Got through Book 4 of Jade Regent. I made the tedious final dungeon better by removing half the battles. As a change from linear dungeoneering, I'm thinking of trying to sandbox book 5 by giving the party the general goal of building support for their cause, and I'll improvise ways to make use of the source material provided to work with their plans.
Your DM might be one of those people who thinks puzzles in RPGs are a bad idea.
Katanas are much more average than that. Much, much more average than that. I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine katana in Japan for 486,000 Yen (that's about $4,000) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 hours now. I can now cut meat with my katana. Japanese smiths spend anything up to three months working on a single katana and fold it up to sixteen times to produce adequate blades known to mankind. Katanas are not quite as sharp as European swords, nor as hard for that matter. It's entirely possible that anything a longsword can cut through, a katana can cut through. I'm pretty sure a katana could eventually bisect a man with simple horizontal slashes. Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered conquering Japan? That's right, they were too far away from each other. Even in World War II, American soldiers targeted the men with the katanas first because they were a sign of rank. So what am I saying? Katanas are simply a sword that the world has seen, and thus, require stats in the P2e system. Here is the stat block I propose for Katanas: Price: 2 gp; Damage: 1d6 S; Bulk: 1; Hands: 1; Category: Martial; Group: Sword
Now that seems a lot representative of the cutting power of Katanas in real life, don't you think? tl;dr = Katanas need to do adequate damage in P2e, see my stat block.
Update on Jade Regent campaign: Made it to book 2 of Jade Regent. The party raided 'the farmhouse' and used various spells and intimidation methods to gain an advantage in a situation where they were outnumbered, and ended up forcing the enemy to back down. They've gained the info they needed to proceed, but it's made things kind of awkward: the PCs were probably supposed to murder them all. Now they've (a) missed out on a ton of loot, and (b) left witnesses who can identify them, which means they're going to get assassins coming after them. Fortunately, I was very generous with the 'custom loot' you're supposed to give the party in book 1, so they're not going to be too far behind on party wealth. Maybe I'll have some wealthy assassins show up... Occasionally I have all four players show up the same week. That's always exciting. The rest of the time, I'm glad I can throw in an NPC like Kelda Oxgutter to help out. (A shame the 'main' NPCs are too high level to routinely participate like this. It makes it hard to develop them as characters when they're rarely around.) Unlike the first time I ran this campaign with a more progress-focused group that blasted through everything so fast the enemy never had a chance to respond, I've taken the time to read all about Kalsgard and think of ways to incorporate the setting. Maybe they'll challenge the High Skald to a poetry contest / rap battle...
The Magus doesn't get an extra attack. I get to cast a spell, and the spell can allow him to make an attack. But generally, when he does that he trades a touch attack for a normal AC attack. It's been a few years, but surely a level 5 Magus using Spellstrike and Spell Combat at the same time can cast Shocking Grasp and attack twice with the same weapon, where a level 5 Fighter would only attack once. That sounds a lot like an extra attack to me.
Maybe Dervish Dance was the bigger flawed design. Why gate Dex-to-damage behind something so specific? Just call it Greater Weapon Finesse and allow it to apply to any light or one-handed slashing or piercing weapon when your other hand is empty. At least we'd get maguses with a variety of weapons and deities.
GM: "You failed your Will save. You now think this wizard is your best friend."
I don't like to trick my players into putting on helmets of opposite alignment, because I don't like taking away their agency. But if they did, I'd expect them to act completely differently, same as if they were hit by 'Charm Person' or 'Dominate Person' or 'Hold Person', or turned into a rampaging werewolf. The GM can't (usually) control the player character, but if the player tries to control their own character in a way that constitutes blatant metagaming or similar, the GM can tell them to stop doing that or leave the game. Or turn the character into an NPC and have the player make a new character.
A good and pure character accidentally reading the book of the damned will turn evil. The same character can then turn back to good if they keep on going in their merry way ignoring all the bad stuff they just read. Ah, the power of bad role-playing: GM: "Dark magic suffuses your very soul. You were Neutral? You are now Evil. You despise all that is good and pure and yearn only to hurt and kill."
