Appletree's page

I think the last year of running PF2 has been the most fun I've had with a TTRPG. Combat is very tactical and I find it fun, the players have plenty of options, and it's very welcoming for homebrew that doesn't break the system due to how modular everything is.

I do find it interesting that they get enhanced focus recovery as part of their automatic progression. I quite like that.

Oh right also, for morale, can do that at certain events and point loss thresholds, face an infiltration-style complication.

I think maybe like maybe you split it into two sections: preparing for battle, and battle itself.

Preparing for battle I think could work well if done kind of like the infiltration examples, gaining you a bunch of bonuses or tokens you can cash in on the day of the fight (although maybe recruiting does just build up some other scale, which you use as a health bar later on), although you should probably put a harsher timeline on it. Depending on the feel you're going for, you could make the rounds take way longer, like months or years (although I imagine that one is thematically way better for things like playing the invading empire or an interplanar army).

Like your listed options there would be pretty good examples for this. You could also implement several ways For recruiting soldiers. Say like, maybe if you conscript a bunch but crit fail the check they might turn against you at an inopportune moment, or cause other difficulties. You could even make the different ways have different DCs, so while forcing people to join you is way riskier than making them want to join, the DC is also lower. Drilling, etc. would definitely be a good way to get tokens you can cash in during battle to change how it's going (so e.g. the other side messes the army up with a dragon, but the player is like "We trained for this" and cashes it in for a reroll).

For the combat itself, I think maybe the way to do it is either split every player into running their own squad, or give them alternatives like a sabotage mission if they'd prefer to be helping the fight in other ways. If army size was determined by points in the previous step, have it count down in conflict when checks are failed, but the other side count down when checks succeed.

The Weave05 wrote:

So excited for this book! I happen to have a session coming up where the PCs will be engaging in naval combat - does there happen to be any section that addresses rules on how to best handle that?

The section on vehicles is a minimalist solution - basically a pared-down and simplified version of the PF1 vehicle rules, meant to span the gamut of vehicles from chariots to warships to alchemically-powered juggernaughts. As such, you will find no accounting for wind speed, tactics in naval combat or individual crew-based skill checks where the whole party can contribute to success.

There are several very good solutions for naval combat amongst PF1 third-party publishers. Their only drawback is going too far into minutiae, IMHO.

So for any naval combat you're going to plan, you have three options:
- keep it highly abstract
- have all "naval combat" situations resolved via boarding actions
- invent your own system to fill in the blanks.

For the last option, the victory points system might be able to cover some?

Spells are a good baseline, especially for constant or at will spells that might just be thematic. Like say, tidal surge for a creature that tries to drown people, silence for a creepy monster that never makes a sound, or say an action or reaction approximating the effects of secret page for a haunted book that pretends to be a regular book until combat starts.

For what it's worth, I think you can also pull some fun tricks with the mechanical tables given etc. E.g. I did something like the following for an engineering-themed dragon in my setting:

Craft missile (One action) The dragon assembles one missile. If she wishes, she may then add it to her armour as a free action. She may store up to three missiles.
Fire missile (One action) If the dragon crafted a missile with her previous action, she may fire the missile. (missile is statted vaguely similarly to a fireball spell, but also does piercing damage from the shrapnel)
Missile salvo (Two actions) The dragon fires all stored missiles.

This used the table of what should be able to be done every round as AOE and what should be possible every few rounds and I'm fairly happy with how it turned out thematically.

There's similar advice on how to handle things like attacks that heal the creature, which is also an easy thing to roll into thematics.

All this waiting is gonna make me perish.

Monster and hazard creation rules

Thanks for adding that, I forgot where to find it for a moment.

I definitely think it needs some more stuff adding though.
[spoilers="Comparison with lich"]
The lich comes out overall a bit stronger than this, with higher HP and resistances. It also notably uses the extreme value for its top skill (+28) and spell save DC (36), and a midpoint between high and extreme for spell attack (+26), and the moderate value for its attack mod (+24). To some degree this is because of me intentionally choosing the lower suggested values, but I can't say I can see why the reason for the effective HP variation.[/spoiler]

For what it's worth, a lich with the gnoll features as highlighted above would probably serve wonderfully well in most situations for your party here at least.

