Pathfinder 2e: If your MAP is too high, use your third action to Post.

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Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

while i appreciate the effort in throwing out a lot of wildly different campaign premises, it doesn't stop golarion from feeling like a patchwork quilt of campaign pitches with no real coherence

similar to how eberron basically level-gates its three continents

# ¿ Aug 22, 2022 01:10

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 00:12

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

also flying takes an action to maintain, not having the move-action distinction means that maintaining flight fucks with your ability to do things badly, especially since most spells are two-action for a much shakier chance of success because of tighter numbers.

there also aren't really spells that Just Work, No Save like 3.5 forcecage or force too many saves to not do something like 3.5 prismatic <blank>

# ¿ Oct 6, 2022 18:12

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

is this some leftover pf1 10 minute adventuring day brainworms

# ¿ Jan 3, 2023 08:39

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

i'm pretty sure everyone else was just thinking of "why not enlarge the big fightboy because they are a big fightboy and it's a fight"

# ¿ Jan 3, 2023 09:03

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

VikingofRock posted:

Wait what's wrong with using a battle axe as a fighter? Taking a quick look:

One-handed weapons give you a lot of flexibility for maneuvers, shields, second weapons, etc

1d8 is reasonable damage for a one-handed weapon

Sweep plays nicely with your already-high accuracy when facing multiple foes

The axe crit effect is pretty cool in those scenarios too

Is there some other weapon that is just straight-up better?

the gnome flickmace meme probably, reach+flail type on top of sweep, going down to d6 is more than worth the trade

# ¿ Feb 19, 2023 09:09

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

bagrada posted:

The GM specifically made fun of some of the more outlandish uncommon and rare ancestry options in pathbuilder so I'm not hopeful about playing either with this group but they are fun to think about. Azarketi and Fleshwarp are a bit less unintuitive than skeleton, lizardfolk and kobold so you never know. I'll be happy keeping things simple while I learn to play and check out his setting and the group's playstyle.

why have things and not use them tho. just don't play with smelly gm if they don't like kobolds. no game is better than game where you aren't having fun

# ¿ Mar 10, 2023 21:15

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

sugar free jazz posted:

Uncommon and rare tagged things are explicitly not available by default

This is a game balance and design decision by Paizo

if there was a system of objectively more powerful ancestries then all the guides and discourse would account for that. rare and uncommon tags are not remotely equivalent to power. gunslinger is balanced against fighter, maybe a little weaker and less flexible, but gunslinger is uncommon. they are equivalent to things with setting implications for golarion that gms who care a lot about the integrity of the setting should be aware about

# ¿ Mar 10, 2023 22:13

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Keep in mind that it has the Incapacitate tag, though, so it's much harder than it actually seems to land the save without a big level gap between you and the targets.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2023 16:19

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

it's a pretty reasonable dungeon and/or dragon, though my friends are attaching a little more to the Advanced 5e thing that just came out in comparison because it's willing to kill a couple more sacred cows. I personally prefer PF2's action system and how Paizo's loads of premade 1-20 modules are almost a selling point in themselves

# ¿ Apr 11, 2023 17:32

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

pumpinglemma posted:

It's basically the build variety and general insanity of 3.5e, the balance of 4e, and the simplicity of 5e all in one system.

I don't think the build variety is there at all. Current-day Paizo really likes classes to stay in their lane. If they deleted skill feats and made Free Archetype a standard rule I think it'd be closer to true, but another reason i mentioned people drifting to A5E is it does stuff like have specific subclasses for any given combination of two base classes, and that's the kind of thing PF1/3.5 had where PF2 didn't really

But also that's a big matter of preference; it's much better for balance in PF2 that there's such a tight range of possibilities on what any given class can accomplish.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2023 18:10

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

pumpinglemma posted:

Admittedly I�m new to the system, but it feels to me like if you have a character concept then the system is rich enough that there�s probably a way to turn it into a viable character (especially with free archetype), and any two characters from a given class will feel incredibly different from each other even before bringing in ancestries and archetypes. Also, there seems to be a pretty huge feat selection and especially at higher levels those feats often do really cool things rather than �+1 to number�. For me a lot of that was there in 3.5e from the sheer variety of available classes, but was totally missing in 5e - in that system it always felt to me like I was picking one of ten pregens with minor variations, feats were scarce, and often the same feats were optimal for every character (like lucky).

that makes sense, i'm considering it from the opposite viewpoint where you can't take a base class and go totally orthogonal to that class's intended behavior with a clever build--that sort of thing is what defines 3.x to me, and pf2 has much stronger role protection than that

# ¿ Apr 12, 2023 02:12

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

mind the walrus posted:

Back to the subject of picking classes or backgrounds very far afield of what the Adventure Path suggests-- you're signing up for an adventure to be Blood Lords or Circus Performers or Paranormal Investigators or Magic Students. If those concepts aren't appealing to you to create a character in that vein, then you need to communicate with the GM to run something else or open up your mind a bit to the possibilities.

while the post is accurate, one of these is off-base: extinction curse sheds a lot of the concern with the circus pretty quickly, and if you want to run it i highly recommend getting people who are more on board with "unlikely heroes" than people who sincerely want to spend their entire lives as a clown, because when you ask the clowns to do heroics it gets weird re motivation

(there's a lot ELSE you have to edit with that game if you don't want really questionable dedication to the heroism too; it really does feel like it got all the writers who don't know what a metaphor is)

# ¿ Apr 20, 2023 05:40

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

mind the walrus posted:

I'm gearing up to run two groups-- one Extinction Curse and one Stolen Fate. Anyone who played in or GMed either of those have any recommendations? Mostly new players, but some 5e experience and everyone's on-point.

I've talked about Extinction Curse before, and what I said holds up: You want your group not to care too much about the idea that their characters want to be circus people forever. The module really wants like, unlikely young heroes with troubled pasts who ran off to join the circus rather than blungus the magnificent honklord who, when hearing about a wizard plague, probably just goes "you should report that to the good wizards idk i'm a clown"

But beyond that, you'll probably need to clean up a lot of the angles that the module takes in its plot, because frankly, it's really written for an uncomplicated "orcs bad, humans good" type of mindset. The side that you are fighting for is unarguably the one that started the problem, but aren't directly responsible for its consequences today. Does that mean you let people die in order to only partially restore something lost forever? The game wants you to say no but that's only because the people reclaiming their ancestral artifacts are now demon-possessed fallout mutants as a direct consequence of the fact that they had those things stolen from them. Extinction Curse steps directly into a moral problem that it is not at all interested in really grappling with in a meaningful way, presumably because the writers just never caught what they were actually talking about. Do you play FF14? It's Heavensward but you can't actually get the dragons to sit down and talk. If you're not interested in drastically changing around plot beats and sequences of events, I recommend looking at some other 1-20 adventures.

As a module, mechanically? It's fine, if a little undertuned at times. If your party is smart about things they'll be able to do most dungeons without a long rest, which definitely isn't what the module assumes. Be careful about severe solo encounters, they tend to be things that demand magic-bullet solutions that a lot of party compositions will have a very hard time dealing with, and that if let go too long, will totally splatter a group.

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Apr 27, 2023

# ¿ Apr 27, 2023 20:18

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Lamuella posted:

Making him on Pathbuilder right the gently caress now.

The entire reason I'm halfway through extinction curse right now is that regional names for trail mix came up and I said "gorp and scroggin sounds like a sitcom for goblins" then someone said they'd run the module for me if i played a washed-out goblin standup that got cancelled

# ¿ Apr 27, 2023 20:46

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

The game basically assumes you'll use focus spells like lay on hands to recharge to full between most combats.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2023 20:24

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Chevy Slyme posted:

Yeah, like, doing Vaults as a classic dungeon crawl diablo-like, with the various iconics as playables, is a legitimately neat and cool and good idea that can work very well.

