Bluenose's page

Pendragon isn't a bad choice for this. Most of the literature it's based on is written around the adventures of solitary knights, and it's not hard to adapt those to the RPG. And it's one game where there's more than a small amount of one-to-one gameplay alre4ady. Of course it does depend on wanting to play a knight.

This thread really should have been titled, "Four years of Wizard players explaining that when they spent 18 years defending power disparity they meant that it was fine when their favourite class was at the top of the power curve."

Is Baldur's Gate 3 going to be any good? I've heard not great things about it. Maybe they've improved it since then. I heard character customization by class and such not a thing. Pre-generated characters. And you can't create your own party.

I don't know where you heard there was no character customisation, because the beta has had that from the very start and hasn't had pre-generated characters to play. Whether it's a good game will always be a matter of opinion but I'd be very doubtful that all the time they've spent on their character generation system in the beta is going to be thrown away when the full game comes out later this year. And all their publicity up to the most recent Panel From Hell earlier this week has discussed creating your own characters.

Sanityfaerie wrote:

Alchemic_Genius wrote:

Really, what I find most bothersome is how what people want in a samurai class (ie long actions that involve drawing their sword in some fashion, or features revolving around drawing and sheathing repeatedly) doesn't actually reflect the fighting style at all.

The thing is, a lot of the folks who are interested in this stuff don't want to play "historically accurate samurai". They want to play things like "that one guy from Samurai Shodown", and Samurai Shodown had a guy who was constantly drawing and re-sheathing.

The biggest problem with Samurai as a class (or any historic archetype, but Asian ones get it strongest because anime) is the gulf between "I want to play an aristocratic horseback fighter" people and "I want fight a full plate demon mask godkiller who does an Omnislash with his katana" folks.

I remember how in PF1 Paizo did the dragoon archetype that wanted to be both a historic dragoon and FF4 Dragoon. It didn't really work ;)

That's what levels are for. People seem able to manage the idea that they don't start the game as Lina Inverse but have to work up to it; they can presumably also grasp the idea that they'll start as the aristocratic mounted warrior and work up to slaughtering people by the force of their ki-shout and waving a sword in their direction.

Gortle wrote:

Temperans wrote:

The biggest issue with the whole spellbook thing is how we had to quote like 8 different sections just to figure out how this one thing works. Which is honestly insane amount of book flipping.

That is something that doesn't get talked about enough. In order to play a caster you have to flip through a bunch of pages just to kind of understand a bit of the rules, then still fail because you forgot about another rule. By comparison the biggest issue martials have is companions.

The only way to avoid that flipping is literally memorizing the rules, or actively having cheat sheets. Which just reinforces the whole "you have to master the system just to play properly".

******************
Before anyone says "but I didn't have issues" or "this doesn't affect a lot of players". No, this is clunky design and it only seems good if you have a computer/pdf where you can search for things. Heck that design principle is why Pathbuilder is so encouraged to even make characters in the first place, since it cuts down on all the page flipping.

Tell me about it. I'm despairing over Kingmaker kingdom rules at the moment. I need at least 4 windows open at different pages in the rules. I'd hate to think how bad it would be if I was using the physical book not the PDF. Then the players have separate rules with different page numbers. The last two sessions have just been rolling kingdon activities.

Have fun with that. I've had to write a bunch of modifications. So far it doesn't the payoff of first edition kingdom building rules which is causing the player that used to enjoy that part of kingdom building to lose interest. I may just let them build buildings without rolls and use rolls only for interesting tasks.

In the 1st edition Kingdom Building rules, it was a build lots of magic shops and become powerful. A little different in this one. I may wing it more to make it more interesting.

Possibly try Horizon of the Vast, the Starfinder AP - often called Kingmaker in Space. It's got decent rules which seem like they'd adapt to PF. Yes, it's SF and the terminoogy needs adapting but I remember it being quite decent in giving different ways to develop the colony which aren't so much, "Just do this and prosper".

Katana, Kama, Kusarigama, Daikyu, Flintlock Firearms (copied from occident), Naginata, Tekko-Kagi, Sai, Tonfa, Tekko-Kagi.

That'd be matchlocks, historically. Flintlocks were hardly used anywhere before the 1620s at the earliest and Japan's great era of firearms in warfare started much earlier - and finished earlier, with the Tokugawa victory.

