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I think the story Paizo is lurching towards is that the original Razmir is already dead, and was already replaced (perhaps several times) with another figurehead pretending to be him. It's just tricky to tell that story now, since the old trope of "we will bring down this prominent figure by revealing a scandal" is sort of laughable in the modern era.
This is my third or fourth time asking for this: For Player Core 2 please add to the feat Qi Spells (also Advanced, etc.) a section that reads "Special You can take this feat multiple times, choosing a different initial qi spell each time." Other classes that have a "choose a focus spell" feat (e.g. Ranger, Cleric) have the option to take the feat more than once, so it's strange that the Monk lacks this particularly given this was not how it worked pre-Remaster (where Ki Rush and Ki Strike were just different feats.)
Considering that there are exactly three weapons with Brace, I don't think it's likely to get another pass from the developers. One of the purposes of highly situational traits, I feel, is it gets players who end up with those weapons to consider alternative combat strategies. If you don't have the weapon that has Brace, you might never think about readying a strike. In that way, the Nodachi is functional, it doesn't really matter that it's not the weapon that someone with access to every weapon would choose.
Weapon traits being very niche is just a thing. Like how often does Disarm or Razing come up? Sweep and Shove are nominally useful on paper but I've never seen them used to good effect.
I adore the Timewracked Mythic Destiny. I wonder which Starfinder 2e class would be the most fun for Revenge of the Runelords.
Precision Immunity should certainly be rarer than it is. Considering all the things you can do bleed damage to, it shouldn't be a stretch that most things have a weak point that is more effective to target than a different point (this is, in fact, easier to justify than "it bleeds some kind of essential fluid.")
Gotta love how often weapon complaints just boil down to 'my pet favorite weapon should do more damage' Really, the Ranseur should be the king of polearms.
I mean, in the real world there are an unsettling number of people who believe in the divine mission of politicians who don't even profess divine provenance, so I'd believe that this sort of thing happens all the time in Razmiran. There are assuredly some grifters in the bunch, but it's not 100%.
"I want to use my unlimited powers to create a lasting change to my environment" is something that needs to be adjudicated based on what the player wants to accomplish rather than "do the rules allow for this" I feel. I think the operative principle is- does this enable more stories, cut off potential stories, or does it have minimal effect. Like a Kineticist should not singlehandedly be able to solve Rahadoum's desertification crisis, but if you wanted to make a small lake next to your cabin and plant some trees so that it looks nice? That's a fine thing to spend downtime on if it's meaningful to the player. Like you can put a stop to "I'm going to plant a forest" by "every time the player starts doing that, you start rolling for random encounters."
You don't really need to translate between the two versions, they're basically compatible. Some things work differently, but the old version of things works with the remastered rules and vice versa. The reason for the remaster had to do with the potential death of the OGL so Paizo was on thin ice if they wanted to legally use certain terms, but in your home games it makes no difference. That being said Paizo wanted to take advantage of "we need to rewrite all the core books" so some things are better than they were the first time around, so people would want to use the remastered version instead. Only a handful of things got weaker in the remaster, so players should always prefer to use the remastered version of things.
I consider that in the overall arc of geology and geopolitics the number of individuals on Golarion who have PC-level agency is very small. Like a sufficient number of druids and kineticists working in tandem can solve all manner of climate/terrain related issues, but you're not likely to find critical mass of that without PCs getting involved. Like canonically Rahadoum has been searching for non-divine solutions to their ongoing desertification problem, and that's a nation that has significantly more resources to bring to bear on a problem than Belkzen does.
The Exemplar Archetype is something that literally every class whose main combat loop involves "doing damage with a weapon or an unarmed attack" would want to take since it's 1 feat for +2 damage for each weapon die with no restrictions. My Psychic Archetype MC Monk on the other hand spent 3 feats on the dedication (Tangible Mind for Shield), the Mental Resistance feat, and Psi Strikes for +1d6 damage, +1 AC, and Mental Resistance Level/2 for a 2 action loop.
One reason I suspect the Psychic is gong to get more than a token pass is that one of the main gimmicks of the class on release was "more efficient refocus" from the start, but now that's something everybody gets for free. So they need to get something just to spend the class power budget.
I'm not sure why "the Wizard is a weaker choice for a magic focused character" is an intolerable situation when "the Fighter is a weaker choice for a sword focused character" has been a fact of life a lot of times in the history of this family of games. The Remaster was less "let's fix all the classes" and more "let's make the best of a bad situation."
But they did fix the Monk archetype by adding a single line to the Flurry of Blows archetype feat. They could do something similar to the Psychic dedication. Something like "Amping Psi Cantrips is possible but taxing for you, once you have amped a Psi Cantrip you are unable to do so again until you refocus." This is barely a nerf for most MC Psychic characters, but solves the Magus problem.
