Yeah. Ditto. Look at it this way, whoever picks this spell is intentionally forgoing combat effectiveness to some degree in order to do so. It's 100% about the roleplay satisfaction they get from the spell. So it'd be nice if the game met them halfway by rewarding that sacrifice with a lot of flavor and open-ended utility. Same with quite a few of the standard of living spells...
So looking at the poltergeist in preparation for my own game I have a larger question. Unless the poltergeist uses frighten--and just flies around at chandelier height hucking things telekinetically at PCs, how would they even know they're being attacked by a separate creature? Like even if they see the wight in the dining room summon him (which is kind of a weird ability anyway) all they would see would be a flash of some kind of spell effect and an invisible creature get summoned...which would kind of look like nothing. I could honestly see the poltergeist sticking around for the rest of the adventure, sniping characters for 4d6+4 damage a round without any of the PCs ever having any hint as to its location or nature... That feels like trouble. I don't want to play my badguys dumb, but that feels like a fairly cheap monster ability combo. If I were to suggest edits to the monster, I'd argue that in its normal state it creates a nimbus of glowing energy around itself that makes it concealed rather than invisible. It can manifest as an incorporeal creature if angered sufficiently (usually done by confronting it with uncomfortable truths from its former life), or willing itself to become completely invisible. In its fully manifested state it induces fright in those that see it and its attack powers become stronger. When completely invisible its powers are diminished and it must spend an action concentrating to maintain its invisibility.
We definitely want feedback on whether people think there's not enough setting info, or too much, or just enough. Setting aside a chapter (like we did in the Starfinder Core Rulebook) is possible, but adding a LOT more would be difficult, as we can't let this become a 600-page book. Understood. And I also feel like that's a subject better covered in separate book just based on interest level. Folks who are looking to play in their own homebrew setting may not benefit as much from learning the differences between Taldane and Garundi culture. I feel like it's enough just to introduce the idea that humans have ethnicities--that it's just part of what makes humans different. Maybe the ethnicity allows a regional language, a single ethnic weapon proficiency (like the starknife for Varisians) and a lore. That way they don't have a humongous mechanical impact but impart a lot of flavor--and you don't have to try and nail down what things each ethnicity gets, you can just let players work it out with GMs during character creation. All you need write is that humans have ethnicities from living in a certain part of the world. From them they get a language, training in a specific weapon type and a lore. Players get to pick one of each with GM approval. Done.
When they're talking about adulthood in the book, I get the feeling they're not talking in setting about societal norms or legal rites of passage. I think they're talking about the age you should, by default, expect to make your character. And while, yeah it does bother me a little that this feels like another instance of the game reality merging with the real world in the blandest possible way, I think I can see why. Adventurers have some horrible things happen to them, and roleplaying horrific violence against children might have made someone somewhere uncomfortable. That's the world we live in. There does feel like there's a sense that designers have shifted from what I consider the "historian" paradigm of roleplaying (appreciate how far we've come in society by looking at how dysfunctional medieval societies used to be...that guy is a slave, that woman has no rights, those races are systemically oppressed in awful ways, these children are forced to work in the fields) to a more utopian paradigm, where the roleplaying world should exactly model what we want to see in a progressive world (Wow, look how open about gender and sexuality everyone is here! Man, this world sure has an impressive range of human skin tones and cultures based on a variety of respectfully treated real-world analogues. Geez, these women are so empowered and such good rolemodels!) And while I'm old enough to somewhat wish that fictional worlds were free to diverge from our own and be different as a way of illustrating things about our world without being seen as non-PC, I also understand that making these worlds more open and inclusive makes folks feel welcome gaming when they historically haven't. It's perhaps instructive to a group of young white dudes to see a world that suffers from injustices and perhaps play as those disenfranchised people as a way to open their eyes to realities they don't normally see. But there's plenty of people who come to gaming and discovering that similar or worse barriers exist for them in fictional worlds can't be encouraging. So yeah, I'm willing to take the bullet of a slightly less "medieval" feeling medieval world if it means we get to share it with a bunch of new folks who honestly deserve to get something nice. And if human ages get bumped up a little to make sensitive folks feel better about the often violent content of these games, I can handle that too.
