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Even ignoring the non-statically linked continuities and alternate timelines, deities and even just demons have such a weird relationship with identity that you can't really rely on "facts". There could be a new Nocticula, and number of equally valid ones, some sort of time loop, a split soul, a Piccolo good/evil split, an imposter, an entity formed from outdated lore, Nocticula being infested or forgetting herself, etc. etc.
The goddess of self-redemption on your own terms vs. going around redeeming people to your own standards. Nocticula's about self-perception more than external approval.
I am a reliable advocate for removing attack accuracy from stats. It does require cooking up extra uses for stats to give wizards a reason to max Int, but that's needed anyway.
The more free hands you have, the more interesting options there are. Nets aren't even magic, but they can do a lot as an opening move. Eternal eruption, even under-leveled, is great for when you're a martial fighting a swarm or ooze. Windlass Bolas is a great tool for abusing Athletics builds at a distance. Utility items can be great with the right planning. Versatile Tinder box is handy for a patient pyro and for various bluffs. Flask of Fellowship, Bottomless Stein, etc. are simple but nice, flavorful tools, Decanter of Endless Water can be a menace, and so on.
Combat also doesn't have to mean getting the other team all down to 0 hp. From recent PFS examples:
Encounter with a un underground room full of cultists with a narrow entrance, and I have Igneogenesis and immediately wall them in, cultists all give up. Room with a few sleeping guards, and I'm a sneaky character with manacles; I cuff them to their beds and skip the combat part entirely. Easy combats are perfect opportunities for a little improv. * I pointed with a finger gun, said "Bang", and cast Needle Darts, and down they went. :3
Something the GM should consider, since they shy away from large numbers of enemies, is to use troops more often than usual. This allows you to have a wider scale of in-story combats without the GM needing to control eight fully separate pieces on the board, allows AOEs to shine, and is less awkward than there always being a swarm enemy.
Magic is generally not about high single target damage, so it's always going to be a bit difficult even with blaster builds. Control is usually going to be a lot more satisfying, especially if you build for spell combos, like any sort of damaging terrain spell you can sustain + any spell that keeps them in the terrain.
I would absolutely love a Book of Serpents, going over the various ophidian ancestries, giving access to sekmin/serpentfolk or a varition thereof, more details about their past and present, and a gaggle of serpent monsters,familiars, companions, and thematic magic, items, and features, particularly some more ways to deal with poison immunity. Serpents have an astonishing amount of mythological and real life lore to work with, and the sekmins were kind of a big deal in the past.
Holding onto something would, at best, give you a circumstance bonus if the GM felt like it, but ladders are not super easy to hold tight to. Shove should work basically exactly as normal. Though why shove down when you can shove down and *out*.
The Big Book of Scaling Items Imagine a book where everything is still usable at level 20 you never have to get a graft ripped out because its DC is stuck at 20 or 26.
Brace is a tool you use when you're acting as a wall. You should not try to be a wall in an open field or against an archer. It's kind of weird it's not used for any spear weapons given this is basically what a pike/long spear is for.
Proteans have precision resistance.
A method of allowing siloed damage types to still be useful is to allow them to be converted into less-efficient alternatives. A swashbuckler or rogue could convert precision damage into a smaller amount of additional damage, and really you could do the same with elemental energy - have the fire kin bust out the sideaarm as they boost their speed or strength with elemental power.
I've been poking around with my swash build - finally should get to play it on Monday - and noticed that shuriken don't seem to be listed in the guide. With reload 0 they seriously ramp up the efficiency of Flying Blade, as you can now just carry a silly number of shuriken, powered by the bandolier, and use a more impactful rune than Returning. It also lets you play with metals and poison more while keeping your hand free for other things. Swashbuckler makes for quite good "ninja" builds.
PF3, before any wizard tweaks, needs to have a major balance pass to ensure that spells of each level are roughly on par with each other. The imbalance between schools shouldn't be there to be a factor, and wizards become more attractive the harder the decision between spells is.
I'm glad the maftet got pushed up. They would make a great ancestry option. Sad sthenos weren't included for the same reason.
An Advanced or Persistent Weapon Infusion feat that would allow this would certainly have its fans, but the fiction is closer to a cantrip than actually wielding a weapon.
