demlin's page

Crunch isn't bad, however the added crunch here has no benefit with regards to tactical depth in the actual encounter. It just feels like 2e combat with all of the interesting bits taken out.

Nope, there are so many mistakes in there and no tactical decisions, I'm thinking about scraping them completely and instead go for a VP system

A long, long time. Expect a waiting time of around 2 years after the initial release

Wasn't really a challenge for us. You need support characters like alchemists and casters or scrolls to deal with invisible creatures.

If your party cut those, now is the time to let them feel the consequences of pure damage builds. Anyways, encounter should be fine

Right, the also made a Remastered pass of the Beginner Box for instance.

Yesn't. It's a way to earn more money and players like getting new stuff so I think it's almost 100% certain that we're going to see new remastered versions of books.

Since a significant amount of books are going to be errataed (Guns & Gears for instance), I don't see a reason why they won't make the reprint Remaster compatible in the same turn and add the new Remaster logo on the front page.

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

If you hand out more activities, pressuring them with unrest will become tougher for you. It's like throwing 5 PCs against 4 PC encounters.

I hand out 1 activity or 2 with a town hall for 5 players

There's no Remastered conversion. You need creatures from the previous Bestiaries (as usual) or AoN. There are a couple of renamed spells that you need to look up in the Player Core under the new name.

What Remastered changes for you as a GM is the removal of Alignment and addition of Sanctification, a couple of additional actions for monsters in combat and small crafting changes. It's nowhere close to the 3.5 changes.

PS: When I started to read through the Remastered books, I was really disappointed. The text is the same on almost every page, the rules are still laid out kinda badly. As a GM, I think if you own the previous CRB, buying the Remaster is a waste of money. It's really just paid errata.

My bad, I was meaning "Skill Training" instead of "Skill Increases", but increases probably also contributed.

In general, most of the changes were positive I think and RAW would have never flown with my group. It just needs more region activities to account for the quicker leveling and more ways to accrue ruin and unrest, either through failing more checks or through outside means.

Apart from all of the above, I think the most important thing is making the rules fun, more so than balanced. And for fun to happen, you need to make strategy the important part. And for that, you need actions to compete with each other hard. There shouldn't be an obvious best way to play it and picking one choice over the other needs to feel difficult.

In my mind, I'm kinda imagining a worker placement system where each leader has a worker and special action. And similar to that, it should start simple and open up new actions as the game progresses (maybe through research tasks that eat a lot of resources?). The cooperative ones that I've played in that area all require completing goals before a timer runs out while being as greedy as possible.

The difficult part is balancing, which was handled for us in combat. So this system would need goals that can be achieved in a certain amount of time and a difficulty label.

Sorry for going off on a tangent :)

So we've run most of this homebrew until kingdom level 10 now (finished Fort Drelev) and there've been a couple of issues:

* 3 lumber, 4 ore, 3 stone per turn
* 40 hexes
* 6 settlements
* ~7 buildings that increase storage
* 9 Farmlands, 5 armies, still needing 12 farmlands to reach 0 consumption

Looking at what the book expects you to have (100 hexes) and what buildings start to cost around that level (8-12 lumber/stone) we've seem to have run into having too few region activities due to faster leveling.

Currently trying out a leadership activity that uses Boating once per turn to gain 1 (2 on a crit) additional region activities and planning for 2 more should we need it that use Exploration and Politics.

PS: apart from the region turn issue, the additional skill and ability score increases made the game too easy. The math seems to be more in line with the base system, but a lot of leadership activities deal with ruin and unrest. We had many turns where they did not know what to do after 6 activities.

A general observation: ruin RAW is never an issue. The threshold of 10 is wayyyyyy too high. I've heard of other GMs reducing it to 5 and only gaining a +1 through ruin resistance. Can't talk about the late game though.

Thank you!

Looking at https://downloads.paizo.com/Kingmaker+Players+Guide.pdf

Page 46: settlement level equal to the number of blocks on the settlement’s Urban Grid that are completely filled

Page 47: is always equal to the number of blocks that have at least one structure

So which is it? Completely filled or at least one structure?

You can run season of ghosts just fine but you need to insert all of the statblocks and items on your own. Still less work than using roll20. It's also likely that foundry modules will break when updating them since no one expects people to stick around on old versions. Just keep that in mind.

New APs (official ones) and compendia will not work with your current version.