For the proposed variants I gave above, I'll confess I do like the idea of an aberrant gnoll gish. For that I'd probably propose using the magical striker roadmap, a bunch of touch spells, and a constant effect of tentacular limbs.

So, let's go with a gnoll caster. Maybe, challenging but not a boss fight on their own, gotta give the baddie some buddies. So maybe level +2 or +3, which would be level 12 here.

First, we wanna look at what traits every other gnoll has.

Then, we just need to look at how the monster guide advises building a caster.

So, let's put this together.

Probs gonna get ninja'd due to my slow typing, but still, may as well post!

Elite or weak work for one level changes but from what I can tell they do not work well for simulating greater level changes. Stacking elite for instance can quickly leave you with very silly stats, like an AC that outstrips a lot of things at that monster's level.

What you'd want to do, as best I can tell, is make a new monster from scratch using similar aspects to the existing monster. So, just a sec, I'm gonna crack open the monster creation rules and my bestiary to check how you'd do it here!

It seems like a good choice if you know you're dealing with large numbers of folks less competent than you. If you roll enough times, you will eventually fail, so it's useful in those situations where you absolutely do not want to alert anybody. Also possibly a fairly funny choice for somebody in perpetual full armour.

Something like an arrow slit in a wall would effectively make you untargetable. That's kind of why arrow slits were invented. They let you attack from safety.

Successfully laying siege to a castle is in fact nigh impossible, which is why most historical armies chose to cut off supply lines and starve the occupants instead.

For what it's worth, the level 16 instant fortress item only grants standard cover from its arrow slits, although this can be waved off as being due to an item balance concern.

Arrow slits along the lower battlements and crenelations at the top provide standard cover to anyone within the fortress

Um, wall of text incoming.

I'm really, really enjoying it. I think it plays easy, is easy enough to customise, and I actually enjoy playing pretty much all of the monsters I throw at my players.

For what it's worth, I've only been a GM so far, with my only previous GMing experience being an accelerated level 1-20 D&D 5e campaign (although my only long term experience as a player was with shadowrun 5e). I'd like to be a player at some point, but I think this system is so fun to GM that I don't really feel the need to any time soon.

Overall with my group the choice of PF2 was a little controversial at first, as while two of the players have been huge fans of the new system, two of them were fairly sad to be leaving D&D 5e. Both of those have since changed their opinion a bit, and while they still like 5e they quite like PF2 as well. The fifth player plays a little less regularly and it's a little harder to gauge his opinions clearly, but it's my understanding that he is completely fine with the system.

Personally I haven't had many issues with the system, with those I have had being small enough to forget, with the exception of hero points. I'm fine with their mechanics, I just don't like them being tied into a meta reward thing.

As for house rules, most of mine were to tailor it to my own setting. So I changed the ancestries and heritages a bit, replaced the pantheon with my own, and added some new advanced weapons (hello flamethrower!). I also let you get language and ancestry feat options from the plane you're from (multiplanar-focused setting) and some ancestry feat options from heritage. I also changed hero points to be a 3/day thing rather than 3/session, with it being a sort of in-setting force of fate thing some NPCs also have. I did make a couple of other changes though.

1) I made it so that background lore skills scale automatically, like with additional lore. For what it's worth I'm also letting players build their own backgrounds for now.

2) I gave every ancestry a fixed bonus feature, which is roughly on par with an ancestry feat or heritage.

3) I ditched half-elf and half-orc as fixed heritages, and mixed them up with adopted ancestry mechanics to let people play mix-and match with different ancestries, where they have an excuse.

4) This is probably the most disruptive change I've made, but I made ancestry feats a subset of general feat and replaced ancestry feat levels with general feat levels. Ancestry feats are usually better, but I'm happy with how it's playing and general feats always exist as a niche pick to round out a build.

Personally at least I think the system handles homebrewing fairly well, so I confess I'm still pumped for the GM's guide.

Off a cliff! Off a cliff!

Surely this should go in the homebrew section?

Am dumb. This is an actual spell.

I think it's because it's a 2 handed weapon that does 1d8 and has 4 traits: it mirrors spiked chain that way. simple, martial and advanced is more about how the mechanics match up to other weapons than how hard it is to use.

