Grimcleaver's page

Yeah. Ditto.

Look at it this way, whoever picks this spell is intentionally forgoing combat effectiveness to some degree in order to do so. It's 100% about the roleplay satisfaction they get from the spell. So it'd be nice if the game met them halfway by rewarding that sacrifice with a lot of flavor and open-ended utility.

Same with quite a few of the standard of living spells...

Just a quick thought regarding quicksand from the ankhrav encounter in the last section. It seemed weird that as soon as players stepped into quicksand they immediately fell in up to their middle and then on a good initiative roll, the quicksand could absorb them up to their neck before they get a chance to respond.

That feels unfairly dangerous, especially given the difficulty of escape and the awful consequences of going under and suffering from the drowning rules--which are just brutal.

I'd argue that a starting condition of immobilized would be a better start. The character steps into the muck and it swallows them up to their ankles and they realize with horror they can't free their feet. Roll initiative. If the quicksand wins, they get pulled down to their waist. If not they have a chance to fall back onto land and free themselves.

That feels more like quicksand, both the way you see it portrayed in the media as well as how it works in the real world.

So looking at the poltergeist in preparation for my own game I have a larger question. Unless the poltergeist uses frighten--and just flies around at chandelier height hucking things telekinetically at PCs, how would they even know they're being attacked by a separate creature? Like even if they see the wight in the dining room summon him (which is kind of a weird ability anyway) all they would see would be a flash of some kind of spell effect and an invisible creature get summoned...which would kind of look like nothing. I could honestly see the poltergeist sticking around for the rest of the adventure, sniping characters for 4d6+4 damage a round without any of the PCs ever having any hint as to its location or nature...

That feels like trouble. I don't want to play my badguys dumb, but that feels like a fairly cheap monster ability combo.

If I were to suggest edits to the monster, I'd argue that in its normal state it creates a nimbus of glowing energy around itself that makes it concealed rather than invisible. It can manifest as an incorporeal creature if angered sufficiently (usually done by confronting it with uncomfortable truths from its former life), or willing itself to become completely invisible. In its fully manifested state it induces fright in those that see it and its attack powers become stronger. When completely invisible its powers are diminished and it must spend an action concentrating to maintain its invisibility.

I can't say anything official here, just what I'd rule, but for my buck a nonlawful monk seems fine. A monk who isn't really a monk, but really a barfighter bothers me for a whole other reason: kung fu magic and chi points.

Like if this wasn't a playtest and you were like: I want to make a monk but have them just be a barfighter who punches people, I'd probably respond: well look, in terms of weapons you can't use, armor you can't use, kung-fu powers and all that the monk just doesn't feel like a good fit--how about a barbarian going off the "fury totem" (ie. no totem, just angry)? That feels like it would give you everything you want and also more stuff that would make a good bar brawler like going into blind rages for a couple of rounds, getting woozy for a round, then unloading on another badguy.

You might respond, yeah but I want the better hand to hand damage from the monk. Done I'd say.

We definitely want feedback on whether people think there's not enough setting info, or too much, or just enough. Setting aside a chapter (like we did in the Starfinder Core Rulebook) is possible, but adding a LOT more would be difficult, as we can't let this become a 600-page book.

Understood. And I also feel like that's a subject better covered in separate book just based on interest level. Folks who are looking to play in their own homebrew setting may not benefit as much from learning the differences between Taldane and Garundi culture.

I feel like it's enough just to introduce the idea that humans have ethnicities--that it's just part of what makes humans different. Maybe the ethnicity allows a regional language, a single ethnic weapon proficiency (like the starknife for Varisians) and a lore. That way they don't have a humongous mechanical impact but impart a lot of flavor--and you don't have to try and nail down what things each ethnicity gets, you can just let players work it out with GMs during character creation.

All you need write is that humans have ethnicities from living in a certain part of the world. From them they get a language, training in a specific weapon type and a lore. Players get to pick one of each with GM approval.

Done.

When they're talking about adulthood in the book, I get the feeling they're not talking in setting about societal norms or legal rites of passage.

I think they're talking about the age you should, by default, expect to make your character.

And while, yeah it does bother me a little that this feels like another instance of the game reality merging with the real world in the blandest possible way, I think I can see why. Adventurers have some horrible things happen to them, and roleplaying horrific violence against children might have made someone somewhere uncomfortable. That's the world we live in.

There does feel like there's a sense that designers have shifted from what I consider the "historian" paradigm of roleplaying (appreciate how far we've come in society by looking at how dysfunctional medieval societies used to be...that guy is a slave, that woman has no rights, those races are systemically oppressed in awful ways, these children are forced to work in the fields) to a more utopian paradigm, where the roleplaying world should exactly model what we want to see in a progressive world (Wow, look how open about gender and sexuality everyone is here! Man, this world sure has an impressive range of human skin tones and cultures based on a variety of respectfully treated real-world analogues. Geez, these women are so empowered and such good rolemodels!)

And while I'm old enough to somewhat wish that fictional worlds were free to diverge from our own and be different as a way of illustrating things about our world without being seen as non-PC, I also understand that making these worlds more open and inclusive makes folks feel welcome gaming when they historically haven't. It's perhaps instructive to a group of young white dudes to see a world that suffers from injustices and perhaps play as those disenfranchised people as a way to open their eyes to realities they don't normally see. But there's plenty of people who come to gaming and discovering that similar or worse barriers exist for them in fictional worlds can't be encouraging.

