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Are Old Vailia or Adeyr slave states?
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Jan 28, 2023 23:00
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I think so. The Slave background can be from Aedyr, Deadfire, Old Valia, or Rauatai. Presumably you're an 'indentured servant' with the Rauatai version?
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Jan 28, 2023 23:39
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My idea for an all-paladins-from-differing-paladin-orders custom party has somehow organically morphed into the Always Sunny gang. I'm just realizing that Rational is a disposition that's compatible with or at least not disfavored by all paladins, so it's going to roleplay like a bunch of sociopaths trying to set aside their petty grievances and squabbling over what is the most "logical" response to the situation. Reason will prevail!
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Jan 29, 2023 03:11
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moot the hopple posted:My idea for an all-paladins-from-differing-paladin-orders custom party has somehow organically morphed into the Always Sunny gang. I'm just realizing that Rational is a disposition that's compatible with or at least not disfavored by all paladins, so it's going to roleplay like a bunch of sociopaths trying to set aside their petty grievances and squabbling over what is the most "logical" response to the situation. Reason will prevail! The W.A.T.C.H.E.R method
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Jan 29, 2023 03:14
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moot the hopple posted:My idea for an all-paladins-from-differing-paladin-orders custom party has somehow organically morphed into the Always Sunny gang. I'm just realizing that Rational is a disposition that's compatible with or at least not disfavored by all paladins, so it's going to roleplay like a bunch of sociopaths trying to set aside their petty grievances and squabbling over what is the most "logical" response to the situation. Reason will prevail! that rules, brute force hyperrationalism is a great way for an RPG party to wreck everything good and I think a meeting of 6 Paladin paragons like that would end in mostly the worst of all possible outcomes for everybody
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Jan 29, 2023 03:41
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Lore question- during one of those moments in talking with Tekehu, where Ondra decides to hop in and talk with you as well, she says she gave the Watershapers their powers…which I also guess the Huana believe as well. But Ondra didn’t exist before ukaizo, right? Something before the Enguithan gods would have given the Huana water magic? Ngati maybe, who is I think the pre -Enguithan ocean god of the Huana? Is it just that Ondra by nature of how she and the other gods were created she thinks she’s ngati? I don’t even know if this question makes sense.
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Jan 29, 2023 04:54
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:Lore question- during one of those moments in talking with Tekehu, where Ondra decides to hop in and talk with you as well, she says she gave the Watershapers their powers…which I also guess the Huana believe as well. But Ondra didn’t exist before ukaizo, right? Something before the Enguithan gods would have given the Huana water magic? Ngati maybe, who is I think the pre -Enguithan ocean god of the Huana? Is it just that Ondra by nature of how she and the other gods were created she thinks she’s ngati? Do we know watershaping predates the gods?
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Jan 29, 2023 10:57
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Staltran posted:Do we know watershaping predates the gods? I guess we don’t, since so much of that history is lost or altered, unless there’s a book in the Wael library? Otherwise I guess I was taking the nature of that last King of Ukaizo section of Rymrgard’s realm as evidence, but it’s not explicit
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Jan 29, 2023 13:03
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Ukaizo archaeologically marks the birth of the Engwithan gods as the machines that originated the artificial Wheel and their apotheosis were turned on after the creation of the city. When you defeat the Guardian of Ukaizo and breach the city, you can discover a statue commemorating several legendary Watershapers, meaning it was already an established art at the time of the city's founding. Furthermore, when you go to Motare o Kozio to retrieve the ancient navigational charts to Ukaizo, they are housed within another ancient relic that has an inscription which references Watershaping as the Huana's oldest art and also mentions the covenant with Ngati. We can extrapolate that this is the Huana's preexisting understanding of their god and cultural history that existed before the Engwithans. We know this because the navigational charts no longer correspond to the current geography and reference a landscape that was pre-ravaged by the Engwithans since the first act that Ondra (the Engwithan god, to be clear) did after the gods were created was to create the storm that destroyed much of the Deadfire.
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Jan 29, 2023 15:15
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Maybe it's kind of hinting that if we ever get a PoE3 that there were actual gods before the Engwithans - the Engwithans just ignored them because only 'savages' worshipped them. Or maybe the density of adra in the Deadfire meant that the Huana's belief in a god of the seas created one, like an egregore kind of situation? And this was the process the Engwithans studied and exploited in order to ascend? It still blows my mind that the wheel was just an actual wheel.
