Perpdepog's page

I just finished rereading Dracula, so now i'm bouncing between Assault on Absolom Station and Seeing Like a State.

I also recommend having a character brainstorming/building session where you talk about the classes and players come up with new characters together. I think a pretty common bad experience moving between almost any two systems is trying to re-make a character from something you're familiar with in something you're brand new to.

Questions like, "What sort of character are you interested in playing?" or "What sorts of things do you want to be doing in a fight?" are helpful.

This also has the benefit of exposing your friend group to a lot of the possible classes and archetypes that PF2 has to offer, which is one of the strengths of the system IMO. Show off a little. Try to highlight "you can do that" moments in chargen to get them excited about playing a character. Just be sure to not overwhelm them with options and try to keep suggestions to one or two things they can think about. Keeping suggestions to pure classes, rather than classes utilizing archetypes, is a good practice; archetypes are where I often see new players getting overwhelmed with choice. (Naturally still suggest something like Duel Weapon Warrior if what they want is "to be the two-weapon wielding guy.")

IIRC, Mark Seifter, one of PF2e's co-creators, initially wanted to integrate Strikes more fully into the game's four degrees of success via a glancing blow mechanic. Effectively, you'd still deal damage on a failure (but not a critical failure), dealing something like minimum damage or the damage you'd do minus damage dice, which classes like the Barbarian could have then enhanced by doing stuff like ignoring resistance. This eventually became the Certain Strike feat, which achieves a similar purpose but of course can't be paired with the benefits of other Strike feats.

With this in mind, I'd be quite curious to see what the game would look like with glancing blows added back in. The main caveat, though, is that this by itself would constitute a significant damage increase to every Strike, so the question would be how to balance damage rolls or their equivalent to reach the same amount of overall Strike damage we have now.

I suspect you'd have to take a particular look at monster damage and start by lowering it. Monsters do more damage on average than players do per Strike, and even when they don't they've got significantly larger static bonuses to add to their rolled damage, so a system of glancing blows would favor the monsters.

I'd also be interested in seeing how such a system would work out in practice. I quite like the concept of glancing blows, or "shock" as I first heard it described in the Without Number series of games. The system forces a sense of urgency and puts the fight on a definite clock. HP totals are still going down even if everybody's AC is really high and everyone keeps missing.

kaid wrote:

Magnatar rifle is a good example of some of the oddness. There are a few great area/automatic weapons but they are advanced. But due to how area weapon works their advanced prof only ever matters for soldiers.

For Area weapons you're absolutely right. Only soldiers need to be proficient.

But for Automatic weapons all characters need proficiency if they want to be able to single shot as well as fire on automatic.

Right not, the Magnetar rifle is clearly the best weapon (by a significant margin) available for almost all non sniper characters with martial proficiency. Well worth getting proficiency in one of several ways (ancestry or general feat) if shooting things is something you want to concentrate on.

I'm confused. The magnetar rifle says its proficiency is advanced?

If you are a GM, or are wanting to make homebrew for fun in your own time, there are guidelines on Building Items. Just keep in mind that these rules aren't player-facing, so you can't use them to, say, craft new items of your own invention in your game without GM buy-in.

The Raven Black wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

Unicore wrote:

The thing about searching generally as an exploration activity is that thralls are really terrible at any of it except walking into traps. They don’t talk or inherently see anything, so they aren’t really any good for spotting hidden enemies. Especially as the trap thing was called out in the class description, they really should just make “Thrall Sweep” into its own specific exploration activity that calls out what it does.

Honestly in my experience "being stealthy" is relevant a lot more often than "avoiding traps" and Thralls are fantastically bad at "not giving away the fact that there's a Necromancer nearby."

New Exploration activity : Broadcast the party's presence.

LOL. Although to be fair, just because a zombie comes stumbling into the room doesn’t mean the bad guy thinks, “oh, there’s a necromancer coming through the door next!” We GMs encourage our players not to metagame, so we should do the same. In fact, I would argue that a metagaming GM is ten times worse than a player who is doing it.

By the same token they'll probably know something screwy is going on; zombies don't just walk through the door everyday.

Unless the big bad is a necromancer themself, I suppose; then zombies do walk through the door every day.

exequiel759 wrote:

We also need to get rid of fundamental runes. Items to keep up with the math aren't fun.

That's why I use Automatic Rune Progression in my campaigns.

This is how PF2 was originally envisioned to work, IIRC, but when Paizo put out their surveys most folks said they wanted items to still add to their to-hit and damage.

I'd be curious to see if they'd get the same results if they put out the survey now.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I'm super excited to see Cyborg become a versatile heritage. It felt like a slam dunk of a choice as soon as SF2 was announced and I'm looking forward to seeing how it works as compared to gaining augments and becoming a cyborg that way.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what kinds of armor we get. It doesn't sound like power armor will be in this book, sad, but I am always down for more armor sets.

That and also count me as interested in Nanocyte. I always wanted to play one in SF but wasn't in nearly enough games to make that a thing.

