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I love that of all the undead to make a full on ancestry they picked skeleton, leaving lich and mummy and junk for archetypes that fit better anyway. I'm gonna make a skeleton bard who plays their own ribs like xylophones.
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May 2, 2022 00:22
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Hopefully going to be starting a 2e game up soon, one of the characters wants to play a dragonborn tho - is Lizardfolk usually used as a 'close enough' or is there something else I should suggest to him?
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May 2, 2022 00:28
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S.J. posted:Hopefully going to be starting a 2e game up soon, one of the characters wants to play a dragonborn tho - is Lizardfolk usually used as a 'close enough' or is there something else I should suggest to him? skeleton is pretty cool could give that a try
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May 2, 2022 00:36
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Big kobold is the most likely to lead to "dragon-y" things in terms of racial feats and options. You could also do lizardfolk with access to kobold stuff, I forget exactly how big kobold (as in, medium size) works but I think it's a waste of a feat or something.
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May 2, 2022 00:47
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S.J. posted:Hopefully going to be starting a 2e game up soon, one of the characters wants to play a dragonborn tho - is Lizardfolk usually used as a 'close enough' or is there something else I should suggest to him? There’s nothing that really maps cleanly onto the general concept of a person with a direct draconic ancestor… except for kobolds, who are definitely tiny dragons who can spend their racial feats on breathing fire, casting ancestral magic, and even flying. If I were to homebrew a “dragonborn”, I would pick a base ancestry (lizardfolk is fine) and let the player take the kobold’s dragon feats.
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May 2, 2022 00:50
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I assume choosing 'kobold' and making them medium sized isn't going to really matter anywhere
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May 2, 2022 01:12
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I just want to say that I love kobolds in 2e and their big goofy skink heads, they are real, and strong, and they are my friends.
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May 2, 2022 03:16
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sexpig by night posted:I love that of all the undead to make a full on ancestry they picked skeleton, leaving lich and mummy and junk for archetypes that fit better anyway. I mean, "level 1 lich" definitely seems a bit silly as a concept, so you can't really make "lich" an ancestry. Honestly, with the stuff in the skeleton ancestry feats about investing your soul into an object and losing memory if you die, a low-level skeleton PC very possibly might have been a lich that died too many times and got reset back down to a more inexperienced slate. I definitely love the idea of a skeleton cleric with Negative Font walking around spamming Harm, nuking everything in a 30 ft radius while healing themselves. Alternatively, a summoner with an undead eidolon with undead sorcerer archetype for more spell slots adding in some more undead minions running around to benefit from doing the same. S.J. posted:Hopefully going to be starting a 2e game up soon, one of the characters wants to play a dragonborn tho - is Lizardfolk usually used as a 'close enough' or is there something else I should suggest to him? The most rules-legal way to play as a dragonborn via just heavy reskinning: • Start with human, taking Draconic as your extra language and Versatile Heritage for a free general feat. • Use that free 1st level general feat to take Adopted Ancestry, and get the GM to not only okay kobold as your selection but to take whatever physiological feats you want because you're actually a dragonborn, not a human who lived with kobolds. You could do this as a lizardfolk instead of a human, but then you'd have to wait until level 3 before you could get Adopted Ancestry. • Take Kobold Breath as your 1st level ancestry feat so you're starting with a breath weapon. Alternatively just copy the half-elf and half-orc heritages, but for some kind of half-kobold that gets low-light vision. Also alternatively, just quickly homebrew some kind of Medium kobold version of dragonborn so you don't get have to lose the full darkvision and the cool bite/scale heritages. If you look at the different gnoll heritages (one of them makes you Small), it could be argued that being Small is worth about +2 HP, being trained in an extra skill, or getting a free innate cantrip. I'd bump the size up to Medium and the ancestry HP up to 8, change the Dexterity ability boost to Strength, and change the Constitution ability flaw to Wisdom or something. Bam, quick and easy dragonborn. Vanguard Warden fucked around with this message at 05:12 on May 2, 2022 |
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May 2, 2022 05:09
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I would love to hear the justification for skeletons getting a Charisma boost - I am not at all complaining, mind you, considering they have the perfect stat spread for a bard which is exactly what I wanted. I just really want someone to sit down and explain it to me.
