Jesikah Morning's Dew's page

Jesikah Morning's Dew wrote:

Cori Marie wrote:

If you subscribe now, you can opt to start with Player Core. If you do you'll get Player and GM Core this month, and Monster Core when it releases in spring and Player Core 2 in Summer.

So if I did that, would I be able to get the PDF early, as some have?

You get the PDF when your package ships... which COULD mean you get the PDF early. It could be closer to the street date. Once (and only once), I didn't get my PDF until after the street date because they were behind on shipping (this was a one-off).

So the real benefit is having the PDF as well, but I wouldn't count on getting it *early*.

Thank you very much! That's very helpful.

If you subscribe now, you can opt to start with Player Core. If you do you'll get Player and GM Core this month, and Monster Core when it releases in spring and Player Core 2 in Summer.

So if I did that, would I be able to get the PDF early, as some have?

Now available!

If someone would be so kind...how does the sub work? Do you pay the cover price for all the rulebooks? Do you get all three PDFs with your sub?

Edit: Apparently, I should have looked more. Others had the same question. I want all three Remaster books. What does that entail?

Thank you for the input!

Just off the cuff w/o checking GMG charts, the longsword should use d8s, so 2d8+4 if you want equivalent average damage. (or maybe 1d8+5 + 1d6 cold (or negative).

I think I just went with the general damage expression listed in the GMG, ignoring what a longsword normally does. I can change that. I actually like the 1d8+5 + 1d6 cold for some flavor and variety.

And the longbow's doing too little damage, needs a boost, especially since the lower attack bonus already represents a big hit.

Okay! I can do that. I don't think he'll use it much since the skeletal horse has great mobility, and this is low-level, the first real "boss" of the game. But the PCs could always take out the mount.

How long does the Enfeebled condition last on Frost Slash?

Good question! What seems fair? A few rounds? Until they make another save at the start of their turn?

And it has Immunity & Resistance 5 Cold.

Ack, I thought I caught and fixed that. Thanks.

I love creating monsters. While I realize it's as much art as science, it's still fun to tinker. This is meant to be something of a boss battle for a group of level 2 PCs (they'll be level 2 by the time they face him), and he is paired with a Skeletal Horse (level 2).

I went sort of basic here. The idea is a capable fighter (a town guard NPC) is killed by a powerful undead sorcerer and reanimated as a death knight that faces down the returning PCs. He's meant to be fairly straightforward: good at fighting, especially up close, and has a frosty aura that he can use against them.

He can also channel a cone of freezing cold through his sword and weaken his enemies. It's meant to be something he can do as an option more than once in the fight, though I might make it more limited-use but higher damage.

How does it look? Does this seem too much, or like it might work well for a tough encounter for a level 2 party?

Death Knight
Level 5
Unique • Lawful Evil • Medium • Undead

Perception +12; darkvision
Languages • Common
Skills • Athletics +13, Intimidation +16
Str +5 • Dex +4 • Con +4 • Int +2 • Wis +4 • Cha +2
Items • +1 longsword
________________
AC 22 • Fort +15 • Ref +9 • Will +7
HP 80/80 • Negative healing; Immunities cold, death, disease, paralyzed, poison, unconscious; Resistances cold 5, electricity 5, fire 5, piercing 5, slashing 5; Weaknesses positive 5
Frost Shroud (aura, cold) • 5 feet • Living creatures coming within the aura make basic Fortitude save or take -10 status penalty to Speed for 1 round
Reactive Abilities • Attack of Opportunity, Shield Block
________________
Speed 25
Melee ♦ +16 (versatile P) • Damage 2d6+6 slashing
Longbow ♦ +14, Deadly d10, volley 30 ft. • Damage 1d8 P
Frost Slash ♦♦ • Cone 20 feet (basic Reflex save) • Damage 2d8 cold plus enfeebled 1 (on failure)

I don't think page 294 is talking about using the Subsist activity. The length of time is whatever you deam appropriate. Probably every day if you're doing daily adventure stuff, but you could stretch it to longer if you need to montage and don't want excessive rolling.

The Sudden Storm would be better represented by a separate check(s). Possibly even a hazard if it is dangerous enough. The GMG has at least one flood listed.

