Saleem Halabi's page

The watch. It begins!

Initial thoughts: I thought it looked great. I was a little concerned with the double attack roll and the accuracy issues, but didn't think it would be that big a deal. My biggest issue was the lack of spells.

Now: Playing level 3, Even with a 1 handed magus the action economy was terrible. So often I would use striking spell on one turn, miss, and then just use my action to cast a spell without striking the next round. Also, the accuracy was MUCH worse than I feared. Having to make two consecutive attack rolls with the second one at a substantially lower bonus that also blew resources was just.... bad.

At this point I am firmly convinced that either the strike needs to be included in the 2 action cast, or that the spell attack roll/save needs to just be eliminated entirely.

Oddly, the lack of spells, which I thought would be my main issue never really came up.

Something needs to happen to clear up both the action economy AND the accuracy issues.

Harmond looks quite... frazzled.

"I think... bad? Yes. Definitely bad. Maybe awful. Its hard to say. I'm not really sure. I think the world is ending."

...This would certainly be beneficial for many players and groups who like to gauge their own performance, i.e. how did we do vs expectations...

...How many TPK's does it take unless you realize that 4 severe encounters back-to-back might not have been your best idea for your current adventure stage?...

... Can't imagine them not having some inhouse rules when designing new adventure paths or stand-alone adventures.

1. They can't answer this question because they don't have an expected baseline. Thats like asking how the protagonists in The Hobbit did compared to the baseline. Its a nonsensical question. It isn't a race. The adventurers handle encounters as the story flow and their comfort level permits. There is no above or below average. That would presume a right or a wrong answer, and there isn't one.

2. According to the rule book, a severe encounter has a roughly 50/50 chance of TPKing a fully prepared party. So you should never do them back to back unless your group likes that kind of story. They have already told you what to expect if you do it (50/50 chance of success each time, assuming full rest). What more do you need?

3. I'm pretty sure they don't. They have already said they don't. (see James Jacob's quote posted multiple times in this thread) Why is it so hard to take them at their word?

Look, this boils down to Paizo being completely silent on a frikkin huge factor in how the game sets the difficulty.

Please tell me y'all don't think it's unreasonable to question that?

I do think the question is a bit unreasonable. Paizo isnt being silent on a huge issue. This is an incredibly minor issue, that honestly would have never even occurred to me as a problem that anyone would have had until it was brought up in this thread.

I've been running games for almost 30 years now, typically as the primary GM of my group. I don't think I have ever forced any kind of pacing on groups except in the rare occasion when an adventure calls for it, and even then its usually on the scale of days/weeks/months, not minutes/10 minutes/hours.

When the players want to rest, they rest. When they don't they don't. Its not a GM decision, its a player decision. If that resting would logically have story consequences, it has story consequences. But the resting or not isnt something that should be up to the GM, but the players.

So for examples:

The last 1e AP I ran was Return of the Runelords. Something was obviously going on behind the scenes, and the PCs could perceive the effects of it, but didn't have a firm idea of why. This lead a rushed feel to the game, a frantic pace that the PCs enjoyed. But even still the rushing was on the scale of days. During the course of adventures, PCs would spend a few minutes healing up after fights and carry on. Once the casters were running out of slots, they would pull back and set up camp, frequently using spells to secure their camp. (Alarm, Magnificent Mansion, etc) There were a few times when the dungeon they were in was already occupied and time mattered, so they didn't get any full days rests in those, but still had basically all the time they needed between encounters. If what they were doing was loud enough for someone somewhere else in the dungeon to hear it (it happened several times) they would end up fighting most of the dungeon at once.

Now in 2e I am running a group through Extinction curse. There has not been a single encounter where they have not had a 10 minute rest after. Most of them they get several 10 minute blocks to rest and heal up. There is no good in world reason why they wouldn't. They are almost done with book one, and only once did they have to stop mid dungeon to recuperate. In that instance they went into a room, boarded up the door with heavy furniture, set watches, and rested for the night. They didn't know it at the time, but they had already killed everything in the dungeon that could have stumbled across them, but if they hadn't the probable result would have probably been the rest of the dungeon swarming their resting spot in the middle of the night. Because that is the logical in world consequence of their action.

No need for artificial pacing constrains. Let the narrative and your PCs drive the pacing.

