Geosharp's page

For those who do have a problem with adding your level to attacks or skills, I am curious- did you have a problem with Full BAB classes? Or an issue with people putting a rank in a certain skill every level? Doing both of these are just adding your level + profiecency (aka class skill) to what you're rolling. They've basically just streamlined that. Now every character who was doing that anyway doesnt have to make sure they don't miss something and fall behind on things they're supposed to be good at.

Sure, they run the risk of things getting too samey. But proficiency will add the variety, and critical successes will make the differences felt.

All pf2 really does with +level is expand upon what we were already using that worked pretty well before.

I shall be brief - I have accepted the +level ship has sailed, but I wanted to briefly comment here. As someone who hates +level to everything, I have no problem with full BAB or max rank skills in PF1. What I dislike in PF2 is *everyone* being full BAB, max ranks, maxed AC, good saves. I would much rather we had fractions of level to hit, anything fromm 400% to 0% of level yo skills, different fractions of level to saves and nothing to AC. Its personal choice I know and that's fine. I'm just trying to be clear that +level is nothing.like what we had in PF1, which is why some of us dislike it.

Geosharp wrote:

Joe M. wrote:

Bardic Dave wrote:

They announced an upcoming PF2 actual-play livestream with Paizo staff, DMed by Jason Bulmahn. No PF2 spoilers, sadly.

From what I caught in the chat, it will be 1 hr/week, 12pm PST, starting April 4th. Didn't have audio so don't know what else came up

Nothing else came up really. Next few Thursdays till game starts will be intro's to the players and their characters. Jason gave a brief summary of how the game starts (in Lastwall at...a port who's name i've forgotten, with players trying to get onto a barge leaving there)....and tbh that was it, somehow stretched out to 40mins.

Not gonna lie, I was pretty damn disappointed *shrug*

To be fair, they did say at the top not to expect PF2 spoilers from it. (Both the actual play and that announcement stream.)

I'll probably watch just to see what I can gleam about the mechanics, and bonus points if its also entertaining.

I must've missed that, but I was only going of this thread, and with it Jason's twitter posts quoted here, which made it sound like a hella bigger announcement than a staff game starting in over a month.

Also, I should point out that they repeatedly made the point that this game isn't really for getting rules previews, it's gonna be about the fun. They also mentioned that they're gonna have to be careful about the character intro's as they can't show some things yet.

I mean, if this means we're getting no PF2 previews till early april at the earliest i'm gonna be pretty narked to be honest, i'd honestly expect them to start before then.
I'm hoping the pathfinder stream tomorrow may contain something (that was listed on the slide before the presentation began as a regular thing, I assume there's one tomorrow?) but honestly that's a slim hope at best.
Ah well, back to checking the forums once a week to see if anything has turned up I guess

Bardic Dave wrote:

They announced an upcoming PF2 actual-play livestream with Paizo staff, DMed by Jason Bulmahn. No PF2 spoilers, sadly.

From what I caught in the chat, it will be 1 hr/week, 12pm PST, starting April 4th. Didn't have audio so don't know what else came up

Nothing else came up really. Next few Thursdays till game starts will be intro's to the players and their characters. Jason gave a brief summary of how the game starts (in Lastwall at...a port who's name i've forgotten, with players trying to get onto a barge leaving there)....and tbh that was it, somehow stretched out to 40mins.

Not gonna lie, I was pretty damn disappointed *shrug*

dragonhunterq wrote:

If I have an idea then that can be treated as my character inspiration, but if I read it somewhere it can't? what about a spell I read about in another game? or an effect I see in a film? does my character have to justify that too?

Who's saying anything about character concepts? They're quite obviously not putting tags on those.

A spell you read about in another game? It has no tags at the moment, it doesn't exist. You'll have to talk about it with the GM, adapt it, and research it, same as always.

It really is mind-boggling how a lot of people are getting so hung-up with the basic concept that a katana can't be found at every single Wiscrani swordsmith's, or that Blood Money is just not a thing outside of Karzoug's personal spellbook, or that to take the Gray Maiden prestige archetype you must have been, big shocker, a friggin' Gray Maiden.

Except they are putting tags on character concepts by slapping a big fat bunch of NO's everywhere.

It really does seem that this exists just to stamp into dust any interesting/different character builds.
So after first reading this, I really hate this idea, especially for PFS.
'Hey, i've just come up with a really cool conecept and build! Oh, wait, uses 2 uncommon feats, well, in the bin with that idea I guess' Is something a player should not be saying, and I fear we're going to be saying that A LOT.
And before anyone comments on the 2 Uncommon thing, unless that number is so high as to be worthless then we still hit this problem.

A lot of people, and probably the majority of more experienced players, like to plan their builds out in advance. It certainly makes for a more effective character to do so. This system is going to make that hugely frustrating and complicated for such players if a ton of stuff is now suddenly locked behind GM Fiat by being listed as uncommon.

