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I ran for a party of four that was barely upper tier. The two full BAB characters were the ones playing up. After four rounds of whiffing, I asked what everyone's to-hit was, and the person with the highest needed a 15 to hit an incorporeal creature with 174 HP. So I started using the lower subtier AC values, but kept the rest of its stats the same. And I changed the 4PA to zero RP instead of two less. I also changed the tactics to "try to pull everyone close, spread attacks out as much as possible among the group." It was still a meat grinder, but they survived (except the drone), even with everyone dropping at least once.
One of the players who was in-tier spent all of his money on some armor off a chronicle sheet that was just at the very upper limit of what he was allowed to buy, and still got hit on a 6 or so. The only character that could consistently do double-digit damage would not have hit one time had I not made the adjustments I did.

Incorporeal creatures effectively have double hit points. Did everyone forget why incorporeal creatures have terrible AC in 3.5/PF1?

After playing enough Starfinder, I greatly dislike the bulk system. All it does is take weight, create a fictional unit of measure for it, and then obfuscate it even further.

I've never had a problem with the weight/carrying capacity system, but I also don't see 10+2+4+7+0+0=? as being more difficult than 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+0.1+0.1+0.1+0.1+0.1+0.1+0.1+0.1+0.1=?

The new edition is trying very hard to flatten the curve on dice rolling - both in terms of players having bonuses so high that their bonus to the roll is higher than the DC and players whose bonuses are so low that they refuse to try. This flattening is most apparent with skills, but applies to all d20s - attacks, saves, skills. But it's also creating a situation where what it's doing is either preventing players from trying to invest in certain things (i.e. I've seen hyper-focused characters with cracked out low-use Knowledge skills (nobility, geography, etc), fighters with massive Perform(Dance), and I've also seen "generalist" characters with basically the same bonus to all skill checks of the same attribute) while putting up an illusion of investment.

The changes in player-side computation of the math, combined with the way DCs scale, it looks like the goal is to create a system where the result is based on the result of the die roll itself and not the result of the check (die roll + bonus). Including a bonus at all is merely a pretense. So, let's drop the pretense and make the goal of the mechanics more transparent.

You have three Proficiencies: Proficiency A means a 5 or higher on the d20 is a success, Proficiency B means a 10 or higher on the d20 is a success, and Proficiency C means a 15 or higher is a success.

Using the PF1 framework for the classes,
Paladin gets ProfA in attack rolls, Will saves, and Fort saves; ProfC in Reflex saves
Rogue gets ProfB in attack rolls; ProfA in Reflex saves; ProfB in Fort and Will saves
Wizard gets ProfC in attack rolls; ProfA in Will saves; ProfB in Fort and Reflex saves
And skills get ProfA in a number of skills based on class (2+Int for Paladin and Wizard, 8+Int for Rogue), but you can trade one ProfA for two ProfB (a 10 Int Rogue could have 8 ProfA skills, or 7 ProfA skills and 2 ProfB skills, or 6 ProfA skills and 4 ProfB skills, or etc). All of the other skills (the "non-invested" skills) get ProfC.

For people who genuinely share this concern, I strongly recommend the X-Card system as a means of making sure everybody's boundaries are respected with no opportunity for recrimination.

Holy cow, that is hilarious. It's like the perfect parody.

TTRPGs are social games, so there the social contract will be heavily involved. The particulars of such a thing will vary from group to group, let alone region to region. It's understandable for Paizo to try to dictate the social contract for Organized Play, but it's ridiculous to do so for all of their player base, the majority of which are engaging with the game in closed groups and isolated social circles. Nobody blames the game for someone else acting like an ass. Trying to impose a blanket dictate will hurt the game more than help.

It doesn't help that the original statement is extremely politically charged.

I've read enough "let's get rid of alignment threads" to come to the conclusion that the reason people want to get rid of alignment boils down to:
"I don't understand this thing. The thing causes problems in my games because I don't understand it. Getting rid of the thing for everyone would be easier than me learning and understanding the thing. Get rid of the thing."

