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sherlock1701's page
Organized Play Member. 496 posts. No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 1 Organized Play character.
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If the mount's strong enough (and large enough) to carry both of them, then I'd let them both ride. I'd say one has to be the designated driver, and the other(s) would be passengers. Only the driver can control the mount, and only the driver and mount share MAP. If the riders want to swap places, it would require an action from each of them.
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I would love to see Kingmaker, I really want to run it for my group but I need a hard copy to make it happen.
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I don't think it's an issue with difficulty. Plenty of other games (pf1 included if you know what you're doing) can have very tough encounters that aren't also frustrating.
PF2 is rough because it's designed to make you fail individual rolls extremely often. This creates the perception that your characters are incompetent and sucks the fun out of the game.
A better way to add difficulty is by adding resistances and health, rather than AC and saves. That way you get the sense of hitting your enemy, of making them fail their saves, but in the background the effects are reduced. You can keep encounters the exact same length and difficulty but make them far more fun just by increasing the rate while reducing the impact of success.
I had this happen in the Starfinder game I ran. About halfway through, the players were getting really discouraged by how often they just missed (even with SFs reduced AC, the lack of ways to boost attack means you fail pretty often, and enemy saves way outstrip spell DCs). I started paring back saves and ac a couple points, boosted hp and tossed in a couple resistances. Result was that enemies died in the same time, provided the same challenge, and everyone was a lot happier.
Basically, having the "difficulty" be implemented primarily by using RNG (since it depends solely on whether you have good rolls) makes for a frustrating game. Other methods are less painful to play.
thenobledrake wrote: Alchemic_Genius wrote: The custom staff rules feel so needlessly restrictive. Consider this:
For players it feels better to have a rule that perhaps the GM can loosen up a bit and everything works out alright than it does to have the book present you an option that the GM says no to you using.
For GMs it feels better to have a rule that is definitely not going to break your game if you include it that you can be lenient with if you want to than it does to have a rule you have to tweak if you ever implement it at all. Pathfinder was always about putting power in the hands of the players. We shouldn't be shunting it back to the GM. There are plenty of other systems out there if you want that.
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Perpdepog wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: siegfriedliner wrote: WatersLethe wrote: SuperBidi wrote: Will this discussion fall to trolling? Is there really a need to answer someone who says that "the same stories cannot be told and the same characters cannot exist" because the magus doesn't have "half a dozen intensified empowered maximized dazing shocking grasps a day"?
I'd prefer to go back to the original discussion, even if most of it has already been answered.
Yeah, a super specific mechanical construct within a prior edition of the class is SO FAR from being a "story" that the argument isn't worth considering.
Even I, who is a bit bummed by wave casting, recognize that the vast majority of the *actual* Magus "stories" can be told simply with a Wizard dip. I mean it's a detour from this topic but magic is certainly less reality defining than in 1st edition. Thematically from an action movie standpoint magus had moved from having a lot of fire and particle effect glittering over their swords to being more like a regular fighter with an outlaw star Castergun that they pull out for the occasional dramatic moment considerably less magical. Exactly this.
And mechanics are the basis of any good story. The number and effects of abilities a character can throw around is integral to their story. And here's me thinking that narrative and character were the basis of any good story. I'd rate them second. For example, if healing potions are a thing and a character dies to suit the narrative while their best friend is sitting right next to them with a potion that could heal them, that's a problem, and it ruins the entire story even if it's otherwise very well told.
Getting back to the original topic though, wave casting feels far, far too limiting. Summoners are martial with less tricks, and magi are either archery turrets or get ruined by action economy.
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siegfriedliner wrote: WatersLethe wrote: SuperBidi wrote: Will this discussion fall to trolling? Is there really a need to answer someone who says that "the same stories cannot be told and the same characters cannot exist" because the magus doesn't have "half a dozen intensified empowered maximized dazing shocking grasps a day"?
I'd prefer to go back to the original discussion, even if most of it has already been answered.
Yeah, a super specific mechanical construct within a prior edition of the class is SO FAR from being a "story" that the argument isn't worth considering.
Even I, who is a bit bummed by wave casting, recognize that the vast majority of the *actual* Magus "stories" can be told simply with a Wizard dip. I mean it's a detour from this topic but magic is certainly less reality defining than in 1st edition. Thematically from an action movie standpoint magus had moved from having a lot of fire and particle effect glittering over their swords to being more like a regular fighter with an outlaw star Castergun that they pull out for the occasional dramatic moment considerably less magical. Exactly this.