So yeah, I'm willing to take the bullet of a slightly less "medieval" feeling medieval world if it means we get to share it with a bunch of new folks who honestly deserve to get something nice. And if human ages get bumped up a little to make sensitive folks feel better about the often violent content of these games, I can handle that too.

The current Paizo published content is all in regards to playtesting the system.

Okay, awesome. If they want to playtest the system they've written I'd like to see them test out try out making story explanations to justify the weirdly level appropriate DCs the rules demand. I think it'd be a useful experiment.

I'm all for testing the system math, but lets not do that to the exclusion of testing what the system math means for the game.

Here's my big problem with the DC numbers. I tried to explain this elsewhere but people got hung up with the example I used and the whole discussion went sideways.

The notes on choosing a DC say this under the heading "Creating Appropriate Challenges":
It’s important that you don’t simply make the DC arbitrarily higher or lower with the PCs’ level. Any increase must be justified based on how the challenge actually increased, and thus how success is more impressive. For checks against opponents’ DCs, higher-level adversaries have higher skills, so the players can clearly see improvement as they challenge and surpass more powerful foes.

What this means is that you're stuck not only with this table of DCs based on level and severity of the task you're having the characters do, which is hard to muddle through and buried on page 337--but not only that! You're also responsible as a GM for justifying the arbitrary math that causes things to get harder to do every level by inventing reasons why whatever they're doing is harder now than it was a level ago. It can't just be that the DCs are harder now because their level has gone up and otherwise they wouldn't be level appropriate (the real reason).

So consequently you're stuck trying to figure out why when they're about to fall into a pit trap that now the DC is a 17 instead of a 14 to catch the edge (like are all edges slippery now? covered in spikes? what?)

Which is entirely backward. It should be that tasks have DCs based on how hard they are irrespective of level--they should have fixed difficulty. But in this, how hard a task is is mostly determined by how high level the character attempting the task is--and then on top of that the GM gets forced trying to bend the story to fit the arbitrary game mechanic.

Not a fan of that.

I do like the fun monster abilities. This is one thing P2 seems to have nabbed from 4e that I greatly approve of. The ankhrav fight was just the best, with his armor gnashing mandibles, acid spray and burrowing--it was just a delight to run.

The idea of pack animals that do more damage when they fight as a unit is another great one too. It made the hyena fight a lot scarier.

I love all of this. In general I'd be happy if the monsters had less hit points, which has led to a lot of sloggy fights, and more fun abilities like these that they get to use once or twice to make the PCs lives exciting.

Honestly there's certain items the game just assumes you're going to pick as soon as you can. Magic Armor at 4, Magic Weapon at 5. The designers should just put out a gear list of the things your character starts with at whatever starting level--much like the gear lists they have for NPCs. If you don't like an item there might be some option to take a payout instead, but not anything close to the full sale value of the item.

Now do I wish that the game was written in a way where it rewarded characters for having a variety of fun interesting items that they could use in creative, freeform ways instead of being locked into a rigid item and coin progression that strictly controls what you can own and requires you to buy a set of mandatory items to avoid becoming mathematically irrelevant? YES! I do wish that!

But that does not appear to be in the cards. Like at all. This is a fine tuned, tightly controlled, optimization centered game system--and if the game system would just admit to that and just give you the items they want you to have it would make things a lot easier for everyone.

Yeah, count me as also against the idea of using skills to gate characters from being able to attempt things. That feels like a corner case (there are things that are impossible to try if you aren't trained, but it certainly isn't like that for everything, and I for one am more willing to tolerate a setting that lets you try anything than one that forces you to consult a master list every time you try and do a thing to see whether or not you can roll to try).

Likewise the idea that you get more bonus to your skills from level than you do from training leads to all sorts of preposterous situations that really make me think the skill system needs to be rethought completely. Don't get me wrong--P1 was awful in that regard. I dreaded having to pick through that big skill to spend my pile of skill points every level. It felt like the most pointless kind of paperwork. But ultimately there was a sense that your character was constantly growing, and it did genuinely reflect the things your character knew how to do or not, which the new system doesn't.

Additionally I'd really like to second the complaints about skill feats. Having dealt with them in the playtest for a few weeks they remind me of 4e's powers in a bad way. Many of them feel like things that characters should just be able to do without taking a special feat and often the mechanics behind them don't accurately reflect the ability they describe, instead giving you some little dice trick you can do.

If I ignore the rules to do what I want, why have the rules?

The rules in a roleplaying game are like the special effects in a movie. Bad mechanics give cheesy, distracting results which are the wobbly cardboard sets and 90s CGI of gaming. Good rules make you feel like you're immersed in a consistent world that no matter what you want to try and do, there's a solid mechanic to let you know how to try and do it--and how it works out.

Rules don't exist for rules sake. There are times when they get in the way. There's times when after running a game for a while with a like minded group you all discover a better, more satisfying, way to handle a rule: armor as damage reduction instead of making you harder to hit, basing hit points on ancestry instead of class, what have you. If the rules you use get you closer to your objective of creating a believable world that behaves according to your expectations with a minimum of fuss, the rules are doing what they're supposed to.

Yes, it’s really weird that people playing a game would be concerned with what the rules allow. Calvinball, the RPG, would be a huge seller.

See here's what I think is probably a big difference between how I see gaming and how you do. For you, I take it, gaming is first and foremost a game and it runs on a spectrum running from Calvinball on one side to maybe a really dense eurogame on the other. The idea is to know all the rules and play the game well, eat some chips and drink some soda, maybe tell some Monte Python jokes.

