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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:
Is a big bear who is good at clawing and biting and other bear activities.
Gives off a commanding, intimidating aura.
Has supernatural abilities, but not necessarily spells.
Someone would reasonably identify them as the divine/primal/spiritual ruler of a small forest domain.

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.

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?

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?

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?

How would you feel about a high-magic homebrew rule that lets people make a ranged weapon strike with a staff that's 1d4 and a fixed energy type with a ~30ft range, maybe in the sling weapon group like foxfire?

Kinda like the idea of doing some old school WoW style wand spam, and making it a bit cooler to have a staff handy.

Eager Assistant: At the start of your turn, you gain one additional reaction, which you can use only to Aid.

Aid Trigger: An ally is about to use an action that requires a skill check or attack roll.

Aid Requirement: The ally is willing to accept your aid, and you have prepared to help (see below).

See Below: To use this reaction, you must first prepare to help, usually by using an action during your turn. You must explain to the GM exactly how you're trying to help, and they determine whether you can Aid your ally.

I don't see whether this requires you to use two Prepare to Aid actions on your turn in order to Aid an ally twice with your two reactions. Thoughts?

Elf step lets you step twice for one action.

Liturgist gives you: "Dancing Invocation (9th) The movement of your body grants power to your magic. When you Leap, Step, or Tumble Through, you also Sustain an apparition spell or vessel spell."

Would this allow you to sustain two apparition spells or vessel spells for one action as long as you use Elf Step?

I planned to have the party go to a VR gaming center called "The First Volt" run by a NPC technomancer and I thought it was a good pun and now I have to wait another week before I can share it.

Abadar's First Vault houses a perfect copy of everything that's ever existed, sort of like this guy's electronic VR machines can do!

Anyway, I gotta get back to staring out the window wistfully.

In brief: Science fiction settings tend to encourage faster paced action, which makes resting for 8+ hours to recover resources less narratively satisfying than in Fantasy.

In boxer: What I've found since at least as early as SF1 is that our group tends to instinctively assume a more strict background ticking clock when we're playing in a modern or futuristic setting. With cell-phones, email, security cameras, automated alert systems, internet, software assisted background checks, faster modes of travel... getting your objectives done as quick as possible always seemed to feel much more urgent. Missions also tend to be more complex with more moving parts (robotics megacorp factory infiltration versus cave full of skeletons), and reducing time spent on them reduces unexpected variables.

In our SF2 playtesting this trend has continued, and what it has meant is that spellcasters run out of spells (at least at lower levels so far) with much more regularity. This is exacerbated by the lack of staves giving you a reliable source of extra slots.

In Fantasy settings, news travels at the speed of horse, we have expectations of things like hunting for your own food, making camp, and talking around a campfire. The world turns at the pace of the seasons. Resting for a day or more feels a whole lot more acceptable in a wider range of situations in classical fantasy.

I wonder if it might be worthwhile to build in a spell slot recharge mechanic so that long adventuring days aren't so punishing in Starfinder. I certainly don't want to force Starfinder to adhere to the narrative expectations of Pathfinder, and I don't want casters to feel spell starved.

Thoughts?

Got tired of waiting. My walls remain incompletely decorated in framed paizo puzzle art.

So I had to take matters into my own hands

I am drawing a complete blank, but I thought there was a feat somewhere that lets you apply your weapon's critical specialization effects at the cost of damage on a hit, or something along those lines.

Was I hallucinating?

Hear me out.

The Drift exists as a technologically-only accessed and experienced plane of reality with its own rules and permanence. Drift engines let you physically enter, navigate, and exit.

What if someone created a scaled down drift engine using the same basic premise to partially access the Drift, creating a quasi-real bubble of Drift-like space with its own rules, access requirements, and features.

Why:

* Why bother programming virtual realities to sit on expensive servers when you can create ones with internally consistent and permanent rules and spaces via things like demiplanes?

* Creating a demiplane or jumping planes is difficult and expensive. It also requires magic. Borrowing the narrative conceit of the Drift as a relatively easily accessible planar technology might be easier to swallow.