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Jan 29, 2023 15:24
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:Lore question- during one of those moments in talking with Tekehu, where Ondra decides to hop in and talk with you as well, she says she gave the Watershapers their powers…which I also guess the Huana believe as well. But Ondra didn’t exist before ukaizo, right? Something before the Enguithan gods would have given the Huana water magic? Ngati maybe, who is I think the pre -Enguithan ocean god of the Huana? Is it just that Ondra by nature of how she and the other gods were created she thinks she’s ngati? Also in part answer to your question, this was my speculation a while back regarding the nature of magic in this world, especially magic derived from faith. moot the hopple posted:I'm playing this game again for -nth time, this time as an Eothasan priest to experience the subclass's unique dialogue options and to see how it roleplays. It got me thinking, though, of the lore explanation for how priest spells work in this setting. The most interesting thing to me is that a priest's magic seems to work independent of whatever god they are devoted to. We see that with Durance, who was rendered undetectable by Magran when his soul was damaged by the Godhammer Bomb. This fluke is the only reason why he is still alive since Magran made sure to subsequently kill off the rest of her clergy responsible for creating a weapon that could harm the gods. I bring this up just to show that there is a clear annulment between priest and diety, on an actual metaphysical sense even. Yet he is still able to cast spells and perform as well as any Magranic priest in this universe, which suggests to me that a priest's power doesn't derive from a god at all.
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Jan 29, 2023 15:50
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It's a very compelling thought: everything comes from the soul energy. Paladins and barbarians and druids and wizards only differ by cultural tradition and how conscious they are about what they're doing. It even combines well with stats like might affecting every force projected by a soul. I guess this make Cyphers the least delusional people. It is also a very boring idea so I hope it's wrong.
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Jan 29, 2023 16:03
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That was sort of what I worked out as the most plausible sequence: 1- Huana develop water shaping on their own as a form of magic via gifted/well-souled people 2- Huana not necessarily understanding the metaphysics of Eora, assign it to a gift from a god (Ngati) who doesn’t actually exist 3- Engithians come along and create actual gods, then spend decades replacing old god-legends with these “real” gods 4- I didn’t think about the loss of watershapping as an art form, but I’d chalk it up to a side-effect of Engithians doing cultural genocide on Huana history (even with powerful souls running around it does seem you need some training or structure/practice for things like casting magic) 5- Ondra starts taking credit for giving watershapping to the Huana And I guess the only question or confusion I have there, is that it seems like sometimes the Gods talk to the watcher in a way where they’re aware of their artificial creation, and other times talk as if they really are natural, that-which-created-Eora Gods. So it trips me up as a not always astute player, which narrative position the Gods are operating at during those conversations. Does Ondra really think they were Ngati and have Huana watershapping? Or are they sort of sharing an inside joke with the watcher?
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Jan 29, 2023 17:09
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Rymrgand is maybe another example of that. More than any other god he seems to talk about himself as if he really thinks he’s the nothingness and entropy before and after the world. But he also shows up to the big god meetings where they talk about how they need to keep mortals in line or they’ll find out about all the god machines and such.
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Jan 29, 2023 17:55
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Bobby Deluxe posted:It still blows my mind that the wheel was just an actual wheel. ilitarist posted:It is also a very boring idea so I hope it's wrong.
