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KPC_Mammon posted:But now they'll look into getting silver weapons, right? Not yet, and what's worse is they have found a bunch of silver weapons and sold them.
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# ? May 18, 2024 18:49 |
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Kitfox88 posted:I'll gander at it too I guess. I'm kind of hating my rogue in Kingmaker and GM is letting me swap to a different class while keeping the character (which I do like a lot) and I was hoping to keep the nature/survival bent I've had so far. A Sniper gunslinger can easily keep that Nature/Survival/Stealth vibe as a scout/woodsman type.
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mind the walrus posted:I mean, homebrewing buffing the status effects if they come from spells vs. items. Straightforward approach. I'm sure there's some very good reason why it doesn't work but like, has anyone tried it? The issue is that this also benefits the martials, so if you buff the Clumsy effect from spells your fighter is now critting constantly.
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Clerical Terrors posted:It's this but also the fact that Martials can straightforwardly do this by investing in skills that already likely scale with their stats. A STR fighter is going to be at least decent at Athletics for trips, a Rogue is very likely decent at Tumble Through. But these options rarely translate to benefits for spellcasters*, and a wizard isn't going to lower saves with an Arcana check, unless you count recall knowledge, which is effectively divided over 4-5 skills and has a high chance of failure against unique enemies like bosses. OTOH, melee martials help spellcasters just by existing and standing in the way. If I'm playing anything ranged all the melee guys are my hero. Even without the "everything has attack of opportunity" problem D&D has, most enemies will prefer to attack the guy right next to them rather than the guy across the room, so every melee guy in the room is a buff to your effective AC/HP.
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The Slack Lagoon posted:In the fourth level of Abomination Vaults, my party of 5x 5th level PCs almost wiped to the Vaulgrist because only one of them had an ability to to Holy or Silver damage, and that was in the form of Needle Darts. Needle darts is such a cool spell. And I like the idea of casters having a pocket full of exotic gravel.
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Clerical Terrors posted:The issue is that this also benefits the martials, so if you buff the Clumsy effect from spells your fighter is now critting constantly. Facebook Aunt posted:OTOH, melee martials help spellcasters just by existing and standing in the way. If I'm playing anything ranged all the melee guys are my hero. Even without the "everything has attack of opportunity" problem D&D has, most enemies will prefer to attack the guy right next to them rather than the guy across the room, so every melee guy in the room is a buff to your effective AC/HP. To add to this-- a good GM is going to make sure that some encounters really get the martials locked up on the front line so their extra actions can be eaten up quite a lot and they need the spellcasters to do burst damage/buff/debuff/target damage to give them breathing room; while other encounters have the spellcasters unable to do much more than add moral support while the martials flex. It isn't perfect but compared to D&D5e where martials can be borderline vestigial, it's a much more sustainable dynamic.
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My group is getting to the tail end of Extinction Curse and things have honestly started to shift a lot towards the casters being the most important party members. In boss fights they have the more impactful debuffs and status effects and in mob fights Chain Lightning is a spell that exists. It's started to feel like me (Barbarian) and the Fighter are pretty much just meat shields. Oh, we do damage but it's honestly started to not be THAT much higher on the whole. I guess it helps the casters that my GM can't roll saves on boss fights for poo poo though. I swear the guy has a supernatural ability to roll a 1 when saving against Slow.
