3-Body Problem's page

Would Int be more well liked if it had a combat skill that used it?

Int is the stat that is good at identifying patterns and RK is only meant to establish knowledge not patterns that are happening in real time so maybe add skills that provide some 1 round benefit because you watched the target in action and see through their moves. The drawback is int based benefits take seeing it happen at least once to work, another limitation can be that it doesn't keep working beyond a single round of gaining the benefit as combat is fluid nad you have to keep analyzing to get the benefit again. Like other abilities maybe the benefit cant be done again tot he same target for a duration.

Example
Defensive Analysis or something. Choose a target to analyze. After one round of analyzing a target that uses a strike gain +1 status bonus to AC against strikes from that target at the beginning of your next turn until the following turn?
Maybe this can be combined with raise shield or the shield spell to make for a very defensive turn?

New skill feats could interact with these skills in interesting ways.

Yes. Every stat should have a combat skill linked to it. Most stats already have one and some might argue that RK is supposed to be what Intelligence gets, but RK is far weaker than the other extant options and not exclusive to Intelligence.

Something like what you propose is a good start to making Int feel better in combat. I would also give Con a skill that allows one to raise a save by +1 the way Raise Shield does for AC.

Not every option is supposed to be optimal for every build. There are distinct tradeoffs and that is perfectly viable. Now if your fighter had taken a magical dedication then he would have a proficiency in magic and it would have gotten better

Why should a player have to jump through that many hoops to make a Fire Breathing Samurai that has the fire breath as usuable feature?

The other issue is that these new schools are still beholden to the spells that existed before the ORC/OGL split so when they're smaller schools with the same spells we had access before, but in smaller numbers, it's really hard to see the change as anything but a downgrade.

Intelligence was a better stat when it was what got you the best spells in the game. Wisdom used to only grant spells that maxed at lower level and charisma none at all. Problem at least partly lies with charisma being a casting stat at all

Charisma spent all of 3.x as the universal dump stat so you'd need to be very careful how you handled that.

As a player, I've only ever used AI for character art.

As a GM I used it to create a mood board for a specific location and to generate the basic bones of an enemy group the players fought. I still spent two days making the group a base for the players to assault and every encounter was hand-crafted by me. I probably wouldn't use AI for anything plot or encounter-related again unless I was pressed for time and creatively burnt out but I wanted to test what Chat GPT could do so I used it once to see what kind of results it could give.

Not really an important difference though. If wizards had a class feature that required them to throw their spellbook into the middle of the battlefield in order to function properly, it would be no less debilitating or obnoxious to destroy it.

If you want to make a habit of regularly breaking someone's core class features as a GM, it would be easier to just tell the person not to play that class before the game starts.

I expect my players to understand that some abilities come with greater risks than others and to be smart about it. In the case where you must throw your spellbook and risk it being destroyed I'd expect players to, as much as possible, make back-up spells books or even make spellbooks designed to meet the bare minimum requirements to generate the effect so their main spellbook isn't at risk.

Themetricsystem wrote:

It is as reasonable for an enemy to know that Familiars are crucial to a Character as it is for them to know that a Spellbook or a special Holy Symbol is.

If anything, Familiars should be more obvious as a source of power and have a bias toward being targeted than basically any other thing that a PC uses to leverage power since, well, they have their own HP and can easily be targeted to great effect.

Kill the cat.

... This seems like a weird example because "GM destroys the wizard's spellbook" is one of the prime examples of an 'obvious' good tatic that's generally considered bad form because it just makes one player kind of miserable and useless.

That's different the spellbook will usually be guarded and kept on the Wizard's person. If that same spellbook starts whizzing around the battlefield slinging spells or otherwise being a problem it's fair game to destroy it.

That all said, an honest political calculus says that it's not a solution that's going to be implemented any time soon. In the meantime, we have generative AI out here disrupting lives right now. So UBI might be shiny, and if we had it, it might make this less of an issue, but that doesn't really have any sort of bearing on the problem at hand.

Then the solution is to wait a decade while rulings worm their way through courts, are challenged, and new laws are finally drafted. By the time that happens the situation will have changed enough that the issue the laws and court cases were designed to prevent aren't relevant. That's as effective as campaigning for UBI in that it also does nothing to solve the immediate issue while also not solving future issues either.

