RPG-Geek's page

I’ve played a lot of Gloom, Frost, and Jaws. IMO it has the same issues as PF2E I mentioned to Witch. I.e. it gets more repetitive once you know it well.

You can, and should, try playing with the "bad" cards and "bad" characters and see if you feel the same way. Obviously, in the end, it's a game focused on combat, so certain tactics will rule the day, but such is true of literally everything. Sports teams don't run trick plays all the time because the standard systems are what work.

I’d also say that the limited objective + burn mechanic just does not compare at all analogously to slot spells in PF2E.

Make every PF2 dungeon floor a self-contained battle with set objectives and a time limit. If you need to add to it, grant a free refresh of burned resources in line with the added threat.

So long as PF stays as a d20 class system with spell slots, I’m not sure the comparison really provides any lessons learned that can be incorporated into either the PF2E system or GMing to make the PF2E player experience better.

Spell slots need to die for PF3, there's no reason to keep them.

In any event, the Gloom ‘spell’ system is certainly ‘boring’ from the perspective of every magical character having less ‘spells’ than even a Kineticist in PF2E. So if people like Witch are looking for a wider variety of good, effective spells that a single PC can access, then Gloom is definitely not the model to use.

Fair, but you can keep expanding them in line with the current templates. I bet the TTRPG will add more variety, but the system does work best with a limited set of skills per character.

Eh, I'm not sure about it. All martials take Great Weapon Master (or the closest equivalent for their prefered weapon) and all casters take War Caster or Spell Sniper.

Those have been somewhat addressed in the 2024 version. Players also commonly skip feats for ASIs, but you're correct that twice as many feats would be ideal. Decoupling stats from feats also makes sense, but I'm against offering stat growth the way PF2 does it, as it feels like you should only ever boost your key stat and saves, unless you have a very good reason to do something else.

I totally agree with ditching skill feats. My table did this like a year ago (if you meet the prerequisites of a skill feat its yours, with a few exceptions) and its certainly been for the better in terms of speeding up character creation and character advancement, but also in terms of roleplay and character expression during play.

All the good things I said earlier about PF2e skills disappear when talking about skill feats. There's skills that clearly had preferential treatment in regards to skill feats (Medicine feels like it doesn't have a single bad skill feat, while Nature has like 1 good skill feat and it doesn't even have a legendary-tier skill feat). There's some examples of situational skills like Arcana (which is mainly used for RK checks and I believe its the skill with least amount of monsters that can be identified using it) that gain some goodies like a free cantrip, limited darkvision, and Unified Theory which is insane, but I feel like most of the time skills that are already good on their own receive the best skill feats while the niche skills receive fodder, which makes investing into those skills worse than it already is because it forces you to swim through a sea of gargabe to find the least bad and situational option. But even when talking about the best skills like Medicine, if you take a skill increase into it at 3rd level its very likely that you are going to take Continual Recovery either at 3rd or 4th level, only to then take Ward Medic at 4th or 6th level.

There really isn't a choice here. You took an increase into a skill, and there's like 2 or 3 feats that you can take which are also the highest tier of skill you can currently take. Even if the system allows you to take a trained-tier skill feat, why wouldn't you take the expert-tier ones if you just expended a skill increase into that skill? Gifting skill feats if you meet their prerequisites effectively skips a step in the process but ends in a somewhat similar result. Some skills benefit from this more than others, but since you don't have to min-max your skill increases to avoid having to take Eye for Numbers it is more likely for a PC to use their skill increases into niche or flavor skills (or at least, that's whats happened in my table both as a GM and player).

I have a similar concern with ancestry feats too. It isn't as bad as with skill feats because there's always at least one ancestry feat you want from each ancestry, not to mention versatile heritages, custom heritages, and the Adopted Ancestry general feat allowing you to poach the best from other ancestries too, but I often find myself playing certain combinations where one of the halves only exists as something written on the character sheet and not something that can be expressed through mechanics. Not to mention general feats which there's too few and its very easy to simply not meet their prerequisites with certain classes. In that sense I kinda miss the old PF1e feats that, while having the downside of weighting situational and flavor stuff with the mandatory combat ones, if they were just limited to ancestry, general, and skill feats I don't think would make much of a problem since its all the situational and kinda flavorful options anyways. Make it so you get a general feat at 1st and every two levels, take all ancestry feats, general feats, and the best skill feats and turn them into general feats, with all the situational or boring skill feats being deleted or merged into the skills themselves. This or allow PCs to take general feats with their ancestry feats, and even ancestry feats with their class feats.

Unironically, D&D 5e does feats right. You get a precious few and they're build defining, but you never feel forced to take one just to get to a baseline level of effectiveness. PF2 made too many things into feats, and it most results in false choices.

I think the game is better because your PC does not die when they are shot with one normal arrow, unlike a real person.

Wear armour, hide, take cover. Above all, not getting shot should be the first line of defence.

I think its interesting how people often find PF2e being less about RP than, for example, D&D 5e or rules light systems because it has more rules (I'm not trying to mean that's your take Arssanguinus, but I thought about this while reading your comment) when due to the ammount of rules the skill system has in PF2e over the aforementioned systems is what IMO can make it a more interactive narrative experience without requiring GM input.

Back to the topic at hand, I would kinda be onboard for PF3e to ditch skills entirely to make it more "rules light" as long as there were still ways to represent characters being more proficient at X than Y. Skill monkey classes always appealed to me but I always hated how skills in most systems feel arbitrarily designed (I said in my earlier comment the biggest problems I had with skills in PF1e, but other systems like D&D 5e certainly have some too like Perception and Investigation being different skills when the system already allows you to use different attributes for skills, so rolling Perception with Intelligence or Investigation with Wisdom feels redudant, plus other stuff that I'm honestly lazy to write about at the moment). In contrast, PF2e skills feel designed with mechanics and balance in mind, with logic being kinda like afterthought in some cases (like Crafting allowing you to craft anything ranging from a pencil to a cruise, but since Crafting is situational and pretty much optional it barely matters and I actually prefer it that way) but I'm curious to see if there could be a middle ground here for both designs to co-exist.

Skills should be more fleshed out, but D20 (and THAC0) based systems have always treated them like a minor concern. I'll always advocate for ditching skill feats, making more actions into skill actions, and giving skills the same space in the book that spells get with DC penalties and bonuses based on what you're trying to accomplish. Any skill feat should, at best, negate an explicitly listed penalty for using that skill action without it.

