PossibleCabbage's page

@PossibleCabbage

Would it be possible to imagine a character taking a Multiclass into a class whose 'supposed' primary feature is possibly never going to be utilized. Sure, but that might be an expensive or inefficient choice. Are we saying this is the 'intention' with a multi-classed swashbuckler?

Sure, consider a pure martial taking the bard archetype for Martial Performance and Anthemic Performance; you have archetyped into a full caster and you're not going to cast spells other than cantrips. I currently have a monk with the Psychic archetype who just casts shield (non amped) in order to power up Psi Strikes (because it's a 1 action cantrip that's not useless.) I have taken the rogue archetype on a character and not taken the sneak attack feat. I imagine there exist reasons to play a multiclass ranger who does not hunt prey or a multiclass barbarian who does not rage.

Archetypes just give you what they say they give you. It's up to you to figure out how to make that useful.

I'm pretty sure they collect a lot of data regarding class satisfaction like "through surveys at cons, via PFS, etc." so you're probably operating at a level of system mastery that is less than you get among the self-selected superfans on social media and forums. But "the people who have spent the absolute most time thinking about the game" isn't really the demographic you want to design around.

Since at a Con you might have some players who have never played your game at all, and do not want to give them so much stuff to learn that they just drop out. So "this class is easy to understand and play" is really important.

One could argue that the "classic party" of a fighter, a rogue, a cleric, a wizard should be the 4 most simple classes in the game since those are the basic classes that people who know nothing about your game will attach to. This is probably the opposite of what Wizard Super-fans want, since the class has historically been one that benefited from knowing the ins-and-outs of the rules, but that sort of thing probably fits better on a different class *because* of the "basic four" thing.

TOZ wrote:

So, have we solved anything yet?

Still waiting for Paizo to do it. No one seems to have been sacked due to lack of interest.

From Paizo's perspective there's probably little impetus to do it because for all the hemming and hawing you'd get on the forum, social media, etc. their actual data from players regarding class popularity and satisfaction has the Wizard in a pretty good place.

Now in PF1 there was a similar issue with the rogue where the rogue was popular and people liked it even it was weak just because "they liked the fantasy of being a rogue" so this might be something like that.

Uncommon is not supposed to be an especially high hurdle to clear. As long as you have some strong case for having access to an uncommon option (including "they are listed in my ancestry's weapon familiarity list" IMO) then you should have access to it.

This still effectively gates people from taking all uncommon options under the sun, since you're not going to be every ancestry or from every place, but you should absolutely let PCs get access to all of the stuff that's related to their people or their homeland.

The ancestry tag on a weapon basically serves to say "these are the weapons of this people" if you're one of those people, you should have access to them regardless of whether or not you take the familiarity feat.

Like if you're an Elf Fighter who wants to use the Branch-Spear for a finesse reach weapon, you don't need the familiarity feat since that feat is redundant with your class features. You can buy it because you're an Elf, you grew up with Elves, and a large portion of the people you know are also Elves.

Lord Fyre wrote:

Is John Hight a good thing or a bad thing?

At this point, I am not sure that it matters.

Yeah, shared history aside, at this point with the game more or less fully remastered "What's going on with D&D" has about as much to do with us Pathfinder folks as "what's going on with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay" - in that all of the above are games with elves in which you roll dice.

They can do their thing over there, and we can do our thing over here and they don't have much to do with each other.

For some additional context, WOTC (and, specifically, the MTG and D&D franchises) accounts for the bulk of Hasbro's profits and there seems to be consistent pressure from Hasbro corporate for WOTC to monetize, monetize, monetize. Hence, it's very understandable to worry that tolerating changes to the OGL would lead to more aggressive changes designed to keep growing that revenue stream w/ ever-increasing licensing fees etc.

Yeah, it's likely this whole thing started because some executive who doesn't know anything about any particular industry, looked around and thought "Dungeons & Dragons is popular, and it's well-known, but it's not very profitable- let's change that" which got the ball rolling here.

Whatever that would eventually look like, if successful, it likely didn't have a lot in common with the traditional model of "you buy books from your FLGS and play with your friends."

The suits at Hasbro that decided "we should alter the OGL so it benefits us more" really didn't have Paizo in their sights. If you read the proposed alteration, the point was really more "Critical Role is making *how* much money and not getting any of it?" It's just that "Hasbro's lawyers apparently believe they can alter the OGL despite the language in the license including 'permanent' and 'irrevocable' and similar words" was news to Paizo (and a bunch of other gaming companies) which lead to the creation of the ORC as an OGL alternative.

