Expectations for reactions to weapons/magic will vary depending on where you are and who your around.
Hopefully players won't always be instantly ready for a fight, take quick draw if that's the case.
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what character or class (besides monk)'s optimal strategy is ever "attack two times in a turn". The Swashbuckler's class design is to encourage you to take other options, especially since you get a bonus to your skill attacks to things that would give you panache, most of which debuff your enemy. I would think that your best strategy is gain panache, debuff, strike or finisher. All martials except magus. Two attacks per round is what you should aim for, adjusted for build. Many fighters and all rogues do debuffs while doing damage, so why should the swash jump through more hoops to get less done?Allowing riposte to use confident finisher and then allowing Combination finisher to allow a single attack after a finisher as a follow up would help a lot with those issues I think.
Why does a region only need to have one dragon? Could be a few from each plane and other worlds that came over like the elves or just migrated on their own. Could get really interesting with it.
Even climbs crit fail could mean nothing though if it's your first roll while standing on the ground. Having done 8 campaigns, most of them APs we finished I don't think I've ever climbed anything where there was any serious risk, so that's a big your mileage may very sort of thing. You should always keep a hero point in the tank for saving your life, but from my experience you can't rely on them for anything other then auto stabilizing. In line with what the OP describes, when your results suck for long periods of time, even hero points don't help, and they sure don't feel heroic. When your entire play session is fail or crit fail, it's extremely demoralizing. Figuring out options that can help without swinging in the opposite direction when your luck comes around is worth a GMs time IMO.
Do you think the opposite might be true as well? My previous group I was in did 4 APs, 2 1-20 and 2 1-10. With a steady group of four and an extra that would change often. As a whole we came to generally dislike casters as generally enemies got a success the vast majority of the time, crit success fairly often, failed once or twice per session and only crit failed on a 1.It was disheartening, especially at lower levels before you get many options to debuff.
Ready
Aid
Seems to me that you ready at attack on your turn to aid, if using your attack bonus to aid. So adding the attack trait to aid makes sense, then adding in MAP at that point also makes sense. This seems like the logical method of doing attacks to aid. On another note, I could easily see someone shooting an arrow or bullet to land next to someone's foot as a surprise distraction to aid.
Going to be difficult to do an adventure made to fight a mythically powered enemy without mythic. Will be interesting to see how it turns out with the seemingly inconsistent balance of the higher end mythic options. Hope I get to play it at some point.
Isn't it one of the most powerful and easily accessible buffs in the game?Not really. Unless you are Legendary, which doesn't happen often, you'll roll for a +3. And you need a critical success, so DC 25, which isn't trivial before the highest levels. It costs an action and a reaction, which is a steep cost, especially at high level where you should have a use for your reaction and interesting third actions. This right here. It's not that great, people imagine it is but in real situations it doesn't compare well with your other options most of the time. Going into this with trying to change someone's ways is a sure fire way to fail and likely come off as being adversarial. As others have said, figure out the how and why it's happening before you try to figure out how to get what you want.
If all you do is use hero points for saves, then sure. My experience is most hero points are used for attacks or skills, so going from crit fail to fail is still you fail. So if the OP can't find a mechanical reason why things are turning out this way, then please try some of the hero point methods suggested here. If it's all bad luck, and I've seen such before, think about giving hero points a boost and hand them out more to help players feel more empowered. Or if it's all the players and you just have magic hands, think about putting the players a level ahead of things to help soften that edge.
For your wizard example, that's not how things work. You teleport, then have one action. Enemy army does its turn. You cast a two action spell then have one action. The enemy army then reacts to having a wizard wipe a large percentage of them out. Then you could cast two action bullhorn to try and talk to them, but it won't have any mechanical effect because you can't intimidate groups because you don't have that training, you could give them an ultimatum and they would have to deal with that. Intimidation is just giving them a status penalty to everything, without Terrified Retreat and a crit you couldn't make even a single soldier flee no matter what you do. Coercion is taking a while to make sure someone does the activity you want for an extended period of time even if your gone, so doesn't fit this situation at all. None of that has anything to do with being able to role play an overbearing force to break an army and send them packing. The rules are there to make sure that you have a way to do X and get Y result depending on the dice. Also using make an impression, lie to me, etc is all about changing an NPCs relation with you, generally improving it by one category. If that is not the effect you want then you don't want to do that action.