The current Paizo published content is all in regards to playtesting the system. Okay, awesome. If they want to playtest the system they've written I'd like to see them test out try out making story explanations to justify the weirdly level appropriate DCs the rules demand. I think it'd be a useful experiment. I'm all for testing the system math, but lets not do that to the exclusion of testing what the system math means for the game.
Here's my big problem with the DC numbers. I tried to explain this elsewhere but people got hung up with the example I used and the whole discussion went sideways. The notes on choosing a DC say this under the heading "Creating Appropriate Challenges":
What this means is that you're stuck not only with this table of DCs based on level and severity of the task you're having the characters do, which is hard to muddle through and buried on page 337--but not only that! You're also responsible as a GM for justifying the arbitrary math that causes things to get harder to do every level by inventing reasons why whatever they're doing is harder now than it was a level ago. It can't just be that the DCs are harder now because their level has gone up and otherwise they wouldn't be level appropriate (the real reason). So consequently you're stuck trying to figure out why when they're about to fall into a pit trap that now the DC is a 17 instead of a 14 to catch the edge (like are all edges slippery now? covered in spikes? what?) Which is entirely backward. It should be that tasks have DCs based on how hard they are irrespective of level--they should have fixed difficulty. But in this, how hard a task is is mostly determined by how high level the character attempting the task is--and then on top of that the GM gets forced trying to bend the story to fit the arbitrary game mechanic. Not a fan of that.
I do like the fun monster abilities. This is one thing P2 seems to have nabbed from 4e that I greatly approve of. The ankhrav fight was just the best, with his armor gnashing mandibles, acid spray and burrowing--it was just a delight to run. The idea of pack animals that do more damage when they fight as a unit is another great one too. It made the hyena fight a lot scarier. I love all of this. In general I'd be happy if the monsters had less hit points, which has led to a lot of sloggy fights, and more fun abilities like these that they get to use once or twice to make the PCs lives exciting.
Honestly there's certain items the game just assumes you're going to pick as soon as you can. Magic Armor at 4, Magic Weapon at 5. The designers should just put out a gear list of the things your character starts with at whatever starting level--much like the gear lists they have for NPCs. If you don't like an item there might be some option to take a payout instead, but not anything close to the full sale value of the item. Now do I wish that the game was written in a way where it rewarded characters for having a variety of fun interesting items that they could use in creative, freeform ways instead of being locked into a rigid item and coin progression that strictly controls what you can own and requires you to buy a set of mandatory items to avoid becoming mathematically irrelevant? YES! I do wish that! But that does not appear to be in the cards. Like at all. This is a fine tuned, tightly controlled, optimization centered game system--and if the game system would just admit to that and just give you the items they want you to have it would make things a lot easier for everyone.
Yeah, count me as also against the idea of using skills to gate characters from being able to attempt things. That feels like a corner case (there are things that are impossible to try if you aren't trained, but it certainly isn't like that for everything, and I for one am more willing to tolerate a setting that lets you try anything than one that forces you to consult a master list every time you try and do a thing to see whether or not you can roll to try). Likewise the idea that you get more bonus to your skills from level than you do from training leads to all sorts of preposterous situations that really make me think the skill system needs to be rethought completely. Don't get me wrong--P1 was awful in that regard. I dreaded having to pick through that big skill to spend my pile of skill points every level. It felt like the most pointless kind of paperwork. But ultimately there was a sense that your character was constantly growing, and it did genuinely reflect the things your character knew how to do or not, which the new system doesn't. Additionally I'd really like to second the complaints about skill feats. Having dealt with them in the playtest for a few weeks they remind me of 4e's powers in a bad way. Many of them feel like things that characters should just be able to do without taking a special feat and often the mechanics behind them don't accurately reflect the ability they describe, instead giving you some little dice trick you can do.