The ones I've heard have been more like "you ought to be able to barely scrape by without also having to grind your internal resources down to nothing in a soul-destroying job for the privilege" rather than "we can all be rich together", but there's still a bunch of potentially problematic details to work out.

If people are willing to accept mass-produced housing, mass-produced single models of vehicle (two-seat city car, five-seat family sedan, eight-seat van, truck), and fewer brands of food you can get current standards of living down to pennies on the current dollar. The issue is generating the will to do this and having that will be greater than incentives to keep the status quo.

Well, we care about technology being disruptive within our current band because it causes real problems for real people who are ambushed by changes in the environment that are happening faster than they can adjust to. Like, people who've invested significant amounts of effort into actually getting good at creating art, with the expectation that they'd be able to use that as a way of helping to pay rent, now find that this technology is threatening that, in a way that they could not reasonably have predicted when they actually made that investment in artistic skill.

Then you should campaign for Universal Basic Income to insulate people from such changes. That's the best way to allow for these large-scale without hurting people's live's in the here and now.

My table is generally fairly player-favored in terms of rulings but I always make it clear that the NPCs can do anything the players can. This tends to stop my players from trying any exploits they wouldn't want me doing back to them. So if they want to instantly recognize that an effect is coming from a familiar that's cool and that's how we'll run things but they won't be able to get mad when their familiar is targeted when it starts to do spooky stuff on the battlefield.

3-Body Problem wrote:

Yes, but without Napster and its P2P ilk, the digital revolution would have stalled and taken longer. Companies don't change their business model unless their current model becomes threatened.

So your defense of these Generative AI programs amounts to: you agree they are doing something blatantly illegal, but you see using them for blatantly illegal activity as moral and ethical because oh those big bad corporate artists ought to change their business model? Because 'Big Fantasy Art' is keeping the little man down?

That is not at all what I have said. I've merely made note that sometimes a disruption that current laws are ill-equipped to handle can have positive results. AI art may have a worse impact if only because it doesn't seem poised to create a new model that benefits the masses. Movies have already gone digital and now we're seeing the downsides of that change. AI art will only make lazier mass-produced movies more attractive to studios who need no incentive to further favor sequels and remakes over original IPs.

On the other hand, AI art could advance to a point where it produces excellent results from small sample sets. Such an advance could allow a small team of creatives to create an animated movie based on concept art and live-action film and that would be a net positive. It remains to be seen which outcome comes to pass and it might be that both mass-produced AI slop and home-grown projects alike make use of this technology to different ends.

The psychic already had focus spells a plenty and ways of getting 2 back with ease (and only within their own class) and a minimum amount of spell slots. Spell slot spells are generally better than pre-remaster, so classes with more slots and less focus spells are doing better than classes with good access to focus spells and limited number of slots. Especially with cantrips now taking a step down and requiring more different ones to target different weaknesses to really be worthwhile. Only the primal and arcane list get enough different cantrips to be able to play that game except against undead and fiends.

We really don't know what sorcerers will look like yet. They should be close to the same, but the bloodlines might get a pretty decent shake up. If you really value spontaneous casting, there is a good chance sorcerers will always look better than wizards. I think that is probably the way it should be though. The witch catching up to the wizard is probably a good thing overall for the game, but the difference is pretty minimal and you will never have as many top slots as a witch as you would if you were a wizard. I think the caster balance is pretty good in the remastery

I don't think enough spells were tweaked to really impact the value of a spell slot. Plus any class not impacted by the remaster still gets to use their focus spells and the cantrips in their books as they were written so Psychic should be just as good as it's ever been. Better now that it can pick up Wizard spells via an archetype and use them at full power.

I know you're relentlessly positive about PF2 but I don't agree that Wizard didn't fall another half step behind post remaster.

Yeah, but before the remastery, Psychic was ok as a MC, but you still were only really getting to use 1 Focus spell an encounter for a long time, so it was an either or thing. getting 2 force bolts by level 2 is a pretty big deal if you want to be a damage dealer. At level 1 Force Barrage looks like it will be the most reliable ranged damage dealing option out of any martial or caster, but by level 3 throwing down a Thunderstrike and a Force bolt or Force Barrage is going to be top tier single target damage. The starlit magus with Imaginary weapon eventually will out pace them, but they will stay really good against any higher level enemies.

Which is kind of ironic because it was a niche that casters really didn't do well in pre-remastery.

