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sugar free jazz posted: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. I think Mirage is saying that it's weird from an in-universe point of view. I guess it does make sense if you accept the idea that people have some kind of general factor of competence that can rapidly improve through life-and-death adventures (and the writeup on lux aeterna dragons basically says that this is indeed how it works in-universe, although that's technically third-party material).
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Oct 23, 2023 16:31
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Honestly I feel like the Otari stuff that isn't Abomination Vault is already basically Saltmarsh. Beginner Box, then Troubles in Otari. I know that's less content, in a sense, but the town and feel are the same (to me), and it might be a good way to start and then get inspired for your other conversions.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:40
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pf2e is a game and diegetic progression isn't the main focus of its mechanics and if you want lots of in universe tie ins with progression then it's probably not the perfect game for ya
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Oct 23, 2023 16:42
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Silver2195 posted:I think Mirage is saying that it's weird from an in-universe point of view. I guess it does make sense if you accept the idea that people have some kind of general factor of competence that can rapidly improve through life-and-death adventures (and the writeup on lux aeterna dragons basically says that this is indeed how it works in-universe, although that's technically third-party material). Yeah, I was speaking story-wise. Ralph Bumbling Adventurer, who has spent ten levels setting off every trap he finds with his face, take a two-hour college extension course and is now Trapmaster. I get how it works and why it works that way, but it breaks my immersion, especially at high levels.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:24
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Complaining that game mechanics don't perfectly simulate real life is a bit absurd and is, frankly, an unrealistic expectation. Also, if you're ten levels in and just getting to trained rank, you ain't no "trapmaster." It'd be like taking a lockpicking class and then being competent at opening Masterlocks and similar garbage tier locks, which is completely apt. Edit: I guess you could time a level-up where you become trained and get a free rank-up to expert at the same time via a feat or something. Whoopteedoo. It's like complaining that it makes no sense that a character can suddenly figure out how to sling fireballs or any other thing upon leveling up that grants you a new, previously-unavailable option. Welcome to game rules making ~verisimilitude~ concessions for mechanical purposes. Dick Burglar fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 17:26
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Mirage posted:Yeah, I was speaking story-wise. Ralph Bumbling Adventurer, who has spent ten levels setting off every trap he finds with his face, take a two-hour college extension course and is now Trapmaster. Fully agreed. I also don't like that Ralph can't get better at disabling traps without becoming better than most of the world immediately. In PF1e, I could drop a skill point and then up it at the next level, etc. PF2e is pretty restrictive in that regard.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:27
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he takes a two hour course and is trap apprentice who took a two hour course and can disarm basic traps but not ones that require an expert, regardless of what their bonus is. if you’re concerned about it and diegetic progression then the ten levels they spent setting off traps clearly taught them something and that something just clicked and they can finally see
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Oct 23, 2023 17:29
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A 10th level Ralph is an experienced adventurer that has more experience doing his thing than most people get in a lifetime, of course he will be able to pick up a new skill to a sufficient level when he puts his mind into it.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:29
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Andrast posted:A 10th level Ralph is an experienced adventurer that has more experience doing his thing than most people get in a lifetime, of course he will be able to pick up a new skill to a sufficient level when he puts his mind into it. I would also posit that someone who's been bumbling into traps and dealing with them first-hand like that would be pretty uniquely suited for - with some training and application - being at least half decent at recognizing and skirting around them
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Oct 23, 2023 17:31
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I'm pretty sure old editions of D&D or some other system did in fact demand that PCs spend X hours training with a master in order to learn new skills/abilities/spells/whatever upon leveling up, and it was rightfully abandoned because that sucks rear end in actual play.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:33