My take on gaming is that I want to tell the stories of the characters who come to my table. I'm mostly concerned with setting and lore, how the characters relate to each other and how their agendas might mesh together. I need a framework of rules for that, but mostly just when I need to figure out how a particular thing works out. I dip into the rules, roll the dice, mull over how that relates to the issue at hand, and we're back off to the races with the story.

I don't play it like a game...in fact for me the game part of it is largely disposable and frequently gets in the way. It is the means to an end of telling a fun story for my players that weaves all of their stories together and hopefully resolves their business in a satisfying way. That is, if they don't get eaten.

Stuff that's great for me is when a new mechanic saves me time and fuss, or when it offers a new bit of spotlight to shine on our characters (like the new Backgrounds), or when the rules get tidied up so they make more sense (like with the new Alchemists--which make much more sense), or when you get new options (goblins as PCs is great!), or when there's some new bit of lore where a monster suddenly becomes more meaningful and connects to a bit of setting plot or to other monsters. That's the stuff I laud when it comes up. But fundamentally when I play I want the rules to provide a loose structure that doesn't get in my way--or at least to be modular enough that I can pick the rules up and move them out of my way without the entire system imploding. I think I just value different stuff.

So yeah, we still play and laugh and eat chips and soda and make the same jokes--but I think at the end of the day I'm probably on the complete other end of roleplaying games than you are. And I think that's okay.

I assume you were equally irritated with the impossibility of doing this in PF1? Because this isn't new with PF2.

Yeah totally. One of my main purposes here in the playtest is to hopefully advocate for more flexible, open-ended rules that give players more sweet freedom and let GMs run games with a little more story flavor and a little less straightjacket. Granted I'm under no illusion that folks like me make up the majority of Pathfinder players, but I think we're a faction, and that it's hopefully meaningful to the discussion to be contributing a different, maybe even dissenting, point of view.

And yet, despite its 'impossibility' in the mechanics it's something that very easily could be imagined to happen in the narrative of the game...which is precisely my point. We've gotten so obsessed with pinning things down with strict mechanical definitions that we care more about the numbers than what's happening in the game.

The whole paradigm of higher DCs meaning more challenging challenges is just fundamentally broken as a concept. Take Catching the Edge when you might fall off of something. As you level, your Athletics gets better and consequently you are able to hit higher and higher DCs, so the DCs go up. Now according to the game's logic this is never supposed to be an arbitrary thing but reflect increasingly challenging circumstances that make the heroes' accomplishment that much more impressive. That just makes the GM of a game responsible for narrating the ridiculous consequences of bad mechanics. So, what? A first level edge around a pit is normal, but at 10th level every ledge is on fire and covered in spikes? You swim a river at first level--and end up in that same river at level 14, does it now have a firehose level current and 50' waves?

You want to know why people think high level play is cornier than a Marvel superheroes movie? It's this fake idea that challenges have to get artificially ratcheted up every level in order to chase some fake mechanical curve. I don't hate the idea that high level characters are maybe still challenged by climbing a cliff, the same as they were as 1st level characters and that maybe fighting a dragon is hard no matter what level you are, and fighting goblins is never THAT hard, but that it doesn't become so inconsequential that by third level the entire race disappears off the face of the planet.

Then change the math. This is a playtest and that excuse is getting old.

#2 brings up an interesting logical error with the rule as written. There are plenty of floating creatures (like say a flumph) that don't need to physically be able to move their limbs to be able to move.

Which brings up a larger issue in this edition: the arbitrariness of a lot of mechanics. It feels like people put so much brain sweat into trying to craft mechanics that are airtight, balanced and impossible to abuse that it seems like creativity and modelling what's actually happening have become distant concerns...and that just feels wrongheaded.

Tanglefoot bags (and consequently the spell) aren't just useful because they slow enemies. You can use them for all sorts of clever things and there's all sorts of corner cases (like the flumph) where they don't work at all. Say you hold an action against a creature that's a spellcaster and wait for them to look like they're about to cast something, then you hit them with a tanglefoot bag? Well that's going to probably disrupt the casting. Say there's a monster that's about to swallow you and you toss the tanglefoot right in it's face--well it's probably suffocating, maybe even blinded. Tag a monster with a two handed axe on a backswing and you might goo it's magic weapon to a wall, trapping its weapon. Heck, it's even a good on the fly adhesive--say there's a foe that's looking for an item you have, hide it in a pile of tanglefoot goo on the ceiling and you've made it a lot less likely they'll find it--even if you're captured.

Clever stuff. Fun stuff. Perhaps even *gasp* unbalanced stuff. But it's a lot of why people roleplay. This edition could use some more of that.

What Sober here is saying. That. Any kind of stealth spell where it's important that the target and bystanders need not see a spell being cast need to be able to be cast covertly or they become worthless.

For the most part, in previous editions, it hasn't been that much of an issue, because you could always just brew whatever spell you wanted into potion form or forge (or buy) the ability in the form of some knick knack magic item, but it seems like this option is being curtailed somewhat this edition.

But it really feels like a change that needs made--either get rid of the spells or make them so they work.

Also off topic but I sorta love the wizard arcane focus -being able to use my book or my shoe or sword as a magical battery actually sort of makes me want to play a wizard, and normally I don't care for them in the slightest.

A favorite of mine back in my Pathfinder Society days was a evoker of mine who shot force missiles out of his bonded crossbow. That was neat.

