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Jarvisi posted:Strength of Thousands One quick clarification here: Strength of Thousands actually gives you a free archetype, which you can only use to multiclass into Druid or Wizard. I mention this only because the Free Archetype alternate rule is pretty much an objective improvement over the base game because it gives characters a much broader set of abilities without really making them meaningfully stronger. (If you combine Fighter and Barbarian your raw numbers get a bit too big for the system, but otherwise it's perfectly fine.) Whether you let people pick freely or you take Strength of Thousands' approach and give your players a limited list of thematic options, you really have nothing to lose from using these rules.
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Aug 18, 2022 21:59
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 05:25 |
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There's also the Automaton ancestry, which is at minimum close enough to work for Warforged. Other than that, dragonmarks would probably take a bit of homebrew but there's enough examples of feats that give limited access to spells to figure something out.
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Aug 19, 2022 22:30
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The Slack Lagoon posted:Is there a separate Pathfinder GM book or is it in the core rulebook? There's the Gamemastery Guide. It technically isn't necessary, but it has a lot of useful stuff.
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Aug 20, 2022 16:57
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GimpInBlack posted:Honestly this map makes me more hype to try Pathfinder 2e. I will say, Pathfinder 2e does feel like it's handles the stuff on that map in a much more fun way than 1e did. At the very least, it hits 'fun' more reliably. Take the Mwangi Expanse, the Africa joke on that map. In 1e, I hated it because it was just a random slice of colonial Africa they dropped into the setting because Paizo's executives like pulp stories set in that era. 2e feels like they're trying to be more respectful about integrating it into a fantasy setting, instead of just being A Historical Setting, But Fantasy.
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Aug 21, 2022 21:19
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sugar free jazz posted:I mean I guess but there was also like nothing written about the mwangi expanse other than the 30 page sargava companion which kinda counts? Everyone else already mentioned the worse bits of the Mwangi Expanse's presentation, but the way early 1e tried to sell you on locations by presenting them as thin pastiches of real life countries actively put me off of Golarion. Do you like Egypt? How about China? Don't worry, a legally distinct version of the Roma people are there too. Once you get about halfway through 1e it feels like Erik Mona is the only writer who really enjoyed making that kind of IRL cultural expy, and in 2e all the setting info's first impressions feel like actual settings I'd like to read about and less like a racist travelogue.
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Aug 21, 2022 23:59
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Jen X posted:Can't speak to their quality or spookiness, but there were a bunch of short (but I think connected?) adventures in Dark Archive, and I'd assume at least a few of those are horror-adjacent I've only read them, but they do seem like fun little adventures of varying quality. It's probably better to think of them as a season of fantasy-themed X-Files, if you want to know what kind of tone they're going for. It even does the that thing where every adventure is episodic and starts with you getting dumped in a new weird situation, but the final one is about the mysterious benefactor metaplot and ends in a hook for future seasons.
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Sep 1, 2022 20:16
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Tempest_56 posted:- The Investigator similarly doesn't seem to make sense. Is it just meant as an out of combat skill monkey? It seems like it would be pretty useless in anything but an Investigator/specific campaign. Not any more than Rogues. A lot of classes in Pathfinder are functionally equivalent in practice. Fighters, Barbarians, Inventors and Thaumaturges are all roughly equal when it comes to beating people up in melee, but their big numbers come from little unique mechanics. (Base big numbers, raging, having a cool unique weapon and always having a relevant weakness, respectively.) And in practice, Strategic Strike is equivalent to a Rogue getting a good sneak attack off, and all the weird feats and class features that make them look like just a skill monkey are so they can feel like a cool detective to the same extent that a rogue can feel like a cool thief. quote:- The Witch is also throwing me. I think I get the basics of how it operates, but I can't figure out what role it would serve in a group. It seems just like it trades getting a better than average familiar for being a kind of crappy Wizard. Again, see my point about how most classes in this game are functionally close enough that you can just pick the version that fits your flavor best. Witches are ultimately a primary caster for whatever spell list their patron with some cool unique cantrips/hexes, and that's more than good enough for where the game's balanced. Unless your party's really weird, you probably aren't going to be an arcane Witch with a wizard right there and the relative usefulness of hexes vs spell school abilities is going to determine which of you will be more useful.
