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I've recently learned that PF2E can be pretty drat painful as a system if your party composition is too lopsided. It's my friend's custom campaign and the party ended up being an Armor Inventor (me, also the only real frontline), a Chirurgeon Alchemist, a very healing oriented Animal Order Druid (a godsend because the pet is pretty much about as competent a frontliner as I am) and a Dragon Bloodline Sorcerer. Our party has way too much healing and way too little damage and Inventor is really not a class meant to hold up as the only up close and personal combatant. Honestly playing it I'm not sure WHAT the expected role of an Inventor is but that's neither here nor there. Every mildly difficult fight devolves into a lot of me trying to tank everything, not succeeding and my HP going up and down like a yo-yo as the two healers try to keep me up. The sorcerer is facing the low level caster in PF2E problem of just not having enough spells and those spells not being impactful enough. I still like PF2E but drat combat in that particular campaign is annoying. On the other hand our previous campaign (Extinction Curse) was extremely breezy due to having both a Barbarian AND a Fighter going around deleting things. It's still pretty funny to me just how ridiculously powerful Fighters are in this system, honestly.
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Dec 23, 2023 08:39
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bewilderment posted:Inventor is basically a science/steampunk-themed martial character. The whole issue came from the Alchemist player originally intending to be a Rogue, but the player got way more attached to a different concept pretty close to game start. In general everyone picked classes (and free archetypes) with more of a focus on narrative than minmaxing which ordinarily is fine but in this case has ended up being a bit problematic. It's still mostly fine, I'm just venting after a particularly annoying encounter last time we played. Our GM is good enough things still mostly work out. Also right now I basically have two big problems with Inventor: Overdrive having a pretty significant chance of failure (why the heck does it have that it's like if Barbarians could fail to rage!) and basically everything they can do being a Manipulate action therefore making them extremely vulnerable to enemy reactions. Which kinda sucks when you're expected to be the main frontline!
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Dec 23, 2023 10:58
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The big problem with Investigator imo is that it has a lot of feats and features related to uhh... Investigating things. Which can be kind of a bummer if the campaign ends up not really having anything to investigate.
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Dec 23, 2023 21:44
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Dexo posted:I do think that the manipulate trait stuff is confusing as hell, as far as like doing the nested tagging like they do it. Hey, do you happen to have a page number for that rulebook excerpt?
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Dec 27, 2023 18:00
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Dexo posted:474 Appreciated, my DM was asking for it when I brought it up.
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Dec 28, 2023 02:34
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It's funny, I think I'm the complete opposite of the consensus here. I always make my own monsters (I tell the players upfront because I do reuse names but not stats, so they don't complain to me about differences from the official stuff) and give absolutely no info besides what's visually obvious without a successful RK check. Plus I always make sure to have pre-written believable fake info for crit fails. On the other hand I do let people roll whatever skill they can justify for RK. Fighter wants to use Athletics to try and gauge the training and strength of an enemy goblin? Sure. Cleric using Medicine to try to figure out if they know about any nasty wounds caused by the weird monster? Absolutely. I usually give info tailored to the skill used, too.
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Jan 19, 2024 17:01
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Taciturn Tactician posted:I mean I think that's cool and sensible if you're fighting unique, rare, and/or strange monsters, but it really feels absurd to me when it's common monsters that should be familiar within the setting. Mortals have been living alongside trolls and vampires for millenia, and still need to hit a moderately difficult skill check to remember that vampires are weak to sunlight and troll regeneration is turned off by fire and acid? People in our world remember those kind of monster rules even when they're not real, I think someone who was going out to fight monsters would probably have heard of it. You might as well make your Elf players have to roll RK to remember that humans can't see in the dark at that point. If it's something so obvious that the players know about offhand then sure, maybe. But to use vampires as an example seems wrong. I don't think there's a single fictional monster with more varied weaknesses than vampires. Maybe it takes an actual knowledge check to separate fact from fiction. A success lets you know sunlight and a wooden stake through the heart works, a crit failure has you CERTAIN that they're forced to count beans if you toss them on the floor near them.