Yeah. That feels like a problem.

I'm finding the opposite effect. Because general feats have the adopted ancestry, every race has access to almost all the ancestral feats, and humans have natural ambition so its very easy for any race to be almost anything or have access to more class feats

adopted ancestry->human->natural ambition->extra class feat

even ancestral feats that are normally locked at 1st level behind half-race feats like orc ferocity can be picked up by humans at level one.

human->general training -> adopted ancestry-> half-orc-> orc ferocity

This is a great pick up for a human barbarian.

But baked into the feat is the idea that the character has been raised among some other group and picked up some feat that's ethnically 'not their own'. Which is basically to say that no human or elf...or halfling even could be Very Sneaky without having been raised by goblins. And that just seems wrongheaded to me.

The same could be said for a lot of the feats throughout the game. There are quite a few that feel like they should be able to be had by anyone--or at least a subset of races (half-orcs with razorteeth for instance). And not just ancestral feats--there's quite a few class feats that I'd argue more than make sense being used by at least some other classes.

It's a tough thing to come up with feats that describe one particular thing and only that thing.

Agreed. A lot of the ancestry feats feel like they're designed to do fun mechanical tricks rather than trying to model the ability they describe in an elegant straightforward way.

I don't need that much granularity in my darkvision--or really that many types of wacky magic vision at all. I'm fine with underground races like dwarves and half-orcs (and now goblins I guess) having darkvision. I'd like to see elves have superhumanly good vision but I've never much cared for them having special abilities to see in the dark. The rest of the races should just have normal vision.

Well except gnomes. Gnomes should be able to see strong emotions as torchlight--or also gummy bears because gnomes are freaking weird.

This. So much this. Discerning Smell is a neat idea, but the application doesn't work right--instead of superhuman keen smell, it feels more like smell based radar--and that is super weird.

I'd love it to feel more like the scent special ability or like the Alertness feat.

I do actually love flavorful material components and spell foci too, despite my opposition to them having to be tracked and used for actual D&D style 2-4 second spellcasting...

Yeah, there is a weird disconnect for me in that every illustration of magic in the artwork looks like Doctor Strange, with big glowing spellcircles floating in front of the spellcaster's hands as they float in the air, eyes blazing, hair whipped by an unseen wind--and then in the rules of the game it's like some kind of Japanese reality TV show, with the poor wizard having to eat spider eggs or smear bat guano on themselves while waving a feather around.

I love the IDEA of arcane spell components. The actual listed components and how they get used have never really worked for me.

Personally I'm of the idea that shields simply need to get dented only when actively parrying damages twice their hardness or more, more value for the user and more realism to the fact that many small attacks don't damage the shield itself but can severely start to bruise the wielder, while shield breakage remains delegated to particularly heavy hits or bad luck (criticals, magical weapons, important opponents and the like)

It would give a more realistic and lesss pathetic feel without need to change too much...
Don't forget that the damage reduction is eating the character reaction for the turn and can absorb only one of the potential three attacks incoming.

We already have crits and botches where we have to gauge how high above or below each creature's AC which has been dragging out every round of combat considerably. If on top of that you have to compare the damage roll to another different threshold that's another step that needs to be done anytime anyone uses a shield--I can't say I love that idea. Whatever it ends up being, I'd like it to at least be a nice fast system.

It seems to me that the three modes break down like this:

Encounter Mode: You're in a fight. You track time round by round in initiative order.

Exploration Mode: You're on full alert, minis if you have them are on the table and you're moving around between fights--running into traps, looking for secret doors. That kind of thing. At this point initiative is fairly sloppy often happening at the 'speed of talking'. By the way, I sort of feel like we need there to be an initiative order here as well, so folks aren't free to just be all over the place with one person doing a whole bunch of things while a more meditative player barely gets a chance to go at all.

If it's not one of those two, I'd call it Downtime. You aren't on the map at all. Your location isn't being tracked precisely. You're off talking to people or looking for firewood or buying swords at the blacksmith.

I concur. I'd like to see them almost treated as different things. Permanent items have so much more effect on the game that listing them together on the same list with a consumable that does a neat thing for a round and is gone doesn't make any sense.

Picking worthwhile permanent magic items for the higher level Doomsday Dawn characters has been like pulling teeth--having it all on a single table would make that a ton easier!

Here's what I've always felt about how armor and shields should work. It's pretty different, but we've run it this way in my games for years and it's always worked well.

Characters have a Defense trait instead of an AC that comes from 10 + their Dex bonus + a bonus based on class. Shields add to this so long as you have it equipped. If something hits your Defense, it hits you, if it doesn't it's because you dodged or interposed something else, like a shield or terrain you're using for cover, to take the hit instead of you.

Armor is a different story. It's damage reduction. Armor does not make you harder to hit--if anything it makes you easier to hit (as reflected by the fact that the 'max Dex to AC' would lower your Defense the same as it used to). The real benefit of armor is that it absorbs much of the injury from weapon attack...exactly the way shields are supposed to be doing in the playtest. You have a set of leather armor with a DR of 1, it will knock a point off of any attacks you receive. Heavier armor grants increasingly heavy DR. We just translated the AC bonus straight over to DR and that worked fine for us, but for this game you'd probably want something with more math behind it.

But yeah, truth be told, with a armor system like this you'd get a game that's a lot less lethal at early levels, which from our experience of the game so far, could really do the new edition a lot of good.

I think rituals can be a lot of things. I don't know if I need to see the current system done away with and replaced with a 4e feeling one--I feel like they could potentially coexist.

