Sandal Fury's page

This thread really should have been titled, "Four years of Wizard players explaining that when they spent 18 years defending power disparity they meant that it was fine when their favourite class was at the top of the power curve."

Whenever the topic of the 2e wizard comes up, I see a lot of people say what you said here. What I never see, however, is anyone saying what you say they're saying.

Thing is, I've never heard a single person complain that they can't "trivialize encounters" with magic in 2E. What I keep hearing, which also matches my experience playing casters, is that spells mostly miss or get saved/critically saved against by their targets.

Wanting to be successful at least half the time isn't the same thing as wanting to "trivialize encounters". That's the problem with magic in 2E in a nutshell: it very rarely works, at least against competent opponents.

That's something that needs to be addressed in any next edition, however many years in the future that is. Paizo might be losing out on alot of players based on the number of ppl I've seen give up on this game after trying to play casters and getting frustrated.

Exactly this. When I play a caster in 1e, I go out of my way to not use any spells I deem too strong in the interest of balance and preserving the DM's hairline, from the lowly Ironskin to the borderline-obscene Source Severance. I don't dislike 2e magic because it doesn't let me break the game; I don't WANT to break the game. It's my express goal to NOT break the game.

I dislike 2e magic because limited resources like spells should be either reliable or impactful, and oftentimes they're neither.

Okay Deriven. It sounds like you like to play this game at a 9 or 10/10 in terms of optimization, bring your A-game every time. That's fine if that's what you and your table enjoys. Some of my friends and I used to do the same, until we realized we were optimizing the fun out of the game, which was especially noticeable when new players joined our group and couldn't keep up, or we wanted to make the job easy for relatively new GMs (like you said, GMing high level 1e is a nightmare... I should know, I'm going to do it in a few hours).

So now, we play down. Keep ourselves more within the 6 or 7/10 range, and everyone has a good time. And at the end of the day, that's what's most important, that's the purpose of any good game: fun.

But you'll probably want to ease up on the assertion that people can't play the game a certain way. Just kind of a weird thing to say.

Sandal Fury wrote:

All of that just furthers the notion that magic sucks.

No, it doesn't.

It shows that PF2 magic is different and you have to learn the high value spells like you have to do every edition. Magic has a learning curve. It's not for people who want to make a character and play using the same spells they used in PF1.

Most people who play casters have never been the people wanting the straight forward character. Martials are there for those who want to hit something and do damage.

Magic users are classes for those that want to learn the best way to do something using a wide variety of tools. Each edition has been this way. In PF1 you learned the high value spells and when to use them. Same as 3.0. Same as 1st and 2nd edition D&D.

PF2 has just changed what spells are great and the way you use them. Some will take the time to learn and find out magic is still the most powerful thing in the game. Some will play a martial and hit things.

For what it's worth, I'm glad you can enjoy 2e in the way you do, but you're honestly making my point for me.

In 1e, I didn't have to opt for "high value spells." I could make a spellcaster and with perhaps a little bit of reskinning/flavor, stick to a handful of spells that match my character's theme/aesthetic/motif (be it fire, music, crystals, thorns, farting, yelling really loud, etc. and what-have-you) and be a contributing member of the party from an adventure's outset to its conclusion. And most importantly, I could have fun doing it.

In 2e, there are a few dozen spell that are worth casting. And if those specific spells don't mesh with the motif of the character you want to play? Well, I'd say "have fun," but...

All of that just furthers the notion that magic sucks.

Even at high levels, casters still have ample opportunity to suck. I've seen a Disintegrate land a critical hit and do about 3/4 the damage of my fighter landing two normal hits. I've seen Summon Dragon cast to the uproarious applause of the whole table... and go on to do a grand total of 5 damage across its entire duration before the wizard decided it would be better suited to attacking an inanimate object. I've seen Chain Lightning.. waste a spell slot because the GM (understandably, honestly) couldn't be bothered to keep track of a fight with a large number of enemies in a high-level game.

And if the solution to "magic isn't impactful" is to attack with a weapon, that doesn't do much to assuage the notion that magic isn't impactful.

Forgive my terrible crime of necromancy (four years, whew), but for the benefit of anyone in the future searching the forums for recommendations on their first AP to run, I strongly discourage you from running Dead Suns (no offense to those who suggested it those many moons ago).

