What adventure is this again?
Does this look like an adventure to you?
I generally don't use sunder as a GM in Pathfinder (1st edition), except maybe for a very specific enemies to show they are Big Deal (and invoke players' wrath) - yeah, it might have been a sensible thing to do, but it might easily mess with the already poor game balance because the math is already reliant on items.
On the other hand, if the players had ioun stones floating around them (I don't think that happened often enough, though, the players never seemed keen on buying them), some enemies might rather try to grab them from the air instead of sundering.
I haven't got to sundering rules in 2nd edition yet though my Mephisto-faced cat champion bought a healing ioun aeon stone just before the final confrontation in the Slithering.
What adventure is this again?
Shattered Star. They're given one ioun stone per shard, so seven ioun stones for four PCs, but each shard can contain an ioun stone, so between wayfinders and shards the PCs have managed to use all 7 stones without any of them floating around like great big targets.
Then along comes NPC with a whole swarm of rocks around her. There's quite a bit of suspension of disbelief to have bad guys say, "Well, we can't hit her, but look at all those glowy stones flying around her. They can't possibly be anything important..."
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Here's a pertinent RP question that's come up in multiple campaigns: Do your bad guys target the good guys' ioun stones?
To me, it seems like a no-brainer: One hit of an AC 24 item and the PC is out thousands of gold pieces and a current bonus. Sundering a weapon is hard. Even a plain +1 one-handed sword is hardness 12, hit points 15, and you have to beat the wielder's CMD. Breaking an ioun stone takes hitting AC 24 for hardness 5, hit points 10. By the time the PCs can afford ioun stones, bad guys can easily target and one-shot them.
How do other people deal with them?
I dont do that for the same reason we dont calculate the damage to all your equipment when you nat 1 that fireball saving throw. Its just too much hassle to play games like that.
For one thing, you can't BAKE a potato in a FRYER.
Or a Friar, for that matter.
Not true. You absolutely can bake a potato inside of a friar.
The hard part is getting his internal temperature up to 400 degrees.
I gave Hellpoint a try today.
Meh. A thematically might be promising with a dark, somewhat Gigeresque scenery, but the Dark Soul-like combat and the game not even trying to teach you how to fight or develop your character. Nope. Uninstall.
It was a second game that I uninstalled today. The other one was Elderborn, a somewhat Dark Soul-like first person game where you are a barbarian going through a dungeons of an isolated city.
I dont do that for the same reason we dont calculate the damage to all your equipment when you nat 1 that fireball saving throw. Its just too much hassle to play games like that.Here's a pertinent RP question that's come up in multiple campaigns: Do your bad guys target the good guys' ioun stones?
To me, it seems like a no-brainer: One hit of an AC 24 item and the PC is out thousands of gold pieces and a current bonus. Sundering a weapon is hard. Even a plain +1 one-handed sword is hardness 12, hit points 15, and you have to beat the wielder's CMD. Breaking an ioun stone takes hitting AC 24 for hardness 5, hit points 10. By the time the PCs can afford ioun stones, bad guys can easily target and one-shot them.
How do other people deal with them?
When it gets the broken condition it is flawed, when it is out of hit points completely it is cracked.
I usually just give items the broken condition when sundered in combat.
I am very condition-happy. I love the mechanic and I think paizo could have and should have done more with it. But I also think paizo should have fought with Wizards when they used their pugwampi mechanic to build a new edition.
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I thought 2e was supposed to be easier.Well, Vid, I've been trying to do that digging on PF2 sundering . . . .
In the 10 or so months that our group has been playing, I can only recall one enemy having a particularly nasty sunder-style attack. It specifically targeted armor, and I *think* had to be "set up" by a successful bite attack with a grab effect . . . .
But items have hardness, hit points, and "break/broken thresholds", so sundering is certainly built-in to the options one can perform, at least technically.
Our adventuring party is level 12, presently, and we have a couple of characters utilizing shields for their protection. You typically use one of your three actions per round to execute the 'Raise Shield' action, which grants an AC bonus (yeah, shield AC bonuses aren't "always on" in PF2) and allows the use of the 'Shield Block' reaction. Shield Block basically sacrifices a shield's integrity (calculating hardness and hp as normal) against the damage dealt by an incoming attack in order to reduce the damage your character takes from the successful hit.