I do like the idea of buying a certain amount of gold worth of ritual components--candles, a cloth embroidered with powerful sigils, various crystals, a bottle of fresh honeycomb, a stone knife with an antler handle. Much like with alchemical reagents and wizards' components I feel like it's this various magical "stuff" that I enjoy to just an absurd degree. I don't know that I need much mechanically beyond a certain amount of "stuff" bought and carried around--and replaced periodically. I'd treat it pretty much the same way as rations (you don't necessarily need to know if it's black beer bread and dried fish and apples or hardtack or ant eggs and live grubs--you just have a bag of it and are free to describe it as much or little as GM and player tastes desire).

That said, I would like whatever costs are involved with ritual magic to be reasonable (I'd say cheaper than a potion of a similar level--cheap enough to take into consideration the rituals' extra skill checks and time requirements)

Is it weird that I wouldn't hate to see scrolls rolled into this new system? That a scroll is basically a follow-along ritual with instructions on how to perform it that allows you a bonus on the arcana/religion/nature rolls such that someone with assurance could pull them off without rolling.

I dunno. Something like that.

TLDR: I support the addition of 4e style rituals. Great idea.

I'm pretty sure druids and paladins have always had magical pets. Or at least it is heavily implied that the bond you share goes beyond the mere physical realm. Rangers always came across that way to me too, there's a divine (or now primal) bond between you and the animal. I always interpreted this as why your animal companion scales and doesn't have the same stats or abilities as other members of its species.

I don't mind that animal companions can be magical, or at least magically empowered with different spells and gear. I mind that as it stands that its the only option. There's an argument to be made that where you can satisfy folks who like their magical elf stories a little more gritty and grounded can at least have the option. There's different folks who play the game.

Y'know?

Well accept they require Resonance points to make or use them...so yeah, kind of magical.

So I made a point before I run my next session to read through all the new rules, and I found one that stood out as weird, down near the bottom of page 4:

Page 284—In Animal Companions, in both Nimble and
Savage Companion, at the end, add “Its attacks are magical.”

Now as I understand it, Animal Companions are basically just animals that have been trained sufficiently that they're given a template that lets PCs have a better bond with them. There's nothing to say that the gods have sent the animal or that it's some manifestation of magic or the natural power of the world--they're pretty much just a critter, right?

If so, giving them magical attacks seems weird within the narrative of the game. I get that you might well run into creatures in the game that can only be hurt by magic, and that unless an animal companion has magic paws or whatever, they might get sidelined--but those same creatures would sideline most characters too. That's what Magic Fang is for. I don't personally see why that's a change we'd want or where it came from.

So the upshot of what I'm reading is that the interpretation of folks is that the shield form of Righteous Ally can jump ship when your shield gets broken? Because my read on it, much like with the Righteous Ally mount is that when the ally dies, that's it. Unlike familiars, who you can replace, there's no rule for being able to replace a Righteous Ally. It seems like when they die, that's it.

So happy shield ally takes a troll axe to the face, screams and spirit energy wafts back to Heaven.

Crap.

If it doesn't work like that, it's important to put it in the rules. If it does work like that, they may not want to have it manifest as an item that's basically designed to be destroyed--Righteous Ally magic item maybe? Or armor? Or have it be a shield, but have it reform and reappear at your bedstand every morning.

As it is written, it's pretty unfortunate sounding.

It makes the world silly in my opinion. Where do you draw the line? If every race can interbreed, can i have a half-dog half-cat familiar? Having some possibilities of building half-races is fine but it shouldn't be the default.

I know, right? Where would you keep your WEIRD half-dog/cat familiar? In the stables with the griffon or outside with the owlbear?

So every time you need their DC you have to flip to the hard DCs column in the DC table and look it up? That is a huge pain. That needs to be listed in the monster stat block somewhere if it isn't.

One thing I love about the character sheet is how the save DC for their effects are right up at the top. I wish there was something like this for monsters. I'm having a rough time figuring out what their class DC equivalents are supposed to be--which is especially bad when I'm trying to calculate death save DCs on the fly. Can someone point this out for me? Thanks!

Just a quick bit of feedback here. Slowing both in everyday use as well as in the legacy of the game has always talked about effects that reduce movement speed. That it means a reduced number of actions is needlessly confusing. There is a word that means that, things happening that get in your way and make it so you can do less: Hindered.

I'd seriously suggest swapping the game definitions of those two terms. It will make the game a lot more intuitive.

Plus, on a related terminology issue, the term "Bolstered" as used in the game gets really problematic when it gets used in connection with positive effects.

So I just sat down to watch the livestream of the Lost Star playtest with Jason Buhlman and realized we've been running shields in our game off of the same rules, but doing it totally wrong.

The thing is our way seems to fix what a lot of people have issues with about how shields work and conceptually I just like it better than the current RAW. I sort of want to put it out there to see what folks think. Maybe it's a low impact rules fix?

You have a shield with a hardness of 3 let's say. The RAW says that if you take a hit for 5, your shield takes a dent and absorbs 3 of those damage points and you take the other 2. If this were to happen again, your shield would be broken and no longer usable. This seems unsatisfying for two reasons: it makes the rules in the book that talk about shields taking damage from a single heavy hit and being instantly destroyed not make sense (ie. say you take 9 damage with your shield...according to the RAW your shield would take three dents and be destroyed, but according to the example in the livestream it would seem to take 3, be dented and 6 would go through to your HP). It also doesn't really model how you would want a shield to work in the narrative: if you get hit with an axe in the shield and it hits hard enough that it blows through the shield and does you damage--it feels like the shield is destroyed, or at least has a big axe-blade sized gash in it. That it's only dented, and yet you're taking damage paints an oddly inconsistent image.

