magnuskn's page

Hedging my bets, but magnuskin may have been implying that the flickmace would be unusable without OGL content. If this is the case, rest assured (or dismayed) that as far as I can find, that particular weapon seems to originate from Pathfinder. If that's not the case I can't think of any other reason they'd have to go.

No, I actually meant the power level of the weapon, which was one of the few things I picked up on over the last three years in regards to 2E, since I saw frequently complaints about it here or on Reddit.

Helmics post seems to indicate it'll be nerfed via some changes to weapon groups overall.

Probably that gnomish Flickmace thing could go the way of the do-do, if I've followed discussions here correctly.

Well, the Remaster got me interested enough in the second edition that I finally made the mental leap to try to change editions, with caveats.

- First off, there are still some 1E campaigns I want to do. However, my Tuesday group just agreed yesterday to try out a full conversion of Return of the Runelords 2E campaign, when it comes up.
- Which will be after our current GM there will finish Strange Aeons in 1E, which just started yesterday.
- The caveat is that, if the players do not like 2E, we'll just switch back to the original 1E version mid-campaign.
- In my Friday groups (we switch every week between the two groups), I have one player who is in both groups who categorically doesn't want to switch to 2E. Since I don't want to lose the player, he's a good friend, I'll have to roll a lot of diplomacy over the next two or three years to get there.
- We still got a 1E Iron Gods game going there with him as the GM, which will start in three weeks, followed by either a 1E or 2E War for the Crown game with me as a GM, depending on if I can convince him.
- In the other Friday group the other GM and I are switching each module between an Ironfang Invasion and Hell's Rebels 1E game, so we are talking, in both groups, about 3 - 5 years until the topic really comes up there.

So, looking forward to getting into 2E at least in the Tuesday group in about 1 - 2 years. ^^

I originally wanted to wait out 2E for a full 3E release, to see if the game would get back a bit more towards the 1E feel, but a.) I can see that Paizo is sticking with their new format and the two systems are not really compatible with each other and b.) my assumed timeline of waiting 10 years and playing 1E materials in the meantime is kaputt, because I think the Remaster release means a reset of said timeline and 3E will come in a decade now.

magnuskn wrote:

Karmagator wrote:

TL:DR - as we kind of expected, drow are too close to DnD to safely disentangle. Therefore, drow are not going to be featured anymore. Instead, cavern elves aka Ayindilar are going to be the new "underground elves", but they are going to not be a direct replacement, as they seem to be actually be quite good.

The direct replacement for drow as the main organized antagonist in the darklands will be the serpenfolk. They are also taking over the grand underground cities for the most part.

I gotta wonder how they are going to explain away Second Darkness, if Eando or whomever just "invented" the drow, or whatever they come up with exactly. Not to mention all those other Drow NPC's in numerous adventure paths and single adventures and source books and so on.

The same way that they explain why worshippers of Folca, members of Darklight Sisterhood, Slohr, bearded/unbearded in Taldor, Dragonfall Graveyard and countless other soft retcons aren't there anymore - they don't explain that, they just stop writing them in the setting.

Apart from a narrow group of hyper-invested people who Really Care About The Setting and are overrepresented here, few will care/notice. I'm quite confident that none of the 20 people I game with will, at any point, start a conversation about why drow aren't featured in Paizo products anymore.

Yeah, I guess that'll have to do. I appreciate the tough position Paizo has been put in and therefore support such necessary changes, but it makes me a bit sad to see such a long-supported concept just peter out.

TL:DR - as we kind of expected, drow are too close to DnD to safely disentangle. Therefore, drow are not going to be featured anymore. Instead, cavern elves aka Ayindilar are going to be the new "underground elves", but they are going to not be a direct replacement, as they seem to be actually be quite good.

The direct replacement for drow as the main organized antagonist in the darklands will be the serpenfolk. They are also taking over the grand underground cities for the most part.

