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I'd certainly be willing to give it a look given my predilection to science-fantasy.


Oh, good gods, are we back to "casters are only good for buffs" again? I'll be sure to tell our sorcerer player who's been making most of her career off area damage for 19 levels now.


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Oh, good gods, are we back to the "casters are only good for buffs" thing again? I'll be sure to tell our sorcerer player who's been making area damage spells useful for 19 levels now.


I found Glimpse of Redemption just became second nature after a while. The actual problem I have is finding all the add-ons to it I've acquired with feats over time (Divine Smite, Exalt, Shining Oath). I sometimes forget, but then losing the thread in play is one reason I note I'm kind of a bad player.


Like a lot of things, this is a question of frequency, motive, and how the other players react to it. As long as there's a passive encouragement not to take other player's characters and tell them to take a hike (and I'd argue there is in most groups) there's also some expectation that you're not going to go out of your way to make the game more annoying for other players--and someone who deliberately and repeatedly does things to make the game harder for others is doing that.

On the other hand, unless its kind of a group expectation, never expecting another player's character to do something counterproductive is not particularly reasonable. But its a well you can only go to so many times before it appears as a deliberate attempt to annoy others.


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Yeah, a problem you see repeatedly is people who come in from a background in, say, D&D3e or PF1e and are used to the CR calculations overstating the difficulty of the encounter in many cases hitting PF2e and finding they're shoved into a meat grinder.

Generally speaking, if PF2e says an encounter is high threat, its high thread. And even a moderate threat is defined assuming players are on their game and utilizing the tools at hand effectively.

My own suggestion would be to start out lowballing encounters a bit (though this is tricky to do with first level characters because of the limited number of level 0 or Level -1 opponents) until your players get their arms around the system (or it becomes obvious to you that they're not going to).


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thejeff wrote:

Yeah, it would be a lot of work to redo all that up front to present a complete system to work with your new world, but as you say most of it can be done as it comes up or just ignored completely.

I admit this is an issue I suspect a lot of people wouldn't have, but that sort of ad-hoc approach just doesn't sit well with me; when I set up a campaign I want that sort of thing to be done from the onset.

Quote:

Obviously, your world also has to share a lot of basic assumptions with Golarion or you'll need to rule out other mechanical things. Some classes. Changes to ancestries if they don't match your conception. That kind of thing. In addition to all the more general D&D style high fantasy tropes.

There are a lot of little bits and pieces buried here and there too, and they become more common the farther away an ancestry gets from the bland traditional ones.

To make it clear, I understand why it works that way, and think its entirely defensible in a setting-specific way; I just think it takes the usual issues with D&D-sphere exception based design and turns it up higher, and that makes it kind of a pill for settings outside what it was designed for.


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beowulf99 wrote:
Squiggit wrote:
Do you have an examples, out of curiosity? I mean no pressure but I've found it to be fairly easy to just... play in whatever setting I come up with. Pretty much the only mechanical work I have to do is make my own deities.

I would imagine most of this would be tying the region specific archetypes and items to similar areas in a homebrew setting mostly. Which I guess could be a lot of make work for the gm.

That's big part of it, yes, though as you can see I think it goes beyond that, too. There tends to be more mechanics hung on things like Ancestries that has often been the case, so its more work to do new ones there and its more fraught. And in some cases the regional ones you want don't match up to any extent ones.


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Squiggit wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:
Kobold Catgirl wrote:


So, personally, I don't like that the setting of Golarion has always been so closely tied to Pathfinder.
This is actually the only significant objection I have to it (other than my generic objections to all kinds of D&Disms, but that's kind of complaining that water is wet). Golarion isn't a bad setting, but if I wanted to run the game in an original setting, there's a vast amount of heavy lifting I'd have to do, so much is set up with Golarion in mind.
Do you have an examples, out of curiosity? I mean no pressure but I've found it to be fairly easy to just... play in whatever setting I come up with. Pretty much the only mechanical work I have to do is make my own deities.

A large number of Backgrounds are location-specific, and if you don't have those locations or something pretty similar they're unusable. And you want your own locations to have those, too. That's also true of a non-trivial number of Dedicatations (and those are worse to create from the ground up than Backgrounds; they're the replacement for prestige classes after all, and aren't really built to a common metric beyond "at these levels you'll get something") This applies to ancestries to a lesser degree, too. There's a scattering of other things, mostly having to do with magic, but those are the biggies.


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I ended up liking the three action economy more than i thought.


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PossibleCabbage wrote:
Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:
There are people out there who don't use Pathbuilder to generate your characters? Crazy.
I use a pencil and paper, alternatively a spreadsheet.

We've been using Hero Lab, but I certainly wouldn't have hesitated to do it manually; the only issue would have been the search-in-multiple-books thing.