So here's how we read it:

You raise a shield, it negates damage up to it's toughness. A 2 point hit would just go away, completely absorbed by the shield and doing no damage.

For every amount equal to it's toughness, it takes a dent. A hit doing 4 damage would dent the shield by one and the final point of damage wouldn't be enough to dent the shield again, and would thus be absorbed. Six points would break the shield so it wouldn't be able to be used to block subsequent attacks (though if an attack did say 8 points, the remainder of that attack still wouldn't go through because it doesn't bypass the hardness of the shield's destroyed level).

If a single hit would be enough to destroy the shield (10 or more damage in the case of a 3 toughness shield) the remaining damage would transfer to the character and the shield explodes in wooden splinters.

I like that interpretation. It makes shields feel better narratively and makes them more worthwhile mechanically.

What do you folks think? Does this fix it for you?

We did our second session of Rose Street Revenge. The PCs mopped up the remaining kobolds from "Dragons". The crazy luck they'd had last session evaporated this week and they performed like the -4 level foes they are which gave the PCs great satisfaction as they hunted them down, splitting up and cornering the last few in the bottom corner of the map.

They got the journal and were amazingly invested in the list of missing slaves. The PCs with underworld backgrounds rolled their Streetwise to see what they knew about the various townfolk and ended up rolling well enough that they gained all the background information they were supposed to get in the introductions of parts one and three--about the gang that the dwarven ex-slave had gotten involved with and the insular and paranoid cook squatting in the ruins--and were on board to go check out both situations. So off they went into "Puddles".

They felt like they had plenty of information already, with the name of the slave's girlfriend and the restaurant, so they pocketed the 30 gp they would have used for bribes and just went to go talk. She let them know about the ruined manor house and off they went.

A few notes about dungeon flow. As presented, the PCs have a 50% flat chance of choosing between C1 and C2. Forensic clues, since the fight with the skeletal cleric left carnage in and around C2 would lead the players that direction. If they choose C2, they find all the clues they need, the dead body and have basically accomplished the entire mission as a fetch quest. That's pretty unexciting. I felt in order to run the adventure as intended, I needed reconfigure things a bit so that they run into the combat right as they go up the stairs, with the bats nesting in the hallway and the evidence in the bedroom, which they can find once the fight is over. The map was a little confusing as well. Some of this was my fault--I didn't catch the blurb that says that the map is only of the second level, that would have helped a lot, but trying to figure out where the door into the house was supposed to be (it's downstairs, but I didn't catch that) or why the arching stairways don't seem to connect properly (because they're coming up from an unmapped section of the house) required some hasty patching at the last minute and was a little awkward.

The PCs examined everything and specifically asked about the condition of the stairs, so the termite infestation was something they were wary of. Only one of them rolled badly enough to hurt themselves, but it sold the place as really being a dangerous wreck they had to take care moving around in. It would have been nice to see more termite damage--holes in the floor that would drop characters down into the first floor or leave them dangling from edges while getting swarmed with bats--but as it is, it feels like there's the termite stairs and then it never really gets used again. Once they're upstairs, the goblin paladin astride her holy goblin dog pulls open the bedroom doors and advances right into the gelatinous cube! People freak out which spooks the bats and four swarms of bats descend, one each, on the remaining players.

Again, for level inappropriate foes, the bats hold on remarkably well--it's only the elven barbarian, mostly due to repeated raging, who's able to power through the steep damage resistance and actually hurt her swarm. At least three players lose a spell trying to target the swarms which are immune to targeted effects--and no one in the party picked any area effect spells or bombs. The rest of the fight was a long, long, long slog werein someone gets targeted by the acid trap, everyone takes damage from the bats, tracks bleed damage from the previous round, the paladin and her dog get digested, the cube pummels the sorcerer/fighter and his enlarged pug familiar ineffectually and the PCs damage their particular bat swarm or ooze a tiny bit. The low AC of the cube made the paladin pretty adept at hitting it at least twice a round, but 90 hit points made the fight just crawl agonizingly.

Maybe an hour and change later of 'I attack' *roll damage* 'It attacks' *roll damage* and the fight is finally over.

The guy is dead, curled up on his bed where he expired from his wounds, a set of gory claw marks, which makes them think humanoid monster, but the weird moths get them thinking some kind of cult. The PCs are really disappointed that even though they hurried straight there without resting from the previous encounter to avoid something bad happening to the slave guy, who they all became deeply invested in, that he is already dead anyway no matter what they do. The term 'tragedy-porn' gets used.

People even talk about pooling all the resources they have to try and get him resurrected, but looking it up, getting that spell cast would cost way more than all their money together. On top of that, when they bring it up to the clerics at the temple, they sadly admit that the only member of their order who was an experienced enough cleric to cast such powerful magic has gone missing lately (and...is now a killer undead) but that once the PCs rescue him, he'll no doubt be happy to raise their friend (this is what we call tragedy-porn foreshadowing).