If I ignore the rules to do what I want, why have the rules? The rules in a roleplaying game are like the special effects in a movie. Bad mechanics give cheesy, distracting results which are the wobbly cardboard sets and 90s CGI of gaming. Good rules make you feel like you're immersed in a consistent world that no matter what you want to try and do, there's a solid mechanic to let you know how to try and do it--and how it works out. Rules don't exist for rules sake. There are times when they get in the way. There's times when after running a game for a while with a like minded group you all discover a better, more satisfying, way to handle a rule: armor as damage reduction instead of making you harder to hit, basing hit points on ancestry instead of class, what have you. If the rules you use get you closer to your objective of creating a believable world that behaves according to your expectations with a minimum of fuss, the rules are doing what they're supposed to.
The whole paradigm of higher DCs meaning more challenging challenges is just fundamentally broken as a concept. Take Catching the Edge when you might fall off of something. As you level, your Athletics gets better and consequently you are able to hit higher and higher DCs, so the DCs go up. Now according to the game's logic this is never supposed to be an arbitrary thing but reflect increasingly challenging circumstances that make the heroes' accomplishment that much more impressive. That just makes the GM of a game responsible for narrating the ridiculous consequences of bad mechanics. So, what? A first level edge around a pit is normal, but at 10th level every ledge is on fire and covered in spikes? You swim a river at first level--and end up in that same river at level 14, does it now have a firehose level current and 50' waves? You want to know why people think high level play is cornier than a Marvel superheroes movie? It's this fake idea that challenges have to get artificially ratcheted up every level in order to chase some fake mechanical curve. I don't hate the idea that high level characters are maybe still challenged by climbing a cliff, the same as they were as 1st level characters and that maybe fighting a dragon is hard no matter what level you are, and fighting goblins is never THAT hard, but that it doesn't become so inconsequential that by third level the entire race disappears off the face of the planet.
Then change the math. This is a playtest and that excuse is getting old.
Also off topic but I sorta love the wizard arcane focus -being able to use my book or my shoe or sword as a magical battery actually sort of makes me want to play a wizard, and normally I don't care for them in the slightest. A favorite of mine back in my Pathfinder Society days was a evoker of mine who shot force missiles out of his bonded crossbow. That was neat.
I do actually love flavorful material components and spell foci too, despite my opposition to them having to be tracked and used for actual D&D style 2-4 second spellcasting... Yeah, there is a weird disconnect for me in that every illustration of magic in the artwork looks like Doctor Strange, with big glowing spellcircles floating in front of the spellcaster's hands as they float in the air, eyes blazing, hair whipped by an unseen wind--and then in the rules of the game it's like some kind of Japanese reality TV show, with the poor wizard having to eat spider eggs or smear bat guano on themselves while waving a feather around. I love the IDEA of arcane spell components. The actual listed components and how they get used have never really worked for me.
It seems to me that the three modes break down like this: Encounter Mode: You're in a fight. You track time round by round in initiative order. Exploration Mode: You're on full alert, minis if you have them are on the table and you're moving around between fights--running into traps, looking for secret doors. That kind of thing. At this point initiative is fairly sloppy often happening at the 'speed of talking'. By the way, I sort of feel like we need there to be an initiative order here as well, so folks aren't free to just be all over the place with one person doing a whole bunch of things while a more meditative player barely gets a chance to go at all. If it's not one of those two, I'd call it Downtime. You aren't on the map at all. Your location isn't being tracked precisely. You're off talking to people or looking for firewood or buying swords at the blacksmith.
