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I poked around a bit and while there are options out there for card stock it isn't going to be thick enough for your stands so you would end up cutting them out and glueing them anyway. If you have a color printer odds are you can likely print to card stock. Most back feed machines should take 110lb stock though you might need to do one sheet at a time. Chip board or 1/8th inch foam core would be the first things I'd try. If you have a local craft/hobby store you should be able to get single sheets to find something the right thickness. To save your hands it may also be worth investing in scissors made for thick material and/or a cutting mat and hobby knife.

Wizkids and Reaper are the two that have or had licenses to do so.

If you have people completely new to the game it is hard to beat the beginner box. It is just full of good choices for new people as well as a good introductory adventure. From the pawns, to the color coded dice, it is just a great way to get someone new in to the game.

Seems recently with all the shuffling around of people checking out Pathfinder there has been an uptick in discussion on what things (feats, ancestries, abilities, etc.) are worth take and aren't worth taking. Usually these decisions are based around the math of bonuses and how trained you may get to in a certain class. While I do not disagree with anyones findings as it pertains to pure numbers I just wanted to interject that fleshing out a character concept that you think is fun and interesting is just as valid. Want to focus your play around a set of skills, weapons, spells that aren't 'optimized', Go for it! It isn't a race or a test, it's a game to kick back and build stores you will tell your friends about years down the road. It is so easy with the internet to find pre-planed builds, and the way to the make the 'best' this or that. Just remember that when making and growing your own character all that really matters is what /you/ think is fun, exciting, and entertaining. Happy gamming and I hope everyone makes some great table top memories this year!

The wording confused me slightly on the requirement for brutal finish. Can you use this feat with either a two handed weapon or two single handed weapons or just a two handed weapon? Earlier in the fighter section several feats required a two handed weapon while this asks for 'a melee weapon in two hands'. Thanks!

I would also like to add the shift in how the crit system works changes combat numbers in an interesting way. By and large in 5E a group of lesser
level enemies can be more dangerous that one equal to higher level enemy. They opposite is true by and large with Pathfinder 2E. Do to the crit system players will crit more often against the lower level mob and finish them off quicker. While fighting an equal to higher level monster will be much more of a challenge as the pcs will crit less and the monster will crit more. So a GM should be a bit more aware of the attack vs armor ratio when creating encounters.

For what ever reason I have enjoyed playing/running campaigns with a city building element. Has anyone given 2E Kingmaker rules a good run? 1E left a bit to be desired for me. Are there any good 3rd party or system agnostic rules out there that you have had good fun with? Thanks for any suggestions!

Nice!

Has anyone used the Cameo Silhouette to cut out their pawn pdf files? Any tips or instructions out there? Poked around youtube a bit but didn't find anything or didn't use the right search terms. Thanks!

I've been keeping an eye on PF2 since it came out but sadly haven't had a chance to run or play in a game as of yet. That being said one of the major things that caught my attention early on was a lot of talk on forums and in reviews that you didn't have squeeze out every possible bonus like in PF1 to have a functional character. Two years on and I still find those comments and get that vibe from the core game. PF2 came up in discussion at my local store recently though and everyone there that has played felt the exact opposite. Their experience has been if you don't build a class to its fullest save/damage/armor potential your headed toward a hard time. The only thing I could decipher that was different was all of them were playing in adventure paths. I believe a couple were in Rise of the Runelords 2E and Abomination vault. Which lead me to wonder, are AP's just a bit tougher than your average GM when using the encounter building rules and running a home brew game? What have your folk's experiences been now that were a few years in and quite a lot of supplements in the library? Thanks for any input!

I'm not familiar with PFS restrictions. Do they allow archetypes? After a little poking around it seems like Martial Artist would pretty much fix you up for missing out on your dex damage.

I've been getting my son (who turns 9 later this month) into role-playing, and something unexpected happened. We were doing Little Trouble in Big Absalom, and while I anticipated us just having our kobolds kill and eat everything, the kid kept trying to make friends with the opposition and find non-violent ways to solve problems.

So, I am looking for suggestions for one-shots (society scenarios or other content of similar length) that rewards creativity and peaceful interaction, has nothing PG-13 that can't be easily skipped/worked around, and is playable by level 1 characters.