I believe spiked chain has three functional traits? As do most 2 handed d8 weapons in core (curve blade is an exception, but forceful seems to variably take up more room anyway).

So, Bind Soul is thematically a pretty cool spell. You yank away some dying sucker's spirit, stick it in a pretty gem, and your victim gets to spend the afterlife as a necklace.

It seems to me though that all these polished-up black sapphires would make pretty great magical reagents, either for the crafting of items (e.g. variant staffs), or in rituals for the creation of sapient undead.

We don't exactly have item creation rules yet, but I feel like we can maybe make some educated guesses as to approximate level and price, and I'm kind of curious to see what people manage to cook up.

So, with that in mind, me first with a ghost in a bottle.

This book sounds really fun, and it's always nice to read about RPG pantheons, but how much is in here that would be useful for somebody running their own setting?

I've been waiting for this to come out so I can cannibalise a bunch of stuff for my own gods, but I'm just wondering if it's worth getting for all the example weapons, avatar forms, items, etc. and well as new domains and spells, or if I'm better off waiting a few weeks or whatever for it to pop up on archives.

The issue could be solved by instead stating a move action. As the current wording doesn't specify striding up to speed, even a step-worth of striding should currently trigger it anyway.

Damage feels a bit high for me currently, but that's purely a gut feeling. I haven't done any calculation.

Surely this should go in the homebrew section?

Oh, fun fun fun.

Deffo got to add some ideas here. In the meantime, it's a bit rough around the edges (i.e. I should probably give the "Drain Dry" action a very small benefit, e.g. a temp boost to stuff) but it freaks one of my players out at least. My take on a chupacabra, from a corrosive hellscape in my setting.

I am so looking forwards to doing this with my own deities, so much here that looks fun.

Feros wrote:

Ravingdork wrote:

...

Spiritual/Material (Spiritual and Physical) = ???

May I suggest Animist Magic?

Possibly magic heavily involving constructs.

Animist is the name I did run with, and I've gone and made a spreadsheet with the two hypothetical lists on. I need to customise them a little but I have to say, I really like the mental/vital list.

The "Animist" list seems pretty destructive and in my lore I've gone and tied it into psychopomps, the dead, and certain types of undead.

If anybody is interested, these are the "raw" lists you get from disassembling the existing lists and then cobbling them back together. Let me know if I've made any mistakes.

Sorry about the super ugly format I've pasted it in.

Note: Every list has its own unique spells or otherwise breaks the pattern just a little. I'd advise removing ones that don't fit the thematic, adding a couple (e.g. while it doesn't fully fit outside of "vital" I might add harm to the Material/Spirit list to help the undead associated with it), or making a couple of unique spells (e.g. summon skeleton or zombie, to stick with the undead theme).

Ravingdork wrote:

...

Spiritual/Material (Spiritual and Physical) = ???

May I suggest Animist Magic?

Possibly magic heavily involving constructs.

Animist is the name I did run with, and I've gone and made a spreadsheet with the two hypothetical lists on. I need to customise them a little but I have to say, I really like the mental/vital list.

The "Animist" list seems pretty destructive and in my lore I've gone and tied it into psychopomps, the dead, and certain types of undead.

Using manouvers, intimidate, taking cover, pulling a disappearing act. Toss some alchemicals if you're feeling rich. Mobility becomes very important when enemies have sneak attack, too.

Basically, to have players play interestingly, you need interesting enemies. If all your NPCs do is stand still and hack, players will respond in kind. If they kick an open barrel of oil on their head from the upper floor and light it up, someone might think to drop and roll.

I had an encounter set in a warehouse once. A bunch of criminals were auctioning weaponry a bunch of gangs, but they'd threatened some of the gangs into showing up. The players helped remove the threat the first group of criminals were holding over a gangs head, and sneaked along to the auction as part of that gang. TL;DR the druid kicked out some fire spells and intentionally hit some alchemical stuff to set the auctioneers on fire, and all the gangs descended into a free for all. By the end, most of the map was on fire or covered in toxic smog.

Fun times.

Skirmishing enemies or unusual terrain can help. While I like combat anyways in this edition, the most memorable fights have definitely been the ones where the players have planned around stuff.

