magnuskn's page

I suppose it's just more of my general dissatisfaction with Paizo sanding the darker edges off their setting as time goes on - it's hard to imagine any reason other than that for Socothbenoth to not even have been name dropped in years for example - and that seems to clash with what most people here want from the setting, so I'll just keep yelling at the clouds in my corner over here. :)

My love for Golarion still vastly outweighs my annoyance with those few things anyway.

I guess I just wish Paizo wouldn't have put it under the heading of "these changes were specifically for smoother gameplay" but I get it, it's fine.

Eh, you see, we say that all the time, but then I read a novel of theirs like Godsrain and we got cannibalism, despair and body horror. It's not that simple, the developers have reigned in some of the darkest stuff from the start of the setting, but plenty of really dark stuff is still happening. I just wish they would address their changes in-lore, instead of just quietly shuffling the stuff they are most embarassed about into the backyard and shooting it in the back of the head. The War of Immortals would have been a prime opportunity to get rid of a being which rhymes with polka, for example, just by adding the name to the list of gods and other immortals who got lost in the shuffle.

Since I hope this will be picked up for the spring 2025 errata:

Please clarify the duration of the Grandeur cause reaction. By RAW, its effect end when your own turn starts (Player Core, page 426 "For an effect that lasts a number of rounds, the remaining duration decreases by 1 at the start of each turn of the creature that created the effect").
This would make the worth of the reaction highly variable depending on when it is triggered.

However a soft reading of the text suggests it is supposed to last longer, i.e. "for 1 round", which a lot of people would read until the start of the triggering creatures next turn.

Therefore, the worth of the Grandeurs Champion's reaction depends a lot on your GM and since your GM can change a lot in PFS, it may make this cause very inconsistent to use there. Please clarify, to make the reaction's duration consistent for everyone.

***

Also, should this thread's title not be "Spring errata 2025 questions"?

magnuskn wrote:

Oh, bloody hell, they did not clarify the Grandeur cause reaction duration.

Or the Bones Curse. The blog said that PC1 got more attention as it's been out longer, so the spring errata will hopefully have more for PC2.

Yeah, same hope here. Oh, well, I'm playing a Redeemer, anyway, in PFS. But Grandeur sounds, ahem, grand. ^^

Oh, bloody hell, they did not clarify the Grandeur cause reaction duration.

and my understanding is they prefer PF1's ruleset over 2 for their home games.

I think in the past Owlcat expressed that they consider doing second edition a waste of time and money, when they have first edition of Pathfinder implemented.

That is somehow still an urban legend, although it has been repudiated multiple times by their reddit moderator. ^^

Also, sadly, currently they are not working on a new Pathfinder game.

Hey, Maya. Happy to see you. Good luck with all your endeavours. :)

magnuskn wrote:

RPG-Geek wrote:

magnuskn wrote:

Wow, this has turned into a complete doomer thread. Would be really nice if people would refrain from making incendiary statements like "pushing out more garbage".

If that is their honest opinion why should it be censored? Paizo isn't our friend, it's a business that we should hold to the highest possible standards.

Because it's a highly insulting statement. And while Paizo isn't our "friend", they are also not our enemy and are also a company which treats well with customers and keeps our hobby alive. I find those super antagonistic statements out of nowhere to be bad form. Constructive criticism can be well measured, telling someone that they are "pushing out garbage" is certainly not.

If Paizo went under tomorrow our hobby would still exist and thrive. Unless your only interaction with the hobby is via Paizo's IP, in which case, I suggest you at least try other systems.

You are just a gem of social interaction, aren't you? They keep my hobby of playing Pathfinder alive, which is a system I love and have been playing now for close to 15 years. I will not be going to any other system, because I like this one best, first in it's 1E form and now in the 2E version. Most other systems I've played in the past (Werewolf: The Apocalypse, AD&D 2nd Ed, D&D 3.0 / 3.5, Shadowrun) are either functionally dead or (for me) worse than Pathfinder in their setting and rule implementation, anyway.

So while I of course have my own criticisms (why is in 2E mere jumping an impossibility by the rules when you get a free stride where you are allowed by the rule text to fly or swim or climb? That makes zero sense), I think presenting that in a constructive manner is a much more likely proposition to be heard somewhere than making insulting statements.

magnuskn wrote:

Wow, this has turned into a complete doomer thread. Would be really nice if people would refrain from making incendiary statements like "pushing out more garbage".

