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Not directly related, but one thing that reloading has going for it is that your turns go super fast compared to most other players. Move, fire, reload is such a snappy turn that it makes me appreciate crossbow users for saving us all time. True chad reason to use em.
Okay, narratively and mechanically I think I'm on board. It would be SUPER lame to go to Heaven to fight an onslaught of demons and the demons roll up and just say "Go home punk".
According to this spell it fails if "you aren't on your home plane when you cast it." So if you're on the Plane of Wood and fighting a demon, you can't, RAW, cast Banishment on the demon. Do you think this is a mistake? Why would this be the case?
1. What happens if a foe attempts to grab the weapon? 2. What happens if you release it, then grab onto it yourself?
You could also talk about a custom deity to get Air Repeater rice up to D6.
With all that system compatibility you'd normally expect it to be primarily narrative based content rather than hard rules, but there's pretty much no fluff whatsoever.
Did anyone else get their mind blown by what was on page 63? I'm never going to look at Starfinder lore the same again. Uh, yeah! Totally! >_>
>>Lots of valid feelings<< There, there buddy. Just let it all out. backpats
Purchased! Don't believe the LIES on the product page! All will be revealed in due time!!!!
Or the raven has a lame wing. Or the raven is particularly old and frail. I think in general the community has matured beyond requiring much, and those examples are now just not meaningful.
To be clear, staves themselves are not a letdown. A low level staff is a boatload of spell slots that let you go a bit nutty with your spell economy. If you weren't able to get staves at all until high level, a new high-level staff would be a tantalizing treasure FAR, FAR more fun than a high level scroll. It's the fact that you can get 90% of the value of a 90k gold, level 20 staff from a 225 gold, level 6 staff and a handful of scrolls. If high level staves had more lower level spells on their list, or some Wand functionality built in, or had more neat effects, they might start justifying their huge price tag.
Yeah but we're talking about what a GM might require, not what a player might want.
I did it for my players, and they enjoyed it and I had a lot of fun running it. It felt VERY different from level 1, but they still had all the tools to engage with the world and have a blast. It was definitely a great place to start for a horror themed game. Combat was a Last Resort, and they tried all they could with their few skills and lores to figure out ways to get them out of their situations without having to throw down. They were also on board with me running a tally sheet to mark down things they did that lined up with one class or another, and at the end I gave them the options they'd unlocked for their first real class level. I would definitely run it again some day.
I might just put the effects of a high level wand of manifold missiles on a staff, let them pick out the spell list, and call it a day. It kind of sucks that the primary benefit of a 20th level staff could be given out for free at level 1 and not make a blip on the balance radar due to built in limitations. And they could sell a 20th level staff and have a whole lot more fun with the money. If a fighter got a level 20 sword at level 1, they'd be having the time of their lives. I get that higher level staves give you more flexibility, but a low level staff with some useful rank 1 or 2 spells can easily compete with a high level staff with a poor selection at those ranks. Seems to me that you could highly simplify the staff list by having them all get their max level spell list, then use the space you gained to have some staves with cool effects at higher levels.
I was planning on rewarding a sorcerer player with a 20th level Staff of Arcane Might at level 13 for reasons. Then I looked it up and... 1. Their level 6 staff of divination has Sure Strike on it, which they use a lot, so their most common use case is downgraded by the switch 2. The high level spells on the staff aren't accessible until they can cast them, so having the staff early is meaningless there. They were already using charges mostly on level 1 spells anyway. 3. The +3 greater striking feature makes it legitimately more likely to be handed off to the fighter for a backup bludgeoning weapon. They have never made a staff strike, despite me even letting them put property runes on theirs. 4. The only benefit that might appeal is being able to destroy the staff to one-shot a boss, which is a cool feature as a last ditch save-the-day thing but not the primary purpose of the loot I'm trying to give out. Should I make all staves Relics just to get some excitement going?
... unless the GM is going to ambush the party during their daily preparations. Which I wouldn't recommend doing. And if you *do* decide to do that, be prepared to get into the nitty gritty about who is doing what during the various watches throughout the night FOREVER.
