LarsC's page

Hello! My friends and I have started a new actual play podcast where we are playing through Abomination Vaults.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tabletop-gold/id1574594922

I hope you enjoy the show! In-keeping with Abomination Vaults functioning as an "on-ramp" for new Pathfinder 2E players, our group has a mix of experienced and newer players. Our goal is to 1) put on a great show, 2) demystify the system for people who are more experienced with other games.

I love this system so much and I LOVE this Adventure Path. I hope some of that energy comes through to listeners in our show.

It's been a lot of fun to make! Please check it out!

Honestly, I feel like the process of leveling up and adding feats to your build feels a whole lot like the desired inventor aesthetic the OP is describing.

The way I play games like this, I'm constantly trying to refine and adjust the quality of my build over the course of a campaign, and I think the way the feats add on and modify the Inventor class's innovation already captures the exact feel you're looking for, on a macro level.

In seriousness, the only PF1 class that fits the name that we don't have in some form is the Arcanist, so it's that, something new, or something renamed.

Gun Doood?

The other issue really is that paizos adventures really need a difficulty select option. The base encounter design system assumes a competent, tactically minded party with some synergy in party composition and the system mastery to use it. Which is to say it's somewhere between Normal and Hard mode.

Really should have been tuned to a party of newbies who aren't really sure how to work together or Easy mode. With plenty of repeated suggestions to the GM on how to increase the difficulty once the players start to get the hang of the game.

In my game, I found that DUMPING hero points on the party has been a good fix for this. The math stays the same, so the monsters are just as scary, and there's a gameplay system that they get to engage with to feel like they're doing well because of their good choice to spend a hero point. And I give the points away when people do specific tactically beneficial things within the system that they might not otherwise think to do based on our years of playing 5e.

As they're getting more comfortable in the system, I'm pulling back the hero points, and they're almost not noticing that the difficulty is increasing, because they're naturally doing the things I previously incentivized them to do.

That being said, I am a bit confused on how "worn tools" would work. Does this require you to have an actual container for them? Do Bandoliers and Hip Pouches and other similar containers serve as receptacles for tools to be worn in?

According to the errata, bandoliers, hip pouches, etc... don't exist anymore. You don't mechanically need to call out HOW you're wearing the tools. You just get to wear up to 2 bulk of tools.

Frames Janco wrote:

So Grapple not being an attack roll anymore means that it does not suffer MAP on the roll, but would increase it for the next action?

If that’s how it reads maneuvers just became god tier third actions and feats like combat grab were nerfed a lot by proxy so I have to assume that’s not the case.

I’m noticing that the side bar on page 447 still specifically mentions that the grapple action and things like it still have MAP affect their rolls.

In that sidebar specifically, the use of the terms “strike” and “attack roll” really seem inconsistent to me now. I’m not sure what was intended by the clarification about non-strike attack actions and attack rolls was, but I think where we are now is significantly less clear than where we were before this errata.

(And a whole other argument of Making the Kobolds protesting being underpaid unreasonable and extremely homicidal at the flip of a switch is a perverse mockery, especially given what’s going on now in real life.)

This was the single biggest problem I had with this whole book. I can ask my players to suspend disbelief about the treasure stuff and it's not a big deal, but the labor stuff in the second chapter nearly punted us out of this AP. I tried to move us through this section as quickly as possible, relying on a lame sort of "both sides are bad" resolution that I'm sort of ashamed of, honestly.