If that is their honest opinion why should it be censored? Paizo isn't our friend, it's a business that we should hold to the highest possible standards.

Because it's a highly insulting statement. And while Paizo isn't our "friend", they are also not our enemy and are also a company which treats well with customers and keeps our hobby alive. I find those super antagonistic statements out of nowhere to be bad form. Constructive criticism can be well measured, telling someone that they are "pushing out garbage" is certainly not.

Wow, this has turned into a complete doomer thread. Would be really nice if people would refrain from making incendiary statements like "pushing out more garbage".

Still waiting for that Paizo VTT! :p

We do know it's almost half of December and we don't have a 'fall' errata. Unless of course equinoxes and solstices theory is correct and it's fall until 21st of December.

Seems like Paizo did indeed hew to the official end of fall.

Paizo posted in a comment on Facebook that the errata is coming on the 16th. So not much longer on that. :)

Excellent! Fingers crossed that they clarify the Grandeur cause reaction duration. :)

Well, maybe now Roll20 will take a look at it... ^^

I'd suggest Shield Warden. That lets you use your Shield Block reaction when an adjacent ally is being attacked. At this level, that isn't great...

But at level 8, you can get Quick Shield Block. This is a second reaction that can only be used for Shield Block. Shield Warden says that it can be used with a Shield Block reaction, so now you can use both it and Retributive Strike to protect an adjacent ally from two attacks per turn instead of one (and if you're being attacked, you can Shield Block twice).

Then at level 10 you can get Shield of Reckoning, which is both reactions at the same time. This blocks absolutely massive amounts of damage and makes an adjacent ally extremely hard to take down. Note that this works explicitly with the extra reaction from Quick Shield Block, and when you get Divine Reflexes, that means you can potentially use it 3 times in one turn.

If you want to lean more offensive this isn't the best option, for if you want to guard your allies nothing else in the game really compares to this. Have a Rogue with Gang Up just stand next to you and things basically have to attack you (and your superior AC + Shield Block) because you can stop so much damage if they attack the Rogue that they'll never go down.

At 14, you can take Divine Reflexes for another reaction that can be used for Retributive Strike/Shield of Reckoning (because Shield of Reckoning says so). So that's 3 reactions, 2 of which are big defensive ones and one of which can be used for anything.

Reactive Strike certainly isn't a bad thing to have, but IMO it doesn't lean into the strengths of a shield spirit Champion the way this does.

Short addendum to this, if you want to take Shield of Reckoning at lvl 10, you need to take Shield Warden, because it is the prerequisite for Shield of Reckoning.

Not that hyped for the Necromancer (although at least one of my players will probably be so), but the Runesmith sounds very interesting.

magnuskn wrote:

Errenor wrote:

... is any actual useful errata. Because we have about 2 days for Autumn errata to still be considered autumn errata.

Winter starts officially on December 21st, right?

Technically correct, they still have ~23 days. But if you'd told me back in late July that we'd still be waiting in December for errata on some of the most glaring issues, I probably wouldn't have believed you.

Oh, I am absolutely impatiently waiting for the errata pass as well and hoping that they'll clarify my pet issue (duration of the Grandeur reaction for the Champion). Just wanted to point out that they technically have most of a month left to keep to their own timeline.

... is any actual useful errata. Because we have about 2 days for Autumn errata to still be considered autumn errata.

Winter starts officially on December 21st, right?

Okay, I just looked at the Sudden Charge ability of Barbarians and, if I read that correctly, you also cannot Leap while using Sudden Charge, however you could Fly.

I'm beginning the RAW reading of that rule about subordinate actions is getting absurd, but there it is.

Seconded. Obviously it doesn't need to be exactly accurate to the Eastern Roman Empire--it really shouldn't be, both because Golarion generally avoids copying history that directly and because there are lots of differences like the equivalents to Egypt and Syria not being part of it at any point--but it'd be nice to at least have more of the clothing, architecture, & other visual aspects of that period and some influences from the cultures of the Balkans and Anatolia. But I'll admit I'm heavily biased as a Byzantine Empire nerd haha.

The fun part was that I identified Taldor pretty easily as a Byzantine-expy, but in years past I always found people who'd be all "Naaaah, that's <insert other decadent historic empire>!".

Unikatze wrote:

Luis Loza wrote:

I saw there was some confusion elsewhere online, so I wanted to jump back in here to clarify something.

The current year on Earth in the Lost Omens setting is 1927 AD. The Stasian Calendar on Golarion and in Irrisen notes the current year as 2022.

