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Oh hey, look at that. Thanks!

My players and I are a little confused on the last bit of TMI.

If you activate a magic item that requires a spell attack roll or spell DC and you don’t have the ability to cast spells of the relevant tradition, use your level as your proficiency bonus and the highest of your Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma modifiers.

In my party's instance, this would seem to be somewhere around 10 (level) + 4 (modifier) = +14

If you’re a master in the appropriate skill for the item’s tradition, you instead use the trained proficiency bonus, and if you’re legendary, you instead use the expert proficiency bonus.

Trained proficiency bonus is simply +0, which seems to imply that the modifier is still at +14 until you get your appropriate Arcana/Occultism/etc up to Legendary, then it gets a bump to +16?

Are we missing something? It almost looks as if the trained prof bonus was possibly considered to be higher at some point but was removed.

This build mostly stayed intact from the playtest to the launch. I introduced my group to an NPC Champion/Paladin. Throws hatchets with returning runes (divine ally) and stores them in gloves of holding. So it looks like she's a walking tin can with no weapons. Plus, with Ranged Reprisal and Exalt, _everyone's_ getting reaction attacks all the time. I also gave her the Barbarian Dedication feat to add to her Vengeful Oath so those hatchets often get described as going _through_ someone's chest, not sticking into them.

I've tried to hide it from my players as they're not active on the forums or other places we're all frequenting to glean new knowledge. But they're also not stupid and they've taken to asking if they should roll or just flip a coin when I have them make a check.

So, in general, what appears on the surface to be choices and decisions galore are actually numerous linear decisions that you have to commit to at early level if you want to keep up.

-Linear progress and number scaling. (If you keep up, you maintain ~50% chance to succeed a medium DC for your level, at any level.)
-Linear skill choices. (Choose 1-2 skills only to focus on and just be ok with your success rate of everything else dropping dramatically.)
-Linear skill feats. (Because of linear skill choices, your options for new skill feats are limited and have circumstantial use at best. Usually it's assumed you take the highest level feat option you have unlocked.)
-Linear class feats. (Commit early which subpath [TWU, Shield, Storm Druid, Stances, Bows, etc] you're taking and reluctantly take the only feat that pertains to your subpath at each level it's available.)
-And I guess in a way, linear multiclassing. (Class dedications give you armor/weapons and smell faintly of a class but only in the way that my visiting a farm will make me smell faintly of cows but doesn't make me a farmer. You have to take 2-3 level dips into any one dedication to have even the faintest hint of being that class. So either you commit to some kind of 50/50 split or just avoid multiclassing altogether.)

I said this months ago before the revisions even started rolling out. I'm fully on board for all of the concepts that PF2e has promised. They're steps in the right direction and keep me interested in the potential for a d20 system that I actually enjoy. I'm just still extremely hesitant about the implementation of any of them.

Barbarians didn't get much of a bump in 1.6. I've got a player who's also gone Wizard/Fighter trying to recreate the Magus. But they're in the minority.

The parity in numbers speaks to the +1/level being more of a factor than the attributes themselves, which is probably partially to blame for the stat dumps being what they are.

When my Str bonus is increasing on a linear growth pattern while my damage dice increase exponentially, I still maintain it's worthless mid game and beyond. Add to that many ranged combatants and nearly all casters who won't even use it for damage... It's marginally helpful at low levels for around 60% of builds. That's it.

I recall seeing some early discussion (read: August) regarding Int being the new dump stat, especially beyond Lvl 1 due to knowledge skills getting spread across Int and Wis, as well as Lore not being overly useful. Has there been any change in opinion on this as the playtest has gone on?

The other stat I see as relatively worthless now is Str. Unless you want a few % chances higher to make that climbing roll with Athletics, Str isn't really doing much for you beyond level 3. The moment your 1d4+1 Rogue or that 1d12+4 Barbarian gets that potency rune, the stat bonus from Str means very little. It's exacerbated with each + from the potency runes. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not entirely certain that I don't like the extra dice rolls for damage. They're kind of fun to toss around. But it makes the Str bonus weak at best, and at worst, completely worthless. Chucking around 4 dice at 12th level makes that extra +5 (if you're lucky) not feel like it's a worthwhile investment. And I know there are probably a few items to artificially boost your Str to get the bonus up another point or two but the scaling in general just doesn't seem to make it worth it. Give me Wis, Cha, Con, or even Dex at this point.

