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You leave those mating display frills just hanging out??
But I think both Animist and Druid wild shape less and less at the higher levels. Spells are just so much better.So you have effectively conceded the point. Wild shape needs a boost. A fighter, a wizard, and a druid sit down at the lunch table. "I have a ham sandwich" says the fighter. "I have a bowl of mac and cheese" says the wizard. "I have half a ham sandwich and three quarters of a bowl of mac and cheese. I find the mac and cheese fills me up enough that I don't really need to eat all of my ham sandwich" says the druid. You, an intellectual, "So you admit you need more ham sandwich"
People who can't handle Ravingdork's posts have a weakness in them I find vaguely upsetting.
Can we take this mutagen talk somewhere else? We're trying to have a serious nudie discussion here.
Honestly, one of the only things I think 5e still has over Pathfinder: unarmored Barbarians. From your mouth to Paizo's ears
I can understand handwaving everyone having clothes, but what advantages could we obtain from running around in the altogether? Perhaps we could argue for a bonus to escape checks, especially if we use the bar of soap we *do* have before each fight. Funnily enough, the topic of clothes came up more than it ever has before in my group recently. I had the players start out with weapons, armor, and key important items, but nothing else. This meant what they were wearing for clothes was a much more significant fraction of their net worth. They were in a situation where they may have resorted to using their shirts to haul magical compost. I think it's well worth everyone establishing what their outfits generally entail in such a game where minor resources are important.
I also like Momentum. It's got some latin old timey vibes going for it. Daredevil is pitch perfect for a Starfinder class, so it's kind of a shame to see it used here. Don't see a great alternative. Maybe Madcap. Either way, it's probably fine. Slayer is spot on. I wouldn't want to to change it at all.
Eyes peeled ◎ܫ◎Yes keep them peeled! We have lots planned! We also recommend turning on notifications for our Twitch channel so you can tell when we're live since sometimes the calendar is a bit wonky on accurately displaying what our streams will be. Any chance for simultaneous Youtube streams? I loathe Twitch with a fiery passion.
There's so much narrative space for a shifter character far outside of Druid that starting from the assumption that it should be druid related, let alone a Druid class archetype, is completely off the mark in my opinion. That's before we get into the mechanical reasons. I want a Shifter class that has no anathema or other requirements forcing them to be reverent of nature. If a player wants to build a character that shifts into animals and worships nature, they can, but they can also play a Skinwalker who makes a mockery of nature and uses natural forms purely for nefarious purposes. The class should also support turning into monsters, unnatural creatures cooked up by a wizard, magical beasts, or other such things. I would also want them to be able to explore the Animorphs narrative question of losing sight of your original form, or the love-hate relationship with your alternate forms in werewolf stories. Mechanically, I want the entire focus being on the shifting, with no distractions like spellcasting. I want them to be able to focus on one or two forms like a WoW Feral Druid and take on standard martial roles, or have more flexibility to be a as-the-situation-requires shapeshifter and have more of a utility role. They should be able to change forms lighting fast (free action once per turn type of fast). They should also start with a full body transformation at level 1, so you're not mucking around with baby "I grow some mediocre generic claws to be a bad Barbarian for 2 levels" stuff.
We will be doing some other fun streams to announce new product, so be on the lookout for those! Eyes peeled ◎ܫ◎
It would be REALLY COOL if we still got an Erik Mona keynote style presentation, just launched on youtube or something. I look forward to those the most!
Seen more than my share of dev teams that stick to their guns, either in a misguided attempt to save face or out of sheer stubbornness. It's refreshing to see something else for a change. I can definitely see how they came to that decision. "Hey, we're adding a bunch of class features, items, and spells that tack on sources of typed damage. We've been balancing those assuming they can trigger weaknesses, but that benefit might get overwritten by easily obtained sources of typed damage. What if we ruled in a way to err in favor of the players, allowing all these features to reliably contribute against weaknesses?"
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It usually works, but it can spiral when the player just cycles through different BS ideas and you have to keep doing a game of oneupmanship and the whole world starts feeling ridiculous.
Best to rule that Apparitions are entities that are primarily beyond a veil that separates them from definitive interaction with the physical world, including direct, unambiguous observation. They may get a sense of things in this world, but it could be hazy, abstracted over the past and future, or seen from a completely inhuman perspective that doesn't translate well. I would point them to Consult the Spirits as a means of obtaining that flavor of ability.