No, you missed the point. You were trying to use modern reality in a fantasy game for weapons. You seem to want to use realism when you feel like it and discard it when it is inconvenient to your arguments.

Even something like what would it really be like to be struck by a 10 ton dragon that can fly at immense speeds. Would a 150 to 200 lb. human even be able to withstand one blow from such a creature much less the breath weapon coming from its mouth? Especially with realistic Medieval weaponry.

I'd be fine with representing that in-game. Dragons should be brown pants when glimpsed from miles off, level threats. Fighting them should take an army, defensive magic, and never come without a massive cost in lives. Even an Ogre should be something you fight with as long a spear as possible because you will not survive being hit by them.

RPG-Geek wrote:

It wears too many hats right now and should be split into rarity and disruptiveness, and rated common to rare, and no risk to danger of campaign derailment.

100% agree there. A second disruptiveness measure would be very welcome. To add, when I tried Battletech, there is a 3rd meter to consider, legality. Battletech had a rarity and legality measure. Between the three, that'd be a lot of good information.

BattleTech is really good for being clear about eras, tech level, rules level, faction availability, etc. BV 3.0, when it comes, should solve the issues with jumping cLPLs being undervalued and things like MASC being overvalued.

It's an understandable question. Some folks just have to work a little harder to read.

Rough, I'm glad you're able to get where you need to go with reading in the end, in spite of it all.

I love rarity. I don't have to worry about whether or not something exists. I just have to worry about its commonality in the area. Instead of asking a question of, "Can I just make this exist in this setting?" I'm only having to ask the questions of, "Alright, what avenue can I use to get that item (or information in the case of intangibles less physical things) from point A to...

It wears too many hats right now and should be split into rarity and disruptiveness, and rated common to rare, and no risk to danger of campaign derailment.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Arssanguinus wrote:

I’d list the skill consolidation as one of the solid negatives.

Fair. I think if you want to double the list again to have more detail, you'd also want to hand out many more trained skills and skill increases. I'm not against it, but if you want characters that do a few things well, the consolidation works.

Not double it but some things are weird. Sense motive and basic perception ring the same thing, for one example. If you’re a ranger out in the woods who barely interacts with people and is good and spotting things a long way off, you are ALSO an expert and picking up on people’s motives. There are other cases where to be good at one thing you have to also be good at a totally conceptually unrelated thing.

Yeah, the way some skills are overbroad is a tricky one. You need them and want them to feel good, but bundling too much makes distinct character flaws and RPing your sheet much harder.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Squiggit wrote:

RPG-Geek wrote:

Why do you get to pick and choose what traits we keep and which are discarded as "made-up fantasy rubbish" when you can't even handle guns in your fantasy?

Everyone gets to pick and choose. The entire underpinings of a fantasy setting, and ttrpgs in general, is inherently a series of arbitrary decisions made to achieve some personal goal.

You were so close...

You missed the point. DF was trying to port every strength of fantasy monsters into the real world, while ignoring their weaknesses and how they are written into APs and the setting in general.

In other words “if they existed in the real world without any of the weaknesses they explicitly have in the game world they’d totally dominate!”

Yes, and I'm pointing out that by his logic, they should also dominate Golarion but can't because we need a static sandbox to write APs into.

I’d list the skill consolidation as one of the solid negatives.

Fair. I think if you want to double the list again to have more detail, you'd also want to hand out many more trained skills and skill increases. I'm not against it, but if you want characters that do a few things well, the consolidation works.

Ok. Name positives then. Because you sure can’t tell:

The three-action system has a lot of potential, as does 4-DoS.

Once you get over your D&D and PF1 ideas of how it should work, combat flows smoothly and is easy to pick up.

The way stats are generated in character creation is a perfect blend of point buy and array while giving you at least the illusion of choice.

Further skill consolidation is good, and using skills for initiative is inspired.

The balance is nice, even if I'd like it a few notches looser.

Creating monsters is quick, easy, and just works without any fuss.

The APs are quality.

I can go on, but there's no point. Being positive here gets a thread with 3 posts and then crickets. If you're spicy, you generate ideas that might actually translate to your own table.

Have you ever played Starfinder2e or Pathfinder2e? That you would consider almost any other game before SF2e, and you don't like Paizo's current themes and tones, and SF2e isn't even out yet. I get the feeling this isn't really about the game system.

I also play multiple other game systems, including several on your list.

I've GM'd PF2 and experienced it as a player. It's like a solid 7 for me. A bit bland for my tastes, but functional and you can run it and build characters for it with your eyes closed.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Why do you get to pick and choose what traits we keep and which are discarded as "made-up fantasy rubbish" when you can't even handle guns in your fantasy?

Everyone gets to pick and choose. The entire underpinings of a fantasy setting, and ttrpgs in general, is inherently a series of arbitrary decisions made to achieve some personal goal.

You were so close...

You missed the point. DF was trying to port every strength of fantasy monsters into the real world, while ignoring their weaknesses and how they are written into APs and the setting in general.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Agonarchy wrote:

Pulp fantasy before the 90s frequently had swords and guns side by side. He-Man and She-Ra come from this tradition. Harry Potter never brought a shotgun to deal with Voldemort despite living in the modern era. Warhammer is from 1983. Stephen King's The Gunslinger is 1982. The 90s brought us Interview With A Vampire, not guns, except for maybe holding pistols wrong. It's just a genre preference.

Yes, but the roots of mainstream Fantasy, you LotR and D&D didn't, nor did many mainstream medieval fantasy settings. There were some in the 80s, even some that were popular, but they mostly failed to grab a foothold in the TTRPG space (Warhammer wasn't an RPG until later). As we moved into the 90s and self-publishing became easier, we started to see a lot more settings bucking the trend of Tolkien-esque fantasy in a way we saw far less of in the 80s.

D&D had guns before the 80s even started. Early D&D even had ray guns and UFOs as far back as 1E. Tolkein's work certainly codified fantasy for a lot of people and remains the most popular expression, but the guns have always been there; similarly there have been wizards hanging out with space robots for generations.

It always had them as optional rules and magic item level rarities. Never as a core option.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Arssanguinus wrote:

If you’re so convinced everything else is just better why are you even here?

Where else should I be? Is this forum supposed to be a lifeless echo chamber where only minor disagreements, if even that, are tolerated?