* Virtual Reality is way cooler if you can actually enter it, and not even require magic to do so.

* I like the idea of being able to program realities, like Drift technology is borrowing the source code of the universe.

* Since a mini-drift-engine-for-VR is not for transporting whole ships, and doesn't travel the cosmos, it could be a small-sized or low cost device, like a VR headset or a personal transporter pad.

* You can easily tell stories where the party fully enters a VR space with all of their gear and abilities.

* You can introduce levels of depth: some spaces could be accessed through brain-computer interfaces and you don't fully enter, some could have rules that prohibit harm, some could be like 2b2t minecraft anarchy servers.

* It's a natural area to explore the "civilization uploads themselves to a simulated utopia" trope.

* Both the universe and the Drift are infinite and coterminous so this could work for a pretty ubiquitous version of AR as well.

* Technomancers having a fundamental connection to both the Drift and VR is SUPER satisfying.

Just some questions that we might want to think about:

1. Do lasers work under water? They deal fire damage, does that stop them from being fired under water?

2. Should there be an Underwater upgrade, similar to the Underwater rune?

3. How is the range and area of Area weapons affected? (Does the unexploded Stellar Cannon projectile count as a piercing weapon)

4. Should there be a "Traveler's Chair" to grant a swim speed? (Effectively a waterjet pack, or other propulsion pack)

5. An automatic machine gun's auto fire would have a pathetic 10ft cone RAW. Is that too punishing?

My hot take is that it's a good idea to try to make PF2 classes fit in well with SF2 if you don't have to go far out of your way for it. Partly because there are so, so many Science Fantasy stories I want to tell with PF2 style characters, and partly because it's good value for money and a huge benefit for cross compatibility.

A Necromancer in Space is such a juicy concept (and Eox proves that) and I just want to point out that thralls look *rough* in Starfinder. Low range for summoning, no mobility, no ranged attacks, and susceptibility to the more common AoE damage all add up to a bad time.

Wondering how much of that is overly punishing even in PF2's more "melee meta" against certain types of encounters.

I'd love to see options for "archer" thralls with ranged attacks, and thralls that stick-to/chase a target to get some more flexible and dynamic play.

I'm making a character for a Starfinder game that's essentially a Shirren that was modified by the swarm to have a Hydralisk type battle form, but outside of that they're a kind of naive, inquisitive fellow.

I think I'm leaning toward trying to build this idea as a Summoner who takes on their Eidolon form with "Meld Into Eidolon".

Meld Into Eidolon appears to mostly just make me a bad martial. Is there a way to optimize it to get the most out of it? Has anyone played a summoner where you don't use the Eidolon separately at all? Any advice?

Let's say a player multiclasses into Investigator for Devise a Stratagem.

Let's say they're in a Deep Rock Galactic style one-shot, facing off against a bunch of bugs, with no great mysteries.

Devise a Stratagem is a free action if you're aware that creature could help answer the question at the heart of one of your active investigations.

Q1: Would you allow this player to get free action Devise a Stratagems because each bug is helping to answer the investigative question "How many bugs am I going to kill today?" or some other sham investigation?

Q2: If a sniper operative *can* get reliable free-action Devise a Stratagems, how busted is that?

Q3: If Devise a Stratagem was always going to be 1 action in such a game, how would you optimize around it?

Basically since this is going to be a fun birthday oneshot I made a Devise a Stratagem Sniper for a player to use, and I really like how much better a sniper feels with that ability. If you're making one shot a round, dumping bad rolls and switching targets is so juicy. It makes me wonder if we're going to see a lot of investigator multiclass snipers.

Forgive me if you haven't gotten access to the book yourself yet, but I was extremely disappointed to see the Bloodrager get turned into a blood-gorger/vampire/bloat-mage style class archetype. I've always loved martial versions of the sorcerer, people using the magic in their blood in different ways, and Bloodrager was one of my favorite flavored classes in 1e.

I was hoping the PF2 incarnation of Bloodrager would be able to take advantage of the new Sorcerer theme with its access to various spell lists for a wide variety of gishy-flavor. Unfortunately, the flavor of the Bloodrager was locked down into its current ultra-specific, blood-obsessed form.