((Disclaimer: this is coming from someone who was running a Vesk Armored Brute in Starfinder punching people at 1d4+14 at level 4. I'll take my flat guaranteed stats any day of the week, thanks.))

But am I way off? Or is this kind of the meta that's developing so far? Admittedly, I've been GMing this entire test, so the one thing I've not had careful attention on is the actual character building process.

I used a DC2 flat check to see if they had a hard to evade encounter on the shadow plane (which they then failed on the third check, GM lesson; don't put checks in the game that you aren't willing to see the group fail).

Did your groups do anything to reflect the hazardous nature of the shadow plane?

In my encounter they spotted a nightmare and rider coming over the horizon, gaining on them quickly: giving them the option to leave the plane immediately, or buff for a fight. Of course they choose to stay and fight...

Yeah, I was considering this option but didn't want to throw in too much to tip the play test out of balance. Still might, just to keep them on their toes.

The NPC's explanation made it clear to search at the sources/ends of the tributaries, so they started with those and guessed well enough to go south first. After a few false starts and random, unhelpful searching in hexes that had nothing to do with the objectives, the players got smarter and traveled directly to the Dragon first, which they scouted well enough for me to inform them they saw her leave once each day, travel due west, and return looking rather pleased with herself. Shadow walk to the Moonmere, and scouted well enough.

A decently lucky guess based on that narrowed down the search for the cyclopes, which they convinced to join the alliance if they took down the dragon. Shadow walk back to the dragon, dropped her and had barely scratched the Fire Giant, who gladly joined the alliance in exchange for not being slaughtered. Return to the cyclopes.

In total, 7 TP, 3 AP, 2 RP, and with Shadow Walk so far, the potential to still have both RP left when returning to the Moonmere is still on the table if they go there immediately.

Ok, thanks for the feedback, all! I was just making sure we hadn't missed something in the rules that made this unworkable. They're not searching while in the shadow plane and that's still where they were taking the most time.

What they've pulled off so far is acquiring all potential points at I, M, and L, which gives them more than the baseline Research/Allies to trigger the Mercs and also 7 Treasure. They're back at E and ready to start day 17, but that's only because the first 5 days of travel was done normally.

I think, in theory, that they could probably assault the Moonmere at the beginning of the next session and be fine completely ignoring the rest of the map entirely if they really wanted to. Just wanted to be certain that was considered "working as intended" to potentially finish by day 22.

Thats not as big an advantage as you think.

Assuming that the players buy horses and nobody has expeditious perception (the skill feat that lets you search hexes in half the time) the lions share of the time is spent in searching hexes and NOT travelling between them. So you go from 1/3 day (or 2/3 day when off the river) + 1-2 days to 1-2 days per hex. Its an advantage but not an overwhelming one.

With horses and a bit of luck my group basically did as much searching as necessary in a little over a month (the key was making the occassional crit to find clues to the interesting hexes)

I get that the majority of the time is taken up searching but it doesn't change the fact that your horses travel 3.5 mph (3 hexes per day) while my players (whose slowest member has a speed 25, or 2.5 mph) now travel 50 mph (4.2 hexes per hour). Translation: what would take a party on horseback traveling along the river unimpeded 5 days to get between L and J, my party is doing in under 4 hours. The only time they're stopping to rest is when he's out of spell slot, which usually coincides with a chance to search an area.

Alright, so I'm actually fairly impressed by the ingenuity here, but the Bard in my party took Shadow Walk as a 5th level spell and according to our interpretation of the spell and the adventure parameters, the group can pretty much travel to any point on the provided map within the 8 hours duration of the spell with relative ease. Aside from throwing in random encounters on the shadow plane just to trip them up, any suggestions on how to run the rest of the scenario?

Or is this just one to chalk up to "high five the players, report it on the survey, and move on?"

WhiteMagus2000 wrote:

100% of my players misread this to mean 1/2 caster level. (Paizo staff attempts to craft clear rules. They rolled a natural 1, what happens).

