They don't appear in any 2e material that I'm aware of, besides being mentioned in the Barghest entry in the bestiary. This did not give deity stat blocks or domains though.
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My experience is keep it short. There will be times when the party is engaged and watching the solo play happen, maybe RPing around it, and those tend to go well. A friend's hellknight test comes to mind. However, in these scenarios we quickly approach the point where the GM has to make decisions. OK, I can let the wizard have this epic scrying duel with the BBEG, but for how long? Sure the rogue can scout ahead but when am I going to tell the player to stop and go back to the party? These are hard calls to make because essentially you have to get your player out of character and make them change what their character would do due to the metagame reason of the party is fallling asleep. Ultimately you owe it to all your players to maximize the amount of fun they could be having at the moment, not just the person with the spotlight. It is a tool to be used, which can be very effective in making moments memorable, but it needs to be handled with caution, and the GM must be sensible enough to know when enough is enough and what is and is not acceptable to the rest of the party.
For as long as there have been RPGs, there has never been a question of wether we should try to make charcter advancement feel meaningful. Advancing in your class and becoming more powerful is one of the pillars upon which RPGs are built. However, how do we achieve this has varied a lot and ranges on two gradients, that I will refer to as Flavour and Power. Flavour: is the measure of how "cool" something you can do feels. How glad you are you can do it and how good you feel when your character gets to do it. An example of Flavourful character advancement in 2e is the skill feat "LEGENDARY THIEF". Being able to steal a sleeping guard's armor while he's wearing it feels incredibly cool and is a great capstone for the most legendary among thieves! Power: is the measure of how impactful something you can do feels. How much will it change the status quo if you do it, and how high is the chance of it being successful. An example of Powerful character advancement in 2e is the level 20 figther class feat "WEAPON SUPREMACY". Being able to make an extra action every turn without any magical help is very powerful and can provide enourmous amounts of combat power (Assuming of course, there is not an easier way to Quicken the Figther). With those terms defined, I would like to say that, while no advancement is ever completely lacking in A or B, there are some great examples of things very lacking on either of them. For a flavourful Advancement that is not powerful, we can take a look at the level 14 monk class feat "TONGUE OF SUN AND MOON". This ability, while incredibly flavourful to the idea of the mystic monk that transcends the barriers of mortality through asceticism, is not very powerful. In this slot, it contends with other, much more powerful monk feats such as "MOUNTAIN ROOT QUAKE" and "WILD WINDS GUST" and is less likely to be picked, which hurts how much the player "feels like a cool monk" in favour of combat power. And for an example of pure power without flavour, Let us talk about my biggest problem with 2e so far: Armor and Weapon proficiency For those uninformed, the Difference between Expert, Master and Legendary profiency is the number that (Added to your character level) is added to your Armor class or Attack roll. Specifically, every advancement in proficiency increases it by 1. While I do understand that the worth of a +1 has been discussed to death and resurrected a million times, it bears discussing again because of how prominent these +1s are in the playtest. The fact of the matter is that, in my opinion, a +1 to a DC or Roll is about the definition of power without flavour. It does nothing more than add to the math, leaving the player feeling maybe amused at her increased combat prowess but dissapointed at how uninteractive it is. A +1 gives you no actions, involves no gameplay and has no variance. It is design by math for the math, pure and simple. The issue with this is not that statical bonuses are somehow wrong or bad, but the role that proficeincy intends to take in the game design. According to the first pages of the rulebook,"If you’re legendary, your statistic or familiarity with the item is so high that you’ll go down in history." That is a very flavourful thing! it means the character in question has earned the prestige and recognition of others due to their skills. And to compliment this, getting a legendary armor of weapon proficency is VERY hard. A Paladin or a Monk can earn it at level 17 and a Grey Maidem (A very specific subset of figthers from an established city in Golarion) can earn it too, at a somewhat high level. So you have reached perfection in training, or total devotion to justice, or overcome your massive indoctrination and mental trauma and achieved legendary status with your armor. What does that mean for you? +1 to AC This provokes a dissonance between how much flavour something should have from the way its described and how much it actually has. If I were to describe to my players that their use of armor is now so legendary that it will go down in history, its ridiculous for this to simply mean +1 to AC, when the skill equivalents are having the rogues going through walls, and others playing concerts for the gods and falling harmlessly from space. How do we fix it?: If we wanted to keep the concept of armor and weapon proficiency as it is, I would argue for the creation of "Riders" to the +1 increases. As an example, legendary armor proficiency could grant a 25% chance to ignore a critical hit (As per Fortification in 1e) and A Master weapon proficiency could grant players the ability to deal Piercing, Slashing or Blunt damage with every strike (As per the 1e weapon versatility feat). This way, we can add back the flavour that we expect from proficiency without compromising the power level too much. After all, knowing that you are so skilled with your armor that you can deflect enemy blows to non vital areas, and thus being hopeful even in the face of a critical threat, is very flavourful and meaningful. Well, this was just my 2cp, I would like to see your thoughts on this and what effects would you give to the ranks if you were to design the riders.
