Kringress's page

Paizo stated that the rules were backwards compatible for 2.0 and now you are FORCING us to purchase the re-master? WTH is wrong with you! I am a VO that will not even mention this s#!& to my players. If you don't like it I do not CARE.

I have many players that will look at PAIZO and tell them Nope, done with this s&*% and leave the game and society if we force them to purchase the new books (which happened with the change from 1e to 2e), while stating the rules are on Archives of Nethis is not an option.

Please change your policy before it becomes a problem.

Here is what is needed:
Rules on refocus, Recall Knowledge, and Monster Abilities. Other than that there is no need to re-do characters unless the player wants to build under the new rules.

First off, I hope that this is a very sucessful launch of a great product. However I will not pre-order anything for this system, I will wait until it comes to my local game store, so I can do a read through of the rules. This had better impress a lot of people, otherwise you are going to have the exact same drop that you had for playtest except it will be for the new rules.

First is player participation, We started with 15 people at the beginning, we are down to 5 people right now. We lost most people to not liking playtest rules or losing interest.

Attacks, if I were to create a party right now I would have 3 barbarians/fighters and a cleric. Only once was anything written for a dedicated rogue. Spell casters other than clerics need not even apply. Spell casting other than healing needs a total rethink/write. After second level there is no need to have a rogue (better off having a cleric taking thief skills). As far as anyone can tell there is no niche for anything that is anything other than Barbarians, Fighters, Paladins, Clerics. You do not need anything else. This is a FUNDAMENTAL problem, and a bad design flaw.

The only time we had more than one spell caster was for the third chapter and we had 2 clerics who turned the fights into snooze fests with so many channels it was not funny.

Overall I would rate up to Mirrored Moon as the first chapter was interesting, and the others as have a cleric with a bunch of fighter types to absorb and deal damage. It has become how magical is your weapon vs how many hit points do the monsters have.

Just looking through the scenario how the heck is anyone supposed to get more than 3 RP and that at the very end? Most of the combat scenarios we were able to negotiate out of (Cleric 18 CHA). The ones we could not talk our way out of were dispatched with Barbarian/Cleric two hand weapons and a semi effective rogue. The Rogue did no where near the damage that the Cleric did.

Anyone know why even the most expensive non special material armor is 2/3rds the cost of the same level of bracers of Armor?

Also on the Ring of Wizardry 1 you get 2 1st level and one Zero? What the heck, how would you even put in a cantrip into the ring and could you cast it like the other cantrips?

Here is a suggestion that I think will work.

You have 7 permanent magic item slots. These can be used for any non-one shot consumable items (ammunition/potions/oils/scrolls). You get a slot at these levels: 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, and 10. Additionally one half of each bonus in Charisma will either add or subtract a slot. (+2 Charisma will get an additional slot, +4 Charisma will get 2 slots, etc.)

This would allow for 1-2 weapons, armor, shield, and 3-4 pieces of other gear.

For the most part Paizo did a very good job on the design of the rule book, I think there a few organizational changes that need to be made and the dropping of Resonance.

Let’s look at organization. I would move Advancement and Options to right after Classes and change the name of the Spells chapter to Magic, with breaking out Powers and Spells into two different listings. And finally moving Alchemical items from the GM section to the Equipment section.

In the Character Creation section I would take and create a single level up chart that can be used by most classes, and have any unique features placed in the class description. I do not need a second chart that shows the alphabetical listings of the level feats. There are not that many feats that keeping track of them should be that hard.

I love the encounter modes. With the three action economy for encounter mode, the action economy helps move the encounters, but it does power down melee after tenth level. This is due to shield being a separate action instead of an automatic action.

Explorer Modes needs some work, but overall a great idea. Explorer Mode is where I would assign a 10 Skill check for how people are exploring, instead of secret GM checks. Doing this will decrease the time for a GM to handle stuff, and keep the players happy.