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Mirage posted:Yeah, I was speaking story-wise. Ralph Bumbling Adventurer, who has spent ten levels setting off every trap he finds with his face, take a two-hour college extension course and is now Trapmaster. Hey man, if he's been setting them off face first for 10 levels, all that class is doing is giving names to the mechanisms smacking him in the face and telling him how to turn off the thing before it stabs him in the face. I know the average person in unable to learn from experiences, but I'd argue that enough traps to the done should give him the wherewithal to at least learn to duck.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:34
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Dick Burglar posted:I'm pretty sure old editions of D&D or some other system did in fact demand that PCs spend X hours training with a master in order to learn new skills/abilities/spells/whatever upon leveling up, and it was rightfully abandoned because that sucks rear end in actual play. Bard required multiclassing into like 4 other classes to unlock. Monk couldn't advance past a certain level until they defeated and claimed the title of the monk who already had that level and title (Master of Spring/Winter/Fall/Summer, Grandmaster of Flowers, etc) Characters had to spend time training in order to level up. Paladins had to tithe a percentage of their gold to the church.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:39
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This is absolutely a post-hoc rationalization, but the kinds of traps a level 12 klutz is going to run into are going to be so creative/intricate/devious that by comparison the trick to a basic lock or trap is going to seem obvious with just a little bit of guidance.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:45
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the_steve posted:Bard required multiclassing into like 4 other classes to unlock. Not quite what I was talking about, but same idea. Interesting conceptually, but terrible in practice.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:50
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Silver2195 posted: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. I like how Stamina works in Starfinder and this seems like a straight port forward. I haven’t been able to try it in practice, though.
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Oct 23, 2023 18:00
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blastron posted:I like how Stamina works in Starfinder and this seems like a straight port forward. I haven’t been able to try it in practice, though. I've used the Stamina system and it works well, so if there's interest in using Stamina, and no one in the party will complain about it making healers "useless," go ahead.
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Oct 23, 2023 19:32
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:3) Any general advice for adapting 5e adventures to Pathfinder? The creatures aren't going to be the same levels, so maybe don't worry about the creatures? Adapt the story but don't try to port over the mechanics. Pretend you are a game designer building the adventure from scratch using the story. There will be a point in the adventure where characters are supposed to level up. For pathfinder that point is 1000 XP. So the cumulative XP budget for that section is 1000 XP. Dividing the story into 1000XP chunks gives you a reasonable size to work with. How many encounters are there in that section? Each encounter should be 80-120 XP https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=498 Get the bosses and significant talking antagonists as close as you can, but the henchmen filling out the XP budget can be anything thematic and sensible rather than trying to copy the particulars closely. Remember that the number of encounters is variable. If within your 1000XP budget there are too many encounters don't make a bunch of 80XP cakewalks, just cut some insignificant filler. Or if there aren't enough encounters and you don't want too many 120XP slog fests, just toss in a couple psuedo-random encounters that make sense. Next look at the treasure budget for that level. Throw out the 5E treasure entirely and redo it, because it isn't compatible. 5E treasure amounts will destroy the economy in pathfinder. Eg: a set of full plate in pathfinder is 30gp, in 5e it is 1500gp. They should get X amount of stuff over the course of level 1. Figure out magic items that make sense, then sprinkle the treasures through the encounters you built. Use the story, redo the mechanics from scratch.
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Oct 23, 2023 20:11
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Is a single +1 enemy(a Shadow) an appropriate "tutorial" to introduce the incorporeal trait before my players have had a chance to acquire ghost touch stuff? I figure if it's a Low difficulty encounter by the numbers, the resistance will maybe make it feel more like a Moderate, which should be okay? One of them should be packing disrupt undead and they all have at least some magical weapon to use so they won't get hit with 10 Resist All, but they wouldn't likely have any Force damage or other ways to bypass the resist. The Shadow's Light-Vulnerability normally just lets a magically lit item count as magical, and my Magus player likes to cast Light on his sword already, so maybe I could allow it to bypass the resistance so he feels cool? Or maybe I should just trust the numbers and let them sweat a little bit from a fight with a single not-that-scary ghost, and then they will understand why they might want to bring force damage or find ghost touch runes.