I'm kinda wondering if I should try giving them feedback and make account for being able to respond to survey even though I don't think I'm target audience :p

Having *just* people who are fans of 5e respondwill certainly lead to something almost exactly like a repeat of 5e.

Not that I imagine feedback being a large part of the design. Considering it's coming out in 2024 - presumably at Origins - then they pretty much have to be doing the printing, final layout and editing by the start of the year. But with 11 classes, sub-classes, feats across multiple levels, most classes are likely to be one packet. Four weeks between packets, 44 weeks just on the classes, and you're around the end of July next year just through character generation. Possibly later allowing for holidays. Can't see that leading to significant changes once they've "assessed" a particular class. And then there's the rest of the rules, assuming they mean to do anything different with those.

For Carrion Crown I'd look at Swords of the Serpentine. Based off Gumshoe, so good at investigation and basically otherwise a Lankhmar/Ankh-Morpork/Sanctuary simulator.
Actually let me post the description on the Pelgrane site:

Swords of the Serpentine offers:
A fantasy city of mystery and magic inspired by Lankhmar and Ankh-Morpork
Tools for fast and effective character creation
A customized combat system that opens the door for cinematic, heroic battles
Social combat that targets your enemy’s morale, letting you defeat some foes through wit, guile, and threats
Sorcery that allows you to rip apart a tower with the flick of a hand—but are you willing to pay the price in corruption to body and soul?
Powerful allegiances that give you influence in one or more factions across the city, but which can earn you equally powerful enemies…
Streamlined abilities that power four distinct types of heroes, and which you can mix-and-match across professions to customize your character further
Gameplay and rules mechanics that encourage players to help build the world they’re adventuring in
Rules for death curses, true names, alchemy, sorcerous items, ghostly possession, political manipulation, and more!

I reckon it woill work well a couple of the other paths once it becomes commonly available (I got it via pre-order, so my copy is one of the early batch).

Verzen wrote:

It also interferes with a lot of the fantasy. Like.. I'm getting lightning reflexes as a... wizard? Okay...

Verzen wrote:

I also dislike increasing 4 stats by +2 every 5 levels. It makes all the characters 'feel' the same. Especially at 20 when everyone is likely +18 in most of their stats.

Yep

"With everyone super, no one will be"

If some of the more hyperbolic statements about casters are treated as true and it's worthless to play them, then you have exactly that situation where some classes are Super and some aren't. You should be pleased by that, or does this only work when your preferred classes are the ones getting to be superior?

Specifically its causing a trickle down effect to other games, while the majority of 5e players only play 5e, its proportionally swelling the subset of players that try and enjoy other games, basically the more people who try the gateway game, the more end up following through to trying other things, even if most still don't.

For an example, Kickstarter had a total of two tabletop RPG projects pass $1,000,000 in it's history. Until this month, with two more passing that amount (The One Ring 2e and Seeker's Guide to Twisted Taverns) and several others taking over $100k. While I don't think all of that is a result of 5e, there's undeniably an increase in the amount of money being around tabletop RPGs.

The Rot Grub wrote:

Lightning Raven wrote:

Let's just come out and say it then: They thought that because they were veterans, they could apply their vast and curated well of knowledge in RPG's to this system and they failed. Because in other systems, your knowledge was basically "What feat to I have to take next level so I can gain a +1 somewhere?", so they chose several of those feats, called it a build, and forgot they had the feat because it was baked into their sheet. And that's it. The most novelty builds were those that chose a combat maneuver to break and those builds were awesome... When they worked, the first enemy immune to them and the player started crying.

When Cody said in his 2nd video something to the effect of: "My critics will be SURPRISED that my players are between 40 and 60 years old!", not only did he pull the "I'm old so I know what I'm doing" card, but it also betrayed exactly this problem you described.

Their 20+ years of experience has almost no relevance to what's being discussed here. Sure, perhaps they knew what hit points and AC were, and other things you just know after playing tons of other TTRPGs. But because PF2 is its own game what matters more toward your ability to play is your experience playing PF2. The fact that, to Cody, what was more important was his group's experience with other RPGs tells a lot about how wrong -- and hubristic -- they were going into the game.

Especially if their experience was focused on a handful of systems rather than being very broad. Lots of experience with D&D and PF1 gives you some skill, but broad experience with lots of different games can let you get good at adapting to different systems.