Paizo DID remake D&D 4e already, it's called Pathfinder 2e. The first time I opened the rules for 2e and read focus points, I laughed so hard that it alerted people. There's something so funny about the company that existed to compete with 4e just looping around to reinventing "at will, encounter, and daily powers". Maybe 4e's... polarizing design would have succeeded better if the whole encounter powers design was opt-in, like Focus Spells are. Or if they had tried at all to tie them into the fiction and pacing with things like refocus activities. Or if most martials didn't have to interact with the same resource as casters do, which made classes feel less mechanically varied. I do find the "Focus Spells = Encounter Powers" and "PF2 is 4e in a trenchcoat" takes hilariously reductive, but I'm glad some people are able to feel smart when they find parallels between related things!
My first instinct is that Daredevil should either be in Starfinder or a Swash archetype, and Slayer should be a ranger archetype, or a monster parts subsystem. My second instinct is that I should probably let them cook before I come down too hard either way. I'll probably still wish we got Shifter instead because the fantasy being sold in both is way more achievable with current options than a good Shifter is. Neither of these thoughts means I don't love playing PF2, and to suggest otherwise is wild.
Skateboarding skeleton named Calcium?
I completely forgot about Yaoguai! That's a great suggestion. As for multiclassing Exemplar, I'm holding off on using that strategy until it gets a nerf.
The 1d6 jaws with no good traits from Awakened Animal isn't boosted by Humble Strikes, so it's pretty anemic. Hands of the Wildling is pretty bad, and other options don't work with bite, so they're stuck with even worse 1d4 damage.
I think a GM could be convinced to handwave some of the item flavor of Thaum as long as the hands and actions are satisfied. I think the biggest issue is the squishiness, which doesn't feel super bear-like. Have you seen how survivable Thaumaturges are in play?
I'll have to take a look at Thaum, I haven't played around with them much either. At first glance, I think their Charisma has a lot going for the concept. I don't necessarily like the "carrying a bunch of stuff" fantasy however. Hoping this bear looks more like a forest creature than not. Unfortunately, for me, all roads lead back to Barbarian. I have made so many barbarians for various concepts that I gotta just put my foot down. It can't always be the right choice for me!
I've always had in the back of my mind a character that I'd love to play that's essentially the archetypical guardian deity animal of a location. It's the type of thing that comes up a lot in japanese media, but I think there's plenty of examples elsewhere. I want it to be a bear who is empowered to protect his forest from outside threats and keep it in balance. Since the concept ties a lot into land deities, I thought Exemplar would be a great way to capture that "being that is on the spectrum of divinity" fantasy, without loading up on spells and magic that takes away from the "I'm a huge bear and I will crush you in my massive jaws" fantasy. Unfortunately, it looks like Exemplar doesn't do anything to make Awakened Animal unarmed attacks any good. Some of the Ikons could help make the character defensively decent, but it looks like it's falling pretty flat. I'm instead considering a tiny awakened bird Summoner to act as the herald of my character, who is the Beast Eidolon (Bear). Being another awakened animal helps keep some of the mechanical consequences of playing a creature from the wild, so the feel isn't too hurt. There appear to be a lot of advantages going this way, like slightly better base attack damage, some built in abilities like a charge and a roar, and having a pocket healer/buffer. Unfortunately, I've never optimized or played around much with either of these classes. Is there a way you would go about it differently? Goals:
I am salivating over a full 2e shifter class.
You know basic facts off the top of your head. Choose a skill you’re an expert in that has the Recall Knowledge action and for which you have the Assurance feat. You can use the Recall Knowledge action with that skill as a free action once per round. If you do, you must use Assurance on the skill check.Does anyone actually take, much less use the above feat? No. Never even considered it. The things assurance for recalling knowledge is good for are almost always out of combat things.
Thanks! I think it was Darkreader breaking it!
Oh, it doesn't work on Firefox for me (along with the OK button on the "we have updated our privacy policy" banner), thought that was a blank page.
I was wondering why there doesn't appear to be a prominently placed calendar that shows upcoming releases, Paizo Live, conventions, etc. I get super lost when talking about upcoming content and even prior release schedules.