Seems really odd to hang around arguing on the forums of a game you don’t even like. Seems like poor usage of time.

If I didn't like PF2, I wouldn't talk about it. I'm just critical of things I like.

Eh, Star Wars Saga also was a D20 20 level system and worked quite well, except how broken Jedi were at the low levels, if built correctly.

Nah. It was closer to the joke that was D20 Modern than good game design. Give me the WEG stuff, with its whole host of issues, over that slop.

Pulp fantasy before the 90s frequently had swords and guns side by side. He-Man and She-Ra come from this tradition. Harry Potter never brought a shotgun to deal with Voldemort despite living in the modern era. Warhammer is from 1983. Stephen King's The Gunslinger is 1982. The 90s brought us Interview With A Vampire, not guns, except for maybe holding pistols wrong. It's just a genre preference.

Yes, but the roots of mainstream Fantasy, you LotR and D&D didn't, nor did many mainstream medieval fantasy settings. There were some in the 80s, even some that were popular, but they mostly failed to grab a foothold in the TTRPG space (Warhammer wasn't an RPG until later). As we moved into the 90s and self-publishing became easier, we started to see a lot more settings bucking the trend of Tolkien-esque fantasy in a way we saw far less of in the 80s.

Different worlds is not what I'd call a good approach. WotC already has that problem.

Why would I want to learn Eberron, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the host of other D&D settings when I'm still studying the Forgotten Realms and don't even yet feel Intermediate in it?

You don't need to. Play the main setting you enjoy the most and use the other worlds to tell fish-out-of-water stories or as temporary stops in a higher-level game.

Someone wants me to play an Eberron campaign? Alright, I'll need a month or two to study a setting book first. Else I won't actually be able to make a character that lived in the world.

Why is it taking you longer to get up to speed with a setting than it did to outline it in the first place? The initial phase of the contest ran from June 6th to June 21st, then the 11 settings shortlisted submitted 10-page drafts for their pitch by the end of August, with the 3 finalists chosen in mid-October. From there, there was a 100-page draft was made by the 3 entrants, and the winner from these was chosen in early February 2003. So, at most 6 months to write an entire 100-page setting document, and it takes you a third of that just to read it?

No shade your way, but you seem like you like to take your time with things in a way most typically wouldn't.

When you have to deal with multiple settings in one system, you also have to grapple with questions of whether an entry exists or not from one world to another, questions like, "Is this class or class option a thing? Is this ancestry a thing? Is this weapon a thing? Why GM did you not tell me that this item that is rare in this other setting is actually a common staple in this setting?"

This is a session zero issue, not a system's issue. You could make the same complaint about rarity in PF2.

Driftbourne wrote:

RPG-Geek wrote:

No. I have other systems for sci-fi that do it better. We don't need character classes and d20s in space.

What other Sci-fi game has anything as cool as Zo! or Strawberry Machine Cake?

Pretty sure RPG-Geek is talking about the system mechanics such as character classes and even using a d20, which some other sci-fi RPGs dispense with. As for “cool”, given the vast range of tonal preferences available to the possible player base I’d say the answer swings from “none” to “lots/all of them”. Starfinder’s insistence on replicating realworld tropes like TV/vid/net influencer-stars and musical supergroups are not to everyone’s tastes.

This! If I wanted a space game, not sci-fi in general but space, I'd do Eclipse Phase. For sci-fi, I'd pick between heavily modified Cyberpunk 2020, Hard Wired Island, BattleTech (not sure which version just yet), Dark Heresy, Lancer, or even crib the setting from RIFTS, Traveller, or Spelljammer and use them with GURPS before I'd consider SF2.

Paizo's current themes and tones are a huge miss for me and part of why I'm less bullish on PF2 and SF2 than I could be.

Gloomhaven, unless I missed the mark, is also a board game, which means it has a fixed set of possibilities and has near-total control over things like pacing, so it can do very different things from a TTRPG that has to be robust enough to accommodate a wide range of scenarios.

It has fewer moving parts than PF2, but not by as large a degree as you would think. It's like 4e D&D in terms of how many options a character has open to them in combat, and can be played with randomly generated dungeons. The biggest lack compared to a proper TTRPG is enemy variety, and their TTRPG that's in the works should fix this.

This somewhat ties back to Witch of Miracles on the attrition as a way to budget flashiness - a board game can force you at gun point to run exactly five combats before resting and hence balance attrition around that, but the lessons learnt from 3.PF and 5e is that due to RL circumstances and player caution the average playgroup trends towards one or two resource-exhausting encounters before calling it quits,

You can solve this with a dungeon clock that forces the party to move through at a measured, but fair pace, or else risk consequences. If an encounter is cleared every 7 minutes on average or else the final boss gets a buff, it forces attrition to be meaningful because you need to plan when you can afford to rest and when you have to push.

and then you have Deriven Firelion's group on the extreme end of 'the entire dungeon is one encounter'.

That relies on handing the enemies the idiot ball, as mindlessly rushing the party while they're buffed is suicidal. The intelligent enemies should be falling back, setting ambushes with heavy concentrations of force, and waiting for the party's buffs to run out. It sounds like his group ends up playing SEALs versus Militia far too often, and then DF assumes their group is uniquely awesome. Not an attack on him, just an observation that his anecdotes about how his group plays tend to exaggerate his group's skills while merely claiming intelligent enemies with few examples of his group encountering an enemy force as well coordinated as his party.

The reality of the table is that tracking attrition is the first thing to go when a group has in or out of game issues, which is why modern games are moving away from this - however, that also means attrition can't buy as much power anymore.

This is a huge shame because resource management is such a large part of giving a game the room to allow players to feel awesome without letting anything work as a go-to solution or always forcing a 5-minute adventuring day.

I don't play Gloomhaver. Your view of Gloomhaven is subjective as well, not objective. So once again, you are pretending...pretending...your personal preference applies to everyone.

1) Have you tried it?

2) You do the same thing when you call people out and claim your group's way of playing is superior.

3) Shouting down a discussion rather than disengaging or engaging with it in good faith is poor form.

If you think that game is better, then play it. Why are you on a PF2 forum trying to make PF2 into Gloomhaven since you find it more exciting?

I do. Unlike many posters here, I play many different systems and post about them. I rag on D&D 5e in those spaces, Gloomhaven in theirs, even my darlings BattleTech and Cyberpunk aren't immune. I engage with things I like critically and things I dislike not at all.