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Oct 23, 2023 20:22
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Scoss posted:Is a single +1 enemy(a Shadow) an appropriate "tutorial" to introduce the incorporeal trait before my players have had a chance to acquire ghost touch stuff? I figure if it's a Low difficulty encounter by the numbers, the resistance will maybe make it feel more like a Moderate, which should be okay? One of them should be packing disrupt undead and they all have at least some magical weapon to use so they won't get hit with 10 Resist All, but they wouldn't likely have any Force damage or other ways to bypass the resist. The Shadow's Light-Vulnerability normally just lets a magically lit item count as magical, and my Magus player likes to cast Light on his sword already, so maybe I could allow it to bypass the resistance so he feels cool? In Trouble in Otari there is a fight with a shadow and 2 zombies that wasn't too hard for a 3rd level party with no ghost touch. It wasn't a totally normal shadow though -- it didn't have the Shadow Spawn ability. I assume that was to keep things from spiraling out of control if the fight went on too long. Of course the GM could also simply choose not to try to Steal Shadow from the same guy 3 times. This was like newbie bumpers to keep a newbie GM from accidentally turning the encounter into shadow orgy.
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Oct 23, 2023 20:34
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Another random question since I just noticed that Shadows have a flight speed and this will be the first potentially flying enemy my party fights. In a recent session I had a giant snake climb 15 feet up a tree to try to save itself after its buddies were incinerated, and my Magus player tried to use his Dimensional Assault to teleport up to a branch and attack it. I wasn't quite sure how to arbitrate this, so I let him try it but made him do an easy Reflex save to see if he could balance himself while emerging from a vertical teleport and attacking at the same time-- he failed so I let him make the attack with a -2 circumstance penalty as he fell back down to the ground. If I ever have this Shadow use its third action to fly upward 20 feet he will 100% try to blink up there and swing his sword at it. How should I handle that properly?
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Oct 23, 2023 21:29
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I like the proficiency without level variant not for verisimilitude reasons (though the mechanics are silly that way), but because it's nicer as a GM to be able to say "a pretty hard DC is around 20", and not "a pretty hard DC is something I have to look up in this scaling-by-level chart". It's also kind of nice that the flattened out difficulty curve of enemies means that you have a wider range of things to populate encounters with, so if a party doesn't get to a fight you had planned as soon or as early within the campaign as you expected then you won't need to hurriedly do a bunch of tweaking to make the fight engaging. For players it also makes magic items with static DCs not feel like they're going to become obsolete junk in only a couple levels. Like a lot of the variant rules of PF2 though, it's not fully fleshed out and you'll need to know enough to able to fix issues on the fly. A lot of actions or features call for static DCs that you'll need to reverse-engineer back down to reasonable numbers, and the Aid action will go from kind of janky but useful at later levels to just mostly janky. There's also a handful of features in the game that add your level as a proficiency bonus to untrained skills, so if you don't even do that for your trained skills anymore then those features don't actually do anything now; I would probably just go with a +1 bonus for those for half of the bonus from being trained.
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Oct 23, 2023 21:31
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Jon posted:Fully agreed. I also don't like that Ralph can't get better at disabling traps without becoming better than most of the world immediately. In PF1e, I could drop a skill point and then up it at the next level, etc. PF2e is pretty restrictive in that regard. If you want to reflect this, you can use playtest rules for that instead, which had untrained at flat level bonus. People complained about that though, and the inability to make a 20th level character who doesn't drown in a puddle.
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Oct 23, 2023 21:53
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the_steve posted:Bard required multiclassing into like 4 other classes to unlock. There's only one druid heirophant in the entire world, you have to be chosen as heirophant to hit level 16, and when you hit 17 you just go "gently caress this" and hand it off to some other guy and retire to be a weird nature hermit who can gain a few more levels. 20th century D&D was an absolutely beautiful kaleidoscope of terrible, terrible ideas.