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May 2, 2022 06:19
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Blockhouse posted:I would love to hear the justification for skeletons getting a Charisma boost - I am not at all complaining, mind you, considering they have the perfect stat spread for a bard which is exactly what I wanted. I just really want someone to sit down and explain it to me. Literally everyone who sees a friendly skeleton goes "holy poo poo this is loving rad" and is immediately in a better mood
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May 2, 2022 06:21
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For Dragonborn style things there's also the third party Dragon Ancestries supplement by battlezoo. It's designed by one of main developers of 2e Mark Seifter so it's of similar quality as official stuff and is supported by pathbuilder etc.
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May 2, 2022 06:26
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Blockhouse posted:I would love to hear the justification for skeletons getting a Charisma boost - I am not at all complaining, mind you, considering they have the perfect stat spread for a bard which is exactly what I wanted. I just really want someone to sit down and explain it to me. Charisma represents force of personality. A skeleton is entirely force of personality animating and directing its body through sheer willpower  (and magic i guess idk)
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May 2, 2022 06:38
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I feel like the real answer is probably just that skeletons are undead and heal from negative energy, so you're probably very likely to play as something that can either cast Harm spells or similarly heal undead, like a Cleric, Champion, Oracle, or undead Sorcerer, all of which are either partly or directly Charisma-based. You can't really rely on someone with Battle Medicine to fix you up like everyone else in the party can and the friendly cleric casting a 3-action Heal is actively a friendly fire threat, so it's a pretty good idea to bring your own support system. One of the ancestry feats even gives you a 6th-level Harm as an innate spell once an hour.
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May 2, 2022 06:53
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Vanguard Warden posted:I feel like the real answer is probably just that skeletons are undead and heal from negative energy, so you're probably very likely to play as something that can either cast Harm spells or similarly heal undead, like a Cleric, Champion, Oracle, or undead Sorcerer, all of which are either partly or directly Charisma-based. Oh yeah that makes a ton of sense. But also going back to this: Zore posted:Charisma represents force of personality. A skeleton is entirely force of personality animating and directing its body through sheer willpower I think the force of personality answer might be right from a lore standpoint after thinking on it. Any skeleton able to break a necromancer's control and regain a fraction of their former self is going to have hella personality.
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May 2, 2022 07:22
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Could've sworn there was already a heritage for medium kobolds or something, now I'm baffled. I'm sure I've read something like that but it must have been in some random Eberron book or whatever.
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May 2, 2022 08:14
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zachol posted:Could've sworn there was already a heritage for medium kobolds or something, now I'm baffled. I'm sure I've read something like that but it must have been in some random Eberron book or whatever. swolebold
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May 2, 2022 09:12
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zachol posted:Could've sworn there was already a heritage for medium kobolds or something, now I'm baffled. I'm sure I've read something like that but it must have been in some random Eberron book or whatever. Edit: wrong thread
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May 2, 2022 09:13
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Megazver posted:swolebold Swolbolds are actually in 3rd party 5th Edition, not Pathfinder. Specifically a monster type in Kobold Press' Creature Codex. Still, their name rocks. https://www.reddit.com/r/NotAnotherDnDPodcast/comments/ljl02t/spoilers_c1_ep_5_so_i_thought_the_name_swolbold/ https://www.5esrd.com/database/creature/kobold-swolbold/
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May 2, 2022 09:16
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Vanguard Warden posted:I feel like the real answer is probably just that skeletons are undead and heal from negative energy, so you're probably very likely to play as something that can either cast Harm spells or similarly heal undead, like a Cleric, Champion, Oracle, or undead Sorcerer, all of which are either partly or directly Charisma-based. They did actually add a feat that lets you use Medicine to heal undead (Stitch Flesh, pg. 45), though if you were running an all-undead game I'd probably rule the heal undead version is the default and you need a feat to heal the living instead.
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May 2, 2022 17:43
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Alchemy (Oil of Unlife) gets access to easy Undead healing too, and most parties either have one of those floating around or, by definition, should be able to buy mass quantities of them if they wanted to.
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May 2, 2022 18:04
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Oops, I was wrong
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May 7, 2022 23:16
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I played a couple of sessions of 2e about a couple of years ago but in the near future I'm gonna run it for a group that's never played it before and I was just wondering what exactly normal treasure/gear progression look like in this game? I know there's runes and some neat-looking magic items but I'm also wondering if it ever gets to a point where players don't really have anything to spend their money on like in 5e.