Sadly I'm not up on a lot of adventures but I just wanted to say how cool that is and I hope you can nurture that temperament. It is always refreshing to have players that are interested in more than just offing everything they come in contact with much less for someone less 'mature'. Might also be a great time to try making up some of your own small adventures and see where they take you!

It may be a bit much for your first outing in PF2E but some of things described seem very 'cross class' when ported over. Perhaps you and your GM could look at the Dual Class optional rule from the GM Guide. It is a fair step up from the Free Archetype options that others have suggested but I get the feeling from your character descriptions it would get you all a lot closer to what you had and also beef up your stats a tad. This will come at the cost of more work in keeping track of all the things on your end and the gm a bit more aware of all the extra options you each have access too. I still think Free Archetype is worth while but if you doubled up with Dual Class I would remove the option of taking class based Archetypes.

Has anyone finished this AP? How did it go? Did it hold up accross all six books and have a satisfying end?

My group and I have made it through one AP, Serpents Skull, and while I really liked the first few books, the middle was a bit slow and the end seemed to miss the mark on some concepts.

Any input is appreciated! Thank you!

Has anyone finished this AP? How did it go? Did it hold up accross all six books and have a satisfying end?

My group and I have made it through one AP, Serpents Skull, and while I really liked the first few books, the middle was a bit slow and the end seemed to miss the mark on some concepts.

Any input is appreciated! Thank you!

No. No spell failure risk while wearing armor.

Do be aware that wearing armor that you are not proficient in will have poor results. The proficiency rules will reduce the proficiency bonus to zero. All you will get is the static item bonus and DEX bonus. Past about level 2, it will be better to just wear no armor and use your unarmored proficiency.

But if you get armor proficiency, you can wear and use that level of armor as a spellcaster without any problems.

Thank you!

Sorry, this is likely a very old question but I can't seem to get search to find me the answer. Been looking in to PF2e in the Archives and noticed there isn't a spell failure chance in the armor chart. Does armor effect spell casting in 2e? Thanks.

Yes and No. Spellstrike does not in itself provoke an AoO, BUT all spells that I have seen so far that qualify for Spellstrike have somatic components which does provoke.

Gotcha! Thanks!

From what I am currently finding in the rules spell strike shouldn't innately activate an AoO. It is set off by using a spell with a somatic component as part of a spell strike that would activate the AoO. Is that correct? (granted that is most spells) I'm not seeing anywhere else that casting a spell = AoO.

If that is the case you should also be able to use a pre-applied 'striker's scroll' to avoid an AoO with your spell strike shouldn't you?

Without the book in hand I can only go on a past AP I did. I ended up rigging up a projector and scanning hi rez files from the book. A lot of the larger maps and even some medium maps were scaled so as to be unuseably large on a gaming table if printed out. The projector solution wasn't perfect but got the job done quite well for anything larger than 2'x3' in final size. Also be sure to keep an eye on the scale. I found some of the maps to be printed in the book with 10' squares instead of 5'. A couple of the large maps were as big as 20'per square.

I don't think they would add a new class persay in that book but it is entirely possible to see a new Archetype or two that might slot in well with wizards and such to have a more dedicated necromancer build.

It seems like from the descriptions there will be some time skips. I'm very curious how these are handled in the frame of the AP. The descriptions make it sound a bit more episodic than a normal AP which I quite like.

Has anyone finished the last book? I've found some good thoughts and reviews on the first two but haven't seen anything come out for the third one quite yet. What are your guy's thoughts about book 3, finished or not? I have enjoyed a few adventure paths but some of the endings haven't quite lived up to the earlier parts of the AP. Thanks!

Any tie ins to the Serpents Skull AP? I was a little dissapointed the world book didn't really reference that one.

Thanks for the info! Glad to hear they have accounted for down time in a what sounds like a pretty smart way. Thanks again for the feedback. Happy gamming!

I have been considering Abomination Vaults for my groups first 2nd edition outing since it is a little shorter than 'normal' and a pretty basic and well reviewed dungeon crawl. One of the issues in the past with dungeon crawls has been the camping/resting. While it may not help the casters as much I was considering using the Stamina variant rules to at least keep HP at a solid level without camping or returning to town. Has anyone done that? Is it more trouble than its worth or a good way to keep up the momentum? Any opinions or advice welcome!

I would just like to add that for my groups the most important thing when it has come to situations like this is consistency. once you have decided how to handle it always handle it the same way going forward.

