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SilverMike posted:Might be good to mention that Paizo has teamed up with Foundry Virtual Tabletop to start releasing full Adventure Paths there. Beginner's Box, Abomination Vaults, Outlaws of Alkenstar, and some Bounties are fully released as of August 2022. The quality (for Abomination Vaults, anyway) is very good and my group will probably pick up more of them after we're done AV. I know someone who used the official Foundry VTT release for Outlaws of Alkenstar and said it was fantastic, so it seems like it's consistent good results and not just a one-off.
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Aug 18, 2022 02:39
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Hunter Noventa posted:Ah not a huge deal. I was trying to make a weapon-using monk and it seemed to really discourage that. Look at the Monastic Weaponry feat. It doesn't let you use a weapon with stance-provided unarmed attacks, but there are some stances specifically designed around weapon use, like Peafowl Stance or Whirling Blade Stance.
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Aug 19, 2022 22:09
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Gamerofthegame posted:Someone needs to get a srd version up for pathfinder 2: path harder so I don't have to pretend I'm using a geocities site in 2022 Archives of Nethys is the official (as in, they have an actual license from Paizo) reference site.
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Aug 20, 2022 21:33
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Fall of Plaguestone is a pretty good self-contained starter adventure that goes from 1st-3rd (and 4th by the end), though you might want to bump down the difficulties of the fights a little for true newbies (the easy way is just adjusting enemy numbers by -1 or -2 across the board). It's got a nice mix of light investigation stuff in a small town (with a bunch of pretty flavorful NPCs), a pair of small dungeon maps, and a decent number of encounters designed to encourage use of various skills. It also works well for some thematic toe-dipping in a bunch of different areas, with ghosts, orcs, weird abominations, magic animals, small-town weirdos, a really depressed sad-sack paladin, a side jaunt where the PCs can help refurbish an old temple, etc etc, so there's lot of stuff to play off new characters against when it comes to getting a feel for the game.
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Aug 31, 2022 00:02
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I'd say the stuff like using a familiar for scouting, etc, basically anything that falls into "exploration mode", will depend on how the DM runs that in general. As written it's pretty loosey goosey (I'd say intentionally, to cater to different group playstyles) and the benefit of having a familiar as a de facto extra party member will depend on how the GM uses it in the first place. For a specific example, the as-written benefit of having a member of the party scouting is literally just getting a +1 circumstance bonus on initiative rolls in the next fight. If you're playing in a beer-and-pretzels game where the GM is moving everything along as fast as possible, that might be the most you'll get out of a baseline familiar outside of fights.
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Sep 4, 2022 02:33
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appropriatemetaphor posted:Can someone TLDR what makes p2e so much more complicated/crunchy whatever than 5e? Well, for a simple example, take a look at the Pathfinder 2e fighter class table and the number of moving parts you have at level 10 (ancestry feats, class abilities, class feats, skill feats, skill proficiencies, various items that will often have a daily or encounter ability, etc), and compare to how much more limited the set of abilities and choices a level 10 fighter in 5e will have. Even the simplest PF 2e character will have a noticeably higher complexity floor than a simple 5e character, and will have at least a handful of situational things to actively choose between in combats rather than "move and attack and bonus attack". Roadie fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Sep 26, 2022 |
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Sep 26, 2022 03:14
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Generally all the 2e magic item stuff has rebalanced costs so anything up to level 15 items is merely "really expensive", and it's only past that point that things escalate from "mortgage for a fancy house" up towards "small country's GDP". It fits the thematics of the setting a lot better than the clumsy pretending of the 1e rules that all magic items are inherently ultra-rare. For example, a type IV bag of holding is 2,400 gp, which is the same cost as 80 suits of full plate armor or hiring an unskilled labor force of 65 people for a full year—pricey, but you can no longer break the economy by selling one in the wrong place.
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Sep 27, 2022 20:34
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Toshimo posted:Only if you Enlarge yourself first (which is likely metagaming). ...how is that supposed to be metagaming?
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Jan 3, 2023 08:34
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Chevy Slyme posted:Yeah ability score stuff is way better, but feat selection and management still kind of sucks if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I figure it'll eventually turn into a full character generator, since at this point the main thing left in raw (if clunky) functionality is not having a way to track skill training/increases.