I'm beginning to wonder if you are a poster with a lot of different IDs who shows up here every few months trying to push their ideas just to troll the forum. I wish I had a way to check it because I believe you are probably doing just that.

No one spends this much time arguing for other games and claiming other games are better and wanting to go back to PF1 or some other game while spending all their time on a game they don't like and don't find exciting.

That's troll behavior.

I've reported you for this as it is a personal attack. Address my arguments, not me as a person or baseless speculation about my motives.

If you’re so convinced everything else is just better why are you even here?

Where else should I be? Is this forum supposed to be a lifeless echo chamber where only minor disagreements, if even that, are tolerated?

I don't think realism and verisimilitude are all that valuable if they get in the way of a more interesting and fun-to-play game. Sure, in real life, ranged weapons are valuable because they let you kill or hamper a foe from a position where you can't easily be hurt, but when I want to make a character with a ranged weapon, my thoughts are, "Robin Hood/Legolas/Kagome cool," not, "hopefully this will prevent the enemies from using their cool abilities on me and I don't have to be exposed to any risks while playing this character."

Robin Hood and Legolas both break TTRPG character design rules by also being excellent in melee. In their stories, they are often the highest-level person in a battle facing off against mooks PL-3 or worse below them. If they were forced to follow PF2 rules and were written as if constrained within PF2 encounter design their stories would suck.

Like, if we want verisimilitude so badly, we should probably consider the fact that a shield and sufficient armour would render ranged attacks as particularly noisome hail at the upper end of the first range increment--a meaningful threat to those hapless souls wearing cloth, but not for an armoured character.

We'd also want to make it so a character just marching in armour gets fatigued and so that same character is sucking wind 5 minutes into a dungeon and dead of exhaustion within 15 if they keep pushing without getting magical support from the party healer. The idea that you can adventure at all in full plate, rather than adventuring in breast plate and an open face helmet and putting on the full set only before major battles, is far sillier than the idea of them being felled by an archer.

Incidentally, while some of RPG-Geek's suggestions are the same as things that have already been said (give ranged characters flanking opportunities they'll move for), others I feel are not ideal. I would rather see mechanics not punishing ranged characters for suboptimal play, but rather offering them risks and rewards. Making one of the most static playstyles less fun if you do it wrong seems ineffective compared to offering meaningful rewards for participating in the combat in fun and engaging ways.

Punisher effects are often more effective for forcing action than mere buffs. These same changes also impact ranged martials positively, as foes now have to move or become easier for them to hit. Either that PL+3 boss now needs to move, or the ranged character just got +2 to hit against them.

And there are certainly ways you can make a fight start at extra long range and still be fun (I'm thinking Shadows of the Colossus-style running from cover to cover), I think combats where the melee characters have to spend several actions to possibly several turns just moving into position would be the exception even in an ideal system, not the norm.

I'd make the encounter mix something like 60% what we get as standard now, 25% close ranged encounters with ranged threats and cover, and 15% other, which includes long ranged engagements but also stuff like traps/haunts or flying enemies at low levels.

Same as in stories, you start the scene when the action starts, and most of the time, archers plunking small-potatoes damage back and forth across a field while melee characters run is not going to be 'the action' in any meaningful sense, no matter whether it technically shaved off 10% of the enemy's health pool before the fight actually started.

Which stories, though? SLA's bridge runs were all done at extreme range and showed the attritional nature of warfare in a high-fantasy setting. It's about presentation, and most writers are pretty bad at writing these scenes well.

I don't really think monsters rarely attacks settlements in Golarion (unless its said somewhere I don't know) its just that adventurers are that common in Golarion. I think RPG-Geek said earlier that adventurers are supposed to be rare, which (again, unless its said somewhere I don't know) its far from the truth. We have APs from pretty much everywhere in Golarion in both PF1e and PF2e, with new AP books coming monthly from the last 20-ish years in IRL time which coincides with 20-ish years of Golarion too. This means that every month a group of at least 4 people increase 3-ish levels, reaching 10 or 20 level in the spam of a few months. Just taking into account APs (because Society scenarios and random adventures that aren't relevant to make into an AP or Society scenario also increase this number) its means its very likely for most regions in Golarion to have at least someone strong enough to take down most of the serious threats that could ever happen there, with the low level threats working as "initation" for new adventurers to eventually reach those levels too.

APs are often multipart stories. With 3 and 6-part APs being a single adventure. That means, roughly 2-3 adventures per year. PFS stuff can't count because of how small the population of Golarion is there's a chance that PFS players alone, much less their multiple characters, outnumber many Golarion cities.

This is why trying to aim for realism in fantasy settings is dumb because fantasy settings in TTRPGs, books, or whatever media are meant, first and foremost, to be a place where stories are told, thus realism is always going to be sidelined in favor of the narrative. This happens to all fantasy settings, not just Golarion.

You can make a living world in fantasy, but you can't have it be a theme park. Paizo should have made multiple worlds with different themes, rather than one world trying and failing to be everything to everyone.

PF2 is what a balanced game looks like. Less stacking, less immunity, less ways to win the game immediately, less ways to break the game. This is exactly what less power looks like and it feels worse to you.

So is Gloomhaven, and it does flashy and unique better than PF2. There's no excuse for balanced to mean boring when we have games that deliver both.

Because you've decided reality is the barometer and real evolution doesn't care about fantasy limitations.

Reality does have long-lived species with low birth rates and long gestation times. Or do you think Greenland sharks just aren't in the mood very often?

You're making arguments about real world Earth, not Golarion.

Yes, but the evidence suggests that monsters on Golarion are sedate and rarely attack settlements. You can't just assert that they will act in ways we don't see them acting on Golarion just because it suits your point. That's massively dishonest.

What type of knight? A non-noble mercenary knight? What era of knight? Early Celts or the later horse cavalry we see in movies with the shiny armor? What age? Why type of battlefield? What were they doing?

I have all types of books and of course the Internet to pull information from. I've read on knights for ages and their history with weapons and armor.

It's far more varied than you paint it.

It is, but once you add in that we have wheellock equivalent firearms and steel plate armour, you end up in a very narrow span of history. In that span, shields were out, swords were not a battlefield concern, polearms and warhammers were in, and the gun was just starting to rule the battlefield. Magic would change how formations operate, but that doesn't make a sword any better against plate armour.

