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I didn’t have a chance to listen to all of the presentations from Paizocon, so I don’t know if this was covered.
I’d like to submit a request that PFS keep the 0 cost rebuild boon available until some pre-determined time after the APG is sanctioned. Right now, there are a lot of people looking at the list of things contained in the APG and wanting to see what they are to potentially use them with their characters. There’s also been a little bit of a sentiment that the rebuild boons might go away with Year 2, or might go away when the ACP system is fully released.
The issue right now is that we don’t know when any of these things are going to happen. The APG is going to release at the end of July, but there’s no guarantee when it will be sanctioned. If the rebuild boon ends with GenCon Online, then it wouldn’t be able to be used with the APG, even if there are a few days after the books releases while the boon is still available.
If, however, PFS can tell us that the rebuild will be available for at least X amount of time after the APG is sanctioned (a week, month, whatever makes sense), that would do a lot of things. It would put people at ease who are worried they might not be able to use the options from the APG with the rebuild boon. It would also let us know that APG would be the last book guaranteed to be covered by the rebuild, which also gives some clarity when looking at future releases.
Now, the new Society Guide is also on the schedule, so it might be that the rebuild is going to remain until that is released, which would also be great.
It’s the uncertainty around basically facing the possibility of the rebuild being removed with little notice, and sanctioning for the APG taking a while, and it would be great to have some confirmation whether or not we’ll be able to take advantage of those options on our characters without spending a bunch of downtime.
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And it seems as though my fears were justified. I’m not sure if today’s blog it right before or right after I posted this message, but here is the info:
This also means we are REMOVING the free rebuild boon from those available. At this point, we plan to remove that boon 2 weeks after we launch AcP purchases. We will include a rebuild boon on the AcP reward chart, but it will cost. If you are planning on doing any character rebuilds, I highly encourage you to do so now!
So at this point it looks like no APG material for the free rebuilds, which I know is going to disappoint a lot of people.
So I’ll amend my request to ask that the free rebuild be allowed to remain until after the APG is sanctioned. Yes, there needs to be an end to it. The APG is a special book. It very much looks like it is going to be part 2 of the Core Rulebook. Things that many of us felt needed to be in the system before it would feel like a complete system are slated for the APG. To remove the free build just prior to the release of the APG seems like incredibly poor timing.
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"We will include a rebuild boon on the AcP reward chart, but it will cost." Tonya, org play blog 6/4
We have been lucky enough to have the FREE rebuild for as long as we have, while allowing the team time to work through AcP properly-as it should be, to avoid as many issues as possible- and we have had that much longer to earn AcP to afford paid-for rebuilds.
Venture-Captain, Missouri—Columbia
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I am going to agree with Ferious. We are going to see a lot of players wanting to add things to their characters and the rebuild will be the only way they can do it legally.
Of course, players could pick up the free rebuild now so they have it for their characters when the APG comes out.
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I am going to agree with Ferious. We are going to see a lot of players wanting to add things to their characters and the rebuild will be the only way they can do it legally.
Of course, players could pick up the free rebuild now so they have it for their characters when the APG comes out.
Wait, can we do that? Even if we play the character after picking up the rebuild?
One of my issues is that I have a character sitting on 13 XP who has not been played at 2nd yet. I’m taking a dedication but almost certainly will want one of the new archetypes when the book comes out. I may also want to change his background. I could just not play the character until the APG is sanctioned. But are you saying I could purchase the 0 cost boon and apply it to him, but actually do the rebuild later?
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While I understand where you are coming from, and why you think it could be sub-optimal. We have had all of this time to earn more AcP, and especially with more Cons moving online, as Premier events. Referencing 2/6 blog https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sh3w it will only be 20 AcP to rebuild a PC between level 2-4 and starting at 50, plus +15 after each time for lvl 5+.
I am in support of them removing the free rebuild before APG is sanctioned also, for can you imagine all of the players rebuilding their high level PCs without digesting the contents of the book? I could see that leading to a lot of inconsistancies and bad habits being formed by players not having adequate time to understand how the new options can work together.
Venture-Captain, Online—VTT
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I'm pretty sure you can't no, you apply the rebuild, add the chronicle numbered appropriately (when it's working properly) and then carry on playing adding new chronicles, you can't "save it up".
I suppose you could potentially apply the chronicle and then simply stop playing, but even that seems like a shady way to try and get around the fact it's going away instead of celebrating the fact we've had it for so long for free and that the new AcP rebuild options are generously cheap even for someone who doesn't GM.
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The lower cost on the AcP rebuild helps. I was misreading the chart on my phone and thought all of the rebuilds had an escalating cost. Meaning having to spend one to use the APG options would have a long term impact. But Nicole cleared that up.
It would be great to get an answer to Dustin’s question in the other thread. If I could play the character now, assign the boon during the 2 weeks after the AcPs go live, and then set the character aside, that would be much preferable to setting him aside now.
As is, a significant portion of the games I have played haven’t been reported (not online, Richard, you all are great about making sure it’s done). So in a situation where I’m already down about 1/3 the AcPs that I should have, where a rebuild would cost more than half what I do have, I’d rather take whatever route avoids that until I at least know what’s in the APG and whether I even want any of those options or not.