That tide lifted the boats of every class that uses focus points. I don't see how any of this makes a Wizard more attractive than a Remastered Witch or Psychic or Sorcerer.

A spell blending wizard is then stuck with 2 school spells, one of which is very likely going into a staff? The school limitation really can be bypassed with ease if it bothers you.

In that case, the question becomes why take a school if the best way to use those slots is to blend them away and feed them to a staff? The focus spells aren't good enough to be a draw.

3-Body Problem wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

It feels like they were deliberately trying to "remove ability mods from cantrips for consistency" not "change how much damage spells tend to do" because it looks like they set the remaster damage as close to the original damage, on average, as they could.

If they wanted to do that they'd have changed Cantrips to deal dice + 4 damage. If you can add a fixed +1 to the damage magic missiles do you can do it for cantrips.

Don't most spells just do dice in damage? Like Fireball is 6d6, Disintegrate is 12d10, etc. For consistency it's good to have them all be mostly just dice.

Cantrips are already different than slotted spells and we have at least one spell with a fixed amount of extra damage per die so cantrips with additional fixed damage shouldn't be an issue.

It feels like they were deliberately trying to "remove ability mods from cantrips for consistency" not "change how much damage spells tend to do" because it looks like they set the remaster damage as close to the original damage, on average, as they could.

If they wanted to do that they'd have changed Cantrips to deal dice + 4 damage. If you can add a fixed +1 to the damage magic missiles do you can do it for cantrips.

3-Body Problem wrote:

What makes a Dwarven War Axe any harder to use than any other axe?

It's a hand-and-a-half weapon, which means that it's not really optimally designed for use in either one hand or two. This design philosophy results in weapons that each need special training to get used to their peculiarities.

I've seen HEMA practitioners who specialize pick up new weapons that are very similar to other weapons they know and do well with them. The change between a heavy one-handed sword and a hand-and-a-half sword isn't something many of them can't adjust to with a little time to practice. I don't see how a fantasy axe would be any different.

<snip specific advanced weapon counter points>

So a slightly funky sword is harder to use than the following Martial weapons:

Asp Coil
Battle Saddle
Bladed Scarf
Fighting Fan
Flail
Gun Sword
Injection Spear
Khopesh (Basically a hook sword)
Mace Multipistol
Pantograph Gauntlet
Rope Dart

I could do the same breakdown you did for all of these. The line between Advanced and Martial is arbitrary at best.

A person with a dagger is at a disadvantage against a swordsman, sure, but a dagger is a far, far simpler weapon to use than a sword. It takes serious training to turn someone into a proficient swordsman. You can know more or less all you need to know about how to use a dagger in an afternoon.

You give a complete newbie an afternoon course on how to use a dagger and put them up against an equally new person with a sword and see which one wins more often. The sword is going to be easier to use because knowing how to use a weapon involves more than basic mechanics and comes down to knowing how to block or parry with that weapon and how to find open lines of attack with it. The dagger will be much harder to get skilled with than a sword is in those respects.

... Nope. It is extremely hard to even know how to strike someone properly with a hook sword.

Harder than doing the same with an extended Asp Coil? I doubt that very much.

This is an issue of the abstraction necessary to create a ruleset. Strength and Dexterity aren't actually separate things in the real world. To increase your agility and hand-eye coordination, you use strengthening exercises. If you're strong but not agile, you have weak links and are not able to move powerfully. You're going to have to make some allowances that the game isn't super realistic at all times.

Fantasy gaming has roots in the kind of fiction that believes that small, dainty people are better suited to archery than swordplay. In the real world, swordplay doesn't require much muscle, but a good archer will have a huge back. For the last several decades, gaming has prioritized the fantasy over the simulation.

I'm calling for a reversal of that trend.

3-Body Problem wrote:

Why even restrict weapons by class at all? The weapons proficiency buckets have never made sense, have often been kind of racist (exotic weapons) and don't bring anything interesting to the table. I'd rather Paizo do the work the assign weapons to regions and use the rarity system for something interesting instead of as a shorthand to warn GMs that something might disrupt their game.

Because it's easier to hit someone over the head with a club than it is to use a whip-sword? And people should not be able to do the latter without actual training, presumably.

What makes a Dwarven War Axe any harder to use than any other axe?

