Greymist's page

And the effort to recreate goblins (which has already detrimentally dominated two Pathfinder Scenarios) continues. I've never considered that the entire goblin race should be evil, but making them a core race is a dramatic and unneeded change. I see this as taking a very interesting chaotic / insane / generally evil race and trying to shove them into a design space that is already full with gnomes and halflings. To me this is another disappointing choice Paizo is making in the development of PF2.

Prior to the playtest, we averaged about 14-20 people, normally playing PFS (occasionally SFS) at our game store. Once our VO started running the playtest, we generally had about 10-12, counting those at the playtest table. A big part of this was the difficulty of finding a scenario that everyone could play, which on several occasions forced us to go back to repeatables. Once the group finished the playtest and we've started offering two scenarios most weeks, our attendance has climbed back slightly.

Part of this is also that with the end of PF1, several GMs want to focus more on playing their characters rather than running games.

As far as PF2 is concerned, a lot of our players (like myself) tried it once and found elements that they seriously disliked. Some of these elements have been changed in the updates to the playtest, but the numerous updates, each in a separate document, meant that understanding the changing rules required devoting more time than these players (or I) were willing to spend.

"Low level magic items are a problem"

Really? Really?

Magic Wands were the problem! No seriously Paizo, where'd you get the info that people were mass spamming Potions? The only other thing that saw as much spam was Scrolls for wizards.

Nerfing the wands alone would and should have been enough to solve the "CLW Wand Issue" which was named due to WANDS.

If low level wands were the problem (which is a point in dispute), it is partially a function of the price. Why were wand charges only 30% of the cost of an equivalent potion? Raising the cost of healing wands will encourage players to focus more on defense and finding options other than pure melee.

The "wand issue" could also have been solved through adjusting the amount of hit points and the damage done. One of the results of the increase in hit points from older D&D to PF1 was that if a character lost 90% of his/her hit points, that character needed more healing. However, the effectiveness of healing spells were not increased, so this translated into needing more spells, encouraging CLW wands spam or shorter adventuring days. Proportionately slowing the growth of hit points and damage done will decrease the need for CLW wands, as would increasing the effectiveness of healing spells.

Resonance seems to be an overly broad "solution" with numerous side effects. In my opinion, it inhibits smart playing. If a party finds out information about a future opponent and his/her defenses, through scrying, diplomacy, intimidation, or other methods, I think that party should be able to find ways to improve their odds. One of the ways of doing this is through purchasing one shot or limited use magic items chosen specifically because of each layer of the defense or for the opponent himself/herself. Resonance makes this much more difficult.

I have also found resonance to reduce fun by adding one more set of resources to track. To me the game already has too much accounting, especially for PFS. If resonance were merely a substitute for slots -- for example being able to wear/use your character level worth of permanent item levels -- I believe it would simplify the game and allow players more choice in designing their characters.

Great looking artwork

I do like the idea of having a mechanical benefit from my character having a history / background. I just don't want to be put in a position of having to decide which of several pre-designed boxes best fit my character concept. I want to pick the abilities (traits, racial traits, feats or whatever) that fit my mental picture of him/her. I have a half-elf with the mismatched racial trait and gave him the third eye trait purely as a cool combination. How could I fit that into one of Paizo's backgrounds? I feel that we will lose a lot of cool characters with this approach to backgrounds.

My personal opinions:

The GREAT --
prioritizing tenets of the code to greatly reduce "no win" situations -- this invites intelligent play by paladins. There should be clarification about where religious requirements and anathema fall in the list of priorities.
being open to having paladins of multiple alignments (with the understanding that the paladin code presented is for Lawful, Good paladins). I would like paladins of all alignments to be in the core, but it is not a deal breaker.
oaths and the class feats identified also look great.

The HORRIBLE --
why are paladins the best at armor. Certainly if you open this class to all alignments, a paladin of Cayden Cailean would not focus on armor as more important than fighting skill. A character's focus between armor and weapons needs to be a player choice -- if I want to play a "tank" character, I don't want to necessarily play a paladin. On the other hand, I might want to play a socially focused paladin, who would not be an armor specialist. This appears to limit the optimal play styles for each type of character

I've been looking forward to blogs that actually address what I see as the principal issues with the current Pathfinder game, the caster/martial power discrepancy and the way that the turns of some classes with companions can take twice as long as many other classes. I'm happy to see this post give some initial ideas on magic, but I don't see it (or any of the other posts so far) actually address the power discrepancy. The heightening of spells described in this, including the heightening of cantrips, seems to actual increase the power of caster, potentially increasing the discrepancy. The new system also seems to add considerably to the complexity of the game system. I'd like to hear more about what Paizo staff thought were the biggest problems with the existing system and their plans for fixing those problems. Instead, we've heard a lot about fixing things that aren't broken (again in my opinion), such as changing races and racial traits to ancestries and ancestry feats.