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Jan 29, 2023 18:06
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You know, thinking about it more from their perspective, it's so crazy how badly the Engwithans hosed over the Huana in particular. Picture yourself as one of the Huana, going back to the ancient Huanan Empire when it was one of the crown jewels of civilization. It is so great that strangers from a similarly mighty empire called Engwith come from across the sea and entreat your King Wingauro to build a monument fit for your legacy: the grand city of Ukaizo. The Engwithans ingratiate themselves onto your king's council and construct their strange machines of copper and adra within the city. The work is complete and one day the machines turn on and the strangers all disappear. At the same time, a terrible cataclysm is unleashed. A ravaging storm crashes over the islands and renders much of the land inhospitable. The geography is so transformed that previously recorded maps no longer correspond to its current landscape. The three legendary guardian dragons pledged to the Deadfire's defense are nowhere to be found. A storm now permanently lingers around Ukaizo, cutting it off from the rest of the world. Still, future generations will come to feel its loss deeply in their hearts even though they have never touched its shores. Your descendants struggle to rebuild but never reach the same heights as your apex. Your ancestral art that gives you command over the land has faltered. Though your champion Periki has stolen an alternative for you, it is a shameful substitute that perverts your oldest tradition. Your neighbors from the Vailian Republics see your vulnerability and come to steal the land from under you with usurious contracts, empty promises of trade, and other bureaucracies. Your erstwhile children from Rauatai have returned to your waters in boats teeming with bronze cannons. Time and distance have turned them into a hardened breed who regard you not as kin but as subjects to conquer. You pray to your mother Ngati for deliverance, not knowing that the one who now pretends to be her was the one who visited destruction upon your lands all these centuries ago. Toamowhai, the three faced god, hides the face of another usurper who gluts himself upon the fights you hold in his honor. You do not know it, but you and your children pay homage daily to your betrayers. It's been a centuries long story of suffering for the Huana, who have lost everything for once hosting strangers from across the sea and who have been paupered ever since by the rise of the Engwithan pantheon.
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Jan 29, 2023 18:17
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Another thing I’m thinking about this morning is how pessimistic I am about the ending. After Ashen Maw, Eothas tells you “go tell the gods what I’m doing. Tell them they’ll have to forge new covenants with kith” more or less. And you do. And you even can tell the kith. The gods response is basically “ok well can you ask him pretty please not to? And if he does we’re going to have to go prepper mode” The kith response is mostly “oh yikes but wait can we go back to discussing the big abandoned city that we can strip the copper pipes out of??” Like sorry Eothas, your faith was misplaced!
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Jan 29, 2023 18:36
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:3- Engithians come along and create actual gods, then spend decades replacing old god-legends with these “real” gods While they understood that military might would dominate the leaders of an area, they were surprisingly permissive about the religious beliefs of the dominated tribes. So after the Romans rocked up, rather than saying "gently caress you you worship apollo now," they would build a shrine to the local god and be like "Oh yeah, we know this guy *wink*, he's friends with our guy Apollo, we'll build a temple to them both." Then they build a fancy new stone shrine and a big, sturdy Roman temple and everyone goes there and the religious activity is enclosed by the Roman temple. Then over time it becomes their deity under Apollo, and then through a process of gradually shifting references to him as a local spirit or a servant of Apollo, and eventually it's just a temple to Apollo. So with that in mind it'd be really interesting if it turned out that just as there was already a wheel and the Engwithans hosed it up for their own purposes, there was also previously gods and a flow of belief that the Engwithans kind of overwrote with their own system.
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Jan 29, 2023 18:40
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Raygereio posted:Any supernatural ability basically originating from your own soul has been a fairly fundamental concept of the setting since the start though? And that's not just the magic users. A rogue becoming invisible, of a fighter sweeping their weapon and knocking enemies back, is them tapping into their own soul in order to pull of some amazing feat. I know you're probably right but I find this idea so very boring. You know that memetic phrase from Metal Gear series, when a villain explains his sudden powers as "Nanomachines, son"? It's like that. Traditional high fantasy like D&D does this with magic too, of course, but usually, there are some well-explained rules for its use and there are some powers beyond rules and their involvement is a big deal with a cosmic horror seasoning. And in sci-fi no matter what unobtanium powers everything we still have understandable machines and intuitive rules. PoE souls are both mundane and govern the universe. If you see someone dealing an especially nasty melee strike it's soul power, if you see an ancient curse engulfing the land it's soul power, if a weird artificial race of people exists it's because they're soul power batteries. At first I thought this was meant to do exactly that: make all the fantasy stuff mundane, secretly sell people a historical setting with elves and dragons they think they want. But while PoE2 in a way doubles down on this mundanification of the supernatural by making 90% of what happens in the game assumes that not some metaphysics but compound interest is the strongest power in the universe, it still makes its main story about mechanics of souls. So do the stories in the expansions and many sidequests. Perhaps you're supposed to only think about it in terms of the destruction of the power base of traditional elites (gods), but everyone who plays the game can't help but wonder what are technical implications of wheel breaking and how does soul power works. Which is the same thing that everyone uses. Souls are simultaneously a mysterious deus ex machina and petroleum. Of course, this is by no means an attempt to say that the game or its story are bad. It's one of the best, and it makes me take it seriously.
