arcady's page

Seems like the only way to make playing a Grandeur viable as an option to play is if you can always reshuffle turn order such that:

4 - Any hostiles
3 - Any Allies
2 - Champion
1 - Any hostiles

Any hostile that acts in between 3 and 2 is best ignored - let the victim eat that hit and force your allies to delay into the 'right' order or eat hits.

Otherwise it's a trap choice to play.

I'd argue the main perk is not the damage mitigation - that's a small number of HP. And even the Dazzle has limited impact. But the off guard that comes with the added feat is why you'd go into Grandeur, as it's a potent support ability, especially in combo with the dazzle. Each alone would not make the choice worth it. Together they do.

But this errata makes it a very limited thing that will only work if your entire party is onboard with spending round one playing initiative reshuffle.

Page 91: Flash of Grandeur’s duration could be far too short in many situations. Change the final sentence to “Until the end of your next turn, the attacker is affected by revealing light.”

So if I read that right.

Turn order for round N+1 (any turn past round 1):

PC 4 - 21
Bandit 1 - 20
Grand Champion - 19
Bandit 2 - 18
PC 2 - 17
PC 3 - 16

init 20:
Bandit attacks PC 4 as last action.
Champions uses reaction. Champ has the feat that applies off-guard

init 19:
Champion does something
Grandeur expires, off-guard expires

Rest of turn: None of Champ's allies can take advantage of the off-guard, conceal effect never did anything.

Given that Champions tend to have low initiative, they're very likely going to go 'after' any given attacker, on the round they use the reaction, so the effect will often expire before it can benefit the team.

That seems like a very hard nerf.

This one might need clarity for Treasure Vault:

Numbing Tonic ( https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=1963 ) gives temp hitpoints with no duration listed. If you drink a vial and manage to never even stub a toe for the next 98 years, do you still have that temp HP?

If it was made by an alchemist as a versatile vial (effects last for 10 mins), does the HP wear off in 10 mins, or does that only apply to the "regain the temp HP every round for 1 minute" part?

Is the lack of a duration for the hit points for that tonic a mistake, or on purpose?

I think at this moment the obvious gaps in coverage are fey ancestries and aquatic ancestries, so those are what I'd like to see more of (possibly at the same time). For fey we have all kinds of classics. Dryad, nymph, satyr, I guess nixie, leprechaun, satyr... Maybe redcap, or satyr... Uh... Satyr...

Faun - as in a non-genderlocked satyr, is the primary thing that has me going back to the daggerheart order website and hovering over the button every few days.

When that hits I'll almost surely have to drop one night of my 2 nights of pathfinder in order to go play a Faun in something. :)

Ever since I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in primary school in the 70s that's been my favorite fantasy creature. Before I even knew the genre existed.

How many actions does it take for a Toxicologist Alchemist to use Quick Alchemy to make a consumable injury poison (not field vial, but a formula, example: Giant Centipede Venom) out of a Versatile Vial and shoot someone with a blowgun to injure them with that poison?

I get conflicting answers on this and it makes me realize the wording goes all over the place between the different things, leading to confusion.

So a Toxicologist can use quick alchemy to craft a consumable. Which expires at the start of their next turn.
A blowgun has a reload of 1 and uses blowgun dart ammo.

So if they want to use a versatile vial to create an injury poison consumable and shoot someone with a blowgun to deliver that poison... what occurs?

4 actions: reload, craft poison, apply poison, shoot
3 actions: craft and apply poison to ammo, load weapon with dart, shoot
3 actions: craft/apply poison, load weapon with that poison, shoot
2 action: craft and apply poison, shoot

Impossible - because you need to apply before you reload, and so your 4th action takes place after it expires.

When I've asked this I've gotten theories that are all over the place.

It seems to mostly split 3 ways:

1. 4 actions as I noted above.
2. Impossible as I noted above.

3. A weird new idea: Once you apply to the ammo, it has 10 minutes to be shot - this is because the 'item' was used before your next turn, but the effect is now on the ammo for the next 10 minutes.

It seems like RAW the correct answer is 'Impossible'. But this needs clarity.

We don't have faith in a setting like Pathfinder.

I'm not sure what's there even qualifies as religion.

If you 'worship' your neighbor because he has a big gun - that isn't faith. He's standing in the yard with a big gun. It's just fact.

If you form a doctrine for how to venerate the neighbor with the big gun, and what to give him to keep him from shooting up your yard and instead shooting your other neighbor's yard - that's not a religion, that's paying off a mob's as a part of a protection racket.

Faith systems are about believing something about the unknowable. Religions are about organizing that into social / political systems for various reasons / goals.

What you have in Golarian is a team of super heroes and a team of super villains and regular people pick sides and try to pay them off for protection, and some of those regular people get minor super powers as a result.

It's a fundamental flaw of many tRPG settings - they were written by people who didn't understand polytheism, let alone even faith.

I would be very hesitant to try and apply an lessons for your real life from it. It's a game mechanic system that, at a fundamental level, just doesn't work for actual human psychology, faith, and religion.

Best to just hand wave away the 'sense of disbelief' on it.

I prefer them either standalone or indirect.

After doing a 1-10, I suspect people are burnt out on the current setup and want to try something new.

Personally I have never seen a group even manage to finish a 1-10. They almost always shatter 5-7 levels in.

So I'd be in support of not only them not being sequels, but of having less APs and more adventures. However I suspect people like to purchases APs more even if they routinely fail at running or playing them...

The newest adventure that is actually 3 mini-adventures for different groups of PCs but to one overall story - that's how I'd recommend APs be. Each book made for a different set of PCs, but all tied together loosely.

You could then have a 1-3, a 9-11, and an 18-20 all in one 3-book 'AP' that is really 3 adventures across time and location that deal with one story beat.

Safest and most promising...

Ok, new idea.

Sitting on the Starstone.

Not next to it, not almost there, not in the room, not touching it for the first time.

Just sitting on the thing, enjoying having made it there.

It's over - you've won your trial. And it's pretty rare for someone at your new power level to get attacked outright. They need to publish a whole slew of books if that happens.

So for the moment, in that spot - you're really safe and full of promising potential.

Time to light up some flayleaf and enjoy the moment.

Now just... don't go anywhere. ;)

If they opened up 'fist' to always count as a weapon for all of these various issues no one would ever want to use any weapon but fist.

It's already a very powerful option for many builds as you always get to have a 'hand free'. It is essentially a "pseudo weapon" that has nearly ALL the traits except versatile.

And you can't be disarmed. You don't drop it when you get knocked out. And with 'handwraps' you can get runes.

Which does beg a question. Could things like the blazons mentioned in the third post work with handwraps?

Even if not, it's still a great option.

I play in a game with a Champion of Irori that uses fist and a shield with a shield boss. I've got the ability to spam out all kinds of manuevers.

My only mistake was going boss instead of spikes for 'cooler art' reasons.

When D&D 4E was announced and we saw that it wasn't D&D anymore but a wholly new tRPG that just had D&D slapped on the front cover.

It was a great game. I still think it's a better tRPG than any edition of D&D. But it was just named wrong so there was brand confusion and folks started looking for the exits.

Bunch of folk from Dungeon Magazine decided to reprint the D&D 3.5 rules. At this point in time I'd already first moved on to Mutants and Masterminds and then mostly left the hobby because MMOs were picking up and there were way too many racists in the D&D scene back in those days.

But I grabbed the playtest of the new D&D 3.75 - named Pathfinder, and sat on it. Bought books as I saw them over the years and sat on them.