Sidebar: that damage absorption even applies to the shield cantrip -- the caster gets the AC bonus for casting it, but if you use the Shield Block reaction to absorb a blow, you lose the ability to cast the spell for 10 minutes!
But as near as I can tell, it appears that only a dedicated barbarian build has anything like the potential for a true "sunder build". And, even then, the true mechanical benefits don't seem to kick in until you're beyond level 10 with the character.
DISCLAIMER: But let me make something perfectly clear -- despite the fact that I've been playing this system for almost a full calendar year, I make no claim that I've tracked down all the relevant information. This rulebook is a data miner's wet dream of cross-referencing -- I doubt I will ever get to the point that I will know its workings well.
Easier than what? Learning inverted logarithmically-derived ancient Sanskrit just for kicks?
Then the answer is "Maybe".
1) I've never seen a clearly-formatted "feat tree" progression for any of the feats in this game. That was one of the things I loved most about 3.5/PF1 -- you almost always had a clear idea of where you were headed with your build. As it stands now, I'm sure that most of the characters in my playgroup are quite "organic" in their development, simply because sifting through the layers of prereqs for the optimized versions of given abilities cannot be discerned within the pages of the Core Rulebook nor the Pathbuilder 2E app. So while it may have a metagaming-averse (lack of) utility, it's quite frustrating for me, who likes to be able to follow the steps of a mechanical progression without flipping pages.
2) The math in this edition is brutally effective. And the emphasis is on the "brutal" part. Most of the monsters/enemies you combat feel very much like a focused class build with some splashy features from another class spliced on just to make for relevant challenges (for instance -- all the focus and speed of a ranger hunting prey, with some insane Stealth features and poison damage you'd kinda expect from a rogue). I mentioned in NH's Shattered Star Campaign Journal that we've cakewalked over encounters that should have killed at least one of us, and we've nearly been slaughtered by encounters that were supposed to be quite easy -- player decisions and die rolls define everything in this system: if you undercommit *and* make suboptimal tactical choices *and* roll poorly, or just roll poorly at all, you're in for a tough time, even if you have the classical archetypes represented within your party.
But it seems to me that the math is unnecessarily bulky, in a way. Not only do you have to gauge results based upon natural 1s or 20s, but you also have to watch for the +10/-10 range of numbers to either "side" of the target number for success -- you can fail spectacularly in this system in more ways than one. (And for some reason, even though the opposite is also true [critical on a natural 20 or target+10], it just doesn't feel quite as frequent.)
PF2 might use fewer numbers and types of numbers than PF1, but you can never be certain which numbers will be employed in what equation(s). Considering the fact that every single skill you possess (though I have not yet seen this with the "knowledge" skills or the Lore skill) can be employed as a "defense score", I don't even understand why they still have Fortitude, Reflex, and Will supplied as saving throw categories anymore. Sometimes they attack your Reflex, but sometimes they attack your Acrobatics, and sometimes an ability/effect that seems it should go after your Reflex or Dexterity instead targets Fortitude/Constitution.
3) While this system is nowhere near as fubar'd as D&D 5E (Seriously: what can you do with a 'bonus action' that makes any sense?), it would still be far easier to learn if you've never played OGL d20 AT. ALL. The 3-action system seems clean and elegant at first blush, but then you have to start paying attention to a keyword system that involves more layering than those little Eastern European nesting dolls.
I've got to stop this while I'm behind.
It may simply be that I've got a very good GM at my table (And he is!), but I'm still not comfortable with the "game you play to play the game", so to speak. It may also be that I've finally found a "forever table" despite the conflicting playstyles and attitudes of the players, but this is the most enduring campaign in which I've ever participated, and I fully expect that we'll actually play all the way through this AP -- it will be a true first, for me.
The results of the mechanics are dramatic, climactic, tense, and can be fun. But the process of determining those results still feels extremely convoluted, to me.
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I thought 2e was supposed to be easier.Well, Vid, I've been trying to do that digging on PF2 sundering . . . .
