Serisan's page

First session of the book tonight. I'm glad I was prepared for the problems because man...there were problems. My players had a bit of an off night due to varieties of exhaustion IRL, so the session felt a bit flat. Special note: per request of the players, we agreed to upscale the AP to character level 20 by the end. This resulted in them being level 17 for this session.

The transition from book 5 to book 6 is not particularly well established. The PCs have been gone from Avistan for 3-4 weeks according to the timeline. The only discussion of the transition is an assumption on page 4 that says "The PCs have at last managed to return to Avistan, arriving in Lastwall weeks after their departure." There's no indication from any NPC or discovery as to why the PCs would want to go back to Lastwall specifically. It's been 3-4 weeks, after all, and there's no particular reason to believe that the PCs should believe that they could find survivors if they went there. The instinct from the most experienced player was this:

"Let me prep Eyes and Ears of the City a couple times, we'll teleport to Absalom and figure out what the situation is real quick."

One very pregnant pause later, I asked the player if that's what he's sure he wants to do. Some hemming and hawing later, with the very reasonable justification gone over again, he decides to instead prep Commune and do that instead, getting the necessary information to get on the rails and not immediately get dumped in part 3. Some very short info-dump later, they're on their way to Keirodera.

Let's talk about maps real quick. There aren't any in part 1. I get it - there was a lot better stuff to spend word count and layout space on in this adventure. I grabbed a couple from various PFS scenarios - specifically, Mysteries Under Moonlight part 2 (encounters 1 and 2, for blight and WH respectively) and The Sealed Gate (the final encounter, intended for rusalkas).

Upon arriving outside the wood, the PCs decided to use spells to scout and avoided the Barometz entirely. The Wild Hunt, however, came over and started their thing. One of my PCs is a Mortal Usher, however, and Calm Emotions hit 5 out of 6 members of the Wild Hunt. The PCs then engaged in combat in such a way that there was literally no chance of the WH critters doing anything, then gracefully allowed their surrender and departure. It was...honestly kind of sad.

I forgot the rusalkas entirely. Whoops. I purposefully skipped the viper vines because it's kind of a non-encounter at this point. The PCs killed 2 of them in Jolizpan. Adding a 3rd does nothing.

The forest blight was entertaining, but I had no interest in doing anything except brute force. It slapped the hell out of the archer and got absolutely obliterated. In hindsight, I probably should have removed the degenerate template to be more appropriate for my party.

The funny haunt got noticed by the cleric who resolved it with Mass Heal.

We wrapped up for the night there, with Hammer Rock in sight. Per that acceleration, I had them level to 18.

I ran the pathfinder society scenario "Reaver's Roar" for my players as it is related to the starting town of the AP.

Strongly recommend this as an option. It has really important history for Roslar's Coffer that is assumed as part of the Player's Guide. It's also appropriate for level 7-11 characters.

So, the rest of Gallowspire:

Jandaroka: Due to the active Daylight spell the party uses for their lack of darkvision, Jandaroka was well aware of the PCs. In case you were curious, Roll20 does a great job of showing just how far the light extends. In the picture, the PC has a yellow aura reflecting the bright and dim light radii. I was still using the Reveal tool instead of dynamic lighting here, but the main thing is that, from the intersection, it extends very far into Jandaroka's room. Keep that in mind when determining when the party draws her attention.

I let the PCs roll perception to hear her order the devils to go investigate, which allowed for the possibility of a surprise round when they used Greater Teleport to move the short distance to the PCs. This left Jandaroka alone to use her Summon Monster spells, drop a Stinking Cloud, etc. from a significant distance. This was the most effective that I've ever had an enemy conjurer be in my history as a GM. The time and distance made a significant difference in this combat. Ultimately, they ended up wiping up her summons and rushing up on her, as one would typically expect. They did not find her phylactery.

Elementals: My PCs are particularly bad at dealing with elementals given the removal of one of the damage dealers in the prior session (RIP rebuilt Jando). I ended up handwaiving this encounter after 3 rounds because it was just going to be a slog.

Bloody Bones: This encounter gave the PCs some challenges due to the relatively powerful attack routines. The PCs tended not to stand near mirrors, so the swift action Dim Door was not usable. The monsters had to rely on standard action casting and then being near enemies who could smash them. Mass Inflict Moderate was a nice damaging touch for the animal companions and Dondun to suffer while also healing the Bloody Bones.

Krobdak: Boy, where they surprised when it Plane Shifted away. Like other critters, it saw the light and moved toward it. I gave the PCs the opportunity to sense motive as things were said, so they played toward the diplomatic aspect. THey never identified the marut. It was a lot funnier later.

