I’m having trouble reconciling this “change” with a game where “you should expect to go down, it’s part of the game” is a wisdom often provided to people complaining about the base difficulty.
Well, I'm not sure who you are talking to about it. I haven't heard that you should expect to be dropped. You should expect to be hit, yes. You can't build an exceptionally high AC to prevent you from getting more than scratches like you could in PF1. You will take damage from enemies.
But being dropped is a different matter entirely. If your characters are getting dropped in the first round of combat, then something is amiss
A couple recent threads where this is suggested by several people. It’s certainly more of a low-level issue but in my opinion dying rules should be balanced around low levels more than high levels, since that’s usually players’ introduction to the system and where they spend most of their time.
I’m having trouble reconciling this “change” with a game where “you should expect to go down, it’s part of the game” is a wisdom often provided to people complaining about the base difficulty. One of my players is a giant instinct barbarian and is regularly dropped on the first round of combat by an enemy casually walking up and critting him in the face two or three times. Then the cleric gets him up so he can do his job of tearing the foe to shreds. I don’t think he’d find it very fun if I told him he should either sit out for the combat or have an 80% chance of rolling a new character. And my healer-maxed cleric would probably quit if my tactically-minded players told them not to heal the guy bleeding out on the ground.
If you’re expected to retreat or die in the Moderate-Severe range of encounters pretty regularly I’m not sure how you’re supposed to get anything done.
I doubt the designers were considering touch a sense at this point in writing the CRB and it’s certainly problematic in other areas to run it like this.
It really is just a “check with your GM” indicator. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give any info to the GM about WHY it needs to be checked. The fact that the naming conventions for it are based on the concept of “rarity” doesn’t help the issue when the reason is often not based on in-lore rarity at all. I’d rather my players check in about Teleport and not Boneshaker or a Katana, but the rules put all of them at the same level.
A couple years ago someone posted some great cleaned up versions of the NPC act posters in Book 1, since as printed in the book they're overlapped and angled, which doesn't make for good printouts. My group is getting into Book 2, and as far as I could find, no one has made any more, so I cleaned up the acts in this book to make some more printouts.
Then why would the Mirror Image language differ from Concealed/Hidden? If it was meant to work against all targeted effects it would say so, but instead it says attacks.
In my opinion it’s pretty clear that “touch” in a spell description is just a descriptor for the range of the spell for the purposes of targeting, and that’s it. Otherwise a normal Vampiric Touch would be affected by Mirror Image, but Reach Spell + Vampiric Touch would not because now it’s a targeted spell with 30ft range. I don’t think Mirror Image protects against every hostile targeted effect, otherwise it would talk about being targeted rather than being attacked.
The thing about Thematics is that they are conserved between editions in a way Mechanics are not.
Paizo has up to this point conserved thematics across editions, but I want a class (thematics included) to stand on its own. I shouldn’t have to tell a new player to go read Occult Adventures to figure out why Kineticists use Con.
So thematically the reason for Con is "your biology is not supposed to have an internal gate to elemental energy like that, and you're constantly doing resistance training with every cell in your body by running planar energy through it."
This was true in PF1, but nothing in the playtest flavor or abilities suggests this. Beyond mechanics, I would like to see more of the flavor text suggest you’re actually using your Con.
”Alright!! You’re getting me fired up for this!” Zurrus’ tail starts lashing back and forth excitedly. ”How does this sound: two feathers, six seconds to get ready, and 60 feet to start.” She bares her sharp teeth in a lighthearted sneer. ”May the best team win!”
Based on the discussion thread, went with 2 feathers, one round prep, 60 feet starting distance.
Edit: Also a new 6th-level spell that I have yet to choose.
Edit edit: Choosing Scintillating Safeguard as my new 6th-level spell, and swapping out Vibrant Pattern (signature) for 6th-level Haste (signature) as my free swap for the level up. Will need to retrain 3rd-level Haste into a new 3rd-level spell.
Gogiteths! “A slavering nightmare of teeth, eyes, and hairy spiderlike legs” that stalks you through the Darklands, skittering and popping. The popping stops and you think you’re safe, but you realize too late that it was just hiding, waiting to grab you and drag you into the depths of the tunnels, never to be seen again.