I threw together what I think is the minimal set of changes to bring it back in line with the Sorcerer aligned version from PF1. Can you tell me what you think?

Sorcerer-ified Bloodrager

Notes:

* Took out Bleed damage as default, looked for a simple way to lock in a damage type that feels important to your character, wondering if this solution makes sense at all.

* Reworded text to indicate power is in your bloodline

* Latched into Sorcerer Multiclass Dedication, which gives access to a bunch more feats there, including Bloodline Breadth. The original version of the Bloodrager doesn't have a breadth feat, which I think it could really use, since the Rage trait thing is locking you out of a lot of options to go elsewhere for more lower level slots. This Sorcerer dedication access is the biggest buff I gave, and I'm wondering if it's to much.

* Turned Spelldrinker into a way to get your Bloodline granted spells in a limited form

* Largely removed reliance on enemies that can bleed, but introduced susceptibility to other immunities. I think it's a wash?

Heavy armor is at least 3 bulk, most two handed weapons are 2 bulk, there are feats that require two 2-handers (and a spare is always a good idea) so before any other gear you're at 7 bulk. 5 + (1/2 con) is 7 bulk until level 10.

What's the deal here? Are we supposed to be dipping into strength just to carry the bare minimum?

I finished running my group through Strength of Thousands, and boy were there issues. It left me with the distinct impression that the "magical school AP" would have massively benefited from being a 3 book, levels 1-10 AP with graduation at the end.

So, if we took a trip to an alternate world where that was the case, what do you think the adventure would look like? What would be kept? What's the first to cut?

I'd like to imagine it would be much more tightly based in and around Nantambu, with more consistent NPC interactions. The first two books could almost stand as is with a significant amount of filler trimming, then the whole Red Planet and books 6 plot could be remixed and served up at a lower level.

Teachers would stay higher level than you, a graduation scene could be a climactic ending, and your fellow students scaling with you or not wouldn't be such a big question mark. It would then set you up to go off on a big 10-20 adventure as graduates, with all the bonus feats and skills showing off your alma mater.

If you had to guess, in general, how many 10 minute rests do you typically take:

1. Between moderate encounters?

2. After an extreme encounter?

3. Over the course of a whole level?

If you had to turn in a token for each 10 minute rest, how many tokens would be enough to last you for one whole level (assuming standard experience point leveling)?

If I look at it from Trivial an Extreme ends I might be able to bound the problem:

For Trivial: My estimate is that you need at least one 10 minute break per encounter as a baseline, so that focus point reliant characters can get a focus point back. Add another 10 minute break to allow for one round of healing in addition to a refocus activity. With 25 potential trivial encounters over a level, that's 50 ten minute break tokens.

For Extreme: Start with 3, assuming all players need to refocus their whole pool. Then let's assume two PCs need to be healed from zero to full with a slowish healing source (Lay on Hands). That changes as HP pools change over the 20 levels, so looking at around level 10, we can estimate around 6 Lay on Hands to get to full. So, 15 ten minute breaks per Extreme encounter. With a potential ~6 extreme encounters for a full level, you'd need 90 ten minute break tokens.

So, imagining that there's roughly 12 encounters per level of varying difficulties and you got on average 5.5 tokens per encounter, you should have plenty of ten minute breaks.

Does that align with your experience at all?

Forcing a GM to come up with some "erroneous knowledge" is one of the worst mechanics of PF2. As a GM it feels like garbage, especially when I can't come up with a good lie at the drop of a hat so I come up with something and the players just laugh at the obvious fake info. It's like what was the point? Making the monkey GM dance so you can point and laugh? Having a heritage or background drop Dubious Knowledge in your lap feels somehow worse than getting nothing at all.

Please just pretend this feat doesn't exist in Starfinder, and let us get back to ignoring the critical failure effect of Recall Knowledge as well.

I love that they gave the mystic bond a 10 person limit right out the gate. I believe by the way it's worded you could have a bond with an important NPC back on Absalom station while you're out mining asteroids in another star system and if they get hurt you would know. Really interesting "I sense something is wrong, we must return" type scenes available just because there's enough headroom in your bond count to allow it.

