Howard197's page

Goblin Squad Member. Organized Play Member. 48 posts. 1 review. 1 list. No wishlists. 6 Organized Play characters.



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I loved the Market in Mummy's Mask. It actually made acquiring random boons more exciting to me, since even a useless boon would be good currency at the right trader.

I really hope that some form of trader or market mechanic makes it into the next adventure path you guys release, even if its basically purchasing random draws, as the trader system usually was.

The "thrill of the chase" idea where letting players pick up lower level boons more easily shouldn't be in game mechanics is countered by the way you can already do a replayable scenario with banish closings, and use one of those as an excuse to clear your deck of dead weight anyway.

Longshot11 wrote:
Keith said wrote:
Some locations lend themselves more to a market trip than others.
The other explanation is that this got swept in the whole "Make. Game. Harder!!" momentum, but to my table the almost seamless fusion between mechanics and *theme* has always been one of the biggest draws of PACG and when an arbitrary rebalance trumps the flavor of a card to such a ridiculous extent - that pill gets a bit too bitter.

That's a good point. I get they didn't want a wizard to be able to clear the Academy in 1 turn anymore, but it feels like we lost out on a unique location with lots of spells just so players would be exposed more to the army of "BYAs."


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Like most people I dislike non full-page chronicle sheets.

Regarding Boons, I prefer a few powerful boons I can just slot without thinking about most of the time. In Starfinder the best example is the hireling boon.

I think having like 3 boon slots without "typing" them is fine. I'll pick 2 boons and use them every session, and keep a 3rd open if I need to slot another . boon in the middle of the game.

Regarding convention boons: I don't GM often, and I don't go to the really big cons like Paizo con or Gen Con, so I am never going to get my hands on those supposed amazing exclusive boons.

You know what? I don't care. It doesn't take anything away from me if other people are having fun with something they've received, and I hope they enjoy it. I think you should continue injecting limited edition exclusive, powerful boons like these. I love hearing stories about some long time GM showing up at a table with a crazy character, and I hope I'd never be jealous of something like that.


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Loving the game, but dang if the Kingdom Management is a slog. I feel like if Owlcat sold advertising on their load screens they'd be rich by now, getting into and out of the Throne Room is a nightmare.

A lot of the building, events and quests in Kingdom management are quite fun, but the rules are unclear and its not like you can go back and read the tutorial tips. Getting new counselors beyond the original 5 is incredibly difficult.

That said, the rest of the game is so fantastic everyone should be playing Kingmaker anyway.


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Tridus wrote:
Luke Styer wrote:

I’d be curious how much of the community either “don’t see the challenges” that resonance is attempting to fix or “don’t see them as problematic.”

Because if a big enough chunk of the player base either doesn’t see a “challenge” or doesn’t see that “challenge” as problematic, then it arguably isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed.

I'm not sure they would like the answer to that question. A lot of effort is being spent on something that just isn't that big a problem to a huge number of players.

So, who are they actually trying to solve this for?

There are people who genuinely hate this, they've been coming on to the forums and complaining about it for years. I think the problem is, the 2E designers have taken it as gospel that these complainers are representative of the player base as a whole.

I'd love to hear if Paizo did some organized market research beyond the forums. Hired a company to interview a statistically valid sample and learn what the average player really wants in a new system.

I mean, I could be wrong. My community could be non-representative, and most players actually want to stop easy healing, have much less magic items, and focus more on balance than fun. If I saw data from some big organized statistically valid survey that proved this, I'd stop complaining, because even if I didn't like the system, I would understand why Paizo is creating this new system the way it is.

Until then, I think the most important design goal should be "player's choice and decisions have a bigger impact on success or failure than random dice rolls."


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Swiftbrook wrote:
"Stephen Radney-MacFarland wrote:
Case in point—let's talk about Resonance Points. Yeah, that's right. I'm going there.

Thank You!

"Stephen Radney-MacFarland wrote:
A big issue is that a lot of folks just plain don't like Resonance Points.

+1! Resonance may attempt to solve perceived problems, but I still don't like it. It's confusing. It's not how magic is suppose to work. It's not fun!

"Stephen Radney-MacFarland wrote:
Designers, by nature, want you to use the items they created in actual play. But adventure designers are often under budgetary constraints to make not the best item for the story, but the one that does the trick while still conforming to the amount of treasure output in the design guides.