In the middle of Covid lockdown I was musing around on Amazon and it popped up 'Mwangi Expanse' as a recommendation so I looked it over. All sorts of glowing reviews and comments about it being a well done 'fantasy Africa' treatment.

Not that I believed that. I'd been in this hobby since 1980 and I'd never once seen a non-Eurocentric sourcebook that wasn't full of "problems". Even half the Eurocentric ones were bad stereotypes. I'd already been playing almost 20 years of WoW and rolling my eyes at the ethnic stereotype used for Dwarves - which is notably some mix between Scottish and Irish.

So I sat on that recommendation for a few months and keep looking back at it, and reading detailed reviews.

Finally on a whim I bought it, fully expecting the worst. Tarzan and Lora Croft meets 'Maguma the porter', voodoo, and all that usual nonsense.

Ok... it does have a gorilla king. So it didn't get off scott free. And they did still have some legacy stuff from the PF1E days. Vidrian may be there but that the place had been colonized before hand never should have been in this history. Something that that later repeats in Tian Xia.

At this point in their mutual histories it is more likely Goka or some other power in Tian Xia would colonize the heck out of Cheliax.

BUT... They clearly worked hard to 'write forward' and fix PF1E stuff without 'wiping the slate' with a 'DC Comics' style reboot.

I have mixed feeling on that.

However that they did such a good job of 'writing forward' and making a great sourcebook that explored the people of that area got me interested.

Not just in Pathfinder, but in the hobby as well.

Clearly something had changed for this to happen, and maybe the racism had died down or been pushed back some. So I decided to give things a try.

There's a very nasty rpghorrorstory of mine on reddit and I didn't want that kind of experience again so I was very hesitant. And that rpghorrorstory is only a fraction of things as it only dealt with my attempts at playing a female character, and didn't cover what happened anytime my characters had a 'bit of shade' to their tone or groups found out I did.

Took almost another year to finally get to finding a group to join just a month or so before the OGL scandal hit.

And yeah. The hobby's changed.

You folks that are here after the 5E / Critical Role / Stranger Things era have no idea what it used to be like.

There are still some oddballs. They get thrown at me in my YouTube recommendations all the time. But they get lectured now, rather than being the ones dictating to everyone like it used to be.

And Pathfinder 2E?

It seems to be in the lead on this in the right ways. D&D 2024 is also going forward - but I have some issues there as I'm mixed-race and that can be discussed ELSEWHERE.

But Pathfinder 2E keeps giving me hope.

And it turned out to be a good game system too. Not just good lore.

Though it seems to be based on some mix between old d20 and that game WotC called 4E that, as I said, I feel was a great game with the wrong name.

So... The lore and ability to do a wide array of cultures well is what got me to 2E. In a roundabout way.

I'd think Goka over in Tian Xia.

Big metropolitan city. But not under threat all the time.

That or the highland kingdom of the Samsaran. Bunch of reincarnation hippies up there. ;)

The only real SMN-specific build decision I see as a big fork in the road is the eidolon-spellcasting feat line.

IMO, the possibilities added by the cantrip feat make it very good on basically all builds....

I completely skipped thinking about that feat to give the Eidolon some cantrips.

Would those be better on defense and 'weird'?

Like getting shield, and some oddball quirks. Then your Eidolon's melee strat could be 'do something martial' plus cast shield or glass shield (tradition depending)?

They're innate spells so it seems like spells that have a save are going to be less successful as your eidolon doesn't have great charisma (even Demon and Fey only hit 16).

If you did give your Eidolon Shield or Glass Shield - it now has a reaction. I assume that if both the Caster and the Eidolon had Shield on - only one of them could use a reaction each turn?

Completely different sub-topic because the attack one is kind of shifting into general GMing strats.

Summoner builds for roles in the group.

How would we go about two types of summoners?

Summoner as the party main healer.

Summoner as the party melee control / tank.

-------- As Control Tank ------------

I'm not sure the class is built well, out of the box, for either. But I see both get attempted. 2 of the summoners I've seen in play tried to be the group tank using Brutal plant.

I was a believer in this, but the lack of a reaction makes me wonder how it can 'control' enemy options. In the game's I've played it failed in the first because of the things I've noted about hyper-focused GMs always going for casters. The second is an ongoing campaign and the GM has largely ignored the caster who also rarely uses spells (mostly only melees with a reach weapon).

-------- As Healer ------------

I've seen mention that there's room in the class to go for healing options. I'm doubtful on this as it seems like it requires giving up class feats to take a few archetypes, but if it can be done I'd be curious.

I've not seen anyone try to play it.

-------- As Flanking DPS with light area support ------------

This seems the natural role for the summoner. Flank with the eidolon and toss out cantrips with the caster, saving the extremely limited spell slots for crisis saves.

-------- As a Ranged martial / caster ------------

Folks seem to suggest there isn't a viable path for this one as the caster eidolons don't perform. I need to look over the list again and see if a ranged martial eidolon is present.

-------- As frontal melee DPS ------------

This is where I think a lot of summoners that try to be controller / tanks actually end up. Like a lower DPS Barbarian. Trying to run in and be direct, not thinking about flanking to help allies. Just trying to be a direct damage martial. It seems a popular but sub-optimal strat to me because in my mind anyone who is NOT controlling / locking down enemies should be setting up flanking or using the flanking the control martial has set up for them.

This is kind of... playing the eidolon like the stereotype of what I hear DnD martials are - just walk in and them spam MAP attacks until one side or the other is done for.

-------- So ------------

All that said, any thoughts on where the summoner best performs, where it can perform, and how to build it out to handle one of the trickier roles?

BigHatMarisa wrote:

I mean if your GMs are sending literal wild animals at you as if they were trained assassins from the Golden League then I think that's less "If the GMs aren't coddling me I can't play this class" and more "holy s##% I need to find better people to play this with".

I think a number of GMs will play beasts as "go after the thing that hurt me most, if I can." That's not malicious, that's somewhat reasonable. So really it only takes one round of "EA did good, and my Eidolon missed this round" to send a beast towards the Summoner even with a reasonable GM.

Yeah, I get that and I myself GM animals more or less that way - as animals rather than covert assassins from the Golden League. :)

My own GM strat, very different from the GM's I've played under; comes from 'threat assessment and intelligence' assumptions.

1. What's the big threat to me here?
2. Am I an intelligent, Animal-level, or mindless enemy - which determines how I handle that threat.

So when I'm GMing casters get a pass until they prove to be a threat, and downed PCs get ignored or maybe dragged away because leaving them wounded makes their allies need to help them rather than attack me. Finishing them off is actually a bad tactic as once you do that their allies are free to focus on you.

BUT...

I do have some 'gamer trauma' over GMs that have a 'healers first, then casters' mindset that comes from somewhere.

When the one GM had the majority of the wolves go for my sleeping character hidden out of view inside a tent behind the rest of the party it was a bit of a final straw of a pattern in that game. I liked that GM as a person and as a story teller but he had a thing against healers and casters and it just went way too far sometimes.

I could keep breaking that story down but at that point it belongs on reddit under rpghorrorstories as a minor story. ;)

BUT (again)...

In an active fight - if they go for the backline, the backline needs to be ready for that.

Maybe folks are right here: An NPC seeing that the summoner and eidolon are connected is not enough for an NPC that doesn't pause to do a recall knowledge to know why. And said NPC needs a metagame-free reason to waste an action doing that recall knowledge.

So the player of the summoner has a reasonable expectation to expect their summoner will not be a target unless they act to make themselves one (prove to be a bigger threat), and we have a game-table social issue if they start getting focused.

