One of my pet peeves of many systems is how armor works. Particularly, that a lot of lightly-armored characters are relegated to having ungodly high DEX if they intend to survive in combat, whereas that might not always be the case in fantasy in general.
For that reason, I've always liked this gem from the Iroran Paladin:
At 1st level, when wearing light or no armor and not using a shield, an Iroran paladin adds 1 point of his Charisma bonus (if any) per class level to his Dexterity bonus to his Armor Class. If he is caught flat-footed or otherwise denied his Dexterity bonus, he also loses this bonus. This ability replaces his proficiency with medium armor, heavy armor, and shields.
It's simple enough – pile up your DEX + CHA mods and then apply an armor's Max Dexterity.
Suddenly, your Iroran Paladin is free to go with high STR, high CHA, and not-terrible DEX, and they can waltz around with light armor without being tied down to the almighty DEX.
You still can't dump DEX, and you don't particularly benefit from piling up on CHA + DEX together, because you'll eventually hit light armor Max DEX cap with no discernible benefit other than touch AC.
For PF2, I still need to get more acquainted with how stat priority and armor mechanics will work.
But keeping options like this provides a great deal of breathing space for designing unique characters.
Can you get rid of your line of dashes? It breaks the forum on a phone.
I agree with Fuzzypaws. I can't read what you're sYing as a result
Line dashes are no more.
One of my pet peeves of many systems is how armor works. Particularly, that a lot of lightly-armored characters are relegated to having ungodly high DEX if they intend to survive in combat, whereas that might not always be the case in fantasy in general.
For that reason, I've always liked this gem from the Iroran Paladin:
At 1st level, when wearing light or no armor and not using a shield, an Iroran paladin adds 1 point of his Charisma bonus (if any) per class level to his Dexterity bonus to his Armor Class. If he is caught flat-footed or otherwise denied his Dexterity bonus, he also loses this bonus. This ability replaces his proficiency with medium armor, heavy armor, and shields.It's simple enough – pile up your DEX + CHA mods and then apply an armor's Max Dexterity.
Suddenly, your Iroran Paladin is free to go with high STR, high CHA, and not-terrible DEX, and they can waltz around with light armor without being tied down to the almighty DEX.
You still can't dump DEX, and you don't particularly benefit from piling up on CHA + DEX together, because you'll eventually hit light armor Max DEX cap with no discernible benefit other than touch AC.
For PF2, I still need to get more acquainted with how stat priority and armor mechanics will work.
But keeping options like this provides a great deal of breathing space for designing unique characters.
I certainly hope options like this are in PF2, or at least appear in the APG. I think a shirtless barbarian who adds Con to AC should be as viable as the one swathed in hide and bones.
I liked some items that applied a contingent bonus vs. confirming Crits.
Confirming doesn't exist, but same concept works re: bonus to AC for purposes of crits.
I'd like the see the Getting Lost rules improved so it is more consistently usable. Too often I see it ignored.
Could be as much an issue of presentation as mechanics per se.
Falling objects: the rules are to small and it comes up to much to have so little rules.
Getting Lost rules are fantastic.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Deadliness scenario. I have not come accross it I think in PF yet.
You got caught out, the bandit has a knife to your friends throat!
Player 1: "It's ok he's got a lot of hp"
Player 2: "yeah but it's like a guaranteed crit?"
GM: "Uh it'll be a coupdegrace"
Player 1: "low level bandit, still a doable check.."
ETC. It is so damn difficult to make good action tension in Pathfinder compared to other systems (or free styling no rules) that I'd like to see something. I'd like to see some suggestions or possible rule resolutions to dealing with a duel where they started with the guns point blank on each others faces, an inminent fall from someone on a cliff...
Not everything needs rules in this game. However storytelling should be, if the GM wants it, helped along in its resolution by rules to describe player/npc actions and choices. At the moment, there is nothing, and pure pathfinder combat is not a good medium for storytelling action in its midst.
Deadliness scenario. I have not come accross it I think in PF yet.
You got caught out, the bandit has a knife to your friends throat!
Player 1: "It's ok he's got a lot of hp"
Player 2: "yeah but it's like a guaranteed crit?"
GM: "Uh it'll be a coupdegrace"
Player 1: "low level bandit, still a doable check.."ETC. It is so damn difficult to make good action tension in Pathfinder compared to other systems (or free styling no rules) that I'd like to see something. I'd like to see some suggestions or possible rule resolutions to dealing with a duel where they started with the guns point blank on each others faces, an inminent fall from someone on a cliff...