Of course, even then you can fall prey to assuming that superficial similarities will run deeper than they really do. I definitely remember that hitting my group when we started playing 3.0. It was easy to miss how important the build game was and how some of the roles had changed, because you could just start with characters much like AD&D character with a few extra options.

I have to say that I wouldn't think of someone as a veteran who hadn't played AD&D before 3.0 came out (consider there are people with 40+ years of experience with RPGs). And if they got through that, then they're well aware that games sometimes make very large changes from one edition to the next. That is a theme with modern D&D, after all. Any sort of appeal to experience that doesn't allow for changes from one edition to the next seems a little odd when experienced players are involved and have been through the same before.

Do we have any example that is not Gandalf of a Wizard using weapons?

Because one is an exception rather than a rule.

Go outside European mythology and folk tales and they're not too uncommon. Taoist exorcists in Chinese magical fantasy usually employ both magic and a weapon (usually a monk's spade) even as novices, for instance. There are some in post-Tolkein/post-D&D fantasy - it's hard to tell how good they are as warriors, simply because they rarely come up against skilled enemies. Gandalf across The Hobbit and LotR uses Glamdring twice against a significant opponent, killing The Great Goblin in a surprise round with a weapon designed against goblins/orcs, kilsl the balrog off-stage, and otherwise going through large numbers of ordinary orcs and goblins.

Bluenose wrote:

Test the last by giving it to everyone, and see how well it's received by people who think casters already have enough problem overcoming saves.

Your argument against buffing a weak, single target school power is... that if literally every enemy had it, they would be stronger against Wizards?

You realize that argument could be applied to almost every ability in the game? Absurd.

My argument is it should be tested rather than simply give More Power to what may or may not be a particularly weak ability - though I realise that's unpopular with people who've already decided that arguments about power level and not inflating it unnecessarily only apply to martials in 1e, and caster should get anything they ask for to power them up.

I like playing wizards, but I hate being mathematically weaker than other party members in near perpetuity.

I don't want my Ranger to be permanently inferior to the Wizard at flying, teleporting, and moving the party to another plane.Unless your idea is that a Wizard should have a whole range of abilities that a Ranger/<enter other non-caster here> can't ever get AND should be as good as them at anything they can do, then that's an issue you might want to address.

Wizards being overpowered last edition is potentially evidence that...

...the people playing Wizards in both this and the last edition might have inflated expectations of what a Wizard should be able to do and are upset that they aren't doing it.

I admit that the effects of arcane thesis features can fall into the "mechanically potent, but boring" realm since they boil down to "have more feats" or "have a different number of spells per day" - but that doesn't make them actually bad

If "Mechanically boring but potent" was seen as a problem, PF1 wouldn't have had so many threads where some people insisted Fighters were fine because their numbers were big.

I am of the mind that actions have consequences. A caster spending all of their spells on 1 fight wont get sympathy from me when another fight breaks out. Similarly, a martial character that goes too deep cant complain if the enemies gang up on them.

This generates two sorts of encounter/situation. Ones where they need spells (or at least magic) to resolve them, where the spellcasters automatically are more important than the non-spellcasters; and ones where it's not necessary to use spells and party composition is only relevant in that spellcasters don't need to use their main abilities. If PF2 has moved away from the situation where some characters are effectively makeweights for large parts of the game, I don't think that's too bad.

The-Magic-Sword wrote:

I sort of interpret that as character growth, if you start out with Power Attack and later retrain to Exacting Strike when it starts to fall off, it doesn't mean the character forgot the maunever, it means they've changed their fighting style and don't practice the original move anymore.

Maybe the elf no longer wants to specialize in the elven curve blade, so they replace the ancestry feat, does it matter? Maybe a magical power they had goes dormant and they pick up something else. Maybe their magical powers move on so they stop practicing inefficient magic and replace those spells with something better suited to their developing magic.

Except that per the rules you don't just not use whatever after you've retrained, you don't remember how to use it.

It's a game, so in a sense none of it matters. Still, a lot of the abstractions in Pathfinder feel a bit... I don't know, uncomfortable to me.