In the 10 or so months that our group has been playing, I can only recall one enemy having a particularly nasty sunder-style attack. It specifically targeted armor, and I *think* had to be "set up" by a successful bite attack with a grab effect . . . .
But items have hardness, hit points, and "break/broken thresholds", so sundering is certainly built-in to the options one can perform, at least technically.
Our adventuring party is level 12, presently, and we have a couple of characters utilizing shields for their protection. You typically use one of your three actions per round to execute the 'Raise Shield' action, which grants an AC bonus (yeah, shield AC bonuses aren't "always on" in PF2) and allows the use of the 'Shield Block' reaction. Shield Block basically sacrifices a shield's integrity (calculating hardness and hp as normal) against the damage dealt by an incoming attack in order to reduce the damage your character takes from the successful hit.
Sidebar: that damage absorption even applies to the shield cantrip -- the caster gets the AC bonus for casting it, but if you use the Shield Block reaction to absorb a blow, you lose the ability to cast the spell for 10 minutes!
But as near as I can tell, it appears that only a dedicated barbarian build has anything like the potential for a true "sunder build". And, even then, the true mechanical benefits don't seem to kick in until you're beyond level 10 with the character.
DISCLAIMER: But let me make something perfectly clear -- despite the fact that I've been playing this system for almost a full calendar year, I make no claim that I've tracked down all the relevant information. This rulebook is a data miner's wet dream of cross-referencing -- I doubt I will ever get to the point that I will know its workings well.
Easier than what?...
It may simply be that I've got a very good GM at my table (And he is!), but I'm still not comfortable with the "game you play to play the game", so to speak.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
There are some approaches to tabletop gaming that leave a bad taste in my mouth and gaming the system seems to be the worst for me. Some people LOVE that, but after some poor experiences myself I tend to be a bit wary.
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Played Ghost Recon again last night, but this time in Campaign mode instead of "endless attack" mode.
What a difference!
As Shiro put it, it's like Far Cry 5 and you're trying to take every peggy base while winning the "take a base undetected" award. With 4 coordinated players, so far it's ridiculously easy. Especially compared to the whole, "endless waves of guys are coming to mow you down, survive for as long as you can" mode.
We had one mistake where someone set off an alarm and reinforcements arrived, but by then we were well-hunkered in and we survived the attack.
So, campaign mode is definitely MUCH better.
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Yup, the sundial is coming along fantastically. It's more of a puzzle now then anything, though I don't think I'm going to be able to fit it in a box.
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It has been raining all day.
Why?
Because God is very sad about England's defeat in the Prusso-Swabian Toad-back Bog Snuggling Championship and has been crying non-stop since 11pm on Sunday, that's why.
Played Ghost Recon again last night, but this time in Campaign mode instead of "endless attack" mode.
What a difference!
As Shiro put it, it's like Far Cry 5 and you're trying to take every peggy base while winning the "take a base undetected" award.
Definitely, except you don't have a reliable (chain) melee kill from behind.
With 4 coordinated players, so far it's ridiculously easy.
When playing campaign solo, your squad is less than stellar, most of the time.
So, campaign mode is definitely MUCH better.
I didn't even know there is an endless attack mode.
A word of warning - from what I read (unless it was patched since the comments were made) the campaign progress only counts for one of the players while the rest only gets experience (and possibly supplies). Not sure about gear but there were complaints you don't even unlock new travel locations.
Obviously, playing solo I had no way of testing it.
Speaking of Ghost Recon, I have just finished a very frustrating achievement needed to reach 9th rank of Engineer class. Kill six enemies with the help of the engineer's combat drone...
The drone is a skill that lasts for a limited time... And it struggles with killing enemies fast enough to complete that achievement before its duration runs out.
A word of warning - from what I read (unless it was patched since the comments were made) the campaign progress only counts for one of the players while the rest only gets experience (and possibly supplies). Not sure about gear but there were complaints you don't even unlock new travel locations.
Obviously, playing solo I had no way of testing it.
For me that's a non-issue because I don't play games solo. The other players tend to like it because it lets them do the campaign twice.