I don't sweat small to medium mechanical details. Pursuing balance has diminishing returns that I think kick in WAY earlier than a lot of people complaining seem to expect. Quality control issues are not that big of a deal for me either, since a few typos or RAW flubs are easily fixed. What would concern me are things like lack of creativity, tunnel-visioning on approaches to products, employee burnout, major disconnects between teams, corporate policy or investment changes, or other doom portents. I think they need to shake up adventure design, should explore new product categories, and could afford to branch out into other styles and themes. Overall, I'm not worried however.
Flagged this post to be moved to "null" /s
I'm sure he did a great job but loading the new guy up with frikin Starship Combat was a hilariously brutal move. Overall it was an excellent interview, and I loved the notetaking OP! I'm so looking forward to checking out the final technomancer and new dwarf content. Rock and Stone!
"Nethys found some new magic and tried it out" is as good an explanation as any lol. It's certainly something he would do. Hey guys look what I can-
I don't really think PF2 is OSR-compatible at all. At the risk of seeming like a big grouch, I'm not sure this thread really fits here - it seems much more like a blog post, IMO! Would you like to go into more detail? I'd love to discuss it!
Ryuutama has definitely come up a lot in my research! There are quite a few cozy games these days. One I thought I'd mention is Iron Valley if only for how adorable it is.
That last point reminds me of a conversation between 2 incarnations of Moorcock's Eternal Champion, where one asks why they always have to save the world instead of dealing with mundane everyday challenges. And the other answers that maybe mundane everyday challenges are actually more difficult. There can definitely be mundane, everyday challenges that are incredibly difficult (figuring out what to say to someone who's lost a family member, for instance). Saving the world can also be a straightforward, black-and-white affair that represents someone's escape from day to day stress. That's why I think it's important to point out that Difficulty and Coziness are not opposite ends of a spectrum. I've yet to define what cozy means in the context of gaming, but that's partly because it's a bit different for everyone. Some people say cozy games should emphasize nonviolence, but I'm not convinced that kicking skeleton butts can't be cozy. To me, Cozy gaming is all about going at your own pace, making your own goals, self-expression, and being able to fail or make mistakes without it costing you too much. That last part is why, in general, I see "High Stakes" being opposed to Cozy, which is why I'll often use Low Stakes Fantasy as a name for it. I think, technically, a saving the world campaign could feel low stakes if you had unlimited tries at it, or the conclusion was foregone and you were more worried about personal priorities, but I think that structure is very rare.
In Stardew Valley, you have a bunch of reasons to go into the mines, from advancement, to quality of life, to finding gifts for NPCs. In a cozy game, it's easy to find reasons to go into a dungeon, since the rewards don't have to be balanced against your life. I've mentioned "metroidvania-ing", which involves going back and forth obtaining useful tools in one area to make progress in another. I think this can be a powerful element for encouraging delving beyond loot, and creating a satisfying mechanical feedback loop. As for death penalty, you can really make it as punishing or inconsequential as you like. In my game, it triggers a significant monetary penalty and the loss of a chunk of time. Since managing your farm output on a schedule is pretty important, unplanned setbacks in time can have severe ripple effects. You could also go in a more "realistic" direction by stopping everything else to perform a ritual, and going fully into the consequences of crossing back and forth to the Boneyard. This decision will definitely have a big impact on how cozy it feels, however. Haven't had any deaths yet, so we'll see what happens!
Only for characters that are the same level. Attributes kinda work to establish difference between characters in a party and almost nowhere else in the game or world.One mechanical issue I have with trying to represent abilities mathematically in a system where level is so much more relevant is that ability scores only actually matter in a very specific level rangeThat's just flatly untrue. A +1 vs +3 cha person using intimidate is a significant difference all the way throughout levels 1 to 20. Two players of the same level with equal degrees of training, you mean. PF2 decided training matters a lot. Untrained adds nothing, and raw ability matters a lot to everyone in the world from levels 1-20. Training allows you to overcome the difference in natural ability, but it still matters to those at the tops of their fields throughout. This works out perfectly fine narratively, but even more in actual play where the vast majority of checks you deeply care about aren't static.