I agree with shroudb. The design thought process was likely along those lines. It probably is reasonable to handwave if a player really wanted to, though, since wands are pricy and there aren't *that* many long duration spells you'd care about. It'd also be reasonable to disallow it because you want them to feel the slot cost.
I haven't read through it in detail, but from what I can tell you're doing a bang up job. Looks like you're referencing existing options well for balance and have hit on the key goals you laid out at the start. I'd also like to give you kudos for understanding what a Firbolg is, since last one I saw on here wanted to make them a Cow-folk which is decidedly not what they are. I would like to point out that Firbolg Illusory Disguise is probably too short a duration for its intended purpose. I would probably recommend a feat that lets you take on a smaller, specific humanoid form at will, similar to how Battlezoo Dragons does it.
I wonder how much work it would be to make a PF2 mod for BG3. Like, compared to making a new game from scratch.
As much as I love playtest books, it does surprise me that they're on the subscription.
I would love to have Wisdom focused martial, but I would also like to see it not be divine-based. Bringing back the Wisdom based monk like Zoken44 is describing would be my first instinctual pick. A shifter could also be Wisdom based pretty easily. I'd love to see a version of the shifter that can choose to substitute their strength or dex with their wisdom when they transform into a different form, or something along those lines. If you did want to stick with Divine, though, I would love to see a Divine counterpart to the Magus. There's still room in there between Magus and Warpriest to fit a concept that really utilizes the extra budget from Wave casting to make martial divine support/healing work very interesting.
It's too bad that Michael Smith won't be able to join the playtest. We'll unfortunately miss out on his valuable input.
I can't wait for a level 20 jock Exemplar to shove Razmir in a locker.
One god at a time? Are you serious? What a terrible way of doing this... Watch out everyone, we've got a genius at work
This is fun! Well written too!
Also, as someone who has the PF2 playtest books, it feels pretty great to have a physical reminder that you were there and contributed to the new thing!
I hope the newborn god is very cute. If it's not cute, please fix that asap.
As a perma-GM: I *definitely* want to err on the side of making it easier to balance games. One of the whole reasons we finally abandoned PF1 is because I got tired of having to *always* hand-hold my players through every character decision because it could have huge impacts on my workload if they messed something up. I would rather say "Poison corrodes circuitry", "All adventure-relevant diseases of this age have found a way to harm most ancestries", and "Everything bleeds some kind of liquid, gas, powder, or magic" than have to look over my players' shoulders to make sure they're not hard-countering the adventure I've planned purely by accident.
First! (if everyone is nice and pretends)
Whenever I imagine Netherworld versions of Golarion cities, I imagine dried riverbeds which contribute to the picture of a desolate, ruinous locale. However, I don't recall every hearing about water. Do you think there are bodies of water in the Netherworld? If so, what do you think they're like? If not, do you picture the ocean areas simply yet more desolate landscape?
Would it be a good idea to give a hand full of random low level consumables to the party at level 1 at the start of the game just to see how they use them and to get them used to using them? Yes. Getting fun trinkets into their hands early can be a whole lot of fun. If they sell it all, well, at least they can have fun with the gold too.
Now that the game is move away from many concepts of D&D I don't think that even the very concept of underground = more dangerous than surface will need to be kept. I don't think it needs to be kept, but it should be, at least as a baseline assumption. Part of the fun of the Darklands is how dangerous it is.
I am not sure how well a "friendly element" might work within the setting. All lore aside, having no opportunities for respite and friendly dialogue throughout the Darklands would make it an absolutely trash-tier place to set a campaign. Since you need such a thing to tell good stories in there, you may as well use Cavern elves as one of the options.
I would have been absolutely shocked if Technomancer got turned into a Wizard archetype. There are way too many good ideas for it! Funny story: During a playtest stream, during a break, there was a hot mic that caught someone saying "ah that'd be good for the technomancer" or something along those lines, but no other details. It was such a tease!