Here's what I've always felt about how armor and shields should work. It's pretty different, but we've run it this way in my games for years and it's always worked well. Characters have a Defense trait instead of an AC that comes from 10 + their Dex bonus + a bonus based on class. Shields add to this so long as you have it equipped. If something hits your Defense, it hits you, if it doesn't it's because you dodged or interposed something else, like a shield or terrain you're using for cover, to take the hit instead of you. Armor is a different story. It's damage reduction. Armor does not make you harder to hit--if anything it makes you easier to hit (as reflected by the fact that the 'max Dex to AC' would lower your Defense the same as it used to). The real benefit of armor is that it absorbs much of the injury from weapon attack...exactly the way shields are supposed to be doing in the playtest. You have a set of leather armor with a DR of 1, it will knock a point off of any attacks you receive. Heavier armor grants increasingly heavy DR. We just translated the AC bonus straight over to DR and that worked fine for us, but for this game you'd probably want something with more math behind it. But yeah, truth be told, with a armor system like this you'd get a game that's a lot less lethal at early levels, which from our experience of the game so far, could really do the new edition a lot of good.
I think rituals can be a lot of things. I don't know if I need to see the current system done away with and replaced with a 4e feeling one--I feel like they could potentially coexist. I do like the idea of buying a certain amount of gold worth of ritual components--candles, a cloth embroidered with powerful sigils, various crystals, a bottle of fresh honeycomb, a stone knife with an antler handle. Much like with alchemical reagents and wizards' components I feel like it's this various magical "stuff" that I enjoy to just an absurd degree. I don't know that I need much mechanically beyond a certain amount of "stuff" bought and carried around--and replaced periodically. I'd treat it pretty much the same way as rations (you don't necessarily need to know if it's black beer bread and dried fish and apples or hardtack or ant eggs and live grubs--you just have a bag of it and are free to describe it as much or little as GM and player tastes desire). That said, I would like whatever costs are involved with ritual magic to be reasonable (I'd say cheaper than a potion of a similar level--cheap enough to take into consideration the rituals' extra skill checks and time requirements) Is it weird that I wouldn't hate to see scrolls rolled into this new system? That a scroll is basically a follow-along ritual with instructions on how to perform it that allows you a bonus on the arcana/religion/nature rolls such that someone with assurance could pull them off without rolling. I dunno. Something like that. TLDR: I support the addition of 4e style rituals. Great idea.
So the upshot of what I'm reading is that the interpretation of folks is that the shield form of Righteous Ally can jump ship when your shield gets broken? Because my read on it, much like with the Righteous Ally mount is that when the ally dies, that's it. Unlike familiars, who you can replace, there's no rule for being able to replace a Righteous Ally. It seems like when they die, that's it. So happy shield ally takes a troll axe to the face, screams and spirit energy wafts back to Heaven. Crap. If it doesn't work like that, it's important to put it in the rules. If it does work like that, they may not want to have it manifest as an item that's basically designed to be destroyed--Righteous Ally magic item maybe? Or armor? Or have it be a shield, but have it reform and reappear at your bedstand every morning. As it is written, it's pretty unfortunate sounding.
It makes the world silly in my opinion. Where do you draw the line? If every race can interbreed, can i have a half-dog half-cat familiar? Having some possibilities of building half-races is fine but it shouldn't be the default. I know, right? Where would you keep your WEIRD half-dog/cat familiar? In the stables with the griffon or outside with the owlbear?
So every time you need their DC you have to flip to the hard DCs column in the DC table and look it up? That is a huge pain. That needs to be listed in the monster stat block somewhere if it isn't.
Just a quick bit of feedback here. Slowing both in everyday use as well as in the legacy of the game has always talked about effects that reduce movement speed. That it means a reduced number of actions is needlessly confusing. There is a word that means that, things happening that get in your way and make it so you can do less: Hindered. I'd seriously suggest swapping the game definitions of those two terms. It will make the game a lot more intuitive. Plus, on a related terminology issue, the term "Bolstered" as used in the game gets really problematic when it gets used in connection with positive effects.
Yeah. There needs to be a reliable way to just hunker down and *do* things: climb a rope, toss a grappling hook, cross a pit trap you know about, pick a lock, knock down a stubborn door, searching for secret passages. I can understand how as an adventure designer the idea that sometimes being unable to bypass an obstacle and having to go around feels like it adds something to the game, but I haven't found that. I've found that players just hunker down and try to do it and when their characters constantly fail and look like buffoons it makes the game less fun for everyone.