I won't get in to why I think that feeling makes no sense, I was just pointing out that boiling Golarian religion down to transactional while not seeing similar themes in many human religions seemed like a mistake. You can start elsewhere for both in learning and experiencing them.
A game within a game. Rerolling a crit fail into a fail still feels terrible. Hero points should be a meta currency for enabling something you want to happen, to take some of the chance out of the game. However you can make that possible, it should be there to help players.
In any gamified situation involving a religion that grants abilities, it is going to be inherently transactional and I don't think that's a healthy place to build an understanding of faith from. Stick to these edicts, perform these actions for spells, gain new spells at specific levels. All very transactional. Is that not most human religion? Follow our teachings, our book, and get into the good after life, don't follow them and get punishment. You can easily look at that as trade your life for your soul, the ultimate transaction. Real world religion is understanding the world around you mostly through feelings. Zoken had a good summery of polytheism in Golarian. Gods are powerful beings that you aspire to be like or as examples to avoid. You might use their teachings to learn and understand the world better, pray to in times of need like asking for help from an organization built to help people in your exact situation, or as forces in the world to work around and through.
I've found hero points don't help when your on a bad streak, you'll just roll the same number or worse. Rolling a crit fail from a fail is one of the worst feelings. A friend of mine almost quit after 6 sessions of rolling a 5 about 20% of the time, streaks of 3-4 5s in a row and every other number being a 5, it was rough to see, even our GM was like "I feel bad but I don't know how to make this fun." It happens but there isn't much you can do about terrible luck. In my last group the GM adopted my idea to allow hero points to give +10 instead of a reroll if desired. It gives players the option to know when they use the point it will have an effect, and that feels great. Just need to be prepared for auto crits, you could add in a limiter on damage for them and I think it would be fine.Caster save rerolls should be a thing, it's rather bad that only martials can better their offensive chances with hero points.
It started as a joke, but now I like the idea of a neurodivergent Bard whose barding methodology is info dumping constantly.Ugh, this guy. He doesn't shut up. What happened to the bard that just quipped about stuff or the one that slept with the dragon? Imagine a bard and thaum both built as know it all's and the discussions they could have.
Ugh, this guy. He doesn't shut up. What happened to the bard that just quipped about stuff or the one that slept with the dragon?
Imo, PF2 really shows how swingy d20 systems can be. If you have hot dice and the players don't, combats can definitely feel unfair, especially at early levels when your barbarian can completely obliterate a boss on a critical hit, or miss three times and do nothing. Few things feel as bad as rolling single digits all night. Then throw a 20 on a group check then a 1 on a death save later. Some people have those nights more often then others. When I get on a bad streak it disconnects me from the game and makes it hard to feel like your choices matter.
Might just be me but I feel like the game doesn't get all that complicated as you level. You get more options but you also lose some.
I think the idea that low level and mid/high level being so different is more about the difference between high damage martials, mid damage martials and casters. All three can contribute with strikes at low level and can have close to max defenses.
The way things scale, survivability and martial effectiveness between all classes is definitely something I could see throwing new players. I introduced someone to the game and they quickly decided the best class is rogue and he would never play another class, skill feats meant that much to him. Another new group from 5e had a hard time understanding the basic math expectations. One didn't want any armor or Dex because it didn't fit his character. Since you can easily play anything from society games to APs or even harder home brew it's hard to say if those issues are a system problem or just getting to know what your GM expects of you and what system knowledge you need to meet those expectations.
Most of the "resist going down at 0hp" abilities are very risky.
Maybe more then two, to be safe. Some examples for things don't clear up the problems people have with it. So more examples, especially for rare or more complex situations, could greatly improve understanding.
Didn't a giant moth god murder their leaders forcing thousands to flee or be brainwashed? Not that I know of, their biggest problem was pathfinders coming in and stealing their princess away because she fell in love with one of them or something along those lines. Well that and dealing with the fey.
I don't have much interest in fiends, but like others have said, more ways for players to interact with them in the form of researching weaknesses, true names, behaviors, etc to really drive story and combat interaction is great.
Forget the name of it but the island nation surrounded by fey woods, where they have the dance of four seasons.
You have 4 levels to figure out what weapon you want to specialize in, legendary in all weapons isn't a big bonus by the time you get it as you don't have feat support to just swap styles.
Would there be interest in expanding devils and deamons if someone who was as inspired as you are for demons put forth ideas?
