|
I'm a little out of the loop. Did they explain the reasoning behind the cantrip changes discussed before? Or give any more clarification?
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 11:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 21:19 |
|
|
Managed to get into the Pathfinder Society Special last night at GenCon where we faced the most fearsome enemy my character has ever encountered: 
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 14:07
|
|
|
xK1 posted:Managed to get into the Pathfinder Society Special last night at GenCon where we faced the most fearsome enemy my character has ever encountered: Yikes, not many people can survive a jackalope attack
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2023 17:14
|
|
|
boxen posted:We ran into issues doing that... things like the permissions not properly being reset, or multiple tokens staying selected when you were trying to select only one, vision permissions getting wonky... Is there any reason to not just have all the players have equal access to all the player characters? I do it for one game and the biggest bonus is specifically letting other players easily command characters for missing players.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 01:46
|
|
|
Clerical Terrors posted:I'm a little out of the loop. Did they explain the reasoning behind the cantrip changes discussed before? Or give any more clarification? No, likely because the video was likely pre-recorded like a month or two ago I’m also sad they didn’t share anything on recall knowledge
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 02:24
|
|
|
Made my GM proud today. Society session; mission into Cheliax to track down the official Venture-Captain of the unofficial Lodge in the Chelaxian capital. My character is an NG human aasimar, whose backstory is... he was born in Ostenso in eastern Cheliax. His parents were mid-tier merchants who sold their shop and bought a ship when he was six, getting him (and his twin aasimar sister) The gently caress Out Of Cheliax, becoming sailing traders rather than land-bound merchants. He loving HAAAAAAAAATES Cheliax (the nation and its rulers, not the people). Get to the end of the dungeon to find a Hellknight torturing people. My dude challenges the Hellknight to single one-on-one combat. GM's eyes light up and the Hellknight accepts at once. My party is blown away by this turn of events, but the enemy mercenaries (or armigers maybe) stand down, my allies stand down, form a ring around the combat. Two fighters duking it out. GM even goes over to the other table running the same adventure to tell them (the other GM is his best friend and my usual GM) because he says "this is cool as poo poo." Final turn, it's pretty even, until I roll a 19+13. Hellknight had made me flat-footed until the end of his next turn; he had chosen to push the attack and not fight defensively. His AC was 22- if he had parried with his off-hand weapon, it would have been 23. I crit. With a Striking Longsword. Roll max damage; 40 on a single hit. He goes down. Guards flee; adventure completed (until the follow-up Society session in 2 weeks).
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 05:24
|
|
|
Sky Shadowing posted:Made my GM proud today. Sweet!
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 07:27
|
|
|
Sky Shadowing posted:Made my GM proud today. This kicks rear end
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 08:21
|
|
|
So it looks like I'm going to have one player take Alchemist dedication at level 1 from being an ancient elf, and another player is doing the alchemy methodology Investigator. They really want free potions I guess. I was hoping to avoid the proper crafting rules, but if they decide that they want to engage with trying to make alchemy stuff beyond the free things they can make every morning, the RAW timescales just will absolutely not work for the adventure I'm planning, since they will never have significant downtime. I'm considering just allowing them to do a day's worth of crafting every time they sleep for the day as part of their rest, but I'm wondering if that would be too much? From what I understand the crafting rules basically require you to pay the cost of the item anyway, so allowing them to craft faster shouldn't be particularly problematic, but I have a far from thorough understand of the whole system or how it might break.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 16:32
|
|
|
My GM is running a similar campaign, and just told us we could do a day of downtime activity every time we sleep. He also made crafting 4x faster by fiat, so we can do 4 days of crafting every night. It hasn't actually broken anything, but also, he knows that we are not the kind of party to abuse it
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 16:53
|
|
|
I'm going to be running my first Pathfinder campaign soon after ending a 2 year 5e campaign. I want to try XP rather than milestone for the first time ever since XP in Pathfinder makes sense to me unlike the absurd numbers dnd presents. I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around getting to 1000xp without it feeling like busy work, and I seen some suggestions about "bundling xp" into little packages when certain milestones, for the lack of a better word, are met. So breaking up a level into tiny milestones essentially, but assigning them numerical XP values. Does anyone have experience with something like this or further advice on how to not make the gathering of XP a slog for my PCs? I can understand at later levels taking your time giving out XP so level 17 to 18 doesn't take 4 sessions, but it seems odd to my milestone brain staying level 1 or 2 for 3-5 sessions each. Any advice on running XP would be appreciated, I've avoided it until now for kinda this reason, but I want to give it a shot atleast once.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 17:22
