Dekalinder's page

If you really want the old school roll, then i believe the best way is to roll 2dx. Like 6 hp becomes 2d6. This way you have both the very high and the very low, with acceptable distributions and a bonus average in exchange for the risks involved in rolling.

DC not scaling automatically with level was one of the major opposition point brought up by dev against the concept of threadmill. In the end, I still see a threadmill.

You should go backwards, filling the low levels slot with anything that is still relevant to your level and then make the high level choice to fill what is missing, with the eye toward high level slot being reserved for the boss fight.
Let me know if you see any appreciable change.

I think the best routine is True Strike into Power Attack to leverage the better to-hit and thus crit with a single attack. Since true strike is verbal only you can usr a two-handed weapon for maximum effect (even if unfortunatly compared to the playtest bespell weapon does not scale anymore with the weapon dice)

pjrogers wrote:

Also, as I understand it, part of the motivation behind the creation of PF2e is to attract new players to Pathfinder. These new players are going to need support and will need to feel they're investing in a game where the design team is responsive to these newcomers' questions and rules confusion. Otherwise, I suspect they will go elsewhere.

You mean, they'll go play 5e which doesn't have a forum, doesn't have a dedicated FAQ button to make people feel important and where designers don't really interact with player base? Because that's what they've been doing for the last 5 years as PF1 playerbase steadily migrated to 5e.

Having a semi-regular FAQ document and doing errata while making a new print run? Sure. Having a perpetual hotline for handling any rule question, especially ones that aren't really questions? No point.

Forums being outdated doesn't mean that 5e dev are silents. They are more active then ever (somethimes more than they should imho). And, as you can see, on platforms even more informal and inclusive than forums. 5e recieved a healty and steady flux of clarification, and some few erratas, even if they (rightly imho) mostly refrain from "balance patches" ala pf1.

People keep bashing the head against the wall repeating that since a solution is available the problems is non-existant. That's not how it work folks. Having solution for a problem is a fallback. Ideally, the problem should not present itself.
All that refusing to acknowledge the problem does is paving the way to having it happen again.

Just to be precise, a flat dc 5 check fails on 1-4, so it's only a 20% chance to miss

Dekalinder wrote:

autoscaling of AC

You realise PF2e has this. Right?

Yes, so?

I do believe most of the main problems with 4e was class omogenization (all had the exact same AEDU scaling with mostly same amount of nova and normal damage) and the impossibility of specializing in something as much as to be able to "beat the treadmill".
The second tier of problems was the "too much gamist". Ability being fluffed as "powers", autoscaling of AC ecc. In particular every space being counted in squares amd such seemingly small thing made most combat being utmost impossible to fairly adjudicate without battlemap, killing the "theater of mind" school.

Unicore wrote:

It seems incredibly clear to me that the intention of being able to dissemble magic items for essentially the same cost as selling them is so that a character the dedicates resources to crafting does not have to spend going to the big city for 5 days selling their "raw materials" items and rebuying "raw materials" items but can instead just get started making what they want.

I find this statement truly fascinating and slightly bizarre, just because of how at-odds with my understanding of the intention of being able to disassemble magic items is.

The only place disassembling magic items is mentioned in the whole book (that I know of) is in the section about formulas. It seems incredibly clear to me that the intention of being able to disassemble items is for the purposes of trying to reverse-engineer the formula.

CRB pg 293 wrote:

If you have an item, you can try to reverse-engineer its formula. This uses the Craft activity and takes the same amount of time as creating the item from a formula would. You must first disassemble the item. After the base downtime, you attempt a Crafting check against the same DC it would take to Craft the item. If you succeed, you Craft the formula at its full Price, and you can keep working to reduce the Price as normal. If you fail, you’re left with raw materials and no formula. If you critically fail, you also waste 10% of the raw materials you’d normally be able to salvage.The item’s disassembled parts are worth half its Price in raw materials and can’t be reassembled unless you successfully reverse-engineer the formula or acquire the formula another way. Reassembling the item from the formula works just like Crafting it from scratch; you use the disassembled parts as the necessary raw materials.