Narratively, Dead Suns has an interesting premise, but commits many storytelling cardinal sins: events that play out exactly as written regardless of player action, an entire chapter that turns out to be a wild goose chase/red herring, the second half of the AP is almost entirely on-rails with no option to "go back to town," and the course of action that the final chapter proposes the players take is illogical, improbable, and infeasible, to the point that it seems most GMs have to tell the players what the game expects them to do.

SPOILER:

Gameplay-wise, Dead Suns was being written before the Starfinder base rules had even been finished, meaning it incorporates a lot of obscenely poorly-balanced encounters, including a boss at the end of chapter one which seems, at least anecdotally, to boast a rougly 40-50% TPK ratio, and a boss in (IIRC) chapter 4 whose AC was miscalculated, and as a result, most PCs won't be able to hit without rolling nat 20s (which, per the rules, won't even result in a critical hit). There's also very little money to go around, so players who are itching to play around with some cool weapons and armor upgrades are going to be sorely diappointed.

Of course, all of these issues can be circumvented if you're willing to put in the effort, but you should know that you've got your work cut out for you.

Again, no offense to anyone who enjoys (or worked on!) Dead Suns, but to give my honest opinion, and echo that of others, it's a mess.

Powerful necromancy is at work here. Also, I couldn't help but chortle at the idea that "blaster is the new benchmark."

If only we'd known how bad it really was.

There's nothing inherently magical about "focus." No reason classes couldn't gain non-magical maneuvers and abilities that use focus points, too.

Sandal Fury wrote:

Granted I haven't played a great many tabletop systems, but I think 2E's prepared casting is the worst magic system I've ever played

Do you think you could give us the reasons that make you feel so ?

I play a Witch in PFS and I have not felt it was that awful.

It's mostly the fact that spells no longer scale with caster level, so if you want a given spell to be effective, you have prepare it in a higher level slot. Turns the whole thing into a bookkeeping nightmare. It's like they took 5e casting and added all the worst aspects of PF1 casting to make something exponentially worse than both.

Flexible spellcasting makes it better, but it's borderline insulting (hyperbole, yes) that I have to spend a feat AND sacrifice spells-per-day in order fix a bad spell preparation system. Flexible spellcasting should just be an option by default.

Not to mention that magic in general is less impactful than PF1

Granted I haven't played a great many tabletop systems, but I think 2E's prepared casting is the worst magic system I've ever played

No sugar coating: a line has to be drawn somewhere. At a certain point, sensibilities need to be recognized as too delicate and, frankly, beneath consideration.

This topic is past that point.

I have fairly little play experience with 2e and just thought of this two minutes ago, but would this work for a house rule RE:Item DCs?

*ahem* During your daily preparations, designate X number of items (maybe 1+CHA mod?). These items use your class DC if it is higher than their own.

Again, I have given this basically zero thought, but I don't think I've seen Class DC come up once in my relatively short time playing the game, so this might give it some mileage.

Ramlatus wrote:

In my experience, one player/character usually has to carry the rest of the party a good 80% of the time. Relying on other players/characters will get the entire party killed. Most players/characters act independently of all the others in the party against the same enemy, but there is no coordination or planning, and very few player use abilities or spells to help their comrades unless the spell/ability they were using on themselves had additional targets beyond just themselves. I have a hard time seeing this work in game.

You need new experience then.

That mindset is exactly the type of thing that causes threads like this and this and this.

"I wonder if one of those is mine..."

*clicks first link*

"AYYYYY called it!"

Turn 1, two-hand power attack or whatever. Turn 2, drop a hand (free action), grapple or disarm, then two-hand strike...

Hol' up

I was under the impression that shifting your grip on your weapon always requires an action (which I understand from a game balance standpoint, but realistically is ridiculous). Is it an action to go from one-handed to two-handed, but a free action to go from two to one?

You're leaving effectiveness on the table with a Fighter by taking anything that doesn't have knocked prone as its crit spec. There simply aren't many optimal builds in PF2 that use a sword and forget making a proper Samurai that uses a horse, bow, and sword to full effectiveness.

