Philly-Specific News

Honestly, there’s not much new on the local news front. Just a reminder that there are two conventions coming up – MEPACON and Nerdvemberfest. Other than that, things are back to normal in Philly, with our gamedays happening back on schedule after the momentary blip that was Unseelie Court. As usual, check the Calendar for more details!

Pathfinder Society General News

Two new scenarios have come out! 5-06: You Have What You Hold is a exploration into the city-state of Tymon, where gladitoral combat is the great equalizer. Someone’s messing with Pathfinder shipments, and it’s up to you to figure out who. Sczarni members won’t want to miss this one!

5-07: Port Godless is Pathfinder Society’s 2nd trip to Rahadoum, the country of atheists. At least this time, you won’t be smuggling in clerics into a godless nation. However, you still need to watch out for those Pure Legionnaires. Can you make it through and save the Riftwardens that have been captured there? Members of the Cheliax, Osirion and Qadiran factions won’t want to miss this!

Also, while we were at Unseelie Court, John Compton, head developer for PFS, had a video chat with one of the VCs for Atlanta, Nani Pratt. During that chat, he took questions from the audience and said a lot about the direction of PFS over the course of the season. You can find that chat here.

Additional Resources was updated for Blood of the Moon. While the skinwalker race isn’t freely available, all the equipment and magic items are open. Check it out!

FAQs

There’s a lot of FAQs over the past two weeks, so here they are in one post to keep track of them. Most of them are relatively minor, although there are some changes to archetypes that players of that archetype should really pay attention to.

Weird Words – Our first FAQ is not actually an FAQ, but the Pathfinder Design Team suggesting a fix to an ability.The Weird Words ability of the Sound Striker Bard Archetype has pretty bad wording. It can be read one of two ways – either all the words could hit one target and then it’s pretty strong or the words had to target separate targets in which case it was pretty weak. On top of that, no matter how you read it it required about 30 dice rolls to resolve, which was just too much. (I ended up going out an buying color-coded dice for my Sound Striker at GenCon). The Pathfinder Design Team ended up suggesting a fix to it, and that’s what the link to the side is for. If you have a sound striker, or if you just want to see this ability work, feel free to comment on the thread linked. (source)

Crossblooded/Wildblooded Don’t Work Together – The title of this one basically says it all. You can’t combine the Crossblooded and Wildblooded Sorcerer archetypes since they both replace the same class features. This FAQ reinforces that although the wildblooded bloodlines look like alternate sorcerer bloodlines, they are in fact archetypes and behave like archetypes (unlike say, subdomains). Another side effect of this is that it’s really hard for crossblooded to stack with any sorcerer archetype, which honestly is fine since crossblooded is already pretty strong. (source)

You Can Lose Actions During Your Turn – If you get reduced in the number of actions you can take in a turn, then that reduction is applied immediately, even if it means you no longer get the action you are currently attempting to do. The easiest example of this is if you provoke an AoO from a monk, and he uses Stunning Fist and you fail your Fortitude save, you stop where you provoked from and lose the rest of your turn. (source)

Black Blades Can Be Sundered – The Bladebound Magus Archetype allows the magus to gain an intelligent weapon called a black blade with its own arcane pool and its own abilities. One of those abilities is Unbreakable, which makes the black blade immune to the broken condition and making the blade unconscious when it would be broken. This FAQ clarifies that while you can’t break the black blade, you can still destroy it. Unbreakable is apparently not undestroyable. (source)

Eagle Shamans Have the Ability to Become Medium and Large! – Eagle Shamans were hindered from fully using their abilities by the availability of stat blocks of Medium- and Large-sized birds. This FAQ tells those druids how to find appropriate shapes to turn into. (source)

Sohei Monks Can Flurry of Blows With Light Armor – Sohei is a Monk Archetype that, among other things, grants the monk armor proficiency but still wants it to use flurry of blows, which is an ability that doesn’t work if the monk is wearing armor. This FAQ fixes that, and makes sohei an even stronger archetype for monks. (You still don’t get the monk AC bonus if you’re wearing armor though. That would be silly.) (source)