If you removed (or limited) how much the Psychic Magus can Amp imaginary weapon, would it really be worth taking over a bunch of other focus spells one could poach via multiclassing? Like Winter Bolt is pretty competitive with an un-amped Imaginary Weapon. One amp per refocus sounds about right for the dedication.
You could have killed Gorum a lot more easily I guess. It says any armor, it doesn't specify "armor you can touch."
I do think one thing that Paio should do to underline "Pathfinder classes work here" is that in some book or another to create feats, subclasses, etc. for PF2 classes that give them both the tools and also the flavor they would need to fit easily in any SF2 games. You could also do the same thing for the Starfinder classes to fit better in Pathfinder. This would also be a way to signal like "these classes are good to go" and also highlighting which other classes might not fit easily in the other game without a lot of work.
I feel like the reason you have 6 classes in the Player Core book is due to the other 27 classes that work just fine in Starfinder 2e. Like you can just play a Cleric or a Gunslinger or a Commander or an Exemplar. The important thing about the Starfinder classes is that they let you do something that you couldn't do with a Pathfinder character who has access to Starfinder options.
Isn't the reason for a tighter band that PF2 has very tight math, so "rolling for DCs set levels too high or too low" might not be fun? Like a Hard Challenge for a Level 8 character is a Very Hard challenge for a level 6 character. I think it's better to set "how hard is this challenge" by the needs of the narrative rather than the identity of the character attempting it.
I feel like RPG settings are like comic book universes in that you want to avoid too much specificity in terms of the map in case you need to insert another city or whatever somewhere. Like the planet Earth that DC Comics takes place in is slightly larger than the planet Earth we live on, in order to have both a "Metropolis" and a "New York City." Like there could be *anything* in the vast Qadiran desert- we'll find out when we get there.
Like I imagine that the reason that most nations do not wish to engage high level PC types in matters of state, is that you do not generally wish to attract their attention since they could just as easily take over *your* nation as defeat your enemy. They might even do both, in deciding the former is part of the most efficient path for the latter.
I think the thing that the high-level PC party is bad at (and is still important in war) is "holding territory for as long as it takes" since that basically requires the PCs to stay in one place and that means they can't go solve problems elsewhere.
It's been 12 years since Reign of Winter though and someone is smuggling stuff from a portal between Irrisen and Earth, so they have access to better guns than the ones they would have had. Like Anastasia could get her hands on a Browning M2 or a Besa MG.
The standard in PF2 is basically that the durability (or lack thereof) of items in the background are subject to the needs of the story, and thus GM fiat. If the Maguffin needs to not explode even if someone threw a fireball at it, it doesn't. If the GM thinks "destroy that power coupling to inconvenience the enemies" is a fun thing to have happen that rewards player creativity, then it does. The problem with "I have to look up rules for the material this desk is made of" is that's something that people almost never have close at hand so it slows down the game for someone to look something up. If it's something that "maybe the object gets destroyed, maybe it doesn't- I'm comfortable with both outcomes" then you just come up with HP/Hardness for the thing and let the dice decide. If an uncommonly durable sofa survives an implausible amount of plasma fire, then maybe that becomes a fun thing (e.g. determine they need to keep that sofa).
Letting someone flank everybody within, say 30 feet is incredibly strong. Not game-breaking, mind you, but not something you should have at low levels. This is a good option for a higher level feat or feature upgrade though.
Yeah, since "threaten" is only used by the rules in a natural language sense you could make the case that "I'm threatening everybody I can see because I have a gun out and I could Strike them" which is probably not how the ability is intended to work.
The "some ancestries are made amazing by their feats" angle often doesn't take into account how some ancestries are going to appear in one book with some feats and go years (or possibly forever) without getting a new feat. So while "Elves have a weak chassis but great feats" might be a good reason to play an Elf, there might never be a corresponding argument to play a Shisk.
The trouble is the phrase "threatened" is used only twice in rules elements in SF2. In Dance partner, it might describe your melee reach. In the other it unambiguously refers to the weapon's first range increment. What's the other one? It seems better to just use unambiguous phrases like "reach" and "first range increment" going forward.
It's probably worth considering that early on in PF2 they were much more conservative about the power budget for ancestries than they became later. Compare, for example, the ancestries in the Mwangi Expanse book to the ancestries in the Tian Xia book. It might be a project worth considering to just juice some of the premaster ancestries so they're not vastly inferior to ancestries from the same game.
