Arcaian's page

It's that several groups realized that being little s*+@s and getting killed all the time was bad and perhaps those few goblins who DID NOT do that had something going for them.

It's also not like all goblins were always presented as being monolithically evil antisocial creatures; it's just that the Varisian (and Goblinblood War) goblins that got the most focus were pretty close to that. Non-evil, happily-in-society goblins were canon in PF1 within a year or two of the system first being published, but people tend to remember the Rise of the Runelord goblins more than others.

I wouldn't count three or one issue adventures as AP, personally, they are more like Adventure Driveways or Adventure Back Alleys. Too short to be an interesting story, too long for a one shot and to be honest a waste of printing material.

But I'm just old, yearning for the good old days, so don't take me serious

Having run, played, or heavily prepped 12 of the 24 pre-PF2 APs, I cannot name a single one of these 6-book APs that didn't have at least one book that just didn't need to be in there. There are some storylines which justify 6-book APs (Wrath of the Righteous probably needed that much space, for example), but I think basically all of the pre-PF2 APs I'm familiar with could be put into 3-4 books without losing much of anything in their story.

ObligatoryHuman wrote:

I wonder if this is a sign of something to come for Pathbuilder.

Pathbuilder is already on the CUP that AON is being moved to. But if they’re this petty and shortsighted about AON and get away with this they might go after the CUP again like they did last time… my trust for Paizo is now at a real low.

Pathbuilder isn't on the Community Use Policy - it cannot be, as it is (partially) a paid product. That's why Pathbuilder doesn't have any Lost Omens-specific terminology - it has to rename a bunch of things. I'm pretty sure Pathbuilder is just using the ORC/OGL licenses to reference the rules free of any references to Paizo IP. AoN going to the CUP will still allow it to use Golarion lore, though there may need to be a rewording of some descriptions if they're currently taken directly from the book.

I'm confused on what is the difference between 2nd edition and the remaster branded books and which should I pick up?

For lines like the Lost Omens or Adventure Path lines, where the focus is more on lore/setting info/adventure content, get whichever ones are interesting for you. Most haven't been - and don't need to be - updated, and at worst there'll be a slight changing in terms used in the Remaster. For mechanically-focused books, like the Core Rulebook (now Player Core 1), or Advanced Player's Guide (now Player Core 2), get the Remastered books - it's the most modern version of PF2, and although they are overwhelmingly similar, the Remastered books are what you'll find in online tools, discussions, and expectations for what will be used in a new game for most players at this point.

It being Paizo, it's entirely possible that, as a nigh-all-powerful, irredeemably evil FEMALE character, she redeems herself and becomes a good guy [Sorshen, Nocticula, Arazni].

I don't think it's fair to put Arazni in the same category there - she was never in that category of "loved being evil, loved doing evil, willing did it for millenia". She was obviously being forced into her role, and resented it - both the evil forces putting her in that role, and the forces that were aligned against Geb but did nothing to rescue her. She's angry, she's resentful - but she was never, in my opinion, irredeemably evil. She was doing evil things in a terrible situation.

For an Age of Lost Omens, prophecy seems to still be quite reliable. . .

That is basically the crux of what is happening (and why the PCs need to stop the plan) in Stolen Fates, yeah.

The problem is most of the community has a history of playing D&D and don't share your view. In fact the core are players who resisted the changes from D&D3.5.

You are still missing that there are different people here. At the risk of stereotyping; Engineers, IT, Physics and Maths geeks were the core player base for a long time. They want a different game from the general public. Don't kill this game by trying to make it the same as everything else.

Throw me in as another one in the pile of "scientist who wants the game's quality-of-life to be improved by smoothing unnecessary complexities over". I truly think the changes in PF2 to make the game focused more on tactical choices makes the game far, far, far more interesting from an analytical perspective, and I think changes that simplify things that don't need to be complex allows for the game to focus its complexity in the parts that actually benefit from the complexity. I'm also in the group of people who have been here since the pf1 era who thinks Pathfinder still has way too much attachment to d&d's dogmas, and generally has been improving significantly as both d&d's dogmas are tossed aside and as the game has become increasingly focused on improving the gameplay. I did enjoy pf1 back in the day, but once I started exploring other tRPGs I realised that I basically only enjoyed character creation - the game was solved at character creation, you basically didn't have meaningful tactical decisions to be making past the first few levels. PF2 absolutely did the right thing and tossed out a lot of the complexity of the character-building minigame, instead focusing on the gameplay. I think there are still too many parts of the game where the gameplay could be improved if we were only willing to change things from the way they traditionally have been, and I hope these changes come in future developments/editions of the game.

I also really don't think those of us who were around in the PF1 era are the core of the Pathfinder playerbase in 2026, nevermind the 3.5 holdouts who formed the very start of Pathfinder's playerbase in 2008. By the time I'd joined PF1 halfway through its lifetime, those 3.x holdouts were already a clear sub-community. PF2 is far bigger than PF1 ever was, and many PF1 players didn't even make the transition to PF2. I think the next evolution of the game will make these more significant changes - there were many interesting ideas in the PF2 Playtest which were overturned by PF1 players who had attachments to the 3.x style of game, and who no longer are Paizo's core audience.

As I am trying to point out, the issue is that “how much time passes” does it take for a failed result to matter is subjective to the situation it is happening in. At best, these decisions would need to happen at the adventure writing level, not the default activity results level, and that it is ok to have situations where no amount of time is going to matter and then we can just skip the roll, rather than have to invent a consequence just because someone chose to roll.

I do think that if the PF3 - as this is far too big a change to really meaningfully try to include in PF2, outside of tweaking the failure conditions on a few standout offenders and trying to change adventure design - design wants to continue with the current style, at the very least the game should make it far more obvious when some mechanics are designed to be only relevant under encounter-mode time pressure, and that you should skip it if you're not in encounter mode. I think this would risk alienating quite a few people who find out that the game isn't designed to allow there to be an interesting consequence from picking the lock of a door in an infiltration without a guard being ~30 seconds away from you, but it's better than that being hidden and just leading to boring gameplay.

But while I do broadly disagree with your perspective, where I do think you are correct is that it is quite difficult to codify this into the rules of a game like PF2. Failing forward is very much dependent on the narrative. For the picklocking a door example, a consequence of failure could be:
- The obvious one - your lockpicking is unsuccessful, and you need more time to see if you can pull it off. This is only an interesting consequence when the time pressure applied to you is significant enough that you care about this.
- Something like the lock breaking and you being unable to get in this way without someone opening it from the other side. It's a fairly strong failure in response to the dice roll, but can be very fun - but if it's the centerpiece of the entire plan, it's going to disrupt things way more than you'd otherwise expect. If bluffing is a plausible way in, or there are other ways you could sneak in, or if you can afford to go loud but just don't want extra risk, it's an interesting consequence.
- Something like you opening the door, but leaving behind obvious evidence of specifically who broke in. It's a completely boring consequence if you're planning on an action that doesn't require anonymity, but if you're relying on it then it might be more interestingly harsh of a consequence than most other possibilities.
- You make enough noise that someone on the other side of the door comes to investigate. Interesting in many situations, but completely inappropriate in others - like if you're trying to pick a lock into a location that is uninhabited, but you're still being sneaky to avoid being seen getting into the location.
- You damage the lock, and you get through the door, but when the door closes behind you it jams shut, and you can't get back out the same way you came in without a massive amount of noise. An interesting consequence in a situation where you care about stealth on the way out!

I could go on for much longer, but I fear I'm belabouring my point. The point is that all of these are interesting, appropriate consequences to a failed attempt to pick the lock on a door. All of them have situations where they are either completely inappropriate or incredibly boring too. I think the game would be much more interesting if an appropriate choice from the above list was selected every time you failed to pick a lock. In a game where you can just say "on a failure, the attempt goes wrong, and the GM will tell you precisely what happens. On a critical failure, it goes really badly wrong." it's simple (though it relies on good GMing advice and improvisational GM skill to generate those interesting possibilities). How would you handle that in a game as mechanically specific as PF2? I don't think PF2 players would be super into the concept of the consequence being fully undefined and left to the GM. I'd be interested in the response to the failure being something like "you need more time to pick the lock, you damage the lock, you alert a nearby creature to your presence, or a similar outcome as determined by your GM". But the fundamental issue here is that failing forward requires narrative responsivity in the failure, which cannot be easily done with single set-in-stone consequences for a failed action, as PF2 currently does.

A couple of issues here.

Often the difference between Success and Failure just doesn't matter. There are many situations where time is not important. So as a generic rule it is problematic.

Because you can succeed on a failure suddenly your ability with the skill is not that important. It is perhaps whether you have the skill or not. So suddenly the wizard can become good enough at wrestling and the cleric at lock picking. What is the difference between a +2 and a +4 in this scenario? Are stats really that important anymore?