If I thought I'd face a fair GM...

...

... I'd probably got for one of:
+4 Cha, +2 Con, +2 Dex, +1 Int
+4 Cha, +3 Con, +1 Dex, +1 Int

I still favor +1 Int over Wis because it gives me more I can do out of combat by opening access to the skill feat "Skill Training". It's combat inferior, but opens up more roleplay for me.

Maybe someday I'll find a GM that isn't hyper-focused on using every random house cat as if it was an assassin sent by the Golden League out to get the 'mage'. ;)

Anyway...

On a pure caster GMs have trained me to do everything I can to max out AC. So I will often get it as high as I can.

But on a summoner which is a hybrid exposed on both fronts I do see the appeal of having good HPs, which is why I posed the question that got us down this whole tangent.

I don't think any summoner build could survive the kinds of GMs I face that go to comical extremes trying to 'geek the mage' (an old Shadowrun term for this kind of focus lock, and I suspect where the mentality originated from as far back as the late 80s in tRPGs).

But even in a game with what most of you seem used to - GMs that judge it by situation - I worry summoner is too 'MAD' - needing good Cha, Dex, Con, likely Wis, and for me personally also +1 so I can unlock the 'train a skill' skill feat.

I don't see a good way to build or play the class unless a GM coddles me.

arcady wrote:

SuperBidi wrote:

Why is your Eidolon always taking less hits than your Summoner? I don't expect the Summoner to take 50% of the damage of the couple, the Eidolon takes most of the damage. 4 hits is the minimum you should consider.

Unless the Eidolon is grappling and has reactive strike, an aura, or something - I expect it to take almost no hits, and for the summoner to be the main target of any intelligent enemies. I expect most Eidolons to play a role more like a rogue or swashbuckler, or flanking for whoever does have reactive strikes, grapples, auras, and/or champion reactions.

The eidolon needs to find an excuse to force enemies to attack it, and it usually lacks these.

Often if the Eidolon is a target - it will be a target of 'Tumble Through' or 'Reposition'. More often 'Tumble Through' as while Reposition is superior for making someone susceptible to a very bad situation; in an indoor fight there's often nowhere to move someone to.

Relevant Tangent:
I had the experience two months ago of filling for a missing player at my brother's table. Final battles of the dungeon they were in - I took over a Monk with a +0 in Dex and all Str. I stood in a doorway and everything could just tumble through me to the backline, while I couldn't tumble past the enemy I was fighting. It was a badly made PC by a new player. I swapped his stance for Mountain - but it didn't solve the issue. This tangent is where I realized that you can't tank without either a reaction or the ability to block a spot - the low Dex on that monk meant every enemy just tumbled through me into the backline.

A Brutal Eidolon can just be tumbled through on the way to the Summoner.
A Fleet Eidolon has better odds of stopping that.
Both are pretty good at avoiding being repositioned.
However the Brutal is still what you want to be able to grapple or trip and thus lock enemies in place.

So, from experience I can say that chasing the summoner as the primary target is something that doesn't...

My experience goes the other way.

My idea that they will always go for the backline is a trained one. It's from seeing backline characters get rolled over and over and over again.

This one isn't a theorycraft issue. It's practical experience. Unless the frontline finds active ways to lock down enemies, they run around them, reach past them, or go through them and just wreck the backline.

And for summoner - the backline target is just way too attractive.

- The reach past them is a recent experience BTW. When on my alchemist I went in to give a martial something, I got hit with a crit by the enemy with reach the next round and barely survived.

And... the example I gave a page or two prior where at level 7 I got luck with crit spam and took 2 martials from full to dying 2, and nearly got the wizard as well - that was an Irnakurse, a large-sized enemy with 20-foot reach. I'd have hit all 4 of them but the last caster was out of reach.

In Kingmaker I was on a healer Kineticist. We were in camp, I was asleep. 6 wolves attack. 4 of them ignore the PCs that are up and about and run past them for the tent behind them and crit my sleeping character into dying. That... was routine for that GM. The other 2 wolves went for the other caster - running around a martial to do so. That GM would have even mindless or animal NPCs focus lock healers then casters - even on round 1.

Even when I GM, if the opportunity is there a caster is going to get it. I don't focus lock them like nearly every GM I've played under does, but I won't pass on them either.

Is it worth it to focus lock on the backline? For a pure caster or even ranged martial I'd say no because they're not the same threat in Pathfinder that they are in DnD (or with a ranged martial, the action economy is often not there like you note). That's why I don't do this myself as a GM.

But for a summoner I'd say yes because it's a weakpoint to take out a martial if it's AC is low enough. BUT only if you're going for the pair. As a GM myself I'd likely go for neither until they were a proven threat. But if I did - I'd have my NPC go for the summoner if it was an intelligent NPC, and usually the Eidolon if not.

But whether its the better option or not, I've been trained by GMs to expect it, and I've come extremely close to losing characters when not being prepared for it or when the dice that didn't favor me.

I've also been trained by other players to not expect the front liners to know how to play defensively and actually hold a line. They much prefer playing offensively and leaving gaps in the line. It's not hard to understand - if they feel they can get 2-3 times the single target damage output of the backline, that becomes addictive over telling them to trip that guy, stand in the way of the other one, grapple here, reposition there.

Every GM I've played under has been willing to lose whole turns running around. And if they're ranged NPCs - then it's even more brutal. In that same Kingmaker game, my Kineticist hiding in the trees across a river has been focused down by longbow archers in towers that the martials were busy lighting on fire, while our psychic caster faced the same but got lucky when they missed. This particular GM for a while mad me put 'come over from DnD' as a redflag against any potential GM as I started thinking that was why I keep finding GMs like this. But I've also seen it now from GMs who've been with Pathfinder since it's inception.

Why is your Eidolon always taking less hits than your Summoner? I don't expect the Summoner to take 50% of the damage of the couple, the Eidolon takes most of the damage. 4 hits is the minimum you should consider.

Unless the Eidolon is grappling and has reactive strike, an aura, or something - I expect it to take almost no hits, and for the summoner to be the main target of any intelligent enemies. I expect most Eidolons to play a role more like a rogue or swashbuckler, or flanking for whoever does have reactive strikes, grapples, auras, and/or champion reactions.

The eidolon needs to find an excuse to force enemies to attack it, and it usually lacks these.

Often if the Eidolon is a target - it will be a target of 'Tumble Through' or 'Reposition'. More often 'Tumble Through' as while Reposition is superior for making someone susceptible to a very bad situation; in an indoor fight there's often nowhere to move someone to.

Relevant Tangent:
I had the experience two months ago of filling for a missing player at my brother's table. Final battles of the dungeon they were in - I took over a Monk with a +0 in Dex and all Str. I stood in a doorway and everything could just tumble through me to the backline, while I couldn't tumble past the enemy I was fighting. It was a badly made PC by a new player. I swapped his stance for Mountain - but it didn't solve the issue. This tangent is where I realized that you can't tank without either a reaction or the ability to block a spot - the low Dex on that monk meant every enemy just tumbled through me into the backline.

A Brutal Eidolon can just be tumbled through on the way to the Summoner.
A Fleet Eidolon has better odds of stopping that.
Both are pretty good at avoiding being repositioned.
However the Brutal is still what you want to be able to grapple or trip and thus lock enemies in place.

Initiative is golden on a summoner, as with most casters. Playing before your opponent allows you to hammer them with a big spell, or buff yourself/your martials, or go out of the way, or trip a big baddie.