Nobody wants it including you. Halberds were not made for indoor combat in dungeons. Polearms in general weren't. Sticking realism in games like these is something no one wants because when you study these weapons for real, you find they were made for specific purposes you don't even talk about for use in large scale battles.

Polearms still work in a dungeon, because a spear or two in a doorway means nothing is getting past you and your mages and archers can clean up.

You're bringing up some dueling competition when it is very clear halberds were not much involved in dueling culture. They were primarily made for heavy chopping against horses and heavy armor by military units involved in large scale battle.

Knights, in plate, on foot used their polearms against other dismounted knights. That's why they had hammers and back spikes on them. I brought up HEMA and duels to show that they aren't useless 1-v-1 as you were claiming they are.

It was a fairly useless weapon in close up, one on one battles easily bypassed by even a moderately skilled warrior to get into melee combat.

If that were the case, why weren't 17th-century knights using swords instead? Perhaps because a polearm and dagger were more efficient for the threats they were facing, and swords, even specialised ones, were losing the race against armour.

Made up fantasy rubbish. A real race with their characteristic would waste us.

Why do you get to pick and choose what traits we keep and which are discarded as "made-up fantasy rubbish" when you can't even handle guns in your fantasy?

So it's realism when you want realism and made up stuff when you want that?

You have to use all the evidence. Evidence says that monsters on Golarion are very few in number and passive; otherwise, we wouldn't have a setting to play in.

Or you figure out that the real versions of these weapons were built with a specific purpose in mind. Absent that purpose, they would be inferior like using a polearm in one on one combat or trying to use a bow in a melee.

So why did knights, who didn't fight in strict formation, carry polearms when on foot during the period when plate was common? You've refuse to answer this simple question.

We don't want that version of the weapon. We want the imaginary, fantasy versions where bows can be fired effectively like in seconds and swords or halberds can be standardly carried weapons with minimal differences in capability.

You, for whom guns in their fantasy is apparently a step too far, don't want this. Nobody else has had a choice because the bigger games have chosen to be abstract.

But Teridax does pose a problem with optimal ranged character situations.

They are not all that dynamic.

That's because PF2 doesn't force them to be. If a character standing still were a sitting duck, they'd need to find cover and ensure that the enemy can't invalidate that cover or accept that they are going to get crit if anything wants to attack them.

Ranged combat works best when any attack can threaten a character, you need to either be in hard cover or juking like a madman, and when most characters are able to participate. PF2 fails on every one of these counts and, as a result, makes it poorly suited for ranged attackers without spells or other tricks baked into their kit.

It's why my suggestion isn't just make better encounters, though that does help a lot. It's also to penalise ranged characters for standing still in the open and getting into reach of a melee threat, making mosters weaker to flanking shots at range (but only from narrow angles), giving melee characters impactful gap closing options, and designing battles with a mix of tight dungeon battles and open encounters that use maps spanning the length of an entire kitchen table.

I think there is no standard encounter to measure against or really say one design is overly specialized and another is typical.

There might be typical encouter design for APs? I wouldnt know but I dont adhere to any typical design other than what makes sense for the story.

APs and PFS play would be the standards as they are designed by the same people who write the rules. This is 30 x 30 rooms, narrow hallways, few ranged enemies, little to no cover, no verticality, etc. You can tell if a battle is a set piece if the room is bigger than 30 x 30 and/or has actual features.

That is the sense I get.

Ranged is getting the combat environment they want when the team is keeping them safe.
Ranged wants to turret basically, its up to the enemy to disrupt that situation.
And with that in mind maybe adding anything more to ranged capabilities is really just power creep even if its not the intention. Maybe unless those alternatives don’t at all do damage.

That leads me to the thought that if ranged is boring it is on the GM/AP or whatever is making the decision of what an encounter will look like. I also think that maybe those close quarter encounters should be horrible for ranged characters. They have to be closer than is optimal for them, they probably always have allies in the way making their shots harder. The strong melee enemies can easily get to them, and they dont do the same damage as melee characters.
I think that is appropriate and actually a good reason for ranged characters to pick up some options good for shorter distances instead of focusing only on ranged.

You've got it bang on. Ranged works fine as is, the enounter design in APs just sucks for them and the bandaid fix that is not penalising ranged characters for being in melee only makes this issue worse.

This assumes the ranged enemies always go for the ranged martials, which I think is actually a rarity if your enemies have enough tactical acumen to focus on specific targets, as the party caster tends to be a much juicier (and squishier) target in the immediate. Even in the case of ranged characters targeting each other, the problem with cover is that taking cover gives enemies cover against your attacks too, so even if it does mitigate the damage of a really threatening ranged opponents, it's not a great option in and of itself either.

Casters are still ranged characters. They're not the subject of this discussion as they have more options and thus don't tend to get bored, but you should have ranged threats attack your casters often enough that they have to spend resources on defence.

Who said they had no backup ranged weapons? Do you think that the Barbarian is going to have a good time just because they'll be spending an action a turn plinking with their under-runed bow for the next two to three turns they'll spend trying to catch up to that enemy?

Yes, in the current design paradigm. The fix is that we should design melee martials so they have impactful things to do outside of melee range (probably tied to a resource like focus points), or we give them gap-closing moves that let them cover that ground faster.

It is a system issue if every character is built to make distances and range irrelevant. Gap-closing abilities exist as 1st-level feats like Sudden Charge: these are meant to be optional feats to aid against specific situations, not must-haves to paper over systemic problems.

You defeat gap closers by exploiting terrain, moving back as they try to advance, or by sending your own melee out to meet them. Gap closers don't invalidate ranged threats; they simply ensure that trying to be a turret is a poor play unless you're set up in a great defensive position.

And again, that is not a problem of encounter design alone if encounters need to be designed in a highly specific way to avoid the pitfalls of the system they're dealing with. I also don't think what you're saying is true either: when encounters are cramped, ranged martials are in fact vulnerable to attack when they're a Stride away from the enemy, so the issue of excessive safety disappears. The problem there is that these encounters consistently take away the advantage of long range increments, so ranged martials just often end up playing like weaker melee martials. It's why volley weapons like the longbow tend to be seen as trap options by more experienced players as well, because something like volley 30 feet means you'll nearly always be shooting with a penalty in a 30-by-30-foot battle arena. Range increments and the size of AP encounter areas don't match, is the point.