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Thune, how is the APG going to be different than any other new book that is about to come out. Are you not going to have the same feelings when other new books come out? I fail to see why the APG should be treated differently than other books in the future. Are you going to insist on free rebuilds when the next hardcover after the APG comes out?
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The APG is different because 2nd Edition feels incomplete right now. The Core Rulebook and the options in it feel like a framework for the game, but are far short of being complete. The APG feels like "Core Rulebook Part 2" where the game actually starts to become a fully functioning thing. That might not end up being the case, but the preliminary announcements make it feel that way.
It's also the timing of it and that they have the choice to handle the situation differently than they are. The rollout of PFS2 has had a lot of issues. Many of them were things beyond the team's control, but many of them weren't. It's been a long year of promises that are just now starting to get delivered on. Since the AcP system took so long that it is happening essentially right on top of the release of the APG, the team could decide that as a way of acknowledging that things didn't go as smoothly as everyone had hoped for the last year, they will extend the rebuild so that people can look forward to fixing characters that just couldn't work quite right with the more limited options available.
I know a lot of people will disagree that 2E has limited options. 2E has a lot of options, but it's a breadth of options, not a depth of options. Once you go down a class path, you're pretty limited in what is actually helpful to take. That's evidenced by things like there only being 3 7th level or higher General Feats that aren't Skill Feats and only 6 that are 3rd level or higher. They very clearly delayed releasing a lot of the higher level options, leaving them out of the Core Rulebook so that they could fit more of the core game in.
So the APG, unlike other books, very much feels like it's going to be filling in those gaps. That's why it's different.
EDIT: The list of Archetypes alone in the APG feels like a piece of the core game that was just flat-out missing in the Core Rulebook. They come across as almost a necessity to achieve some pretty basic character concepts without being locked into a very specific path in the Core Rulebook.
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I have built and played a level 7 Wizard in society. Despite all of your points, which have merit, I find that I still cannot make up my mind completely on my future build...because of my options. Not liking the options is not the same as them not existing.
As for the comment of...
"Once you go down a class path, you're pretty limited in what is actually helpful to take."
...yeah, that is the nature of character construction as it pertains to leveling in crunchy systems.
I understand your points but don't agree with your conclusion that the CRB is incomplete. It is a CRB. Books that come after will add to the options as all additional books do.
As an example, I'd encourage you to play PFS1 in core mode. Without all of the additional books it "feels incomplete". But it is not.
P.S. Maybe I don't grasp what you mean by breadth and depth.
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I don’t really want write a treatise on the core rulebook, but that’s basically what this is going to turn into. The 1E core rulebook had 3.5 to fall back on. Not for PFS, but in general play. There were many, many existing books that could be used with it, and that was part of the design philosophy. To be backward compatible for at least a while. 2E didn’t do that, so it has to stand on its own. What the 2E CRB does is set up a framework for how a lot of systems will work... class feats, general feats, skill feats, archetypes, etc., and it gives just enough options to be playable, mainly focused on lower level play. There’s enough to run high level stuff, but far more low level options. To the point that you end up spending higher level feats selecting lower level options, because they’ve done a good job making them stay relevant, but it’s still something at 6th level you could have been doing at 1st level.
Breadth meaning there are a lot of combinations. There are 8 core ancestries, 12 core classes, and I think 60 or 70 backgrounds in the CRB (that might be higher). There are a lot of combinations of characters that you can make. There’s no denying that.
Depth meaning when you actually try to make a character that is good at a particular thing, though, you end up being locked into far fewer choices. For the most part, background and ancestry have far less impact on being good at a particular thing in 2E than race and traits did in 1E. Ability choices are fairly open. I tried to test that making a dex-based dwarf rogue for my -2001, and it’s worked out pretty well. He’s kind of a tanky rogue, which is fun. He was also nearly identical to the dex-based Dwarven rogue another player in the area independently made, because once you settled on that concept, there were only a handful of options that made sense.
Once you’re down the path of “I want to be a dex rogue,” your options become pretty clear. When you add two-weapon fighting it’s even clearer. There end up really only being a couple of class feats at every choice that make any sense.
Champion is even more limited. You’ve only got 2 class feats you can even choose from at 1st level, since most are restricted by cause. One of those involves some additional choice (domains), but still pretty limited and it also competes for resources with lay on hands. At 2nd level, you basically take divine grace or you focus on one type of enemy. There’s a decided lack of viable options the deeper you try to go with the class. When you get higher level, there are class feats that seem pretty much like necessities just to be able to keep your abilities from conflicting with each other. Want to shield block and retributive strike? Then you really need to take Quick Block. Etc.
All of the martial classes feel that way. Spellcasters at least have a list of spells to mix things up.
In a less specific sense, if you say “I want to be a good archer,” you end up one of a very few places. You either take fighter or ranger as your class, or you take a fighter or ranger dedication. They made a design decision in the CRB to lock certain fighting styles behind certain classes. So once you’re down a path of wanting to be good at whatever thing, you narrow down significantly which options make sense. And with the dedications you’re often waiting until 4th level to be doing something other people who use that style we’re doing at 1st.
