HumblePi's page

Hmm... Feedback as a condition, increasing with uses, and if you have more feedback than your max level, you strain to use magic? The opposite of resonance, but it might possibly be better received fluff-wise.

It is essentially reversed. I think it feels a little better because it's a soft cap, rather than a hard cap - you get to decide at what point you're just wasting charges, etc., items don't just stop functioning at a certain value.

As you say, you could decide it does kick in until LVL or LVL + Cha or whatever.

I guess the hard thing about making it rewarding is that it's designed as a limiter - anything you code in that makes it net positive means it can still be spammed (just less optimally spammed...).

I was thinking we could turn it completely around and make it a bit less artificial and potentially a little more interesting. Something like this:

(Fluff) Magical Destructive Resonance: Utilizing magic from external sources causes slowly building feedback within you own body, the more magic you take in or use, the worse this feedback becomes. Rest will gradually drain the resonance away.

Effect: Every time you trigger an external magical effect, your Feedback score goes down by 1 (starting from probably zero, but see below). On each additional use of a magic item, you apply your feedback score to the rolled values associated with the effect (damage, healing, etc). For fixed bonuses and durations, the effect is reduced by the reciprocal of the feedback score (so at -2 Feedback, durations/bonuses are 1/2 normal, at -3 they are 1/3, etc).

If you like, you could still have "attuned" items causing feedback (they would just subtract from the score), and you could still have +CHA if you really wanted (though I don't think you need it). You could even decide that a positive score gave a bonus of some sort.

I think this is nicely self limiting, it scales pretty well with level as well, as higher damage/healing/buffs can withstand a bit more reduction before they're useless.

I think we're out of the time window for this one now, but my understanding is that the dates are more like...guidelines, so I'll report 'em as we get through 'em.

Quick background on me and my team:
Me: I've been GMing pretty much continually for the last 33 years. Cut my teeth on Mentzer DnD, have played every edition and a lot of other games besides - have been playing PF1 since inception (did that beta too!). My order of preference would be: PF1>5E>3E>2E>1E>4E>0E

Players: I'm actually the youngest of this old bunch! All have 20+ years of experience with DnD - Mainly Pathfinder for the last while, though have had descent runs at 5E and 4E. I'd describe their style as pretty gamey, lots of character optimization, lots of tactical battles, not a big interest in RP or complex narrative.

On to the game...

Character Gen:
I thought the ABC process was fairly smooth, a little bit of back and forth to work things out, but in general pretty typical. They ended up with -
1/2 Orc Barbarian (was not too happy with 1/2 orc as his ancestral)
Goblin Ranger (annoyed about having to go Xbow when he wanted a bow)
Elf Rogue (Very happy to get a free cantrip at will)
Dwarf Fighter (Didn't raise any issues)
(Yes, no Cleric! We decided to go with it..just to see how it would play out).

Adventure:
Encounter A1: Sewer ooze popped up, sprayed crap (literally) on the clustered party, party proceeded to beat it to death in 2 rounds. No issues with this one, though I did think the leveled "hampered" condition and multiple actions to scrap off was needless complexity - though in this case it didn't affect the encounter at all. Players got a bit cocky at their apparent firepower, which was about to cause them an issue...

Encounter A2: Rogue scouts out the Gobbos, reports back to party. Party charges in. Barbarian has initiative and attacks with "sudden charge" - and..misses. Gobbos go 2nd (of course!), surround poor Barb with ease and beat the stuffing out of him and down he goes. Party then follows in and proceeds to mop up the Goblins with only minor additional damage - everyone is very surprise that base Goblins are at +6 to hit, especially the barbarian with AC 13.

Party, having no healer, retreats to the surface to rest and recover (this will happen after most encounters, but no healers, so not terribly surprising).

Encounter A3: Rogue sees rubble and finds a use for his background feat! Of course, he's then attacked by all the giant centipedes and nearly killed...Party runs in and mops them up quickly and the rogue makes some lucky saves, bringing him back from stage 2 poison. He's still nearly dead, so it's another trip back to the surface! (I gave them a week to finish the mission, so they really have plenty of time, but no knowing how many encounter their were, they still felt some pressure to continue when they could).

Encounter A4: Party decides Bugbear is clearly not a vampire, move on.

Encounter A5: Fungus! No way are any of my guys going near that (I must have caused too much trauma over the years...)

At this point we had another player join, he went with a Human Sorcerer (Arcane) - since they were back at the surface so often, no issues getting him into the game.