I gotta wonder how they are going to explain away Second Darkness, if Eando or whomever just "invented" the drow, or whatever they come up with exactly. Not to mention all those other Drow NPC's in numerous adventure paths and single adventures and source books and so on.

The biggest changes to classes are going to the wizard and witch, followed likely by the champion.

As a big Sorcerer fan from 1E, I'm actually quite interested if the class is getting a bigger rework since it's in Player Core 2 or if that's just the luck of the draw, since they wanted to get changes to the Witch out faster than next year.

Oh, that's really pretty good. A situation where a party needs to GTFO does not come up that often, but when it does, it's just good to have a tool to survive.

https://2e.aonprd.com/Rituals.aspx?ID=41

https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1161
https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=848
7th spell rank, and you have it. For a lot of gold and a week of casting. Or only a minute of duration and 120 ft distance. Or 9th-10th rank and a minute of casting.

Let's see...

Return Beacon seems sadly the most useless of the three, given it's very high level and the one minute casting time. What I think would be good for the game is a normal spell casting time (two actions or three actions) escape spell for the entire party.

Rally Point fails the test due to its one minute duration. If there'd be a variant which has a ten minute or even one hour duration, it would be perfect. Level 13, when it should come online, would be pretty much the exact right point where such a spell would have come only really into its own in 1E.

Word of Recall seems pretty on point, although I gotta ask if you can "refresh" the ritual at level 8, 9 and 10 when the casters go above level 14 without spending the entire money plus the additional costs again. That'd suck pretty badly, IMO. Then again, while casting it for the first time at level 13 is pretty bad, since its 1/5th of what the entire party should have as loot, casting it at level 17 is trivial.
The duration of one year (when a normal adventure path campaign will be long over in most cases) also fits.

In any case, thank you for looking up the spells. Word of Recall seems to be what I am looking for, with some minor caveats. Seems the developers have players covered that way.

Run the old fashioned way.

I don't think that hacks it anymore at high levels. When people can blast you in the back, just running away most of the times would be not fast enough for the group to make it.

magnuskn wrote:

Kobold Catgirl wrote:

The core rules aren't really changing, just the options thanks. It's a mega-errata, and maybe 2.25, even, but it's not a new edition.

To be fair, that's about what 3.5 did back in D&D days and I think most people saw that as a new edition.

3.0->3.5 had multiple far more fundamental changes (skill system, action economy, weapon sizes) and a lot of changes that, while small, resulted in a very different experience (two examples: 3.0 DR that was "you can't hurt it, lol" in some cases and 3.0 spells turning every combat in the game into "you either cast haste on your side of this fight or this is over").

I'd say PF2R is PF2.25, given the fact that action economy, skill system and stuff like sizes or how armor/weapons function doesn't seem to change.

Probably true enough. :) The changes in the Remaster seem to be still under what you just described for 3.5, but still more than people did expect so far.

Uh, unless I found the wrong Tesseract Tunnel on AoN, that's a Cantrip 5, i.e. available at level 9. Also the wormhole it opens only extends to where the caster can move in that round via striding, i.e. not only is it not a good escape tool to a safe location, it also can be used offensively.

There's a version marked "Amp", i.e. probably "Amplified", which makes it a bit more versatile still.

What I am looking for as an addition to the Remastered rules is a tactical escape tool to avoid TPK's for parties, without an offensive component. Since the books are not finalized yet, it seemed the perfect time to at least introduce the concept into the minds of people. Although the developers are at PaizoCon right now, so who knows if anybody of them will ever see this. ^^

The core rules aren't really changing, just the options thanks. It's a mega-errata, and maybe 2.25, even, but it's not a new edition.

To be fair, that's about what 3.5 did back in D&D days and I think most people saw that as a new edition.

Well, I'm not playing Pathfinder 2E yet, but I'm definitely moving myself (and my players) in that direction, getting all the new books, etc.

