the crystal from their mote as a standard action, and the crystal falls loose if the mote is deactivated in any way. A solarian can’t have more than one crystal in his mote at a time.

A solarian armor crystal doesn’t give a solarian the option to create a suit of solar armor if they did not choose that option for their solar manifestation. All solarian armor crystals add a +1 insight bonus to the solarian’s KAC while their solar armor is manifested, as well as an additional benefit described by each individual solarian armor crystal. A solarian armor crystal counts as a single armor upgrade when determining the total number of armor upgrades that a solarian can have installed at a time; if the solarian doesn’t have at least one unused armor upgrade slot available when placing a solarian armor crystal inside their mote, they gain no benefit from the mote’s presence. If a solarian armor crystal’s effects refer to level, use the armor crystal’s item level.

A solarian armor crystal is a hybrid item that blends magic and technology. When an armor crystal is within a mote and the solarian uses the mote in solar armor form, the solar armor is considered magic for all relevant purposes.

Broken Solarian Crystals: If a solarian armor crystal with the broken condition is inside a solarian’s solar mote, the solarian doesn’t gain the additional benefit of their solarian armor crystal (they still gain the +1 insight bonus to KAC, however). This effect lasts until the crystal is repaired. As hybrid items, solarian crystals can be repaired using the make whole or mending spells, or with the Engineering or Mysticism skills.

Okay, with this in mind, let’s get started on effects!

Building Effects: Stating the Goals

Now that we have the core effects of the solarian armor crystals, we need to have the “sweet effects” they all bring. So, why do we need this? For one this adds a bit of extra choice to the solarian’s tool kit. For another, their direct comparison items (solarian weapon crystals) usually bring two effects to the playing field: a passive weapon damage buff and a cool critical effect. For our armor crystals, we can consider the passive +1 insight bonus as the “passive benefit” that the armor crystal provides. This means that we need to add special abilities that are roughly as powerful as a critical effect—that means either “all the time, but not strong” or “rare, but powerful.” Where solarian weapon crystals follow a very paint-by-the-number design, we have the opportunity to make the armor crystals REALLY cool and flashy. Why? Because by their nature, weapons are flashier than armor. Armor’s just a thing you have on, where a weapon is a thing you DO and SWING and WIELD. It has presence on the battlefield the way that armor just doesn’t in Starfinder.

To understand what I mean, consider this: when you’re looting the body of an NPC that you bested in Starfinder, which item are you generally more “aware of” that you’re getting—the NPC’s weapon, or the NPC’s armor? Let me tell you, when we fought a sniper in Dead Suns, we were VERY aware that by besting her, we were getting a sniper rifle. For solarian armor crystals to be cool, a solarian who defeats an enemy solarian with an armor crystal should know what they’re getting.

With this in mind, here’s a list of goals:

• Armor crystals should be roughly as strong as a critical effect.
• Armor crystals should have a visible presence on the battielfield.
• Armor crystals should come in large variance.

Researching Effects: Looking at Sci-Fi

So normally at this phase, I would suggest researching fictitious ideas that are visually similar to that of the thing we’re designing for inspiration. Herein lies the problem with the armored solarian, however—the concept of “I conjure my own magic armor” is surprisingly not done very often in fiction. Fiction values offense way more then defense on average, and when defense IS done, its usually in the form of a weapon like a shield.

Another problem is that whatever we do can’t be something that feels like an armor upgrade. Why? Because if we make a solarian armor crystal that feels like an armor upgrade, the question becomes, “Why did you make this solarian only?” The question, then, becomes “How do you make an armor crystal that gives a cool defensive effect that feels like it should be solarian only.” The answer, my friend, is in flavor. The solarian OOZES flavor—its manifestations come from the balance between stars and dark holes. That means anything we need to do needs to feel supernatural, rather than technological, and should be flavored around things the solarian alone can do. To a certain extent, they should feel like very specific revelations.

Aside from this, lets look at different characters that do things that feel very “armor-manifesty.”

Here are a couple of different things I came up with in my hunt.

Doctor Strange (MCU: Doctor Strange, Thor Ragnarok)

So this one might seem peculiar given Steven Strange’s association with magic rather than technology, but when you get right down to it the solarian IS a magic class, so I think this is a pretty good candidate. Specifically, Doctor Strange has this awesome cloak that’s capable of moving on its own and doing stuff independent of its master. A solarian with a crystal that could do something like that seems pretty awesome to me.

Orisa (Overwatch)

While Orisa doesn’t have any connections to stars or light or anything like that, she has several mechanics that feel VERY defense-solarian to me. First, she can project a small crystal that generates a powerful barrier that blocks line of sight and absorbs damage. Second, she can create a plasma ball that grapples enemies and pulls them all together. Now, that later effect feels VERY similar to an existing solarian revelation, but it is still something we can keep in mind. Orisa also has a strong defensive ability called fortify, which drastically increases her armor for a short while.

Symmetra (Overwatch)

In Overwatch, Symmetra is able to create physical objects from light energy. That sounds VERY star-oriented to me, guys! In Overwatch, Symmetra has the ability to construct turrets, shields (that work like temporary hit points applied to all of her allies in a very large radius), and barriers (a mobile force field that basically blocks line of effect in Overwatch). I don’t know how you guys feel, but a solarian who can create barriers, provide temporary hit points, and make cover sounds VERY defense-solarian to me.

Next Week: Construction!

Alright, so we have some target goals for our solarian armor crystals, as well as some great pieces of inspiration. Next week we’re going to take all of this stuff we’ve found and try to piece it together into a couple of solarian armor crystal items! This is it—the article you’ve been waiting for. Let’s do it! In the meantime, I’m curious—what sort of fictional characters do YOU associate with solarians? What sort of powers and abilities feel very “armored solarian” to you? How about weapon solarian? Leave your comments below, please; I’d love to see them! But until then, I’m Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and I’m always here to offer you a little bit of Guidance!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Step 3: Identify Integral Components

So we have our desired solution, now we need to identify precisely what our solution needs to accomplish. You should always start by taking a minute to list out any important information we have on the topic. My list appears below:

• We’ve got roughly a 1 point to EAC / 2 point to KAC gap to work with. (In other words, it can’t break the game’s existing math.)
• Our item needs to be a competitive choice compared to other armor upgrades.
• Our item needs to provide effects that fit the flavor of the solarian class.
• Our item needs to be something that isn’t going to inadvertently boost the soldier further.

Okay! So now our next step is to figure out solutions to each of these paradigms, preferably starting from “most specific” to “least specific.” For example, “Can’t boost the soldier,” is more specific than “be a competitive choice compared to other armor upgrades” because it is easier to set strong boundaries with a specific paradigm then a less specific paradigm. With this information, the next step is to design a solution to each of these problems. Rather than list every possible solution, I’m going to walk you through my thinking for each step.

Cannot Boost the Soldier Further

This requirement is both REALLY specific and easy to do. Immediately, I figured that the easiest option would be to note that the armor crystal only provided you with a benefit while your solar armor was manifested.  Now, for wording the rule. First I referenced the Starfinder Core Rulebook’s working for solarian weapon crystals on page 170, which looks like this:

A Solarian weapon crystal adds damage to a Solarian’s Solar weapon. The Solarian can place the crystal inside his mote as a standard action. While within a mote, a crystal applies its effects any time that mote is in a Solar weapon form. A crystal within a mote can’t be interacted with in any way other than via abilities that specifically target a mote. The Solarian can remove the crystal from his mote as a standard action, and the crystal falls loose if the mote is deactivated in any way. A Solarian can’t have more than one crystal in his mote at a given time.

Of specific note are the first two sentences. These quantify where the crystal goes to do its thing. Soldiers absolutely don’t have a mote, so it’s the perfect thing to reference! My first rule looks like this:

A solarian armor crystal adds defensive properties to a solarion’s solar armor. The solarian can place the crystal inside their mode as a standard action. While within a mote, a crystal applies its effects any time that mote is in a solar armor form.

Roughly 1 Point to EAC / 2 Points to KAC

This statement is also relatively easy to work with. The best thing to do would likely to have a flat AC boost associated with a solarian armor crystal, and keeping in line with the first idea (cannot boost the soldier further), our best bet is to use a bonus type that the soldier already possesses. In this case, armored advantage gives a +1 bonus to the soldier’s KAC, so we can make sure the two don’t stack by also providing an insight bonus. Using the solarian weapon crystal writeup as a guide again, we have the first sentence:

A solarian weapon crystal adds damage to a solarian’s solar weapon. 

So taking this and the previous paradigm, we get this:

A solarian armor crystal adds defensive properties to a solarian’s solar armor. The solarian can place the crystal inside their mode as a standard action. While within a mote, a crystal applies its effects any time that mote is in a solar armor form. A crystal within a mote can’t be interacted with in any way other than via abilities that specifically target a mote. The solarian can remove the crystal from their mote as a standard action, and the crystal falls loose if the mote is deactivated in any way. A solarian can’t have more than one crystal in his mote at a time.

A solarian armor crystal doesn’t give a solarian the option to create a suit of solar armor if they did not choose that option for their solar manifestation. All solarian armor crystals add a +1 insight bonus to the solarian’s KAC while their solar armor is manifested, as well as an additional benefit described by each individual solarian armor crystal.

 Provide Effects that Fit the Flavor of the Solarian Class / Be a Competitive Choice Against Other Armor Upgrades

So for this next part, we’ll have to design specific solarion armor crystals. Right now we’re only hammering out the generic rules of the mechanic after all! So before we move on, why don’t we finish that up?

Here’s our reference point, the solarian weapon crystal rules:

A Solarian weapon crystal adds damage to a Solarian’s Solar weapon. The Solarian can place the crystal inside his mote as a standard action. While within a mote, a crystal applies its effects any time that mote is in a Solar weapon form. A crystal within a mote can’t be interacted with in any way other than via abilities that specifically target a mote. The Solarian can remove the crystal from his mote as a standard action, and the crystal falls loose if the mote is deactivated in any way. A Solarian can’t have more than one crystal in his mote at a given time.

A Solarian weapon crystal doesn’t give a Solarian the option to create a Solar weapon if he did not choose that option for his Solar Manifestation. Most weapon crystals increase the amount of damage attacks with the Solar weapon deal. This increased damage is normally the same type of damage the Solarian weapon deals (typically bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing). If a Solarian crystal’s damage entry lists an abbreviation after the damage, however, the additional damage the Solar weapon deals is of the indicated type.

Even if a Solarian weapon crystal’s extra damage is a type of energy damage, attacks with the Solar weapon still target KAC, not EAC. If a Solarian crystal lists a critical effect, that critical effect applies to any critical hit the Solar weapon makes while the Solarian crystal is within the Solarian’s mote.

For example, a Solarian with a minor photon crystal and a base Solar weapon damage of 2d6 deals 2d6 bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage, plus 1d6 fire damage, on a hit with his Solar weapon.

A Solarian weapon crystal is a hybrid item that blends magic and technology. When a weapon crystal is within a mote and the Solarian uses the mote in Solar weapon form, the Solar weapon is considered magic for the purpose of overcoming damage reduction.

Broken Solarian Crystals: If a Solarian weapon crystal with the broken condition is inside a Solarian’s Solar mote, the Solarian takes a –2 penalty to attack and damage rolls with the Solar weapon, and the Solar weapon can’t deal extra critical effects. Both effects last until the crystal is repaired. As hybrid items, Solarian crystals can be repaired using the make whole or mending Spells, or with the Engineering or Mysticism skills.

And here’s our end product, the solarian armor crystal rules:

A solarian armor crystal adds defensive properties to a solarian’s solar armor. The solarian can place the crystal inside their mode as a standard action. While within a mote, a crystal applies its effects any time that mote is in a solar armor form. A crystal within a mote can’t be interacted with in any way other than via abilities that specifically target a mote. The solarian can remove the crystal from their mote as a standard action, and the crystal falls loose if the mote is deactivated in any way. A solarian can’t have more than one crystal in his mote at a time.

A solarian armor crystal doesn’t give a solarian the option to create a suit of solar armor if they did not choose that option for their solar manifestation. All solarian armor crystals add a +1 insight bonus to the solarian’s KAC while their solar armor is manifested, as well as an additional benefit described by each individual solarian armor crystal. A solarian armor crystal counts as a single armor upgrade when determining the total number of armor upgrades that a solarian can have installed at a time; if the solarian doesn’t have at least one unused armor upgrade slot available when placing a solarian armor crystal inside their mote, they gain no benefit from the mote’s presence. If a solarian armor crystal’s effects refer to level, use the armor crystal’s item level.

A solarian armor crystal is a hybrid item that blends magic and technology. When an armor crystal is within a mote and the solarian uses the mote in solar armor form, the solar armor is considered magic for all relevant purposes. 

Broken Solarian Crystals: If a solarian armor crystal with the broken condition is inside a solarian’s solar mote, the solarian doesn’t gain the additional benefit of their solarian armor crystal (they still gain the +1 insight bonus to KAC, however). This effect lasts until the crystal is repaired. As hybrid items, solarian crystals can be repaired using the make whole or mending spells, or with the Engineering or Mysticism skills.

This is a great start in designing our rules for solarian armor crystals! We have a baseline rules set that we can use to further expand and give definition to solarian armor crystals. Next week we’ll be continuing our look at Step 3: Identify the Integral Components by designing some base-level solarian armor crystals! But until then, I’m Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and I’m always here to offer you a little bit of Guidance!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

If it’s the first option, a simple hand-wave and a retrain are easy enough as long as the problem is identified soon enough and the player doesn’t completely change into an all-new character. Pathfinder and Starfinder even have rules for this (though admittedly Starfinder is WAY harsher about retraining then Pathfinder is). But what if its the second option? What if the player loves the flavor, but the option itself under performs? Well, sometimes the best answer might be to design some rule that the player can take that’ll “fix the issue,” so to speak. How do you do that? I’m glad you asked! This week I’m going to be going over a real-world example for how I design things to fill a niche. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Identify the Problem

So in our Dead Suns game, we have a player who’s been REALLY unhappy with her solarion build as of late. She plays a weapon solarion in Starfinder Society, so she thought she’d try an armored solarion in the playtest. A big problem that we’re running into, however, is that her solarion armor does NOT live up to expectations. It doesn’t provide her with much benefit when she’s not directly in combat, and even when she’s engaged enemy attack rolls are still often high enough that they seem to hit her frequently. She’s clearly frustrated with her character choice, so I figured I would see what I could do to help! In this case, our problem is clearly that the player is not satisfied with the solarion armor ability. On a deeper level, the armor doesn’t seem to substantially improve her combat functionality or survivability compared to other characters—in this case, the most direct comparison would likely be my soldier, Shoku.

But before we can truly say that the problem is identified, we need to do some number crunching. After all, it’s hard to get conclusive evidence that a solution is needed without data. Without further adieu, here’s my spreadsheet information on the topic. Please note that I am a fallible human being, and there’s always an off-chance that I typed in an armor’s value incorrectly. Turns out it is crazy difficult to input every light and heavy armor in the Core Rulebook into a spreadsheet, and that mistakes happen. Go figure. If you see a mistake, note it in the comments and I’ll do what I can to fix it. Thank you.

Okay! Let’s start by explaining my methodology with the data. This spreadsheet consists of two pages. Page 1 lists every Armor of both the Heavy and Light variety in the game. Yellow highlights are the best Light Armor bonuses for their item level, while Orange highlights are the best Heavy Armor bonuses. Here’s some notes:

Page 1: Armor Comparisons

• I prioritized KAC over EAC. That’s why I listed KAC first instead of EAC. Sadly, I had to pick one to prioritize (just like players do) and that’s what I picked. When possible, I picked the armor with the best KAC and EAC overall. This happened surprisingly frequently.
• If there were multiple armors that were tied for the highest bonus, I picked the armor that had the lower Maximum Dexterity. Lower Max Dex means its more likely that a PC can get the most out of that kind of armor.

Page 2: Class Comparisons

• I copied Page 1 and removed all armors that weren’t best for their item level.
• For the Solarion column, I assumed the Solarion had the Solarion Armor class feature, which gives a +1 enhancement bonus at 1st level, increasing to +2 at 10th-level.
• For the Soldier column, I assumed the Soldier had the Guard fighting style, which raises the Soldier’s maximum Dexterity bonus by 1, as well as Armored Advantage, which gives a +1 insight bonus to AC at 3rd level. It’s worth noting that because of this, it’s unlikely that a lightly armored soldier is going to have the full Dexterity bonus indicated by the column because its unlikely that they’ll have a Dexterity modifier capable of equally or exceeding their armor’s Max Dex +1. However, it is still a valid bonus for the soldier (though it’s very likely that the soldier will need to invest in personal upgrades to raise their Dexterity modifier or invest at least a 14 into Dexterity to make it worthwhile.

Findings

• A soldier in light armor stays roughly 1 AC ahead of their armored solarion counterparts at nearly every level.
• A soldier in heavy armor stays roughly 2 AC ahead of their armored solarion counterparts at nearly every level.
• Solarions can take gravity shield at 14th-level, which gives them a +1 circumstance bonus to AC for 1 round as a move action. Since this is a huge action economy tax that the soldier doesn’t incur to use their class features, I discounted this revelation.
• It’s worth noting that Armored Advantage is the only ability currently in Starfinder that adds an insight bonus to AC, meaning that it’ll stack with basically everything currently out. In contrast, mechanics have a class feature that adds a +1 enhancement bonus to an ally’s AC, so a mechanic wouldn’t be able to use this ability on an armored solarion.

Verdict

When you compare the armored solarion, a class option that requires a major character building decision that you can’t change, to a soldier with the guard fighting style and Armored Advantage gear boost, the solarion comes out 2 KAC behind (and 1 EAC on average). This seems like a pretty solid mathematical justification for designing something that helps armored solarions “bridge the gap” between themselves and soldiers.

Step 2: Brainstorm Solutions to the Problem

The next step in the process of designing to fill a niche is to brainstorm several solutions to fix the problem that we’ve identified. This mostly relies on a combination of your knowledge of the rules and your creativity. After each solution, you should try to come up with 1 Pro and 1 Con for it. With a bit of brainstorming, this is what I came up with:

• Feat to Boost Solarion Armor.
  • Pro: Quick. Few feats in SF. Power level of a feat varies, and presence of prerequisites means that they’re easier to gate.
  • Con: Solarions don’t get many, and this could be feat-tax territory. (A feat tax is a feat that your character HAS to take to do the cool thing they want to do.)
• Solarion Revelation to Boost Solarion Armor.
  • Pro: Part of the core class design.
  • Con: Might be too strong compared to existing revelations. Doesn’t sync up with the soldier’s gear boost (3rd level). Becomes a required choice. Risks throwing the solarion out of “balance” between proton and graviton.
• Armor Upgrades to Boost Solarion Armor.
  • Pro: Part of armor design.
  • Con: Might not make sense. Who built a little machine to boost an unknown spiritual force. Doesn’t “feel” very solarion.
• Solarion Armor Crystals to Boost Solarion Armor
  • Pro: Unique. Could be a neat counterpart to a type of gear that weapon solarions get that armor solarions don’t. Potential for a lot of customization / story elements.
  • Con: “Credit Tax:” if too expensive, they could be a fine that armored solarions feel they need to pay to be competent. Risk feeling like “reflavored armor upgrades” if not handled well.

Choosing a Solution

One of the important things to remember about choosing a solution is that it isn’t need to be set in stone; if you start working with a solution and it doesn’t work, scrap it and try a different one! With this in mind, I think I’m going to take the risky route and try to design solarion armor crystals for my friend. The “cool armor-solarion-only” aspect is something that I think I can work with, and if I’m careful I can try to design them so they aren’t too expensive. In the long run, I think a credit tax that establishes a new item type for players to use to customize their characters is less prohibitive then a feat tax or a class feature tax, and I can make sure my design doesn’t accidentally boost soldiers by making it not an armor upgrade.

That’s all for this week’s installment of Guidance! Next week we’re going to tackle the solarion armor crystal design head-on, establish some goals for the mechanic and figure out how we want it to work. With luck, we might even have a sample solarion armor crystal put together for our enjoyment! Until next time, I’m Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, and I’m always here to offer you a little bit of Guidance!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Nowadays, my professionalism makes me wand to prep more—how else could I have written Yuletide Terror for Everyman Gaming LLC? But every now and then I need to fall back into those old skills, and this Saturday was one of those times. And I mean, hey, it wasn’t my fault I didn’t have time to prep Strange Aeons! Sure, I was off on Spring Break from my Master’s Classes, but I still worked full-time, wrote products, put together a bundle sale and a video for a Kickstarter I’m doing soon, celebrated my brother’s birthday with him by watching Thor: Ragnarok…, the list goes on and on! And so I just kind of didn’t have time to put Strange Aeons together this week. But cancelling was also not an option for me—we plan these games MONTHS in advance, and I didn’t want to drop it. So I leaned back into my old hat-of-tricks. Winging It.

Step 1: Take Inventory

If you’re going to be a professional “Winging-It Man” like I am, the first thing you need to do is take inventory on what you have. For me, this meant knowing what I already had prepared / decided on, and knowing what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. This looked a little bit like this:

• Last session, the PCs finished the main story arc of Strange Aeons book 3, and had reached Level 10.
• Because my players are really good at researching, they actually finished Parts 2 and 3 of Strange Aeons before Part 1. Basically, Parts 1 and 2 happen at the same time, one in the Material Plane and one in the Dimension of Dreams. So even though they had finished all of the Dimension of Dreams content, the part in the Material Plane was NOT done, and this is sort of an issue because in Part 1 the PCs are sailing somewhere. So they literally had weeks of time to pass, and I had roughly 1/3 of Part 1 left prepared. Part 1 assumes the PCs are about 7th or 8th level, however, so the PCs would wipe the floor with most of the stuff that was left. This would NOT help me “wing it,” since my goal was to create a fun game without making me run too much of Book 4 blind.
• While I had told my players last time that we would probably end up skipping the rest of Book 1, the players hadn’t received much loot in Book 3 because most of what they had done doesn’t happen in the Material Plane. Precious little loot could be brought over with them; the PCs were dramatically below recommended Wealth by Level, and I knew it.

With all this in mind, the easiest course of action seemed to be:

• Make the players finish Book 3. If they asked, tell them that I had changed my mind because they were poor. (Who was going to argue with money?!)
• While they were playing Book 3, I would work ahead and get some information together to run Book 4 when they reached it.

Huzzah! Now, on to the REAL “work.”

Step 2: Adjusting the Content

So, I knew everything I had ready for my players was too weak for them, so I pulled open my NPC Codex and Villain Codex and searched for NPCs that matched the general classes of all the NPCs that the players would meet, upgrading them as appropriate. I also threw in some extra low-level NPCs where necessary, partially to increase the challenge but also to give them more treasure for beating the increased threats. I also DRAMATICALLY improved the tactics of the NPCs wherever possible.

Here’s some examples of the sort of choices I made:

• The PCs have to deal with a cult of Hanspur, the drowned god, as one of the random encounters. They fight the cult on their boat, which is REALLY small. The cultists are kind of low level, but lucky for me there are a set of CR 7 and a CR 9 stat blocks in the NPC codex for water-themed druids. They were the PERFECT level range, and they had tons of loot, which made them serve my purpose well. I rebuilt the encounter to have four of the CR 7 druids and one of the CR 9 druids.
• Originally, I was going to have two CR 9 druids, but then I found out that the giant squid was a CR 9 creature. Now, throwing a giant squid into a river encounter is weird, but since I was dealing with a cabal of druids, it would work if I claimed that the squid was a druid using wildshape. I used the giant squid stat block instead of the druid stat block save its mental scores, but when the giant squid died I had it “return to its true form” and gave the PCs treasure as if they had beaten two CR 9 druids instead of a CR 9 druid and a giant squid.
• This resulted in roughly a CR 13 or 14 encounter, which was TOUGH for my party of five 10th level characters, but VERY lucrative. They enjoyed the difficulty of the fight and the spoils of war (they walked away with six headbands of inspired wisdom).

Step 3: Let the Players Write the Story

One thing I learned from James when he read Dead Suns for us is this: “If left to their own devices, the players will solve their own problems, but they’ll take WAY more time doing it.” And if I’m being honest, part of the “winging-it” strategy was to get the players to use as much of their time as possible doing things that advanced their story, but that minimized my lack of preparation.

Here are some examples of the tricks I used to get the players to drive the story.

• When the players met an eccentric mayor of a riverside town who had information for them, I absolutely let them roleplay with him for as long as they wanted. (Hint: a bit of emphasis on my part got the players roleplaying with this mayor for ten to fifteen minutes. I even got my players engaged with the NPC because he was crazy enjoy to offer to PAY THE PCs 10,000 GP to sit and listen to him speak to them. You can literally get your players to do most anything for an encounter’s worth of treasure!)
• At one point, the party meets a rather vicious law enforcement agent who ultimately accuses the PCs of harboring a fugitive from the law. (She’s not wrong, technically.) I had roleplayed her up twice—once when they first met her, and once now when she appeared again. I gave the players a choice: fight her, or run from her in a chase scene that I ran on the fly using the Skill Challenge Handbook, by Everyman Gaming LLC. They chose the skill challenge, which was GREAT. It helped me keep a high-energy atmosphere that, honestly, was more engaging and more time-consuming then a combat encounter would have been. Excellent!
• When the party wizard fumbled a teleport, I had her appear near the camp of the friendly organization of NPCs that the players were going to meet soon. I pulled the wizard player aside, Roleplayed with her one-on-one to establish where she was and why she should wait, and then I got to do almost the EXACT SAME ROLEPLAY with the rest of the PCs a few minutes later when the rest of the party caught up.
• When the players investigated a local alchemist that they had a lead on, they had literally no idea how to proceed when the alchemist shut the door in their faces after politely excusing himself. Turns out that emphasizing how breaking down the door of a well-respected merchant in the middle of a metropolis could be seen as a crime will really deter some players. (Note: Not all. Use your best judgment.) My players ended up wanting to go to a food vendor that the alchemist recommended, because SURELY the GM dropped that line as a clue…. NOPE. (Although it did give me an opportunity to provide the PCs with more information about the city and the goings-on, as well as introduce the sassiest Taldan waitress the world has ever seen.

Step 4: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for a Minute to Prep

Sometimes your efforts aren’t going to work as you had hoped; you’ll need time to prep before you continue. When you do, ask your players for 5 minutes to read ahead, or simply call a meal break and work through the meal. Your players will understand and appreciate your honesty, which you’ll be able to twist into even more prep / winging it time!

And those are my tips and tricks for “winging it.” While I admitted that I was once a prominently “winging it” GM, with experience comes wisdom, and now I can honestly say that I prefer to use a combination of the two strategies. I like to go in with a plan, but I’m always prepared to throw that plan out of the window if the players do something I didn’t expect or go further then I expected.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to have more time to prepare for Strange Aeons next month, as I don’t think I can get away with a looser session again like I did this week. Most players understand that being the GM has more work attached to it then being the player, and they’ll usually overlook you slacking a little bit once or twice. Just be sure not to push it TOO far, or you might end up with a table of players that no longer wants to game with you. And we can’t have that, can we?

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

EDIT: And yes, I totally “winged” this article. Victory!

You might want to grab a tinfoil hat or two for this one, FYI.

1. Skill Challenges (Or Something Similar) Will Be Core

If you don’t know, “Skill Challenges” are basically the D&D concept of having a skill-focused encounter, where you complete the encounter using your skills and noncombat abilities rather than your combat abilities. Pathfinder 1E had been slowly adding dozens of Skill Challenge-style things for YEARS—research, verbal duels, chases, these are all specific examples of what a skill challenge system could be. Frankly, having meaningful “encounters” that use your noncombat abilities are an essential part of getting players to view skill-focused resolutions to problems as a thing they can do; the murder hobo minset is partially a product of the perceived inability to solve problems in the game without fighting.

So in PF 2E, I predict we’re going to see a unified, standardized skill challenge system much like I produced in Everyman Gaming’s Skill Challenge Handbook. Frankly it makes too much sense not to include, as a good foundation in the Core Rulebook could be easily expanded in future products and supplemented.

2. Year 1 Is Going to See a Lot of 1E Updates

One of the most important parts of a new edition is getting the players their favorite shinnies from older editions as quickly as possible. This removes the hanging net of, “I had this in the old edition and now its GONE,” from over the designers’ heads, so as a result I would expect to see most character concepts that you had (and loved) from 1E put back into the game during Year 1. I know what Erik Mona said about potentially having to wait a few years—I was there. But I would be very surprised if they made us wait too long before “putting their house back in order,” as it were.

3. The Core Rulebook is Going to Have a Basic Setting Info Section.

We know that the 2E Core Rulebook is going to have Golarion lore intertwined with it from Erik and Logan’s chatter and posts on the forums. I’m going to go one step further and say that like Starfinder, the Pathfinder 2E Core Rulebook is going to have a small section detailing the basics about Golarion in it. Doing so makes TOO MUCH SENSE. I mean, if the Core Rulebook is supposed to be a new player’s “gateway drug” into all things Paizo, why would you ignore the setting information? Plus while many 3.5 veterans don’t want the Golarion setting in their rules, a new player benefits from having context for all of these classes and feats and characters put into some kind of perspective. Brand new GMs especially need a world they can use before they’re comfortable with building their own, if they choose to ever do that.

4. Paizo Will Try to Keep Old Classes as Classes

There’s been a lot of buzz regarding whether Paizo will try to transform older classes, like the hybrid classes, into archetypes for their parents. My current thoughts on this are “No, they won’t,” but for a relatively weird reason. The Iconics. Paizo’s marketing is HEAVILY invested in their Iconic characters; they put them on merch, have them illustrated constantly, and more recently have them placed in comic book and RTS game stories. Those characters are a huge part of Paizo’s identity, and I’m not convinced that Paizo is going to want WAR Iconics for archetypes as well as classes. Maybe they will, but I find it doubtful. As a result, I think any class that has an Iconic character already (Hint: all of them) is safe from being transformed into an archetype. Yes, even the ninja and samurai, which sort of frustrates me.

5. Theoretical Launch Schedule

Based off of what we’ve heard both in posts and during our interview, this is my predicted “launch dossier” for Pathfinder 2E’s Core Rulebook line. Predicting the Campaign Setting and Player Companion lines is much, much harder because I imagine those topics will feature around the “world shake-ups” that Erik alluded to in our interview, but I think this is a pretty solid list for the Core Rulebook line.

1. PFRPG Core Rulebook (August 2019)
2. PFRPG “Bestiary” (August — October 2019; I don’t know if they’re actually going to stick with the term “Bestiary,” but its become such a huge part of the brand that I assume they will. Additionally, this book would ideally launch on the same day as the CRB, but it didn’t for 1E or Starfinder, so who knows? Still, gonna cross my finders.)
3. PFCSG “Inner Sea World Guide” (Spring 2020 — August 2020; This is sort of a must-have. If what Erik said is true, the setting will need an update for 2E, and I’d imagine that this is the big project that the dev team is going to be working on in tangent to the CRB. Not to mention they can make this book a LOT nicer, a la Inner Sea Gods.)
4. PFRPG “Advanced Ancestry Guide” (October 2019 — August 2020; this is a book title I threw at Erik during the interview, which was met with a very suave response. Basically, I envision this as a “big book of ancestries” that gives us CRB levels of information on a LOT of the fan-favorite ancestries from PF 1E. Getting as many of the established ancestries back into the game as soon as possible is important both from a “maintaining my 1E character” position and a “filling the world back in” position, so I’d expect that we’d get this pretty fast. While you might be able to simulate, say, the hybrid classes with class feats from the Core Classes, there’s no way you can use the existing ancestries to model classic things like “tengu” or “aasimar” or “wayang,” so getting this back into the game fast is definitely going to be on the creative teams’ minds.
5. PFRPG “Advanced Player’s Guide” (August 2020; Having a big book of player options be released at the next GenCon makes WAY too much sense. I would be shocked if this isn’t the GenCon 2020 product, but the Advanced Ancestry Guide could fit there too, I guess. I simply feel that an APG is more appealing to con-goers then the Advanced Ancestry Guide, hence why the AAG would be better for a Spring Release and the APG, a Con release. This is also a good place to put back in a bunch of the “missing” classes, hence why I think it will happen early.)
6. PFRPG “GameMastery Guide” (???; We basically got confirmation from Logan and Erik that this was a book that they’re actively thinking of, but when and where they’re going to put it is a huge question mark at this point. A GMG is an important tool for new GMs, and it will likely include a bunch of the 1E Pathfinder Rules Systems that didn’t fit into the Core Rulebook. I guess time will tell at this point, huh?)

Alright! And those are my “current” Pathfinder 2E predictions. I’d like to revisit this blog article once the playtest comes out in August, but for now I’m sticking with it. What do you guys think? Do you agree with any of my prediction? Disagree? What do you want to see in Pathfinder 2E’s future? Leave your comments below, and I’ll catch you next time.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Reiteration—Here’s the aspect I designed last week, just for ease of reference:

Eagle Aspect

The eagle is a proud avian that dominates the skies with all the majesty of a king. Those who take this aspect gain enhanced abilities

Minor Form: You gain a +2 enhancement bonus to your Charisma score. At 8th level, the bonus increases to +4, and at 15th level it increases to +6.

Major Form: Your shape changes to that of a Large eagle. While in this form you gain a bite attack (1d6 damage), two claw attacks (1d6 damage), a fly speed of 60 feet (good), low-light vision, and the benefits of the Dazzling Display feat, which you use as if you had Weapon Focus (claw). If you have Dazzling Display or Weapon Focus (claw), you gain a +2 racial bonus on Intimidate checks for each feat you possess (maximum +4). At 8th level, you can use Dazzling Display as a standard action or an immediate action when you confirm a critical hit with your shifter claws. At 15th level, you can use Dazzling Display as a swift action and your fly speed increases to 90 feet (perfect).

Step 1: Scaffolding

So the first part in my design strategy is to ask myself, “Has anyone in the official Pathfinder RPG done this before?” Typically, I start looking at the Core Rulebook line first and the other lines second. While all Paizo products are good, the Core Rulebook line has the fingerprints of the Pathfinder Design Team on it more so then the other ones, and their wording is typically tighter. Referencing someone else’s rules is REALLY helpful when constructing your own.

As fate would have it, Ultimate Wilderness has a shifter aspect that is VERY similar to the eagle in terms of concept—the falcon. When I say “similar,” I mean, “You can shapeshift into a bird,” which is the lynchpin of the experience. In other words, I’m looking more for my scaffold—or the existing “structural support” I’m using to guide my design—in the major aspect, since the minor aspects are pretty straight-forward. Here’s the falcon aspect for ease of reference:

Falcon

The falcon senses all and has the speed to hunt down even the most elusive prey. Those who take this aspect gain enhanced abilities to perceive and reconnoiter the wilderness—little escapes this shifter’s attention.

Minor Form: You gain a +4 competence bonus on Perception checks. This bonus increases to +6 at 8th level and +8 at 15th level.

Major Form: Your shape changes to that of a Small falcon. While in this form, you gain a bite attack (1d4 damage), two claw attacks (1d3 damage), a fly speed of 60 feet (good), low-light vision, and a +4 racial bonus on vision-based Perception checks. At 8th level, you gain darkvision with a range of 120 feet, and your racial bonus on Perception checks increases to +6. At 15th level, you gain blindsense with a range of 60 feet and your fly speed increases to 90 feet (perfect).

When looking at the falcon shape’s major aspect, I see first that the shape is Small, and the natural weapon damage supports that. The falcon also has a good fly speed, low-light vision, and a bonus on Perception checks baseline. At 8th level, they get a massive darkvision range and the racial bonus on Perception checks goes up. Finally, they get blind sense and their fly speed improves. This tells me that the falcon is focused heavily on vision more than anything, so when I do eagle that is a niche I do NOT want to hit. After all, stealing is bad m’kay. It WILL lead to either (A) my eagle obsolete or (B) the Paizo falcon obsolete—neither of those is good. A good designer wants both options to be viable so their work improves the overall quality and quantity of content in the game.

With this in mind, there is a second avian with similar abilities I can look to for scaffolding, the owl. Let’s check it out.

Owl

The aspect of the owl is one of silence. This predator glides through the night unheard, a master of stealthy attacks.

Minor Form: You gain a +4 competence bonus on Stealth checks. This bonus increases to +6 at 8th level and +8 at 15th level.

Major Form: Your shape changes to that of a Medium owl. While in this form, you gain two talon attacks (1d6 damage), a fly speed of 60 feet (average), darkvision with a range of 60 feet, and a +2 racial bonus on Stealth checks. At 8th level, you gain Flyby Attack as a bonus feat, and the range of your darkvision increases to 120 feet. At 15th level, you can take the form of a Large owl and gain the benefits of the Snatch feat, but you can use it only to grab a creature at least one size category smaller than yourself, and you can squeeze a creature grappled with this ability no matter what size it is.

Looking at this major aspect, what do you see? I see a Medium flying creature with no bite attack (claws only). They have better vision at low-levels (darkvision > low-light vision), but eventually that tapers out when falcon gets their own darkvision. Where the falcon excels at vision, the owl is REALLY good at Stealth. They eventually get the ability to snatch up prey, grow in size, and deal more addition. They are also better suited towards combat, being larger and having benefits like Flyby Attack and Snatch.

So to recap, in order to hit a sweet spot my eagle needs to be (A) less vision-oriented then the falcon, (B) less stealthy then the owl, and (C) not focused on flying agility-based tactics like Flyby Attack.

Beast Shape II, we need YOU!

Step 2: Research

With all this in mind, next I need to do research. First, I know that all shifter minor forms are based on hunter aspects, so I need to check to see if the hunter has an eagle aspect. The answer is yes: the courtly hunter has an eagle aspect, reproduced below:

Eagle: The creature gains a +2 enhancement bonus to Charisma. This bonus increases to +4 at 8th level and +6 at 15th level.

This is likely jiving off of the eagle’s splendor spell. This is a difficult synergy because the shifter doesn’t have a lot going for it Cha-wise, but to break the pattern will doom this eagle aspect to being seen as amateurish. I need to follow Paizo’s design.

Fly, giant eagle fly, on the road to victory!

Along the same lines, I know that Paizo’s major aspects are build off of the beast shape II spell, so I quickly go and look up that spell. Check it out on the sidebar to the left. As you can see, beast shape II allows Large creatures, and considering the falcon starts at Small and the Owl starts at Medium (eventually growing Large), I think I can build a cool niche for my eagle aspect by making it Large to start. Before I do this, I search to see if I can find any precedent of a Large eagle-like animal or magical beast. (The Large owl is a giant owl, after all, which is a magical beast.) What I find is the giant eagle—a magical beast that’ll suit my purposes well enough.

Step 3: Tying it Together

So, let’s look at what I’ve gathered so far:

• Needs to have a Charisma bonus as a minor aspect to fit with established patterns.
• Cannot focus too much on Perception, Stealth, or agile flight / dog fighting for its mechanics.
• Should have a base size of Large to set it apart from the other aspects.

Now I need to tie it all together!

The first thing I think of is what to do with a Charisma bonus. How do I make it sync together? I remember that you get a size bonus to Intimidate checks if you’re bigger than your foe, and I was planning on making my eagle major aspect Large. Eagles are pretty intimidating—they have sharp eyes and always look intimidating in whatever picture I see of them. That’s likely why they have Charisma as their stat. With this in mind, I decide to give my eagle aspect the niche of being really good at Intimidating.

To make my plan work, I give the eagle Dazzling Display as a bonus feat—there’s a precedence for that in the owl major aspect. Now, Dazzling Display specifically requires you to “present the chosen weapon” with Dazzling Display, so I give the feat a line that lets you use your claws with the feat. Now, I think that an eagle shifter with Shatter Defenses and Deadly Stroke would be REALLY cool, but I don’t want to ruin this aspect by just making it “feats in a birb” for design. That’s boring. But I also don’t want the major aspect’s ability to be useless if the shifter takes Weapon Focus and Dazzling Display on their own, so I give the aspect an ability that instead gives the shifter a bonus on Intimidate checks if she takes Dazzling Display and Weapon Focus on her own. This will let shifters who don’t want to focus on Intimidate still get cool mileage out of the class while also giving those who buy into the Intimidate route a bonus so they don’t kill off their own class feature.

Next, I add some classic “make Dazzling Display easier to use” abilities by giving the shifter more ways to activate Dazzling Display, thereby making Shatter Defenses and Deadly Stroke even more attractive for the shifters who want to go for them. Finally, we end with a small speed boost and another action economy improvement to Dazzling Display.

I hope this helps you understand my design process. If you have any questions, leave them in the commons section below. Until next time, this is Alexander Augunas, the Everyman Gamer, signing off!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

OH MAN! EAGLES ARE SUPERBOWL CHAMPIONS!

Sorry. I’m not a big football fan, but I AM a Philadelphian, and when our team is in the big game and casts off the shackles of a 52-year long win drought, you’re a fan. And as a fan, I felt it necessary to celebrate this victory in my own, special way—by stealing a page from Ryan Costello and Luis Loza’s book and designing something for you guys to use! So with all of the quality you’ve come to expect from me and my companion, please enjoy this new shifter aspect. Who knows, maybe in the future I’ll publish this properly in an Everyman Gaming product, but for now…

E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!

Eagle Aspect

The eagle is a proud avian that dominates the skies with all the majesty of a king. Those who take this aspect gain enhanced abilities

Minor Form: You gain a +2 enhancement bonus to your Charisma score. At 8th level, the bonus increases to +4, and at 15th level it increases to +6.

Major Form: Your shape changes to that of a Large eagle. While in this form you gain a bite attack (1d6 damage), two claw attacks (1d6 damage), a fly speed of 60 feet (good), low-light vision, and the benefits of the Dazzling Display feat, which you use as if you had Weapon Focus (claw). If you have Dazzling Display or Weapon Focus (claw), you gain a +2 racial bonus on Intimidate checks for each feat you possess (maximum +4). At 8th level, you can use Dazzling Display as a standard action or an immediate action when you confirm a critical hit with your shifter claws. At 15th level, you can use Dazzling Display as a swift action and your fly speed increases to 90 feet (perfect).

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

When I do Iconic Designs, I often write up builds that I’m planning on using in one capacity or another. It’s easier that way—I already need the build to plan my characters after all. So for today’s article, I’m going to share my Top 10 character builds from Iconic Design that I actively played this year. If possible, I’ll share a fun anecdote or two about the character and throw some Everyman Gaming art in. It’ll be great! (Hopefully.) The header for each character will be a link to that build on the Know Direction site for your convenience. So strap in, let’s go!