This is a different game. There are games that do this and they are valid and have their place. Go play those, don't destroy the uniqueness of this one by destroying it's core.

Why do we need to spoon feed our players and make it so easy for them. Failure sometimes is OK. Force them to think and adapt to challenges.

Kept to its simplest, the premise of this thread is that if a roll of the dice resolves as "you have no effect, but you can keep trying if you want. What do you do next?" then this is considered a substantially less interesting outcome than something happening in the narrative being told. Can you explain how this is avoiding failure? If failing to pick the lock results in the door's lock being broken and unable to be opened from this side no matter what, how is that less punishing than just asking someone to roll another 19 d20s until they succeed enough? Failing forward often - almost always if that's the tone the table wants, in my experience actually - can be more punishing to the characters than the more stagnant alternative, but it is more interesting for the players (unless they respond really badly to characters not always succeeding). I feel that's a much more interesting situation than nothing happening.

Likewise, when I play fantasy games, I generally prefer more archaic worldviews and morality. I understand that not everyone likes this, as you demonstrated with your example. But just as you defend your right to your own vision, I will also defend my right to a realistic, archaic world.

It really feels like a lot of your point here is getting into the common myth of progress - but there is not linear progress going from a worse world to a better world over time. A setting 300 years into our own planet's future should not guarantee that humanities morals have advanced well beyond what we currently experience, and if you use a setting of 1700s-era Earth, you'll find a tremendous variety of moral perspectives and worldviews across the planet. If you wanted to take more "modern" worldviews - acceptance of trans folks, abolition in response to slavery, anti-carceral justice systems, women's liberation, bodily autonomy, etc - there are plenty of examples across the world's history to point to.

I do think there's a fair criticism that going for classic fantasy aesthetics and tropes can clash with the desire to present these differing worldviews and moralities. The structures of a society will influence the worldviews of those present in the society, and there can be some odd moments of unintentional clashing from this in many settings that are combining classic fantasy tropes with a more "modern" morality. A highly authoritarian system of absolute monarchy combined with feudalism where the majority of people are owned as part of the land of their local lord will have impacts on the way this society views the world. It would be very strange to combine this society with a commonly-held worldview that placed significant respect on individual rights and the autonomy and freedom of all of the society's members. I think we should assume that fantasy settings can have a very wide variety of morals and worldviews, but that those should be a plausible result of the structures that impact the people holding those worldviews.

zimmerwald1915 wrote:

Arkat wrote:

If Paizo were really customer-focused, it seems to me they would occasionally gather some input on how things turned out when their customers played the APs and incorporate some of that into the lore.

Running surveys is expensive and unreliable, far simpler to anticipate and respond to market signals.

I wasn't suggesting a "survey."

If Paizo just created a specific email address and asked for folks to send them some interesting stories about an event in an AP, I'm sure they would get much more useful information than they might get from a card with a few check-boxes or a blank line or two with enough room for only one or two 14 word sentences on it.

Right now, they pick to canonize the outcomes of the APs that lead to the most interesting world state for Golarion to continue with, while still being a plausible ending to the story. Ending Ironfang Invasion with diplomacy was not the focus - or even discussed as a possibility - for the first 5 books of Ironfang Invasion, and I'd imagine the vast majority of tables in the AP killed her. The canon outcome is that she was talked down and the AP ended diplomatically, because that was a more interesting outcome for Golarion. That seems a significantly better outcome for the setting than them picking a very table-specific outcome from one group and implementing it - I would've been less satisfied if we ended up with the Onyx Vault in control of a small group of Nirmathi-supporting high level adventurers who are using it to terrorize Molthune, which seems like a pretty likely outcome if they were trying to use individual, interesting table experiences for the outcomes of APs.

It also runs the risk of being very disconnected from the established lore - like your suggestion of a new Hellknight order led by an incredibly powerful Hellknight as an outcome of Hell's Vengeance. Unless there's something I've not heard of, that is fully disconnected from the AP. It also is massively disconnected from existing Hellknight lore - you'd have all this lore about the Hellknights, their balance of power, their relationships, etc, which would be massively changed by the addition of a new, powerful order. It'd be far more interesting to me for that to happen in a dedicated Hellknight/Cheliax lore book where the whole point of the new organisation is to be a natural outcome of what has happened in the overall storytelling of the setting, not one table's specific events.

If you want your tables' events to be reflected in the canon of Golarion, playing PFS - reporting is collected on the outcomes of adventures, which informs the outcomes of these adventures collectively. You'll play a small role, but you will be contributing - and it'll even be to some pretty big events! The defeat of Krune and the freeing of Ranginori are both meaningful impacts on the setting, and people playing PFS at the time absolutely contributed to how those turned out.

James Jacobs wrote:

Unlike Bastion of Blasphemies, Vaultlines is not built to have a "built in" on ramp. Any 1st to 10th Adventure Path would work in theory, but there isn't one that's an obvious choice. Standard mode for higher level Adventure Paths, really.

And honestly, the idea that you have to play a PC from 1st to 10th level before you can play a higher level Adventure Path kinda does no favors to us publishing more high level adventure paths. It takes a long time to play through 10 levels of content, and we do want to keep publishing higher level stuff, so normalizing the idea of starting a new PC at higher than 1st level is perhaps a good goal here?

Not to poo-poo the idea of playing a PC from 1st to 20th—that is BY FAR my preferred method to do things, but... yeah. That takes time!

Got to give a little push-back here. Building level 10 characters from scratch is a big ask for a lot of players. Hence, having lead-in adventure paths is good for onboarding players into playing high level content adventure paths.

There are obviously enough low-level adventure paths out there to have a lead-in for any new level 11 - 20 adventure path and only the most dedicated group imaginable would be able to have played them all already, and there will be new low-level adventure paths coming out in the future as well. But not having any connective tissue, even if it were only suggestions on how to connect the stories, presents a problem.

Dedicating one or two pages to giving hints how to connect existing low-level adventure paths to a new high-level adventure path would, IMO, be a huge help to a lot of groups to already plan to continue their campaigns with a published new high-level AP. Putting those two pages into the Player's Guide would also avoid the problem of them eating space in the printed book, since Player's Guides are only digital and hence the page count is kinda immaterial (aside from the work hour requirement to put them together).

I do think pointing out connections with existing APs is absolutely a good thing to do in the player's guide, but I'm also excited that there are some APs doing completely new things! Like I think I read that Vaultlines is assuming you're Darklands natives, which is really cool to me - treating the Darklands as a place that people come from, not only as a place where surface-dwellers come to explore mysterious occurrences. If that means that there's no good tie-in without breaking that expectation, I'm OK with that too - it lets you do new sorts of stories, and sometimes those stories are a bit too niche to have both a 1-10 and 11-20 AP dedicated to them.

And the people who encountered Drow in Second Darkness were all huffing paint? Or the other Drow encountered on the surface in a multitude of adventure paths?

This is still the one decision by Paizo regarding lore I like the least. Yes, it's legally understandable, but lore-wise it made everyone I told about it, who are players who encountered Drow on multiple occasions in multiple AP's, go "This makes absolutely zero sense", which is exactly correct.

I think it is pretty clear that this is the most substantial retcon that was required during the OGL crisis, and that it will require some greater contextualization for past events including Drow if they're revisited. Obviously Second Darkness makes no sense right now - we don't know how it will be retconned when/if it needs to be addressed. It's a fairly large and hard retcon - it's going to need to change some things that wouldn't make sense to try and revisit in one big list during the OGL crisis or anything like that. In the meantimes, it's not like you can't keep using drow in your games - the drow in AV are still drow in my campaign there.

I do think they did go a fair bit over the top with it especially when they kept Kobolds near enough the same I get they couldent keep drow as drow but no reason they couldent have changed them all to cave elves or something (I doubt Wizards could copyright the idea of elves that live underground and yeah I get that they would have to do more retconning than just the name but none of it could have been as big as they never existed) So I do suspect there were certain other problematic elements that made them decide it was to much trouble.

