Mechalibur wrote:
No, but that's mostly because for most casters, raising a non-primary mental stat doesn't do anymore for them than it does for a martial character. To a wizard, wisdom only increases Will, Perception and a few skills. Meanwhile, all martial characters have some benefit from all physical attributes; more AC, more HP, higher damage, they're all good.
ChibiNyan wrote: CHA Halflings were just a leftover from 3E. The much more grim Halflings of Golarion have developed their survival instincts a lot and became more socially reclusive. They are still commonly liars, but WIS is for sure their main thing seeing how much the Halfling lore talks about their perception. Wait, what? No. Halflings used to be -Str +Dex. We didn't have these fancy schmancy "second ability boost" back in our days. If you were playing a Half-Orc, you even got a second -2. Those were the days. All of that was in jest, but Halflings didn't get a boost to Charisma in 3rd edition. That's a Pathfinder thing.
Let's say you're playing a 10th lvl Fighter with a +19 Attack Bonus* and you're fighting a 7th lvl monster, let's say a Bulette, with 29 AC*. You have a 45% chance to miss, a 50% chance to hit, and a 5% chance to crit. Meanwhile, the monster has a +15 to hit*, and your Fighter has an AC of 27*. The monster has a 55% to miss, a 40% chance to hit and a 5% chance to crit. Now let's say we remove +lvl from everything, so your Fighter has a +9 Attack Bonus*, and the Bulette has 22 AC*. You now have a 60% chance to miss, a 35% chance to hit and a 5% chance to crit. Conversely, the monster with its +8 to hit* now attacks your Fighter with 17 AC*, and it has 40% chance to miss, 50% chance to hit and 10% chance to crit. You have altered the hit chances.
The only way to lose the aesthetic of high numbers in your player characters, but keep the odds the same is by lowering all DCs, ACs and Attack Modifiers by the Party's level, not the Challenge's level. This makes it so that DCs scale negatively with the party's level, meaning that, for instance, a beginner lock's DC lowers, and eventually goes into the negatives. If you're okay with that, that's your prerogative, but that's not a nice aesthetic to me. *These numbers have no meaning; they might not be close to what they are in the game, but I don't care. They still serve as an adequate example.
It's not so much that I refuse to give details, it's more that my players don't think the stats are relevant when buying an animal. They trust that Paizo, and WotC before them, designed the animal in such a way that the stat block could basically function like what people imagine a guard dog to be like. It's got good perception, mediocre combat ability, but can't pull a wagon or be ridden by the fighter. All else is just a bit nit-picky when buying a dog. "Oh, it's only got a +3 to hit? Don't think I'll buy it then"; "Don't you have an animal with +10 on perception instead of +8?"
Chief Cook and Bottlewasher wrote: I think the idea is that lore(religion) would be broad knowledge and lore(your god) will be specialisation. A cleric with acolyte background might not bother with broad knowledge(religion) This. I don't know why we expect imams to tell us about Hinduism, or rabbis to know a lot about Shinto.
Slim Jim wrote:
I've been running variations of this game for the better part of two decades, and I don't think it's been a pain in any way since the switch to PF1, due to a few subtle rules changes. In fact, I still occasionally call for Use Rope checks. Anyway, that's beside the point... in my experience, a large part of being able to run this game smoothly is to only care about specifics when they actually matter. Besides, the way it looks, I won't need 3rd party software anymore to make my PF2 characters. That's a plus in my book. Slim Jim wrote:
Instead of a tablet with character sheet and a dice rolling app, I tend to play with printed out character sheets and dice. Even less distractions in front of the players! It's not even a rule I put down or anything, we just play that way. As for looking up rules questions, we tend to handle them in one of four ways. * If it's an obscure feat or skill challenge that's part of an adventure, it's the GM's job to look up how it works during preparation (or occasionally during intense RP moments where there's no adjudication needed and I'm reading ahead and see that I forgot to look up whatever is needed).* If it's an obscure feat or spell or whatever that's part of a character, I fully expect that player to either know what it does, have it written down, or know where to find it and have it ready whenever it comes up. I mean, you should know what your character can do. * If it's a miscellaneous rules question that I know is in the CRB - which I tend to know, because I've leafed through the damn thing so many times - we look it up. In a book. That I carry with me. * All other things I adjudicate with what makes sense, or a close approximation of a similar rule. Slim Jim wrote: That's a straw-man fallacy, as no one has argued for "having every possible rule in the game in a single book." --We certainly don't need the stats for pit fiends in the CRB. We should have the stats for mundane gear. Basically, anything listed in Goods and Services should have an entry just as if it were a weapon. Horses, dogs, and cart-pulling donkeys are very commonly-purchased goods by low-level PCs of all classes, and deserve a few inches of space. That's easy. He's getting a guard dog. Something like a Rottweiler or Doberman. When he decides to use it to keep guard, I'll look up its Perception score on the one laptop at our table, which is behind the GM screen; when he brings it into combat, I'll look up its attacks, AC, hit points and speed. If he wants to know its Strength, I'll ask if he wants to arm wrestle it. After that one session, I'll expect him to print out the stats of a guard dog, or write them down in his notebook (a paper one, not a bleepy bloopy one). A guard dog in Pathfinder isn't a stat block with a picture of dog attached, it's a mental image of a dog, quite a big one at that, that you occasionally need stats for. And that's a guard dog, I can't even begin to fathom why you'd need any of the stats of a cart-pulling donkey.
