XBow Enthusiast's page

I like the change because it feels a lot more believable than the innkeeper rolling about with several hundred gold on them, or a bladesmith making a pittance for what are honestly fairly intensive and involved products to make.

Yes, wizards got the Nerf greataxe, they seriously earned it and I'm glad that I don't have to worry about the party wizard replacing the rest of the party.

I got my books yesterday. I was up way too late just screaming in triumph as all that playtesting finally paid off. I feel like a lot of our suggested improvements went into the book. I'm certainly going to have a ball building characters and converting my favorite Playtest character Hama over. Also anyone else feel like a little of them is in this book? Or is that just Playtest fatigue?

All I can say is. LET THE PATHFINDING BEGIN ANEW!! FORWARD ADVENTURERS TO GOLD AND GLORY!!!

A perfectly normal high medieval village complete with NPC's, a blacksmith, and farmers.

My group has tried Kingmaker for 1E, we pretty much dropped it due to lack of interest in 1E's rules and because our Ranger kept killing everything he intended to spare to interrogate (really unlucky damage rolls). So having 2e adaptations and expansions for Kingmaker is fantastic for us because all of us are excited for 2e.

PF2 actually brings a lot of its features over from Starfinder, so while you probably don’t need to convert everything to the soft capped math of PF2, it’s not a big leap between the two systems. Certainly the action system can be ported over just fine. Which accounts for a good chunk of what makes PF2 unique.

I suggest you look at Starfinder for that anyway, it has rules to convert classes over and your party can exist and even heal without magic. Starfinder is much kinder to low fantasy than Pathfinder of either edition.

I’d like to see a stealth power, as a callback to the 2e Ranger’s ability to use a set of rogue skills to hide in shadows.
Maybe something that gives them the ability to blend in almost anywhere.

I feel like the four essences didn't have as much of an impact partly because the Arcane spell list demands to dip its toes into so many arenas. Does anyone remember if anything was said about curtailing that, making Arcane its own identity and allowing the other essences to outright take spells more thematic to them, even if previous editions had those spells as Wizard spells?

Not sure, but I recall that Arcane was referred to as a greedy tradition becasue they kept adding spells to it due to it's ambiguous flavor. Which I agree it needs to be defined more clearly like the other three are.

Just waiting for the gigasword and the terasword.

I wish I had more marshmallows, I could make s’mores off the impending flame war/ hate fest about yo happen. Anyway, I like the system and will be looking forward to August.

Carry on.

gwynfrid wrote:

John Lynch 106 wrote:

gwynfrid wrote:

A well-run game doesn't need to break immersion, as PF2 gives the GM all the tools to prevent it.

Whether Paizo wanted it or not, the playtest provided a sample as to how PF2 could work if implemented with the rules that were present in the playtest.

Doomsday Dawn was a test, as Edge93 reminded us. Using this as a predictor of how PF2 adventures will be designed requires assuming that Paizo will ignore their own stated intent. I think we can safely dismiss that hypothesis.

If Doomsday Dawn was a test, one thing it objectively failed at was demonstrating that AP writers could readily come up with justifications as to why a certain skill usage required a particular level-appropriate DC.

It wasn’t trying to, nor should we use it as such. It was for mechanics testing above all else, story was secondary to the testing process.

MER-c wrote:

I disagree, a lot of human learning is simply observing, training involves both observing and then attempting, to the point where you become competent. Since any critically thinking human can glean useful information from observing and experiencing then I see no reason why any PC is not able to at least imitate trained people after years of observing trained people. Thus I prefer adding levels to untrained checks because experience counts for something granted I do it at -4 or if that’s still not a large enough gap -5.

Can you provide ONE example of a real person who got better at being stealthy simply by watching someone else be stealthy?

Can you provide ONE example of someone who got better at climbing simply by watching others climb?

And they have to be seriously meaningfully better.