The issue with drow is how little development away from their original, heavily-OGL-influenced version they'd had. For most of the creatures affected by the OGL, Paizo had found the time and space to create their own version of the creatures. Kobolds did have to be removed from their draconic connection, but Paizo kobolds were already separate enough from OGL kobolds to have alternative characterisations to draw on there. For Drow, that just wasn't true - the vast majority of our information on them comes from 3.5-era publications which were keeping drow very close to their OGL inspirations, and so you'd have to make major, sweeping retcons to change them to something legally defensible. It likely would've been legally plausible to change drow out for cave elves, but they couldn't then have these cave elves be demon-worshiping, matriarchal, divided-into-houses, and ruling an underground empire. They could be some of those - but any amount of them was probably a legal liability in terms of needing to defend it. I doubt most people who want drow to be around would've been happy with a retcon that said "there are still elves who live underground, but they're survivors of an ancient war which destroyed their empire, worship devils, have traditional family structures, and are split into small groups just barely trying to survive", or something like that. Drow were just not able to continue in their former role in the plot - perhaps legally it could've been done with some significant tweaks, but it'd open up significant legal risks of needing to defend the differences in court. If there'd been more published on the Drow, if the CN, protean-worshiping drow that were seen soon before the OGL crisis had been done a decade ago and there was an established version of Paizo Drow that were significantly different than OGL drow, it would've been much more possible to keep them around with soft retcons (kobold-style), rather than the hard retcons needed here.

If it was always intended that way, why do some monsters have "Hardness 10" instead of just "Resist All 10 (except adamantine)" or something? Why have two entirely different types of rules if they were meant to be the same effect?

1: The original rules were clear, and the devs were clear this was a change, not a clarification. The claim isn't that the devs never intended for Resist All to double-dip on damage types, but that the monsters with it weren't balanced around it.

Gods, the negativity for a batch of errata that was 99% really good is exhausting to read through. So I'll just say:

So wait, who actually asked for this change to Resist All and complained about it? It looks like you’ve once again taken a non-issue people were happy with and done surgery with a chainsaw to it to solve a problem that didn’t exist. Now a ton of feats that give Resist All are extremely overleveled if not outright dead, Ghost Touch runes are way less valuable, etc, etc.

If you’re going to make huge errata changes to core parts of the rules, please at least put out a survey or *something* first instead of the current policy of “do whatever and then wait to see if the backlash makes us have to change it or if it’s quiet enough to ignore”.

The rest of the errata looks largely fine to great, so there’s really no reason you couldn’t have had an easy win there for most of us without this…

I absolutely have asked for this. I've always run Resist All as just decreasing the damage by the amount listed, because otherwise it arbitrarily gets way, way better for no reason for the enemies that have it in a way that it pretty clearly isn't balanced around. There's no reason for a Ghost to just hard counter a PC that uses multiple different damage types, it's unnecessarily punitive. Similarly, I've never had a champion at my table find it unreasonable to "only" reduce enemy damage by the listed number in their reaction, and not double-to-triple that. It was very clear that Resist All did reduce damage by that much - I'm not arguing that this isn't a new rule. But this is a rule that makes more sense, and I don't know why everyone is assuming that this is inherently less balanced; Paizo themselves stated here that these enemies weren't designed with this interaction in mind.

I am going to assume that all the drow stuff is just going to be retconned away.

It has already been made canon that all pre-existing mentions of drow came from lies spread by the first couple of PFS agents who discovered the serpentfolk empire underneath Avistan, and - worried about what may happen if the truth got out - fabricated the story of the drow. All drow settlements have been retconned to actually have been serpfentolk settlements the whole time, with the exception of the Drow capital, which is abandoned but has basically been quarantined off by the serpentfok, who are clearly scared of something about the settlement/its history. We've got a bit of information on the post-Remaster Darklands in the final volume of Sky King's Tomb!

Think how much stuff is on the surface of Avistan, how much has been described, and of how they still have not detailed everything.

And yet, if Paizo published a book describing the previously-unmentioned halfling empire that dominates much of central Cheliax, it'd still be in significant conflict with existing lore. Opening up Into the Darklands, their description of Sekamina says:

The drow empire spans much of central Avistan, from Varisia east to Razmiran and from the Worldwound south to the northernmost reaches of Andoran. Theirs is easily the largest empire in all the Darklands

It also says:

Of the three realms of the Darklands, Sekamina is the most civilized, the most explored by the darksider nations. Here are not the vast uncharted tertiary tunnels of Nar-Voth, nor the mysterious and ancient and unknowable vaults of Orv. Between the svirfneblin, the ghouls, and the drow alone, Sekamina is a vast region dense in places with cities, towns, and well-traveled trade routes. The wilderness still exists in Sekamina, but the greater danger comes from the numerous nations of the region—nations who rarely get along well for long.

Sekamina isn't an unexplored area, it isn't filled with a wide variety of locations unknown to the inhabitants to add in more stuff without touching the Drow. This is our most complete description of this part of the setting, and it makes it very clear that Sekamina is explored, settled, and controlled by nations in the same sort of way that the surface world is, and that the Drow are the largest of these in the whole Darklands. You absolutely could add new locations and places here, but it'd be the same as expanding on already-established regions of the surface world; if a new settlement within Taldor isn't controlled by Taldor, the settlement's story has to revolve around that fact, and it also has to be minor enough that the major setting overviews haven't mentioned it. They control the entirety of Sekamina from Varisia to the Worldwound to the River Kingdoms to the northern bits of Andoran. You would have to condemn all that region to never being discussed again in canon material if you wanted to keep the Drow canon in the setting. You can't just make up facts like "you could have 24 separate continent-scale maps under Avistan to represent Sekamina [and so the Drow don't control all of this area]" when that is in direct conflict with the setting material that you are trying to keep canon.

It'd also be difficult - possible, but messy - to maintain much of the rest of the canon Sekamina information without referencing the Drow. They're by far the dominant force in the region - it'd be like trying to write an article on Isger without mentioning Cheliax. You can communicate a great deal about the internal aspects of the nation, but at some point it will become relevant that there's a much larger imperial force very close by that wants to expand and control the nation.

Sekamina is also only 6000 feet deep, not 6000 metres (more like ~1800 metres), and many of the canon depictions of these locations have massive open caverns that would take up a very significant chunk of this width.

Arcaian wrote:

This would just be de-facto barring most Darklands content from the game

I wasn't going to comment again because, while I don't like Paizo's decision on this, I have to respect that it is their business (literally and figuratively). But I'm sorry, his is hogwash.

The darklands is much bigger than north America, being under essentially the entire world. More fundamentally, it is also three-dimensional in a way that surface continents are not - it would be trivial to avoid showing the drow cities on future maps without overwriting them by simply shifting the cutlines they are taken at by a few 10s of metres (100s at the most).

Yeah, but the darklands under the entire world isn't very relevant if 90%+ of content is set in Avistan or northern Garund. For the Darklands under this region, we know that there's a large series of tunnels and caves (Nar-Voth) which then leads to Sekamina, which is where basically all the classical Darklands stuff is, and is canonically where there's space for big civilizations in the darklands that isn't down deep in the almost-unknowable Vaults of Orv. Canonically, before the drow retcon, the drow controlled every single canon settlement in Sekamina with the exception of one serpentfolk city, one hryngar city, and one ghoul city. The drow controlled the entire region of Sekamina under Avistan, with the exception of a small region around the hryngar city underneath southern Andoran, and a small region around the serpentfolk city underneath northern Varisia, both of which are affected heavily by Drow politics.

If you said that we'd just not visit the areas of the Darklands where the drow are, so they don't need to be retconned, you would be unable to engage with the Sekamina parts of the Darklands (i.e, the bits that are classically the Darklands) under the following metaregions:
- Old Cheliax
- Most of the Shining Kingdoms (maybe not taldor)
- the Eye of Dread
- the Broken Lands
- the Saga Lands

Which is to say, you would be barring a very significant chunk of the Darklands content from the game, because if not the majority of adventures take place in these regions, it's pretty damn close.

James Jacobs wrote:

glass wrote:

]Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?

We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone.

You could not mention them by just not mentioning them - that would not have been what I meant by "gone gone". What I was asking was whether you were going to do that, or deliberately overwrite them. From the rest of your reply (and the Archpaladin's), it seems like you are doing the latter.

This would just be de-facto barring most Darklands content from the game; the Vaults of Orv are so distant and mythological that it'd be very hard to go to, so Nar-Voth would be the only place left you'd ever be able to go. Trying to write content in Sekamina without mentioning the Drow would be like writing about North America without mentioning the US.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

I personally find that really unintuitive, but that's just me.

All of it, or just a particular part? What seems unintuitive about it?

Witch of Miracles wrote:

I also think it would be bad formatting to have to check trait tags instead of just... reading the damage type next to the damage, which is the place it's most relevant.

Fair, but if Paizo went all the way on traits, like they should have, they could format things like the layout design so as to make that easier.

If you do a big hit for 100 damage against an enemy immune to fire and it is all bludgeoning damage, you deal 100 damage under your proposed rules. If you do the same hit but someone gave you a minor 'buff' that gives you +1 fire damage on your hit, you would now deal 51 damage, rather than 100. That feels both very unintuitive and very frustrating, to me.

Nice to see some improvements, and good that you're calling for feedback.

