My Saturday night game ran with only the rogue's medicine skills until level 9. At which point they got some supplemental magical healing in a new party member, but it's the medicine checks that still do most of the party healing.
I'd rule no. A "paralyzed" character has no muscle control and was quite possibly caught in an excited state (combat) and would have been using their mouth to take in more air meaning it would be open. The act of holing one's breath is partially sealing apertures, and partially pressurizing the system to keep out invasive fluids. Being paralyzed means that such muscle control is unavailable and even if they were to stop breathing (assuming they could) there's nothing keeping the cube from invading through the mouth or sinuses. That kicks in the drowning rules. Which are fine, outside of going unconscious. I ignore that part, paralyzed or not.
Bulk is my least favourite thing about 2.0 At first I liked it for simplifying things, but once we dug in it seems to actually over complicate things as bulk is largely subjective and gets even more so as things get larger. Now for the issue at hand, have you ever tried to throw a feather? We can pretend that the lifting belt is negating mass, this means that there's no inertia to keep the object moving. The instant the object is released, it regains it's mass, but at the same instant it's inertia is tested against air pressure and it instantly stops, and then gravity pulls it to the ground. Hopefully not on your foot.
I brought this thread up tonight at our table, they were aghast at the idea of being handed multiple Hero Points per session. I left out the spat between Ravingdork and myself, and that's been handled via PM. I've long been a fan of fate points, but taken in a form closer to the old Warhammer fantasy. Where you get X amount for the life of your character. They were more powerful and could be used on anything, but you had a finite number of them, which made them valuable. Thus the one per session isn't in itself a huge stretch for me or my groups, but we all find the idea of multiple per session would lessen the risk/reward of their character's actions. That said, I'm still running a homebrew (a converted homebrew DnD campaign in Greyhawk) and it seems as if the AP's are balanced around the use of them to keep the party going from what I see on the forums. This may be where there's a disconnect. How many people using hero points conservatively, like myself, are running homebrews where we control all the encounters vs those who are running the AP's? I kinda like Kainite101's hero point pool idea: We changed it to a shared pool using poker chips on table in a pile next to the map and started "remembering" to use them and also make it likely someone would use it to do something heroic, rather than hoard that only point for a bad save roll or getting crit hit... And sometimes RNG is just nasty to someone all night, and the blessed player never needs them, so sharing the pool helps out on that for us anyways... I may try implementing this, as the party gets into more heroic grounds and the costs of failure and the danger of sudden death increases.
Going UP level is hugely punishing in PF2 where in 5e it means next to nothing barring a couple exceptions. With out doing real math you could easily look at PF2 scaling as +/- 10% combat effectiveness, where for each level of difference, penalize the underdog and award the favourite. Level -1 or lower are filler, no real threat on their own Equal Level are interesting fights which may take some condideration. Level +1 is going to give them a run for it Level +2 should be limited to Boss level fights Level +3 or higher is an Endcap fight, where the party goes in prepared and knowing EXACTLY what they're doing and party members still get killed. I ran into this immediately after converting my current campaign over to PF2. I wound up completely scrapping planned encounters and changing the dynamics of fights on the fly just to avoid TPKs. With my players there seems to be a lack of interest in creating/obtaining their own specific magical gear/buffs. They just aren't used to the idea of being that proactive since they mostly only know 5e and being locked into 5e modules at that. This makes some encounters even more difficult since they haven't taken gear options that I think the game assumes they have. I'm sure some of the encounter issues in the first printed adventures fall into the same learning curve. (I locked down a party of 5 9th level characters with a single 10th level necromancer on a nightmare this weekend. Nearly taking out 2 of them even after they nuked the nightmare in 2 rounds)
We could also go back to having non humans be their own class, so every elf is a fighter/mage capped at level 12. Every Halfling is a thief. Every Dwarf is a axe and shield fighter. It seems a silly complaint to knock additional classes. They'll all have multiclass dedications if you want to dip. Variety is fun, if you don't want to take advantage of it just play a vanilla fighter. |
