citybound4st's page

I have really only been keeping up on reading the responses in this forum, and to be honest....

It feels like a lot of y'all would hate on someone playing a game like Breath of Wild differently to how the creators of the game intended it to be played.

Where's the room for creativity? Isn't this supposed to be a role-playing game and not a "let's see what stats we can put together to best beat the boss" game?

The main reason I come to Pathfinder, to TTRPGs in general, is for the collective and collaborative storytelling aspect. The rules, combat, and dice are just there to help that. If I wanted to play something that was so rigid in how you could do things regarding the rules, then I might as well go play a video game. Heck, the adventure path I mentioned that I was going to run has been made into a video game (and one of my new players has actually played it before, but that's neither here nor there).

Someone brought up the eight pillars of fun, and several other people brought up how they like to have fun at their tables. I'm not going to tell people how they should have fun when attempting to roll weirdly shaped pieces of plastic with numbers on them onto a table while playing adult make-believe.

This thread is completely full of people assuming what I said or what player B or D said, or what was intended by anyone involved, and there's a saying about what happens when you assume. Perhaps I (or Robo) didn't give you enough context for you to understand fully what was going on. Perhaps we didn't feel that context was needed to grasp the situation, and perhaps it may be because nothing else was happening in the situation.

Anyway, I thought I might leave my thoughts here. I'm gonna refrain from saying more as I'm starting to get a little heated about a random conversation online which doesn't really have any bearing on my life.

I think to add to this is that this is something RoboMNRK and I have been seeing in the Pathfinder playerbase as a whole, that the "only" or "best" way to play the game is to have an optimized/good party comp. Part of what I was trying to do with this thread was to discuss this specific situation, but I was also using it sort of as an example to talk about the player base at large.

I have a player of mine who has been kind of upset with some of the meta in the playerbase. I'll explain what I mean by discussing what has been going on in my Kingmaker group that's currently still forming.

Basically, one of the players (Player A) is thinking about doing barbarian, champion, or cleric (potentially Warpriest). Another one of my players (Player B) is looking to build a spell sub mentalist wizard. For a minute, that's all the players I had, but I found a couple more in a LFG page online (it's an online game anyway, so I didn't mind). One of the players I had added (Player C) said he was looking to play either a wizard or a sorcerer. The second player I added (Player D) was simply looking to round out the party after hearing what everyone else was looking to play. Earlier today, Player D said he would be looking to do bard, oracle, druid, or cleric, and mentioned that sorcerers can do a lot, but if Player C didn't play Phoenix Sorcerer, he would stick with one of those four options.

Player B then messages me privately saying that this was one of the things he wanted to avoid in this game, that there would be something the party would have to do in character creation to be a "good" team. He had said he liked when Player A said that having blind spots as a team would make things more difficult but that it can be fun to fail things (and I agree with this sentiment, although none of the other players have commented on this remark). He (B) concluded with "So the mentality of play this subclass of sorcerer and we should be good rubs me the wrong way" and I can't help but see where he's coming from. Players A and B are both pretty versed in D&D5E, to give an idea of their frame of mind.

We were talking about healing as a group and the topic of who gets access to what healing came up, revealing that arcane casters don't have access to healing but occult, divine, and primal casters do through Heal and Soothe. But outside of that, there's also healing potions. Player D then chimes in saying that potions are very action taxing in combat but are great out of combat. Player B also mentioned concerns about this comment to me. I explained that potentially, the mentality could come from the fact that healing potions take an Interact action to take out and then a manipulate action to drink and only restore 1d8 HP whereas Lay on Hands is one action for 6 HP, Heal costs 1 action for 1d8 HP (or 2 actions for 1d8+8 HP), and Soothe costs 2 actions for 1d10+4 HP. He then asks why not change the rule of drinking a healing potion requiring an Interact action to take it out first, to which I replied that I don't have a compelling reason to change the combat rules as I feel they work robustly.

To conclude this post and pose a question to the reader, what should I do about this? Why is the playerbase so bent on making a completely viable party? Would it break the game to house rule that drinking potions don't require an Interact action first?