One thing which stuck in my craw back in the playtest was the lack of a group escape spell, since Dimension Door was nerfed to be just a personal spell. Back when I got to be a player in a Way of the Wicked campaign, playing a Sorcerer, I saved the party in two sticky situations by recognizing that the party had to bail out, calling together the other player characters so that they moved to my character and then using a Dimension Door to escape. That option doesn't seem to exist anymore in 2E, unless some new spell I don't know about yet has been introduced in the meantime.

Now, I know that the tactical depth of Dimension Door also makes it an excellent offensive spell for getting the melee characters to an otherwise difficult to reach boss. So did the inaptly named level 5 bard spell Bard's Escape from 1E, which turned out be a veritable end boss killer.

Hence a new spell of that kind would have be tuned to be only for escape, i.e. you can't use it tactically to re-position in a fight under practical circumstances. The level 6 bard spell Getaway from 1E would actually be a perfect way to achieve this in 2E.

So, that is basically my one petition, as an aspiring 2E player, to the developers for the Remaster (aside from un-nerfing Prestidigitation, ahum ^^). Re-introduce Getaway into Player Core 1 or Player Core 2, make it available to more casting traditions and thus allow player characters a way to get away from a TPK with Getaway. Yay.

I must say, I'm kinda looking forward to a time when a single monster can take on an entire party and it's not a one-sided ass-kicking by the party against the monster, but the other way around. :p

No, I don't want to be a killer GM, I always feel very guilty when I, mostly accidentally, kill a character. However, since Paizo loooooves their single monster encounters, having a system which actually supports that playstyle on the GM's side is something I look forward to.

Still, I am not letting Return of the Runelords and War for the Crown go to waste and since I am now going into a period where I get to be a player in three, yes three, campaigns (Ironfang Invasion, Iron Gods, Strange Aeons) and I am committed to another 1E run of Hells Rebels with the Ironfang Invasion group (alternating each module with the current GM)... it'll be a while. Maybe I could run Return of the Runelords in 2E, since there's a published conversion kit on Pathfinder Infinite, but it'd be kind of a shame to not have a mythic Alaznist as the final boss.

So do I. Just making a note of the different experience GM'ing Curse and Hell's Rebels, which happened pretty much at the same time.

Yeah, it's one of the main reasons I want to, in the long term, switch to 2E. Still got a few AP's to run in 1E, though. ^^

Furthermore, "balancing" an adventure in favor of the "optimal character builds" is a disservice to the more casual side of gamer. We always aim to present adventures for the average group, so that if you have a beginner group or an experienced group, the adventure doesn't favor one situation over the other.

Still, Hells Rebels felt quite a bit more challenging overall, so I'd say there is a difference between earlier and later AP's, just as there is a difference between Bestiary 1 and Bestiary 6 monsters in effectiveness and overall design.

Does that mean that, perhaps, "Curse of the Crimson Throne" plays better for a 1E group who limits their build options to just the core rules? Probably so.

I would say so. One thing which specifically stuck in my craw was how the Grey Maidens and the Red Mantis felt like total chumps. And that is with extensive reworks for both on my side in the last module (and the Grey Maidens in every book they show up... they did do better in their first appearance at least. ^^). Maybe if there was a "CRB only" group it would feel a bit different.

Then again, both groups were easily taken out in the last book by the Arcanist mostly with AOE spells and that a CRB only Sorcerer could do just as well. I guess it's at the end more a question of balance in high-level gaming. I basically had to assign fantasy numbers to all opponents in both campaigns at the end to make them at least somewhat competitive, only in Hells Rebels I did not have to inflate the numbers by as much as and as early as in CotCT.

The adventure path came out in 3.5 format originally, anyway and then was remastered into PF 1E with the hardcover. At that point the encounters could have been balanced a bit more for the power level 1E finished at, because the hardcover came out in 2016, well into the time 1E had released a lot of its most powerful options.

magnuskn wrote:

Sadly Barzillai went down way too easily

A common problem in Pathfinder boss fights. It's even worse if your party has more than 4 party members.