Is there currently a mechanic where people can look at a map of the galaxy or look at the sky and point to a star and find a path to that system? Like blind exploration? Right now it is you just follow beacons and get to your destination, but what if I see a Type K star "here" and want to go explore it, do some calculations and enter the drift. That's perfectly possible in SF1. Traveling from point A to point B when neither points are themselves a drift beacon is common, and Absalom Station is a unique drift beacon that's super fast to travel to. The conceit in SF1 is that areas of space are split into Near Space and the Vast, where Near Space is just areas with a certain concentration of drift beacons. You can travel to a star in the Vast with no drift beacons using the Drift, it just takes longer.
Might be a stretch but you could flavor Gouging Claw to be a bite
Everything so far has got me ridiculously excited!
Word of Recall divided by 7 targets is 715 gold each, which is within spitting distance of the 600 gold you mentioned. Makes it seem like 600 gp is a reasonable starting point for such an effect if a player was going to acquire it on their own. If I were running it, I would make the creation of the tattoo a custom ritual based on Word of Recall and have the fee set to 600 for wizards who are members of the organization but using the tattoo for personal reasons, and then have the cost waived or significantly reduced if the tattoo is being used for official business. You can say the ritual focus is a super rare and fragile magical construction that the order keeps in their home base. This ties the access to this custom, super useful teleportation ability to relationship with the order. If you want it to exist in a much easier to acquire form you could just ignore the actual cost (~600gp) and give it whatever cost you want. You could even throw in an additional downside, like it reduces your Fortitude by one while it's on you, to give justification for lower prices.
There is also the Dragonkin heritage on Pathfinder Infinite, also written by a designer of the game, that you could use as a reference. https://www.pathfinderinfinite.com/product/378138/Lost-Omens-Ancestries-Dra gonkin
Probably useable only once a week and lasting a specific number of rounds, maybe between 5-10 something like that. Also I made it clear that it would be a 13th or 17th level ancestry feat, most likely a 17th level feat. I don't advise making any ability with a cooldown longer than a day if you want it to see regular use. It's already difficult enough to make 1/day abilities feel worthwhile, since it's a tough balancing act. Yet, it makes no sense to have the build of a dragon and not the physical stats. Given that we are talking about ancestry feat available at either 13th or 17th level (leaning towards 17th level), and probably useable once a week, and the fact that a 17th level character is probably NOT GOING TO BENEFIT from the attributes, I don't see follow your reasoning. Also, I have no idea what you mean by a Battle Form type of Ability or Dragon Form, as I'm new to the game. If you are so new that you don't know what a battle form ability is, or or what the spell Dragon Form is, or how to look either of those up you absolutely should not be homebrewing this mechanically complex custom ancestry. I have no idea what the Battlezoo Dragon Ancestry is that your talking about or where to find it. https://battlezoo.com/products/battlezoo-ancestries-dragons-pdf Well first I have to find out what an Archytype is. If you don't know what an Archetype is, you should not be homebrewing this mechanically complex custom ancestry. You were not much help. Apparently I introduced you to the terms Archetype and Battle Form, so I've already been much more helpful than you are currently capable of realizing.
1. How long does the dragon transformation last? 2. I cannot emphasize enough how much I do not recommend going down the route of replacing ability scores. This type of transformation should be handled by a Battle Form type ability. See Dragon Form for reference. If the feat gave you a 1/day Dragon Form casting at 17th level that would be about on par with other 17th level ancestry feats. 3. Look into the Battlezoo Dragon Ancestry to see how they handled playable dragons. In fact, you would likely be better off just using Battlezoo Dragons as a base and reflavoring as necessary. This ancestry was written by Mark Seifter who was one of the lead developers of PF2, and is well balanced. 4. If you're looking to pack a lot of power into an ancestry, you should strongly consider making an Archetype to go with it so you can buy powerful abilities with Class Feats. Ancestries have an upper limit of power that they can grant.
What's going to define a SF2 vs PF2 game at our table is going to be almost entirely setting. Pact Worlds vibes vs Golarion vibes. I plan to be very permissive about ancestries and classes. Futuristic item access will be extremely limited for Pathfinder games, however. Our group played heaps of PF1, then a bunch of Starfinder as PF1 was winding down, then when PF2 came out we almost immediately dropped Starfinder for PF2. With both Starfinder and Pathfinder on the same engine, we'll be doing somewhere around 50-50 of each.