Boo, the Starfinder archetypes suck.

Just a fun little story here

When I GMed it, the players chose to punish the three goblins by using them to test the magic bag. First one, Reta bombed the Str check to hold the rope, so the rope got dropped. Second one, they tied the rope to a tree, and I used the "CMB to tie a rope" rules to get a die roll. Bombed that roll, so second goblin gets lost into the bag. Third one, they decide to tie dozens of ropes to dozens of trees all to the last goblin. Here, I GM fiat'ed that Big Sparrow found him and ripped him from the ropes, describing it as all the ropes moving and jerking around like a fishing line with one on the hook, and they got back a bunch of torn rope ends coming back out of the bag.

So, in the game I ran, the lost goblins were stuck in the Baglands by the actions of the PCs.

I, for one, am looking forward to Pathfinder Society: Year of the Blakros.
An entire year of missions in the Blakros museum.

Pathfinder has enough mythological creatures in it, let's not add fictional units of measure as well.

Is "morality is subjective" an objective fact?

The gaming world doesn't operate on your philosophy/worldview. If you are unable to set aside your personal worldview to engage in a fictional universe that operates differently than how you think the real world does, then the problem isn't with the game, it's with you.

I do not recommend using the Starfinder tier system as is.

My LGS has enough players to support one table every other week, and an uncomfortable gap is spreading between people who can make it every game and those who can't. This was made worse by 3-6 scenarios coming out very early in the first season - when one of those gets scheduled, players that are still level 2 on their -701 just don't show up. So those that were level 3 when a T3-6 came out (and was the only scenario that could be scheduled) just played with a table buddy, widening the gap. And we just don't have enough players to reschedule previously played scenarios.

I completely get why Season 0 had Tier 1-7 scenarios.

Funny how this thread stopped being a poll almost immediately and just turned into "Paladin debate thread #147"

I agree with removing the LG requirement for Paladins (let's chuck alignment altogether). All it does is pigeon-hole Paladins unnecessarily. If someone want to play the classic Paladin, all they need to do is play a LG Paladin and we can have holy warriors of all alignments, which would be so much better. The people who liked the old way can still have what they had, and those that didn't like the way it was can get something new and different.

Also, why do Druids have to be these weird agents of nature? Let's remove the nature-focus of the class, all it does is pigeon-hole Druids unnecessarily. If someone wants to play the classic Druid, they can just roleplay a nature-focused Druid and we can also have full-plate wearing agents of civilization, urbanization, and advancement of technology, which would be so much better. The people who liked the old way can still have what they had, and those that didn't like the way it was can get something new and different.

Also, why do Clerics have to be healers? Let's remove healing spells and abilities from their spell lists and class features, all it does is pigeon-hole Clerics unnecessarily. If someone wants to play the classic Cleric, they can invest in UMD and use wands, and we can have non-healing Clerics, which would be so much better. The people who liked the old way can still have what they had, and those that didn't like the way it was can get something new and different.

Also, why do wizards have to be spellcasters? Let's remove spellcasting from wizards.

D&D 3.75
and
D&D 3.75.5

Bring back potion miscibility!

Clearly, the way you modernize a Bard is to have him rap.

There is an issue I've seen in Society play that would be exacerbated by skill proficiencies - DCs for the same task scaling with level for no reason (I'm not talking about a higher-level trap having a higher-level DC, but things like the perception check to find the plot letter is higher just because they're higher level).

If that's going to happen with leveling, they may as well just change the whole system to having three levels of proficiency in a skill/save/weapon attack - success on 15 on the die, success on a 10 with the die, and success with 5 on the die, with which category you get for each skill/etc being dictated by your class options.

At the very least, make it bigger than the Alien Archive. That book was so lean I haven't bothered picking it up yet.

I am a legal deity. Worship me.

So let's have a forum debate in order to reach a consensus on how to interpret consensus on forum debates.