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Jan 29, 2023 20:17
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:Another thing I’m thinking about this morning is how pessimistic I am about the ending. After Ashen Maw, Eothas tells you “go tell the gods what I’m doing. Tell them they’ll have to forge new covenants withkith” more or less. I actually think a lot about PoE2 as being in a sort of incidental, sidelong conversation with Elden Ring, as both are concerned (if you adhere to the prevailing fandom.wiki interpretations of ER’s text) with the disruption of metaphysical forces yolking the state of the world to unnatural, exploitative systems. ER could be a sequel to PoE2
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Jan 29, 2023 21:01
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Maybe Ngati was just a giant cool sea dragon like the one in their basement. Worshipped as a God like Nanmok and in exchange she empowered the faithful. Ondra killed her when they drowned Ukaizo and then the missionaries and inquisitors started saying that Ngati was an incarnation of Ondra.
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Jan 29, 2023 21:23
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ilitarist posted:I know you're probably right but I find this idea so very boring.
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Jan 29, 2023 21:38
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ilitarist posted:It's a very compelling thought: everything comes from the soul energy. Paladins and barbarians and druids and wizards only differ by cultural tradition and how conscious they are about what they're doing. It even combines well with stats like might affecting every force projected by a soul. fighters cast spells and warlords shout limbs back on, this game is bullshit ...wait, wrong game Edit: to be clear, I think this complaint is lame. You can inevitably reach the "everything is samey" complaint if you break things down far enough, and "everybody's sweet powers are a result of their internal strength or a part of their very being, manifested in myriad ways due at least in part to their conscious or subconscious beliefs" is not a particularly compelling case to make for things being too samey or boring. Just because the gods aren't real and some characters aren't powered by divinely-granted magic doesn't mean "everything is the same." Would you have preferred Eora have the exact loving same array of power sources as D&D instead? Because that is far more boring. It's funny how any departure from pre-established* ideas about "how a D&D-like game should operate" will prompt the exact same kind of complaints that D&D 4E garnered. *to varying degrees--some sacred cows were created in 3E or 3.5E. Edited to remove (some) unnecessary snark. Dick Burglar fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jan 29, 2023 |
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Jan 29, 2023 21:50
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I kinda have the same position and it's not about "being samey" (which I don't think ilitarist actually said). for me magic being all just soul power flattens out the metaphor of magic and magical thinking - there is no element of sympathy or similarity to magic, no meaning or moral, just raw resources and someone with the desire to use them in Kill 6 Billion Demons, Meti bemoans how the demiurges use the limitless power of pure creation to create especially sharp rocks. PoE says that's all the limitless power of pure creation ever actually was. this is fine, because PoE's thing is historical materialist-fantasy, but it is a drier approach to the genre. combined with some of the other fundamental design goals (blank-slate PC, focus on high-level political manoeuvring between nation-states), it leaves me a little cold e: we say "is this just because it's different from D&D?" but D&D is arguably the originator of magic-as-technology, where spells are just tools in the players toolkit to apply wherever needed, without context Lt. Danger fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jan 29, 2023 |
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Jan 29, 2023 22:23
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I'm all for there being mystery left in the universe and not everything having a determined origin and explanation--anyone who's read through a fictional setting's wiki can attest to how disappointing it can be to find a prescribed answer for every little thing about the setting--but magic being essentially a mostly-solved equation just doesn't bother me the way it apparently does some of you. I think there is room for magic to not be an inscrutable, unknowable thing. I actually have a harder time gelling the idea that souls and the very concept of rebirth are mostly-solved equations. Those things being "known quantities" is a point in the setting that I'm far less comfortable with, and frankly makes the scope of the setting's universe feel fall smaller than it should. Everybody being powered by soul-midichlorians is just... not the right complaint. Dick Burglar fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Jan 29, 2023 |
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Jan 29, 2023 22:38
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I'm not especially bothered by PoE's mechanistic explanation of souls and magic because it's perfectly in step with the setting's focus on themes of progress, knowledge, and the construction of meaning in the face of the existentialist dread that the loss of traditional surety creates. It's functionally the same thing as natural scientists slowly discovering that the human body was not powered by an immortal soul or some vital essence, but by blood, meat, and electricity; it made the magic of life mundane, subject to categorization and precise manipulation, like each supernatural object in Control having a detailed file tucked away in a manila folder somewhere. Like the ending, I suspect this is, at the end of the day, a matter of taste: it's very much in line with what the narrative is aiming at, but I'm also sympathetic to the fact that it's a far more melancholic take on traditional D&D fantasy.