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I think PF2 is like many other D&D-style games in that casters start out weaker than martials but are stronger by the end…it just happens a lot more slowly, and the gap is small enough that specific classes and builds complicate it. Speaking of which, thoughts on Extinction Curse? It’s one of the two 2e APs that are worst received, I think (the other being Gatewalkers). I didn’t play it myself, but I read a completed PbP of it; the biggest issue that struck me (in addition to the one everyone mentions of the circus becoming irrelevant) is that it feels like it’s reusing a lot of ideas from Tyrant’s Grasp and Age of Ages with worse execution. Arguably some of this may have been a deliberate attempt to put twists on established AP tropes, like redoing the befriending-the-elves sequence from Age of Ashes with urdefhans of all things. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Speaking of urdefhans (and xulgaths), I’ve noticed that PF2 has been moving away from “evil races,” but in a patchy and inconsistent way, exacerbated by the way each PF2 ancestry requires so much game design work, with the result that you often have two superficially similar kinds of creature but one is a “person” and the other is a “monster.” Anadi are people but jorogumo are monsters; iruxi are people but xulgaths are monsters; dhampirs are people but urdefhans are monsters; vishkanya are people but serpentfolk are monsters; grippli are people but boggards are monsters; and vanara are people but charau-ka are monsters. To be fair, xulgaths are playable in Starfinder now, and Monster Core, despite the title, has moved various creatures further in the “people” direction. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Chevy Slyme posted:A Sniper gunslinger can easily keep that Nature/Survival/Stealth vibe as a scout/woodsman type. On that note: I really wanted to make a character that invested in survival, but it seems like an incredibly niche skill. Unless your campaign focuses a lot on struggling for food resources (which could be engaging in a Dark Sun-esque game), or requires a lot of speedy tracking, the skill seems pretty pointless to invest in. And most of the skill feats are just plain bad. Am I missing something? Like, besides Performance, which is largely worthless to anyone besides bards and that one swashbuckler subclass (unless you want to use it for a downtime earn income skill), survival seems like the least useful skill barring very specific circumstances. Admittedly, several skills require "specific circumstances," like thievery requiring locked doors and traps, or society requiring interacting with bougie folks, but those don't feel as narrow as survival's niche. It annoys me that all the woodsy backgrounds with fun lore skills (farming, hunting, scouting, etc) have terrible skill feats. Oh boy, forager or assurance: survival. Sure am glad I've got that. I know this is a relatively simple "ask your GM to let you pick a new skill feat" fix, but that's not a perfect solution since PFS characters can't do that.
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Dick Burglar posted:On that note: I really wanted to make a character that invested in survival, but it seems like an incredibly niche skill. Unless your campaign focuses a lot on struggling for food resources (which could be engaging in a Dark Sun-esque game), or requires a lot of speedy tracking, the skill seems pretty pointless to invest in. And most of the skill feats are just plain bad. Am I missing something? I agree. Performance at least has a use for some classes, but survival is incredibly niche and will mostly only be reliable in hexcrawls. The Verduran Shadow archetype in wardens of wildwood will at least give it some utility, but that's an archetype investment to make a skill useful instead of it being useful right out of the gate.
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Silver2195 posted:Speaking of urdefhans (and xulgaths), I’ve noticed that PF2 has been moving away from “evil races,” but in a patchy and inconsistent way, exacerbated by the way each PF2 ancestry requires so much game design work, with the result that you often have two superficially similar kinds of creature but one is a “person” and the other is a “monster.” Anadi are people but jorogumo are monsters; iruxi are people but xulgaths are monsters; dhampirs are people but urdefhans are monsters; vishkanya are people but serpentfolk are monsters; grippli are people but boggards are monsters; and vanara are people but charau-ka are monsters. I think you're getting hung up on "monster" as evil. Recall that there is a "monster" entry for "commoner" and "urchin" in the "downtrodded" creature family. The difference between a monster and an ancestry is just mechanical reality of how you design the statblock, not a unifying thesis on their place in society.
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Silver2195 posted:I think PF2 is like many other D&D-style games in that casters start out weaker than martials but are stronger by the end…it just happens a lot more slowly, and the gap is small enough that specific classes and builds complicate it. Honestly I've not been a huge fan. I thought the first two books were pretty strong and the capstone to book 2 was really great but almost immediately afterwards it starts feeling super aimless. It does a pretty bad job of making the events something that the players really should care about and entire parts of the campaign feel haphazardly stapled on. A lot of stuff also seems to come to really anticlimactic endings. Also, in regards to the whole Xulgath being just monsters thing, our entire party had to sort of deliberately act against character to keep playing because honestly our interpretation of events is that the Xulgath are kinda right to be pissed off and demanding their orbs back. In a lot of ways I feel like the circus thing explicitly makes the overarching threat of little direct impact to the characters since they can just... Take the circus out of the Starstone Isles and let them deal with the very deserved consequences of Arodens actions. It'd probably have a stronger emotional hook if the PCs just like, lived there to begin with.