I don't think they critically failed. I'd say they definitely got a few failures, but that is because Write Clear Rules tends to have a pretty high DC.

Only because Medium DC continues to scale based on your level. :D

WhiteMagus2000 wrote:

The problem is that firing a crossbow into the crowd is now better than cantrips.

At level 1 a hand crossbow does 1d6 compared to a produce flame that also does 1d6 (and takes 2 actions)

At level 20 a hand crossbow +5 does 6d6 compared a produce flame that does 4d6 + (Ability modifier) (and takes 2 actions)

You're making the assumption that the person with that crossbow has invested their gold in that potency rune. In reality, my melee characters through this playtest have had a backup ranged weapon doing 1d6 OR they've been Wizards w/ Fighter MC and relied on their cantrips to do much larger damage.

Simply put, you've got it backwards on secondary weapons. Casters, dropping cantrips, have the advantage over weapons experts using off-weapons.

And, c'mon, it's entirely unfair to list crossbows as having 1-action firing when they have reload times. Just ridiculous a comparison.

Exactly. And on top of that, the difference of 2d6 averages to ~6 points of additional damage- which is exactly what a 20th level caster is going to have for their ability modifier: +6. I'll take the guaranteed damage any day over the variable.

We're about ready to start this one up and I'm concerned about there only being 4 Research Points available, plus deterioration, while the chart specifically lists a 4+ being possible. Are there other points available that I've missed? Is it possible to scout upon first finding the camp and then scout again right before the final battle (resulting in 2-3 additional points being available)?

I'm in favor of spontaneous spell heightening getting fixed to a more workable and less restrictive situation, situational feats allowing cantrips to be only 1 action, and a lot more spells in general having multi-action options. A lot of the issues mentioned in this thread are sorted with those three things.

I thought Jason implied in the stream that multiclassing to Paladin would be beneficial for the armor, but you'd have to be willing to work with the restrictions the class has built in. Wondering if leaving out the code was an unintentional oversight.

For logistics, the playtest is a hectic time, especially given that they're also publishing starfinder products, simultaneously, so it can't even be a all hands on deck activity. So I wonder if there are the manhours to update the PDFs for every update. Even for just DD, this probably involves at least a couple passes through, to ensure it's fit for distribution.

CTRL-F about 30 times with a few minor numerical/text changes is absolutely less time than typing up "Pale Mountain's Shadow: Page 29—In the second paragraph, in the first sentence, change “DC 25 Arcana, Nature, Occultism, or Religion” to “DC 23 Arcana, Nature, Occultism, or Religion”. (The text concerning the DC’s reduction to 20 does not need to be changed.) In the third paragraph, in the first sentence, change “DC 19 Thievery” to “DC 18 Thievery”. In the seventh paragraph, in the first sentence, change “DC 29 Perception” to “DC 27 Perception”." for each separate entry needing changed. There's no question about that. I kind of get the not changing the master document ruleset, but Doomsday Dawn could absolutely get tweaked in about 20 minutes. And formatting wouldn't really change either because the spacing to go from "29" to "27" doesn't change.

For Clarity, which is probably the major consideration, How will this affect the data? By going off an errata PDF, when surveys ask "are you using update 1.X?" it's easy to say yes or no. With an updated DD or CRB PDF, it's harder to say. The CRB is especially an issue, because what of groups playing with different copies of the rules. Or people on the forums or other avenues of feedback, who might specify page numbers or rules that don't correspond across updates.

If you're claiming to use Update 1.3, you'll be using the new DCs. If you're using 1.2 or lower, then it's also implied you're using the old DCs. I'm not sure how this affects anything in regard to an updated DD pdf. The surveys already start off by asking which update you're using.

For a Full Released version, yeah, updating with each errata is the right way of doing things, but for a playtest, I don't think it's the best idea.

I would normally be inclined to agree, but Doomsday Dawn has repeatedly been said to be designed for purely playtesting reasons. They wouldn't format it with such rigid design rules, major level skips, and

In the Friday night stream Jason mentioned that Paladin was now the route to get the best armor multiclass benefit (and other classes got reduced armor benefits), so it looks like it's probably intentional.