Amaretos: Because the PCs had not rested and were down a damage dealer, I removed one of the necrosages. Honestly, this was as much for my sanity as anything else as the necrosages are really, REALLY bland opponents. They all had plenty of time to prepare as the PCs brute forced the ring puzzle due to not being able to make the linguistics check (for reference, the only party member with Linguistics trained was the Courtly Hunter's animal companion, who also has one of the highest int mods in the party due to familiar scaling).

Amaretos got his Black Tentacles out, but the necrosages were cut off from him via Wall of Fire. They began casing Protection from Energy to deal with that, as well as Wind Wall to deal with the party archer, but by then Amaretos was absolutely obliterated by the paladin/swashbuckler. 2 crit full attack will do that. I just called the combat at that point. The necrosages were an easy mop up. Amaretos never got the chance to full attack. In retrospect, I had failed to use the time that the PCs were at the door to buff him, but he had attempted to use the Bracelet of Friends while that was going on. I would recommend replacing 1 casting of both Web and Scorching Ray with Bladed Dash to make this encounter a bit more dynamic.

Lich's End: This went about as by-the-book as it possibly could have. My players successfully did all the modifiers via story events, which results in 3 helpful, 4 friendly, and 1 indifferent among the honor guard. The PCs then successfully hit the Diplomacy check on Ulthun. The replacement PC replaced one of the honor guard for the sake of being close enough to accidentally get pulled in by Arazni's teleporting.

We intro'd into book 5 to allow for character introduction time, but I'll basically say that the players are quite varied on engagement. There's a lot of proper nouns being thrown around, which was really rough for my wife, who is not particularly familiar with the setting.

Just wanted to pop in and give a big thanks to Serisan. As a GM running this AP about a half-book behind you, your session-by-session write-ups have been a huge help.

Knowing what your party found fun/easy/hard is helping me prep better.

Here's to you!

Glad to hear that it's been helpful! That's always been the hope with my posts and I did similar things with Hell's Rebels when I ran that.

For a brief update, I've been working with the player as far as a replacement character and the obvious choice from my end was to have it enter as part of the RP scene at the end, having the character be one of the Watcher-Lord's advisors. My guidance to the player was that his new gestalt character must have levels in fighter, rogue, or a non-druid/shaman divine caster. The resulting concept that I've seen so far is Cleric 14 // Fighter 6/Mortal Usher 8 as the player has been really hoping to play with the new prestige class.

Nope, 2020, the year of the best ONLINE CONVENTIONS EVER!

Maybe not EVER, but SO FAR or YET? I mean, there's gonna be a lot of people suddenly more experienced and/or comfortable running/playing in virtual settings, which can only be good things for future online conventions.

I know it probably feels like old news from a world away, but any word on chronicles for Tyrant's Grasp and Return of the Runelords? Those of us who haven't played out 1E would very much appreciate those chronicles.

Started Catacombs on Friday. Some short notes:

General exploration notes: I'm running on Roll20 and this map is being handled via the Reveal tool. I'm going to dynamic lighting with book 5 (didn't have a subscription when I built the floor). The aura functionality for Daylight is really, really helping with monster trigger conditions. Yes, practically every monster is able to see the light because of its enormous radius, which means literally just walking out of the first room is enough for the simulacrum to see the party and engage in conversation.

Gallowdead: Remarkably difficult opponent for PCs who decide to underestimate the entry. They scoped out things well in advance, knew there was an enemy waiting due to the whispers, but still decided they'd wing it without buffs. Nearly killed the paladin/swash because he didn't smite. Were it not for the obol providing negative energy resistance, he would have died.

Simulacrum: The Finger DC is quite high. The rebuilt Jando PC who went up to 25 pt buy and added Warpriest levels as gestalt had less than a 50% chance of success against it. He nat 1'd and got obliterated. RIP in pepperonis. Looking to replace as of the crusader wrap-up. This will be that player's 3rd character. That was the only turn that the snow puddle got.

Shining Child: I was really worried about this one. Somehow, only 1 animal companion had issues with the blindness save. It was Jando's companion, so we're probably ok there.

Short session last week to finish off Upper Catacombs.

Pallid Sunrise: Didn't survive a round. Archers and low AC, I tells ya! I got a breath weapon off and then it died.

Tycha + Fleshhunters: Really would have liked even a modicum of equipment on the Fleshhunters to give them survivability. Not asking for much here, just like...studded leather. Not even masterwork. I didn't add it, but I strongly considered it. Tycha's tactics make sense for an assassin, but do not make sense given his lack of preparation to use them. Decent enough stealth was helping, but the lack of Invisibility and/or Silence was what got him. He was easily noticed because he couldn't close in on any PCs without getting pinged by Echolocation. The Fleshhunters all fell relatively easy, having only succeeded in damaging animal companions, while Tycha took a couple extra attacks due to his high AC and HP.