But, goddamn it I want my Pf2e videogame to do tactics simulator and charop shenanigans in!!!!

Yeah this exactly. I wanted a little character building lab to see if something would function at a table

# ¿ May 2, 2023 01:49

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Prokhor Zakharov posted:

Wrapped up the adventure path where you make the trade deal with the lizardfolk, I forget the name, where I was playing a small size leshy fighter/cavalier on the back of a medium size pony. It was lots of fun and I'm surprised how well the mounted joust mechanics work considering how awkwardly they're presented in the rules. Felt good blasting my lil plant knight across the battlefield to lance badguys. Starting up Abomination Vaults now with an android thaumaturge. Their gimmick is that they're a Starfinder android abolitionist who accidentally went back in time because of something something star trek style bullshit. All their abilities are appropriately flavored as high tech gadgetry from the future that they desperately try to keep working. It's been fun basically treating Pathfinder as if you're role-playing through Army of Darkness.

weirdly, small jousters do tend to work better than medium jousters because of the rule about 'tall' vs 'long' sizes and how reach weapons shrink when mounted

# ¿ May 3, 2023 08:05

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

The Golux posted:

wait does 2e let you hit adjacent to yourself with a reach weapon, or only when mounted, or what? (not that those squares aren't threatened by mount anyway).

It�s in the rules for mounted combat and in the rules for size increases. The squares you can hit with reach vs non-reach are different for every size category of mount, and the size categories themselves make distinctions between �long� size and �tall� size such that an ogre gets inherent reach where a horse doesn�t.

# ¿ May 3, 2023 21:21

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Characters that were inquisitors in PF1 have generally been interpreted as champions in PF2 and I'm largely fine with that, we just need LN/CN champion variants

# ¿ May 21, 2023 04:40

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

the problem here too is talking about fighter as a synecdoche for the overall martial/caster problem in dnd-type games, because fighter specifically in PF2 is something of an anomaly. if you just want to power attack you'll do better damage than anyone else, and if you want to specialize into weird control stuff you'll also be top-shelf at that with minimum effort compared to more complicated classes added later like magus, swashbuckler, or gunslinger. overall the martial/caster power dynamic doesn't strongly favor one or the other in PF2 because there's stuff that spells can do that simply cannot be replicated, but fighter itself is probably just plain overtuned unless other party members are going harder on optimization.

# ¿ May 21, 2023 08:38

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Fighter is honestly the bigger problem in general. There�s fighter which just does everything, then there�s other martials where they might have a razor thin advantage over a fighter in their one narrow specialty

# ¿ Jun 16, 2023 00:51

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

i think generally your experience will only improve, the first 5 or so levels in PF2 are the weakest experience

# ¿ Jul 4, 2023 05:08

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

The real breakpoint for caster effectiveness is level 10 where you can buy a Shadow Signet. Most monsters have either a fort or ref DC lower than their AC, sometimes even by as much as 4 points, and usually at least by 2. It makes spell attack rolls hugely more reliable. (Another reason why I think Paizo should do more 11-20 and 5-15 modules rather than 1-10, but mainly they should just scrap that item bandage and give casters attack roll scaling with their weapons like everyone else gets)

Attrition is another major problem that gets compounded by spell selection, but this time it's focus spell selection. If you choose the subclasses with really good focus spells, you're generally a lot more set for a big adventuring day because you can increasingly lean on those.

