Totally Not Gorbacz's page

Given that Remaster is at the printer and Paizo won't rebalance the entire spellcasting in the game anytime soon (likely not before the next edition, which now got pushed back even further due to PF2.1), this could have some merit in the Homebrew as "hey, I think the game balance should be this, and I want to rebalance spells in my game in line with that concept, any help?" but here I have no idea what the aim of the thread is.

The title of this thread is oddly horny.

Besides, Paizo has been doing APs set entirely or partially outside of Inner Sea for quite some time and yet Hellknights are still a prominent part of the setting.

Still a bit out of sorts that we won't get the book with the new Tian races until AFTER this AP is out, seems like an odd choice...

BUT I'm still looking forward to grabbing this~

These books were supposed to be out now, but the sudden need to put Remaster out threw the publishing schedule in disarray.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

Zepheri wrote:

As for Cayden I think he only have 1 problem that he got by becoming a god and that is that he can't never be drunk ever again

Why can't he get drunk?

Because he’s not a liquid, I would say.

The only thing that's stopping you from drinking bodies other than liquids are the self-imposed limits of your brain.

As for Cayden I think he only have 1 problem that he got by becoming a god and that is that he can't never be drunk ever again

Why can't he get drunk?

For mythic stuff I want to feel like Hercules or Chuchulain.

You're doing this already with Legendary skill feats, and the Exemplar will be this+++ with all of their "throw the bad guy into the sun" feats.

I find it funny that people would bring up "but what about all these high level spells" in a thread about low level casters. But then claim its moving the goal post when someone says "those are high level, they are uncommon or just flavor, and martials don't need them in the first place cause the GM will just given them a way anyways".

Specially when any martial can just grab a scroll or wand of glitterdust or see invisibility. That is if they didn't grab blind-fight and make the need for See Invisible obsolete for 80% of its uses. The last 20% is just speeding up search.

Because the game is meant to be played and balanced across all levels. "Casters never dominated the table in my games / what's the highest level you got to in your games? / Oh we got to level 10 once" is a frequent conversation around here.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

Can those materials teleport, plane shift, conjure magical mansions and see invisible enemies?

At higher levels . . .

Teleport/plane shift: Get the martial where they need to be "Hi I'm Ron Wilson bus driver." and that's assuming the campaign involves other planes and doesn't ban teleport as problematic and gets high enough level to use them and doesn't take place in one area in or around a city. Not to mention it is fairly high level which most games don't get too making it outside the scope of this thread which is dealing with low level casters who can't do any of those things you listed. I mean seriously if I don't have teleport or plane shift do you really think the game will end in defeat or will the GM have us miraculously find another way to get there in time? I'm not needed for them, indeed in first ed people HATED having mages with teleport.

Conjure magical mansions: Honestly I don't think I've ever seen this spell used, then again I've never been in a game that got high enough to really do so and didn't have you staying in forts or other established strongholds instead. Its also uncommon so there's no guarantee you'll even get it as a caster. Come to think of it so are teleport and plane shift.

See invisible enemies: Yes.

*
as long as you can identify the location precisely both by its position relative to your starting position and by its appearance (or other identifying features). Incorrect knowledge of the location's appearance usually causes the spell to fail, but it could instead lead to teleporting to an unwanted location or some other unusual mishap determined by the GM. Teleport is not precise over great distances. The targets appear at a distance from the intended destination equal to roughly 1 percent of the total distance traveled, in a direction determined by the GM. For short journeys, this lack of precision is irrelevant, but for long distances this could be up to 1 mile.

So, it's a "no, no, I'm going to move goalposts around so that I appear to win the argument", how can a Fighter see invisible enemies?

Can those materials teleport, plane shift, conjure magical mansions and see invisible enemies?

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

Giantslayer, by all accounts, sold very well and is quite popular, but at the same time, it's one of Paizo's worst APs.

I’ll be interested to see how we like it (it’s next in our queue)

Please don't start hurting yourself.