One mechanical issue I have with trying to represent abilities mathematically in a system where level is so much more relevant is that ability scores only actually matter in a very specific level range That's just flatly untrue. A +1 vs +3 cha person using intimidate is a significant difference all the way throughout levels 1 to 20.
Like I said earlier, if you decouple accuracy from stats but leave them in for most other purposes, you've already done most of the job people seem to think removing stats achieves.Genuine question: if attributes were to no longer affect checks, what would their purpose be? Would they just exist to satisfy feat prerequisites, increase the Bulk you can carry, give you extra trained skills, and so on? I mean they no longer affect the accuracy of attacks and spells. They can still affect damage, skill checks, and everything else they do. A low strength fighter would lose a few points of damage rather than 20%+ of their damage. I think people are just way too focused on the accuracy part of a class's main schtick (to an illogical degree honestly) that removing it from the equation may be enough.
Like I said earlier, if you decouple accuracy from stats but leave them in for most other purposes, you've already done most of the job people seem to think removing stats achieves.
Hi everyone! I'm in the middle of writing and playing a cozy campaign with my group based on Stardew Valley. In developing this campaign and its subsystems I've encountered quite a few game design thoughts that I think would be fun to discuss. Here's one: Dungeons Are Extremely Compatible with a Cozy Campaign This is a big topic, so my apologies for rambling! For those that don't know, in Stardew Valley, a farming sim, there exist several caves/dungeons which you can fight your way through and explore to obtain resources that help you in the rest of the game. These dungeons are fun and can be genuinely challenging. In my experience, true dungeons have been slowly going extinct in D&D and Pathfinder. I see all the time people online admitting that they hardly use dungeons anymore, or that dungeons are reserved for OSR play where torches, prying gems out of sockets, and traps still matter. In many modern groups, a dungeon is on narratively shaky ground from the outset, and proper dungeon exploration clashes with story-and-adventure-driven clocks. The big issues with dungeons, from what I can tell, are: 1. Narrative. A dungeon filled with danger and treasure, waiting for the party to delve its depths. Unless there's some village/town/city/country/world ending threat requiring the party to delve, the player characters have to be suicidally greedy to throw themselves at it just for treasure or fame. Not everyone wants to play such a character. Having a story setup that requires you to explore such a dangerous place lends itself to ticking clocks, outside pressure, and a Main Story that makes taking your time feel strange. It's a tough fit. 2. Megadungeons. Let's say you're narratively incentivized to delve a dungeon (this incentive often encourages exclusive focus on the dungeon). It's pretty hard to come up with similar narrative structures that make you delve multiple dungeons, so you end up pushed to a mega-dungeon. Megadungeons have a lot of weight on their shoulders. They have to have all the experience and loot required for the full level range, and they tend to have big sections with vastly different ecologies and structure in order to keep things fresh while supporting the whole campaign, and even get loaded up with NPCs you'd rather not include just for the completeness of the TTRPG experience. They usually must have a continuous difficulty, without jumps in threat that require returning later. In short, they can end up a thematic disaster, or otherwise prevent you from having a tight, lean, fun dungeon. 3. Traps. We all know about the issues with traps. Too strong, they delete characters. Too weak, they don't matter. Keeping an eye out for traps feels mechanically orphaned from the rest of the game in PF2. In OSR, you're not supposed to be attached to your character, so instant death is allowed to be on the table, but in games where you are encouraged to keep your character around the price of traps is in-game time, which, as discussed previously, is often meaningless. Without traps, dungeons can feel too much like sequential rooms filled with monsters, and traversing a dungeon will have little mechanical distinction from waltzing through the woods. I do think traps are a useful tool if they could be implemented properly. So, what happens when death is off the table, the party has lots of things they want to do in a day, and there is a robust "town/farm" experience that provides incentives for exploration? Since the players know they won't permanently lose their characters, it's no longer about risking your life for treasure, it's risking some time and whatever penalty replaces death. You can have much more reasonable minded characters who would agree to delve. The narrative of exploration is much more palatable, and the decision isn't forced by some outside force or doomsday clock. This, in turn, means exploring multiple dungeons is a lot easier to fit in the narrative, so each dungeon can be more distinct, doesn't