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Kobold Catgirl wrote:


So, personally, I don't like that the setting of Golarion has always been so closely tied to Pathfinder.

This is actually the only significant objection I have to it (other than my generic objections to all kinds of D&Disms, but that's kind of complaining that water is wet). Golarion isn't a bad setting, but if I wanted to run the game in an original setting, there's a vast amount of heavy lifting I'd have to do, so much is set up with Golarion in mind.


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Deriven Firelion wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:

I think you're missing the point: yes, you may not have had to raise a shield in PF1e, but doing the things sacrificing it in 2e does cost you _more_. Usually sacrificing your Full Attack option or at least the third attack (which might actually be useful, as compared to what it is in PF2e, which is normally useless). As such doing things like Move or Trip is a more attractive choice, even if it does cost you _something_. Trying a Trip in D&D3e was most likely worthless unless you were specifically built around it, and often it wasn't that effective anyway given how a lot of 3e monsters were built. All kinds of characters that are not Trip-focused can still pull off a Trip in PF2e and the effect is almost always worthwhile if successful.

And its just one example. Trip-Strike-and-Move Way is another, or just Strike-Strike-Move Away. For most characters in D&D3e those ranged from unlikely to be successful to outright mistakes.

And, again, I don't specifically know PF1e, but I know D&D3 and no one has ever suggested they're radically different.

No. In PF1 or 3E, you tripped and stomped the person to death.

Maybe if you were a specialist. Otherwise what you did was usually fail. And that was if it was your first attack.

Quote:


Trip was one attack, then you could continue to use your full attack routine to continue beating them. Why would you move away? Your AC was high enough to avoid getting torn up. You tripped and took away their

Not a given IME.

Quote:

I don't have players in PF2 trip, strike, and move away either. Not sure why you would do that unless you were engaging in a kiting strategy.

And that's a bad idea because--?

Quote:


In PF2 we use trips to set up AoOs or force the use of an action to stand up to reduce attack actions for an opponent. This idea that trips automatically work is not what I have experienced. So all these players moving in, tripping easily, then moving away is not how PF2 works. You might get a trip on a boss monster, but you could just as easily move in, attempt...

It isn't automatically successful. But it can be successful on targets that you're doing little damage to because of damage resistance, and set up someone else for an improved chance of a crit or to leave them subject to precision damage when you can't get into a flank.


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Deriven Firelion wrote:
Physicskid42 wrote:
The Raven Black wrote:


TBH Talk to your GM and build things together so that you're both happy with it is all the help needed.

Far better IMO than hitting the GM on the head with a big Paizo book (figuratively) until they surrender.

But a robust rules system could at least be a jumping off point. I just don’t get this mentality where the mere existence of a rule will lead to adversarial Dm ing . After all the artifact gift rules are in the gm guide and there isn’t a big problem of players demanding a specific artifact. Even if they did a Dm could incorporate into play. I think there is a middle ground between the gm just hand waiving everything and the gm being held hostage. After all the whole “rulings not rules” thing is a big part of the problems with 5e

Wow. Did you miss on the whole "rules lawyer" era where DMs had to deal with players forcing them to follow a ruling in a game that made the game trivial? This is especially true in PFS where they tend to follow the rules as much as possible.

I'd rather Paizo err on the side of balance, then let DMs adjust to their table and preferences if they can handle it.

I'm kind of not buying that "There are systems to getting to big hands-on influence on a campaign level" automatically translates into "The game will automatically be out of balance." That's more a sign of bad design, rather than a subsystem existing in the first place.


The Raven Black wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:
Malk_Content wrote:
Sanityfaerie wrote:
Garretmander wrote:
And that higher level macro play is better suited to campaign specific encounters, story lines, items, rituals, etc. It's very ill suited to being something any old caster can start doing with their default class features in their downtime at level 13 or so.

Well... the actual issue is when the casters get it with downtime and their default class features, and the martials don't. Back in AD&D, fighters were busy building castles and developing retinues while wizards were pursuing their version of macro play. One of the big problems on that side was that they carved it off the one side and left it on the other.

That's part of what I'd like to see in something like this, really. You'll have druids becoming One With The Forest. You'll have necromancers turning themselves info undead. If you want real balance, you need some way for the various martial classes to get into the macro play side of things while still being the martials that they are. My fighter wants a keep. My swashbuckler wants to start a dueling school.

I think the problem I that unless something is inherently magical, I don't really need specific mechanics. Your Swashbuckler already can start a duelling school.
But the game is going to give you zero help in what he needs to do to do that, and what the benefits of it will be. That means chances are a player is diving into it blind, and just as likely to be disappointed.