Prestige Classes Which Advance Spellcasting Only Advance Spellcasting – When your prestige class says that it advances spellcasting, it advances your caster level, spells per day, and spells known if you are a spontaneous caster. No bloodline spells, not mystery spells, no patron spells, nothing besides what is written in the spells class feature of your class. (source)

Metamagic Spells Count as Their Effective Level or Original Level, Whichever is Worse For the Caster – Say you have a dazing intensified fireball. (First of all, holy crap, you have a dazing intensified fireball. That’s pretty sweet!) You want to cast it defensively? That’s a DC 29 concentration check since it’s a 7th level spell. You want to use a selective metamagic rod on it? Hope you have a greater version since the lesser and normal versions won’t work on it. However, you will be sad when you try to make that spell go through a globe of invulnerability and it doesn’t work since it counts as a 3rd level spell for that. (source)

Clarification on How Mithral Pricing Works for Non-Armor Items – You use the item’s weight, not the new weight once it becomes mithral. Yeah, I know, not exciting. Not every FAQ is. (source)

If a Weapon is Made Out of Multiple Materials, Use the Lower Hardness for Sunder – The basic idea behind this FAQ is that if you are taking the time to sunder a battleaxe, you would be a fool if you tried to break the hard metal head instead of the softer wooden haft, so you use the hardness of the wood rather than the metal. This means you should really have the description of your weapon with you when you play a character so that the GM can quickly adjudicate what kind of materials the weapon is made out of. But of course, you’ve been making sure that you have your additional resources with you whenever you play that character, right? (source)

The Bastard Sword is Either One-Handed or Two-Handed, But Not Both – The bastard sword is a weird weapon. Anyone with martial weapon proficiency can use it as a two-handed weapon, but if you burn a feat on exotic weapon proficiency (or you’re a half-elf who took the ancestral arms racial trait), you can use the bastard sword as a one-handed weapon. The question then comes up with feats like Power Attack which care if it’s a one- or two-handed weapon. The answer is that if you’re wielding it in one hand, it’s one handed. If you’re wielding it in two hands, it’s two handed. (source)

Alchemist Confusion Bombs Require a Saving Throw – The alchemist discovery Confusion Bombs allowed the alchemist to auto-confuse someone who took a direct hit from an alchemist bomb, but he had to trade away 2d6 damage to do that. This effect was ridiculous, and now there’s a saving throw to bring it back in line with, say, actual confusion. (source)

Temporary Bonuses to Ability Scores Work Like Permanent Bonuses, Except They Are Temporary – In the glossary, they had to save space when referencing what temporary bonuses to ability scores do. This FAQ clarifies that it was only to save space, but they should still do everything that full ability scores do. (For instance, temporary increases to strength will increase carrying capacity.) (source)

Feral Combat Training Allows You to Use Your Monk Increased Unarmed Strike Damage in Place of the Natural Attack’s Damage – The basic rule is that natural attacks and flurry of blows don’t mix, unless you have Feral Combat Training. Since it says that all effects that apply to an unarmed strike apply to a natural attack, this includes the monk’s class feature that increases their damage. I’m sure there’s some ridiculous build that comes from this – so monk optimizers have fun! (source)

If Your Familiar Delivers a Touch Spell For You, it Doesn’t Break Your Invisibility – The trick here is that you aren’t the one making the attack, your familiar is the one making the attack. Not an big leap of logic, but one nice to have written down. (source)

Alchemists With the Chirurgeon Archetype Can Now Use Their Archetype to “Cast” Breath of Life on People – At 10th level, Alchemists with the Chirurgeon Archetype gain the ability to prepare breath of life as an extract and give it to other people. The problem is that usually the action economy of feeding other people potions doesn’t work out that well. Normally this doesn’t matter, but the action economy actually prevents breath of life from actually being cast on anyone. This has been fixed. (source)

Augment Summoning Now Works on Summon Monster or Summon Nature’s Ally Spell-Like Abilities – Continuing Paizo’s recent trend of spells = spell-like abilities, summoners can use Augment Summoning to improve the summoned creatures off of their spell-like abilities just like their spells. They still can’t use it to buff their eidolon though. (source)