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Sep 2, 2022 19:32
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Also, remember: if those feats don't work out for them in practice, retraining them is only a week of downtime by default. It really isn't hard to change that kind of thing out in a fun little in-universe way. EDIT: And I just realized you already mentioned retraining. Either way, it's good to remember that pretty much anything short of class or ancestry can be changed after the fact without worrying too much. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Sep 23, 2022 |
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Sep 23, 2022 22:45
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super sweet best pal posted:
Also, it's been discussed to death before, but "my entire cultural group is innately smarter than average, don't worry about it" is a really weird vibe when viewed through the lens of racism. 2e is really good at avoiding it with heritages, since they always emphasize that any given group of a given ancestry has a mixture of them instead of having a Woodland Elf country and a Seer Elf country and etc. This change just makes how they treat ability scores line up with that. (Also, the old system isn't still being supported so people could make new characters with it. It's so people who made characters with the old system don't feel obligated to completely rework their statline to stay rules-compliant. It's the computer running Windows 98 you keep around for legacy purposes, it's not something you want people to actually use.)
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Jan 4, 2023 17:37
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CottonWolf posted:Did WotC really just re-edit the OFL to gently caress over Paizo et al? To bring some points over from the industry thread, the new OGL they've made can't retroactively make the OGL Paizo used not valid. This isn't a change to screw Paizo. It's a change to 'encourage' everyone to only make D&D content within WotC's system and to not make their own character creators in the future.
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Jan 6, 2023 17:44
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As far as I know it wouldn't be hard to just use the ability modifiers like that, but sites like Pathbuilder show the full ability scores so trying to fully remove them might be more trouble than they're worth. Also everything you'd want to measure in combat is still measured in five foot cubes, so just going all the way to squares would change basically nothing.
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Jan 9, 2023 17:49
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Rythian posted:Not sure, but the GMG has a variant rule that let's you count diagonal movement as 5-5-5 feet rather than 5-10-5 feet as is default, for ease of use as opposed to realism. This, basically. It means things like Fireball are squares instead of chunky Minecraft circles
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Jan 9, 2023 19:58
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Yeah. Each new adventure is going to be a relatively good starting point to enter the story, since you just finished one big climactic moment and they're designed to give you relatively quiet moments to slip in new characters and so on, but the amount of background work you need to set up to make any given story make sense is going to vary wildly from adventure to adventure.
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Jan 15, 2023 17:32
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Lamuella posted:I will admit to finding it odd that the Diabolic and Demonic bloodlines draw their spells from the Divine list It's probably the part of the class that changed the most from 1e to 2e, honestly. Conceptually, the divine spell list works for them. But so much of the established devil/demon sorcerer playstyle from previous games in the general D&D-alike pool are so focused on big flashy bursts of hellfire, and that's not something the divine spell list does at low levels. Sorcerers changing their spell list based on bloodlines is still a good decision overall imo, but there's still corner cases where the spell lists don't feel quite right.
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Jan 30, 2023 21:35
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Chevy Slyme posted:And then whatever multiclass archetypes you want; Alchemist, Inventor, Rogue, Barbarian and Gunslinger all feel like shoo ins. I feel like you could probably put Witch on the short list of potential multiclasses too, depending on the vibe of your specific tribe. It doesn't gel with their good stats the way Sorcerer would, but it's a kind of spellcasting that fits with goblins' vibes.
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Feb 2, 2023 23:41
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To be fair, in some contexts that could be considered a benefit of using XP over milestones. If your players are the kind of people who rush to the next major plot point instantly, XP could be good for making them slow down and actually experience some of that side content. I'd still treat milestones as the default myself, but it's worth thinking about whether milestones or XP would work better for your group dynamic.
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Feb 8, 2023 17:57
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Lamuella posted:So: if wizards are broken, how would you fix them? Honestly, I'd just give them class feats that are actually interesting. The class itself feels kind of flat, good feats fix that. The class has nothing interesting to do with their third action, good feats could fix that. Good feats... probably can't fix their spellcasting feeling fundamentally janky, but it can't hurt. Realistically, the real problem is that wizards are bad because Paizo overcorrected for the years of wizard supremacy and doing that kind of big feat overhaul would look like they're just going back to that if they aren't really careful.