And mechanics are the basis of any good story. The number and effects of abilities a character can throw around is integral to their story.
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Guntermench wrote: Ehhhh, you can Spellstrike with cantrips all day long and literally never run out. I'm talking about leveled spells, not cantrips. If a caster is down to cantrips only they're stopping for the day.
A magus who had half a dozen intensified empowered maximized dazing shocking grasps a day, in addition to a bunch of weaker versions and utility spells is not recognizable in the new paradigm. This is an example of how the same stories cannot be told and the same characters cannot exist.
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It brings back the 5 minute adventuring day in the biggest way possible. 2 fights, even at high levels, and your spells are done, time to go to sleep.
Also wildly incompatible with the lore. All of a sudden, these magi/summoners who could cast a three dozen spells a day can cast exactly four. It's even more egregious than the break for full casters and martial was. PF2 Golarion is at this point an entirely different universe from PF1, and the same stories fundamentally cannot happen in the two due to the mechanical differences. This was promised by the devs and broken in many ways, but most egregiously here.
My biggest gripe with the economy is that you can't perform an activity that takes more than 3 actions in combat. I wish they would have put in abilities that are really strong but take several rounds worth of actions to charge up, e.g. you have to spend 6 actions over any number of rounds to activate it. So you could spend 1 action a round for 6 rounds, 3 per round for 2 rounds, or whatever other combination. Would have given a lot of flexibility, especially if you did that with spells.
I haven't had issues with short adventuring days because I don't keep the 'dungeon' static. What that means is, if my players pull out and rest, the dungeon will be reinforced, a bad guy in it will add traps/perform rituals, ancient machines will crank out an extra golem, or some other increase in the danger levels in response to the invasion.
My table knows this and they always weigh the value of the rest against the expectation of an increase in danger. It usually incentivises them to push until they are almost completely out of resources to minimize the number of rests. And when they do rest, the increase in difficulty means it doesn't make life easy.
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In some older versions of D&D, poison use was mostly restricted to evil characters, and was on the list of things that a paladin would leave a party over. I could see some players still having that sort of holdover if they started in those games, even though they no longer apply.
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Additionally, nothing in the stealth skill suggests that it works differently with different imprecise senses. In fact, going by RAW, I would have to rule that a stealth check to Hide makes you nondetected by imprecise scent: "it might be undetected by you if it's using Stealth". There's nothing in the feat, the description of imprecise sense, or the description of the Stealth skill or it's actions that would let you autodetect a hiding/stealthing creature with imprecise scent.
A GM could be very nice and say that stealth doesn't apply to scent, but that would be up to table variation.
Which means, imprecise scent (at least from this feat) is specifically only useful in an area of Silence, loud noise (but not strong smells), or if the character has been deafened.
GayBirdGM wrote: Darksol the Painbringer wrote:
My premise was that there are situational things which would make the feat useless. Foil Senses is just one example, one that apparently doesn't exist in published works, nor is it apparently something GMs use as a tactic, my guess is because it's badwrongfun to use PC options as a GM, based on the fact that that's the first thing being thrown out by people when a GM hypothetically does so.
No one seems to be saying it's badwrongfun to use PC options as a GM. You're allowed to do that.
It's badwrongfun to only use things that directly counter things your player picked, because that's adversarial GMing. If you're picking those options for the reason of "this will shut down -player's- ability", then that's mean and I would leave that table.
What I seem to understand from this, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that people seem to think you are arguing that because things like Foil Senses exists, that makes the scent ability ENTIRELY useless or bad.
They're saying that the existence of these abilities does not render the other one completely useless as a whole, just useless in the scenario. Fireball is useless against things immune to fire, but the existence of Fire immunity does not render the entire spell a bad spell. Just bad for the situation.
I think the point is that most creatures that the scent would help you against will fall into one of two buckets. A) things you can just hear and don't need to smell, or B) things that are good enough at going undetected that you wouldn't smell them (or that their smell would be too hard to distinguish from the environment/is nonexistent).
Given that the scent ability only works while raging, the fact that most creatures will be in one of these two buckets means that there's little value to the feat. Certainly you can come up with some specific scenarios it would be good, but such cases are rare (once every 10 to 12 sessions or less) in every game I've run, played in, or heard about. If it worked outside of combat it could be quite useful for sniffing out ambushes and the like. As it is, it can't come close to competing with options that are useful in the vast majority of fights.
