the complaints of 1e GMs who came to Paizo complaining that their players had too many ways of affecting the narrative in any meaningful fashion.
This is such an oddly antagonistic way to describe the GM-player relationship.
Plus you realize a 1e GM can effortlessly stop you from doing anything they don't want to at any time too, right? You're always constrained by what the table will allow you to get away with in every system.
These kinds of commenters aren't unique to PF2E. What's unique to PF2E, though, is the quantity and concentration of them.
It's... really not. Like even remotely. 5e forums are this way. Lancer communities are this way. PF1 and 3.5 were this way when they were more popular. Even more expressively narrative systems like World of Darkness get this kind of talk. "TTRPG company released something that's really good/really bad and people are talking about it" is just like, a standard component of discourse in these kinds of games. The variance you see is mostly a matter of how crunchy the system is, you see it more in PF2 and less in PBTA, because the system rules are more/less weighty. But like... people talking more about the crunch of a crunch heavy system than a system that isn't meant to be crunchy also is kind of a self evident revelation.
Like IDK you're just describing one of the most normal aspects of online discussion for crunchy TTRPGs and then framing it as something special about PF2. The reality is this is just how people talk about games like this. Like people complaining about how bad the 5e ranger is is basically its own meme.
The balance-heavy ethos draws in a crowd that's fairly picky about how different classes and options stack up against each other; a single option out of whack really starts to dominate the discussion.
I'm really confused as to why you think this is some special feature of PF2. Like I can't really think of any crunch heavy, splatbook based tabletop where people don't talk about new options in a power sense if they're really out of line one way or another. It would be really bizarre if people didn't. The only TTRPGs where this doesn't feature prominently are ones that aren't mechanics forward and/or don't rely on splatbooks (and even then you'll still find mechanically minded discussions on stuff, just less).
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If I were paizo, I don't know if I'd want to make another system where I'd have to keep such a tight eye on the content of every single splatbook to keep those more vocal parts of the playerbase from being annoyed
.. I also don't really get the suggestion that quality assurance is primarily an issue of staving off angry fanboys. Do you think there isn't any inherent value in trying to deliver a well written product?
.. I'm also not even sure if the idea lines up with reality. Paizo gets dinged in community circles arguably even more often for being too conservative in its design choices, not too out there... Paizo products also come out with a lot of editing mistakes that sometimes get corrected very slowly. Not that they're releasing bad products, but it doesn't really suggest there's some intense hypervigilance in QA and editing that's being implied here.
I mean, being able to hide completely out in the open with nothing obscuring you doesn't make sense, but that's also literally what Legendary Sneak does. The feat is logic defying by design.
I kind of really dislike the notion that because they primarily use as same language they "never progressed as a culture" as if they're like fundamentally stunted in some way.
Language is an important part of culture, but there are dozens of societies both in game and in real life that share languages in common while still having deep and rich cultural uniqueness. I really dislike and vehemently disagree with the suggestion that not having a unique language makes some group culturally stunted or lesser.
There is no way that a class that has access to supernova and black hole at level 4 can be considered undertuned (I strongly suspect the scaling on supernova will be scaled back at some point).
I sort of disagree. Supernova is a nice feat, but I also think that if broadly speaking a class doesn't work right unless you take certain specific load bearing feat choices it's still probably fair to call the class generally undertuned. The really good classes in SF/PF2 have a wide variety of options because they just work on a basic level.
Like there's no way we can call a class healthily balanced when the advice starts with picking some very specific feats and probably ignoring a bunch of your core class features in the process.
But in this edition the class has really lost its way.
I mean let's be real here, it never really had a way. The biggest thing PF2 did to destroy its 'identity' over older editions was make it less overpowered, which says a lot about what the class actually does.
That said, having a class that's generic and self referential isn't necessarily bad. The wizard is mostly just a little bit underbaked and saddled with a terrible casting mechanic.
The fact that people deride the attempt to structure arguments and cite rules is insane. For me, any attempt to state what is RAW with no reference to actual rules text is a big red flag for 'this is just my opinion/homebrew'.
Think there's something about stones and glass houses here, since most of your position is kind of just... vibes based and has nothing to do with RAW.