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Dick Burglar posted:On that note: I really wanted to make a character that invested in survival, but it seems like an incredibly niche skill. Unless your campaign focuses a lot on struggling for food resources (which could be engaging in a Dark Sun-esque game), or requires a lot of speedy tracking, the skill seems pretty pointless to invest in. And most of the skill feats are just plain bad. Am I missing something? We generally use Survival as the skill to roll when we need to do any kind of navigation and we don't have a map with a specific route or directions available, including navigating large cities, but don't quite need hexploration rules (or don't want to bother with them). The only penalty for failure usually being a number of hours lost as the party bumbles around. It's not much of a tangible benefit but it's been enough to encourage our groups to try and have at least one person trained in survival if possible.
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Taciturn Tactician posted:I think you're getting hung up on "monster" as evil. Recall that there is a "monster" entry for "commoner" and "urchin" in the "downtrodded" creature family. The difference between a monster and an ancestry is just mechanical reality of how you design the statblock, not a unifying thesis on their place in society. Sure, but the pre-Remaster Bestiary entries for a lot of these creatures pretty much did present them as monolithically evil, to the point where even the still-pretty-unpleasant urdefhans in Extinction Curse are hard to reconcile with their description in Bestiary 3.
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Infinity Gaia posted:Also, in regards to the whole Xulgath being just monsters thing, our entire party had to sort of deliberately act against character to keep playing because honestly our interpretation of events is that the Xulgath are kinda right to be pissed off and demanding their orbs back. Possible spoilers: I believe there’s a sidebar that acknowledges that some players may feel that way, and suggests allowing them to negotiate with one of the xulgath leaders instead of fighting them, but the details of this are left for the GM to figure out.
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Silver2195 posted:Sure, but the pre-Remaster Bestiary entries for a lot of these creatures pretty much did present them as monolithically evil, to the point where even the still-pretty-unpleasant urdefhans in Extinction Curse are hard to reconcile with their description in Bestiary 3.
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Infinity Gaia posted:
It's been awhile since I looked through the books, and my campaign finished the first book and got no further but: Wasn't the player circus made up of people running from a different circus that has some members show up in book one but the actual 'evil' circus shows up in book 2? My memory is hazy but what I told my players was that the big 'evil' circus had been on the big island somewhere, and then some number of them split off, formed their own circus, and hosed off to the small island. This new circus was small with not a lot of resources or reputation (that's why their playing in a podunk farming village). The ringmaster of this new circus who was nice and well-liked was murdered on maybe their first night ever performing as this new circus and that's the motivation for the first book, solving/avenging his death. But the circus is still small and poor, and I imagine shipping everyone first to the big island when they were part of the big evil circus, and then splitting off and running off to the small island drained their resources further. So, even if the circus wants to check out of the Starstone Isles, they likely don't have the money to pay passage to do so.
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boxen posted:It's been awhile since I looked through the books, and my campaign finished the first book and got no further but: Yeah it's just the entire circus plotline ends in book 2 and is only kinda there in the others, and by the end of book 2 or 3 at the latest there is definitely a way for the circus to have enough resources to just gently caress off out of the isles. You don't even get the full aeon orb context until near the end of book 2 anyways. Also it's still super weird that this island saving plot has to be resolved by some circus weirdos when Absalom is RIGHT THERE. Honestly the entire circus performer premise just completely and utterly clashes with the rest of the story. If the players were just like, generic adventurers, the whole thing would make a lot more sense, imho.