Foraging while traveling is what the -5 penalty is for. Which I wouldn't just wave-- the DCs aren't that high to begin with. A lush forest is only DC 10. Also, if you start house ruling things out of existence, you may wind up negating particular skill feats, which doesn't reward people who built for this.

If you'd like a more robust wilderness survival system, I'd recommend Trail for the Hunted from the Ironfang Invasion AP. It is a great adventure, though the survival system wasn't my favorite part of it. But you can tweak it to taste and so it accounts for PF2 skill feats.

Thank you, I may just take a look at that. You say it's more robust. Can you tell me a little more about what it has in it?

Thank you for the advice!

I realize now that the Standard of Living to which Subsist refers is per week, not day. That does change things a bit.

Though I still don't like the idea of shelter-making to be dependent totally on a weekly, long-term thing. What about having to make a hasty shelter because of a sudden storm?

Or what about hunting and foraging to supplement your supplies on a long travel?

This game may spend long periods of time out in the wild. I'd like to make sure there is a lot to do there for characters skilled at wilderness survival.

It seems strange to me that Subsist is by default a Downtime Mode thing only. If you are traveling in the wild, do we only use it when we assume nothing else happens after a day or several? Or if we try to use it in less than, say, a day, do we have to have the -5 penalty?

I had some thoughts about this, as I'm trying to make wilderness exploration a fun and engaging part of my game.

Can you have a day with some Encounters and some Exploration, and then at the end of that day assume it's been Downtime enough to roll Subsist for that day? Basically, is Subsist in Downtime *all* you can do for the day, or can we tack it onto the end of a day of Encounter and Exploration?

What about using Nature as a supplementary skill? Identifying game trails, water sources, etc., for foraging and shelters. It could be an Aid to the Survival roll for Subsist, or I was considering allowing it to waive the penalty for trying to Subsist in 8 hours or less.

What do you folks think? This sort of wilderness survival really screams "Exploration Mode" to me, so I'm thinking of ways to make it work better within the rules.

So, backpacks only give you a convenient space to store up to 4 Bulk and still leave your hands free, right? As opposed to increasing your Bulk capacity by 4?

Good riddance to overpowered magic. It's still the best for raw ability later on, but at least the days of caster supremacy are mitigated. Magic needed to be nerfed hard so that everyone else could have stuff to actually do, and thankfully it's a lot better now. Long may 2E reign in that regard.

I don't even see a "Weapon Finesse"-style "Dex to damage" under Rogues. What am I missing?

But that doesn't sound too bad. The couple of points that you lose out on from not specializing in Strength doesn't seem like it makes a big difference, other than a little bit of flavor: trading a little more defense for raw power, but both can strike pretty accurately. Cool.

Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

Well you don't need wisdom at all for monks now, even if you want to use ki powers.

Str monks are definitely fine, and Dex monks don't need str at high levels, but it helps at low levels.

There is a stance so Str monks don't need as much Dex, but using that means they do less damage.

Weapon using monks probably won't be able to do as much damage as unarmed monks.

Question: Is there a way to get Dex to unarmed damage?

By the rules, yes, I'd say so. The engine alone is rebuilt to do what it originally wanted to do, and seeks to address the inherent (and ancient) flaws of the old 3.x engine. This is just based on the playtest; the final version looks to be even better, but I'll know more tomorrow.

Keeping in mind, the answer to your question and will always be purely subjective.

♫ ♪ I'm so excited
And I just can't fight it
But I'm about to enter encounter mode
And roll my dices ♪ ♫

Jesikah Morning's Dew wrote:

Xenocrat wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I figure multiclassing monk to get one of the d8 (or d10) unarmed styles available at level 1, and flurry at level 12 (I believe) will work well for anybody else who wants to punch people.

I'm not sure how proficiency in unarmed strikes is figured though. Do rangers, barbarians, and champions all get master unarmed?

According to an allegedly comprehensive proficiency chart, fighters get legendary, barbarians, monks and mutagen alchemists get master, druids get expert, and everyone else is trained in unarmed attacks.

Monks don't get Legendary in unarmed, one of their signature specialties, but Fighters do?

Nope. They get legendary in unarmored, so they're the best dodgers, and they get the best saves (with their choice of any one in Legendary), but instead of getting the best accuracy with their unarmed attacks they have to settle for lots of feats that make their unarmed attacks much better than the fighter's.