Don't get me wrong that's a fine way to make judgements on ambiguous stuff like this for your games, but it's weird to try to assert some sort of moral superiority about RAW here when you're drifting off into irrelevant tangents about real world historical techniques and 'metas' that don't really have anything to do with rules either.
You just have to have it match your class fantasy.
TBH I think the class itself has some issues with fantasy.
Like at first read the Thaumaturge sounds very technical, a weird scrappy occultist martial with a collection of esoteric gimmicks, but in practice it's still just very much a kind of standard PF2 martial.
I've had more than a few players like the OP jump on the class with some wild ideas and then get frustrated by how much they end up being just a regular martial striking things.
It's a good class but I think there ends up being some mismatched expectations with the way it sort of looks on the surface.
Magnetic Pinions lets you target up to three creatures with an attack that does 1d4 bludgeoning and 1d4 piercing. There's no described mechanic for altering the way it does damage.
... So yes, you can target just one person with the ability... for 1d4 bludgeoning and 1d4 piercing damage. That's all the ability does and I'm not sure why your player thinks there's some hidden second effect here.
- There are three or four times as many PF2 classes as there are SF2 classes. The result would be that people would go in interested in playing SF2, only to find that it's just PF2 2: Now Electric.
I mean it is, but also the opening premise of this was a player who didn't want to play any of the Starfinder classes. So this reads more like a solution than a problem.
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The systems do have different balance and assumptions.
Marginally, but mostly in terms at what levels certain options come online, and most of those options favor Starfinder anyways. The underlying math and most of the mechanical guidelines are literally the same. The idea that they're operating on totally different wavelengths is super overblown.
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It's a means a lot of system bleed.
Is it system bleed if we're just talking about two different things built for the same system?
Like it sounds like you're just sort of arguing against splatbooks in general.
I do think one thing that might be compounding it a bit is that the SF2 classes are somewhat narrower than their SF1 counterparts. Soldiers were much more generic, Operatives had more tech options built into their playstyle, technomancers and mystics were easier to gish with, and even Solarians had some weird early lifecycle build variations. With SF2 it's fairly easy to understand what a character might play like only from their class choice, with only a few exceptions.
One decision point I think really kind of sucks here is how SF2 sort of silo'd off melee builds into their own space. The fact that you can't be a melee ghost operative because Paizo decided to make your abilities not work unless you took the melee quarantine subclass hurts build variety a lot, and maybe contributes to that feeling of restrictiveness.
But it also seems somewhat clear to me that they do expect PF2 classes to at least be something you think about, and that one of the reason SF2 classes are so specific is because the more generic versions already exist.
Obviously not every table format is going to accommodate that, but that's kind of a table thing too if class variety is a problem for you.
Your issues with Dex aren't really going to be solved by just more classes, it's kind of baked into the system, Dex was a key stat in PF2 and it's only exacerbated by SF2's extra emphasis on ranged.
I also feel like any potential discussion of class options here is going to get clouded by your very offhand subjective assessments of things. I feel like you either need to explain your thoughts more, or maybe not talk about that at all since which sublcasses are good doesn't really seem to be like the meat of what you want to talk about.
I do generally agree that six classes is kind of a sad opening for the system, especially with some of them not having a lot of built in build variety making them pretty narrow.
... but I guess it's also worth pointing out that there are 27 other classes made for the same system you can go add to your games if you want. That would help variety a lot while waiting for more dedicated SF options.
Really? I thought 'If your next action' and 'Your last action was' would follow the same logic for compound actions
They follow the same logic but because the requirements are different so are the outcomes.
"Your next action is" doesn't work with spellstrike because the next thing you do is activate Spellstrike.
"Your last action was", at least under the sequence based framework, would be the strike.
Ryangwy wrote:
Either way I think it's clear RAW that anything that looks at the 'next action' or 'previous action' only sees the combined action but anything that sees 'an action' sees the individual action.
I mean it's obviously not clear RAW because no one has been able to find a rule that actually says that.
It's possible that's Paizo's design intention, but there's absolutely no concrete rules guidance here.