Glass Cannon gang are likely a factor there.

Has Troy ever explained why he chose Giantslayer over all the other APs that were out at that time?

Probably for the reason everyone else did, that being middle-aged D&D dude nostalgia for "Against The Giants" vibe.

Giantslayer, by all accounts, sold very well and is quite popular, but at the same time, it's one of Paizo's worst APs.

Having some people complain that changes are going too far and some complain that changes are not going far enough is a solid indicator that the amount of changes is just right.

What if PF2.1 Bard is a prepared caster?

Also because having two different spellcasting systems but just one class that benefits from the other one isn't the best idea for a book that's supposed to get new players into the game easily.

Diego Rossi wrote:

Just a question:

"What level of gun-toting Rogue was Al Capone?"

Based on what I know (which is not much) he seems like a charisma based rogue with the firearm proficiency talent. A smooth talker and a smuggler, but could wield a gun if needed.

Can't be, Al was a successful dude and PF1 Rogue is a comically bad class. He even wouldn't be able to backstab people in a dark alley because how PF1 sneak attack works.

It's kind of amazing how Secrets of Magic is more than two years old and we're still getting the Temperans thread derail every time the class is brought up. They've been doing this since the playtest.

Genuinely kind of goofy.

Temperans simply figured out how moderation works here,as long as you don't comment on some person (and ofc don't cross any "slavery was kinda fine" lines), you can easily spend 10k posts telling people that Paizo products are crap and derailing every thread.

Sooo a propos of nothing, one addendum: among the "old school" PF1 playerbase, women are a horrifyingly small minority. It took Paizo 13, thirteen Adventure Paths, before a woman with an adventure credit was in it. Not because Paizo hates women, but because there weren't female adventure writers for D&D and its offshoots, and that was because there weren't enough women playing the game. And when these women started popping up, I distinctly remember grumblings of "forced inclusivity", concerns about "lower quality because women are picked due to gender, not skill," and musings about whether a 30yo woman can recognise the splendour of D&D history at such young age.

A few years ago, the admin of the biggest PF Facebook group, herself a woman, put up stats showing that women were less than 10% of the 35k+ group, and I can bet my horses that a solid chunk of them was from continental Europe, where TTRPGs spread across entirely different demographics than in US.

I agree with magnuskn *sneezes* it's one of the best designs by Paizo. While most of PF2 classes are well balanced, they have so far been mostly retreads of older ideas or re-implementations of 3.5/PF1 concepts under the new framework; this one, despite sharing the name and some thematic elements with the PF1 Kine, is a whole new design that's fresh and exciting. Bring on the 2024 classes, if these too will be new stuff not shackled to previous designs, I am all for it.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

Abomination Vaults and Strength of Thousands easily rank alongside RotRL and CotCT, and are just behind the best Paizo AP ever, Reign of Winter.

I don't dispute that. I want Steel Wind to clarify.

(However, you're wrong about Reign of Winter. You are forced to help a very bad person defeat a slightly LESS bad person who is simply trying to save her own life. IMHO, that Sux.)

Life is all about choosing the lesser evil and the less wrong choice, the sooner you realise it, the easier it will be.

Abomination Vaults and Strength of Thousands easily rank alongside RotRL and CotCT, and are just behind the best Paizo AP ever, Reign of Winter.

I think the stuff that belongs "top-shelf" is back in PF1's Adv Paths.

This is not an edition war post: I prefer the rules of PF2.

But the plots, the development work, and perhaps most of all, the quality of the freelance writers with PF1's APs, especially chronologically, the first two-thirds of them, are better than anything we have received in PF2.

It takes a lot of time to convert PF1 APs to PF2 if you are being meticulous about it -- but if you are looking for the best Paizo adventure paths? That's where you will find them.

*"Things were better back in my days" playing softly in the background*

Oh no, nipples. Did anybody at Paizo think of all the children?

Yes, but have you played one, or is this more of white room armchair theorycraft?