Note that it is not implausible that Paizo et al would have succeeded in a legal challenge that OGL 1.1 can't actually be revoked, but it would have involved paying lawyers instead of authors and artists.

A basic problem now with the monk archetype was that a lot of the reasons to take it was "you can get a d8 agile, finesse stance with a level 1 monk feat, and eventually you can grab FoB".

But Martial Artist still lets your rogue take Stumbling Stance, and has easier unlock requirements. I figure the main reason to MC monk now is for qi spells or grappling stuff.

There is the standard (but slightly late) full refocus feat, and the curse is suspended while you’re in the process of refocusing.

Note that it's "when you start refocusing" that you stop being on fire, so if your GM is being deliberately antagonistic by starting the next combat exactly 59 rounds after the last one so as to bait people into resting but not letting them actually refocus, you're still okay. You'll just start on fire as soon as the next combat starts.

PF2 largely assumes that you're going to spend the time to heal up and regain resources between combats, so the oracle is fine here since the alternative is "the next combat starts immediately after the last one."

Of course the Flames Oracle probably should be patched for the case where the party is on a ticking clock and they're rushing from room to room so you're not burning the whole time, but I figure a GM can do that. I have no intention of tracking players being on fire during exploration mode.

I think errata to add the line "fire resistance or immunity cannot reduce this persistent damage" from the flames curse would be reasonable, but it's probably not intended that the Flames Oracle isn't someone who can benefit from fire resistance at all, since their 10th level cursebound feat involves taking a bunch of it. Since other mysteries get call out that the suppress your resistance generally, which was previously ambiguous in the legacy oracle.

Like when the APG came out there were arguments in the rules forum about whether like a tempest oracle with the stormtossed heritage would "avoid or mitigate the curse" or if it didn't because said character still takes more damage from electric when their curse is active than they would if it's not. Now that much is clear at least.

An important thing to remember is that it's not "you're always taking 1-4 points of fire damage/round as a flames oracle" it's that this is the cost of using your cursebound abilities, which effectively serve as a separate focus pool. We know your basic cursebound ability is foretell harm, which you'd only want to use after a high rank damaging spell, and you might not want to use it at all when you'd only be doing 2 extra damage to someone who got hit with your breathe fire. Being more or less conservative on using your cursebound abilities depending on your mystery seems reasonable.

A class archetype could solve some of these problems, but "buy another book to make this thing from the first book work properly" feels pretty bad.

And an archetype that gives you weapons turns weapon trance into even more of a disaster.

I mean, a battle oracle right now is a 4 slot divine spontaneous caster with a bad focus spell. That's useful, it's just not going to fulfill the fantasy of "full caster who is okay in danger" that the battle oracle classically has. Choosing it for the domains on the granted spells or that dead walk cursebound ability is valid.

Paizo can also assume that people are more likely to consider "War of Immortals" as a must-own book (it's got new classes in it) than most books they print, and they've also teased that there's some new fundamental force in reality that's coming with the event and the pitch for "how to make the battle oracle work like it has historically" just tied neatly into that so it got shoved into WoI.

One thing I think is possible is that there's the intent to make a class archetype that allows for a more martial oracle to appear in a forthcoming book (War of Immortals, say). That way people who want to play a battle oracle that has the medium armor and martial weapons of the legacy version can buy that back, but most oracles are not going to want to play that way so there's no reason to build it into the basic chassis.

The reason to address Flurry of Blows in the monk archetype was that it basically allowed other classes to be better at the monk at the monk's basic fighting style, which felt bad.

But at the same time some other builds with FoB from the Monk Archetype were fun, and I'm sad about losing them.

I'm not a fan of "curses are purely negative" either. Like this probably makes the class easier to understand, but it was fun when there was a push-pull within the curse.

Like Cassandra's curse was not that people would not believe her, it was that she could also actually see the future.

It's just interesting to me that PC1 basically didn't have major nerfs (cantrips lost like 1-2 points of damage), but PC2 has 3 of them all in multiclass archetypes.

I'm also pretty sure that the 1d4 was inserted so that people could still, potentially, FoB more than once a fight if they got lucky, since the standard cooldowns graduate from 1/round, 1d4 rounds, 1/minute, 1/10 minutes, 1/hour, and 1/day.