Basically, if you want reach flanking for a kin, carry a whip.
There are a handful of glaring issues which made 4E less fun than it was built to be, as much as I love the system, that PF2 mostly avoids:
Based on the D&D 5E 2024 feedback, a lot of players are hooked on the idea of summoning "real" monsters, so I think it would be best to add any formulaic summons as a new set of spells or an alternate option for the existing ones.
Narrow concepts like "pyromancer" are often narrow because of a lack of supportive options that allow a concept to be well-rounded in theme. The fire kineticist is a better example of what can be done, but misses things like fire-powered punches, melting terrain and objects, stoking the internal fires for an exhausting burst of energy, etc. which could allow a more varied set of options. This of course eats up page space and makes it harder to differentiate between builds, but the option go full Hunter X Hunter* with a theme is there, in theory. * An anime that made the guy with bubblegum powers one of the main villains because he used it in all kinds of deadly ways.
Since a summon can stick around for a full minute, its round-to-round abilities have to be diluted compared to an unsustained spell. You might be able to have higher-powered summons with less issue if you had to constantly feed them spell slots.
The masks topic is actually near and dear to me. I have two characters about to start their PFS journey both with masks: An ifrit nagaji swashbuckler and a kholo magus. Swashbuckler can't afford the ifrit smoke vision feat, but can use the goz mask for the same effect. The mask has no DC to worry about AND it scales! I can always use the mask to be a smoke ninja with hypno eyes. Kholo magus has Cha as a dump stat. They're basically a stuttering noble out of combat. In combat, they put on a kitsune mask drop the kimono hiding their bone armor, and start laughing madly. Demon mask would be perfect here to let them be scary despite the dump stat, but only for a few levels
You can always just use a minimum DC. Getting an amazing level 10 item at level 2 only to sell it as vendor trash at level 14... It's too much like WoW or Borderlands for my tastes, though at least without level limits to use. As for masks... characters wearing masks is an extremely popular trope.
It's especially bad for niche things. If I get the Toxic Blood graft because I kept getting bit at level 1-8, but I don't encounter anything that it would affect again until level 16, it's going to feel really bad.
As a player, I'm more than happy to pay the treadmill cost as long as I get to keep doing the thing so I can make doing the thing part of my kit and my story. This also goes for things that don't scale in other ways, like the lifting belt being stuck at +1 athletics - it shouldn't be something that you automatically discard once Sash of Prowess etc. come along because of math and limited slots. Some people may enjoy the episode/comic-style scenario where you bust out a fun gadget during one adventure and it's never seen ever again, but I think it's more typical for people to want to build their characters up into a routine or theme. We have consumables and prescient planner for one-offs already.
Compatability between the systems is a bonus, but SF2 is intended to stand on its own. A pure SF2 experience should feel different than a pure PF2 experience and from a hybrid experience. It will take a bit for the options to be fleshed out; PF2E has quite a few more books to work with.
Kineticists are pretty well designed to break survival scenarios in general. That's part of their fun, but it needs to be considered for any survival game. If you want hardcore mode, you'll need to nerf them or limit their build options (probably to air and fiee).
Session zero, X-Cards, etc. exist for any actual discomfort issues. GM fiat exists for the annoyance issues. Removing the divine element you could easily have things like warriors codes, personal ethos, etc. Certainly I would be distracted an ineffective if I violated one of my personal anethema, like ignoring the suffering of a friend or treating someone as a stereotype instead of an individual. If I were a terrible person, I would similarly kicking myself for failing to take advantage of someone being in a bad situation, like one if them bleeding heart goody goody suckers. It's all fiction in a world no more real than The Land of Oz or Wonderland, so what ultimately matters is the table experience, but I'm happy to use the rules as written.
You could have some kind of ammo miniturizer or something but it does at least require more explanation than "battery gots more juice". On the plus side, solid ammo is less likely to be drained by a monster to power its electro-gamma breath.
All drink, no pay
Clumsy longshanks topple hard
Snatch the treasure, reap the spoils
Burn the doggies, horsies too
Eat a pickle, stab an elf
We really do need more tools for low-impact equipment mods. I want concealable polearms that look like staves until the pointy bits spring up, or whips that look like belts.