Hm. Well, I suppose I'll have to see how it plays out!

If only the PDFs would drop early! Siiiiiiiiigh. Two more days? I don't think I have enough HP to survive the deprivation....

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I figure multiclassing monk to get one of the d8 (or d10) unarmed styles available at level 1, and flurry at level 12 (I believe) will work well for anybody else who wants to punch people.

I'm not sure how proficiency in unarmed strikes is figured though. Do rangers, barbarians, and champions all get master unarmed?

According to an allegedly comprehensive proficiency chart, fighters get legendary, barbarians, monks and mutagen alchemists get master, druids get expert, and everyone else is trained in unarmed attacks.

Monks don't get Legendary in unarmed, one of their signature specialties, but Fighters do?

Arachnofiend wrote:

Maaan I'm so happy to see Fighters and Rogues be straight up better than other classes at things that are universally desirable. Weak attempts at niche protection are OUT.

I hate that things that are universally desirable are niched out to certain classes. Why can't I have a cleric (or sorcerer or alchemist) with Legendary Perception? Its only the most important (non-skill, but really should be) skill in the game. Trapfinding isn't even locked behind the rogue anymore.

I'm okay with some of it, but Perception is an issue for me, too. Monks, for example, are often noted for their keen insight, and their ability to see things that others cannot. I want my Monk to be able to have Legendary Perception. Heightened senses and keen perception in general are, to me, one of the most important abilities to have. One of my favorites. Is there no way for my Monk to ever have Legendary Perception?

Jesikah Morning's Dew wrote:

So, are there good rules for creating custom monsters?

Nope. Those were explicitly going to be in a Game Mastery Guide, which is slated for January, I believe.

Thanks. That's what I was afraid of. Long time to wait! I suppose I can get a good enough feel for it to just wing it until then, but I am really looking forward to having something to tinker with!

So, are there good rules for creating custom monsters?

Illrigger wrote:

Be ready for some sore arms after reading the CRB, it must weigh 3 pounds.

Four and a half.

What's its Bulk rating? ;)

Psst. I really didn't want to be THAT lady, but there's a slight typo on the Succubus. "These demons are can easily exploit..."

WatersLethe wrote:

Yeah, to be clear, a cash grab is a real thing and it can be a problem.

For example, a major game company could fire a ton of staff and focus on using their prior successful franchises in low-effort spinoffs that have a high profit to cost ratio. The fans of the previous type of game that built up the franchise's reputation are very much left out in the cold even if the company makes a lot of money from the move.

4E didn't have the hallmarks of a low-effort attempt at making a new system. It seemed like Wizards were all in. They also made good faith, and pretty successful, attempts to fix it during its time.

Forgive me is your example actually referring to something specific that has flown over my head?

Blizzard Games is a great example of this exact thing. They had a record year...then fired 800 people, have all but completely sold their souls to the Chinese market and laws, tanked Heroes of the Storm (which was my favorite MMO), started focusing heavily on the mobile market (including an outsourced-to-China "Diablo" game that's just a reskin of an existing game), and basically forgot who they used to be. The company's nearly as bad as EA now. Hearthstone has some of the greediest lootbox-style mechanics ever seen in a game. "Sense of pride and accomplishment" indeed.

Gasp! But that's one more than a fortnight!

I never play human characters, either, and the idea of being limited in what classes I can take, and to what levels I can advance them, in comparison to the humans was frustrating. Or yeah, not being able to roll well enough to play a certain class is, while when I was a kid it was thrilling, now just an exercise in frustration and false exclusiveness.

Of the many overarching assumptions 3E changed, more freedom and flexibility was one of the best.

And I want to point out that I'm fine with max. HPs, I just still might want to house-rule them in my games. I definitely do not want to return to days of rolling ability scores, that often resulted in bitterness when one of the guys rolled up an "elven hero" and the rest were playing farmboys with pitchforks. This expression comes from an Undermountain campaign years and years ago; one PC was an elven fighter with vastly superior stats (Str 18/96, Dex 18, Con 17, etcetera), while others had 14s or 15s in their prime attributes. It wasn't really fun to play in that particular campaign.

