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KPC_Mammon posted:Could you take one or two defender oriented implements? Level 2, currently. Any thoughts/advice for building? e: I've seen Scroll Thaumaturgy and it looks fantastic - would love to try it tbh. ZZT the Fifth fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 00:44
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ZZT the Fifth posted:Oh no, thematically they're fine. Party-comp wise, I'd be abandoning the closest thing we have to a Defender to instead play a Face/Support. you don’t need whatever a defender is in pf2e
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Oct 22, 2023 00:51
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Our Thaum went 16 strength and 18 charisma, with a general feat spent on armor proficiency. Bulwark means you don't need to worry about dexterity and can instead improve constitution and wisdom. Using a whip with a strength build means you lose very little damage but gain a ton of versatility from reach. It looks like there are a ton of great ways to build a Thaum, but I can tell you what my has been doing. Scroll Thaumaturgy should be used for utility spells and problem solving. My party is level 8 and our Thaumaturge has a backpack full of scrolls. Weapon Implement is one of the best opportunity attacks because it also works against actions that require concentration. If someone tries to use demoralize, you get to hit them. There have been a lot of monsters with concentration abilities, but it is, of course, campaign dependent. Regalia makes you terrifying. I'd suspect at least half of his demoralize checks have been crit successes, and he's only failed a demoralize check once, against a boss, but he used a hero point to reroll and succeed anyway (it ended up being a crit success). Against many of the foes he's encountered, he's needed a 2+ to succeed (make sure you get a demon mask if you go this route since every bonus matters). You won't be quite so potent at low levels--He made his Thaumaturge at level 5 after his barbarian died. Having people follow the expert when you have the regalia can be a sizeable boost for the party outside of combat as well. He also took Diverse Lore to get a free recall knowledge when he exploits vulnerability. I'm using the spoiled rules from the revision, so he gets one question on a success and two on a crit. Having picked up know-it-all this level, the number of questions has doubled. This is really powerful if you have casters in the party. Everyone else will frequently delay to go after our Thaumaturge so they can target weaknesses and waste fewer spell slots. It can also be nice as a martial character to know if an enemy has reactions before you engage them.
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Oct 22, 2023 01:24
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If you plan on wearing plate and are starting with 10 dex you can use an Armored Skirt with chainmail to prevent your AC from being bad at levels 1 and 2.
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Oct 22, 2023 01:31
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Ok an actual question on adapting something to run in 2e. I picked up Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and it seems like a really neat setting and adventure sets. Trying to figure out the work of adapting it to 2e though... 1) Any suggestions on where to set it within Golarion? Or other setting-related adaptations people would make? 2) Does 2e have any rules for ships and ship combat published? And/or would the ship-combat stats from 5e be segmented enough from the rest of the rules to maybe just run those from the sourcebook? 3) Any general advice for adapting 5e adventures to Pathfinder?
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Oct 22, 2023 05:21
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Pf2e adventures are significantly better than 5e ones. My advice is to not convert them. Consider: Paizo makes all of their rules available for free. Adventures are their revenue. 5e can kind of just do whatever and it will sell through momentum and live plays. Edit: I've heard nothing but horror stories about 5e adventures. They sound more like dream boards you can use for inspiration than something you can run without a ton of work, even if you run them in 5e. KPC_Mammon fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 05:56
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paizo adventures do have their problems, i wouldn't oversell them, but they're way more manageable than wizards adventures for sure. the worst-written set piece in extinction curse has nothing on the crab maze from candlekeep mysteries for sheer unplayable nonsense
Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 07:04
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I mean if the person wants to play Saltmarsh let them play Saltmarsh, it's an adapted adventure/setting from D&D 2e anyway.Fidel Cuckstro posted:Ok an actual question on adapting something to run in 2e. To sorta answer your question. Saltmarsh is a fun one. You could largely get away with running the region of Saltmarsh anywhere there is a large body of water, a coast and a forest nearby Maybe something like Southwestern Mwangi I probably wouldn't bother thinking too much about its location in Golarion unless you desperately need to put it there, if like this is gonna expand past just running the saltmarsh stuff As far as naval combat goes, I would probably Google for ship combat rules designed specifically for Pathfinder 2e I don't believe there are official rules for it. But I wouldn't bother trying to adapt 5e's ship combat rules, they are not particularly great I just quickly looked on infinite and found this https://www.pathfinderinfinite.com/product/396152/Smoke-and-Sail-a-Pathfinder-2e-Naval-Warfare-Sourcebook Could probably find some free rules on Reddit or something by googling.