I'd note the irony of how you try to make -4 (or even minus 5!!!!!) sound like this serious give, when you casually embrace +20 over 20 levels as no big deal. But the core statement is so divorced from reality (and you are the one claiming to invoke how things really work) that this really doesn't matter.

Well considering I’m not talking to you, no. Also because you wouldn’t be willing to furnish a valid, non contrived example to support your position so why should I be held to a standard you don’t even hold yourself to? Good day hun.

kaisc006 wrote:

Actually PF2 encourages min max even more. Sure the spread will be smaller but there is more value to every +1 due to the +10/-10 crit system and penalty for extra attacks. Practically any option that gives a +x bonus will be superior to others.

Also, with critical misses activating monster effects you can bet people will be upset if you show up at the table with an unoptimized character. Before you’re character was just
mechanically bad but now you could hurt the party.

I don't agree with this at all. First of all show me the flat +x bonuses you can get in the playtest. Items and proficiency are basically the only way. They are moving away from feats that just give flat bonuses for good reason. Second of all there's a very small percentage of monsters in the bestiary that actually have effects that activate on a crit fail. Finally I guarantee you that the difference in optimization will not equal a +-10 unless it's a wizard attacking with a great sword that they are not trained with vs an optimized fighter.

Optimization will not be game breaking like it is in PF1. Everything points to the exact opposite.

Note that PF2 optimizations won’t actually be skewed towards character creation, rather towards your in game action economy,. Someone with system mastery will understand how to best use their limited actions to get an advantage while a more casual approach will either be neutral to slightly disadvantaged.

Time to re-live every game I ever played against Nids with my guardsmen. Can't wait to hunt some bugs. :)

D@rK-SePHiRoTH- wrote:

The fun lies in researching ways to make your own idea work.

Aww hell nah. I don't have the time to spend going through every book anymore. I do enough research for work, I don't want my hobby to be more of it. Just give me options I can choose with minimal consideration so I can play the dang game rather than paperwork.

Engineering mentality says, I want to be think less so let the system be simple and easy to use. To hell with dumpster diving through ten years worth of trap options and splat books.

Outside of a few snide comments with playtesting over with I've moved toward setting the playtest rules up for more sustained use until the core material arrives. In the meantime that includes a personal fix for Sorcerer to make them totally unique.

pjrogers wrote:

In a few years, PF2e with its likely large additional number of splatbooks, etc. will require a "M.A. in system mastery," similar to the current PF1e.

By your logic, 5E should have a metric ton of splatbooks, because 3E and 4E did so.

It doesn't. It has a grand total of 1,5 player-side splatbook after 4 years in print. It's so because companies are actually capable of changing their business models and revenue streams. The fact that Paizo has sold PF1 under the "zillion splatbooks" model does not preclude them from altering the model.

We'll see. My money is on Paizo drastically altering their PF2 publishing model into a pace that's faster than 5E but far slower than PF1.

I suspect we'll get the Starfinder model, we get tons of Adventure Paths, but core books are slow, only a few per year between alien Archives and a major core release like the recent Armory release and the upcoming Character Operations release next year.

It's sort of like the whole thing with cyber security. We still call the collection of skills we have Hacking, more or less, but the occupation is often Penetration Testing. The skills are no different than those used by attackers, just the application.

Totally stealing this, my group is about three sessions into Kingmaker.

For all this discussion about wanting PF1.5 and saying that the 2E can't compete with D&D5e, I want to say that one of my players actually flat out told me that if they had to choose between PF1, 5E, and the current Playtest, they'd pick the Playtest without a doubt.

With all the complaints about things in the Playtest, it has already solved a ton of nagging issues my group had with PF1 and has been received fairly well. And rather than seeing blasts spells dominating, buffs/debuffs, save or suck, and terrain effects have had a great impact on battles so far.

After one, I repeat here, ONE, session I got my entire group of players to convert over to PF2, we’re actually considering putting the extra effort in to convert Kingmaker over to second edition, just based on the playtest so far, I can say that so far the Playtest has brought Pathfinder back to life in my area in a way no 1.5 revision ever could have.