The laser rifle is also not martial, so I assume plasma is the martial "upgrade" to laser with the Plasma Caster a plasma pistol that accidentally got stats of a plasma rifle and we are waiting on a real plasma rifle but they would have to errata the Plasma Caster first because it is awkwardly filling both roles.

Unrelated, I put "" around upgrade because Laser Rifles are surprisingly good for simple weapons. I've always treated martial weapons as a straight upgrade to simple in pf2e and I think in all but some outliers that is true, so its weird to me to see simple weapons being competitive with martial. It in a small way devalues feats that give you martial proficiency.

Yeah. I appreciate them trying to implement the simple/martial/advanced paradigm into SF2, and I understand why they did it that way, but it doesn't fit the system nearly as well as the division of weapon categories in SF1 did, IMO.

I agree with the others, that the heritages are likely to be more broad and generalized than referring to specific creatures, though I'll happily be wrong. Really rooting for the mezlan to be playable, myself.

I know I do this a lot in my own games where most things can speak common (whatever common is for the area they're in), but ones that have their own native language tend to prefer it. That tends to cause them to view someone using that language in the initial interaction more positively.

Oh, that's a really good idea; I'm going to do that from now on! Turning more game mechanics into rewards rather than restrictions.

- What the fresh heck is even going on with advanced weapons? Do they add anything to the game that can't also be handled by rarity and access?

They're supposed to give especially exotic or advantageous combinations of traits, and also serve as options unlocked by ancestral weaponry feats.

I don't think they necessarily succeed at this goal, myself, at least not all the time. I like the idea of advanced weapons being in the game, I've had a soft spot for interesting, exotic, and just plain wacky weapons in TTRPGs ever since I discovered my beloved dire flail, and PF2's reliance on traits means such weapons can have more going on, but I don't really think they often live up to that in practice, particularly with how difficult they can be to gain proficiency in.

What I am hoping we see in future, either in some alternate system or future edition, is for weapon proficiencies to be tied to traits in some way. What I mean is, rather than needing a specific proficiency to wield a weapon at all, increased proficiencies grant a weapon more traits or capabilities, with traditionally martial/advanced weapons having more tiers you can unlock.
Anyone can wield a longsword, but you don't gain its Versatile (Piercing) trait unless you have a martial level of skill with it, or something, and going beyond that level of skill might grant it the Parry trait, or the Two-Hand d12 trait of the bastard sword, or some other benefit.

I haven't got the mental bandwidth to respond to all of OP's points right now, but I will say that I'm a fan of both how counteract works and the ExP system.

I like that you've got to spend some serious resources to counteract stuff of or above your level. It makes enemies and hazards that inflict status conditions and debuffs feel like they've got serious teeth, which is really important in a game where things like damage reset between encounters. It's one of the main ways to keep your resource management game feeling like a resource management game.
I've also played in games that do the opposite, where relatively low-level or cheap resources are able to counteract most anything you throw them at, and I'm just not a fan of that narrative. It brings up questions like "Why does a high-level caster bother making any long-lasting magical working if it can just get dispelled by an apprentice with a spell scroll?" Counteracting being difficult makes encountering those kinds of enchantments and workings feel more permanent, and thus more impressive.

And I like the ExP system primarily because it's great for planning out an encounter's budget. I really, really appreciate how tightly everything maps together, and that when the game says that encounter of X ExP will be X difficult it tends to mean it.
I also like that the ExP system is something of a self-correcting one. If a party gets ahead in level and makes future challenges easier, well they're worth less ExP now, so they're going to level slower, and the reverse is also true, that if a party misses out on some ExP early on the later fights will be a bit harder to help them make up the shortfall.
Iunno, this system has just clicked with me in a way that no other system I've seen has. I'm definitely not flailing around with it as much as I was when I tried running PF1/3.5, that's for sure.

I think Pathfinder has a unique advantage in the form of its trait system, which already does a lot of categorization by itself: this means some domains, like fire, would likely be very easy to implement. Others, like time, less so because spells and feats lack that categorization (though there is a time trait in 2e!). Ideally, I'd like the basic rules to be intuitive enough that lumping a feat or spell into one or more domains would be fairly straightforward even when they're not automatic, including for game elements added after the categories and their rules are set. That way, the implementation would be forwards-compatible and domains shouldn't get siloed despite PF2e's rules-heavy nature.

Agreed, traits are our friends here, for sure.

I wonder if one way to help with siloing not being an issue is to do what Battlezoo's eldamon supplements did. There are some features, particularly for the Elemental Avatar class, that have a very simple framework, like granting you a deployable shield, that are then modified by extra riders depending on what element you are using. Earth having more hardness and being tougher to crack, fire doing a smidge of retributive damage, ice causing a status penalty to speed, etc. (I don't recall if those are the actual effects by the by.)

Starting off with a big grab bag of generic effects, and then layering the unique benefits your spheres grant onto them afterward, would help you avoid having too many things locked away in a manner that'd be hard to counter.

