Envall's page

So the pet is a roleplaying element. A wizard can have a book in his pouch, the witch a rabbit, but only one of them gets roasted if there is a chance of fireballs in the local weather forecast. I get it why everything living has to have simulated life, but this is one of those things where I cannot help but go back to the age old bad doctor advice: "Help my Witch player's pet keeps dying!" "Well stop killing it".

Ah yes but the pigeon the witch has could possibly fly and spy and carry small keys in my dungeon puzzle, truly this practical use for it requires us to make sure it has an entry in the list of targets the dungeon monsters have and truly one of the disposable mooks will make his job to make sure the pet pig gets chopped up. But from narrative perspective, it is not really immersion breaking if the fairy companion manages to survive each encounter.

Nine out of ten, best way to reclass is to ask your GM if you can remake the character into the new class.

A new feat with "You become expert in light armor. If you already were expert in light armor, you gain expertise in medium armor. If you were expert in both, you become expert in heavy armor. Requires trained in X, etc. etc." as its text is super easy to write, and feels like a natural extension of the existing rules, but will not still give what few of you want.

This is not really a rules or math issue. This is not about how powerful wizards would be in their heavy armor, this is about the emotional reaction that wizard class is meant to use robes and only robes and that is it. And that is actually a valid response all and all.

Considering lvl 14 Champion multiclass benefit is getting expert on all armor types, I doubt general feat is an investment of equal size. Heavy armor is merely now a more exclusive club than before.

So what is assumed normal? Because I know it is assumed normal for things to take place in temperate woodland area, but you probably do not run into wolves in the desert or the ocean and these places are also normal places.

As far as I understood, you can always get uncommon things even in the "character building" process, but they have somekind of opportunity cost to them. You want dwarven battleaxe, you have to be a dwarf, etc.

This is all still feeding into the reading of skill points that is ignoring the fact that level bonus IS STILL NOT ABOUT PROFICIENCY.

Ant can drown in a puddle. I cannot drown in a puddle, and it is not because I know how to swim and the ant doesn't, I am a freaking human and the puddle is a size of my foot. It is about literal POWER LEVELS.

Accept the abstraction.

Giving me examples of bad PF1e monster design (arbitrary bonuses) isn't going to convince me that a completely arbitrary system is somehow better. Let's not take the worst examples of PF1e and make them the norm.

I want the interconnected web of monster stats. It means if I make a change as a GM - change weapon, change armor, select a different feat, add HD, etc. - I know where to make all the "trickle down" changes. It also means that as a player if I manage to do one of those things it has the same effect on the monster as it would on me.

I don't need to know that the shopkeep is a level 3 expert with a full stat block. But I do want to know that the various NPCs are all level something somethings, and that they interact with the world the same way my PC does.

Because the GM can literally not play the same way as a player, NPCs cannot interact with the world like a PC does.

Sorry if I take the bad doctor approach to this, but first step if the game world makes no sense if you construct it out of "lvl x class npcs", stop making it out such elements.

I know Paizo compromised and told that NPCs made with PC rules are legit, but do not do it. A town demographic no longer is a distribution of many low level npcs and then few higher level npcs. Infact, majority of the world will never be statted, only the exact pieces that end up interacting with the PCs do and they will have arbitrary numbers made up by the GM.

Level 10 cleric was not born level 10, but became level 10 after adventuring to that point from level 1. Everyone ought to kill the idea from their heads that the PF1 npc gallery method is still legit.

Lot of confusion seems to come from trying to use both levels and proficiency to measure the same things. Level is merely abstraction of power.

This is very different from PF1 where only pure skill rank mattered. Consider this metaphor: Artisan of past, present and future all craft an expertly made weapon. All of them are equally fancy inside their own cultures, but they operate on completely different level: sword, assault rifle and plasma destroyer.