1E was like that... but the combat feats made it a lot easier to be a good archer belonging to almost any class, for example (or any 3/4 or full-bab class, anyway). You didn’t have to be a fighter to be a good archer, though the extra feats helped.
Now we’ve had a glimpse at how archetypes can work in the lost omens line. There are some cool options there, but they are restricted based on lore and more of a replacement for the prestige classes. Still, they show us what non-dedication archetypes look like.
What the APG promises to do is to fundamentally change the way that most characters are built. Look at the names on the list of archetypes. Things like “Archer” are pretty obvious. Something like “Mauler” less so, but it’s been said that’s the two-handed style archetype. The APG is the thing that is going to open up a vastly greater flexibility in the way that characters are built. If the designers have done a good job with it, we’ll end up with something more flexible than 1E was, but also more balanced. So now if I want my switchhitting Champion to get better at ranged combat, I don’t have to shoehorn in Ranger or take a mostly empty Fighter Dedication just to get to an ability two levels later. Instead I take Archer or whatever fits.
Maybe retraining will be enough to swap over to these new options. But that depends on what the prerequisites are. If I need a 16 dex to take Archer, and I’m locked into a 14 because that’s what I had went I hit 2nd level, that requires a rebuild or waiting until 5th level when I can boost my stats. Maybe nothing in it will require prereqs that couldn’t be picked up with retraining, but that seems unlikely.
The APG promises to be the book that shows us why the system is designed the way it is. Maybe it won’t deliver on that. I’m hoping that it does.
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Venture-Agent, Minnesota
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I'll admit that I've been keeping Teki Strongut, my -2002, in GM Baby mode in part because I want to have a look at the APG oracle and what a multiclass with it might offer. Still, I know that pretty much every book is going to have the 'is this something I can use?' issue. There are so many choices right in the CRB!
It will be nice to see the ACP system come to fruition.
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Yeah, my -2003 is likewise in GM baby mode, because I've been waiting to see what Ranger focus spells will look like, and if I would want to go with the Druid dedication for low level spellcasting or potentially be satisfied with the in-class options and instead pick up an Archery dedication if it comes with e.g. Point Blank Shot. I've thought about playing him once I got the Plaguestone chronicle, but waiting another couple months isn't a biggie since I've got 3 other characters actively being played.
Edit:And yeah, the blob is only 2nd level, so the 20 AcP rebuild is totally an option for him. In general, PF2 retraining is fairly generous; at low levels the opportunity cost of spending a week of downtime to retrain a feat from the CRB into a shiny APG option is... 3.5 silver. Though in my case I'm going Ancient Elf for Druid dedication at the moment, and changing Heritage is very much a rebuild, not a retrain.
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Either my -2004 or -2005 will be a hobgoblin so I am looking forward to that!
I think some cost for a rebuild is not bad. As Nicole Hites pointed out, the fact that we have had free buildings of any level up to this point has been really good for those players who have taken advantage of the option.
I have not read the free rebuild so I don't know if it needs to be applied immediately or not. I would be a little surprised if it did have to be applied because there is no way the Paizo database could track that.
EDIT:
I just purchased the rebuild for a character and, aside from it being given to Linda!, I don't see anything on it that would prohibit the boon from being applied at a later date, say after ACP is released.
Unless I have missed guidance that was provide, which is always possible.
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Venture-Captain, Texas—Austin
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Considering that it only takes 7 days of downtime to retrain into a feat, and that a full rebuild is the equivalent of playing 5 games, or just running 3 (as far as we know now), I don't see the need for the free rebuild to extend into the APG release window.
The idea behind the free rebuild was to let people tinker with the options represented at launch, and its window has already been extended by 6+ months.
APG is going to expand this system by an incredible amount, but so will every other book in the RPG line. The cost of early adoption is you don't get everything at the start, but with retraining and AcP rebuilds that cost is comparatively low.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Turku
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Agreed - There's not really a need for the rebuild to be extended until APG, otherwise there will be the next big book with the next new options and the want to extend it even further. Even extending it 2 weeks past the launch of AcP is -generous-.
My main concern wasn't really -when- it goes away, but rather, will the players be informed that it's being removed and are they given a "last chance" to use it - the blog stating that yes, you will be given a warning AND it'll be AFTER ACP is excellent news.
And yes, retraining is pretty cheap in this edition, and the rebuild boon isn't too expensive either. I think this arrangement is pretty good.
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My main concern wasn't really -when- it goes away, but rather, will the players be informed that it's being removed and are they given a "last chance" to use it - the blog stating that yes, you will be given a warning AND it'll be AFTER ACP is excellent news.
This was a large part of why I started the thread. The timing of my post and the blog was weird, so I didn’t know that was going to be included when I posted originally (note that I posted it before the blog went live, so it wasn’t in response to the blog). I do think it’s a really good thing that they gave that window, and I should acknowledge that. That is the more important of the two requests, and I’m glad to see it was included. My subsequent posts focused a little too much on the part we didn’t get than the part we did.
