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IDK I am here for those Goblin smiles. Le Gasp! Its so dangerously teethy!
On Replayables, I support. I came into PFS early in year 4 and I still haven't found all the games to from seasons before and after. Its hard to find games which are old and non-replayable. GM's are only incentivized to run them once between the drip of new content. New GMs come in and they might run it sure, but with (currently) a full 7 seasons of scenarios they are spoiled for choice while I am waiting for something specific. Of course it doesn't help that GMs do not run scenarios specifically for me, that of course I can only sign up for games I have time for and weren't already filled. So it has been tough, and I think infinite repeatables is going to help a bit here. GMs are still spoiled for choices, but now it is ALL GM's. New and Old. On people boon hunting, its not good, but I prefer that risk, and to trust the community. IF we have to take some action against (IMO) outliers, then their builds will be obvious to everyone when they play their perfectly optimized PC and so shouldn't be hard to bring up with a VO. I am more neutral on the other aspects of this post.
This idea is strange to me. I have never in all my games seen Heal Scrolls forced on the Cleric (or equivalent). Sometimes the players ask if the PC would take a scroll, other times the PC asks for scrolls, but I have never seen it be demanded. If there was ever a time a Cleric (or other) was harassed for not wanting to take scrolls that would be a shock to me. I think our community is better than that. If that has been your experience then I am sorry and disappointed in the community.
and no more cellular stimulants. Nobody wants the penalty. They get completely ignored. The spell is just straight up bad. Someone at Paizo LOVES Cellular Stimulant and they will be forced on us till we like them too.
Unsatisfying as a GM or player? Most SF2e scenarios I've run as GM lasted 3 to 4.5 hours. There are a few that are much shorter; I would recommend running those with another scenario in the same session.Unsatisfying as a player, I haven't GMed any SFS2. Maybe I've been unlucky, but with the exception of 1-01 every game that I've played has been short. I don't believe that the GMs have chosen to add anything; but then obviously I've not actually read the adventures. Sorry Drift but I have seen your posts on how you run scenarios. Its 3-4 hours at your table because you make them longer. I cannot give credit to Paizo what you are adding to the game. These are things that make you a master GM. Most of us are finishing in 2 hours, sometimes less with your average GMs who run the scenarios without more flair than "I put on a funny voice and try to answer questions in character". That has at least been my experience at my home lodge and online games through Warhorn. I believe you are in an extreme minority. As for my own opinions on length... IDK... For SFS2 I have generally been content with 2 hours, but I haven't for PFS2. My group did the strix adventure from year 7. (SPOILERS) We were done in 3 hours after accidentally doing one of the optional combats, AND voluntarily doing both the final fights. That was 2 extra combats and we didn't even meet get to 10 or 20 minutes past 3 hours. I suppose I want more content in general, so I do want longer SFS and PFS, but will at least admit the content of SFS2 has been good.
Pathfinder Provisions will be removed. After mission briefings, players will receive a bespoke selection of consumable or otherwise useful items, which must be returned upon completion of the adventure. For adventures which take place before year 8, players will each receive a level-appropriate healing potion. Oof, do not like. I've seen plenty what SFS2 has given instead of provisions. Between nothing and of questionable use. Bad call, just give provisions to SFS2
Regretfully double posting but felt it was important to acknowledge that as I am reading through the other thread now, people have mentioned the idea of how lucky will will be if the volunteers at AoN continued after this. That was important for me to say. I don't think those comments were repeated here, and I don't think I needed to read both threads before posting in one, but since I saw people were talking about it over there I wanted to give a little asterisk to my comment.