Alchemic_Genius wrote: I think a lot of people who take issue to the economics of pc crafting really do underestimate the benefits of a professional shop.
Irl, it costs more to buy the materials to make a pair of jeans and sew them than it does to buy a cheap pair of jeans. This is because a manufacturer that makes a f&+#tillion jeans has specialized equipment to speed up the process, suppliers who offer discounts due to mass bulk purchases, etc, while the home crafter is buying enough material for one pair of jeans and lacks an automation process. The traveling adventurer who is crafting an item is like that home crafter; they have their alchemy/enchanters/woodworking/whatever kit and they are making in the back of their wagon, inn room, rented studio, what have you.
The crafter making all the ladders and cheap stuff in the world have a shop specially build to streamline the process, an army of apprentices, assistants, and co workers who make the process much more streamlined and efficient. When you use crafting to Earn Income, this is closer to what you're doing; you're making abstract items and selling them, with the profit margin being what what you take home after the roll.
Obviously, this still glosses over some things, but crafting items yourself not giving you a benefit in your pocketbook is not unrealistic.
I can forge a good sword for a lot less than it costs to buy one. Tools, materials, and a forge are not expensive. And that's a far more comparable metric for medieval fantasy than mass-produced jeans.
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Yes, in basically every way possible.
-less spells per day
-short durations
-no automatic effect scaling with level
-DCs are overall worse for properly built mages
-magnitude of effects has been drastically reduced
-utility and skill spells do very little compared to prior version
-many spells were increased in level
-many spells were made uncommon
-metamagic is much more limited, and you can only apply one effect
-shorter ranges
How you feel about these changes is another thing. Some like them. Some hate them (speaking as someone who mainly plays martials or partial casters in PF1, I think they went way overboard on the nerfs). But you can't deny they took a massive hit across the board.
Malk_Content wrote: I think random tables ate best served as a community project. As an official one will have to be either broadly generic,constantly updated or miss new items out. Sounds like exactly the kind of thing that AoN could support.
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CorvusMask wrote: Yeaaaaah, I definitely couldn't stand idea of tracking both cubic volume and weight of objects :P It would be vastly preferable to this odd system of arbitrary values where nothing means anything and random stuff is way bulkier or less bulky than it should be.
Bulk alone is enough for a hard pass on this game as far as I'm concerned.
Watery Soup wrote: PossibleCabbage wrote: you never actually need to calculate the bulk of that sofa the PCs are hauling up the stairs- it's enough to say that carrying the sofa makes you encumbered until you put down the sofa. How Much Can You Carry Society Scenario #1-01
Fed up with the constant death and destruction caused by artifacts at the Blakros Museum, the Absalom City Council has ordered the museum condemned and its owners evicted. Pursuant to ACC Code 2.7.18(e), the council must solicit competitive bids for the hauling and disposal of Non-Qualified Mixed-Magic Artifacts. Can the PCs estimate the aggregate Bulk of the NQMMAs in 10 business days or less?
Primary success criterion: NQMMA bid cost ratio of less than 1.5 gp per standard human workhour using floating disk, or less than 2.5 gp per standard human workhour without floating disk.
Secondary success criteria: one or more of the following:
- NQMMA bulk estimation error does not exceed 20% of values listed in Table 1.
- No more than 10% inclusion of Qualified Mixed Magic Artifacts in bid. No joke, that sounds like a really fun sidequest to run/play.
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I think a better option than Bulk would have been to list out weights and volumes for each item, and impose limits on both instead of only weight. They sort of did this previously with e.g. bags of holding.
That way, everything would still be in logical, easy to use units, and the need to have something other than weight represented could have been met.
Bulk as a system is unusable for me and the games I run since it's excessively abstract for very large objects and the values for big creatures are nonsensical.
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If you're open to a little houseruling, the Dark Heresy system has an interesting take on AoEs. Basically, you make an Agility test (reflex equivalent). If you succeed, you move to the edge of the effect as a free action, up to your single action movement range. If you don't have enough movement to make it to the nearest edge of the effect, then you take full damage regardless of your roll.
Of course, the baseline move speed in Dark Heresy is 3 squares as an action, while it's 5 for PF2. Maybe go with half speed as the distance for PF2.
This might get you where you want to be. Just make sure your players are clear on it.
