BotBrain's page

Well, I used Microsoft CoPilot to ask the following questions:

1. How do you calculate damage in PF2e?

2. What would the calculations look like using a greataxe for a Fire Giant?

In #1, it gave an example of a barbarian using a greataxe. Ignoring barbarian special abilities, the difference in damage centering around the greataxe my PF1e players thought just wasn't believable.

We're not asking for realism -- we're just asking for a level of believability.

I'll bet if a survey was taken, most PF1e players would have a lot of issues playing with PF2e damage calculations -- with the core issue being weapon size.

Having a tiny greataxe and a huge greataxe do the same damage is just unacceptable to PF1e players. Almost always discussions about this with different PF1e players yield utterances of "dumbing it down".

This is the same thing PF1e players said about 5e.

For the love of all that is holy do not use LLMs to tell you how a system works. They're prone to just lying at the best of times, much less parsing specific information about a system with similar names and mechanics to other systems.

I'm not going to comment on the size thing because this is clearly just going to come down to personal prefrence, but the rules are easily accessible online and you're more than capable of reading them on your own.

omg please i'd love a second edition contempary of Strange Aeons. I love putting cosmic horror stuff in my games even when it is entrirely irrelvant. Sure APs don't add loads of feats or whatever but I can dream.

Aren't Pathfinder ancestries getting stuff in the Galactic Ancestries book already?

That's one aspect of what's being asked for. But that won't include things like class feats, cross-compatible numerian items, etc.

Huh that's interesting, because I'm reading their (admitedly limited) entry on starfinder wiki and they sound like they're closer to some kind of beast. I wonder if the loss of aucturn will spur them forward.

Family corpse resureccted without your permission? Sue now!

Cultists in your neighbourhood? It's more likely than you think!

Have you or a loved one been diagnosed with radiation sickness?

I think a lot of the fun of in-game myths like wukong becoming immortal is that they DON'T make sense. It hints that these stories are something mortals tell to explain something, and the "Real" events may be different.

Perhaps wukong didn't just delete his name from a book, he used supreme trickery on a cosmic scale to make it so his name was never real, and that's much harder to communicate.

Perhaps this is bias on my end, because in my setting I enjoy mixing the way TTRPGs normally do gods, and adding this unknowable aspect on top. My fave little tidbit is introducing doubt as to whether mortals actually ascend, or if their acenction has produced something that thinks it's the mortal.

(Yes i stole this from swamp thing)

BotBrain wrote:

Timber sentinel being a stronger guardian tree isn't power creep, because nobody in their right mind is going to take a kineticist dedication just for timber sentinel because it's stronger protector tree.

Oh I dunno, that one, the healing ones, and a couple of the stances make it really tempting. Use-all-you-want on things where your attack or save DC doesn't matter are like this whole other dimension of niceness. IMO the thing holding the kineticist archetype back is not what you get but when you get it; waiting until L4 to get your first impulse, then getting 1 per 2 levels is kinda meh. I think a lot of other archetypes deliver a quicker 'hit' of benefit.

Okay but now we're talking about kineticist in general being strong. Kineticist has not entriely overshadowed prior options to the point where you're causing yourself problems by not taking it. I'm not denying it's a stronger-than-baseline ability. It obviously is.

My point is that it has not created a problem where anyone who would want to take protector tree is instead coaxed into taking kineticist dedication JUST for timber sentinel.

Again to go back to YuriP's point, Strong =/= power creep. It's why I don't think Numbing tonic is a strict upgrade to elixir of life. There are lots of situations where you want to pick one or the other.

I really don't understand what timber sentinel is power creeping. Power creep is when an older option is rendered obsolete by a newer option which is stronger.

Timber sentinel being a stronger guardian tree isn't power creep, because nobody in their right mind is going to take a kineticist dedication just for timber sentinel because it's stronger protector tree.

Same with numbing tonic. What's that completely replacing?

As yuriP said. Something being above baseline =/= power creep. There's above baseline options in the legacy PHB.