Can't wait to play "Hitler must die" for PF3 or PF4.

Rasputin must die 2: no Ras this time.

I was going to write my own adventure path where Rasputin comes back and takes over Irrisen, but then I changed to 2E and now I got enough material to not have to bother. ^^

No when an action tell you to make a strike as a subordinate action, it only the regular strike action.

you cant replace a subordinate strike, with another action that also have a subordinate strike

Subordinate Actions wrote:

An action might allow you to use a simpler action—usually one of the Basic Actions—in a different circumstance or with different effects. This subordinate action still has its normal traits and effects, but it's modified in any ways listed in the larger action. For example, an activity that tells you to Stride up to half your Speed alters the normal distance you can move in a Stride. The Stride would still have the move trait, would still trigger reactions that occur based on movement, and so on. The subordinate action doesn't gain any of the traits of the larger action unless specified. The action that allows you to use a subordinate action doesn't require you to spend more actions or reactions to do so; that cost is already factored in.

Using an activity is not the same as using any of its subordinate actions. For example, the quickened condition you get from the haste spell lets you spend an extra action each turn to Stride or Strike, but you couldn't use the extra action for an activity that includes a Stride or Strike. As another example, if you used an action that specified, “If the next action you use is a Strike,” an activity that includes a Strike wouldn't count, because the next thing you are doing is starting an activity, not using the Strike basic action

Alright, thank you. I guess it was too good to be true. :)

The Acrobat archetype has the wonderful Tumbling Strike action compression feat at level 8. However, I ask myself if by RAW you can use the Strike you get out of Tumbling Strike for a finisher, given that they normally are considered their own action (like Confident Finisher). On the other hand, Confident Finisher, as the example mentioned, says "Make a Strike", so it is possible that you indeed can use your Strike you get from Tumbling Strike for a Confident Finisher.

I'm still new to the exact use of these rules, so I hope for some clarification here.

Gorgo Primus wrote:

Is there an option to be a ‘Champion’ of Razmir too, or just a ‘Cleric’?

Haha, champions don't even have their full premaster ability set back yet, let alone anything new.

<looks at Grandeur cause> Uh, what?

Also, there are a lot of Champion feats in this book.

Maybe I'll use FA in the future, but for now we are just starting our first 2E campaign and our mechanics averse player is already struggling with the panache mechanic of the Swashbuckler. After everyone has learned the system in one or two campaigns, I'll ask around if people are interested.

I suspect that it would lead to a power differential in the party, though, since we got all kinds of players represented, from the OCD number cruncher to the guy who just wants to play with his friends and doesn't care much about numbers.

I really would love to see a Roll20 module for it as well. Yeah, I understand that it's Roll20 who need to create it, but maybe anyone from there sees this.

I GM's four campaigns from levels 1 - 20 (three homebrewn campaigns in D&D 3.5 and, ugh, Wrath of the Righteous) and about ten other AP's from start to finish. Starting on Abomination Vaults right now as my first 2E campaign and the plan is to continue with Fists of the Ruby Phoenix, so the next 1 - 20 campaign is penciled in. After we get done with Strange Aeons (where I am a player now, yay), we'll do a 2E conversion of Return of the Runelords for another 1 - 20 campaign.

CorvusMask wrote:

I'm curious if we will ever get Casandalee article that acknowledges exact nature of her origins from Iron Gods xD

A Casandalee deity article is high on my want-list for an Adventure Path backmatter article, but it has to be at the right time with the right fit for an Adventure Path. Something like this, if I were developing it, would 100% absolutely dive into those origins from Iron Gods.

I really hope for an Nocticula article one day. :) Currently playing a redeemer Champion of Nocticula in PFS.

I’m currently running Kingmaker 2E, and the “tight range” is very frustrating in the context of a hex-crawling sandbox, but I still probably appreciate it more than the wild power level variance in PF1.

I'm sorry, but as someone who ran Kingmaker in PF1E for a while (got too frustrated with some aspects of it and dropped the campaign, the only one to ever get dropped in my group), it's extremely funny to me that people hail Kingmaker 1E for being more balanced. The random encounter table in the first module gave you the chance to meet a werewolf or 1d3 troll at first level. My group progressed into a hex from the third module early and a player character died to a random encounter pit trap which had something ridiculous like a 200 ft. drop. Kingmaker 1E was just as bad for meeting higher level threats (at low levels, at least) than any 2E "outside of the -4/+4 bounds" encounter would be for the other side of that equation.