Character's prowess should be defined by the situation they are in at the moment they make the skill roll rather than the size of the bonus modifier. We can't do anything about d20 at this point, but repeated rolls and crits allow even small number differences to make them feel distinctive. "Oh it is just 3 point", well the DC difference between something severe and impossible is also just 4 points.

Also the fact that the roll of the dice meant less and less the higher level you got in PF1 was not really as much a planned feature as the bug in the system. There is no reason to keep that, unless you are just so risk averse that your power fantasy is killed the moment your character does not succeed.

If I giver the baker in the town infinite HP and nobody attacks him, does he actually have infinite HP?

At some point both developers and players could truly, with all their heart, believe that the world could be reasoned and built from the class levels like building a castle from lego blocks. The "NPC Gallery" from the Game Mastery Guide, the 2010 book is to me kind of a ... bible of old faith. For example, let's take the humble "Beggar". One level commoner, one level rogue. I mean, when it comes to citizens in your world, this is one of the lowest positions you can be, and even then, the beggar is LEVEL 2 entity! Commoner levels in general are element of "non-importance" and one rogue level? Ah, the class "rogue" was after all meant to represent all kind of thuggish, criminal, backhanded level. In another way, his classes could read "non-important low life, lvl 2".

You can see rogue class being treated as measurement of "rogueness" every where. Merchant Prince has rogue levels because being a shrewd merchant has to involve rogueness. Pirate Captain has rogueness. Criminals are plenty rogueness.

Of course, this method of trying to build the world ran into many problems. First of all, there is not enough paper in the world to print enough NPCs for there to be one for every occasion. Second, NPC levels are also arbitrary. A generic King is a lvl 16 NPC. Alright, what does that actually mean? Why does it matter? So he can have +32 diplomacy modifier? If the king used his diplomacy on players, he could make it "illegal by the rules" to attack him. Ah, rules driven world! You can do anything you want, as long as it is written into the core rulebook!

In a way, there is a lot of desire to expose the strings holding the puppet show together. Tabletop RPG challenges have always been completely arbitrary, PF2 is just lot more honest about it than DnD 3.0+ ever was.

Whenever there is a huge change in the character, the character has a life changing moment and want to change into a different character, it is just so much better to talk to the GM and remake the character. This of course breaks the kind of "organic change" some people like, but personally I believe it is not that important. You got a Rogue that by plot twist gets divine powers, shuffle papers, rebuild the character, and you got narratively much better result. This applies to both editions, especially in PF1 it was much easier to just rebuild characters if players wanted big character changes instead of dipping into classes and realizing that multiclassing gets you just an ugly mess unless you planned it 5 years in advance.

That logic doesn't work.

The guy in the OP's audience who did the elbow nudge (out of combat) could have been a monk doing an unarmed elbow strike, or could have been somebody delivering a touch attack with a gentle elbow nudge (or, alternatively, a gentle finger poke or a light caress).

How is one kind of unwanted contact (elbow nudge) different from another kind (gentle poke or caress)?

What is it about "Hey, we're in combat now" that turns one kind of elbow nudge (free to do whenever you want even during the casting of a spell) into another kind of elbow nudge (nope, you can't do it at all, you have to wait your turn, because combat).

In a RPG where "RP" stands for "Role Playing" played by people who like their stories to make sense, having some kind of mechanically gamist logic that certain laws of physics apply ONLY during combat and entirely different laws of physics apply out of combat is just not going to be well received by these people.

Each to their own, some people like that kind of thing. Others don't. Maybe this might turn out to be the kind of game that only works for one kind of player, not both.

We differate the two to ALLOW roleplaying to exist. To "Strike" is not just hitting someone, it is meant to represent any way of KILLING other person. In any situation, a character can slap a character. Because we know this is not a combat thing, we do not have to go insane and start counting out non-lethal unarmed attack penalties to hit the AC for a narrative moment.

We do not think walking in the park as "move actions". We do not count rounds when characters are talking to each other, remember, you are only allowed to speak 6 seconds at time before the other person has its own turn to speak!