From MY experience (which I guess is as valid or invalid as all the other ones), acting first and moving the summoner away from action while using the eidolon to tank has prevented more hits on me than any dex investment.

Disregarding the drama over when certain Champion reactions expire - I find it's still best for everyone to roll a lower initiative than whoever's playing Champion or Fighter. And Champions tend to have very low perception rolls unless the character gets multiple things to boost it. Ideally that list would also include Barbarian but I've only ever seen one player play a Barbarian without going into 'Leeroy Jenkins' mindset.

Going first gives you plenty of opportunity to foolishly move into the wrong spot because in the moment you moved it looked good or because you're a newer player that doesn't think 3-4 complete turns ahead.

Rather than acting first to move away, Ideally I'd like the Champion or Fighter to move first and get somewhere around which all the enemies and front liners will cluster.

This almost never happens... Which then leads to your strat being a good one.

But given that a summoner starts with an expert Will save it feels safer to leave wisdom alone. There is a second side to the game - which stats will most benefit you during roleplay.

Of of combat the best stats seem to be Cha, Int, and Dex.
Social skills, getting more skills, and a things like stealth and thievery. Thievery can be ignored if there's anyone who's main stat is dex. But having good stealth is always handy.

Summoner does have an edge having Cha as a main stat so they can max out the social skills. They don't get 'enough' skills so I favor a +1 to Int in any game that's going to have a good amount of roleplay just because it gives one more skill and lets me spend skill feats on 'skill training'.

arcady wrote:

So invariably, the backline ends up taking half or more of all the attacks.

We are back to the same kind of discussion I'm having with Easl: The number of attacks you take doesn't make AC more important than Con. If you survive longer by having higher Con then you survive longer if you are rarely attacked and you survive longer if you are regularly attacked. You just survive longer.

Even a Barbarian will often go down from full to 0 from a single crit.

Last session my players came up against a monster with a 'tentacle spam' attack. Took me several rounds to get him positioned into melee with 3 or the 4 PCs, and once I did I hit that attack and took the 2 frontliners from max to dying 2 from one hit each that were crits, and the one caster I got I somehow rolled low and only got a hit on him, so he was just 'mostly dead' and hearing Billy Crystal in the background. Fortunately for them the monster in question was equally mostly dead by that point and the next PC got a crit of his on him. PCs in this are level 7, enemy was a level+2 mini-boss.

And unusual number of crits all at once. But its something I see often: a high HP character instant faceplanting from a crit.

Pre-remaster every Barbarian I saw in play would get 'one-shot' to dying 2 at least once a session. Often twice, a few times three times a session. That low AC just meant half the hits they took did double damage, and they don't get 2.1x as many HP as a fighter, they just get a little bit more. It's less common now, but it still happens regularly to see a Barbarian get one-shot from max to dying-2.

Its been a little over 2 years now but I think my first Witch PC had maybe 14 AC and I assumed I was safe in the back, but after the third time our Barbarian got one-shot and the enemy had nowhere to go but me, I started re-evaluating things. That was BEFORE the GM started trying for backliners. Once he changed to that mindset things would just run around the front.

Maxing AC is a very good advice for a frontliner. But on a backliner, maxing HPs is more interesting. I honestly don't understand why players are so focused on maxing AC on backliners. It's certainly some kind of bia where people dislike to be hit even if they have a sizable hp pool to soak damage.

You're playing with a different kind of GM than some of us have faced.

I keep seeing one or both of two things:

1. Every NPC tries as hard as possible to ignore the frontline go for the backline. It's why all my own frontline PCs have gotten obsessed with maxing out athletics and going weaponless or sheildless so I can grapple... And why my Backline PCs focus on their AC. This has been almost every table I've been at save for a few that were example 2 below.

2. The Frontline stands around like fools or spreads out, leaving the backline standing on the German Autobahn in the oncoming traffic lane and the GM has to start making excuses for why nobody just drives forward through that galaxy-wide gap of foolishness. When you're sitting in a session and the GM has the NPCs turn around and run away while still at full HP - only to realize it's because they went for one of the frontlines that ran past them to do WTFery over there... you know your GM is coddling you when he's earned his TPK fair and square thanks to Leeroy way over there. And this... is a regular thing at some tables I've been at.

So invariably, the backline ends up taking half or more of all the attacks.

There's a third situation that makes it even worse for the backline:

Fighting indoors.

Throw 4 PCs and an elder dragon into a 5 foot by 5 foot room and where is that backline. This a comic example of a rather common situation for fantasy tRPGs that so love 'dungeons'. When you're on a battle map that starts looking like that puzzle game with a bunch of letters in a grid that has only one single open spot and you have to figure out how to get them all in the right order.
- In some games we spend a whole pile of actions on 'Reposition' and absolutely nobody is out of melee range of anyone else.

Tridus wrote:

Guilty, lol. Though most of the time that's because whoever is expected to be up front opening the door isn't paying attention and people get tired of sitting around waiting for them to wake up. Especially if it's not the first time and you've already prompted them that session.

Fully agree. At the end of the day, this is a game. The player's fun is the point, the PC's tactics merely contribute to it, they don't override it. If fun for your group is the impatient player kicks down the door while the other players get coffee, well I have no problem with that. My suggestion in that case would not be "GM beats them to a pulp until they are forced to adopt good tactics," it would be "GM reduces encounter difficulty so the players can enjoy the game their way." Or maybe a simple solution that requires neither GM nor players to change their ways: "group does two encounters every in-game day."

Quote:

Timber Sentinel annoys me so much as a GM. In fights with things like mindless creatures that can't reasonably deal with it, it can effectively trivialize entire encounters because it stops absurd amounts of damage and unlike Protector Tree the spell, is infinitely renewable.

Yeah, it's probably a contender for "best impulse." We have a wood kineticist. It has not trivialized encounters but . . .

Timber sentinel is notably better at mitigation than a Champion's Reaction, and then it's a debate at to whether or not the other side of the Champion Reaction (their strike, debuff, or whatever) is enough to offset that.

And I think that at best it makes them a match.

But that's still an issue because now you have an optional class feat from one class being on-par or often better for the same situation than the iconic class ability of another class.

If Timber Sentinel was "kineticist's main thing" then we could say it's fair: the game has two ways to be the 'damage mitigator' that are different but about matched. However for one it's the whole point of bringing that class (Champion Reaction), and for the other it's... Oh hey, I have a spare class feat, lets grab this random ability.

Ravingdork wrote:

SuperBidi wrote:

I'm pretty sure no one on this forum uses your strategies.

My old Agents of Edgewatch table certainly did, though that may have been part of the "swat team" fantasy we all had for ourselves.

I think more tables than myself use good small unit tactics.

I agree with small unit tactics. But I also have to remind myself that I'm not playing with a group of RL soldiers who 'get it' and don't take offense at leadership at that level.

At the end of the day, I'm gaming with civilians who all want to be 'free to be you and me' and so on. Mindsets that get people killed in real life.

But it's a game, not real life. So I hold my piece while that one eyebrow is twitching behind my screen.

I get used to offering light suggestions where I see an opening to, but I'm not going to order someone to 'go left, swap with that guy, while you flank so and so and then this and that.'

At my own table, I've lost players because other players with into 'game-splain' mode and tried dictating action choices to the table. Even telling 'Officer Splainer' to stop, the player getting yelled at still walks out half the time.

Its kind of the luck of the draw if a table all approach play the same way or not. You can't force it.

arcady wrote:

Summoner ...

It's also oddly a class much easier to play in person than on a VTT because the VTTs just get all the permissions and automation wrong for it, and I play online so I keep seeing how messy that can get when the player is also trying to learn the controls in a new VTT.

