Mark Seifter wrote:
Why should it be inherently more difficult to recreate a rare or unique spell? Finding a scroll or a copy in a spell book? Yes. Finding descriptions of it or notes about it in the texts of the church of Nethys? Sure. But recreating a rare spell should be no more difficult than creating a new spell. I see the following situations: Second hand experience
First hand experience
Voss wrote:
This discussion is in the context of creating magic items in the Pathfinder 2 game, not an earthly cemetery. Creating a magical rune of potency or sharpness on a scimitar is a magical process. Removing that rune is a magical process. Transferring that rune to another item would also be a magical process.
Voss wrote:
Etching a rune is a magical process, I'd assume removing one is also a magical process. This is just a preview, the full rules should have a flavor text description of what's going on. Quote: Dents? And repair? Oh, yeah. This is a level of micro I never wanted in Diablo and WoW, let alone in a table top RPG. Especially when any skill involved can just be erased by 6 gold bottles. Agreed. If we have to start tracking HP, dents, or other values for gear any more than we do in PF 1 (where it really only comes up when you fight that bad guy who took the sunder feats), it's going to be annoying.
I don't think it's very clear what the costs are for each ability of the cloak. In particular, it's not clear if I have to spend resonance for each of those benefits, or just to don the cloak.
Captain Morgan wrote:
I remember the Rogue and Monk preview stressing how flexible the two classes are, but the Fighter didn't strike me as more flexible than the Pathfinder 1 version, maybe because that class is the most flexible in the Core book. I reread the preview and there are phrases like "the fighter has the largest selection of feats out of all the classes" and "a conscious effort to give fighters a number of paths...These paths are pretty open". The Pathfinder 1 fighter has the largest selection of feats, and gets the most feats in the game, but still has several baked in class abilities that assume the tank style. And the second phrase sounds almost like Ranger styles, which are customization, but not at the level of a P1 archetype. If the description had been more like the Monk, where they expressly stated Monks don't get ki powers or any weapon proficiency without spending feats, it would have been more clear. I know the feat trees are getting pruned. These archetypes are basically trees of dependent feats, so the analogy to the Pathfinder 1 feat trees (graphs technically) seemed appropriate. Having wasted feats on Mobility and Spring Attack in D&D 3.0 (when you only got character feats every third level) to get Whirlwind Attack to become a Weapon Master, I appreciate the pruning.
Antony Walls wrote:
But that's not quite the same. For example: Currently, a fighter gets all martial weapons, all armor, and all shields as proficiencies. What if you want to play a gladiator type, or a fencer type, or a dervish type? You're still getting those proficiencies that don't fit your character (e.g. heavy armor or tower shields), and possibly even getting later abilities that expand on those, like full speed in full plate at Fighter 7.One way to fix that might be to give the fighter N combat feats to choose at first level, and turn class abilities like armor training and weapon training into class feats. Actually...that sounds pretty cool. A fighter class that is just a blank slate with "class feat" as the only abilities gained. Consider that my first playtest feedback. :)
So are the archetypes that remove some abilities in exchange for others gone? I like this type of archetype, because it expresses specializing in a an aspect of that class (similar to a wizard selecting a school). Two examples that come to mind are the Armor Master and Polearm Master fighter archetypes from Pathfinder 1. In these, the fighter skips some training in weapons to focus on defense, or skips some training in weapon variety to focus on a type of weapon. The old system allowed two fighters to be very different, almost as different as a fighter and a ranger, even at first level. The new system sounds like all fighters will have the same generic base abilities and then just advance separately. This doesn't seem much different than feat trees, like the Pathfinder 1 Critical Focus tree, Blindfight tree, or Feint tree.
I don't think I like the idea that a 10th level fighter who has never touched a piano before is going to be a better pianist than a low level bard with training. It also seems like the difference between untrained and legendary (5 points) is low enough that it'll be stuck in the shadow of the large die roll variation at lower levels or of the large level bonus at higher level.
My group just finished Kingmaker, and after the fight with Nyrissa, I was wondering how other groups handled it. My group consisted of a barbarian 16 wielding Briar, a monk 16, a cleric 16, and a sorcerer 16.
The fight would have probably gone slowly in her favor (the sorcerer would eventually fail a counterspell roll against maze on the barbarian, the barbarian would eventually not avert his eyes, and fail a save), and we were only scoring one moderate hit per round. The cleric player and I were discussing how we could negate her spellcasting better (which would allow the sorcerer to target her with greater dispel, removing all those protections), when our session ended. Before the next session, I was trying to figure out how we could prevent her spellcasting, and stop that blindness effect. The cleric didn't have silence ready, but the sorcerer had limited wish. When we reconvened, I spent a round syncing up the initiative order, so it would be sorcerer, other allies, then Nyrissa, and used a limited wish to create an anti-magic field. After that, she lost her blinding effect, her AC went down to the teens, and the combat was pretty one-sided. But not every party is going to have anti-magic field, or a wish effect. So I'm curious how others defeated her, particularly how they dealt with the blindness effect.
So we all know there's a character tracker out there for macOS, iOS, and Windows. But there's nothing good for Android/ChromeOS, despite their overwhelming popularity. So I figured we could either wait for that other tracker to possibly get ported to Android some day in the future...maybe, or we could create our own (and make it not suck like that one does). So who's with me? I've got some good Java skills and some ideas for how to design the engine and datastore. What I don't have are the front end skills, or the time to type in all the details about what every feat or magic item property does. I'm looking for at least a few more developers, preferably some with Android UI experience, and some data entry volunteers.
If you're interested in helping out, post here with your skill set, interest level, and contribution potential. If we get enough interest, I'll set up a github project that everybody can join. My idea so far is to have all the game content and character sheets be json data that we store in Google Drive. The character sheet would just be a list of levels, feats, items, curses, spell effects, diseases, etc. that are currently active on the character. The character would be a singleton that has a bunch of methods to query things (e.g. Will save). Each time the player adds an active item, spell effect, level, etc., it adds its bonuses to the character singleton (if better than any existing ones of that type). Each time the player removes one of these, it removes all bonus associated with that source. (And would need to trigger a UI redraw, most likely).
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