10. Loza Rikiya

Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Used with permission.

Fun story—this character is named for freelancer and Know Direction blogger Luis Loza, who designed the style feat chain that the character used. Loza also has all of my Reign of Winter chronicles on him, as well as a cool boon that I won at a charity auction, the Thanguard Mantle. All of this couldn’t save Loza from one small detail, however—Loza is by far one of the most unlucky characters that I have ever played. Ever. Literally everything Loza does blows up in his face. When I played him in 8-99: The Cosmic Captive this year, that bad luck included getting 6 negative levels out of 7. When I played him in Ward Asunder, that bad luck included getting hit with a x4 tetsubo crit at Level 3. (He hand to be washed off of the walls for his raise dead spell.) But he FINALLY had his moment to shine in the Golemworks Incident of all things! Without spoilers, in the adventure there’s a part where you have to cross this MASSIVE map to get to the enemy you need to defeat, who is taking his time shooting lasers at you. (I mean, they’re not ACTUALLY lasers but they’re basically lasers.) Even better, the floor is covered with trash and junk, making it difficult terrain. You’re supposed to slog through the difficult terrain for two or three rounds as you’re peppered by bullets and harassed by crowd control effects like stinking cloud or black tentacles. But Loza? Loza was like, “No!” He’s a vexing dodger and is REALLY good at climbing, like “Has a climb speed,” good. So rather than trudge through the muck on the grond, I grabbed onto the stone-hewn walls and used a delightful combination of ninja-like jumping and climbing to get ti the enemy surprisingly quickly, and managed to occupy their time for a few rounds. Of course, the party summoner decided to drop the boss into a pit and Loza being Loza failed his REFLEX save (his +11 unchained rogue with a Dex focus Reflex save), but in the end that pit basically turned into the thunderdome as everyone jumped into it for cover from the lasers. A hilarious scenario GMed by the ever patient (and ever brutal) James Ballod of Code Switch!

Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Used with permission.

9. Hirokyu Yoishi (PF)

Hirokyu’s actually my -1; the first PFS character I made. He got his claim-to-fame in that his fighting style absolutely did not work initially, so then I rebuilt it to the build linked above (I even spent the prestige to retrain the character), but that STILL didn’t work, so when I was offered the Weapon Master’s Handbook gig, I added a bunch of options that drastically helped thrown weapon fighters. (Yes, I fixed my character using my freelancer status. Wanna fight about it?!) Maybe someday I’ll redo his build for the site so you can see what I did.

Anyway, we were doing this adventure that involved the scariest thing known to man—an antipaladin MINOTAUR, and falcon, my character was Neutral Good! A cleric of Desna gives me this sick blessing that makes my dagger holy, and I start doing work with my weapon. So much work, in fact, that the cleric manages to hit me with the maze spell. And of course, he has a special ability that allows him to follow me into the maze. He grapples me and I have two choices—I can either try to roll a 19 on a d20 to escape the maze (you need a 20 and I had a +1 Int modifier), or I can try to kill the monster in one round before he pins me. I elect for the latter, and full attack with all the gusto I can manage. I blow a panache point so I can throw my dagger for an extra attack (I have Rapid Shot), and I pray.

Hirokyu crits THREE times, on all three attacks, and CONFIRMS them all! The minotaur dies brutally in his own maze, and I escape rattled but unharmed. (Coincidentally, my character did this to a DIFFERENT end boss a few weeks earlier, critting her three times during the first round of combat and dropping her instantly.) Hirokyu has definitely gone from zero to hero in my eyes!

8. Yenzie Redhollow (SF)

Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Used with permission.

So I knew how I wanted Yenzie to be built before I ever build him, but the irony of me sceambling to put my character to paper while I was sitting at my first Starfinder Society scenario is not lost on me. Yenzi is my ysoki operative, a character who is completely built around sick Acrobatic flips and kicks. My first (and currently only) Starfinder Society scenario was 1-02, and I was really impressed with that scenario. Not only was it quick and surprisingly in-depth, but the combats were fun and action-packed. There was even a great moment where when confronted with the final boss of the adventure, Yenzie found out that his enemy had very similar abilities to his own—and thus an unforgettable sick-flip-off began! In the end Yenzie and his party (including Intergalatic Pop Sensation Hasuko Hane). I haven’t played much SFS because of time, but I’m glad that I have a quirky character in my stables for when time stops eluding me. (Although I’ve come to find that the ysoki operative race/class combination is super common—maybe I’ll hold out for a boon and change his race to something else, like halfling or, gosh, SKITTERMANDER!)

7. Zulvr (PF)

Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Used with permission.

Zulvr, my catfolk bloodrager, was definitely not a character I expected to make this year. I ended up getting a catfolk boon at GenCon—my friend Tom was a Tier 2 GM, I was Tier 3. He wanted to play a naiad and I walked to play my prowler at world’s end bloodrager archetype. Tom was super cool and swapped his GM boon for mine, so special shout-out to you Tom! Zulvr’s build ended up working perfectly, but it was the adventure he found himself in that really made him stand out as a character—9-08: Shores of Heaven. This is an AWESOME adventure if you’re playing a character who has any investment in the outer planes, and Zulvr’s ability to flexibly pick and choose his powers at the start of a scenario really came in handy. In that adventure, we didn’t have a strong face character or anyone with ranks in Knowledge (religion), so Zulvr called on his trickster leopard spirit for assistance. Having those extra skills was crucial to our success in that adventure, which made a very memorable scenario all the more fun.

6. Marcellus Jhaltero (PF)

You’ll have to forgive me—I don’t have any pictures of Marcellus yet, but to say that his lack of pictures means a lack of “war stories” would be just wrong. Marcellus is one of my stranger PFS characters. Back in 2016, I earned a special boon for GMing at PaizoCon ’16, a boon that let me choose one character and give them a bonus trait from the list of Hell’s Rebels campaign traits. Super cool, right? Well, one of those traits is called Child of Kintargo, and it allows you to join a major Chellish noble family if you have the Noble Scion feat. From this trait spawned a wacky character idea—a brawler whom I did everything in my power to get into as many noble houses as possible. But the catch? As much as it would have made sense for Marcellus to be part of the Sovereign Court faction, the “All nobles united Illuminati style” faction, Marcellus woudn’t be in that faction. Instead, I made him Liberty’s Edge, looking for freedom fighter contacts to send back towards Kintargo to help liberate his homeland from House Thrune. This is the basis of a character who would end up having a LOT of strange presence in a variety of different adventures. In Assault on Absalom, he pushed very hard for his party to rally the support of the local Absalom nobility, but also rallied a bunch of slaves to his side towards freedom. But nothing could have prepared me for how much FUN he would be to play in 9-08: Birthright Betrayed. Without going into spoilers, this is a scenario that is built around a high-society investigation, and it ended up being a MARVELOUS adventure. Another player in the party was part of Sovereign Court, and she had a boon / feat that allowed her to be part of a well-known Pathfinder Society noble house (House Lebeda—they’re featured in the scenarios “Horn of Aroden” and “On the Border of War”). We had an absolute blast running amok in Taldor, callously throwing our noblity around and getting tons of benefit for doing so. I can honestly say that it was one of the most satisfying scenarios I’ve played because of its combination of great writing and perfect roleplaying / gameplay opportunities for players who came to the table with noble characters. 10/10, looking forward to Marcellus’s next adventure!

5. Yujin Ishihara (PF)

Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Used with permission.

One question that I get a lot being a frequent kitsune player is, “Hey Alex, do you play the OP kitsune enchanter build?” And my answer to that question is, “Yes, but I build into other tricks so I don’t have to spam the enchantment spells. My enchanting prowess is very much something Yujin saves unless there is no other option—it is the only way to be an ethical enchanter. And one thing I made sure of when writing Yujin is that he was very ethical; most kitsune enchanters are creeps on a power trip, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t fall into that trap. In fact, when we played Torrent’s Last Will a few months ago, I didn’t use a single enchantment spell until the final encounter, an encounter that is SUPER tough because it features a very powerful, dangerous monster. (No spoilers, but I’m sure those of you who’ve played it will agree with me.)

So going into that fight we were down a man (our pregen oracle got horribly murdered after she moved into melee to breath of life a PC), and very early on one of our three remaining party members dropped unconscious. The other guy was badly hurt and slowed, so it was basically my sorcerer versus this VERY dangerous monster. So what did I do? I pulled out the enchantments. This type of monster usually has very high Will saves, so you can imagine the GM’s shock when I told him he needed to roll a 25 or higher to save against my confusion spell. Between confusion, stinking cloud, black tentacles, and virtually every controlling spell in my arsenal, I managed to hold the monster off long enough that our three man party recovered and engaged, giving us a win by the skin of our teeth. That was hard-fought and super fun, and boy was I glad to have some OP enchantments on my side for it.

4. Kohdaehan (PF)

Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Used with permission.

When I first started playing Kohdaehan, he was an experiment—how high could I pump Strength on a race with a Strength penalty? The answer was pretty hilarious—something in the high 20s, I think 27 or 28 was the final number I reached during PFS. Kohdaehan had plenty of awesome moments, but his most awesome moment was his final “undergrad” PFS game. In Pathfinder Society, you generally only get to play most of your characters between the levels of 1st and 11th, because official support from PFS at 12th level and beyond is extremely limited—modules and up to 8 XP of seeker arcs only right now. For this reason, PFS characters who reach 12th level are largely considered “retired,” and when Kohdaehan was 11-2/3 I knew his final game had to be a big one. Kohdaehan’s personality is very righteous; he’s abyssal-tainted, and so he wants to make sure he can justify his blasphemous existence by destroying as much evil as possible. Kohdaehan also ended up playing a LOT of Season 4 adventures, and for this reason, the only game I could retire Kohdaehan on was the infamous Waking Rune, the adventure where the Pathfinder Society has to stop a newly-awoken Runelord. I won’t go into spoilers, but as a group we prepped hard for this adventure and in the end, my bloodrager got the killing blow on the Runelord of Sloth with his massive +2 adamantine impact greatsword, which Code Switch blogger James Ballod affectionately calls the “Car Door.” Kohdaehan’s retirement was absolutely a highlight of my 2017 adventures!

3. Ihan Blakros-Ichihara, Teen Detective (PF)

Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Used with Permission.

Speaking of retirement, I got to play Eyes of the Ten on my investigator, Ihan Blakros-Ichihara! It was VERY fun—combat-wise it is still solid and rather difficult, but storywise I don’t think it holds up as well as some veterans think it does. John and Linda have certainly brought the PFS Storytelling structure a long way since Season 2. However, this series pushed my investigator to his absolute limit, necessitating every trick he had in his extensive book. Inspiration remains one of my favorite mechanics in the game, and Ihan’s ability to boss traps, mind blast people for huge amounts of damage, and ace nearly any skill check made for an extremely fun adventure for me. And yes, for those asking, we got the best possible reward from the adventure. Very cool, very fun.

Make sure you ask me about the “font” story sometime; bonus points if James is around so you can see him writhe as I tell it!

2. Asaru and Scrappy (PF)

Copyright Everyman Gaming LLC. Used with permission.

These two are LITERALLY one of my favorite PFS characters–Asaru, a kitsune raised by fey and wolves, and Scrappy, his animal companion “wolf-brother.” It’s a lot of fun to play a character who doesn’t understand (or is still learning) a lot of basic stuff about society, and they’re especially fun because of their crazy antics. For example, in 9-02: A Case of Missing Persons, Asaru and his party of halflings and ratfolk were faced with an issue—breaking a man out of prison without getting caught or trigging an encounter. Asaru had a brilliant idea based around his notoriously strange allotment of spells. He called in some contacts and acquired an oil of reduce person, then lead the group to the jail cell and cast the all food spell on the cell’s bars. After he quickly ate the bars, he helped the ratfolk ninja and halfling rogue into the jail cell, where they made Stealth checks to avoid being seen or heard. Once they were sure no one was looking, they slathered the prisoner in the oil of reduce person, and once his size had been shrunk small enough to fit through the now-open jailhouse window, we extracted the team and the prisoner and fled to safety! BY THE POWER OF ALLFOOD, WE SURVIVED!

Asaru tried a similar tactic this past weekend in No Response from Deepmar to less effect, but that adventure had its own fun and challenges. Once you track the abductors from that scenario back to their lair, you’re met with a very sticky situation—the enemies’ tactics are to disengage at 1/3 HP and run for help. And we were pretty powerless to stop them from running. Basically, our crew ended up fighting the entire dungeon’s worth of denizens in one massive waved encounter that took almost three hours of time to run. This was both a good thing and a bad thing. As a plus note, our party could effectively roll buffs because everything was coming to us. The bad news was that we lacked a healer and had expended all of our healing resources on a previous encounter, so there was NO room for error. As a 7th-level character, Asaru has a LOT of tricks for buffing himself and his animal companion, and the party sorcerer was pretty awesome for buffing us too. At one point, he had sense vitals, coldsteel, haste, barkskin, strong jaw, and rage active all at the same time! But it was NOT easy. At one point, Scrappy was knocked unconscious, –19 hit points with a 19 Con. The ONLY thing that saved Scrappy was that he still had the rage spell active, and our party’s sorcerer managed to hit him with our group’s final charge of infernal healing just before Scrappy went down. It was an amazing, epic battle and easily one of the crowning moments of PF / SF gaming for me.

1. Shoku Devilblade (SF)

My number 1 gaming memories for builds I’ve made in 2017, however, absolutely go to Shoku Devilblade, my Starfinder Soldier whose building process I meticulously posted to Know Direction in September / October. In our first game in Dead Suns, Shoku was AMAZINGLY fun to play. I learned first-hand that it’s pretty awesome to bring a sword to a gunfight in Starfinder, because no one is expecting to be stabbed with steel in space. We had great combats with excellent pacing, awesome roleplaying, and even a starship combat where Shoku got to be the main pilot. (No one else has Piloting trained. Who knew?) I’ve written a lot about Shoku on Know Direction, so check out some of those posts for more information. (Plus Perram will kill me if I say anything spoilery on Dead Suns. Sorry!)

Honorable Mention: Zanzo Xitan, my kitsune bard in Reign of Winter. We’re almost done with the Adventure Path, and Zanzo has had so many clutch moments that I probably could write an entire blog post on just his moments. However, I don’t think I’ve ever put Zanzo’s build on the site because it’s pretty basic. Maybe I ought to change that. Or maybe I should do an episode where I air my grievances on the bard class. Meh, we’ll see. Which would you rather see: my bard’s build or an episode where I talk about why the bard is a poorly designed class? Leave your choice below, and we’ll see which one I end up talking about first in the new year! Peace out, everyone. May your days be merry and bright!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

I’m on winter break from my Master’s courses, and James Ballod finally ran the first session of his Dead Suns campaign for me and our friends Tom, Robyn, and Vic. And guys, it was AWESOME! Man, James went and made scenery and walls out of dental plaster! And we fought in turf wars and flew a star ship and had a starship combat and I may or may not be plagued, we’ll see.

But coming out of Dead Suns really changed my impression about several things in Starfinder, which I am planning to share with you all today. So why wait? Let’s get sharing!

1. Always bring a longsword to a gun fight.

Just ask Shoku Devilblade!

If anyone tells you that melee isn’t viable in Starfinder, they’re wrong. Flat-out. As you might recall from prior episodes, my soldier focuses on melee weapons, and holy crap, his hits out-damaged EVERYONE. Our party has an exocortex mechanic and an armored solarion and I out-damaged BOTH of them handedly. Shoku was a dervish of death that darted from enemy to enemy, ending them with which should be an anarchic weapon by all accounts. And MAN, was that satisfying.

Basically, melee weapons almost universally have higher damage dice then their ranged weapon counterparts, and the fact that I had a modifier (my Strength) to add made all the difference. Where the exocortex mechanic was stuck in a never-ending volley of ‘1s’ and ‘2s’ on his damage dice, the minimum I could roll was a 4. (Granted, I was on fire that night, constantly rolling 4 and higher for damage.)

2. Deadly Aim isn’t super important at low-levels.

Building off of my previous statement, Deadly Aim isn’t super important at low-levels. Your to-hit is low, and if you’re melee like me you have plenty of damage modifiers for your level. I could see the argument that Deadly Aim is more important for ranged characters, who don’t get a damage modifier until Level 3, but none of us had Deadly Aim and we did fine. It’s definitely not the must-have feat that Power Attack was in Pathfinder, and that’s sort of refreshing. I’ve already decided to pick up Coordinated Shot early instead of this feat at 2nd level, and honestly I might not take it for a while yet. After all, the bonuses don’t really feel worth it until 6th to 8th level, when the damage bonus exceeds the penalty. I can wait.

Gotta go fast!

3. Step Up and Strike is REALLY good.

Shoku has the Step Up feat, and one thing we learned really fast is that since Step Up takes a reaction, I don’t get an attack of opportunity when I follow someone with this feat. This means that Step Up and Strike, which is a 6th level or higher feat, is INCREDIBLY good. I mean, it boosts Step Up to 10 feet instead of 5 and give you an attack of opportunity for use when you want as part of the action. That’s insane—I am totally grabbing that feat at 6th level on the nose. (Soldier perks!)

4. Starship combat is fun for the whole party.

In our one bout with starship combat, everyone did an awesome job! Shoku ended up being the pilot, Ilasha (our armored solarion) was our gunner, and Katro the mystic and Butters the mechanic ended up swapping back and forth between Engineer and Science Officer. Everyone had something to do, and everyone’s job felt important at all times. The one thing that I wish was that we (as a group) had someone who could fill in the captain role—I think it’s rough that there are five roles and an average party size of four, so hopefully we get an NPC or something who can help us out there. (Even still, our armored solarian is the ONLY person in the group with face skills, so maybe it’s best we don’t have a captain?)

5. Absolam Station is VERY colorful.

I was honestly surprised how much information the Incident at Absalom Station managed to cram in about the setting in the short amount of time we played. (Although 6 hours in and James says we’re nearing the end of the first book already—he says we’ll finish it within another 6 to 8 hour session easy!) The setting, which is subtly built on Pathfinder’s setting, is definitely this game’s strongest aspect. I’d say don’t be so quick to write off the Starfinder setting—give it a try and see what you think!

6. Everything is Faster!

Granted, almost everyone at my table is experienced. James, Tom, and Robyn were all part of my Starfinder Playtest Group, and all three of them are linchpins of the Philadelphia Starfinder Society scene, so we’re absolutely a group who knows how to play the game. (And who have no problem helping our friend Vic, who is our fourth PC, learn the ropes.) But since we know what we’re doing and know the game, rounds fly by fast. Combats are definitely longer, but we’re not drowning in actions or choices. We act, do the thing, and move on. It’s kind of refreshing.

BONUS — Buy Healing Serums / Have an envoy!

Don’t let anyone sell you short on the envoy’s ability to heal Stamina Points — your hit points will be eaten up WAY faster than you give your enemies credit. As a result, you should always have a couple of serums of healing on your person that you replenish often, and if you can get a mechanic to heal your stamina, do it. I WISH we had someone who could do that, because man, it sucks wading into battle at half your vigor!

And that’s my lessons from the first part of Incident at Absalom Station! I hope this was helpful to you in your own games, perhaps in your deciding on whether or not to give Starfinder a try. I am definitely looking forward to our next Starfinder session now, and really want to play more Starship Combat! Gotta pull me some sick gundam flips!

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

With this preface, I’d like to start doing a series where I talk about some of the weird, gray areas in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Whenever I write these articles, there is a VERY good chance that there will likely be a preconceived notion about how the rule(s) I’m talking about should be run. The point of these article isn’t that no answer exists—it’s more about shining a light on how a zero allowances rules system like Pathfinder inherently creates “weird areas,” because in defining these areas we can get official answers made for them.

Guide us!

And okay, with this in mind let’s go on to our first “Guide Us” topic—what is an effect? No, seriously. Have you ever thought about this? The game is FILLED with references to what an effect is, but the term is not identified ANYWHERE and a staggering number of rules questions are confounded by the fact that the game doesn’t tell us what an effect is. Or, perhaps more specifically, what can be an effect.

Take this for an example: Let’s say you’re a bard, and you have the well-versed class feature. Well-versed gives you a +4 bonus on saving throws against bardic performance, sonic, and language-affecting effects. So, what’s an effect? Well, if we look at this list, right off of the bat we’ve got sonic (a type of energy damage AND a spell descriptor), language-dependent (a spell descriptor), and bardic performance (a class feature). This seems simple enough—spells and abilities often list when they’re language-dependent or sonic based, and bards have a class feature called bardic performance, so those effects simply apply like that.

Well, what about energy damage? Not all effects that deal energy damage have the relevant descriptor. For example, a gold dragon’s fire-based breath attack technically doesn’t have the fire descriptor. Does it still count as a fire effect? The logical answer is “yes,” because it is an effect that involves fire. While this is perfectly reasonable to assume, it has some problems that we’ll talk about later on because the word “effect” gets used in some wild and crazy ways in Pathfinder. Don’t believe me? That’s okay.

In 2013, the Pathfinder Design team issued a ruling that allowed half-orcs and half-elves to select human racial archetypes, favored class options, and class options because they have the human subtype. The reason given was that their elf blood and orc blood racial traits allowed them to “count as a human for all effects,” and this ruling basically stated that selecting archetypes et al was an effect related to race.

So, wait a minute. Things OTHER than spells and abilities can be effects? And wait, in 2015 the Pathfinder Design Team also stated that any effect that grants a morale bonus is a morale effect. But morale effects don’t exist outside of creature type immunities, and they’re not referenced anywhere in game….

See how the definition of what an “effect” is gets confusing fast? Let me show you the ULTIMATE offender in effect definition: the familiar.

Familiar Effects

I’m sure she’s REALLY interested in how badly I’m going to break her familiar.

Familiars have one line of text that makes them SUPER confusing. (Granted, this is another case of, “This is how we did it in 3.5, so this is how it is!” for many people, but based on word choice alone there’s a lot of dubiousness in there.) Anyway, here’s the problem line:

Familiar Basics: Use the basic statistics for a creature of the familiar’s kind, but with the following changes.

• Hit Dice: For the purpose of effects related to number of Hit Dice, use the master’s character level or the familiar’s normal HD total, whichever is higher.

Okay, so, what’s “an effect related to Hit Dice?”

From all of our prior deductions, an effect can be: a class feature, the result of a spell or ability, prestige class / feat / archetype / class feature requirements. Let’s take this apart line by line.

Spell or Ability

Plenty of spells and abilities have different effects based on your Hit Dice, like circle of death. This one is pretty easy, and it’s the most agreed upon stance.

Feat

So, if Hit Dice requirements were something related to the familiar’s feats, I suppose this would be an effect related to Hit Dice, right? Well, I guess my familiar can take the Leadership feat then. Leadership’s major requirement is having a character level of 7th, and the Beastbonded witch archetype can grant a familiar a feat as a bonus feat, so starting at 7th level a beastbonded witch can give her familiar the Leadership feat.

Skill Ranks, Caster Level, and Ability DC

HERE’S where people are going to shout heresy at me. So, according to Step 3 on Page 290 of the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary, Hit Dice “determine a wide variety of other statistics, including a creature’s hit points, attack bonuses, and special ability DCs.” So it’s pretty safe to say that the number of skill ranks you have is an effect determined by your Hit Dice, and while most people think that this means “use the animal’s skill ranks exactly as printed,” that isn’t what the familiar rules say. THIS is what the familiar rules say about skill ranks:

“For each skill in which either the master or the familiar has ranks, use either the normal skill ranks for an animal of that type or the master’s skill ranks, whichever is better. In either case, the familiar uses its own ability modifiers. Regardless of a familiar’s total skill modifiers, some skills may remain beyond the familiar’s ability to use. Familiars treat Acrobatics, Climb, Fly, Perception, Stealth, and Swim as class skills.”

Yikes. So, it does say to use the “normal skill ranks for an animal of that type.” However, it DOESN’T say, “Use the skill ranks for an animal of that type as printed in its stat block.” No. No it does not, because if it did that would prove this point moot. And we can actually ascern this because unlike skill ranks, hit points—a DIFFERENT Hit Dice-dependent effect—has its own special wording, as follows:

“The familiar has half the master’s total hit points (not including temporary hit points), rounded down, regardless of its actual Hit Dice.”

So yes, the familiar tells you to use the NORMAL rules or the WIZARD’S rules for skill ranks, but only the WIZARD’S rules for Hit Points. To me, this is stating that familiars get their own smattering of ranks as their wizard gains master levels DESPITE how familiars are traditionally run, and the crux of the argument comes down to the word “effect” and how it’s used here. (And in fact, this probably applies to calculating things like the caster level of the familiar’s spell-like abilities and its save DCs for its poison and the like. Again, those are both Hit Dice-dependent effects.)

Conclusion

In this visual analogy, I’m Nick and the Pathfinder Design Team is Judy. Sorry, guys! I love you, but CONTENT! No hard feelings, right?

As you can see, the “What is an effect” question is a weird one that has some strange effects on the game. The question of effects has grown and evolved with time, and hopefully some day we’ll get a more official answer. I sort of thing we need one, personally. It’s important to know how our game runs and how the rules work with one another.

But until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

I don’t like Ultimate Wilderness’s new class, the shifter.

Now, to clarify, I don’t like the class’s execution. Personally, my math indicates that it’s a perfectly fine class damage-wise. I don’t care for the flavor—I don’t think ‘nature-paladin’ is a good niche for a class to fill, and frankly I wanted a class that wasn’t intrinsically tied to nature worship. I also think the class is too bare-bones in its features when compared to the two classes that are most similar to the shifter mechanically (monk) and thematically (paladin). More then this, I think I’m disappointed that the existing of the shifter likely means that Pathfinder will never get the sort of shapeshifter I want. (Good think I wrote it myself in Paranormal Adventures, I guess.)

Anyway, back to my, “The shifter’s not a bad class,” comment. There’s stuff you can do it with it—there’s just not MUCH stuff you can do with it. In any case, I think the build I have to show you today is pretty indicative of the shifter’s powers.

Build Concept

Any information important to understanding the build or its roots goes here.

• Classes: shifter 12
• Feats: Weapon Finesse (1st), Shifter’s Edge (3rd), Power Attack (5th), Mutated Shape (7th), Weapon Focus (claws) (9th), Shifter’s Rush (11th)
• Abilities: chimeric aspect, defensive instinct +3, shifter aspect, shifter claws (1d8; bypass cold iron and silver), second aspect, third aspect, track, trackless step, wild empathy, wild shape (5/day)
• Aspects: Tiger (1st); Deinonychus (5th); Bull (10th)

Play Description

So comparing shapeshifters is hard because polymorph effects add a LOT of crazy stuff into the mix. First, to evaluate this build I’m going to start with some notes, because for a class that’s supposed to be the “beginner’s guide to polymorph effects,” this class is actually kind of complicated, and not always in good ways.

First off is defensive instinct. It’s this neat little ability that allows you to add your Wisdom to your AC, as well as a scaling +1 bonus almost exactly like the monk’s progression. This ability has a clause that’s likely supposed to be ‘neat,’ but it’s actually a giant trap. The clause is that if you wear armor as a shifter, you continue to benefit from half of your Wisdom bonus from defensive instinct. Friends, I cannot stress this enough—this is a HUGE mechanical trap because of this FAQ from a few years ago. Basically, if you wild shape into a new form while wearing armor, this FAQ states that you still count as wearing armor, and gain all of the penalties but none of the bonuses for doing so. This means that if you wildshape into something as a shifter, you lose your armor bonus to AC as per the standard rules for polymorph effects, but your defensive instinct doesn’t return back to equal your full Wisdom bonus. Basically, you turn off your armor and get half benefit from your class feature. As a result, I recommend going Dex-based shifter with a smattering of Strength, and just run around with no armor. Buy bracers of armor. They’ll stack with your defensive instinct without reducing it, and when you wild shape the bonus will go away, but at least you still have full Wisdom.

Another big trap in the shifter is the claws—at a glance, they make it look like you’ll ultimately stop caring about amulets of mighty fist but in actuality, the only DR that the shifter can’t naturally overcome is DR/magic and you’re probably going to still want that enhancement bonus to boost your accuracy and damage. Sorry, neck slot is still spoken for! (It’s a shame because the amulet of natural armor would have been SUPER useful for you.)

So, when building a shifter there are a couple of different builds you can do, but I personally think that tiger / raptor / bull is the best progression. If you take Weapon Finesse at 1st level, your tiger minor aspect will translate into a helpful bonus to Hit, while raptor comes online at 5th level. Raptor has the most natural attacks in the game currently, and throwing lots of dice is usually best when it comes to natural attacks because their damage tends to be low. Finally, bull comes online right after you get chimeric aspect, so you can fuse tiger / bull with your raptor shape for enhancement bonuses to your Str and Dex. It’s useful, and ultimately it’ll likely mean that you don’t need to worry about spending your gold on stat belts. (Instead, you’ll get to spend it on bracers and amulets! Yaaaaay!)

Now, like I said, I am totally going to provide you with some hard-fought math today. As a warning, math on polymorph builds tends to be REALLY tough because you have a whole bunch of different weapons that you’re rolling with. I’m assuming our guy doesn’t have an amulet of mighty fists (I can’t predict when your GM will give you loot and at what pace, sorry), and for our wild shape I’m assuming Deinonychus with tiger / bull minor aspects active. I’m also assuming you’re using the Mutated Shape feat to grow a pair of horns for a gore attack.

True Form

• Ability Scores: Str 18 , Dex 25, Con 12, Int 10, Wis 14, Cha 8 (This includes +4 enhancement to Str and Dex from Bull and Tiger aspect.)
• AC: 26 [22 when wild shaped] (10 + 7 Dex + 2 Wis, + 3 dodge + 4 armor)
• BAB: +12
• Claw Attacks: +18 to hit, 1d8+12 for damage.
• With Power Attack, that’s –4 to attack rolls and +12 to primary attack damage rolls / +4 to secondary attack damage rolls.
• AC of a typical CR 12 enemy is 27, so each claw has a 55% chance to hit baseline (you need a 9 or better), or a 35% chance to hit if you Power Attack (you need a 14 or better).
• Average Damage (Normal): 9.075 damage PH (9 of 20 hits, average damage is 16.5.)
• Average Damage (PA): 4 damage PH (8 of 20 hits, average damage is 28.5)

Deinonychus Form

• Ability Scores: Str 20 , Dex 25, Con 12, Int 10, Wis 14, Cha 8 (This includes +4 enhancement to Str and Dex from Bull and Tiger aspect.)
• AC: 26 [22 when wild shaped] (10 + 7 Dex + 2 Wis, + 3 dodge + 4 armor)
• BAB: +12
• Primary Melee Attack: +18 [+19 if claws] (1d6+13 or 1d8+13 for claws)
• Secondary Melee Attack: +13 (1d6+8)
• With Power Attack, that’s –4 to attack rolls and +12 to primary attack damage rolls / +4 to secondary attack damage rolls.
• Primary Melee Attack (Foreclaws): 10.5 damage PH (12 of 20 hits, average damage 17.5)
• Foreclaws with Power Attack: 13.275 damage PH damage (9 of 20 hits, average damage 29.5)
• Primary Melee Attack (Gore/Bite): 9.075 damage PH (11 of 20 hits, average damage is 16.5)
• Gore/Bite with Power Attack: 11.4 damage PH (8 of 20 hits, average damage is 28.5)
• Secondary Melee Attack (talons): 4.025 damage PH (7 of 20 hits, average damage is 11.5)
• Talons with Power Attack: 3.525 damage PH (3 of 20 hits, average damage is 23.5)

Average Hit / Average Damage Full Attack

• Normal (claw/claw): 18.15 damage PH; 22.8 damage per Power Attack
• Wild Shape (claw/claw/bite/talon/talon): 52.75 damage PH; 56.4 damage per Power Attack

So basically, our shifter is looking at an average of 52.75 damage per full attack while wild shaped, or 56.4 damage if she Power Attacks. As an average (meaning that we’re rolling 20 attacks and assuming we roll every number on the die once, which translates to a fair number of misses for 0 damage) 50-ish damage for a 12th level character is pretty average—it’s very close to what my arcane/abyssal crossblooded bloodrager did in Waking Rune. So while I don’t like the shifter class and don’t think I’ll be building another one on my blog unless some super-cool build or archetype gets released in the future, I also don’t think it’s a bad class. But whenever Pathfinder 2.0 rolls around, I certainly hope we get something that takes more risks in its design space. If you think you’ve done something cool with the shifter, then by all means, leave me your thoughts in the comments below. I could REALLY use something to get excited over with this class.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Now, usually for me to write an article like this, something needs to happen. And a lot of stuff is happening in Tabletop RPGs right now. But I’m going to focus on something that I don’t think many people are talking about, and that’s Paizo’s Alien Archive being released. Yeah, that thing. Perram, James, and I did a review episode centered on it, and it was great and fun. But Perram said something during the episode that bothered me (you can probably see it in my face in the episode—I’ve very expressive like that), and I wanted to talk about it.

In the episode, we were talking about pros and cons for the book. I had mentioned some of the mechanical things I don’t like about it, and James pretty much loved everything about the book. But Perram had a “con” that really bothers me as an RPG Industry progressional, and what he said was something along the lines of this:

“I wish this book was bigger, because it feels like we got less than we ever got in a Bestiary. I want future books to be bigger.”

I have a serious problem with this sentiment (which I’ve seen in TONS of people who’ve bought this book), and I want to take some time to put them to paper now that I’ve had some time to figure out my thoughts on the topic. Warning: this article is going to be short, because I am going to try my damnest to make sure that I don’t rant (and believe me, I am EXTREMELY close to ranting mode on this topic).

The Many Rewrites of Grandmaster Augunas

Now, I wrote this article roughly five times, and trashed it every time. First I decided to try and tackle it with math. When you math it out, the Bestiaries cost roughly $10.00 more, and for that $10.00 you’re getting roughly 80 to 90% more pages. Not quite twice as many, but not an insubstantial number. However, it became clear to me that the math wasn’t the message I was trying to get out. I’m not trying to prove that Alien Archive is an amazing value: you are paying more for Alien Archive then for a Bestiary, and I won’t sugarcoat that.

So the next two times I tried to write this article, I started talking about games in general. Basically, gamers don’t want to pay for games. Don’t get defense, because it’s absolutely true. The fact that you wait for Humble Bundles or for Golem Clearance Sales or for Steam Sales 100% proves my point. A sizable number of gamers actually don’t value the games they play, which is heartbreaking. But both times I took this route, I got lost in this very “Holier Than Thou” tone that I decided wasn’t worth your time or mine, and I trashed that article. Twice.

So the fourth time I tried to write this article, I combined both of those approaches. And like fusing a dog with a little girl, that created a result that nobody wanted. (By the way, I started watching Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. WHAT THE HECK, JAPAN?!)

So, here I am. Try number five. At this point, me writing this article is basically a meme. So how am I going to tackle this burning anger that’s inside my heart? Well, Bruce Banner style, I think. I’m going to get to the root of my anger and bare my soul to you, the reader. And in understanding my anger, use it as a weapon. And alright, here it is. I am baring my soul in 3…2…1….

When you say, “This book isn’t worth it’s money,” all I can hear is, “Your work isn’t worth my money.”

Are You a Cog in the Murder Machine? (Probably)

Now, what I said in our Alien Archive episode is true. I did not write a single word for the Alien Archive. I am not part of that book at all. But when I say that sentiments against Alien Archives tell me that my work isn’t worth your money, what I mean is that you, the customer, don’t think that we, the authors, deserve your money. The RPG Industry is incredibly stagnant in terms of cost. You might hate millennials, but when we like something, we’re always willing to pay what it’s worth. Video games going from $60.00 to $70.00?

“I like this game and I want more of them, so I will pay for this.”

In-app purchases?

“I like this game and I want it to grow, so I will pay for this.”

Microtransactions?

“I like this game and I want to experience more content, so I will pay for this.”

DLC?

“I like this game and want to enjoy more of it, so I will pay for this?”

RPG books?

“Oh man, this book has half as many pages, but only has a cost reduction of $10.00! I refuse to buy this product!”

Please Sir, May We Have Some More?

What kills me is that no one ever stopped to ask how much it costs to print a book. (From my printer, a 100 page book usually costs about $15 to $20 to print, which is literally half the book’s cost in many cases.) How much money is needed to cover art costs? Author costs? Developer costs? Editor costs? Art Layout and Design costs?

Things do NOT get cheaper. They get more expensive. There are people who need Alien Archive sales to live, to afford to pay people. And when the community says, “Oh, I am just going to ignore the print copy out of principal! Keep your sales low!” then what you’re basically saying is, “I don’t want this thing that I love to grow.” This is how companies fall apart. This is how Wizards decides to slash its production staff to just a handful of people. This is how AAA game studios sink after one project.

After a certain point, we need to recognize what things are worth and pay for them accordingly. And if we can’t, we don’t deserve to call ourselves fans of those things. Because at that point, we’re not. We’re fairweather enthusiasts, and we’re willing to let our creators (video games, TTRPGs, et al) be paid sub-living wages to save ourselves $10.00 at Barnes and Noble or whatever.

Next week I’ll show you guys that catfolk build I’ve been messing with as long as I’m not too grouchy from this Alien Archive thing still. So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a wake-up call. Take care.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

With this in mind, here’s a brief definition for each type of diversity.

• Age: To qualify, the character must clearly be older or younger than “generic young adult.” This means that we (the viewer) need a way of telling that the character is either an adolescent or young, or Middle-Aged or older. If they’d fit as Paizo’s “Adult” age category, they don’t count for age.
• Body Type: To qualify, the character’s body type must portray something that isn’t “toned,” “fit,” and “average of height. Since no good artistic standard exists for this, we relied on the falliability of our own judgment.
• Ethnicity: To qualify, the character must clearly be of a non-fantasy ethnic group that is not Caucasian. We define “non-fantasy” as “having skin tones comparable to those on earth. For example, the red-skinned humans of akiton do not count.
• Gender Identity and Sexuality: To qualify, the character’s actions must somehow indicate that the character is LGBTQ+.
• Race: We are primarily looking at humans for diversity, but with this in mind, we did make some exceptions: androids counted if their bodies lacked clear robotic indications (none qualified); half-elves and half-orcs counted if their ethnicity clearly suggested human ethnicity. For example, a bright green half-orc would not count, but a half-elf who looked Caucasian would count as a Caucasian human. Elves in Pathfinder have no “whites” in their eyes, so we counted any elf-like illustration in the book as a half-elf if we could see the whites in their eyes.
• Other Points: If a clear representation of a human was in this book and circumstances made it impossible to discern if they met any of the above criteria, they failed that criteria. (If they didn’t look diverse for a category, they counted as non-diverse.) Also, if a picture included multiple counts of a thing, it only counted once. (For example, if a picture had five white guys in it, it only counted once.) Following this logic, multiple counts of the same character only count once. This mostly applies to the Iconic Envoy.

With this in mind, let’s dive in!

Human Counts

1. Iconic: Navasi is an Asian female. (1 pt)
2. Themes: Ace pilot is white female. (1 pt)
3. Themes: Spacefarer is white female. (1 pt)
4. Themes: Themeless is black female. (1 pt)
5. Human Race: One of the sample humans is a Native American male. (1 pt.)
6. Human Race: One of the sample humans is a Black female. (1 pt.)
7. Mechanic: One of the sample characters is a white male. (1 pt.)
8. Mystic: One of the sample characters is a white male. (1 pt.)
9. Operative: One of the sample characters is a white male. (1 pt.)
10. Operative: One of the sample characters is a black female. (1 pt.)
11. Solarian: One of the sample characters is a white male. (1 pt.)
12. Soldier: One of the sample characters is a plus-sized white female (1 pt.)
13. Archetypes: The Starfinder is a black male. (1 pt.)
14. Skills: Raia is fighting at least 3 middle-aged white males. (2 pts.)
15. Feats: White female on page 161. (1 pt.)
16. Starships: 3 or 4 white males on page 293. (2 pts.)
17. Spells: Black woman casting life bubble on page 363. (1 pt.)
18. Environment: White female dying on page 395. (1 pt.)
19. Pact Worlds: White female on page 425. (There might be an Asian female on this page too, but everything about her except her hair is blocked by a dwarf.) (1 pt.)
20. Pact Worlds: White male talking to aliens on Page 427. (1 pt.)
21. Pact Worlds: White female on page 469. (1 pt.)
22. Pact Worlds: Hispanic (?) female on page 478. (1 pt.)
23. Pact Worlds: Asian male on page 479. (1 pt.)
24. Pact Worlds: White male on page 496. (1 pt.)
25. Pact Worlds: Seelah in Space (black female) on page 509. (1 pt.)

All data has been secured! Let’s check it out!

The Breakdown

We’ll be looking at each of the categories herein and going from there. For the purpose of this study, the sample size of artwork is 21 pieces. A piece of artwork is worth 1 point to a category (diverse or nondiverse) if it has at least one character fitting the category’s description. If the piece has two or more characters, it is worth 2 points instead.

