don't wake baby's page

I like a lot of the things about 2E - it seems more balanced (especially compared to 1E).

Conceptually, the idea the proficiency skill bonus for each step after trained is just a +1 just bugs me. It doesn’t feel right. It isn’t clear to me on how you can fix this easily. Maybe changing from -4/0/1/2/3 to -4/-1/1/3/4 could work? You couldn’t do this with attacks/perceptions/saves - it would unbalance too quickly.

Other than that, it comes down to a lot of preference quicks.

I like some of your rules.

We’ve been going through the Darkwood Moon series (Hallows Last Hope, Crown of the Kobold King so far) and something to pay attention to are Skill and Monster DC. These progress at 1.5/level whereas Character proficiency goes at 1/level. It is recognized as a problem that will be addressed in the future.

Since you are running a homebrew, check the forums for suggestions. I don’t know if one is better than another as we haven’t tried them yet.

The thing that I like about this idea is that a player isn’t stuck with being a heal bot. It would be nice to have a cleric free party for a change.

My high level fighter should be like movie Thor, except better looking.

Martials and Casters seem pretty well balanced, assuming that the Martials have the correct magic items.

And that is the problem. You can’t always the right magic item and you don’t want the campaign littered with items. How about making the Martial character be the magic item?

At 5th level, a Martial character can spend a resonance point to add a damage die to all non-magic weapons for a minute. At 10th, two die and so on. For athletic/acrobatic skills, perhaps a resonance point to add a die to the check.

This helps get magic weapons that are magical just for the sake of balancing the game, which allows you to make magic items interesting and part of story.

The last thing to make things special is to have expert, master, and legendary skills to actually mean something. It seems to me that legendary should be more than 15% better than trained for both sides of the divide. What if legendary athletics meant you could scale a 30’ slick wall? Or legendary occult means that you can summon a specific obscure demon that is the only one who is able to help you overcome your current dilemma?

That is what I want. A Martial character who can be the magic. Legendary skills that are ... well ... legendary. And all classes should relevant, interesting, and able to advance the story.

It might be better to consider class feats to be class options. TWF was a fighting style in 1E available only to fighters/rangers and in 2E there is double slice available only to fighters/rangers. This might help to scale back the emotion. Grouping the class “feats”/options could be a help as leveling is not quick. Also, it seems like some “feats” could be pooled into general groupings (martial/spell casting) - why shouldn’t power attack be available to all martial classes? Or eschew materials to all spell casters (actually this might already be the case - I haven’t researched spell casters in 2e).

Then we are left with the general feats and skill feats which have flaws. There are few general feats and the skill feats don’t always add up. For example bonded animal is a second level skill feat that requires expert in nature which can’t happen until level 3 making bonded animal effectively a level 4 skill feat. Which is OK except that I think the designers want you to have bonded animals at lower levels where they are more effective/fun. My thoughts are that the weaknesses in these feats is the root cause of the unhappiness. The focus was getting the class feats/options just right which made the general/skill feats suffer in comparison.

My experience is that there are things to like and to dislike. If the dislikes outweigh the likes, wait and play something else. Starfinder has a nice stamina/hit point system and home brews can be fun. In one home brew that we played, our party accidentally unleashed a zombie apocalypse and destroyed the entire world. It was fun.

Warning: This is a long and in depth thread digging into the foundational math of skill DCs, their Scaling, Monster Skills, Monster Perception, and consequently Skill Items. .

Thank you, this is an exceptionally well written post.

Based on experience,

With #1, I had a second level character attempting a DC 17 dying save. Death was pretty much automatic with this.

#2 made stealth a useless skill - unless I was trying to hide from party members

Lastly #3 means that tumble through doesn't work and that Cat Fall becomes a required pick because you are going to fall when climbing (up or down).

Whatever the intended outcome, the result is that the game is less enjoyable than it could be. The character that could sneak into the Dragon's lair to tell the party what was inside, no longer exists. The acrobat who would tumble through combats in order to gain advantage on the enemy, no longer exists. The hero who would climb castle towers to rescue the princess, fell to his death a long time ago.

It does need to be fixed and we should focus on what the outcome should be - characters that can do more than smash, cast spells, and die.

Right now I’m wondering why should I continue with Pathfinder 2e (Playtest). What are people finding interesting about Pathfinder 2e?

The one thing I like is actions. The Pathfinder team did a nice job of cleaning this up.

After that, I am at a loss. Classes/Feats/Spells are largely watered down versions of Pathfinder (version 1). I am struggling to find something that sets 2e apart from the other RPG games that are out there (5e, Starfinder, Pathfinder)