The system's not perfect though, of course. For one thing, you would still want a fair number of effects to be unique to each of your spheres since, well, people like having special toys. It makes your character stand out and feel more distinct, and that's something that people who extra focus on a particular theme want from what I can tell.
For another, not all spheres are going to map as neatly on to all of the effects, so picking an choosing which make more or less thematic sense could be a bit of a headache depending on the baseline effects you choose. At the end of the day someone, somewhere, is going to disagree with an interpretation of a power. I guess that's less of a limitation of my approach and more a reality of making such a system though, and something some design discussion along with such a system would help solve better than specific rules.
Also, the idea as I've presented it works way, way better for caster-flavored spheres, like Fire, Emotion/Mental, Shadow, or Time, than it does for martial-coded ones like Agility, Endurance, or Might. Martials tend not to throw around big damage shapes or debuffs and focus more on special action-compressing abilities which are harder to tweak without making completely different.

I kind of feel like if your dungeon is defeated by shambling minions marching several yards ahead of the party, the dungeon was a bit bad to begin with.

Simple traps themselves have always been pretty dumb, and ambushes that trigger on mindless slow zombies aren't very clever and maybe deserve getting counter ambushed.

This is a whole different discussion, but I do agree that simple traps don't really do what they're intended to do with how PF2 is set up, I mean, unless they are immediately next to an encounter.

The main point of those traps, at least in most modern games, is to build tension by making actual fights harder for the party through debilitation. This makes damage one of the weakest ways a trap can inconvenience a party in PF2 because damage is one of the easiest debilitations to remedy.

The first thing I'd do is shamelessly steal the categorization systems from other games that did something similar.

Spheres obviously works for that since, well it's where we're getting the idea from, but I'd also look at other sources like the AGE games, Fantasy and Modern AGE specifically, and also probably Godbound, where your abilities are all gifts granted by the three--or sometimes more--words of creation that make up your divine portfolio.

I'd also think real long and hard about what effects are basic and universal enough that they don't really need to be in a sphere by themselves, and could work just about anywhere. For something like Pathfinder that'd likely focus around a handful of very straightforward damaging effects: hit guy with blast, do fireball-but-not AoE, an explosive line, a shield to protect from your chosen spheres if possible, things like that. One of the issues to watch out for with these kinds of systems is making sure they don't get too siloed. That's not a huge problem if your game is relatively rules-light, or its rules are very simple and easy to translate, but I don't think Pathfinder is ever really aiming to be that sort of game.

You can have a purple skinned human with green hair and gold eyes if you want. There are no rules for aesthetics.

I'm running a game of Shadow of the Weird Wizard for my group on Sundays. That game is very explicit about how unusual people can look in a world full of magic, and that people with goat eyes or purple skin may be both entirely human, and go unremarked upon.

It's rather tough to do while they are in a fey realm where people seem to know the elf, tho.

The Raven Black wrote:

Lord Fyre wrote:

The Raven Black wrote:

The PF Drows retcon also had another cause : the popularity of DnD's Drows.

The PF Drows were introduced in the second Paizo AP as extremely similar to the DnD Drows so that people who liked DnD would feel familiar with this new setting. And Drows were iconic, recognizable and popular.

Second Darkness was the 3rd AP ... and was by most accounts a disaster.

The Raven Black wrote:

And when the OGL debacle happened, it was simpler to just divorce the quasi-DnD Drows from Golarion.

The Dark Elves were the least of those casualties.

You are right about it being #3. I believe it was still a 3.5 AP though.

That is correct. But, unlike RotRL or CotCT, I don't expect an update.

The Raven Black wrote:

And Drows are without doubt the casualty about which people have been the most vocal.

But to use Dark Elves now, Paizo would need to go back to the original legends.

I'll just leave this here. Also, they were in the previous edition, too.

Maybe they'll get a look in with Feybound, or if not then, hopefully we visit the Netherworld and learn more about them.

My main concern, and this is less "why we shouldn't do this" and more "something to consider," is that such a system could lead to just as many notes and exceptions and special cases over time if the designers fail to take into account every use case for every feat. Class-exclusive feats would be especially prone to this. Say you make the investigator in this system, a class with a fair amount of rogue in its DNA. Suddenly you have the issue of either having to reprint or carve out special exceptions for the rogue feats the new class may want, or keeping them siloed off and having players confusedly grumbling about why the rogue feat they think fits an investigator isn't on their list. (And in all likelihood both at once.)
Yes, you could potentially solve this problem by making fewer overall classes, but classes are one of Pathfinder's strengths IMO. Even classes like daredevil and slayer, classes that people call New Monk/Swash/Ranger/Whatever, still feel pretty different to me and I'd be sad to see that variety go away.