I remember those days, as well. I started GMing at the tender age of...ten? With AD&D 2E, I think. I do remember the days of rolling my character's attributes, and HP, and I definitely don't miss it. I very much like the way that PF2E does it, myself. Rolling a 1 sucked. I know we were often allowed by one GM to reroll 1s, but then I would get a 2 or 3, and it just wasn't very fun. The rolls I want to matter are the ones taken for in-game actions, rather than vital character attributes.

Even so, I do hope they have an option for you. The default assumption they're running with is much more to my taste, but it wouldn't take much word count to give you an optional rule you're looking for, I think.

That's not possible. It wouldn't even exist unless a PC was there looking for it, by those rules and the logical extension thereof. Unless the GM is literally rolling for every single possible item ahead of time, regardless of whether any PC ever even visits that shop, its existence remains in a state of flux even by PF1 rules until looked for by a PC.

I think the character, Brea, would be on a quest to find an unbreakable shield so that she could defend the entire world! Bonus points if it looks like the Hylian Shield.

I didn't see: do we have any idea whether there are any abilities or items to make shields into Captain America-style bashing and throwing offense?

So, the concept I threw together here is actually one that has interested me for a while. I'd like to make a warrior of some kind that only uses a shield—sometimes offensively, but really focuses on defense, being a bastion that doesn't break.

What's the closest we can get to that in 2E, do you think? Even a warrior with the shield who can also heal her allies would be cool.

61
Brea Summerly (age 19)
ABC: Human Farmhand Warrior
Weapon: NONE! Shield only!

Sometimes, I still hear the sounds. The fires, the shouting, the grunts and the laughter and the hooves. I remember when they came for us. Our little farming village wasn't prepared. Our warriors were too few. We had pitchforks, they had spears. We had slings, they had crossbows. We had swords, they had those terrible, terrible teeth. They burned and tore and shattered everything I ever knew.

I saw something gleaming in the bloodstained grass. A shield, the only one we had. I picked it up, struggling under the weight of it. I watched as my people fell to the blades of the enemy. I watched as some fell on their own swords instead of being captured and dragged away. I watched as weapons drank life after life in the hands of the ruthless.

I raised my shield and I screamed.

Ten years later, and I still hear it. I hear it when I find a town under siege. When brigands raid in the night. When some spell goes awry and the dead rise. The only thing that quiets it is when I raise my shield. In honor of my people's memory. In defense of others. When I hear the clang of metal on metal, when I push back the monsters, then I push back the nightmares.

I swore that day that I would never pick up a weapon. I would stand as a shield between the defenseless and the wicked. Those behind me would not fall as long as I could lift my shield-arm. And I have not stopped protecting those who cannot protect themselves since that day.

So you think you can break me? I stand here still in defiance of your cruel might. I will not fall here today. They will not be yours to claim. Begone, for today you have met an impassable wall! You are but a droplet hurtling itself against the cliffs. I have weathered tidal waves. Begone, fiend, for my shield is unbroken.

I am unbroken.

This is more or less just a repeat of your previous couple points but again I don't really get this one. A new player is less likely to make a broken character under the naive assumption the designers presented reasonable options for them to take and the game is less likely to collapse under heavy optimization, but that's not "little reward for system mastery"... that's just a system that's better balanced.

This is a big one for me. "System mastery" should never be a thing. New groups shouldn't go to a book, pick stuff that looks cool and fun, only to find out that they made such a suboptimal choice the game is breaking around them. The idea of min-maxing every last +1 and that the game SHOULD have trap choices is, to me, so adversarial, and so antithetical to what I enjoy when playing with the rules, that if it disappeared entirely tomorrow the RPG world would be better for it.

sherlock1701 wrote:

Not much. It seems like a pretty straight downgrade from 1e across the board, and it's completely incompatible with my homebrew setting.

Just going to reply to my own post to explain in more detail.

Ways I feel it's a downgrade:

Wow. Almost literally every single item you mention and every detail is the opposite of how I feel, and in fact all of these things are why I'm excited for 2E. You'll definitely be better off with 1E, and thankfully so, because if 2E was that much like 1E, I wouldn't be playing it.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I mean, an Oradin who worships one deity and is cursed by an opposed deity could be a pretty fun RP situation, if the GM is up for it.

