Alvah's page

I have a pending order for Order 7967870, AP #144, Midwives to Death? When is this expected to ship? I still cannot download or access the PDF for this AP issue.

Should I have at least had the AP #144, Book 6 of Tyrant's Grasp, added to my digital downloads at this point? The AP's physical order still says pending, but I figured the pdf would at least be available by now.

Are there options/rules for those of use that still roll ability scores and roll hit points every level? I know it's not preferred for many people, but my group is full of old folks who've been doing it that way since forever, and we actually like the randomness of it.

A lv13+ fighter is expected to have a +3 weapon (+4 weapons aren't expected until lv17). Let's call it a longsword for easy numbers.

The +2 to hit lost isn't too much of a big deal (harsh, but can be recovered with some buffs), but the 2d8 lost are. You go from an average of 23 damage per hit (4d8+5) to an average of 14 (40% damage loss), and many feats rely on the number of damage dice.

Coupled with the lost +2, you've basically halved the damage output if not worse. The answer is no, he's a liability (unless he uses specific feats that focus on doing non-damage, like combat grab).

So what I'm hearing is that PF2 is not the system for folks that like to run low magic/magic items are rare type of games, which is something my group likes to do from time to time just to play something that's similar in flavor to Conan, for instance.

Folks play the game differently. As long as everyone in the group is on the same page, it shouldn't matter. The rulebook is a guideline, individual groups adapt and change to fit their styles all the time. My group likes having the specter of death hanging over us, we play a game where smart villains and monsters, and where savage, flesh eating creatures will absolutely take out a downed pc unless there is something preventing it, and our group routinely coup de graces out of it combatants.

Also, we do all dice rolls out in the open, so there's no wiggle room for fudging dice rolls, as my group says, let the dice fall as they may.

David knott 242 wrote:

But since PCs don't usually coup de grace their fallen foes (unless the foes are trolls or other regenerating creatures), there is no good reason for NPCs to be doing that unless they have superior knowledge about PC capabilities.

I've known plenty of players who would whack a fallen monster a few extra times "just to make sure".

The group I play in does it regularly. In fact, in last week's session, the PCs coup de graced two fallen adversaries and another pc used Death Knell to suck the life out of a third. It happens regularly in our group, the players tend to want to ensure that no one comes back, and are really 'dead'.

While I appreciate removing the slowed condition from the dying rules, I cannot help but think that the wounded condition will make it even easier for a gang of determined enemies to beat down on a massively-AC-debuffed, dying PC in order to finish them off once and for all. That is a tactic I have been using in my playtest games to force TPKs, and the new wounded condition will make it even easier.

According to the playtest rulebook, "only the most vicious creatures focus on helpless foes rather than the more immediate threats around them," but then, how are PCs supposed to survive those vicious creatures exploiting the wounded condition?

Smart adversaries would indeed eliminate a dying creature, it's one less potential problem for them if they are revived and return to the fight. Smart enemies would not simply let a wounded character be, that's absolutely absurd. Chaotic adversaries would likely loot the dying corpse before moving on as well, all that shiny stuff could help them eliminate the rest of their foes.

I don't know why anyone would assume smart or well prepared adversaries wouldn't finish the job. PCs do. It stands to reason that bad guys who have brains or common sense would as well.

I can thin of a particular campaign, 'The Night Below' where PCs did not want to go down alone or without being in arm's reach of a comrade. You'd never see them again.

I read thro "On the topic of Hit Points Healing -- What about Stamina?" forum post and most people there think that they should not be obligatory.

Do anyone think that it's a good thing to always need a cleric or other healing focused class in the party?

Should someone be forced to play a cleric? No, I do not think so. Often times in my group, it's the least favorite class for folks to play, and no one wants to feel obligated to play a class they aren't interested in.

I'll be curious to see if the other divine classed presented in PF1e make their way into the official rules of the new version later on (Oracle, etc.). My group tends to enjoy playing those much more than a cleric, as the players really get tired of being called on during encounters to simply provide healing to others. No matter what people say about role playing, and play your cleric your way, break the mold, etc. the routine always falls into line once the campaign is in full swing and people start taking damage. 'Where's the cleric? They should be healing us'.

But there are those of us that do, and who have been using them since we played basic dnd. My group still uses the Critical Hit and Fumble Chart from Dragon 39, even though we play PF1. We've been using it since it came out back in the day, no matter what version of the game we've played. We did try the Arms Law and Claw Law critical hit tables back in the early 90s but that was a bit of overkill.

Of course, that's all moot if your GM decides things are different in their version of Golarion. I know my group doesn't always play with a totally 100% faithful rendition of Golarion, and I don't know anyone that does. Your mileage may vary, the rules are a set of guidelines and can be tweaked.

So, after reading the rules, my group has chosen not to participate in the play test.