I'm also concerned about power, or rather, about the homogenization of class builds. I suppose this would be solved by having lots of categories, or granting access to only a few categories per class, but that's a pretty fine line to walk between something that feels flexible and saves on page space and something that is functionally what we have now, a system that tries to protect class niches by giving each class lots of bespoke feats, but just formatted differently.

...and I had zero interest in the class fantasy.

This has always been the main reason I've never been interested in playing rangers, personally. I've never been super drawn to the nature-centric character fantasies, and that always feels like it's a core part of the ranger.

Ironically, PF2 is the closest I've ever come to wanting to play a ranger specifically because their features are a bit more agnostic and you can opt out of most--not all but most--of the nature flavor if you want.

TheTownsend wrote:

Eh, these books kinda have to cherry pick their topics for space reasons, and I can understand why they'd go with the current capital of a decaying Hell empire housing a recently minted infernal demigod tyrant, rather than the husk of a town that used to be the capital before any of that stuff happened. It's about where the action is, y'know?

Allow me to disagree. Where is there room and opportunity for resistance:

1. In the very center of an infernal realm ruled by its demigod ruler, where she literally wields power over the land itself, and where forces loyal to her dominate?
2. Or in a major coastal city, with its own identity and pride, unconnected to the infernal monarchy and even in opposition to it, the country's largest sea gateway, with its own elites and clergy?

That feeds into TheTownsend's point. The harder it is to mount a resistance the more apposite a location is for adventuring in. There's reasons that two of the original Star Wars films have their climax on the Death Star, the symbolic heart of the Empire's powerbase. Westcrown, as somewhere unconnected to the infernal monarchy, isn't going to be as important to adventures which are probably going to center around that infernal monarchy. It's a place that a party might come from or go to for a quest, but not a place they're likely to end up.

Chassis like kinectist and runesmith would be a good basis for superheroes. A limited pool of powers than can be used at will, or close to it.

And perhaps more uniform frames of save and attack progression that you can mix-and-match, to a limited degree, to let you get the feel of a character who is meant to be a bruiser, or speedster, or techie person, etc.

I've also imagined essentially doing away with spell slots, and leaning more heavily on a focus point system that is also tied to Hero Points, so your focus spells become alternate spends for your points. Not sure if the pool would need to be bigger to accommodate the extra usage, or if they should be easier to recover, but yeah.

Dream collaboration is between Paizo and the Sentinels of the Multiverse creators, Christopher Badell and Adam Rebotarro. Combining Golarian fantasy and Earth superheroes is maybe a little awkward, but I would really enjoy seeing my two favorite cooperative game companies do something together.

I've considered PF2's framework applied to the comicbook superheroic genre, and I think it's workable.

I'm really eager to get into the section on the Eldest and see them fleshed out more! Especially Shyka, easily my favorite among them. I'm hoping that, assuming they have "deity" entries, their Boons and Curses are really off the wall!

I'm super looking forward to this section as well. IIRC none of the deities in any other themed books have had boons and curses appended, but let's cross our fingers and hope!

This may be better to ask in Advice or perhaps in Homebrew since Flatfinder isn't an official Paizo product.

Also, thanks for mentioning Flatfinder; I'd nevr heard of it and, while I haven't played PWL yet, I've been interested in the varient!

QuidEst wrote:

Gisher wrote:

QuidEst wrote:

Gisher wrote:

On the topic of Rune traditions, does anyone else find it strange that Thullax, Rune of Corrosion is Arcane rather than Primal?

The other offensive damaging runes may be primal, but they also have elemental connections, unlike acid. Seems like a fair enough distinction to put it under arcane instead.

I thought acid was associated with Earth just like cold is associated with Water and electricity is associated with Air.

In PF1, yeah. Not in PF2.

Thanks! I hadn't noticed that change.

It's way too late now, and I'm not sure the extra cognitive load would be worth it, but I'm wondering if labeling runes after the essences they evoke rather than their traditions wouldn't have worked to help with this kind of confusion. Label them with Material, Mental, Spirit/Spiritual and Vitality/Vital. Then have a textbox that explains the essences that each tradition uses, and thus which traditions would use which runes most frequently.

A tiny thought: prepared spellcasting as it is now is too limiting. Allowing prepared spellcasters also cast spontaneously exactly like spontaneous casters makes spontaneous casters irrelevant (as is for dnd sorcerers).

So, maybe allow them be spontaneous, but not exactly like sorcerers and the like?
For example, for the specific rank all prepared casters are spontaneous: no more choosing how much fireballs to cast. But prepared casters have no signature spells at all (nor all the more free heightening like in dnd or flexible archetype). Could this be enough of a difference and a way for spontaneous casters to be valuable?

I really like this idea. I don't know if it would be enough on its own to try and satisfy folks and keep prepared and spontaneous methods of spellcasting feeling distinct, but it does one thing I really like; it reduces bookkeeping.

Yup, looks right to me too.

JiCi wrote:

Is it me or does the Runesmith currently lack Occult and Divine Runes :O ?

The Annihilating Compound Invocation requires 4 runes: 1 for each magic tradition, except that there aren't many Divine or Occult rune to pick...