When we sat down at a table, the guy playing a summoner went into detail about how he bought a Wand of Scorching Ray so his actual character would have something to do in combat.

Towards the end of the scenario, we enter a room with two sphinxes or chimeras or something sitting on top of pillars, ready to attack. They go last in the initiative, so everyone spends the first round buffing/drinking potions of fly. The summoner, however, moves in front of the front line, whips out his wand and hits one of the monsters with a scorching ray. He proceeds to get charged, pounced, and taken down to single-digit HP on his level 8 or 9 character.

I was playing an Ifrit Fire/Primal Elemental Sorcerer who had just hit level 7 (so my scorching ray just got its second ray), so after I move into position, I give the summoner a jokingly cocky "Here, let me show you how it's done!" and cast my own Scorching Ray on the monster that was on top of the summoner. I toss out two d20s and they both land on 20. I confirmed both threats.

But maybe...just maybe if penalties were assigned to aid another checks, some players would be less inclined to dump stats like Wisdom or Charisma and be inclined to take traits which give them access to bonuses to Diplomacy or other non-class skills- often making them a class-skill.

Ideally, people should want to make well-rounded characters, but trying to put up certain fences to "encourage" that isn't going to be very successful. Implementing a penalty on aid another or something similar is only going to result in people sitting out participating in non-combat encounters with no changes in the way they build their characters.

This scenario is getting a lot of backlash from people because they happened to have poor party composition for the kind of scenario it was. And are now demanding that we get told/warned exactly what we have to do/get/roll to win future scenarios before sitting down, or that PFS no longer make any skill-heavy or social scenarios.

Six months ago, I played a game that resulted in a TPK. It was a combat-heavy scenario and we came up against something with DR 5/- in the middle of it. We couldn't get past it because there was no way to bypass it without fighting it and the character with the highest Str was my cleric with a 14, who was also the only healer, so I was doing double-duty while the others couldn't contribute effectively. This is not our fault for having poor party balance nor is it no one's fault because sometimes you're just unlucky at the table - it is clearly the writer's fault and the campaign leadership's fault. Therefore, I demand that all future scenarios have full monster stat blocks posted in the scenario blurbs or that there never be a combat in a PFS scenario ever again.

This is a semi-tangent, but a few people are complaining about what happened when they brought characters with no Knowledge skill investment to the game and I have to wonder why anyone has a PFS character with no ranks in any Knowledge. When you build a character, you build it for the campaign you are playing (you wouldn't build a Ranger with favored enemies Drow, Duergar, and Wayang for the Giantslayer AP, a Paladin for Hell's Vengeance's villainous campaign, or a desert-focused character for Skull & Shackles). PFS is a campaign centered on an organization of Indiana Joneses. That doesn't mean all of our characters must be bards, but every character should have some form of Knowledge-based expertise. If you don't have many skill ranks available to you, pick one Knowledge skill for your character to specialize in. I have a Barbarian with max ranks in K(Arcana) even though I never made it a class skill through traits or multiclassing, because I chose that to be his Knowledge specialty for character reasons (and only a single rank dropped into Nature). I also have a 7 Int fighter with a number of ranks in K(Dungeoneering) equal to about half his level (and none in Engineering, his other Knowledge class skill), because every character needs a Knowledge skill decently invested in.

Whips are made of leather, so get one made of dragon hide.

I can't even imagine how terrible a GM would be that would refuse to let the players use splash weapons and area affects against a swarm, one of the most basic and common subtypes, due to a bad Knowledge roll or because the party makeup resulted in a hole in the relevant skill. That is a GM who hates the players and is going out of his way to create a miserable experience.

It could always be worse. I once had a GM require a Knowledge(Local) check to identify that the creature attacking us was a human.
And the combat's CR was 5 or so, so the DC was ~15+

Legio_MCMLXXXVII wrote:

This right here is why I say that all PFS characters should be simultaneously hyper-competent and also death incarnate. People who make weak characters get other people killed. It's much easier to play down your strengths in game than it is to play up strengths you don't have.