Temperans wrote: It says they are related, but there is no actual connection. As it currently works, unless you force yourself to pick related lessons, you can have a cold themed patron and pick only fire themed lessons with a flaming familiar (if those are a thing). How do you think your icy patron stays chilly? Has to bleed that body heat off sonehow, might as well be through you.
Rysky wrote: One person said they should have focused on the "most invested" (meaning not most invested in then normal sense but in this sense the extreme optimizers and theorcrafyters) players instead of everyone else, which prompted the next person to say that getting rid of said small audience because they're reducing the fun of the larger audience (which the original statement is pretty explicit about doing) would be a good thing.
Definitely not how I would have worded it but I can certainly understand it. What makes a player more invested over another? What makes you [general] more invested than me?
Players who are willing to dig into the rules and interactions and put a lot of time and effort into mastering them are more invested, as they have put a lot more time into the game.
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MaxAstro wrote: Gonna have to agree with Rysky on this one. If one part of the player base wants to be the "special children" that get everything they want and the designers design specifically for them instead of the wider player base...
Yeah, the game is better off without entitled people like that.
Not liking the game's direction is fine. Saying you wish the devs had gone a different direction is fine. Saying you wish the devs would listen to you and ignore everyone else is toxic.
Seems like an easy distinction to me.
It's toxic to want a game that's tailored to my specific tastes? Isn't that what everyone wants?
Rysky wrote: Cyouni wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: Megistone wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: Excuse me for liking games that I enjoy and being disappointed that paizo decided to make something that's basically unplayable as far as I'm concerned as a followup for my favorite ttrpg. Consider Mass Effect Andromeda or Fallout 76, PF2 is in the same league as far as I'm concerned. The point is not that you love PF1, but that you love the aspects of it that have traditonally and widely been considered its biggest flaws, and you double down on them. Yes, because those things are 80% of what makes the game fun to play for me. I wish more people shared that interest.
It's a little bit like a Souls game. Hard to understand and learn all the moving parts when you first pick one up, but rewarding and cool if you stick with it. Paizo could have really leaned into that niche, and made something that was even better than PF1. A Souls game doesn't require 6-10 hours to build a character and start the game, as you've stated is basically mandatory in the past.
A Souls game doesn't stop midway because someone has to look up details about the system because it's incredibly convoluted.
And most of all, a Souls game is primarily a single-player affair, not a cooperative one. Also it’s about skill, not builds.
*runs around with 2Handers and the prettiest outfits* It's not a perfect parallel, just an example of how designing for a specific, smaller, more committed audience is not a bad thing to do. They should have continued to appeal to the most invested players in the system instead of everyone else.
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Rysky wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: RicoTheBold wrote: graystone wrote: BellyBeard wrote: If two players spend two actions each to remove one boss action, and the other two focus on just damage, that fight probably becomes trivial. So players are trading 2 of their actions for one of a foes and that's a bad thing when it costs resources? I thought that's spells/feats were meant to have meaningful effects is the foe fail their normal saves... I don't see it. It's bad against multiple/weaker foes. It's good against a boss, because their actions are generally worth more than a party member's actions. Which is exactly why bosses shouldn't be immune to the effects. They're best used against them. If a boss is as easy to defeat as its minions then what makes it a boss fight? The fact that it's a/the leader of the opposing faction, aka their boss. If a party went to fight Apple I doubt that Tim Cook would be the toughest one there. But the fight with him would still be the final boss battle. If you're unseating a corrupt king, his best guards are probably stronger than him, but he's the boss.
Even if you're going for a boss who's stronger, his stats are already better than those of his minions. A balor is more likely to make his save than a marilith is, because he has higher stats. He doesn't also need a side rule to protect him.
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Megistone wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: Excuse me for liking games that I enjoy and being disappointed that paizo decided to make something that's basically unplayable as far as I'm concerned as a followup for my favorite ttrpg. Consider Mass Effect Andromeda or Fallout 76, PF2 is in the same league as far as I'm concerned. The point is not that you love PF1, but that you love the aspects of it that have traditonally and widely been considered its biggest flaws, and you double down on them. Yes, because those things are 80% of what makes the game fun to play for me. I wish more people shared that interest.
It's a little bit like a Souls game. Hard to understand and learn all the moving parts when you first pick one up, but rewarding and cool if you stick with it. Paizo could have really leaned into that niche, and made something that was even better than PF1.