Encounter A6: Lots of futzing around with the very non-specific detect magic, especially the sorc trying to triangulate on fixed objects. Eventually they found the idol in the pool and, of course, set it off. Quasits rolled poorly for initiative and pretty much got chewed up in the first round. No one took much damage in this one, so they decided to press on. Lock door was just frustration, they had about 5 rolls and then gave up. Meanwhile the Ranger snuck around the other corridor, set off the trap, didn't care (passed save) and proceeded to start knocking on the other side of the door, just to prank the party. Barb tried to break door, no luck there. Party eventually left the door vowing revenge!

Encounter A8: Rogue snuck in, rolled really badly and was detected, ran back out to the party, who formed up as a wall in A6. Skellies pilled out, took some damage and then managed to push through the Ranger (who had no STR and thus no Athletics). With a "hole" in the formation, they swarmed all over the party (after only 1 AoO from the fighter). The party still did pretty well, though took a lot of damage across the group. Sorc. discovered that 1d4 claws + 1d4 fire does exactly nothing to a skeleton. Back to town to rest again!

Rogue player had to leave, so back down to 4 players again for the last section.

Encounter A7: Direction change to avoid the trap (as no rogue). Pretty straight up fight - Gobs hit 3 of them with the rocks, managed to grease most of the party as well (which, with crawl as a single action did surprisingly little). Sorc found out that sleep is essentially a non-combat spell in PF2. Barb climbed up on the ledge, found the door, broke the door! (revenge against all Doorkind!). No one went down in the fight, but again, lots of damage, so back up to rest one last time.

Encounter A10 (Boss fight): Ranger managed to sneak in undetected, but with all the noisy people in the party, they decided just to rush in (so, standard plan really). The Barb got in a 17HP hit onto Drakus in the 1st rnd, so I thought it was going to be a bit of an anti-climax. Then Drakus got his go, form change and flank gave him effectively +14 against the Barbs AC13, so a crit on a 9+...(which is stupidly brutal). Barb went down on that first round, then one by one, he dropped the other PCs. Now this would have absolutely have been a TPK if not for the altered Dying rules - Application of Hero points (and a healing potion or 2) allowed the PCs to pop back up and they eventually got enough hits in to take Drakus down, but if felt a bit like victory on a technicality.

So mission successful with no deaths and surprisingly no cleric! (Though a very very generous resting regime with no monster resetting - which I obviously wouldn't do in a "real" game).

Thoughts and musings
The good list:
1. Character generation was pretty easy and fairly quick.

2. The action economy worked really well most of the time. Though it was occasionally a bit punishing (stand, draw weapon, move - you're done!)

3. The game still plays like DnD - while there is some divergence, it's not as much as say 4E.

The less good...:
1. Siloing of feats to classes - Enforcing specific weapon types or play styles on classes seems unnecessary.

2. 100s of points of minutiae. Fine detail is great if it adds significantly to the game, it's less good if it adds lots of extra bookkeeping for little impact - many of the conditions are written like this at the moment, as are the weapon properties.

3. The crit. system vs. AC - This really seems to be a double kick in the pants. A low AC is already pushing with a base creature attack of +6, but that it also means you'll be critted to death is too punishing.

4. The consensus around our table was that, as it stands, PF2 does not feel like a significant "improvement" over PF1 - Thus, incentive to switch over would be limited. It certainly feels like a different game, but the new game, with it's many many moving parts, doesn't currently have much of a "wow" factor that would really pull us in.

We're moving on to the next one, I'm interested in how the system does once the options are opened up a little.

Hi Erian, fantastic sheet, great job!

I noticed that size bonus to hit is being reported incorrectly (after you select race) and is oddly linked to Strength bonus...Looking at the code, you've just missed the column reference on your size table field by one - I've fixed mine and now it works properly.

Cheers

I had exactly the same issue with this. You can't trap stop an archer (or spellcaster) in melee with the 5' step rule.

The best way I came up with handling it was to re-work the 5' step rule just a little bit to:
A 5' step that leaves all threatened squares results in an attack of opportunity.

It has to be "leave all threatened squares" or else it impedes tactical movement by the fighters. But this way, the archer has to take a withdraw action to get out of combat without being attacked (also means casting defensively comes up a lot more for the mages).

The result has been the the party archer has had to be a lot more tactical in ensuring the enemy doesn't have a clear path to him - which is just what I was aiming for, though he still has the option of firing if he wants to absorb the attack.