Harmond heads strait to the punch bowl and pours himself two glasses. The first one gets downed rather quickly, as he heads towards the stacks. He nurses the second one as he browses the collection occasionally pulling out a book to flip through it. Eventually he finds one that pulls him in and he spends the rest of the evening reading, pausing to engage in polite conversation whenever approached. When he runs out of drink he makes sure to refill his cup. By the end of the night he is well and truly wasted.

Harmond spends an unnecessarily large amount of time watching the crew build the library, and looking through the books as they bring them in from out of town.

Just ran the first part last night. The circus mini game was absolutely the highlight of the session and the players loved it! I did have to adjust some of the numbers to make winning possible, but over all it worked quite well.

The biggest problem when transitioning from PF1 to PF2 was not the goblin in our group but how to handle goblins as an "accepted" race in general. Even without some traumatic goblin wars to begin with our group more or less directly went from Rise of the Runelords to Age of Ashes and most players were: Wait, wait, wait, haven't those creatures been the baby-eating bad guys before?!

So the earth equivalent is saying "We just finished a game in France, where the local goblins were eating babies. Why does everyone accept the goblins in this game set in Italy?"

Well. Because you are hundreds of miles apart, and the goblins in Varisia are not the same as the goblins in Isger.

2e has done away with (the frankly ridiculous) idea of world spanning mono-cultures.

Why would goblins from one part of the world be exactly the same as those in another? In some areas, goblins are despised. In others they are welcomed with open arms.

I've played in 5 PFS sessions (at conventions), run about 13 (locally). Every single one has had at least one goblin character. Not a single one of them has been even remotely disruptive.

In our Extinction Curse game (first session last night!) one of the players is a goblin that was born into the circus, and is infact the circuses book keeper. He insists that the goblins have a rich written history that has been suppressed by the longshanks. He brings a bit of levity to the game without bothering anyone. (It is a circus after all)

I gave my players a mythic rank after they defeated Zutha, and whenever they killed an entity capably of granting spells. They hit MR 4 by the end. Consequently I had to up the challenge of a lot of encounters. They were a lot more murder hobo-ish than you guys as well. :(

Loved this campaign. I was running RotRL right along with this, and reading how other players handled it was very helpful, although we finished back in November. Our AP before that was Strange Aeons, so looking forward to seeing how you guys deal with that one as well.

Wrapped this up last night.

My group spent several days clearing out the last section. The fight with the orcs completely tapped them and was almost a wipe. At one point 3 of the characters were bleeding to death with only the monk still up.

After that they stopped to rest for the night. The next day they went through the rest of the complex, and got to Vilree almost completely tapped. Fortunately they were able to finish her off with a combination of cantrips and bombs they found in the rest of the dungeon.

They also snuck up on her so that she didn't get her monologue before combat, and when they killed her, they didn't take her dying speech to indicate that there was anything they could do to stop the drudge. They just assumed she Ozymandias'd it and sent the drudge out that first night when they were resting.

Consequently they didn't chase after it and the town died a horrible death.

Overall I think the difficulty of the adventure was way over tuned. Someone went down almost every fight, and that was with a Healbot cleric, a champion with lay on hands, and a Chirurgeon alchemist.

In short, fantasy game or not, crafting has to make sense. No one can afford to sell items for 100% of the cost that it took to make them. So I created my own crafting rules.

A lot of people seem to be missing this, but PF2E is not, and was never meant to be an economics simulator, nor a physics simulator. It is an adventurer simulator. The rules are designed to accommodate and encourage adventurers doing their thing.

NPCs do not function by the rules in the book. They do their crafting and make their money and go about their lives, and the rules neither address nor care about how they do so. The rules only care about adventurers doing adventure.

I recommend doing it like so:

GM: "The enemy wizard casts fireball. Everyone make a basic reflex save or take *rolls* 15 damage. If anyone has Fireball in their repertoire you know he just cast fireball. Otherwise all you know is that he just made a big ball of fire appear unless you use your reaction to make DC X Arcana check."

In regards to your first issue, you do realize that if the Archetype feat has the <skill> tag that it is a skill feat and is taken with your skill feats instead of class feats right?

As for the second. I'm not sure how you would have some feats not be better than others for certain builds? Thats the nature of the game. Unless you are advocating removing all roleplaying aspects from the archetypes, which once again seems like it would be stripping the base nature of the game itself from the game.

So is the "Throne-Bound Dude" Groetus?

"One tread forth beyond the Eclipse, but without death yet in the world, this Prince became Bound to a throne in the Spire’s shadow to await his time."

I'm pretty sure it's the Oinodaemon (or his precursor? Things get fuzzy that far back in time)

As the neutral Evil progenator it lines up perfectly with daemons, further.