Age

• Adolescent and Younger Count: 0 pieces
  • Total Points: 0
• Middle Aged and Older Count: 1 piece (#9)
  • Total Points: 2
• Adult Count: 20 Pieces (All except #9)
  • Total Points: 25

Body Type

• Average Count: 20 pieces (All except #11)
  • Total Points: 26
• Plus-Sized Count: 1 piece (#11)
  • Total Points: 1
• Thin: 0 pieces (None)
  • Total Points: 0
• Other: 0 pieces (None)
  • Total Points: 0

Ethnicity

• Minority Count: 10 pieces
  • Total Points: 10
• White Count: 15 pieces (#1, #2, #6, #7, #8, #10, #11, #13, #14, #15, #17, #18, #19, #20, #23)
  • Total Points: 17

Sex

• Female Count: 13
  • Total Points: 13
• Male Count: 12
  • Total Points: 14

Gender Identity & Sexuality

• Straight Count: 0 pieces
  • Total Points: 0
• Queer Count: 0 pieces
  • Total Points: 0
• Cis Count: 0 pieces
  • Total Points: 0
• Trans Count: 0 pieces
  • Total Points: 0

Assessments

Alright, so with this data we can surmise a few things about diversity in this book, which I’m going to list out below:

• Age & Body Type: Representation for young people, old people, and people without a “fit and trim” body type is basically nonexistent in the Starfinder Core Rulebook, with the only piece going to a plus-sized female. I’m glad this piece exists, but it shouldn’t be asked to carry the entire diversity of the human form (which is even specifically talked about in the human section of Chapter 2). Additionally, there is NO appearance of old or young people except for one piece with a bunch of coded antagonists attacking the iconic technomancer. Paizo doesn’t have a great history with their representation of old or young people in their world, so it was a shame to see this omitted.
• Ethnicity: Okay, so I both want to applaud Paizo and mention that there’s still room to do better. There’s a near 50:50 split between white characters and non-white characters in the SFCRB, which is AMAZINGLY good. Hats-off to Paizo, I’m not even sure if any other publisher has ever come close to that ration. (Perram says that statistically, the precise ratio is 4:6, but we’re both willing to round in Paizo’s favor.) However, it’s worth noting that this ratio lumps ALL non-white characters into one group, which means that white is still the majority character ethnicity in this book. Hence why my final verdict is: awesome diversity, you deserve applause, but there are still more mountains to climb.
• Sex: So Paizo actually manages to depict more human women then men in the Starfinder Core Rulebook, but the men manage to slink ahead because every time there’s a group of humans in this book, they’re all men. So again, good job on this front but you might want to ask your artists to diversify gatherings a bit more. (It would have been especially nice to have a woman or two in the “building starships” illustration.)
• Gender Identity and Sexuality: So there’s no pictures in this book that hint at characters’ gender identity and sexuality, which I guess is a good thing in the sense that this book isn’t favoring any one over the other, but it’s also not a great thing since without those call-outs, people are going to reset to default, so to speak, which is straight cisgendered. I would have appredicated if one of the fancy full-page spreads (or maybe one of the 1/2 page illustrations) was Navasi looking longingly at her lover right before she died, as discussed in her backstory. That would have been a great way to visually reinforce the diversity of the world they were writing. However, as a single point in Paizo’s favor, Arshea, who is basically Pathfinder’s LGBT+ god, has their own write-up in the book. That is a HUGE nod to the LGBT+ community, so I’m going to keep my assentation’s at: you done good.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the Starfinder Core Rulebook is likely the most diverse roleplaying book of all time. Does it have perfect representation? Absolutely not. For one, the human section talks about how physically diverse humanity is, but never really delivers in terms of body shape. Furthermore, characters who aren’t in their 20s or 30s are basically ignored artistically, there’s still a larger ratio of white characters then any other ethnic group. Also, both “multi-human” picture in this book are predominantly male (Perram and I even joked about the men in illustration #14 all being literal clones of each other), and this book tries to take a “our setting is universally diverse” stance when, frankly, the real world isn’t there yet. I strongly feel that this book really could have used a diversity disclaimer along the same lines as Dungeons and Dragons’ 5th Edition, and it really could have used a removal of the minimum age rules (which 5E also did, if I remember correctly). Basically, we need a game system that tells us that it’s okay to play who we are if we want to, that everyone can be a here, and Pazio is SO close with the Starfinder Rulebook. I sincerely hope Paizo continues to push the boundaries of their diverse, inclusive world.

And if anyone questions whether or not this world is inclusive, well, now you have the stats to prove it!

So last week I took some time to sit down and name five things I really liked about Starfinder (my “boons”) and one thing I didn’t like (my “bust”). Now, for the sake of being honest, there’s more then just ONE thing that I’m not crazy about as far as Starfinder’s design goes, and after a LOT of debate I’ve decided that I’m going to share five more things I don’t like about the system, and end it with one more thing I do like. Basically, a reverse from last week’s article.

Before I get started, I want to remind everyone that I like Starfinder as a whole, and just because I’m pointing out problems with the system doesn’t make it bad. Instead, I believe that honestly acknowledging a game’s problems will make sure that designers and developers have ample opportunity to fix those problems in future products and expansions to the system. After all, Starfinder’s legacy won’t rest solely in the Core Rulebook; it’ll be in the sum of everything that has ever come out for it ever. Also, please don’t be a jerk and try to use my article and throw it on the forums to attack Paizo developers or win arguments because “this guy who’s good at game design said it first” or whatever. My articles are meant to improve everyone’s knowledge of Pathfinder / Starfinder and of game design, not to be wielded like brutish clubs for petty reasons. (And yes, if you’re planning on using my article as an ace in the hole to win an argument, your reasons are PETTY. Win your own argument with your own words, sweat, and tears!)

With that in mind, I’m ready to go! Fighting words ready!

Bust #1 — Spellcaster Utility

Alright, this one is going to be tricky to explain because it requires a lot of knowledge about past iterations of the 3.5 engine and a bit of foresight. Basically, in 3.5 Spellcasters were always seen as “too useful,” and one of the problems that martial characters “had” is that they can’t problem solve the way spellcasters can. Sure, a fighter can fight good, but the wizard can completely bypass entire encounters (if the GM lets them) with teleport. At the very least, the chance of inconsequential overland combats goes WAY down if your wizard is bringing you to the desired location in a blink of an eye. Martials can’t do anything about this.

So as spellcasters level up in Starfinder, their single target damage spells tend to stall out a bit. They start the game with super powerful damage-dealing spells (i.e. mind thrust’s 2d10 against an average of around 16 Hit Points and Stamina Points combined at 1st level), likely to try and offset Pathfinder’s “terrible low levels” situation that most spellcasters have in the first four or five levels or so. This is good. But by the time you’re getting spells like snuff life, the average damage of these spells really drops, which encourages spellcasters to take powerful battlefield control spells and utility spells instead. You know, the things that martials already couldn’t do. And doing this is REALLY easy in Starfinder if you take a lot of variable-level spells. Renenber that spell effects do not scale at all in Starfinder, so when a variable-level spell is no longer worth it, swap it out for a utility spell that ages better. Mind thrust (1st level) might be negligible after level 3 or so, but share language’s effects are the same (and useful) no matter your level, after all.

Maybe this was SF’s design intent, but in my mind this system of, “Our damage output drops and most spells don’t scale” just exacerbates 3.5’s problem with spellcasters versus martials. Time will tell if I’m right, but I personally think that a proper fix needs to be willing to allow martials have some of that high-quality utility that spellcasters have, not simply make martials better at the things they’re already good at by weakening spellcasters.

Bust #2 — Technomancer Branding

So I’ve come to the conclusion that the technomancer is a great class with one bad class feature (the spell cache’s bonuses don’t amount to much useful) that was HORRIBLY branded by Paizo’s team. All throughout the playtest and even the marketing campaign, the technomancer was sort of put into this role of “the wizard of tomorrow,” but in terms of the actual abilities it gets and the spells at its disposal, the technomancer does not play like a Pathfinder Wizard, or even a Pathfinder Socerer. They don’t have great control, they lack a lot of single-target spells and effects, and most of the best sorcerer/wizard spells in terms of utility found their way into the mystic’s hands. But do you know what they’re REALLY good at doing? Shooting people with guns, believe it or not. They have 3/4 BAB, they have supercharge weapon (which they can get at-will with an 11th level spell hack), and they (like any other character, can pick up Weapon Proficiency and Weapon Specialization with a longarm or a sniper rifle and just go to town with it, supercharging before every shot. They can even put touch spells into grenades and chuck them, touching one target with the grenade’s spell as it expodes.

Technomancers aren’t the wizard. Technomancers are the magus. But all of the marketing and all of the flavor make them seem like they’ll play like the wizard, so when you realize they can’t, it is jarring. As a result, this is a bust for me in terms of advertising the class, rather than the mechanical rules themselves. Change how you think about the technomancer and I think you’ll find it’s a great class with a lot to offer. But if you’re looking for a wizard, you won’t find it here. (Although my buddy Matt, who worked with me on the Starfarer’s Companion, DID covert the wizard to Starfinder!)

Bust #3 — Solarian MAD  

So the solarian has this really strange problem with ability scores, and it isn’t necessarily that they need two of them. It’s that they need the two ability scores that do the least in the entire game. Starfinder moved a lot of emphasis onto Dexterity and Intelligence; they govern most of the skills and provide you with more benefits than any other ability score (except perhaps Constitution). Strength, on the other hand, determines to-hit and to-damage with melee weapons (and thrown weapons), your Athletics skill, and the amount of Bulk you can carry. Charisma … adds to Charisma skills. That’s it. So when you’re a solarian and you’re investing all of your ability points into Strength and Charisma, you’re not getting a whole lot of return on those purchases. You aren’t boosting your saves, most of your skill bonuses are low, since you’re probably putting any final “good” ability score value you have into Constitution. Then when you level up, two out of four of your new ability increases are almost guaranteed to go into Strength and Charisma, which means that your AC, saves, and skill bonuses are going to probably lag behind even more as you level up.

I know Starfinder hasn’t been too keen about X to Y in terms of ability scores, but the solarian could have REALLY used something to Charisma to lessen the blow of its ability scores; Charisma instead of Wisdom on things would have been REALLY helpful, flavoring it as “communing with the cosmic way” or something. It might make envoys want to dip solarian, sure, but see #5 on Multiclassing.

Bust #4 — Exocortex Mechanic

Okay, so I played this class a LOT during the playtest, and I wasn’t really satisfied with the exocortex. The mechanic’s exocortex is flavored as “the combat mechanic,” the “Iron Mad,” but when you actually sit down to play the class, nearly NONE of the exocortex’s abilities are designed for combat. You get combat tracking, the ability to track multiple targets, and that’s it. All of the drone mods you can pick from are utility-focused, all of the other powers involve skills, and in the end, you’re light years in damage behind the soldier and the solarian. (Trust me, I played my mechanic with both in a party!)

This might not have been so bad if there were more mechanic tricks specifically for the exocortex mechanic, but there’s not. There’s one or two that interact specifically with the exocortex, and they don’t give meaningful combat buffs. I think that’s what the exocortex needs to come into its own — the ability to do things a drone can’t and make the mechanic into a fighting machine instead of the guy who hides behind a robot. This is 100% an area that Paizo can improve on in future books, and hey! If you don’t want to wait, I wrote a SF product that’ll do it for you. Huzzah!

Bust #5 — Multiclassing

As many of you know, I like multiclassing. I think that it adds an extra layer of interest to a character when they have one or two diverse job sets. But man, multiclassing is PAINFUL in Starfinder. Sure, they threw spellcasters a bone with stacking caster levels, but in general martials now suffer from “Do I wanna” REAL bad, especially the soldier. I’m sure the idea was to give the players hard choices about whether or not they REALLY wanted to dip into another class for its low-level powers, but now martials have the, “It’s not worth it” problem too — what you’re loosing is always so much greater than what you’re gaining that it isn’t a choice you can really afford to make and still contribute to the party at high levels. For instance, a soldier that multiclasses is delaying his access to iterative attacks, effectively. Those extra attack dice are a HUGE part of the soldier’s damage output, so why would he dip a level into operative for a measly d4 trick attack? I consider you guys intelligent people, so I’m not going to go through and list every class’s “Do I wanna,” but they’re all there and they tend to be crucial elements that you can’t really play without, rather than neat quality life things that you have to contrast with a level somewhere else. Like I mentioned, it’s like deciding to multiclass as a spellcaster in PF — no matter how flavorful it might be to pick up a new skill or trade, power-wise nothing is better than sticking with your class.  Granted, this one is the very last “problem” on my list because I’m not sure if it’s one you could ever actually solve, but Starfinder seems to hold true the Pathfinder ideology that multiclass characters are outliers, and we should deincentify their existence.

A Boon — Bulk

Holy crap, have I ever told you about how much I LOVE the Bulk system? It is the smartest thing, like, EVER. If you don’t know, carrying capacity in Pathfinder was a pain in the ass. Bulk is Starfinder’s solution. Instead of tracking pounds and ounces, the Bulk system assigned a number to each item; each point of Bulk an item has is roughly equivalent to 10 pounds. Some items have less than 1 Bulk, but their weight isn’t negligable; this is ‘light bulk’ and is noted with an ‘L.’ Light Bulk basically doesn’t count against your carrying capacity unless you have 10 of them, at which point they equal 1 Bulk.

So basically, Bulk gives you an easy number (your Strength score) and an easy tracking system (single-digit numbers) and let’s you track encumbrance without ever having to look at the CRB’s tables and charts. Even though Strength is undervalued in SF, I think this will go a long way to getting people to invest in Strength. Seeing that they can carry an extra Bulk or 2 just for boosting it at one of the ability score check points is going to be tempting; I know I boosted my Strength in Fallout many times just to get that carrying capacity number up. This is one of my favorite additions to the game, and one that I think should be applied everywhere. Carrying capacity doesn’t matter in PF because it’s too darn hard to calculate, but Starfinder makes it so easy that I can see GMs being less likely to hand waive it.

That’s it for this week! Enjoy your holiday if you’re state side, and if you were in Texas during Hurricane Harvey, please stay safe! So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Oh, who am I kidding! It’s all anyone can talk about, am I right?

Well, it just so happens that I have a LOT of thoughts on Starfinder. I was invited into the closed playtest for the game, so I’ve had the chassis of the rules for a while and have worked quite a bit with them. (You might have heard that I co-authored a product for Starfinder called the Starfarer’s Companion. If you’re looking for a classic fantasy taste in space or just want some neat feats, spells, and gear for your sci-fi characters, give it a try!) Anyway, as someone with a bit of experience, people keeping asking me, “What do you like about Starfinder?” and “What don’t you like about Starfinder?” I’ll go on the record as saying, “It’s a great game. Not a Pathfinder clone, not a Pathfinder upgrade, but a great game.”

Yes, that’s right. There’s some things I REALLY like about Starfinder and some things I’m not crazy about. I’ll call them my “booms” and my “busts,” and today I’m going to share five things I really liked about the system, and one thing I don’t like. You don’t have to agree with me; it’s very much an opinion piece after all, but I wanted to make sure I talked about the things I liked first.

At any rate, let’s get started!

Boom 1 — The Operative Class

HOLY crap, I love the operative. I could go on FOREVER about what I like about it. I love the skill-based interface for trick attack. I love the unparalleled skill access. I love the “I move 30 feet before I stab you,” mechanic. I love how things like Shot on the Run and Spring Attack have special interface with the operative. I love the flavors of operative specializations. I love tricks. I love exploits. I love EVERYTHING.

In my opinion, the operative is the best rogue class ever designed. It is fun, evocative, is great with skills, is awesome at using those skills at combat, and is just all-around fun to play. Love it SO much!

Boon 2 — Feat Simplification

I love how streamlined feats became. The Starfinder Core Rulebook isn’t padded with a billion of “paint by the numbers” feats the way that the Pathfinder CRB is. For instance, there’s one feat (Skill Synergy) that covers about half a dozen feats in PF (Athletics, Persuasive, and so on). I like Combat Expertise as a feat and miss seeing it here, but at the same time I LOVE that it’s not a gate feat for have the cool options in the game. And Deadly Aim and Power Attack being merged? Sign. Me. Up. I think that the feat tree balancing in SF is WAY better than both Pathfinder and 5e, personally. Like, holy crap! I don’t feel bad about taking Mobility now. And Toughness looks SO good! Super happy with how the system ended up.

Boon 3 — Fusion Seals

YES. ALL MY YES. We needed a system for moving weapon abilities (now called weapon fusions) from one item to another, and this system delivers. I absolutely LOVE this system. It is the greatest thing to happen to 3.5 OGL, even if it means that the weapon abilities themselves need to be weaker to compensate. I am A-OK with that, personally.

Boon 4 — Critical Hit Confirmation

So, I played a game of SF at Gen Con and got to see this first hand for the first time, and I thought it was really smart and great. It spend up gameplay and was fun. But holy crap, let me tell you that I didn’t REALLY notice how great this rule is until I compared it to running Tier 7-8 Pathfinder in Solstice Scar. Like, dude, I never realized how much time crit-fishing builds waste confirming critical hits. Granted, this isn’t a rule you could just port over with the whole “x3 and x4 crit damage mods” thing in Pathfinder, but I hope we see this system in future iterations of the game; it really speeds up play. So much.

Boon 5 — Item Level and Crafting

I get that some people think it feels very video-gamey, but I think item level is INCREDIBLY cool. It simplifies the crafting rules SO much. It allows them to apply to things without needing five extra pages of rules for it. It provides an inherent progression system to help GMs out. It is AWESOME and I love it so much. I’m not entirely sure if it would work in Pathfinder, as Pathfinder is more focused on magicing up weapons rather than actually buying new ones, but I would be interested to seeing an item level system in Pathfinder of some kind. It would need to be different, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it.

 A Bust — Skill Focus and Stacking

This is the ONLY feat I don’t like in the whole book, and it’s mostly because of the whole, “Every class gives insight bonuses” thing. At low levels, classes like the operative and the envoy use Skill Focus as a way to “jump ahead” on their insight bonus. Any class can, in fact. (Exocortex mechanics get a similar gimmick.) Later in their class progression, when the class’s insight bonus gets high enough to equal the +3 from Skill Focus, operative and envoy and mechanic all have ways to make the feat more useful. (Operative uses Skill Focus as a way to determine which skills they can take 10 on regardless of distractions, and envoys get a one/day roll twice with expertise and take the higher benefit from the feat. Exocortex mechanics can just reprogram what skill benefits from their Skill Focus.) So like, I get it. These classes all totally have ways to make Skill Focus not a “dead feat” for them, but I don’t think that the system was handled well. Like, a new player looking at the system might say, “Hey! My solarian gets a bonuses from her class on Athletics checks. I’ll take Skill Focus with Athletics to be the very best!” And obviously, they don’t realize that Skill Focus as a feat for a skill your class already benefits has a very clear shelf-life before its usefulness runs out.

I think Skill Focus would be better if it just had a contingency built directly into the feat that said, “If your class grants you a +3 or higher insight bonus, the feat does X instead.” In other words, put those rules into the feat, not the class. Even if it means having to reduce the “class specific-ness” of the benefit the character gains, I think it would be easier for new players to understand and make it higher for them to make terrible choices they’re going to regret. Because no one wants to waste a mnemonic editor on Skill Focus.

That’s it for now! Currently school (both graduate studies and work) is starting up again, so I’m just going to keep doing more of these “boom and a bust” series until everything’s under control. So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Now, in my mind, Zanzo is a good person, but he’s not a hero. He’s cowardly, and after he died the first time he definitely has a self-preservation streak that he only sometimes puts aside for his friends. (“It’s okay! As long as you can hear me singing you get buffed. I don’t need to be there!”) He’s definitely gone from a wide-eyed naïve 19-year old to somewhat of a pessimistic who puts his survival first, and their mission (saving Golarion from an eternal winter) second. But this was a slow change that I wanted to do via roleplay, and if your group is like mine, we all want to get to the story. Not sit around and talk to each other for hours without getting things done. (In fact, in my experience trying to get your entire group to sit and do nothing but roleplay for hours on end if the group doesn’t want that is the best way to annoy your group AND burn yourself out on the game.)

So, if you’re not sitting around chatting by the fireside, then how DO you roleplay your character? Simply put, you make it the side dish, not the main course.

Injecting Roleplaying in Everything You Do

Your character doesn’t stop being a unique individual just because combat’s started or the dice are rolling. Oftentimes what I do (and what I did with Zanzo) is roleplay while the action is happening, and there are plenty of subtle ways you can do that. Here’s a few of my strategies:

• Roleplay Every Check You Make: Hey, you have skills, right? Whenever you make a skill check, add a little flavor to it. Describe not only what your character does, but how they do it. For example, I roleplay Zanzo as a coward who is primarily worried about not dying (again). One of the ways I emphasize Zanzo’s character is in how I roll Knowledge checks to identify creatures. When I ask questions, I ALWAYS ask for questions in ways that emphasize Zanzo’s cowardice, growing pessimism, and fear of getting killed again. Here’s an example: GM: “This is a devourer, and you get two pieces of information about it.” ME: “What is the absolute most terrifying thing that the monster could do to me in a dark alley?” This emphasizes Zanzo’s paranoid and gives me a fun way to rely the information to the other players in the party. “That thing will suck the life from your body through its fingers!”
• Banter In-Character: Games like Pathfinder are a social experience, and as a social experience, you and your friends are going to talk about stuff. When you do, try to socialize with your friends in-character. For example, when I joke on Zanzo, I try to always joke about subjects Zanzo would be able to joke about, and do so in-character with the other players at the table. For example, when we’re joking about how our kathasa bow nomad PC, Armored By Distance, is indiscriminately murdering fey creatures, we make sure to (jokingly) call her out on her indiscriminate racism in-character. When we’re sitting at the table, we’re joking and having a good time, but we’re also socializing and being silly together in-character. That sort of banter is what makes characters feel real—no well-written character is a pile of serious Lawful-Good (or comparable alignment) angst all the time.
• Make Mechanics Support Personality: Another way we “roleplay” our characters is through our ability choices. Every character in our party has abilities that reflect their personality and values, even if they aren’t always the most optimized choices. For example, Zanzo doesn’t want to get beat up, so he’s mostly ranged and he buffs other people to fight for him. Armored By Distance is a bow nomad scavenger, so she makes traps and her own arrows. Raynard (James’s character) is a bit of a self-sufficient type, so he has tons of mechanics designed to allow him to sneak attack without needing an ally’s support. (He has things that let him snipe, hide in plain sight, can sneak attack while moving and charging plus Spring Attack, and so on.) If you build your character’s personality to support their mechanics (or vice versa), you can literally make every action you take or don’t take indicative of that character’s thoughts and values.
• Use Failures as Well as Successes: One REALLY good trick I’ve learned to roleplaying is to roleplay your failures as well as your successes. Whenever I miss with an attack roll, fail a skill check, roll low with an initiative check, I always try to roleplay why the result happened using what’s going on around me. For instance, if I rolled low for initiative, clearly my character didn’t think a fight was going to break out, and was surprised. If there was a surprise round, maybe something that happened distracted me from reacting sooner. If I missed an attack roll the turn after my friend took major damage, maybe I was too worried about that person and lost focus. Roleplaying both when you succeed AND fail makes for a good character, because real people fail just as often as they succeed; maybe more so. But how you react to failure is just as telling, maybe more so, as how you react to success. Capitalize on it.

Those are just a few of the tricks that James, our friends, and I use to roleplay without dedicating large swaths of time to roleplaying. Ultimately, roleplaying works better when you stop seeing roleplaying as a separate part of the game that you just “turn on.” Roleplaying should be something that you are doing all the time when you’re sitting down to play. Since roleplaying is literally living and acting as another person, everything attack you make or don’t make, every spell you cast or don’t cast, every skill check you make or fail, they should all be woven together to make your character who he or she is.

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Now, I don’t really enjoy relaxing outside of my home because I would rather “unwind” by sitting at my computer writing then laying out on a beach somewhere or chilling in a mountain resort, but even if you like your job / hobby work, its important to get away from it for at least a short while. The break helps you recharge your drive and creativity; in behavior analyst terms, it creates a reinforcement deprivation that makes subsequent emissions of the behavior more reinforcing. Or if you hate your job, its much-needed time away; because again in behavior analyst terms, escape is its own type of reinforcement (negative reinforcement, to be precise).

So, why am I talking about this in a Pathfinder article? Well, I strongly think that we as GMs (and sometimes as players) don’t give our PCs enough “time away” from adventure. I mean, in Reign of Winter the first couple books take place over roughly a two-to-three month period of non-stop adventure. That sort of pacing can be cool if you’re going for a Lord of the Rings style feel, but it has consequences both in terms of game mechanics and flavor that I wanted to take some time to talk about today.

Game Mechanics Consequences of No Downtime

I’m sure you don’t think about it too often, but a LOT of game mechanics in the game expect you as a player to have some downtime available to you. Here’s a brief list of examples.

• Acquiring new animal companions / familiars. If something happened to your animal companion, such as its death, it actually takes you a full 24 hours to reacquire a new creature to fill that role. If you’re a witch or shaman and you  rely on your familiar to access magic, this is huge; you need that time to get a new companion critter.
• Crafting: This is probably the biggest, as crafting takes more time than anything else in the game. It is easy to say, “Oh, crafting is too powerful!” or whatever, but the fact remains that crafting is literally built into the infrastructure of several classes. Skalds and wizards both gain Scribe Scroll as a bonus feat. Gunslingers gain Gunsmith as a bonus feat. Alchemists get brew potion as a bonus feat. Keeping a break-neck pace of adventure all the time dampens the power and effectiveness of those character choices in a way that offers no real choice to the players, and as a result it is pretty weak when you allow the players to take these options, then don’t give them opportunities to use them.
• Retraining: As part of the downtime system itself, if you don’t have time to retrain, you can’t retrain. Simple as that. This can be frustrating for a PC who took an option that they later discovered wasn’t a good choice for your campaign. (Maybe they took crafting feats or ranks and found out later that you weren’t going to give them time to use them!)
• Shopping: Alright, so here’s a dirty little secret of adventure design; unless you are custom-designing your enemies to have equipment that you know your players want, the PCs are going to end up with a lot of treasure that’s useless to them. This is a sorry consequence of how the game rewards hyperspecialization with specific weapons / spells / options instead of generalization, but it is a fact nevertheless. If your fighter took all of his Weapon Focus feats with a longsword and your adventure keeps dropping axes, well, those axes are junk to your fighter no matter how many enhancement bonuses they have. This makes time to sell items and shop for new ones crucial to the ongoing success of the PCs, as Pathfinder’s math assumes that they’ll reach certain attack bonus and AC bonus benchmarks at specific points throughout the game.  If you don’t give your PCs time to shop and hawk wares, you are inherently making all of your future encounters much more difficult while also dramatically lowering the power of classes that specifically choose specialized weapons / equipment. (Fighters are, without a doubt, the most affected by this, but gunslingers and swashbucklers are as well.)

Those are probably the four biggest mechanical problems that come from not giving your players downtime in your adventure, but I did mention that there are story issues as well? Let’s talk about them quick, shall we?

Flavor Consequences of No Downtime

“But Alex!” you say, “How can there be flavor consequences for having no downtime in my games? The Lord of the Rings had no downtime and it worked fine!”

Ah, my friend, but I would argue that in the Lord of the Rings, the characters don’t really “level up” in the sense that you don’t see them becoming much better than they already were at the start of the show. Merry and Pippin become more assertive, sure, but think of Legolas and Gimli. Or Aragorn. Those characters are just as skilled at fighting in The Fellowship of the Rings as they are in Return of the King. They don’t “get better,” so to speak. The truth of the matter is that when we think of improving our skills, we think of rigorous practice for months at a time to improve, and in a game without downtime that cannot happen. In Reign of Winter, my bard has gone from a 1st-level nobody to a 15th-level god of music, arguably one of the most powerful bards on Golarion, and he’s something like 19 and a half years old. That’s not a strong, linear progression, especially in terms of skills. Heck, we’ve had time where I’ve “randomly” learned new spells halfway through a dungeon with no time to really sit down or figure out how they work.

And maybe this flavor works for some games. Maybe all the PCs always have some crazy form of innate talent or grand destiny, but it certainly isn’t very realistic, and it arguably contributes to the notion that Pathfinder is a “larger than life” game, a further tick on the board supporting the idea that Pathfinder doesn’t NEED to be hyperrealistic in its rules design, and certainly that the game mechanics themselves aren’t hyperrealistic.

What To Do About Heroic Vacation?

So, I want to wrap up this article by simply stating that you as a GM know what is best for your game. After all, you know your players better than anyone else. However, it is important to consider the choices your players are making or have made when it comes to you deciding about downtime. Do your players actively seek time to craft or retrain? Do they need to find new animal buddies because you murdered their last friend? (Sorry, Fluffy….) Do your players simply need some time to decompress, maybe get to know the people living in the town that you want them to save? (That’s actually a big one; your players as people are more likely to be invested in the consequences of their adventure if you give them a choice to meet and know and learn to care about the people living there. Give them a face and all that.)

Chances are your game will benefit from having downtime. Your PCs will be better equipped, which means you can throw bigger challenges at them, and they will have a bit more attachment to your campaign world. Remember, downtime doesn’t have to mean, “Sitting around playing Economyfinder for a full session.” For example, while Player 1 is figuring out what scrolls she wants to scribe and how long it will take her, give the other three players a small roleplaying exercise in town. You’re the GM; you control the world, and you have the power to make anything fund. If only you’d use that power….

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug

Endzeitgeist wasn’t the only person to give this prestige class high marks; I think it’s currently sitting on two or three 5 Star reviews as of July 17^th. Now, this is interesting to note because before last November’s Paths of Prestige, you hardly ever heard of Paizo publishing prestige classes. (Even still, the ratio of Prestige Class to years of Pathfinder aren’t high; we got maybe 20 new ones between Paths of Prestige and Adventurer’s Guide.) However, it’s pretty safe to say that even the 1^st-party prestige classes don’t end up garnering a whole lot of buzz or excitement. Why?

Well, I have my theories (which I’m going to share with you, of course), but ultimately, I want to take some time today to talk about what goes into making a good prestige class. I hope you’ll sit back and join me for this one.

Ingredient 1: Concept

Before you even start designing a prestige class, the most important thing to make sure that you have is a strong concept. Prestige Classes that wind up as “The Mounted Combat Prestige Class” or the “Dagger-Fighter Prestige Class” are boring and ultimately lead to rules bloat and character hominization. Why? Because when you make a prestige class tied to something mechanical or combat-oriented, you end up making a path that ALL characters who want to be good at that niche need to take, and that’s boring. What I’m saying is don’t make the 3.5 mistake and make Prestige Classes for “mundane” things.

Instead, a good Prestige Class is built around an idea or a theme. This can be something like a specific organization, a racial theme, or some sort of flavorful idea or philosophy. These concepts possess inherent identity, which is critical to the creation of a successful prestige class. As a general rule, if it makes sense that all characters wanting a specific flavor take your prestige class designed around that flavor, then it has the makings of a good prestige class.

Paizo is REALLY good at this, so you can pretty much look at any Paizo prestige class and be okay. (Some of the new ones in the Adventurer’s Guide, like the Westcrown Devil and the Riventhune one, are spotty, but their track record on picking topics that deserve prestige class is good.) Where Paizo (and many other designers) tend to struggle when designing prestige classes is mechanically, and the reason is pretty simple—Prestige Classes as they’re traditionally written are REALLY difficult to design well because they actively conflict with Paizo’s core design philosophies.

Bacteria vs. Virus

If a core class or a base class is a healthy cell, a Prestige Class is either a bacteriophage or a virus. Basically, your happy, healthy class was going well progressing and doing its thing when suddenly some outside force attacked and ultimately changed it. That “thing” is a Prestige Class, and it either consumed your character’s class level progression for resources (bacteriophage) or usurped it to fuel its own powers (virus).

To drop the allegory, nearly all Prestige Classes in the game require you to basically stop progressing your base class and progress the prestige class instead. These prestige classes are bacteria cells—they attack and kill your base class to use up all of your character’s resources (XP / levels) to progress themselves instead. In doing so, the original base class does not grow or progress at all; it has been completely and utterly usurped. Virus Prestige Classes, on the other hand, attack and kill your base class, but they don’t destroy the base class. They continue to use aspects of your base class the way that a real virus hijacks its host cell’s DNA and RNA to product more viruses. The cell’s organelles, like its cell wall, its cell membrane, its mitochondria, they all still work normally. In this metaphor, they all grow and progress.

The simple difference between these two types of Prestige classes is that bacteria prestige classes halt growth in your base class, while virus prestige classes continue to grow it in a limited capacity as an afterthought.

So applying this idea to Pathfinder, Pathfinder’s design track took a very abrupt change from 3.5’s early on in the game’s history. 3.5 offered very little reward for staying in the same class; it’s what made prestige classes, and therefore multiclassing, so popular. Pathfinder changed this by having many class features and abilities scale with your character level: classes like the witch, which have save DC-heavy class features tied to their witch level, are extreme examples of this change in design philosophy. Because of this, the usurper-style Prestige Class is not attractive to many characters anymore, because Pathfinder accidentally doubled the opportunity cost of entering a prestige class (or multiclassing in general)–in addition to losing future abilities from your class by taking a prestige class, you also halt all of your current abilities from progressing.

3.5 saw this problem and made prestige classes progress spellcasting—the only real class feature that strongly progressed with character level in the area. Pathfinder, however, never fixed this problem for its shiny new class features, and the end result is that few people want to risk these old-style prestige classes. But this isn’t a problem for the just-emerging hijack-style prestige class, like Paizo’s evangelist or Chesandro Warden (or my 5 of 5 Stars prestige class, the kyubi paragon). Prestige classes that acknowledge the abilities your character has earned already and respectfully progresses them are inherently more attractive to players because you’re not forcing them to pick new abilities versus old abilities and new abilities; its merely a contest of new versus new, and that makes your class way more desirable.

What-Do-I-Get 1: Power

Okay, so we’ve talked about how hijack-style prestige classes are better than usurp-style. But this now opens up a very dangerous hole—power. Obviously your new prestige class needs some unique abilities to it. If it doesn’t have any, what’s the point. Also, your prestige class can’t give you EVERYTHING that your base class gives you alongside new benefits; there’s nothing but power creep there. So, what to do?

First, think about what your prestige class boosts and why? The less it boosts, the more it can give. Second, think about delaying old ability boosts. This is an old trick going back a LONG time, because getting something at 10^th level that was intended for 9^th level is a loss of power, even if you eventually DO get it. The Winter Witch prestige class from Paths of Prestige basically subsides solely on this principle, as does the Chesandro Warden.

Make sure what you’re taking is roughly equal to what you’re getting in power. This is a skill you have to practice to learn; I can’t really teach it. In general, versatility trumps specific unless the specific is EXTREMELY powerful. (Good examples of this is the sanctified slayer inquisitor archetype; sneak attack is a LOT better at damage than judgment, but sneak attack FOR judgment AND extra abilities is a fair trade because judgment is WAY more versatile than sneak attack, which is a damage boost that’s easy to nullify.)

What-Do-I-Get 2: Desirability

Paizo is really good at Part 1: Theme. Paizo is really good at Part 2: Power Balance. Where they often falter is Part 3: Desirability. Note that desirability and power are NOT the same thing; something can be desirable without being a stark combat bonus, as power is situational. (As Order of the Stick villain Xyklon famously says, “Power equals Power.) It is okay to give your party flavorful abilities if they are useful. And Paizo is good at giving abilities that are useful, but they often give abilities that are niche, which is a totally different problem. A niche ability is one that only matters under extremely specific circumstances. For example,  a vigilante’s unshakable ability is niche.

Niche abilities are okay as long as they are generally applicable enough that they come up frequently or guaranteed a flavorful outcome for the player when they do come up. Good examples are a bard’s well-versed ability; the bonus basically turns a bard from a poor Fort to a good Fort against those effects, or augments their already incredible Reflex and Will beyond normal measures.

I hope this gives you guys a bit of insight on the sort of things you need to consider when designing a prestige class—it is not easy. In my opinion, designing a good prestige class is as difficult as designing a good base class; it requires a lot of work, a mastery of the rules, a knowledge of what else is out there, and most of all, it requires that you think about what opportunities that the player is losing by taking levels in your class instead of in their base class. Many prestige class writers don’t consider this; they consider the packaged prestige class but not the thing its being applied to. Think about both together and how your prestige class slides onto characters, and you’re well on your way towards making an awesome prestige class!

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug

With Starfinder just around the corner, I’ve seen bunches of people (including a few of my fellow Know Direction-ers) talk about Starfinder and speculate on whether or not it will be a proving grounds of sorts for changes that could find their way into Pathfinder someday. While I think that’s a given, one thing that I want to talk about specifically relates to Pathfinder Unchained, specifically the notion of a sequel. Plenty of people (myself included) speculate that another Pathfinder Unchained book (or at least a revised Core Rulebook in the spirit of Pathfinder Unchained) could be something Paizo turns to in the not-so-distant future. (And for me, “Not-so-distant” is within the next ten years; enough time for it to seem far-off, but in reality not too-far-away.) And please note, I say this as a speculator, not as someone with any inside information on the topic.

Turning to Pathfinder Unchained, there are several obvious classes that people always call for as needing an “unchained” version. Usually they’re classes that tend to underperform or perform only in niche circumstances (like the fighter), be somewhat lopsided in how and when they give you powers (like the gunslinger), or be a little bit on the insane side (like the swashbuckler). However, I have my own thoughts on what classes need to be unchained, and largely I find myself fairly alone in this regard. So starting today, I am going to begin a mini series on various classes that I feel need to be redesigned from the ground up and my (short) reasons why. Today, I begin with:

The Bard: A Class Without Options

So, like, damn. That is a HUGE statement to make, right? That the bard class has no options. Well, if you look at the class it’s basically true. But I wouldn’t stoop so low as to make you guys believe me without evidence (I AM studying to be a scientist, after all), so here’s my evidence that the bard needs to be unchained on the grounds that it has no real options.

1. Inspire Courage Has No Equal

Inspire courage is arguably the most powerful buffing ability in the bard’s repertoire. They get it early and the bonuses are general enough that basically everyone in your party benefits from it in some capacity. The combo of +X to weapon attack and damage swings tides in your favor drastically, and the power of inspire courage means that among bardic performances, it has no equal. No archetype that replaces bardic performance gives you anything as versatile or as powerful, I will say this plainly. Generally speaking, you are a worse bard if you lose this ability simply because of how good it is. But this doesn’t stop at simply archetypes, no other combat performance in the bard’s roster is as strong as inspire courage either. For example, inspire greatness is laughably unusable with its meager +1 competence bonus on attack rolls and temporary hit points, and while inspire heroics gives nice bonuses, the morale bonus on saves isn’t stackable with most of the bard’s core buff spells (the same problem inspire courage had in 3.5 that was changed in Pathfinder), and inspire heroics only works on one creature at a time, so you have to play the guessing game of, “Is this person the best person for this performance?” Bardic masterpieces likewise do nothing to stem this problem; it is not a good investment of my time to spend 5 full round actions calling down a blast of lightning when I could be making all of my allies mathematically more effective for those same five rounds. Ultimately, the power level of the various performances needs to be brought closer together in order for the bard to be a class with depth; right now, it spams one option and that’s all it gets.

2. The Bard Has No Real Choices

Speaking more on “that’s all it gets,” the bard has no real choices outside of spells known. To iterate, in the transition from Pathfinder to D&D, every class was given abilities that allow for meaningful choices throughout the character’s career. These choices enable members of each class to inherently distinguish themselves based on ability alone. Bards lack this in any real capacity. Not only do they have almost no feats that specifically modify them or their performances, but they also have almost no choices within their class features themselves. They basically get versatile performance, which mucks with one class feature at 2^nd level and every 4 levels thereafter. What’s worse, the choices in versatile performance don’t matter; in Core, the skills overlap with one another heavily, so there is a very clear “Right” and “Wrong” set of performance skills to take. (Usually it includes dance because of all the Dex to Cha that happens within it, and a combination of performances to get Bluff, Intimidate, Sense Motive, and Diplomacy as Perform skills, which brings you to a total of three choices by 10^th level.) By the time you get the 14^th level Perform skill, you have no ranks to invest in a new skill and REALLY don’t get a darn about the new versatile performance as a result. As a result, most bards end up looks VERY samey. (Note that the advanced versatile performance options I wrote in Blood of the Beast helps with this problem, but it doesn’t solve the issue that the bard has very few choices to make over the course of their career.)

3.The Bard Spell-List is a Hot Mess

Finally, the bard spell list is REALLY not a great spell list once you look past some of the glitz and glam that bards have gotten in PATHFINDER; plenty of the core spells don’t hold up, and the bard is missing plenty of tools that they feel like they should have. Everyone gets REALLY surprised when I mention that the bard doesn’t get fly or overland flight; things like Mary Poppins or Peter Pan (aka singing / feeling good emotions to fly) feels very bardic, but bards cannot do it in any capacity. Bards also lack any decent area attack spells; shout is REALLY bad damage-wise, and the deafened condition isn’t great. Really, their powerhouse AOE spell is shadow evocation, and 14 levels is a long time to wait to cover that base for your party. (Believe me, swarms have laughed at my Reign of Winter group FOREVER because we don’t have a wizard.) And really, that’s the problem—the bard shouldn’t be able to cover all the same bases as a wizard or sorcerer as well as they can, but the bard’s niche is the skill monkey / fifth man character, and they really lack a bunch of very basic utility options to fill that roll.

But in the meantime, let’s get a discussion going. What other ways do you think the bard needs help? Do you think I’m wrong or am overlooking anything? What classes do you think need an unchained treatment?

Until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

#1 — Tumbling is VERY Confusing

So, most people know that when you use Acrobatics to tumble, you have to move at half speed. What many people DON’T remember is that you can take a –5 penalty on your check to tumble at your full speed. VERY nifty if you want to escape.

Speaking of escaping, tumble is worded VERY confusing-like when it comes to multiple foes that threaten you. Basically, when you use Acrobatics to tumble, you have to check against each opponent who threatens a space that you move through separately, and for each check you make, you take a cumulative –2 penalty. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running through a group of 4 people crowding around one square or 4 people at separate points throughout the move—you roll against each of them. However, you only need to check once per opponent per move, no matter how many of its squares you move through. (This was clarified in an FAW in November 2010.)

 #2 – Your Alchemist’s Bombs Don’t Super-Crit

Alchemists. Engines of exploding devastation, am I right? They’ve got oodles of touch attack splash weapons that deal a fistful of damage. Better yet, you can pick them as weapons with feats like Weapon Focus and the like. So obviously Improved Critical seems like a must, right? So you can throw another fistful of dice?

Well, it might be a good feat for you, but it is important to remember that when an alchemist bomb crits, only the first 1d6 is multiplied—every d6 after the first counts as an additional damage die that doesn’t crit. (This is literally in the bomb ability, but people always forever.) For example, if your bomb does 3d6 and crits, it’s doing 4d6 damage plus double modifiers. That’s a sizable chunk of damage, but you’re not destroying kingdoms with a single bomb using that crit. (Probably not, anyway.)

#3 – The Flying Rules are Brutal

So, here’s a question. You like flying, right? Super useful, great mobility. Question: have you ever READ the Fly check rules? Because they are absolutely INSANE. You need to make a fly check to do just about anything, and in a game that otherwise does not have facing, the Fly rules have facing. You need to roll to turn more than 45º, you need to roll to ascend higher than a 45º angle, you need to roll to hover, you probably need to roll to fart while flying.

Ignoring about 90% of these rules is a VERY common house rule that I don’t think most GMs even realize they’re implementing—they’re just ignoring something tedious and boring that doesn’t add to the game.