Partial floor session last night, heading into the upper catacombs. Party entered via the well rather than external crater.

Bone golems: the party was a lot more concerned about these guys than they really needed to be. I think it was basically 3 rounds of attacks with no way to bypass the DR available. Would have been 2 rounds if they could bypass. I may have landed 2 hits.

Mummified Morrigna: I ran this wrong and assumed the wrappings were semi-autonomous re: grapple. Not sure why I had that confused, exactly, but I definitely ran it as though the wrappings could grapple without taking away from the monster's actions. The vital strike archer (ranger/warpriest) was not thrilled with the Deflect Arrows. It was a strugglebus combat because my error in running, but it certainly felt satisfying to not have a single-target encounter get completely obliterated for once.

Dread Wraiths: Players successfully sensed motive on the bluff/riddle bit, just attacked. These are really one-dimensional, boring monsters and the lack of Ghost Touch weapons in the party so far has been a major problem.

Trapped door: I forgot about this because of where the trap is mentioned (J6, not J7) and the fact that there's a typo referring to the trap as leading to K7. It's a pretty significant trap. I told my players about it afterward and they squirmed a bit at the thought of it.

Forgot to update last week for upper Gallowspire. Notes will be shorter here. Some things modified due to time constraints and the size of the floor.

Skipped the Nightwing and the combat against the Daughters. The Nightwing would have been challenging-ish, but it didn't feel like something that was going to contribute to the experience and was also not a mappable encounter for Roll20 due to 3D combat constraints. Daughters literally can't touch my players. They RP'd and I handwaved the combat.

Gravesludge: it was entertaining to play with, but its tactics were ill-suited to my party. Wall of Ectoplasm has very low HP, so it's easily burst down. Best tactic for it was to burrow/stealth and use its ability to cheat action economy for a 2 attack standard action, so that's what it did.

Otto + Loambones: I accidentally had this combat in I3 because I totally missed the transition to I4. Whoops. The squeeze up made for interesting interactions. I think the combat was more challenging for the space constraints. That said, it's 2 CR 9 critters. They got roflstomped because the PCs are 12.

Players did not approach I5 and due to time, I had to handwave the combat in I6. The Tempest Guards could have actually been interesting as they have decent bonuses to hit and reasonable damage.

Dybbuk: The players made really good use of an Antimagic Field to disrupt the primary tactics of possession and dominate. Combat went relatively smoothly with that in mind. The best part was the hunter/slayer using Hydraulic Push on an animal companion to push it into the AMF when it got possessed.

Yhalas: Players won initiative, she got 1 round of actions. Hilarious build, needed some meat in front of her to work with. Probably "best" if she enters 2-3 rounds into the fight against the Tempest Guards instead of being a separate encounter. Definitely gauge this against your PCs relative damage output. My party puts out pretty high DPR for a party of 3 gestalts.

Gallowgarden GOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Tonight was my group's first Roll20 session due to COVID-19. One of my players has somewhat severe dyslexia and had never used the platform, so there was a bit of a learning curve there. He was very focused on getting everything up and running so we can continue the campaign. I'm also just learning the GM side of things there, so I've got my own hiccups to deal with. Still, we made it through 5 encounters in one night, which I think is a rousing success for 4.5 hours. Generally speaking, though, the encounters are heavily weighted to the players' favor initially, then dramatically ramp up in difficulty toward the crater.

It should be noted that the miasma is the real threat here. It's negated by Life Bubble. My players had it.

Flytraps: The players had some nightmares about their prior encounter with the giant flytrap in book 3. I think we were all relieved to find that the party was much better equipped to deal with the situation, both from a spatial and capability standpoint. Barely lasted 1.5 rounds.

Adenos: My players learned from the pegasi encounter that sensing motives and paladin laser sight (Detect Evil) are essential here. Adenos does not have a Bluff bonus to speak of. As such, the shambling mounds didn't get triggered and the party absolutely obliterated the daemon.

Moldwretches: They're speedbumps. The players were extremely grateful that they found diamond dust that they had forgotten to purchase in book 3 when there was still a city to shop in.

Furcifer: This was a little rough, but I think a big part of it was my strained prep for the session. Swallow Whole is a serious issue for the party and I misread the Utopia ability to think that the players still needed to make the Will save to recognize that it wasn't just part of the terrain after it attempted the tongue grab. Still, it was mostly the miss chance that was the problem.