|
|
|
Green Tea Erotica posted:I'm going to be running my first Pathfinder campaign soon after ending a 2 year 5e campaign. I want to try XP rather than milestone for the first time ever since XP in Pathfinder makes sense to me unlike the absurd numbers dnd presents. if you want the lower levels to go faster, just make them take less XP. having level 2 take 500 xp is perfectly fine, just make sure you give out the full level's amount of treasure in that smaller amount of encounters. it's written somewhere you can do this in the rules, i forget exactly where though. also gaining xp doesn't feel like a slog in pathfinder 2e for the same reasons you're already discussing, because the numbers are so much smaller it's easy to gauge and feel accomplished with gaining 250 xp in a night.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 17:29
|
|
|
Also, if you look at published adventure paths, throwing your party some bonus XP if they do something neat that isn't a strict fight is perfectly fine. Like Arivia said, 1000 XP per level is easy to understand compared to the constant inflation of traditional D&D, so as long as you keep the adventure itself snappy and are generous with XP it should be fine. EDIT: When I say generous, I mean stuff like "you had a fun little RP scene where you learned a major plot point, here's 50 XP" or "you got around this encounter without a fight, so here's XP as if you beat them up". Again, it's fine as long as you keep chipping XP in. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Aug 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 17:43
|
|
|
I am using milestones and using xp on my end only to budget encounters on the way to the next milestone because I know my players are bad with numbers and hate tracking XP.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 17:47
|
|
|
Sky Shadowing posted:"this is cool as poo poo." What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, that owns!
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 17:55
|
|
|
Scoss posted:So it looks like I'm going to have one player take Alchemist dedication at level 1 from being an ancient elf, and another player is doing the alchemy methodology Investigator. They really want free potions I guess. My hot take on this is that the whole point of playing an alchemist or taking a reagent archetype or feat (alch sciences, or munitions crafter, or snare crafter or or or), is specifically not to interact with the crafting system. Those rules exist to enable the fantasy of “the character that can whip up some bullshit every day for the right situation.”, and there’s no reason to engage with the crafting subsystems at all to enable them. The actual Crafting Skill, and the crafting rules, exist to serve four purposes: 1) doing skill checks involving mechanisms and broken poo poo in the field and jury rigging up all manner of goofy bullshit as needed. 2) Shield repair specifically, and equipment repair more generally if you gently caress with effects that damage gear. 3) you can craft to earn income, same as half the other skills on the list And the big one 4) if your players are in a small settlement, where, RAW, they can’t buy the gear they want, crafting provides a mechanism for them to “buy the gear they want” irrespective of that limitation. Where the crafting rules get a bad rap is from people who expect them to provide a way for players to save money or outpace the power curve versus just buying the gear they want from a shop in town/accumulating dungeon loot. And it just does not work for that and was never meant to and that expectation is the problem tbh. If that’s what you want from a crafting system, go look at battle zoo and other 3pp, or plan to houserule up a storm, because that’s just not the design. The design is that crafting is written to provide you with a value quantity of stuff equivalent to just doing Earn Income and buying it. The benefit of crafting instead of earning income is the access to stuff the town won’t sell, not getting it cheaper or faster. but, all of that said, and getting back to my point: the whole joy and beauty of the reagent options is that they specifically exist as a means to nope out of and ignore the actual crafting rules. All you need to know is the item lists, and, as a GM, if your players want more formulae, don’t hesitate to present them as loot or provide the opportunity to buy them.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 18:03
|
|
|
Chevy Slyme posted:My hot take on this is that the whole point of playing an alchemist or taking a reagent archetype or feat (alch sciences, or munitions crafter, or snare crafter or or or), is specifically not to interact with the crafting system. Those rules exist to enable the fantasy of “the character that can whip up some bullshit every day for the right situation.”, and there’s no reason to engage with the crafting subsystems at all to enable them. the hot take here is that crafting isn't terrible. its terrible, ignore it as a system or just do some kind of homebrew thing unless you're running a low magic osr style settlement building game like you're doing stonehell but using pf2 for some bizarre reason