#4 – Some Spells are Longer Than You Think

Everyone knows that summon monster and its ilk take 1 round to cast, but did you know that some other very popular spells also have a casting time of 1 round? Powerful enchantments like sleep and dominate person / dominate monster all have a casting time of 1 round, so make sure you smack those wizards before they can dominate the barbarian!

#5 – Combat Maneuvers — Not That Threatening

You likely know that most combat maneuvers provoke an attack of opportunity if you don’t have the appropriate Improved maneuver feat. However, did you know that you only provoke from the person you’re using the maneuver against? It’s totally true (same for making unarmed strikes without Improved Unarmed Strike). So if you want to grapple the wizard without Improved Grapple, go for it. Only the wizard can try to stop you. BECAUSE YOU ONLY PROVOKE FROM THAT WIMPY LITTLE VOLDEMORT WANNABE.

#6 – You Can Take a Move Action and 5-Foot Step

5-foot steps—everyone knows and loves them. Except plenty of players don’t know them as well as they think they do. I’ve met tons of people who think that you can’t do things like stand from prone (a move action) or draw a weapon (a move action) and still take a 5-foot step. Well, that isn’t the case—when you take a 5-foot step, you can’t have moved any distance. So, for instance, you can’t move 30 feet and then take a 5-foot step. However, you can take move ACTIONS and still take a 5-foot step, provided your action didn’t move you any distance.

#7 – Your CMD is Probably Better Than You Think

CMD, or Combat Maneuver Defense, is calculated using a formula of 10 + your base attack bonus + your Str modifier + your Dex modifier. As a result, players often think that their CMD is too low, and it is. But the reason their CMD is probably too low is that CMD also adds all circumstance, deflection, dodge, insight, luck, morale, profane, and sacred bonuses to AC to their CMD. This includes things that the swashbuckler’s nimble ability, the monk’s Wisdom to AC bonus, and even your rings of protection. Granted, the flip side of this is that basically anything that penalizes AC also penalizes your CMD.

Oh, one more thing—if you’re flat-footed or denied your Dexterity bonus to AC, you also lose your Dex bonus to CMD. So you can feint and trip people, and laugh extra hard.

Now, I think these seven rules are great ones to keep in mind, whether you’re playing or GMing. However, I’m sure that these aren’t the only esoteric rules out there—do you know any rules that people often forget or overlook that I didn’t list here? Drop a comment with them below and we can fill this blog post up with esoteric knowledge.

But until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

This can sometimes get me a lot of weird labels, especially considering my favorite race in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is often squarely in in the fetish zone when you look a stone’s throw away from our community. (And sometimes not even that far; Code Switch blogger James Ballod has joked with me on a number of occasions that 95% of the non-sexualized kitsune in the Pathfinder Society are my characters.)

Still, even though it sometimes earns me weird looks, I like playing things that are different, and honestly—I don’t mind talking about that habit. Sometimes, I even go out of my way to talk about it. (Such as by writing a blog post on the topic that will likely be viewed by a couple of thousand people this month.) In one particular situation, I was chatting about the virtues of playing humans and nonhumans with another designer friend of mine. For the purpose of this article, we’ll call that person “D,” and I’m going to actively use gender neutral pronouns to refer to them. Maybe they’re male, maybe they’re female, maybe they identify as neither. YOU’LL NEVER KNOW!

So I was talking to D, and they mentioned to me that despite working on several different races for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game throughout its history, they prefer to play humans because they prefer exploring ethnicity rather than race, and that one of the things they find boring in regards to writing and reading about new races is that they’re so cardboard. (Meaning they’re two-dimensional and lack depth.

Obviously, as someone who wrote about 160 pages on kitsune, nagaji, samsarans, and wayangs rather recently, I had a lot to say about this. But before I did, I asked D whether they minded if I shared my thoughts on the topic. Because when you’re talking about a conflict of opinion that doesn’t have grandiose consequences, I feel asking for permission is appropriate. D said sure, and so I shared my thoughts, which are the basis of today’s article.

You too have a choice, reader. Read on, or go back to Amazon—your choice. 😉

A Tradition of Blandness

So I think D had a good point when they said that races, as they’re so often presented in roleplaying games, are two-dimensional and lack depth. Even in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, races tend to be painted in broad strokes, their fine details filled in later (if at all). Let’s set aside the myriad of new races that we’ve gotten in Bestiaries and Campaign Settings and the like and focus on just the core races for a little bit—in 2007 when the Inner Sea Gazeteer was printed, each race got a standard write-up of roughly seven paragraphs, except humans, which got roughly two additional paragraphs for each of their major ethnic groups (that’s 11 extra articles in all, for a total of 22 extra paragraphs). Combined with the seven humanity originally got, we’re looking at a total of 28 paragraphs—literally four times as much as any other races. Elves of Golarion came out in 2008, a year before the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and Dwarves of Golarion soon followed. However, the “original” version of what is now the Inner Sea World Guide was published during the same year as Elves of Golarion, and if we’re really honest with ourselves, the way that Golarion is written, most of that Campaign Setting Guide is human support. The other races would also eventually get “of Golarion” books too, including humans of all races, though half-orcs and half-elves only got roughly a third of a book in the form of Bastards of Golarion, which actually only came out in the last two years or so.

As far as Pathfinder’s concerned, there has—always—been more words printed about humans than any other race, and this tradition is MUCH older than Pathfinder. It goes back throughout 3.5 into every major campaign setting that TSR and Dungeons & Dragons ever published. (The only exception—might—be Faerun; that setting was comparatively crazy about elves instead of humanity, but even they managed at least three different splatbooks focused on human controlled regions during 3.5.) Now, there are two big things to take away from this, both which are sort of a slippery slope. First, there’s the fact that publishers tend to write what sells, so to a certain degree we can surmise that humanity might simply sell better than other races. Along those same lines, however, is the fact that the races were not balanced equally in terms of their racial abilities in 3.5 (and by inheritance, Pathfinder), so it’s possible that the “human demand” was self-engineered. “We’ll make humans a little more powerful so people will want to play them. Oops, we over shot it and now most people want to play human. Guess we better write all these books about human ethnicities and cultures.”

It’s not the perfect theory, but hey, it works. However, I think there’s another tradition at play here besides good old fashioned capitalism, and this one goes back WAY farther into the game’s past.

Silly Kitsune, Ethnicity is for Humans!

So when I had this conversation with D, the big elephant in the room was the simple fact that if races seemed like cardboard, then we as writers are intrinsically at fault because we decide what’s said about those races. And if we’re being completely honest with ourselves, there is absolutely no reason that races other than humans could not have ethnic groups. Honestly, some of them do in Pathfinder (elves, dwarves, arguably gnomes). However, there is ONE little uncomfortable smidge that Pathfinder does in this regard that is a long-standing tradition in fantasy that, in my opinion, we should REALLY do away with, and that’s the presentation of racial ethnicities as entirely new races.

Right, so stop and think about, say, dwarves for one moment. Do duergar REALLY need to be their own race? Do the ouat REALLY need to be locked into one specific archetype? Why are elves, aquatic elves, and drow their own separate races? Sure, you can go into grandiose tales about how those races were warped or twisted, but when we warp and twist humans we don’t go and make entirely new races out of them—their humanity is generally preserved, and when they’re warped enough that they’re not human anymore, we generally give them a new MONSTER stat block, not a new 0-Hit Die RACE stat block.

And this is a tradition that goes back WAY further than Pathfinder. Faerun had, like, a dozen different “races” of elves and three different “races” of dwarves. Even if you go and call them “subraces,” that goes as far as to imply that those races have drastically different heredities and genes and stuff. Going back even FURTHER, Warhammer and Warhammer 40K basically started this trope with their division of the elven race into THREE separate armies, but even they managed to pull off the idea that all three elven races were, essentially, one race with different political groups and attitudes towards human encroachment.

But when you get right down to it, how we present races is mostly in our control, both as writers and as GMs. I think my friend D has a great point when they say that races are usually presented in a vacuum, completely untouched by regional climates and politics, and I mostly think that’s a problem. When I talk about how I dislike Pathfinder humanocentrism, I’m talking about things like this—where humanity is fleshed out very regularly and all of the other races are left in very two-dimensional positions for years and years. If anything, we’re inviting people like D to assume that that the strange and wonderful creatures that we’ve designed are cardboard on a stage for humanity to exposit towards. And I think we can do better than that.

If you want to see me try to do better then that, I recommend picking up a copy of my recent race book, the Dynastic Races Compendium. In the DRC, I went and made sure that each of the four races that I wrote about had a few ethnic groups interspersed between them. From terrain-based kitsune cultures to body modification-based wayang clans, there’s several different rakes in that book regarding how ethnicities for different races could look if presented as such. I generally think that the Dynastic Races Compendium is a good model for what races could look like if properly given the same treatment as humanity in terms of depth, but hey, pick it up yourself and let me know what you think if you’re interested! I would love to hear from you about it.

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Complicating my desire to change up the AP was the fact that I accidentally invited six people to play instead of the standard four that the AP suggests. Granted, I was going to stick with five people, but after I accidentally gave someone the impression they could play with us, I didn’t want to be that guy and turn them down. But, I mean, let’s face it—it is SUPER difficult to challenge a six-person party using an Adventure Path that was written for four people. This made me wanted to change things EVEN MORE. So I experimented, and today I come bearing the fruit of my labors! For you, my dear readers.

Case #1 — No Party Like Ghoul Party

So in the first book of Strange Aeons, the party is expected to fight a bunch of ghouls. Now, I was REALLY worried that the PCs were going to blitz through that part of the adventure because, seriously? Three CR 2 ghouls versus a militia of level 3 players? They’d DEMOLISH those little ghouls! So I used my own advice, pulled out the GM’s Guide to Challenging Encounters, and toughed up the encounters. I put in two really high CR ghouls (two CR 7s) who used at-level gear and had suboptimal tactics for story reasons. (One of the ghouls is missing his left hand, as per the AP!) The party triumphed as I had hoped, but it was harrowing. I used the higher CR fighters as a means to infuse some additional wealth into the adventure as well. It was a win-win! However, there was ONE teeny problem….

“Who were those ghouls?” I froze when one of my players asked me this. I quickly came up with a good justification on the spot—they were former high-ranking security members of the Briarstone Aslyum. My players bought it. But … I didn’t. Challenging encounters are bested served as pivotal encounters for important scenes, and I went out of my way to modify those two encounters. In fact, the fighters, which would have likely taken ten to thirty minutes tops, lasted almost 90 minutes each. And while it was super fun to make them sweat, I kept coming back to that single question.

“Why?”

I didn’t understand why I felt that way until they had completed the third encounter that I had modified.

The Oneirogen

**WARNING — This next part has mild spoilers for the Strange Aeons Adventure Path**

The next encounter that I modified was with an oneirogen. I can’t really tell you what they are without spoiling some of the coolness of the Strange Aeons adventure path, but know that they’re outsiders with a cool connection to dreams and that they’re introduced in Strange Aeons Part 1.

So ‘In Search of Sanity’ HEAVILY foreshadows the oneirogens before they appear through roleplaying and discovery of these creatures, and unfortunately, I had REALLY built up them up to the PCs. Like, to the point that I realized that it was a problem when they started prebuffing right before they entered the chamber where they knew it was. They were expecting this BIG fight, but honestly, as written I knew that the oneirogen wouldn’t be a challenge at all. I had two choices—call the night early, or wing it. And being the Everyman Gamer, there was only one real option.

Wing it, baby.

I decided right away that I didn’t want this to be a lethal fight—I wanted the PCs to feel the epic scope of things and for the fight to feel spectacular and grand, but I didn’t want them to die to my hand-waving. So I did the cheapest trick in the book. I gave the monster the following spell at will as a supernatural ability: quickened mass unwilling shield. Why yes, I DID totally make that spell up, thank you!

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen unwilling shield, but it is AWESOME when you can spam it a lot. It’s basically shield other, but the target takes YOUR damage if they fail a Will save. So basically, I had the group walk into the room and had them each make a save on their turn. (I calculated the DC out to be 18; hard, but not impossible). If a PC failed, an unwilling shield was established between them and the oneirogan. If they passed, they were immune to the ability for 24 hours. As expected, most of my PCs failed. But rather than say, “Oh, now you have this mystic mumbo-jumbo,” on a second spontaneous whim, I decided to connect the failed save to the PCs. You see, the oneirogen in the AP are connected to dreams, and the PCs have lost a lot of their memories, so I decided to “give” some of those memories back by having scenes from the character’s backstories appear when they failed this save. For the elf who watched her mother get assassinated, the assassin appeared, taunting her. For the bard who thought he accidentally killed his parents, their dead, poisoned bodies appeared. So on and so forth.

Now as luck would have it, by the end of the first round, I had five unwilling shield effects up. As written, I’m PRETTY sure that in this case, I’m supposed to divide the damage up equally between all players. But that was boring and took too much math, so more spontaneous meddling–each time someone damaged the oneirogan, I rolled a random die and the player who I rolled got the damage. Barbarian attacking the monster and I roll ‘wizard’? Soooooorrry! It was REALLY fun and REALLY tense, but the best part? The players were all trying to roleplay in the middle of combat with these REALLY intense scenes from their backstories! It was awesome, and when I got home, I realized why the ghoul fights felt so underwhelming. 

Challenge as Tension

You ever notice how in movies, the most tense moments often involve a source of extreme challenge AND conflict? For example, in Rogue One, the scene isn’t tense when the heroes are doing well, even though there’s danger around. The reason is that its not IMPORTANT danger. It’s not “danger with a face,” so to speak.

That’s why things are SO much more tense at the final fight scene—main character on the roof, staring down the antagonist as rebels fight and die around her. You KNOW this villain is important. He has a name and a face, and moreover, his place in the story MAKES him a threat. So too is it with challenges. If every encounter is equally challenging, then the players have a harder time distinguishing when the important moments are. Those pivotal scenes in the adventure’s story that you WANT the PCs to know and remember. The “Boss Fights” as they were. If an adventure does it’s job well and foreshadows powerful enemies, THOSE are the times you want to step in and tweak up the difficulty. Make things fun, doable, but HARD. Make the PCs sweat. To put it another way, easy encounters are just as important as hard encounters—the easy encounters are VITAL to making the PCs feel like heroes, while the hard encounters make the PCs realize when things are important.

In my most recent game of Strange Aeons, the group is now dealing with a militia of juju zombbies. The zombies themselves aren’t hard, but it’s a LONG way between the MANY rooms of zombies and the important NPCs, so after two encounters with “smaller” groups of zombies, I decided to allow the militia to use its “call for reinforcements” tactics to call for help a little bit earlier than written. I had already foreshadowed that there were probably a LOT of zombies in the building, and I didn’t want my group to have to fight room after room of 1-2 zombie soldiers. It was a LOT cooler for them to be fighting a total of eight of them in waves, and it gave them time to shine using their tactics. (There was a great use of hold portal by our wizard, who effectively turned the room they were occupying into a one-way zombie grinder.) It was fun, interesting, sped up the part of the book a little bit, and also took the easy threat and boosted it up a little bit. They had fun, I had fun, and at the end of the day, that’s the reason you modify encounters—do it to create the most fun, evocative scenes you can at your tables. Not to simply give your PCs a rough time of it.

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

To me, the bard was just a class. I never really understand why the bard diehards loved it so much, nor did I understand why the haters hated it so much. I was also in this really weird position where about half of my 3.5 ground hated the bard because, “The bard can’t DPS, man!” where the other half loved it. As mentioned, I played one game as a dhampir bard WAY back in, like, 2008 or 2009 and that was it.

Being the inquisitive guy I am, after a LOT of internal discussion, I decided to round out my Reign of Winter’s PCs by picking a bard. Note that I say “round out” in only the most general of senses, as our group did not (and still does not) have a traditional 9^th-level arcane spellcaster, and I spent a LOT of time trying to decide whether to play a 9^th-level arcane spellcaster or a bard. While I’ll never know what could have been, I would absolutely LOVE to take some time to tell you about my experiences as a bard, what worked for me and what didn’t work for me, and if you’re on the fence, maybe you’ll be able to decide whether bard’s right for you too.

Rocky Start

From my perspective, being a bard was rocky for the first book in Reign of Winter. I got a taste of just how rocky life would be when I opened a door and was mauled by a trio of zombies, knocking me unconscious in the very first turn of the very first fight. I had built my bard to be a general skill-focused character who was very skill focused; I used trades to grab Disable Device, my spells were quality-of-life abilities designed to help my party out of a pickle, and of course I had inspire courage. In fact, I had all of the standard bard abilities—I didn’t take a single archetype on this character at first.

And I was rewarded with several additional “knock out” moments. I failed to disable a trapped chest and was knocked out by the trap’s damage. I was attacked by a bunch of rabid animals and knocked unconscious. I was left sitting in the snow, singing desperately to help my allies while at 0 hit points holding my internal organs in. Great times!

Basically, my experience was that as a low-level bard, you start singing and you keep singing if you can. That’s your thing. Its what you do. There are other abilities that you can take that are good, but when you’re in a martial-heavy party like I am (a bloodrager, a rogue, and a ranger, plus me and a life shaman), that extra +1 to hit and damage was basically all those melee types needed to make their attacks connect WAY more than they have any right to. It was a lesson that I learned quickly, but it also made the early levels (I’d say below 5^th) really, really boring.

The Prestige Class Quandry

Another thing that I tried to do early on was build into the Battle Herald prestige class. I had a player in a home game I ran who went battle herald, and he was absolutely AMAZING, and it was a build I wanted to try for myself. So I went bard / cavalier (daring champion) for the free Weapon Finesse, and carried around a rapier and a bow. The idea was that I could Dex switch hitch, and ultimately shoot and stab somewhere within the range of our ranger (who is a bow nomad kasatha) and our unchained rogue.

Let me tell you folks, that was a HORRIBLE idea for me. The prestige class works, and it works well, but the fact remains that I was trying to build a niche for myself as “the generalist,” but it didn’t work. Truth is that when another PC is better than you at everything, you end up being inconsequential rather than general. It was a hard lesson to learn, but thankfully my GM let me spend some gold and use an NPC bard we met along the way as a trainer so I could ditch my cavalier levels for straight bard levels, and lose some of the other niche abilities I had. For instance, having a trait and ranks in Disable Device didn’t matter when we had a trapfinding rogue and a trapper ranger. Having two people cover a base is fine, but truth was that I was a third wheel, and no one needs a third wheel in Pathfinder. So I ditched the cavalier levels and the Disable Device trait and rebuilt my character to capitalize on things our party didn’t have—arcane spellcasting, buffing, social skills, and Knowledge skills. It ended up REALLY working out for me; I clicked into these roles almost instantly since they were largely vacant prior to my focusing. I became the Know-It-All who could talk our group out of basically any problem. Better still, I was now Level 5—2^nd level spells and an inspire courage bonus of +2 does amazing things for the bard.

Alex’s Bard Strategy

As a bard, I had a general strategy for how I decided what options I would take. My strategy looked like this:

• Does it keep me generally away from the front lines? My time going for battle herald made me realize that I did NOT want to be near the front lines if I could help it, so I only took spells and feats that let me stay away from certain doom. I grabbed feats that let me shoot a shortbow pretty well when I didn’t want to magic, and I made sure that the majority of my spells could be cast with some distance between myself and my target. After all, most of my allies were in melee, and I decided that was NOT where I wanted to be. I spend most of my time around 30 feet from enemies, plinking them with arrows whenever I don’t have spells to cast. To further supplement this strategy, I took spells like jester’s jaunt and dimension door to help me (and my allies) keep distance when I needed to. It actually came into effect in our last game, where I teleported myself and my ranger ally directly out of the way of a massive Improved Vital Strike death machine because holy crap, I did NOT want to be near those jaws!
• Does it allow me to do something that no one else in the group can cover? I had spent enough time with my battle herald build to know that I needed to be able to bring something new and different to the table to have fun. Since our only other spellcaster is a shaman, this was pretty easy to accomplish. Our spell lists don’t overlap much, but when they did, I erred on the side of picking something different rather than doubling up.
• Can it get us out of jams? This ended up being WAY more important than question #2. I picked most of the arcane utility spells that I had access to that let the party escape trouble or deal with enemies. For instance, glitterdust for invisible creatures, or grease for big creatures with weapons (or for preventing charges, which is AMAZING). Spells like hold person/hold monster, dimension door, liberating command, and saving finale have let me provide an answer to a problem so many times, I can only name a few before I risk you all getting bored and reading something else! One time, I dimension doored my party out of a TPK. Another time, I hit a miniboss who was so mobile that she was impossible to full attack with hold monster as a readied action and paralyzed her against all odds (she was a monk!). I’ve rescued friends from being swallowed using liberating command, allowed friends to remake vital saves with saving finale, and one time, I even used the countersong ability to nullify a suggestion spell. Having the answers to those problems felt incredible, and it really made me appreciate my bard more.
• Does it make my allies better? When you play a bard, your primary job is to make your allies better. No other spellcaster has the perfect spell list that you have for this purpose, not even the wizard. You get certain buffs before sorcerer/wizards, and you get plenty that they never receive. Inspire courage is obviously the bread and butter of this playstyle, but the bard has plenty of other tricks up his sleeve. Among them, haste (everyone is a murder machine!), heroism, good hope (its like heroism cranked up to 11 and basically bard only), and heroic finale. Oh man, heroic finale. I LOVE that spell. You basically end your performance to give another ally an instant move action or standard action. My favorite thing to do with that spell is to grant our party cavalier (formerly our bloodrager, one death later) a standard action so he can immediately use his Improved Vital Strike attack as an immediate action. One time, I used heroic finale like this to end a combat. Another dumb plan of mine is to use it when an adjacent spellcaster manages to cast defensively. Screw you, spellcaster! He’s attacking you ANYWAY! The final spell that I picked was greater invisibility, which I basically took for our party rogue. Not only was it a great defensive buff for him, but it also let him murder things indiscriminately. How great is that?
• Do I have a way to ruin everyone’s day? Now, when I say this, I don’t mean the party. I mean my enemies. I believe that an effective spellcaster has an action that has a reasonable chance to affect every kind of opponent, meaning that you should always have something that you can “do” in every situation. For my bard, this mean that I a) wanted to be decent at attacking with at least one kind of weapon, in case my spells weren’t going to be the best option, b) wanted to have a spell that targeted each kind of saving throw. As a bard, your vs. Reflex and vs. Fortitude options are somewhat limited, but I like having grease as a general, “In case they’re not nimble” spell, and ear-piercing scream in case they have bad Fortitude. (Note—I still need a bit of luck with these super low-level spells, but they work.) For Will, I have PLENTY of choices—namely hold person, hold monster, and hideous laughter. Overall, this means that I usually have a “day wrecking” spell for every occasion.

This reevaluation of my bard’s strategy helped me tremendously in how I played my bard, and I like to think that I’m a generally useful party member for it. I typically have a spell for most situations, whether that’s stopping an enemy or boosting an ally, and when all else fails I’m a decent shot with my bow. Sadly, I’m pretty sure that to 3 of 4 of my fellow party members, I’m, “The guy that gives me +5 to attack and damage between inspire courage and good hope.” And you know what? That’s A-okay by me!

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Now, I mentioned in my last article that getting freelancers to the point where they’re standardized is the hardest part of being a publisher. Well, I’m going to go ahead and say that innovativeness and creativity are the easiest, which is weird because they’re the aspects that people largely associate with writing the most. (ESPECIALLY innovativeness.) The reason that these are “easy,” however, isn’t because I have an easy time teaching them to freelancers. It’s because that both  aspects are basically binary, “I have it,” or “I don’t” aspects of freelancing. Now, one shouldn’t take this as, “I don’t have this now and I never will,” because like standardization and legal, anyone can learn how to be innovative and how to be timely.

Timeliness, or Doing What You Said You Would

You would think that publishers would LOVE it when you have timeliness, right? Well, honestly, we don’t. We EXPECT timeliness, and are infuriated by lateness. Basically, timeliness factors in heavily to your overall professionalism as a writer. Do you get things done when we’ve agreed that they need to be done? Are milestones in at the right time? Do you have the turnover ready when I need it? That sort of thing. Being timely is more of a maintenance thing—you’re maintaining the already understood notion that you are a competent worker. You’re only ever really going to “stand out” for timeliness if your publisher contacts you with a rush job, you accept it, and you manage to meet their rushed deadline. For example, when I worked on Weapon Master’s Handbook with David N. Ross, we were both given a time table for 16 pages (about 24,000 words) with a two-week turnaround, and GenCon fell on one of those weeks (which we were both attending). However, we both succeeded and subsequently, we both got more work from our developer as a result of us being able to help as quickly as we did. And that’s what “timeliness” is—a means to either get more work, or never work with that publisher again.

Innovativeness, or That Thing Called Writing

Hey! It took us almost two months to get here, but now we’re FINALLY going to talk about your writing ability. Your innovativeness can and will get you jobs. This is a fact, but like timeliness, this isn’t something I can teach you. If your head isn’t filled with good ideas, well, then you need to fill it up yourself. The best way to do this is to consume LOTS of information. Other writers will often tell you to stick to stories, video games, fantasy TV, and the like, but let me tell you that sources like that do NOT lead to innovation. Why? Because that’s where EVERYONE goes, and if you want to be innovative, you can’t be “everyone.” So really, the best thing you can do is read, learn, and RESEARCH. Researching is SUCH a huge part of innovation, I cannot even begin to describe it to you. Like, seriously—when other people ask me about my writing work the #1 misconception that they make is assuming that I just sit down at a keyboard, crack my knuckles, and stuff flows onto the page. That is not how writing works. Not. At. All. You need to KNOW things to be able to write about them, so researching the story you want to tell and experiencing it for yourself is the best way to do that.

To give an example, I’ve been working on my first published adventure, a Fox’s Wedding, for a while. Now, there’s a hefty portion of my adventure is set to take place in the spirit world, and I only have a little bit of a background knowledge on eastern “spirit world” ideology. (I watched both Avatar series for their take on it, so that was my basis.) So, what did I decide to do? I researched fantasy and literary takes on the concept of a spirit world. I read historical texts that discussed the myths, and I sat down and watched one of the most famous spirit world movies, Spirited Away. The hours I spent doing that research gave me plenty of things to think about that ultimately improved my ability to write the story I wanted to tell.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing an adventure, a campaign setting, or rules—research, research, RESEARCH! After all, all good ideas are built upon the shoulders of the ideas that came before.

Final Thoughts

Well, there you have it! With this final article, you have all my thoughts on what you need to do and know to be a successful freelancer for a tabletop roleplaying game. The work is never as easy as you think it’ll be, but it is very fun and fulfilling to see your name in an official product. It takes MONTHS, if not YEARS of work to get to the point where “senpai notices you,” so to speak, but if you work hard and make yourself marketable by using the steps described here, you’ll be well on your way to building up the game you love so very much!

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

As a publisher, getting my freelancers to the point where they are standardized is the hardest thing about working with freelancers. As special and cool as any given freelancer thinks her ideas are, ideas are cheap. While idea generation as a skill can be valuable (we’ll talk about that in two weeks when we get to the final marketability item, innovative), if you get a room filled with 100 chipanzees with no training into a room with a bunch of type writers, probability states that eventually at least one good idea will be created in there somewhere. The truth of the matter is that everyone has good ideas, and what’s worse, I can be inspired by other people’s good ideas for free. Whether we’re talking about drawing on the works of famous literary works, taking inspiration from something another company did, or even just browsing an internet threat where people are chatting, ideas are EVERYWHERE, and no one’s ideas, not even a professional’s ideas, are priceless.

The value of an idea is in its application, and that is the essence of standardization.

Types of Standardization

When we talk about standardization in Pathfinder, we’re talking two avenues in particular—standardization of text, and standardization of mechanics. Another way to discuss this idea is to call standardization Pathfinder’s “Voice,” it’s the way in which words and ideas are presented to the reader. Both types of standardization are similar, but also very different. If you master these skills as a freelancer, your publisher will notice, especially if they’re very text-oriented, and it will likely get you more work. Each type of standardization is very different, however, so I’d like to take the time to go over them both separately.

Mechanical Standardization

In the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, no ability is ever worded the way it is by accident. For example, we never say “a large zombie” in our rules text unless we mean “a Large zombie,” meaning specifically that some terms have very specific meanings within the context of the game’s mechanics, and those concepts are more important then figurative language. For example, the word “missile” means “projectile” and the spell snowball is a magic effect, but to call snowball a “magic missile” is wrong. We would need to use one of the appropriate terms, such as “a ranged spell” or a “1^st-level spell” or a “ranged touch attack.” All are appropriate in terms of the game’s mechanics.

But mechanical standardization goes beyond “flavor text,” it also applies to the way mechanics themselves are written. For instance, everything from spells to feats to classes are written and presented in a very specific order in Pathfinder. They are consistency, and writers are expected to find and follow that consistency too. The best way to learn this consistency is to play the game, and note how things are worded. More importantly then how, note why. For instance, have you ever noticed that all fighter archetypes are written with male third-person pronouns, while all swashbuckler archetypes are written with female third-person pronouns, while all feats are written in second-person? This is a conscious choice on Paizo’s part (class content always uses the gender of the class’s iconic character), and a good publisher will want to make their products feel more “official” by copying Paizo’s choices, which in turn means that they expect their freelancers to do the same.

A good resource for learning mechanical standardization is Rogue Genius Games’ style guide. It includes TONS of little nuances that you probably never noticed, but are consistently employed throughout the game. If you are serious about being a freelancer, especially one who works for Paizo, read RGG’s list. Know it and love it.

Textual Standardization

Just as Pathfinder has a common voice in its rules, its next has a common voice as well. This type of standardization is much harder to pick up and relies a lot more on not only your best judgment, but your developer’s best judgment too. As a general rule, Pathfinder tends to avoid second-person in its writing—feats, spells, and certain rules systems are really the only exceptions. Additionally, Pathfinder tends to avoid dwelling on one subject for too long, and they avoid telling the GM more than the minimum that is needed about a given subject. This is hard for more flowery writers, but in a game like Pathfinder, it’s often form over function unless you’re writing things that you intend the GM to read. Think of it this way—if you were planning on using a monster in your game as a GM, do you want Paizo telling you exactly how to use it and why, or do you want to be able to fit it into your game as it works best for you?

In addition, Pathfinder’s default gender is female. Meaning that if you don’t have a good reason to use male pronouns (such as “I’m writing an archetype for a fighter), you should use female pronouns. Another good rule to keep in mind is that Paizo always uses one space after their periods, not two. Apparently that’s a thing that’s hard for some people—I don’t know, one space is always how I learned it in school myself. Finally, make sure you’re using English spellings (anything non-English is itanlicized) and always make sure your voice “sounds” like Paizo’s. This is a skill that you will only pick up if you practice—I recommend picking up Paizo’s books and reading them often, out loud if possible. That’s the only way to get good at this type of standardization.

Final Thoughts on Standardization

Now, before you go nuts and start making read aloud groups, I will admit that as far as publishing goes, textual standardization is icing on the cake compared to mechanical standardization. Unless you’re planning on being a fiction author, it is WAY more important to write rules the way that Paizo does.

As you might have guessed, standardization is an art you must master, rather than a skill that I can teach you. When you get good at standardization, your publishers will know, and you will get work because your work is standardized. One of the common comments that I personally get from Paizo developers who look at my work is that, “They can always tell when I work on something because it always accounts for the little details that would have otherwise broken the option.” Does the feat work weirdly with an archetype from Ultimate Combat? I note it. Does the archetype provide a broken combo with a spell from Ultimate Magic? I note it and close the exploit. Having a strong working repertoire of the game’s rules and how they’re written will help you keep your work solid and memorable in the eyes of everyone who reads it.

But ultimately, the best way for you to learn how to do this is to read and reference CONSTANTLY. If you want to write something, check to see if Paizo has published anything (and I mean ANYTHING) with similar wording and use that wording to start your work. For instance, whenever I want to say, “This option uses your level as your effective class level,” my go-to reference is the sanctified slayer archetype for inquisitors, especially the studied target ability. I ALWAYS use how that archetype references the slayer class as my baseline for how my rules should reference other classes for determining effective levels. Using and researching Paizo’s rules as an example for standardizing your writing is the best, most efficient way to make sure that your work is standardized.

Next week, we’re going to hit the last two of the four important marketability traits for Pathfinder Freelancers—Timely. And don’t you worry, this one won’t be late!

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

You see, innovativeness, the generation of good ideas, is what will get you hired once. But innovativeness will NOT get you hired multiple times if you are not timely, standardized, or lawful. And if you get one gig and never freelance again, guess what? You were never a freelancer to begin with. To be a freelancer is to get multiple assignments and continuous work. And frankly, innovativeness is the EASIEST of the four quality to get. Good ideas are cheap. Being able to write those ideas down effectively is skill, and that is governed by your timeliness, standardization, and lawfulness.

So today, just to be spiteful, I am going to talk about lawfulness. So buckle up all of you self-described chaotic neutrals—we’re about to get axiomatic.

The Laws of the Land

Lawfulness, as it applies to freelancers, is the ability to fall the rules of freelancing. And believe me, there are rules. Your publisher, be it Paizo or Everyman Gaming LLC, will have rules and regulations for you to follow. They’ll have specific forms they want you to follow, templates to use, design paradigms, the works. Even if they’re all, “Do whatever is awesome!” that’s still a rule that you need to follow, albeit an easy one.

However, there are two crucial rules that all PUBLISHERS need to follow when it comes to producing content, and if you as a freelancer are familiar enough with those rules that you make your publisher’s life easier, then guess what? You’re going to get hired again. Now, the two most basic rules, in order of importance, are the Open Gaming License (“OGL”) and the Pathfinder Compatibility License (“PCL”). These rules serve an INCREDIBLY different purpose, so you’ll need to follow me on their differences. I firmly believe that a rule is difficult to follow if you don’t know the origin, so we’re going to take a minute to talk about them. Let’s Go!

OGL, the Reason for the Season

The OGL is arguably the most important piece of legal information for any Third-Party Publisher, Paizo Inc itself included. The OGL was originally created WAY back by Wizards of the Coast in 2000. Ryan Dancey, the “Father of Open Gaming” spearheaded the OGL’s creation, which would allow individuals, amateur companies, and professional companies and groups to publish works derived from the 3.5 Edition of D&D under a format called the “Systems Reference Document,” (“SRD”) under the d20 System Trademark. This move was HUGE. It ushered in the open gaming movement, which basically allowed Third-Party publishers to reference select Dungeons and Dragons copyrighted trademarks, rules, and mechanics. Without the creation of the SRD and OGL, Pathfinder would not exist, as mechanical concepts like feats, the Vancian spellcasting system, or even common lingo like the “d20” couldn’t be used, nor could classic D&D concepts like the tarrasque. I will reiterate—the OGL represents generosity that is simply unseen in the business sector, and our “industry” largely exists in the capacity it does today because of the OGL. If you are a 3PPublisher or freelancer, you absolutely owe every dollar you’ve ever made writing or selling 3PP to the OGL, so it is crucial for you to know what the OGL is and how to comply with it.

So the first thing I’m going to do is provide you with the mandated OGL that you can get from Wizards of the Coast’s open gaming foundation site: http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/ogl.html

Second, here’s the OGL link that the Pathfinder Reference Document (the PRD) uses: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/openGameLicense.html

So you’ll probably notice a few things about the OGL—first, points 1 through 14 look the same in both documents. Second, Point 15 is MUCH larger in the PRD’s than in Wizard’s. That’s because whenever you reference copyrighted material, you need to include that material’s OGL copyright, plus ALL copyrights that the material uses.

For instance, let’s say you wanted to reference the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook. You would first need a copy of the OGL as it appears on Wizards of the Coast’s site—this is basically the “core agreement,” so to speak. Next, you would need the OGL copyright of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook—you can find that in the back of the CRB, under its OGL declaration. Third and finally, you would need to include a copy of EVERY OGL declaration in the CRB that isn’t already on your license in your product’s OGL. (This means you don’t need to cite the Open Game License twice, but you would need a copy of the SRD, the Book of Experimental Might, and the Tome of Horrors.

This requirement of the OGL to include copyrights of every product referenced in your book is what makes many 3PP OGLs so long—EVERYTHING you use must be legally cited. It doesn’t even matter if you reference a product’s name in your text—if any part of that product appears in your product, you need its copyright information in your OGL’s section 15.

As a result, effective freelancers ONLY use OGL products in their work (aka its from a product with the Open Gaming License somewhere in the text), and they ALWAYS give a list of those products to their publishers. Freelancers who want to REALLY impress their 3PP will compile the Section 15s of all products they use and hand that over with their turnover, preferably in alphabetical order. (Note that Paizo will never make you do that.)

Now, this is enough information to bring us to the SECOND important legal document—the Pathfinder Compatibility License

PCL, the Heir to 3.5

Okay, so the first thing that you need to know is that the OGL only covers game mechanics. Things that could be considered stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes, and any artistic rendition of a product’s likeness or trade dress is NOT covered under the OGL. This means that the idea of “goblins” as “small, green, big heads, long ears, and lovers of fire?” TECHNICALLY that isn’t covered under the OGL, as that would fall under the “depictions” clause of the OGL.

And that’s not the only thing! TECHNICALLY every product Paizo has ever published would be considered “language” and “trade dress.” As would the name of the game, the “Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.” TECHNICALLY you can’t cite ANYTHING with the word Pathfinder.

That is, you can’t. Without the Pathfinder Compatibility License.

The OGL has a clause under Section 1 that notes if you want to use any of those elements I listed above, you need to enter a separate agreement with the IP holder (in this case, Paizo). That “separate agreement” is known as the Pathfinder Compatibility License. (For Starfinder, it’s called the Starfinder Compatibility License.) You can read the PCL here: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/compatibility .

So, the PCL has a bunch of sections too, and they basically spell out what you can and cannot use. If you sign the PCL agreement, you basically have to honor all of Paizo’s trademarks, adhere to all of their rules, and refrain from using the license in a way that suggests that your product is a Paizo product or is directly endorsed by Paizo. This means you can’t make your product LOOK like a Paizo product via font or background or whatnot, you can’t include trademarked terms (this includes Pathfinder or Pathfinder Roleplaying Game). The license is also notes what happens if you breach it, notes that the license is not compatible with any product that could be considered “adult” or “inappropriate for minors,” and Paizo can terminate the license whenever they want. There’s also a whole bunch of disclaimers you have to include on the title page of your product, and you get a PCL logo you have to put on the front and back of your product.

It sounds harsh, but it is REALLY generous. Specifically, this agreement allows you to reference and cite specific Paizo products.

If you scroll down to the end of the PCL to Exhibit B, you’ll see a list of products that you’re allowed to reference in your OGL product. It is basically every Core Rulebook product, plus the Bonus Bestiary. Section 5 also describes how referencing works works in products—there’s actually a very specific format you’re supposed to follow that can be altered slightly, but not much. Its basically section, then chapter, than book.

The big takeaways from this for freelancers is Exhibit B. That is the list of products that you are allowed to directly call out by name and/or reference in a 3PP. If a product isn’t listed there, YOU CANNOT REFERENCE IT. You can republish everything you want under the OGL and include the product you took the text from in your Section 15, but you CANNOT reference the product that the content comes from by name.

For instance, let’s say you LOVED the kitsune rules I wrote in Blood of the Beast, and you wanted to sell me a product that built on them, and you included a rules element that referenced Blood of the Beast in the following manner: “see the kitsune section in Pathfinder Player Companion: Blood of the Beast.” That, technically, is a legal wordage for a reference as per Section 5, but the reference itself is illegal because Pathfinder Player Companion: Blood of the Beast does not appear on Exhibit B of the PCL. If you wanted to use something from Blood of the Beast, you would have to lift the content whole cloth and note that to me, so I could put Blood of the Beast’s copyright info into my product’s Section 15.

THIS IS ENTIRELY LEGAL, and its thanks to the OGL. Blood of the Beast may not be part of the PCL agreement, but it was published under the OGL, and therefore anything that isn’t IP is fair game.

Summary

To sum this up, here are some takeaway points:

• The OGL lets you use game mechanics from other OGL products. You need to include a copy of the OGL in everything you write for Pathfinder, and list ALL OGL products that you reference in your product’s Section 15.
• The PCL lets you reference select Paizo products in the body of your products. It counts as a “separate agreement” as defined by the OGL, and works hand-in-hand with that product. The PCL has additional requirements and restrictions imposed by Paizo itself, but the ability to cite Paizo’s work makes it ultimately worth the small hassle it provides.

Next time, I’ll be talking about standardization, which revolves around taking these laws and legal precedents and using them to properly cite and reference your products, as well as “write good.” So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Well, I hate to break it to you, folks, but the vast majority of RPG customers are NOT RPG design prodigies—hours spent skimming through submissions during the now-defunct RPG Superstar taught us that much. And let me tell you, NO ONE knows this better then an industry person who has to actively sift through fan submissions. I’m willing to bet that Tim Nightengale, patron of the fantastic Wayfinder fanzine, knows this better than anyone, but any publisher who has ever had a new designer work for them has gone through this “anti-honeymoon,” or for the purpose of this article, “the cough syrupmoon.” Because man-oh-man, taking in and molding new talent is GOOD for your company in the long run, but sometimes new writers REALLY do not go down easy!

But today’s article isn’t for publishers—I’m not about to tell them how to pick their people for projects. (At least, not yet anyway.) Instead, I want to target this article, the first in a four-part series, to the rabid fan who is brimming with great ideas that they’re just itching to sell to someone / get published. Because honestly, THEY’RE the one who needs the support, not the publishers. With that in mind, let’s get started!

Marketability and You

Now, if this was a conventional article, you’d be getting all of this advice about how to brainstorm or how to come up with ideas, but I’m not wasting your time with that. I assume that if you’re serious about writing for RPGs, you probably already have ideas swishing about in your mind. You have inspiration that you think is good enough to get you published. So instead of helping you learn how to be creative, I’m going to teach you about how to be pragmatic with your creativity. This probably surprises you, but here’s the thing—you pick the most God-awful actor in Hollywood today and Hollywood can do a lot to “improve them in post” using advanced techniques like CGI, voice sampling, and image rendering. But let me ask you this—how much do those techniques cost to employ? Millions upon millions of dollars, perhaps? While it won’t cost your publisher / developer millions upon millions of dollars to clean up your work after you’ve submitted it, it DOES cost that publisher creative and financial time to fix what you’ve done. And folks, let me be the confirmation—if you are too difficult to work with, your publisher WILL dump you. Your skills need to be marketable for you to be successful as a freelancer, and that means that your product needs to be something your publisher can use.

