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The Free Archetype rule is just straight-up great. Once I used it in one game I've used it in every game since. It adds so much versatility and flavor to a character without unbalancing anything.
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Aug 19, 2022 01:24
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Pasha posted:How does PF2E handle encounters? Is there an XP budget (or something similar)? Yes, there's a budget, and it's very easy to understand: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=497. Figure out the total, pick the monsters and/or hazards, done. There are also very good rules for creating monsters and hazards. The one big thing to note is that each level of difference between the players and a target swings the math in favor of the higher-level entity by 1, so an Extreme-threat encounter filled solely with mooks at a -4 level will only be Extremely boring, and an Extreme-threat boss at +4 might be entirely unsurvivable with attacks only hitting on a 19+.
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Aug 22, 2022 20:44
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Pathfinder 2e: If your MAP is too high, use your third action to Post.
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Sep 24, 2022 04:28
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Harold Fjord posted:Not when it uses a damaging action, the reaction trigger is a creature moving out of a space the swarm covers. This is most likely happening on a players turn. The "plus Cling" in the attack is the confusing bit. It would seem that every hit it does triggers Cling, dealing damage to itself and applying the persistent damage.
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Nov 8, 2022 05:04
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Inspire Courage has spell components listed, and it only requires a verbal component, so you can cast it with your hands full. https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=386
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Feb 26, 2023 04:50
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sugar free jazz posted:Uncommon and rare tagged things are explicitly not available by default It's a design decision, yes, but not a game balance one. The access rules are there so that things that are game-changing are gated behind GM approval. Teleport isn't a spell that measurably increases a party's combat abilities due to the inaccuracy and long casting time, but at-will instant travel around the world dramatically changes the flow and pacing of a game, so it's Uncommon. Similarly, having a skeleton adventurer in your party isn't inherently unbalancing, but it adds a ton of complications to the game, including as mechanical things like negative healing and role-playing things like having an undead monster in your party. Since it's got such an outsized effect, it's marked Rare.
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Mar 10, 2023 22:26
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sugar free jazz posted:teleport is classically one of the most powerful spells in the game and it’s real weird that you see balance as a combat only thing That's not what I said at all. Teleport is very powerful, but it's not unbalanced, because it's a campaign-level party utility thing. It doesn't really matter that one specific player has it, because in practice it's something that the entire party decides to use and benefit from. It's marked as Uncommon not because it's too powerful, but because it's a game-changer. Balance is about individual power, whether that's in combat, when exploring, in social encounters, and so on. D&D 3.5's Knock spell is unbalanced, because it can open any door, at medium range, silently, with no check required. It is flat-out better than any other option for opening things, including the entire class built around the fantasy of being a sneaky thief who can pick locks. Buy a wand of it and you've replaced your rogue entirely. Pathfinder 2e's Knock is much more balanced, because it just provides bonuses for a Thievery check, meaning that difficult locks will still require someone good at Thievery to open. (Note that 3.5e's Teleport absolutely is a personal power thing, and absolutely unbalanced. It is (mostly) pinpoint accurate, instant cast, and extremely versatile in its usage. A wizard with Teleport is not just the best way to get around the world, but also the best way to ambush an enemy, the best way to flee from combat, the best way to break into a vault, and so on.)
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Mar 11, 2023 08:36
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sugar free jazz posted:Spell schools mostly made sense and it’s weird to pretend to be confused about it. It’s been around a very long time and is pretty intuitive. I think that you only find it intuitive because it’s been around a long time. Apart from Divination and Illusion, the definitions of the schools are broad enough that there are spells that could easily fit in multiple of them. Why is Wall of Force, which creates a barrier, an evocation instead of an abjuration? Why does “necromancy”, the magic of death, cover healing spells? It’s all extremely arbitrary.
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May 28, 2023 05:37
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sugar free jazz posted:“Effects and magic items with [the Necromancy trait] are associated with the necromancy school of magic, typically involving forces of life and death.” Outside of D&D, and especially in Western fantasy, necromancy has everything to do with death and little to do with healing. The school contains healing effects because it was arbitrarily constructed to do so, not because it makes any actual sense.