E.g. some of my earlier encounters in my campaign involved an urban area, with trees next to buildings, 10 to 20-foot wide roads and alleyways, and groups of enemies on the ground with support on the rooftops. The martials climbed the buildings to beat up some of the archers and bosses, using the trees to make it easier, while the spellcasters did stuff like wall of wind and blasting spells to keep themselves safe on the ground.

I wouldn't be too surprised if some of this sort of thing gets handled with rituals, similar to animate dead or animate object, with a crafting secondary check. With a lenient GM who's comfortable using the monster creation rules, this is pretty easy to homebrew right now as long as the player doesn't push too hard for specifics on how things work. Even then, you could just make bonus complexity on the creature have increasing cost. E.g. maybe requiring unusual components/excess weapons to be used as additional components in the ritual.

It's also possible this could get handled in a different way, but right now this stands out as something really not that hard to incorporate.

Was anything mentioned regarding creature creation?

John Lynch 106 wrote:

Neo2151 wrote:

I'm curious - why is the idea of resurrection magic any more or less fantastical than any other magic in the setting, in that it needs to be so much more rare or restricted?

Or is it actually just the unpleasant thought that you think players popping up again and again from death eliminates tension?
Can your players' party actually afford that? Why are you showering them in diamonds, etc?

Is this a legit problem at tables or is it armchair math gone crazy?

It's got nothing to do with players (hence why I've already worked out a couple of ways to give PCs access to both forms) but about the setting. Most fantasy stories don't have person dying = go to the local priest and get a raise dead. The only one I can think of where death is that easily overcome is Wheel of Time: ** spoiler omitted **

So I don't think there's anything antagonistic about it towards players.

I think Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone also had it be fairly commonish once their big magic whatsits in the setting got moving, and were similarly ... icky.

Though that could be a fun thing to play with in a setting, actually. Totally reverse the rarity of the resurrection ritual, make it dirt common, but something the priesthood and devotees of the evilest evil god to ever evil have access to because their god's portfolio is death, or breaking causality or some such. They don't get exterminated as a religion because, well, kings and rich people and high-profile adventurers want to be brought back from the dead.

So the party can most definitely bring each other back as often as they like, it just costs them owing the bad guys a solid every time they do. Infernal contracts on tap.

Causality breaking sounds like a really fun way of handling resurrection.

My setting has one of the main (less pleasant) afterlives directly connected to the prime plane, which puts me in a weird scenario.

Resurrection spells (I'm probably only having the actual ritual with easy access) are preferred, as it's the only way you actually come back to life properly alive. People in the afterlife tend to actually save up money to pay for their own revival, but practically speaking most people never achieve it or take years to do so.

For people unwilling or unable to wait, you can break out of the land of the dead, either by getting lucky, or by actually being strong or competent enough to get past the diabolic guards, cross the wastes, and reach the land of the living. Anybody who tries this method ends up undead or in a weird in-between though, instead of actually being alive. There are a lot of refugees from the land of the dead, but practically speaking a player character is only coming back via this method if the player is a) up for it and b) the PC is actually able to pull it off.

At the end of the day though, even the rich and powerful in my game would prefer to avoid the risk. The afterlife isn't a pleasant place, and no resurrection is guaranteed to work.

Ngl stupefied is probably the condition that makes me drool, just because of the caster shutdown options.

You can use three spells in one turn if you have one action spells, as mentioned above. Generally if something is only once per turn, the rules call it out either explicitly or via a trait.

A good example of a three spell turn would be a high level bard with the following:

Inspire Courage, True Target, Shield

While elves and dark elves in my setting already look drastically different, I was honestly pretty happy when I saw the bestiary drow.

Because they reminded me of the starfinder ones which, I just thought looked really cool.

What deadman said. I am super hyped for how demons work now.

As for the main topic. I remember I liked the idea of shocking grasp on a tentacular limbs gish.

I've been running with a homebrew thing sort of like this for a while, albeit slightly different and with a short list of other changes to ancestries and ancestry feats.

Deadmanwalking wrote:

Damage was meaningless outside combat past very low levels in PF1 just due to Wands of CLW.

At least this version of being healed between each encounter takes significant time, and as levels rise significant character investment.

I was always hoping Paizo would fix the pricing on cure wands or make an adjustment to wands functions. I was not wanting a whole new system.

