Ven's page

I've been reading and rereading the rules to 2e for years now. Every so often I start watching a ton of 2e content creators on YouTube and generally I'm of the opinion that its probably the most well designed system to date, but I have a growing list of oddities, barriers to entry, or general silliness that make me hesitate.
I'd love feedback on any or all of the following issues:

1) Default character sheet is baaaaad.
2) Backgrounds are neat but just seem "extra" and unnecessary. Just get a stat boost and skill+lore of your choice. They're so unimportant why make me go through a list of "none of this is what I want"
3) Stat generation is neat, but hard to track in practice. I'd rather take the "standard array"
4) Every player needs a rulebook. Real DnD 4e energy on this one.
5) Trick Magic Item is a silly name, it's like your class doesn't actually let you know how to activate an item, the item just has a rule against letting you use it unless you pull a fast one on it.
6) Stronger enemies are more vulnerable to damage than weaker ones. Makes some sense mechanically, the vulnerability needs to scale with attacks at their challenge level to stay relevant, but seriously big bag dragon is so weak to cold that 3 damage becomes almost 30? That's SOME vulnerability.
7) I thought we were tryna go away from Save or Suck mechanics in modern TT? Why would Treat Wounds be save or suck? I got stuck by a goblin so a trained medic stitched me up. I got stabbed by two goblins and an master medic was like "I may have doubled the roll of the last medic but I'm sorry, I've completely forgotten how medicine works and can offer you no benefit. Like I get that you're trying to heal twice as much in the same amount of time but a medic isn't going to go "I can either try to stitch one of these stab wounds in 10 minutes, or try to rush through 2 in the same time." They're going to go "I have 10 minutes, lets see how many of these stab wounds I can sew." No fail forward at all?
8) Direct Damage cantrips are just terrible early on. Sure better than 1d3 ray of frost from 3.5 but still.
9) Cantrips quickly become more powerful than 1st level spells in terms of blasters. What are those slots for after that?
10) Focus spells add a needless layer of complexity and could have been wrapped into cantrip rules.
11) Math is far too high. Everybody is full base and also gets up to +8 beyond that before bonuses. It feels like 2e was made with VTTs that roll everything for you as the standard.
12) I get decision paralysis when choosing skill feats because none of them really seem all that good. Trying to theorycraft a rogue is particularly bad in this area. Did they really need so many of these?
13) Leveling is too complex in general.
13) Character creation is too complex in general. There's just so much going on both of these points, use of character generation and leveling apps is almost mandatory to play. Don't get me wrong I appreciate the customization level here but it would have been nice to do more with less. I don't think 1e struggled in the customization department and I found that much easier to follow.
14) Every class is a sorcerer. There are no "martial" classes. Everyone is a super hero at high levels and not because of feats of strength or skill, the rogue is literally so sneaky that they create illusory decoys? That's not skill that's magic. That's not a rogue that's an arcane trickster. DnD 4e energy again.
15) Martial classes should be simpler to play. The most 4e of all, and don't get me wrong I like that martials don't just stand there and trade blows until dead, and it's implemented worlds better than 4e in that they're not a lot of "once per day/once per encounter" martial skills because that made no sense. But they do keep gaining more and more abilities until their action list is big enough that you need a rulebook nearby or you can't really track it all. Do Fighters feel like wizards? No, but at my table we probably get into combat 25-50% as often as standard. We run pre-fabs and do a lot of "just the plot" fighting. Storming Hook Mountain plays a lot more like a movie than a video game (and not like, the Avengers). I feel like half as many strike options would be more than enough and this issue contributes to some other points like "leveling up is complicated"

I really *want* to like 2e, I had really high hopes, and DnD 5e was a disappointment, watered down and too simple, but 2e feels like a pretty wide swing the other way. I was hoping for a streamlined Pathfinder but ended up with this overwhelming system that begs to be run with Apps and browser based rulebooks to be playable. Which, on the one hand it's really neat that we have such powerful tools that we can play a system so complex with relative ease. I've seen YouTubers play really *fast* sessions on Foundry. And they obviously know exactly what to do and exactly what to click to get that to happen but I would 100% play a 1hr combat in 4hrs here with all the time my players would take thinking over their turn and constantly having to reference one of the *forty two* different conditions. But I don't want to play on my laptop I want to play on my notebook.

Please help. Talk me into it!