have to be bloated with all the treasure and experience you need for a level range, and can even have discontinuous challenges that encourage the party to metroidvania around the campaign. You can also bring "death" back as a trap consequence, though in this case it's a non-permanent penalty, it can still hold a lot more weight than PF2's "okay we heal up the damage and continue" penalty. However, as discussed previously, time as a resource in this type of campaign means stopping to treat wounds and conditions that traps might impose actually matters, since it might prevent you from completing a villager's request by the due date. Additionally, traps designed exclusively to waste time (no damage, no conditions) are suddenly a thing. Going back to the OSR compatibility of this style of campaign, the players are responsible for earning their own money to either meet or exceed the wealth by level table, so they can bring back old school shenanigans like stealing the furniture, searching for every last secret compartment, disassembling and selling traps, etc. Since they're in the same region, they can also take over and convert dungeons (unless you opt for random/regenerating kinds). The players can come up with unusual solutions if they can make the time budget make sense, like tunneling, or flooding. I've been excited to imagine being able to mix and match pre-written dungeons from other sources and using them as drop in content for these style of campaigns, and I've been enjoying flexing my long neglected dungeon building skills. TL;DR: Nonlethal, cozy games can use dungeons effectively as a welcome change of pace from more peaceful activities, without requiring PCs be willing to risk life and limb for a bit of treasure. Dungeon design is easier, and less constrained than in other types of campaigns, and the old tropes of dungeon exploration can be given new life. Have you experienced issues with getting dungeons to fit in your modern campaigns? Do you even like dungeons?
I like attributes. Same with Vancian casting. I'd rather they decouple accuracy from attributes instead of getting rid of them altogether, if something has to be done to change them. I love being able to mechanically express my characters the way I currently can using them, and all the attribute replacement suggestions I've seen sound like hot garbage to me.
In my campaign I have Lol! My consequence is basically "that Cozy label on the campaign? it's starting to peel off at the corner"
I've come across "there's consequences for dawdling but we won't decide what those are or when" when I was playing the Kingmaker CRPG and it was implied that taking too long would be seriously inadvisable... so I ended up save scumming to the max to make as little time pass as possible. I guess I imagined that the consequences would be dire and I would have to restart the whole game. I wonder if I would imagine such a sword of damocles in Mutant YZ as well. If I had a GM who knew to reassure me in Kingmaker or Mutant, maybe that would have made the difference. In my campaign I have a gradual early warning system that something is going wrong if they try to game the system with years doing one repetitive thing with the intention of breaking something else. I haven't mentioned it, and I have no idea if it'd come up.
Hi everyone! I'm in the middle of writing and playing a cozy campaign with my group based on Stardew Valley. In developing this campaign and its subsystems I've encountered quite a few game design thoughts that I think would be fun to discuss. Here's one: Wait, Is This Cozy Game Actually Old School Revival Aligned? Now, admittedly, I'm not an OSR aficionado so I might not be the most up to date with definitions in the space, but as I understand it OSR is all about player agency, fewer prescribed methods for engaging with the game world, allowing players to encounter challenges they're not expected to defeat, emergent storytelling, and increased lethality. In my limited experience, I associate it with a rag-tag group that's banded together to increase their chances of surviving a megadungeon with the goal of extracting loot to increase their own power and pay for extravagances back in town. I think of carousing in town, hiring NPCs, dumping money into local politics, gaining fame, buying castles, or building a wizard school as background goals that the PCs may be actively or nominally doing all this adventuring for. I decidedly don't think of OSR as about saving the world, or even saving the town. In a lot of my early memories it was all about going out and finding adventure from a relatively peaceful starting point. Setting aside lethality (in my opinion, permanent death should be difficult to achieve in a Cozy game), I was surprised to find out that a lot of the subsystems, goals, and game design I was pulling together fit in well with the OSR mentality. I'm able to put dungeons together with foes and challenges they cannot yet face, and may have to metroidvania their way back to. If they do try to throw themselves at these threats, they'll probably lose, costing them some penalty but not game over. They could spend time mining through the walls to get where they want to go, but again time is valuable so that would be a meaningful choice. Since