Players have the same complaint as to why they can't just Step with the Haste action, or use Haste as part of a Vicious Swing/Sudden Charge; the rules are designed that way for a reason.

I can see why it should be kept as a separate action and not used for two-action combo feats, but not being even able to do a simple jump seems a bit much. Anyway, again, rules are rules. I'll probably allow in my own game, but I was asking more for characters I plan to use in PFS.

Alrighty. Too bad. I think the restriction on that extra stride is a bit too tight, but the rules are the rules.

So, I got this idea in my head for a Barbarian who, after getting hasted, leaps into a group of enemies and then uses Whirlwind Attack. You can reduce your action economy for jumping to a single action with Quick Jump and there are a lot of supporting skill feats and Barbarian class feats to allow for some pretty amazing distances you can jump around.

However, as per RAW, you can only Stride (or Strike) with your extra Haste action. I cannot find any clarification if jumping (i.e. the Long Jump or High Jump actions) would be considered Striding or if they are completely separate from Striding and thereare are not legal for use with the extra Haste action. By logic it would make sense that you can jump as part of your normal movement, but logic and rules are often separate things.

Any ideas on this?

I have Gm-ed PF1 games where the players can blitz through a multi-encounter dungeon and still have time remaining on their minutes/level buff spells. There's no way to tell those stories in PF2 unless the dungeon is stocked with level-4 and below enemies.

I mean, that is, for me, an absolute reason why I now think 2E is superior to 1E. I've been GM'ing 3.5/1E for about 20 years at this point and have reached the end of my rope dealing with overbuffed parties and players still discovering hidden buffs which stack in some dark corner of the 1E splatbooks even now. That you cannot trivialize encounters way above your CR because you have stacked five different buffs on top of each other and there are several unnamed bonuses on top of that which also all stack with each other is a great positive, because I might as well not run the encounters where an overbuffed party just smashes through them and save everybody time.

With 2E, you can be pretty sure that the encounter difficulty does what it says on the can and for someone who wants to keep challenging the player characters even at high levels, this is a great advantage of the new system over its predecessor. I'll take the more gamist approach in stride, it still feels much closer to the old D&D/Pathfinder 1E to me than D&D 4E did.

Very welcome news, indeed. This probably should be put into the page advertisement blurb, though, because down here this comment will probably be lost on a good number of people who are weighing wether to cancel their suscription for a month.

yeah i'm also wondering where the famed fall errata might be...

They said they are working on the "fall errata". Technically they still have time until December 21st, when winter officially begins.

I personally would love to see a clarification on the duration of the Grandeur cause reaction for the Champion.

Alright, I guess we'll see how it goes when we get to the high levels. Starting Abomination Vaults this Sunday, finally. :)

So, I would agree with other comments here that a direct sequel sounds like the 6 part AP under another name. Not a bad thing, but books in the same AP can already be a bit disjointed, so I can only imagine what it would look like with two separate teams working possibly years apart.

Much more cohesive than any six-parters we got, I'd have to assume. Assuming that work on the second trio of module gets started half a year or later after release of the last module of the first trio of modules, the second team would have the advantage of being able to read the first three parts and work in NPC's and plots from them much easier than the concurrent writing style we have had in the past. That is assuming that the writers would bother to read through the first three modules, of course.

Magus is great! Having only one spellstrike per encounter is fine if you consider that most fights are decided by turn 3 and that you most likely have stuff from your primary class to do on the other two turns.

Is that so? High-level fights seem to take much longer, if the VOD's I saw of the Rules Lawyers Ruby Phoenix Tournament campaign are any indication.

Well, personally I would prefer new 6-part adventure paths, but that ain't on the menu.

From the options given, I personally think that the middle option, i.e. Indirect Sequels, is the best compromise of the three, in terms of economic success and storytelling.

Personally I'd prefer direct sequels and I wouldn't mind the Not Sequels option ocassionally as well, but making high-level AP's where you get the option to connect it to one of the existing lower-level AP's as well seems to me to be the logical way forward, since it leaves an entry through the lower-level AP's for GM's and players to take their characters forward. Creating a completely new 10th lvl character is a steep demand for anybody, but especially for newer players.

Also, I'd like to point out that an Indirect Sequel is just a No Sequel with more steps.

Gaulin wrote:

Not going to lie I'm a little salty that the thing I've wanted most in pf2e (being able to apply runes directly to your character to empower unarmed attacks or unarmored ac) is tied to a rare class that I don't really vibe with. The monkeys paw curls.