I don't want to be an optimally effective min-maxed hammer man.

I want to be a cool samurai.

I'm putting together a new character, level 10 orc fighter. I envision a fairly standard samurai, two-handing a single katana, extension of the soul, peerless swordsmanship, yada yada. I've only played a monk in 2e so far, but looking over feats/archetypes/items, it seems like there are VERY few enticing options for two-handed characters in this edition. I get that in Starfinder and 2e, Paizo wanted to rein in two-handers, and understandably so; I found that in 1E, if you had a two-handed weapon and Power Attack, your character was essentially at their peak, and every item and feat you gained from then on was just icing on the cake, and it sometimes felt like AP writers sometimes forgot how much damage those weapons could deal.

It seems like in 2e, if you're either weapon-and-shield or "duelist" (one-handed weapon, off-hand empty), you're practically *drowning* in cool options to add to your repertoire. Meanwhile, two-handers get slightly better damage dice and seemingly nothing else. I'd love for my new character to masterfully deflect enemy blows in classic samurai style, but try as I might, there seems to be no support for any such thing. Anything approximating fancy swordplay requires an empty off-hand.

But I'm still pretty new to 2e, maybe I'm wrong! Are there any feats/archetypes that I'm glossing over that would help me be something other than guy-who-enrtirely-sacrifices-defense-and-versatility-for-d10-damage?

I don't know if it was part of the reasoning for it, but a happy side effect comes into play if your GM likes to award xp for good roleplay or doing something just kind of neat. But in other editions, if the GM wants to *keep* doing that, they have to adjust the amount as you level up. Pretty massively. They might say, "Wow, that was cool, take 50 xp!" And at level 1, that's great! But it won't be long until that 50 xp is in the same bracket as 0 xp.

With a standardized goal, the GM always knows how potent that reward is.

That's Starfinder way of dealing with monsters. Monsters have quite low AC compared to characters. But hitting a lot and dealing a small portion of the enemy hp doesn't feel more rewarding than hitting rarely but dealing a significant portion of the enemy hp.

I could not possibly disagree more. A higher chance of failure means a higher chance of consistent failure, which means a higher chance of going an entire encounter without contributing at all. That doesn't feel good. It's crushing. It's depressing. It's boring. This isn't Dwarf Fortress; failure is rarely fun.

So from what I'm reading and my somewhat limited experience, when people describe 2e as tactical, it's not in the sense of "tactics and strategy will improve your odds of success," but more "if you don't employ in-depth strategy with your team, you will fail."

I... *really* do not like that. One thing I've grown to detest in 1e was when a player's turn would start, and the whole party would start strategizing out of character, telling who to go where and target which with what so they could optimize their own turn and the party would be most efficient. "The Quarterback," for those familiar with the trope/webcomic. This could happen, and it was admittedly effective, but it was almost never necessary. In 1e, you could just wing it most of the time. If your buddy happened to be flanking, cool. It feels like Paizo took some common player habits (some of them bad) and baked them into the system.

Also, in the way it's presented, Recall Knowledge feels less like identifying monsters in 1e and more like mechanically incentivized metagaming. IMO.

I know this sounds weird, but I'm sure someone will get what I mean when I say this system feels "too much like a game."

Frightened is a penalty to

Saves
Skill checks
AC
Attack rolls
Special power DC's
Spell DC.

Basically anything that you roll or that is derived from something you roll.

So...

AC

is a DC

Huh.

I think nobody's bothered with demoralizing or any other in-combat skill stuff because we just kind of figure we'll fail the check anyway.

On a related note, though, dumb question: When Frightened mentions a penalty to checks, that doesn't include attacks, right? My knowledge of 1e says no, but I've learned that 2e is very much not 1e, and similar terms don't carry over.

Sandal Fury wrote:

Fumarole wrote:

Enemies never critically fail saves? I suspect you're being hyperbolic, as this should be happening about 5% of the time an enemy rolls a saving throw. In a recent session I ran, a PC hit ten foes with chain lightning and two of them critically failed, while none critically succeeded. The PC dealt 654 damage with one spell. He felt pretty damn powerful and the party voted him the MVP for the session.

Well, again, we only just reached level 4, so we haven't been in dozens of battles, but no, enemies have literally never critically failed a save in that time.