One of the things holding me back from using a more advanced VTT is we I don't play the conventional way. Never have, never will since it is a tactically poor way to engage.

Most of the time over the years, I've seen groups kind of let the DM go, "Door is open, there are some orcs there or monster, roll initiative."

I don't enjoy this type of play in a game with this much variation and ability. Why wouldn't I use stealth to scout ahead if I can build a really strong stealth character? Why wouldn't I decide where to engage the enemy? Why wouldn't I want to hit them at a distance first forcing them to use move actions while I'm using damaging attack actions at range to leave them already hurt with lower hit points once they hit the frontline?

Most VTTs cannot handle this type of play yet. Hopefully it will get better because I'm not changing how I play for some visual bells and whistles.

Your playstyle in a post just prior to this describes how I like to handle things as a player, being a veteran. But I've never get the chance to play with others who have even a single tactical brain cell in them. ;)

Check doors, have heavies open, try to draw things out, etc.
You only rush in when doing so has you at an advantage - you've created chaos in their ranks and reduced their visibility but not your own, or something like that.

VTTs can work just great for this. The deciding factor on a tactical playstyle if groups coordinating and ensuring you didn't invite Leeroy Jenkins to the table.

In fact I find a VTT helps more tuned in players better see the tactical choices and coordinate what they do.

arcady wrote:

[

No amount of HPs makes up for being crit. In play I've seen Barbarian as having the worst survivability of any class I've seen people try for this very reason. Especially pre-remaster.

Also, Summoner doesn't even have light armor proficiency.

And a few extra HP is not going to help when you become a crit sponge.

But your Eidolon already has max AC - you're reducing crit chance on someone who shouldn't be targeted at all, in exchange for HP on the actually punched target ideally.

If your cloth caster with 30ft range is getting punched, run away and use Boost Eidolon, you're still hitting standard martial numbers. If your GM is still chasing your cloth caster, grapple and trip exists. If none of that work, take Sentinel dedication, IDK.

That's not what I see though.

In my current game the GM is ignoring the caster, so the caster is not using his spells and just attacking with a melee weapon.

But in the other examples I have seen it has always been enemies will try everything to ignore the eidolon and go for the caster because they are visibly linked and one is easy to hit.

The mere presence of a summoner can make enemies start to pressure the backline even more than if the backline has a wizard, cleric, alchemist, etc - because now the backline is also "melee flanking" them.

So once there is a summoner, people need to start body blocking that backline, and I see enemies mostly pass on attacking the eidolon if they can either gap close, range, or hit a different target.

In a comp like:

S.C.W
......
B.E.R
..[X]..
[Y]

[X] will work on the Barbarian or Rogue, [Y] will shoot the summoner or run around and melee the summoner, or try to flank the Barbarian or Rogue.

Eidolon is always the absolute last thing anyone targets. Only if they have no way to get S at all, and need to deal with S and E more than any other targets, do they bother with E.

My current GM is the first time I've seen an exception and I suspect he's just trying to be nice to a new player.

I imagine people are looking at my stories about the groups of new players I've had and just wondering at what kind of weirdness am I in... I know I do that sometimes.

But a lot of these folks are coming over from games where every last dust-bunny has unlimited reactive strikes, there is no flanking, and every caster has fireball as a cantrip or something. And if you're coming from games like that some of the crazy confusion I keep encountering makes sense.

New players are often coming in with trained expectations from games that look similar on the surface, and wanting to try the most unique option possible first.

Summoner just gives you two chances to get it wrong instead of just one. :)

It's also oddly a class much easier to play in person than on a VTT because the VTTs just get all the permissions and automation wrong for it, and I play online so I keep seeing how messy that can get when the player is also trying to learn the controls in a new VTT.

SuperBidi wrote:

Case A wrote:

S..W

......
E..R
..C..

Case B wrote:

W..S

......
E..R
..C..

Superbidi, when you tell these boards your advice is to keep S and E together, what you're communicating is neither case A or B, it's case C:

R..W
.....
S..E
..C..

Arcady, Deriven, me - and probably many of the lurkers - hear you say "keep them together" and take it to literally mean Superbidi thinks you should keep them in 2 adjacent 5' squares.

Yeah.

Also to add. Case C is what I keep seeing new players do.

I've yet to GM a player playing summoner so I have to be the one at the table to say "Ok folks, I need to help this guy out a bit."

Instead I'm one of the other PCs in that diagram. Maybe I'm a Champion who rolled lower on initiative and saw the summoner move into diagram C while until my turn comes up I'm back there where the Wizard belongs - and then they body block me out of the action.
- This has literally happened several times. Most of my uses of the 'reposition' action have involved looking up the rules for willing targets because I'm trying to get some fool caster to be behind my Champion or my Wrestler Monk in one game and one one-shot I was in. ;)

Or I'm on a ranged character and just watching the mess unfold.

As a player, I have 'limited agency' to demand how another player plays their character without coming across as rude. I use the word 'demand' there because even softly given advice can get heard as 'you [expletive] something-or-other, do I what I want you to do'...

That's a social issue not relevant to this thread as I struggle to find ways to give advice at tables that have the 'play what you want' philosophy so hard ingrained that even advice is seen as intrusive.

But... this formation C is what I hear when I hear 'keep them together' because I have seen 3 out of 4 summoner players go for it. Number 4 was only an exception because they picked the 'combine into one' ability at level 1, got annoyed at how Foundry handled it poorly, and tossed the character after one session.

Now when I think 'keep them apart' I think the examples of A and B earlier - but I hadn't considered breaking down the difference in the two though it is likely if I played one I'd have landed on B unless we got hit from multiple sides, then gone for A with an attempt to switch positions.

However even if I'm using A or B - I still want a higher AC on my caster because I am very used to being targeted in the back line by reach or range. I mostly play assorted healers (anything but cleric) or ranged martials, and once a witch - and being shot at back there was and is a whole regular thing, combined with enemies that try to rush through the front line to get to the backline. Had one GM that would always have enemies go for my water kineticist - even animals and mindless - because she was a healer. Even at the start of combat before any of us had done any actions, they'd "know" I was a healer... so I just go used to stacking on any excuse I could find for more AC. Again another one of those 'social issue' problems.

But the summoner caster has a similar magnet on it - the easier to hit one of the two. Somehow a Skeleton and a Giant Rat both know they can get crits that way with some GMs... ;)

And while they shouldn't if the GM plays right; the Elf Rogue and his Human gunslinger companion in some hypothetical encounter likely would know to go for the caster if they can get there. At which point you do not want to be a crit-magnet.

Here's another Case D - which is actually what I see new players gravitate to:

EXAMPLE D.1

H..W
.....
..C..
S.[X].E
(where S and E both get into melee along with other melee)

I have repeatedly had people at tables tell me the point of summoner is for self flanking, I point out why that's a bad move, and then they go and make a character and do it. It's a whole thing I keep running into.

EXAMPLE D.2

H..W
.....
..C..
S..E
.[X].
(where S and E both get into melee and block other melee from access)

- Where [X] is a melee opponent.

But even more I see this:

EXAMPLE D.3

H..W
.....
.S.C
..[X].E

- Notice how nobody is getting flanking here, and yet all 3 melee martials are in melee with that enemy. Me... I'm back there as H or W. Healer or Ranged DPS.

Granted I also see this all the time in a game with no Summoners. Open space all around the enemy and the martials stand in front of it side by side and me in the back saying "move just a little more" getting met with "But I like it here".

arcady wrote:

Shouldn't the summoner's second highest stat be Dex given that they have no armor proficiencies?