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Jan 14, 2023 01:19
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Finster Dexter posted:Actually, come to think of it, I kind of had a similar experience with Wizard in PF 2e. Felt way less "cool" than spellcasters in 5e. I think spellcasters in 5e have a huge array of options during character advancement, especially Bard. So, going from playing almost exclusively spellcasters in 5e to Wizard in PF 2e felt kinda meh. But, looking at some of the other classes (like thaumaturge, swashbuckler, etc.) there's a lot more going on there. Low-level anything in 2e has a limited amount of stuff, because you're expected to actually be able to use the entire level range instead of stopping at level 12 or 13 when everything in the mechanics of both 5e and 3.5 has basically just fallen apart. Or, in other words, levels 1-6 are basically the tutorial range where it drip-feeds you stuff to keep new players from being overwhelmed, and level 7 is where the general thematics kick over into openly superhuman action movie star territory and everything you can do starts really opening up in multiple ways.
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Jan 29, 2023 10:40
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Harold Fjord posted:Stealth and climbing in PF2E I find to be inordinately complicated but also it makes sense that they would be difficult, because those are difficult things to actually do. Stealth is actually very straightforward, it's just written in an awful way that spreads it across multiple parts of the book. Take a look at my mechanically equivalent but better-edited version of the stealth rules.
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Feb 1, 2023 21:45
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OgreNoah posted:As someone who absolutely loves Starfinder, everyone being relentlessly negative about its slightly different rules and thus not playing it at all makes me sad. It's not because the rules are 'slightly different', it's because for most classes they're just boring. There are lots of examples, but the most obvious is the optimal operative, whose course of action every single turn in combat for the entire campaign is to move and trick attack with a single minmaxed skill.
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Feb 2, 2023 09:09
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Epi Lepi posted:My groups biggest gripe with Starfinder is we had an Envoy and an Operative and it felt like everything the Envoy did, the Operative could do better plus it could do more damage. Like both had abilities to make it easier for the group to hit enemies but they were the same type of bonus so they didn't stack etc. This is absolutely a thing. The Envoy class is basically worthless unless you want to be (a) a healer, or (b) a shapeshifter (but if you do that you're stuck using Starfinder's incredibly overcomplicated polymorph spell rules). Everything else it does is just the lovely version of an Operative or a spellcasting class.
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Feb 2, 2023 23:50
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2e crafting is fine in concept. The character investment isn't about giving you more money (and thereby more power), it's about giving you access to stuff without having to go find it first. Considering all the APs where you're outlaws hiding from the law, you're out in the boonies where the nearest city is an extended travel sequence away, you're a bunch of migratory cavemen, etc, there's plenty of room for that. The subsystem's problems are pretty much all in (a) fine execution (the whole 4 day thing and other fiddly stuff), (b) the fiddly bookkeeping stuff you're never going to get away from with a system that delineates character-power-through-magic-items in individual gp tracking, and (c) not making it clear that the point of the subsystem is that it's about getting access to stuff without having to go find it first.
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Feb 6, 2023 10:20
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Anarcho-Commissar posted:Apologies in advance, I searched for a Starfinder thread and the only one I found was archived from 2018. Which might actually answer my question: Starfinder is a thumbs down from me because it leans way into the "do the single optimized combat thing every turn for the entire campaign" problem, yet is still too fiddly with the numbers and abilities to actually make the most of that and turn into a game of XCOM instead.
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Feb 7, 2023 05:52
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Any tips/advice/changes for running the Beginner Box adventure with 5e experienced players? It looks pretty simple but it's also mostly a new system so I'm thinking just run it straight. I do wish it came with more reference cards though; I can just print more off but they won't be as high quality. The main thing to watch out for, system-wise, is that the game expects some level of real tactical engagement and teamwork from the whole group. If they just reenact the "stand still and use every action to attack" anecdotes I've seen a few times they'll have a bad time.
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Feb 8, 2023 22:45
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MonsterEnvy posted:Demon Lords and other entities are considered to be Levels 26 to 30. Treerazer a not Quite Demon Lord is Level 25, so I wonder how he does against a Level 20 party of four. Well, the encounter rules note a single creature of party level +4 as "extreme-threat solo boss", so if the stats live up to that he would absolutely faceroll an unprepared level 20 party and probably still win against a specifically prepared level 20 party. More generally, a 5-level gap is around the territory where a creature can be expected to reliably dunk on a full squad of enemies, and a 10-level gap is the point where a creature of decent intelligence should be able to defeat a functionally infinite number of enemies. The bestiary entries actually work this in a pretty intuitive thematic way (at least until you get to the more esoteric monsters), considering that the benchmark for level 10 enemies is the adult red dragon and it makes perfect sense that one of those could mow dow any number of level 0 or 1 soldiers and would only be even marginally threatened by the enemies who are more powerful/talented than that. Roadie fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Feb 10, 2023 |
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Feb 10, 2023 11:33
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The Slack Lagoon posted:I'm playing Kingmaker, and I was hoping for folks' thoughts on something. Is the whole module the party being colonizers? Yes. One thing the module's backstory leans on heavily that most of the encounters and setpieces barely show (because they were obviously writing all this stuff piecemeal and off the cuff) is that people of every species have all been trying to settle the area for literally thousands of years, and that for one reason or another every nascent kingdom and colony has eventually failed. (This becomes a plot point later, though it's a poorly-connected one.) What this should mean is that everywhere you go you should be walking over both ancient ruins and new settlement attempts, and that most or all groups you run into should be ones who have only even settled there themselves within living memory, but the AP doesn't bother to try evoke either of those points.