What,s weirder is how some runes DON'T have magic traits to them.

You mean Germantria, Rune of Partnership couldn't get a Divine Rune or something?

You choose the tradition trait of the runes that don't have traits.

Paizo wrote:

Runes are magical effects. Some runes have a specific tradition trait; for instance, the elemental ranshu, rune of thunder is a primal rune. If a rune has the magical trait, you can choose to replace the magical trait with a specific tradition trait, provided you're trained in the skill matching that tradition. For instance, you could create an arcane pluuna, rune of illumination if you were trained in Arcana.

That being said, I wouldn't be upset to see more explicitly Divine or Occult runes. I'd especially love a level 17 occult rune that invokes cosmic geometries, like being able to draw part of/an entire Elder Sign or the Yellow Sign.

Oh, and I wouldn't mind at all seeing some iconic wyverns and other beasts from the Monster Hunter series given stats. We've already seen the Slayer from the R&R playtest that touches on a bit of the MH fantasy from the character-side. I would love to see some kind of monster-part crafting rules not unlike what Heliana's Guide is for 5e

This is a good call. I'm not familiar with the series myself, but I've got friends who love Monster Hunter to bits and such a collab might get them into Pathfinder.

Also, not to invoke the cliche of "Battlezoo did it!" but ... Battlezoo has got both monster-climing mechanics and pokemon-alikes, even if neither are the actual licensed properties involved. They both look pretty cool; I'd recommend them to anyone interested!

We're on the same page about this. My problem with the spellbook is that its pointless. It's bookkeeping that doesn't actually do anything. There's no real advantage to having a spellbook vs being a class that doesn't need a spellbook, but there are disadvantages: bookkeeping work, cost, and the fact that the spellbook is a target which is extremly disruptive to lose (though that seems like a much less common tactic by GMs these days).

Lets be honest: PF2 Wizard has a spellbook because past D&D/PF1 Wizards had spellbooks. Not because the spellbook is actually a mechanically significant class feature in PF2. Taking PF2 in isolation, the spellbook is complexity for the sake of complexity.

Complexity for the sake of complexity is not particularly interesting. We can make things SUPER complex if we want to, without really adding anything. Certain types of folks will love it, and the mass market will nope right out.

Ultimately, if we're going to have the complexity of a spellbook, there should be a reason why it's worth the complexity. Like, making spell substitution a spellbook feature instead of a class feature does it: every class that uses a spellbook gets spell substitution for the slots that are coming from their spellbook. Or maybe a spellshape that lets you substitute on the fly by having your spellbook open to the spell you want to cast instead.

Just something that makes the spellbook itself a mechanically relevant feature rather than a vestigal thing that adds complexity because that's how it worked 20 years ago.

I would adore something like this for the wizard. It would even justify paying to scribe spells into a spellbook if, say, the wizard had access to the entire arcane list. The spells in their book are the ones the wizard knows backwards and forwards and has more facility with casting.

Also, and I'm not sure why, this post reminded of my personal favorite form of prepared casting. It comes from Worlds Without Number. Mages in that system only ever get to cast a handful of spells in a day, starting at 1 and eventually being able to cast 6. They know far more spells at a time, however, I believe starting at 3 and eventually growing to a full dozen. You are also allowed to prepare any number of spells of any rank; you don't have to prepare X number of spells at rank 1, for example.
It allows for a lot of flexibility in your preparation and IMO feels better because the decision point is still on which of your limited, encounter-defining spells you're going to cast rather than how many of a particular one you have when you start. It also leaves room for spontaneous casters, which the game calls evokers, to feel different, which was an issue I have always had with 5E's system, even though I do quite like it. Evokers instead have a pool of points they can spend to cast any of their spells, which gives them much more flexibility and many more lower-level spells in practice at the cost of using multiple fixed spells of higher ranks.

I adore extraplanar stuff. It's one of the things that was so much fun about the works of Tabris: Chronicle of the Righteous, Concordance of Rivals, and Book of the Damned.

I'd especially be all for an exploration of planes that haven't gotten much love in the past, some of the real weird ones like the Dimension of Dreams or Dimension of Time.

There are also a couple feats that require attacks with those traits, like Weighty Impact and Grasping Limbs.

Perpdepog wrote:

Squiggit wrote:

Part of the problem I think is that the Wizard has a really weak internal definition. Like.. it's dude who casts spells and has a spellbook but those are all pretty low level concepts. I feel like right now the Wizard is almost more defined negatively (as in, in terms of the things they can't do, like heal very well) than in terms of like... what they're actually selling.

Agreed. Wizards are often defined by what they aren't as opposed to necessarily what they are. It's doubly difficult because once you make other casters then that helps define the bounds of what a wizard isn't, which gives you less room to work with. Wizards don't heal because clerics are the premier healers. Wizards don't do a ton of necromancy because, well, the necromancer exists, and is generally one of the first specific magical wheelhouse classes to show up when the wizard's space starts getting divided up. Normally this would be helpful because getting the bounds of a class's identity can help zero in on what it can do, but since the wizard is also a major archetype in TTRPGs it's also generally one of the first classes to show up.