Gustari: I was worried about the possibility of a charge crit. It's ok, the paladin didn't get crit but did crit her back. The fight was effectively over in 1 round. The Daughters of Urgathoa are not a significant threat at this level.

Had the Arazni reveal 2 weeks ago and the journey up until Gardens of Gallowspire tonight. I had set aside most of 1 session to the reveal, thinking that the players would have a lot of interaction with her. Turns out they were scared both as PCs and as players and opted to just let the demigod talk at them so as not to offend her.

Ossua + troop was not much of a threat to the party. Pretty unmemorable encounter. To be fair, it was a rough week out of game and that may have been a factor.

Horse Thing was basically shut down by Thorny Entanglement. The players gave me some guff about how lazy the monster name was as I had zoomed in to only show the name when they ID'd it.

Gibrous + Boggles was remarkably painful to the PCs. 2 archers + 1 animal companion failed a confusion from a boggle due to horrid rolls. Because of this and how the combat started, I had Gibrous randomly targeting and generally using bad tactics. The PCs eventually turned this around, in large part due to having taken Dondun as a companion via Leadership and getting a dispel magic against the confusion. The warehouse was set on fire and I had Gibrous jaunt out through the wall and mentally reset so that the PCs could actually get down to the story. They ended up mercy killing Gibrous with the realization that he was a terrible liability to leave alive. They had some feels as players about that, which I thought was pretty satisfying for everyone.

We skipped the tomb giant and the haunt. The party was just two well structured to do anything other than waste valuable play time dealing with these encounters.

DRAGON! This was a rough encounter for the party. Dragon landed a dispel on the paladin/swash after eating a 50 damage hit opener, then followed it up with a shadow breath against both archers. Pally/swash drank a potion of fly while slowly falling to re-engage. Archers started to deal with the situation when the dragon moved in with an Imp Vital Strike bite + snatch. They took him down to the morale condition before I could do anything else and he escaped with 2 HP. It felt glorious.

Pegasi were funny, but they're just not a threat against my players. We did the social part of it and I had realized during prep that the "right way" to handle the bluff was for 7 pegasi to use Aid Another on Dawnwatch's bluff, giving him an effective +28 to the check. The party fell for it, but they all had means of flight so it was no big deal.

I wish it were sooner rather than later. I've got a number of character concept that I can't advance without this book.

Similarly, I just don't intend to play in Society until it's sanctioned. From my perspective, this book was needed a year ago to keep the system fresh. I finally got it, started building a character for the first time in months, then dejectedly realized that sanctioning would prevent me from actually playing.

And among those fantasies is what using a riot shield?

Wasn't a fan of the name choice, certainly not a fan of the IRL connections, but hey, Gungans had shields. Wakandans had shields. Shields are part of quite a few tech-advanced fantasy settings.

Didn't quite make sense to me that nobody had figured out how to put a thing in between the user and things coming toward the user in dangerous ways.

I could rant about EAC/KAC vs attack. In fact, I deleted a rant I was starting on it. What I will say is this: while some folks might not like math enhancers inflating some math, there are other folks (like me) who have found the system to lack options that...

Serisan wrote:

Glen Parnell wrote:

Don't forget that shields will now be money sinks for most characters that get them, and may possibly delay armor and weapons purchases, which will probably balance out all but the extreme cases.

That may mitigate some of the concern.

I think that's a minor concern at best. Shields scale very slowly, such that the shields you might care about are levels 1-5. There is no AC benefit to upgrading them again until 13. In fact, the Field and Advanced Tactical Shields are mechanically identical save for hardness/HP, but are 2500 and 17500 creds, respectively. Would you pay 15k more for hardness/HP?

Well you can jam more fusions on the Advanced, and the calculation for save effects are going to be different. Still not that significant unless you are doing a Captain America build.

I would guess that more characters will use shields for the AC bump, but your point is fair. I suspect we'll see some heavies with Riots and most others with Knights. The Cap builds are probably going to revolve around Knights because of the damage type option, as well.

I've just been slightly mystified by some of the balance choices on shields. I get that it's all supposed to be pretty tight math, but it's a weird thing to say "there's virtually no benefit to this 15k additional cost unless you're sinking more credits on buffs."

Michael Vogels wrote:

I have a question about food, my PCs just dont have enough on them, do they need to eat in the boneyard? I dont see any food in the adventure.

IIRC the Boneyard has the planar trait of Timelessness, which means that the PCs don't need to eat, sleep, etc. Also, I think poisons and disease don't work here nor do they get HP back after resting. I'll have to refer back to Planar Adventures when I get home to check, though.

There should have been a sidebar in the AP mentioning the Boneyard's planar traits. I feel that it's omission was an oversight.