I'm suddenly imagining a Paladin of Apsu who's been cursed by Dahak. Like something straight out of mythology, I love it.

Sounds cool! Also, if you're the same Fobok on RPOL, then you're the one who was interested in my game. :)

Norrath could be a very fun game world, with both familiar races (elves, dwarves, halflings) and some funky additions of their own (iksar, erudites, etc.).

Trolls and Ogres are another! I also liked how the races in EQRPG were very powerful. But I love the flavor and the abilities of the Iksar, and so I definitely have considered running stuff in that setting.

One thing the EQRPG did that won't be done here, though I am hoping someone comes up with rules for it, is that it used a magic points system. But I don't think that's absolutely necessary.

About the only quibble I've got with the setting is how many of it's evil gods are gods of stuff that nobody would worship, like fear or hate or disease. (Nobody names a day or month or planet after a Greek or Roman or Norse god of those things! Give me sun gods or war gods or love gods or gods of fate. Some of those can be evil, not gods of bad childish sith lord 'these feelings are bad' reductionist psychology!)

Maybe not, but seeing what some folks "worship" (both literally and figuratively) in our world, I'm not so sure it's that unbelievable. However, this is an easy thing to fix, I think.

One huge bonus to off-line play is having a GM who can skip you past the boring parts and zip right to the fun bits!

Absolutely! Though one thing I am looking forward to doing is making the exploration parts fun and engaging, both mechanically and narratively. My Breath of the Wild-inspired game very much has exploration and survival stuff as a focus, and I think it'll work out very well.

Something cool about various video games and MMOs is that certain monsters have built in mechanics, that make fighting them a mini-game of it's own, and it would be cool to see more of that. Not just 'these orcs have scales and spiky bits,' but something really mechanically different, even if it's an environmental hazard in which they commonly live, or something like that.

No need to hunt down a specific spell, for instance, to create a monster who is 'shielded' by something being done by sub-monsters that have to be killed first to 'render it vulnerable' to attack. Just 'bang,' new monster ability and run with it. Kill the 'firebringer imps' or their healy flames will keep healing the big bad demon faster than you can damage it. (Or make it chanting cultists and a gateway full of Cthulhu-tentacles, and you can chop away at the tentacles all day, but the cultists chants are keeping the gate open and pulling through more, so the party has to kill the cultists first, and only then can deal with the no-longer-replenishing tentacle beasties. Same mechanic/tactics, different flavor.)

Chrono Trigger (the greatest CRPG of all time!) does this a lot, and yes. I love love LOVE things that are engaging and dynamic in terms of environments and layered rules and setpieces. So, goblin archers standing atop a crumbling cliff that you can collapse with some well-placed shots. Part of the floor having given way to lava, and the smoke elementals keep weaving in and out of the noxious fumes. Giant spiders keep dropping down from the ceilings and stringing webs across the room, restricting movement—or you can cut the creatures struggling in their webs free (accidentally or intentionally!), introducing more chaos into the fight! Heck, you could roll on a small random table to see just WHAT you let free!

This game can't come out soon enough. Wish they could bump up the release date! I want to get into a PBP, and I want to start mine!

What the Alchemist needs is an artifact version of Ana's biotic rifle in Overwatch. Load vials of elixirs into it and...shoot your friends. With healing! Or whatever.

On a semi-related note, what would be the best class for an absolute "White Mage"-style build that focused on buffs and healing and utility stuff, but was lightly armored at best and wasn't really meant to go in swinging weapons?

Jesikah Morning's Dew wrote:

Cori Marie wrote:

And if you do want a sub, and can't afford it, I do try to give some away during Oblivion Oath, and I'll try to give some away during these too!

Having just conquered homelessness and finally gotten into a place again, money is needless to say tight! So I am very interested in this. So it's on Twitch?

Well typically what I do is give out 5 random subs during the stream, but I'd be happy to unique gift one, if you are on during the stream and give me your twitch name :)

I would love to! What time is the stream? What is your stream called? Though I fear taking away subs from others, but I do greatly appreciate it.

And if you do want a sub, and can't afford it, I do try to give some away during Oblivion Oath, and I'll try to give some away during these too!