Star Wars never made sense when you looked closely at it, no matter how good a swordsperson was and how badass their lightsaber was, a high explosive shell going off nearby would kill them. The entire SW universe was high on suspension of disbelief, and so does Starfinder.

Yes, PF1 casters were fun, spell DC 47 + Sacred Geometry + Persistent Spell and laughing at the poor sod who is playing a Fighter/Rogue multiclass because that's what he did in 1982 and thinks it will work in 2012.

SF1 casters were fun, too, 3 good spells / day and a rifle for anything else because you read the forums and knew that you need to dump all your feats into being good at long arms to be of any use.

Let's never do either again.

My theory for why no technomancer is so that they don't have a repeat of the Alchemist playtest experience, where they are simultaneously developing the class and also the entire subsystem it revolves around.

This is also probably why Alchemist fell out of PF2.1PC1.

Exactly. It strikes a nice balance between complexity and playability.

Stars Without Number is my favourite TTRPG for spaceship combat. Light, abstract but with roles, meaningful.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

PF2.1 is launching with a different (and smaller) class mix than PF2.0 did, so I guess Paizo is just in general cutting on the number of classes, presumably to make the game easier to access for new players who might have a hard time figuring out just what exactly is the difference between Sorcerer and Wizard.

Huh??! What are you even talking about?

The Remastered Player Core and Player Core 2 books are going to have the exact same classes as the original Core Rulebook and Advanced Player's Guide - which are the books that they are replacing. They are just in a different order.

And the rest of the classes in the other PF2 books are still going to work for the most part. Minor errata is all that they will need.

Notice that I used the word "launching", PC2 comes out much later.

Launching a 2nd edition with less classes at launch then even just the first edition of the Core Rulebook feels like a huge step down though. PF2 had every Core Class plus the Alchemist at launch. Losing any of the Core 7 classes from Starfinder feels like a huge trench of character types unfulfilled.

PF2.1 is launching with a different (and smaller) class mix than PF2.0 did, so I guess Paizo is just in general cutting on the number of classes, presumably to make the game easier to access for new players who might have a hard time figuring out just what exactly is the difference between Sorcerer and Wizard.

Seriously, slashing 3/4 of the classes from P1E to P2E was brutal...

Half of non-core classes were "This class exists because multiclassing the two parent classes sucks" and from the other half that had some design value, the best ones (Kineticist, Magus, Summoner) are already in. There's not much left to translate over, and the two new classes we're getting playtested in two weeks are going to be completely original.

Dancing Wind wrote:

Tyler Hildebran wrote:

This feels like it's giving gatekeepers more fuel for the fire. Our community is pretty great, and I haven't seen much of that kind of behavior, but as soon as people can point to an app that empirically says "I know more about this than you" it's gonna be a problem somewhere, sometime. Just thought I'd put that out there.

How is having the high score in a trivia game "gatekeeping"? As long as you can buy any Pathfinder publication without proving you have a minimum score in that game, then there is no 'gatekeeping'.

Would Pathfinder be a better game if no one was allowed to know more about Golarian than their GM? Or more lore than anyone else at their table? Do you think GMs are going to recruit players based on a score in a trivia game about Golarian?

Or are you just afraid that some people will brag about their scores in public instead of keeping quiet and pretending they don't really know that much.

I don't care if someone brags, I don't care what their score is, I just want to make sure every table is as welcoming and inviting as it can be for everyone, and being told "no you can't make x character" or "no you can't worship that god" because you know more about the lore than them sucks. If it's your gm making a table wide decision, that's one thing, but I've seen my fair share of people being dicks in my time to know this will probably come up.

I should be clear, I don't mean people are gonna be excluded at the table, nor do I think Paizo would ever put any of their books behind a wall like that. I'm saying there are gonna be people who get shut down at the table, told their voice doesn't matter, and made to feel small because the person telling them that has a higher score than them. I'm not saying the app shouldn't exist, I'm not saying the scenario I listed is gonna be common, just that I wanted to make sure Paizo was considering the ramifications of their actions. I *want* to be wrong, but I felt like it was...