My experience of seeing a strength-based Magus using a one-handed weapon is that after a few levels it did more damage than the average martial while having far more versatility and if they cast any defensive spells, more defensibility too. Low level Pearls of Power allow them to keep on doing doing their basic damaging spells across multiple encounters.
It's pretty generous giving 5 out of 5 for a "skeleton of an adventure". Prospective GMs should be aware that Book 3 as written is a bunch of caravan encounters that don't really work, plus a couple of decent mini-adventures. If you get good results, it's because of the work you put in.
I think there's too much economic realism in this thread. The genre is fantasy. Could it work? Yes. Are there cheaper ways to achieve the same thing with magic? Yes, but there are lots of things that seem like they wouldn't be needed in a world with magic. Teleportation is better than sailing ships. Castles don't work if an invisible flying wizard can drop fireballs on you. We usually ignore those problems, because we like sailing ships and castles. If you need a justification, you can always make something up:
Re: Balance in 5e. I think 5e has a good tolerance for imbalance. The game tends to be loaded towards the PCs in ways that the average person doesn't necessarily notice. For example, you get hit, fall to 0HP (because there are no negative HPs), then someone in the party uses 'Healing Word' to bring you back to 1HP so you can stand up (which doesn't provoke an attack) and keep on fighting. This makes fights that seem hard to win actually quite hard to lose. You can have a weak enemy seem like a threat, because they do significant damage, even though they have no real chance of winning. You can have a bunch of incompetent players use terrible combat strategy and still win, when they'd have TPKd in the equivalent Pathfinder adventure. You can have significant class imbalance in combat, and it doesn't really matter because the battles are pretty easy either way.
I'm running Jade Regent a second time, for a new group. (A bunch of local strangers I found on the internet.) I hoped that by doing an AP I'd run before, it would be easy, but I now feel compelled to fix all the mistakes I made last time. This time I'm thinking of things for the NPCs to say and do. I'm eliminating the caravan rules and relationship subsystem entirely. I'm incorporating the bits of Eastern Journey Adventures that I like. First time around I was dealing with an optimized group who I struggled to challenge even a little bit. This time, I'm struggling not to TPK them every time they fight a goblin chief or skeleton champion. It adds up to a lot of work, and reminds me of why I seem to quit RPGs for a year or two after every campaign I run.
Here's what I'm getting: the only reason to ban/restrict crafting is to benefit the GM. Yup, same reason the GM bans anything overpowered or overcomplicated - because they don't like having the extra workload of rebalancing the campaign around you.
IF the treasure the GM is providing in adventures has so much "trash" that players want to sell all/most of it to purchase other magic items that they would be even coming close to doubling their character wealth with item crafting, that may indicate something. The players' character concepts are probably not being sufficiently supported by the GM. That's a valid playstyle, though. I run prewritten material, the players find a ton of magical junk, they sell most of it for half-price, they buy the magic loot they actually want at full price, and that takes them to full WBL because of the generous quantity of gold and 'trash' available. Assuming shops and NPC crafters are available, this lets the players get the specific gear they want, and doesn't make any extra work for me. If we add unlimited crafting to this campaign, suddenly the party are way over WBL.
If you didn't tell your players at character creation that Item Creation feats are banned, or that there likely won't be downtime portions in this campaign where expensive mundane or magic items can be made, then later you impose such restrictions on them, why? Why didn't you ask during character creation? There is too much stuff in Pathfinder for a GM to list everything they don't like. They tell their players, no Dazing Spell, no Sacred Geometry, no Chained Summoner, no guns, no Leadership, no Slumber hex. Maybe they forget to mention crafting.
First off, magic item crafting does NOT "double the PCs' wealth." What happens is the PCs sell unwanted magic items found during adventures at 50% of market price to craft wanted magic items at 50% of market price. While a group that doesn't craft has to pay 100% of market price, meaning they only have half as much wealth (except for the magic loot they find that they want to keep, which in a typical adventure path is the minority).