What about these weapons? Rhoka Sword, Repeating Crossbow, Aldori Dueling Sword, Broadspear, Gada, Kalis, Butterfly Sword, Falcata, Hook Sword, Karambit, Nodachi...

It frankly doesn't make sense that it's any harder to use these than their martial or simple counterparts. In reality, it's harder to fight an opponent with a sword with a dagger than it is to fight back with another sword yet a dagger is a simple weapon and swords are martial.

Why even restrict weapons by class at all? The weapons proficiency buckets have never made sense, have often been kind of racist (exotic weapons) and don't bring anything interesting to the table. I'd rather Paizo do the work the assign weapons to regions and use the rarity system for something interesting instead of as a shorthand to warn GMs that something might disrupt their game.

1. They are not the old schools, which were never a good fit. They originated as minor comments on AD&D 1e spells and were later used as building blocks way beyond what they were supposed to carry. Just look at how many times the schools have been rearranged since they actually got mechanical weight with Dragonlance Adventures and AD&D 2e.

If you disliked the old schools you must loathe the spellcasting traditions for being just as arbitrary and poorly defined. What exactly is the logic behind where the cut between Arcane and Occult ended up again? Why is Arcane still mostly just the old Wizard spell list if there are supposed to be rules to these things?

2. They are expandable. I don't have the Player Core yet, but it has what, four schools in it? That's nothing. You could easily add dozens of schools for various purposes. The old schools were collectively all-encompassing, so there was no way to expand upon them.

The old schools were 128 crayon boxes and the new ones are 16 crayon boxes, and you're praising them for making you buy more to get less.

If you think that the new schools mean new focus spells, well there was never anything stopping Paizo from publishing more focus spells before the OGL nonsense.

3. They are not tied to OGL material.

I couldn't tell you a single cool thing about Golarion that an average Joe might know while I can tell you dozens from OGL sources. Losing the OGL was necessary but it was a loss.

Because it's heroic fantasy, and sometimes that means enemies do stupid things to play up the heroes doing cool things or using abilities.

Can you show me a page in the rules that says this? Anything on the skills being used that suggests enemies should rush to attack Bon Mot users?

If you can't this is useless to any table that doesn't share your exact view on what makes heroic fantasy fun.

Squiggit wrote:

What I think the most interesting thing about the school change is that given how little the rest of the chassis did, Paizo either internally believes the Wizard needed to be toned back slightly, or doesn't consider the size of your school to be a meaningful point of balance at all.

Really makes me wish we had some avenue for gaining insight into dev design processes, because it's definitely a perspective I don't see echoed in a lot of other places.

It's hard to tell how many of the decisions in the Remaster are deliberate conscious decisions on the part of the writers and how many are a product of a short deadline. The new schools definitely feel like a good idea they didn't have the space to properly expound on, especially when put next to the far more pronounced patrons.

What part of these new schools feels like a good idea? I get that some people like the new flavor but I really question what there is to like about these new schools beyond that.

Arachnofiend wrote:

So are we supposed to just see the list of school spells as nothing more than a suggestion for what should go there then, and all your school selection really means is what focus spells you have access to?

More than a suggestion, much less than a hard limit.

Its a thematic starting point for what that school is, your GM is given the final say, and specifically that the criteria is thematic, so if you try and translate that as "there is no requirement for the spells, its whatever I want it to be" then you're going to run into a wall when you try and take a good spell that is unrelated to the concept of the curriculum, but if you're picking useful spells that are also thematically appropriate, you should be in the clear.

So for instance, most GMs would let you take True Strike as a Battle Magic Wizard, but maybe not as a Civic wizard, because a spell that operates as a targeting system for attacks makes sense for a Battle Wizard but not for a Civic Wizard (barring your GM buying into a really elaborate justification for it, I guess.)

I guess PFS players can just get bent then, eh? This hurts anybody playing with the RAW who doesn't have access to the ability to essentially pick the spells that are in their new school.

Calliope5431 wrote:

Riposte is currently borderline irrelevant, so that would be awesome yup.

Ok I have seen this too much. So a quick run down on Riposte.

Yes if you do nothing a Riposte only trigger when your enemy rolls a 1. This will vary by their level a lot. But that is not irrelevant. Because of MAP. They will likely stop attacking you at -5 to hit. They wil almost certainly stop attacking you at -10 to hit. That is a big defensive boost to you as that attack at -5 is still about half the value of a normal strike.