What's left of the adventure is investigating the gang, which I've renamed the Marked and have placed at the Battle Market using a tattoo parlor called the Skin Canvas as their front. Pretty excited about that. It's another of the fights where there's plenty of low hit point goons the PCs can dispatch pretty easily, but who can work together and maybe do some cool roguish stuff--along with two mercenary scouts who will be a little tougher. Then there's the main fight, which should be significantly less brutal since there's no good way to level a boss that I can figure out (other than the template to basically boost their level by one) and I don't want to mess up our playtest results by trying to homebrew adding class levels to him or crib mechanics from the antipaladin in Pale Mountain (though that's probably what I would otherwise do). That said, I think it's probably best that the fight be a more atmospheric, less TPK threatening kind of fight since really all of this is working as a lead in for these characters to really get tested in the next chapter of the playtest module.

Pretty happy, in that regard, that even with this two session side jaunt that we're pretty well on schedule. Feels like the players are all really getting attached to this new group of characters, which was my big hope after many of them lost their primary characters to Drakus at the end of Lost Star.

Yeah. There needs to be a reliable way to just hunker down and *do* things: climb a rope, toss a grappling hook, cross a pit trap you know about, pick a lock, knock down a stubborn door, searching for secret passages.

I can understand how as an adventure designer the idea that sometimes being unable to bypass an obstacle and having to go around feels like it adds something to the game, but I haven't found that. I've found that players just hunker down and try to do it and when their characters constantly fail and look like buffoons it makes the game less fun for everyone.

I feel like in general a more flavorful game that leaves as many reasonable possibilities open for creative play--not just for magic, but for anything characters might think to do--makes for a more satisfying game from where I sit. I don't sweat the numerical nerfs. That's stuff that I feel doesn't overly affect my enjoyment of the game--it's when things get tightened down so you can't use them in clever ways that I get frustrated.

Like Floating Disk; which I've never seen used as intended (as a magical porter to carry your stuff). I've only ever seen it used so that folks can do their cool Doctor Strange thing and float around while sitting crosslegged on it, or when they needed a stepstool to get up somewhere (like float up so they can stare a large creature in the eye or grab books off a top shelf). Once my players cleverly used it to evacuate a fallen PC from a fight they were in. I liked that.

The current version has this kicker, which feels designed for no reason other than to ruin people's fun:

The disk is dismissed if a creature tries to ride atop it, if anyone tries to lift or force the disk higher above the ground, or if you move more than 30 feet away from the disk (such as by Flying or Climbing above the ground)

Things like that just make me grumpy.

I approve. If for no other reason it feels like Pathfinder hasn't really ever had the chance to shine the spotlight on their orcs and how they're different and special. We've seen their goblins, their ogres, their kobolds and they're all great. The orcs have always felt like they've needed more of a Golarion spin--and this would be a great opportunity for that!

Not a big fan of the gnome/elf ancestral feats that feel like smell/hearing radar either--where you have a cone you can use to detect hidden foes. If you want to emulate an ancestry having better than average senses, just give them Alertness: expert training in Perception. Done.

I like this. I think it's a good step toward making Golarion a bigger world with more race combinations--which feels like a win to me.

It heals more than a single cast of healing magic yes... at level 1 and 2. If you can make an exceptionally difficult check. With a high chance of damaging whoever you're trying to heal. And once the caster hits level 3, they now take the lead, and the gap grows ever wider with every spell level they gain. Add to that the fact that the caster has potentially several casts while the skill feat is only ever 1/day per target... yeah no it's just too weak.

Uh. Okay. None of that I particularly disagree with? The thing is, a guy with some herbs and a needle and thread versus someone using the power of a god to magically do the Wolverine thing to someone's wounds: the power of a god should probably have a bigger die type?

Now do I think the skill feat *should* be limited to once per day per target? Not really. Doesn't make much sense. I also feel like the DC is currently too high. I don't hate the idea that you can damage the target on a botch--because you're fishing around in their ribcage and bad stuff can happen.

I do wish it took time to do though.

One big thing to keep in mind is that adding a pile of significantly lower-level threats (e.g. adding 4 skeletons) might not have the desired effect because those foes are such a lower level than the PCs. Not only will the AC and saving throws be so low that the PCs are critically hitting left and right, but the attack bonuses will also be far lower than what's necessary to hit the PCs with any frequency.

So we did the first session of the revised Rose Street Revenge and the results were really interesting. We started with Dragons. It felt like it was the best introduction to the events going on with the least ties to the events of the module--it seems somewhat unrelated and could tie nicely into the larger mystery.

I had the pit trap at the door into the kobold's training room after his lecture to check everything carefully. The PCs moved up to the door and declared that they were checking the door for traps, at which point the trap beneath them activated, the PC caught the ledge pretty easily, so no one was damaged but the lesson the kobold was teaching really brought home. Trust nothing.

Mechanically though it brought up a weird consequence of leveling. In the section on Difficulty Classes on page 336:

It’s important that you don’t simply make the DC arbitrarily higher or lower with the PCs’ level. Any increase must be justified based on how the challenge actually increased, and thus how success is more impressive.

So with things like Grab an Edge, the idea is that the DC goes up every time the PC levels--but not arbitrarily to scale with the characters' abilities--but justified by an objectively more challenging situation. The problem is, the difficulties of events in roleplaying games don't naturally scale like that and it's unfair forcing it onto GMs to try and justify what is nakedly a game mechanic. A fourth level edge isn't any different than a first level one. It's the same task. Certainly it's an unrealistic idea that as characters level they'll run into only increasingly hard to grab edges as they level. This whole line of thinking feels backward. DCs should exist to reflect what's going on in the game--what's going on in the game shouldn't have to be altered to reflect the DC's of hazards.

