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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.
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.
And here's me thinking that narrative and character were the basis of any good story.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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, in basically every way possible. -less spells per day
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's toxic to want a game that's tailored to my specific tastes? Isn't that what everyone wants?
If a boss is as easy to defeat as its minions then what makes it a boss fight?Which is exactly why bosses shouldn't be immune to the effects. They're best used against them.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.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. 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.
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.
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.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. Which is exactly why bosses shouldn't be immune to the effects. They're best used against them.
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.
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 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.
Consider Mass Effect Andromeda or Fallout 76, PF2 is in the same league as far as I'm concerned. Given that the fun went out of character creation, games weren't enjoyable at all.
I swear gray you look for the worst possible side to of something to be on then fully commit. 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.
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.
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.
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.
And their solution was to make the abilities useless by level capping them. 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.
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.
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.
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.I'm not sure how "want to autosucceed" isn't wanting an easier game. 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.
I don't want an easy game, I want the challenge in a different place.
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.
Why do you have a problem with people specializing and being good at what they do, and then using their best skills at every opportunity? That's how it's meant to be played.
What I wanted from PF2 was an evolution on PF1 with even more options and depth. What I got instead was a completely different game with little depth by comparison. So yes, I am disappointed in PF2, which is why I am particularly active on the boards here as opposed to other systems I dislike, which I largely ignore. At least one of the following: 1) PF3, if and when it is released, winds up being more in line with my tastes 2) They release an 'unchained' book with more palatable rules 3) They significantly overhaul the system in the next printing The first two at least have a decent chance of happening. It isn't fun, but it's necessary to be constantly heard to be taken into account for future plans. I'm doing everything I can to push towards a shift back at some point.
More or less this, PF1 is the perfect game in my opinion. I had very high hopes for PF2 when I first heard it was announced, which were subsequently wiped during the playtest, and I'm even more disappointed by the final. I put in a fair bit of feedback during the playtest, and my thoughts were clearly ignored (the only big change I see that I wanted from the playtest is items having HP instead of dents). What I wanted from PF2 was an evolution on PF1 with even more options and depth. What I got instead was a completely different game with little depth by comparison. So yes, I am disappointed in PF2, which is why I am particularly active on the boards here as opposed to other systems I dislike, which I largely ignore. Online play just doesn't do it for me unless I already know the people I'm gaming with. I much prefer to sit at the same table.
I know of 0 fighters who given the choice between being awesome because he is inherently good or being awesome because the wizard decided to offload some low level spells onto him will choose to need the wizard. Ah, so we should just delete all the buff spells then, I see. Nobody would ever want a buff, given the choice between having one and not having one.
I think a great houserule is adding "per level" to the duration of most spells with an hour or less duration. Shoulda been that way RAW, but here we are. I mean it's bad if you hate magic. If you like spells with durations being actually relevant it's good.
I think a great houserule is adding "per level" to the duration of most spells with an hour or less duration. Shoulda been that way RAW, but here we are.
I said lorewise, all the novels that have Paladins have Detecting evil be something they get late as an advanced technique, it's not the first thing they pick up as a Paladin, that's usually smite.BTW what happened to all the Evil-detecting low-level Paladins in the setting ?Lorewise Detect Evil was a pretty advanced ability that not every paladin even had, so its new placement matches up with that. That's goofy. Why would you write a novel if you don't know the basics of the class you're writing about? If a paladin has detect evil at level one, then that's what they get in the book. I detest authors (like Salvatore) who use a system to sell their work but don't even follow the most basic of mechanics in their narrative.
I feel like they should have used the rune system for shields like they did with weapons and armor. It would be similar to how they worked in the past and avoid this issue entirely.
I would personally have liked a much more granular skill list than PF1 (maybe 50ish skills plus knowledges) and a lot more skill ups. But instead we went the more nonsensical route. I also hate Perception not being a skill anymore. You should need to invest in it, and should be able to invest in it (the general feat that levels it for you doesn't count since it stops at Master).
Maybe you just swing your weapon so fast that it heats up enough to let you cauterize the wound with a quick touch.
You don't need a backpack at all really. "I carry all my stuff in my pockets" works fine, since there's no listed limit for pocket capacity of clothing. Heck, you could affix hooks to your clothes and hang your stuff off of them without impeding your movement in any way.
So if I'm creating a level 1 starting character, a 700-year-old elf who's been a baker since he was a youth of 70, why can't I start as a legendary baker? For 630 years, all he did was bake, bake and bake some more. Yet he can't make anything better than a 15-year-old human adventurer who was a baker for a few months. Both are trained, with a +1 from level, plus whatever their ability mod is. You say this is better from a realism perspective, but there's still an obvious problem.
That sounds awful. Who fantasizes about being the Wizard who carries around a barrel full of staves? That's what you'd expect from a parody, not an actual game.Staves are lackluster I suppose I'd prefer to be the wizard who has enough spell slots and a wide variety of prepared options. Running out seems pretty lame. If that means a barrel of staves, so be it. Staves now are kind of like what pearls of power used to be. An extra spell slot or two. Not my fault it's a big stick instead of a tiny gem now.
there's simply no reason why a crafter, would choose to craft a potion over a permanent item unless he wants to lose money for no apparent reason.What if the crafter only happens to have the formula for a potion and not a permanent item? That's the point, the techniques to make magic items aren't commonly known. The entire rarity system would beg to differ. The crafter simply goes to the local blueprint shop and buys the wand formula. It's common, so anyone can find it easily enough.
Staves are lackluster Agreed, though the one good use for them I've seen is to be a True Strike battery. Low-end staff of divination, spend a slot to double the charges, and go ham with attack roll spells. Not much other value in them for a prepared caster, but I guess one spell slot per day is nice. Houseruling away the one staff limit seems like a viable solution, at least partially.
Lore is useless because there are no strict guidelines for how much easier it will make things. Invest in the real skill instead.Look at DC charts and go from there. If there were a rule such as "an appropriate lore makes the check two steps easier" or "reduces the DC by 5", then it would be useful to invest in lores that might come up often, like engineering or architecture (taking Lore(bakery) would still be pointless in all but the most contrived scenarios). As it stands, the table variance (and individual check variance) will be so broad as to make the value of the lore skill completely arbitrary and unknown, meaning that you should invest in the general skill instead since it does more and you will have a better idea how useful it is.
Lore is useless because there are no strict guidelines for how much easier it will make things. Invest in the real skill instead.
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