Ryangwy wrote:
but it's equally true to think of the combined action as a container and anything that checks specifically for the previous/next action to only see the container
Right, that's definitely the main other framework, but it we're still stuck with the problem that this concept is never defined in the rules... which is problematic if it's meant to be a fundamental way we're supposed to look at certain mechanics.
I can't think of any metamagic feat that you use after casting a spell. Do you have an example of the interaction you're talking about?
It's mostly to establish that there's a common case of actions requiring your 'next action to be X' only triggers if it's X and not a compound action involving X, so naturally anything that requires your 'previous action is X' should follow the same sense.
I mean, the argument in favor of the latter working is that you look at each individual act being performed in sequence, so no the logic wouldn't hold both ways because the abilities are asking for different things.
It also doesn't make a lot of sense to me that because a certain ability works in one way that another ability with a completely different requirement would have a similar outcome. There's no particular reason you should expect parity between them because they literally aren't even asking for the same thing.
TBH that's kind of my trouble making a definitive ruling here. The argument against spends a lot of time inventing concepts that aren't in the rules. Disentangling this. Isolating that. Toying with order of operations rules that don't exist. We're less in the realm of discussing concrete rules and more devising convenient inferences in order to reach a predetermined goal.
Ryangwy wrote:
FWIW, metamagic already works like that - there's no case of a compound action involving Casting A Spell also benefitting from metamagic or catalysts, and items that Activate to cast instead of flat out having Cast a SPelldon't count either
I can't think of any metamagic feat that you use after casting a spell. Do you have an example of the interaction you're talking about?
Man I'm not going to lie. Inclusivity is important but if someone sat down at one of my tables and hit me with the whole "humiliation of being forced to pledge servitude to the divine" thing I think it would be pretty hard for me not to be suspicious of them.
Particularly the combination of strangely self-inserting language (the phrasing of some of the comments suggests the player themselves feels like they're being forced to join a religion) with the whole 'demanding to play a cleric but I fundamentally hate clerics' thing along with the goalpost shifting, I'm just a little worried about what their table behavior would be like even if I gave them their way.
Not to mention that Pathfinder religion doesn't even really resemble real religion contextually in the first place, so the whole frame of reference and constant nods to 'real world' issues feels out of place and damaging.
I'd probably suggest they find another game. Like, not to try to gatekeep but I genuinely don't know how someone that antagonistic could function properly in a tabletop setting, especially one that so prominently features the thing they're so antagonistic toward.
No, the perception and detection rules starting on p.424 go into more detail about dim light and darkness. Shadow connection doesn't say it works against darkvision, so we have to assume it functions as usual
I don't agree.
Darkvision defeats the normal effects of dim light, but the Shadow connection explicitly gives concealed as an additional effect, which Darkvision doesn't interact with at all.
If the intent is for someone with darkvision to bypass the concealment that sentence should be removed because that's just how dim light works normally.
So one minor correction, Double Slice doesn't use the "for the purposes of" language. It says "combine their damage" with no caveats. Twice-
small Double Slice Rant:
This ability is written really weirdly. It tells you to combine their damage, then add effects from "both" weapons" ... then it says you only get precision damage once but get to pick which attack gets it... which doesn't mean anything because the damage has already been combined and you've already applied the effects of both weapons.
Then it tells you to combine the damage again for some reason?? And reminds you that resistance and weaknesses only get applied once which is entirely redundant because you've already combined the damage... two times!
The second section is so wordy and you could remove like a third of it without changing the meaning at all I do not understand what they were doing here
That said, we can replace Double Slice with Flurry of Blows and it's the same conundrum since Flurry does use "for the purposes of" ... not sure why they have two abilities do almost the same thing but worded in completely different ways.
wrt "last action" abilities... there's been a longstanding debate over whether an activity with subordinate actions should be treated like a container (double slice contains two strikes in it that are wholly removed from the rest of the game) or a string (you start a double slice then strike twice).
I have to agree that it feels broken and unintuitively complex to have the last thing you do be strike an enemy but then argue it doesn't actually count because it was initiated with an activity, the logic is never explicitly laid out and it has some weird knock on effects.
That said there are a handful of abilities that do want to look back like that. Flensing Slice requires your last action to be Double Slice.