The change to the action system, the way skills are being handled, and the way races have been modified have contributed to this choice.

If the lore is well done, we might buy some books to intigrate with our ongoing 1st edition game.

My group has come to the same conclusion, but the rules and the layout of the rules, after reading them, is not the only issue. My group has 8 players (10 at times). Five of us have bookshelves with every PF1 hardcover made on them, and many of the softcovers and adventure paths.

For us, it's a love of PF1 and an economic choice. Sure the PF2 rules may be free on an SRD, and that won't cost us a thing, but we like PF1, and we've made an investment in the PF1 rulebooks that we aren't willing to overlook. It's that simple really.

Economic impact and utility is a real thing for us as well.

However, I know a lot of people are excited about it, and I hope it does well for Paizo, because at the end of the day, even though it's not for me, I ultimately want Paizo to be successful.

To echo others, nope. My group is looking forward to it.... aside from some wonky wording everybody likes it mostly.

Maybe its a brand loyalty thing? My group rotates games through different systems - Deadlands, Shadowrun, Rogue Trader.

So perhaps because we have less of an attachment to any one ruleset, the changes don't bug us as much? While more dedicated/conservative tables are the ones rebelling against the drastic changes?

Not saying anybody's opinions are wrong or right, just wondering if there's a pattern.

In some cases, you just know what you like and don't see a reason to change? For me and my group, it's that simple.

No morale issue here. My group has a total of 10 players, and only one has expressed any interest in PF2 at all. We're not even doing the playtest, although part of that is we just started an AP, and are slated to have another member of the group run another AP when that's done. Reaction after reading a good portion of the rules released yesterday only confirmed our lack of interest. We went from 1e ADnD to PF basically, after an ill-fated dip into 4e in between that was overwhelmingly disappointing. We went back to 1e ADnD for a bit, but then went to PF1, which is what we love. I think part of it too for us (aside from the fact that we're all older, and yes, know what we like, but I will emphasize that we're happy when people find what works for them, we're not the sort of older gamers that will tell you that you're doing it wrong, we like our hobby, and we like when people find their fun) is the sheer number of PF1 products we've all bought, and that was one of the things that kept us from buying wholly into 3.0/3.5 was we all owned all the 1e ADnD stuff and didn't want to spend anymore money since we had something we liked. PF1 came along, same thing. I've got a bookshelf full of all the PF1 hardcovers, they serve me well, and the other members of my group do as well, and honestly, we like it. I'm glad other people are liking what they see in PF2, but we just aren't interested. There's nothing wrong with that, and I hope Paizo does well with their release, but we've got all we need to keep playing PF1.

My group generally does point buy (20 points) or we roll, 4d6 dropping the lowest one, nine times, take the best six. Generally depends on what we are doing. If we're doing a converted old campaign (Greyhawk, FR, Lankhmar or Dragonlance) we tend to roll, since that's the spirit of the earlier versions. For APs and Pathfinder oriented modules, etc, we use the point buy.

For our group CLW wands are not a problem at all. In fact, since our current group only has an inquisitor and a witch for healing options, they are a must. We've never experienced a problem with them.

My entire group is sticking with PF1E. We're happy with the rule set, and see no reason to change. Never mind that most of us own every 1E hardcover, and we have endless years worth of AP and original adventures to run, we're fine. We don't see any reason to change since we like 1E.

My current game also lacks a Divine caster. The players have two people who can do healing magic, though (a Witch and an Occultist).

This is my current game too, we are doing Hell's Vengeance and we have an Inquisitor and a witch. If we didn't have wands of CLW, we would literally sit around for days waiting on natural healing, or we'd simply refuse to fight something until we were ready. We wouldn't be as cautious if we had a cleric in the party.

We played Reign of Winter with a Druid and a Ranger as the only divine casters, and had the ranger and druid not had those wands, we'd have never survived.

I know with PF1, there are rules to continue playing past 20th level provided, not sure where they are listed, but they are there, because my monthly group uses them. I'm currently running a group that is 26th level with 3 mythic tiers, so I would have to imagine that optional rules for that will be provided somewhere in PF2 at some point. There are plenty of us that don't cap our campaigns at 20th level.

bookrat wrote:

Crayon wrote:

While I'm sure there are as many reasons for groups abandoning APs as there are groups playing the things, I would think that the fact they're supposed to take 2-3 years to complete is probably a much greater contributor to why many people never finish them.

They are? I thought they were supposed to take six months to complete, and my group was just slow.

Release of one book per month seems to suggest they expect people to finish each book in a month (or at least within 4ish session of play).

I'm fine with being wrong on that, it's just the assumption I've always had.

There's no way anyone's finishing an AP in six months - well, I guess if you played all weekend you could get it done, but not with any form of normal play density. 2-3 years seems more likely.