In this case it was a question of players builds coming together way too well... nobody in the party expected the teamwork feats to work so good at the start of the campaign and it was actually the guy playing a Cavalier/Hell Knight who had to talk the players of the two kukri dual-wielding characters into taking them.

This, and the Pathfinder 2E Remaster, are the two reasons why I've decided to eventually move on from 1E. The players are now finding combos which make me essentially helpless to work against them. Doesn't mean that they'll be taking them every time, but it sucks as a GM to always have to anticipate that.

We finished Hell's Rebels a few weeks ago. Sadly Barzillai went down way too easily, despite having received very substantial buffs and still using his empowered version as the base (with an even more empowered version held in the background). My melee players found a feat/build combination which negated the high AC advantage of Barzillai almost completely, i.e. in my hopeful calculations they would miss most of their attacks on their consecutive attacks, while halfway reliably hitting their primary attacks. The problem turned out to be that the players ping-ponged attacks of opportunity of each other with a high crit build and the Outflank teamwork feat (as well as the Improved Outflank teamwork feat for easy positioning) and Opportunist for the Rogue and Slayer. Barzillai was shredded in one round of his 1000 HP I gave him when they got in position.

We are going to start Strange Aeons next week with a new GM, one of the players of the group, where I get to play my mad elven Alchemist, Doctor Ogol. Looking very much forward to it!

magnuskn wrote:

Also, the higher level encounters really were underpowered by a mile and a half, which was quite noticeable in comparison to Hell's Rebels, another city AP, which I also finished a month ago and which felt much more competent in its encounter design in most places.

Curious - did they feel underpowered 12 years ago? There's been a whole lot of power creep since then.

Ah, I think I started Curse in 3.5 and then migrated to Pathfinder 1E in the mid of the campaign (when the alpha rules came out), so the balance was kinda wack back then as well. ^^

Paizo's YouTube is where this kind of stuff lands (usually not immediately, tho).

Yes, stream VoDs are instantly available on twitch.tv/OfficialPaizo right at the same place that they're livestreamed, and then they'll also be uploaded to YouTube. And I know that for past years' conventions, audio-only recordings have been uploaded to a podcast feed afterward, so maybe those could happen this year, too!

Thanks, should still be interesting for the details, even after reading the summaries on the board. :P

Thanks. I wish I could do Paizo Con Online but sadly I think a lot of it is during work hours, but I'll watchstuff afterward.

Will the panels be put up for free somewhere after they have happened or do you also need to get an online ticket for their archival recordings? Are there archival recordings in the first place? Since I live in Germany, the time difference and just work hours are not compatible with life viewing for me.

I'm just about to finish Curse of the Crimson Throne for a second time (the first time was about twelve years ago), I gotta say that the second half of the AP still disappoints. Leaving Korvosa for the Cinderlands was okay, but Scarwall was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to long and the return to Korvosa felt underwhelming, since the party is quickly shoved into Castle Korvosa (another dungeon) and then the Sunken Queen (yet another dungeon).

Also, the higher level encounters really were underpowered by a mile and a half, which was quite noticeable in comparison to Hell's Rebels, another city AP, which I also finished a month ago and which felt much more competent in its encounter design in most places.

Also, I feel Jade Regent is underrated in your guide. :p

Also also, complete disagreement on Shattered Star. It was really bad later on, my players were getting tired as hell on the whole endless dungeon thing and I don't know where you got the idea that you know you'll be fighting Xin early on, since that is only communicated through events in the last adventure to the party. The first five volumes you are on an artifact hunt to help against the, ahem, Return of the Runelords.

At least you were lucky not to have gotten to the point of Shatter Defenses/sneak attack/fear spam build characters forcing you to run exclusively fear-immue things against the party - I've been there, and it's ugh. Again, something you only discover as you play.

Yeah, ugh. I can imagine, including the frustration on part of the player when his build doesn't work, due to the fear immune opponents. No fun for anybody.