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Infinity Gaia posted:Yeah it's just the entire circus plotline ends in book 2 and is only kinda there in the others, and by the end of book 2 or 3 at the latest there is definitely a way for the circus to have enough resources to just gently caress off out of the isles. You don't even get the full aeon orb context until near the end of book 2 anyways. Also it's still super weird that this island saving plot has to be resolved by some circus weirdos when Absalom is RIGHT THERE. Honestly the entire circus performer premise just completely and utterly clashes with the rest of the story. If the players were just like, generic adventurers, the whole thing would make a lot more sense, imho. Okay yeah, I see your point there. With a bunch of the AP's though, you reach a point where the party just does it because they're the heroes. There might be other justifications but there a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that this group of random people just decide to band together to fix the world's problems. That's just the way Golarion works, at least occasionally. FWIW, half the players in my Extinction Curse group were excited about the premise of the circus, wanted to plan performances, invest and upgrade, etc, and the other half were just in it for the classic rpg elements. The latter group is also playing in the Abomination Vaults campaign I'm in and is satisfied with the Diablo plotline of "there's a big hole in your backyard, go down there and kill anything you find." I thought the circus setting was a fun and cool idea, and a good way to get some really unique player characters.
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Alright posters. I've decided to bail on Abomination Vaults. I don't like it, my players don't like it, and we just hit the Voidglutton and got some additional deaths - a garbage loving fight in a little coffin room where I rolled well first round and murderized them. This poo poo is stupid as hell. So, I need a way to track this onto another adventure. They've seen the wall of force, they know they need to go get the macguffins to get through it. My thought here is to route them into Absalom and adapt an old PF1 adventure that I have, Gallery of Evil. Magic paintings come to life! It's not great but it will work and it takes place in the right setting. I also have a collection of battle maps and am comfortable enough with encounter design to do custom setpieces for each questline. After the Wall of Force I can do whatever I want, so I'm thinking one more level and then a custom encounter. The end. Get the gently caress out of this dumb town and this dumb dungeon. What I need is two things: of Abom Vaults level 5 - 10, what is people's favorite level? And does anyone have a bridge adventure to get them from level 7 to 11 or so after the adventure, so we can move to a different AP? Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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The group I'm first time GMing just got through the second force wall on level 7 and into the final area so I can't comment on the quality of the last part. My favorite level of the previous three was level 6. The bar was a lot of fun for my players, and they actually went down there some even when they were on the previous level. It's one of the places in AV that's not really about combat at all though so it's kind of an outlier. The devil level could be kind of fun depending on the party but my group had no interest in taking any infernal contracts so it was just kill, kill, kill. The walls of force are kind of stupid though and I wish I would have just gotten rid of them. It's clear from the way creatures act in the dungeon that the walls of force actually don't block anything but the players from going down a level which feels gamey in a dumb way. I guess its because of the way it was released as 3 parts but they should have updated it IMO.
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SithDrummer posted:Hard to reconcile in what way? The urdefhans are portrayed in both sources as as terrifying, death-obsessed warmongers and Horsemen of the Apocalypse-cultists. The only difference in Extinction Curse is that over the course of book 5, the heroes make themselves known as extremely capable badasses that this particular cult of urdefhans would rather use to their own ends than attempt to kill for no reason. I’m mostly thinking of the writeup on War Champion Kharostan. He’s still evil, but he’s slightly more complex than Bestiary 3 implies an urdefhan (let alone a half-daemon urdefhan!) is capable of being. This isn’t a complaint about Extinction Curse, to be clear; it’s a complaint about Bestiary 3. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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However, there is an actual complaint about Extinction Curse that I forgot to mention: the settings. Mistress Darklight’s circus is cool, as is the drow city, but mostly it’s set in interchangeable towns in Golarion’s equivalent of upstate New York, interchangeable towers full of xulgaths, and only slightly less interchangeable small ruined temples and similar mini-dungeons.
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Alright posters. I've decided to bail on Abomination Vaults. I don't like it, my players don't like it, and we just hit the Voidglutton and got some additional deaths - a garbage loving fight in a little coffin room where I rolled well first round and murderized them. This poo poo is stupid as hell. since I don't see it mentioned here, talk to your players and see what kind of game you all want to play. do you all want to play a hex crawl, just a different dungeon crawl, something with a lot of intrigue or kingdom management? something loose with a lot of threads to follow, or something highly structured and railroady? seems like probably not a dungeon crawl, so what kind of game do you want?