If the intention was to disassemble items and use the parts to craft other things, then:

1) I would expect "disassemble item/disassemble magic item" to be described as an activity in the crafting section
2) I would...

If the intent was just to learn the formula, it would have just said "you study an object for x time and then you can reproduce it" instead of devolving 20 sentences to raw materials and gold amounts.

The auras reminds me a lot of the 3.5 Ardent from complete psionics

I think that losing common and evocative elemental damage types like lightning and cold is a major loss. That elemental list could have been more expansive.

Yes, I know, somewhere in the 5 post below at least 3 people will say "archetypes will fix that!"

How about stop thinking that, as th DM, it's your story? (*Insert FFX joke here*)
Tabletop RPG should be a cooperative storytelling experience where players have as much say in the story as the DM.

Dekalinder wrote:

So this confirms that Casters do the same damage with a shortbow that with their own cantrips, with the only difference that shortbows can be improved with feats, cantrips do not.

Blasts are still crap compared to a full attack.

Well the other difference is the casting skill should make hitting with cantrips WAY easier as you level. The best a caster will do is expert at level 13ish with a bow but they will likely already be master with their casting check at that point.

Cantrips are nearly always going to be more consistent both in damage they do and ability to hit its target.

The chart accounts for accuracy. Also, expert vs legendary is +4 difference, but weapon can get a +3 from items that spells cannot. Additionally, legendary spells is at level 19.

So this confirms that Casters do the same damage with a shortbow that with their own cantrips, with the only difference that shortbows can be improved with feats, cantrips do not.
Blasts are still crap compared to a full attack.

You don't need weapon or armor shape to be class-defining if you have interesting and effective class ability. I see too much of the class focus being put into proficiency, witch are just number-pumping, and too less on actually interesting class option.
5e manages to get "full-plate wizard with weapon" while keeping the fighter an interesting and univocally different experience. If pf2 can't get over the paradigm of "classes identity is the weapon you are wielding and armor you are wearing" or, from the other side "weapon and armor are dictated by class choice", then I don't see how it can be considered a superiorly customizable game experience.

+1 to hit, barring exceptional cases, increases your damage per attack by 10% of the average hit damage.
Those exceptional cases are needing more than 10 or less than 2 to hit. In those cases it's only half as effective.

Correct

We have gone full circle back to the "you must kill a person for no other reason than to join the assassins guild".
It's plain and simple and involution of the concept of "separating mechanics from roleplay" or, in some way, a return of the "all paladins are now required to be found by faeries as a baby". I see we have learned nothing from the mistakes of the past.

Except that they traded 2d8(9) for one handed or 2d12(13) for two-handed with +3 (+4 if you are a fighter).

The main problem with dedication, for what I see, is that whatever armor or weapon proficiency they give you doesn't scale with your own proficiency.
In first edition, if you take a proficiency with a weapon, it automatically scales according to your bab. I don't ger why they wouldn't in this edition.

Focus point fill the E in the ADEU lineup. Attack and cantrips are the A, spells are the D. Luckly, compared to the [redacted], pathfinder gives different classes differents balances of ADEU, with martial leaning more to the A, wizard leaning more on the D amd sorcerers focusing (heh) on the E.

No multiclass gives armor proficiency aside from champion. No multiclass gives weapon proficiency aside from fighter. No multiclass at all gives higher proficiency than what you get in your primary class.
Means, multiclassing fighter does not makes you any better at hitting that what your primary class allows.

I came out from hiding just to say that a multiclass system that doesn't allow you to trade spell proficiency for more weapon proficiency or weapon proficiency for armor proficiency is not an actual multiclass system for me.

Yes multiclassing is a very dear argument for me.

I'll go back to my cave now, bye.

"DM of the ring" should be an obbligatory read for everyone who wishes to become a DM

And that was intentional, so that since everything that affect the combat comes from the same pool, you cant "game" the tight balance by moving more or less pieces to the same basket. Basically, your combat strenght is locket to what amounts to 10 class feats. Your skill strenghr is locked to ehat amounts to 10 skill feats. Ecc. Classes like rogue gives you more skill in exchange for... actually nothing, the rogue is as strong in combat as other classes.