It's not really about "balancing across game systems" but more about "balancing across the party." Since it's a bummer when player A finds that they get to do a lot less cool stuff than player B simply because Player A wanted to play a human or an android or a ysoki and player B picked something else. On a table by table basis for home games, the solution might be for the GM to juice some under-performing ancestries to bring them in line with some of the superstars. Like, if you wanted to bring forward the Anadi from Pathfinder they are spending a 9th level ancestry feat for a climb speed that's only available in spider-form whereas skittermanders can get the same climb speed with a heritage. If you wanted to play an Awakened Animal in Starfinder you should absolutely get all the movement capabilities of your animal at level 1.
"Threatened squares" is no longer a general rule since "Reactive Strike" (formerly Attack of Opportunity") is not universally available to all classes or monsters. So you only get to do what Reactive Strike, or whatever comparable reaction, says it does. Notably reactions have triggers (conditions under which you can use them) and Reactive Strike reads "Trigger: A creature within your reach uses a move action or leaves a square during a move action it’s using." So "threaten" isn't a game term in PF2/SF2. A rewrite of Dance Partner should read something like "If you used two actions, any enemy within the reach of both you and your ally counts as being flanked regardless of your relative positions."
I don't think "threaten" is a game term in PF2/SF2 anymore (reactive strike just refers to actions made within your reach). Dance Partner should probably be rephrased.
There's a discussion, RE: Nocticula about whether Starfinder is better served by "maintaining a completely separate canon" even if this might feel like it invalidates stories that people who play both games were invested in, or if it's better off retconning things that weren't honestly important when they were mentioned the first time in Starfinder. Like I feel as though "Nocticula's redemption didn't stick" is more of a bummer than just establishing her as a former Demon Lord regardless of how she was described as an aside in SF1. A way to split the difference might be to recognize that since alignment no longer exists, Nocticula is followed by both followers who of her redeemed portfolio and also by those related to her previous portfolio who hope to eventually move on to greener pastures ("assassin wants to get out of the game" is a trope after all.) One thing I think that helps with this going forward, is how much PF2 switched from an omniscient voice to more of a voice from the perspective of someone in the setting in its non-core setting books (e.g. Divine Mysteries is supposed to in the voice of the Nosoi Yivali), which makes it much easier to change something you've previously committed to the page. I hope Starfinder does something similar going forward.
The guidance I would want answered is how to implement something like Barathu, for example, in a game where I would not grant unlimited level 1 flight to one of the Pathfinder Ancestries that comes with wings (Sprites, Strix, certain Awakened Animals). Like it's easy enough to just add the three flight feats to the dragonkin's set of ancestry feats. But Barathu have a 5' move without flying.
Like it's entirely possible that "the PCs can fly at low levels" is not going to matter at all in a given Pathfinder game- perhaps the entirety of the first 9 levels or so is going to take place indoors where the ceilings don't get very high. The GM of the specific game is the person who has insight on whether this is going to be the case so leaving "how you should adjudicate flying ancestries" to the GM is really the only way to handle deviating from the printed rules. It's not totally different from how we handle amphibious ancestries- in an adventure that requires a lot of getting wet, it's potentially a huge advantage to be able to breathe under the water without help. In a campaign set in the mountains it's not going to come up much. It's just that the relative frequency of "aquatic" adventures compared to "ones where flight is a huge advantage" is much lower so we don't benefit from creating a cost to being aquatic like we do for flying.
Like it doesn't entirely feel correct to separate "the scientific aspects of the natural world" from "the magical stuff the Nature skill covers" in a setting in which Primal Magic exists. Scientists in Starfinder will be at least aware of Magic and have some idea about what can and can't do as part of doing science. Like a dragon shouldn't be able to fly or breathe fire based on the laws of the natural world, except for the inherent magic that dragons have that let them do that. You can't really "study the laws of the natural world without regards to innate magic and the like" in a setting in which dragons exist.
I don't think listing all the lore skills is possible or even desirable. Since "basically anything you can imagine that your character is good enough at to get paid doing it" is a valid lore skill. Like "Mathematics Lore", "Triaxian Pastry Lore", "Supernatural Romance Novel Lore", "Pseudo-Riemannian Manifold Lore", etc. are all valid choices for a lore skill. You are not guaranteed that your lore skill is guaranteed to come up, but any time you can convince the GM it's relevant then it should be (and GMs should be fairly permissive about this). You can always earn an income with Lore, and generally the more specific your lore skill is the lower the DC for any relevant checks should be (e.g. the roll to determine if the chef is lying to you about where they trained is lower if "Triaxian Pastry Lore" applies than if you're rolling "Cooking Lore") They could give a list of example lore skills, but mostly that's going to be specific to the campaign so something like "here are lore skills relevant to the campaign" is a good thing to put in a Adventure Path player's guide. They shouldn't prevent someone who really wants to be an expert on the history of the Veskarium Postal Service to play that character.