This is odd. Based on PFS standards, a PC goes through approximately 10 fights to gain a level. That makes 30 fights to get to level 4. If we make a hypothesis that you cast 2 spells with a save in each fight, that makes at least 60 saves that enemies have to roll. Likely more as many save spells have more than one target.

At least 3 of these save rolls should have been Nat 1, which is almost always a critical failure.

Zero critical failures on the enemies' side for 3 levels defies probabilities.

We've been milestone leveling, so I guess we're in fewer fights than normal. Honestly though, ten fights per level sounds like an absolute slog.

But yeah, no crit fails.

For those asking, this is a homebrew game. I was aware of the general consensus that early 2e APs are surprisingly hard/unbalanced, so I guess I figured it was just baked into the system. We're still fairly early in our adventure, so I'll ride it out for a while, see if things change, and talk to the DM if needed.

Enemies never critically fail saves? I suspect you're being hyperbolic, as this should be happening about 5% of the time an enemy rolls a saving throw. In a recent session I ran, a PC hit ten foes with chain lightning and two of them critically failed, while none critically succeeded. The PC dealt 654 damage with one spell. He felt pretty damn powerful and the party voted him the MVP for the session.

Well, again, we only just reached level 4, so we haven't been in dozens of battles, but no, enemies have literally never critically failed a save in that time.

Lots of good advice here, much appreciated. There's a lot about the system I really like, at least on paper (particularly the three actions, Medicine actually being useful, and weapon and armor runes). But so far, I am just not really liking the combat. Maybe it is just a low-level issue, good to know we'll probably feel a lot stronger later on.

For clarity, our party consists of:

-A gunslinger and champion, run by the players with the most experience with 2E
-A wizard, played by our least-experienced tabletop player (Not sure this was the best choice, we never recommended spellcasters for first-timers in our 1e games). I don't recall if an enemy has ever failed a save against one of his spells.
-An inventor, who unfortunately is only around about half the time due to work/life schedule
-Myself, a Medic monk, formerly cleric of Zon Kuthon.
-Formerly, a fighter who had to drop out due to a new job, and who coincidentally got petrified by a cockatrice in his last session. I recall him lamenting that the petrify DC was inordinately high.

I don't know if that's good party composition or not. Probably not.

My group started our first 2E game a couple months ago. All but one of us are 1E vets, with myself having played from the very start all those many years ago. We're currently level 4, and I've noticed some patterns.

Enemies almost never miss.
Enemies deal considerable damage.
Enemies almost never fail saves.
Enemies NEVER critically fail saves.
PCs hit maybe half the time.

I've been playing a cleric, recently switched to monk (same character, we just needed another combat-type since our fighter had to drop out) with the Medic dedication. With 18 dex and +1 striking handwraps, I'm looking at a +11 on my highest attack, which routinely has less than a 50% chance to hit. Anything.

In going from cleric to monk, my AC jumped from 16 to 22. "Great!" I thought. But I was wrong. It was not great. My first time in melee, with 42 HP, I got knocked out in two rounds (one hit, one crit). Which is very not great when you're the medic.

After every battle, the party has taken *significant* damage. Someone goes unconscious every other fight. Which means numerous Medicine rolls (and previously, heal spells). I knew I was signing up to be a healer, but this has gotten to be pretty tedious. I've played less deadly games of Call of Cthulhu (with a particularly merciless GM). Not totally sure how to word this, but my assumption is that Paizo wanted to foster a sense of investment by making enemy attacks more dangerous: Players will feel more engaged if their HP is constantly fluctuating. In practice, this just means more bookkeeping, and more time KO'd (and therefore, not playing the game. Or having fun).

From reading the forums for a while before actually playing, I got this idea that in 2E, you pretty much have to minmax to have a 50% chance of success at the things you're supposed to be good at. From experience, it seems even worse. In 1E, I could make a combat-focused character with no ability score higher than 14 and make it work well enough. In 2E, that seems like it would be a recipe for disaster.

So I'm just wondering, is this normal? Does the game ever reach a point where you have a decent chance of avoiding damage? Or even a decent chance of *success?* I see people saying 2e lets you play whatever character you want, but it seems like that comes with the caveat that that character must be borderline minmaxed, which is not something I enjoy.