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Feb 21, 2023 14:53
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My general read on character option rarity is this: -Uncommon: It generally fits into the generic fantasy milieu Pathfinder goes for, but it could be a bit weird. So when you take an uncommon option, just pause for a second to think about any possible complications. Maybe you're making a gunslinger but your friends are weird about guns in fantasy, maybe you're playing a campaign about fighting demons and playing a tiefling could be too much extra drama. If you can think of an issue, talk it over with your group. If you can't and your group is cool, you're probably fine to just go for it. -Rare: This is wild and fiction-altering enough that you should talk it over with your group no matter what. Maybe it's just a fictional problem like the secret royalty background, maybe it's a mechanical thing like healing undead, most of the time it's both. Either way, if your group is cool you can work something out one way or another. EDIT: Well, and sometimes the fiction-altering issue for Rare options is just something simple like "your people live in a small corner of the Mwangi Expanse, why are you here". So talking it out with your group can just be "I want to play a Shisk explorer that decided to settle here" "Sure, go for it". Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Mar 10, 2023 |
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Mar 10, 2023 22:44
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Harold Fjord posted:I don't think that's what that says at all. Yeah, this. Teleport isn't powerful because it wins fights. Teleport is powerful because it lets you go "instead of doing this whole adventure, I'm going to teleport the entire party to the end goal and back again", and the ways that changes how you allocate your resources completely warp the game. It's the definition of a big fictional effect you want to restrict player access to because it makes adventure design a lot harder, and the point is that character option rarity is less about things being numerically better and more about the fictional effects being hard to write around.
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Mar 11, 2023 00:14
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Andrast posted:"how strong is the party as a whole" is also a question of game balance, just a different one than inter-party balance Honestly, the problem is that we're all using slightly different definitions of powerful. Like, if someone said "Detect Evil is the most powerful first level spell you could prepare, one time I cast it and solved an entire mystery in the first encounter" it would be weird, because Detect Evil's power is entirely focused on the narrative disruption axis and does nothing for winning fights or making numbers bigger that we're usually focused on during character optimization. But Detect Alignment's still Uncommon in Pathfinder 2e, because whether an option is restricted by rarity is almost always based on its narrative disruption. And precise high-level teleport effects let you allocate your resources in a way that completely breaks the game if you go for 3.5-style scry and die tactics, but it's not uncommon because of that. It's uncommon because it easily disrupts whatever adventure the GM is trying to run. (And yes, what rarity means in ancestry/class selection is different from what rarity means in spell selection, it's kind of dumb but it works well enough when you internalize it.) (Also, to Admiral Joeslop's post, Dimension Door is right there for short-range teleports and is just common. So there's still options for teleporting in fights that isn't also the big ritual that at minimum bypasses an entire travel sequence.)
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Mar 11, 2023 17:10
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marshmallow creep posted:So random question. That's probably how I'd rule it? Picking a energy type that's thematically appropriate to the dragon is easier and closer to the intended balance than trying to make a weird custom thing for stuff with weird breath weapons like faerie and cloud dragons.
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Mar 24, 2023 21:29
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Taciturn Tactician posted:Alignment leaving is hypothetically nice but considering that PF2e has quite a few alignment locked character options I find it hard to believe this is more than a quick rebrand of the system. Honestly, I'd accept just getting rid of alignment damage. That whole system is more fiddly than it's worth.
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Apr 26, 2023 22:03
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Megazver posted:Have they actually mentioned when this stuff is coming out? They're just listed on the store page. October 2023 for the Player and GM Core, March 2024 for the Monster core, and July for second Player Core. Basically, we're getting the basic system reworks in October and most of the reworked classes and new monsters next year. EDIT: Whoops, misread the site. And also there's a few slight differences between the store page and the announcement, but at least it's not too different.