No, it's Con. You share your hit points with your Eidolon so you benefit a lot from high Con. Also, getting an Armor is trivial in PF2, if you really miss the few points of AC.

My Summoner has 18 Cha, 16 Con and 12 Dex, and I don't miss the Dex (but the Con saved me a few times, you don't want to drop as a Summoner).

I just don't see that.

No amount of HPs makes up for being crit. In play I've seen Barbarian as having the worst survivability of any class I've seen people try for this very reason. Especially pre-remaster.

Also, Summoner doesn't even have light armor proficiency.

I suppose if you want to be the party tank with your eidolon - which then entails keeping your caster out of range of enemies rather than near that eidolon. I keep seeing players try to be the party tank with things like the plant eidolon - and in fact that's what a player is doing in the game I'm in. But I'm starting to feel it's not that viable a position to go for because he's got no AC and is too easy to crit because... he keeps his caster too close. Enemies just melee hit his caster instead of the eidolon.

And a few extra HP is not going to help when you become a crit sponge.

As a player with assorted online GMs I've been having the experience of seeing a lot of GMs that will just throw new players to the wolves and then get short with them when they don't 'get it'.

If I'm the GM sure, as I noted. As a player I keep getting pushback when I try to help players through these things. I don't push the issue because people do not like to be told how to play their character, and I refuse to be 'that guy'. But I do try to give advice.

Often I see the pushback of 'just play what you want' when anyone at a table tries to coordinate as a group.

But that's a social dynamic.

Solvable when a session 0 is done right. I've found in session 0 that people often do not like to show and tell their characters, compare notes, and pick things together. Again a social dynamic issue that when I'm GMing I forcibly push past by using Foundry to give everyone full access to everyone's sheets and openly discussing what each player is picking and asking them 'have you all thought about that as a group' when they're thinking of options.

It's only in this thread as a comment in response to the person who noted that their new players always somehow pick good choices.

My experience is they will pick random choices unless someone shows them how that will work out in play.

And to bring that back to Summoner - it has a lot of options that become bad trap choices if combined poorly. So invariably... I see new players go there.

I've yet to meet new players that will make good choices on their own before they've mastered the game's rules.

Then I see a player playing with a summoner in a party like this with all the new players, and it quickly tries to use Electric Arc and Strike with the Eidolon and notices almost instantly from the damage it caused by landing a Strike and an EA that it is doing better alone than the martial and the caster are doing together (and in fact he is because the players still don't understand the potential of the system and its mechanics).

You have been blessed in the ability of your new players to quickly grasp things. :)

What I see when a new player hits summoner is:

Oh, now I have 2 martials.
Or: Phase bolt sounds cool, electric arc is for losers.

Which is a level beyond just the complexity issue.

Even on full casters in the hands of new to PF2E folk I keep seeing:
- "I cast phase bolt, then hit it with my str-based melee weapon."
In the last few months I have seen that from a Cleric, Druid, and Wizard. Turn after turn of misses, followed by the inevitable "man casters just suck in pathfinder."

And silently on the other side of my screen, one of my eyebrows is twitching...

I try to become aware of potential trap options and bad moves so that when I'm GMing I can at least caution new players about them and work to steer them towards something they will enjoy. As a player with assorted online GMs I've been having the experience of seeing a lot of GMs that will just throw new players to the wolves and then get short with them when they don't 'get it'.

I just hope the presence of such tech doesn't make RPG designers make their systems overly complicated. Fingers crossed the next 10 years won't see new tabletop RPGs which are too complicated to play using pen, paper, and actual table.

In the long run it probably will.

The developers of World of Warcraft have admitted to building fights for certain popular mods. They both build them in attempts to get around those mods, and to have information handed to players through only methods the mods read. Specifically mods that telegraph enemy moves. But they also time actions and require player activity on a pace that the UI does not reveal, but which can only be seen through mods.

Once one side of a community over-relies on something, the other side will start to cater to it.

I suspect somewhere around the time of 'DnD 5.75' we'll start seeing options that can only be properly handled using their in-house VTT or a competing VTT that has scripted for it.

I already feel some parts of Pathfinder would just be a pain to run without a VTT.

This isn't a problem for experienced players because they'll know what to build around. But compare to something like Fighter which is much more newbie friendly because unless you do...

That's been my point.

I keep seeing players who are completely new to Pathfinder try it. I suspect because when I got the new DND 2024 PHB, I didn't see an entry for Alchemist, Gunslinger, or Summoner. And so yeah - guess what I keep seeing over and over again from new players to Pathfinder. While I think there's an addon book that makes a gun character of some kind, and I didn't list Inventor because DnDers keep telling me they have something for that (arcanist, machinist, I dunno and my FFXIV references are taking over)...

So yeah complete newbies are attracted to Alchemists and Summoners like flies to honey and it just so happens these are probably the two hardest classes to play. Number 3 on the popularity list has been Gunslinger and I've seen new players just ghost games mid session because of that one - yet as a player myself the best DPS I've ever had was with Gunslinger because I knew what to do with my options.

So...

I see new players on Summoner trip up over Act Together, over having two sheets yet one HP pool, over where to stand, over what to do with the caster, and some unique Foundry issues caused by the class not really being added to Foundry all that well.

Popular mistakes:

My caster is a melee DPS.
My Eidolon should move in BEHIND my caster so it's safe.
My Eidolon will protect the back line, my caster will flank the reactive-striking melee boss.
My Caster shoots phase bolt, now my Eidolon bites - why can't it hit? (forgetting about MAP).
My Caster will flank for my Eidolon against this melee boss.
I can't find my Eidolon's actions on my sheet (looking at caster sheet).
I can't find my spells on my sheet (looking at Eidolon sheet).
I clicked to apply the damage I took and nothing happened (Foundry issue)
I can't move my Eidolon token (GM not setting up pet right / Foundry issue)
I can't put my Eidolon on the map (GM not setting up pet right / Foundry issue)
Wait, My Eidolon can't use my skill feat?

And then there's all the situations where they forget to declare Act Together, mis count actions, and so on. A GM just presuming you're always using Act Together avoid half of these - but even with that you still get some confusion.

Deriven Firelion wrote:

Depending on how you shade your stats, the eidolon is likely to have equal dexterity to the summoner.

If you speak of a Str Eidolon. Dex Eidolons have much higher Dexterity than the Summoner (+3 higher in general).

Shouldn't the summoner's second highest stat be Dex given that they have no armor proficiencies?

My instinct on making one would be to go +3 Dex, +1 Con, +4 Cha, and the remaining stat depending.

That puts a dex pokemon at only 1 above the caster.

But I've not played the class. I've only seen people try various different things in games I've been a player in and give up in frustration. I'm still waiting to see a player try one in a game I run. So all my build thinking exists in a vacuum of guesses as to what was going wrong with other players.

I want more Lost Omens and short 2-3 level long adventures, and less adventures and adventure paths.

I hate forums that put a lock on how long you can edit a post...

A day later and I see a typo that changes the meaning of what I meant.

That sentence should have been:

I want more Lost Omens and short 2-3 level long adventures, and less adventure paths.

As in - I want more adventures, less adventure paths.

I suspect the sales heavily favor the adventure paths, but I've got a near complete collection of these for 2E now, and the adventures are just... better. Mostly because they have fewer cooks in the kitchen. So things remain consistent.

They're also easier to run and play without suffering burnout.

I've always wanted to try a summoner as my first PF2e character

I'd advise caution here.