The issue I take with the "All(most all) concepts should be available at first level" mindset is that it feels like it's a very lazy way to do things, it basically means you don't really want to explore things like "Why did the wizard start using a greataxe?" so much as you just want the wizard with the greataxe. Who knows, maybe he was a normal wizard and he only used the greataxe as a desperate last stand to save his party when all his spells ran out and he never learned a damage cantrip. From there he just liked using the greataxe and got the Fighter or Barbarian to teach him how to use one. Or he used one he scavenged to chop down trees in the wilderness to keep himself warm when he got lost in the high alpine mountains and since that axe saved his life he's going to keep it and learn how to use it.

Stuff like that is what you rip out of the game if you can ship out a ready made concept at level one with all the bells, whistles and trimmings. I think that the idea that level one characters aren't particularly that awesome or are really not that far off from their non adventuring counterparts brings them a bit of a humanity that frankly a lot of PF2 characters I've seen in the past, have utterly lacked.

TL,DR; you do you, I think it's a bit lazy but I don't speak for the world so rock on buddy. :)

Monk wizard.

"I cast... FIST!"

*Proceeds to punch out a dragon with literal magic fists.

I just had a new awesome thing happen :)

Level three Redeemer and her Cleric traveling buddy, we'd been in a fight for about three rounds. Our impulsive Gnome monk finally got it in his head that fighting two fire elemental at once was rapidly killing him faster than the two heal capable members could keep him up. He ended up running out of combat at 1 HP and came up with the idea to run out of the cave we were fighting in, into the blizzard outside and started filling a bucket with snow.

Meanwhile the two holy peoples were basically facing the two fire elemental alone while the rest of the party went and got snow and ice to throw at them.
One fire elemental decided it was going to throw a ton of attacks at the Cleric and my Redeemer, At the time I had an AC of 23 due to getting a shield up so it threw three attacks at me, crit failed two of them, then threw two attacks the the Cleric, hit one, I reacted, forced it to fail due to it trying to keep up the attack, resulting in a miss, then getting the Cleric just enough resistance to actually ignore the resulting damage when the last attack hit. So with one reaction, while on critical HP from face tanking a crit earlier for my party I got the HOLD THE LINE, and felt like a total boss for being able to do my job.

We then ended that encounter by throwing water at the fire elemental till they died. Both of them were Level 5 to our level three, so we were at APL + 3 there.

I felt even more awesome later on when I decided to try out some good ole diplomacy on a Young Black dragon, the DM laughed, I invoked the will of the dice gods, and rolled a 20 to convince a dragon of all things to sell us a big gem we needed to get some WIll'o'Wisps to firebomb some evil person who wanted to burn down a vilage. We got it for 200 gold, due to some shenanigans our other gnome had about 149 gold plus some from our last adventure, so every had the mental image of a six foot tall Paladin making a deal with a dragon, then shaking every loose coin out of our greedy as heck Gnome then throwing the backpack of gold into a crack in the wall she was talking through to pay off the dragon.

We then bough a Type 2 bag of holding for a chest of gold we found later on, from the same dragon, which we did after literally backhanding (the cleric and myself again) a ghost with positive damage.

When my Strength Monk almost soloed a second level encounter at level one. It was Skeletons that were modified for higher AC.

Turns out it doesn't matter if you have a lot of AC when Weakness 5 meets 1d6+4 resulting in the double one shots turn one then a third one shot on a bigger skeleton.

Flurry of Blows is a troll ability sometimes.

:)

I too feel this way.

To me, +1/level isn't the problem. The problem is that proficiency doesn't do anything.

If you properly gate or advance abilities with proficiency, you grant the specialist feeling while maintaining the presence of level having a strong meaning.

This is especially since the change to Untrained to -4, which made the jump from U -> T very impactful.

However, the jump from T -> E (or really any variation after U -> T)...

In the meantime I've decided to patch proficiency by giving each increase double it's value and gating certain things behind level of proficiency. Haven't done anything about skill feats because I don't want to write that much.