I expect things will still get pretty crazy the next years, but I at least I can be happy that I am the only guy who actually reads guides or the forums and my players, in all three groups, accidentally stumble into the powerful stuff. ^^

magnuskn wrote:

Totally Not Gorbacz wrote:

Paizo stated that material from rulebooks beyond APG (Guns and Gears, Secrets of Magic etc.) won't be "remastered" and these books will be fine as they are now (probably with some minor errata to account for alignment changes etc.).

Alright, then. Any recommendations what is particularly good? I kinda dig Secrets of Magic, but I also think waiting for the 2nd printing would probably not be a bad idea, given the normal amount of errata one can expect from Paizo will probably make the hardcopy of the first printing obsolete.

That's pretty much down to what's your jam. I love Guns and Gears because Inventor is a really fun stab at "character with mech gizmos" concept that has eluded D&D and its offshoots for quite some time, but I also appreciate how Thaumaturge (from Dark Archive) is one of smarter designed classes that I've seen in some time. I'm a bit neutral on Secrets of Magic, but that's just because the concepts of Magus and Summoner don't rock my boat as hard as "weird" classes do. Then again some SoM spells are just ballers in terms of effects or names (Summon Kaiju, Canticle of Everlasting Grief, Horizon Thunder Sphere etc.)

Alright, I think I'll get Dark Archive then, too. I'm not that interested in the Gunslinger and the Inventor in fantasy games, hence I'll hold off of them for a while at least. Gah, I probably need to get the Bestiarys as well and the Gamemastery Guide. There go another 200 - 300 Euros...

Thanks for the help!

Magnuskn here is a great example of how some things about how a game works you discover only after quite some time of playing it :)

Aw, come on. I've been mostly GM'ing 3.X/Pathfinder for more than 20 years now, I am pretty versed in that system. And, yeah, only now after all that time, when my players are discovering that teamwork feats are really good (and I am discovering that there are few mechanical ways to counter a "two two-weapon fighting kukri high-crit characters with lots of DEX and combat reflexes play crit ping-pong with Outflank"), I have gotten to the point where I am finally done enough with the system to want something more balanced, magic nerfs included.

Paizo stated that material from rulebooks beyond APG (Guns and Gears, Secrets of Magic etc.) won't be "remastered" and these books will be fine as they are now (probably with some minor errata to account for alignment changes etc.).

Alright, then. Any recommendations what is particularly good? I kinda dig Secrets of Magic, but I also think waiting for the 2nd printing would probably not be a bad idea, given the normal amount of errata one can expect from Paizo will probably make the hardcopy of the first printing obsolete.

Oh, by the way, I'm finally on board with the 2E train. At least I'm buying the books now, I still got about 2 to 4 years of 1E material to go through (Return of the Runelords, War for the Crown, a second run of Hell's Rebels with another group, also I get to be an actual player in Iron Gods, Ironfang Invasion and Strange Aeons, to which I look greatly forward after a decade of almost exclusively GM'ing) which I will not just drop. But I've started suscriptions for the rule books and adventure path line again and have bought back volumes for Gatewalkers and Stolen Fate, as well as getting Treasure Vault as the first hardcover.

Any recommendations if there are already published hardcover rulebooks which would be good to also have with the new "core" books? I kinda fear that all the already published classes will just come out again in "Player Core 3" or "Player Core 4" in three or four years.

That's an overstatement: I, for instance, knew what he meant as I read manhwa/manga/manhua/light novels/web novels.

I read a lot of manga/manwha and saw a metric ton of anime and it's the first time in my life I heard of the term. Also, it sounds terrible and something to do with gardening, which, for me, is one of the most uncool things around. So, please, stay with either Monk or Martial Artist (the latter of which I actually vastly prefer, given how the 2E monk ain't shackled with the alignment thing anymore).

CaptainRelyk wrote:

Wait, does Paizo own the license to smurfs or something?

Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to. :)

Wait, YOU HAVE YOUR OWN SMURF AVATAR?!

Dang it, Paizo, this is definitely favoritism! :p

magnuskn wrote:

Hm, I am generally not wild about the "no forearms" (yeah, I know that they are supposed to be the wings, thank you) model for dragons. I hope this won't be the case for every of the Paizo dragons going forward.