Correct. The Fighter got the Weapon proficiencies and a bump in Armor. The Paladins now have the Armor proficiencies. Jason implied that if you were going to multiclass so far, it's been hands down as Fighter to take all the armor, so they wanted to spread things out across all 12 classes more evenly.

The two pages of DC changes listed in the update file are great, but I can't help but think that it would have taken half the amount of time to change a few numbers in DD itself and push out a new download.

Admittedly, I'm not accustomed to running premade adventures as it is, but the last thing I want is to now have a fourth or fifth file open to tab back and forth between to run the playtest. Inevitably, I'm going to miss something, somewhere.

In general, my loves/hates all revolve around the same two things. I love the _concept_ of nearly everything introduced. The ideas and intentions behind them are great and it's what got my group interested in trying a d20 system again (even though we're not huge fans). What I hate is the _implementation_ of most of those concepts.

So here's the list.

Love:
1) Choices. The flexibility of 3 actions, non-linear class options, archetypes replacing class feats, 1-3 actions on spells affecting the result, etc. My daughters, who sometimes play with our group, both made multi-class characters and had a blast.
2) Tiered Success/Crit/Fail system keeps everyone on their toes.
3) The dedication to the Paizo team to actually listening to feedback and not coming in looking to steamroll the new system into existence. They get that not everything is perfect yet and are willing to work with the community to get it right.

Hate:
1) The illusion of choice. While the blogs seemed to refer to the myriad of options and ways to build your character, I'm not seeing that play out. Instead, whether you want to go multi-class, archetype, or simply build a cohesive single class character, you need to plan out at least the first 8-10 levels ahead of time to make sure you meet all prereqs by the time you're able to take the things you want. Even the basic single class characters are shoehorned in on most options to choosing a path early on and sticking with it to get optimal results in later abilities. This is a far cry from blog posts that assured us that nearly anyone could have a familiar/animal companion if only you spent the Feat on it (as just one example).
2) The handbook reads like a technical manual. Repetitive language, terminology everywhere that points you to another page halfway across the book, dry textbook descriptions. I get that pictures will help, but I usually can consume the general idea behind an entire new system book in a day or two. I found myself falling asleep reading this one.
3) As stated a number of times, I love the ideas attempted here to create choice options for unique, memorable characters. But when those options are virtually identical to other classes (sometimes with different names, sometimes literally identical), circumstantial or situational abilities, or just plain boring, it makes one wonder if maybe less choices might be better after all. If there's 100 options but only 10 good ones, you can save everyone the trouble and eliminate the other 90.
4) Bonus hate- I recall reading that there was an attempt to reduce artificially inflated numbers from PF1 but the automatic proficiency level bonuses do exactly the opposite. We're not playing Final Fantasy and if the DC is only going to scale up anyway, this is just a waste of everyone's time. Keep the numbers down and the scaling to a minimum.

In short, the big picture systemic creativity and ideas show promise. But the detailed, focused implementation is holistically lacking in that same creativity and turns a beautifully sketched outline from a potential masterpiece into something boring and entirely uninteresting.

TheGoofyGE3K wrote:

Not to mention past 17/18 things drop to +1 instead of +2 to stats.

That is easily fixable by simply cutting the rate you get the boost in half after +4.

Far easier to simply say that raising beyond +4 costs 2 Ability Points and remove the needless stipulation of raising 4 different abilities.

I'm with you, Edymnion. I wondered this back with Starfinder when it came out and now the creation process is even simpler and doesn't require 3-18 at all. Base 10 becomes Base 0. Creation boosts and flaws become +1 instead of +2.

I've played dozens of systems and written a few of my own, and nothing has caused more weird confusion in my home games with new players than the artificial/useless numbers associated with d20 abilities. And these are with relatively smart people- just not well versed in old-school gaming so it's not second nature.

"What's your STR?"
"Uh, it's a 16."
"Great, so add your modifier to your d20 roll."
"I rolled a 12... plus 16?"
"No, your modifier. +3"
"I add 3 to my 16?"
"No."
"Why don't they just give me one number. Can I just erase the 16?"
"Please do."