zlefin's page

The action economy is, indeed, the most important revision in Pathfinder 2E and the reason to play it.

Honestly, something that would be amazing is if they would embrace it more fully and give most if not all spells the 1/2/3 action commitment that only a few spells (such as Magic Missile and Heal) get currently. Very similar to how 5E made heightening spells easy and a clear way of gaining power, leveraging the action economy to make spellcasting more flexible (and hopefully not more powerful) would be quite useful.

I disagree; in that while of some use in itself; one could simply play PF1 with the unchained action economy rules to get largely the same benefits.

GreyWolfLord wrote:

Vic Ferrari wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

I feel that there are two things worth noting-

- Pathfinder is a game usually played with between 3 and 7 player characters.
- Pathfinder is a heroic fantasy game in which our heroes will eventually be up to the task of accomplishing basically any heroic task one can come up with.

So that being said, Pathfinder really needs to be a game in which 3-7 player characters can manage whatever the GM throws at them, provided it is level appropriate. So things like "our plucky adventurers hold off 20,000 roaring orcs long enough for the ritual to be completed" are right in the wheelhouse of this game. For this to be possible, a level 1 orc fighter simply cannot pose a whole lot of threat to a 20th level party.

No edition of D&D supports a party of 3-7 holding off thousands or orcs, thank god.

I did that in AD&D.

I did that in AD&D 2e.

I did that in BECMI D&D.

I did that in 3e.

I have no idea where you get that assumption...though you are right for ONE edition of D&D.

D&D 5e does not support a party of 3-7 holding off thousands of orcs...that party would be slaughtered.

Heck, it doesn't even need thousands...even a hundred could probably kill them right off.

(edit PS: did you know there was actually an AD&D module where a general encounter could have you face off with 10,000 enemies!?

Of course, the level for the module was 18-100).

No, no you didn't. You want us to believe that your DM ran thousands of enemies against your characters? That doesn't pass the smell test.

I'm betting they didn't, what the DM narrated was thousands of enemies being fought and defeated by your character ie they just hand waved it away.

The only real way a situation like that could happen is when the PC becomes immune to non magical damage etc and defacto becomes immortal for that threat and the DM doesn't want to deal with it. The rules don't support playing that scenario out, it is just...

in 3.5 it's very feasible to reach the point where the orcs simply cannot hurt you. and you can outrun them to chase them down and slaughter them at will. All they can do is run away and scatter so you can't kill all of them. Or try to do some damage to something else before you kill them.

it's not a handwave to narrate away the situation if it's not possible for the enemies to hurt you regardless of the rolls.

definitely a design choice; the entire design of p2 seems to center around having minimal variation between different characters of the same level. Not just attack rolls, but also stuff like defenses, ac, skill rolls, there's very very few ways to modify them, and they're all tightly regulated. No more stuff like skill focus to get a +3 to one skill.
So the expected values for say, a lvl 10 rogue, will be very similar no matter how they're built.

It also makes me wonder though: where's the 11? with the default rules you can't get 11 in a stat. The numbers are chosen for purely legacy reasons; but odd numbers below 18 basically don't exist in the new stats system. Seems odd to use numbers like this but then ignore half of them. For us long-term users we know it exists for legacy reasons/compatibility; but for a new player, one might wonder why the intervening numbers can't exist.

it being gencon weekend doesn't seem like an adequate excuse to me. All this stuff should've been ready long before.
While I accept that mistakes happen, it doesn't reflect well on any release, even a playtest, when it's missing basic components like this. (and it's not the only missing basic component imho; the rulebook has a severe lack of examples to help demonstrate things, and the set of stuff in the download doesn't include a selection of cheat sheets. There should really be 2-8 pages of cheat sheets aka quick reference things to help with new stuff like what all the conditions and basic actions are. Having quick references like that the table is a huge help when running a new system)

I realized one thing lacking in this book for the feats: summary of the ability lines in the feat lists.
i.e. on page 160 where it lists all the general feats and skill feats, it doesn't say anything about what those feats do.
Looking at the 3.5 stuff for comparison; when it had the lists that summarized what all the feats were (i.e. name and prereq etc) it also had a short line telling roughly what the feat did.

in this playtest document; I can't tell anything about what a feat does except by looking up its full text.

While I haven't gotten enough testing to be sure; it seems like chain lightning could potentially hit hundreds of creatures or even thousands in a massed army.
none of the other spells seem to have quite as much potential to wipe an army, though aoe is of course great vs armies. But chain lightning could kill every enemy in a 500-foot radius as long as they're close enough to make a path through them all. (and in an open field environment so you can get line of effect to them all).
It just seems like an excessive potential compared to the other spells I've seen.

first, I wish there was just a generic megathread for people posting their reactions; cuz I'd rather post there than making a thread for it. But I see a lot of other reaction threads; and it'd seem odd to respond to one of them with my own reactions.

haven't gotten to playtest yet, just read through most of the manual.
On the whole feeling unimpressed; it's not terrible, but it doesn't seem great either, not sure it'd really be worth switching to/learning a new system.