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Apr 27, 2023 15:34
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Chevy Slyme posted:I do think it's interesting that they've moved the Witch into Core 1, and moved the Alchemist, Barbarian, Champion, Monk, and Sorcerer into Core 2 along with the other 'Advanced' classes. I'm assuming Sorcerer vs Witch is because Sorcerer is built around picking one of 14+ build options that define what your character is about and Witch just has... six. Even with the Witch rework making patron choice more important, it's just fewer choices to dump on your players at once in your new basic core book. Also, I'm honestly more interested in the changes in which ancestries are in each book. It's just interesting to see which ones they consider most representative of what Pathfinder is once they've moved away from those core 3.5 assumptions. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 17:00
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:Did an organized play event last night. Was pretty alright. Cool stuff. After some quick googling, the Goblinblood Wars were 4697-4701, and it's currently 4719 in Golarion. Recent enough to be an orphan, in any case.
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May 20, 2023 16:31
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CottonWolf posted:If they carry on the tradition of giving at least one new class in a rule book, this seems like the perfect excuse for Shifter. That would leave Inquisitor as the last heavily requested class. I'm assuming it's a Book of the Dead-style book, judging by the previews. So it's not fullly devoted to player options, but it's 1/3 player options and 2/3 enemy stats and setting info because people like playing characters in that theme. For Book of the Dead that theme was fighting or being undead, and Howl of the Wild is cool animals and animal people.
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May 20, 2023 20:26
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Vanguard Warden posted:I mean it kind of is if you don't forget to factor in things like conditions and chance to hit, the first post you linked suggested using "time to kill" as a metric instead which is just DPR with more steps. To be fair, the extra steps are the point? The whole idea is to compare your DPR numbers to common enemies to see whether you actually hit a better break point. It's just a rephrased version of the conflict between white room char-op and people who think about how it works in actual play that's existed in optimization communities for decades. (But also, I'm saying this as someone on the actual play side of the debate, so I'm all for adding a formalized sanity check to see if damage optimization actually does something useful.)
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May 22, 2023 16:08
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Ultimately, I think it's just that it's easy to justify your product being mostly free when it starts as a fan project, and it's hard to justify when you're a business. I'm sure Demiplane just did a cost-benefit analysis and it was better to not have some diehards buy the character builder options than it is to keep a program running indefinitely for free.
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May 23, 2023 22:29
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I mean, it sounds bad when you just say it that blatantly, but in practice it isn't that far from using worse tactics to give your players an easier time. You're effectively just deciding to have the enemy surrender at 50 HP instead of dying at 0, and if you decide your players are getting too salty about how high the AC is in this fight and do something like have the enemy general tear his helmet off to show that his AC is being lowered it isn't that different from having him blunder into an easy flanking position. It's definitely something that you should only do if you think your group would be alright with it, but I wouldn't call it abhorrent GM practices or anything.
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May 26, 2023 03:12
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Scoss posted:How do people typically handle conditional bonuses on checks involving a certain trait, when the traits aren't obvious? It's the same as any other secret roll, honestly. You add the result yourself since the modifier applying is itself a secret. Also, the default spell identification and counterspell rules hinge on the GM internalizing what spells their party has and just telling them automatically when it's a spell they know. It's kind of awkward, but it makes enough sense once you're used to it.
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May 26, 2023 18:20
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I didn't really think about how irrelevant spell types are most of the time until they announced that they're removing them. And now that they're gone and they've talked about what's replacing them, my one question is what they're doing with runelords. They're one of the more iconic parts of early Pathfinder, and they're a lot harder to explain without spell schools. Maybe they'll just treat them like any other wizard school and remove prohibited schools as a concept?
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May 26, 2023 22:17
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DemonMage posted:Yeah which is called out in the document a little. The runelords are the basis for the new focused on the school of learning system they're using. Update: I'm blind. Ravus Ursus posted:Didn't the runelords have a minor correlation to the 7 deadly sins? Couldn't they slot that in more prominently and have the magic tie to the theme m,ore? Yeah, but there isn't an easy "you can't cast spells from X" option without spell schools. But then, it's also not like runelords are so powerful mechanically that they need that kind of restriction in 2e. It'll probably be fine.