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RicoTheBold wrote: graystone wrote: BellyBeard wrote: If two players spend two actions each to remove one boss action, and the other two focus on just damage, that fight probably becomes trivial. So players are trading 2 of their actions for one of a foes and that's a bad thing when it costs resources? I thought that's spells/feats were meant to have meaningful effects is the foe fail their normal saves... I don't see it. It's bad against multiple/weaker foes. It's good against a boss, because their actions are generally worth more than a party member's actions. Which is exactly why bosses shouldn't be immune to the effects. They're best used against them.
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Henro wrote: I feel like Sherlock's problems with 2E aren't design problems, they're design goal problems. 2E was designed with some particular goals in mind which run counter to Sherlock's ideal experience. (examples of these goals are: reduce the difference between optimized and unoptimized characters; Move a lot of optimization/strategy away from character creation and into combat; Reduce caster/martial disparity).
For me, a lot of these design goal are perfect and I believe 2E pulls off a lot of what it sets out to do quite brilliantly. For me, 2E has kept all the good stuff from first edition and removed the stuff I hated.
For players like Sherlock however, playing 2E might be like trying to use a lemon juicer to peel a potato. No matter how good the juicer is at juicing lemons, it will still be lousy when faced with that task.
I'm actually on board with reducing caster/martial disparity, but it should have been done by elevating martials Tome of Battle style, instead of nerfing magic into the ground.
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swoosh wrote: Bluenose wrote: Or are you expecting they should have the most versatility and equal effectiveness to a specialist - the Jack of All Trades and Master of All Trades rolled into one character? I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they're expecting, yes.
sherlock is a strategist. They've talked in the past about how building and constructing characters is the most important and intriguing aspect of the game for them. The act of playing out the character is less the point in this method of play and more a way to test the concept, with the goal of absolutely annihilating any challenges put before it.
You ever seen those competitions where people build and program little robots then have them run courses or smash into each other? The act of building and programming is the main challenge and the actual course is just a way to test the efficacy of the design. I will note that I always put a great deal of effort into writing up a backstory and then having my character act accordingly. I just do it after I've designed them. The RP aspect is enjoyable, even if it is secondary to the build and strategizing.
That said, I usually get tired of the character eventually and then let them die off so I can try out a new one. And I'm never upset when they die naturally in the course of things.
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Ravingdork wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: Consider Mass Effect Andromeda or Fallout 76, PF2 is in the same league as far as I'm concerned. But did you actually play a few games before arriving at that conclusion?
My friends and I didn't think we'd like it either, but then we tried a few games and positively fell in love with the new system. Given that the fun went out of character creation, games weren't enjoyable at all.
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Vidmaster7 wrote: graystone wrote: Vidmaster7 wrote: I swear gray you look for the worst possible side to of something to be on then fully commit. I've posted with someone before that used classy = elegant [pleasingly ingenious and simple] before so maybe my perspective is different.
Vidmaster7 wrote: I'm personally completely fine with the incapacitation rule. I'm fine with them in the same way I was fine with spells HD capped in PF1*: I didn't take them and skip right past them when I see the tag. So here too I can see sherlock's perspective. There are less slots to go around in PF2 with top ones at a premium, then you add that most heightened spells tend to be inferior to spells actually of that level... It's a tough sell for me.
Secondly, the affect that warrants such a tag seem scattershot: Cloak of Colors [1 rd blind/stun] is hardly the encounter ending spell like Phantasmal Killer [dead].
* now I did take them in PF1 if I had a way to replace them later: my 5th+ level sorcerer isn't going to keep Daze as a cantrip... Eh I don't know I felt like the tone was pretty clear to me anyways.
Are you looking at it from a player perspective then? Because Since I primarily DM I feel like it will be super helpful but I guess if you look at it from a player perspective maybe I can see wanting the option to just end combats. Also on a critical failure it's still pretty bad even with incapacitate isn't it? No, I spend about twice as much time in the GM seat as I do playing. Critical failures are unreliable at best; that's why I would avoid both incap effects and any of the cantrips with crit fail effects.
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Malk_Content wrote: Did everyone, including sherlock, forget that this was a thing in pf1? There wasn't a trait for it but numerous spells and abilities only worked against certain HD numbers, which is basically the stand in for level. Same reason I never took those spells unless there was an ok effect above the HD number.
Seems like an odd decision to go whole hog on the least interesting spell mechanic and sacrifice the actually cool ones, like usable durations.