Actually 2d6 and 1d12 are pretty much the same, as your average is about 7 on each die, actually had this come up with a laser weapon in starfinder that did 2d4 instead of 1d8, long story short it looked better on paper, but in practice all you do id raise the lowest possible roll by 1. Granted that weapon had other problems as well (Used 10 charges per shot) but in the end it wound up doing the same damage as a normal equal level laser weapon.

Now granted the accuracy improvement counts for something, it's not all that much stronger, still problematic though and the idea could use some work.

kaid wrote:

One option if you want to go really scary would be riot shield+power armor then you can have a built in weapon with a weapon reloader for your scary implacable armored dude build.

So basically a Space Marine Terminator from 40K...that's what you're describing ;)

I'm trying to build a Ysoki Vanguard to represent this ;)

Bonus points for charging anything, while shouting pointless semi religious nonsense about primarchs, honor, and courage. Even more for painting it blue. :)

We're just having fun with words and trying to kill off a dead horse thread, Anguish ya crank. Lighten up and merry christmas! :)

At this point I'm somewhere between "Meme the ever living daylights out of potentially toxic threads" and, "Sit back, grab a blanket, and watch Thread Explosions 2: Return of the angry internet people" Most of the time I land on

I don't think removing the 3-18 numbers would remove the [Name] Modifier notation, after all the term modifier is the most descriptive word for the derived value, it modifies dice rolls

Frankly the "oh just houserule it" argument bugs the snot out of me. If that's the law of the land why the hell is anyone in this playtest forum to begin with?

Your box containing 2e could contain nothing but a feral puma that mauls the first person to open it and the old argument of "Well that's PF now, just houserule it per your preference" applies just as much as it does with save/lose effects.

Mostly because Pathfidner and every D&D variant short of 5e (Not sure about 4e, don't have a book for it) has a proviso inside the front cover affectionately called Rule Zero. Rule Zero amounts to.

Well, in software development (where the term hacking comes from) a hack is always intended to be temporary.

Hacking as a term we use today is actually far older than software development, it originated in the 70's as a term to describe people who built micro computers in their gauge, it was expanded in the 80's and 90's to include software and eventually web based hacks, but the actual term "hack" really just refers to a workaround, however I can attest from experience that most "Hacks" turn permanent real quick when you're trying to keep a company's systems running.

Just dropped in, holy cow that was the most flags I've ever thrown in any one ten minute time frame.

As for my opinions on the Fighter, and other martial for that matter. I like where the Fighter, Monk, Ranger, and Barbarian are right now. I still think Paladin can use work but it's playable, if nothing else. Of the classes above I think Monk is in one of the better spots, but Fighter, when I finally got my hands on it, was almost perfect for what I enjoyed. A versatile class that was straightforward and easy to use the combo system in place with Open and Press actions added a new layer to how I thought about combat, and I think it can be expanded. If I had one wish for Fighter it would be to give some more coll reactions to help out, things like a Parry and Riposte, maybe a reactive shot to a ranged attack for bow or crossbow users. Stuff that can really cement the Fighter as the Master of the Battlefield.

Someone who survived an improbably long enough time in outer space to get picked up by a starship arriving at exactly that time and exactly that place. Vogon ship optional, Vogon poetry optional and not recommended.

I don't get why the blacksmith need to be level 7 to make a living? At level 1 he can make 1sp a day, which sure is not a lot, but it would be enough to letting for him to get by since the lowest cost of living is 4 sp a week and by level 2 he earns enough to live a comfortable life. And this is using the rules as they are available to PC's. Actually being an NPC he might have cheaper cost of living than that and be able to earn more than a PC would doing the menial task for a short period of time.

I had a Level one Blacksmith Monk (We flavored her as an apprentice blade-smith) earning around 13sp a week with an OK craft, granted that was with some godly rolls but that's pretty decent

As to the proposed changes, I think it's better to stick to four levels but we can add some flair to it, such as making one or two skills "Incompetent" for a larger penalty and maybe adding a first level skill feat called Prodigy that let's you select a skill you are trained or worse in, you get a permanent +x to that skill or you may select a skill and you roll twice and take the better result.