With the spells please change the superscript from H or U to the 2 letter College abbreviation. As a caster I need to know the college well before I need to know if it can be heightened. In the spell/power description the Trait Word box needs to be consistent with Alchemical Items. People will look at the Trait and if it is not in the box but in the description, they will say the spell description does not apply.

Resonance. Again a solution looking for a problem. With the removal of the protection items and placing protection into armor, the only character that Resonance applies to is the poor Alchemist and his bombs. For the most part Paizo fixed the wand issue with dropping wand charges by a fifth but only cutting the cost by a third, and by making Trick Magic Item a feat that you have to have training in the skill you want to use. It is cheaper, easier, and more convenient to have scrolls and potions than a wand. In our play tests we have only run out of resonance three times, twice on the Alchemist, and once on the Cleric until the cleric figured out that Combat Heal is a great downtime heal feat.

Lastly the character sheet itself, Remove the T,E,M,L circles and just put in a line for the -2, 0, 1, 2, or 3. This will help anyone who is running the pregenerated characters. This will also save room on the sheets that could be used for other things.

I posted most of this on the Facebook page, but have done some editing to hopefully make my concerns better

My impressions so far in Three Parts with the forth part being placed to go over the design of the rule book.

1. Character creation and Advancement makes blah characters.

After creating characters for PF2 and doing level ups all characters look the same. There is no room in the character creation process for any real uniqueness. To give an example:

At the end of character creation you will usually have 18, 16, 12, 12, 10, 10. This is due to the rule on page 18 on ability boosts “When you apply multiple ability boosts at the same time. You must apply each one to a different score.” With this you will have these types of scores:
Prime Stat: Secondary Stat, Save, Save, INT, CHA.
Level 1: 18, 16, 12, 12, 10, 10
Level 5: 19, 18, 14, 14, 10, 10
Level 10: 20, 19, 16, 16, 10, 10
Level 15: 21, 20, 18, 16, 12, 10
Level 20: 22, 20, 18, 18, 14, 12

Typical Dwarf Cleric
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA
Level 1: 12 12 12 10 18 14
Level 5: 12 14 14 10 19 16
Level 10: 12 16 16 10 20 18
Level 15: 14 16 18 12 21 18
Level 20: 16 18 18 14 22 18

You will have at 20th level 4-6 18’s and there is no way of avoiding that. All your characters will have these stats. Blah, blah, blah. There is no variety, no creativity, no fun. This is also a big problem with Starfinder.

My proposed fix:
Change the 4 individual boosts to 8 points that let me put those points where I want them, and then change the level increases from +2 per stat under 18 to +2 per stat under 14 and anything above a 14 is +1. This should keep the base about the same but the increases will be vastly different.

Part II of Character Creation

Ancestry, Background, Class:

I LIKE IT.

Ancestry, by putting in feats you get to create a semi unique person that has things that the will do differently than anyone else. The only advice I can give here is to keep all the races at the same point buy system and have different feats that they can take.

Background, having a Lore and a Skill that starts at 1st level that people having a day job check on is great.

Class, is a good grouping of skills and feats that define those classes. Individual feats and class issues will need to be addressed, but in general the only big problem is with the casters.

First. having Expert, Master, and Legendary all jammed together at level 12, 16, 19. This would be better for all if they were spread out such as 6, 12, 19. This allows for better to hits and saves though the entire progression getting closer to a 50% to hit and to save.

Second, go to a 1, 2, 3 progression for spells and bring back the casting stat bonus spells. This will smooth casting progression and with the casting stat boost you will end most of the gripes from people who want to play casters. This way you get rid of the last 3 levels of stagnation.

Third, have fun.

Part III of Character Creation, The Final Chapter:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good: General Feats. Nicely grouped, well placed and thought out. I may have a problem with a couple of the feats, but overall everything here looks very good.

The Bad: Skills. The grouping and consolidation of skills are good, along with what you can do trained and untrained. The very bad part is the automatic increases per level weather or not you are trained in them.

As an example, there is no way in heck that I am going to be able to compete with a trained person in any field that they are trained in unless I get lucky. Can I be trained in that field, yes. But will I know as much as an expert, master, or legend? Probably not.