The lowest of those is what the monk already has, and made FoB real easy to poach, while 1/minute means you're only ever getting to use FoB once per fight. Every 1d4 rounds is the rough medium between those two.

I just don't like the random part of it, if it was 1 round, or 2 rounds, or 3 rounds then you could plan a loop around it but 1d4 is a bummer.

I found the playtest experience completely underwhelming.

I mean, the Guardian was a class I expected to love since my #1 ask since the original PF2 CRB playtest was "let me play a Champion that isn't tied to deific worship". But expecting to love the Guardian probably set me up for a disappointment because I genuinely did not enjoy playing the class at all. Taunt specifically just doesn't do anything for me, and that seems to be the essential nature of the class. I liked Hampering Sweeps, but apparently that can't exist in the final release.

I guess my hope is for a class archetype to let me play a Rivethun Champion, or an Animist Champion, or a Sangpotshi Champion, or a Pantheist Champion instead.

But unlike other playtests, this one made me sad.

Monk archetype imposing a 1d4-round cooldown on Flurry of Blows was a pleasant surprise.

Less exciting than a minor boost to monks FoB at around 10th level, TBH.

It being a 1d4 round cooldown instead of a static length cooldown makes it annoying to plan around, to boot.

Really if we model the Wizard after an academic, your original thesis is just "what gets you into the club where people won't dispute your credentials" and beyond that you just formalize and subsequently publish your results.

This is why when comic books (and comic book movies) want to make someone sound really smart by saying "they've got 6 PhDs" it's very funny hardly anybody on earth gets more than 1, since the 1 already lets you submit to journals and not get rejected out of hand and no PhD program would accept someone who already has one since it's a waste of time, effort, and resources.

But the problem with making the Wizard super-academic, is that you don't spend a lot of time going to school in this sort of game.

TBH, I really hate spending class feats on "once per day" stuff.

When I do it has to be something that's really a force multiplier when I use it (like quickened casting) not something purely reactive.

I was under the impression that when a wizard picked up a scroll in order to copy something into their spellbook, they still had the scroll when they're done.

So the thing about scrolls is if a Wizard thinks Tongues might be useful, they buy a scroll of it, then they copy it into their spellbook, but don't prepare it. If it comes up that Tongues is useful in a given context, they cast it from the scroll and if they think it's going to continue to be useful they prepare it tomorrow.

I'm sad that there's not an option for "Guardian that isn't based around taunting" in the cards.

If someone decides to make a one rat monk, four turtle fighters party... PLEASE let me know...

Clearly it's a Rat Monk, and a Turtle Commander (... leads), Turtle Inventor (... does machines), Turtle Barbarian (... cool but rude), and a Turtle Swashbuckler (a party dude).

Damn no Martial weapons.

Like sure, alchemist doesn't need them, given where their damage is coming from, but g***@%n are there some martial weapons I'd love to play properly on a toxicologist.

This seems like a good use for the various ancestry feats that peg weapon proficiency in specific weapons to the lower tier. Normally martials skip these unless there's an ancestral advanced weapon they want, but there are plenty of decent martial weapons with an ancestry tag. Want to use a breaching pike on an alchemist? Be a hobgoblin.

I mean, there's also things like "the party is on an ocean voyage, they might get attacked by pirates or a sea monster on a given day, but they're not going to get attacked over and over again on a single day" that means sometimes the narrative requires the number of fights/day to not be especially high.

There's also an issue where "the party is trying to liberate a captive from a stronghold", where the number of fights is in part going to be affected by the approach the PCs take (and also how successful they are at it.) Like if they do reconnaissance and enter in the right spot, proceed stealthily, and get in and out quickly that's going to result necessarily in fewer fights than "they decide to kick down the front gate and fight every guard." You can never assume the PCs are going to do the thing you thought was sensible and obvious, after all. You also want to acknowledge player choices in deciding their approach whether they want to be sneaky and efficient or noisy and belligerent and those are things that probably should not have the same results.

How am I going to recommend feats for the remaster champion without having Player Core 2 yet?

From a sustainability perspective I don't see a huge difference in "slots" vs. "mana points", I just think that casters shouldn't start the day at 100% and monotonically count down until they're out of stuff. Addressing the sustainability question is more about "is there a way to replenish your spent resources somehow."

Yeah, like a basic problem with the original 8 schools is that almost any magical effect you can think of could be categorized as "transmutation" since via magic you're causing something to be other than what it was. There was a real problem with this in PF1 with the rapid release schedule for Players Companions etc. - they got hugely more Transmutation spells than they did other traditions and had to figure out how to turn some of the Transmutation spells into something else.