New with medicine it is the same issue but characters are "hiding" for hours to cure up after combat. It fixed nothing just changed the problem. IMO

I mean I suppose it depends what sort of games you play in, but as a non-module player I don't really consider that a problem. In my games I don't really have a fixed plot so tend to change what things happen based on what time it is and what has previously happened, by a lot. At least for my group "do we heal up or do we solve the current problem now" is a pretty reasonable trade-off to have available.

Personally my main issue with wand based healing is the thematics. I'd rather run a game where medical attention, even implausibly good medical attention, is the primary way of fixing people up, over a game where you primarily pay money for healing.

Personally I'm pretty happy with medicine being as strong as it is.

There is no such list at this time. I'm hoping we can get one into Gamemastery Guide, but the more folks who ask for them, the better.

That sounds great, I'd love that sort of resource.

I've been running a game for a while now in a Very homebrew setting, previously in a somewhat homebrewed version of the playtest (just adapting my ancestry options etc. to the final version so I can actually run a game this weekend).

The setting itself consists largely of a thriving multiplanar metropolis, with more exotic planes being the result of a war between the gods (also homebrew) and the all-consuming world serpent. Probably the most notable bit about the planes is that all of them were originally parallel worlds thanks to the actions of the players in my previous campaign.

For the most part the actual setting style is modern or even a more upbeat variant of cyberpunk, but with all the technology replaced with arcane magic.

The actual content of the game so far has varied from a ritual in the form of a concert (ran by a well known group of travelling occultists), to a diabolic infestation in a small neighbourhood, to gang warfare, to bioterrorists, and being interrogated by a megacorp.

The current top runner for antagonist is a cleric of the world serpent who has been organising bioterror attacks and peddling weirdly high tech wares from my equivalent of the afterlife (read: sort of like dark sun but the sand is acidic and there happens to be skeletal sea-life swimming through the sands of the dried-up oceans).

I figure weapon and armor feats are on the way. PF1 had a feat near the end that I missed that allowed different damage types weapon versatility

This seems like an interesting sort of thing to add as an option, in that you could have a feat that adds traits to weapons.

I think you could either riff on the level 1 human feat Unconventional Weaponry, wherein you choose a Martial weapon you're proficient in (trained with all martial weapons as a pre-req) and you add a trait from a list, excluding some which are valued as multiple traits (e.g. IIRC forceful is the main example here).

I think a more fun take on this might be to play on the level 6 Fighter feat Advanced Weapons training and make an option for each weapons group. E.g.

1) Versatile Swordsmaster: When you wield or attack with a Martial Sword, it gains the versatile (Piercing) trait, or versatile (Slashing) if it is a piercing weapon. If it already has this trait, then it instead gains versatile (bludgeoning).

2) Flying Spear: When you wield or attack with a Martial Spear, it gains the Thrown (20 ft.) trait. If it already has the Thrown trait, then you may increase the range increment (e.g. by 10 feet).

Fiendish Resistance looks like two pretty good ancestry feats rolled into one... and also doesn't make any sense. I don't get why having horns would make your claws hit harder, nor do I understand how they'd interact with a character that gets horns elsewhere (like an Animal Instinct Barbarian). Seems like it should be its own gore attack similar to the bite that Demonic Sorcerers can get.

Yup. Horns are themselves a heritage and would be handled as a new natural weapon, e.g. the goblin jaws. I think a d6 piercing unarmed brawling group attack with deadly d8 could be a reasonable way to go.

The fire resist is fine but should be bundled with a weaker secondary effect, such as a small number of bonus HP (e.g. +4) at level one, or an exploration/terrain interacting ability like shifting hot environments to seem less bad for the tiefling.

Supreme sorcery I feel also goes massively against the careful balancing of the rest of the system.

Sorry, there was supposed to be a “have” after Composites. I had more written up but deleted because i saw you were just comparing composite vs non so it doesn't make as much sense, what I get for writing just after waking up.

Ah, no worries.

Appletree wrote:

swoosh wrote:

Appletree wrote:

Takamorisan wrote:

IMO all blades should have the versatile, buff Greatsword with another trait if you dont want to be at the same ground as bastard sword. Most of the two handed are underperforming compared to the Greatpickaxe

This makes the bastard sword tread on the longsword niche.