A combat scenario is a combat scenario and GM ought not to make it too hard to distinguish when you ought to just roll init and have a surprise round and when not to. It is important that the players can assume it is not combat and if it turns to combat, the GM will signal it somehow. Usually it is just a skill roll to notice ill intent/hidden weapon/crossbows in the balconies and then get down to the surprise round. But an actor does not need to roll fist fighting attack rolls to see if they successfully slapped the other actor on the face with a glove.

Combat rules only apply during combat.
This was made even more explicit in PF2.

Just take a mallet and hammer it in to all future module writers.
"THE TABLE LEVEL REFERS TO TASK LEVEL, NOT PLAYER LEVEL"
"THE TABLE LEVEL REFERS TO TASK LEVEL, NOT PLAYER LEVEL"
"THE TABLE LEVEL REFERS TO TASK LEVEL, NOT PLAYER LEVEL"

And roleplaying a godly intelligent being with Int of 18-24 as having int 4 is not suspension of disbelief?

Wizards are beyond clever. Not playing them as such breaks immersion much more heavily.

It reminds me a rogue player of mine that was saying I was meta gaming for putting every single magical trap behind a thin sheet of lead, so that Detect magic wouldn't pick them up.

I was like "wut mate? You know the wizard has both 24 int and the detect magic on his list right? Why wouldn't he cover up his traps?"

Playing casters as morons to make a setting work is not "doctor was right" it's the doctor seeing you have gangrene and going "wear this glove so that no one notices it"

And yet all villains exist to fall.

So for whose benefit do we do GOTCHA! moments for? So the wizard is super smart and has a contingency plan for every single thing that party could imagine. Let's say players did not assume far enough and the party loses. What then? Do you WIN as GM?

What's stupid? Wizards? Invisibility? Flight? Fireballs?

If a wizard can do all those things under the rules, it's stupid for them not to when confronted by, say, an army.

Because it fights against many people's suspension of disbelief. You can pick apart the setting, but then it becomes really hard to run an adventure in it if everyone is already ready to disbelieve it. You can call for change, but change what? Change the rules or change the setting? Changing the setting can result in setting people don't care for, changing the rules can result in ruleset people don't find fun anymore. So the best option is to not do it.

This time the doctor was right, if it hurts, don't do it.

Just because something is allowed, does not mean it is intended behavior.

You can make invisible wizards flying high in the air shooting fireballs down to the ground. But that is stupid, so you ought not to do it. There is no solid arm of the law to stop you from doing bad ideas, that is left to your own intuition. You can question everything, but the reality that it gets you nowhere.

It is starting to become a really common line of thinking that anything that inconveniences players/characters is bad because inconvenience is subset of frustration and thus inherently negative emotion. If we can get rid of all negative emotions in the game, surely we will have just net more Good Fun and the game would be Better.

But these little things give the game friction. Rulesets ought to push back at at player desires every now and then. That is why we have dice involved in skill checks, instead of deciding expertise by binary numerical check. We could just ask players to have X amount of skill points to pass this challenge. But we do not, because the game wants to disobey the player.

Okay so we increase the pace by making things per-encounter. That means removing the attrition idea from the encounters. So each encounter has to be individually dangerous rather than maybe dangerous as a collective. So then we create encounters where you are assumed to have all your best spells, so we make every encounter very dangerous. On a road with no friction, only way to slow down is a sudden stop.

Ruleset with zero disobedience stops being a roleplaying game and just becomes a novel. The adventure becomes determined.

They made it easier to die permanently to offset the increased post-combat healing. You are expected to lose PCs.

There's a term for an option that is intentionally bad. It's called a "trap option," and its only purposes are to make other options seem artificially better and/or to punish those foolish enough to fall for it.

I cannot accept this logic on options that are outside of permanent character option choices. A s~%$ty potion is s*$!ty, sure, but it can also be your ONLY option. And it is always a net benefit. There might be a situation where, yes, you can choose from a weak potion, lean wand and powerful scroll. But these are not interchangeable AND they are not equally distributed.