So, what makes you marketable? Well, I’m glad you asked! Below are, in my opinion, the four most important qualities that freelancers need to be marketable.

Innovative

Everyman Gaming, my personal 3PP, has a slogan that was no accident. “Innovation is never more than a page away.” I picked this slogan intentionally, since I knew the importance of innovation when it came to RPG consumers. But what, you might be asking, is innovation?

Innovation is, simply put, something new. A new method, a new product, a new idea. In Pathfinder terms, I specifically use innovation to mean, “Something that’s never been done before, or something old presented in a new way.” To be a marketable freelancer, your ideas needed to show that you’re capable of doing things differently from the way they’ve been done, because newness sells and stagnation kills businesses. This means that going up to a publisher and offering, “archetypes that let every class gain trapfinding in a near identical way” is probably not going to be an enticing pitch, regardless of how well-balanced your ideas are, because they lacks innovations.

Of course, innovation can be taken TOO far. If your ideas are so new and shiny that they lack and solid foundation from which your customers can use to scaffold your new concept, there’s a good chance they’re not going to like your ideas at first (possibly ever) because they’re too hard to get around.

Timely

There are two aspects to “timely” when it comes to the marketability of your work—timely in the sense of need and timely in the sense of production. A timely product is one that the players want and need—it fills a niche that players are clamoring for, and does so at the perfect moment. As an example, Paizo’s Pathfinder Unchained product is timely because Pathfinder was about 5 years old when it came out, and Paizo had built up enough credit with their community that people started to wonder, “What could Paizo do if they had done the game their way instead of 3.5’s way.” Releasing Unchained right after the Core Rulebook, however, would NOT have been a timely move. Always make sure that it is a good time for your product. (Because it isn’t always.)

Along different lines, timely can also refer to your practices as a freelancer. To be marketable, you need to be able to move and adapt to changes quickly. Not only does this mean that you need to turn in your turnovers on time, but you also need to respond to questions and provide feedback quickly. Doing so improves your professionalism, which will also help you be a better fit for whomever you are working with.

Standardized

Your work needs to be standardized in the sense that it fits with the style and form of the 1PP. You might not like that, you might think its absolutely terrible, but your work sells a LOT better when it feels “as good as First Party, if not better,” and you get that from standardization of language and game mechanics balancing.

Lawful

Trust me when I saw that I can hear the “Hur dur I’m Chaotic Neutral!” jokes from Philadelphia, but the #1 thing that separates “good” 3PP freelancers from “great” 3PP is respect for the law—specifically the laws of 3PP tabletop publishing, the OGL and the Pathfinder Compatibility License.

And there you have it, the four basic tenants that YOU need in order to be a good 3PP freelancer. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be looking at each of these tenants in-depth and talking about ways that you can improve your writing and design by following these tenants.

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Before we begin, I’d like to state the obvious—not every Smark likes the same kind of content, and not every Mark likes the same kind of content. Few things in life are black and white—life is a spectrum, and when we free ourselves from binary thinking, we begin to truly be able to understand our fellow man. (Or elf. Or dwarf. Or gnome. Or halfling. Or kitsune. Or ratfolk….)

That said, there are strategies we CAN use to make things attractive to both sides of the coin when we’re designing. That’s because a pure-Mark player is looking for something very different from a pure-Smark player, and today we’re going to go over both.

Marks, or, “Do These Pants Make Me Look Fat?”

When designing for Marks, “image” is the first thing you should think of. In this respect, the Mark player is very much a fashionesta—he wants every option he takes to directly add to the overall presentation of his character, if he can help it. Presentation, as used here, refers to the manner in which the Mark uses his character to interact with the game world. As a result, Marks prefer options that are tied to specific locations and places in campaign settings. They also like options that give mechanical justification to their character’s background. “My character is from Varisia, so she has the X feat and the Y archetype.”

This doesn’t mean that Marks shy away from options that lack setting flavor or power. On the contrary, they’re all about setting neutral options as long as they create something cool in their heads. For instance, Improved Familiar is a very powerful feat, but when a Mark looks at it, he often says, “I want this because it gives me a companion BFF that fits perfectly with my character’s presentation.” They want the angel familiar because their character is good and associated with angels, or they want the pipefox familiar because they’re going with a Japanese yokai theme. They love archetypes like the kami medium, which creates a very vivid, very specific style of character.

Now, what options do Marks hate? They often dislike options that they feel EVERYONE has. Marks crave uniqueness of character, just like every other player, but unlike Smarks, who solely want uniqueness of effect, Marks want uniqueness of source too. They also often want things that make them cool and special both on and off the battlefield—they are far more likely to appreciate a more niche option with few combat uses and appreciate options that only work out of character. Feats like Orator or Esoteric Linguistics are much more the domain of Marks than Smarks for this reason.

Smarks, or, “Do These Pants Protect Me From Conflagration?”

Smarks want one thing, and one thing only—results. For them, options are the means with which they build their character, and unlike Marks they don’t often care too much of the options precisely fit every small little aspect of their character. If Marks are Fashionestas, Smarks are Lumberjacks—they wear what they like and what they like is stuff that suits them. They don’t care if things are “stereotypical” and “cookie cutter” is a feature, not a flaw. More then anything, Smarks want their cool build concept / idea to work, and they often want it to work efficiently. To them, what their character DOES is more important than who their character IS. They want to be able to say, “My character is a fencing champion from Varisia, and she can do X, Y, and Z.”

As implied with that last statement, Smarks are not afraid to pick options that befit their characters or their backgrounds. However, those options need to be effective at whatever playstyle their character has, and they’re not afraid to build their character’s history and personality around the options they pick. For example, a Smark would see no problem with being a trans boy from Varisia who left home and studied at the University of Lepidstalt to take the Ustalavic Duelist archetype before traveling off to Qadira where the campaign is set to begin. In essence, a Smark takes what options are available and tweaks them to suit their character.

Now, what options do Smarks hate? Well, some Smarks, despite what was said above, HATE things with explicated ties to a specific campaign setting. This is an issue of customization—they want to be able to pick out the fabric of their clothes, choose the color, and tailor it to who their character is. They don’t care about how “pretty” the fabric was at the beginning as well as it does the job the Smark wants it to do. Smarks also hate options that they personally perceive as “useless,” which we’ll define as, “Something that wouldn’t make my character better.” For instance, they’d look at the Orator or Esoteric Linguistics feat and call it garbage because it isn’t a feat they could see themselves taking.

Designing for Smarks and Marks

At first, these goals seem counterintuitive. How do you make something rich in flavor for one person, yet easily tailorable to unique characters for another?

Well, if we look at the lists for each Smark and Mark, we come up with the following common themes:

— Must be evocative. (Marks)

— Must be customizable. (Smark)

— Must be cool and unique. (Mark)

— Must be pragmatic and worth taking. (Smark)

So, the best way to hit all of these things is as follows:

1) Keep the flavor to the descriptive text. Archetypes and feats both have “descriptive entries,” and the best way to make the Mark happy and the Smark sated is to keep your flavor in those places. Use that space to tell the Mark how your option fits in the campaign world or talk up the option so your Mark player is hyped up, but don’t use too much of that setting flavor in the actual mechanics of the feat so the player has more freedom to decide how their character interacts with that option. Note that Smark players will forgive moving flavor to other parts of an archetype or feat if the flavor makes mechanical sense. For instance, having a feat for kitsune that alters how Change Shape works or an archetype for drow that builds on their racial spell-like abilities will feel fitting to a Smark because those options have direct mechanical ties into their respective races. But no ties, no good according to most Smarks.

2) Make your option cinematic and tailored to a specific playstyle. Marks hate it when they feel their options aren’t special, and Smarks want to play viable options. Therefore, the best way to make a new option is to design it in a way that it exploits “mechanical niche” that has few options available to it. (Or that is restricted to a specific type of character—broading niches, confusingly, is also a niche you can explore if you are gingerly designing said new option.)

3) Make your option useful and helpful. Marks want to feel cool and awesome, and Smarks don’t want to waste their time with terrible options, so make sure that your option feels cool and is also an option that is mechanically viable.

Next Time

Whelp, that’s all I have to say on designing for Smarks and Marks this week. Next week, I am going to be shifting gears to talk about what is my favorite kind of design—race design. Races are a HUGE part of both your character creation and your setting creation, so designing cool, interesting races is vital both to get players and GMs interested in your game.

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

LET’S GET READY TO WREESSSSSTLE!

All right, before I begin my explanation, please be aware that I am NOT in to professional wrestling, so if I get something wrong please correct me in the comments.

In professional wrestling, the terms “Marks” and “Smarks” refer to the people in the audience who are watching the wrestling match. As many of you know, professional wrestling is LITTERED with rivalries and trash talk and … its all a performance. All of it. Sorry if I crashed your bubble. So, the first thing that is important to point out about the audience is that basically everyone knows that the rivalries and the trash talking is all just a performance for entertainment. As South Park put it, its all subtext. Most people don’t believe that any of it is real, but how Marks and Smarks handle this knowledge differs drastically. The history of the terms “Marks” and “Smarks” has a fair bit of insulting history behind it (mostly going back to the early days of Pro Wrestling, before it was widely known that most of the wrestling was for show). Instead, I’m going to use the modern terminology for this.

Marks are the people who follow wrestling casually. They care more about the drama and the stories then the actual construction of the match, even though they know it isn’t real.

Smarks (or Smart Marks, as they like to call themselves) are the people who study and analyze matches, root out backstage gossip, and generally take wrestling more seriously.

Generally, in wrestling, Marks don’t know that they’re Marks—they’re too casual to be familiar with the lingo, so even today it’s a term that largely gets thrown around by people who identify as Smarks.

So with this in mind, how can we apply Marks and Smarks to Pathfinder? Well, I’m glad you asked.

LET’S GET READY TO ROLL DIIIIIIICE!

Bringing the terminology of “Marks” and “Smarks” to Pathfinder is pretty easy. Change “Wrestling” to “Pathfinder,” “Match” to “mechanics,” and “backstage” to “freelancer/developer.”

Watch the magic unfurl.

Marks are the people who follow PATHFINDER casually. They care more about the drama and the stories then the actual construction of MECHANICS match, even though they know it isn’t real.

Smarks (or Smart Marks, as they like to call themselves) are the people who study and analyze MECHANICS, root out FREELANCER/DEVEOPER gossip, and generally take PATHFINDER more seriously.

Boom! Instant application! So, what do we do with it?

Marks and Smarks, the Eternal Struggle!

In professional wrestling, the advent of the internet has allowed the Mark and Smark communities to mingle better then they did back in the days of newsletters and video tape trading, which has caused the line dividing Mark and Smark to blur drastically. You’ll see Marks talk about how they don’t like certain wrestlers and will leave when thy’re on, and you’ll see Smarks enjoy wrestlers who aren’t the “technical perfection” in the ring simply because they enjoy them.

Pathfinder has shades of this too. There are Marks who are very mechanics-savvy and there are Smarks who get engrossed in the story, even established Campaign Settings like Pathfinder’s. And neither side is really any better than the other—both wrestling and Pathfinder have hard-core fans that insist upon the difference, usually by emphasizing each other’s negative stereotypes or overall acting poorly. But even as divides blur and ethnical morality ebbs between the two, at the end of the day people come to each conversation with one of these two mindsets, and some of the biggest clashes you’ll see in shared spaces between the two groups happen because of this differentiating ideology.

For example, about a week ago this big conversation erupted on Paizo’s forums involving the new Bladed Brush feat (the one I featured on Iconic Design last week) and whether or not its requirement of “must worship Shelyn” was a fair one. Another one of my friends, Isabelle Lee, pointed the thread out to me. Reading the post, it was fairly split between Marks and Smarks. The Smarks attacked the feat, saying that it made no sense to have a deity component in the prerequisites because there was nothing divine about the feat’s benefit. The Marks defended the feat, saying that it clearly represented Shelyn herself and how her followers would likely wield a glaive, and that the feat appeared alongside a Shelyn Prestige Class so it made sense. The Smarks didn’t like that the feat told them how to play their character. The Marks say that as a feature, not a flaw.

But ultimately, is any one of them wrong? Well, yes and no. When we talk about Pathfinder, we’re mostly talking about opinions on both sides. That’s because of the simple truth that true Marks don’t care about the numbers or the statistics, as long as things look and feel good, and true Smarks don’t really know the ins and outs of the game. They THINK they do, mind you, and modern Pathfinder players (Marks and Smarks) are more informed then they ever were, but that doesn’t change the fact that neither Marks nor Smarks are the people who write the game.

Or are they?

The Third Element

In professional wrestling, there is a “third” category of “audience” member beyond Marks and Smarks—the Smarts. Originally, Smarts were named so because they were the ones who planned the wrestling matches. They’re the ones who wrote scripts and set up matches. They were the “smart” people who knew wrestling was fake because they were the ones who made it. To this extent, a Smark or “Smart Mark” was so named because they were a Mark (someone in the audience who wasn’t involved in production) who knew that everything was fake, like a Smart.

In Pathfinder, its possible to say that a “Smart” is someone who helps make the game itself—a designer or developer or author. But Pathfinder is WAY more complicated than wrestling in this aspect in that people who were in the audience ascend to production with relative frequency. For instance, Creative Developer James Jacobs started playing Dungeons and Dragons when he was 10 years old and eventually joined up with Paizo after working and writing for Wizards of the Coast for a few years. Developer Mark Moreland was owner and primary operator of the PathfinderWiki, which was originally a fan-run website dedicated to Pathfinder. Adam Daigle was a freelancer for a number of years, Mark Seifter and Linda Zayas-Palmer were Venture-Officers for PFS—the list goes on and on. And each of those people comes to Pathfinder with their own ideas and assumptions regarding how things ought to work in Pathfinder. For example, the crew that makes up the Pathfinder Design Team is pretty cautious (formerly opposed) to Dexterity to damage for martial characters, but the Campaign Setting team brought Dexterity to damage into the setting years prior in the form of things like the Dervish Dance feat and the agile special weapon property. Specific aspects of the campaign setting have been outright changed or left to rot as people come up with ideas and eventually disown them, such as Erastil’s original attitudes towards women or Taldor’s disownment of Sarenrae’s faith.

I would go as far as to say that “Smarts” don’t really exist in Pathfinder in the sense that to a degree, everyone is an audience member. Every member of Paizo’s staff plays Pathfinder, many of whom play directly in Golarion. They make the stories and adventures that they themselves are interested in seeing and experiencing, so in a certain sense that design Pathfinder with themselves included as audience members. And like the audience, they have their own ideas on how things should work in the game. So if the people who make Pathfinder can agree to disagree and still create something wonderful, the rest of us audience members should be able to as well.

Next Time

I’m going to continue with this train of thought on the next installment of Guidance, which will be focused around people looking to design for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game with Marks and Smarks in mind. How DO you create something that people with these different thought processes will enjoy, because let me assure you, it IS possible.

So until next time, I’m Alex Augunas and I’m always here for YOU when you need a little bit of Guidance. Take care!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Well, what does this have to do with roleplaying games? To be honest, nothing. Nothing and everything.

 Now, before I continue I want to make something pretty clear—this year my family celebrated a fantastic Christmas. We exchanged gifts, did one of those “throwback pictures” where we pulled out an old Christmas photo of the family from a decade and a half ago and recreated it. We had delicious food, played fun games (Exploding Kittens is a new family favorite), and genuinely enjoyed each other’s company.

I’m willing to bet that the majority of freelancers, gamers, designers, and all of the other people who make your favorite games as great as they are had a similarly wonderful time in their own way.

Today, I don’t want to talk about gift giving on Christmas. I want to talk about gift giving year-round, and honestly I can’t think of a goof way to segeway into this topic, so I’m just going to drop it on you readers like a ton of bricks—good game design isn’t easy. It is arduous, time consuming, and sadly, it is often thankless work. When you’re the freelancer, your developer doesn’t often have time to give you feedback because of tight turnarounds. When you’re a developer, your freelancers never see the hard work and magic that you put into every sentence they crafted to make it shine. And for the majority of things they right, both freelancers and developers never hear a lick of praise or thanks from the majority of customers who buy their products.

Now, this isn’t a, “Shame on you for not licking our feet!” sort of post, but I want to reiterate again that game design, like all forms of technical writing, is work. Hard, grueling work. And despite the fact that we know praise is rare in this business, most of us still get really attached to things we write. We pour our hearts and our souls into every word, whether we’re freelancers pulling ideas from nowhere, designers putting all of the freelancer’s ducts in a row, editors working their hearts out to make sense of 256 pages of technical mumbo jumbo, and so on. Everyone who works on every game you’ve ever owned puts a little bit of themselves into every word you’ve ever read. And the majority of that toil and sacrifice is never reciprocated.

It is a gift that the folks who created it are almost never thanked for.

We live in a digital age. An age where criticism comes far more naturally thank thanks and appreciation. Some people think to themselves, “Well, if I’m just echoing these people on the stuff I write, I’m not giving useful feedback.” Others get so tied up in the ten or twenty words that they don’t care for that they neglect the love and respect they have for the other 10,000 or 20,000. It is an all-too easy trap for us to fall into. But even more true is that the majority of customers don’t interact with the content creators at all. They buy their product, say, “Oh, I like this!” and never send those thoughts any further then that. The praise and thanks stays wrapped up in the customer’s head and never goes anywhere. A gift that is never delievered.

And honestly, folks, a lot of great game designers that I know could really use that praise. We’re not always the most mental or emotionally stable of people. I’ve personally had bouts with depression and burnout, and I know designers, freelancers, and even creative leads who’ve had similar struggles. Now, different people have different demons, but when it comes to the industry, those who have mental and emotional illnesses revolving around creating the things that you love often get those illnesses from the sheer amount of negativity that we experience interacting with our customers. All that, “Positivity doesn’t give good feedback, criticism does!” Yeah, multiply that a thousandfold and the feedback doesn’t always matter like it should. The negativity matters, because too much negativity is toxic. And the only cure is positivity.

So this holiday and year-round, I implore you, readers, to think about the games that make your year special. The games you play with your friends, your families, and all of your loved ones. Think of all of the positivity it brings to you and the people you enjoy those games with it, and bottle a little bit of that positivity. Bottle a rule or a monster, a magic item or an archetype, an adventure or an NPC, or even just a feeling that a game product gives you and give that bottle back to the people who helped make the experience that you loved in the form of a quick little forum comment, an e-mail or private message, something. You think that positivity isn’t useful feedback, but here is the simple truth—criticism might help us to be better in the future, but positivity fuels the creative fires that make the next product possible at all.

Have a safe and happy holiday, and I’ll see you in 2016.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

We largely live in a world where prices often seem static until they mysteriously and often abruptly change for reasons that we might not understand. Well, if you understand basic economics, price changes start to make more sense. Basically, any given object or service has a value that’s determined by two things—what the object is worth both to the seller and to the buyer. But before we get too in-depth in that concept, we need to talk briefly about mediums of exchange.

Swap Force

Okay, so let’s say that you’re living in a world with no monetary mediums. Well, what does that mean? Let’s say you’re a pig farmer, and you have a three squealing piglets, but lack any means to repair the roof to your home. You know that Jo, who lives down the street, is excellent at fixing broken roofs, so you approach him and ask him to do the work and in exchange you’ll give him your pig. In this case, neither the pig nor the roof is the medium of exchange despite the fact that both (the pig and the labor on the roof) are being exchanged.

Instead, this “swap system” is what is known as a barter system, an economic system where two groups swap things that have for things they need without using an intermediary medium, namely money. And in this specific instance between you and Jo, it worked out for you—you got your roof fixed and Jo got a piglet. So if bartering makes people happy, why ever switch to intermediary units. Well, there is a real good reason for mediums of exchange, so let’s talk about your neighbor Borris.

Borris works down the street, and he owns a vegetable farm. You think vegetables are delicious, so you ask Borris to trade you a bushel of vegetables for one of your piglets. But gasp! Borris is a vegetarian, and is therefore uninterested in your swine-shaped meatball. You don’t get any vegetables and Borris doesn’t get a piglet he doesn’t want. This stumbles upon one of several disadvantages to barter systems, which ultimately gave rise to mediums of exchange.

• Bartering doesn’t happen if all parties involved don’t value the other side’s goods. In the case of Borris, the value of your pig (which was worth a fixed roof to Jo) is nothing.
• There is no common measure of value between trades. Your friend Jo might be mad that eight hours of his life (the time it took him to fix your roof) was worth the same amount as a small bundle of vegetables to you.
• It is tricky to divide goods. For instance, if Jo wanted half a pig to fix your roof, then what the heck do you do with the other half of a pig? The only other option is to inflate the value of the roof-fixing by giving him the whole pig, which results in a net loss for you.
• You cannot “borrow” things effectively. Well, you can, but we all have that friend who wants “a hamburger today for ten dollars tomorrow,” right?
• Wealth is difficult to store. Pigs don’t live forever, and if you’re selling fixed roofs, then how long do you have to DO that service?

With this in mind, let’s introduce mediums of exchange.

Exchanging Everything

To put it simply, a medium of exchange is any unit that is used to represent the value of another good or service that can be swapped for goods and services. Basically, its money but it doesn’t have to be money in the way we think of it. For instance, Bottlecaps in the Fallout games are a medium of exchange—their only purpose is to act as a medium in which the residents of the wasteland can assign value to items.

Using a medium of exchange circumvents most of the economic disadvantages of barter systems—the medium acts as a common measure of value, everyone wants the medium because it is universally accepted as an exchangeable currency, submediums and supermediums can be created to assure fair transitions, and wealth can be stored easily if the medium itself is easily stored. Its no wonder that gold pieces are all over the place in Pathfinder, or that credits are universally accepted throughout the Empire in Star Wars.

But there is a secret to mediums of exchange, both in fantasy games and the real world, that isn’t overtly apparent, and that’s the simple truth that value isn’t as static as we think it is.

You’re Worth What You Pay For

Okay, so I want to imagine a shiny new supercomputer, capable of playing all the video games and doing all the work you can imagine. Let’s pretend that this super computer is for sale for $3,000 USD, and therefore it’s worth $3,000 to you. If you go to the store and buy it for $3,000, then you’ve validated that value and your net wealth has remained unchanged—you spent $3,000 (–$3,000 value) but gained a computer that you value at $3,000 (+$3,000). The net total is +$0.

Now let’s say that you wait until a sale happens, and the company puts that same computer for sale at $1,500. You buy it in a heartbeat, because you know it’s a $3,000 that you only spent $1,500. In this case, according to economy theory, your net wealth actually just increased by +$1,500. You obtained an item worth $3,000 to you (+$3,000) but paid only half price for it (–$1,500). This leaves you with a net gain of $1,500. That being said, the reverse is true—if you buy an item worth $3,000 (–$3,000) that you only value at $1,500 (–$1,500), then you’ve basically lost $1,500 of net worth.

Economics is fun! And entirely in your head.

That’s because while we like to think of money as having this solid, stationary value, the truth is that we as people decide how much things are worth to us. How much our labor is worth, how much specific parts and baubles are worth. Everything. The price that we are willing to pay tends to relate back to supply (how much of the thing there is) and demand (how much people want it. High supply + low demand = cheap item, while high supply and high demand = expensive item. (See $69.99 Hatchables.)

So this Holiday season, when you’re looking at the gp cost of a magic item, think to yourself, “Is this item worth the price to me?” and “How did I get this?” Because if you find an item in a dungeon (–0 gp) that’s worth 4,000 gp to you, you’ve just raised your net wealth by 4,000 gp. But regardless of what any rulebook says, if you find a magic item that’s worthless to you, your wealth never increases—even if you wear it.

At least, that’s what economic theory says. And boy, is economics confusing!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

I mean I don’t know why I was expecting when I Googled, ‘Planet of Foxes.’ It wasn’t this, though.

When I spoke to N. last week, we were talking a bit about my work in the kitsune section of Blood of the Beast and contributions that I made to it. The conversation continued on, and the topic of kitsune in Paizo’s upcoming Starfinder RPG came on. I can’t remember precisely what was said (I ended up just putting our conversation out of text chat; check it out at the end of the article!), but it amounted to a coy remark about how I was sure to sneak in a planet of kitsune into the fledgling RPG. Without a second thought, I dismissed the idea as being boring and I think I caught him off a touch off-guard. Today, I’m going to share with you my reasons for nixing a “kitsune planet,” and my reasoning boils down to a single idea: what is compelling about the race.

Stick to the Script!

So, why would Mr. Kitsune not want a planet of kitsune characters? Well, put simply the concept of a “planet of kitsune,” as they’re defined in Pathfinder, is incredibly boring and goes against the race’s themes. When I’m gaming at my local PFS in Philly, I often encounter kitsune players who run around scenarios in their true form all the time, gallivanting this way or that while shaking their floofy fox tails. To me, that makes absolutely no logical sense—I mean, come on. You’re a shapechanger. Why would you run around Golarion or even Absalom in your true form when 99% of the civilized world is human? Unless you’re mechanically inclined for a bite attack or are personally obsessed with being a furry fox person, there’s no situation where being in kitsune form rather than human form is advantageous to you mechanically speaking, but more importantly, such decisions directly go against the race’s themes and culture. Think about it—this is like roleplaying a doppleganger that runs around in its true form instead of using its shapechanging powers to try and blend in with the setting around it.

Kitsune aren’t dopplegangers—they are significantly more “normal” than a monstrous humanoid and they are likely more common too. But that said, humans are insensitive jerks that tend to only accept people based upon their limited world view on what is “individually acceptable.” We see this in the real world and we see this in fantasy worlds too. Generally speaking, its simply easier for most kitsune to use their human form and just pretend to be human then to run around in fox form because they’re not getting the surprised faces or the too-long stares or the racist assumptions that they’re tricksters, thieves, or lycanthropic monsters. To use an overused adage, to be a fox among hens doesn’t make sense.

Keep Your Race Compelling

This idea that kitsune work best when they’re constantly needing to blend in with others and pretend to be something they aren’t, is what makes the race and their story compelling. And that isn’t a story that you can tell when you have an isolated group of kitsune who don’t interact with humans, aka “Fox Planet.” Kitsune currently and will always be their most compelling story-wise when they’re having to balance who they are with who they pretend to be while dealing with the ramifications of what happens when their secret slips out. This idea is somewhat backwards compatible with most Pathfinder RPG races, but it is perhaps most applicable to the kitsune. The other, major race that falls into this category is the changeling, since the story of, “Weird hag daughter gets raised by humans,” is what makes the story of the changeling compelling.

The only acceptable answer to the question, “Why aren’t you ever in your human form during our missions?”

Still, this small idea—that “Planet Kitsune” doesn’t work from a flavor or worldbuilding standpoint—is why you’ll never see me try to sneak a major kitsune presence into Starfinder (1PP or 3PP). If they’re anywhere en mass, they’re in Absalom Station quietly living alongside of the humans of tomorrow. Otherwise, there just happen to be lone kitsune on various starships across the galaxy, quietly exploring the stars with their human companions, who may never be aware of their true nature. This sort of story is what could make kitsune fun in Starfinder, not “Planet of the Foxes.”

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Wanna see snippets of the conversation that inspired this article? Okay.

N. Jolly: Also seriously grats on being the kitsune loremaster, hope if they’re in Starfinder you’ll be dolling out the lore for them there too.

Alex: Eh, I am not sure if I want them in Starfinder. Kinda need to see the world first, like whether it’s humanocentric or alien centric. The fun of playing a kitsune is being a fox among hens. The shapechanging part. If you are a kitsune among aliens, then what’s the point? They don’t get what you look like–you still probably aren’t blending in, you know?

N. Jolly: And it’s good that you have some consistency in your world view for them rather than just making a foxy planet and throwing it in.

Alex: Yeah, no. Foxy planet is meh. It’s why I was sort of hesitant to do anything with kitsune villages or cities in the DRC, and instead compromised at taking about what they’re like while emphasizing how rare they are. It would be like a planet of doppelgängers. Who cares? 

N. Jolly: To be fair, I find the idea of a planet of doppelgängers pretty interesting, but only if they don’t have a natural form.

Alex: But yeah, I pretty strongly feel that a kitsune as a character is at his best when he’s surrounded by humanity. Trying to blend in and thrive among them while simultaneous trying to stay above them. Same with any shapeshifter with a not-human true form, really.

N. Jolly: That’s understandable.

World of Warcraft frequently requires you to be dumb if you want to progress along a plotline. This doesn’t really bother me anymore, but it is one thing I like less about WoW than tabletop.

Originally, I was going to type a big, long, unsolicited reply on Owen’s Facebook post with my thoughts on the topic, but about three sentences in my Costello Alarm started blaring in the back of my head: Content! Content! Content! So I quickly deleted what I was writing and wrote this blog post instead.

Buckle up, readers, because you’re in for a game design rant that I was planning on giving to a fellow game designer!

Of Sandboxes and Theme Parks

So in a good game players have this thing called “agency.” We’ve touched upon agency a bit both in Guidance and across the Know Direction Network. Agency is essentially the ability of an entity to take actions without needing the consent or approval of another. So, for example, when I go on a multipage rant about how kids aren’t given enough agency in roleplaying games, I’m essentially talking about having kids in the game who are able to take actions that are meaningful and relevant to the game world as opposed to being relegated to “setting props” with no other purpose than to show that a town is alive and hopping.

Switching gears away from “Activist Alex” mode, player agency in referendum to game design basically refers to the player’s ability to shape the story with their actions. How much control do they have in determining the shape that their game world is in and whatnot? Now, its worth noting that player agency as I’ve defined it in this context is basically limited to games with a narrative—there’s no story to Connect Four, and so there isn’t any player agency in the sense that we’re talking about shaping the story. (Although there are certainly actions that Connect Four players can take in games like Connect Four, which means they have a measure of player agency in their own right.) Anyway, I digress.

Ultimately, there are two basic “types” of player narratives when we’re measuring player agency—sandboxes and theme parks. Now, of course there are shades of gray and degrees of each within them, but for a general category that’s what you’ve got.

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard of sandbox games before—that phrase is pretty famous among tabletop and video game gamers at this point. A sandbox is a game that maximizes player agency. Rather than provide the player with a concrete background for what’s happening in the world they’re in, a sandbox game challenges the player to create her own story by providing tools to make the story of the game her own. But what, then, is a theme park game? Well, theme park games are the opposite experience—rather than give you the tools to tell the story that want to tell, it gives you a prepackaged experience and asks that you assume the role of a specific character and enjoy the show.

Below are some examples of games (both Tabletop and Video Game) that fall into each of these agency types:

• Call of Duty (Extreme Video Game Theme Park): You’re given a character, a setting, a story, and even the general actions that each character takes. As a result, you have no control over the story aside from, “Do I choose to play this game?”
• Kingdom Hearts (Moderate Tabletop Theme Park): You’re given a character with a specific personality and story, and you don’t have much control over what happens in said story. You do get to chose your character’s powers and abilities to an extent, and you also get to make choices regarding the order the challenges that you tackle.
• PFS Serpent’s Rise / Serpent’s Ire (Moderate Tabletop Theme Park): You’re given a character and specific objectives that you have to complete in order to succeed, as well as a basic personality. You ultimately get to choose what happens in the story, however, by virtue of your actions and interactions with other PCs and NPCs.
• Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (Moderate Video Game Sandbox): You can build your own character from a dizzying array of options and choices, and tackle the world at your own pace and leisure. While there is a general story to be found, you’re under no requirement to actually embark on that story if you don’t want to. However, what happens across the world basically predetermined, and there are limited paths and options you can take.
• Pathfinder Adventure Paths (Moderate Tabletop Sandbox): Everyone makes their own character, and you can generally build your character however you want. (Though the APs often give suggestions to help GMs tell a cohesive story.) Generally speaking, the story of the AP is prewritten but the players involved can change the course of the story dramatically based upon their actions and how they use their powers and abilities to solve problems.
• Minecraft (Extreme Video Game Sandbox): You can do whatever you want. There’s no real story in the game—only tools. Do you want to build cities and monuments? Gather villagers? Explore other dimensions? All of it? None of it? Its all up to you, friend. All up to you.
• Home Games (Extreme Tabletop Sandbox): In a home game where the GM is making up the story, the players and the GMs can take the story basically anywhere they want if the GM’s willing. The story is whatever the GM dreams up, and suggestions and actions taken by the player shape that outcome. The GM and the player are in complete control of their shared experience together.

Because Knowing is Half the Battle

So, what’s the point of talking about the differences between theme parks and sandboxes? Honestly, just to acknowledge that different games have different narrative styles and goals. Intrinsically, no one format is inherently better than the other—it all depends upon the experience that the players are looking for in the game. For instance, when you sit down to play an Adventure Path, you typically do so with the understanding that you’re going to need to forfeit some of your player agency to play the game in question. Going off rails and doing whatever you want in a Tabletop RPG is fine, but if you do it during Strange Aeons, then you’re not really playing Strange Aeons anymore, are you? Ultimately, this is the biggest difference between video games and tabletop games—because video games can only do what their developers have coded them to do, they are incapable of “going off their story’s rails,” so to speak. But if the players of a tabletop game decide, “Hey, Strange Aeons isn’t cutting it for me. Let’s just do a home game,” or “Let’s just pick up our characters and ‘wander’ into the setting of Dragon’s Demand,” or “Let’s say our characters fell into an interdimensional hole in space-time and ended up in the world of Mouse Guard and were turned into mice,” then you can do that.

In this regard, Tabletops are inherently more sandbox style, while Video Games are inherently more theme park style—even Minecraft has limits to the things that you can do with the game, limits that might not exist in a Tabletop RPG. In contrast, tabletops have such a strong social element that two game sessions played by different gamers are always going to be inherently different, because they’re so heavily influenced by the actions of people.

This was ultimately what I wanted to point out to Owen, that even at its most RPG, games like World of Warcraft are inherently limited by design constraints, man hours, and funding, and as a result they’re simply unable to offer the same scope of player agency that you can get from an RPG. And frankly, it is absolutely okay to prefer having player agency to forfeiting it as you do in a video game, but it’s also important to remember that this lack of agency is a feature of the medium, rather than a flaw. Just as how you cannot write a Pathfinder Society scenario and truly expect there to be no table variation between PFS’s millions of players—you can really only minimize variation. But when players accept games for the amount of agency they allow them, they just might find the experience is ultimately better than expected.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Now, I want to preface by saying that I have nowhere NEAR played or run every PFS scenario in existence. That’ll talk me a crazy-long amount of time. But that being said, of what I’ve played and run, I do have my favorites. Today, I’m going to share my list of favorite PFS scenarios with everyone. I’ll do my best not to spoiler the scenarios mentioned too much, but if you want to go into every PFS scenario absolutely fresh, you might want to avoid reading too much of this article.

And with that, let’s get started!

7. Blakros Connection

First, its worth pointing out that in terms of quality, Blakros Connection leans on the shoulders of giants. You’re only going to get the full picture from Blakros Connection if you’ve played both Seige of Serpents and Serpent’s Rise—having all that background knowledge makes Blakros Connection MUCH more solid as a scenario. But that being said, Blakros Connection is pretty stellar in its own right. Season 7 generally relies pretty heavily on skill-based characters for making secondary success conditions possible, but Blakros Connection takes it one step further and places the bulk of progressing the story on the hands of skilled characters. Specifically, Blakros Connection relies heavily on the Research rules from Ultimate Intrigue, and Research as a means of storytelling is FANTASTIC. Its very fun as you move from library to library, searching for clues until you ultimately track your quarry down to an otherworldly realm. (This scenario also, to the best of my knowledge, started the trend of “Pulling the PCs off of the Material Plane,” which is pretty awesome in and of itself.) I ran this one and played it, and had a blast every time! Just goes to show you that there’s always something fun to do in a library.

6. Abducted in Aether

This is a follow up to Blakros Connection, and as with Blakros Connection its totally worth doing the full line of scenarios so you know what’s happening. But skipping right to the point, Abducted in Aether is esoteric in setting to the upmost degree. There is literally no pre-Season 7 scenario that managers to be as metaphysically out there as Abducted in Aether, and its glorious. The scenario is filled with strange sights and souls and strange creatures, some of which have never even been placed in Golarion proper before. The monsters you fight are likewise cool, new, and different, and they offer challenges to PCs that aren’t normally challenged. For instance, one fight involve a serious of creatures that gives a REALLY nasty time to gunslingers—that NEVER happens! This is another scenario that I’ve both played and run, and I’ve had a blast with it every time. Its cool and fun, the characters are well-designed and interesting, and it really uses the metaplot of Season 7 to its fullest.

5. To Judge a Soul

To Judge a Soul is a two-part scenario, and while it might be cheating to combine both volumes into #5, I can do what I want! As separate halves, To Judge a Soul is sort of average. It’s when you play them both together, back to back, that they are fantastic, however. Part 1 is very skill-heavy and involves seeing interesting sights and meeting interesting people. Specifically, you go to nations that have never been explored much in Pathfinder, so that’s refreshing. Part 2 is the pay-off for Part 1—the dungeon crawl filled with combat that you get for all of the exploration and intrigue you did in Part 1. As mentioned, alone they seem imbalanced—too much roleplaying and exploring in 1, too much combat in 2. But together they make for a fun, unique experience that includes great payoff and even a character arch or two. If you’re going to play to Judge a Soul, remember—do them together or don’t do them at all!

4. Bid for Alabastrine

So I ran this scenario twice at PaizoCon and played it once at home. Let me start by saying that it is an atypical scenario—there is one combat in the beginning, then the rest of it is all skill challenges and roleplaying. And let me tell you, it is GLORIOUS if you encourage pulling the PCs into the game with you. Both times I ran Bid for Alabastrine, I got compliments from people telling me that it was the best PFS scenario they ever sat down to play. That’s half from me, and half from this scenario. If you run this module to its strengths—its amazing opportunity for character exploration on both sides of the screen, you end up with a session that people will remember and talk about FOREVER. And the best way to do that is to use the scenario as an excuse to show the PCs that you care your character and are willing to have the world treat them in a way that suits said character. You do that, and boom. Every time this ends up as the best game anyone’s ever been a part of. This is a scenario that gives you, the GM, the space to really make the events memorable for the PCs, provided you just go for it.

3. Siege of Serpents

This scenario is the 2015 PaizoCon multi-table interactive, and let me preface by saying that by far, this is my absolute FAVORITE multi-table interactive. The gist of the scenario is that the Aspis Consortium attacks the Grand Lodge (the Pathfinder’s HQ) while they’re holding their yearly fancy dinner party; at this one, they’re patting themselves on the back for their successes throughout Season 6.

There are a couple of reasons why I love this scenario, and rather than simply having rose-colored glasses, I can safely say that I both played in and ran this one, and had an absolute blast every time. First, the air surrounding this one is HUGE. Normally we, as Pathfinders, are doing the exploring or assaulting, but Siege of Serpents has us on the defensive, and that’s honestly a very exciting prospect. The very mechanics of the scenario reflect the idea that the Pathfinders are scrambling to defense the Grand Lodge from the attackers, and the chaotic, energized atmosphere that characterizes a multitable event really captures this. The threats are real, and every time you think you’re winning something terrible happens to further complicate things. Better still, the Pathfinders manage to defend the Grand Lodge, but the ending of the scenario is bittersweet just like a good assault should be. Personally, I found this to be the best multitable event I’ve played in, both in terms of content and story. It deserves a high ranking in my favorite list of scenarios.

2. Out of Anarchy

So of all of the games on this list, Out of Anarchy is the only one that I haven’t both played and run. For Out of Anarcy, I’ve only ever actually GM’ed it, but despite never getting to be a player at an Out of Anarchy table, this is still one of my favorite PFS scenarios. The best way to describe Out of Anarchy is that it is a scenario that wanted to be a module. The amount of detail they give you in this module is INSANE. Absolutely INSANE. They practically reprint the entire town of Pezzack’s entry in Towns of the Inner Sea for you in this one. As in Bid for Alabastrine, this gives a strong GM the ability to customize the setting to the PCs. More importantly, there’s a strong sense of urgency and hostility in this one—the PCs have infiltrated a blockade and they have a very short amount of time to “do the thing” that they need to do and escape before they’re all going to be taken in by Cheliax. The plot is strong, the action is strong, and the stakes are high for the Pathfinders, as they’re up against the hyper confident and super scary Chellish Navy, and a GM who runs the scenario well keeps the action fast-paced while also tense, making it one of my absolute favorite PFS scenarios.

1. Overflow Archives

Overflow Archives is 100% my favorite scenario, but for everyone who’s played it, it isn’t for the reason you think it is. (NO SPOILERS.) The NPCs in this module, freaking ALL of them are super strong and possess amazing personalities. When I ran this, I had some amazing voices that I worked hard to perfect when delivering lines to the PCs, and the characters themselves are so distinct that making different voices for different characters is easy. The plot for this game is basically moved forward by a puzzle, which is both fun and interesting, and the game itself has a very awesome vibe to it that is a delightful, “Jumanji, except the denizens of Wonderland of Alice in Wonderland fame came into the world through the game board,” feel to it. And if you’ve played the game right and learn everything there is to learn about the characters by the end of the scenario, you’re left completely unsure of whether or not you (the players) were actually the heroes or the villains of the story.

So, there you have it! My current Top 7 Pathfinder Society scenarios. Hopefully with time this list will change—after all, I’ve easily played/run less than half of the scenarios available thus far, and two new scenarios come out every month. I’m hoping that there are still more gems out there to fine, but for now these are my favorites.

But what do you think? If you’re a PFS player, what are your favorite scenarios? If you’re not a PFS player, do any of these fancy your interests? Leave your comments below, and I’ll see you next week for another bit of Guidance! Take care.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

That being said, not all spells are created equal when it comes to wands. Some are really good, and others underperform by a lot, especially in Pathfinder Society where it is very uncommon for you to find a wand with a caster level above the minimum level needed to craft the wand. Today in Guidance, I’ll be sharing the Top 7 wands that I’m most thankful to have in my possession on arcane spellcasters, divine spellcasters, and psychic spellcasters.

You ready? Then let’s take a look at these wands!

7. Wand of Cure [BLANK] Wounds

The first wand we’re going to look at is the most obvious—healing wands. These come in three varieties—cure light wounds, cure moderate wounds, and cure serious wounds. As a general rule, cure serious wounds wands are simply too expensive to see too much play in the early levels, but cure light wounds wands are STAPLES of low-level play, especially in Pathfinder Society. Seriously, cure light wounds wands keep the party refreshed and roaring to go; they’re the glue that puts the party back together again after the most difficult fights, and they’re the magic item that essentially allows PFS parties to be as mismatched as they are. (That, and the fact that few PFS scenarios are designed to require all of the game’s roles.) Cure moderate wounds wands are also very helpful, but I find that most parties don’t have them as often as they have cure light wounds—CLW is simply too cost effective to ignore. So we’re not ignoring it.