Following your logic Paizo should stop making games, because as I write this somewhere out there somebody is bragging that their Vital Strike Cave Druid is better than anybody else's at the table because they're better at this game.

In a party-oriented game, it's hard to make that concept work unless everyone is a fighter pilot.

Congratulations, you've just discovered why on many occasions in history, the military was well-fed and looked after while general populace was starving and destitute.

I hope devils & demons stay as they are

They won't, because many of them were made up by TSR/WotC.

If I'd like to play a MMORPG boss battle I'd just play a MMORPG.

Claxon wrote:

What you're suggesting was useful/necessary in PF1 because PCs could hit way harder than their level would suggest. The math of NPCs, unless you custom built them, was designed for unoptimized parties. My personal experience was that my players would often have the power level of +2/3 higher than the game would expect. But it was because the game was just poorly balanced with player options.

I would not say that PF1 was poorly balanced, it was just balanced assuming that the players were not build or teamwork optimizers. As opposed to PF2 were the game assumes that your are playing an optimized character with optimal teamwork. The overall result is that PF1 characters could punch above the balance point creating a feeling of "Yeah we are awesome!". While PF2 characters often punch below tbe balamce point creating a feeling of "That was rough, glad we made it".

Personally, I perfer the PF1 baseline because you can always make fights harder by adding more enemies or playing smarter. But with PF2 you have to actively run enemies worse to make fights easier.

PF1 balance fell apart the moment one of your players was running a Wizard who thought that burning hands is a powerful spell and wasn't interested in boosting their Int above 18 because "that's video gamey and I'm here not to play a video game" and then took two levels of Rogue because that represented a side trek in their career as a magical spelunker, while another was running a Vital Strike chain Cave Druid.

The solutions to make fights harder also fell apart, because making the fight challenging for the former made it still trivial for the latter, and making it hard for the latter meant it was impossibly tough for the former.

Dahak will still be a dragon that is red, but it will not be a Red Dragon.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

The boss mechanism in PF2 is that a |your level+4| enemy will crit you with almost every hit and you'll fail or crit fail against almost all their spells/abilities, and so very quickly you'll have people dropping down like flies if you don't fight smart.

It's a much better mechanic than Legendary/Lair actions meant to compensate for the action economy advantage of PCs.

No its really not, that solution is both extremely swingy and very forgettable. Its not even a mechanic at all, you r just buffing all the numbers until they almost break.

Are you going to remember the Troll that threw your fighter 20 yards into a mountain wall. Then when we crit it, it sprayed acid for blood all over your party. Then it dove down into the swamp and just bust out under our healer. But then you all pulled thru in the end.

or your version

Remember the boss that hit so hard all the time.... like all the bosses. Yeah and he was also hard to hit and saved again a lot of stuff... yeah like all the bosses. I'm i really glad we stacked all modifiers correctly so we had a chance.

Look legendary actions might not be the answer it might be 3 limited super-thematic boss moves it can to as a action or reaction to something happening.

It could be spawn minions, it could be a aoe reaction to being at 50% hp it could be extra actions. I'm just saying just pumping numbers up does not make for a good bossfight.

Have you seen some PF2 monsters? Most, especially at higher levels, have multiple memorable abilities. Yesterday we fought a thing that could engulf people, and constrict them, got healed every time it constricted its victims and was generating some aura of thorns that would wound anybody moving near it.

The *danger* of that fight was due to numbers, the *variety* was due to creature design.

The boss mechanism in PF2 is that a |your level+4| enemy will crit you with almost every hit and you'll fail or crit fail against almost all their spells/abilities, and so very quickly you'll have people dropping down like flies if you don't fight smart.

It's a much better mechanic than Legendary/Lair actions meant to compensate for the action economy advantage of PCs.