Furthermore the Temple of the Oinodaemon is located near the base of the boneyard (in the spires shadow) and lies under a great eclipsed Sun, said to be the prison (or the body?) of the Oinodaeom.

That's all really awesome.

The listed deities of the 'First 8' are Pharasma, Desna, Sarenrae, Achaekek, Rovagug, Ihys, Asmodeus, and a nameless God bound to Pharasma's throne.

The Speakers of the Depths are probably the Proteans.

I'm not sure that Pharasma counts as one of the first eight. The way I see it is that each of the eight sides of the seal is one of the outside alignments (with Neutral being the center)

I would interpret it as

LG: Ihys
NG: Sarenrae
CG: Desna

LN: Achaekek (before he descended into savagery apparently)
N: Pharasma (Not counted among the eight)
CN: Speaker of the Depths

LE: Asmodeus
NE: Throne dude
CE: The guy that stepped off and got eaten by Rovagug (or just Rovy)

"I like Tamlyn, it sounds very regal. So, besides the actual building of the city, what else do we have to do? How to we actually draft laws and paperwork to keep the place running smoothly?" He looks to Ahto.

That night Harmond will spend some time drafting a letter to his parents.

Random encounters are the devil. I love that they are no longer assumed to be part of the baseline.

O_o Well uh, i guess they were pretty optimized?

You could say that.

Only the Barbarian and the Bard could actually hit it on anything other than a 20, but with all the buffs up (Bloodrage, Furious weapon, Bard song, +3 Chaotic Outsider Bane to weapon from the party occultist) I think he was hitting on a 9+. Both the Bloodrager and occultist were immune to Temporal stasis (his melee rider). I put about 150 points of damage into the occultist (whose MR are in Defender, so wasn't a guarenteed hit) and dropped the bloodrager to around 30 HP left before they dropped Tawil. In two rounds.

The only one to fall victim to the Microcosm Aura was the wizard.

Xenocrat wrote:

The intent of "encounter mode only" is to stop PF1 arguments/shenannigans where people were trying to walk around in a stance all day to avoid spending the action in combat. You absolutely cannot start combat in PF2 in a stance without the appropriate feat, it's a GM call whether you can use it outside combat to get noncombat benefits.

Sure you can

"The fighter and I spar as we travel, spending one action per round to walk, circling each other as we move, and one extra action every minute to take a nonlethal swing at each other." You can do this indefinitely. Probably move at half speed, but you were probably doing that anyway.

No you can't. Its explicitly called out as encounter mode only. Sparing with your party member while you explore is still exploration mode, and thus not encounter mode, and thus no stance.

nothing Heroic in selling every single consumable you find.

Who said anything about selling every consumable you find? In fact I specifically said selling consumables is typically forbidden in the games I play.

And quite frankly they probably should be in most games. Especially since in PF2 more control is being placed into the GMs hands. Not every merchant has to buy every item, nor have every item available for sale. One of the big talking points Paizo has been bringing out for this edition is putting more control in the GM's hands. This seems like an area where the Gm should take control.

THAT is imo terrible design

You may not like it, but that makes it neither terrible, nor untrue. It is simply different from what you want.

You want a game where the rules define all aspects of the universe, but that is not the game that Paizo wanted to make. They wanted to (and did) make a game where the purpose of the rules is to create a system for playing heroic adventurers. Simulating things other than Heroic Adventurers is outside of the scope of the rules.

Its like complaining that you don't like chicken, so the wing place down the street is an objectively bad restaurant. You just want something different from what the owners want to provide. Neither option is bad or wrong.

That's what i mean by "the market will collapse".

Once again. The rules are not a universe simulator The rules are not concerned with who makes them. They exist for the purposes of easy loot to distribute. The rules for crafting exist for PCs. NPCs are not bound by them. The NPCs don't pay full price to craft potions, because NPCs don't pay anything to craft potions. The rules do not exist for how NPCs get potions. They do *something undefined* and potions come out. The rules do not care to simulate that level of non PC detail.

The market doesn't collapse because the market does not function on PC rules, because the rules are not designed to simulate an economy.

Do you know any Adventurer that'll go, "let me grab 4 potions of resistance for the 4 times i'll face fire", instead of "Let me grab a ring of resistance that'll use in my career forever"?