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Oct 22, 2023 13:34
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If suggest a location based on the types of characters they want to run. Golarion is adaptable and there's no reason you cant do inverted saltmarsh in Geb (Nex?)
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Oct 22, 2023 13:41
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Yeah. Saltmarsh is a generic D&D starting town like Otari so the simplest place to put it would be near Absalom or in the Shining Kingdoms, but you can place it basically anywhere on the coast without changing that much besides what ancestries/cultural groups are living there. VVV EDIT: Oh, right, I forgot Andoran. That whole corner of the map is the most generic D&D area, so just put it somewhere on that end of the Inner Sea if you don't want to think about it too hard. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 15:50
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Lost omens world guide owns
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Oct 22, 2023 16:01
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love the isle of terror just being UH OH
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Oct 22, 2023 20:14
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NGL I constantly mistake "Golarion" for "Glorantha," because my brain is broken I guess. I've never even played HeroQuest, but learning about the duck people has stuck with me.
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Oct 22, 2023 20:28
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Dick Burglar posted:NGL I constantly mistake "Golarion" for "Glorantha," because my brain is broken I guess. I've never even played HeroQuest, but learning about the duck people has stuck with me. PF2 lets you be a duck-person too, actually (the Shoreline Strix heritage).
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Oct 22, 2023 21:26
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Knowing practically nothing about the setting, I made my Strength of Thousands character as being from Absalom nearly at random and wound up characterizing it as Fantasy New York whenever he talks about home so I'm glad I was apparently not too far off.
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Oct 22, 2023 21:39
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PublicOpinion posted:Knowing practically nothing about the setting, I made my Strength of Thousands character as being from Absalom nearly at random and wound up characterizing it as Fantasy New York whenever he talks about home so I'm glad I was apparently not too far off. Absalom is probably best described as “Ankh Morpork but not a joke”. Which, fantasy New York is close enough, sure.
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Oct 22, 2023 22:37
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Blockhouse posted:love the isle of terror just being UH OH If tomorrow my character went to sleep and woke up there, that would be his immediate in game and my out of game reaction.
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Oct 22, 2023 22:47
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Dexo posted:
I got those rules and I didn't like them, bit to be fair I'm kind of an age of sail nerd. Wind has almost no effect in the rules, for example.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:02
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Chevy Slyme posted:Absalom is probably best described as “Ankh Morpork but not a joke”. Which, fantasy New York is close enough, sure. Tropetopolis, the Big City on trope island.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:05
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3 Action Economist posted:I got those rules and I didn't like them, bit to be fair I'm kind of an age of sail nerd. Wind has almost no effect in the rules, for example. I mean yeah at that stage with wind, I would just like find some actual sea combat game and switch over to that for naval combat. Because yeaaaaah that is far far more indepth than I would ever want to run lol.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:05
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3 Action Economist posted:I got those rules and I didn't like them, bit to be fair I'm kind of an age of sail nerd. Wind has almost no effect in the rules, for example. golarion has plenty of naval vessels that don't need wind so it'd be weird to make it a direct age of sail thing between all the various magical propulsions or powering screws/paddles via internal alchemical combustion/steam/clockwork flywheels it's just a mess atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 23:12
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Well my group playing through AV imploded fairly early on. Post mortem is that Foundry VTT is fantastic, the AV module for Foundry is also fantastic, pf2e system is... okay? AV is too dungeon-crawl-y and needs more GM support to turn it into a narrative that would get my players to 'stick'. The main thing was I just really had no time to work on it much outside of running the module. I'll have to either do some planning on adding more of a narrative through-line to AV or investigate different modules, I'm curious about Indigo Isles. But either way I think that group is just done for the foreseeable future so I have plenty of time to plan.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:16
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I think the most I would allow wind to do for a sail ship, just idling thinking would be a fortune roll for maneuvers with the ship when going with the wind, and a misfortune roll when trying to make a maneuver into the wind.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:17
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atelier morgan posted:golarion has plenty of naval vessels that don't need wind so it'd be weird to make it a direct age of sail thing Yes except those rules that were linked are specifically sold as an age of sail ruleset for PF2e. It would definitely be more than necessary, I'm sure, bit I was disappointed because of the expectation. Dexo posted:I think the most I would allow wind to do for a sail ship, just idling thinking would be a fortune roll for maneuvers with the ship when going with the wind, and a misfortune roll when trying to make a maneuver into the wind. Alternatively you could probably just call sailing upwind difficult terrain if you really don't care that much
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Oct 23, 2023 00:47
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Dexo posted:I think the most I would allow wind to do for a sail ship, just idling thinking would be a fortune roll for maneuvers with the ship when going with the wind, and a misfortune roll when trying to make a maneuver into the wind. That’s a pretty 5e-ish approach. It seems simpler to just apply a +4 bonus or -4 penalty; similar effect, but with fewer die rolls. Especially since fortune and misfortune effects have some odd rules implications; if the benefit of sailing with the wind was a fortune effect, you wouldn’t be able to use a Hero Point to re-roll any attempt to make a maneuver with a favorable wind, for example.