I support AoN in this. Paizo makes a great game, victories from development become soured by corporate choices. There is a saying in the videogame industry that we watch the developers build something great and then watch the BBAs up top make market decisions to ruin the work of the developers. Something I have seen skirted but not addressed in this thread is that AoN is a passion project. It stops existing without passion. People here will say that AoN is not being shut down by Paizo, and this is certainly technically true. But consider the emotional reaction of the AoN volunteers. They are choosing to comply with Paizo's orders sooner than they have to. Does this sound like a group of volunteers who are passionate to be working with Paizo, or a group which just wants to get this over with? I argue that we will be lucky if the volunteers want to put the same level of passion into this remarkable labor going forward. We will be lucky if they want to put up new content at all. I am not going to blame volunteers whos passions have been splashed by cold water that their passions have been dowsed. I can only blame the water thrower for that. I pray AoN keeps up their spirit, because it is a resource that Paizo has under evaluated in a corporate board room meeting. AoN IS how I get new people to play the game. Its an amazingly intuitive site which puts everything of pathfinder out on display for new players to get captured in. Not all value is quantitative. When the forums, discords, and reddits tell you that yes, our groups have bought books despite AoN, that AoN helped get them into the game, that AoN makes the overall game a better experience; that is as good as any market survey. Don't try to put a numerical value to it, its not quantitative. Just recognize the impact of AoN and find somewhere else to cut a cost. I am not going to stop buying Paizo products, but I felt tempted. I felt a little temptation at the last decision I didn't approve of. My camel can take more straw, but I don't know how much more. Lets not push things anymore. Come out of the boardrooms and into the discords and forums. The community wants this to be a community supported company. Every decision that is "corporate" immediately makes of think of WOTC. Maybe that is undeserved, but it is the truth.
Except the Cheliax book which is coming out after the conclusion for Hell's Destiny and acknowledges the rise of the Goblinoid nation in the Chitterwoods IS establishing the new status quo. I don't know if we have ever canonized the ending of an AP this quickly excluding anything related to the Runelords in 1e of course. We are officially establishing a new status quo for Isger going forward. We will have canon in the setting. A GM can always adjust the setting and say "in our Golarion, Eutropia lost the war, and we are dealing with a very different Taldor", but that doesn't count. Thats just GM prerogative, its not the story Paizo is going to be selling in future books and adventures. Note Pathfinder Society is ending its adventures in the Cheliaxian war. Definitive ending? No, but certainly falls into the exact mold I mentioned first. PFS's war if no one else's is dictated by Earth's fiscal year and its disappointing. If you are going to start a war take it seriously, and yes I know you, Mr. Jacobs are not in charge of PFS scenarios. I also don't want Cheliax to go away as an enemy. I am not against kick fascists, I just am less excited by a repeated theme of chipping away at Cheliax's borders (Hell's Rebels, Hellbreaker, and potentially Hell's Destiny). We need a variety of antagonists to keep games interesting. Not every group needs to be fighting demon hoards and mythical lyches. Sometimes you just just want to fight against societal wrongs that have an infernal bent. Some people will call that maintaining the status quo, but in a game setting I believe in conservation of narrative hooks. Except for PFS notably in the metaplots of Years 3, 6, and 7. Paizo didn't forget about Cheliax, and I never said they did. As stated before we are already moving on from the war in PFS come year 8. Society either doesn't have a war to fight or is capricious enough to leave it half finished. I'll leave that possibility open, but it seems plain to see Paizo is moving on. Two APs for the war, then immediately a setting book to canonize changes, and no more Society involvement as they play around with an Azlanti relic. The war's most impactful time, unfortunately, is set in a whole year and I find that very disappointing. But I did say that chipping away at Cheliax's borders was already done. I'll narrow down what I was saying to not presume Hell's Destiny's ending, though I am personally convinced. Hell's Rebel's and Hellbreakers is the same theme of being rebels in a Cheliaxian vassal and then granting it independence. Nothing wrong with liking that. Hell's Rebels is very popular why not remix it into 2e.
I am annoyed that the war seems to be ending roughly a year after it began like the world of Golarion's destiny is dictated by the market cycles of some strange world beyond their control. I also don't want Cheliax to go away as an enemy. I am not against kick fascists, I just am less excited by a repeated theme of chipping away at Cheliax's borders (Hell's Rebels, Hellbreaker, and potentially Hell's Destiny). We need a variety of antagonists to keep games interesting. Not every group needs to be fighting demon hoards and mythical lyches. Sometimes you just just want to fight against societal wrongs that have an infernal bent. Some people will call that maintaining the status quo, but in a game setting I believe in conservation of narrative hooks. Let this new world state persist, lets leave space for war stories which aren't over in a fiscal year.
My two cents is that I support this change.