Do you remember how to do calculus the way you did when you learnt it at school? I don't. I do remember the statistics and probability that I learnt at the same time because I've kept using them (for work and hobbies). Of course that's after several decades, maybe it would be different it was only a few months. On the other hand, I remember at least one physical skill I was good at that I stopped practicing for nine months and found really hard when I went back to doing it - and plenty of people will have experience learning how to walk again after an accident that injures their legs. It's not enough to remember intellectually how to do a physical skill, if you aren't practicing it then you won't be good and certainly not likely to perform reliably under stress.

Gorbacz wrote:

393 ratings at Amazon!

The 8% of 1-star reviews ratio somebody did brandish earlier as a proof that something is very amiss with the game and needs some urgent housrules to be workable has fallen to 5% over the course of last few weeks - like I said, backlash "YOU'VE BETRAYED MY PRECIOUS FEELINGS" reviews are drying up. Of course it will take some time to reach PF1's average rating and % of 1-stars but ... it's getting there.

Maybe I'll do a countdown to 400 if it makes enough people ang happy.

That's a pretty impressive change in percentage, because it means most of the incoming reviews from Christmas were not 1 star reviews (as the number of reviews nearly doubled, but the percentage almost halved).

Exciting stuff!

And I'll toss a vote out there for the countdown to 400, your updates are the biggest reason I keep refreshing the thread.

There have been forty reviews since the last 1* one (that was early in November), which accounts for the change.

I must admit as a librarian I find the number of people complaining about case binding and thinking it's fragile to be amusing. They seem to expect perfect binding, which is far worse.

This thread reminds me of the immediate aftermath of Starfinder's release when people would declare Soldiers and Envoys tier H/12 trashcan material and Operatives as tier S+++ godlike, based mostly on armchair rocking and "40 years of experience in playing games"

Stating that now in Stafinder forum would get people to laugh and raise their eyebrows, as actual gameplay proved Soldier damage output as more consistent and reliable than Operatives and Envoy's buffs and debuffs indispensable.

Or the common opinion early in D&D 3rd edition reviews that the Monk was overpowered. Less often, the Sorcerer made the Wizard obsolete. And of course a little later the Mystic Theurge was the God-tier prestige class which everyone will want. Funny how those worked out.

Now, if the same complaints are still being made after a year or two, that's when they start to sound plausible. See the Caster/Martial Disparity for more than a decades worth of examples.

But the truth was the mechanics had reached the end of the cycle. There was just so much you could do with a twenty year old game chassis. And new gamers just weren't coming in fast enough.

Plenty of games don't see the same large changes from edition to edition that have been happening with D&D since 2000, and have been going for a lot more than twenty years while still finding interesting new products to sell. The idea you need to change the system so it can do more is a very 'D&D' phenomenon. It might be a necessary one for a business strategy committed to a high churn on splats, but D&D 5e has shown that's not a necessary feature even for D&D-a-like.

Like the Star Wars RPG pops up there whenever there's a Star Wars movie on the horizon.

It's pretty much a constant on the list. 5e is the big item, PF was usually second, then you'd get some 'Hot New Thing' (sometimes more than one) or 'Latest G&S Game' fighting for 3rd place with FFG Star Wars. As those New/Latest items lose some of the shiny they drop away but Star Wars has stayed in/around for years.

And there are one or two companies who put out sales numbers. We're about due for Evil Hat's yearly report which lists sales for all their items, for instance.

Demands that the game be modified to suit <POSTER'S> personal preference - still around.
Insistence that there shouldn't be any changes and everything is fine - still see those.
Claims that if other people "actually played the game" they'd have a different opinion - haven't disappeared.
Assumption that claiming you didn't like 4e D&D makes your point stronger - ongoing.
Posters thinking their assumptions about systems they know little about qualify as facts - of course.
Gorbacz posting something snarky - not sure about that.

Still looks like the Paizo Messageboard to me.

Deadmanwalking wrote:

Nobody here is arguing casters are the best class ever. Their Proficiencies in weapons, armor, Perception, and saves lag in general behind martials, as does their single target and at-will damage. Martials are sincerely better at some things than casters are this edition and should be.

But only some things. Casters are much better at buffs, debuffs, utility effects, dealing with large numbers of opponents, and nova-ing with their limited resources. And likewise, this is as it should be.