I feel like in general a more flavorful game that leaves as many reasonable possibilities open for creative play--not just for magic, but for anything characters might think to do--makes for a more satisfying game from where I sit. I don't sweat the numerical nerfs. That's stuff that I feel doesn't overly affect my enjoyment of the game--it's when things get tightened down so you can't use them in clever ways that I get frustrated. Like Floating Disk; which I've never seen used as intended (as a magical porter to carry your stuff). I've only ever seen it used so that folks can do their cool Doctor Strange thing and float around while sitting crosslegged on it, or when they needed a stepstool to get up somewhere (like float up so they can stare a large creature in the eye or grab books off a top shelf). Once my players cleverly used it to evacuate a fallen PC from a fight they were in. I liked that. The current version has this kicker, which feels designed for no reason other than to ruin people's fun: The disk is dismissed if a creature tries to ride atop it, if anyone tries to lift or force the disk higher above the ground, or if you move more than 30 feet away from the disk (such as by Flying or Climbing above the ground) Things like that just make me grumpy.
I approve. If for no other reason it feels like Pathfinder hasn't really ever had the chance to shine the spotlight on their orcs and how they're different and special. We've seen their goblins, their ogres, their kobolds and they're all great. The orcs have always felt like they've needed more of a Golarion spin--and this would be a great opportunity for that!
Not a big fan of the gnome/elf ancestral feats that feel like smell/hearing radar either--where you have a cone you can use to detect hidden foes. If you want to emulate an ancestry having better than average senses, just give them Alertness: expert training in Perception. Done.
So you're a paladin and you just hit third level and a holy outsider manifests to join in your cause! Maybe you get a glorious weapon with Returning or Ghost Touch! Maybe you get a mighty celestial warhorse! Maybe you get a shield that breaks after 4 dents instead of 2 before being destroyed. This seems really weird. You'd want a paladin's Righteous Ally to have some kind of magical ability akin to what you get with the blade version, but unlike the other two (maybe glowing like a torch in the darkness with a continual flame, having a chance to reflect the gaze of monsters in a nod to Perseus, or resisting evil magic). Also in this version of the game, shields are consumables. If you're going to have a shield get destroyed in combat you would it to magically reform and appear bright and shiny at the foot of the paladin's bed every night. Better though, just make it indestructible so long as the paladin wields it. I mean what kind of paladin has a Righteous Ally and just lets them get pummeled to death the first fight they're in?
So I have a player who will be getting Counterspell as a Sorcerer and I'm trying to help him figure out how the spell works. Start the merry chase! First we get sent to the section on Dispelling, on page 197. Here we find out that Dispelling is a Counteract Action. Off to page 319! Here we get a table that...I don't know. I think one side is the level of the effect to be countered and the other is the level of the spell slot you need? I think? This gets weird though because the text seems to say that you compare the spell level slots straight across--that a caster casting Magic Missile in a third level slot and a player trying to counterspell it with a first level slot would take a -10 to their roll, for example. When attempting to counteract an effect, compare the counteract level of the effect with the counteract level of the ability you are using. A spell’s counteract level is equal to its spell level...If your ability has a higher counteract level than that of the effect to be counteracted, you automatically succeed. If your ability’s counteract level is the same as the effect’s counteract level or lower, you must succeed at a check using the relevant skill or ability against the DC of the target effect. You take a cumulative –5 penalty to this check for every level by which your ability’s counteract level is lower than the target’s. If your ability is 4 or more counteract levels lower than that of the effect you are trying to counteract, your attempt automatically fails. On a successful counteract check, the condition or effect immediately ends. So I'm not sure about my interpretation of that at all, but it seems to be what the text is saying. Problem is, it's not at all what the chart is saying. The chart is weird. But mostly I'm concerned by this part: If your ability’s counteract level is the same as the effect’s counteract level or lower, you must succeed at a check using the relevant skill or ability against the DC of the target effect. That doesn't even look like words to me... So you roll a check? Like Arcana? Against "the DC of the target effect". I have no idea where to even find that. There's the table of DCs of various difficulties by level in the Difficulty Classes section under Game Mastering. Is that what we're talking about? At what, the High difficulty? So a 19 at 4th level? And the roll takes a -5 for each level higher the spell your countering is from the slot you're blocking it with? Is that right?