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Jan 29, 2023 23:16
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to be clear the complaint isn't that magic is explained, just that magic-as-resource doesn't allow any room for more thematic or emotional approaches. compare KOTOR2, where the Force wound functions as a very direct analogue for PTSD, or Mask of the Betrayer and the spirit-eater/mask dualism motif to also be clear, no one's tried to stop you from enjoying PoE's materialist approach or argued there isn't room for different takes on magic. not sure I understand where this is coming from
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Jan 29, 2023 23:27
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Yeah, having one Glorantha is enough for me, thank you very much. I personally prefer when the world is more grounded compared to when magic gets too metaphysical and high concept. When everything is malleable collective conscious goop it's hard for me to stay engaged. I'm not sure why magic as a resource prevents it from being a metaphor, things duller than magic has been used in story telling before (if I'm following the though correctly).
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Jan 29, 2023 23:29
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Lt. Danger posted:to also be clear, no one's tried to stop you from enjoying PoE's materialist approach or argued there isn't room for different takes on magic. not sure I understand where this is coming from I was simply stating that I thought its particular implementation of magic-as-system met its thematic goal, and I apologize if it came across in some other way.
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Jan 29, 2023 23:34
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Vermain posted:I was simply stating that I thought its particular implementation of magic-as-system met its thematic goal, and I apologize if it came across in some other way. sorry, that was directed at Dick Burglar
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Jan 29, 2023 23:37
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My god this thread is polite, it's lovely to see. Who's threatening y'all with a giant hammer?
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Jan 29, 2023 23:40
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I get why the suggestion of thermodynamic-type physical rules and technology (in the basic sense of explicability) to the metaphysics of PoE feel dulling. If wonder and pleasure live in mystery (imo they do), and if positivist materialism that underpins scientific inquiry abhors mystery (it indisputably does) then you can look at that suggestion and reasonably conclude that you’ve lost something pleasurable about the setting. This is the danger of worldbuilding (“”) that people either don’t realize or deny. They get frustrated when their meticulously detailed second world starts to feel labored and drab. There have to be things you can’t understand, there have to be things you can imagine without certainty. That’s why they cal it fantasy. A lot of people don’t want practical magic to exist in a framework akin to thermodynamics. A magic missile spell is, when you get down to it, either a weird summoning of primordial, infinite forces, or a Glock nine mil that just happens to be invisible and requires jazz hands movements to pull its trigger. You can try to work backwards into a kind of muted, Carl Sagan-rear end awe at the way a Glock works, but it’s hard work to make science awe-inspiring. To science, awe is just a step on the way to taking a thing for granted. Also, a Glock is just a grim entropic tool that stops the warm, excited material processes in a body, and that’s that. By contrast, magic missile kills a guy and a whole lot of things can happen after that! Much more interesting process, narratively. Who wants to read fantasy to see the different ways you can reskin a Glock? In that sense, physics-type-metaphysics get boring.