TBH Talk to your GM and build things together so that you're both happy with it is all the help needed.

Far better IMO than hitting the GM on the head with a big Paizo book (figuratively) until they surrender.

I'm usually the GM. And I'd rather not have to build subsystem on my own, or completely pull something arbitrary, thanks.


Malk_Content wrote:
Sanityfaerie wrote:
Garretmander wrote:
And that higher level macro play is better suited to campaign specific encounters, story lines, items, rituals, etc. It's very ill suited to being something any old caster can start doing with their default class features in their downtime at level 13 or so.

Well... the actual issue is when the casters get it with downtime and their default class features, and the martials don't. Back in AD&D, fighters were busy building castles and developing retinues while wizards were pursuing their version of macro play. One of the big problems on that side was that they carved it off the one side and left it on the other.

That's part of what I'd like to see in something like this, really. You'll have druids becoming One With The Forest. You'll have necromancers turning themselves info undead. If you want real balance, you need some way for the various martial classes to get into the macro play side of things while still being the martials that they are. My fighter wants a keep. My swashbuckler wants to start a dueling school.

I think the problem I that unless something is inherently magical, I don't really need specific mechanics. Your Swashbuckler already can start a duelling school.

But the game is going to give you zero help in what he needs to do to do that, and what the benefits of it will be. That means chances are a player is diving into it blind, and just as likely to be disappointed.


I think you're missing the point: yes, you may not have had to raise a shield in PF1e, but doing the things sacrificing it in 2e does cost you _more_. Usually sacrificing your Full Attack option or at least the third attack (which might actually be useful, as compared to what it is in PF2e, which is normally useless). As such doing things like Move or Trip is a more attractive choice, even if it does cost you _something_. Trying a Trip in D&D3e was most likely worthless unless you were specifically built around it, and often it wasn't that effective anyway given how a lot of 3e monsters were built. All kinds of characters that are not Trip-focused can still pull off a Trip in PF2e and the effect is almost always worthwhile if successful.

And its just one example. Trip-Strike-and-Move Way is another, or just Strike-Strike-Move Away. For most characters in D&D3e those ranged from unlikely to be successful to outright mistakes.

And, again, I don't specifically know PF1e, but I know D&D3 and no one has ever suggested they're radically different.


Temperans wrote:

[

Yeah early on Fighter and Paladins were very rigid, specially if the player decided to spend every single feat on combat (even though they didn't need to). But that is the same as a PF2 Fighter or Champion going very strictly into only 1 thing.

Even there, there's still the issue that specialists can still find they have a third action that isn't painful to sacrifice. My wife's aforementioned two-weapon fighter/rogue does have an SOP (Tumble behind, twin-feint) but it isn't a "do this and nothing else".


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Deriven Firelion wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:
Deriven Firelion wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:
Deriven Firelion wrote:
Malk_Content wrote:

To be fair I dont agree with Deriven at all. If PF2 doesnt give tactical options then I don't know of a game that does.

I'll also note there are several ways to play a 2/3rds caster. Literally any martial with a casting archetype. Or the new casting methods of Magus/Summoner being a different and new take on the idea of restricted casting.

Nowhere did I say PF2 doesn't have tactical options. But it isn't any more tactical than PF1. I played PF1 for ages. And it was a highly tactical game, just not using the short-term buffs and debuffs in PF2.

The idea of this more intensely tactical game than PF1 that people need to learn is a false idea. Both games were tactical. It took time to learn the tactics of both systems.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with Malk on this one. While presumably PF1e had tactics (I didn't play it) I can't imagine they were immensely different from D&D3e in that regard, and most of them were largely useless outside of extremely specific builds.

PF2 has similar play in my opinion.

Not in my experience. I've played both a champion/bard hybrid and a sword-and-board fighter, and I found good reasons to change things up with both of them with frequency I _never_ saw in D&D3.

Those are two classes I can agree on. Champion and sword and board fighter much better in PF2 than 3E and PF1.

Paladin in PF1 was simple and powerful to play. Pretty much use Smite Evil on the boss and win.

Sword and board fighter was an ok defensive build, but not as good as PF2 in terms of interesting play.

Seems to apply to my wife's two-weapon fighter/rogue too; she may do some repeated things, but there seem to be good reasons for her to do other things sometimes too.

That's why I'm kind of with the group that says that at least for martials, there's a much longer list of things that can be at least reasonably worth doing reasonably often that weren't true in PF1e/D&D3. And I'd suggest strongly the fact the three action structure is there has a lot to do with it. My champion/bard does Shield as a third action fairly often, but its in the line of "doesn't have anything better to do". Its not painful or counterproductive to do something else. Same with my wife's use of Twin Parry. Add in the fact that AoOs are not nearly as common (so movement isn't stupid) and there's just a lot more times when standing and slugging away (or doing your One Big Trick) isn't as dominant.