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Rysky wrote: 1) it was an insult, telegraphed by the “useless” beforehand.
2) the abilities aren’t useless in the slightest, you can still use them as you go by you using higher level spell slots.
They are useless if you have to burn the higher slot. You literally cannot cast them at the level they're made for and get any value out of them. You have to usurp a higher level spell slot. I thought we wanted to make low level slots more useful, not less so.
And even then, the cap being double the slot level means that against anything with any real power the spell is wasted. As in, against the things you would most want to affect with said spell, there is no point to casting it.
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Unicore wrote: Temperans wrote: PF1 spell due to caster level scaling had better damage, duration and range. So even if you only knew a few you could do a lot with the right spells. A great example is Fly.
** spoiler omitted **
Movement and utility spells were deliberately restricted for the sake of story telling purposes, not some mechanical balance issue. That was a change for the sake of adventure designers and being able to have skills be a more meaningful choice for players for a longer period of time. Having spells just cover everything that skills can do, only better was a design flaw of D&D. No, it's good design. There should always be multiple solutions, and there's no reason you shouldn't be able to use magic to accomplish mundane tasks. What do you think real wizards would use magic for? Making their lives easier. Doing things magically so they don't need the physical skill or ability. Getting around with a minimum of effort and time. That's what needs to be supported by magic, before we even think about chucking fireballs and summoning walls of ice.
Unless your universe is like warhammer and magic is likely to just screw you over completely, your storytelling has to take that into account. PF1 spells were well designed, PF2 spells are lackluster at best.
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Deadmanwalking wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: And their solution was to make the abilities useless by level capping them. An ability you can readily use on a high percentage of the foes you fight isn't 'useless'. They made them less useful, certainly, but hardly useless.
sherlock1701 wrote: Classy. Could you maybe not be a giant dick to people just because you disagree with their game design philosophy? That'd be great.
sherlock1701 wrote: Incapacitate was a bad idea and never should have been added. "But they might stun the boss". They sure might, and that's never a bad thing. One shotting is ok. Part of the design goals was pretty clearly to make single foes of higher level a legitimate and scary threat (which they often weren't in PF1). Rebalancing around that involves reducing the odds of this. It just does. The two steps back in design this edition wasn't my fault. It happened despite my objections. I reserve the right to critique commercial products.
Ravingdork wrote: There are no stars. The PCs brought them crashing down years ago with the misuse of a powerful artifact.
The immeasurable devastation, unending darkness, and eldritch horrors that were released from the fallen stars have long since turned the world into a post apocalyptic wasteland of survival horror.
It is now up to the PCs to somehow undo the calamity they brought forth upon the world. Their actions are opposed by the once benevolent and world spanning Church of Stars, now corrupted into fanatical death cults that have seen their gods' true forms.
That's not really how stars work.
Claxon wrote: To the title of the thread, no it wasn't a solution in search of a problem. It was a solution to a real problem, that is perhaps less elegant in some places than others (mostly when effects have binary outcomes instead of the 4 levels of success like most abilities now have in PF2).
It was a real problem that some GMs would overwhelm parties with lots of low level enemies as part of the CR budget that had save or die/suck effects. It didn't matter that the party had a 90% chance to pass each save, when you make 10+ of them a round it was pretty brutal.
Conversely, same thing with parties vs BBEG, the party would focus on throwing out as many encounter ending abilities as they had to shut the BBEG down before they ever got to act.
As somebody who has played on both sides of encounters like this, they are a good thing, lots of fun, and removing them was a bad idea.
Not sarcastic, I genuinely like them.
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Deadmanwalking wrote: It's because otherwise, individual bosses get pretty screwed by SoD effects, since a whole party can theoretically hit them with four or five of them. Odds are they'd fail at least one Save in that situation. And that's pretty anticlimactic and not a tactic they want to encourage.
The same applies to PCs, quite frankly. Let's take the example of 8 Basilisks (a Severe but not Extreme encounter) vs. an 8th level party. Most 8th level characters will have between a +11 and a +16 on Saves. At DC 22 to Save, lot of PCs would probably get petrified there if incapacitate didn't apply.
Now, Ghouls in particular should maybe not have the trait given their standard role in encounters and the general weakness of their paralysis, but that's a specific issue with ghouls rather than one with the Incapacitate trait.
And their solution was to make the abilities useless by level capping them. Classy.