So we need to make fights close ranged to cater to melee, and this isn't an encounter design issue, but suggesting that we fix encounter design to engage ranged characters doesn't count because... We already have specific encounter designs in published material, both due to page space and a desire not to force melee characters to spend even a round not being awesome. PF2 is built to make melee feel good and doesn't spend enough time either in encounter design or specific rules to ensure ranged feels the same way.

The AP enounter designs suck and are the biggest issue with PF2. Fixing this fixes ranged martial's feeling bad at the table. A mix of close and open encounters means that both ranged and melee characters get their chances to shine.

Dwarves have no sensitivity to sunlight.

They also have no desire to be above ground, and breed slowly compared to us. The lack of reach and slow speed is also something they'd struggle to overcome.

Elves live so long they would absolutely waste us.

One loss for them is like 100 for us because they just don't reproduce quickly enough. Skill doesn't save you from a stray arrow or getting hit from behind by the human tribe that has 10 or 20 times your numbers.

Illithids or aboleths or even worse real demons or devils would annihilate us.

They should also annihilate Golarion, as heroes are meant to be rare, and only the largest cities have anybody who can fight at or above 7th level. They all have to hold the idiot ball to make the setting function so we can assume they'd have the same lack of initiative if they were real.

Polearms have real weaknesses in single combat. They were best in formation. Polearms are unwieldy and smaller arms users that bypassed them would go to town on a polearm wielder. Its why they often carried short swords or shorter weapons for up close work.

That's when you either shift your grip or drop your primary arm and go for a grapple with your dagger.

Some dueling competition doesn't change the reality of combat. You wouldn't use a shield against a halberd which is made for breaking heavy armor. You would looking to move very fast to breach the reach of the halberd and get in close. Reach can be both an advantage and disadvantage in combat.

Ryangwy was saying that axes, maces, and shields should have a place just because they were common before the advent of plate armour. They were well out of favour by the time plate armour and guns ruled the battlefield. Using anything but plate armour (or a breastplate) should mark you as a peasant or a role where you don't expect to be attacked. Using leather should mark you out as an idiot when a gambeson does the job better and doesn't need a dead cow per set of armour.

It's irrelevant because humans could not wield a halberd long enough against magic or against a giant or dragon or other huge creatures, especially alone.

Those same creatures that mostly sit in the wilderness and avoid human settlements? By your logic, Golarion should be ruled by dragons who are, in turn, thralls to outsiders who are, in turn, ruled by gods. There's no room for anything else to happen.

Humans used to be frightened of grizzly bears, lions, and tigers. Creatures of nightmare to humans.

So frightened that we made cave lions extinct, drove bears and wolves into hiding, and expanded into what used to be their territory. Even Tigers, if we weren't protecting them, can be killed with simple wire traps and a spear with no ability to fight back.

There are a ton of D&D creatures that make bears, lions, and tigers seem like puppies and kittens.

Too bad they only show up to fight on level PCs and otherwise do nothing to impact the world. Golarion is a snapshot of a theme park. If we pretend it's a living world, it only works if these threats are very few in number or are, for some reason, unwilling to even try their luck against a settlement unless they're desperate or stupid.

Swords were used on the battlefield, just depends on the sword and the army strategy. Different units had different strategies. If that strategy incorporated a sword, then it was used.

With the tech level of Golarion, they would be uncommon as battlefield weapons. Knights would carry hammers/picks on horseback as a backup for their lance, with a dagger for close work. On foot, they carried polearms and daggers. Nobody was going to battle in the age of pike and shot armed with a sword and shield.

Swords are very versatile in build and purpose.

This makes them excellent sidearms for self-defence, but they are the pistol or home defence shotgun of weapons. Near useless as military tools once the phalanx was out of fashion.

Unless you want firearms in your games so you can get to sabres and other similar weapons, which you don't because you don't like guns in fantasy and want armour to be useful, you are stuck with swords being civilian defence weapons and duelling toys for the rich.

But there is still a glaring issue you raised even if the GM changes things up. A party that protects the backline well creates the environment where ranged only needs to reload and fire or just fire fire fire.

This is the win condition for ranged characters. If you're bored with this, you probably shouldn't play a ranged martial character. Ranged wins if the enemy shows that they aren't a threat to break through. After all, the shot just keeps firing while the pikes still hold.

You can also implement my other ideas where not moving or being in cover applies a penalty to reflex saves and AC. So holding still is a risk/reward choice for more offence at the cost of being a sitting duck if anybody does get to you.

Right, and as mentioned already, there's probably good reason for this. Imagine your melee party members constantly starting three or more Strides away from the enemy; do you think they'd be happy?

No, but that's what they get for being melee only and not carrying any backup ranged weapons. It's also a system issue if melee characters don't get good gap-closing abilities from level 1.

What you're suggesting is sound advice for a GM wanting to make play more interesting for their ranged players, but ultimately what you're suggesting is a GM workaround to a design problem being discussed on this thread. This isn't the advice subforum, this is general discussion, and having the GM work overtime to make the game work well is precisely the kind of thing 2e tries to avoid.

Part of the design problem is that Paizo builds encounters badly and doesn't use enough variety of spaces or the correct mix of range, melee, and evasive threats to ensure that the front liners can't just keep everybody in front of them, so ranged characters don't need to move. Hence a fix is for GMs to correct this poor design themselves, no different than a GM using any other fix found in this thread.

As others have mentioned already, I don't think the solution is to throw in a bunch of ranged enemies when most AP encounters are cramped enough as-is. I don't think ranged enemies make that much sense in a bunch of encounters either (which ranged animals are you thinking of including at levels 1-3?), and ultimately melee characters don't need enemies of a certain type to work, so I don't see why ranged enemies should be required to paper over the excessive safety of ranged party members.

Make larger maps on two-page spreads, make half-scale maps and make the GM blow them up before combat, or include full-sized fold-out map sheets with APs. Paizo has options and chooses not to use them.

You don't need to add ranged enemies to every fight, but you should add them to encounters if you have a ranged character with a bored player. The game caters to melee in a way that no other edition has, but has done so by removing power and options from ranged characters while also allowing them to function in melee without issue. It's a baffling design choice and one that has very obvious drawbacks.

What are you even talking about?

Ancient man did not square off against D&D like creatures or we would be dead.

They did square of with huge beasts like mammoths and whales using only very simple tools, though.