2-3 years? My group just finished the Hardcover Crimson Throne, I was gming, in 13 months. We play once a week, 4.5 hours per session. We thought 13 months was slow, and there were a few unscripted side treks. I figure the average AP takes 12-18 months, if you play once a week. We did Reign of Winter in 12 months, and Rise of the Runelords in 14. Maybe we play longer than an average group does once a week though, not sure about that.

Alvah wrote:

Not having read all of the playtest blogs or posts, one question I have, especially about these skill feats, they work the same for npcs too, I assume?

Or are npcs going to be watered down a bit?

Depends on what you mean by NPCs.

You can, by the PF2 rules, build an NPC with the PC creation rules using an Ancestry, Background, and Character Class, the whole thing. If you do that, then yes, they get Skill Feats in precisely this way.

You can also build an NPC with the monster creation rules (this probably being the vague equivalent of using an NPC Class). If you do this, the evidence is that they will be simplified comparatively, and may not have much in the way of Skill Feats (though they probably also could have a few for specific reasons).

So it depends.

Ah, then if I run the playtest, I'll do what I do with my NPCs now, build them as PCs, same rules, etc. I never understood that and neither did my players (a few who also gm and build their npcs the same way).

Not having read all of the playtest blogs or posts, one question I have, especially about these skill feats, they work the same for npcs too, I assume?

Or are npcs going to be watered down a bit?

... I am so confused by people who seem to be acting as if they're forced to play high level games when they seem to have issues with high level gameplay. Especially when it's so easy to avoid.

I concur, I mean the GM can remove/add as it suits the campaign they are running, and in my case, sometimes I advise my players that it's going to be a slow progression, and we won't be going beyond level 10 or 11, or that we will be running e6. I mean, it's a rules set and a set of tools, it's not set in stone, GMs are free to design the campaigns they want, and impose limits. My group has 9 players, 3 of us share the gm chair on a rotating basis, and there are differences in the way the three of us run games, and since we discuss it with as a group first, that always works for us.

I wonder how this structure affects multiclassing so that it does not lag behind in power level while also not becoming the de facto Go To solution for minmaxer builds

I too am very curious about this. It's one of the things I am really looking forward to seeing the rules for.

My group successfully completed it.

We had a

gnome druid
human barbarian
human inquisitor (witch hunter)
human fighter
human rogue
elf wizard

It was quite the amazing campaign.

Worst I ever had was the stereotypical 'Me v. party' GM that felt if he wasn't trying to kill us all at every encounter, he wasn't doing something right.

Just wanted to declare victory for my players in the hardcover version of the AP. We finished the game last Saturday after roughly a year of struggling to take down Ileosa and save Korvosa. The battle was suitably epic and only one character was killed during the final battle.

The boards were always a great help when I was stumped on how to go forward. Thanks Paizo for a great path and thanks to you guys for the help.

Time to change my avatar to the most significant NPC of my next path!

Awesome! I wrapped mine up a few weeks ago, it took my group a little under a year to complete the AP, and the group had no permanent casualties, although a couple of folks did have to get resurrected during the later stages of the campaign.

They supported Cressida Croft as the new queen, and the citizens and nobility agreed, so in my Golarion I run, it's now Queen Cressida I of Korvosa!

So excited for this. As a person who GMs a lot, and who is sticking with 1E, this is a great release for me, and I've been looking forward to something like this for a long time.

My group figured out who Blackjack was pretty quickly, and they weren't really that interested in him. They agreed to give him his items back when they found them and rescued him, but they also stated to him that if he was retiring, then they would be better served with the items. No one wanted to be his successor, and eventually they pretty much ignored him.

I successfully just finished running this campaign with my group, and Laori became an integral part of the group, they loved her so much. She was so upbeat and fun, and I played her absolutely bubbling over with happiness and enthusiasm, that every time in the story where she was given an out to leave the group, they asked her to stay. Over the course of the adventure, she finally had friends, real friends, and that spurred her conversion from Zon Kuthon to Pharasma, which was fun to play out. My group has already said if I reconvene this group of pcs for a higher level adventure, they want Laori to join them.

As others have said, there's nothing stopping anyone from character generation the old fashioned way, and that's what my group will do if we decide to play the new version. We've always rolled dice for stats, no matter what version of the game, and there's no reason to stop that now. From what I understand there will be some rules or a notation on dice rolling for stats.

Alvah wrote:

Wait, wouldn't the first step in character creation be rolling your scores, then picking the ancestry, etc?

This is the playtest. It would be bad if they got lots of feedback from players saying the class was too weak because of a terrible stat roll.

Rules for rolled stats will show up in the final version as an option, though.

Ah, well, that's interesting. My group always rolls, so if we decide to play this version, I'm sure we will go directly to rolling like always. Interesting.

Wait, wouldn't the first step in character creation be rolling your scores, then picking the ancestry, etc?