The things that makes me hate the paladin as LG only is that I have to ban it in every single campain where the rest of that party isn't LG. That is because I like to give players meaningfull choices on witch direction to take in the campaign, and even witch of multiple faction to join. With a paladin in there, it's either his way or the highway. The third option would be havin a party with one of the pc being a high level commoner.
LG paladins work for a cliche filled AP on railoads, non for anything where meaningfull choices are presented, because those choice for a paladin where already made on character creation.

Take away a Cleric's holy symbol and her component pouch, what is she? A miserable little pile of secrets! Take a Fighter's +3 holy shock corrosive sonic burst greatsword and what is he? Well, a 1d4+5 death machine!

Seriously, it's the People Who Wanted More Exalted in Their D&D vs. HWalsh. Can I get ringside tickets, because this is going to be glorious?

Everyone who felt like HWalsh already left for the 5e

Now it looks like this:

1. Lack of combat style customization and flexibility outside of class
2. Weak spells
3. Limited class options (narrow feat level tiers, enforced party roles, "least bad" feat selection)
4. Limited first/early level customization
5. Over-reliance on a designated "healer"
6. Low success rate for optimized characters
7. Heavy armor being too heavily penalized
8. Skill feats taking too much away from baseline skill functions
9. Class specific problems (Retributive Strike, Hunt Target)
10. Bland races
11. Focus

Maybe we could brainstorm some less specific problem area categories that we could put into a survey to rank the importance of current concerns?

I do have to say, my current list is pretty much the same, maybe switching around the first 2 points.

Maybe this is the question they're referring to?

Quote:

I would prefer no potency on weapons and armor at all. Attack roll bonuses and AC bonuses would come from item quality, damage would come from my character's inherent martial ability, and any necessary saving throw bonuses could come from elsewhere.

edit: It's near the end of the rules survey. It seems pretty clear, but knowing what it meant before reading it makes me a poor choice for evaluating clarity.

Talk about lumping 5 question togheter so you can be sure any data you gain from it is usless

thorin001 wrote:

You do realize that you are comparing the cantrip to a primary weapon. At 5th level you will only have the one +1 weapon and at 13th level you will only have one +3 weapon. It is at 9th or 10th level that you will be able to have a backup +1 weapon, and probably 16th or 17th level that you might have a backup +3 weapon.

I legitimately have no idea what you are talking about.

I said that Cantrips compare fine to Crossbows, which are the weapons that casters would be using if Cantrips didn't scale and the player didn't want to spend feats learning something better, and they have the bonus of not costing any gold to own. I've no idea what you interpreted that as, but I'm sure you interpreted it wrong.

Yea, cantrips compare equally with the worst existing weapon available used by the worst class at using weapons on the caveat that it hasn't invested anything on it. If that is considered to be meaningfull contribuition to the party, I don't get why people complained about the PF1 rogue.

Like the changes in a vacuum, but.

Lowering the floor of untrained instead of increasing the bonus for higher specialization while lowering skills CD shows that they are tring to increase the 50/50 chance homogeneously instead of rewarding specialization, keeping the adherence to the 4e philosophy of "everyone is decent, no one really shine". As is also shown by the ranger rework, there still is lack of willingness of tacking on a more serious rework to the current system of tying general stylistic choice (i'm talking about combat styles, armor specializations ecc.) to specific class feats instead of generally available feats.
Resonance, everyone knew it had to go. But they are still refusing to lay it to rest. Let's see what they come up with.

All in all, the changes are nice, but the general trend they show to me is the lack of willingness to make big changes to the "4th ed" style of "Compartmented class roles. High floor but chockingly low ceiling. 0 narrative power on feats and spells, everything is there only for combat"

At least they put their s%!* together for that damn question about shield dents.