The downside to timelessness is that PCs have all that catch up with them once they leave the Boneyard. So x number of days' worth of hunger, aging, disease, poison, etc.. all occur at once. Which is partly why Barzahk's way of getting the PCs back is so crucial as she cures the PCs of pretty much everything along the way. In my group, everyone has some affliction or another and it's causing them no end of consternation. Heh. waiting to get hit is apparently worse than getting hit.

I talked about this problem upthread here and here.

My players did the first floor of the Bastion of Light on Friday. It was rough. Current party is all gestalt and has already hit the strugglebus on other areas of book 2.

Paladin/Swashbuckler
Hunter/Slayer
Jando rebuilt as Ranger/Warpriest (the ranger/psychic died twice this book after they "scavenged" a reincarnate scroll)
2 animal companions (bird and some sort of cat)

A short rundown of struggles:

It's only unsatisfying if you make it unsatisfying. Also, depending on how the fight goes, the PCs can save NPCs who cement their legend, so it's not necessarily a "no one remembers you existed" situation. Your particular PCs may not be the canon heroes for the setting, but they can certainly be local canon to you and your players.

Spoiler for My Hero Academia with a very similar scene

My table's experience has been very positive. It's led to some interesting RP along the way as they've dealt with the situations. I'm entering the final act of book 2 at this point.

The planar aspect of book 1 is ambiguously handled, which can lead to significant GM confusion. That said, when understood well and planned for, it becomes a novel and interesting modification to run - the PCs have some of their expectations about how the world works subverted and start getting creative. My players had to hunker down in the first section of book 1, barricade a door, and spend 3 days resting to allow the hunter to cast Cure Light Wounds enough to heal them all. This gave them a legitimate reason to introduce themselves to each other and establish relationships in an otherwise in media res introduction.

Kasoh's feedback is sort of the flip side of mine. Many of the APs have a similar setup, else there would feel like a seemingly unending series of unrelated events occurring, but TG definitely feels more like the PCs are constantly behind. It's supposed to feel more like that, though, and this is something that's mentioned repeatedly. The first book even identifies the genre as "survival horror." You have to expect going in that there will be significant barriers to success at every turn, just like if you were watching The Walking Dead for the first time. The lack of shopping until book 3 is another great example of these problems. You have what you can scavenge, and that's not much. So far, my players have enjoyed that.

First two sessions went great, Spiritualist did snag CLW and the rp so far has been pretty good. There is tension between the Half Orc and the other players as they all pretty independently made backstories where their loved ones died in the orc raid. Out of character everyone is cool with the rp so that is good.

They flew through the opening dungeon so I got to end session one with the reveal which was super satisfying.

Session two was pretty good, though they don't seem worried about they Psychopomp after them, so I am scared for the final fight, I need to maybe add more confrontations so they are compelled to research it more.

I mean, they can be plenty scared once they're all affected by Calm Emotions and she starts suggesting they make out with her, right?

I recommend using Umble and Thoot to play up the concern. They know Mictena very well.

Thank you, I had misread the text as numbers not digits. That is much more reasonable. I am actually really excited to start tomorrow. My biggest issue so far is someone wanted to play a necromancer, which... really really doesn't work for book 1.

Party is.... Paladin (Oath Against Whispering Way), Ranger, Mindblade Magus, Spiritualist, and Slayer. So hopefully they have a good showing.

I hope your first table went well! I'd be concerned about the party comp if the Spiritualist didn't pick CLW, but they should have decent options for damage. I'm glad you're excited for it and hope that it excites your players, as well.

I would add to Serisan's infos that the first level of Roslar's tomb is really, REALLY dangerous if you don't have a dedicated healer, with or without planar traits. I play without planar traits, and my party consists of a Tactician Cavalier, a Dragon lineage Sorcerer, a Child of the Moon (Thunder domain) Druid and a Dervish Dancer Swashbuckler. They struggled to hit the Ostovites who nearly killed them.

The druid can at least prep CLW as needed. It's not a bad mix you have there, though there will be some struggles along the way.

Have the assassins sabotage the ship shortly after take-off, allowing the rest of the party some means of getting to the combat. Have there be some sort of send-off for Bill + PC for the trip. If a PC declines to attend, they don't get to participate. Have the encounter start with the ones staying behind at a 2 round disadvantage, having to devote resources to get to the combat.

This method allows for the full combat to go forward without intentional nerfing, gives the PCs a second chance at following the plot, and doesn't result in straight murder most of the time.