I strongly (and respectfully) disagree, sir. If you insist on cleaving to a martial/spellcaster line, then I'll phrase my argument in those terms:

There should be means for creating any combination of focus(?) and role. That is, there should be martial single-target damage dealers, martial AoE damage dealers, martial (de)buffers, martial controllers, etc, spellcaster single-target damage dealers, spellcaster AoE damage dealers, spellcaster (de)buffers, spellcaster controllers, etc.

True parity would allow for all of those things -- and that's what we're after, right? Parity?

In addition to what Artificial 20 says about out-of-combat ability, are we also assuming the martial character can spend money and then the next day change from being awesome at battlefield control to being awesome at single-target damage? Because the wizard can fill their spellbook out like that, and clerics or druids don't even need to do that (sorcerors, of course, are pretty much screwed).

Though I do admit to being very interested in what you propose the martials should be doing that's as useful as Wall of Stone, to give one example.

Temperans wrote:

Like Warhammer?

Never played or read it. Having played the war game I can assume its heavily combat focused but couldn't say for sure. Doesn't hugely deteact from my point that if you don't like combat anything dnd is probably the wrong game.

The "classic" WFRPG campaign is The Enemy Within. Shadows over Bogenhafen is the first part, and it's largely an investigation/mystery scenario with very few fights. Death on the Reik is the second part, where the PCs inherit a trading barge and end up using it to move up and down the river making deals while discovering clues to another threat. Power Behind the Throne and Something Rotten in Kislev also are more about investigation with not a huge amount of combat. Empire in Flames does have rather a lot, though by that stage of their careers the PCs should be more able to handle it. There are a few adventures that focus more on combat, but most involve a lot less than you get in Paizo Adventure Paths.

Martialmasters wrote:

Like it or not my table is changing a single word in the disarm description.

We are changing the word their. To your.

They receive a negative 2 to their attack rolls until the start of YOUR next turn.

Simple fix. Brings it inline with other maneuvers and doesn't over power it.

It actually doesn't bring it in line with other maneuvers. It could also create cognitive dissonance by making the fiction not much the reality (why do they have a -2 for exactly 6 seconds? Depending on how much your players accept your answer will depend on whether or not they experience cognitive dissonance).

The six seconds that the other person uses trying to disarm you is the same six seconds in which you're trying to act. Even if they don't manage to take your weapon away, they're engaging it and pushing it out of line so you have to persistently spend time recovering proper form.

Trip makes a target prone until THEIR turn when they have to spend an action to fix it. Bull rush (or wahtever it's called in this edition) moves a target back a few feet until the THEIR turn when they have to spend an action to move back to where they were.

If you want to make disarm inline with these other maneuvers then you should require an action for a target to adjust their grip to undo the -2 penalty. This way there is always an affect (they either experience a -2 OR they lose an action) and there is no chance for cognitive dissonance (the in game fiction without any room for doubt matches the mechanics).

I'd probably make it follow the 1/2/3 pattern of some other effects, with being prone or disarmed the effect on level 3 - until then it's just a penalty to attack and/or AC.

People can backflip in full plate just fine IRL, should google it!

You can also swim in heavy armour, as can be seen in some Youtube videos. It's probably easier in plate than chain, which is also true of moving around generally. I'd certainly rather run an obstacle course in well-made plate armour than a chain hauberk - and have done so years ago as a reenactor.

All classes should be "best" in their style of combat. Saying fighters should be best at combat might be good in Conan the Barbarian, but it is not good at a gaming table. The combat contribution should just be different, not inferior.

Now apply that to non-combat situations and see how long it takes for the Fighter to realise that they can't get the party to another plane no matter what they learn to do, they can't ask questions of thin air and get answers, they can't bring people back from the dead at all, and plenty of other things. Unless you privilege Combat much more than every other thing the campaign could be about, making the characters with a huge amount of non-combat versatility also have combat ability equal to the ones that are limited outside combat but good at it is rather unreasonable.

Bluenose wrote:

Basically since the release of 5e the top two had stayed steady, D&D 5e in first, PF in second.

That’s not entirely accurate. Pathfinder fell out of the #2 slot after the Spring of 2017 numbers and has not returned to that sales position yet.

Quite true. I should have added that it had remained that way until the PF2 announcement.

If we want to talk about wrong. Clearly my definition "failing forward" was wrong and is so extreme that no-one (except the authors of the Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition Dungeon Master's Guide 2 and the nerdologist blog I linked to plus a couple of people in this thread) would ever actually use that definition.