But that is the do nothing approach you can shift your odds a lot. Extra defence helps your offence:

1) Buff your defences. Use a shield/parry weapon/buckler/Dueling Parry.

2) Spells like Protection, Forbidding Ward or Inspire Defense.

3) Debuff your enemy with Demoralise or any number of spells or abilities.

4) Feint in particular Goading Feint which is a good pickup for any characer with charisma. It will likely stack with everything else as it is a circumstance penalty to their attack roll.

It is pretty easy to shift that roll by 6. That really brings your odds of a riposte up to something quite useful. When you are facing a boss you are very likely to have all those numbers stacked up.

Embrace your role as a defender and take the point position.

En garde

Is your enemy lobotomized? When you see a PC going all in on defense you don't attack them. Even in a choke point scenario, where the Swash should be strongest, the enemy could be better off breaking line of sight to the party's ranged damage and recovering, setting an ambush, or doing anything else that isn't walking mindlessly into eating counter attacks.

It's very funny that people seem to think they are the only ones with the ability to do math.

Especially when Mark was one of the core designers.

If that's the case why are there so many trap options in the game? Why was Flickmace printed as it was? Why do they have to go back and fix weak classes in the remaster?

kvltjam wrote:

Why doesn’t Class DC get a TEML Strip?

First, what is a TEML strip?

Second, will Paizo be posting the character sheet online when the physical books are released?

I'm hoping to update one of my characters before the next game, but am not sure how soon my local gaming store will be getting the new books despite me putting in an order many months ago. Plus, it's nice to have a digital version so I don't have to break the spine of my Player's Core to make a scan of the character sheet.

Trained, Expert, Master, Legendary in a strip so you can check off what you're at for a given skill, save, weapon proficiency, armor type, etc.

You've never taken a social science course have you?

Social science. The only science that never makes repeatable predictions and thus can never be tested. Nearly as useless a humanities course as one could take once one excludes philosophy.

Actually the Wounded Rules there contradict the "new" rule in recovery checks.

In the quote there for Wounded it says to add wounded value when you GAIN the dying condition. Not to re-add it to every time you increment your dying value.

So if we go by that text in Wounded remaster has NOT changed how dying and wounded works. If we go by the parenthetical included to the side of the recovery checks - then remaster has changed it.

Gain doesn't only mean the first time you get something, in this case, the Dying status. Gain can also mean when your Dying value increases.

Examples: Gaining weight, gaining value, gaining muscle. These all require you to already have the thing you are gaining more of.

If they wanted it to only work the first time you become Dying after being in a different state they'd need to use much tighter wording.

What it says above. How much of the new, changed, and clarified bits of the remaster do you intend to use at your table?

For me, it's likely I'll allow a hearty mix of old and new while choosing to ignore the clarification of how wounds and dying are supposed to work. This will just give more options to my players.

How about all of you?

You can always recreate anything you want for your own games but the short answer is no, you cannot. Part of what made schools good was the sheer number of spells you had access to for that final slot. The new schools give between 1 and 3 spells per spell rank and even if you made a custom school that gave three spells per rank you'd fall well short of what the old schools used to give.

While some of his comments about direction are questionable. It is fair to say that releasing a messed up product, admitting it was messed up, but refusing to do anything to fix it (or even make sure all customers are aware of the problems with the product) is kind of sketchy.

The TTRPG industry is one of the only ones where people regularly defend that kind of practice too.

Also, realistically, how much work would it be to remaster a handful of poorly made old APs? You already have the art, the story, the encounters, etc., and just need to adjust some of the flow, find places for players to rest, and add warnings before some of the nastier surprise encounters. It isn't free but you could probably remaster 3 APs in the time it takes to make one new AP.

3-Body Problem wrote:

breithauptclan wrote:

3-Body Problem wrote:

Paizo still sells those APs as written to new players who won't have read every forum discussion and developer blog. If they actually cared they would have remastered those APs by now. Or, at the very least, appended them with a warning about their unexpectedly high difficulty.

... Instead of writing Dark Archive or Rage of Elements? Or creating PF2 Kingmaker?

Or are you just expecting them to magically have time to do anything and everything?

Or they stop selling the old APs which would also work.

The purpose of a corporation, as I understand it, is to make money.