"Potion did not save me, it was a trap to drink it" is a valid statement, BUT it is not proof that the potion is too weak. It can also mean that drinking the potion at the wrong time was a tactical mistake. It is not a fact that potions ought to be good source of healing in middle of a combat.

I am sure healing weak to make sure combat is not prolonged by potions in your belt being "extra health bars". The NPC is near death, he chugs a potion, he is now topped off, party needs to repeat the combat.

The desire to not die is super strong among players, for obvious reasons. But proper challenge curve is meant to make sure that one dungeon either kills someone or results in a near death situation. I am one of those who can subscribe to the thinking where loss can lead to triumph, victories have to be earned with blood. Bad potions and resonance exists to make damage last, and if your enjoyment is tied to your character staying alive, you can never enjoy resonance, because it literally exists to kill your comfort zone.

The trap of thread is in the title.

There is no real collective "we" in this.

Alright, but is this not bit like reading inspirational scifi and then having the enlightenment that maybe things should not be so easily fixed? Free energy, flying cars and fantastic clean environments are clearly false and we need "real" scifi, skeptical scifi, question how future actually looks like. You get real, or maybe even cynical, and thus invent, to put it simply, cyberpunk.

Setting speak. This is not antagonistic, but everyone can get cynical about the absolute simplicity of a typical DnD magical system. The fact that the effects of DnD magic is not more deeply investigated and its effects examined, how it will affect societies, how it affects trades, how it gets political, this is not done because old DnD writers were lazy or stupid. You are just meant not to question it.

There will always be settings that are meant to be taken for face value. Is the wizard society in Harry Potter ACTUALLY functional? Is it believable? Do wizards control the parliament, are wizards immune to bullets? Rowling will introduce money, banks, wizard councils, but she will not have armed muggle soldiers fight wizards, because that is not actually part of the setting. You can create new settings by just doing the "twist spinning". I am sure you have not been the first one to think what "oh, what if magic was actually dangerous to use..."

But inspirational high fantasy is not inherently foundationally flawed because "it refuses" to put a skeptical spin on magic. It is perfectly normal to roll your eyes at a show where love conquers an obstacle. But on the same notion, that kind of catharsis is not flawed because you can point out that love cannot actually conquer all obstacle.

The consumer base of in Pathfinder and outside of Pathfinder for over 10 years had been sending signals what an improved product would look like, and one that would make them even more engaged to to the product.

And Paizo analysed these signals over the years, created a product that is meant to respond to said signals, and now we have PF2 as a result of this process. But because this is RPG industry, quality cannot be measured in any sane metric. People play rulesets based on a desired feeling, which makes engineering absolutely useless. Seifer and his math expertise can create progression path that keeps each dice roll somewhat exciting, but can he build a system that makes people get that "correct DnD fantasy feeling"? Well go figure, you might need a poet for that.

To be fair, Channel Life basically gives a Paladin "Lay On Hands, Only Even Better Than 1e" due to how the Heal spell works in 2e.

It doesn't even begin to justify how weak the rest of the Paladin's defensive kit is though. The 1e Paladin is a Teflon-coated Hammer of Justice that flat ignores a host of debilitating conditions through sheer faith and resolve while Evil melts before them. The 2e Paladin...isn't those things.

This really fits into a narrative that PF2 is the hangover of Pathfinder, it both good and bad. Paladin is a good point, because PF1 Paladin was both powerful but utterly one-note class. Because were super high on saves and immune to just half the stuff anyway. You said it, he ignored events. Lot of time you ended up just not participating in roleplaying events that are called "failing a save".

"I pulverize things with smite and ignore all effects" is awesome, but has no nuance to it. Point of empathy, the new stuff is too careful, too tame, but the kind of "always one immunity" goes nowhere either.