Having just conquered homelessness and finally gotten into a place again, money is needless to say tight! So I am very interested in this. So it's on Twitch?

I think the game will work just fine for less combat-heavy games. The one I'm setting up now is very Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild-inspired, in that a lot of it is going to be exploration, survival, and uncovering ruins and things (all of which I'll give XP for, in addition to combat), that kind of thing.

But I like high fantasy, so I wouldn't want to really get rid of it. What you do is take inspiration from bigtime mythological stories and other media. If the PCs are now like gods, cool, get them involved directly in the machinations of the gods as peers, rather than mere uppity mortals who challenge them. Have them take on more abstract challenges. Starvation, wars over resources, plagues, natural disasters (on a vast scale). Have them go to other realms and do the things high-level PCs do. They can still face challenges that you can't just beat up and still need strategy to overcome, such as a league of gods, social upheaval, or that kind of thing.

Even at lower levels, I don't tend to run games that are one fight after another. Not that there's anything wrong with such a game, but what I enjoy most is immersion in a high fantasy world, so I really strive to help bring it to life through exploration, interaction, and so on.

Wish I could get an advance copy to write a review or something! I'm impatient. I'm getting my game forum setup on RPOL, and I have lots of ideas for an exploration-and-survival-heavy game with underlying mystery and grand adventure seeds (a la Breath of the Wild). But not having the rules makes it tough to do more than put concepts together.

This is gonna be one long brainstorm!

Nothing.

That was going to be my response. I'm not interested in any of the PF1 rules. I don't play it currently because, although the Paizo folks seem like real class acts and they put high quality production values into their games, the rules in PF1 are not something I enjoy playing with. PF2 looks a heck of a lot more my speed and I'm very, very excited about it. I've even begun setting my "Breath of the Wild"-inspired game over on RPOL in anticipation of the rules coming out.

"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."

The idea that "fail forward" inherently removes character agency is, I think, a completely backward way to look at it. Rather, the concept lends itself more readily to embodying player agency than anything. It's a way of saying "This action matters." Pass or fail, you're doing it because it has some kind of meaning to your part in the story. After all, if it didn't, you wouldn't be doing it. And "matters" doesn't even have to mean dice rolling. Your character may choose to give the last bit of water in their canteen to the haggard wanderer in the desert, only to find out that the wanderer was the son of a powerful lord having escaped his captors, and gain an ally in the region—and an enemy in those who kidnapped the prince.

If the action matters, then the agency is in simply undertaking it, in being the reason that it matters. Nowhere in any great story do you see the heroes thwarted with no chance of learning from the event. In fiction, there is no such thing as a binary pass/fail upon which the entire narrative hinges. Failure often has more interesting consequences than successs. Frodo is captured in Mordor because they failed to sneak past Shelob. He's stabbed on Weathertop because they failed to avoid the Ringwraiths. And Sauron is defeated ultimately because he failed to account for someone thinking differently than him, that his enemies would only seek to destroy the Ring and not use it (thus falling prey to it). There are many, many thousands of examples of this.

The concept of still gaining something, or being able to progress in some way, to change the game state and the story, that's what "failing forward" means. It doesn't mean "you just unlock the door anyway." If it wasn't important to have a chance of failure, you'd not bother rolling. Maybe you trigger a trap that looses an avalanche of rocks that damage the party but also the door, allowing the stronger characters to force it open. Maybe you alert the orcs on the other side, who open the door, but now you're in a fight you might have avoided.

There are a lot of ways to do this, and not every single action ever needs to have such dramatic potential. But the idea that it removes player agency is, to me, strange, when "nothing happens" is the most agency-robbing result possible.

Whoops! I misunderstood the game, as it were. But I don't know all the deets on the ABCs. Is there a document anywhere with all the spoiled info?

Jesikah, Elven Monk out in search of wisdom and growth, trying to make the world a better place by her journeys.

Alyssah, her sister, a Druid who seeks a true connection with the primal wilds (and has a love for dinosaurs!).

Seryna, an Elven Champion who adventures with bright steel and a brighter heart and smile.