Personally, I'd just update. The only changes you'll notice is that alignment is gone. The remaster is really the same game

Regarding DC math:

Level based DC at level 1 is 15:

1 (level) + 1 (ability) + 2 (trained): succeeds on an 11 or higher -> 50% chance to succeed

Level based DC at level 20 is 40:

20 (level) + 4 (ability) + 2 (trained) + 3 (item): succeeds on a 11 or higher -> 50% chance to succeed

So no, the system is not built to force you into proficiencies higher than trained. Granted it takes some juggling around regarding ability modifiers, but those sort of cap out at 18. At least for the kingdom I think it's a bad idea to go for anything higher than 18 since you can't really specialize.

Proficiency requirements with regards to buildings (as mentioned before) is the biggest offender in that regard.

Plus using your rare skill increases to get skills to trained means you don't increase other to expert/master, so you'll eventually fall behind the control DC math since it is expected you're basically master in everything to have the slightest chance to succeed at some point.
/d/1GCf0OA9Ajdb5PWw0IbHU36ebMxmpNLzFbXVA2HOUzog

That's not really true. Proficiency bonus combined with ability bonuses, guaranteed item and circumstance bonuses grows faster than a level based DCs. Again, failing skill checks is fine.

If you hand out too much, you won't be able to make use of many Leadership activities.

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.

Demlin, I'm curious, How high a level have you gotten to in Kingdom Building?

Our tests found the math is fine at lower levels, it only breaks down at higher levels for non-invested skills.

We're currently level 12, but still, the higher you level, the more skill trainings you can use to train skills and there's always supernatural solution available. Invested skills balance the kingdom size penalty plus you can very easily gain +1-+2 circumstance bonuses in many cases to even cancel the -4.

The kingdom rules are mostly fine math wise and I think the complaints are widely overblown. I run no adjustments, no additional ability score/skill increases nor do I give out extra skills. Only thing that I adjust is the XP gain which is truly broken.

Skill checks are not slated against the PCs, there's always a way out with Supernatural Solution. That means you need to skill into Magic, much like everyone needs to skill into Medicine. Remember, if you don't fail, you can't accrue unrest or ruin and then there's no point in removing them using Leadership activities.

The real big issues are:

* Structures are extremely hard to calculate. I can't fathom doing them by hand.
* The rules are not fun: they are hard to balance (time wise), don't offer fun strategic choices yet take a lot of time.

Ruin does not work (threshold is way too high). You've got 12 actions to take leadership activities. There are only so many things you can do and almost none of them have a real big impact. You can grow your kingdom but there is no pressure or goal.

In a way it's similar to simple hazards: if you run into a simple hazard, you spend some time healing the damage with treat wounds afterwards, then continue. Now imagine a 1 hour dungeon filled with simple hazards.

Armies come way too late and sort of justify getting more settlements up. Then again, it takes 2 months to deploy and attack with an army (if you beat the rolls) and combat consists mostly of rolling attack rolls that deal 1 damage.

By default, each army can move, flee or attack. That's it. Everything else is baked into tactics. No strategic positioning, not a lot of fun choices. No real guidelines of how long you should let PCs recruit them, or how many armies you should throw at them.

The good parts: Kingdom Events. Great thing, easy to flavor. You can also easily move those into the Kingdom in the Background type of game by replacing kingdom skills with PC skill checks. That's about it.

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?

Leadership activities allow you to reduce ruin and unrest. If you give them more, you make it harder on yourself to pressure them, aka make it somewhat fun.

My recommendation is to keep them locked at 12, so 5/6 party members would get 2 activities (1 without town hall).

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.

In general, you want 1200XP or 1500XP if you add custom content.

You should simply add an additional creature. If it's a single enemy, add a low level enemy to balance the XP.

In other APs you might get away with throwing 4 player encounters at 5 players, but due to potential overleveling and the absence of a lot of extreme and severe encounters, I think you absolutely need to scale up encounters in terms of XP

1. You run 1 or more kingdom turns. My tip: let the players learn the system, then quick level their kingdom to level 4 and guesstimate how many hexes, settlements and buildings they've constructed

2. That way you avoid that dreaded question. Your players should do quite some adventuring, then return back to the capital to run the kingdom turn. That's why you should not handwave travel time. Don't forget that they need an additional week of downtime or they'll incur the vacancy penalty

3. Jamandi wants you to claim these lands for restov sort of, so that's where most of the qualified personnel will come from

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.

If you can't use PF2E for homebrewing and improv, there isn't much point in playing it.

What I'm trying to say is: the Crown of the Kobold King isn't straightforward to run. It's more of a sandbox that you need to fill in the blanks right away from session 1. There are multiple starting points and quests that can be triggered depending on where your players go in town, all roughly leading to the same outcome. Your players are basically thrown in right away without any guidance.

The Beginner Box is a straightforward dungeon crawl that teaches concepts room by room and is easy to prep. You'd need to translate that sorta into Crown of the Kobold King.