It feels like level matters too much, or at least in too direct a way. Basically everything that matters has scaling = level. A lvl 15 Legendary skill roll is the same as a lvl 20 untrained. That just feels weird; it means levels give you a HUGE jack of all trades effect, no matter what your class is. While I get that it helps with keeping certain things balanced at high levels it feels weird. And because in every case it's just +your level, rather than being individual tables that varied somewhat like the old save values; it feels like when you levelup, the improving everything due to the +level itself is simply more important than whatever other abilities you get; all those other feats and such seem insignificant compared to the +1 to EVERYTHING from leveling itself. The difference between something like Expert and Trained is very minimal, EXCEPT for gating effects wherein if you don't have it at a certain level you're just not allowed to do stuff. That kind of hard binary gating is weird when the difference is otherwise very tiny (i.e. just a +1).

Organizationally, I feel like Chapter 9 should appear earlier; or at least some parts of it should. There's a lot of basic framing stuff in there that, if you haven't read yet, makes it harder to understand what's all happening. Alot of keywords defined there and such.
It should be possible to read through the book in order, and still understand stuff pretty well; but right now that doesn't work so well.

More examples are needed; there's a lot of places where I wasn't quite sure how things worked, and it'd have been helpful to see some examples to look at.

Some of the classes feel a bit too samey; in many ways some feel less like distinct classes than different subgroupings of the same class. Like Druid has those various paths: leaf, wild, and whatever.
Some of the classes have so muhc overlap in when they get various upgrades and in their feats that they could have all been made as just one class, with a lot of specializations.

I dislike that there's still a lot of unrealistic nonsense like armor automatically making you walk slower and max dex; but I'm not surprised that was kept in.

While the existence of more defined downtime and exploration phases theoretically opens up options; in practice it seems like there's very few feats (especially class feats) that interact with them. It feels like they're really given short shrift.

dotting for interest, considering a Negotiator Bard.

I think I'll skip this one. The lack of feedback available on the last one was a bit too irksome. They should at least let ya know what the votes were on your item, and roughly how that compares. Not even getting that data just made it too uninteresting to me.

hearing no one say on that, I'll just go ahead with planning an xp budget of 2000.

Ok, starting on planning the encounter, I'm thinking of aiming for a lvl 2 party, but it looks like some gm discussion is happening in the recruitment thread and there may be a glut of lvl 2 adventures; is there some other target lvl that would be good?

Part of the issue is that different communities and people have different ideas on what "average" optimization is, and I really don't have a sense of where this community's is.
I think I'll start somewhat low and adjust from there, though it looks like there's a lot of people trying to GM at the moment.

Ah, that would explain some of the difference then; since I use class levels sometimes I'll have to be careful on that and think.
It sounds like your encounters are rather different than what I would have expected.

The same could apply to foes as well though, especially if they have class levels.

I'd like to hear more opinions on the topic.

Hmmm, so, if I aimed an encounter for 5 lvl 2, the xp budget would be 2000 for the encounter?

I remain surprised that no one has died yet facing such encounters on a regular basis. If I make one, I'll have to be careful to either not optimize it, or to adjust for optimization by lowering the xp budget.

So, looking at that encounter design chart, do you guys aim for challenging, hard, or epic encounters? or some other value?

How optimized are the monster builds and strategy?

I'm surprised there haven't been any deaths yet, makes me worry I might design something too dangerous.

Found this one looking through the recruitment and like the setup you have; thinking about maybe dm'ing, or maybe just joining to play.

How tough do you guys aim for the encounters to be?

What level of build optimization and tactics/strategy do you aim for?

do you have a glut/shortage of dms or players?

how do you handle player death?

Have fun folks, I can't come up with a concept that's really striking me right. Also, I can see everyone else is writing much better than I do.

I'm still trying to find a character concept that feels right for the situation. I'm not very good at RP'ing, most of my skills lie in strategy. Just letting you know I'm still around and may submit if I can come up with something suitable.

side question: how is necromancy viewed in your games?

Looks interesting, will have to ponder if I can make up something good enough to play. Never played a PbP on this forum before.

oh, never mind then, it's too hard to tell what's core and what's not.

Interested, considering an alchemist.
Need to think if I can get a backstory that will work right.

Ah, submitted my little entry, I wonder how I'll do, I don't expect much. Hopefully I can do better than 50% percentile.

I'm not really up to the level of the top homebrewers I've seen on this and other forums; but I may as well make something up for fun anyways.

Arcanist feels a bit too bland to me. Sorceror and Wizard are one of the most similar pairs of classes in the game already. This hybridization just doesn't feel that distinct from either one of them.
It feels like it will occupy the exact same gameplay niche, with only some fluff differences.

The other hybrids feel like they have a more distinct purpose.