I'm writing a story about this mist that rolls in at night and if you go into the mist the terrain there is different, always a pine forest and not the area that surrounds the town. What's happening here is the main enemy is using an artifact to cause some planar mumbo jumbo.
Plot point 2 is that those who go into the mist will be quickly attacked by undead or other gothic creatures. I want them to think that the mist is completely filled with monsters and give the town an Attack on Titan vibe for a session. Eventually they should notice they always see the same person in the treeline during battle and I'm hoping to steer them towards the idea that there aren't unlimited monsters, but that this one person senses life entering the mist and quickly finds and attacks them.

I can easily enough say the artifact does that too but the less I rely on that the stronger the story. So I was hoping to workshop some ideas about other ways she could accomplish this. My first thought was that there may be creatures with lifesense around who could quickly report to her? Maybe a spell of some kind? An existing item?
Any and all thoughts welcome.

Some of the monk stances say "trigger you are unarmored," I think this should say "requirement" no?

I've walked new players through character creation many times, I think that this playtest character went as smooth as any, having a narrower feat selection at first level really helped. Choosing a background is more grounded in reality than choosing a feat from the general feat list in PF classic, she was easily able to say "I think scout fits my back story."

Where she got hung up at a dead stop was skill proficiency. The check mark gives you your level, extra check marks give you extra, but no check mark gives you your level minus two, which at level one is minus one altogether. So you get a plus 1 if its checked and minus 1 if its not, which is simple enough but trying to explain that the minus 1 was actual plus one minus two went over her head.

If I could go back to yesterday I could explain it better, but PF classic was a lot easier to explain, you get a plus one if you put a plus one in it. Otherwise you don't. If its checked you get +3 more.

As a veteran player I like the current system, but if you increase all the numbers by one it would be simpler to explain, especially at first level.
Unchecked is 0, checked is your level plus one, two checks is level plus two.
You can easily hold up your fingers and say, I'm third level, and I have two check marks, that's five.
Just my .02

Is there a place where I can read the rules with the updates doc changes included? Like a wiki or something. Its difficult to keep track of which things have changes and thus I'm likely to miss them.

I have a player who wants to have a backstory where he came up with a good idea, but it ended up "stepping on the Prince's toes."

I need help coming up with an idea.
I plan to have the next part of the campaign involve a Mage who is looking to flush out some vampires to solicit their aid. She's a time/fate specialist so it would be great for him to have had a plan that could only possibly fail if some series of bad coinsidences happend at once and they did, also leading to a breach of the masquerade, and the prince wondering who's side the player is really on.

The city will be based in Ireland with pleanty of changelings who could feasably be reaistant to dominate and may die if fed vitea in some attempt to blood bond them. There could be a thread there if the prince needed something and an npc was captured and ended up dying when he very much needed to survive.

I'm running a game, actually the story is based off of Chrono Trigger but with twists to make it Golarian-y, and coming up soon is a section where they travel to the age of darkness.

Anyone have any idea what the world is like? I figure I might cover the world in ash (mimicking the snow of 12,000 bc) and have the party beset by surface dwelling Drow. But other than that I can't really think of interesting environments for them to traverse.

I do intend on moving the kingdom of Shory into this age (the humans using it to get above the clouds of ash and soot). Anyone feel like shotgunning me some brainstorm? These forums never disappoint on creativity.

The DMG says you now add a multiplier to the xp values of an encounter if it has multiple monsters. that seems like a bit of crucial information for the PHB or MM to have had... It also says if you have more or less players there are multipliers (or dividers) for that too. Do these multipliers replace the old "total up the xp and divide by number of players" rule? Or does a party of 4 player's still recieve 1/4 of the experience per player?

I've read that the character's pretty much steam roll the campaign. But I plan on making a Monk and wanted to know if there are any obvious problems with that choice. Also, could it help up the challenge to not bring a healer at all?

Does a Dullahan's CR account for his Heavy War Horse already? Or should that be factored in to the XP/general challenge of the encounter?

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/dullahan

I need to lower the Tarrasque's CR by 1. Does applying the Young template even come close to being accurate?

I made this years ago because I like to make spells on the fly quickly using this spell system. Nobody really plays this but eh, thought I'd throw it up now that google drive is a thing and I can have it hosted easily.

LINK!

Just go to "file-> make a copy" to start making spells for yourself.

Find me the rule that states this happens.

After that we can talk about any other RaW concern.

The telepathy on a succubus' profane gift states "across any distance."

Does this include inter-planer travel?

I made a replica of The Misgivings to live in for my Minecraft Survival Server. I'm sort of at a loss for what to fill the rooms with. It feels empty. Suggestions?

Link
Room Numbers based on the original printing of the adventure, not sure if they changed in the Anniversary version, but I own that one too if someone needs a room clarified.

I'm pretty sure that the voting system is supposed to show 2 items that you have not seen before. This is not the case. Just letting you know.