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Jul 17, 2023

# ¿ Jul 17, 2023 08:34

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

which is to say that if you have both, flurry is better for low AC targets because you get more swings in, and power is better for high AC targets because you don't want to attack with MAP against them.

wild shape druid is in a bit of an odd spot, in that there is no dedicated martial wildshaper build like there was in 3.5 or PF1. the power of a druid will always be in its spell list. its primary ability is a spellcasting ability, after all.

the better way to think about it is that in exchange for monopolizing your feat investment, a wild shape druid gets the most possible throughput anyone can get out of a single focus point. if you go all-in on the build, you become roughly as capable as an average melee character of an melee-focused class, if somewhat less potentially flexible in your tactical options... except for the part where you can just choose to be a caster for an encounter instead if that's more advantageous to you, and you don't really lose all that much compared to a druid that invests heavily in making their casting options more flexible.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2023 05:52

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Yeah it�s the same thing as realizing that the antagonists in extinction curse actually have the moral high ground in the dispute but you can�t really negotiate with them because of demons and stuff. Not necessarily written out of intentional propaganda but just a huge blind spot about what you�re ACTUALLY saying

# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 19:43

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

goblin for burn it, probably, or hobgoblin into runtsage for burn it

# ¿ Aug 3, 2023 05:57

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

it's hard to think of broad fantasy archetypes that aren't already reasonably doable. a class representing someone like frodo, an otherwise unremarkable non-adventurer who happens to be the only person capable of holding an artifact of unimaginable power, maybe

a dedicated necromancer would also be nice if that isn't one of the wizard subclasses

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Aug 3, 2023

# ¿ Aug 3, 2023 17:28

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

KPC_Mammon posted:

I might be having a big combat coming up. The forces of evil are attacking a small town. Has anyone run something like this? The bad guys are likely to try attacking from multiple directions since they have access to some teleportation magic, so they'll need to react to problems as they appear across town.

I don't know about handwaving too much. Some of the NPCs are good friends of the party, and having them randomly die off screen might feel punitive, I guess?

take a page from the non-dnd game space. use clocks like bitd--accomplish this goal in these many rounds to be able to respond to the next one in time. be explicit with your players about the risks, rewards, and limitations of the scenario rather than arbitrarily deciding what happens off-screen. basically, turn the whole thing into a meta-encounter and acknowledge that you're playing a game, so have rules about it. you have a rare opportunity in this system for the players to meaningfully risk and lose something without failing their entire quest, take advantage of it. ramp up that tension.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2023 18:25

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

it doesn't help that some classes in this system, like magus and gunslinger, do have very tight action loops that hurt to have disrupted

# ¿ Aug 28, 2023 19:02

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

after being told off enough, any unintentional sabotage should be treated as intentional

# ¿ Aug 28, 2023 19:50

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

Yeah but they wouldn't know about that Gnome Flickmace build. They wanted to take a crack at making their own character and this is their first dance with Pathfinder 2e.

There was also a near-zero chance of getting them to play a martial.

Edit: And they watched a Pathfinder 2e tactics video and the host really pounded into their head that "every +1 matters" so they were like, "I'm being useful! I'm giving a +1 Inspire Courage and a +2 Flanking bonus! +3! That's huge! Support Lyfe baby!" and it's like, well, no. But he had no frame of reference beyond D&D in general and 5e in particular to know it was very suboptimal.

Well at least they�re halfway there with the inspire courage, just cast a spell instead

# ¿ Aug 29, 2023 21:27

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

isekai protagonist. choose one way in which you break the fundamental rules of the game, but you can't do anything besides that one cheat skill. try and see how far it applies

# ¿ Aug 30, 2023 06:00

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

appropriatemetaphor posted:

Fighter isn't really a tank in the moba sense, unless you go hard into tripping/grabbing

This is a pretty big "unless" though because the fighter is far and away the best at this too. Fighter can choose any basic combat activity to be the best at.