Incapacitate was a bad idea and never should have been added. "But they might stun the boss". They sure might, and that's never a bad thing. One shotting is ok.
Under Magic Weapon on page 599-600 of the CRB. It uses the language "x extra damage dice".
On AON:link
Incap spells are partly useless because they do nothing to bosses. Crippling bosses is far, far more useful than crippling their minions
The other part of their uselessness is that there are usually better options at the level you have to heighten them to for them to be at all effective. Essentially, they're generally only worthwhile at their base spell level. They're just too unreliable to bother with.
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I think a lot depends on how you run games and perceive the world as players.
For example, in games that I run, class abilities and spell names are known things in character. People know that a spell is 'cure light wounds' or 'bladed dash'. People know a gunslinger has grit. Spells are codified in books by their level of power.
In my current setting, spell incantations are subroutine calls to a set of goddesses that interface with the world through complex thaumaturgic computers. I've written up a little bit of language for the computers and incantations.
Class abilities changing or disappearing if you run a world like this is of significant note if you have an ongoing campaign. People would understand that teleportation, once freely available to all mages who trained enough, was suddenly restricted. Weapons that used to work one way suddenly function completely differently. Magic items and spells that used to work together in harmony suddenly no longer function the same way, and now the strongest one overrides the others.
I like characters in game having that level of "meta" knowledge. It makes sense to me that they would understand how their world works. It also means that an edition change is virtually impossible unless I write a whole new setting, or majorly time shift the one I have.
Gorbacz wrote: That, or that PF3 will be more like PF1, which means we're in for a decade of constructive criticism. It's this one. I'd also be fine with a much more nitty-gritty system than PF1 for PF3 (e.g. making height and weight have mechanical effects, more realistic depictions of gear, more skills, more bonus types, etc.)
0o0o0 O 0o0o0 wrote: That speedy but weak elf gets tangled up in the fruit cart as he crashes into it while the dwarf just powers through, barely hindered by the flying apples and melons.
I assume your chase sequence has a fruit cart
Bah, why use a fruit cart when there's always a cabbage cart around?
I do miss the coupe de gras rules, and I would like to see them return. I think this is a case where you could use the 4 degrees system well.
For example:
The attacker hits automatically for normal damage. If this doesn't take the target out, they make a Fort save against DC equal to the damage taken (this works out to a reasonably easy DC assuming average damage for an equal level subject). On a failure, they're dying 1 (so can hero point out of it). On a crit failure, they die completely.
In the given scenario, the innkeeper's son probably deals 3 or 4 damage, so the player only fails on a nat 1 and likely can't critically fail.
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Malk_Content wrote: Deadmanwalking wrote: Malk_Content wrote: I'm not sure how "want to autosucceed" isn't wanting an easier game. In fairness to sherlock1701, he appears to want a game where making a character who can auto-succeed is a game in and of itself. One like PF1 where character creation is full of bad choices as well as good ones and you need a certain degree of system knowledge to achieve such a character.
I think that sounds hideous, personally, and suspect the majority agree with me, but I wouldn't call it an easy game. Well apart from the bad choices part the ability to design characters to auto succeed at tasks is possible, if you make the game easier by uniformly adjusting dcs down by about 4. Problem is that maxing out your roll in PF2 is too easy, there's no challenge to be had then.
One of my favorite characters was a fighter built around armor spikes with bull rush and overrun - it took something like six or eight hours of digging through feat interactions and whatnot to come up with something really effective and powerful, that could succeed most of the time and deal heavy damage.
The fun was in spending all that time rooting around the rules to cone up with a character who was as good at something as they could be. I don't really see things like this ever being possible with the way PF2 is designed. It's too easy to max your roll and pick your options. There's little joy to be found in a game that gives you the best possible character without any major effort.
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Malk_Content wrote:
I feel sherlock's game play style should be supported (guidelines in the gmg for making the game easier for example) but that doesn't mean I support the intent behind his posts.
I don't want an easy game, I want the challenge in a different place.
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Malk_Content wrote: I dunno John, this is a person whose stated goal on the forums us to spend his time trying to make pf2 seem as bad as possible so it fails and they make a pf3 he personally is happy with. I think most people would agree that such an approach can only be detrimental to the community (and company) as a whole. Thats...not at all what I said. I don't "hope PF2 fails". I want a PF3 that's better. Paizo has to stick around for that to happen. What I did say is that I'm being vocal about my complaints in the hopes that future versions (or this version, though I realize that's unlikely) will improve.
