Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder Sneak Peeks (Old thread)

[Starbuck_II]

I like the Medusa and DarkStalker.

The Paizo Golem has a save or suck (dazed 1d4 rd) and the Golem gets your stuff

the Golem can use any skill or feat possessed by the victim as if it itself had the skill or feat, adding the victim's skill ranks to its own if it already possesses them. In addition, the victim's BAB, if higher, replaces the Golem's, and the Golem gains all of the victim's spells, able to cast them without their requisite components (if any). Any such spells used by the Golem are considered cast when the victim regains control of his senses.

 

[Nikosandros]

I like the Medusa and DarkStalker.

The Paizo Golem has a save or suck (dazed 1d4 rd) and the Golem gets your stuff

For those that won't follow the link, that golem isn't the standard golem from the bestiary, but a tongue in cheek description of the "Paizo Golem" that guards the vault of the company building...

 

[Windjammer]

I'd recommend people to download the Bonus Bestiary on paizo.com - it's for free, once you've signed up for an account on the site (which doesn't cost anything, just requires a valid email address). It's basically Paizo's offering for FreeRPGDay.

Here's an interesting tidbit. They redid the Allip as follows.

Defenses: are weakened. Yes, Fort goes from +1 to +4; and Will/Refl stay at +4; but AC is reduced by 1 (was 15, is 14; flatfooted 13, was 13).

Attacks: are nerfed. Yes, touch attack bonus goes from +3 to +4, but. Wisdom Drain is no longer 1d4 Wis drain on a touch attack but 1d4 Wis damage, and so is appropriately renamed ("Touch of Insanity"). It's basically a 4E-style concession to minimize negative effects a monster has on the party beyond the encounter in which the party meets it (4E Rustmonster would be a classic exhibit).

And these news leave me puzzled. At level 3, Pathfinder PCs are considerably stronger than their 3.5 counter parts (more hp, more attack options, better skill ranks, better base stats owing to two racial +2 to ability scores [still in the final, if you do the math]). So while I expected the Bestiary to stay close to the 3.5 MM, not least owing to make it easy on those who wish PF to stay as close to 3.5 as possible, I expected either monsters of the same power level or slightly above. Heck, some people used the device to reduce the CR of 3.5 monsters by 1 when they were playtesting the Beta with their players, because feeding a CR 3 monster to a level 3 PF party was simply way too easy to merit a level headed XP reward.

And now we see the opposite alteration, actually. What does this tell us? Well, it tells us what I expected early enough, that Paizo, as much as WotC, is conscientious in building a game that works for their organized play format (Pathfinder Society). Here's the catch. If your DM kills a character of yours in a home game, you roll up a new character of the same level for next week's game. If that fate befalls you in Organized Play, you roll up a level 1 character and start afresh - all the gear you accumulated (and for some Organized Play people, that's the main thrill) is gone.

How do you fight that? Easy. Power up PCs, boost their hp, defenses, attacks, and do the exact opposite for monsters. So that when a party of PCs meets an encounter appropriate for its APL, there will be no losses or, worse, long time backdraws beyond the duration of a single session. That's your new CR 3 Allip, gentlemen.

Well, good news for Society players. I'm not one of them, so this won't be a game for me if the final game aims to deliver more along these lines.

The remainder of the Bonus Bestiary is well worth your time. It contains brilliant flavour texts (check out the Annis Hag's, in particular), and seriously tempts me to buy the final Bestiary even though I'd mostly use it to supplement my 4E MMs which are woefully underwhelming on that account.

 

[coyote6]

Attacks: [/B]are nerfed. Yes, touch attack bonus goes from +3 to +4, but. Wisdom Drain is no longer 1d4 Wis drain on a touch attack but 1d4 Wis damage, and so is appropriately renamed ("Touch of Insanity"). It's basically a 4E-style concession to minimize negative effects a monster has on the party beyond the encounter in which the party meets it (4E Rustmonster would be a classic exhibit).

Ability damage doesn't automatically heal after an encounter, unless Pathfinder has changed it; it lingers until healed (via lesser restoration or more powerful spells, or slowly heal naturally). Those knocked around by an allip are likely to have to live with the Wis damage for the rest of the day.

I think they changed it from drain to damage so that healing it was in the realm of the PCs; ability drain requires a 4th level restoration, which is four levels past the ability of 3rd level PCs. To recover from Wis drain, PCs either have to seek out a scroll (800 gp -- quite a bit for 3rd level PCs) or someone to cast it (380 gp -- still not cheap). And if the allip(s) managed to slap around a couple of PCs, fixing the damage can easily become prohibitively expensive.

By the time PCs are capable of curing an allip's damage (i.e., at 7th level), allips have become relatively minor threats.

I think it's a decent change. Now you can use an allip as a tough, scary threat for a party of 2nd level characters, or a really scary (possibly even unbeatable) threat for 1st level characters (if they don't have the magic weapons to hit it, assuming PF incorporeal==3.5 incorporeal).