* In My Library, it would be good if when you click Group by Category, it actually grouped everything by category. As it stands, a single category is smeared over multiple pages, e.g. there's an Adventures section on each page, instead of all adventures being grouped together.

* In My Library, sort in alpha order should be an option like Publish Date or Last Downloaded. At the moment, e.g. if I search "flip-mat", thr 144 products I have are in a random order, making it hard to scroll through.

* In My Library, when you search for a product, there should be a way of differentiating products with the same name, like there used to be 'sing file' or 'chapter' versions of a product. At the moment, e.g. if I search for "Guns & Gears", I get 4 products all called Pathfinder Guns & Gears PDF, and there's no indication of which is remaster, non-remaster, single file, and whatever the last one is.

* In the store, there doesn't appear to be a way to filter to digital products unless you view the Desktop Mode of the site. Filtering to digital products isn't intuitive even on desktop, as you can only find a PDF by searching for a product then using the "digital products" filter. It would be great if a product just had different listings, e.g. Guns & Gears vs Guns & Gears PDF.
Also, for some products e.g. Pathfinder Player Core, Pathfinder Society modules, and more: I can't work out how to get a digital version at all, even on desktop.

* It would be good in the store if products you owned appeared as such, or could be filtered out when searching.

I'm just reiterating the call for the categorisation in the library to put everything on one page. It is extremely counterintuitive to click on a category for adventures, see only one of the many you own, and then have to click through multiple pages to see all of them. Have multiple pages of different categories if it is necessary, but each category should be self-contained and contain all items of that category in your library without needing to change through pages.

Skeld wrote:

glass wrote:

Souls At War wrote:

Some of us already pointed out it should help with internal consistency

People have claimed that, but I am not sure I buy it. How should it help?

ISTM, consistency or lack thereof in APs has more to do with how they are written and edited than how they are published.

Because spreading them out over 6 or 3 months means that the individual chapters are all in various stages of development at any given time. With publishing as a single volume, all individual parts will need to be in roughly the same stage of development so that the lead person can edit the whole thing at once instead of in pieces spread out over time.

-Skeld

Yes, but publishing them over 3 or 6 months does not force them to spread the writing over 3 or 6 months. They could theoretically write it in exactly the same way they will be going forward, and then just hold onto the later parts for longer.

Although admittedly, it is psychologically easier to get something done in a certain time frame if you have a genuine hard deadline. Plus there is the longer period between paying the writer and selling the product, which I had not considered before. So, fair enough.

The editing is the big difference. The authors of the current APs are absolutely writing them simultaneously, we know that to be true. But when it comes time to edit them, they have to be edited as their own separate books. That makes it very easy to do something like miss out on a character name being spelt differently in different books of an AP, or a continuity issue where you/important NPCs start off in a slightly different context than you ended off the last book in, etc. These sorts of issues will be much more straightforward for editors to address when it is a single book that is edited simultaneously.

Considering the wiki's page for Sarenrae talks about the Cult of the Dawnflower as if they still exist (which they don't)... Not sure it's going to reliable, especially since it mentions things from 1st Edition that may no longer be considered canon anymore.

Good catch on the Sarenrae front! It's a single sentence primarily linking to an article that clearly states that the Cult of the Dawnflower is now non-canon, but that should be in the Sarenrae article itself too. It's a really easy edit to make, and getting an account doesn't take long at all - I'd encourage you to fix it! We're always struggling with getting enough volunteers to stay up-to-date with changes and new content.

In terms of return on effort, it wouldn't only be used by humans - if we had a list of common edicts and anathema for different parts of the world, that could equally apply to anyone that has been influenced by the culture of that region. Not an essential thing, but it'd be nice if it happened!

QuidEst wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Tridus wrote:

Deriven Firelion wrote:

I think they will build the psychic like the new Oracle with a third resource pool that keys off their psychic abilities. I think that fits the class much better as well.

Feels unlikely given the constraints on updates to these books. I'm thinking closer to "tweaks" than "major functional changes."

Why would you think this when the only reason to redo these books is to make substantial changes?

Psychic is one of the classes that needs some serious improvements. With what they did with the oracle and witch, not sure why they would redo the psychic to keep them pretty much the same.

I expect pretty massive changes to the psychic as it doesn't play very well.

Oracle and Witch aren't the point of comparison, though. They got new books, and this is not a new book. Guns & Gears is the actual point of comparison- no new book name, everybody who owned the PDF received a free updated copy, and very few things changed. Inventor was in a similar boat to Psychic, and only received some small number tweaks that allowed it to be changed without changing any page numbers.

"The only reason to redo the books is to make substantial changes" is the premise I don't agree with. It's being redone because it was under OGL license, and did things like mention owlbears, alignment, flat-footed, and other odds-and-ends that need cleaning up in the move to ORC. So, a little more substantial than a usual reprint cycle, but less significant than Player Core 1 or 2.

That won't make for a very good psychic.

And the Inventor remaster didn't make a substantial change to the class either - these books are being remastered primarily so they can keep being sold, they're not being changed substantially.

I'd love it if the psychic could keep its niche as a focus caster with some slots on the side - for changes that could fit in the word count, maybe extending Unleash Psyche's duration by a round and giving you a focus point/letting you cast one amp without spending focus while you're in it could be a solid addition to try and maintain psychic's niche.

Teridax wrote:

This is a bit distant from the main point, but wall spells tend to be effective even when they get "annihilated", for the same reason that quandary is strong even if your spell save DC sucks: it does the thing immediately, and it's up to the enemy to then spend actions rolling against it, so you still win. An enemy that has to spend their turn attacking your wall is an enemy that's spent actions and incurred MAP, so anything they do against you will inevitably diminished, and if your team got to make use of the wall before then, it's served its purpose. Anything beyond is a bonus.

I'll also say that wall of stone has the benefit of letting you shape its path, so it's much easier for separating enemies, whereas wall of metal scales more consistently than wall of force, doesn't vanish instantly from a disintegrate spell, and is just plain bigger. Those are only two of the several wall spells available to the Animist, as well.

No, they are not. One creature annihilates the wall, the rest move through it. Spells also blow through walls. Before I hear you can't target objects, you sure can if the GM says so. I definitely allow it if someone wants to blast a wall with a spell. That wrecks any weak walls.

Wall of Stone is ok when you first get it. Then as you progress, it becomes weak.

Quandary is always good. Not sure why you're using that comparison. But it's single target and you use walls against groups. Quandary is usually used against a boss with allies. Quandary the boss. Usually lasts at least 2 rounds, likely longer.

I wouldn't waste a spell slot that high on a mook though. That's wasteful.

Creatures tend to get larger as you level up, so they need to break open more of the wall - the level 16 Shemhazian might do ~24 average damage per hit (after hardness) and so only needs 3 actions to break the rank 5 wall of stone, but as a 20x20 creature it needs to break at least a 10x10 hole in the wall to be able to move through without squeezing, which means it'll need ~12 actions to break a hole in the wall it can get through. Even if it could cast a big 8th rank blasting spell that affected the wall (its spell does spirit damage), an 8th rank 16d6 blast does 42 damage after hardness, so you'd need that and a strike per segment to break through, which is still 6 actions spent against a 5th rank spell slot. Flying getting more widespread does make it more niche when you can apply it to maximum effect, but when you can apply it fully, it is highly effective.

Why is it that we take for granted then the idea that Animal Companions (and a handful of other feat chains) must actively degrade in functionality over the course of a campaign?

Because the alternative is that they start off so weak or domineering of your actions as to be unsatisfying. Right now, a generic level 2 STR martial with a d8 weapon is attacking at +8(1d8+4); your level 2 companion will be attacking with +7(1d8+3), Against an average same-level AC, that's 5.1 vs 4.125 expected damage, or doing 81% of the expected damage of the martial. The martial only gets better if it's using a bigger weapon, or from class features that boost damage (and not all martials get substantial boosts there) - and you can get 2 actions to cast spells while your companion still gets 2 actions to be a martial. If you could get the current level of functionality for only a level 2 feat, it'd be pretty straightforward - and probably optimal - for a party to all invest one 2nd level feat in this, and get a functional frontline without needing to have any frontline characters. I do wish companions were able to keep their low-level power throughout the whole game at the cost of the additional feats, as it's frustrating to see a feature get less useful even as you invest in it, but they cannot do so at the cost of a single 2nd level feat.

The alternative would be to either start with the companion being very weak and letting that weak power level stay true relative to your power throughout leveling up, and then provide options to improve it (which I think would feel substantially worse), or to make it really difficult to use with the low level feats (3 of your actions for 2 of theirs or something) and have the current level of power scale well as you level, with the additional feats making it simpler to use. I'd prefer that over it being very weak at the start, but I think the current compromise works better than either of these.

