who the fuck is megan

After almost a decade on this site, I found another Tumblr user in the wild. I stopped to tie my shoe with rainbow laces this morning outside the silversmith at Colonial Williamsburg, and I heard it.

“I like your shoelaces.”

Oh. Oh no.

I responded the only way I could. “Thanks.” And then I reluctantly added, “I stole them from the president…and if that makes sense to you, I’m very sorry.”

The poor man, in full Colonial dress, stared at me for a long moment. And then burst into laughter. And said, “I haven’t thought about that in YEARS and this has never happened to me before.”

Yeah. Me neither. Not until today.

Men's underwear: easy access hole

@swordandscytheandpen through the wonders of high level play in pathfinder 1e, because it becomes a truly absurd game. In this instance, its through the combination of regeneration and ferocity. In pf, a creature with active regeneration cannot die; even if you reduce it to ashes, itll start to regrow. Now, usually this isnt That big of an issue; creatures regenerate a set amount of hp each round, usually not very much, so even if you can't kill something, you can just keep stabbing the unconscious body until its so far in the negatives itll take hours to get up again.

However, there's a much less common ability called Ferocity, which allows a creature to keep fighting after its HP has hit zero, so long as its still alive. Now, there are Very few monsters in game that have both these abilities, but when they are combined, it results in a creature that can effectively keeo fighting regardless of what its HP is at, so long as whatever conditions are needed to suppress its regen aren't met.

My players all managed to get regen a while back, which takes some of the stakes away in fights, but not nearly as badly as you'd think.

There are also like two spells which grant you temporary ferocity. So one of the party paladins (there are two of them) is getting absolutely obliterated,. Smashed to a pulp by a titanic enemy thats like 10x his height. But because he had both regen and ferocity, he got down to like -400 hp before his regen got taken out. So we were trying to figure out what it looks like when only holy magic of the highest order is holding together what used to be your body and full plate.

This is so funny because I want to be clear here, regen + ferocity is like...a 4/10 on the pathfinder bullshit scale. Like, its not Nothing, but this is a game where i have an actual List of ways to completely Break the game by getting numbers to infinity and similar stuff.

When I was Really into doing insane pathfinder shit, I tried to figure out what the max damage in one round you could get without using any of the previously mentioned infinite number tricks, just making builds using intended mechanics, and I think I was upwards of 80,000? Might even have been in the hundreds of thousands, its been a while.

Like to be clear, none of that shit ever comes up in campaigns because, like, were here to have fun, not break the system like speedrunners, but still. Just in terms of regen, Ive made a character I intend to use as an enemy at Some point who has ferocity, regen that can only be surpressed by fire or acid, and then is also immune to both fire and acid damage. Hes got a bunch of abiluties that let him reduce AC to deal bonus damage and stuff like that, because damage literally just doesnt affect him.

The 80k+ damage is purely build based. Im not using a technicality to get whats supposed to be a one-time buff an infinite number of times. Im just combining various class features and feats and such to do something absurd.

1st tier is someone who really does not have any system mastery, usually someone just starting out. Theyre mostly gonna pick options that sound fun and arent too complicated. When they level up, theyre gonna look through the most accessible options and pick whatever sounds cool or interesting. I cant actually put any good numbers on this tier just because Ive never had many players in this tier, and even when i have, i like helping players build more mechanically complicated characters that give them more options in play.

2nd tier is someone who mostly knows what theyre doing. They dont have any particular urge to optimize and dont go through every possible option, but they have a specific build in mind and mostly find good options. At higher levels in a normal campaign, in my experience, these guys (if built primarily for damage) tend to average ~120 damage per round against enemies at around their CR, give or take a bit depending on how theyre doing it/whether theyre built for reliability or are more well rounded, etc.

3rd tier is where I tend to build at, and where most of my players end up. This is players who have either a near encyclopedic knowledge of the options, or enjoy going through the prd for hours at a time to find the best options available. At high levels, again allowing for some variation based on other choices, these guys tend to average ~250-300ish damage per round, with the far end getting up to ~500ish (and if you allow mythic abilities, you can basically double or triple those numbers). This is where you need either all of (the combat focused members of) the party to be somewhere around the same level of optimized, or need a good gm, because it isnt fun for anyone if one player (speaking from experience as this used to be me) is dominating combat because the others just cant keep up. But if the entire party is at this level of optimization? Imo thats where pathfinder really shines. Being able to out extremely dangerous combat puzzles in front of a group of characters that are all well designed machines, who have a very good knowledge of what they can do and how to do it...thats why I stick with pathfinder 1e even though my group has come to the conclusion that a solid 15% of the game was written by giving particularly vicious chimpanzees access to typewriters.

4th tier is when you are no longer building to play the character, you are building in the hopes of raising the character high enough to catch a glimpse of the gods. This is where you get mages who can go all out and deal a quarter million damage in 1 round or a slayer who can sneak attack someone 20 times in a round. These are the characters that I have dreams about, praying that at some point in some campaign, Ill find a way to actually use them.

The weird 4.5 tier is cheating because its not really focused on damage specifically, but I want to give it an honorable mention anyways. This is the same as 4th tier, but instead of building specifically for big damage, youre building for something very specific instead, with damage as your metric for how well youve pulled it off. This is the tier where you see a weird ability and go "hmmmmmm" while grinning evilly. Examples here include stuff like "how much damage can i average in a round using nothing but magic missile (~360 iirc)" or "how many attacks can I give this summoner in one round? (~25 or ~50, depending on how stricly you interpret a specific ability.)" Some of these ones Are actually playable without wrecking a campaign, but like, itd be Really weird.

On the GM side of things (or at least, me as a GM), when designing encounters for mid to high level parties, I tend to use encounters 2-4 CR above the party level for an average fight, and 5-8 above for difficult boss fights. I think the most challenging encounter ive had in my current 21st lvl campaign (i previously ran a different epic level campaign, but it was before i actually mastered the system, so it was Not balanced) was a trio of monsters who each had 700ish max hp, with other numbers like 30-50% higher than those the demigods have (ACs in the 60s-70s, saves with saves all above +25, attack bonuses ~35-45, etc.), And each had high regeneration that was nearly impossible to suppress. Amazing fight, one of the funnest fights ive run, at least on my end (despite me being a visionary, with immaculate planning and balancing beyond compare, my players told me the encounter felt unfair and unwinnable right up until they won.)