It's not like the PDFs of Age of Ashes contain radioactive isotopes or something hazardous to the general public, and thus they should stop selling them in the name of public health. Especially since there is a market for "the dragon AP" or "the circus AP". If you do not want to play them, you don't have to. Just play something newer.

What is the cost of new players picking up the remaster, a few cheap old APs, and then never playing again because the game isn't balanced and their characters keep dying?

Calliope5431 wrote:

breithauptclan wrote:

Calliope5431 wrote:

Cleric In-combat healing gets EVEN MORE necessary.

Cleric is most definitely not the only source of in-combat healing.

No... but the ludicrous number of fonts is highly important, especially given some APs DO NOT obey the 3 moderate encounters per long rest rule. Most other classes (druid, say) run out of slots. And also aren't rolling d10s for heal.

I've done without a cleric, but I'd hate to bring a party to Age of Ashes without one using the new rules.

Yes. And the AP writers have apologized for not fully understanding the new game system well enough when they wrote those first APs and recommend that GMs adjust the difficulty of the AP encounters to follow the guidelines in the GM guide.

So I don't see how it is the game developers who are insisting that you run the game in a way that demands maximal amounts of healing.

Paizo still sells those APs as written to new players who won't have read every forum discussion and developer blog. If they actually cared they would have remastered those APs by now. Or, at the very least, appended them with a warning about their unexpectedly high difficulty.

You're aware that there are 1388 spells currently and 13 classes capable of casting, right?

You're aware that you're suggesting quadrupling+ the work of developers for no benefit? And then it also breaks the entire system if they introduce a new casting class, because now they have to backport all 1388 spells into that class?

1,400 items and 13 categories is not a lot of data to sort especially if you go in knowing that you're planning to sort things and tag it all from the start. What spells new classes get should be a part of the design process for new casting classes as much as their feats and class features are.

I think it's an interesting perspective on the essences, and I certainly wouldn't have an issue if things went this way - I think ideally all traditions should fundamentally be separated from their iconic classes in the way you're describing. If the justification for the arcane list being so broad is 'but wizards', then give wizards class features. Talking of this:

3-Body Problem wrote:

So you want to make Wizards even worse and even less connected to what they've been since the dawn of TTRPGs while buffing Clerics who already get a better base chasis with Occult getting gutted as collateral damage. Your fixes don't fix anything while making several already conteniously weak classes worse.

You get a hard no from me on this.

The original post literally says:

Quote:

The magus, witch, and wizard would likely no longer need to use a spellbook-like mechanic to avoid becoming too versatile, and could instead use their spellbook or familiar to learn other kinds of things.

If the above traditions ever turn out to be too specific for existing casters, caster class and subclass features ought to fill in the gaps, just like how the current druid chassis features good defenses to make up for the primal tradition's focus on direct combat.

The point is to try and take a critical eye to the traditions, make their mechanics more in-keeping with their narrative and thematic roles, and then rebalance any casters that are now out-of-tune to make up for this.

I fundamentally dislike the way the traditions have been implemented so even if balance is perfect, and given the issues I have with PF2 I have my doubts, I don't think I would enjoy it. I do not think there is a valid excuse for not maintaining per class spell lists in the digital age we live in.

So you want to make Wizards even worse and even less connected to what they've been since the dawn of TTRPGs while buffing Clerics who already get a better base chasis with Occult getting gutted as collateral damage. Your fixes don't fix anything while making several already conteniously weak classes worse.

You get a hard no from me on this.

Because I don't want to learn blades in the dark or play it?

Not a knock against blades in the dark... but... yeah. The time spent learning another system is time not spent playing the game.

This aversion to learning new systems, systems that are objectively less rules-dense than PF2, baffles me. I run the system that fits the tone my players aimed for in our pre-session zero talks, I don't contort systems to fit that tone because that's always going to take more work over the course of the campaign than using the right tool for the job would.

Yeah, you can do that in PF2E. Easily.

Is it done better? Do you even know what Blades in the Dark is and what it is designed to do?

Because the group wants to play PF2E.

That's a bad choice. Play PF2 for what it's good at and play other systems for what they're good at. Don't beat a generalist high fantasy d20 game into something it's not.

On the tangent:

You guys just need to see what happens when players decide to create stealth party and play stealth intrigue/social infiltration game for whole campaign

If my party wants to play that why am I running PF2 instead of Blades in the Dark?