Alison-Cybe wrote:

I was recently called 'the penultimate SJW' (among other things) by a group of OSR-loving chaps because my bio includes my pronouns. It's... kinda amazing that people still get so upset about such things. It's also super easy to know the type of people never to game with.

Ahhhhhh............................ Those are Nazis. Lets not mince words here. You were harassed by Nazis.

Those "chaps" sounds like dinguses for sure (dingi?), but hyperbole like this only serves to shift people more toward dingus-ry. Can we maybe not be so quick to sling around the name of the most devastatingly genocidal group in modern history because someone got called a pretty mild epithet? Deep breaths, woo-sah.

Bigger numbers does not always equate to more fun.

I'm trying to understand. I thought I had a decent idea of what a "dog whistle" is. Now apparently the definition includes idioms with checkered pasts (i.e. "grandfathered in" or "rule of thumb"), but it's also being violently thrown to the ground and being blatantly insulted. I mean, "Jew" obviously isn't a slur, but in context it was clearly meant as an insult (I'm Jewish, too. Been there).

Again, I'm on the outside looking in, but it feels like we're working with very broad definitions here. This doesn't help to dispel the notion that everything remotely disagreeable is being categorized as a dog whistle, and therefore, hate speech.

As a DM, it seems like you have to put in a lot more work to make your own system-compatible setting, compared to 1E. In particular, creating new races and deities. New deities require a codified anathema, a skill, and three spells of varying levels; new races require roughly TWELVE unique (and hopefully balanced) feats. Kind of feels like Paizo saying "If you're going to play our game, *you're going to use our setting*"

Which would line up with some other complaints I've seen.

I haven't actually gotten to play 2E (yet), so I can't say I have any gripes regarding mechanics (again, yet). But I do have some bugaboos:

1. The formatting of the Core Rulebook, as has been mentioned. As someone who taught himself how to play 3.5 by reading the PHB back to front, this book is an absolute nightmare. "Here's a list of conditions. You want to know what they actually do? Skip ahead ~200 pages, obviously!" I didn't realize you add your level to everything you're proficient in until page 444!

2. The general wording of rules, and how everything feels so... codified. Sometimes it feels like I stopped reading a game manual and started reading a legal document. "Wizards cast spells" has become "You gain access to the CAST A SPELL activity." Adventuring isn't just a thing you do anymore, now you enter EXPLORATION MODE. Again, I haven't actually played yet, but it seems like this makes the whole thing feel more like a game and less like a *story.*

3. The change in hobgoblin art. LOOK HOW THEY MASSACRED MY BOY.

Sandal Fury wrote:

I think a lot of the hubbub around Erastil stems from conflating "traditional gender roles within families" with "horrible misogynist bigotry."

Granted, the way it was worded in the original Erastil article was... not great. I get that the times, they are a-changin', but the concept of the husband being the breadwinner and the wife keeping the home isn't a human rights violation, it's just old-fashioned.

Not great?!

That's the understatement of the century. He originally was written as thinking that independent women of any sort were a problem. A problem to be solved by forcing them into marriage and pregnancy, so they'll shut up and listen to their man. That's not "not great" that's deeply problematic and alienating to literally half of your population.

I was being facetious, but yes, that's precisely my point. The concept of traditional family structure is not in and of itself a bad thing. But the way it was presented in the Erastil writeup was very nearly the worst possible interpretation/implementation (it only really could have been worse if it just staight-up said "Erastil thinks womens ain't got no rights").

I think a lot of the hubbub around Erastil stems from conflating "traditional gender roles within families" with "horrible misogynist bigotry."

Granted, the way it was worded in the original Erastil article was... not great. I get that the times, they are a-changin', but the concept of the husband being the breadwinner and the wife keeping the home isn't a human rights violation, it's just old-fashioned.

I'm fully unversed on the subject of unions, 95% genuine question, 5% snark: is it normal in these circumstances to specifically use the phrase "voluntarily recognize?" I'm seeing the word "voluntary" stressed a lot, and it comes of as... not suspicious, just kind of peculiar. Is there an involuntary way to recognize a union?

There's a were-deinonychus in