And a few others, mostly Elves, like a Sorcerer, maybe a Rogue or two!

kaineblade83 wrote:

Barnabas Eckleworth III wrote:

Shisumo wrote:

I'm looking forward to homebrewing an Eberron conversion. The new rules for ancestries are going to make so many things so much easier.

Ahhh. I thought I was the lone one thinking of Eberron campaign uses for PF2.

That makes three of us now, and I can't wait.

Here's number four.

I'm looking forward to trying a couple different non-Golarion campaign settings. Forgotten Realms is one, but also Norrath of EverQuest. The EQRPG did some fun stuff with D20 back in the day, and the setting is amazing. Cabilis and the Iksar alone are going to be worth converting (the very first Ancestry I'm going to homebrew and share on the forums is the Iksar!).

I want to do a very Breath of the Wild-inspired open-world kind of game. Lots of survival, exploration, and noncombat adventuring. Ancient mysteries to uncover, new vistas to find, all of which I plan to grant XP in the form of quest-style rewards. That's the cool part about it being standardized to 1000 XP. It makes this sort of thing easy.

I'm looking forward to creating monsters of all stripes, because I love to do that. Customizing foes is so much fun to tinker with; being able to build NPCs and stuff the same way, if I choose, is so great. I can't wait.

I'm looking forward to skills mattering now. To having stuff to do besides hit things or blast things. To finding a way to immerse my group and I in a fantasy setting and really breathe life into it, but by blending rules with narrative much more seamlessly than before.

Most of all, I'm looking forward to playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

Failing Forward fundamentally means "regardless of whether you pass or fail, something interesting or engaging happens". Now the thing that happens will be better if you succeed than if you fail, but what won't happen is "nothing, no progress is made."

For a simple example: the PCs are trying to get through a locked door and roll to pick the lock.
On a success: you pick the lock and can go through the door, progress is made.
On a failure: you make a noise that alerts someone on the other side of the door, who opens it and puts the PCs on the spot leading to a combat or social encounter. Once that is resolved, the PCs can go through the door, and make progress.

Basically the idea is to never waste your players' time by making them wait around for a big enough number to appear- failure has a cost but it is not "you are stuck here." In terms of player agency, the kind I am 100% in favor of removing as both a player and a GM is "the agency to create situations in which nothing a player would be interested in, want to happen, or enjoy happening does happen." I strongly prefer fail forward style games and I did this in PF1 games I ran too. I just feel "you fail, and are back to square one" to be fundamentally disrespectful to people's time, which is precious since scheduling a time that works for everyone is hard.

This is pretty much why I have grown to like a lot of the narrative-based games of recent years. It changes the dynamic. Binary pass/fail isn't as interesting to me as, say, FFG's Star Wars games, where you can fail but with some advantage, or succeed but with a complication, and the narrative that unfolds as a result makes the character's actions matter just that much more. It's a way of saying, "Your character has chosen to undertake this action, so it has meaning, whether you succeed or fail."

Looks good. I can't wait to really put all the exploration rules to the test. I've got a Breath of the Wild-inspired game I'd like to run, and I enjoy even whole sessions of non-combat, just exploring remote locations and ancient ruins, dealing with traps and environmental hazards, and taking in the scenery.

Looks amazing! I can't wait to create a character. As Elves and Monks are my favorite, I shall be creating Jesikah, an Elf Monk, who has completed her training and now journeys the world in search of wisdom, growth, and making the world a better place through her own self-improvement and discovery.

While I have many characters I want to play, this is my favorite and the one I'm looking forward to playing most!

I think just using level as your differentiator is a better way to go here, with the appropriate social contract with your playgroup, of course. That way, no one is going to feel like one option is always better, and that you'll always be inferior, even at the same level, to the character with the more powerful ancestry.

BadHairDay wrote:

I agree, Waters. But I'm making my decisions in the next 8 or 10 weeks, so... I'm just trying to get a clue before spending what will end up being hundreds of dollars and committing to a system for a year. I would rather just stick with 3.5 and homebrew in what I need, but kids today- they always want the latest fashion. And if PF2.0 works for them and for me, then I'm willing to go with it, but I need information now to make the call...

$30 gets you all the pdf you need to run the game.

That all it is? Nice. I'm still going to see if someone can grab me a copy at GenCon, but I do all my playing online anymore, so I am very interested in knowing it's such a good price point!