Deriven Firelion wrote:

You going to as a DM short circuit their attempt because say you guys don't have invisibility, so you can't do it. Or tell them none of it works because they don't all have the right social skills?

Yes, of course. If they don't have the proper tools to break into the fort it just doesn't work.

In general, I'll tell them that they don't see it working. But if they insist, they just fail.

My players can come up with creative ideas, and it's highly encouraged, but being excited about an idea doesn't make it work. It also needs to be realistic and properly backed up by skill checks and magic. Otherwise, just try to find another idea. And if the whole party is a bunch of Barbarians who increase only Athletics, then they won't succeed at out of combat encounters and suffer the proper consequences. Well, in general, if the party is a bunch of Barbarians who increase only Athletics, I encourage them to switch characters as they won't be able to play the adventure at all.

You missed the entire context of the section of post you quoted:

"For example, let's say your four players talk amongst themselves and come up with some interesting method using their available abilities to break into a fort or something. Your rogue uses stealth and follow the leader. Your fighter uses athletics and high strength to bust the door in. Your caster uses ghost sound to simulate something falling in another area to slightly distract the guards. And your cleric just follows the plan.

You going to as a DM short circuit their attempt because say you guys don't have invisibility, so you can't do it. Or tell them none of it works because they don't all have the right social skills?"

Are you going to tell the party that they can't use those skills and abilities to break into a Fort? If you would, I am glad you don't GM or play at my table.

The limited number of spell slots is a voluntary restriction players put on themselves though. It is very easy to build a caster that spends their gold on getting lots of additional spells to cast in a day. At low level, this is really only accomplishable through scrolls though, so if a player is trigger shy about buying scrolls, they can end up feeling like they have very few spell slots. By level 3, it is trivially easy to have a first level scroll to use at least every encounter. With any foresight about the encounter it is not hard to have a useful spell to cast in an encounter.

You keep harping on this, so let us play a game where the martials only get so many swings with their sword each day before they need to start spending actions using a consumable before each attack. Does that sound like a fun system?

PF2 has balanced a lot of things externally, classes are close enough, monster levels provide challenges, etc. but internally spells and feats badly need a dedicated team tuning them. There are too many traps and must-takes that shouldn't exist in a game that wants each level to have meaningful choices.

If the game assumed that players never built synergistically and if build bonuses could trounce combat tactics, then yes. But in PF2 combat tactics alone can be a 3 point swing from circumstance bonuses and penalties from a pretty low level and quickly rise to a 5 point swing. This is just circumstance...

If we apply this same logic to martial characters, one of which gets a built-in accuracy bonus...

I'm not going to derail this any further but I definitely like the box of legos approach more.

its not whether it changes the actual game math, it is about what it leads players to try to do in play.

I don't get this guardrail approach to player fun. Devs should make a system that plays well without needing to overly currate that fun. Instead, Paizo seems to have taken the wrong lessons from PF1 and thinks players and groups can't be trusted to find their own unique fun if given a box of legos without instructions.

level -2 enemies are plenty dangerous. You just have to use enough of them and put them in an encounter site where those numbers can be leveraged effectively. A great way to do this as a GM is to have stuff in the room to do other than try to move and attack PCs. Suddenly that action economy advantage is huge when enemies are looting the treasure in the room and making a break for it while the boss is fighting the party and getting angry her goons aren't doing what they are supposed to. This is a fun way to combine a level +2 or 3 monster (depending upon party level) and a handful of 4 or 6 level -2 creatures. As a fight it could easily get out of hand if all the enemies worked together, but you as the GM you have a lever now you can switch to change things up in a way that can keep tension high and get everyone moving all over the dungeon instead of standing around with murder faces on.

You can always improve any system with good GMing, where does this type of encounter design show up in APs and PFS scenarios?

Look at the 5e Artificer compared to the PF2 Inventor and it's no contest. The 5e version gets an invention, plus a brace of magic items, and a limited selection of spells that max at 4th level. By comparison, the Inventor is just a martial class with extra flavor and unreliable boosts at low levels. Now, I know these are different games but it feels bad that the Inventor is so limited in what they can interact with.

If we had a magic version of Inventor that could pick from a list of magic items each day and change them out at a short rest with a hard crafting check that would scratch a pretty big itch for a lot of players.