6. Wand of Identify

I am a HUGE sucker for wands of identify. Why? Because knowing what magic items do is REALLY important, and wands of identify greatly shift the odds of knowing what your equipment does in your favor. Even better, you can use identify to effectively “try again” on a Spellcraft check to identify an item that you failed, which means you can try to identify the item the old fashioned way and break the wand out only as a last result. As a result, these wands last forever, and I love them for it.

5. Wand of Mage Armor

Wizards don’t care about preparing mage armor, since they aren’t limited in their spells known. Spontaneous spellcasters, however, CRAVE this spell. They NEED it. Because really, who wants to spend a spell known on a spell that you’re going to cast once per day? For 750 gp, 50 charges of a 1 hour duration mage armor spell is PLENTY and affordable. Better still, if you’re playing an unarmored or low-armor character, having a wizard bop you with a wand of mage armor once every hour is simply the best. Simply the best, I say!

4. Wand of Bless

Man, I love me a wand of bless for the same reason that I love wands of mage armor—because this isn’t a spell you’re going to want to cast all the time, and when you get right down to it there isn’t a huge difference between 1 minute/level and 1 minute—both are roughly going to be one combat long, and if you run out, so what? 50 more minutes where that came from! I almost always try to pick this one up on my oracles / inquisitors if at all possible. Consider me a fan.

3. Wand of Comprehend Languages

This wand is a great example of, “Your mileage may vary,” but in PFS I consider it practically an essential. You often run into ancient ruins or strange creatures that want to interact with you, and you never want to be stuck as, “the guy who can’t understand the other person.” I’ll admit that comprehend language’s lack of ability to reply in the foreign tongue keeps it from being #1 on the list, but this is definitely a consumable that I wouldn’t want to be without.

2. Wand of Protection from Evil

All right, this might be one of the most practical wands on my list. Why? Well, have YOU ever been in a fight where your barbarian failed a save against a dominate monster spell? I have, and it’s not pretty. Protection from evil won’t protect you from things that aren’t evil (there are different alignments for that), but man is it helpful to give allies rerolls against effects that possess or exercise mental control over them whenever you want. Honestly, duration doesn’t matter as long as you can just shut the enemy down. And when you get down to it, isn’t that what we all want?

1. Wand of Lesser Restoration

So the final wand on my list, wand of lesser restoration, won’t turn the tide of combat. Lesser restoration isn’t flashy like that. But MAN is it vital. Ability damage is something that can shut down an adventuring party of any level, and the ability to remove tons of it quickly is very useful. This wand is probably the most expensive on my list, being a 2nd level spell, but it is SO vital that I would say that its worth it. Whenever a cheap “used” wand of lesser restoration appears on one of my characters’ chronicles, I always pick it up. You never know what you’re going to run in to.

Generally speaking, wands are very useful—especially when you manage to pick up a few charges of spells that you wouldn’t normally want to walk around town with. Even fully charged, wands are a steal for their price, so no matter your class, consider grabbing a few wands whenever they just happen to show up. You’ll thank me when the wand saves your character’s life, trust me! But now, I leave the topic in your capable hands, readers. What are your Top 7 must-have wands? Leave your answers in the comments below, and I’ll be back next week with more tips, more tricks, and more Guidance!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

 If you’re a fan of Know Direction the podcast, you might remember a few months ago where Ryan and I got into an argument about the Shield Slam feat, whose text I have included below:

Shield Slam (Combat)

In the right position, your shield can be used to send opponents flying.

Prerequisites: Improved Shield Bash, Shield Proficiency, Two-Weapon Fighting, base attack bonus +6.

Benefit: Any opponents hit by your shield bash are also hit with a free bull rush attack, substituting your attack roll for the combat maneuver check (see Combat). This bull rush does not provoke an attack of opportunity. Opponents who cannot move back due to a wall or other surface are knocked prone after moving the maximum possible distance. You may choose to move with your target if you are able to take a 5-foot step or to spend an action to move this turn.

After a listener question, Ryan and I were debating the intent of the benefit like, “Any opponents hit by your shield bash are also hit with a free bull rush attack.” After a designer comment, the Pathfinder community went aflame with this idea that according to the feat, you cannot choose whether or not to use the Shield Slam feat—should you take it, the free bull rush attack happens every time you hit a foe with your shield regardless of whether or not bull rushing an opponent is convenient for you.

Ryan took the stance of, “Yes, that’s what it says so that’s what it does.” I, on the other hand, took the stance of, “No, because a feat should always be a choice.” Yet no matter how long I debated this to Ryan, I couldn’t win. Why? Because unknowingly, I had stumbled upon a core element of Pathfinder as a game system—something that sits at the heart of how designers and developers present Pathfinder’s rules. This core element is something I like to call zero allowances

What is Zero Allowances?

Before I answer this question, I want you to think about the way that good freelancers, designers, and developers write text in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Knowing how things are written and published is a crucial element to being an effective designer.

I’m going to put a few different lines of text from various feats and class features below—there’s a reason for this, so bear with me.

• Benefit: As a full-round action, you can move up to your speed and make a single ranged attack at any point during your movement.
• Benefit: When running, you move five times your normal speed
• Benefit: When making a full-attack action with a ranged weapon, you can fire one additional time this round at your highest bonus.
• Starting at 1st level, a barbarian can rage for a number of rounds per day equal to 4 + her Constitution modifier.
• The rogue’s attack deals extra damage anytime her target would be denied a Dexterity bonus to AC (whether the target actually has a Dexterity bonus or not), or when the rogue flanks her target.

Take a look at all of these effects. Read them two or three times, then answer the following question.

Which ones are optional? (Don’t worry, there is a correct answer to this.)

The answer is actually pretty straight-forward—the first, third, and fourth effects are optional, while the second and fifth effects are mandatory. How can we tell?

Because the first, third, and fourth effects give you an option, while the second and fifth ones don’t. And the secret, my friends, is in the word “can.”

The word “can” in Pathfinder is indicative. It states something that you have the ability to do, implying that since you can do it, you can also choose not to do it. If the word “can” or “may” isn’t present, then the rule isn’t a choice. Its mandatory. This, my friends, is the heart of zero allowances—the idea that you are not allowed to do anything that the rules do not tell you that you can do.

Let’s start by looking at the first effect, a snippet from the Shot on the Run feat. Normally the rules do not allow a character to make an attack during movement—they require a character to either move, then attack or attack, then move. Actions have to be separate; no mingling. Shot on the Run, however, is a new rule that changes this—it allows you to do something you couldn’t normally do. No experienced player would claim that you could replicate the effects of Shot on the Run without that feat, because without the feat you effectively don’t have the rule.

Zero Allowances and GM Fiat

So when we’re talking zero allowances and the idea that players can’t do anything that a rule they have access to doesn’t allow, let’s talk about GM fiat.

GM fiat, as many of my readers will likely know, is basically the Golden Rule of Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons. It’s the idea that the GM can make any rule she wants in the spirit of making the game fun. Its an important part of the game, but sometimes its misinterpreted as proof that Pathfinder isn’t a zero allowances game, that players can do anything they want as long as their GM says its okay.

Well, the proof is really in the pudding there, isn’t?

Ultimately, the power of GM fiat lies with your GM, not with you as a player. If the GM wants to give you the freedom to implement whatever rules you want in the spirit of “rule of cool,” then that’s fine. But don’t confuse that decision for the game being something that it isn’t. Ultimately, the GM using the rules (perhaps the greatest rule of all) to the benefit of the player.

And ultimately, that’s what makes Pathfinder as a rules system so great. The rules are grounded and concrete, but they have flexibility built right into them for the GM’s convenience!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

In any case, I’ve decided to try some new stuff in the next few months, one of which being the introduction of a new series that I’m calling spotlight. Normally when I want to talk tactics on Guidance, I do it as a Playing 101 article and I cover a big topic—usually for new players. But I don’t always want to handle every tactic that way. Some tactics are small and rely on a single feat or class feature, or maybe a weird interaction of abilities. Today’s topic is one just like that, so Spotlight was created as a result.

Today’s spotlight comes from a not-often-enough-talked about Player Companion, the Ranged Tactics Toolbox. In a stroke of coincidence, I did NOT write the feat that I’m talking about today, so let’s dive into this neat little feat—Combat Advice.

What’s Combat Advice?

Before we begin, let’s look at the Combat Advice feat:

COMBAT ADVICE

Your succulent words can aid an ally even in the heat of battle.

Benefit: As a move action, you can offer useful advice to an ally engaged in combat at just the right moment. Designate an enemy; your ally gains a +2 competence bonus on her next attack roll against that enemy. For your ally to benefit from this feat, you must be able to clearly see your ally and the designated enemy, and your ally must be able to hear you.

Why Talk About Combat Advice?

Combat Advice is an AWESOME feat for what it does. So, what are the perks? Let’s take a look!

1. Move action is easy to activate, and it allows you to attack, cast a spell, move, or even use the aid another action. This means there’s plenty of flexibility.
2. 30 foot range on the advice makes this an option that characters who want to stay out of combat—namely spellcasters—can nab up and benefit for.
3. Competence bonuses to attack rolls are uncommon, so they stack with a LOT of things.
4. This stacks with aid another! That means an extra +2 on aid another shenanigans if you want to use them.

Now, before you GMs go and ban this feat, Combat Advice has some strong balancing points. Let’s talk about them.

1. While competence bonuses to attack rolls are rare, one noteworthy class feature that is pretty common doesn’t stack with this feat—inspire courage.
2. You have to be able to speak to use this feat, and your ally has to be able to hear you.
3. You have to be able to see your enemy to use this feat.
4. This applies to only one attack roll. (The next attack roll the ally makes.)
5. Not interacting with the aid another action means that this feat’s bonus, action economy, and basically everything else about it can’t be increased by other effects.
6. Since it’s a competence bonus, multiple characters with the feat can’t stack the bonus the way aid another can stack.

When Should I Use Combat Advice?

Combat Advice works best on characters that don’t need a whole lot of full-round actions, like kineticists and full spellcasters. It is strongest in a group that doesn’t have the inspire competence ability among its characters. It works best when you have resource-intensive characters (like full spellcasters) because it allows them to contribute to the party without needing to burn limited resources.

Overall, Combat Advice is an awesome feat that I hope to see more of. I thank my friend Matt Morris for showing this feat to me, and I hope you get use of it in your games!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

HERO POINTS AND TENSION POINTS

The Harrowed Character Building System assumes that the PCs have access to hero points—a currency of fate and fortune that enables them to turn the tides of combat in their favor. This functions identically to how hero points function in Chapter 7 of Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Advanced Player’s Guide, except each PC’s hero points replenish at the start of each new session of play, rather than at each new level and whenever a PC uses her hero points to avoid death, she gains a random penalty as a result of the near-fatal trauma she just experienced (see Table: Cheat Death Penalties).

In addition, the GM has a currency of her own called tension points. At the start of each new session of play, the GM gains a number of tension points each to the number of PCs present at that session. The GM can spend tension points in order to grant NPCs a bonus, following the same rules as a PC spending hero points to enhance her abilities. Unlike a PC, however, a GM can prevent any creature from dying (not just an NPC), and doing so costs the GM 1 tension point instead of 2. If the GM spends a tension point to prevent a PC from dying, that PC rolls three times on Table: Cheat Death Penalties and the GM chooses which results (up to three) the PC gains. A player can choose to veto the GM’s ability to prevent her PC’s death, if she chooses. In addition, certain gifts and stains grant players and the GM additional ways to spend hero points and tension points beyond those described here.

Harrow Cards are a divination prop/accessory for use with the Pathfinder RPG available from Paizo.

The following list of harrow cards includes the various attunement powers, gifts, and stains that are associated with each harrow card.

The Suit of Hammers (Str)

Cards in the Suit of Hammers represent physical power, especially muscular power, as well as the character’s ability to fight in melee. They also broadly symbolize war, battle, and honor.

The Paladin (LG, Str)

The Paladin symbolizes standing strong in the face of adversity. The Paladin does not back down under any circumstances. This card usually indicates the need to stay the course or do what one knows is right, even if it takes a heavy toll. If the card is misaligned, such a course might be foolhardy.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Strength-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Strength-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add the driven by guilt campaign trait (Pathfinder RPG: Strange Aeon’s Player’s Guide) to the list of campaign traits that you can choose from.
• Gift: Gain a +1 trait bonus on saves against charm and compulsion effects. This bonus increases to +2 against effects created by evil creatures.
• Stain: Anytime you fail an attack roll, concentration check, saving throw, or skill check, you lose 1 hero point. A successful Will save negates this effect (DC 15 + 1/2 your character level). If you have no hero points when you fail this save, the GM regains 1 tension point instead.

The Keep (NG, Str)

The Keep is a symbol of quiet strength, one that can move when necessary, yet stand firm through the greatest hardship. Those represented by The Keep are not shaken by any force. If The Keep appears misaligned, it can mean giving way to temptation or falling in the face of greater strength.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Strength-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Strength-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add the stalwart defender prestige class to the list of classes available to you.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on saves against fear effects and a +2 trait bonus to the skill DC to demoralize you.
• Stain: You take a –2 penalty on saves against charm and compulsion effects, cannot gain immunity to charm and compulsion effects, and reduce any bonuses that you gain specifically on saves against charm and compulsion effects by half (minimum 1).

The Big Sky (CG, Str)

The Big Sky shows an epic moment as the slaves of a nation are freed. The slaves’ freedom specifies momentous and powerful change, as old shackles are cast off in the light of day. If misaligned, those castoff shackles might be replaced with worse ones.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Strength-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Strength-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, archetypes, feats, and spells for the bard or skald class (choose one class) to the list of alternate class options, archetypes, feats, and spells available to you—alternatively, you may add the skald class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, archetype, feat, or spell.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Escape Artist checks, and Escape Artist is always a class skill for you. Additionally, you gain a +1 trait bonus to your CMD against grapple attempts.
• Stain: All opponents gain a +2 bonus to their CMD against combat maneuver check and Escape Artist checks against grapple attempts, and the save DCs of all movement-impairing effects (any effect can be suppressed by freedom of movement) increases by 2. This increase doesn’t apply to creatures that aren’t your allies.

The Forge (LN, Str)

The Forge evokes strength through great diversity. The blacksmith represents those who can survive the mephits’ trial by fire, but The Forge’s fire is so strong it burns many to cinders instead. This card often represents a dangerous event that needs many sources of strength to overcome.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Strength-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Strength-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain one Craft skill as a bonus background skill.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on all skill checks made to craft an item, including magic items.
• Stain: You attract danger. The GM can spend 1 tension point to roll twice when rolling a random encounter and combine both encounters together. The combined CR of this encounter cannot exceed your party’s APL +4 (or your party’s APL + 5 if your party is 7th level or higher).

The Bear (N, Str)

The Bear is pure strength. People often make the mistake of thinking The Bear can be tamed or trained. When someone believes he has The Bear under control, that person eventually learns the error of his ways. Brute force might be required here, but the consequences of its use might be severe.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Strength-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Strength-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add skinwalker (werebear only) to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Strength checks made to break down doors or objects, and on Strength-based skill checks.
• Stain: You were bit by a lycanthrope in your youth, and you struggle against this affliction. You gain the lycanthrope (bear) corruption. Creatures that are immune to disease or lycanthropy cannot choose this stain.

The Uprising (CN, Str)

The Uprising represents being caught in the clutches of something much more powerful than you. It is an overwhelming strength that often crushes what comes in contact with it. The crown held high signifies an overthrowing of a leader of some sort. In the spread, it indicates a force much stronger than the person receiving the reading.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Strength-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Strength-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; you gain Hero’s Fortune^APG as a bonus feat, increasing the total number of hero points you receive each session by 1.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on damage rolls against creatures whose Hit Dice is greater than your Hit Dice.
• Stain: Members of the Cult of Hastur (including members by proximity) gain a +1 bonus on all attack rolls made against you, and the save DCs of any spell or effects created by such a creature is increased by 1 against you.

The Fiend (LE, Str)

The devil that devours the masses of the innocent, and can represent the deaths of many in a disaster.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Strength-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Strength-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add tiefling to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: You gain a +2 bonus to your Constitution score for the purpose of determining the total number of negative hit points that you can accrue before dying, and you gain a +2 bonus on Constitution checks made to stabilize.
• Stain: You gain a curse that calls an otherworldly horror to you, similar to the curse of the boogeyman. The creature chosen is up to the GM, and has major storyline implications for you and your party.

The Beating (NE, Str)

The Beating signifies coming under attack from all sides, but it can also indicate the dissolution of the self—mentally. Whether the strength is of the flesh or the mind, it dissolves under the relentless attack. Misaligned, this card suggests that during the assault, undiscovered strength is found.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Strength-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Strength-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain Great Fortitude, Iron Will, or Lightning Reflexes as a bonus feat.
• Gift: Whenever you have half as many hit points as your maximum hit point total or fewer, you gain a +1 trait bonus on damage rolls and to the caster level of spells you cast, but only for the purposes of determining duration and making caster level checks to overcome spell resistance.
• Stain: You begin play with 1d6 points of sanity damage and one minor madness. Whenever you or an ally take sanity damage, the amount of sanity damage you take increases by +1.

The Cyclone (CE, Str)

The Cyclone is a force that tears through whatever it meets. This disaster does not come in the course of natural order but is one that comes from the plots of intelligent beings. The Cyclone signifies war, arson, or other plans that destroy everything they touch. Misaligned, this card can indicate renewal after a blustery trial.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Strength-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Strength-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d6 combat feats from any Pathfinder RPG product to the list of feats available to you.
• Gift: Whenever an ally uses the Heal skill to treat your deadly wounds, add the higher between your Strength modifier and your Constitution modifier to the total amount of hit points that you restore.
• Stain: You have a nemesis that seeks to do you and your allies harm. The GM adds an NPC to the story with a vendetta against you and your allies, whose presence is felt in every adventure. You can use this nemesis to qualify for the Nemesis story feat (see the story feats section in Chapter 1 of Pathfinder RPG: Ultimate Campaign).

The Suit of Keys (Dex)

Cards in the Suit of Keys represent agility, reflexes, balance, and skill with ranged weapons. They also broadly symbolize trouble, children and entertainment.

The Dance (LG, Dex)

The Dance is a rich and delicate framework that, like the universe itself, requires everyone within it to abide by its rules, lest the entire construct collapse. It advises staying in perfect step, knowing your place in the greater good. Those who step out of the pattern do so at their peril. Misaligned, that pattern might be hypnotic, but not to the good of all.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Dexterity-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Dexterity-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain Perform (dance) as a bonus background skill and add 1d4 bard, mesmerist, or skald alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the mesmerist or skald class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on saving throws against charm and compulsion effects, and Perform (dance) is a class skill for you. If you already had Perform (dance) as a class skill at 1st level, you gain a +1 trait bonus on Perform (dance) checks instead.
• Stain: You are weak-willed and easily mesmerized. You take a ­–2 penalty on saves against enchantment and illusion effects.

The Cricket (NG, Dex)

The Cricket is a grig, a creature whose mind is as quick as its body. It represents speed and quick passage. Although The Cricket is commonly associated with travel, the peach it sits by represents treasure at the end. If misaligned, the journey will go poorly, and the treasure will be one that is lost rather than found.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Dexterity-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Dexterity-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain Believer’s Boon (Travel domain only), Eldritch Heritage (fey bloodline only), or Fleet as a bonus feat, ignoring the feat’s prerequisites.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Diplomacy checks and Diplomacy is a class skill for you. Additionally, you gain the following favored class option, regardless of class: Gain 1/5 of a new Fleet feat as a bonus feat.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point to cause you and your allies to become fatigued. A successful Fortitude save (DC 10 + 1/2 your character level) negates this effect. Any creature that fails its save also reduces its movement speed by 5 feet until the fatigued condition is removed.

The Juggler (CG, Dex)

Destiny, deities, and those who play with the fates of others.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Dexterity-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Dexterity-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain the fate’s favored faith trait (Pathfinder RPG: Ultimate Campaign) as a bonus treat, even if you already have a faith trait.
• Gift: Three times per day, you can call upon the fate, the gods, or some other higher power for a bit of good fortune. You gain a +1 luck bonus on any one d20 roll or check that you make. Using this ability is part of the action used to make the roll or check. You must declare that you are using this ability before the result of the roll or check is revealed.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point to force any player to reroll any d20 roll or check that she makes and use the worse result. A d20 that has been rerolled by this ability loses any luck bonuses it would normally receive and it be rerolled again for any reason.

The Locksmith (LN, Dex)

The Locksmith presents the subject with the keys she needs to unlock her destiny. He grants the tools to access a new location, clue, or treasure. He does not grant insight into how or where to use the tools granted. This card often represents a strange, ancient, or magical object.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Dexterity-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Dexterity-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain Disable Device as a bonus background skill.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Disable Device check to open locks, a +1 trait bonus on Diplomacy checks to gather information, and a +1 Knowledge checks to answer questions. This bonus does not apply on Knowledge checks made to identify the weaknesses and abilities of creatures.
• Stain: The destinies you uncover are not always benign. You take a ­­–2 penalty on saves against curses, and there is a increased chance that any magic item that your party recovers will be a cursed item. This chance is equal to 1% times your party’s APL.

The Peacock (N, Dex)

The Peacock is a creature of astonishing beauty, but it is a beauty that can only be retained if frozen like a cockatrice’s statues. Smarter people accept the passage of time and dance out of The Peacock’s way. Its appearance always signifies a sudden personal shift in attitude or societal change.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma- or Dexterity-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Dexterity- or Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you. The Peacock counts as a Charisma-based and as a Dexterity-based card for the purpose of adding new races to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on all Diplomacy checks and Bluff checks made outside of combat. These bonuses increase to +2 against a creature that finds you to be sexually attractive.
• Stain: Whenever you or an ally that you successfully aided with aid another fails a Diplomacy check, the creature’s attitude towards you decreases by one step, or by two steps if you fail the check by 5 or more.

The Rabbit Prince (CN, Dex)

The Rabbit Prince is a quirky fellow who represents the vagaries of hand-to-hand combat. The Prince is battle personified and nothing if not capricious. As his broken sword symbolizes, any combatant can fall in battle, no matter how brave or skilled. This card sometimes stands for younger members of royalty or other powerful households.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Dexterity-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Dexterity-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add the Youth age category to the list of age categories that your character can begin play as.
• Gift: You are a member of a minor noble Ustalavic household (a minor house is a family created by the GM or the PC). This trait grants you regional affinity with Ustalac and allows you to begin play with six times the normal amount of starting gold (900 gp), a set of courtier’s clothes, and a signet ring. This gift grants you additional storyline benefits, as determined by the GM. If you take the Noble Scion feat at 1st level, you may instead choose one of the major noble houses of Ustalav (a major house is one of the important households named in the Pathfinder Campaign Setting).
• Stain: Every weapon you wield gains the broken condition whenever you roll a natural 1 on an attack roll made with the weapon, and every spell you cast has a 5% spell failure chance, as if from arcane spell failure. You take a –4 penalty on attack rolls made with an indestructible weapon (such as a bladebound magus’s black blade) for 1 minute after rolling a natural 1 on an attack roll with the weapon, but it otherwise does not gain the broken condition.

The Avalanche (LE, Dex)

The Avalanche is disaster. It is an unthinking, unreasoning thing that overruns all who get in its way. It can represent physical disaster or the disaster that comes from a panicked crowd or other unthinking group or entity. If misaligned, the calamity is likely to be averted, though not without consequence.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Dexterity-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Dexterity-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain Toughness as a bonus feat.
• Gift: Whenever you fail a saving throw, you can choose to roll 1d6 and add the result to your saving throw as a trait bonus. This can change the result of the roll from a failure to a successful. Using this ability is an immediate action. One round after using this ability, you take n amount of ability damage to a random ability score equal to the d6 result.
• Stain: Whenever you or an ally rolls a natural 1, all your allies (yourself included) lose any luck bonuses they possess for 1d6 rounds, and take a –2 penalty on all d20 rolls and checks. This penalty stacks, up to a maximum of ­–6

The Crows (NE, Dex)

The Crows are a dangerous bunch who indicate violent taking of that which is loved. When The Crows appear, murder, theft, or other shocking loss occurs. If the card is misaligned, such acts can be averted or the thievery is a just one.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Dexterity-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Dexterity-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add tengu to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Sleight of Hand checks, and Sleight of Hand is a class skill for you. If you gain the Improved Steal feat, you also gain a +1 trait bonus on steal attempts.
• Stain: All thieves that your party encounters gain a +4 bonus on skill checks during any encounter in which they attempt to con, trick, or steal from you. If you are using the kingdom building rules, you must roll twice on Stability checks made to prevent an NPC from being assassinated and use the lower result.

The Demon’s Lantern (CE, Dex)

The Demon’s Lantern is the card of traps and tricks, sleight of hand and sleight of mind. These will-o’-wisps and the man who sought their light represent an impossible or intractable situation. Misaligned, The Demon’s Lantern represents an opportunity or a guide arriving at a perfect moment to show the way.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Dexterity-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Dexterity-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 trickery-attuned classes, archetypes of a trickery-attuned class, or alternate class options of a trickery-attuned class to the list of classes, archetypes, and alternate class options available to you—a trickery attuned class is any class that has Bluff, Craft (traps), Disguise, Sleight of Hand, or Stealth as a class skill.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Diplomacy checks, and Diplomacy is a class skill for you. This trait bonus increases to +2 whenever you attempt to garner assistance from an NPC that trusts you.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point whenever you or an ally makes a saving throw against a trap or a mind-affecting effect to increase the save DC by 4.

The Suit of Shields (Con)

Cards in the Suit of Shields represent health, stamina, and an ability to survive injuries or diseases. They also broadly symbolize health, the home, and pain.

The Trumpet (LG, Con)

The Trumpet is a declaration of power. This archon is an aggressive force who wades into the direst situations without hesitation in the cause of right. Misaligned, it suggests the motives aren’t noble, bringing injury and crumbling strength. It is a card that grants all or nothing at all.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Constitution-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Constitution-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain Diehard as a bonus feat, ignoring its prerequisites.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus to your Armor Class and on saving throws whenever three or more opponents are threatening you simultaneously.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point whenever you or an ally is dealt hit point damage in order to deal additional nonlethal damage to the character equal to half the damage dealt. A successful Fortitude save reduces this additional damage by half (DC 10 + 1/2 your character level). The save DC against this effect increases by +5 if the damage is the result of a critical hit or an effect that you rolled a natural 1 to save against.

The Survivor (NG, Con)

The Survivor represents a person who has been through an ordeal of some kind. Surrounded by his fallen comrades, the man represents someone or something thought lost forever, but found once more. It can also represent rebirth. Misaligned, The Survivor can evoke terrible news or a profound loss.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Constitution-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Constitution-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 occultist alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the occultist class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: Whenever you or an ally die, the GM can spend 1 tension point to return you to life 5d10 hours later, as if from true resurrection. When this occurs, the GM inflicts one of the following side effects on you: become affected by a geas/quest spell cast by a deity or similarly powerful entity (GM’s choice); become a different race (as reincarnate); become replaced with a doppleganger, possessed by a shadow demon, or a similar effect; gain one random madness; randomly become older or younger by 1d2 age categories; take 1d6 points of ability drain, divided among your Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma (GM’s choice); or any other, similar effect of the GM’s choice. A player may be ineligible for this gift, at the GM’s decision.
• Stain: Anytime you or your allies gain a negative level for any reason (including returning from the dead), there is a chance that the character will gain 1 additional negative level. This chance is equal to 1% times the party’s APL.

The Desert (CG, Con)

The Desert is an environment so bleak that none can survive it without aid. For those who find that aid, the journey across the wastes can lead to great things. Misaligned, it implies the subject cannot rely on the help of others and will assuredly be lost. The sphinx on this card can refer to a mystic or doctor bringing salvation in times of plague or illness.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Constitution-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Constitution-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 oracle, shaman, or witch alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the oracle, shaman, or witch class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option or archetype.
• Gift: Each session, you have a chance to find additional treasure worth as much as an encounter with a CR equal to your party’s APL – 1. This chance is equal to 1% times the party’s APL.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point whenever you fail a Survival check to navigate to a landmark, settlement, or environment in order to cause a random encounter to begin. The CR of this encounter increases by +1d3.

The Brass Dwarf (LN, Con)

The Brass Dwarf shows an azer who represents invulnerability to a current danger. Although others might fall, he remains hale and strong. The Brass Dwarf can also mean a failure or dark fate for one, which in turn might save all others around him from a greater danger.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Constitution-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Constitution-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add ifrit to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: Once per day, you can grant yourself DR 1/– until the start of your next round as an immediate action. This stacks with any other sources of damage reduction that you possess.
• Stain: Whenever you are below 0 hit points but stable, the GM can spend 1 tension point to cause you to begin dying. This stain can only be activated during your turn, and is always accompanied by a dramatic sign of death’s advances (such as convulsions or hacking blood). The GM cannot use this stain if using this ability would cause you to die.

The Teamster (N, Con)

The Teamster is a driving external force that keeps the subject going, no matter what. This force can be physical or mental, as a person who exhorts others to continue on when they have no more strength to give. The force can be for good or ill but cannot be ignored. The half-orc depicted is leading a life of constant toil, but for his own betterment.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Constitution-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Constitution-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 cavalier, druid, or hunter alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the cavalier, druid, or hunter class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Handle Animal checks, and Handle Animal is a class skill for you. If you have or later gain an animal companion, eidolon, or familiar, your first animal companion, eidolon, or familiar gains +1 hit point.
• Stain: Add 1 to the number of tension points that the GM gains during each session.

The Mountain Man (CN, Con)

The Mountain Man signifies an encounter with a physical power outside of one’s control. The giant could personify an authority, an army, an earthquake, or even a desperately needed rainstorm in a parched land. Acceding to the force might be wise, but surviving it is paramount.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Constitution-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Constitution-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain Survival as a bonus background skill.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Survival checks, as well as on all skill checks made to circumvent environmental obstacles and effects (such as on Acrobatics checks to leap across a pit, or on Perception checks to see something through fog or a rainstorm).
• Stain: Once per adventure, the GM can spend 1 tension point to increase the CR of one encounter to equal your party’s APL + 4. If your party is 7th level or higher, this instead increases the encounter’s CR to your party’s APL + 5.

The Tangled Briar (LE, Con)

The Tangled Briar is a card of ancient deeds. It indicates an object or person from long ago that will somehow have great influence on the situation. The object or person in question is one lost or murdered in some foul way. Misaligned, the thorny past brings not just pain, but hope for the future.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Constitution-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Constitution-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add elf to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: Whenever you fail a saving throw against an ongoing effect (such as a disease, poison, or spell with a duration longer than 1 round), you gain a +1 trait bonus on the next saving through that you make within 1 minute.
• Stain: You have lost something (or some one) incredibly important to you, granting you the doubt drawback (see the drawbacks section in Chapter 1 of Pathfinder RPG: Ultimate Campaign). The GM can spend 1 tension point in order to cause you to take the penalties from this drawback on a roll or check that wouldn’t normally be penalized by your doubts—this can retroactively cause a successful roll or check to fail.

The Sickness (NE, Con)

The Sickness represents plague, pestilence, famine, and disease. It can also indicate corruption of the soul or of a multitude of souls. If misaligned, The Sickness represents either great health or a chance to stop such a disaster.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Constitution-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Constitution-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add dhampir to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Fortitude saves against disease and poison. Once per day, you can grant this bonus to one ally within 30 feet that can see and hear you for 1 minute. Using this ability is an immediate action.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point to cause one PC to take a –2 penalty on saves made against curses, diseases, poisons, and the special attacks and abilities of vermin and vermin-like creatures for one encounter— this can retroactively cause a successful roll or check to fail. If used against you, this penalty increases to –4.

The Waxworks (CE, Con)

The Waxworks is a place of helplessness and physical entropy. The mind might be willing, but the flesh is frozen in this place of horror. It is also the card of torture and imprisonment, signifying literal inability to move or a paralysis of a more prosaic kind. Misaligned, this card indicates an abundance of energy at a crucial moment that changes all.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Constitution-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Constitution-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain Run as a bonus feat.
• Gift: Once per day, you can cast one of the following spell-like abilities, using your level as the caster level: burst of adrenaline^OA or burst of insight^OA.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point to cause all PCs to take a –2 penalty on saving throws against fear effects for one encounter. If any of the PCs are immune to fear effects, this instead causes those PCs to lose their immunity to fear.

The Suit of Tomes (Int)

Cards in the Suit of Tomes represent ability to learn and reason, and indicates facility with languages or arcane magic. They also broadly symbolize money, school, and literature.

The Hidden Truth (LG, Int)

The Hidden Truth symbolizes the ability to see past the obvious and the banal to a greater truth within. Sometimes this discovery is an esoteric one, sometimes it is a literal find, such as an item revealed within a room. Regardless, it is a card with the power to reveal secrets. Misaligned, it can mean a secret being revealed to the subject’s detriment.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Intelligence-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Intelligence-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 psychic alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the psychic class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: Once per day, you can cast identify as a spell-like ability.
• Stain: Enemies you encounter seem are all-too familiar with your party’s fighting style, spell selection, and other character options you and your allies have chosen, making them better prepared to challenge you in combat. In addition, the GM can spend 1 tension point to allow an NPC to attempt to demoralize a PC as a free action.

The Wanderer (NG, Int)

The Wanderer is a collector. This centaur appreciates that which others regard as junk or trash. The Wanderer appears to those clever enough to find the true worth in something others ignore or treat as worthless. Misaligned, The Wanderer signifies a loss of values, or the inability to see what is truly valuable in a person or situation.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Intelligence-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Intelligence-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 druid or occultist alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the druid or occultist class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Appraise checks and Diplomacy checks, and one of these skills is a class skill for you.
• Stain: The amount of gp that the party gains from selling items is reduced by 10% (base 40% instead of 50%). Successful checks can increase this amount as normal.

The Joke (CG, Int)

The Joke shows a terror that must be overcome—but not by physical means. This monster can only be defeated by trickery or artifice. This card can represent the value of humor in finding the way past a difficult person or task. When misaligned, it often signals that the joke will be on you.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Intelligence-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Intelligence-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 gnome alternate class options, archetypes, feats, or options to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you—a gnome option is any such option that appears in a section in a Pathfinder RPG product that is devoted to gnomes, or that requires the character to be a gnome.
• Gift: Choose two of the following skills: Bluff, Disguise, Sleight of Hand, or Stealth. You gain a +1 trait bonus on skill checks made with both skills, and one of those skills is a class skill for you (your choice).
• Stain: At the start of each session, roll 1d20. The result of this d20 becomes the joke die for that session. At any point during the session, you or an ally can spend 1 hero point to force one creature to replace the result of any d20 roll it made with the result of your joke die. Additionally, the GM can spend 1 tension point at any point during the session to force one creature to replace the result of any d20 roll it made with the result of your joke die. A player cannot use this ability to change the result of a die that was modified by or rerolled as a result of a tension point being spent, and the GM cannot use this ability to change the result of a die that was modified by or rerolled as a result of a hero point being spent.

The Inquisitor (LN, Int)

The Inquisitor accepts nothing save the truth. He represents immutable reality, that which cannot be fooled or swayed in any way. To attempt to go against this unchangeable object, person, or idea is to court disaster.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Intelligence-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Intelligence-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 inquisitor alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the inquisitor class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on saving throws against illusion effects. Once per day, as an immediate action, you can reroll one saving throw that you made against an illusion effect and use the better result.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point to cause one creature to gain immunity to all enchantment and illusion effects for 1 minute. Alternatively, the GM can spend 1 tension point to cause one creature to lose any immunity to enchantment or illusion effects that it possessed for 1 minute.

The Foreign Trader (N, Int)

The Foreign Trader is the card of spies and peddlers alike. Any who trade in information are subject to this card’s influence. A bargain made under this card’s auspice always concludes true, but the ramifications of the pact might be shocking for those who do not understand its implications.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Intelligence-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Intelligence-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add the pactmaker class (Grimoire of Lost Souls) and 1d3 pactmaker alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on all skill checks to acquire information, including (but not limited to) Diplomacy and Knowledge (local).
• Stain: You have agreed to do something shocking for an NPC in the storyline. The GM determines the nature of this favor, and while you are not required to keep your word, you did give it to this NPC of your free will. This stain has major storyline implications for the campaign.

The Vision (CN, Int)

The Vision represents arcane knowledge. Such knowledge can take the form of madness or cryptic words. This card often means an encounter with a crazy person, but it can also signify a brush with genius.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Intelligence-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Intelligence-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 arcanist alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the arcanist class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: Once per day, whenever you roll a skill check you can add a +1d6 trait bonus to the result. If you roll a result of a 6, you may roll an additional +1d6 and combine the dice together to determine your trait bonus. You may continue rolling additional d6s each time you roll a result of a 6, up to a maximum number of d6s equal to your highest mental ability score modifier.
• Stain: You take a –4 penalty on saving throws against confusion and insanity effects, and you cannot gain immunity to confusion or insanity. Additionally, you and your allies add +1 to any sanity damage that you take.

The Rakshasa (LE, Int)

The Rakshasa is the card of dominance and mind control. The creature sitting serenely upon the back of the slave indicates an exterior force imposing itself upon another being’s mind. On occasion, the slavery is literal, but more often it is mental enslavement to a force or idea. Misaligned, that enslavement can be cast off in the face of new information.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Intelligence-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Intelligence-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 mesmerist alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the mesmerist class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Escape Artist checks, and Escape Artist is a class skill for you. In addition, you gain a +1 bonus on saving throws against enchantment (compulsion) effects.
• Stain: You are a runaway slave, and your former slave master values your return to his possession. This stain has major storyline implications for the campaign.

The Idiot (NE, Int)

The Idiot is a card of grave foolishness and greed. It can mean bribery, blackmail, or naivety so grand it can see no evil. The goblins have captured a foolhardy man, representing the knowledge that loss of dignity can precede loss of life. Misaligned, this card might indicate feigning of idiocy to disguise one’s gifts.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Intelligence-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Intelligence-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add goblin and kobold to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Bluff checks, and Bluff is a class skill for you. When using Bluff to feign ignorance or idiocy, this bonus increases to +2.
• Stain: You gain two drawbacks from the following list: headstrong, forgetful, naïve, or sheltered.

The Snakebite (CE, Int)

The Snakebite is a vile, poisoned weapon. Poison takes many forms—not all of them physical. The poison on the assassin’s blade represents the death of ideas and freedom, as well as the ability to turn friends against each other or poison the minds of the virtuous. Misaligned, this card can mean a mental leap, a new friendship, or a discovery.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Intelligence-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Intelligence-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add nagaji and vishkanya to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: Whenever you spend a hero point to gain a bonus on an Intelligence-, Wisdom-, or Charisma-based check or skill check, increase the bonus you gain by 50% (+4 to +6, or +8 to +12).
• Stain: Whenever you or an ally takes damage from a poison effect, increase all damaging effects caused by the poison by 1. Whenever you or an ally is affected by a mind-affecting effect with a duration longer than 1 round, increase its duration as if the level or Hit Dice of the effect were 1 higher.

The Suit of Stars (Wis)

Cards in the Suit of Stars represent willpower, common sense, awareness, intuition, perception, and facility with divine magic. They also broadly symbolize ancient history, morality, and the gods.

The Winged Serpent (LG, Wis)

The Winged Serpent is a powerful being. Knowledge and prudence are separate keeps bridged by understanding. The couatl represents this bridge, knowing whether now is the time to strike. Misaligned, this card means either not seizing a moment or doing so ill-advisedly.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Wisdom-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Wisdom-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add aasimar to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: Choose two Knowledge skills. You gain a +1 trait bonus on checks made with those skills, and one of them is a class skill for you.
• Stain: You take a –4 penalty on initiative checks and on Perception checks made to act in a surprise round.

The Midwife (NG, Wis)

The Midwife is a conduit to creation, although she does not create on her own. This halfling is a key that lets new life or information into the world. Her heart can see the good in even the worst situation. She can see the import of any new arrival, but if the card is misaligned, the new arrival will likely not inspire much joy.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Wisdom-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Wisdom-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add halfling to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: You can spend 1 hero point to grant an ally a +8 bonus on any roll or check. If used after the roll or check has been made, you instead grant a +4 bonus.
• Stain: Reduce any bonuses that you and your allies gain from spending hero points by half, and no other effect can modify the amount of bonus that you and your allies gain from using hero points.

The Publication (CG, Wis)

The Publican represents fellowship and camaraderie, and a place of refuge for those in need. Most would find the cyclops inconsequential, but he has insights relevant to the reading or a quest. Misaligned, The Publican represents refuge unfound or false information given at a crucial moment.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Wisdom-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Wisdom-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 oracle alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you— alternatively, you may add the oracle class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: Whenever you use the aid another action, increase the bonus that you provide to your ally by +1. This increase is a trait bonus, and doesn’t stack with other bonuses from character traits.
• Stain: Whenever you or an ally fails a Knowledge check to identify the weaknesses or abilities of a creature, that character receives one piece of incorrect information.

The Queen Mother (LN, Wis)

The Queen Mother is knowledge personified. The formian knows all but does not reveal anything to anyone who does not show her proper worship. She is fond of the powerless and the underclasses, for they serve her when the more powerful refuse. She represents the need to become part of a society, or to bow before those who know more than you.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Wisdom-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Wisdom-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; gain Breadth of Knowledge^APG as a bonus feat, ignoring its prerequisites.
• Gift: Choose any two skills. Those skills become class skills for you.
• Stain: When an opponent succeeds at a Knowledge check to identify your abilities and weaknesses or those of an ally, that opponent gains a +2 bonus on all ability checks, caster level checks, saving throws, and skill checks made against you for a number of rounds equal to 1 + its Intelligence bonus (minimum 1).

The Owl (N, Wis)

The Owl represents the eternal wisdom of the natural order. It is the harsh realism that causes a pack of wolves to cull the weak in the herd. It is tragic for the culled deer, but through such actions the herd grows stronger. The needle. The Owl holds binds life together, but just as easily can pick that life apart.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Wisdom-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Wisdom-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 druid alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you.
• Gift: Once per day, you can cast death knell as a spell-like ability, using your Hit Dice as the spell’s caster level.
• Stain: Whenever you or an ally is reduced to 0 or fewer hit points during a combat, all opponents that have not been defeated regain a number of hit points equal to 1d8 + the Hit Dice of the fallen ally. For every 3 Hit Dice that the fallen ally possesses, the amount of hit points healed increases by 1d8, to a maximum of 6d8 + the ally’s Hit Dice.

