Avdiggin's page

Yeah, I don’t see this wording in the rulebook as being at all ambiguous.

A Critical Success is either, 1) a natural 20 that beats the DC (a natural 20 isn’t an automatic success if you don’t beat the DC) or 2) A roll (+modifiers) that beats the target DC by 10 or more.

I dig it because playing with a natural 20 being an automatic success your players have 5% chance to accomplish ANY task regardless of its difficulty or their skill.

What would really have helped me and my group was a section explaining the changes (philosophically if not mechanically) from PF1 to PF2.

The basic, generic preamble to this book was fine (same kinda thing you find at the front of most RPGs), but it didn’t really help transition players from PF1 to PF2. Paizo has to know they’ve got players who’ve been running some version of the 3X system (D&D 3, 3.5 and PF1) for nearly 20 years. Including a section that briefs those players on what’s changing from would be very, very welcome.

As for a lot of the complaints in previous posts about a lack of options, from what I’ve seen that doesn’t quite ring true. I think that the fact that your proficiency reflects your level makes that much less of an issue. Figure, even if you’re untrained and have no ability score bonus, if you’re a 5th level character you have AT LEAST a +3 bonus to every skill, save, and ability. It seems to me that will give all characters more viable tactics to employ. Yeah, it seems to be tougher to create unbalanced/OP/exploitative characters, but that’s kinda the point, right?

How many hours have we all spent with gamers trying to create those kind of characters? “I wanna be a fighter, but I want all the rogue skills.” “I want to be a rogue but I also want to be able to stand my ground in a melee fight.” If the fighter you’re trying to build/play doesn’t wear heavy armor or use shields, and has a great dex and favors bows, maybe he’s a ranger?

My take:

I don't really care if Monkey Grip is too powerful or too weak. I just don't like the visual flavor of someone wielding a two-handed weapon in one hand. It feels silly to me. Like wearing two pairs of magical boots at once and gaining the benefits of both. Silly.

I think that part of the issue is that there is a huge range of "medium-sized" characters. If the medium-sized character in question is a half-elf that's about 5-foot-8 and weighs 160 pounds and has a +0 STR modifier, then yeah, wielding a greatsword one-handed would be pretty comical. However, what if your medium-sized character is a 6-foot-8 human barbarian that weighs 260 pounds and has a STR modifier of +4 or higher?

All this talk about how silly it is for a medium-sized character to wield a large weapon doesn't really take into account the basic fact that a greatsword weighs 8 pounds. It's totally unreasonable to think that the half-elf given as an example above could wield an 8-pound sword in one hand without penalty. But, it's also totally reasonable to think that the barbarian given as an example above could wield that 8-pound sword one-handed with no problem at all.