Are buff spells visible?
Do the people with ten magic spells stacked on themselves just glow as hell?

There is to me a huge social stigma towards actually finishing off dying player characters by the GM. Especially at low levels when raise dead is still expensive and out of reach, going out your way to remove a player from the game does not feel acceptable, it has feeling of spite to it. This is obviously where each table is very different, but it feels much better to me there to a be a system where it is safe as GM to be deadly without having to regret that this one crit removed your favorite actor from the game or stupid monsters are just going to let that wizard lay safely on the ground till the fight is over.

You have to move on from the core rulebook descriptions of the alignment themselves. They are less core tenets of each side and more like abridged version for quickly getting the hang of it.

I like to think there is Soft and Hard version of each alignment. Like Soft Chaotic is a mortal rebel, the barbarian, the anarchist and other things. Hard Chaotic is the proteans and free will and non-deterministic concepts that are really hard for humans to make up, like us real life humans.

I can say, mortality is a lawful concept. Imagine a world where everyone can choose if they die or not. That would be a chaotic concept. And that kind of world where that it is in effect is really hard for me to imagine in very deep detail.

We must go back to Hero Quest.

Alignment is akin to MTG's Color Pie, a categorization of personalities and principles rather than a 1:1 value judgement. It exists because putting the label of "chaotic evil" on something carries instantly recognizable assumptions both the GM and players identify. Same way people in MTG can predict what a card does in MTG based on its color.

In Pathfinder One, lot of spells were evil out of different kind of necessity. If you wanted an evil wizard, there was father fast NPC creation method by just putting all major evil spells on said wizard. The other side of the egg and chicken debate, the spells are evil because they are used by evil mages, which is why they are evil because evil mages use them which makes them evil because, etc.

Evil being still act evil even if you removed the evil label.
If you want to remove alignment on the basis that you want all entities to show all possible behaviors, you have to remove all personality they might have.

"Angels are good" is compression of their personality. "Angels are self-sacrificial and like to help others" is what translates out of the alignment system if you unpack it. You see, we can remove alignment and get "Angels are humanoids with wings", but what do you have at that point? Stat block? No alignment also means no set behavior.

So you would have to implement some other behavior system to the game in the end anyway. And that might get in your way just as much.

Population demographics will change the population layout, as will personal PC choice. However in the average fantasy tavern, one would not be surprised to see a Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, Halfling, or Human. Goblins are on the list now. Maybe every tavern will suddenly have a token Goblin?

Dwarves, elves and half-orcs are still very rare. Core race in this case does not mean common place race. Your average tavern is still mostly full of men, maybe with a group of halflings in the corner.

If core races were decided by popularity, one ought to right away take the knife and cut both gnomes and halflings from the book right away and put catfolk and tieflings there. That statement was based on pure anecdotal evidence, but still.

Also the question, for Pathfinder to finally leave the last remnants of the DnD nest. Goblins actually feel less inconsequential than gnomes or half-elves in how they manifest in the fictional setting. I guess every other AP does have some gnome in a fancy hat and with big facial hair as quirky character, but they are so marginal. So what the heck are even core races? What does it MEAN to be a core race? It cannot be importance, because half of the classic core setup barely counts then!

Agree, Troop subtype is necessary abstraction of fighting large number of weak opponents.

CR system does not play nice with big groups. Before swarms, you always ran into the problem, that if you added enough mice to a pile, you had a danger the size of a great wyrm.

While a pleasant idea, it is also self-destructive, because it means either that all classes have the access to the same abilities or challenges set by the GM always require the same set of skills the party already has.

So if you are a party of 4 fighters, only thing you face are different gauntlets of climbing walls and swimming real good.

Does alignment give you power, or do very powerful people just have very extreme alignments?

I love me some egg with some chicken.

Being setting agnostic and rule heavy are to me, mutually exclusive features in a tabletop ruleset. And DnD/Pathfinder really is rules heavy.