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May 11, 2022 01:22
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There's a table that breaks loot distribution into a by-level thing, as both leveled item count and just a flat budget, but the jist seems to be "one item per player per level, plus some consumables". At the very least a PC would want to max out two different kinds of fundamental runes for both their weapons and armor on top of getting an apex item, so that's a total budget of at least 125,000 gp for a single PC by endgame just for basic progression stuff. That appears to be about the total budget of level 20 itself alone, but adding up some of the previous totals makes it seem like you'd probably start to come just a little under your budget towards the end of trying to fill out all your property rune and investment slots with high-end stuff at the cost of somewhere around ~15k gp for each.
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May 11, 2022 01:49
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Vanguard Warden posted:There's a table that breaks loot distribution into a by-level thing, as both leveled item count and just a flat budget, but the jist seems to be "one item per player per level, plus some consumables". This is the actual wealth by level table from the GMG: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=940 But none of that really answers Scrap Dragon's question: yes, there are plenty of things to spend money on from levels 1-20, including the downtime rules/projects (which I don't think 5e really has an equivalent to in its core rules, stuff like running businesses or building strongholds and so on). Buying and selling magic items is a standard part of the rules (you can change this if you want), and the rarity rules make it very nice and easy to manage. The wealth rules are one of the things in 2e that were clearly and honestly developed with a lot of experience from the Pathfinder organized play campaigns to make them work really, really well.
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May 11, 2022 02:19
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It should also be noted that the game is explicitly balanced around that loot/wealth progression and if you don’t follow it somewhat accordingly the game can get unbalanced and out of control either way quickly, which would remove one of the foundational strengths of the game.
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May 11, 2022 02:31
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Arivia posted:This is the actual wealth by level table from the GMG: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=940 I mean I didn't post that one because quote:This table gives them fewer items than they might have had if they had gained items through adventuring, balancing the fact that they can choose what items they want.
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May 11, 2022 03:47
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Bottom Liner posted:It should also be noted that the game is explicitly balanced around that loot/wealth progression and if you don’t follow it somewhat accordingly the game can get unbalanced and out of control either way quickly, which would remove one of the foundational strengths of the game. Yeah, the game very much expects you to have certain bonuses at specific levels. If you want to deviate from that you can use the automatic bonus progression rules https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1357. The table in the link also gives a good baseline for what bonuses the players should have at each level.
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May 11, 2022 04:37
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Thanks y'all. As part of the homebrew setting I was planning on using for this campaign I was considering a system where spellcasters could freely buy spells of an appropriate level, but also that they'd have to buy them instead of automatically learning new spells after leveling up (think Materia, or more specifically Quartz if you've played the Trails series). If the game's economy is that tightly balanced then I'll just nix that idea and have them learn spells normally while maybe treating it as if they're using materia in the fiction. Also, I've heard that the Alchemist class is pretty bad? Or at least was on launch. Did I hear wrong and/or are there any common fixes for the class?
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May 13, 2022 15:05
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Scrap Dragon posted:Also, I've heard that the Alchemist class is pretty bad? Or at least was on launch. Did I hear wrong and/or are there any common fixes for the class? Alchemist is the lowest raw power base class, but they've had a couple of fixes applied by errata. Outside of charop, they do fine in general now, but someone might have some cute homebrews to spice them up if you are really concerned.
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May 13, 2022 15:14
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Yeah I don’t think they’re bad now so much as just weird and require a little more system mastery to make sure you’re getting the most out of it.
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May 13, 2022 15:22
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Scrap Dragon posted:Thanks y'all. As part of the homebrew setting I was planning on using for this campaign I was considering a system where spellcasters could freely buy spells of an appropriate level, but also that they'd have to buy them instead of automatically learning new spells after leveling up (think Materia, or more specifically Quartz if you've played the Trails series). If the game's economy is that tightly balanced then I'll just nix that idea and have them learn spells normally while maybe treating it as if they're using materia in the fiction. Rituals and uncommon/rare spells make buying spells a pretty common thing in the game as it is with the existing economy, FYI.