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 18:23
|
|
|
crafting is fine. it's only bad if you want to use it to break the game balance wide open like it was still pathfinder 1e or something. it's okay for the basic system to be functional.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 18:25
|
|
|
Green Tea Erotica posted:Any advice on running XP would be appreciated, I've avoided it until now for kinda this reason, but I want to give it a shot atleast once. The Pathfinder math/guidance on encounter building is going to pretty consistently call for about 12-13 encounters and other XP awards per level-up. Given that the encounter difficulty levels (numerically) are opaque to the players, you can package them into groups of 3 or 4 encounters with an achievement award as a cherry on top; this will let you construct bite-sized narrative arcs with "lieutenants" (if there's a BBEG or adversary organization in play) to defeat. If you want to accelerate the early levels, what Arivia said about reducing the XP needed to level up will work, or you can grant XP awards more frequently; whatever you prefer.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 18:28
|
|
|
Arivia posted:crafting is fine. it's only bad if you want to use it to break the game balance wide open like it was still pathfinder 1e or something. it's okay for the basic system to be functional. nah it's just bad and boring as hell. they made crafting magic items a pfs day job check, that's pathetic
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 18:42
|
|
|
sugar free jazz posted:nah it's just bad and boring as hell. they made crafting magic items a pfs day job check, that's pathetic if you want it more interesting than that then there's the systems in treasure vault. there's nothing wrong with the basic function in the system being "math that works" since that's the most crucial version to get right.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 18:45
|
|
|
My wizard switched to Kineticist (all Fire) and he is having a blast, pun very much intended.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 18:58
|
|
|
sugar free jazz posted:nah it's just bad and boring as hell. they made crafting magic items a pfs day job check, that's pathetic correct. They made crafting magic items a day job check because you can also just use day job checks and buy the thing. And as with day job checks, you can throw money you already have at the thing you want to buy to get the thing faster, up to and including, just buying the item and not “working” on it at all. The special thing that crafting gets you is that you can buy things that nobody in the town you are in wants to or is able to sell you. The special thing that you want crafting to get you is “cool poo poo for cheaper than buying it”, which the system is explicitly designed to not let you have. To be clear, I am not saying you are wrong for wanting the thing you want. I’m just saying it is antithetical to the design goal that PF2E’s authors have chosen to work towards, and if that’s your expectation, it will never be fixed, and you should go check out a third party product or do some extensive home brewing. But simply declaring your expectations mismatch as “crafting sucks and is a pathetic dumpster fire” is not really helpful and just makes conversations about the subject harder. Chevy Slyme fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Aug 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 19:04
|
|
|
Chevy Slyme posted:correct. They made crafting magic items a day job check because you can also just use day job checks and buy the thing. And as with day job checks, you can throw money you already have at the thing you want to buy to get the thing faster, up to and including, just buying the item and not “working” on it at all. why did you pretend to read my mind in the same way that arivia did it's very confusing and weird. crafting items should be interesting and cool and produce unique and interesting and cool things, not be a day job check which is a thing that even pfs players think is stupid and largely ignore. paizo fixed a lot of things with skills, crafting was not one of them, and the treasure vault changes weren't much better if at all
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 19:27
|
|
|
sugar free jazz posted:why did you pretend to read my mind in the same way that arivia did it's very confusing and weird. The special thing that crafting gets you is that you can buy things that nobody in the town you are in wants to or is able to sell you. If you want the things you produce to be cool and interesting, restrict the availability of cool and interesting things for purchase; if your problem is that the items in the game aren't sufficiently cool and interesting across the board, that's a different problem and crafting has nothing to do with it. If your problem is that the items in the game are too expensive for character wealth or have level requirements that you feel are too high, and you want crafting to be an end run around it, see my post above. If you want crafting to give you access to things above and beyond what existing items gained by other means can do, then you can't put that on a skill feat/skill subsystem because it instantly becomes a tax on everyone that you can't skip. Which in turn, means it needs to be a class feat/archetype situation instead. And we actually have lots of different options to do stuff like that, from the various reagent based consumable options, to cool 'customize my specific piece of gear that's mine' options like the Inventor class and archetype, or stuff like Sterling Dynamo and Soulforger. And if, as a GM, you want to introduce an interesting "collect magical bear assess and assemble them for UNIQUE POWER", the relic system is very easily skinned to enable something like that if that's what you want. But again, if you want crafting to be something that it clearly has never been intended to be, that's valid, and you do you, but just bluntly saying "CRAFTING SUCKS poo poo IGNORE IT" doesn't really help anyone who is trying to understand what the crafting rules are actually trying to do. Chevy Slyme fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Aug 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 20:18