So something like blood lords? As I said though, because of the difficulty of making it work for everyone its unlikely.
Most of the games you mentioned use their balancing to drive sales, and lots of people who play those games complain about balance.
Underwater combat and flying combat should be similar. Mostly full of charging, using momentum and doing mostly strikes on the run.
Most Fantasy RPGs have never been about realistically portraying historical combat. We have long swords instead of arming swords and soft leather as armor. 3.5 had more realism, a mid tier magic user would just toy with a martial character. We aren't here for any of that.
No. Unbalanced stuff is not fun unless your the one at the top.
I really want an Ocean Stuff book. We've got enough aquatic ancestries to do a whole adventuring party without doubling up, but we've only got the Player Core and GM Core paragraph each for underwater rules. A version of Aquatic Adventures for 2e, especially with a full suite of underwater hazards, would be very cool, or even a Lost Omens: Wide Seas. Give us a Grindylow Goblin, an Aquatic Elf, or maybe a Triton or Cecaelia, and maybe a Fleshwarp heritage for aquatic stuff - algollthu and krakens both appear to do fleshwarping. Maybe a spellshape to do fire effects as steam, so they work underwater? And of course a bunch of magic items and spells for underwater stuff (I'd love to see some rituals based on real sailor superstitions, too - whistle up the wind and blow down a storm!) I don't think an AP or similar would work well for this, just because every adventure needs to be viable for the iconics. We don't have enough aquatic iconics for the adventure not to have to cater to land walkers in a way that would effect the feel of the adventure IMO. I'm not a big fan of "stranger in a strange land" trope when you can just be the people of that land. A deep sea guide, while not my thing, should exist at some point. A whole year of ocean stuff, one book with ships and pirates then one that delves under water to the societies that have been there since earth fall or earlier.
Started with AD&D, played every edition since. Had no interest in Pathfinder since it was just more 3.5 and I was tired of that editions problems. 5e was bland and felt more like 1st or 2nd edition with barely anything going on.
Fighter has the best feats for using weapons.
Fighters are those with the most accuracy and skill with a weapon group of choice. I think that's plenty identity and mechanical power. There's a reason they "fixed" the ability to get full scaling in multiple types of weapons.
Mammoth lord isn't a very good AT, basically only taking it for the huge size so when they become large they can still ride. Cavalier at least has some good feats for protecting your mount, though shield warden and improved reflexive shield might fill that role. Your basically losing a level two feat since mammoth lord requires level four. So even beast master would be better.
Dual weapon warrior to strike with shield and weapon.
Fighter feats, quick shield block, shatter defenses, shield warden, agile grace, dazzling display, fearsome brute, mirror shield, tactical reflexes, any one or more stances that fit your play style. Don't forget to get a dread rune on your armor.
In the time it takes you to get this going you could take your kids on an adventure and make them both more powerful to maintain your families safety and make enough money to start doing things with. Otherwise at some point someone's going to figure out how your family gets its wealth and either steal it, or kill for it. The thing about easy money is that unless the circumstances are right, someone's going to do something about it.
I'd really like a book of or with weirder and more monstery ancestries. Maybe a grab bag of monster-y options in general - like more equipment, an archetype or three, spells and impulses, that kind of thing. But really I'd just like to be able to scratch the itch to have a party of monsters or monster-themed characters. You know, like a heroic gargoyle or medusa, or someone who's got a barghest themed set of abilities, or a character who's entirely kitted out in things made from different gorgons. Roll for combat has a lot of monster ancestry options covered. Getting more ancestry based weapons and gear would be great.Along those lines I would love to see more places where the settlement write ups aren't always majority human. Nearly every settlement has 50% or more humans unless its dedicated to being a "this race lives here" place. Even if humans were 30% of the total population, so long as no other ancestry was over 30% that would still make humans the majority. Lets have more places that give the feel of when you look down a street you aren't seeing humans with small groups or individuals of other ancestries sprinkled about.
Indeed, there was just too much focus on it being the GMs fault when clearly one single player was making this an issue. Without clues you can easily run out of ideas to tackle a situation, setting up multiple ways to solve a problem and being open to crazy player ideas (within reason) is best. Getting the other players input on the situation would be good as well. I have a hard time imagining a group of players that are invested in the game and story to be ok with just sitting around for multiple in game days for a single slightly far fetched plan to work.