I have an oracle in my group. His story goes like this: he used to be a wizard who tried to unlock healing magic using arcane means rather than divine, (bards and witches can do this fter all). On, lets call it a whim, Nethys cursed him one night declaring that he would not have personal control over divine spells until he learned to respect it. So he stripped him of his arcane magic spell casting ability(all his wizard spells fizzle now) and gave him a wasting disease. Now he can heal everyone but himself. No magic he tries can cure the disease.

His goal is to return to arcane magic using thasalonian rune magic or the words of power system, thinking they pre-date Nethys' assention to godhood they wouldnt be under his sphear of influence. And/or cure his disease somehow.

I plan on giving him a ritual to find in runeforge that allows him to cure his disease but it sacrifices his eyes, he will decline because he uses scroll magic a lot.

As an oracle of life he gets cured of all disease at lvl 20 but i want this to be significant in the plot somehow rather than just something he gets for leveling. And he'd rather be free from wasting than get arcane magic back, he's better now with divine spells than he ever was with wizard spells.

Any idea's?

I just got a published story about a pack's rite of passage, complete with pre-gen characters. it says in the ritual section of the werewolf rulebook that group cannot learn rites or gifts until their rite of passage is complete, but the pregens all have 3 gifts and some have rites.

does anyone know anything regarding this old RPG that can help clarify? I'm not running the actual story as it's presented, I'm just nabbing some of the encounters.

large scorpion-like construct with grab gets an opportunity attack on a charging fighter for moving through its threat range. does he get the free grapple check even though its not his turn? I typically say free actions can only be taken on your turn, and only immediate or interupt actions on on your off turn. but free actions in the core rulebook say they can be taken as PART of another action. so I ruled it could grab the fighter.

the fighter then asks to use his great sword in the grapple, I say no, light or one handed only. she asks if she can use her two handed weapon in one hand with the appropriate minuses... I say I don't know, I rule that she can't because its not the using two hands part getting in her way its the category of the weapon due to its size.

thoughts?

My Girlfriend's Toshiba Satellite keeps giving her this hard disc failure for her C: drive warning. It's under warranty and she has the extra coverage thing from Best-Buy too. The problem is, I was using this glitchy program that kept giving me errors on her PC tonight, and I clicked "don't remind me about this problem" because I thought it was another error from MapTool and not the PC giving the error its been giving for the last 3 days sporadically.

I goofed, she meant to wait for that error, put it to sleep and bring it to Best-Buy. But now it wont show the error message cause I told it to go away forever. Is there a way I can get the Error message to come back?

I had my party at the Xenesha battle when we got the new book in. I was keeping them 1 level behind because it was 3.5 stats and now I'm making up the difference.

I was looking through the guidelines for where they ought to be and it says "almost 8." I was going through and calculating things just to be thorough so I could decide PRECISELY how almost I wanted to put them, when I realized that even if they started AT level 8, and did every single encounter and got all the bonus XP, they would be under par.

The book says almost if not at lvl 11 by the time chapter 3 is done, but even starting at lvl 8 they wouldn't be even close to lvl 11 until well after the sandpoint raid.

Assuming medium progression and starting at 51k, everything up to and including the raid puts them at 148k, still off by 7k.

assuming fast progression starts them at 34k, and leaves them at 108k (3k above lvl 11) just after finishing chapter 3.

I guess my question is, what gives?

I'm a 8th level caster with Craft Wonderous Item. I gain 1 negative level. Can I still make a belt of incredible dexterity? to do I need to heal the level first?

I ended my last session in a dungeon i randomly generated as a way for my players to aquire the material component so the restoration spell (they died fighting xenesha and need to recover negative levels). The end boss was in a room with a dome ceiling and old constalations painted on it. One of my players expressed an interest in figuring out what the ruin's use was before it was abandoned.

I was thinking of adding a magic crystal that, when activated, would reveal a 3d lightshow of the stars around Galarion and a tracking for the path of a large object heading towards the planet. The image would show a plains area and a craggy mountinous region, and then the stone would strike and they will see a rifts shoot out across the terrain, part of the plains would sink down and the mountains would sink so far down the ocean would be let in. The end would have the image resemble the cinderlands, lower varisia, and the gulf, though i wouldnt come out and say it.

Question: is this information revealed later in ROTRL? Am I giving spoilers away too early? (Starting hook mountain next session)

Typed on my phone, there may be errors.

Specifically, its the Cheetah(or rather the small cat animal companion) that sparked this discussion. When an entry says "2 claws (damage expression), Bite (damage expression)" Does 2 claws count as 1 attack?

Can a cheetah run up to its speed and "pounce" with 2 claws without actually having the pounce feat? or would it only get 1 claw?