The Carnival (CN, Wis)

The Carnival is the card of illusions and false dreams. This card can heighten the power of the arcane, but depending on such whimsical forces can be risky. For others, this card depicts imprudent plans or unrealistic ambitions.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Wisdom-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Wisdom-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 mesmerist alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you—alternatively, you may add the mesmerist class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: Once per day, you can add a +1 trait bonus to the caster level of any spell that you cast. Using this ability is part of the action to cast the spell. Each time you use this ability, there is a chance that a wild magic event will trigger as a result. This chance is equal to 5% times the spell’s level.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point at the start of a round in order to trigger a wild magic event or a primal magic event (GM’s choice).

The Eclipse (LE, Wis)

The Eclipse represents self-doubt and loss of purpose. This card afflicts those with faith in the divine, as their talents can wane under this stress. It can also indicate a loss of way along a path. If misaligned, it can augur an unheralded ability coming to the fore or a concealed location revealed.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Wisdom-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Wisdom-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; you gain Luck of Heroes^APG as a bonus feat.
• Gift: Choose two Wisdom- or Charisma-based skills. You gain a +1 trait bonus on checks made with those skills, and one of them is a class skill for you.
• Stain: You gain the anxiety and doubt drawbacks.

The Mute Hag (NE, Wis)

The Mute Hag might be silent, but the eye she holds lets her see into the hearts of men. This hag invokes blood pacts and poisonous secrets, the kind that turn brother against brother and son against father. It is a card that performers loathe, as it leaves them stumbling over their words and songs. Misaligned, it indicates unshakable loyalty and lucidity of speech.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Wisdom-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Wisdom-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 witch alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you—alternatively, you may add the witch class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: Choose two Charisma-based skills. You gain a +1 trait bonus on checks made with those skills, and one of them is a class skill for you.
• Stain: You have a terrible secret that threatens to shock and infuriate those closest to you. Work with the GM to determine the exact nature of this secret, but its gravity should be such that it could ruin you if it were ever revealed. This stain has major storyline implications.

The Lost (CE, Wis)

The Lost is the card of emptiness and loss of identity. The bodak shown is forever mad, lost in a world of lunatics, insane asylums, and mass killers. For those under its influence, the world makes no sense. It evokes times where all is babble, as when meeting someone who speaks only in another tongue. Misaligned, it can indicate clarity of mind under duress.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Wisdom-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Wisdom-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 medium alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you—alternatively, you may add the medium class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on concentration checks and on skill checks made to avoid an attack of opportunity (such as an Acrobatics check to move through a threatened area).
• Stain: Whenever you or an ally fails a saving throw against a mind-affecting effect, you take 1 point of ability damage to a random mental ability score.

The Suit of Crowns (Cha)

Cards in the Suit of Crowns represent a creature’s personality, personal magnetism, ability to lead, appearance, and may indicate facility with psychic magic. They also broadly symbolize love, family, and politics.

The Empty Throne (LG, Cha)

The Empty Throne has a sense of loss that is palpable. The ghost signifies that those who are gone will always be with us. They taught us important lessons, if only we choose to listen. This card can bring information from a far-off or ancient source. If misaligned, the ghosts of the past are restless, and might require effort to set at peace.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 medium or spiritualist alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you—alternatively, you may add the medium or spiritualist class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: Three times per day, you can make a trained skill check that you have no ranks in untrained.
• Stain: You become cursed by an effect similar to the curse of the boogeyman (Pathfinder RPG: Horror Adventures), except instead of a boogeyman, the creature summoned is a ghost with a CR equal to your party’s APL +3. The ghost takes the shape of an individual whom you have wronged or otherwise angered enough to transform into such an entity.

The Theater (NG, Cha)

The Theater is the card of true prophecy. The puppets act out a scene, just as the prophet acts out a scene in which she has no part. The prophet is the audience and the prophecy is the show. She has no influence on what she sees, and its importance is often not recognized until too late. If misaligned, the prophecy is just for show.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; choose one class—add that class and 1 archetype, alternate class option, feat, or spell from any Pathfinder RPG product to the list of classes, archetypes, alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you.
• Gift: You can spend one hero point in order to receive a useful clue from the GM that pertains to your current situation without needing to roll an ability check or skill check. This clue is typically as useful as a helpful divination
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point whenever an NPC dies to immediately restore them to full health, replenishing all her class features as if she had gotten a full night’s rest, and have them gain the benefit of the misdirection spell. The NPC must continue the combat (or begin combat, if she wasn’t previously a combatant). The GM can only use this stain once per combat.

The Unicorn (CG, Cha)

The Unicorn is a card that generously offers that which the subject seeks, just as the charger in the picture offers up its fruit. When misaligned, the card means betrayal, poisoning, or a false friend.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add changeling to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: Whenever you are in a settlement, you can spend 1 hero point in order to receive a good or service that costs up to 25 gp x your party’s APL.
• Stain: A random, otherwise helpful NPC’s backstory and motivations are in direct opposition to those of you or one of your allies, and that NPC is willing to discretely undermine that character’s efforts and goals in order to advance her own. This stain has major storyline implications.

The Marriage (LN, Cha)

The Marriage can be a union of people, ideas, kingdoms, or other distinct things. The progeny of the salamander and water weird shows that a union might bring forth new power from both parties, or it might be a ruinous joining of that which should never have been united. Once wedded, the two cannot be parted. This is the card of permanent change.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add ifrit and undine to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: You are competent at giving and receiving aid. The bonuses from a successful aid another attempt that you grant and receive increases by +1. This bonus is a trait bonus.
• Stain: You gain the family bonds drawback, and have a close bond to a significant other (such as a spouse, a lover, etc). You have strong, romantic feelings for this individual and would be devastated if something terrible were to happen to them during the course of the campaign….

The Twin (N, Cha)

The Twin signals duality of purpose or identity. This doppelganger can also mean indecision, as a person or group wavers between very different options. It can also mean divided loyalties abound. The card makes a harrower wary, as it can also mean the entire spread has a hidden or reversed meaning.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add kitsune to the list of races available to you.
• Gift: Three times per session, whenever you roll a d20 roll or check, you can add a +1 trait bonus to that roll. Using this ability doesn’t require an action—acting it is part of the action used to make the roll or check. You must use this ability before the result of your roll is revealed.
• Stain: At the start of each session, the GM can spend 1 tension point to replace this stain with one stain from any other harrow card.

The Courtesan (CN, Cha)

The Courtesan is the card of political intrigue. Her mask embodies the social niceties that must be followed. If it slips, negotiations can take an unexpected turn. The card can also indicate a woman of power who shapes events. How she is treated decides the outcome of the situation.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 vigilante alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you—alternatively, you may add the vigilante class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Bluff, Diplomacy, and Sense Motive checks. This bonus doesn’t apply on checks made during combat.
• Stain: You are beholden to a powerful mistress to whom you owe a debt or favor of some kind to—you determine the nature of this favor, though it is subject to GM approval. Although your character might believe they have plenty of time to repay the debt or that the favor will be forgotten, this stain has major storyline implications.

The Tyrant (LE, Cha)

The Tyrant indicates a ruler who is a blight upon those ruled. The dragon might indicate a monarch, overseer, or head of a household. Whoever this person is, he does harm to those over whom he holds sway, whether he realizes it or not. Misaligned, it might show a tyrant revealed or dethroned.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add lawful evil character to the list of alignments that you can play, and the antipaladin class and the tyrant archetype to the list of classes and archetypes available to you.
• Gift: You gain a +1 trait bonus on Intimidate checks and initiative checks, and Intimidate is a class skill for you.
• Stain: The GM can spend 1 tension point in order to prevent you and your allies from spending hero points for the duration of the current encounter.

The Betrayal (NE, Cha)

The Betrayal is selfishness incarnate. Envy twists the spirit and leads ultimately to devastation. It can also indicate a person whose loveliness hides an evil heart. Misaligned, the card means self-sacrifice or turning away from the material world and its temptations.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 vigilante alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you—alternatively, you may add the vigilante class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: As long as your current hit point total is less than half of your hit point maximum, you gain a +1 trait bonus on attack rolls against opponents.
• Stain: You take a –4 penalty on Sense Motive checks and on opposed Perception checks. The GM can spend 1 tension point in order to double the bonus that one NPC gains on Bluff and Disguise checks made to oppose your Perception and Sense Motive checks (+2 per rank instead of +1).

The Liar (CE, Cha)

The Liar is love at its most treacherous. This is not the love that moves mountains, this is the love that rips the heart in two and causes lovers to leap to their deaths. This lamia can mean obsession, unrequited passion, or doomed love. Misaligned, the card can indicate a new relationship beginning, although disguised as something much less beautiful.

• Attunement: Choose one: Add 1d3 Charisma-attuned classes or an archetypes of a Charisma-attuned class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you; add 1d6 alternate class options, feats, and spells you qualify for from one Pathfinder RPG product to the list of alternate class options, feats, and spells available to you; add 1d4 mesmerist alternate class options or archetypes to the list of alternate class options and archetypes available to you—alternatively, you may add the mesmerist class to the list of classes and archetypes available to you in lieu of choosing an alternate class option, or archetype.
• Gift: You gain a +2 trait bonus on Charisma-based checks made to influence NPCs with whom you have established a positive rapport with.
• Stain: You are either madly in love with an NPC or will fall madly in love with an NPC that you meet. The character’s motives and objectives remain their own, although the NPC is never as they seem. Regardless of what secrets the character keeps, this romance has major storyline implications.

I promised that I would try to do these Algalon Paradigm articles with a bit more frequency, and today I’m going to try and make good on that promise by talking about what is EASILY one of my favorite TV shows that’s on-air right now. That TV show would be Steven Universe, a cute little cartoon that both myself and the Marlows watch religiously.

Take a Moment

So, what is Steven Universe? Its essentially a relationship-focused story that has the backdrop of an intergalactic war that takes place on an alternate reality version of Earth. Steven Universe is very much a modern cartoon—its episodes are roughly 15 minutes long and has a more modern “feel” to it in the sense that it relies heavily on gags and is generally very fast-paced (you need to be to have quality episodes in a mere 15 minutes). The rapidfire pace of the show can be disorienting to people who are more accustom to the traditional 20-minute show (such as the Avatar series) and downright blasphemous to those who enjoy longer running times. Pacing issues harry the series in its first few hours of watching (which amount to roughly 4 to 5 hours of actual time spent watching the series), but once the show finds its legs around Episode 24 of Season 1, it gets REALLY good.

Really, REALLY good.

So, what’s the hook for this series? Honestly, its character arcs. Steven Universe’s greatest strength is its ability to make meaningful connections between its characters and then grow them (both the connections and the characters). Also of equal note—there is NO filler in Steven Universe. Every episode, even those that seem pointless in the present, usually comes into play at some point in the future. To date, there hasn’t been a single episode that wasn’t growing a character for a bigger episode later or exploring a relationship between two characters so it could go back and draw upon them sometime in the future. Even better, Steven Universe’s relationships are SUPER believable—the series features ALIEN ROCKS FROM OUTERSPACE, yet people love those characters because of how well-rounded their personalities are.

Universal Lessons

Warning! This section will have spoilers. Turn back now if you don’t like spoilers.

So, what does Steven Universe have that makes it so worthwhile to GMs and players? Allow me to tell you:

• Competent Dads: Steven is 12 years old at the start of the series, and his dad looks like a washout. He’s big, fat, dresses poorly, runs a carwash, and lives out of his van. But at the series moves on, WOW. Greg is one of the most likable characters in the series, and it shows time after time that he is generally a great father to his son. He’s a father that makes mistakes, sure, but in many ways Greg is a role model for male parents, especially as his character is explored more in Seasons 2 and 3.

• Flawed Characters: Holy CRAP every person in Steven Universe is flawed. Its pretty crazy to see such well-rounded characters in a kid’s TV show, but its part of what makes Steven Universe’s characters so endearing. Now, you’re probably wondering, “Gee, how flawed could a kid’s show’s characters really be?” Well, pretty much EVERY character has had at least one moment where they do something REALLY terrible to a friend, as well as plenty of times where their negative qualities are explored. For example, both Steven and Amethyst are self-deprecating, with Amethyst being borderline depressed about it. Steven has had plenty of screw-ups, but as a 12-year old kid he hasn’t done anything quite as series as the adults in the series. For example, there’s an episode that explores the friendship between Amethyst and Steven’s Dad, and in that episode Amethyst accuses Greg of dropping their friendship after Greg becoming romantically involved with Steven’s mom. Gems all have the ability to shapeshift and Amethyst is the best at this power, so in order to spite Greg she SHAPESHIFTS INTO THE LIKENESS OF GREG’S DEAD WIFE TO MOCK HIM, saying, “Would you like me better if I looked like this, Greg?” All of the major characters have low moments like this despite being generally good people, which is part of what makes the show SO believable. It’s a skill that many players and GMs lack—the ability to humanize their character(s) by having them act in a variety of ways as a result of their emotions or abilities.

• 

  Looks pretty nor—OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO AFRICA AND ASIA?!

  Alternate Earth: Steven Universe exists in an alternate version of earth where things happened a little bit differently thanks to the presence of aliens. At first this isn’t super clear aside from naming conventions—Beach City, the name of the town that the story takes place in, could be any shoreside town. But as the series moves onward, you see that names are eerily close, but different—for example, New York City is just called “Empire City,” (New York is the Empire State in real life) while Pennsylvania is called Keystone (in real life, Pennsylvania is the Keystone State). Hilariously enough, New Jersey is just called “Jersey,” and all of the worst stereotypes about Jersey apply. The AE is cute, but it doesn’t really become relevant until the first global map of the world is shown, and we see that something looks off with the continents, specifically North-Asia (AKA Russia). Bits and pieces of story have fluttered in that suggest what may have given the world this shape, but nothing has ever been confirmed so far. We’re still waiting.

• The BEST Aliens: The aliens in Steven Universe, a race called “Gems,” is one of the most well-rounded, well-thought-out, and ultimately unique races that I have ever seen in a series. Essentially, each gem is a construct the size of a gemstone, but the gems have the ability to project a light-based body around themselves based upon a specific layout, or blueprint. In many regards, Gems are compared to computers, and “bad stuff” can happen to them along the same lines as computers. They can be damaged or corrupted, and their bodies can be destabilized or destroyed. The sheer ecology of the Gems, however, is what makes them so interesting—gem culture and psychology alone makes Steven Universe worth the watch.

• Childhood Heroes: Not only does Steven Universe feature a child protagonist, but it does an EXCELENT job of developing the character’s fighting ability and maturity on-screen. Steven starts the series unable to do as much as summon his weapon, but by Season 4 he’s helped take on one of the series’ major antagonists and defeated her. The growth of Steven is one of the best parts of the show, to be frank, and its worth a watch if only to see how young people can be trained to come into their own as fighters and heroes.

• Everything Matters: There is no filler in Steven Universe. The writers are amazing at taking episodes that look like they should be “slice of life” shorts and pulling them back into their overarching storyline, either by eventually stating that a character “needed the growth” shown in the episode, or by having the events of such episodes boil over spectacularly later. Things that happen in the show have consequence (there’s a story arc where one character remains furious with another for almost five episodes), and the show is VERY good about continuity. GMs watching the show would take care to note how much BETTER everything feels when its all worked together in this manner.

I have a LOT more thoughts on Steven Universe, and I’ve kept silent about a number of awesome things (like Gem Fusion) in order to try and get you to check it out. So do it! See it! The show is currently on hiatus, so you have PLENTY OF TIME to catch up.

So until next time, I’m signing out to go stare at my screen, futilely hoping for more Steven Universe.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

The comic strip that I posted to the right is from Order of the Stick, arguably the most famous D&D-related comic. Period. You can learn a lot from Order of the Stick as both a player and GM, and today I want to use this strip in particular to talk about my thoughts regarding a topic that Dungeons and Dragon gamers have been talking about FOREVER—the role of Charisma as it pertains to attractiveness.

Personally, I don’t think that Charisma should have ANYTHING to do with beauty, for reasons I’m going to lay out today. But before I do that, let’s do a brief history on Charisma as its been portrayed throughout Dungeons & Dragons.

History of Charisma

Charisma has been long-referred to as the “attribute of physical beauty / attractiveness,” and it makes sense as to why that’s been the case—its literally been in the rules for a LONG time. But it hasn’t always been this way. So let’s take a quick road trip down memory lane and see for ourselves how Charisma has changed over the years. I will do this by taking the initial description of Charisma from every Dungeons and Dragons rules book from every edition I can find. So, let’s get started!

• 5th Edition (Source, 5E Basic Rules Set): Measures: Confidence, eloquence, leadership. A character with high Charisma exudes confidence, which is usually mixed with a graceful or intimidating presence. A character with a low Charisma might come across as abrasive, inarticulate, or timid.
• Pathfinder (Source, PRD): Charisma measures a character’s personality, personal magnetism, ability to lead, and appearance. It is the most important ability for paladins, sorcerers, and bards. It is also important for clerics, since it affects their ability to channel energy. For undead creatures, Charisma is a measure of their unnatural “lifeforce.” Every creature has a Charisma score. A character with a Charisma score of 0 is not able to exert himself in any way and is unconscious.
• 4th Edition (Source, 4E Player’s Handbook): Charisma (Cha) measures your force of personality, persuasiveness, and leadership. Many paladin and warlock powers are based on Charisma. Your Charisma might contribute to your Will defense. Charisma is the key ability for Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate, and Streetwise skill checks.
• 3.5 (Source, d20SRD): Charisma measures a character’s force of personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, ability to lead, and physical attractiveness. This ability represents actual strength of personality, not merely how one is perceived by others in a social setting. Charisma is most important forpaladins, sorcerers, and bards. It is also important for clerics, since it affects their ability to turn undead. Every creature has a Charisma score.
• I was unable to find credible sources for editions older than 3.5, sadly.

So, if we assume that 3.5 is like 3rd Edition, then it becomes clear that the “change” to Charisma not involving physical attractiveness didn’t happen until the early 2000s, with the advent of 4th Edition. As a result, it makes sense as to why so many people think Charisma determines how hot you are—it was literally in the rules until recently.

That said, while I was unable to find any information regarding Charisma’s role in AD&D or earlier (or confirm that 3.0 uses the same wording as 3.5), I did stumble across a nifty little tidbit in the AD&D Unearthed Arcana product that I think is worth talking about—comeliness.

Never Looked So Comely

So based upon what I’ve managed to dig up, during AD&D a book called Unearthed Arcana was published. This book was monstrously successful, so much so that Unearthed Arcana would continue to be a product title that Wizards of the Coast would reuse every edition up until 4th Edition, similar to Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. One part of Unearthed Arcana that seems to be somewhat lukewarm in its reception is the Comeliness attribute—a seventh ability score that measured your character’s physical attractiveness that existed alongside the others. Honestly, I found an old copy of Unearthed Arcana, and in reading it I can see why Comeliness never made it far in the game—it was an ability score that depended upon another ability score to prop it up (Charisma) and its effects ranged from pointless to overpowered, all while seeming INCREDIBLY creepy and straight privileged. Don’t believe me? Allow me to reproduce the comeliness rules below:

Comeliness: Comeliness reflects physical attractiveness, social grace, and personal beauty of the character. It is used to determine initial reactions to the character, and characters with a high comeliness may affect the wills and actions of others. While charisma deals specifically with leadership and interactions between characters,

comeliness deals with attractiveness and first impressions. Comeliness is not charisma. Charisma, however, can affect comeliness. After the first six attributes of a character are determined, his or h er looks must be determined. Is the character ugly, homely, plain, or pretty? This characteristic is determined by the comeliness roll. 3d6 are rolled and totalled. The resulting number, between 3 and 18 inclusive, is modified:

Characters with a charisma of less than 3 will have an adjustment of -8 on comeliness, so that it will fall in the range of -5 to + 10. For charisma of 3, the adjustment is -5; charisma of 4-5, -3; for 6-8, -1; for 9-1 2, no adjustment; for 13-15, + 1 ; for 16-1 7, + 2; for 18, + 3; and for charisma of more than 18, +5. As charisma is raised or lowered, whether by disease, disfigurement, aging, or artifacts, comeliness

should be similarly affected on a point-for-point basis (a loss of one point of charisma equals one point of comeliness equally lost). In addition to the adjustment to comeliness based on charisma score, characters of certain races must take an additional adjustment to their comeliness scores. This racial adjustment applies only when the reaction of characters of other races is concerned, in similar fashion to the way that racial adjustments for charisma apply only to those of other races. The penalties and bonuses are these:

Half-orcs: -3

Dwarves, gnomes: -1

’Halflings, humans: 0

*Half-elves, sylvan elves: + 1

*Gray elves, high elves: + 2

– Treat these pairs as being of the same race for purposes of effective comeliness; e.g., halflings are just as attractive (or repulsive) to humans as humans are to each other, and vice versa.

Comeliness will have the following effects on creatures of human sort. (This category includes, but is not necessarily limited to, humans, demi-humans, humanoids, giant-class, and bipedal creatures of human-like form and motivation.)

-16 or lower: Those viewing a character with comeliness this low are repulsed and horrified, so as to turn away or attempt to destroy the creature so offensive to the sight. If the individual with low comeliness is powerful, the reaction will tend toward escape, or reinforcement of previously determined awe (horror) reaction. If both viewer and creature are of evil alignment, the effect is that of a positive comeliness of the same total.

-15 to -9: Disgust, evidenced by a tendency to look away, revile the individual, and act hostile in general. Under no circumstances will this character be accepted by the viewers unless all are of evil alignment, so that the negative comeliness can be regarded as positive.

-8 to 0: Aversion and a desire to be away from so ugly a creature will be evidenced by all viewers. If given an excuse, those near the individual will be hostile and openly aggressive; otherwise they will merely tend toward rejection.

+1 to + 6: As such an individual is simply ugly, the reaction evidenced will tend toward unease and a desire to get away from such brutishness as quickly as possible. If given the opportunity, the character’s charisma can offset ugliness, but this requires a fair amount of conversation and interaction to take place.

+7 to + 9: The homeliness of the individual will be such that initial contact will be of a negative sort. This negative feeling will not be strongly evidenced. High charisma will quickly overcome it if any conversation and interpersonal interaction transpires. (Consider a dwarf with 16 charisma and a base comeliness roll of 9; he or she will be at 8 when viewed by all creatures except other dwarves – who will see him or her with comeliness adjusted by + 2 for charisma.)

+10 to + 13: Plain to average comeliness; no effect on the viewer.

+14 to +17: Interest in viewing the individual is evidenced by those in contact, as he or she is good-looking. The reaction adjustment is increased by a percentage equal to the comeliness score of the character. Individuals of the opposite sex will seek out such characters, and they will be affected as if under a fascinate spell unless wisdom of such individuals exceeds 50% of the character’s comeliness total.

+18 to + 21: The beauty of the character will cause heads to turn and hearts to race. Reaction for initial contact is at a percent equal to 150% of comeliness score. Individuals of the opposite sex will be affected as if under a fascinate spell unless their wisdom exceeds twothirds of the character’s comeliness total. Individuals of the same sex will do likewise unless wisdom totals at least 50% of the other character’s comeliness score. Rejection of harsh nature can cause the individual rejected to have a reaction as if the character had a negative comeliness of half the actual (positive) score.

+ 22 to + 25: The stunning beauty and gorgeous looks of a character with so high a comeliness will be similar to that of those of lesser beauty (17-21), but individuals will actually flock arpund the character, follow him or her, and generally behave so foolishly or in some manner so as to attract the attention of the character. The reaction adjustment is double the score of comeliness: Le., 22 comeliness equals + 44%. Fascinate-like power will affect all those with wisdom of less than two-thirds the comeliness score of the character. If an individual of the opposite sex is actually consciously sought by a character with comeliness of 22-25, that individual will be effectively fascinated unless his or her wisdom is 18 or higher. Rejection is as above.

+ 26 to + 30: Unearthly beauty of this sort can be possessed only by creatures from other planes – demi-gods and demi-goddesses and deities of unusual sort. Reaction adjustment is double comeliness score. Fascinate-like power is effective on all except those with wisdom equal to at least 75% of comeliness, except that 19 or higher wisdom always allows a saving throw versus the power. An individual of the opposite sex who is consciously sought by the possessor of such unearthly beauty and comeliness will always be under the “spell” of the individual with such beauty unless he or she has wisdom of 20 or more. The fascinate-like power of high comeliness is similar to the 2nd-level illusionist spell of the same name. Those subject to this power will be captivated by the user, and treat him or her as a trusted friend, mentor, and companion. A saving throw versus spell will negate the effect but if the comeliness is not magical in nature, then dispel magic, antimagic spells, and similar spells will not affect the fascination effect.

Fascinated creatures will follow the orders of characters with high comeliness, provided a roll of 3d6 does not exceed the comeliness of the character. Requests that are not in the best interest of the creature get a + 1 to the die, while those that are hazardous can gain up to + 6 or higher on the die roll. If the roll is higher than the user’s comeliness, the fascinate-effect is broken.

If a once-fascinated creature has been badly treated and breaks free of this enrapturement, the creature will react as if the character’s comeliness was a negative amount. If the creature has been well treated, it may still be friendly to the character even after the fascination has worn off.

The effect of one’s comeliness upon others is temporary; once a character is known to other characters or creatures, its effect is negated, and charisma is used to determine reactions and followers. In this way characters of high comeliness and low charisma may attract interest, but not long-term followers and allies (beauty being only skin deep).

The effects of the fascinate power do not affect the abilities of the individual with respect to fighting, casting of spells, etc., and in no way reduces the subject character to a zombie-like state, a puppet for the high-comeliness character. Actions performed by a character while fascinated may affect alignment (though they would have a good addition to the comeliness check, say + 3 or + 4).

Magic can mildly and temporarily affect the comeliness of a creature. Illusion-based spells such as change self and alter self will raise or lower comeliness by a maximum of 1 point, no matter what the final

Creepy, right? But this is important, because Unearthed Arcana is copyright 1985, which means that Gary Gygax himself noted that Charisma isn’t the same thing as being hot as early as 1985, and attempted to remedy the situation. However, we can see that the rules he created for Comeliness are, to put it bluntly, creepy as $#@, which is likely why they were discarded for future editions.

But just because the rules sucked in 1985 doesn’t mean that the entire concept of Charisma not being attractiveness doesn’t.

Rules As Needed (RAN)

Dungeons & Dragons is a game of rules, an idea that Pathfinder has inherited. Most of the time, rules are a good thing. They let us do things. By its very nature, Pathfinder is an exclusion-based game system—you cannot do anything unless the rules say you can. (Note how the rules always say, “You can” or “You may.” If the rules don’t say you CAN, you CANNOT unless your GM says otherwise.)

In my opinion, the rules are very clear—Charisma does NOT determine physical attractiveness because Pathfinder’s rules don’t say that it does. And let’s be honest—Charisma is defined as a mental ability score, not a physical one. It determines your appearance in the sense that it determines the way you carry yourself. Pathfinder itself isn’t always clear that this is the case (plenty of things that do Charisma damage or drain say that they “physically disfigure you” after all), but we should always be mindful of what the game says Charisma is and what it does not say that it is.

Comeliness (and attribute-based attractiveness in general) does not often work well in games. It tends to get creepy fast, and generally how pretty your character is should be something that’s determined by the player, not the rules. It’s the same idea that got ability score modifiers for men vs. women removed from the early versions of the game—its unneeded and it often causes more uncomfortable situations at the table than beneficial ones. Not to mention that it pushes the stereotype that beautiful people can’t be shy, or that unattractive people can’t have a powerful presence about them. There are plenty of places throughout history that prove such thinking false, and its even creepier when you consider that attaching physical attractiveness to Charisma sort of takes away NPC and PC’s agency to decide for themselves whether a given character is attractive or not. Most elves probably wouldn’t find a 18 Charisma gnome as attractive as an 18 Charisma elf, but tying Charisma and attractiveness together changes the narrative to, “These two people are equally attractive to everyone,” which is lame. (I personally don’t like GMs telling me how my character feels about someone—I would prefer the character be described to me so I can have my character react as I feel is appropriate.)

So lets drop the “18 Charisma Under the Hood” talk and just let people be as ugly or as beautiful as their players (or GMs) made them!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

So I gotta be honest, folks. My brain is shot. Over the past week, I’ve had to survive lower back pain, a developing sinus infection, crippling writer’s block, and the most infuriating Presidental election that I have ever seen. My brain is shot and drained.

So today, I’m going to share with you the only GOOD part of the past week—the Pathfinder campaign that my buddy Justin GMs once every month or two. I promise that there’s a relevant point for both players and GMs, but this was also a REALLY great session and I want to indulge in it to get my mind off of the crippling anxiety that is surely tearing me apart mentally and physically.

So, let’s get started!

Quick Synposis

Justin’s jungle campaign takes place in a homebrew campaign setting that he’s been writing and growing for the past two decades or so. Our main characters are Kyr’shin Yilenzo, Dyne, Saladin, and Sirrix.

• Kyr’shin (Alex): A kitsune fighter/cavalier who grew up in a decadent elven city. Although kitsune mostly live in the jungles surrounding the equator in Justin’s setting, Kyr’shin’s parents
  

  Kyr’shin Yilenzo — The Reluctant Groom.

  stowed him away on a northbound ship in infancy and he was adopted by elven aristocrats on account of his exotic he looks. Unlike most warrior types, Kyr’shin is quick-witted and has a silver tongue that has helped him aid a generations-long blood feud. Currently, he is the king of our PC settlement, which consists of a weird mix of hobgoblins, elves, kitsune, and OTHER (with most of OTHER being humans). Despite his flirtatious ways, Kyr’shin is not in a significant relationship.

• Dyne (Adam): An elven magi who met Kyr’shin when the kitsune was apprenticing as a blacksmith under his “brother.” Dyne comes from a nation where young elves and dwarves are mystically paired with one another in a process called “twinning,” and he is the heir to a powerful family relic called a black blade. Dyne’s sword is inhabited by the consciousness of a copper dragon named Hrothgar, who’s purpose is currently unknown. Dyne is a glut for knowledge and lore, especially involving the arcane and the mysteries of the world. Dyne is married to Sister, an ancient elven druid whose soul was bound into an ooze. Dyne figured out how to save her with Sirrix’s help.
• Saladin (Tim): The inquisitor Saladin is a member of a special subrace of half-elf that is entirely mercantile. They live in giant cities on the backs of massive sea turtles, and they largely control maritime trade. After founding their kingdom, Kyr’shin and Dyne made a number of trade deals with Saladin’s people, and Saladin has come to protect his kind’s investments in Kyr’shin by defending both Kyr’shin and the settlement and influencing policy in a way that increases the settlement’s wealth and influence.
• Sirrix (GM NPC): Sirrix is a half-elf of the same race as Saladin, and was Kyr’shin and Dyne’s first contact with that race. He was a ship oracle who has since become shorebound, meaning that he is bound to a specific settlement (Kyr’shin’s kingdom) as a symbol of ongoing relations between nation and half-elf. Sirrix is extremely powerful—he is a conduit of positive energy the likes of which has never been seen before in the world. For storyline reasons, Sirrix and his wife were not present in the story.

Currently, Kyr’shin, Dyne, and Saladin are at a wedding that Kyr’shin accidentally consented to. Local elves in the region have a megaraptor ridding tradition, and as a cavalier with a tribe of jungle elves under his rule Kyr’shin wanted in on it. However, the right to ride a raptor is available only to tribe members, so Kyr’shin’s representative took his claims as a desire to officially join the tribe, and the only way for non-elves to do that is through marriage. So Kyr’shin took part in a duel with an elven monk named Gea whom he has had contact with throughout his time in the region and ultimately beat her. Barely. Kyr’shin was staggered at 0 hit points, he attacked her and knocked her unconscious with his attack, and then he fell unconscious from taking the action on account of having 0 hit points. When he woke up, he found himself at his own wedding, which apparently EVERYONE knew about except for him!

The Scene

Dyne – Awesome at killing, terrible at talking.

Justin ran the wedding as a social encounter, using the influence rules from Ultimate Intrigue. There were a very large number of guests, and each of the three of us (myself, Tim, and Adam) had our own unique list of objectives that we had to accomplish during the wedding. We also had two actions each (a “move” and a “standard”) as well as some support from our cohorts. (We play using the “Leadership for everyone” rules that I wrote in Everyman Gaming LLC’s Ultimate Charisma.)

The goals were as follows:

• Kyr’shin (Alex): Jungle elf society is matiarchial, and had Kyr’shin lost the combat he would have had to marry Gea with no questions asked on her terms. Since I won, however, he could accept or refute the proposal and negotiate with her as he desired. My goal was A) figure out all I could about Jungle Elf wedding traditions and cultural acceptable and B) to try and build inroads between my kingdom, the larger jungle elf nation, and the representatives of a human nation that had shown up at the wedding.
• Dyne (Adam): Dyne has been researching this extremely powerful elven wizard who lived in the area thousands of years ago known as the Wet King. He has left ruins of his dealings across the jungle, and Dyne wants to understand as much about the Wet King and his secrets as possible, and the wedding has brought a number of extremely old elven tribal leaders to the area, as well as learned scholars from the human lands. Dyne needed to A) learn as much as he could about the Wet King and B) try to discover more about the strange ruins that dotted the area.
• Saladin (Tim): Word had gotten around about the wedding (even if Kyr’shin himself was oblivious), and a gang of racist pirates learned of it. The pirates are all about purity of blood, and they hate demi-races—including half-elves like Saladin. Saladin’s people have a “kill on sight” policy regarding these pirates, but Saladin has learned that they are planning to infiltrate the wedding to prevent the possibility of any heirs being born as a result of Kyr’shin and Gea’s marriage (despite the fact that no one knows if kitsune and elves can interbreed in this campaign setting). To that end, Saladin has to A) “protect his people’s assets,” aka Kyr’shin, by preventing the pirates from either castrating or outright murdering him and B) gather enough evidence to indict the people perpetrating the plot.

We also had the following help:

• Shira (Alex): Kyr’shin’s cohort, Shira, prowled the wedding grounds, secretly moving information back and forth between Kyr’shin and Dyne (and later Saladin once he revealed the plot to Kyr’shin).
• Sister (Adam): Dyne’s wife mostly kept herself busy with keeping the revelries going and keeping tabs on high-interest people throughout the wedding grounds. This enabled us to make a free discovery check each round to figure out where people are and to identify him, which Shira passed around via her network.

As you can see, it was a very cool, very complex set up that was a LOT of fun. While I won’t bore you with a turn-by-turn recounting of everything that happened (this took roughly 16 glorious hours of gameplay across two sessions), I will give you the highlights and the “end game.”

• Kyr’shin met with most of the people in Gea’s bridal party and learned that while she had political power to gain, she genuinely liked Kyr’shin and wanted to marry him in order to help him further his own goals in the region. By tribal law, a non-Jungle elf can’t rule a jungle elf tribe, so marrying Kyr’shin would make her a tribal leader while giving him a more legitimate claim to the Jungle elven sovereignty. He met with many different people who gave him pros and cons for marrying her, the most powerful being, “You can’t grow old with her,” and “You deserve a proper queen that you can spend the rest of your lives with.” In a plot twist, Kyr’shin’s adoptive sister showed up at the wedding and pointed out that he was restricting himself to Jungle Elven marriage traditions, and technically he lie to everyone and say that whatever he wanted to do was a kitsune marriage tradition (since as far as anyone knows they don’t exist yet). Kyr’shin ended up telling the elves that in kitsune marriages, husband and wife sit down in private and have a long talk about their relationship before deciding on whether or not to get marriage. Boom, instant tradition! Ultimately, Kyr’shin and Gea decided to call each other their “second husband” and “second wife,” basically playing off the marriage as “Political friends with benefits” so they would both be free to marry someone who could cement their legacy via a proper heir. Kyr’shin also made tremendous inroads with the other kingdom through diplomacy and a bit of staged oration—he counter-intuitively fights kitsune slavery by taking part in the slave trade, which has given him a reputation as a slaver in this other nation, and he worked hard to try and state his argument. He ended up winning that case with some very tact diplomacy. (I rolled a 35 on one such check!)
• Dyne met a number of wizened folk, including an old jungle elf granny that apparently is somehow immune to all forms of psychological attacks. (We joked that she was immune to giving any F.) Dyne ended up learning that while most people don’t believe the Wet King ever existed (he was very much a boogeyman figure to most people), there are strange consistencies in all of the different stories that point to some sort of corruption that might exist. Also, the one person who did acknowledge the Wet King’s existence (granny elf) warned Dyne of the dangers that he was investigating. Ultimately, however, we think Dyne might have accidentally gave more information to other people than he got in return.
• Saladin managed to hunt down the pirates and foil their plans. He discovered that they had infiltrated the camp of the human guests and have established a number of contingency plans to assassin or subdue Kyr’shin before the wedding’s end. However, Saladin was being stalked spy-versus-spy style, and while Saladin avoided capture or combat, his adversary warned the pirates of Saladin’s presence. As a result, the pirates dropped the nonlethal plans and instead created a contact poison that would be scrawled on a contract and delivered when Kyr’shin touched the paper. Saladin intervened and ultimately stopped the assassin from killing Kyr’shin by striking him so hard that the assassin spilled the poison all over himself. Then, he and Dyne managed to save Kyr’shin and the diplomats from death by exploding powder keg. (The fact that Adam had hydraulic push prepared BOGGLES my mind!)

All in all, a very awesome game!

The Lesson

There is a LOT of good tips and advice that you can learn from watching Justin run a game (or reading about him running a game), but in this instance, the one idea that I think you REALLY want to take away is the concept of “the looking glass.” In our game, we all sat around a table and were aware of what the others were doing. I knew that Tim was actively trying to save Kyr’shin’s life, and as weird as it sounds it was a lot of fun to watch someone ELSE talk about my character and interacting with others in ways that affected my character without my ability to be involved. It was a cool moment because I stopped feeling like a player and started feeling like a spectator—it was a moment that normally would be reserved for NPCS. Heroes go and try to stop the NPC King from being assassinated. Except it wasn’t an NPC this time, it was ME. And I couldn’t participate because if I let on that I knew what was happening, we wouldn’t have been able to stop the assassins because they wouldn’t make their move.

It was FUN. It might have been one of the most fun experiences I have ever had in a roleplaying game, the moment of just letting my character go and watching someone else interact with him in ways I had never expected.

When you roleplay with people that you’ve known for years, using characters with developed backstories and motivations, and allow one another to freely make decisions that can have major repercussions for your character, great things happen at the table. It’s a lot like the, “Give GMs the freedom of tell you what your character did for a small period of time,” experience that Strange Aeons offers. The willing and ability to share the agency between PCs is what makes roleplaying a shared story experience, and what ultimately makes the most powerful stories between friends and characters.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

I mentioned this on a recent episode of Private Sanctuary, but I am prepping to start a Strange Aeons group for the players at my PFS location. I have a couple of pretty over-the-top character builders in the crew, and I wanted to try and dial back on some of the crazier sourcebook stacking that can often happen in a game that has matured as much as Pathfinder has. A few months ago, my friend Owen K.C. Stephens mentioned that he had a house rule that limited your available sourcebooks (Core Rules + three non-Core sourcebooks of your choice), and while I liked that idea I’m not a fan of flavorless limitations. If I’m going to limit my players, I at least want it to have some pizzaz. Then I remember KDN’s own Perram and his strategy of handing out “Special Snowflake” bonuses.

With these two ideas in mind, my brain began hatching the plan that blossomed into the Harrowed Character Building System.

Summary of the Rules

Player options are incredibly limited at the start, but are unlocked through a Harrowed reading that not only offers them additional options for their character building, but also gives them ideas for character traits, character history, and their general place in the party and the campaign world.

Because of this, you have to keep the lid on your player’s creativity until after the Harrow reading—in practice, this has been the most difficult part of the entire process for me, as my players all REALLY want to start putting their characters together both mechanically and historically. Ultimately it isn’t a bad thing if your players start fleshing out some race and class agnostic ideas, but you don’t want them to come with this crazy intricate saga. A huge part of the Harrowed CBS is that it gives the players a shared experience (the Harrow Reading) to build off of. This idea works especially well in the Strange Aeons Adventure Path because the AP mandates that the players have a shared history of a minimum of three months that they have little to no control over narratively.

While you can perform this reading without an actual Harrow deck, you really shouldn’t. Paizo offers two “styles” of Harrow card for you to use as a prop for this system, and I wholeheartedly recommend picking them up. I used to do a lot of amateur tarot reading in high school, so buying the Deluxe set was a no-brainer for me. Anthony tells me that the playing card set is a better prop for playing Towers, a szcarni game in Golarion. Which you get is up to you. Ultimately, you need to understand how to actually do a Harrow reading before you sit down to run this system for your players, and all of the Harrow deck products come with a little booklet that will help you do that.

Once you have the players together, the flow of the rules looks like this:

1. The question is presented. Typically, this is something like, “What is my role in the upcoming adventure?” or “What is my destiny?” The question needs to be something that makes sense for a “character history and future” reading.
2. Each player is assigned a “role” in the story. They are each dealt one Harrow card, and that card is recorded in the reading. The “role” card can be significant if the player (or a different player) draw it. For example, if James draws the Big Sky and Paul later finds it in his spread in the Negative Past position, the card’s placement could represent something that James’s character (or a person related to his character) did that slighted or outright harmed Paul’s character.
3. Next, one player is chosen and a 3 by 3 spread of Harrow Cards is dealt for that person. The GM then goes through the Harrow cards, using each card’s associations to spontaneously weave a narrative together that attempts to answer the question, “What is my destiny?” (or whatever you picked) for that one character. This does mean that you will need to do one reading per PC involved in your campaign, which can be time consuming.
4. Once the reading has ended, the player chooses three cards for his character. If that player’s “role card” is on the board, he has to choose it. The cards that the player chooses grant him special bonuses, as well as one penalty. The player is entitled to knowing some (but not all) of the benefits and stains that each of the cards gives. For instance, the player is allowed to know how card choice unlocks races and new classes, archetypes, and so on. The player is not allowed to know the benefits and stains associated with each card, however.

