DarkSavior's page

I run APs using Foundry VTT, and I am very fond of full campaign APs (1-20) of which there doesn't seem to be many for Foundry. At present I think just Blood Lords and Kingmaker. So personally I'd prefer to see more of those, especially for use on Foundry. Things like Agents of Edgewatch, Age of Ashes, Rise of the Runelords, and Curse of the Crimson Throne. That is my first choice. Full campaigns 1-20.

Next after that, probably some more games, sequel or not, that run in the level range of 11-20, Like Fist of the Ruby Phoenix, in general.

Last after that, I think direct sequels are a neat idea, especially for returning to APs like Abomination Vaults and Outlaws of Alkenstar.

Those are my preferences in order, and more content for Foundry VTT the better please and thank you!

I am running Blood Lords for my group on Foundry, using the official AP for it, and for the most part this book is pretty good. I did however run into kind of a DM trap tonight. In Gristlehall there is a Fossil Golem, and this creature has several things going on, but the one thing that caught us off-guard was its Fossilizing Touch. On a hit, it forces a Fort Save (with a decently high DC) that on first failure, causes the target to become Slow 1 for one minute. Then the next time a target is hit with the effect that also has Slow 1 from it, they become petrified permanently. This is the first time the group had anything do that to them, and one player wound up petrified. This derailed the adventure, forcing the group to leave Gristlehall and make an emergency trip to Mechitar, the closest city. Here is why it was a problem. First, there is nothing in Gristlehall that can fix this, it also is a level before the party can cast Stone to Flesh, so they cannot inherently handle it either. Also the map for Mechitar doesn't appear in the Foundry AP until the next book (Ghouls Hunger). So this is a bit of a trap that could force the DM to have to either be really fast on their feet, or break the session to set the stage for the party to fix it. I just wanted to make other folks running the AP aware of this in the tail end of Field of Maidens so they can plan for/counter this situation in advance.

I am finding the traps, like Taviah's cottage, and later the Keystone Trap in Sallowshore are really rough, especially for a party without a Rogue. The cottage I had enter initiative at the top of the round after Taviah is defeated, and it was way harder for the party to deal with than Iron Taviah and minions were. The Keystone Trap, if you don't have anyone trained in Thievery, or Expert in Crafting, is incredibly difficult to do anything about having 60 HP, 15 hardness, and 25 AC for a fresh party of 5th level characters. Even with a BT of 30, its rough for players that level to consistently hit an AC 25, and almost never deal enough damage with those hits to penetrate hardness 15. It was an encounter that made the players feel very futile, and ate up way more of the game night than I feel it should have, leaving everyone irritated on the night. I'd definitely change this to either lower its AC and Hardness by about 5 points each from the start, or at the very least have it use the monster construct armor rules to lower its hardness and ac by those amounts on a crit, although even that is really tough (requiring a nat 20) for players at that level.

Probably not, OoA is hard, and can be punishing for 4, so 5 will likely not bust it. However if after a few encounters you feel its going a bit easy, try using elite templates for the next few encounters and see how it feels.

Well, the issues I have with Second Edition are...

Major issues:

1. I cannot learn enough feats. I wish the PCs would be able to learn one class feat every level. I also wish that starting with two ancestry feats and gaining another at every odd level thereafter would become a default rule.

2. I cannot learn and cast enough spells. I hope the spell slots of caster classes would be doubled or perhaps tripled. For example, I wish a 20th level sorcerer will learn 8 spells for each level and 10 cantrips.

3. Focus spell system should be entirely overhauled. I have not found out satisfying house rules yet but I think removing focus point entirely and allowing PCs to cast focus spells freely, or perhaps using the D&D 3.5 recharge magic variant rule seems good enough.

4. Sustain a Spell should be removed entirely. I honestly have no idea why the developers thought forcing the casters to pay attention to the spell that has already been cast to sustain its effect would be a good idea.

