shepsquared
Erratic Aussie
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
Yet vancian has become one of D&D's sacred cows, even though the devs refused to bring it back 100% in 5th edition.
Dungeons and Dragons Megathread
- Thread starter Havocfett
- Start date
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
My GM had Waterdeep Dragon Heist preordered on Roll20, so we got to start playing it today.
It's off to a good start. The level one mini-adventure managed to feel pretty punchy and high-octane. Two of us nearly died twice. A good time was had by all. And now we own a house.
It's off to a good start. The level one mini-adventure managed to feel pretty punchy and high-octane. Two of us nearly died twice. A good time was had by all. And now we own a house.
Morphic Tide
Crazy Brainstormer, Munchkin and Wannabe Min-Maxer
- Location
- MI, USA
Well, there's a few mechanical difficulties caused by Jaina being a Frost specialist of a sort that's at least three Spheres (Weather, Conjuration and Destruction), just for her Frost magic. World of Warcraft mages have way too many tricks up their sleeves to be easily handled by Spherecasting. Fire's almost solely Destruction, though Life of all things is needed to represent a defensive cooldown, while Arcane takes... Let's see, there's Protection for Mana Shield, Warp for Blink/Teleport, Time for Haste, Illusion for Mirror Image... Yeah, a large number of talents get burned on just Sphere unlocks. Fortunately, a lot of this modeling can be done without impact from many drawbacks, so you can get a lot of Talent-neutral Sphere accesses due to not being bothered by a lot of the restrictions you could pick up.
shepsquared
Erratic Aussie
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
Okay, Spheres of Power questions:
- If I take the Energy Focus drawback for destruction, do I need to spend the bonus talent on Acid Blast or whatever I'm restricted to, or do i get that for free with the drawback?
- Is it really worth it using the Spheres archetypes for pathfinder's normal casting classes?
- If I take Nature (Fire) as the base talent, can I take talents like Boil Water or Melt Earth without also taking Nature (Earth) or (Water)?
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
- Location
- Land of Bureaucracy
- Pronouns
- Plural/They
1: Unless a sphere-specific drawback says that you have to spend the talent you get a certain way, you do not have to spend them that way.
For Energy Focus specifically, you either spend the bonus talent on a Blast Type talent, or you spend it on something else - if you do the latter, you are stuck with the standard blast, doing magical bludgeoning damage.
2: They mostly do the basic work of converting those classes into sphere casters. Which is otherwise fairly simple: slap a spell pool onto it, give a high caster a high caster progression and equivalent talents, and the same for mid and low casters. Now, sometimes they also swap out other class features, so you might not want that? But in that case, turning them into sphere casters without the archetype is easy.
If you're asking whether they're better sphere-casters than the new classes - well, that's a more complicated question.
3: It doesn't say so, but I'm 99% sure that you do indeed need all basic packages if a talent specifies multiple elements.
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shepsquared
Erratic Aussie
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
One other question: The base Summon ability from Conjuration just gives me an avian or other shape that I can (permanently) upgrade with new form, type or companion talents when I gain them right?
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
- Location
- Land of Bureaucracy
- Pronouns
- Plural/They
A companion always has a base form (avian, biped, ooze, orb, quadruped, serpentine, vermin).
In addition, each companion gets one free (Form) talent applied to it.
And whenever you purchase a (Form) talent via your normal talent progression, you can only apply it to one of your companions, if you have multiple ones.
Finally, each companion may have multiple companion archetypes.
So let's say I spend a talent to buy the base Conjuration sphere. This gives me the Summon ability, which comes with a companion. I decide that this companion is a quadruped, and that it's free (Form) talent is spent on being a Mount. And then I decide to apply the Mindless archetype, because it's never supposed to do anything fancy anyway. This only costs one talent, and I get a nice mechanical horse out of it.
Later, I decide to go all-in on the minionmancy, and my GM allows it. I get Extra Companion. This gives me another companion, and I decide it'll be bipedial. For it's archetypes, I decide on Martial Companion and Warrior. For it's free (Form) talent, it's spend on Shield Bearer. I get a nifty shieldbearer.
If I now buy more (Form) talents, I have to decide which companion to apply them to. If I buy Avian Creature, I'd have to decide whether to apply that to my mechanical horse, or to my shieldbearer. I can of course buy it more than once, and apply it to both.
I can also buy talents like Greater Summoning - those apply to all my companions, since they aren't (Form) talents, and just upgrade my Conjuration-talents in general.
Also, dirty trick with the Conjuration-sphere that GMs should keep in check in most games: Get summons with their own spherecasting abilities.