This is my main problem with all of Pathfinder Playtest, not just Resonance Points, and this is the first time I've seen it in print. Pathfinder Playtest is all mainly about making it easier for designers to create products, not about making it more fun for players to play the game. You're creating a 'balanced is boring' game. The PCs don't feel heroic, then seem balanced and common.

The Playtest has some good stuff - OK some very good stuff. I love the three action rules, they really make sense.

But in the end, I just hope you scrap Resonance Points. The negatives and negative consequences far out weigh the perceived positives. It's not worth it.

I totally agree on putting designers above players. It's why the biggest problem for me isn't Resonance, it's the Common/Uncommon/Rare system. When they introduced the idea, everyone assumed it would be used really sparingly, and the tired complaints about "Blood Money" got thrown around a lot. But when the actual playtest came out, what spells are marked as Uncommon? Scry, Teleport, Protection from Evil, Discern Lies. Not overwhelming spells that break the game, but creative spells that a smart adventure designer needs to play around.

What I'm terrified of is, the idea is that each adventure is going to have a little paragraph in front for the GM, saying "Warning, make sure you ban Teleport, Scry and the following other uncommon spells during this scenario, as I was too lazy to come up with a counter for them when I wrote this." (I may be paraphrasing that last part.)


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I think Resonance is symptomatic of a larger problem. As someone who lives in a large metro area and has rotated around almost a dozen game stores on and off, I've played with hundreds of players over the years, and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of what they like and dislike about Pathfinder. I've also spent a fair amount of time on these forums. And the likes and dislikes of the people on these message boards is wildly unrepresentative of the larger player base who don't bother to regularly comment on Paizo.

Only on the messageboards do more than a tiny handful of people seem really focused on stopping other people from having cheap healing, from making sure every character is perfectly balanced, to just making sure other players aren't having too much fun.

Unfortunately, it appears to me that the Pathfinder 2E Design Team has spent two years listening to this tiny, non-representative minority on the message-boards and created design goals almost entirely to satisfy them.

It sounds like you are saying that you recognize that Resonance has failed as a feature towards the design goal of preventing people from easily healing and having lots of magic items, and in response to this you will now diligently work on a brand new mechanism for preventing easy out-combat-healing and players having lots of magic items.

When are you going to submit the actual playtest GOALS for review? Not the mechanical features, but the actual goals? Because right now it seems like the designers have the primary goals of:

A) Make Every d20 Roll so absurdly well balanced that a 10 on the dice fails and an 11 succeeds.

B)Make sure the designers know they are more important than those impudent players.

C)Make magic, especially magical items, much rarer (calling them "unique" and "wondrous" fools no one).

I can tell you to dump Resonance and the Common/Uncommon/Rare System, etc until I'm blue in the face, but if you're just going to try to come up with new methods of achieving goals that I think make the game worse, what's the point?


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So we know skills and ability checks are going to scale with level now, and skill DCs are also going to scale with level.

It seems like the easiest thing to do is is just tell players to roll a d20 and then say "a ten or higher for a trivial task, a fifteen or higher for a difficult task."

These DCs seem to be doing the same thing, but there's an extra step that's obscuring the results.


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Overall the weapons look good. It's hard to tell though, without the math. It's really important that weapons be upgradeable. We know the single biggest flaw in Starfinder is the sell for 10%, combined with the general lack of upgrading, means players feel like they are throwing their gear away at the end of every level.

So if runes are readily transferable, and magical and mundane gear can be sold back for at least 50% of their market price, then I think the magic weapons system is great.

Armor looks pretty great overall, despite resonance adding another layer of complexity.

But again, we come to consumable magical items, which are ruined by resonance. As others have pointed out, spending resonance to do cool magical effects when you might need it for healing means much less cool magical effects and quite possibly a horde of unused resonance at the end of the day.

Wands are not included, not surprisingly, since there's probably going to even more controversy when they come out, based on the last two posts.

When there is playtesting on this, lets not beat around the bush, give some scenarios resonance-free wands of CLW, and leave the other players with a big old pack of resonance-costing healing potions, and then gather feedback on which parties felt like they had more fun at the end of each session.

Ending on a high note, I am surprisingly excited that Horacalcum is losing its annoying H and bringing it more in line with standard fantasy materials. Thanks!