Talking about "what this is used for" seems like much cleaner theming than "what is the essence for this spell" since the actual essence for magic in Pathfinder are matter, spirit, mind, and life. The Arcane tradition only deals with 2 of these (matter and mind.)

Like a good reason to drop the schools was that basically the Wizard was the only class who really used them. It's not really a good idea to have one mechanic that applies to all of the spells in the game that only one class gets value out of it.

I don't really see how the new schools are more "all over the place thematically" than the old schools.

Like a school of magic about wards, runes, symbols and language seems thematically cleaner than "Necromancy" and a school of magic about applications to either war or city-building/maintenance seems just as thematically tight as "Transmutation" or "Conjuration."

The-Magic-Sword wrote:

Notably, a lot of games that used to use mana have gone away from it-- MMO characters frequently still have them, but the actual play is more about managing cooldowns or build-and-spend resources (usually both), which is a more rigid version of spell slots, but they refresh more frequently too. Persona SP is mana, but its characters also burn health for physical attacks.

Though ironically a lot of MMOs have done that for the same reason as this thread, addressing the friction between game balance and selective attrition.

There's also the issue that in a tabletop game you're relying on human memory to track things like "cooldowns" which has significantly more overhead than "using computer memory."

Like the Exalted tick system with the battle wheel would have worked great in a video game, but it was a hurdle to get people over to get them to actually play the game.

I mean, it's much more of "A Wizard of Earthsea" AP anyway. You can tell because all of the people are the Wizard school are themselves competent adults. It's grad school for magic, not high school.

There's also value in not having to print so many arcane spells in one book, when you can just add more spells to the schools later when you want.

I allow any Wizard player to add any spell to their school list if the player can explain how that spell is related to what they studied, like "why is this useful to civic magic" etc.

I think no matter how many fireballs you can throw, you're still going to end up with people who are disappointed they couldn't get one more. Which suggests to me this is mostly of an issue of expecations management and encounter design.

Like how often is it appropriate to have a Wizard expending a meaningful spell slot on something? What sort of effect should this have?

I'd say part of why the Wizard feels so bleh to many players is because their core identity is basically just "the arcane caster", much like how the Druid's identity can be summarized as "the primal caster". Conversely, the arcane list was expressly designed to be the Wizard's spell list, eight legacy schools and all, just like how the primal list was designed around the Druid. However, whereas at least the Druid has some solid stats and some meaty focus spells, the Wizard is all about casting spells, so you really have to love the arcane list to get into the class. In a different world where the Wizard didn't have that kind of baggage, and were balanced around a much slimmer spell list, the class would have a much bigger budget for standout class features, and there'd be room for more arcane classes to boot.

I think part of this comes down to how in the original design of PF2 the Arcane List needed to be "greedier" than the other lists, since it needed enough spells of each level to serve 8 different school specialists. Being that this was unique to the arcane list (none of the other traditions have casters that demand this much breadth) this probably makes "has access to the arcane list" part of the power budget of the Wizard.

Except that this doesn't really factor into the Arcane Witch or Sorcerer, but it probably was part of the foundational design of the Wizard.

Anyway, this means there's hope going forward into the next edition, where the Arcane list can be streamlined (just focus on mental and material essence) and the Wizard can get more stuff.

So the thing I notice is that "cursebound" looks like an encounter resource. Like, "take more curse" is explicitly intended as a cost, and higher-level characters are supposed to be able to get more cursed than lower-level characters. As such, I'm thinking that ones you've maxxed out your current curse level, you don't get to push it any further, and all of those shiny feats turn off until you can (somehow) get your curse to subside.

Yeah, my read on it is that it's another metacurrency parallel to your focus pool. It's additive (you gain levels of curse), there's a cap (probably depending on your level), and each additional level of cursed hurts you somehow, but it's otherwise mostly "a second metacurrency" and probably serves to replace the original oracle gimmick of "you automatically get the accelerated refocus without spending feats" which wasn't really needed anymore.

My issue is that the way they've handled him in 2e has always been a change from how they did it in 1e, where LN Asmodeus worshipers were at least theoretically supported.

I believe the official line from Paizo was something to the effect of "LN worshippers of Asmodeus were a lore error that needed correcting, since Asmodeus is *supposed* to be one of the main 2 big bads of the setting."

