Castellanox7's page

And combats were often decided by buffs & builds before tactics came into play so you'd better have system mastery.

Which is different than trying to game the system to bank as many hero points as possible for inevitable degrees of failure how? Cya.

I love the degrees of success mostly... But I'm not convinced that we need to have crit fail effects on so many skill actions, like trip. I get it, trip isn't strike, I'll stop using it.

That's a holdover from the "fail by 5 or more" BS rule that 3.x had, but I agree, it was trumpeted as "Here's all these things you can do now with 3 actions per turn!" and then it became "But if you fail, it'll be worse than if you just stood still."

Did you somehow miss the part of 3.5 or pf1 where you could just fail a save or suck/lose/die and just roll over? Losing to bad rolls isn't exactly new. Or did your GMs just never throw that sort of thing at you before?

Let me tell you, I loved failing a fireball and getting 12d6 damage from a lvl 6 sorc in 1e... wait, you couldn't, as fireball maxes at 10d6... at 10th level.

I know save/suck--I have a vehement hatred for nigh everything prismatic because of it. And while, yes, it sucks to fail a save/suck, one's failure wasn't doubled on a 5% whim.

What "esoteric hand waives" are you talking about in particular? Becouse from what you've quoted, it seems like you don't like making houserules, which is fair, but its kinda par for the course with all TTRPGs, or at least rule heavy ones. No designer can make a perfect rule system for everyone, and sometimes you either need to make some changes yourself or learn to deal with it. Thats not just saying "nah", thats just how it is.

Hero points being the esoteric hand-wavium. We had used our hero points for something else; with that, what's the next play? All I'm hearing is "Whoops: Guess the party got TPK'ed because double the dice on a 5% makes sense. Sucks to suck."

I'm also a player, so I can't do anything about it except figure out how to game the system so hard that I always have as many hero points as possible, which then sort of distracts from the point of everything in the first place.

Sounds like a rough session, but what are the odds, right?

The sliding levels of success was one of the most popular and integral changes, subject to much playtesting and review. So don't expect it to be "fixed" except by yourself which you can totally do if your table prefers that. Go ahead, Paizo wants you to make any changes that make the game more enjoyable for y'all.
And under that system, yes, crit fails are bad, so bad they might drop PCs which is why there are Hero Points. Sounds pretty cool and dramatic IMO that those two weathered the fireball despite deep burns. Yet note if you change the math there it alters the math throughout the system for PC casters, which in turn strengthens martial roles unless you take crits away from them, which sort of imbalances the whole. And steals...

It sounds like (personally) a system shouldn't be propped up by esoteric hand waives which basically say "nah". That's as bad as 5e's counterspell logic.

Also, the hero points at that time were gone--what's the fix for that? This was (I'm guessing) a sidequest to OoA the DM made, and literally every fight except the (If memory serves) the second or third battle in book 1 has been a "How am I going to die to some rubbish status effect or rule this week".

There was no issue with the yo-yo effect. 4e and PF1e basically had from character gen that you all were on on the track to be Big Damn Heroes. 4e broke it down by Tiers based on level, and PF1e had two different ability stat arrays for NPCs--one was even named "Heroic". The higher ones for PCs were high and epic fantasies--sounds kinda par for the course, especially when drinking a liquid (Potion of Cure whatever) literally stitched together wounds and all.

I'd waive a wand and have a review/hard look at why everything needs to be on a sliding scale of success.

Our last session someone cast a fireball as the opening volley. Three people failed, and of those, two people critfailed.

Max 12d6 damage would've killed the entire party at level 4; and had the two people that critfailed not been a champion and a monk, they would've been burn iron stains on the ground. I understand fireball is supposed to be a nuke, but at this level, the druid (8 hp/lvl) that cast it would need to drop three boosts into con to be able to save *average* damage.

I'd have the entire counteract system be revamped to where you don't need a table (there wasn't anything wrong with d20 + CL [or for 2e, d20 + casting proficiency bonus or something]).

I'd remove the wounded category--I've heard it's supposed to solve "rocket tag" issues with 1e. Which it doesn't really when you just spend 10 minutes in the middle of an enemy base having a quick rest to remove it all.

Those are the large ones at the moment. I came into the system excited, but honestly, every game just feels like "how exactly am I going to die/get screwed over by the system this session?"