Well structured and reasoned! Here are my thoughts on the matter: Ancestry Ability Scores: I've always had issues with but I understand where they came from and why they are a bit to precious to get rid of them. The solution paizo came up with is a very nice compromise, allowing all ancestries to be more or less playable in any class. Ancestry Feats: A big problem for me too, in all honesty while ancestries dont feel unimportant they are very much imbalanced and they have lost a lot of flavour. Elves losing sleep immunity is the big one for me, as their culture is known for finding "Sleep" spells as an insulting way to start a feud (Elves of Golarion). In addition, Half elves and Half rocs being heritage feats is a really good idea but it was horribly excecuted. I would reccomend giving ancestries two Ancestry Feats at character creation instead of one, to make sure hybrid races are nto at an inherent disadvantage. After all, we can no longer play half elves raised by elves who can use elven weapons and other similar stories. Backgrounds: I believe are a great addition. I was VERY opposed to this before reading them but they are flexible enough to eb usable. HOWEVER I do have an issue with how restrictive they are because we dont have that many yet. This will be fixable in time by adding more of them but in all honestly the number in the actual 2e CRB should be higher. Class Feats: These are a mixed bag. I dont think that the design of them is inherently flawed by I do think that more options should be avaliable at low levels in order to prevent characters from finding themselves with nothign good to take in the low levels where these feats are all that they have. Archer Rangers come to mind. Skill Feats: I love them. Please remove signature skills from the game (painfulyl if possible) and use the page space to give me more of these. New Action Economy: Is pretty good so far. Elegant design and seems very easy to ablance arround. Props to paizo. Multiclassing: I'm iffy on this. Multiclassing archetypes compete with class archetypes and Prestige archetypes for your combat feats. I dont think its too far of a stretch to want my figther to both have a horse AND be a hellknight (You know, Ennead Star cavaliers were a thing) but this seems impossible to do with the amount of combat feats that the base class grants. I would ask that the idea of taking 3 feats from an archetype before getting a new one is removed.
Thanks for the clarification!
...Well, the title says it all doesnt it? In an interview with Jason Bulhman, UK tabletop magazinehas stated that the golarion campaign setting will advance 200 years, to 4919 with the release of second edition. Here's a photo of the paragraph in question: https://i.imgur.com/4sLqCI1.jpg Now let's ignore the horrific consequences that would come with a 200 year timeskip (which, unlike what the Bulhman quote implies, would basically change A LOT and make the setting very different) and instead focus on paizo stating in their F.A.Q. that THEY WOULD NOT DO THIS http://prntscr.com/ke0t93 Now, hopefully this is all a misunderstanding, or an editing error. But I would prefer if we could get confirmation about this from a paizo employee because my poor heart can't take another timeskip and I would prefer to believe that Paizo would not go back on their word like this. So please, if we can have any confirmation on this being true or false, It would be much appreciated. |