I think Battlecry's admonitions about "war has a right side, and the PCs are on it" isn't so much a statement about the nature of war, but more a statement about the appropriate sorts of war stories to tell in a game like Pathfinder 2e.

Just like you want to leave the truly horrible stuff that happens in non-war contexts entirely offscreen, you want to leave the truly horrible stuff related to war similarly out of view. The version of Golarion that is appropriate for a fun game one plays with their friends is somewhat sanitized by the nature of "we're cultivating for fun here".

I think it's perfectly reasonable to avoid telling content that is too horrific for the vibe you want to be giving as a publisher - but I do think that there's some danger in doing that by presenting horrific content in a sanitized way in some cases. Sanitizing the reality of mental health care in the times the setting is inspired by? Not the end of the world in my opinion, it's not really too relevant to the modern day. But sanitizing war into "there's a good side to a war, and if you're on the good side you just do good things and be morally virtuous" is I think legitimately dangerous as a concept - though to be clear, don't have Battlecry, and I obviously don't have Hellbreakers, so I do not know if that's the direction Paizo is taking. But if it is, I do think that's an inappropriate sanitization - it's taking a myth that is widely used to manipulate people into supporting something they otherwise wouldn't, and making it true in your setting. While widespread in a lot of fiction, I do think it's a dangerous thing to do.

Tl;dr I don't think there's a way that you can tell war stories that are so sanitised as to safely remove the horrific things that are done by all sides of the war, even those we now view as morally good participants, without buying into very dangerous myth-making about how conflict works. If it's important enough to a publisher to avoid telling those stories, I think it's more appropriate to exclude war stories from your narrative all-together.

keftiu wrote:

I'd still love to know what "worldview the writer is forcing on us" by not depicting Cheliax's POV, Arkat. It's been three days and I still think that's kind of an unreal thing to post.

I was trying to avoid answering this, but since you called me out directly, here you go:

That it's THEIR world and that we have to play how Paizo wants us to play.

One of their employees made that quite clear in an X post some months ago.

Are you satisfied?

I'm quite confused by this one, because it is obviously Paizo's world, and if you are exclusively running pre-published content without altering it, you do have to play what Paizo thinks would be most fun. What other possibility is there? Paizo could make content that it thinks is not a good fit for the game purely because some people on the internet want to do it, but why would they do that? If you disagree with Paizo's perspective on what is fun content for the game, run your own game differently - or even write up alternative pre-published content and sell that, if you think there's demand for the content. Nowadays with Infinite, you can even sell that content while using all of Paizo's IP! I'd understand your argument if the game excluded all content that could plausibly be used for anything except the sort of APs Paizo is writing (though it'd still be fine to have an intention for how the game should be engaged with, but I'd understand not wanting to engage with it if you have a different intention). But Paizo has gone out of its way to make it possible to play all sorts of stories that clearly aren't the focus of their prepublished content - what more do you want them to do to make it possible for you to play those stories?

The ability to prevent enemies from focusing fire on a single target, unless they choose to target you, is extremely powerful. Combine that with the natural resistances to damage that the Guardian is getting in its final release, I don't think it will be a bad idea to regularly use Intercept Attack. Certainly I think it's worthwhile using even if the attack wouldn't knock the ally unconscious - much better for 2 party members to be 3 hits from going down than 1 party member be 1 hit from going down. The guardian is also using it's own AC to protect allies by its taunt mechanic (as well as feats like that 1-action power attack so long as your enemy is flat-footed from your taunt) - if they don't attack the guardian, they're taking a penalty to-hit and becoming flatfooted. The enemy either has to hit the guardians substantial AC + resistances, or open themselves up to more incoming damage.

Yeah loss of automation for the free society stuff is a bad move for me, and frankly this does nothing but make stockholders feel good. It is what it is.

It's kinda wild to say 'this does nothing but make stockholders feel good' when it's better for anyone without several subscriptions, which themselves are pretty absurdly expensive if you live anywhere but North America. This benefits plenty of people - perhaps at the cost of long-time subscribers to multiple lines, and I understand that frustration. But it is noticeably better for many, many people too.

Captain Morgan wrote:

Quentin Coldwater wrote:

I still feel like a +1 skill increase is too little to feel like an actual increase. Unless there's more ranks of proficiency so you could still climb that ladder faster. But at that point, you're back to 1e's skill points.

I do miss skill points, though. Felt much more rewarding than 2e's "which singular skill will I get better at?" every two levels.

That framing feels odd to me. You don't choose a singular skill to get better at every two levels, you get better at ALL your trained skills and choose a skill every two levels to get even better at than those other skills. And at the alternating levels you get to choose a skill to get better at via a skill feat. And that's assuming you don't gain anything else from your general feats, class, or archetype.

Skill ranks were just never going to survive in the tight math of PF2 anymore than feats like weapon focus and greater weapon focus would.

Yes, going from Untrained to Trained means that skill will forever scale with you, but with level-based DCs scaling faster than that (DCs seem to go up by 4 every 3 levels), eventually that Trained proficiency will not swing it anymore (meaning that if you have to roll a 10 at level 1 for a success, you'd need to roll a 12 by level 6, a 14 by level 12, and so on). Boosting that one skill means keeping up with the DC, instead of getting ahead of the curve. Meaning you steadily get worse at the skills you don't invest in. +1 items and stat boosts help catch up, but they feel more mandatory than optional.

If you want to keep up with the DC by level chart, you actually don't need anywhere near the amount of investment you're talking about here. From level 1 to level 11, the DC-by-level goes from 15 to 28 - after taking into account you getting +10 from level here, you only need to get +3 from any source to maintain the same chance of success. If you boosted the ability score at level 5 and 10, you only need to buy a +1 item bonus item to keep up with the chance of success, with the sub-100 gp expense barely being noticeable at all at level 11. Even from level 1 to 20, the DC only goes to 40 - after taking into account the +19 from leveling you've gained, you only need +6 to maintain your chances of success. If you've got +3 to your ability modifier (at some point you might've hit 18), you can get away with only boosting it to expert and keeping that +1 item from before, or invest in a +3 item and maintain the same chances of success without needing any skill increases invested at all.

Lets say you have a system with 3 core attributes.

One for physical power one for speed and reflexes and one for mental stuff.

With that set up all caster types are going to draw off the same mental stat, there will be no differentiation based on core attributes for all the different kinds of casters you want in your game, that is unless you have derived stats that provide that differentiation at which point why not just start with more mental stats that lend the descriptive quality to them.

Yeah, you could make a bad set of attributes and it'd cause a problem, but I don't see why that is being treated as an argument against the whole concept? You could have 3 stats that are all appropriate for both magic and mundane means - for a random example: "heart", "violence", and "finesse". Each one of those could work for a martial character - a selfless protector who defends their allies might be a more heart-based character, an in-your-face martial combatant might be more violence-based, and a technical fighter who fights with control might be more finesse-based. Similarly, you could easily have magical options for each of them - a healer who cares more for protecting allies than hurting enemies might be heart-based, a dangerous stormcaster might be violence-based, and a highly technical magician who controls the enemy via their magic might be finesse-based. At the same time, I feel like those stats all give you good ideas for what that character's narrative might look like, without outwardly dictating anything. If we're moving away from the sacred cow of 6 attributes, we don't have to stick with slightly modified and merged versions of the existing attributes.

As an alternative solution to your final question, if you find there's a problem with 3 core attributes, why do you say we have to start adding more of those mental stats back? Why not remove the attributes entirely and let the casters be differentiated by their own unique mechanics instead of the attribute they're based off of, which is not a very interesting area of differentiation IMO.

Thanks for the response James.

It seems there are 3 Severe encounters but we skipped 1. Of those 2 we rolled them with our party of 5. We are playing in Foundry so it seems it's calculating the CR from our party of 5 so I will ask the GM to adjust.

From a design perspective, isn't it easier for a GM to just delete a monster than tinker with making an encounter harder by adding monsters? You can't take them away once they're on the map but "backup" can arrive.

If you're playing in a 5-person party, then there should be adjustments made to the encounters to account for that as you say - the rules are here on the Archives of Nethys. For instance, in a Moderate encounter, going from a 4-player to a 5-player party means you should add 20 XP of extra enemies to maintain the same difficulty - maybe a level-2 creature. The guidelines also aren't perfect - if you add a 5th PC who is particularly good at amplifying the power of existing PCs (for example, a bard) that is a larger boost in power than if you add someone who doesn't benefit (or benefit from) the other character's actions as much.