Summoner is a complex class to build out, and majorly complex class to play.

I've had the odd luck of only seeing it played by players completely new to Pathfinder 2E every single time I have seen someone play it, four times now. And every one of those players has struggled.

I've seen three of them give up. One of those give up on Pathfinder 2E itself as a result. Granted for one of those players it was just a single session full of expletives shared between him and the GM before he tossed his sheet out and the GM banned the class from that table. The others were a slow burn of a player losing interest in showing up for sessions.

The fourth is in an ongoing game and every time it comes around to his turn, if we're in combat; something goes wrong. I try to cut in and help him sometimes during his turns, but I'm also often trying to talk over other people making annoyed noises when I do so.

I don't know if the player is suffering, but he sure sounds miserable.

I highly recommend getting as much system mastery as you can before playing a summoner. Specifically master actions and both taking and dishing out conditions.

You really want to know, more than any other class, what action you can do. You've got to split them between your trainer and your pokemon... and its messy when you're still trying to learn how things work and what adds up to what where.

I've been playing PF2E since the end of 2022, and I'm thinking I'm just maybe about ready to be able to not mess up the flow of my actions on a summoner. Or at least be aware of it and not get frustrated over making constant mistakes.

In Pathfinder 2E, I strongly advise new players to avoid both summoner and alchemist. Before the remaster I would have also said Oracle.

I know people can master alchemist and make it fun and quick to play if they know how the mechanics work, because it's what I'm playing in one game, and I've seen another player breeze through it.

I assume that if I ever see a player who's already experienced with pathfinder play summoner, I'd see someone play it with fun and no confusion. Everything that makes it confusing is something people naturally pick up with time playing the game - but thrown at you all at once out of the gate with summoner. But so far I've only seen newbies play it.

What I want and what sells well are very likely not in perfect sync.

I want more Lost Omens and short 2-3 level long adventures, and less adventures and adventure paths.

I want then to fill out the missing parts of the world map of Golarian.

I want the lands south of Geb for an 'East Africa vibe', I want the lands south of Taldor for a Persia / South Asia vibe, and I want the lands to the west of the Inner Seas for a Maya / Inca / Amazon / Lakota / and all my other cousins vibe.

I worry about more rules because eventually a game gets bloated. Too many classes means things start to break down - if not in balance, then in clarity of/or purpose.

I think we have enough adventure paths. They're super popular but they keep getting poor reviews because they're team efforts and clashing writing styles or writers not quite meeting up right leaves them disjointed. I'd rather have those writers write a lot of short adventures for use here and there. But even just selling the very people I game with on why I think adventures are better than adventure paths has been a tough sell.

So yeah... not expecting what I want. But that's what it is.

Let's take a Fire kineticist as an example: you'd think that you could Simply blast stuff with fireballs, but that's completely wrong! Not only your build requires you to be melee until level 10 (aka, basically your whole campaign most of the time) but It also requires to use a "death by a thousand cuts" strategy, where most of your damage comes from proccing weaknesses and from the Fire Oracle dedication everyone gets.

Oracle? Why?

I played a Fire/Water Kin and was often our top DPS. And we had Barbarians in and out of the party often. They would top me for DPS for a bit, but only because I'd be spending half my actions healing the up from some rank of dying...

And I almost never got into melee.

My problem with kineticist after playing 3 of them is not about combat power, but out of combat. With the main stat as Con, I found I didn't have enough skills and was at best number 2 on any skill I did take.

That meant that as soon as any battle ended, unless people kindly avoided taking certain skills, I was more or less benched.

I could roleplay this or that all I wanted, sure - but if it mattered someone else would need to be the one doing it so we'd have better odds of not failing.

Combat wise, there are plenty of easy paths to making a strong ranged DPS that can just keep going all day long. And I can do it while also being a healer or mitigation.

And it's really not a complex class at all. You pick your impulses, and then you spam them. And you don't need to think about managing when to use the "good ones" because they have unlimited uses.

Most turns could be an impulse and movement or raise shield, or an overflow impulse, open gate, and blast.

The gameplay makes a red box basic DnD fighter look complicated.

And it's pretty easy to pick impulses. You can quickly go into any element and spot a whole set from 1-10 that will a specific playstyle. Once you hit level 11 it's open season and you can start changing yourself around for the needs of the day, but the list to pick from is tiny compared to slot-based casters so it's not all that hard to deal with.

That said, anyone whose takeaway from World War I is limited to its inciting incident (and who makes that inciting incident the assassination of Franz and Sophie rather than the German blank check to Austria and the subsequent Austrian ultimatum to Serbia!) is Doing It Wrong.

This is the problem with history. The 'inciting incident' of WWI could easily be said to the last King of France convening the 3 estates to discuss tax reform.

You can trace things back continuously without even making many logic gaps or time leaps. Most directly though - there's a period right before German unification where a post Napoleonic France tries to recapture the glory days by slaughtering millions in the German countryside. Itself a revenge for things done to them that were a revenge for things they did to others that were... etc.

The first break in the chain seems to be the failed royal treasury of France. But that probably also has causes beyond the simple.

The problem tRPGs often have is a short-line form of history where events happen in isolation. Or a super long history where people take action based on something thousands of years ago.

I love Golarian but... it has both problems.

Imagine the real world if we were still fighting grudge matches today over ancient Babylonian succession disputes, yet also couldn't draw a line even as direct as between 9/11 and Afghanistan.

but with less dungeon-crawling.

That.

That's what I want.

I'm running Abomination Vaults right now and I've come to despise it. I've been super close to cancelling my campaign multiple times and the ONLY thing keeping me going is that when I was a player in it I had 3 GMs give up and cancel it on us. A 4th I left for schedule reasons and in following their discord - they abandoned it also.

Because dungeon crawls just get in the way of roleplay.

Monster in room 1, then 2, then 3 ... repeat to N.

No matter how much logic you put into that, players can and will just roll through and slaughter things. It hyper trains them to think they're entitled to bust down the door of people's homes and kill everyone inside.
- That's been a theme everytime, and in running it I've come to realize that half the early battles we were in, we were technically the bad guys.

The door was there, the treasure was there, the thing inside looked like a monster or couldn't explain itself fast enough, or somebody heard a rumor from 30 years ago, or I got tongue tied, or it was unclear in defending it's right to exist, so the PCs killed it (which just reads back extremely badly in light of things that happen all too often in the modern world).

As a GM I can see plot and story here and there - and if the PCs go from 1 to 2 to 3 they get the plot. But if they go from 3 to 1 to 4 to 2 they don't.

I'm just so over dungeon crawls because every excuse to make them make sense is way too thin and can be skipped through no fault of anyone leading to just a 'murder-hobo slog'.

I want stories with plots, and locations that unfold as the story does. I want tools to bake in why a villain is the villain, or NPCs players will encounter that they don't have 'baked in logic' to presume 'this guy is in room F23a, so we kill him.'

AV has plot and story, but it's all 'on the side' and players nature can steamroll right past it. And it's just so insanely long that it gets tiring trying over and over again to get the story back in there rather than 'there's a door, bust it down'.

So...

NO MORE DUNGEON CRAWLS.

I finally got the single file one by using a different computer. Pulled out my laptop and used that.

AFTER doing that, I went to my PC and tried again, and it gave the old one.

Seems hardware connected?

Hamitup wrote:

Llez wrote:

Same; my quick check was going to p.17 and looking at otherworldly protection (both are identical, listing alignments rather than spirit).

My quick check was the back and both list the OGL as the license.