A friend of mine is playing Pathfinder with me and it is their first experience with d20. She doesn't agree with the way prepared arcane spell casters work because "it doesn't make as much sense" as a sorcerer. The way I've explained it is that it's not that they can't simply prepare more spells than the book says they can, just that at their level of practice they can't only remember that many activations reasonably. As I understand it most of the spell is cast ahead of time (to "prepare" it) and then the last catalyst or focus is used with a command word or phrase to trigger it.

Basically, the reason they can't prepare more per day is because they're afraid of that thing that happens when you switch from "Gears of War" to "Rainbow 6: Vegas" and end up turning on your night vision when you run out of ammo because the buttons are all switched up.

So what would have if a wizard DID prepare more spells than he could 100% remember the controls for? Perhaps if your have 3 lvl 1 spells per day and he prepares 4 instead? Maybe if he does that he gets 15% spell failure chance for all spells he casts (not just the extra 1). This would increase by another 15% for each additional spell he prepares over his maximum. The spell fumble chance increases by 25% for every spell of the maximum level you can cast that is prepared above your normal limit.

Help me flesh out this idea. I wouldn't make it a permanent rule, just something we'd use for a game. So it wouldn't need to be perfectly balanced, but what do you think?

I have an Oracle with wasting disease in my game. As if that didn't creep out the townsfolk enough, He would like to buy Jarvis Stoot's old house. How much will this cost him? Will he have to clean out the Odd Bird effigies himself? The gruesome stuff should be cleaned out by the law already right?

Second, another party member wants to burn down the fort on thistle-top, but a third wants to clean it up and live in it. (once he clears out the last of the monsters, which is a tentamort, 3 shadows and a MALFSHENEKOR. But anyway, How much to hire a team of Scarnetti to hack away a propper road through the briar outside?

does the spell shatter (when targeting a weapon) ignore hardness? most spells ignore damage reduction, do they ignore hardness too?

I'll just be jotting some notes here regarding some of the more interesting choices my players make through the coarse of this campaign. Feel free to comment!

First, some background on my PC's. This'll be my longest post here, the actual adventure synopsis will just be snippets that assume the reader knows how the adventure is supposed to go already.

Tank: Human Fighter - Gareth Jeggare. Born to a rich Family in Korvosa, estranged relationship with his family caused him to journey abroad. Hitched up with some mercenaries in Magnimar but felt the lifestyle unsettling to his Good nature. Settled in Sandpoint as a Blade for Hire to the Town Guard. His 19 str makes him an excellent bodyguard.

Melee DPS: Human Rogue - Haschell Drokkus. A young Varisian boy with ties to the Sczarni family. Tried to make a name for himself by murdering a traveling Wizzard by the name of Caledrel. He was bested by the Elf and taken for experimentation. He was eventually rescued but not before the arcane experiments left him with scars of the Elemental plane of Air. He will be taking levels in Sorcerer and become an arcane trickster.

Ranged DPS: Tiefling Ranger (urban archtype) - Darius Drokkus. A bounty hunter by trade, Darius was also born in Korvosa. At that time, the town still struggled against the diabloist nature of their parent nation of Cheliax. Horrified by the birth of their first half-fiend, his father abandoned him on the roadside a mile from town. He would have died from the experience were it not for a traveling Varisian Caravan who happened by. They fought off some predators who were attempting to make a meal of the child and adopted Darius as a member of their tribe. Near starvation at an early stage of life left him with a poor constitution score and compensates with a sharp wit and ranged combat. His adoptive parents settled in Sandpoint to build what would become the Sandpoint Theater. Darius became the other side of the coin that was Nualia's presence in Sandpoint.

Healer: Human Oracle of Life - Veovis Andorhal. Hails originally from Riddleport where he was trained as a Warrior, and Pirate. Taught by his father to craft weapons and armor, and to sail. When a Traveling Wizard happened onto his ship at an early age Veovis was fascinated. In exchange for hauling treasures from the sea-floor he would train the boy in the arcane arts, assuring the pirates that what Veovis learned would help all of their lives. And so it was that Veovis spent the better parts of his life mastering the arcane arts. Forgoing the standard Armored battle-mage disciplines for the simpler Still-Spell Meta magic. Eventually Veovis came to see all magic as a secret that could be unlocked, and endeavored to "break the code of divine magic" as it were. He was determined to unlock the weave of creation without the aid of the Gods and prayer. But, one god took notice. Nethys came to Veovis in a vision one night, announced that Veovis would not grasp the power he sought until he learned to respect it, stripped him of all Arcane Spellcasting ability, and cursed him as an oracle of life. Veovis would gain the ability to cast divine magic at will, but not as he imagined. Now he has the ability to heal any wound or ailment, save for his own wasting disease. A gift from Nethys that Veovis likes to refer to as a "Divine Practical Joke."

