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What makes you think the numbers are fake, BeNotAfraid? Overall it looks like 80-90% of respondents told Wizards they were unhappy with the move, which sounds about right to me. If anything, I'm a little surprised responses were that united; it's pretty hard to get 80% of people to agree about anything.
Nothing is final until it's a legal document... but it looks like they have ears. At least one thing is final - the 5.1 SRD is now under Creative Commons. They included a publishing of it in that post, which means they can't back out of at least that.
Well guys. Looks like we won. Fully and irrevocably. I'm still a bit in shock.
Indeed. Layout was poor.At least for me its not the language that's the issue, it's all organizational. Feats and spells being arranged alphabetically rather than by level, needing to flip between the various appendices to parse out conditions or focus spells, stuff along those lines. All a massive hassle if you're using a book or pdf and makes learning the system horrifically tedious. This I have to agree with. The amount of time it took me flipping back and forth through the CRB from cross-referenced entry to cross-referenced entry to figure out how Dispel Magic works was absolutely silly. The end result once you understand it is good - unifying spells like Dispel Magic and Neutralize Poison along with items that do similar all under a single system is great. But the layout in the CRB was awful.
I am no fan of 2e and didn't care for the ways it was encouraged by some fans of the system or how it was promoted by the company. That said I don't know of anyone who swore off paizo entirely because of it. I know two people, both formerly of these forums. One chose to die on the hill of non-Lawful Good Champions existing, which was apparently a bridge too far. The other was absolutely insistent that Paizo would be shuttering 2e within two years unless they made the changes he personally wanted to see to the system. Went so far as to make me promise to apologize personally to him for defending the system when it happened. I told him I would if he would do the same if 2e was a success. Can't imagine why I don't see him around here anymore. XD
Being a fan of roleplaying games is not a purity test. Don't try to make it one. Can we have this again in like, 20 foot tall burning letters please? For the people in the back? :) I am definitely "boycotting" Wizards right now (in quotes because I already wasn't buying anything from them, just because there was nothing there I wanted), but the occasional tribalism that sometimes rears its head on these forums is icky, and let's avoid it.
The only thing that is different is that you cannot gain power in some focused specialization by taking on maluses that you probably are just thinking of as some kind of dump stat that isn’t an important part of your character, while potentially narratively covering that decision by doing something like talking with a stutter, or an accent that represents a lack of intelligence in your mind, or having your character stumble around. I feel like this comment somewhat unfairly stereotypes people who enjoy playing characters with mechanical drawbacks. It also skips over that it's entirely possible to be enough of a "roleplayer" to enjoy playing characters with flaws, but enough of a "powergamer" to feel ooky taking flaws for no reason. I'm certainly right there. If I'm playing a character with low Wisdom, I'm not going to roleplay them as an airheaded caricature, but I am going to feel like I am seeing my character creation choices in play when they fail a Perception check. And that's a good feeling, in the same way that seeing your choices come into play when you succeed is a good feeling. I look at character creation as something like a puzzle, with lots of moving parts and fiddly bits to put together to make something unique and mechanically interesting. But a "you are optionally worse for no reason" puzzle piece doesn't enhance the enjoyment of that, any more than a "you are optionally better for no reason" does. Actually, thinking about it, I am realizing that I dislike the new flaw rules for the exact same reason I dislike how fixed/free ancestries interact with the new boost rules. "Obvious good" and "obvious bad" choices make the puzzle less fun.
I hope we continue to see +++- ancestries in the future. I really like every ancestry having access to the ++ option, but if they stop doing +++- ancestries the net result of that will just be older ancestries being more versatile than newly printed ones. And I definitely agree that printing fixed/boost ancestries at all in light of this change is decidedly odd. My personal houserule is going to be treating fixed/boost as an intentional drawback, meaning those ancestries can't choose ++, but that will quickly stop being a reasonable houserule if fixed/boost is just the standard going forward. Giving every ancestry the ++ option seems like it nicely resolves the concerns about biological essentialism; I'd hate to see Paizo go the extra step of not wanting to print ancestries with flaws anymore.