The DMG2 doesn't say anything like your definition of how you believe "Fail Forward" works. It has advice on how to design branching trees of character decision points and how to avoid making some of those branches into dead ends, but that's all.

And since PbtA and Fate have been brought up as possible places where the PF team could have got the idea from, I'll point out that none of the versions I'm familiar with (though given that both systems have extensive hacks I can't be sure there's none deviating from their norm in that way) have advice on "fail forward" that matches your original definition either. It seems more like a definition that would be invented by someone who wants nothing like it in their RPGs, as a way of claiming that Fail Forward is inherently bad without having to address how it's supposed to be applied.

graystone wrote:

This isn't ANY different from us having a strike action now or a shapeshift action or a sneak attack action or... Named techniques were there before and afterwords. No one ever had to call the abilities those names in game. Ever.

Sneak Attack has never been an action. Nor are having actions like 'shapeshift' or 'strike' or 'attack' the same as having specific names like 'Tide of Iron' or 'Steel Serpent Strike' (both 1st level Fighter Powers in 4E).

I played Exalted for years, as well as actually watching a varity of anime, and those sound like Charm names from Exalted or technique names from an anime (or wuxia film) in a way that 'strike' and 'shapeshift' never come remotely close to.

Do "Full Iron Door Defence" or "Grand Coup en Hauteur" sound like it comes from anime/wuxia? Does "Salmon Leap"?

Of course if it's all a matter of presentation and it's perfectly fine to give warriors a wide variety of non-magical techniques with distinctive mechanical effects as long as they're described in a way that people will tolerate (which seems to be the OPs position regarding 4e Encounter Powers and their PF2 equivalent) then I don't see much difference in effect. It's when a rejection of "anime" powers comes with a rejection of anything more sophisticated for martial abilities, and unfortunately there's a very strong correlation between people who object to both those things. Maybe you're fine with Fighters temporarily making themselves nearly invulnerable to attacks, striking enemies that start beyond their reach and falling back in the same manoeuvre, or jumping up waterfalls; but only if those are described in the most neutral language imaginable.

Lastly, the shape of the shield. Since he is the Iconic Fighter, it would have been nicer to see a more..... traditional shield. Something with less of a point at the top, and rounded coming down to the bottom. I'm all for Fantasy getting away from historical designs, but something less "Kite" shaped and more "Shield" shaped. I can only hope that will shields being dented and broken, that Valeros finds something a litter nicer as he levels. :D

It is a historical design. The Italian Targa shields often appear in illustrations and surviving examples to have been that shape and a pretty good match for size. There are older examples too. I think WAR taking inspiration from a wider range of history and culture than previously is a good thing.

I've never heard talking of hand-pavises, but then again, I've never heard of half-ellipticals either, so I guess whatever we want to call that shield is okay.

It reminds me in shape and size of Middle/New Kingdom Egyptian shields. Like these two, though certainly not as ornate (they're from the tomb of Tutankhamun). Whether that's a good model to use is another question, but at least it's not another European type.

ograx wrote:

Joana wrote:

Perfectly understandable. Then you're going to want this thread.

That thread is a decade old. I think getting a PDF download for buying the book should be a standard thing with RPG books and can be tied to a serial number or the scanner code on the back.

You either write the number down or take a pic of the code and hey, free PDF. It's XXI century, everybody has a high-res camera in their pocket.

You could do ones inside but then it means all books need to be wrapped in foil, folks can't browse them in store (spoiler alert: people like browsing books in stores) and the owner has an additional headache of looking after people unwrapping the book. Result = unhappy FLGS owner.

And even if it all works and you buy the book and you redeem the code and download your PDF, what happens if you return the book (spoiler alert: there are countries on this planet where law gives you a non-derogable right to return any product purchased)? Well, free PDF! Also, a unhappy FLGS owner.

The funny thing is that you declare support for your local store yet you propose a service that's perhaps the worst thing imaginable for them.

The way it works with the Bits and Mortar scheme is that you give the store your email address on purchasing an item and then you're sent a link to download the pdf(s) of the items you bought. As long as you keep the email then that should stay usable. Not that this helps with Paizo products, but other companies do it successfully.