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Jan 30, 2023 01:11
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All that about mystery said, I don’t think that suggestion of explicability - the appearance of correlations and rules that govern and regulate possibility - should be quite enough to kill the intrigue of the game (not the game PoE2, the basic game of a text teasing and enticing its reader with mysteries). Even irl, scientistic materialism can only account for what it can’t presently explain through a positivist claim that data definitely exists to make things legible, we just don’t know where to look for it yet. The weakness that often presents itself in positivism of that kind is that claims of possible evidence tend to be used as a placeholder for evidence itself. Even in hard sciences (certain infamous areas of physics and mathematics, but also things like anatomy and biology) you end up kind of struck by how many gaps in knowledge are patched up this way, and how strained that spirit gum can get in the edge cases. You can go bankrupt booking every scan and test modern science can throw at you and still not nail down why you feel a particular, physical pain. One reason a lot of people don’t end up trusting doctors is that disconnect between their capacity to shrug / freely speculate on a thing they haven’t nailed, and their claims to expertise/authority regardless of result. The exhaustion you feel when that happens is, imo, related to the exhaustion you feel when the metaphysics of a fantasy world are explained to you. It is an authority stepping in with an unsatisfying claim and foreclosing upon any alternative that might better avoid pain (or in the case of worldbuilding, enhance pleasure). Personally this is why I found Control insufferable - it wanted the frisson of mystery, but the authors were overeager in every case to explicate and describe everything they put in front of the player. It’s like a baker making a cupcake, presenting it to you, eating it, and describing the taste. Personal interpretation is a basic pleasure of reading. Imo, PoE avoids this mistake. The silhouette of systemic rules that can be poked and prodded by something like the scientific method is not precisely the same thing as a stark materialist positivism. Certainly the writers are very aware of how crude scientism is in practice, in contrast to the clarity of its theory, enough to cast doubt about animancers’ capacity to interpret their own work. I find it really interesting that PoE2 presents the asylum in PoE1 as, imo, a kind of feint - the first game deliberately gooses players’ assumptions about scientific knowledge and progress re: animancy, directly in the simple fact that Thaos is trying to stop it (which sort of necessarily implies that supporting it is the right and honest thing to do), but more broadly in the fact that (as has been mentioned in this thread and elsewhere) the animancers are made to resemble pre-modern physicians, whose various extremities (and in some cases, sadism) are understood as necessary and foundational to better futures. But then, if you meet Caedmon Azo again in Neketaka there’s really no sense that his work has been used to any particular end… except maybe sidelong entry into the Vailian’s Mr. Fantastic-caliber research into soul energy. Anyway, I think an alternative interpretation of animancy is that it doesn’t map to irl narratives of scientific history and progress. You could just as easily conclude that our irl understanding of physics and phenomena is so inadequate that even a fantasy analogue of modern science wouldn’t be a whole lot more complete or explanatory than what’s been so far presented in PoE. In which case, the mysteries of soul magic aren’t in substantial jeopardy, and they can still be enjoyed as mysteries. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Jan 30, 2023 |
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Jan 30, 2023 01:31
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I have tried to create a super turn-based stunlock character by getting 'killers froze stiff' up to two rounds of duration. I used a character with 19 base int, equipped them with gear for +3 int, made scrolls of prayer for the mind for int inspiration. As it turns out, that was not enough because the spell actually has a base duration of 0.7 turns, and that factors into how it converts to actual turn-based turns. I did, however, get 'I am yours' up to two rounds as it has a base duration of 1.3 turns. This stopped working shortly afterwards and went back to one round as it turns out the enemies I was testing it on in poko-kahara seem have a variety of resolve - lesser skeletons and some other monsters get charmed for two rounds, but highers levels like risen armsmen and the skeleton paladin lads only for one. Hypothetically, this might be salvageable by making the character a single class bellower rather than multiclass, if power level boosts give even more duration bonus, but given my unreliable results I feel like trying to keep ahead of the curve of enemies resolve might be futile, and bellower also would have very small aoe which is much less useful.