And let's not forget how deep the problem goes. Once upon a time the wizard was the magic class. Even the original cleric is partially defined by being part way between Fighter and Wizard in terms of abilities, aside from having much fewer spells in general. Interestingly, both are assumed to be using a book of spells and be capable of magical research!

Regardless, it's not hard to see how years of not quite updating the wizard's identity from "I'm the one who casts the spells except healing" as more and more unique spellcasters show up each with their own unique theme and clear identity beyond just having a bunch of spells. Especially since "the spells" has narrowed from "everything but holy stuff and healing" to "the mental and elemental spells++"

That's why I like the idea of the wizard as the meta-magic (not necessarily metamagic but that could be part of it) class and turning their constraints into benefits. I don't know if I agree with necessarily all of the ideas people have put forward for how the wizard achieves the goal, but I do think the wizard being the best at mucking with spells and making them do different things is a goal worth pushing toward. Let the wizard be the most toolboxy magical toolbox of all the casting classes; it's a design direction that preserves something I see many folks say they like about the wizard, that they enjoy how wizards approach encounters as puzzles magic can solve, and allows them to remain a generalist while keeping their own niche.

The other thing, turning constraints into rewards, is just about removing pain points. Arcane schools are a flavor win, much more so now than before IMO, but having slots that can ONLY hold a very small set of spells doesn't feel great. Having a spellbook you reference, a tome of all your collected knowledge and arcane acumen, is also very flavorful and is maybe one of the strongest elements of the wizard fantasy that separates them from other casters ... but falls a bit flat when you realize that it pales in comparison to the ways other prepared casters prep their spells, and is going to cost you a lot of money and time if you want to take advantage of its capacity to boot. Introducing features that give you benefits for using your school spells, or that encourage you to fill/use your spellbook in some way, would do a lot of good in revising how the class is perceived and would also reinforce the wizard's theme as someone who leans on their magical knowledge for advantage.

What other types of creatures might work for this reskinned style of necromancer?

The first things that come to mind are elementals, plants, and constructs of some sort, either physical ones like little puppets or clockworks, or energy-based constructs of pure magic, like moving runes. Whatever they are, they need to be something that carries the flavor of being easily disposable and not have any serious moral implications for sacrificing them. The necromancer can get away with having as many guys as they do because their thralls are incredibly temporary, and often need to be sacrificed to trigger the necromancer's powers. That's an important component of the mechanical loop to keep from cluttering the battlefield, but it's gonna make it really hard to argue for non-evil versions of the class fantasy when you have to repeatedly sacrifice cheerful fey, or woodland critters, or celestial spirits to keep your powers going.

Part of the problem I think is that the Wizard has a really weak internal definition. Like.. it's dude who casts spells and has a spellbook but those are all pretty low level concepts. I feel like right now the Wizard is almost more defined negatively (as in, in terms of the things they can't do, like heal very well) than in terms of like... what they're actually selling.

Agreed. Wizards are often defined by what they aren't as opposed to necessarily what they are. It's doubly difficult because once you make other casters then that helps define the bounds of what a wizard isn't, which gives you less room to work with. Wizards don't heal because clerics are the premier healers. Wizards don't do a ton of necromancy because, well, the necromancer exists, and is generally one of the first specific magical wheelhouse classes to show up when the wizard's space starts getting divided up. Normally this would be helpful because getting the bounds of a class's identity can help zero in on what it can do, but since the wizard is also a major archetype in TTRPGs it's also generally one of the first classes to show up.

I think that's why most folks are talking about wanting the wizard to be good at altering spells, even if they are couching it in terms of narrative rather than mechanical identity; they're homing in on the wizard's potential identity as someone whose wheelhouse is magic itself rather than a specific subset, like conjuring fire or raising the dead. "Guy who is good at messing with magic on a meta level" is a niche that I could see a wizard falling into that it could keep to itself, even if other classes can still access it a bit. Classes other than necromancers can summon undead, after all, and characters other than elementalists can fling fireballs.

I'm not sure if this thread is intended to be about what we'd like to see in this edition's wizard via new feats or archetypes, or about our wishes for a hypothetical Unchained/3E wizard, so I'm going to lean on the latter and just talk a bit about what I'd like to see the wizard be.

For one thing, I actually like the wizard's niche of having spells all day, every day, and not frequently running out of gas. I know the sorcerer has that as well, but wizard has feats that give them scrolls, or lets them play a minigame of trying to chain slots down their list to keep getting Drain Bonded Item to trigger feel more wizardly to me. Honestly the idea of wizard feats opening up a few minigames is just something I find cool overall. I also like the idea someone else mentioned, I think it was QuidEst, of wizards getting more feats that don't expressly force you to use a particular flavor of magic, but reward you for doing so.