The Rules as Written

I’ve done a lot of summarizing up to this point, but now I think its time to just SHOW you the rules as I have them thus far. Since my players haven’t used the rules yet (and one of them is a blogger on KDN), I am not going to include the cards in this article—I’ll post the cards in their own blog post sometime in November.

Until then, enjoy the system!

Harrowed Character building

The Harrow Character Building system utilizes a deck of 54 harrow cards to determine the character options available to your character. The GM, taking the role of the half-Varisian, half-Garundi fortune-teller Ms. Marasaph, performs a harrow reading for your character. Initially, you the list of character options available to you is extremely limited, but you have unfettered freedom in building your character’s backstory. By consenting to allow the harrow help shape your character’s history, ambitions, hopes, fears, and flaws, however, you can dramatically expand the list of player options available to you.

When building a character, you always have access to the following character-building options, even if you choose to abstain from a fateful encounter with Ms. Marasaph.

Alignment: You may play any alignment except Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil.

Age: Your character can be no younger than the starting age for your race, and no older than the maximum age for the Middle-Aged age category. If you choose to be Middle-Aged, you gain the normal aging bonuses and penalties to your ability scores for your advanced age.

Classes and Options: You may gain levels in any base class in the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook (barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, or wizard), as well as the unchained versions of the barbarian, monk, and rogue (Pathfinder RPG: Pathfinder Unchained). Additionally, you may gain levels in any prestige class in the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. You cannot select class options for your class that are not from the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, Pathfinder RPG: Pathfinder Unchained, or a product that you have gained access to via an attunement power or a gift from a harrow card. If you gain an animal companion or a familiar, your companion may come from any Pathfinder RPG source (provided it is available to your class), but the creature must be native to the region in which you possess regional affinity (see below). You may also select creatures native to Ustalav, even if you don’t have regional affinity to Ustalav.

Feats: You may choose any feat whose prerequisites you meet from the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, except Leadership, and Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea World Guide. You may also choose Additional Traits (Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player’s Guide).

Races: You may choose half-elf, half-orc, or human as your race. In addition, you may choose any race listed on the Additional Races List if you have selected a harrow card whose suit matches each of the race’s ability score bonuses (see Step 2—Select Your Cards).

Regional Affinity: You must choose one regional affinity for your character. Your regional affinity represents where on Golarion you grew up. Your regional affinity can be as general as a nation (such as Cheliax) and as specific as a settlement (Westcrown, Cheliax). If your race has a list of languages that you can learn from having a high Intelligence score, you may add all regional languages spoken in your area of regional affinity to the list of languages that you can choose from. This does not allow you to add secret languages (such as Druidic) to this list.

You cannot select region traits, feats, or prestige classes that require you to be from a specific region unless you have regional affinity with that region.

Spells: You may learn to cast any spell on your class’s spell list from the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook or Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea World Guide, as well as any spell stored within a spell completion or spell trigger magic item that you or a member of your party acquires or crafts.

Traits: You gain two traits at 1^st level—one of these traits must be a campaign trait from Pathfinder Adventure Path: Strange Aeon’s Player’s Guide, and the other must be one of the following sources: Pathfinder RPG: Advanced Player’s Guide, Pathfinder RPG: Ultimate Campaign, Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea World Guide, Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Gods, or Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Races. You cannot select the driven by guilt campaign trait (Pathfinder Adventure Path: Strange Aeon’s Player’s Guide) as your campaign trait. If you have a regional affinity (see above), you may choose any region trait that is associated with the region that you have regional affinity with, subject to GM approval. In addition, you may gain a third character trait by forgoing all gifts granted by your harrow cards (see Step 3—Gain Your Attunement Powers and Gifts).

Additional Races

Golarion is filled with a colorful assortment of races, and while they are often a minority compared to the human populations of the Inner Sea and beyond, members of other races are just as likely to rise to greatness. In order to choose one of these races for your character, you must have selected one harrow card whose suit matches each of the desired race’s ability score bonuses. In order to select a race with an ability score bonus of +4 or greater, you must select two harrow cards whose suit matches that ability score bonus, in addition to any other ability score bonuses that the race possesses. If a race has an alternate racial trait (such as changelings) or variant versions of the race (such as aasimars) that alter the race’s ability score bonuses, you may use the race’s modified ability score bonuses to qualify for the race instead of its standard ability score bonuses, provided that the alternate racial trait or variant race is a legal choice for you.

Common: These races are common on Golarion, be it in the Inner Sea region, on far-off Dragon Empires, or on other continents. You do not need to give up any attunement powers to play as a common race. The common races are dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling, kitsune, nagaji, ratfolk, samsaran, tengu, vanara, wayang.

Uncommon: Though often heard of, these races tend to have localized presences on Golarion. In order to play as a member of an uncommon race, you must give up one attunement power from one of your harrow cards. (This doesn’t prevent you from using the card to qualify to play as a member of the race). The uncommon races are catfolk, changeling, gillman, skinwalker, vanara, and vishkanya.

Rare: Whether few in number or difficult to find, these races are decidedly rare in virtually every region across Golarion. In order to play as a member of a rare race, you must give up one attunement power from two of your harrow cards. (This doesn’t prevent you from using the card to qualify to play as a member of the race). The rare races are aasimar, ganzi, ifrit, oread, suli, sylph, tiefling, and undine.

Extremely Rare: The following races are either impossibly rare or so predisposed against being protagonists in the campaign that they might as well be impossibly rare. In order to play as a member of an extremely rare race, you must give up all of the attunement powers from all three of your harrow cards. (This doesn’t prevent you from using the card to qualify to play as a member of the race). The extremely rare races are galthlain, ghoran, goblin, kobold, lashunta, monkey goblin, orc, and traxian.

Ability Attunement By Class

Each base class and prestige class not mentioned above is attuned to one or more ability scores, based upon its class features. A class is attuned to an ability score if it has a class feature whose benefits, rounds per day, or uses per day are determined using that ability score. Additionally, all character classes with a base attack bonus equal to their class level or to 3/4 their class level are to both Strength and Dexterity. An archetype is always attuned to the same ability scores as the standard class. An archetype’s class features or specific character options (such as a bloodrager’s bloodline or a psychic’s discipline) can alter which ability scores its base class is attuned to, as if its features were class features. For instance, if you draw a card from the Suit of Crowns (Charisma), you could treat the psychic class as if it were attuned to Charisma provided that you pick a discipline whose phrenic pool is keyed off of Charisma, such as the reborn discipline.

A quick list of base classes (and their ability score attunements) has been provided below.

Strength: alchemist, antipaladin, barbarian, bard, bloodrager, cavalier, cleric, druid, fighter, gunslinger, hunter, inquisitor, investigator, kineticist, magus, medium, monk, ninja, occultist, oracle, paladin, ranger, rogue, samurai, shaman, skald, slayer, spiritualist, summoner, swashbuckler, warpriest

Dexterity: alchemist, barbarian, bard, bloodrager, cavalier, cleric, druid, fighter, gunslinger, hunter, inquisitor, investigator, kineticist, magus, medium, monk, ninja, occultist, oracle, paladin, ranger, rogue, samurai, shaman, skald, slayer, spiritualist, summoner, swashbuckler, warpriest

Constitution: barbarian, bloodrager, kineticist

Intelligence: alchemist, arcanist, investigator, magus, occultist, psychic, witch, wizard

Wisdom: arcanist, druid, cleric, gunslinger, hunter, inquisitor, monk, psychic, ranger, shaman, spiritualist, warpriest

Charisma: antipaladin, arcanist, bard, bloodrager, cleric, medium, ninja, oracle, paladin, psychic, skald, sorcerer, summoner, swashbuckler

Using the Harrow Character Building System

Using the Harrow Character Building system to create a character occurs in four steps: participating in the harrow reading, selecting your cards, gaining your attunement powers and gifts, and acquiring your stains. You don’t have to participate in the Harrow Character Building System if you don’t want to. If you choose to abstain from the system, your character building options are limited to those outlined at the beginning of this section.

The steps to participating in the Harrowed Character Building System are described below:

Step 1—Participate in the Harrow Reading: Your GM will conduct a harrow reading for your future character. This reading is designed to help you flesh out your character’s ambitions, hopes, fears, abilities, and flaws. Knowing these traits in advance will help the GM tailor the campaign and its denizens to your unique character. Both you and your GM should record the results for consultation and reflection as the campaign progresses.

First, at the start of the reading the GM (playing the role of Ms. Marasaph) will will shuffle the deck and lay all of the cards face down in front of you and ask you to select one card. The card you reveal represents your character’s destined role in the campaign. Once your role has been chosen, the GM will shuffle this card back into the deck, then pass you the deck to shuffle yourself. Once the deck has been shuffled twice, the GM will deal out night cards face down in a three-by-three pattern. First, the GM will turn over the three cards in the left column and explain their significance to your character. Next, the GM will turn over the three cards in the middle column and explain their significance. Finally, the GM will turn over the final three cards in the right column and explain their significance.

Step 2—Select Your Cards: Once the harrow reading is complete, you must choose three of the cards displayed upon the table. If any of the nine harrow cards is the card that represents your destined role (see Step 1), you must select that harrow card as one of your three. If any remaining harrow cards were true matches or misaligned, you must choose those cards—up to two true matches and up to one misalignment (if you have true matches or misalignments beyond these numbers, you may choose which to select).

Each harrow card is associated with a number of special powers and abilities as well as a penalty, but the GM cannot disclose any harrow card’s powers and abilities to you until Step 3, after you have have chosen your three harrow cards. The only exception to this rule is if you draw the harrow card representing your destined role—since you are required to select that card, the GM may disclose its attunement power (but not its gifts or stain) to you immediately. In addition, the GM will inform you that in order to create characters of certain races (as determined by the GM’s Additional Races List), you must have selected at least one harrow card that belongs to a suit that matches each of the race’s ability score bonuses. For instance, in order to create an elf character you must have selected at least one card from the Suite of Keys (Dexterity) and one card from the Suite of Tomes (Intelligence). If you wish to create a character from this list that has a +4 bonus (or higher) bonus to one of its ability scores—such as a goblin—you must have selected at least two harrow cards that belong to the suit that matches that ability score. For goblins, this means having selected two cards from the Suite of Keys (Dexterity).

Step 3—Gain Your Attunement Powers, Gifts, and Stains: After you have selected your three harrow cards, the GM will help you determine your character’s attunement powers, gifts, and stains. First, the GM will inform you of the three attunement powers that each of your harrow cards possesses. Once she has finished, you must choose one attunement power from each harrow card so your character has a total of three.

Next, you choose two of the harrow cards to be gifts one of them to be a stain. If any of your cards were true matches, you must choose those cards as your gifts. If one of your cards were misaligned, you must choose that card as your stain. Otherwise, you may assign the chosen cards as you please. The GM will not inform you of what benefits or hindrances each gift or stain grants until after all three harrow cards have been assigned, and once assigned they cannot be changed.

Step 5—Create Your Character: Once the harrow reading has been completed and you have gained your attunement powers, gifts, and stains, you may begin to build your character and her backstory.

Alright, so its basically October. That means that Pathfinder’s newest base class has been officially live for roughly six months now. Which is great—barring a few poor archetypes, the vigilante is an awesome class and people should be playing it. But do you know what’s weird?

I NEVER see the vigilante in PFS. NEVER. I think there’s one other person besides me who’s playing one actively (and granted, we both play our vigilantes in bits and pieces). Ergo, there aren’t many vigilantes in PFS.

Why?! Why wouldn’t you play the vigilante in PFS? Well, instead of just shout incoherently at the sky, I asked a few people at Gen Con (specifically people who sat at my table to get wrecked by ratfolk) why they wouldn’t play a vigilante, and I generally got three answers:

1) I am currently invested in a different character.

2) Vigilantes aren’t good in PFS because of dual identity.

3) Half of a vigilante’s powers are social abilities that I don’t want.

That first reason is pretty legit—not going to knock being invested in something else. But those other two? TIME TO KNOCK THEM DOWN, FRIENDS!

Tony Stark Had It Right

Whenever the PDT talked about the vigilante and its role in PFS, one thing kept getting restated over and over again. “Well, I guess you’d just play in your vigilante identity all the time.” This seems to be the stance that most people take, which means that every odd level is an ability you probably wouldn’t use unless you found the time to switch your identity around.

So, um, question. If you were only going to play in one of your two identities, why would you only play in the vigilante identity? Especially when there is absolutely no penalty to playing only in the social one. Don’t believe me? Well, its true. According to dual identity AND vigilante specialization, you have all of your vigilante identity powers and abilities in your social identity—you simply have a chance to “expose” that your social identity is more than it seems, aka you can associate one with the other.

So, if you don’t care about PFS, wouldn’t you just go public with your vigilante powers like Tony Stark? Aka use them all the time in social identity? Think about it—you don’t have your social identity talents in vigilante identity, but you have both your social talents AND your vigilante talents in your vigilante identity. Ergo, just never leave your social identity. You’ll have all of your powers, all the time, and you’ll never have to worry about half of your abilities turning “off” in PFS.

The Antisocial Vigilante

The second reason, “I don’t want these social powers,” is sort of a weird one, if you ask me. When you get right down to it, just how many of the vigilante’s talent choices revolve around being social? Even the social graces talent, arguably one of the most potent of all, doesn’t necessarily require you to be social—after all, it lets you pick any Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma-based skill that isn’t Perception or Use Magic Device. You can pick Knowledge skills for identifying enemies, or Sense Motive checks for figuring out when foes are lying to you. One of the nastier combos that you can do is pick Intimidate—sure, it’s a social skill, but it is also used for demoralizing foes, and the stalker vigilante has some AMAZING demoralize-focused tricks. And with the edition of Spymaster’s Handbook, you can even pick some neat feats as social talents, or reduce the time it takes you to switch between your social and vigilante identities (because let’s face it, it’s the time needed to switch that makes you unsure of whether or not you want to play this class).

Its impossible for me to say if the vigilante is the perfect class for you. No class is perfect. But the fundamental mechanics of the vigilante aren’t broken—it is perfectly plausible to play one in any campaign setting, even Pathfinder Society, without feeling like you’re losing half of your abilities. If anything, the only thing you have to choose whether or not to keep is whether or not you switch identities. And mechanically speaking, that is actually an EXTREMELY small part of the class that is very easy to mechanically ignore if you don’t want to be bothered with it.

So if the vigilante’s talents and abilities look fun to you, I say give it a try and just be Jack Fancypants, the noble with a can of whoop@$$!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Everyone loves a good story, roleplayers moreso than anyone. Usually when a player puts a Pathfinder character—not a build, but a character—together, they obsess for hours over the intricacies of that character’s personality. Her ins and her outs. Her quirks and her traits. Everything. After putting so much work into a character, reciting her around and around in your head non-stop until you’ve absolutely perfected the essence of what it means to be that person, it can be very difficult to hear someone say the following to you:

“Dude, your character’s really stale and predictable.”

BUT WHY, GASP?! WHY IS THIS ABSOLUTELY PERFECT BEING BORING AND TRITE?! WHY DO YOU NOT LOVE THIS PERSON AS I DO?!

Well, the very simple reason is as follows—your perfectly sculpted personality doesn’t feel legitimate or sincere, and today on Guidance I’m going to explain why.

Flesh vs. Plastic

Before we continue, I’d like to ask that you stop for a moment and consider the following question—are you the same person that you were last year? How about two years ago? Three years ago? And I don’t mean, “Basically the same,” I mean, “Genuinely identical.” If I went back in time and pulled you to the future to meet you as you are today, would the two of be exactly the same?

The answer, probably, is no. As humans, we are shaped by the things we experience in our daily lives. Sometimes those changes are dramatic and occur in an instant. Sometimes they are subtle and only emerge after months or even years. But ultimately it is important to allow your character’s personality and motivations to grow and evolve as new things happen to him or her, because continuity is what makes episodes into an overarching story—even if we don’t know what is causing the growth, seeing characters change drives interest in them. It is the difference between playing as a living, breathing person and a Barbie doll.

How to Grow

One of the more difficult bits in “growing” a character is figuring out just what constitutes growth. If you’re playing a Chaotic Neutral barbarian who murders everything and one time you decide NOT to kill someone for an unspecified reason, then that’s not character growth. Character growth is a reaction to something going on around a character—people typically do not change unless some force challenges them to change, be it an external force like an orc invasion or some existential threat to the character’s wellbeing or an internal force like one’s personal goals and desires. Change typically comes in the form of powerful, life-changing events in the real world. Events that typically do not happen all that frequently, especially as we age.

Luckily, as an adventurer major world-shattering events happen ALL the time. Like, seriously. You may think that your CR 10 encounter against a babau or whatever was, “Just another fight,” but you seriously just took down a demon. A DEMON. This is a being that, while you know exists, the average person never gets to meet. And we’re only talking about “typical” encounters—what about the earthshattering events that your character experiences? The ones that push the plot forward?

For example, if you’re a Pathfinder Society player, more than one adventure has your headquarters, the Grand Lodge, brought directly under siege by a terrible enemy. People die all around you—friends, coworkers, neighbors. People you don’t know. Imagine this happened to you in the real world, like at your place of employment. How would it feel to walk around your work’s campuses or offices, or drive your route or enter your assembly line only to know that Frank from accounting died just five feet away from where you’re currently typing at your desk? To jump at every creak in the floorboards and grow tense every time the door opens, just because it could be your boss telling you to go on break, or it could be another attack. One you aren’t going to survive.

Stuff like this CHANGES people, and how your character reacts to the weight of such burdens as a person defines him or her as a character. How do they change and adapt to the things that have happened to them? Can they adapt at all? These are the interesting characters that make your character as an individual, not your well-scripted and rehearsed backstory.

And now, for some examples!

An Overt Example

Know Direction’s very own James Ballod has a tengu gunslinger in PFS named Kamilla Crackshot. She has a lot of interesting character quirks that I could talk about, but two that are worth repeating are her love of food and her fear of motherhood.

When I ran Masks of the Living God for James and some other locals, the party encountered a cult of Rasmirians who offered them a delicious all-you-can-eat meal. Kamilla took them up on it—she ate everything she could. When a cultist asked if she, “Wanted a wheel barrel for her portions?” her eyes grew wide. “You can order food by the wheel barrel-ful?” From that day on, Kamilla always began every adventure by filling her lead wheel barrel (so no one could scry on her food to steal it) with tasty goodies. James calculated out the weight and volume, even, so he knew how much gold to spend to fill the wheel barrel to the brim. Boom, instant character development.

A more psychological example also comes from James—in one PFS adventure, Kamilla’s party got hit with a TPK, and Kamilla was brought into the Ethereal Plane to serve as the spawn-mommy for a colony of Xill. Kamilla was eventually rescued (she had the Prestige for a body recovery, as she didn’t actually die during the adventure), but Kamilla was emotionally scared by the experience. Anytime anyone asked Kamilla about laying eggs or motherhood, she would freak out and say, “Never, nope, NEVER!” For those who knew what happened to hear, she would deny it vehemently, for she had so forcibly repressed it that she would just sort of wig out as described. Eventually she got the memory removed from her head by a group of caulborn, but now she makes references to, “Not quite being able to remember,” what she did for a few months,” every now and then.

An Invert Example

Now, for one option from one of my own characters—my Reign of Winter character Zanzo Xitan. At the start of our campaign, Zanzo was a very bright-eyed, naïve character who was very much against James’s dhampir rogue, Raynard, who had a very Neutral Evil outlook of the world. He was all about “stab first, ask questions later and do what you have to in order to survive.” Zanzo and Raynard even got into one confrontation—it ended with me getting sneak attacked to the brink of death. As the game progressed, however, Zanzo and Raynard started to see more eye to eye. Zanzo began seeing that the government of Irrisen for what it really was, and found a lot of value in Raynard’s methods of, “Stay alive to keep fighting.” Zanzo isn’t usually “Shoot first, ask questions later,” but through adventuring with Raynard and his mort chaotically-aligned party, he’s picked up an appreciation for action in the face of adversary, and learned that you can’t always talk evil into submission. This change in Zanzo’s thinking was best captured in the following exchange:

NPC: ~talks about how a villain we’ve been hunting has been kidnapping children to blackmail their parents~

Zanzo: “We need to find that hag and murder her.”

Party Healer: “Wow, I mean I’m all for that course of action, but that’s incredibly bloodthirsty for you, Zanzo.”

Zanzo: “She’s already taken kids. Multiple kids. There’s clearly no reasoning with her. We have to take her out, and I’d prefer to let out a little aggression in the process.”

Characters can and should change during the course of play. Knowing how and when to change a character is both intuitive and a skill that must be mastered, but when done well it often makes the character more memorable simply because the character will surprise people at the table. Maybe even her player.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Hello, everyone!

You know, when you fall into a character building “type” in PFS, the look on everyone’s faces when you bring something to the table that isn’t your usual type. For me, its kitsune. I have a healthy (and deserved) reputation for being, “The kitsune guy,” in Philly, but I actually like a whole lot of different Pathfinder RPG races. Today, I’m going to talk a bit about some of my favorite not-kitsune races and why I like them! Because variety is the spice of life. Or something like that.

#10 — Catfolk

This is pretty close to an honorable mention, but I like catfolk enough to put it on my list. The —only— reason catfolk are even on the list at all, however, are the khadjit, from Skyrim / Elder Scrolls. I don’t know, something about their accent combined with their role as shifty thieves and merchants is just plain appealing to me. As a result, the Bestiary 3-style “Chesire Cat” catfolk doesn’t appeal to me. Khadjit needs cat-like features or khadjit not happy. I totally get why Paizo would want to stray clear from such an iconic representation of the race—however, I am under no such compulsion. (Though the “defenders of reality” angle from Inner Sea Races is also cool, and I’m a big fan of that too.)

#9 — Samsaran

Wow, there’s just so much cool stuff you can DO with this race! The samsarans have a perfect mix of flavor and mechanics to back it up. I’m talking specifically about Past Life Skills and the motion that the samsaran lived a full life as someone else. There’s lots of great roleplaying opportunities there, and if I had a samsaran boon I would totally explore them! (Since I don’t, however, I’ll have to be content slipping them into my home games where and when I can.)

#8 — Orcs

I don’t like orcs because they’re powerful (which they totally are for Strength-based melee builds). I like orcs thematically—they’re cool, fun, flavorful, and have decades of awesome tradition, lore, and personality to draw upon. Sauron’s orc armies are very different from Warhammer’s orks who are in turn very different from Warcraft’s orcs, yet all three feel orcish. Orcs are a refreshingly vibrant race that is open for a lot of interpretation compared to most other races—provided you have the whole, “martial tradition,” and “shamanism / savage” feel going for them in at least a small capacity. (With Warhammer being ‘extreme savage,’ Warcraft being, ‘light savage,’ and Sauron’s army being somewhere in the middle).

#7 — Dhampir

So, I’ve never played a Pathfinder dhampir. But I did play a 3.5 “half-vampire template” human back in 3.5 for a couple of sessions, and man was he the best! That race was a LOT more restrictive then Dhampir—not only could I not heal from positive energy, but I started disintegrating in sunlight over the course of hours like a real vampire. It was painful, but a lot of fun. My first-ever bard was a dhampir, and that was the game where I discovered the power of the bard class, but that’s a story for a different time. At any rate, those memories of my former dhampir character are fun, and I would totally play one in PFS if the race was never made more available (currently, it was only available from one Beginner Box event). Maybe someday I ‘ll get my wish, or maybe I wouldn’t. Still, a man can dream, can’t he?

#6 — Ratfolk

Honestly, ratfolk wouldn’t have been on my list at all before Pathfinder. Someone at Paizo REALLY likes them (I’m thinking Sutter, Crystal Fraiser, Owen, and Wes—maybe more!), because ratfolk always get really cool stories and backgrounds and histories wherever they’re included. The thing that’s neat about ratfolk is that they really only seem to have a culture that’s build around “survival,” and somehow that works. Seriously, ratfolk culture basically amounts to, “Take rat behaviors and slap them on a humanoid,” and for some reason, I love it. Its great, fun, and exciting.

Man, I should try Mouse Guard. I bet I’d like that too….

#5 — Elf

I don’t really like playing elves in Pathfinder, but my first D&D character was an elf, and most of my World of Warcraft characters are elves. I like them. They feel human, but alien in a way that kitsune also feel (although kitsune are “more human” which is one reason I like them more). Usually the thing that holds me back from playing elves is a lack of direction—elves are sort of the opposite of orcs in that they all tend to feel the same, especially with the whole, “Our elves come in every color,” thing that fantasy LOVES to do to them. Tree elves, aquatic elves, tundra elves, desert elves, mana/magic elves, evil elves, you name it. Defining what an elf is becomes more about where they live and how they adapt to that terrain then what makes that culture different from others. (This was a major reason I didn’t like Faerun elves as much as others did.)

#4 — Skinwalker

I wasn’t kidding when I said that I like shapechangers. Skinwalkers are REALLY cool, what with their animal-based powers and abilities. I love how customizable the race is; not only do you have the standard skinwalker, but you have the shiny, more specific “were-variants” that are perfect fits for Golarion. It’s a race that you can easily mold with your GM’s permission based upon how common different types of lycanthropy are in your campaign, and I LOVE races that can blend into the campaign like that. To me, skinwalkers are like the “anti-kitsune” though. Kitsune change into humans to hide among them. Skinwalkers basically ARE human, but they can partially change into monsters / not-humans when they need to. It’s a very different dynamic that I’m looking forward to exploring with my Gen Con 2016 race boon at some point.

#3 — Human

… Yeah, okay. You got me. I like humans. Not really for the fluff or the flavor, but more for how easy they make character building. Non-fighter archers are basically a thing at low-levels because of humans (or at least they’re significantly less painful to play). They can also just fill out their niche and take powers and abilities they wouldn’t normally gain so EASILY because of their bonus skills, flexible ability bonus, and bonus feat. Like, if you are a knowledgeable player, you have to try to build a bad human and I like that about them. That said, they’re usually not my go-to race because I feel like a minmaxer when I take those crazy-powerful favored class options or that amazingly useful bonus feat. Also, humans are only as fun to play as the setting you’re playing in, in my experience. If your world’s humans have cool ethnicities and histories, they’re cool. If they’re cool, they’re not. But other races sort of come with cool pre-installed. Not so with humans, but I guess I shouldn’t hold it too much against them. (And usually don’t.)

#2 — Dwarf

Listen, I can’t even tell you why but I have a MASSIVE soft-spot for dwarves. Maybe it’s because of their bear fascination. Of their iconic-yet-easy-to-imitate accent. Maybe its just because they’re almost always portrayed as being super awesome in a brawl, or maybe its just because they’re AWESOME. I am a huge dwarf fan,

#1 — Halfling

I’m going to say something weird—Lord of the Rings really wasn’t a huge influence on me as a fantasy gamer, so I’m not really sure WHY I like halflings as much as I do. Maybe its because they’re small and scrappy. Maybe its because they’re not played often. I couldn’t tell you, but Frodo? Sam? Pippin and Merry? Yeah, those guys don’t really scream, “Cool,” to me. Personally, I like playing halflings that go against the racial stereotypes. One of my halflings, Alton, was a ladies man with a love of slinging stones and a bit of a gambling addiction. He always grew his beard out into a scruff and always wore shoes because he didn’t want to be talked down to. (BUT MOST PEOPLE DID ANYWAY BECAUSE HE’S A HALFLING!)

Also, the luck thing is fun. Especially adaptable luck—I REALLY like that.

So, there you have it. My Top 10 favorite races that AREN’T kitsune! What did you think? What are your “guilty pleasure races,” and what makes you like them so gosh-darn much? Leave your comments below or on our site Forums, and I’ll see you next week for another installment of Guidance!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

Last week on Guidance, I talked a bit about why I don’t think a second edition of Pathfinder will drastically change the rules system away from the 3.5 Engine. As promised, this week I’m going to give my thoughts on what a theoretical “Pathfinder 2.0” might look like.

Like last week, I want to make one thing perfectly clear—despite being a Paizo freelancer I will never know know anything about their release schedule beyond whatever it is I’m working on for Paizo, and I can assure you that I would NOT be writing this article if I was working on Pathfinder 2E or had any intimate knowledge on the subject whatsoever. (Yes, not even to double cross my dear readers.) I will say, however, that as someone who is pretty involved in the RPG industry I do have some insight in regards to sales and other factors that Paizo would consider when deciding when the time is right to print P2E and what sort of content would be in P2E. As a result, there’s no wild speculation in this article—its all 100% educated guessing!

Now, let’s get started.

Assertion #1 — Pathfinder 2.0 Will Take After Unchained

To a certain extent, we’ve already seen how Paizo would handle an edition change—Pathfinder RPG: Pathfinder Unchained. This book is basically a massive codex of alternate rules and rewrites of various 3.5 systems, and the title literally references, “unchaining” Pathfinder from its predecessor, D&D 3.5.

Yet for everything that changed, all of Pathfinder Unchained’s rules follow the same generic guidelines as the Core pathfinder content. Although you might need some minor rewrites of various monsters and may need to slightly tweak certain classes, Pathfinder Unchained does not invalidate any aspect of the established rules, and I believe that such methodology is crucial in designing the next edition of Pathfinder, whenever it may be.

So, how would a theoretical “Pathfinder 2.0” be different? Well, for starters I believe that the core product would be called the Pathfinder RPG: Core Rulebook 2.0, or something like that. The title would directly reference that the new product is designed to override the original product. It would include all of the base classes from the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, keeping all of the classes that don’t need changes the same while providing “unchained” versions of those that do. I would expect the unchained barbarian, rogue, and monk to be reprinted, and would hope for newly remastered versions of the cleric and fighter, with tweaks made to all classes as necessary. I would also expect a single, unified simplification of combat as well as how things are presented in the book. (For example, there is no reason for the “what happens when I can’t see,” rules to be spread out across multiple Core Rulebook chapters.) I would also expect tweaks and changes to things like individual spells and feats, magic items, and more. In all, a theoretical Core Rulebook 2.0 would be designed so you could look at an old stat block, see a feat or a spell from the Core Rulebook and be able to say, “Oh, I’ll just reference the new version of this instead of the old one,” and you wouldn’t need a huge number of changes. In this way, a new Pathfinder CRB could basically “phase out” the old one without rendering anything in that original book completely obsolete, similar to how the unchained rogue and unchained barbrian updated most of the original rage powers and rogue talents with new effects tied to the classic names.

That being said, I don’t think everything in the CRB will be tightened-up versions of classic content. I think we’re going to get new content, content that will be heavily playtested before its release. I’m not just talking about an open playtest, however, I’m talking about testing as a finished product. That product, of course, is Starfinder.

Assertion #2 — Starfinder Will Have Pathfinder 2.0 Elements

Its hard to make predictions supporting this assertion because Starfinder itself hasn’t been released yet, but historically speaking RPG companies often test new ideas for their flagship line in their newer ventures. An excellent example of this is 3.5 Edition’s Star Wars Saga, which includes mechanics that are EXTREMELY familiar to the hard-core 3.5 player. But in addition to those classic mechanics, SWS tried a lot of new things, and those new ideas were immensely popular with the 3.5 fanbase. So popular, in fact, that many were sure that 3.5 was going to uplift most of the newer innovations into 4th Edition, and the fact that Wizards of the Coast didn’t borrow from their Star Wars Saga game directly was a large wedge that helped create the edition rift that ultimately spawned Pathfinder in the first place.

The parallels between Star Wars Saga and Starfinder are uncanny when viewed in this light. The big two? Both are high fantasy science fiction games based upon an existing property (Star Wards for SWS, Pathfinder for Starfinder), and both include a drastic redesign of the older game’s mechanics.

Guys, let’s be honest—change is necessary, but no one likes it. I still remember the controversy of the “playtest changes to Stealth” blog a few years back—it created a HUGE divide in the community, even among Paizo staffers. People don’t want to see the game they’ve grown to love change all willy-nilly. But those same constraints aren’t there for a new game, so it is very possible—easy, even—to introduce an old population of gamers to a new mechanic in a new system, get them hooked to the “new” way of doing things, and then port those ideas back into the older game. We could very well see that happening with the Starship rules, which could make for some pretty slick vehicular combat rules if they become popular in Starfinder….

Ultimately, however, we won’t be sure of WHAT the future holds for Pathfinder until it gets here.

For now, this is all my thoughts on what a new edition of Pathfinder would look like—a drastically revised version of the Core Rulebook that is streamlined, reorganized, and includes fixes to common complaints that are ultimately compatible with as many Paizo products as possible with as little adjustment as possible. This is the most optimal strategy that keeps the investments of Paizo’s customers sound while building upon the incremental changes that Paizo has already made to Pathfinder over the past decade. I don’t know when the time for a new edition will be, because I truly don’t think that option bloat is anywhere near as bad in Pathfinder as people often claim it is (but that’s a topic for another week).

So, what do you think readers? Leave your comments below or on our forums, and I’ll see you back next week!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.

PS. You might have noticed that my uploading has been a bit erratic since I came back from Gen Con. I’ve been having some personal issues going on behind the scenes, which managed to hit me at the same time as back-to-school for my work. It is not a pleasant combination of things to have happen to you. I apologize for missing last week’s article. Please be patient with me as I work to take care of my business and get back into my posting and recording routine.

— AA

Nowadays it seems like everyone is itching for a change. Change in the Pathfinder RPG’s edition, at any rate! There’s been talks about, “When will Paizo make a new edition of Pathfinder,” for a few years now. When Wizards of the Coast announced that they were going to make a fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, the talk got big, and that talk’s lingered ever since.

Now, there’s one thing I want to make perfectly clear—despite being a Paizo freelancer I will never know know anything about their release schedule beyond whatever it is I’m working on for Paizo, and I can assure you that I would NOT be writing this article if I was working on Pathfinder 2E or had any intimate knowledge on the subject whatsoever. (Yes, not even to double cross my dear readers.) I will say, however, that as someone who is pretty involved in the RPG industry I do have some insight in regards to sales and other factors that Paizo would consider when deciding when the time is right to print P2E and what sort of content would be in P2E. As a result, there’s no wild speculation in this article—its all 100% educated guessing!

So strap in, and let’s get guessing.

Asseration #1 — Pathfinder 2E Will Not Be a Revamp

Now, this might be surprising but I believe that whenever Pathfinder 2E comes out, it will not be a mechanical or setting revamp in the way that we’re “used to.” While we as a community are totally used to games trying to reinvent themselves for us mechanically and/or setting-wise, its almost never successful. “What are you talking about, Alex? Of course change is successful!” Normally I’d agree with you, Disembodied Strawman Voice, but humor me with a list of major Fantasy genre worlds that have had major mechanical revamps between editions.

• World of Warcraft (MMORPG; counting each “expansion” as an edition)
• Warhammer Fantasy (Tabletop Wargame)
• Dungeons and Dragons (Tabletop RPG)

Pretty good list, right? Okay, now let’s talk about how mechanical changes to those games are received by their fans:

• World of Warcraft: Begrudgingly accepted largely because Blizzard is now able to fix “mistakes” relatively quickly with patches to the game.
• Warhammer Fantasy: Popularity and profitability have been dropping for a LONG time, both because models have become more expensive and the rules tend to favor “armies of the month,” meaning that the newest army is almost always the most powerful for competitive play, and new sculpts for new armies are almost always top tier as well.
  

  This is a sales chart of GWS Revenue from sales during Q4 2015 (Left) and Q$ 2014 (Right). As you can see, their sales fell from the previous year, and this is during the Holiday Season, which is usually a boon to luxury markets like GWS.

• Dungeons and Dragons: Worked for a while (Pre AD&D to AD&D, AD&D to 3rd, 3rd to 3.5), but the transition for 4E ruined the D&D brand with the TTRPG for half a decade, and ultimately the designers had to adopt a modified version of their previous ruleset coupled with an open playtest that was basically a massive PR event in order to recover their brand.

Of this list, World of Warcraft is mostly an outlier, and yes, I’m sure there are other RPGs out there that have managed to pull off drastic overhauls of their game mechanics and stay afloat, but let’s look at the names here: Games Workshop. Wizards of the Coast. Two of the BIGGEST names in the industry fell (or are actively falling) because of the decision to change their mechanics round and force their players to discard old merchandise for the “latest, newest thing.” That’s simply not what the majority of TTRPGamers are into—we tend to see our products as investments for future fun. We don’t want someone telling us that our library is now “obsolete,” and if you think I’m wrong remember back to the early days of Pathfinder. Remember how much Paizo totted that Pathfinder was carrying 3.5’s torch. All of the posters for the Core Rulebook back them said, “3.5 Thrives.” Early Pathfinder advertisements never focused on selling Pathfinder’s own innovations and ideas—it focused on telling gamers, “You don’t need to get rid of the stuff you like. Play with us instead….”

This data was gathered by Awesome Dice Blog; you can click this picture for a link to the blog in question (they have WAY more cool graphs than this one).

So the question that I ask you now is, “Is Pathfinder at the point that the TTRPG community as a whole will forgive a reset?”

My answer is no, and its a pretty simple reason—Pathfinder’s biggest competitor right now is basically its evil twin.

Assertion #2 — D&D 5E Proves a Massive Change Is a Bad Idea

For this to make sense, we have to start with Paizo’s history as an independent First Party company as opposed to what it originally was—a Third Party Company. When Pathfinder first began, it was just a line of adventures that Paizo started to stay in business. Remember, Paizo used to be a Second Party Company—they were basically the Syrinscape of magazines for Wizards of the Coast. So when Wizards pulled Paizo’s ability to make a fanzine, they needed to do something to stay afloat. That “something” was create what we now know as the Adventure Path line. But then 4th Edition happened, and after sending a representative to meet with Wizards of the Coast to see their new game (rather late I might add), Paizo decided to separate from Wizards and do their own thing. Thus the 4th Edition and Pathfinder were created. One died young while the other lives on today.

But Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons and Dragon’s owner and publisher, didn’t die with 4th Edition. They put 4th Edition down and started something fresh and new. Sort of. Under the banner of “pulling from every edition of the game,” Wizards of the Coast created 5th Edition and its doing pretty well. But man, oh man, when you read through 5th Edition it doesn’t really READ like an amalgam of all of the editions of the game. It reads like 3.5, cleaned and refreshed, with some good ideas from 4th Edition sprinkled in.

Wizards of the Coast literally build 5th Edition by taking 3.5, cleaning up parts that didn’t work well, and selling it. Just. Like. Paizo.

And while its difficult to say who is beating who in sales for a number of reasons that don’t matter to this discussion, man oh man is the latest Frankenthree-point-five selling well. And for all its worth, Pathfinder is still doing well for itself too. At Gen Con this last year, I got to GM for a game that—if an official representative were present—would have broken the Guinness World Records for number of players playing the same game simultaneously. To me, none of these things add up to a, “Old, tired game system that needs to be completely redone.

But let’s take the focus off of the competition for a minute and shift it to Paizo and their business strategy.

Assertion #3 — Changing Pathfinder is Bad for Paizo

So, if you’re like me you have a bunch of subscriptions under your belt, right? I just picked up the AP Subscription for Strange Aeons, so currently I’m sitting at AP, Core Rules, PComp, and CampSet for my subscriptions. So of those four, which of them do you think sells the best?

The answer is the flagship product, the product that saved Paizo when they had nothing else, the product that build their campaign setting and showcased their fledgling rules. The Adventure Path line. And let me tell you, changing the rules so they aren’t compatible with the Adventure Path line is NOT a good idea.

Paizo puts out more adventures than any one person can play. Paizo knows this. You know this. I know this. In the past two years, I’ve managed to find time to get to Book 3 in two different Adventure Paths—we’re about one-fourth of the way done Reign of Winter’s Maiden, Mother, Crone and we just started Carrion Crown’s Broken Moon on Saturday. It will likely take my Reign of Winter group until next January or February to finish Reign of Winter if we’re lucky, and my Carrion Crown group moves even slower on account of the once-per-month schedule we have. By the time we’re done Reign of Winter, a new AP will have concluded (Strange Aeons) and a new one will be gearing up (Ironfang Invasion).

Now, Paizo REALLY pushes the AP subscription. If you subscribe to the APs, you get discounts are pretty much EVERY Pathfinder Product. (Its called the Pathfinder Advantage for a reason!) This means that there are plenty of people who are swimming in AP volumes—more then they could ever possibly play. How do you think those subscribers are going to react when they learn that their investment in the AP line will officially become fruitless? That they won’t be able to play all of those Adventures that Paizo spent 5+ years creating? There are going to be angry people, and there are going to be lost subscribers.

But HOW many will Paizo lose? Its impossible to predict human behavior, but we know from the mass exodus that put Paizo on the charts in the first place that the TTRPG community is fickle. We also know from various developer quotes on the forums (James Jacobs himself being one of them) as well as several of the podcasts that the team has done over the years that the AP line is sort of like a train that puts the tracks down in front of it as it goes—each AP largely pays for the next one. But what happens when word gets out that P2E is coming? What if people abandon the subscription?

What *could* happen is that people learn in Q2 of Year A and quickly drop their subscription. Why bother if  the product’s game won’t be supported in a year because a newer game is coming? That means that when Gen Con rolls around, there are reduced sales for the AP that’s debuting in Q3, which in turn will affect the ability to produce the next AP in the following February, which means the new Pathfinder Edition’s AP will be affected. (This, of course, assumes a worse-case scenario where Paizo has no money in their vaults to draw on to help them through the transition, which is SUPER unlikely. Still a hit to profits for an entire year will affect the company short-term, which may affect the launch of the P2E product its trying to launch.)

Naturally, this “doomsday scenario” can apply to any of the lines—Player Companions, Campaign Setting Guides, Core Rulebooks, and so on. The only way to dodge this would be to create the P2E rulebook in advance, give it to all of their freelancers in secret (or all of the work for those other lines in secret) and have a massive, surprise system relaunch for all product lines at the same time. Which would be a TERRIBLE idea because even it would destroy consumer trust in Paizo.

Is There a Silver Lining?

I mentioned before that I think a Second Edition of Pathfinder is possible, just that it wouldn’t be like what we’re used to from the likes of Wizards of the Coast or Games Workshop. Paizo is lead by some of the most brilliant designers, developers, publishers, businesspeople, and gamers in the industry—I am confident that when P2E comes, they will not make any of the mistakes I outlined above.

But what WILL they do?

I actually have thoughts on that too, but you’ll have to wait until next week to hear them! Take care.

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex also cohosts the Private Sanctuary Podcast, along with fellow blogger Anthony Li, and you can follow their exploits on Facebook in the 3.5 Private Sanctuary Group, or on Alex’s Twitter, @AlJAug.