Edit to add: I tried from a different browser and it downloaded the new one. I wonder if the system isn't pointing to the new version if you downloaded recently.

The downloads can get a bit finicky sometimes, so it might take a refresh or cache clear to get things displaying correctly.

Tried 3 different browsers, and repersonalizing.

Remaster is in the 'file per chapter' option but not in the 'single file' one.

Switched from phone to PC and Firefox to Chrome, in incognito mode. Still the old version. If it's caching, it's not doing it on my end.

Same here.

Have also tried the 'problems with this' button to have it re-personalize.

I can get the remaster in file per chapter, but not in single file

zergtitan wrote:

If we already got the previous pre-remaster version via subscription, will we be getting the remaster PDF update? or is this a completely different book?

If you already have the Guns & Gears PDF, you'll get the remaster version of the download automatically just like you would when we release a new printing with errata.

I see the GnG PDf is now available. But it's not yet in our downloads for people who'd previously bought it.

Is there meant to be a process for that?

EDIT: Seeing the notes above will. Will check again in a few hours.

Red Griffyn wrote:

[...]

The alchemical bomb feat on gunslinger was also updated to 4+half level of advanced alchemy of at level bombs or ammunition.

[...]

Alchemists lost any ability that links -number- of items to level.

Gunslingers for 1 feat, gains 4 + 1/2 level of a limited subset.

I mean, it's great that Gunslinger got a genuinely good feat out of the remaster like that, but holy hell, why does Paizo appear to hate/fear Alchemists so much.

Quick Alchemy being infinite and Versatile Vials coming back at 2 per 10 minutes is more than enough to make up for any X + half level PER DAY.

If anything, Gunslinger is getting the short end of this stick.

Especially if that's in batches of 4. You spend it all on level 0 bullets, and risk running out before the day ends if in multiple encounters.

The way I see it, this is potentially a massive nerf to gunslingers, to go from batches of 10 to batches of 4. Possibly crippling the ability to use them in dungeons. The class might be 'limited' to campaigns with few daily encounters now.

You might need to collaborate with the GM to narrow down the question or skills,

This is key to me.

A GM should never base your success on you picking the right skill. They should get the roll for the skill that applies.

In Person: just have them roll a d20 and look at their sheet for the math yourself.

In Foundry: just use the recall knowledge button of PF2E HUD or the recall knowledge macro of... I think PF2E Workbench (?). It will show that roll compared against every possible skill - and if the player had targeted an NPC who's sheet had a recall knowledge entry, shows any relevant matches with a green check or red x. Plus showing the totals in case you as a GM see a more fitting match.

When I try to remember the answer to 2+2...

I don't first try to think of whether I learned that in Kindergarten, Calculus for STEM majors, Life Drawing, or Military Engineering Lore.

I just know the answer.

I have a GM right now who's always asking us 'which lore skill do you use' and we auto-fail if we don't pick right. It drives me nuts. Especially as I'm a Thaumaturge with Diverse Lore, but it's a question I feel shouldn't be getting asked for any of us.

DMurnett wrote:

Something I really want is more playable fey ancestries.

Now that we have centaurs, minotaurs,and awakened animals, we are SO close to having a Narnia campaign.

If we can get satyr and something akin to a gargoyle or harpy, then I think we will have most all of the bases covered.

Long as it's not gender locked. Give me Faun, but not Satyr - since to Paizo these are different and one is not gender locked.

A non-gender locked Satyr "almost" convinced me to give Daggerheart a serious look. But then I saw the game engine itself which was seriously not my thing.

arcady wrote:

More Thaumaturge Implements. Thaumaturge is the only Cha based non-vancian class in the game. So I'd like to see more from it. I'd like to see some way for a non-weapon Thaum to be able to use a shortbow at proficiency.

Does a 1+ handed weapon count as a one-handed weapon? I'm pretty sure they're their own distinct category, so it's not an eligible choice for a weapon implement.

It probably doesn't break anything if you allow a thaumaturge to use a bow for exploit vulnerability but disallow Implements Empowerment.

Yeah, losing implement is too great of an issue for most Thaum builds.

There's a feat to get around needing a free hand during reload - but if you're not weapon implement you're still losing whatever you implement gives or does.

If we already own this in PDF, and already own the foundry mods - is this errata version going to be in our downloads or need to be re-purchased?

Any particular class options people are really hoping to see in the future?

Class options...

I want to see more for Kineticist. More impulses.

I'd like to see a whole new set of 'gate' options that are NOT elements, and with some; if taken prevent you from taking element gates.
- To expand that game design into other ideas.

But Paizo's already said they're 'shy' about non-Vancian options.

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More Thaumaturge Implements. Thaumaturge is the only Cha based non-vancian class in the game. So I'd like to see more from it. I'd like to see some way for a non-weapon Thaum to be able to use a shortbow at proficiency.

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More alchemist options for weapon proficiency. It'd be nice for the class to be able to use a non-reload based ranged weapon.

It'd be nice to have some AoE bombs to it can target a save (reflex for explosions, fort for poison gas).

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Back to kineticist...

Give it some ability to get an elemental animal companion. That should not be a druid only thing.

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Those are my ideas at the moment based on recent characters I've been playing with.

Fabios wrote:

sadly in an extreme encounter i think that a gunslinger would never ever find space, and that everyone would prefer a cleric or a bard over a wizard or a psychic

I played a level 6 gunslinger into a level 10 encounter in Outlaws and contributed tons, but clearly that's not possible, so I must exist in an alternate universe.

Most lethal results in a PC I've ever played was a pistolero gunslinger using two dueling pistols. Not the same model as yours, but another one of those 'things that apparently don't exist despite my experience of imagining that I remember playing it.' :)

She was also my second most "out of combat potent" PC. Behind only the Thaumaturge I just started playing - so this is just a guess that my Thaumaturge will outshine what I was able to do with my Slinger. With my Slinger I was basically both a dynamic 'face' and 'detective' because I dipped into an archetype that gave skills that synergized well with where I'd put my stats.

I will concede to the anti-slinger faction that Gunslinger has some 'trap options'. But that doesn't mean the class isn't viable. Just means you need to avoid the trap options and then 'learn to play' the build you do go with - as a team.

I think the term for this is 'high skill floor' - meaning it takes to player skill to get to competent with the class. This isn't a problem. It just means it's a class beginners should avoid. Beginners will be frustrated with bad results.

I feel it also has a 'high skill ceiling'. Meaning that an advanced skill player can go very far with it and get extremely effective results. So a player with a lot of PF2E expertise can thrive on gunslinger.

So! the community takes great pride in saying that every build is viable and one can't just win the game in character creation; the second sentence stands true, but does the first? partially, in my opinion. it all depends on the encounter's difficulty!

You can't "win" in character creation but you can certainly "lose".

However you can lose in two different ways: as an individual PC, and as a team.

It's possible to having a set of "winning PCs" and thus lose as a team because they don't make a good mix.

It's a little less easy to have a "losing PC" and for the group to still be viable, but it happens. Especially if you have 5+ players.

The problem is that players coming from "that other tRPG" always think of what they will play. So they and many of those YouTubers only make individual character tier lists. Those are mostly meaningless in PF2E.

Successful PF2E players think of what the group will make together.

YouTubers making click-bait lists don't make team-comp tier lists because it's a much more complex model to build, and it is highly subjective and varies a lot more.

It's very easy to spot a 'losing' team comp. Unless you're wrong because of the specific adventure or set of players. ;)
It's not so easy to spot a 'winning' team comp. Unless you go ultra-basic in both the comp and what kinds of adventures they will be used in.