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Jan 19, 2024 21:59
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Facebook Aunt posted:From a meta perspective Metal is the weakest one, so a dual gate might serve you better. Is Metal really the weakest? I don't know much about Kineticist besides hearing people talk about them, but I've heard at least a couple of people using Metal. I've NEVER heard of anyone using Fire so I assumed it was the weakest. Is it just that Fire is boring or something?
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Mar 4, 2024 04:32
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I like the change because I took Wrestler dedication which had an otherwise pretty drat useless bonus passive of +2 circumstance bonus to Fort DC when attempting to resist being Grappled or Swallowed Whole. Everything auto-grabbing made me very annoyed.
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Mar 14, 2024 03:08
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gurragadon posted:Our barbarian is a pretty good tank too. He gets d12 every level up, temporary hit points when he rages, and with his choice of barbarian he can become large now when he is raging. They only wear medium armor, but the hit points make up for it pretty well. Orc Barbarians are great meatshields but heavily rely on getting healing support due to their overall low AC for a frontliner.
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Mar 18, 2024 15:30
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Good taste on the Whirling Throw by the way. For my money it's the most fun feat in the game and I appreciate Wrestler for making it more easily available to anyone who wants it. It's an especially great feat if your GM has scenarios with cliffs or lava or boats.
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Apr 2, 2024 16:28
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I think the most sensible thing is to just determine targeting narratively. Sure, if you're fighting a squad of battle hardened mercenaries they might know that it's important to focus fire and take down the guy in fancy robes in the back, but a zombie would just keep attacking the first thing in front of it and a minotaur might switch targets to whoever last hit it in a blind rage.
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Apr 7, 2024 01:15
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The problem with most incapacitation spells is they're competing with Slow, which doesn't have the incapacitation tag even though it has just as much potential to shut someone down as a lot of incapacitation stuff, if not more. Tbh Slow should just be nerfed, it's WAY too good.
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Apr 10, 2024 04:04
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My group is getting to the tail end of Extinction Curse and things have honestly started to shift a lot towards the casters being the most important party members. In boss fights they have the more impactful debuffs and status effects and in mob fights Chain Lightning is a spell that exists. It's started to feel like me (Barbarian) and the Fighter are pretty much just meat shields. Oh, we do damage but it's honestly started to not be THAT much higher on the whole. I guess it helps the casters that my GM can't roll saves on boss fights for poo poo though. I swear the guy has a supernatural ability to roll a 1 when saving against Slow.
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Apr 23, 2024 14:14
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Silver2195 posted:I think PF2 is like many other D&D-style games in that casters start out weaker than martials but are stronger by the end…it just happens a lot more slowly, and the gap is small enough that specific classes and builds complicate it. Honestly I've not been a huge fan. I thought the first two books were pretty strong and the capstone to book 2 was really great but almost immediately afterwards it starts feeling super aimless. It does a pretty bad job of making the events something that the players really should care about and entire parts of the campaign feel haphazardly stapled on. A lot of stuff also seems to come to really anticlimactic endings. Also, in regards to the whole Xulgath being just monsters thing, our entire party had to sort of deliberately act against character to keep playing because honestly our interpretation of events is that the Xulgath are kinda right to be pissed off and demanding their orbs back. In a lot of ways I feel like the circus thing explicitly makes the overarching threat of little direct impact to the characters since they can just... Take the circus out of the Starstone Isles and let them deal with the very deserved consequences of Arodens actions. It'd probably have a stronger emotional hook if the PCs just like, lived there to begin with.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:52
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boxen posted:It's been awhile since I looked through the books, and my campaign finished the first book and got no further but: Yeah it's just the entire circus plotline ends in book 2 and is only kinda there in the others, and by the end of book 2 or 3 at the latest there is definitely a way for the circus to have enough resources to just gently caress off out of the isles. You don't even get the full aeon orb context until near the end of book 2 anyways. Also it's still super weird that this island saving plot has to be resolved by some circus weirdos when Absalom is RIGHT THERE. Honestly the entire circus performer premise just completely and utterly clashes with the rest of the story. If the players were just like, generic adventurers, the whole thing would make a lot more sense, imho.
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Apr 23, 2024 18:02
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