You can get into Foundry for the price of the FGU Core Rulebook. Should be a no brainer, especially because using FGU means you've got loads of money.

As for the adventure: it starts off in a hub area with lots of locations that will require improv or homebrew. You will need to prep quite a bit to make it run smoothly, disregarding the system altogether.

It might be easier on you to just start with the Beginner Box and move on to Abomination Vaults, especially because both have fantastic and cheap Foundry modules. Otherwise you can just free community maps like https://www.reddit.com/r/dungeondraft/comments/1174esr/menace_under_otari_2 _floors_24x30/ or https://foundryvtt.com/packages/av-maps-remake-by-narchy.

So a bit further in and we've changed the following stuff

* Ruins and structures can be integrated into a settlement if they are in its influence area: some ruins are awfully close to suggested settlements and building yet another settlement doesn't really make sense

* As a Leadership Activity, if you have a Temple, you can remove curses from items using a successful Magic counteract check. Your counteract level is your (kingdom level / 2) rounded up (Using Kingdom Level instead of settlement level because settlements are stuck at a certain number of lots for a long time)

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

There's no reason to roll random encounters when you roll those checks during camping.

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).

demlin wrote:

I mean if you play without magic items, I guess? Similarly, not super happy about moving some items to the GM Core book, that way you can't simply tell your players to reference the item in their CRBs anymore.

Archives of Nethys says hello.

Why bring up Nethys? We're talking about books. If the books aren't usable at the table, there's no point in buying them.

Pathfinder 1e had a Gamemaster's Guide. In D&D, you do not technically NEED the Dungeon Master's Guide to play the game as most of it is world building & variant systems. The Player's Handbook & Monster Manual is more than sufficient to run a D&D game.

I mean if you play without magic items, I guess? Similarly, not super happy about moving some items to the GM Core book, that way you can't simply tell your players to reference the item in their CRBs anymore.

Otherwise, if you need help balancing there's this company called Owlcat. Just throw a Demilich at your party if you feel like they're lacking a challenge.

Another Army issue: the Efficient Ammunition tactic is not described anywhere.

Wyvern Flight is a level 12 army, which usually have a +26 to attack.

These guys have a +18 though. Should that be a +28?

Have you thought about changing the bonuses from feats into circumstance bonuses rather than status bonuses?

Hi James, just wanted to ask if status bonuses provided from the following feats:

* Civil Service
* Crush Dissent
* Fortified Fiefs
* Insider Trading
* Practical Magic
* Inspiring Entertainment
* Quick Recovery

and Kanerah's Deliberate planning are a mistake and should be circumstance bonuses instead? Reason being that you get status bonuses from invested roles anyways so these will almost never be useful.

Blueprints allow you to actually construct the building. With this change you don't get access to all buildings out of the box when you reach that Kingdom level allowing you to introduce them gradually.

BTW, there should probably be a limit of +4 for stacking Kingdom Feats and Invested Roles, since otherwise you end up with a +7 from Quick Recovery

Love these changes, I dislike the reconnoiter activity since it takes away exploration and requires me to pre-plan all encounters.

I've added this one, which expects PCs to unlock new buildings. Y'all got any more ideas for new and useful Leadership Activities?

Research Building (Scholarship)
Downtime, Leadership

You try to figure out a new building's blueprint. Choose a building of your Kingdom's level or lower and attempt a Scholarship check against the building's level based DC.

Critical Success A significant shortcut allows you to construct your first building at half the RP cost. You gain the building's blueprint

Success You gain the building's blueprint

Failure You fail to receive the building's blueprint

Critical Failure Same as failure but additional utilities require the expenditure of 1d4 RP

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

I will give them advance notice; for example, "the ground here is very dry and covered in kindling -- you expect that a wildfire could break out at any time. How would you prepare for that?"

That way they have a chance to prepare and it doesn't feel like a "surprise! You're dead!" scenario.

I mean yeah, that's what happens RAW if you beat the Survival/Perception check. Which for a lv 4 or 5 event, you very likely won't.

The owlbear example fits, but RAW this one throws even Trolls at you at level 1.

Anyways, those things are easy to solve by changing RAW to APL+2 instead of APL+4. The thing that really confuses me still is sheltering and what the party can do during a continuous event.

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?

Has anyone done the kingdom with five or six PCs? Does adding invested leaders for each PC make anything too easy or hard?

I have five PCs. I want to give each an invested leadership position. Near as I can tell it doesn't look to cause too many issues and should invest the PCs in this part of the game.

You can only get 4 benefits at most if you invest a role. There are only 4 ability scores.

There is however the issue of 3 leadership activities per players. There isn't really a lot of actions that you can do because many actions can only be taken once per turn. I cut that down to 2 for 6 players.