So I've been hearing a lot of talk about a schedule for the playtest. Something about three weeks for the first chapter and two weeks for each subsequent chapter. However, one thing is entirely unclear to me; namely, are those the dates until which we can report our feedback, or from which we can report. Are those the dates the surveys are released to public, or they deadlines after which the surveys won't be accepted anymore?
Mathmuse wrote: As KingOfAnything said in comment #40, the PF1 alchemist infusing his aura into extracts and bombs appeared to be an inspiration for resonance. Yet if the PF2 alchemist does not use resonance for bombs, then half that inspiration is gone. The way I read it, the Alchemist still uses Resonance to quickly create bombs. Quick Bomber tells us: Fumbus, goblin alchemist sheet wrote:
Now this tells me that you can either carry around some bombs to throw around whenever you like, and/or you can craft some of them on the fly when you don't have the right bombs on hand. This doesn't tell us anything about whether bombs use Resonance though. However, when we look at Quick Alchemy: Fumbus, goblin alchemist sheet wrote:
So you definitely still need Resonance to create a spontaneous bomb. Whether or not conventionally crafted bombs require Resonance when crafting is, as far as I know, still unknown.
Malk_Content wrote: Funnily enough the older I get the more I use AP material. I suspect a lot of people migrate towards "the kids table" as they take on more responsibility and have less time. Very much this. Adventure paths are a godsend to me and my group. Ever since I got a job, preparing a whole adventure just isn't in the books for me anymore.
Roswynn wrote:
I particularly enjoy the two axes of success, giving a total of 6 ways to succeed or fail at a task; the formalized rules for social "combat"; the complete lack of it feeling like a miniatures wargame, due to the narrative dice; and the amount of time the designers take to explain why they made the design decisions they did (especially in the GM section).
Roswynn, if you're more into a narrative style of play, and don't mind a lack of built-in flavour, I've been reading the Genesys rulebook for the past few days. It's tremendously easy to customize to any setting and includes some example settings and themes (including a superpower theme). I haven't played it yet, and the character options do feel a bit generic sometimes (due to it trying to design for everything between fantasy, steam-punk and sci-fi), but Fantasy Flights Star Wars RPG, which uses basically the same system, played really well with my group. Besides, there's rules to generate everything from custom items, to custom monsters, to custom talents, so in a way there's as much flavour there as you're willing to put in.
Roswynn wrote:
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to your argument if you didn't portray anyone who doesn't fully agree with you as a blatant racist. I generally play with alignment on the backseat, if there at all, which is also how I run my Orcs, Goblins and Kobolds. No 'Usually CE' if there's no such thing as CE. I just don't particularly like being called an uninformed racist because I generally cast them as my low-level villains. As an aside, I'd say that TES Orsimer also tend towards chaotic evil, and that Warcraft orcs have been slowly run into the ground over the last decade or so due to being too prominent in their series. Then again, I played Alliance, so what do I know?
Roswynn wrote:
You do realise that Oriental just means Eastern right? As in the place where the sun rises, - oritur in Latin. It never referred to North Africa, nor did it originally refer to the Middle East. Originally, it meant the eastern half of the Roman Empire - basically anything east of Italy. I can't see how it's derogatory to group people by the direction they are in. Grouping people in this way is in no way saying that they're the same culture, much in the same way that saying that Germans, Italians and Americans are all part of the Western World (or Occident) isn't oversimplifying their culture. The word just doesn't have anything to do with culture, but with regions of the world. Incidentally, do you think it's okay to describe people from Syria, Jordan, Israel and Palestine as Levantine (from the French lever - to rise), or the Turks as Anatolian (from Greek ανατέλλω - to rise)?
Fuzzypaws wrote:
While visually striking, that option uses a lot more real estate. Using an entire line instead of a single character also means you can't use it inline. Certainly not a problem without a solution, but I'm just trying to say that there is no perfect solution to this, or most UX problems (which this basically is). I think this decision is pretty comparable to the 'Tap' symbol in Magic: the Gathering. It's also a short-hand for a cost to activate an effect, in both cases the cost being expending an action. Originally, Magic wrote out the word, later followed by a tilted 'T', before finally settling on the current 'Tap' symbol. Out of all of these, I think the last one is the clearest. Incidentally, this is also why I'm not a huge fan of the 'circled A' suggestion I've seen floating around. I'll admit I'm mostly pro-symbol here, so I'm absolutely not neutral, but I get where the other side is coming from. As long as the visually impaired are not completely ignored, and have some way to access the information encoded in the symbols, I think it's a pretty elegant way to convey costs for abilities.
Weather Report wrote:
How do you read? Not trying to be an a!~+#*+ here, but if you can't make out symbols, which are generally a bit larger and more distinctive than Latin letters, how do you actually read words? |