they have all the time in the world to gather resources or earn money, I'm not bothering to hand out loot to make sure they're on the right wealth by level chart. They can do that themselves. They're free to try to invest time in building up wealth so they can stomp lower level encounters, but alternatively they can go in guns blazing and try to get the items they need from those encounters to speed run their long term goals. This also means it's worthwhile to scrap and carry all the loot you can, instead of just handwaving piles of weapons and armor as trash. This in turn makes carrying capacity matter (too many trips back and forth and you don't have time to plant crops!). Having a bag to carry stuff matters. Building up relationships with the NPCs is critical because it gets them access to a lot of different bonuses and incentives (in addition to just having romance goals), as a natural part of their advancement. As an example, special seeds, buildings, or equipment are locked behind NPC trust. It's almost like how fighters automatically got Keeps and retainers in old school D&D; these NPC relationships are just more organically developed. Focusing on one region allows the players to decide to meaningfully advance it if they so wish, and be rewarded for doing so. If they wanted to, they could found a wizard school on the land and have the students help them with magical farming, or build out a farming guild to help with collecting a stockpile of food or paying taxes. I'm of course glossing over the subsystems that I'm working on that encourage these things, like the punishment for subsisting off of rations, the magical farming rules, the bonuses for eating good food, the regional hidden stories and dungeon design, but I thought it was interesting how much overlap there is between OSR and Cozy. TL;DR: Aside from lethality, a lot of the elements of a cozy, low-stakes campaign align surprisingly well with what I understand to be OSR goals. What is OSR to you? Can PF2 even be bent toward what you would consider OSR gameplay? What is Cozy Fantasy / Low Stakes Fantasy / Cozy Gaming to you? Have you ever gotten tired of being tasked with saving the world all the time in your TTRPGs?
I did the same, yet it worked in my campaign. I wondered about the difference, so I asked my wife, the most sandboxy of the players, though two other players out of seven come close. She says that the GM cannot create a sandbox alone. The players have to actively contribute to pushing the narrative and expanding beyond the plot. I think in my case a big contributing factor was my feeling that each addition I made to the game should have a good mix of magical-school content, player background engagement, and exciting encounters. I ended up wedging apart the AP content and getting limited by what sort of rewards I could offer. I didn't want to out-level or out-gear the AP stuff with too much of my custom content. With my experience now with cozy content, I could have devised alternative reward schemes that engage the players' need for mechanical incentives beyond *just* having fun roleplaying. While we do like some good roleplaying opportunities, we also like game structure (which is why we like PF2, now that I think about it), and building relationship points and earning a grade in class would make a big difference. I actually took a look at Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs to see if I could make mechanical hooks to each layer for the players to latch onto and strive towards. Our current mood is a bit more towards main story, which is also because we tend to have one session per month. Everyone is busy having kids and such. So I focus a lot on having every session being a pretty complete standalone thing, that has a good tension curve and completes something by the end of the session. That has been my situation for many prior years. It has taken a toll, in my opinion, on the feel of the game, because watching the real world clock and making sure they make progress in today's story to reach a satisfying conclusion absolutely burns through swathes of opportunities to stop and smell the roses in-game. It's almost unavoidable, though. We had lots of fun, but now I'm hoping to get a more frequent, more bite-sized game going where they run through maybe 7 in-game days in a session, note how they're meeting their targets, and get ready for next time. When you're trying to be as productive with your time as possible, that to me is the opposite of cozy, and taken to an extreme you get stuff like speedrunning, which even in Stardew Valley isn't at all relaxing. Yeah 100%, there are plenty of conversations online about whether Stardew Valley actually counts as a cozy game when so often you'll find yourself fighting your way out of the caves as the clock turns red and your heart rate goes through the roof. I think a key is that it's not happening *all* the time. It occurs in spikes, and even when the clock runs out the consequences aren't life and death so it's more of a "Eustress" situation than it could be. I think you're also right that having positive outcomes they work toward is key. I have a few of those, but I might want to beef up my festival rewards based purely on your suggestion. It sounds like a great idea.