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Mar 11, 2023 07:19
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Owlcat could never make a PF 2e game because their approach to 'difficulty' would just fall apart would just fall apart the second they touched rules that were tightly balanced in the first place.
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May 3, 2023 08:51
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For the games I've run, maybe the standout worst thing players have done in a tactical sense is moving towards obviously melee-only enemies in the first round of combat, instead of taking a decent defensive position and letting enemies come to them. Second worst is repeatedly forgetting about flanking and Demoralize. Third worst is repeatedly using debuffs like Trip or Demoralize or Bon Mot after other actions instead of before. Epi Lepi posted:Edit: And I have seen foundry be very swingy, I swear I went two sessions where I whiffed every attack but 2 or 3 and those 2 or 3 were crits, it was insane. Foundry is fine. Don't be a pseudorandom number generator conspiracist. Roadie fucked around with this message at 20:14 on May 17, 2023 |
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May 17, 2023 20:11
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mind the walrus posted:Interesting I've seen a disparity between people who came from 5e versus people who are brand-new to TTRPGs. The absolute newbies seem to map much more instinctively to the idea of being nerd support for the jocks while those from 5e look at their spell list like "where is my spell-themed sledgehammer?" The funny thing there is that I've seen PF vets use heightened spells to shred monsters but it's nowhere near as obvious as the "spam Firebolt" or "spam Eldritch Blast" button that made a lot of 5e combat tired. I would bet that's at least in part because the non-5e newbies are coming from the context of MMOs (either directly, or via pop culture osmosis), so it's obvious to them that spellcasters are supposed to do buffs/debuffs and handle the adds.
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May 22, 2023 05:14
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Piell posted:Pf2E is like 4E in that there was an intentional attempt to make combat interesting and tactical rather than just "I stand next to the enemy and roll basic attacks forever" and some people aren't interested on that 
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Jun 11, 2023 19:21
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Dick Burglar posted:Second, a rule question: I'm looking at power attack and flurry of blows, and I'm not quite sure what the difference between "This counts as two attacks when calculating your multiple attack penalty" and "Apply your multiple attack penalty to the Strikes normally" is. My understanding is that your first attack rolls at full attack bonus, and the second is at a -5 (usually) penalty. So, presumably, with flurry of blows, you roll two attacks at full bonus and -5. How does power attack differ from that? Does it differ? It feels like it's just talking about if you want to make a third attack after, you'll be making it at the usual -10 penalty associated with a third attack per round. I don't understand why the language is different for the two seemingly-very-similar abilities. You understand the mechanics perfectly. It's different because -10 (after Power Attack) is a huge penalty to the point where it's usually pointless to even try making an attack with that, while -5 (after the first attack from Flurry of Blows) is merely 'pretty low chance to hit'. Roadie fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Jul 22, 2023 |
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Jul 22, 2023 05:18
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You only have to read this part from the first book to realize how hosed the whole premise is for Agents of Edgewatch:quote:Each guard theoretically receives a modest stipend, but in practice only the top brass see any real compensation; the rank-and-file watch members’ wages are automatically garnished by the city to pay for food, training, uniforms, and lodging in the station’s barracks (regardless of whether the officers actually choose to stay there). The guards’ only actual means of earning liquid cash is by requisitioning possessions and money from any criminals they catch breaking major laws—no trial required. All findings are to be meticulously catalogued so as to prevent abuse of power, and any confiscated goods with identifiable owners must be returned. Absalom’s Grand Council insists that once the festival is over it will revise the budget and convert the Edgewatch to a normal pay structure. In the meantime, the public tolerates the guards’ summary justice, preferring it to the anarchy of an under-policed city.