Cyrad wrote:

Your GM was very forgiving as running should be impossible and impractical because:

You're partly right and partly wrong.

Clearly, yes, the Manticore should have killed the party.

But its a playtest. At that point the lesson of the Manticore (Wow, flying creatures with ranged attacks can be nasty, especially to parties with few ranged options) has been learned. Rather than have a TPK the GM decided to continue with the adventure.

Which seems the right decision to me. From a fun point of view, the party keeps playing. From a testing point of view, more information is learned.

It skewes the results by recording 1 less TPK and 4 less death to the tally of the playtest. Then we have people saying it's impossible to TPK since non one reported having one.

Though this really only confirms your point about the impenetrability of this rule, afaict characters with multiple attack penalties of -3 or lower (including, importantly, fighters with the Agile Grace feat) CAN use Press abilities, just not their failure effects.

I honestly don't know whether referring to an actual number was sloppiness, or an unfun plan to minimize synergy. I'd expect either from Paizo at this point.

I had to recheck, and indeed you are right.

I don't get how people keep saying that PF2 is good for casuals. Have you even read the exploration mode tactics, and what a mess that is? Did you try and parse the dying rules? It took me 2 hours and a degree in engineering to understand what the hell that was supposed to mean. I'd like to ask how many of this "PF2 is easy" folks do actually now what it means "Press", and why you can't use it after attacking with an agile weapon if you are a ranger and used Hunt Target.

5e is a much more shallow game.

I'm not saying it's a bad game, but for everyone decrying a lack of options in the PF2 Playtest doc, please go read a 5e PHB and then come back and talk about lack of options. 5e is a perfectly functional...

5e has you making very few choices, that is true. But every single one of them is way more impactfull that the whole 10 class feat your PF2 class gets. In 5e you can chose the skill you are good at, you can chose witch talent you want, or even if you want them at all.

Right now PF2 let's you make 20 choices every time you level up, but aside from the class none of them is meaningfull.

My hope for PF2 was for a system where mastery was rewarded instead of cookie-cutter build. If you like cookie-cutter, at least 5e let's you spice it at your leisure.

So it is only me that feels like that this edition will be PF 2e:Martials will die edition.

I was thinking more about Pathfinder of the Exile, but SoulsFinder: Prepare to Die comes as close second.

Cantriped wrote:

IIRC, said dev was also speaking from the perspective of himself as GM. I am given to understand that he did not reference a copy of the rules before answering, so gods only know whether or not he answered correctly, or even understood why the question was asked. I get the feeling most of the devs are working from their knowledge of the internal design documents; and aren't actually familiar with the playtest rulebook.

That's why I said "speculated". Really though, if the devs aren't even sure how things work, we certainly can't be.

Is not like they have been working on it for months (if not years). Or like playtested a few times before putting out a beta.

Bardarok wrote:

That makes since. Looks like it ramped up difficulty to quickly though, if it's easy with 5 PCs but adding one or two Mook (lvl 0) enemies jumps it to deadly that's a serious system problem.

I think it's more an issue that they had 5 PC's and no main healer. a paladin or cleric or druid would probably have made a huge difference.

Guess we are back to the Holy Trinity. How long before BBEGs gets an enrage timer?

sherlock1701 wrote:

If you've built your character well, that should be it - they should be able to easily overcome any obstacle within their specialization. You need a party because everyone specializes in different things, and because one fighter can't stab all the baddies at once.

And then we get the million threads about "my specialized character can't do anything outside his specialization".

Personally I feel that a base of 50-50 against same level opponents is perfectly fine,
One of the goals of this edition is to reduce the rocket tag combat, but it seem that some of the people requiring higher to hit base values want exactly that.
"I win initiative, the enemy get to do nothig and I win the fight."
For them it can be fun, for me it is annoying and boring,

Is not that different if you need to be specialized to even hit that 50/50. It means where you are not specialized you dont even need to bother trying.