Very excited about most of these changes, but I agree with Kobold Catgirl that the nerf to voluntary flaws is a bit sad to me. It was a rule I used on many of my characters, and almost never for the supposed "point" of getting an 18 in your flaw stat. My players have used it many times too. Obviously I can just keep using it, so it doesn't really affect me that much, but I wanted to express solidarity with others who are sad to see that particular change. :)
What is making folks think Elemental Blasts are 2 actions now? I don't see that in the blog, and it would break my heart. This is the wording that has me worried they will go to 2-action: The contrast between Elemental Blasts and other impulses touches on the lack of clarity too. After seeing feedback, we’re looking at switching it to function similarly to other impulses and act more like an attack cantrip. All attack cantrips are two-action, and for that matter all impulses are at least two-action, hence my concern.
Very much right there with Cydeth and Themetricsystem. I like what is being said, but I'm concerned there's no mention of damage types. I also hope blasts aren't balanced too tightly to cantrips - a class whose main attack feature can be replicated with a first level ancestry feat doesn't sound fun. Edit: I'm also a little disappointed this probably means they will be two action. One action blasts was a nice feel for the class.
As someone who has been pouring an embarrassing amount of money into Fantasy Grounds, and also as someone who has had to develop a Fantasy Grounds module myself for an adventure by hand... I have to agree with the people saying it's a good deal. It's a bit more expensive than going the Fantasy Grounds route, but my understanding is that FG has a much higher buy-in cost than Foundry.
Instead I'd suggest that wands or talismans don't get destroyed and you can continue to invest their 'burnt-out' item. and after a set time longer than a day, or allow it be a once-per-day upon being invested, they make a DC15 flat check allowing it to be used again. Any roll of a natural 1 on its recovery check, the wand stops being eligible for recovery rolls for 1 week, and may seem to stop radiating magic. The changes to wands and talismans actually predate the rest of these rules for me, and I implemented them simply because my players never used talismans. They didn't get excited about finding them as treasure, and when they found a talisman they did like they never used it. Basically the Elixir Paradox: "What if I need it more in the next fight?" Changing talismans to 1/day got my players to actually use them and be excited about them - although even at 1/day, they still don't see a lot of use.
The ability to use the attack result as a save result could end up being overpowered: there are a lot more ways to buff your attack roll or debuff an enemy's AC than there are to buff save DCs or debuff enemy saves, so this might make it much easier to land powerful save spells. Especially since it means e.g. that if you have a fort save spell you want to cast, but the enemy has a very high fort save, you can completely bypass the fort save by spellstriking. While this is true, I suspect it might be balanced out by the extremely limited number of spells per day a Magus has. Still, good food for thought, thanks!
Have you shared this with the Discord, by the way?
Does anyone have 17 yet? I think I just got it. I'm not at home yet, but I'll share it once I am.
You son of a behir, I'm in. :)
Almost certainly the Impersonate action would already cover imitating someone else's spell signature or hiding your own, since it already handles things like voice or even supernatural aspects of one's appearance (i.e. Impersonate is still the correct action for a human to disguise themselves as a conrasu, it's just a harder check at GM's discretion).
Thanks for the help Mark! I'm super excited about this project (over the course of the past day I've gone from "I'll just get the year of monsters PDF" to getting the hardcover and the Eldamon hardcover too...) but I don't use Kickstarter much. ^^;;
EDIT: Update-it's in the Backerkit. So what you can do if you still want to help earn stretch goals is pledge the $30 now and use it in the Backerkit later. Or you can wait and add the money in the Backerkit afterwards. Oh, okay, so I'll be able to add it in after the campaign closes? If I want to increase my pledge now, should I put that in the "bonus support" field on Kickstarter?
Instant pledge for me! That said - I'm trying to get the Year of Monsters Hardcover after pledging for the PDF. The site says to use the pledge manager to add it on for $30. However, when I try to select it as an add-on, it wants to charge me an extra $130. How do I do this?
