WestTreefrog's page

Ah, I had missed the implications of that, yep that fixes that old issue nicely. And they can only actively seek for 10 minutes without suffering fatigue penwlties, so the 'alert' period gates for about that long. And now I have the Metal Gear Solid theme in my head...

The more I play with this the more I'm coming around in it, so far the fail scenarios are easily patchable with some judiciously applied (and fairly logical) circumstance bonuses whereas in PF1 you could end up with some fairly odd results like a 15th level wizard, (in spite of all that presumed experience) suddenly noticing a lvl 3 monster with it's teeth suddenly in her arm due to the massive variance between trained and untrained skills.

But more on topic, with the corrections above I think most skills work better, assumptions of item based stat boosts aside. However, I think perception is fundamentally flawed as is.

Take three scenarios of a stealthy pc sneaking past a sentry.

1) Sentry has been tipped off and is actively expecting the pc.
2) Sentry is well trained and disciplined, but not expecting trouble.
3) Sentry is poorly disciplined and more concerned with staying warm.

The opposed roll works nicely for scenario 1, but the frankly far more common scenarios 2 and 3 where the party is bypassing some monster not actively looking for them? The rules treat all of these exactly the same.

I'm tempted to add a blanket circumstance penalty (-3?) on all perception checks not actively looking for something specific and a larger one (double) if really not expecting trouble.

This way a sneak specialist has a very good chance against a level -2 sentry, decent against 2 but starts to get dicey up against 4 or more.

Against an inattentive, drowsy goblin, the entire party has a good chance to sneak past, as they should.

Related aside, I went to model drowsy and my first pick, fatigued, doesn't impact perception (or any mental state). The best model I'm seeing is actually fascinated. I guess drowsy = fascinated with sleep? That...actually works rather well.

One of my players has come up with an idea that I think can really help to fix both this and the unreasnobaly difficult DCs to achieve basic stuff. It's based on the same error Mark Seifter said there was with the prof. tiers, but the solution is backwards:

Untrained is +0, Trained is +2 and up from there; do not rebalance any encounter or monster. This is essentially a free +2 on everything that the PCs do, which finally lets most characters be on par with the lv0 Goblins and improves the lockpicking odds among other things. From what I've seen, 2 is the magic number that things seem to be imbalanced by. This would mean the Fighter, who is a master of his craft, would usually have at least +1 to hit over (level equivalent) enemies while non-fighters would be a lot more comparable.

Only problem I see is how the +2 AC on PCs would maybe be too much of an advantage unless the monsters also got +2 AC (Monster AC is usually their only inferior stat compared to PCs to compensate for their higher attack, I guess to artificially make combat more lethal for both sides) to compensate. Everything besides AC seems to fall into place just right with the +2. Alternatively, make PC AC start at 8 so that it's more in line with monster math and not have to modify the entire bestiary's AC.

Actually one of my group was wondering, based on the oddity of indexing the system at -2, if the playtest is at 'hard' difficulty and what you have here, 0 indexed, is 'normal' difficulty.

Based on the math in this thread and our initial experiments with doomsday dawn's first section...I wonder.

It's doable as is, but just. And only with a well built party, with a suboptimal party mix, good luck.

Although I wonder how much of the problem is deadly/fatal weapons at low levels. We tried giving Drakus a pick instead of a longsword. In didn't go well...especially with that opening +2 he gets on revealing form. 3d10+10 critical on a 14-20 roll? Yikes...