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Alright posters. I've decided to bail on Abomination Vaults. I don't like it, my players don't like it, and we just hit the Voidglutton and got some additional deaths - a garbage loving fight in a little coffin room where I rolled well first round and murderized them. This poo poo is stupid as hell. To sort of add on to this question, all in all, what would be the easiest adventure path to run as a crap DM? I think I asked before and was pointed towards Abomination Vaults myself, but I don't know if that's still accurate or if there are better ones to begin with after the beginner box.
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abom vaults is a very much taste-dependent game, compared to something like extinction curse where it's roundly disliked. if your players have a good sense for the kind of tactics the system encourages, and you personally have a good sense on when to contextually expand on or alter the book's instructions for how to run certain encounters, then vaults is a really great dungeon experience. in that sense, if you're conscious that you're not as good at GMing, maybe something like quest for the frozen flame, where you know what the premise is from square one and are following it directly throughout? but the very fact that you're using a module is a HUGE support for relative incompetence in running games, so I think vaults is fine if you've done this stuff before
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the_steve posted:To sort of add on to this question, all in all, what would be the easiest adventure path to run as a crap DM? I think I asked before and was pointed towards Abomination Vaults myself, but I don't know if that's still accurate or if there are better ones to begin with after the beginner box. A lot of people like to point as Abomination Vaults because of the foundry module and the tie-in with the beginner box, but there are some pretty brutal encounters that occur early on that can wreck a party. More recent modules are probably more generous with regards to their design; Rusthenge -> Seven Dooms for Sandpoint is probably a better alternative, but if you want something a little more open Sky King's Tomb or Season of Ghosts might be good.
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the_steve posted:To sort of add on to this question, all in all, what would be the easiest adventure path to run as a crap DM? I think I asked before and was pointed towards Abomination Vaults myself, but I don't know if that's still accurate or if there are better ones to begin with after the beginner box. Sky King’s Tomb is pretty great if what you want is a crash course on subsystems. That’s a value neutral statement. I know some people hate subsystems and some love them. I think it’s done well in SKT, and that subsystems provide a great crutch for beginner GM that takes the time to review them before running them, but if that’s not your jam, don’t run SKT.
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Mister Olympus posted:in that sense, if you're conscious that you're not as good at GMing, maybe something like quest for the frozen flame, where you know what the premise is from square one and are following it directly throughout? but the very fact that you're using a module is a HUGE support for relative incompetence in running games, so I think vaults is fine if you've done this stuff before Watch out for that moose though... In the WFRP starter set, there is an early fight with a troll, newbie GMs often come into the WFRP discord and ask will the troll wipe their party. The troll is 30 WS, I've never heard of it winning that fight. The moose in Quest for the Frozen Flame on the otherhand, that moose has TPK'd many a party.
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I am very much Enjoying Sky King's Tomb, I think it's a good balance between combat encounters and situations that actually require your players to think creatively for a bit, but still relatively easy to modify if your group is leaning more towards either of those.