Have yourself tied up (with knots you can actually easily break out of) and pretend to be a prisoner. Disguise yourself as a dead body, have another PC pull you around on a little cart. Disguise yourself as another PC's pet dog.
Surrender is volunteering to be eaten, which is the same as giving up, and should be viewed as signs of larger problems with the game, overall. The players are not interested in their own characters enough to care what happens to them. If the players surrender, it's probably because the alternative is fighting to the death, and surrender looks like their only chance to survive. That's a sign that they do care what happens to the PCs.
Link: Debate over whether the existence of a special magic mithral tower shield implies the legality of nonmagical ones
Not a great ruling, but there are lots of ways to make a reasonable sounding Suggestion that effectively removes a PC from combat. If the demon had said, "Flee, lest we devour your very soul," then the rest of the party could still get slaughtered if they can't handle the battle without the Fighter. That's why Will saves are so important.
The job of the crafter that makes the trap is to make it hard to disable, not to make it a cakewalk. But the job of the game is to make it so that traps can be disarmed, or there'd be no point in having a trap specialist. It ought to be pretty much impossible for a well constructed magic trap to be disarmed. There's an invisible magic eye looking down the corridor. If it sees any moving entity it doesn't recognise, that person is blasted a fireball. There's no way to reach the eye or the fireball-launcher without entering the area the eye is looking at. As soon as you enter the corridor, you get blasted, and until you enter the corridor, you can't interact with the trap. In order for this to work in gameplay terms, there has to be a solution the PC can use to get around it. So maybe the Rogue can spot the trap without triggering it by peeking round the corner with a tiny mirror, and then fool the sensors that allow it to tell friend from foe by holding up the severed head of a dead guard... And Pathfinder isn't the kind of game where it's the player's job to think of that, it's a game where the character thinks of that if they can pass a skill roll.
I had no idea pocket watches existed in Golarion. Are they reliable enough to solve The Longitude Problem? The Traveler's Pocket Watch says it's accurate to within half an hour per day, which doesn't sound good enough to synchronise an attack from different locations. (The regular Pocket Watch doesn't specify.) There's no game mechanism for a PC to lose track of time, and it would be hard for a player tracking their spell durations not to metagame with that information. I don't see many GM's making it an issue if no-one has a timepiece in the first place.
My first PC died in a TPK.
What lessons did this teach me? Power-game more. You can't make perfect decisions in every battle. You're bound to have a series of bad dice rolls sooner or later. With a GM who doesn't pull punches, if other members of the party aren't power-gaming, you have to power-game even harder to compensate. Either that or pressure them into making a stronger character. Or, you can TPK. Again. So... don't be too judgmental of people you don't know well who play differently from you. They're probably just doing whatever their first GM inadvertently trained them to do.
Early editions of D&D didn't give you a free choice of class. Roll 3d6 for all your stats in order. Roll well? You get to be a Paladin. Roll badly? You're stuck being a Fighter. It's hard to blame someone for picking a weak class when they're not allowed to play a stronger one. Your role-playing character building choices were limited more by the rules than by the players. Want to be an Elven Ranger? No, not allowed, forbidden combo. There was also more of a focus on "we need a Cleric / we need a Thief", since other classes couldn't imitate their unique abilities. I guess there were some role-play choices that you could be attacked for. Want to play a woman? Your Strength is capped at a lower level.
Based on the way the creators run it (see Jason Bulmahn references on page 5 of this discussion) the intended rule is, if DC is 12, you crit-fail on a 2 or less, and crit-succeed on a 22 or more. I don't know if there's an official clarification anywhere, but if there was, that's what it would say.