This sounds more like a PFS failing than the system itself. We've known from the get-go that mixing SF2e and PF2e will come with issues like flight from level 1.

I don't know how much you can argue something is power-creep when it's from an optional ruleset that explicitly flags this as a problem. It'd be another thing if Dragonkin was a printed ancestry in Pf2e.

Okay, so for the "Beast Boy" version of a shifter what is keeping the Wild Order Druid from fulfilling that role? Serious question. Not down playing that desire at all.

For the Werewolf-ish Shifter, what is keeping the Beastkin VHeritage, the Werewolf Archetype, and the Animal Barbarians from fulfilling that role?

The beast boy comparision is limited, I just use it to emphasise the difference between barb and a hypothetical shifter.

Druids are still spellcasters, so you don't get to commit fully to the fantasy of this blurring of man or beast as you swap forms freely in battle.

Untamed form is also very limited, you get a small pool of fixed options, instead of a wider pool of options to pick from.

Would my hypothetical shifter be derivative of wild order druid? Yes. But a lot of classes have a decent amount of overlap and I don't see the difference here.

If you want to see what I'm on about, Teridax's shifter is essentially my pitch, though i would prefer it remain purely animalistic, at least at first. There's not really any reason for that, I just like the flavour of PF1e's shifter.

BotBrain wrote:

Ooh con based shifter sounds like a really fun idea.

This could be something. The Shifter concept is much more amenable to damage boosts than the Guardian one IMO.

Though Unarmed martial with a big bag of HPs does sound pretty similar to an Animal Barbarian.

In my mind, the distinction would be the shifting aspect. Unlike barb, you adopt parts of various animals (or even more) for both encounter and exploration mode.

I've seen "Wolverine Vs Beast Boy" used to explain it and it's pretty spot on.

Ooh con based shifter sounds like a really fun idea.

Yrmidar is the humanoid polar bear deity in Divine Mysteries.

Archives of Nethys has the entry.

Yeah you're just not getting pf1e levels of caster power in this system. It's kind of one of the goals of the system, to not have that.

That being said, it really sounds like your DM set you up for failure here. Learning to play the system at 18th level whilst trying to play a character that's radically changed between systems sounds like hell.

If you haven't been completely put off when you're going into a new campaign I would encourage you to keep an open mind. I personally find it a lot more rewarding than pf1e because it's not enough to blast something down with an absurd build, because absurd builds don't really exist. You have to work more with your party, and I really enjoy that.

If that doesn't sound appealing, it's probably not the system for you atm.

Nope. The feat automatically fails the standard level DC at every level. Like, WTF? Barbarians, rogues, and others don't have to deal with this **** for their extra damage.

Is this not just a failure of overdrive as a mechanic instead of assurance?

Assurance is useful for skills and situations where you are making a lot of below-level checks. Like, medicine, athletics against weaker enemies, and so on. Push it higher, and it moves out of the space normally occupied by skill feats (Nice to have, not vital) and into centralising terrotory where you essentially have to have it. It's contextual but so are most skill feats.

I still really want a gunslinger archtype that lets them work with slings (and also buffs slings in their hands.)

So I brought this to my DM and he responded with:

Quote:

What I understood was: it's within a turn. The reason it doesn't normally apply is that you have one reaction --- so one reaction during another actor's turn.

... so if you 're fighting A and B and you take one reaction on A and one reaction on B, it still doesn't apply.

But if you take two reactions on A, and those reations have the attack tag, then it applies.

In other words, it's a pretty specific, narrow case.

I know Weapon of Judgment specifically calls out that sort of thing -- are there any other examples of that?

This Strike doesn't count toward your multiple attack penalty, and your multiple attack penalty doesn't apply to this Strike.

Publishing in one go seems like a better approach. One of the reasons i've never really bothered with APs that i've picked up in humble bundles or whatever is that they feel really disconnected.

That being said, not putting the stat blocks is a severe misstep. Running in organised play is pretty stressful, and anything you can do to reduce that load is really important. I would urge reconsidering, or at least adding a free download for each one that gives you the statblocks in one place, since i suspect this is being done for space reasons.