Take the Mage-archetype, spend the free (Form)-talent on Magical Companion, and the companion gets a bunch of sphere talents. They'll only be mid-casters, but that still scales up to caster level 15 (assuming you yourself are a full caster), and will spend their feats on magical talents. At 10th level, that can give you a companion with CL 7 and four talents on their own (and more if they're allowed to be customized via traditions) - that's a 4:1 trade on talents! And they come with their own pool of spell points!
If you then give them the Puppet-archetype, they can even be sommoned at no spell point cost of your own, ready to do your bidding whenever you need.
Then you just take that a bunch of times, and have your own pocket healer (Life-sphere), diviner (divination sphere), teleporter (warp sphere), and buffers (enhancement, fate, light, time, war spheres), as well as basically anything else you want.
Don't actually do this in excess, obviously. It can be fine if done to fill gaps in the party - say, out-of-combat healing - but otherwise it'll really cheapen things. The companions will never be able to pull off the combinations a sphere caster can, but it's still pretty bleh if you just have the exact solution that a player would have to spend 3-6 talents on, at the cost of one talent to yourself - and that for any sphere you want.
In addition, each companion gets one free (Form) talent applied to it.
And whenever you purchase a (Form) talent via your normal talent progression, you can only apply it to one of your companions, if you have multiple ones.
Finally, each companion may have multiple companion archetypes.
So let's say I spend a talent to buy the base Conjuration sphere. This gives me the Summon ability, which comes with a companion. I decide that this companion is a quadruped, and that it's free (Form) talent is spent on being a Mount. And then I decide to apply the Mindless archetype, because it's never supposed to do anything fancy anyway. This only costs one talent, and I get a nice mechanical horse out of it.
Later, I decide to go all-in on the minionmancy, and my GM allows it. I get Extra Companion. This gives me another companion, and I decide it'll be bipedial. For it's archetypes, I decide on Martial Companion and Warrior. For it's free (Form) talent, it's spend on Shield Bearer. I get a nifty shieldbearer.
If I now buy more (Form) talents, I have to decide which companion to apply them to. If I buy Avian Creature, I'd have to decide whether to apply that to my mechanical horse, or to my shieldbearer. I can of course buy it more than once, and apply it to both.
I can also buy talents like Greater Summoning - those apply to all my companions, since they aren't (Form) talents, and just upgrade my Conjuration-talents in general.
Also, dirty trick with the Conjuration-sphere that GMs should keep in check in most games: Get summons with their own spherecasting abilities.
Take the Mage-archetype, spend the free (Form)-talent on Magical Companion, and the companion gets a bunch of sphere talents. They'll only be mid-casters, but that still scales up to caster level 15 (assuming you yourself are a full caster), and will spend their feats on magical talents. At 10th level, that can give you a companion with CL 7 and four talents on their own (and more if they're allowed to be customized via traditions) - that's a 4:1 trade on talents! And they come with their own pool of spell points!
If you then give them the Puppet-archetype, they can even be sommoned at no spell point cost of your own, ready to do your bidding whenever you need.
Then you just take that a bunch of times, and have your own pocket healer (Life-sphere), diviner (divination sphere), teleporter (warp sphere), and buffers (enhancement, fate, light, time, war spheres), as well as basically anything else you want.
Don't actually do this in excess, obviously. It can be fine if done to fill gaps in the party - say, out-of-combat healing - but otherwise it'll really cheapen things. The companions will never be able to pull off the combinations a sphere caster can, but it's still pretty bleh if you just have the exact solution that a player would have to spend 3-6 talents on, at the cost of one talent to yourself - and that for any sphere you want.
shepsquared
Erratic Aussie
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
Okay, Conjuring looks like way less of a talent sink now. Thanks
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
- Location
- Land of Bureaucracy
- Pronouns
- Plural/They
Well, suppose you want to get something like the Paladins Divine Bond - a mount you can call at-will, and that sticks around with minimum effort.
For your companion, you'd want Mount and Altered Size, as well as Lingering Companion. You yourself take Greater Summoning, so that it sticks around longer. And you might want to either increase it's land speed (Animal Creature), or outright add a flight speed (Avian Creature). At this point, together with the base sphere, that's six talents.
But you get one of those for free, and you can take Elongated Summoning, Figment Companion, and Object Bound - now you just have to spend two talents on this! And in exchange for a minute of casting, and two spell points, you get a flying spirit horse that you can call and dismiss at will. And if you want, you can spend extra talents to upgrade it with stuff like spell resistance, it's own buff-spells, or other gooddies.
shepsquared
Erratic Aussie
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
God news: Pathfinder Playtest Updates!