I don't disagree that adventurers buying potions is dumb. I'm pretty sure in all the years I have been playing I have never had a character buy a consumable beyond those necessary for the core functionality of a class (Scrolls for a wizard, wand of cure light for survival etc). For that matter, outside of organized play I am pretty sure I have never sold a consumable either. They get stashed away in case they are needed in the future. Most GMs i have played under have a no selling consumables rule, because, why would the general store merchant want that potion of barkskin? It will just sit on their shelf forever.

That being said, adventurers find consumables constantly and found consumables get used when needed. That is why they exist. Its easy loot to put on an adventure that doesn't destroy the long term balance of the game.

Such a bad market will naturally wither away since no one has a use of said market.

No it wont because once again The rules are not an economics simulator. The devs have said this multiple times. They are a narrative engine designed to tell stories about heroic figures going on quests. It is not a simulation of how the world markets work, it is not the physics engine of the world. It is a tool designed to tell stories about heroic figures. Simulating a realistic market is not and has never been a design goal. Constantly trying to make it so is an exercise in futility.

It always comes back down to "Mother May I?"

As it should. The player controls their character. This includes skills, feats, attributes, and all choices the character makes.

The GM controls everything else. Including item availability, what loot you can find, what loot you can sell, what shops there are, and what those shops are interested in buying.

Your character is for the Player, the world is for the GM, and items are part of the world, not your character.

The only benefit that I can see to crafting magical items yourself is that you can potentially obtain one in a situation where you are unable to buy one (such as when you're stranded on a desert island)--provided of course you are somehow still able to get the crafting supplies and formula first.

This assumes the PF1 standard of all items can be purchased everywhere and everyone is always willing to buy your leftover junk. While this may still be the case in PF2, I'm not 100% sure that it is.

None. But Golarion has pretty consistently come across as human centric and actively racist. Halflings are mostly slaves or indentured servants, elves and gnomes get the stink eye, dwarves barely exist, and even several human ethnicities are actively discriminated against.

Outside those bounds, except in a few cities with poor reputation (like Magnimar) anything else seems fair game for outright killing, with few to no questions asked.

I don't get that from the text at all. Most major cities have large non human populations, even if the majority are human. The "other" population in most city stat blocks is at least 1-2 percent. Think about the number of blondes you know. That's how many of those strange and non-core races you see in most cities.

I would hardly call that "fair game for outright killing"

As to the racism, that is also largely geographically based. Sure halflings get the short end in Chelliax dominated regions, but I've never heard of something similar with elves or dwarves beyond extreme regional variations.

and I'm VERY proud of it and of the hard work the six authors poured into bringing the story to life.

And you should be! Return of the Runelords was far and away my favorite AP to date.

The oddest thing about this AP is I find myself not at all gripped by the spoilers for the three books advertised so far.

On the flip side, my players have insisted that I not run Age of Ashes, so that they can jump into the AP where they get to run a circus as soon as it is released.

It sounds like you want the game to be simulationist, when it is actually gamist. This general type of complaint seems to be rather common, as 3.5 and its direct descendants (except 4th) had very simulationist tendencies.

For most of these types of questions the answer is "because it makes for a better game flow, and gets the probabilities where the game designers want them."

That is to say, the rules are not based on simulating reality, but creating a fun game.

"fun and engaging" are generally not the words I get to hear when I tell my players they can't do something (for no justifiable reason) that they clearly saw an npc doing. :P

But that is the core of a class based system. If you have a party consisting of a Fighter, Rogue, Wizard and Cleric, and you have an NPC that casts a 9th level primal spell, that is literally something your PCs can NEVER do. Once they picked their classes at 1st level, they were locked out of that option forever.

Similarly, an NPC wizard can just go become a lich. A story process completely undefined by the rules. Your PCs can never do that.

Or they can craft an elaborate dungeon full of all the traps and hazards found in the players hand book. Your PCs can never do that.

Sure, you might say "But as the GM I can adjudicate those situations and provide an avenue for my PCs to do it."

Yeah, you could do that with fiend summoning as well, but neither that, nor any of the options I presented above, many of which are standard fantasy adventure tropes, can be done by PCs according to the rules.

I think I figured it out.

You enjoyed PF1 via a method that it was not designed for, but for which it was well suited (Making characters without having a game to play them in, ie theorycraft)

In the processes of improving the method for which it was designed (making characters with the intent to play them) it has made it harder to enjoy the product via your preferred method, even though that method is not the one for which the system was designed.

Am I correct in my reading of the situation?

This is incredibly frustrating for players who don't have access to a GM.