:)
Obviously actually dangerous as well, but a giant spider that’s actively malevolent and knows how to hide its presence to better hunt you down is nightmare fuel for me.
To me, Kineticist was the “burn” class because it was very hard to find something else that could do the “push yourself beyond the limit” trope. The elemental stuff always just seemed like a vehicle for that, especially since “aether” was just telekineses and they moved towards weirder stuff like void and wood that aren’t really elements. Not to mention there was plenty of support for elementalist characters elsewhere.
That said, they did really lean into the elemental stuff so I can see why a lot of people gravitated towards the class for that reason. I think as long as they at least include the option for pushing yourself too far it would scratch that itch for me (hopefully with something less obtuse than the 1e burn mechanics).
That is effectively what the kineticist is. It is also one of the best PF1 classes and one of the most likely to be butchered by PF2 class design.
That class is just too good as is for PF2 standards. Getting talents, damage upgrades, and ways to change/boost said damage while mix and matching? Simply impossible unless free archetype was baseline and every class gave actual features.
This take is very interesting to me because Kineticist is usually regarded as “mediocre” specifically because it follows many design philosophies that transferred over to 2E. Everything it needs to be effective is given to you in the class chassis so it’s hard to make a bad kineticist, but the abilities are written to not interact with almost anything else so you can’t break the optimization ceiling either, the way you could with almost every other class. Not to mention you basically get class feats and skill feats (infusions and utility talents, respectively). The power levels will need to be reworked to fit into 2E’s baseline (but that happens with every class), and probably a burn rework, but the core feel of the class could remain largely unchanged.
I cannot understand why anyone is celebrating this news. My PDF Importer on Foundry was working great. This is why Foundry was the best way to play PF2. Now I'll have to buy everything again. There's going to be limitations placed on content that we'll be able to use, because you'll have to wait on Paizo conversions and buy everything again.
This is terrible news. I'm debating stopping the Beginner Box adventure I was running. What's the point of trying to get new players on board with this system now? Future adventures, bestiaries, and APs won't be available.
Are they coming after Archives of Nethys next so we have to buy everything on Nexus? Taking down Pathbuilder?
PF2 was better than D&D for VTT because we didn't have to go through sites like DND Beyond (which I think is terrible).
And I know you will say "you can still use PDF Importer for what you've already got." Yeah, for now. Once it's not compatible with the next forced update of Foundry, all that content is gone.
I would advise reading the responses in this thread and the FAQ on Foundry’s website before complaining about things that have already been addressed. The PDF Importer was maintained by one person who had already decided to stop supporting it. Due to the precautions he took to make sure it was compliant with both Paizo and Foundry’s rules, he can’t open source it, so it can’t be maintained by someone else (and it really shouldn’t fall on one person to manually create full adventures for everyone else’s benefit anyways). Short of you or someone else deciding to make a new importer from scratch and manually supporting every new adventure, this partnership is the only way we will have pre-built Foundry content without doing it ourselves (which again, anyone is still free to do). Purchasing a module through this partnership gives you a free PDF, and you get a discount on it if you already have the PDF, so you don’t need to buy anything twice.
As for rules content such as Bestiaries, all of that is still included in the PF2 system on Foundry and is still maintained by the community. This is not going away.
All this partnership does is let you pay a little extra to not have to prep the adventure yourself. We aren’t losing the ability to do anything, the one guy that did all of it for us just doesn’t want to do it anymore.
As a player I make it a point to complain about my poor ears when my fellow party member unleashes his arquebus right next to my character in a small room. The GM doesn’t seem super concerned about it, though.
It looks to me like they're including the AC bonus from +1 hellknight fullplate as it would work for a PC. That's not technically how it works but I think it's a pretty fair way of handling/improvising it.
That is how it works per Bestiary 2 on page 7 (maybe the first Bestiary as well):
“Bestiary 2” wrote:
If a creature doesn’t have its armor, find the armor in its Items entry and reduce the creature’s AC by that armor’s item bonus (Core Rulebook 275). If the armor has a potency rune, increase the reduction as appropriate.