Actually, that brings me to the one big thing I'd like to see changed in a hypothetical future wizard: I want to see their restrictions become rewards. It's something I've talked about before, most recently with the magus and how Arcane Cascade got reframed to grant extra benefits through feats rather than being a requirement. That kind of design makes classes feel better in play because finding synergies, even if they're obvious ones, feels good. It makes players feel like they've got control over their character rather than being forced in a particular direction because the game said so.
A good example of what I mean are the school spells. I'd really love to see a future wizard offer some kind of benefit for casting those spells, or maybe categories of spell, rather than having special slots that can only cast those spells. Perhaps it could be a connection between their Arcane School and Arcane Thesis which, while both very flavorful and cool, feel rather siloed off from one another. As a spitball, maybe the Spell Substitution thesis provides a faster spell slot conversion time when you are swapping in one of your school's spells, or the familiar thesis allows you to cast your school spells from your familiar's location rather than your own. Features like that, features that give incentives to use the limited spells from your school rather than just appending them to your spell slots are something I'd really like to see.

Yeah, the coins sound like a lot of fun to pass around and fiddle with at table; that's very cool. Also, have you considered making your hero points also be usable to increase or decrease a roll by 1? It's just a thought I had since, as you pointed out in your post, sometimes a player really wants to change a roll's outcome. It's also one of the few ways to adjust enemy saves and attacks on the fly, which is pretty valuable, and it feels odd that the full coin's worth of hero point can't do that.

I also forget to hand out hero points pretty much all the time. I've compensated by instituting a rule that if you get a natural 1 on a significant roll--a roll made as part of combat or some other encounter or during an important downtime activity--you get a hero point. This only occurs if you keep that roll though, so if you had a hero point you have the decision to either spend the one you have and avert the 1, or take the loss and be compensated with another hero point on top.

Some heritages and feats for automatons/androids to make them Numerian tech-robots. Unless there's something in Starfinder for that. (I admit, I don't necessarily know what this would entail. I'm suggesting on vibes right now.)

There is a pretty popular ancestry in Starfinder called the SRO, or Sentient Robotic Organism, that is very robot-y. They aren't explicitly intended to be stand-ins for Numerian robots or for Aballon's anacites, but they slot into that space pretty easily. They're going to be released in Tech Core later on this year, too.

Honestly some feats that interact with the Arcane Thesis in any way would be a huge win for me. I like it when classes have ways to progress their various gimmicks.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

For me it is more about the narrative idea of the wizard. The wizard in stories is always a mover and shaker of the world able to do things others cannot. They are almost always respected as extremely powerful and brought in by rulers to assist them or rulers themselves.

Rincewind the Wizzard (says so on his hat) says "hold my beer, I have the most important spell in the multiverse stuck in my head coz I snuck into a place I wasn't meant to and opened a book I shouldn't have (or should I have?) and now I a) can't cast *any* spells b) only move and shake myself out of danger and off the edge of the world c) am not *really* respected anywhere though I did get to meet the Patrician and d) still can't... spell."

He looks askance at a predatory trunk lurking nearby.

"And e) my luggage likes to eat people. Sapient pearwood and all that."

There's always (at least) one.

Discworld is an even better anti-example of wizardly supremacy; it's one of the only settings I know of where a wizard's job is primarily to not use magic. It's also a setting where sorcerers are explicitly more powerful than wizards.

Also, now I'm wondering if Rincewind's situation opening the Octavo and getting a spell from inside it stuck in his head served as any inspiration for impossible spells. It's a cool bit of coincidence even if it wasn't.

I just want to see if Quest for the Frozen Flame gets referenced in any way.

I can't imagine it'll go totally unremarked upon. It's probably the most exciting player-facing thing to happen there ever.

Is there any new information that we will receive the Devil option for the Summoner?

I was hoping it was going to be in the recent book with the Hellknight update but it wasn't.

Will it be in Lost Omens Cheliax, Infernal Inheritance?

I haven't heard anything on that front either way, sadly. Though, if you and your group don't mind 3P, Summoners+ has a section that adjusts existing eidolons, and one option alters the demon eidolon into a devil.

Or, yaknow, just have a different member of your party be the one who does the chasing while you hide around a corner so nobody can see your eidolon symbol.

Or be out in the open and claim to be "a thrall of the monster" or some such; you've got high charisma. It's very doable.

NotADragon wrote:

There is a not a spellcaster that can create custom magical effects as needed by combining components (i.e. design spells during combat). Pathfinder 1 had a "wordcaster" system in Ultimate Magic that did this, and obviously other games have had similar systems. My first exposure to something similar was Ars Magica.

I think you might have better luck with that if you don't remind Paizo about Words of Power. I don't think their takeaway was that it was a thing that people got a lot of use out of, or that could be continually expanded on later like regular spells.

Which is a real shame, because I feel that Words of Power would play much more nicely with PF2's three action system.