Animist is a really cool class and the class archetypes are great. Bloodrager is an awesome new take on the class. Again a little salty that seneschal witch is the only class archetype that's rare and maybe the one I was most looking forward to playing, but such is the rarity system.

I'm on the opposite side where it comes to Bloodrager. Been wanting 1e Bloodrager to be put into 2e as a class archetype since the game released, given the sorcerer dedication + Moment of Clarity feat and action tax approach just makes it very unappealing, so definitely got the monkey paw curling on that end. Really do not vibe with the theming change one bit.

Yeah, I'm underwhelmed as well. The class archetyoe would have been nice as its own thing for people who like it, but for the name Bloodrager I would have preferred something which is more like the class of old.

The watch has ended, at last.

As so often, the communication from Paizo about delays and their reasons leaves something to be desired.

I have received the payment and shipping notice, been charged for my order. Should I have access to the pdfs now?

You should, check your digital content.

Still pending. If Monday nothing comes along, I'll contact CS. Would be nice if we'd get an update if the shipping window has been extended for a few more days.

The extras I took for my digital deluxe edition (two dice sets and the gold coin) count just as much towards hitting the end goal as everyone else. ;) But, seriously, thank you to everyone for hitting that particular mark. Archetypes are great.

For players, they're used to doing all kinds of things and having those things work. Those things suddenly don't work. Some terms are still there but mean something different, etc. It's quite jarring. That's why players new to TTRPGs tend to pick up PF2 more easily than someone who played PF1/3.5 for 15 years and now suddenly has to make this shift otherwise they get clobbered.

Yeah, I'm a bit concerned that our resident power gamer might not like the game for that exact reason. I'm reasonably sure the other players will have an easier time of it, although two of them are not very with the mechanical side of things even in 1E, so also an area of concern for me. The other three should be fine, even the guy who complains about everything. ^^

He's actually one of my favorite characters, because despite his smug arrogant exterior he has a soft core, which can be seen when he's interacting with Ember. Also, he's interesting, which is more than I can say about Sosiel, the Jacob of the party, who is my least favorite character.

Late to the party here, but I will say my first impressions of PF2 were very similar. My views are slightly skilled as my schedule doesn’t really support a home group play, and 95+% of my experience is Society play. Basically it takes a mental shift from PF1 and it took a few years for the adventure writers to start to follow their own rules, instead of what they thought adventures should be like. Give it another shot, maybe another game, another GM or both.

While the game definitely is different in many aspects, I had not that big of a problem shifting to 2E gameplay when I had my first PFS games. Then again, I've been mostly GM'ing 1E the past 24 years so I might have a different perspective than someone who has been been a player of 1E.

I'm kinda nervous how my guys are going to like 2E, since we are starting our first campaign in 2 1/2 weeks. :p

Swashbuckler is a DPS, not a tank. If the 'boss' is ever hitting you outside of a random 'oops' now and then someone else on your team who is your actual frontliner is not doing their job right. If you don't have someone in that frontliner role... then yeah: you just brought a 'outcast rogue' (or whatever they call it in WoW) to tank a raid boss and learned why MMO players don't do that. ;)

While the Swashbuckler definitely is a DPS class, I am not that sure it also isn't at least partially a tanky one. It has shield block variants, decently high AC, a reaction which procs off critical misses and a good amount of debuffs for the enemy. Yeah, the armor proficiency progression is not the best in the game, but it's still decent enough. Outside of Champion and Monk, it can hang with the other secondary tank classes, IMO.

Three Krooths!? They would kill the entire 7th-level party, not just a single character. And that explains how Professor Digby was critically hit twice in a turn--I had thought that that was merely extreme bad luck. That is bad encounter design. If a failed Acrobatics roll on a rickety pier is meant to be fatal, then the GM ought to give more clues to not go out onto the rickety pier.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition is balanced with tight math. If a monster is listed as 8th level, then it is exactly as dangerous as an 8th-level player character, which is 44% more powerful than a 7th-level player character. Three krooths rate at a combat power of 180 xp while four 7th-level PCs rate at 160 xp, so the Krooths are more powerful. The PCs might win if they prepared anti-krooth tactics in advance or if the terrain favors the party, but falling into the water favors the krooth.

The tight math lets the GM design encounters that...

The encounter is a moderate 9 in the book, so either the group was doing that encounter way ahead of schedule or the group has not uniform levels or the GM is doing some other bad GM stuff.