Hey all, just finished running this book tonight. A couple notes for the crowd based on the experience of my 3 player gestalt PCs (Slayer/Hunter, Paladin/Swashbuckler, Ranger/Psychic):

oh snap, 1 month out! <3

Still waiting for the update where level 1-5 combats stop being as long as 1st ed level 12+ combats (the drawn out variety, not the SoD I Win variety). It gets entirely too tedious to bother with combat currently.

I agree with OP's 3 loves, so I'm just reposting those here.

3 Loves:

1. Three action system. Its simple, it works.
2. Cantrips that scale.
3. Crits at +/-10 to hit, rather than just on a 20 or 1.

3 Hates:

1. The narrow band of skill floor and skill ceiling.
2. The general slowdown of combat and strange numbersflation.
3. The retention of anti-crit mechanics.

I need to provide some context here as, frankly, I'm probably done with the playtest. Unless there's a substantial mathematical rework, I don't know that I have interest in 2e anymore.

Re: skill floor and skill ceiling, I readily admit that 1st ed has a massive gap between the floor and the ceiling. One might easily say this in martial terms as a scale from Harsk to Crowe - universally, Harsk is regarded as the worst pregen among the martials for having suboptimal choices in favor of flavor. Crowe, on the flipside, is one of the most optimized pregens available while still being interestingly flavored.

Harsk - - - - - - - - - Average Monsters - - - - - - - - - Crowe

Looking at Starfinder - a.k.a. proto PFP - the band narrowed substantially. A large part of that was the way that equipment became more controlled. The common complaint I hear, though, is that there's entirely to much homogenization of characters, which can be described as "You don't have to say Soldier 1/Mystic X, I knew you had a level of Soldier when you said you were playing a Mystic." There are still other factors in there that complicate things, like Starship Combat, but by and large, the skill floor was raised and the ceiling was lowered. It didn't completely close that gap, though. Using our same Harsk/Crowe spectrum, it's more like this:

- - - - - - - Harsk - - - Average Monsters - - - Crowe - - - -

PFP's scaling has created an interesting new problem - lots of flavors of the exact same proficiency. The skill floor is SO HIGH and the skill ceiling SO LOW that it's hard to actually have a scale. Everything is more or less mashed together.

- - - - - - - - - Harsk - Average Monsters - Crowe - - - - - -

This creates an entirely different set of issues than "everyone dips soldier" in Starfinder because there's a degree to which classes suddenly lack identity in other ways. A wizard with 18 starting strength that takes Fighter Devotion at level 2 is functionally a fighter with full spellcasting. You don't need to take more feats for this to work out well. At most, you'll only be down 1-2 points of attack for most of your career and down the fighter-specific class feats (mostly), but you'll be a capable fighter with full spellcasting, wearing full plate if you want and using whatever weapon you choose.

But really, the key thing to look at here is how much design space did you lose? Suddenly, you find that your floor and ceiling are so constrained from 1E to PFP that there's little differentiation to be had. There is currently very little investment you can do into anything that makes you significantly better than someone with no investment at all. Now, to be clear, I don't mind the raising of the skill floor. Building a mechanically terrible character is certifiably not-fun for the majority of people. Having virtually no headroom above that, though, is where the pain truly starts.

Re: combat speed and numbersflation: Aight fam, this is where point 1 starts to hurt. For this, I want you to consider what should be equivalent monsters between 1e and PFP: the CR 3 Medium Fire Elemental from 1e and the Creature 3 Minor Fire Elemental from PFP. Pitting them head to head is generally kinda pointless - AC and attack values vary wildly between the two systems. There's one key indicator of "hold up, what now?" to them, though: HP. Did you expect monster HP to increase by 50% on an equivalent creature between versions? Probably not.

Let's look at another example: Flesh Golems. Again, largely pointless AC and attack values, but the HP goes from 79 to 143. That's an 80% increase, roughly.

In both cases, we see a significant increase in HP that is likely intended to counteract the expected increase in damage from multiple attacks per round. I'm here to tell you, however, that this simply doesn't bear out in actual play. Having run Arclord's Envy (a level 5 PFS scenario for PFP) multiple times this past weekend, I can without a doubt tell you that the increase in monster HP is dramatically felt. A 6 player table spent nearly 90 minutes on an encounter with 4 minor fire elementals + an ifrit ranger, while a 4 player table struggled to take down a flesh golem at all. In both cases, it was not poor tactics, poor builds, or other standard issues. It's that they're swinging relatively limp noodles at giant sacks of HP.

Anti-crit = anti-fun. "Sweet, we get to crit things that have low AC way more?" Yeah, I bet you've heard that from players when they hear the +10/-10 crit rules. This is, in part, one of the mechanics that allows high level players to completely dunk on low level monsters...at least in theory. I have an incredible hatred of immunity effects in every game (I'd rather things be resistant in various ways, such as an automatic increase of success by 1 step on saves against a type of effect), but this one in particular rubs me wrong despite being a holdover. It actually feels worse than PF1.