My first recommendation would be to check out Rose Street Revenge, the organized play module to see if you'd be happier with that. It's got the same kind of mini-adventure structure as the main adventure but looser. Maybe it will work for you. The thing that I think will maybe work best for you would be to just take the rules and run your own game. That's one of the playtest methods Jason Buhlman suggested. You can run pretty much anything (adapt an older Pathfinder AP or adventure, grab a third party adventure, whatever) and see how the rules work for you--or just go your own way and run your own adventure. Then, when you're done, file your results in the open survey. You really don't need to throw your hands up because you aren't thrilled with the playtest module, in fact it'll probably be more helpful having some folks out there running all sorts of different things. Hope that helps.
I've always felt like cheap and widely available healing potions (or minor elixirs of life) were the key to killing the 15 minute workday and Clerics being press-ganged into being the group's healbot. The more different kinds of healing mechanics we can get into characters' hands through magic items or different classes, the better.
The biggest problem with Adopted Ancestry is that you sacrifice a feat for it but you don't actually get the feat from the Ancestry you're looking to dip into. Then that ship sails and you're stuck waiting five levels for something you were hoping to start the game with--something that's only a first level feat. By the time you qualify for it, I'm not it would matter anymore. It just strikes me as a frustrating and needless straightjacket. We have a player in the game I'm GMing. We're making characters for the second part of the playtest adventure. He wants a talking dog. His character has ties to gnomish culture in his backstory and it sounded like a blast. Seems easy enough. I figured he could sacrifice his human feat to pick up an Adopted Ancestry to grab the gnome familiar, so he can be a human fighter with a talking dog, just like he wants. But that's not possible according to the rules: he either has to be a gnome or a spellcaster. I'm not sure what in the rules makes it so he can't just start with another races' Ancestry feat at the cost of his own. Seems plenty balanced to me. I wish I could do it for him.
So we got back from part two of Lost Star. It was a rout. Half the characters died and the rest ran. I don't know that it's the hit points at fault as much as the fact that monsters have such high to hit rolls (+6's are crazy for 0 level monsters!) and that monsters get three actions just like players. I wonder if we're going to give monsters their own mechanics if we might think about having them only have two actions a turn? I still feel like PC hit points are too high in this version of the game. I feel like at present monsters do do too much damage, but I think that's more to do with their inflated to-hit scores and the gonzo damage poison does combined with the fact that healing potions just aren't as cheap and plentiful as I would want. I would still take a game with nice lowball hit points (or at least variable hit points so there's the option for folks that like a gritty game) over a game where fighting turns into wood chopping--which is where this looks like it's headed. I'll hang in there though and let you know how I feel as we test out characters with higher HP totals.
Sure doesn't feel heroic resting for 8 hours after fighting 5 goblins or skeletons. Especially since without dedicated healers natural healing only grants you your Con modifier in hit points every 8 hours. You could be there a while.
For the name thing, they're called potency runes, so I'd probably just call them a "potent sword", "twice-potent sword", "thrice-potent sword", "sword of four-fold potency", or "sword of five-fold potency". Niiice catch! I like that. Swords of Potency. I especially like the (Two-Five)-Fold Sword of Potency naming convention. Sold. I dub this canon. ...that's how making things canon works, right?
Here's an idea: make the alchemist the alpha healer. In lore they're the ones that make all the healing potions anyway. I agree though, any class with healing as part of what they do should get an equal shot in helping out. I wouldn't even so much seeing rangers step up with some healing power--like herbalism. "Do you have any Athelas? Kingsfoil? It should slow the poison."