That's been true since before any edition of pathfinder existed, even old D&D versions recommended that defusing fights was worth the same as fighting them.

True it has always been a thing it isn't always clear or obvious to new players. Especially coming from a video game background. Most of us have also been in games where if 5 of those 10 goblins runs the gm only gave you half xp which is a bummer, you should get full reward for the entire encounter which I felt PF2e has done a better job of making clear in the core book and adventure paths.

One last minor point to add that i've noticed is pointed out better in pf2 is that xp is per encounter no matter how that encounter is overcome. So an entrepid group of players manages to talk/bluff/bribe their way by your 300xp budgeted combat they still get 300 xp. There is no mechanical reason to put everything to the sword.

That is my understanding. I've heard some arguments to do xp per monster so there is a slight bonus but as I read it regardless of character adjustment or compositions a moderate encounter is 80xp reward. Hopefully some more folks will chip in.

Are there any printed variants to Hero Points yet? I took a look through the Archive but nothing jumped out at me.

We've done a lot of Coriolis and Mutant Year 0 in our group between fantasy games and I've /really/ liked the economy of how they have their 'hero point' system set up where it is more back and forth between the players and gm. Instead of a limited pool you spend from they give a point to the gm and gm uses those points to re-roll npc's or activate crits etc. so there is a bit of a trade off/risk. If you want to re-roll every action in a game, go for it, but you're loading up the bad guys with re-rolls as well. It was good in MY0 and almost perfect in Coriolis and I've been considering doing something similar as a house rule for PF2 and was wondering what your thoughts were. Thanks!

No reason I can think of for it not to be. You will need to do some conversion work on monsters not listed in the bestiary and probly funds a few checks here and there as 'flat checks' are new to 2nd ed etc. There is, if I understand correctly, a 2nd edition update do out in '21 some time but no idea when it might land.

I wish I saw more GM centered PF2 youtube videos about how easy it is to utilize game mechanics on the fly to dial up or down the difficult to meet your...

I've been enjoying the Agents of Edgewatch podcast on 'roll for combat' youtube channel. It has the GM doing an intro to each episode going over things from the previous and some that come up in that game and the whys and where fors of some decisions and house rules. It is an interesting insite in to that side of the game.

I definitely try to play the enemies to their intelligence or cunning.

Lots of skeletons, I don't have them flank or employ anything but very rudimentary tactics.
Lots of trained soldiers I will definitely have them focus fire on one PC. Because why wouldn't they?
Zombies will attack the nearest brains they can find.

While this is a very logical way of running things I can't help but feel it depends on your group and as a GM one also needs to be able to read the room a bit. The simple answer to the question 'why wouldn't they?' is that it might not be fun for your players. For groups that enjoy grittier games that more 'realistic' approach is great. For more swashbuckling heroic leaning players and tone I'd try to spread the damage out as much as I could.

My 2 cents. I don't disagree but I've run a few games that while doing so would have made perfect sense it just wouldn't have been fun for my group.

With mysticy stuff like that I try to make things more meaningful than difficult. Do something that implys they are destined for something more. So they ask around and directed to the local witch (by reputation not class necessarily). She needs a special ingrediant for her current project (feather, sea weed, creature part etc.) which will lead to a small encounter of some sort but fairly easy. Along the way however they would get a chance to help a local. Missing child, womnan being attacked, etc. Something hero light. Again though, not a hard combat, something quick and simple. But then, in your example, that would turn out to be the child/wife of a ship captain that is now friendly to them and cuts them a discount or offers free travel to the shackles for what they did. Some side benefit that makes it appear the 'witch' knew it would help them more than they helped her or some such. My 2 cents :)

I've poked around a bit and I can find some youtube videos of 'how' to play a table top rpg via VR but I haven't seen any actual play sessions. Have any of you done a VTT via VR headsets? If you have, how was it and what did you use? If you are a designer of such things there may be a market opportunity ;)

I wonder if they will have any post-AP Saventh Yi updates. That was the only AP my group did start to finish and it would be kinda neat to see something more being done with the city of seven spears. The city once again coming to life with people could be cool.

Ah, that sounds better. I have read that description many times and for some reason it always read that the players were incarcerated heh. Thanks for the clarification.