Deriven Firelion wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:
Deriven Firelion wrote:
Malk_Content wrote:

To be fair I dont agree with Deriven at all. If PF2 doesnt give tactical options then I don't know of a game that does.

I'll also note there are several ways to play a 2/3rds caster. Literally any martial with a casting archetype. Or the new casting methods of Magus/Summoner being a different and new take on the idea of restricted casting.

Nowhere did I say PF2 doesn't have tactical options. But it isn't any more tactical than PF1. I played PF1 for ages. And it was a highly tactical game, just not using the short-term buffs and debuffs in PF2.

The idea of this more intensely tactical game than PF1 that people need to learn is a false idea. Both games were tactical. It took time to learn the tactics of both systems.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with Malk on this one. While presumably PF1e had tactics (I didn't play it) I can't imagine they were immensely different from D&D3e in that regard, and most of them were largely useless outside of extremely specific builds.

PF2 has similar play in my opinion.

Not in my experience. I've played both a champion/bard hybrid and a sword-and-board fighter, and I found good reasons to change things up with both of them with frequency I _never_ saw in D&D3.


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I wouldn't go so far as to say "dumb"; I'm playing in an AP right now after all. But I will say that virtually every module I've ever seen was rigid in ways that doesn't appeal to me at all as a GM.


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Malk_Content wrote:

I think the reason I see PF1 as less tactical is because you could build your character such that your one chosen tactic works all the time (or is shut down completely with no middle ground) and thus there isn't a tactical choice being made at the table. I was never making any hard choices DURING an encounter in PF1. It all happened beforehand.

Very much this. You baked a cake, mostly through character generation and advancement, then you served it.

This was a little less true with spellcasters because of their appalling flexibility, but non-spellcasters progressively had their gig and did that and not much else. And they didn't need to, because under the circumstances it didn't work it was usually all in the spellcasters courts anyway.


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Deriven Firelion wrote:
Malk_Content wrote:

To be fair I dont agree with Deriven at all. If PF2 doesnt give tactical options then I don't know of a game that does.

I'll also note there are several ways to play a 2/3rds caster. Literally any martial with a casting archetype. Or the new casting methods of Magus/Summoner being a different and new take on the idea of restricted casting.

Nowhere did I say PF2 doesn't have tactical options. But it isn't any more tactical than PF1. I played PF1 for ages. And it was a highly tactical game, just not using the short-term buffs and debuffs in PF2.

The idea of this more intensely tactical game than PF1 that people need to learn is a false idea. Both games were tactical. It took time to learn the tactics of both systems.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with Malk on this one. While presumably PF1e had tactics (I didn't play it) I can't imagine they were immensely different from D&D3e in that regard, and most of them were largely useless outside of extremely specific builds.


Sporkedup wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:
Sporkedup wrote:


If Pathfinder 2e doesn't fit either the narrative or challenge style you want, that's really okay. Adjust it to fit your needs if you must, or find a new game if you must. It's all okay.

The only qualification I'd put on this is that PF2e is too well designed toward the effect its trying for not to make fiddling with some basic structural features (say, the to-hit and crit chances relative to level) without having knock-on effects that, in the end, you may not like much better than whatever you were fixing with it.

There are subsystems in PF2e that can be largely fiddled with without much risk there (say, substituting character advancement traits for melee weapon magic items), but I don't think this is one of them.

I don't mean they should change the game as much as there are a lot of things already suggested that could make it a more pleasant experience. Toning down the difficulty of encounters via creature selection. Playing the APs a level advanced. Being more open with information like monster AC, saves, or level from the get go.

All of that of course is GM work, so if someone as a player is getting the crap kicked out of them every fight and not loving it, there's not much they can do beyond holding a conversation with their GM. And it's true that some GMs just won't bend. None of which is a player's fault.

Generally fair, though I have some qualification on "Not much they can do." If its happening because they aren't actually engaging with what works well for the character type they have (like, as I've mentioned, just making three attacks for most characters), they can indeed to something--learn what works.

Now they may not be _willing_ to do that, in which case you're right, though I have a little trouble generating a lot of sympathy in cases where even the most basic tactical understanding of your character is too much trouble.

But if they _are_ doing that and still getting beat up regularly, you're entirely right.


Sporkedup wrote:


If Pathfinder 2e doesn't fit either the narrative or challenge style you want, that's really okay. Adjust it to fit your needs if you must, or find a new game if you must. It's all okay.

The only qualification I'd put on this is that PF2e is too well designed toward the effect its trying for not to make fiddling with some basic structural features (say, the to-hit and crit chances relative to level) without having knock-on effects that, in the end, you may not like much better than whatever you were fixing with it.