Just sharing here some rules I have been using for a while to get my PCs to be more excited about treasure they find in a dungeon. I don't convert all dungeon treasure to ancient items, but individual items here and there, and it has definitely resulted in my PCs using more of what they find and selling less. Some groups might struggle with the verisimilitude of "you can find these in just about any dungeon but you can't buy them", but my players have accepted it as just part of the game. ----- Ancient items are rare variants of more common items, often found in old ruins and other places frequented by adventurers. Mostly created by old and dead civilizations, the methods for recreating them have largely been lost; ancient items cannot be crafted. They also have a reputation for being fickle and unreliable, especially if they frequently change owners. As a result, those who own an ancient item are typically reluctant to sell it, but in turn few people are willing to pay what such items are truly worth. Mechanically, ancient items have a sell value equal to that of the common equivalent, but cost at least five times as much as the common item for the average adventurer to purchase, if they are available at all. Ancient items also always need to be invested to function. In exchange for the difficulty of acquiring them, ancient items come with several potent benefits. Any save DC associated with the item uses the bearer's class or spell DC, whichever is higher, and the bearer can substitute their own attack roll or spell attack roll for such rolls the item would make. If an ancient item can cast a spell, that spell is heightened to half the level of the bearer rounded up. Ancient weapons and armor also typically (although not always) increase in power with the bearer; such items cannot be inscribed with fundamental runes, but instead receive those bonuses based on the level of the bearer, as though using the automatic bonus progression rules from the GMG. Ancient consumable items - which are almost always Talismans - are not consumed on use and instead function with a frequency of 1/day. Staves are never ancient, but wands can be. An ancient wand has a DC of 6 for the flat check the first time per day it is overcharged; this DC increases by 5 each subsequent time that day. When the flat check to overcharge an ancient wand fails, it can no longer be used that day, but is not destroyed and functions normally the next day. Unlike other ancient items, the spell contained in an ancient wand is not heightened based on the level of the wielder.
Couple out of character ones. ----- Player: Oh no, you are too good at characterizing NPCs, I already love them. ...I'm going to kill them now, though. ----- Player A: So do we find out the results tonight?
----- And one in character: Sorcerer: "Flying dragon kick" just sounded cool, I swear I didn't know he was an actual dragon!
Those are good points. Thinking on it more, I think rather than adding on the Expansive Spellstrike - and rather than giving out more cantrip options for free - I'm going to just add a new 1st level feat, Versatile Spellstrike, that allows spellstriking with spells that have a saving throw. The main reason for mixing the attack roll with the save is so that you aren't rolling twice for the same spell, but your note about true strike is well noted. EDIT: Also, I just realized that I in fact completely misread Espansive Spellstrike, missing that it works with spells that just "target a creature" rather than only spells with an area. So actually the main thing I wanted to enable (spellstriking with fear, slow, or just electric arc) is in fact... totally already possible and I didn't notice. Boy I feel silly. So I guess never mind entirely except for the second part about targets!
Reviving this because my players just about killed me last session. ------ Rogue: "Ah, I see the Lamp Eaters are here."
------ Barbarian: "After careful consideration, I think we should take her offer."
That is somewhat unfortunate, but it at least doesn't require you to be the only target. Still, I do wish you could Deconstruct a fireball.
Amped Telekinetic Rend is the baseline for doing AoE damage all day. Psychics can do this twice a fight, every fight, and often at a higher Save DC than the Kineticist. This is not entirely accurate - Psychics give up the opportunity cost of using any other amps to do that, and you don't always get ten minutes of downtime between fights. Overload abilities can be used every other round forever, with no need for a ten minute rest and no restriction on what abilities you can use.
Theoretically Elemental Weapon also allows you to benefit from feats like Sudden Charge or other special abilities that make Strikes. Really though Elemental Blast should count as a Strike.
Well, for one, you don't always get ten minutes between combats. And for two, the action economy isn't really that bad. Or rather, it's not the overload ability's fault, imo. Rather than giving these abilities better action economy, I would rather see Gather made more interesting itself, sorta like gunslinger does with reload. Feats or features that let you mix gathering with another action, for example.