I am sorry if this is pre-mature but I've had my eye on Agents of Edgewatch for a 2nd ed campaign and after reading all the book previews it sounds pretty fun /accept/ for one part of book 5's preview. It mentions your players loosing agent status and getting put in prison. This is a plot point that I have had a hard time in the past as there has been on occasion quite a bit of push back from players. OOC complaints that it doesn't make sense, they were forced to 'loose when they should have won (especially at higher levels like this happening in all the way in book 5) in character stance of going out fighting etc. Anyone else have similar issues or concerns? Any tips for getting through these typs of plot points?

Saw a video recently where they off handedly mentioned a varient rule in 5th edition where 'mana' potions could give back spell slots. This sounded like an interesting idea so I was wondering if there was something like that currently in PF2 in the gm guide or elsewhere. Thanks!

Age of Ashes is a bit weird probably because it was written before the 2E rules were finalised. So far, Extinction Curse seems to have returned back to regular AP quality (i.e high). Althoug I am not sure how Plaguestone and Extinction Curse 1 ended up having such a similar plot.

if i remember right age of ashes 1 rminded mea lot of carrion crown 1. city meating catches firw, eventually leads to castle ruins.

Thank you for the feed back!

I noticed the description of the GM Guide mentioned 'hexploration' which I've found fun in the past. Is this basically a guide to setting up hex/squire crawl type game? What did you guys think of it? Was that section helpful or mostly just full of things most GM's would do anyway? Thanks for any input, it is one of the things I am more interested in but don't have a store to skim through to make a purchase decision and I didn't see that section talked about much in the forums.

Depending on how long 'long term' is to your group PF2 may fit the bill. Based off the standard of a full 6 book adventure path it takes about a year to more or less get to max level and be done with the campaign. At the end of the day PF2 is a well done product with a lot of support and high production values so as long as your group is up for it I'd give it a go. Grab the core and monster book as pdf, write up a one shot to test things out and see what you all think.

If you want something that lasts longer than that I kinda feel a point buy system of some sort may work better as you don't really 'max out' and are left with no more character change or growth stats wise. RP wise obviously there is not such limit. A good robust point buy system should have enough options out there to keep adding to and molding character stats for quite some time. My longest game was actually Exalted. Between point buy stats, powers, and a plethora of possible gear we deep dived that game for a little over two years. Earthdawn is also pretty deep into an unique mix of point buy and level based advancement and gear that is well suited for long running campaigns.

Yossarian wrote:

This means that the GM cannot easily upgrade the creature for higher levels or take the base creature and add a class

Take a look at the Monster and Hazard creation rules. They're a free PDF currently, until the Gamesmastery guide comes out. They tell you how to do all of that. It's very simple in 2e to do so once you know how.

Adding a class is a case of upping the underlying numbers (there's charts in the guide for this) then adding class feats and abilities from the class description as needed and appropriate.

As others have said the design philosophy is very different. It's top-down concept-led design, rather than bottom up formula-based design.

It's a lot faster than 1e monster creation and adaptation, which i'm very happy about after running a campaign to level 20 recently with a lot of modified enemies. OMG that was work. 2e streamlines it enormously. 2e monsters is vying for my favourite change to Pathfinder.

Thank you all for your responses.

I am glad they will come out with a system for this in the Game Masters handbook. I hope it provides what I want. If it does wat you state here then I can work with it.
only
AS to the "it is easier" argument I disagree.

In 1e if you wanted to just quickly for instance make tougher orcs you just adjusted hit points, saves, attacks or damage accordingly on the fly and kind of gauged the power level yourself. This is what the bestiary says to do in 2e. To me that is OK for a quick random monster encounter you have two minutes to set up for the party but it is terrible for planned encounters in an adventure because let's face it the "on the fly" thing is guessing and you usually ended up with fights that were either TPKs or way to easy for final boss fights.

The system in 1e where I can add levels which means I can add feats meant I could make encounters with creatures customized to challenge my characters. For instance, suppose a party member played a multiclassed fighter / rogue build built...

I think this is partly what Yossarian meant by a change in design philosophy. since everything in first was more or less a variation on a class or could have a class there was not a lot of difference adding in a creature with say trip vs giving a level of a class to a creature to give it trip. The core philosophy on monsters (in my opinion) is now to use monsters to tailor the encounter how you like vs tailoring each individual monster. Since their abilities are now quite varied and unique having been separated from the feat system.