The bastard sword is quadruple the price of the longsword. Maybe that should count for something.

Nobody complains about composite longbows invalidating longbows by getting an extra free trait.

Composite longbows being an upgrade for cash is something I personally don't like. I prefer approx balancing trait count by weapon tier rather than by cash. If a weapon is expensive I'd rather that be more due to an exceptionally handy combo of traits that straight up having more.

Composites the Strength requirement from Propulsive, though it's easier to use than 1e's version.

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what your phrasing is intended to mean here.

I don't actually have a serious with composite bows and non-composite bows both existing, as both serve different characters. The thing I'm not a massive fan of is the price difference for something which is a buff for a large proportion of characters. That's all.

The PF bastard sword should simply have stats of the Katana. As such it doesn't compete with the "great-sword" aka the real life Two-handed sword/Slaughter-sword/Montante. The Katana stats feels very appropriate it was well executed by Paizo.

Maybe I would replace the Deadly Trait with the Versatile (B) to represent using the pommel, quillions etc as club/war-hammer. It also differentiates the Bastard Sword from the Katana ever so slightly

NGL I'm still a little internally smug that the final version of the katana closely resembles how I homebrewed it before the full version of PF2 came out the only real difference is that I gave it the monk trait for anime nonsense.

EDIT: I didn't give it versatile though. I actually kind of think versatile is overkill here.

Katapesh Fried Chicken wrote:

Game mechanics aside, why is there even a Bastard Sword in the game? It's literally a Longsword IRL. They're the same weapon...

The same reason as most weapon oddities- Gary Gygax had a rather bad book about medieval weapons, and then mixed in some movie fight logic in the mix. And everything was grandfathered from there.

Seriously though? Versatile doesn't seem worth considering in balance terms. The only damage type combo that would be 'strong' would be slashing/bludgeoning- unless something has changed in the monster list, those are the only ones that matter in most situations.

Having some extra piercing doesn't affect much. I somewhat believe that piercing damage is a grand fathered nerf from an older D&D edition (it is on the ever powerful bows, the rogue martial weapons tend to do piercing, and a lot of simple weapons are piercing- although some bludgeoning is in there too because SKELETONS).

Piercing has a major, albeit niche, advantage of working far far better around water.

Appletree wrote:

Perpdepog wrote:

I was mildly bugged by the fact that every element dealt bludgeoning damage

I was like transiently bugged but then I remembered that the traits can potentially make a massive difference with interactions. Waterball affects certain monsters in a very different way to Earthball.

"Go, elemental sorcerer, I choose you!"

"My name is Tavrin, you know."

"Use TACKLE!"

"..." *sigh*

"I have a +3 to unarmed."

"I don't care."

Appletree wrote:

Takamorisan wrote:

IMO all blades should have the versatile, buff Greatsword with another trait if you dont want to be at the same ground as bastard sword. Most of the two handed are underperforming compared to the Greatpickaxe

This makes the bastard sword tread on the longsword niche.

The bastard sword is quadruple the price of the longsword. Maybe that should count for something.

Nobody complains about composite longbows invalidating longbows by getting an extra free trait.

Composite longbows being an upgrade for cash is something I personally don't like. I prefer approx balancing trait count by weapon tier rather than by cash. If a weapon is expensive I'd rather that be more due to an exceptionally handy combo of traits that straight up having more.

Does Speak With the Dead even exist anymore? I can't find it on aon.

But regardless, marking it uncommon will make it less likely for malefactors to know that this is a thing which can be done and in order to prevent it they should take the head, smash the jaw, put needles in certain places, etc.

Diagetically it seems like "Speaking with the recently deceased" is the sort of thing religious orders would want to control access to since it's the sort of tool that could be seen as disrespectful contextually. So they'd only let people who they believe they can trust in on it.

Talking corpse, page 376. Interestingly, Undead sorcs can get it.

I was mildly bugged by the fact that every element dealt bludgeoning damage

I was like transiently bugged but then I remembered that the traits can potentially make a massive difference with interactions. Waterball affects certain monsters in a very different way to Earthball.

IMO all blades should have the versatile, buff Greatsword with another trait if you dont want to be at the same ground as bastard sword. Most of the two handed are underperforming compared to the Greatpickaxe

This makes the bastard sword tread on the longsword niche.