So some friends of mine have expressed an interest in playing tabletop for the first time and I have decided on pathfinder because I'm into it right now and having trouble starting my other group up again.

Anyway, they play wow and are a little tired of the classic fantasy thing. They have therefore chosen to play a gnoll sorcerer(undead), a tengu monk, and a dhamphyr bard(oratory to simulate glamour from trueblood).

The open endedness is kindof getting to them so I thought id throw in a pc of my own to lead them by the nose at first, and take them on a published campaign as they tend to be more of a railroad than skin of my teeth adventures. So does anyone have any suggestions on which one would lend itself towards non generous non heroic characters? In or out of print, monies not an issue.

I was leaning towards council of thieves? From what little I read of the intro it seems the characters basically get hired by the guard no matter what their disposition. I could make whatever that town is into a hodge podge of many humanoid races, monsterous and otherwise, living together and make the government lawful evil or lawful nuetral. Ideas?

TLDR down at bottom;

Background: I have a player who is new to d20 roleplaying, I'm trying to get her into pathfinder because I'm a big fan and my group is finishing up our white-wolf campaign.

Well, this particular player is resistant to DnD, likely due to the stereotypes. But she has enjoyed clawing more and more and the vast number of creative options you have for your characters. So after long sessions of saying yes, or no, to any particular "CAN I DO THAT!" she ended up wanting to be a Gnoll character, who after being cursed by a wizard, lich, or some other supernatural whatyado (we haven't hammered out the specifics) becomes a sorcerer of the Undead bloodline. Now she has her heart set on encountering and contracting lycanthropy.

The end result is supposed to be a fireball breathing, undead-gnoll-were-crocodile.

I thought maybe someone would get a kick out of all that but here's the Question:

I want to acquiesce to as much of this as I can, anything to get her into D20. So rather than contracting a disease that makes you frenzy upon being injured I decided that the bite of the ***** spells from D&D would be a good alternative. Now there is no were crocodile version of the spell but I figure the stats for were tiger work just as well, maybe up the strength from +12 to +16 and then take away the 2 claw attacks in lieu of str+1/2 on 1 bite. Overall damage is less I think. Only real issue is the purview of the adventure wont bring her the levels necessary to cast high-level magic.

TLDR: Is it gamebreaking to allow a sorcerer to learn bite of the were tiger at the same level as a druid? Or alternatively, would halving the durration of the transformation merit lowing it's caster level? I want this spell to be accessible earlier, any suggestions?

Clearly not completely useless, as the title would suggest. I mean, at least it gives us a 5d8 version of Cure ****** wounds. But the extra Life invigorating portion of it doesn't seem to actually do anything.

Link

If cast upon a creature that has died within 1 round, apply the healing from this spell to the creature. If the healed creature's hit point total is at a negative amount less than its Constitution score, it comes back to life and stabilizes at its new hit point total.

As I understand it:

Dead

The character's hit points are reduced to a negative amount equal to his Constitution score

So the character in question was not brought back to life, because he never died. BUT:

If the creature's hit point total is at a negative amount equal to or greater than its Constitution score, the creature remains dead.

So... they come back to life if they aren't ever dead, but if they are really dead... they stay dead...

is this a long way of saying "heals 5d8+[max]25?"

I'm going to be starting Burnt Offerings soon and I was curious as to how "by the book" they were written, and how much attention I should be paying to the treasure (Gold as well as Magical Items) allotment?

Example:
The Gamemastering section of the Pathfinder core rulebook says that by 4th level players should have 6,000 gold (or its value of items).

As we play through Burnt offerings, does it assume my players are going to go through all of the encounters? (the book says they'll be over-leveled but I totaled it up and its not that bad) I'll probably only skip one or two encounters. If you total up the value for everything that comes along you get 9,044 gp per character(4 pcs) and about 9,500 xp (max including extra ad hoc encounters). That puts them right at 4th level but with way too much treasure. Or if it assumes that the items are only worth their sell value, they would be at 5,213 gp giving me some left over cash to reward the party for saving Sandpoint.

So how do published adventures handle Magic items as far as their value for their level? And, how much does it matter? I like the guidelines they give for character wealth so I know that they won't be under geared or over powered, but it seems like I'm over-thinking this.

So, should I be keeping track as they go in case they end up with too little by skipping encounters? Or should I just play the adventure path and assume that the writer is accounting for all that, even if they miss some things?