Champion is definitely the truest tank in that most of its unique gimmicks are direct mitigation, but it still won't be able to lock something down as consistently as a fighter.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2023 18:58

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

KPC_Mammon posted:

Champion is better at this than Fighter because they have higher AC and the Fighter's bonus to weapon accuracy isn't relevant for a grappler. Self healing is also really nice for a tank. Redeemer Champion can grab onto an enemy to make sure they are within range of their extremely powerful reaction, which lets other melee engage the grappled enemy with impunity. Without grappling it is pretty easy for enemies to just move out of range of the Champion's reaction.

it's absolutely relevant because snagging strike exists to work off of fighter's higher proficiency. fighter is the best at all the basic stuff because it gets the feats to do cool stuff with its basic maneuvers in-class, where other classes simply don't and have to archetype into wrestler or dual weapon warrior or mauler or w/e to leech off fighter feats, which might conflict with taking feat taxes for their class gimmicks.

i'm of the opinion that fighter shouldn't exist, and all its feats should just be a big pool that all the martials can take. give casters something similar probably.

this is probably the most evident with monk and ranger, classes that work better as vehicles for multiple archetypes (early flurry access and MAP reduction) than as anything you want to take the actual class feats of

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Sep 22, 2023

# ¿ Sep 22, 2023 05:55

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

sorry, i meant combat grab.

point being that anyone can focus on maneuvers, but fighters can focus on maneuvers and pick up a sideline--like archery, maybe--since a champion is handicapping themselves if they don't take the various improvements to their reaction. the fighter can then do both of those things at a generally higher success rate because of the flat bonus.

this is okay balance wise because a champion's unique gimmick at least contributes effectively in terms of the numbers game, but something like ranger falls behind pretty hard. and i was under the impression part of the point of remastering classes was to bring the early classes up to the more interesting standards of the later classes. but i've observed that a lot of that can be accomplished just by deleting fighter, because fighter kind of hogs all the cool unique actions to itself in terms of the core classes.

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Sep 22, 2023

# ¿ Sep 22, 2023 06:39

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

why wouldn't you take wrestler for a grappling build, though? which feeds into my point, that a lot of archetypes exist to give other classes an amount of what fighter has universal access to

Andrast posted:

A fighter using Combat grab is significantly less accurate than someone just using trip/grapple normally without MAP.

i'm also not really seeing where this is the case, especially since as you get higher in levels, fortitude tends to be the strongest average save among creatures. fort DC is frequently within 1 point of AC in either direction on a lot of statlines. and fort DC can't be decreased by flanking in the same way that AC can

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Sep 22, 2023

# ¿ Sep 22, 2023 06:45

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Facebook Aunt posted:

Looks like the only reason to ever use that focus spell is that it takes just 1 action instead of 2, so it is useful if you have a spare action lying around.

as above single action spells are extremely valuable, because you don't always need to move, you frequently need to toss out more damage, and the vast majority of spells are two actions only

# ¿ Sep 23, 2023 15:38

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Impermanent posted:

so far the pcs for my upcoming campaign are goblin cleric, leshy druid, and elf (secretly changeling) thaumaturge. it's kingmaker though so a lot of these are going to thematically work pretty good. fourth player hasn't chosen yet

i am running abomination vaults with a dream dragon, duskwalker gnoll, lizardfolk, ghost poppet, and tiefling vanara. these are all at least uncommon and all the major AV NPCs outside the dungeon are humans, dwarfs, or halflings, but they all have a reasonably thematic fit with everything going on in the module, and i prefer the angle of "you are all consequences of things happening inside the dungeon and are therefore scrungly weirdos" to "you are unrelated adventurers from outside"

and to be clear these were things they wanted to play for mechanical reasons that only needed slight massaging into compatibility with the plot of the module

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Oct 2, 2023

# ¿ Oct 1, 2023 22:39

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

iirc the basic undead benefits that undead PCs get supersede the normal undead trait rules

# ¿ Oct 6, 2023 21:45

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 00:12

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Clerical Terrors posted:

I found RPGBot's guide to the be kinda out of date and not always that great tbh.

agreed, I generally go with whatever the most current guide is over here.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2023 08:32

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Pathfinder 2e: If your MAP is too high, use your third action to Post.

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