Bards get 10th level spells and are a little better at healing (their healing spell now has range), animal totem barbarians get less of a penalty, signature skills are gone and nearly every class gets more trained skills (generally ending up with something like 5+int mod skills at first level).
Now if only designers would stop talking about the healer being a character archetype thats integral to the fantasy of the game...
Bards get 10th level spells and are a little better at healing (their healing spell now has range), animal totem barbarians get less of a penalty, signature skills are gone and nearly every class gets more trained skills (generally ending up with something like 5+int mod skills at first level).
Now if only designers would stop talking about the healer being a character archetype thats integral to the fantasy of the game...
- Location
- Somewhere
Umm... a medic is sort of necessary for a functional combat squad. You're out there doing dangerous shit. Someone needs to put you back together
shepsquared
Erratic Aussie
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
And if that medic wasn't required to devote all their spells per day to healing you (or be a cleric) that would be fine. But apparently requiring a cleric or leaving the dungeon after one bad fight is working as intended.
Especially when pathfinder devs consider the wand of clw to be a major problem that needs fixing.
Morphic Tide
Crazy Brainstormer, Munchkin and Wannabe Min-Maxer
- Location
- MI, USA
The thing is that they need to do something else. Single-function characters have a very bad track record in roleplay, so you can't have just a healer. A healer that also improves your capabilities? Sure, especially if they can do that to the whole party! And summon some dudes to apply the rest of the instances to! But a pure healer just doesn't work.
- Location
- Somewhere
So in other words, the cleric, who can heal, buff, and summon already. And makes abetter necromancer than a necromancer.
shepsquared
Erratic Aussie
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
And if you don't want to play a cleric in pathfinder 2e, you need a spellcaster who doesn't get free healing spells and thus has to spend most of their resources on healing. I am not criticising how healing works in any edition but pathfinder 2e playtest. I am criticising the attitude pathfinder staff seem to have, which is that you have to have a cleric in your party, which isn't even a thing in most fantasy sources of inspiration.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
I agree that it's a problem, but the only part that's really new in PF2E is that they're trying to restrict the use of wands to provide healing. In 3E when clerics got the ability to spontaneously exchange their prepared spells for cure spells, they wound up sacking a lot of their spellcasting to keep people healed up. If your party had an alternate healer like a druid then they would have to devote most of their spell slots to healing instead.
The real issue is the overall D&D attitude that PCs should take damage and be healed constantly and parties should have a dedicated healer, which is not how other tabletop RPGs operate.
FaeGlade Plural
Semper Legens
- Location
- Land of Bureaucracy
- Pronouns
- Plural/They
As so often talked about, healing also tends to be an out-of-combat role - yet it will take up a large portion of a characters "combat resources", such as spellslots.
And since I've been talking about Spheres of Power recently, how do they handle it?
Well, at it's core, the Life-sphere provides not-terribly-efficient out-of-combat healing (1D8+CL for 1 spell point), a way to grant temporary hit points, and a way to heal ability damage and some conditions. So it doesn't really break with the established dichotomy of how healers work. So, what a can a dedicated sphere-healer do?
Well, the most spellpoint efficient out-of-combat healing you can achieve works off the Revitalize talent, which can grant the target fast healing. It starts at Fast Healing 1 for minute/CL - which is already more efficient (at CL 1, you'd heal 10 hp instead of <=9. At CL 5, 50 instead of <=13). Healing 50 hitpoints off a single spell point is pretty damn efficient, and if you really have to you can take Greater Healing to double or triple that.
Oh, and you could take Revitalize again to make it last an hour per caster level, but with a limit of healing 10xCL HP (+same for each time you've taken Greater Healing). This doesn't increase what you heal with it, but rather makes it last through multiple combats. And getting up to Fast Healing 5 is pretty darn good.
So the "hit-point healer" package I'd recommend is this:
Take the Limited Restoration drawback and bar Invigorate (the ability to grant temporary HP), and buy Greater Healing with it. Take the Slow Recovery drawback, which grants Revitalize.
For the low price of one talent, and one spell point each time you need to heal someone, you can fully heal anyone to full hit points within one minute. And as a bonus, you can heal some ability damage and some conditions.
Of course, you can make this even better with my above-mentioned Conjuration-trick, by letting your companions do this for you.