Here is my proposed fix:

1. Unless you are trained in the skill you get a D20 – 2 + your skill modifier. This is no matter your level, the best you can get is an 18+modifier.

2. Bring back the skill points. As written you have to increase all the skills every level. Changing to Skill Points is not hard and helps keep characters unique. This will allow for greater role play opportunities and keep level bloat down.

3. Use the skill boosts to add Expert, Master and Legendary for the bonuses, and maybe additional things that you can do. This will give you 9 increases with maybe 3 skills in Legendary status.

4. Lore with the fixes above will be much better because you will have to train in a lore to be able to fully understand it.

The good part here is the Critical Failure, keep that it will make people who don’t have a reason to roll not roll.

The Ugly:

Whoever did the equipment section needs to re-look at this entire section. This is a solution is search of a problem. Go back to the weight system, it is better and cleaner because you still have to do the addition. Lets start with Armor, then weapons and finally gear.

Armor: All armor should have at least 1 bulk, (just the weight and how much sweat they generate), and remove the fragile and clumsy qualities from the armor. All of the metal armor can have the noisy quality. Why buy Full Plate as written? It costs more than Half Plate and is worse in all respects. You could have just imported the 1E armor, and added TAC to the armor.

Weapons: Going from one handed to two handed should just increase 1 dice, a D6 to D8, D8 to D10, etc. this should be changed in order to distinguish from 2 handed designed weapons. And give Short, Long, Bastard, and Great Swords versatile P/S.

Now to the worst section. Gear. This section is so bad there are no words to describe it. Personally I would just cut and paste the gear from the Core Rule book with the removal of the Alchemical section.

To show how bad this is, an 8 Str Halfling can carry 19 backpacks (each backpack is 1L). Each Backpack holds 49 backpacks (4 Bulk or 49L and 9-), with each backpack holding 499 pints of oil (1 – per pint, 10 – per L) in them, or about 24,460 pounds per backpack. Or at full load 464,740 pounds, or ~ 58,000 gallons, or about 6 tanker trailers of liquid. This does not include what can be done with belt pouches. But I read that the GMs will check it and enforce it. Yeah uh huh, pull the other one it has bells on. Some GMs will, but a lot will not even look at the sheet.

I can understand trying to change armor and weapons to work within a new system, but most of this is the current Pathfinder system. Paizo should have just put in the old values and added TAC and the minor changes to the weapons. As written the changes to gear are so bad that you need to go back to the old system.

I can understand wanting to make an easy system for gear, but when looking at the rules Paizo is putting the pressure on the GM to make sure things are ok. This is very bad idea because you can get different GMs to make different rulings. One GM could totally redo the list and state this is what you are using, while another GM would only look at weapons and armor. For future PFS you are going to have to have hard written rules on bulk.

According to the current rules I can carry 19 backpacks with a 4 strength and be in light load, with each backpack carrying 50 gallons of oil. This is not the only issue that is there, but is one of the worst. Other problems are things such as arrows taking 1L, they may be light in weight, but they take up a lot of space. Arrows and a Quiver should be looking at 2-3L each.

Personally I would rather go back to PF1 rules for bulk because weight is a huge consideration not just space taken up.

Thanks

Looking at the Alchemist bombs they have the Descriptor Splash, but in the traits section of Acid Splash you have Acid, Cantrip and Evocation. Only when you look at the spell description do you have splash. So does Acid Splash get the 5' radius splash damage? Please put Splash in the traits section. We are getting into an argument over weather it applies or not.

This is very confusing to me:

20 Ranks: If you attack after successfully using Stealth, your target is denied its Dexterity bonus against all attacks that you make before the beginning of your next turn.

Reading this, you only get the first sneak attack as a precision attack, and all others are regular attacks. Is there an errata that was put out to change the core rule book? Then only Flanking Sneak attacks can get multiple sneak attacks. I looked through the forums and did not see where this would be at.