A humanoid race with equal or higher human intelligence with darkvision as an advantage would wipe humanity out if we had to compete against them.

If they had a sensitivity to daylight, they'd struggle because they'd hunt us at night, and we'd do the same in the day. Removing these penalties because PCs might want to play them is stupid.

That's why even in Arthurian legend, the knights use swords. They're not all getting wiped out by Swiss pikemen in a mass formation created to break horse cavalry.

Those legends also come from an age when a coat of mail and a shield were still knightly weapons. They never saw combat with men in plates of armour who were trying to bash each other to death.

Also, polearms don't only work in formation. Go watch some HEMA open weapons duelling and you'll see why you don't bring an axe and shield up against a halberd.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Pendragon isn't half of what I'd want. The Riddle of Steel, with QoL hacks and fixes from other derived systems, is where I'd go for crunchy combat. It is tough to find a game, though.

Weird, it's almost like the changes you're advocating for are wildly unpopular with the vast majority of players. Perhaps most people are more interested in enjoyable mechanics and sticking to an interesting shared fiction rather than painful levels of realism? :O

BattleTech Classic is popular and has as much crunch, so you really can't make that claim.

All historical weapons were made to fight humans. The fact that we're using them in this fantasy setting against monsters is already wildly unrealistic. I would not want them to spend any development time on making weapons hew closer earth battlefield useage.

This is blatantly false. Weapons have always been used for hunting, and primative man used little more than sticks and rocks to send megafauna to extinction. If anything, the existence of greater numbers of such beasts would push even further towards having swords be sidearms and polearms be primary weapons.

I don't think this is true at all, at least not for melee combat. Putting aside how you need to move into melee range to start attacking in melee, flanking means there's constantly an incentive to move to either get into flanking position or avoid getting flanked. Even just a five-foot Step is movement, and that melee characters would do this to mess with an enemy's turn does show in my opinion that movement matters in melee.

That's still pretty static. A step better than PF1, but still basic. Adding +1 to Ac per 20 ft. moved in a turn would be better at showing how well running works to keep you harder to hit. If it also gave an equal penalty to attacks, you'd more closely approximate the tradeoffs made in a fight.

In addition, Sibelius makes a good point that even if it isn't true now, it is still something worth advocating for. A lot of the problems of ranged martials stem from their excessive safety, as they mention: ranged martials can feel boring to play when they fight at long range, because they're too safe from enemies and thus don't feel in real danger. Ranged martials can also feel boring to play because they just stay in place and do the same thing, and that's because their safety gives them no incentive to do anything different from turn to turn if they can avoid it. Ranged martials can also feel boring to play because they tend to do a lot less than melee martials, but they can't really be allowed to do more when they can make themselves so safe (and again, at no tradeoff given how large range increments are). A game in which ranged martials were less safe is a game where they'd be more likely to do more things, including move, and would be allowed to do more too.

This stems from poor encounter design and too few ranged enemies invested in making life difficult for you. Toss in a few PL-2 ranged threats where you can, and you'll see ranged characters more engaged.

The balance I'm asking for is precisely that all the things in history are balanced roughly as per history. Because history is broad! Your view is biased in favour of sword techniques and polearms and, I think, a point in time where increasingly powerful crossbows and the emergence of guns is what's actually killing off earlier successful armaments like shields and axes.

Swords are pretty bad weapons on the battlefield. If anything, I'd favour hammers, picks, and polearms as the most effective weapons. Axes and maces were peasant weapons, as were shields after the advent of plate armour.

It's also an environment of increasingly large standing armies, which frankly is not what PF2e is trying to emulate - many factors like the 'push' of a longer weapon are only relevant when there's twenty similarly armed guys next to you. I doubt a truly perfect emulation of the shot-and-pike era where conflict sizes are a baseline of four-man teams will really end up as you expect.

A halberd or ranseur well wielded will make a man with an axe work hard to get within striking range. Watch HEMA sparing polearm versus one-handed weapon and shield and you'll see that the reach really is a huge advantage.

One of this has a better return on time spent than the other. But in the meantime, have you tried Pendragon?

Pendragon isn't half of what I'd want. The Riddle of Steel, with QoL hacks and fixes from other derived systems, is where I'd go for crunchy combat. It is tough to find a game, though.

Axes and maces were good because they were able to punch through armour while holding a shield, a thing swords and spears are worse at especially when not massed (remember, D&D is a squad battle game, three guys with spears is not a shield wall).

Guys in plate armour didn't carry shields on foot. They used picks or hammers with backup daggers. If we're talking the days of mail hauberks, a good sword could thrust and break links to deal damage.

The longer reach of a sword is, IRL, balanced against the fact that good armour means the mace guy can gamble on pushing through your sword and hitting you with something not so easily shrugged off.

Swords were pretty terrible against plate unless you were halfswording and handing the reach advantage back to the guy with the axe.

Polearms do make a tradeoff on their armour penetration for their reach and also don't let you use a shield,

You don't use a shield if you're wearing plate armour. That was a thing for the joust, not for fighting on foot. Shields should provide no AC bonus to characters in heavy armour.

They're also vulnerable to getting hacked by more solid weapons

There's little evidence that this actually happened. The zweihander was likely used to control a few pikes at once to make an opening for others to exploit.

Oh, and don't forget how deadly getting knifed while grappled is - and it specifically has to be a knife because anything else is too long to be useful for that trick.

Halfswording was practised for just such cases. A knife might be more ideal, but it takes longer to draw a knife than to switch your grip on a sword. PF2 fumbles here as well.

You can represent all of this but this is a lot of effort for marginal gains compared to the trait system, especially once you start adding all the other things you want to portray like martial arts and magical movement. And this has to be balanced for every martial class with every reasonable combination of weapons!

Balance isn't my biggest concern. Let what worked in history, not your weird pop culture take on things, result in more effective warriors.

You'd need to entirely redo the movement system, though. A Step will now, what, move you two range bands? How does difficult terrain work? How do you calculate flanking? How do large creatures using weapons, or people mounted on large creatures, which is already a mess in PF2e, calculate their reach? How do you make using an axe/mace, which is historically one of the best weapons, mathematically good when you have a substantial chance of being stopped by a swordsman? You're hyperfocusing on one specific RL melee concept, but you're not considering the knock-on effect on anything else.

Nah, just have the first two range bands at 5 ft. spacing and the rest at adjacent, and it works fine.