Not everything needs rules in this game. However storytelling should be, if the GM wants it, helped along in its resolution by rules to describe player/npc actions and choices. At the moment, there is nothing, and pure pathfinder combat is not a good medium for storytelling action in its midst.
My hope is that they'll make it something like "Coup de Grace immediately gives the target the Dying 1 condition" but make it much harder to coup de grace someone (either because spells that used to allow it only give that effect on a critical fail of the saves, or because there are fewer conditions that allow for it)
Deadliness scenario. I have not come accross it I think in PF yet.
You got caught out, the bandit has a knife to your friends throat!
Player 1: "It's ok he's got a lot of hp"
Player 2: "yeah but it's like a guaranteed crit?"
GM: "Uh it'll be a coupdegrace"
Player 1: "low level bandit, still a doable check.."ETC. It is so damn difficult to make good action tension in Pathfinder compared to other systems (or free styling no rules) that I'd like to see something. I'd like to see some suggestions or possible rule resolutions to dealing with a duel where they started with the guns point blank on each others faces, an inminent fall from someone on a cliff...
Not everything needs rules in this game. However storytelling should be, if the GM wants it, helped along in its resolution by rules to describe player/npc actions and choices. At the moment, there is nothing, and pure pathfinder combat is not a good medium for storytelling action in its midst.
On the flip side, player options for the deadliness scenario. "He's got a lot of HP" works in reverse. At higher levels, it becomes nearly impossible for a player to do anything about the situation without specific magical effects. In a movie, you could talk to the bad guy. Distract him a bit then shoot him in his exposed leg, allowing the hostage to free themselves. But in the game, the bad guy simply takes X amount of damage, the hostage can't break the grapple DC, then the bag guy just kills the hostage.
This causes a lot of storytelling issues. We typically just hand wave it, playing the situation out narratively with a check or two. Initiative is rolled after the deadliness scenario is resolved.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yeah, it's hard to keep that kinda tension to a non-ridiculous extent without a lot of GM fiat and I think GM fiat will be needed in PF2E too.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I do NOT want to see more of the alignment system, so that's as far as you got me.
But seeing Aid Another have a bigger place in *combat* particularly is something I'd like, not so much seeing it outside of combat.
I'm looking forward to seeing how they've improved their poison and chemical rules. I really hope they play a larger roll in games; the price alone made them fairly unusable on a regular basis.
And while addiction and disease rules were there, they didn't see much play. I'd love to see more of it throughout the system and the lore.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I want more Words of Power.
Team Work Feats.
They never really worked well because it required multiple people to invest in the same feat, and it was hard to convince everyone to do it. Especially in PFS.
But if we could make it so our own feats could expand to others to make it work as a team, that would be awesome.
I'd love a feat that allowed me to buff an ally (even if I got minimal or no benefits) because it shows teamwork.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I would like to see Aid Another codified better.
1. Make it clear that all skills can now be used untrained (including with Aid Another), and that Aid Another has no Critical Failure chance [I hope].
2. Make it clear that it can be used on all skills.
I always hate when the GM says "Roll Perception" or "Roll Sense Motive" and half the people sit around with their d20's idle. I don't care what the skill is: assume we're talking about Stealth: maybe you signal to your teammate that she's still too exposed and not enough in the shadows... it's just a +2 for your standard action, usually outside of combat [where there is no action to lose really].
3. Pick a direction: either the character of the person who's been doing the most [talking] to make the main check (which is really annoying when the character with [charisma] dumped just happens to have the most [talkative] player) or the party selects one character to re-iterate in-character the best argument the table of players arrived at. The rest can either roll their own check [which would risk a critical failure for that character] or make the assist.
4. Explain how to do an Aid Another on a saving throw. When exactly does that come up? You make your save vs. Hold Person but a teammate fails. You then take your next round's standard action to do Aid Another on your adjacent ally?
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Boiling water dealing scalding damage, not fire.Might I ask what the difference is? Fire damage is probably better listed as high thermal damage and cold damage as low thermal damage, but realistically the method of transmission (radiant, convection, contact) is somewhat largely irrelevant to the type of cellular destruction caused by the exposure. Hot water vs hot metal vs steam vs fire vs lava, it's all basically going to do the same thing: cook you, to some degree or another, by denaturing your proteins and rupturing your cells with escaping man-steam.
The difference is simple. There are no resistances or immunities to scalding damage.
|
|
are you trying to get scalding damage to be a thing so you can bypass immunities and resistances in a ruleslawyer style
This, actually. Because of the way Resistance and Weakness works in the game it makes that some things might be weaker to really hot water than to just fire. Sort of like an Ice Elemental I guess.