I also really like the Healing connection focus spell. It's basically a slightly weaker Heal with all its useful action scaling.

The Healing connection's ability to heal Void-healing creatures right out the gate is SUCH a breath of fresh air. No jumping through hoops to make sure the healing character can actually heal everyone.

The vitality pool looks like it's going to be so much fun.

I'm planning on making a Baymax style automaton healer mystic, with high strength for carrying people around and grappling enemies to stop them from causing harm.

Looking forward to digging into this!

You got a runty little sprite running around between your legs with its 0ft reach stabbing at your ankles. You look down and try to stab them with your sword. Should the GM give it lesser cover against your attack?

Same question but you're a huge dragon with a small goblin climbing up your back.

Last year I was asking about alternatives to Barbarian for recreating a silly dual-greatsword character I used to like to play back in the day. The new changes to Barbarian makes it a whole lot more attractive, so now I'm back to ask for any thoughts on cramming more fun stuff into this style of character! Using Free Archetype.

The main idea is to wield two Large-Sized Two-Hand trait swords (for the aesthetics) and get the most out of dual wielding them with Double Slice.

I was looking into Juggler to open up a hand for maneuvers because all the Two-Hand weapons have few traits, but I think the weapon bulk is a show stopper.

I wasn't sure if Mauler could have any benefit since some of the requirements are "wielding a two handed weapon" and I don't *think* a 1h weapon with the Two-Hand trait counts.

Any good general advice for a two-weapon build that doesn't have any good weapon traits like Agile?

I hate how quickly items with static DCs become useless. The bottom of my players' bags are lined with cruft from items a couple levels old. It's not unreasonable to expect an item only two levels old to be useful against a likely enemy (+2 APL).

Maybe someone as suggested this before, but:

I propose that all item DCs automatically scale based on the level of the user by an amount calculated by the difference between the character's level and the item level. So a level 7 item with a DC 25 save goes to DC 27 in the hands of a level 9 character.

The way this works is it linearly improves the item DC which means the nonlinear boosts aren't accounted for, making higher level items still have a better base DC.

Quick Check using poor save progression from monster builder rules:

RAW Black Tendril Shot vs at-level target's worst save

Lvl 7 Arrow vs Lvl 7 Creature: 60% chance of success
Lvl 12 Arrow vs Lvl 12 Creature: 55% chance of success
Lvl 17 Arrow vs Lvl 17 Creature: 60% chance of success

RAW Black Tendril Shot vs +4-level target's worst save

Lvl 7 Arrow vs Lvl 11 Creature: 30% chance of success
Lvl 12 Arrow vs Lvl 16 Creature: 25% chance of success
Lvl 17 Arrow vs Lvl 21 Creature: 30% chance of success

Proposed Modified Black Tendril Shot vs +4-level target's worst save

Lvl 7 Arrow vs Lvl 11 Creature: 50% chance of success
Lvl 12 Arrow vs Lvl 16 Creature: 45% chance of success
Lvl 17 Arrow vs Lvl 21 Creature: 50% chance of success

Spending valuable actions in combat to levy an attack against a target's worst save (assuming they have a poor save) and having only a 30% chance of having an effect is *worthless*. Bumping that up to a 50% chance feels like the bare minimum for such a hail mary type situation.

The main problem with this approach is that you end up with small (5%-20%) differences in success chances between scaled up low level items and higher level items, but I argue:

1. Success chances in those ranges are hard to overestimate (every +1 matters)
2. It's not likely that people are going to clamor to get a bunch of consumables for those 50% chances against a +2 enemy's worst save
3. Most consumables are found as loot, so it's more important to extend their useful life so they're not automatically converted to gold
4. Worn items with DCs take up investment slots, so you'd ideally want to maximize their usefulness, and given that worn items often define a character's story it's great to see them have a hope in hell of being effective even +8 levels later.

Thoughts?

Nowhere in the spell description does it say it's super noisy. A bolt of lightning, even a small one, should produce a thunderclap.

