demlin's page

Here's mine (though untested) https://github.com/BernhardPosselt/pf2e-kingmaker-tools/blob/master/docs/ho use-rules.md#battlecry-skirmish-rules

Sorcerer. So many spells, great flexibility in spell lists. I just lament the fact that melee sorcerer like dragon disciple isn't really working in 2e. I think paizo needs to print more class archetypes like the battle harbinger (which looks pretty cool in the game I GM right now) that alter the base chassis of a class more.

That being said, if I could, I'd like to play Oracle some time. Such great flavor and interesting mechanics, plus I like the divine spell list

The thing that causes the most complaints in the early game are leadership activities. There aren't a lot of use cases as you've mentioned so feel free to just skip it or reduce them until dealing with unrest becomes important.

I wouldn't touch region activities since those are very important and sparse.

I'd highly recommend to mix army combat with the rules from Battlecry since army combat is just too mechanically boring. Recruiting and equipping armies is fine, it's just the war minigame itself is incredibly shallow, since it basically boils down to rolling attacks all the time. There are no good 3rd action choices and the rout rules don't really work as intended; it's quicker to just kill an army than to try to rout it.

As for early game war: highly recommend it since you need a source of ruin and tension. Maybe you can get in some feeling of urgency by letting Pitax or Brevoy claim hexes.

Kingdom:

When: After they've defeated the Stag Lord, Jamandi sends help, providing craftsmen and materials to get you started

Why: Jamandi wants you as an ally to prevent Surtova from attacking Rostland. The Swordlords of Restov were loyal to Chorral and suspect that Surtova f%&@ed with him.

Craft Luxuries or Create a Masterpiece could be tied to small quests that unlock those activities. You can activate/deactivate activities easily on the Tools kingdom sheet. Interject those quests after 2 sessions. That way you don't get overwhelmed, lighten up the turns and don't get overwhelmed.

Players can use activities more than once. There are a couple exceptions to that. Reread the rules a couple times to get an idea and skip the unimportant ones to reduce analysis paralysis. Your kingdom should level roughly ever 5 turns with V&K adjustments. You need adventuring content after 2 turns to spice it up.

Apart from that I don't know what to recommend since you don't really list any issues

IMHO beast master as an archetype was a mistake and it should have been a class feature instead. That way you can tune the budget

That document basically says: up to the GM.

Thank you, so basically it's an optional reroll with a +2 circumstance bonus, but the GM is not allowed to tell you the outcome (most likely only applies to events then)

Inflation

Looking at the rules text:

You can call upon the solution to aid in resolving any Kingdom skill check made during the remainder of this Kingdom turn. Do so when a Kingdom skill check is rolled, but before you learn the result. Immediately reroll that check with a +2 circumstance bonus; you must take the new result

Is this a more convoluted way of saying that the next check gains a +2 circumstance bonus and the fortune trait?

Because if you roll the check you immediately know the result based off the rules, so I don't think this applies as a re-roll like supernatural solution. Unless of course you need to throw your dice under the table and re-roll immediately without picking it up :)

Having less skills makes everything out of combat less fun

Hexploration ties into time tracking and traveling on the main map. You as a GM will need to set time limits for completing chapters. If players play efficiently they will have more downtime to craft and earn money. During kingdom turns, players will be able to build roads to make travelling quicker.

I use Survival a lot for recalling knowledge, traversal or in skill challenges. There are a lot of free hexes so you can add your own content easily

It's also used frequently in camping if you're going to use that subsystem

Hexploration: Yes you are correct. I'm using 8 hours for one day full of hexploration. If there's an encounter that takes longer than 10 minutes, I subtract an activity or more depending on how long PCs stay out. If you run it in Foundry, that's automated for you.

Survival: Long story short: it's not fun, don't track it. I've yet to encounter a mechanically great survival system. You want to get from one interesting PoI (Point of Interest) to the next one quickly.

Random Encounters: See them as an improv prompt. When I roll 6 Boggards, I'm thinking about how I can connect them to another PoI on the map or how it fits into the main storyline. If you are having trouble coming up with something on the spot, pre-roll them and make about 3 sentences of notes. Encounters at night can be deadly if you roll a medium encounter and no one notices it. I don't use hazards unless they are complex.

I don't ban anything but I'm awaiting the next wave of errata until I allow war of immortals.

There is no official conversion; they've just released the bestiary for 5e, nothing more.

I just wondered about another aspect of the policies this blocks: artwork commissions.

If this is an issue, it's always been an issue since the CUP explicitly forbids making money off it.

I think the main issue here is the removal of the CUP without advanced notice and appropriate alternatives since the new license prohibits so many use cases that are common nowadays.

It seems obvious this is a way to consolidate 3rdparty stuff on Infinite which serves both as an easy gateway for existing authors to sell stuff and give roll20 a 30% and Paizo a 20% cut rather than just offering it for free and a way to advertise this store to the community because they'll have to interact with it.

Personally, I don't want to enter into a license agreement that prevents me from distributing my content elsewhere since not only is that in direct conflict with Free Software licenses such as the AGPL but it also shuts down any collaboration that can occur on GitHub. Plus I don't like Roll20.