Remember that Minor Fire Elemental? Creature 3, as you'll recall, with 47 HP. As it turns out, those are still a slog for 5th level characters... and 6th... and 7th... and 8th... only really improving at 9th, when you're expected to have a +2 weapon (let's be real, your first 8th level item will always be the +2 weapon, just like your first 4th level item is the +1). Until then, you're still reliably requiring 3-4 hits with your +1 weapons for each fire elemental. And what do we know about encounters at high level with low level monsters? There are just more of them. Again, crits are supposed to be the mechanism for mopping these things up, along with reliable hits.

What happens as a result is that you're left with compounded disappointment: your relatively advanced characters continue to struggle against old foes (well, at least the sack of HP that they represent, the incoming threat is fairly low) AND that new shiny mechanic of crit range is completely thrown out the window.

So ultimately, I could whittle down the Love/Hate to 1 item each.

• Love: The system is easy to learn.
• Hate: The system is best when you're ignoring the rules entirely.

Thank you all for a great event. I am taking home some very special memories. I'd love to learn the final fundraising result. Again, thank you to everyone who made this happen.

The not-so-secret total is taped to the door behind all the tiara-wearing Venture-People.

I am very happy to hear that Signature Skills as a concept dies today. One of my frustrations in my initial readthrough was the inability of characters to be good at things that they may have character reasons to be good at while being outside their class.

Background: I'm sorta plugged in on PFP and very familiar with PF1 and SF, but my wife found PF1 to be completely overwhelming and is generally more old school (read: most of her RPG experience comes in the form of being at Dave Arneson's table as a sub for some sessions). She's literally looking only at the things that catch her eye and hasn't read the whole book, but said she'd be willing to play a level 1 playtest adventure at an upcoming con. She said Ranger to start, so we started building a Ranger. Here's a short list of things that sent her down the spiral a bit:

• Lore skills don't make any sense, especially since you could have something like Lore (Pickles). This also means that authors could reasonably put things like Lore (Pickles) into an adventure.
• Backgrounds feel too complicated. Tying a skill feat into the Background, while thematic, caused every single one to be a page flip. Tying a Lore to each one made her question the value of any Lore skills because, again, Lore (Pickles).
• Speaking of Backgrounds, Animal Whisperer was super confusing to her, particularly whether Train Animal (the skill feat that comes with the Background) wasn't particularly clear as to whether it did anything for her Animal Companion or if it was required for her Animal Companion to do anything worthwhile. WAAAAAAAY too many page flip rabbit holes came from this.
• Still on Backgrounds, there's no label for it on the chapter section (that thing on every odd numbered page). Adding it to the Ancestry header would help with that.
• Ancestry: "Hey, Gnomes can get an animal. Can I have 2 animals? Wait, it's a Familiar and they suck. F*** it, just go Dwarf." -Actual quote when reviewing this section. This was then followed by a thorough review of Rock Runner vs Weapon Familiarity. There's a feeling of TOO MANY THINGS.
• Traits: intuitive to hardcore gamer husband, not so much to RPG luddite wife.
• There's just a lot of page flipping and it feels like too much.

That's as far as I got with her in about an hour. No ability boosts, no skill selections, the only feat selection was the Ancestry Feat. We're using Hero Lab Online to build this level 1 character, so I'm not sure how much that adds or detracts from the process, but she has been primarily looking at the book itself for the process.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I'm gonna throw in my 2cp. My upfront disclaimers: I buy a lot of Paizo product, I participate in the playtests, I play a lot of PFS (here's a sample of some characters), I GM a lot, I've played a few other systems, and I've co-authored a system.

Part of the problem with PF1 high end content demand is the fact that everybody knew walking into the system that high end mechanics were borked. Like, seriously borked. So why play that, right? Why would you want to set yourself up for that? That, in turn, affects the sales and design choices.

The problem with that situation, though, is that you have customers like me, who wants to go to high levels and spend a lot of money on product. I'll even go on record as saying that if there's not fairly robust support for high end content, I'm probably not going to retain interest in PF2. It doesn't have to be there right away, but I have virtually no interest in the 1-5 area of play, where PF1 has historically felt like "I don't have the ability to do anything interesting."

Low level stuff is great for simple mechanics and relatable stories. Not my area of interest, though, which means not where I want to spend my money.

Also 1cp:

STREET MEAT

Price 1 cp; Weight 1/2 lb.

Usually sold by vendors on a thin wooden stick, these small chunks of cooked meat often come from many different sorts of creatures—rats and pigeons are the most common.