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42nfl19 wrote:

So one of my big "issues" with this new RP system is that it hampers/removes the most cost effective way of healing between combat/down time or what is now called exploration mode. Before, after you get your first deposit of dosh the best cost effective healing item is Wand of CLW. You don't even need higher level wands. It has enough charges to top you off between fights. Do you have at least one person that can cast CLW? Boom don't even need UMD. Every party member, if they had extra dosh, could get their own and just let the party healer use it on them. Then the party healer could better use their spell slots for more utility spells, buff spells, etc.

Was this method too "Overpowered"? I feel like it was not that OP. It freed up spell slots and allowed more spells to be used. It also meant that you can stay out in the field longer and not have to stop. Can any DEVS or Mark comment on this? Was this tactic something you wanted to remove in the new system or can you replicate this healing method?

Also can other people comment on this? Was this method/tactic ok or too OP?

Nope, you nailed it. My party finally bought up a wand of CLW and a wand of infernal healing, and now our bard and oracle can actually use their spell slots in fights instead of having to hold on to them in case we need between-fight healing.

I get that there are certain players who love being a pure healer, and that's awesome! I've played with people like that, you don't need to spend charges from your own wand of CLW and they keep you alive and keep you going between fights. But the vast majority of players want to be more than just a heal-bot.

If they want to borrow a bunch of ideas from Starfinder, I don't know why they don't just do stamina on top of hit points, then they can get rid of healing as much as they want.


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On a larger point, I know it irritates people to compare 2E to D&D 5E, so I won't go there.

What I WILL say is, the reason I gave a hard pass on 5E was because they wanted to make magic items "rare and powerful" and no one could get a magic ring or sword before around 5th level. 5E is sitting right there any time someone want to play a low-magic tabletop game where magic items "unique." However, I far prefer Pathfinder, and one of the main reasons is when someone casts Detect Magic on me, by 4th level I should light up like the Xmas Tree of that one house on the neighborhood everyone else hates.

To be fair, there's actually a lot to like here. I think trinkets are cool, martial-focused consumables sound awesome. I also like the changes being made to staves.

But you guys need to ditch this resonance system. And frankly, the underlying assumption that out-of-combat healing should be "hard" needs to be ditched as well. Wands of Cure Light Wounds have made Pathfinder faster, funner, and without them the martial/caster disparity would be way worse than it is.


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magnuskn wrote:

Alright, the more I read about resonance, the more worried I get about its metagame effect on the game overall. There has to be a better way to make charisma a non-dump stat than this.

The problems I am having with resonance, as presented so far, are:

- That it exacerbates the 15-minute adventurer workday paradigm, instead of shifting the game away from it. With resonance being such a limited and important resource and there being negative consequences to it running out, players will be incentivized to retire from their adventure for the day as soon as they get into danger of being caught out without their resonance pool to fall back on.
I was hoping that Paizo would shift away from the "clear five rooms, rest for a day" type of gameplay which has plagued D&D/Pathfinder for decades. I fear that the developers are going into the totally opposite direction with resonance.

- That it denies opportunities for non-traditional parties. You may think what you want about Cure Light Wound wands as cheap healing resources, but their existance made it possible to run adventure paths without a dedicated healer and also helped out with the 15-minute workday problem enumerated above. With resonance being a limiting factor on cheap healing alternatives, at least one player will be forced into a "healing battery" choice, if he wants to or not. The only solution to that is that the GM begins throwing expensive healing items at the group.

This is exactly what I was thinking as soon as I read about the resonance system. Almost every player will stack as many invested items onto their character as possible, and if that means they can only get magically healed once, then it's two fights a day. If the resonance system is strict on that 24 hour limit, maybe 2 fights every other day. "The mayors daughter will be sacrificed at midnight tonight in the caves of darkness? Too bad for her (and our second prestige in PFS), we simply lack the resonance to save her!"

And if you see a player come to the table with an interesting cleric who wants to use his spells for cool effects, they'll need to be shut down and reminded that they are a heal-bot, and they should be waiting in the corner until after the fight.


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*Fires arc pistol wildly into the air in celebration*


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Overall I like this. Heighten Spell for free, Healing as a sub-type of necromancy, scaling cantrips, all makes sense.

I can tell everything is more tied to level, level differences look less like a power curve and more like a power staircase, with every level one stair up. That can work fine in a game, though the designers are going to have to drop the idea of making every other fight 1 CR higher than the average party level, since there will be such a huge power differential between each level.

The one bad news is rituals. 4E did this exact same thing, and it was one of their worst features. I know there's been a lot of favorable talk about the CONCEPT of rituals on these boards, but in the practice of them it seems to go poorly. Let's remember the origins of Pathfinder rituals were in the occult books, since only idiotic cultists of Great Old Ones would bear the horrific risks of backlash and failure involved. Skill checks and spells really shouldn't mix like this.