I'm currently removing the CUP parts from my software and will just fall back on the OGL license. It's a lot of pain and work to shoulder that in my free time.

So much for the Kingmaker Errata, which definitely needs one pass because of the included systems.

My guess is that 3e will break things up a bit more and will allow a tad bit more unbalanced abilities back in, simply because building an effective character who is better than other characters is fun if it's limited.

The 2e chassis is fantastic though and just fine tuning them in a 3e would be enough to make me switch to that. 2e feels like it could on for another 10 years as opposed to 1e which broke down mechanically due to build shenanigans and feat bloat.

Fully agree with YuriP here. The core is fine, the issue more often than not is the actual content that they put into it and the huge amount of time it takes to filter through all of it.

Balance basically never comes up in APs, Tumble Through requires an important reason to risk a Reactive Strike potentially end up surrounded by enemies that doesn't come up in APs. It just needs needs a more generally useful application without the adventure designer specifically designing for it. At least magic skills are useful for disarming traps, identifying magic items and creatures which comes up multiple times in every session.

Personally, I think those are all bogus issues. The big 2e issues are:

* too many archetypes which are purely flavor without a lot of interesting mechanics
* too many items and spells with niche applications
* consumables feel bad
* items with an ability where the DC does not scale
* lackluster skill feats
* acrobatics needs skill actions
* simple hazards don't mesh well with free healing from treat wounds

Interested in buying this for the art since I own the book. No use if the art supposedly looks bad.

After buying both I can confidently say: no. Unless you are using the book instead of something like AoN, it's basically the same, just formatted differently.

You're better off just reading a changelog.

Haha, had a good laugh. Errataed this to be a maneuver without the attack trait, especially since it matches Outflank now.

The best version with the most errata is usually released at the end of an edition. Do you want to wait until 3e til you can play 2e?

I’m in Canada where the special edition hardcovers are already 99.99.

At what price does an RPG book become unaffordable for the majority of the people using?

If I’m buying RPG special editions from Paizo now for 149.99 instead of 99.99 I have to ask myself the big question.

Is it worth it?

Special Editions are for people who are loaded enough to pay a huge up-charge for a slightly different cover, so I don't see the issue here.

Honestly, I don't see how they'll get any weaker by these changes. Wizard has always been the caster class that gets a lot of cool spell feats.

Aaaaand it's bad: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2388460/Pathfinder_Gallowspire_Survivors /

I lament the loss of Drow and the "Duergar" term (hryungar sounds kinda stupid) but I'm on board with everything else.

It's already at the printer.

Here you go https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43r3b?Vance-and-Kerensharas-Comprehensive

The things you are complaining about have been talked to death already.

We're at the cult of the bloom right now and our kingdom is level 6. Skills becoming useless because they aren't trained so far has not been an issue because of Creative/Supernatural Solution.

The homebrew document above fixes the XP issues

I mean owlcat is working on a turn based wh40k crpg. Pretty sure that one's going to be good as well, I just want more Pathfinder. These crpgs come out every 4 years so it's not like you can burn out on them

Hack n Slash, not gonna back this.

Maybe if it has decent reviews I'll pick it up for 10€ on sale.

demlin wrote:

If the books aren't usable at the table, there's no point in buying them.

I'm still using my Core Rulebook (First Printing) at the table.

Did you know that there have been 3 more printings of the CRB? Did you know that all three of those printings included errata and slight changes to the rules?

Did you know that the Fourth printing has an entirely different way of creating characters than the First printing? A way that removes restrictions based on Ancestry completely?

According to staff, this remastered version of the Core rules (player, GM, and creatures) will be fully compatible with all four of those previous printings.

All of your PF2 books are still useable at the table and will be even after these remastered books are released. Just like I can still use my Core Rulebook (First printing) at the table even when other people are using 2nd printing, 3rd printing, and 4th printing copies.

Most people don't throw out their old printed copies and buy new ones each time a new printing occurs. People aren't complaining that they've now had to replace their First printing version with three other versions. You don't have to replace them with this remastered version either.

I'm not arguing about that. I don't like seeing a significant amount of player magic items in GM books (which is what they're going to do for GM Core).

After a couple sessions using the camping rules, we gave up in frustration.

RAW camping is going to take up at least 15 minutes of your session and will eat up an entire encounter you could have had. I made the following adjustments to it and automated the hell out of it in Foundry:

Camping is optional. If you don't want to make camp, you:

* Can still subsist as usual with a -5 penalty
* Consume 1 day worth of rations or food gained from subsistence or spells
* Advance time by 12 hours (usually)
-> 2 hours for finding a camp
-> 9 hours for camping with 9 or more people (including companions)
-> 1 hour for Daily preps (or 30 minutes without gunslinger; cleaning more than 4 weapons incurs an additional hour per 4 guns as usual)

Otherwise:

* Prepare campsite does not allow performing any other activities nor can you perform any activities that do not have the Camping trait during camping rounds
* There is only one round of activities and no random encounter check is rolled, nor do you decrease the encounter DC.
* Rest and Relax and Tell Campfire Story are gone
* All other buffs (e.g. Linzi's Bolster Confidence) happen before the first round of combat
* Each companion can only be influenced or discovered once per camping session, but multiple companions can be influenced or discovered in the same round
* Performing a camping activity does not decrease the flat check (aka increase the likelihood of a random encounter)
* All camping activities take 2 hours and all buffs that last only 1 hour are extended to 2 hours
* Up to 3 companions perform their activities automatically

Watches:

* There is a single random encounter check per night, not one per 4 hours

Ran one today:

* Party almost TPKed to a Wildfire (Hazard 4) at level 1 and the events technically go up to lv 5?!