I think it's a little unfair to assume people who dislike a certain anathema design are only mechanically focused. Sometimes the problem with an anathema is that it limits or overly prescribes certain roleplaying options.
A big part of it imo comes down to how much does the restriction logically follow some element within the setting. Secondarily is how much does that restriction connect to a core ability that has mechanical or thematic significance. There is a mechanical element, but I think the bigger concern is how strong the mechanics-roleplay alignment is vs how arbitrary it might feel.
So I think a cleric's deity anathema works fairly well because the versimilitude is high, it connects directly to an in universe force with a congruous nature and (in one of the most incredibly bizarre D&Disms there is) your choice of deity has weirdly little mechanical significance.
But like-... the premaster Dragon Barbarian gave you two options for defining your relationship with dragons. You either revere and can't defy them, or you hate and must kill them. A mechanics only player can simply choose to hate an evil dragon because that's pretty safe and not worry very much, but anyone who has a roleplay concept that doesn't fall within those bounds just doesn't get to make their character, and unlike say... a druid being told not to pollute the thematic pull of the anathema was pretty weak.
The champion example is interesting, and definitely ties to mechanics more, but I do think it comes down a lot to the way those limitations are defined.
Like Justice = Retribution is a very specific (and somewhat awkward in modern contexts) relationship that can feel a little bit constraining... though admittedly the current anathemas are pretty soft. This was more a problem premaster when these abilities were tied to alignments, which effectively gave each alignment one specific way to be a champion which was a little not great.
Tridus wrote:
There is, but the mechanic isn't codified. It's "you piss off your patron or work against their goals." Your patron can withdrawl their power at any time for basically any reason.
Sort of, yeah. As a GM I can ad hoc stuff like this and I agree that the game is better for having it this way, but in terms of rules and mechanics Witch has about as much related to losing their powers as a Fighter does, which imo feels a little bit odd design wise given the way anathemas were being used at the time.
It's less that this is bad, just to me there's a funny incongruity between some of the highly prescriptive CRB anathemas and then the Witch dropping not that long after without even a nod to the idea of losing power.
I think it depends a bit on the context, like I think they work okay for clerics because buying into the anathema is a core thematic tenant and has good flavor/mechanics harmony... and for the most part most mainstream anathema are not written to be stupid or obnoxious to follow. Plus like, since a significant part of choosing a deity is roleplay to begin with, having those restrictions doesn't feel as bad. Like if I'm choosing to make a cleric of a certain deity the idea that I'd want to abide by their tenants sort of follows naturally, which diminishes how much friction the anathema create.
I dislike anathema that don't seem to clearly come from something or tie into a core theme. Premaster Barbarians had anathema and they always felt really strange to me because the Barbarian's power source is so nebulous, and the anathema didn't always necessarily tie to a central theme that made intuitive sense.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Barbarian, I'm happy they don't but Witch always stood out to me as kind of an odd counter example because there's no class in the game whose power source relies more on a direct link to a being of power. Your familiar is explicitly an agent of your patron and hex spells are explicitly favors provided by your patron to you... yet there's no mechanic at all for a Witch losing their power. Comparatively it's a little bit odd.
I think the other GM is definitely more right here.
You activate the ability after you've already concluded the attack, and it specifically says "damage dealt" not damage you would deal or damage roll.
I mean think about it from a plain language stance: Your damage roll is a 6 and the enemy has weakness 5. If someone asked how much damage you did, I think 11 is clearly the more correct number to offer.
The trouble with Only the Worthy is that gear is so easy to destroy if you let it be targeted. The moment that becomes an option for the enemy the feat loses most of its mechanical value (and you might just ruin the exemplar depending on which ikon they dropped) and it's already somewhat of a niche thing.
I think you'd be better off just banning it ahead of time than surprise exploding a critical piece of gear.
Tridus wrote:
Detonate Magic damaging the item puts it pretty squarely in the realm of PF1's Disjunction: PCs are destroying their potential loot by using it, and GMs can wreak absolute havok on characters by using it on key items.
Sort of. PF2 loot is pretty disjointed from enemy equipment though, since monster damage is standardized separate from loot. It was a big deal in PF1 because 'armed' enemies were expected to have some parity with PCs, but in PF2 it's not entirely rare to have enemies wielding mundane weapons that still hit like they have runes.