To an extent I actually like non-scaling items because they encoruage players to actually use them. It has its own problems, but I do like the fact that my players can't just sit on 100 items until the perfect time to use them.

I want No!!! to be reprinted with an extra exclamation mark.

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

The remasters of existing books are being done in the place of regular reprints. That's why it's been semi-random. All the remastered non-core books are is special errata.

In addition We can look at treasure vault and guns and gears to see that anything that's going to require a lot of new or altered text is unlikely.

This happens with each book and people need to stop getting their hopes up that the reprint is going to fix whatever pain point they have, because Paizo have been pretty clear that's not what they're doing here.

Castilliano wrote:

PF2 changed Summon spells so they create simulations of creatures, not summon actual creatures...

Castilliano, do you have a cite for that? I'm not seeing it in the 'Summoned' section of spell descriptions (PC1 p301). Now the spell lists use the word 'conjure', but the actual spell descriptions consistently start out with "You summon a creature that has the ______ trait...". That seems pretty clear: you are summoning something, not creating a simulacrum.

Additional texts in some spells (see specifically "Summon Monitor", PC1 p361) also seems to point to this being a real critter. Urgathoa doesn't prevent her followers from creating illusions of psychopomps, but she does care if her followers summon one.

It's mentioned in the writeups of the old spell schools in Secrets of Magic.

Woah! The ancestries are meaty too!
I was really worried that the focus on ancestries would give us quite shallow ancestries but this is a good sign. Keep it up starfinder team!

Yeah hard agree on not making classes to just fill out whatever combination we don't have. While it isn't mutually exclusive, I'd rather not just get classes to fill out random gaps if they're just there to fill out that gap.

I wonder if Pathfinder, which ever edition it is on by then, will do something crossover-y with WWII nine years from now.

Not to be a party pooper but I hope not. WW2 alternate fiction can cross the line into yikes territoriy really fast, because you get put in a catch 22 where you ignore the holocaust, which is a bad thing to do, or you introduce the holocaust to your TTRPG with dragons and goblins. Neither option is great.

This isn't remotely related to the actual point of the post, but "This/That" are excellent pronouns

I use Battlezoo's monster crafting system, especially in wilderness-heavy campaigns where handing out magic items isn't always the most seamless. It can really plug one of the holes with PF2e which is where magic items are required, but there's not always a thematic way to give them out.

Now that I've got my hands on NPC core.
Gun witch. This is not optional. /s

/QUOTE]

Battlecry! was never the "Martials" book. It's the "War" book. Aesir Bloodline, a military wizard, and Necromancer raising their own pseudo-troop make perfect sense. Swarm Eidilon is a little bit of a curve ball, I'll admit.

Yeah this really can't be stressed enough. Calling it "the martial book" was always something that was imposed on it by the community, really. I don't think it was a wrong assumption, but I do think calling it that is about as misleading as calling WoI "the divine book". It is, but it also isn't.

That being said if we got a martial book, especially one focused on a bunch of feats for most martial classes, I wouldn't complain.

Ooh this makes me want to play a guardian so badly.

Obviously the name conjures the impossible lands, so it's possible the framing device of this book will be a looming war between nex and geb, or an actual war between the two.

This would certainly explain the necromancer. If you're doing a book about Geb, you put in necromatic options.

The real snag to this theory is runesmith. If necromancer represents geb, runesmith would represent nex, which doesn't make much sense. Dougun hold if you squint, sure, but that's not much of a match anyway.

So it could be a red herring and it's just a more generic book about magic or something.

Can we start calling it descriptive text and ditch the word flavor.

You can't eat the words and taste them.

I broke into paizo's warehouse and ate the books but that's a seperate issue

Also no site which tracks differences between the remastered and previous versions mentions anything about a change in size and reach rules.

Thanks for any clarification with sources.

The large PC rules are from howl of the wild, a post-remaster book. There are no pre-remaster rules for this, as PCs that are by default large did not exist until howl of the wild.