An entire AP book being mostly moderates with a few Severe encounters is a little bit on the easy end for how I personally run the game at most of my tables, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea for a good amount of the published content to be like this for a few reasons:
- Straightforwardly, inexperienced players are going to make mistakes, and it's a lot better an experience for people coming in fresh to the game to mess up and make a moderate encounter into a severe one than it is to mess up and make severe encounter into an extreme one
- While the experience of walking all over the encounters in an AP is not normally the most fun, the single bad experience of a TPK can ruin an AP for many tables. It's generally easier to recognise that the game is feeling like it is lacking tension and then work to fix that than it is to fix the negative experience of a TPK, because one is slow and gradual and the other is very sudden.
- While the difficulty levels in PF2 are overall good estimates to the difficulty of the encounter, the way the GM runs the enemies can still pretty substantially change the experience of difficulty. Do all the enemies focus-fire on one PC at a time to ensure the party is losing action economy the same way the enemies are? Do the enemies kill dying creatures after they've seen healing? Do enemies with big scary one-target abilities go after the person they most want to see suffer, or do they go after the most tactically advantageous target? How tactical are the enemies - do they weaponise Delaying and Readying to ensure they're working together as best as possible? How much do any of these vary based off of the nature of the enemy - are demons bloodthristy, devils tactical, and wild animals straightforward? Or is everyone equally tactical all the time? Some of these don't even necessarily make the fight harder - e.g. targeting downed PCs might reduce the chance of other PCs dying - but they do add to the stakes one might be missing from an otherwise-simple Moderate encounter. The authors of the AP cannot know how a GM is running all of these, and so cannot make decisions based off of this - whereas I know that I tend to softball on targeting single PCs, only use the best tactics when I want to emphasize the narrative of their enemies being organised, and try not to kill any PCs if I can avoid it. This means I tend to bump the difficulty of the fights in APs up a little bit, because I know that I'm not adding as much tension through my GMing style (which I do not wish to change - I think it's not very fun to be dying/dead for half a session). When writing an AP, the authors don't know where people stand on this one, and are trying to avoid the singularly bad experience of something like a TPK. I can't imagine the reputation of PF2 APs still have as being brutal helps them want to push the difficulty too high either, to be honest.

That last point can be addressed to some degree by including tactics and the like in the AP itself - but the issue there is that GMs do miss them quite regularly. Maybe there's a better way of presenting them, but quite a few of the most infamous death-traps in early PF2 APs actually had some sort of tactics recommendation to avoid the worst possible outcomes, which were neglected by many GMs who missed/forgot that part of the text.

Hermea || 6,300 || 0.4 million || 1.58%

If we're getting Hermea having a 1.58% urbanization rate, I think there's something fundamentally wrong with the methodology - it is an island that was only recently inhabited, whose economy revolves very heavily around exporting knowledge while being fed by a noticeably efficient agricultural scheme. The only city on the island has 6,300 residents, the people coming onto the island are heavily restricted to a very small number, and the state has been focused on maintaining as much control over individual's lives as possible. In the most recent overview of the island, there is only a single set of residents outside of Promise itself that is mentioned, and they are explicitly described a small group that might 'progress towards an independent settlement'. I'm sure the agriculture has some residents outside of the city - but the neighbourhood of Farmer houses many of the people who work on the island's agricultural work, even that outside the city. I do not think that 98.42% of the population lives outside of Promise.

Pendragon isn't half of what I'd want. The Riddle of Steel, with QoL hacks and fixes from other derived systems, is where I'd go for crunchy combat. It is tough to find a game, though.

Weird, it's almost like the changes you're advocating for are wildly unpopular with the vast majority of players. Perhaps most people are more interested in enjoyable mechanics and sticking to an interesting shared fiction rather than painful levels of realism? :O

I think this is looking in the wrong place in a few ways.

-One has to do with encounter math and variety. I deal with that a lot, a lot, a lot later in the post. Suffice it to say that I feel like the encounter builder is pretty constrained in what it allows.
-A common complaint with the game is that it tends to funnel effects into +2s or -2s, instead of making them feel unique or giving them unique mechanics. This doesn't really change that.
-Ultimately, almost all martial damage is funneled into checks against AC. This... has issues, and closes off a lot of design space. The removal of touch AC and flat AC is understandable in this design, but it hurt gameplay variety and spell attacks both. This, oddly, is something 4E did better than PF2E; I feel like I remember more abilities that hit Fort/Will/Ref DCs there, and I half suspect they didn't put such things in the game because they were afraid of it looking similar to 4e. The end result is homogenization (and casters just being harder to play than martials for no obvious reason).

I also have never felt like PF2E's in-combat options were that interesting, personally, so shifting the burden to them is a net negative. To me, the game is—as you noted it can be—pretty repetitive, and the good choices are usually pretty obvious. I'm rarely unsure of what to do or asking myself how to handle a situation. About the biggest source of interest is remembering consumable items and item abilities.

I'm not sure that a common complaint is that the game funnels effects into +2s or -2s, I've barely seen that discussed, outside of some people's frustration with bonuses and penalties not stacking. I don't think the wording you've outlined is a reasonable complaint - I feel like PF2 goes out of its way to avoid giving mathematical bonuses. If we look at some random list of abilities, like lets say the 1st and 2nd level barbarian feats, the options include:

That's 3 out of the 15 that meaningfully engage in changing modifiers, while the vast majority give you different ways of engaging with the game. That's my experience for the vast majority of classes as well, the game really does focus on trying to give you a variety of ways to engage with combats, and those methods are rarely just different numerical bonuses. The fact that the primary way to engage with non-AC defences as a martial requires active investment is a problem, I agree - I tend to play martials who have a variety of options for targeting different defences via either things like feinting/demoralize/bon mot/stealth/combat maneuvers, the fact that you need to know those options exist and invest in them can lead to people building characters that don't have a great deal of options available. I don't think touch or flatfooted AC would help here, however - just giving martials a different way of debuffing AC isn't going to address concerns about being unable to target other defences. This is also something that different classes can help with, and post-Core classes have tended to be better at - inventors, thaumaturge, exemplars, and swashbucklers are all much better at letting you get meaningful advantages out of targeting other defences.

All that being said, if you don't enjoy the in-combat options, I don't think PF2 is really the game that you should be spending your time playing. There are many excellent games out there, and PF2's focus and key area of advantage is making tactical combat interesting and focusing on it - I'd happily encourage you to try varying combats in a way that encourages tactical flexibility (something the APs are often bad at), but if the fundamental baseline of the system isn't interesting to you, why not play some of the many other good ttRPGs out there?

I don't think that a game's monster design must work like PF2E for the game to be balanced. There's a lot of pushback against the kinds of homogenization PF2E uses to achieve its balance in almost every gaming sphere I interact in. People who play the MMOs I play complain about classes becoming too samey for balance. People complain about fighting games homogenizing different characters' options. This isn't something universally liked or good. It's just that the people who dislike it won't be posting on the official paizo boards for the game.

To call this homogenization is to assume that the only way to have differentiation is numbers. Sure, the numbers in character creation are homogenized in PF2, and that's not the only way to achieve balance in theory - though I also have never seen a game with the amount of crunch that PF2 has be anything approaching balanced in the long-term without reducing pre-combat numbers to pretty small bands. But it's theoretically possible to have massively different numbers and balance it out, especially if you only publish a small amount of content to ensure it's all carefully triple-checked and playtested. But the whole point of PF2 is to try and put the focus on your active choices in combat; allowing the pre-combat numbers to be massively divergent is really running the risk of locking you into whatever your numbers dictate. If my champion's AC is massively higher than all the other martials at the cost of having terrible offensive capabilities, or if my cleric's healing spells are massively better than everyone else's healing at the cost of being terrible at other sorts of magic, then I'm already locked into things extremely strongly. I like that the champion in my Stolen Fate table is a sword + shield champion and mostly goes pretty defensively with 1 strike/turn, but in the fights against fiends recently they've been incentivized to strike 2/turn and neglect those defences a little because their Holy Avenger is really effective at triggering weaknesses.

