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Another book that I want to see, is to get a book on the strange elder races and what they had been doing back then and if possible enough rules to play these ancient creatures. What was the war between the Aboleths and Xiomorn like? What are the wars between the Elohim and Anunnaki like? What was the Xulgath and Serpentfolk empires like?
I've asked this before but I really want a lore book on the planes, but I want to know is about the local animals, weather and terrain that exists. What fish things swim in the great lava lakes of the plane of fire? What is the difference for a desert in Elysium compared to one in the Abyss? What crazy wood equivalents can I get in the plane of Earth? I also want to know about the cities in the planes that are not the City of Brass, Axis or Dis. Give me some write ups on what a city in the plane of Air is like, or what does a small village in Heaven look like and so on.
Hey James, I hope you've been well and had a good PaizoCon experience.
Another change I think we should implement is to add more to ancestry, instead of it being just the race. I think it was a missed opportunity to just make it "dwarf" or "human". If you made it a three step process then we can have this going on, ancestry is where you character came from, that is their race, their culture and their family. As such you should pick 3 things. I think you can have ability scores keyed to race as normal, but have more things like ancestry feats making more sense if you get to pick from either race, country of origin/society and family. Family may be somewhat already rolled in with Backgrounds but I think backgrounds should be what your character has been doing and personal experiences. Which could also do with expanding from 1 to 3 options: Childhood, profession and defining moment. That way you end up with a more unique character but also a more fleshed out one.
So before we start with lists of things we want changed in the new game system let me add this; lets just post on this thread additions of systems the game has, if you want a complete overhaul to a system for example resonance, that should probably have its own thread. The assumption we'll use in this thread is that the basic concepts of the game will remain the same, we're just adjusting the system to do better. Alright so let's get started then: First off I think we should make stealth work like perception, every adventure should be at least trained in stealth. Now hear me out, the reason for this is 3 fold; 1) Every adventurer will at one point come up to a situation where stealth is the answer to the situation, especially at low levels, 2) Every character should be able to at least somewhat competently try to stealth if the situation demands it, 3) Stealth is the 2nd most common form of initiative from perception, it only makes sense that most characters should be able to, without being too penalised, have the option of rolling stealth for initiative. Obviously rogues will be better trained and start of as experts and so on, but no adventurer should be completely untrained in stealth. Second point lets rejig how skills and signature skills work. I say we should keep signature skills but divide them like so, each character has 3 signature skills, one from their ancestry, one from their background and one from their class. Signature skills start at expert and then upgrade to master and legendary when appropriate. Simple and makes characters have at least a baseline of what that character is good at. With that said lets beef up what it means to be trained, expert, master and legendary. This fix would eat the most word count but I think it would go a long way to making people more excited to play. Basically each level of training above trained should give you additional benefits in feats, class abilities, weapon properties and even weapon attacks and spells. For example each level above trained in a weapon should add your strength modifier (or dex for finesse weapons) to your damage rolls in a crit. This would mean that a legendary sword fighter compared to just someone trained with a sword is mechanically superior in and above just being more likely to crit. Weapon properties should scale the more trained with the weapon you are. If we implement this, untrained should hurt more, two ways to do it would either be 1) to add additional penalties for being untrained (say adding the possibility of hitting yourself on a critical failure with a chained weapon) and 2) the rate of scaling bonus be lessened to half level rounded down or maybe even quarter level rounded down Moving away from skills, a big disappointment in the system is how little rules exist for outside of combat and the lack of incentive to be anything but a murder hobo. To remedy this I propose a few additions to the game. First we should return the NPC boon and woe mechanics, giving the players an incentive to keep NPCs alive and also invest in them. But we should also expand this system to items of renown, since people will treat you differently if they see you caring the sword of the Baron that just died or the legendary Mcguffin of Doom. Bandits are less likely to attack someone in full plate adamantine armour for example. Secondly an introducing a contact mechanic, in which each of ancestry, background and class would provide the character with a contact be it their parents or siblings, work/profession contacts or just their friends; because no person goes around the world completely alone; to give players something to do in downtime and to give GMs a way to introduce plot hooks, give the solution to a problem the PCs can't solve and just more options. As the Characters progress through the story they'll obviously gain more contacts, though I don't know if that should be story based or by level. Finally we should also introduce a fame/infamy/honour/status system because as the PCs do deeds that go out and affect the world, people will start to react to them differently. I'm not entirely sure how many of these subsystems should exist, but there should be differences between circles. The champion of a gladiator ring is obviously going to have a lot of clout in the arena, but probably will be treated no different in the king's court or by the wizard's academy than any other person. Those are the ideas I have in my head at the moment, and will probably post more here as they appear as the playtest goes on. So What fixes or addons would you implement?
You know what, I think it would just be easier if clerics are limited to their god/goddess' alignment only. Because it is hard to justify why ZK would get LN clerics but Asmodeus not and in all fairness it makes more sense to just go "you have to be the alignment of the deity you worship"
Having ran a single session I can say that 1) it isn't that hard to pick up, 2) it doesn't feel that different from 1e 3) it does feel slimmer and some what less clunky. Now that is from only one session at lv1 so I'm sure things will change, but I'm glad we're getting a new systemI'm impressed as I'm on day 4 of trying to make it through the pdf to make a character and STILL haven't managed to do that. The constant jumping around from list to an entirely different section for everything sucks the momentum I have quickly. So I disagree on 1 and 3 for creation at least, and I haven't gotten the pathfinder 'feel' as of now. Stealth keywords, unseeable rarities and the new symbol based actions also slows me down to something slower than a crawl. :P I managed the character building process by seeing it more from the Modiphius' 2d20 system character creation process than the old PF1. Just go by each section and pick what you want and systematically build the character rather than everything in one go and that turns it fairly straight forward. The caveat I guess is that you need to know what you want to build and want to build a character rather than seeing how to exploit the system or what is the best combination.
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