Here is my line of thought. What is a rule? It is worldbuilding. When you make a rule such as "all characters have strength value which decides this and that" you are already making context on the rule based on some sort of world setting! You just decided that physical strength is important and that it varies from being to being. Why, what if I run a setting where there is no concept of physical strength? Or physical bodies all together?

And that is just one stupid nitpick. We got swords, vancian magic, goblins, the whole lot. Always something that HAS to be given a context for.

All that reminds me of another experience: Do not start the arms race.
The arms race sucks. It sucks for everybody.
Not only is it just voodoo science when you start doubling enemies, doubling AC, double HP and saves, you are just actively fighting against your players. Not just the ones doing good, but all of them.

So you make enemies harder. Now the guys who were playing "normally" feel weaker and/or more in danger to death. The archer/sorcerer feels targeted and frustrated because of it. The GM is forced to spend even more time preparing the sessions because he now suddenly needs to be an expert game designer to redesign the encounter system. On the freak chance you hit the right balance, now the game is ... better? experience for all, maybe? But there is the huge chance now you just make it less fun FOR EVERYONE AT THE TABLE.

Think about game on easy mode. Sure, it is trivial and kinda boring. Now you crank it up to some NIGHTMARE difficulty out of desperation. Now your players are in a gridlock and everyone hates playing the game.

This thread is starting to drown in platitudes.

On the topic of making the ruleset just RUN BETTER, I adopted one guideline. "NPCs never stay in air for more than 1 round". This is not even about "because fighters can't fly" issue, this is how much it sucks to play flying units on a flat battle map, how tedious the flying rules are at times, how uninteractive up-high-hovering enemies are, etc.

You know how in MMOs flying enemies just come and hover in front of your face and stay there when they attack you? That is somewhat optimal to just running your combat scenario in a pleasant fashion. Only time when I had the dragon actually just stay in the air for longer times was when everyone had just played Dragon's Dogma and I improvised some quick "Shadow of the Colossus" rules which brought it down to the ground pretty fast. Oh, or doing one of those MMO-style breath attack runs? That is pretty classic too even if easy to avoid.

Sometimes I feel sympathy for the wizard too. Maybe the wizard player DOESN'T want to memorize Fly. Maybe he has been memorizing fly on his arcane characters for 10 years in a row and it is time to stop.

I tend to think that at this point, Pathfinder is to DnD what modern format is to MTG. PFS even has a ban list, like modern.

Just some general feelings I guess.

Cavalier was always meant to be "Fighter who gets to do more stuff", but the class was just sidelined till forever because loss aversion makes mount seem like a burden rather than a situational benefit.

People have identified and studied this fault line for so many years for now.

But people get all awkward and skittish when someone asks "Ok, so, which side of the fault is the greener field? Which side is the correct side?" Sure, people homebrew, they turn to 3pp. Path of War is basically not Pathfinder. Bob's "low magic" setting where he just takes the axe to all magical in the ruleset is not Pathfinder either. But both are just looking for their own "perfect" Pathfinder experience at heart. The fault line is real, but it harms nobody because tables are individuals and how you homebrew does not impact my table.

Starfinder is much more consistent. I don't see a fault line in that, the classes and the mechanics are much more tightly focused.

All I am saying is that, is that failure and triumph go hand in hand. Sure, failing a save sucks. But it always leads to something, failure, looking for help, others helping you, moments of compassion. And no victory ever feels real unless you actually were uncertain you might achieve it.

If you all go to the tomb of the pharaoh, and NOBODY gets cursed, it seems like a major disappointment to me.

We are getting all Pillars of Eternity here now.

Starfinder's First World is straight out of No Man's Sky.

The primordial gods, as a test, procedurally generated whole galaxies. They are littered with seemingly random selection of features, some of the planets are absolutely work in progress and some are weird and extreme because of bugs in the system.

Does chest high wall give cover because it hides you feet or because it is implied you kneel behind it?