If you don't have access to a GM you aren't a player. You are a potential player.

PF2 has been streamlined for a better play experience. What you are complaining about is that this streamlining has ruined your non-play experience.

Which is something that... just doesn't make sense to me at all.

If you need an NPC that summons devils, just give him the ability to do so. NPCs are not bound by PC rules. Just because a 1st level PC wizard cant summon a quasit doesn't mean that a 1st level NPC wizard can't.

Class rules are largely for PCs. NPC stat blocks just have the abilities that they need to have. You don't have to justify it beyond that. Remember, the rules are designed to tell a fun and engaging story, not act as a physics engine.

The devs of the video game seem to have a very loose grasp of how alignment actually works, and to me seem to mischaracterize Pharasma quite a bit. I wouldn't take anything that happens in the game to be reflective of actual tabletop pathfinder.

I still find it strange that in CoR he mentions all other major planes of existence except those two.

I thought the implication was that the seal and the barrier built around it was the positive energy plane.

Zall good. I'm loving the game so far. You guys are all great to play with. =)

Was anybody else weirdly excited about the idea that Arcadians are on the cusp of inventing automobiles?

Well, after all that, it ended up being a 130 damage Finger of Death from Erigantus that melted one of my members. Sorshen's fight was challenging but never really incredibly threatening, except when the kineticist almost got trapped in melee.

I believe level 9 should be the proper level for Korvosa though unless I'm mistaken? Were you running milestones or tracking XP? Also, I know James has already addressed it, but it's still funny to me how quickly you level up in this campaign - we almost hit lvl 11 and lvl 12 in the same session.

I use milestones. I find XP tracking far too fiddly. Here is what I use (note that I also gave my PCs a mythic rank after defeating Zutha, and have been up-scaling most encounters appropriately)

Hello everyone! Thanks for inviting me to your campaign. I have to wake up for work in 5 hours, so I'll finish up the character's profile tomorrow. I look forward to gaming with all of you!

I haven't read any of the previous posts on the campaign, as I want to come into it as ignorant as my character is going to be.

This is also my first play by post on the Paizo boards (definitely not my first actual play by post though). How do I go about setting up my character page and the little grey bar/info under the character name?

Also, how do we want to get my character into the story? =)

Edit: Figured out the grey bar thing

• Monk fighters are great at combining unusual weapon styles. For instance, a monks isn't hindered by a restriction to keep one hand free, because they want to punch you with that hand anyway.

This is my favorite part.

It causes so many problems when enemy humans of about your party's strength break the in-universe laws that you are bound to.

This is a problem I struggled with for years, but I think its important to remember that the rules of the game are not the in universe laws of physics. They are an abstraction designed for us players to tell an interesting story and to have fun while playing a game. Their primary function is to make the game fun, not to establish the laws that bind everything together.

Just because their is no rule for a thing does not mean that thing doesn't exist in the universe. And just because there IS a rule for a thing doesn't mean that it must always happen the way the rule lays it out.

I mean on the actual planet Golarion, when throwing a knife at someone 50 feet away, in universe you don't always have a 5% change of hitting regardless of who you are and who you are throwing at. A 3 year old with a knife will hit that trained soldier way less than 5% of the time. But according to the rules out of 100 throws 5 of them will hit on average. That's because it is an abstraction meant to create a fun game for us real humans to play. Not a physics simulator.

Ok, here is my submission, a Warpriest of Mrtyu

If you're losing a powerful class feature for a whole game session (say you're missing out on an extra attack as part of your full-attack action, as a random example I just thought of =P ) then it is acceptable to stop the game and argue, but you still have to put a time-limit on it.

If I am playing a martial character and the gm says I get one less attack than the rules say I do the time limit for arguing is exactly as long as it takes me to either convince them they are wrong or realize they will not be convinced. At which point the game would end because I would get up and leave. If a GM doesn't know the rules well enough to run the game, then I wouldn't trust them to run the game fairly. No gaming is better than bad gaming.

Its pretty much one of the core setting conceits of Pathfinder that prophecy just doesn't work any more. If you go back in time a couple hundred years ago in the setting, prophecies were coming true with pretty much 100% accuracy an there was nothing that could be done about it.

Now that Aroden has bit the dust *shrug* who knows. Maybe it will come true, maybe it wont? Prophecy is unreliable so that your PCs can have agency.

Nada.

** spoiler omitted **

My interpretation was

Edit: Also forgot to add. This is an amazing book, definitely in my top 5. Great job guys.