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Aug 2, 2023 22:04
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Hero Lab has some neat functionality and the company has some pretty dedicated people, but they have the long-running problem that their official communication with users is usually completely nonexistent and they never do anything to keep people updated about what they're actually working on.
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Aug 4, 2023 05:35
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All the ambush stuff is summarized in in a small section in the Gamemastery Guide. It's pretty clearly laid out, outside of the stupid language in one of the sentences that reverses the PCs and enemies. If you're Avoiding Notice when you start a combat, you can try to ambush opponents by rolling Stealth for initiative, including cover bonuses. If the Stealth roll beats the Perception DC of all opponents, that character is undetected (enemies have no idea what square they're in), and if the Stealth roll also beats all enemy initiative rolls, that character is also unnoticed (enemies have no idea they're even in the area). Then, to take advantage of this, either the group launches some alpha strike attacks (they stop being undetected/unnoticed after the first attack, but enemies are flat-footed to it), or they Sneak around (preferably with cover or greater cover) and then do whatever. This is all significantly less powerful and harder to take advantage than 1e surprise rounds, but frankly that's a good thing, because it allows the GM to use the same rules for enemies without absolutely obliterating the party at some point. Roadie fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Aug 18, 2023 |
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Aug 18, 2023 20:07
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boxen posted:If I have that right, my only other question is what decides when you roll initiative? It seems like if you have someone say "I attack!" and they already had a bow drawn or whatever, they'd be first on initiative order but that's not how the game works. If they say they attack, then there'd be the initiative roll and maybe they'd go first, maybe not. If not, storywise it'd be because one of the ambushees was alerted somehow, or one of the ambushers got a little trigger happy and didn't delay. Currently it's just "the GM decides", with a side order of "the PCs get to that node of the dungeon flowchart while Avoiding Notice". But this is also just a general issue with encounters, as even if nobody is Avoiding Notice there's no mechanization for, say, how close two enemy groups get before you start initiative rolls and round-by-round movement tracking, and in all the APs it's a case-by-case thing or just left up to the GM to decide. If somebody wants to come up with homebrew here, I'd say the biggest factor to keep in mind is that a lot of PF 2e assumes fairly tight distances (even at high level you've got a lot of AP dungeon rooms that are under 20 squares across), so you want something that has starting distances that only take 1 or 2 turns to cover.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:24
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:I'm a little confused- does this bundle include PDFs of the various sourcebooks, or just like modules for HeroLabs? It's just the Hero Lab Online content. (Note: no "s", and there's a space.) This is their online platform, not the previous standalone app, so it does have a small subscription fee on top of the content price (the bundle includes 6 months coverage). I used to be a Hero Lab advocate, but after a decent first couple of years with HLO the company has gone back to their old pattern of absolute silence to customers while the company owner and lead dev works himself to death on god-only-knows-what and acts like a martyr about it in the extremely rare moments he talks to anyone at all, and their server-first infrastructure limits them hard compared to the rate of updates that Pathbuilder has as a one-man shop. The one use case where it really does shine is if you have a in-person group who use character sheets on tablets: the GM can get the slightly-pricier GM subscription, link everyone's accounts, and have the sheets all linked together so everyone has live-updating read access to each others' sheets and can easily transfer stuff between them. For online play it's superfluous if you're using a decent platform like Foundry, though for Roll20 it's still way better than all the built-in character functionality. Edit: They also spent an apparently significant amount of time developing their 'Vault Viewer', which is basically... a fancier-looking version of AoN's itemization and cross-linking, presented in an ebook-style format matching the book's flow. Which is nice, I guess, but if I'm willing to actually spend money on this stuff then I've already got the PDFs, and I can actually send AoN links to other people. Roadie fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Aug 21, 2023 |
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Aug 21, 2023 07:50
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:edit: Had a good conversation with the Bard and it looks like the days of Warp Step and Raise Shield are over, thank goodness! C'mon, after all this you can't just say that and not give us some deets. Kyrosiris posted:I also have the bad habit of internalizing everything in terms of "okay, how'd I gently caress up this exchange" and realistically I should realize that anyone who reacts to "hey <player> there were at least a couple of places where a two-action or three-action Heal would've swung the tide of battle in our favor during that fight" with "if this system is all about rollplay instead of roleplay then I'm out" is not someone I can get things through to. "How about roleplaying as someone who's actually competent at this whole adventuring thing" More seriously, this is where you talk to the GM and get them to put a foot down about that nonsense.
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Aug 28, 2023 23:29
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Jen X posted:I did say "from the start," because yeah, everyone is goku at level 18, anyone trying to be mundane there is a moron Nobody in any edition of Pathfinder is "gritty" past the first few levels at most.