5. The duration of most spells should be extended. I really miss the good old days when the spells lasted several hours.

Minor issues

1. Fine, Diminutive and Colossal size categories should return. Simply reading the size category helped me estimate the rough size of a creature a lot. But now that Paizo incorporated Colossal creatures into Gargantuan creatures, estimating the size of a creature that I'm not familiar with became quite hard and inaccurate. In First Edition, I can anticipate a purple worm would be clearly smaller than Tarrasque because their size category was different. Now they both are Gargantuan and thus it would not be quick and easy to compare the size of them. Actually, when I heard the Second Edition will be developed, I hoped there will be a new size category that is even bigger than Colossal, so that those truly big creatures (the Spawn of Rovagug, kaiju, mu spores) can have suitable size category. I honestly have no idea...

Sounds like your issue is similar to mine, I find Pathfinder is a wonderful system in many respects, but magic, magic items, spells and spellcasters underwhelm the heck outta me. That said, I very much doubt there will be a colossal change, at least not the one it would take, in order to rework all of that to the degree it would need it in order to satisfy. I wouldn't expect this out of the revision coming, it sounds more focused on including errata, slaying some sacred cows, and removing all terminology associated with D&D and the OGL. Not so much on revising 2nd edition entirely, which for the changes to spellcasters you, I and others are looking for would require either extensive houserules or a new edition I think.

I am running Punks in a Powderkeg now, I am using Foundry. Overall I am underwhelmed with it as a VTT product, but that's another rant. To the OP's main gripe, I agree. I feel like the Player's Guide very strongly indicates this is a game for non-casters, so in a party that all leaned into that (gunslinger, inventor, investigator, and rogue) it was pretty lame to realize even early on, the oozes, clockworks, and haunts all have damn steep damage reduction that is largely only surpased most easily by spellcasters. It very much felt like the Player's Guide advised the players to their downfall, and seems like dirty pool. To hear that it only gets worse from then on out isn't encouraging, on top of the VTT package lacking (missing scenes, npc, not much music) therefore requiring me to fill in those gaps way more myself than a 35 dollar package should. I contrast it to the excellent Abomination Vaults, which had everything and required very little from me to modify or provide, and I am deeply disappointed. I hope other modules are more like AV and less like OoA, or else my module buying days with Paizo are over.

I am currently running this on the heels of having finished Abomination Vaults, both in Foundry VTT. I mention that because there are some issues I have when comparing the quality of the two. Abomination Vaults was amazing, good sound, all the scenes, NPCs etc that might be needed, zero issues. However, Outlaws: Punks in a Powederkeg is a bit on the scant side with all three of those. Very little music provided outside of some piano stings, several scenes are missing that would have been useful to have (Longhorn Lounge, Hotfoot Hippodrome, Ryka's Reagents, something for the chase sequence in chapter 2) I had to find or make scenes for all of those. Also, several NPCs just aren't there and have to be theatre of the minded. To be perfectly honest in a VTT setting, everything should be there, no theatre of the mind, or very very little. It defeats the purpose of using the VTT and having to do alot of theatre of the mind. It also defeats the purpose of buying he AP from Paizo if I have to still build a bunch of scenes, download music, and build out NPCs defeats especially for $35 per entry. So not only is this a more expensive AP than Abomination Vaults, but its lacking as mentioned above. Please do better, or I may stop buying these. AV impressed the hell out of me as my first AP from Paizo with Foundry support, but Outlaws has done the opposite and now has me on the fence about the quality and worthiness of other APs because of it. I won't say I wouldn't recommend it, because its likely easier than building it all out on your own, but its a sharp decline from the price, quality, and content of Abomination Vaults, and absolutely will need additional work from the DM to flesh out what is missing.

I find myself in agreement with a lot of what both Edymnion and magnuskn have said already.

My first pass through the material was "this is interesting, but it's not what I want to play when I think of 'Pathfinder' or 'DnD'.

It's a radical enough departure from the 3.0/3.5 mechanics that I have to ask - WHY would I choose this system over Dnd 4E or Dnd5E (or GURPS, for that matter). Myself and the group I game with all ported over to Pathfinder as "Dnd 3.75" precisely because it was closest to what we've played all these years.