There are subsystems in PF2e that can be largely fiddled with without much risk there (say, substituting character advancement traits for melee weapon magic items), but I don't think this is one of them.


pauljathome wrote:
Hobit of Bree wrote:
HammerJack wrote:

No.

I wouldn't expect that to change without some kind of limitation, since that would be throwing open the doors of unlimited flight at low level.

Sort of. If it was a level 10 item or level 10 feat, it wouldn't impact low-level play. And flying isn't *that* uncommon starting around level 10.
Even at level 10 unlimited flight is pretty uncommon. As in non existent. Strix comes online at level 13. Druid soaring shape+form control or form control+pest form comes online at level 11 and 8s close to giving you unlimited flight but is pretty limiting.

Yeah, there's more limited versions earlier, but they're usually pretty short-time.


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I think you guys are making this too complicated. Their ideazations of what the caster values in terms of other creatures, and the minds they have are problem parts of his own consciousness compartmentalized to run them. They don't have free will or volition separate from his own, because they aren't truly separate from him; the closest thing to them is the concept of a tulpa.


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HammerJack wrote:

No.

I wouldn't expect that to change without some kind of limitation, since that would be throwing open the doors of unlimited flight at low level.

Yeah. Its extremely notable how they've avoided that.


Eh. Maybe at really low levels I can see that as an issue, but if you use, say, a rogue for it, their ability to disengage is strong and gets stronger the more levels they put under them. She's admittedly a hybrid, but my wife's rogue/warrior scouts all the time. She just figures the risk is part of the gig, and I can't say I've ever seen her run into anything while scouting she couldn't handle one way or another.


YuriP wrote:

But ends here because the rest I agree with DF I don't see many players chosing wizard because of this once they still may do an arcane sorcerer instead and choose the spell on the fly. Probably most players only choose the wizard because the flavor not the mechanics.

Probably depends on how much people weigh in the extra spell slots and increased nontactical options.

(Which doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong; I'm not even sure prepared arcanists were that attractive to most people coming to the idea anew as of 3e D&D. Whatever the reason, having spellcast slots you can't use because they're tied up with spells you don't need can feel bad, and a sorcerer only has to deal with that regard spell levels at worst).


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WWHsmackdown wrote:


Drawing a through line from Age of Ashes to Abomination vaults shows a slight readjusting of encounter structure (for non boss stuff) that's a tad more forgiving but nothing too eye catching. Again, even if Age of Ashes is some supposedly high bar, my players did fine. Casters had enemies save on spells a majority of the time but martials weren't really struggling at all, at least I don't remember any complaints from the martials.

I'd suggest some of that is the opposite of what I think you see on the other side of this: luck. There are absolutely some encounters in AoA that seem overtuned for when you get them (you'll hear the early game barghest encounter come up a _lot_). That doesn't mean they're impossible, but if you have a bad experience with them they're going to really stand out.

As I've said, I really think the issue is that PF2e can be unforgiving compared to some incarnations of D&D; it doesn't automatically beat you up, but a few bad die rolls at the wrong time can be really punishing. Add in the usual things where, while its hard to completely fail a PF2e character build, neither can you bake a cake that will deal with everything handily, and it can come across as rough to people who are only used to either getting plenty of time to turn things around, or being able to trivialize a lot of encounters with the various rocket tag tricks.


Exocist wrote:

1e/2e D&D was also insanely fast combat wise because no one had any hit points. It would be equivalent to taking everything’s hitpoints in PF2e and quartering them or sixthing them. I got through Temple of Elemental Evil for 1e D&D with a Fighter 7/Thief 5/Bard 10, having about 101 total hitpoints by using cheese and it was a god stat array.

Though as I noted, except for big monsters like giants and dragons, the damage numbers were also lower. So the lower hit points didn't always mean as much as one would think.

If you were fighting things that did 2D6 damage, the fact you only had 40 hit points still meant that was about six hits worth, and not all high level monsters were massive damage dealers (sometimes, of course, you'd get things who's gig was take-out effects or obnoxious stuff like earlier edition life drain).


Deriven Firelion wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:

My suspicion is--and this can't be but a suspicion, as I haven't seen one in play, let alone play one myself--that if you are careful about choosing staple spells as a default (that is, have a standard set of prepped spells that are widely useful) and only swap out when you have advanced information about what's coming, a wizard will probably feel okay (unless you're someone who thoroughly internalized the expectation that arcanists should be as overpowered as they've frequently been in the past).

The problem, of course, is that's a big "if". I doubt most people playing them do that, because they're hung up on the rotation versatility.