Would you rule the sound is more audible than typical combat noise (cannon fire, gunfire(?)), about the same as combat noise (shouts, gunfire(?), maces on shields), or no more noisy than the most verbal spellcasting

Banishment

According to this spell it fails if "you aren't on your home plane when you cast it."

So if you're on the Plane of Wood and fighting a demon, you can't, RAW, cast Banishment on the demon.

Do you think this is a mistake? Why would this be the case?

Animated

1. What happens if a foe attempts to grab the weapon?

2. What happens if you release it, then grab onto it yourself?

I was planning on rewarding a sorcerer player with a 20th level Staff of Arcane Might at level 13 for reasons. Then I looked it up and...

1. Their level 6 staff of divination has Sure Strike on it, which they use a lot, so their most common use case is downgraded by the switch

2. The high level spells on the staff aren't accessible until they can cast them, so having the staff early is meaningless there. They were already using charges mostly on level 1 spells anyway.

3. The +3 greater striking feature makes it legitimately more likely to be handed off to the fighter for a backup bludgeoning weapon. They have never made a staff strike, despite me even letting them put property runes on theirs.

4. The only benefit that might appeal is being able to destroy the staff to one-shot a boss, which is a cool feature as a last ditch save-the-day thing but not the primary purpose of the loot I'm trying to give out.

Should I make all staves Relics just to get some excitement going?

Whenever I imagine Netherworld versions of Golarion cities, I imagine dried riverbeds which contribute to the picture of a desolate, ruinous locale. However, I don't recall every hearing about water.

Do you think there are bodies of water in the Netherworld? If so, what do you think they're like? If not, do you picture the ocean areas simply yet more desolate landscape?

I'm considering implementing a house rule to ensure that players will always be able to take advantage of magical crafting feats and character build resources even if downtime isn't available for one reason or another. My proposed rule is:

"Once per level, during your daily preparations, you can choose to put the finishing touches on a crafted object that you had been working on during free moments in the past. Perform the Craft downtime action, but ignore the time requirements. You cannot achieve a critical success when crafting in this manner."

The idea being: I've had several scenarios where multiple levels have passed by and there has been zero downtime available, making the players' crafting skills useless for uncomfortably long stretches.

What do you think?

I've put together a few of my thoughts regarding what I would like to see for Starship design and combat for SF2. I've put it in a presentation layout because it helps me be a bit more organized and concise.

Here is a link to the presentation

Here are the key takeaways:

1. Silo combat and non-combat ship customization
2. Simplify ship combat customization down to two or three personally relevant decisions for each player
3. Standardize speeds, shields, and armor to tighten up combat balance
4. Put GM in control of Drift capability access
5. Standardize and provide guidance for lead up to and conclusion of combat
6. Put players in charge of their own sections of the ship for combat
7. Retain round-by-round ship initiative for positioning, but otherwise use standard initiative and 3 action economy
8. Give all players more options on their turn, never over-constrain
9. Dramatically cut and simplify Crew Actions and Ship Roles
10. Make physical movement around the ship during combat matter

Is there a way to wield (ideally dual-wield) oversized weapons outside of Barbarian? I'm talkin' anything that is mechanically an unusually large weapon to be able to heft one-handed, like Greatswords or giant-sized longswords or what-have-you.

I was just fondly reminiscing about an old neverwinter nights tiefling character of mine who used two greatswords, accuracy be danged, with monkey grip. It was aesthetically satisfying.

Let's get this out of the way. While I can certainly see some legends being intimately associated with a worn or wielded object, I find it thematically limiting, uncomfortably similar to the Thaumaturges, and running counter to the idea of being essentially a godling.

The first idea that came to mind when I heard of this class was to play a Dragon Exemplar, and I always play dragons to have as little dependence on gear of any kind as possible. The second idea, after hearing about Fishing from the Fall's Edge, was to play as an Awakened Bear, with the similar goal of being a paragon of it's kind which naturally lends itself toward reduced thematic dependence on items.

Should there perhaps be an option to allow you to choose 3 Body icons to switch your power between, or something along those lines?

Thoughts?