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Sep 4, 2023 10:37
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Now I find myself wondering if prestidigitation cleaning is seen as the best cleaning, or if it's the opposite and there's a social stigma if you're a weirdo who never actually uses real soap.
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Sep 5, 2023 04:18
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Facebook Aunt posted:Items that can cast spells are limited to people who have those spells on their spell list, right? Incorrect. Scrolls, wands, and staves include this explicit requirement: quote:To Cast a Spell from a (scroll, wand, or staff), the spell must appear on your spell list. Other magic items don't, like spellhearts, which anybody can use to cast spells.
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Sep 11, 2023 22:31
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Cyouni posted:Basically, you can assume that any common item of level 4 or lower is available, with level 5 items being a little more limited. Once they start getting past town level, you can basically convince the town to order/craft higher tier items, but it'll take a little more time to get them from Absalom. On this note, Otari is only about 60 miles away from Absalom, and Absalom is the biggest city in the setting and biggest center of trade for two continents. It's pretty reasonable to expect almost anything, including Rare items, being available at pretty short notice, with maybe the occasional thing that might require a field trip to Absalom (which itself can be an opportunity for side adventures and change-of-pace sessions).
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Sep 19, 2023 10:38
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Cyouni posted:Not including Rare items, the whole point of those is that those are literally not accessible. Out-of-game, sure, it depends on the GM allowing access, but in terms of the setting itself, there is literally nowhere in the world it's more likely to see [Rare] things in general than in Absalom.
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Sep 20, 2023 03:14
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Kitfox88 posted:parlayed peacefully with the radish kobolds It's funny how I've yet to see single GM actually run that encounter RAW of "the kobolds suicidally attack the PCs to try and defend a claim on some radishes, and the PCs murder them all to steal their radishes".
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Nov 15, 2023 08:44
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KPC_Mammon posted:My players run away from monsters plenty, I don't even have to make a demoralize check. Intimidation is more of a performance, flex, or stunt, which a typical skeleton wouldn't be good at. People run away from skeletons because they are skeletons, not because they are good at going "grrr" or "boo". What are you talking about? Skeletons are great at that stuff.
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Dec 30, 2023 04:30
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KPC_Mammon posted:Outlaws of Alkenstar is extremely fun with player buy-in. If your players want to play a paladins and wizards I wouldn't bother. The one huge complaint about it that I've seen from a GM I know is that it spends almost a whole book building up an apparently time travel-related plotline and then goes NOPE DOESN'T EXIST HAHA YOU SUCKERS WHY DID YOU BELIEVE THAT?, then swerves into a completely different plot after wasting all that narrative time and energy.
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Mar 21, 2024 20:54
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Chevy Slyme posted:In fairness, PF2E specifically fixes a lot of my specific gripes about 4e, a system which I loved in the broad strokes, and absolutely hated in the details.  The only things from D&D 4e that I firmly prefer over PF 2e are the static defenses and not needing the handwave of focus spells for encounter(ish) abilities.
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Apr 18, 2024 20:28
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I'd call out Ruby Phoenix as one that should be relatively easy for somebody with good mechanical skills with PF2 but bad DMing skills, since the basic setup gives immense player buy-in on going along with everything. Unlike a lot of APs, there shouldn't be much to worry about with players wandering off the presented path or trying to actively avoid any of the setpieces you're presenting them with, since the whole point of the characters being there is to fight all the stuff and win the big tournament.
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Apr 24, 2024 00:02
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IMO, the other big thing to keep in mind about the 3-action system is that it bakes in some non-obivous asymmetry just from how the classes are structured. Casters are generally doing "spell plus one action", most martials are mixing and matching, monks play differently right off the bat because flurry means they effectively have four actions instead of three when they most need it, etc. mind the walrus posted:To this end I do think a lot of martials in PF2e start to realize the diversity of options they can use in combat but still freeze up at thinking of environmental usage -- cutting a rope to cause items to fall down, knocking over a cabinet to create a wall/path, etc. Spellcasters really can do the same with their cantrips or basic attack spells, but have more trouble seeing a battlefield in this way. As starting point, put stuff on the map. I'm a big fan of having ladders, fireplaces, chandeliers, etc on a battlemap as prelabeled hazards with trigger conditions that both the PCs and enemies are aware of. This gives some complications to positioning and actions right off without any 'bullshit!' factor from having unexpected mechanical things sprung on the players.
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May 4, 2024 23:33
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