I would like to see things doubled in bonus, so Experts get a +2 and Legendary gives a hefty +6

I think one way you could do it for monk is also give them Paths in manner akin to the Rogue. Something like A more Strength focused Path. Let's call it way of the Earth for now, it focuses on the physical aspects and much like a Bardic Muse grants access to feats that play off Strength, Dexterity or Constitution.
A second one could be more of a mystical path, let's call it Path of Heaven or something, and have it be more about Wisdom and other mental stats as well as more Ki Focused. Then throw in a Path of Balance that takes a bit of the Ki stuff and a bit of the Physical stuff and plays more like a normal monk.

It's horribly rough, but it's an idea that came to mind and I thought it would be worth sharing as a way to improve one of my favorite classes.

My personal preference for changes to rituals would be:

Remove the rarity restriction in that they always must be uncommon or greater. That's fine as a baseline for higher level or grander rituals, but it really limits design space.

Remove the downtime-only restriction. Again, appropriate for bigger rituals, but prevents the design of any type of "minor" ritual. With the addition of Treat Wounds and the expectation of a roughly 10 min "break" between combats, there is a good design space available for minor 10min rituals that can be performed by a single character while others are treating wounds or identifying items.

Add more interesting costs rather than just things that can easily be translated into a gp value. Part of the appeal of big...

One thing a DM of mine accidentally did was create a Monk specific ritual for a character I was playing. I was able to meditate for a time and then sense the life energy around my character. It was pretty fluffy and even got us into a combat encounter or two when the Lawful Good Blacksmith suddenly darted off to try and save some travelers who were getting attacked. I really enjoyed that little ability and I think it brings about the idea of

Raylyeh wrote:

More customization is good and overtime will more than likely be available. I guess what I want to say is that by the end of PF1 players were spoiled with the number of possible options and are forgetting that most of the base classes are pretty bare bones and that it was mostly archetype options and a few feats which came later that made customization a thing.

Then you misunderstand what players are saying when they want customisation. The biggest change is the fact general feats are no longer able to be spent on combat feats. Either not making every combat feat a class feat or allowing general feats to be spent on any type of feat would address the customisation complaints. Putting out 10 new hardcovers won't address them.

So basically they are upset because now things have an opportunity cost.

Voss wrote:

MER-c wrote:

I play a lot of Warhammer so I’m pretty firmly in the camp of “Dump a literal bucket of dice”

I'm pretty much the opposite for the same reason. The current design of warhammer is a poster child for roll (and reroll) buckets of dice for minimal purpose and result. Especially with their hit/wound/save system, where you can literally roll 300 dice and only end up killing a model or two.

And then move on to the next unit.

Rolling a bucket of dice is a complete waste of time.

I used to play bad Moonz Orks.

The fact that only one hit out of 20 would kill a Marine never really took the shine off saying “alright, this unit fires, it’s 56 shots” and then flipping the bucket.

You’ll love the new codex. They get some fun stuff.

Also I think we the best way to summarize our stance is.
“Like Dakka, you can never have enough dice buckets.”

I play a lot of Warhammer so I’m pretty firmly in the camp of “Dump a literal bucket of dice”

My only response to this is that I know that people who are not trained to pick up on cues from your opponent like body language or weapon position will have a hard time reacting to anything. in truth if you don't know what to look for you'll never be able to read a target. This idea that people who aren't trained in battle don't know how to read their opponent properly to exploit holes is prevalent in PF in the form of the Fighter, the most trained class in the art of battle, is the only class that get's AoO's, i.e. punishing a small opening, for free, the other classes that get it need a feat which symbolizes training, Same deal for other reactions. A Reaction is a read on your target or an action you anticipate needing.

Cool so this isn't a Chrome issue. :) Thanks for keeping up on it!