Making sure everyone has something outside of combat that they're interested in is definitely a requirement! I had to spend a lot of time developing content that's both mechanically and narratively interesting enough to make sure people who voted to play a Stardew Valley game *actually* followed through with engaging with noncombat stuff. I *think* there are ways to make such things viable in more traditional adventure games, as long as it's a sandbox. But once you have a main plot line I do suspect that will suck the air out of the room for the rest of the optional content. Stardew Valley is a farming game, right? That's all I know about it, so WatersLethe's analogy went right over my head. Stardew Valley is a popular farming game with cave exploration, combat, mining, and loot in addition to the farming, villager interactions, and holiday events. It gives you a glut of options for what to do each day, and the day's clock ticks by fast, so you can never do all you want to, and it also provides a bunch of different short and long-term goals that give you something to strive for. I highly recommend looking into it if only as reference for its craftsmanship and gameplay design (and music!). Strength of Thousands barely mentions time I know! This Stardew Valley themed game I'm running is coming right off the back of finishing Strength of Thousands. Our group didn't get any of the cozy vibes we were hoping to experience in a magical school game. I had pulled together a calendar and side content and all that jazz, but I came to realize the "main plot" was a huge reason why it just couldn't do what we wanted it to do. We wanted more sandbox, and NPCs to interact with, and options, and down-to-earth gameplay, but everything I came up with to add in that department had to fit into the pacing of the linear adventure. I could very much see us going back to a school with a day-by-day approach like I'm using now, with studying and classwork being some of the optional daily activities.
Hi everyone! I'm in the middle of writing and playing a cozy campaign with my group based on Stardew Valley. In developing this campaign and its subsystems I've encountered quite a few game design thoughts that I think would be fun to discuss. Here's one: Time as a Resource, But, Like, In a Stardew Valley Way We all know by now that using time as a resource is a great tool in a GM's toolkit, allowing you to put pressure on your group, encourage them to use other resources when otherwise they would be conservative, and make efficient performance in combat (even trivial ones) matter. It's gotten to a point where I regularly recommend GMs keep track of the world's tick rate in 10 minute intervals, because even in a dungeon with no big bad planning a doomsday clock, you can generate time pressure by having each tick of the world have a chance for some new threat to arise, or otherwise change the game state. One of the problems with a ticking clock, however, is that now you've got players worried about two high stakes: threats to their characters' lives and limbs, as well as a constant dread of time running out. It's not very relaxing, even if it's more compelling moment to moment. Something interesting happens when you shift the consequences away from the dire; when failure in combat doesn't mean permanent death, and running out the clock is mostly just a matter of losing out on something you would have done in that time. Players start to think of time as a currency that they can afford to spend on things they want, rather than as either an infinite resource that the GM better handwave or they'll riot, or as a nail biting countdown to the Bad End. Resting for ten minutes between encounters starts to stack up and they wonder if they'll have enough time left in the day to get back home, or if they'll have to camp out. Coming out of a combat unscathed means they can move onto the next without taking a break, and maybe fit in a visit to a friend's house in the evening. Going back and forth to the cave to fight slimes means spending travel time that could be used to plant more crops, so it's a great idea to go as far as you can on each trip. Downtime activities like crafting can be mixed into day-to-day adventuring, making Downtime a regular thing rather than a "between story arcs if the GM remembers" type of thing. Time passing feels more realistic, when each hour of each day matters tracking days passing, and keeping the calendar is easy and natural. We're still only a few sessions in, but running Time like Stardew Valley does, as a limit to just how many things you can achieve each day for you to either strategize and optimize or as an outside means of forcing you to make in-world priority choices, has felt quite refreshing! Obviously, a lot of this goes into other elements of the Stardew Valley campaign and its homebrew elements, but I'll save talk about those for another post. TL;DR: When players have many optional things they want to do in a day and a limited amount of time to do them, spending time feels meaningful but not overly dire. How have you experimented with different approaches to handling time expenditure, especially in a sandbox game? What's the finest time increment you find yourself regularly paying close attention to outside of combat?
Happy new year Paizo Staff! Thanks for all your hard work, and keep on being real cool folks!
The reason they're combined is so that they're not utterly boned by resistances. You're already not guaranteed to hit both attacks, so trying to overcome resistance is already punishing as heck. Finally landing both strikes only for the full damage to be eaten to no effect would have people flipping the table. Also, a lot of dual wielders and monks invest heavily in dexterity for various reasons, meaning their strength might not be maxed out, further reducing their peak damage numbers. Even with the combined damage, I'd still take a big accurate single attack over two combined smaller attacks 10 times out of 10 for overcoming resistance. |