What Rysky said, having two AC values, each within 1 or 2 points of each other, is not worth the mental load of figuring out which one targets which one and which one is affected by buff/condition X etc. etc.

Derklord wrote:

Heather 540 wrote:

In my view, party roles are more of a "make sure everything is covered" than anything else. If I'm joining a group and the other players are bringing a cavalier, slayer, and barbarian, then I'm not bringing my fighter. I'm bringing my cleric.

These sentences are contradictory. The concept of party roles rests on characters having one main thing they defines them - otherwise, the word is misused. But if a party has "cavalier, slayer, and barbarian", you cannot cover everything with just one "role". What you want in that situation is a character that can do multiple things, to cover the multiple things that party can't do yet.

Why does a party role mean the character can only do one thing? A role is just something that needs to be covered. One character can always do multiple roles.

Take a magus, for example. That one character can fairly easily cover the roles of DPS, skill monkey, and arcane magic that goes from blasting to utility. One character, 3 roles.

As far as my original example, can a fighter be a healer? Yes. Is a cleric going to be much more effective at it with much less investment? Also yes.

How exactly is Fighter a healer until they have enough Use Magic Device to "hack" a wand of CLW reliably?

JiCi wrote:

You don't get it...

There shouldn't be a difference between getting shot by one guy with 4 pistols and by 4 guys with one pistol each.

So why doesn't everyone use two pistols to be twice as effective? We have 2 rms and two hands.

Obviously, they don't read this forum, duuuuh!

You don't get it...

There shouldn't be a difference between getting shot by one guy with 4 pistols and by 4 guys with one pistol each.

Make it extra damage dice
Make it to spend additional charges per weapon, emptying the clips faster
Make it more difficult with a penalty
Make it 3 actions
I do not care...

Just make it so if a Kasatha shoots 4 bullets at you, you take the equivalent of 4 attacks directly in the chest under 6 seconds.

Basically Double Slice with more than 2 hands...

"B-b-b-but too powerful!"
"Then make it balanced with a higher risk!"

How hard can THAT be? If you can shoot 15 Magic Missiles as a 9th-level spell, SURELY you can fire one bullet per weapon wielded.

It, actually, can be hard enough, since Paizo designers concluded that they're not interested in this, as PF2 doesn't have any "you do more DPS the more arms you have" mechanic.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

magnuskn wrote:

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

But damn, it's a really well done multiverse, Paizo nailed the class.

Probably the best-written class I've ever seen.

All right, who are you and what have you done with the real magnuskn?

Hey, everybody can evolve over the years and I am finally mentally over 1E. 2E has some warts (queue the endless "casters are underpowered!" debate you can find on Reddit), but overall it seems a much more balanced system, something which has become much more important to me after a few more 1E campaigns which at high levels derailed more than a bit due to player power. Also it plays much more dynamically than 1E. AND it seems to make GM'ing much easier as well, in terms of prep time, adjudicating the game and adjusting encounters on the fly.

And the Kineticist is really, really well written, in terms of balance and class flavor.

Of course! Godspeed and great gaming.

*searches for "Magnuskn's Villa" on Google Maps* We're coming to save you, you grumpy edgy Teuton, that good guy doppelganger won't fool me and TOZ.

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

But damn, it's a really well done multiverse, Paizo nailed the class.

Probably the best-written class I've ever seen.

All right, who are you and what have you done with the real magnuskn?

The problem is that if you put in the game drugs that give any mechanical benefit for their use, you'll inevitably have That One Guy who will attempt to minmax them to his advantage and will come at you with a PC that's essentially intoxicated 24/7 to have +2 to Will saves or whatever and the downside is mitigated through a combination of Feat X, spell Y and magic item B.

This only underscores the importance of session zero and discussing game safety because somebody who just lost their relative or a friend to drugs might not take that well.

Doubly crucial if you're in the US, as you folks seem to have the opioid situation somewhat out of control.

I heard fentanyl took off big time recently.