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Looks good overall. Waiting to see how ancestry feats are handed out to judge them.

One thing that does bug me is the lore: Elves only live to be 600 now? They used to be basically immortal, and there were elves running around over 1,000 years old! It's a key part of their mindset. Hope they take this out of the lore.


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Jason Bulmahn wrote:

I want to take a moment and talk a bit about the a concern I am seeing here with some frequency, and that is that characters will be streamlined and not customizable. I get that we are using some terms that may lead you to think we are going with a similar approach to some other games, but that is simply not the case.

Characters in the new edition have MORE options in most cases than they did in the previous edition. You can still make the scholarly mage who is the master of arcane secrets and occult lore, just as easily as you can make a character that goes against type, like a fighter who is skilled in botany. The way that the proficiency system works along with skill feats gives you plenty of choices when it comes to skills, allowing you to make the character you want to make.

Beyond skills, every class now has its own list of feats to choose from, making them all pretty different from one another and allowing for a lot of flexibility in how you play. And just wait until you see what Archetypes can do...

Next Monday we will be looking at the way that you level up, and the options that presents. Next Friday (March 16th), we will investigate the proficiency system, and how that impacts your choices during character creation and leveling.

Stay tuned folks... we have a lot of great things to show you

Jason Bulmahn
Director of Game Design

I really hope this is true. One of the biggest mistakes we've seen in the last few years in Pathfinder was the pernicious myth that, unless every new class/archetype/feat/spell was made significantly mechanically weaker than older examples in the Core Rulebook or other old books, it would magically make "lift the power curve." That kind of thinking implies a fanatical focus on preventing any new class or ability the chance to be interesting, on the off-chance that it might somehow break the game.

I'm seriously worried that the talk about simplifying magic items and spells implies building a highly-standardized formula for every possible class ability and piece of gear to ensure nothing is ever out of place, as is already too much the case in Starfinder. Take some risks with that power curve for once!


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Tinalles wrote:

I find this entire question very odd. I see NPC use of occult rituals (and their predecessor from Unearthed Arcana) as primarily plot devices. There are only two times when a ritual is "on screen":

1) When you want the PCs to be able to do something they couldn't ordinarily do.

2) When you want mechanics for a ritual the PCs can interrupt.

The mechanics are only necessary when the PCs are interacting directly with the ritual in some way.

If an NPC is using a ritual, and the PCs aren't helping or interrupting it, then it happens "off screen" and the outcome is whatever I as the GM need in order to advance the plot. Simple as that.

A good, well-written adventure is one where improbable things don't constantly happen when the PCs aren't looking to advance the plot. And that requires a setting that has internally consistent rules between how the PCs affect the world and how the NPCs affect the world.


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The Mad Comrade wrote:
Howard197 wrote:
Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:

"However, if they are built around treating the gear as 100% value because some monster with 3 requisite feats has an exotic heavy weapon that players are thene expected to make use of themselves, then we have a very SERIOUS problem."

Well no we don't since weapons don't work that way in Starfinder. Weapon Profiencies are in groups, not individual weapons. And a Soldier is proficient with all of them.

That's nice for the soldier, but not for anyone else who isn't proficient in heavy weapons/has the strength to wield them properly, etc. Counting full value of looted weapons isn't viable unless you're running a really carefully managed home-brew campaign.

That said, a shift to story-based rewards is a positive sign that may make this moot.

At things stand right now my expectations are that the lion's share of the character swag-by-level will be upheld by story awards with some consumables, ammunition and petty cash coming from the corpses of one's enemies. Which is great as it permits a more fluid pace instead of the usual "rip up everything that we can't tear out with power tools" approach. ;)

You have a good point. It would be nice to just grab credsticks, batteries and ammo, and just write off IDing enemy armor and weapons and spend all that time figuring out their worth, how we're going to carry them back to town, etc.


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Skeld wrote:
I'm the one who first mentioned the Gug. The way it's head-mouth opened reminded me of a Gug. It could be a Dimensional Shambler though. I'm not very familiar with them (other than the name sounding boring).

Gugs did travel to the Darklands by "tunneling through from the dimension of dreams." That's basically what this one did. I was recognized that thing as a Gug by episode 2, I was expecting the kids to start calling it that instead of "Demagorgon."