Though the runes the Runesmith uses do feel very similar.

I dunno if I'd call it weird. Exploitable, yeah, but not so weird. It's meant to evoke the fantasy of spray-and-pray in action movies and similar media. Such weapons are often employed by goons who go to the Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, filling the air with lead because they can't hit the broad side of a barn otherwise. (They tend to miss the heroes when filling the air with lead, too, but there ya go.)
I know it's not realistic, that there is a lot more that goes into properly controlling a firearm in full auto release, but from a pulpy simulation perspective it makes perfect sense.

It also means that your noodle-armed wizard is just as good at blowing baddies away with a machine gun as the best-trained operative or fighter, and that tickles me.

Distant Worlds is already my favorite 1e setting book.

Same, or if it's not it's definitely in my top five, along with whatever book gave us Basrakal.

... I also wonder what about your players make them dislike changing settings around the globe but like changing planar settings. Having a game move or take place in an entirely different reality seems like an even more extreme case of just having something happen in another country, so I wonder why one feels good and the other feels bad.

Shot in the dark, it's possible that the extreme separation is actually the point. OP mentioned how their friend liked their settings relatively small, and likes seeing themes on fantasy tropes. Settings-as-dimensions makes that easier rather than harder.

Having your settings all be countries, as Pathfinder does, is going to be messier for a number of reasons. For one thing, we all understand more or less what a country is. We know how they can interact and mix together and engage in struggles over resources. That opens the doors to said countries getting in each other's faces about things and making the setting feel wider. Different dimensions haven't got that problem unless you specifically include mechanics for interdimensional conflict somehow, and we have relatively few preconceptions on how that would look since we don't live in that kind of world. "They're kind of like islands where the physics can be different" is about how I conceptualize the discrete planes model of setting construction.

I can also see how that would be attractive from a character standpoint when it comes to riffing on tropes as well. Loads of settings like invoking the "Our X are Different" trope specifically because it's enjoyable for people to see a twist on something they thought was familiar.
Take elves. Both Pathfinder and D&D have loads of different elves: forest elves, snow elves, high elves, elves who only get high sometimes, etc. That can happen irrespective of whether the elf groups live in different nations rather than different worlds. What you can't do in Pathfinder's model, however, is give elves different origins. Elves can't both come from the land of the fey and also be aliens from your setting's version of Venus, for example; you need to pick one and then, at best, have them move to the other after. Having loads of little settings means you can keep making up different origin points and frameworks for elves if you feel like.

Do you think Paizo is going to make a new setting at some point? I feel there's a finite number of stories you can tell in a particular setting and in recent years I been feeling we are close to reaching zero. I feel there wouldn't be a better chance to remove all D&D-isms than making a new setting when those never were a thing. Not like I see it happening in this edition though. Probably not even in a 3rd edition either.

Not unless they decide to make another Xfinder-style TTRPG, say Streetfinder for modern fantasy. They've got no reason to otherwise.

Golarion isn't so much a singular settings as a bunch of smaller settings, each with different genre trappings and conventions, all stitched together; it's effectively D&D's planes model, but all on the same planet. All Paizo has to do is focus on a different region that they haven't looked at in a while, or ever looked at before. I suspect that'll somewhat accelerate given the new focus on three-part rather than six-part adventures, but like QuidEst said there are still huge sections of the world not really explored, and since each region is effectively touched on once or twice there are always options of going back, updating what's going on, and write an adventure around it.

Also, yaknow, it's a planet. There could always be a sneaky little continent, or archipelago, or peninsula added to the map for new stories to take place in. Heck we've seen powerful characters create new nations and adventuring locations in the lore multiple times.

I think if there is something to be concerned about it should be the number of big bads in a setting. Pathfinder's setting is a fantasy superhero-style world, and such places tend to live and die on their ability to give the party suitably epic challenges and baddies to deal with. This was something I was worried about for a while, but thankfully it looks like some classic BBEGs are either returning or getting a shot in the arm viz their effectiveness.

You create a magical trap by binding a hostile spell into a rune. As part of performing this ritual, you also Cast a Spell to store in the rune. The stored spell must take 3 actions or fewer to cast, have a hostile effect, and target one creature or have an area. You can set a password, a trigger, or both for the rune.

Emphasis mine. The text does repeatedly refer to "you," and rituals use "you" to refer to the primary caster. If a ritual is referring to something the secondary casters can do it shows up in the form of the phrase "you and the secondary casters."

I don't actually think it would matter from a power standpoint if someone else casts the spell into the rune. You still have to pay the appropriate cost to make the rune in the first place, and the primary caster would still have to roll the skill matching the spell's tradition. From a RAW perspective, however, it looks like it's referring only to the primary caster.

Impossible Magic, p. 215, the Literate Lemur spell catalyst doesn't tell you which save enemies need to roll when saving against its effects. Mad Monkeys has options for using a spell attack, or having enemies roll a fortitude or reflex save, so it's not clear from glancing at the spell, either.