Perhaps you should ask first if the players would want this enemy to escape and if that would tell a story they would like. If they are on board then changing it to a chase scene could work.
Plan for your PCs to pin the enemy in place and focus them down, expect the worst case scenario for you and find ways to minimize that without increasing the threat to the PCs. Make sure the escape makes sense for that character as well, a hyper plan focused enemy, a cowardly one that looks for an escape early on, etc.
I would venture that most groups wouldn't be interested in an enemy that gets away unless it was charismatic. Either a silly enemy or a dastardly vile enemy that sees the PCs as a minor concern and has other more pressing concerns and can leave most of the battle to their underlings. Having an enemy that gets away to fight another day that you didn't plan on, will usually have more effect then one you do as it feels more natural and spontaneous. So if you want to do that story beat you need to be very careful to make it feel probable and not forced.
How high of a standard? Doesn't matter, my original statement was just using freelancer as an obvious lower expectation of correctness.
Just because you have had bad experiences don't assume everyone else is the same. As for going to the market and planning an ambush, that's potentially a rather terrible idea. Committing what is likely a crime, or against the code of whatever organization runs the slave market, close to a populated area where you can get discovered is an extra risk that has no need to be taken. Following the clues that Claxon would have given out and catching up to a slow moving transport is far more advantageous. Even if you couldn't catch up in time you could then pretend to be a buyer and try to either buy your friend back or follow and deal with who ever does buy them one way or another, there's lots of ways that story arc could go. Getting to know your players and what sorts of stories and themes they like is very important, so is finding ways to let them know when an idea might not work out the way they think. The fact that there's a player who seems like they have something to prove, is a problem. Depending on a number of different factors the way to deal with that is varied, so there's no real answer other then have a talk with them about it.
Even full-time authors can’t keep the entire ruleset in their memory. Hell, I was just educated last month that when a target is paralyzed or otherwise immobile, combat maneuver checks automatically succeed as if you rolled a natural 20. And I’ve been working with 1E from the start. Maybe not every detail, but they should have a higher standard for them. The rest of your comment is untrue/misplaced because we're talking about 2e.
Do you think these items are intended to work with some rules, or is it more likely they were written by free lance writers who didn't know that there were no sight range rules?I would guess whoever designed these itemsjust assumed that sight ranges wear defined in the rules, but I don’t know that we need to assume that means they were designed by freelancers. This system is sufficiently complex that full-timers can easily have blind spots. Perhaps, but I would expect in house writers to have a much better understanding of the rules then freelancers who likely write for multiple systems and different projects.
I think their plan failed because they snuck in, got found out but found where there companion was being held.
When all else fails, do it the hard way. They could still have interesting options when doing a full on assault.
Players need to buy into the story, accept there might be some rails and need to build off of what is presented, especially for APs. Making your own adventures with people you don't know is a lot more work as you need to forshadow or outright explain all the things that would be in an APs player guide and then some. This is why I find it funny when people accuse CritRoll of being scripted. It's just that Matt talks to each of his players to make sure they are on track for the overarching story and exchange ideas for that characters possible personal story arc. This can be very difficult with people you aren't familiar with to have a casual conversation about where things are and how they are going. It can be uncomfortable trying to stem mildly problematic behavior. Sometimes just suggesting why the current idea or path could be a bad idea might work, sometimes you might have to have a check in to get everyone on the same page. I've seen such go badly but it's better to address issues early then to let them fester and possibly explode or worse.
More things like beast gunner, using magic as technology and ways of improving summons/minions/AC to make them better into later levels. Hopefully there's a place to explore that can give more of these options and improve the ones we have.
Indeed, I think there's generally two viewpoints for this. People who only play with their friends so just assume the social contract prevents much of the gross play habits that can show up. People who play society games and so there's a person putting it together and more of an authority feel to it. (I've never played society so might be wrong on this.) While playing online with random people can feel like the minority, as it doesn't feel like it's talked about much. As nerds I feel we have a lot of social and communication issues to varying degrees. So it can be hard to set boundaries and such with people when you don't even know what a lot of the issues that might come up even are.
Don't want to derail so I'll say yes, it would be great to have talks about social contracts, as mostly it's a learn as you go type of thing. Seeing how the OP has noticed this type of thing from this specific player though, I would say having a talk with the group why they go along with such things and if this is a really good use of their time.
Is this how you hide the other two Kobolds? |