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May 27, 2023 03:29
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The problem with spell schools is not that they're confusing, the problem is that they're completely extraneous. Sure, we could laugh about how Barkskin feels like it could be conjuration or transmutation or maybe evocation if you're feeling spicy, but the real issue is that it does not matter at all which one it is. If you aren't a specialist wizard, all spell schools do is add an imperceptible drop of flavor. And the fluff in Secrets of Magic that tried to give spell schools more flavor still exists, so players can still just apply that flavor to their spells by themselves. If you have a more passionate argument for their continued existence than "they've been around so long, I'll be kind of sad when they're gone", you're being a contrarian. On a more positive note, as far as I know Gunslingers are solid. They want more party optimization than similar ranged characters, but that's just because guns are designed around being slightly fiddlier but having big crits. The class itself is designed to let you be a cool gunslinger, and that puts it miles ahead of the 1e Gunslinger.
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May 28, 2023 21:29
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Big Mouth Billy Basshole posted:Combat I've heard this a lot about early Outlaws. If it helps, Treasure Vault added elemental ammo that's pretty affordable for low level characters, and it does a lot to help characters in the adventure path designed for Guns and Gears characters not run into an immediate roadblock with all the enemies that are hard for a lot of gunslingers to deal with.
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May 31, 2023 01:01
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KPC_Mammon posted:Did they leak any new rules for the ancestries? I'm really interested to see what being a size large minotaur invloves. No, the leak was just an article using art featuring all the iconic characters from the book. We have some info from the Paizocon panel, but they didn't get into what being a large PC means mechanically.
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Jun 5, 2023 02:41
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Chevy Slyme posted:Giving Merfolk wheelchairs to let them adventure on land is so simple and obvious and I don’t know why it’s not been done before. They did something similar in the art for Fellowship's underwater elves, but even that was a big chunky robot with legs and not just a cool wheelchair.
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Jun 5, 2023 15:08
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Silver2195 posted:I'm far from an expert on Pathfinder lore stuff, but didn't Sorshen do things that were really, really bad? Like, "sexual slavery on a massive scale" bad? Should she really have been "redeemed"? imo, Sorshen was softened because she did really bad things. She's too major to write out entirely, so you soften her enough that people don't instantly recoil from the gross sex wizard. It's like how ogres are still splatterpunk The Hills Have Eyes rejects, but they're written with the distance of a single Bestiary entry instead of having all the gross incest horror shoved into people's faces in the first adventure path. (I'm not saying they're trying to cover up their dark past or anything. Just that they realized they were too gross and horny on their first pass of the setting.)
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Jun 5, 2023 23:31
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Xalidur posted:Looking forward to running this soon. A few questions for The Experts: 1) The main thing I'd recommend is that Pathfinder kind of sucks if you just walk forward and make multiple attacks with increasingly high attack penalties, so as long as your three probably-melee people understand that it's fine. For the others, basically any kind of caster would work fine. Arcane isn't great at support, but otherwise they should have plenty of options. (Alchemist is technically a completely nonmagical support class, but it requires a lot of system mastery to play well and it's rough at low levels.) 3) Like everyone else said, adjusting crit thresholds like that is a really big deal in this system. If you are going to use that kind of effect, it shouldn't be due to a basic lunar cycle. If the moons are in a once-in-a-century diamond formation and you want all magic to crit more easily, sure. If you're entering the blood god's carnage realm and want violent actions to crit easily and beneficial actions to be harder, go for it. But it should be something that's a big climactic moment, because that's a really big mechanical change and it needs to feel special.
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Jun 10, 2023 15:18
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Arivia posted:Reminder that the GMG makes it very clear that there's no world simulation aspect to NPC stats and it's just supposed to be what's challenging and interesting for the game. Now, please return to having fun with your thought exercise. But also, unless you're making having a high attribute your thing, attributes are a really boring thing to treat as a uniquely heroic trait. It just kinda feels nice to say that if you're good at your job you probably have a 16 in your main stat.
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Jun 22, 2023 14:55
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There's also the Merciful rune for later, if you want a nonlethal weapon but dislike the aesthetics of just hitting people with a sap.
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Jun 27, 2023 16:31
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