Feats are also complicated by versatile heritages with their own feat packages.
Like the hypothetical scenario of an ancestry being overpowered but having really bad feats just completely fails when you take a versatile heritage that also has good feats.
There's also adopted, which admittedly costs you a general feat but also gives you access to most of another ancestry's options... heck Dragonkin even have an ancestry feat for that.
... Also Unicore's premise is just not correct either. Elves trade 2 hp for +5 movement speed. That's a totally reasonable trade on its own, and one that gets better the higher your level because ancestry HP never scales. Mechanically focused players might play an elf because of their chassis, not despite it.
I'm normally a more options is better thing, but I agree this is a concept space better held by an archetype.
For the necromancer specifically, there seems to be an intentional design choice to steer it away from some of the traditional conceptions about Necromancy. Giving it innate access to Unholy sends the wrong message.
I think it'd also just be kind of odd and athematic for an explicitly occult class to suddenly have deity-based feat choices.
The trouble is the phrase "threatened" is used only twice in rules elements in SF2. In Dance partner, it might describe your melee reach. In the other it unambiguously refers to the weapon's first range increment. So hopefully the errata clarifies how Dance Partner is supposed to work.
I think it's good that the Starfriends continue the radical and controversial stance in post-Remaster PF2E that maybe your ancestry should be FUN. Maybe it should fulfill your fantasies, gave reliable abilities, and inspire fun roleplay.
If that was the actual design principle I would be all on board, PF2 ancestries are kind of bare bones and that's a bit of a shame. The trouble is it's not, instead we just haphazardly get a couple of notably overloaded ancestries among the pile of pretty bland CRB tier stuff.
There are some rough edges but so far I've seen nothing that is particularly egregious. Every class and ancestry is playable and none dominate the game.
I mean yeah but "everything is playable" is a pretty low bar. Most modern systems manage that much, even ones with egregious balance concerns.
But that doesn't change like, obvious gaps in design like here with ancestries.
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But do NOT start with a mixed Pathfinder/Starfinder game.
I mean you don't need to mix systems to run into most of these concerns though. It's also worth pointing out that ancestries like Human and Ysoki are nearly identical to their Pathfinder counterparts, so the whole "Starfinder ancestries are on a different level and you can't compare them" thing falls a little bit flat when that's exactly what Paizo did.
but on the subject of mixing, my experience has been the opposite. Allowing both types of content improves the balance somewhat, especially because Starfinder right now is so small it's difficult to have access to secondary options to help patch some of its shortcomings. You lose tons of quality of life improving archetypes and other options if you omit 80% of the system like that.
All that being said, I also have no idea what is going on with Dance Partner. Do we have any clarification on what "threaten" means in the context of sf2e?
I just checked and you're right, the concept of threat/threatening with a weapon is never defined in SF2 player core.
.. To be honest I'm having trouble finding a definition in PF2 material too.
Like some ancestries will have two or three significantly powerful features and another ancestry might have only one or very little.
Dragonkin and Vesk are both 10 hp and 20 feet of movement... but Dragonkin have flight and darkvision and their partner bond while Vesk only have low-light vision.
I know flight is considered cheaper in SF but it's still a very good ability.
Astrazoans have low light vision and almost unlimited shapechanging, humans have no features, a hearing/sighted vlaka has less hp and a cool but somewhat situational skill feat, kasatha get four arms and... an extra language for some reason?
Some of these aren't huge on their own but in general it seems like ancestry bonuses are really haphazard, with some ancestries getting multiple high powered features baseline and others getting almost nothing without any real clear advantage in any other way.
... As an aside. I think part of the trouble with this specific example is as much a balance issue as a conversion issue.
Flight is less valued in SF, but it's still a strong ability and Dragonkin have flight and darkvision and limited telepathy with a party member and 10 hp. That's pretty overloaded for a base ancestry.
Vesk are also Starfinder and also 10 hp/20 feet but only have low-light vision. So worse eyesight and no flight and no telepathy.