As you mentioned the monster book has some short hand rules for upping or decreasing the power of a creature on the fly, mostly by adding 2 to all the things and upping damage the actual core book suggestions recommend adding creatures above making any one creature more powerful. Doing so can add a lot of tactical changes to combat now that creatures powers and abilities are a lot more varied. In looking at it that way it ends up being a lot easier to lay out an adventure ahead of time by populating it with the creature mix that will challenge your players vs having to write up class levels, adding hp, feats, weapon bonuses etc.

I realize that doesn't really help your customization problem and I hope the GM book will get you what you need but I also hope that helps with the view point some of us are coming from that feel 2nd edition is simpler when dealing with monsters/encounters. Also keep in mind there is nothing from stopping you taking base monster stats and just using those instead of choosing a race and background during character creation. Just be aware that may make things a bit more difficult than intended on occasion. My 2 cents. Hope you find a good solution and your group has a good long lived campaign! And please do share if you do settle on a solution you like. Others may feel the same as you and would appreciate using it themselves!

If I understand correctly since it does not list a duration it will last until you are cured or until you make enough saves to cure yourself. At stage 1 and 2 you get to make a saving through ever round. If you drop to stage 3 you only get to make saves once per day.

So once you make your initial save and fail, you get new saves at the listed intervals. On a success you reduce it one stage, on a crit success you reduce it by two. On a failure it increases by one, on a crit fail it increases by two.

Do they have to use there armor in their act? If your strong man is your fighter, let's say, why doesn't he only use his armor adventuring and the rest of the time it's in his trailer? I've got my eye on that adventure path as well but to me this sort of thing is more about character background than what fits in with the circus. It would be odd having weapons and lockpick tools on your rogue clown but again he is not likely to be wearing those things 'on the' job but his character background may/should explain why he has them at all. My 2 cents.

I had some issue with this when I first got that adventure as well. There are a few threads in the 'adventure' section as well some gm info if you are running it here in the 'adventures' section of the forums.

A so the 1 is the level for which the encounter is 'low'. Since all encounters are based on party level now. So if it is low 1 and your party is level 2 it would drop to 'trivial' as I understand it.

B As far as I can tell for combat encounters that xp is the encounter xp. All other xp appears to be listed in the AP, avoiding traps, talking people out of something instead of combat etc.

I'd definitely take a jot over to the https://paizo.com/community/forums/pathfinder/adventures section to see what people have already gone over. If you get to playing or finishing this adventure please remember to let us know what you thought and how things went!

The Gleeful Grognard wrote:

Thinking of it that way makes it harder than it needs to be. In reality you choose a difficulty for the encounter and level you expect them to fight it at.

That gives the exp amount to award. Adjustments for encounter budget never have to be written down. Especially as it is always a quarter more per player.

I currently run 5 and 6 member parties and it takes no effort for me to build encounters for them budget wise. And distributing exp is as easy as knowing how much a difficulty category gives.

The other part of my post you quoted is basically the same thing you just said to me. It isn't, however, how the book actually states that this whole thing works. I'll use an example to illustrate:

I'm setting up a campaign for my 6 players. I have an encounter that I want to be a Moderate threat for their level, so I take my 120 XP budget and start to spend it: I pick out creatures for the encounter that happen to 1 level lower than the party, so each is worth 30 XP. I put 4 in the encounter, and I'm good to go.

I of course can reward each character 80 XP for overcoming this threat and call that "close enough" - but if I follow the exact process laid out by the book, I've got "...each character gains XP equal to the total XP of the creatures and hazards in the encounter (this excludes XP adjustments for different party sizes)" to work with.

So if I scale the encounter to 4 players, the budget is 80 XP, so the closes these particular creatures would get to the budget is if there were 3 of them - and that means this encounter is worth 90 XP for each character, rather than 80 XP.

While that's not a big deal if it happens rarely and/or is balanced by some encounters being under-budget but still giving full budget XP, I figure it would be dissatisfying to a not insignificant number of players if they found out they were not getting what the game says they should be.

So, you lost me a bit here. Whether it is 6 players or 3 they get 80 xp each in this example according to the book. they would just fight more or fewer enemies if you are making your own encounter.

PS: Do let us know how your game goes!