This may be really out there, but I could see a TN Champ being nature/druid-y themed. Nature has no alignment, and a protector of the wilds as a more defensive rather than a ranger's offence focus seems a natural fit (pardon the pun)

I'd suggest the Rangers' focus would be more stealth and ambush - Robin Hood, Tarzan, for example - where the 'Champion of Nature' would be the person who challenges the enemies of Nature openly - a la The Green Knight.

The one that isn't interested in nature is more like a wandering sword-for-hire, less interested in the cause they're fighting for than perfecting their personal skills - stepping a little into the Monk's sandals, in some ways.

Always thought it was 'Kee-ra'

Apart from that, it's pretty good though her legs seem awfully far apart which conveys a more stable approach to combat as oppose to the mobility being cited in the video - though perhaps she just completed spin and is regaining her footing...

If it was a combat stance I'd expect her to be less flat-footed. It's a little more like being on a surface that isn't entirely stable and trying to compensate for that - a ship's deck, for instance.

I don't know how big that influence really is - all I can see is that big surge of people starting to play and liking that podcast.

Critical Role (not VM or M9 but the same channel) also play other RPGs. IIRC Monster of the Week was one of them. It had at the time been out for six years, and had sold decently for an indie. When Critical Role played it the company that sells it says they sold as many copies in the next three months as they'd sold in the six previous years.

That's how significant Critical Role can be.

magnuskn wrote:

Actually, every pale person who doesn't naturally bronze in the sun who I've ever known turns beet red after some prolonged exposure to the sun.

I mean if I go through a lot of cycles of "get sunburned, recover, get sunburned, recover" I don't get noticeably darker I just get "less likely to sunburn" through some mechanism I do not understand.

Repeated sunburns seriously increase your risk of getting skin cancer. Use stronger skin protection or stop exposing yourself so often.

I really hate how men with high strength are always shown with lots of muscles whereas women with high strength are shown like stick figures. Unless there's some sort of DEX Barbarian build I'm not aware of, she doesn't look like she could hold up the sword let alone swing it. Not a fan (and this isn't a 2nd ed change, this has always been a bugaboo of mine. I just never had an excuse to bring it up on these forums before).

I think that's a bit unfair, Kyra, Seelah, the Inquisitor whose name I can't remember, and Kess are all solid, and there aren't any real body-builder types among the men. Amiri could certainly do with looking to have a heavier build, although I agree that a dex-build would be reasonable for her appearance.

I sort of want the story to continue.

The giant stepped aside, and Amiri's scream turned into a yelp of surprise followed by a thud as she landed face first in the snow. The giant sighed. "That was really stupid. I could find a place for you in my hill giant squad, they'd probably admire your antics and try to copy them, and I could do with getting rid of a few. There's barely enough food to be had for my army as it is, and once they started coming in I've got no idea what will happen in a week's time when the supplies run out."

necromental wrote:

So, if I do something that's suboptimal and boring, I'll last longer? I mean I usually play magic-martials, but if I want to play the casting-caster it's not because I want to cast cantrips all day long.

Let's take a look at this from a game design perspective:

1) Spells are limited in uses per day, while most martial abilities are not.

2) Given that, spells need to be more powerful than typical martial abilities to justify their limited uses

I think a different game-design perspective gives a different result.

1) Spells do an incredible variety of things and it's easy for a caster to exploit that to be useful in many situations including ones where both weapons and skills are completely useless.

2) Given that, spells need to be inferior to typical martial and skill-based abilities to justify their flexibility.

Cellion wrote:

While your concerns are near and dear to my heart Edge, I must respectfully disagree with your proposed solution. Clearly, we should be using SI naming schemes here to match PF2E's very timely switch to meters, centigrade, and kilograms in update v1.7. I suggest the following weapon names:

Greatsword -> Megasword

Longsword -> Kilosword

Shortsword -> Sword

Dagger -> Millisword

It'd be far more simple and elegant.

So where does the bastard sword fall in this system?

Presumably that's the Decasword.

(This loosely connects to the "How do people feel about the FATE system?" thread)

Let me be the first to Introduce MACHO WOMEN with FATE!

...

No, it does not exist.
It probibly should not exist!
(But, it would work.)

I'd be prepared to bet there is a Macho Women with Fate extension somewhere, working rather well.