Axes/maces were okay weapons, ones that were used a lot because they were easy and common, but always a step below a proper polearm or a mass of spears. You wanted a proper warhammer/pick or a polaxe if you wanted to take those weapons and make them better. They also would have struggled with closing distance against a guy with a sword, watch HEMA sword vs. axe battles.

Anything with Resist All (Incorporeals, the entities formerly known as golems, construct armour, clockworks) or regeneration all can serve that role well. That said, they're relatively rare and have decent offense because 4e is a lesson in that those kind of monsters suck to actually play out, prompting the MM3 revision. This is, I think, one of the cases where people asking for this don't actually know what they're getting into (or should play more 4e, which I always encourage)

Those aren't the same thing. The Wall-type enemy and the assassin type on the other side of that same coin aren't meant to be solo threats. They're meant to be seen when they are PL+0 at the highest as either a fire/ice duo or as added bodies to spice up a key encounter.

RPG-Geek wrote:

The fact that you don't get many highly specialised monsters, like extreme AC and HP, high saves, but weak damage and attacks. Something that's a wall even at PL-1, but that is best served holding the line and not as a solo threat.

There's a reason you don't see published creatures who exist only to be "walls." There's nothing stopping you from making one, but a creature with extreme AC, HP, saves, but weak attack and damage would only exist to make a combat stretch longer and be frustrating. I understand if the idea is "the PCs need the silver bullet to fight off this creature," but it also means that lacking said silver bullet makes any encounter with them frustrating and uninteresting. I mean, look at the golems before the Remaster as a good case study.

EDIT: There's literally nothing stopping you from making a creature like that and the rules are easy enough to do so without much work. You can even use a monster builder to mock it up quickly.

Walls serve a good role as bodyguards for squishy foes. They should have low damage, but be annoying with grapples and other abilities that make bypassing them difficult. They only suck as standalone foes or the focal point of an encounter.

I question the claim that combat should be static: from the point of view of trying to win, sure, I don't want to move if I can spend that action hurting my opponent more directly instead, but from the point of view of wanting fun combat, I think movement is one of the most fundamental ways of making encounters feel more dynamic. The fact that ranged characters often move very little is a big reason why their turns tend to feel so repetitive, in my opinion, and I'd want to give ranged characters more reasons to move, ideally at ranges that make them approachable to melee enemies. Although some characters could set themselves up to snipe, no character should be able to just opt out of putting themselves at risk entirely, certainly not as a default part of their playstyle.

The game does a poor job of making you want to move. Even melee characters often only need to take a five-foot step back to force the enemy out of using 3-action attacks. If the team wanted movement to be key, they needed to make that a core design goal.

RPG-Geek wrote:

Bluemagetim wrote:

i wonder if its more on the encounter design to make things interesting for ranged characters than the abilities.

30x30 flat rooms are not made for ranged characters to have much fun.

Rangers for example can have cool sniping moments if they can prepare and set up on nearby highground. used ranger just cause the double range with hunt prey, but anyone can do it from the right distance.

Areas with differing levels and difficult terrain and outcropings or buildings provide cover and something to work with regarding distance.

If the enemies are all melee any walk up to the parties melee and stay there the whole fight then why wouldn't ranged characters stay back and turret.

If the terrain has changing or interactive elements like crumbling floors and rope suspended objects then ranged characters start thinking of how they can use these elements to their advantage.

Outside of VTTs, interesting 3D terrain is also hard to do on a 2D map sheet. Imagine the pain that a simple cliff with an overhang can cause on your average dry-erase board.

You still have to deal with flight at somepoint and that makes terrain even more important.

Yeah, and flight mostly sucks at the table if you want to do air-to-air melee. I mostly solve this by not using a grid and going theatre of the mind with drawings if my players need a visual to help them orient. This also lets them take my descriptions and ask if x thing is cover or if they can climb y.

i wonder if its more on the encounter design to make things interesting for ranged characters than the abilities.

30x30 flat rooms are not made for ranged characters to have much fun.

Rangers for example can have cool sniping moments if they can prepare and set up on nearby highground. used ranger just cause the double range with hunt prey, but anyone can do it from the right distance.

Areas with differing levels and difficult terrain and outcropings or buildings provide cover and something to work with regarding distance.

If the enemies are all melee any walk up to the parties melee and stay there the whole fight then why wouldn't ranged characters stay back and turret.

If the terrain has changing or interactive elements like crumbling floors and rope suspended objects then ranged characters start thinking of how they can use these elements to their advantage.

Outside of VTTs, interesting 3D terrain is also hard to do on a 2D map sheet. Imagine the pain that a simple cliff with an overhang can cause on your average dry-erase board.

Witch of Miracles wrote:

I spend a lot of pf2e gameplay (as a player) completely checked out because I'm waiting for a turn that requires almost no planning or performing a turn that doesn't really require any planning.

This sounds like simple game fatigue. You know the system so well there's no surprises any more. New classes, spells, etc. can get you a bit more squeeze, but you're looking for something beyond that. Unfortunately, I don't see what you're asking for giving you that newness. A more swingy feat, spell, or maneuver will quickly go the same way: you will learn it. You will learn exactly when to best use it and when not to. Your party will learn how to support it's use to minimize failure risk. And then it will be exactly as autopilot-y as what you do now.

I'd suggest more complex encounters and antagonists with shifted stats, changed up resistances and weaknesses, etc. so that the how of combat matters more since the what is already solved for you. But maybe you've tried that too? I don't know what to suggest. Well to reference another thread, if you want 'moar different' you could always mash up SF2E with PF2E.

PF2 does lend itself to feeling samey, though. The fact that you don't get many highly specialised monsters, like extreme AC and HP, high saves, but weak damage and attacks. Something that's a wall even at PL-1, but that is best served holding the line and not as a solo threat.

Putting a requirement of "the target must be within 30 feet and not have any bonus to cover" for any called shot type ability would put you in that close and needing to move to get the right angle situation.

I don't think ranged off guard should be on the table, it helps certain classes far more then others.
In a perfect world we would have class feats to improve on basic called shots, but that's a whole other set of homebrew.

Static shooting is realistic, but it's not heroic. So moving for the right angle needs to be rewarded more to make ranged combat more engaging.

Bring back penalties for shooting while in melee, and the melee guys have an incentive to rush the ranged characters again. This also gives budget to offer ranged characters more power in exchange for needing to care about positioning again.