|
|
|
Yeah, as someone who was the mandatory crafting bitch in various groups across both 3.5e and PF1, I'm glad that crafting is largely able to be ignored outside of things like shield maintenance unless the DM is specifically limiting item availability at the macroeconomic level.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 20:25
|
|
|
Chevy Slyme posted:The special thing that crafting gets you is that you can buy things that nobody in the town you are in wants to or is able to sell you. That sounds like an absolutely lousy "solution". "Nobody gets to play with cool poo poo unless somebody takes all the crafting feats and spends all their downtime doing it" is an awful DM take. That turns it into a feat tax for the entire party and also punishes the other players.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 20:51
|
|
|
Being able to produce items with different properties (or change an extant item's properties) would be cool, but also probably would be absolute hell to balance. And with a game focusing on pretty tight mechanical balance, I think it makes sense why crafting is boring. Yeah, it's disappointing, but there is absolutely no way you're going to account for all the ways people could create broken-rear end items with a more robust crafting system. And the above posters are also right: the idea that you need to devote a ton of resources to unlock this cool minigame that produces brokenly-powerful poo poo, or you don't and you're stuck with boring gear, is also bad design.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 21:06
|
|
|
Zurai posted:That sounds like an absolutely lousy "solution". "Nobody gets to play with cool poo poo unless somebody takes all the crafting feats and spends all their downtime doing it" is an awful DM take. That turns it into a feat tax for the entire party and also punishes the other players. Right. I agree. But also, that’s what any solution that lets crafting result in items above the level curve or below cost provides too. So, if you don’t want that to happen, what do you do? Crafting can’t turn the knobs on item availability or cost. So what’s left? You can make it earn income better than any other skill, or… what? What does a good version of crafting that doesn’t turn those cost or access knobs, that isn’t a tax that breaks the power curve look like? Please enlighten me because I got nothin’. And, once you take those options off the table, the knob that’s left to turn is availability. If you are playing a game where scarcity is real and item availability is an interesting part of your economic milieu, crafting is cool and good and interesting. If you don’t, it isn’t. If you want to enable a character fantasy around Making Cool Stuff and Using It, the inventor and alchemist (and various feats that follow in the mold of those classes) present two very different ways of making that what your class is all about and both work pretty well. (The alchemist has other issues, reagents/alchemical crafting not really one of them). If your goal is to tell a story about how you find rare ingredients to make unique poo poo, use the relic system. If you don’t want either of those things, what do you want, other than to break the resource curve? (Also, unrelated to any of the above “and spends all their downtime doing it” is misleading - you can throw money at crafting and essentially buy items at standard shop cost; there’s no reason to do that usually, but if access to items is being constrained, it becomes a viable and interesting option to get things you can’t buy otherwise. If you want your items for below cost, you can spend downtime, and get a discount that is equivalent to (slightly better than actually, but not enough to really notice) earning income before buying the thing. Yes it’s boring. But that’s because item cost isn’t what crafting is solving for, for the above mentioned reasons.) Chevy Slyme fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Aug 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 21:11
|
|
|
Zurai posted:That sounds like an absolutely lousy "solution". "Nobody gets to play with cool poo poo unless somebody takes all the crafting feats and spends all their downtime doing it" is an awful DM take. That turns it into a feat tax for the entire party and also punishes the other players. Sometime you are just in the rear end end of nowhere and don't have access to vendors who sell poo poo, that's a cool time to have a person craft poo poo
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 21:21
|
|
|
For what it’s worth, I believe the remaster is making crafting better by removing the formula requirement for common items, so you no longer need to “pay twice.”