PF2 does allow for pretty drastically different numbers, but the expectation is that those numbers primarily come from action you take in combat - the Champion who has Raised a tower shield and got a +1 status bonus to AC from the bard is 8 points higher in AC than a standard non-plate wearing martial. The Fighter with a +4 aid bonus and a +3 Fortissimo status bonus targeting a Frightened 2 off-guard creature has an effective +13 bonus to-hit over a standard martial. A spellcaster targeting the weak Ref save of a Frightened 2 creature affected by Distracting Feint or Catfolk Dance has about a +7 accuracy bonus over one targeting an un-debuffed average save. But to get these changes in numbers, you take actions during combat; that's the intent of PF2's "homogenization" of the maths, to put the focus on the active tactical choices you're making in combat. Are there issues with this? Absolutely, no game is perfect, and there are both characters that tend to have minimal tactical choices available/options so good they remove choice (ranged flurry ranger should basically always just put as many attacks as possible into the creature most likely to be killed by those attacks every turn), and it is definitely possible to end up repeating the same similar tactics in most fights, at which point it can really make the game feel like you're not meaningfully making tactical choices anymore. Both are significant problems; the first should just not have been printed, and the second should be addressed by varying the combats significantly enough that keeping reusing the same tactics is actively harmful. This is not an easy thing to do, though, and I think it's a pain point of PF2 - the game doesn't provide the tools for a GM to easily be able to figure out how to do this (and the GMG was better than GM Core here, IMO), and the APs don't demonstrate it well. Varying the amount of enemies, the distance at which combat starts + that enemies work well in, the primary aim of the combat (e.g. are you trying to kill them all, are you trying to keep non-combatants around alive, are you trying to buy time for reinforcements to arrive/a retreat to finish), time limits on a fight, and the introduction of terrain, hazards, enemies you don't have to fight, etc, are all pretty essential for a game focused on tactical choices to not become 'solved', and I think a lot of tables would benefit from guidance here. Ironically, I think Dawnsbury Days, the PF2 game on Steam does a good job here in a lot of ways - the stat blocks for all enemies are completely transparent and you can try a fight as often as you want with the same starting point, so the challenge doesn't come from obfuscation but from varying the conditions. It's not perfect, but there are some fun demonstrations of different sorts of ways one can vary encounters to encourage tactical flexibility.

For example, the Wrath of the Righteous campaign includes demons invading a city and features street to street fighting of low level paladins and guards against demons of various levels. In pf2e this narrative is a complete farce, the lowliest of demon hangers-on to Khorramzadeh would be capable of wiping out the city with ease. In pf1e, however, a group of well-built level 1-2 paladins and a bunch of level 1 volunteers, between the benefits of smite and the less extreme AC ranges of pf1e, can absolutely win against demons in the CR 7-10 range, even if doing so has a terrible cost. Even a group of basic guards can consistently and meaningfully contribute with cold-iron weapons and the basic consumables available to level 1-2 creatures.

This is literally just turning the bad balance of PF1 into a point in its favor somehow because level 1-2 characters can take on level 7-10 threats if well built. If we look at level 1-2 PCs built by the same people who made the demon stat blocks, it is plainly obvious that the intent of the story is that they cannot defeat those creatures. If I pick a low CR you listed, 8, and take the Nabasu, and then compare its stats to a party of 4 Honorable Outcasts, the level 2 paladin from the NPC Codex, we can see:

This is not even close to a fight these paladins are supposed to be able to win. What you are describing is not PF1 enabling a tabletop simulation of a living world, you are describing the ability for broken characters to perform feats the game did not intend them to be able to do. If it weren't for the fact it would ruin everyone's night, you could absolutely do the same thing as a GM and optimize the enemies much more than the PCs, and you could cause a TPK with underleveled enemies - hell, I've nearly done it in a PFS scenario just because many incorporeal creatures can take down characters with min-maxed ability scores very easily. This sort of "level 2 characters killing a level 8 character" narrative is also not included in the stories being told in pre-published content; to use your own Wrath of the Righteous example, the only time the story expects you to face a CR 6 encounter is when you're already level 4. Stories about 50 1st level militia holding off a bunch of demons when prepared with anti-demon weapons is also easier to tell in PF2 than in PF1; in PF1 you're hoping that you can confirm a bunch of crits to do enough damage from the massed attacks, in PF2 they can all just throw some vials of holy water, trigger the weakness even on a miss, and that'll be a very credible threat to a massed demon attack.

Dimity wrote:

monochromaticPrism wrote:

for example, a level 10 grunt minion at the very bottom of the level 18 BBEG's organizational hierarchy could conquer a substantial portion of the world and live like a king as long as they only attacked parts of the world that are in "low level zones", so why are they putting up with their current situation?

I don't get this at all.

Why would a grunt minion be able to conquer anything? He's a grunt minion, he's not a king of anything. You said it right there -- Grunt Minion. Why would you expect him to be able to conquer things? He can't.

Relative to the level 18 party, a level 14 grunt minion is, well, a grunt.

Relative to a town of peasants and guards not exceeding level 5, the level 14 grunt minion is deific.

This is just how the game math works.

It's just strange to call it out in a discussion of the differences between PF1 and PF2 to me - sure, if you weren't doing any optimization in PF1, you might not have a +1/level scaling on some things (mostly saves and spell DCs), but most numbers had something close to that built in (max-ranking a skill gave you +1/level, full-bab classes got +1 to hit/level, etc). On top of that, PF1 just obviously had high level characters being more dominant. You could have mook casters at level 13-14 by the end of APs quite easily (would be higher if APs regularly went to 20 instead of stopping at 16-17), and a 14th level caster in PF1 would absolutely be able to rule an area of max 5th level people with an iron fist if they wanted to, especially with the broken things you can do in PF1. Outside of the fact that the gap between well-built and badly-built humanoids being much, much bigger in PF1 making it less obvious by blurring the directness of the relationship between level and power, I don't see a reason to say that a 10th level grunt is more powerful compared to the low-level zones in PF2 than PF1, unless we assume a significant difference in optimization of the grunt and the creatures in the low-level zone.

It's just another area where Paizo chose to throw out the simulationist roots of why ttrpgs work in the first place

What a bold claim to make. There are multiple reasons why ttRPGs can work, simulationism is not a requirement for ttRPGs to work, and non-simulationist RPGs have been around forever.

I think it's high time someone in Alkenstar invent a proper revolver to solve these reload problems.

Edit: Ok, that was like half joking, but I just found out there were revolvers in Ultimate Equipment for first edition, what's the deal? Why can't we have those here? I might actually be kinda upset now cause those would be a big help lol.

At the time of Ultimate Equipment's release, the RPG line for PF1 was system-agnostic, and so when guns were introduced there was an expected standard fantasy set of firearms, similar in technology level to PF2's firearms, and which were used in Golarion. There were additional 'firearms are common' setting option, where things like revolvers were normal and available, but they were never intended to be present in the Golarion setting outside of niche situations from APs that might allow one or two to be present (iirc there were 2 PF1 APs were you could access those higher-tech weapons).

I am curious if the rationale behind Thrune's nationalization of the Hellknight orders is going to be expanded at all... I imagine it's going to be sold as something as simple as an attempt by Thrune to coalesce power. I hope that's not the case though, because by making them chelish orders in this particular moment will make the butchery of Breachill be seen as a Chelaxian action, which should burn whatever goodwill Cheliax has left with its non-allied neighbors. For a nation that serves Hell and thus Asmodeus, they could really take note from his game plan... They are really dense when considering their image and relationships, and other soft power notions.

I think Cheliax could argue that, in response to some of the particularly damaging actions that Hellknights have taken recently, they're trying to take them under the control of a strong, centralizing force to ensure the Hellknights will face consequences for any similar actions on the future. It's probably not the most convincing thing in the world, but I think that sort of framing could be effective at convincing those who already had an incentive to believe them.

Why would a first level party regularly be encountering level +2 creatures? That should probably be a one time thing that happens during the whole of 1st level encounters, if it happens at all.

Why is that the case, though? It's not the case at higher levels - you can comfortably throw level+2 creatures there without issue. So why should the maths of the game make it unwise to regularly use level+2 creatures in the first few levels? Of all the published content I've run or played for PF2, level+2 creatures haven't been avoided at low level either. In an AP I'm running, there were 3 level+2 creatures at level 1 and 4 at level 2. In an Adventure I played, the very first creature we encountered was a completely unhinted at level+2 creature when we were level 3. Looking at the most recent 1-10 AP I own, there are 2 level+2 creatures at 1st level still, one of which does not seem to be built up much at all. Not only does the game not effectively communicate that it's best to avoid level+2 or level+3 creatures at low levels, they actively still use these creatures at low levels. Why not make level+2 mean the same thing throughout the whole game?

Not particularly surprised, but seriously, is playing a Chelaxian character who isn't actively fighting against House Thrune even supported anymore?

It's supported in any AP that isn't about fighting House Thrune, I imagine. There are many adventures and APs that are fitting for a Chelaxian character to be present. If you instead mean "When will I be able to play a Chelaxian fighting on the side of House Thrune?" then I think you'll be waiting some time - they've stated that there aren't many writers interested in writing an AP that explicitly evil, and that players show substantially reduced interest in it as well, so it'll likely not happen in an AP for some time. Perhaps an Adventure might be more possible?

exequiel759 wrote:

I think the main problem with the gunslinger is that its limited by the fact that firearms (and ranged weapons in general) have to seemingly be worse than bows for whatever reason that was stablished in the fantasy genre (bows are even better than most guns in Starfinder 2e too, which is weirder), with PF2e firearms in particular having built-in action taxes in the form of reloads, which the gunslinger class needs to fix to make firearms usable.