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Oct 23, 2023 00:51
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yeah after thinking more than like 5 seconds that all makes more sense.
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Oct 23, 2023 00:55
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Dexo posted:I mean if the person wants to play Saltmarsh let them play Saltmarsh, it's an adapted adventure/setting from D&D 2e anyway. That's fair, but it isn't going to be trivial. If I had to design all of the encounters I'd just make up my own thing, personally. For actual advice, keep in mind that encounters have different expectations in different systems. You'll need to craft all of them yourself, possibly making your own monsters or changing what is being encountered to match the level ranges that work for a pf2e party. Filing the serial numbers off a close enough monster could work, depending on the circumstances. Also keep in mind that pf2e assumes that players can heal between fights. This can easily take several hours at low levels, so this can change the pacing dramatically. Figure out justifications for pacing changes ahead of time if necessary. Make sure you follow the treasure guidelines. Too many GMs don't and it makes for a horrible experience for players. There is zero chance that a 2nd edition adventure converted to 5th edition will be remotely accurate for pf2e. Because they are different games it is really going to come down to using the advice in the gamemastery guide for making and running your own adventures and applying it to Saltmarsh. I think it sounds like a lot of work but I hope that it is fun.
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Oct 23, 2023 05:15
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just wing it and gently caress around porting stuff over and if it’s not working change it
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Oct 23, 2023 05:36
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Yeah I'm going to tentatively plow ahead on trying it. It's really more about whether I can make time from work and convince some of the Pathfinder Society people I've been meeting to give it a shot. I will say- I don't know that I've seen a lot of good recs for campaigns built specifically for 2e. The Society adventures are a nice way to kill an evening and get a TTRPG fix, but none have really wowed me. Kingmaker mostly interests me for the kingdom-building stuff (which is admittedly pretty broken as written), the actual campaign doesn't really tug at anything for me. And it feels like the only thing I've read in this thread is how Abomination Vaults is really really hard. Like- is there's something agreed upon as like the killer 2e campaign?
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Oct 23, 2023 06:33
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I spent a tremendous amount of time and effort doing an on-the-fly conversion of D&D 5e’s Curse of Strahd AP to PF2e. Strahd is a standout adventure, and my players had a lot of fun, but ultimately I don’t think I would recommend it. Keeping everything thematically coherent while making it mechanically fun was a huge and constant problem that ultimately came down to the raw game design differences between the two games. There are a lot of these, but the biggest one I was constantly running up against was level scaling. D&D 5e is a game with “flat” leveling math, where getting a raw numerical bonus to your die rolls is a big deal, compared to PF2e, where every level gets you a +1 to things you’re proficient in. A D&D adventure can thus be a lot fuzzier with encounter balancing, since a monster that’s threatening at level 6 is still going to be threatening at level 9 (give or take a few fudged HP). PF2e encounters, however, must be tightly balanced to the players’ levels. In Strahd, there are a number of encounters where the players run into some stereotypical vampire beast minions like wolves, bats, and so on, whose threat levels are intended to be scaled by just adding more wolves. You can’t do that in PF2e, just due to how the math works. A level 5 D&D Fighter struggles to deal with their third wolf while their PF cousin crits their way through the entire pack without breaking a sweat. This wound up requiring me to constantly invent increasingly dire wolves every few levels that kept the players feeling threatened while also keeping the progression fantasy of getting that +1 every level going strong. Every encounter and every monster needed to be entirely bespoke in order to present the story as written while providing an engaging gaming experience. My GMG’s binding is a little cracked around the monster creation rules because I spent so many hours referencing them while trying to prep encounters thematically equivalent to the AP’s casual descriptions like “two wraiths and a shadow”. On top of that, I had to somehow bridge every other aspect of the game, whether it was big things like loot hoards or even little things like jump distances, to make everything fit. It was a huge amount of effort, and my players ultimately did really enjoy it, but I killed myself to make it work and was so, so happy when it was over. It’s not worth it. Just play a PF2e AP.