I'd just like to start a thread to remind people that next year we're going into the playtesting phase of an entire new edition, which happens so infrequently that it's easy to forget what that really means.

When you're playtesting classes, they're already locked into fitting within the framework of the existing system. When you're playtesting a *system* you can ask for a whole lot more. Granted, unlike PF2 we're going into SF2 with more limitations due to compatibility, but there's a lot more on the table than you might be aware.

I see people talking about the Field Test content the same way they talk about class playtests when it's entirely possible to build a weapon type around a class instead of the other way around, for example.

I thought it might be fun to talk about things that you think are wide open for development, and build hype for people in the run up to the actual playtest. For many of us, this type of thing is the closest we'll actually get to designing a game. From my experience with PF2, seeing the way things worked out differently based on my (cumulative with others' of course) feedback gives me warm feelings to this day.

Some examples!

* Virtual Reality. I think virtual reality is a fun concept that wasn't explored enough in SF1, and wasn't done well in Shadowrun, but could be handled quite well with the excellent Paizo team revisiting. Even if it merely ended up being sort of another Plane (Techy First World?) it could open up a bunch of new stories without landing us in "Hacker does their thing while we all get lunch" mode.

* Starship Combat. Let's get creative! I can't wait to see what people come up with, and what other excellent systems we might borrow from.

* Melee Combat Balance. We're all wondering how we can make sure melee doesn't dominate again, but based on some recent discussion about special abilities granted by gear traits, we might seem some really interesting solutions.

* Magic Worldbuilding. We haven't seen magic standing on its own nearly as much as I would have liked in SF1, mostly it was used as a Deus Ex Machina of the Gaps(tm) only really filling in where people's technology imagination struggled. I want a hoity toity society of rich, old, influential pure magic users, or a John Henry story of a pure magic spaceship racing a pure tech one, or Secrets of Magic style books all about how the scholars of different fields feel about their work!

* Comm Units Not Being Just Cell Phones. How can we show that carrying around a modern day supercomputer on your lapel could be more useful than making booty calls back to the ship?

* Noncombat Challenges and Goals. We could have whole new subsystems devoted to things like space ship races, NPC favor, colonization, or anything you can imagine that's not just about beating up aliens. Stuff built into the core of the system, and not tacked on after the fact.

I've finished the four Pathfinder jigsaw puzzles a little while ago and now my hands are shaking and I need another fix.

Has anyone heard if they're going to be putting out more with Toy Vault?

I guess our clamoring for a technology book really paid off! I can't wait to give my players their beloved rail guns and laser rifles again!

Low level spell slots are still great for buffs, debuffs, and utility, but damage options are just flat out wasted. How would you feel about a feat or something that makes it so that no damage-focused spell can do less than approximately cantrip-tier damage?

Lost Omens: Highhelm is just around the corner and we all need to get ready to rock and stone.

Dear esteemed colleague,

Please forgive my late response, I have been quite busy tracking down these bags over the last several weeks. You will be pleased to know that I have secured eight bags that have been confirmed to predate the estimated 2750 AR cut-off you had proposed, and another two which may also have been contemporary. You will find them individually sealed in the satchel I pray accompanies this letter. Of those, fully five of them display the phenomenon!

Given the frequency and extent of this behavior, I took the liberty of contracting a capable group of Pathfinders to investigate the danger it might pose to other unsuspecting owners of likewise affected bags (I have attached an invoice to the academy for their fee, and you have my apology and thanks as always). You will find their full report delivered in due time, but, in short, the demiplane to which all five bags are now linked is temperate, comfortable, and devoid of apparent threat. In all respects, it appears to be a facsimile of a pleasant, grassy plain. My concern, however, is the sheer, unprecedented size of the space. It will take a team (and budget) much larger than mine to even begin mapping it.

I have no knowledge of a wizard with the wherewithal or desire to create such an enormous demiplane, least of all one who would crash it into such a well documented astral web. The absurdity of the idea lends credence to your speculation about the coincidental formation of an astral bubble, however if that were the case why would it be so ordinary? I am baffled, and hope that your inspection of the bags’ dweomers will shed some light on the issue.