Like there's been talk about SF2 ancestries having a larger power level and more wild abilities but in reality that's only a couple of them. Most of them are fairly unremarkable and I'm sort of struggling to understand what Paizo's vision there was because the balance seems really haphazard.
This allows different GMs to come up with different ways to handle it.
What do you mean allows? Having some idea what Paizo's thoughts or suggestions are regarding the game they designed doesn't stop me from doing anything, it just gives me some sort of working frame of reference for what the developers think is normal.
The level 14 Solarian feat Stellar Shield Collapse seems barely usable. It's a reaction when your Raised shield is destroyed, but the most normal way for that to occur is during a shield block, which is also a reaction.
This doesn't feel intentional, Collapse should probably be a free action.
Agree with Finoan here. It would read like "Make a recall knowledge check using Computers" if the goal was to always override. So for this you should just follow the default rules for RK and ask your gm/suggest a skill.
Needing a 19 with a +22 and flanking means 43 AC... per the average monster stats by CR table that's the expected value for a level 25 enemy. Crazy high and does kind of sound really unfun to play with.
Do agree Fighter and Slayer are good picks for high accuracy straight martial builds but this also feels like a talk to your GM kinda scenario too.
I mean clearly it is, because it's working for fine for other people. It's really not that big of a deal.
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That kind of adventure meant sorting spell lists quite easily into the domain of one of 5 deities. Now in other systems that was relatively easy (yes even D&D 5e). In PF2e it's simply not because of the overlap in traditions. You'll note that many spells draw from more than one tradition.
If you're splitting by spell list type, I don't really see a problem in there being some failure in Arcane not causing problems for similar Divine effects (especially since you mentioned splitting things this way in 5e too and 5e also has overlapping spells).
I just don't understand why splitting 5e into arcane/divine/primal make sense but splitting PF2 into arcane/divine/primal/occult doesn't. The former is your own example, so I'm struggling to understand the disconnect.
To some extent I get the hangup, but give how hyper specific both the idea and your required implementation is, I don't think it's super fair to call that a PF2 issue or Paizo's entanglements with Golarion. Just that you build something around 5e's schools of magic and it's not going to work great in any system that doesn't have something similar.
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I don't know if you've ever tried running PF2e in a game where your player characters didn't get magic items at the same rate - it's no fun for anyone because the maths starts to fall apart FAST!
Yeah I just use ABP.
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That your suggestion is 'stop making more work for yourself' kinda tells me you've probably never really built your own settings from scratch.
Fascinating that you think that! Does assuming I'm incompetent or clueless help any?
The broader point here though is that I think we sometimes underestimate how much we can get stuck in a specific rut and how sometimes hard rules we think exist are just an issue of mind over matter. Looking at your description, I see a lot of really specific rules that relate to how you play 5 that I'm not sure are really necessary for the setting, and part of adaptation if stepping back and re-examining why we make those choices.
Re-categorizing every single spell in PF2 sounds like an obnoxious and terrible amount of work... so me personally I just wouldn't do that unless I was really in the mood for that kind of in depth re-contextualization of the setting, I'd use a different categorization system, like the already existing spell traditions.
I think my main advice is to stop making more work for yourself than you need to.
Like I don't really understand why you think you need to sort through every individual spell in PF2 but not in 5e. You mentioned sorting by schools of magic or type of spell list (though primal isn't even a thing in 5e...) so why couldn't you do that with PF2's spell traditions or leave it more open ended in categorization? It feels like you've created very different standards for both systems, the solution is to just not do that.
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So, again I ask - what do other Pathfinder GMs tend to do?
I've been struggling to answer this question because I feel like it keeps coming back to a really unsatisfying one: pretty much nothing.
Like if I'm playing PF2 in one of my homebrew settings I just... play PF2 in that homebrew setting. There's very little that requires some Golarian setting conceit to work, and most of what does can just be kind of handwaved (like the various setting specific options in 5e).
The two big ones are deities and whether you want sanctification to be a thing or turn it off. I find it to be pretty easy to just disable or enable the latter without much and for the former... if someone wants to play a Cleric I'll just homebrew something for them (though you could reskin a golarian god if you want it to be easier and one of them happens to be close enough to something in your setting). That admittedly is extra work, but deity statblocks aren't that big either.