I think Guns & Gears is probably the book with the worst content in PF2e. In the case of the gunslinger, I don't think its bad necesarily, but in an ideal world bows wouldn't be the gold standard and all ranged weapons should be made equally, and in that ideal world the gunslinger would just be a fighter.

One of the many reasons I don't like guns in my fantasy, they never do them right. Guns made man-powered weapons like bows obsolete and are far, far, far, far, exponentially more powerful than bows, crossbows, or the like. Yet in fantasy game rules due to balance, they end up worse or equal to bows. That should not ever happen.

Putting the two weapons next to each other ruins the verisimilitude for guns and for bows at the same time.

I understand some folks want the steampunk feel to their game and don't care about accurate power. I just can't get past it. It's too much to buy into for me and I enjoy buying into dragons and wizards.

This really isn't true, and they do go to some effort in Guns and Gears to establish a reasonable technological space for firearms to occupy that makes them comparable to, but not superior to, other ranged weapons. It's not like everyone abandoned bows or crossbows the moment a firearm was invented - there were ~200 years of overlap between the bow, crossbow, and firearm in western europe - ~1350 to ~1550 they were all used. That's comfortably in the time period from which Pathfinder draws from - full plate armour was basically unheard of before ~1400. By the end of that time period it was pretty clear the firearms were superior but economics might stop your force from relying on them, but earlier in that time period there were benefits and disadvantages to each of these options. There's no reason to say that guns necessarily have to be "far, far, far, far, exponentially more powerful than bows" - that's obviously true of modern guns, but the technology level of the Lost Omens setting is clearly drawing from a period of overlap of all 3 of these weapons.

There are some really interesting analyses of the change between longbow and firearm in the English army in particular, as they had to discuss it very heavily due to how much they'd previously relied on longbows. This is an interesting article discussing the topic: link to JSTOR article.

Why? All the planer dragons are Paizo originals aren't they? I don't see a need for this and sort of just makes things more difficult.

They specified for Delight vs Havok that, as Elysian dragons, Havok gives the wrong vibes - even if they do sometimes cause havok, it makes more sense for a creature meant to represent Elysium to have its narrative focus be on the Delight it is associated with.

AV is a bad example. If you read what James Jacobs was doing with AV, lethality was intended. He made it like an old school sandbox module like Keep on the Borderlands or something similar where if you wander into the wrong area, you die. Just like in Keep on the Borderlands way back when, you wander into the Ogre or owlbear cave or the hobgoblins or evil church too early, it was goodbye character time.

I believe this was intended design to create that old school sandbox experience that wandering into particularly dangerous areas was a likely goodbye to your character and likely a TPK. Some of us old school people remember these TPKs in old modules because they were built to happen by design. It made beating those modules when you finally did feel great and memorable.

Another AP that shouldn't be in the conversation is Age of Ashes as it was early design and they over-tuned it because the module writers didn't have a full grasp of encounter design.

Otherwise, most APs have a few encounters here and there that may be rough, but are otherwise very manageable.

That seems directly at odds with James Jacob's GM advice at the start of Abomination Vaults, which states:

It seems pretty clear to me that the intention is not for players to walk into harder-than-expected challenges and just die, at least not if they're willing to retreat.

Arcaian wrote:

One could argue that the lethality of low-level play is intended to contribute to the feel of lower level play, but I don't think we see that reflected in the stories produced by paizo - few of the APs I've run or prepped seem like they want you to feel like you're a peasant thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation, about to die at any moment. They mostly feel to me like pretty classic heroic fantasy, starting at a pretty good power level

You need to wait for level 2 to get your Full Plate or even sometimes your weapon (some firearms are really expensive). That's peasant's concerns.

You are literally expert in no skill. The main difference in competence between 2 level one characters are their attributes value as none of them is actually specialized in anything.
Any classic fantasy enemy is a deadly threat (ogre, ankheg, whatever). The safest way to gain experience is to face a ton of low level enemies. That doesn't feel heroic at all.
You lack feats so most of your actions are pretty generic.

Feelings being what they are we have all the right in the world to disagree. But I do think the feeling of playing a peasant with a greatsword is there.
I've played games where you start at a "pretty good power level" and it's not at all the same feeling: You start with all your equipment, you have most of your powers, you don't wait for higher levels for your build to go online, etc...

Being able to go into battle equipped with heavy armour, large professional weapons (including backup weapons), perhaps with some minor magical items like a healing potion, is "peasant's concerns"? You aren't an expert in combat at level 1 (unless you are, like a Fighter or Gunslinger), but you're a well-trained combatant, not someone inexperienced in the field. Being Trained in something means you'll reliably be able to do things that are expected of competent people, not "peasant thrown into the deep end"; you can swim flowing water easily, but rapid flowing rivers might be a struggle, you can climb well but might struggle when only small handholds are available, you can navigate a difficult path through a forest but might struggle with something intentionally confusing like a hedge maze, you can track a normal creature through the plains but maybe not a nimble panther through the jungle (all examples from the book, not my personal opinion). Even then, if you're talented in the area, you'll have a ~40% success chance at those difficult things - with someone Aiding you, you're just barely missing being at a 50:50 shot of tracking a panther through a jungle! It's not super blue-collar fantasy at level 1. Sure, classic fantasy enemies are deadly threats - but that's true beyond the first 2 levels where this HP thing is a problem, even a small dragon is a major threat to a 5th level character. Fantasy enemies tend to have all variety of threat levels, it's not hard to find one that threatens a character - and it's not like all of them are a deadly threat at level 1. Kobolds, goblins, etc are all classic fantasy enemies and they're not deadly (individually) to you.

If we're comparing this to other fiction, there are other stories where there's high lethality, a single mistake leaves you dead, and the protagonist(s) must be highly cautious if they're to survive. These stories are typically grimdark, or horror-adjacent, or maybe set during an apocalypse, and are almost always stories where the protagonists aren't expecting to be able to do massive changes, they're just trying to do what they can. They're almost always stories of low narrative agency for the characters. Those do not seem to be the same sorts of stories being told as in low-level PF2. My experience of low-level PF2 includes some horror-adjacent content, yeah - but it's not very much. There are mostly-cute stories of settling into a supportive university, there are explorations of forests with kobolds and traps, there are dungeons filled with mitflits and spooky-but-not-incredibly-strong creatures, hunting wild animals and fights against other humans who aren't individually stronger than you, etc. In all of them, you're expected to have high narrative agency, and you never feel like you're being beaten down by an unfair world that you're desperately trying to survive in. I do not think low-level PF2 is meant to feel like the existing fiction in which this lethality is found, I think it's meant to feel like a normal part of the heroic fantasy that the rest of the levels more accurately reflect.

Then you agree with me. My take is that Paizo should make 90% of it's releases for established players and 10% for new players.

This feels thoroughly disconnected from the point of the thread - I don't think there are many people advocating making levels 1-3 of all APs into Beginner Box style teach-the-new-players scenarios. The point of criticism is that the maths of the game in the first few levels teaches very different lessons to the maths of the game after those levels, and I think that it is clear to see that: a): the community online went through a phase of treating those early level lessons like they were true the whole game, and took years to get past it, b): new players often encounter issues at early levels where they either learn these not-always-true lessons themselves or are taught them as a solution to their problems at early levels by others, and c): many of the most common reasons for new players bouncing off the game are connected to these difficulties at lower levels.

None of that requires new releases to be marketed at new players to fix - the maths could be changed so it takes ~3 hits from a boss mob to take you down at all levels, instead of ~2 at level 1, and ~4 at level 20. That way people would learn the same lesson across the whole game, and it'd be less frustrating when you go from full hp to 0 hp without having the chance to take any action against it. Sure, you could carefully design all low-level prepublished content to avoid these weak points of lower level play that lead to frustrating situations, but you could also just change the maths. Presuming that people frustrated with this would leave the game anyway doesn't have any firm grounding, I think - if the game was constantly at risk of my PC dying before I took action in any given boss fight I probably would enjoy the game much less, I just know that it stops being like that quickly where a new player might not.

One could argue that the lethality of low-level play is intended to contribute to the feel of lower level play, but I don't think we see that reflected in the stories produced by paizo - few of the APs I've run or prepped seem like they want you to feel like you're a peasant thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation, about to die at any moment. They mostly feel to me like pretty classic heroic fantasy, starting at a pretty good power level - hell, you start out the game able to wrestle a camel into submission with about a 50% success rate, that's not the right vibes for a weak peasant thrown into the deep end (unless the story is very specifically trying to tell that by putting you up against higher level creatures). This description feels like it lines up more with the 0th level variant, where I do think it should feel like you're in over your head. I do feel like this is just a weirdness of the maths at low levels, and I don't think the game is better for having it present.