In the meantime, I will continue searching for more such bags, and providing counsel to their owners. I fear that the phenomenon is temporary, and some foolhardy youth might find themselves stuck in here when the link is broken.

Yours,
Octor

P.S. I am writing this upon a particularly high knoll within the demiplane, a thread tied at my ankle leading back to my entrance some ways off. It is a beautiful night here, a faint sweetness on the breeze, the rushing of the grass is akin to the sound of the sea lapping at the shore. Looking at the stars glittering overhead, I must admit: if this place was made by a foolish wizard I think I would dearly like to meet them.

I think Paizo should launch a line of merch (T-shirts, pins, stickers, mugs; essentially as generic merch as you like) that anyone could buy, even if they're not PF or SF fans, that would contribute to the legal fund for the development and maintenance of ORC, as well as potential future legal battles against OGL1.1 (or OGL2.0 if that's what they're going with).

Paizo has put their flag down and are prepared to foot the bill for legal costs, and buying Paizo products can indirectly help with that, but it'd be nice to buy something that says "I am specifically making the purchase to help out", and such an option may be more attractive for people who maybe aren't that interested in Paizo itself.

I don't know, I just worry about the Paizo staff not getting raises because Wizards is costing them an arm an a leg in legal fees.

Also, I've already bought pretty much everything Paizo has to offer from their regular catalog.

Let's say I want to join a party as a helpful, pretty smart, lovable dog. Everyone in the world is okay with just letting it slide that a dog is in every important scene in this adventure, wagging its tail and just generally being a good boi.

Hello!

So I've been working on a homebrew version of a hot-seat GM, procedurally-generated game mode inspired by Deep Rock Galactic. I still believe Paizo should do something similar to this, which is why I wrote up my proposal a while back, but being realistic I'm tinkering away!

A big part of this project is creating monster families which cover the full range of levels so that the GM can pull from a deck that says something like "3 Grunts APL-2, 1 Spitter APL+1", and the GM just has to flip to the page for the right stats for that level monster without any manual calculation. I'm no programming genius, so I put together a tool in Google Sheets to help me create monster families that I can print out for a hands-on prototype.

Here is the spreadsheet that I've come up with so far:
20221222_Deep Rock Finder Monster Families

The first sheet has the reference tables from the creature creation rules, as well as some default matrices for the different base road maps. The second sheet has the species template, where the blue fields are where you edit. At the bottom of that page you can find the creature level selector and printout area.

I was hoping people could look over the five species I put together: Grunt, Spitter, Warden, Praetorian, Dreadnought. Since I've pretty much only played to level 11, and I almost always reskin monsters rather than creating my own, I would very much appreciate any thoughts people have regarding the higher level abilities and stats for each species!

My next step will be working on the randomization elements including the encounter deck, dungeon layout deck, room deck, and bonus deck.

Cheers and happy holidays!

I'm going to be playing a dragon (from battlezoo) that can turn Large (later up to Gargantuan) and having a high strength combined with the bulk conversion for size I can easily carry my team.

The book suggests that when using allies as mounts, both the mount-character and the mounted-character should burn an action to coordinate.

Would you allow a third character to climb on, and if so, would you simply have the mount-character burn a second action?

Can you think of ways that this could be abused, or is it pretty innocuous and sub-optimal as I think it is?

You can make a dungeon-delving adventure for tabletop games using simplified procedural generation techniques, but how do you make a system that’s repeatable, fun, and might help solve the GM shortage?

Borrow the core gameplay loop from the wildly popular, and procedurally generated, Deep Rock Galactic video game.

Deep Rock has a simple premise: be dwarves, fight bugs, and dig for treasure; but it never gets stale. By adopting its challenge and reward structures, and accepting a narrow thematic scope, PF2 can introduce a fast-paced, fun, repeatable game mode that doesn’t require prep-time and shares the GM workload between players.

Link to Pitch Presentation

I was noodling around with a way to get my players to dip their toes into GMing (and let me actually play for once) and stumbled across an idea that might not be too original, but just might be worth it for Paizo to consider. At first I was angling for an official Deep Rock Galactic partnership product, but decided there's too much potential for showcasing parts of Golarion using this game mode.