* How does sheltering work? Does every player need to beat that Survival DC? Or just one. Because if everyone does, then it basically is going to kill PCs not speccing into Survival.

* If you don't manage to beat the DC, you suffer the effects for being unsheltered. On a continuous event, can you treat wounds in between rounds of damage? What happens when you drop to 0hp? Do you stabilize between rounds of damage? or does each additional round require that reflex save and accrue dying points? Can you retry to find shelter in between rounds?

Can one distribute the Kingdom Event stat blocks (page 554 onwards in the Kingmaker Adventure Path) under the OGL/CUP?

The OGL seems to exclude plots and incidents, does the event description in an event fall under these?

I'm pretty sure Paizo is past having an AP written entirely by men.

If that's what makes an AP fun to run for you, then more power to you.

The hilarious part is, that, if you check the AP PDF, the maps in there don't line up as well. Someone had to glue the pictures together for the PDF and physical AP version and I'm pretty sure they knew, that they don't line up. They just went: f+!~ it.

Very pretty. Thanks!

Yeah, the encounter stuff when camping just doesn't make any sense at all.

Reducing the encounter DC by 1 for each hour of camping and rolling a flat check just seems overly disruptive in addition to the 2! rolls during night.

I'll check how it works out and probably tone it down to 2 flat checks, one for the day and one for the night.

In general there seem to be too many flat checks in the additional rules. The weather rolls are very taxing. Instead of rolling on 2 random tables we get like 4-n flat checks each day just to figure out the weather.

Ok, so looking at the rules, I also had a similar feeling.

The kingdom DC just climbs and climbs, eventually auto failing/crit failing certain events if you haven't gotten skill training in that skill yet. Not that big of a fan of that behavior.

Another thing that I came across: Agriculture and Warfare seem to be kinda mandatory. There is no alternative way to get enough food without building farms, and farms rely on Agriculture which becomes impossible to succeed once the DC climbs up.

Warfare seems important as well, and given that settlements can only have a fixed number of farms, this feels like the only reason why you want to build them at all, since your kingdom's buildings apply their item modifier to everything.

Right, that only applies to the US though since shipping is more expensive than the PDF usually.

Or is it Paizo's goal to nudge people to stop buying physical product and instead go for digital only?

Jesus Christ, 35$!!? Is there a way to de-bundle the module from the PDF to bring it down to something reasonable like 15-20$? I mean I don't need the PDF nor journals with a physical copy? Otherwise we're in painful 5e territory: buy physical copy, buy on DnDBeyond, buy on Roll20.

Right, but I suppose 100$ would be a fair price as well, since I can just use those prep hours to work at my company and buy the module then?

Sarcasm aside, it's a hefty price tag to ask in a global recession, immense inflation, rent and energy price increases for something that is essentially optional. I'm sure that the upper class will pay for this, but they also paid for the Fantasy Grounds price clown fiesta

Dunno, passing on that one I guess? 30$ with a 10$ PDF discount is too much. It moved from "no brainer" to "am I making enough money per month to justify spending another 30$ on top of a 25$ book that I bought as well".

It's even more expensive than the FG module now and since I get everything except the maps for free, I'm just gonna do it manually again.

demlin wrote:

So same for Dark Archive featuring small adventures?

As keftiu says, Dark Archive is not a setting/Lost Omens book. It is, in fact, a Rulebook.

Isn't that just splitting hairs really? Rules can be combined with small adventures to show them in play but a setting can't be shown using the same technique?

Personally I would not expect any adventures in rule books since these are supposed to be setting agnostic, right? Yet here we are and I honestly don't really have anything against it.

I would resent using up lore pages for mini adventures

So same for Dark Archive featuring small adventures?

I think dedicating a couple of pages (8-10 per 135 page book) to some very short encounters is probably a good idea since it sets the material into action and shows how it can be used. We're playing a game after all, right? I'm not asking for setting books that are essentially module/AP material.

The two line adventure seeds as described above are usually too short and "hidden" since they are usually missing the twist that make these things interesting (if that makes sense?). Like adding maybe 3-5 more sentences that describe interesting circumstances and backgrounds would already be good enough to weave that in.

I ran Age of Ashes and used the Katapesh: Dark Markets book on top. I was able to pull out like 20-25 encounters very quickly and these encounters conveyed a lot of the lore in playable material which was easier to use than a traditional Gazetteer.