What do you mean? The Diabolic Dragon has visible forearms in the Side View part of the picture. The notes even talk about the arms having webbing that runs along the medial seam of the body.

Oh, you're correct! I mistook those for his legs, because the actual legs look so tiny, I took them part of his wings. Sorry, my mistake.

Although in that case the dragon looks distinctly more gorilla-like than cat-like. Not sure if I like that. ^^

Hm, I am generally not wild about the "no forearms" (yeah, I know that they are supposed to be the wings, thank you) model for dragons. I hope this won't be the case for every of the Paizo dragons going forward.

Adopting the metric system would be dope.

Yeah, it's really distracting. It shouldn't be so hard to move them at least to the end of the index, so that they come dead last in the forum, after the playtest has been completed for years.

It makes sense to me? Maybe I'm just not a cat person.

Well done, well done. Made me smile. :)

magnuskn wrote:

Oh, that's Xanderghul on the GM cover. I wonder if that means he might be coming back... he kinda got screwed over in Return of the Runelords, IMO. :p

James Jacobs wrote:

For those also wondering, yes, that's Runelord Xanderghul on the mirage dragon for the GM Core. We've put a runelord and their dragon buddy on the previous two GM books, after all.

Dang, ninja'ed by James himself.

He absolutely decimated my players' characters.

So much so that I had to pull timey-wimey shenanigans to put a different version of the team together to take on the rest of the AP, with the option for the players to play their original characters once they
** spoiler omitted **

I just loved the descriptions in the book where he seemed kind like a very bored Tony Stark. :p

Yeah, just un-nerf Prestidigitation. It'd be a show of good faith to us who got annoyed that it got nerfed for no reason in the first place.

That's be nice and I'd get the AP if that were the case.

Will the automatic bonus progression from the Gamemastery Guide be included in this book?

Well, my big problem with Starfinder is actually the lack of high-level AP's, otherwise it seems like a decent game. However, adding a "We'll see..." ominous uncertainty about its future doesn't really help, either. ^^

James Jacobs wrote:

For those also wondering, yes, that's Runelord Xanderghul on the mirage dragon for the GM Core. We've put a runelord and their dragon buddy on the previous two GM books, after all.

Just four more GM books to go before you run out of options!

Can't wait for Sorshen. ;) Hopefully she'll have one of those magnificent Hallowed Lynx with her. :p

While I am still very leery of 2E overall, these new books might just be the thing to get me to buy some 2E material after all. I'll have to think about it for a bit, but then again the first relevant book (Rage of Elements) comes out in July, so there's time.

Zaister wrote:

kinderschlager wrote:

something

Maybe it is just me, but to my German ears your nickname sounds really offensive. If you don't know, it basically translates to "child beater". Is that what you want?

Maybe it’s in another language that isn’t German, or maybe it’s an unfortunate last name?

Well, that very unfortunate name would be "Kinderschläger" or "Kinderschlaeger", if you avoid the Umlaut. Although it is not a word used in German common speech, the literal translation of "Kinderschlager" would be "childrens hit song" or "childrens pop song".

Although it's definitely a bit of a strange forum name.

We'll see. :) In any case, looking forward to what James has planned!

Well, that Starfinder mostly was built on the 1E core is one of the selling points of it for me.

Although I got to say what happened to Xan-Xan seemed pretty final. :p Absorbed by Abbadon's eclipsed sun and forever dead and all that. ^^

Stay tuned, for now! ;-)

Or maybe the plans I've got for Xanderghul kinda needed things to happen they way they did in "Return of the Runelords," and the choices we made in canonizing that Adventure Path are intentional and, maybe, just maybe, setting up something for the future?

Well, dang, now you got me pretty hyped. :) The new books actually might (might... no promises) make me look into getting into buying some 2E stuff, so if you are planning some Runelord related stuff, that would fit right into those plans.