I honestly don't know how you could have gotten that I hope PF2 fails, or that I'm somehow 'out to destroy the community' from what I have said. Yes, it's not the game I hoped for and it is disappointing, but my aim is to make the next one better, not make this one fail.
Rysky wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: Rysky wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: K1 wrote: One session with Monsters disarming aoe players and players will understand why disarm is something which is not worth in a system like this.
Or eventually a couple of mobs who disarm a player, loot his weapon worth all his equip, and run/teleport away.
Repeat until the players won’t have anything else left.
Players start to go with chain glove?
Mobs, which are not necessarily stupid, will do the same.
Sometimes players see a mechanic only on their side, but they not always realize that it could be used against them.
In this case, disarm on Normal hit and chain glove to get a hold grip for their weapon. You're saying all this like it's a bad thing. It is. It’s bad design, and boring at that. Only boring if you enjoy constant failure. I don't. It's the pinnacle of design, because you can fail constantly if you build one way, and succeed constantly if you build another, thereby enabling any level of play to suit taste. ... there’s a vey big gulf inbetween “always succeed” and “constant failure” in play. If you're likely to fail the roll more than once or twice in a session it's constant.
Attack rolls after the first get a partial pass if the first one is a near guaranteed success.
Rysky wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: K1 wrote: One session with Monsters disarming aoe players and players will understand why disarm is something which is not worth in a system like this.
Or eventually a couple of mobs who disarm a player, loot his weapon worth all his equip, and run/teleport away.
Repeat until the players won’t have anything else left.
Players start to go with chain glove?
Mobs, which are not necessarily stupid, will do the same.
Sometimes players see a mechanic only on their side, but they not always realize that it could be used against them.
In this case, disarm on Normal hit and chain glove to get a hold grip for their weapon. You're saying all this like it's a bad thing. It is. It’s bad design, and boring at that. Only boring if you enjoy constant failure. I don't. It's the pinnacle of design, because you can fail constantly if you build one way, and succeed constantly if you build another, thereby enabling any level of play to suit taste.
Castilliano wrote: sherlock1701 wrote: Mark Seifter wrote: Captain Morgan wrote:
Another option is you could use a success disarms and a critical success let's you either snag the weapon or going it into a further square. But that is a pretty big buff that will probably hurt players more than it helps them. We tried disarm on success at first (before the playtest). It makes gameplay pretty miserable for anyone who depends on a weapon, particularly if the other team has low-value characters at hand who can pick it up and just start leaving with the weapon, both of which are more likely to affect the PCs (monsters don't as often have weapons, and the bad guys more often have minions who can spend actions to dash away, or 5th level dimension door miles away, with the weapon without weakening their side much). Assuming you don't wind up with a gentleperson's agreement at the table to just never use it, like some groups had for breaking gear in PF1. PF1 had a weird side way around PC frustration for disarm by virtue of having two or three negligible-cost ways to be essentially immune to disarming that PCs used and published NPCs and monsters weren't written to include, but that sort of winds up with no one being able to use it if the GM, quite reasonably, has NPCs adopt the same simple methods as the PCs. So instead it's a waste of time and effort. Or it's a high risk, high reward tactic.
And I'd rather the minions needed a 20 to disarm my PC so that they don't try because whatever you can do with a success, they'll have a shot at doing to you.
And cheap equipment had already nullified disarming in PF1. Really cheap, and easy to improvise since it was just a cord tied to a weapon so even primitives might have them. And if disarming were that easy in their reality, they would have them. I'd rather Disarm be a dramatic event. I say this as somebody who used a True Strike wand to disarm at will in PF1, which was funny, but grew old fast. Imagine taking 3 feats to be great at... Even with a weapon cord, you still cost them a move action to retrieve it, which means no full attacks. That's well worth the effort.
Disarm is defeated by locked gauntlets, but those do come with other drawbacks.
You can also make a weapon cord in pf2. It may not be an official item, but you can still tie a bit of rope (or a strip of leather sliced off a belt pouch, etc) to your arm and the weapon. It just matters less because nobody is foolish enough to actually try to disarm you in PF2. Much like KAC+8 in starfinder, crit success is a ridiculously hard target for a maneuver.
I suppose if it inflicted a penalty of some type to the enemy, it might be ok, but as it is it basically does nothing on a normal success so it's unreliable and therefore useless.
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