The point of a free hand weapon is being able to do multiple things instead of one thing. If you only want to do one thing they aren't going to be for you. For those who like to do multiple things, they save a lot of actions on drawing and stowing weapons.
They make for great side weapons for agile and maneuvers, secondary damage and crit options, etc. Tekko-kage pairs well with rapier, for example, since sword crits grant off-guard which is often easy to get.
There's room for developing essentially a punk metal version offshoot of Hellknights through a civil war that rejects devils but still carries some of the feel, but in a defaced way, in the way that tieflings might acknowledge their heritage while rejecting its ethos. They might even do things like Hack Hell to sabotage it, screw with their records, etc. Hellpunks could be a good time while further exploring the topic area. They could even be reforming devils here and there. Plus the art would be amazing.
If one is to fiddle with prep, you can just say that wizards can prepare additional spells per day per slot, but their actual casting per day is the same. Say I prepare the following list: Fireball
I can cast:
but I cannot cast Fireball
or Fireball
Versatility up, power the same, not stepping on Spontaneous, mostly just makes analysis paralysis worse.
More finesse weapons, body augment style weapons, and more themed weapons like the singing spear and singing coil. I want it to be possible to have a cross between the Silverhawks and Josie and the Pussycats.
Personally I'm more of an Ethereal Plane fan, but I'm always interested in transitive planes.
It could be interesting to delve deeper into wizard magic use specifically and how it differs from sorcery or granted magic. Perhaps some sort of effect lingers from having cast spells, instead if simply depleting them.
The classic D&D-inspired wizard is built around the core of collecting spells so they can have the perfect spell for the given scenario as long as they predict the scenario correctly, unless you want to go so far back that they are literally just fantasy artillery with limited ammo. Any version of a wizard that doesn't have to pick and choose spells every day has no particular reason to be called a wizard over any other name. The fact that divine magic used to top out at 7th level instead of 9th was a partial mitigation between sources to balance out the full list access of divibe casters, but this obviously is no longer the case. Given the variety of casters who can use arcane lists and other lists in the same way, the lists should be balanced with each other, and parity should be with the class. Wizarda should lean into the strengths of arcane a bit, but shouldn't automaticallu be the "correct" class for arcane casting over the witch.
Preaumably they somewhat deconstruct the armor and position it as needed, like a gelatin mold full of metal bits trying to move in the path of an incoming attack.
Some folks struggle with making rulings, especially new GMs, so clarity is valuable.
I am of the position that each spell list should be as equal as such things can be, with different strengths and weaknesses, so that they can be treated as equivalent as often as possible. Otherwise, there would need to be special benefits that come with using a lesser source to make up the difference.
D&D 2E's Dark Sun setting had a trader class. Basically a rogue with no backstab but lots of languages, skills, and a fast-talking ability.
There's plenty of room for nuance yet with the Hellknights, but they're clearly starting to falter against the diabolic temptations. This feels *right* given that managing to stay clear of temptation for so many generations makes devils look bad at their jobs. This also opens up room for drama when they discover some pre-Gap information that proves how far they've fallen. Imagine a galaxy-spanning Hellknight civil war! And remember, it's not impossible for fiends to reform...
Kins get plenty of benefit from off-guard and standard bonuses while being able to control the battlefield in absurd ways with little risk. They can create all kinds of control combos and bottlenecks and solve problems in ways that are hard to match. They don't turn into rocket tag but who needs to when you can just seal the enemy in with a barrier and blast them through a murder hole. They can be a *slow* class, but they can turn the battlefield into a tomb.
I really hope this leads toward playable Mythic Monster-like ancestries, especially since some humanoid versions already exist in the lore and monster books. Bonus points of some of them are minimally humanoid.
Two makes sense. Increases the chance someone will buy the book, allows for thematic ties to be explored, gives a better bang for your buck, etc. I would also like more options for existing classes, but there are inherent diminishing returns to these.
Mystical ninja have always been around, but the concept was on top of the standard ninja whose skills were more like magic tricks that felt magical in the moment. Apart from the rogue, a swashbuckler that focuses on stealth, deception, and tools fits the bill nicely; the default tumbling covers the gratuitous ninja flips.
I will be disappointed if there is not a vague Kim Possible allusion somewhere.
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