Don't forget there are also higher level feats that specifically require dedicated gate. Deconstruct Element in particular looks very good for fire kineticists. That said, I hope the final version has more dedicated gate feats... and that Stoke Element is less awful. XD
Feats that let you mix another action with gathering would be awesome to see. That's basically what they ended up doing for gunslinger, isn't it?
Considering you can gather way before combat and there's no reason not to, it rather feels like most of the AoE blasts are designed to be openers. Since they are also at-will, I'm pretty okay with that design space. If anything were going to change, I'd want more damage rather than better action economy.
To expand a little on that last point: it’s one of the few APs that supports any type of hero, which adds a lot to that customization. Your kingdom is as likely to be a refuge for the oppressed as it is to be a bastion of Asmodean tyranny. The only thing you need your PC to be is “somewhat interested in building a kingdom” and “capable of working with the party.” Compared to the usual heroic fare or the campaigns with a significantly tighter premise, you get a lot of variability. Very much this. I ran the original Kingmaker as a heroic campaign with your typical assortment of good-to-antihero spectrum of heroes. I'm going to be running the 2e version of Kingmaker for a different party as an evil campaign, with PCs about as evil as you can possibly get. I don't expect to need to make any major adjustments to the story or villains to accommodate that.
I'm a big fan of how Magus turned out, but both me and my players are a little unhappy with how few spells are a good fit for spellstrike. In the hopes of making the class more versatile without raising its power level too much, I'm testing out the following pair of house rules for it: --Cantrips that require a saving throw instead of a spell attack roll can be spellstriked with, using the attack roll in place of the saving throw (so a critical success on the attack roll has the effect of a critical failure on the saving throw). The feat Expansive Spellstrike allows you to also apply this rule to non-cantrip spells that require a saving throw, in addition to the other effects of the feat. --If a spell you are spellstriking with normally has multiple targets, choose targets normally. One of the targets (the primary target if the spell has a primary target) must be the target of your spellstrike. Other targets of the spell resolve the spell normally instead of as a spellstrike (each target makes a saving throw, or you make separate spell attack rolls against those targets, whatever is normal for the spell). . My goal here is to give more more options for spellstrike choices (electric arc is now on the table!), and also to make multi-target spells not strictly worse than single target spells for spellstriking. As far as possible concerns, I'm wondering if this makes Expansive Spellstrike too much of a "must pick" (although honestly it's probably already in that category), or if there are any spells that would be outright broken by this choice. I'd love to hear people's feedback!
Yeah, I was checking all day and almost missed it because I was looking for blog posts.
On the other hand, Chain Blast is up to five attacks mapless as long as you don't miss, so that's cool.
That would definitely be ideal, yeah. Especially with the bonus feats that a single-element kineticist gets, since you could just drop one of those on switching your blast.
If we can't get "choice of blasts at 1st level", I would definitely accept "low level feat that lets you use an alternate blast" as a compromise, as long as it's like... 4th level at the highest. I just want to summon a halberd of pure lightning to smack my enemies with, is that really too much to ask for? :P
Oof, it didn't occur to me that elemental blast didn't count as a basic strike. I mean, I suppose the main reason is so that you can't Sudden Charge with an elemental blast, but... Is there actually a good reason to not let you Sudden Charge with an elemental blast? On the other hand, I disagree that "gathered element" needs to be capitalized every time. 2nd edition in general tries to avoid the Capitalizing Things Like Winnie the Pooh problem. Also, Gather Element is an action, while "the gathered element" is a result of an action.
I definitely would prefer master blast proficiency over legendary class DC, if I have to choose between one or the other.
Posibly, Paizo's made comments about specifically wanting to divorce Acid from Earth, but an Acid Blast does sound cool to me. I agree with AnimatedPaper, acid does feel like it would fit more naturally with Metal than Earth.
This, basically. And I'm definitely not negative on the class as a whole - in fact, I'm zeroing in on this because I pretty much love everything else about the class. I'm also less convinced that hybrid abilities will satisfy this wish, for one because they are only listed as a "maybe" and for two because I suspect they are going to work more like the cold and electricity abilities that already exist - specialized attacks rather than a new basic blast, which is what I want. Someone in the other thread for this suggested the idea of each element having two basic blasts, and you choose one at 1st level and are then locked into that blast unless you take a feat later to unlock the other. I think that is an absolutely fantastic idea. It lets air kineticists be air benders if you want or lightning slingers if you want. And since the impulse feats are already a mix of the two elements, it's not like you'd need to change those.