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Oct 23, 2023 22:48
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Every GM stuck with 5e eventually digs into the TSR stuff to help spackle over the anemic content of the official books, and realizes two things: 1. Oh wow this was an imaginative game with some wild concepts. Even if they don't seem like they would work, I'm impressed and some of this stuff is worth salvaging. 2. I totally see why TSR sold this poo poo off to the Magic assholes.
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Oct 23, 2023 22:55
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Scoss posted:Another random question since I just noticed that Shadows have a flight speed and this will be the first potentially flying enemy my party fights. If you teleport into mid-air you fall. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=402 If he teleports 15 feet straight up and falls that would be 7 damage, I think. If he happens to teleport next to a handhold he could try to spend his reaction to grab an edge. https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=95 For teleporting into a tree he could grab an edge or balance. https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=28 He could also take the Cat Fall feat to never take damage from his 15 foot falls and just throw himself in the air all the time if that's what he wants to do. https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=765
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Oct 23, 2023 23:24
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Facebook Aunt posted:The creatures aren't going to be the same levels, so maybe don't worry about the creatures? Adapt the story but don't try to port over the mechanics. Pretend you are a game designer building the adventure from scratch using the story. I think the creature stuff won't be completely impossible to find some matches- Saltmarsh is mostly undead, Sahaugains/Sea Devils, and some Aberrations like Aboleths...and Saltmarsh as-is seems to run levels 1-12, which I think matches a fair amount to where a lot of those creatures drop in the level curve for Pathfinder as well. Having done this with 4e years ago I get the risks everyone's warning about, but I think it'll be more work-intensive than risky. Could be wrong though! For XP, I'd almost certainly do milestone based leveling. Most of the 5e advice seems to suggest that route anyways, and Saltmarsh is built upon having ~7 reasonably strong adventures that happen to themselves have good beats within for leveling up. I do think I'll have to go through and re-think encounter pacing though- that's probably the most work. I don't know if it somehow works in 5e, but the adventures are a lot of map-explorations, and those TSR adventures were not afraid to have like 1 rat appear in a room because you had 25 rooms to make interesting. I think compressing down those fights in to a few clear-cut encounters and then maybe some sort of simple-hazards where players can get tagged with a save-or-ouchie could work. Also agreed re-doing treasure is a pain, but necessary.
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Oct 23, 2023 23:32
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Cyouni posted:If you want to reflect this, you can use playtest rules for that instead, which had untrained at flat level bonus. People complained about that though, and the inability to make a 20th level character who doesn't drown in a puddle. Nah, PF1e scratches that itch for me when I GM and when I play I'm not determining which rules we use anyway.
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Oct 24, 2023 03:39
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mind the walrus posted:
I thought this had less to do with any kind of sense of shared design ethos and more with the fact that TSR hosed their finances so thoroughly they were an extremely toxic purchase for anyone but Wizards of the Coast.
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Oct 24, 2023 11:40
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Clerical Terrors posted:I thought this had less to do with any kind of sense of shared design ethos and more with the fact that TSR hosed their finances so thoroughly they were an extremely toxic purchase for anyone but Wizards of the Coast. That's what I was implying-- you get the impression reading through the 2e library that whoever was running the ship was not focused or thinking through a lens of long-term viability
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Oct 24, 2023 11:57
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The bubble and deflation of late capitalism as told through the history of D&D editions
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Oct 24, 2023 12:40
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The remastered cleric preview is up. Some neat new feats here. This one in particular stood out: quote:Raise Symbol [one-action] — Feat 4
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Oct 24, 2023 21:06
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Oct 24, 2023 22:27
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VikingofRock posted:The remastered cleric preview is up. That actually rules. It'd be funny if thaumaturges got something similar, but I recognize that they don't really need more wacky actions, since they've already got a number of them.