The specific case of the Wraith's attack
Melee incorporeal touch +6 (1d6 negative energy plus 1d6 Con drain) My opinion:
The general assumption for effects is if the creature negates the damage from the effect, the creature isn’t subject to additional effects from that attack (such as DR negating the damage from a poisoned weapon, which means the creature isn’t subject to the poison). Since Death Ward negates the damage, it should also negate the drain.
The next thread over is full of people complaining that spell attack rolls are too hard. I could post on there, "This is only a problem because you're playing PF2! Just play D&D 5e instead!" It is technically correct that they could solve that one problem that way, but they'd have to abandon all the stuff they like about their system and learn a new one that has its own issues. People wouldn't be grateful to me for my advice. They'd just think I was an annoying D&D fanboy.
Saying "all physical ills and afflictions are repaired" strongly implies that mental ills are not repaired. This suggests that a dead person can have mental illnesses. That seems weird, but let's say the illness is afflicting the creature's soul and continues to do so until Pharasma judges it. A dead creature isn't a valid target for Feeblemind because the soul is not in the body, but if the soul returns it is not magically cured of insanity, etc. This would also imply that any pre-death buff spells that have not expired should resume their function once the creature returns to life.
There's one or two "correct" ways to build a party and play the game and doing otherwise is just an exercise in frustration. I wonder if having 5-6 PCs is key here? Four PCs versus published adventure material might feel weak compared to other systems. Having a couple more PCs means there's likely to be enough natural synergy, enough, buffing and debuffing of enemies, to make most parties feel effective.
For curable conditions, it's also worth asking whether these people can afford the relevant spellcasting services. In 2e getting someone to cast a mere second level spell on you costs 7gp. Someone who can barely pay their rent (and who has a disability that might make it hard for them to work) might take years to save that much. And if they need something like Regenerate cast on them, that would cost 50 times as much.
Because it is a team game, I think it is fine that not everyone does the exact same thing. 1-2 people hyper focusing on damage, 1 person hyper focusing on spells, and 1 person hyper focusing on skill is the literal stereotypical party. The Rogue is the skill person, so it's fine if they deal less damage than a Barbarian or Fighter whose thing is damage. For me the game is not just combat, but everything including social things and skills so maybe that is the problem? Some people see the game as only combat and nothing else? Most classes are useful both in and out of combat. Some classes, like Fighter, are good in combat, bad out of combat. Rogues are comparatively bad in combat, mediocre out of combat. You'd probably get more utility from a Ranger, a Bard, a Wizard, a Cleric, a Paladin, a Druid, etc. There are so many spells that are better than skills. A party can generally cope with having one or two characters who are bad at non-combat stuff, as long as you have the most useful abilities covered (eg, someone who can remove negative conditions, someone who can cast Fly/Teleport, a party face, Perception, etc.) Missing abilities create challenges. If no-one can disable the trap in the door, you have to figure out a way to set it off safely, or to tunnel through the wall, or whatever. Characters who let you down in combat, on the other hand, are a leading cause of TPKs.
But rogue has limited HP for a reason. You are supposed to do opportunist strikes, not to wade into the middle of melee and shout "I SMASH FACE". 'Opportunist strikes' are part of the problem. Most classes can attack (or cast) whenever they want. A character that needs to look for an opportunity is much less useful than one that doesn't. A good opportunity to deal damage (by running round into a flanking position, or dashing across the battlefield to stab the enemy caster) typically puts you in the most dangerous place you can be.
My experience of seeing a Rogue was like this: Enthusiastic new player: "My two-weapon-fighting Rogue can do amazing damage!"
Meanwhile, every non-Rogue in the party is providing far more of a contribution, because they're all either 'strong in combat, weak out of combat' like the Barbarian, or 'strong in combat, useful out of combat' like the Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Bard, Ranger, Paladin...
But if you're swallowed whole, it has to be a Light slashing or piercing weapon, and those are useful against grapplers too.
Dropping the ASF rules would tempt me to make a Full Plate and Tower Shield wizard. (Who needs proficiency? It's just penalties to hit and the like...)