There is only one thesis that allows swapping in 10 minutes. So switching spells to prepare for a battle takes a day. I can't imagine most parties would wait that long to take on an encounter. Then wait another day for the next encounter. Then another day for the next one. So the only way the wizard is doing any swapping is if they purchased the spell needed, put it in their book, and took the thesis that allows swapping in 10 minutes.

But I wouldn't expect them to bother with most encounters (that's what the defaults are for) just the important ones. And I don't doubt people I play with would absolutely be willing to wait a day for those.

Quote:


Whereas if I make an occult sorcerer and take Occult Evolution I believe it is called, I can search every mental occult spell and take it within a minute. That has been an immensely useful ability in a module like Agents of Edgewatch. It's once per day, but I keep the spell for the entire day.

Doesn't seem to fill the same niche to me, and I don't think the occult list is, on the whole, as useful for swap-outs (and that I _do_ have a sense of since one of the characters I'm playing is a hybrid bard).


My suspicion is--and this can't be but a suspicion, as I haven't seen one in play, let alone play one myself--that if you are careful about choosing staple spells as a default (that is, have a standard set of prepped spells that are widely useful) and only swap out when you have advanced information about what's coming, a wizard will probably feel okay (unless you're someone who thoroughly internalized the expectation that arcanists should be as overpowered as they've frequently been in the past).

The problem, of course, is that's a big "if". I doubt most people playing them do that, because they're hung up on the rotation versatility.


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Deriven Firelion wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:
Though there it depended on the damage capability of your opponent. An 8th level fighter against his equivalent was mostly going to take a while, as he was going to have around 40 hit points and neither he nor his opponent were going to do more around ten or there abouts per hit. If you got one-shotted at those levels it was likely either a spell or some physically big monsterous opponent who did massive damage.

8th level wasn't a power level. An 8th level fireball did what? 8d6 in Advanced D&D? It's been so long since I played that edition. You could get belts of giant strength that boosted your damage a lot. If you had 18 percentile strength. Unless that was 2nd edition. I don't recall Advanced D&D being slow at all. You could do a lot of combats fairly quickly.

You could, but given until 3e there was a strong allergy in the D&D world to buying magic items, there was no assurance of it.

And the reason why pre-3e D&D was relatively fast was that as soon as you got away from spellcasters, there was not much in the way of meaningful decision making; as a fighting specialist, you picked a target and just kept rolling hits until it fell down. When you've got a comparatively simple resolution system and no decisions, even ablative damage won't be slow.

But it still could take a number of rounds. It was just that the rounds didn't individually take long because as soon as you got away from the spellcasters there was nothing much to take up time.

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PF1 and 3E was where the game slowed down immensely as you gained levels. It was all the spell options that did it. The pre-buffing. The long-term buffs that you prepared for each battle made things nutty long.

Not just spell options. Deciding whether to apply feats and which way, dealing with avoiding AoOs, figuring out whether it was worth losing multiple attacks to get to a particular target--a lot of decisions in 3e era weren't particularly _good_, but there were still a fair number of them to think about even for a lot of non-casters.

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In 2E you cast stoneskin at the start of the day and called it good.

Eh, I saw a lot of dithering by spellcasters all the way back in OD&D.

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In 3E/PF1, you cast resist energy, mirror image, mage armor, some fly, haste, see invis, stat enhancements, and just about any buff you could get. And that was all the spells you cast before you actually started casting spells during the battle.

Not to the same degree, but in any serious fight I saw a pretty fair amount of that even in OD&D; only reason you didn't see more was because the value of what buffs there were compared to attack spells was different.


Jedi Maester wrote:
Squiggit wrote:

Yeah, MAD is a big problem and PF2 is already a game that doesn't support flat/broad statlines very well (even worse than Pf1 in some respects).

Honestly I think that's the biggest problem with the Thaumaturge. The flavor people are looking at values... pretty much every stat to some degree.

It's also why it's hard to lean too heavily on media inspiration. The whole notion that you have to give up being smart to be charming or that being good at noticing things means you're probably less athletic is a very D&D contrivance that doesn't map to real life or fiction very well.

I think it's more that Constantine and Batman are many times solo heroes. They have to do everything themselves, which means no dump stat. In a team, doing everything makes others feel redundant, TTRPG and fiction wise. Helsing is a good example of a character in a team. He provides the knowledge and weaknesses, but leaves the fighting to others. It's hard to make TTRPG characters based on solo heroes because they can't have dump stats.

Yeah, the reason you see trade-offs in RPG characters is that no one character is supposed to be able to do the load by themselves. Its noticable that in the forms of fiction where that's also true, you also see far less polymaths (and when you do see them, its because you have a main-character-and-sidekicks situation like Doc Savage).