There are surprisingly few weapons with an ancestry trait (I think just the two for the Vesk) so it's especially unclear what the "unconventional weaponry" ancestry feat does. Like in Pathfinder terms the umabiguous use case is "grab a weapon that a different ancestry can get with its weapon familiarity feat" but then we're left with the other case where we're wondering "Is there another culture in which Plasma Cannons are common?"
I was genuinely surprised reading the Solarion that at no point do you get a 3rd trait for your solar weapon or unlock additional traits (other than that one feat that gives you Twin). Like the sample Solarion has an illegal build that suggests a third trait should be possible. I honestly wonder if Reach and 2-hand d10 shouldn't just be one trait like the others, since the reason you make them two is "so you can't take them together" but a 2 handed reach weapon that does d10 is just something anybody with martial weapon proficiency can buy at the shop.
I guess the thing is that your Starfinder character probably isn't doing graduate research in glaciology on Triaxus, or anything. We're going on space adventures and need to test things relevant to space adventures and those tend not to be very academic. Like it feels bad to have invested greatly into meteorology and just never have the weather come up in the entire adventure because you're spending the whole time indoors on space ships/stations and caves/caverns. So it just seems like we're unlikely to design a bridge, but might need to MacGyver a new capacitor for the deflector array so crafting does mostly apply to this. If you want to represent "my character knows about oceanography" that seems like what the Lore skill is for (which could stand to have a rebrand honestly) since that's "specialized knowledge that's not guaranteed to come up."
Different solar system, not galaxy. Vesk are from the same galaxy as golarion, so can come to Golarion via a rank 10 teleport. (On this note, every ancestry in Starfinder, except for ancestries that do not exist yet, like the Shirren (They'd need time travel, plus this), could theoretically access Golarion via a rank 10 casting of Teleport.) I mean, as a GM hearing about this character my first response is "tell me more why someone used a 10th level spell on a 1st level nobody?" I'm not saying there can't be a good answer to that, but I hope the answer is more interesting than "this is what I need in order to justify playing this character."
Yeah, I assume the Nex/Geb thing is starting again and they didn't want to tell us that three years out. But also, "the Nex/Geb thing can start happening again at any point" has also been a thing they've been signposting for over 10 years.
I think the things for which a conversion guide will be useful, moreso than ancestries, is classes. A GM can make a quick call based on any ancestry on nothing more than "this isn't really a story featuring people from other planets." But people are going to want to play something like a Mystic in a Pathfinder game and there's no reason this shouldn't work, so some guidance a la "recharge weapon is nonfunctional in Pathfinder so replace the cantrip granted by the Elemental Connection with something else, and you might want to alter Data Bond so you don't give access to Summon Robot in a pathfinder game" would genuinely help people.
I think the reason for Paizo to avoid releasing a "conversion guide" is this might create a "well, Paizo says I can do this" problem. It genuinely seems like the community is better doing this on their own. Like Shirren are mostly fine if you wanted to play one in Pathfinder. You would probably want to change the flying heritage, but other stuff feels fine. Except during Pathfinder times the Shirren didn't even exist yet, they were still part of the Swarm and a GM is justified in saying "I don't think you should play that in Pathfinder." Even things like a Vesk fell through a portal so now despite being from a different galaxy you get to play one should the sort of thing that happens rarely.
I understand Paizo wants to change around their announcement or release schedule, that's fine and normal. But the reason this is somewhat bothering about this particularly book is that was the book we playtested the classes for where they wouldn't even tell us the title of the book for the playtest (a thing that they hadn't done before.) So some part of this has to be "they are holding their cards close to their vest" because the very title of the book is predicated on something big happening.
Like the thing about two different canons (as well as "the very existence of the Gap") is that the people who write for Starfinder can't be expected to predict every single thing that happens in Pathfinder forever, nor should the people writing Pathfinder refuse to do something fun or interesting because "that's not how it is in Starfinder." So it's more about how things need to work, than "we want different canons on purpose". If the PF folks want to give Iomedae a cool new hat, they can do that. If Starfinder previously didn't depict her with her cool hat, they can just decide to do that going forward and nobody should worry about it. It's nothing more than "The SF folks also liked Iomedae's cool hat."
I mean, the Gap basically exists to justify any retcon they want to do. Sometimes they want to diverge from Pathfinder canon, sometimes they don't. Retcons aren't bad, after all.
So, folks over on the Inner Sea War speculation thread seem to think that the war will be modeled on WW I.No, we really don't. If there's a sense it models WWI it's less in the "how war was conducted" sense and more in the "entangling alliances get more nations involved in what is essentially a local issue." |