For anyone whose running persistent homebrew campaigns, how do you implement such changes cleanly? How magic works, etc all help define, over time, how the campaign evolves. Sure Forgotten Realms was regularly blown to bits to accommodate changes in how magic worked, but I found that to be a pretty brutal way of doing things, and NOT suitable for my own campaign. That also helped Pathfinder pretty much be the shoe-in as the next logical step from 3.0/3.5 evolution. When WotC came along with 4E, I pretty much took one look and "noped" right out that - it wasn't DnD (despite marketing and branding). Pathfinder WAS.

I'm left with a distinctly 4E deja-vu feeling that I can't quite shake, and I'm not liking that.

I'll see how gameplay is, and I'm sure it can be a fun system, but 2E is going to fall into the same category that GURPS, Call of Cthulhu and other 'non-DnD" systems fall into for me.

I've got enough 1st Edition material to last 20 years. And two more AP's coming. In a year, it will be 3rd party publishers I'll be relying on more and more.

Meh.

^This, exactly this. You have echoed my own thoughts and sentiments precisely. Well said.

GameDesignerDM wrote:

I welcome all the nerfing. It's more in line with 5E

Thing is, if I wanted to play something like 5e... I would be playing 5e.

This in many ways feels like the same bad design direction that WoTC went with during 4th Ed, including the whole statement at the beginning about,"Our goal is to simplify and make it easier while maintaining depth" I am paraphrasing the line, but its the same vibe for sure, and I am hating most of what I am reading, because Paizo from what I am seeing is not only failing at simplifying anything, from the convoluted ability boost rules changes and the dumpster fire that Resonance is. Changes that are adding nothing good while over-complicating and sucking the fun out of magic items, not to mention creating far worse problems that what they appear to have been trying to solve. I am super underwhelmed and honestly disappointed. Looks like WoTC and Paizo are companies that were once cool, and now suck. This is a product in its current form, I would never buy.

My issue with tying Dying to CR is that it's unlikely everything in existence will have a CR.

"What is the level of that fall I just took?"
"Let me check.... Aha, that was a level 7 ledge."

They could give damage from environment either specific DC's or a general DC, but the problem that causes, is if you are facing a DC 10 death save from falling off the cliff you are fighting the boss on, or the boss dropping you and the save being DC 20, you will see players jumping off the cliff if the fight looks grim. Or other worse shenanigans.

In the tense and critical moment of the fight, nearly dead from the onslaught of the dragon (1 hp remaining) and locked off from using his healing potions from an earlier fumbled magic use check, Seppuku the samurai decided on his turn to pull a 0-level kitten from his bag and stab himself with its claw, dropping to 0 health and Dying 1 with a DC 5 stabilize check. The dragon turned its attention to the party wizard and executed her with its breath weapon, leaving her at Dying 1 with a DC 25 death save.

I also generally disagree with the perspective coming from people suggesting that essentially death should be less deadly. Neuter it too much and it no longer becomes something player's will ever worry about happening. I am sincerely hoping save or die spells don't get pussified like happened in D&D. Otherwise it will turn into 4E where the only approach to ending any fight was to whack on a big bag of hitpoints.

Looking at pf2s playtests , it almost seems like you're going to require a dedicated healer in the group. Is there any way to avoid that? Either with PFs's pugs or a home game where people don't want to be stuck with the role the cheap cure light wounds happy stick (for all its problems) lets everyone play the character they want to play.

Starfinder easily lets you play without a healer. Whats pf2s solution?

The issue I have found with a dedicated healer such as Clerics built for it specifically, Druids burning up a ton of spell slots, etc is that there is an inherent opportunity cost associated with them in combat. Out of combat, its just a burn of spell slots for them, but in combat I often found that given the action economy, actions spent healing would have been better spent trying to kill enemies and end the encounter faster instead. Since dead is the combat ending condition, making enemies dead faster is better than just making enemies kill you slower. So dedicated healer's issue isn't so much the existence of wands or potions, its that you cannot heal your way out of combat. So another damage dealer was always a better option. Out of combat it could be helpful, but hardly worth dedicating a quarter or more of the party's output to.

On resonance in general, I think what the devs have proposed sounds interesting, but they are going to have to make it perfect in order to not massively screw up way more than it hopes to fix.