,,,The first few stars are about quantity and showing you have can do the basics. After that, it should start being about giving to the community, developing the skills to be able to guide others in a fun way, and sharing in the community that we have here. ...

My Rant: Actually, for those of us who don't have an opportunity to play that often, every game that we GM is about giving to the community. Between work and family, I've had the opportunity to participate in less than 150 PFS games, but I've given up a quarter of my limited opportunities in order to GM and provide games to others. I recognize that our 4 and 5 star GMs have given a lot more time and effort to building PFS, but it would be appreciated if the conversion to 2.0 recognized and rewarded the effort and sacrifice put in by everyone who has contributed to the growth of PFS.

I respect Paizo's right to manage its products however it wants, but I'm with those who are disappointed with this move. I also agree that Pathfinder can certainly be improved, but the richness of the current options has a lot of value to me. I've got numerous character concepts that I still want to try, and existing characters that I want to play with and develop more fully. Now I'm told that the richness of the existing rules will go away. Further, at least for organized play characters, they have little more than a year to "live" before my time, and my emotional investment, gets wiped out. Meanwhile, I'm not purchasing any new Paizo products that will have such a short useful life.

I'm going to join the chorus that RAW the Aid Another rule does not have, or imply, a penalty for failure. Further, that RAI it was intended to encourage dog-piling to keep players vested in the game. After all, the first section of the Aid Another rule reads: "You can help someone achieve success on a skill check ..." It doesn't say that you can help someone achieve success OR FAIL on a skill check ..." (emphasis added)

Rysky -- normally I find your comments very well thought out and convincing, and I would even agree with you that there should be negative consequences of excessively failing the Aid Another (at least under some circumstances), but this time I think the lanaguage is clear.

As a side note, I will sometimes use very poor Aid Another rolls to aid in description -- the NPC may clearly snub the character with the poor roll and focus on the lead diplomat.

My experience with a variety of pain, as well as that of family members and friends, is that the solution to pain is often individual. My mother had fibromyalgia with horrible pain across her head, neck and shoulders. What kept that surpressed for her was originally massage. Later, it got worse after she had a stroke, we found that accupuncture actually helped (and we doubt it was a placebo effect as she had very poor understanding of what was happening at that point). Another friend was hobbled with major joint pain that was resolved after he was determined to be gluten intolerant -- he cut out gluten and had an amazing recovery. Personally I had a long fight with sciatica and finally resolved it through attention to body position (a kneeling chair, new mattress, and an assortment of body pillows to sleep without stress on my back) together with massage and stretching in the hot tub.

While none of these examples may be your solution, I just want to encourage you to continue trying different things especially, attention to body position as well as things like massage and Tai Chi to improve flexibility.

One trick I've used is having opponents react. The fun part is that I'll do an occasional handout of rumors, and include mentions of the party and their use of tactic "X", e.g., they brought in a famed bandit gang in the form of a collection of stone statues. The party enjoys the fame of being mentioned in the rumors, but then it becomes reasonable for groups that might oppose them to also be familiar with those rumors.

One technique that groups I've been in (as player or GM) have used with games that are less frequent than once a week is to do the prep work via email in advance. Assuming that the party is not camped out in the middle of a dungeon, or elsewhere with limited options, the GM sends out an email with rumors around town and asks what the party wants to investigate and otherwise wants to do to prepare. The GM then has a chance to roll what the party learns and provide them with the general information (and also to roll if anyone else learns what the party is choosing to investigate). Key roll playing encounters can occur at the beginning of the session. Players that want to prepare can then come to the session with a list of stuff that they are buying, last minute spells that they are casting, and spells that they are prepping, without using a lot of valuable in-game time to prepare.

Overall, I think that this class works well, with the exception that some of the spirit powers need to be reviewed for balance (e.g., the Greater Spirit Power for Life).

I don't see the Druid spell list fitting this class too well, the animal and plant oriented spells (Calm Animals, Detect Animal/Plant, etc) don't seem to match the orientation toward spirits as well as the Cleric class's necromantic oriented spells (e.g., Detect Undead).

I think that it would be reasonable to make casting Charisma based, since in many cultures the idea of shamanic magic was convincing spirits to do what was requested. Wisdom based casting also works.