They can add new damage types this way, but I doubt they want another reason for people to compare their game to 5e.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm interested to see how rituals work in PF2, and whether they can cut down on the author fiat in adventures.
For example, from the Reign of Winter adventure path:
At the end of The Snows of Summer, at the top of the tower, there's a big ritual chamber that's keeping open the winter portal. It stays open indefinitely unless the PCs shut it down. The book describes roughly what it looks like, but says nothing about how the PCs are supposed to stop it other than by rolling a high spellcraft check.
There are two problems with that. First, it's got no flavour, no romance to it. It makes for a boring session if there's no participation in the ritual at all beyond one player making one roll.
Second, if that one player fails their roll, there's no provision for how the party are supposed to proceed with the AP. How often can you re-roll? How can the rest of the party help?
Related to Sadie's post, I'm really hoping the exploration mode rules will turn out to have a coherent skill challenge ruleset. They put out various specific skill challenges over the last few books (Occult rituals and psychic combat, chases, research and social combat, wilderness exploration rules), but combining them all into a basic chassis would be nice. I'd also like options to dial the complexity up or down depending on how much time your players want to spend on it.
I really liked the Skill Challenge book, and hope some fashion of that becomes part of the core rules.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Deadliness scenario. I have not come accross it I think in PF yet.
You got caught out, the bandit has a knife to your friends throat!
Player 1: "It's ok he's got a lot of hp"
Player 2: "yeah but it's like a guaranteed crit?"
GM: "Uh it'll be a coupdegrace"
Player 1: "low level bandit, still a doable check.."ETC. It is so damn difficult to make good action tension in Pathfinder compared to other systems (or free styling no rules) that I'd like to see something. I'd like to see some suggestions or possible rule resolutions to dealing with a duel where they started with the guns point blank on each others faces, an inminent fall from someone on a cliff...
Not everything needs rules in this game. However storytelling should be, if the GM wants it, helped along in its resolution by rules to describe player/npc actions and choices. At the moment, there is nothing, and pure pathfinder combat is not a good medium for storytelling action in its midst.
I created a house rule for this. There's a lot of variables, but I think it's simple enough. It's called the Hostage Situation.
The mechanic these scenarios are coming close to emulating is a Coup de Grace (auto crit; Fort save vs. dmg dealt or death), but such a maneuver requires the victim to have the Helpless condition. In these scenarios, the victim may be considered Flat-footed, or even Pinned, but they’re usually not considered helpless, which means the mechanical payoff to such a flavorful setup is almost always just a simple attack roll, followed by normal damage, which is almost never enough to warrant the tension such a scene should invoke.
At the same time, a full Coup de Grace is perhaps a bit too far in some of these cases, which aren’t always even incredibly hard to pull off; some sort of middle ground would be more appropriate. Introducing the Hostage Situation; it’s not a condition, so much as a very unique portion of combat in which a special attack can be made to devastating effect.
Setting up the Hostage Situation: All of the following conditions must be met in order for the Initiator to create a Hostage Situation:
• The Initiator must have a Light or One-handed piercing or slashing weapon, or one-handed firearm drawn. Other weapons could potentially be used at the GM's discretion.
• The Initiator must be adjacent to the victim. Other positionings could be possible at the GM's discretion.
• The victim must have at least one of the following conditions: Dying, Flat-footed, Helpless, Paralyzed, Pinned, Stunned, or Unconscious. In the case of Flat-footed, the victim must also be unaware of the Initiator's presence, or at least believe the Initiator doesn't mean them harm. In the case of Pinned, and the Initiator was the one who performed the Pin, they can choose a prone OR standing position (with a designated forward-facing side of the square) to keep the victim in. If the Initiator wasn't the one who performed the Pin, they need the consent of whoever did in order for it to count.
• The attacker must have some way of seriously and immediately threatening the victim's life (having a dagger pulled while adjacent to a Flat-footed/unaware Tyrannosaurus would not be considered a serious and immediate threat to the dinosaur's life).
The Hostage Situation begins if all four of the above conditions are met at the same time. The victim is now considered the Hostage. The victim remains the hostage, even if the condition it had changes, such as from unconscious to awake and prone, or losing the Flat-footed condition after the first round of the combat. The idea here is that the Initiator has positioned themselves into an un-defendable position when the victim's defenses were down, and even if the victim is now able to defend themselves normally against other opponents, the Initiator is still inside the victim's defenses, and able to strike with impunity, even if such a blow wouldn't be quite as devastating as if the victim were completely helpless. The Initiator must remain adjacent to the Hostage, and must continually have the weapon they began the Hostage Situation with drawn, as well as the life of the Hostage seriously and immediately threatened. Should the Hostage gain the benefits of a Stoneskin spell, for example, their life would no longer be seriously or immediately threatened, unless the Initiator’s weapon happened to be Adamantine.