Dispater is always there for when you want to be a kinder, friendlier devil worshiper, after all.

While there are certain social observances a citizen of Cheliax is expected to participate, I'm pretty sure there are members of the nobility in good standing who aren't really whole-hearted devil worshipers. There's a big gulf between "participating in the social aspects of a state religion" and "accepting spells from Asmodeus."

Brenden Falke wrote:

In a Song Of Silver (Hells Rebels 4), the Bleakbridge was officially renamed to the Silver Span. I see that in the players guide it is once again called the Bleakbridge? Did the heroes that liberated the city fall out of favour? Why would they reverse the name change?

That's an error. It should still be called "Silver Span" but, obviously, that's a bit of lore change that we've had a hard time keeping caught up on. (Fortunately, the location doesn't really play much of a role at all in the Adventure Path so that's not a big deal overall.)

Realistically, in the case of "a thing changed names" it's plausible that people will sometimes refer to that same thing using the old names. Like my local airport has two terminals whose names were changed in 2009, but I still think of them with the original names and Hell's Rebels was in 2015, IIRC so the people of Kintargo have had less time to adapt..

The Curtain Call player's guide references Dirty Trick (one of the backgrounds grants it). It's a thievery skill feat.

The player's guide for Curtain Call is written with "you have player core 2" in mind since it name checks the new Champion causes.

Which makes sense since I thing Stage Fright and PC2 ship on the same day.

Pharasma is None/Holy

Typo here, she's Heal/No Sanctification.

exequiel759 wrote:

I don't know what happened with Paizo in the APG but the classes from that book feel like they didn't have any playtesting at all.

To some extent they didn't. The Witch, Investigator, and Oracle all saw substantitive changes to core mechanics before printing. While those changes were based on playtesting, those new versions of the class were never playtested, obviously.

The Swashbuckler kind of had the opposite problem. Lots of people looked at the class, saw it had an interesting new mechanic, and then turned their attention back to the much more obviously broken other classes. People didn't start really deep diving on the Swashbuckler's math, feat, and skill issues until months after the APG came out.

The APG was also the first playtest we had since the CRB came out, and the data you get from the playtest is obviously going to be better when the participants are more familiar with the system itself.

I genuinely do not understand the difference* between

- A level 1 druid can cast Tempest Surge 1 time to do electricity damage to a single target, they can't do it again until they take 10 minutes to refocus. (PF2)

- A level 1 druid can cast Frost Flash 1 time to do cold damage to a single target, they can't do it again until they take a short rest to recharge it (4e)

Like obviously these mechanics expand in different directions, one druid will eventually get 3 focus points while the other one will eventually get 4 different powers that are tracked separately but these are, in essence, the same thing right? They are, at the very least, intended to address the same problem (giving characters a meaningful option that is not endlessly spammable, but does not expend any sort of daily resource.) Paizo deserves credit for taking this in a more interesting direction, but these two things start from the same place. It's like the difference between a Fuji apple and a Honeycrisp apple- one is almost objectively better than the other one, but they are still both apples.

* that's not a difference in range, damage, saving throw, or energy type.

It's obvious that Focus spells aren't exactly the same as Encounter Powers, but they fill the same role (giving you a power you can use without expending a resource that is difficult to get back) and you use them at approximately the same rate.

The differences are:
1) You can, in between short rests, cast a single focus spell 3 times.
2) Focus spells have applicability out of combat (like healing) that matches the same recovery cycle as other out of combat abilities (10 minute cooldown.)

It's a better version of encounter powers, based on an understanding of how encounter powers worked in the other game and how that played out over the lifespan of the game, not literally the same thing.

It's just baffling to me when PF2 fans point to "4e Bad" stuff when PF2 is literally the game in this family that has the most in common with 4e. It's just that PF2 had "everything that happened in 4e" to consider when they sat down to tackle all the same problems with the 3.x chassis that both games wanted to address.

Focus spells are encounter powers because they're spells you can use every encounter.

The only difference is that instead of being able to use every encounter power once per fight, you can use any focus spell but generally only 3 total per fight. They even have the same "you have to recharge them" mechanic (encounter powers only recharged after a short rest in 4e.)

Encounter power builds are incredibly bad for narrative.

I don't think this conclusion holds water and the counterexample is obviously that focus spells are essentially encounter powers, and nobody has a problem with focus spells narratively speaking.

I don't think it's useful to get into a deep dive about the math of the Swashbuckler without actually having the text of the remastered swashbuckler.