Androids and their survival in vacuums is a weird fringe case, because while many people will cite "but my old android could do that" the actual play experience of 90%+ of tables, is that almost every player could do that thanks to built-in armor protections. I think seeing some of the updates to environmental protections, which, admittedly aren't as all-encompassing as before, will give a better view on how PCs can interact in harsh environments or lack of environment.Okay. Why? I mean, do you have especially awesome stories that you want to tell that require that people not have all-encompassing environmental protection? Why not just make "basically everyone has easy access to strong environmental protections" a system assumption right alongside "by default, combat is at range, and flight is relatively easy"? It seems like it would be a really good way to be able to easily handwave away large swathes of this stuff. An ancestry getting to actually show off their unique ability rather than it being obsoleted by gear is exactly the type of story that I'd like to be able to tell.
I'm just gonna go ahead and accept that head canon.
To be fair, it *would* make perfect sense for Wildsong to be a primal talent derived from druid-level attunement with nature. It would then remove the need for the anathema, and make druids seem less like elitist weirdoes.
What if a PC followed through, but then later retrained out of Druid Dedication? Do they really forget a whole language somehow? I think it's straightforward rules as written. You lose the language because you trained out of the feat that gave it to you. Otherwise you could train/retrain Multilingual infinitely to learn all languages. In this case I would add a coat of roleplay paint as the meaning of the natural sounds that make up the language gradually leave you. You can't get it back through Multilingual because don't have access to it, just like how you can't backdoor into other access requirements by training/retraining. In terms of roleplay, Wildsong is a whole lot easier of a pill to swallow than things like retraining out of Skill Training feats and suddenly being completely unable to sail a boat, despite having been a Legendary Sailor a couple weeks ago.
...and explode like a puny meat bag when thrust into the harmless vacuum of space...(wait.. i'm literally being hurt by nothing? What...?) Just as an aside, in space there's lots of radiation and no atmosphere. They have to specifically design electronics to be shielded from radiation, and to have complicated thermo-regulation features that shed heat through radiation. Example: Play a game on your PC while it's in a high-end vacuum chamber.
Have you read up on the Battlezoo stuff? The dungeon ancestry is probably enough of a peek for you to get the general vibe of the non-dragon ancestries. You would probably feel similarly with the rest. I like what they've done with bringing gonzo ancestries (like mimic, dungeons, and intelligent weapons) into playability, and that's pretty much as far as ancestries on their own can go in PF2. Lots of others are quite happy with them as well, but if that's not enough for you that's fair. I get the sense that to satisfy the Gonzo-ness you and others are looking for, SF2 should *really* lean into Ancestry based Class Archetypes. The Dragon ancestry gives a Class Archetype, and two regular Archetypes. The Class Archetype trades out things that Ancestry alone could never touch in order to get real Dragony. Proficiency in weapons and even the ability to use held magic items get traded out for baseline, level 1 good natural weapons and scales. The martial and caster dragon archetypes let you build on your ancestry's baseline stuff as well, and you can go to level 20 without taking a non-dragon class feat if you want. The dragon ancestry stands head and shoulders above the other Battlezoo ancestries for me because of that support. For Stafinder 2e, they could even group ancestries with similar-themed-gonzo-ness into class archetypes that grant similar abilities with the same trades. They could also make regular archetypes with big pools of abilities that you can buy as you level with requirements like "having wings" or "have at least 4 arms".
I think the theme of Superstition as a mage slayer is great and won't change, but all it needs is to be reframed. Also, a "warrior in constant battle against wizards and witches" would understand the value of spellcasting, especially supportive casting, when facing those foes. Saying a person who specializes in taking down casters won't accept support (even from divine or primal sources) is SUCH as specific fantasy. It should be an opt-in thing, even for this specific instinct.
Yeah, and if they're going to get shouted at either way, it may as well be the way that also gives people stuff, since some people will also be happy with that stuff. Have you read up on the Battlezoo stuff?
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