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Deriven Firelion wrote:
Squiggit wrote:
considerably wrote:


However, if you get hit less or hit more often, the game is easier.

I mean, if that's the only change you make, yeah, but that's not really what they're proposing.

It feels like kind of a strange assertion because there are a lot of games, tabletop or otherwise, that are very hard without being predicated on the idea that certain characters have a high chance of failing with their core abilities.

There were multiple design goals. Difficulty was but one of those goals. Combat speed was another.

I don't know what those game systems are. I've played a lot of game systems. You're either killing real fast or getting killed real fast. PF1/3E was one of the slowest games I ever played due to the sheer volume of countermeasures in place.

Generally speaking D&D and similar styles of heightened-hit-points-over-time games have gone out of their way to slow pace-of-resolution so that (at least in theory) players have time to change tactics and/or withdraw before things jell badly. As you note, this is a very different model than most of the games in the hobby (and even those that have some of it have it in different ways, such as ablating hero point type mechanics).

The problem is, unless you mix in things like take-out spells its tedious, and when you do mix those in, it all too easily turns into what's called "rocket tag".

So PF2e tried to moderate the process and make it faster without going all the way to things like GURPS. But even a moderate move in that direction is going to feel jarring to people who are used to things taking longer, since at least part of it is going to be to potentially make individual strikes more important on both sides.

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GURPS was one of the fastest kill games. You really had to be careful with that game. The called shot rules were brutal. You took a head or brain hit, you were usually done.

Talk to BRP players. Old time RuneQuest hands would laugh at the complaints of how unexpectedly dangerous PF2e strikes can be (though admittedly ongoing exchanges between two highly skilled opponents could take a while--but it also could end with one exchange, too).

Now, of course, we're talking about two game systems that lean much more into the grittier end of the spectrum than most D&D-kin do, but its still relevant to the matter at hand.

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The original Boot Hill was really deadly and random.

Advanced and 2nd edition D&D you died on a single roll sometimes. Combat was pretty fast because everyone had mostly low hit points and low AC with casting being fairly slow. Maybe that paradigm is what someone like N N 959 would prefer.

Though there it depended on the damage capability of your opponent. An 8th level fighter against his equivalent was mostly going to take a while, as he was going to have around 40 hit points and neither he nor his opponent were going to do more around ten or there abouts per hit. If you got one-shotted at those levels it was likely either a spell or some physically big monsterous opponent who did massive damage.


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N N 959 wrote:
Malk_Content wrote:
I still think Paizo is in a no win situation. There will always be people upset about the direction...
Really? You honestly think people would have complained because they weren't getting crit more by bosses if Paizo had followed Sherlock's advice at the start?

I have no way to know how common it would have been, but I wouldn't have found it a virtue to make bosses more brittle, whether by critical hits or other means.


Yeah, its pretty clear you normally only use that third attack when you have no other useful options; my wife's fighter/rogue hybrid does it fairly often, but she's also done her best to reduce her MAP problems.


I do it all the time with my Champion and his glaive.


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The great truth is that Hasbro would have to screw up on a really massive scale to lose ground appreciably with D&D; even the 4e situation was a loser _only by their standards_ (by any other RPG company in the world it would have been considered a massive success).

The combination of decades of name recognition and network externalities is just a juggernaut that likely can't be beat. PF1e, which is probably as close as anyone has come (barring the debatable Vampire case) was an artifact of a perfect storm of events, and as has been noted, that likely just meant they were at least in the running.


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Claxon wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:
Claxon wrote:
The Raven Black wrote:

And yes, PF2 is the game of GM's great power, and hopefully great responsibility.

Both players and GMs need time to fully integrate this.

And there is a way to real power in PF2 : overall party optimization. Not necessarily at build, but through retraining and advancement choices : when every PC takes options that help the other PCs use their special abilities more often and to fuller extent, encounters become much easier.

Become the well-oiled machine of death and success follows.

My problem with this is, I don't want to build characters that way.

I realize it's an issue of prior experience with "related" game editions, but that doesn't change my mindset. I don't want to be required to build my character with everyone else's character in mind, just to be successful.

I've got to say man, that the idea in a role-centric game like D&D you could build a character with no reference to what anyone else was doing and expect it to go well, whether that is PF2e, D&D3e, or OD&D, strikes me as really, really odd. Unless the GM was very actively bending the game around whatever he got, its hard to see how that _ever_ would have gone well.

Beyond coordinating general character roles such as "melee, range, caster (support, debuff, damage)" my group never required coordination to excel. Because individual characters are so powerful in PF1 unless your group showed up with all melee characters, or all casters, etc you were probably going to be okay.

That's about all we did in PF2e and we seemed to get by.