Dude. Please don't? Gatekeeping what kind of feedback you think is helpful really... isn't helpful. And "the final version might have hybrid impulses" really doesn't address the specific issue some people are having.
Oh this is the best idea I've yet heard. Giving each element a choice of two blasts, but not letting you freely switch between them without further feat investment, really neatly solves this issue. That way the people who want to play an air bender and the people who want to hurl lightning can both be happy, and you don't have the balance concerns of certain elements having both physical and elemental damage and others not.
Strongly, strongly agree here. 5 out of 6 (counting wood and metal) elements dealing physical damage with their blasts is a huge let-down for me personally in terms of flavor. I can see how giving too much damage versatility to a single element would be problematic, so making water able to switch between physical and cold damage at will might be a bit much. But please please please switch air to electricity damage and water to cold damage for the blast. Please please please. Please don't make fire kineticists the only ones that actually get to do elemental damage with their blast.
That's less a compromise and more a power creep; letting those elements switch easily between physical and elemental damage would make them kind of automatically the best elements. So I get why they didn't go that route - I just strongly agree with Keftiu that elemental damage feels core to the fantasy.
Kineticist: "Now watch as I form this elemental energy into a blade of pure metal!" Fighter: "Um... yeah... my sword is made of metal too?" Just had that mental image come up and had to share. :) ----- More on topic, Elemental Weapon is amazing and definitely one of my favorite things about the class. Although by my read - do you need Martial proficiency if you shape your blast into a martial weapon? Or does it still count as an unarmed strike? EDIT: Missed the line that says that strikes use your proficiency with blasts. That's pretty cool.
Fire kineticists being the only ones who can actually do elemental damage with their basic elemental blast is my only real disappointment with the kineticist right now. Please please please can we switch air's blast to electricity damage and water's blast to cold damage so that the elemental damage-focused class can actually do elemental damage? If I only got one wish for this entire playtest, it would be that. Earth totally makes sense to deal bludgeoning damage, but three out of four elements (and I imagine with wood and metal it's going to be five out of six) dealing physical damage is just a huge let-down. Ideally, wood would be piercing damage and metal slashing damage. That way, we would have fire, cold, electricity, bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing as options - half elemental and half physical.
Absolutely love the flavor of the class. Love that everything is at will. Love that fire kineticists can fly Bakugo-style. Love the Exalted-style names for the capstone feats. Love that elemental blasts are just weapons and benefit from weapon runes. Overall this is pretty much exactly what I wanted kineticist to be. Very disappointed at the lack of electricity and cold basic blasts, though. Really wish air and water defaulted to those instead of both being physical damage. Fire kineticists being the only ones who actually get basic elemental blasts that actually do elemental damage (and I don't imagine wood or metal is going to change that) is... very non-ideal, let's say. But easy enough to house-rule if it doesn't change. Still, I hope it changes.
Actually - Gebbites and the Whispering Way hating each other makes a lot of sense to me. Gebbites believe that undead are superior to living being - but they also allow living beings to exist and in fact encourage a state of coexistence. Geb trades with kingdoms of the living, Geb has living citizens, some of which even have meaningful rights. On the other hand, the Whispering Way believe that all living things must be turned to undead, that life itself must be eradicated in favor of universal undeath. The living are the enemy to their cause, or at best tools to be expended. The only worthwhile living creatures are those that actively seek to become undead. So you have Gebbites thinking that the Whispering Way are dangerous fanatics who will undermine peaceful coexistence and possibly trigger the living to go on crusades against the undead, and then you have the Whispering Way thinking that the Gebbites are mewling, weak-faithed cowards making accords and compromises with the living instead of destroying them. Yeah, I can totally see those two groups hating each other. Honestly, the idea that "you're both undead, shouldn't you get along?" strikes me as very out of touch with how these things often shake out in the real world, if you think about it.
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