I've posed this as a proposal for Paizo, and I've bulleted why I think that's a good route (and why this is in General instead of Homebrew), but in the end I'm an amateur and could just be taking my spot in a long line of backseat Paizo designers.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the concept, since I'm planning on continuing to develop a playable version to test out the concept and maybe actually play instead of GM for 10 gosh darn minutes. However, I'd also love to hear if anyone else agrees that this would be a good idea for an official Paizo product.

Cheers!

Kobolds are extremely social creatures, having evolved to live in close proximity with dozens of their kin in cramped tunnels. Touch is a normal part of their communication and social navigation, and is a built-in instinct.

In short, your kobold traveling companions WILL absentmindedly try to hold your hand like a toddler.

Example:
Let's say you're in a campaign with a moderately benevolent GM who has said she's willing to give Divine Intercessions as appropriate to the circumstances, but doesn't plan on adding quests or significantly altering the AP you're running.

Let's say you're playing a cleric of Nethys and you *really* want a specific arcane spell on your spell list, and you want Nethys's moderate boon real bad.

[For reference:
Moderate Boon: Nethys grants you insight into the secrets of magic. Add one spell from a different tradition of magic to your spell list. You still must learn it or add it to your repertoire normally.]

How would you go about helping set up an appropriate circumstance for acquiring that divine boon?

Broader questions:

1. What guidelines should GMs follow when considering granting boons?
2. If a GM has decided to give out boons, what level makes the most sense to target?
3. Should any player reasonably hope to acquire a specific boon as part of their character's story arc, even if that means discussing it with the GM? Or should it really be a GM tool in play only?

Hi! I'm working on an archetypical dwarf who is outwardly and in most respects a bog-standard dwarfy dwarf, except that his hobby and life's work has been to invent a lightsaber. He rolls around in heavy armor, brews and chugs beer, is stout and strong, and when a fight breaks out KSSHH! out pops a lightsaber. I was hoping people could give me suggestions to improve my plan, and perhaps make the lightsaber more lightsabery.

Fluff-wise I want it to be a small looking rod that has a thaumo-magneto-field that acts as a blade, but also contains and shapes the plasmothermal energy that he can sometimes get to work. He's supposed to be good in combat, but not necessarily super strong. Also likes to hand out drinks and help his team mates.

Mechanically I'm planning on going with a strength based Dwarf Inventor with Weapon Innovation on a Clan Dagger. Using the Agile to capture the quickness of the lightsaber and Parry to get the cinematic feel of lots of blocking and parrying happening. Inventor's bonus damage will be fire, and the offensive boost will be fire too. I'll pick up Clan's Edge to get the attack-attack-parry for two actions, then Protective Sheath to up the AC. With the free hand I'll be using my Free Archetype Alchemist dedication to mix/brew/drink beers as buffs for me and the party in the vein of Deep Rock Galactic. I'll pick up Sentinel dedication to go up to heavy armor so I can leave dex at 10 (classic non-graceful dwarf), and pick up Unburdened Iron to help my speed.

Modifications I'm looking at are:
Complex Simplicity (1d6 damage instead of 1d4)
Aerodynamic Construction (Sweep, for the wide cinematic arcs of the lightsaber, and to help with Clan's Edge)
Extensible Weapon (Reach, because a lightsaber could get longer than a usual weapon, and reach is super good for Clan's Edge attacking multiple targets)

Runes I'm looking at are:
Flaming, Keen, Wounding(?)

So, anything you would change? Any ideas to make a lightsaber more lightsabery?

Let's say I wanted to give something to a player who burns a spell slot on a missed attack spell. Perhaps not as much as the save spells' success conditions, since attack spells are ostensibly tuned up to account for that lack.

What would be a good thing to add that wouldn't be too strong, and isn't too annoying to track?

Here's my idea that I wanted to bounce off you guys:

A Rune you can only carve into a staff that gives you a bonus charge when you expend a Spell Slot of 3rd level or higher on a spell with the Attack trait, and you miss.

Eh? eh? Maybe?