But back to the session. I threw in a second training room to demonstrate Seek actions in combat encounters--but mostly to break up the fat chunk of exposition and illustrate the point the kobold trapsmith is making. So I had them get into combat with a training dummy with a spear trap hidden in the room. They made their check and triggered the trap safely and didn't get stabbed.

They got their final warning from the kobold as they headed into the rival kobold turf and advanced forward looking for traps. To account for the PC's higher level the Slashing Blade Launcher got replaced with level equivalent Spinning Blade Pillar.

So this gets weird. There's a hidden control panel on the wall--DC 24 to find. The player rolls a 25. So now I have to describe...I don't even know what, a medieval kobold tech level gearbox with an on/off switch full of ropes and pulleys (I mean to control a big telescoping propeller blade that roves around using D&D level technology, it's gotta' be something like that) that these kobolds have somehow installed into a pre-existing sewer in such a natural, invisible, innocuous way that it's nearly impossible to notice--even in operation with ropes whirring and wooden cogs spinning. Describing it was a mess, because I couldn't even get my head around it. I don't think a scrapmetal launcher would have been any easier. As I was running it, it made me really start to evaluate these sorts of traps. Really aren't we talking about kobolds with snare kits setting up the same kinds of traps the PCs can? Is it weird that kobolds on the fly are able to set up autonomous roving slicer machines out of scrap metal that fold up so they're nearly invisible? If instead I was dealing with Hobbling Snares, Trip Snares and Stalkerbane Snares they would have been a lot easier to narrate. The Spinning Blade Pillar felt like something out of a video game and I had to work hard to get people to suspend disbelief.

So I muddle through the rules for how to run this hazard. It's weird that the text switches back and forth between Stealth as a skill the trap is supposed to have and Theivery as a skill the PCs need to use. I end up having to read through the rulebook because on first pass it looks like PCs are detecting traps using their Stealth skill rather than Perception and I get confused. Finally I figure out what's going on, that hazards have a Stealth check--and it doesn't make a lot of sense, since traps can't choose to hide or sneak or anything--but finally I figure out what's supposed to be going on.

The PCs find a sign of something big under the dark water that's causing ripples in the current and the water to swell as it flows over it, so they start trying to trigger the trap to see what they're dealing with. Again I have trouble wrangling the stat block to find any kind of listing for springing the trap intentionally--only rules for how to deactivate it or what happens if you destroy the console, so I wing it. They roll well tossing rubble out into the water and I have it briefly activate and then fold back up. In hindsight I figure they probably should have ended up activating it and triggering the encounter, but at the time I was hoping to reward their ingenuity. After a while, the plan becomes to try and lay a board across the water where the trigger seems to be, to scramble across and open up the control panel. The dwarf paladin starts across with his shield raised against where he knows the blade trap is, botches his athletics and falls into the water. The trap activates and nearly destroys his shield (it takes two dents, but is magically reinforced). He clambers out of the water and into the room with the control panel and is sneak attacked by all the kobolds--six magic missiles as well as a number of slingstones and picks. He deflects one slingstone with his shield, but the assault reduces him to half hit points. The cleric is able to heal him back to full using a bunch of feats that he's used to make his healing especially powerful.

The rest of the PCs begin to try and make their way across the path of the Spinning Blade Trap, worried that passing through the spaces where its blades are spinning will damage them--and in truth, they should have, it's weird that this whirling blade attacks people on its turn and then stops to let folks by on their turns and then turns back on again to slice people. But once folks realize its safe to get past, they all scoot into the room. The kobolds attack once more and then use their special ability to scatter and clear out of the room and into hiding in the darkness beyond. The only ones who can't are the sorcerers who don't have quite enough movement after casting electric arc on four of the players. The PCs catch up with one of the sorcerers and just destroy him --the paladin crits his attack to finish him off and he turns to paste.

Our barbarian gets to the second sorcerer kobold but isn't able to attack. The kobold scampers away and she uses her barbarian feat to match his movements and chase him. Unfortunately his image fades and she realizes it was an illusion, and she gets trapped in another ambush--kobolds hit her with slingstones and scamper away (one hits for 0 damage, the other hits for 2). These kobolds can't roll lower than 18s for most of the night. The kobolds lead them out toward the second Spinning Blade Trap hopping to get them to follow without searching and trigger it on themselves.

And that's where we had to end it. Making 4th level characters took a lot of time and folks needed roughly the first half of the session to work their way through the rest of it as well as to pitch their characters and work through the intro. But yeah, we marked everyone's locations on the map and will pick it up this weekend. Hopefully I remembered everything well enough, but the site's been down and this has been my first chance to report. Hope it helps. I certainly found it interesting. Very proud of the kobolds. I figured being as low level as they were that they'd just get wiped out, but they've been making a good show of themselves--they've been hard to hit, hard to pin down as they scamper away from the PCs whenever they get close, and hitting more often than they have any right to.

I came into this thread of one mind, but reading through everyone's feedback, I've changed my mind a bit.

I want to echo what folks are saying here: the DC is too steep and the inability to perform healing multiple times doesn't make sense. I also quite like the solution people have come up with that healing by means of the combat medic skill feat should take some time--ten minutes sounds right to me. The kind of thing you can do between encounters to bind up people's wounds.

A d10 + Wis feels like too much healing for a single action--more than you can heal with healing magic, alchemy, potions or wands, but spread out over a ten minute action--I don't hate that.