Newer players have less opportunity to play older scenarios, as old GMs have probably already run it, and new GMs are spoiled for choice between new and old. We now don't have a limit on GM credit which is what I care about Relatedly myself and at least one other GM I have spoken to don't care to buy non-repeatables. They are the same cost as repeatable but less valuable as a GM (you can disagree and call me a miser is you like I won't argue but its my truth and I am sticking to it.) This makes all scenarios worth my money now and I am buying more than what comes from a Humble Bundle these days. My final point, what everyone else is worried about - players.
Would it be simpler to do something like play without advancement instead of the slow track? Once you slow track once, if you want to go back to the normal track, then you have to odd amount of XP. Instead, when you play a scenario that would level you up, you can choose not to advance and not get any credits or XP from it, but still get ACP. Next time you play, you could do the same again, or choose to advance; either way, there's no half scenario's worth of credits or XP to track. Maybe I am misremembering but isn't a rule if you do slow track in PFS2 you have to be slow tracked for the whole level? Right or wrong I wouldn't want to get no credit for an adventure, especially not a metaplot one. If a GM says "Who has played (adventure which comes before this)", I want to be able to say I have with a chronicle to prove it.
I want ancestries to get more love. Every new class scares me for how it changes the game. Thematically I would rather these have be archetypes, but I see people are really excited about the playtest material so far so I won't be a downer on it. I just think next time, after Daredevil and Slayer, we might try to shore up other areas of the game which do not see as many updates.
And as a second thought, remember that you have options a fighter and barb will never have at the cost of that -1 or -2 to hit comparatively.
For me that has always been the trade off. If you can be Huge, be Huge, its awesome. And not everyone can get huge for a focus spell! (I do wish it wasn't 2 Actions though. It does make the first turn pretty boring)
I mostly just want the forms to keep scaling. If I want to be a wolf because Untamed Form is my reflavoring of a werewolf PC, then I would like to be able to commit the form without it eventually having a hard stop on progression. I get wanting to do some magic in Untamed Form because I too try to make that my first move in combat and end the day with way to many unspend spellslots, but that would be to powerful so instead I would ask for a shifter class or shifter like class arch for the druid which becomes like the non-magic shapeshifter.
The theme is that it is the wilds of darkland. It exists as a space which only has hints of the abomination vaults above and the empty vault below. Though the open spaces seem empty you are making very frequent random encounter rolls. So while the space around the PCs seems empty, there is always something on the hunt which could ambush them around any corner or from any dense patch of mushrooms. Things are very close together, if you want to space things out, I say go for it. Its already one of the biggest tactical grid maps I have seen in TTRPGs. So I didn't change anything distance wise, but I get it. Its not the Drow and Urdefhan at war, thats to grand. Its two bad neighbors who skirmish with each other when they meet in the Hunting Grounds. While they do hate each other this is actual just normal behavior regardless. For Belcorra I had her hunting them. For me the basins were where she learns about the PCs progress then takes the initiative. All she has is time on her hands, she might as well be actively hunting them. So put the fights anywhere including and even maybe preferably in a location she hasn't planned. And changes, I don't have anything more interesting than just adjusting for the group. I've run this twice and one group got a Legacy and one group got a Remaster Golem in the vault. I just checked if they had spells that would work. And I made Belcorra mythic to be a grander encounter, but at the same time made the Roseguard items relics which gave PCs a power boost against her, again just to make each encounter a grand spectacle.
I never thought the remaster needed to be as rushed as it is. Yes the OGL crisis gave Paizo a reasonable scare, but the backlash got WOTC to back down, for now. It has been 3 years or so since the Crisis and WOTC hasn't tried that stunt again. That is not to say they never will again, but it is to say that when it became clear WOTC lost that fight against its own community, it should have been a sign for Paizo to slow down, recognize the remaster didn't need to be so rushed and to do more proofreading and playtesting. Hindsight being 20/20 we know they had the time. I would hazard to say we knew we had the time then as WOTC wasn't going to try the again while the community was still fuming. Yes I think there has been a down turn in quality and I wish they would just slow the hell down.