That could be true, but in my experience super optimized characters are not "played down" by their players. YMMV

I don't know about anyone else, but in my experience, "optimized characters" and "effective characters" are two very different things that don't often overlap. What makes someone effective has much more to do with how they play than what they've built - some of the most ineffective characters I've ever seen are ones that look like they googled "[class] optimization guide" and copy & pasted what they found there.

Alignment debate thread. Take a shot.

You can't trust anybody, they're out to get you.

Side note: I noticed a lot of responses that propose different methods of conveying health/damage without using numbers, but have set-in-stone meanings in order to convey specific numerical values. That really doesn't seem that much different than just saying the numbers. You're taking words that represent specific numerical values and replacing them with words that don't represent specific numerical values, but are then declaring them to represent specific numerical values. If it helps your personal immersion to describe wounds in a certain way, that's fine, but that doesn't make using numbers in a math-heavy game wrong.

The last time I significantly refluffed/reskinned anything, I was playing the psychic pregen and I declared that the somatic components for the Mind Thrust spell was a pelvic thrust.

1) The title, in general.

2) What about if you bring in "Hide in Plain Sight" and similar abilities?

There's one guy in my area that pronounces it deck-em-vee-ruh-tay.

I request that the Broodmaster archetype be made legal solely for unchained summoners for making one angel eidolon and one devil eidolon.

If I hold my Core Rulebook upside down, that means I can buy a Cloak of Resistance +3 for 000'6 gold, right?
At least until an errata comes out about upside down books or campaign leadership bans the practice of manipulating the Core Rulebook in a three-dimensional space.

I don't see what's so difficult.

...

On the Grand Lodge card, can you check the "Be somewhere other than Absalom" goal on one season's card and a second goal on the other season's card?
Also, can you get credit for visiting the same nation in two different scenarios on two different seasons' cards? If no, that goal is going to be excessively difficult to achieve a second (or third) time.

"Player insanity" and "PC insanity" are two entirely different things and a distinction that probably matters here.

I think a lot of GMs do it so players don't autosucceed DC 15 to 20 challenges.

Succeeding at DC 15~20 is the entire point of taking 10/20

What's a spot check?

If you have players doing the opposite twins thing, they should go Sarenrae/Rovagug instead.

I suggest to let the dice fall where they do next time. Unless the team consists of newbies, of course. They'll cope

Like I said, I tend to be soft on the players when I GM, mostly in the form of "The bad guys are doing well? That's when they make poor decisions," in a "A player is conscious and prone at the feet of the 13-Int fighter because he dropped last round and got hit by a channel? The fighter doesn't notice he's back up and attacks someone else instead," sort of way. I don't pull the kind of generosity from this session when I run the higher-level games, just the lower. Though the level of this game was more in the middle of my mercy ranges.

Sounds like a party for which the scenario was not very kind to, TheFlyingPhoton :/

This party just had a very unlucky party composition and unlucky initiative rolls. The characters weren't even terrible, either, just a lot of overlap in certain party roles and a complete lack of other roles. If one more person did better on the confusion save, or if the Alchemist saved against the feeblemind, then they'd have been fine.

In my opinion, you should not wait for players to ask how well they are doing before allowing them the chance to notice they are failing.

Yeah, if I were to run this again, I would have them throw out Perception/Sense Motive rolls at every awareness check. The Alchemist asked if he thought he did well on his first one, so I had him throw a Sense Motive on the spot and then didn't have to make up a DC because he rolled so low. After that, people just kept asking whether or not the mod provided the players with any way of knowing how many awareness points they have, so I just didn't think about it after that.

Spoiler:

I hate to say it, but I really need to stop counting The Ranger as being a meaningful party member. He seems to spend half of any battle he participates in hitting himself with a CLW wand. It only keeps him alive if the party never really needed him there in the first place.

Yeah, I have no clue what was going on with that ranger.