Anyway, Fate isn't a great 'gearhead' game. Personal equipment matters rather little if you aren't playing something like Camelot Trigger or Tachyon Squadron where the vehicle you operate is a character in its own right. I don't think it's good as a game where logistics matter, scavenging for supplies and hoping you won't run out - the zombie apocalypse is an extreme example. It's not good at letting a PC be leader of a group of mooks or anything else which involves much more than individual characters, and when you combine that with the lack of much interest in gear it means Star Trek or BSG don't quite fit the bill. Of course it's not any worse at those things than many other games.

MER-c wrote:

I disagree, a lot of human learning is simply observing, training involves both observing and then attempting, to the point where you become competent. Since any critically thinking human can glean useful information from observing and experiencing then I see no reason why any PC is not able to at least imitate trained people after years of observing trained people. Thus I prefer adding levels to untrained checks because experience counts for something granted I do it at -4 or if that’s still not a large enough gap -5.

Can you provide ONE example of someone who got better at climbing simply by watching others climb?

And they have to be seriously meaningfully better.

Alex Megos. At least according to Alex Megos. He claims he didn't have any special training, he just watched how other people climbed and copied their technique to improve his skills.

I don't get why a wizard becoming better at attacking (even physically) is ok, but a wizard becoming better at defending is absolutely not.

The only explanation I can think of is: because it used to be so.

Why does every character become more skilled with their weapons when their BAB increases, including the ones they aren't even proficient in? Why does the spellcaster who never casts a single necromancy spell turn out to be able to cast them perfectly when there's an 8th level one they like? Why does killing goblins make you better at opening locks because you level up and that's where you put your skill point(s)? It's all a great mystery.

Why are we talking about realism in this thread?

Did realism stop mattering, then? Can we dispense with all the arguments about how fighters shouldn't be able to leap tall buildings because they can't do that in reality and it ruins certain peoples sense of verisimilitude, and allow a whole range of heroic non-magical abilities from myths and legends (personally I'd like Finn McCool's ability to speak any tongue)?

There are people, such as myself, who enjoy being the big burly in the group who can take a hit and stand toe-to-toe with the biggest monster in the dungeon. That's a playstyle that I think should be facilitated. I'm open to hearing how a Fighter's damage could be boosted slightly without stepping on what the Barbarian is good at (High DPS Fighter w/good armour vs. High DPS Barbarian w/poor armour).

Compare the Fighter to the Rogue. A rogue might be made in one way to be a social chameleon and con-artist, in another as a cat-burglar, thirdly as a spy and in a fourth way as an assassin. Now the Fighter can be a 'big burly', or a mounted warrior - oops, that's Cavalier - or a lightly armoured and mobile melee combatant - Swashbuckler took that niche - or an inspiring leader of men - except that is left to Bards, because obviously without magic you can't inspire - and doing too much damage upsets the Barbarian and being a Tank upsets some people's sense of what's realistic... And the fact that you like the one narrow option the Fighter gets shouldn't mean there shouldn't be other ways of doing them. It's not as if the options I'm suggesting are as varied as the rogue options, or deviate hugely from being good at combat.

2 - Spells being destroyed, gutted, nerfed and the pandering to idiots on this forum who complain about martial vs caster disparity in a team game.

Play your character concept, and don't worry about how weak it is. It's a team game.

Have you seen all the threads about casters and spells not being good enough? Apparently the amount of power a character can wield is extremely important to some people.

Makarion wrote:

Actually, I'd be all in favour of a setting where only the most legendary of spellcasters can cast a 5th level spell, and where martials are on par with that. Maybe want to eliminate levels as such a hard power-up experience a bit, or create half-levels somehow, but as a general power gage, I'd be cool with it.

Granted, that is not what most PF and D&D players are likely to enjoy, but I bet I'm not alone in longing for some good old Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, and similar, fantasy.

And, though it scrapes at the "then go play something else" fallacy, I'd like to mention that there are games like that already. No need to hijack this one, too.

There are also games that do super-high-power levels too (Exalted, for one example). The thing to note about both the low-powered and high-powered option is that they present Merlin and Lancelot as endgame peers, or Doctor Strange and Goku as endgame peers. They don't make Doctor Strange and Lancelot the top tier options for casters and martials. Paizo need to pick a power level to aim at for 20th level, and not make sure all the classes get to it.