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Taja the Barbarian wrote:
To be fair, most consumable loot drops since D&D3 have had two likely fates: Either
  • They get sold to a vendor at the earliest opportunity, or
  • They are held in reserve by the PCs and forgotten about until the campaign ends and someone goes 'wow, I still have that low level item in my inventory!'

I believe the phrase is "I feel attacked by this relatable content." :)


Claxon wrote:
The Raven Black wrote:

And yes, PF2 is the game of GM's great power, and hopefully great responsibility.

Both players and GMs need time to fully integrate this.

And there is a way to real power in PF2 : overall party optimization. Not necessarily at build, but through retraining and advancement choices : when every PC takes options that help the other PCs use their special abilities more often and to fuller extent, encounters become much easier.

Become the well-oiled machine of death and success follows.

My problem with this is, I don't want to build characters that way.

I realize it's an issue of prior experience with "related" game editions, but that doesn't change my mindset. I don't want to be required to build my character with everyone else's character in mind, just to be successful.

I've got to say man, that the idea in a role-centric game like D&D you could build a character with no reference to what anyone else was doing and expect it to go well, whether that is PF2e, D&D3e, or OD&D, strikes me as really, really odd. Unless the GM was very actively bending the game around whatever he got, its hard to see how that _ever_ would have gone well.


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Claxon wrote:


The people who are willing to GM the games in my friend group like the direction PF2 moved to, and because the default difficulty of APs (what my group almost always ran) is on the high end that's what they want to do.

I understand that if I can convince them to lower the CR of encounter by 2 or increase the player character level by 2 I'd probably get the experience I'm after. But it requires a level of persuading I'm not capable of.

While I have a considerable degree of sympathy for your position, Claxon, this really comes across as less an issue with the system and more that you and your group are off-sync in your mutual expectations.

Is there some reason to think that if a hypothetical PF3e changed that you wouldn't just flip the problem?


I'm a hard one to answer; I've been GMing for more than 40 years now, but I've also probably run more than a score of different systems in that period, and even the ones I ran most went through multiple editions (which is often worse than hitting a whole new game in terms of getting confused).


Hmmm. I recently tested out a couple of newer Paizo digital flip mats and flip tiles and they seemed to line up fine in Maptool.


That said, as others have mentioned if that's where you want to go with it, you're more likely to get a result you want by talking to the GM adjusting his end than anything you can do adjusting your end.


Calybos1 wrote:


We're not trying to "win the game," because combat isn't the game. We're trying to minimize the play time wasted on combat so we can focus on the parts we actually enjoy: interacting with NPCs, negotiating with factions, investigating mysteries, exploring unknown territories, making bad jokes, discovering clues, coming up with clever ideas, and roleplaying. Combat is getting in the way of that, and we want it to stop taking up so much of our game time.

We don't want to enroll in a military academy and become combat specialists; we want to make combat go away faster.

I'm going to say something I normally avoid: PF2e may not be the game for you. A game that has spent a lot of time making sure combat is engaging and meaningful is not a good choice for people who consider combat an impediment to the parts of the game they actually enjoy.


N N 959 wrote:
Thomas5251212 wrote:
N N 959 wrote:
Unicore wrote:

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Melee characters often carry more than one weapon to cover weaknesses and resistances. Close quarters is a severe weakness of the Longbow in PF2.

After a year of playing PFS, I haven't seen anyone switching out weapons in PF2 once they get potency runes, unless it's ranged to melee or vice versa.

This assumes you don't have a potency rune on the backup weapon, too, far as I can tell. I don't do it all the time but changing from the glaive on my Champion to the cold iron mace has been a thing I've done several times, and he's 11th level at this point

In the statement you quoted, I am not assuming anything. I am stating my observations.

But yes, I am assuming that once players heavily invest in their primary weapon, they are inclined to use it, regardless. Of course there are always exceptions.

The problem is, its not difficult to have as much investment in a backup weapon a bit into the range where you can find the runes; unless your GM is being generous with availability, you can have quite a while where you can find addition runes at the levels available to you that are, effectively, cheap. I mean, I have a potency rune on his _dagger_, because why the hell not?

Switching to the mace when I hit something that blows off slashing or non-cold iron is a no-brainer, honestly; I do a bit less base damage, and the mace doesn't have the Deadly quality if I get a crit, but against the things I'm fighting when I switch a crit isn't particularly likely anyway. Even against normal things I'm only going from 2D8 to 2D6, and anything with resistance likely has more than a couple points of it.

So I guess my point is, if people aren't changing weapons when its useful, its not because its not a good idea, its because they've apparently sat on their money (and probably unloaded addition runes when they got them) rather than used them, and/or just can't be arsed, that's far from a given.