At low level I don't think you're supposed to know anything about "that".

With a certain boon applied from a high level character onto a level 1, I would think some level 1s could very well know of those injustices.

Why did it take so long for Colson Maldris to “go missing”?

I dunno, but I've subtitled the new scenario as "To Kill A Maldris."

I would very much like it if the level range extended past 15 for that special. It would be nice to have something besides Race to get to 20.

1 hour 26 minutes in is about where Lini starts up.

Serisan wrote:

No joke, my level 20 psychic in PFS had a ring of sustenance that he wore from early in his career...to stave off the munchies. He was Psychedelia discipline.

Nice, I am picturing Shaggy, the Occultist.

I suppose Venture-Captain Mystic Mickey with the Sick Sticky Icky is not that far off from Shaggy. The whole Venture-Captain thing was a lot like getting promoted to manager at Taco Bell - he started feeling responsible for his junior agents.

Can we also do away with form-fitting butt armor?

Source Severance selecting Divine and Mage's Disjunction should carry this fight.

nfelddav wrote:

. And self-indulgent explanations about how hard it is to get pronouns right are not better.

It is not self indulgent in the least. Its realistic. .

The difference between "he...sorry, they" and "she...sorry, they, I just have such a hard time with...(insert things and reasons)...and that's why I keep screwing up" is, in fact, self-indulgent and it doesn't help the situation at all.

Quandary wrote:

Uh... "Spell Power" is less gamey than "Spell Points"?

Yes.

Anything with "points" in sounds gamey.

I can just about imagine something in a fantasy world saying, "His spell power is too much for us! We must retreat!" Or talking about "magic reserves" or "spirit energy" or "mana" or "mystic vitality" or something like that.

I can't imagine "He has too many spell points!" as anything other than a game term.

Not that this is a big problem. Hit Points is clearly a game term, but we got used to that.

I'm on your bandwagon here: Game mechanic term =/= how it's referred to by PCs/NPCs

I get that people aren't always on board with the terms used in the game. From a gameplay perspective, though, HP isn't supposed to be known without using status on people. Deathwatch provides a good explanation of how things appear to PCs.

I will admit, though, that some players have gone the extra mile to get around that with phrasings like "on an arbitrary scale of 0 to 94, I'm at about a 33."

Just posting my experience. I'm a middle schooler (yeah Gen Z!) and I alternate between the two usually using points.

Glad to see a middle schooler engaged with the game and the community.

I'm playing in Legendary Planet as a Vesk Soldier. He's convinced he's on a reality TV show and that there are microcameras everywhere, has ranks in Prof: TV Personality, and the like. I have Climbing Suckers and I tend to switch hit between a heavy weapon and unarmed strikes.

So I'm on the ceiling directly above the boss during one of our major encounters. I've got my reaction cannon in hand. Mathematically, the full attack is the clear winner here given my attack bonuses, but...

FROM THE TOP ROPE! *detaches climbing suckers and goes for the elbow drop*

*Nat 20*

*dead boss*

Always remember that we're talking about a flying skull that should only be active if disturbed (unless Torpor was removed/modified by the GM). Scoop it into a bag of holding and poke the bag if you have to.

"kinetic healer(sp): save: none SR: yes 1 pt. burn to self or target to heal = blast damage".....umm....pretty sure blast damage goes up ever odd level....outstrips a CLW potion/wand at any level past 1st.

Congratulations on a 2 year necro to respond to someone who hasn't posted on the boards in 10 months.

Just gonna throw out there that the old trope of nimble elves in the woods being a terrifying thing actually looks to play out in this system. A few underleveled archer NPCs and a few underleveled illusionist NPCs together could rapidly turn itself into a Tucker's Kobolds, but with elves. This wasn't nearly as easy to pull off in PF1.

So do Elves get doubly screwed on their frailty?

It seems they get the least HP AND also a Con penalty.
I realize that we don't know exactly how HP are determined, but it seems overly harsh for a lot of concepts to have 2 penalties to HP.

You can use your floating bonus to buff your Con.

And here I am, still wishing Seifter's April Fools joke was reality. Skittermanders >>>>>> Elves.

I said it at PaizoCon last year, in several threads, and I'll repeat it here: define Burrow. 10 years in and there are still no actual rules for burrow speed. I played a PFS character to 16 and he had burrow speed as an option for 11 of those levels. I had to ask GMs to define it at every table.

I mean I think they're pretty distinct already. And nobody thinks Sylphs and Elves are the same, but they're both Medium Races with +2 Dex/+2 Int/-2 Con

No no, we definitely call them "fart elves."