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the_steve posted:To sort of add on to this question, all in all, what would be the easiest adventure path to run as a crap DM? I think I asked before and was pointed towards Abomination Vaults myself, but I don't know if that's still accurate or if there are better ones to begin with after the beginner box. Abomination Vaults is classic dungeon crawl, so if that's your and your players' style it's the one to go with. Extinction Curse looks easy but as mentioned on this page, the circus element makes it weirdly finnicky. Running that one was more trouble than it was worth to be really blunt. Kingmaker has a great reputation but if Abomination Vaults is all crawl, Kingmaker's reputation is "massive sandbox" so probably not a good thing if you still call yourself a crap DM. I haven't run them but it looks like Season of Ghosts, Sky King's Tomb, Strength of Thousands, and Seven Dooms at Sandpoint could all be very friendly entry points. As with most recommendations for APs do bear in mind that they overload encounters so as a GM you'll have to pick and choose which ones to run unless your players are super into mostly filler, all killer. Agents of Edgewatch, Quest for the Frozen Flame, Age of Ashes may also be good but I know relatively little about them. Outlaws of Alkenstar, Gatewalkers, Stolen Fate, and Ruby Phoenix are not that friendly to newer GMs, although I wouldn't call them hard, just not a shake-and-bake kind-of thing. You can find the full list here: https://paizo.com/store/pathfinder/adventures/adventurePath mind the walrus fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Chevy Slyme posted:A Sniper gunslinger can easily keep that Nature/Survival/Stealth vibe as a scout/woodsman type. Kind of frustrated Running Reload shares a feat level with Alchemical Shot but I think I'll give this a try, yeah. Thanks. ![]()
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Re: overloading encounters, Sky King’s Tomb is supposed to be where they stopped doing that and just made milestone leveling mandatory. Filler encounters are definitely a thing even some otherwise good APs are guilty of; the terracotta soldiers in Fists of the Ruby Phoenix stand out as especially bad.
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I'd call out Ruby Phoenix as one that should be relatively easy for somebody with good mechanical skills with PF2 but bad DMing skills, since the basic setup gives immense player buy-in on going along with everything. Unlike a lot of APs, there shouldn't be much to worry about with players wandering off the presented path or trying to actively avoid any of the setpieces you're presenting them with, since the whole point of the characters being there is to fight all the stuff and win the big tournament.
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As with all GM-ing tools, it does require some eye for detail. Running the hexcrawl in Chapter One as-is will take the players quite a drat long time to do, even if they're extremely efficient. Best practice as a GM is to alter the timescale and have an ear for which encounters fit the players' vibe. I made a big mistake with that -- my Thaumaturge expressed a desire to do more ghost-spooky stuff after I had already spoiled that I removed all the supernatural encounters from the transport towers. Live and learn though. Ruby Phoenix also requires some real organization to read ahead and have an eye for patrons and rival teams, and/or build their own using either the template provided or their own originals. Like it's completely doable and not that hard, but on the relative curve of "I'm a bad GM" I don't know it'd be my recommend.
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Book 1 of ruby phoenix is a big dungeon crawl with potentially brutal encounters if you wander off in the wrong hex at the wrong time, so I’m not sure how much it’s be good for a party that disliked AV. the AP also needs some solid GM legwork to fill in its gaps too. However I definitely recommend it as like a good fun adventure
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Kitfox88 posted:Kind of frustrated Running Reload shares a feat level with Alchemical Shot but I think I'll give this a try, yeah. Thanks. You mostly don't need alchemical shot now that you can craft elemental bullets or bolts.
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If you have an alchemical shootist, look up life shot. https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=1899 Not that great under normal circumstances. But if you have infused reagents and advanced alchemy, during your daily preparations you make 2 batches of stuff from each set of reagents. Ammunition comes in batches of 10. So you can make 2 healing elixirs or 20 healing ammunition for the same cost. Great for emergency healing for a pal that is way across the map. Or between fights you can helpfully mag dump into your friends.
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# ? May 18, 2024 18:49 |
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Facebook Aunt posted:If you have an alchemical shootist, look up life shot. https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=1899 the amount of healing is really quite poor. the two feats spent to be able to do that could get kineticist dedication into fresh produce and heal for 5d4+19 (avg31.5) by the time munitions crafter can make lesser life shot and get 3d4+3 (avg10.5). same two actions (one to attack and interact to active the ammo, versus one to cast the produce and one to consume on the part of the person healed) for combat use. your infused reagents are almost certainly better used on almost anything else, 10.5 for 2 actions at level 9 (or 2.5 for two actions before that!!!) is just not worth using in a fight; and outside a fight there are better options (including just, medicine training with ward medic and continual recovery). if you just want a tiny bit of healing to stabilize someone who is dying at range cantrip cards of stabilize can be used by anybody atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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