So its weight on your home planet then? No, it's mass. What we colloquially call a weight of 50lbs is actually a mass of 50lbs. Kilograms, tons, all these are measures of mass. Scientists measure weight in Newtons. A barrel with a mass of 50lbs has the same mass anywhere, irrespective of lift or gravity.
There's nothing wrong with a game where the players have the agency to create their own stories. There's nothing wrong with a game where the GM is creating a great story that the players can interact with. There's nothing wrong with a game where there's barely a story but which is packed with exciting mechanical challenges. There is everything wrong with people telling you there's only one way to play. However, the term 'storytelling' is best avoided, because telling a story is not gaming. It carries implications of, "Sit down in silence and listen to me talk." That might not be what you mean, but someone who has in the past been aggressively railroaded by a bad GM will probably make negative assumptions about you.
My experience of an open-world game: (1) The GM was trying to minimise the amount of preparatory work he had to do. So he used random map generators and things like that to provide most of the content. "This map hex contains the burrow of a flail snail." Which isn't to say he wouldn't do work, but if he didn't have the time, there was stuff for us to explore. (2) We at least had an overall plot hook - it was a lumber colony set up in a previously abandoned location, and they wanted us to map the vicinity, and there was a cash reward for anyone who could clear out the local haunted ruins. I did get frustrated sometimes about us not having a clear goal beyond exploring the area. (3) When we found things, they were mostly trying to kill us. One time we discovered a village, but the people there refused to speak to outsiders. (Which is frustrating, because I couldn't even tell if there was anything we were supposed to be doing there, or if we should just ignore them.) (4) There was quite a lot of tension in terms of the mechanical challenge - the random enemies weren't particularly balanced against the group, so you had to have a retreat plan. (5) There was an overall quest, but once I discovered it, I was reluctant to pursue it, because I could tell it represented the end of the campaign. There were too few sub-quests for my taste. The rest of your group sound like they're having a good time, either because they're just excited to be playing a RPG, or because they're people who enjoy hanging out together. That doesn't mean the game couldn't be better, just that they don't need it to be. The game might well improve over time - you could stumble across a threat that gives the campaign more direction, or the GM will find the time to create more specific content. As for gentle critiques: A better approach might be to try to understand what the GM is trying to do. "I'm not used to this kind of open-world game where there aren't any obvious immediate problems for us to tackle. One time I played a game where we were mapping the wilderness, but there was a missing boy and rumors of a bandit camp to make it feel like our exploration had a clear purpose. What's expected of us? Should we be taking advantage of our free agency by making our own plans to, I dunno, take over the town, or will that just make things harder for you? Right now I feel like we're just wandering around the countryside, hoping to get attacked. Is that OK, or are we missing obvious clues as to what we should be doing?"
I'm playing a Primalist Bloodrager with the STRENGTH SURGE Rage power, and I have to tell you it's Suuuper useful. We don't need a Rogue in the party because I can smash down doors. I'm not convinced that covers all the utility of a Rogue. But I guess you could improvise for the rest. "A shame we don't have a rogue in our party, because it looks like we're going to have to pick the lock..."
Often an 'easy' encounter is one where the party rolled well on their saves and so weren't rendered helpless, or where the party had the right protective spell prepared, or where the enemy attacked in waves instead of all at once, or the boss enemy failed a save. That doesn't mean the contents of the encounter were too easy, just that the situation came out favorable for the PCs. Run it again and it might easily go the other way.