 

[Windjammer]

Ability damage doesn't automatically heal after an encounter, unless Pathfinder has changed it; it lingers until healed (via lesser restoration or more powerful spells, or slowly heal naturally). Those knocked around by an allip are likely to have to live with the Wis damage for the rest of the day.

Yes, and a 4E player who's lost his magic sword to a rust monster has lost it "for the rest of the day", but can retrieve it after the session or whenever there's time for the DM to handwave the trip back to town to exchange the residuum for one's favoured type of item (cf 4E MM 2). That's a huge change over from having lost a sword "for the rest of one's adventuring life".

So what are you arguing for? That anything short of the vanished sword magically re-appearing after the very encounter with the rust monster wouldn't be a considerable shift in game design?

Think about it. Why change ability drain to ability damage? Because, as you say, the latter heals automatically without player input (don't want any of that, no sir!) at a rate of 1 point per damaged ability score per 8-hour rest unit.

For the underlying design philosophy see this post, esp. on the use of the term "blast radius".

 

[coyote6]

So what are you arguing for? That anything short of the vanished sword magically re-appearing after the very encounter with the rust monster wouldn't be a considerable shift in game design?

I'm not arguing for anything. I wasn't concerned with 4e's rust monster; indeed, as none of the people I game with are interested in 4e, I don't really care about the 4e rust monster.

Think about it. Why change ability drain to ability damage? Because, as you say, the latter heals automatically without player input (don't want any of that, no sir!) at a rate of 1 point per damaged ability score per 8-hour rest unit.

I believe it's 1 point per 24 hour period, or 2 points if they spend the entire 24 hours laid up and recuperating. That's still likely to be days of recuperation, assuming the allip gets in a couple of hits, which seems likely. Or the party cleric is going to have to burn spells (the next day, most likely; possibly for a few days, depending on the amount and spread of Wis damage) to cure it.

I would suspect that the reason they changed it is because they figured ability drain is overly punishing to 3rd level characters, in terms of the resources it requires to recover from and the resources available to a 3rd level party. I imagine they think ability damage at low levels is sufficiently dangerous.

That's just my guess; if you want to know why they changed it, you'll have to ask Buhlman, Jacobs, et al.

 

[Qualidar]

Yes, and a 4E player who's lost his magic sword to a rust monster has lost it "for the rest of the day", but can retrieve it after the session or whenever there's time for the DM to handwave the trip back to town to exchange the residuum for one's favoured type of item (cf 4E MM 2). That's a huge change over from having lost a sword "for the rest of one's adventuring life".

So what are you arguing for? That anything short of the vanished sword magically re-appearing after the very encounter with the rust monster wouldn't be a considerable shift in game design?

I find this to be a foolish argument. They saw a creature that they thought had a mislabeled CR and they did what they thought needed to be done to fix it. That doesn't speak to some overarching conspiracy to pump up their organized play group or make the game more like 4e.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I find this to be a foolish argument. They saw a creature that they thought had a mislabeled CR and they did what they thought needed to be done to fix it. That doesn't speak to some overarching conspiracy to pump up their organized play group or make the game more like 4e.

Hmm. Lower its CR to about 1/2 or 1, lower its hit points especially, have it show up only at low levels, and make it incapable of digesting magic items.

Same basic solution, still a potentially deadly pest-- much less of an assault on verisimilitude. (IMO.)

 

[Hunter In Darkness]

I would suspect that the reason they changed it is because they figured ability drain is overly punishing to 3rd level characters, in terms of the resources it requires to recover from and the resources available to a 3rd level party. I imagine they think ability damage at low levels is sufficiently dangerous.

That is my guess. They have said they are moving and changing things to be more in line with CR. We all know CR was wonky so it needs to be looked at. And really drain is very harsh for a 3rd level group. You get half the party drained and your hurting in a way it could take more then one level to fix

 

[James Jacobs]

A few points of interest...

1) The "Paizo golem" from today's (6/30/09) blog is intended more as a "happy Paizo Anniversary" post then a for-real preview of how all constructs or monsters work.

2) Making the monsters "more powerful" is not the design goal of the Pathfinder Bestiary. We're making adjustments here and there to not only match the way the PFRPG works, but also adjustments that we feel (and our playtesters feel) have long needed to be made to the monsters, as evidenced by how combats with monsters in 3.5 over the past several years have shown everyone. In most cases, these adjustments are going to be relatively minor, and certainly we're attempting to keep the changes when they happen so that, in game, the monster won't feel any different in PFRPG than it did in 3.5. The allip's a good example; it does pretty much the same thing it did in 3.5 and fills the same monster role, but it's no longer doing things that a party of 3rd level characters are going to have to go broke fixing (permanent ability drain). It might be worth remembering as well that a monster of a specific CR isn't supposed to be a Life Or Death super-challenge against a party of an average level equal to that CR... that's never been the way CR works, really.

3) With a few exceptions, we're trying to keep all monster CRs the same as they were in 3.5 so that they'll still be able to serve the same roles in adventures. In some cases (such as the rakshasa) this means the monster gets buffed up, in others it means the monster gets nerfed.