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 21:23
|
|
|
There are basically three basic scenarios in which crafting could exist. Below are my suggestions Crafting (as in spending a bunch of time to make items that someone could instead Earn Income and just buy) is bad other than as a flavor level. Since a majority of games exist on this level, where you can generally just buy crafted consumables, DMs for this type of game should tell people not to waste feats on this type of crafting and just roll Earn Income and buy crafted items and say you made them via crafting. Crafting (as in Alchemist/Talisman Master/Herbalist style "you get some number of free consumables per day) is fine, the player gets tangible results without having to mess with a bunch of downtime poo poo. Crafting (as in "your players are in some situation where they are unable to buy consumables normally but have plenty of downtime") is a pretty rare situation. My suggestion is to ignore the actual crafting rules and have them roll earn income and buy consumablesand say they were made via Artificer/Alchemist PC or whatever. You'll notice at no point of this do you need to use actual rules for crafting poo poo beyond the basic Earn Income rules. In addition, give players monster parts as part of their item rewards that give the equivalent amount of discount that an actual item of that reward level would give. This is the fun part of crafting anyway IMO, having your actions and experiences result on tangible visible outcomes Piell fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Aug 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 21:29
|
|
|
I really should sit down and read the Battlezoo monster parts crafting rules.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 21:43
|
|
|
3 Action Economist posted:I really should sit down and read the Battlezoo monster parts crafting rules. It's extremely easy and good, you get GP of monster parts as loot (there's formulas for how to handle this 3 different ways) and then the players turn the GP into effects. You can turn them into your standard +1s or damage dice but also if its 1000GP of, like, gross Spider Venom Sacs, you can add a poison ability to your weapon. Infuse your blade with Djinn blood like the psycho murderhobo you are to unlock the power of the wind!
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 21:57
|
|
|
On the subject of Earn Income; how should task levels and DCs be set for a given task?
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 22:03
|
|
|
ZZT the Fifth posted:On the subject of Earn Income; how should task levels and DCs be set for a given task? There's a table.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 22:11
|
|
|
I think crafting’s biggest flaw is that you need to buy into it with feats (and formulae) if you want the good stuff, whereas every other Earn Income source doesn’t require you to do so. The only reward you get from spending the feat is the dubious benefit of always being able to get exactly the thing you want, which won’t matter for most players since their GMs will likely just let them buy whatever they need from the general store in town. Replace the feat with a different requirement, like needing to be Expert in Arcana to craft magical recipes above a certain level, and this problem is solved very neatly.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 22:16
|
|
|
blastron posted:I think crafting’s biggest flaw is that you need to buy into it with feats (and formulae) if you want the good stuff, whereas every other Earn Income source doesn’t require you to do so. The only reward you get from spending the feat is the dubious benefit of always being able to get exactly the thing you want, which won’t matter for most players since their GMs will likely just let them buy whatever they need from the general store in town. Replace the feat with a different requirement, like needing to be Expert in Arcana to craft magical recipes above a certain level, and this problem is solved very neatly. Right. This is the fundamental disconnect between the crafting rules as written, and the crafting rules at most tables. As written, there's an expectation that settlement level matters and the GM is paying attention to what you can get a hold of where, and in some campaigns, the feat is useful, and in some it is not, and that's fine because not every feat is for every game. The result is that they just kind of don't do anything at most tables, and then players start looking for 'well what are they supposed to do?" And for a lot of people, the answer they want is "enable cool stuff", which, fair! But, that's not what they're supposed to do. What they're supposed to do is enable players to choose the items they have access to without worrying about a separate mechanic that most tables just kind of completely ignore. Which, fine, every game I've ever played in basically ignores it too. But, I do think that getting mad that you don't get a benefit from an investment, when your GM has handwoven away the restriction that makes that investment beneficial is... a little silly at minimum? The solution, obviously, starts with figuring out well, what then, do you want crafting to be for?
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 22:23
|
|
|
After trying to make the 2e Crafting system work RAW and not really enjoying it I now give all common formulas for free on level up and I let each day of crafting reduce the cost of crafting the item as an Earn Income using their Crafting skill. Yeah there's problems but it's really simple and maintains the crafting flavor without penalizing them. I also try to let them use Crafting in their Aid check, like one time my Wizard said "hey I made a suit of chainmail, couldn't I spot any weaknesses in our opponent's armor and call them out to our Ranger for an Aid check?" and it's like, yeah. No problem.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2023 23:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 21:19 |
|
|
Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I also try to let them use Crafting in their Aid check, like one time my Wizard said "hey I made a suit of chainmail, couldn't I spot any weaknesses in our opponent's armor and call them out to our Ranger for an Aid check?" and it's like, yeah. No problem. i feel like a quiet tip for pf2 gms in general is 'let people aid with basically loving anything they actually come up an excuse for, as long as they think to do it'
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2023 00:49
|
|