Yeah calling 5e rules-lite is a bit of an abuse of the term. 5e wants to be both rules-lite and crunchy at the same time and cannot make up its mind as to which one it is. So you get stuff like the gold ecomony being used as a balancing tool, whilst DMs are given zero advice as to how to handle this.

The big meme is that D&D players can't read,

You're telling me. I used to help run a knock-off adventurer's league at university. The things i've seen.

Hasn't daggerheart like, just come out? That'll be the main reason. It's also by the critical role people who are basically the biggest movers and shakers in the DnD space.

However, I do also get unreasonably fustrated at the popular idea that PF2e is somehow absurdly complex*. If you're able to read at a passable level, you can learn it. I'm not saying it's like playing catch but the idea it's ultra-complex seems like the typical r/dndmemes nonsense where a line is repeated constantly without any regard for what is actually true.
(20 as auto-succeeed on a skill check is another good example of this. It's not true, but if you read around certain places, you'd sure think it is).

That being said i'm very selfishly happy with the space PF2e occupies. It's large enough that there's a good sized community but not large enough that it's devolved into the depths of complete nonsense that other large fandoms do.

*And frankly if I feel like being mean, I'd point out how 5e refuses to give DMs anything to work with, making it much harder for first-time DMs to run.

Oh Chk Chk, you've stole my heart.

That's because Adamantine is from Mythology. It can't be trademarked.

Same goes for orichalcum while we're at it.

JiCi wrote:

Agonarchy wrote:

Dragons are a reference to Greek serpents, and then the word and concept evolved and got leggier and wingier, possibly partly due to fossil finds etc. The "Asian dragons" aka the loong likely have a similar origin but developed separately, so are only dragons by convergent cultural evolution.

Oh boy :p

- Dragon -> 4 limbs, 2 wings

- Wyvern -> 2 hind limbs, 2 wings, 1 stinger

- Drake -> 4 limbs, no wing

- Lung -> 4 limbs, no wing, can fly

- Wyrm / Serpent -> no limb, no wing

- Amphithere -> no limb, 2 wings

- Linnorm -> 2 fore limbs, 2 wings

No matter what they tell you, remember: YOU ARE RIGHT! Fantasy definitions must be defended; otherwise, we end up with vampires that glitter in the sun and goblins that look like green elves. If you choose to die on this hill, I will die at your side.

Why are those bad things? Twilight didn't change how vampires are written or depcited in media, and it's very very rare that something does. Nothing was lost.

The idea that fictional concepts need to be locked in one incarnation forever is absurd and would make things like TTRPGs very very boring.

So if Monster Core has eight dragons, and Monster Core 2 claims to have eight more, does that mean only around four new dragons will be in the Dragon Codex, as the twenty dragon statistics includes expansions on those sixteen dragons?

It says "over 20" so I'm going to guess we get 8 more, for a total of 24.

Barnes and Noble must really hate dragon themed suprises. That's a pretty interesting list of features for the Lost Oments book.

Woo! Elemental Barbarian doesn't lock you out of all your impulses. That's made me sad for a while, so thanks for the correction. It's finally tiime to make my big hulk of metal barbarian.

I do personally feel like the design of "class that has high AC, but has a really good reaction that requires them to not be targeted" is a bit scuffed and has antisynergy.

That being said, the class features are strong enough on their individual merits that it doesn't really matter if there's antisynergy. It's just a good class.

I've always understood it as the high AC means the champion won't be targeted, so it needs something to punish that and say "Hey! Look at me, not them", and that's where the synergy comes on. You either try and hit the harder target, or go for the squishy and trigger the reaction.

1 day to go!!

Avenger is a racket but it seems to work like an archtype in that you have to take Avenger dedication and then 2 more feats. The real thing is if I have fun with it or not.

Aye it's a class archtype. They're a middle ground between an archtype and a subclass.

I recall mention of a Rune Dragon in one of the new Pactbinder, sounds like a potential new Dragon

Oh yeah, they're some kind of academic dragon. If only my supervisor was a dragon...

More dragons are always welcome imo. Now that paizo have fully broken away from the chromatic/metallic split, I am very excited to see what we get.