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Jan 30, 2023 01:38
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Really a shame that the interruptbarian got thrown out with the mechanical bathwater, imo
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Jan 30, 2023 01:50
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Captainicus posted:I have tried to create a super turn-based stunlock character by getting 'killers froze stiff' up to two rounds of duration. I used a character with 19 base int, equipped them with gear for +3 int, made scrolls of prayer for the mind for int inspiration. As it turns out, that was not enough because the spell actually has a base duration of 0.7 turns, and that factors into how it converts to actual turn-based turns. I did, however, get 'I am yours' up to two rounds as it has a base duration of 1.3 turns. This stopped working shortly afterwards and went back to one round as it turns out the enemies I was testing it on in poko-kahara seem have a variety of resolve - lesser skeletons and some other monsters get charmed for two rounds, but highers levels like risen armsmen and the skeleton paladin lads only for one. I had tried a similar perma paralyze build in real time mode but the tack that I took was going Skald/Tactician so that I could a) get the casting cost of the invocation down to 2 phrases with Skald and b) have Brilliant from Tactician which could be thought of as doubling the rate of chanting since it gives +1 class resource every 6 seconds on top of the 6 seconds it takes for you to naturally perform a chant. So roughly every ~6 seconds (doesn't quite equal that amount since you stop chanting for a little bit while casting your invocation), you could generate the 2 phrases needed to cast Killers Froze Stiff. I also stacked intellect and tried to reduce recovery as much as possible with my fighter bonuses so that I could also squeeze in a melee attack in between paralyzing enemies. It didn't work out to permanent paralyze because of the variable defenses of enemies, like you discovered, and also Dexterity affliction resistance becoming more prevalent. Another downside was that it tied up my Cipher teammate who had to cast Phantom Foes, sometimes a couple of times, to flank all enemies to activate Brilliant on my Skald/Tactician. I also tried to play around with Skald's +1 phrase gain when critting with a melee attack for even more resource generation. I went single handed style and maximized crit chance by using Sun and Moon and the Clear Out fighter attack ability (the double flail heads performing 2 attacks for every target in Clear Out's arc). Even critting several times off one Clear Out attack (note that there is a hardcoded limit of gaining a maximum of only 1 Skald bonus phrase off an attack), I would sometimes come out of it with no phrase generated because of the 50% chance. I decided this was too variable to try rely on and swapped back to dual wielding for the overall better DPS. Anyways, it was still a fun build and the Skald's cheaper offensive invocations is really the main draw for that subclass. Not sure how the above would translate to turn based or if it would even fare any better, though. Something to point out if you go for Bellower subclass instead like you're thinking is that the AoE size of the chants is what gets reduced, not the invocation size, so you wouldn't be hampered in that regard if that was your concern.
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Jan 30, 2023 02:26
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moot the hopple posted:Anyways, it was still a fun build and the Skald's cheaper offensive invocations is really the main draw for that subclass. Not sure how the above would translate to turn based or if it would even fare any better, though. Something to point out if you go for Bellower subclass instead like you're thinking is that the AoE size of the chants is what gets reduced, not the invocation size, so you wouldn't be hampered in that regard if that was your concern. Oh shoot, you're right, I mentally mixed up the words chant and invocation. My thinking with troubador was that they get 2 phrases per turn instead of one, and with +1 cost 'killers froze stiff' costs 4. So if I'd get 2 turns from it, I'd have it forever (barring grazes and misses).
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Jan 30, 2023 02:35
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Basic Chunnel posted:This is the danger of worldbuilding (“”) that people either don’t realize or deny. They get frustrated when their meticulously detailed second world starts to feel labored and drab. There have to be things you can’t understand, Let this man cook!!
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Jan 30, 2023 02:41
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Lt. Danger posted:to be clear the complaint isn't that magic is explained, just that magic-as-resource doesn't allow any room for more thematic or emotional approaches. compare KOTOR2, where the Force wound functions as a very direct analogue for PTSD, or Mask of the Betrayer and the spirit-eater/mask dualism motif Ultimately, I think I got my hackles raised too much over something inconsequential, even if I think the argument is kind of nonsense. Mea culpa 
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Jan 30, 2023 02:51
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Captainicus posted:Oh shoot, you're right, I mentally mixed up the words chant and invocation. My thinking with troubador was that they get 2 phrases per turn instead of one, and with +1 cost 'killers froze stiff' costs 4. So if I'd get 2 turns from it, I'd have it forever (barring grazes and misses). Hmm, maybe multiclassing it with a Tactician might be able to get you there. I'm not sure the rate of extra resource gain that Brilliant gives you per turn on turn based mode, but Brilliant will automatically give you +5 Intellect and also +1 Power Level, all of which will increase the duration of your invocations. You would still need to flank all your enemies (easiest way in my experience is using a friendly Cipher to cast Phantom Foes, but there's also a myriad of other ways) in order to activate Brilliant on a Tactician. It doesn't have to be the Tactician subclass, though. Alternatively, you can take any Fighter subclass and just get the Tactical Barrage ability, which will still give the tier 2 Intellect Inspiration for the +5 Intellect and +1 Power Level. Caveat, I have way less experience with turn based mechanics so I'm not sure if the above would get you to the specific tipping points you need for permanent paralyzing.
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Jan 30, 2023 03:00
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