I have problems when games distinguish one group of NPCs from another because people own them. Imagine your character is a pirate and gets into a barfight and his entire crew jumps in to help. How would you run that fight? In general I think if that answer a game's answer is any different running that situation than it would be for a ranger's animal companion, or a necromancer's troupe of skeletons, something isn't working right. The world is full of NPCs. Some of them are going to help you out. You can't try and craft an entire subsystem to make this work differently in the effort to try and streamline things. Trying to eliminate any way to make it happen seems like a bad solution too. I'm sure in that barfight you probably aren't going one by one through every crewmember, having them take one action to break a beer bottle on the bar, then move toward another brawler, then shivving them. The fight would take forever and none of it would have anything to do with the characters. So you pull out the battle rules. You roll to see what the NPCs contribute to the fight and how much damage they take, you narrate, the story goes on. The answer is a good system for adjudicating NPC impact on a battle in a nice, clean off camera way and then apply it to everything.
Flurry of Blows indicates that it is a one-action activity because it is prefaced with the "this requires one action" symbol, much like how Sudden Charge is prefaced by "this requires two actions" symbol or Whirlwind Strike is prefaced by the "this requires three actions" symbol. That's those diamond shaped bulletpoints that show up every once in a while, aren't they? I've looked right past those every time. Crazy. Thanks for the catch you guys!
Our party found the owlbear claw, which took a fair bit of doing, but when we looked up its stats everyone just kind of deflated. The only character that could have used it would have been a fighter (we don't have one). That hypothetical fighter would have to have critted with it for it to even do anything and even then it would only unlock an ability that happens when you crit--and when that happens you get to move an enemy around or give them a status effect that it feels like you could much more easily give them some other way. As someone who loves owlbears I want this item to be awesome. I'd say make it something any class can use, and ideally something they don't have to crit to make happen. Offhand I like the idea that it makes the next attack with the weapon you affix it to a critical hit and then it burns away into ash. But it could be anything really. It just bums me out that my players got this cool and rare feeling thing and then found out it was kind of useless.
One thing that has come up any time a fantasy game has gone under scrutiny has been the issue of the +1 magic sword or +1 chainmail. Two issues here. First of all, and perhaps most glaring, is that for as big a deal in the setting as they are supposed to be, there's NO in world name for them thus far. Our groups over the years have tried various things. My favorite has been Longsword of Minor Enhancement for a +1 to a Longsword of Epic Enhancement for a +5 (Minor Enhancement, Lesser Enhancement, Enhancement, Greater Enhancement, Epic Enhancement). That at least gives characters something to say. But in practice I've found that weapons with pluses don't feel very magical. They become a crutch that gets factored into the game math anyway so it's not like you even get a bonus for having them--the EXPECTATION is that you have them. So you're obligated to get this thing and then, because the numbers are already set up to where it's assumed you have it--you get no enjoyment from it. Plus a +1 to hit and damage has never once gotten a woo-hoo from anyone who's ever used it. It's such a small bonus, I doubt the characters even notice much of a difference (except that now they can fight monsters they couldn't before...but probably didn't run into until they got weapons they could use). Whereas weapons with powers are neat. They aren't factored into the math so you get to enjoy being different and unique, plus they usually do something with some visual pizazz--like ice blades or lightning. Maybe they they give you darkvision. Maybe it's a set of daggers that look like fuzzy spider fangs that poison themselves and when you wield both you get spiderclimb a number of times per day. It always feels like the crazy magic items are the things players want and the kinds of magic I like to give them. I sort of wonder if we might just recalibrate the math so that weapons with +'s are no longer expected of us and just let magic be something cool?
I do wish you could use a single point for any of the three functions (save your life, reroll or take another action). You get a max of three a session, that feels like a pretty tight lid to keep them from getting abused already. That you have to burn all of them in order to do anything good, as well as needing to 'contribute to the group' out of character in a way overt enough to get called out by the GM for an in game reward as well as do something so amazing that session that you get called out for your in game action as well...and you need to spend all three points on one thing? I'd want that thing to be a heck of a lot more significant than to have an extra action in one round of combat. One point for that feels like plenty.