B8 the maze in the sewers of xer are the A and B walls in the north that are adjacent to each other labelled the wrong way round? Because otherwise you can't get to the B button to lower the walls because you need to get through B walls to get to the B button. Unless I'm missing something.This is an error that crept through on the map that we missed clearing up, alas. The wall behind the southernmost "B" location should be empty, allowing passage through that area. I am sorry but what does this mean? The Southern most B wall is the wall to the C switch. How does that get us into the north west corner? What does it mean the wall is "empty"
The point of a thread like this is to discuss if something needs to be homebrewed and the best ideas for a homebrew. Lots of GMs will make their decision without ever coming to this thread, but it exists anyways for those that do, and for us to vent a little on what is (some of us but not all believe) is a silly rule. As for SFS2, it has already been a little bit of a mess. Like we just have to ignore the fact that in Frozen Moon we all die because environmental protections don't cover this kind of cold, and its not till late levels that we can. Its a small example, but it goes to show this roll out is to fast for the designers and the scenario writers to get on the same page.
While I agree that casters feeling compelled to be Key Attribute 4 and Dex 3 so they don't die is to rigid, its also something that I've already accepted since it is all over PF2e. I definitely misunderstood your intentions for Medium Armor, but I still believe this doesn't actually make FORTRUN more durable, only opening options. A Light Armor FORTRUN can take Hardlight Series (or similar) and have full AC with only a -1 to Stealth, Piloting, and Thievery. Not great, but better than a -2 to those skills from Medium armor. If you avoid the -2 from Medium it means being MAD as I mentioned before and I am not sure how appealing that will actually be for players. They won't be DPS++ and the stat is -2 to the martial they are standing next to so they won't be using that Strength for anything else except Athletics rolls. I just think there are better options than opening up the Medium armor options, but I am also resigned to the formula that Casters get light (if any) armor and you choose a skill penalty or a suboptimal AC.
I do think it was as easy as having two classes, because the two oracles share names and themes but are very distinct. Legacy Oracle which can only take Oracle feats from APG, and Remaster which can only take Oracle feats in PC2. It was a choice to reuse names which counts as an overriding errata onto the class. The mysteries and curses could have had different names to preserve the uniqueness of Legacy content. Or they could have more simply not say anything we rename is changed forever. And you're right, Unicore, this broken promise probably wouldn't sting if Oracle got Alchemist treatment. Alch cannot go back to Legacy either, which might suck except every post I've seen and ever Alch player I have talked to thinks Remaster Alch is a 100% improvement. You are right that the difference is that there are some of us who despise remaster Oracle, and we don't think the change forced in PFS was reasonable after we got a promise. Call me old fashioned, but if you can't stand by your words, don't say them. It is easier to be silent.
You are losing sight of what Tridus is actually saying. The errata is one thing, it changes a class but this is supposed to be okay because legacy characters were promised to always be viable. If the player wanted to be a remaster Oracle, they could have, but they didn't want to and we were told that was going to be okay. Then we find out PFS-Paizo is breaking its promise. Legacy Oracle is not playable, then the official response from the representative from the company was frankly insulting. I didn't leave the game, but I am a lot less excited about everything remaster now and I haven't bought a rulebook since PC2. Am I alone in this? Maybe, but it only being a small problem doesn't make it okay to dismiss.
This suggests the fix is just a manual button to turn on the EP or to adjust the sensor to search not for a vacuum but for a lack of breathable air. This is literally what a smoke detector does. Its extremely simple technology and if corps won't supply it, it should be the easiest and cheapest jailbreak of a system possible and would dramatically improve the effectiveness of EP
Well it doesn't sound like she plays SFS then, ironic. Not everything in the errata threads is a five alarm emergencies. So far nothing has destroyed the game, but there is a difference between a small grammatical change and a core feature of a class. You literally can't homebrew everything.
That is a glaring indictment on the company which cannot manage their own rules team to come to a simple consensus. They can write books which work more than they fail, but they cannot settle simple questions? And the number of spells a simple question to answer should absolutely be the highest priority. It is the easiest question with one of the biggest impacts. VTTs are easy to homebrew, I don't know where that idea came from , but PFS is impossible to homebrew. This makes PFS games worse because we can't just say its okay we will homebrew this. You have to play what is written in the book. The books says two different things. This creates table variance which isn't going to be okay with Oracle players. Also excusing missed errata with "the GMs will handle it" is the attitude that a lot of us fled away from in the dnd5e community. To not have an easily understood default is a negative against the game that makes it harder for me to sell this game to my dnd friends if it isn't true that it is a game you can find a reliable ruling in.