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Oct 23, 2023 07:08
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My players are level 8 and nearing the end of abomination vaults. There has been two deaths, making it far less lethal than old school dungeon crawls I've run for earlier editions of D&D. I think a lot of the difficulty complaints come from inexperienced groups who approach it like 5e, where you can kind of do whatever and win. Since your existing group plays pathfinder society, they won't have any problems. The battle that killed two PCs, by the way, was a boss fight that was lost due to bad tactics. When they finally decided to retreat, came up with a better plan, and returned to the dungeon better prepared, the fight actually ended up being really easy. As for cool adventures, Outlaws of Alkenstar, although not perfect, had some of the coolest setpieces I've had the pleasure to run in over 25 years of RPGs. Edit: I've not been able to play with them due to time constraints, but a few friends of mine are playing through Blood Lords and are enjoying it. The regular updates I hear from them makes the campaign sound fun and not too challenging. From what I've read, the first few APs are a bit rough because they were written before the rules were finalized. Running anything from AV onward should be less of a rough experience. I really want to run Gatewalkers because the villain is a psychic space whale but my players want an 11-20 adventure next. KPC_Mammon fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 07:21
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blastron posted:There are a lot of these, but the biggest one I was constantly running up against was level scaling. D&D 5e is a game with “flat” leveling math, where getting a raw numerical bonus to your die rolls is a big deal, compared to PF2e, where every level gets you a +1 to things you’re proficient in. A D&D adventure can thus be a lot fuzzier with encounter balancing, since a monster that’s threatening at level 6 is still going to be threatening at level 9 (give or take a few fudged HP). Do you think the Proficiency Without Level variant rule would be enough of a change to fix this problem? It might make buy in from existing pf2e players harder, and I heard the math isn't perfect, but it sounds easier than stating up a dozen different direwolves and bats.
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Oct 23, 2023 07:55
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:Yeah I'm going to tentatively plow ahead on trying it. It's really more about whether I can make time from work and convince some of the Pathfinder Society people I've been meeting to give it a shot. I think Strength of Thousands is probably the best-received 2e AP aside from Abomination Vaults.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:22
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KPC_Mammon posted:Do you think the Proficiency Without Level variant rule would be enough of a change to fix this problem? It might make buy in from existing pf2e players harder, and I heard the math isn't perfect, but it sounds easier than stating up a dozen different direwolves and bats. do not do this though if you wanna run a Sandra Lee style semi homebrew thing go for it. Like there’s plenty of good APs but if you wanna do whatever salt marsh is that’s cool. But don’t do proficiency without level without having a real good reason
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Oct 23, 2023 14:05
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Does anyone have any experience with Proficiency without Level? Or Point Buy, Alternative Scores, Deep Backgrounds, Skill Points, or Stamina? My impression is that the variant rules that actually get used are basically just Free Archetype, Gradual Ability Boosts, Automatic Bonus Progression, and occasionally Ancestral Paragon. Maybe Level 0 Characters for a "gritty" one-shot or something.
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Oct 23, 2023 14:30
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Profiency without level works just fine but I would not try to use it with being experienced with the system so you know how to handle edge cases and anything that feels weird. Encounter balancing is also way more of a crapshoot with it since the system was not made with it in mind. In my opinion it's quite a bit of work for little gain.
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Oct 23, 2023 15:04
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proficiency without level also puts you in a position to possibly do a lot of editing of adventures if you're running one. to me, this cancels out one of the biggest advantages of playing PF2, which is that it has a lot of prewritten adventures that go 1-20 and need minimal editing and improv to do something good with. if i felt up to constructing my own everything and building every encounter from scratch, i'd do a system less tied to D&D sacred cows in the first place.
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Oct 23, 2023 15:16
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Mister Olympus posted:proficiency without level also puts you in a position to possibly do a lot of editing of adventures if you're running one. to me, this cancels out one of the biggest advantages of playing PF2, which is that it has a lot of prewritten adventures that go 1-20 and need minimal editing and improv to do something good with. if i felt up to constructing my own everything and building every encounter from scratch, i'd do a system less tied to D&D sacred cows in the first place. I only run my own stuff and encounter building for PF2 is honestly very easy. PF2 way better for that than the average system, GMing and adventure design both have good guidelines and you can do it with very low prep time once you get used to it.
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Oct 23, 2023 15:33
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PF2's Proficiency rules as written are weird, but they're In The Rules and so everything published is balanced toward that. The fact that you can go from "I don't know anything about that" -> 1 point -> "Yes, I get +15 on every roll now" doesn't enter the conversation.
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Oct 23, 2023 15:33
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Mirage posted:PF2's Proficiency rules as written are weird, but they're In The Rules and so everything published is balanced toward that. yes it does. skill checks and tasks are explicitly gated by training levels and at the point you get a +15 from getting trained you're level 12 and being trained doesn't actually do that much for what you as an adventurer want to do.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:21
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