I like this idea in theory, but as has been mentioned I think we need a better "Roleplaying Your Class" section first. Once we get that, I think that would be an excellent way to earn your Hero Point. I'm a little more iffy about the idea of rewarding out of character actions with Hero Points. That feels like it courts the idea of favoritism. What if I notice the cool thing that Fred does for the group but fail to notice the cool thing Velma has done. I don't want to get put in that position. "Well Velma, you don't get a Hero Point because Fred bought me pizza." Yeah I'll probably just give everyone the 'showing up' and 'being cool' Hero Points because I'm shy of implying in game terms that the player hasn't been cool or helpful. That seems kinda' crappy.
One of the nice things is that people are not really arguing. Everyone’s just chiming in with their answers and moving on. :) Well and it's great because you see these folks on other threads and kind of want to peer into their brains and see what makes them respond to things the way they do. I think this thread has made a great method for looking folks up and doing just that. It's been really interesting.
I know this is not at all what the OP intended, but has anyone else been using this post to look up folks that they've seen posting in the forums to get a feel for what their POV is regarding the game? I certainly have and it's been really illuminating. I think this may be my favorite thread on the Playtest forum so far. And regarding the redefinition of accessibility, I would not wish being like FATE on any game. I love a game that's elegant and quick to learn and play, but I want to still be able to immerse myself into it without a bunch of awkward minigames and being forced into being an unwilling pseudo-GM. If I want to attack a goblin or remove an evil totem from a pool I want to just be able to do it, not have to figure out what deep seated angst from my past relates to some esoteric quality of the action I want to do. When I take damage I want it to be damage, not strain that I then broker into damage in exchange for being able to stay in a fight longer. That way lies madness. When a GM has me walk into a magic shop and asks me what it looks like I want to give him a deadpan stare and have him do his job and run the game.
Yeah. Okay. So apparently there's a lot of stuff in Pathfinder I had no idea existed. Or were words.
It's 2018 and "video game" is still an insult? Inasmuch as roleplaying games are supposed to be the medium where you're free to interact with the setting however you want and video games remain the medium where you must interact with the game bits exactly in the ways the designer prescribes. Yes. People want their characters to be able to do what they want without the game censoring them within the bounds of reason and the tolerances of all those at the table. Games that unreasonably restrict what characters can do for reasons that are entirely gamist...yeah that's, if not an insult, a complaint at least
They need to put this on a big gold plaque and post it everywhere.
Though I would counter that the downside of choosing to use a weapon you aren't proficient with isn't that harsh, right? Rather than get the Level+1 you get Level-1. If I had a monk, I'd just grab a sling and go for it.
@Grimcleaver I was thinking the same, then I thought of the physiology of the goblins... if you scaled them up to medium size, with their tenacity and wild ferocity, it would rival orcs imo. Or their enormous pumpkin heads and skeletal bodies would crush them to death. That's what my betting money's on.
All of this. I second ALL of this. There is too much thick terminology and too much scavenger hunting around from definition to definition before you find out what an ability actually does.
Y'know it's not the +Cha thing that bothers me so much as the fact that up till now every small race got -Str. Goblins are the first to not. Whenever someone would make a halfling barbarian or gnome monk and asked what the -Str was, I would always remark that it's to reflect that small races are comparitively weaker than larger races. Right? This seems to fly in the face of that. I'd argue they should be: -Str, +Dex, +Cha.
I agree with pretty much all of this. There's too many feats. Feats have always been my least favorite part about making Pathfinder characters and now it feels like it's become the engine for character creation. I really don't like the idea of races evolving over time. It doesn't make a lot of sense. The fact that the biological traits are mostly hereditary feats makes this somewhat better--but it still feels weird. And yeah, I can see how it could add complexity for new players. Plus I'm not a fan of how a lot of the sensory abilities for gnomes and elves boil down to strange invisibility detection powers, rather than what they really should be--getting the Alertness Feat. |