If no one is playing a Cleric I do almost zero conversion work unless there's something really specific I want to change for my own reasons (like I've kind of redesigned druids for a thing I'm doing but that's just something I wanted to try not something I feel like is a requirement).
Pharasma has it rough. She's both a literal character in the setting with her own motivations, personality, and goals but also more explicitly than anyone else a vehicle for delivering non-diegetic features into the game world. Pharasma can allow/deny resurrections because it creates an in setting reason for resurrections to fail, or for resurrections to succeed without having to wonder if angry psychopomps are going to knock on the PCs' door.
You can see shades of this with some of her other policies and actions too.
But it does have the downside of sometimes making her feel very arbitrary and sometimes even capricious... with the setting itself sometimes seeming to vacillate on whether she's allowed to be arbitrary and opinionated or whether she's just Objectively Correct about most things and everyone else just has to deal with it (the former makes room for better storytelling, but eh).
... As an aside, suddenly picturing like a post-endgame probably-extremely mythic level heist campaign where the goal is to steal the unstealable and bring back the soul of someone Pharasma has decided had hit their resurrection limit. I realize that doesn't comport with how a lot of people view Pharasma but I also think it sounds kinda fun.
It's worth noting (though I'm sure most people are aware) that the solar weapon ability is the two-hand trait, not actually giving you a 2h weapon. Which probably accounts for some of its power budget weirdness.
Though even then d8/d10 2h doesn't conform to the 'advanced weapon' profile the solarian otherwise gets (there's literally an advanced weapon that's d8/d10 and also deadly, after all... which itself has the same profile as an older pf2 weapon + powered/tech). Plus most 2h trait weapons get two die sizes, not one... so it's undercosted on both ends kinda.
... But these are also very simple number comparisons and references to things that already exist in Paizo. Paizo apparently even has internal rules about weapon budgeting... so none of this should be news.
Maybe the more interesting question is why Paizo thought the Solarian's 2h option needed to be bad on purpose, especially given the class' generally low damage.
I 100% prefer crafting to engineering. Genuinely surprised to see something so trivial being used as evidence of the system being diluted or weakened.
Crafting vs Engineering is a flavor fail, but not a load bearing one.
The removal of Physical Science without an adequate replacement is more symptomatic of SF2E being diluted, imo.
I think this is backwards, tbh. Having "pretty much all the sciences" crammed into one addon skill helped contribute to SF feeling like a weird hack of Pathfinder.
Like... astronomy, geography, geology, meteorology, oceanography, all forms of physics and chemistry, and also a catch all for all forms of potion and medicine crafting mashed together was just kind of a disaster of a skill.
Because Life Science in 2E would be doing everything Nature does. Only Mysticism could cover primal magical beings. Life Science was not capable of covering that.
But nature does, and if we're just renaming nature for the vibes I don't see why would change that.
I have the same question.. My friends voted to go with Starfinder 2e for our next gaming system, but come to find out, there is no game system released to Foundry yet.
The starfinder dedicated foundry system isn't out yet, but as far as I can tell the Starfinder Anachronism module for the PF2e is entirely functional from my experience.
Having a dedicated system with aesthetics and details tweaked to suit SF better would be ideal, but there's no need to wait and see either the game is entirely playable.
having a playable necromancer and another magic themed class in a thing titled impossible when 'impossible' is used specifically to refer to two places in setting.
And it's probably not 'impossible kingdoms' content since that would require extra support and doesn't suggest necromancer.
QuidEst wrote:
John R. wrote:
Gaulin wrote:
We might still get this book next gencon... Hopefully.
I really don't expect it to take that long. The playtest was released Dec. 2024. I expect the book to release Q1 or early Q2. A whole year and a half sounds WAY to long. So far I think books have usually released 13-14 months after playtest, not 18.
I will point to Starfinder having an uncertain playtesting schedule that they may have intentionally cleared space for. Unless you think they are going to fit in a class playtest in for the GenCon book, or that they won't not have new classes at GenCon?
It's possible. Some of the playtest > release cycles have been as short as 6 months, so a January playtest for a gencon book wouldn't be entirely outside what we've seen before.