As a GM I wouldn't want loans because I wouldn't know how to handle it. It would be a sudden surge of money which might get them an item beyond their level which could then break the balance. I suppose not every group has a problem with that, but what about repayment? Adventures are usually pretty short experiences anyways so will we ever expect a loan to be meaningfully paid off? Is it one big purse and one interest payment before the campaign ends? If you don't pay your loan do you start sending collections to the PCs? If they cheat the bank would they kill the collectors too? Does the Bank of Abadar back its loans with absurdly powerful angels? Overall its more than I want to deal with. A piece of paper saying the PC is good for X amount of money though? I have no problem with that. Coins weigh so little, and platinum makes even big sums manageable that this seems more narrative than anything else. You want to have this be a think in our game it is easy enough I don't even think about it. On the FVTT I make a new treasure in your sheet and call it "Bank Bill for X amount" and then call it done. Again, coin weight is so small this really is just a narrative thing for a character. I believe there is even a "recent" adventure with something like the former if you want to stress canonicity. IIRC Night of the Grey Death has an encounter with a banker who promises you a reward but can only pay it out in what is effectively a check.
I hope that that line from the blog post becomes true. So far there is still no level 10+ content which isn't homebrew or playtest. As selfish as it is I am drawn to the incentive of glyphs and chronicles. I want to play APs, but if I have to pick between ones that give chronicles and GM credits vs ones that don't I am going to pick the former every time. There is enough PF2e content which I know is worth playing and will even give me a little reward for doing so that I am not going to even look at Murder in Metal City, Guilt of the Graveworld, and everything after it if they cannot do the same. I would be okay with it doing nothing more than XP and Credits, plus GM credit if GM. I would like to play more Starfinder so that is all I really need. If there is anyone else like me who would buy more SF2e if it felt as incentivized as PF2e, then this could be a serious marketing mistake for a game that really needs to put its best foot forward.
Unfortunately, with all the old reviews gone from the new store, I have no way to see what high-level scenarios are unloved or why. Is there something about the high-level scenarios that people didn't like? Monkhound already made 2 good points. I would say though that at this level the complexity of events gets out of hand. This has two effects, first there are more editting errors than normal. Another is that the scenarios take a buttload of time. These are not scenarios you fit into the four hour mold. They will go over because everything is even at its most basic a big bucket of hit points for each fight and usually overly elaborate subsystems. I want to stress that its not all high level, and this exists in lower levels too, but its so much of the 9+ content that it kind of does feel like all of them even when it isn't.Apart from that they do tell interesting stories (at least imo), its just mechanically they become to much of a slog to enjoy. That might be anecdotal, but it is what I have experienced and heard from others I have played with. If nothing else its true to me. I would be happy to be wrong and really overblowing the problems.
"I don't follow PF2E news closely, but for SF2E, scenarios are capped at 10th level. The reason given seems ot be to address exactly the problem you are talking about." We shouldn't need a level cap this low when currently we can start at level 7 and all scenarios are repeatable. Sorry for stating the obvious but higher level tables are hard to play because there are only so many scenarios which can get you to that level. In Pf2e there are enough repeatable scenarios to take you to level 6. This is nowhere near enough. 1-4 repeatable are abundant. Getting to level 5 is easy but to get higher than 6 you really have to hope a 5-8 you haven't played before is offered up. As you get to 9-12 it really is a desert. I see a lot of Replays spent here on Warhorn because its just a requirement to play. On warhorn I see unloved scenarios get filled with a huge waitlist because they are high level and its a rare chances to bring out of retirement. That is all to say people want high level content and it is madness that when we get the shortcut and the endless repeatable that they put the level cap so low, then blame it on us for not being able to fill the same number of tables was 9-12s as we do with 1-4s.
But flight is an extremely powerful adventuring ability. The reasoning falls apart when we remember how useful in exploration and combat flight is. Even if a level 1 Strix adventurer has a max to hit of +3, they would ultimately be doing better than other level 1 adventurers.