Some people have more free time than others.
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Oh, and how bad is Shattered Star?
A-yep.
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Oh, and how bad is Shattered Star?
** spoiler omitted **
That doesn't sound bad, sounds like they're having a great time.
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Oh, and how bad is Shattered Star?
** spoiler omitted **
In our international group, we have an incredible way of befriending folks that a conventional player group would not.
It makes the campaign a lot more memorable when we don't have a graveyard of our former foes, but a thriving community. :>
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That doesn't sound bad, sounds like they're having a great time.Oh, and how bad is Shattered Star?
** spoiler omitted **
The entire scenario played out beautifully.
Mysterious Woman: I understand you want to go underwater to learn more about me, but there are hungry predators down there. I charmed them so they won't hurt me, but they'll attack you on sight.
Party: We can deal with that!
The party went down, heard the woman call out in Aquan asking the predators to hold off or they'd be killed, and they yelled, "Come on out! We'll feed you!"
One Rod of Splendor later and the six siyokoys had a feast for 100 and a promise to be released from their imprisonment as soon as the party was finished searching the area. So of course they helped. And of course their referring to the woman as, "Great one," made the wizard realize she was an aboleth so she returned to her true form to be more comfortable underwater.
So yep, a party being towed around by swim speed 60 siyokoys and accompanied by an aboleth exploring an underwater dungeon. I think all those swimming and water hazards have now become non-issues.
And the party's having a blast.
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I'd rather have a LE guy on my team than a CN one.
At least you can trust the LE one not to stab you in the back most of the time.
LE is the "I can play well with others if I absolutely must" villain, like Magneto, Raistlin Majere, Lex Luthor, John Marcone, or General Tarquin. IF it's to their advantage, they can make amazing allies.
That's a lot better than "meh, I feel like this right now, but my mind might change."
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Yeah at least you know what to expect from the LE.
Interesting twist to the laundry tonight. Manager worked 2nd shift, so of course he didn't touch it. But as the first load was finishing up in the wash, the automatic detergent/bleach/softener dispenser started pissing water on the floor. So I contained the water with rags, let the load finish washing, and then shut off the water to the machine. So now I have an undeniably legitimate reason to not wash any more laundry tonight. So I just have to finish up what was in the wash when I came in, and then dry and fold what I just washed, and I'll be done.
All this time I have been suggesting fire but turns out water was the way to go.
Interesting twist to the laundry tonight. Manager worked 2nd shift, so of course he didn't touch it. But as the first load was finishing up in the wash, the automatic detergent/bleach/softener dispenser started pissing water on the floor. So I contained the water with rags, let the load finish washing, and then shut off the water to the machine. So now I have an undeniably legitimate reason to not wash any more laundry tonight. So I just have to finish up what was in the wash when I came in, and then dry and fold what I just washed, and I'll be done.All this time I have been suggesting fire but turns out water was the way to go.Just more evidence to support the conclusion that you are usually wrong.
(Joking. I hope you would know that, but I want to be clear.)
You forgot to use disclaimer gran.
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Back from a cinema - I watched Black Widow on the big screen.
It was a lot of fun, and yet, at the same time, there were rather emotional moments...
The cats are in, the heat is on in the studio and the bedroom, and the sun is nowhere to be seen.
Must be July.
Dammit!
So many game, so few dollars...
:(
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I have the onyx flagstone cut in all the way for the sundial. Now, comes the fun part, figuring out how to mark the passage of time, also experimenting with new tools and techniques. And clear sealing the onyx, because it looks way better when it looks wet, So that's how I'm rounding out my week.
Tomorrow after clear sealing I'll spend most of my day cleaning up after phase one.
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My best tech at the previous job has jumped ship and will be starting his new job at my current place of employment on the 26th.
*Sigh*
After accepting the offer he's gotten cold feet. The old job matched the salary offer and he's decided to stay with the abuse he knows.
I have informed him that he is an idiot, but he's still my friend.
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I still say you should be setting something on fire.
Yeah I don't even haggle anymore takt it or leave it at this point.
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There I am!
That bear you're shaving seems to be unusually flat and green.
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