I would recommend stripping it down to just Common / Available (folding Uncommon into Common), and Rare / Permission Required (folding Unique into Rare). While there is value in special gear, techniques etc limited to certain factions, unique to an individual boss or patron, associated to a dead civilization, and so on, I don't see the point of a distinction between Rare and Unique in this case - both require interaction with stuff in the game world in play to gain access to. Meanwhile, distinguishing between Common and Uncommon creates not only an unnecessary character planning barrier, but also an unnecessary workload and word count bloat in having to specify all the different regions where things are common vs uncommon.

And then as I thought about it more I realised my problem was the uncommon rarity, and I wholeheartedly agree with Fuzzypaws.

Making a few really powerful/bust/rp-specific things rare is fine, and indeed quite cool, but I really hate the idea of uncommon, Just leave everything else at common and be done with it.

Feels like an arbitrary barrier to players actually using the stuff in the books they pay for.

Great for the guys who don't like their players building the characters they want to play, I guess?

And no, it's not 'just the same as dm fiat that's always been in the system'.

And this is my other concern. I've bought several books from Paizo without really knowing the contents, just that they are heavily Alchemy or Kineticist related. Now I won't. I'll wait for them to come out, see how much is Uncommon (otherwise known as off limits outside of homebrew) and then decide.

The more I read the comments here the unhappier I am with skills in PF2 than I already was after reading this blog and the other, earlier one that talked about skills.

Much like John Lynch 106, Maliloki and a few others (who have mostly just been shouted down by the rest of you) the whole level to all skills, even untrained, just really rubs me the wrong way.
For me, if you've spent 2 years with a rogue watching him sneak, or with a healer watching him tend the wounded, you know what represents that casual knowledge sinking in? Picking up the skill at trained. If you're untrained it means that you haven't taken any of it in - you had more important things to worry about.
I don't care that you're 20th level. You're a DEX 10 fighter wearing plate. You will suck hard at stealth without help, get over it.

Personally, if I ever run a PF2 game, I think i'll change untrained's bonus to 1/2 level instead of level-2 as a sorta compromise. It means a lot of things you can still roll, and the bonus widens as you level so it affects low level play less - in fact untill level 3 you'd be better at untrained skills than the current setup previewed (unless it bottoms out at 0).

Also, if they're going to lock what can become Master and Legend, I really hope flexibility is built into the classes or you get a free choice through background.
Considering how few General Feats and Skill Feats we get, having to spend one to unlock nothing but the ability to have a higher cap on some skills would be pretty awful waste of one.

It is a shame. I'm generally liking PF2. The action economy is growing on me, especially after the quick 1 hour demo I did at UK Games Expo, I *love* the changes to alchemy, but skills.....i'm a long way from sold.

Crayon wrote:

RumpinRufus wrote:

I'm interested to see some of the high-level alchemical items! It would be cool if they were priced so that lots of characters might actually buy consumables - and one advantage of the alchemist being that he gets them for free. It would be nice if they just worked a la carte for a rogue (or whatever other class wanted to use them,) without requiring alchemist class features to actually use effectively. It would be a shame if Paizo spent all this effort developing an elegant alchemy system, and then made alchemical items a trap option for everyone but the alchemist.

While I feel the term trap has been overused to the point of being almost meaningless, I struggle to understand how, on any level, a Class whose entire concept is based on excelling with alchemical items being better with those items in any way detracts from the usefulness of said items to other classes.

Alchemists should be better at alchemical items, for sure. I just don't want them to be useless for non-alchemists.

In PF1, almost no one ever really bought consumables (besides for healing.) Consumables were generally something you found in loot, stuffed in a sack, and then promptly forgot about. It would be nice to see in PF2 that spending your money on consumables is actually a viable option.

I think they've opened up some design space for this - now that you don't need to spend all your money to fill every possible item slot, and magic items cost resonance, that opens up a nice niche for alchemical items as consumable power enhancers that don't cost resonance.

It'll just be a shame if we see that they've created a beautiful alchemical item system with 100 different cool alchemical items, but for one reason or another they're all useless or overpriced for non-alchemists.

Archetypes, that's how. It's one of the upsides of class agnostic archetypes. Make one that swaps out, lets say, your 4th, 8th and 10th class abilities, and for that you get the free items at the start of a day, a scaling damage boost that tops out at x4 rather than the alchemists x6, and something else alchemic-y. You're still not as good or flexible as the alchemist, but they still do appreciable damage, and you get all your class abilities that you've not swapped out.

Starfinder has started to go this way with the Pact Worlds ones, which is good, because I will agree with others, the 2 in the base book were just dire.

The other option is a feat chain, like the amateur investigator chain that exists in PF1. We already know there's a feat that anyone can take to get some formulae, so maybe a follow on gives a damage boost, and the third gives you some free stuff at the start of the day.

Either way, I hope they do one of them, as I really like they've made non-magic a viable think unlike PF1 (me and a friend have both been hacking away at how to do a non-magical healer in PF1, here it is a supported thing, yay!) and I really want to be able to have fighters or rogues do it as a decent sideline rather than being tied to one class.