Ah, but that's the problem. She doesn't want to do this. We all saw the same vision she did--weird and tragic family history, desperate need to sell a family treasure to somebody in Kalsgard. And her conclusion was not "I need to travel across the world to Minkai!" It was "Dammit, I want my family's sword back, and there's a chance that this merchant in Kalsgard still has it." That's where the problem is. The book explicitly says that the vision makes Ameiko think, "I need to travel across the world to Minkai to reclaim my birthright! And maybe pick up that sword along the way!" If the GM messed this up, she needs to have another vision. Climax of Book 1: In the visions, the PCs see an army of terrible fiends—with burning skin, glaring eyes, and sharp tusks, wearing strange armor and wielding exotic weapons—emerge in a storm from a vast forest, then descend upon a nation populated by Tian people. This vision is swiftly followed by another: a young man dressed in royal robes stands over a simple well, a friend at his side. Suddenly, the friend grows nearly three times in size and is sheathed in a frightening suit of jade armor. The jade warrior draws a sword and strikes down his royal friend, then holds the bloody sword aloft in triumph. A third vision follows, this time of a young Tian man handing a beautiful sword to a richly dressed Ulfen man in exchange for a bag of gold. Finally, this vision fades, and the PCs see their friend Ameiko waking from her deep sleep, but she is dressed in the finery of an empress. She rises from sleep not in a humble Varisian caravan, but from a resting spot within the arms of a jade throne.
These visions pass in the span of a few heartbeats, and after they do, they impart knowledge to the PCs’ minds. The PCs know that the land they saw invaded by fiends was Minkai, that the man they saw murdered by the jade warrior was Emperor Shigure of Minkai. They know that Ameiko Kaijitsu’s true family name is Amatatsu, one of the five royal families of Minkai—indeed, the last surviving royal family. The PCs recognize the young Tian man with the sword as Ameiko’s grandfather, Rokuro Kaijitsu, formerly Amatatsu Tsutoku, selling the family’s legendary sword Suishen to the Ulfen merchant Fynn Snaevald in the city of Kalsgard to finance his family’s flight and exile. They also know that Suishen is intelligent, and can impart much more knowledge of the Amatatsu family’s legacy if recovered. Further, they know that Ameiko herself is the heir of her line. Finally, the PCs know all of the powers and abilities of both the Amatatsu Seal and its warding box — including the danger of leaving the warding box open, which would allow the oni of the Five Storms to once more track the Amatatsu Seal. Back at the caravan, Ameiko experiences these same visions, and as they pass, she wakes with a gasp as the kami possessing her returns in a flash back to the Amatatsu Seal. She quickly recovers from the ordeal, and like the PCs, may be a bit overwhelmed at what the visions revealed, but by the time “Night of Frozen Shadows” begins, she is eager to travel to Minkai to seize her birthright and save an empire.
"If the creature fails its save, it is helpless, but can still breathe... A creature can break the ice as a full-round action with a successful Strength check (DC 15 + your caster level)." "A helpless target is treated as having a Dexterity of 0 (–5 modifier)." "A character with a Dexterity score of 0 is incapable of moving and is effectively immobile (but not unconscious)." Kinda ambiguous. I would lean towards saying that if you can't move, you can't try to break the ice.
As any player who played the crafter minigame in PF1 can tell you In my experience, you craft for 50% of cost, and you sell for 50% of cost, earning you zero. Anything beyond that is Profession rolls and GM fiat.
Might be a confusion over the game term 'pinpoint'? After all, the phrase 'pinpoint accuracy' usually means accurate to within a pin's width of the target, not 'somewhere within a few feet of it'. The relevant rule is:
Even once a character has pinpointed the square that contains an invisible creature, the creature still benefits from total concealment (50% miss chance). Not to be confused with:
BTW, Matthew Downey (or anyone else), how do you get to the PF1 FAQs?For some reason Google doesn't like to take people to this page.
it is not clear whether the Paladin can use their SLA to cast the normal version of Detect Evil, or of they are limited to their single-target move-action version.
I don't see why adding abilities isn't playing the system as intended. The published adventures (mostly) don't do that. If there's an evil human fighter ruling a fortress, they don't give him flight, Spell Resistance and an arbitrary +5 to all saves (on top of the usual bonuses from his gear) to make it less likely he'll be rendered helpless in the first round of combat. They'll create a PC, give him a basic stat array and an unusual item or two, and leave him to it. It's not a bad idea for the GM to give him some 'cheat' abilities, but it's not the default expectation.
|