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Oct 24, 2023 22:30
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Sacred Ground sure does show that they still haven’t realized that any out of combat healing option simply MUST be balanced against the combo of Risky Surgery / Ward Medic / Continual Recovery. It’s maybe a slightly better option at level 4/5 unless your medic is a Rogue or Investigator, since that triple feat combo generally won’t come online for most players at level 6. So, let’s compare the two at level 6. Sacred Ground heals for 6 times the number of players who are more than 6 HP below max. So, let’s say 24 in a party of 4. The Medic meanwhile, will heal 2 people for 12.6 each on average. (+10 Expert, +2 Wisdom bonus, +2 Risky Surgery circumstance bonus, +1 item bonus probably is a +15 against DC15, for a 95% crit chance/5% fail chance to heal for 4d8-1d8) So that’s 25.2 average healing. If the medic chooses to roll expert checks instead, it becomes a 25% fail/75% crit and pushes the average heal up to 17.625 per target, or 35.25 and you would need a party of 6 for sacred ground pull ahead. And it gets even worse at level 7, when the medicine skill user gets to Master and Ward Medic works on 4 targets instead of 2, so those average heal values can be doubled, and with another +3, DC20 checks become a 90% crit rate - so you’re averaging closer to 21 points per target or 84 points of healing per ten minutes. While Sacred Ground goes up by one and is doing 28 healing in a party of four. And yes, the medic is using three feats to do this compared to one from the cleric, but… like, skill feats are inherently just so much less valuable than class feats. It would be insane not to have someone in every party that can run this three feat engine. It makes rolling for heals out of combat a pointless exercise that should just be handwaved usually, absent significant time pressure on the party. And it just makes every out of combat healing option from any other source look really bad in comparison, and until they start balancing out those options against Medicine - or making them interesting in some other way… they all just feel like a waste of ink.
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Oct 24, 2023 22:44
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It's definitely less powerful than Ward Medic/Continual Recovery/Risky Surgery, but it's also one level 4 class feat vs 3 skill feats and a maxed skill (the latter is a LOT), and can also be combined with the latter if you want.
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Oct 24, 2023 23:03
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It also has the advantage of being one and done- your Cleric can cast that and then spend 10 minutes doing something else, like Searching or Refocusing.
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Oct 24, 2023 23:20
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I think that characters should simply reset to full HP outside of combat if adventures aren't going to be written with time pressures or gauntlet fights as an explicit challenge, which I haven't really seen much of. Maybe one or two per book
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Oct 24, 2023 23:31
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Hand waving is fine, and I'll definitely do it in situations where time has absolutely no consequence, but I feel it's better to have the various tools available for players who prefer that level of resource management.
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Oct 24, 2023 23:37
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hand wave if you want but it seems real stupid to make that the default
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Oct 25, 2023 02:26
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Dick Burglar posted:I'm pretty sure old editions of D&D or some other system did in fact demand that PCs spend X hours training with a master in order to learn new skills/abilities/spells/whatever upon leveling up, and it was rightfully abandoned because that sucks rear end in actual play. Oh, it was even worse than that. In 1E AD&D, the DM was expected to grade how well the player played their class each time XP were distributed, using a scale of Excellent (1), Superior (2), Fair (3), or Poor (4). Then when you got enough XP to gain a level, the DM averaged out your grades and that was the number of weeks you had to spend training to level up ("be certain all decimals are retained, as each .145 equals one game day," notes Gygax). On top of that, you had to pay (current level x 1500) gp for each week of study and find someone of your class to teach you. Unless your grade was better than 2, in which case you could self-train, which took twice as long, meaning you'd end up spending about the same anyway. We never used this poo poo back in the day, and I've never spoken to anyone who did. I suppose it does provide a useful gold sink, but if your DM was stingy it would be easy to get into a situation where you were ready to level up but couldn't afford to. Selachian fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Oct 25, 2023 |
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Oct 25, 2023 04:29
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