Slay the Hostage is an action the Initiator can choose to make, using the weapon he used to begin the Hostage Situation. This is a special attack, which is considered a confirmed Critical Hit, as well as a confirmed Critical Called Shot - usually to one of the following areas on the Hostage: Head, Heart, Neck, or Vitals, appropriate to how the Hostage Situation was set up. If the initiator has 11 or more HD, the special attack is instead considered a confirmed Critical Hit, as well as a Debilitating Called Shot. If the Called Shot effect calls for a saving throw, treat the Initiator's attack roll as if they had rolled a natural 20. This attack is usually made quickly with little to no wind up or kinetic force involved - special damage-boosting options like Power Attack or Piranha Strike usually can't be used. If the attack is made with a ranged weapon, the attack doesn’t provoke from the Hostage. An ally of the Hostage (or any creature, for that matter) cannot ready an action to interrupt this attack.
The Initiator has several options for when he can Slay the Hostage. He can do this as a Standard action, in place of an attack of opportunity, or as a Readied action he can prepare when the Hostage Situation begins (such as if any of the hostage’s allies move toward them). If the Initiator takes damage during a Hostage Situation (besides residual damage from effects like Bleed), the Hostage can, as an Immediate action, attempt a Bluff or Escape Artist check at a +5 bonus to end the Hostage situation (see below). Failing this check provokes an attack of opportunity. Even if the hostage is the only creature threatening the Initiator, the Initiator must still cast any spells defensively (as long as the Hostage is the only creature threatening, the Initiator gains a +5 bonus on the check), or provoke an attack of opportunity from the Hostage. The Hostage can choose to forego this attack of opportunity to instead attempt to escape with a +10 bonus on the attempt (see below). Slaying the Hostage ends the Hostage Situation, though if all four conditions above are still in place, the Initiator can immediately begin a new Hostage Situation on the same turn.
The Hostage: In addition to the normal rules for attacks of opportunity, if the Hostage takes any of the following actions, it will also provoke from the initiator: taking a Withdraw action, taking a 5' step, using a Supernatural or Extraordinary Ability with obvious effects, drawing a weapon or other object (though making a Sleight of Hand check vs. either the initiator's Perception check or Sense Motive check - whichever is higher - doesn't provoke; drawing a concealed weapon nets a +2 bonus on the Sleight of Hand check), defensively casting a spell (though defensively casting a Quickened spell doesn't provoke - in addition to any other Concentration checks they might need to make, like from being Grappled), or making an attack roll (though making a Bluff check vs. a DC equal to EITHER 10 + [initiator's BAB] + [initiator's Wis mod], OR 10 + [initiator's bonus to Sense Motive] - whichever is higher - doesn't provoke).
As a Standard action (or Immediate action in response to the Initiator taking damage), the Hostage can attempt to end the Hostage Situation by making EITHER a Bluff check with a DC equal to 20 + [Initiator's BAB] + [Initiator's Wis mod], OR an Escape Artist check with a DC equal to the Initiator's CMD + 10. The Hostage gets a +5 bonus on the check if it's in response to the initiator taking damage. The chosen method must be appropriate to the means with which the Initiator began the hostage situation (being pinned to the ground does not allow the use of Bluff to escape). Other methods could exist, but the GM has the final say on what is allowed. In any case, failing such an attempt provokes an attack of opportunity from the Initiator.
On a success, the Hostage Situation ends, but the victim isn't necessarily out of danger. A Pinned creature might simply instead be Grappled again (with the initiator still in control of the Grapple). On the other hand, if the Initiator simply had a knife to the Hostage's back, making a Bluff check could allow the victim to take a 5' step out of danger and face the Initiator as a true combatant.
I don't see how any bladed weapon couldn't be used to hold a hostage!
You could grab a greatsword by the pommel and the blade, with the hostage between you and your body, and press the blade up to the hostage's neck.
If you have a gauntlet, you wouldn't press hard enough to cut your fingers and you could threaten to slit the throat of whoever you got trapped.
It could certainly be modified to accommodate different weapons - I know it's not a perfect system.
But anyway, back to mechanics that actually exist, as per the original topic - I always liked the idea of giving non-casters (and casters, too, for that matter) the ability to directly use magic, albeit at great risk, so I really hope Occult Rituals get more of a spotlight in PF2.