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May 13, 2022 15:25
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More than power issues I think the 2e alchemist just has an identity problem compared to 1e. The 1e alchemist had three core class features “Potions” which were literally spells like any other caster, but self only, modulo a feat (and were thus, all buff stuff), bombs, which were their primary ‘attack’ spells and scaled pretty linearly with level, and Mutagens, which were more potent self-only stat buffs which were mainly separated from potions to ensure no sharing ever. In 2e they decided to take all three of those and hook them into the games core crafting mechanics and generic item lists. So, for example, anyone can just buy a bunch of alchemists fire, or bestial mutagens or elixirs of life. And an alchemist can make these and give them to their party members to use. The problem is that the alchemist themself is… basically never the best at using the things they make. (With maybe the exception of the Poison specialist subclass). Like, a Bomber does decent damage. But you know what does better damage? A bomber handing a big pile of bombs to a fighter at the start of the day and then staying home while the fighter goes adventuring. At mid levels, the alchemist gets a bit of help once the Calculated Splash/Sticky Bombs combo comes online - but even then, you’re suddenly a DoT specialist in a game where combat is very much about big crits in a lot of cases. Persistent damage can be nasty but it can also just end up being noise where it doesn’t really impact the length of combat when it is chipping down health in between the two crits that were enough on their own to bring down the target. The Mutagenist fares even worse here - since the mutagens can be handed out they become a great potion dispenser for the party, but they just get absolutely nothing to make using mutagens better or more appealing for them, to the point where there are long ‘dead’ stretches where a mutagen isn’t better than the magic items available anyway (and they don’t stack) and you start wondering what the point of the class even is. If this all sounds extremely negative, let me caveat by saying that alchemists can be a lot of fun and in actual play without a fully optimized bunch of grogs, it ends up fine - you’ll have to work a bit more to figure out all the stuff you can do, and you’ll need to lean into being an enabler more, but it works. It’s just… very much not what the class is sold as or what anyone coming from the 1e alchemist might expect.
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May 13, 2022 15:29
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I introduced five people to 2nd edition this year. Everyone but the alchemist loved the system and is playing in a weekly game of abomination vaults. The alchemist logged off Foundry in the middle of the first session and hasn't been back.
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May 13, 2022 16:38
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The alchemist is bad and the fixes have merely made it somewhat less bad, it is still substantially the worst class, especially for new players who don't know how to wring out maximum effectiveness that still only gets the alchemist to a level to where its comparable to the baseline of other classes. They should just bite the bullet and do a full rewrite of the alchemist from scratch Piell fucked around with this message at 16:45 on May 13, 2022 |
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May 13, 2022 16:43
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KPC_Mammon posted:I introduced five people to 2nd edition this year. Everyone but the alchemist loved the system and is playing in a weekly game of abomination vaults. The alchemist logged off Foundry in the middle of the first session and hasn't been back. I don't particularly like the alchemist in 2e but I don't think the class was the problem there
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May 13, 2022 17:04
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How would one fix it? Give the alchemist more perks when they use bombs (like the Int to damage in 1e), limit mutagen ability to be used by others? Because I did think the alchemist in first edition had some issues with trying to be too many things at once.
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May 13, 2022 17:50
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KPC_Mammon posted:I introduced five people to 2nd edition this year. Everyone but the alchemist loved the system and is playing in a weekly game of abomination vaults. The alchemist logged off Foundry in the middle of the first session and hasn't been back. Well that’s a player problem right there, bullet dodged
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May 13, 2022 18:01
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The Golux posted:How would one fix it? Give the alchemist more perks when they use bombs (like the Int to damage in 1e), limit mutagen ability to be used by others? Because I did think the alchemist in first edition had some issues with trying to be too many things at once. I think you could do any of a dozen things but they all come down to “the Alchemist should be the best person to use whatever kind of alchemical item they have specialized in, not just the best at making lots of them for other people to use”. Calculated Splash basically does give bombs Int to Damage, but honestly, what they need is an accuracy boost more than a (direct) damage boost. For mutagenists, Feral Mutagen (and the other mutagen specific feats too) is probably too high level for what it needs to be to give the mutagenist a real identity. Make it a level 2 or 4 feat, tone it down a bit if need be and then add some scaling to it. Chirurgeon might be beyond saving. Toxicologist, honestly, is the only one that feels fine in terms of identity, but I really haven’t looked closely enough to see how it stacks up in terms of charop.
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May 13, 2022 18:06
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The design intention for the alchemist in 2e is clearly meant to be that old trope about Batman having all the time in the world to prepare for the fight. The problem is that the resulting character class is less Batman in this situation, and more Alfred for a Batman fighter that is built around having an alchemist buddy back home to set him up with a fresh supply of gear every day. Put another way, the problem at the end of the day isn’t that the fighter does more damage than the alchemist. The problem is that the fighter does more damage than the alchemist while using the alchemist’s toys. Chevy Slyme fucked around with this message at 18:51 on May 13, 2022 |
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May 13, 2022 18:48
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The biggest problem is that 2e alchemist is a class that really specializes in versatility and flexibility, and that just ends up being really bad to both 1e players and anyone new who expected it to be something else. It also makes it a lot harder to manage as a player.
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May 13, 2022 18:51
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