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May 28, 2023 07:20
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One thing to note is that one of the primary bonuses of leveling up is getting a +1 to everything you’re proficient in. Someone with a permanent +1 to everything isn’t quite as strong as someone who is one level higher, but it will definitely let them punch above their weight class.
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Jun 8, 2023 20:34
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Blockhouse posted:what the gently caress this sounds like a nightmare In practice, it played like a spontaneous caster with more bookkeeping, with the important distinction that your power wasn’t tied to level-specific spell slots, so you could cast more high-level spells per day. Since there were also ways to spend more points in order to make a spell more powerful, this lead to psions dumping all their points into huge nukes. It wasn’t bad per se, but was heavily reliant on the psion’s player paying attention and planning their turn out in advance so that they weren’t fumbling with a calculator for two minutes in order to figure out if they could afford to erase the boss this round.
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Aug 5, 2023 19:23
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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.
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Aug 7, 2023 22:16
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TECHnically, that knowledge should be gated behind a Recall Knowledge check with a low DC, so until the dice have rolled it’s still metagaming.
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Aug 10, 2023 19:57
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I’d forgotten that Pathfinder’s math is so tight that one of Fighter’s capstone feats, up there with cleaving spacetime or becoming permanently quickened, is critting on a 19. (But only if you would have hit anyway.)
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Sep 4, 2023 17:43
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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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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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Nelson Mandingo posted:Stealth question. Assurance is, very simply, the ability to guarantee a result of 10 + Proficiency, adding no other modifiers, instead of rolling. Your proficiency modifier is equal to your level, plus a fixed value given by the proficiency rank, so if you are Expert in a skill and are level 5, your result is 19 (10 + 4 [rank] + 5 [level]). The big drawback here is that you don’t get your ability modifiers, so the Assurance result is likely going to be 3-4 points worse than the average value of a roll. If you’re Expert, level 5, and have +4 in the relevant stat, your average roll is 23.5, with a minimum of 14 and a max of 33. In a vacuum, this looks pretty bad, if your goal is to pass every check. However, the DCs you’re trying to hit are very circumstantial. For Stealth, your target number is your opponent’s Perception, which is based on their proficiency and thus their level. If you are higher level than your target, and you have a better rank in Stealth than they have in Proficiency, Assurance is an excellent pick. A level 4 character that is Trained in Perception and has a +3 Wisdom has a DC of 19, which a level 5 Expert’s Assurance beats. You’re also likely to be fighting many opponents who are lower level than you, since that’s generally how encounters are built, so this will come into play often. In short, Assurance is fantastic against weaker opponents and worthless against stronger ones. If you hate failing rolls that you’d succeed on a 6, take it, but don’t expect to never touch a die again.
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Feb 27, 2024 19:04
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 18:27 |
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Dick Burglar posted:I still think keeping the mechanic of saving against spells is bad design. If I'm doing the action, especially on my turn, I should roll to see if it succeeds. And, to be fair, AFAIK literally everything else has the "attacker" roll against a static "defense" (think: attacks, skill actions) except magic. It almost seems like magic was walked back to 3.X (and older) style at a later stage of development, because of stupid grognards. I generally agree, if only because it makes hero point usability so inconsistent. I can spend one to hit someone with a beam, but I can't spend one to hit them with an explosion. Similarly, I can spend a point to dodge a fireball, but I can't spend one to block an attack. These are conceptually related actions ("attack" and "defense"), so the inconsistency in usability can sometimes feel bad. A fun alternative could be to have players roll a lot more of the dice, asymmetrically. If I throw a fireball, I would roll an attack, but if I get hit by a fireball, I would roll a save. This would have enormous knock-on effects, especially for AoE spells, which would cause a balancing nightmare, but it could be fun.
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Apr 18, 2024 20:47
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