So, 3 4 and 7 basically means "the system works we don't care what the forums says". I hope for them that we really are the vocal minority.
At this point from Mark comments about class feat is clear they are aiming at recreating a 4.5 edition, probably with the aim at catching all orphaned 4e players. I guess it's time they too deserve something new to play.
All I know is that I can now declare with utmost certanty that there will be no PF2 in any of my groups. I'll still hang around the forums out of curiosity, if this does not offends anyone. I've grown attached to this place with the years after all.

Porbably shouldn't complain about the math too much since this edition can probably be nicknamed "Mathfinder RPG", and the developers probably already have all those spreadsheets and dozens more, which they used as the abse to design the game with. The only one they probably didn't make was one for Power Attack calcs, to be honest.

The bestiary, specially, was made pretty much based on spreadsheets with almost no attention going to the actual monster physiology and such. (Numbers-wise at least. They mostly have well-designed abilities).

So whatever numbers we're seeing, unless we're missing something, are exactly the intended ones, maybe +/- 1 as I've heard Mark seifter said the levels where you gain proficiency changed around post-bestiary.

Whitch is the reason I find this all the more terrifying.

How about divorcing background from mechanics, and have everyone write the background they like, pick the stats that fit the character, and chose an appropriate lore and skill feat? Or that would be too much player empowerment?

Haven't seen the devs commenting anything else than "the system works, you just haven't got it yet"

MerlinCross wrote:

Dekalinder wrote:

If they skip 70% of the rooms as they should since they contain absolutely nothing but trouble, the adventure gets much easier. There are only 3 encounter that are mandatory to finish the adventure.

I mean you can say that about a lot of dungeons in APs/modules but how does the team know just what to skip?

In my experience skipping rooms is something that can happen in a playtest (because the levelling is artificial) but never happens in actual games. My players are out there hunting for XP and every room is potential XP. No stone is left unturned in case there's something to kill, loot, charm or trade with underneath it.

I do completely agree, I wasn't portraing that scenario as plausible nor advisable, just as possible.

There is being an incomprehension. Sherlock is talking about items, and specifically abount items with the "potent" attributes, aka stat-boosts. Not the level based stat improvements.
And bte, I do agree with you OP

Dekalinder wrote:

FLite wrote:

It's called holy smite, and they get it at level 9 now.

Given the number of players who dipped paladin to get smite and CHA to saves, I am not sad about this.

Let's prevent players who like smite from enjoing it for close to half their campaign otherwise some clever character builder can have some fun breaking the game. This way we are going to show both of them. There is going to be no fun on my watch!

... Smite Evil was a first level ability.

And the actual replacement for Smite Evil is not Holy Smite (9) but Blades of Justice (6), the point of this phylosophy still stands, and permeates this entire playtest.

Eh, the errata did nothing for alchemist power wise, just a couple of fixes to officially allow them to craft the mutagens.

All tables I know already allowed mutagen crafting either way.

If anything, putting in errata all feats to use Quick Alchemy instead of Advanced or Quick is pointing towards the development team going towards a really terrible road for the class...

At least they got 1 more skill. The sorceror just lost 4, and his amount of skill was the only thing that justified picking it over wizard.

It's called holy smite, and they get it at level 9 now.

Given the number of players who dipped paladin to get smite and CHA to saves, I am not sad about this.

Let's prevent players who like smite from enjoing it for close to half their campaign otherwise some clever character builder can have some fun breaking the game. This way we are going to show both of them. There is going to be no fun on my watch!

Spell attack rolls are made using Dex instead of your spellcasting modifier. It seems like the actual spell roll is only used in... spells that ask you to roll your spell roll? Not sure which ones these are. Also melee touch attacks use Str but are finesse, so they can use Dex as well.

The bit that concerns me on spells is Spell DC scaling. Sure, all casters become Legendary in it, but does anyone else find it odd that there can be up to a +5 item bonus to all saves, but not a similar item bonus to spell DCs?

We definetly don't want spell to actually be reliable, that would be really bad, wouldn't it?

I searched there for Flat-footed, Conditions, dying, poison. I'm using the PDF so some of the searches where skipped thanks to the sidebar bookmarks.