Let them take the Medicinal drawback - now they infuse some liquid to turn it into a temporary potion (which lasts for the rest of the day), so even after they're dismissed it'll stick around. Maximize their caster level by giving them the Studied Healing feat (which'll bump it up to their hit dice). Remember to make them puppets so they're free to summon. Get one companion to provide healing potions, ideally some with hours-long durations. And then the following combinations (using the drawbacks to buy as much of those talents as possible):
- get Restore Senses, Restore Soul and Restore Health. You now have healing potions that heal 4D8+something, and heal all poison, disease, blindness, deafness, etc, ability damage, ability drain, and temporary negative levels. And they don't cost you anything but a single talent.
- Don't take Medicinal. Get Ranged Healing, Restorative Cure, and Restore Composure, Mind and Movement. You probably won't be able to squeeze it all into one companion, so taking two for this might be good. Mass Cure might also be a good idea. Optionally, take the Sympathetic drawback. Maybe don't make this companion a puppet. Their function is to be summoned in combat, and restore any nasty conditions that have been applied - charmed, confused, dazed, entangled, grappled and anything from the Restore-list.
Fluff-wise, this can be anything from shamanic spirits infusing herbal potions you prepared, over calling upon astral merchants whom you've bargained with for their goods, to something that isn't summoning at all but instead, say, just an act of crafting those potions from thin air with your magic.
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Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Honestly, I'm totally chill with infinite slow healing for out of combat refills. 3.5 made it something you can get multiple ways by like level 5/6. pathfinder makes it a bit harder, but still has possibilities.
This is fine since healing simply cannot keep up with damage and therefore is not a functional in-combat role. 9 times out of 10, you're better off focus firing an enemy to keep him from inflicting damage rather than trying to heal the damage he does.
Source pls?
Anyway, I am working on a character built around Cooking as a concept, so far the stuff I have found to theme is:
Iron Chef archetype for the Blacksmith (Spheres of Might) class
Akashic Recipes from April Augmented 2018
Ordre des Repas Exotiques, a martial tradition for the Path of War
Anyone have other suggestions?
This is fine since healing simply cannot keep up with damage and therefore is not a functional in-combat role. 9 times out of 10, you're better off focus firing an enemy to keep him from inflicting damage rather than trying to heal the damage he does.
Source pls?
Anyway, I am working on a character built around Cooking as a concept, so far the stuff I have found to theme is:
Iron Chef archetype for the Blacksmith (Spheres of Might) class
Akashic Recipes from April Augmented 2018
Ordre des Repas Exotiques, a martial tradition for the Path of War
Anyone have other suggestions?
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
I have no idea if there are rules for it, but this seems like the perfect fit for a variant alchemist of some sort: crafting food and drink that heals or buffs. Very reminiscent of Fallout ("Drink this beer so you can carry more weight!") or Gauntlet ("Elf needs food badly!").
Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
It's from the Elfwood Files by Fredrik K.T. Andersson. I don't think I can link his stuff because there's a lot of NSFW on his work.
And I'll note the URL is in the pics, so you can find it.
There's a lot more pics involving 'the bard' ^^
- Location
- my house
Make potions and other temporary magic itens/buffs and fluff them as meals
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The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
This. Pretty much all the alchemist's stuff (except for bombs) is used by ingesting it, so it shouldn't be an issue to make an alchemist with max ranks of Profession (cook) and describe your potions and elixers as being baked into food.
- Location
- Somewhere
Anyone ever thought about how truly mind boggling powerful the fully mobilized Efreeti Empire must be?
Pathfinder calls it the Dominion of Flame (don't know what DnD calls it), and it consists of basically the entire plane, although the city-state the City of Brass is the strongest part of the Empire. Like, the Empire has extraplanar reach, can extort wishes for anything they want nonstop thanks to massive, massive slave populations, and have lots of high level people running it.
Also, the City of Brass (and thus possibly the Dominion as a whole) is confirmed to have black sites for torturing people who are caught binding Efreeti. That makes me happy, because it makes sense to do that, but it was nice to see in universe confirmation so it didn't have to be my own worldbuilding.
Like, this Empire can literally just shit out wishes nonstop against any foe they're actually organized against.
Pathfinder calls it the Dominion of Flame (don't know what DnD calls it), and it consists of basically the entire plane, although the city-state the City of Brass is the strongest part of the Empire. Like, the Empire has extraplanar reach, can extort wishes for anything they want nonstop thanks to massive, massive slave populations, and have lots of high level people running it.
Also, the City of Brass (and thus possibly the Dominion as a whole) is confirmed to have black sites for torturing people who are caught binding Efreeti. That makes me happy, because it makes sense to do that, but it was nice to see in universe confirmation so it didn't have to be my own worldbuilding.
Like, this Empire can literally just shit out wishes nonstop against any foe they're actually organized against.