Setting Magus aside, the problem with it is that the Dedication is way out of whack with other Dedication feats. It gives you a LOT for a single feat, including the signature ability of the class.Is it the signature ability of the class? Ultimately they're just focus spells. Unleash would be the better comparison point as a unique feature that can't be poached. That it's lackluster is unfortunate, but that doesn't change that it is a unique action locked to the class that can't be poached. I don't think there is anything about Unleash Psyche which couldn't be poached if Paizo wanted it to be part of an archetype. So it isn't really different from Amp. Since UP sucks and Amp doesn't people use AMP, focusing on it while forgetting about UP entirely. I have a Psychic in my AoA game which has never UP but Amps every fight. We are starting the 4th book soon, that is how little UP matters. It is not the signature ability which people want; If Psychic dedication came with UP and not AMP people still wouldn't use UP.
I think we can agree Trick Magic Item should be a baseline feature that didn't require a skill feat, so personally I wouldn't really put it as a benefit of spellcasting dedications even if it technically is. Similar to how rogues and a few other classes were the only ones that could disarm magic traps in PF1e. If thats true they missed their chance with Tailwind. They had the chance to fix the spell as a remaster erata or remaster new spell and they didn't so they must not have been to bothered by it. Not like most buff spells weren't short length anyways. Most buff spells that came out at the same time were 1 minute. Some were 10, rarely more than that.
I played this scenario with the author. I probed the author about going with the Functionary. He was pretty clear we die. Which isn't the best because thats not written in the scenario, but there is the "word of god". Do to the nature of the scenario your group might be a little mad at you for missing what happens next. (I will say no more)
To add to this with my own military experience, firing to suppress and firing to kill are so drastically different if we are using that as a metric for how it makes sense in SF2e then it would also make sense that Auto-Fire (to be specific to the kind of weapon talked about above) should give your enemies a +4 to their reflex save, though apply Suppressed to all but the Crit Success. Spraying and Praying doesn't get you the results that we see in SF2e. It also isn't 2x number of targets for ammo expended either. I think Paizo is wrong to not factor in training to Area/Auto weapons, but as was mentioned above they are committed to it, so get used to it.
I still run legacy wizard in a home game and never remade my legacy wizard to remaster in PFS. I don't care if the new schools are fun to read they aren't fun to play. Any player could have written about their school in a backstory. Paizo didn't actually add anything but ideas. Wizards needed feats, not schools. Some new thesis ideas would be interesting, but at this point I just want all the thesises (thesi?) as part of the wizard chassis. I want them to have more skills with extra improvements (less than rogue/investigator, bet more than everyone else), I want a lot of things I am not going to get. What I never wanted was a restrictive like of school spells with a theme. At this point I just want the magical schools back with the freedom to take anything from a big list. At least I can still have that in my home games, and the next time a level 7-10 or 9-12 PFS scenario is being run.
And to be clear: curses providing both benefits and drawbacks made each stage of those curses really messy and difficult for many players to parse. I can fully understand why Paizo wanted to rework that and make curses purely detrimental as their name would suggest. However, I also think the designers gave us the solution to that problem when they baked curse scaling into cursebound feats: by making those feats scale based on how cursed you are, you get to draw benefits from your curse in a manner that is not only much easier to understand, but also easier to mold onto the mechanics of each feat. I never understood why people didn't like a class from the Advanced Players Guide was more complex. This was kind of the point. Swash was also more difficult to play for needing to juggle your Panache, Finisher, and applicable skill. It was nice this wasn't removed just made easier with Bravado. Why did Oracle have to have its complexity neutered? I never thought these were classes for first time players. I didn't try Oracle till I had some game experience under my belt. And I loved it. It wasn't stronger for being complex, but it was different and gave me a lot to think about when I wanted that as a player. I would have loved some extra attention to the Legacy Oracle in the remaster so the weaknesses were addressed and brought into parity with the stronger parts. Teridax, your ideas in the next paragraph are great. I would have been happy with the curses benefit being put on steroids is the curse negatives were as debilitating like Ancestry. If they wanted to add more spell slots, thats nice too.
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